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into-control · 3 years

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Into i need help. I bought a oculus quest 2 right and i tried to connect it to my laptop and it wont work so I realized i needed and actual pc gaming setup you know, problem is idk anything about PCs and i dont wanna get scammed. Can you help me? Ive looked online and idk wtf im looking at tbh. Can you give like advice and shit lol 😂 love you into 💕

well i'm not a professional at pcs by any means but i've always had a huge fixation on them so i can try to help as much as possible and i'll even try to put it in simple terms. fair warning, i talk A LOT in this post because i love rambling about computers :') i tried to use the simplest terms possible since you seem confused but if something doesn't make sense just ask and i can try to reword.

it all depends on what you want out of your pc. and do you want to build one or get a prebuilt one? if you want my advice i recommend building one. getting a prebuilt pc is the easiest way to get scammed because retailers tend to overcharge and they think they can get away with it because they stuck a flashy high end graphics card and colourful lights in it even though it has shit airflow and they cheaped out on the motherboard and power supply or something like that. if you're going to get a prebuilt pc make sure you look at allll the specs and consult some online reviews to see if they're any good, and figure out if you're going to be overcharged. now i'll talk about building one. a lot of this will still be useful if you're considering buying a prebuilt though.

the very first step is deciding your budget. idk where you are but in USD the typical amount to spend on pc parts is i think like $1000 - 1500 (you can spend less but that's if you don't have a lot of money to spend and are still desperate to have a gaming pc). i'm spending around $1700 CAD (before taxes, eugh) on mine bc i want to get into more demanding games eventually. it sounds very costly but computers like these can last you a decade and are very multifaceted. figuring out your budget first instead of going right ahead and buying stuff is important because each component should take up specific percentages of your budget. another important thing to consider when deciding your budget is if you want RGB (the colourful lights as previously mentioned), because components with that capability are slightly more expensive.

after deciding your budget, your first move is deciding what graphics card (GPU) you want. the GPU is responsible for processing and presenting the visuals on your screen. theoretically it should take up between 35 - 40% of your budget because it is the powerhouse in a gaming system. you have two developers to choose from here: NVIDIA or AMD. from what i've seen people tend to prefer NVIDIA but AMD cards aren't bad and they definitely compete in performance. i'll talk about nvidia though because that's what i know more about. by searching up the oculus quest 2 system requirements it tells me you at least need an nvidia geforce gtx 970. this card came out in 2014 and is by no means bad however it is actually the same base price as a lot of newer cards. if you want to go better than the minimum requirements, first consider what your monitor is capable of. if you don't have one yet, consider what you want it to do. monitors are not considered a part of the budget i keep mentioning by the way. idk how much this matters to you since we're talking about the oculus quest 2 but i'm just kind of assuming you're going to use this pc for other games too. the main two things to take into consideration are max resolution and refresh rate. my monitor has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and a 144hz refresh rate. what the resolution means is that there are 2,073,600 pixels in the screen, and can go up to a resolution of 1080p in video games. the refresh rate means the monitor can refresh the picture on the screen 144 times a second, therefore can show a max of 144 frames per second in a video game. to put that in to perspective, most screens have a refresh rate of 60hz, such as regular laptop screens, iphone screens, etc.. monitors come in mainly 60hz, 75hz, 144hz, and 165hz, and for resolution they mainly come in 1080p, 1440p, and 4k. seeing as i don't have any plans on upgrading my monitor any time soon, dropping extra money on a GPU that can achieve more than 144fps and 1440p/4k would be pointless. but forget about the monitor, the oculus quest 2 has a max refresh rate of 120hz and its resolution lies somewhere between 1080p and 1440p. if you know what kind of games you're going to be playing, look up how they perform with different kinds of cards. i'm fairly certain anything above an nvidia geforce rtx 3070 would be pointless because of your display limits, and anything below the nvidia geforce gtx 970 simply won't be enough for the system. you can look at all the GPUs ranked here. after deciding which GPU you want you need to figure out which brand of it you want (NVIDIA themselves, asus, gigabyte, evga, etc), because they all perform at slightly different levels, although the difference is usually only a few frames so it's better to save money. something to watch out for is the quality of the fans in the GPU because if they aren't good, it will overheat and underperform. i'm aiming to get a 3060 or 3060 ti, if that helps. the only problem is that there is currently a worldwide GPU shortage due to covid, tariffs, and the cryptocurrency mining boom (gpus are used in bulk to mine). fortunately there is currently a crypto mining crackdown happening in china, where majority of mining in the world happens, so the demand for GPUs will hopefully start going down soon. you wont be able to build your pc right away but the market is looking better than it has in awhile. this is just about the only argument i have in favor of getting a prebuilt pc, because they have GPUs in them and are more readily available. i don't think that's a good enough reason though especially since part of the reason i'm building my pc is because it looks fun lol. another thing to note is that you should not overspend on your GPU. the shortage has caused a lot of GPU prices to skyrocket into the $2k-3k range but none of them should be above 1k except the highest end ones. when deciding on a GPU, search up the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP). cards made by brands other than AMD and NVIDIA will almost always cost a little extra, but do not pay hundreds of

extra dollars. but anyways!! the GPU is now out of the way and is definitely the longest paragraph here because it's the most important part.

next up is the central processing unit (CPU), which you should be spending about 20 - 25% of your budget on. its job is essentially to retrieve instructions from the RAM and execute it. i suppose you could call it the brain. again you have two developers to choose from, this time between intel and AMD. i've had two laptops with an intel CPU and my current one has an AMD CPU and both are very good, however the general consensus is that you can get the same performance for less by going with AMD. CPUs have cores, and each core can run its own process. the more cores you have, the more your pc can think about basically. you can get CPUs will all sorts of amounts of cores but for gaming, 4 or 6 cores is all you really need. 8 is actually already a bit overkill. so you really don't need to get the best CPU out there. the one you get should depend on what GPU you get (hence choosing that component first). you don't want to bottleneck your GPU by getting a CPU that isn't good enough for it, but bottlenecking your CPU with the GPU by a small amount isn't as big of a deal because the goal is to allow your GPU to be used to its full ability. another detail about CPU is clock speed, which determines how quick it can complete tasks. the higher the faster, obviously. my (non gaming) laptop's CPU clock speed is 2.30 GHz and has 4 cores. the cpu i have for my build is the AMD ryzen 5 5600x. it has a base clock speed of 3.7 GHz but it can be maxed out to 4.6 GHz, and it has 6 cores. the oculus quest 2 has a minimum requirement of the AMD ryzen 5 1500x or the intel i5-4590, which is a little low on the performance list. but like i said the CPU should depend on the GPU. all it takes is a google search for which CPU goes best with the GPU you've chosen and you can find several answers depending on if you want the best possible performance, best budget performance, etc.. a nice little fact about choosing AMD over intel is that most AMD CPUs will come with a stock cooler, which is absolutely necessary otherwise your CPU will overheat (this is another thing prebuilts will cheap out on). this only adds to the whole price-to-performance thing. the stock cooler will most likely do unless you push your pc or want the build to look prettier.

next on the list is a motherboard, where all the parts come together in unity. you should spend 8 - 10% of your budget on this baby. it's easy to over and underspend on a mobo. the most important thing when it comes to choosing a mobo is that it supports your CPU. you cannot use the same mobo for intel and AMD CPUs. fortunately the product page will straight up tell you which CPU brand the mobo is meant for and will typically have two versions of the same board. it's important to note that motherboards don't always have onboard wifi, meaning it wont be able to connect to the internet via wifi and instead needs an ethernet cable or an external wifi adapter. if you can't get an ethernet cable to the room where you want your pc, you're going to need onboard wifi, or a wifi card/usb. onboard wifi mobos tend to be more expensive so it's up to you, but i personally bought one with wifi included so i wouldn't have to worry about it because our ethernet cables are in the basement and i'm upstairs. another very important thing about motherboards is that their BIOS version (operating system i guess?? idk how else to describe it) doesn't always support your CPU out of the box and must be updated before using it. this can present as a problem if you don't have another CPU to perform the update with, however some motherboards allow you to 'flash' the BIOS with a only usb drive as long as it's hooked up to power. there are plenty of step by step youtube videos about how to do this. i will have to do this with my motherboard when the time comes because it doesn't support ryzen 5s out of the box. don't let this deter you from getting a certain board as long as it has a BIOS flash feature. next up is what I/O ports you want, which are the ports (usb ports, headphone/mic jack, hdmi port, etc) you'd find on the back of any desktop computer. that is the side of the motherboard. basically just be aware of how many of each ports you want, and remember that there will probably be even more ports on the front of the case you get. the last thing i can think of right now is making sure your motherboard has all the headers (where you plug components in) you want it to have but i'll get to that later.

next up on the list is RAM, aka random access memory. this stores short term data. the amount of RAM you have kind of determines how much your pc can multitask. RAM sticks typically go up by some multiple of 2GB. most standard laptops and desktops nowadays will come with 8GB of RAM, which is enough for day to day use. it can be enough for mid and low end games however it cuts it pretty close most of the time. 16GB of RAM is the sweet spot for gaming and anything above that is pretty much overkill (and once again a waste of money) as long as you don't have a billion unnecessary background processes. a large amount of RAM is typically needed for video editors or computer programmers. you should always make sure your motherboard can support the amount of RAM you want although any good motherboard will support 64GB or even 128GB. the best option is to get a 16GB RAM pack, which will include two 8GB RAM sticks. splitting RAM between two sticks will increase efficiency. this is called dual channel. i also recommend getting DDR4 RAM, which is simply faster than DDR3. a good speed to have is around 3600 MHz. make sure your motherboard supports DDR4. you also want to be weary that your RAM is compatible with your CPU brand because they do have to interact for your pc to function.

next is storage. there are three-ish options here depending on how much you're willing to spend. generally you should spend 8 - 10% of the budget here. you can always get a good ole hard drive for the cheapest, however they are the slowest and physically biggest option, meaning whatever you put on it will take a bit longer for your pc to retrieve and open (they can load about 100-200MB of data per second). the next option is a solid state drive. they are a little more expensive but can load as much as 600MB of data per second and take up less space. the last and most efficient/expensive option is an m.2 nvme drive. these things are physically absolutely tiny and can load up to 4GB of data per second. anything you put on these will open very very quickly. the fairly standard solution for this is a combination of two of these three. personally i'm using one m.2 drive and one hard drive. the hard drive i have can store 2TB while the m.2 drive can only store 256GB. funnily enough these two drives are roughly the same price. the idea here is to install your operating system on the faster drive. this makes it so it only takes like 8 seconds tops for your pc to start up. you can also put any other programs you use most often on there (like your main browser and favourite games) and they will open very quickly, while the bulk of your games and other files will go on the bigger drive. that's all there really is to say for storage, just make sure the reviews are good on the drive you want to get, but that goes for any component.

next is your power supply (PSU). very very important to not cheap out on this. 6 - 8% of the budget should go to this. the function of the PSU is to do exactly what its name implies: supply power to all the components. this is where the website pcpartpicker can come in very handy. not only does it help you build a list of parts that are all compatible with each other, it will also estimate how much wattage you will need to run your pc. 600W is usually enough for a normal gaming pc. PSUs are ranked, and you should never really go below a bronze ranking. you can also choose between non-modular, semi-modular, and fully-modular PSUs. non-modular PSUs have all the cables permanently attached. this can be desirable to people who are confused by what cable is plugged in where but also undesirable as unused cables cannot be removed and make cable management harder. fully-modular PSUs come with the cables all in a separate bag so you choose which ones to plug in. semi-modular power supplies have the necessary cables attached and the rest can be attached need be. it all depends on preference and how much faith you have in yourself. i have an 80+ gold certified fully modular 750W PSU because the thought of unnecessary cable management makes me sick lol. corsair is pretty much the most trusted brand for power supplies. be careful because this is another place prebuilts will cut corners.

now for the case! this one isn't overly difficult to choose and mainly will just appeal to your aesthetics. it's less important to stick to a precise percent of the budget for this one but you also don't want to spend more than 8%. do you want a black case? a white one? do you want a glass side panel so you can see inside your pc and admire your hard work? besides that, you also need to make sure the case is big enough for your motherboard, GPU, and PSU. most info pages for cases will tell you the max size of the GPU and PSU and what size of mobo it's meant for. you also want to make sure there is a place to put your storage drives (unless you only have m.2 drives which are installed on the motherboard). you also want to make sure it has optimal airflow abilities. a case with no airflow will cause overheating. the best ones have mesh fronts and tops to allow cool air to be pulled in and hot air out. it's even better if you can get a case that comes with fans in the front, because they are what pulls that cool air in.

