actually, i'm now noticing it may be cheaper for me to buy used skis than to rent them. buying used i can get it cheaper than even renting just once or twice

you could get a wood burning stove heater. as long as you have enough trees to be sustainable, burning firewood is a great way to go. and with the clean burning filters they have now a days, you'll much much better off than from the days when they used to burn fires inside a house with no container/stove/filters or even a chiminey at all! (just a hole in the roof if you were lucky.)

You can get by with a woodburner without buying wood in a fairly large city if you collected the odd car load during the year.

That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.

I think a lot of people are taking it as a precise prescription. Rather, I think it's the main idea that counts: you can downsize and reduce your expenses by quite a bit. I think this will become ever more important going into the future as the standard of living continues to erode, as it has done for the last 27 years.

i agree. but i think most people are worried about second order effects (the impact of supply chains on the whole economy) rather than whether or not you can buy 3$ shoes on temu.

i grow a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes in my backyard every year. I'd happily sell some to my neighbors.

the question is which shelves. Not ALL shelves. only 13% of our stuff comes from China. they might run out of toys and electric shavers but there will still be a lot left to buy.

As I've said elsewhere, that's not how markets work. Supply is balanced with demand. Disrupting supply while keeping demand constant will result in an increase in prices and less stock available to purchase. Add in irrational hoarding when people see fewer things available, and we could have a real problem on our hands. This isn't even addressing the fact that not everything coming from China are items available for immediate sale; many are components used in other products. If shelves don't go empty, it's likely to be the result of the price of everything increasing to quell demand.

You didn't cite a source there, but aside from finished products, American companies that make things domestically source many materials from China. I remember a few years ago a news story about a company that makes crab pots being impacted because the steel wire they use was imported from China. There are a lot of secondary impacts.

As long as it isn't food. Heard a quote once (Last of US maybe?): humanity is always about 3 missed meals away from riots." In reality its probably more like 6-10, but the details aren't important. It doesn't seem like there will be food scarcity, but perhaps there could be. I'm sure there will be less food diversity, which stinks, but that is a different conversation. People will still eat.

As for toys, most kids don't play with a plastic toy for more than like, 3-10 hours of its existence and then it rots on a shelf or in a drawer until is eventually ends up in a landfill. I'm not going to miss that. I'm sure that someone will point out important things that china makes dirt cheap and I'm sure they'll be right. I personally don't care if clothing options are limited or plastic toys are scarce. The US will not implode.

It really seems like china has more to lose than we do, but because they're a communist country they can just deploy troops to quell uprisings. Tiananmen Square comes to mind. So we play this game of chicken and the media screams that they sky is falling.

Of course the Walmarts and Amazons of the world care, most of what they sell is plastic shit and clothes. I have little sympathy for them.

let's not forget, "In 2024, China supplied approximately 13.4% of the total goods imported by the United States, with a total value of $438.9 billion. " '

And those are heavily concentrated in certain industries like basic electronics, toys, etc.

in anycase, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

if everyone's expecting a market crash and prepared for it (that means it should already be priced in), how can there still end up being a crash? seems counter intuitive.

It becomes self-fulfilling, no? Like a bank run started by a rumor.

More money flowing away from the market into safe(r) investments than flowing in causes valuations to plummet.

Yes and no. If everyone who expects a crash has sold already, and there wasn't a crash yet, how could it trigger one?

The stock market has been found to behave completely randomly, even when taking into account all available information.

Yes, there was a crash at the beginning of COVID-19, and the market recovered disproportionately to the amount of pandemic-related destruction. There are also many really bad things that happened and did not cause crashes. And there are crashes that happen out of nowhere.

They say that esteemed economists have predicted 92 of the last 5 recessions.

Not everyone. The options markets are much thinner than the stock market as a whole; it takes fewer people to move them.

Also, it costs much less to buy an out-of-the-money option than the value of the option. You can buy cheap insurance against catastrophe, and not unwind your main position. This leaves you protected against a crash while still able to make money on the upside.

for every option bought someone is on the other side issuing the options.

Not everyone's expecting one.

You know how risk is "priced in" right? It's an art, not a science. They buy/sell financial instruments to hedge that risk, like collateralized bonds or credit default swaps. Plenty of people lose big money when these bets don't work out.

I will respond to this by posting a shitpost from reddit. In reality the market can never be perfectly efficient or their would be no room for profit.

Don't even ask the question. The answer is yes, it's priced in. Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That's already been priced in. You work at the drive thru for Mickey D's and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don't already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil's expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren't thinking of. You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether AAPL has priced in earpods 11 sales or whatever, know that it has already been priced in and don't ask such a dumb fucking question again.

Love it. I know it's satire, but I call the real thing the "efficient markets fundamentalism". For some people really is blind faith.

Cars also contribute to the deaths from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes due to encouraging a sedentary lifestyle and making our locales less walkable... They also have a lot of externalities in the form of tire dust, noise pollution, and other effects.

if you use a more reasonable calculation of inflation and calculate real GDP according to that, you'll see we've been in recession almost half of the years for the last 25 years.

Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.

You might be confused by the CPI. The GDP is actually adjusted using a different measure of inflation (the "GDP deflator"), which looks at the actual purchases made in the country over that period. There's not really any "reasonable" alternative calculations to be made there.