The poster's sentiment is correct is saying that it's a good idea to have low-risk resources available as a safety net. However I'd say having physical things like items you know you'll need in the future, or food storage, would be more valuable than having cash. Inflation wouldn't hurt the value of a computer or food you already own. In the other hand, I would imagine investing in gold would be a good idea as well.
Depression, you'll want gold and barterable goods.
Economic collapse or apocalypse, you'll want food, medicine, and alcohol (possibly the most barterable good, also delicious).
In any case anybody reading this in a major city faces non zero likelihood of disaster (take your pick for your city, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, terrorist attack, war) and should be stockpiling 3 liters of water per person in the house per day you want to be able to survive on your own, alongside 2k calories of food, trash bags, etc. I say have a stocked liquor cabinet as well because my experience in Backcountry many week hikes has taught me you can get nearly anything in return for good liquor :)
I've also heard strong arguments for the stockpiling of pornography and certain chemicals that are valuable in tbe production of medicine or just used as general reagents, don't know too much about chemical stockpiling though.
Careful for the prepper rabbit hole, it runs so very deep ;)
Yeah, there's a very deep end it's possible to go off.
However after this winter's experience where two feet of snow ran the supermarkets out of fresh food, I'm going to keep slightly more food and folding money on hand.
But remember these are long-term processes. Ultimately your connections and community will become important in economic collapses, because they're usually very slow-motion.
Regarding that, I highly recommend "a Paradise in hell."
It analyzes the citizen responses to several catastrophic disasters. Turns out, people don't turn into ravaging wolves in a disaster, they immediately begin to help their neighbor, with no regard to race color Creed etc. It's when the national guard comes in that issues start arising...
First I've heard or thought about stockpiling chemicals for the apocalypse! What an interesting thing to theorycraft about. Here's a few ideas:
Potassium permanganate - A swiss army knife of a chemical. It can be used to clean certain contaminants from water, clean wounds, start fires, and it's cheap as dirt.
Aqua Regia - A mixture of muriatic acid and nitric acid. I can imagine this being useful to smuggle gold through bandit warlord checkpoints. George de Hevesy dissolved a nobel prize medal to hide it from nazis. Acids in general are useful.
Sulfur - Depending on your location, this is the hardest component to obtain for making gunpowder. The other components can be made from pee and cooked wood.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Note: I am neither a chemist nor a prepper.
Gold is worthless for buying stuff. My dad holds this view that people should keep a bunch of gold on hand for disasters. He was right that disaster would strike (massive snow storm), but he was wrong about the gold. Turns out, when credit card machines are inoperable, grocery stores won't take gold, just cash.
Tuck away a few hundred bucks in small bills. It will be more valuable than a chest full of gold when you really need it. It suuuuuuuucks to be caught without physical cash in an emergency.
I can't agree with your opinion or your father's anecdote. Throughout all of history, gold has held intrinsic value in all kinds of civilizations, and is still one of the most valuable elements that's widely traded. If you can't buy groceries with a block of gold (assuming you're not just shredding off dust to pay them), then the seller clearly doesn't understand the value. On the contrary, paper dollars are intrinsically useless, especially since we left the Gold Standard, which links the value of paper dollars to the value of gold.
Being prepared is not an exercise in mutual exclusivity. You prepare for inflation by owning non-cash assets. You prepare for a rapid drop in the value of stocks and real estate by having cash.
In the lab, yes. Presumably in real time. Presumably without configuring things differently than normal, except that they used a pre-recorded feed. Presumably without multiple attempts. Presumably without...
> We have no atmosphere of innovation because our salaries are garbage compared to the US. This is the problem, every single time. Most of my Canadian graduate friends work for US companies, some remotely. We literally do not have economic reasons to stay here. No amount of lip service will ever transform 100k into 300k.
That piece is absurdly biased. There's no comparing living in San Francisco to Waterloo. The COL difference isn't just disappearing -- you're paying to live in lively metropolitan city.
Also I think it's funny when people position "number of startups" as an important factor. Just because your city has 30 five-man startups crammed into a coworking incubator doesn't mean I want to work for any of them.
I work remotely and I can't leave my friends and family over money. Money is just money, if I can max out what I make in my radius, cool, but I won't be moving to chase it.
I'm not making up numbers, just speaking from personal experience.
That article is extremely dumb. The title does not match the slogan. Is it salary or quality of life? You make way more in SF than Toronto, but your QOL might suffer because of exorbitant rental rates. That's not new information.
>To prove this, we are going to look at the money you can put in your bank account at the end of the year after paying taxes and living expenses.
We're obviously talking gross not net because net is subjective.
> Mr. Meadows said he was later dismissed for what he was told were “performance issues.” Tesla declined to comment on Mr. Meadows but noted that the incident happened months before the release of the technology, giving the company plenty of time to work out problems that had been discovered during test drives.
We used to treat our test pilots with the highest regard. How low have we fallen?
This is the third or 4th time I've heard that story repeated and the details change each time Meadows tells it, in my opinion. The date and viability of the system changes when I've read it and that leads me to believe that his motivation may not be altruistic but vengeful instead. He probably did get fired from Tesla for performance issues and so he feels the need to fire back at them by noting an incident that happened in the very early stages of the technology's development. We treated test pilots with the highest regard because they were separated from the technology/machinery itself. There was no personal stake in it for them other than making it out alive and exposing issues with the systems being tested. In the current cases, the "test pilots" have a vested interest in the system because they are the ones designing it and deploying it. That's why I have to stifle my gut reaction when I hear stories like Meadows'. Which is more likely, that Tesla would risk its entire reputation by releasing software that was dangerously inadequate or that he's a little butthurt about getting fired and threw a bit of a tantrum?
> We treated test pilots with the highest regard because they were separated from the technology/machinery itself. There was no personal stake in it for them other than making it out alive and exposing issues with the systems being tested.
I think this is an extremely salient and important point, and I've never thought of it before!
Test pilots only care about a good product, not success or failure of the product. That's not the case anymore.
Maybe this would be a good time to propose a new "test pilot core" for cars, made up of perhaps some elite drivers who don't work for any car company.
Or heck, maybe the army wants to test self driving cars!
> Maybe this would be a good time to propose a new "test pilot core" for cars, made up of perhaps some elite drivers who don't work for any car company.
Yes, having more neutral testing programs like CA's standardized testing would be nice, particularly if the tests were mandatory for all manufacturers.
I'm surprised there isn't a national testing system in place for that, but I guess it is our system to leave most control to the states.
Exactly. I would love to see a "test pilot core" but that's never going to happen as long as the major players involved in these technologies are companies that are looking to make the most profit possible. A "test pilot" that has access to all the different self-driving programs is a prime point of weakness for any kind of confidentiality or security that might be in place for these programs.
> I would love to see a "test pilot core" but that's never going to happen as long as the major players involved in these technologies are companies that are looking to make the most profit possible
Wouldn't top companies lobby for a standard when they can meet it and other companies can't? Doesn't this happen in every industry, e.g. food and drug, aerospace, manufacturing, all the time?
> A "test pilot" that has access to all the different self-driving programs is a prime point of weakness for any kind of confidentiality or security that might be in place for these programs.
How do you propose evaluating them, then? Just use people as guinea pigs and see which system causes the fewest accidents? Do you think people will elect politicians who completely ignore public safety to satisfy the whims of corporations?
Public video of a problem during testing is a big no-no. Here in Germany nobody shows issues Porsche test drivers have during >300km/h tests on public highways in the night, only if they cause a major accident.
