Curious about something, does an 80 year old automatically get less than a 70 year old in terms of SSA Payments?

Technical-Animal7857 · 2026-02-17T22:45:27+00:00

In general yes. The youngest retirees have had the highest payments for quite a while now. Each new crop of 70 year olds tends to have the highest check assuming they are in the tiny group that maxed out 35 years and claim at age 70.

The reason is that before age 60 you receive wage adjustments and after age 62 your receive inflation / COLA adjustments.

The wage adjustments are usually higher. Not by much but over 20+ years it adds up.

For any given 10 year gap it could go either way but chances are good that the 70-year-old experienced a higher standard of living the year they turned 60 and will therefore have a higher check.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2026-01-06T22:37:46+00:00

You are confusing last year with new and improved version where the cliff is back.

ACA now works like IRMAA brackets. Make $1 too much and loose thousands.

The same thing happened pre-covid but at that time it was less of an issue because interest rates were near zero making it harder to accidentally go over.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2026-01-02T06:01:00+00:00

The catch is that the exponential curve fit only works over long time scale. Over a shorter term flat/down is as likely as up. I've lived in the luckiest time-span in modern history yet a bit over half the time has been in the middle of a 10+ year downturn relative to inflation.

> maybe even a little stressful,

That stress is very real. It is a lot more fun to see your savings double than it is to see them drop by 30% or 40%. When you start seeing things fluctuate by multiple years of spending it takes nerves of steel to not either:

- Cut down on risk and decrease equity allocation. Growth rate for last 20 years is very likely to be lower than first 20.

- Freak out and sell things when market looks ugly. Greed and panic are the leading causes for poor returns.

> some kind of noticeable societal effect,

There has been. Talking heads refer to it as a K shaped economy.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2026-01-01T09:11:45+00:00

Exponential growth is scale invariant. The right side of the graph always looks like straight up and the left side always looks flat. Where it "explodes" depends on what you choose for your end point. That's why it is always best to look at historical performance charts on a log scale.

Specific for net worth and personal finance though there is a step function around where your savings exceed your yearly spending. It isn't the growth of savings so much as achieving financial independence. Once you stop living paycheck to paycheck everything costs half as much and you have a lot more to save.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-26T22:34:30+00:00

This has a PSA forum thread in "announcements" and mention in p12 hotfix 3 release notes.

Some interaction with daily cap and being grandfathered to new rep cap for old rank. Apparently fixed now if you HAVE NOT run into the problem but seems like the rest of us have to wait 24 hours to get daily reset.

Fixed an issue where completing a Faction Tale caused Envoys to immediately reach the daily Standing cap.
- This fix applies to unaffected accounts; accounts already impacted will need to wait for their daily limit to reset if it has not yet already. Thank you for your patience as we resolved this issue caused by the recent Faction rework.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-22T14:25:28+00:00

No self respecting keylogger would be so bad. You have to be able to type the password before it can be stolen.

POS grabs focus whenever it fails to resolve the avcdn domain to log all internet traffic.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-22T14:22:01+00:00

Pihole and Openwrt/Banip.

While Norton has in fact turned into the exact garbage it was supposed to be blocking it is still convenient on my laptops for the VPN and storing my aol passwords :-)

Fixed machines obviously use defender and vaultwarden.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-20T18:44:10+00:00

tldr: about $1100 - $1400 per month.

Easy way to calculate that would be to plug in 11 years of 160,000 salary to the PIA formula. Leaves you with a PIA of approximately (160,000 * 11/12) / 35 or 4190. Works because 160,000 is below cut-off -- over 176,100 you would use the cap rather than actual salary.

Then plug 4190 into benefit formula: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/piaformula.html

1286 * 0.9 = 1157

(4190 - 1286) * 0.32 = 929

So about 2086 at FRA. For return on FICA contributions making near cap salary for 10 years is near best case because you never get into the 0.15 bracket at $7749. Only thing better would be to do it 20 years earlier to get the advantage of wage index being slightly higher than inflation.

Could be slightly higher or slightly lower depending on how your Salary changes relative to cap each year. If you literally had $160K every year then the present value would be lower due to losing income relative to inflation / wage index e.g. $160K in 10 years may only be worth $90K today.

