this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Index funds are much better than individual stocks. But Index fund price to earnings ratios (P/E) still reflect their individual component stocks.

When the P/E ratio is 40, a rough way to read that is "it will take 40 years of stability for this purchase to pay off".

Many people don't have 40 working years left to wait for a stock purchase today to pay off.

And the supply of "years of stability" isn't looking amazing, right now, either.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

More or less this, yes.

Index funds are generally less risky than trying to pick individual stocks, balance your own long term portfolio, or god help you, be an active day trader...

But, as pinball wizard says... if the blend of stocks the index etf is based on... if all the components are also varying degrees of delusional...

Then everything could break, rather rapidly, if enough small delusions, or one big shared delusion... are revealed as such.

I'm not actually, nor have I ever legally been a financial advisor, but I am giving some advice:

Go make a chart of the DJIA, divided by the USD price of Gold.

... Gold is pretty signifcantly outperforming the stock market, in this 2nd Trump term.

As the Chinese say, we are currently living in 'interesting' times.