Tulip mania!

Irrational Exuberance

Roaring 20s?

Capitalism?

You think status signaling isn't part of biology? That it just happened to independently appear in every human culture and many animals that we are aware of?

Social status is a big part of what makes a person attractive especially if you're a man.

I think we're underestimating how relatively recent these social phenomena are.

Just a few decades ago, the average person had very limited exposure to people outside of their immediate town (outside of celebrities and public figures), which really grounds your standards and expectations of other people. Spend 5 minutes in any social media or dating app today and average people around you will start to look severely below average.

There was also stronger cultural pressure to settle down by a certain age, which again, forces you to be more realistic with your options. The tldr is that Our Paleolithic biology has only so much capacity to adapt to today’s rapidly changing culture and environment.

System of education? The current form of it have nudges and blockers everywhere to stop population explosion leading us all into Soylent Green type situation.

I thought Biology drives coupling, not partnering.

Porn and 4B divert coupling...

Referring to ownership, not renting

Housing is incredibly expensive. Roughly half of Korea lives and works in the Seoul metro area. The average salary is roughly 40,000 USD and the average apartment (maybe 84 square meters) is over 1 million USD.

Government efforts to cool housing inflation have resulted in a 40 percent minimum down payment for a mortgage.

Housing in Seoul and much of Gyeonggi is a pipe dream for most

>It's impossible to have expensive real estate

no it's very possible because in an aging country people relocate to a handful of cities. 50% of South Korea's population now lives in the Seoul metropolitan area. The real estate that's getting cheaper is the one decaying in the countryside.

It's like saying Russia can't have expensive real estate because the country is big, what matters is where people are actually moving.

Huh? According to https://seoulhomes.kr/en/properties/prices/, in Q1 2026, the average apartment in Seoul sells for ~₩1.2B, ~₩45M per 3.3sqm, that's ~840k USD and ~9.6k USD per sqm or ~900 USD per sqft, in what world is that cheap?

Population can age fast while the supply of desirable places to live still doesn't meet demand.

The threshold for greed is higher than the median net worth of an American. We tell people they need "generational" wealth to a make it in this country because housing, education, and healthcare are all so expensive

Seems to me that many people do not care about part 3 anymore.

This is the logical end conclusion, but in reality, we live in a middle ground where plenty of people have and will live in a society where they can sell their labor for a perfectly content life.

Did it never occur to you how the vast majority of people acquire initial capital is via labor?

Investment or business do also have some gambling factors in it. And both usually cost extreme amounts of money to get started.

However, I found that if the bar of doing business is high enough, "investing" in stock market maybe safer than start a proper business. Because if a business failed, you likely lost a huge amount wealth, including everything you put into the business and maybe more. Whereas if you buy stock responsibly (for example, DCA VOO/&QQQ), there's a high chance you'll eventually bounce back.

Maybe that's one reason the young Koreans invested so much in their stock markets. Their country failed them by restricting them from opportunities, the only way they can save themselves is by gambling.

Indeed, pg has an essay about it: https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

You also can't earn extreme amounts of money. You can only win it by gambling.

It's a quote, and somewhat of a figure of speech. Also Charlie was born in 1924; he was literally of a different era.

[dead]

> This is a bit disingenious, note that Buffet did not use leverage...

In a way, but Buffet wasn't making those investments exclusively using his own money. Effectively there's a degree of implied leverage when you get a performance reward from investing other people's money.

Buffet funded his investments with insurance float

There's very few people in the world that can maintain 47 years of uninterrupted discipline. Most people hit one or a number of:

- A significant health issue that also drains them economically

- A broken marriage that cuts their savings in half (or less)

- A low point in their life where saving for retirement just doesn't make sense in their heads anymore because they feel they'd rather die tomorrow.

- A streak of bad events longer than they planned for (the car breaks down, they got fired and their mother-in-law needs financial assistance all at the same time)

- Etc, etc...

The point is: nobody is retiring a millionare through the process you described. Either you save signfiicantly more at certain points (because you earn more) and get lucky enough with the above where you make it there, or you don't retire a millionare even after having saved consistently for many periods in your life.

3% less annual returns than the S&P500 over 10 years and the entire fund lifetime. That's a considerable difference.

target date funds always confused me, b/c they don't account for the rest of my portfolio.

My IRA/401(k) actually has close to 100% cash/bonds to minimize annual taxable impact and the rest of my portfolio is equities.

In Europe bonds are mostly out of fashion because they pay very little or have considerable risk of default. At least for retail investors.