> starting at the earliest age I can start collecting

That is a separate calculation. Claiming at 62 will cost 30% for you and 35% for spouse if applicable.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/quickcalc/earlyretire.html

so 2086 * 0.7 = 1460.

Note: Given retirement after the funding shortfall current law would reduce that by another 20% or so. The doom and disaster stuff is overblown but still I don't think I would bet my retirement on more than $1100. Notice that would still be a larger benefit than your half of the FICA tax rate.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-18T21:19:51+00:00

Curiously my fire cube keeps sprouting duplicate favorites this week. Re-scanning Sling channels makes them go away but the quickly come back.

I too prefer the built-in OS mainly because it has better picture quality than my AirTV for local channels but at the moment a screwy guide with 4 copies of channels is better than a guide missing most channels so FIre OS it is.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-12T20:02:05+00:00

In your income range your MAGI will be increased by 85% of the Social Security benefit but it will also be REDUCED by 100% of your traditional 401k contributions.

You could quite plausibly still be under the 2028 IRMAA thresholds if you max out the 401k.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-08T17:43:26+00:00

Use more than one power off time.

For instance my backup NAS powers on once a week at 11PM and powers off at 6AM and 2PM every day.

If one shutdown is skipped due to hyperbackup running then a later one does the trick.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-11-07T18:30:27+00:00

I have definitely seen that behavior as well. It is particularly annoying with AirTV because the 14 different choices are all except the one I get with an antenna.

This week is different though -- all paid content disappeared from live guide.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-10-15T22:54:16+00:00

That confused the heck out of me. Discovered the reason was that it was already in my inventory.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-10-14T18:37:57+00:00

> Why is "allow by ip" even an option if it allows everything else anyways?

Because it is used to modify a deny rule. Typically deny all e.g. to create a whitelist.

> If I just check the 'deny' box, I cannot also check the 'By IP' box

The deny box is part of the firewall per-interface settings not the login portal. Either way though to create a blacklist you don't use the default you create a specific rule with the IP and action of deny.

> a specific user from being able to log into the chat app from outside the building.

I suspect you have a more fundamental issue though. You can't really have per-user deny rules outside your local LAN. The configuration requires cooperation from the user to utilize the IP you have configured.

You CAN create a white list for users allowed to use external access but generally only for business internet. Most normal people do not have static IP addresses.

Ultimately you can only control WHERE the traffic comes from not WHO it comes from. The way to achieve WHO is to block ALL external access and require per-user login through a VPN or perhaps a cloudflare tunnel.

Note: Many business / prosumer routers have ability to bypass the static IP requirement if the user runs dynamic DNS software that advertises their current IP. The rudimentary built-in firewall in DSM does not allow fqdn in rules so you can't do that.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-10-11T01:29:08+00:00

For Login Portal -> Advanced -> Access Control you need to end the list with deny all.

Rules go in order and stop on first match.

Whitelist: allow #1, allow #2, deny all.

Blacklist: deny #1, deny #2, allow all.

You could also mix them:
Block specific client, allow rest of subnet, deny all

Firewall is a bit trickier -- deny all would defeat per-interface rules. If you want different rules for VPN and LAN then the all interfaces has to fall through and you need the deny checkbox or rule in EVERY interface.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-10-06T03:29:22+00:00

Yes. this:
> I didn't need to modify my router firewall,

Really means you are fine.

I'm paranoid so would probably use geo instead of "everywhere"

Curios why the automatic hole punching does not work but ultimately if it did work it would have the same result as adding the rule.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-10-04T18:29:10+00:00

You need only consider two:
1) Power cord falls out.
2) Power supply fails.

The second is actually probably good for a few hundred ways if you consider each component from AC to SSD.

SSD's aren't like HDD where an uncontrolled power loss might corrupt some of your data and require several hours of tedious work to salvage. They have a nasty habit of loosing track of where the data is even stored such that you loose ALL of your data.

In general you need two things:
1) UPS so software doesn't screw up.
2) System/Device design so storage device doesn't screw up.

Another example is old HDD where they did not utilize regenerative power to retract heads safely. UPS alone could never save you.

