I haven't ridden in two decades, but I think a high-powered jetski is close to your description.
Either stand-up (small one-rider) or a 3-seater; each has its perks.
You can waterski behind a larger HP machine, and it's always nice to have a fellow beloved rider saddling-up alongside your antic't britches – whatever the hell that means, to you.
Or go be stupid and jumpwake on a crotchrocket standup jetski #LifeIsShort #CrippleLife #DontGetRunOver
This isn't financial advice, but if they dropped 40-50%, things like consumer staples would go up. In fact, they did this Friday, when everything else melted.
The best defensive stock for those situations is WMT, but you can think of other similar names as you reason through the why. That's where I'd go. There are many ETFs such as VDC (Vanguard Consumer Staples).
If you don't want to be so defensive, you could go VTV which is basically "large cap value stocks" so it still includes some Tech like Intel but it's way more diversified into other industries.
Gold is more inflation-related, so I wouldn't go there, at least not for the 40-50% draw down scenario you're describing.
I think a tricky thing is names like WMT, COST, TJX already have high p/e ratios.
You could usually try utilities or energy but those are also high due to AI buildout & Iran.
I think gold could make a come back since it's beating down a bit this year. Treasuries or just a reasonable hedge with puts against your holdings may be the best bet.
Of course none of this is financial advice & is just open discussion looking for thoughts.
Yeah, that all makes sense, great points. I agree utilities and energy are already high. As usual, the answer is probably that diversifying a bit to get exposure to all of the above is likely the right move, but that depends on one's appetite for risk and personal views on when the downdraft risk materializes
Small cap value did well in the 2000 tech crash and SP600 (small cap) doesn’t have many direct datacenter or AI exposed names compared to large and mid cap indexes. But given the scale of capex across the US they aren’t immune from secondary effects.
I think there are no safe harbor investments at this time. Even gold is unpredictable.
Personally I went 80% world excl US and 20% equal weight S&P500 to hedge against what I think is an AI bubble. But if the market decides to adjust Nvidia's valuation 20% downward next week, I expect there to be ripple effects throughout the economy.
(Like the .com bubble, I think the tech is genuinely transformative and here to stay, but the valuations are just ridiculous.)
Their satellite internet business is the only thing which makes them money, which is enabled by their orbital launch business which is as of right now not profitable and I have no idea of if it ever will be but without it they would not be able to launch enough satellites.
Their stupidity with AI and buying X mostly seems to be about scamming investors to make Musk even richer. Like this particular deal is just them doing what CoreWeave does at a SpaceX valuation.
Launch isn't profitable simply because ongoing Starship R&D is eating into it. A lot of opex, capex, and pre-revenue.
If they start running Starship anywhere near the way they do Falcon 9, it'll flip into profits. A lot of big bets SpaceX made ride on Starship coming online. I'm honestly surprised Starlink is already so profitable without it.
One of their big named bets includes: orbital datacenters. Which puts this specific deal into perspective.
80% of the space launch business is putting starlink satellites into orbit, so it's all internal funny money. They could very well be letting the space launch business take losses to make the satellite internet business look better (only profitable part of the whole thing).
Wasn't starship supposed to be funded by the NASA contract?
Well it would be a lot easier if those companies wanted to build them in uninhabited areas in the middle of nowhere with no infrastructure. Somehow they don't want to do that...
Sorry, I was unclear. With that I did not talk about this particular deal. This particular deal seems sane. XAI built more compute that they can use themselves since Grok is not very successful so to not just have the hardware standing there they rent it out to competitors. Makes total sense.
It is other things Musk has gone with Twitter and SpaceX which are shady.
That's only about 35% more than the main telecom operator here in Belgium (Proximus: $7.2B revenue in 2025, $2.5B market cap, positive earnings for 15+ years).
Obviously Starlink can and will growth. I'm just pointing out how insane the market cap is, when compared to similar scale "connectivity" businesses.
Profitability of space flight has a hard maximum. It’s not anywhere close to what their valuation would suggest.
There’s a reason Elon keeps trying to get investors to believe his “data centers in space” lunacy, because you need that sort of magic pixie dust to justify why any of this valuation makes sense, let alone have anywhere to go but down.
Starlink terminals are popular, they put them on drones to avoid jamming (Starling jamming exists but not that easy for now). It might be their sales are inflated due to its use at war.
