So the story goes, if you burn $50k on a piece of fine art, the art appreciates to $150k as the gubment debases its currency, 1 option is to sell it like a stonk & recover $116k after paying $30k in capital gains tax.  Another option is to donate it & deduct $75k from taxes.  Lions never saw any value in buying art in order to shelter money from taxes unless the original goal was to donate money.  Instead of donating the original $50k, you'd earn $25k after the currency fell & donating the original amount.  Average inflation during a tripling of art prices would be 3% so you'd get ahead of average inflation.

Automatic 401k enrollment was the big deal lions didn't ponder enough.  That's driving the current bull market.  Presumably, it'll continue until animals start trading inside their 401k's, change jobs, or more employers drop 401k's.  The lion kingdom's last job did not provide a 401k for 2 years.  

The current generation treats them as set & forget accounts, rather than past generations which speculated.  It's possible that speculation will once again replace index funds.  It's unlikely the fed will ever take out all the quantitative easing money.

That made the stonk market basically what social security would have been if it was privatized 20 years ago.  It's volatile but not going broke in 10 years.  The SSD benefit is so much higher than the retirement benefit, it makes lions ponder if a torn ligament is good enough to get on.

The lion kingdom's social security benefit is definitely a pittance compared to even the most conservative money market fund.  Interest is going back to 0 as soon as the gubment can get it.  There is hope the stonk positions will be sufficient by then.

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Are any women not fake spam accounts or clickbait photos?

 

 Funny how 20 years of fake spam accounts & clickbait photos of hotties have made us automatically ignore all women.

 

 

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Dreamed heavenly mother wasn't satisfied with the current timeline & reset everything back to 2000 because the lion kingdom didn't have any kids.  The lion kingdom was 25 again, all the money was gone, all the rejections & get losts were yet to happen, but the memory of the next 24 years remaned like a dream.  The lion kingdom was sleeping on its futon again, pondering how to pay for the next year, still 6 figures in student loan debt.  There were some upsides.  Should lions apply for a job at Goog?  Should they invest in the stonk market at 7000, bitcoin at $1, nvidia at $1?  Their ligament wasn't torn anymore.  Their vision & teeth were a lot better.

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The lion kingdom's Casio FD91W dreams came to an end with yet another cheap stopwatch.  The 1st one was $12 in 2007 for timing flights. It died from water intrusion.  The 2nd one was $8 in 2024 for timing sunlight exposure.  A heat resistant time piece is essential for this purpose, which the phone is definitely not.  

 

The larger display made any vintage watch completely worthless.  The Casios went from $10 to $15 in the last 5 years.  It would have only had nostalgic value but never been worn as a watch.  

 

 Maybe the watch would have had the water resistance for a race.  The only race use would be counting laps by incrementing the alarm minutes & timing the last lap.  The laps would be in base 60.  It would be difficult to get the lap time & navigate to the alarm to increment the laps.  There could be a 2nd stopwatch just for time.  Most of the internet agrees the Casio is not water resistant though & would suffer the same fate as the stopwatch in a prolonged race.

There are still dreams of hacking a time piece to specifically count laps in base 100, automatically time each lap, undo laps, have a countdown timer, have ringtones.  The alarm function would become a set function for the countdown timer.  The day of week icons would animate to show the direction of the current mode.  No-one has ever used the alarm function.  Tap the start button to increment the laps.  Tap the reset button to decrement the laps.  Hold the reset button to clear the laps.   A new mode would just show the time between the last 2 lap increments.

 

It would be much cheaper to hack a full size stopwatch than a wrist watch.  It's believed the LCD pads & button pads on the original circuit board could be broken out to a daughter board.  The microcontroller would not be as efficient as the original ASIC.

This one might be a PIC, based on the 4 programming pins.  If it's not a PIC, the programming voltage would kill it.  It would be a tight squeeze to solder flying leads.  Outsourcing to pcbway would make it a $50 stopwatch but it would work.  There are $20 stopwatches which count up to 100 laps.  Just remember if you already did 100.  A 100 mile race is usually 100 laps.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FJ4LCMF

To be fair, the lion kingdom has pondered just getting another $8 stopwatch specifically to try to hack.  2 hours of rent money that could change a life.