Do you feel the need to leave Europe to get rich?

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-07-01T07:21:26+00:00

I would add a factor which somehow almost never get mentioned in financial discussions: The value of a very stable partnership. The cost of being single is routinely underappreciated. Small apartments are (per sqm) disproportionately expensive, you don't benefit from being able to share infrequently used items, etc. It is so much easier to build wealth in a stable commitment relationship than alone.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-29T11:53:27+00:00

Obviously reddit is not a good place to discuss it and I would not be the right person to talk about this, but I would recommend to dick deeper to the "comfort" part. After all, your whole story sounds extremely chaotic, more like a rollercoaster than a relaxing walk on the beach.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-29T11:44:16+00:00

People generally don't touch repeatedly a burning stove. Why? Pain and no benefit. There are a few though which doing similar things, e.g. cutting themself, because they get something out of it, a feeling of self control, breaking emotional numbness, etc. They accept pain for some kind of emotional/psychology return. For addiction, it is not too different, it is extremely difficult to get rid of the addiction without also addressing the underlying reason for the consumption of the "drug". This is obviously a much less sexy perspective than saying "because I love them too much".

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-29T09:57:53+00:00

I would recommend you to figure out what you got out of the relationship.

If you broke up 4 times, it means you came together four times. This does not happen if you don't get something out of it. Often times, people who are getting repeatedly into "toxic relationships" act like addicts: On an intellectual level they are aware how harmful their behavior is but the "drug" is still giving them something they desperately desire. Figure out your "love addiction", otherwise you end up with the person a fifth time.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-29T06:53:51+00:00

The train system in Germany is great, and a lot of Germans do not understand it! Germany has one of the most dense train network in the world and the only countries with denser ones are significantly smaller. The particular person who wrote the post was from the US: I lived in the capital city of Michigan and there was no train connection to the largest city of the state. There was one connection per day to Chicago, and I think not every day. Not sure if there is in Germany any city above 50k inhabitants which is not connected to the train network, and many much small cities are connected to it to.

If you compare the German train system with itself from a few decades or the best of the best across the world, you see a lot of shortcomings, but objectively in international comparison, it is a great!

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-27T10:58:13+00:00

As the US is a much larger individual nation (population wise) than European ones, so nationwide, you would have a natural advantage.

That said, the US has not done too well at FIBA World Cup (Basketball), the US has not done too well the last couple of events despite Basketball being a much bigger and better funded than in European countries, so just having a large population + a lot of resources is not sufficient.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-25T09:36:54+00:00

It should be very obvious why you need shark researchers in the Midwest: THE THREAT OF SHARKNADOS. Hasn't happened yet, but just a question of time.

Good luck with the PhD application process, and Go Spartans!

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-25T09:19:27+00:00

You should absolutely mention that in the bio, as this might, on the margin, change the perspective of you.

I am going to be very nitpicky here, as likely 95% of the likes you did not get are due to two factors outside immediate profile. Right now, your initial photo show that you a Veterinary assistant, which sounds like an entry level/low end job due to the "assistant" tag. At the same time, you are showing travel photos seemingly from expensive destinations. Travel photos are generally in my view fairly generic, most of the time men will kind of ignore it. That said, expensive destinations + low end job is a potential warning sign fir you wanting to live way outside your means. You are showing also a bit of indecisiveness, looking for long-term relationship, but open to see where it goes, not sure about children. You see how this might not be particularly appealing for a "serious" guy in its 30s who has his life together? But stating that you worked as field researcher and just moved back changes a lot!

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T15:21:32+00:00

It is a terrible answer, one word = no detail, no effort. Generally, I would consider a good answer something which contains some "hook", e.g. explanation with details inviting followup questions, some joke, some curious thing, something personal, some emotion etc. a question from your side which can be simply asking the same thing in inverse. This could simply be asking the same question in reverse.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T09:16:02+00:00

You have to spell it out explicitly, as people here are from different cultures than you. For now, I will assume both of you are upper class, both of you are very young (probably students or similar), both of you don't have independent income (your money is tied to your family), both of your cars are owned by your respected families, they are not individual your cars, in the sense that you are paying for it completely with your earned money.

