The Ukrainian government’s military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency’s database and backup copies....
I remember as a kid going over a friend’s house and seeing the quarters lined up on the table. His parents were both nurses and had to pay to park at the hospital. I don’t remember the amount at the time, just being in awe at how much they spent just to park where they worked.
They usually worked on different schedules too, so that’s separate parking.
For four decades, patient savers able to grit their teeth through bubbles, crashes and geopolitical upheaval won the money game. But the formula of building a nest egg by rebalancing a standard mix of stocks and bonds isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has.
I’m a risk-averse person, so I’ve always favored reducing expenses. Definitely no debt of any kind at that point. Assets in good condition: hopefully 2 relatively new cars (unless my city gets better urbanism over the next few decades), a house, relatively new roof, appliances, etc. No major repairs or renovations expected, just basic maintenance for a solid 20-30 years.
Between my mortgage, student loans, and car payment today that’s about 60% of today’s budget that I won’t have to worry about in retirement. That just leaves food, utilities, clothes, maintenance costs, etc. If things go well I will be able to live in relative luxury (eating fine food at restaurants, traveling, etc).
From there, the performance of my investments and state of my savings (along with my health) will determine my lifestyle. Maybe I end up spending my twilight years in my house catching up on the backlog of books, videogames, and movies I never got around to. I can live with that.
I am a proud owner of a brand new home. I am in love with it. It’s cute the yard is perfect. It is old and lived in hard. And we couldn’t afford really nice. Pretty much everything we looked at had some serious issues so we chose the one we loved the most and the one we felt we could handle the issues. I have lots of...
This is one of the few things YouTube is still good for. The channel This Old House is usually a good resource for a lot of projects, but you can find tons of other channels that have good info. Some creators are contractors, so their focus will be on doing things efficiently at scale and might not be as relevant to you, but there’s still good information to be found.
One of the lessons I learned getting an Accounting degree is that everything around you is constantly degrading. Every object has a limited number of uses, and we can only take guesses at what that number will be. Every time you open or close a door, you are putting wear on the wood of the door and frame, the hinges, and the latching mechanism. Every time you open or close a tap you are putting wear on a valve. Every rain drop that hits the roof is trying to erode your shingles, work it’s way into the sealant around fasteners, damage your gutters and downspouts, and erode your land and foundation. So try to be gentle on what you can and keep up on preventative maintenance when you can.
To start off with, you take care of emergencies. Things that will cascade into more damage to your property or health if not addressed. Sewer line backing up and flooding your basement? Emergency. Water leaks in the roof? Emergency. Hot Water tank leaking? Well, the leak is an emergency, but a lack of hot water probably isn’t. If you’re strapped for cash, you should be able to turn some valves to disconnect it and live with cold water until you can afford to fix it properly. But if you’re somewhere cold in winter, that could put those pipes in danger of freezing. (In case you couldn’t tell, water causes trouble everywhere it goes)
Without knowing the details of your financial situation, I’m going to assume you’re like most new homeowners. Young, probably just starting to get financially established enough to break the rent cycle. Maybe some other car or student loan debt you’re trying to pay off. Expecting to advance your career and make more money in the coming years. Assuming your income keeps up with inflation and your interest rate on your mortgage is fixed, from now on your housing costs as a percentage of your income will most likely go down.
So you’ll probably have to put things off for the first few years. You’ll need a couple of years with mild and extreme summers and winters to get a feel for how much your utilities cost. Try to keep an emergency fund (credit cards can work in a pinch, but they cost you long-term). Some problems might need temporary, cheap solutions. The general financial wisdom most old people gave me was “buy cheap, but twice”, but sometimes you just need to “waste” $50 on something janky to last a couple years until you can afford the $5,000 proper renovation. You’ll slowly transition from being reactive to proactive over time. First set aside money for an emergency fund. Once you have a couple grand, start setting aside some for cosmetic stuff like flooring and paint (it’s less important objectively, but living in a house with peeling paint and stained carpet can be bad for your mental health). You probably want ~$10k in an emergency fund eventually (in today’s dollars), but don’t feel too much pressure to get there immediately. And don’t be afraid to use that money for emergencies either: that’s what it’s for.
