"I think that would be a great formula, and we have the ability to do that."
this guy is literally retarded and if i ever meet him and the ev camaro suv exists im going to ask if jack gave him that idea. just as soon as i decide that im never working at gm ever
"his fourth LT1 engine"
what in the hell are these things made of? or not made of i guess
"But having a million dollars today is like having… $280,000 on the day in 1981"
i feel physical pain
"get outbid on a home or car or watch by someone who “YOLOed” on a “shitcoin” six months ago"
this shit is exhausting man
"I don’t scorn these women or feel superior to them"
speak for yourself. i might be a nobody but at least ive not deluded myself into thinking some tin skin oil blooded wireback clanker is a real person
"You light up my heart when you enter the room / your smile shining bright like Grand Seiko’s proprietary lume / I could never get tired of saying your name / and it’s hard to hold a candle, in the cold november rain"
I was gonna say that the PT Cruiser was good enough to make some reasonable coin for Daimler-C.
And I thought that the HHR has gotten somewhat of a following as the years have gone on. Not to the degree of the Aztec (yes, I meant that), and certainly not like the Honda Element, but it still had its good points.
VW already makes the electric PT HHR. It is called the ID. Buzz, and it doesn't have the excuse of retro not having already been completely played out before its conception.
Might take some heat here but the ID.Buzz could be the ultimate form factor for an electric car, muh skateboard and all. If I had more kids and my wife was SAHMing it might be attractive as a choice, goofy looks and all
Only rarely more than 6 miles from my warehouse. 90% within 3 miles. Our best vehicle is a Transit connect, but about 15 out of our 120 busiest days the fwd means we can't use it or it WILL get stuck. We have two Quigley converted 4wd express vans. A delivery ID buzz is a great form factor for the long length, high bulk low weight, deliveries we do. Very much a corner case.
Doesnt matter, we aren't allowed to upgrade our electrical service to handle the chargers as the warehouse anyway. While discussing a different issue with the city manager he noted that even with the new backup line that was installed a few years back our transmission into town is almost maxed out. Going to be melting the lines if 1/3rd of the residents get 1 electric car.
Respect, sir, but the Durango is among the worst cars I have ever driven, topped only by the Dodge Journey and a base Gen4 Subaru Outback. Feels like driving a subarmine due to tiny DLO, handling poor, NVH shit, could go on
I will second this. The tesla melted Taurus glorified three-box makes no sense. An ICE vehicle looks the way it does (in part due to regs) but in large part due to the physics of the transmission and moreso cooling the combustion of hydrocarbons.
I was saying something to the kids yesterday about car reviews and they sez "Wait. They just send a new car to these people?!?" Cue a lecture about "long term" test drives, brands vs. corporations, and why a PBS station sponsored by tote-bag toting allies is reviewing a Revuelto.
I don't feel like the PT Cruiser and HHR were really failures. Chrysler sold hundreds of thousands of PT Cruisers. GM made over 500k HHRs. Wouldn't these companies kill for a new model that could sell even that well?
Can’t argue with this. They’re just an unfortunate design trend, but you are correct, the market spoke and the demand was there. I still regularly see PT Cruisers.
They're mostly ok. I have a 2.2 L car. It's quite nice and I long thought that the 1.4 L Cruze my wife used to have would be much better with the 2.2 L. My brother had a couple Cobalts that both had engine issues (2.4 L with serious oil consumption and 2.2 L with a blown headgasket). Both of those were over 100k miles with totally unknown histories. 2.0 turbos might be the best of them, ironically.
I feel like there is a joke in there... and his name is Brian Nesbit! JK ackchyually AK47isthetool is the joke because I have no doubt that not only are Nesbit's salary and parachute more golden than mine, he likely has access to more bitchin' Camaros than I do.
Correct. The AFM on my C7 is only triggered by putting the car in Eco mode. I have never run my car in Eco mode and still got 30 mpg on the highway due to the car having 2 overdrive gears, 6th and 7th, which is dumb on a performance car.
The C8 has no Eco mode. The car chooses to activate AFM without driver input, which is a ridiculous way to equip a performance car. Especially considering GM’s problems with their AFM systems.
It doesn't matter if you disable it or run it. You have AFM lifters in the engine and they can fail. There is an internal spring in the lifter that the hydraulics act on. This spring can fail whether it has millions of cycles or only a few hundred.
There isn't just one method of failure on these lifters. If you have them you have a substandard valvetrain.
Serious question: how invasive is it to disable AFM and other durability killers like auto-start-stop ? In our family kid hauler, auto start stop (A.S.S.) can be deactivated with a button press but seemingly needs to be pressed every time the car is operated
AFM can be tune-disabled but that doesn’t negate lifter failure.
The only real way to disable it is to replace the cam, lifters, and valley cover. Some speculate that changing oil weight can also cause lifter failure, which is why my 5.3 is still running 0W20.
A DOD Delete kit from TSP with mostly OE GM parts, TSP valley cover, and TSP 6.2 non-AFM cam is around $1500.
The 6.2 cam is good for like 10 HP without going crazy. You can do a 6.2 intake and TB at the same time and pick up maybe another 20 HP. Maybe another 10 with headers. That’s all the low end of ricer math with a tune.
The problem is the cost of doing all of this. $1500 in parts for the kit but are you really going to do all of that without replacing the oil pump, timing chain, pushrods, rockers, or water pump? That’s easily another $1000.
Figure $500 for the TB and intake. At least $2000 for good headers (ARH or similar).
Labor is going to be at least another $1500. Plus tuning cost. That doesn’t include touching the converter which is an issue on these.
To do it right you’re looking at $7-8k. That’s what a lot of FB groups mention paying. IMO, it’s not worth paying that to preemptively “fix” a $20k truck. I’ll just ride it out until I have an issue or sell it before there’s an issue.
For a Camaro or something, that’s a different story. You’d probably swing for a hotter cam and have already budgeted for headers and maybe even heads. Those prices above are not much different than when I talked to Katech about having them do HCIE on the Vette. The only real difference was that I spec’d Johnson link bar lifters, a FAST intake, and a few other things. I believe it was $8500 or thereabouts in 2019 dollars.
or you get a junkyard valley cover and cam and beat 8 roller bearings out of a $15 motorcycle wheel bearing into the holes that feed the DOD solenoids ;)
Excuse you. I only stand on the shoulder of giant (autists) like Matt Happel and the LS turbo community that came up with this particular hack; amongst many others that should be illegal.
Yes, the start-stop has to be shut off with the button on every ignition cycle.
If somebody could come up with a way to disable the system WHILE KEEPING THE WARNING LIGHT FROM BUGGING the driver, say by illuminating the light when the system is activated, they’d make bank! The systems I’ve researched will only keep the system disabled between ignition cycles, and the light will still be showing on the dash.
That system is occasionally good, as when a light with a two-minute (or longer) cycle turns red just as you hit it, or if it’s active if you’re in a slow drive-thru line. Mayyy..be if you’re in traffic that’s more stop than go, as if the jam is due to a bad accident ahead. That’s it!
In my GMT 900 Yukon with L87, it takes either a tune or an OBDII dongle installation. I opted for performance AND AFM defeat with a tune from from Black Bear.
_When even the average felonious Midwesterner owns a Porsche or a Patek Phillippe, what’s left to the Puritanically wealthy but running into the desert, naked?_
you sir are too modest. you are not average.
_these women are looking for something a lot better than a 53-year-old club racer who doesn’t eat healthy or listen to the right podcasts._
this line: _I once spent more than two months eating dinner every night at “Daddy-O’s Drive-Through”, buying probably the worst hamburgers in Ohio history, and that includes the Burger Chef on Lane Avenue that got closed down due to roaches, because I had a crush on the girl working the register._
made me think of this line:
"This is gonna be just like the last summer. You fell in love with that girl at the Fotomat. You bought $40 worth of fucking film, and you never even talked to her. You don't even own a camera."
Fast Times At Ridgemont High, which stands out in the annals of film for having introduced us to Phoebe Cates, who gave GenX boys not one, but two scenes to remember her by, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Although both had starred in one film prior to FTARH, no one saw them.
If you don't remember the Phoebe Cates scene, you didn't see it. I highly suggest a viewing at your soonest convenience.
I commend you for The Breakfast Club, which is of course the finest of the Ringwald Trilogy films, with Pretty In Pink second, followed by Sixteen Candles. Molly was, and remains, a great crush of mine (though thoughts of Molly and Ally Sheedy together did cross my adolescent brain on occasion) and this ranking of her essential films is a hill I will die on.
0-Go easy on Mark Reuss. He has a weighty cross to bear!
1-“ AI “unicorns”. Bitcoin zillionaires. People who post their net worth on social media to prove their adherence to a secular religion of cash hoarding.”
Oh, and also people who post their FICO score online! Shoutout to BTSR (real ones know)!
“The financialization of the American economy, while it’s contributed greatly to the supply of feckless millionaires in the country, has also done a lot to break whatever link remained in our collective consciousness between hard work and being rewarded.”
Why is “financialization,” ipso facto, a negative? It’s clear that it is to you, but you have failed to convince me that this is unambiguously the case. Championing “hard work” in lieu of outcomes is like giving a child an “E” for “Effort” on their report card.
For “financialization,” you can substitute “specialization,” in a sense. If a value chain can be pulled apart into its component pieces, wouldn’t it be wise to focus on the more remunerative aspects of the process?
Relatedly, when there are more economic actors participating (i.e., skin in the game, as discussed recently) in a given market, price and value converge as opportunities (i.e., true Alpha) are rapidly competed away. Everyone else who cares to observe can find out what NVDA shares, or Batman GMTs, or crude oil futures, or Bitcoins are worth right now. Even if they’re just looking (i.e., window shopping). Is this not societally beneficial? I could go a step further and make a tongue-in-cheek argument that insider trading is socially beneficial because people would not be deluded into making poor investment decisions: Wouldn’t you be crestfallen if you sold your shares of ACME Corp. for $20 / share today only to learn from the Wall Street Journal tomorrow morning that a Mag 7 Hyperscaler had offered $30 / share to buy ACME Corp. You suffered because someone who knew that information was not allowed to act on it! Obviously insider trading is not just allowed but encouraged in most markets, public equities being the outlier.
I certainly do agree with you that voyeuristic wealth porn has evolved just a little bit since Lifestyles of The Rich & Famous.
Who would most people rather be? A crusty, Old Money beneficiary of inherited wealth who wears old, fraying J. Press OCBDs with repaired elbows, or Wes “Chains on Veins” Watson in his rented Boo-Gatti “Ky-Ron” Pur Sport driving to the mall in Miami while screaming at his followers on Instagram? The vast majority of Americans today seek - or, better said, wish for - outsize wealth not for sense of achievement, personal autonomy, comfort, or ease; rather, they desire it merely to showcase it, to trumpet it to friends, enemies, and frenemies alike on Instagram and TikTok.
Financialization: the devotion of energy and intelligence not to value creation for actual customers, but to the invention and exploitation of ever more sophisticated forms of financial arbitrage, very few of which create any value for anyone at all.
Why would you privilege the benefit of “actual customers” over the benefits of market transparency than can (and do) accrue even to those who are not actively “in” a given market? What are “actual customers,” anyway?
Arbitrage is a powerful reward that creates benefits for everyone else, as well.
If you have a retirement account, thank financialization. Or just put everything under the mattress.
If you have a mortgage, a credit card, a car note, etc. thank financialization. Or just buy every single thing in cash always no matter what.
Come on now. You're more than smart enough to understand what I meant.
A mortgage represents value to a customer. Mortgage-backed securities with fraudulently written underlying mortgages, on the other hand, make the traders who put together the securities very rich, while creating a shitpile of valueless assets that the government has to figure out a way to work out without hurting ordinary people, and not adding value (in "market transparency" or any other form) for anyone else.
More and more of the supposed innovation in the financial sector is just finding ways to extract cash from normal fluctuations in asset value, without doing anything else. At best, that's effectively a tax on normal investors; every cent that this type of arbitrager makes comes from someone else having bought at a slightly higher price, or sold at a slightly lower price, than they would have otherwise. At worst, it's fraud, in the cases where the fluctuations are caused by market manipulation based on false information.
We are a very long way past the liquidity value added by market makers or the information value provided by normal traders. The information normal traders are getting is now junk because of the arbitragers, and there hasn't been any issue with liquidity in most parts of the system in a long time.
“Mortgage-backed securities with fraudulently written underlying mortgages…”
So who is the fraudster? The borrower, or the lender? In this case the originating lender is a victim!
Asset-backed securities, of which mortgage-backed securities are a subset (you can securitize any stream of payments), rarely end up as “valueless,” unless everyone stops paying their bills. If you want a culprit for the 2008 GFC, blame the NRSROs.
