I’m not American, but even I heard about Trump tweeting like a maniac. Here in Europe, though, the media understand that politicians use social media to communicate with their supporters, and nothing else. So, traditional media usually ignores them (unless they say something clickbaity), and focuses what was said outside the social media. Perhaps the same could be applied in the US. Especially if Trump is indeed as narcissistic as he’s portrayed. When he realizes people don’t listen to him, he may change his methods of communication.

You can always quote without giving the source. “Politician XY said that …”, instead of “Politician XY tweeted that …”

Everyone who signed the petition should close their Twitter accounts. And write their newspapers that they would cancel their subscriptions if the articles quoted or embedded tweets. I didn’t sign any petition, and I’m already doing it. Well, sort of. I didn’t have any Twitter account ro close.

Wrong question. If they picked me, you ought to ask how screwed the aliens are…

I live in Ireland, where all investing that’s not into real estate is heavily taxed, and investing into idex fund is taxed extra hard (including tax on unrealized capital gains). So, that option is not for me, but it’s a perfectly sensible option for many. These days I just manage my retirement funds by rebalancing them within the investment house I’m with, based on economic megatrends.

I used to work as a financial analyst on Wall Street, and even after I changed careers I invested on my own, roughly following Buffet’s strategy. My annual returns averaged 22%, but given the little starting capital ($2000), I cashed out with just enough for a large downpayment on my house.

Anyway, just a very short primer on how Buffet is investing. He’s a student of Benjamin Graham who wrote the highly influential The Intelligent Investor. There, Graham outlined the most basic fundamental strategy: buy stock in companies where market cap is below book value and hold long-term, until stock catches up. Obviously, that’s hardly feasible in today’s markets, but there are still stocks that you won’t realize they are undervalued until you research the shit out of the companies. Not stocks, but companies. The former, technical investing, has been in vogue since at least the 90s, while the latter is the old school fundamental approach of actually calculating the stock’s underlying value and its growth potential.

Where it all comes together is portfolio building. The conventional theory is to have around 30 stocks to minimize volatility. Buffet’s approach is to maximize upward potential by having fewer stocks (around 10), while minimizing risks by researching and fully understanding companies he invests in. This ranges from understanding financials and operations to analizing the company’s management. Buffet is known for keeping the management of an acquired company in place and not interfering with their decisions because he wouldn’t invest into a company where he wouldn’t trust the management in the first place.

Of course, I didn’t have the means for investing enough to have any influence on the company or market, so I had to really dig into the fundamentals and hope the market would eventually realize the value of the company. It worked for me, as long as I stuck to companies whose business model I could understand. So, I missed loads of winners from the tech sector, but I’ve had a steady above-market return, and that was good enough for me. I followed the advice from the book On Investing by John Neff, which I can fully recommend, if it’s still in print.

Seconded. Switched my wife to Mint two years ago, and she never cared about going back to Windows. Not that she cares about Mint, either; the point of contention was the transition, which was much smoother than she was afraid of.

That’s what I’ve been using when flying and when running on a treadmill in a busy gym. But as you said, it does defeat the purpose of hearing your surroundings, so otherwise I keep to headphones where I can regulate the volume to hear better without completely blocking the external sound.

I live in a RCV country (Ireland), and it’s got its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, you can always make sure that your vote will count. In addition, RCV tends to push the final result towards the political centre, with fringe extremist parties getting less popular vote than in other voting systems. The biggest drawback is that once a party gets entrenched near the centre, ir’s very hard to dislodge it. Ireland had been governed for over 100 years by the same two parties - sometimes alone, other times (like now) in a coalition.

I still listen to radio on my phone. Wired headphones are required, as they serve as the antenna.

Other than that, I do a lot of running. Given how often it rains, headphones last no longer than half a year, and wired ones are far cheaper to replace. (I do have a pair of wireless Shockz, which handle water very well, but they are not good for city running with high ambient noise.)

I wish my company did the same, instead of the IT giving out to me for running two virtual machines on my laptop all the time…

Thanks; I’ll try it. I usually get bread and sparkling water there (their produce and meat quality got so bad I switched to Aldi), but I haven’t been looking for baguettes yet.

The meme is also European, from Ireland. That said, I’m more interested which Spar is selling long enough baguettes that they don’t fit in a bag. My local shops don’t.

That’s similar to Audible. I can’t rate the books I listened to because I downloaded the instead of streaming them through their app. I think it’s to prevent brigading and fake ratings.

Just got my first TV since my old vacuum tube stopped working in the early 90s. 55" Sony flat screen. It has gour fixtures for its stands: a pair that’s narrow close to the centre, and a pair if you want a wide stance. I didn’t mind the wide option, but I appreciated having a choice.

I use Mint, and I found that it’s the best distro for introducing my family to Linux. Those who tried it never asked for their Windows back.

I’m close to 50, been running for decades, and still pull over 2k miles annually. Almost all that on asphalt. Haven’t experienced any joint problems yet. I credit three things for that. First, modern running shoes are designed to soften the impact, and recently they have gotten ridiculously soft. The extreme cases give you 50mm (about 2 inches) of soft foam under your feet, but even more normal running shoes have advanced foam and bouncy elements in the outsole to soften the impact. Second, proper running form is not rocket science, and most people fall into a decent running form naturally. This form is the most gentle on the joints. And finally, if you are serious enough about running to go the distance where hard surfaces could be a problem, you are already likely to supplement your running with strength training, which further helps to protect your joints.

That was pretty normal. But the angel and venture investors walked away with money. And if the founders were smart or assertive enough, they also made enough money to start a new venture, possibly with less external seed funding.

Having worked in business incubation at a research university, helping researchers find angel investors, I’d like to throw in my two cents:

First of all, the article runs headlong into survivorship bias. For each Bezos or Gates, there are thousands of entrepreneurs with financial backing that went bust. And the vast majority of those who didn’t were acquired by larger, established companies before they could even hit the news (in my area, the ideal exit strategy was said to be acquired by Cisco, rather than an IPO). Many of these startups had even more initial backing by the three f’s (family, friends and fools).

Now, let’s look at those who didn’t have financial backing. For such people, there are angel investors. As others in this thread pointed out, one needs to have good connections to find such investors. Good connections are available in most, if not all, research universities, via their business incubators. Universities, however, will retain part ownership of the company (licensing any research or technology back to the entrepreneur), and they are still thinking in the medium term. They are not looking for unicorns, but a steady stream of revenue, so their preferred exit strategy is indeed the acquisition. I’m certain that the very few poorer entrepreneurs who’d strike it rich in IPO were pressured into selling their company. That’s why you don’t see any examples of a company truly being pulled out of nothing. And don’t get me even started at the wasted opportunities where the professor didn’t sign the research licensing papers because he’d make a comfortable living keeping the research at the university…

Point of this is that it will be statistically likely that we’ll get a few super-rich entrepreneurs, and they’ll come mainly from backgrounds where they could secure seed financing. That does not mean they didn’t work very hard with the money they were given.

Not OP, but I also prefer Vivaldi over Firefox. My reason may not be the same as OP’s, but for the sake of discussion, here it is. I simply can’t stand having tabs on top of my screen, and I’ll go to great lengths to have them on the bottom. On my private computer, I used to use Firefox with Tab Mix Plus, until Mozilla killed support for such extensions. I later managed to get the tabs to the bottom via custom CSS for Firefox, but every few releases the CSS stopped working and had to be recreated from scratch. So, I switched to Vivaldi. On my work PC, where only Edge and Chrome are allowed, my workaround is to work in separate windows instead of tabs, but that tends to get a little messy.