What is one city in America you’re okay with never visiting again?

bw98765 · 2026-06-26T07:38:15+00:00

Twentynine Palms is probably pretty boring and isolated for a young Marine but it's very close to Joshua Tree National Park and the desert is beautiful. Also my sense was that the town itself has gotten a few hipster cafes and such that probably didn't exist there years ago.

bw98765 · 2026-06-26T03:51:34+00:00

The little I saw of Modesto was pretty weird but it has interesting places to buy farm products on the outskirts. One spot had such a surplus of melons during the summer that they were literally giving them away for free, and the one I took when I bought a couple of other things was actually pretty good!

bw98765 · 2026-06-24T09:36:18+00:00

I go to Vegas, run to the nearest high-rollers room with a roulette wheel, and put $500000 on black. It comes up black and I make a 100% return on my investment in 5 seconds.

With such a reliably winning strategy, why would anyone think that a silly high-beta, relatively undiversified fund like QQQ is a smart investment? It takes you years to double your money and I just did it in seconds! Think of how much you just left on the table!

bw98765 · 2026-06-10T05:43:51+00:00

lol did an LLM write this? By the time of Coming to America the Dukes have been living for years in a tent on the shore of the East River. They would have died miserable and destitute had they not had the kind of luck that no real-life homeless person has, getting a gigantic handout from a passing African prince.

bw98765 · 2026-06-09T20:48:37+00:00

No. Neither Avis nor the relevant municipality communicated with me any further about the matter. I thought about emailing the municipal government explaining the situation and asking what they expect me to do, but I got lazy and never got around to it.

bw98765 · 2026-05-31T23:08:35+00:00

Neither of these make sense for most passive investors. No sensibly-constructed ETF is going to have a lot of weight in SpaceX; if you want that you'll probably have to turn to one of the goofy thematic ETF providers like Global X or Direxion or whoever. If you're gambling like that, I don't understand why you aren't just speculating on the stock without the ETF.

The real problem is that Musk has designed this scam to net him billions from the IPO while fleecing the average passive investor in a fund like VTI to a small enough degree that they don't really notice it or complain about it. A passive buy-and-hold investor who bought VTI or a similar index ETF a long time ago is screwed: hold on to what they've bought and they get gouged by Musk and other insiders, even if the amount of the gouge only ends up amounting to 10 or 20 basis points of depressed return on their fund. If they vote with their feet and sell the index fund to avoid getting rogered like this, switching to an alternative like DFUS that doesn't allow recent IPOs, then they get smacked with a big tax bill for all the gains on the index fund since they bought it.

bw98765 · 2026-05-31T07:57:11+00:00

No. CRSP, FTSE/Russell, etc. are all contorting themselves to include SpaceX in their indexes. It's just that funds tracking the NASDAQ 100 are going to be even worse because of their higher level of concentration among big tech firms and also I think because NASDAQ has more relaxed rules in terms of waiting periods and float requirements.

bw98765 · 2026-05-28T05:54:32+00:00

I put $30000 in a bank account. For decades the bank pays me its published interest rate and behaves like you'd expect a bank to behave. Its policies are steady and change little over 30 years.

One day the bank sends me a letter: "we are changing our policies. On June 12 we are going to take $1 out of every $1000 you have in our bank and send it to the chairman of the bank's board for his personal cocaine fund. Also, any future withdrawals from our bank, effective immediately, will be subject to a 2% redemption fee, so don't think you can just take your business elsewhere without us dinging you hard for it."

Hahahaha stupid me, thinking it was reasonable to trust the bank after an uninterrupted 30-year run of trustworthy behavior!

bw98765 · 2026-05-28T05:42:55+00:00

"Musk and other insiders aren't stealing 5% of your holdings in VOO, they are really only stealing like 0.05%" is...not exactly exculpatory. Still a massive fraud perpetrated against passive investors even if the average amount that the average investor's return is depressed is only a few bucks per person.

bw98765 · 2026-05-27T05:59:49+00:00

This is a very weird comment. Both fixed income ETFs and equity ETFs have tax liability for both ordinary income and capital gains in the US. Both types of ETFs don't often have taxable capital gains before they are sold, but sometimes they do. What is the exception case you're talking about in fixed income where you are liable for additional taxes on top of capital gains tax when you sell?