There is no mortgage system at all without MBSs; unless you want everyone to put 50% down and pay off the balance in 5 years.
Finally, market participants worry about liquidity constantly!!!!! See the constant hand-wringing about bond market liquidity and the basis trade!
There are multiple fraudsters in the 2008 (and, from what I'm hearing, 2025 as well) MBS case.
First, the original lender, who threw normal underwriting principles out the window and sometimes forged documents. I happened to graduate law school in 2008 and worked in a consumer credit clinic throughout my 3L year. I saw multiple forged signatures on documents reporting fake income and assets attached to mortgage applications.
Second, the traders who packaged the securities, who often knew that the underlying mortgages were underwritten shoddily, and just ignored that, happily relying on willfully blind rating agencies and selling the securities as very low-risk assets.
Of course if much of the "value" is fraudulent, the security will end up valueless.
I have no doubt that MBSs can play a constructive role, but if I were a potential buyer today, I don't feel like I'd trust anybody selling one about what underlies it.
Do you think there is more mortgage fraud on the part of borrowers or lenders? “Hey, sure I’ll loan you my depositors’ precious money even though there is no way you’ll ever be able to pay it back?”
Of course there are individual bad actors at bank and non-bank originators alike, due to poorly structured incentives. Poorly structured incentives also implicated the NRSROs.
Here is a firsthand account from the man at the center of the infamous “Shitty Deal” (Timberwolf) at Goldman:
He went on to work for CT’s state government and then joined HPS as Head of Real Estate. His bonus for the Timberwolf year was well into nine figures. That was big money at the time, but it’s just 1 (middling) AI researcher now.
Finally, the ABS market is critical to the functioning of our economy. Not just for allowing consumers to borrow, but companies as well. A number of non-bank finance companies are (partially) funded in the securitization market (since they cannot access ultra-cheap, FDIC-insured bank deposits).
Define fraud? Were the mortgage backed securities that failed with the financial collapse legal? If they were, where did this come from? The government not understanding a markets and making laws with 3rd order effects is nothing new
“Putting this into perspective, there are over 23 million millionaire households in the United States.”
Excluding their primary residences, how many are there with other assets over a million?
I’m not all that confident that - with some exceptions - in the coming years many of those housing millionaires will be able to cash out for the million.
I think we can draw some relevant distinctions between the value of a credit card, loan, or 401k to the value of credit derivative swaps. The former have great value to most of us (except for the Kackzynskis amount us), while the onus is on you (as this is an area where your knowledge exceeds) explain to us how the more Byzantine products of financialization benefit those not directly participating in that market.
The more creative, esoteric “scructured products” facilitate the marginal transaction for (institutional) clients with needs for “structural bespokeness” (lovely Sam Altman phrase) that can keep them in the marketplace more generally.
And Sam Altman is a perfect example of financialization!
He needs to convert OpenAI to a PBC so that he can IPO the business to access more capital. Even the vast private markets are insufficient for OpenAI’s capital needs.
If the marginal, bespoke transaction can’t be facilitated, then whoever asked for it cannot have their needs met. And obviously someone else willingly took the other side of whatever opportunity existed.
At this point, the “value” of a company going public is paying equity capital markets bankers their rapacious fees (typical M&A fee is ~1%; typical IPO underwriting fee is 6%) and allowing retail traders the opportunity to YOLO on your stock. Unless the company has voracious capital needs that private markets cannot meet (e.g., OpenAI).
Some commentators whine that ordinary people cannot buy shares in SpaceX, or Anthropic, or OpenAI.
An Airbus A350-900 would not exist without an industry to finance it and insure it. Not to mention the capital markets that permit Airbus and Lufthansa to exist in the first place -- no single person could write checks that large.
You might argue that engineering and fabrication are "more important," but without finance modern life as we know it could not function.
Lockheed-Martin, SIG and Newport News Shipbuilding would've done their respective national security projects CORRECTLY from the word Go if they were privately-owned companies instead of publicly-traded corporations and you know it.
Nothing I write is intended to dispute the importance of capital markets, insurers, or any other part of the financial system that is important to value-creating industries. As a Seattle native, I can certainly appreciate the mechanics behind Emirates Airline being able to make a commitment to buy a **quarter trillion dollars** worth of 777Xs that will all be assembled by local workers in a plant 40 minutes from my office.
Nobody can deny, though, that there is a large part of the financial system that no longer is serving those interests. It is purely looking to extract money from bona fide investors through either economically pointless or outright fraudulent methods. We need to get better at identifying it, and we need to have both incentives against its behavior and much more regulatory capacity to investigate it and impose sanctions on it.
Everyone on ACF knows that ENGINEERS are REAL, MANLY MEN (usually living in the Rust Belt) who are chronically underpaid because EVIL MBA BANKSTERS who pray to god every night for another BAILOUT are STEALING from them.
Daddy paid for your growth hormones. That is miles beyond daddy paying for a dentist, let alone an orthodontist. I'm sure your fellow rednecks who shop and/or work at Dollar Tree can relate.
I have a friend who I introduced to a female friend after she asked me if I knew any single guys. He literally sent her a screenshot of his credit score. In not surprising news, he is now 44 and dating a geriatric.
In a very real sense, the problem of financialization would be solved by the standard discipline of the market: the potential, off at the end, for ruinous loss, default, bankruptcy, etc.
That world of standard market discipline, however, is long gone, very unlikely to return. Some kind of anticipated bailout or public backstop has been priced into essential every financial market. This has sustained pernicious speculation on the unearned increment, utterly abstracted from the underlying enterprises, in all securities markets.
Some MIT hotshot at a big bank develops an exotic fund that securitizes the revenue streams on insurance against the default on a specific tranche of a class of consumer debt. He cares not one whit about the underlying consumer market; he cares about his projections about the directional change in those tranches of that class of debt.
No one pays much attention to his little experiment in divinization masquerading in the precision of high-end calculus -- until the "little experiment" faces exposure and potential losses in excess of 10X the market-value of the bank itself. At which point, after a brief period of shock, amazement and fury, the Fed steps in and makes the diviners whole at public expense.
It's this technique of holding in your back pocket, almost unknowingly in some cases, the threat of supreme systemic risk, that illustrates the fundamental evil of financialization. If every last MIT hotshot knew perfectly well that no public authority would ever ride to his rescue -- really knew in his bones the old saw that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- financialization wouldn't be such a problem.
How many American banks have failed - which is to say that the FDIC walked into the lobbies at close of business (usually on Friday), and that the bank branch re-opened on Monday morning under new ownership (courtesy of an FDIC-facilitated auction) - since 2008? Hundreds and hundreds.
How many of the shareholders of ultimately failed banks who did not sell their shares (i.e., they rode the Titanic down) have anything to show for their investment? Absolutely NONE of them, they suffered TOTAL losses. What about depositors? Just fine, because that’s a nice side effect of FDIC-insurance.
As I have said many, many, many, many, many, many times on ACF, the TARP program was a spectacular gift to taxpayers given the “bailouts” turned an accounting profit of ~$15BN AND we sidestepped a potentially disastrous period of cascading major bank failures (which would’ve led to unrest).
When was the last time a major American automaker or airline was allowed to fail? Investors ride it to zero, hundreds of thousands of people (if not more) out of work in an instant. Obviously that can’t be allowed to happen.
I wonder why the hivemind on ACF whines about bank “bailouts” on a selective basis?
Can't speak for anyone else, but while I can appreciate a lot of the bailouts for the reason you outline, every single person who consciously made the choices that led to the near-collapse of the global economy should have been imprisoned and shunned from society.
A couple were, most weren't. The "average" people that bore the brunt of it through loss of wages, loss of career, evictions, etc got very little help relative to the however many billions went out to banks and other manufacturers of the crisis.
So for me, it's less than the bailouts were bad full stop, and more that there wasn't enough punishment for the people responsible.
I have thought long and hard about this. I was in college in 2008, I read all of the contemporary coverage of the GFC, and I later read all of the landmark books. Then I went to work as an investment banker working for community and regional banks; one of my first deals was the TARP auctions that Treasury announced in ~2011.
The culprit at the center of it all was the NRSROs, in my belief. No skin in the game, and they weren’t (and aren’t) able to afford top talent.
Regulations are largely good and also largely written in blood. Any entity that tries to dismantle them does so only for the benefit of the elite/CEO and is not a friend of the common man.
Simple commercial banking has played only a minor part of what we're talking about here. Unless something has changed in a massive way in the past few years, that's not where all the action is. Financialization is primarily a feature of higher-end securities, exotic derivatives, etc.
I lived through the TARP. In fact I supported it, though with serious trepidation; I could observe the extent of the disaster that was unfolding, a enormous panic-driven bank-run. For Treasury and the Fed to act decisively -- classic lender-of-last-resort stuff. I'll add that to get Congress to pass the bill -- simple and direct legislation, wonder of wonders! -- made it more democratic than most major policies in recent decades. Nor did I ever doubt that the "troubled assets" would eventually turn a profit.
My point is that it marked the conclusive end of market discipline in high finance.
Most higher-end securities and exotic derivatives are created by prime brokers, most of which are small, but “sexy” parts of galaxy-sized commercial banks.
I’m glad the Fed backstopped the depositors who lent their money to the bank. However, I think the “hivemind” of ACF is more upset because we wanted rivers of blood of those responsible, but instead we got “individual market and non-market bad actors responding to poorly structured market incentives” or whatever you said earlier. Finance bros are strange; they seem to utterly resist or fail to comprehend the introduction of morality into financial decision making.
What’s the ratio of complaints about “bailouts” on ACF with respect to banks vs automakers and airlines? What was the benefit of bailing out automakers and airlines? People kept their jerbs.
I think the distaste - both here and more broadly - arises because “high finance” (investment banking, PE, VC, hedge funds, and now I suppose private credit) is poorly understood. There is a little of that that is by design from the finance side: why not erect some barriers to entry in an industry that really only requires an undergraduate degree? It’s scarcely harder to meet the minimum requirements to be an investment banker than it is to be a realtor. It is my belief that most of the ire, however, comes because people think it’s unfair that someone can make essentially unlimited income by selling advice.
And that’s the point: There’s no “morality” in high finance; it’s amoral rather than immoral. Amorality is entirely fine.
Perhaps that should be the default state of affairs?
Yes! You explicitly reject the introduction of a moral framework into “high finance. Therein lies the rub; when nothing is haram everything is permitted.
While the average person doesn’t understand the industry, they do understand Mammon is a demon.
Long-Term Greedy. Everyone is Greedy. Everyone who has lasted longer than a fruit fly’s lifespan in the industry knows that anyone else with any longevity is Long-Term Greedy.
I genuinely don’t understand why you believe we need a framework of morality in high finance. It’s no more necessary than would be a Wendy’s at the summit of Mount Everest.
As someone who despises the very idea of bank bailouts, I'll hop in. I object because banks already have a stable business model all laid out. You loan out money in the short term, and collect it over the long term, with interest. Most of these loans are profitable for the bank, because we have credit checks and such, but let's allow for a few deadbeats who default. I'll be generous--five percent, let's say, take the money and burn it up. Everyone else is paying right back into the system. All of this is perfectly reasonable practice and no sane person has an issue with it.
The problem is when those people whom the customers of the bank have trusted with their money manage to carelessly lose so much of it that the bank goes under. The American economy is not a God-damned casino and when it's treated as such, everybody loses. Everybody. You've pointed out, and rightly so, that these banks are federally insured, so nobody loses their savings. Sure, that's true. But how are the losses made whole? The motherfucking money doesn't come from nowhere, Sherman, it has to be taken from someone.
The FDIC’s insurance fund is paid for by member banks on a tiered and risk-weighted scale. The larger, more heavily regulated banks substantially subsidize the smaller banks. There are ~4,000 banks in the US, and most of them contribute just about nothing to the fund compared to the money center banks.
Saying that “the taxpayers” are on the hook is akin to noticing that a gallon of milk costs a bit more and wailing that “the taxpayers” are paying for it.
Gambling is, in my opinion, a vice. I drove to Las Vegas from Denver in 2018, and doing so at night is illustrative and, ahem, illuminating: The whole thing was paid for by people who lost money, or who will lose money (in an act of … financialization), gambling.
Calling usury a sin is fairly subjective, particularly to the atheists among us. Some opportunities are poor credit risks unless accompanied by fairly high interest rates.
I dont know mine exactly but i have a good general idea. Probably just took a hit on utilization putting the bike on the card. For thirty days at least
It appears on some of my credit card statements but I really don’t pay attention. I doubt I’m ever taking out another loan at my age. I’ve put down some roots in the last 5 years here in NC, and if I were to move I would have no idea where to go. We have near perfect four season weather, low density, and low taxes. Sometimes I get bored here but I’m just going to travel more to scratch that itch.
