Yeah, I know, and I’d do it too if I could! But you’re not really who I’m aiming at. Building assets is key to monetary survival, be that songs that get heard (and royalties paid), an apartment that gets rented - etc.
Things go bad when the concentration of wealth, assets, and - critically - opporunity - is so high that people like you and me are locked out of the system.
Most of my discourse is not about communicating my ideas. Questions are the whole point. I question my fundamental assumptions, and help others to question theirs. Sometimes we can compare our individual realities.
In my posts, it is not unusual for me to ask a person 10-12 questions, and they make no effort to answer any of them! But the problem is not that they owe anybody answers, it’s that they refuse to ask themselves these questions. Usually, people will disregard my questions and try to engage me anyway! It seems to be a symptom of a communication style which assumes implicit rather than explicit meaning. As if questions are merely hinting at some vague statement. But to me, questions are just that, questions to be considered. As we learn to ask better ones, we can get more of a variety of possible answers, and understand our own cognitive biases. I am not interested in persuading people nor being persuaded.
I’ve said this to him at least 10 times now…
Try asking one or two.
People aren’t really interested in you “helping” them question their own ideas. That isn’t why they are here and that isn’t why they’re discussing things here.
What do you find ironic about this?
Perhaps you are fortunate enough to converse with more introspective people, but I find it rather difficult to progress in discussions with people who are instantly derailed by asking them about what they say. I consider it a token of respect, of interest. I care enough about your view of the world to ask you about what it is.
It’s not just at your end 
although the computerization of certain tasks hasn’t reduced employment, it has reduced the number of decent-paying, routine-heavy jobs. Cheaper jobs have replaced them, and overall pay has declined.
And with the disappearance of those routine-heavy jobs, the opportunities to move up have also disappeared.
I had a bachelor’s in mathematics but struggled with unemployement and underemployment in my mid-20s. I took a gig at a mortgage company generating appraisal appointments for mortgages. After a year, I got a management job that led to a career in IT.
Without that gig, my path would have been much harder. That job is long-gone, completely automated for at least 5-10 years now. Granted, if I was the company that had hired me, I would have automated the job, too! But while we as a society have found out how to automate jobs that should be automated, we haven’t found the way to identify how to increase opportunities.
Your idea that it’s a good idea to help others question their ideas is precisely that which you said you don’t communicate – it’s one of your own ideas.
I don’t actually have to answer you, you know. Asking me to explain something is not an argument. However, I will suggest you read any of the books written about the last housing bubble in 2007/8 (surely you remember what happened?) and the various books of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Investors appear to be willing to pay large amounts of money for housing despite the fact that the last housing asset bubble crash was less than 10 years ago. Yet on the other hand pharmaceuticals companies will not spend a tiny fraction of that on developing new antibiotics despite the fact that existing ones are rapidly becoming useless.
I’m not writing about causation, but our seeming inability to make rational estimates of risk. Human history is full of disasters caused by poor risk assessment and lack of rational future planning, but people seem to learn nothing from it.
In the case of housing bubbles, downward pressure on incomes of people who would otherwise be entering the housing market suggests that present trends are unsustainable.
It’s a methodology. Methods work when applied regardless of their content. Any resulting Ideas would be the content.
Just because you communicate your ideas in the form of questions or by negating meaning, that doesn’t mean you’re not trying to communicate ideas. I’m not against questioning or negation at all, I do a fair bit of it myself. But when you question/negate specific concepts but not others, people understand that as a statement, and interpret its meaning as best they can.
If you genuinely don’t believe you’re trying to say anything, and are purely “questioning everything”, that could explain the misunderstandings. Because you definitely are saying things, but because you’re unaware of it, you’re not being careful to explain them carefully or cooperate with your interlocutor, and so are prone to misinterpretation.
That’s what I asked Santa for, an “Irony Meter”.
As for those millenials who are cheap because they’re broke…
(I sometimes imagine popobawa4u cackling with glee over yet another successful derailment.)
No, just crying in my tea.
Sure but then you implied that pharmas choose not to pay for antibiotics resource because…real estate bubble! I question that since I’ve heard a bit about what the pharmas chose not to do that research, which was stupid on their part, but was completely about it not being terribly profitable for them as large corporations. It is more about corporations and short-sighted profits than any high concept societal issues here.
I don’t expect corporations to do things based on a moral good. That isn’t going to happen usually. They do it based on profits.
Corporations, megacorporations in fact, on one hand, are not really comparable to normal humans and the fact that humans continue to invest in real estate even though you imply it is a mug’s game. Hell, I invest in real estate for very straightforward reasons: it makes me money and is a good longterm investment as long as people keep moving to the Bay Area of California where I live.
I think you need to understand the difference between comparison and implication. If I had said that A caused B, I would have said so.
It’s notoriously difficult in macroeconomics to identify causes and effects - a lot is correlation - but since 2008 I am simply amazed that apparently rational actors choose to support a housing bubble with savings.
So you’ve identified the main risk factor - the Bay Area economy. How have you offset or discounted it? Remember that if prices do start to drop, as people try to sell the drop becomes a stampede out by everybody who isn’t in negative equity. As I said earlier, it sounds like you really need to read Taleb (his books are approachable) - bankers made the error of estimating downsides based on a lack of common-mode failure, not realising that their own systems ensured that once a downside was perceived it spread rapidly through the system.
Since 2008 the systems are more automated and the swings faster. Imagine for instance what would happen to the Californian economy if the growing problems with online crime caused a major lack of confidence in Internet use.
and yet my house, bought during the beginning of the slump in 2006, is worth at least 50% more than I paid for it nine years ago. The duplex that I bought two years ago is worth about 40% more.
That doesn’t sound like a bad investment to me, especially since one is the home I live in and that I refi’d to under 4.5% interest on a 15 year note.
So, yeah, real estate bubble but the answer for “why do people still do it?” isn’t “they’re idiots!”
Note: my house was worth 50% of what I paid for it from about 2008-2012 as well. I had to just hope that things went up again then.
Have fun selling that!
What kind of tea? Lemon? Sugar?? Cream??? Dare I ask… Salt???
I can’t disclose my favorite. People would… Judge me.
