Ava

It’s worse, they didn’t actually ask about the 4th.

“To the best of your knowledge, which of the following best describes what America’s 250th anniversary commemorates?”

Yeah the 4th is the day, but plenty of people might reasonably be less certain given the options listed and the fact that the anniversary has been talked about in general terms in the media for weeks.

A futurist is someone who has an interest in or studies the possible futures of our world, and who generates work related to their predictions of the same. It’s a pretty broad term, and would encompass certain academics, as well as writers and other enthusiasts. Their basis in evidentiary processes is obviously going to vary greatly, by it’s not necessarily accurate to say that they are simply guessing. It’s not a licensed term, but neither is “author” or “crypto-bro” or “politico” and yet one can certainly be any of those without any credentials.

There are certainly some elements of guesswork and hypothesis in any predictive field. Certainly there will be authors out there who might style themselves as futurists, but whose works are much closer to fantasy than speculative science fiction. I (personally) think it would be grossly inaccurate to call Star Wars a futurist work, for example. But I think one can easily look at the history of technological and social developments and create something that is a reasonable prediction of the future. I think Weir does a respectable job of portraying a mostly-plausible scenario in The Martian, by comparison. Asimov’s work has various examples that could probably be called Futurist, as well.

Why might a director or script writer consult with such individuals? Well, partially I suspect it’s to claim that they did. It’s a headline and marketing thing, of course. But also, because they’re making a piece of media that’s not necessarily in an area that they’re intimately familiar with. Even if you’ve made several science fiction movies before, I think it’s probably obvious that taking advice from someone who has spent thousands of hours considering the minor nuances and smaller details of something would have some useful insights.

Hate to break it to you, but placing the order at all is already giving them all that data.

I’d probably push back on requiring model disclosure. Tons of games use purchased assets, and a full accounting of all the relevant software in that chain seems challenging. Additionally, any user-generated content is going to be very difficult to audit for similar reasons.

Meanwhile, it seems like this would make for a relatively easy way for spiteful individuals to attack developers for “failure to accurately disclose” sorts of things.

A safe withdrawal rate on funds invested is usually 3-4%, not 6%.

Not that $300k isn’t more than sufficient for a high quality lifestyle. Your point is more than valid.

I’d question whether they’re setting up for a false flag but I think the administration is just that fucking stupid.

These will all be football fields in the year 17776.

Something other posters have overlooked here is that one life is guaranteed to be saved if you pull the lever. There are 5 tracks in the image, but the ratios use quarters. If you pull the lever, you have saved one life. You have a 75% chance that you have saved one life with no consequences. You have a 25% chance of killing a net of 4 people. By that method, your expected number of kills is 1, no matter your choice.

However, I really think I look at it more on the chance of good outcomes, personally. If I pull the lever I have a 75% chance of saving everyone, and only a 25% chance of bad outcomes. I can live with that choice. I can live with the decision to take action, because to not take action is still choice.

In which a bunch of Tolkien enthusiasts eagerly take this bait. Much like a swarm of angry bees, in fact.

A lot of these calculations solve this by using a lower expected growth rate, to offset the expected inflation. It lets you have the more simple conversations in today’s currency values, which are easier to reason about.

That’s not the case in this particular example, and you’ve correctly identified a deficiency. I raise the point for the benefit of any curious readers who look into other conversations on the topic.

Only if you’re a shallow person who evaluates the partners of your friends solely on their sex appeal.

Thinking like this is telling on yourself.

To my knowledge, those two are the only citizens known to have been killed in her district though. Which y’know. Is what the article is talking about in this particular instance.

For those curious as to additional reading, the origin of the 4% rule comes from the Trinity Study, a finance research project from the late 90s.

Not to be confused with the Trinity Test, which occurred in the 40s and had very little to do with finance.

My recollection is that Voat took a turn into being fascist Reddit 2.0 pretty quickly itself.

I hate when these sorts of statistics point to “the top 10%” as the problem based on numbers like this. It’s simply much less broad than that. Of all wealth, the top 0.1% holds 14.5%. The next 0.9% holds 17.3%. The bottom 50% hold only 2.5%. The top 1% of households hold 12.72x as much wealth as the bottom 50%. And, notably, the bottom 10% of households have less than $1000 in net worth. The bottom 8% of people have $0 or less.

A household which is at the 90th percentile for Net Worth has a net worth of roughly $2,000,000, including equity in their home. You get to the 95th percentile before you double that to $4M. The 90th percentile has 1000x higher net worth than someone with $2,000 to their name, which seems obscenely unfair when described in that way. However, a net worth of $2,000,000 would provide a retiree a mostly-safe withdrawal rate (4% or $80,000) of around the median income of ~$84,000. (This doesn’t actually check out since it includes equity in the home, but as a simplification.) Retirees have access to social security and tax-advantaged accounts and the like, but someone who ends up with a net worth of $2M could live only a median lifestyle without working.

Is a net worth of $2,000,000 a very large number and a large chunk of wealth? Of course it is. But it’s not like, obscene wealth. If I gave a random American $2M it would change their lives profoundly, but the people who have a net worth of $2M aren’t the ones who are ruining our lives. They’re just not.

The top 0.1% hold 14.5% of the wealth. The top 1% hold 31.8%. The bottom 10% hold less than 0%. That’s the ball game.

Disclaimer: I have not rigorously cited my sources, nor verified all my figuring. However, most of this is pulled from the Fed data linked in the article. Other stuff is pulled from sources which cite the same, though I’ve not run a rigorous analysis of the maths. My work should not be cited as correct, it is intended to be illustrative. That said, I’ll happily remedy any errors that others might notice!

The article links the source data from the FED, which has data since 1989
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:144;series:Net worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:levels

The Ten Commandments, famous for being identical and consistent across varying versions of religious scripture and sections within the same!

Pretty much. Leave sharing policies are usually set up such that in some sort of extraordinary medical circumstance, employees can transfer paid leave to one another.

The idea is sorta that if a loved one has a major medical emergency and needs a lot of care for 3 months, other employees can transfer paid leave to help cover gaps. This makes sense as a way to cover edge cases in extreme circumstances, but “is having a child” definitely isn’t such a case.

FFXIV probably deserves a spot on the list, the initial launch was so bad they just remade the game.

I mean… in fairness to Google, wouldn’t this be an email address that has almost exclusively emailed a massive chunk of users all at once, without obvious connection, and with exactly identical content? The URL it’s sent from doesn’t resolve to a webpage, and isn’t on the same domain I found attached to other information/copies of the settlement.