That's not really true. A lot of small-time investors are invested in funds that charge significant fees based on the amount invested. Almost all mutual funds have some sort of percentage fee, though it is quite small for the better index funds. On top of that, many retail investors are paying a "financial adviser" (really a salesperson) a percentage of assets under management (often 1-1.5%). Total fees can easily be greater than 2% a year. That doesn't sound like much, but if you are a retired person, that amount represents HALF your annual income (not including social security).
The sad thing is that all these fees are rarely necessary. Simply investing in low-fee index funds from the likes of Vanguard or Fidelity gets your fees down to a nominal level (like.05%). Indeed, trading makes no sense for the retail investor, but fees on trades are rarely the biggest fees retail investors pay.
You do make a point about hedge funds, which are designed to fleece the rich. They are often worse than retail mutual funds, traditionally charging a "2 and 20" (i.e. 2% of assets invested PLUS 20% of the return). Then, pile on private equity investments that add restrictions to liquidity on top of all that. But, of course, they have a slick "wealth manager" that plays golf with them and makes them think they are getting "exclusive" opportunities because they are oh so special for being rich.
My spouse went to Rice. The dorm was a pretty basic cinder block affair and the sports facility wasn't extravagant. The grounds and classroom were quite nice, however.
Plasma TVs are obsolete and it's pretty much impossible to find any TV that isn't flat. You can get them at Walmart for $100. Seems like an anachronistic comment.
The first Mass-produced Li-ion batteries may have been produced in 1991, but it wasn't until around 2010 until they were used to make a viable mass-market automobile. It's only just now that we are starting to really build mass-market cars with EV range comparable to a tank of gas.
Even at the smaller scale, it's only been in the last 10 years or so that things like lithium-battery power tools have really come into their own. As recently as 5 years ago, most electric lawn tools were chintzy ni-cd powered devices suitable for only the lightest duty work. Now, you can get lithium-batteried tools that rival internal combustion counterparts and are suitable for even professional level work.
Long story short, there's been a LOT of battery development since 1991 even if the basic chemistry is mostly the same. Little 10-20% improvements compound into a revolution over time.
Really? How many gender studies majors do you know? I went to a hippy dippy liberal arts college and there were only a handful there. None of them that I did talk to had any expectations that it would lead to a remunerative career.
Overall running of a business is basically the same, but there is a hole host of specialized roles within business administration that didn't exist before. One macro difference is the need to coordinate and parse all the information coming in from these subject matter experts.
The plural of anecdote is not data. However, I will share my counter example. I paid $35k a year for a philosophy degree back when that was about as expensive as schools got. Then went to law school, got a masters in tax law, and started at a six-figure job right after graduation during the worst part of the recession. Yes, it was very expensive ~$200k all in, but I paid my loans back within 5 years. I wouldn't change a thing.
The problem is not majoring in humanities- it's going to school with no particular interest or plan for what you will do afterwards. I know people who majored in hard science and struggled afterwards. There's not much you can do with a B.S. in biology or physics career-wise, but nobody jokes about the uselessness of a biology degree. If you want to major in those subjects, you need a plan for what you will do afterwards.
Other than requiring classical Greek/Latin, things really have not changed that much for liberal arts education. The de-emphasis of Greek and Latin is to me a good thing. While those works are important to Western civilization, early 20th century institutions tended to emphasize them to the exclusion of all else.
Subjects like Queer or Gender studies are red herrings. People love to rag on them, but they simply aren't a big factor in today's educational landscape. For one, very few students actually major in subjects like this. For another, such subjects are really just English/History/Sociology majors with a narrower focus. If they are well-taught, they will have all the rigor of a classical liberal arts education. They would add value to any position that demands good writing skills, understanding of social dynamics, and synthesis of a large amount of information. That being said, I would agree that such narrow specializations are far more appropriate for graduate research than undergraduate majors.
As far as "hitting the ground running." Frankly, it didn't take much specialized knowledge at all to hit the ground running in white collar fields prior to WWII. Consider running a business in the 1920s: There were no GAAP accounting rules and no SEC. Supply chains were relatively simple. Even the largest corporate deal documents were no more than a few dozen pages (compared to thousands for particularly complex deals today). The tax code was brand new and could almost be condensed into a pamphlet. All you really needed to succeed was decent raw intelligence and the right cultural background (i.e. be a WASP male).