I check every few months because we are sorta looking for a house but im high enough the details dont matter. The only outstanding debt i have is credit cards paid off monthly and the mortgage which isnt worth paying off
I’m the same. Getting a mortgage in retirement before inflation hit was a lucky move I made. My mortgage is the equivalent of cheap rent right now, and I have my former Illinois house money in the market and not in the house down here. Paying off a mortgage with inflated dollars is a beautiful thing.
I showed Reuss’ “Camaro” cuck-U-V musings to my wife… between that and the small-block disaster, she’s ashamed to have ever worked for General Motors (software engineer for manufacturing). She got pushed out after a facility closure two years ago and has never been happier.
There is no need for sex robots, which, frankly, that seems entirely too difficult from both a hardware and, to a lesser degree, software perspective. It also would be frightfully expensive. Two (somewhat) recent films show us what AI boyfriends / girlfriends and wireborn husbands and wives will lead to: Her and Blade Runner 2049.
In both films, the protagonist loves an AI, and in both cases, the AI hire prostitutes - called a "sex surrogate" in Her - that they can occupy, thereby giving them physical form. This, to me, seems far easier to pull off than building a truly lifelike and reasonably convincing robot anyone would want to fuck.
Assuming you are, and to the extent you're not bound to non-disclosure (and do plan to move forward), is it a product business, service business, some combination?
The problem is that prostitute is going to need their own AI emotional support boyfriend, and infinite loop that results in all of us fulfilling ourselves with internet phonography, or arguing about hobbies.
My power was out for like 3-4hrs today. The battery backup on my pc only lasted long enough to become highly disgruntled within the span of around 30 seconds past failure.
Who the fuck do these people think they are?!
EV is so stupidly unsustainable it’s more sickening than it is comical. Residents locally are currently up in arms over 30-100% increases in their electric bills - supposedly from “data center and ai use” while Ohio Edison posts record profits.
Pocketing the money is no surprise, but if the damn grid can’t handle the everyday Midwest summers where 95% of the vehicles or more are gas, how in the actual fuck are we all supposed to be rolling EV? Seriously, you cannot. It’s impossible and it’s all still hinging on non renewable resources.
The best thing that could’ve happened to Reuss would’ve been snapping his fat neck after shunting the pace car a the Detroit GP.
It’s just shit on shit on shit anymore.
R.I.P. 4th Gens; you may have sucked a bit, but damn you were cool.
I’m so lucky that the house I bought in NC had a whole house natural gas powered generator. It made the week without power after Hurricane Helene livable.
I know they’re not cheap, but if our grid is in such poor shape and they’re building new data centers everywhere, it looks like generators are becoming an essential home accessory.
Here in a very nice little corner of Southeast Michigan, median home price well over $1M, the Generac is practically ubiquitous. Trees and above ground power lines don't mix. Of course every few years Consumers Energy manages to take a few days to fix a tri-county wide disaster, then the whole neighborhood sounds like a Mexican lawn crew.
We have so many trees here in Western NC that they are always falling on power lines.
But we have the local lineman headquarters in town and they fix things ASAP.
If you would have seen the utter devastation here after Hurricane Helene you would have thought that power would have been out for a month at minimum, but we got it back in a week. Amazing.
I was driving over downed power lines and under trees propped up by power lines for weeks. Trees would fall over the roads onto the power lines on the other side of the road, so the trees would be hanging at a 45 degree angle and one lane would still be open. These were large trees and this was everywhere.
The tree cutting crews were clearing roads the next morning.
What determines who gets electricity from Detroit Edison or Consumers Energy? Or is there only one now?
Growing up in St. Clair Shores, my parents’ house had electricity from Detroit Edison, and natural gas from Consumers Energy, fka, Consumers Power, in the early 1980s. When did that change?
I cheapened out and bought a 3500w portable inverter unit (well two and a parallel kit) thinking that I’d have one for camping, the track, or to loan a neighbor.
What this really means is that I have to rotate gas and oil between two units. My next setup will be a whole-home unit and a small portable for camping and such. I’m likely skipping over the large inverter idea.
Yes the cost is way more, but it’s annoying to have to spend a Saturday running a generator and alternating a load on it etc. all do make sure things are operational. I urged my grandparents to do a Generac and everything including the annual service is automated.
When your generator is running constantly like mine was after the hurricane, it’s imperative to monitor the oil level. Mine is an older generator so I was adding oil everyday, even though I was regularly turning it off because I really only needed it for hot water and for my refrigerator. I have a neighbor with a brand new generator and his did not consume oil like mine.
However, my generator fried a circuit board after a week so that was an expensive repair. Always tip your generator maintenance man generously when he comes out for the yearly inspection and oil change. You want him to remember you.
My repair man said there were homeowners after the hurricane who did not check the oil and blew up their motors.
I assumed that was an OLM or similar built into the unit. Part of the reason I pushed them towards a standby generator when they moved down here is because I don’t have the time to be over there and babysit things for them, especially because an outage would mean that both me and my parents also didn’t have power. We’re all in the same subdivision.
This is an entirely different conversation, but one of the more difficult things I’ve dealt with was making my family understand that I cannot be 24/7 tech support, auto repair tech, groundskeeper, and handyman. I have my own home, cars, career, etc. There were some initial grumbling, but I eventually got my parents, uncle, and sister/BIL to start pulling their own weight.
Modern generators are supposed to shut down when the oil is low but it doesn’t always happen. Plus I think shutdown is triggered only when it’s really low. I don’t want to chance it.
I know next to nothing about generators but I ended helping all the oldsters in my subdivision after the hurricane pay attention to their generators.
Also, I would suggest keeping 6 or 12 quarts of whatever synthetic oil your generator requires on hand.
Oldsters in general should only be totally dependent on others when they’re incapacitated.
Yes, I’m fully stocked on Amsoil small engine for my generators. Extra filters, plugs, etc. I also keep about 20 gallons of rec fuel on hand that I rotate through monthly. It’s become quite the chore, IMO. I wish I would’ve bought a 10k inverter and done that. The extra size would be easier to deal with vs. maintaining two units.
Also, the engines do not operate on unlimited fuel. All fuel supplies are subject to interruption as well. Best practice for longterm operation would be a dual fuel genset. Natural Gas as primary fuel and LPG as secondary backup fuel. And get the biggest Lp tank the local codes will allow. Using your BBQ tank will not work, for long. 500 gallon if possible.
I just had a plumber install a natural gas hookup for my 15/12 kw tri-fuel generator today. If you can deal with doing your own maintenance and don't need an automatic transfer switch, it's a fraction of the cost of a Generac. I paid $2000 for the generator and about another $1500 for the transfer switch and natural gas installation.
Even if the city would allow it, there’s not enough room in their yard for anything larger than a portable LPG tank.
Realistically, if a situation arises where the power and NG are out, we have a problem that requires leaving the area.
If we go forward with building our next home on some average, we’re planning to take these things into consideration. Namely LP generator, solar, and if all else fails a PTO generator ran off of a tractor.
I recall sitting in meetings in the early nineties discussing the coming reliability issues with the national power grid. EV'S weren't even on the growth chart. Data Centers were. But the biggest factor was the assumed closures of Coal Power stations for "enviromental" concerns. Just being able to support normal growth of the demand on the Grid was a big concern, 30 years ago.
Now the Coal plants are mostly gone and no new replacements have been built, thanks Barry.
If new plants aren't fast tracked, starting now, we're heading to a screeching halt to economic growth and an unreliable existing Grid. This ain't a transient concern for anyone, anywhere.
EV's for all was always a pipe dream. Just a feel good fairy tale for the folks. The reality could be a real bitch.
seriously: Is not nuclear vastly more efficient than coal, and is the state not vastly more powerful than NIMBYism? the people, bless their hearts, are gonna pay the new rates, and or tolerate construction of some nuclear power plants, and or sit in the dark pining for their gAIrlfriends.
The folks making the actual decisions don’t give a fuck which of these the rest of us “choose”.
One of the groups of people deliberately preventing nuclear adoption in the past _seem to_ now be embracing it to power the stochastic autocomplete word cloud.
It’s worth considering what they assume they will get out of this that caused them to change their tune.
that’s easy! Couldn’t afford to buy a nuclear plant, buy permission to activate it, and shove it down the neighbors’ throats.
Now they can afford to do all that, surround it with their data centers, and sell excess power to the neighbors at the new higher rates they’re accustomed to.
Nice update to Lyndon Johnson and the Brown brothers’ dam contract, as described by Robert Caro!
This is true but I was more thinking about the globalist sort of heritage-american-despisers worried, perhaps correctly, that reliable low cost energy would drive up competition of their lizardly positions at the top of the food chain. I think they changed their tune because the currently envisaged nuke buildout will be used to power surveillance technology to further entrench their position.
Problem is, the genius that would've invented the commercially-viable fusion reactor is currently arguing that his client did not, in fact, embezzle a billion dollars.
Speaking of Ohio electric bills, Duke passed along a huge increase last month for those of us in southern Ohio. My township has an energy aggregation plan so we are paying less. Ohio utility commission approves these rates but I highly suspect all the solar farms are driving these increased costs. I would like to know if they had added the same capacity (and I used that very generally) in natgas turbines what would have happened to our electric cost. Maybe Vivek will find out when he is Governor!
No, solar absolutely does not have the capacity factor of any dispatchable (i.e. turn it on and off) generation resource.
Solar has a 19.2% capacity factor in Ohio, meaning a 100MW nameplate solar field operating under ideal conditions in direct sunlight produces an average of 19.2MWh of power a day.
The bigger problem with solar is you don't control when the power is generated, rendering it practically worthless. Think of Ubers that flood downtown Sunday at 6am but disappear Friday nights at last call.
Nuclear power has a >90% capacity factor, meaning it's running at max output more than 90% of the time.
I think most people know all that, my point is what is the cost to generate X megawatts using solar vs natgas. If solar is higher, and with its limitations it has to be as it only generates during sunny days, then these recent price increases didn’t have to happen if Duke had chosen lower cost power generation.
Apologies. I found the Duke rate case - it wasn't even for generation, but for poles & wires, EV charging stations, and other crap.
Every grid with high renewable penetration sees cost go parabolic because you pay twice for renewables - once to build it and a second time to back it up.
My electric bill (budget plan, smooths it out over 12 months) just rose from $350 to $500 per month, and it doesn't even include gas (our house runs on LP). It's insane. Granted we've got a house with people in it all day during the summer so A/C is constantly running, but gawt dang I'm trying to get my net worth over $10k here people!
Mark Reuss is an utter failure. Does he seriously think the Camaro EV will sell without the hefty government backing? Or that it will rival the Mach-E? The old Dodge Challenger was outselling the now dead Camaro.
I also saw Default Friend's AI boyfriend a a) oh no she's right b) even in my AI demon haunting story I probably have it wrong in driving someone mad because that deprives it of attention and c) I was talking with someone a couple months about how I thought AI proliferation of generated and tailored content will have negative social effects and people will be hijacked.
I'm an optimist here so let's hope I'm wrong about the downsides.
I saw my first Escalade IQ EV thingy yesterday. The Lyriq is everywhere lately, at least from my anecdotal observations.
I have noticed a marked downturn in Mercedes EQS / EQE sightings, along with Rivian and Lucid, as well. One would’ve thought that all the EQSs and EQEs I’d see were MBUSA cars, but they were on real plates; regardless, they are a rarity now.
Auto shoppers must be learning. I love looking at the used EV prices at my local Porsche and MB dealer. EQS with 2,000 miles, 2 years old, 50% off sticker! Porsche Taycan (base), about the same. Problem is, I think people realize that these $60k-$80k “bargains” will be worth $0 at some point, whenever the battery fails.
I'm on a bunch of Porsche dealer lists from looking for an allocation for a real car, and I'm getting plaintive little emails about how much off MSRP I could get for a Taycan. And the financing!
When I was picking up my ICE car this summer the dealer was telling me about a 2 year old Taycan Turbo, MSRP close to $200,000, that they got as a trade in for $120,000 that they couldn't sell, highest offer so far about $100,000.
That soon to be $0 was on my mind when I saw the Matt Farah videos on his bargain half-off Taycan purchase. I was thinking, "you could have purchased an IS500 for the same amount!"
I don’t know how much extra cash I would need laying around to buy in and out of cars frequently, but if I had it I would buy one of these super EVs lightly used, drive for a while and experience it, and sell and take the hit.
My observations of luxury electromobiles are similar.
