Ice cream Castles is a good album. Prince is obviously very talented.

Yeah I was surprised to see she was uncredited too.

There are some real Prince scholars out there. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia page for example.

Maybe Jerry's fighting against her father was keeping her grounded. Sure he's an idiot, but he's an idiot who loves his family.

He plays Squanchy too if that makes you feel better. And Pensylvester, and a bunch of other bit voices.

And that Jelly Bean, was played by Spongebob voice actor Tom Kenny.

In the future when hubski is being excavated by Xeno Archaeologists they will not be able to explain what happened here.

I'm super down to talk R&M. I've been watching religiously for the last few years. Watched all of them multiple times, even the new one that was on last night.

So far, I love all of them. This review of the pickle rick episode was extremely good and I felt like they 'got' everything in the episode that a lot of other people missed.

In the final panel of that, in the background of the street scene, they have the Led Zeppelin icons as a sign. I dig that. That was a cool comic also! Learned a lot.

I mean, you could always just keep it. You'll just be losing the real value at the rate where inflation outstrips your savings interest rate.

Shit man, luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity (Seneca-ish). Take it when you can get it.

Honestly most of my financial technique is based on how debt and savings make me feel with the caveat that I feel as if I have a strong core of common sense.

I know that mathematically it's not the strongest return to pay off my mortgage as fast as I do, but in a few years, I won't have a mortgage to pay off. And that's going to make me feel infinitely richer.

So everyone is thinking investments. They're skipping over basic step one stuff which I don't know if you've done or not.

Step 0: Pay off unsecured debt. You said you're not really savvy with this stuff so I'm going to define unsecured debt as debt that you couldn't pay off by selling the thing the debt is for. A mortgage isn't unsecured. A car loan isn't (as long as you're not upside down because you bought a new car, or your house lost value). If you have credit card debt, student loans, any of that stuff, pay it off. Some people will disagree with this because they think that if you're paying 8 percent interest on a credit card, but going to see a 15 percent return on an investment, that you should take the higher return investment. To me, this ignores cash flow, which is more important than a small difference in return on investment. First, that credit cad interest rate is guaranteed to be that rate or worse, and your investment is not guaranteed to do a damn thing. So to argue that an ROI is higher and so that should be the only consideration is naive. Second, if you pay off a debt, you no longer have a minimum payment on that debt. This allows you a great amount of flexibility in how you spend your money otherwise. I find this to be valuable in an intangible way.

Step 1: Save cash in an emergency fund. It should be as much as you're comfortable with. Generally that's said to be about six months of salary or living expenses. So take all your outflows for the month, multiply times six, add 10% for what you're forgetting, then put that amount of cash away. If you can do this, and you have no debt already because of step 0, you are infinitely richer than almost everyone you know or see every day. This is money you can quit your job with and take your time to look. This is a security blanket. This is freedom money. Honestly, if you've done this already, and you have any money left over, you've left the realm of 'not a lot of money' for most people.

Step 2: Pretty much anything else you want to do with your money after paying off debt and saving is based on risk aversion.

You retiring tomorrow, or forty years from now? If tomorrow, save it. You won't see a return on it. If forty years from now, you can tolerate risk. Sequence of returns has lot to do with your final payout, you should read about that. That's basically the thing that the stock brokers aren't going to tell you. Sequence of returns doesn't affect their bottom line, but it does yours.

If you can tolerate the loss and eventual rebound, an index is less risky than you can probably tolerate and you could look at smaller investments that a broker can walk you through. But they're guessing just like anybody else. You very well could lose everything you give them. Just accept that if you're going uber risky. Think of the money as gone and everything else is a happy surprise.

But if you index it, you're looking at the standard 11% overall return.

Honestly, I don't think the college model is going to work much longer. And they've (and I've) been saying this for years. College is mostly a waste of time. You go to learn one skill set, then you have to learn a hugely diverse skill set to become a 'well-rounded' individual.

I get that, I hold two Master's, and around 300 credit hours in a classroom, with many of those hours going to nothing productive in particular. I'm round. But having done all that, which was an insane luxury for most, I don't recommend it. I took really hard (for me) math classes that expanded my mind a bit, but I also had to start from trig because math has never been my strong suit. So a lot of classes it took to get to Abstract Mathematics and Non-Linear Algebra before math really started blowing my mind.

But what do I use in my job? Mostly overall concepts of marketing segmentation, media channels, and experience from other jobs I've had. And a fine ability to bullshit. That's like 4 of the classes I took in college ever, a lifetime of not liking extra work, and luck.

