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This is a great article that explains markets (not just the stock market really) in an easy to understand way. The one thing I believe people should know about

This is a great article that explains markets (not just the stock market really) in an easy to understand way. The one thing I believe people should know about the stock market is: There are people with more capital, time, and knowledge than you who will consistently beat you. Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game. Buying tech stocks and/or crypto in the last couple of years has been a consistent exception to this, but I worry that many of the people who made good money from those investments will now believe that they have some superior understanding that lets them consistently beat the market. But sooner or later they will find themselves in a similar situation as those who thought investing in Japanese Tech companies was a surefire way to beat the market 20-25 years ago. So my advice to anyone who already got rich from their investments in the last couple of years: Congratulations! Now take that money, invest it in the most boring thing possible, and enjoy life. To everyone who is trying to get rich quick now: Do your thing I guess, but be aware that you're gambling.

mgh2 5y ago
Why is this the top comment? It is just an opinion without much analysis. Yes, there is gambling but there is also investing, knowing the difference is key.
dgb23 5y ago
Isn't there some qualitative difference between financially focused decision making and domain focused decision making when it comes to investing vs. gambling (as you say)? An expert in some particular field sees different opportunities and make strong educated guesses vs a trader who will react on financial metrics.
- cehrlich 5y ago
  To a certain extent yes, but don't fall into the trap of overestimating your own domain knowledge and underestimating that of others.
- Retr0id 5y ago
  Traders can hire domain-specific technical consultants.
3pt14159 5y ago
People keep telling me this, but I keep beating the market. It's been 20 years or so of applying very basic reasoning and getting ahead. 1. Commodities are bad long term bets because technology gets better. I remember people talking my ear off about peak oil and then the US turned into a net-exporter. Short term inelasticity, yes can sky rocket prices; but long term prices go down. 2. Physics based thinking. I knew electric cars were going to work because the math checked out. 3. Economics of scale works. Find companies that understand this and focus on it. When I saw Telsa focussing on a single car for a year I knew they would be a winner. 4. Software scales. People like to make money. Combine the two and its a real winner. 5. Sell when forward price to earnings after cash starts to look wonky. Which was 2007 and I think 2019. Covid and the direct stimulus kinda messed up the timing, but the market is still completely screwed. Either way, sell early and buy the crash. Telsa, Apple, Shopify, Amazon, Google. Only really lost on Etsy (I can't believe how much they missed the opportunity to become a real platform). Why bother investing in GM through a broad index fund if I know for sure Tesla will eat their lunch? This isn't really get-rich-quick. This is looking at companies rationally and projecting where they will be in a year or two. And rationally speaking this market is out of wack and I wouldn't advise investing in even my favourite tech companies right now. I don't think this is Japanese Tech level of readjustment. I think there will be a -%50 S&P500 crash, maybe more, and then in 10 years Apple will be worth more than double what it is worth today. They have fundamentally better technology. Their software competency is below average, but their hardware, fit and finish, design, and cultural cache is world class and it is hard for me to imagine any scenario where they lose other than a US war with China.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  I bought GOOG in 2005 and TSLA in 2014. Similarly, I don't see why I would buy Facebook or GM as part of an index fund when their growth potential looks terrible when compared to TSLA and GOOG. If I was 70 and couldn't afford a 5 year correction, things would be different
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    substitute Ford for Tesla in the early part of the last century, and on the timescales you are talking about, General Motors ate Ford's lunch. furthermore, Musk is very impulsive and could already have been cancelled by the SEC for his mistakes: I bring that up to point out that by hitching your wagon to this one individual (or Henry Ford) you are taking on enormous risk, risk that is diversifiable and there's no reward for.
ericmay 5y ago
> Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game. Kind of. What you have to remember is what game you’re playing. While financial firms can outspend and out-research you at an individual level, they can’t take the same risks you can or move as quickly as you can. If I decide I want to go all-in on some company I can just do that. Your friendly neighborhood hedge fund? Not so much. Most people should buy index funds or similar, no change there, and even those who decide they want to pick stocks should mostly have a broad portfolio, but you can pick stocks if you want and you can be successful.
- andriesm 5y ago
