Turniper
7d ago
I am just a non-miserable tightwad. There's very little that costs money that I want and yet do not have. Most of my big spending is A) The house, and B) Nice groceries (Which is just not that large).
For a single person, it's really not complicated. You identify what you care about, and what those things cost, and compare the cost benefit of them being part of your life vs the additional years you need to work to afford those drinks/that boat/the next step up the housing ladder.
Where it gets complicated is when your working partner comes into it. Ultimately, you really need to understand your wife here. Does she support you retiring early? If yes, does she actually, or will she get resentful about it? Will it make a difference if you're pursuing a hobby seriously or taking care of the kids rather than getting high and playing games all day? Does she expect you to support the family entirely when kids come into the picture? If so, is that gonna be just while she's on maternity leave, or is there an unspoken expectation that she'll transition to full time caregiver while you win bread? You really need a firm understanding of how she feels about your money vs our money vs her money, and how much she enjoys work, if you're even gonna consider stepping away.
I am married, semi-fired, and expecting kids in the next few years, so I've got some experience here. My wife is very much uncommonly devoted to separate finances and does not feel entitled to my money. The flip side of this, is despite being unemployed, I do still pay more than 50% of the household expenses. Additionally, we are both naturally quite frugal, so there's few 50-50 travel expenses that I'd balk at. It helps that her limiting factor on travel is available days off, while mine is money, so there's not a lot of pressure to go on more trips. On top of that, I do a lot of household labor, and expect to be primary caregiver a sizable part of the time when kids get added to the picture.
In your case, with the massive income disparity, and your wife enjoying spending more than you, I'd just add half a million to your fire number (Unless it's already so large you'd be able to afford her quitting and traveling as much as you want). It's just gonna make sense for you to do more earning for the family with your large earning capacity.
Turniper
7d ago
Nice. I've been driving my 07 for almost 18 years now, and I love it to death. Just an absolutely bulletproof car, I basically give it the absolute minimum possible maintenance and nothing breaks except the UV-vulnerable plastic and the usual belts. I keep saying I'll sell it when the next problem comes up, but I think outside fluids and state inspection it's gotten 500 bucks in maintenance since 2021.
Turniper
7d ago
No, I don't really think we are. It's definitely possible we could get a 2001 style sector driven crash if AI growth slows, but I don't think there's any structural leverage for a 2008 style devaluation. The two inflated assets are 1) The US stock market. and 2) The US dollar. Yeah, nobody in 08 thought the housing sector could crash, but I don't see any scenario where the dollar falls more than 20% right about now, and the US stock market's insane valuations are driven by a number of companies with genuine chances of reshaping much of the world economy. There's still plenty of cash on the sidelines willing to move in if valuations drop.
If you wanna blackpill, my bigger concerns would be structural unemployment for the bottom 60% of people in the coming decades, and inflation hollowing out middle class wages following increasing salary pressure from the capital and well earning professional classes. I don't think the bubble explodes. I think it keeps growing and largely pulls money upward out of wage earner hands.
Anyway, if you wanna be prepared, the advice is basically the same as it's always been. Have a big pile of cash, your housing situation locked in, and be able to weather a sudden job loss (Back up plan, second household income, or savings).
Turniper
27d ago
99%? If I try it on and like it, it's gonna be good. I usually thrift these days, but I don't think there's any secret, just be picky before you purchase, not after. I usually try on like 2% of what I see, and buy 20% of what I try on.
Turniper
1mo ago
My head hurts. Been sick all week. But I got my chapter written, so my work week is done, and I fly out for my honeymoon tomorrow, so all I've got to do is pack. All looking up from here. Going on an Alaska cruise. Excited.
Turniper
1mo ago
All of this was part of it. But the novelty of exploration was also a big deal, and embraced that same philosophy. Vanilla WoW made travel punishing. Even on-level for a zone you could die to taking the wrong shortcut and pulling one elite, or three or four regular mobs. Even with an epic mount, you could die taking a wrong turn through a naga camp if you weren't way overlevelled. Dungeons were confusing messes. Getting a group together was a trial without a warlock, and you'd often have 15 minutes of anticipation or slow pulls waiting for that last guy to make his way there. Most dungeon bosses had like a 5 item drop table, and discovering what was on it that was good for your character was huge. Every upgrade mattered. Class quests often sent you across the world, and rewarded genuinely valuable features that would just be handed to you now, like cat form, or warlock pets. And the social aspect was reinforced by all of these challenges. You often had little to do except talk during travel periods or while waiting for someone. You needed friends to access a lot of fairly core content. The way all these details tied together was masterful.
I kind of wonder what contesting paternity means in a practical sense in this context. Let’s suppose the wife does not agree to a test. Then what?