So when I say that college is on its way out, I think what's going to take its place is certification. That cert used to be a degree, but lots of jobs in IT especially don't respect your degree. They want you to see you code (I've heard, I'm not a programmer). They want to see your Cisco certification, not your diploma.

So why is Marketing different? Because it didn't spring up quickly, and employ a group of fast moving people who walked into a job of unlimited growth, and who now run their companies' IT departments without a degree, thus spurring on a disregard for people with degrees but little practical experience. I dont' work in IT, but I do know a ton of people who work in IT, especially tech support for big companies, whose major skill is being able to look up the solution to a problem in forums and on google.

As soon as people can get hired with certs for marketing functions, people aren't going to go to school for Marketing anymore. Same with most jobs. I didn't go to school for education, I did it to waste time while I adjusted to being out of the military. Along the way I found something I liked doing, but that is a super inefficient college journey.

Math shows it's still a very solid investment to go to college.

Education Level - Median Weekly Income

High School/No College - 668

High School/Some College - 761

Bachelor's - 1101

Master's - 1386

So if you did rack up 100k in student debt to get a bachelor's degree, it would help you make (1101-668)=$433 more dollars per week over someone who went to high school only. $100,000/$433= approx 231 weeks of extra income's worth of loans. That's only 4.5 years, then for the rest of your life you're just making more than your investment.

Of course, you don't make the difference right away as it's the median income level for someone with that has that degree level, and I understand that it's part of the article to say that there's a wealth buffer, but even if you triple the repayment of the investment, it's still worth (in a 40 year career) ~800k in additional money. So you put in 100k, you get 800k. Anyone should make that investment.

Really, it's a wonder that college was every as cheap as it was to begin with. It's a huge return on investment, not only in percent, but in nominal dollars as well. Of course when you give people nearly unlimited access to capital, and shield lenders from any fear of losses through aggressive lending, you're going to spiral up the money supply in that market and get cost to the new maximum level that the market will bear. So now here we are.

As well, colleges have waaaaaay too many extravagant things to solely judge their costs on a repayment in education. There's probably a new market soon to emerge that would aim to be a bare bones educational experience. Go to class, no cafeteria, no sports, no av club etc.

That's awesome. I'm not voting for her, I don't want single payer, and moreover I don't live in Nevada CD4. But, I really really respect anyone who will put their money where their mouth is and run for office when they don't think the current person is doing a good job.

It's true that as a congressman in 1983, McCain voted against making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He was on the losing end of a 338 to 90 vote in the House of Representatives.

McCain no longer stands by that vote. On April 4, 2008 — the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death — McCain said the vote was wrong in a speech he gave in Memphis, the city where King died.

"We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I myself made long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King. I was wrong," he said, to loud reaction from the crowd. "I was wrong, and eventually realized it in time to give full support — full support — for a state holiday in my home state of Arizona. I'd remind you that we can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans."

So I'm no crypto-currency whiz, but the gist of this is that a hacker basically stole a page from the Road Runner and at the last minute swapped the road sign that pointed the ICO buyers where to send their money right?

The equivalent would be me going to Wal-Mart and standing in front of the cashier and telling the customer how much they owed me.

Neat.

You know why I get tired of it? Because it's not my job to prosecute him for the things that would 'otherwise end an administration.' And if it's not my job, and no one else is going to do it, then why get all spun up about it? Especially with this Russia thing. If there's something to be found, it's the job of the many people investigating it to find it. And when I say something, I mean impeachment level somethings. Even these DT Jr. e-mails don't prove that Trump ever knew about any of the meetings. Just that his son met with a Russian government official and they still don't even prove that despite their worst intentions that they were able to profit from this meeting.

Not watching the news makes me happier. I listen to the NPR news once in the morning on the way to work, and once on the way back, and hardly ever do I miss anything that has a shelf life of more than a day.

Capitalism and Freedom is the one I was thinking about when I said that. But I also really like his 18 page essay "Why Government is the Problem (Essays in Public Policy)". It's much to short to be a book, but it's concise.

Well even the faithful are willingly eating a human body. So maybe that's not the faith for me.

So I like Caplan's argument that social welfare programs make unemployment more palatable. But his justification of supply and demand ignores social pressures which encourage employment over jobless welfare use. I don't that's an insignificant impact. In fact, I think it's probably one of the main factors in the decision.

