ORH_wxman

BTW, I don't think I posted in this thread much last week...but my older son caught covid at daycare....had to be home for 10 days along with his younger brother who then became a direct contact. My younger son is 21 months old....he never caught it from my older son. We never attempted to separate them as it would have been basically impossible anyway. My older son only had some mild symptoms for perhaps 2 days. Then he was running 100mph around the house and yard for the next 7-8 days. He went back to daycare on Friday. My wife and I are already vaxxed, but we still tested a couple times and they never came back positive.

Yeah...unfortunately "getting back to normal" isn't purely a question for an epidemiologist. This is especially true as the virus becomes less threatening due to increased vaccine intake. It becomes a question of trade-offs. Everything involves trades-off when it comes to major policy decisions. There is no such thing as 100% safe in a free society.

Certain items are up a lot. Soybeans are up like 80% in the past year. But food as a whole is up about 4%. It’s because some items dropped in price too. Each person shopping might have a different experience depending on their diet.

Food is technically up about 4% year over year....but that is more than recent years. We've become accustomed to very low food inflation since the recession in 2007-2009. A couple years in there actually had slightly declining food prices (2016 most recently). Global food inflation is a bit higher though...some countries are experiencing double digit food infation because of higher energy costs in addition to the more modest food inflation. The United States is lucky in that it can grow way more food than it needs and doesn't need to import a lot of staples...and the two countries we happen to import the most food from are right next to us (Canada/Mexico) which keeps transports costs down.

Yeah that was insane. Like temps creeping below 30F on the coast with blowing snow in October *during the day* And yeah, that Feb 1-2 storm is gonna be a real “taken to the woodshed” storm for your area as we remember it in future years. I mean, it went from like nothing to 3” of slop to 12”+ within maybe 15-20 miles? (Technically less than 5 miles if you count top of blue hill, lol) Even around here, I had almost 17” and literally 6-8 miles east had like 6-7” of total sludge. Real screwgie on/near the coast that was.

And ironically one of the better events near the coast of SNE was even earlier on 10/30. Some of the spots that got totally skunked on 2/1-2/2 had like 5" of snow on 10/30

Public school quality is a defacto proxy for housing prices in suburban areas. If you want top schools, you pay top dollar.

This one (housing cycle) will be interesting to follow....the supply isn't nearly as goosed as it was in the mid-2000s. There is a dearth of supply and last year made it even worse when many spots paused building for a month or two during the peak in the spring. Lack of supply makes me think there is probably a real floor to how far this can fall. Obviously if you get a bad enough economic recession, then who knows where the bottom might be....but just a typical real estate swoon probably won't have this fall like 2007-2008. This is particularly true for like those starter/middle class units where supply is crunched the worst. I do think there's probably going to be some steep corrections in the upper end housing. It's already been showing up in the really high end stuff (like multi-million dollar units) since like 2019.

There's definitely a niche market for some of this stuff. I don't think we want to confuse the idea that something may be in an unsustainable bubble as the same as being "it will be 100% worthless".....it can be somewhere in between. Crypto is a different market dynamic right now than some diehard video game recluses who will pay a grand for a virtual sword. We don't see a ton of people throwing life savings into virtual swords. Crypto has a lot of hallmarks of a bubble craze. The question for people thinking of crypto right now as an investment is do they think it's going to hold or increase in value over the long term? If you are just trying "time the peak", then that is different...that's just gambling. There are some technical experts who can do that type of thing pretty consistently with success (akin to the casino gambler who has an edge on the house by card-counting or exploiting a dealer weakness).

Correct....but that is a different discussion versus investing money longer term. When you invest, you want your money to increase in value over the long term....or at the very minimum, hold value against inflation if you are a very conservative saver. 12 months ago, a shed filled with hand sanitizer was worth a small fortune. Now it's probably not worth that much more than before the pandemic. So the question to ask, is this entity going to hold value?

Well we aren't selling anyway....at least within the next year or two. We may upgrade at some point, but we'll prob let the market come back to earth some which would probably help us. Our starter-type home is much less likely to fall as much in value as a home a tier or two up since nobody is building starters....just a reality of the supply. So we'd probably make out pretty well. But yeah, I do think many could take advantage if they want to....esp with more remote work now. Sell your overpriced house and pocket all that profit and then move into some sleepy town where you can prob pay cash for a nice house and still keep your income via remote work. That will definitely be a trend in the next 5-10 years imho.

