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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • It really does depend on what you’re looking for. You can “replace” US Treasuries with comparatively safe assets like British gilts or bonds from large, stable EU countries like France or Germany, but these will be denominated in GBP or EUR respectively, not USD, so they’re not a drop-in replacement. The EU itself also plans to issue some joint debt to pay for Ukraine-related expenses, so that might also be available depending on how they do it.

    As for stocks and ETFs, there is the Euronext 100, but a cursory web search didn’t reveal any ETFs that track it. I’m sure there probably is one, but I just didn’t find it.

    That being said, the Euronext 100 isn’t a replacement for American indexes like the S&P 500 though. The liquidity on the European side is lower (and for EUR securities in general), and because the American stock market in general performs better than the European stock market, you would give up a lot of financial gain. If you invested $1,000 into an S&P 500 index fund on 1 January 2010, that would now be worth $6,111. But if you instead invested 1 000€ into a Euronext 100 index fund on the same date, it would only be worth 2 548€ today. Even if you cut it off before the AI-led growth in the American stock market, the S&P 500 still would have outperformed the Euronext 100 by nearly double.


  • To be fair, Congress could fix this easily as well:

    AN ACT

    To enforce the act of November 19, 2025 entitled “an act to require the Attorney General to release all documents and records in possession of the Department of Justice relating to Jeffrey Epstein, and for other purposes.”

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa­tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

    Section 1. Short title.

    This act may be cited as the Epstein Files Transparency (Enforcement) Act of 2026.

    Section 2. Court may order release of files

    (a) Notwithstanding any other section of law, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (“District Court”) has jurisdiction over and may, upon the application of the Attorney-General, or any authorised legal representative of any State or the District of Columbia, issue a writ of mandamus to order any person who appear to have in his or her possession or control, files, documents, or any other information of any description or type whatsoever, subject to disclosure under the Epstein Files Transparency Act of 2025, to disclose or cause to disclose such material.

    (b) A writ issued under subsection (a) of this act may be directed to any officer, agent, secretary, or employee of the United States, or any person under or formerly under the employ thereof, or to the Department of Justice, the Attorney-General, or any person under the employ thereof, or any combination of the above-mentioned persons or organisations.

    © The District Court has jurisdiction to rule on matters pertaining to whether material is subject to disclosure under the Epstein Files Transparency Act of 2025.

    (d) Nothing in this section authorises a court to order a person to testify if such testimony may be used as evidence against them in a criminal proceeding.

    Section 3. Penalty for non-compliance

    (a) A person who fails to comply with a writ issued under Section 1 of this act, may, at the discretion of the District Court, be held in contempt of court and punished with imprisonment until such time that such person complies with the order of the court, and be issued a formal caution that further non-compliance will result in criminal liability.

    (b)(1) A person who fails to comply with a writ issued under Section 1 of this act and who refuses to comply despite a caution issued by the District Court under subsection (a) of this section commits an offence and may be punished with imprisonment for a period not less than four years and not greater than eight years and fined an amount equal to their total taxable income under the Internal Revenue Code from four years before the date of their conviction until the date of their conviction.

    (b)(2) The District Court may compel the production of records from the Internal Revenue Service for the purpose of the calculation of fine amounts under this section.

    © In addition to criminal penalties imposed by this section, the salary of any employee of the United States or person who is entitled to draw a salary paid from funds belonging to the United States, who fails to comply with a writ issued under Section 1 of this act, is five cents per month until January 21, 2029, notwithstanding the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 or any other law to the contrary, and such person shall not be entitled to any payment of any kind or for any purpose whatsoever other than for salary purposes from the United States, or any officer, employee, department, or agency thereof.

    (d) A person who fails to comply with a writ issued under Section 1 of this act is disqualified from practicing as an attorney in any court of the United States and/or of the District of Columbia until January 21, 2029.





  • I’m not underselling anything. I believe a quick napkin calculation will show that it’s roughly in the right ballpark.

    Total: 741 million USD

    Most billionaires keep most of their wealth in actual investments (stock, bonds, Caymanian bank accounts, swimming pools filled with gold coins). Though this information is not public, let us assume that only 10% of their wealth is contained within these “lifestyle” objects, which is likely an overestimation. This would give us a total of 7.4 billion USD

    Given the actual average wealth of a billionaire to be 5.3 billion USD (reference), I maintain the objects I have described accurately describe what a typical billionaire would be able to afford (if not slightly more than they could afford, actually).






  • Bankers fulfill a pretty important role, which is that they turn excess money that would otherwise be economically unproductive into economically productive loans. The world would be a lot worse without bankers.

    All the negative behaviour associated with banking comes not from the bankers, the people who work at the branches writing loans and collecting deposits, but rather from finance bros at the top making the management decisions.

    When a financial institution is ethically run, you tend to not think about it because it just quietly does its job in the background without making noise or causing trouble. You always hear about big banks in the news doing something shady but when have you heard about a credit union or building society ripping off their customers to the tune of hundreds of millions?


  • The last part of a Web address is a “TLD”, or “top-level domain”. There used to be relatively few of them, namely .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, and .mil. One of the functions of TLDs is to categorise websites so you know what sort of site you’re visiting. The list of valid TLDs is a Web standard and creating a new TLD is not easy.

    As time progressed, more and more TLDs were created. You have familiar ones like country-code TLDs which are for each individual country or region, such as .ca for Canada or .es for Spain.

    In the past decade, several weirder and more arbitrary TLDs which are just random words with no categorisation purpose whatsoever have popped up, like .party, .xyz, or whatever.

    The fact that Google, a private company, can have its own TLD (.google), is an indicator of how supremely influential the company is over the creation of Web standards. Not only does that TLD mean nothing and has no categorisation potential whatsoever (the company largely does not even use it), but based on the original model of only six TLDs, a private company wanting to have its own TLD would have then been considered the pinnacle of hubris.