But what about a Magic: the Gathering set?

“Everything is political” is a ridiculous take. My ideal is to have as little as possible be political.

Maga? Really? I was very vocal about voting against him in all three elections.

I’m not saying Trump was the better candidate. I’m merely saying Harris ran a poor, tone-deaf campaign.

Interesting. I think people here would agree Social Security is a state pension, we just only call it by its name.

A pension specifically refers to a plan that makes consistent payments throughout retirement and stops at death (or may pass to the surviving spouse until their death). Anything else is a retirement plan if it’s tax sheltered until some age, or an investment account if it’s not.

I hear annuities are unpopular here, most seem to prefer either a dividend strategy, or sell securities as needed to cover whatever Social Security doesn’t.

Really? This is what I see with a simple search:

When you’re able to take your pension, you can choose how and when you want the money. This usually includes the option of taking up to 25% as a tax-free lump sum and using the rest to get a guaranteed or variable income.

Looking more into it, I guess it’s similar?

The 401k typically doesn’t offer the guaranteed income, though I suppose some plans could offer annuities. You can choose to take fixed payments though, but there’s no guarantee how long that will last. I don’t know what the options are in the UK, but in the US, you can do whatever you like, as long as you withdraw the minimum (percentage of assets based on your age, starting at 73).

I see a pension as having some kind of guaranteed benefit. A 401k doesn’t have that, so it doesn’t count.

crashes lead to sub 20 PEs

The 2000 crash didn’t though, it was just over 20 at the trough. Jan 2003 was 21. That was almost as high as the peak in the 60s, and higher than the moment before Black Monday. So the market reverted to a mean that would be considered a peak just 20-30 years prior. 15 used to be a good marker for “average,” and now that’s the marker for the Great Recession.

Crashes used to lead to sub-10s, and now they crash to 15-20. The market has fundamentally changed with 401ks and IRAs.

Right. OP’s point is that they call both defined benefit (i.e. what some union people get) and defined contribution (i.e. 401k and whatnot) a “pension.” My understanding is that a “pension” is a specific amount of money paid monthly in retirement (used to also just be the wage for certain jobs, not a retirement benefit).

A quick search yielded “defined contribution pensions”, which seems to be a mix: your contributions are invested during employment, and then you get a fixed payment in retirement.

With a 401k, there’s no fixed withdrawal in retirement unless you set one up, the only thing is a mandatory minimum withdrawal at a certain age (73?). My understanding is that wouldn’t be considered a pension since the withdrawal isn’t guaranteed or fixed, and you can withdraw everything if you so choose.

Maybe I’m wrong and a pension is a looser term there, but my understanding is that a pension needs to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement.

I don’t think anyone should trust my numbers either. Here’s the CAPE data, make your own decision as to whether the CAPE ratio makes sense going forward.

Pension is the correct English term

I don’t think it is.

A pension implies benefits are distributed to the person in retirement, usually with some fixed amount per month. My understanding is that in the UK, defined contribution plans are required to be invested largely in annuities by retirement, which satisfies that, whereas in the US, 401ks don’t have such restrictions. So a 401k could be depleated well before death, or be passed on to children as inheritance, unlike an annuity. There are required minimum distributions, but they don’t kick in until your 70s.

If 401ks switched to a defined benefit plan at retirement, I could see calling it a pension. But since they’re not, I think that’s misleading, and employer sponsored plan makes more sense.

~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.

15-20 was normal for the 100 years ending 40-50 years ago. But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don’t know how what “normal” looks like going forward. More people are buying stocks than ever before due to retirement plans and poor bond yields, which pushes up the PE.

So whether ~40 is high for a PE going forward isn’t clear. The CAPE hit ~45 in the 2000 crash, and reverted to ~20 after the crash, yet the 2008 crash only hit ~26 and crashed down to ~14 and quickly bounced back to ~20. The 2008 had little to do with CAPE and more to do with corruption in the banking industry, whereas 2000 was almost purely oversized hype in the burgeoning tech market.

So is the normal range 20-30? Idk. Maybe 20 is actually low going forward, it’s unclear. Either way, 40 isn’t as outlandish as it was in the 2000s, and that pushed up to 45 before crashing.

there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.

Agreed. But if you drop out of the market and invest in other stuff, you would miss whatever the rest of the runup will do before it bursts, which could leave you worse off than someone just investing in the entire market by market cap. Ot could continue to run for 10-20 years, or it could pop this year, it’s impossible to know since it relies heavily on investors continuing to believe the hype and companies continuing to have something to back up that hype.

Can confirm, circles look like bubbles.

Can you see how dehumanizing that is? Viewing people as cost?

This is how Nazis start by the way, not viewing people as people

The Nazis are a completely different story. It wasn’t that they saw Jews as a cost or as objects, it’s that they saw them as less than objects, they viewed them as actively threatening the country. As in, this was active hate, not apathy.

