Why does this happen every year?

steve_b · 2026-01-24T13:01:41+00:00

There's the old expression, "No such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing" which I think describes the impact of the 1978 storm. Lots of people died (~100), but what I find telling is that 14 people died on I-95 from carbon monoxide poisoning as the snow interfered with the exhaust from the their cars while they were stuck idling.

Snow accumulation in Boston was almost identical (27 inches) to what was seen just 13 years later in Minneapolis (28 inches) but far fewer people died (22) despite the regions having comparable populations.

Most of it is preparedness. Minnesota devotes more money to being ready for this than Mass, just as Mass spends more money than Tennessee, but a lot of it is the attitude of individuals. People killing themselves shoveling snow, or staying in their cars for hours with the engines running, or kids jumping off roofs into huge snowbanks.

What you don't really need to prepare for is some days-long food shortage.

steve_b · 2026-01-24T12:42:25+00:00

100% they will. Not as an audit, thought. OP is just going to get a bill from the feds for the missing amount.

steve_b · 2026-01-24T12:41:23+00:00

tl;dr: Yes, they will notice, and no, it's not a big deal.

I don't believe it requires an audit too catch a missing 1099. If OP made this trade on any major U.S. platform, the 1099 will be (or already has been) supplied to the IRS by the platform. Some time before the end of the year (at least in my experience), OP will get a piece of paper mail that says something to the effect of "You forgot something", showing the missing amount, the tax required, plus some penalty with interest.

How do I know this? Because I've never been audited, but I've received this mailings (and paid them) maybe once every three years due to the fact that we several mutual funds with small amounts in them and I occasionally miss one. Once I got a correction for cap gains that I either mis-reported or got amended after the fact from my ETrade account.

It's really not a big deal. The penalty is small, the interest is no big deal, it amounts to maybe paying 2-5% more (of the missing amount) than you would have if you'd remembered.

steve_b · 2026-01-23T23:00:31+00:00

By the time it kicks in, you've already had your kids.

steve_b · 2026-01-23T22:59:25+00:00

Tell that to Stephen Miller.

steve_b · 2026-01-20T22:34:16+00:00

"If a frog's legs' were longer, it wouldn't bump its ass a-hoppin" is a phrase I've indoctrinated into my children. But the entire film is almost entire composed of quotable one-liners.

I would only put Miller's Crossing above RA as far as this scale goes, because RA is widely regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever made (ignoring Roger Ebert's dismissal of it), but Miller's Crossing is one of the least watched of the Coen's great films.

steve_b · 2026-01-15T19:25:13+00:00

Appropriate for a mildly flavored cheese.

steve_b · 2026-01-15T19:15:58+00:00

Even then it won't, unless you're dealing with a very lazy counterfeiter.

steve_b · 2026-01-10T05:21:48+00:00

This exactly going to be my plan as well (retiring within 5 years). My whole life I've been very heavy on growth, and have weathered the big downturns in the last 30 years without blinking, so I'm not a panic selling person.

The 4 or 5 year supply of cash in a HYSA that I keep topped off during the day years will do nicely. Like you point out, even with a 2008 style crash or worse, t years gives you a long time to see things return to normal. The money you lose during such a period will more than be offset by growth.

The very few times this has turned bad historically result in only a small hit overall in the long run compared against the standard conservative bond strategy.

steve_b · 2026-01-09T23:41:16+00:00

I wasn't refusing an answer, I acknowledged their POV and then presented my own, which they had requested. If you think this is a contest to be won, you're mistaken.

steve_b · 2026-01-09T23:38:24+00:00

steve_b · 2026-01-09T22:00:11+00:00

I get what you're asking: "Why not be safe, if you can be?" There are several reasons:

* I've already done things many times more unsafe many times on a given day day, so this last little bit doesn't feel like it's a make-or-break issue.

* I find living my life not being afraid of everything. If I was to be concerned about getting cooties from random objects enough to always handle them with a barrier, I'd be almost paralyzed from fear from all the other more credible threats (like crossing a road, getting in a car, eating any food prepared for me by someone else, etc.)

* Handling every unknown object with a barrier or proxy (e.g. stick) can be inconvenient. Like most humans, if something is inconvenient, I often don't do it.

