As a Traeger owner but not apologist, the whole value proposition of the thing is that it doesn’t take nearly as much monitoring as a traditional smoker, and it delivers on that fairly well. Its temperature regulation is pretty good, and it sends an alert to your phone when your meat hits the target temp. But you can’t get as much smoky flavor, and you won’t get any at all unless you’re using a smoke tube in the main area beside your meat.
Nevertheless, I agree that it reeks of something fun to take up at home when not going out.
Owner but not apologist is how I’d describe myself too, it won’t produce elite smoked stuff but it’s nice for a lazy person like myself. I also use mine as a grill so that’s a plus, it’s not a great grill (you don’t get direct flame on the food) but good enough for my needs.
FWIW, this was about the same time that I was also considering getting an Ooni (or equivalent) and becoming a serious pizza guy. Instead of doing either, I just bought a bunch of cookbooks that I’ve never read/used.
From Matt Levine’s newsletter - someone needs to get legal guardianship in terms of Michael Martin’s financial decisions:
Michael “Jared” Martin, 25, said that most of his portfolio is tied up in shares of Bed Bath & Beyond and GameStop. When he received a bonus check from his IT job, he said he poured much of it into the retailer’s shares this March. He doesn’t plan to sell.
“I think that Bed Bath & Beyond, even in bankruptcy, is one of the best deals in the stock market,” said Martin, who is based near Louisville, Ky.
Martin, who started chatting with other traders on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets years ago, first got into the stock around the time that the billionaire investor Ryan Cohen did so last year.
Martin has gradually increased his stake, while doing hours of analysis on the company and how it might exit bankruptcy. “You can call me a conspiracy theorist,” he said.
I don’t know exactly how to feel about it, but at least my parents did a superb job instilling in me the core belief that I’m not smart enough to think I have an edge over actual smart people in things like investing. Every time I see a story where some normie “feels like” some investment is great I wonder how incredibly loving their parents must have been.
I’m not sure how I flipped. In my early 20s I thought I was an individual stock picker - I listed to Jim Cramer’s radio show on the drive home - I even wrote him a letter he read on air (in the lead up to the Iraq War I said to buy Haliburton) and read his Confessions book (which, lol Jim Cramer, but was still a fun read).
I don’t think I had a big loss because I was investing when almost everything went up, but at some point I realized I was a moron and should just buy indexes. I think I was on the right boards and just got hit over and over by posts like yours saying “Just buy indexes, you’re an idiot” where this guy Levine talks about just happened to be on boards giving him the opposite message.
Even separate from trying to scare people out of trying to outsmart smart people dedicated to the craft of stock picking, I like the analogy that index fund buying is just about the only gambling you can do where you can bet on the house.
I can only assume he said all of this before BBBY announced they were liquidating their remaining inventories and closing all stores that are still open?
People are buying BBBYQ at this very moment. Some of them believed Carl Icahn would step in and buy the company for a moonzillion (because one time there was a picture of Icahn and Cohen together), but now that Hindenburg exposed Icahn as a Ponzi schemer, redditors have pivoted to some other Q drop. I haven’t had time to keep up on the latest “DD” unfortunately.