I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label.
But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.
Back in those days, when I wasn't at a computer, I was listening to non-fiction audiobooks on business and software. I don't know how I had such motivation bvack then, but I'm glad I capitalized on it while I had it.
In other words, to people reading questioning if they're working too much: it's okay to work hard as long as you're doing it for the right reasons. (I'll purposely leave "right reasons" undefined, that's on you to evaluate)
I'm just generally not a fan of people putting other people down for wanting to be productive. It's okay to work hard, and it's okay if your identity is your work at least for a short time in your life.
> I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label.
But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.
I'm glad this worked out for you
As a small counter anecdote I guess, I was this person in my 20s too. I arranged my whole life around work, constantly trying to get that next rung. Then I burned out, quit my job, moved to a new city and was unemployed for a year. My career has been pretty decent since then, but it almost had nothing to do with the hard work in my 20s. It's just that where I was working before didn't reward the hard work and where I am now rewards the work I do even though I don't work nearly as hard as I used to
Anyways. All I'm really saying is if you're going to work yourself to the bone trying to get ahead, make sure to take a breath once in a while and look around. Check in with yourself to ensure that the hard work is actually paying off, building the life you want. Otherwise it's just trading your youth and getting nothing in return
There is a subtle "misery loves company" at play even in one's own trusted circles. Criticizing someone for working too much tip-toes into that realm. It can be well intentioned: everything in moderation, life is about more than work.
But also it can be alienating and dismissive. I have the habit of working every single day. Weekends, holidays, on vacation. Over the years more than one roommate and family member would eventually call me on it. I felt judged. I took it harder than they intended.
I think to them it was a sacrifice. My work ethic was a cost. I could have been out with friends, on the beach takin in the sun. But instead I felt it necessary to toil away toward some Capitalistic superficial goal.
But it's not a toiling cost to me. It's a healthy habit in the way that a morning workout is a healthy habit. It's lucky that enjoying one's work can also "pay off" in the traditional sense. I think that's the key: only you know why you're working. If it's toil toward some Capitalistic superficial goal, just make sure you're aware of your tradeoff.
If it's your morning coffee, I see you buddy! Enjoy your day.
I learned a lot during those years too, and in some ways had to learn those things no matter what role or opportunity I chose.
I received some advice to simply add 15 minute of additional "work" a week, and not any more until I could handle it to my baseline... and then be sure to add 15 minutes of "balance" a week as well. Where my work days would go long, I found I was able to tie in habits to go for a walk, eat, etc. This did let me stretch quite far for a longer time, and burn out was a much lower risk.
How efficiently or effectively I learned those lessons could be debatable, but putting in sheer hours on learning and learning to apply things has compounded in some areas very strongly.
At the same time it must be acknowledged that doing this in a way that is not balanced can naturally lead to under development in other areas and it's worth trying to stay mindful of.
Hard work isn't a bad thing, it's the gap of not learning, not improving, not reflecting. There's no shortcut to putting in the work or learning the learnings.
> In other words, to people reading questioning if they're working too much: it's okay to work hard as long as you're doing it for the right reasons.
I personally feel that working reasonable hours even when junior is just as productive for learning, etc. The only thing I learned from being a workaholic is, to not be a workaholic.
Building muscle is much harder than maintaining muscle.
And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before.
It's pretty comparable to skills. You don't need to practice as hard to maintain a skill than you do to build it. And if you let the skill atrophy, it's much easier to recover the skill compared to building it from scratch.
> And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before.
This very much depends on age. I went on statins about 18 months, which destroyed about 15lbs of muscle over the course of a year (160->145). Along with that muscle loss came about a halving or more of the weights I could lift in any given exercise. I interpreted the "do you have any weakness on this medication" question as inability to function levels of weakness, it wasn't until I showed my training logs to my physician that she asserted that I was having weakness.
It's been a year since I went off them and I'm still lifting barely what I could in high school. I'm exploring some different training plans, but AFAIK, there isn't much research into if different weight/volume breakdowns work better for older guys.
I’ve got 20 inch lean arms - I know far more about muscle building and retention than you. I train just as hard to maintain them as I did to get them there.
The people who say “oh it’s easy to maintain” LOL it’s easy to maintain 16 inch arms.
