>plants grow in the dirt and risk having insects crawling all over them
Non-sequitor.
>And the sheer number of lifestyle diseases people have.
Red herring. Other peoples' diabetes or obesity doesn't really impact me. Plastic has contaminated water and soil, it's not possible to opt out of the consequences of others using it even if you do not use it yourself.
There are some interesting thoughts here, but reading this I can't help but think the author is themselves afflicted by some sort of internet-addiction-induced psychosis. This reads like the mental dump of a mild schizophrenic, and perhaps that's what makes it interesting enough to read until the end despite the lack of any clear or convincing conclusions. Definitely a writer in need of two or three additional editing sessions, but I think with more work the author has an interesting stylistic element that could endear in an online world increasingly filled with mediocre and predictable AI slop.
Regarding the "do you remember" section, I honestly don't think I ever knew who three of those people are, and I lack context for what another two events are supposed to mean to me. But then again I've been opting out of most news for several years.
HN these days is very similar to Reddit. Most users spend their free time talking about things others have done, rather than doing things themselves. Of course, most of this internet discussion leans negative for various reasons that have been addressed in other places better than I could recap.
Why care what anybody on here thinks? They're mostly anonymous nobodies.
Incorrect, the DJIA lost around 90% of its index value in the Great Depression, so the theoretical portfolio in this exercise would have declined to around 10 cents, but holding an asset at a negative return does not result in a margin call if one is not trading with leverage.
In practice, it would have been a toss-up between individuals' outcomes because index funds as we are familiar with them today did not exist at the time. The DJIA was a price index but there was no way to invest in the DJIA basket as there is today, so brokers picked stocks on behalf of investors. So it's certain that some investors' portfolios did decline to zero during this time due to bankruptcies of all the companies they happened to be holding.
The Nikkei 225 is still below its peak value from December of 1989. The US is an outlier in terms of historical average stock market returns and there is no guarantee this outperformance will continue into the future. Actually I'd say it's less likely, given that should it continue, the US market cap will eat the entire world stock market. The US stock market is currently 62% of the world's stock market capitalization.
The Nikkei 225 may be below its 1989 peak in price terms but you can’t ignore the dividends which an actual investment in the index would have paid during that period. On a total return basis (if you had reinvested the dividends into the index as you received them) the Nikkei passed its 1989 peak in 2021.
I struggle to understand why an educated crowd like HN routinely forgets dividends when posting any sort of financial charts. Total returns are what matters.
I don’t know how many people in tech you’ve worked with, but the number of other people I’ve interacted with who actually read quarterly reports of publicly traded businesses has been exactly zero.
My point still stands, as the original comment was discussing the risk of loss over 30 years, with no additional investment that was 32 years of the investment being below its peak value.
> The Nikkei 225 is still below its peak value from December of 1989.
Okay, and how many people put 100% of their money in at December of 1998? Versus how many people have been dollar cost averaging for the last 30+ years?
Only if you invested everything in the Nikkei on the height of the market though. Many US companies are pretty global and have a lot of sales outside the USA. In that sense the risk is a lot less concentrated outside of extreme political events.
Many international companies are global, and have a lot of sales to the US. But I never see anybody using that as a justification for not investing in the US.
As to the Nikkei retort this seems to be hindsight bias and ignorance of historical context, the general consensus at the time (both inside and outside of Japan) was that the Japanese economy was going to take over the world.
Don't blame them, they just asked their agentic AI to make a successful site for renting tools. A Show HN post, and engagement in the comment section is a required step.
Good. Why should MRNA get 10% of their market cap in free government research handouts when there's other pharmaceutical companies that have been far more successful at making vaccines. MRNA literally has two products.
This is a dying one trick pony, the ultimate COVID meme stock, that has lost 95% of its peak market capitalization. One of the top 15 or so pharma companies will probably buy them out when the market cap gets to $3-5B.
> Why should MRNA get 10% of their market cap in free government research handouts
There is a muted commercial incentive to develop vaccines for potential pandemics. There is great public interest, however, in not being the country or trading bloc that forgot to.
(Not saying that’s worth almost $1bn/year, though.)
> This is a dying one trick pony
Not a domain expert. But Moderna’s pipeline [1] seems decently varied.
> One of the top 15 or so pharma companies will probably buy them out when the market cap gets to $3-5B
This article is clearly written by a journalist and not an economist.
Retail prices of eggs going up is not proof that the egg suppliers are being exploitative. The end retailers need to be investigated for their margin on eggs for it to be determined who in the supply chain, if anyone, is exploiting a narrative to make excess profits.
The other piece of "evidence", Cal-Maine's quarterly P/L, is also useless, for all we know they decided to invest in less capital equipment than previously in Q3 2025. It's actually very curious to choose P/L over gross revenue to "prove" the point the author is pushing. Unless of course the point of the article is not a genuine economic/corporate analysis and instead a narratively political topic du jour by some untrained journalist.
People can prove things to be wrong without having to substitute their own complete analysis. This is how misinformation on the internet spreads so virulently; people can just post false claims and misleading content far faster than those with the know how to counter it can do their own complete analysis.
"for all we know", "is not proof" are not "proving wrong". It's sowing doubt of an analysis without anything concrete and without providing an alternative.
> The other piece of "evidence", Cal-Maine's quarterly P/L, is also useless, for all we know they decided to invest in less capital equipment than previously in Q3 2025
There's no serious moral or value distinction here; if you insist on pointing fingers you can, but at the end of the day the profits we see celebrated come with higher costs, and the continuing-to-increase wealth inequality in this country confirms that not everyone sees the benefit.
> You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
I'd imagine they come out in essentially the same condition they go in. :)
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