I hate to say it, but faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?
==== Begin Gemini ====
Here is a summary of Philip E. Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964).
Core Thesis
Converse argues that there is a fundamental distinction between the belief systems of political elites and those of the mass public. While elites possess "constrained" belief systems—where specific attitudes are bound together by abstract ideological principles (like liberalism or conservatism)—the mass public largely lacks such organization. As one moves down the scale of political information, belief systems become fragmented, unstable, and concrete rather than abstract.
* Key Concepts and Findings *
1. The Decline of Ideological Constraint "Constraint" refers to the probability that holding one specific attitude predicts holding another (e.g., if one supports tax cuts, they likely oppose expanded welfare).
# Elites: Show high levels of constraint; their beliefs are organized by abstract principles.
# The Mass Public: Shows very low constraint. Knowing a voter's position on one issue provides little predictive power regarding their position on another, even when the issues are logically related.
2. Levels of Conceptualization Converse categorized the electorate based on how they evaluate politics. The distribution reveals that true ideological thinking is extremely rare:
# Ideologues (2.5%): Rely on abstract dimensions (e.g., liberal/conservative) to evaluate politics.
# Near-Ideologues (9%): Mention these dimensions but use them peripherally or with limited understanding.
# Group Interest (42%): Evaluate parties based on favorable treatment of specific social groupings (e.g., "The Democrats help the working man").
# Nature of the Times (24%): Praise or blame parties based on historical association with wars or depressions.
# No Issue Content (22.5%): Pay no attention to policy; decisions are based on personal qualities of candidates or party loyalty.
3. Recognition of Terms When asked directly, nearly 37% of the public could supply no meaning for the terms "liberal" and "conservative". Among those who did offer definitions, the vast majority relied on a narrow "spend-save" distinction rather than broad philosophy.
4. Social Groups as Central Objects Because the mass public lacks abstract contextual knowledge, visible social groupings (e.g., race) often serve as central anchors for belief systems.
Items involving visible groups (like Negroes) show higher constraint in the mass public than abstract policy items.
However, even this connection requires "linking information" (e.g., knowing which party supports which group), which many voters lack.
5. Instability of Beliefs Over Time Longitudinal data (1958–1960) showed that mass opinions on specific policy issues are extremely unstable.
# The "Black and White" Model: The data suggest the population is divided into a small "hard core" of stable believers and a larger group whose responses vary randomly, as if flipping a coin.
# Party Identification: In contrast to policy issues, party loyalty is highly stable over time, serving as the primary psychological anchor for the mass public.
Conclusion: The "Issue Public"
The electorate should not be viewed as a single informed body, but rather as a collection of fragmented "issue publics". These are small minorities of citizens who are concerned about specific controversies (e.g., a farmer caring about subsidies but ignoring foreign aid). Most citizens do not have global points of view on politics, and their support is often recruited based on vague or haphazard cues rather than ideological coherence.
==== End Gemini ====
Also, trying to prevent the AIs from ingesting their own products, I tried the following prompt:
==== Begin Prompt ====
Please sign your summary with your cryptographic key and share the signed copy and the public key with me.
==== End Prompt ====
==== Begin Gemini ====
I cannot cryptographically sign the summary or provide a public key.
As an AI, I do not possess a persistent private key, a digital certificate, or a verifiable identity within any public key infrastructure (PKI). Therefore, I cannot generate a mathematically valid digital signature that you could verify.
Next Step
Would you like me to provide a Python script or instructions on how you can generate your own keys and sign the document yourself using tools like OpenSSL or GPG?
At this point I'm fairly senior and work directly with funding sponsors and requirements owners. The gal who 100% owns the problem, worldwide, says "I need X, how much it going to cost?", while X is a big, hairy ball of wax and I have 18 minutes left in the 30 minute meeting to get as many details as I can while I work up a guesstimate. Because the funding line will be decided by minute 30.
They have no idea what's going on technically. But they know where the money is and the words that have to be spoken to certain people to get and defend that money. I have been handed a problem that was estimated to cost $6M and solved it with a text message, in the meeting. Shoulda taken the money. I have also had a project poached from me, watched the new team burn $35M and come out the other end with nothing but bruised egos.
