vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Are you fucking kidding me?   You lack common sense and to be honest,  I have never have read anything so ridiculous.   You are saying that despite the fact that it is not only safer for pedestrians to use a consistent and well known area to walk,  specifically made and designated for pedestrians,  the US should just allow random chaos and let the streets be wildly unpredictable and open up every driver on the road to crippling lawsuits.    I can think of many reasons of why you lack any sort of logic,  but I just don't have the time to pick apart why this is the worst comment I have ever read on reddit.
Bank products have been pretty common with tax refunds as well, and they are also being heavily scrutinized for the same reasons.  Refund Anticipation Loans (RALs) have been outlawed for future tax seasons due to lack of consumer protection.  What is a bank product, you might ask?  Rather than waiting 7-14 days for the a direct deposit from the IRS, a lot of places like H+R Block and Jackson Hewitt would offer a bank product to get you money quicker.  For this service, they charge a fee (usually $99-$149) which is grossly overpriced for how little work it takes, but if your refund is several thousand dollars, you may not care.  A Refund Anticipation Loan was the most predatory bank product, as it was an advance on your loan for the amount your expected refund.  However, if there were any errors in your return and the IRS decided your refund was less than what your tax preparer calculated it to be, you were stuck with paying back the advance amount, leaving you to foot the bill for whatever errors your preparer may have made.  These loans also had very high interest rates, since usually the people that wanted RALs were also the same people that rely upon cash advances.  There are also Electronic Refund Checks (which ironically are paper checks for the consumer, not electronic deposits), direct deposits, and prepaid debit cards.  Despite the fact that these same methods of refund payments are offered by the IRS themselves, preparers and banks alike sold these to collect fees for essentially no work.  I'm not sure how similar these bank products for student loans are, but I wanted to shed some light on them anyways.  Regardless of how badly you need money, **do not ever accept money through a bank product.**  If it benefited you more, banks and preparers would not offer these.  (Source:  telemarketing at a tax preparation software company)
Another vote for a bigger downpayment, for the reasons Benjamin mentions. Also, from experience, I would save up at least a small pile as a separate house emergency fund because you will find things that are wrong and/or that got bodged by the previous owner and it's probably not going to last past the first few months of home ownership. In my case, the home inspector missed - amongst other things - that the shower on the 2nd floor was leaking both into the adjoining bedroom and the living room below. That added a little unexpected expenditure as you might guess.
you're correct in that email &amp; www is one of the reasons for the decline in first class mail.  but while convenient to get electronic statements, and payments, I don't do them for the following reasons. there's no float on your funds, two a bill by mail is a legal document, in many cases with electronic payments if there is a dispute you have to request in writing, by mail the item(s) that in dispute. lastly, like any business these days, its not like they're passing on any savings to you for the costs they've saved by not using a friggin stamp. its like the self checkout.. shouldn't you get a discount for checking out your own groceries?  also i'd be remised if i did not point out the sorry state of the adoption and availability of broadband in this country. 15% are still on dialup. anyway..
A lot of these answers are really weak. The expected value is pretty much the answer.  You have to also though, especially as many many millions of tickets are purchased--make part of the valuation the odds of the jackpot being split x ways. So about 1 in 290--> the jackpot needs to be a take-home pot of $580 million for the $2 ticket. Assume the average # of winners is about 1.5 so half the time you're going to split the pot, bringing the valuation needed for the same jackpot to be $870 million. It's actually somewhat not common to have split jackpots because the odds are very bad + many people pick 'favourite numbers'.
"Actually, this is a pretty good analogy to certain types of stocks, specifically tech and other ""fad"" stocks. Around the turn of the century, there were a lot of ""Bobs"" buying tech stocks (like they would baseball cards), for tech stocks' sakes. That's what drove the internet and tech stock bubbles of high valuations. At other times, the tech stocks are bought and sold mainly by ""Steve's"" for business reasons such as likely (not merely possible) future appreciation, and command a much lower valuation."
"Automation is an admirable goal, but I don't think we're going to see a world where there's no menial labor for a very long time.  Coupled with that, there's pretty much no real way to look at a menial-style job and say, ""That deserves $15 an hour.""    The two reasons above combine and make a strong argument for something like a basic income or _drastically_ expanded welfare and safety net programs.    A further failing of the ""retrain everyone"" approach is assuming that everyone _can_ be retrained.  There are, simply put, people that exist -- and will always exist -- that cannot do non-menial work, for a myriad of reasons."