You make it sound like older folks DO understand how finance works. It wasn't Millenials who were buying houses with interest-only ARMs and balloon payments back in 2006.
I've bought and sold several cars in the $5k range both for myself and for family members. My brother drives a car he bought last year with my help for $2,300 (2006 Toyota Yaris). It's gone 15k miles with nothing but an exhaust gasket ($10 in parts from Autozone) and a new battery. You have to buy private party in this price range- no dealer cars are worth buying. In my experience, one of the best places to find such cars are enthusiast groups for the model. For example, if you want a cheap Miata, look on the local Miata club facebook group- don't just randomly search Craiglist junk.
The problem with the tactic is not that there aren't good cars in that price range (there are), but that most people don't know enough about cars to know what's worth buying in that price range. Learning about cars can save you TONS of money. You also need to be prepared with any new car like this to do basic maintenance as a DIY. I assume any car older than 10 years old will need all fluids changed. Not cost effective to pay someone to do that, but easy and cheap to DIY.
I think we are talking about two different things here, and ultimately a semantic distinction. You are using opinion to mean a belief or prediction about a fact (and it is indeed colloquially used for that purpose). A belief about a fact is not really what we are talking about with respect to distinguishing fact from opinion.
I'm not sure where you are getting that definition (it does not correspond to the dictionary definition), but it sounds like what you are talking about is really either a prediction or statement of personal belief with respect to a factual statement- not an opinion.
If you were to say, "In my opinion, the sky is blue," what you are really saying is that it is your belief that the sky is blue. You are couching a factual statement in terms of your personal belief. A statement of personal belief may be used to indicate the speaker is uncertain about the truth value of a statement due to insufficient or unreliable information about the truth value. For example, the statement of belief in "I believe it is raining outside" is used to indicate that the speaker is uncertain whether the factual statement is true or not and wishes to communicate that the statement may be based on unsupported inference.
A prediction has a truth value which cannot be ascertained until the passage of time. For example, "the sky will be blue tomorrow" is not an opinion- it is a prediction of the future truth value of a statement.
Opinions, by contrast, usually contain an ethical or metaphysical statement that is not falsifiable. For example, the statement "butterflies are beautiful" contains a statement about aesthetics that has no truth value. One cannot perform any observation, do any mathematics, or otherwise show that butterflies are factually beautiful. What you could do is make a factual statement about whether the value statement is in conformity with what human society accepts. For example, "most people think butterflies are beautiful" does have a truth value. But the fact that most people think butterflies are beautiful does not mean that "butterflies are ugly" has a negative truth value.
None of that means that opinions can't be ethically problematic, formed with false information, or even downright delusional. That doesn't make them false; but it may make them the subject of derision or ethical scorn.
The problem here is that people cannot distinguish fact from opinion and cannot distinguished biased news from "fake news."
"Collusion is not a crime" is a factual statement. "Trump is indeed suffering from a witch-hunt" is an opinion. An opinion can't be "fake news" because an opinion does not have a truth value.
"Fake News" is a news story without any factual basis. Traditionally, it was used to apply to stories from media outlets that either don't actually exist or don't do any fact finding at all. They were stories that were calculated to generate clicks because they conformed to the bias of a particular political group.
Biased news is a separate phenomenon from fake news. A biased outlet (and all outlets have some bias) at least makes a good faith attempt to report statements with an affirmative truth value, but may omit relevant facts or over-emphasize others. Reporting that "Collusion is not a crime" is a true but biased statement. Yes, there is no crime called "collusion." However, the word "collusion" is simply the one that was seized upon to describe a variety of actions that may be crimes. So saying "collusion is not a crime" is like saying "killing someone is not a crime." Yes, it's possible to legally kill someone (in self-defense, for example), but there are a wide variety of crimes you could be charged with if you kill someone.
People have now weaponized the term "fake news" to apply to any news reported with a bias that they dislike. The danger is that this delegitimizes any opinion you don't like and serves to demonize your political opponents. There was a time when it was assumed that both political parties wanted the best for the country but just had different ideas of how to achieve it. Now, people think the other side is affirmatively evil. It's hard to actually solve problems with someone who thinks you are evil.
