u/Major_Conflict

Respectfully, is it viable to become a teacher for the money, occupational job security, and holidays and still have an enjoyable, long, and successful career? Why or why not? Evidently teaching is a profession with very high churn. What kind of people stay for the long term?

It's a little bit late to ask now but I'm doing my teaching masters with this frame of mind. I'm 24 now. With my liberal arts undergraduate background, I don't know what other profession there is that has high-ish salaries, is easy to pivot to, and has a relatively low barrier to entry. I taught English at a training centre in China for a year and a bit so I think I have some idea what it might be like but I want other perspectives.

Central to my anxiety is this idea that most teachers seem to really buy into the idea of teaching as this grand calling to cultivate the generation of the future rather than as something that pays the bills.

Why did they get thrashed so hard exactly? They had guns right?

Mình là người nước ngoài nên đã dùng công cụ dịch để viết bài này bằng tiếng Việt. Nếu có chỗ nào chưa tự nhiên thì mong mọi người thông cảm.

Theo mình, đây là một chính sách rất ấn tượng. Nó khiến các dịch vụ công ở nhiều nước phương Tây phát triển trông kém hơn hẳn. Thật khó hiểu khi nhiều quốc gia giàu có hơn rất nhiều lại không thể cung cấp những dịch vụ như thế này, trong khi một nước đang phát triển như Việt Nam vẫn có thể dành nguồn lực để thực hiện. Nếu những quốc gia có ít nguồn lực hơn vẫn làm được, thì điều đó nói lên điều gì về các ưu tiên của những nước giàu hơn? Có lẽ các nước theo mô hình xã hội chủ nghĩa xứng đáng được ghi nhận nhiều hơn ở một số khía cạnh. Theo mình, điều này cho thấy vẫn còn rất nhiều điều mà các nước giàu có thể học hỏi và cải thiện.

It puts the public amenities in developed Western countries to shame. It's hard to understand how much wealthier countries can fall so far behind in providing services like this when even a developing country like Vietnam is able to devote the resources to it. It really highlights how much room there is for improvement.

I recently got some topical steroid cream from a pharmacy without a prescription for my eczema. That was pretty cool. It's a prescription drug I'm pretty sure. I was just curious how far you could push it. What's fair game and what's not?

I know a lot of you here are divided on factor investing and may think that factor premiums don't exist (and maybe some of you don't know what they are) but regardless what do you think of my portfolio? I have 1 million USD split 50:50 between an Avantis small cap value ETF and an, also Avantis, lightly-factor tilted emerging markets ETF. If you are familiar with factor investing you can guess the reasoning for my first allocation. My rationale with the second ETF is that a) emerging markets have a low correlation with US equities so it's ideal for diversifying and maximising uncorrelated returns b) emerging markets have underperformed the last 2 decades so it seems sensible as mean reversion is a thing in investing. It's not a sector bet (it's widely diversified) as the second ETF maintains within it stocks from many different countries and across different sectors and of different sizes. Once again, the factor tilt seems self-explanatory. I think this portfolio sits within my personal risk tolerance but who knows if I'll be able to stomach potentially years of underperformance psychologically for higher potential returns (in theory). What do you think of it?

Graduates in NSW start out at $90k and cap out after several years at $129k based on years of service. That sounds pretty good to me especially if you like kids. You don't need to be particularly hard working or intelligent to get the qualification either. On top of that, there's a shortage so it's easy to get and keep a job compared to other professions like law and accounting where competition is fierce. That's why I'm half a year into my teaching master's. What's the catch? It seems much better than a job in hospitality or retail.

Graduates in NSW start out at $90k and cap out after several years at $129k based on years of service. That sounds pretty good to me especially if you like kids. You don't need to be particularly hard working or intelligent to get the qualification either. On top of that, there's a shortage so it's easy to get and keep a job compared to other professions like law and accounting where competition is fierce. That's why I'm half a year into my teaching master's. What's the catch? It seems much better than a job in hospitality or retail.

I'm thinking of buying some cheap rural unproductive land in the country, building a shed, and then filling it with metric tonnes of vacuum sealed white rice and dried beans. I think that and a water source nearby should be enough to greatly improve my odds of survival. Do you think with the odds of such an event happening, it would be worth the investment? I feel like people don't weigh that risk in their minds enough. It seems like it could happen so easily.

So I'm 24 and I bought a gram of weed at a dispensary in Bangkok and I made this really stupid decision to smoke it on a chair next to a table outside. I thought I'd just get a bit of a high and I'd be able to walk home easily. In retrospect that was a huge mistake. The weed sold there is quite potent as in upward of 20 percent THC. Anyway, I didn't feel anything so I kept smoking until 3/4 of the 1 gram joint had been smoked.

By the time it hit me I knew I had overdid it. I was getting too high too fast. I tried to walk home but 5 minutes of the way back I felt I could barely stand and had to sit down on some brick stairs. Soon, I couldn't sit down either and I had to lie down too in a really socially unacceptable way. I had what felt like a 4 hour fever dream where I couldn't move my body at all. I had lots of paranoid thoughts that people would judge me for getting intoxicated in public and maybe they would call the police for being disruptive. I also felt some people were jeering and laughing when they walked past and maybe some of that was true.