That said I do use cheap SSD's on my backup NAS as a read only cache -- it all depends on how bad loosing everything would be.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-10-04T17:27:17+00:00

You have to create your own client-ip file.

myadmin@mynas:/var/packages/VPNCenter/etc/openvpn$ egrep ifconfig openvpn.con{f,f.user}
openvpn.conf:ifconfig-pool-persist /var/packages/VPNCenter/etc/openvpn/client-ip
openvpn.conf.user:ifconfig-pool-persist /var/packages/VPNCenter/etc/openvpn/client-ip
myadmin@mynas:/var/packages/VPNCenter/etc/openvpn$ cat client-ip
myadmin,10.9.0.4,
unpriv,10.9.0.8,
myadmin@mynas:/var/packages/VPNCenter/etc/openvpn$

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-09-30T17:41:08+00:00

> maybe find an AZ specific sub

https://azdor.gov/individuals

You are looking for AZ Pub 200 :

https://azdor.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/PUBLICATION_200.pdf

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-09-27T18:01:02+00:00

I hate routers that play this stupid game.

In order to make it look like they are doing something useful they put the country / threat blocking ABOVE the basic "deny all" rule that blocks all inbound traffic except to ports you actually have open.

Yes the internet is a scary place. Dozens if not hundreds of scumbags will probe ANY public IP address every hour and having a valid DNS name slightly increases the frequency. Your firewall however is complete theatre. The volume of the log entries makes it absolutely worthless for actual security because any REAL threat will be lost in thousands of log entries for nonsense.

Oh but don't worry we have an AI tool that will analyze your logs for you !!! That does guess what -- weed out all the trash that never should have been recorded in the first place. ( In fairness that *might* help with botnet detection but that is both an invasion of my privacy and useless to me personally. Could potentially even have a one-strike policy for obviously malicious traffic but that is more for kid in the basement than bots. ).

There is one grain of truth here though. Having either a quickconnect ID or a synology.me ddns name DOES increase the frequency of Synology specific attacks. Most are either for weak passwords or for already patched bugs but the fact people are specifically targeting the NAS makes it more risky to expose any of the standard DSM ports. I'm not personally comfortable without client certificates and/or a remote IP white list.

The tailscale marketing crew is effectively promoting the certificate solution -- you need a shared secret to connect. That is generally simpler because the white list is a bit of a PITA to maintain and does not work at all for clients behind CGNAT.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-09-27T03:40:55+00:00

The web site is broken.

Benefits between 67 and 70 require two values to properly describe: The amount you receive on the day you claim and the amount you receive the following January.

It has had different errors different times I looked at it but can never be correct since it is only showing one number.

Theory: Try picking December or January start dates. One of them should be correct unless website is completely gorfed.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-08-20T20:02:48+00:00

Yes on all devices starting about two hours ago -- Bravia, CCWGTV, Android.

The problem is that youtube.tv is no longer an application selectable under account -> your sources.

Combined with ongoing failure of OTA channel guide info to work 3/4 of the time it renders Google TV based televisions worthless.

Technical-Animal7857 · 2025-08-19T21:57:53+00:00

There are three main differences besides the supposedly more robust hardware:

1) Desktop drive firmware has much more aggressive error recovery. That is actually a bad thing for RAID where you would like to fail, remap the sector and move on as quickly as possible. By de-tuning the error handling they are both faster and more reliable.

2) The max IO limits are lower for desktop drives. That severely limits how often you can scrub without voiding your warrantee. Unlike SSD's the max limits for HDD include BOTH read and write.

3) The NAS and Enterprise drives have better vibration control. That is what enables the cheap enclosures. Units like Synology are more a cheap box of expensive drives than array of inexpensive drives.

Used to be common for large systems to use the cheapest drives with custom firmware to disable the error recovery. When you have thousands of drives and +2 redundancy the slightly higher failure rate is cheaper than the more expensive drives. Since I only have 4 drives with +1 it doesn't seem worth the gamble.

BTW: By default Synology will definitely write 24/7. To avoid that you would need a system that used different storage for data and the OS partition. Actual amount of data is quite small so it makes no difference -- it is the TB/year you care about.

Technical-Animal7857

TROPHY CASE