arch_8ngel

The real question is what bread dimensions make a sandwich a "sub". Is a hotdog a sub? (it is certainly a "sandwich", at least) If not a regular hotdog -- is a footlong hotdog a sub? But yes, a Philly cheesesteak is a type of submarine sandwich. 1) it's a sandwich 2) it's significantly longer than it is wide 3) you generally keep the two halves of the bread connected (not a strict requirement, since some places do a full separation-slice or a trench cut -- but a pretty common feature of sub sandwiches)

Starlink -- eventually we'll be plagued by seeing a continuous band of them around the globe.

Ah yes, another reminder of living in the era of careless and carefree use of near-Earth space. Right up there with a few years back when they decided to generate a bunch of low-orbit space debris for no useful reason. And in terms of long-term impact, only slightly ahead of Starlink interfering with earth-based telescopes.

His point is that the various stable coins exist as places for people to shuffle money in-and-out of the major cryptocurrencies. It is all churn as people move between other assets on the exchange.

Surely it has some kind of fee that would negate any gains from swing trading a swing that small, right?

I've rewatched it a couple of times with my kids (along with the other two live action releases) and the original holds up WAY better than I would have expected. It is also neck-and-neck with Ghostbusters for a fantastic representation of 80's-gritty NYC. (yes, I know the movie was released in 1990 :P, but you know what I mean -- it leveraged the dirty-and-dangerous image of NYC before major cleanup happened in the mid-to-late 90's)

If you want to toss around memes about "1 BTC = 1 BTC" then you could say the same thing about ANY currency, in nominal values. But 1 "real" BTC does NOT equate to 1 "real" BTC on a day-to-day basis. There is genuine and serious volatility in the day-to-day purchasing power of "1 BTC" of any useful good or service in the world. While major fiat currencies avoid that day-to-day volatility and accept a long-term drag of gradual inflation (where ideally in any given year, your currency is only devaluing by 1 - 2%, so over the course of a year your wages are not "volatile" relative to their purchasing power, and you can reasonably invest in real assets that beat inflation over the longer term) The case for BTC shouldn't need to be that it is better than long-term holding of a large amount of USD, because nobody should be long-term holding an un-invested hoard of fiat currency in the first place. They should generally be invested in real assets of some kind, with relatively small (< 10%) amounts of their net worth in "cash" at any given time. The volatility is a serious issue, though, along with deflation making it fail to function as a currency. Anyway -- I think you have your causes and effects backwards on some of this stuff, and I also think you are too fixated on inflation (by bringing up your Venezuela example, which is not the kind of situation faced by major developed countries). By and large, deflation is "worse" than inflation, if you're talking about ensuring that a currency actually circulates in the economy.

I actually think the religion-elements of Xenogears and FF Tactics are fantastic cautionary tales about the dangers of zealotry, and provide good lessons on what it looks like when things are taken too far and done with bad motivations.

What matters is fluctuations in purchasing power. BTC is WILDLY VOLATILE on a basis of purchasing power. USD (or any other major currencies from developed nations) is far less so. Will BTC have a long-term trend up that preserve purchasing power against inflation, on average? Maybe, who knows. But if it gains real value (i.e. increased purchasing power over time) then it potentially fails as a currency because of a deflationary spiral. Will the USD gradually loser purchasing power to inflation? Yes, by definition of modern monetary policy. It does this on purpose and is how you avoid a deflationary spiral. But along the way to some future point, 20 years away, the USD is going to have a relatively steady time getting there (with spot fluctuations in specific commodities based on real supply and demand changes), but the BTC (at least based on it's history) certainly seems more likely to have significant volatility along the way (i.e. higher volatility in any meaningful traditional usage of the term).

No doubt a feedback loop related to the news of the Etherium founder becoming the first "crypto billionaire".

Glad that it worked out. I'm sure it was a deep-pit-of-the-stomach dread when it first happened though.

It strikes me as more "puzzle based" in that the "tactics" aren't open-form and instead are more like Chess tactics puzzles. (similar to Into the Breach) I'm a big fan of that subgenre of tactics where you're looking for an optimal solution.

Neat, I'll have to check that out.

Didn't have DQ VIII for DS. For a while, though, it was a Father's Day tradition to get my dad a DQ game. My kids get to engage in that tradition this year by picking up DQ XI for me on the Switch EDIT: also, I'd have to check my records, but that Layton UT copy of DQ V might actually be the one I sold last spring getting resold again

Wow, that is pretty crazy. I cleared out my dad's old DS Dragon Quest games last spring and that is quite a jump.

I never owned one, because I thought paying money for a repro of Stadium Events was a pretty dumb thing to spend money on -- but my recollection was that they were "full" reproductions though they may have had a ROM hack of the title screen. That I'm not entirely sure of.

My recollection of events was that they were all working repros from the get-go.

Yeah -- ethical lines were definitely crossed, because "the joke" was a pretty obvious repro-sale cash grab (back when repros were a "newer" thing to most people) that under ANY other circumstances would have seen a lot more blowback. They could have very easily accomplished the same "joke" with just labels and cartridge shells without all of the effort of soldering chips onto boards to make actual reproductions.

It was an ill-advised "joke" that resulted in something like 45 repro-copies of Stadium Events going into the wild. Yes they were marked -- but it got a lot of well-deserved criticism at the time.

Look at it another way -- would you trade an inflation-adjusted $40k/year-income-forever (on top of the $1MM principal) for that?

Having $1MM "liquid cash" is still very different from having $1MM/year in income. Simply "having $1MM liquid cash" isn't the focus of the capital gains tax increase being discussed. For instance, a net worth (excluding house) of $5MM is top-2.5% of households. A 20% cash allocation in that case would be $1MM "liquid cash". Even a $10MM net worth only bumps you to 1.5% of households (i.e. not yet into the proverbial "1%") where a more practical 10% cash allocation would be $1MM liquid. But in either case -- you would be fairly unlikely to realize $1MM in income in a single year unless for some foolish (from a tax perspective) reason you chose to liquidate all of your holdings and force a realization of capital gains. (high dividend income in the $15-$20MM asset range would force you there -- but otherwise people have quite a lot of control of when to realize their capital gains, so just because market "averages" would generate $1MM in asset appreciate per year in the case of the $10MM, they wouldn't necessarily be forced to realize it as income -- though the $10MM in invested assets-case is right on the precipice)

Watched this one with the kids on Sunday, and they both enjoyed it quite a bit. As corny as the family drama is, as an adult -- that aspect of it really connected with the 7-year-old. And both kids had fun recognizing that the Video Armageddon announcer was the same actor that plays the secondary villain in the live action Scooby Doo (which they both love).

I don't personally view it as that much more complicated to have a Roth account in addition to your 401k. The trade-off is really favorable, IMO, to make it worth the marginal effort.

Which stuff? For solid discussion about "safe withdrawal rates" go look at r/FinancialIndependence as a really good consolidation of information regarding the Trinity Study that I mentioned. If you want some really advanced reading, there are a few blogs that link from that subreddit that get into dozens of case studies of deep financial planning and prediction.

I think that almost anyone that isn't in a high enough tax bracket to imply income that easily maxes out 401k contributions is better off ONLY contributing "up to the match", and then maxing out a Roth IRA as the next major priority. There is IMMENSE flexibility that comes from that approach -- and if your tax bracket is relatively low (in his case married, with low or no income on his wife's end, basically getting MFJ treatment for his individual income) -- then paying the taxes NOW on Roth contributions for tax free withdrawals later is too good to ignore.