You get it done anyway. Assuming you're the father on the birth certificate, you have the right to do so in most US states. In the few you don't have the right to get one with legal weight done, you still have the right to do a private test (Home kit, you can purchase online with no interaction), and you would then seek a court order to get a second one with legal weight done. Judges generally grant those orders unless there's some reason not to.
Turniper
1mo ago
Oaxaca is great, but you can definitely replace it with low skim mozzarella in most applications. My mom is mexican, so I tend to make a whole variety of enchiladas on different occasions. My two true favorites though are probably the simple ones. Shredded rotisserie chicken, sour cream, a melty white cheese with good pull, wrapped in a corn tortilla, topped with either ranchero sauce or dona rosa mole + chicken stock + chipotle onion paste. I finish the red with shredded cheese and the mole with more sour cream. As far as I'm concerned, its simply the best easy weeknight casserole dish out there.
I would love to visit Japan eventually. We'd considered it for a honeymoon, but after doing Italy a few years ago my wife and I were tired of planning, so we opted for an Alaska cruise instead. We'll be leaving in 11 days :)
Turniper
1mo ago
For me this week was lazy. So, chicken enchiladas with ranchero sauce/Oaxaca cheese, made from a broken down rotisserie, and some steaks that were actually top blade short ribs just grilled to rare with potatos and creamed spinach. Both really easy when you purchase the rice/beans/potatoes premade.
Got more energy this week, so gonna try a panang curry for the first time, and then just do homemade buffalo mac n cheese and grilled chicken for the second meal. I usually just cook twice a week and get 8-10 servings out of each one. My wife gets fed catered meals at work, so her interest in cooking is pretty low atm. I tend to do all of it since I'm technically unemployed and I have the time.
Turniper
1mo ago
I usually figure out how the novel ends when I've written about 60% of it. If you wanted to write a particular plot, then you need to take pains from the outset to write the sort of characters that support it. Fiction is an art of fitting together details. That's all it is, when it comes down to it, details that create the texture of a world a reader can believe. You will never get everything to fit perfectly, but the best stories are those where the character tensions and plot holes are so subtle as to be unnoticeable. More actionably, you'd be surprised how easily you can move characters by leveraging random chance in a believable way. Need an idiot ball? He was drinking hard that night. Need to force aggression? Bad day, foul mood, poor choices. A war is fated to occur but both parties are reasonable? Add an unreasonable subordinate.
Turniper
2mo ago
Unlike your theoretical darknet version, Polymarket actually has a reputation for reliably paying out. For all crypto's fancy talk of solving trust with escrow and game theory, we've still yet to find any actual solutions for allowing anonymous parties to handle huge amounts of other people's money that works better than the US legal system.
Turniper
2mo ago
Thanks! Well, we're 1 for 3 aiming for 2 of 3. We've had the house for a while, are planning on kids, but are pretty committed to separate finances. Both of us had parents who had disputes over money, hers more severe than mine, and feel better about a hers/mine/ours situation where we have a shared account for shared expenses. Having kids might change that, but I don't think it will.
Turniper
2mo ago
Our whole event is pretty low-key, so I'll actually be spending much of the reception with my dad grilling lol.
Turniper
2mo ago
Getting married today. I suppose that counts as fun. We've been together for 10 years already, so I think we've a decent hand on this whole romance thing, but does anyone who can beat that want to chime in with advice for love and life?
Turniper
2mo ago
If I'm gonna be honest, I continue to not care that much about the events in Iran. We've spend 40 billion dollars and lost 13 soldiers. That's not great, but it's also a drop in the statistical budget. That's like 4% of the yearly defense budget and one week of the armed forces all cause mortality. The deaths, including civilian, in Iran are a tragedy, but they're a tiny tragedy compared to the numbers of protestors butchered in the last few months.
The destruction of natural gas plants is possibly extremely bad for Europe and parts of Asia, but doesn't really impact America. If Iran keeps tolling the strait long term, that's bad and entirely on Trump. If they get the bomb and means to deliver it, same deal. I would prefer the Iranian regime fall, but I don't think that's an outcome achievable at any price America should be paying, and a mistake to attempt.
But overall I frankly just do not care that much, and I won't have firm opinions on the conflict until consequences have shaken out for a year or two or things escalate substantially.
Turniper
2mo ago
This survey is structured so that not supporting subsidizing renewable energy counts as pro-coal (See question 2 about the role of government). I don't think it is surprising that when energy prices go up many voters care more about increasing whatever form of capacity is cheapest than subsidizing greener options.
Turniper
3mo ago
It is currently 142,448 words, pending a little bit of churn from ongoing edits.
Turniper
3mo ago
A couple thousand words away from finishing my second novel (Xianxia series called Between Beast and Buddha). Looks like it's gonna clock in at just shy of 200k words. A bit meandering in places, and darker in tone than the first. I'm a little too close to the work to have an objective opinion on it yet, but I'm mostly satisfied, it's a necessary part of the story I set out to tell. Reader reception has been mostly good, but I'm not sure how the ending will land.
