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I said how they make money. Gift cards are easily (and legally) able to be converted into cash. There is a secondary market for gift cards where people will pay you pennies on the gift card's monetary value. If you have nothing but time investing in obtaining the gift card then it is pure profit.

You’re thinking more of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); Patriot Act applies more to domestic agencies such as the FBI. But yes, Title 1 FISA gives the government authority to intercept US-based intelligence from foreign agents/powers operating in the US and the FISA amendments act section 702 gives the government authority to issue warrants to US companies to intercept foreign intelligence. It doesn’t require a back door so to speak, but google can’t just say “no, we’re not giving our records over” if they have them. But if the NSA wants a way in for whatever reason, it probably won’t matter if the company has implemented end-to-end encryption or not.

they’re usually scams. how do they make money off those scams?

Gift cards can easily be converted to cash relatively easily and anonymously. You can do so without being in physical possession of the card--you generally just need to know the card's number.

Thank you for the replies.

Assuming the companies do what they claim, then is messaging through WhatsApp the same as Signal?

Presumably no,

A back door for one person, is a back door for everyone. Companies who are serious about security, understand this and don’t have back doors.

NSA does have tools to brute force encryptions, but they take time and can be patched out (assuming it’s a software, not hardware, solution.)

One thing not mentioned so far is that a Roth is not subject to Required Minimum Distribution) RMD when you reach mid 70's, which can jack up your taxes paid well into retirement. This is why Roth conversions are a thing.

The way modern encryption works is that the receiver has a private key (say two very large numbers) and they send out a public key (say the product of those two numbers). You can encrypt the message with the public key, but to decrypt it you need the private key. This works because it's trivial to multiply two large numbers together, but it's enormously expensive to factor the product of two large primes (until quantum computers come into their own).

If Alice wants to send a message to Bob, Bob can send her his public key. Alice can then encrypt whatever she wants to say to Bob and send it back. Alice may have to send her message through lots of people, but they can't read it without Bob's private key. This is end-to-end encryption - nobody along the way can read it.

Of course, maybe facetergram is sitting between Alice and Bob, and the message goes through them. Facetergram may say "hey, use my public key", then Alice sends a message to facetergram, then facetergram decrypts it, then re-encrypts it with Bob's public key and sends it off. In this world, Alice doesn't need to know Bob's key (convenient!), but facetergram can now read Alice's message if they want to. This is not end-to-end, since the message gets read in the middle.

Incidentally, this is why I think a lot of the law enforcement efforts are colossally stupid. If I'm a criminal, I'll just call up Bob and say "hey, Bob, what's your public key?" Then nobody in the middle can read the message. The software to do this isn't hard - I had to do it for a single homework assignment as an undergraduate. Letting facetergram decrypt your messages is an enormous security hole (what happens if they get hacked?), but if I'm a criminal I'd send messages in a way that they couldn't read. So, only legitimate users (or really dumb criminals) can have their messages read, at the price of potentially disastrous leaks.

Oh, maybe your right, it is the same idea though - except 401(k)s are employee sponsored and are subject to different limits. The fundamental tax question is the same.

The lack of overflow error is due to good programmers checking the value and refusing to add to it if you hit the max.

Thank you for crediting Athena as a war god. So many people only think of her the god of wisdom not realizing that her birth was literally due to the need for a wartime strategist. She could also throw down. I won't site anything for that one because it's just me liking to picture her putting Ares into a chokehold 😂

The trick is that there exist encryption schemes such as RSA which allow a private and public key. The way it works it that you generate both, keep the private key a secret and share the public key with the world. The private key only decrypts messages signed with the public one and the public one only decrypts messages encrypted with the public key. This means the public can send you messages only you can read and you can send messages that are verifiable to have come from you because they can be decrypted by the public key. From here you can use AES, which is symmetric, same key for encryption and decryption, to share the same key between both people. This is actually how https Internet security works. Your OS /browser keeps track of certain public keys that can be used to verify domains as being legit.

You are discussing IRAs, OP is asking about 401ks (I thought IRA too, until op I read the description of 3 options and re-read the title).

To add, they were just designed poorly. These buildings were put up without an air barrier in the insulation envelope. This causes a temperature delta between the two substrates with the two air pressure systems interacting with very little force interruption. As a result it would produce the equivalent of 2 liters of moisture per square foot in a building in a month.

That’s a fuck ton of moisture.

All commercial buildings going up now have air barriers to prevent the ungodly amount of moisture that was the biggest problem with the earlier builds.

It means that the message is encrypted on your phone and decrypted only at the receiver’s phone. Crucially, only the two ends have the decryption key, so it CANNOT be decrypted by the server.

This is in opposition to something like e-mail where your email is encrypted on your phone but decrypted at the email server (Gmail, etc).

theres also evidence that the "american" accent is also the original british accent but when people starting coming to america the british accent changed over time while they kept the original accent

Movies are not reality.