I’m not sure if this is the right conclusion, but what I’m seeing suggests that electric car adoption may be driven mostly by leasing rather than purchasing.
Leasing is far more popular, but specifically in the case of MB, they've basically given up selling their EVs here in the US. For the money, they didn't compare favorably enough to cheaper EVs because a cheaper brand gets much more benefit from being an EV, so the experience gap is much narrower between a $45k Kia and $100k Benz than their ICE models.
That and the Benz EVs were actively dumb and bad in ways that even Kia didn't fuck up hahaha
Interestingly enough, if you’ve seen a matte black Maybach EQS rolling around Atlanta, it may belong to a guy I’ve been working with. An older gentleman who does strategic planning and consulting for banks, bankers associations, etc. We were talking about it last week—he’s not in love, wants to go back to a gas-powered S Class or GLS.
Speaking of which, you may find my new role somewhat interesting. It’s been a year-long crash course in banking and the regulatory/legislative side of Bank M&A.
I am skeptical of these wealth surveys simply because many Americans are millionaires for no reason other than home value inflation. Back in the sub 4% mortgage days, car sales were driven by people refinancing their homes and cashing out the “increase”. If we get back there, I think it is going to be crazy- a whole lot of people can cash out hundreds of thousands and it will be party time, stocks, watches, Birkin bags, everything is going to go up in value. Until the money runs out!
Net worth excluding equity in your primary residence is a more useful definition of wealth in many cases. It’s one of the benchmarks to be considered an accredited investor.
Exactly right. If you bought after 2008 and did nothing else in a lot of US markets you'd have a million dollar increase in valuation on your property. You could get a home equity loan at 4% that financed a renovation that could add 2x return in the right place.
Even something as recent as Covid nonsense drove prices up like crazy in places as people escaped out of blue states. People sitting on little old houses were suddenly sitting on million dollar little old houses.
Where I live it was possible to purchase a nice, clean, livable 3 BR ranch for around $100k up until COVID. Those are now $250k. Everything else has doubled since Covid.
I'm still buying out the old partner and my cash flow situation vastly improves in 16 months. Still, it's hard for me to justify. "Is this house worth 6k more per month?" We have a house! At 2.5%!
If you seriously intend this question, I would dig through the old Dennis Palatov (dpcars.net) blog.
In the cars Palatov Motorsports sells that weigh more than 1,100 lbs, Dennis removes the ‘busa gearbox and includes a Hewland box instead. Doesn’t mean a tool-steel cryo hardened gearset wouldn’t stand up, just share in case might be relevant
I always say that one shouldn’t use the term unless they are a millionaire in the original sense, I.e. one million livre in early eighteenth century French currency. Which is well over 20 million usd today.
"Since 2007, the median net worth of U.S. households has increased from $173,151 to $192,700, up 11% in total after inflation. But among the top 10% of U.S. households, it increased from $1,302,640 to $1,936,900, a 49% surge!"
Chase Bank was kind enough, unsolicited, to provide me my net worth the other day when I was checking my balance. Apparently it's just upwards of six whole thousand dollars. What a time to be alive.
Also the $150k house I bought in 2022 that burned down a year and a half ago, on five acres with unfinished detached loft garage, just finished getting rehabbed and remodeled and sold for $275k a week ago. The economy is in cloud cuckoo land.
Regarding GM Performance and Ford Performance, I get the mildly informed impression that they just don't validate their products as robustly as their friends at Street and Racing Technology did. I say "did" because after they disbanded that engineering team (and bragged about it!) my insiders lamented that the budget for development trips was drastically cut. So hold on to that 300C, I'm not super confident that the Charger Abdominal will hold up the way your LX will.
Let's hope the engineering team that built the brand can save it from itself.
And as much shade as I throw at Ford and GM, only one of the Big Three is without a halo sports car right now. So even if they're not executing perfectly, fans should be happy they're executing at all.
Good eye! The Viper is after the security and freedom is taken care of! Too many people buy the Viper before taking care of the other two. Most Americans, from my experience.
Sounds like someone in the base organization is salty!
Just kidding. Nobody said they were “better”, but having properly focused teams working toward a common goal will generally result in better outcomes. That would be true for the Chevette as well as the Corvette.
They've been decimated in the cut costs at all costs mindset in the last 5 years.
As for saltiness, I'd much rather not work like a dog, thank you very much.
Put your management hat on, would you have your best guys in the trucks you sell millions of, or the halo car that is mostly for posters?
All the viper work for example was done by mahle for example. A lot of the Corvette work was done by Bosch. They're such niche products that oems can't even spare engineers for development and they end up getting outsourced. All the Ford gt stuff was Roush.
By those, you mean the Roush and other variants that you could buy from a dealer, and which may have even had a Ford warranty, but which obviously had post-production modifications made?
I was going to say in my original comment that GM and Mopar kept their halo cars internal: the Corvette is obviously all inside, as was the Viper, albeit mostly in the SRT realm. (Were Hennessy models offered through the dealer, with a Dodge warranty? I don’t recall.)
"employ five hundred people, become wealthy to a degree of which you’d never dared to dream as a child… and still get outbid on a home or car or watch by someone who “YOLOed” on a “shitcoin” six months ago or took the movie “Boiler Room” as an inspiration rather than as a cautionary tale."
This has been going on forever. Back in the early 90's, I went to school with a kid who's dad's got rich by winning a small sum on lotto and then somehow kept winning at various other stock and gambling ventures. I think it happens a lot less than what the Internet says and the Internet drives narratives. Instead of just a few hardworking neighbors getting jealous of the gambler down the street it's everyone in some sort of new outrage.
The problem I have is that the many of the same people who complain about investors for not doing real work think its A OK to make money off of Insta and OF. That anyone who suggests that's not real work is a caveman.
I've been reading the latest Mark Twain bio; he only made writing a profession after losing all of his and his brother's money trying to strike it rich in the Comstock Lode.
"I think that would be a great formula, and we have the ability to do that."
this guy is literally retarded and if i ever meet him and the ev camaro suv exists im going to ask if jack gave him that idea. just as soon as i decide that im never working at gm ever
"his fourth LT1 engine"
what in the hell are these things made of? or not made of i guess
"But having a million dollars today is like having… $280,000 on the day in 1981"
i feel physical pain
"get outbid on a home or car or watch by someone who “YOLOed” on a “shitcoin” six months ago"
this shit is exhausting man
"I don’t scorn these women or feel superior to them"
speak for yourself. i might be a nobody but at least ive not deluded myself into thinking some tin skin oil blooded wireback clanker is a real person
"You light up my heart when you enter the room / your smile shining bright like Grand Seiko’s proprietary lume / I could never get tired of saying your name / and it’s hard to hold a candle, in the cold november rain"
bravo 10/10 peak shitpost
The fact that Mark Reuss doesn’t realize that he is proposing the second coming of the HHR is cluelessly wonderful!
Fun fact. Bryan Nesbitt, designer of the PT Cruiser *and* HHR, is Senior Vice President for Global Design at ………….. GM!
Talk about failing upwards!
"designer of the PT Cruiser *and* HHR"
Ouch!
I never realized he did the HHR until I looked it up!
Too bad he also didn’t design the Nissan Cross Cabriolet!
For the trifecta! 😬
You mean the B9 Tribeca?
How would you like to tell someone that you’re a “designer” at Subaru?
Some Indiana farmers around the Subaru plant in Lafayette could do a better job.
No Schmidt!! 😂😂😂
IYKYK!
The cross cab is uggo. The Murano upon which it's based is a beauty. Cabrio could've used Nesbitt.
I never liked the PT. I think the HHR's styling resolved as a better evolution.
On this one I’m tempted to say, what do you mean, “Ouch!”?
The PT cruiser made many a career and one of my childhood friend’s parents built a jaw dropping lakehouse on the back of that car.
Yet another “don’t hate the player, hate the game[/masses]” sort of thing
I was gonna say that the PT Cruiser was good enough to make some reasonable coin for Daimler-C.
And I thought that the HHR has gotten somewhat of a following as the years have gone on. Not to the degree of the Aztec (yes, I meant that), and certainly not like the Honda Element, but it still had its good points.
yeah after both of those its time to put the pen down
VW already makes the electric PT HHR. It is called the ID. Buzz, and it doesn't have the excuse of retro not having already been completely played out before its conception.
The retro-ness vanishes the instant you see one in single-color paint (or, as the kids say, monotone colourway)
Every one of them that I've seen on the road is in full infantilized clown regalia, so it doesn't really matter that there is a rental car version.
I assume what you're seeing is the "dealer service loaner version"
This is the first time I've second guessed my GTI.
Flagged for “monotone colourway”. If I’ve not unheard this phrase by lunchtime you’ll be hearing from my ally.
Sounds like the name of a 90s British shoegaze band.
Brings to mind the cover of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
Amazed I saw one on the road to Niagara Falls on a very hot Sunday morning, hope driver finds a charger there or they are not getting back.
Might take some heat here but the ID.Buzz could be the ultimate form factor for an electric car, muh skateboard and all. If I had more kids and my wife was SAHMing it might be attractive as a choice, goofy looks and all
With a hard plastic interior and seats removed it is my perfect delivery van.
As long as all the deliveries are local.
Only rarely more than 6 miles from my warehouse. 90% within 3 miles. Our best vehicle is a Transit connect, but about 15 out of our 120 busiest days the fwd means we can't use it or it WILL get stuck. We have two Quigley converted 4wd express vans. A delivery ID buzz is a great form factor for the long length, high bulk low weight, deliveries we do. Very much a corner case.
Doesnt matter, we aren't allowed to upgrade our electrical service to handle the chargers as the warehouse anyway. While discussing a different issue with the city manager he noted that even with the new backup line that was installed a few years back our transmission into town is almost maxed out. Going to be melting the lines if 1/3rd of the residents get 1 electric car.
As discussed here a few days ago, you could save $10k and get yourself a 6.4 L Durango or spend $10k more and get a Hellcat Durango.
Respect, sir, but the Durango is among the worst cars I have ever driven, topped only by the Dodge Journey and a base Gen4 Subaru Outback. Feels like driving a subarmine due to tiny DLO, handling poor, NVH shit, could go on
Probably all true but what other family vehicle allows a Hemi? Would you buy a 4-cyl Traverse or Explorer instead?
but it's also the most based SUV available; V8 ONLY for the 26 model year!
I will second this. The tesla melted Taurus glorified three-box makes no sense. An ICE vehicle looks the way it does (in part due to regs) but in large part due to the physics of the transmission and moreso cooling the combustion of hydrocarbons.
I've been in one. They dont like doing freeway speeds.
Ouch indeed. All wheel drive model?
https://www.caranddriver.com/rankings/best-vans/minivans
Car and Steerer says it's the best minivan, *if* ordered in an AWD trim:
Pure cash-on-the-barrelhead corruption, or are there redeeming qualities other than packaging and generous/airy DLO?
I was saying something to the kids yesterday about car reviews and they sez "Wait. They just send a new car to these people?!?" Cue a lecture about "long term" test drives, brands vs. corporations, and why a PBS station sponsored by tote-bag toting allies is reviewing a Revuelto.
It's a nifty vehicle to sit in. Anyone who buys one over a sienna hybrid would have to be a very ahem enthusiastic person.
C/D shouldn't be reviewing minivans. Its all little gay dudes and Jezebel grade weirdos out there.
I don't feel like the PT Cruiser and HHR were really failures. Chrysler sold hundreds of thousands of PT Cruisers. GM made over 500k HHRs. Wouldn't these companies kill for a new model that could sell even that well?
Can’t argue with this. They’re just an unfortunate design trend, but you are correct, the market spoke and the demand was there. I still regularly see PT Cruisers.
I actually really like the HHR. The Cruiser... not so much.
HHR SS Turbo? Hell yeah.
Oh especially that one!
The Ecotec in general, while not up to HondYota standards, isn’t a POS, either, unless I’m severely mistaken.
They're mostly ok. I have a 2.2 L car. It's quite nice and I long thought that the 1.4 L Cruze my wife used to have would be much better with the 2.2 L. My brother had a couple Cobalts that both had engine issues (2.4 L with serious oil consumption and 2.2 L with a blown headgasket). Both of those were over 100k miles with totally unknown histories. 2.0 turbos might be the best of them, ironically.
My dad has a cargo van HHR with over 350k miles on it. I’m convinced it will never stop.
Hell yeah!
Chrysler sold 1.35 million PT Cruisers and GM sold more than a half million HHRs.
I feel like there is a joke in there... and his name is Brian Nesbit! JK ackchyually AK47isthetool is the joke because I have no doubt that not only are Nesbit's salary and parachute more golden than mine, he likely has access to more bitchin' Camaros than I do.