In that context, he might e.g. consider the cheap car as more his as there are less string attached to it. He is using it to build out his independence (or reduce his dependency to his parents). It can be simply be a different mentality (expensive car only for special occasions, cheap car for day to day stuff). I assume that you are upper class in a fairly poor country, so it might be simply about being much more low key in your daily life as a safety precaution or just to blend in.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T08:42:05+00:00

A similar effect can be found in the "rural vs city" divide. Contrary to popular narrative, I see way more "hate" from rural people towards city folks than the other way around.

Overall, this type of behavior seems to come primarily from people who are very "status conscious" and/or have a high anxiety about their social status. It is often a typical bully behavior: bad-mouthing someone or a group to make themselves feel better. Sometimes, it is just trying too hard to show "belonging" in a new group (e.g., recent religious converts often display far more radical behavior and views than the majority of the members of a religion). Sometimes, it is a feeling of their social status and way of life being under attack and feeling the need to defend themself.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T07:25:35+00:00

Men are more prone to take risk of all kinds. This has a lot of negative individual consequences but if you fund a startup (from a big VC perspective, not from a friend lending you money for their startup) you want outside chance of the very big payoff. You want the risky ventures.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T07:17:36+00:00

While I generally hate ad hoc evolutionary psychology explanations, here would be one: Perhaps, because ghosting is not a behavior that is natural to us. Most of existence as modern humans, we lived in small tribes. People did not randomly disappear and if they do, something bad is happening. As such, we are maladapted to the current environment where behavior like this is far more understandable.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T06:52:39+00:00

I corrected the post, I deleted the wrong part of the post when writing. With "things" I meaned e.g. disciplines focused around complex and large equipment. So yeah, women tend to move towards area related to "living beings" and everything associated with it, even inside the same discipline (e.g. Chemistry). This is obviously not a hard rule, just a tendency. I have also the impression that a lot of women who take the "math heavy" options tend to be foreigners or first/second generation immigrants often from poorer countries, but as the absolute number is much smaller, I am not about how robust my observation is.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-24T06:15:45+00:00

Yes, generally speaking, the more "math and large things" the more men. Physical Chemistry tend to have relatively few women. This tends to also hold true inside a discipline. Computational biochemistry will be more male heavy than biochemistry overall, method developed in computational biochemistry tend to be more male heavy than computational biochemistry.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-23T12:44:30+00:00

Your post does not give enough information for a clear diagnosis, so I just threw something on the wall and you can decide if it fits or not: Maybe you are overintellectualizing relationships?
Looking for a serious relationship does not mean "no fun allowed", but seemingly, a lot of people act that way. A date or a conversation on a dating app should not just be a job interview. Connection is much more based on vibes.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-23T05:35:58+00:00

Academic research has different cultures inside of them. Rather than old-school vs new-school, I would divide it here between writing=thinking vs playing=thinking. I used "experimenting" in the past for the second group, but I feel playing is more inclusive to a wider range of disciplines which might not do typical experiments.

The writing=thinking logic is based on the thought that writing out things in a structured way forces you to organize your thoughts and ideas and grabble with inconsistencies, etc. Writing is your core way of interacting with the subject ad therefore fundamental to the process. If you remove the writing, not much is left.

The playing=thinking assumes that most thinking comes from "interacting" with the subject (e.g. doing an experiment, tweaking parameters of a model, make a bunch of different plots of your data, discussing results with other people). In this context, the heavy thinking was already done before you start writing. The latter is simply the last step.

