partial_accumen

No joke, I’ve had a car dealership tell me they can’t sell me the car I want because my credit score was nonexistent (no credit history in 7 years). I was paying in full, in cash, literally in an envelope in my hand.

There are car dealers (especially at the low end of used cars) that don’t make money selling cars. They make money with horrible debt and payment terms trying to trap vulnerable people. The worst of these dealers may end up “selling” the car 2 or 3 times repoing it each time when the buyer can’t pay.

So its first possible that this dealer didn’t want to sell you a car for cash because its against their business model.

Grand total of 8k, all in 100s, super easy to count.

$8k in cash is super sketchy for a single purchase. Its untraceable and that sets off fraud alarm bells. The dealership also may not be set up to deal in large sums of cash like that lacking the security to do so. Lastly there are laws at the state and federal level called KYC (Know your Customer) for some transactions that require the seller to verify the money is legit. With cash, thats nearly impossible.

You might have had more luck showing up with an $8k cashiers check or offering an $8k wire transfer from your bank. Both of these are exempt from lots of regulations (because there’s a paper trail) where cash would not have that luxury.

But no, I didn’t have a “good enough credit score” so I couldn’t buy that car from them, despite having the money to do so. Mental gymnastics on that one.

I’m guessing that was just an excuse to not sell to you because either they’re the sketchy dealer (that likes to sell loans not cars) or they thought you were super sketchy as a buyer.

Paying your utility bills on time for your whole life will not raise your credit score one point.

FICO Credit scores measure exactly one thing: How good are you at regularly paying on debt over time? Thats it.

Utility bills are generated and cleared every month (assuming you pay). If you got in a financial jam, you could probably lower how much HVAC you use or lower your water usage while times were tight. You can’t do that on installment loans. The full loan payment is due every month. Utility bills are not a great measure of the ability to regularly pay on debt over time, which is what FICO scores measure.

There are a lot of bad answers or misunderstandings about credit scores in this thread.

FICO Credit scores measure exactly one thing: How good are you at regularly paying on debt over time? Thats it.

There are some other companies that take your FICO score and make their own determinations from it, but those are not the intended purpose of a FICO score.

ANON is also saying “x raises” or “y lowers” but he’s missing one other part. Some of those raises and lowers are temporary meaning for a couple of months only, and those don’t have years long impacts.

Most of the big moving pieces are publicly published right on the FICO website too, so you don’t have to guess:

source

So lets look at ANONs complaints through the lens of what FICO scores address:

Using credit lowers your score

I’m assuming ANON means “using a portion of an already established credit line.” We can see in the chart that this would increase the red segment of the FICO score. FICO assumes the closer you get to your maximum credit availability, the more you’re being squeezed financially reducing your ability to pay on all of your debts. From a lender’s perspective, if your debts are piling up, then lending you more is a higher risk.

Not using credit lowers your score

If ANON means “using zero credit” then, yes, ANON wouldn’t have a recent history of paying on debt then the Payment History section of the graph would be thin or empty. From a lender’s perspective, if you haven’t paid on any debt in the last 6 months, how do they know you still have the ability to do so if you want credit right now?

Paying back late lowers your score

Absolutely! Its violating the very purpose FICO is made to measure: How good are you at regularly paying on debt over time?

Paying back early lowers your score

This one is a yes or no depending on what scenario ANON is talking about. Paying back a credit card early DOES NOT lower your score. In fact, it would likely RAISE your score. Paying back an installment loan, lets say for a car, early can lower your score, but not because its early, but because the load will disappear. Without a loan to pay on, you will have less recent history of paying on an installment loan for a car, and 6 months from now a lender may not know if you still have the ability to do so, so you score falls.

Even checking your score lowers your score.

ANON checking ANONs score DOES NOT lower your score. ANON allowing a lender to do a hard pull check does lower the score, but only a small amount 10-20 points and this is temporary about a month or two. Further, do several hard pulls at once, they don’t each lower by 10 or 20 points. If you do the pulls close together (within a week or two) it will be only the temporary lowering for a month or two. From a lender’s perspective if you’re reaching out for new lines of credit, it means you’re indicating you’re about to take on more debt which could affect your ability to pay on further new debts.

