They can always hurt you more. The market turns right before you retire? Lol there goes your 401k. Meanwhile, their hedge funds have made enough shorting the market to keep them afloat until it bounces back.

As long as the market’s doing well, yes.

You borrow $100 at 3% against a $125 asset and then invest it in an asset that appreciates 10%. After a year, your debt is $103 against a $137.50 asset, and your asset you bought with the loan is worth $110.

You take a second loan of $88 against your new asset (80%). Your first asset is now worth $151 with a $106 loan against it. Your second asset is now worth $121 with a $91 loan against it. And you have an extra $88 to spend on top of it.

So after 2 years, you started with $125 in assets and now have $272 in assets with $194 in debt, for a net gain of $78, and have pulled out $88 in cash tax-free. Whereas if you’d just left the money in the market you’d have only gained $26, and would have to sell and pay taxes on it to actually access that money.

This is the essence of the “borrow, repeat, die” strategy. It gets more complex as you’re typically making minimum payments on loans and working with large sums of money, but this is the basic strategy. It works as long as your investment profile keeps generating interest, which is why the rich use hedge strategies and other tricks to keep the money flowing during recessions. But an unexpected downturn can have the bank suddenly margin call you when you’re underwater on your loan, and then you might be facing bankruptcy if you didn’t do it right.

Generally yes, but it depends. For example, there are no FOSS games that are anywhere near the AAA games from 15 years ago, let alone today. But things like browser? FOSS all the way.

It actually makes sense if you think about it.

Titanic was Cameron’s previous record breaker, and still has more cultural impact than Avatar. Why? Because it’s also one of the best selling home media films of all time. People watched it in theaters, then took it home and watched it again. They watched it when it aired on tv.

Even before home media, movies like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were released in theaters multiple times, and then later were sold on home media and aired on tv. Home media films are the ones generations grow up with and continue to talk about.

Avatar movies are purely theatrical films. How many people are rewatching them dozens of times on streaming? Likely very few. So the buzz only shows up when one enters theaters, and once the theater run is done the buzz dies down.

And between films, people only really talk in meta-commentary: the box office, whether the films are overrated, whether they have cultural impact, etc. No one is comparing Jake Sully to Captain Kirk or Luke Skywalker, no one is shipping characters, no one’s commenting on the plot at all, they only talk about the films as films.

“Congratulations on the winners, and I hope everyone had a great time[…]I hope you will join me next time for more Pokémon or drug fun!”

Yes, this was definitely the final exam and not a trivia game.

Alas, what started in their network soon became a social currency for adults online. Gen Xers and Millennials—the parents of today’s middle schoolers—couldn’t leave six-seven be; they’re accustomed to burning through such memes like their parents or grandparents did cigarettes, as if culture writ large can withstand habitual abuse. Social-media-influencer culture also latched on to the phrase for its own attentional ends, as did brands, the indefatigable scavengers. These forces stole six-seven from the kids who had nurtured it.

Yeah ok. It was a song lyric first and then became a TikTok basketball video meme. It was an adult meme that kids latched onto. How dare adults continue to use it and destroy childlore or whatever?