His voice acting in Tim & Eric regarding the Cinco line of products seems to go right along with the humor of the iconic Acme brand. I think he'd be great at this.
This term has no legal definition and is unregulated. A fish caught, cut, and thrown on a plate as sashimi could be called sashimi grade having never touched a freezer to kill off parasites.
I've never understood the logic behind the idea of a "nest egg". Years ago, perhaps, it might not have been clear to the average person that money has to grow over time to stave off inflation, but that information has been widely available for decades and many people still don't put money into any kind of investment.
Not judging anyone. Circumstances are different for each and every person, and financial literacy isn't universal. But I am genuinely curious as to how such a large number of people that have/had careers that paid ok end up paycheck to paycheck when retirement comes around.
Humans in general are short-term thinkers if you can put it off until tomorrow most will elect to do so. Personal finance classes should be required classes the first year of high school and all the way through the senior year.
Most want the instant lottery win when you tell them they have to save and live within their means over time, eyes just glaze over and it doesn’t happen.
I also have given up trying to advise people to do differently in my life. They won’t learn/listen until they get to 50-55 before they start to realize that time has run out.
Unless you were born with a silver spoon, the treadmill starts when you turn 18. when you are young compounding interest/stock splits/dividends/blue chip stocks/401k/unions are your friend.
I was never in a Union, but in my profession, the pipe fitters who worked in the field at my company were, and their healthcare and their pensions, and their savings at the end of life were very very good.
It’s too bad. A large part of the country are anti-Union in fact, many people in the union were very conservative and didn’t quite realize how lucky they were to be in a Union.
> Years ago, perhaps, it might not have been clear to the average person that money has to grow over time to stave off inflation, but that information has been widely available for decades and many people still don't put money into any kind of investment.
There was a lot of debate about whether it should still be government run, or left to individuals, and it is exactly this situation that many folks said that there needs to be some component of retirement that should not be able to be touched by individuals.
It's pretty easy to see how it happens. People don't intuitively understand compound interest and defer.
You're supposed to start saving during the most financially constrained portion of your life, and those are the dollars that have the most impact on your nest egg. Imagine someone starts investing $100/mo at 20 for 3% annually. Their friend who starts saving the same amount at 30 will have 30% more money, despite putting in almost as much.
A person whose parents gave them $10k for retirement at 20 and only starts investing at 30 will have as much as the person who invested religiously from 20, while a person who managed both will have double.
It's not always that simple. I was deep in debt for most of my 20s & 30s, and the interest rate on that debt was higher than I'd have gotten by socking it away.
While somewhat avoidable in retrospect, I don't believe my story is uncommon.
If everybody is rich, then no one is rich. In other words, if everyone has a lot of money, then the prices will be high enough to suck this money out of everyone.
America, and now much of the Western world, runs on debt and taking on debt is being instilled from the early years, so no wonder why people can't save when their income is spent on interest payments.
We know empirically that lower wealth inequality works because in the past periods with lower wealth inequality societies lived more secure lives financially, so wealth redistribution is the answer.
A tale of two cities both had access to the North Sea oil wealth one spent like a drunken sailor, the other side set up a sovereign fund guess who was doing better today. (and no population size has nothing to do with doing the right thing). Britain has a ton of excuses after 60 years.
And the point is to save and live within your means you can’t sit around and worry about what if the right thing to do is to save and live within your means you don’t sit around and worry about if everybody’s rich then no one‘s rich that sounds like an excuse not to do anything.
Many people who I worked with always had an excuse there’s no point saving or living within your means because inflation is gonna kill you or you’re going to be taxed.
Look around in any parking lot or stop light. Check out some real estate listings near you. Notice the number of deliveries going out at your local restaurants.
It gets worse when you read financial "social media" people repeating BS like "high yield savings account" there is no such thing as long as I am alive, it is something from maybe 80's or 90's or even earlier. My cousin had the idea of "just put some money in savings account each month and never check it" - that's exactly super outdated advice or a crooked one where someone doesn't know anything about ETFs and heard you put money each month in it and forget...
There is whole LARP scene of FIRE and influential bloggers from that scene are the only ones that are making money.
Nest egg I do believe had merit back when there actually were "high yield savings accounts" available. I basically see who is LARPing money management when I see they post about FIRE or HYSA, well "money market accounts" seem better and kind of like of HYSA, but the hell those are not really that easily available.
Government bonds are also rather interesting for keeping as "nest egg", corporate bonds are useless.
Article author seems to be from quite well off family lamenting he just didn't understood any of financial stuff and world moved on while he ate away whatever he had. Sad part is it can happen to any of us even if we are financially literate because market can be bad far longer than we can afford or like retirement, jobs all of this can shift while we are left with much less for day to day. Part that I don't understand is that, we should expect that outcome rather than be surprised by it. We should be surprised when all went well and there was no recession, layoffs during our lives.
> ... BS like "high yield savings account" there is no such thing as long as I am alive ...
HYSA are in 2026 readily available.
> ... well "money market accounts" seem better and kind of like of HYSA, but the hell those are not really that easily available.