To me, the literal plot of 2001 was always a bit of a sideshow to the greater metaphorical messaging. The overall arc of the story is of the journey of mankind from a primitive animal to a fully-realized being. It's helpful to know that the title track is Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (which is a musical setting for the book by Nietzche) and that the child is the last stage of the "Three Metamorphoses" discussed by the title character of the book (the first two are the camel and the lion). Kubrick was well-versed in philosophy and most certainly did not choose the soundtrack and final scene by accident.
In the book, the "camel" is defined by the external burdens it takes on and the fealty to "thou shalt". In these sense, it is very much like a primitive man who was all-consumed with the demands of survival and was unable to create beyond his immediate survival. Finding the first monolith marked the transition from the camel to the lion. The "lion" is able to create for his own, but is still defined in opposition to his burdens. The events in 2001 correspond to humanity in this stage- they can travel to other planets, but are still prisoner to the vast distances and challenges of outer space. The child is freed from all burdens and can truly create anew. The finding of the second monolith marks the transition to the child, which is the state humanity seeks as it ventures away from the planet.
I think the murkiness of the third transition is fully appropriate because it is a vision of the distant future. By the 1960s, the path from primitive human to space-venturer was already clear. But our transition past that remains only a vision. The scene faux-French room I took as a waiting room representing where we were in the 20th century prior to the upcoming metamorphosis and the discombobulation representative of the immense pace of technological and societal change.
As a side note, I never really considered 2010 as a true sequel because it abandoned all philosophical pretense with the departure of Kubrick from the project.
If you play AAA titles, the console development cycle should still matter to you as a PC gamer. While there's a certain amount of scaling up that can be done for more powerful hardware, at the end of the day the technical ambition of big budget games is going to be limited by the capabilities of the latest console. Few developers are willing to develop big games for the PC only, and they also don't want to have to do more work than absolutely necessary for the port.
It's true that I've been out of the loop for a while, but mostly because progress is sufficiently slow that I don't really feel the need to do things like upgrade from Gen 1 Ryzen to Gen 2- the difference just isn't material enough to bother. AAA gaming titles run fine on a couple year old hardware, and I can't tell the difference between 80FPS and 90. My current setup is Intel, but I bought before Ryzen came out and the AMD options weren't really competitive outside the low end at the time. Funny thing is I'm still targeting the same basic price points for hardware as I was almost 20 years ago, even though I can now afford to expand the budget by several times- the super high end stuff is well into diminishing returns.
I've also given up on overclocking for the same reason. Circa 2002, I was running an AMD XP1800 Thoroughbred at ~2.5ghz (benchmark stable at 2.8 as I recall) on a custom chilled water setup. That was significantly more powerful (and noticeable in day to day tasks and gaming) than the tippy top spec 3100+ or Intel Northwood chips. Overclocking motherboard options were plentiful then too so long as you bought a reasonably enthusiast oriented example- the only thing that's really changed is the event of super-high end enthusiast stuff. Today, you can still OC if that's your jam, but the return just isn't worth the trouble. You mostly just see it in synthetic benchmarks.
In some ways, a self-built machine isn't as good of a deal as it used to be. 15+ years ago, it was often possible to buy low-speed binned chips and overclock them beyond the top binned chips. Since the only difference between the cheap processor and the expensive one was clockspeed (and maybe a small amount of cache), you ended up with a processor faster than the fastest one available OEM (and OEM motherboards typically did not allow overclocking) for a fraction of the cost. Today, there are important physical differences between low-end and high-end processors (more cores, etc.). You aren't going to get an i3 to perform like an i9.
Also, back when a 2 year old computer was obsolete, the enthusiast could stay on top of things buy upgrading piecemeal. Things like power supplies, hard drives, cases, and optical drives didn't go obsolete nearly as quickly, so you could have latest and greatest hardware only upgrading core components. Motherboards usually allowed a processor upgrade or two before becoming obsolete. Obviously, piecemeal upgrades are still possible, but the last two iterations of hardware have gone 5 years for me (except video cards). After 5 years, I find even things like power supplies often need to be replaced and end up buying pretty much an entire system.
On the other hand, things are also WAY easier than they used to be (especially 20+ years ago). Today, everything pretty much plays nice together. You don't have to search high and low for drivers and troubleshoot compatibility. You don't have to make floppy boot disks or sift through dozens of configuration options to get an OS installed. Formerly exotic things like watercooling (which used to require designing a system from scratch), are now available in a variety of easy kits and price points. Everything just works today.
