CharlieTiger

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I have one through an employer but there are no investment options so we opened another one through Fidelity and do a transfer of assets every so often.

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Interesting. Your HSA will allow you to move it anywhere you want?

My company uses Optum as the HSA and they have Betterment as the investment vehicle. Betterment is somewhat limited, imo.

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Why would you not keep the Gold and also get a Plat?

Likely missed out on a welcome bonus and the Plat is a horrible daily driver. If you're spending enough to hit the waiver there's likely a lit you can also put on a gold.

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We thought about it, but the Gold perks are not great, imo. They have some things like restaurant credits, but they're very limited where you can use them. The annual fee also went up to $325 last year. They compensated by an $84 annual Dunkin' credit, but I could not tell you the last time I've been to a Dunkin. We also already had a gold so would not have gotten any welcome bonus. We did get a big one for platinum. 100k points plus additional points for the first 6 months spend. I think we ended up with about 150k points. Bought two of our four tickets to Italy with that.

The biggest points for gold come from groceries and restaurants. Our main grocery store is a huge "farmers market" about a mile away from us that doesn't take credit cards(only debit). We buy probably 85% of our food there. We also subscribe to a CSA with weekly deliveries from end of April through about Thanksgiving every year. We don't eat out all that much and often cook at home. We also have younger kids so going out to eat can be tedious and now just about twice the cost with them. So, the two biggest reasons to have the card from a points perspective minimally come into play for us. We could definitely get more points from the gold, but I just don't know that they'd outweigh the additional fees of both of us having a gold card.

I also really don't like having more than 2 CC's. We have the Amex and a Visa in case we can't use the Amex. We use that for things like paying for kids afterschool, the kids rec baseball fees, etc. Visa is used more internationally if we're traveling too.

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My (limited) understanding is that CTE is the physical result of repeated head shots, but CTE can manifest itself through a number of psychological issues. Am I off on that?

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Yes, it's caused by repeated head/brain injuries and while I can't speak to the second part, it does seem to manifest itself in a number of ways. Look at some of the former NFL players that were diagnosed after death. Quite a few different manifestations. Seems like the brain essentially just goes haywire.

Mayo clinic on CTE: LINK

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Also, that Ibogaine stuff seems like a great thing to heal people. I hope they legalize it here for treating PTSD and other addiction/mental health conditions plaguing our country.

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Not all that familiar with Ibogaine, but psilocybin research is really showing really great effectiveness for treating those types of issues.

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I don’t think we ever bring back making cheap plastic shite mainly because of environmental laws here

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Not a bad thing. Do we want smog cities like China and India had/have? People bitch about regulations, but clean air, water, etc is not just some silly left wing thing.

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we can definitely recapture higher end manufacturing if we want. Robots cost the same here or in China. I’d rather things we need be made here.

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Don't think anyone would disagree with that, but the idea being sold is all the jobs that manufacturing would bring back, which is just not true given the level of automation that would be used.

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If we took a measured approach and gave reasonable deadlines for clearly delineated policy changes, there would be grumbling, but everyone would get over it.

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This can't be said enough.

It's the back and forth haphazard way this has been done that is paralyzing many of my current suppliers because they can't plan when they don't know what to expect. Even with the announcement yesterday, there's still not that much clarity on the products they make in Mexico to be imported here.

Trump may think that chaos and confusion is a great tactic when he's negotiating with someone, but when you use that to implement significant change like this, it's terrible for business.

And if he's truly trying to bring manufacturing back, you can't just throw up barriers and expect people to break ground immediately. It's going to take years for a car factory to be built, so in the meantime, consumers are going to be paying significantly more for pretty much any car out there. We're looking at probably 2 years minimum before any new greenfield site is up and running, so you're going to have continued inflation for the next 2-3 years at least because by and large, these tariffs are going to be passed on the consumer.

And if there is a rush to build, not only are those materials going to cost more due to tariffs now, but the spike in demand for materials and labor is going to make those factories incredibly expensive. And how will these companies look to reduce operating expenses once they're built? Automation, which means less jobs. Not that any new factory wouldn't be using significantly more automation anyway, but those higher costs to build will incentivize them to automate even more.

I'm afraid the "short term pain" is going to be way worse than anyone in favor of these tariffs is leading on.

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I once bought a random old record and to my surprise it contained the whistle that was sampled at the beginning of Devil’s Haircut.

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Another one for Beck.

LINK

Basically the entire melody for Jackass.

I'd never heard this cover until a few months ago and was like....oh wow. It's instantly recognizable when it kicks in.

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I don't know but their 2019 roster had 5 starters go to the NBA. Cade Cunningham, Scottie Barnes, Moses Moody, Caleb Houstan, and Day'Ron Sharpe.

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2023 had Cooper Flagg(Duke), Liam McNeely(Uconn), Derik Queen(Maryland(and yes he walked)), Asa Newell(uga) and Robert Wright(Baylor). All in the top 28 composite on 247.

Butterfinger Blizzards are still the best though.

I only eat Butterfingers around Halloween, so I guess I never really noticed the difference. My kids have to pay me the Butterfinger tax before they can eat any of their candy(or at least what they haven't managed to shove in their mouth before they get home).

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But your quote, although "technically" accurate, fails to mention that every one of those employees were specifically DEI employees.

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In this situation, I couldn't care less what kind of employees they are. Just cutting jobs to cut jobs is a poor decision, imo. It's not doing anything to cut waste, imo. Go after what is truly not efficient and wasteful.

It will cost more to go through the process of finding and hiring replacements, if they end up doing that, then just keeping them on the payroll. That is the definition of wasteful and inefficient regardless of how you feel about those hires.