A business owner is primarily concerned with the health of the business, and costs threaten that health. If mandatory benefits are too high, that may threaten the viability of the business, and limits options for competition.

The counter to this is everyone else voting in favor of mandatory benefits and whatnot. If the system is working properly, both sets of voices will be heard and representatives will push for something for both groups.

Your assumption is that every side serves a purpose. But when we say “hey we shouldn’t kill people” and the answer is “shut up libtard” can you see how they don’t have a “purpose” other than to spread hate?

I assume you’re talking about gun rights? You’re using favorable rhetoric for one side and unfavorable rhetoric for the other. Let’s look at their actual policy proposals:

• Dems - ban “assault weapons” and high capacity magazines
• GOP - enforce current laws

“Assault weapons” have consistently been defined as “scary looking guns,” and each has an equivalent that is less scary looking and just as effective. High capacity mags are easy to jerry-rig from legal mags, and DIY mags are easy to make with a 3D printer and a spring or two. These types of laws are mostly to grab headlines and get someone reelected, not to actually solve any problem.

Likewise, saying “enforce current laws” requires citizens to actually cooperate with police, and for police to actually deserve that level of trust. They don’t lffer any kind of change to police accountability, so this is merely a way to get gun enthusiasts to support them for reelection and not piss off other voters so they can get reelected.

Neither party is actually solving any problems on this issue, they merely speak to their base to get elected. So the rhetoric here should be dismissed, and voters should focus on the issues where the parties are actually interested in doing work (for GOP, it’s mostly taxes and regulations, and for Dems it’s mostly entitlements and regulations; neither party seems to focus on social issues beyond rhetoric).

If you’re talking about something else, then please, elucidate so we can discuss it.

I know who my problem with is, is it’s just hate. Not exclusively politicians, anyone who wants to seee dead.

My point is that the GOP isn’t your enemy, nor are they your friend. In a twin party system, you’re going to have a party that covers each extreme up to the middle.

If you strongly dislike a given party, don’t push against that party (that won’t get anywhere), but instead push against the two party system, because that’s what allows that party to have the power it does. If third parties were viable, neither the Dems or GOP would exist in their current forms. You’d actually know who your enemies are because they’d out themselves by the party they support.

You skipped the part that said “government.” If you read the rest of the definitions, they all have to do with politics and power, even if they’re not governments themselves. So think political parties, PACs, etc. Some non-government entities can have enough power to be comparable to that, such as large companies where maneuvering feels like maneuvering in a government.

Here are other definitions:

• Webster
• Cambridge
• Oxford

All of them are principally about government, or things closely resembling a government. That doesn’t leave room for a small laptop manufacturer or small FOSS project, because they don’t resemble governments. The same goes for patronizing a business or not, that’s not a political act, because we’re not dealing with the types of power associated with politics.

To the average voter who doesn’t follow things very closely, the options were basically:

• bad, but the same as the previous admin, which did stuff that negatively impacted me
• bad, but different; the last time they were in office, they didn’t do things that impacted me too much

Unfortunately, far too many people blame the economy on the sitting President, when they often have little influence on it. Trump was president during an economic boom, and got out just as COVID was going. Biden was president through COVID, and by all accounts was incapable of the job during at least part of his term. What do you expect the average person to do who doesn’t follow politics closely but catches bits and pieces closer to the election? Of course they’ll go with the person promising change over the person promising the status quo…

You mean big tent politics? That’s inevitable with a 2-party system.

That said, theyade a donation to FOSS projects and FOSS shouldn’t be political.

I’m saying that there’s a good chance Framework didn’t know the views of those projects when they donated, so ascribing those views to framework doesn’t make logical sense. That’s all.

The messaging was:

• Harris - I agree with everything Biden’s did and wouldn’t change a thing
• Trump - Biden’s economy was a mess and I’m going to fix it

What do you expect the average person to take away from that?

Harris ran an awful campaign IMO, so it’s not surprising that people opted for the alternative.

No, politics is specifically concerned with government. Any other use is generally a metaphor for government, like “office politics.” Voting on what food to get for dinner isn’t “politics,” neither is boycotting a store for treating their employees poorly.

You seem to be talking about influencers and whatnot. I’m talking about your average Joe in the middle that doesn’t really follow politics but was mad at things getting more expensive over Biden’s term. They aren’t large in numbers, but they tend to determine elections.

No, voting is only political if it’s part of a political process. Everyone in a group voting what kind of pizza to order isn’t political, and it can merely be informative (e.g. the person ordering the pizza could pick something else). Voting is only political when it involves government.

“Voting with your wallet” a metaphor. It just means changing your shopping habits so a company loses revenue, usually due to a recent change. Maybe it’s a policy you don’t like, or maybe it’s a drop in quality or something. It’s usually not a political act, though it can occasionally impact political policy (e.g. if the boycott is in response to a political change that involves the target company).