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Vanguard Target Retirement Funds are a huge series of “all-in-one” mutual funds, now with over $1 trillion in total assets. I don’t hold them myself, but I have advised my parents to invest their IRAs in them. I appreciate that they are low-cost, diversified, and rebalanced automatically to maintain a reasonable asset allocation, meaning that I don’t have to actively monitor them myself.

However, due to a mix of factors, it is important to know that these Target Retirement 20XX funds tend to make larger capital gains distributions than an equivalent mix of index ETFs. This can cause unexpected tax bills, especially for those with large balances and near retirement. Inside a 401k or IRA, none of this matters. But you should avoid owning them in a taxable brokerage account unless you accept these disadvantages as a price of their ease of ownership.

Back in 2021, these made large capital gains distributions due to a mishandling of mutual fund expense changes by Vanguard. Vanguard eventually had to settle a class action lawsuit for $40 million. This 2022 Morningstar article has more details: Lessons From Vanguard Target-Date’s Capital Gains Surprise.

The Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 and 2020 funds again announced a higher capital gains distribution amount than its peer funds in its 2024 estimate report. The 2025 TDFs for American Funds, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price were all in the 0.53% to 2.10% range, and American Funds are actively-managed! The Fidelity Freedom Index 2025 Funds only distributed 0.53%.

Assuming a $1 million balance in Vanguard Target Retirement 2025, the 4.29% capital gains distribution would work out to $42,900 in additional, likely unexpected income. At a long-term gains rate of 15%, that’s a tax bill of $6,435.

This could all happen again and again. Why? For one, Vanguard’s steeper glide path at this age period means they are selling stocks for bonds faster than other funds. Second, folks have been selling their shares, either because they need the money for retirement expenses or because they are part of the larger trend of selling to switch to ETFs. Either way, these two things are expected to continue in the foreseeable future.

ETFs have inherent structural advantages over mutual funds that help them to avoid creating capital gains. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before Vanguard introduces a line of Target Retirement ETFs, which would be able to minimize capital gains distributions. Of course, that could mean even more people selling their Target Retirement Mutual Funds if they can’t figure out how to make converting a non-taxable event, which would result in even more capital gains distributions! I’m not saying this would happen for sure, but it is a possibility that may create a spiral of increasing capital agains.

The actionable move here is to avoid buying into the Target Retirement Funds in a taxable account right now. If you are a younger investor, a Target Retirement Fund is 90% stocks anyway, essentially split into 60% VTI (Total US Stock) and 40% VXUS (Total International Stock). I’d just buy those two core building-block ETFs if you manage to have extra money to invest after 401k/403b/457/TSP and IRAs. If you wanted to be more exact, you could buy 55% VTI, 35% VXUS, and 10% BND.

Japan Airlines said it was hit by a cyberattack Thursday, causing delays to more than 20 domestic flights but the carrier said there was no impact on flight safety. From a report: JAL said the problem started Thursday morning when the company's network connecting internal and external systems began malfunctioning. The airline said the cyberattack had delayed 24 domestic flights for more than 30 minutes, and the impact could expand later in the day.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Offer is back again/still around. Capital One has brought back a deposit promotion worth up to $1,500 for new 360 Savings accountholders. It’s a good bonus, but only for “new” customers and those that are willing to keep an eye on things. Here’s their definition of “new”:

If you have or had an open 360 Performance Savings, 360 Savings, 360 Money Market, Savings Now or Confidence Savings account as a primary or secondary account holder with Capital One on or after January 1, 2022, you will be ineligible for the bonus. If your account is in default, closed or suspended, or otherwise not in good standing, you will not receive the bonus.

Note: Some readers have reported in the past that they were not able to apply the promo code even as valid new customers, and Capital One responded that this was a targeted promotion even though there is no such language on the offer page nor in the terms and conditions. This offer seems clearly available to the public, however. After applying, I would contact them and make sure that the promo code “BONUS1500” was accepted before making a large deposit for this promo.

