WoodScientist [she/her]

Thanks to sprawling American car-dependent infrastructure, not even Bigfoot can walk to places anymore.

Exactly. For middle class folks who still have to rely on the stock market for retirement, the best option is to just buy dumb index funds and hold them til retirement. You aren’t going to be able to outsmart and out time the actual Wall Street traders who have PhDs in mathematics, access to microsecond trading, and a trading bankroll of billions. If you need to rely on the market, buy and hold is the only sane strategy. At least then you minimize the number of trades you make and the chances for the snakes to screw you over.

If you want real investment advice: no. If you’re investing for retirement, and you’re not near retirement age, you have decades ahead of you before you need these funds. You know those people who “lost everything” in the 2008 recession? Sure, some people lost their jobs and were forced to burn their retirement savings just to keep the lights on. But far more lost money because they sold when the market was in the toilet. The market did eventually recover, but the timing of the recovery couldn’t be predicted in advance, so they lost out on much of the recovery. The market went back up, but they still had their 401k sitting in cash. They lost money on the dip, and then they lost money again on the upswing.

Also, keep in mind that Trump’s policies mean that cash savings will be far more vulnerable in this crash than in the 2008 crash. At least in 2008, the inflation rate was basically zero. Cash didn’t lose much value just sitting in your savings account. But Trump is trying to weaken the dollar to make imports more expensive and US exports more appealing to foreign consumers. And Trump’s policies are expected to be rather inflationary. Cash is no safe haven right now. You could try to move your assets to foreign currencies and companies, but this crash is global. The US set itself up as the linchpin of the global economy after WW2. If the US stumbles, everyone stumbles. The only country that won’t be hurt much by this crash will be North Korea. But there really aren’t that many investment opportunities for foreigners in the hermit kingdom.

It sucks, but at this point you should just ride it out. If you still have decades till retirement, just ignore your retirement balance for the next few years. Just ride it out and remember that you’re investing not for today, but for decades in the future. Or consider the parable of Bob, the world’s most unlucky investor.

I would say that you’re a civilian if you aren’t currently serving in the military, regardless of former military service. That’s at least how it works under international law.

That’s the problem with founding a state based on genocide and ethnic cleansing. When you’ve convinced yourself that you’re literally doing the will of God, when are you actually “done” with God’s work? Just how big is the “Jewish homeland” supposed to be? The Torah said that Yahweh gave the ancient Israelites all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. A fundamentalist Zionist can justify, based on a direct religious reference, that Israel can rightfully expand that far based on the direct word of God. And God never said the Israelis couldn’t conquer more land beyond those bounds. It’s a recipe for self-destructive never-ending conflict.

Israel’s MO is pretty obvious at this point:

1. Antagonize your neighbors just over the border until they start attacking you back.
2. When your neighbors retaliate against your harassment and violence, send in the military to secure a “buffer zone,” billed as a demilitarized zone like the Korean DMZ. Say you can’t have Jews and Arabs living right next door to each other, so a buffer is needed.
3. Once the buffer zone is established, let Jewish settlers in to build towns and cities in what was supposed to be an empty safety buffer.
4. After a few years, Jews and Arabs are once again on each other’s doorstep.
5. Start again antagonizing the neighbors (who are usually the same people you displaced a generation ago.)

This has been Israel’s strategy for decades. They’ve seized “buffer zone” after “buffer zone.” They let their people move into the buffer zone, and then suddenly they don’t have a buffer zone anymore. They use their own civilian population as human shields, putting them in a position where they are guaranteed to be attacked by angry people the Israeli government and settler forces are continually antagonizing. Then when they’re inevitably attacked, that can be used to justify expanding the borders even further. Oh, and none of their neighbors can resist this process through direct military action, as Israel has a nuclear arsenal. No one can afford to get in a total war with Israel.

I really don’t know where this ends. At this point I think the best thing for Mideast peace would be the Iranians, Egyptians, or Turks getting a nuclear weapon themselves. The only thing that’s going to stop the never-ending drive for Israeli lebensraum is if they expand until they’re up against someone too tough for them to boss around. And that’s probably going to need to be a country that is themselves a nuclear power.

The other problem with this expansion is that it gets baked into the Israeli society and economy. It’s a bit like what happened with ancient Rome. Their whole economy became dependent on this process of expanding, conquering peoples, subjugating and enslaving them, etc. They had to keep expanding just to keep their economy running. They paid their retired veterans with stolen land. The only way you can keep that model going is by expanding forever. And eventually they expanded beyond what they could manage. The same thing is happening in Israel. They have whole sectors of their economy dependent on this process of expansion and settlement. At this point, even if they wanted to, they can’t just say, “ok, we’ve expanded enough. These are our fixed borders now and forever.” They can’t do that without collapsing the part of their economy that is dependent on selling and developing all the land they take. They can’t have peace without causing a massive recession. They’ve become addicted to stealing land.

That’s amazing that a patient can be infected by a tumor located 5,000 km away from their body!

Or here’s another idea. If this is actually a real threat, how about we treat it like one? We can simply choose not to develop certain technologies; we’ve done it multiple times. We’ve had the tech for human cloning for decades, but we decided it was unethical and to simply not pursue the technology. We could do the same for AI beyond a certain level of complexity.

Hell, if this really is a threat to the human race, I would fully support just outlawing computers entirely if that’s what it took. Fuck it, we’ll just go back to pen and paper. It would be an extreme step, but if that’s what it takes, so be it. We can go full Dune, “thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.”

I’m impressed. You have excellent language skills for a premie infant.