>> what in the hell are these things made of? or not made of i guess
AFM kills. Only the Corvette-bound LT1s are free from that particular goblin.
As I understand it all LT1s have the AFM hardware. Manual cars, both Corvette and Camaro have it electronically disabled.
Correct. The AFM on my C7 is only triggered by putting the car in Eco mode. I have never run my car in Eco mode and still got 30 mpg on the highway due to the car having 2 overdrive gears, 6th and 7th, which is dumb on a performance car.
The C8 has no Eco mode. The car chooses to activate AFM without driver input, which is a ridiculous way to equip a performance car. Especially considering GM’s problems with their AFM systems.
It doesn't matter if you disable it or run it. You have AFM lifters in the engine and they can fail. There is an internal spring in the lifter that the hydraulics act on. This spring can fail whether it has millions of cycles or only a few hundred.
There isn't just one method of failure on these lifters. If you have them you have a substandard valvetrain.
Good info. Not much I can do about that except not trigger the AFM.
If it fails I’ll have the engine rebuilt.
Are the latest recent truck engine woes due primarily to the AFM stuff? Am I thinking of a different engine block?
Serious question: how invasive is it to disable AFM and other durability killers like auto-start-stop ? In our family kid hauler, auto start stop (A.S.S.) can be deactivated with a button press but seemingly needs to be pressed every time the car is operated
What's AFM?
Active Fuel Management, f/k/a displacement on demand
Oh.
FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
You know it's bad when it keeps getting rebranded. It's also been called "cylinder deactivation."
so, so true!
Like your acronym for auto start/stop better.
AFM can be tune-disabled but that doesn’t negate lifter failure.
The only real way to disable it is to replace the cam, lifters, and valley cover. Some speculate that changing oil weight can also cause lifter failure, which is why my 5.3 is still running 0W20.
A DOD Delete kit from TSP with mostly OE GM parts, TSP valley cover, and TSP 6.2 non-AFM cam is around $1500.
The 6.2 cam is good for like 10 HP without going crazy. You can do a 6.2 intake and TB at the same time and pick up maybe another 20 HP. Maybe another 10 with headers. That’s all the low end of ricer math with a tune.
The problem is the cost of doing all of this. $1500 in parts for the kit but are you really going to do all of that without replacing the oil pump, timing chain, pushrods, rockers, or water pump? That’s easily another $1000.
Figure $500 for the TB and intake. At least $2000 for good headers (ARH or similar).
Labor is going to be at least another $1500. Plus tuning cost. That doesn’t include touching the converter which is an issue on these.
To do it right you’re looking at $7-8k. That’s what a lot of FB groups mention paying. IMO, it’s not worth paying that to preemptively “fix” a $20k truck. I’ll just ride it out until I have an issue or sell it before there’s an issue.
For a Camaro or something, that’s a different story. You’d probably swing for a hotter cam and have already budgeted for headers and maybe even heads. Those prices above are not much different than when I talked to Katech about having them do HCIE on the Vette. The only real difference was that I spec’d Johnson link bar lifters, a FAST intake, and a few other things. I believe it was $8500 or thereabouts in 2019 dollars.
or you get a junkyard valley cover and cam and beat 8 roller bearings out of a $15 motorcycle wheel bearing into the holes that feed the DOD solenoids ;)
Shortest Circuit, God bless you.
I really don't know what this country is going to do without people of your level of ingenuity
Excuse you. I only stand on the shoulder of giant (autists) like Matt Happel and the LS turbo community that came up with this particular hack; amongst many others that should be illegal.
It will cost more than $1500 of labour to install the Displacement on Demand kit.
You need the heads to come off, the front timing cover requires the front differential to be dropped, radiator gets pulled out.
It is a lot of work but well worth it.
Begging pardon:
HCIE?
High comp, intake, exhaust?
Heads, cam, intake (manifold), exhaust. Aka “full bolt ons.”
Yes, the start-stop has to be shut off with the button on every ignition cycle.
If somebody could come up with a way to disable the system WHILE KEEPING THE WARNING LIGHT FROM BUGGING the driver, say by illuminating the light when the system is activated, they’d make bank! The systems I’ve researched will only keep the system disabled between ignition cycles, and the light will still be showing on the dash.
That system is occasionally good, as when a light with a two-minute (or longer) cycle turns red just as you hit it, or if it’s active if you’re in a slow drive-thru line. Mayyy..be if you’re in traffic that’s more stop than go, as if the jam is due to a bad accident ahead. That’s it!
In my GMT 900 Yukon with L87, it takes either a tune or an OBDII dongle installation. I opted for performance AND AFM defeat with a tune from from Black Bear.
_When even the average felonious Midwesterner owns a Porsche or a Patek Phillippe, what’s left to the Puritanically wealthy but running into the desert, naked?_
you sir are too modest. you are not average.
_these women are looking for something a lot better than a 53-year-old club racer who doesn’t eat healthy or listen to the right podcasts._
I don't think it's the podcasts, but Rush...
Oh, I don't have a Patek! There might be one around here, or possibly on the way, but it isn't mine!
this line: _I once spent more than two months eating dinner every night at “Daddy-O’s Drive-Through”, buying probably the worst hamburgers in Ohio history, and that includes the Burger Chef on Lane Avenue that got closed down due to roaches, because I had a crush on the girl working the register._
made me think of this line:
"This is gonna be just like the last summer. You fell in love with that girl at the Fotomat. You bought $40 worth of fucking film, and you never even talked to her. You don't even own a camera."
Which movie?
Fast times
Fast Times At Ridgemont High, which stands out in the annals of film for having introduced us to Phoebe Cates, who gave GenX boys not one, but two scenes to remember her by, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Although both had starred in one film prior to FTARH, no one saw them.
https://youtu.be/y5oPZFDci80?si=3h0lINczaF6iLOYs
that album is on the list of best debut albums ever. five stone-cold classics and not a bad tune among the rest.
Obviously, then, I either didn’t see it, or I don’t remember. Probably the former—I led a little bit of a sheltered life.
“The Breakfast Club” is what I remember. Along with “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
If you don't remember the Phoebe Cates scene, you didn't see it. I highly suggest a viewing at your soonest convenience.
I commend you for The Breakfast Club, which is of course the finest of the Ringwald Trilogy films, with Pretty In Pink second, followed by Sixteen Candles. Molly was, and remains, a great crush of mine (though thoughts of Molly and Ally Sheedy together did cross my adolescent brain on occasion) and this ranking of her essential films is a hill I will die on.
Jennifer Jason Leigh…..mmmm…..must watch “Flesh & Blood” and “Miami Blues” again.
At least he asked her out
Congrats bark!
I gave him a list of podcasts yesterday!!!
He should start with Ezra Klein and Pod Save America, obviously.
I'm sure there are a few girlboss podcasts he'd enjoy as well...
That would be Ezra.
0-Go easy on Mark Reuss. He has a weighty cross to bear!
1-“ AI “unicorns”. Bitcoin zillionaires. People who post their net worth on social media to prove their adherence to a secular religion of cash hoarding.”
Oh, and also people who post their FICO score online! Shoutout to BTSR (real ones know)!
“The financialization of the American economy, while it’s contributed greatly to the supply of feckless millionaires in the country, has also done a lot to break whatever link remained in our collective consciousness between hard work and being rewarded.”
Why is “financialization,” ipso facto, a negative? It’s clear that it is to you, but you have failed to convince me that this is unambiguously the case. Championing “hard work” in lieu of outcomes is like giving a child an “E” for “Effort” on their report card.
For “financialization,” you can substitute “specialization,” in a sense. If a value chain can be pulled apart into its component pieces, wouldn’t it be wise to focus on the more remunerative aspects of the process?
Relatedly, when there are more economic actors participating (i.e., skin in the game, as discussed recently) in a given market, price and value converge as opportunities (i.e., true Alpha) are rapidly competed away. Everyone else who cares to observe can find out what NVDA shares, or Batman GMTs, or crude oil futures, or Bitcoins are worth right now. Even if they’re just looking (i.e., window shopping). Is this not societally beneficial? I could go a step further and make a tongue-in-cheek argument that insider trading is socially beneficial because people would not be deluded into making poor investment decisions: Wouldn’t you be crestfallen if you sold your shares of ACME Corp. for $20 / share today only to learn from the Wall Street Journal tomorrow morning that a Mag 7 Hyperscaler had offered $30 / share to buy ACME Corp. You suffered because someone who knew that information was not allowed to act on it! Obviously insider trading is not just allowed but encouraged in most markets, public equities being the outlier.
I certainly do agree with you that voyeuristic wealth porn has evolved just a little bit since Lifestyles of The Rich & Famous.
Who would most people rather be? A crusty, Old Money beneficiary of inherited wealth who wears old, fraying J. Press OCBDs with repaired elbows, or Wes “Chains on Veins” Watson in his rented Boo-Gatti “Ky-Ron” Pur Sport driving to the mall in Miami while screaming at his followers on Instagram? The vast majority of Americans today seek - or, better said, wish for - outsize wealth not for sense of achievement, personal autonomy, comfort, or ease; rather, they desire it merely to showcase it, to trumpet it to friends, enemies, and frenemies alike on Instagram and TikTok.
looking old money is a trendy thing now and i get it
i would 1000 times prefer a nice cable knit sweater over some balenciaga shit
As modeled by this year's most famous tech worker replaced by H-1Bs:
https://www.gq.com/story/luigi-mangione-courtroom-loafers-no-socks
Actual “Old Money” and Social Media ~~Old Money Aesthetic~~ are very different.
"No one in my family's had a job since great-great-uncle Thaddeus stopped running opium out of Shanghai."
Financialization: the devotion of energy and intelligence not to value creation for actual customers, but to the invention and exploitation of ever more sophisticated forms of financial arbitrage, very few of which create any value for anyone at all.
This is supposition.
Why would you privilege the benefit of “actual customers” over the benefits of market transparency than can (and do) accrue even to those who are not actively “in” a given market? What are “actual customers,” anyway?
Arbitrage is a powerful reward that creates benefits for everyone else, as well.
If you have a retirement account, thank financialization. Or just put everything under the mattress.
If you have a mortgage, a credit card, a car note, etc. thank financialization. Or just buy every single thing in cash always no matter what.
Come on now. You're more than smart enough to understand what I meant.
A mortgage represents value to a customer. Mortgage-backed securities with fraudulently written underlying mortgages, on the other hand, make the traders who put together the securities very rich, while creating a shitpile of valueless assets that the government has to figure out a way to work out without hurting ordinary people, and not adding value (in "market transparency" or any other form) for anyone else.
More and more of the supposed innovation in the financial sector is just finding ways to extract cash from normal fluctuations in asset value, without doing anything else. At best, that's effectively a tax on normal investors; every cent that this type of arbitrager makes comes from someone else having bought at a slightly higher price, or sold at a slightly lower price, than they would have otherwise. At worst, it's fraud, in the cases where the fluctuations are caused by market manipulation based on false information.
We are a very long way past the liquidity value added by market makers or the information value provided by normal traders. The information normal traders are getting is now junk because of the arbitragers, and there hasn't been any issue with liquidity in most parts of the system in a long time.
“Mortgage-backed securities with fraudulently written underlying mortgages…”
So who is the fraudster? The borrower, or the lender? In this case the originating lender is a victim!
Asset-backed securities, of which mortgage-backed securities are a subset (you can securitize any stream of payments), rarely end up as “valueless,” unless everyone stops paying their bills. If you want a culprit for the 2008 GFC, blame the NRSROs.
There is no mortgage system at all without MBSs; unless you want everyone to put 50% down and pay off the balance in 5 years.
Finally, market participants worry about liquidity constantly!!!!! See the constant hand-wringing about bond market liquidity and the basis trade!
There are multiple fraudsters in the 2008 (and, from what I'm hearing, 2025 as well) MBS case.
First, the original lender, who threw normal underwriting principles out the window and sometimes forged documents. I happened to graduate law school in 2008 and worked in a consumer credit clinic throughout my 3L year. I saw multiple forged signatures on documents reporting fake income and assets attached to mortgage applications.
Second, the traders who packaged the securities, who often knew that the underlying mortgages were underwritten shoddily, and just ignored that, happily relying on willfully blind rating agencies and selling the securities as very low-risk assets.
Of course if much of the "value" is fraudulent, the security will end up valueless.
I have no doubt that MBSs can play a constructive role, but if I were a potential buyer today, I don't feel like I'd trust anybody selling one about what underlies it.
Do you think there is more mortgage fraud on the part of borrowers or lenders? “Hey, sure I’ll loan you my depositors’ precious money even though there is no way you’ll ever be able to pay it back?”
