I was never into comics. But I saw Invincible and really liked it. So I bought the phone book sized collections of the individual comics. It was pretty good so I went looking for other stuff. Basically coming in from scratch? Yeah, comics are in a bad place. From what I gathered, comics collapsed in the 90's. With sales low, pay is low for most creators at the big studios. Low pay means the bulk of creators are not going to turn out the best quality work. And if they're not in it for cash, they're in it for prestige, ego bump, hoping to raise their profile for other lucrative work, etc. I do think the woke criticism is a bit overblown. I suspect it's short-hand way to to buy acceptance. Much like declaring a character to be an orphan. It's harder to hate or criticize a character with a disadvantaged background. I'm not claiming it's a good idea, moreso writing shortcut because series aren't long enough to build up a background and earn acceptance. Quality is low, sales are low, prices are high, there's a lot of politicking and fighting for the jobs that are available, digital comics are not developed, supply chain is not great and manga is a strategic threat. At a guess, they probably should reduce the number of comics they make, raise the quality, focus on improving sales by modernizing their market research, focus on improving logistic, improve their digital distribution. At a guess, manga is efficient, economically priced and diverse enough to satisfy their customers. Comics needs to find how to match all of those to survive. Or it will become just a niche product like vinyl. Not dead, but relegated to a very very tiny market. With sales of 50k for the top end, and closer to 5k for the mid-tier... They're not far from that type of market.

You're aware wind mills have large concrete pads with a ton of steel, right? It is not obvious as most of it is below grade. Here's a video of the process. It is roughly a large swimming pool amount. Now multiply for every wind mill you will need.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's nothing really to replace concrete with either. There are attempts at replacing parts of the aggregate with other stuff, and slapping a 'green concrete' label on it. No 'green' concrete is something you want to use in infrastructure. Because you need a lot of duration based testing before it could get approved. Certainly not near a nuclear power plant. If you want to know why, look up the nuclear kitty liter incident.

You do remember that Russia occupied half of Europe until 30 years ago, after 46 years of occupation?

If the US did not intervene, I do think Russia's chances of re-taking Europe are only 60/40. Not the 99/1 of the Soviet Union era. And Russia is still in the seizing territory mode. Just ask Ukraine, Georgia, etc.

At that point, no company on earth really had significant space experience. Aircraft were the closest 'similar' technology. So example still holds true. You want the most experience. If no one has experienced, you snag folks from the closest possibly related field.

County park on a lake would be my guess. I've seen them around at places. Pretty much same concept as concession stands. Brings in a bit of revenue to offset maintenance costs. I've seen kayak rentals, cabins rentals, etc that were actually owned by whomever owned the public park and contractors operated them rather than government employees because it was a service oriented role. Government isn't always geared at making customers happy.

In this case, county was either idiotic or corrupt. Idiotic in that you don't just want anyone handling the concession because jet skis are expensive and (relatively) maintenance intensive. You want knowledgeable, reliable persons to handle it and that doesn't always mean the cheapest party. Or just corrupt that the winning bidder was a relative of someone in the local government. Sounds like idiotic in this case, if it was a lowball bid. But possibly there was some legal reason for the bid to be lowest bid rather than best value contract.

https://www.bls.gov/data/infla...

Using the US government's inflation calculator, I put $100 in for Jan 2016. Today, that would be $115.47 in inflation dollars. So investing still beats inflation, but not by the margins it initially appears. Inflation is continuously compounding, not a one time event.

And mind, real inflation is higher than the official CPI-U index. BLS is allowed to make substitutions for cheaper alternatives, without changing the historical info. The typical apocryphal example is substituting ground beef for steak. But not having to go back and adjust previous years to always include ground beef instead of steak. While this looks malicious, and very much can be, certain commodities do have isolated pricing issues that may skew results. Non-US government folks do track the original metrics (always including steaks) if you'd like more consistent inflation indexes.

Ah, the No True Scotsman fallacy.

