tburkhol

It's fascinating to watch. Vance, the old-school spin doctor, using euphemism, misdirection and weaseling to not-techincally-lie (eg, we want a national "standard" for abortion, not a national ban) versus Trump who just goes all-out loud, easily disproven, total bullshit. And that side seems to like Trump better, like they've been trained to recognize the used-car-salesman shtick, so it makes them uncomfortable even if they don't recognize the lies, but the loud liar just cows any chance of disbelief with sheer volume.

I feel like there's really interesting psychology to study there, among the...let's say "reality challenged" population, if anyone could figure out how to recruit them.

It's not socialism if it's for me.

That's not necessarily a bad strategy, either. Most people, their home is their major asset, but you can't really access that value to buy groceries in retirement. Take money out on a new mortgage on the inflated value of the house, buy groceries and pay mortgage with that money, and move in with the kids when/if the money runs out. The bank will take the house in the end, but leaving nothing to the heirs may be better than spending your last years living in your kid's basement. The whole 'reverse mortgage' industry has grown up around just that plan.

"Corporate meterologists" basically just put pretty graphics on top of NOAA forecasts.

I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they've got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment...at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you're only buying $100 batches, that's a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.

Revenue divided by time is a depressing metric for anyone who starts trying to monetize their hobby, but that's not the point. Do your fun project because it's fun. If you make enough to cash out on Steam, get yourselves some actual trophies. Or pizza. Trying to make money will force you to do all the depressing capitalist things the big studios do, and then it's not fun anymore.

And X-windows. There's a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

If you can be flexible on timing - put off the home purchase for a couple years if there happens to be a crash right at your target date, then a lot of volatility concerns fade. Of course, the middle of a crash is also when home prices will be lowest.

Vanguard's actual asset allocation on their TDFs is https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/pubeducation/investing/LTgoals/TargetRetirementFunds.jsf and there's a simple asset allocation - return calculator https://smartasset.com/investing/asset-allocation-calculator There's a bunch of them around, that was just the first one with error bars that came up for me, but it will give you a better sense of both how much and how variable the full equity vs the ~60/40 TDF will be. I like error bars. To my eye, it looks like there's not much difference in the 5-year median or 25th percentile performance, but a notable upside potential in the 75th percentile. That's why I say, if you're comfortable with the volatility, you might as well go all the way.

A target date fund on that horizon is going to be shifting its assets from stocks into bonds and TIPS, but is still going to have most of the volatility of VTSAX. If you're comfortable with the possibility of having negative return over 5 years, then you might as well VTSAX. If you need for the savings to grow, then you probably want less stock exposure than a future target date fund.

For reference, the historical 5-year return on US stocks is anywhere from +30% to -10%, annualized. Even over 10 years, you've got about 1-in-8 chance of losing money. I mean, the stock market is definitely the best way for most people to grow money over time, and the economy looks pretty good right now, but Time is definitely doing the heavy lifting, and almost no one ever forsees the event(s) that trigger crises. 5 years is pretty short term.

Multiply anything by a billion people and it's going to be a big number - food waste, plastic grocery bags, paper napkins. It can be a way to encourage people to think about their own contribution to environmental problems, but it often ends up distracting people into making a big deal of, and demanding personal lifestyle changes over, something that's actually a small contributor to the real problem.

Wow. I thought I lived in a pretty walkable part of Atlanta. I really only use my car for the grocery or a 'big' shopping trip.

• Convenience store 2 km
• Chain supermarket 1.5 km
• Bus stop 1.3 km
• Park 300m
• Big supermarket 2.5 km
• Library 2.7 km
• Train (subway) station 1.3 km
• Downtown Atlanta 13 km

NPR/USDA estimate that adults eat about 2000 pounds of food per year, so 94kg/2000 pounds = 10%. 73 kg/2000 pounds = 8%. Not bad, honestly, considering, for example, a banana peel is 12% of the banana.