Sorry, couldn't understand what you wrote. Could you translate to American?

No, it's not free at all. It's an investment. That is, it ties up your money and subjects you to risk. Not free.

Apparently it's a profitable investment, which, if you're a government that can afford to take that risk, is a better deal than free.

"Free" is a decent approximation for casual conversation, then. But it's not free. Call it what it is. A profitable investment!

That's a tough sell. Most of the popular German beers are only around 5%. That's more than Bud Light but not outside the range that any college student would be used to. But many of those are served at ~350 mL (12 oz). Weizenbier is often served by the half liter, but that's just a pint. The only German beer that's regularly served in a Mass (liter) is Munich beers. Those are often ~4%. So you're really down to just Munich festbier, which can be north of 5% and served in two-pint glasses.

The real devil is the undertrained American bartender who will pour you a pint of a Scotch ale, Russian Imperial Stout, Belgian quad, barleywine, or big double IPA. Oof.

To be fair, if you go to any sizable store or gathering in Germany, it's quite clear that the vast majority of what anyone sells, buys, or drinks is crap like Beck's.

Weizenbier is probably the most widely-available good beer in Germany. (Though, IMO, a Jever will do in a pinch.) More regionally, helles, festbier, and dunkel from respected breweries are good. Same with rauchbier or schwartzbier, but those are an odder flavor and less common. Koelsch is excellent.

There are some good Pils also, but it's not a flavor everyone likes, and it's so popular in the mass market that you've got to be careful about what you're buying.

That's so 2000s.

Now it's Belgians. No, wait, sorry, that was two years ago. Saisons? "Farmhouse"? No, that was last year. Sours. I think it's sours now. Especially gose or barrel-aged. Though there's always been a level of support for anything barrel-aged, especially if the alcohol level makes you double check to make sure it's not wine you're buying.

The hoppiness is probably a byproduct of the fact that we have good hop breeding labs and a lot of brewers tired of beer with no bitterness. (Incidentally, Germany has good hop breeding labs, too, but they have a hard time selling their more aggressively-flavored products locally. Sad for a country that's fighting losing one of the world's finest hops to disease and that processes a ton of delicately-flavored hops into canned hop extract.)

Also, it's dextrose-heavy double IPAs that taste like an ethanol-water hop tea. (Or, if you prefer, triple-strength Bud Light with hops.) Even quite hoppy single IPAs still have a noticeable malt presence and yeast esters.

It would be a tough call to choose between the so-called "flavor" of Beck's or Bitburger and the lack thereof of Bud Light.

Mercifully, in Germany and the US, you can get good beer. It accounts for a small fraction of nationwide sales (and a tiny fraction of exports) in either case, but it's there.

Germany is heavy on tradition, so most of the breweries that are good have been doing this a long time. The mass-market is newer and sucks. In the US, the closest thing to a worthwhile traditional beer is something like PBR or Narragansett. (The mass-market crap we got from a combination of German immigrants and industrialization.) So all of our good breweries are young and experimental. Either works, but sadly, neither makes a sizable dent in mass-market beer.

Your company has to provide the option for a 401k. If they don't, and they also don't offer any other retirements savings plan, there are self-directed ones that require more research. If they do offer a 401k, you need to at least withhold enough to fully get the company match, or you're throwing away money.

The next step is to max out Roth IRA contributions (general $5500/yr, last I knew). These are both tax-deferred and tax-free upon withdrawal, and there's an income limit on contributions--so investing in them young is very valuable. Roth IRAs you do yourself. Lots of reputable companies will set these up for you. Generally, a retirement account that has a periodic deposit attached to it should have no fees. They'll also provide help getting it set up. If you can't get those two things, find someone else who will. Fidelity and Vanguard are good options.

After that, there are many options. If your 401k is good, you could just increase the withholding on that.

Use big, popular index mutual funds with low fees. If you're young, lean toward stocks. Say, 10-20% bond index fund and 80-90% equity indexes. Equity indexes should be mostly domestic but some international and should include both large-cap and small-cap. A typical boring 401k portfolio for a young person might be 10% bond index, 55% S&P 500 index, 20% international index, and 15% small-cap index.

When you change jobs, roll your 401k over into an IRA so that you're using your preferred vendor and have better control of it. You'll find that the company getting your money is happy to help you set that up.

Once you have substantial retirement savings, particularly under a single company's umbrella, investment advice becomes much cheaper and easier to come by.

Sort of. One of the major design elements of a real hybrid is that it uses a smaller, more efficient gas engine. That's what the electric motor is really there for -- the gas engine can't provide enough power on its own for proper acceleration under many circumstances, but the two motors combined can. So the electric motor is the thing that enables you to have a small, efficient gas engine, and the regenerative braking is just a good power source for the electric motor. On the highway, the hybrid has to carry around the weight of the electric system, but it carries less engine weight and still benefits from using a small engine.

In practice, for me at least, I get 45 mpg highway out of a Prius, which is pretty decent.

SwiftOnSecurity has 68k. (More than explanoit's 2.5k and less than smoss's 3M.)

That's a little unfair, though. Smoss has some notoriety outside of being on CSI Cyber.

... yes. That's definitely what Van Der Beek is known for.

It's Zero Hedge. Every article is submitted by Tyler Durden.

Yes. But some safety measures will have lower probabilities of bad things happening than other safety measures. The fact that it is always possible for bad things to happen has no bearing on the fact that some safety measures are more effective than others.

The effectiveness of a measure of course has to be balanced against its cost and impact.

Not only do they see that message, but the alert pauses the loop that keeps loading the pages.

Well, the acronym for Socialist In Name Only is "sino".

I had no idea Mesopotamia was part of China.