Divemedic

FBI Reenters the Caliber Wars

Listen to the below video:

There are 9mm projectiles out there that are doing the same thing the forties are doing, but we can take the full power nines that are still less recoil impulse, high magazine capacity…

I own handguns in all of the major self defense calibers, including a few .40S&W and about three times as many 9 millimeters. I can’t tell you the last time I carried, or even shot, a forty caliber. When the FBI decided to use that caliber, they did so by neutering the 10mm. Why? Because female and limp wristed beta male Federal officers can’t handle the recoil of full power handguns.

I’m just going to say this: The 9mm has been a go to carry piece for me because of capacity and ease of concealment. If I were a Fed and could carry what I wanted without fear of printing or accidentally flashing, I would carry a full sized handgun.

He says it, but in a roundabout way:

I asked the guy at Hornady, why are we seeing huge gains in 9mm performance, but not in the other calibers? His answer was “you allowed us to increase velocity.”

This is a fundamentally misleading statement. The 10mm had plenty of velocity, but you forced the industry to slow it down and called it a .40. That’s why the “S&W” at the end is said to stand for “slow and weak.” The heart of the issue is at 12:45 (paraphrased just a bit):

10mm was fine for some agents, but you can’t hand that to a “Fleet” of 13,000 agents. The 180 grain bullet generates too much recoil, so let’s slow it down. Well, if you slow it down, you might as well go to a 40.

The other issue was the handgun chosen for the 10mm: The model 1076. He says half of the guns bought had to go back to the Performance center to be reworked because the gun didn’t function correctly. That’s a firearm, not a caliber problem. Still, recoil was and remains an issue.

All handguns are tradeoffs. Still, let’s be honest here- the FBI went back to the 9mm because women and soyboys are recoil sensitive, and the 1076 was just a crappy gun.

By Divemedic, ago

Agents

There are all sorts of businesses and careers that should have been retired to the dustbin of history by now. Let me illustrate:

The only real advantage that realtors had was being the sole arbiters of access to the MLS. The Internet has completely destroyed that. I have bought and sold 7 different houses during my lifetime. I did it in a few different ways: Using an agent, doing it myself, and buying from the builder. Here is my take:

In a good real estate market, houses are easy to sell yourself. Put them on Zillow, fill out the papers, get the title company to do the rest. In a bad market, it takes some effort to sell a house. The one we recently sold took six months to sell. The agent had to hold a dozen open houses. She did them on weekend mornings for about 2 hours each. So call it about 25 hours of sales work. She also had to do some work once the seller contacted us. Call it about 10 more hours of work. So I essentially used up a week of that woman’s time. For that, she and the buyer’s agent charged me a total of more than $16,000, or nearly $200 an hour. I don’t think the services I got were worth that much.

Don’t get me wrong, she did her job well and I don’t blame her for the price- that price is just what it costs. I like the woman, and I would hire her again, but I have a problem with the expectation that 5% of the sale price of the home is just pissed away for a job that is essentially obsolete in these days of the Internet.

Many businesses have been changed or eliminated by e-commerce: The recording industry, video rentals, movie theaters, retail stores, I’m sure you can think of others. There are other industries that have also been rendered obsolete or should no longer exist in their current form, mostly because the Internet has changed the landscape.

There are some industries that have adapted by offering things that you can’t get online- SCUBA shops offer diving lessons and tank refills, pool supply stores that offer to test your pool water for free, then make money by selling the needed chemicals.

The other way to survive is through government regulation, for example: gun stores and insurance companies both rely on government regulations to eliminated much of their competition. If an online company like Amazon sold guns, most gun stores would go under unless they could offer something other than access to guns. That’s why so many gun stores secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) support gun controls like prohibiting online sales.

The point of this post, which has taken me a bit to get to is this: The science nerds like Elon Musk like to claim technology, AI, and robotics will eliminate the need for people to work. That will never happen. If the Internet didn’t destroy retail, AI and robotics certainly won’t destroy employment to the point where UBI is needed.

By Divemedic, ago

Why People Are Poor

Check out my comment and all of the retarded comments to it.

Ignoring that the lottery is a poor investment plan to start with:

If this girl had taken the million, she would have gotten about $680k to invest, even considering taxes. The first year, she would likely earn at least $60,000 in an index fund. That would mean with an average rate of return, she would have $1.6 million by age 30. By age 35, it would be worth $2.4 million, and her annual earnings would be $220,000 a year. By age 40, it would be worth $3.8 million. Her annual return would be $343,000.