Royalty trusts track oil prices (they're a pure play on ownership of a portfolio of mineral rights and do not otherwise have the operations that the oil companies themselves have).  Many publicly traded ones listed at the embedded wikipedia link.   Oil tankers are having a bang up business right now as described in the article, but that's because of the low prices and flood of product from the middle east.  The article notes that inventories are near capacity, so terminals and pipelines may be in for a few good years, though these do not directly track oil price.  However, as a way to bet on oil or oil services, many terminals and pipelines are organized as publicly traded master limited partnerships or MLPs, often spun out of a major oil company for tax reasons, allowing fine-grained investment in specific assets.
"&gt;Of course, this is true as long as you ignore issues like New York policeman spiking their overtime by working as flagmen on construction projects.  A POLICEMAN.. dont you know if one person gets welfare that doesnt deserve it, we should throw out the entire system.. right?  &gt;The unions have done a great job focusing anger on the banks,  yeah cuase it was unions that crashed the worlds economy. IT was unions that created derivatives, it was unions that created sub prime lending, it was unions that created ""liar loans"" right?    &gt;but the states and cities are going to keep going bankrupt.   Ok big quiz here, please turn down fox news for this one.  WHAT HAPPENS TO STATE FINANCE'S IN A RECESSION?  what happens to tax receipts? and what happens to spending on things that help the poor?  I'll wait on you to think about it, I will not wait on you while you wait  for fox to tell you the answer  Bonus question since you are not going to bother the answer the one above.  What is the program called ""[starve the beast](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)"", who started it, what is its purpose, and what it it;s methodology?"
And as we are reminded because it's been in the news recently, chartered flights are only permitted for the very top of government employees, generally for national security reasons, and only when the itinerary of the trip cannot be satisfied by a commercial option.
"Here's what's going to happen: At the last minute, he's going to ""discover"" that for some reason first you must send him $10,000.  He'll tell you not to worry, as he's still going to send you $40,000... now $50,000. In fact, he's going to tell you that he'll send you $60,000 and tell you to keep the $10,000 as a ""finders fee"". Then you will send him, $10,000 and he will walk away with your $10,000.  You'll never hear from him again. This is a very common scam. The best way to avoid it is not to tell him you won't do it for IRS reasons. The best thing to do is to stop accepting email from him and (optionally) report him to law enforcement."
Alright you seem like a pleasant guy. I'm going to continue here the conversation here if you don't mind. Referencing back to what you said about Kodak, one of my business professors was in middle management with them in the 90's. He cited the monolithic culture and adherence to chemical photo processing as the main reasons for their downfall. They refused to embrace the future DESPITE having developed digital camera technology ahead of the rest of the curve. In fact, they suppressed it, for fear of sowing the seeds of their own demise. Why Kodak has closed up shop has nothing to do with China and everything to do with themselves.   The few places that still do chemical photo processing are countable and shrinking. It seems your anger is misplaced.
"Black-Scholes is ""close enough"" for American options since there aren't usually reasons to exercise early, so the ability to do so doesn't matter. Which is good since it's tough to model mathematically, I've read. Early exercise would usually be caused by a weird mispricing for some technical / market-action reason where the theoretical option valuations are messed up. If you sell a call that's far in the money and don't get any time value (after the spread), for example, you probably sold the call to an arbitrageur who's just going to exercise it. But unusual stuff like this doesn't change the big picture much."
Really, the only way to develop meaningful relationships of any kind (personal/business/etc) is to interact with people directly in a shared context.  If you don't have any professional interaction with them through your/their business, then you're left to social/personal things -- play tennis together at a club, golf together, work out at a gym together, meet at charity events, attend social gatherings, etc.  Executives are people too.  Think about it -- how would you want someone to approach you?  Some random guy sending mail/email to a bunch of people with your same job title hoping to make a contact for entirely selfish reasons (i.e. getting a job, selling a product/service, whatever) is not going to look attractive to you -- you're just going to ignore it because there's no personal connection, no reason to care.  For all intents and purposes, you may as well be talking about an unsolicited ad from Comcast for TV service you don't need.  In general, I'd go back to the drawing board.  What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?  Are you trying to sell a startup/project you've been working on?  Are you trying to find a shortcut to a high-paid job?  Revisiting your objective will give you the recipe to more effectively approach it.  **TL;DR** -- Sending spam to executives is not an effective way of networking.  It is a good way to identify yourself as an undesirable contact, however.
