No joke if youre a young American with a job go open up a Roth IRA and start saving money
My first day of classes, my professor doesn’t even hand us a syllabus. He begins instantly talking about retirement accounts. We were all a bunch of history-loving college kids who probably wanted to go into academia and we were the perfect audience for such a talk. He specifically told us to open a Roth IRA. We were young, low income, and probably all unmarried.
A Roth Individual Retirement Account (Roth IRA) is meant to hold post-tax income and accrue interest tax-free. It’s meant for young lower-income workers looking to invest early and its most effective when done then – Anyone who has made income from a job can open one (which includes child actors apparently). Roth IRAs have eligibility requirements. if you are single or the sole head of your household and your Modified Adjusted Gross Income (google that) is less than $120,000, you can put in the maximum of $5,500 a year (although you cannot contribute more than you earn if you make money below $5.5k). Married couples and old people have slightly different requirements and outcomes.
“… if a 20-year-old puts $5,000 a year into a Roth for 10 years and then stops contributing, … the 10 years of Roth contributions and growth – let’s say about 8% interest a year to age 65 – could total about $1,070,944 tax-free dollars [for retirement].”
I’d read more about it to see if youre eligible and if itd right for you but pretty much any high school and college student with a job will benefit from one. If you think you’ll need money later in life after retirement, you need to open one of these.
It’s also worth noting that in order to comfortably retire it’s recommended that you contribute at least 10% of your income and try to begin by age 20.
Many workplaces (even shitty retail jobs if you jump through enough hoops) will match your 401k contributions. My workplace (a factory), for example matches 100% for the first percent and 50% for the next 5%, meaning by contributing 6% of every check, my employer will contribute a total of 3.5% of what I make, but out of their own pocket. Make sure to find out about and take advantage of any such program you can find
I work at a bank, my job involves some basic IRA knowledge. This is pretty good advice, I just suggest you make an appointment with your bank so there’s time to discuss the accounts available. For example, CDs (certificates of deposit) usually have better interest rates but those funds are locked – you can’t add to it until the term is up. IRA accounts (statement or passbook savings at my bank) you can add to will probably have lower interest. You might be best off with either/or, or one of each, but you won’t know till you get your options in detail. Don’t be afraid to check at more than one bank, either!
Predictably, last week’s most quotable moments of right-wing viciousness were Trump’s jabs at reporters. So goes the game plan. Team Trump flips all defeats into victories, or triggers for belligerence, or both, so it was entirely in character that he seized the spotlight and changed the subject from Election Day’s votes of no-confidence, first by firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then, the day after the election, by insulting and banishing reporters. Certain reporters in particular.
Trump has been playing so many race cards he’s spread out a full deck. At his November 7 press conference, Yamiche Alcindor of the PBS NewsHour introduced her question thusly: “On the campaign trail, you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists.” Trump interrupted, saying: “I don’t know why you’d say that. That’s such a racist question.” The second sentence he repeated twice more.
Why would the true observation that Trump has called himself a nationalist, and that he has “emboldened white nationalists,” be “racist”? Might it be that Alcindor, of Haitian descent, is black? If so, Trump’s language would be consonant with his peremptory words for another black reporter, CNN contributor April Ryan: “Sit down!” Or his contempt for CNN’s Abby Phillip: “What a stupid question that is. What a stupid question….You ask a lot of stupid questions.”
But there’s something at work besides raw disrespect. Trump’s thrust at Alcindor rhymes with a prime theme of the white supremacists who call themselves “white nationalists.” And it looms large in the utterances of the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who shouted “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” to Nazi salutes just after Trump’s election. Trump is not Spencer, though Trump has been at pains to echo Spencer’s themes.
The day before the midterms, Spencer issued a manifesto called “The Unmentionable Majority.” He took what was, for him, the high road: a pass at analytical rigor salted with references to mainstream journalists. Spencer argued that Republican politics is doomed, for demography is a tide running against the white majority. No triumphalism for him this year:
The Republican party is the de facto White party; the Democratic party is the de facto party of non-Whites, immigrants, and their urban White “allies.” An America in which Whites no longer comprise a majority is an America where a Republican majority is simply untenable at the national level….
The Republicans, in other words, have reached the peak power within their reach by electoral means. In the long run, they hold a weak hand. The Democrats, winning the House, will make sure that Trump’s power dwindles. Encroachments upon his authority will constitute an emergency. The supremacist prerogatives—white nationalism, voter suppression, NRA politics, anti-immigrant animus—are at risk. The Democrats are attempting a counterrevolution, even a putsch.
Democratic recovery of the House ratifies Spencer’s claim that whites are wimps, failing to secure their blood-and-soil entitlement as their numbers wane. Spencer suggests that the white majority is not bold enough.It doesn’t even dare speak its own name:
The obstacle preventing the GOP from fulfilling its destiny is fundamentally psychological. In multicultural America, Whites remain the decisive voting block for determining electoral outcomes; yet they are the only voting block that is not allowed—and that does not allow itself—to advocate openly for its own existence and political power.
