stelea99

Comments

• Corporations have a life cycle. For most, at some time they will be publicly owned. When they lose relevance they are often taken back to private ownership. The dream of most entrepreneurs is to take their startup public and get the big bucks.

  Post: The Incredible Shrinking — Stock Market?

  Link to comment from December 17, 2025

• I think it would be helpful, if you truly want a discussion on this topic or any other, if you didn't use your own financial situation as the basis for consideration when you are quite wealthy in terms of income. HD readers are not the general public in terms of income or assets. What is affordable to them has no relevance to affordability for most of the US population. How can a household which has trouble paying for rent and food deal with a high deductible health plan? This is the conundrum that faces the current majority in the House of Representatives. Health Savings Plans are a joke for most Americans; they have no extra money to save.

  Post: Affordable is an interesting word – especially related to healthcare

  Link to comment from December 17, 2025

• Well, my new Canon B&W laser arrived yesterday. I paid $122 for it at Amazon. I did get the WIFI connection working. The tiny LCD screen was hard to see but it only took 3 tries to get the WIFI password entered. I will be ordering a couple of new aftermarket cartridges today as well as seeing how printing from my IPhone will work. The new printer is quiet, starts fast, and the print quality is sharp.

  Post: Tech Part II: How to buy a printer/scanner, accessories and more

  Link to comment from December 14, 2025

• In helping family over the long term, less spent for undergraduate education opens the way to potential help with home purchasing, weddings, or many other aspects of life that cost so much more today than they used to. The kids and grand kids will ultimately get all that remains when we pass. We didn't accumulate what we have by making unwise decisions during our lives. Nothing teaches like the example we have already set.

  Post: $92,000 a year is quite an investment. The ROI is real, but maybe not.

  Link to comment from December 13, 2025

• For less than $100, it is easy to buy a docking station which allows with one cord, the use of a monitor, big keyboard, and wired mouse, speakers, and wired network printers. After loading the software for the station, it only requires using one Fn key to mirror the laptop screen on the monitor. You can then unplug that one cord and carry to laptop off to use remotely. So, you can easily transform a laptop into a desktop.

  Post: Part 3.0: More notes and ideas from the retail tech world

  Link to comment from December 12, 2025

• From a lot of discussion over the years with people who grew up in the Northeast of the US, I feel that there is a different philosophical feeling about the value of particular private schools vs. those of us who grew up in the West. We don't perceive a difference in the value of an undergraduate degree from "best schools" compared to state universities like the University of California, or the University of Washington. Indeed, a person who graduates with a degree in Elementary Education from Stanford University, or USC, will not fare better in the job market than a person with a similar degree from Cal State Hayward, or WSU in Eastern WA. They, however will have spent $248,000 on tuition for four years vs. a quarter of that for a state school in CA or WA. And, both UW and UC Berkeley are top ten rated schools in fields like Computer Science, and other areas. The proof is in the pudding. My grandson who graduated from the University of Missouri, in Columbia, MO used that degree to win admission to medical school. How would a degree from some more prestigious school have helped......? So, my approach with both my children and grandchildren is/was to have sufficient funding set aside to cover the costs for a four year degree from a state school. If a child decided that they wanted some additional panache from XYZ school, they could borrow or otherwise cover that cost for themselves. Furthermore, with the cost of education today, even at a state school, costing 72X what I had to pay in 1967, parents and students considering higher education, need to consider whether the income in a particular field of work will, even over a career, be economically viable.

  Post: $92,000 a year is quite an investment. The ROI is real, but maybe not.

