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Lord Ratner

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Everything posted by Lord Ratner

  1. Lord Ratner
    He's one of my favorite comedians
  2. Lord Ratner
    Depending on exactly what the problem was, I've had this happen before. Tried to spin up the engines and it only got to ~13% before stalling out. We couldn't figure it out, and then the plane next to us reports the same problem. And then the plane next to them, and so on. Turns out the planes were angled such that the freezing rain froze the valve that controls air intake to the Apu. But only the planes that were lined up in the same direction. The solution was to shut down the APU and let the heat from the APU radiate outward and unfreeze the valve, but that required external power and by that point DFW was a circus. Eventually they called freezing rain in the METAR and just closed the airport for the night.
  3. Lord Ratner
    I know you're just trying to make a point, but you're wrong here. In that scenario you could just pay off the loan early. Zero risk. Like I said, it's been so long since the Fed wasn't fucking around with artificially low interest rates that we have forgotten how a market acts in time of limited liquidity.
  4. Lord Ratner

    Gun Talk

    Lord Ratner replied to VL-16's topic in Squadron Bar

    No, I haven't. I'll keep them in mind if I decide to try carrying a Glock, but I've been really happy with the Sig P365X so far. Though I might just try them on my G17 for the range. Thanks for the tip
  5. Lord Ratner

    Gun Talk

    Lord Ratner replied to VL-16's topic in Squadron Bar

    I never understood the obsession with 1911s. They are gorgeous, and I have one, but every time someone tells me they carry one I have to question their thought process. Ancient tech, low capacity, and a super light trigger pull. Just doesn't make sense to me for most realistic use scenarios. They are thin, so I guess that counts for something, but it's not like it's a small gun. Glocks are fucking hideous, and I don't love the grips, but it's a phenomenal weapon for actual use. Edit: Obviously I'm assuming your friend is using a Kimber 1911.. That's all I ever see from them.
  6. Lord Ratner
    That's not true at all. If he can't afford to make the payments back of he loses it, for whatever reason, then his original idea is financially sound. Take the loan, put it into a high-yield savings account, and then pay the loan off using the savings account.
  7. Lord Ratner
    That's great, but useless to an individual. Would you risk your financial stability on a one-time bet with a 33% chance you lose? For personal funds, sure, for leveraged investing that's a different story. I would do it exactly how the investment firms do it. https://www.fidelity.com/trading/margin-loans/margin-rates So around 9-12% with the option to liquidate your collateral if your losses put my funds at risk. If the loan is restricted to only market index funds, then maybe that drops to Fed Funds Rate + 3 (so about 8.5%), but again, only if I have the option to liquidate your collateral if the investments decline towards a loss.
  8. Lord Ratner
    Finally. You guys really haven't been paying attention to financial history for the last 20 years of you can't differentiate between investments with loaned money and investments with personal cash. Hell, we literally had the worst/second worst banking failure in American history happen less than a year ago, and all because the risk managers at the 4 banks invested borrowed money into what they were positive were highly safe assets. Until they weren't after a 40 year bond bull rally. Leverage is always a completely different game. If you don't understand that, you have no business telling anybody what they should do with their money. And anybody under the age of about 40-45 has never invested in a normalized interest rate environment. Absolutely everything has changed now that we are no longer in the era of ZIRP/NIRP. Just look at what is happening to commercial real estate, another "sure thing." The cadet should absolutely dump his personal money into whatever investment vehicles he wants to, but investing with leverage is a dangerous game. It should not be done by anyone who assesses the viability of financial instruments simply by looking at the chart brabus posted.
  9. Lord Ratner
    It's not his money, it's the bank's money. If we need to go back to the basics of investing then step one is knowing who's money you're playing with. There is a cataclysmic difference between dollar cost averaging, which is a good strategy for index investing, and dumping most of your (the bank's) money into something that historically has very large moves in the negative direction on its way up. Anyone who dumped money into the market back in 2000 or 2007 took years just to get back to even. Those who dollar cost averaged did much, much better. The same uniformed amateur financial advisors who recommended everybody buy a house at their PCS location "because housing never goes down" put a lot of people into some serious debt when '08 '09 came around. That's all well and good when it's your money to lose, but when it's the bank's money it's a very different game. It may seem obvious to you that this statement has a gigantic caveat, but it might not to the cadet asking for financial advice. Better advice: " A simple index fund historically outperforms 2.99%. however that is a running average and varies dramatically based on the starting and ending points of the investment. Dollar cost averaging will help you avoid these wild fluctuations and take advantage of the long-term trend upward, so don't dump your money into an investment all at once, ever." If that's what you meant, great. But it certainly wasn't obvious from your post.
  10. Lord Ratner
    Don't do this. The guys who did this in early 2000, and the ones who bought houses at their PCS locations in 2006/2007 got their dicks kicked. "It can only go up." Now, if you already have much more than 25k (let's say $100k or more) in investments and can afford a 50% haircut on the 25k, then go for it. Otherwise: Stick with your plan (or better, put it directly into T-bills with higher yields) Or If you want to put it into the SP500 (or other "unsafe" assets), put 1k per month in over the course of the next two years, keeping the rest in the HYSA as you dollar cost average your way into the market. The stock market over time trends upwards. But in the short term it's a casino. I have most of my money in it, so I'm not just a paranoid gold hoarder, but you definitely shouldn't be dropping huge percentages of your wealth in when you have a deadline for repayment. The dudes who put their money into the NASDAQ at the peak in 2000 took fifteen years to break even. Same duration for the Vegas housing market to surpass the 2006 peak.
  11. Lord Ratner
    Someone is going to win the culture war. And at the end of that process, they will have to have a system to support. What exactly is the conservative-right defending if they decide that the rule of law isn't a rule at all? Disregarding the supreme court *is* happening the country. It's one thing to adopt legal strategies to defeat the left at their own game. It's another to claim that the problem with the left is their disregard for the law of the land, so we need to disregard the law of the land to beat them. This is the most conservative supreme court in generations. If you lose a case with them deciding, then perhaps your strategy isn't going to be great for the long-term survival of the American system.
  12. Lord Ratner
    It does no good for conservatives to delegitemize the Supreme Court. You think ACB is rooting for the Democrats? The Supreme Court is how conservatives are going to fix many of the problems we have. Throwing a tantrum when they force you to find a better strategy that aligns with the constitution is a short sighted and stupid plan. I hope Abbott doesn't dick this one up.
  13. Lord Ratner
    I had a civilian attorney. Best $15k I ever spent. Not only did he know what he was doing, but the expert witnesses he had relationships with were fantastic, and those are paid for by the government.
  14. Lord Ratner
    Trump was never the cause, he was always the symptom. And honestly has anything changed to indicate different symptoms? The problem is not the people who are running. The problem is human nature and societal oscillations. It's happened before and it's happening again. It's a bummer.
  15. Lord Ratner
    Yeah, and that sucks. Believe me, the immigration crisis is infuriating. But you think it's better in Europe? Asia? South America? Something can suck and still be the best. It's a sad indictment on where we are, but it's reality.
  16. Lord Ratner
    Sure we can, and yes we do. I was addressing the words he chose to use, not the ones you might have used instead.
  17. Lord Ratner
    You just keep saying absurd things. Uniquely dangerous? Insufferable? How many of our citizens have we slaughtered on the shrine of Americanism? Where is our Stalinist purge? The suffering of the American people at the hands of our politicians, regardless of how incompetent, is only unique in how minimal it has been
  18. Lord Ratner
    And which countries are the icons of morality in your mind? Especially considering you just said this, pardon me for considering this statement a bit ironic.
  19. Lord Ratner
    I guess it could be a little different for a general, but for an Article 32 judge to recommend against court martial, you must have absolutely zero evidence against the defendant, and possibly some particularly incriminating evidence against the alleged victim.
  20. Lord Ratner