  I agree - most people should buy low cost index funds but that is not enough - they have to space it out as monthly contributions over many years. If you put all your money in at thr wrong moment, like say the Nasdaq in 99 then you waited 13 years just to break even. But if you bought monthly you would have done very well because you averaged into the market. The alternative is if you really understand valuations, diversification, risk and market psychology, like I do, then you can consistently beat the market. Most people cannot and most people you pay fees to do it on your behalf won't. You could consider buying berkshire hathaway instead of a stock market index.... assuming the lead investors don't die too soon.
  - nly 5y ago
    You give this advice like it's a choice. I invest monthly because I get paid monthly. I invest lump sums when I get windfalls, like bonuses, likely because I haven't invested as much as I want because my repayment mortgage (saving me 2-3%/annum) eats all my monthly income. I sell everything when I need to buy a property because I'm not rich enough to use my stocks as collateral.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    Isn’t dollar cost averaging fundamentally valuing “timing the market” over “time in the market?” I’d need to do a Monte Carlo to provide hard evidence but I’m fairly sure that lump sum investing is, on average, going to provide the greatest return. For people just starting out in investment, whose appetite for risk is high, that seems the way to go. Edit: Leggio and Lien (2001): > We find DCA [dollar-cost averaging] consistently remains an inferior investing strategy to Lump Sum investing using the risk-adjusted performance measures. > The failure of DCA as an optimal investing strategy for all assets and portfolios considered is likely because DCA is a conservative investing strategy best suited for investors interested in a forced savings plan that avoids the consumption of earnings.
shoto_io 5y ago
My stock advice for any rookie has always been the same: - Buy S&P ETFs, most preferably by Vanguard, because they are a non-profit and thus have very low fees - If you have a large sum of cash, go all-in immediately, don't wait for the perfect time - Now, just wait, ideally 10+ years, before looking into your account again
- fmx 5y ago
  Why S&P 500 specifically? Is it just because they have the lowest fees you've found? There are many index funds all over the world to choose from. What if I could find a fund with with even lower fees than VTSAX somewhere? I often hear "don't pick stocks, just buy 'the index'" - but you're still picking an index, aren't you?
- lr1970 5y ago
  > Buy S&P ETFs, most preferably by Vanguard, because they are a non-profit and thus have very low fees Vanguard is certainly a for-profit organization [0]. What, I think you wanted to say, that many of the Vanguard funds are index funds that do not have exuberant management fees. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group
  - tjader 5y ago
    He probably meant to say that Vanguard is owned by the funds themselves, not by some external private entity. That makes their incentives be more aligned with making the funds cheap and efficient.
  - abeppu 5y ago
    But they did spend a long time saying that they were providing services "at cost", which was eventually removed. https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/john-bogle-vanguard-scraps-plain-talk-no-profit-at-cost-20190207.html https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/john-bogle-vanguard-scra...
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    Yes, you're right, I was not precise. That's what they used to say about themselves: “The Vanguard Group is truly a mutual mutual fund company. It is owned jointly by the funds it oversees and thus indirectly by the shareholders in those funds. Most other mutual funds are operated by management companies that may be owned by one person, by a private group of individuals, or by public investors. ... The management fees charged by these companies include a profit component over and above the companies’ cost of providing services. By contrast, Vanguard provides services to its member funds on an at-cost basis, with no profit component, which helps to keep the funds’ expenses low.”
rafale 5y ago
In a way, what's considered "tech" is successful innovation that hasn't been commoditized yet. Telecoms are not considered tech anymore, and so is large scale agriculture. In this view, investing in tech is a sustainable strategy. The sweet spot is somewhere between wild VC experimentation and commoditazation when the technology is clearly useful but the growth curve still have 10+ years to run.
notacoward 5y ago
> There are people with more capital, time, and knowledge than you who will consistently beat you. I think it's more than that. There are people with more capital etc. who specifically use that to take advantage of people like you. I don't just mean pump-and-dump kinds of stuff either. HFT exists to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities created by traditional kinds of trading in aggregate (and sometimes to take advantage of other HFT bots) creating a kind of "friction" that is hard for less capitalized traders to overcome. The market is as much of a fight as a race, and it's really hard to win against the heavyweights unless you're one yourself. > Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game. Definitely true in the short term, for the reasons mentioned above. Still mostly true in the longer term. At least there's a chance that a sufficiently canny investor can pick a basket of stocks that will grow over time, but statistically it's almost certain that you'll fall behind the S&P index. Even the very best fund managers, with all of the resources at their disposal, rarely beat that more than a couple of years in a row.
