Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.
Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.
I had already downloaded and installed Ironfox (FF Android fork) on my phone and have been using it for a week or so. It works identically to FF for android. Ublock Origin is working in Ironfox too.
Technology is a known depreciating asset so that’s a bad example. Try housing, or trying to get a loan for anything.
Also, limitless consumption is unsustainable.
Until our sun stops shining on our planet we effectively the capacity for limitless consumption.
In incognito or private browsing mode, you are way more likely to be blocked or forced to fill out a captcha, because the site won’t see any tracking cookies you would otherwise have.
I use youtube almost exclusively in incognito and I never get the captcha. The only negative consequence is no suggested videos show up. It looks like this:
However, as soon as you watch even a single video, it gives suggestions based upon that. As soon as you close all your incognito windows, it wipes the slate clean and opening a new window and going back to youtube just gives you the screenshot I linked here. I don’t have a youtube “feed” and I like that. Again, zero captchas.
It certainly opens up lost of “evil maid” attacks.
Is this new? Perhaps geographic testing in certain areas? I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that on youtube. Just curious, what happens for you if you open a browser in Incognito go to youtube and without logging in to youtube, go to the video you want to watch?
Initially makes me wonder how the employer could be so dumb as to give one employee so much access.
The amount of access he had doesn’t surprise me. He’d been there for 11 years already likely working on many things as he interacted with systems in the course of his legitimate work. While its possible to set up access and permissions in an organization utilizing the “least privilege principle”, its expensive, difficult to maintain, and adds lots of slowdowns in velocity to business operations. Its worth it to prevent this exact case from the article, but lots of companies don’t have the patience or can’t afford it.
A 55-year-old software developer
… and…
Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate “realignment” in 2018 that “reduced his responsibilities,” the DOJ said.
So he was 48 at the time he started this. Was he planning on retiring from all work at 48? I can’t imagine any other employer would want to touch him with a 10ft (3.048 meters) pole after he actively sabotaged his prior employer’s codebase causing global outages.
Yeah, I was calling out savings accounts cause that’s what I imagine most people are talking about when mentioning compound interest.
I don’t think most people think of a savings account as the main example of compounding interest. A bond would probably be a better example.
The video is talking about the false promise of compound interest and I wanted to call out the real reason it doesn’t work.
If you’re citing the saving account as the failure of compound interest, it isn’t because of a low 5% return, its because its not a fairly consistent return at 5%. If there was a consistent 5% return year over year savings account that would be a great investment even with inflation for the portion of your investment you needed to keep safe. This is essentially what bonds are.
I feel like I’m not being clear then: that’s ONLY taking into account the potential interest earned? Touching the principal, you’d be able to go for much longer.
This is the gamble though. The rule of thumb is a 4.7% safe withdraw rate. Once you retire, you’ve earned all the income from wages you’ll ever earn. What money you have saved will have to last you the rest of your life which is an uncertain amount of years with uncertain expenses. You can stack the deck in your favor by doing such things as owning your home outright, but that doesn’t shield you from the sky high cost of eventually having to move into an assisted living at today’s cost of $6000/month. Who knows how much that will cost in the future? So your $50k/year is completely exhausted by the first week of August having not spent another cent on anything. You’ll have to dig into your principle to make up the difference.
That’s the thing, interest rates are almost always less than inflation.
Savings account interest rates are almost always less than inflation, true! Even worse, interest earned on savings accounts are subject to taxation as income, so effectively your highest bracket of taxation (in the USA at least).
However, no one with even the smallest shred of knowledge of retirement savings will tell you to park your entire retirement budget in a savings account and expect any kind of healthy return. Savings accounts are VERY safe investments. The deposits (not interest) are backed the the federal government up to $250,000 per person (and per bank). For better returns you need more risk. The basic index funds in the stock market such as the S&P500 return an average of 7% per year over a long period of time. This means that some years will be in the toilet at negative returns, while others. Two years ago it was 24%! Even last year was 23%! All of this is also ignoring the massive benefit of saving for retirement in a 401k or IRA where you can skip or defer the taxation on retirement income achieving even higher effective returns.
S&P500 historical annual returns:
This mean that if you had $100 in a standard boring S&P500 index fund at the beginning of 2023, you’d have $124 at the end of 2023. At the end of 2024, having not invested another single penny, you would have had $152.52 at the end of 2024. A savings account with a 5% interest rate and that same $100 deposit would be $105 at the end of 2023 and $110.25 at the end of 2024. This small amount difference doesn’t sound like much, but now imagine it was some 35 year old’s retirement fund with $100,000. End of 2023 would have that value at $124,000 and the end of 2024 would be $152,520. So an extra $52k growth in just two years!!!.
My example above is compounding in only two years. Now look at all those green years and you can get an idea of the power of compound interest.
The reason for this is that the government/economic model is designed to encourage spending. Holding money is effectively lost “opportunity” so the real value of the dollar is always pushed down.
I know you’re saying this like its a bad thing, but if you really want to see the bad thing, imagine the reverse of what you said is true. Imagine the government was pushing deflationary position! Imagine your dollar would be worth more tomorrow if you didn’t spend it today. People would stop buying all but the absolute essentials. Why buy a car today for $30,000, when if you waited it would only be $20,000 next year. Suddenly cars sales drop to nearly non-existent. Auto workers would be put out of work in droves. That is just one example. It would ripple throughout the economy negatively.
