Other than the Puerto Rico joke, what else was bad in it?

Calling Latinos in the crowd at the event evidence of illegal border crossing, racist stereotype about blacks, racist stereotype against jews, a few more. None of it was funny, all of it was offensive, and very few of the crowd responded well to it. It was cringeworthy.

Well, if that’s your argument, then neither Ukraine nor Russia have a claim to Crimea. It should belong to the Crimean Tatars.

Didn't you earlier claim to not know anything about Russian culture? Now suddenly you're a scholar on the history of the Soviet Union and Russia? The sovereign country of Ukraine didn't deport Crimean Tartars in boxcars to Uzbekistan as Russia did 80 years ago, but I'm guessing you know that already. You've now made it abundantly clear your position of your support of today's Russia's actions and given many clues as to why you hold that support.

No need for me to continue interacting with you. до свидания!

Stop. The Vanguard retirement funds all did this if the target is before 2060. And those are invested in index funds by professionals. OP likely had the VTINX

OP's losses are more exagerated than just the Target Date fund experiencing a dip from bond exposure.

Here's OP's same initial investment on the same day but 100% in VTINX:

So instead of a $4k loss that OP showed, it would been a $71 loss. OP went picking individual stocks and got burned (assuming they liquidated their position after seeing their portfolio balance).

So you’re arguing against self-determination for the inhabitants of the Donbas on the grounds that the territory historically belonged to Ukraine.

So you're arguing that as long as an invader/occupier can displace or genocide the entire population that lives in a territory, there should be no barriers to an invading force claiming whatever land they want.

I see you also ignored my question about the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014.

I see why others gave you the "Russian Sympathizer" label. You say you're not a Russian asset. If you want to avoid that suspicion in the future, you should really avoid using lines like you're using now right out of the Russian propaganda playbook.

Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.

Then you should have led with that. I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to explain how to use the system to someone not interested in any part of the system. None of your arguments are about the mechanisms of the system, but instead lack of its universal applicability. You weren't interested to learning how the system can work, you'd already dismissed it from the get-go.

Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.

Your posts come off as trolling because you're arguing about particular internal steps to the current system when you don't even care about it.

I think that Ukraine is a puppet of the Western powers, and I think that the US and NATO provoked the war in the Donbas.

How about Russian invading Crimea in 2014? Do you say that's somehow the US and NATO's fault too?

And I don’t even know much about Russian culture.

...and...

I’d like the people of the Donbas to have a referendum about which country they’d like to be a part of, but neither Ukraine or Russia are going to let that happen.

The first statement of yours is why the the second statement of yours doesn't work. You're missing the knowledge of Russian history and politics. Part of the Soviet/Russian way is to take over a territory, then deport all of its local population to other parts of Russia and replace the population with Russians. Not only was this done historically in Donetsk and Luhansk (Eastern Ukraine) prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, but even after the Russian invasion in 2014 to these areas Russia went back to their old methods and move much of the Ukrainian population out. source

So if you had your way, the people voting would include large portions of recently settle Russians to the Ukrainian territories. Which way do you think Russians would vote on that?

You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?

Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with "being right" or "getting zingers" that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I'm human, I've been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.

The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don't that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.

Back in the day (before third party hardware to do this) the only way to get Dreamcast online was to Dialup or the very rare and expensive broadband adapter.

Seeing as the Dreamcast shipped with a dial up modem, it was possble to set up your PC (also with a modem) and with a a couple of resistors, make a type of "dial up crossover cable". You would set up your PC to "answer" the call from the Dreamcast, then route the traffic to the PCs broadband connection. Zero phone line needed!

Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.

Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.

45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source

You don't need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn't get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.

I recommend FSKAX over FZROX. There are few minor differences. Yes FZROX has a lower expense ratio, but it BARELY lower when compared to FSKAX. My understanding is the biggest downside to FZROX is that you can't hold that in any other brokerage. So if one day you decide you don't like Fidelity you have to sell all your FZROX and then buy something else offered at the other brokerage. In a retirement fund this isn't so much a big deal, but could mean you miss out on gains between the sale and the purchase of whatever else you replace it with.

