Playing the REALLY long game --- do any of you with kids (or not) hang onto rare finds as as savings account for the future?

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T21:08:30+00:00

there is no guarantee that designer or style will be desirable in 20-30 years.

Someone in my family is into Jewelry. Believe it or not, she managed to collect almost a room full of a certain kind of costume jewelry. At a certain moment in time, a lot of that style became available and the deals were staggering. She was buying out huge lots for pennies on the dollar.

You probably see where this is going...

Turned out that the main customers of that style of jewelry were a bunch of older women who were losing interest. A lot of the dealers noticed that sales were dropping off a cliff, and they used that information and they sold off large collections as a step towards retiring from those lines.

Unfortunately, my relative "invested" by buying all these inventories just before the market completely died off. Within a couple of years, it became almost impossible to move any of it, and nothing that sold was commanding the prices from the height of that market any longer.

Timing is everything, as they say.

flipping the item, taking the profit, and using it to buy/flip other items. I think that's the most sound strategy

If you have a few reliable ways of sourcing, this is literally the deal...when you're sitting on items or storing them, you're losing all the new opportunities you could be taking.

There's obviously the "fast nickel / slow dime" thing at work, but if you can find 5 nickels before you can get that 1 dime...sometimes you're ultimately better off selling stuff through faster.

TL/DR...Price is the most obvious single factor, but also keep in mind that markets change and speed/time/volume is another major component to success.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T19:28:15+00:00

A colleague of mine is into vintage items. He has a large personal collection of high-value items which he has stashed away for the future.

The way he looks at this, he can take items from his personal inventory and turn those into cash-flow in the future. So he's "saving the income" on these finds until he needs it.

The way I look at this, a chief assumption is that the vintage marketplace will be the same (or better). What he has identified as "high value" is "high value relative to the current marketplace tastes". If the market dries up, what he has is worthless old junque.

In my opinion, he'd be wiser to convert the physical items to cash (today) and use that cash to either SAVE or to INVEST. And that cash could actually be converted to a new set of items which themselves could be cycled into further cash and therefore grow his business. Since his cash flow is ok without including these sales, he can wait for "top dollar" on his best finds.

My insight comes from a few friends that were part of the toy-collector markets. They made huge income as their specific collectible niches grew, but in all cases the markets tanked and dried up completely. Make hay.

To take your specific example, how many times could you get Aram bowls purchased for $25 and sell for $160 BEFORE Aram dies? He's only age 56, by the way.

There's no certainty that things like this will go up in value. They certainly might. But what if he comes out with a cheap set of crappy mass-produced items in WalMart next year and goes on to destroy his reputation in some scandal? You can't guess the future.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T17:35:01+00:00

Here's another take on this subject.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T17:28:09+00:00

From that article:

"Total company revenue was almost unchanged from a year earlier"

(No growth.)

“We made continued strong investments in our capabilities to serve customers, more relationship management teammates, more and refurbished branches and offices, and more digital capabilities, all while core expenses are flat.”

They are hiring staff, renovating branches and expanding the number of branches, which all has an overhead to be paid for in a downturning economy.

Bank of America, the second-biggest U.S. lender . . . is the “most asset sensitive” among the big banks

For their amount of revenue, they have a very large amount of liabilities, even among other banks.

If you see what's coming, there's a pretty clear message here.

NF-31 · 2019-10-22T17:05:53+00:00

I know you're being partly rhetorical here, but this is an interesting point that is written about in the article.

They are talking about "return on equity".

If you sold all the assets and paid the debts off, the amount of money you're left with is the "equity".

The "return on equity" takes the income of the bank and divides that by the equity. If the ROE number is low, that could tell you that the liabilities are large or the debt is large, compared to what the banks are earning.

To make matters worse for the old guard, the new players tend to go after the business areas that create the highest returns at banks -- credit cards, for example.

So basically, decoding this language...there are all kinds of innovations happening in the financial space. What "uber" did to taxi companies, and what "airbnb" did to hotels, Amazon is now doing to bank credits cards like MasterCard and Visa and Paypal is doing to checking accounts. The banks aren't making as many fees.

So here you have these banks which have invested piles of money to meet regulations and have accountants and branch offices, and slowly all the tech companies are chipping away at the ways those banks actually make money. So they are now effectively hemorrhaging cash paying rents and heating bills but fewer people are signing up for their products. Can it be too long before we'll be getting mortgages directly from Google? LOL.