Movies have gigantic thousand-foot-tall waves because they look cool in movies.

How does the recipient device know the encryption key?

I'd assume a new key has to be generated everytime and if the sender generates one, to encrypt the message, then it can't send the key to the recipient because if it does so, any man in the middle would also know the key and thus, making the entire encryption thing useless.

Should mean its safe, but doesn't necessarily guarantee. The software can only guarantee the encryption between the sender and the recipient. But if something on either the sender or recipients device has the ability to intercept the message, it can still be compromised.

Because movies are make-believe, made by people who have never seen a tsunami, who don't care that other people have, and who don't know how to make a real tsunami look interesting within the bounds of their portion of the production budget.

they are accurate because someone "zeroed" it in, or made it accurate. it is important to understand that that is only done at a specific range. for example, a rifle could be zeroed at one hundred yards, so if you want to hit something at that range, you would put the crosshair directly on it. if you want to hit something beyond that, you would need to use the stadia marks underneath the crosshair to aim above the impact point you want.

This is a big question with multiple answers. I am a history undergrad with a focus on ancient architecture. I'll share a little bit from what I've learned in my classes.

1. Some of these historic sites get totally buried. With the volatile geology of places like Greece the earthquakes that they have and the degree of erosion that they experience off of their mountains and hillsides, huge buildings can be entirely swallowed up. For example, the Athenian Agora was almost entirely buried until about 1930. The only structure that was still visible was the a single temple ( I'll come back to that in a minute). The rest of it had been literally buried from erosion. On top of that burial there were people that had constructed homes and they were compensated and removed by the Athenian and Greek governments in the '30s that way the American schools of architecture could come and excavate the original agora.

2. They often get repurposed. The structures that wind up standing, like the Hephesteon in the Athenian Agora, do so because they were maintained or taken over by church usually. These are incredible structures that were built to impress and intimidate when they were constructed and they still serve that purpose thousands of years later. The Greek Orthodox Church used it as a cathedral for an extended period of time, I don't actually know how long, but it's the Greek government has gotten involved in the archaeological societies have become more involved It has been restored.

Another way of repurposing an ancient building is to go and take stone out of an original building and use it for whatever it is that you are building. This is really common at archaeological sites that are near small towns or cities where gaining resources might be difficult. If you're a farmer building a stone wall and you have a theater nearby where nobody ever goes, it seems practical to go and just take one of the stones that are there and use them in your wall. This is really common throughout the ancient world and people recover random pieces of text and stole (stones that have engravings on them) all the time in really weird places. What's cool is that if it's done carefully then it can sometimes be one of the best ways to preserve a stole.

3. Resources are not always available. And some other redditors have pointed out, when a major powerful government like the Athenian League or the Roman Empire collapses the resources become less available because they take colonial holdings in order to keep in order. Without those colonial holdings it gets much more difficult. There's also a time and focus issue, It takes a long time to maintain and reconstruct some of these buildings and if no one really cares to do it then they just fall into disrepair. Especially considering the ubiquity of limestone, and how limestone reacts with acid rain, sometimes this can happen really quickly.

4. Some of the disrepair is intentional. Some of these buildings fell apart a long time ago through events like earthquakes for example. That earthquake destroying the building imparts its own history into that building. And if an archaeological team goes out and only puts up four or five columns it gives enough, visually, to reconstruct the rest of the building on paper. And really that is what is the intent. They leave them knocked down because to restore them exactly as they used to be, would be incredibly expensive and it kind of takes away from some of that history.

I don't know if that was e l i5 enough, but I really care about it and it's hard to talk about it in other terms.

Sounds interesting at least

I assume these are 401k plans.

Pre-tax (Standard): Pay taxes on your contributions upon withdrawal. This lowers your current taxable income, which may be beneficial.

Roth: Pay taxes on your contributions now. Gets taxes out of the way (no one knows what future tax brackets may be), especially good if you start your career in a lower tax bracket. For most high-earners, a Roth 401k is usually not a good idea.

After-tax: This is a standard 401k but you can add additional money (already taxed like in a Roth) above the standard contribution limit ($22,500 for 2023 and if <50) to a max of $66k (including employer match) in 2023 if <50. However, earning are taxed, and is the only plan where this is so.

Now sure why the standard Pre-Tax and After-Tax are both offered (After-Tax is the same if you don’t contribute over $22,500 from paycheck deductions). Only thing I can think of is that the funds/investments offered are different.

General advice is to either invest in index funds (S&P 500, Total US Market, Total Foreign Market, Total World Market) or invest into Target Date Funds (you select the one with a date closest to your retirement date and it handles the allocation of investments for you and changes every year, doing more stocks at the start and more bonds towards the end). And make sure the expense ratios (fees) are low, below 1% for sure but below 0.25% even more so.