Likewise readily available: open a free brokerage (or "cash management") account at Fidelity.com online (it is easy and acts similar to a bank account: your paycheck can be direct deposited there, it offers a billpay service, you can use it for electronic transfers, and outgoing wire transfers are free; no minimum balance and no monthly fees), cash by default goes into their SPAXX money market account (its 0.42% ER (Expense Ratio) is higher than some, but its 3.33% yield beats most savings/credit union savings rates; EX: Ally bank is yielding 3.00% these days). If you want more of the yield to go into your pocket you can buy (with no transaction fee) a ETF like Vanguard's VBIL which invests only in short duration US Treasury bills (now yielding 3.63% w/ER 0.06%). And if you're up for slightly higher effort, you can buy T-Bills directly at Fidelity with auto reinvestment, at no extra cost.
The preceding (including HYSA) are all near-zero risk, and as a consequence, do NOT pay truly "high" yields (which I think was your real point), they just pay yields that are at the upper end of 'near-zero risk'. These are NOT where you invest for long-term gain/appreciation. For the latter, conventional wisdom says: invest in the stock market, where the risk is much higher, but the historical long-term return is too. ETF's make this easy and efficient. One candidate for "fire and forget": VTI, Vanguard's Total [US] Stock Market Index ETF (as before, with an easy to open account at Fidelity, you can trade these for almost no cost; Fidelity has many competitors, I am merely a happy customer of theirs).
The designation of "HYSA" is itself kind of a semantic shrinkflationesque slight of hand.
"HYSA"s in 2026 have similar and often worse rates than a standard savings account back in, say, most of the 1990s.
But, sure, compared to the average modern standard savings account (with rates of effectively nothing and well below inflation) it is higher yield than that.
Generally the only account that keeps even with inflation is a CD, but of course that locks up your money for that duration, which would suck in an emergency.
That is why a personal finance class should be required before you graduate from high school. The treadmill starts at 18 unless you have a silver spoon.
I know folks who save and invest 20-80% of their income. They are not LARPing, and many of them have investments with growth exceeding their job income after 10 years of this kind of saving. It's hardly a LARP to save and invest. Maybe if you're investing in something actually worthless or a ponzi scheme, but last I checked land is still an investment vehicle and they aren't making more of it. One can put solar on it, or a business, or lease it out to someone else.
> I think you're optimistic about the overlap between "people who tit about with guns" and "people who absorb education".
The cavalier phrase "tit about with" is exactly the issue. People do so due to a lack of education about gun safety.
> I dread the outcome of practical safety lessons because, the moment you give a classroom guns
OP didn't mention practical lessons, and giving real guns to school children would be idiotic. You don't have to actually have a gun in your hand to learn what not to do with one should you encounter it. We have MYRIAD examples of non practical instruction (things like sex ed, chemistry [what happens if sodium is dropped in water and why?], physics [hey kids, lets visit a live nuclear reactor!]). If anything, the best way to dampen the glamor of guns instilled by media would be to make it a boring school subject.
> Make gun ownership a tedious bureaucratic procedure.
In many cases, it is. In my state, you can't hunt with a gun (or even a bow I think) without a mandatory gun safety course, and I needed a background check to buy the rifle in the first place. A background check that required a form.
Not to say there aren't loopholes, of course, and I think most Americans agree with common sense gun laws to implement more scrutiny.
> To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Which they go to the correct length to explain in the link associated with that demonstration. I found that exercise quite apt. They aren't saying "This is what non-aphants see" but rather "This is an approximation of what someone who can see images in their mind sees using a separate process so that you get an idea".
For me, the afterimage effect really DOES look similar to aspects of my own internal image perception (colors that are sort of there, but not quite; hazy quality; transparency).
Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.
I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that part isn't fancy)
It uses the visual center of my brain (fMRI would show it according to the literature), but it doesn't use my eyes. I do, however, tend to pay much less attention to what I'm seeing when I'm visualizing intensely, so there's some competitive inhibition.
I used to be very frustrated with people who just couldn't see how the furniture in a room could be rearranged, or the color a wall could be, or where the bolt is on the underside of the engine now that we've installed it. Typical mind fallacy, that was me.
Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.
In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.
But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.
Completely opposite on that front, here, as well. I can't even really associate, I have visual memory all the way back to my earliest childhood memories (specifically, 3-4 years old, stepping on the track of a sliding door in San Diego, I believe, it hurt, I wanted to go see the pool outside), and my memory is so visual that sometimes I can see people's face, and what they were wearing and where we were standing, in the conversations we had but not necessarily hear what they're saying. I also have some semantic memory, something like "we talked about x for a while, and then I think we did y", but it's much hazier.
Honestly I love the fact that humans are so cognitively diverse and that we all can share our experiences.
After reading your comment I went to see the test. The scale shows the same picture in four different opacities, which isn't useful. The textual descriptions were more useful.
One thing that I have always noticed about my own internal images (yes, I am not an aphant) is that when I am perceiving something in my mouth (such as a sore spot or tooth), my perception of it visually in my mind is wildly different than if I actually look in my mouth using a mirror. Objects look and feel much larger and more detailed in my mind than they actually are.
> Americans always fail to comprehend that outsiders judge them by how they act outwards to citizens of other countries.
Americans are not their government. Judging individuals based on the actions of their government is the type of ignorant behavior that breeds exactly the type of tribalism corrupt government officials are able to thrive in.
You're assuming there are human eyes behind all of these accounts. With the rise of AI has also come a precipitous rise in astroturfed views.
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