This is actually true— Duke Energy guaranteed a $10 million line of credit so the Democrats could hold their 2012 convention in Charlotte. The host committee never paid it back. Duke simply wrote it off. Shareholders (and ultimately ratepayers) ate roughly $6 million of the cost after taxes. Jim Rogers, Duke’s CEO at the time and a co-chair of the host committee, shrugged it off as a contribution “for the greater good.” Years later Lynn Good collected $20–21 million packages—mostly stock and incentives—while North Carolina families watched electricity prices climb and the company sought rate hikes. A regulated monopoly underwriting one party’s convention, absorbing the loss, then handing its top executives eight-figure pay. That’s the arrangement.

You're not supposed to afford it. It's an entire industry designed to vacuum up every last dime of boomer wealth before they slip their mortal coils. For thousands of years, you were supposed to die at home surrounded by your loved ones. Instead the boomers destroyed a high trust society to maximize a number on a graph making it somehow make sense to liquidate your estate so a Haitian care worker can feed you seed oil slop and then smother you in your sleep after your retirement balance hits $0.

Most people never think about this until it’s too late. If your parents have assets, there are no affordable long term care options for them, unless they are wealthy or have an increasingly rare type of insurance policy that will cover this. Medicare will not help them, as it doesn’t cover long term care. Don’t wait until your parent breaks a hip/leg or the dementia gets too advanced to work out your plan to deal with this reality.

Tricks millionaires used to pay less taxes than you! The rich created the rules

I genuinely don’t understand how ordinary people are supposed to afford assisted living for their aging parents. Some facilities charge upwards of $10,000 A MONTH. That’s $120,000 a year just to make sure your parents are properly cared for. How is the average family supposed to afford that?

For anyone curious about what it actually looked like to kill a generation of functioning cars, here’s an actual video from 2009 and brief explanation: The dealer first replaces the oil with sodium silicate solution. It’s a clear-ish liquid that crystallizes under extreme heat. As the engine warms up the solution begins to form small abrasive crystals in the oil system that shred the bearing and score the cylinder walls. Within seconds of starting the car you can see smoke billowing from the exhaust, this is the crystals scratching the cylinder walls and leaving small grooves for oil and solution to leak past into the combustion chamber and ignite/evaporate, producing the white smoke. Pretty soon the entire crankcase is full of crystals and freshly shredded metal flakes, the engine seizes. It took about 40 seconds in this video. Some engines reportedly lasted up to 7 minutes, but all were destroyed. That strikes me as sort of sad in a way, like watching a great warrior slowly lose a heroic last stand. Now, this is the part that gets insanely wasteful. These cars were sent to federally approved recycling facilities where they had 180 days to sell the non-engine parts before they were required to prove that they had shred the entire thing into scrap steel. But, in talking to a guy who ran one such facility at the time, he typically just sent them straight to the crusher. The timeframes allotted weren’t long enough to dismantle all of the cars, and even if you could, the marginal prices of the parts was greatly diminished. You cannot sell 1000 transmissions when only 50 went bad that year, they became worthless. So just like that, in order to increase prosperity and save the environment, 677,000 entire running cars and trucks were turned directly into rebar worth a few cents per pound. The entire Obama administration was like a chapter out of atlas shrugged.

My grandfather paid into a whole life insurance policy for 41 years. $250,000 death benefit, premiums fully paid, policy marked "paid-up" since 2019. He passed away in March. My grandmother filed the claim expecting the $250,000 that funeral costs and three decades of planning were built around. The insurer sent a letter back: the policy had lapsed eleven months before he died. Death benefit owed: $0. She called, confused, holding a "paid-up" certificate from 2019 in her hand. The rep explained that in 2015, he'd taken a small policy loan against the cash value, $8,000, for a roof repair, and never paid it back. Interest on that loan compounded silently every year, invisible on any statement they ever read closely, until the accumulated loan balance finally exceeded the cash value itself. The moment that happened, the policy automatically terminated for nonpayment, with a single notice mailed to an address he'd moved out of nine years earlier. Forty-one years of premiums. An $8,000 loan from a decade ago. Zero payout. The rep said: "The policy loan provision is standard language in section 12 of the contract. It's disclosed at issuance." Disclosed once, in 2015, before anyone could know it would quietly erase a quarter million dollars eleven years later. They didn't deny the claim. The policy destroyed itself years before he died, and nobody was required to tell them until it was already gone.

Anti vaxxers are really flat earthers. They just don’t know it yet. Because they are so stupid.

Can someone explain why Strive holds $50M of $STRC on its balance sheet? They’re collecting 12% from Strategy while offering preferreds paying 13–15%. It makes no sense to me.

Holy shit they're doing it. They're stealth-privatizing social security. It's really happening.

Trump is spending 400 million dollars to help republicans in the midterms. 80 million people would have voted straight republican ticket if there was no war in Iran, $2 gas, and unredacted Epstein files. Easy way to save 400 million dollars.

Nobody will ever pay you $20,000 to fix their problem if buying from you forces them to admit they were stupid Rich guys will happily lose $50,000 a month doing the wrong thing rather than sit on a Zoom call & admit to a 24-year-old that they suck at running their business Look at how divorce lawyers, TRT clinics & cult leaders close people in 10 minutes: They hand the buyer a scapegoat before they ever ask for money The TRT clinic tells him his low energy comes from microplastics in the tap water, never his 4 hours of sleep. The divorce lawyer tells her the ex-husband is a clinical narcissist, never that she picked wrong How to weaponize "Ego Absolution: on high-ticket buyers: 1. Tell the prospect his offer & his work ethic are elite so his ego relaxes 2. Blame an external enemy he already resents ("Your funnel would be doing $300k/mo right now, Meta's ad auction is just taxing you 80% because their algorithm punishes high-ticket offers") 3. Show him the escape hatch once he realizes the failure wasn't his fault Once his ego is off the hook, his psychological defense drops to zero When we publish posts on X breaking down how ad platforms rob high-ticket businesses & how we pull $0.25 webinar opt-ins & $5-50 booked calls organically instead, burned founders wire $15k on the first call (yegor. com) Enjoy Bucko!

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?” Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century. politico.com/news/magazine/2…

One of the cruelest things about today's economy is how quickly a middle-class household can lose everything it worked for. You can have a decent job, an apartment, a car, and a little money saved. Then you get laid off. Three months later, the savings are gone. Six months later, you're carrying credit card debt just to keep up with basic expenses. And the job applications keep getting rejected. Meanwhile, rent, insurance, groceries, and loan payments continue showing up right on schedule. People love to talk about financial responsibility. But millions of Americans are one prolonged stretch of unemployment away from discovering how little financial security they actually have. That's a terrifying way to live.