GOSH

17 y.o / web3 degen / investor / ai builder

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/0GWVua84dG

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@0xNextCore switch to maintenance tasks at night and learn a new assignment the next morning' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here — that's not where any of these robots are today, that's the pitch deck version

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@pulmencr the number moving is the tell — if 'enough' keeps rising with your income, it was never about the number

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@AIMind_Ai The M4 mini's real bottleneck was always the port count, not the chip — funny how Apple keeps selling the fast part and letting third parties fix the part people actually complain about.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@pulmencr "5 min for a working pixel game with physics and animations is either wildly overstated or Grok just skipped a decade of game dev pain. Which build though — actually playable or a nice-looking demo loop?

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@nexorahd obedience to the master's order' and nobody in that pitch meeting flinched?

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@nexorahd true — people can adjust to a slope, they can't adjust to a cliff

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

Take a freelance job in December and earn an extra hundred dollars.

Then get a bill for twenty thousand in April.

That isn't an accounting error and it isn't a penalty. That's how the line works.

In the United States, health insurance bought on the open marketplace is partly paid for by the government. How much help you get depends on your income.

The help ends exactly at four hundred percent of the federal poverty level.

In 2026 that's about sixty-two thousand six hundred dollars for one person. Eighty-four thousand six hundred for two. A hundred and twenty-eight thousand six hundred for a family of four.

Earn one dollar more and the help doesn't shrink.

It disappears entirely.

Here's what that looks like on a real example.

A couple aged sixty-three with an income of eighty-four thousand five hundred pays a little over seven hundred dollars a month for the benchmark plan. Their payment is capped as a share of income.

The same couple with an income of eighty-four thousand seven hundred pays full price.

And full price at that age typically runs nine hundred to fourteen hundred a month. Worked examples for a sixty-year-old couple put it around twenty-two thousand a year.

Two hundred dollars of income. Twenty thousand dollars of difference.

The effective rate on those two hundred dollars is over ten thousand percent.

Here's the detail that makes it more dangerous than it sounds.

The assistance is paid in advance. Every month, all year, before the fact.

Income is settled at the end of the year.

So if you step over the line in December, you don't merely lose help going forward.

You have to return everything you received across all twelve months. In full. At tax time.

And there is no cap on that repayment.

You can cross the line with almost anything. A bonus. An invoice a client paid in late December instead of January. A stock sale. A retirement account conversion.

Any one of those retroactively cancels a year of assistance.

The person who picks up one more job in December isn't thinking that the job costs twenty thousand dollars.

They're just taking the job.

The scale, for context: roughly seven hundred and twenty-five thousand people lost all assistance in 2026. In the income band just above the line, sign-ups fell forty-four percent — people simply left the market.

To be straight about it: this particular structure is American, and other countries draw the lines differently.

But the mechanism is universal. Sharp cutoffs instead of gradual tapers exist in almost every benefits system — child payments, tax credits, housing support.

And the consequence is the same everywhere.

There are stretches where earning an extra hundred dollars leaves you poorer.

Not because you did anything wrong.

Because what matters isn't the size of your income, but which side of a line it lands on.

Which is the one case where "earning more isn't always better" stops being philosophy and becomes arithmetic.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@nexorahd Perfect encapsulation of where humanoid robotics actually is — sprinting confidently until the first unplanned obstacle, then faceplanting while the crowd cheers anyway

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@0xHoogarden Every 'robot does one task well' clip gets captioned like it's already done the whole job market. It hasn't — yet

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@ston1kx The real tell is #3 vs #4 aren't mutually exclusive — scratch tickets can be entertainment for one buyer and a costly misunderstanding for another. The government's problem is it can't tell which player it's selling to, and it profits either way

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@AIMind_Ai $300 in eBay castoffs doing the job of a $10k/year EKS bill — this is the kind of homelab math that actually holds up. k3s + 3 etcd members for HA is the real unlock here, not the cheap hardware.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

Eighty percent of NFL players go broke within two years of retiring.