    USAA

    Lord Ratner replied to a topic in General Discussion

    I haven't been able to put my finger on it exactly, but I suspect it has to do with artificially low interest rates. In that environment, where retained profits do not make any money, it seems like all businesses eventually create an obsession with growth-at-all-costs, and we get the strange business world we have now. Unfortunately it's such a complicated issue that most people are simply looking at it and saying that capitalism has broken. They have a point, but I am afraid of the solutions when you think that business, rather than government intervention, is the root cause. USAAcould have remained a military only company and done quite nicely in perpetuity. But that would have meant little to no growth. You can see the same thing with all the private equity nonsense in the hospital and retirement home world. There's going to be a reckoning from all of this, and it's not going to be pretty.
  21. Lord Ratner
    This is incorrect. "There is no justice" and "life isn't fair" are the same thing. Timing is everything It's better to be lucky than good There is no justice. The real core values of the air force and life in general.
  22. Lord Ratner
    It shouldn't be. You are no doubt emotionally attached to other things that people find bizarre. It's basic human nature. Just look at bashi, perhaps the most emotional person on this entire forum, he's just emotionally attached to the other side of the argument.
  23. Lord Ratner
    I haven't been following it closely, but this administration is against mergers. As far as I've seen, strong economies induce liberals leadership, and modern liberalism distrusts business. So without huge concessions, I'd be surprised. It's not just airlines, the Adobe/Figma merger was blocked for no logical reason. So we'll just have to see
  24. Lord Ratner
    The thing about self hosting is that once you realize what's possible, you tend to want it. If money isn't a driving factor, get a TrueNas Scale box. It's got a great interface, it's easy to add modules to it, and most importantly, there's a large community of users so you can Google answers to problems you have. I would set it up as RAID5/Z-1. The downside with truenas is that you have to buy all your drives at the same time and they all have to match. Some of the other solutions allow you to add random drives as you go, but it's less efficient. If you're truly going to self-host your own backups, you will need a second box at a second location to clone your data to. All the raid drives in the world won't stop a fire from annihilating your data if it's stored it one location. Use the simple box from Synology or similar as the off-site backup.
  25. Lord Ratner
    How technically oriented are you? Comfortable with Linux?
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