WalrusDragonOnABike @ WalrusDragonOnABike @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

If people have UBI, you can get away with paying less though. That's how walmart does it; just encourage your workers to get welfare so they stay alive enough to work more

Switch to using an ebike this year, so it has its built in light, I have another rear light that blinks (not very bright and turned so its not directly facing drivers), and recently got a helmet with a front and rear light. Also wear bright clothes and have reflective stickers on my bike and stripes on pannier. I still don't trust some of the cars given passing in-lane is the only option for them to pass and the lane is too narrow for that.

I suggested an alternative semi-standardized metric that still wouldn't describe everyone perfectly, but I suspect would do a better job than the one used. I don't think its weird to use one. I think the one chosen is weird, even if I acknowledged one of the reasons why they probably used it (easy of data). Current spending would still be a terrible estimate for the FIRE-types who work in HCOL places and move to LCOL places for retirement, but I think it would much better account for ordinary 25th percentile income households who live paycheck to paycheck. But I doubt Vanguard really cares if their metrics are useful for poorer people who live paycheck to paycheck since its obvious they're not going to have enough anyways and not exactly their target demographic.

Maybe if you assume healthcare stays as-is, you may be able to use roths to keep your taxable-income low enough to stay under the magic number required to get the deductible/max year out of pocket savings and the potentially $4000s of dollars a year savings in health care costs.

Numbers:
Hypothetical case: need 30K/year after taxes if getting the MYOP savings or 34K/year after taxes if not and assuming you put in all your money now and wait 30 years to retire using 5% average returns. Assume 4% WR and 27K is the threshold for extra savings. All numbers adjusted for inflation.

t401k:
Need 213k now - 921k in 30 years (which would be 850k after taxes on the gains)
r401k:
Need 193k now if marginal tax rate is 10%, 197k if marginal tax rate is 12% - 750k (no taxes paid on the gains)
Mixed (you only need to 3k/year from roth to bring taxable income down to threshold):
169K into t401k + 19-20k into r401k (10 and 12% marginal tax rates) = 189k now.

Another easy case is when the current marginal tax is 0%. If you are putting money into retirement accounts when your income is under the standard deduction, then definitely Roth. Traditional literally does nothing in that case.

Of course this is a bit of a contrived example and it assumes you have the same 10-12% marginal tax rate on either side. I think most people who have the extra income to for it to be worth the time to consider the difference probably make enough now to be in higher brackets, but probably will retire with significantly lower spending than their current income. If taxes across brackets increase in the future, otoh, then paying them now would be beneficial and may give some peace of mind about that risk.

There's so many unknowns that I think its a bit oversimplistic to assume one is simply better than the other.

You can be an employee at places still? /j

Weird to determine retirement spending based on annual income instead of annual spending. Like, if someone is only spending 40% of their income now, why would they assume they are going to increase their spending by 65% when they retire? Or otoh, if someone is spending 95-110% of their income now and that's mostly housing and food, why would they only need 68% when they retire (especially if they're accumulating debt)? I'm sure its mostly a result of that data being a lot easier to get and may be using assumptions about how many years someone is working and assumed savings rate required to get that amount of money (heuristics like if you have a constant inflation-adjusted income and save 30%, it takes about 30 years to save enough to retire)?

70th percentile is only $120K/year. A lot more than I make, but not exactly what I'd be using "wealthier" to describe, even if just as a comparative. Even at like 90th percentile (220K/year) would still just be in the "well off" category in my mind.

I sometimes bike to work (15 miles each way), but fortunately to have a trail I can take a good chunk of the ride to work.

Unfortunately I get off after-dark and its closed (I wouldn't ride it at night even if it were technically open), so stuck riding a sometimes poorly lit stroad for a five-mile stretch home that's down to 1-lane much of the way because of never-ending construction with no shoulder or bike lane (plus stroads most of the other 10 miles home). I couldn't recommend the ride to anyone until the construction is gone. Would be great if they'd put some protected bike lanes there though, but given the trails available during the day, non-night riders and non-bike commuters would probably feel like its redundant.

When trump leaks classified info it's bad. When gay furry hackers take classified info, it's funny. /J

If he can even get a 1% gain in net worth from market manipulation, it would be a worth it even with 2 more zeros. 1 billion dollars is barely anything for him. 20mil is like a $80 fine for millionaire.

Even if we could just take away 99.9999%, that would be nice. He'd still be several times wealither than the average american his age.

August was the hottest September?

Trans is about how your gender identity relates to their assigned gender. If life begins at conception and you assigned gender at that point, everyone should be assigned female. Anyone who identifies as a man would have a gender that doesn't match their assigned gender and therefore would be trans.

And the reception of those hormones, which may not exist or may not be functional for some people.

Turns out making beings out of trillions of cells of 100s of types (all of which have basically the same 3 or 6 billion base pair genome, yet have to act very differently) is complicated and any process has many steps, which involve various genes, receptors, signals, etc, all of which could be interrupted.

Fetuses are regularly assigned gender, whether they have one or not (and by the time you can have a high-confidence guess at genitalia, the brain's gender might already be somewhat determined). At conception, many transphobes would try to assign gender based on chromosomes even though those aren't even used for assigning sex and certainly there is no gender given there's no brain yet.

I think you underestimate how popular taking action to stop climate change is. Even in places like Texas, it has super-majority support. The idea that it is a controversial issue is just made up to feed into climate apathy.

Local effects are a way to deal with the warming we've already locked in.

If I'm a passenger when my brother's driving, I'm probably on my phone most of the time and using my phone for the car's music, for example. Such a restriction would simply mean my brother would be doing the music while driving.

Haven't really had to deal with this much, but getting immediate family member's name correct the first time is a challenge for me even when they've always had the same name. If their names start with the same letter, their names may get mixed up often...

If it cost 1000s of 10,000s a month to simply cook food, it would probably not be worth the cost to save the planet. That's how high they expensive they expected wind to be in their calculations.

Feel like its a common mistake to mix up kW and kWh, but if you don't know the basics of power you shouldn't be trying to write on the topic and any peer reviewer should know the cost of onshore wind is in the cents per kWh, not 100's of dollars per kWh if someone has even if only from paying attention to their own electric bill.

Also apparently mixed billions and trillions at one point? Just a small factor of a 3 (orders of magnitudes).