"I have been a landlord in Texas for just over 3 years now. I still feel like a novice, but I will give you the benefit of my experience. If you are relying on rental properties for current income versus a long term return you are going to have to do a good job at shopping for bargains to get monthly cash flow versus equity growth that is locked up in the property until you sell it. If you want to pull a lot of cash out of a property on a regular basis you probably are going to have to get into flipping them, which is decidedly not passive investing. Also, it is easy to underestimate the expenses associated with rental properties. Texas is pretty landlord friendly legally, however it does have higher than usual property taxes, which will eat into your return. Also, you need to factor in maintenance, vacancy, tenant turnover costs, etc. It can add up to a lot more than you would expect. If you are handy and can do a lot of repairs yourself you can increase your return, but that makes it less of a passive investment. The two most common rules I have heard for initially evaluating whether an investment property is likely to be cash flow positive are the 1% and 50% rules. The 1% rule says the expected monthly rent needs to be 1% or greater of the purchase price of the house. So your hypothetical $150K/$10K scenario doesn't pass that test. Some people say this rule is 2% for new landlords, but in my experience you'd have to get lucky in Texas to find a house priced that competitively that didn't need a lot of work to get rents that high. The 50% rule says that the rent needs to be double your mortgage payment to account for expenses. You also have to factor in the hassle of dealing with tenants, the following are not going to happen when you own a mutual fund, but are almost inevitable if you are a landlord long enough: For whatever reason you have to go to court and evict a tenant. A tenant that probably lost their job, or had major medical issues. The nicest tenant you ever met with the cutest kids in the world that you are threatening to make homeless.
In this case, the meaning of the amortization schedule on your credit card is how long it will take you to pay off the balance if you stop charging and pay at the proscribed payment level over the term described. Given the high interest rate on credit cards, you may end up paying twice as much for goods in the long run if you follow your lenders schedule. Amortizing loans are common for consumer loans, unless a borrower is seeking out the lowest possible monthly payment. Lenders recognize that people will eventually die, and want to be paid off before that happens. Balloon and interest only bonds and loans are more commonly issued by businesses and governments who are (hopefully) investing in capital improvements that will pay off in the long run. Thousands of people and businesses have gone bankrupt in this financial crisis because their interest only loans reached term, and no one was willing to lend them money anymore to replace their existing loan.
There are some excellent responses to this question at the time of this post. I have had the greatest success writing 1-month options. The 2 main reasons are as follows: With little time to expiration as stated in the question the implied volatility of the option is dictating the premium. Looking for the highest premiums is a mistake because you are taking a conservative strategy and re-creating it into a high-risk strategy. My sweet spot is a 2-4% monthly return for my initial profit and then mastering management techniques to protect that return and even enhancing it.
"&gt; Hahaha... there is a housing project directly across the street from me as I write this. So you have a front row seat at the zoo. That is not the same thing as living *among* the poor. Petting your beloved downtrodden now and then to try to gin up some sense of personal nobility simply isn't the same thing as actually having been there and done that. &gt; drug war, which disproportionately targets minorities Yes, in the same way that speeding laws target people that drive too fast. While I oppose the drug laws, the idea that they target the underclass is idiotic. They target people that distribute drugs. And isn't it fascinating that these poor, poor people, who have so little, for whom we are to have such veerrrrrrry deep compassion, always manage to have money for cigarettes, beer, and dope. &gt; but the Libertarian ideology only allows for one. No. Libertarian ideology does not speak to the underlying reasons. It merely refuses to allow the ends to justify the means. &gt; Does society have any responsibility to help people who are trapped in a cycle of poverty and bad choices No. We as individuals do, but ""society"" does not. ""Society"" is just another code word used by the self anointed Saviors Of Mankind (tm) as an excuse to pillage personal liberties in your neverending quest to seize power and and appear far more important and noble than you actually are. &gt; The rich are rich for many reason No, the rich are only that way for one of three reasons: Theft, inheritance, achievement. I've already stipulated that the first is always wrong whether by the rich or people like you than want to use a third party in government to execute the act. The other two are none of your business. &gt;There just as many reasons the poor are poor. And just like the rich, this is also none of your business so long as you insist and trying to make me pay for your utopian wetdreams. If you feel so very badly about this, pick up the tab yourself.
"&gt;**He tells buyers** he ""is involved at every capacity"". This is a lie.  In the link you provided, this was never mentioned. The only claim made about 'The Donald' is that he said he was basically a spokesman for the project.   I'm not seeing any reasons given for the project collapse, or any context for the why's and how's of it. It is too bad that it never ended up happening, but sometimes investments are lost, for a variety of reasons."
What I am saying is that social contract, despite the words chosen and combined in order to label the concept, is not a literal contract or agreement.  How is it not common sense that individuals have to make some sacrifices for the good of their community/state/republic?  If you think that a nation can function on the level that US does without majority of its citizens paying their taxes, I don't know what alternative you are offering for paying the costs of running a country.
