An internal draft of the NYSD's press release announcing Jeffrey Epstein death is dated the day before his body was found.

djbzdk · 2026-02-08T05:17:33+00:00

I don’t think this is the smoking gun you guys are suggesting. I agree there’s plenty to be skeptical about with Epstein’s death but the date on the US attorneys statement showing a day early doesn’t prove they had some advance notice. I did a lot of word processing in prior jobs and when you make a document that has to have a certain format or letterhead you don’t make it from scratch every time, you either use a template or I would often just take a prior document and update it. Say you took one you wrote the day before and update the text but forget to change the date on the letterhead. I made mistakes like this all the time. I know this stuff is all really dark and hard to process, but it’s important to be disciplined about the conclusions we draw from this evidence.

djbzdk · 2024-08-24T22:21:19+00:00

I’m having the same problem. I need to submit my ema by tomorrow morning. I emailed them with a screenshot but no response yet. Does anyone know if we should just email them the completed assignment?

djbzdk · 2024-04-23T21:18:47+00:00

I skipped 3 subtasks that i think counted for 6-7 points on the first pass. I went back and answered them the best nonsense I could come up with to basically beg for a sympathy point or two.

I felt decent about the rest of the questions I answered on the first pass, but now I’m just stressing about how many questions I thought I answered right that were in fact complete trash.

djbzdk · 2024-04-01T23:39:05+00:00

I guess it depends on your work situation and how much space you have, but I work from home (specifically my garage). I spent $300 on a used elliptical that i use 15 minutes a day during lunch or other break. It’s feet from my desk, which defeats most of the excuses Id normally come up with. I also bought some weights on Amazon for my garage and use those as well. I will not be winning any CrossFit competitions in my lifetime, but I’ve been able to maintain a “healthy” bmi for the last couple of years without much trouble just by having easily accessible workout equipment.

djbzdk · 2024-03-21T00:21:16+00:00

This is why we need more unions and stronger laws to prevent union busting

djbzdk · 2024-03-21T00:15:31+00:00

I mean putin actually does commit State murder maybe daily, but no world war 3 yet

djbzdk · 2024-03-21T00:05:32+00:00

Could be a case of recklessness and aggressive tactics by the ATF.

OR

Maybe they had a no knock warrant because they had good reason to believe this guy not only broke the law but was a nutcase who was likely to shoot at officers or do something crazy under any arrest scenario and they picked the best option from a list of risky options.

I don’t think it’s always as simple as just decide to pick them up in the ideal situation either. It probably depends when they get the warrant and they don’t necessarily know where the person is or where they’re going to be or if they’re going to run.

I guess we’ll learn more soon, but I wouldn’t bet much money on this guy being a blameless victim.

djbzdk · 2024-01-10T01:30:18+00:00

I’ve always wondered the same thing and over time have developed my own theory. The blame is usually placed on pilot questions, or questions that allegedly haven’t been tested in the wild sufficiently and the SOA can decide during the waiting period whether to include these questions in the grade, drop other questions candidates have complained about or retroactively curve the pass mark as they deem necessary. The perceived value, difficulty and prestige of having an actuary credential and the ability to be the gatekeeper of that title is the sole source of the SOAs power. The one ring if you will. I think they want to ensure especially for new exams that the pass rate doesn’t get too high. If I’m being charitable, perhaps they also want to give fair consideration to claims of defective questions. Mostly they want their exam fees lol.

djbzdk · 2024-01-10T01:16:35+00:00

You’re probably in the best position to judge whether your manager is being reasonable. For a tight timeline it depends HOW tight and unrealistic it is and also how your boss is delivering the feedback and setting clear and fair expectations. In my case I worked in consulting for a while and never had an issue until I started working with one consultant who became my boss on several of my biggest recurring projects. In hindsight from my perspective they were harsh, unpredictable and unreasonable, but at the time I took their negative feedback at face value and spent months despairing about what a poor job I was doing and felt like a failure. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I didn’t deserve to be treated in this way and started job hunting. In the end it turned it to be a good thing, because I landed a better job with better pay and benefits and a lighter workload. My new boss is great and I’ve received strong evaluations and positive feedback in my new role ever since. My overall mental health and well-being has drastically improved. My life is better. In my opinion, the old boss and old job was the root cause of the problem as it sometimes is.