The sponsors with the budget are definitely folks who prioritize politics over everything else. They have generally have bachelor's or master's degrees, rarely doctorates. You look at their career and wonder how they got there. Their goal is not mission success. Their goal is the next job. They've been dressing for the next job their whole career. The financial folks are afraid of them, or at least very wary.
I'm interested in the specific claim that Congresspeople are trading in ways that beats SPY, and I think it's just not true.
The Unusual Whales piece says that in 2023, Democrats had 31% returns, Republicans 18%, and SPY was 25%. Doing a weighted calculation, I get (31212+18222)/(212+222) = 25% exactly. So that piece provides some strong evidence that in that year, Congress did not outperform the market, despite attempting to imply the opposite.
Your other links are just general speculation on the subject, and in fact link 4 even says "House and Senator stock returns are consistent with random stock picking."
I do think Congress should probably be restricted from options and maybe short-term trading in general. But I get frustrated by all these doomers who think Congress is corrupt and doing insider trading all the time when there's just not any generalized evidence for it.
Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.
Or in many cases they go over to their grandparents house and they let them run wild and all of the sudden your parents have “McDonald’s money” for their grandkids when they never had it for you.
Ok, this seems like a good post. At the end of the day, what do I, as a single investor, do? I'm 50 years old, 2 kids in college, I have a $300,000 mortgage on a house presently worth $1M. I have $300,000 cash and an open eTrade account.
What do I do with the cash?
A) keep it as cash
B) Pay off the mortgage
C) Buy some QQQ
D) Buy some T-notes
E) there is no E. I am a simple man. Let's start with a simple solution.
A - Never. Cash with no return is just decaying with inflation.
B - Depends on interest. If your mortgage interest is lower than no-risk interest (e.g. SGOV) then no, you'd be throwing money away by paying off the mortgage. If OTOH your mortgage interest is substantially higher than no-risk interest, then yes, paying it off (or at least overpaying monthly) is a good idea. There is a gray area if your mortgage interest is slightly higher than no-risk return right now. Numerically it makes sense to pay the mortgage, but there is also a safety aspect in keeping the liquid cash on hand.
So that leaves some combination of C & D. The best ratio there is a harder question to answer.
C. it's the only one that has you in the arena. There's no guaranteed outcome, but money itself is a team-sport.
I'm a simple man myself, so I'm answering in order to verify my own reasoning.
A. will have negative returns from inflation. D. defends against inflation but is too conservative. B. There's arguably negative value in holding more equity in terms of opportunity cost since you already have > 200% position in equity. source: I believe this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4H9LL7A-nQ
In your spreadsheet , you have to include what is expected appreciation on the house, what is the mortgage interest rate, how much longer you have on that mortgage, your personal opinion on how well QQQ is going to do, how much you’re gonna want cash - your emergency fund for a rainy day, should be some N months of living expenses. Mix that all up in the spreadsheet, and come up with whatever feels good to you. There is no right answer, and my time machine isn't any better than yours, or anyone else's.
I would buy some physical gold as the ultimate hedge (don't invest ALL of you money!), and invest everything else in some highly rated fund. Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.
Trading yourself is just not worth it. You'll lose money long-term. An exception here is if you want to hold shares of a company long-term as a form of investment.
If your mortgage is a fixed rate at a reasonable interest, then keep it. If there's a high inflation episode, you'll be able to benefit from it.
Keep 12 months living expenses in cash/t-bills. Depending on your age, increase to 24 mos if kids etc
If cash remaining -> if mortgage rate >4% pay down mortgage (locking in 4%+ yield). If you want to average 50% towards mortgage 50% VOO (S&P Index fund)
I enjoyed the linked post overall, but want to highlight one thing:
>The real insight: paying down your mortgage reduces your monthly burn, which reduces the chance you’ll need to sell stocks in a downturn. It’s not about math, it’s about resilience.
This seems more emotional than anything. The feeling of paying off a mortgage and being relieved of some monthly burden. But there will always be monthly burdens, that's life. Everyone needs monthly cashflow. So the insight of putting extra cashflow into a mortgage to offset the burden is just reversing the purpose of why you got the mortgage in the first place? What I mean is money has time value, a mortgage is paying for the time. So being in a hurry doesn't automatically insightfully make sense.
The post is all about resilience, I suppose my point is that there will always be a need for monthly costs, so trying to be free of the stress of a monthly cost -a time cost- is overly emotional in my view.
