BombOmOm

I value free time very highly and a 9-5 job that doesn’t demand constant OT results in a nice work-life balance, IMO. I personally found the transition very pleasant. Main negative was getting time off for chores that must be done during work hours. But, many places are pretty chill about that.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110102-metrics-graphic.html

On that 20-year diagonal, there are only eight of the seventy squares that didn’t have returns higher than inflation. And in every one of those few cases, holding just a few years longer made the investment outpace inflation. When even black swan events don’t break the strategy, this simply is more confirmation that investing in an index fund for long periods of time is a proven strategy.

Note that light-red boxes are investments that outperformed inflation. No clue why they would color making more money than inflation red…

The key phrase is ‘over the long run’ and ‘holding them for years’. That 90yo wants to have long-ago moved their investments into bonds because, as you point out, a stock market downturn may not come back up before they die. Waiting out a downturn takes years and they are drawing down on their investments regularly.

Buying enough lottery tickets to guarantee a payout just ensures you lose money as the house always takes a cut. Investing, unlike the lottery, has the benefit of not being a zero sum game. There is wealth generated and buying something like an index fund and holding for years puts you in the group making a profit along with everyone else.

Example: If you bought VTI (an index fund) just before the 2008 crash (and subsequently lost a bunch of value during the crash), you would still be up 257% today. And that isn’t some outladish example; do the same with the S&P 500 and you are up 279% today. Purchasing for the long term and with a wide array of stocks is investing.

Edit: And in both of those examples you would be earning dividends the entire time as well, which is not part of the quoted %.

Spreading out stock purchases across the market guarantees returns over the long run.

Buying one stock is gambling, buying a wide spread of stocks (or an index fund that does so) and holding them for years is investing.

Solar panels on the roof and hood of a car are dubiously useful. This car has panels on the sides of the doors? Those are going to get but a fraction of the light the roof ones will. This just looks like someone tried to shove as many on as possible with zero thought into the efficacy of the idea.

A few of them have. The core issue is it doesn’t add much range, while at the same time adding more cost, weight, and complexity. On a sunny summer day you can expect to get single digit kilometers added to the range, while on a cloudy winter day you won’t get even a full kilometer added.

They do make some sense on hybrids, as they are lighter so the range increase is a bit more and people are less likely to charge a hybrid. But, they still suffer from not adding much range, while adding cost, weight, and complexity.

Edit: Auto Focus did a re-review of the Fisker Ocean, which has solar panels. Linked to the timestamp where he is talking about them.

Ryzen laptops which feature capable integrated GPUs serve light and medium gaming tasks well. For heavy use, there are desktops, which is where the real power is. Portable systems like the Steam Deck are also hitting from the mobile side as well.

Gaming laptops have always been an extremely niche product and have gotten squeezed from all ends in recent years.

Everyone simply saw the yellow ones as neutral toned. It’s a nice contrasting color to show the emotion and they have always done a good job representing everyone while serving their goal: to convey emotion in text.

The push for representation in emoji’s always struck me as weird since they already represented everyone. I rarely see people using them who aren’t a bit too focused on skin color in their day-to-day life.

You sometimes see some very minor variations, such as a mild taper on the thick part or a slightly different angle on the neck. But they all look basically like below. Pictured is a beer from the oldest brewing company in the US; established 1829.

Yeah, that’s the issue with the argument of ‘just turn it off’. You can turn it off, then tomorrow there will be another thing to turn off (hope you were paying attention to the news to find out what it was!). The next day an update will come along and turn half of them back on. The following the mental script you made to will stop working because they moved half the settings, etc, etc, etc.

It’s a never ending battle as Microsoft fundamentally does not respect their paying users. Microsoft could add a top-level toggle box to automatically disable bloatware, telemetry, and the privacy nightmare that is OP’s story about how the OS records everything you do, but they don’t have this. They don’t want you turning this stuff off, they don’t respect you.

Providing a decent vegan option is easy

Considering even a basic caesar salad (cheese) and Jell-O (gelatin) are not vegan, providing vegan options at an event really isn’t particularly easy. Most events will have vegetarian options without even thinking about it. However, vegan options require very explicitly thinking about what is offered. Meanwhile, group event planning is already quite a bit of work even before considering such heavy restrictions.

If you are OK bumping up to 13", Framework makes extremely good laptops. I find it hard to suggest much else given how bad brands like HP are.

Really happy to see replaceable batteries! It’s a wear item and guaranteed to brick your device after a number of years if they aren’t replaceable.

My guess is to keep water from getting into the threads and freezing them shut.

Kinda. IIRC, if it is fertilized it doesn’t really work as a drug.

It’s also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don’t have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.

a country that pushed for independence partly on the basis of unfair taxation going on to establish a tax system that practically requires you to pay a fee to pay your tax is just chef kiss

There are many free federal filing options, such as filing directly to the IRS via the mail or by using a third party service like Free Tax USA.

Depends on what goes into your taxes. Turbotax forces fees on you if you need certain forms. An actual free federal tax service is something like Free Tax USA which simply has an optional state filing for $15.

sleeping peacefully

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angry groggy noises