greatpostman 5y ago
This is awful advice and people keep repeating it. Taking on risk over the last few decades has paid off in spades.
- gruez 5y ago
  >>So my advice to anyone who already got rich from their investments in the last couple of years: Congratulations! Now take that money, invest it in the most boring thing possible, and enjoy life. >Taking on risk over the last few decades has paid off in spades. There's two types of risk here: risk that is compensated by higher returns (eg. buying stocks rather than bonds) and risk that isn't compensated by higher returns (eg. buying OTM options rather than stocks). It's not really clear that higher than expected returns in the past decade or so for "tech stocks and/or crypto", mean that they have higher risk-adjusted returns in the next decade.
  - greatpostman 5y ago
    Keep saying this and watch your peers assets balloon in value. There’s really nothing to argue about, spreading this “I can’t beat the market mantra” is bad for everyone. Also asserting that tech, which is essentially the largest growth area won’t keep growing is a radical opinion
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Keep saying this and watch your peers assets balloon in value. There’s really nothing to argue about, spreading this “I can’t beat the market mantra” is bad for everyone. While I don't doubt that you could beat the market given enough effort, I'm skeptical that you can trivially beat the market with a strategy as simple as "buy tech stocks". I'll invoke the efficient market hypothesis here: if tech stocks are expected to grow 20% but non-tech stocks are only expected to grow 10%, why would anyone buy non-tech stocks? Wouldn't everyone bid up the price of tech stocks so that their returns would only be 10%?
adamsmith143 5y ago
> I worry that many of the people who made good money from those investments will now believe that they have some superior understanding that lets them consistently beat the market This x1000 I've seen plenty of friends of friends who probably had issues passing HS Algebra thinking they're "Daytraders" because they made some money off BTC or GME in the past few years and I just cringe so hard. My index funds consistently return ~20% a year lately. If you aren't even matching that you aren't a trader you're a sucker.
_9omd 5y ago
>So my advice to anyone who already got rich from their investments in the last couple of years: Congratulations! Now take that money, invest it in the most boring thing possible, and enjoy life. To everyone who is trying to get rich quick now: Do your thing I guess, but be aware that you're gambling. That right there is the best advice. If you want to get rich quick, you're going to have to make some calculated bets with higher return and thus higher risk. However, if those bets work out and you do become rich, don't fool yourself into thinking you're some kind of super genius that can consistently beat the market. This can be a hard lesson for people to learn (it took me a long time), because in most aspects of life success is more skill based. With investing, there is more decoupling between action and outcome due to randomness, and you have to always consider you may have made the right choice and lost, or you may have made the wrong choice and won. In the case of the latter, take your winnings and be happy, but don't delude yourself into thinking you made a good play. This is extremely hard, you have to be willing to put your ego aside and realize you actually made a mistake that made you a lot of money. I think ordinary people with the right knowledge and foresight at the right time can beat the market in the short term. The trick is to be extremely patient until you have a reasonable level of confidence you have an edge in a bet with an asymmetrical return, and then take a position with conviction. I've done this a few times in my life, and the knowledge, timing, and luck all happened to work out for me. I've also had that feeling a few other times where things went south. Luckily for me the winners far exceeded the losers. However, I wouldn't con myself into believing I can consistently generate an edge. I simply made a small number of calculated bets when the stars all aligned for me. It's very possible the stars will never align for me again like that, which is why I've now moved most of my money into ETFs and other safe investments. One way to spot someone who doesn't know what they're doing with investing and trading, is you never hear about their losses. You never hear about their net gains. You never hear them tell you the story of when they drunkenly made a really stupid leveraged stock pick that just happened to work out from pure luck. No, you hear all about the winners, all about how they knew for sure it would work out for all these reasons. You just see the overflowing ego that gambling has drummed up, rather than the intellectual honestly of someone who has sat back and grappled with the tough question, "did I make all this money because I'm smart, or am I just a dump and lucky ape?"
- 5y ago
Tiktaalik 5y ago
> I worry that many of the people who made good money from those investments will now believe that they have some superior understanding that lets them consistently beat the market. lmao god this feels so much like the mindset of so many tech people in general. They were right about one thing so naturally they're of course right about this next thing...

