🤔 reads more like /c/[email protected]

Yes, yes it is fake but it still captures the zeitgeist of working in a corporate environment.

About 26 miles from the hospital I was born in, or 35 miles from my family’s home at the time. I haven’t gone far, but each move has a been a little bit further.

Who knows, by the time I die maybe I’ll live outside the local metro area!

Or attract people who probably shouldn’t be teaching.

Myself, my wife, her parents, and my parents all use it, though honestly the latter are there for grandkid pictures and I’m confident 100% of their conversations with anyone else are sms/facebook/etc.

You could call it senility but it’s also completely in character: lie, make shit up, and take no responsibility for anything, including and especially things he’s directly done.

If you needed an image to sum up this administration, here it is. The only way it could be more on the nose is if they did it in front of starving people.

In a statement, he said, “The Office of the Governor rigorously complies with the Texas Public Information Act and will release any responsive information that is determined to not be confidential or excepted from disclosure.”

Translation: We will not release anything of interest or of substance. And we won’t give you back your $244.

I’ve used cursor quite a bit recently in large part because it’s an organization wide push at my employer, so I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment.

My best analogy is that it’s like micro managing a hyper productive junior developer that somehow already “knows” how to do stuff in most languages and frameworks, but also completely lacks common sense, a concept of good practices, or a big picture view of what’s being accomplished. Which means a ton of course correction. I even had it spit out code attempting to hardcode credentials.

I can accomplish some things “faster” with it, but mostly in comparison to my professional reality: I rarely have the contiguous chunks of time I’d need to dedicate to properly ingest and do something entirely new to me. I save a significant amount of the onboarding, but lose a bunch of time navigating to a reasonable solution. Critically that navigation is more “interrupt” tolerant, and I get a lot of interrupts.

That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.

To challenge you slightly: what are your tax reasons for focusing on dividends? People commonly misunderstand the comparative tax implications of dividend vs total return investing. In most cases focusing on dividends is suboptimal both in terms of return and diversification.

Zooming out, there’s key pieces missing here: what are your goals with your investing? What is your current financial situation?

My blanket advice for generic scenarios would be:

• If your taxable brokerage position isn’t large, consider building an emergency fund of 6-12 months
• Pick a simple, diversified, and easy to automate investment allocation (eg. a three fund portfolio)
• Outline your goals, investments are a means and not an end unto themselves
• Sketch out a rough path from today to your goal so you’re not navigating blindly

A mega backdoor Roth involves putting money into an “after tax” (not Roth) 401k account and then rolling it over into Roth either within the 401k plan or to an external Roth IRA. It can mean an extra $25k+ in Roth on top of what you’re already contributing to the 401k. Most plans do not offer the features necessary to do this.

Assuming tax policy stays the same, you’d probably lean traditional if you expect your income to be lower in retirement but you’d also want to consider tax diversification. Another aspect is that Roth IRAs will allow you to take contributions back out tax and penalty free before retirement which can be useful if you planned on retiring early.

+5 points if you realize it mid way through by the look on your audience’s faces.

Leopards exfoliated my face.

“We lose money on every query, but we make up for it in volume!”

Apologies, I didn’t intend for this to turn into a wall of text, but I’m posting it anyway. 😅

Usually Roth vs traditional comes down to a judgement call on whether you think it’s more advantageous to pay your marginal tax rate now vs your marginal tax rate in retirement. The optimal answer is unknowable without knowing the future, so you make an educated guess.

People early on in their careers (especially, but not exclusively, where they expect to earn significantly more later) or those who feel that tax rates will be significantly higher in the future during their retirement vs now (eg. you believe taxes are at historic lows and will rise) will often opt for Roth accounts.

Conversely those in a high marginal bracket now who expect to have significantly lower taxes in retirement will often opt for traditional. Indeed if you’re a high W2 earner a traditional 401k is one of the few tax breaks you get.

There’s also something to be said for tax diversification: we don’t know what tax policy will be in the future nor what your income will be in retirement so you can hedge the risk of guessing wrong by putting funds in both Roth and traditional retirement accounts.

People looking specifically at backdoor Roth are usually those who aren’t otherwise eligible to contribute based on income limits.

People looking at mega-backdoor Roth are just lucky (both to have a 401k plan that offers it and to have the money to leverage it).

Regarding a financial advisor: it’s entirely possible to get one-off financial advice for a fee instead of an ongoing commitment or having them manage your assets. The key is to look for a fee-only fiduciary that offers consultations (checkout napfa.org) and not financial “advisors” at banks, brokerages, insurance companies, etc. Those guys aren’t guaranteed to be bad, but they most often double as salesmen who get commission and have a conflict of interest at best.

Apparently this was the prompt:

@grok if you have to pick between two titles, would you call yourself Gigajew or MechaHitler?

Still…

At this rate we’ll have church in state in no time!

Most frequent (and white) churchgoers already lean heavily Republican. There is interesting nuance in the data though (how frequently people attend, evangelical or not, etc).

We can’t be sure, but we can send him to a prison in El Salvador on the vague hypothesis that he is.