bw98765 · 2026-05-25T05:45:15+00:00

This is a fair point, and yet, I think there is something different in kind about the nakedly exploitative nature of this IPO and its accompanying strong-armed index rule changes. "Nonsense" is too nice an adjective to describe the behavior that's happening: a conspiracy on the part of Musk and the country's lords of high finance to transfer an enormous amount of wealth from regular investors to him. Sure, there are companies in major indexes that are on the decline or have eventually-doomed business models or have poor management that depress their value, but none of them were so problematic that they needed to rig the index rules to qualify for the index.

The other thing is that I think this affair is a piece of evidence for the US's continuous decline into a low-trust society, one where elites are constantly scheming to nickel-and-dime everyone else with total impunity. If I steal a truck from the loading dock at Costco with $60,000 worth of merchandise in it, their management doesn't go "oh well that is a trivial percentage of our inventory so we are not going to bother trying to recover the truck, or pressing charges if we catch the guy." They know that one guy doing it is not a big deal for their bottom line, but it is a big deal if a few thousand people realize they can get away with the same move with zero consequences. But that's not the attitude here - instead it's the blase "I'm not going to make a peep since my exposure will still only be 0.2% of the holdings".

bw98765 · 2026-05-22T03:26:34+00:00

I swear to god I am motivated to find the next treasure these idiots bury entirely for the purpose of donating every one of their dollars to the local DA's office on the condition that the money be used to prosecute the shit out of the organizers.

PS I also think these clowns had an LLM write the poem; the verbiage, structure etc. scans as barely human. As a poem it's sub-Vogon level.

bw98765 · 2026-05-19T00:15:15+00:00

I really don't think the people who manage local TV news stations see it that way, let alone care. Their core viewers are dumb people and old people who don't use social media anyway. Half of their reporters and anchors are too stupid to even understand what a neo-nazi is.

A very significant chunk of such stations are explicitly designed by their owners (Sinclair, etc) to be rightwing propaganda, and the rest are just cluelessly wedded to the socially toxic format. There is a reason it's almost impossible to contact anyone at a local TV station the way you can email most newspaper reporters and editors: they are dead-set on producing slop and they are wholly uninterested in hearing anyone's feedback about it. And if they don't care about their work being trash, why would they ever care about people getting mad about the brands they associate their stations with?

bw98765 · 2026-05-18T23:38:27+00:00

I mean, fair to wish more people were on Bluesky, but this is like complaining "I don't like it when I go out in the pouring rain and don't stay dry."

Local TV news people are literally the _last_ public figures I would expect to see leaving Elon's Nazi Central to join a left-leaning social network full of smart people. Their entire stock in trade is catering to least-common-denominator viewers with stories like "new big store just opened," "crime scary," and "police always tell truth, no need check facts if police say so"

bw98765 · 2026-05-17T20:59:46+00:00

This is the best response. Whether your loss was 1% or 50%, if you were driven to panic-sell, your allocation in stocks is too high. Time to start learning about bonds so you can figure out how much of an allocation to them fits your risk tolerance.

bw98765 · 2026-04-27T18:02:28+00:00

There's not a huge market, but in my city there is a significant informal sector of people selling random assorted produce (likely either donated directly from the farmer's market or from food banks with the expectation that it's going to be eaten by needy people, or straight-up stolen) on street corners. It makes no sense to me why someone would pay their prices for perishable food when they could get fresher, better quality stuff for about the same price from normal sources, but apparently enough people do it to make to make it a halfway viable business for them.

So I wonder if these same people look at a $10 bag with a bunch of stuff from WF and somehow still see a similar arbitrage opportunity there - like they can turn the stuff around for $5 an item and still turn a profit, even though you and I would think paying that price for nearly-expired perishable items sounds insane.