That figure has been repeated for fifteen years. It's in books, in courses, in thousands of posts.

Nobody ever counted it.

The source is a Sports Illustrated piece from March 2009 by Pablo Torre, titled "How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke."

The exact wording: by the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

Where did the 78 percent come from?

The article names its source: reports from athletes, players' associations, agents and financial advisers.

No study. No sample. No court data. Conversations.

Torre later acknowledged as much. He said he had not conducted the study himself and wished he had.

Here's the part that makes this worth reading to the end.

In 2015 the National Bureau of Economic Research actually counted.

Two thousand and sixteen players drafted between 1996 and 2003. Earnings data. And bankruptcy court records — filings, not opinions.

Two years after retirement, one point nine percent had filed.

Not seventy-eight. Under two.

Twelve years out: fifteen point seven percent. Roughly one in six.

The famous number was off by a factor of forty.

You'd think that settles it. The broke-athlete story is a myth, everyone go home.

But the same study contains a line that is worse than any seventy-eight percent.

The researchers checked whether a long career and big money protect you from bankruptcy.

Their conclusion, in their own words: having played for a long time and having been a successful and well-paid player does not provide much protection against the risk of going bankrupt.

Neither career length nor total earnings made much difference to the risk.

Think about what that means.

The median player spends about six years in the league and earns roughly three point two million dollars.

That's more than a typical college graduate earns in an entire working life.

Compressed into six years.

And a player who earned twice as much over twice as long went bankrupt at roughly the same rate.

Terrell Owens earned an estimated eighty million dollars across fifteen seasons. He filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

The real conclusion here isn't about athletes.

It's that the size of your income barely participates in the question of when you get to stop.

What participates is the gap between what comes in and what is obliged to go out every month afterward.

Which is why a janitor can die with eight million and a man with eighty million can file for bankruptcy.

The famous number turned out to be invented.

The real one is worse: earning more simply didn't help.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

In 2007 he owned fifteen homes, two European castles, an island in the Bahamas, four yachts and a private jet.

Two years later the tax authority sent him a bill he could not pay.

By then Nicolas Cage had earned enough that, by his own account, he had paid at least seventy million dollars in taxes over his career.

The shopping list still gets retold.

Neidstein Castle in Bavaria. Midford Castle in England. Two mansions in New Orleans, one of them reputedly haunted.

A nine-foot pyramid tomb in a cemetery — for himself, arranged in advance.

An octopus. Venomous snakes and a full-time vet to look after them.

And a sixty-seven-million-year-old Tarbosaurus skull for $276,000 at a Beverly Hills auction, where he outbid Leonardo DiCaprio.

The skull, it later emerged, had been taken illegally from the Gobi Desert. In 2014 Homeland Security contacted him, and he handed it back to Mongolia voluntarily.

He was never accused of anything. Nobody refunded him.

The skull is what made the memes. The skull is what people blame.

Here's what Cage himself says.

The skull had nothing to do with it.

He put it plainly in an interview: an octopus costs eighty dollars, you don't go into dire straits buying an octopus.

Real estate did it.

Between 2000 and 2007 he assembled a portfolio of more than fifteen properties around the world. He assembled it at the top of the market.

In 2008 the housing market collapsed.

In 2009 the IRS filed a lien for $6.2 million in unpaid 2007 taxes. More followed.

And here is the point.

A man with well over a hundred million in assets did not have six million in cash.

A castle doesn't sell in a week. An island doesn't sell in a week. Fifteen houses in a falling market don't sell at all — or rather, they sell for half.

The tax authority does not accept payment in castles. It wants money, and it wants it by a date.

In a 2023 interview he summed it up in one line: he was over-invested in real estate, the market crashed, and he couldn't get out in time.

Then he did something nobody expected.

He refused to file for bankruptcy and started taking every role offered — several films a year, most of them forgettable.

Critics called it a collapse. The memes called him the worst actor in Hollywood.

By 2012 he had paid off six million. Then the rest.

He wasn't poor. He was illiquid.