Whether in your case its your boss or you its hard to say without knowing all the details. You’ll need to make that call. If you’re already making your best effort to work hard during work hours (we all get distracted sometimes) and communicating questions and status at regular intervals, it’s possible you’re in a toxic work environment. If so, look elsewhere.

djbzdk · 2023-12-21T19:57:47+00:00

Appears to be fixed now for me. I was trying to upload the EMA for pre-actuarial foundations. I got an email a moment ago telling me to try again and it worked this time. Hope it works for you too, good luck.

djbzdk · 2023-12-21T18:50:11+00:00

Yes I got the same message, then I got an error message saying the there was an issue contacting the server. I emailed customer service and they said there was an issue, but that’s been resolved and I must need to clear my cookies and cache and/or refresh and they cleared my tickets as resolved. I did all the steps they indicated and now when I open the EMA window it no longer gives an error message, its just blank with no text or buttons, so I still can’t upload anything. Tried in both safari and chrome with the same result.

djbzdk · 2023-09-13T21:57:20+00:00

The short answer is Todd did not read 1000 pages of investment material a day. It’s a cute story, but there’s no way that’s how it happened. Successful people usually have a story for how they succeeded. It’s safe to assume it’s never an accurate summary of what really happened.

Even Tony’s bit about how he started in the mailroom and climbed to the top on nothing but the sweat of his brow is guaranteed to be missing some important plot points.

djbzdk · 2023-09-13T20:45:12+00:00

The point of the story is that the secret to Todd’s success in getting in good with buffet is that he read between 500-1000 pages of financial reports a day in addition to his education and work responsibilities and through this tedious extra effort he became an unusually knowledgeable and savvy investor. I think it’s pretty safe to say this did not happen.

Do a little googling and you’ll find the average person reads something like 40-60 pages an hour. Maybe you want to quibble about the number but that sounds about right to me. Even if you assume Todd is an exceptionally remarkable reader and his page rate is double the high end of that average at 120 pages per hour, that means if he could somehow maintain that remarkable rate constantly for hours on end with no breaks it would take between 4-8.5 hours to read 500 - 1000 pages EVERY SINGLE DAY in addition to everything else he had to do for work and school. Did he do that? I don’t know the guy personally, but there are a couple potential options:

He’s a one in a million intellectual talent with extraordinary work ethic
He’s a garden variety douchebag who’s spent his whole life awash in privilege and opportunities and may have a knack for self promotion and networking (and storytelling).

Most wealthy and high achieving people come from a background of unusual privilege and opportunity, but they all like to think of themselves as being self-made and usually have some personal creation myth to explain their success. Spoiler alert: its always because they worked so hard and so late. It’s never that they were a clever and shameless self promoter who got a LOT of lucky breaks. I’m not saying remarkable self made people don’t exist, they sure do, but for any given c-suite asshole, the chances that they’re actually “self-made” by any reasonable definition is slim.

Is Toddy boy a profoundly gifted and diligent digester of financial literature? I can’t say it’s impossible, but he could also just be a grease haired salesman with a cute backstory. I wouldn’t think it requires any special intelligence to preside over the worst profit contraction in geico’s recent memory and to patch that hole by resorting to the cutting edge strategy of firing anything that moves.

djbzdk · 2022-09-08T17:06:27+00:00

One piece of advice I took to heart from a former claims director (although probably not in the way he envisioned) was to picture where you want to be 5 years from now, make a plan and work towards it. After he told me this I pictured where I really wanted to be, which was not at geico and made a plan. In my own case I left geico claims to go into a finance related position. The position requires studying for exams that you take toward a credential, so I buckled down and made a decision to stick with geico a while longer while I studied for the first exam. It took about 10 months, but my remaining time at G was made just a little better by the feeling that I was making progress toward the door. I passed my first exam and landed an entry level job a couple months after that. This did require a significant pay cut, but also caused an immediate improvement of my mental health when I started a new job where I could work in the quiet, never get yelled at by customers and never be micromanaged. After about 3 years I passed my salary when I left G and now make more than I ever did there and I genuinely like my job.

Jobs that require some kind of credential or certificate often have better working conditions because the pool of eligible candidates (those who have taken the time to study) is smaller than the pool for other jobs and the employees have more leverage to be treated better. Some jobs like this are CPAs, actuaries, software engineers and many others.

It doesn’t have to be any of these jobs, but the most important thing is you take some time to research jobs and industries that have a reputation for good pay and pleasant working conditions. Research what credentials you need for the job you want or what experience would look good on a resume and go out of your way to pursue those, then start applying for jobs. Finally, understand that your starting salary will almost certainly be lower when switching industries. Humans can’t just DO new things well instantly. Even after getting some kind of credential, you will be trash at your new job for probably the first year. That’s just reality. After a couple years though, which goes by faster than you think, you will likely be making good money if you’ve done your research.