I was with my gf at the time and she stayed me throughout and assured me that nobody really cared about me and I don't know how true that was. Eventually I could get up and go home provided that she led me by the hand throughout.

I think if I had just smoked it on the balcony like a normal person I'd have a good experience. Not to say that it was all bad. I kind of enjoyed how surreal it was.

I don't want to just buy VT because that's just indexed to the market cap. I want to maximise uncorrelated returns. How do I do that without bonds and other asset classes?

I don't want to just buy VT because that's just indexed to the market cap. I want to maximise uncorrelated returns. How do I do that without bonds and other asset classes?

Basically, I consider myself to be fairly comfortable--I'm in my mid-twenties and I'm part of the two comma club, but when I describe to people how I take public transport everywhere or even walking when time is not urgent, taking a coach bus or train when travelling to different cities or countries instead of flying, wearing well-worn unfashionable second-hand clothes, driving old second-hand cars, offering to eat other people's food when they won't finish their plate, etc. etc. I get treated as if I'm despicable, destitute, pathetic, or a combination of all of these by the people I talk with.

Of course, this isn't always the case but many people are extremely judgmental in this regard. I feel like it's really wrong to worship conspicuous consumption in this way. For one, you can't tell how much money someone has by their habits. Second, it's just really really shallow. Why not judge them by how compassionate they are to other people instead, or use a billion other things?

Anyway, this type of attitude really really annoys me. Does anyone else feel the same?

I see a lot of people advertising themselves as prostitutes discreetly or otherwise and I'm just wondering how much money do these people actually make. Do they quit their dayjob or can they just find 1 or 2 clients a week or something. How much do people charge for their services? Is it this gold mine people are sleeping on because too many value dignity over money or just not really a very profitable industry?

So for a long time investors have bought into this story that emerging markets equities trade at significantly lower valuations than developed markets equities because of geopolitical risk, currency risk, lack of transparency, etc. but how much of that is true and how much of that is a hangover from a couple of decades ago?

I've recently travelled to a number of developing countries, particularly in Asia, and going there instantly dispelled any notion of the superiority of developed nations. The infrastructure in most countries was clean and modern and they just generally seemed to be very vibrant and nice places to live. Maybe in the past these places really were full of poverty and crime, but if it has it certainly seems like huge progress has been made.

I think a lot of people have already started to question the narrative of US superiority in light of the progress countries like China have made and I think this trend will continue especially with the historically high valuations of US equities.

I think it's as close of a thing to a surefire bet that emerging markets will outperform developed markets in the medium to long term. Consider how it has underperformed for the last two decades and how unpopular of an investment It has become. It seems primed for a bull run as popular sentiment shifts. Even if it does underperform there is limited downside as there is next to zero hype around emerging markets.

Am I missing anything here?

Why spend your time defending people who would throw you under the bus the second it benefited them politically? Have some self-respect. They think you're freaks lol.

I'm 24 and I recently inherited a million dollars (not much money anymore these days I know). How do I grow that amount into a lot more than that. Currently I have it all invested in a factor-weighted emerging markets ETF. But returns are so slow. I want more haha. But I guess higher returns mean a corresponding level of risk.

I was thinking of creating an online retail business selling classically fitted trad/ivy/prep clothing at Uniqlo prices. Like a kind of quality clothes at affordable prices model because I don't think any brand sells this kind of thing at the prices I'm looking for. I feel like I could definitely afford to do it if I operate this business in a very lean way. I don't know how much of a pipe dream this is can anyone tell me?

Although I appreciate the LGBT movement for what it did in largely decriminalising and destigmatising male on male sexual behaviour, I think it's incredibly ridiculous to define people by their sexual preferences. For instance, you will often hear things like gay musician or gay writer even when their sexual inclinations are barely relevant to their life's work.

To me, I feel it would be like if some Muslims started to identify under a pork-eating label defining themselves around their preference for pork over other meats and wanting other people to view them as pork-eaters.

Like, there are no gay bonobos. Bonobos just have sex with what they feel like at the time. I would like a movement that destigmatises gay sex for everyone. Not just gay people. People who have gay sex should not be othered or treated as some freak accident of biology.

The whole idea of "homosexual" as a separate malformed subspecies of human originated in 19th century pseudo-scientific ideas about the sex drive being geared solely for reproduction and all other expressions of sex as falling short of it. They even had terms for things like masturbators (onanists), etc. Before that there were no homosexuals. Just sodomy which was a sin and a crime just like burglary. In other societies like in the ancient Greco-Roman world and in Japan and China there was no prejudice at all or the prejudice was more about gender expression and sexual roles. So in the latter 20th century when masturbating and everything else became accepted as normal homosexual sex didn't.

But that doesn't make sense. "Straight" people have non-reproductive sex or sex for recreation all the time. Of course a large part of it was that society wasn't and isn't ready to let go of the taboo just yet. But it doesn't help that LGBT activists continued to perpetuate the pseudo-scientific homosexual otherness idea with the "born this way" rhetoric. But maybe that was the only way society could accept homosexual behaviour.

I understand that homosexuals were defined that way first by society. But I think it was a mistake for "homosexuals" to rally under that label.

TLDR: The whole concept of sexual identity is a modern invention and shouldn't exist. It only serves to other people who choose to have sex with their own sex.