And if you have a floor amount of money where it is 'worth it' to take a job and dedicate your time to employment, then Wal-Mart benefits from that floor being otherwise occupied by government programs. You can prove this the same way he 'proves' his theorem, which is to ask 'If I was in charge of Wal-Mart, would I encourage a social pressure to take employment even when the pay is not at the level which produces a meaningful wage?' Of course I would, because then I can pay less as the worker gets an less tangible, but very valid, value of respect and participation in the employed labor force.

Another example on another end of the employee would be a retiree who takes Social Security. It's available to workers and non-workers, but Wal-Mart wouldn't have access to a group of workers that they prefer to hire in that position (nice old people) if those old people were still working in the job that they otherwise were able to retire from with the aid of social security.

The EITC is our greatest hope of a UBI in the near future. And was actually the idea of the EITC in the original Friedman plan, which he called a 'guaranteed income.' There's better sources than that, but his book (which is like Gospel to me) is harder to link.

That's a really interesting point.

Most people know I'm a Libertarian and that includes the support of the free market economy in most places, which of course includes wage transactions between adults. Moreover, where government subsidizes, the free market is interfered with. Wal-Mart is a good example of government making their low prices possible by offering social welfare programs for their workers, which allows their workers to be paid less and still maintain a sustainable lifestyle. I'm not saying it's a life of luxury, but they would likely have the basic necessities at that point.

However, where I think I depart from most L-Party is that I don't know how, in the age of automation of soon to be everything, that it will be possible for the free market to function. At a certain point, no matter how much innovation and development creates new jobs, there will not be enough jobs to sustain the population. Transitioning to the age of plenty will be damn near impossible to do well and especially knowing when that begins in earnest, and when we're still subject to the Luddite fallacy.

I'm also concerned that we may try to transition to early, and slow development of society otherwise. For all the ills heaped on capitalism, life is better than it ever has been for more people than ever. There's more food, there's cleaner water, there's less disease. These developments did not come from the USSR. Of course, you could also argue that altruist heroes like Jonas Salk who literally just gave away the polio vaccine (see below for an interesting side note) have done some good, the development of most vaccines does not come from similar places and instead comes out of the same labs that make boner pills.

It's going to be a really interesting thing to watch that transition from old to new as we go through the next 50 years.

SIDE NOTE: As pointed out by Robert Cook-Deegan at Duke University, “When Jonas Salk asked rhetorically “Would you patent the sun?” during his famous television interview with Edward R. Murrow, he did not mention that the lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had looked into patenting the Salk Vaccine and concluded that it could not be patented because of prior art – that it would not be considered a patentable invention by standards of the day. Salk implied that the decision was a moral one, but Jane Smith, in her history of the Salk Vaccine, Patenting the Sun, notes that whether or not Salk himself believed what he said to Murrow, the idea of patenting the vaccine had been directly analyzed and the decision was made not to apply for a patent mainly because it would not result in one.

You guys getting a 404 on this?

The woods already ate the lead town and spring water resorts in Missouri. It's prettier now. I hike there.

Wow. That's a bad thing to see happening. I wish they explained more as to whether it was a difference of opinion in how debt was bad for students and that was the influence or of they dislike the products of colleges and universities.

I read the links. While the anecdotal evidence of people who have trouble getting IDs is there, they conflate a couple of things. especially the difference between having an ID and having a driver's license. To this point, they examine the case of 'who drives' for a good portion of the NPR article as if that answers the question of who would be disenfranchised by these ID laws, but from Ballotopedia: As of June 6, 2017, 33 states had enacted voter identification requirements. A total of 18 states required voters to present photo identification, while 15 accepted other forms of identification. So to imply 'who drives' is important is roughly false. And I like NPR, I'm just saying that this report is off in that regard.

Moreover, they never really answer the questions that they set out to answer: Who doesn't have IDs and why? I would like a rough number of how many people are actually being disenfranchised from voting here. If it's millions in a state, that's not a cost worth any benefit, but if it's a hundred per state you can start to argue for or against it.

And again, I think voter ID laws are stupid wastes of time and money meant to address a problem that doesn't exist en masse in voter fraud. But I don't agree that getting an ID of some sort should be considered an unbearable burden. In Missouri, for example, as long as you are a registered voter, you can just bring in your registration with your name and address on it. I just brought that in, even though I had my ID on me. That kind of ID doesn't seem burdensome.

Nothing, but there are a ton more young urbanites than rural black. Just there concentration of people can tell you that. 80.7 percent of the country is urban.

Interesting for sure.

So if young Urban voters are more likely to have IDs and also to vote Democrat then why do they fight the laws which would disenfranchise the opposition constituency?

I mean, I know it's not altruism.