Zillow thinks our modest 3 bedroom raised ranch is worth like half a million bucks....lol. We bought it 4 years ago for 345k. There's no supply on the market right now which is part of the issue. As soon as anything within a sniff of 500k goes on the market, it's gone around here...usually in a bidding war/all cash offers. 500 is the new 400 these days.

Yep pretty much. The larger institutions will find a way to make a boatload of fees off popular trading products regardless if they are fiduciarily responsible investments (see financial crisis). I’m not anything near boomer-age, but I don’t see them as anything but gambling. Esp in the stage they are at now. If they were actually easy to use for small transactions then it might be different...though they will never remove the issue of being non-physical. But who knows, maybe some of these cryptos actually become useful currency outside of a niche market. Nobody’s made a great case for it yet, though.

You're giving a technical explanation for a short term move....that is something that absolutely can happen again. What we're still missing with crypto is fundamentals. It is still a speculative play. Doesn't mean it is an incorrect bet, but this is much more akin to volatile commodities than equities....except crypto isn't even physical like commodities.

We've already seen it crash before....BTC went from 20k to 3k in under a year between late 2018 and 2019...an 85% reduction...it obviously has gone back up now well past it's previous highs, but would it really be shocking if it tanked to like 8k or something? What if the true value of BTC is really just a niche market somewhere in the neighborhood of 5k and not an order of magnitude higher than that? The idea is that we should invest in crypto because it keeps going up even if we cannot explain the fundamentals behind the rise. That makes it speculative.

Oh absolutely...never said you can't. You're talking to a dude who used to count cards in blackjack and got tossed from a lot of casinos, lol. It's just that people should understand the difference between the two. For sure...that's why I mentioned looking at technicals and educating yourself when you pick individual stocks. Individual stocks can be very much like gambling with commodities. Index funds are the safer play and require less knowledge.

The stock market is a good long term investment....so you shouldn't get too wrapped up in the spikes and dips if you are a long term investor. The crashes can be scary....1987 crash, dotcom bubble crash, financial crisis in 2008, etc. But it is different than speculative commodities markets. I would tell people if they want to make a long term investment, then go with some safe index equity funds or do your own research into technicals of specific stocks and invest accordingly. If someone was selling me crypto as a safe long term investment, I'd pass. I would call that gambling....which is fine if you want to try and score a big speculative strike. But it's still gambling and anyone putting money into it should be aware of the high volatility and downside that goes along with the upside.

Huge institutions investing it in it doesn't necessarily mean it's "safe" to invest in. You should still understand exactly what you are doing and gain technical knowledge. It's more likely these institutions are eyeing its popularity to exploit rather than as some great long term investment. Remember, these same institutions "invested" in countless bundles of garbage debt and we all saw the result in 2008......and these institutions all have the advantage of being first in line to dump shares if the bottom falls out.

Yep. You shouldn't invest money in entities that you do not understand (or the person who is investing your money doesn't understand). If you do, then understand that you are just purely gambling which is different from investing.

I blame all generations since I'm in between them all....I think they call us Xennials or Oregon Trail Generation....that 1978-1984 time range or so. We don't quite identify with Millennials since we all grew up still doing book reports on a type writer or by written hand (at least until High school) and most of us didn't have cell phones until we were past college-aged or nearly past it....so we all grew up memorizing phone numbers of friends and family. But our late schooling years were with high speed internet and the age of chat rooms and AIM. We are sort of the linking small generation between analog and digital.

Congrats dude....hopefully you enjoy the new career path and find success there.

I haven't been to one in years but back in the day, it was respectable for a chain. I heard more recent reviews that they burn their food too often nowadays, but back like 15 years ago, I could be generally satisfied going there....and this is coming from a Texas BBQ/steak snob. I do agree there is a bit of cult following to that place though. To me it was just kind of a cheap imitation of an informal Texas steakhouse, but was adequate. I did like that they would cut a steak for you on request if you didn't see one you liked on the menu or display.

Those soundings are pretty close over the interior of SNE/CNE on the GFS for next week. It would take something pretty special, but there's an outsidce shot for measurable.

Yep, the prices are still feeling the wage hike pinch. They try and cut costs where they can but there are employees you have to keep.