partial_accumen

No worries at all. I wouldn’t expect anyone to know this unless they follow markets personally or professionally. Even what is said on the news doesn’t lay this out plainly.

The weird part is everyone knows we’re headed for a market correction, but nobody knows when. I honestly thought it would have happened years ago, but it keeps going up. I’m a long term nonprofessional investor, so I’m okay with the downturn for myself when it eventually happens.

But bare in mind the economy is all kinds of messed up right now.

I’ll be the first to say that investing in the stock market is no sure thing. I’ll also say that past performance does not predict future results. I’ll also post this chart which shows the annual returns of the S&P 500 over the last 8 years. Even during the disruption of the global pandemic the returns were substantial.

With the exception of 2022, its been absolutely crazy crazy good! Even if someone invested at the worst time in 2022 absorbing the all of the losses from that year, they’d would have already been cash positive by the end of 2023.

That being said its the lowest risk way for your money to make money.

The S&P 500 is not the lowest risk way to make money. It is maybe the lowest risk way to make the most money. US Treasuries or even an FDIC high yield savings account (or NCUA for credit union) are far safer, but don’t earn nearly as much.

Invest in s&p500 index. See bogelheads.org for the investment playbook.

This. If OP got this $150k on Jan 1 of this year and put it in a boring old index fund tracking the S&P 500 OP would now have $168,810. That’s right, $18,810 in growth just from Jan 1 2026.

I had no idea who Blevin was besides a voted-out conservative former governor. I had no idea how much of a piece of shit he and his now-ex wife were in their treatment of their adopted kids.

The adopted son suing (Jonah) for back child support was brought from Ethiopia when he was 5, didn’t speak English, neither adult Blevins spoke his language, and eventually shipped him off to abusive “schools” out of state, and eventually out of the country. I found an article where Jonah tells who whole history.. Matt Blevin apparently tried to trick Jonah into choosing to go back to Ethiopia by telling him he had living family there after years of telling him as a child his mother was dead.

Even more laughably the now-ex wife’s pet project as First Lady of Kentucky was working against child abuse. The former governor even said he initially ran for office to reform the adoption system that prevented him from adopting before. It makes me think the Kentucky adoption process was perhaps well working if it protected children from would-be adopted parents like the Blevins.

Are you talking about fictional rocket/spacecraft or actual designs proposed for construction with today’s technology and abilities?

I’m not struggling personally. Most of my close peers are doing okay, but we’re much closer to the end of our working careers than the beginning. We’re established and at least had the chance to make our large purchases earlier in our lives (education, housing, cars, etc) when things were cheaper and a dollar went farther.

If we had to do the same with today’s financial environment we’d be in worse shape. Some of my peers didn’t make some of those big purchases back then and are staring down tougher choices.

For most of the those of working age today, I don’t see a workable path long term if this keeps up. Costs continue to spiral upward for the basic needs (food, housing, etc), and the job market is such a polluted game of cat and mouse jobs are incredibly hard to get (and keep for that matter).

I think its likely possible to build a data center that a community would be okay with. It would mean making certain design choices:

• Closed loop water cycle - This would mean that only small fraction of water that is normally used by DCs is consumed. This technology is fully mature. The reason most companies don’t use it is, it is more expensive to run the DC this way.
• Large scale PV solar panel installation for the DC - While not a complete answer to power consumption question, it would provide a large offset during the hottest hours of the day when DC cooling is most needed mitigating the worst impacts to DC electricity consumption
• Waste heat reuse - In many parts of the world heat centrally created in a city and distrusted through pipes to other places that need heat. DCs are exceedingly good and producing heat, and it is largely wasted. If a community would know that their own heating bills would come down by using waste head from the DC, that would be an incentive.
• Sound mitigation - most of the sound comes from cooling fans. If waste heat reclamation is done properly or a water loop to a large body of water is available, then the noise could be significantly reduced or eliminated too.

All of these things are possible and if a DC builder did these things on an existing site, then used that as a showcase for what a new DC would be, I think it would be much better received. They can do all of these things. They don’t because its cheaper not to.

Coin-operated elevators sounds like a libertarian paradise!

Coin-operated elevators are a libertarian hellscape!

A single paid fare on the elevator will take the passenger to any floor. While their are fixed costs on the elevator car and the initial installation, the rest of the costs incurred on elevator operation are variable based upon how many floors the elevator traverses before dispensing its passenger. The same coin that takes a passenger to the very top floor of a 25 story building will also only take a passenger one floor up. Where are the variable fare rates so that each passenger only pays for what they are consuming, and nothing more?!

Because much higher costs are incurred from the top floor passenger than the one-floor-up passenger, it means the one-floor-up passenger is subsidizing the top floor passenger. The top floor passenger is a parasite sucking value out of the system without returning an equal profit margin as the one-floor-up passenger. What we’ve got here is socialism!

/s

Granted this was 10 years ago, so it’d probably be worse now, but it was shockingly only ~15% inflation. That’s high, but not hyperinflation high.

