Error Sorry, the promo code EMCBCBF36 you’ve entered is invalid.

BTW, price at newegg is $59 now.

In for 1–Merry Christmas

Fine print: "BK® eGifts can only be redeemed by presenting the sixteen (16) digit code at Participating Restaurants by showing a crew member the code on your smartphone or in printed format. "

I dunno about the chances the cashiers at BK can type in 16 digits correctly in fewer than 10 tries. I wonder why they did not incorporate this in the BK app?

currently unavailable

fine print: purchase required for freebie.

Speculation about provisions in a tax bill is not very useful IMO since we are a long way from anything being passed.

But on the topic of 401Ks, in retrospect, I would have been much better off investing in a Roth and a total stock market index fund in my taxable account. I am now 69 and looking at RMD’s in the next few years and it is going to be brutal. My marginal fed+state income tax rate plus the increases in social security/Medicare fees make my overall marginal tax rate well north of 40%.

I am not complaining (much :). I am fortunate to have started saving during the Ronaldus Magnus’ boom in the 1980’s and to have stayed the course during the crashes in the Clinton and Obama administrations but it is frustrating to see that much go to taxes.

@jcantanixon said in 50% off Halloween Candy/Seasonal Merch Purchase of $10+ With Digital Coupon Download @ Kroger/Food4Less, Exp 10-22-17:

I normally get the big bags from Costco. Getting 50% off from Food4less is a better deal, right?

We don’t have a Kroger’s nearby but we got ‘fun size’ Snickers and Kit Kats for about 10 cents a candy bar from Safeway/Walgreens on sale.

Thanks. I use flash drives for long term backup of valuable data so I need to go extra steps to help with reliability. Looks like:

1. buy from reliable supplier who allows refunds
2. look for signs of counterfeiting in packaging and drive. I ran across some things to look for by doing a search.
3. Run H2testw suggested by zapjb if the drive is small enough so the test finishes in a reasonable time.
4. Otherwise try the FakeFlashTest program
5. Do a test of the data on the drive after creating the backup. How long to wait–a few weeks?

Someone posted a deal here about a dual 128 GB Sandisk flash drive for ~$30. I have not bought a flash drive for a while so I got curious what the current prices are for flash drives. I did a search on amazon and found some amazing (to me) prices: for example
Amazon 128 GB for $10.99

As expected 34% of the reviews are one star. Here is a comment to one of the reviews:
*Your experience is typical for fake-capacity flash drives - low capacity drives with only 4GB, 8GB or perhaps 16GB of real memory (a $3 to $5 value) that have been altered and relabeled by dishonest suppliers to make them appear to have a much greater inflated capacity - 128GB in this case. They may appear to work at first, but failures and data loss are inevitable.

If you look at the other reviews for this and similar unusually low-priced, high-capacity generic USB flash drives, you will see a clear pattern of other reviewers reporting similar problems.*

I am in the market for a drive and my question is what brands are reliable? I have the usual big names, Kingston, Sandisk, Corsair, but I have gotten great service from no-name brands like Emprex. Has it gotten to where we have to stick to the big names to avoid ripoffs?