Being a trades and manufacturing based economy didn't hurt us too badly on the innovation department for the last 100 years or so. We vastly generalize the value of a college education in this country, and people end up going for the sake of going because that's what they were told to do. If we moved away from that, we wouldn't lose any innovation really because the people who are going to innovate while tapping into a foundation of higher education are going to go that route anyway. We just wouldn't have a large portion of the population playing beer pong for 4 years at Western State A&amp;M when they could be more productive elsewhere.
Hard to imagine people going to casinos in the first place.  That aside, Atlantic City was never going to be a good place for casinos.  Now that there are so many casinos to choose from at so many locations all around the country it only stands to reason that more and more casinos will go out of business (not enough people who do not understand basic arithmetic to go around) .  Also to factor in is that going to a casino is not the brightest thing to be doing with your money.  And if it should turn out that there is so much money to burn out there, then taxes are definitely not high enough!    Imagine going into a building and playing games, for money, where the odds are stacked against you.  The longer you play the worse your chances are!  Madness!
While you are correct, engine tuning isn't as nefarious.  A common issue is someone who has no business buying a sports car will go out and buy a sports car.  And, if they are not tuned to drive like a sedan, they will get brought back the next day.  You will have people that spin out when the light turns green, just because their car has 500+hp and they don't know how to drive it.  So, paying for tuning, sounds more like custom software, than an on/off switch of the batteries.
"Not sure what you are talking about.  The house isn't part of a business so neither of you can deduct half of normal maintenance and repairs.  It is just the cost of having a house.   The only time this would be untrue is if the thing that you are buying for the house is part of a special deduction or rebate for that tax year.  For instance the US has been running rebates and deductions on certain household items that reduce energy - namely insulation, windows, doors, and heating/cooling systems (much more but those are the normal things). And in actuality if your brother is using the entire house as a living quarters you should be charging him some sort of rent.  The rent could be up to the current monthly market price of the home minus 50%.  If it were my family I would probably charge them what I would pay for a 3% loan on the house minus 50%.   Going back to the repairs... Really if these repairs are upgrades and not things caused by using the house and ""breaking"" or ""wearing"" things you should be paying half of this, as anything that contributes to the increased property value should be paid for equally if you both are expecting to take home 50% a piece once you sell it."
Steel building kits are now being preferred by a lot of industry. The kits make it very easy and convenient for erecting a building in half the time and cost. One of the main reasons for using the steel building is that they provide safety from various elements like no other materials.
In addition to what has been said, gift cards with a credit card logo (which is what I am assuming you mean here) do not have an address associated with them. That means that if you try to use one at a merchant that users address verification (common in online purchases), the transaction will fail.  In my experience with an American Express branded gift card, I was able to call the number on the back and they added an address to the card so that it would work. It seemed like this was a common and well known issue.  Because the gift card is not associated with any person, no verification is needed to add that address, you can give them any address you want.  Also I believe that the card numbers in use for gift cards are specific, that is you could tell that a card is a gift card based on the number alone. That means it is likely possible for a merchant to reject those gift cards while still accepting other cards from that network.  This is likely for certain transactions. For example,  a hotel or car rental agency requires a credit card for incidentals, and it's likely that the system itself will outright reject a gift card even if it has enough on it for the initial hold.  As for debit cards, I think there are far fewer issues with acceptance, other than the aforementioned hold issues described in another answer.
Ah!  The old “Taxes are stealing” rhetoric that fails to account for social contracts, the need for a consistent and uniform infrastructure, and the realization that most of what you rely on is based on the belief that people should work together “for the common good”, rather than exist as small bands of financial “bandits”, stealing from anyone they can for access to the resources they guard.  You call the government a thief, yet you strive to turn everyone into thieves.  The hypocracy is palpable.
I'd be a bit concerned about someone who wanted to transact that large of a transaction in cash.  Also consider what you are going to do with the funds, if you deposit it, you will need to tell the bank where it comes from. Why does the bank want to know, because most legal businesses don't transact business with large sums of currency.. What does that tell you about the likelihood the person you are about to do business with is a criminal or involved in criminal affairs?  The lower bill of sale price might be more than just to dodge taxes, it could be part of money laundering..  If they can turn right around and 'sell' the boat for $10K, or trade it in on a bigger boat for the same amount, and have a bill than says $4K, then they have just come up with a legal explanation for how they made 6 grand.  and you could potentially be considered an accomplice if someone is checking up on their finances. Really, is it worth the risk.
People have had a taste of affordable health care. It will not go away, but people will demand that their tax dollars are used sensibly for health coverage for all. Maybe the Government could start working for the common people (the majority of it's citizens) instead of being a slave to corporate power and the wealthy.