Did the Econ professor also talk about the knock-on consequences if we did this? “Printing money” devalues the currency. Yes, we’d be honoring our debt holders by paying them back in the same number of dollars we borrowed, but our actions in doing this would be handing them back dollars worth significantly less than the dollars they handed us initially. We’d be financially burning every US Bond holder in the entire world (and many of those being US citizens holding government debt).

No one in the entire world would ever lend us money again at the cheap rates we get today. That would cost us trillions of dollars in additional interest we’d have to pay on future debt because the risk of us firing up the money printer would be priced into the very high interest rates investors would demand to buy US debt after that.

I suppose if San Diego County supervisors wanted to go nuclear, they could close the entire training facility, then contract with another facility only for county sheriffs. This way the county would still be providing facilities for sheriffs, but the sheriffs would have no control over who else would be let in.

Even if you own the money printer, you can effectively default if you print too much money. The result of overprinting devalues your own currency so much that it reaches insolvency.

Exhibit A:

In 2008 the government of Zimbabwe experience hyperinflation when the country tried to print piles of money to pay back its debts. Each subsequent printing devalued the currency even more until they were printing 1 Billion dollar notes.

Exhibit B:

Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1923, saddled by WWI payback debt, ran the money printer full blast devaluing the Reichsmark currency to the point of it being worthless. It included them printing the 500 million mark notes:

How long ago did you get your mortgage? Even 5 years ago the interest rates were rock bottom. Wouldn’t refinancing today double your interest rate?

the transparency of a policy that allows the ICE director to restrict the public release of footage unless “it is in the best interests of the agency”.

Lets see how made up department policy stands up to a FOIA request in front of a federal judge.

You want to blame Singer Sewing Machine company for this. They’re the ones in the 1850s that came up with the idea of pre-made non-negotiable contracts. Before this, every single contract had to have lawyers adding and removing terms until both sides agreed to it. I know today’s version sucks, but the alternative could be worse.

Imagine having to bring (and pay!) your lawyer to a car dealership to buy a car or even sign up for Netflix. Imagine how much more expensive the goods and services would cost you because of the army of lawyers needed to negotiate contracts for every single consumer.

Absolutely! People are always wondering “how do you get experience in X?”. The answer is “be the person that volunteers to research and implement it”. Multiple times in my career I’ve done this and I took that knowledge and experience and got a better higher paying job from it. Rinse repeat.

If your employer is going to pay you to learn a skill or product that will make you more valuable, if you turn that down you’re passing up an opportunity to advance. That advancement just may not be at that employer.

Or a more cynical version of this is “make your mistakes in learning at your current employer and if your efforts are not rewarded, take that knowledge and experience elsewhere for higher pay”.

The front page is just VetOfTheSeas and everybody else lol.

The default Lemmy UI “front page” is posts that are “Active”. First, try setting it to “Scaled” and you’ll get much more variety of posts instead of just the ones with the most replies. You can set this as a setting each time you visit Lemmy, or edit your Lemmy profile so it defaults to “Scaled” all the time you visit.

Second, start cultivating Lemmy communities you like. “Subscribe” to communities and block the ones you don’t like. Your “front page” will have lots more content you like and far fewer of things you don’t care about.

Third, some poster are consistently too far away from from what I want to consume on the internet. You’ll know them when you see them where everything they post something you wish you didn’t have to see. Block these users and you won’t see their posts or their comments on other posts. None of these change affect what other people see so there’s not risk of harming others or censoring them for others. They are free to continue to be seen by whomever else doesn’t want to block them.

With these three changes I have found Lemmy to be a much more engaging place.

Trump is worse he isn’t out of office and not causing harm.

In 1938 Hitler seized the Sudetenland (modern day Slovakia and Czechia) that was just before the gas chambers. If trump seizes Greenland, then I’ll say he’s on track to be worse than Hitler. As it stands, as horrible as trump is, he barely ranks against Hitler so far.

I know trump is abhorrent, but don’t downplay the inhuman sins Hitler committed against the world and the people of 20th century Europe.

I think Trump is actually a bigger cunt than Hitler.

trump is a tremendous asshole having caused permanent damage to the USA and the world along with indirect deaths from cuts in humanitarian aid (USAID) plus the deaths of civilians in Iran in an unnecessary war, but lets not forget that Hitler was the man that caused WWII in Europe and made literal gas chambers for mass killings of millions of Poles, Jews, LGBT, Belarusians, Blacks, Greeks, Italians, Roma, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, his political opponents and others.

Hitler is still worse than trump.

oil

It’s right there, in the first paragraph. How did the writers miss it?

One important fact that the article author left out of their article that might have cleared up the confusion:

“Oil generates a very small amount of electricity in the United States, totaling about 16 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) or roughly 0.4% of the nation’s total utility-scale electricity generation.” source

So (in the USA anyway) increases in oil costs don’t have a substantive increase in the price of electricity. So to confirm the headline accuracy, Iran war (and the subsequent increase in oil prices) isn’t increasing electricity prices in the USA.

I honestly don’t know why the GOP are attacking mail-in ballots. I would guess the majority of mail-in ballot users are established older adults, a demographic that usually leans more red. If the GOP is successful in stopping mail-in ballots, won’t a higher percentage of their own voters be blocked from voting for the GOP?