I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.
Echoing a sibling comment, lots of landlords require it now, and the basic packages that insurers offer you as a bundle with auto or other forms of insurance are pretty decent, depending on state.
Typically seems like $100-200 per year for coverage that would handle the loss of most of one's possessions, provided you don't get screwed by "well, you don't have the receipt" or "we only cover water ingress, not floods or leaks".
What do you consider useful? While I do not know how easy it is to make a claim, but my policy is a bit over $100 annual and covers some $20-30k loss. Which feels more than sufficient.
Hopefully, I never have to use it, and it is just a tax I pay.
I'm talking about people buying houses near a river that floods regularly and not purchasing flood insurance. Someone else brought up renter's insurance in response to my comment about flood insurance. Renter's insurance is cheap, btw. I have something like $300k coverage for less than $10/month bundled with my car insurance.
Probably a lot? I've moved around a bunch over the past 20 years, so have had several landlords. I think all of them for the past decade have required proof of insurance when signing the lease. I don't think anyone I rented from required it before 2018ish
I don't [think] there is some threshold of extreme skepticism at which someone suddenly reverses polarity under skeptical duress and flips over into a mark. Rather, you just have a mark trying to be good at skepticism and failing horribly.
Sovereign citizenry is such a strange thing to me. It’s all the parts of a conspiracy theory with none of the interesting things like aliens or lizard people. No those are replaced with strange interpretations of laws and ordinances.
It's not strange really, it's tax evasion with an addition of larping to not feel bad. Oppressive government is in fact out there, but you feel that you can neither challenge nor escape it, so it's just that -- sublimation of sorts
Hyper-skepticism is quite selective, driven by ideology and partisanship. Some of the most successful grifters become the heads of political parties, governments, etc.
> Additive Manufacturing, industrial robotics, the Internet, and the proliferation of computers had already made large portions of manufacturing and low skill white collar jobs redundant by the mid-2010s.
I think a much more realistic explanation than robotics and 3d printing is the outsourcing of the social and environmental costs of industrialization to countries willing to bear it, like China, Vietnam and Mexico.
Containerized shipping, email, and computerized logistics have made globalization efficient, and therefore inevitable.
Low skilled manufacturing had already left the US by the early 1990s with stragglers leaving by the early 2000s.
Heck, I used to live in LA as a kid at that time in the 90s and 2000s and the sweatshops (yes we had sweatshops) sewing clothes for Gap were staffed by undocumented Mexican, Korean, Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese migrants in the Fashion District.
On the other hand, even highly paid manufacturing segments like automotive had already normalized industrial robotics by the early 2000s [0].
Basically, income mobility was already dead by the 1990s [1]. The difference is most Boomer HNers were insulated by that because it is clear almost everyone on HN who grew up during that era grew up in a 50th percentile and above household back then and wasn't the head of a household in the 1980-2005 period.
Advertisers are salivating at paying users but paying users really don't want any advertising in their product because they're paying not to have any advertising. That does not mean somebody will not cave in and shove advertising in regardless.
I'm not criticizing the Mongols ("Mongolians"?) for building a pointless "line up here" wall. I'm pointing out that that's not something they did, and criticizing jpollock for suggesting it was.
Even bending over that far backwards to find a useful example comes up empty.
Those kinds of emails are so uncommon they’re absolutely not worth wasting this level of effort on. And if you’re in a sorry enough situation where that’s not the case, what you really need is the outside context the model doesn’t know. The model doesn’t know your office politics.
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