I think they meant more like they wouldn’t have been able to afford the same house 4 years later, due to appreciation of the house, the increase in property taxes on that appreciation, and higher mortgage rates to boot. That or they had a variable APR loan.

The former case happened to us and is how my coworkers and I sometimes discuss the housing market - house values increase so fast where we are, buying a month later would have gotten us an appreciably worse home. A month later, worse again. Prices were increasing 25+% YoY. If we hadn’t locked in when we did (Dec 2020) I’m not sure we would have found a place. The mortgage rates seem to not matter because so many of the buyers scooping up houses are older families with lots of money buying investment properties, or whole ass corporations (often foreign corporations) willing to pay 20% over asking, in cash, and waive inspection, to lock out any other prospective buyers.

Insurance is about 50% more than when we bought the house and taxes are maybe 10% higher due to rate increases and the increasing value. We would barely be able to afford half the house we’re in if we bought today.

The only reason we switched from doing our own to paying a CPA is when my wife started operating her own business. This was more to have someone to ask questions about making sure she covers all of her tax obligations who can answer authoritatively and back us up if anything comes back to us in the future (since she is sole prop. and going it alone). We paid $200 the first year, and considering turbotax would have been about that much, getting our taxes filed for us was practically just a bonus. She charges a little more now, but it’s still worth it IMO just to not have to deal with doing the actual paperwork and having someone who will help us out if anything does come back to us. I would say anyone who just has W2 income and maybe some stock sales doesn’t have a complicated enough situation to warrant a CPA, and should just use FreeTaxUSA (and hopefully over the next couple years, the auto filing program with the government will eliminate the need for that, too).

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Thoughts? I have to admit I’ve been nervous about this for a while now, with “once in a generation” events happening on a seemingly yearly basis, I started saving for retirement in 2019 and it seems like things have essentially traded sideways since then - my accounts are barely worth more than the money I’ve put in to them. The article is quite gloomy.

Unfortunately you can’t just recuse yourself from society. You’re still impacted by who the president is even if you don’t vote for them.

You’re still using public utilities. Driving on public roads. Interacting with people who went to public schools.

Acting like both choices are the same because they will always eventually do something you don’t like is disingenuous and you know it.

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The match to the mat is really nice!

I am surprised the age would be so young. My dad retired at 67 but went right back to work a year later, still working now (71). Health insurance do be expensive. I wonder how this statistic would capture someone like him. My mother was working until she died at 60, but would have likely been in a similar situation, trying to keep working as long as possible, certainly was not looking at retirement within a year or two.

My wife’s parents are younger (late 50s) but in the same boat, there is no path to retirement for them and they plan to just keep working. The only people I know who managed to retire by any conventional definition are or were Silent Generation.

I’m curious about how dielectric grease on the wires is different to 205g0. I’ve always just brushed 205g0 in a thick layer on to the wires and call it good but never tried anything else, and I don’t even really know what to look or listen for to know if I should be doing something different.

I’ve also seen you should use a syringe to inject extra grease in from the top after a few months, but never done that either and curious how important people feel it is.

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Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

Prebuilts from brands like Ducky? mechanicalkeyboards.com

DIY kits are generally best bought from their mfg’s - Akko, Keychron, GMMK, Keycult.

More general retailers will have some mix of keycaps, switches, kits, maybe prebuilts and accessories - Novelkeys, Canon Keys, Mekibo, Bolsa Supply (mostly GBs), Vala Supply, KBDFans, KPRepublic (mostly caps), Kono Store, Drop (mostly caps).

To track upcoming and live GBs, at least for keycaps and keyboards - mechgroupbuys.com. It’s pretty dead at the moment but I think the number of active group buys has tumbled recently due to several high profile scandals in the industry (namely Mechs & Co and Rama). Also several major keycap manufacturers piled up huge backlogs during the pandemic that are only just finally clearing up, namely GMK and Milkyway. All of that is causing there to be very few new GBs starting right now, and they can be kind of hard to find unless you’re already in the communities of the designer(s) or refreshing Geekhack.

In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I’m friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won’t let you rent one unless you can drive one already.

