partial_accumen

What specific traits or habits do people close to you recognize that would reveal an impostor trying to mimic you?

They ask me what specific things would reveal themselves when they mimic me. Thats probably a red flag.

Nobody’s demanding they wear a mask

Which country are we talking about. In the USA there were absolutely mask mandates.

“They’re wearing a mask to stop the spread of disease, because they are sheep and I feel a need to react to this person’s wearing of a mask to prove to everyone else within eyesight I am not sheep lest they question my superiority."

FTFY, they don’t see the mask as preventing disease that needs to be prevented. They see COVID as a mild inconvenience. An inconvenience that isn’t worth doing anything to prevent it, and they get upset when anyone tells them they should care about it (even if its just for other people’s sake).

Masks are a highly-visible sign of compassion. It’s a sign that you don’t want others to suffer due to your own actions, especially if you’re suffering already.

I agree with this.

So when a person who has no compassion (but doesn’t want to admit they have no compassion) sees a mask, they feel the need to defend themselves and attack the mask.

I don’t agree with this. There is no self awareness of lack of empathy in this group. Its not like they’re recognizing masking as an empathetic action, and choose to act counter to telegraphy the don’t care about empathy.

Instead, they (wrongly) see mask mandates as some kind of subjugation (even though it isn’t). They build the narrative that “COVID is just like the flu” so no freedoms should be impinged. Personal exceptionalism demands they rail against anyone or anything demanding their obedience or compliance. They see the demand of not hurting others with the spread of disease as an infringement on their freedom.

The result of their actions is a lack of empathy, but I don’t think that is their goal and they even have any awareness about anyone else’s needs except their own.

FYI, Passive Matrix doesn’t mean monochrome. Passive Matrix were color too. If you’re actually looking for a reflective monochrome LCD, you probably want STN aka Supertwist LCD.

I’m not aware of any STN smartphones. Others have already rightly posted eink is likely a better fit for what you want.

To my complete lack of surprise, Russia is seems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.

What does the United States have to do with this? Since when is Finland part of the United States? Linus Torvalds is Finnish.

Not in an academic sense but they never actually learned to form ideals

First, yes there are people that never intellectually explore the world nor the underpinnings of their beliefs after high school. This is, many times, why people are a stark difference from their prior selves when they go to college and do actually get exposed to other beliefs and are taught to question the “why” of their known “what”.

However, don’t get too cocky and arrogant in your superiority. I only have fractional knowledge of this myself, but when I was much younger I thought the way you did and I was equally ignorant as you may be now. There’s more you’re not seeing that has value.

Those same people you’re referring to do learn other things which aren’t always apparent. “Street Smarts” is one way some of these skills are described. They can generally read a room and know the social condition in it and if it is risky or becoming unsafe. They are keenly aware of navigating the fringes of society’s bureaucracies just out of necessity. This includes navigating the legal system. Many times they have social bonds, which to outsiders, defy reason. Others would look at some of these relationships as “toxic” but they don’t understand that those bonds will sometimes produce effort, money, or insight in emergency or dire situations to those on the in-group not available to the rest of us. Society has a pale phrase that tries to encapsulate this in “ride or die”, but to those that live it, its much deeper and more committed.

Stop. The Vanguard retirement funds all did this if the target is before 2060. And those are invested in index funds by professionals. OP likely had the VTINX

OP’s losses are more exagerated than just the Target Date fund experiencing a dip from bond exposure.

Here’s OP’s same initial investment on the same day but 100% in VTINX:

So instead of a $4k loss that OP showed, it would been a $71 loss. OP went picking individual stocks and got burned (assuming they liquidated their position after seeing their portfolio balance).

Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.

Then you should have led with that. I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain how to use the system to someone not interested in any part of the system. None of your arguments are about the mechanisms of the system, but instead lack of its universal applicability. You weren’t interested to learning how the system can work, you’d already dismissed it from the get-go.

Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.

Your posts come off as trolling because you’re arguing about particular internal steps to the current system when you don’t even care about it.

You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?

Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with “being right” or “getting zingers” that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I’m human, I’ve been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.

The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don’t that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.

Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.

Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.

45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source

You don’t need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn’t get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.

I recommend FSKAX over FZROX. There are few minor differences. Yes FZROX has a lower expense ratio, but it BARELY lower when compared to FSKAX. My understanding is the biggest downside to FZROX is that you can’t hold that in any other brokerage. So if one day you decide you don’t like Fidelity you have to sell all your FZROX and then buy something else offered at the other brokerage. In a retirement fund this isn’t so much a big deal, but could mean you miss out on gains between the sale and the purchase of whatever else you replace it with.

If you’re investing in a non-retirement account this is a BIG deal, as any gains would be taxed at the time of sale. This can mean you pay 15%-20% on the gains just to switch brokerages. FSKAX doesn’t have that limitation, and you’d be able to simply do an “in kind” transfer of the securities to your new brokerage without any tax events/consequences. To me, that portability is worth the tiny different in expense ratio.

Haven’t found a good fund yet except FSKAX and VTI

You found the good ones. No need to go looking further.

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

Thats not how to do it. As you approach retirement age (5 to 10 years out), you move your money out of riskier (but higher return generating) stocks and into safer (but lower performing) investments like bonds or even cash (actual cash, CDs, Tbills, etc). Generally you also don’t move it ALL out of riskier stock. You don’t need 100% of your savings on day 1 of retirement, so you convert a few years worth (5 maybe?) to safe stuff and let the riskier stuff ride usually gaining more value even after you retire.