The steps:

• Open a new 360 Performance Savings account with promo code BONUS1500 on or after April 3, 2024.
• Deposit $20,000+ of external funds during the 15-day Initial Funding Period after opening your account.
• Hold the deposit(s) in your account for an additional 90 days after the 15-day Initial Funding Period ends.
• $20,000+ deposited = $300 bonus.
• $50,000+ deposited = $750 bonus.
• $100,000+ deposited = $1,500 bonus.
• See the bonus in your new account within 60 days after holding.
• You’ll also earn their normal interest rate (variable, but currently 3.80% APY as of 12/22/24). No monthly fees or minimum balance requirements.

Note that the 90-day “maintain balance” period is after and in addition to the end of the 15-day “initial funding period”. So if you are counting from the opening day, that is a total of 105 days after opening. This is important as other readers have gotten denied for the bonus when withdrawing after 91-100 days. You may wish to chat with Capital One to confirm the exact date.

As long as you hit the tiers exactly, you are getting 1.5% of your deposit with technically a minimum holding period of 90 days, but you’ll probably want to send it in a little early and take it out a little late to be safely within the deadlines. Let’s call it 120 days for a conservative round number. This works out to the equivalent of (a little more than) a 4.5% annualized yield. Add in your expected interest rate for the total annualized yield for those 120 days.

Again, this one is only for new customers or those that have closed their previous CapOne360 savings-type accounts by January 1, 2022. Thanks to reader playc for the heads up on it coming back.

Three more EU member states -- including the most populous, Germany -- have joined the list of countries with "ultra-low" fertility rates [non-paywalled source], highlighting the extent of the region's demographic challenges. Financial Times: Official statistics show Germany's birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN's "ultra-low" threshold of 1.4 -- characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse. Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries -- including Spain, Greece and Italy -- that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman. The fall in birth rates partially reflects the "postponement of parenthood until the 30s," which involves a "higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock," said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has no plans to develop its own search engine despite potential restrictions on its lucrative revenue-sharing deal with Google, citing billions in required investment and rapidly evolving AI technology as key deterrents, according to a court filing [PDF]. In a declaration filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said creating a search engine would require diverting significant capital and employees, while recent AI developments make such an investment "economically risky." Apple received approximately $20 billion from Google in 2022 under a deal that makes Google the default search engine on Safari browsers. This arrangement is now under scrutiny in the U.S. government's antitrust case against Google. Cue said Apple lacks the specialized professionals and infrastructure needed for search advertising, which would be essential for a viable search engine. While Apple operates niche advertising like the App Store, search advertising is "outside of Apple's core expertise," he said. Building a search advertising business would also need to be balanced against Apple's privacy commitments, according to his declaration.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Russian government has banned crypto mining in ten regions for a period of six years, according to reporting by the state-owned news agency Tass. Engadget adds: Russia has cited the industry's high power consumption rates as the primary reason behind the ban. Crypto is particularly power-hungry, as mining operations already account for nearly 2.5 percent of US energy use. This ban takes effect on January 1 and lasts until March 15, 2031. The country's Council of Ministers has also stated that additional bans may be required in other regions during periods of peak energy demand. It could also go the other way. The ban could be temporarily lifted or altered in certain regions if a government commission examines changes in energy demand and deems it necessary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lost deliveries, shipping delays and theft on the front porch have become such growing problems that companies are making consumers pay for package protection. From a report: Tens of thousands of online retailers now offer the service for a few dollars per order. The fees go to young companies -- Route and Corso, to name two -- that promise to make customers whole without charging the merchant if a delivery doesn't arrive. Consumers are finding that retailers either ask them to pay for package protection or draw a harder line when it comes to replacing a missing item. Some retailers are making the fees mandatory, spreading the burden of package theft among all customers. To know whether you are paying the fee, review your order before you press purchase. Sometimes it is named after the company offering protection, and sometimes it is called shipping insurance or package protection. Skincare brand Topicals began using Corso two years ago after seeing 30% of its packages were regularly marked delivered but not received, according to customer insights manager Deja Jefferson. By requiring protection, which Topicals discloses on its shipping page, the company doesn't have to worry about convincing customers to opt in. "We actually don't get any complaints on it whatsoever," she said. Further reading: Porch Pirates Steal So Many Packages That Now You Can Get Insurance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has published a year in review for its Edge browser and talked up AI-powered chats while lightly skipping over the software's stagnating market share. The company had some big numbers to share. There had been over 10 billion AI-powered chats with Copilot from inside the Edge browser window (although it did not disclose how many chats were customers asking how to install Chrome). Some 38 trillion characters had been auto-translated. Seven trillion megabytes of PC memory had been saved through the use of sleeping tabs. However, are those numbers actually as big as they seem? What Microsoft did not say is how little Edge has moved the needle on market share in 2024. Strangely, the company did not share raw usage information. Yet, a look at Statcounter's figures for browser desktop market share showed Edge with 11.9 percent of the market in December 2023 and reaching 12.87 percent by November 2024 -- an increase of less than 1 percent. The market leader, Google's Chrome browser, went from 65.23 percent to 66.33 percent in the same period. That's only slightly more than 1 percent, but it still maintains its dominance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple may be worth one and a half Googles now, but the world's most valuable company needs its relationship with the world's largest search engine to keep clicking. From a report: Such was evident Monday when Apple filed papers seeking to participate in the penalty phase of the Justice Department's antitrust case against Google. The search giant lost that case in August and is now battling the government over what remedies are appropriate. The DOJ has a long wish list that includes breaking the company up, forcing Google to make key search and user data available to potential rivals, and stopping the payments Google makes to partners such as Apple. The payments to Apple alone now reportedly equate to about $20 billion annually, and make Google the default search engine on devices like the iPhone. Apple didn't confirm any specific amounts in its filing, but did say the company feels compelled to "protect its commercial interests." Analysts widely estimate that the payments from Google are nearly pure profit for Apple, given relatively little incremental cost to generate that revenue. For Apple, $20 billion is about 16% of the operating income reported for the company's fiscal year that ended in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux RNDIS Removal Branch Updated For Disabling Microsoft RNDIS Protocol Drivers  Phoronix