We have Driver’s Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.

This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

I’ve never driven a manual car. I’ve had people be like “You can’t drive manual?!” and then I would respond “So are you going to teach me?” The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn’t be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you’re buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that’s great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.

I will second Durock V2s and TX AP/Rev3 or rev4 stabs. If you use TX make sure you use the “plugs” - the little wheel of snap-off bell-shaped pieces that hold the stab in from behind since they do not screw in.

Also double check your PCB thickness, 1.2mm vs. 1.6mm and make sure you get the right size.

Transistor - really any Supergiant game, but Transistor in particular.

This is the only path I see - real estate needs to not be a guaranteed profit generator. It’s been viewed this way for decades. Rents are allowed to increase indefinitely, which inflates property values, which raises taxes, which raises mortgages, which raises rents, because real estate is said to be zero risk maximum reward investment. So it’s better to hold an empty unit until someone comes along willing to pay the price you’re asking than let it go for less.

The only way I see around this is a really aggressive cap on rent. Like, once a rent is established, it can never be raised, for any reason, ever again (unless the property were radically transformed, like a large single family plot in to a townhouse development, condos, etc.). The home value can still do whatever, but it no longer has the catalyzing agent of perpetually exploding rents to drive it up.

I spent a few weeks reading as much about rent control as I could, where it had been tried and analyzing how they failed. The legislation has never been remotely extensive enough - only touching a handful of (usually very old) structures in a single neighborhood, county, or city. Of course if there is a cluster of rent controlled units you will depress building where the properties might not generate as much profit vs. guaranteed to generate profit forever. But if it applies everywhere at once, you don’t have this problem. Landlords evicted tenants to get around the caps, because the only mechanism to increase rent beyond the cap was to cycle tenants out. So the real problem here is landlords taking it out on their tenants, rather than let the properties simply not be a guaranteed infinite profit generator. Finally people in rent controlled units tend to stay in rent controlled units, limiting mobility. This seems to be cited as a weakness but I never came across an adequate explanation as to why. You have to make landlording simply not worth it to bring the number of people who want to own homes in to balance.

New developments would be able to charge whatever rent they wanted, if they wanted to rent them. So if you are absolutely determined to own and rent out properties, you have to keep building them if you want to keep setting new market rates.

An interesting note though is once rents are largely stagnant (except for some special exceptions I would make where owning single units is unusual, like apartment complexes own by single property management firms who handle communal landscaping, clubhouse, etc.), those properties will actually remain competitive for longer… in an environment where average rents go up 10% a year, of course not increasing rent will make it unprofitable very quickly and you might as well sell… but when average rents go up 1% a year, it will actually stay profitable for a lot longer even if you can’t increase rent. So I don’t foresee an instant flood of the housing market.

I also see benefit to pairing this kind of legislation with one that bars or otherwise limits corporations, especially foreign corporations, from owning and renting single family properties, but that’s a separate issue I haven’t studied as extensively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc

We typically spend between $800~1400 between two people on all food in a given month. Granted that’s high, but considering that includes everything from grocery trips, meaning paper products, cat food, alcohol… one thing that was interesting for me looking at the data is our ratio of spend on eating out doesn’t strongly correlate to the total we spend for the month. For instance:

July was a super high outlier overall, but it was driven by our grocery spending more than our eating out spending. Major contributing factors were meeting friends more often than usual (four weekends of providing alcohol) and a Costco run. Our eating out generally constitutes lots of runs to e.g. Subway, Chipotle. I get a $6 coffee ~once a month, my wife doesn’t drink coffee. We very rarely go down to sit-down restaurants and have a $50-100 meal, basically only for birthdays or anniversaries. That also hit in July (anniversary).

Part of what’s going on is I think rapidly fluctuating food prices and the fact that for the last ~year groceries had been so much more expensive than normal and a lot of “fast food” at least hadn’t appeared to update their prices at a comparable rate. So we might be spending $10 to make a meal for two at home or $20 to eat out together. So eating out ~twice a week vs. ~once a week barely registers on a typical monthly food spend.