Taking out loans lowers your score

Temporarily, yes, but over time this can grow your score if its in a different loan type or length.

Paying back loans lowers your score

Yes and no, circumstances depending. If you pay back that one loan type lets say a car loan, and you have have no other installment loans, then you will have no more recent history of paying on any installment loans. However, if you have a mortgage which is another type of installment loan, you’ll take no hit for paying back the car loan as you will continue to have a recent payment history of paying on installment loans. You could take a hit because a nearly paid off loan looks good for the “Amounts owed” component of the score, but you could use a trick like getting a credit card of the same credit line (and not charge anything on it) to avoid that if you really need to.

Not taking out loans lowers your score

Not quite true. Having no recent payment history means a lower score, but it you already have some type of loan or credit you pay on every month, not taking out more loans will not hurt your score.

One final thought I really really want to dispel: YOUR FICO SCORE IS NOT INCREASED BY PAYING INTEREST ON CREDIT CARD DEBT!

Try everything you can to avoid carrying credit card debt into next month. Interest rates are crazy high and it does nothing to help you. If you put a purchase on a credit card, make sure to pay the full statement balance every month. If you do this, you’ll pay zero interest on any credit card purchases.

On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.

This is surprisingly good! I would have figured it would have taken far more than twice the land than a Lithium battery solution.

yeah, sure thing buddy. the CO2 will be in a closed loop until it won’t. just like Fukushima and Chernobyl were supposed to be closed loop systems, until they weren’t. disasters happen, no matter how much the techbro mindset insists that they’re impossible.

So you concern is the ecological impact should this bubble fail and the entirety of the CO2 is released to the atmosphere as pollution? Did you even read the article? They discuss that.

First, a full on failure would be rare. Then, a full on failure of 100% loss of the closed loop CO2 is equivalent to 15 round trip flights of a jet flying from New York to London. To put it in perspective there about 250+ flights of this length per day from London, with many being much much farther.

So you’re comparing the impacts of a once in a lifetime nuclear power plant failure to the impacts of another source 1/16th of something that already happens every in one airport. Your logic is why out of whack on this if this is your concern with the bubble.

I was thinking about much larger scale bubbles in “unwanted” geological depressions such as old open pit mines or rock quarries. The depression in the ground might offer more protection allowing it to scale up higher in volume.

Your internet traffic is already encrypted in transit, that what the “s” in https means.

You don’t get the “s” until you have the “https”. Your DNS request which turns www.TheWebsiteYouDoNotWantKnown.com into its IP address happens before you have the “s” in “https”. By default, that request is sent in plaintext, and frequently by default, to your internet service provider. So an outside monitor may not be able to see the contents of the website once you establish your https connection, they likely know that you went there and have a good idea how long you stayed on it.

While its also possible to encrypt the DNS request with DoH or DoT, its not on by default and requires the user to take configuration actions in their browser. If they’re looking at VPNs for the first time, they likely don’t know this and are sending their DNS requests in the clear.

Maybe MS couldn’t stuff enough ads into the old Start Menu requiring a re-write to allow for more ad space. /s

In every version of Windows up until now which has contained a taskbar and start menu, as far back as Windows 95. Not just Windows 10.

Sadly not true. Microsoft removed the Start button in a version of Windows before. It was in Windows 8 (and Windows Server 2012 for some godforsaken reason) with the cursed “metro” interface. MS did it for the same stupid reason they’re citing here “tablet and touchscreen users”. The uproar caused MS to release Windows 8.1 a year later where they returned the Start button.

I’m imagining code snippets that would actually download ads into applications people are writing. This would target those that copy/paste’d code without having any concept of what the code in question does.

but I think the realistic reading is it was simply a kickback to fortune 500 companies that got these politicians elected.

If there were no legitimate geopolitical reasons, then the “simply a kickback” would be much more plausible. Also, if it was a single source company, then “simply a kickback” would look true. Additionally, if was perhaps just domestic companies “simply a kickback” would certainly be even more likely. Lastly, the Chips act wasn’t just about production domestically. It also blocked sales/exports of completed high end chips and chip making equipment to China. If the Chips act was “simple a kickback” you wouldn’t do all that other stuff, and you certainly wouldn’t allow foreign winners (like Taiwan’s TSMC).

