How is this different than “pretty well off” people everywhere?
This might be a “me” problem, but I’m really struggling to even understand the argument that the teachers are the baddies.
As I understand it, teachers/unions made a deal. Maybe it’s a great deal for them. So what? Isn’t that what unions are for? Doesn’t everyone want more money and a good pension?
This look works too:
Because public sector unions sit across the other side of the table from the same people that their political machines get elected. The incentives are out of whack, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
So you can parse what “blame” means, and I agree that random teachers have done nothing wrong. But the situation I described above leads to the disaster facing Illinois. It should be fixed if possible, and avoided in the future. In order to do that, you have to “blame” politicians and union leaders who try to create untenable pensions.
It’s this. I think my biggest pet peeve with teachers unions is that they didn’t demand (and strike for if need be) higher wages and the removal of any requirement for teachers to get a masters degree.
Honestly I’ve had very little respect for teachers unions since I was a kid watching the working conditions of the teachers in my schools and my mom and stepmom who were both teachers.
And make no mistake the unions are more to blame than just about anyone for the state of American education. They spend enormous energy making sure it’s almost impossible to get fired as a teacher (which allows a great many of them to be garbage which increases the workload of the ones who aren’t) and very little energy holding politicians feet to the fire on wages.
But yeah IL is up shit creek without a paddle because the Boomers promised their kids teachers a heavily backloaded compensation structure and then didn’t set anywhere near enough money aside. At a certain point you kinda have to start blaming the generation that did all these deals and be pretty hard hearted about the ones who don’t get the promises that were made to them kept. They voted for all of this full stop.
Yeah the LA Times series on “rubber rooms” where teachers sit for years before they can be fired - some of whom have done terrible things - is infuriating.
They actually fired like 9 teachers (out of 26,000) for cause in 5 years or something ludicrous. The rest they just pay $50k to go away, since the alternative is to have them spend years in rubber rooms and end up costing the district $500k to get rid of.
To build on this and the comment above from @anon38180840 , this is the reason that pensions aren’t a simple negotiating issue where the workers traded off other parts of compensation for pensions. Everyone at the negotiating table decided the pensions were a lot cheaper than they actually were, so no concessions on other parts of compensation were necessary. The “but we gave up salary” argument doesn’t hold, although it is a common argument that public sector unions use to deflect their part of the responsibility.
The easiest way to identify that unions have a role in this is to simply listen to them talk about pensions. They will casually and confidently take positions like:
The pensions are massively valuable to our workers because they provide guaranteed income for life protecting our workers against financial market volatility and longevity risk,
AND
The pensions are actually super cheap and we don’t need to give anything up to keep them.
I mean, c’mon man.
This is why DB pensions are fundamentally toxic. No one involved actually believes they’re worth what they’re worth, so the equilibrium is that they get handed out like candy, underfunded, then explode in 40 years. And then if you require them to be adequately funded, employers see that they’re ruinously expensive today, and that just offering cash is much more attractive to employees.
Alright, I might actually do my first short. This company, Cassava, is an obvious fraud. They’re pretty clearly manipulating data around trials for their sole product, an Alzheimer’s drug that doesn’t work. And making Theranos-style impossible claims to boot. This is wild shit.
Wow, @Riverman is doing his first ever short? What could possibly go wrong? This is a guaranteed success!
Excuse me while I buy short dated calls that are as far out of the money as possible.
What Ive learned from The Big Short is that shorting is risky af even when your thesis is basically correct.
Yeah, you don’t just have to know that something is overvalued and that it should and will eventually go down. You have to know when it will, and that’s way harder and riskier, especially when there’s no limit to the amount of money you can lose.
I’ve had some hard lessons shorting and buying puts on things that seemed obvious. It usually results in me swearing I’ll never short or buy another put again. That usually lasts a few years until I forget the lesson. The only spectacular success I had was loading up on puts in January and February 2020. It made up for all the earlier lessons.
Sounds like more lessons are incoming.
Very true. I lost money shorting two different companies that went bankrupt (A&P and Kodak). Sigh.
(Also, long post regarding Coke and valuations coming up at some point for @anon38180840) but am not sure when I’ll have sustained time to write it.)
Looking forward to it. Doesn’t necessarily have to be Coke, use whatever illustrates the points you want to make - I literally just picked the first name that came to mind for a large and safe company.
I heard this was where the smart folks from 2+2 were now. Sure glad i joined because just reading this thread makes me realise how little I know !
I’m hoping to buy a property this year and am in a position to do some investing too but there are just so many options. Put it off until now and kept all my money in t"high yield savings" earning me nothing - I know real dumb.
I don’t need to borrow to buy the property and I’m determined to make my money work for me this year. Going to slog through this thread and a couple of others before making any decisions though !
I think buying index funds is the usual advice tho it depends on your life situation.
Investing in a low expense ratio, passively-managed fund that matches your desired level of risk is almost never a mistake. Basically everything from Vanguard meets the former criteria, and they have a lot to choose from when it comes to risk levels. If you are going to need this money to buy the property fairly soon, then something lower risk and bond-heavy. If you want to just track the S&P 500 more or less, they have something for that. If you want a true set-and-forget fund where you can just plop your money and forget about until you retire, then one of their target retirement date funds are perfect for this. It’s hard to do much better than this on a consistent basis without insider information, although obviously some people will hit it big on some big bets sometimes.
Yeah, I was thinking that this was money that he’d want to have access to whenever he buys the property, but certainly look into tax advantaged accounts for the money if it can be locked away for a while.
I’m only 31 and have neglected doing anything better than high yields before because I’m lazy with money matters.
Don’t really care about any return on the money put aside for the property so it can stay where it is. I’m hoping to have closed on somewhere by May at the latest when I have to go away again for 12 weeks.
When I’m away I’ve got limited opportunity to do personal finance stuff and don’t want the distraction.
I was thinking about splitting 50/25/25 between no risk stuff and medium/very high risk. Losing 25% of my roll won’t kill me.