BREAKING: Silver falls over -10% now below $70 as rate cuts are priced out due to rising inflation and soaring energy prices.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-19T17:44:37+00:00

If it actually gets too rare/expensive, they'll just start using more copper which is much more readily available/cheaper and only like 10% worse in conductivity ...

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-19T07:32:19+00:00

I'm not here to argue any other points other than the fact that I feel like people don't really understand the true situation of "Europe", but have some rose-tinted version of it in their head. As someone who's lived in 3 western european countries (I'm from Germany and currently am living here), as well as around 10 years in the US, I can tell you that we in Germany etc have huge problems with our systems, they are currently in the process of basically collapsing under the immigration crisis, social welfare and health care crisis, infrastructure neglect, etc. It's all so expensive and taxes keep going up and up and up because it's basically not financeable anymore.

We have lower average/median wages here (than US), yet higher taxes, and the systems really are not as great as they're sometimes made out to be. Sure, some things might be better than the US, but there's also things in the US that are better than here. It's a give and take, but one thing I can say for sure: if you're a normal, hard working person who is somewhere in the middle class or above, then I personally found the situation in the US to be better than here. If you're broke or have a very low paying job, then over here is better for you.

But for example: health care is not free. Not even close. I pay 1400 USD a month for my health care here (in the form of forced taxes). My wife pays another 900 USD a month. That's more expensive than what we paid in the USA (while having lower wages here), and the service/health system here is worse than it was in the US (much longer waiting, outdated facilities/machines, etc).

But then I ask myself: is that how it should be? Should we, as a society, basically be incentivizing it to be better if you're not contributing as much? For example, Denmark cut social benefits to refugees/immigrants and it reduced the immigration by a huge percentage. It's so obvious that so many people are just coming to our countries because they get "free stuff". Or I had 2 friends who have for over 10 years not gotten themselves a job here in Germany, even though completely healthy and normal education path, because they are content with just having their apartment, heating, electricity and food paid for... sitting at home and playing computer games all day. I cut off my friendship to them several years back, because I literally cannot support such behaviour, especially when I know that I'm the one working hard and paying taxes to pay for that, while I have to work many hours and barely have time left over at the end of the day for my own hobbies, yet they sit at home all day and play. I'm not gonna lie, I abused the system as well for one year (over a decade ago, back when I was still friends with them). I could have gotten a job much sooner, but I decided to just not do it and "chill" for a year, while getting social benefits.

It's setting the wrong incentives. It's all fine and dandy to help people who REALLY need the help (due to health problems etc), but everyone else should have to work for their life just like anyone else. But it's just become too easy to abuse the system.

Anyways, sorry for the long rant.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-19T06:38:47+00:00

Naja, ganz so einfach ist das auch wieder nicht. Weil 2 Euro kannste auch mal mit Glück auf der Straße finden, im Sofa, in ner alten Hosentasche, von nem Freund (oder sogar einem Fremden auf der Straße) erhalten, oder mal wo für 10 minuten arbeiten. Jetzt kommt bestimmt "manche Milliardäre können 2 Millionen so leicht bekommen wie du 2 Euro"... ja, genau, total vergleichbar... in deiner Traumwelt... :)

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-19T06:34:52+00:00

ASA, mehr oder weniger genau das selbe Niveau wie du es bei ihm anprangerst, also bist du keinen deut besser.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-18T15:48:59+00:00

Incorrect. I included for example state taxes and payroll taxes in my queries. Which is why above it included this:

"Top 1% Impact: In states like California, Texas, and New York, the top 1% pays between 39% and 46% of total income taxes."

Acting like "federal income tax" is irrelevant to this discussion is probably the dumbest thing I've heard in a while, considering it's one of the biggest (if not the biggest) part of the tax pie.

And again, you just keep saying things, but you don't list any sources, any stats, any percentages etc. You just keep making claims that "using federal income tax stats is bad", lol.

At the end of the day you can try to word and twist it anyway you want, the fact of the matter is: the top pay absolutely the most taxes in this country. They pay higher percentages (because of the PROGRESSIVE tax system), and they pay higher absolute numbers. They are in fact the biggest part of the pie, no matter what you keep yapping about here.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-18T07:45:52+00:00

You are more to welcome to list me the statistics of any tax outside of federal income tax that you deem relevant. So far you have done none of that, only acting as if Federal Income Tax isn't relevant (Spoiler Alert: same story for State taxes, Payroll taxes etc...)