I really should get back to editing the first one. It would be nice to finally officially be able to say I have a book out there, instead of explaining web serials every time someone asks me about it at a party.
Turniper
3mo ago
In no particular order:
Yes, I know, people hate it when I respond to advice like this. But it's part of how I was raised — to automatically find flaws in and try my best to shoot down any proposed plan, because anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so you must spend every waking moment considering every possible point of failure and taking measures to address it, always have a Plan B for when Plan A fails, and a Plan C for when Plan B fails, and a Plan D…. My first instinct whenever anyone suggests anything is to poke holes in it, find every possible point of failure, and respond with every reason why it won't work.
Man, you can respond to things however you want. But I do think you should try some. If you're already so worried about doom, what could failing really cost you?
Who pays for that? And through what platform? Don't all the payment processors and crowdfunding/donation platforms/Patreon clones pretty much forbid NSFW? And I'd need to somehow obtain skill with AI art generation, enough to be competitive with all the other people out there with far more skill and experience. (Plus, I'm hardly the person to know what constitutes desirability or quality in pornographic output, given my own unfamiliarity with and lack of consumption of porn.)
Subscribestar and Patreon. Patreon's rules are actually pretty lax, basically no underage, no rape, and no real people. Not sure the other platforms even go that far. There are people clearing tens of thousands a month just reselling curated image sets. Probably won't be a thing for more than a year or two, but they're making money now. This is a 'skill' that didn't even exist two years ago, you're not competing with ML engineers, you're competing with random degenerates who asked someone on discord what model they used and how to set it up.
Can you be specific what you mean by "repackaging" here, and is that something people actually pay for? Plus, it's my youngest brother who's the artistic one in the family.
You say you sell images suitable to be book covers. You don't say those images are largely AI. A lot of books come out every year. The same people who were previously willing to pay 200 bucks for some stock images photoshoped on top of each other (Go browse some romantasy covers on Amazon) are now perfectly happy to pay for AI ones. Fiverr is the starting marketplace, but anyone who gets real business just makes their own portfolio site eventually.
I talked to the insurance company recruiters at the Job Fair a couple of times, discussing my math skills, and that stuff all gets done outside of Alaska. Plus, I lack actuarial training (and whatever degree/certification) and such.
Actuaries are a very small percentage of finance. Remote is also very available these days. That being said, a 4 year degree (Literally any major) is very important for these jobs, and if you don't have one, it's probably not a good path.
actually making book covers
(Doing art. Print shops are a dying breed, but people still commission covers)
Edit: I guess you might say my "dream job" is "prophet of doom," but nobody pays for that.
PEOPLE LITERALLY PAY FOR THIS. Seriously. People love the evening news, they love their various youtuber naysayers, and all those AI Doomer substacks. If you actually think you're good at it, go put your money where your mouth is and start seriously seeking a broader platform instead of contenting yourself to be a replyguy on niche reddit offshoots. It doesn't matter how good your content is, if it isn't top-level on a large site, it will never gather an audience.
Turniper
3mo ago
You just want a large list? Data entry, content moderation, sales, repackaging AI generated images into book covers, actually making book covers, teaching english via zoom, customer support, all the ancillary shit software companies need that isn't code like project management, basically 70% of finance and insurance, streaming, selling curated AI generated porn. I'm sure there's more but that's all I can think of immediately without googling.
Turniper
3mo ago
We've had this conversation before, like 20 months ago, and you detailed your many limitations, though their specifics escape me now. I still maintain that if you can write with this clarity and frequency on the motte you are theoretically capable of earning income through intellectual work, you just need to find a way to cross the gulf between it impacting your benefits and it being enough to live on. There are huge numbers of jobs that can be done entirely via interacting with a computer or phone these days. I personally have made money writing software, tutoring high schoolers, and accepting donations for fiction. LLMs are changing many of those niches, but at least for the moment near as many opportunities are being created as are being destroyed, though that may not hold forever. But for the moment, if you want freedom, you'll need to earn income. That's the way the world works. If this 'slaughter' you cannot speak of arrives, well, that might change as some nation begins accepting US asylum applications. But until then, not a single nation is interested in acquiring dependents with no ties to their citizenry.
Turniper
4mo ago
Design isn't the bottleneck though. We have designed fabs before, most of the hard part is solved. It's actually building these massive facilities, supplying them with water and energy, keeping them at pressure, staffing them with technicians, and troubleshooting the million small issues that can eat into yield ratios that is hard. It would take some world changing advancements in robotics or AI just leapfrogging our current understanding of how to build chips for them to make a dent in the difficulty of the process.
Path of Exile 2. The new patch is just so peak. It finally feels like a true sequel to the first, even with half the character classes missing.
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