This hasn't been the case for years as processor development has slowed. My desktop is coming up on two years, and it would still crush a new $400 computer Heck, a 5 year old high end computer would still be competitive with a $400 computer in most tasks.
You do not need a financial professional to manage your retirement savings. That is a lie spread by "financial professionals" a.k.a. salespeople. They want it to seem complicated so the rubes will give up and seek help from them for a low-low price of 1% assets under management (which likely works out to 25% of your income in retirement).
All you need is a low-fee broad-based stock index fund and a low-fee broad-based bond fund. If you are conservative, keep your age in bonds. If you want to get more aggressive make it 80/20. If you want to get a bit more fancy, devote a little bit of the equity side to an international fund. Add to it every paycheck, and don't touch it or otherwise make trades until you need it for retirement spending. That's it.
It's not about price. The whole idea of watching a "channel" that streams some content only at a specific time that someone else chooses makes no sense to me when there are other options. Yes, you can do DVR, but that's just a crutch and you are SOL if your DVR wasn't set up for whatever specific content you want to watch. Cable is starting to offer more "on-demand" content, but the interface and breath is still usually a tiny fraction of what the major streaming services do.
At the end of the day, cable TV is just a lousy user experience compared to streaming. This is especially the case for people who only watch TV intentionally- not just to have something on in the background.
For many people, attempting to make a living off a hobby ruins the hobby. For example, I love working on my vintage car. Solving mechanical problems and upgrading its performance it is very satisfying for me. However, if I tried to open a shop, it wouldn't be fun any more. I'd be dealing with deadlines, customer complaints, and jobs I don't find fun or interesting. Better to keep my hobby a hobby.
Nothing. If the dealer model is inefficient, it will die. However, other products are produced where you have the option of buying direct. I can buy an iphone at an Apple store or at Best Buy, and it seems to work for the respective companies.
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Turkey has a border with Georgia. Georgia was part of the Soviet Union. It did not become independent until the early 1990s.
That's not really true. A lot of small-time investors are invested in funds that charge significant fees based on the amount invested. Almost all mutual funds have some sort of percentage fee, though it is quite small for the better index funds. On top of that, many retail investors are paying a "financial adviser" (really a salesperson) a percentage of assets under management (often 1-1.5%). Total fees can easily be greater than 2% a year. That doesn't sound like much, but if you are a retired person, that amount represents HALF your annual income (not including social security).
The sad thing is that all these fees are rarely necessary. Simply investing in low-fee index funds from the likes of Vanguard or Fidelity gets your fees down to a nominal level (like .05%). Indeed, trading makes no sense for the retail investor, but fees on trades are rarely the biggest fees retail investors pay.
You do make a point about hedge funds, which are designed to fleece the rich. They are often worse than retail mutual funds, traditionally charging a "2 and 20" (i.e. 2% of assets invested PLUS 20% of the return). Then, pile on private equity investments that add restrictions to liquidity on top of all that. But, of course, they have a slick "wealth manager" that plays golf with them and makes them think they are getting "exclusive" opportunities because they are oh so special for being rich.
My spouse went to Rice. The dorm was a pretty basic cinder block affair and the sports facility wasn't extravagant. The grounds and classroom were quite nice, however.
Plasma TVs are obsolete and it's pretty much impossible to find any TV that isn't flat. You can get them at Walmart for $100. Seems like an anachronistic comment.
The first Mass-produced Li-ion batteries may have been produced in 1991, but it wasn't until around 2010 until they were used to make a viable mass-market automobile. It's only just now that we are starting to really build mass-market cars with EV range comparable to a tank of gas.
Even at the smaller scale, it's only been in the last 10 years or so that things like lithium-battery power tools have really come into their own. As recently as 5 years ago, most electric lawn tools were chintzy ni-cd powered devices suitable for only the lightest duty work. Now, you can get lithium-batteried tools that rival internal combustion counterparts and are suitable for even professional level work.
Long story short, there's been a LOT of battery development since 1991 even if the basic chemistry is mostly the same. Little 10-20% improvements compound into a revolution over time.
