. @Faust1601

The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet

No President can fix it because you can't fix it without taking an axe to social security and medicare, or dramatically raising taxes. Both things would cost a President their head politically. Voters won't have it, and they don't understand or care about the math. So we'll just wait for the eventual debt crisis, or the automatic cuts, and do it the hard way because we lack the societal maturity to proactively fix the problem. If social security and medicare (both its costs and its tax revenue) vanished from our budget, we'd actually run a surplus through 2050. They are the entire problem. Things like fraud and waste are good to stop, but barely make a dent.

Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. @neoavatara

a month ago

Trump is kicking the can down the road on the deficit/debt, just like every other useless president in my adult life. It's always someone else's problem.

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• be John Bogle • 1951, Princeton undergrad • look at the massive, elite Wall Street mutual fund industry • crunch the data for your senior thesis • realize the "experts" in thousand-dollar suits are literally just guessing • realize their massive 2% management fees mathematically guarantee they will underperform the baseline market over a long timeline • basically write a paper calling the entire financial establishment a parasitic glitch • fast forward to 1974 • you climbed the corporate ladder anyway, became CEO of Wellington Management • make one bad merger decision • the board of directors forcefully fires you • 45 years old, completely exiled from your own kingdom • traditional path: beg for another Wall Street CEO job, kiss the ring • asymmetric path: burn their entire casino to the ground • 1975: found Vanguard Group • hack the corporate structure: make the company mutually owned by its own funds • zero outside shareholders, zero Wall Street vampires extracting rent • operate entirely at cost • 1976: launch the First Index Investment Trust • literal brain-dead strategy: just mechanically buy all 500 stocks in the S&P 500 and do absolutely nothing • require zero high-IQ stock pickers, zero trading floors, charge practically zero fees • Wall Street goes absolutely nuclear • the chairman of Fidelity publicly mocks you, calls settling for market average "un-American" • the elite bankers label it "Bogle's Folly" • the IPO is a catastrophic failure, raises only $11 million instead of $150 million • you literally do not care • you know the math is absolute • Wall Street managers panic-sell during crashes, burning their clients' capital on excessive trading fees and taxes • your passive machine just sits there, compounding relentlessly decade after decade • the lethal math of subtraction kicks in • the 2% fee Wall Street charges compounds to steal over 60% of an investor's total wealth over a 40-year timeline • your index fund simply gives that 60% back to the actual creator of the wealth • Vanguard scales into a multi-trillion-dollar behemoth • personally save retail investors an estimated $1 Trillion in fees over your lifetime • die with a net worth of $80 million, a tiny fraction of the billionaire hedge fund managers who mocked you • you could have been a billionaire, but you chose to leave behind an invincible legacy that permanently broke the Wall Street gatekeepers "Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack."

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Warren Buffett: "Kindness just doesn't cost anything. You haven't given up anything [by being kind]. It's just so easy. And you get it back — with interest."

When the motive for a decision is not economic, modern man is bewildered and frightened.