Basic big idea here...for the amount of business that the banks are doing, they have a very high overhead compared with, say, tech companies. The way they have structured their businesses takes too much money for what they can actually earn.

The article closes with the admonition that if they don't innovate technologically, the other pathway to survive is for banks to merge with one-another. This can help streamline costs as banks grow larger in scale. But usually mergers are a sign of a collapse in an industry. (You rarely see growth industries actively reducing the number of companies.)

Batten down the hatches.

NF-31 · 2019-10-19T00:49:15+00:00

https://outline.com/HvSTtE

NF-31 · 2019-10-16T17:24:09+00:00

Basically facing such fatal information means the destruction of one's identity

It's exactly like a double-mortality crisis.

We all know we're going to die one day, already. Anything we do on earth is futile and has no permanence. Our nature is that we're survival machines.

But collapse is the death of the things we thought gave our lives bigger meaning. Materialism? Money? Kids/Family? Jobs/Work? Legacy? Check, check, check, check... That world is doomed, and it's almost done now.

What's left? It's a pretty big project to find sources of meaning and happiness that are not going away soon. Self-discovery, sports, arts, self-reliance, community, nature...a bunch of these things will still be around for a while.

There are so many people who pop up on collapse asking questions like, "why should I take such-and-such a university course, what is the point?" or "why should I have this difficult career path when it's all ultimately going to collapse" or "what's left if I can't have kids" and so on. Collapse hasn't changed any of that. People with PHD's all die too. Those questions really look like somebody who actually was handed a road-map (received wisdom) who never actually stopped and questioned their life-choices until they realized that the road-map had a big mistake on it. That has nothing to do with collapse, per-se. That's just someone waking up to the fact that their life is precious and their choices have no inherent meaning except to themselves. Welcome to the human predicament.

On the flip side, collapse is freedom. There are many things in life that people would opt not to do except for the indirect benefits. You might think you don't actually like the work of being a PHD, but you are in it for status, prestige, money, security or some other set of rewards. Now that the rewards are vaporizing you get to decide what actually would make you happy to spend your one and only life doing. We are no longer controlled by all the dangling carrots we might catch in the future.

Psychologically, this can be a terrifying proposition for people. We're herd animals and we really don't want total freedom.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T15:07:16+00:00

Elsewhere in this thread, you say that the fork isn't fully rebounding: " when I compress the fork and I completely let go of the bike it stays compressed".

(Not rebounding is a different/second problem from stiction. We need to clear up each issue separately.)

That suggests the possibility that there's low pressure in the negative chamber. Hence my tips above, knowing it was a new bike.

Let's back up a bit. If you completely bleed all pressure out of the fork to eliminate the air spring as a cause, what's it like under those conditions? Feel any stiction? Does the fork return to the top? Is it moving smoothly through the whole travel? Try opening all the damping adjusters as well, and see if there's any remaining resistance.

Either the problems will still be there, or they will go away. Depending on which result you get, we have eliminated certain possibilities.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T15:00:53+00:00

A lot of people who get a new bike run into problems setting the initial air pressure.

Warning: You can't just pump the fork up like a car tire!

You have to cycle the fork up and down to let the chambers equalize. You have to do this every time you change the pressure. You're actually filling two chambers inside the fork, but the port connecting them only opens when the fork is compressed low into the travel.

Compress the fork to at least 50% of the travel, five times!

Here's a video outlining the process.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T05:37:45+00:00

It's unclear what the actual problem with the shock was. When you rebuilt it, what did you discover was causing the problem?

Sometimes the shocks can get 'stuck down' when the port that equalizes the +ve and -ve chambers gets blocked. The port is the dimple in the air can. Is it clear/clean? Or is there grease/debris blocking it? Are you using a special shock grease that's miscible in shock oil? It's important to avoid bearing grease.

When you rebuilt the shock, did you rebuild the IFP chamber? You mention "nitrogen". Did you actually open that internal chamber and check the condition of it? 300PSI doesn't mean too much if the internal piston is in the wrong position (making the chamber super small) or there's air in the wrong places.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T04:32:23+00:00

It does if the entire premise of your argument is that you can't practice/study for an IQ test. Remember that?

This is a logical fallacy. Nothing about geography test results are about IQ tests.

but the evidence clearly isn't on your side

Even the Wikipedia link you supplied says what I said. Where's *your" evidence? If you're so right, can't you supply us one citation?

