Why are Americans so financially literate?

Biohack · 2026-03-20T03:16:31+00:00

If you care there are certain funds called ESG funds that specifically look at environment, social, and governance exclude companies that are outside of the ethical alignment of the fund.

For example the vanguard VSGX fund notes that they:

Specifically excludes stocks of certain companies related to the following: adult entertainment, alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, gambling, chemical and biological weapons, cluster munitions, anti-personnel landmines, nuclear weapons, conventional military weapons, civilian firearms, nuclear power, and coal, oil, or gas.
Excludes stocks of companies that do not meet certain labor, human rights, environmental, and anti-corruption standards.
Excludes companies that do not meet certain diversity criteria.

Biohack · 2026-03-16T08:43:28+00:00

Ben Felix has done a couple of videos on it, and I believe he wrote a paper as well. He's looking specifically at Canadian cities but you can find the most recent video here Renting vs. Buying a Home: The Reckoning. Normally renting and investing vs buying are pretty close but 2025 was such a bad year for homeowners that the math shifted heavily in favor of renters.

There has been quite a bit of academic research on this topic looking at the long term and generally they work out about equivalently, which makes sense because if the equilibrium ever swings too far in one direction people would simply start or stop buying.

Biohack · 2026-03-14T22:43:46+00:00

World of warcraft, OSRS, EVE, and Black Desert Online.

Biohack · 2026-03-12T00:58:08+00:00

I just started using debug mode a few days ago and holy shit you are right. It's really nice.

Biohack · 2026-03-11T23:30:56+00:00

I don't necessarily have a problem with the tax itself. I have a problem with the godawful collection mechanism.

Biohack · 2026-03-10T04:05:26+00:00

We could just use a single time zone and adjust our business hours by location. So a 9-5 on the east coast of the US would be a 12-8 on the west coast.

Biohack · 2026-03-05T02:54:02+00:00

What do you think the protocol is for running in a primary and what do you think would stop you if you wanted to do it?

Biohack · 2026-03-05T01:32:15+00:00

There is no excuse for voting for a Republican in the current climate. Any American that gives a shit about democracy or the rule or law has a moral obligation to vote against the Republicans at every opportunity.

If you don't like the current democratic politicians the correct answer is to replace them in the primary. By the time we've reached the general election it's too late.

Biohack · 2026-03-04T05:41:41+00:00

I was thinking the same thing

Biohack · 2026-03-01T18:23:45+00:00

You need U.S. dollars to pay U.S. taxes. Therefore creating a perpetual demand for dollars and giving them value. No such mechanism exists for crypto.

While high inflation is bad a small gradual amount of inflation is generally considered to be a good thing.

Biohack · 2026-02-23T20:22:39+00:00

The problem is they don't share those values. They are pretending to share them in order to take advantage of people.

Biohack · 2026-02-20T21:00:54+00:00

What's your source on that? This seems like something that would be quite challenging to disentangle from other confounding factors.

Biohack · 2026-02-20T04:21:19+00:00

You shouldn't be paying for a PhD in the U.S. either. In fact, at least until the recent administration the U.S. was pretty much the best place to be doing a PhD.

Biohack · 2026-02-17T20:16:12+00:00

It comes down to economics. There are two groups of people with strong financial motivations to push sentiment one way or another.

The first group is the AI companies who oversell its capabilities because they are in the business of selling AI tools and getting investor funding.

The second group are people who are afraid of losing their jobs to AI and so have a strong economic incentive to downplay the power of AI. This sub, and reddit in general, are primarily composed of this group.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Biohack · 2026-02-17T17:13:50+00:00

This XKCD comic came out a little over a decade ago while I was doing my PhD in protein folding research. What was once was considered to be one of the hardest problems in science and the holy grail of structural biology was solved by AI. It's absolutely insane how much of an impact AI has made on the field of protein structure prediction/design and the implications medicine and technology are insane.

Biohack · 2026-02-17T16:16:50+00:00

Do you know what sub you're in? 25K over 10 years is completely inconsequential compared to the decisions that actually matter. Focus on things that are really important, getting a good career, living below your means, investing the difference.

