Lion ponderings

After long dreaming of running around the Apple campus, it was revealed to be for employees only.      Every entrance is gated with guards.  All that space is just for the boys club of involuntary office commuters making over $300k.  Kiwipedia clearly states "The Visitor Center is the only part of Apple Park which tourists are permitted to visit." Indeed, Steve Morris, Marc Merlin, Jerri Ellsworth, Curious Marc & the gang may own houses in the center of everything, but it's all gated office campuses now.   They're just tourists in their homes.  It was formerly an HP campus & accessible to the public.  Lions visited it in 2000.  There are no photos of the interior but it was comprised of a huge cube farm with a tall ceiling & power drops from the ceiling.  Lions went there during rolling blackouts & the intercom was playing warnings about it. It might have been a converted factory & quite outdated by 2000, with im...

 Waterproof grocery bags would be nice.       Is it too soon for BRK to become an AI datacenter?  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/v8o8vmZBObk   The 2nd refrigerator death of the lion kingdom's renting career came to pass.  They were both separated by roughly 22 years.   This one spoiled some $50 of food.  Fortunately, it was manely storing electronicals which would not perish in a short term outage. Refrigerators are no longer designed to be repaired, cleaned, or recharged.  They're just recycled straight away.  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Started pondering the fee implications in the rule of 55.  Keeping the current 401k intact entails paying some manetenance fees.  The fees could be greater than the tax penalty of waiting until 59 & jamming everything out before 70.    Starting distributions of the current 401k at...

 The 10 gig download of black cauldron was a rare 80's miss.  Even the beastmaster & the evil dead movies were better.  Basically, they had to throw someone in the mcguffin to destroy it.  The obvious sacrifice was the evil king, but instead, they sacrificed the dog.  Then the evil king got killed by the cauldron's super powers anyway, they recovered the dog, & the mcguffin finished unscathed.  It was all a bit pointless. The mcguffin had some power to reanimate the dead into an army.  It reminded lions of the dead being reanimated in Army of Darkness which didn't come until 1992.          Lions saw elements of snow white getting reused, manely the 7 dwarfs making a brief reprise in the form of the thousands of dwarfs.  British accents required playing it at 1.5x.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Watching Stripes again for the 1st ti...

 Another amusing dream which began in an urban highrise apartment with wraparound windows.  The bathroom had wraparound windows & lions assumed there was an LCD curtain function.  From there, the lion kingdom decided to venture into the underground complex of Resident Evil.  The underground complex was now full of H1B zombies.  They weren't attacking but it seemed only a matter of time before they did.  They were filing things.    The complex descended down & down.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lions have recurring dreams about urban highrise apartments, but probably don't care where they live.  They spent the 1st 40 years in suburban locations & now are in the most urban location of all of them.  It was converted into a city center in the last 5 years.  Every place before 2020 would have been considered suburban.   ...

After paying another huge tax bill & pondering more cash in tax advantaged accounts, the problem was the chance of capital gains tax actually being higher than regular income tax.  The 12% tax bracket when counting standard deduction is now up to $63k.  The 1st $12k are only 10%.  If the stonks are in a after tax account, interest rates or the cash balance is 0 by the time the stonks are sold, lions could pay 15% instead of 12% on the capital gains.  Most of the IRA funds are currently in dividend paying stonks, which would be taxed at 24% in Calif*.  The dividend is less than what cash is earning, though, for now.  The amount of cash which could be moved to the IRA's would still be paltry, despite every effort to decrease the tax burden.  A lot of cash is going to be needed for housing & transitioning.  It could cost 15% capital gains instead of 12% income tax to raise it from stonk sales in the after tax account.  On the other paw, ...