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Buy payphones and retire

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Re: Buy payphones and retire

#331

Post by jon_richards »

eru wrote: post #243
jon_richards wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there’s no free lunch, but there is the beat-you-up-and-take-your-lunch-money of not investing. Bonds may have gone down, but they still paid out. Unless people sold at a loss for liquidity or could’ve timed the market and bought low, they were better off than people stashing money in a mattress or most bank accounts.

Yes, holding cash also has risks.

That's not really my point. I think one thing that gets lost in the "everything has different levels of risk" discussion is that many risk/reward profiles are bad. Calling everything a tradeoff is misleading. Banks are more than happy to capitalize on laziness and lack of knowledge (an American is more likely to change their spouse than their bank), so the balance between risk and reward gets thrown out of whack.

The simple term for this is Sharpe Ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio

If you want to get really deep into investment theory, Beta implies basically everything is a good investment in small enough amounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance)

Though in practice, Beta is mostly irrelevant beyond a relatively simple portfolio https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-myth-more-why-...

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#332

Post by maxwell »

potato3732842 wrote: post #82
maxwell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the other day that self-storage facilities seem ideal: you don't even need to account for discrepancies in utility usage, as in missing water at car washes and laundromats. Just say units are rented and paid in cash. Not aware of any KYC laws but haven't looked recently.

There are no KYC laws for self storage because it's already standard practice so you can sue the person who pays cash for one month of storage and then crams the locker floor to ceiling with hazmat.

Makes sense. Also would probably hit into full occupancy pretty quickly. I guess you could use it as a warehouse for black market goods or something too though.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#333

Post by TheRealPomax »

pc86 wrote: post #66
TheRealPomax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that there are loads of things that you can't keep working on after you retire. If your company had you in a position where you ran really interesting projects, all of those are the company's projects, not yours. You got to work on them because you worked there, and once you retire you can't just keep working on them, you can't even do the same work on your own because your contract made that pretty clear: now y…

It's pretty cool that you have such detailed knowledge into everyone's personal circumstances that you know they all have employment contracts and what the details of those contracts are. Most people reading this right now are in the US, and the vast majority of US employees at at-will, which means no contract at all. Even for those with contracts, it's a pretty big leap to get to "IP theft" with anything anyone coul…

What made you read that comment and go "they're talking about everyone" instead of "oh, yeah, those people also exist, blanket statements don't make sense in this context"?

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#334

Post by PawgerZ »

Foreignborn wrote: post #324
lazyasciiart wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve really never seen unattended farm stands in the rural US?

I’m from very rural USA (population: 32). I’ve only seen farm stands in very isolated towns where people generally know each other. A lot near my home town have disappeared. In my experience, I’ve seen unattended farm stands, antique stores, and flea markets even in Tokyo.

Rural Iowa here. I've seen them in populations as big as 30,000 (Mason City, Iowa for example)

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#335

Post by SoftTalker »

le-mark wrote: post #314
WalterBright wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to make lots of money with no work and little investment. An example is buying lottery tickets. The problem, though, is the risk goes up with the potential reward. Your chances of winning the lottery are indistinguishable from zero. But it's still there.

Other ways are writing a hit song, advertising jingle, a bestselling novel, a top selling video game. Ways not to get rich; a “better c” language and compiler?

Those things sound like a lot of work to me. Perhaps enjoyable work, but work all the same.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#336

Post by opo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #300
opo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At its worst, 1999 to 2009, SP500 total annual return was only -0.2%, per dqdyj. That might not be adjusting for inflation. According to the calculator on moneychimp, with adjusting for inflation, the cagr for the S&P 500 over that time period was -3.42%. (i.e. $1.00 shrank to 71 cents if invested in S&P 500 Jan 1, 2000 to Dec 31, 2009. >...and it shows that the government is willing to pull out all the stops if the…

We don’t need to adjust for inflation since we are comparing nominal returns across the board. What other investment options were there from 1999 to 2009 that had a similar risk profile (implicit backstop by government), but also unbounded upside (unlike fixed income options)? > I imagine the potential collapse of the financial markets, was maybe a more important cause of monetary and fiscal policy around that time.…

>We don’t need to adjust for inflation since we are comparing nominal returns across the board.

Well there are things like TIPS, so comparing real returns across the board might be more helpful. Some of the returns from S&P investing will be in the form of dividends, so ideally the amount of taxable gains would also be included to get a better comparison.

I agree that even with the history of long slumps that stocks are still one of the best investments out there.

>If multiple SP500 companies are at risk, then I am going to bet Congress is going to shift into high gear to find a solution.

I think we might be in agreement that bailouts come down to systemic risk and political pull. Silicon Valley bank fails and people got all their money bank even if the accounts were far above the FDIC limits. Other banks fail at about the same time and account holders get only up to the FDIC limit. Maybe there was systemic risk there, but it feels like political pull was at least involved.

When the dot com bubble burst, many large companies failed but there was no concentrated action by Congress or the Fed to bail them out. Hence the lost decade for S&P 500 investors.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#337

Post by j0hnyl »

krageon wrote: post #329
HPsquared wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vending machine in an empty field just reminds me of Japan's low crime rate.

It's not noticeably low when you're from a nice country. It'll be very noticeably low when you're from a nightmare place.

There are few places in the world where things won't be taken when left unattended.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#338

Post by ido »

wongarsu wrote: post #132
hifromwork wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but in my very walkable european neighbourhood I don't see any vending machines either (except on the train stations, in waiting rooms, etc). Granted, there are small shops every corner, so vending machines don't feel necessary, but sometimes it would be useful to have some.

In Germany a lot of vending machines have appeared over the last ~10 years, and there are a lot more popping up all the time. And not just in the big cities. Nowhere as many as in Japan, but for example in my area there's a farmer selling fresh eggs in a vending machine, a meat packaging plant selling meat and sausages, an ice cream/frozen yoghurt vending machine (some local Ben & Jerry's competitor), a bunch of vend…

I’ve lived in Berlin for the last 11 years and have never seen the phenomena you describe (I wish I had them in my neighbourhood!)

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#339

Post by WalterBright »

le-mark wrote: post #314
WalterBright wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to make lots of money with no work and little investment. An example is buying lottery tickets. The problem, though, is the risk goes up with the potential reward. Your chances of winning the lottery are indistinguishable from zero. But it's still there.

Other ways are writing a hit song, advertising jingle, a bestselling novel, a top selling video game. Ways not to get rich; a “better c” language and compiler?

Writing compilers is certainly not a probable path to getting rich. I do it for other reasons.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#340

Post by ndarray »

hyperhopper wrote: post #217
ndarray wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is 3D and instances of pyramid schemes exist in the world, making them 3D.

By your logic your comment is red, since it's written in words and words can be read.

No... it's not that the world "can be" 3D, it's that the world entirely IS 3D. You could say that my comments is 3D and you'd be right, in many ways, since storage mediums as well as pixels are technically 3D.
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