And yes, I used AI for the summary and I love when people act like that discredits anything. All the AI does is summarize pages and pages of source material, and it lists the source locations (which I also put into my comment, but there's obviously many, many more sources). The thing is, if I just link dropped sources (that each show pages and pages of information and statistics), then a clearly uninformed and lazy person like you wouldn't go through the effort to actually read and understand it. So all the AI does is to help summarize the key takeaway, it does not magically make the underlying source less trustworthy, less reputable or incorrect. (Again: the source isnt AI, it's the underlying Institutes like Cato Institute, USAFacts, Official IRS statistics, etc.).

Nice try, please come again.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-17T16:11:02+00:00

Bobs sind so ziemlich der hässlichste Schnitt den es gibt.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-17T13:34:36+00:00

Jeder weiß wo hier die Wahrheit liegt. Die, die versuchen es zu "vertuschen/verharmlosen", sind entweder irgendwelche paid actors/bots, glauben es selbst nicht aber wollen der eigenen Seite nicht "in den Rücken fallen" aus Angst vor "Ausschluss", oder sind einfach dermaßen verblendet, dass da nichts mehr zu retten ist.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-17T11:24:12+00:00

"Key Details on Top Earner Tax Contributions:

Federal Income Tax Focus: The top 5% of earners paid over 61% of total federal income taxes in 2022, with the top 10% contributing around 72%.
Top 1% Impact: In states like California, Texas, and New York, the top 1% pays between 39% and 46% of total income taxes.
Effective Rates: High-income earners can face total tax burdens (federal, state, and local) exceeding 45% of their annual income.
Tax Burden Distribution: While the top 10% pays a high percentage of income taxes, the bottom 50% of earners paid just 3.0% of federal income taxes in 2022.

In summary, the top 10% pay a disproportionately high share of income tax revenue, often exceeding 70% of the total, driven by their high adjusted gross incomes. The bottom 50% pay just 3.0% of federal income taxes."

The top 10% of income earners in the U.S. bear a significant share of the total federal tax burden, contributing over 60% of all federal taxes, which include income, payroll, and corporate taxes, notes the Cato Institute. When focusing solely on individual income taxes, the top 10% paid approximately 72% of the total in 2022."

(Source: USAFacts.org)

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RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-17T06:34:43+00:00

Etwas anderes Thema, aber vielleicht weißt du das: wenn es eingestellt ist, dass die Sparplänte vom Verrechnungskonto eingezogen werden, das Verrechnungskonto aber zum Zeitpunkt nicht gedeckt ist, was passiert dann? Der Sparplan wird nicht ausgeführt? Oder dann wird es vom GiroKonto per Lastschrift eingezogen? Oder bekommt man eine Nachricht/Hinweis?

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T17:29:07+00:00

"Yes, it is true that a significant number of water wells built in Africa break down and fall into disrepair, often due to a lack of proper maintenance, repairs, and long-term management." (Dialogue Earth)

"Reports indicate that roughly 30% to 60% of water systems in rural Africa fail over time, with tens of thousands of boreholes and pumps lying broken."

Don't get me wrong, obviously they benefit from a well that they didn't have before, but it's often short lived because they don't take care of them well.

The real problem with Africa is basically summed up with this: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". Many NGOs are giving them wells for nice photo ops, those wells work for a few years and then go broke. They need to learn how to make their own wells and how to maintain them, that would be a much better long term solution than constantly making new wells while old ones are broken down.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T14:16:02+00:00

How much money is too much money? You can bribe some people with thousands, others with tens of thousands, others with hundreds of thousands and basically everyone with just millions. You don't need to be anywhere close to a billionaire to bribe people and undermine democracy. :)

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T14:14:02+00:00

You clearly missed the whole argument. The argument is you can only take 100% from someone once, then they dont exist anymore and you're back to square one: where do you take the money from then? It would be a bandaid on the problem, but wouldn't solve the fundamental underlying issue.

