• 55 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • If there’s any real debate to be had, it’s along the lines of male hormones and penises. Should either be present in a place which essentially only exists for the purpose of keeping those things out?

    They are. Every sporting governing body I’m aware of requires trans women to be on hormone therapy for a minimum of 2 years before they can compete in the women’s category. This is completely in line with the medical community’s research into how long it takes before the benefits of being biologically male are counteracted by the hormone replacement.

    The debate has been had in the medical community and has been resolved. Now random people who never gave a fuck about women’s sports before think they should have input when they have no qualifications, just because they have prejudices.




  • My favorite from my time working in the news industry:

    Neighbor puts toilets in their yard facing other neighbors house. That neighbor builds a fence so they don’t have to look at the toilets. Original neighbor then hangs toilets from the tree so it is visible over the fence. Cue complaints to get toilets removed by city/county.

    I believe the original dispute had to do with tearing out a shared bush and parking on lawn, but I don’t recall the details.

















  • Airlines really don’t like it when you try to play games to save money. They have complicated algorithms to price their flights based on demand on where you are traveling from.

    If you cancel the return often enough on the same airline, they are very likely to just ban you in the future. This is even more likely to happen if you book your flight to Germany through the same airline as the return. It won’t happen right away. It might never be an issue for you. But be careful if being banned completely by a major airline would be problematic for you.






  • General retirement advice is to contribute 15% total to your retirement account. Since your employer adds 12%, you should contribute a minimum of 3%.

    As for your coworkers advice, it may or may not be valid. Contributing to your 401k or a taxable account, both allow you to invest your money. The 401k comes along with tax advantages. Assuming you are making Traditional contributions, then you are saving taxes at the marginal tax bracket (potentially 22 or 24%). If you contribute enough to drop your MAGI to the 12% bracket, then the tax benefit is much less. You can still contribute to Roth, which means you can withdraw that money tax free in the future but you have to pay taxes on it now.

    Another thing to consider is the fees in your 401k. Since you are limited to the options provided, sometimes fees are quite high. If you don’t have any options that cost less than 1%, you likely are better off investing your money elsewhere.

    Finally, you get into the really personal part of personal finance. What are your goals? Do you have short/medium term goals that you would prefer to save this money for? For instance, if you want to save up for a down payment for a house in the future, putting that money in a 401k is a bad choice. Do you have a comfortable emergency fund to pay for unexpected expenses? Do you have high interest debt to pay off?

    A good resource is this flowchart from r/personal finance: https://imgur.com/u0ocDRI