Nobara Linux Takes on Fedora With a Custom KDE Plasma Desktop  The New Stack

Modern LED headlights are significantly brighter and more glaring than traditional halogen bulbs, creating dangerous driving conditions, lighting experts report. The newer lights produce an intense, concentrated beam that is bluer and more disorienting, particularly affecting older drivers. "Headlights are getting brighter, smaller and bluer. All three of those things increase a particular kind of glare. It's called discomfort glare," said Daniel Stern, chief editor of Driving Vision News.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Software development is entering an "autopilot era" with AI coding assistants, but the industry needs to prepare for full autonomy, argues former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. Drawing parallels with self-driving cars, he suggests the role of software engineers will evolve from code authors to operators of code-generating machines. Taylor, a board member of OpenAI and who once rewrote Google Maps over a weekend, calls for new programming systems, languages, and verification methods to ensure AI-generated code remains robust and secure. From his post: In the Autonomous Era of software engineering, the role of a software engineer will likely transform from being the author of computer code to being the operator of a code generating machine. What is a computer programming system built natively for that workflow? If generating code is no longer a limiting factor, what types of programming languages should we build? If a computer is generating most code, how do we make it easy for a software engineer to verify it does what they intend? What is the role of programming language design (e.g., what Rust did for memory safety)? What is the role of formal verification? What is the role of tests, CI/CD, and development workflows? Today, a software engineer's primary desktop is their editor. What is the Mission Control for a software engineer in the era of autonomous development?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What will 2025 bring for Linux PCs?  PCWorld

