I’m going to be honest here, as an American I fully support you in this and hope the best for Canada. Many of us totally understand the resentment and know that our government and republican party asked for this. I hope the boycotts work and I hope they send the clearest message back. At the same time I don’t have much faith I our leadership to react rationally.

This article is written with some wild speculations by both the author of the article and the source they are quoting. When cell phones are cracked for evidence they have to use write blockers when they copy the phone. They do the analysis on the copy. The original is then re-copied in court to show what was found. This way the original is never tampered with and made inadmissible, and whatever analysis bullshit you did isn’t mixed in with your court room copy. What this also means is that your AI can hallucinate all it wants and make up any evidence you can imagine all day long, but when you get into the court room and have to then point to where the conclusions came from and you can’t-you will be standing there with a dick on your forehead and with a case being tossed out.

Think of a more direct democracy. I will oversimplify enough to annoy those from Switzerland:

Differing levels of law require differing thresholds. Country votes on a law, the majority above the required threshold vote it in. It becomes a national law. That is easy. What about when it fails? Then look to the state level. Did it pass the threshold for your state? Yes? Then it is a state law. Failed state level? Let’s look at your county/city/local level. Passed threshold? Local law.

Again, over simplified, but general idea.

I saw patients this past week. Like I do every week. That is my one bullet point. I still need 4 more bullet points??? This is ridiculous. I’m doing my job, that I have been asked to do. He doesn’t know what my job is. The AI they are going to feed my answer through doesn’t know what my job is. The people who do know what my job is know that I am doing it just fine. We already have an evaluation system that I have to sign every 6 months and submit bullet points with.

My supervisor, and their supervisors, are now going to have meetings about us responding. Then we are going to be told in meetings about how to respond. Then I spend some arbitrary amount of time responding. Do you have any idea how much combined time across the entire government is being waisted on this? This is literally millions of dollars in total time waisted just for the whims of a mad man. This is a prime example of wasting tax dollars.

I was already going hard on AI stock, then day of inauguration when he sent the clear message of where tech companies stand in running this country I dumped ALL investment money into AI stock. If I have to live in this hellscape I better at least get to retire in it.

It’s worse than you think. Last week we got an email that looked like strait up fishing spam demanding that we were to email back “yes” confirming that we got the email. So many people even reported it as spam that we had supervisors have to directly tell us that it was legit. Then they sent out a second email with a warning that is was in fact legit and to respond to that email with “yes” if we got that one.

On the back end at OPM: Musk forced his way in and demanded to redo the email servers. The IT told him it wasn’t possible for what he was asking. So he brought in his own goons to install a non government server with unknown software and unknown security configurations and they plugged it into the OPM network to spoof it as an official OPM server, then sent out those emails.

And sure enough, the idiot didn’t didn’t configure the security correctly or let official government IT people touch it, it ended up backdooring into the entire government HR system, and it had every active government email that responded “yes” to his stupid email that we were required to. And now we know it was compromised. There is no telling what foreign governments now have all of that info as well as what other backdoors they have installed.

This is a double edged sword. You are protecting homeowners from predatory behavior, sure. But also delaying those who simply want to cash out and say fuck this.

This is also LA’s chance to go into these areas and build high density, high efficiency housing with fire resistant materials and prevent future issues like this while also providing some relief to the housing issues in the area and showing how energy efficiency is the future of construction. Unfortunately these homes are going to be rebuilt as fast as possible for the families to move back in as fast as possible and they will use whatever is the cheapest and most accessible materials to make it happen. And this protection does nothing to stop that, and if anything encourages it by blocking the sales and pushing for individual rebuilds.

With climate change pushing these fire to happen more often, this disaster that could be at least mitigated. Policy like this will only push for a future cycle of rebuild the same way followed by burning down the same way. And it is the poor and middle class footing the bill to the insurance companies charging whatever they want, knowing it is going to keep happening.