next is the CPU cooler, which i briefly mentioned. if you don't get an AMD CPU then you'll need to buy a separate cooler. you can choose between air coolers (a fan and a heatsink) or liquid coolers. i don't really have much to say about them and i recommend doing your own research on liquid coolers lol.

last but not least, case fans. like i said a lot of cases will come with front fans and also an exhaust fan at the back, however you might want more, or even replace the ones you already have with better ones. pay attention to how many fans your case manual says can fit and plan accordingly. check out reviews to see if the fans you want are quiet and efficient. if you buy a three pack of case fans there is a chance it will come with a fan hub. this makes it easier to control all of them in sync because the hub will connect all the fans to one header on the motherboard. generally 3-6 fans are pretty good for a gaming pc. two or three in the front pulling in cool air, one at the back and two on the top to pull out hot air.

now that i have all the components out of the way i'm gonna talk about RGB lighting. numerous components that i've mentioned have the option of including LED lights to make your pc brightly coloured, which is always nice if you have a glass side panel on your pc. it's an extra bit of money but i personally was willing to sacrifice that because i want to show off my build lmao. motherboards, RAM sticks, GPUs, CPU coolers, and case fans are the main components that can come with RGB lighting. you can also get special LED strips and power connectors designed for PCs. if you decide to go for RGB lighting, do try to stick to one RGB ecosystem, meaning make sure all the RGB components can be controlled by one program. RGB is controlled by your motherboard. for example if you get an asus motherboard you'll probably want to use their program, aura sync. most components can be controlled by any brand's program however if the motherboard itself has RGB lighting it can only be controlled via its own brand's program, along with the GPU. if you want RGB case fans you really have to make sure your motherboard has RGB headers (the thingy on the motherboard where you plug the fan's LED lights into). most motherboards will only have two-ish RGB headers so if you're going to buy a bunch of fans make sure they come with a fan hub, which lets you plug them all into one header on the motherboard. also, never sacrifice performance for RGB. specifically when it comes to GPUs. if you have a choice between a GPU with RGB and a GPU without RGB, always take the one that has better performance (given it's within the parameters i mentioned earlier).

that's all i have to say :) if you couldn't tell i really love this stuff. i will also recommend you watch youtube videos about this, you can see the build process and the reasoning for using each component, and also tips on what to do and what not to do. i hope this helps and wasn't too confusing. i know you said this is mainly because you got an oculus quest 2 but if you're going to get a gaming pc you should definitely consider games outside of the oculus too.

#ask #anon

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hollywood3015 · 4 years

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Apocalypse BaCC Ruleset

I've always wanted to try my hand at an Apocalypse Challenge but could never get behind the whole only one family thing. I am a avid rotational player. One family just bores me, so I came up with this challenge. This is based off of my own rulesfor the Bacc and not the original or one of the many variations.

Starting Out:

-Create a new neighbor and create your three founders. They can be families or single it doesn't matter.

-The three founders may NOT go to college. That would make the challenge way to easy.

-Build and Buy mode tabs are NOT allowed after you build the families house. Not even for a baby crib so make sure you factor that in when you make their house.

-The bunker can look however you want it to. It does not need to be up off the ground nor does it need to be 8x8 but you may only have a max of 3 rooms until Architect is unlocked.

-Sims may not have a stove, they must have the cheapest grill and Fridge.

-No sims may sleep outside.

-The lot must be enclosed by a fence.

-Only 3 restrictions may be unlocked a generation

-No Electronics may be used. Only the cheapest fridge and cheapest fridge

-Basic Electricity is unlocked when a sim has Max mechanical and level 8 logic. Once that is done $3500 must be paid from town funds.

-Taxes must still be paid. It can be whatever percentage you want but it has to be consistent.

-No smoke detectors, sprinklers, burglar alarm

-To unlock running water you must get level 5 cleaning and level 5 logic. That enables sinks.

-Basic airport is your ticket out of the city. If you plan for your kid to go to college you must have a basic airport. You must pay $25,000 dollars. With a basic airport you get:

Flooring

Wallpaper

Adopt Stray Pets

Higher quality furniture that has been unlocked.

-No cars, service sims, or delivery service.

-Pet adoption is unlocked when a pet store is opened.

-Nanny is unlocked when business is unlocked, and there 5 teenagers in town.

If you want to get more households:

SIM MULTIPLIER

+1 When the first community lot is built+1 When you have basic electricity+1 When you have plumbing+2 When you get an Airport+1 With every 5 community lots after+1 A sim tops a career. (maximim 1 per household)+5 Downton+10 University (Multiple universities are allowed)+13 For every business district.

-Community lots:

Are unlocked when the business career is topped.

-Downtown:

Is unlocked when the political career is topped and $100,000 dollars has been paid.

Universities:

Are unlocked when there is an airport and a population of 1,000

RESTRICTIONS

-Hopelessness

You cannot move in anyone until someone tops the career.

-Adventure

Sims may not go on vacation

-Architect

Sims may not move out until this career is topped.

Businesses may not be built until this career is topped

-Artist

A position opens when a sim maxes creativity

Sims may not use workbenches or the potty/clothing bench

Sims may not open any art type business or have any paintings on their business

No deco items may be placed

-Athletic

For teens and elders to leave the lot they must have level 10 body skill.

Can NOT have a gym or workout equipment on their businesses.

Cannot move anything bigger than one tile

Items received as date or outing reward may be moved once no matter how big they are but after that they may not be moved again. If they are restricted items they may be moved to inventory but not sold.

Sims may not sell items on community lots that are bigger than one tile

Sims may only sell things they made

Gym equipment may not be used or purchased

Sims may carry no more then three items in their inventory

-Slacker

Sims may not use vacation days

Sims who miss a single day of work lose the job

If a sim loses a job they may never take that job

No clubs community lots may be built or owned

Elders may never retire

You may not ignore chance cards

-Science

Sims may not use the phone unless it is tuesday

No cell phones or computers may be used or purchased

Sims may not use the robotics bench or have servos

You may not call the exterminator

No lights

No trash compactor or bass or guitar

-Politics

Sims may only have 3 rooms in there house

NO downtown may be unlock

Sims may not go to college

May not have a cemetery

No basements

May not have a second floor

No vacation hood

May not influence other sims

-Paranormal

May not plead with grim reaper

No cemetery lot

May not move a grave. If a sim dies somewhere the grave must stay there

May not place graves or urns into inventory

May not use the resurrect-o-nomitron

-Natural Science

No landscaping items

No gardening trees

May not own a pond

May only have a 4 plot garden that has to be enclosed with a fence

May not alter the ground color

May not flatten the lot

May not use fertilizer

No cow plants

No chef salads

No telescopes may be used

Sims may not watch clouds or stargaze

No flower arranging bench

No Greenhouses

-Business

Businesses may not be opened (home or community)

You may not sell items via buy and build tab.

May not sell paintings or workbench items.

Sims may not hire service sims

May not use workbenches

-Dance

Sims may not dance.

Sims may not do tai chi or meditate

Sims may not use the ballet bar or the dance sphere

Stereos may only be used to build body skill

Sims may not have a club business or a business where they sell music.

-Entertainment

Sims may not throw parties or use the entertainment menu

Sims may not buy anything from the party tab

Sims may not use the karaoke machine (also restricted by Artist and Science).

Sims with televisions are limited to the Yummy Channel, the Workout Channel and the News/Weather Channel.

Sims may not read a book unless it is a skill building book

Sims may not have wedding parties

Sims may not use wedding archs

May not place a wedding venue.

No toy crafting bench

Sims may not have a business with instruments or a microphone.

-Intelligence

Sims may not perform any action from the Ask pie menu that came with Nightlife.

Sims who are not friends with a member of the household may not enter the house.

Proposals to move in may only be offered by the Sim who is in love and will produce the next generation with the new household member.

Sims may not accept blind dates, jobs, or contact numbers from social townies.

Sims may not chat online, send emails, or blog.

Sims may not hire employees.

Sims may not give gifts.

Sims may not visit community lots alone—they must take a friend or family member along.

Sims may not Search for UFOs or Summon Aliens.

Sims may not go on vacation at all.

-Law Enforcement

Your sims may not purchase a smoke detector, sprinkles, burglar alarms, car alarms.

Sims may not use the emergency tab on their phones.

Teens and Elders may not go to college

Can not call the police to look for runaway teens.

-Medical

Showers and tubs may not be used

Dishwashers may not be built

Hot tubs, water wigglers, and pools may not be used

Sims may not use medicine to get well

If a sim gets sick you must roll to determine if they are going to die. 1-5 is live/ 6 is die

Whenever a sim woohoos they must try for a baby

May not purchase changing tables.

-Culinary

Sims may only buy a cheap grill and and fridge.

May not buy anything from the small appliance category

Sims may only prepare food once a day and may not store food in the fridge

Baby bottles do not count

No gelatin

May not prepare food on community lots.

Sims may not open restaurants or open anything that has to do with restaurants.

No pizza or chinese food delivery

Sims may not open a grocery store.

Sims may not hold food in inventory

NO birthday or wedding cakes

No buffet tables

-Life of Crime

Every Sunday all the sims income has to go into the town funds.

-Military

Sims may not travel to community lots

You may not invite sims over unless you are in love with them

Only a to be spouse may be moved in

No sim may move out

No parties, dates, or outings

Sims may not go to college

Must have level 10 body skill to go anywhere

-Show Business

Sims may not practice romance in mirror

Sims may not change clothes

Sims may not make their own clothes

Sims may not purchase love potion or purfume

Sims may not own a salon

You may not put down a salon type lot

May not use the makeover chair

Diva and Mr. Big may not be moved in

-Music

May not own a stero

May not Smustle

May not classic or slow dance

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jhaernyl · 4 years

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So my ninja taxes are predicated on a handful of concepts, one of which is a big straying away from canon bc I cannot rationalize why Konoha works the way it was if we don't change Hashirama and Madara's motivation for founding the village.

If they really had started their village So That Children Would Not Have To Fight And Die then there is no fucking way that Konoha would have ended up the way it did, not even from the beginning.

Children would not have been allowed in the field, full stop.

My reasoning, instead, went that Hashirama and Madara looked at how hard life was for their older relatives, the ones that got injured too much to fight again but didn't die, the ones that went blind or deaf and had to be cared about from the rest of the Clan and possibly thought themselves a burden on the other members of their nomadic society, respected "Elders" who weren't necessarily old but who couldn't fight anymore and who dealt with a slew of PTSD complications that might have barred them from even interacting with children and teaching them, further making them feel inadequate or who possibly left the Clan to go into civilian careers where they could settle down in one place, get more or less regular medical care as needed and thus sort of 'left' the Clan behind.

(As a side rant I would like to add that the reason why Madara and Hashirama wouldn't focus on the 'children shouldn't be soldiers' is because that while child soldiers definitely do happen in the real world, in the contest of the Naruto framework it didn't make sense for the time Madara and Hashirama were in to send children as young as the manga told us they were to fight against full-grown adults the way the manga depicted them doing.

I can buy the occasional genius being put into battle way too young (cough Tobirama cough) as long as it came with other factions being anything in the range from impressed-but-somewhat-disapproving to downright appalled at the age the kid was thrown into the field but not it being a systematic thing, because the infant mortality rate would be too high and unsustainable so I think it would make more sense, especially given their ages when they meet, if Madara and Hashirama older brothers died rather than their younger ones.

Hashirama and Madara are supposed to be SEVEN YEARS OLD when they meet and yet somehow both of them are the eldest of their siblings, with Tobirama being the second eldest to Hashirama and Izuna being somewhere around Tobirama's age supposedly, and both have already lost three younger brothers to battle against the opposite faction? Huh huh, sure Kishi, whatever you tell yourself to feel edgy.

