521–530 of 566 posts
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I would bother to make my payments because I would feel like shit if I took that much money from the American taxpayer without paying it back.
Why not start donating extra tax to repay any public school expenses you acrued as a child?
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They effectively said, "The increase went down." It would have been much clearer for them to say, "The increase has slowed."
This is like the 3rd derivative, right? e.g. we now have a slightly lower rate of acceleration towards the cliff than before?
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this is a 'haha Americans so dumb' myth that's been blown up - it's the result of a NY Times article that outline a private restaurant chain focus group result. So tldr; some people in a private focus group questioned the value of a 1/3 pound burger over the same priced 1/4 pound burger. It's not indicative of any system numerical illiteracy. I will add there were no actual data released - it's solely based on an ane…
Even more than that, the accounts we get claim that some of the people in the focus group said the 1/3 pound burger was smaller than the quarter pounder. Even if those claims are accurate, it's possible they were looking at the diameter, since the 1/3 pounder has two smaller patties stacked on top of each other, while the quarter pounder is one large patty. Most places that report on this say that the third pounder w…
But of course my point was never about the burger. It was just that many aren't good with numbers and finance (in the edit with the links).
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Do you have inflation protected bonds? In the USA you can buy I-Bonds (max $10k/year per person) that pay interest at the current inflation rate. But what is considered “safe” really has a lot to do with your timeline. How soon do you want to access the money? If it’s in tears then index funds are likely a good buy today.
Poland offers something similar, but with a twist. On the plus side, the amount you can buy is unlimited. However, interest rate is fixed in the first year, at 7% (which is a far cry from 17.9% inflation). From the year two the interest rate is inflation rate + 1% premium. You can buy either 4 or 10 year bonds.
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This is like the 3rd derivative, right? e.g. we now have a slightly lower rate of acceleration towards the cliff than before?
There's no cliff (at least for this to be the third, or even second, derivative with regard to.) Its not like there is a magic bad nominal price level.
If we average 2%yoy every single decade for the next 300 years, people will probably have a lot of trust in the dollar in the decade following. If we hit that same price level tomorrow, people will rightly flip. $1700 milk either way, but in one case we'd expect $1700 milk the following day and in the other we'd expect the dollar to plummet further from the shock of it.
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And you’d be a sucker for not taking tax credits the government has legally granted you. It’s the governments fault for making terrible loans and forcing taxpayers to absorb the risk. Don’t be mad at people for receiving…be mad the government is offering!
My partner and I make $420k gross. it's ridiculous the government is offering us another $20k because we graduated school in the last 2 years. still going to take it, of course, but simply bad policy.
Anyone notice that brand name soda (looking at you Coke) has increased almost 100% while the generic/house brand has had slight increases. I feel like Coke is testing the pricing limits of its customers especially with the smaller packaging and these prices will not come back down.
If you check Coke's financial statements, you'll see that although revenue has risen quickly, cost of revenue has risen about as fast, leading to relatively unchanged gross profit margins (36% so far in 2022, compared with 40%+ in every year from 1985-2014 and between 33%-39% from 2015 to 2021). Word from industry press is that the rising price of aluminum has been a major driver of the increased costs. I don't know…
The US has it easy, since the inflation was largely caused by lockdown stimulus, and also benefits from being the global reserve currency so it can leverage cheap imports as the interest rate rises increase the value of USD. I wouldn't be surprised if it's better in a few months, especially with the growing protectionism in the anti-inflation act, etc. and acts against Chinese competition, etc. keeping more industry…
I too watch/read Peter Zeihan and think he has some insights, but please don't take it all on face value (industry is probably not coming back to the US in force, and shifts from China will be slow and painful)