What has been your best financial move in life?
- Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.
- I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.
- My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.
To understand why this is happening, you have to go back in history to the end of the slave trade. When the ability to kidnap people from Africa and bring them back to enslave them was legally ended, the white enslavers realized that the only way they could keep slavery going was to force people to breed more slaves. Google that history. It is utterly abhorrent but necessary to understand where the Republican Party is coming from today.
Since the end of slavery, a certain contingent in the U.S. has never gotten over the fact that they couldn't legally have a sub-class of citizens that they could use for free or nearly-free labor. So they kept trying to find other ways to keep people oppressed, and they expanded that oppression beyond just black people and to any of the "less desirable" groups. Think not just Black people, but also Irish, immigrants, Appalachia. They pit these groups against one another because divided people are easier to control. But the goal is the same - have large groups of people poor for generations who have no other option but to work for slave wages and keep the people at the top very, very rich.
Slavery in the U.S. was a huge economic force, one that a certain contingent (the very wealthy) never got over losing. The next best thing was to create whole groups of people who are desperate enough to work for almost nothing. That's what we have in this country now. And it works best if those people are constantly putting out more children. That keeps them even more stuck and more desperate, and it keeps a steady supply of cheap labor coming.
It's no coincidence that they want abortion ended but also want to ensure those same people are continually subjected to sub-standard education, that those same people are "allowed" to send their kids to work (defeating years of progress through child labor laws), that those people are also unable to access higher education, government benefits, or virtually anything that could potentially make their lives better.
I starting using Reddit in 2010 or so when I was going through health issues and was looking for information. I became very active on Reddit over the years, occasionally helping to mod a couple of communities. I am not a hugely "online" person, but I loved Reddit as a source of information and advice from actual real people. Particularly for those of us living with chronic health conditions, Reddit in particular was hugely important.
But I don't use Reddit anymore. The whole API fiasco was the last straw for me, and I also just didn't see it remaining a vibrant place full of valuable information. So I deleted my accounts and left. Haven't been back since.
And we need to make that process of getting kids who need it that basic foundational education as easy and cheap as possible. I would say the best thing we could do is make sure they have the opportunity to be de-programmed as soon as they are adults.
And sometimes they are living there and simply cannot afford to relocate. Relocating is very expensive in the U.S., especially if you want to relocate to an area that has better education.
This is actually a terrifying prospect that would only make the situation worse. The kids stuck there and being educated in this propaganda are the ones who will need higher education the most! It is not their fault their parents are living there. And while some parents may have a choice in the matter, many do not as relocating in the U.S. is very expensive and impractical for some families.
I actually feel like the opposite is needed - that public universities go out of their way to accept kids who were educated in Florida in the hopes of actually being able to educate them and break the cycle that is currently feeding this wave of fascism.
This is what gets me. Christian Selig pointed out in a number of interviews that Reddit could have easily made this work without alienating a huge segment of their user base. I get this vague feeling lately like CEOs are intentionally trying to tank their products, because no one so well paid could actually act so dumb.
Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.
I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).
I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.
I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.
I don’t recall the specifics of the one article I read about this, but yes, I think being able to declare bankruptcy gives an out for at least some of the debt. I believe there was also some way that doing so protected Tesla but can’t recall exactly how that worked.
This just doesn’t seem like a “he’s just bad at running a company” situation. A company of Twitter’s age and maturity could have run itself for quite some time if Elon just let it continue on. He’s doing this intentionally for some self-serving reason.
IIRC, causing its value to plummet is the easiest way for him to get out of this whole fiasco via bankruptcy (remember, he was basically forced into buying it). He played a stupid game and won a stupid prize and now he’s desperately trying to find a way out.
This only makes sense when you understand that he’s intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.
This is just not true. Kids absolutely need accurate sex education BEFORE they are ready to engage in any sexual activity. It's important for kids to have accurate names for body parts and sex itself for all sorts of reasons. Comprehensive sex ed results in REDUCED rates of sexual activity.
Bottom line: you don't wait until kids might be sexually active to provide sex ed. You provide it long before that point and, in doing so, can actually DELAY the start of sexual activity.
I have a child this age. It's not that you're expecting them to engage in sexual activities but they ABSOLUTELY have quite detailed questions and a bit of information at this age, both information gathered from parents and observation as well as the less-than-accurate information they have obtained via the rumor mill. Yes, there's also the internet, but despite access to the internet, I'm finding that the rumor mill to still be the primary place where this info is spread.
In addition, 10 is about the age when puberty starts on average (for girls it is often even a bit earlier), so it's important accurate information is provided before that happens. There are 10 year old girls who often appear quite older and those girls are likely going to get attention that they may be be prepared for. It's important that they KNOW about sexual activity in order to know that it's OK and appropriate to say NO. Sometimes information is what STOPS kids from engaging in sexual activity that they are not prepared for. It's the kids who don't have that information, who may not even understand what is happening, that are more likely to engage in sexual activity.
Bottom line is accurate and early sex ed is really important. More than ever, kids need ACCURATE information about sex and their bodies.
Locked
U.S. Coast Guard Update on Titan: All members on board assumed to have perished during implosion
Given how much they have lied about already and the crap Huffman has pulled in the past, I would not doubt it in the least. I am sure they are doing all sorts of mind-games crap like this to try and keep users from fleeing. They have to be freaking out right about now.
All I can do as a user is take my content and time elsewhere. Which is why I'm here. Hoping that like has happened on mastodon, we will slowly move past the "Reddit news" phase and just transition into people contributing to communities and building apps for Lemmy/Kbin.
Reddit is only valuable because of the content users provide. If you don’t post valuable content, the site is worthless. Reddit can force subs back open, but they can’t force users to submit the content that makes the site valuable to begin with.