Identify any big, expensive, non-urgent projects: how much will the cost and when will they become urgent? You’ll need a roof every 25-50 years depending on the kind of roof and where you live. In today’s dollars in the US you’re looking at the ballpark of $10-$20k. You will probably be able to finance part of it if you need to.
You can’t control what the previous owner did or did not do, the corners that a builder cut, or the flaws in the architect’s designs. If there’s something serious that was legally required to be disclosed to you and was not, you could consult a lawyer to see if you have any recourse against the seller.
You are going to be making a lot of your own repairs and decisions restricted by your budget, equipment, and skills. 10 years from now you might find you’re cursing your past self just as much as you’re cursing the previous owner now. Either way, there isn’t much to be gained from getting upset over what ‘the last guy’ did. All you can do is try to be nicer to ‘the next guy’, who may or may not be you.
Just some general advice. You’ll probably hear other advice recommending that you do not buy cheap tools, but to wait and buy nice, expensive tools as you find you need them. I strongly disagree. If you don’t already have screwdrivers, wrenches, sockets, a measuring tape, hammer, etc those cheap kits can be great. Sometimes it’s nice to have tools you don’t care about for dirty jobs or loaning to a neighbor. I don’t want to use the same screwdriver I would use on my guitar or computer on a sewage pipe or my car, for example.
Also keep records. Put together a binder with receipts, warranty cards, etc. If something has a 30 year warranty you need a good resource for how to claim that 25 years from now. And it’s a great thing to hand off to the next owner. What year was this roof installed? What was the hex code and brand of paint on the trim in the living room? Is there lead paint that is currently sealed behind newer paint? Did you upgrade the Ethernet to cat6? Does the basement flood once every 200 years, once every 20 years, or once every 2 years? Think of all the stuff you wish the previous owner would have told you and start writing it down for the next person. A house shoukd last a few hundred years, and I would argue that the quality of records should be a factor in buying/selling.
For #2, one piece I forgot to bring up is the urgency. One of the reasons I advocate for having a small collection of basic, cheap tools is that there’s some cases where you don’t have time to get to the hardware store or wait for a delivery. Sometimes you need a wrench NOW to fix a leak. Or there’s a foot of snow on the ground, the roads aren’t allowed, and something goes wrong with your heat or the pipes are in danger of freezing. Or there was the time I had scheduled my new over to be installed and the old one disposed of: I was responsible for disconnecting the gas from the old oven, but didn’t realize until about an hour before that I would need not one but two adjustable wrenches to disconnect it and had to make a mad dash to get another one. I’ve also had enough issues with toilets that I keep at least one flush/fill valve set and a sealing ring on hand (maybe I need to get a water filtering/conditioning system to go easier on my hardware?). Having a way to move water (either a cheap hand pump or the ability to use a shop vac) can also be critical.
A couple other things I keep in mind with tools are:
How often am I going to use it? A lot of experts giving advice, advocating for expensive tools, are craftspeople who use those tools every day. If I only need that adjustable wrench once a year, the $2 one from Harbor Freight is fine.
And specialized tools are different. It’s hard to even try to buy them in advance because you don’t know they exist until something comes up. When I looked into converting my home’s landline phone network into Internet, I had to get a crimping tool. I noticed the old window AC units has a bunch of bent fins, and research led me to special combs for straightening them.
Hey there, fellow movie enthusiasts! I’m on the hunt for films that portray positive masculinity. We often see movies with traditional, stereotypical portrayals of masculinity, but I believe there’s a world of cinema out there that can challenge these norms and offer a fresh perspective....
For purely positive masculinity, Avatar is good. It was great for it’s time, but I think there are some bits and pieces that haven’t aged the best. Most of the female characters end up being damousels in distress. The most prominent, Katara, is primarily a maternal figure who mostly adheres to traditional heteronormative gender roles. Toph was originally written as a joke, according to interviews with the writers. It’s hard to say for sure how much was on the writers vs the execs at Nickelodeon. For the time, it was still fairly progressive.
