partial_accumen

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

As I get older I’m starting to learn about Medicare and the add-on products like Medi-gap (aka Medicare Supplement Insurance) or Medicare Advantage (aka Medicare Part C). All the names look kind of similar, but their are drastic differences between them.

When I was young I had always thought the dream of Medicare was: as soon as you are eligible for Medicare you get it, and its free, and you don’t have to pay for healthcare again. It is not that AT ALL.

Its certainly better and cheaper health insurance than anything most of us has access to under the age of 65, but its still insurance with different percentages it pays for different medical services and leaves you with a substantial portion to pay out-of-pocket after Medicare has paid its bit. Everyone aged 65 and older can buy Medicare as your health insurance, and you should! Its a great deal!

However, understand medical costs don’t end when you’re paying your monthly Medicare premium payments. This is where Medi-gap or Medicare Advantage comes in. If you can afford it pay for Medi-gap. If you can’t afford Medi-gap, you might consider Medicare Advantage, but just understand you’ll likely have lots of difficulty getting medical coverage because its essentially a private company HMO model, but worse.

I am disappointed Costco is putting their name on a Medicare Advantage product. I won’t touch Medicare Advantage with a 10 foot poll, but I also recognize I have the luxury of affording Medi-gap instead and many don’t.

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:

I have that problem too with polyester socks. I may have those same adidias socks, and I primarily use them for gym/workouts. My daily driver socks are cotton in the summer and merino wool in the winter. Both of these are Costco branded and are lasting years and wearing well.

I stand by the only thing that I have said in this entire thread: using “Women” as a pejorative term is not required for a good natured ribbing.

We all understand you still believe that. You’re welcome to continue to hold that belief. I believe you’re too limited in your thinking, but you’re welcome to that too.

And I’m still not sure what that has to do with pointlessly gendering people

Multiple people including me have attempted to explain, and you’re not getting it. I don’t know what else we can do to help you understand. I think we have come to the end of any productive conversation on the topic. I genuinely, with no sarcasm, hope you have a good rest of your day.

That cat has the look of betrayal. “Your hands are supposed to be here, not over there”

I really don’t appreciate you making assumptions about my personal relationships

You’ve communicated you’re not able to conceive of loving relationships which can use words or phrases lovingly that, in other public contexts, would be hurtful, disrespectful, or insulting.

and frankly I think it says a lot more about you than me.

It possibly might. I learned this lesson long ago in my 20s. I assumed most people did too. If you haven’t yet and you’ve made it well out of your 20s and haven’t learned it yet then perhaps I matured faster, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think most folks learn this around that time in life by observing healthy and loving relationships of others.

For the record I’ve been with the same person for over 15 years.

Then certainly by this time you have to understand that not all loving and healthy relationships operate internally the same, yet they can all be loving and healthy. Why do you assume that the way your relationship, that follows the rules in your relationship, is the only one that could be loving and healthy? You’re looking at the private conversation between a father and daughter and casting judgment that the father is disrespecting his daughter. I think that says more about you than it does about them.

You still seem to be missing the point so I will just leave this here.

Oh, I’m not missing your point. I think you’re stopping as soon as you see an answer and are not looking beyond it.

I’m not sure your contention that othering people is humorous makes you as fun as you think it does.

I feel very sorry for your that you have not experienced any intimate relationships where you can know love beyond the literal definitions of words. I hope someday you can find this. In the years ahead as you grow up, you will learn that those very close like husband and wife can have entire conversations which sound like one thing, but are something else entirely. Sometimes its not even words, but just a sound or a look.

Good luck friend.

and if you think that opinion makes me unfun then by all means go ahead and think that.

Then I believe you are unfun or rather your sense of humor is limited. Alternately, I also accept that perhaps English isn’t your first language and much of humor is mixed with advance language understanding.

It’s possible to give somebody a good natured ribbing without using “women” as a pejorative term,

This feels like we’re deep into ThatstheJoke.jpg territory, but when a term that has an obvious pejorative usage exists, and it is used by a speaker you know doesn’t hold that pejorative opinion, then the joke gains another level of humor that the speaker is communicating the opinion they are stating can be considered jokingly dumb as though someone stupid that would use the term as a pejorative would hold that opinion. Its a method of communication that telegraphs the joking context to the recipient.

In this case it is extremely unlikely the Dad uses the “you women” ever as a pejorative. So the only reason he would use it is as a joke. He’s telling the daughter “hey, joke incoming using hyperbole of gender stereotypes here.”

Do you ever smile and call anyone you love and “asshole” or a “bitch” sarcastically when you are joking and happy with them when there is full respect and zero malice? Or perhaps more generally, if someone were to look into your private text messages with your parents could anything you say be taken out of context and be displayed as disrespectful?

The context of a dad talking to his daughter in a private text message. Its likely used as a phrase of endearment referring to his wife and daughter. He’s not speaking to about public women he doesn’t know.

Nah, maybe how it once was and now I only wear Darn Tough socks.

You’re wearing a $20-$30 pair of socks to mow the lawn or change the oil in a car? I’d be worried about messing those nice socks up.

I almost never wear out the toes. For me its balls of the feet holes or occasionally a heel hole. I’ll also say that my socks last a long time.

One slightly different path here is socks. If a sock lives long enough for its elastic to wear out it can go to “garage clothes” category. Socks missing a mate can also go here being pair up with another sock with a missing mate. Another path for socks to “garage clothes” is if fashion trends finally evolving so far that wearing those socks will get admonishment from the gf/wife if worn out in public. However, as soon as a sock has a hole in it, it skips the “garage clothes” step and heads straight to the “rags” category.

I go the other way. My 20s were filled with good things yes, but also many embarrassing life lessons where I didn’t read the room appropriately or missed possible opportunities for romantic relationships. I had a short period of doing silly things to try to impress others. I spent money on stupid shit, and stayed at a job for way too long before finally moving on which put me years behind in my career. I got addicted to World of Warcraft for an entire year and accomplished absolutely nothing with my life. I never physically injured anyone or committed crimes, but I could have been a better version of myself. I do value my 20s, but really because of all the lessons I learned that made me a better person in the years after.

You can keep my 20s, thanks. My 30s were pretty excellent though and I would probably be okay being 33-37 until I die a regularly human lifespan.

Thats a nice ETF. Expense ratio is pretty low and its performance YTD and 1Y are within about .5% of the S&P500 (with it beating the S&P500 YTD).

For others, if you’d received this magical $50k exactly 1 year ago and invested it in ESGV, you’d have about $60k today.