Really? How many gender studies majors do you know? I went to a hippy dippy liberal arts college and there were only a handful there. None of them that I did talk to had any expectations that it would lead to a remunerative career.
Overall running of a business is basically the same, but there is a hole host of specialized roles within business administration that didn't exist before. One macro difference is the need to coordinate and parse all the information coming in from these subject matter experts.
Sounds like you are bitter about not majoring in business.
The plural of anecdote is not data. However, I will share my counter example. I paid $35k a year for a philosophy degree back when that was about as expensive as schools got. Then went to law school, got a masters in tax law, and started at a six-figure job right after graduation during the worst part of the recession. Yes, it was very expensive ~$200k all in, but I paid my loans back within 5 years. I wouldn't change a thing.
The problem is not majoring in humanities- it's going to school with no particular interest or plan for what you will do afterwards. I know people who majored in hard science and struggled afterwards. There's not much you can do with a B.S. in biology or physics career-wise, but nobody jokes about the uselessness of a biology degree. If you want to major in those subjects, you need a plan for what you will do afterwards.
Other than requiring classical Greek/Latin, things really have not changed that much for liberal arts education. The de-emphasis of Greek and Latin is to me a good thing. While those works are important to Western civilization, early 20th century institutions tended to emphasize them to the exclusion of all else.
Subjects like Queer or Gender studies are red herrings. People love to rag on them, but they simply aren't a big factor in today's educational landscape. For one, very few students actually major in subjects like this. For another, such subjects are really just English/History/Sociology majors with a narrower focus. If they are well-taught, they will have all the rigor of a classical liberal arts education. They would add value to any position that demands good writing skills, understanding of social dynamics, and synthesis of a large amount of information. That being said, I would agree that such narrow specializations are far more appropriate for graduate research than undergraduate majors.
As far as "hitting the ground running." Frankly, it didn't take much specialized knowledge at all to hit the ground running in white collar fields prior to WWII. Consider running a business in the 1920s: There were no GAAP accounting rules and no SEC. Supply chains were relatively simple. Even the largest corporate deal documents were no more than a few dozen pages (compared to thousands for particularly complex deals today). The tax code was brand new and could almost be condensed into a pamphlet. All you really needed to succeed was decent raw intelligence and the right cultural background (i.e. be a WASP male).
You make it sound like older folks DO understand how finance works. It wasn't Millenials who were buying houses with interest-only ARMs and balloon payments back in 2006.
I've bought and sold several cars in the $5k range both for myself and for family members. My brother drives a car he bought last year with my help for $2,300 (2006 Toyota Yaris). It's gone 15k miles with nothing but an exhaust gasket ($10 in parts from Autozone) and a new battery. You have to buy private party in this price range- no dealer cars are worth buying. In my experience, one of the best places to find such cars are enthusiast groups for the model. For example, if you want a cheap Miata, look on the local Miata club facebook group- don't just randomly search Craiglist junk.
The problem with the tactic is not that there aren't good cars in that price range (there are), but that most people don't know enough about cars to know what's worth buying in that price range. Learning about cars can save you TONS of money. You also need to be prepared with any new car like this to do basic maintenance as a DIY. I assume any car older than 10 years old will need all fluids changed. Not cost effective to pay someone to do that, but easy and cheap to DIY.
I think we are talking about two different things here, and ultimately a semantic distinction. You are using opinion to mean a belief or prediction about a fact (and it is indeed colloquially used for that purpose). A belief about a fact is not really what we are talking about with respect to distinguishing fact from opinion.
I'm not sure where you are getting that definition (it does not correspond to the dictionary definition), but it sounds like what you are talking about is really either a prediction or statement of personal belief with respect to a factual statement- not an opinion.
If you were to say, "In my opinion, the sky is blue," what you are really saying is that it is your belief that the sky is blue. You are couching a factual statement in terms of your personal belief. A statement of personal belief may be used to indicate the speaker is uncertain about the truth value of a statement due to insufficient or unreliable information about the truth value. For example, the statement of belief in "I believe it is raining outside" is used to indicate that the speaker is uncertain whether the factual statement is true or not and wishes to communicate that the statement may be based on unsupported inference.
A prediction has a truth value which cannot be ascertained until the passage of time. For example, "the sky will be blue tomorrow" is not an opinion- it is a prediction of the future truth value of a statement.
