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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • True, but it’s worth noting that this is an average and will vary wildly. Since I started tracking my annual returns have been 9.42%, 1.12%, 8.44%, 17.28%, -5.30%, 22.04%, 18.75%, 15.60%, -17.58%, and 18.11%. Which averages out to 7.75% — not far from the usual 7% figure.*

    So for anyone just learning about investing, you’ll almost never have an “average” year. Each year will be all over the place. It’s only when you’ve been in the market for a long time that your returns will average out to something close to typical.

    *I’m also ignoring an important distinction: IIRC the stock market averages close to 10% returns if you only look at dollar values. But when you account for the fact that inflation makes reach dollar worth less, on average returns are 7% in terms of real purchasing power. The returns I posted above are not inflation adjusted, but they include some bonds which don’t return as much as stocks. So it’s no surprise that my returns are on average less than 10%.





  • Theoretically, Biden could do it and not be prosecuted.

    But if he ordered a member of the military to do it, they are required to refuse illegal orders. I don’t know the rules about illegal orders but I bet this would fall under that. At the same time, the President can pardon people convicted in military court so that’s not much of a deterrent.

    Similarly if he ordered a civilian (say, CIA) to assassinate Trump, that person could be tried. But again, the President’s pardon power makes federal charges not much of a threat.

    BUT — the President cannot grant pardons for convictions in state courts. So anyone involved would be in trouble if it happened in a US state. And if the Supreme Court did not make the President immune from state-level prosecution, Biden could be tried for being involved… but it seems unlikely that they would go for “the President is immune from federal prosecution but not state prosecution.”

    Of course, all this show how insane and dangerous the idea of Presidential immunity is. It’s a terrible idea.


  • Where I’m coming from: I’m just a random person on the internet, my opinion doesn’t really matter. So I’m willing to apply heuristics here that I would not apply if I were directly involved in the situation. If I were directly involved I would want to know more before rendering a judgment.

    The heuristic I applied here was: this whole thing about “furries in schools” has come up repeatedly as a right-wing talking point and to my knowledge it has been a lie 100% of the time. So I was comfortable applying the heuristic of “if this has been a lie every other time it has come up, this time it is probably a lie.” As they say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so I would need something extraordinary to convince me that furries assaulting students with impunity is a thing that actually happened. Not impossible, there are enough humans on the earth that absolutely bonkers things happen all the time, but extraordinarily unlikely to be true.

    A cursory search revealed a much more believable story: some students wore headbands possibly with ears on them to school, and other kids were assholes to them. Honestly the only surprising thing to me is how reasonable the administration was: they sent a letter reminding students that those headbands are not allowed by dress code but also reminding the other students that being terrible to your fellow students is not ok. I remember high school, this all sounds believable to me (except for the part where administration admonished the food-throwing bullies, that’s a little bit of a surprise to me).








  • Yeah, it will help and it won’t. If you’re uploading through a typical cable internet connection, WiFi will almost never be the bottleneck. But if you’re streaming 4k in a part of your house that doesn’t have good coverage while other people use the same connection, it could make a difference.

    I do a lot of streaming from my desktop to my TVs and I occasionally have bandwidth problems, so this could help that. And I have 300 up / 300 down fiber Internet, and in parts of my house I have problems getting anywhere close to that on WiFi. So WiFi 7 might help with those cases even if in the end your ISP is usually the bottleneck.



  • We just got 2 new Carrier Infinity 24 heat pumps and I don’t think I’ve ever heard them running (except for the fan pushing air through the ducts, but that’s part of a traditional furnace too). It’s an expensive system that is advertised as being particularly quiet, and I think they deliver - I haven’t noticed any change in noise levels. One of them had an issue for a while so we ran the backup gas furnace instead, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the one that was using the heat pump and the one that was using gas.

    So it’s possible to get a quiet heat pump, depending on the model.