No, it makes more sense to me that they were middle children who both became Heir because their older siblings either died or were crippled too bad to continue fighting and that was followed by frustration/rage/depression/sense of being rejected / feeling of uselessness in relation to their war-like Clan whose tradition and Leader Are In The Field kind of leadership demanded an able-bodied shinobi to lead them and that shaped them and informed their ideas for and dreams of an ideal village where that wouldn't be the case and where their younger feelings shouldn't have to feel that was going to be the end they were going to one day meet unless they died in battle.)

So Hashirama and Madara looked at that and they went "That's not what I want for my brother/cousins/uncles/aunts/relatives / etc." and so their dream was to create a place where a shinobi would be supported (the way many self-made shinobi at the time weren't, unless they joined the Clan and, as said above, even joining a Clan didn't necessarily protect them in the long run, depending on their specific situation) beyond his or her or their utility in the field, where they wouldn't have to leave the Clan and their support network to settle somewhere safer, (Tobirama, in the background: where their health and minds could be looked after so that they would not snap and go insane and have to be mercy killed.)

Which allows for the focus of the village to be on a very Japanese-appropriate taking care of your Elders who have already contributed to your society and can still have more to contribute in the way of teaching young ones without having to die in the battlefield or feel themselves become 'burdens' (which they aren't but they might still feel like) and reducing the weight of care on the families by having a support system to person and families be something organically built into the Village’s structure, in more ways than taxing but also through the taxes levied.

It also allows for a spiralling effect being present towards having more people and time to devote to training the young and thus, especially once the Ninja Wars happen and create that sort of constraint on society, leading to younger graduation classes because that can happen as a slippery slope kind of situation where no one means to send young kids into battle before they are ready but if you are sending the older teens and adults into battle, then the younger kids can take over in-village missions that would otherwise be given to adults, right? And if they are doing in-village missions, why not missions right around the village, not too far from it, with their jonin sensei coming along to ensure their safety? They are not being put at risk, they are just being helpful to the system while still being safe.

And that slides into 'well they can do missive runs to safe places on safe routes, we are not putting them in danger, they are just covering for the kind of thing that the adults are too busy with the war front to do' and then slowly and slowly inch down until it becomes 'bring cargo to the back of the lines, far away from the front line, so that we are sure it gets there safely and then they can help the adults escort the wounded back, reduce the number of people we have to discharge from duties where they are needed and there are still enough adults around that it’s safe enough.'

As I said, a slippery slope.

Starts small and over time it gets normalized and slides down inch by inch.

Back to topic, the focus is on looking after those who get injured and/or need to retire means that two of the main taxes being levied are the Injury Insurance Tax (IIT) and the Invalidity, Old Age & Survivors Tax (IOS) which works like the national funds do in Italy.

It's something that you invest in, just in case you will need it later. Almost all ninja end up needing the IIT funds, at some point during their career, while recovering from injuries and being unable to run missions (thus reducing the stress on ninja on the monetary side and sometimes making life easier for the medics, because patients who know that they will get paid while they work to get back to 100% are patients who might be less likely to book it out of a window at the first instance) and all ninja who are not on a suicidal bend and actually looks forward to managing to make it out and retire can look at the IOS as a support system that will one day help take care of them, should they be too damaged / too old / not able to be around children to make out a living by having a profession/teaching children, etc.

The IOS being something that they have put money in during their service to the village, this also avoids the mental trap of being seen as a charity because it's not you accepting charity from someone else. It's you reaping the reward of that money you sacrificed for so long and set aside exactly for this specific occurrence.

It's not a handout but rather one of your rights that you are expecting/requesting/demanding to be granted to you as promised, so it skips quite a few mental traps that might otherwise prevent them from accepting the help they are being offered.

There are fixed percentages for how much you get taxed depending on rank because the higher you get, the more money you make and the more danger you are exposed to so you both can afford to be taxed higher and you are undergoing higher risks, so you are more motivated to invest into taxes that will give a return when something happens.

Clan ninjas are especially invested in the system and joined under the clear assurance that the village would look out for them if they look out for the village and have a higher investment in wanting their retirees to be supported and looked after properly since that was one of the reasons Konoha got founded to begin with and they were attracted to the security it was supposed to offer.

They get taxed an extra on the IIT and an extra on the IOS in all categories because living in a Clan gives you all sort of advantages that people outside of a Clan don't have and thus you are expected to have the funds to be able to afford that extra and being part of a Clan you have plenty of people around you that are benefiting from the system which goes to show you that it's worth investing in it.

Everyone pays a not indifferent amount of their paycheck to the village in general, upfront, and that amount of money is part and parcel of being part of the Village.

The Village provides for you in many ways, including allowing you to be part of the village and take their missions at all along with things like the free healthcare, but for the village to be able to afford to provide for you, the Village needs the funds and so your missions get taxed and what you get taxed on is fed back into the natural circle of the village's economy.

That is especially important during wartime when funds are going to be depleted way faster than they would normally be and a lot of missions you would see during peacetime fall to the wayside / cannot be taken on by you so you wouldn't see an income from them so you have to be offered a different kind of Wartime Paycheck if you are deploying in the field on the frontline in one long stretch rather than on a mission-back-to-Village-have-time-off-to-train-and-relax-and-get-some-TLC-get-another-mission-back-to-Village-again-etc. basis.

So every ninja pays a specific tax amount to the Village and then Clan ninja give another cut to their Clan because of societal obligations to your Clan and because the Clan provides for you and all Clans pay a general tithe to the village in the form of being taxed based on the number of members they have, the space they occupy and what percentage of whatever it is they produce (poisons and antidotes for the Yamanaka, medicines for the Nara, preserved food for the Akimichi, insect-related products for the Aburame, etc.) gets handed over to the Village to be used for everyone (the rest they keep to store or sell as they prefer).

Being part of the Clan is a privilege and a duty and part of it is contributing to the Clan, which is both a remnant of before the Villages were formed and how the Clan maintains their specific level of independence from the Village. Some Clans will ask more of you, some Clans will ask less and leave more in your pocket, it depends from Clan to Clan.

It's not all detractions, tho, though there are a few more that go to hit non-Clan, non-Clan-affiliated ninja. The Village provides you with basic kits and as they get depleted you can just go to the quartermaster and get refills issued without paying. If you go out to shop, you get discounts (calculated monthly based on medium earnings, the family of origin, living situation, taxes paid, quality material, economical support you have or don't have, etc.) on goods that you might need to use as a ninja and, if you are from a Clan, you get discounts within your own Clan or allied clans.

Orphans, especially ones without Patrons to look after them who are still underage or who are of age but do not yet have a trade to fall back on / are unable to be at least chunin ranked, are given a base monthly stipend and then they receive extra money on top of that basic stipend depending on their needs. Food needs, training material needs, age, family situation, your rank, how long have you been your rank, clothing needs as identified by the wear and tear of your gear as witnessed by your rank's quartermaster, if you need feminine hygiene products, etc.

On top of a basic food allowance, there are also extra food categories are organized based on whether you are pre-pubescent, pubescent or adult (the amount of food a growing kid vs a growing teenager vs an adult needs varies), what kind of diet do you need for your, for civilians, apprenticeship or, for ninja, training and development.

Are you focusing on your physical skills rather than your chakra skills? Non-chakra intensive diet. Are you working with a lot of Jutsu / genjutsu / training to expand your pool of chakra? Chakra-intensive diet. Are you doing both? Okay, file for both. Your sensei needs to confirm and vouch for your request.

Depending on what you are doing, who your sensei is and what he has you doing and what brand of skills you are focusing on (which influences which kind of foods you will need), the 'very chakra-intensive' / 'very non-chakra intensive' and the 'extreme chakra-intensive' / 'extreme non-chakra-intensive' diets are something you might need to apply for.

Someone like orphaned teenager Maito Gai would definitely hit the 'extreme non-chakra intensive training diet' category because he is doing extreme taijutsu training but given that he also needs to develop and train the amount of chakra necessary for summoning, he'd also be able to apply for 'very chakra-intensive training diet' whereas someone like Kurenai, who is a genjutsu mistress and relies less on her physical abilities, would go for the 'extreme chakra-intensive training diet' box possibly with a side of 'chakra-intensive training diet' if she's keeping up with something more than the barest levels of physical conditioning.

Plus depending on what kind of things you are doing, you might qualify for more than one category of the same type. Let's say you are Minato and you are working on fuck off giant Jutsu (extreme chakra-intensive) but you are also working on finicky, control-based sealing work that requires a different use of your chakra but is also exhausting in its own way (chakra-intensive) but you also need to work your ass off on your speed and reflexes (extreme non-chakra intensive) to keep up with your in-development Jutsu technique without getting disoriented / splatter yourself against trees along with the general physical training you do (non-chakra intensive).

Depending on what your schedule is and what you are doing, you will eat different quantities of food and you will need different types of food as well so if you can convince your sensei to sign off on it, you just apply for whatever you think you need the most or you go big or bust and try to apply for all categories if you think you can get away with it.

And then there's the housing tax if you live in Village housing for ninjas (with the expected wear and tear for being somewhere ninja lives and thus often needing repairs that are given to you free of charge because you are already being taxed for occupying a ninja-specific living space with all that comes with it).

There’s also whatever you (if you are an orphan) owe to the orphanage and/or academy (calculated based upon the resources spent to house and feed and clothe and wash and train you accordingly to your potential).

A lot of the housing thing and owed-to-orphanage/owed-to-Academy debts are predicated upon whether or not you have or not a Patron or a Clan sponsoring you or relatives who might not have been able to take you in (due to age of the relative or other issues) but could help pay for your upkeep and studies and if you do have someone which kind of person they are, what kind of agreement is in place and what kind of economical support they have been able to give you.

Aaand I'm going to stop there for right now because I've been typing about taxes for an hour and a half and I need a break XD

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alanaisalive · 3 years

Text

There was a Buzzfeed article based on a Reddit thread about "Why you left the church," and I wish I had a neat and tidy story of a single event that left me feeling like, "That's it, I'm done." For me it was death by a thousand cuts.

I was raised in a Baptist church in Minnesota. I went to church like 3 times a week and joined the Christian campus organizations in college. Nearly all my friends were also evangelical Christians. I was all in on the whole church thing.

I stopped regularly going to church when I lived in Seattle after college. The church I went to was initially good and I had what I thought were friends, but as time went by, I felt less and less like anyone wanted me there. I noticed that my "friends" spent a lot of time talking shit about whoever wasn't there at the time, and I just couldn't let go of "what are they saying about me when I'm not here?"

In 2001 I had a "probably benign" ovarian tumor and I was unemployed. I needed $600 for back payments on my COBRA coverage. The church humiliated and interrogated me before they would part with any cash to help. That's around the time I stopped going. I went back once, after a few months away. They invited me to a group thing that night and gave me the address. The address didn't exist. I walked around in the rain for an hour in a strange neighborhood in the dark. I don't know if the fake address was on purpose, but I never went back after that.

After I left I started making connections with more people at work and around my neighborhood. People who weren't indoctrinated by the church. I learned that they weren't what the church told me. They weren't evil. They were just people trying to live their best lives with honesty and kindness most of the time.

If I'm honest with myself, I always had a few problems with some of what the church taught. They taught me that "The Bible is the unerring Word of God," and every word of it is "God-breathed." But it was compiled and edited by people. Men, specifically. They sat down in essentially a church committee and decided which stories should stay and which ones had to go. This happened over and over, which is why Catholics and Protestants have different Bibles. So which one is the real Word of God? How do we know? Where did God ever say that the Bible is the Word of God? I mean, the Bible itself never has God calling down from a cloud telling people to worship this book. He never told anyone which version, which edition or which translation was the important and literally true one. I have had a problem with this at least since I was a teenager, and have never gotten a satisfying answer that wasn't based on circular logic. I generally just shrugged and said, "Okay, whatever."

I shrugged and accepted it because I believed that the church was helping people. Our church was full of addicts and alcoholics who credited God and the church with helping them. I had a good and comfortable life and was always told that that's because of "God's blessings." So if there are a few logic holes, I was willing to ignore them because the church was helping people.

But then it wasn't. I started to see all the ways that the church was hurting people on a personal level and on a societal level. The church refuses to pay taxes, even though the Bible says that they should. If they cared about what Jesus taught, they should voluntarily give up their tax-free status. Any church could do it. None of them do. Money is more important than what Jesus taught.

They hurt me. They made me hide my bisexuality for decades because I knew I would never be accepted. They treated me like shit when I needed help because that $600 I needed for surgery was worth more to them than I was.