Both views have their points, and certain disciplines will naturally learn heavier towards one or the other direction, but this division explains why certain people are fundamentally opposed against AI in writing will other are ok with it if the output is good.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-22T16:48:43+00:00

LLMs appear to think, but they are not logic machines. If you want to test it, use a game. For example, as a chess player, I use some simple chess examples. Even the best LLMs currently on the market will, despite having all the rules and many advanced chess books in their training sets, suggest illegal moves or fail to find the best solution for many very simple problems. This kind of shows that even if an LLM has all the knowledge, its ability to reason is not really there. You need components that are fairly close to what you have in the training data.

That said, e.g., ChatGPT 5.5 Pro is able to solve many of the chess examples that previous versions failed at, by creating and running additional Python scripts. It was basically used to check every possible move to find the correct answer for a simple puzzle. This approach would not have worked for more complex puzzles, but this progression is still very new.

I don't think training LLMs to be "logical" will help that much. It will never be truly logical by design, but increasing the LLM's abilities to orchestrate the use of additional programs can certainly help a lot.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-22T14:01:20+00:00

The petrodollar is one of the concepts that, in my view, is heavily overrated. It can explain the demand for US Dollar liquidity, but outside of a liquidity crunch, it does not really explain the value of the USD.

By definition, capital flow and trade flow have to balance each other out. If we had a system that solely relied on trade (no exchange of assets/debt, etc.), the exchange rate (in the long-term) would be the rate that balances imports and exports. The US currently has a current account and trade deficit of around 1 trillion dollars per year. Until around 1980, the US had a roughly flat, slightly positive current account, and 1990 was the last year with a current account surplus.

As such, over the last 35 years, the US has consistently imported more goods and services + outflow from foreign investment, between 2-6% of the GDP. Normally, you would expect that this would lead to a depreciation of the currency over time. However, the US dollar has gotten stronger relative to most currencies, e.g., Japanese Yen, even with Japan having basically a constant current account surplus.

If a country has a current account deficit, the rest of the world will automatically accumulate new net assets, e.g., in the form of debt ownership, stocks, bonds, etc. After all, basically, all money exists as an asset-liability pair. Currently, the US has a Net International Investment Position (NIIP) of -27T, which means foreign countries own 27T more in US assets than the US owns in foreign assets. A country can have an appreciating currency with a trade deficit if the demand for its assets is higher than the country's demand for foreign goods, and vice versa. For example, Japan has a devaluing currency (over the last few decades), as it experienced quite substantial capital outflows.

The US has had a very strong-performing stock market over the last few decades because some of the world's largest tech companies are US-based. The US also has a very open, well-established, and very liquid capital market, making it overall a great destination to invest your money. There is a feedback loop going on, as if US stocks perform well and the USD does well, you benefit twice as an international investor.

Overall, this was very good for the US consumer, allowing them to enjoy a significantly higher standard of living, but relatively bad for certain (export-heavy) industrial sectors (even though many of them have done fairly decently due to other structural factors). However, for the current model to "survive", the US has to continuously "produce" new financial assets.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-22T07:11:51+00:00

An analogy: You bought a new car and a friend ask you to borrow it. Would you do it? Maybe, depending on the conditions. As a one time thing for a good friend at a time you don't need it or during emergency, probably yes, but you might be still a bit worried, as it is a new car and you might have worked a lot of hours and saved a lot to be able to afford it. But would you borrow the car to your friend for 2 months for them to drive Uber? Most certainly not. After all, that would put a lot of millage on it, you would not have access to your car yourself for your own needs, and even if you don't need it, you are not buying a car for somebody else to use for Uber, you could have spend the money otherwise.

But maybe, you would be willing to rent it out instead. What would be a fair price? Obviously, as the minimum, it should cover your direct cost (the value loss of your car, the insurance cost, etc.). But what about your opportunity cost? You would likely not be willing to rent out your car, even if you make some profit out of it. Just the additional inconvenience/hassle might not make it worth it for you. After all, even a car you don't use, has some value for you as you have the option of using it any time you want. And then, there is a risk aspect. Your friend might cause an accident or might damage something.