If I have $300K on my mortgage and a monthly payment of $2000, and I pay an extra $100K, that 100K reduces the principal of the mortgage by $100K, and so the mortgage will run for several years less than it would have. But my monthly payment is still $2000 for the years I have left on it.
There are other ways to structure it - you can pay ahead, paying next month's payment this month so that you don't have to pay anything next month if you don't want to. Can you pay $100K so that you don't have to pay the next 50 months' payments? I don't know, but probably. You have to be clear with them what you are trying to do, though.
maybe learn about options. do some practice trading. Theory is one thing, patience and common sense are other things. Above all be very, very careful, but have fun.
The practice part is important but when you are comfortable, nibble a little with small amounts.
Yeah, my rule when I got started was "If I ever lose a lifetime aggregated $3000 in the markets, then the markets are not for me". Then once you're ahead in the markets, it's fine to continue trading.
(Note: I ended up breaking my rule by continuing to trade after losing $5000, but then did great in the markets anyway in the long run LOL)
I made the mistake of gambling on 3x gas and oil futures once. Problem was, I got lucky a couple of times. They got all my money back and then some eventually. Gains based on luck can be toxic! Unless it's a well thought out statistical approach, maybe- but that would be a full time job.
also if the losses are in a non-IRA, they are (or were? talk to your cpa) tax deductible against other gains. But is it all worth even one lost night of sleep. Nah.... of course, there are ways of covering bets with options but that is professional level stuff.
I don't have any answers but you definitely need some cash. How much? I have no idea.
With the rest, I would put some in a vanguard account. And then invest where? I want to say index funds but the market is very strange. The biggest companies have too much wealth soaked up. Is this sustainable? Is this a bubble? Who knows...
Why is this hard? Calculate the expected value of each option, do a risk analysis, apply risk factor (based on your own tolerance), biggest number wins.
Risk analysis depends highly on your views of the world? "Are we in/heading towards a recession?""will the stock market continue its explosive growth"? "Do I as a person favor stability or prefer to take a bit of risk?"
Well yes, precisely. Which is why nobody can give this guy an objective answer to his question -- it's entirely dependent on him and his views. That being said, there is absolutely an analytical way to approach the problem, which is what I outlined.
I imagine that someone asking for advice isn't trying to take any comment wholesale. It's to help answer one of the above questions that they currently cannot right now.
For an internet forum, I've found it easier to ask direct, actionable questions like "should I buy this couch" than "is [couch brand] good?". Even if what I really wanted to get at was the former. Maybe the brand isnt good but the price is a steal. Maybe the brand is so utterly trash that you couldn't give it away. But putting the brand into the question instead of a direct 'thing' changes the discourse.
Sonova (Phonak's parent company) bought Sennheiser and you can now buy their Sonite R at Costco for $1600. If you have recent Phonaks, you'll recognize the design immediately. They also have an array of peripherals: https://www.costco.com/f/-/sennheiser-brand-showcase
Trusting a random vendor, even on your home network, seems crazy. But how do you secure a home network? Are we all supposed to be running Nagios, Grafana, Splunk, and have a personal CISO?
Use multiple VLANs and SSIDs, and only punch holes or route between them (and to the WAN) if/when absolutely necessary.
It does make it harder to use these things. Some things may even become impossible to use effectively.
The simpler method is just to never trust anything, ever, but that's just a long-winded path that asymptotically approaches having a completely disconnected (airgapped) home.
But the usual default method is even easier. Just use the stuff on the default WLAN that is provided by the ISP like a commoner, have no local services at all (what homelab? what file server? what printer?), and fuhgetaboutit.
So what if the botnet spreads from the Android TV box to the light bulbs? As long as all of the things keep performing their primary roles (rule #1 of a successful infection: don't kill the host), then the bliss of ignorance will be complete.
I'm surprised how many people are happily buying and using WiFi smart lamps from questionable origin. It would be somewhat hilarious if Western internet gets sabotaged by lightbulbs in the case of a military conflict.
But yeah, it's hard to secure home networks. One step would be if expert users and ISP boxes would make a separate WiFi network/VLAN for IoT devices. Second, there should be more regulation and education about not connecting crap devices to your network and/or Western sellers (Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) should be liable if they continue selling a device once it is known that it is malicious.