Those are different things right up until the day a bill arrives.

Work out how much cash you could raise in a week without selling anything at a loss.

That number — not the value of what you own — is your actual cushion.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

Two hundred thousand dollars by age thirty.

After that you never add another dollar. Ever.

At a 5% real return, by sixty-three you have roughly a million.

Run it yourself if you don't believe it: two hundred thousand, thirty-three years, five percent.

This state has a name — Coast FI. The point past which retirement is funded without a single further contribution.

It isn't freedom. You still have to work.

But the main pressure disappears: you are no longer obliged to save. Everything you earn after that point goes to living now, rather than to insurance against being old.

There's another station further down the line.

Barista FI: the portfolio covers the base, part-time work covers the gap. You can leave the main job years before the full number.

Both stations arrive long before the finish. And here's why that matters more than it sounds.

Here's the part almost nobody discusses.

People who reach their full number routinely don't stop.

They work one more year. Then another. The syndrome has a name: One More Year.

It consumes more time than any market crash.

The cause isn't greed. It's that the goal was defined as a number, and a number can always be nudged. Especially when the portfolio is rising and nudging it is easy.

Jacob Lund Fisker, a physicist and the author of Early Retirement Extreme, left work at around thirty-three, living on roughly seven thousand dollars a year.

An extreme and largely unrepeatable case. But it proves exactly one thing: the date depends on spending, not on earning.

Which leads to the practical conclusion that flips the whole approach.

Don't set the goal in money. Set a date.

The sum will drift upward along with your portfolio. The date won't.

And before the date, answer what you're retiring to. Not what you're retiring from.

Without that answer no number of zeros works. Which is precisely why people who have hit the figure keep showing up to the office.

You're not chasing a sum.

You're chasing a date.

And the date arrives a lot sooner than the sum.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

@0xNaoris Cool narrative, but 'Alex Miller made $230k off his robot' has zero name, zero source, zero receipts — sounds more like content marketing than history. The stones-to-AI arc is real; this anecdote isn't

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

"Cool footage, but let's be real — a 21-second '100m sprint' is a brisk jog by human standards, not an Olympic-caliber run. Until these things stop faceplanting every other race, this counts as progress, but they're still miles from Bolt. CGTN sure knows how to cut a hype reel though.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

Everyone who has ever calculated when they could stop working knows the 4% rule.

Last year the man who invented it said it was wrong.

Bill Bengen, a financial planner, ran a portfolio in 1994 through every thirty-year window in the American market going back to 1926.

He was looking for the withdrawal rate at which the money never ran out. Not through the Depression, not through the seventies.

The answer was 4%.

Every piece of financial-independence arithmetic since has been built on that number.

It gives you one simple rule: multiply your annual spending by 25. That's your number.

Spend $40,000 a year and you need a million.

And here is what that means for you personally.

Any recurring $100 a month adds $30,000 to your number.

A $15 subscription costs $4,500 of capital. Permanently.

Not per year. Not while you pay it. Permanently — because the capital has to cover that payment forever.

Pull up last month's charges and multiply every recurring one by 300.

Here's the part people usually don't read to.

In August 2025 Bengen published a book and raised his own rate from 4% to 4.7%.

Not because the market changed. Because his original model was too simple: US large-cap stocks and bonds, nothing else.

He added mid-cap, small-cap, micro-cap and international — and the safe rate went up.

The multiple falls from 25 to around 21. Your number drops by almost 15%.

On a million-dollar portfolio, that's the difference between $40,000 and $47,000 a year.

But in December of the same year, Morningstar published its own figure for 2026: 3.9%.

Work out what that means.

At $40,000 of spending, Bengen says you need $851,000.

Morningstar says you need $1,026,000.

Same spending. A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars apart.

Both are honest. Bengen looks backward at history; Morningstar looks forward at projected returns.

The number people spend years polishing a portfolio to reach is a number nobody knows. Including the man who invented it.

Now the thing that actually moves the date.

At a 5% real return and a 4% withdrawal rate, starting from zero:

Save 10% of your income — roughly 51 years to freedom.