Opinions, by contrast, usually contain an ethical or metaphysical statement that is not falsifiable. For example, the statement "butterflies are beautiful" contains a statement about aesthetics that has no truth value. One cannot perform any observation, do any mathematics, or otherwise show that butterflies are factually beautiful. What you could do is make a factual statement about whether the value statement is in conformity with what human society accepts. For example, "most people think butterflies are beautiful" does have a truth value. But the fact that most people think butterflies are beautiful does not mean that "butterflies are ugly" has a negative truth value.
None of that means that opinions can't be ethically problematic, formed with false information, or even downright delusional. That doesn't make them false; but it may make them the subject of derision or ethical scorn.
The problem here is that people cannot distinguish fact from opinion and cannot distinguished biased news from "fake news."
"Collusion is not a crime" is a factual statement. "Trump is indeed suffering from a witch-hunt" is an opinion. An opinion can't be "fake news" because an opinion does not have a truth value.
"Fake News" is a news story without any factual basis. Traditionally, it was used to apply to stories from media outlets that either don't actually exist or don't do any fact finding at all. They were stories that were calculated to generate clicks because they conformed to the bias of a particular political group.
Biased news is a separate phenomenon from fake news. A biased outlet (and all outlets have some bias) at least makes a good faith attempt to report statements with an affirmative truth value, but may omit relevant facts or over-emphasize others. Reporting that "Collusion is not a crime" is a true but biased statement. Yes, there is no crime called "collusion." However, the word "collusion" is simply the one that was seized upon to describe a variety of actions that may be crimes. So saying "collusion is not a crime" is like saying "killing someone is not a crime." Yes, it's possible to legally kill someone (in self-defense, for example), but there are a wide variety of crimes you could be charged with if you kill someone.
People have now weaponized the term "fake news" to apply to any news reported with a bias that they dislike. The danger is that this delegitimizes any opinion you don't like and serves to demonize your political opponents. There was a time when it was assumed that both political parties wanted the best for the country but just had different ideas of how to achieve it. Now, people think the other side is affirmatively evil. It's hard to actually solve problems with someone who thinks you are evil.
To me, the literal plot of 2001 was always a bit of a sideshow to the greater metaphorical messaging. The overall arc of the story is of the journey of mankind from a primitive animal to a fully-realized being. It's helpful to know that the title track is Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (which is a musical setting for the book by Nietzche) and that the child is the last stage of the "Three Metamorphoses" discussed by the title character of the book (the first two are the camel and the lion). Kubrick was well-versed in philosophy and most certainly did not choose the soundtrack and final scene by accident.
In the book, the "camel" is defined by the external burdens it takes on and the fealty to "thou shalt". In these sense, it is very much like a primitive man who was all-consumed with the demands of survival and was unable to create beyond his immediate survival. Finding the first monolith marked the transition from the camel to the lion. The "lion" is able to create for his own, but is still defined in opposition to his burdens. The events in 2001 correspond to humanity in this stage- they can travel to other planets, but are still prisoner to the vast distances and challenges of outer space. The child is freed from all burdens and can truly create anew. The finding of the second monolith marks the transition to the child, which is the state humanity seeks as it ventures away from the planet.
I think the murkiness of the third transition is fully appropriate because it is a vision of the distant future. By the 1960s, the path from primitive human to space-venturer was already clear. But our transition past that remains only a vision. The scene faux-French room I took as a waiting room representing where we were in the 20th century prior to the upcoming metamorphosis and the discombobulation representative of the immense pace of technological and societal change.
As a side note, I never really considered 2010 as a true sequel because it abandoned all philosophical pretense with the departure of Kubrick from the project.
If you play AAA titles, the console development cycle should still matter to you as a PC gamer. While there's a certain amount of scaling up that can be done for more powerful hardware, at the end of the day the technical ambition of big budget games is going to be limited by the capabilities of the latest console. Few developers are willing to develop big games for the PC only, and they also don't want to have to do more work than absolutely necessary for the port.
It's true that I've been out of the loop for a while, but mostly because progress is sufficiently slow that I don't really feel the need to do things like upgrade from Gen 1 Ryzen to Gen 2- the difference just isn't material enough to bother. AAA gaming titles run fine on a couple year old hardware, and I can't tell the difference between 80FPS and 90. My current setup is Intel, but I bought before Ryzen came out and the AMD options weren't really competitive outside the low end at the time. Funny thing is I'm still targeting the same basic price points for hardware as I was almost 20 years ago, even though I can now afford to expand the budget by several times- the super high end stuff is well into diminishing returns.