Korra is a worse show for a variety of reasons, but this is one of the places where I think it’s better than Avatar. Another show that shares some writers with Avatar is The Dragon Prince. It’s still not done yet and it’s not perfect, but so far seems to be pretty good.
I do think Avatar helped to bush the boundaries and opened up doors for later shows. Adventure Time is probably the biggest, and I’d say Finn is a fantastic example of a boy growing up and learning to avoid toxicity. That spawned a wave of what some derrogatorily and erroneously refer to as the “Cal Arts” era, which I think are even more great examples of not just positive masculinity, but positive humanity. Steven Universe is probably the most relevant here, but it seems like almost everyone who worked on Adventure Time went on to get a show of their own after, and most of them are pretty good.
I can’t see that reddit post without downloading the app, but I think I understand.
With Flapjack, I know that Quintel. Was involved too and he went on to do Regular Show, which ran largely parallel to Adventure Time. A lot of shows in that era of CN I lump together: Flapjack, Chowder, Foster’s, Regular Show, etc. They’re all fine, often with similar and interesting visuals. I think if you’re just looking at technical aspects like the animation, the use of textures, sureal world building, and more you can draw that back to Flapjack.
But I think there’s a huge gap in the writing. Those other shows are mostly just “hijinks of the day”. The writing isn’t all that different from shows throughout the 90’s and 00’s like SpongeBob, Billy & Mandy, Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Lab, CatDog, etc. That’s where I think Avatar really pioneered, and Adventure Time differentiated itself. Tackling heavy emotional topics in a way that was accessible to a young audience, almost educational with regards to emotional intelligence. Getting children to think and feel complex things instead of just re-hashing the same 2 dozen episode tropes. I never cried watching a Flapjack episode, for example.
I don’t mean to say that it wasn’t done before Avatar. Samurai Jack is notable for going an entirely different direction. Or you can point to Japanese anime (a lot of which gets referenced by these later shows, like Evangelion). Even when it comes to Adventure Time, I would point to Over the Garden Wall as a stronger influence in terms of what made AT unique than Flapjack (though McHale worked on all 3). I didn’t bring up OtGW earlier because it doesn’t really have many examples of positive or negative masculinity, but it does have a lot of dark themes and some serious character development.
In the top 10, 7 are cis white men, along with these 3:
Karen Lynch, CVS
Amin Nasser, Aramco
Sundar Pachai, Alphabet
Bringing up sexual orientation, gender Identity, and racial identity is what these billionaires want. Plenty of “girl bosses” have shown they are perfectly capable of exploiting labor. Peter Thiel is a perfect example of how you don’t have to be straight to oppress people. The CEO of Microsoft isn’t white.
UAW just announced a strike against 3 manufacturers today, including GM whose CEO is Mary Teresa Barra.
Then of course there’s tons of CEO’s and billionaires from Asia, Mexico, and the Middle-East. Calling out Cis White Men does nothing but cause further divisions between members of the working class. There’s plenty of CIS straight white men out there laboring and being repressed by a variety of different demographics.
Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly...
All these words saying “oh there’s totally statistics that back up that things are actually good” without ever citing them.
Income inequality is at an all-time high. Full-time minimum wage is not enough to afford an apartment anywhere in the country. Homelessness is rising. Red states are rolling back child labor laws. House prices, rent, health care, education, and other items have been inflating much faster than wages for my entire life. The only positive metrics you can find are for owners of capital investments.
Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn't been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
I grew up hearing all sorts of addages about vehicles. “New cars lose tons of value as soon as you drive off the lot, so you’re much better off buying used”.
Once I grew up and started buying my own cars, I learned that the best miles a car has are usually right out of the factory. The sound dampening wears over time. The foam in the seats wears out. Scratches accumulate, colors fade, odors accumulate. Hoses leak, mechanicals fail.
