Stocks and Finance

General
185

This is the consideration that has been giving me bleak visions for the past 8 years or so of investing. On the one hand, things have performed quite well over that period, but there’s this sense of trying to have a long-term strategy and patience but knowing that there is a low but increasing chance that things go really pear shaped and all that planning and financial self-discipline is thrown in the trash due to forces well beyond my control. Yes, it is always some non-zero possibility, the future is not guaranteed, but there are nihilistic forces driving short-sighted pursuits that are increasing that risk substantially (probably still quite low, but way higher than it should be).

It really makes it hard to emotionally and pragmatically balance what I spend and enjoy today and what I invest for the future that may turn out just fine by the time it arrives. Or, the whole system is so dramatically different that there is no realistic way to have expected and prepared for it.

186

There are many possible scenarios, but you have to consider how likely each one is, and what the timing of each will be.

Will society fail? Will wall street fail? Will you still have a job and source of income? When will any of these things happen, if at all? In what combination? Will we take back the government and institute more socialist policies? What is the likelihood that any of these things happen?

I can tell you one thing. While we have evil people in power, their power exists only in money. No matter how stupid or evil they will be, or how much harm they will cause, there are two things they fear most.

The thing they fear second most is a world where money is meaningless. The thing they fear most is a world where money still matters, but they are poor while others are wealthy.

Those evil people do everything they can to make stocks go up. They lay people off, we complain, but it makes stocks go up. They do evil dark patterns in their web apps and put all kinds of fees on shit, but it increases revenues and stocks go up. They deregulate and operate their businesses with no regards for safety or the environment. Super longs freight trains derail, forests burn, waters are full of PFAS, but all of that cuts costs and makes stocks go up.

The socialism that we want will make stocks go down. But that’s ok for us. We won’t need so much retirement savings if health care is covered by the government for free. We won’t need so much retirement savings if housing is a human right. Cut my 401k in half, but give me those things, and I probably still come out ahead.

Wealthy people on the other hand, stand to lose everything in that scenario. If stocks go down, they lose their power. Free government services are much worse than what they can trivially afford for themselves today.

Therefore, I personally believe that it is a good idea to invest in stocks as much as one is able. If the rich people take off and we can’t stop them, at least we claw back a bit for ourselves. If the economy fails for one reason or another, we will still be ok.

The only really dangerous scenario is if you are close to retirement and then the stock market crashes at the last second before you have a chance to recover. This is why the conventional advice is when you get close to retiring to move your money to a place with lower risk, such as a money market account.

187

Yep, all things that I have considered and that have driven my commitment to stock market investing. And I totally agree that the right wing rich people want the stock market to go up, so I want my boat in that water.

But what I am concerned about is that in their myopic drive for that they will actually break it in the medium to long term, just when all the long years of disciplined investing should have yielded the desired benefits (financially secure retirement) but instead the Great Depression looks pretty good in comparison. Basically, the marshmallow experiment but instead of the adult returning to the room with my multiple marshmallow reward for having had the self control to leave the one marshmallow uneaten, rather the building has caught fire and people are in the streets stealing food from each other. So not delayed gratification, but foregone pleasures now and dystopia later. Again, I’m not saying I am predicting this will happen, but that it could even though that is not what the rich assholes want because they are trying to get as many marshmallows now that they possibly can.

188

What if the major economic indicators were calculated with formulas that better reflected the lived experience of citizens? Turns out that our economy is a lot worse than these numbers would have you believe. For example:

I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464

189

In addition to everything they cite, it seems like the ease of getting really shitty gig work through apps contributed to the artificially low unemployment rate. The standard statistical model probably works better when fewer people have lousy part-time work.

190

Excellent point. And this is, of course, what capital wants. They want the US to be like other countries with exploited low wage workers that have no protections of any kind. Slavery is what they wanted since before the US existed. They lost that battle, but you gotta give them credit for never giving up. As long as those evil people exist, they will always push to get back to slavery, or as close as possible.

191

Here’s what happens when you let an AI trade stocks.