They’ll give it up if they have to, yes, but that’s because they have to. The tobacco industry is still doing $100 billion each year, and they print death threats on the packages. People who know meat is bad for the environment still eat it. People are stupid, lazy, and panicky. You won’t reduce the damage at the grassroots level. You have to win elections, frame the debate, and set policies. Anything less is pissing on a forest fire. You’re just going to singe your pubes.
The population at large will never voluntarily choose to stop eating meat. Beef will just become prohibitively expensive, and the government will give more and more subsidies to try to reduce the cost of hamburgers until the market collapses and they blame immigrants/lgbtq+/atheists/whichever scapegoat is most convenient at the time.
Don’t be fooled by maps. Bridges and tunnels back up quickly, and trains are occasionally delayed. Expect your commute to be double whatever Waze is currently estimating, and some days you will be pleasantly surprised that it only takes that long.
Also, $4k a month for rent is not going to get you very much within that radius. You can find a 1 bedroom, maybe a small 2 bedroom flat, but I would budget for $5k if you definitely want a separate room for the baby.
$220k is a lot of money. Congratulations on your success. But if you work in NYC, it won’t feel like a lot of money. On the other hand, living there is an experience unlike anywhere else in the world. You might love it, you might hate it, but at least you’ll never have to wonder about it.
It is, but forex markets allow traders to trade on significant margin. Meaning, if I have $100, I might be able to buy $1,000 worth of foreign currency (a 1:10 margin) and if the value of the currency increases 1% ($100) you get 10% of the profit, which is 10% of your investment. If the position increases by 10%, you double your money. However, this also means that if the value drops by 10%, your money is gone.
Now consider that forex traders often leverage at 1:500 margins. You get to buy massive positions with currency pairs, and even the tiniest fluctuations can provide massive profits or instantaneous ruin.
The algorithm I used monitored recurring micro-patterns, watching for predictable movements. You’re also watching relative value pairs, rather than just an absolute market value. Both sides of a currency pair have nations vying to improve the value of their own currency, so you can make money (or lose money) on either side of the pair. Dollar is low against the yen, buy dollars with yen. Yen drops against the dollar, sell your positions. Euro drops against the yen, go pick up Euros agains the yen, and feel confident that Japan is already trying to strengthen the yen (simplified example, because it’s way more complex than that).
So if you track currencies across all currency pairs, you can find inconsistencies. I called it “torque” 15 years ago, but I’m sure a proper forex trader can give you an actual name for it. These are areas where three or more currencies are out of alignment, like if the dollar is up against the yen but down against the euro, and the yen is up against the euro. These are situations where you would expect the market to equalize in one direction or the other, and the trick was being able to predict which way it would go.
And I thought I had figured that out. I had not figured that out. I had gotten lucky several times in a row. In fact, the market can tolerate that sort of incongruity, and the market forces on various positions are far more complicated. And because you’re leveraged, if you bet big, even small swings in the wrong direction can wipe you out.
And because your leveraged, if the position dips, you can’t just hold it hoping it will bounce back. Once the loss in value reaches your investment, the position automatically closes and you’ve lost everything you put in. It doesn’t matter if it bounces all the way back up, because you no longer own it.
It hurt with fake money, because I thought I had discovered some big secret key. Like that movie Pi. And then it was gone. All the sucess, all the dreams of a 9-screen batcave-style computer station with financial tickers and shit. I realized that I had nothing, and I was foolish for thinking otherwise. Stung like a bitch.
But you’re right, safe investments are the smarter long-term play. I did make an extra paycheck on dogecoin once on a moonshot. But otherwise, my boring retirement funds are all steadily beating inflation by a few percentage points. Why fight the tide?
Reminds me of the time I started learning about forex. I used a practice account to test an algorithm for recognizing short-term trends and trading on the activity. I ran a simulation for a few days to make sure it was working, and my fake $10,000 bankroll turned into $50,000 in less than a week. I was excited about the results, and went to explain it to someone with deeper pockets who might actually have $10k to invest, and in the time it took me to walk from my desk to his and back, it went to less than $600. Five minutes, $50k wiped out.
Needless to say, he didn’t invest and I stopped daydreaming about owning a yacht. Forex is gambling.
But how can this be, when all the world leaders got together and decided to ? And then all the corporations made sure that ? Surely the plan to was enough to slow climate change!
Narayama Murthy sounds like an enormous piece of shit.
Of course it does, by doing what I said. It’s the only way anything ever changes. Win some elections, frame the debate, pass legislation. That’s how it always works, and it never works any other way (without violence).
There has never been a movement that built up so much grassroots support that everyone just unanimously agreed to go along with it.