You feel sorry for insurance companies? Huh.

You don’t know what my scenario is. I didn’t say in this comment what I recommend, only that his advice is poor, which it is. This stuff is literally what I do for a living.

The payment period alone is not sufficient information, it also matters how old OP is and what their expected lifetime is. Plus how do you know the lumpsum was calculated correctly?

That’s such bs. You don’t know how old OP is so you don’t know her expected lifetime. You’re advising her to take on longevity risk, specifically the risk that she runs out of money when she’s old and probably unable to work.

Living off the lumpsum only works if her drawdown is 1% a year, not 1% a month.

There are a lot of questions that would influence my answer.

For example: Who did the calculation? Do you trust them to have calculated the lumpsum as a fair representation of the payments?

Who is carrying the death, disability and unemployment risk? In particular, if your ex-husband dies or becomes unable to work, who will continue to make the payments? What if he married in the meantime and his new wife fights the settlement due from his estate? (Happened to someone I know. She won eventually but had a very hard time for years until the money was released.)

How large an amount are we talking about? Can you survive on 1% of the amount per year? For example, if the lumpsum is USD 10m, then hire a wealth manager to invest it and have yourself paid 1% a year, in this case USD 100k a year, or USD 8.3k a month. The invested lumpsum will increase with inflation and so your 1% will also increase each year. This setup will allow you to live off the lumpsum indefinitely.

Based on the limited information you provided I assume the amount isn’t that big, in which case I would advise that the monthly amounts are paid via an annuity purchased in your name from a life insurance company.

This solution has a number of advantages:

1. The insurance company will calculate the lumpsum (which would be the price of the annuity)
2. You aren’t subject to any risk from your ex-husband’s life
3. If this is payable for life, the life insurance company takes on the risk that you become very old and run out of money.

You will have the risk that the insurer goes bankrupt but provided you select a reputable, well-funded company that’s been around a long time, the risk is relatively low - life insurance companies are heavily regulated. Also, you would get some money back from a bankruptcy. Many annuity products also pay back part of the annuity price if you die within the first few years, so in that case there should be something to inherit for anyone you leave behind.

Edit: I see from your comments that the payments are not meant for life but only a limited few years that will end before you reach retirement age. Is that correct?

If so, that raises new questions. Importantly, do you have any additional retirement savings or is this settlement meant to cover that? If you were married for 20 years you should be entitled to a portion of his retirement savings if you don’t have any of your own.

If this money includes your share of your retirement savings, then take the lumpsum and put the amount that represents your retirement money into a suitable (tax advantageous) retirement fund that you can not touch. At your age (nearing 40?) you should have saved up a sizeable retirement amount already, so that will easily be half the lumpsum I would assume. The actual numbers depends on all sorts of things I don’t know.

My qualifications are suited to helping you with calculations. If you are willing to give more personal information, pm me and I can give better, more tailored advice.

Spain?

India?

So, if I added this board to my device, I must be sure to only charge it with a power supply that supports PPS in the 12v range - is that correct?

That is extremely useful, thank you.

Do I understand correctly that the PD unit is in the USB C plug i.e. can I change the barrel jack connection to the connection on my existing cable?

Yay, some success :D

The squabbling is, ugh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Everyone agrees that the current duopoly of apple and google app stores is bad, but instead of supporting a variety of alternative options, they expect every option to offer a perfect solution for whatever they’re a purist about.

I can’t believe I just wasted time reading this.

Tldr: GOS accused OP of trying to create public drama and instead of taking multiple opportunities to deescalate, OP kept pushing and got banned.

So, if GOS was wrong about OP wanting to create public drama, then why have they made this post?

I’m not saying GOS didn’t overreact but that whole conversation was at the level of 13 year olds. Surely, OP, you can do better?

Specifically:
If all you wanted was to share the information with CalyxOS, wouldn’t the logical option have been to copy the relevant text from @jertek’s comment (which you had already recovered), and quote it in a comment on your CalyxOS feature request? You could have linked to @jertek there and continued the conversation without involving GOS.

You know GOS aren’t intending to implement this feature - you were informed of that on the GOS discussion forum before opening the ticket. (I just searched the forum for this topic because I was so sure I must be missing context but no, not really.) So when they deleted the request, why not let it go? I just don’t get why it mattered so desperately that they deleted your feature request, and why you couldn’t clarify that anywhere except on a clone of their repo. I really, genuinely don’t.

I’m not convinced it’s efficiency driving the difference.

China have the advantage of lower labour and production costs (although that will change as their economy matures).

Regardless, pharma costs are heavily driven by R&D, risk, and regulation. A huge amount of R&D goes into products that never make it to market, which is a necessary investment. Most (all?) western pharma companies operating in the US have had massive Tort settlements, and their prices have to include a margin to finance that risk (insurance is expensive, if it’s even available). Then there’s regulation. The US and Europe very heavily regulate these companies. I’d be interested to know how the Chinese regulations compare, especially for Chinese headquartered companies.

Finally, China should be doing more clinical trials than the US + EU combined given the size of their population, so it’s great that they’re finally developed enough.

I see their growing competitiveness as a natural consequence of their developing economy and not due to any failure in the West.

Some relevant comments from the developer on another forum from about a year ago, when they only had 10 apps:

Developer of Accrescent here. Yes, there are only a handful of apps available right now. The reason for this is that the recent focus hasn’t been directed on getting more apps in the store, but instead on internal changes to allow Accrescent to include more features and scale to more users. It will be able to include more apps once more of those changes are implemented.

Yes, we may take on some additional apps over time. This depends on how much the project can handle maintenance-wise and how willing those app developers are to deal with the early and changing nature of Accrescent. We’re not directly reaching out to any developers at this time, however.

So apparently it’s been a deliberate choice so far.

My understanding is that the whole point to trying to hire a full time developer is to be able to finally scale their services.

Yes, that is a weakness with many FOSS projects. Developers with great ideas lacking business acumen.

That said, I expect that they can become financially self-sustaining from selling proprietary apps if they can get enough scale. I wouldn’t mind making a small monthly donation long-term but it needs to be less than what they are currently asking.

Here is a link to F-Droid’s Open Collective page. If this is accurate, they seem to be doing OK for funding right now. I’m sure they’d appreciate another sponsor though, if you’re not already donating.

Last I heard, the intention is that users will be able to filter for open-source apps if they want.

I haven’t seen anything warning against proprietary apps specifically. As a minimum, I would hope that they implement an agreement similar to the play store where the app developers are legally bound by the privacy terms in the app description (re data, advertising, etc.). This statement could maybe include an alternative wording for OS vs Proprietary apps? Definitely something to think about.

Edit to add: I can’t comment on 3rd party repositories. Too technical for me.

Precisely, that’s what I meant. Different market segments need different approaches.

Why not both? ;)

Some FOSS apps are only available for a fee in the play store and I think that’s great. They’re able to access a bigger market for funding purposes, and we both know the vast majority of play store users won’t make the effort to figure out how to make donations otherwise.

That’s an absolutely valid choice.

It’s not however the choice that the majority of people make. Weaning them off the play store needs an alternative with proprietary apps.

You can’t download paid apps through the Aurora store.