Contrast that with the $1,000 per week plan. This plan means $52,000 per year for the rest of her life. She, and the idiots who are arguing against me, arrived at this plan by saying “52k times 40 years is 2 million. She gets more by taking the 52k,” and they are morons.

When you take the payout over years, the lottery commission invests that million dollars. The investment is assumed to earn 7% per year, and the commission then pays you 70% of that. So you are actually getting 5.2% and the commission pockets the rest.

The smartest thing for her to have done would be to take the $1 million, pay the taxes, keep perhaps 5% of it as “fun money” and invest the rest. By age 35, place the $2 million or so in a lower risk fund earning 5%, she would be retired and would never need to work again. Time is on her side, she can afford to wait a bit in exchange for a huge reward later.

Most index funds based on a broad market earn 9-10% per year, ignoring inflation. (You have to ignore inflation, because that $1000 per week payout doesn’t change, let’s make the comparison fair) Either way, you are getting a million, but in the case of the “thousand per week” payout, the commission is keeping most of the returns.

Arguing so strongly against investment and not understanding the math behind the decision is why so many people stay poor. Here are a few index funds, and the average returns they have earned over the past:

Fund5 year annual return30 year annual return
SPY21.9%9.15%
QQQ26.7%10% *
VTI21.39%8.16%*

The 30 year return for QQQ is actually 26 years. The fund didn’t exist 30 years ago. The 30 year return for VTI is actually 23 years. That fund was established in 2002.

What people get tied up in, is that the market occasionally has a bad year. If you look at the prices for the funds above, you will see that there are two dips-

  • 2001-2002 The index funds all lost about half of their value over that period, caused by 9/11. However, if you held on and didn’t sell in a panic, by 2005 all of your value had returned.
  • 2007-2008 The funds again lost value, due to the mortgage collapse. Within 3 years, the market again recovered and gains resumed.

The important thing to remember is that a loss of stock value (or gain) only exists on paper, unless you sell, thereby making it a real loss (or gain). It’s important to stay in the game when dips occur.

Or you can let someone else earn a profit using your money because you are a retard.

By Divemedic, ago

Credit Card Followup

In a follow up to the credit card post, let’s look at the math of credit card rates. Interest rates on credit cards only matter if you carry a balance on them. Nearly half of credit card holders (47%) carry a month to month balance. Who carries this balance?

  • more than half of Gen Xers (ages 46-61; 53%)
  • millennials (ages 30-45; 53%),
  • 2 in 5 boomers (ages 62-80; 43%)
  • Gen Zers (ages 18-29; 40%)

The average balance for credit cards where the owner does carry a balance is $6700.

Why do the users carry a balance? The largest single reason is they aren’t properly managing cash flow and spending beyond their means, which forces them to use credit cards for everyday expenses.

According to the Federal Reserve, 82% of American adults have at least one credit card. However, it’s common to have several cards in your wallet. On average, people have 3.9 cards.

My wife and I are super prime users, and we spend about $40,000 per year on credit cards. We use them for everything: utility bills, groceries, you name it. Once, I even made a $20,000 down payment on a car with a credit card. The difference is that we pay the balance off every month. Why do I do that? Rewards.

My Amazon card pays 5% cash back. Our joint card that we use for daily expenses? 5% cash back on fuel and restaurants, and another card gives us 7% credit for use on vacations. It’s all about maximizing our cash back returns. It’s like giving yourself a raise. As for us, that $40,000 a year in card use gets us about $1500 a year in rewards and freebies.

You just have to make sure you don’t carry a balance. That means spending within your means and not carrying a balance. The nationwide average APR on general-use credit cards is 21.91%, which means interest adds up quickly.

Among those who carry a balance, more than 7% of them are more than 90 days past due. So do the math from the other post- people with lower credit scores (below 700) spend the least, but are the most likely to carry a balance and most likely to become seriously delinquent and default.

So Trump’s rule of requiring credit card rates to be capped at 10% will cause credit card limits and availability to be greatly restricted. People will move back to cash, and will have to use debit cards for online transactions. This will in turn do three things:

  • It will force people like me to stop taking advantage of rewards, because they will no longer be available. I, and other prime and super prime users, will have to switch back to cash.
  • Prime users with scores between 700 and 749 will have restricted access to cards, and even then, those cards will have very low spending limits, likely $1000 or less.
  • Credit cards will simply not be available to those with a credit score below 700. This will force these subprime borrowers into more expensive payday loans, which carry interest rates of more than 300%.

The hit to online vendors and shopping will be enormous. Amazon, as the world’s largest online retailer with $400 billion in annual online sales, will be especially hard hit as people lose access to easy digital funding sources.

