aubeynarf

1. pay off high interest debt

2. top off your emergency fund so you don’t run into expensive short-on-money situations

3. take care of deferred maintenance on your car or house that might turn into an expensive repair

4. If you have an employer sponsored 401k, increase the contribution amount to get 10k more tax free into it before the end of the year and use the $10k cash in hand for expenses.

5. Open a roth IRA and contribute the maximum amount you can (which may vary based on your income)

VT, VTI, and SPY are good broad-market funds with good historical growth.

most Americans enjoy the benefits that come from being an economic, military, and diplomatic heavyweight

The threat to American citizens is that they are steered away from their own interests and the interest of furthering democracy throughout the world because they see a curated feed that excludes information critical of China and amplifies information that promotes China as a country of harmony, peace, and prosperity.

And in some cases, the trends amplified on Chinese social media apps directly fuel American political division.

Could be a crypto key, or a randomly distributed 64-bit database row ID, or a memory offset in a stack dump of a 64 bit program

And then JSON doesn’t restrict numbers to any range or precision; and at least when I deal with JSON values, I feel the need to represent them as a BigDecimal or similar arbitrary precision type to ensure I am not losing information.

That’s because the nearest representable float to 0.99999999999999 is 1.0 - not because Python is handling rationals correctly.

This is a float imprecision issue that just happens to work out in this case.

It’s worth wondering why, if Python is OK with “/“ producing a result of a different type than its arguments, don’t they implement a ratio type. e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node18.html#SECTION00612000000000000000

How would you implement this in code?

JavaScript is truly a bizarre language - we don’t need to go as far as arbitrary-precision decimal, it does not even feature integers.

I have to wonder why it ever makes the cut as a backend language.

Yeah, I agree the tax needs to be visible in the price to be effective

Good argument for the price inclusive of tax to be the price shown.

I think it’s fairly uncommon for sales taxes in the US to be intended to incentivize behavior - moreso, they are for funding local government and higher taxes are placed on things that are politically palatable in local elections - hotel rooms or restaurant/alcohol sales come to mind.

So I just don’t think we’re well practiced at mechanisms that make them work as a point-of-sale incentive, and changing the way a single class of items are priced would be complicated and surely receive pushback from retailers and the industry involved.

I think it’s possible media’s attention to scandal has made you cynical.

Most politicians do not do shady, illegal shit. Most “elites” (do you mean billionaires?) do not torture and rape people. Most law enforcement officers are just trying to do their job.

My perspective is from the USA. I understand many other places internationally have a culture of corruption and naked power structures.

So, maybe a good question so answers can be in context is, where are you from?