mgh2 5y ago

Why is this the top comment? It is just an opinion without much analysis. Yes, there is gambling but there is also investing, knowing the difference is key.

dgb23 5y ago

Isn't there some qualitative difference between financially focused decision making and domain focused decision making when it comes to investing vs. gambling (as you say)? An expert in some particular field sees different opportunities and make strong educated guesses vs a trader who will react on financial metrics.

cehrlich 5y ago
To a certain extent yes, but don't fall into the trap of overestimating your own domain knowledge and underestimating that of others.
Retr0id 5y ago
Traders can hire domain-specific technical consultants.

3pt14159 5y ago

People keep telling me this, but I keep beating the market. It's been 20 years or so of applying very basic reasoning and getting ahead. 1. Commodities are bad long term bets because technology gets better. I remember people talking my ear off about peak oil and then the US turned into a net-exporter. Short term inelasticity, yes can sky rocket prices; but long term prices go down. 2. Physics based thinking. I knew electric cars were going to work because the math checked out. 3. Economics of scale works. Find companies that understand this and focus on it. When I saw Telsa focussing on a single car for a year I knew they would be a winner. 4. Software scales. People like to make money. Combine the two and its a real winner. 5. Sell when forward price to earnings after cash starts to look wonky. Which was 2007 and I think 2019. Covid and the direct stimulus kinda messed up the timing, but the market is still completely screwed. Either way, sell early and buy the crash. Telsa, Apple, Shopify, Amazon, Google. Only really lost on Etsy (I can't believe how much they missed the opportunity to become a real platform). Why bother investing in GM through a broad index fund if I know for sure Tesla will eat their lunch? This isn't really get-rich-quick. This is looking at companies rationally and projecting where they will be in a year or two. And rationally speaking this market is out of wack and I wouldn't advise investing in even my favourite tech companies right now. I don't think this is Japanese Tech level of readjustment. I think there will be a -%50 S&P500 crash, maybe more, and then in 10 years Apple will be worth more than double what it is worth today. They have fundamentally better technology. Their software competency is below average, but their hardware, fit and finish, design, and cultural cache is world class and it is hard for me to imagine any scenario where they lose other than a US war with China.

gitfan86 5y ago
I bought GOOG in 2005 and TSLA in 2014. Similarly, I don't see why I would buy Facebook or GM as part of an index fund when their growth potential looks terrible when compared to TSLA and GOOG. If I was 70 and couldn't afford a 5 year correction, things would be different
- fsckboy 5y ago
  substitute Ford for Tesla in the early part of the last century, and on the timescales you are talking about, General Motors ate Ford's lunch. furthermore, Musk is very impulsive and could already have been cancelled by the SEC for his mistakes: I bring that up to point out that by hitching your wagon to this one individual (or Henry Ford) you are taking on enormous risk, risk that is diversifiable and there's no reward for.

ericmay 5y ago

> Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game. Kind of. What you have to remember is what game you’re playing. While financial firms can outspend and out-research you at an individual level, they can’t take the same risks you can or move as quickly as you can. If I decide I want to go all-in on some company I can just do that. Your friendly neighborhood hedge fund? Not so much. Most people should buy index funds or similar, no change there, and even those who decide they want to pick stocks should mostly have a broad portfolio, but you can pick stocks if you want and you can be successful.

