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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • That’s very generous of you, but I would advise against doing this secretly, for a few reasons.

    First of all, the information needed to do this (like their loan account number) is considered personal financial information whose disclosure is protected. There is nothing preventing them from giving you the info willingly, but if you try and find it out without their knowledge you may be breaking the law.

    Also, technically any gifts between people who aren’t directly related are treated as income by the US government, and there is technically tax owed on it. And yes, paying off a loan would still count as a gift. The threshold to trigger tax on a gift is high ($19k for 2025), but the tax is the liability of the giver, not the receiver. Depending on how big the gift is, you could be inadvertently opening yourself up for scrutiny by the US IRS. But if you are open about the gift and plan it with the recipient ahead of time, you can also do all the required tax planning to make sure you don’t run afoul of the IRS.

    I don’t think I need to remind you that the legal climate regarding foreigners in the US on student visas is precarious right now. It would suck if your attempt at a secret gift ended up backfiring and ruining your plans for education in the US.


  • dhork@lemmy.worldtoPersonal Finance@lemmy.mlDedollarization
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    4 days ago

    What you are really asking is whether you should hedge your US-based investments, anticipating a dramatic fall in the value of the dollar. But even if governments and large corporations start keeping reserves in Euro or other currencies, that doesn’t automatically mean the dollar tanks.

    You could find a fund that specifically invests in non-US companies. Take note of the fees associated with these, since they will be higher than bog-standard index funds. I wouldn’t go nuts and put all your eggs there, though. Take a portion of your overall net worth to bet against America, but don’t use it all. It is possible that the global economy decides that the business-friendly Trump policies have enough value to put up with all the chaos, and the dollar might even get stronger.

    Always remember as a an investor, you are a small fish, in the same tank as the sharks. You will be shark food eventually. Your goal is to simply survive by not being the slowest fish in the tank.

    Someone else in this thread offered Crypto as an option. It certainly seems attractive with the current regulatory environment. But make sure that you understand what you are buying if you go that route. There is a difference between an established currency with its own blockchain and governance, and some random President’s shitty token which took no effort to set up and whose market can be tanked by manipulators whenever they want. If you are not interested in the difference, stay far away.


  • You are all getting it all wrong. It’s not that the right wing has more charismatic leaders, or even better leaders. It’s that the right wing allows their politicians to lie with impunity. Their voters will turn a blind eye to the most egregious of falsehoods, as long as those voters are told what they want to hear.

    Their opposition doesn’t have that luxury. Their charismatic leaders must also speak truth. MLK was not only charismatic but he was able to relate the truth about the situation of the time that resonated with people of all races.

    Those charismatic people who can also stay true to reality are few and far between. It is very possible that in today’s political environment which is flush with cash, super-PACs, and self-dealing, all those people are simply not in politics. Leaving only the liars, and those are tolerated better on the Right.











  • She’s fake, she can be whatever she wants to be.

    But in the US (and I assume in Canada), many people identify based on where their ancestors came from, even if they came over several generations back, as long as their family still associated with that country’s culture. Because let’s face it, unless you have native heritage your ancestors came here from somewhere.


  • You have to pick a leader somehow. In authoritarianism, the leader is often the one who can take over by force, and can maintain that force over time (even across generations, for hereditary systems). While it’s possible for someone who takes over that way to be benelovent towards their people, it’s far more likely they will be violent and overbearing, because that’s how they got the gig in the first place.

    And after a few generations, the one in charge won’t have any memory of how their ancestor came to power in the first place, and just take it for granted that they ought to rule. So now you have a leader who is violent and overbearing, only because that’s how their parent taught them to be, not out of any real experience accumulating power.


  • The election apparatus in the US is extremely hard to rig. It’s run by local officials, so in order to fix the counting of voters you need to get to thousands of individual county/city/town election boards, all at once. Those boards have members of all parties generally present on them so there is a fair amount of local oversight to overcome, too.

    There was a bit of time in the early 2000’s where the voting machines themselves were suspect but some good work by independant researchers shined some daylight on that. Now most votes in the US are either done purely by paper ballots (counted by machines) or on machines that generate verifiable paper trails, and are very hard to just casually alter the count without being found out.

    Republicans rig the vote by manipulating their media. Roger Ailes was one of Nixon’s media advisors during Watergate. The lesson he took away was that if the media didn’t hold Nixon to account, he would have never had to resign. Ailes went on to run Fox News in the mid-90s, and the rest is history.




  • Right, there are legitimate cases for this. The argument, though, is that these companies are not to be trusted.

    I bought a new Toyota recently, and know from others that their app has some car tracking built in to it, where once you connect the app to the car you can see info on trips and gas mileage and such. When I bought mine, though, I carefully read all the T&Cs, and specifically declined the one that said it would sell my driving data to third parties. Guess what? I don’t see that historical data. A minor inconvenience, but it lets you know who they consider their real customers to be.