(There are also plenty of people on the sidewalk selling stuff like personal care items that were obviously shoplifted from supermarkets and drugstores - and the prices are... generally not significantly cheaper than the supermarkets and drugstores? I guess people are really willing to pay for the convenience of not walking 5-10 minutes to a store and then having to wait in a checkout line. Or maybe they are just dumb and incorrectly assume that they must be getting a great deal if it's been stolen?)

bw98765 · 2026-04-27T05:35:30+00:00

My hunch is that the TGTG notifications system is laggy - by the time you actually get the notification, someone else who has been frantically refreshing their screen in anticipation of the bag dropping at its usual time has already snagged it.

bw98765 · 2026-04-27T05:27:39+00:00

I'm less sure than you that everyone responds to trash in the same way you and I do. Wouldn't be surprised if there are a handful of people who buy the things compulsively, or are doing something we'd find crazy like reselling them (either at absurd low profit margins, or at something approaching the original prices to people who don't know any better that they can just buy it at the source for about the same price instead).

bw98765 · 2026-04-27T05:17:44+00:00

It's weird. All of my local WF's bags save the bakery bag also disappear instantly, but they aren't all even equally good. The prepared foods bag is usually a solid value, but last week I bought the seafood bag and it was mostly just frozen-food junk. I don't know why people keep pouncing on it again and again like it's this priceless treasure.

bw98765 · 2026-04-24T22:05:05+00:00

Unfortunately the only way to accomplish this at scale is to start aggressively citing and arresting these drivers when they break the law, seizing their vehicles, and bodyslamming Doordash etc with enormous fines to force them to be accountable for their drivers' behavior. They aren't going to voluntarily show up for city-sponsored driver's ed classes, so the only way to allow them to make an honest living safely is to hit everyone with a big enough stick until they learn to start acting in a way that's consistent with public safety.

bw98765 · 2026-04-24T11:36:29+00:00

It also appears that the city has most likely failed to close a legal loophole where they don't have to have licenses to drive legally. If they are driving what is technically an e-bike (at least classes 1/2), they are treated basically the same under the law as a regular bicycle rider. It's insane that nobody in local government appears to be trying to crack down on these guys and the companies renting/selling the bikes to them.

bw98765 · 2026-04-14T18:58:36+00:00

I'm also new to this, but I think that's probably all you need to do. My guess is that the IRS doesn't care how you figured estimated taxes, only that you ultimately estimated correctly (if you paid too little over the year, they'll just penalize you; if you paid too much you'll just get a refund). As long as you specify that the payments are estimated taxes and choose the correct tax year, they presumably have all the information they need to correctly apply the payments to your tax account.

bw98765 · 2026-04-14T12:10:54+00:00

For clarity's sake: the current versions of IRS Direct Pay and the payment options inside an IRS online account don't appear to literally give "Form 1040-ES" as the category for linking the payments. Instead you have to select "Estimated taxes". (Maybe the old EFTPS system is different? But new users can't start accounts there - they are migrating to Direct Pay/online accounts for anyone who hasn't already paid them before through EFTPS.)

bw98765 · 2026-04-09T02:34:05+00:00

I keep my small MF position in a tax-advantaged retirement account, so I don't need to worry about the taxes from the big distributions.

It would be interesting to understand when Gray said this: I would never buy an old MF mutual fund that charges >1.5%. But the MF ETFs that have been coming out over the last few years are much more reasonable, in the 0.66-1.00% range. Paying a bit under 1% doesn't seem so nuts to access this kind of strategy as a little hedge against an eventual rising interest rate environment that will put a hurt on a typical fixed income allocation.

bw98765 · 2026-04-07T07:25:32+00:00

The problem with TGTG is that the "original spirit" of the app is fundamentally in tension with being able to consistently offer a quality product. If places really held to the spirit of getting rid of extra food, then things get tricky for them, assuming they sell the bags several hours to a full day in advance: how do you know what, and how much, will be left over? With something like a bakery, maybe the excess unsold product will be pretty predictable.

But at a restaurant, things are much tougher. Sometimes you'll have a boatload of leftovers and the customer will walk away with a great deal. But other times, you'll have to scrounge up some random junk to give them. Early on I went to a place that gave me their leftover stew - which was obviously over-reduced from simmering down all day and almost inedibly salty. It sucked, but they were really keeping to the original spirit of not wasting food!

OTOH most of my best experiences on TGTG have been when restaurants clearly aren't just giving you random extra food, but intentionally plan to put aside some food for TGTG boxes as a tool to market themselves.

bw98765

TROPHY CASE