I saw more holes in the teachings. I was taught that a society without God can't function and that it would be pure anarchy. But that's provably untrue. Japan has one of the smallest proportions of Christians of any country in the world, and they're fine. Most of the country has no declared religion, and they have a far more orderly and less violent society than any so-called Christian country. The same is true of a lot of countries. A higher percentage of people who profess to being Christian has zero correlation with overall prosperity, safety or happiness of a country.

I didn't completely stop identifying as a Christian until Trump. If they can support that man, there is nothing of Christ in them. They are just morally and factually wrong in every way, and 80% of evangelicals voted for him. I challenged my Christian friends back in the US to spend a year focusing their Bible studies on just the teachings of Jesus, and there was a deathly silence. None of them wanted to even look at what Jesus actually taught. They know. They just don't care.

Where am I now, belief-wise? I find myself agreeing with Jewish teachings and attitudes toward the Old Testament more than Christian ones. I believe Jesus was a teacher worth listening to. Was he the Son of God? Don't know. I won't rule it out, but I won't swear to it either. I just don't know.

For me, agnosticism is more intellectually honest. I don't know. I wasn't there and everyone who has told the story has an agenda. So I will do my best to honor the teachings of Jesus and my own conscience and try to be a decent person. If God has a problem with any of it, I'm willing to debate it with Him when the time comes.

#long post #why i left the church #american christianity

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lanaisnotwool · 4 years

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421 - 401K Rip-Off

https://moneyripples.com/2020/09/11/421-401k-rip-off/

Are 401K’s a good idea?

Is it possible that you are worse off with a 401K?

Where can you invest instead?

Chris runs the numbers to see what happens if you invest with a 401K. It is catered for you and is filled with the information you need to make the right decisions and making a ripple effect to the lives of others.

Listen to our Podcast here:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/07/30/421--the-401k-ripoff

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Hello, my fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles. Your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a wonderful show. A show that is for you, and it’s about all of you. Those of you that work so hard for your money. And you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now! You want to work because you want to not because you have to. You want to have that cash flow. That freedom. That prosperity. Today! Not 30 or 40 years from now, but right now, to be able to have that life that you love. To do what you love while you can still live. While you still have life in you. And it’s not just about having your own life of comfort and ease and freedom, which is amazing, but it’s about so much more. It’s about be able to create a ripple effect to the lives of others. Because as you prosper, you can use your blessings to bless the lives of others too. And that is a ripple effect. I’m here to create guys. Thank you for allowing me to create that ripple effect through you. And thank you again for bingeing, for sharing with others, for creating conversations, right? Because the only way to elevate your success is to elevate your conversations of success as well. And guys, you guys are doing an amazing job. Thank you so much for being a part of this and allowing me to create a ripple effect through you.

As a reminder check out our website, MoneyRipples.com Well, not only do we have the great e-book, Beyond Rice and Beans, that you can download for free, which will help you find money. Especially if you’re looking for a cash and be able to use and be able to create more freedom. There’s also great blogs. There’s even videos of this very episode being posted as well. So check that out. As well as our YouTube page. So check those out!

Today, guys. So again, I get this all the time because I get it. When the rest of the world is telling you to believe one thing, and you’re trying to do something different. It’s hard to break that pattern, right? Hey, we’re witnessing this in the world right now. There’s debates going on and between majorities and minorities and everything else, and it is creating a lot of debate, but the one thing you don’t see, many people debate is actually in the realm of money, right? When it comes to money, most people would agree going with the mainstream advice. It’s spend little, save a lot, save it in your mutual funds like your 401k is and get that employer match because it’s “Free Money”

Stay out of debt! You know, do all these things that you’re supposed to be doing that should somehow create freedom. Like guys, it has not worked! Period. Now you might think that somehow it has worked. Now, we might look back to grandparents generations, but understand is that there’s a ton of workers, funding, their social security and other things. They had pensions. We don’t! They have their pensions right now. There’s school teachers right now out of pensions, like running out of money. There’s States that are bankrupt right now. Government workers that aren’t getting the things that were given to us even few decades ago. And right now it’s relying upon you to create your own freedom. You cannot rely on anyone else. You cannot trust the government will have a decent amount of cash for you to use. It’s really up to you. So what’s been the answer of course, over the last several decades? It’s been the 401k, right?

I’m here to tell you the 401k is a Big Fat Lie! Now, granted. Does it do what people think it does in the sense that you defer taxes? Yes. You can have employer matches, which is like having free money. Yes. By the way, that’s just means that they’re just not paying you as much, just so you know. You know, it’s just a benefit, the company benefit of the add on, they just take it away from your salary anyways. All of these things, you know, is it essentially a real tool or a vehicle? Yes, it is. It’s a tax code that started back in, you know, back in the Carter era, right in the late seventies and by about 1980 and so on. Even though most employers didn’t really implement it, at least for the average worker, usually by the mid eighties, you start to see the average workers getting offered 401ks.

It became more mainstream. Now you have to ask yourself first and foremost, why does this thing becomes so big? Right? Why did people just keep using IRAs? Or why don’t we keep, you know, why don’t we start making roth IRAs more popular? Since that’s been around now for 20 years. More than 20 years. You know, we’ve had that for a while, but why aren’t people going crazy about the Roth? Now there’s some people that say it’s great, but the truth is you can’t save enough into a Roth. Can you? $6,000 or $7,000 a year is not enough to retire on. It’s nothing. It’s a ridiculous rule that you have the Roth IRA that kind of loses it. You’ve got things like life insurance out there that we talked about before. That is tax free, much like a Roth. It’s the same kind of taxation, but you can dump it a lot more.

But even then guys, if you’re trying to rely on a product to get you there, it won’t do it! There is no one single financial product that any financial advisor will offer you or your employer wall for you that will get you to financial freedom. And that’s what we are talking about today. Specifically, I’m going to focus on the 401k and why it’s a lie. Now understand that when it came out into the Carter era, taxes were much worse. Now there’s an article that one of my good friends sent and he sent it to me. He said, Chris, you should check this out. Very interesting. It’s actually an article in Bloomberg about 401k dated back on July 21st. Now this article, I’m not going to quote from it completely because even as I was reading it, I started to see some inaccuracies. The basic premise is pretty interesting.

Some of his solutions were different. He was talking about changing the 401k to be more flexible. More rules. I’m not opposed to that, but it doesn’t really answer the basic question. But he did bring up some good points about what happened when it started. So for example, the points that were good, right? And by the way, I know these are bad points and not only was it bad, I decided to look at the comments, which is never a good idea. If you want to stay in a good mood. When you look at the comments and people are railing into them saying, Hey, this was inaccurate. This was inaccurate. Right? But even with those inaccuracies that decided to go back and use some of those arguments, people were debating about, well, yeah, tax were higher, but medium income was lower. So I said, great. Let’s pull up the historical bureaus and find out what the census said, you know, on those things.

So anyways, I took a trip back in time to figure out what it really was. So here’s the first thing he said, the Marshall tax rate was higher in 1980, which is true. Your tax rate could be anywhere. It was taxed by just, but get this. We have eight tax brackets right now, right? In the federal income tax. The lowest is 0%. Of course. The highest is 37%. That is the highest bracket possible. Now you don’t get tax all that. It’s a scale that goes up, right? So as you hit each income bracket, that portion of that income bracket is taxed at that rate. So for example, right now missing, I’m not exact on the number. So I just closed them off, but you can get, basically get taxed 0% from like zero to about 18,000 bucks, right. Per year. So you have 18,000 or less of income.

You’re not even getting a tax on the federal side. State, maybe, but not on the federal. Then jumps up to like 10 and then 12 and so on. You know, so the top tax bracket for the median income today, by the way, the median household income today is about $78,500. So the top tax he even hit is 22%. By the way, the tax is owed as of 2020. If you make 78,500 on the federal tax, I’m not talking about the state taxes. Federal tax, you’ll pay 10,332 bucks, which is just over 30% of your income. Your total income. In 1980, the median income was 28,220 bucks. And this is across all races. I found out that white races were actually much higher. It was like 51,000. And I thought that was really interesting to see how it’s such a bigger discrepancy back then. I’m not surprised, but still pretty surprising how much the average white household was making was about 51,000.

But the median household income with all races, just like I did with 2020 was 28,220. Now with all the tax brackets, I did all the math on it. The tax, your taxes owed would be $5,663. So just over half of what you would have you paid today for the median income. The difference is though it’s about a third of the income, right? So that total percentage that you would have paid taxes back in 1980 was 20%. And also here’s the thing. The top tax bracket in 1980 was 70% with zero to 70%. With 16 brackets along the way there. So your top tax bracket even at the median household income, which wasn’t a lot 28,000 bucks, right.

Was still in that 32% tax bracket. That’s the bracket you’re in. The top bracket. So that’s where you’re paying more. So of course, if you’re looking for ways to reduce your taxes, why not find something to give you a tax deferral. In hopes that you would live on less. Here’s a faulty premise of course, is that even if you started saving in 1980, let’s say you have saved for the last 40 years. And I know some of you have. The problem is you’re probably noticing you’re not in a whole lot lower tax bracket today, are you? You know, maybe you earn a decent income, but income goes up with inflation, right? So of course the inflation you’re still having to make more. Now, granted right now is a lower tax bracket, for sure. So if you happen to retire today and you’ve been saving for awhile, you might be pretty happy.

But if you’re saving today, this might be the worst time to try to use a tax deferred account. Because right now we are in the lowest tax brackets we’ve been in decades. You know, this is amazing! These are, the tax rates are awesome! Even better than when I started working. Why would I try to avoid paying taxes now and go for a future date when it’s likely to be higher? And here’s the thing, guys, even if the brackets remained the same because of inflation, you have to consume more money each year to live. If you do, guess what, you’re getting tax on it. By the way, if you’re trying to count on social security, yes, you can get tax on social security. If you pull out more than a certain amount per year, and that’s not a lot of guys, it’s not a lot. So that’s the thing is that right now, it’s just based on taxes alone. The concept was great back then, which was, cause there was high taxes. They’re trying to pay for crazy stuff.

Inflation was going through the roof. It made sense, right? It made sense to say, Hey, the tax rates are ridiculous. I’m likely to be in a lower tax bracket because there’s so many tax brackets. It’s not hard to get to a lower one. So it was easy to kind of contribute to that and lower your tax bracket. But you’re delaying that tax for the future. You’re not really saving any taxes when you do a 401k. In fact, you saved nothing. And remember your employer’s contributions are going in as well, tax deferred and they come out taxed. So that’s a big one right there. Now here’s the thing is that people will say, okay, Chris, got it. You know, what’s the alternative, you know, what about now? You know, what’s going on today? Like what would you recommend?

Here’s the thing guys, again, I’m never going to make blanket statements. I’m not going to make blanket recommendations. I’m not going to give investment advice on the show. That’s because it’s illegal. I can’t do it. Right? But let me give you an example of what can happen because here’s the other problem with the 401k that’s a lie. Now people think with a match, right? This is the other big argument I get all the time. They’re like Chris, does it match though? That’s like a 50% match. That’s like a 50% return or a hundred percent match. It’s like a hundred percent return. So guys, I decided to do some calculations. I said, let’s do it by the numbers. That was another criticism on this guy’s thing. They said they didn’t really go by the numbers. He’s right. He didn’t, he was giving more conceptual stuff. Again, this is why I’m not really sharing the article. Cause it’s not. It’s good, but it’s not great. Right?

It’s not something you’d take as gospel for sure. So look at this way, whenever I talk to people or say, okay, Chris, this is what I’ve been doing. They’re like, I maxed out my 401k. Now when we calculate that with the match, because the match doesn’t go over usually 5% 6% a year. Anyways, if you get a hundred percent, most like get a 3% match or something or 4% maybe. But I said, okay, let’s go for the top that I’ve seen. Usually I won’t see with employer contributions. I won’t see more than 25,000 going in per year. So that’s great. Let’s just say that’s the case. I’m going to run two different scenarios. One have a person that’s about 45 years old with a quarter million saved up in the retirement account. That’s maxing their 401k for the next 20 years. And then I got somebody who’s 25 years old, starting from scratch. Also maxing out their 401k.