If you're investing in a non-retirement account this is a BIG deal, as any gains would be taxed at the time of sale. This can mean you pay 15%-20% on the gains just to switch brokerages. FSKAX doesn't have that limitation, and you'd be able to simply do an "in kind" transfer of the securities to your new brokerage without any tax events/consequences. To me, that portability is worth the tiny different in expense ratio.

Haven’t found a good fund yet except FSKAX and VTI

You found the good ones. No need to go looking further.

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

Thats not how to do it. As you approach retirement age (5 to 10 years out), you move your money out of riskier (but higher return generating) stocks and into safer (but lower performing) investments like bonds or even cash (actual cash, CDs, Tbills, etc). Generally you also don't move it ALL out of riskier stock. You don't need 100% of your savings on day 1 of retirement, so you convert a few years worth (5 maybe?) to safe stuff and let the riskier stuff ride usually gaining more value even after you retire.

I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.

Its not your total market fund killing you, its your individual stocks. I don't recommend picking specific stocks for your real savings. Save individual stock picks for money you can afford to lose. In your case it cost you $7,000.

I used your same data and here's what it would have looked like if all of it was in your Total Market fund.

You would have $18,679. This would have been a gain of $3479 or a 22% return on investment in only 2 years. That is crazy good! Retirement isn't a total scam, but unless you are VERY lucky, picking individual stocks is risky. You can successfully save for retirement with just one, two, or three funds: Total Stock Market fund, Total Bond Fund, and perhaps an International fund. I mainly focus on just the boring Total Stock Market fund and it performs fairly consistently well over time.

EDIT: Just to underscore retirement is possible with saving and investing with boring Total Market investment, if 20 years ago you had that same $15,200 and invested it in a boring Total Market investment and never save another penny, today it would be worth $88,982.

I'm not saying that you can go back in time, but with 20 years of growth (very typical for retirement savings) it can really grow. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

And TNG really was about taking the episodes more or less independently.

This era was also the high water mark for syndicated TV which really drove the episodic format. Viewers couldn't be guaranteed the show would air on the same channel or even the same timeslot. So long form serial TV were really rare.

The problem I have with theaters is that the time and money sink is a terrible value these days. For my wife and I it’s always somehow shy of $70 and takes up most the night.

The money is bad, yes, but the deal breaker for me is....other movie-goers.

For 90 minutes, modern movie-goers simply:

• can't keep their bright phones in their pockets
• can't stop talking to each other above an occasional whisper
• can't consistently keep their food and drink off other movie-goers
• can't level their infants or small children at home during non-family movies
• can't quietly not do any of the above when someone challenges them on it

Paying for a movie is expensive, but when its regularly ruined by others in the theater it simply stops being worth trying to go anymore. I'll watch it at home when it comes there.

edit: After checking on responses overnight I see I have 3 downvotes. I can only assume that these are the movie-goers I'm talking about in my list above. To those folks, why are you upset with my post? You won. You have the whole theater to yourself because I'm certainly not going to be in the same room watching a movie with you. Enjoy your theaters. I hope there are enough of you and you don't annoy each other enough to drive each other off that movie theaters don't go out of business.

DBAs: "Tables, mirrors, dumps, joins, unions...oh and if I really care about it, replication. I try to avoid surprise drops and injections though."

People: "My god! What sort of drug infested brothel do you work in?!"

Emmett

just that they should exempt people who have to rebook through no fault of their own from that.

I'm not sure I'm understanding you. I'm reading your post that a "flight booked for today" should be booked at the same rate that the person had if they book, lets say, 3 weeks prior. Is that what you're saying?

Like “lock in” the rate at the initial booking.

If I'm understanding you, that means the person pays a much smaller rate for a "today" booking. That would mean the airline has to lose money on that seat if they could have sold it to a last minute business traveler at full "today" rate.

Someone needs to invent a waterproof suction-mounted device dedicated to recording actual shower thoughts.

No one needs to hear me butchering Beyonce's "Single Ladies" off key while humming through the verse because I forgot the lyrics only to belt out the chorus at full volume because that's mostly what I remember of the song. And no, I don't do that dance at the same time (because I don't know the steps).