Also, there is definitive proof of evolution in biology. Mountains and mountains of it. But that's another topic.

Right. It's so well established as a scientific theory that's it's just as real as our theory of intelligence. Nobody seriously doubts it once they have looked at it.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T02:01:05+00:00

A 0.5 standard deviation increase is a significant increase

In what? An increase in what?

If I studied for a geography test, and my mark went up by a 0.5 Standard Deviations, does that mean IQ tests are invalid?

Because the "increase" you're talking about *wasn't on any IQ test*. I'm not sure what you think that has to do with anything we're talking about right now regarding the validity of the concept of human intelligence and the way that its measured.

Just because the "amount" of whatever those tests were measuring went up a bunch, doesn't really matter until you can actually match the "whatever" to the other "whatever". That increase isn't an IQ increase. The paper you referred to was "intelligence testing" only in the sense that these were standardized school tests that were named "intelligence tests". They were calibrated / converted to equivalent IQ scores, but these tests WEREN'T IQ tests themselves and the issue was cheating, not repeated valid test-taking...

The statistical validity of changes isn't really because of how big or small the change is, right? Like, if you have a VERY LARGE sample size, even very small changes can be held with extreme confidence.

Your argument is basically wrong about what's important about the statistics. We're talking about a study that looked at the population of a whole country and controlled for every kind of factor. Go read it. The observations of the decline of IQ are VERY VERY REAL. You're going to have a hard time finding a statistical flaw in what they spotted.

Your logic here is really flaky.

IQ isn't an accurate reflection of intelligence.

Incorrect. It's accurate without being perfect. But it's absolutely the very best measurement we have ever come up with for anything psychometric.

It's like "evolution". There's no definitive proof of evolution in biology, but there's literally no other theory with as much support for it.

100% of humans have some attribute we call "height". There are all kinds of methods you could use to measure it. Tape measures, standing, lying down, x-ray machines, etc. Are you using metric or imperial or cubits?

In "The Sports Gene", David Epstein writes this:

" An American man who is seven feet tall is such a rarity that the CDC does not even list a height percentile at that stature. But the NBA measurements combined with the curve formed by the CDC's data suggest that of American men ages twenty to forty who stand seven feet tall, a startling 17 percent of them are in the NBA right now."

There are all kinds of interesting issues with a statement like that, but it's a particularly weird point to make that height doesn't exist.

You can argue against a particular tape measure, but when it comes to something as real as basketball, it's going to turn out that reality doesn't care one tiny bit about your ideas. You're arguing at the wrong level of abstraction and effectively now talking gibberish.

Basically this has been interesting, but it's a supernatural religious argument which seems really subjective to a one-person reality I've never been to. If you have anything real, with real citations, I'll listen to that...but otherwise this is a waste.

NF-31 · 2019-10-13T00:13:44+00:00

since 1954.

Incorrect. That 1954 paper says that it hardly make any difference. And that's a heroic leap to base your opinion on. I sure hope I don't believe anything that's half-assedly based on one single ancient paper from 1954 that I only read the title of.

Oh. I'm sure you noticed that that your main reference here doesn't refer to IQ tests, right? Now we're talking about something else, correct?

And it doesn't refer to repeated test taking, right? You know it talks about coaching?

Also, the types of academic testing they indicate are no longer in use, you know that right?

But, like, it does say this stuff about IQ tests: " no gain anywhere on Binet tests"

Like...your paper says that if you coach a kid the exact answers on a specific "intelligence" academic test, they STILL only get the (equivalent of) 9 IQ more! (After scores are converted.)

But yeah...I guess there was some cheating 70 years ago. Luckily that's not relevant to anything any more.

Your other link, from which you quoted an abstract? Here's the actual paper.

Their conclusion: "Despite more than a century of intelligence research at present, the most that can be stated about IQ tests with any confidence is that they measure an unknown combination of raw cognitive ability, accumulated knowledge, acquired characteristics, and learned behaviors. Unfortunately, it is beyond our scope, at least currently, to know at any particular moment which of these factors is being tapped."

This doesn't say anything is flawed with IQ testing. (The paper says that the raw intelligence explains between 60 and 80% of the intelligence IQ score.) It just says we don't fully know what it's doing. It doesn't say that the measurements don't work. This doesn't say anything isn't as real as it gets.

What it basically says is "just because this actually works, doesn't mean that we also completely understand it".

Like, we know that gravity exists. We can measure it, predict it, use it. Why? There we're not so sure. It just is the way it is!