When it is easy bull markets, I go heavy on growth stocks. When the market is bear, I go heavy on dividends. Right now though there is a high beta turmoil, so I have a mix of both. My IRA is also set up as more od a “leave this alone” investment. My etrade account has my “fuck around and find out” money. I mention this because it is hard to directly compare the two. So far my dividends have strongly out performed the growth stocks, but only in the last 3 months or so has the gap widened. I credit it to 2 specific ones that are getting me 30%-ish yields with stable prices. They are also new etf’s, so the hedge money is still strong before the stripping gets to its prices. I mentioned in a post lower that that my little under 30k is netting me 800/month. Honestly it is paying a higher yield than renting out my condo is getting me.

It is also called ‘dividend stripping’.

Also yes. The more professional name is ‘dividend capture strategy’. More work, worth the pay off, do all you can to avoid commissions and fees.

Little under 30k in higher risk dividend. Bring in about 800 a month.

I have a mix of large cap, small cap growth stocks, then dividend high risk and low risk. Stock like this (I do not own PETS, I was just using it as an example) would be a high risk due to its price instability. But you mitigate that with stop loss orders.

I have a vanguard/roth for my longs (large cap growths and stable dividends with DRIP) and then use etrade for the small cap or high risk ones. I like their tax documents and easy interface.

People make arguments against dividend stocks, I simply call it a different strategy. Some years it beats out my growths, some years it is about on par. Depends on where I have it at the time and slightly more market dependant.

I have recently gotten into ex-date chasing. While it has increased the returns, it is more work.

Sure. It is still a lower rate than going into dividend stocks.

PETS, sorry, don’t know why my phone cut off the ‘S’.

PETMED EXPRESS INC COM

$10,000 at 4% gives you $400 interest in one year.

Just about any decent dividend stock will outperform that. Look at PET for example. It is sitting at $3.65/share right now and offers a quarterly dividend of $0.30. That puts you at $1.20/share per year. 10k = 2739 shares = $3,286.80 dividend payout in one year.

Banks are the worst place to put investments. Money in bank accounts are only supposed to be there if you need it liquid, like an emergency fund or your checking account.

*PETS

PETMED EXPRESS INC COM

For all the nay sayers downvoting me as if it is impossible to find dividend stocks that outperform their precious SPY or high yield savings rates, here is a great list I found with shit loads. I count 60 different stocks that offer 10% yields or more. 100 in total all offering over 8% -double what some bullshit ‘high yield’ savings offers.

https://www.tradingview.com/markets/stocks-usa/market-movers-high-dividend/

I think they left out the most obvious questions-

Are you super rich?

Can you afford elective heath operations that will potentially prevent life ending illnesses or affliction?

Can you afford expensive lifestyles tailored for your health?

Can you afford to reduce all forms of stress in your life and live with no worries?

Seriously. We are talking about tire tread compared to weight. Both use multiple sizes of tire depending on the year/model. There are a few that overlap in diameter to get the closest to comparison but they still have a very different width. We are talking about a 235/35R18 vs a 235/75R18. That is a huge difference in wall height/aspect ratio and changes how the tire gives under power. Those numbers massively change depending on model as well. Something like an f150 raptor could have a 315/70R17, almost a foot wide. So comparing just the weight and saying they are close enough is far from a fair comparison.

You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn’t hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the ‘levelized cost of electricity’ where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn’t invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can’t handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.

My personal saying has always been: Democrats rule with incompetence. Republicans rule with spite and malice.

Looking passed the absolutely insane answer here, no one has even brought up the whole issue of AC vs DC. Batteries are DC, while your fridge that plugs into your wall running on AC. I know they make DC ones, but it isn’t like they are interchangeable.

I agree with you as a realist on the situation. We will never stop manufacturing them, at least for the foreseeable future. But we forget that something like recycling is the last stage of the 3R’s to follow. We must first look to reduce consumption. We need to find alternatives where possible, and switch away from these forever chemicals anywhere we can. Next, while “reusing” is not the best term here, but we need to find ways to extend the life of the products that we are forced to use and try to use them up in every way we can. Then lastly we need to be recycling it as best as possible before we send it to an incinerator, or more realistically a developing nation landfill.

Reduce -> Reuse -> Recycle is listed that way for a reason. Everyone always just jumps to the final stage then argue about how bad the recycling is while not even considering ways to reduce or reuse throughout the entire process.