Very true, however, 15k sitting in a bank account will be equally as worthless as a valueless security if the economy completely imploded.

I’ve also noticed that the economy is pretty robust in it’s ability to weather storms that should theoretically cripple it. It would take an event so catastrophic that all sectors of business are heavily impacted. Barring all-out civil war, I can’t see that happening. Even a global pandemic saw certain businesses do better than ever - companies that made PPE, hand sanitizer and toilet paper mostly.

Coming from someone who wishes they invested earlier rather than shoving my savings away in a checking account - if you can’t think of something off the top of your head that you would need that money for in the next year or two, invest it in an index fund. It’s braindead easy, does not require you to manage it, and will steadily grow 6-10% each year which beats any high yield savings account by a fair bit. So you just set it and forget it and then maybe in 10 years you remember you invested 15k in VTI or VOO and now you have around 30k or more depending on how well the market did.

There will be market booms and busts, and you might end up losing money in the short term, but as long as there is a functioning economy, the line will inevitably go up.

I prefer index funds over bonds because you can always sell your position if you need a quick infusion of cash.

Again, this is just if you don’t already have designs on how to spend the cash. If your bro gave it to you to enjoy it as you see fit, you shouldn’t feel obligated to save it. Do what you think is right for yourself.

The thing that will kill this is forcing users to migrate to a new app. Removing the largest friction barrier that prevents people from leaving your app by forcing them to cross it is a great way to scatter the TikTok userbase to the four winds.

I hope this kills TikTok, and that the people who enjoyed using it remember who was responsible for it.

I’m sick of the media trying to gaslight me into thinking that this dude getting blasted is a bad thing. IDGAF about political violence at this point. When Republicans commit acts of political violence, it’s downplayed or even openly celebrated by the highest level of government (e.g. Trump making fun of Paul Pelosi). When a Democrat does it (and we still don’t know what the shooter’s political affiliation was) suddenly we need to “turn down the temperature” and Dem politicians start strongly condemning acts of political violence, saying it’s not the way we do things here. But when you have one side strongly embracing fascism and the political left doing absolutely nothing to stop them, we’ve gone beyond our ability to handle this any other way. Part of the problem is Trump himself fanning the flames of divisiveness by preemptively blaming the attack on “radical leftists”.

If we’re going to get blamed either way, why not embrace the narrative that the right so desperately wants to sell their base?

You promise?

The only thing I’m afraid of is the reprisal that Trump will extract from us.

The video games industry needs to learn to not be afraid of letting games cook for a little longer. Silksong took a long time to come out, but what we eventually got was a good game made by a small team. Imagine if instead of the 500+ team members working on the next annual release of Assassins Creed, they peel off 50 artists, writers and programmers to create a new IP over the course of the next 5-7 years? Kind of like the original decision to do just that which got us… Assassin’s Creed for the original Xbox.

There has got to be a good balance between “Here is EA Sportsball 20XX, that will be $70 please.” where you get an underwhelming and uninspired annual release title with minor changes from the previous year, and Duke Nukem Forever or Cyberpunk 2077 that were trapped in decades-long development hell and released a sub-par, buggy product.

It’s not the $70 price tag that’s the issue, it’s “what am I getting for the extra $10 I am paying for this?”. If the answer is a more polished and refined product, I’m all for it - but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s funny, the fascists “won” here, but they are still expatriating themselves to fuck up other people’s countries too.

Yeah, the 3x salary requirements are insane when housing accounts for almost 50% of people’s take home pay in most places.

The problem with making charts like this is that they are punchy to people who don’t understand that the stock market is not a very good indicator of economic health (and that it’s incredibly outdated by this point, making the numbers untrue) but anyone who actually does any investing, even casual investing, quickly realize that the DOW, NASDAQ, and S&P500 are completely unmoored from reality.

The fed talks about (but crucially does not commit to) a half percentage point interest rate cut next month? Line go up!

Tesla quarterly earnings beat their revenue goals, but not by as much as analysts predicted? Line go down!

The numbers will go up or down mostly irrespective of what the man in the oval office does. What Trump or Biden say and do as President certainly has an effect, but then the market forces usually correct it days later and it’s back to business as usual.

The more important stats to focus on are how regular consumers are feeling the pinch every day with the inflated cost of goods and services. Who cares about whether or not the wealthiest companies are doing well for themselves. If the stock market has a bad day, just wait a month and you’ll be back in the green again. If the consumer market is having a bad day, it’s not likely going to be isolated to just one day.

This is the coolest trick since I learned about the “quick 20% tip on your tab” method. Take the total bill, move the decimal point one place over to the left, then multiply it by 2 to get 20% gratuity. I will sometimes round down on the change to make it closer to 18%. Also I only really need to do this when I’m drunk and can’t maths.