That makes a lot of sense. Get peoples interest by posting a crappy CAM bootleg (not even telesync for good audio) and make them want to pay to see it in 70mm IMAX or whatever the highest end option at a theater near them is.

Ordinarily I'd cringe at Comcast, one of the most hated companies in America, owning anything...but it's currently owned by Musk. So that would be an improvement. Especially if Musk took a nice financial hit.

Every movie that comes out has multiple torrents and various other sites you can download it from. This has been going on since the 90s since CeNTRoPY used to hookup the telesync SVCDs sometimes before the movie was released. One could download it from XDCC bots on IRC or if you were connected on a topsite or relay site some courier used FXP to directly transfer it to from another FTP site. Not much has changed except it's on torrents, darkweb, or other bootleg sites. Is the point it was posted on X?

I've yet to meet someone that preferred Microsoft Teams over Slack. People use it because it's bundled, but it can have poor UX and be a hairball to config and manage.

That's pretty amazing even back then you could start so low, my understanding is only low-end fixers and entry-level condos sold for that much in 2002.

I would argue if you ran the calculations on your rental houses versus investing in the S&P500, the S&P500 would surely win by a significant margin.

Today though, or even since 2011, this strategy could not have replicated the same results. For most Americans, the ship has long sailed on leveraged real estate investments being such a great source of wealth accumulation. Gen X was the last generation able to enjoy this, for us Millennials and even worse for Gen X, it hasn't worked out.

While you did buy at a historically great time and great location, the numbers still don't work out in favor of buying a house with a mortgage. For myself, I was in high school in 2001/2002; the next best opportunity was 2008 when I was a fresh college grad, so no such market timing possibility has even existed for my generation.

That said, even with massive bay area home value appreciation (400-500% since 2001); it still doesn't beat investing the money. I understand for some a forced leveraged investment like a home might be the only way they have the financial discipline to achieve these results. But, if you did have Boglehead type discipline, the results are staggeringly in favor of not buying.

If you bought a $500k house with $100k down in 2002, you'd have a $2mm house today..with significant attrition on those gains based on property taxes and mortgage interest and maintenance paid in the interim. If you straight invested that $100k in 2002 in a low cost S&P500 index fund, and didn't add any more money since, you'd have about $1mm today. However, if you rented at $2,000 a month back then and invested the delta between the mortgage and the rent over time in the S&P500, you'd have about $3.16mm today.

Ultimately this comes down to financial discipline and behavior.

However, these results in Bay Area real estate could not be replicated in the current generation (at least since 2011 or so). If you invested the $100k in 2011 in the S&P500, you'd have $776k today. Even with the $500k house optimistically doubling, you'd have less equity than the S&P500 investment.

Straight buy when mortgage interest rates skyrocketed. Shark exploding offer (expired in 24 hours, all cash, no contingencies). Nice house, not a fixer, desirable Bay Area location.

As a Boglehead investor I agree 100 percent and would add: Don't lose your money to speculative investments. That said people who work at Meta as the article mentions don't get windfalls, they get high salaries. A basic house in the area can run $2mm, so they take out mortgages thinking they'll always be making over 300k. I, coming from a working class family background, knew better and waited to buy until I could pay upfront. The people I bought from? Huge mortgage they couldn't pay made them sell.

I'm also one of the "winners" of Silicon Valley fortunate enough to achieve complete financial independence a few years ago. If I wanted to return to the workforce today, jobs I used to have look like four jobs combined....because you have Claude you can do it all! Startup working hours are more brutal...some companies doing the dreaded 996, most just consuming your entire day into the evening at full nonstop bandwidth. My former employees text me all the time looking for new jobs, as work has gotten harder and pay hasn't gone up, but I hear of little to recommend to them. People are scared to quit jobs even as they get harder and somewhat more abusive. It's the polar opposite of 2021 where employees were demanding more of companies, higher pay, and changing jobs in droves.

I share your sentiment and think EFF is/was a great organization doing very important work. Then I got to meet them at their offices and learn more about them and their team. This was maybe eight years ago, and they seemed very interested in dealing with the huge amount of Bitcoin donations they got which were rapidly increasing in value. To "deal with it" the conversation turned to various off sites they could have for "team building," and going to Burning Man. It struck me as a Burning Man camp of scenester nerds with incredible funding sometimes functioning as a civic organization.

While the law of Headlines would say this is a "no," this is one case of a resounding "Yes of course they did!". America has been shifting taxes from corporations onto individuals, and regressively taxing individuals since the implementation of the Income Tax. Mind you the income tax was never intended by those who pushed for the Constitutional amendment in the Progressive Era to be a tax on anyone but the super wealthy. The way it worked out is that the middle class pay the bill of taxes and corporations/ultra wealthy are adept at dodging it. They have the power to lobby for arcane changes in the tax code to benefit them. The money has to come from somewhere, and it's been on the backs of the average American for a long time. Neither party wants to do anything about it, Dems want more taxes for social services, Republicans want regressive tarriffs and corporate welfare.

Very true -- Slashdot seems to have many older programmers who refuse to use AI because theu dislike it and like writing code manually. I think of it like great grandpas who refuses to use power tools and used awls, hammers and other hand tools instead. AI generates code at the level of a senior developer at this point. It gives the same advice on security a seasoned CISO would. It finds security bugs in code better than a certified pentester. Much like the IT people who were anti-virtualization (because bare metal servers were "better"...), and then anti-cloud (because on prem or colo was better...) there will soon be only legacy jobs and then no jobs left for those who refuse to embrace the new tools.

This is a much bigger list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So let me get this straight (pun intended) -- we spent billions of dollars bombing Iran. They still are able to block the Strait and are now charging a tax that didn't exist before, to pay to repair things we bombed. Trump says there's "Complete and Total regime change," but the leader of Iran is still named the Ayatollah Khamenei. I'm not sure how any measure shows the US campaign was a success. On the contrary, it is likely a pyrrhic Victory that will embolden Iran, strengthen their Islamist regime and defiance, and fracture US alliances like NATO. What exactly was accomplished here? The end result seems like we're now giving Iran money and allowing them to dominate the Strait officially.

Lewinsky never got free trips on government jets and a protective detail assigned to her. Those benefits are reserved for Kash Patel's medicore-country-singer sugar baby girlfriend.