Which most people don’t do when they’re 25, but I’m going to say somebody is staying cheap. They’re the ultimate ideal saver, right? And they’re saving for the next 40 years and earning this. Now here’s the another debate. People say, well, what’s the real return? You know, this is why he got, I’ve put the match into this equation, right? With the match. You know, the real rate of return the market is anywhere usually between 7.4% and 7.6%, depending on the day. That’s of course the average I’ve seen like a 30 year average over time. It’s not 10 or 12%, the S&P500 doing at best, right around seven and a half. As of right now, July to July 2020, July 1990 to July of 2020, we went from the first to the first it’s about a 7.47% average.

Now like a real rate of return, not 10 or 12, that’s makes a massive difference when you’re started looking at 20 or even 40 years down the road. I figured, okay, we got that. But remember, there’s also fees in 401ks. And this is something that I saw in those comments. People are like, Oh, I’ve got like 0.04% cause I use Vanguard funds and all that stuff. Here’s the deal, guys. The fees in a 401k, aren’t that bad and even said he’s like, Hey, if you can get outside of the 401k, your fees will probably be less. Right? But here’s the deal guys. Most people never get that. And especially if you have money to go in a 401k, your fees are at least 1% on average. That’s pretty typical. They’re just the administrative fees that are inside 401ks. 401ks by the way, have like almost 20 different fees they can charge you.

So, and they’re all embedded with them. They don’t really make them very public. They’ll make them easily known. This is why people say, Hey, the Mark has been up, but my money’s not going up. Right. If you’ve ever said that, especially if you’ve been in the market long enough, you’ve felt this or noticed it before. You’re like, Hey, the market went up, but my money didn’t. There’s something wrong. This is part of the reason, fees are coming out. So I actually went kind of on the high end. Usually I don’t see people netting more than 6% rate of return. I put this at 6.25, I bonus you a quarter percent because the truth is, my point still going to win out. Even if I’m overly liberal with these numbers. Right? And not even being conservative. I’m actually being liberal against my own point.

I’m playing devil’s advocate against myself. Right? So 6.25%. Again, guys, I know the numbers going out because I just know a few of the guys are going to try to run the numbers yourself. So this is why I’m doing this. So anyways, here’s the deal. So I took that person. I said, Hey, what if you’re 45 years old? You’ve got a quarter million in your 401k as of now, which I know there’s several of you that do around this time. You’re max funding it. You’re going in about 25,000 a year with a match. I’m assuming you’re making that 120,000 or so a year. If you’re making less, it’s less right. But I’m putting this up, you know, kind of on a more conservative end where somebody might be max funding this. So you’re getting in a total of 25,000 a year. At six and a quarter percent after 20 years, you will have about $1.84 million.

So you have nearly $2 million. Now you might think that’s a lot, but you got to understand. There’s another thing working against us, which is inflation. Now I went conservative on this number. Again, playing devil’s advocate against myself, but I just decided to make this a number of conservative. I put it at a 4% inflation rate. Do not trust the government says about what, you know, their consumer price index and the inflation rates are. They’re messing with those rates to slow down the increase on social security payments to you. You know? So they’re trying to let that money stretch and last longer, they’re manipulating those numbers in real life, though, if you notice your real life, it’s not too far fetched to say, you know, about every 10 to 15 years, you know, my lifestyle has to kind of double.

Like what I’m living on today. I’ve got to have about double that within 15 years. You know, if you’re living on $4,000 a month back in 2005, you’re probably living on about $8,000 a month now. Again, changing circumstances with the life that’s the thing with inflation is kind of weird. You can’t really count on it because life situations changes. It can go more or less, but I put it 4%. There’s debates that it could actually be like 6% or 7%. It’s more closer what it’s been. Since we’ve been taken off the gold standard back in the early seventies. So anyways, I put it at 4% just to make it better. Here’s the key guys. When you’re looking at lifestyle, cause $1.84 million sounds great in 20 years. But when you look at the after inflation adjustment, that’s almost like having $840,000. So, and by the way, you haven’t paid taxes on this money yet. You still gotta pay taxes.

So say a quarter of that goes to taxes. You’re now left with about $600,000, right? And we’ll say 650,000. Again, I’ll be overly conservative on this number. 650,000. Here’s the key, again, financial buyers have taught this for years. Some people will say 4%. You can live on, right? That you’re not supposed to take out more than 4%. That’s an old number. That’s a number that worked before, back in the seventies. Most advisors that they’re, if they’re up to speed, won’t say more than pulling out 2% or 3%, especially with people living longer. So if you want your money to last, you want to pull out more than 2% or 3%. So what if you pulled out 3% of this after inflation adjustment of 650,000, that means you have about $19,500 a year lifestyle living on. You have a quarter million right now, you max out your 401k for the next 20 years.

And that’s like, you know, that’s a lot, right? They were putting in like over 18,000 19,000 a year into your 401k only to live on about 19,000 a year after you’ve paid taxes. That doesn’t sound so great. Does it? What if you started brand new? What if you’re a brand new person coming in and you’re like 25 years old, starting from scratch. You start immediately max funding that 401k, just like everybody tells you, you do that for 40 years. Six and a quarter percent with inflation working against you. Well guess what? The ending balance is almost 4.4 million, but after inflation, it’s more like 900, just over $900,000. So when you live on that, and remember you have to take out taxes. So let’s say a quarter of that goes into taxes. You’re left with less than 700,000. Again, you’re living on about, you know, if you factor in 3%, you’re living on about 20,000 a year. It doesn’t get any better.

This is why I say that 401k is a lie! You can not retire of 401k alone. Roth IRA won’t get you there by itself. And you can’t put in enough to make it work. You know, you factor in, even with the 401k, even with the match, you’re max funding it, unless you’re making a half million a year and you’re trying to stuff at full, most likely you can’t even do it that way. No, you can’t even do that much. It doesn’t matter. After some point you actually get restricted IRAs too. Some of you might say, well, I’ll do a SEP IRA. So I can do more of my income. I know some of you I’ve talked to, you put in 50,000 a year. It doesn’t matter, guys. You’re putting in 50,000 a year. You just double that number. And by the way, when you’re putting in SEP IRAs, you’re putting in your own match.

So the truth is you’re not even getting free money. You’re putting in all your own money to then live on about 40,000 to 50,000 a year down the road. If that. You get my point here? Is that whatever you’re trying to max fund into it. If you’re lucky, if the market smiles and you just right, stays around the average, you’re lucky to maybe pull out the same amount of money you’re pulling in. So whatever you’re putting in that’s about what you can pull out. That’s not fantastic, guys. That’s actually seems ridiculous because you can say, wait, I can just take that money, save it. You know, I can save it. Just keep it certain, not have to gamble the stock market. Because if you do like what happened to my dad Y2K knocked his retirement downright before he retired. It postponed his retirement. 15 years guys. That, I mean, this is again assuming averages. This is not assuming what if the market crashes, what if you’re trying to retire next year? And the market crashed in the next few years. Are you going to wait another five years to retire? That’s what some are doing. That’s ridiculous. It’s crazy. It’s insane.

Now let’s look at the alternative. Cause you say, Chris, what’s the alternative. So, you know, we’ve talked about different things. So I took the example of like AHP. Again, never guaranteed, right? But American Homeowner Preservation, you know, you hear their ads on this radio sometimes. They’d pay 10% a year right now. So what if you did the same thing, but here’s the thing. You’re not getting an employer match. Right? So say that you won, you had the 250,000 sitting in your 401k. You cash it out, right? Well, you might be able to avoid the penalty depending on COVID and the cares act, right?

But at least with taxes, you’ve pulled that money out. Let’s say you lose 60,000 of that quarter million. You’re left with 190,000. Okay. There you are. You’ve got 190,000. You can invest it. So say you go and invest in there. Again, this is not a recommendation. I’m just using this as an example of numbers, right? So you get 190,000 leftover after you’ve paid your taxes. You only put in 14,000 a year, not 25,000 because there is no employer match. And because now you’re getting paid that money after taxes, you got to pull taxes out. So even though you might be paying like 18,000 19,000 a year into the 401K, because now you’re taking the money out. Now you’re getting taxed. So I’m actually putting you in what would be viewed as the worst tax scenario, right? Because negative tax pull, you know, not taking, putting the money into your 401k.

Now it’s just coming out. You’re using after tax dollars. By the way, yes, you could invest in AHP pre-tax or with IRA money. But I’m using this as after tax where you get taxed every year. On the grow. So not only did you get taxed on the money, you know, that’s of course you’d actually finally put in, but now the interest you earned, which is at 10% also gets taxed and you still have to fight inflation. But again, it’s at 10% a year, right? After 20 years, here’s the thing, the end balance is almost one and a half million dollars. And this is, using this sort of person that’s 45 years old, right? So that person that said, Hey, I had a quarter million put in 25,000 a year with a match. Now they got 190,000. They’ve put into something like an AHP type fund at 10% putting in 14,000 a year.

They’re just putting their 401k contribution now into this. At 10%, they actually have one really about $400,000 less than they had when you’re putting in the 401k. You might think, well, Chris, even though they made a better return because there’s less money to go in. Yeah. There, of course it’s less. But remember too, when you’re cashing out of that money from the 401k, you gotta pay taxes. So it kinda actually owns breaks even at that point. And, but, well, actually you might end up paying a little bit more in taxes. So you might actually be a little bit under at the 401k, but remember the 401k says you should only be pulling out no more than 3% a year, right? The difference is this is that, again it’s about cash flow. Not accumulating money and then trying to live off less in the interest. It’s cash flow. Because if you had almost one and a half million dollars and you’re getting paid 10% a year, guess what?

Now you’re not pulling off, you know, and now using the numbers, of course, using the, now I’ll use after inflation number. So I just gave you that before. After inflation adjustments about, you know, $667,000, right? So that’s about what you got in, you know, in real dollars after inflation. 667, but you’re being paid 10%. It’s like having $66,700 a year lifestyle. Versus what I just said before with about an, you know, what was that $19,000 lifestyle. So you’re more than triple the lifestyle. Why? Because even though the numbers are about this, end up about the same, the cash flow is way better because the interest that’s paying you, the cash flow that’s coming from that is at 10% and not at 3%. So that’s why you’re getting more than triple the money back. Right? And yeah, you’ll pay tax on it. But so what, like maybe after the other money, your stuff pay tax on that too.

So again, same thing. That’s the person that has got 20 years of retirement. Right? So understand you can now hit those numbers faster. I use the example with that person that’s fresh start. Brand new 25 year old, right? Starting from scratch. So they just put 14,000 a year to AHP or something that earning 10%, right? Well, they’re going to end with about 3.4 million, but after inflation, that’s only like 716,000. But once again, because even though it’s like at $716,000 type of thing after inflation, the lifestyle that you can have is your pull off 10% a year is 71,000 a year. Much better than going about 20,000 a year. Right? Once again, kicks the crap out of it because it’s about cashflow, not just about accumulating money. And again, like I said, the 401k, it has to work at the right timing. You have to retire just the right time.

Otherwise it could be worked wrong. You got to make sure that taxes don’t go up dramatically. I was just pretending the taxes were staying similar, which they may or may not. If taxes go up, you’re getting host on your 401k. And people often will tell me that, Chris, I don’t know if I was a betting person. I would say that taxes are likely to go up from now. And I say with the way they’re printing money right now, either they’re going to cause massive inflation, which if you cause even worse inflation, that means you have to pull out more money, which means still more tax. Or they raise tax rates keep inflation down. So then you now have more money coming out, either way you lose when you start using that 401k. Or an IRA or anything else. Again, there is no product that a financial advisor can offer that will get you to that freedom. To be able to get you to that number.

You know, you have to be saving a ridiculous amount of money over a hundred thousand a year in hopes that you’re gonna make something. Or just live on a really cheap, you know, fixed income type lifestyle, right? Where you just try to do nothing. Don’t travel. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t visit grandkids. Just sit in your front porch and drink lemonade. Why? Not because you know, you want to, but because you can’t afford to go anywhere else and Lemonade’s on sale at the store. That’s why. This is the key factor here guys, is that it’s all about cash flow. And by the way, this is that 10% with tax with no tax advantages. If you do things like real estate, you can make better than that amount of money. And I’m not throwing those numbers out there. I’m staying on the low side. I’m basically going conservative with my point.