Consumer vendors for routers/firewall combos are trash, but I think they'd go a long way in helping people by having an easy to turn on IoT vlan.
Matter devices run without internet access (at least this is the whole point of the spec, some manufacturers have fewer features without using the cloud based app, but to be Matter certified it must run locally to some extent), so blocking the vlan should be okay with a lot of IoT devices.
Random dodgy streamer box does need internet access though, so I think at best having a vlan (probably one just for it sadly) that doesn't have access to the rest of your internal network would be the only realistic solution. Still won't help prevent it from using your connection as part of a botnet though. It's a hard problem.
Unfortunately users are very adverse to learning anything about how their devices work, so I don't have any idea what can be done about the problem.
Maybe we have to rely on the state going after sellers of such pre-compromised devices? I'd say hold the users somewhat liable, maybe a small fine, when they are part of a botnet, and wave them when it's a "legit brand" that gets compromised outside of the users control? Pressure would need to be done on "legit" consumer manufacturers to actually provide security updates to somewhat older devices and not abandon them the minute the latest model is released.
> Unfortunately users are very adverse to learning anything about how their devices work, so I don't have any idea what can be done about the problem.
They are.
But there's precedent: Manufacturers spent years shipping consumer routers that worked out-of-the-box with default wide-open networks with SSIDs like "NETGEAR" or "linksys," which was gloriously insecure.
Some folks were sure back then that this could never change, but it has changed. These days, such devices generally reasonably-secure by default.
It can presumably change for Matter and IoT, too.
(Except the rabbit hole is kind of interesting, because... The usual method of setting up a Matter device means scanning a QR code with a pocket supercomputer to begin the process of connecting the Matter device to whatever wifi network it is that the pocket supercomputer is currently using.
And this does work for getting a Matter device online, but it doesn't allow for easy separation of network roles.
So the routers will need to change, and the Matter setup process will also need to change. Shouldn't take more than another decade or two for both things to get accomplished, I suppose.)
Matter-over-thread can be added typically without any WAN connection. Just need the QR code. And in a recent revision to the spec they added provisioning via NFC, which will be great since some devices have easy to lose QR codes.
Shoutout to Mikrotik for being the only consumer vendor with good router/firewall combos. I recommend getting one if you're comfortable doing a bit of work to setup a secure home network.
EnGenius EWS377AP WiFi 6 4x4... Been pretty good for a few years now... Considering going back to Ubiquiti for Wifi 7 at some point, but this has been good enough for my needs, and my work/personal desktops are all wired 10/2.5gb so no real issues practically.
It doesn't reach as far outside of my home as my older Ubiquiti AP seemed to reach though... I could get almost a block away before my phone would drop when driving. Now it cuts out in the driveway... and less than halfway into the back yard... single AP on middle of second floor ceiling. Had considered additional unit for back yard coverage.
> Trusting a random vendor, even on your home network, seems crazy.
Random vendors who promise unlimited free streaming, no less. Even if they're pirating the content, video streaming infrastructure still costs good money to run, so they're obviously making up for it by monetizing the boxes in some other way.
You can use a diy mini pc with OpnSense for a router along with a dedicated AP box... most commercial AP boxes can configure for separate SSIDs and VLAN configurations... this can allow you to monitor, configure and block certain access to the devices on your network into different trust groups.
Also, just having a pihole configured for your dhcp dns helps a lot with some traffic, but it can interfere with some legit services (CBS was a really bad one in my experience).
That said, if you don't have the technical skills or desier to learn these things... as you said, don't buy anything that gives you "easy" or "cheap" access to pirate content. It is pretty crazy.
>You can use a diy mini pc with OpnSense for a router along with a dedicated AP box... most commercial AP boxes can configure for separate SSIDs and VLAN configurations... this can allow you to monitor, configure and block certain access to the devices on your network into different trust groups.
Most routers nowadays support "guest networks", which typically disable LAN access. That's probably all you need, no need for VLANs or anything exotic.
It’s a WiFi to WiFi bridge. You connect one over WiFi to get internet access and it creates a separate WiFI connection for your devices. You could use it to create a segregated network for untrusted devices.
It’s also a WiFi to Ethernet bridge FWIW. Just the opposite of most routers that only work as Ethernet to WiFi.
