Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
Yeah.
I really don’t want to see text like this.
It would make things a lot more annoying to read.
I much prefer combining sentences by default. It’s natural to put a blank line between paragraphs, and Markdown was designed to make the natural thing render decently. You can put things on separate lines if you want, and it’ll always read nicely.
But definitely break things up into paragraphs if it makes sense.
It’s a lot easier to just share a login…
It could also be a difference in how sales tax or whatever is presented. I know in the EU, VAT is included in online pricing, whereas sales tax in the US is not. I don’t know how Brazil runs things, but that could explain a chunk of the difference. The US also likely has higher volume for these kinds of things, so prices will likely be lower in the US than Brazil.
But yeah, it looks to be about 40-50% more expensive, which is substantial. If you’re looking to spend $600-700 on storage, there’s a good chance you can afford another $300-400, you just don’t want to spend that much.
Exactly. I haven’t used a HDD in my PC for years, yet I bought HDDs for my homelab NAS. Unless SSDs get a lot cheaper, I’ll keep buying HDDs for on-prem bulk storage.
Most of those are in the 30-60GB range IIRC. So if you keep 5 installed, you’re looking at 200GB or so.
What OP is referring to is things like COD that are 300GB or so.
Why is it there for the paragraphs and gone for the lists?
You need a blank line between paragraphs, so:
First paragraph.
Second paragraph.
If you want a list, add a hyphen or asterisk, like so, and you won’t need the blank line:
- item one
- item two
Renders as:
In freedom units, that looks to be ~$1k for 8TB SSD. Same device here is $600-700.
Or both extremely expensive.
And by default, WireGuard doesn’t keep the connection alive when there’s no traffic. You can tune this in settings, which I’ve done because I’m behind CGNAT and need a persistent connection.
Also run a health test on it. It’s less important for SSDs IMO, but it’s great for HDDs to check if there’s any obvious issues.
Do you actually know anyone who’s in this situation?
Both sides of my family are generally fairly successful (middle class and upper middle class), with most of my cousins having completed a 4-year degree. My family is quite close, vacationing together almost every year, renting large houses in the middle of nowhere so we can spend time together (e.g. this year we had ~20 people in one house in nowhere Idaho).
My in-laws, however, are the opposite. My MIL completed a chef certification, but other than that, neither has completed formal education beyond K-12. They drive nicer cars, wear nicer clothes, and go to nicer restaurants than I ever did growing up (we thought the “cheap Chinese” place was a special treat). Both of them work, while I grew up in a single-income family. I don’t know details about their financial situation, and I’m honestly preparing our finances so we can support them when they can no longer supplement their SS income.
My family is largely quite successful (siblings are professor, accountant, actuary, and software engineer), I work in a field with a lot of successful people, and my neighbors are largely fairly successful (mostly middle middle class to upper middle class). That said, I’ve had neighbors have cars repossessed, coworkers struggle w/ credit card debt, and people making more than me struggle with a house down-payment (and I bought in my late 20s making much less than I do now), and the reason for each is pretty obvious from the outside (they spend way more than me on hobbies, cars, and other lifestyle items).
That said, I do admit I have limited personal experience with people in this situation. However, I personally choose to live like I’m a level below my means so I have a cushion in case something goes wrong. And one of my life goals is to leave my career early to actively help people with spending problems at all income levels to break that cycle, hence why I’m so interested in this.
they have a job opportunity dry up after they already moved for it, or they had a messy divorce because their spouse was abusive, or they poured a ton of money into some career training that turned out not to give them any real, marketable skills
At the risk of sounding callous, this sounds like symptoms of the same underlying problem: lack of diligence. And no, I’m not saying they didn’t “work hard enough” or they should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” I’m saying they could have mitigated these problems by making different decisions:
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
- Seneca
I fully appreciate that many people don’t have the training or experience to avoid manipulation by others, which is a common thread here, so we absolutely need to improve our education system. But blaming others for your choices is a recipe for failure and isn’t going to help you move forward.
I have made my fair share of mistakes, some of them have cost me a lot. But I refuse to blame others and instead choose to point the finger back at myself, and I think that has made all the difference. And that’s what I’m getting at here: you can’t change your present, but you can make choices to change your future.
Thirty years ago, a family could weather one or two of those, no problem. My dad got laid off not too long before I was born, and he was the sole earner for our family. He got hired fairly soon after, but in the meantime we were fine.
And that’s the same today. I lost my job at the start of COVID right after my daughter was born (she was born in March, 2020, so we saw lockdowns come into effect while we were in the hospital). So I had a ton of medical expenses, few opportunities for work (I was a consultant at the time), and an uncertain economic future. But what I did have was 6-12 months expenses in cash. So we were fine, and it took me most of a year to find a new job because companies had frozen hiring (ended up w/ W-2 position because I couldn’t network due to lockdowns).
That set us back a couple of years, but we were already ahead because we were living below our means. Fast-forward to today and we’re back to being ahead because we continued to live below our means.
Here’s an interesting article about household debt over time, which goes back to 1995 (so almost 30 years). A quote:
The authors found that household liabilities rose relative to income and real interest rates mostly declined from 1995 to 2010, which led them to suggest that an increase in loan supply relative to loan demand happened during that period.
I read this as: debt got cheaper, so people got more debt. So people are in more debt today, but they’re paying about the same to service that debt. So people are spending more than they used to, but they’re able to do that because borrowing rates are lower.
