economics

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

Tell me this isn’t how it actually works… pic.twitter.com/UBzyHZk1VL

— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) January 14, 2026

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.

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

$1m invested at market rates is going to earn more than $52k a year

— Divemedic (@DMAreaOcho) January 14, 2026

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:

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.

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.

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

The average new 30-year mortgage now costs $2,665 per month.

That’s $31,980 per year — after tax.

At a 22% federal tax rate, you need about $41,000 in gross income just to pay the mortgage.

Before food.
Before insurance.
Before kids.
Housing didn’t get expensive.
It got… pic.twitter.com/lhtQP0iUdT

— Jon Brooks (@jonbrooks) January 11, 2026

• 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.

I get so tired of hearing tipped workers on Social Media crying about how little they make. Watch this:

Server from Texas Roadhouse shares how much $$$ he’s made over a 12 hour shift pic.twitter.com/0RCbnMP9P7

— Financial Dystopia (@financedystop) January 4, 2026

So in a 12 hour shift, he made $503. That works out to $42 an hour, plus add in the $11 an hour a server in Florida would make, and that comes to $53 an hour. Tips are crazy. It’s how a business gets away with not paying their employees and puts that responsibility on the customer.

We need to get rid of tips and just make servers hourly employees like everyone else. I haven’t seen a single rational argument as to why we still do this, other than servers loving how much they make by tricking people into thinking they are not making $$$.

PM prices rose like a rocket last week, then crashed on Monday. Why? Because the market is being manipulated.

After a strong week-long rally that sent gold, silver and other precious metals prices to all-time highs, prices fell sharply Monday after exchange operator CME Group made a key change to its metals contracts.

There is something called the gold/silver ratio. For those who don’t know, that ratio is the price of one ounce of gold compared to one ounce of silver. That is, how many ounces of silver would be a trade for one once of gold at any given point in time.

A higher ratio means that either gold is overpriced, or that silver is underpriced. That can dictate which of the metals is the better deal. Historically, the ratio is usually between 60 and 80. In April of this year, the ratio was 100.8, meaning that one ounce of gold was worth about 100 ounces of silver.

Some investors are talking about the 80/50 rule. That is, if the ratio is higher than 80, stop buying gold and buy silver instead. If the ratio is less than 50, then silver is higher priced relative to gold, and it’s time to buy gold.

Thanks to the skyrocketing price of silver earlier in the week, the ratio is currently (as of this writing) 57. The gold/silver ratio was last below 50 in April 2011, when it reached a low of approximately 35:1. In April 1968, the ratio hit a century-long low of 16.75:1.

So why is this important to us? If you want to increase your holdings, you would sell some silver and use the cash to buy gold. Once the ratio returns to its historical mean, you would then reap a profit. Let’s say that the ratio hits 40. At that point, 40 ounces of silver (worth $1160 a year ago) could be sold and traded for a single ounce of gold. Once the ratio returns to its historical range, that would require that silver loses value or gold increases in value. Either way, your ounce of gold would be worth 60 to 80 ounces of silver, but you only paid for it with 40 ounces.

Just food for thought.

This article in Fortune correctly states that the $1 trillion in interest payments is problematic, but I think they understate the scope of the problem. The Federal government collects about $5 trillion a year in taxes. That’s a lot of money, but it isn’t enough. For decades, the government has spent an average of $1.45 for every dollar it collects in taxes.

The majority of it goes to so-called ‘mandatory spending’ and interest on the money that we have already borrowed. Mandatory spending includes entitlements like Medicare, Social Security, VA benefits, etc., which are REQUIRED by law to be paid. Interest on the debt must also be paid. Entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) accounts for about two-thirds of the federal budget, and interest on the debt that we already owe brings that to just over 83% of the budget. Entitlements are mandatory spending, meaning they’re on “autopilot,” growing automatically based on eligibility rules set by Congress, unlike discretionary spending.

All of the other spending: Welfare, Food Stamps, the Military, the Courts, jails, etc., account for the other $2.3 trillion of Federal outlays.

It’s just unsustainable, and anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.