Of course there are individual bad actors at bank and non-bank originators alike, due to poorly structured incentives. Poorly structured incentives also implicated the NRSROs.
Here is a firsthand account from the man at the center of the infamous “Shitty Deal” (Timberwolf) at Goldman:
https://ctnewsjunkie.com/2019/02/26/20190226_lawmakers_focus_on_david_lehmans_work_at_goldman_sachs/
He went on to work for CT’s state government and then joined HPS as Head of Real Estate. His bonus for the Timberwolf year was well into nine figures. That was big money at the time, but it’s just 1 (middling) AI researcher now.
Finally, the ABS market is critical to the functioning of our economy. Not just for allowing consumers to borrow, but companies as well. A number of non-bank finance companies are (partially) funded in the securitization market (since they cannot access ultra-cheap, FDIC-insured bank deposits).
Kerry Killinger has entered the chat.
cf. “The Big Short”.
Define fraud? Were the mortgage backed securities that failed with the financial collapse legal? If they were, where did this come from? The government not understanding a markets and making laws with 3rd order effects is nothing new
Part of it was that the wrong people pay the ratings agencies. Perverse incentives abound.
“Putting this into perspective, there are over 23 million millionaire households in the United States.”
Excluding their primary residences, how many are there with other assets over a million?
I’m not all that confident that - with some exceptions - in the coming years many of those housing millionaires will be able to cash out for the million.
Best info I can see is that excluding the primary home, about 13-14 million households have a net worth over $1MM.
Only if they sell their houses to each other, over and over.
I imagine being house rich and retirement account poor is how people lose everything to medical calamities.
I think we can draw some relevant distinctions between the value of a credit card, loan, or 401k to the value of credit derivative swaps. The former have great value to most of us (except for the Kackzynskis amount us), while the onus is on you (as this is an area where your knowledge exceeds) explain to us how the more Byzantine products of financialization benefit those not directly participating in that market.
The more creative, esoteric “scructured products” facilitate the marginal transaction for (institutional) clients with needs for “structural bespokeness” (lovely Sam Altman phrase) that can keep them in the marketplace more generally.
And Sam Altman is a perfect example of financialization!
He needs to convert OpenAI to a PBC so that he can IPO the business to access more capital. Even the vast private markets are insufficient for OpenAI’s capital needs.
That sounds like a benefit for an individual participating directly in that market.
If the marginal, bespoke transaction can’t be facilitated, then whoever asked for it cannot have their needs met. And obviously someone else willingly took the other side of whatever opportunity existed.
Where is the line drawn? There is real value to a company going public.
At this point, the “value” of a company going public is paying equity capital markets bankers their rapacious fees (typical M&A fee is ~1%; typical IPO underwriting fee is 6%) and allowing retail traders the opportunity to YOLO on your stock. Unless the company has voracious capital needs that private markets cannot meet (e.g., OpenAI).
Some commentators whine that ordinary people cannot buy shares in SpaceX, or Anthropic, or OpenAI.
An Airbus A350-900 would not exist without an industry to finance it and insure it. Not to mention the capital markets that permit Airbus and Lufthansa to exist in the first place -- no single person could write checks that large.
You might argue that engineering and fabrication are "more important," but without finance modern life as we know it could not function.
Lockheed-Martin, SIG and Newport News Shipbuilding would've done their respective national security projects CORRECTLY from the word Go if they were privately-owned companies instead of publicly-traded corporations and you know it.
Nothing I write is intended to dispute the importance of capital markets, insurers, or any other part of the financial system that is important to value-creating industries. As a Seattle native, I can certainly appreciate the mechanics behind Emirates Airline being able to make a commitment to buy a **quarter trillion dollars** worth of 777Xs that will all be assembled by local workers in a plant 40 minutes from my office.
Nobody can deny, though, that there is a large part of the financial system that no longer is serving those interests. It is purely looking to extract money from bona fide investors through either economically pointless or outright fraudulent methods. We need to get better at identifying it, and we need to have both incentives against its behavior and much more regulatory capacity to investigate it and impose sanctions on it.
Everyone on ACF knows that ENGINEERS are REAL, MANLY MEN (usually living in the Rust Belt) who are chronically underpaid because EVIL MBA BANKSTERS who pray to god every night for another BAILOUT are STEALING from them.
Youre not not a man because you aren't an engineer. Youre not a man because youre short
Daddy signs your checks!
I have check writing ability on the account short man. And unlike mr pornography, i bought into my equity
Daddy paid for your growth hormones. That is miles beyond daddy paying for a dentist, let alone an orthodontist. I'm sure your fellow rednecks who shop and/or work at Dollar Tree can relate.
savage
Jimmy Hoffa was 5'5".
Bruce Lee was shorter than that. Humphrey Bogart wasn't much taller.
Hush.
His identity is wrapped in things that he didn’t create for himself, like height (lol) and the job his daddy gave him.
This only applies to sherman who is a pornographer absolutely obsessed with what makes someone a man. The real answer is easy and it’s being a dad.
I'll speak for myself; I respect engineers because I see the value they add to society.
I never said they weren’t.
I am lampooning unsupported hivemind ACF beliefs.
Your second sentence is correct.
I'm not sure that would be a bad thing.
I have a friend who I introduced to a female friend after she asked me if I knew any single guys. He literally sent her a screenshot of his credit score. In not surprising news, he is now 44 and dating a geriatric.
unprompted?
Yes, unprompted
I gotta re-up for the $35/month experian membership. I hear it directly links the api to Tinder.
With all the corporate data breaches I thought everyone had Experian for free by now.
People complain a lot about the dating world and then they do stuff like that and it's immediately obvious they deserve the results they are getting.
Oh balls...I'm not sure if that's worse or better than the shirtless gym selfie, but it's certainly more dweebish.
A shirtless gym selfie might actually get you laid if you are good looking enough. A credit score will not
In a very real sense, the problem of financialization would be solved by the standard discipline of the market: the potential, off at the end, for ruinous loss, default, bankruptcy, etc.
That world of standard market discipline, however, is long gone, very unlikely to return. Some kind of anticipated bailout or public backstop has been priced into essential every financial market. This has sustained pernicious speculation on the unearned increment, utterly abstracted from the underlying enterprises, in all securities markets.
Some MIT hotshot at a big bank develops an exotic fund that securitizes the revenue streams on insurance against the default on a specific tranche of a class of consumer debt. He cares not one whit about the underlying consumer market; he cares about his projections about the directional change in those tranches of that class of debt.
No one pays much attention to his little experiment in divinization masquerading in the precision of high-end calculus -- until the "little experiment" faces exposure and potential losses in excess of 10X the market-value of the bank itself. At which point, after a brief period of shock, amazement and fury, the Fed steps in and makes the diviners whole at public expense.
It's this technique of holding in your back pocket, almost unknowingly in some cases, the threat of supreme systemic risk, that illustrates the fundamental evil of financialization. If every last MIT hotshot knew perfectly well that no public authority would ever ride to his rescue -- really knew in his bones the old saw that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- financialization wouldn't be such a problem.
Alas, as I say, that world is long gone.
PIN THIS, JACK
Can't pin a reply
How many American banks have failed - which is to say that the FDIC walked into the lobbies at close of business (usually on Friday), and that the bank branch re-opened on Monday morning under new ownership (courtesy of an FDIC-facilitated auction) - since 2008? Hundreds and hundreds.
How many of the shareholders of ultimately failed banks who did not sell their shares (i.e., they rode the Titanic down) have anything to show for their investment? Absolutely NONE of them, they suffered TOTAL losses. What about depositors? Just fine, because that’s a nice side effect of FDIC-insurance.
As I have said many, many, many, many, many, many times on ACF, the TARP program was a spectacular gift to taxpayers given the “bailouts” turned an accounting profit of ~$15BN AND we sidestepped a potentially disastrous period of cascading major bank failures (which would’ve led to unrest).
When was the last time a major American automaker or airline was allowed to fail? Investors ride it to zero, hundreds of thousands of people (if not more) out of work in an instant. Obviously that can’t be allowed to happen.
I wonder why the hivemind on ACF whines about bank “bailouts” on a selective basis?
Can't speak for anyone else, but while I can appreciate a lot of the bailouts for the reason you outline, every single person who consciously made the choices that led to the near-collapse of the global economy should have been imprisoned and shunned from society.
A couple were, most weren't. The "average" people that bore the brunt of it through loss of wages, loss of career, evictions, etc got very little help relative to the however many billions went out to banks and other manufacturers of the crisis.
So for me, it's less than the bailouts were bad full stop, and more that there wasn't enough punishment for the people responsible.
I have thought long and hard about this. I was in college in 2008, I read all of the contemporary coverage of the GFC, and I later read all of the landmark books. Then I went to work as an investment banker working for community and regional banks; one of my first deals was the TARP auctions that Treasury announced in ~2011.
The culprit at the center of it all was the NRSROs, in my belief. No skin in the game, and they weren’t (and aren’t) able to afford top talent.
And they completely escaped sanctions, claiming, “It was just our opinion”!
This. Worse, the regulations that were dismantled prompting the crisis were never reimplemented.
Regulations are largely good and also largely written in blood. Any entity that tries to dismantle them does so only for the benefit of the elite/CEO and is not a friend of the common man.
Yes. Like the ACA, Dodd-Frank is considered to be authored by the industry it was meant to regulate.
Simple commercial banking has played only a minor part of what we're talking about here. Unless something has changed in a massive way in the past few years, that's not where all the action is. Financialization is primarily a feature of higher-end securities, exotic derivatives, etc.
I lived through the TARP. In fact I supported it, though with serious trepidation; I could observe the extent of the disaster that was unfolding, a enormous panic-driven bank-run. For Treasury and the Fed to act decisively -- classic lender-of-last-resort stuff. I'll add that to get Congress to pass the bill -- simple and direct legislation, wonder of wonders! -- made it more democratic than most major policies in recent decades. Nor did I ever doubt that the "troubled assets" would eventually turn a profit.
My point is that it marked the conclusive end of market discipline in high finance.
Most higher-end securities and exotic derivatives are created by prime brokers, most of which are small, but “sexy” parts of galaxy-sized commercial banks.
I’m glad the Fed backstopped the depositors who lent their money to the bank. However, I think the “hivemind” of ACF is more upset because we wanted rivers of blood of those responsible, but instead we got “individual market and non-market bad actors responding to poorly structured market incentives” or whatever you said earlier. Finance bros are strange; they seem to utterly resist or fail to comprehend the introduction of morality into financial decision making.
What’s the ratio of complaints about “bailouts” on ACF with respect to banks vs automakers and airlines? What was the benefit of bailing out automakers and airlines? People kept their jerbs.
I think the distaste - both here and more broadly - arises because “high finance” (investment banking, PE, VC, hedge funds, and now I suppose private credit) is poorly understood. There is a little of that that is by design from the finance side: why not erect some barriers to entry in an industry that really only requires an undergraduate degree? It’s scarcely harder to meet the minimum requirements to be an investment banker than it is to be a realtor. It is my belief that most of the ire, however, comes because people think it’s unfair that someone can make essentially unlimited income by selling advice.
And that’s the point: There’s no “morality” in high finance; it’s amoral rather than immoral. Amorality is entirely fine.
Perhaps that should be the default state of affairs?
Yes! You explicitly reject the introduction of a moral framework into “high finance. Therein lies the rub; when nothing is haram everything is permitted.
While the average person doesn’t understand the industry, they do understand Mammon is a demon.
There is a powerful incentive in place:
Long-Term Greedy. Everyone is Greedy. Everyone who has lasted longer than a fruit fly’s lifespan in the industry knows that anyone else with any longevity is Long-Term Greedy.
I genuinely don’t understand why you believe we need a framework of morality in high finance. It’s no more necessary than would be a Wendy’s at the summit of Mount Everest.
There is morality of a sort: Making money is good; losing money is bad. That’s it.
This is offensive to the economic central planners who populate the comments section.
How DARE someone make a living doing something of which they don’t personally approve?
As someone who despises the very idea of bank bailouts, I'll hop in. I object because banks already have a stable business model all laid out. You loan out money in the short term, and collect it over the long term, with interest. Most of these loans are profitable for the bank, because we have credit checks and such, but let's allow for a few deadbeats who default. I'll be generous--five percent, let's say, take the money and burn it up. Everyone else is paying right back into the system. All of this is perfectly reasonable practice and no sane person has an issue with it.
The problem is when those people whom the customers of the bank have trusted with their money manage to carelessly lose so much of it that the bank goes under. The American economy is not a God-damned casino and when it's treated as such, everybody loses. Everybody. You've pointed out, and rightly so, that these banks are federally insured, so nobody loses their savings. Sure, that's true. But how are the losses made whole? The motherfucking money doesn't come from nowhere, Sherman, it has to be taken from someone.
