And don't forget about the myriad expenses that most people don't realize are a major ongoing part of owning a house. Rarely do people factor in that a house is disintegrating daily and you need to spend serious money on a regular basis to keep it from becoming a pile of garbage.
This is the figure I always point to when people ask me why I'm not buying.
From there, you can start stacking additional costs and savings on both sides of the argument. I've done that math, too, and found that, at least in my area, that only makes buying look even worse.
That said, in a lot of places (e.g., small towns and suburbs), it's slim pickings for apartments that aren't basically bachelor pads or eyesore cookie cutter developments. If I didn't live in a major metro area, I'd probably be buying, too.
I use AdBlock https://www.adblockios.com on iOS which runs a local DNS server that can blackhole domains. It doesn't work well on very large host files so I gave up trying to import https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts, but it does work well for smaller lists.
(1) Install "1Blocker X" -- not free but it's cheap.
(2) It has a huge number of rules and protects your Safari pretty damn good.
(3) You can disable the existing rules if you so choose.
(4) You can add new ones based on URL regexes or CSS rules.
I am still using it actively both on my iPhone and iPad, one of the best investment in apps I ever did.
I tried pi-hole but my family couldn't make it work. Pihole blocks a lot of content they want to see, for example, email newsletters from our city gov. I understand why (privacy/tracking concerns) but it was just blocking too much and frustrating non-technical users in my house.
A lot of these list maintainers put a lot of work into not breaking things, but their are just too many websites out their to know if a block breaks one of them or not. Send the list maintainer an email - or if they are on Github/Gitlab open a ticket and have a discussion. I think you'll find many of them are happy to remove breaking domains. Of course whitelist is always an option too if the list maintainer disagrees with the removal of a domain.
I spoke directly with the pihole maintainers. They took a Hardline position that them blocking email from my city was the right thing to do because it used click tracking or some other metric gathering and was deemed a privacy risk.
I understand the devotion to a cause but it was too myopic for me.
As far as I know, the pi-hole maintainers do not maintain any of the default block lists. I maintain a list [1] that is then feed into the popular host list by Steven Black [2] - which is a default list.
I definitely do not want to break things for people and I'm happy to remove any reasonable domains from the list. I wouldn't consider google analytics a reasonable one to remove - but you get the idea. I hate to hear you had a bad experience of it. If my list had the breaking domains for you, I would of loved to have a ticket opened where we could discuss it. Sometimes it isn't clear cut between ads & tracking and useful services.
As commented below, we don't actually maintain any of the lists, so that wasn't us you spoke to!
You can configure the lists that you use to suit your needs. You can also whitelist any domains that you need. It's up to you what you ultimately block!
Hmmm, not sure I recall. Mind linking back to the conversation? Point is, we don't choose what domains are blocked or not, so there is nothing we can do except ship with a default whitelist. But we're not going to do that either, if we were to start doing that... what's to say we wouldn't whitelist something more nefarious.
It's safest for us, and our reputation, to stay out of the finer points of the actual blocked/not domains and instead defer to individual list maintainers who make that their business.
That post is 2 years old, and the op understood and was ok with the outcome...
Oobe is either
1)leave suggested defaults as is
2)don't use those lists.
Option 2 is available in the installer before you're even up and running. There is only so much hand holding we can do, to be fair. We have an extensive support community, and plenty of documentation, and yes, whilst I agree some users may fall between the cracks, the majority are able to find a solution to their problems.
There is no doubt that pihole works for some people. I'm just giving my honest review: it didn't work for me. It blocked too much. I asked for guidance and got a lecture about privacy.
And I did find a solution, just not with you product :)
I found the same thing with emails sent from an airline. It was frustrating because I did actually want to follow the links in the emails as they were to do with a flight I was taking.
The included dashboard with the pi-hole is incredibly easy to use, so I just have it bookmarked on all our browsers in case someone in my family needs to pause it or whitelist/blacklist a site. We barely ever have to touch it though, mostly just to update the blocklists occasionally.
That's interesting. There's another comment further down saying it broke stuff too, but I've honestly never had that happen. The most I've ever seen it "break" anything was formatting issues when people didn't declare the ad div size.
To be fair, we're very light/casual web users as most of my hobbies/entertainment are physical electronics and my wife/kids mostly watch Netflix/Stan or just browse reddit/news sites.
I'm sure there's plenty of stuff it breaks (due to how it works and how complex modern sites/web-apps can be), I've just been lucky that all of the sites we use seem to work fine.
> The most I've ever seen it "break" anything was formatting issues when people didn't declare the ad div size.
Haha, I remember some years back a popular C++ programming site would break if you didn't have an adblocker because someone had put wide header banner ads in both of the side banner areas, shrinking the text to a single word column in the middle. I guess they only tested their website with adblockers on...
I'm very curious why it would block city gov.
I've been running it for over a year on my server and I have not heard a peep out of any family members complaining about not reaching anything.
A lot of newsletters use click tracking. These scripts are blocked with a full block list, making everything unusable. It's often affiliate stuff and the newsletters that do this stuff
I'm bullish on the sentiment expressed by the parent poster, actually.
Like another commentator, I believe index funds are going to be ripped hard and this is what the average saver has been told to dump their money into by the banking industry since the last crisis.