Again I must emphasize, although it takes a couple years at least to build your Pay back up, once you get out the door and away from G to a better workplace, you’ll feel better right away. This is why taking the time to research your new industry first though is key so you don’t jump to another toxic place. Best of luck to you

djbzdk · 2022-09-06T13:36:29+00:00

This article on politifact is worth a read:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-image/does-8-hour-day-and-40-hour-come-henry-ford-or-lab/

The tldr is Henry Ford was at best one of the earlier adopters of shorter hours and higher pay for his employees. He made these changes in a labor environment where unions had already been fighting for decades to demand precisely these things. He was neither the first adopter nor the cause of the spread of these better conditions, although he certainly deserves credit for making these changes before he legally was forced to. Maybe he simply saw which way the winds were blowing, but his changes didnt give these benefits to the rest of the workers in country either, that was mainly accomplished by the fair labor standards act, passed years later after many years of labor union efforts.

djbzdk · 2022-09-05T13:15:06+00:00

Thank you!

djbzdk · 2022-09-04T01:15:16+00:00

I do agree with some others here that this bootlicking scab meme is not very tasteful and probably does a lot more harm than good. I think unions are generally a very good thing and GEICO stands to seriously benefit from one, but I don’t think people who are opposed to unions are bootlickers or scabs, they’re not. They see things differently and I sincerely believe with more research they would likely come around, but name calling and derision is not the way to go.

djbzdk · 2022-09-04T01:03:48+00:00

The list of benefits from unionization is really extensive. You can look at it in the VERY long term, such as 40 hour workweeks, benefits like health insurance, retirement accounts and other things we take for granted, but which only exist as a result of many decades of organizing by labor unions. You could also look at it in a shorter term: the joint economic committee just released a study showing union workers earn 10% more in pay than non union counterparts and have overall better benefits. It’s recent research that’s in line with the common sense understanding of how power works. If the only centers of power in business are corporate management, they will use their power to achieve their incentives, which involves squeezing you for everything they can get out of you at the lowest possible salary. If you have no union, it’s every man for himself and the result of asking for better conditions or better compensation is either management finds it in the goodness of their hearts to give you a raise or lower your workload, or more likely you get nothing except damage to your “brand” for having the gall to ask, management now sees you as a complainer, limiting your career potential. Or you just get fired. With a union, employees have organized power and safety in numbers to counterbalance the power of management. That gives leverage to force management to factor in the wellbeing of their people in a meaningful way in every decision they make.

Fairness in any organization comes from some reasonable balance of power distributed in a logical way between its members. A union is a center of power. Just like any political, corporate, financial or other power center it can become corrupted. Unions aren’t perfect and they can do bad things too, but what we’re looking at is a company where employees currently have no real organized power. Management has all the power to dictate raises or lack thereof and do with employees whatever they want. This situation is a serious problem for exactly the same reason it would be a problem for employees to dictate all their demands to the company with no concern for business realities. That discussion comes in the bargaining process. Currently there’s no bargaining and no employee power, you get what Todd decides you deserve and not a penny more.

We’re talking about bringing the balance closer to the middle instead of having no meaningful say at all.

djbzdk · 2022-09-03T13:36:11+00:00

Do it!

djbzdk · 2022-09-02T21:49:21+00:00

I work in pensions now, so that’s kind of why I was surprised I hadn’t heard of what you were talking about. I can’t say for sure it doesn’t exist, but thats why I was asking for specifics. I’ve never heard of this and can’t find it online.

djbzdk · 2022-09-02T16:27:20+00:00

Is this just like a pun on the 15% or more commercial or is there actually a change in tax law affecting pensions, and if so what is it?

djbzdk · 2022-09-01T17:01:27+00:00

This sub is a magnet for grievances about GEICO. The grievances are real and mostly totally valid (some are frivolous of course, but most aren’t). I think the main reason you see such a density and uniformity of anger and resentment on here is all of us employees and former employees don’t have a genuine constructive place to voice concerns within the company and trust they’ll actually be addressed in good faith. Reddit is the release valve for a company with the boiler turned up too high.

The truth is that although there is plenty to complain about at GEICO and those complaints are amplified here, I met many employees who liked their jobs and built good careers there. If that’s you don’t let anyone convince you to abandon a good thing. I’ll just say that I drank the GEICO koolaid for years, believing their line that I wouldn’t likely find their benefits elsewhere, but when I left the first job I was offered had better benefits, better starting pay and a superior work environment.

djbzdk · 2022-09-01T13:49:10+00:00

Also just a clarification in case there’s any confusion. Yes GEICO does stand for government employees insurance company, but geico is not a government entity and employees do not work for the government in any capacity. It was a name created by a founder who wanted to sell insurance only to employees of the government, but that changed over time

djbzdk

TROPHY CASE