I'm not trying to tell you "keep at it, it gets better", because it doesn't. It starts out awesome and stays that way, in my opinion.
But if you had watched more you'd see Mariner's persona is a front. She might be the most Starfleet motherfucker in the show.
That's a tautological statement. We define words like sentient and sapient in terms of what we are.
Saying "this lifeform that we can't communicate with in any meaningful way (for these purposes) has emotional or cognitive experiences that we would recognize as meeting those definitions" isn't falsifiable and therefore isn't science.
If at some point someone invents a human to mollusk translator so we can discuss our experiences, this topic can be revisited.
Until then words like "may" and "possible" should be used.
Have you not been paying attention to what the Fed has been doing? Pardon my language but shoving cash up my asshole earns more than 1% these days.
In 2022, before most of the rate hikes, the trust fund earned $66.4 billion. This year's high, and hopefully very temporary, interest rates aside, it'll usually be around 2.5-3%.
I'm not sure what you think loss leading means or why you're using it here, but governments storing reserve money earmarked for a specific purpose in their own bonds isn't unusual or a bad thing. Should they stuff it under a mattress earning 0%? Should they risk it in the markets? Unsecured domestic bonds? Foreign bonds?
Reference your questions about relative percentages of the population etc., I had a whole big ass post with references but I lost it. I'm not doing all that again so I'll just give the main takeaways from memory and the history in my calculator so unfortunately my source is trust me bro.
Two caveats: I'm using median ages of the cohorts, average could charge things (edit: see correction at end). Percentages are of total population including children (who generally have no wealth), not working age plus retired population.
In 1990 the median boomer was 35, they represented 30.6% of the population and had 21.5% of the wealth.
In 2022 the median millennial was 33.5, they represented 21.7% of the population and had 5.6% of the wealth.
So boomers had 1.4x the share of the population but 3.8x the share of the wealth.
Boomers in 1990 did have 1.5 more years to earn, save, and grow their wealth than millennials in 2022(maybe more or less if you use average age), but I don't see how that alone makes the difference. For whatever combination of reasons, boomers had a much larger share of the wealth, relative to their population share, in their mid thirties than millennials do.
Correction: 35 and 33.5 aren't median ages, that's just the age of the middle of the cohort. The point about using average (or even the real median) age for an apples-to-apples comparison stands, I just misused the word median.
My wife and I loved that.