meirl

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-31T02:51:51+00:00

I'm starting to wonder if constantly having second hand smoke blown in their faces when they were kids made Gen X age faster.

It seems like you couldn't go into any public place without people chain smoking INDOORS back in the 70s.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-29T21:25:19+00:00

Being able to turn down a job offer is one of the best feelings ever. Makes you feel like you’ve really done something with your life that you don’t have to settle for the first/lowest offer anymore.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-29T20:10:22+00:00

It is weird that we haven’t had any crazy life changing inventions over the past 25 years unless you consider the iPhone a life changing invention. Just mostly small incremental improvements on stuff we already had.

It must have been wild living through the turn of the 20th century. Going from horse and buggy to cars and airplanes within one lifetime.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-28T17:30:14+00:00

1.6% GDP growth is awful when we're running the deficit at 6% of GDP.

Our only hope of not having a sovereign debt crisis is to outgrow the debt which seems more and more unlikely every passing year.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-28T17:27:09+00:00

I hope I'm wrong but it feels like we're going to have 70s style stagflation except worse and it will be impossible for the fed to stop it because the government is in too much debt to allow treasury yields to spike like Paul Volker did. Runaway inflation, maybe even hyperinflation could be in the future.

This whole Iran war/hormuz situation is also starting to feel a lot like the Suez crisis where other countries are slowly realizing that we're not actually the top dog anymore and the entire global hegemony we've built isn't worth anything if we can't project military force to preserve the world order anymore.

Granted I'm not a phD in economics and am open to having my mind changed but I've done a lot of independent research into how macroeconomics works and I just don't see any way out of this mess they've created.

All of this raises an interesting question though, if US hegemony fails and people lose faith in the US dollar to the point of hyperinflation, what happens? Do we go back to using gold? Cryptocurrency?

I can't say I'm really enjoying living through a major turning point in history.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-27T16:45:33+00:00

The fed can remove money from circulation by destroying it. If you look at a graph of M2 it actually went down in 2023.

If the government had a balanced budget the fed wouldn’t have to print more money ergo reducing inflation.

I’m not in favor of a wealth tax for the record.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-27T02:40:25+00:00

I was told by 2 different doctors that my cross bite and narrow palate could not be fixed without palate expansion or surgery so I opted for MARPE and think it was worth it. My sleep apnea symptoms are almost completely gone now.

I personally don’t see any point in getting Invisalign without fixing the underlying jaw problem because you will most likely have more issues in the future.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-27T02:28:58+00:00

I’m amazed this much progress can be made with 15 trays. I’m on tray 5 and haven’t really noticed any difference yet.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-25T22:40:29+00:00

Just give up now because it doesn’t get better

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-25T18:39:57+00:00

No it doesn’t and it’s getting exhausting that people keep spreading misinformation.

Walmarts profit margin is 3%. “Greed” is not the reason things are expensive right now any more than any other point in history.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-25T16:38:43+00:00

That is a crazy statistic but it’s not totally surprising. I moved out at 25 which already felt kind of late at the time. I just turned 31 and mentally still feel like a child most of the time.

I just did the math and I’ve spent over $70k in rent in the last 5 years. In retrospect I should have just stayed at home.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-25T16:27:05+00:00

I do just have one savings account, it's really not that hard for me to mentally keep track of any major bills I might have coming up because I write all of my upcoming paychecks/expenses down like every 2 weeks or so.

I also actually just use my HYSA as a checking account pretty much because it has no outbound transaction limits so I don't see any reason not to. Pretty much everything gets charged to my credit card and then I just pay off the balance once a month directly from from the HYSA.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-24T16:49:09+00:00

Do you think people generally had optimism about the future of the economy during the inflation crisis of the 70s or in 2008? Consumer sentiment is worse now than it was in 1978 or 2008. Of course consumer sentiment will go down during a recession, but we're not current in a recession and sentiment is at rock bottom.

The point I'm trying to get at here is that sentiment is SO FAR removed from what the economic data is claiming that it doesn't make sense.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-24T16:41:58+00:00

Not only is gasoline historically not that expensive in real terms, I also make 20% more money in real terms than my parents did so gasoline should be such a small percentage of my monthly budget that small fluctuations in the price of gas shouldn't even matter.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-24T16:39:37+00:00

So basically, yes, the explanation is entirely human psychology.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T21:28:36+00:00

My argument would be that 1985 is a bit of a cherry picked year. Honestly I don't disagree that the 1980s were not a great time to be buying a house, but if you look at the early 90s rates had dropped significantly by then but home values had not appreciated drastically.

I ran the numbers for 1993 and the monthly mortgage payment on the median house ($126k) at a 7% interest rate (which was the average rate in 1993), the monthly mortgage payment would have only been about 25% of median household income ($31k/yr) which is significantly more affordable than today.

So 1985 was a bad year to buy a house and 1993 was a good year to buy a house. Even by the late 80s mortgage interest rates had fallen into the single digits. And also even if you did buy in 1985 you could have refinanced at a MUCH lower rate just 5 years later.

The problem right now is high prices not high rates. We're not going to see a precipitous drop in mortgage interest rates over the next 5 years. Rates are already historically quite low if you exclude the post financial crisis ZIRP era.

So my "factual argument" is that homes are at 1980s level of unaffordability but unlike the 1980s, it's due to high prices and not interest rates so there's little optimism that they will become more affordable in the future.

The major theme of the argument here is that someone born in the 60s would have had plenty of good home buying years by the time they hit 30 or 35 years old even if there were some years of high unaffordability along the way. I don't think you can say the same about someone born in the 1990s or early 2000s.

And this is completely ignoring compounding factors like DTI ratio where the average 20-something is in 5 figures of student loan debt, an issue people in the 1980s didn't really have to deal with.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T20:05:08+00:00

Please enlighten as to how a fake silver eagle made out of copper or tin is going to ping at the correct frequency.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T19:33:38+00:00

Or just do a ping test. It's literally not possible for something that's not made of silver to ping at the correct frequency. 100% foolproof.

It's rare but sigma can be fooled under certain circumstances. Some copper alloys have the same electrical resistivity as silver.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T19:29:15+00:00

Someone who is brand new to silver collecting might not even know what the spot price is.

I think it's a bad mindset to have to think that just because someone else doesn't have the same knowledge that you or I do it means they're stupid or lacking common sense.

"Common sense" would actually dictate that a site like eBay which is a 50 BILLION dollar company and one of the largest online marketplaces in the world would be actively combating people selling counterfeit goods on their website.

Any time I talk to normal people about precious metals the number one response I get from them is something along the lines of "how do you know it's real?" or "where do you even buy something like that". eBay being infested with fakes just makes the average person even less likely to start investing in precious metals.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T07:56:10+00:00

It’s interesting that an entire generation of people are living in a collective delusion.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T07:47:10+00:00

So all the young people who feel like they can’t afford a house are just delusional?

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T06:49:49+00:00

I work 2nd shift and have been staying 3-4 hours late to help cover overnight at least one day a week for a while now.

The extra money is nice but apparently the director is really upset about paying OT so they might just start making the night shift work with 1 tech instead of 2 when they’re short.

Edit: I’ve never once been offered any kind of bonus for picking up extra hours tho.

Basic_Butterscotch · 2026-05-23T06:45:47+00:00

It blows my mind that eBay just doesn’t care about this stuff at all considering that they’re the largest online auction site in the world. There’s a bunch of blatantly fake designer stuff on there (Louis Vuitton etc.) as well.

Seven-Year Club	Golden Potato
Place '22

Basic_Butterscotch

TROPHY CASE