The solution, then, isn’t necessarily that people don’t have enough income, it’s that their expectations of what that income can buy is out of whack. In my experience, people largely paid for things w/ cash 30 years ago, whereas today paying with credit is a lot more common. People don’t save up to buy things as much, and instead buy now pay later. So the real issue here is discipline, at least for those in the middle class and above.
Something systemic probably changed.
My argument is that systemic change is access to credit, which has gotten a lot easier in the last 10-20 years where you can get a new CC or personal loan on your computer instead of actually having to go talk to someone at a bank. That means being irresponsible with money is easier, which I think encourages more people to do it.
So I do think younger generations (including my own, I’m a millennial) are more irresponsible with money and have higher expectations of what that money can buy than previous generations. Over the last 30+ years, real wages have increased consistently (i.e. after taking inflation into account), and we’re back to the peak of the early 70s before the stagflation of the 80s. Yet people claim we’re getting poorer, so I have to take that as people having unrealistic expectations instead of an income problem.
You can’t stabilize any finances if you’re taking out payday loans in order to pay rent every month
Oh, I 100% agree. But in many cases, taking payday loans is a symptom of other serious problems in someone’s spending patterns and not necessarily an income problem. Maybe the car payment is too high, or perhaps they’re paying too much for food. Whatever it is, that needs to get fixed to end the need for emergency cash.
If you’re in the lower middle class or higher, there’s no excuse for it IMO. If you’re in the lower class, you’ll need to get creative (government assistance, co-living, etc).
you can just sell the supercar or downsize your house or whatever
You say that, but in many cases, they still end up net worth negative. The problem here isn’t with income, but spending, and you’re not going to sell your way out of a spending problem.
I think income divided by local cost-of-living could be, maybe.
Certainly. Economic classes are very much location-dependent. If you live in NYC or SF, you’d need to adjust the numbers a bit, likewise if you live in rural Mississippi or something. And there are calculators available online to help with that.
most people who are struggling financially are not in those situations
Pretty much everyone will say that though, because people are pretty bad at noticing the excesses in their own spending. If you’re not standing out as being “weird” for spending so little, then you’re probably “keeping up with the Joneses,” because the average American is pretty irresponsible.
This is a pretty broad brush stroke to be sure, and I’m sure there are plenty who are legitimately struggling despite a conscious effort to cut costs. I’m just saying that many, if not most, people who aren’t “financially stable” could make room in their budget to get financially stable, but instead end up throwing a ton of money down the drain due to interest.
Hmm… 39 years?
And since I have young kids, I don’t play with my homies much anymore. So single player and couch coop (with kids) it is.
“Class” is determined by income, “enough” is determined by spending habits. You could make $50k and have positive cash flow, or you could make $400k and always be strapped for cash. The higher your income is, the more options you have, but also the more exposure you have to more ways to waste your money.
This is a great video about this. Basically:
At each level, I see two types of people:
By this metric, not being strapped for cash is possible for pretty much anyone in the lower-middle class and above, and even those in the lower class could get there by stabilizing their finances so they can take some risks to increase their income (i.e. night school, quitting a bad job for a better job, getting CDL and financing a truck, etc). On the flipside, being strapped for cash is also quite possible at pretty much any income level, and I’ve heard plenty of stories about lawyers and doctors having trouble keeping up with debt payments because they got caught trying to keep up with those wealthier than them.
So I don’t think “strapped for cash” is a good metric for economic class, income is, because you can make choices that can cause you to be paycheck-to-paycheck at almost any income level, as well as choices to maintain stability at almost any income level.
I just don’t understand how “line go up” is a thing when so many refuse to buy because of stupid DRM. I know we’re in a minority, but surely the DRM doesn’t actually increase sales, right? People who would pirate will just wait, so I doubt it’s actually translating to more sales than if they courted the anti-DRM people.
Hmm, unfortunately I can’t go negative.
What exactly did you learn? If it’s that there are a number of different types of stem cells, then we really need to improve scientific communication to the average person. I learned this kind of thing because I’m interested, but I thought this was being taught to kids since they were an active area of research (something like 15-20 years?).
They seem to have really high employee retention:
Nintendo’s employee retention rate is 98.9%, surpassing the national average of 70% thanks to factors like brand strength and a strong employee welfare program.
That said, it’s a Japanese company, and Japanese work culture is very different from western work culture (read: a lot more stressful), but they seem to be doing reasonably well vs their peers.
Don’t worry, I’m old too, and I got you fam.
Burning is creating disks by etching the data onto the metal disc below the plastic layer, and ripping is extracting the data into a digital format, like an ISO, or in the case of music or video discs, usable media files (often includes a transcode because who uses CD/DVD format anyway?).
I’ve burned dozens if not hundreds of disks in my day, but haven’t burned anything for years. I most recently ripped my entire DVD and Bluray collection onto my Jellyfin server so I don’t have to deal with those ancient discs that keep getting scratched anymore.
Well, if a pitcher pitches a baby, the baby is likely dead regardless if it’s going to make it all the way to the batter. Whether the impact with your bat or the catcher’s mitt is what ultimately causes the baby to die seems to me to be an unimportant detail.
That said, since the baby is entirely unaerodynamic, it’s going to move a lot more slowly than a regular baseball, meaning there’s a chance you could save the baby by bunting (especially if you avoid the head), and if you assume the catcher has an ounce of humanity, they’ll probably be more concerned with checking on the baby rather than tagging the runner coming from third or throwing you out at first base.
So here are the options as I see it:
I’d go with 1, it’s the most humane, and probably no less likely to succeed vs 2.