From my 10 minutes spent on it, Interactive Brokers seems like the way I’d go for a long-term ETF style EU investment broker, and I’d run from Trade Republic based on a few negative experiences I just read about.
While they have an app, I see references to a desktop tool, as well as online, so I think that’d resolve your phone issue. Might be worth a look.
Saw a couple mentions to using their Irish entity, likely to do with tax benefits, not sure, should look into that more too.
I’m going to flip this a bit, do you only feel bad for just the “people who get pregnant who the anti abortion people affect”? Or do you actually feel bad for all the “people who the anti abortion people affect”, like doctors, those trying to use IVF, widowers or even the unwanted children, for example?
Rather than trying to use a more accurately specific term, I think using a more general term is likely easier and is probably more accurate.
Oh, don’t be fooled, they take some cuts out of the raw ticket sales too, not directly taxed, but something like 50+% of sales doesn’t go to the jackpot. Capitalism loves to take a cut everywhere it can, and it has been allowed to just run completely rampant here.
I wouldn’t say taxes in general are lower everywhere here, that was just the income tax comparison, there’s several other forms of taxes to pay, everywhere they can take a cut, except where the rich can bribe them not too of course.
I didn’t actually go do the math on it, looks like it’s accurately 37% to 50% (or thereabouts), I saw several EU countries listed around 53%-57%, so it can be pretty measurable, I guess.
Wendy’s is falling off a quality cliff unfortunately, while also driving up prices. Used to go there a lot, haven’t been in a while.
Gifts are from us, to parents/grandparents individually, everyone else as a couple if possible, else single.
A few of topics to cover here to explain it all: 1. Lottery Annuities, 2. Taxation 3. Wealth based Tax Avoidance.
For a lottery grand prize, the actual payout of the total is done via a multiple (30 in this case) payment yearly annuity, usually one that increases in size by a fixed amount (5% for this), where the total face value of the payments equals the winnings. If the winner took the annuity payout, they’d get like $25M today and more every year for 29 more years until they got about $100M, which would equal the jackpot. Alternatively, the lottery offers a “lump sum” payment, based on the value of the annuity (basically what it would cost today for someone to buy that stream of payments), which will be like half of the jackpot face value due to how compound interest works.
For taxes, any lottery payment is income and will be taxed accordingly by relevant entities, this will further reduce the take home amount by another 40%-60%.
For billionaires, they have wealth in the form of investment in the billions, not typically income. There are lots of loopholes here due to tax code complexity, but the 2 common examples are: long term investment tax and loans. If you’ve held any stock for at least a year, you only need to pay a reduced tax amount (this exists to incentivize stable participation in the stock market). Money you received from a loan is not income and is not taxed, lenders will allow you to secure your loan with investment holdings. There might be some additional trickery related to the cost basis used for payments of stock as compensation, I’m not looking into it. Basically, you can combine these into a process where you make large purchases or even day to day based on money from loans, and only pay those off using long-term investments, paying less income tax on your profit from them, which effectively reduces your tax burden. With massive holdings, you can turbo charge this, into what is essentially a ponzi scheme of loans, assuming interest on your investments is better than your loans (which will be lower because of your low risk to default).
Say you have $1B in mixed assets ($700M in long-term assets, $150M in each of short-term assets and cash), you want to buy a $100M house. You basically have 4 choices. Choice 1, pay with cash, you already paid taxes on it at whatever rate you did, but now it can’t earn you money by being invested. Choice 2, sell short-term holdings, you’ll pay taxes on your profits for this year as ordinary income, it also cannot earn more interest. Choice 3, sell long-term holdings, you pay reduced taxes on your profits for this year, it cannot earn more interest. Choice 4, purchase using a loan secured by your stock, you pay no taxes, you can continue to invest all your money which will earn more than the interest payments will cost on the loan. 4b, you take out loans to pay for your other loans, it’s basically always more profitable to keep your money invested and you never pay full tax on investment income if you need to use it.