The annual defense policy bill signed by President Joe Biden Monday evening allocates $3 billion to help telecom firms remove and replace insecure equipment in response to recent incursions by Chinese-linked hackers. From a report: The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act outlines Pentagon policy and military budget priorities for the year and also includes non-defense measures added as Congress wrapped up its work in December. The $895 billion spending blueprint passed the Senate and House with broad bipartisan support. The $3 billion would go to a Federal Communications Commission program, commonly called "rip and replace," to get rid of Chinese networking equipment due to national security concerns. The effort was created in 2020 to junk equipment made by telecom giant Huawei. It had an initial investment of $1.9 billion, roughly $3 billion shy of what experts said was needed to cauterize the potential vulnerability. Calls to replenish the fund have increased recently in the wake of two hacking campaigns by China, dubbed Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, that saw hackers insert malicious code in U.S. infrastructure and break into at least eight telecom firms. The bill also includes a watered down requirement for the Defense Department to tap an independent third-party to study the feasibility of creating a U.S. Cyber Force, along with an "evaluation of alternative organizational models for the cyber forces" of the military branches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. 4MLinux is a minimal distribution which ships tools for four types of tasks: servers, gaming, multimedia and system rescue. The project's latest stable version is 47.0 which comes with upgraded applications for the Internet, including Firefox 133.0, Chrome 131.0 and Thunderbird 128.5, besides various other improvements: "The status....

They gave it the old college try, but America's elite universities are facing money problems partly of their own creation. From a report: It might not seem that way compared with the broader world of U.S. higher education. Ivy League institutions and a handful in a similar orbit like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago aren't just blessed to have international cachet and their pick of excellent students and professors -- they also have the most money and the richest alumni. By contrast, public and especially smaller private colleges and universities are cutting staff and programs. Many are closing outright. A school like Harvard, now well into its fourth century, will almost certainly survive for a fifth one. But there are financial problems below the surface that could emerge if the bull market stumbles and especially if some proposed Trump administration policies are enacted. Harvard's $53.2 billion endowment is so huge that the difference between a good and a so-so investment performance translates to sums that would dwarf most colleges' entire nest eggs. Former Harvard President and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers estimated this year that if Harvard had been able to just keep up with other Ivies and "large endowment schools" in the past several years, it would have $20 billion more. For perspective, he says that just $1 billion could fund 100 professorships or permanently cover tuition for 100 students. But even Harvard's peer group isn't doing as well as it could. Veteran investment consultant Richard Ennis wrote this month that high costs and "outdated perceptions of superiority" have stymied Ivy League endowment returns, which could have been worth 20% more since the 2008 financial crisis if invested in a classic stock and bond mix.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BSD: What Is It, and How Is It Different From Linux?  How-To Geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe: Every weekday morning at 8:30, Preston Thorpe makes himself a cup of instant coffee and opens his laptop to find the coding tasks awaiting his seven-person team at Unlocked Labs. Like many remote workers, Thorpe, the nonprofit's principal engineer, works out in the middle of the day and often stays at his computer late into the night. But outside Thorpe's window, there's a soaring chain-link fence topped with coiled barbed wire. And at noon and 4 p.m. every day, a prison guard peers into his room to make sure he's where he's supposed to be at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine, where he's serving his 12th year for two drug-related convictions in New Hampshire, including intent to distribute synthetic opioids. Remote work has spread far and wide since the pandemic spurred a work-from-home revolution of sorts, but perhaps no place more unexpectedly than behind prison walls. Thorpe is one of more than 40 people incarcerated in Maine's state prison system who have landed internships and jobs with outside companies over the past two years -- some of whom work full time from their cells and earn more than the correctional officers who guard them. A handful of other states have also started allowing remote work in recent years, but none have gone as far as Maine, according to the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the nonprofit leading the effort. Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers' wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they're released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date resumes, a nest egg -- and the hope that they're less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Jacque Montague Raymer has announced the release of a brand-new version of MakuluLinux, a user-friendly distribution integrating the Cinnamon desktop and various Artificial Intelligence tools with the "Testing" branch of the Debian distribution. The latest release, labelled as version "2024-12-22", is part of the project's "LinDoz" range of....