And I liberal against my point. Just to prove a point. Which is, is that there is a different world, a world of much better hope. If you look outside with the mainstreams, trying to pitch you and they’re selling you. And they’re selling you because they make billions of dollars in management fees off that. They want to keep the money in there forever. They’re the ones telling you to live on 2% or 3%. Why? Because then their money keeps growing. Their stock prices keep going up. Their CEO’s get keep getting paid more. They’re making more money because you’re not! And guys, that is one of the big reasons why I’m so passionately against things like 401ks, IRAs, which by the way, the government determines the rules and they can change the rules at any time. There’s no certainty. There’s no planning that can be done in those situations because you can’t maneuver with it.

You don’t even know what the rules are going to be like in 10, 20 years, how you, unless you’re retiring today, you have no clue. And even then they could change the rules. Look how they’re changing the rules on us right now because of a little virus, right? They’re freaking out. And they’re using that as a way to be able to change rules on us. We have a very different life today than we had six months ago. Wouldn’t you agree with that? Why couldn’t they change it on you? With the financial tools and things like that? The vehicles that they’ve been recommending. Of course they can. They need more taxes. They know where to go. They go for the people that are poor and middle class that don’t know what they’re doing. That are going and investing in these 401ks have zero tax advantages. And with the match, it’s just golden handcuffs.

You know, that little employer match does so little compared to the cost and the risk. But guys, just like you might’ve heard Robert Kiyosaki say, he says, the people that get the best tax breaks, the best tax advantages are the business owners or investors. If you’re in that category, if you get out of the employee mindset, you get out of that traditional mainstream mindset. Now you can actually have hope to break free. And guys, that is the kind of stuff that we’re talking about. Again, each of your situations are individual and different. I get that. Sometimes there are rare occasions, I think 401k works. Especially if you can pull money out right away. Like I get, I’ve had people get the match, pull the money out and go invest it on their own and they can work great. But, it is solo 401ks, by the way, guys, for those of you that are investors doing solo 401ks, I don’t trust those either because anything can change those rules and not to mention that we just don’t know.

I mean, plus if you get sued, I mean, there’s other issues that can happen there. You have assets they’re exposed that works against you in different scenarios. Either way, money getting locked up, get your money out of prison, get into a place that works for you. You guys want to know what that is. If you haven’t listened to show. There’s great examples of that. You know what, if you’re at the point you say, Chris, I think now’s the time I got to change my strategy. Shoot me an email. Say, Chris, what do you think about my situation? What do you think I should do? Just shoot me an email. [email protected]. And yes, I answer my emails. I shocked a guy he’s like, I can’t believe you keep telling me to email you. And I finally did it. And that guy, it was a slam dunk.

I was like, man, like, I’m so glad you actually had the courage to do it. Because for him it was like a 70,000 a year difference. You know, like a passive income that he could create from his current situation. I’m not saying that’s you, it could be, it might not be. But either way, if you think there’s a calling or a feeling with in you saying, I think now’s a time to do something different. The marks recovered. Maybe now’s the time to do something different right now. Why? While there’s still money in the market, you know, while the market’s still overvalued drastically, right? This might be the time. So again, if you have questions about that, shoot me an email. [email protected].

Guys, I hope this valuable. I hope you start to see why the 401k just cannot and will not work. And this is why I’m so passionate against it. Cause I’ve run these numbers over and over and over. And it comes up with the same results. Guys. You can’t expect to get something different when it hasn’t ever been different. This is how it’s been. This is why I left financial advising. And this is why I did something different. They gave me different results that got me to retire when other financial advisors can’t retire. And by the way, great question for financial advisors, ask them, Hey, did you get financially free off the advice you’ve been giving? Not from the commissions you’re earning, but actually from doing the things you’re telling your clients. And I can tell you honestly, I’m doing the things that I tell people to do as well. They don’t! They aren’t retired off that their mutual funds and their 401ks and IRAs. They aren’t! They are making money by selling you this lie!

This needs to stop now! This is why I’m here. This is a ripple effect I want to create. Guys, I hope you share this episode too. Share this other people. They need to know the truth. This has to stop! There are too many dumb pundits out there teaching this crap because people are putting money in their pocket, telling them, Hey, you do this. We pay you money. We will give you a little perks and benefits if you do this. So much money being thrown, at these 401ks and other plans. So you buy them and you buy a hook line and sinker. But the only person that loses is not the person telling you on the radio, right? Or on the TV or on interviews. Those people aren’t losing. The financial companies aren’t losing. It’s only you. This has got to stop. Guys, I hope this is valuable for you. Make it a wonderful and prosperous week and change your life now. It’s all about action and taking action to do something different. Do the opposite of what you’ve been told to do. Make it a wonderful week. We’ll see you later.

#Chris Miles #Anti-financial Advisor #Cash flow #Cash flow Expert #Debts #Entrepreneur #Financial Freedom #Money Ripples

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codylabs · 4 years

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Having the Time of My Life Overanalyzing Voltron Science, A Visual Novel

The team’s little mantra in the original show was “ Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go! Let’s go Voltron Force!” And they said this each and every single time their 5 lions formed together into the combined robot.

In today’s essay I will be deeply examining and wildly speculating about what exactly interlocks, dynatherms, infracells, and mega thrusters are, why it’s entirely crucial that these 4 items be part of the Voltron preflight checklist, and explaining why (or at least inferring that) you should take it all seriously.

Interlock

The Interlock is easy. It’s probably whatever system is used to attach the 5 lions together. So what are they? Magnets? Docking rings like on spacecraft? Just mechanical latches? Hard to say. But something as simple as a mechanical latch isn’t something you’d have to ‘activate’ or actively call out during pre-flight, so I would suspect ‘interlock’ is likely a catch-all term for not only the mechanical attachments, but also the control circuit used to synchronize the computers onboard all 5 lions. It would be a complex integrated system within the black lion, which also explains why they refer to it in the singular instead of plural.

Without the interlock, Voltron would just be the 5 lion with their individual brains tied together like duct-taped dogs. The interlock synchronizes them into a common intelligence, under the direction of the centralized black lion.

I don’t know what the mechanical structure of the interlocks would be. Conventional material science would suggest that a robot as large as Voltron wouldn’t be able to even stand, let alone run and jump and fight, so even if we assume nearly-indestructible exotic alien materials, I think you would still want something more than hooks and pins to connect the various pieces together. It would be best if the actual structural elements could somehow fuse at the molecular level. Welding is the most obvious method for that, but there’s also Vaan-Der-Waals forces, which could bond together flat surfaces that could then be slid apart. And maybe if you had superconducting cables running between the elements and then ran a ton of current through them, then you could use magnetic binding? I’m not sure if that would work, but it sounds futuristic enough to be true. IDK.

Dynatherms

I can’t tell if this is ‘dynatherms’ or ‘dinotherms’, but the first sounds less prehistoric, so I’ll go with that. So it sounds like pieces of the words ‘dynamic’ and ‘thermal’ mashed together, which don’t really mean anything except in the context of thermodynamics, so.... What is this? A reactor? A steam engine?

Of all the various components this one puzzled me longest, but I think I’ve got it.

The dynatherms are the cooling system, meant to radiate away the massive amounts of heat its engines and motors would generate. Most spacecraft, heck most vehicles in general, have a system analogous to this. Here’s the one the ISS uses:

Voltron doesn’t have any weird extendo-wings like this, but it’s conceivable that they could be built directly into the outer layer of its armor. The black lion’s little red wings are likely a part of the system too. If you ask me, the surface area of its armor isn’t nearly enough to dissipate enough heat to keep a thing like this cool, but I think I can ignore that.

So anyway. At first this explanation doesn’t seem to fit, since they say ‘dynatherms connected’, not ‘coolant pumps started’ or ‘refrigerant levels maximum’ or something. You don’t ‘connect’ the heat radiators, they’re always connected. You just pump water through them. Right?

Wrong! Here’s my sufficiently futuristic explanation: Voltron’s cooling system doesn’t use coolant and pumps or any type of conventional refrigeration at all! Instead, the ‘dynatherms’ are a network of thermally superconductive cables connecting all its motors and engines to radiative armor panels on the exterior. Thermal superconductivity is a concept I learned from Star Wars and later found out is a real-ish thing. Basically any vibrations in any part of a thermally-superconductive material can frictionlessly travel to any other part of the material. Since temperature is based on vibrations, this means that if a hot thing touches one part of the material, everything else touching the material can instantly feel that heat, and even dissipate that heat. You can think of it as Marvel vibranium or as warmth communism.

Since there’s no fluid flow, the only way to control this cooling system or increase or decrease its dissipation is to connect and disconnect individual cables. Hence why they would have to connect the dynatherms before forming Voltron; combat in combined robot mode is one of the most taxing conditions of the machine’s operation, so they need all the cooling they can get.

Infracells

Now HERE’S where it starts to get interesting. ‘Infra’ roughly means ‘below’. To take the most common example, take ‘infrared’ light, that is, light existing at frequencies lower red light, which is itself the lowest frequency in the visible spectrum. Infrared is invisible, so the only way to describe its color is ‘somewhere below red’.

So as far as I can tell, ‘infracells’ could mean one of three things. They could be some kind of infrared light sensors, like FLIR imagers used for night vision and targeting on modern military equipment (which I consider unlikely, since that’s not the type of thing you would specifically call out during the preflight, or something intrinsically useful to the Voltron assembly process.) Or it could be an armor layer consisting of some kind of cells literally ‘below’ the rest of the armor (which I also consider unlikely, because why would that be important to the Voltron assembly either? You wouldn’t need to even worry about it until you take damage to the outer armor layer, right?) Or, finally and most interestingly, it could have something to do with lower frequencies or lower speeds in general.

Here’s my theory:

The infracells cause time itself to run differently. You all saw the movie Interstellar, where time aboard the spacecraft passed slower for the crew whenever they were inside powerful gravity wells. If you had high buildups of negative energy within cells inside Voltron, it would produce the opposite effect, causing time to move faster inside the cells than outside. Anything inside would experience the rest of the universe in slower motion, meaning lower acceleration, lower forces, and lower stress.

Therefore, if such ‘infracells’ were installed around Voltron’s skeletal frame and motors, it may explain the machine’s great strength and indestructibility. And it would make sense that this would be the type of thing they would call out during the pre-flight, as even one down infracell could spell disaster once that section of the frame is attempting to support the entire weight of the robot; it would buckle and break. Every infracell needs to be up before forming Voltron.

Mega thrusters

Now, this just sounds silly. They’re likely the engines that Voltron uses to fly, but the show creators put ‘mega’ in front of the name to sound cool. Might as well call them ‘super rockets’ or ‘the ultra drive’, right? But mega is an interesting word, as it’s actually a scientific term in the metric system meaning to multiply by a million. Like a kilometer is a thousand meters and a kilogram is a thousand grams, a megameter is a million meters, and a megagram is a 1000 kilograms. You may have heard of ‘megaton’ when referring to nuclear explosives; a three-megaton bomb is a bomb with the explosive yield equivalent to three million tons of TNT. A lot.

So, uh,

Why would you call a thruster a ‘mega thruster’, then?

Well, I know approximately jack-diddly about the original show, but I know that in the newer show, most large spacecraft in the universe get their energy not from nuclear reactors or solar cells, but rather from Balmeran crystals. The crystals are able to produce apparently infinite energy so long as you don’t damage them or overtax them. I don’t know where the crystals get their infinite energy, but that’s not what I’m here to speculate about, so I’ll just treat that as one of the universe’s rules, like bending in Avatar.

So! How do you set that up to make an engine? Well, infinite power is good! Higher power to the engine means hotter, faster exhaust, and hotter, faster exhaust means higher fuel efficiency and higher thrust. So the question becomes, how do you get the most power in the safest and most efficient way possible?

For the sake of some rules, let’s say that you need to give the crystals a little bit of stimulating energy to make them produce energy. That seems fair, I think. Let’s say they produce 5 times the energy they absorb.

So you give a crystal 1 watt, you get 5. That’s great; that means if we need 50 billion watts to run the thruster, we just need to get a big crystal, and feed it 10 billion watts. However! Where do we get that initial 10 billion watts? Well we could just take a portion of the crystal’s own output and cycle it back around to the input, but that’s a dangerous game to play, since if the percentage you cycle around is even slightly more than 20%, you could create a “positive feedback loop” where more input means more output, which leads to greater input which leads to even greater output, and so on and so on until the crystal breaks or the ship blows up or something generally unfavorable happens. This is approximately the experience of the people at Chernobyl, and is not recommended.