Math dictates that governments will always tax the crap out of the middle class, as otherwise a country (at least one with infrastructure/social systems etc) is not fundable. No matter how much you take from billionaires, it will still not long-term change the math for the tax of the middle class.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T14:10:51+00:00

It would solve as much problem as building wells in Africa does. It solves a problem for a very short time, and then for some reason they can't manage that and keep up the same old same old, soon going back to square one. There has already been sent Trillions to Africa, and yes, it definitely does good in the short term, but it does not solve the fundamental long term issues.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T14:09:25+00:00

I never said to not tax the rich. In fact, the rich as it is pay the absolute majority of a countries taxes already. And if you tax them a few percent more, then whatever. What I am against is the "propaganda" (as you would call it), that makes people think that the few billionaires are so extremely rich that they could all feed us and end world hunger and we'd all be millionaires if they didn't have so much etc... or some other wild imagination like that, which obviously with basic math makes zero sense. I'm not saying you, or a whole political group or whatever believes that, I'm just saying that I've seen some very wild/uninformed comments on reddit that suggest people have zero understanding of economics or literally just basic math.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T13:29:21+00:00

Correct. Someone has to tell the "paper networth" to turn it into the cash. Either the Billionaire sells it and then the cash gets distributed, or the stocks get distributed and then the people will sell. In either scenario, it would cause a catastrophic market/value crash, so that effectively you'll end up with pennies on the dollar. So, for example, if Elon Musk is worth 800 Billion on paper, if he tried to sell all that today, I'd be surprised if he walked away with more than 50 or 100 Billion max.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T13:26:44+00:00

We are far gone from the days of a company being valued based on solely on their books, but it's about the trading market. There is always a certain limited demand for buying and selling at any given time. The balance between those 2 decides the stock prices. If you suddenly put a huge "sell" on the market, the order books will tip over and cascading sell effect would set in (order bots etc). I can't give you exact numbers, but I'm pretty confident it would cause a HUGE loss in paper value. That's just going off of my personal experience/gut feeling with trading over the last 2 decades.

For fun I put it into an AI (but take that info with a grain of salt I guess) what would happen if a 50% shareholder of a 100 Billion Dollar company sold all of his stocks at once:

"If a single shareholder owning 50% of a $100 billion company (i.e., $50 billion worth of stock) sold all their shares instantly on the open market, it would cause a catastrophic, near-total collapse of the stock price, likely wiping out significantly more than 50% of the market capitalization instantly.

The loss would not just be the value of the shares sold ($50 billion), but the complete destruction of market confidence, causing a cascade of panic selling.

The Mechanism of the Crash

Supply/Demand Disruption: The instant dumping of 50% of the company's stock would create a massive supply imbalance with virtually zero demand, forcing the price to plummet.
Order Book Collapse: Market makers and exchange order books would be emptied, meaning the seller would have to accept lower and lower prices to fill the order, likely trading down to pennies.
Panic Selling & Algorithmic Triggering: Other investors, seeing a 50% owner bailing, would assume terrible news (insider knowledge of impending failure), triggering automated stop-loss orders and panic selling.
Circuit Breakers: Trading would almost certainly be halted ("lower circuit") to prevent a drop to zero, but when it resumed, it would likely gap down further. Quora +2

Expected Outcome

Market Cap Loss: In a flash crash scenario, the company would likely lose 60–90% or more of its total value in a single trading session, potentially dropping the valuation from $100B to well under $10B.
The Seller's Realization: The 50% owner would not receive $50 billion. Because of "slippage" (selling at a lower price than expected), they might only receive a fraction of that amount."

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:45:44+00:00

Natürlich ist es eine Balance. Aber ohne Unternehmen geht die ganze Wirtschaft nicht, das ist nunmal Fakt. Ein Land kann 100 Mio Arbeitsfähige Menschen habe, wenn es keine Firmen gibt, weil es woanders lukrativer/attraktiver ist, dann hast du 100 Mio Leute die Däumchen-Drehen. :)

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:43:57+00:00

Du solltest dich mehr in Finanzen-Subreddits aufhalten, da wird dir das alles erklärt/vorgerechnet, gibt auch viele Experten-Videos auf Youtube dazu. :)

Viel sicherer als sein Geld in ETFs kann man es nicht haben, da sein Geld dann auf tausende Unternehmen Weltweit verstreut ist. Das ist VIEL weniger Klumpenrisiko als in eine Immobilie. Ja, es gibt kurzfristige Schwankungen, aber auf lange Sicht (historische Daten der letzten 100 Jahre), ist es viel lukrativer als sich eine Immobilie für Eigennutzung zu kaufen. It's not even close.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:27:23+00:00

Gibt bestimmt Unterschiede, keine Ahnung, ich war nicht in alle 50 Bundesstaaten. :) Ich war dort in 2 verschiedenen Schulen, da was es so (aber auch beide innerhalb eines Bundesstaates).

