If a person wants to build wealth, there are much easier and cheaper ways than buying a slowly appreciating asset that requires insurance, maintenance, and property taxes and would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars of interest payments in order to see any real equity

Sadly, I think a lot of people don’t know better

A friend used to work in computer sales. He was required to sell financing but frequently broke his sales script to ask if buyer understood how much they would end up paying for a $500 computer

Few cared. Monthly payment was all they understood

Here’s the breakdown of a $500,000 home with 5% down at 5% interest.

Who wouldn’t want to be tethered to a single asset for 50 years in exchange for paying double the asset value in interest and achieving little to no equity until year 25?

Financial illiteracy is a prerequisite for this

Absolutely!

Pundits could explain all this nuance too, but I think they know that saying it the troll-ish way is what gets the clicks.

Politics is a game of perceptions & popularity

Is this how normal Dems think? No! But huge coordinated conservative media campaigns have succeeded in making Democrats look incredibly weird and out of touch. Saying that they could fix that by tripling down on popular things is not a bad idea?

I dare you

Michio Kaku did this? I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

People will lie to themselves and unconsciously invent post hoc rationalizations for why they think what they do, but most of the time they are doing just that: lying to themselves

Politics is a game of manipulating human belief in order to create action. Dishonest people are better at the game

Please tell me it wasn't @alamodrafthouse.bsky.social that got cold feet

Epidemiology is hard! We can find real associations between things, but they aren’t always cause and effect. There’s often a third, invisible thing controlling them both.

Luckily, we have a way of teasing out the difference: Careful, well-designed scientific research studies.

Interesting things pop up when you ask “Why was mom taking Tylenol in the first place?”

Was it because of an infection or chronic illness during pregnancy? Maybe mom has a genetic or psych condition that leads to more Tylenol use? Do moms who use it have more access to doctors/autism diagnosis?

If acetaminophen truly increased autism risk, you’d expect to see higher rates in an exposed sibling compared to an unexposed sibling.

But they didn’t see that. It means the previous studies that suggested some link were being fooled by hidden family or genetic factors. It’s not the drug itself.

Last year a study of >2.4 million kids born in Sweden looked at Tylenol exposure and autism

At first, it seemed like there was a small association.

But then they compared siblings where one was exposed in utero and the other wasn’t and found no increased risk jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...