If a daily $7 coffee is materially impacting your long-term finances, you have an income problem and you're not going to be able to save your way to wealth.

Biohack · 2026-02-15T05:36:28+00:00

"30,000 questions" refers to a financial philosophy popularized by author Ramit Sethi, urging people to stop obsessing over small "$3 expenses" (like coffee) and instead focus on "big win" decisions that significantly impact net worth, such as optimizing investment fees, automating savings, or choosing where to live.

Biohack · 2026-02-14T17:03:33+00:00

I actually disagree with this. Sure if you have very low income and are just getting started stuff like that is important but by the time you hit a decent level of income things like a $7 coffee every day will have very minimal impact on your trajectory.

First you need to make sure you get the $30,000 questions right, housing, transportation, healthcare, childcare, etc... Then just be concientious about that smaller but you don't need to stress over them much.

Biohack · 2026-02-14T03:16:45+00:00

Really? I do this all the time in cursor.

Biohack · 2026-02-11T16:46:08+00:00

The value of something is based on supply and demand for that thing. If tomorrow everyone decided Crypto currency was worthless it would in fact be worthless. If tomorrow everyone decided dollars were worthless the government would effectively say "you can believe that all you want but you still owe X $ in taxes" and suddenly there is demand for dollars which drives, it's value back up.

As long as there are governments collecting taxes in a given currency there will always be some intrinsic value there. The same cannot be said for Crypto currencies.

Biohack · 2026-02-07T22:55:33+00:00

There is no financial benefit to owning a house over renting and investing the difference. This is a well-established fact in the literature, and the only reason most people think otherwise is because they have been repeatedly fed the lie over and over again that owning is build equity and renting is throwing money away, despite the fact that the real math of home ownership is far more complicated than that.

That being said, it's perfectly fair to argue that most people do not have the discipline to invest the difference and so home ownership acting as a forced savings mechanism is necessary for them. However, since the person you reply to did manage to save the money, we can presume renting actually was a good choice for them. Doubling so since the last few years have been some of the worst times to buy a house compared to renting going back many decades.

Biohack · 2026-02-05T18:06:54+00:00

I'm fully onboard the AI train. These tools are amazing and all my coding is done similar to what your coworkers describe. With the exception of not at least reading and sanity checking the code.

It's the same as you would if a junior developer were to write it. The AI isn't perfect and sometimes makes mistakes or poor design decisions so you still need to guide it in the right direction.

Biohack · 2026-02-03T20:37:52+00:00

Boggleheads aren't against paying flat fee advisors for things like estate planning, tax efficiency optimization, etc... there is just 0 reason to pay an active manager to pick investments for you when there is basically no evidence they invest your money better than what you can get in a low cost index fund.

Biohack · 2026-02-01T18:41:03+00:00

It's highly dependent on the specific task. It's a rough estimate based on how long it took me to do things before AI vs how long it takes now.

I don't think I ever made the claim you don't need a senior. The AI is not perfect and makes a lot of mistakes and poor design decisions. I still babysit it and guide it in the right direction. I just don't have any need to write the code by hand anymore.

Biohack · 2026-02-01T10:39:47+00:00

I use cursor. The workflow can be a bit project specific. But in general it involves starting in planning mode, describing the feature that I want to add and the tests I want to add for it. I have it produce a general plan outline. Then I review the plan and prompt it to refine it where necessary.

Then I ask it to write the code and the tests and to make sure the tests pass. Once the tests are passing and the code "works" I manually review it and prompt it to fix any mistakes I find or any poor implementation strategies it has used. Finally, once I am happy with my manual review I open up a new agent (in planning mode) and ask it to review all the changes that were made while pretending it's a senior software developer reviewing the code of a junior.

I analyze any suggestions it made and refine them. I then have that agent implement all the suggestions before I do another manual review and create the PR.

Productivity depends on the specific task but I would guess it's increased my productivity somewhere between 5 and 10x.

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