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Nice Guy Eddie

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Nice Guy Eddie

  1. My high yield savings account just announced a rate drop from 4.5 to 4.4%.
  2. I fail to comprehend where some of these high school kids are going to land in the future in terms of a job or career, but as a 55 year old without kids, I guess it's not really my problem. I do think we've been failing our kids the last couple of decades and letting them slide in school doesn't seem to be a good solution. If someone has a good solution, I'm happy to do my part including higher taxes if it actually helps the future. I understand the opinion that some knowledge/info workers don't need an university degree full of unnecessary classes, but a degree represents more than sum of the individual classes. It shows completion of a long term commitment. For some of us, that commitment was shaky at times but we got through it. Personally I wouldn't hire someone today that showed up with a handful of online classes and a certification that may or may not have value.
  3. Seems crazy to me to think that rules, competency and morals are to be followed in a war, especially now that we can kill people in a way where the operator is more detached than they if they were playing a video game. I imagine that there is a small percentage of the heroes in Arlington Cemetery that were killed accidentally by fellow Americans. And in the same wars, innocent civilians are killed at a higher rate. I'm very much a pacifist but also a realist when it comes to how war operates. What is occurring in Gaza has been occurring for centuries or thousands of years.
  4. I know of a similar story that occurred with an Astronomy 301 final in the late 80s.
  5. Wasn't a thing when I went to school in the 70s and 80s. Of course then again I went to a relatively poor school. Hell my parents did well, and our only annual vacation was 2 weeks in August. And yes, unexcused absences definitely lowered your grade after a certain point.
  6. I assume that many kids got a pass for barely participating in the pandemic, and some parents noticed that the sky didn't fall. Of course being a dumbass kid with no ambition/plans is not really felt until a few years down the road after you can't earn a living. On @Pancho note about online influencers, I've watched a few clips where kids are being told by their peers, that school is a waste of time. While this peer is flashing money, cars, girls, etc. My viewing was other channels reacting poorly or laughing at these clips.
  7. I'm not saying the good ol' school days were better, but I only recall missing 1-2 days of school (K-12) due to reason other than illness. It was my grandmother's death when I was in 3rd grade. Admittedly I did have a problem pretending to be sick because I wanted a break. As mentioned above, I regularly hear my friends talk about pulling their kids out of school for vacation because flights are cheaper on some days. Personally I could care less but that didn't seem allowable when I was in school. It was an unexcused absence that lowered your grade, and in theory could hold you back if it occurred too often.
  8. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/29/us/chronic-absences.html no paywall but ads: https://archive.is/91mrf Nationwide absences (edit: chronic absenteeism) have doubled to 26% from before the pandemic. Quotes on the reasons I can understand why parents aren't always worried about a kid missing a day of school but this feels like a drastic change where we don't know the outcome.
  9. Stories about people booking multiple hotels/AirBnBs across the country to mitigate weather issues. I imagine Texas hotels and hosts are being hit when cancellations which is painful if they had customer-friendly cancellation rates. Shame that Texas is looking so poor across the board. You would have thought either south or north Texas would have been clear. I've planned to take off Monday from work to drive from Houston but doubtful I will do that now unless the weather offers better chances somewhere in Texas.
  10. One more piece of advice that I recommend for anyone dealing with parent who is entering assisted living, hospice, dementia care, etc: talk to a consultant. There are people who can answer almost any question you have. In my experience they get paid from the living facilities/services that they recommend. Obviously keep that in mind. In Houston, I found that Lori at the following was invaluable teaching me about everything senior care/living related. http://www.seniorlivingspecialistshouston.com/ I never asked her about the Medicaid lookback but I would assume that consultants understand that very well.
  11. My mom had LTC insurance that was a blessing in allowing her to stay in assisted living near me (central.) If she didn't have the LTC, she would have had to stay in a place that was further (suburbs) from me. I found that Genworth Ins was awesome with my mom's LTC. They didn't have a problem qualifying her. They were inconsistent in payment dates so I made sure my mom's bank account wasn't dependent on the payment being received on the exact same date each month. I padded her account by a month's expenses. As for getting LTC for us younger folks, I would love to but I worry about the benefit time coverage and the uncertainty of rising premiums while waiting to someday use the benefit. On note of utilizing hospice care, the answer is 100% yes assuming that the person is effectively done with curative care. And even with that, you can opt out of hospice whenever you want, and re-apply.