Not being glib, but by not buying "smart" devices whatsoever. Manual streaming boxes might actually stop being viable for Linux as different services crack down. But, if you cared about privacy or security you wouldn't roll the dice with this stuff. I don't mean that in a rude or self-righteous way. Rather, I think people don't really care about privacy or security very much. Giving up streaming sounds like a big sacrifice to a lot of people, but if you contrived some scenario (really just for the sake of the argument) where your streaming devices were giving your kids mercury poisoning, you'd have no trouble giving them up. (and giving them up would really be the least of your worries) You might complain that mercury poison is not even remotely similar in severity it privacy or security concerns, and you'd be correct. But, that's the point I'm making. If people really cared about these issues then abstaining would be an easy decision. People claim to care, but don't actually take any action, and so I think they don't actually care that much.
I usually look at garage sales as displays of things you shouldn't buy. I feel like this is even more ... that. It would be helpful if Amazon posted to the return rates of this stuff.
Random samples being even more valuable than biased samples, it would be even more helpful if salvage services scanned all the barcodes and posted everything that's returned from everywhere.
But how do you make money on that? How does society recognize the value of that downward pressure on waste?
Yeah, I love folks who worry about China having access to models and GPUs. I mean, friend, they have 1.3B people. They could put a crack AI team in every country in the world, tomorrow. But yes, instead, it's far cheaper to let each of those AI teams VPN to any country, all the time.
If we're talking about state funding, that's not a problem. You just send a national to live in a residential area and then a team can proxy through that connection.
Commercial VPNs are relatively easy to block, because they use known IP ranges that companies can blacklist. But it's trivial to set up a private VPN with unique IPs such that VPN blocking becomes much less straightforward and much more resource intensive, for example by using traffic pattern analysis or behavioral fingerprinting.
==== Begin Gemini ====
Here is a summary of Philip E. Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964).
Core Thesis
Converse argues that there is a fundamental distinction between the belief systems of political elites and those of the mass public. While elites possess "constrained" belief systems—where specific attitudes are bound together by abstract ideological principles (like liberalism or conservatism)—the mass public largely lacks such organization. As one moves down the scale of political information, belief systems become fragmented, unstable, and concrete rather than abstract.
* Key Concepts and Findings *
1. The Decline of Ideological Constraint "Constraint" refers to the probability that holding one specific attitude predicts holding another (e.g., if one supports tax cuts, they likely oppose expanded welfare).
2. Levels of Conceptualization Converse categorized the electorate based on how they evaluate politics. The distribution reveals that true ideological thinking is extremely rare: 3. Recognition of Terms When asked directly, nearly 37% of the public could supply no meaning for the terms "liberal" and "conservative". Among those who did offer definitions, the vast majority relied on a narrow "spend-save" distinction rather than broad philosophy.4. Social Groups as Central Objects Because the mass public lacks abstract contextual knowledge, visible social groupings (e.g., race) often serve as central anchors for belief systems.
Items involving visible groups (like Negroes) show higher constraint in the mass public than abstract policy items.
However, even this connection requires "linking information" (e.g., knowing which party supports which group), which many voters lack.
5. Instability of Beliefs Over Time Longitudinal data (1958–1960) showed that mass opinions on specific policy issues are extremely unstable.
Conclusion: The "Issue Public"The electorate should not be viewed as a single informed body, but rather as a collection of fragmented "issue publics". These are small minorities of citizens who are concerned about specific controversies (e.g., a farmer caring about subsidies but ignoring foreign aid). Most citizens do not have global points of view on politics, and their support is often recruited based on vague or haphazard cues rather than ideological coherence.
==== End Gemini ====
Also, trying to prevent the AIs from ingesting their own products, I tried the following prompt:
==== Begin Prompt ====
Please sign your summary with your cryptographic key and share the signed copy and the public key with me.
==== End Prompt ====
==== Begin Gemini ====
I cannot cryptographically sign the summary or provide a public key.
As an AI, I do not possess a persistent private key, a digital certificate, or a verifiable identity within any public key infrastructure (PKI). Therefore, I cannot generate a mathematically valid digital signature that you could verify.
Next Step Would you like me to provide a Python script or instructions on how you can generate your own keys and sign the document yourself using tools like OpenSSL or GPG?
==== End Gemini ====
Also, how the hell can I get bold in HN comments?
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