Lurking within Trump’s insult to Yamiche Alcindor is Spencer’s scorched-earth demographic panic, a protracted theme in the white supremacist movement for decades. It’s a racist standby already virulent in Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and resounding decades later in the ideologue Sam Francis’s warning of “the war against the white race and its civilization.” Francis’s friend Pat Buchanan picked up the same theme in The Death of the West (2002). There’s a straight line from them to the shrieks emanating from Trump, Fox News, and Lou Dobbs & Co. about the Central American caravan—including “unknown Middle Easterners,” “very tough fighters,” and many violent criminals.
Behind the “invading” dark-skinned horde are, of course, “the Jews.” “Jews will not replace us,” was the Nazi taunt in Charlottesville. Pinning the Central American caravan on George Soros’s funding enables the white nationalists to score a twofer. Another crass way to stir panic is with the term “white genocide,” an absurd projection that’s been a staple of white supremacists for decades. Thus, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has gloried in the fraudulent theme of South African murders of white farmers. Trump’s “nationalism” is, in his terms, “nicer.” It’s still code for sticking up for an allegedly embattled white race.
Wayyyy off topic but I want to share this very informative thread I found on Twitter for all my US peeps and any others affected by the E Coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce since this is “my lane”
We are verging on dangerous territory here folks. Rollbacks on regulations within organizations like the FDA are only going to cause more outbreaks and other public health disasters as time goes on. There’s a reason we don’t normally see these “drop everything” warnings from the CDC, and it’s because these outbreaks usually aren’t that bad. And they aren’t that bad because as a developed nation we have protocols in place to prevent this from happening. But I want y’all to understand how much of a big deal this is. We’re loosing effective antibiotics at an alarming rate. And until politicians start listening to us scientists out here who are literally screaming to do SOMETHING, nothing is going to change. I see many people chastising the CDC for “banning romaine lettuce but not guns”. And yes while I agree gun violence is a major public health crisis in this country, it’s not the CDC’s fault they can’t do any research on the issue. All their funding comes from the government, and while the NRA and other pro gun lobbiests have their hands up the asses of our politicians, the CDC is never going to get the funding needed to research gun violence. The CDC and the FDA are not the bad guys here. They are trying to help us, and our president and his administration is hell bent on destroying all of that. To anyone who thinks politics doesn’t matter, that their vote is meaningless, that ignore the happenings in politics because typical political issues don’t affect them, I can guarantee you, your apathy will eventually come back and bite you in the ass. It may even get you infected with E. Coli.
Tumblr’s official word is they’re having ‘a problem’ with the app that they’re working to clean up, but there’s a non-zero chance the two things are related. Apple kicks apps that don’t meet their cleanliness standards out of the store without warning sometimes. (I suspect that blogs properly tagged nsfw are being purged while non-tagged nsfw blogs remain untouched. hence: the pornbots are here to stay. probably.)
if your blog is nsfw, or you have any nsfw sideblogs, probably time to back them up & brace.
If your account(s) have been nuked, submit a ticket, inundate them because of their fuck-up.
I would strongly discourage blaming any discoursers on tumblr – fandom police or otherwise – for the purge.
First: as noted above, it may not be deliberate on their end. Tumblr’s coding is. Well. A mess. I wouldn’t put it past possibility. (Hence: take the time to notify tumblr if you don’t believe your deletion was deserved.)
Second: tumblr bloggers are not clients, so we’re unlikely to have site impact at this scale. Getting individual blogs mass-reported into oblivion? Yes. But fandom policers have a myopic outlook that prevents them from organizing a campaign that puts tumblr under so much pressure they just wipe out NSFW content entirely. (The effort is too long-term & seems only semi-adjacent to their goals.)
Rather: we’re eyeballs that advertisers want to reach. Losing the ability to gain eyeballs via the iOS App Store means tumblr loses advertising value. that hurts their bottom line – which seems much more likely to get tumblr off its ass, trying to look like they’re cleaning up their act.
Let’s not start a blame war over this. This is much more likely to be a marketability thing than a fandom politics thing.
“[…] we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse. As this is an industry-wide problem, we work collaboratively with our industry peers and partners like [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children] (NCMEC) to actively monitor content uploaded to the platform. Every image uploaded to Tumblr is scanned against an industry database of known child sexual abuse material, and images that are detected never reach the platform. A routine audit discovered content on our platform that had not yet been included in the industry database. We immediately removed this content.” [emphasis added]
until law enforcement has gotten involved and the work is done, we won’t have a complete story (and even then, we may not get one). however, the context is clear: the images being targeted are exploitative images of real csa/cp victims that reached the platform because it was not previously included in the industry-wide database. the current reaction appears to be a widespread trawl/overhaul to locate, identify, and purge any other cp that was not previously caught.
The work being done to complete the cleanup is clearly very sloppy, and a lot of well-known blogs posting explicit sexual images of many kinds are being purged from tumblr.
but the current blog purge appears to be a rushed attempt to wipe any and all real child porn from tumblr’s servers – not an attempt to wipe out explicit fanart of adolescent characters.*
lovingdread 