You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.

Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).

Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.

Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.

That’s about it.

The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.

VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.

BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.

So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.

Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.

Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.

Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.

Thanks for the clarification.

It could be 10+ years of me misremembering the explanation. The person who told me this was Korean, so it seems more likely that I misremembered than them explaining it wrong.

Someone told me that Oppa means ‘Uncle’, but in the particular district of Gangnam the word Oppa/Uncle also means Pimp.

So it’s basically a song based on a pretty bad pun. I’ll protect you like an uncle, and by Uncle I mean Pimp.

EDIT: English speakers likely would do better with the translation as 'Ill be like a Father to you, a real Las Vegas Pimp Daddy (where Daddy is a word that means Father but has more Pimp connotations, and Las Vegas being famous for legalized prostitution).

It’s definitely debauchery. But we likely have memorials to Austin Powers and other such pop culture icons, so it’s understandable.

Someone needs to tag this with git blame and it’d be the perfect programmer joke.

For the non programmers: git blame is a tool to figure out who on your team wrote a specific line of code. Inevitably, the answer tends to be ‘me’. Waaayyyyyyy too often.

Itch.io is currently saying the problem is Stripe, and maybe Visa.

Historically (ex: https://otakuusamagazine.com/visa-and-mastercard-refuse-to-work-with-another-doujinshi-retailer/), I’d say Mastercard and Visa are both to blame. But the jury is still out on wtf is going on here.

I’m not sure who pressured Steam. But Itch.io (https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypal) is claiming Stripe and Visa are pressuring them.

(Speaking with Aftermath, Itch’s founder, Leaf Corcoran, specifically cited a notice from Visa as an incident that led to the sudden deindexing of so many games).

While Hercules is impressively wrong, I knew Aladdin was a fun original read when it began with ‘In the Far East Kingdom of China…’

Hercules, for all of its faults, actually takes place in Greece. Which is kinda sorta close to Rome (Hercules is his Roman name lol. Heracles is his Greek name).

On the other hand, Aladdin might be a fake story all together. As in, some French Guy may have made up Aladdin as part of his translation of 1001 Arabian Nights. IIRC, Arabs don’t know wtf that story is doing in the (French) book.

So Aladdin might be an entirely fake addition to the 1001 Arabian Nights novel. Canonically fake. So it’s in the true spirit of Aladdin (and 1001 Arabian Nights) to screw with the story anyway.

Btw: the original Aladdin story had no three wishes rule.

Aladdin just spammed the heck out of wishes. Got everything he ever wanted.

The only part of the Disney movie that’s accurate is when the sorcerer returns, teleports the Sultan (of China) palace to Africa, and Aladdin needs to use the weaker Genie of the Ring to steal the Genie of the Lamp back through trickery.

The princess of China (yeahhhhhh) helps Aladdin out a bit IIRC.

But yes, palace teleportation, sorcerer wishing to be Sultan, that’s the legitimate part lol

Remember that Discover is self-banked (unlike Visa/Mastercard that banks sign up with). This means that every credit line needs to be backed by… well … A bank.

Bigger banks mean more credit opportunities, better interest rates (etc. etc). Deeper credit lines.

Discover seems to be the best bet to me so far.

Discover is on the JCB, UnionPay, Troy and RuPay. (japan, China, turkey, and India respectively). Probably many more.

Similarly, a JCB card should work wherever Discover is. It’s a billateral alliance.

Oh, and all Discover cards work on Diners Club International because those two networks completely merged.

Alliance members are not 100% acceptance. It seems like 95%+ acceptance though (most JCB will accept most Discover cards and vice versa, though you will get confused looks from the locals). It sounds like there’s a lot of old equipment around the countries that break compatibility but cities and other urban areas with new equipment shouldn’t have any problems.

I’ll probably get a Discover card and start testing this out. I already have Visa and Mastercard but this new censorship issue seems serious enough to make me start supporting a 3rd place competitor.

Between Discover vs AmEx, it seems like AmEx is about elite club / customer service / returns etc. etc. nice features but I’m not sure if it’s worth the price.

Discover is free of annual fees, reasonable cash back, mediocre costs for the merchants (better than AmEx anyway and comparable vs Visa) and a surprisingly huge offering of international compatibility (RuPay, JCB, UnionPay, etc Etc). It seems like the winner to me as a 3rd card to experiment with.

What’s wrong with Capital One? I feel like Discover/Capital One / Diner’s Club network is a good thing for Discover customers.

Discover and Diners Club merged a few years ago btw. Discover also has an alliance with JCB.

So Discover network is actually really, really big.

Discover has an alliance with JCB. So that’s just Discover in the USA.

Ummmm.

ACH is how you get your paycheck, and it’s being updated to FedNow.

Zelle is an independent network as well.

And of course, there is Discover and AmEx.

There is also cash, check, money order. They still work today, just people largely forgot how to use them.

IIRC some Brazilian network was getting very popular off of this. If you want to look at non-US options.

There are plenty of competitors to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal.

People change.

Never burn the bridge. If she’s changed this much she can and will change again. Hopefully for the better next time.

But don’t expect anything good from her in the near future or even medium term. These kinds of changes can take decades+ to occur. Maybe in the best case she will be a better person 2 years from now.

If there are that many mistakes here, then it’s likely malicious compliance. Someone was ordered to edit, so they edited in the most obvious manner possible.

This is quite ridiculous how shoddy of a job this was.

They already did.

There’s that ‘Raw Edit’ video that is missing over a minute of footage because they forgot to edit out the timestamps.

Why would an American tech millionaire believe in the power of money and become subservient to a Billionaire?

I dunno. Good question.

I was an active subscriber who regularly read WashPo.

Ruth Marcus, Alexandra Petri and a whole slew of other liberals have left the post after the 2024 election and various tampering by Jeff Bezos. Or have you not noticed the change of writers yourself??

The ones who remained are hardly NeoLiberal, but overall have shifted farther and farther right. Jeff Bezos killing a few key OpEds have made it clear to the liberals that they are no longer welcome at the Washington Post.

Or what? You gonna try to convince me that Hugh Hewitt is a liberal or some shit?

You youngsters will blame the next generation as well. You just aren’t old enough to see the pattern yet.

Washington Post is Murdoch connected as of December 2023 (new leader and Bezos began to flex his muscles at the paper). I hesitate to call it neoliberal. It’s moved right of that.