A lot of this can be fixed, or mitigated with proper maintenance. But the ultimate lesson I learned is that the resale value only matters if you actually intend to sell the car while there is still meat left on the bone. I’m fine driving a car into the ground until it’s scrapped, so I don’t factor resale value into my purchasing decisions.
Even back in 2018 I noticed the price gap between new and used cars wasn’t as wide as I remembered it being back in 2011. I ended up with an Impreza with ~12k miles for $17k, but a new one would have been just over $20k. I was strapped for cash at the time, but I wonder if a new car would have been a better value even back then.
I don’t know how long ago, if ever, a $20k new car was comparable to a $5k used car.
My first car purchase was in 2009: I got a 2005 Cavalier with ~40k miles for $8k. Cars cheaper than $7k were basically a couple months away from the scrap yard (unless you’re able to fix up a project car yourself, but I think that’s outside of the scope of this conversation). And even then: a $20k car in 2009 was a completely different class of car. A comparable car, the Cobalt, had a sticker price of about $16k. So, anecdotally, that’s a 50% discount in exchange for a car being 4 years old with 40k miles. Even that cavalier was a pretty terrible car that was both a bad experience to drive and costly to repair and operate.
I don’t think today you are ever seeing a $20k car being even remotely comparable to a $5k car. It’s not a $15k difference.
If the % was the same: of the choice was between a $20k new car and a comparable $10k used car, I think thats a close decision. The problem is that comparable used car is costing $17k or more. I think the conventional wisdom of buying used has swung too far and driven up the demand for used cars. I think the average buyer does not adequately factor in both the diminishing driving experience over time/miles and the increased repair costs into purchasing decisions. I also think that resale value is overvalued.
Of course, there’s other economic factors. Some people don’t have the luxury of choosing $20k vs $17k: they’ll take the $17k every time. I’m just talking about the decision making process for those who can make it.
I got a lot of downvotes on Reddit for pointing out that there’s no scientific evidence supporting porn addiction. It’s just the latest version of religious indoctrination. ISIS was using that as part of their recruitment process: men who are sexually repressed are easier for them to manipulate.
Ukrainian military says it hacked Russia's federal tax agency ( www.bleepingcomputer.com )
The Ukrainian government’s military intelligence service says it hacked the Russian Federal Taxation Service, wiping the agency’s database and backup copies....
'Wildly more expensive': Workers with in-office jobs spend about $31/day that they wouldn't working from home — here's what employers need to do ( finance.yahoo.com )
Your ‘Set It and Forget It’ 401(k) Made You Rich. No More. — WSJ ( apple.news )
For four decades, patient savers able to grit their teeth through bubbles, crashes and geopolitical upheaval won the money game. But the formula of building a nest egg by rebalancing a standard mix of stocks and bonds isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has.
New homeowner lots of questions
I am a proud owner of a brand new home. I am in love with it. It’s cute the yard is perfect. It is old and lived in hard. And we couldn’t afford really nice. Pretty much everything we looked at had some serious issues so we chose the one we loved the most and the one we felt we could handle the issues. I have lots of...
Looking for Movies that Showcase Positive Masculinity
Hey there, fellow movie enthusiasts! I’m on the hunt for films that portray positive masculinity. We often see movies with traditional, stereotypical portrayals of masculinity, but I believe there’s a world of cinema out there that can challenge these norms and offer a fresh perspective....
Frontier Airlines CEO says the pandemic made workers 'lazy' and less productive: 'People are still allowing people to work from home, all this silliness, right?' ( www.businessinsider.com )
Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle blamed higher overhead costs on workers being less productive, calling it a "society-wide" problem.
Opinion | Crime, Inflation and Public Perceptions ( www.nytimes.com )
Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly...
It's Almost Impossible To Find A Decent Used Car Under $20,000 ( jalopnik.com )
Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn't been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
We Know “NoFap” Is Misleading Men About Masturbation. It Might Be More Dangerous Than That. ( slate.com )