Fees are a big deal. This video helps explain why.

https://videosift.com/video/Frontline-Retirement-Gamble-Mutual-Fund-Fees

My mom didn't marry my father. I never knew him. I was placed with my Grandparents because my mother wasn't done with her fun 70's lifestyle.

My Grandfather was a violent alcoholic who was only able to get money because my Grandmother was disabled and he was paid to be her caretaker for part of the week. We ate from the garbage sometimes at Safeway (Randalls). We supplemented our income by picking up cans on the roadside. I lived right on the border of the Tohono O’odham reservation and had to go to their school for 5 grades.

Then we moved to Texas, I had to go to a reform school in Killeen for one year because they couldn't find room for me in the regular school and we lived too far outside the city. The next year, after being in multiple fights and failing the 6th grade because I couldn't concentrate on my studies, I was allowed to go to a smaller country school on hardship.

Every single one of my immediate relatives had some type of drug issue or were mentally ill. All 3 of my Uncles were criminals. I had major problems with trust and making friends because of these and other related issues. I played football primarily to hurt other people. I suffer to this day from anxiety and depression.

Yet, thanks to nonexistent government programs designed to prevent me from succumbing to Inter-generational Poverty, I somehow managed to be the first person from my family to go to College, not be addicted to drugs, have a completely functional and non-abusive marriage that has lasted almost 20 years, and managed to make a quite successful career in computers that allowed me to retire early when I started having health issues.

Yes, I thank the government every single day for all they did for me, because there was no way I could have overcome the hand I was dealt without their help. I would have just been poor, white trash like the rest of my family, since no one can strive for a better life or aspire to anything unless they have the hand of Big Brother to lift them up.

it's unfortunate, I agree.
We need government to set laws and restrictions because humans are shitty, and big companies will always make decisions based on money and short term solutions. Big business and corporations will cut corners on anything environment because it's not in their interest. their only interest is paying back the biggest dollar to their shareholders.

The funny thing is, the shareholders are people like you and me, and we don't have a say on how these companies are run. Our Retirement funds are invested in them, and our savings accounts are being used by the banks to invest in them. That's why our money grows over time.

So big corporate interests are our interests. It's a vicious circle, If we want our investments to be responsible, we're going to also need our governments to impose those rules on corporations so we can have a future for our children and live on a clean earth.

Lighten up.

Obama picked 2 to sit on the court and Trump now gets to pick his 2nd choice.

A true fight should not come until Ginsburg retires.

Loved this whole story. After thinking about it for a while, I figured that Foster was probably going to get an NHL record for highest "career save percentage".

1) The contract that the emergency goalies sign makes them official NHL professional athletes for a day.
2) He came in and made 7 shots on 7 saves, a 100% save percentage.
3) Official player, official stats earned, yet extremely unlikely that he'll ever see another minute of ice time or shot against ... therefore, into the record books.

I looked at NHL stats page and a few other sources to try to figure out if that was correct, but everything I looked at limited "Career Save Percentage" stats to players with a high minimum number of games.

Then I saw this story:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/blackhawks-emergency-goalie-scott-foster-accountant-jets/

Confirms that YES, he'll be in the records books, but he'll be tied with 17 other guys all having a 100% save percentage (after having faced between 1-17 shots).

So even though he's tied with 17 other guys, dude is set for life for a story to tell his kids / grandkids / strangers in the bar:

"So yeah, I'm a former NHL goalie. Retired with a career save percentage better than Brodeur or Roy. Left the game literally at the top of the charts."


I think Patrick Kane and/or Jonathan Toews should give their salary from this one game to the guy since the contract he signed precludes the team from paying him... (both make $10.5 million for this season, so 1/82 of that would be a bit over $125k)

The only tie I remember was a guy that could have won had he bet more. He chose to get the tie because it was his last day on the show. I think at that time, you could only win 5 times and then you were retired. The person he tied with came back the next day.

So... having an armed guard didn't deter this shooter... and this shooter, unlike many others, did not have a death wish, he went peacefully once found.

It's impossible to know how many shootings ARE deterred by armed guards.

But, we can know how many school shootings were stopped by armed guards... My quick search shows one shooting was stopped by an armed guard just days after, but nobody seems to have any statistics on how many armed guards stop shootings... If you're going to make the assertion that "guards are effective at engaging threats", you need to show numbers. Certainly, with as many politicians who want this to be the solution, and with the monumental rise in school shootings over the last decade, there should be someone, somewhere, capturing metrics on this sort of thing.

