> Perhaps I have been given misinformation, but I have seen several people saying that the USD may be on the verge of hyperinflation

It seems highly unlikely that USD will experience hyperinflation. And, if it does, to be honest, it'll be because the world economy is collapsing as a whole and no currency will be safe.

I hate being wrong, but I hate not correcting myself even more, and it turns out you are correct: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/average-credit-card-interest-rate/

Have you looked at low interest balance transfers with no or low fees? 24-26% seems high to me for credit card interest, even given recent inflation, but is apparently normal. Are you paying a punitive rate because you missed payments?

Are they offering their driver's license information as well? It does seem odd, unless it's some sort of bank thing. Banks now require ID before you can open an account, but, unless they're planning to use your ID to open an account (red flag!), they normally wouldn't need your DL info

Stepbro, what are you drawing?

I agree, but I don't think doublechecking the script would've been enough here-- this is just bad backup design.

Right. The backups should be "untouchable". And why did the coworker write a script that somehow accessed all the backups. Seems dodgy

> always, ALWAYS double-check any script you're running on a live database

Wrong lesson. Your company should be making regular backups and, at most, you should lose no more than 1 day of work. Not your fault. Well, sort of your fault, but much bigger fault by the company.

I wouldn't call this a "life pro tip", but it reflects my basic life principle and I call it "hard agnosticism". It's easier to find holes in someone else's logic than to come up with a logical argument yourself. You can then generally conclude that, since there's no provably right or wrong answer, people should believe and act how they want. Ah, libertarianism!

If you could convince the bear a large number of large animals is stampeding or something, maybe, but I think the bear'd be more likely to attack the source of the nuisance.

I like potato-shaped :) because of the potato radius (https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/04/12/27697/potato-radius-to-define-dwarf-planets/). In the CSPICE computational libraries (https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/aboutspice.html), all bodies are modeled as "potatoes", or, formally, triaxial ellipsoids.

EDIT: the numbers I have say the triaxial diameters are 360.2 km × 266.0 km × 205.4 km

You're correct in thinking they are (almost) the same thing, but it's easier for average people (including people starting out in statistics) to think of "fair dice", "fair coin", "roulette wheel" or "what are the chances Ms Johnson has two boys..." versus something like "the discrete uniform distribution of {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}" or "assume an independent binary process repeated 3 times..." or whatever.

So, why "(almost)"? Because, in the real world, there are no fair die, no fair coins (I believe a study recently showed that the way most people flip coins, the side that was up originally is more likely to be up after the flip), gender distribution at birth is unequal (more boys born than girls), and so on. There isn't even really such a thing as a random sample since we have no way to generate true randomness.

So, the whole coin/marbles/roulette wheel/etc thing is just a way to make statistics more accessible to the beginners and the average person

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/ says we have 47 years left, but it only counts proven oil reserves and excludes the possibility we will discover more oil.

A Venn diagram on https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-much-oil-left-earth-2017-12-27 isn't particularly helpful, but points out there's almost certainly more oil that we can obtain economically and even more that we can obtain but will probably be too expensive to be worthwhile

I believe this is true for most or all birds and several reptiles. According to the highly educational https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VxV717PRBU (About 1:19 if you're impatient) anacondas do this as well, but it's even crazier as it's sort of a gangbang

They're small but they're also fairly close to Earth. If you're talking about "iridium flares" (satellites visible briefly at certain locations) it's because all of the sunlight is being reflected onto a relatively small area of the Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare

I believe most satellites are still not visible to the naked eye most of the time.

Keep in mind that credit card debt can be negotiated and sometimes paid off for pennies on the dollar. In some cases, the credit card companies (banks) can end up paying you money if they violate debt collection practices. Always do debt negotiation through a lawyer since they will sue debt collection practices violators whereas companies that just do negotiation won't.

There was a time when you could invest in FOREX using credit cards (almost sure you can't any more), which gave you a little bit of arbitrage. If you invest in FOREX using credit cards and make money, great. If you lose money, you can pay it off for less than the total amount. You're basically gambling with someone else's money

All that is a long-winded way of saying: consider doing it with the understanding that, if your business fails, you can recover some or most of the cost by negotiating debt.

Of course, do NOT use home equity or any other form of collateralized debt for risky ventures

You're correct, but that's like talking about opportunity cost. For anything I choose to do today, there's a chance there's something I could've done something I'd enjoy more. That doesn't mean I've "lost enjoyment": it simply means I don't 100% optimize my life, which I don't think anyone does.

I agree with https://www.reddit.com/user/TyrconnellFL/ that you lose money only in a metaphorical sense. I doubt agencies like the FDIC would reimburse you for "losing money" due to inflation

Different people have different tolerances for risk. If you don't feel comfortable investing in instruments that can lose money, stick to bank accounts (but remember the FDIC limit on protection), Treasury instruments, or other money insured by the government, and hope our government doesn't collapse any time soon :)

I think you need to edit your TL;DR to include the fact you slapped a little girl in the face, because that's the part of the story that stuck out to me.

I want Axel F and We Didn't Start The Fire :)

This is clickbait. The article clearly states "With a diameter of 1 to 2km, space rock named 2022 AP7 crosses our orbit but has ‘no chance’ of hitting Earth"

Arguably, there are many celestial bodies whose distance from Earth is decreasing at any given time

We measure the distance to nearby stars using parallax: simplified, we take two points in the Earth's orbit that are 186 million miles apart and see how much a nearby star has shifted against the background of other stars. This amount, while measurable, is very small and not something you'd be able to see with the naked eye.

At 50,000mph, it'd take you about 6 months to get 186 million miles and you wouldn't see even a slight shift in the nearest stars (unless you had a telescope), so no, stars wouldn't whiz by at that speed.

Take heart, though. Thanks to relativity, you can crank up your speed to where you might actually notice changes in stellar angles, both because the galaxy is denser as you travel towards the center and because your "rapidity" (speed compensated for contraction) get quite high. More information:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidity

As https://xkcd.com/1138/ notes, most maps like this look similar to population density maps. What might be REALLY interesting is to "divide" this map by population density or do something like "number of people served by a given zipcode", which should have some variations that don't look like a population heat map

Both Starbucks and openstreetmap.org would have a list of locations, but finding the opening dates would be tougher. Starbucks doubtless knows this information, but you might have to request is specifically, since they possibly don't think it's interesting enough to post publicly.

This sounds suspicious. The idea behind hard pulls is that other potential lenders can see how much credit you're requesting at one time even if you haven't received the credit yet. For example, if you're requesting credit from 10 different banks at once, a bank would have no way of knowing how much credit they could extend you because they would have no way of knowing how much credit you already had (or would soon have) and thus your available credit to income ratio.

If it works, great, do it, and find other banks that do it and get as much credit as you can :) But, I'm guessing they'll say at some point "oh, I'm sorry but my boss says we have to do a hard pull-- is that ok?". It's also possible they want to pre-qualify you for an amount of credit with a soft pull and then do the hard pull once you formally apply