I get all that, it’s a fun philosophical widget to ponder over. But out here in the real world it has value to me because I can sell it for more than I paid. I’ve taken profits and converted it into real goods for myself. I am aware it could go to zero and I’ve hedged my risk appropriately.
Looks like those buyers are reconsidering it's value too.
HODL? Illogical unless you believe there is some underlying value. Otherwise there will be bagholders and all you've accomplished is to guarantee you'll be among them.
What is the point of raising this distinction? Air has infinite value/worth to every human, but its price is zero. It would make as little sense to start accumulating air on the converse assumption that something that has value will eventually have a non-zero price as it would to short bitcoin on the hypothesis that it will eventually be priced at zero because it is worth zero. The goal of investing/speculating is increase the price fetched for assets you control. You can only do that with prices, value is irrelevant.
Monks understand that sentience is not connected to language and reasoning. “You are not your thoughts, you are the observer” language and reasoning are just the mechanism we use to express this experience. We only believe other humans when they describe sentience because they are equipped with the same hardware as us. In fact, monks meditate to avoid thinking in order to increase their consciousness. Thinking is viewed as a distraction from consciousness.
In this sense, a very intelligent sounding language model provides no evidence of sentience. We have to understand what sentience actually is to establish a machine is sentient.
We were making too much stuff. Banks decided we needed to buy less stuff so they made less money. Now the leftover stuff will sit because we won’t make enough money for ourselves to buy it. We’ll adjust by reducing how much stuff we make so there’s no extra stuff to sit. Once that happens the economy will not be bad anymore and then we’ll make more money to buy stuff that doesn’t exist so we can start making more stuff…
Not sure why you're being downvoted for this. When I was doing my PhD, I definitely noticed that the primary aim of research was not to produce something of benefit to mankind, but to produce esoteric silos for academics to protect their egos in.
The politics were petty and vicious, and the number one rule there was to maintain the "face" of the people above you.
Its unfortunate that those groups exist. But there are many who genuinely want to discover and share knowledge and know how. Research is a slog and it’s hard to quantify how some seemingly esoteric research could benefit humanity.
>But there are many who genuinely want to discover and share knowledge and know how. Research is a slog and it’s hard to quantify how some seemingly esoteric research could benefit humanity.
I understand that "mooshot" research exists, and why it sometimes has to be that way. It's just that the entire process of academia seems to be almost designed to crush any curiosity and redirect mankind's brainpower to validating particular ideas that incumbent scientists base their ego on.
My comment maybe came off as a criticism for academics but I was speaking from experience with my own struggle disentangling my ego from academia. I still wanted to think of myself as a physicist and it handicapped my career progress and made me unhappy. Letting go of that was key.
That's not entirely the individual's fault. With many (or most) academic fields, leaving academia for industry is seen as failing, and leaving the institution means leaving the network.
It’s definitely partially academia that does this. When you are a grad student you are paid so poorly and worked so hard it is difficult to build a substantial identity outside of being an academic. Academia is good at marketing itself as a noble cause that imbues very high status if you can ever “make it” so quiting is giving up on that lofty dream. Where in industry it is definitely “not cool” if you build your identity around your job. That creates a helpful firewall that pushes people to develop something outside their work.
This is very true. The only way I coped with it was by basically just cutting off any contact I had with people in my former field, with the exception of a couple of friends. Or at least, I like to think that I cut off contact. A more realistic assessment is that I simply ceased to exist to most of those people as soon as I left the field.
I did the same thing. It wasn’t conscious, it was more that they lived in a completely different world from where I went. We couldn’t really relate as much anymore. Like we now had very different approaches to life. Academy moves so slow. When I check up on people I’m just shocked at how little has changed with them.
Return on capital for flipping bits has been much higher than physical. SWEs are paid far more than material scientists and I think the latter is much harder.
Tech work doesn’t feel like something you can have a life long career in. It’s stressful and there’s ageism. Tech workers are mentally amortizing their productive tech life-span over their whole life and then comp doesn’t look as high.
The geniuses are the ones that regularly take gains when stocks are green for so long, and regularly buy on deep "blood in the streets" reds.
If you can successfully flip the colors, long green is sell, red is a sale, then you can beat the market in the only way small investors can. It is very difficult to do, because of that FOMO.
Some of the better stocks like Apple, Google, Amazon will be splitting in summer, that is a nice regular bump. Prices on some of these will never be this low again. Good time to start dipping buys into index funds (VOO, VTI, VOOG, VOE) etc if you can.
Long green > 1 year so it is long is when stocks have been green for a while or above where your exit / price point was set. I guess people here really dislike the idea of selling and profit taking gains regularly. [1] In no way am I saying don't buy regularly, just also sell regularly so you can get into buying opportunities.
Dollar cost averaging works best if you aren't selling off every downturn and every so often banking some profits. If the only time you are selling is in downturns then that is a problem, selling should be as regular as buying.
A bit surprised this is so controversial. Taking gains regularly, even if you leave some gains on the table is better than only selling in downturns which is what happens in massive pullbacks. The massive pullback reds are when you should have some on the sideline to invest.
The base is sell high buy low, easier said than always done but if you have a regular sell strategy then you can bank some of those higher points just like DCA gets you into some of the lower points.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't dollar cost average or buy the dip, it means you have some cash to invest when there are pullbacks to get in lower. This allows you to continue doing other price target strategies and dollar cost averaging etc. You want some money in cash to be able to get into buying opportunities, like right now there is massive sale due to selling.
Basically have a regular buy strategy and a regular sell strategy.
