otherbarry

That sounds pretty typical, didn't know they used to not charge for a residential pickup.

To be fair businesses that have a FedEx / UPS account and have regularly scheduled pickups do get charged for that. It's one of the items buried in the bills you get from them every week (can't remember offhand if the pickup fee is a weekly or monthly charge). Maybe the high volume businesses get it for free, not too sure.

I'd expect USPS to do the same but don't have any direct experience with their billing.

Where I work we have a similar situation, we sometimes have prepaid FedEx labels but no regular FedEx pickup so that has to be arranged differently on our end. We could pay FedEx their pickup fee if we wanted but we don't ship FedEx every day so it's kind of a waste of money, and the FedEx drivers would be coming and going without picking anything up most days.

Same here, back in the 90's had multiple year's worth of Nintendo Power magazines & later on Game Pro as well. I do remember seeing Game Informer around & sometimes bought those issues but never really got into them. I can't even think of any friends that had Game Informer magazines back in those days.

TBH I'm kind of surprised at those numbers /u/[email protected] posted, maybe Game Informer was a bigger thing outside of the northeast U.S. where I was.

Coincidentally, for no real reason I ponder this sort of stuff too! But I'm much more pessimistic about the outcomes haha.

The real answer to this stuff would be to find a financial advisor, I suspect setting up a trust and giving out x amount of money per year is the most sane approach.

re: your options

Give them a lump sum of $X million. They eat the taxes the first year and handle the savings themselves.

Keep in mind people tend to be terrible with money/finance. And also keep in mind you cannot force people to do what you think they should do with their money.

There will be a good percentage of people that will neglect any advice about keeping that $$ for taxes & such and will come back to you in a year asking for more $$ to cover the the taxes and expenses that they are facing - after all you were the one that put them in that position.

The other percentage of people will have remembered to keep some $$ to cover taxes but will likely still bankrupt themselves in the next few years - they too will come back to you asking for more $$ because, well none of that would have happened without you starting it all.

Hopefully you'll have a few people that didn't blow it all & maybe invested it, or at least paid off their bills and mortgages.

Create a company and hire them to “work” one hour a month for a big salary. If you put $25m in an account, the interest covers the salary. They get a steady bonus income with the added bonus of getting the best insurance available. Is that legal?

Not sure on the legality, I guess you're essentially creating some sort of shell company? Keep in mind both the company and the "employees" will be facing taxes. Those "employees" are going to end up in entirely new tax brackets depending how high you bumped their yearly incomes.

On the upside they would be paying way, way more into social security so at least they'll end up with a bit more coming back in their later years if social security still exists. And you could maybe do things like auto-enroll them into a 401k and invest that into retirement savings.. as long as each "employee" doesn't somehow screw that up since each 401k account is technically their own and you can't force your will on people to do things with their own money.

Set up a “shared” checking account they can use to pay for…whatever. But would these expenses count towards the gift tax? I do not know.

Not sure on that one but I suspect that's just another version of gift tax like you said. You'd better talk to a financial advisor.

Buy houses and let them live there rent-free. I don’t really like this one because I don’t want to be a lord to my friends and family.

The smart ones will immediately sell, even if they sell at a loss they'll make free money. The less smart ones will come back to you ever few years when something needs to be done with the house, it's very possible many of those people will be living in houses they can't actually afford to maintain and upkeep and you put them in that situation in the first place...

Yum, microplastics!

Windows has its default Remote Desktop Connection that uses RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), once enabled it will listen on port 3389. It is pretty solid and has a few features beyond VNC. Just be careful, you probably don't want to open that port onto the internet since every port scanner is scanning that port & looking for unpatched Windows vulnerabilities or insecure user/password logins.

I use RDP myself for my Windows system but I need to SSH into my network before using it, so it's really RDP over SSH. If you're not going to go through all that at the very least change the port to something else so it doesn't get port scanned to death.

.. TBH if you're not too sure about how to secure this stuff maybe Chrome Remote Desktop is the best option, at least it's secured behind your own Google account (hopefully that itself is secure and you have 2FA enabled).

RDP is kind of limited

It’s useful if you only need to do stuff while you’re actively connected but you can’t, for example, remote in and start an app or process going and then disconnect and have that app continue.

Sure you can, I do this all the time on the work RDP server. Maybe you need to tweak your group policy so it doesn't kick you out right away.

When you d/c your profile is essentially logged out.

Nope, depends on what group policy you configured. If you've never configured that before as a starter launch gpedit.msc (with admin privileges) and head to Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Remote Desktop Services / Remote Desktop Session Host / Session Time Limits. The other settings in there are also useful for other things you may want to configure.

Your activity also can’t be viewed by a user on the remote system, if you needed to collaborate or assist somehow.

Yes this is true, the only way to do that is to have admin privileges on the host and then take over that user session. But of course that's not collaboration, that's just you taking a user's current session without them being able to see what you're doing.

On Windows the official way to do that is via Quick Assist (on Windows 10, not sure if it got renamed on Windows 11), it's sort of a shared RDP session where both the user and the remote user can share the same session. I've never needed to use it myself - with the work system users are pretty content with just having me "fix" whatever they needed without them watching, they usually don't care how to fix the problem themselves LOL.

VNC is the kind of the baseline remote desktop that works on pretty much any operating system. You can start there & then decide if you need specific features that the others have.

You didn't mention your own OS but it too probably already has support for its own remote desktop solution.

That could probably be its own post, people have pretty strong opinions on that haha.

Me personally I've always been partial to Mario Kart 64 (& I know lots of people hate on it). It has just the right balance of speed and driving mechanics that make it a good racing game. Later on remember playing the follow-up on the Gamecube (Mario Kart Double Dash) & I never really liked that one, it just feels kind of slow/sluggish compared to 64. Like it's trying to be a racing game but it just runs too slow IMO.

Yes of course, I meant as a general idea of what you'd aim to do lacking any other information beyond the fact that the bomb itself fell in the local downtown area (going by the post itself).

Thing is if a bomb dropped that close most people will not know what the scale of the bomb was, what the design was, how far exactly they were from the blast radius, whether it's ground / atmospheric, wind direction, all that stuff. In that short amount of time you'd just need to run into the nearest still-standing shelter & figure things out from there.

Hopefully with some extreme luck the bomb would fall just as you were walking/driving past your nearest fallout shelter and can easily get in. Or you're a prepper and aren't far from your homemade bunker with supplies, radio, and whatnot.

Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city.

If it's that close you then essentially you'll need to decide whether to die quick or slow :/

If you're actually planning on surviving you'd need to stay in an underground bunker or something similar for at least 3-5 weeks to be safe enough to travel outside (and we're assuming you have clean sources of food/water, bathroom, etc, during that time). If you make it that far then afterwards you'd likely want to go outside & get as far away from the radiation zone as possible.

Coincidentally the basement of my work building actually has a fallout shelter sign from back in the day so the basement might survive a blast but I don't see how I'd make it 3-5 weeks without being extra prepared for that beforehand.

I turn the water off.

Growing up we used to live in a house with what I swear was the smallest boiler ever so the hot water would only last for maybe 1-2 showers before needing some time to get hot again. So leaving the water running meant no hot water midway through the shower, or forcing the next person to wait to take a shower.

It's a habit that stuck with me ever since, I've found that I don't really need the water running the whole time anyway.