investment and savings are for people who earn more than their expenses. I support a wife and a retired mom, and a house on one salary, and apart from work-mandate Teachers Retirement System of Texas, I have no real savings other than about $1,000 for emergencies.


401K's are a fucking LIE and useless unless a person is willing to put i around $15,000 a year or more, which is ridiculous for someone working a corporate gig at $30,000/year.

did you read the whole articles or just the headlines?

in the one where the express stores closed, some retailers will reopen (and others might move in. eg on my area, familly dollar and the like cover small communities)

in the second article, the economy in those towns dried up. walmart did the smart thing by moving. why would they keep a store with no shoppers?

again, maybe different stores will move in or maybe more people will buy online. making brick and mortar moot.

why do people expect things to stay the same forever? that’s the foolishness...

every change brings new challenges and opportunities. it’s always been like that. always always always. ALWAYS.

It takes years of unemployment before anything positive can come out of it. Years of lives being ruined due to lack of work. Jeez, guess you loved Thatcher's closing of the mines "ah, sure something will come up. Don't worry about it"

So you don't think that Walmart should have some responsibility to the towns? This is a company who will happily spend years undercutting on their profits just to shut down local stores to have a monopoly. When they get that monopoly and decide "ah, didn't go as well as we thought it would. Shut down and fuck the town in the ass". This is exactly what you said you hated before. Government subsidised companies able to get a monopoly on towns.

Cold man.

As someone in his late 20s who has a few years work of an employer marched 401k tucked away, could you elaborate on this? Like how do you figure? Being an actual adult is new to me still

Ty rob

ok rob, im glad you have mandated teachers systems retirement because that... makes you indirectly a stock owner haaahaaaahaaaa

yep, that’s where your pension is gonna come from: walmart. amazon. exxon... if they get looted... so does your pension.

it’s a very eleborate system of investments as you can see:

https://www.trs.texas.gov/Pages/inve...framework.aspx

have 750K in Roths, 250K in regular IRAs

i dont know anything about thatcher, sorry.

as for the unemployment... it was unemployment in the towns that made the stores unprofitable.

if there are no customers, how do you pay your employees?

you pay them to sell nothing?

:confused:



the way i see it walmart provided a service to the town and got paid for said service. people chose walmart’s service over the other offers. nobody got marched there at gunpoint.

now if the town offered incentives for walmart, or asked for things in return then maybe something is due? i don’t know what deal they had. there is none mentioned in those articles. you think walmart should keep the stores open at a loss? their returns barely beat a savings account at this stage.

but as long as there are shoppers there will always be someone to supply them.

e.g., ups is my supermarket now. the driver got a union job and makes more money than me. great benefits too. some day robots will make drivers obsolete, so get ready. but today... ups wins. tomorrow, someone else

roths are the best way, pay taxes in, not out. So any gains are untaxed. Use dollar cost averaging if you're scairt, otherwise, find a good stock. The ones that worked in the past for me are BAIDU, FB, V, a couple more, right now I have a lot in BABA, it's down 8% from my buy in price, but I think Chinese stocks are about the most promising out there, YMMV

Are you sure you're not a Libertarian, symbols? Haven't been following the thread, just reading here and there

maybe only as an allergic reaction to bolsheviks and junk money printers who want to tell you that there is such thing as a free lunch and they’ll deliver it to you next tuesday :p

NOT IF SCHUNK AND BERNIE AND AOC HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT THAT

401K's and investment retirement plans are all set up to benefit those whit the most salary and with the most knowledge about stock market and investments. Every employee, no matter how uneducated in investment they are, is expected to pick and choose their stocks, bonds, trusts, and various other options to "invest" their retirement money in the stock market. There are no guarantees, and there is no safety net should your investment broker fuck you over.


My mother's 401K retirement fund from 25 years working at a top-notch cardiologist in Houston lost over 50% of it's funds overnight due to the Enron scandal, money she will never get back.


Unless you can afford to put away 15% of your salary, or at least 15,000 a year. If that is the case then the 401K can work very favorably for you, but it is still putting your hard earned retirement money into a gambling pyramid scheme.



It used to be that large corporations and companies would set up trusts that they would feed money into, and which would get invested for safe returns (NOT stock market, more like government bonds and IRA's) so that long-term employees could draw a pension.


This is the way that America became such a mighty industrial powerhouse, making sure employees were taken care of, loyalty was a given because the company cared enough to look after you (after the unions forced the capitalists hands), all backed up by government regulations. This meant more $$ in employees hands, more spending, and more healthy economy. Now? the $$ goes to the top of the pyramid scheme,a nd to shareholders who are looking for return opn investment, and do not care about the actual health of the companies.


Those regulations were gutted by Reagan and instead of safe pension plans, everyone absorbed those funds to use in paying off dividends and latched onto the 401K model.


The rich making the rules work for the rich.


same old story...

the problem with pensions is that they are a guaranteed return and often end up in a deep fucking hole, paying out much more than they take in

e.g. see:brazil

These last few pages make me think he'd have probably found her a bit too much of a Lefty for his tastes.

I don't know what is worse....

Defending Trump or defending WalMart....

i know

i shop at walmart

$35 purchase i get 2 day free shipping

why even drive?

commerce is glorious

o man! this got lost in the shuffle im sorry

so... i dont understand this very well

the rails are hugely profitable you say

and the the government is subsidizing unprofitable rail lines to keep them open for whom?

From Demand Progress:

The unprofitable parts of the rail are subsidised to ensure they stay open cos while there aren't enough people who use it to be economically viable, they're still vital for small villages like the one I live in to remain connected. Take away the railway and these places would basically become ghost towns.

aaaaah....

but what goes on in these towns? they’re just bedroom communities? (wikipedia says the britishism is “dormitory village”, or something)

yes?