The FDIC’s insurance fund is paid for by member banks on a tiered and risk-weighted scale. The larger, more heavily regulated banks substantially subsidize the smaller banks. There are ~4,000 banks in the US, and most of them contribute just about nothing to the fund compared to the money center banks.
Saying that “the taxpayers” are on the hook is akin to noticing that a gallon of milk costs a bit more and wailing that “the taxpayers” are paying for it.
It boils down simply to: usury is a sin and gambling is a vice.
Edit: both have and will always exist, but FIRE should not make up as large a fraction of the economy that it does.
Gambling is, in my opinion, a vice. I drove to Las Vegas from Denver in 2018, and doing so at night is illustrative and, ahem, illuminating: The whole thing was paid for by people who lost money, or who will lose money (in an act of … financialization), gambling.
Calling usury a sin is fairly subjective, particularly to the atheists among us. Some opportunities are poor credit risks unless accompanied by fairly high interest rates.
Is it more of a flex to post a high FICO score or to not know ones score at all?
That’s very zen. I’m leaning towards not knowing.
I dont know mine exactly but i have a good general idea. Probably just took a hit on utilization putting the bike on the card. For thirty days at least
It appears on some of my credit card statements but I really don’t pay attention. I doubt I’m ever taking out another loan at my age. I’ve put down some roots in the last 5 years here in NC, and if I were to move I would have no idea where to go. We have near perfect four season weather, low density, and low taxes. Sometimes I get bored here but I’m just going to travel more to scratch that itch.
I check every few months because we are sorta looking for a house but im high enough the details dont matter. The only outstanding debt i have is credit cards paid off monthly and the mortgage which isnt worth paying off
I’m the same. Getting a mortgage in retirement before inflation hit was a lucky move I made. My mortgage is the equivalent of cheap rent right now, and I have my former Illinois house money in the market and not in the house down here. Paying off a mortgage with inflated dollars is a beautiful thing.
Yep. What on Earth would I borrow money for?
I showed Reuss’ “Camaro” cuck-U-V musings to my wife… between that and the small-block disaster, she’s ashamed to have ever worked for General Motors (software engineer for manufacturing). She got pushed out after a facility closure two years ago and has never been happier.
There is no need for sex robots, which, frankly, that seems entirely too difficult from both a hardware and, to a lesser degree, software perspective. It also would be frightfully expensive. Two (somewhat) recent films show us what AI boyfriends / girlfriends and wireborn husbands and wives will lead to: Her and Blade Runner 2049.
In both films, the protagonist loves an AI, and in both cases, the AI hire prostitutes - called a "sex surrogate" in Her - that they can occupy, thereby giving them physical form. This, to me, seems far easier to pull off than building a truly lifelike and reasonably convincing robot anyone would want to fuck.
But think of the innovative, creative financing solutions a Financial Engineer could devise for the CPO sex robot market!
Care to cofound a biz in this, ahh, exciting industry?
How do you know I haven’t already made a commitment to do so with a friend who runs a leading “Teledildonics” company?
How indeed.
Assuming you are, and to the extent you're not bound to non-disclosure (and do plan to move forward), is it a product business, service business, some combination?
I am kidding, actually.
But it is a virtual certainty that some sort of sex robot will be coming.
You can finally get a girl friend
im gonna domestically abuse it
I look forward to this.
Not because I'm gonna buy one--I most certainly won't.
Because it's gonna thin out the competition even further for the rest of us.
More machines putting people out of work.
Solutions? We're doing chemicals now?
I'm more worried about the dismal lives of the Field Service Engineers in this eventual market...
They would have the best stories, though.
Some of the best stories were hell for the protagonist(s).
The problem is that prostitute is going to need their own AI emotional support boyfriend, and infinite loop that results in all of us fulfilling ourselves with internet phonography, or arguing about hobbies.
Enter Tyrell Corp...
I was bitterly disappointed when all forms "Tyrell" were taken in my state when I formed my first LLC.
depending upon the nature of your company, you could name it Zhora or Pris...
Not “Tyrrell”, the British F1 team?
More Human than Human
Wouldn't it be both easier and cheaper to simply shame hypergamous sluts and womanizing cads alike?
well yeah but then they would feel bad (this is a good thing)
Elon says he wants more people then puts out an AI named Valentine designed to suck in all the femcels.
I think what the tech overlords want are more people who won’t fall for AI and they are using AI husbands to remove unsuitables from the gene pool.
Job Market & Population Utopia, as envisioned by Elon Musk:
https://youtu.be/uY5SX8c8kWI
That is a very charitable notion. Not sure it’s born out by other elite statments re: masses, eugenics/dysgenics, etc
My power was out for like 3-4hrs today. The battery backup on my pc only lasted long enough to become highly disgruntled within the span of around 30 seconds past failure.
Who the fuck do these people think they are?!
EV is so stupidly unsustainable it’s more sickening than it is comical. Residents locally are currently up in arms over 30-100% increases in their electric bills - supposedly from “data center and ai use” while Ohio Edison posts record profits.
Pocketing the money is no surprise, but if the damn grid can’t handle the everyday Midwest summers where 95% of the vehicles or more are gas, how in the actual fuck are we all supposed to be rolling EV? Seriously, you cannot. It’s impossible and it’s all still hinging on non renewable resources.
The best thing that could’ve happened to Reuss would’ve been snapping his fat neck after shunting the pace car a the Detroit GP.
It’s just shit on shit on shit anymore.
R.I.P. 4th Gens; you may have sucked a bit, but damn you were cool.
I’m so lucky that the house I bought in NC had a whole house natural gas powered generator. It made the week without power after Hurricane Helene livable.
I know they’re not cheap, but if our grid is in such poor shape and they’re building new data centers everywhere, it looks like generators are becoming an essential home accessory.
Here in a very nice little corner of Southeast Michigan, median home price well over $1M, the Generac is practically ubiquitous. Trees and above ground power lines don't mix. Of course every few years Consumers Energy manages to take a few days to fix a tri-county wide disaster, then the whole neighborhood sounds like a Mexican lawn crew.
Aye aye aye!
We have so many trees here in Western NC that they are always falling on power lines.
But we have the local lineman headquarters in town and they fix things ASAP.
If you would have seen the utter devastation here after Hurricane Helene you would have thought that power would have been out for a month at minimum, but we got it back in a week. Amazing.
I was driving over downed power lines and under trees propped up by power lines for weeks. Trees would fall over the roads onto the power lines on the other side of the road, so the trees would be hanging at a 45 degree angle and one lane would still be open. These were large trees and this was everywhere.
The tree cutting crews were clearing roads the next morning.
What determines who gets electricity from Detroit Edison or Consumers Energy? Or is there only one now?
Growing up in St. Clair Shores, my parents’ house had electricity from Detroit Edison, and natural gas from Consumers Energy, fka, Consumers Power, in the early 1980s. When did that change?
There’s both and the service areas are all wonky. I have DTE for both. I know people in Plymouth who have DTE for electricity and CMS for gas.
I cheapened out and bought a 3500w portable inverter unit (well two and a parallel kit) thinking that I’d have one for camping, the track, or to loan a neighbor.
What this really means is that I have to rotate gas and oil between two units. My next setup will be a whole-home unit and a small portable for camping and such. I’m likely skipping over the large inverter idea.
Yes the cost is way more, but it’s annoying to have to spend a Saturday running a generator and alternating a load on it etc. all do make sure things are operational. I urged my grandparents to do a Generac and everything including the annual service is automated.
When your generator is running constantly like mine was after the hurricane, it’s imperative to monitor the oil level. Mine is an older generator so I was adding oil everyday, even though I was regularly turning it off because I really only needed it for hot water and for my refrigerator. I have a neighbor with a brand new generator and his did not consume oil like mine.
However, my generator fried a circuit board after a week so that was an expensive repair. Always tip your generator maintenance man generously when he comes out for the yearly inspection and oil change. You want him to remember you.
My repair man said there were homeowners after the hurricane who did not check the oil and blew up their motors.
That’s a great point, I’ll look into it.
I assumed that was an OLM or similar built into the unit. Part of the reason I pushed them towards a standby generator when they moved down here is because I don’t have the time to be over there and babysit things for them, especially because an outage would mean that both me and my parents also didn’t have power. We’re all in the same subdivision.
This is an entirely different conversation, but one of the more difficult things I’ve dealt with was making my family understand that I cannot be 24/7 tech support, auto repair tech, groundskeeper, and handyman. I have my own home, cars, career, etc. There were some initial grumbling, but I eventually got my parents, uncle, and sister/BIL to start pulling their own weight.
Modern generators are supposed to shut down when the oil is low but it doesn’t always happen. Plus I think shutdown is triggered only when it’s really low. I don’t want to chance it.
I know next to nothing about generators but I ended helping all the oldsters in my subdivision after the hurricane pay attention to their generators.
Also, I would suggest keeping 6 or 12 quarts of whatever synthetic oil your generator requires on hand.
Oldsters in general should only be totally dependent on others when they’re incapacitated.
Yes, I’m fully stocked on Amsoil small engine for my generators. Extra filters, plugs, etc. I also keep about 20 gallons of rec fuel on hand that I rotate through monthly. It’s become quite the chore, IMO. I wish I would’ve bought a 10k inverter and done that. The extra size would be easier to deal with vs. maintaining two units.
Also, the engines do not operate on unlimited fuel. All fuel supplies are subject to interruption as well. Best practice for longterm operation would be a dual fuel genset. Natural Gas as primary fuel and LPG as secondary backup fuel. And get the biggest Lp tank the local codes will allow. Using your BBQ tank will not work, for long. 500 gallon if possible.
I just had a plumber install a natural gas hookup for my 15/12 kw tri-fuel generator today. If you can deal with doing your own maintenance and don't need an automatic transfer switch, it's a fraction of the cost of a Generac. I paid $2000 for the generator and about another $1500 for the transfer switch and natural gas installation.
Generac pricing started at $16,000 for my needs.
Even if the city would allow it, there’s not enough room in their yard for anything larger than a portable LPG tank.
Realistically, if a situation arises where the power and NG are out, we have a problem that requires leaving the area.
If we go forward with building our next home on some average, we’re planning to take these things into consideration. Namely LP generator, solar, and if all else fails a PTO generator ran off of a tractor.
I'll endorse Kohler here, but same idea.
I recall sitting in meetings in the early nineties discussing the coming reliability issues with the national power grid. EV'S weren't even on the growth chart. Data Centers were. But the biggest factor was the assumed closures of Coal Power stations for "enviromental" concerns. Just being able to support normal growth of the demand on the Grid was a big concern, 30 years ago.
Now the Coal plants are mostly gone and no new replacements have been built, thanks Barry.
If new plants aren't fast tracked, starting now, we're heading to a screeching halt to economic growth and an unreliable existing Grid. This ain't a transient concern for anyone, anywhere.
EV's for all was always a pipe dream. Just a feel good fairy tale for the folks. The reality could be a real bitch.
Call me NUKE. Annie says it’s my new nickname.
seriously: Is not nuclear vastly more efficient than coal, and is the state not vastly more powerful than NIMBYism? the people, bless their hearts, are gonna pay the new rates, and or tolerate construction of some nuclear power plants, and or sit in the dark pining for their gAIrlfriends.
The folks making the actual decisions don’t give a fuck which of these the rest of us “choose”.
One of the groups of people deliberately preventing nuclear adoption in the past _seem to_ now be embracing it to power the stochastic autocomplete word cloud.
It’s worth considering what they assume they will get out of this that caused them to change their tune.
that’s easy! Couldn’t afford to buy a nuclear plant, buy permission to activate it, and shove it down the neighbors’ throats.
Now they can afford to do all that, surround it with their data centers, and sell excess power to the neighbors at the new higher rates they’re accustomed to.
Nice update to Lyndon Johnson and the Brown brothers’ dam contract, as described by Robert Caro!
(Mansfield Dam, “The Path to Power”, birth of what we know now as KBR)
This is true but I was more thinking about the globalist sort of heritage-american-despisers worried, perhaps correctly, that reliable low cost energy would drive up competition of their lizardly positions at the top of the food chain. I think they changed their tune because the currently envisaged nuke buildout will be used to power surveillance technology to further entrench their position.
Gross. Flagged for truthiness.
Problem is, the genius that would've invented the commercially-viable fusion reactor is currently arguing that his client did not, in fact, embezzle a billion dollars.
Speaking of Ohio electric bills, Duke passed along a huge increase last month for those of us in southern Ohio. My township has an energy aggregation plan so we are paying less. Ohio utility commission approves these rates but I highly suspect all the solar farms are driving these increased costs. I would like to know if they had added the same capacity (and I used that very generally) in natgas turbines what would have happened to our electric cost. Maybe Vivek will find out when he is Governor!
