^^ This guy got chased out of the temple by a furious Jesus Christ /s

You make it seem like the US’s market will need to experience the same thing eventually.

You make it seem like it didn’t already: The US market didn’t reach its 1929 peak again until 1954. 25 years is a long time to hold out on withdrawing your retirement investments.

Here’s two other modern markets:

The Athens Stock Exchange had peaks in the 2000’s that haven’t recovered.

Ukraine’s stock market has ceased operations since the invasion.

These events are rare, but not unheard of.

At least as close as anything can be guaranteed in this world

Turns out “close to guaranteed” is in fact, not “guaranteed.”

So much so that if you pick any 25 year period over the last 200 years, you won’t find a single instance where the total value of the all traded stocks was worth less at the end than at the start.

Here’s my 25 how did they do:

• Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
• Washington Mutual Inc.
• General Motors Corporation
• Enron Corporation
• WorldCom Inc.
• CIT Group Inc.
• Chrysler LLC
• Thornburg Mortgage Inc.
• Conseco Inc.
• MF Global Holdings Ltd.
• Energy Future Holdings Corp.
• Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E)
• Toys “R” Us Inc.
• Sears Holdings Corporation
• Blockbuster Inc.
• Eastman Kodak Company
• American Airlines (AMR Corporation)
• Frontier Communications Corporation
• Hertz Global Holdings Inc.
• JC Penney
• Peabody Energy Corporation
• RadioShack Corporation
• Remington Outdoor Company
• Pier 1 Imports Inc.
• Purdue Pharma L.P.

(hint: they’ve all filed for bankruptcy at some point)

Again, look at the Nikkei from the 1990’s - that’s an entire index that was flat for 30 years. Hard to put off retirement for 30 years waiting for that index fund to pay off.

Don’t bother dying on this hill, son, there’s plenty of other, nicer hills to die on.

It becomes gambling when you are going on gut feelings without researching what you’re doing.

If you have an investment strategy that financial advisors approve of, let’s say investing 70% in a US index fund, 20% bonds and 10% high risk mutual funds that you don’t touch for years or decades, that’s investing.

If you’re just randomly picking stocks, buying and selling in order to make a quick buck because of some guy screaming at you on television without any real research into a company other than a few google searches, that’s gambling.

I want to remind everyone that there is no guarantee that the market / index funds continue to go up. It hasn’t happened in the US market, but look at the Nikkei over the last 30 years - if you had invested in the 90s you would only now be getting some of your money back - that is a long time.

Most potent toxin known to science

…so far.

Midjourney is a good alternative that renders 4 images when you feed it a prompt

I’d like to remind everyone of the “vampire effect” of wall-wart chargers - if you just leave them plugged into the wall waiting for you to connect a device, you’re constantly wasting a bit of electricity. That should also be involved in the efficiency decision of using the already plugged in computer or laptop.

INSTANTLY

THIS IS THE HILL I DIE ON.

No one has ever recovered overwritten data, as far as anyone can tell. Go look it up. The technique was only a theoretical attack on ancient MFM/RLL hard drive encoding (Gutmann’s paper). Even 20 year old drives’ (post 2001, approx) magnetic encoding are so small there isn’t an ‘edge’ to read on the bits. A single pass of random data is sufficient to permanently destroy data, even against nation-state level actors. Certainly enough for personal data.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method :

Most of the patterns in the Gutmann method were designed for older MFM/RLL encoded disks. Gutmann himself has noted that more modern drives no longer use these older encoding techniques, making parts of the method irrelevant. He said “In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques”

More reading material:

• https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1131&context=jdfsl
• https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/is-data-remanence-a-myth
• I can’t find the page on wayback machine, but there was actually a contest someone ran to see if one, small, simple file on a new, unused drive could be recovered: https://www.root777.com/security/the-great-zero-challenge/

NOW THAT BEING SAID there is no harm in doing a secure, 35-pass overwrite other than the time, energy and disk wear. If watching all the bit-patterns of a DoD-level wipe using DBAN on a magnetic disk tickles your fancy, or you think this is a CIA misinformation campaign to get people to do something insecure so they can steal your secrets, please just go ahead and do a 35-pass overwrite with alternating bit patterns followed by random data. I can tell you that I believe in my heart-of-hearts, that one pass is sufficient.

no. POTS (plain old telehphone systems) still exists. None of that is VoIP, although it’s almost certainly encoded to digital and sent as packets. VoIP is a very specific thing, and not the same as cellular or landlines.

And tomorrow is always just a day away.

Can you link to the data / source?

wow, what a surprise. smh…

Yes, The Beetles.

That’s a schrute observation.