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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2023

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    1. pay off high interest debt

    2. top off your emergency fund so you don’t run into expensive short-on-money situations

    3. take care of deferred maintenance on your car or house that might turn into an expensive repair

    4. If you have an employer sponsored 401k, increase the contribution amount to get 10k more tax free into it before the end of the year and use the $10k cash in hand for expenses.

    5. Open a roth IRA and contribute the maximum amount you can (which may vary based on your income)

    VT, VTI, and SPY are good broad-market funds with good historical growth.




  • Good argument for the price inclusive of tax to be the price shown.

    I think it’s fairly uncommon for sales taxes in the US to be intended to incentivize behavior - moreso, they are for funding local government and higher taxes are placed on things that are politically palatable in local elections - hotel rooms or restaurant/alcohol sales come to mind.

    So I just don’t think we’re well practiced at mechanisms that make them work as a point-of-sale incentive, and changing the way a single class of items are priced would be complicated and surely receive pushback from retailers and the industry involved.







  • You may need to go back to when he showed up here, when people responded to the concept of third party candidates in general, not him or their assumptions about him specifically.

    After a while he made a name for himself, and people started to respond to him differently after evaluating his many interactions.

    Let’s compare, for example, to mozz, who probably has a fair amount of respect for his thoughtful and comprehensive replies. Or jeffw, who also seems to want to generate traffic but appears to be much more genuine about republishing political articles of general interest.

    UniversalMonk has earned some of the negative response he’s getting.




  • You are seeing changes in the refractive index of air as a result of heat lowering the density of the air. As air comes in contact with the hot surface, it becomes heated and rises through otherwise cool air - The rising air causes eddies and vortexes that lead to light bending in weird ways as it passes through.

    The shadows are much like the shadows on the bottom of a pool when there are waves on the surface. Incoming wavefront of light are distorted from planar and sent in different directions, some directions get less total light, some get more.