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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • How would that work, even on paper? Not being a dick, just don’t understand. So it’s literally just, “you can never own this property fully?”

    Yes. The tradeoff is you have a property that is in your name (with a bank note attached), and if the property increases in value during the time you own it, when you sell, you pocket the difference. If you have a fixed interest rate, it also caps the growth of your payment for housing for the entire time you live there. There’s quite a bit of value in that.


  • One weird thing we have is that part of the interest you pay is tax deductible.

    This matches the USA system for mortgages.

    for this reason there is a type of mortage where you first only pay the interest, and slowly start paying off more and more of the mortage, which means your net mortage fee slowly increases over time, which is nice if you expect your income to increase over those decades.

    This sounds new to me. In the USA we do have amortized mortgages so a very high percentage of the monthly payment is interest with little going to principal. Over time that relationship flips where you’re paying more principal that interest. However, in our system the mortgage payment stays the same, only how much of that fixed payment goes to interest vs principal changes.


  • Balloon mortgages would be good in only two situations:

    • you’re not planning on living in the house very long, so you likely exit before the balloon payments hit.
    • you believe interest rates will decline in the next few years and you can refinance to a fixed low rate

    I don’t ever see myself using a Balloon mortgage. Worse, they are frequently sold via predetory lending methods. Unsavvy buyers are convinced to take a balloon mortgage not understanding the payments will rise dramatically in the years ahead. This can lead to eventual foreclosure when the owners can service the higher payments.


  • It an overall bad deal in my mind, but there are some upsides (not enough for me to take it). Assuming you get a fixed rate, you lock in your payment and your “rent”/mortgage will decline over time just from inflation eating away at it. I think most folks would love to have their rent decline by 3% every year. This effectively does that.

    Additionally, if you are the homeowner instead of the renter, if the real estate increases in value, when you sell, you pocket the increase. There’s nothing like that in renting.


  • Congratulations on your new home!

    Thanks for providing that info on the “afloasingsvrije” mortgages. It was a few years before 2008 when she bought, so that tracks with what you’re reporting.

    Here in the USA we have fixed rate mortgages, where you have a single fixed interest rate for the entire length of the mortgage, but I know that not all countries have that. From what I understand in Canada the rates fluctuate during the mortgage where you can get something like fixed for 5 years (maybe 10?) but then the rate can increase on the existing mortgage you’ve already got.

    How does the Dutch system work? Fixed for life of mortgage? Continuously variable? Fixed for a time like Canada? Something else?




  • I have a small portfolio of space company stocks and keep them as a reminder to avoid active investing.

    My boring old Total Market (essentially S&P500) index funds have done much better in the same time as my space stocks.

    Wait till gold drops by into it.

    Every time the market spikes for gold (as it is now), I run the projections to see if I would have been better off in gold than buying equities instead. Gold has never once shown to be the better investment as vehicle for appreciation.




  • Edit: Redacted a mistaken identity

    I’m not sure you understand what this article is or how our markets work.

    The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with. Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars

    He doesn’t have a billion dollars. He’s a hedge fund manager that manages (at least) a billion dollars collectively of other people’s investment money. Its that money he’s betting.

    Them he’s betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we’re okay with that shit.

    No, he’s not. He’s betting against only two companies: Nvidia and Palantir. He has a relatively small bet against Nvidia ($187.6 million), and HUGE bet against Palantir ($912 million). I’m not sure I’d bet against Nvidia yet, but Palantir is co-founded by Peter Theil, trump’s deputy chief of staff which job has a large influence on White House policy. If you ever watched the TV show The West Wing, this would be the Josh Lyman character’s job.

    We already know trump’s favor swings widely and if politics are going against trump (as recent news show) then its not unbelievable that Theil might get the boot or at least trump would punish Theil by killing lucrative government contracts to buy Palantir services.

    All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell

    The point of shorting a stock exists so that the market can express a view that they believe a stock will fail. This is an important “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the market. The other option is a policy that you can’t criticize a company with any meaning and investors continue to put money into failing/risky companies without this important indication of the risk.

    Frankly I don’t like your idea of jailing someone that says “The emperor has no clothes”.


  • The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won’t burst?

    Nobody believes the AI investment/growth trajectory we have right now will continue for infinity. What nobody knows is: when the correction will occur.

    • Do you pull your investments out now and sit on the sidelines waiting for the fallout while your principal loses value daily from inflation?
    • What does the correction look like when it happens? Does all the value evaporate on day 1, the first week, a month? This is important to figure out for this strategy to know when to go back in.

    This is the info/decisions you’d need as an average investor. What Burry is doing is the riskiest type of investments with shorting the market. If growth continue to occur he and his fund will have to pay for the growth to those whose shares he borrowed to short.

    In summary, its not enough to know that a bubble exists, but to profit from it you have to figure out when it will burst and when the full burst is done.





  • “2017 Stigmata? No, that’s a 2016. Notice the bulb size in the taillight array. In between the switch from 5th Gen to 6th they changed the LED bulb size from 3.3mm to 3.35, so now theres only 58 lights in the upper track.”

    “On the US domestic market version, sure, but on the European version (made in Dresden, not the one in made in Prague of course) they had to add the 59th light back to the upper track to comply with traffic safety laws”



  • My only problem is that I’m obsessed with health & fitness.

    That might be a problem if it rises to the level where causes you trouble interacting with society peacefully.

    I choose not to adapt to a sick obese society.

    If you’re talking about your own personal choices and consumption, no one is asking you to be obese. More importantly, the picture or the post the OP made also also doesn’t advocate for an obese society, so your assumption that it is would be projection on your part, no?

    If instead you’re saying you won’t tolerate other people in society being obese, that a very large problem because you don’t get to make those choices for others.

    And if that makes me an outlier and you think I need to be medicated in order to conform to all the fat slobs in the world,

    That’s a nice strawman, but it belongs to you, not me.

    I suggested you need might want help because you saw a fairly innocuous wholesome picture of a cartoon character that enjoyed a meal and you wrote an entire narrative about how it would lead to the subject becoming obese and unhappy in life. That’s not a reaction most folks have. Does that seem okay with you that you saw something that would otherwise be considered cute or happy and you only saw darkness in it?

    I’m frolicking at a nude beach right now and you probably wouldn’t feel comfortable here.

    Continue to do that if it brings you joy and fulfillment and doesn’t hurt anyone.


  • If this is where your mind goes when presented with with the otherwise wholesome image in the OP, I’d really recommend you talk to someone. If you have clinical depression, it isn’t your fault. Its a chemical imbalance and there is help available. We’re all broken in some way. Some people wear their challenges on the outside, other are invisible on the inside. There is zero shame in seeking help.