I've also given up on overclocking for the same reason. Circa 2002, I was running an AMD XP1800 Thoroughbred at ~2.5ghz (benchmark stable at 2.8 as I recall) on a custom chilled water setup. That was significantly more powerful (and noticeable in day to day tasks and gaming) than the tippy top spec 3100+ or Intel Northwood chips. Overclocking motherboard options were plentiful then too so long as you bought a reasonably enthusiast oriented example- the only thing that's really changed is the event of super-high end enthusiast stuff. Today, you can still OC if that's your jam, but the return just isn't worth the trouble. You mostly just see it in synthetic benchmarks.
In some ways, a self-built machine isn't as good of a deal as it used to be. 15+ years ago, it was often possible to buy low-speed binned chips and overclock them beyond the top binned chips. Since the only difference between the cheap processor and the expensive one was clockspeed (and maybe a small amount of cache), you ended up with a processor faster than the fastest one available OEM (and OEM motherboards typically did not allow overclocking) for a fraction of the cost. Today, there are important physical differences between low-end and high-end processors (more cores, etc.). You aren't going to get an i3 to perform like an i9.
Also, back when a 2 year old computer was obsolete, the enthusiast could stay on top of things buy upgrading piecemeal. Things like power supplies, hard drives, cases, and optical drives didn't go obsolete nearly as quickly, so you could have latest and greatest hardware only upgrading core components. Motherboards usually allowed a processor upgrade or two before becoming obsolete. Obviously, piecemeal upgrades are still possible, but the last two iterations of hardware have gone 5 years for me (except video cards). After 5 years, I find even things like power supplies often need to be replaced and end up buying pretty much an entire system.
On the other hand, things are also WAY easier than they used to be (especially 20+ years ago). Today, everything pretty much plays nice together. You don't have to search high and low for drivers and troubleshoot compatibility. You don't have to make floppy boot disks or sift through dozens of configuration options to get an OS installed. Formerly exotic things like watercooling (which used to require designing a system from scratch), are now available in a variety of easy kits and price points. Everything just works today.
This hasn't been the case for years as processor development has slowed. My desktop is coming up on two years, and it would still crush a new $400 computer Heck, a 5 year old high end computer would still be competitive with a $400 computer in most tasks.
You do not need a financial professional to manage your retirement savings. That is a lie spread by "financial professionals" a.k.a. salespeople. They want it to seem complicated so the rubes will give up and seek help from them for a low-low price of 1% assets under management (which likely works out to 25% of your income in retirement).
All you need is a low-fee broad-based stock index fund and a low-fee broad-based bond fund. If you are conservative, keep your age in bonds. If you want to get more aggressive make it 80/20. If you want to get a bit more fancy, devote a little bit of the equity side to an international fund. Add to it every paycheck, and don't touch it or otherwise make trades until you need it for retirement spending. That's it.
It's not about price. The whole idea of watching a "channel" that streams some content only at a specific time that someone else chooses makes no sense to me when there are other options. Yes, you can do DVR, but that's just a crutch and you are SOL if your DVR wasn't set up for whatever specific content you want to watch. Cable is starting to offer more "on-demand" content, but the interface and breath is still usually a tiny fraction of what the major streaming services do.
At the end of the day, cable TV is just a lousy user experience compared to streaming. This is especially the case for people who only watch TV intentionally- not just to have something on in the background.
The world needs ditch diggers too. Uh, wait- maybe it won't need ditch diggers anymore?
For many people, attempting to make a living off a hobby ruins the hobby. For example, I love working on my vintage car. Solving mechanical problems and upgrading its performance it is very satisfying for me. However, if I tried to open a shop, it wouldn't be fun any more. I'd be dealing with deadlines, customer complaints, and jobs I don't find fun or interesting. Better to keep my hobby a hobby.
That's exactly my point.
Nothing. If the dealer model is inefficient, it will die. However, other products are produced where you have the option of buying direct. I can buy an iphone at an Apple store or at Best Buy, and it seems to work for the respective companies.