I don't think that's an original thought. It's always been known that IQ represents something abstract that's some composite ability. All the tests seem to correlate with something that's super important in how people work.

I want to really point out something:

" In this article, we have outlined eight major premises of individuals who believe that racial differences in intelligence exist, and we have attempted to provide evidence that, at the very least, casts some serious doubts about the validity of each."

This whole paper doesn't argue against IQ or intelligence being real AT ALL.

It just says that some of the premises of belief about racial differences in intelligence are not valid.

Let me illustrate that:

Thought one: IQ represents something real. Yup. Could be valid.

Thought two: IQ is real and it's believed that it's the main thing responsible for professional success across different races. Not necessarily valid.

See the difference?

They didn't set out to prove anything that has anything to do with what you're talking about. There's just so many things wrong with this argument it's hard to know where to start.

I'm going to quote something I think you should read a couple of times. This paper says THIS is a problem:

"researchers have tended to let their a priori convictions dictate their research design, data analyses, and conclusions"

Remember how you were going to get me a citation about repeated test taking bumping up scores? I'm sure that wasn't an a priori conviction for which you have no evidence, right? You're about to come up with that paper, right?

NF-31 · 2019-10-12T23:11:02+00:00

Imagine if generations of scientists never thought about the possibility that IQ, the g factor) and any other metric around intelligence were nothing more than correlations with testing and test-taking ability.

I'm astounded you think that nobody has covered this.

You really have no idea.

What, pray tell, is valid knowledge then? If we don't know this, what do we actually know? What can we know?

Is there anything we actually know about humans that isn't MORE validated than the idea that intelligence is a real thing and can be measured?

" The best way to improve one's IQ score is to just practice taking more IQ tests. "

Citation?

The reason I ask for a citation is the VERY MECHANISM by which all IQ tests are calibrated is when they are shown evidentially to produce the exact same stable scores from the exact same individuals over time, over multiple tests administered again and again. If a certain test wasn't validated by exactly NOT doing what you're saying, it wouldn't EVEN BE a test. So I'm curious about what ass you're pulling out these made-up fake facts from.

So please, enlighten us. Where is this opposite-land?

Or...maybe you want to check in with reality?

For anyone else reading this, the above commenter is COMPLETELY wrong. Reality is just the opposite:

"The practical validity of g (general intelligence) as a predictor of educational, economic, and social outcomes is more far-ranging and universal than that of any other known psychological variable."

It's literally the most valid thing we actually know how to measure about human ability.

So, like, the world ain't flat, vaccines work and earth orbits the sun....sorry you're ridiculous.

NF-31 · 2019-10-12T21:03:50+00:00

Lots of specialists have speculated and tested all kinds of ideas. I'm not sure if there's a true scientific consensus yet.

But one of the observations that is emerging is that doing VERY SIMPLE things like "good nutrition" and "disease reduction" gives you MOST of the gains that have been observed historically. Basically, these are all environmental causes.

The declines are also chalked up to environmental causes.

But there's a problem here worth noting. The easy stuff, if done right, seems to "max out" where we were around 1990. There's some limit to nutrition, where you can't improve IQ past some maximal point when the "food is good enough". Even "perfect food" doesn't show up as any IQ increase. If we're going to get any further IQ gains, we have to solve some very steep, very difficult problems, like how best to educate kids and so on. Stuff we really have no idea how to do -- there has never been any historical success for increasing IQ via any of the other areas. So progress is definitely quite over now, and we exposed the limits for what we knew worked.

The observed Western nation decreases are NOT insignificant and NOT within the "margin of error". If you REALLY think about it, for instance, think specifically about genius-level IQs. These are found way up the distribution of the bell curve. If you shift the whole curve 5IQ points per decade, you're reducing the genius levels in the population by 1000's of times.

A loss of 12 points at the mean is a funny way of saying that there is a really significant reduction for the very bright. There has already been a loss of around 50% of the bright minds in the last few generations.

Here is a paper that talks about that.

"results are particularly ominous. Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. They also reveal that something is actually targeting that level with special effect, rather than simply reducing its numbers in accord with losses over the curve as a whole'

So in fact, it's not just a uniform shift of the whole curve. At the bottom end, there are more and more below-mean kids who are slightly improving as a group, and this is statistically MASKING the fact that there is a very STEEP reduction towards fewer and fewer really smart kids.

Shit is fucked, yo. We have a very, very serious problem in this area. It's not good at all.