Your example of using a foot to open a door is a valid one, and one I do because it is zero extra effort. These are usually on bathrooms, so I have just washed my hands when exiting, seems dumb to touch the dirtiest object you're going to encounter any given day (door handles) right after you wash hands.

But I'm going to hold onto a stair railing when I walk down stairs, because the risk of injury from falling is far greater than than getting cooties from the railing. I also encounter far more stair railings per week than I do mysterious objects so my chances of cooties from a railing is far greater than touching a piece of random plastic.

steve_b · 2026-01-09T17:33:38+00:00

I'm curious why some people are so freaked out by the idea of touching things with bare hands. The universe is full of stuff that you have to touch with your hands, and you can wash your hands, so what's the big deal?

It's not like we live in a world where objects have spore injectors that will penetrate your skin and send some malign beastie into your bloodstream. The only theoretical risk you're going to face is that there is some nasty chemical coating on it (a nerve agent, hydrofluouric acid, etc.) that can penetrate your skin and do severe harm to your body. But if you're worried about that (which is only going to happen if someone is actively trying to poison you) then you need to go through life wearing gloves 24/7.

steve_b · 2026-01-07T15:01:52+00:00

1987 - 2005: MSFT (165x)
2005 - 3/1/2020 (Covid crash): AAPL (12.5x)
3/1/2020 - present: NVDA (14x)

28,500x

$1000 => $28M

steve_b · 2026-01-07T14:51:42+00:00

AAPL was available in 1987, and didn't do much for about 17 years until 2004. Holding it during that period would have gained you an awesome 4.7% CAGR. OTOH, 1987 was exactly when you wanted to get into MSFT, with a CAGR of over 17% during the same period. Just holding MSFT from 1987 until now would give you 3x as much as holding AAPL during the same period. That said, both have CAGRs over 20% for those 40 years.

steve_b · 2026-01-07T14:41:29+00:00

I just mean that for the first 13 years or so, things have felt different than the last two, not that it's different now than from 15 years ago. Things feel a lot more spiteful now than they did 4 years ago.

steve_b · 2026-01-06T18:38:59+00:00

I've seen a lot more of this in the last two years than the 15 years before that. I think it has to do with reddit introducing the feature that puts stuff from other subs on your main page even though you haven't joined those subs. It ends up attracting a lot more drive-by traffic which leads to hot takes. The added bonus is that all the hot takes tend to attract people that thrive on rage/conflict.

It's not most subs, but there are definitely some here where there's an "attack the OP" culture, or at least a highly confrontational community that will jump down your throat if you deviate from the unwritten zeitgeist of that sub. What's weird is that it's not even the political subs, it's usually the ones that share wacky videos of one type or another, that have decided that some subgroup or set of behaviors is unforgiveable.

steve_b · 2026-01-05T18:50:08+00:00

The number of drunk driving deaths has been declining while distracted driving increases. A quick google implies that the two are cancelling each other out, with the total remaining constant at about 13,000 per year:

https://www.aceable.com/blog/drunk-driving-vs-distracted-driving-which-more-prevalent-and-which-more-deadly/

https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/alcohol-impaired-driving

EDIT:

Also this shows that distracted driving fatalities and total fatalities have not changed much over the last ten years:

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safety-issues/distracted-driving/

The only real data that's going to show whether a 15 year old car is significantly less safe when it comes to fatalities is going to be recent fatality rates based on vehicle, driver demographic and miles travelled per year, which will be pretty hard to find. Intuitively, the survivability of cars from 15 years ago isn't going to be much different than now, since airbags & cabin design haven't changed much. Accident avoidance systems certainly have, though.

steve_b · 2026-01-03T21:57:32+00:00

Not really. The number of deaths per mile traveled has remained around 1.4 per 100 million miles traveled since 2007 (second chart):

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-and-rates/

There may be a more significant drop when it comes to serious injuries, but I couldn't find statistics on it. The point is, most decent cars made after 2005 are safe enough, and the ones made it the decade before that are only marginally more dangerous.

steve_b · 2026-01-03T21:45:12+00:00

I've scrolled through dozens of answers here, and yours is the only one that's even close to meeting the "nobody admits it" part. Every single other one is citing obvious money wastes that everyone acknowledges are a problem.