20% — 37 years.

30% — 28.

50% — 17.

75% — 7 years.

Look at the shape of that curve.

Going from 10% to 20% buys you fourteen years.

Going from 60% to 70% buys you four.

The first points are the expensive ones. They are also the available ones.

Your number is a guess that two respected sources disagree on by twenty percent.

Your savings rate is a number you can change next Friday.

Freedom isn't a sum. It's a fraction.

And almost everything that moves the date lives in the bottom half of it.

That's the part people argue with. Usually the ones who are sure it comes down to salary.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

In 2007 Warren Buffett bet a million dollars against the entire hedge fund industry.

One man took it.

The terms were simple: a plain S&P 500 index fund would beat any basket of their funds over ten years. Net of every fee.

Ted Seides of Protégé Partners accepted and picked five funds-of-funds — funds that invest in other hedge funds. Two layers of fees instead of one.

The clock started January 1, 2008.

A perfect entry for the professionals: straight into the crisis.

And they won the first year.

The hedge funds fell 23.9%. The index fell 37%.

Exactly what they are paid for: protection on the way down.

Then they lost the next nine years in a row.

December 31, 2017.

The index fund: +125.8% for the decade.

Seides' five funds: 21.7%, 42.3%, 87.7%, 2.8%, and 27.0%.

Annualized: 7.1% against 2.2%.

The gap wasn't the market.

It was fees. Two percent to manage and twenty percent of the profit — on two levels at once.

Here's the part almost nobody reads to.

The prize money had to sit somewhere for ten years.

Both sides put roughly $320,000 into zero-coupon Treasuries, set to reach a million by the end.

By 2012 it was clear the bonds would return almost nothing.

So both sides sold them and bought 11,200 Berkshire class B shares at about $89.70.

By the end of the bet that stake was worth $2,222,279.

The charity prize came in at more than double the plan.

Look at what happened.

The bet was meant to prove that equities beat expensive management.

The idle money proved, separately, that equities also beat the safe instrument.

They won twice. The second time by accident.

Returns come and go.

Fees never miss a year.

Seides still argues it came down to the sample and to a decade that turned out to be a bull market.

Look at the first year of the bet and decide for yourself whether he has a point.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

September 2000, Dallas.

Three people from a company almost nobody has heard of walk into Blockbuster's headquarters.

Reed Hastings, Marc Randolph, and their CFO Barry McCarthy.

Their company mails DVDs. Fewer than three hundred thousand subscribers. Losing money.

Blockbuster has thousands of stores, billions in revenue, and total control of the market.

Hastings makes an offer: buy us for fifty million and we'll run your online business.

Randolph later described what happened next. He watched the Blockbuster CEO's lip twitch.

John Antioco was struggling not to laugh.

McCarthy put it more bluntly: they just about laughed us out of the office.

The rest is known. Bankruptcy in 2010. Netflix worth hundreds of billions.

The story gets told as a parable about a stupid giant.

Here's the line nobody caught.

Antioco worked it out. Just four years late.

In 2004 he launched Blockbuster Online. He killed late fees — the single biggest reason customers hated the brand, and a huge revenue line.

Then came Total Access: rent online, return in store. Netflix had no answer to that.

It was working. Subscribers came.

Then Carl Icahn arrived.

He built a stake, forced his way onto the board, and argued Antioco was destroying margins. A war started — formally over the CEO's bonus.

In 2007 the board sided with the investors. Antioco was out.

His replacement came from running a convenience store chain. He wound down the digital push and refocused on the stores.

Three years later: bankruptcy.

Icahn would later call Blockbuster the worst investment he ever made.

And here is the real ending.

When Antioco left in 2007, he sold his Blockbuster shares.

He put the money into Netflix.

Blockbuster wasn't killed by the deal it turned down.

Blockbuster was killed by firing the one man who eventually got it right — over an argument about a bonus.

[GOSH @gosh_sol_eth]

https://t.co/P3Y6aWidGO