Corcaigh

Of Sideshow Bob?

So you’re saying it’s a wash?

it was literally the soundtrack of a Herbalife/diet shake annual meeting.

This half time show has the vibe of a MLM conference or Tony Robbins seminar.

If the game gets one-sided CBS should just show Taylor Swift full time to trigger the haters.

When everyone thinks of the beauty of America they think of Post Malone.

A healthy start to Year of the Dragon

Yes, you could convert as much as you want from tax-deferred to Roth in any year but that will be treated as ordinary income along with any other income, so typically people would decide how high a marginal rate you are willing to bear, say the top of the 22% band. RMDs kick in at some point in your 70s dependent on your age (now 75 for people born in 1960 or later). The idea of lowering your future RMDs via Roth conversions before you get there is potentially to pay more tax in the near term (but at a lower marginal rate than if you didn’t do any conversions and were getting RMDs on top of SS and any other income such as dividends, pensions etc.), and also to avoid higher IRMAA charges (fees paid by higher earners for Medicare benefits).

Has averaged about 13% per year over the past decade, including the COVID crash, and two other bear markets.

The potential ‘time bomb’ for anyone with large tax deferred accounts is whether tax policy will change in the future. Will the decision pay off to defer taxes today during the strong earning phase of your career to a future time when total income will probably be lower, and therefore the top marginal tax rate you pay will be less. Post retirement and before SS and RMDs kick in you can potentially do Roth conversions from tax deferred at lower rates, but need to be cognizant of the impact on ACA subsidies and IRMAA penalties. That’s a fun math exercise for me with our CPA in the near future - how much to convert to Roth while keeping income at a level where other benefits aren’t impacted. Again, much like the benefit that higher earners get from their 401k contributions, this is a (100% legal) tax shell game that the less affluent don’t get to play. Doing it right will probably save several hundred thousand in taxes during retirement.

The tax code has many anomalies and in this scenario certainly favors higher earners as their contributions are at their (higher) marginal rate compared to lower earners, and so they pay less tax than they would otherwise. It is not the cause of the SS shortfall and making the connection will mostly confuse.

The last experiment at the JET tokamak (which uses large magnetic fields to confine the fusion plasma compared to inertial confinement used by NIF) in Oxfordshire, UK has been run. Onto the ITER experiment in France which should get going in earnest with full fusion plasmas in 2035 and beyond that the DEMO experiment in around 2050. Maybe commercialization by the end of the century. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2415909-uk-nuclear-fusion-reactor-sets-new-world-record-for-energy-output/

For my top word, callipygian, you don’t need a thesaurus, just Google image search.

Callipygian

Steve Allen said: “Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth.” Eight seems a little old. You should have started with this board book in the crib. But I suppose it’s never too late to start. How will you feel when the kid is visiting the neighbors and the Mom asks what he’d like to drink and he replies “An Old Fashioned”. What other sinful activities will you be Introducing the young child to?

Well, they are in for a nice surprise when they check their 2023 statement. Thanks Biden! The thing with the decline in bond fund NAV is that they will have seen an increase in dividends, and if they do plan to sell a portion of their bonds in the near term they should at least have that portion in shorter durations. If their financial advisor put them in this situation they need a new FA or just do it themselves and save the AUM fees.

Critics have stopped talking about gas prices for now but I still hear a lot of whining about retirement accounts being decimated. A central pillar of most people’s retirement accounts should be a diversified stock portfolio. Since Biden entered office the broad stock market is up about 30%, I.e. which is above historical averages. Even if they are sitting on cash they are getting much higher rates than in the past decade. And the news on other fixed income isn’t bad either, unless they did something misguided.

Billionaires funding athletic freaks who will severely shorten their lifestyles for the billionaires entertainment. That said, testing is so patchy that many don’t really trust the fairness of elite competition.

It’s a shame that he didn’t bring a map of the world with him so that he could show that Singapore and China are not the same country. Even better to ask Tom Cotton to point them out on the map.

If Zuckerberg's (non) speaking opportunity is represented by the short clips he should have sent a cardboard cutout instead. As a bonus it would display more charisma and emotional warmth.

The algorithms are not going to pick that up and make it go viral in its current format. They should replace one of the talking heads with a dog that farts every 17.5 seconds for optimum virality.

While he’s at it Hawley can drag Al Gore over the coals for enabling the internet to exist in the first place. What a stupid circus.

Well the Commanders practice facility is literally across the street from a sewage plant so it’s hard to compete with that.

Slightly changing population in Virginia. Some of the immediate DC area decline is driven by more remote working since COVID, where people are willing to be up to a couple of hours away for the now very rare occasions they go to the office. https://statchatva.org/2024/01/29/amid-slow-population-growth-virginias-demographic-landscape-is-being-transformed/ Migration is not going to make a difference in voting at the state level but it potentially might make more rural counties less red (and metro areas with a smaller blue majority), although for many counties it will take more than a few percent population shift. The article mentions disproportionately higher death rates among the older rural population during the pandemic, but again not likely to be large enough to flip a county.