It isn’t going to be one or the other (if they don’t offer a 401k, then you can use IRAs), unless you just make a bad choice. An employer can contribute to a 401k and also provide a pension (mine used to but I’ve been around long enough that I get both the pension and 401k with matching) but if I had a choice, I could pick a pension for example but also put money into an IRA for retirement that would normally go to a 401k.

If you absolutely had to pick one, it isn’t going to be the same answer for everyone. Amounts, what you’re able to contribute, matching, risks and tax situations are going to vary from person to person and their employer.

As far as controlling your money, some 401k’s allow some extra control, some don’t but most have a middle ground except for their company stock which you can usually directly buy. If you’re 401k allows general different ‘markets’ and/or ‘lifecycle’ buckets (they get more conservative on investment risk the closer you get to your retirement age) is, at the end of the day, all controlled by a broker and they are making the actual decision as to what to invest and how. Some plans may allow you to invest into individual stocks through the 401k’s brokerage though.

At the end of the day though, if all you had was a pension offered which you aren’t going to be contributing your income to, then you should invest in some sort of retirement plan yourself, be it an IRA, money market, bonds, CDs or whatever.

They can spend as much time as they want with the patient. The insurance simply caps how much is billable.

I’m sure laws on this differ everywhere in the world but I assume you’re talking US. It is doubtful an employer could win a law suit against you for not showing your specific methodology unless you have a contract and that was part of it.

As far as firing goes, there aren’t very many situations that an employer can’t fire you over for cause but obviously also can fire you without cause.

Would they own the templates? Yeah but they’d also have to know to look for them unless you told them. Otherwise they’d probably already have created some templates and expect you to use and perhaps improve them.

Reminds me of a friend of mine. He was promoted to some sort of engineering metrics analyst. His job it turned out, was to take a bunch of different reporting products and then create a presentation once a week to go over all of the metrics and have them in easy to understand graphs on a specific template.

So of course a month into the job he automates the entire thing and his job now takes a total of 5 minutes because he waits on the actual numbers to be crunched and spit out into the new template.

He’s super bored and asks me if he should tell his boss what he’s done and possibly get another promotion out of it. I said “Sure, if you want to be promoted to the layoff line.”

So his boss gave him some extra tasks and he just keeps blazing through them. His boss wants to know how he’s able to be the most productive person they’ve ever seen in that position. He asks me again, if he should tell the boss and his boss’ boss because they are super impressed. I said “No. Absolutely not. Just shrug and tell them you just do your best every day. They’ll eat that right up.” He does. He gets a promotion a couple of months later to a middle manager of some type. Probably due the Peter Principle.

Don’t ever give out your templates or show your process. If they can hire someone less experienced at a much cheaper rate, they eventually will.

The problem is that even if everybody started fucking now, it wouldn’t change the fact that many countries including China are on pace to not be able to even maintain their current GDP in the 2030’s and other than doing something to replace human labor (bringing people in or automation) to maintain or increase their GDP, there is nothing else they can do. It is too late.

Everyone is in trouble here but some are worse off than others. Especially when they’re going to have to figure out what to do with people that will be aging out of the workforce.

Well if you want to hand wave stuff for a story, sure. The issue with the beacon is a few fold though. So, let’s say they use something close to the speed of light to communicate like a laser and there happens to be no obstructions and the beam is so narrow and powerful it just works. Being even a few light years away just isn’t accurate enough to know exactly where something is going to be in space. Sure, if it travels in an exact straight line (so it’s not near any massive bodies) there’s likely to be some sort of drift, even slightly angular. That’s going to translate into likely at least kilometers in the 10k range between the time it takes the data to be known vs. how many years have already passed from that last bit of data.

Sure though, take away any need for inertia or fuel and yeah, they can just stop somewhere, figure it out and go again and grab it or better yet there’s just some technobabble thing that can instantaneously keep Sol updated in near real-time but also the ship coming to get it. That’s just plot devices for a story though and an author can hand wave away anything they want, so there’s no need to say that if we just talked about a problem in advance, we would just figure it out and make it happen because that only needs to be done in some made-up fantasy if that’s what the author wants to do.

How would a space beacon be detected by an FTL ship? Unless there’s some sort of weird quantum entanglement communication with some paired exotic material, whatever data (probably a waveform of some type) would be so fractional it is unlikely to be useful or even detectable.

But on top of that, if we still contend with inertia, a ship has to slow down precisely to the velocity of the slower ship or do it multiple times to detect it somewhere and then speed back up again.

But then, we’d also have to figure out why the resources are even worth it to spend and weigh the chances of success and the risks of failure.

Unless the problem is arbitrary for everything involved it is doubtful that regardless of what the future holds for technology that we just wouldn’t pick up the other ship/passengers.

Here in California, my annual bill is a little over $6500/year, so $540ish/month. I can only use one company and the PUC is about to approve yet another rate increase again (they’ve never been rejected).

Having a NAT on a consumer router is indeed the norm. I don’t even see how you could say it is not.

I never said NAT = security. As a matter of fact, I even said

It was not designed for security but coincidentally blah blah

But hey, strawmanning didn’t stop your original comment to me either, so why stop there?

Let me tell you: All. Modern. Routers. include a stateful firewall.

I never even implied the opposite.

To Linux at least, NAT is just a special kind of firewall rule called masquerade.

Right, because masquerade is NAT…specifically Source NAT.

I’m just going to go ahead an unsubscribe from this conversation.

So, really, you were “correcting” me for you and your specific setup at the very beginning because your router’s firewall has a deny rule for all inbound connections because I must have been confusing what a NAT and what a firewall is because I must have been talking about your specific configuration on your specific devices.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Are you saying that everyone’s router’s firewall drops all packets from connections that originate from outside of their network?

Because, as I said:

layer 7 firewalls for the network which are going to be where most the majority of attacks are concentrated.

The NAT doesn’t have to operate at layer 7 to be effective for this because

coincidentally it is doing the heavy lifting for home network security because it is dropping packets from connections originating from outside the network, barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.

The point is that the SPI firewalls are not protecting against the majority of the attacks we’ve seen for decades now from botnets and other arbitrary sources of attacks, except, perhaps targeted DDoSing which isn’t the big problems for most home networks. They must worry about having their OS’ and software exploited and owned in the background, which doesn’t get much of an assist from a router’s firewall.

Obviously, this is however true for the NAT since the NAT are going to drop connections originating from outside the network attempting to communicate with that software to exploit it

barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.

They are not layer 7 firewalls for the network which are going to be where most the majority of attacks are concentrated. No citation needed unless you believe they are layer 7 firewalls or using something like Snort.

Added some clarification in my first sentence so it makes a bit of sense.

The word you are looking for is firewall not NAT.

No the word I’m looking for is the NAT. It was not designed for security but coincidentally it is doing the heavy lifting for home network security because it is dropping packets from connections originating from outside the network, barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.

Consumer router firewalls are generally trash, certainly aren’t layer 7 firewalls protecting from all the SMB, printer, AD, etc etc vulnerabilities and definitely are not doing the heavy lifting.

By and large automated attacks are not thwarted by the firewall but by the one-way NAT.

You’d better hope that you can NAT ipv6 because if you aren’t behind a CGNAT and then your LAN is completely exposed without a NAT you’re very likely going to have devices exploited.

NATs on people’s boundary has been doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting for everyone’s security at home.

I just wanted to say that Palestinians and their Canaanite ancestors are Semites as well. So, if we take the phrase antisemitic literally, then the current Israeli government is also antisemitic.