andriesm 5y ago
I agree - most people should buy low cost index funds but that is not enough - they have to space it out as monthly contributions over many years. If you put all your money in at thr wrong moment, like say the Nasdaq in 99 then you waited 13 years just to break even. But if you bought monthly you would have done very well because you averaged into the market. The alternative is if you really understand valuations, diversification, risk and market psychology, like I do, then you can consistently beat the market. Most people cannot and most people you pay fees to do it on your behalf won't. You could consider buying berkshire hathaway instead of a stock market index.... assuming the lead investors don't die too soon.
- nly 5y ago
  You give this advice like it's a choice. I invest monthly because I get paid monthly. I invest lump sums when I get windfalls, like bonuses, likely because I haven't invested as much as I want because my repayment mortgage (saving me 2-3%/annum) eats all my monthly income. I sell everything when I need to buy a property because I'm not rich enough to use my stocks as collateral.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Isn’t dollar cost averaging fundamentally valuing “timing the market” over “time in the market?” I’d need to do a Monte Carlo to provide hard evidence but I’m fairly sure that lump sum investing is, on average, going to provide the greatest return. For people just starting out in investment, whose appetite for risk is high, that seems the way to go. Edit: Leggio and Lien (2001): > We find DCA [dollar-cost averaging] consistently remains an inferior investing strategy to Lump Sum investing using the risk-adjusted performance measures. > The failure of DCA as an optimal investing strategy for all assets and portfolios considered is likely because DCA is a conservative investing strategy best suited for investors interested in a forced savings plan that avoids the consumption of earnings.

shoto_io 5y ago

My stock advice for any rookie has always been the same: - Buy S&P ETFs, most preferably by Vanguard, because they are a non-profit and thus have very low fees - If you have a large sum of cash, go all-in immediately, don't wait for the perfect time - Now, just wait, ideally 10+ years, before looking into your account again

fmx 5y ago
Why S&P 500 specifically? Is it just because they have the lowest fees you've found? There are many index funds all over the world to choose from. What if I could find a fund with with even lower fees than VTSAX somewhere? I often hear "don't pick stocks, just buy 'the index'" - but you're still picking an index, aren't you?
lr1970 5y ago
> Buy S&P ETFs, most preferably by Vanguard, because they are a non-profit and thus have very low fees Vanguard is certainly a for-profit organization [0]. What, I think you wanted to say, that many of the Vanguard funds are index funds that do not have exuberant management fees. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group
- tjader 5y ago
  He probably meant to say that Vanguard is owned by the funds themselves, not by some external private entity. That makes their incentives be more aligned with making the funds cheap and efficient.
- abeppu 5y ago
  But they did spend a long time saying that they were providing services "at cost", which was eventually removed. https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/john-bogle-vanguard-scraps-plain-talk-no-profit-at-cost-20190207.html https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/john-bogle-vanguard-scra...
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Yes, you're right, I was not precise. That's what they used to say about themselves: “The Vanguard Group is truly a mutual mutual fund company. It is owned jointly by the funds it oversees and thus indirectly by the shareholders in those funds. Most other mutual funds are operated by management companies that may be owned by one person, by a private group of individuals, or by public investors. ... The management fees charged by these companies include a profit component over and above the companies’ cost of providing services. By contrast, Vanguard provides services to its member funds on an at-cost basis, with no profit component, which helps to keep the funds’ expenses low.”

rafale 5y ago

In a way, what's considered "tech" is successful innovation that hasn't been commoditized yet. Telecoms are not considered tech anymore, and so is large scale agriculture. In this view, investing in tech is a sustainable strategy. The sweet spot is somewhere between wild VC experimentation and commoditazation when the technology is clearly useful but the growth curve still have 10+ years to run.

notacoward 5y ago

> There are people with more capital, time, and knowledge than you who will consistently beat you. I think it's more than that. There are people with more capital etc. who specifically use that to take advantage of people like you. I don't just mean pump-and-dump kinds of stuff either. HFT exists to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities created by traditional kinds of trading in aggregate (and sometimes to take advantage of other HFT bots) creating a kind of "friction" that is hard for less capitalized traders to overcome. The market is as much of a fight as a race, and it's really hard to win against the heavyweights unless you're one yourself. > Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game. Definitely true in the short term, for the reasons mentioned above. Still mostly true in the longer term. At least there's a chance that a sufficiently canny investor can pick a basket of stocks that will grow over time, but statistically it's almost certain that you'll fall behind the S&P index. Even the very best fund managers, with all of the resources at their disposal, rarely beat that more than a couple of years in a row.