No, solar absolutely does not have the capacity factor of any dispatchable (i.e. turn it on and off) generation resource.
Solar has a 19.2% capacity factor in Ohio, meaning a 100MW nameplate solar field operating under ideal conditions in direct sunlight produces an average of 19.2MWh of power a day.
The bigger problem with solar is you don't control when the power is generated, rendering it practically worthless. Think of Ubers that flood downtown Sunday at 6am but disappear Friday nights at last call.
Nuclear power has a >90% capacity factor, meaning it's running at max output more than 90% of the time.
https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/sep_fuel/html/fuel_cf.html&sid=OH
I think most people know all that, my point is what is the cost to generate X megawatts using solar vs natgas. If solar is higher, and with its limitations it has to be as it only generates during sunny days, then these recent price increases didn’t have to happen if Duke had chosen lower cost power generation.
Apologies. I found the Duke rate case - it wasn't even for generation, but for poles & wires, EV charging stations, and other crap.
Every grid with high renewable penetration sees cost go parabolic because you pay twice for renewables - once to build it and a second time to back it up.
https://www.occ.ohio.gov/factsheet/duke-energy-rate-increase-2024
My electric bill (budget plan, smooths it out over 12 months) just rose from $350 to $500 per month, and it doesn't even include gas (our house runs on LP). It's insane. Granted we've got a house with people in it all day during the summer so A/C is constantly running, but gawt dang I'm trying to get my net worth over $10k here people!
Mark Reuss is an utter failure. Does he seriously think the Camaro EV will sell without the hefty government backing? Or that it will rival the Mach-E? The old Dodge Challenger was outselling the now dead Camaro.
I also saw Default Friend's AI boyfriend a a) oh no she's right b) even in my AI demon haunting story I probably have it wrong in driving someone mad because that deprives it of attention and c) I was talking with someone a couple months about how I thought AI proliferation of generated and tailored content will have negative social effects and people will be hijacked.
I'm an optimist here so let's hope I'm wrong about the downsides.
You’re not.
It’s a matter of time before “Luigi M.-style” emergent effects manifest themself as a result of LLMAI-induced psychosis
It’s not a real gf if it isnt a bitch 3-5 days a month
I saw my first Escalade IQ EV thingy yesterday. The Lyriq is everywhere lately, at least from my anecdotal observations.
I have noticed a marked downturn in Mercedes EQS / EQE sightings, along with Rivian and Lucid, as well. One would’ve thought that all the EQSs and EQEs I’d see were MBUSA cars, but they were on real plates; regardless, they are a rarity now.
Auto shoppers must be learning. I love looking at the used EV prices at my local Porsche and MB dealer. EQS with 2,000 miles, 2 years old, 50% off sticker! Porsche Taycan (base), about the same. Problem is, I think people realize that these $60k-$80k “bargains” will be worth $0 at some point, whenever the battery fails.
I'm on a bunch of Porsche dealer lists from looking for an allocation for a real car, and I'm getting plaintive little emails about how much off MSRP I could get for a Taycan. And the financing!
When I was picking up my ICE car this summer the dealer was telling me about a 2 year old Taycan Turbo, MSRP close to $200,000, that they got as a trade in for $120,000 that they couldn't sell, highest offer so far about $100,000.
That soon to be $0 was on my mind when I saw the Matt Farah videos on his bargain half-off Taycan purchase. I was thinking, "you could have purchased an IS500 for the same amount!"
I don’t know how much extra cash I would need laying around to buy in and out of cars frequently, but if I had it I would buy one of these super EVs lightly used, drive for a while and experience it, and sell and take the hit.
If you figure $1-2k per month depreciation, you're probably about there. But at that cost, why not just lease a new one?
Yeah, that is a good point.
My observations of luxury electromobiles are similar.
I’m not sure if this is the right conclusion, but what I’m seeing suggests that electric car adoption may be driven mostly by leasing rather than purchasing.
Leasing is far more popular, but specifically in the case of MB, they've basically given up selling their EVs here in the US. For the money, they didn't compare favorably enough to cheaper EVs because a cheaper brand gets much more benefit from being an EV, so the experience gap is much narrower between a $45k Kia and $100k Benz than their ICE models.
That and the Benz EVs were actively dumb and bad in ways that even Kia didn't fuck up hahaha
But the Benz EV is so handsome and distinctive! Hardly anyone would mistake it for a Leviathan’s suppository , I bet.
Cars provided to employees by MB don’t run Manufacturer plates.
Perhaps that’s it. I had assumed they do because PCNA cars do.
They're about to become rarer. MB deep sixed the entire EQ lineup for north America next year. Think orders stop in September.
Get ‘em while you can!
Interestingly enough, if you’ve seen a matte black Maybach EQS rolling around Atlanta, it may belong to a guy I’ve been working with. An older gentleman who does strategic planning and consulting for banks, bankers associations, etc. We were talking about it last week—he’s not in love, wants to go back to a gas-powered S Class or GLS.
Speaking of which, you may find my new role somewhat interesting. It’s been a year-long crash course in banking and the regulatory/legislative side of Bank M&A.
I try to avert my eyes should I happen to see a Maybach EQS, which looks like a Youabian Puma crossed with a suppository.
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1813381/what-hell-youabian-puma-and-why-do-we-care/
Based on my earlier professional background, I would likely recognize him name, at a minimum.
Having a million dollars today is like having… *checks notes* $137,000(!!) in 1981
Real purchasing power is measured in bullion. Sorry, I don't make the rules, but yes, I will die on this hill.
Sincerely,
Pete DZillionaire
I am skeptical of these wealth surveys simply because many Americans are millionaires for no reason other than home value inflation. Back in the sub 4% mortgage days, car sales were driven by people refinancing their homes and cashing out the “increase”. If we get back there, I think it is going to be crazy- a whole lot of people can cash out hundreds of thousands and it will be party time, stocks, watches, Birkin bags, everything is going to go up in value. Until the money runs out!
Net worth excluding equity in your primary residence is a more useful definition of wealth in many cases. It’s one of the benchmarks to be considered an accredited investor.
Exactly right. If you bought after 2008 and did nothing else in a lot of US markets you'd have a million dollar increase in valuation on your property. You could get a home equity loan at 4% that financed a renovation that could add 2x return in the right place.
Even something as recent as Covid nonsense drove prices up like crazy in places as people escaped out of blue states. People sitting on little old houses were suddenly sitting on million dollar little old houses.
Where I live it was possible to purchase a nice, clean, livable 3 BR ranch for around $100k up until COVID. Those are now $250k. Everything else has doubled since Covid.
up here that exact house is at least 650k
our economy is broken
Not broken- supply and demand still matters.
Banning ownership by foreign nationals or institutional investors and stopping the flood of immigrants would go a long way in fixing it.
Houses that sold for 650k 4 years ago are 950k in my neighborhood now. I looked at one a couple days ago. 950k for this?
My wife really likes it...
Using my inflation avoidance strategy of “What was that number in 2015?”, that $950k house is really only $700k. Go for it, it’s a bargain!
My mind is still stuck in 2015 dollars.
I'm still buying out the old partner and my cash flow situation vastly improves in 16 months. Still, it's hard for me to justify. "Is this house worth 6k more per month?" We have a house! At 2.5%!
Totally understandable. I would sit tight, too.
But at some point it’s YOLO time! But who knows when.
There go your nicer wine/whiskey/cigars/vehicle.
The cars paid off. But yes on the rest
In most markets, the supply side of the equation has been the constraint. The US has been under-building since the end of the 2008 GR.
Interest rates, and general inflation relative to wages, have tempered demand but not enough to cause significant price declines in most markets.
Jack, I was recently daydreaming about building an old Mazda station wagon with a Busa motor as a hillclimb vehicle.
Apart from the current failures, what has been your experience with the stock Busa gearbox?
If you seriously intend this question, I would dig through the old Dennis Palatov (dpcars.net) blog.
In the cars Palatov Motorsports sells that weigh more than 1,100 lbs, Dennis removes the ‘busa gearbox and includes a Hewland box instead. Doesn’t mean a tool-steel cryo hardened gearset wouldn’t stand up, just share in case might be relevant
"Just when I think you couldn't get any dumber, you do something like this."
"And totally redeem yourself!"
Seriously, this guy have a TBI or what?
There's a pun about GM throttle body ignition in there just waiting to be fleshed out.
I always say that one shouldn’t use the term unless they are a millionaire in the original sense, I.e. one million livre in early eighteenth century French currency. Which is well over 20 million usd today.
I genuinely approve of this.
That’ll never be me then!
"Since 2007, the median net worth of U.S. households has increased from $173,151 to $192,700, up 11% in total after inflation. But among the top 10% of U.S. households, it increased from $1,302,640 to $1,936,900, a 49% surge!"
Chase Bank was kind enough, unsolicited, to provide me my net worth the other day when I was checking my balance. Apparently it's just upwards of six whole thousand dollars. What a time to be alive.
Also the $150k house I bought in 2022 that burned down a year and a half ago, on five acres with unfinished detached loft garage, just finished getting rehabbed and remodeled and sold for $275k a week ago. The economy is in cloud cuckoo land.
Regarding GM Performance and Ford Performance, I get the mildly informed impression that they just don't validate their products as robustly as their friends at Street and Racing Technology did. I say "did" because after they disbanded that engineering team (and bragged about it!) my insiders lamented that the budget for development trips was drastically cut. So hold on to that 300C, I'm not super confident that the Charger Abdominal will hold up the way your LX will.
SRT came back a month or two ago! Not sure what they're really gonna *DO*, but the band is back together in name at least.
Let's hope the engineering team that built the brand can save it from itself.
And as much shade as I throw at Ford and GM, only one of the Big Three is without a halo sports car right now. So even if they're not executing perfectly, fans should be happy they're executing at all.
Amen to all that!
They need a brand new Viper. It’s time.
LOL that you posted this at the same time as 'money is security and freedom' just above.
Good eye! The Viper is after the security and freedom is taken care of! Too many people buy the Viper before taking care of the other two. Most Americans, from my experience.
Well what good is free time if you don't have a Viper to fill (or end) it with?
Priorities!
Goals achieved must always be rewarded.
None of the 'performance' people are the best at any of the companies contrary to folklore.
They're also looked down upon as cost centers and don't get much money to work with.
The resulting failures are no surprise whatsoever.
Sounds like someone in the base organization is salty!
Just kidding. Nobody said they were “better”, but having properly focused teams working toward a common goal will generally result in better outcomes. That would be true for the Chevette as well as the Corvette.
They've been decimated in the cut costs at all costs mindset in the last 5 years.
As for saltiness, I'd much rather not work like a dog, thank you very much.
Put your management hat on, would you have your best guys in the trucks you sell millions of, or the halo car that is mostly for posters?
All the viper work for example was done by mahle for example. A lot of the Corvette work was done by Bosch. They're such niche products that oems can't even spare engineers for development and they end up getting outsourced. All the Ford gt stuff was Roush.
The GT seemed truly separate from the rest of Ford, at least from my limited understanding.
As were all the mustang feature cars.
By those, you mean the Roush and other variants that you could buy from a dealer, and which may have even had a Ford warranty, but which obviously had post-production modifications made?
I was going to say in my original comment that GM and Mopar kept their halo cars internal: the Corvette is obviously all inside, as was the Viper, albeit mostly in the SRT realm. (Were Hennessy models offered through the dealer, with a Dodge warranty? I don’t recall.)
"employ five hundred people, become wealthy to a degree of which you’d never dared to dream as a child… and still get outbid on a home or car or watch by someone who “YOLOed” on a “shitcoin” six months ago or took the movie “Boiler Room” as an inspiration rather than as a cautionary tale."
This has been going on forever. Back in the early 90's, I went to school with a kid who's dad's got rich by winning a small sum on lotto and then somehow kept winning at various other stock and gambling ventures. I think it happens a lot less than what the Internet says and the Internet drives narratives. Instead of just a few hardworking neighbors getting jealous of the gambler down the street it's everyone in some sort of new outrage.
The problem I have is that the many of the same people who complain about investors for not doing real work think its A OK to make money off of Insta and OF. That anyone who suggests that's not real work is a caveman.
People used to get rich in mining, timber and manufacturing.
So obsolete.
Your modern fortune is in selling people suicidal loneliness via "connection" and social isolation.
I've been reading the latest Mark Twain bio; he only made writing a profession after losing all of his and his brother's money trying to strike it rich in the Comstock Lode.
Lots of people still making money off all those things.
Prostitution though is the oldest business, and OF is just an extension of that.