Only around 50% of Americans own any stock at all, including indirect ownership like IRAs and pensions. So, I don’t see the working class suffering that much due to stock market decline. They will suffer due to joblessness.
If you know your history, it's the "middle class" that has directed just about every non-marxist revolution.
I guess I should add the clarification that I think most folks who consider themselves middle-class and who are investing and saving money are actually working-class.
If you don't own your residence outright or have the liquid assets to purchase it and still make investments, you are working-class.
If you live in the valley and can't afford to buy and can't uproot your job to somewhere more affordable to buy while maintaining roughly the same income level, you're working-class too.
>If you know your history, it's the "middle class" that has directed just about every non-marxist revolution.
One can make a strong argument (even from marxist sources) that even the marxist revolutions were mostly directed by the middle class; most of the marxists call it the intelligentsia, but these were mostly educated men at a time when that meant more than it does now. (and even now, I think most people consider a good education enough to make you "middle class" even if you don't make that much scratch.)
I mean, all this depends on your definition of a "revolution" and of "middle class" - if I define "middle class" as "powerful or educated enough to get something done, while not being super rich" and I define revolution as "overthrow of the government by people who aren't already at the top of the power structure" then it almost becomes tautological; if people are powerful enough to start a revolution, by that definition, you are middle class or better, and if an elite starts a revolution, by that definition, it's then a coup.
(I'm not suggesting those are your definitions of revolution and middle class; just that the definition of those two words (and the definition of those two words is kinda fuzzy) makes all the difference in this question)
Really, I think the argument is weaker on the other side; I mean, there are a fair number of revolutions that were lead by the elites; the American revolution and the ACW to name two; I mean, the latter a lot more than the former, but even in the former, a whole lot of the leaders were rich enough that they didn't need to work more than they wanted to; most of them literally and legally owned other human beings, a level of wealth that is impossible today.
(but now it could be said that I'm changing the definition of elite to mean someone who has so much capital that they don't need to work. Still, I think that in both those wars, some of the leaders were also some of the richest people around. I'm also using a right-ish definition of revolution, especially in calling the ACW a revolution and not a reaction. I personally feel that 'reaction' might be reasonably applied to the ACW, at least, just because it was a clear attempt to roll back what would be called, really then and now, progress.)
Investing in total market index funds is literally investing in the economy as a whole. (Or as much of a whole as the index represents.) So while yes, they will crash with future market crashes, of which there will be many in each of our lifetimes, historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered.
"historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered."
This is sorta enshrining survivorship bias in your premises - take the largest economy around today and point out that every time it's crashed, it's recovered. Well, if it hadn't, there wouldn't be anything to point at.
There are actually plenty of examples - even among European settlers of the Americas - where the economy did not recover. The Continental Congress and the monetary system setup under it failed through hyperinflation, leading to the expression "not worth a Continental", and then the country had to be rebooted under the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, plantation owners in the Confederate States of America were totally wiped out - not only was the currency debased, the infrastructure destroyed, and the plantations burned, but the whole legal framework under which the plantation system operated was rewritten.
But you are comparing with fledgling/emerging markets. Samples of failures at this point to scare people should be declines of economies established for more than a hundred years. The falls of empires, etc. Those are what are relevant to the current US investor.
According to this article [1], public firms account for about 80% of the pre-tax profit in the private sector. That's probably enough, given that public and private company returns are probably at least somewhat correlated.
Right. But I'd wager that index fund investors are more interested in profits than GDP, at least as it relates to their investments and the proposition at the top of this thread that index funds will be "ripped" (presumably disproportionately) in the next downturn.
Right. If you have a wide market downturn, all of the "active investors" are going to take their money out as cash and wait to buy and the "passive investors "are going to take a bath.
The mistake that index fund adherents make is that there is no such thing as passive investing.
Certain market participants have been screaming about this fact to anyone who will listen for 2+ years now.
> Certain market participants have been screaming about this fact to anyone who will listen for 2+ years now.
There's an alarming amount of overlap between the groups: "claim that passive investing will underperform," and "make money when people actively invest."
First, it's literally impossible for all of the "active investors" to take their money out as cash; some active investors can cash out by selling all their stock to other active investors who think that this is a good time to buy more stock; passive investors would/could only absorb that amount of stock at the speed of new passive capital coming in, which is gradual, not that large (compared to the flows of active investors) and would likely slow down somewhat in a market downturn.
Furthermore, how exactly are "passive investors" going to take a bath? They're simply making a very long term bull market bet; if DJI drops 50%, it's the active investors that might sell at this price, but the index funds will just keep their position until (and after) it recovers, the only case where they'll lose in the long run is if the DJI drops permanently and that doesn't seem plausible outside of ww3 scenarios.
I mean, there's some causality there; when the active investors try to take their money out as cash all at once, it does tend to have negative effects on the market. but... I think that, generally speaking, the goal of your active investors is to buy during the downturn, and sell into the upturn.
Buy low, sell high; not the other way around.
I mean, that's the goal. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way, but you don't plan on selling at the bottom and buying as it recovers.
It's only a milestone if you make it a milestone. You don't have to participate in these made up events if you don't want to.
I'd recommend the book "a guide to the good life" by William Irvine. It may help you transform your "anhedonia" from something negative to something positive.
