2/ speaking of "strangely good", I was just reflecting that I went into debt around July 1988, age 16, when I signed student loans & ROTC scholarship (with repayment conditions). I then lived in debt for 30 years, until September 2018, when I paid off the last bit of mortgage.
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3/ Debt is a weird thing. The fact that most of us are in debt for most of our lives is a weird thing. It's written from a left wing perspective, but I strongly recommend the book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, by David Graeber.
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4/ Folks got all upset at Moldbug's statements about slavery, because they map them to "but slavery is good tho", when his point was much more nuanced: there are ALWAYS power relations, and these are mediated / documented / justified in different ways.
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5/ In explicit slave states, we have slaves and owners. In totalitarian socialist states, we have "citizens" and party members. In market states, we have debtors and investors.
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6/ It is always better to be powerful than to be powerless. It's worth talking about mobility between classes (because systems with more mobility are probably better than systems with less). Can a Chinese nobody become a party member? Can an antebellum slave buy his freedom?
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7/ Does a system reward good behavior? Is it fair? (Are any of them? (Is there any better alternative?)) But once we acknowledge the similarities between power hierarchies in different systems, ... well, now we're haggling.
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8/ Progs who talk about wage slavery aren't entirely right...but they're not entirely wrong either. But it's not wages that create the slavery - it's the fact that the universe is entropic, and we have to pay for our food and housing.
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9/ "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
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10/ One weird thing is that to maximize your expected income you should NOT be an entrepreneur / indie author / startup founder / whatever. I ran my own firm for 14 years and made crap. That's common. I took compensation in autonomy / freedom, not dollars.
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11/ In a sense, freedom is conserved. You can either get freedom via earning cash, which gives you one kind of freedom (from debt / from the need to work more), or via off beat choices (which gives you freedom from bosses and cube farms). I'm not sure that either is better.
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12/ Of course, there area crappy choices - you can always do worse than that optimal trade-off. On an X/Y graph, it's an efficient frontier.
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13/ I don't have a single point here; I'm just doing a jazz fusion riff (I'm huge in Japan!)
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14/ Concur; have seen this too. Terrible situation. Read an essay by a Harvard MBA recently on how many of his classmates now make $1M/yr , hate their lives ... and can't let go of the tiger's tail. https://twitter.com/politifakes/status/1102223088828112897 …
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15/ If I've got one piece of advice to youngsters re debt, it's this: * live below your means - WELL below your means.
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16/ If I've given the leeway to give two or three pieces of advice, I'd add these: * toys usually aren't nearly as much fun as you think they're going to be
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17/ * it's impossible to overstate the sheer sense of relief and ease that comes from being out of debt. I literally think about it every single day. No one told me about this ahead of time, and someone should have. Debt is a power relationship, and when you owe...you owe.
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18/ Strong disagree on the NRx "but serfs had it great!" meme. Medium disagree on the rest. Time is freedom...but money is also freedom. See my earlier point re efficient frontier curve on X/Y graph.https://twitter.com/Watchman_motto/status/1102228953891246081 …
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19/ Getting back to this: the trade off every day is between working towards something that is distant and hard to appreciate, and buying things that are immediate and easy to grasp. Merely bc 2 attributes, have to bet that equilibrium levels are wronghttps://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1102229693045096448 …
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20/ To tie the concept of (a) debt together with the topic of (b) "the universe is entropic and you have to buy food, hence 'wage slavery'": someone (
@AlanMCole ? other?) once made the point that you're born with an uncovered put re housing and food. >>>Show this thread -
21/ (I'm sure I got that phrase wrong, and instead of spending 5 minutes googling to get it right, I'm just going to let it sit out there and get corrected. I'm not lazy - I'm crowd sourcing!)
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23/ and also, ideally, to pay down the principle (i.e. amass that much in resources so that, going forward, the principle starts covering your monthly housing and food bills).
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24/ So, anyway, in that sense, I've gotten out of one form of debt (explicit student loans / mortgage / etc), but I've only BARELY begun to chip down the other one. REEEEEEEE I hope to get it done by age ~65.
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25/ ...but, damn, it's a cruel irony that we get our stuff squared squared away right around the time we croak. I'd bet 100:1 against any really excellent life extension during my lifetime (used to be an optimist, but bayesian updates...), which is too bad.
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26/ Also, we all scale our behavior to our environment. If we got old and decrepit at 25 and died at 30, we'd start work at 12... (Conversely, if we knew we'd live to 300, I'd still be farting around with long shot startups, etc.) https://twitter.com/LibertyFarmNH/status/1102237197258944514 …
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27/ Crowdsourcing works! https://twitter.com/xctlot/status/1102237455795802113 …
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28/ No. I will never trust a government regulator to make decisions for a person when I can trust that person instead. He might make bad ones ...but the government is GUARANTEED to. https://twitter.com/BrandtJalowy/status/1102260439268950018 …
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29/ Also, Dave Ramsey is good. He really only has 2 or 3 points, so after you've watched a half dozen of his videos, you've watched them all...but if you haven't yet, and have questions about debt, watch a few, maybe buy a book (I'm sure he sells some).https://twitter.com/fairtaxman/status/1102316841119166465 …
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30/ Probably best thing about Dave Ramsey is that he resets your definition of "normal". Certain groups think that $200k in student loans, two $50k cars financed via loans, living off of credit cards is "normal". His insights are not deep; just tells you "normal is over HERE".
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31/ If you want to get stronger, start hanging around with guys who lift weights. If you want to swoop mass beautiful Russian models and do open water swimming, follow
@MichaelPorfirio . If you want to get out of debt and start building wealth, watch Dave Ramsey videos.Show this thread - Show replies
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