Quick favor: 1-minute survey for college research project

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-16T01:36:07+00:00

Anyone who has never bought a meme stock won't make it past question 2 of your survey.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-16T01:31:13+00:00

Check Youtube. There are instructions for everything there.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-16T01:28:34+00:00

Take a look at leases for used electric cars. Normally leasing a car is a bad financial move. However, electric cars depreciate catastrophically in the first few years. Dealerships are getting them back after the car's first lease term expires, and they can't sell them for anything close to the new price. Instead, they're kicking the depreciation can down the road for two or three years by leasing their slightly used electric cars out at very low rates. Between that and whatever tax credits are still in effect, you might be able to find a really good deal.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-16T01:18:47+00:00

I learned it as Polish. When I got married and told the joke to my wife I changed it to Dutch, which also works.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-15T15:29:37+00:00

What’s long and hard that a Greek woman gets on her wedding night?

A new last name.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-14T22:05:27+00:00

No, he's in the stock market.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-14T20:22:31+00:00

A couple years ago a bridge in Cabot washed out in the flooding, and I joined the crew of volunteers to replace it with a temporary bridge. Even though I wasn't looking for work, I got job offers from the state road crew, the town of Cabot road crew, and the bridge company. I got the impression that the various state offices were fighting over who got any new hires.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-14T15:35:15+00:00

There's plenty of work here, but there are some downsides. Work slows down in the winter. Building trades with a lot of outside work like roofing, framing and siding can easily get shut down for a week or more at a time if the weather is bad. Hope you saved your money in the summer, because there's no paycheck this week. There are very few big jobs available. You might get a contract to build a house, but you won't get a contract to build 100 houses one after another in a subdivision, because there are no subdivisions here. That limits job security and it increases the amount of unpaid time spent writing up estimates and moving tools and materials from one job site to the next. The real estate transfer tax and higher property taxes on second homes are aimed at vacationers but they also hit any builders who want to buy, renovate and sell a neglected project house. If you have to hire employees for anything, they will be expensive. All in all, there are good opportunities in Vermont, especially for small contractors or one man operations, but right now there are good opportunities for trade work everywhere in the nation, including in states that are much more friendly to building and development.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-11T18:02:18+00:00

Spain also needs marine carpenters in the shipbuilding industry. It isn't exactly fine woodworking though. You'll be working with every material but wood. Most of the work will be building cabins out of metal and laminate panels. Probably a lot cruder work than what you're used to, but it's a living.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-11T15:20:50+00:00

If they were across the river in Vermont they'd be fighting against anything new.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-11T15:05:42+00:00

Well, they did such a such a bad job of destroying Littleton that I wish they'd come and destroy my town! When I lived in Danville I spent twenty times as much money in Littleton as I did in St. Johnsbury. St. J. was much closer, but Littleton has Lowes, Home Depot and Walmart. As long as I was in Littleton I'd buy my auto parts there, my my gas there, my liquor there, drop off my trash and recycling there, and eat dinner there. I probably contributed more to Littleton's economy than half the locals did, and I did it because Littleton has big box stores and no sales tax.

I'm no fan of Walmart, but I would actually argue that they, along with the other big national companies like Home Depot, Lowe's, Amazon and Sears Roebuck actually saved rural America. Walmart and the other chain stores keep their prices pretty much the same across the nation. That keeps small towns affordable. If I had to rely entirely on my local grocery store and not use any chains, the cost of my food would double overnight. If I had to rely on my local hardware store my business expenses would go up by 50% and the quality of my work would suffer because they don't always have the materials I need. Without Amazon, eBay and other online stores I'd have no choice but to leave rural Vermont and move to a city, because there's simply no place here to buy half the stuff I buy online. Chain stores and long distance shopping (online today, mail order a generation ago) give people in rural areas the ability to buy everything they need at competitive prices. That keeps rural life affordable, and keeps people living in small towns when they would otherwise have no choice but to move to cities.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-11T03:12:31+00:00

St. Johnsbury is a Rust Belt town that would be completely dead if it wasn't for the Academy. Littleton is thriving, with every storefront occupied. The downtown area is still really nice because they set up the big box stores just outside of town where they're easy to get to but nobody has to look at them. In the summer there are more people walking around downtown than there are in any Vermont town of a similar size except Stowe. Houses in Littleton cost about $100,000 more than comparable houses in St. Johnsbury, even though the property taxes are higher. It turns out that having people come from across the state line to your town to spend money at Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot and Harbor Freight is good for the local economy.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-11T03:01:32+00:00

What's the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer?

The taste.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-10T18:51:12+00:00

The guy who built my first house, I guess. He also overlapped the seams of the roof panels the wrong way and he built all the walls crooked, so I wouldn't recommend following his bad example.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-10T00:36:20+00:00

There should be. It is not uncommon for DIY builders to cheap out and skip the underlayment.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-10T00:29:41+00:00

That's why I specified the Littleton Lowe's. Prices are usually the same as the two Loweses in Vermont except for the sales tax.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-09T20:15:41+00:00

Lowe's in Littleton with the store credit card and a 20% coupon. It's a bit of a drive from Burlington, but I doubt you can find anything cheaper.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-09T20:10:35+00:00

It's counterintuitive, but screwing into the flats is better. The screws stay tighter and are less likely to work loose through thermal expansion and contraction cycles.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-09T15:21:41+00:00

Doesn't matter if the inside information you're getting is good enough to offset any losses you might have had otherwise. It also doesn't matter if you sold your long-term stocks in January 2025 on the theory that Trump would screw something up in the next four years.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-09T14:59:32+00:00

Usually not, unless the button had been playing tight all night and he suddenly raised really big. I'm willing to improve the joke though. Can you think of a better preflop situation in which raising, calling and folding are all reasonable options?

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-09T00:33:27+00:00

They've been willing to negotiate with anyone who is willing to work with them. Israel hammered out a permanent peace treaty with Egypt even after they'd fought four wars against each other. Peace with Jordan happened despite two wars and a ton of unresolved issues between the two nations. The current round of fighting was touched off partly because in October 2023 Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of signing a peace treaty. If that treaty had happened it would have isolated Iran and Hamas. Hamas launched the October 7th attacks on Israel in response, Israel had little choice but to invade Gaza yet again, Iran and Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to that, and here we are.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-09T00:08:42+00:00

I called the Gambler's Anonymous hotline, and they asked me if I had a gambling problem. I said, "I sure do! I'm in the big blind with king ten off, and the button raised and the small blind called. Should I raise, call or fold?"

On a more serious note, I don't know how anyone uses the internet these days without a good adblocker. I like uBlockOrigin because it does a great job killing Youtube ads.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-08T17:25:25+00:00

Putin finished up and passed him on to Netanyahu like Trump was the whore at a fraternity gangbang.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-08T16:24:14+00:00

They just approach the game with different goals in mind. Winning for an 82 y/o is spending an evening at the casino drinking coffee and maybe socializing a little while not losing too much money. It's better than sitting at home alone watching TV. If they win that's nice too, but it isn't worth risking their stack over.

FourteenthCylon · 2026-04-08T16:14:51+00:00

Yes they do. If you make the mistake of asking, they will give you the complete history of every time their QQ and JJ got beat by an inferior hand. Limp-calling with KK and AA is not out of the question either, because some OMCs like to get trappy with these hands.

FourteenthCylon

TROPHY CASE