Looks like inflation is around 2.6% and holding steady/falling slowly.

This is good news for the stock market and could impact elections in November since we'll likely see a rally if rates do get cut in Sept.

This interview mostly goes over social policy, so I hope there's a follow-up with fiscal policy as well.

Here's an AI-generated transcript, which has some mistakes but hopefully is helpful. I tried copying it here, but it was too long.

Some interesting tidbits I liked:

• Liz challenged Chase on gender affirming care - his response was "no to surgery before 18, yes to medication if parents and doctors agree"
• open borders - wants an "Ellis Island"-style system where you register and then get to work, while still maintaining a strong police presence to keep out criminals
• courting those on the right of the LP - wants to work together on common causes, but will disagree on social issues
• vaccine mandates - no mandates from the government, but private businesses absolutely can; he thinks businesses requiring masks/vaccines is stupid because it limits customers

The whole discussion was pretty interesting, and I think it's interesting that Liz Wolfe came out as more conservative than Zach (apparently, Zach rarely discusses personal opinions).

So far I'm pretty happy with Chase as the candidate because:

• he's pretty well-spoken - reminds me a bit of Gary Johnson with less "aloof"-ness
• he appears confident and seems to do a good job justifying his positions on core libertarian principles
• very different from both Trump and Biden, so he should contrast well
• going after young voters - he's young, and he's highlighting issues that young people seem to care about, so I'm hopeful that'll resonate with young voters

I certainly disagree with him on some issues, but I think he'll be a good voice for the party. I would like to see more discussion on economic policy though.

Anyway, what are your thoughts? Are you excited for a Chase Oliver campaign, or do you think the Libertarian Party should have made a different choice?

This is exciting for me because:

• I model ny taxes in my spreadsheet anyway, so I'm likely to notice a mistake
• I usually use FreeTaxUSA to file for free, and this means there's one less party to share my personal information with
• my state's taxes are pretty simple, so I don't need state-specific tax software

I hope this helps simplify things for some people and save a bit of money as well. I'm going to try it out next year.

Do any of you estimate your taxes? Are you interested in trying out this service?

Looks like most of the improvements have nothing to do with GNOME, so they should also probably impact Kalpa (the KDE MicroOS distro).

I'm particularly interested in these developments because I'm going to upgrade the CPU on my NAS (old Phenom II -> Ryzen 1700), and I'm considering reinstalling w/ MicroOS. It's currently running on an old SATA SSD, but NVMe drives are getting so cheap that it's probably worth an upgrade.

Oliver's victory on Sunday night was a blow to the Mises Caucus, the right-leaning faction that took control of the Libertarian Party at the 2022 convention and that had orchestrated Trump's appearance at the convention. That faction's preferred candidate was Rectenwald.

I'm not a fan of the Mises Caucus, so I think this is hilarious.

There was widespread media attention in recent weeks fixated on whether the Libertarian Party would nominate a prominent non-Libertarian like Kennedy or even Trump.

Neither got anywhere close to winning. Kennedy was eliminated after the first round of balloting, while Trump did not even qualify for the first round and received just six write-in votes.

Good on you LP.

Now, I know next to nothing about Chase Oliver, but being gay and young will certainly set him apart from the old men he's competing against. I hope he'll get a good amount of media attention to spread the libertarian message.

Anyway, what are your thoughts? Did the convention make the right call? Would one of the other candidates have been better? Would you prefer no candidate?

I haven't finished listening to this, and unfortunately there isn't a transcript. According to the comments, the transcript exists on Spotify (I don't have a subscription, sorry), so that can be an option.

Anyway, I'm well on my way to my number, so I've been thinking about maximizing my time while I wait for the market to do its thing.

I've been listening to a lot of The Money Guy show recently, which has a lot of overlap with the FI mentality, and the recording theme is to optimize for enjoyment. I think that's something I've been forgetting recently, so I'm glad I found this podcast to help keep me grounded.

Anyway, thoughts? How are you spending you time now? How to you expect that to change when you're FI? Are there changes you'd like to make to optimize things today?

From the website:

OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying deep learning models from cloud to edge. It accelerates deep learning inference across various use cases, such as generative AI, video, audio, and language with models from popular frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, and more. Convert and optimize models, and deploy across a mix of Intel® hardware and environments, on-premises and on-device, in the browser or in the cloud.

Here are just the number for all of you degenerates who just want some milestones for your spreadsheets.

Average total retirement savings by age:

• <35 - $49,130
• 35-44 - $141,520
• 45-54 - $313,220
• 55-64 - $537,560
• 65-74 - $609,230

• =75 - $462,410

Average 401k balance by age:

• <25 - $5,236
• 25-34 - $30,017
• 35-44 - $76,354
• 45-54 - $142,069
• 55-64 - $207,874
• 65 and older - $232,710

And retirement savings targets from various advisors:

Fidelity:

• 1x by 30
• 3x by 40
• 6x by 50
• 8x by 60
• 10x by 67

Rowley:

• 1x by 35
• 5x by 50
• 7x by 70

Anyway, do you like metrics like these?

Important dates:

• expected summit date is Nov. 2 and 3 soon after Open Source Summit Japan
• call for speakers is going to end around the end of July

There will be another announcement in a couple weeks.

Horse styles of the ’50s

For crying out loud, Jonah! Three days late, covered with slime, and smelling like fish! … And what story have I got to swallow this time?