Was their rewards because of industry lobbying? Certainly. However, unless you’re in a purely communist system of government where all the companies are owned by the state, you’re always going to have private companies benefiting from government spending, tax breaks, and subsidies. As to this just applying to fortune 500 companies, there isn’t really a “mom and pop” semiconductor industry making handfuls of chips at a time except outside of engineering sample that are used in R&D for fortune 500 companies.

The worst of it hasn’t happened yet. The point where consumers can no longer afford to consume is coming.

Its mostly already arrived.

“As of June 30, the top 20% of earners accounted for more than 63% of all spending”

source

This means that the other 80% of Americans represent only 37% of the spending done today. If a company is looking to maximize profits the typical path is to do so by marketing to the group where they could earn the most money. That is less and less the bottom 80% of Americans.

The creator in that video seems to think the Chips Act subsidies were to benefit consumers by having affordable memory produced domestically. That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to derive drive GDP by having another source of domestic production, and drive job growth/tax revenue from workers working at the domestic facility. Lastly, it was to have strategic domestic production decoupled from other nations so we, as a nation, could not be held hostage by another nation (like we do to so many other nations) for crucial (pun very much intended) resources we need.

Nothing about that is about making RAM cheaper for retail consumers.

The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.

Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.

We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.

Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.

To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn’t the “reasonable plumber”, its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he’s a meth addict that hasn’t slept in 3 days and is seeing “the shadow people” standing right there in the room with you.

I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that

I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can’t be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say “please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond”. In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn’t be able to damage any thing you cared about.

Avoid the trap though. Things won’t just “happen” to make your life better. It takes actions and effort on your part to guide your life in the direction you want it to go.

Yep, thanks for the fact check. Peter Theil is certainly a trump advisor helping shape policy but he doesn’t hold an government office. I’ve corrected my post.

Edit: Redacted a mistaken identity

I’m not sure you understand what this article is or how our markets work.

The simple fact that somebody was able even to bet a billion is insanity that should never be possible to begin with. Nobody should have a billion dollars, let alone have so much that you can just safely bet a billion dollars

He doesn’t have a billion dollars. He’s a hedge fund manager that manages (at least) a billion dollars collectively of other people’s investment money. Its that money he’s betting.

Them he’s betting.yhst the economy will crash, basically, and we’re okay with that shit.

No, he’s not. He’s betting against only two companies: Nvidia and Palantir. He has a relatively small bet against Nvidia ($187.6 million), and HUGE bet against Palantir ($912 million). I’m not sure I’d bet against Nvidia yet, but Palantir is co-founded by Peter Theil, trump’s deputy chief of staff which job has a large influence on White House policy. If you ever watched the TV show The West Wing, this would be the Josh Lyman character’s job.

We already know trump’s favor swings widely and if politics are going against trump (as recent news show) then its not unbelievable that Theil might get the boot or at least trump would punish Theil by killing lucrative government contracts to buy Palantir services.

All of this should be illegal as fuck, and this guy belongs in a jail cell

The point of shorting a stock exists so that the market can express a view that they believe a stock will fail. This is an important “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the market. The other option is a policy that you can’t criticize a company with any meaning and investors continue to put money into failing/risky companies without this important indication of the risk.

Frankly I don’t like your idea of jailing someone that says “The emperor has no clothes”.

The fact that he was even able to make that bet is incredible. How deluded do you have to be to think the AI bubble won’t burst?

Nobody believes the AI investment/growth trajectory we have right now will continue for infinity. What nobody knows is: when the correction will occur.

• Do you pull your investments out now and sit on the sidelines waiting for the fallout while your principal loses value daily from inflation?
• What does the correction look like when it happens? Does all the value evaporate on day 1, the first week, a month? This is important to figure out for this strategy to know when to go back in.

This is the info/decisions you’d need as an average investor. What Burry is doing is the riskiest type of investments with shorting the market. If growth continue to occur he and his fund will have to pay for the growth to those whose shares he borrowed to short.

In summary, its not enough to know that a bubble exists, but to profit from it you have to figure out when it will burst and when the full burst is done.