greatpostman 5y ago

This is awful advice and people keep repeating it. Taking on risk over the last few decades has paid off in spades.

gruez 5y ago
>>So my advice to anyone who already got rich from their investments in the last couple of years: Congratulations! Now take that money, invest it in the most boring thing possible, and enjoy life. >Taking on risk over the last few decades has paid off in spades. There's two types of risk here: risk that is compensated by higher returns (eg. buying stocks rather than bonds) and risk that isn't compensated by higher returns (eg. buying OTM options rather than stocks). It's not really clear that higher than expected returns in the past decade or so for "tech stocks and/or crypto", mean that they have higher risk-adjusted returns in the next decade.
- greatpostman 5y ago
  Keep saying this and watch your peers assets balloon in value. There’s really nothing to argue about, spreading this “I can’t beat the market mantra” is bad for everyone. Also asserting that tech, which is essentially the largest growth area won’t keep growing is a radical opinion
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Keep saying this and watch your peers assets balloon in value. There’s really nothing to argue about, spreading this “I can’t beat the market mantra” is bad for everyone. While I don't doubt that you could beat the market given enough effort, I'm skeptical that you can trivially beat the market with a strategy as simple as "buy tech stocks". I'll invoke the efficient market hypothesis here: if tech stocks are expected to grow 20% but non-tech stocks are only expected to grow 10%, why would anyone buy non-tech stocks? Wouldn't everyone bid up the price of tech stocks so that their returns would only be 10%?

adamsmith143 5y ago

> I worry that many of the people who made good money from those investments will now believe that they have some superior understanding that lets them consistently beat the market This x1000 I've seen plenty of friends of friends who probably had issues passing HS Algebra thinking they're "Daytraders" because they made some money off BTC or GME in the past few years and I just cringe so hard. My index funds consistently return ~20% a year lately. If you aren't even matching that you aren't a trader you're a sucker.

_9omd 5y ago

>So my advice to anyone who already got rich from their investments in the last couple of years: Congratulations! Now take that money, invest it in the most boring thing possible, and enjoy life. To everyone who is trying to get rich quick now: Do your thing I guess, but be aware that you're gambling. That right there is the best advice. If you want to get rich quick, you're going to have to make some calculated bets with higher return and thus higher risk. However, if those bets work out and you do become rich, don't fool yourself into thinking you're some kind of super genius that can consistently beat the market. This can be a hard lesson for people to learn (it took me a long time), because in most aspects of life success is more skill based. With investing, there is more decoupling between action and outcome due to randomness, and you have to always consider you may have made the right choice and lost, or you may have made the wrong choice and won. In the case of the latter, take your winnings and be happy, but don't delude yourself into thinking you made a good play. This is extremely hard, you have to be willing to put your ego aside and realize you actually made a mistake that made you a lot of money. I think ordinary people with the right knowledge and foresight at the right time can beat the market in the short term. The trick is to be extremely patient until you have a reasonable level of confidence you have an edge in a bet with an asymmetrical return, and then take a position with conviction. I've done this a few times in my life, and the knowledge, timing, and luck all happened to work out for me. I've also had that feeling a few other times where things went south. Luckily for me the winners far exceeded the losers. However, I wouldn't con myself into believing I can consistently generate an edge. I simply made a small number of calculated bets when the stars all aligned for me. It's very possible the stars will never align for me again like that, which is why I've now moved most of my money into ETFs and other safe investments. One way to spot someone who doesn't know what they're doing with investing and trading, is you never hear about their losses. You never hear about their net gains. You never hear them tell you the story of when they drunkenly made a really stupid leveraged stock pick that just happened to work out from pure luck. No, you hear all about the winners, all about how they knew for sure it would work out for all these reasons. You just see the overflowing ego that gambling has drummed up, rather than the intellectual honestly of someone who has sat back and grappled with the tough question, "did I make all this money because I'm smart, or am I just a dump and lucky ape?"

5y ago

Tiktaalik 5y ago

> I worry that many of the people who made good money from those investments will now believe that they have some superior understanding that lets them consistently beat the market. lmao god this feels so much like the mindset of so many tech people in general. They were right about one thing so naturally they're of course right about this next thing...