My position: Schools have a hard time paying teachers a reasonable salary... I doubt they're going to be getting top-of-the-line security guards... They'll be hiring retired, ex-military cooks who've had weapon training but never been shot at.

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Trump will veto that, hide and watch....but I hope not so you can see that this memo is nothing but republicans making accusations, not evidence, just inferences drawn from implications based on not reading reports. The classified report they claim to reference isn't being released, just the partisan Republican memo...while the Democrat version of that interpretation memo was kept classified.

Funny, Trump's people claimed McCabe stepped down of his own accord, a few months before his scheduled retirement. He's not fired, he didn't quit, he wasn't even asked to leave, much less forced out. He just switched positions...ostensibly to avoid any further contact with Trump who acts like a bully on the phone, taunting the man's wife then hanging up.

Only one falling here. This should cause even republicans to vote to protect Mueller from removal. That will be Trump's death nail.

Lol. Nice try. If I were a Russian troll pretending to be left leaning, I would be doing it on a right wing site, wouldn't I?

Deliberate, he admitted as much. At the direction of Trump or Jared, or both, according to him. They're the only leaders of the transition team he reported to.

What he admitted he lied about was colluding with Russians to subvert American foreign policy, which is treason, he's been caught on tape and now admitted doing it at the transition teams direction.

It's about his team being liars and criminal traitors. If it's not at his direction, he's incompetent as a leader. If it's not with his knowledge, he's senile. Consider his best attribute was supposed to be his ability to get only the best people, so.....

Everyone who's not a Russian puppet or Trumpeter believes it, and you do too, you simply can't admit it or your world crashes down.

I'm here because I'm retired (low income doesn't necessarily mean low net worth), it's a fun site to watch more interesting videos and talk about them, and with few exceptions have adult conversations and maybe learn something I didn't know from interesting diverse people.
Even you've taught me something....that Putin's troll farms are so advanced they turned out right wing characters to "live" on left leaning sites in order to give the impression that right wingers are ridiculous know nothings that can only parrot the great leader's ramblings as if they weren't racist insanity and troll like 12 year olds with no information to add to a discussion but lots of "I no you are but wat am I" arguments, this to give the impression that those with opposing views aren't worth engaging elsewhere. That helps divide us farther, Dimitri. You know this, it's why you exist here. ;-)

Heavens, this is all too much for me, excuse me while I retire to the fingering room.

Politico has a long piece on Boehner. It includes this little gem:

On Sunday, July 17, it appeared they had a deal. Boehner and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor—whom the speaker had reluctantly brought into the negotiations, knowing the majority leader’s distrust of Obama could poison the talks—worked out some final details that morning at the White House. When the president returned from church, Boehner says, he invited them both into the Oval Office and shook their hands. Some fine-tuning remained, but in Boehner’s mind the so-called grand bargain was done. The framework included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” Boehner tells me.

The next 48 hours changed everything. On Tuesday morning, the so-called Gang of Six—three senators from each party who had been discussing their own sweeping fiscal agreement—announced a briefing for their colleagues at the Capitol. They unveiled a separate framework, totally unaware of what Obama and Boehner had agreed to. This deal included significantly more revenue. Chambliss, by then a senator, was one of the GOP Gang members and had no idea—because Boehner had been negotiating with the president in private—that their announcement would kill the speaker’s deal with the White House. Obama saw that Republican senators were endorsing a deal that included far more revenue, and knew there was no way he could sell the grand bargain to his liberal base. When he came back with a counteroffer, seeking a higher revenue number, it validated Cantor’s warnings about not trusting the president. And by that point Boehner’s members had heard enough about the grand bargain to know they didn’t like it—with the $800 billion revenue figure, much less something higher.

So the deal fell apart, and the two sides peddled their competing versions of events: Boehner’s team said the White House moved the goal posts, while Obama’s allies said the speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal.

Trust me, it has been a topic of discussion. The problem is I am kind of locked into staying here for at least 10 more years. My wife is not going to retire from UT until she is max level on the retirement fund. Plus she is worried about taking care of her parents when they get older, most of her family lives within 100 miles of Austin.

In an interview he addresses why he's retiring, opposed to staying.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2017/10/24/why-senator-jeff-flake-says-he-wont-run-drops-out-race-trump-gop-politics/795497001/