Likely, this will eventually settle into digital currency becoming more popular. At that point, I will have to reevaluate my opinion of things like bitcoin.

Just remember- price controls NEVER work as intended. Where there is market demand, the market will find a way to supply that demand.

By Divemedic, ago

Supply and Demand

People don’t understand how market forces work, and that is true on both the left AND the right. The price of anything: food, houses, cars, even your labor is set by market forces.

Michael Jordan got paid what he was paid for two reasons: no one else could play basketball at the level he played the game. The pool of talented basketball players was very small- there are less than 600 people in the entire country that can play basketball at an NBA level, and Jordan was the only person playing at the level he was playing at. So there is your supply- very limited.

The demand for him was huge- people wanted to watch the man do what he did, and they wanted to be like him so much that they bought millions of shoes simply because Nike put his name on them. That is your demand.

The same is true for houses, cars, food, or anything else for that matter. Right now, my wife wants to buy a car. She has her mind set on a specific car, and is very particular about what she wants. She wants a Lexus TX350 AWD with the Luxury trim package, a dark outside color, and any interior that isn’t white. Guess what? Demand for that vehicle is so high, the dealers are selling them sight unseen before they even arrive from the factory. You can’t special order them, because the factory is so busy trying to meet demand, that they don’t have the capacity to do custom orders. Because demand is so high, dealers charge sticker price, take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, go buy something else, but make no mistake, as long as the Lexus vehicles are selling so quickly, you won’t see deals or reductions in price.

Apply the same to houses- people want to buy houses, and the demand curve is being altered by large investors buying thousands of homes to use as rentals. Demand is high, so prices climb. Why are investors buying so many rentals? Because demand there is pushing rental rates to climb, because so many illegals have entered the country, and they all need places to live.

So more illegals= more renters. More renters=higher demand and increased rental prices. That equals more profits, which draws in more investors to meet that demand. Those investors are buying themselves rental property, which is causing a decrease in supply for homes, and here we are.

By Divemedic, ago

Assist

As a paramedic, I have opened dozens of cars for medical emergencies, pets, or even children locked in cars. A person who is in a car and isn’t responding is a medical emergency until proven otherwise. Our policy was to try and wake the person while knocking on the window. If no response, the person was showing signs of distress, or it was a child, we would then gain entry to the vehicle. If the temperature outside was less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit, we would take the time to open in without damaging the vehicle, if possible. We had tools for that, but they take a bit of time. If the temperature was more than 80 degrees, our policy was to immediately gain access using the fastest possible means.

The people commenting on this post have a problem with what the cops did. I don’t.

By Divemedic, ago

Housing Costs

Check this out, and I can prove that it is wrong:

  • A payment of $2665 corresponds to a house that costs $465,000, so that is realistic.
  • The 22% marginal rate isn’t applied to all of your income, it’s applied only to the portion of your taxable income that is over $81,050 for a married couple.
  • In order to qualify for this house, the payment can’t be more than 50% of pretax household income. To afford this house, a couple would need to make $5330 per month, which means they would have to make $64,000 per year combined.
  • Median household income in the US is $83,730. So an “average” couple would have no trouble affording an “average” house.

However, crying about how people making minimum wage can’t afford an average house ignores mathematical definitions. Average is more than minimum, and there is no way to change that.

This is leftists online trying to piss people off because most people don’t understand math well enough to know that this entire social media post is bullshit.

By Divemedic, ago

Funny

So there’s this crusty old Sergeant Major and he’s really tense and uptight.

One night he’s at a military ball and this beautiful young woman comes up to him and says “Sergeant Major, you look so tense. When was the last time you got laid?”

He replied, “I haven’t had sex since 1955.”

The woman was shocked. “1955?” She said, “That’s so long ago! Why don’t you come back here and I’ll help you loosen up?”

So she takes him into this dark back room. He knows all the angles, all the moves, he rocks her world. Afterward she’s laying on her back panting and she says “Wow, you haven’t forgotten anything since 1955, huh?”

He replies, “I sure hope not, it’s only 2130 now!”

By Divemedic, ago

Liberals Get Angry

Funny thing, leftists on the Internet keep calling me a boomer. I’m GenX, but since when do facts get in the way? Still, now leftists have moved on from their expertise in medicine, foreign relations, defense, and now are back to being use of force and legal experts. If you disagree, they call you names and then block you.

By Divemedic, ago

What It Will Look Like

An American civil war won’t be a clean battle between two sides. It’s going to be a messy affair involving dozens of factions.

By Divemedic, ago