To be fair, there is no true communism. But there is no true capitalism, socialism or fascism. Reality never meets the tidy textbook definitions. China is indeed communist, because they are ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. You can say they don't live up to textbook ideals. They however are the real life version of Chinese communist. Cuba, Loas, North Korean, Vietnam and China are the last remaining communist countries. They are all individual countries and unique. But they are still different forms of communist nations.

I have noticed that exactly zero folks who say China or the Soviet Union aren't real communism never say the same thing about any capitalist countries, even when it is equally true.

That's what the "stick" format media devices are for. You plug one into the HDMI port and you're done. I've personally found them easier to setup with than the built-in smart TV setup.

I don't believe I have ever used the smart features of any smart TV. If you do not connect it to the internet, it is not a security risk. I typically plug in a Roku or use a media PC. I never saw the appeal of locking myself into whatever the manufacturer wants to give me. None of my friends that use their smart TVs as smart TVs really like the built in apps. They tend to be slow and clunky.

Both Roku (dedicated hardware rather than the baked in version) or Kodi are pretty fast, and I can have a bazillion apps, channels, whatever. And I don't have to bin my entire TV if either manage to annoy me.

Expense ratios are all over the place. My S&P index fund is 0.015. But my 401k offers funds as high at 0.7. Old school 2% fees are becoming less common. And hiding fees may be criminal. If you have evidence that your 401k is illegally hiding fees and committing fraud, please report it to the SEC. Yes, the SEC is often asleep at the wheel, but every so often they nail folks to try to 'prove' otherwise. It's worth rolling the dice.

Personally I think anything at or under 0.5% is fine for most folks. But there's a reason why everyone says if you don't know what you're doing, just get a low cost S&P500 index fund. Sure, if you're super awesome investor, you may beat index funds. The part you're not mentioning about chasing higher returns is you increase your chances of losses. If S&P500, Russel1000, etc crashes, we have bigger issues than the stock market. If a meme stock or other potential high return investment crashes, it's just Tuesday. The average person is better off with low work, low risk index funds. Active investors probably can do better, but it is a lot of work and research. Plus the higher risk.

It's how all economics work. People make money, and then spend that money.

It's not fair, it's not even. But all attempts to force equality have had far worse results for everyone. That said, lack of regulation also has a long history of bad results. You want a happy middle ground. Don't try to force everyone into one category, but don't let folks dump toxic waste into rivers. The most healthy economies aren't pyramids, they're diamonds. Very few ultra rich, very few ultra poor. Most of the wealth being in the middle, who tend to spend small amounts at lots of places. Rather than the ultra rich transferring large amounts to a narrow number of places. $300 million at thousands of businesses employs a lot more than one painting, boat, etc. And grows the economy more.

So yea, lots of folks making Silicon Valley or NYC wages in tiny towns will have an outsized contribution to lots of small towns. And likely grow the entire country's economy rather than keeping it centralized in overpriced small areas.

Ah, some issues with your math. Your returns around have to be over 28% annually without interruption to make $7m At 10% annual return, you're talking $700k after 20 years at . Not $7m. 10% is possible but optimistic. 5-7% is more realistic.

Yes. Because governments want folks to pay their taxes and make sure no company is creating a monopoly or duopoly that will be harmful to their economy.

There is no contradiction. Apple and Google are using their positions to keep competition out, and trying to take as much money as possible from essentially a captive audience. Realistically, iOS or Android is 99.98% of the smartphone industry and two companies have a chokehold on it. Though it's doubtful as many people would complain if the duopoly tax was 5% rather than a third, the percentage is less of an issue than the control.

There should be government action to ensure users have competitive market, and I hope more governments do so. For my own part, I plan on looking at vanilla Android options and looking to aftermarket solutions.

That would be due to corporate headquarters being in blue cities. If you look at county level taxes instead of state, you'll see only a very tiny handful of counties at net positive. Which is just accounting. The reality is yes, HQ mails off the metaphoric check to the IRS. But they often have operations across the entire country.

Because human tech has not been in development for 521 million years. Which is a guess at how long neurons have been around for, give or take a hundred million years.

Give us that kind of timeframe and I'm pretty sure we'll surpass that level of efficiency.