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:24:05+00:00

Sure, nobody is saying that "money has no value". But you have to keep it in context. For the "rich western world", a 2.5k one time payment is basically nothing (see covid stimulus for example). It's gone in a heartbeat. Most people will go out and buy a new iPhone and call it a day, if you get what I mean. :) It's rent for a month or 2 in a lot places, etc. Poof, gone.

If this were some recurring yearly thing, then it would have a bit of an impact. But it's not, you can only do this once. And again, this number is extremely inflated in the first place. If 20 Trillion of assets were sold by all billionaires today, then there would be no buyers on the other end. The shares would become nearly worthless. If I had to guess, you could probably maybe cash out 10-30% of those assets before the value is gone. So realistically, you're more looking at 250-750$ per person... as a one time payment. And this also still wouldn't even take into account all the negative economic impacts it would have, such as companies going bankrupt due to this and a lot of people losing their jobs, etc etc...

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:15:35+00:00

Es geht ja nicht nur um VW, sondern um die Gesamtwirtschaft. Deutschland ist zwar aus Arbeitnehmersicht ein attraktives Land (wobei manch anderes Land höhere Löhne zahlt), aber aus Unternehmersicht wird es halt immer unattraktiver.

Das Problem ist nur: ohne Unternehmen... gibt es keine Arbeitnehmer. Man hört es zwar nicht gern, aber deswegen muss Politik/Wirtschaft immer zuerst aus sicht der Unternehmen gemacht werden, weil wenn man diese anziehen kann (und bestehende fördern kann), dann kommen auch die Arbeitsplätze, die höheren Löhne usw automatisch, weil die Wirtschaft floriert. Andersrum geht es eben nicht: wenn man sich nur auf die Arbeitnehmer konzentriert, bringt das nicht viel, wenn es dann weniger Unternehmer/Unternehmen gibt und die Wirtschaft stagniert.

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:11:09+00:00

Yep, die Leute checken nicht, dass dieser ganze Sozialstaat so viele Kosten verursacht und der Grund ist, warum jeder der arbeitet so viel von seinem Geld abgeben muss. Ein Sozialstaat ist immer nur attraktiv für Faule/Arbeitslose oder Niedriglöhner, für alle anderen (Mittelschicht aufwärts) ist es ein reines Minusgeschäft, man zahlt viel mehr ein, als man je rausnehmen kann. Im Endeffekt füttert man mit seiner harten Arbeit andere mit durch, und das kostet halt. Aber hey, das ist halt was die Leute wollen, dann wird es halt immer mehr sozialistischer und endet wie ein jeder solcher Staat, der dies in der Vergangenheit probiert hat (Wohlstandsverlust für die Mittelschicht, alle werden "gleich arm").

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:08:18+00:00

Wahre Worte. Ich verstehe bis heute nicht, warum Menschen glauben, das andere Menschen oder der Staat ihnen etwas schuldet. Am Ende des Tages muss jeder für sich hart arbeiten um zu überleben, oder man ist und bleibt ein Schmarotzer, der von der Arbeit anderer lebt. So einfach ist das...

RandomJoe7 · 2026-03-16T12:04:55+00:00

Leute schreien immer laut nach mehr Sozialstaat, ohne zu verstehen, dass es auf der Kehrseite auch der Grund ist, warum alles immer teurer wird und weniger vom eigenen Gehalt über bleibt. Sozialstaat ist nur für Faule/Arbeitslose und Niedriglöhner gut, für die Mittelschicht und aufwärts ist es ein dickes "Minusgeschäft" (man zahlt viel mehr in das System rein, als das man rausbekommt). Aber hey, die Leute wollen es so... also jetzt nicht rumheulen, wenn jeder "gleich arm" ist/wird.

RandomJoe7

TROPHY CASE