So instead of having crystals feed themselves, you’d instead want them to be fed exclusively by an external source, like a battery or an entirely separate smaller crystal. So the initial crystal would feed larger ones, which would feed larger ones, and so on, each stage in the chain becoming more powerful, but always stable and dependent on some initial external input, so as to never go out of control.

And now, I’m thinking it would be nice from an engineering perspective to have all the crystals together in one shielded location. And from a tactical perspective, it would be nice not to have a bunch of bulky, vulnerable, high-energy cables running around the entire vehicle. So, you would want as many crystal stages as possible in the places where the power is needed most. Namely, the engines.

Therefore, a big part of the engines would be made of armored shells to contain dozens of stacks of crystal beds. They would accept a small amount of power at the top, and multiply it internally to get enormous output at the bottom. Hence, ‘mega’ thruster. It multiplies input by a million.

Boom.

Done.

Headcanon deployed.

So now the next time you’re watching some stupid show and think that something doesn’t make sense, pause to consider that maybe you’re just not using enough imagination, or else I will be with you in spirit to wrong-shame you.

(If you use your imagination and it still doesn’t make sense, then don’t worry. This means that the show is trash and you are right.)

Now go to bed.

#Boom #Voltron #voltron: legendary defender #lion #fan theory #engineering #some cool food for thought #I don't even watch this show what am I doing

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fashionbusinessclub · 4 years

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Small Business Owners: Accounting Is for Profit Planning, Not Just Tax Preparation

An individual may be led to think that benefit is your principal objective in an business in reality it's the cash flowing in and out of a firm which will keep the doors shut. The idea of profit is marginally sparse and just discusses income and expenses in a certain time. Cashflow, alternatively, is significantly more lively in the sense it is worried about the movement of money and from a organization. It's worried about the period in the movement of this currency occurs. Profits don't coincide with their associated cash inflows and out flows. The internet effect is that cash receipts regularly lag cash payments although profits could be mentioned, the company could experience a shortterm cash deficit. Because of this, it's vital to predict cash flows in addition to project possible profits. In such terms, it's crucial that you learn just how to convert your accrual profit for a own cash flow profit. You have in order to keep up enough cash readily available to conduct your business, however maybe perhaps not too long regarding sacrifice potential earnings from some different applications.

Why bookkeeping is required

Help One to function much better as a Company Owner

Make Reliable conclusions Know when to employ a group of employees Know just how to price your services and products Know just how to tag your expenditure items Helps one to figure out whether to enlarge or perhaps maybe not Helps with surgeries estimated costs Stop Fraud and Theft Control the most significant problem is internal thieving Reconcile your novels and inventory management of gear Raising Capital (allow you to to spell out financials to stakeholders) Loans Investors What will be the Best Practices in Accounting for Small Businesses to tackle your ordinary'pain points'? Hire or talk CPA or accountant What may be the simplest strategy and how frequently to get What do you have within my own industry? Identify what exactly is my prime purpose? Can the accountant gauge the total price of my small enterprise Can I help me grow my business with profit preparation methods How do you help me prepare for tax season What are several unique considerations for my specific industry?

To succeed, your company has to be profitable. Your entire organization goals down down to the simple fact. However turning a profit now is simpler said than done. As a way to enhance your bottom line, you want to understand what's going on financially at all times. Additionally you ought to get focused on understanding and tracking that your KPIs. What will be the Frequent Profitability Metrics to Track Running a Business -- crucial performance indicators (KPI)

Whether You Choose to employ a specialist or perform it yourself, then there are some metrics That You Ought to certainly have to keep tabs at all times:

Outstanding Accounts Payable: Outstanding accounts receivable (A/P) shows the total amount of cash you now owe to your providers. Average Cash Burn Average cash burn off up is the pace of which your organization' cash balance is going down on average each month over a specified time period. A negative burn is a good sign because it indicates your business is generating cash and growing its cash reserves. Cash Runaway: If your business is operating at a loss, cash runway helps you estimate how many months you can continue before your business exhausts its cash reserves. Similar to your cash burn, a negative runway is a good sign that your business is growing its cash reserves. Gross Margin: Gross margin is a percentage that demonstrates the total revenue of your business after subtracting the costs associated with creating and selling your business' services and products. It's actually really just a helpful metric to spot the way your earnings contrasts to some prices, and letting you make changes so. Customer Acquisition Cost: By focusing on just how much you really may spend on moderate to obtain a brand new customer, you also can tell just how many clients you want to create a profit. Customer Lifetime Value: You will want to understand your LTV therefore you are able to predict your prospective earnings and gauge the entire number of clients you want to cultivate your profits. Break-Even Point:How do I want to create sales for the own company to generate a profit?Knowing this number will reveal to you the thing you want to accomplish in order to develop a profit (e.g., gain more clients, increase prices, or lesser operating expenses). Net Profit: This really is the one most important number you want to understand for your own organization for a financial achievement. If you're not earning a profit, then your employer isn't likely to survive for longterm. Total earnings contrast with past year/last month. By assessing and tracking your entire revenues with time, you're going to have the ability to get sound business decisions and establish better financial targets. Average revenue per employee. It is vital that you know that this number so you may set realistic growth targets and comprehend strategies to enhance your business processes. The next checklist lays a recommended time line to look after the bookkeeping purposes that could keep you conducive to the operations of your enterprise and enhance your tax preparation. The accuracy and timeliness of those amounts entered will impact the important performance indicators that drive business decisions which will need to be manufactured, on the regular, monthly and yearly basis prior to profits. Daily Accounting Tasks

Review your everyday Cash flow posture therefore that you never'grow broke'. Since cash may be your fuel for the small enterprise, you can't wish to be running close vacant. Start every day by assessing how much cash you've got available. Weekly Accounting Tasks

2. Record Transactions

Record each trade (charging clients, receiving cash out of clients, paying vendors, etc.) at the correct account weekly or daily, based upon volume. Even though recording trades by hand or at Excel sheets is okay, it's most likely simpler to make utilize of accounting applications such as QuickBooks. The huge advantages and control far outweigh the price tag.

3. Document and File Receipts

Keep copies of invoices delivered, all cash receipts (cash, credit and check card deposits) and all of cash payments (cash, check, credit card bills, etc.).

Start a vendors document, sorted alphabetically, (Sears under"S", CVS under"C,"etc.) to get simple access. Create a citizenship document sorted by citizenship date as well as also a bank announcement document sorted by month. A frequent habit would be to throw all newspaper receipts to a carton and attempt to decode them in tax time, however if you don't get a tiny level of trades, it's much far better to have different files for various receipts kept organized while they arrive in. Many bookkeeping applications systems Allow You to scan paper receipts and also prevent physical documents entirely

4. Review Unpaid Bills from Vendors

Every firm must have an"unpaid vendors" folder. Maintain a listing of every one of your vendors which features charging dates, numbers due and payment deadline. If vendors give discounts for early payment, then you might need to make the most of the when you've got the bucks available.

5. Pay Vendors, Sign Checks

Track your account receivable and also possess capital allowed to pay for your suppliers promptly to prevent any late penalties and maintain positive relationships together. If you can give payment dates on net 60 or net 90, the higher. If you create payments on the internet or drop a check in the mail, maintain copies of bills sent and sent using accounting program.

6. Get and Send Invoices

Make sure you include payment stipulations. Most statements are due over 1 month, called"Net 30" in the end of your invoice. With no date, you'll have more difficulty forecasting earnings for your month. To be certain that to get paid in time, consistently use a statement form which comprises the ideal details like repayment conditions, itemized charges, and also your payment speech.

7. Review Projected Cash Flow

Managing your money flow is crucial, particularly in the very first year of one's small business enterprise. Forecasting just how much cash you're going to need while within the forthcoming weeks/months may assist you to book enough capital to pay for invoices, for example your own employees and providers. Besides, you may create more informed business decisions concerning how to pay it.

All you have to is just a very simple invoice revealing your overall income position, expected cash receipts throughout the future week/month and expected cash payments throughout the future week/month.

8. Executive Dashboard (weekly review)

This dash provides you a'snapshot' of one's surgeries on a weekly basis.

It include of Cash on Hand, Cash burn , Account Receivables, Accounts Payable, Items sold, Inventory on Hand, inventory turns, out standing problems in the company, and gross profit margin, new sales drops, customer reductions, customer support functionality, ontime shipping speed and product quality overall effectiveness.

Monthly Accounting Tasks

9. Balance Your Business Checkbook

As you get back together your own personal checking accounts, you want to be aware your money trade entries are true every month and then that you're dealing together with the suitable cash standing. Reconciling your hard earned money makes it a lot much easier to detect and fix some errors or omissions-by you personally or by the bank-in moment to improve them.

10. Review Past-Due ("Aged") Receivables

Make sure you incorporate an"aging" pillar to different"open invoices" with all the amount of days a bill is delinquent. This provides you an instant view of customer payments that are outstanding. The start of the month can be really just actually a fantastic time to ship overdue reminder announcements to clients, customers and someone else that owes you more money.

By the conclusion of your financial year, You'll Be looking at this accounts to Figure out what receivables you Will Have to ship to collections or compose away to get a deduction

1-1. Analyze Inventory Status

For those who have stock, then place aside time for you to re order products which sell fast and identify the others which are moving slowly and might need to be discounted down or down, fundamentally, composed. By assessing regularly (and comparing to earlier weeks' amounts ), it's simpler to make alterations therefore you're neither short nor over loaded.

1 2. Process-or Review Payroll and Approve Tax Payments

Despite the fact that you've got a proven program to pay for your employees (usually semimonthly ), then you want to meet with payroll tax conditions based on national, state and regional legislation at several times, therefore make sure you subtract, deposit and report the applicable tax, social security, Medicare and handicap taxation into the proper agencies on the necessary dates.

Review the payroll outline before payments have been disbursed in order to avoid needing to get corrections throughout the upcoming payroll period. A payroll company may perform all of this to help save time and ensure accuracy in a fair price.

1 3. Review Actual Profit and Loss Circuit Budget and Prior Years

Monthly, take some opportunity to reassess your budgeted expenses and compare these with that which you have ever spent. Are you currently really paying or below budget? Go over the variances and do it as desired

Your profit and loss statement (also referred to as an income statement), either to the present month and year so far, informs you just how much you've got and how much you're spent. Quantify it from the allowance monthly (or quarter). Assessing your actual amounts to your intended amounts high lights at which you might well be spending too much or inadequate, so you are able to make changes.

When you haven't prepared a budget, then compare your present yeartodate P&L with precisely exactly the exact identical prior-period yeartodate P&L to recognize variances and make alterations.

14. Review Month-End Balance Sheet vs. Prior Period

By assessing your balance sheet in one date-June 30, 2015, for example-to a balance sheet by a previous date (December 31, 2014), you obtain a photo of the way you're managing assets and obligations. The crucial thing is to start looking for that which exactly is considerably down or up and comprehend the reason why. By way of instance, if your balances prices up, can it be thanks to raised recent earnings or due to payments from clients?

Quarterly Accounting Tasks

1-5. Prepare/Review Revised Annual P&L Estimate

It is the right time to appraise just how much money you're actually earning, if your assets are moving down or up, the gap between earnings and expenses, which triggered those changes, the method that you're spending money, in addition to pinpointing problem areas, and making alterations to improve margins and sales.

16. Review Quarterly Payroll Reports and Make Payments

You've now already been reviewing your semi monthly deductions accounts. Nevertheless, both the IRS and many countries require annual Revenue accounts and some other residual quarterly obligations. Again, it's better if your payroll supplier completes those files and reports . Your work is to examine to make certain they look fair.

17. Inspection Sales Tax and Make Quarterly Payments

If your organization works at a country which requires sales tax, then be sure to comply with prevent significant penalties. Even the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) will help you decide a state tax duties.

18. Compute Estimated Income Tax and Make Payment

The IRS and countries which have income taxation ask that you pay for estimated taxes. Review your yeartodate P&L to determine whether your debt any projected taxes for this quarter. Your tax accountant will assist if needed.

Annual Accounting Tasks

1 9. Review Past-Due Receivables

Now it is the right time to assess substantial overdue receivables and choose whether you think clients will gradually cover, whether to ship delinquent invoices to a collection service or if to publish off them to get a deduction.