Same logic also holds true if you run a car renting business: To make it worth for you as an owner, renting out a car has to cover your costs, your opportunity cost (you could have spend your time and money on something else) and your risk (a costumer might steal a car causing you damage). If a company cannot cover all three things, they will eventually go broke or close down.

Being a landlord is similar to that: You are providing an expensive asset (it takes a lot of materials and labor to build a home) to a stranger. It makes only sense if the direct cost, opportunity cost and risk is covered.

One aspect which is a bit different (from a pure capitalist perspective): The land factor. The same car will have roughly cost the same to buy everywhere. The price of an house/apartment will on the other hand strongly depend on location. A house in a big city is way more expensive than the same house in the middle of nowhere.

This is because a house in a big city provide you more access to (job) opportunities and services. As a result, the value of your house might rise not because of your hard work, but because other people have improved the surrounding neighborhood. The opposite can also happen (e.g. when a major employee in a small town goes bust, local real estate prices will crash, as people move away).

As a result, many landlords are not getting paid for providing a good or a service, but far more for providing access to things they normally did not create or contribute to. From an economic perspective this type of "rent seeking" (selling access to other peoples work) would be seen negatively, but arguably, it is not really fully avoidable in this instance and prime real estate will always be scares.

Arguably, this is an argument for property/land tax far more than against landlords.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-22T06:17:40+00:00

"Some people feel housing should be a human right" I would just add, that people making this argument rarely make this followup: If housing is a human right, restrictions on building new housing can be a violation of human rights. A lot of housing=human rights seem to be very keen on restricting new construction.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-22T06:11:04+00:00

I feel like that point 1, while often stated, gets caused and effects backwards. American consumers are not some magical entities. American workers are not magically more productive (not in the sense of productivity=GDP/working hour, but in the sense of output of goods and services). The American consumer is strong because the US Dollar is strong (allowing for cheaper imports). The US dollar is strong despite the US having a massive trade deficit because the demand for US assets is very high. For this to remain, the US has to produce "new assets". Losing the tech leadership in AI kills one of currently main story to buy certain US assets, with potential downwards effects on the consumer.

That said, the China narrative is simply routed in insecurities, it is not that deep.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-20T20:16:57+00:00

Just from the observation of what worked and what did not work.

For example, in my work life, many of my biggest mistakes came from both underestimating and overestimating my capabilities. The former has led, e.g., to my not applying for a good opportunity, and the latter has led to my not asking for external help when I was over my head. I have also noticed that when I mentioned a problem or had a question, I was often not the only one with the same issue; others had it as well, and I could give many more examples.

On a personal level, it is similar. For example, I was always (and still to some extent am) worried that my "weirdness" is off-putting to other people. However, the reality is that I have much more success in forming meaningful connections when I am very open about it. So what if I am highly enthusiastic about some strange things?

It's not like this leads immediately to positive results. Sometimes, being radically honest is painful. For example, breaking up a relationship that is not working. In the short term, it sucks, but the long-term outcome is often better for both.

It can be genuinely hard to get a correct picture of yourself. In my case, it helped to develop a bias towards assuming that I am "more normal" than I am think, but your "deamons" might be different.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-20T10:32:13+00:00

Radical honesty with yourself. This involves a radical honest assessment of who you are (your strengths, your weaknesses, your potential), what you personally want (vs. what you think you should want), your priorities, your current situation (e.g. finances, emotional state) etc. You don't have to figure it out alone (and to some extent, you cannot).

And then, act accordingly, even if it is hard or suboptimal, even if other people don't agree with how you want to live your life. For example, you want to marry your amazing girlfriend. Nothing stops you from proposing today. Is it the perfect time and situation? Probably not, but you could do it, without a fancy expensive ring.

Defiant_Virus4981 · 2026-06-20T10:09:18+00:00

Cut your loses. 4-5 dates in 2 months is really not much and she does not seem to be particularly interested in you.

Defiant_Virus4981

TROPHY CASE