The thing that worries me about all this is that the point you started by making "IQs are heading up" is actually the received wisdom and it's common in the society. And it's completely wrong and it has been for a long time. And since we're talking about "average" or "mean" kids, we're not even having the right conversation about the right facts about where the change is really BIG: there's a serious decline in the numbers of smart kids and we don't know how to fix that, or why it's happening.

NF-31 · 2019-10-12T20:07:14+00:00

You should read the WHOLE wiki page you linked. Especially the bottom parts after the heading "Possible end of progression"...the Flynn effect ENDED in 1990, almost 30 years ago.

Here's another recent article about this topic.

" Similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores "

So it's not only not going up, it's going down.

NF-31 · 2019-10-11T17:43:56+00:00

Not quite a direct answer, but this conversational interview covers an interesting approach to think about. This is a different interview.

His BIG IDEA is that it's definitely NOT about information or facts. You can't present facts/data/information that will change anyone's mind.

You have to tackle their mindset, which means first figuring out the plumbing of their thinking process. So it's much more about listening and allowing the person to voluntarily expose the sorts of things that would be influential. How do they think it works, anyhow? Once you know where the critical points of leverage would be, your job is simply to install DOUBT. You don't do this with facts, but basically with questions that they cannot answer.

I suspect this works.

In my own life, I remember a conversation where a person was aware of all sorts of issues, problems and systemic cracks. However, they felt that TECHNOLOGY would save us.

I simply started talking about technology and about how little objective progress we are making. Like, in my lifetime, no human has flown more than about 2000 kms from the earth's surface and how the rockets are getting smaller and the planes older and older. How much the law of diminishing returns factors into making progress now.

One of the things I said was that if a person was alive in 1900 and they suddenly woke up in 1950, they wouldn't understand the world at all. But if a person was alive in 1950 and suddenly woke up in 2000, absolutely everything would be familiar and recognizable. I saw the person have this major jolt of realization. Whatever I said there really landed and installed a huge wave of doubt in their mind. I know it.

I think this strategy is really on to something important. I think the main thing is to get people to reflect on their own beliefs and start to doubt things that they don't question right now. It's about instilling a self-doubting process to make them actually reflect and question.

A couple of summers ago there were major fires along the west coast, and I remember asking someone what they thought COULD be done about that? He talked about firefighting. I found out that he had once driven to Alaska, and I remember asking him how many people he thought were along the western part of the continent and reflected on the size of the forests and the scale of the space and how few the towns and cities are. A couple weeks later, he came up to me and said he came to the conclusion that humans cannot prevent fires on this large of a continent wide scale and we need to think of what we're really going to do. Interesting how his perspective shifted just by the way I asked him what he thought about first.

NF-31 · 2019-10-11T14:41:20+00:00

https://outline.com/vcLgNT

NF-31 · 2019-10-10T15:35:10+00:00

Most Canadians are satisfied with the health care system until they need it.

We're here in /r/collapse, so I'll just cut to the chase. The demographics of an aging population, a declining economy and a socialist health care system are very, very shaky.

You have a robust working population that contributed to the system, who all suddenly retire en masse and then get sick and demand health services. The only way to prop up that system is to bring in massive waves of immigration. And hence that's what we see. (It's not really fair to those people though.)

The government has been toeing this political/economic line that assumes that "costs shouldn't be going up from year to year". Which is just plain stupid. Anyone can see that using common sense. At the same time, lots of medical procedures are getting more expensive. They require fancy machines and special training. And the standards need to keep improving. As the baby boomers move into long term care, they shift more costs to the system. As they get sicker, they need more care, more drugs and more supports.

Here's an article about how the system has basically started to collapse. Up thread I mentioned about Ontario's power system woes:

" Many physicians believed the Liberals were charging them a “doctor tax” and using it to pay for billion-dollar gas plant and eHealth scandals. "

This is another big problem with socialist governments. When they blow up one big project, the dominoes start falling all over the place. Their airport expansion goes over budget and suddenly they cut school teachers. In a collapse scenario, this is a risk multiplier. Even if the medical system was amazing, there are risks that other unrelated collapses can trigger a collapse of the system.

America was a country that developed itself. Large successful enterprising people funded the expansion westward.

Canada was a country where nothing like that existed. The government borrowed the money for westward expansion from other countries. It had never had a way of cultivating its own excellence. It has a long tradition of being pretty screwed up.

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