Say you earn 7% interest in the stock market and loans charge 3.5% interest, a loan to buy the house, you take out 2 lines of credit (loans), you use the lines of credit to pay for the mortgage payments and each line of credit to make minimum payments on the other, and your investments appreciate. Averaged out, you “earn” 7M from your investments you didn’t sell, and accrue only about 3.5M or so additional debt, and pay no taxes on any of it. Each year, this repeats with larger numbers and profit growing faster than debt, you bought a house, you actually paid nothing, people will keep giving you loans so long as you keep having much more holdings than debt, ad infinum. This works until the stock market cracks in half and you earn less interest than debt accrued, but even then you just need to sell enough stock to max minimum payments, and only pay lower taxes on the profits until the market turns around. That’s more or less the extreme example.
Sesame Street is great for exposure to a variety of types of people and some cultures. PBS in general is pretty good for that.
Bluey is fun for parents and kids, though it can give kids some high expectations from their parents.
Numberblocks is a good math concepts/counting show.
Storybots is a good learning about the world kind of show.
Paw Patrol has some life lesson kinds of things, but has more action/adventure stuff.
Aged like 21, working in a gas station convenience store register, man walks in, seems homeless and wasted, asked me to call 911 for him, says they’ll know him. Obviously not covered in the manual, but I figure that if someone asks you to call, you call.
I call, talking to the operator trying to explain… The dude just goes down like a sack of potatoes, whacks the top of his head on the counter, knocks over a couple of displays, and starts twitching on the floor. The operator got ALOT more compliant, EMTs picked the guy up (he was a frequent flier), he had a like 3in bump on his forehead that looked like a horn.
I cleaned up the store, trashed the food he damaged, bleached all the other stuff. Weird day.
CPAP, comes with a cell chip in it to relay data for the Dr to monitor/access. Cell chip stops working after 5 years.
Edit: Realized this could use more clarity. The cell plan for the chip expires after 5 years and cannot be renewed, meaning the entirely functional machine needs to be replaced or the Dr can’t properly monitor necessary vitals.
This guy was working for them and did all this before the standards got lowered and the expectations for intimidation and violence were increased, so I’m not sure I can even imagine the sheer horrors currently happening that we only might find out in a few years.
I’ve come to view tolerance not as a default position, but rather as a contract which people are defaulted into, if you’re breaking it by refusing to be bound by it, you’re no longer protected by it either.
I’ll leave guilt up to the jury, but people really need to read the article, though it could really use more details. There’s a possibility of this actually being a nothing burger. Their family business received a COVID relief payment from FEMA, article says it was for $5M too much (doesn’t say if it was more than they requested or just more than FEMA meant to send), portions of that money were paid to family members (unclear if they worked at the family business) and those family members also donated to her campaign (timeline is unclear, obviously faster movement would be more suspicious, but if these are well separated, not as much).
I’m going to steal this from my favorite author, the power to arrive late to things, and it frequently happens even if you aren’t trying to.
Bonus power: the power to get an excessive amount of water on the floor when washing dishes.
There are many more, it’s a fun series.
Does the length of the bill matter?
Maybe the elected representatives should read an entire bill before they vote on passing it…
It depends on what you mean by viewpoint.
If they’re disagreeing about objective reality, 0/10. If we can’t agree on an objective level, there’s no point.
If they’re disagreeing about following the social contract of tolerance, -10/10. They break the contract, they aren’t covered by it, they should be removed with prejudice.
If they’re disagreeing about the value of certain concepts, solutions or programs, 3/10? I’d talk to someone about something for a little while, I might give them a reference, but it’s not my job to educate them.
Of course just talking to people, I’m like a 5/10 in general…
You could get away with a Starship Troopers Star Trek Terran Empire series literally forever, The Colbert Report ran 11 seasons and people still think it existed to balance out the liberal bias of The Daily Show.
Not to take any rightful criticism off of DOGE, but ATCs just have never properly recovered from Reagan getting pissy, and are still just not properly equipped.
Civility and society are a social contract, if someone rips theirs up to free themselves from its restrictions, they also remove themselves from its protections.