20. Review Your Inventory

Review your existing inventory to find out the worth of items not available. Any writedown of inventory equates to some deduction in your own year old taxes. If you don't writedown un-sellable stock, then you're overstating your inventory balance and paying for additional taxation you don't owe.

2 1. Fill in IRS Forms W-2 and 1099misc

The IRS includes a January 31 deadline which expects one to record that on the yearly earnings of one's fulltime employees (W-2s) & most independent builders (1099s). This deadline incorporates mailing copies of these tax forms to those men and women who worked for you personally. Observe: A 1099 form isn't essential for any builders that got less than 600. Look at saving time and preventing mistakes by having an e filing support.

2-2. Review full-year fiscal reports for tax coverage

Get coordinated Collect and save important records (use programs and calendars for assistance ) Create email folders to save bank receipts and statement Store contracts and contracts Track kilometers and auto expenditures Store all essential records for the organization type.

Tax Preparation Tax preparation can be an early perspective and perhaps not an gain preparation event Capture all applicable occasions Identify all of deduction types Capture all meals Meetings --anything had been discussed/calendar Try never to discuss industry average industry cost for food.

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whatstodaysstim · 5 years

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Bad Weed Trips a Guide for Autistic People to avoid really bad stims.

Tw: marajuana, descriptions of bad trips,

First of all everyone is different and will react to weed differently! This is mainly based off my experiences.

So what is a bad trip like?

For me I was very aware of EVERYTHING. I could feel my pulse through out my body. Like extreme sensory overload. Plus high heart rate, skin was very red and I was very hot. Despite feeling everything I would hop from sense to sense. So I would be hyper aware of my breathing one second, then my pulse, then the texture of my blanket, ect… while every other sense very dulled till I focused on it. My movement became very shakey. You know how in a video game there would be lag but then every input you did happens at once? It felt like that. But also like very sensitive controls in a game where you tap left gently then you take a very wide turn in game.

All these intense experiences at once also lead to a bad headache and nausea.

Like I said this was my experience with a bad trip. You may react differently. Honestly a bad trip can be considered as an experience that is too intense for you.

Now how to avoid a bad trip?

In simple terms, take it slow and stay safe.

Until you really know how different strains affect you go slow with it. You don’t have to smoke it all at once. It’s meant to be fun!

Plus make sure you’re in a safe place. With friends if you can. Don’t have anything planned later in the day or the next. Plus dont have an empty stomach. Have snacks and water near by.

AND make sure you’re in a good headspace! Avoid being stressed or upset.

I ignored most of these when I had my bad trip. I was very stressed, empty stomach, alone and ate a whole edible (that I knew was stronger than average). At least I was home and spent most of the time in bed.

Be mindful of your cannabis!

There are many many types of strains and many ways to consume cannabis. And like always everyone is different. One strain may be a miracle strain for one person may affect another horribly.

Always get your weed from a dispensary if you can. Dont hesitate to ask questions. The more knowledge you have the better.

If you are getting you weed from somewhere else careful. Ask questions (honestly if they are not willing to answer questions and get defensive it most likely isnt safe anyways.) And like always take it slow!

THC and CBD are the two main compounds in cannabis. THC is psychoactive and cause the high associated with cannabis. CBD is nonpsychoactive and doesn’t cause a high but is where a lot of the health benefits come from. Especially for pain! Each strain should have its THC and CBD percentages shown. Higher THC more intense high. High CBD less high but more relief. Both compounds can be good, you just need to find what works for you. Theres also pure CBD products out there (no tax hopefully and usually dont have to be 21+). Just be careful theres a lot of products that say they have CBD but actually have little to none.

Indica and Sativa are types of strains. Typically a indica strain will give a chill calm high and sativa strains are a more energized high. Theres also hybrids that have a mix of effects.

Edibles that arent pure CBD you gotta be careful. Edibles are typically more concentrated and you will not feel the high right away. Take a bite then wait for at least an hour before having more. That cookie may be yummy but you have to take it slow!

What if I happen to get a bad trip?

Don’t panic first of all! It will pass dont worry. Hopefully you arent alone and in a safe place. Get comfortable as much as you can and avoid negative stimuli. I tried putting on a calming gaming video which kinda helped ground me for a bit but it soon became extra noise. White noise worked better. Drink water and if you can stomach it eat snacks! Water is important! It helps flush the cannabis out of your system.

I was lucky my boyfriend was up and I could text him. It was very helpful for me. If you are communicating with someone via text or call and they know you are having a bad time be sure to let them know if you might fall asleep. That way they wont panic if you go silent. Not everyone wants human interaction though during a bad trip which is fine. Do what works for you.

Bad trips may happen even if you take the steps to be safe. Dont worry, stress will just make it worse. Dont blame yourself!

Hopefully this guide helps! Cannabis is known to affect autistic people much more intensely than neurotypicals.

***********

A note from whatstodaysstim: This was kindly submitted by @number1robotkisser, however I have never used weed so I can’t provide any extra information or second this if needed. Please message them instead!

#submission #information #bad stim #Story Time #tw weed #tw drugs #tw bad trip

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strangevoyages · 5 years

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Very cool of you to start this! I was wondering... as someone who would like to publish a traditional novel someday (romance, if that helps) and was wondering if you could outline the publication process for novels? It's a little intimidating for someone like me and I would really appreciate the clarity. Thank you!

Hi there, thank you so much! :) And okay, I’ll do my best to outline how it generally works:

Traditional Publishing

Step 1) Complete your novel.

Step 2) Edit and revise your novel to the best of your abilities! You only get one chance to impress an agent (the next step) and you want to start with your best foot forward. Do not send an incomplete or unpolished manuscript: it must be as close to the finished product as you can get on your own! If you feel you need help, shop it around to people you trust (friends or family, creative writing workshops, writing partners, mentors or professors, etc). Professional and freelance editors (like me!) are also always an option if you need an experienced second pair of eyes!

Step 3) Find agents whose work you love. The best way to do this is to go to your favorite novels (preferably in the genre you want to publish in), turn to the back of the book, and find the agent of that novel’s name in the “Acknowledgements/Thanks” section. Look them up and read carefully to see if your story fits the kind of work they read and are looking for.

Step 4) Write a query letter. This is possibly the most intimidating aspect of the publication process because many authors love to write fiction, but don’t love to write about themselves and their work. The query letter is essentially the marketing or elevator pitch to give an agent a preview of what to expect in your work (and is your chance to intrigue them). There’s a wealth of resources out there on how to write a query letter, and here are some of my favorites:

How to Write a Darn Good Query Letter

How to Write the Perfect Query Letter

Query Letters

Samples of Query Letters

The long and short of it is, query letters contain your book’s introduction and stats (what its word count is (), what its genre and title is), its summary (picture what its blurb would be on the back of the hardcover copy and write that), your credentials as an author, and why you’d like to work with that particular agent.

Some other tips: don’t let the letter extend beyond one page. Agents (and editors) appreciate conciseness, not least because they’re busy and it shows your skill as a writer when you condense important information into a small space. Don’t oversell your work. NEVER describe your book as “the next Harry Potter” or “the masterpiece of our time” or whatever. Let the agent decide that for themselves! But don’t undersell or self-deprecate, either (“you probably won’t be interested in this, but I thought I’d give it a shot...”). It can be hard to have confidence in your writing, especially when entering the pro arena, but you need to inspire an agent’s faith in you as much as in your work (without exaggerating or boasting!)

Step 5) Send your query letter and manuscript to the top 5 agents you’ve been looking at. Sending too many will be overwhelming (and many agents hate “simultaneous submissions,” where you send copies to multiple places at the same time) and sending too few would be putting all your eggs in one basket.

Be careful to read exactly how each agent would like to receive your manuscript! Some only accept physical copies in the mail, in manila envelopes; some only accept attachments by email; some only accept PDFs and not Word and vice-versa! If you don’t follow their submission guidelines, you often won’t get a second chance or a courtesy reminder.

Oh, and format your manuscript according to their instructions. If there are no specific instructions, it’s always best to have your novel in standard manuscript format. Shunn’s guide to story formatting is a bible in this industry, so following those guidelines will make you look professional. Please avoid kooky or unique fonts as well: you may think it helps you stand out, but speaking from experience, most agents/editors really hate this!

Step 6) Wait.

Some agents have a projected time of response to get back to you (“if we don’t get back to you within 8 weeks, we are declining to represent your work”) on their website. Some don’t, and you’ll just have to wait (sending a follow-up query 6-8 weeks after sending your manuscript can be reasonable unless their website asks you not to do this).

If those top 5 agent don’t get back to you (or decline to represent your book) don’t be discouraged! All the greatest writers of all time struggled to find their agents and publishers at first. J.K. Rowling suffered through “years” of rejection from agents before she finally found one to represent Harry Potter, and even after that was rejected by 12 publishers (many very rudely!) before someone wanted HP. So send your manuscript out to the next five and keep going!

Step 7) An agent wants your manuscript.

Ideally, they’re over-the-moon in love with it: you want an agent who’s passionate about your work and will shop it tirelessly to their connections in the publishing industry.

(I feel I should add: do not send your work to or proceed with any agent who wants to be paid to represent you, or who charges a fee to read your work! This is a scam! Like sports agents or real estate agents, literary agents only take a cut of the profits after they’ve sold your book to a publisher. (Usually around 15%, though this could be higher or lower depending on the agent). This way, they’re motivated to sell your book for the highest rate possible, because they only make money from it then, too! If they want you to pay them out-of-pocket for anything, be extremely suspicious!)

After you’ve met with your agent, agreed to work together, and signed a contract (always read these carefully or get a lawyer to look over them), your agent will probably give you some tips or requests to polish your manuscript up even further before sending your work out. After this is done, they’ll shop your manuscript to the publishers they think will be the best fit for it!

Step 8) An editor at a publishing house reads your manuscript and falls in love with it.

This is the dream! There will be some negotiation, and this is where your agent comes in: they will protect your rights and negotiate with the publisher on your behalf to get as high of a selling price for your novel as possible. The publisher will often pay you an advance (an initial lump sum for the book) and will then usually offer you a percentage of the first sales after tax (say 10%, though depending on your publishing history or type of book or a whole slew of factors, you may get a higher/lower percentage or none at all). Your agent will guide you through this process and explain everything, so I won’t get into much more detail beyond that.

Step 9) You accept the terms of agreement with a publisher, and the book goes to their editing team: AKA your new editor.

You will likely go through several months or even years of editing with your editor’s feedback. A good editor won’t change your vision of your work drastically, but you may have to rewrite whole sections of your book to improve pacing, cut out unnecessary plot lines, and etc. Be patient with this and be flexible: your work isn’t perfect (no one’s is, not even after publication) and your editor knows what they’re doing. However, you do also have power here and can push back if there’s something you feel extremely strongly about changing.

Step 10) Your book is on the way to publication.

Now it’s just a waiting game. Your agent (or you) might ask other authors to be advance readers for your edited manuscript: these are the people who give the quotes and blurbs on the back of the books--the ones with glowing praise!

Depending on the publishing house, you may get some input on the cover and design of your book, or you may not. Your agent/publisher may also talk to you about foreign translations and licensing, etc.!

Step 11) Your book is published!

It took a while, but you made it, and now your book has hit the shelves (or the Internet, or both). Not counting the time it takes to find an agent, the whole process takes a minimum of a year to... well, I won’t regale you with the authors who took ten, fifteen, twenty years to get to publication, but needless to say, it’s a slow-moving process.

Getting an agent is arguably the hardest part (once you get one, they really do most of the work for you), and if you’d like to skip this hurdle, there’s always chancing submitting your work straight to the publishers. However, for the big publishing houses, this option has an extremely low chance of success, to put it bluntly. Unless you’re submitting to a very small independent publisher or what’s known as a “vanity press”, almost all major publishing houses nowadays don’t even look at books without agents, and those submissions get lost in slush pile hell. Agents are the first barrier to publication, and once they’ve vetted your book and found potential in it, publishing houses are more comfortable with reading a manuscript that they’re more sure won’t “waste their time.”

Of course, if you don’t want to split your profits with an agent, there’s always self-publishing! But since this post is getting so long, I figure I’ll talk about that another time. Thanks for the great question, and I hope this helped! (And good luck with your romance novel(s)!)

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