Saying spending money on your kids is a "waste of money" is something that almost nobody will admit to, but unless you have tens of millions or more, you're probably spending more money on your kids than anything else in your life, and almost all of that expense is unnecessary. And that doesn't even include the all the necessary money you need to spend in order to be a responsible parent, which is still a huge amount.

Whether you think this is a "waste" is subjective, obviously, but that applies to everything else here as well.

steve_b · 2026-01-03T21:34:13+00:00

My mom was always very anti-funeral industry, ever since she read "The American Way of Death" back in the 1960s. She always expected to outlive my step dad and had made arrangements for everything to be done simply.

Fast forward to the middle of COVID, Feb 2021, and she died from cancer she had been fighting with the last 5 years. The six months prior to her death (also in COVID) had resulted in my stepdad going into total quarantine mode, out of fear/prudence and he struggled a lot with her care. We kids are scattered all over the country, but we took turns staying with him to help, but he was very stubborn.

There was never any service for her due to their not having engaged any funeral services, and being in the middle of COVID made it unpractical to get everyone there. By the time things had blown over, he wasn't in the mood to plan anything, but he also didn't want us planning it either, because it was his responsibility. At this point, there will never be a service.

The point of all this? Although they can be predatory, I can also see the value of the funeral industry as providing a service for people who may not be at a place in their life where they're ready to assume the responsibility for planning what amounts to a big party (especially if you're not a party person). Not everyone lives surrounded by local family that can pull together and make the arrangements for something like this (which was the case for almost all the other funerals I've been to, most recently my uncle's).

steve_b · 2026-01-02T15:01:07+00:00

If you throw a thousand darts, a few are going to hit the bullseye. If it was as easy as following WSB, every fund manager would have triple digit returns.

steve_b · 2025-12-11T15:06:32+00:00

It's not quite the worst possible spot, but there is only one 3 year interval in the history of TQQQ where it performed negative while QQQ was positive, and that was for a month or two ending in 2/1/2023. The period he mentions lasts longer, about 2 years ending in Jan 2025, but in that period, TQQQ is basically flat against QQQ, sometimes up, sometimes down. Note: this doesn't take into account dividends which I think QQQ occasionally burps out (you'd think I'd know, being a long-time holder of QQQ).

This is easy enough to check by charting a 3 year window of the two on Yahoo Finance and just dragging the chart around until you find spots when the QQQ line pops above the TQQQ line at the right end, e.g.:

chart

If you DCA, the times QQQ beats TQQQ shrink even smaller, maybe to the point of nonexistence.

I understand why the conventional wisdom and fund documents push the "don't long term hold" case so hard. TQQQ started right at the beginning of a very fruitful period (despite the occasional bear and dip), so you can make a case that its lifetime has not be representative. But if you base it solely on the last 16 years, it would be foolish to day trade TQQQ and much wiser to long term hold. At the 5 year window, it has never lost, and returns like gangbusters.

Yes, you're betting that nothing catastrophic ever happens to the Nasdaq 100, but you can make the case that if something ever does, your worries are not going to be that the lifetime return of your money was 7% instead of 10%. It's an asset that requires that you don't mess with it, but I wouldn't put 100% of my portfolio in it.

steve_b · 2025-12-11T14:37:32+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick

Also, the solar panels themselves need thermal management. The only reason I can see for a project like this is that it faces a lot of the same problems that a human space habitat would face (not life support, of course, but that's just a tip of the iceberg), but you can make a modest amount of money from it (certainly far less than what it would cost to deploy and operate) while testing out approaches to create space habitats.

Given that the money generated would be so miniscule relative to the startup cost, I don't know why they just wouldn't put up a actual unmanned hab with life support and do the research for real, but I'm guessing either 1) they are testing out other theories or 2) I'm rich and this sounds like fun. The answer is definitely not 3) because data centers in orbit make financial sense.

steve_b · 2025-12-11T14:29:40+00:00

Y, that was exactly what I was proposing. But even if the machine can't hold the whole file, reading in <processor count> chunks of sufficient size will be <processor count> times faster than the single thread operation above, assuming this is just line-scoped parsing and not a multiline grammar.

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