  Link to comment from December 12, 2025

• I just purchased a printer yesterday. I have a somewhat different view of printers than expressed here. My old printer, which I am taking to be recycled, was a wonderful HP laser jet, and maybe ten years old. When Win11 came out HP decided not to create a printer driver for it. And, so for the last several years I ran it with a generic Windows printer driver. The issue with this generic driver was that it would print unending copies of multi-page print jobs, and if you weren't watching carefully, you would end up with an inch high stack of waste paper. Anyway, I need to confess that I also have an ink jet color printer. Both types of printers are useful to have. Why have both??? Well, you can use your color ink jet to make B &W print jobs, but you cannot do this when you need Permanent, Durable, documents. Ink jet ink is not waterproof. So, every time you need to print a copy of a will, a contract, etc. that you need to have for sure for the next 20 years, you need it to be printed on a laser printer. This need seems fairly clear to me. Laser = permanent. Okay, I also want to admit that I have a color laser printer. And, just like a color ink jet printer, both color ink jet and color laser printers have their uses. So, if you have a color laser printer, when you use it to print in B & W, you get a permanent document. And, while it can do color print jobs, it cannot print photo quality pictures. Furthermore, color laser toner replacement cartridges are expensive. Color ink jet cartridges are also expensive. But, in the last couple of years, ink jet color printer which have large ink tanks built in allowed them to greatly reduce the cost of color printer ink. So, if you want to print lots of photos you want an ink jet printer with ink tanks. If you want colored Xmas letters, address labels, colored calendar pages, colored ad flyers, you need the colored laser printer. Back to the purchase of a B&W laser printer yesterday. For home use, both Canon and Brother offer a cheap laser printer. These really good printers do 30 pages a minute, and have built in duplex (2-sided) printing. Like razor blades they want to make money from selling you toner carts. Typically, their cheapest printer comes with a small capacity cart which they say will print 700 pages, compared to the 2500-3000 of a standard cart. So, what you need to do before buying one is to make sure that after-market toner carts are already available for what you are buying. That is why my new printer is a Canon. I can get 3 after-market carts for the price of one authentic Canon cart. Unfortunately, both the Canon and the Brother can be difficult when you try to set up the wifi. I am planning to skip that and just connect to the Canon with a USB cable. Both types of printers offer some kind of cable connection. I am somewhat cheap, so I don't buy MS Word. Instead, I use free LibreOffice which can read and write Word documents. It has a great address label template. However, if you use your ink jet color printer to do labels, especially in the PNW, your letter/card might not get there if it gets wet.....

  Post: Tech Part II: How to buy a printer/scanner, accessories and more

  Link to comment from December 9, 2025

• We need a couple more facts to comment. How long ago did this retiree retire? What is their asset allocation plan? How many years of annual expenses were covered by their retirement assets at retirement? Having been retired for 25 years, I am looking at a group of financial assets that are 350% higher than at retirement. A 25% drop would only shave a relatively small amount off of these gains. Thus, your scenario is not dismal enough to keep me from selling whatever I would need to continue to live. If I needed to sell assets, I would still be paying capital gains tax. Furthermore, the absolute total value of the retirement portfolio might provide plenty of cushion. Someone with $5M before the market drop would still have $3.75M thereafter. And, the asset allocation is also a factor. Most of those who speak about 4% annual withdrawal lasting for 30 years want 40-50% in cash and fixed income assets. Someone with 4 years of cash and 100% of the balance in equities might have a problem. So, I suggest that you consider a Japanese style bubble/crash if you want a more realistic/horific problem to consider. Their market dropped 45% in 1989 and didn't regain its level until 2021. Fortunately for us, we don't have an insular culture and the other issues that confront Japan. There are Black Swan events that could happen for which there is no way to make a practical response plan. You cannot worry about them.

  Post: Would You Raid the Piggy Bank or Mortgage the House?

  Link to comment from December 8, 2025

• Because of Covid-19 life expectancy in the US and Europe dropped and has not recovered your comment on increasing expectancy is not correct. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01450-3

  Post: Are the actuarial assumptions regarding benefit neutrality still accurate?

  Link to comment from December 6, 2025

• Because I do not wish to be tracked on the internet nor do I want to receive targeted ads from Google, I do not use's Google Chrome browser. On my PC, I use Firefox Private Mode, and on my Apple devices I use Safari and do not allow tracking. I am sure that Chrome is a fine browsing application. "Free" software such as Gmail or Chrome, or MS Edge usually involves this kind of tradeoff, between privacy and cost. These are personal choices we each can make.

  Post: How to buy a laptop computer in an AI world

  Link to comment from December 6, 2025