  12. Conservative LSU fans must be at a loss on how to react. They must simultaneously love Mulkey while hating the team.
  13. funny how the "independent" politicians or formerly-liberal journalist do nothing but attack the Dems. At best they will attack Trump by saying that they wish he wouldn't tweet (or whatever) so much.
  14. Wouldn’t it only take 1 or 2 of the GOP reps to announce that they’ve had enough and will caucus with the democrats? Seems like Jeffries could offer up some committee chairs to make that happen.
  15. I would guess that for some of the cases when the convicted are getting a low or no prison sentence, it’s due to the prosecutor having evidence or testimony problems. The children or parents of the children, may not want to testify even in a closed court. At least with a guilty plea, the convicted will be on offender registries. the real tragedies are when they are allowed to plead guilty to lesser crimes.
  16. One thing I took away from the article is that Mulkey is anti-LGBT which is odd considering her sport. It’s most likely tied to her background and beliefs and potentially even politics. She has gay players on her teams so she’s not anti in the sense that she wants a gay person shunned from society. However her don’t ask-don’t tell attitude is anti LGBT. Ex-players spoke up that they were told to be discrete and that Mulkey didn’t want to know their personal life. I have to wonder that she would have said the same if a straight player mentioned a boyfriend. as for the Post pulling punches, they may have given the article more scrutiny given Mulkeys threats. Perhaps downplay a single sourced anonymous story or quote. Flip that into implications or let the reader read between the lines. But to think that the Post was afraid of Mulkey is laughable. finally perhaps outside of her relationship with her children I’m unsure if anyone likes her, or is she has ever been nice to anyone.
  17. My view is that parents money is there for their care. When/if it’s runs out, switch to Medicaid care. But if the parent doesn’t care about their care, then give it all away years before they need it.
  18. Inactive wallets are impossible to fully categorize in terms of why are they inactive. Recently there was a story that an inactive wallet moved its entire balance (1,000 BTC?) for the first time in over a decade. Previously those 1,000 BTC would have been considered lost by many. "Satoshi" is estimated to have between 600K and 1.1m in BTC. There is a range because of the uncertainty of whether all of the potential wallets are his. That range equates to $44-73B USD. If there was a withdrawal from those wallets, it would destabilize the price. The lost coins are effectively built into the current price.
  19. Let’s see what Trump’s company is worth on the stock market when most of the shares, including his, are tradeable. I’m unsure there has ever been a company having this type of valuation with so few customers/users and such low revenue. It lost $49mm on $3mm revenue. That itself isn’t unheard of with startups but those startups are not valued at $9b on the public market. my assumption is that this is some combination of GameStop/short squeeze and relatively few shares available for trading. But we’ll see. Regardless trump can’t sell today and I can’t imagine anyone letting him borrow much on his stake.
  20. I only gotten 1/2 thru book 1 so almost everything in the series is new to me. This part of the episode made little sense to me because there was little context.
  21. I bet that many young men are likely to encounter peer pressure to vote for Trump. At least in the sense that the vocal minority in a friend/acquaintance group are the ones who bring up Biden's senility and that only betas or losers vote Dem. In an extended friend group, I recently encountered a guy who went on how he wasn't friends with liberals. I mentioned that I frequently vote Democrat. He folded like a cheap suit. "I was only joking bro." My attitude and actual thought was that his opinion meant nothing to me.
  22. I doubt that Trump is asking very little at this point to enact whatever the donor wants. Saudis - you want to develop nuclear weapons? Hell, I will give you nuclear weapons if you get me elected.
  23. With the RNC and Trump broke for this election cycle, I can't wait (and simultaneously dread) to see their lawyers and spokespeople especially with the inevitable election fraud claims. The future tv appearances will make the Rudy post-election press conferences look like a MENSA debate. As for some right wing billionaires willing to prop up the RNC and Trump, even some of them may hit their limits. It's one thing to put $1m into Abbott's campaign but something else to give $500m to Trump.
  24. what exactly are her qualifications other than probably having a lot of google founder divorce money? Wikipedia tells me that she started and sold the startup but the sale was after she married the google guy. The timing creates questions of the legitimacy of the sale.
  25. Dangers of working for crypto. TLDR: Binance's African regional mgr detained in Nigeria because the govt demanded a list of Nigerian Binance traders reportedly due to money laundering and terrorism activities. He was under house arrest but allowed to attend services at a nearby mosque. He never returned and left the country on another passport. Nigeria also is filing tax evasion charges against Binance and this mgr. TLDR squared: Nigeria is not a crypto friendly country. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68656119?utm_campaign=mb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew
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