To be precise, it's because of Korea's corporate structure. Korea operates in a way that favors large conglomerates. Since the media is also owned by corporations, it tends to protect corporate interests rather than amplify citizens' voices.

The core problem with 'sacrificing one region to save another' is that you need a market to consume what you're saving. But there is no market to consume it. Most regions are organized around subcontractors for specific large conglomerates.

The typical structure is: large conglomerate (prime contractor) -> powerful local subcontractor -> sub->subcontractor. Often, the powerful local subcontractors are companies founded by former executives from the prime contractor.

In other words, it's a subcontractor-of-subcontractor structure—and the state doesn't block it; it actually encourages it. To survive, independent developers have to work as sub-subcontractors. Because starting a business requires capital.

I've worked across a wide range of fields: finance, drones, factory machinery, tax SaaS, and more. I've worked in over 20 domains. Why? Because while developers are scarce in regional areas and needed, when project budgets shrink, developer labor costs are the first to be cut. Since there's no other work, developers accept poor conditions. And once you get on the wrong side of a powerful local company, finding the next job becomes difficult.

Most independent developers can't succeed unless they can handle this wide range of domains.

Suppose you make an app that 1 in 10,000 people use. In the US, with 340 million people, that's 34,000 users. Add in the English-speaking world, and the potential user base is even larger. And since the global UI/UX standards are based on US standards, it's easier for apps to scale globally.

But if you release an app in Korean, and 1 in 10,000 people use it, that's only about 5,000 users out of 50 million. The scale gap is enormous.

That's why Korea has concentrated everything into one region to maintain global competitiveness. This is the side effect.

But I think this is becoming a global problem. Just as the fertility crisis isn't unique to Korea, Korea is just a more visible case because its landmass is small. I'm convinced that all countries will eventually go through similar pains

> That actually sounds like a business opportunity, if there is a steady stream of people moving out if Seoul.

They aren't. That's why those areas are falling behind.

It could work, but those types of jobs (paying significantly more than local salary and yet fully remote in a different time zone) are few and not easy to get nowadays (not that they were ubiquitous before).

English(lang) is the problem.

Korean and English have very different grammatical structures. I can read English in real time, but writing, listening, and speaking are difficult. (Maybe it'd be different if I were more proficient, but I've never lived abroad, so that's how it is.)

Because of that, remote work usually requires speaking, so most interviews end in rejection. I can communicate through chat, but the vast majority of employers want interviews.

And as the IT industry has grown and become more established, Korea has developed its own standards that diverge from global norms. This makes Korean IT hard to sell globally. I try to follow global standards, but in Korea, I'm told I'm using 'wrong technology' or doing 'over-engineering.'

Either way, the technology you learn or implement is often quite different—because the market leaders set the technical standards.

So independent developers in Korea have to learn both Korean IT standards and global standards—on top of English. (This is extremely painful.)

So if I could do remote work for a foreign company, it would be really, really great. But in reality, English is usually where things fall apart. Koreans often praise Korean as a 'scientific' language, but for most Koreans, it actually acts as a shackle. On the other hand, it's also because of this language that the domestic market is able to maintain at least a minimum level of viability.

US household assets are fairly well distributed between real-estate and equity markets. China for example previously had ~70% of its household wealth tied up in real-estate, which has suffered enormous declines over the past four or five years.

That said, there's no question that US households have grown fat on the massive expansion of the tech giants. A one trillion $ market cap was shocking not long ago, now you've got Apple and Nvidia at $4-$5 trillion, each about as valuable as China's top 25-30 stocks combined. The US wealth base is highly exposed to a PE multiple compression event, which is likely whenever the bubbly valuations centered around the AI boom reduce.

Also to put a reference figure on it, China's top 500 stocks are roughly worth $11.5 trillion. Nvidia + Apple are worth a combined ~$9.6 trillion.

Auatralians are a great case study. Once you control for pensions and similar indirect exposure, Australians have very high stock market exposure.

Indeed. It's so much bigger (in notional terms) than the underlying stock market that you can manipulate it by making large bets in the derivatives market, then move the underlying cash markets with much smaller bets, and collect profit.

That is what Jane Street (IIRC) was accused of. Some of its traders then went to another hedge fund and did the same trick there, reducing Jane Street's profit, and ended up being sued by Jane Street. (BTW, Jane Street claims it was not manipulation, but basis trade arbitrage.)

Of course, 9 out of 10 gambler end up in the red.

Don't get caught up on the geography.

> It is also used despite many developed countries or regions not being culturally Western (e.g. Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao)

It's a USA colony so yes