Could you elaborate on that? At $1 million, that would be your yearly salary for over 13 years. At 5% yearly interest (from something like Discover) would generate $50k/yr. Why would you not be able to retire?
I’m not the poster you’re responding to, but I’ve know the same math they used.
“$50,000 in 1995 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $104,222.77 today, an increase of $54,222.77 over 30 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.48% per year between 1995 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 108.45%.” source
And that example is only over 30 years.
That poster is right. Being a millionaire these days doesn’t feel rich. This is especially true with the current administration attacking the social safety net with new restrictions on Medicaid and now Social Security is in his crosshairs. Lots and LOTS of us are going to be totally screwed in retirement. Even those that have enough for themselves and their immediate family are likely going to be sharing that with a close circle of extended family or friends to keep them out of starvation and exposure to the elements from poverty. None of us except the ultra wealthy are going to have a safe and happy retirement.
Most of the video applies to a Millennial and younger audience. These generations got screwed on the necessary components for compounding to work. Forced to pay for exponentially more expensive education than generations prior put them deep into debt right out of the gate. Further, they entered the workforce during the Great Recession which forever put them 10 to 15 years behind in earning power. Lastly, saddled with the two other things, it prevented many from buying homes which appreciate in value.
In short, the younger generations got totally screwed. The compound interest promise still works for X-ers and above.
I agree with the very ending premise: We need to massively tax the ultrawealthy.
Nobody can seriously believe that the USA colonizes Canada.
Nobody could seriously believe a US President would allow an unelected billionaire into the halls of power and society to tear it down from the inside, but here were are.
India is no really a challenge.
And Canada is?
I appreciate alternate methods of business, but some of your statements here are worrying.
there is the temporary furlough route,
but you also said earlier…
and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire at “the top” needing a second yacht.
Furlough sounds like another name for layoff here.
but ideally there is savings for such eventualities. savings and / or loans can be used to ride out dry spells.
Ideally sounds like wishful thinking. They’re already limiting their work because they only work with NGOs or non-profits, which are usually cash strapped. Further, the lower pay to tech workers mean that the workers have less of a financial cushion should the work dry up for a time. This goes back to my first post that tech workers that don’t live a country with strong social safety nets may find tech co-ops a risky employer.
more stable than typical corporate businesses simply due to the lack of a billionaire class extracting profits and making big decisions on their whims
Yeah yeah fuck the rich, but billionaires are a small fraction of the owners of IT consulting companies. The majority of them are small boutique firms rather than giant fortune 500 companies.
One answer could be that the organization maintains a large fund to act as a buffer to maintain salaries between contracts instead of operating “paycheck-to-paycheck.”
Thats great in concept, but keep in mind they’re already taking customers that likely have small or limited budgets. Where does this extra buffer come from? The only income stream is delivering on limited contracts to cash strapped NGOs and non-profits. Remember, they took corporate work at one point, but hated it. Corporate work is where the bigger bill rates for delivery of contract service come from.
An even simpler answer could be that the co-op chooses to take on a large number of small contracts instead of a small number of large ones, such that the revenue is relatively consistent to begin with.
Its amazing if your org can get so much contract work that there’s jobs available to turn down. This usually requires a dedicated sales and marketing staff, which don’t generate any revenue for the co-op, only delivery of services to. So the sales and marketing arm are yet another drain on the already meager amounts earned from contract awards.
If there was surplus money to be made large for-profit contracting companies would be in here already doing some or all of this work.
the difference in salary they’re talking about is more along the lines of small business vs venture capital-backed startup or established huge corporation.
That would make sense if the organization is revenue generating with its own business efforts instead of enabling other organizations, which is what it sounds like is the case for this tech co-op. The co-op doesn’t seem to generate anything of their own. It sounds like they get contract work from NGOs and non-profits. If there is no work, or not enough, what happens to the co-op workers?
and you’d have to try pretty hard to become unemployed at a coop. there are generally no “layoffs” since there is no greedy billionaire
So when the NGO and non-profit contract work declines or dries up entirely for a time and there is less or no money coming in, how do salaries get paid at 100%? Does each tech co-op worker simply get a small percentage of the remaining income? How long do workers actively working contracts for NGOs/non-profits in the co-op continue to subsidize those that don’t/can’t get placed on work?
One mention I didn’t see was any reference to Sodium Ion batteries. While these aren’t great for EV cars (even though you can buy at least one Chinese EV with one right now), as they are physically larger and less energy dense than any Lithium chemistries. However, they have the potential to be REALLY CHEAP because they use zero of the limited supply of Lithium and instead use the very abundant Sodium…as in table salt Sodium (NaCl).
If they are developed and end up being as cheap as though possible, the positive implications for grid storage are huge! You’ve heard of all that extra wasted solar power in places like California, Texas, and even western China? A very small amount of that energy is already being captured and used on the grid with today’s expensive Lithium batteries and its a game changer. Sodium batteries (if they deliver as hoped) could be an order of magnitude higher in value because of how cheap they could be were we don’t really care they are larger and heavier.