I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.

Its not your total market fund killing you, its your individual stocks. I don’t recommend picking specific stocks for your real savings. Save individual stock picks for money you can afford to lose. In your case it cost you $7,000.

I used your same data and here’s what it would have looked like if all of it was in your Total Market fund.

You would have $18,679. This would have been a gain of $3479 or a 22% return on investment in only 2 years. That is crazy good! Retirement isn’t a total scam, but unless you are VERY lucky, picking individual stocks is risky. You can successfully save for retirement with just one, two, or three funds: Total Stock Market fund, Total Bond Fund, and perhaps an International fund. I mainly focus on just the boring Total Stock Market fund and it performs fairly consistently well over time.

EDIT: Just to underscore retirement is possible with saving and investing with boring Total Market investment, if 20 years ago you had that same $15,200 and invested it in a boring Total Market investment and never save another penny, today it would be worth $88,982.

I’m not saying that you can go back in time, but with 20 years of growth (very typical for retirement savings) it can really grow. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

Emmett

Most laws aren’t retroactive. If you do the thing before it’s illegal, then you skated by. That could very easily be the answer here, especially as most all the physical automation is barely existent. If a company deploys now, they don’t pay the tax, but they will when they upgrade models.

You’ll need to provide your definition of “physical automation” for the purposes of your argument. As it stands that is NOT clear, which is part of the quagmire of all the Automation Tax approaches.

As to code automation, same rules apply. Excel macros get by, but I would apply the tax on companies that replace white collar jobs via SaaS or other applications as their core businesses model,

What does this mean? If a company is still running on-prem MS Exchange servers for company email, then the law passes, then the company switches to Office365 for email instead, does your law hit that company with an Automation tax? If so, how would the tax be applied? Amount of spend on Office365? Amount spent on salaries of former MS Exchange administrators? How long would the tax apply? A year? Forever?

What I’m also seeing is that all encumbant companies (shielded from the automation tax because they already put automation in place) would have an advantage forever against existing companies trying to make automation changes (and being hit with the tax).

Another loophole I see is companies completely liquidating or selling to a newly formed company so that there are “no jobs lost to automation, because this company from day 1 has always used automation”.

or for that line of buisness for vendors that do a lot of things. It would have to be refined as to where you draw the line, but you could.

I don’t know what this means.

Can you give a concrete example of your Automation tax? Situation before your law goes into place, the law passing, then the Automation tax a company would pay when they make a specific change in your example?

The automation tax that gates/etc proposed to fund UBI/social support networks is making more and more sense.

I’m all for UBI, but the automation tax is a quagmire.

In this theoretical new tax, tell me what qualifies to be taxed?

• An Atlas autonomous robot? Sure, absolutely. How about instead a hydraulic arm that is controlled by a human? Previously there were 4 humans that moved the widget from A to B, but now they have 1 human operating a joystick for a net loss of 3 jobs. Is that taxed?
• How about an Excel macro? Prior to the macro, there was one person filling in the spreadsheet the entire 8 hour workday. Now that person was replaced with an Excel macro that runs in 5 minutes with one click. That is automation too right? What would you tax? The cost of the person replaced?
• Who pays the tax? A company that buys an Atlas robot after the law is passed? Absolutely. How about a company that bought Atlas robots 24 hours before the law passed? How about the company that bought them a year before the law passed? Now apply the Excel macro automation. Excel macros have around since the 1990s. Are you going to go back to the first macro run and tax every company retroactively? How about if the macro only does part of the work?

Automation tax is a nice idea but a nightmare to try to make in policy. Additionally, it will have a stifling effect on any business efficiency efforts after it exists.

If the tax is based upon workers losing their jobs to automation, it will have a massive knock on effect limiting new hires. A company would be very leery of hiring a worker if they could be accused (and taxed) of automation replacement when that worker is let go.

In 1970 there were 1.5 million UAW auto workers. Today there are 400k. source Yes, UAW membership isn’t the only type of auto worker, yes there are other factors that cause auto decline besides robots. However, I challenge you to point to a modern large scale automotive manufacturing factory that doesn’t use robots.

The point with factory work is that you don’t need half of what this robot can do if you change the plan of the factory a bit.

So no I don’t think the idea here is for standard factory work.

You’re changing the problem that is being solved. The CURRENT work process is to use a human with all the benefits and detriments of a human. The idea would be to drop one of these Atlas robots in without changing the work or work environment. Perhaps there is a more efficient human doing the work from 8am-5pm and only some work needed from 5pm-8am. An Atlas robot would be perfect use case here. You don’t have to redesign the work or the environment for a human or robot to switch out to do the same work.

What you’re describing is changing the nature of the task or the environment to optimize for a robot.

• Flat floors? Just use wheels instead of legs.
• Short distance to cover? Drop the entire torso and head and just be an arm with a camera.

Boston Dynamics already has that robot. Its called Handle:

As you can see, its a wheeled robot with an arm, but this robot couldn’t do the task that the Atlas robot can in the video because it doesn’t have the fine motor control or fingers to grasp the engine covers, nor does Handle have the ability to deal with those soft pliable racks where Atlas is placing the covers.