The irony is that "collectibles" have their own tax rate and it's considerably higher than capital gains. Most people would pay a 15 or 20% long-term capital gains rate on securities they sell but collectibles are taxed at a 28% rate.

I finally had to give up on gmail for the same reason. Everyone seemed to think it was theirs and for every unsubscribe I went through, 3 more got added. I still get people's mortgage statements, rental agreements for storage units, food order receipts, etc. The most annoying part is someone used it to sign up for a Playstation account and Sony refused to do anything about it. Their system required two-factor so I couldn't just force a password reset and delete the account, and they wouldn't delete it because I wasn't the person who created it. It basically permanently banned me from creating an account with my own email address.

Because they aren't segregated. From their user agreement (https://www.coinbase.com/legal/user_agreement/united_states#hosted-wallet-and-custodial-services)

2.6.3. Digital Assets Not Segregated. In order to more securely custody assets, Coinbase may use shared blockchain addresses, controlled by Coinbase, to hold Supported Digital Assets held on behalf of customers and/or held on behalf of Coinbase. Although we maintain separate ledgers for User accounts and Coinbase accounts held by Coinbase for its own benefit, Coinbase shall have no obligation to segregate by blockchain address Supported Digital Assets owned by you from Supported Digital Assets owned by other customers or by Coinbase.

Not safer, just more transparent.

I think your post is very on point. What we've seen play out in the past 10 years but accelerated recently in the video streaming space was just a precursor to the gaming world that, frankly, we should have all seen coming. Companies value subscription revenue, it's more valuable to their investors for one. You can't garner a critical mass of subscribers to support the platform costs unless you have an arsenal of content to go along with it. That's why Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+, etc. are spending obscene amounts of money to produce content to lure people to their platforms.

Gaming will be no different. Microsoft is clearly heading in the direction where Game Pass is their consumer subscription service that rounds out their commercial subscriptions in Windows/Office. They have the platform and a decent amount of content but this will push them over the top and make for a very compelling offer for what $15/mo gets you. As a long time Xbox owner, I don't personally care whether Sony/Nintendo get these games or not (though I'm sure they do). What actually excites me is Microsoft's stance about including these in Game Pass and generally assuring me that I can play them on PC AND Xbox, hopefully they can bring some more cross-play support between those two platforms as well since third parties have been so inconsistent with it. I expect other studios will continue to be snatched up but I also think others have made good comments in here that none of this precludes great content from arising from other Indie developers. After all, almost every game we celebrate today from the "big players" started off as a small entity that grew. The large studios, to my recollection, haven't been great about starting new content (just look at companies like Amazon that can throw endless money at a project and how many failures they've had).

Exactly. Don't even see how this is news. If you're an investor with any diversification at all, you own APPL, either directly or in any number of mutual funds or ETFs. It's almost unavoidable unless you're trying really hard.

Agreed, part of that issue is also that it's so disjointed. There are too many projects run by too few developers because everyone wants to fork and put their own spin on something. Why do we need a dozen window managers, multiple x servers, a dozen filesystems, 20 web browsers, 30 PDF readers, etc.? Someone will answer that it's because X program didn't have Y feature, but it leads to a plethora of mediocre programs, developed using different toolkits, and most of them are incomplete, incoherent, and poorly documented. Granted I didn't pay anything for them and couldn't do better myself, but it's not going to win over the average household's computer when you don't have one coherent experience.

Well while we're making up statistics (all of my XBox's are hardwired), 95% of users aren't going to go out and buy a new Wi-Fi 6 router anytime in the near future nor do they have broadband connections that would exceed what Wi-Fi 5 can deliver.

1. Quarantining 50,000 people qualifies as a "major impact?" There's a bit of hyperbole in that article and in your argument. Everyone is extrapolating to a "what could be" scenario and the truth is we have no idea how much worse it can/will get. It could spread and become a true pandemic or we could be seeing the worst of it right now and deaths will be limited to no more than 5,000, only time will tell. But for markets to price in a truly disruptive scenario with global recession implications is definitely betting on the extreme. To say the US is doing nothing is also a lie as we've restricted travel, are actively investing in treatment options, and are working hard to track down cases and isolate the spread.

2. I said the mortality rate was lower than other diseases we've battled in the past decade. SARS was 11%, Ebola 83-90%, MERS 45% (your source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), and COVID-19 at 2-4%. Most deaths have been in humans with compromised immune systems or preexisting conditions that made increased their likelihood of death from just about any infection.

Please provide your reference for US deaths in the millions if this disease actually spreads here? China appears to be plateauing, has more than 4 times our population, and has a total of 2,788 deaths as of this writing (https://vac-lshtm.shinyapps.io/ncov_tracker/).

The analysis may not have been fleshed out to your liking, but there are some important things to take away from it. 1) There is little impact in the US as of right now so domestic companies should be in better shape but that will depend on their international exposure. 2) Mortality rate is still pretty low compared to other diseases we've combated in the last decade, so the human impact of this, while non-zero, shouldn't be a major threat to the economy in the same way that millions of deaths would be. We're still looking at far fewer deaths worldwide than the number who have died from the flu in the US so far this year. Healthy, working-age individuals are not what this virus is killing.

Actually, there is only one indicator of a recession, and you can't tell one's happening until it's already happened. There are leading indicators that people use to try to predict recessions (yield curves are an example) but they aren't perfect. E.g., it's true that a recession has always been preceded by an inverted yield curve, but every inverted yield curve has not led to a recession. There are also plenty of other factors that are NOT pointing to a recession, such as unemployment. You also have to be careful to differentiate between a technical recession (where growth actually slows temporarily but there are few other outward signs of economic stress) vs. a full-on recession like we saw in 2008.

A reference that points to multiple studies: https://www.wesmoss.com/news/a...

Common investors took a bath because they don't know how to incorporate risk management into their investing. They follow the trends they hear others talking about or that they see on the news without any regard for the risk involved. Your statement about advisors is pretty cynical, or could be said of any profession by the same token I suppose, but good advisors help their clients be disciplined with saving money, be prudent with investing their money, be sane when it seems like the walls are caving in, and achieve their realistic financial goals. They get paid along the way, but many studies have shown that they provide more value than the fee they charge (one such study was done by Vanguard, the king of passive investing: https://personal.vanguard.com/...)

Because nobody wants to get rich slowly! (-- Warren Buffet)