• 8 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • It really does depend on what you’re looking for. You can “replace” US Treasuries with comparatively safe assets like British gilts or bonds from large, stable EU countries like France or Germany, but these will be denominated in GBP or EUR respectively, not USD, so they’re not a drop-in replacement. The EU itself also plans to issue some joint debt to pay for Ukraine-related expenses, so that might also be available depending on how they do it.

    As for stocks and ETFs, there is the Euronext 100, but a cursory web search didn’t reveal any ETFs that track it. I’m sure there probably is one, but I just didn’t find it.

    That being said, the Euronext 100 isn’t a replacement for American indexes like the S&P 500 though. The liquidity on the European side is lower (and for EUR securities in general), and because the American stock market in general performs better than the European stock market, you would give up a lot of financial gain. If you invested $1,000 into an S&P 500 index fund on 1 January 2010, that would now be worth $6,111. But if you instead invested 1 000€ into a Euronext 100 index fund on the same date, it would only be worth 2 548€ today. Even if you cut it off before the AI-led growth in the American stock market, the S&P 500 still would have outperformed the Euronext 100 by nearly double.














  • Look, I came into this expecting people to understand that most (arbitrary percentage greater than 50 but less than 100) interactions with anyone, ICE or not, are reasonable. You don’t hear about these, because they’re not interesting enough to get posted on the Internet. If your information comes from the Internet only, you will think everything is extreme. I don’t like to use the term “terminally online”, but it’s a problem common with people typically described as being “terminally online”—not realising that real life is a lot more boring than it would appear from clips that people share of ridiculous interactions.

    It’s always difficult to deal with these types of comments because despite it being obvious that they show an extremity bias because the person who made them has a viewpoint influence by an extremely cherry-picked data set, they technically are logically sound.

    Edit: I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.


  • Look here mate, you and I both know there’s probably no empirical evidence whatsoever about this. It’s a heuristic based on observations of how law enforcement works and what people choose to post on the Internet. This is like how people post a picture of a deformed boxed pie they bought at the grocery store to complain about it and then you assume that all pies are deformed. No, people only post the bad ones online to complain about it, but if I were to assert that “at least 80% of pies are fine and not deformed” and you choose to reply with “Where do these numbers come from? internet magic?”, I think you can see the inherent ridiculousness of that reasoning.

    I really hate that on the Internet you really have to explain to people that the things they see posted there are almost always the exceptions rather than the rule.

    Edit: I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2-3 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.


  • It’s a guess without any empirical evidence whatsoever. However, the only reason why you believe it “contradicts evidence” is because nobody ever talks about ICE encounters that go down peacefully. People only ever talk about and post about ICE encounters that are outrageous. So all the encounters you have ever heard of will be ones where someone gets wrongfully arrested/beaten up by agents/etc.

    When I saw them, they were checking everyone and arrested 0 people in the time I observed them.

    I should not have to explain to you that what you see on the Internet has a heavy selection bias towards the extreme and that for every one video of something stupid happening there’s hundreds more unfilmed of ordinary interactions which aren’t interesting enough to get posted at all.

    Edit: I have managed to create a statistic for this. There are 22,000 agents which work for ICE, although this number was 12,000 prior to Trump’s hiring surge (source). ICE claims they made 26,600 arrests in 2025 (source). This means each agent makes about 2 arrests per year on average at most. So unless you believe that most agents are checking only three or four people a year, this would indicate most people are being let go.