Chiming into this little tiff to say I think bulk muscle is a bad analogy in the first place. It’s more akin to a muscle memory/skill. Something like golf is a better analogy. If you took any golfer, at any level, and had them refrain from golfing for 3 years. I feel pretty confident asserting they would all perform worse than they had. Their skill is diminished.
They would also likely get that skill back faster than a brand new golfer.
I noticed it myself with cycling. Took 8 years off the bike, when I started up again I was nearly back to my old FTP in about 2 months despite starting from basically zero. Muscle memory is real, where I am now as a returning cyclist would take a pure beginner cyclist at least 4+ months to get to, fitness wise.
That said, you do have to work somewhat hard to maintain. With cycling, just 2 weeks off the bike is enough to see a VO2 max drop of anywhere from 4 to 7%. After just 4 weeks, your glycogen storage capacity decreases and you start rapidly losing fitness. After 2 months, you are basically now out of shape.
Detraining happens faster than most people think. And therein lies the danger with over reliance on LLMs for your cognitive skills. Detraining there happens just as fast, skills atrophy in a matter of weeks, not months or years.
People could also regain some cognitive skill back rather fastr when they worked to regain it. But the issue is, many people just lack the motivation to do so. If you golf or cycle, it's likely a passion or hobby. Most people don't view their cognitive health this way, they view it as work. It's why most people don't read much after their schooling, learning and being smart was only ever an ends to a means (diploma, job, money, etc).
I think part of the problem is also that many people simply work too hard or have too much going on in their lives to have any kind of cognitive energy left for this sort of maintenance work, even when they reason/plan that it is useful. This also seems to be encouraged somehow (by society?), to keep going like a freight train, or maybe it doesn't get discouraged enough (i.e. it doesn't get recognized as a problem).
My experience as a parent to an only-child has shown me there's just zero boredom or tolerance of boredom. Any pause or void needs to be filled with something. Any time my son says "I'm bored" my default response has become "awesome", "you're lucky", "I wish I had time to be bored" along with other quips like "boredom is a life skill". Of course, I see this same phenomenon in adults as well. So my rebuttal is that most people have much more free time than they think, it's just a matter of prioritization.
This is just another instance of Adafruit's "drama-journalism" functioning as advertising. Adafruit turns its director/ex-director (current status unknown) Phillip Torrone's compulsive personal feuds into principled-sounding "advocacy" and harvests the resulting outrage as free marketing. Adafruit publicising a dispute while not publishing the underlying letter/breach is the smoking gun for this.
People are afraid to speak out on this because engaging @ptorrone or critiquing Adafruit carries significant risks.
There is a pattern of aggressive public confrontation before private resolution along with disproportionate responses & difficulty disengaging with critics.
Even mild criticism or jokes has resulted in abusive messages from PT, with Phil Torrone contacting their managers, employers, ex-employers (as called out by sparkfun) and even a critic’s partner’s workplace.
PT will continue the escalation even after being blocked/suspended on platforms resulting in @ptorrone being temporarily banned from Bluesky last year. Some people were even harassed via their Etsy stores.
> The fundamental reason S&P 500 exists is to let people buy the entire market
And why do people want to buy the entire market in the first place? They want to diversify and insulate themselves from a single company crashing their portfolio value.
What are people afraid of right now? They're afraid of a single company crashing their portfolio value.
Why are people afraid of their portfolio value crashing? Because these 3 companies will fundamentally increase the overall risk and volatility of the index.
The problem is people equating S&P 500 with "set and forget" investment when that's never what it was. It's an index. You're not paying anyone to balance it with a particular risk profile.
There are indexes that invest equal amounts of money into all companies, so Nvidia doesn't dominate. Or you can pick low growth high dividend indexes to insulate against AI. Or just grab Vanguard LifeStrategy if you don't want to think.
The current situation is unusual. No index can handle all situations. Either adapt or use a fund that does the thinking for you, right?
The current situation is unusual and the standard rules handled it fine. For some reason they're changing the rules. That's not "no index can handle all situations." It's a deliberate, harmful change.
People use the dollar in business becaUse its a stable currency.
If the US does something to destabilize the dollar, will economists be running around saying “the dollar was never intended to be used for that purpose!”? No.
It doesn’t really matter if the index “wasn’t supposed” to be something it became. The problem is the same. The only difference is who you blame.
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