ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
4d ago
I thought about it, even considered mentioning the roof example exactly in my prior comment. What I would have said was something like, "I didn't own a house, so it wasn't like I had to worry about suddenly replacing a roof." Life circumstances.
Life circumstances now provide, uh, other reasons why I'm not super concerned about having much of an emergency fund.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
When I first started investing, I learned that you can withdraw contributions from Roth IRAs at any point in time, tax/penalty-free. Also, if you do withdraw, contributions are withdrawn first. I reasoned that the types of emergencies that I would want to be prepared for with an emergency fund were less of the type "the market will crash", and more of the type, "I'll have a lumpy expense, like having to replace a car." Of course, it is possible for both such things to happen at the same time, but probabilities. My conclusion was that I was going to retain a very moderate amount of cash flow buffer (could be viewed as extremely small compared to the emergency fund numbers I see others throwing around), and that I could manage to have my 'emergency fund' essentially be in my Roth IRA. Sure, it wouldn't be great if I actually had to withdraw some, but the downside is just that I would "lose" some prior years' room of possible contributions, which I would necessarily lose if I wasn't putting money into the Roth IRA in the first place!
Times changed, my life circumstances changed, but I've mostly still happened to find myself not really needing an emergency fund. Of course, other people have different circumstances where it would make more sense.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
the stranglehold of the FAA has so totally destroyed personal aviation that we don't have flying cars despite the technology having been widely available since the 1910s.
The FAA has surely mangled personal aviation, but the lack of flying cars is probably better laid at the feet of the NHTSA. In order to be light enough to make any sense flying, flying vehicles have to be pretty fragile. Far too fragile for the NHTSA to approve letting them get in accidents at 70MPH on the interstate.
I haven't been continuing to follow it, but in the last decade and a half or so, I remember seeing a variety of start-ups make minor headlines about how they were getting into the flying car space. I always chuckled when I would dig into their materials and see that they were already claiming at the beginning that they'd be limited to something like 25-45MPH on the road. They're just not going to get a plethora of buyers with that type of restriction, even assuming they could make the rest of the product pretty decent and also survive FAA.
To eyeball some numbers, possibly the lightest passenger vehicle to barely squeek by highway safety standards would be the Smart Fortwo. The curb weight includes fluids, but was originally around 1600lbs. Eyeballing light aircraft (unfortunately, only listing empty weight), we'll start from that weight. After all, we've gotta add wings (eyeballing at least 150sqft of them; not sure where we're going to put them while driving), flying-to-driving-and-back-to-flying mechanisms, including shifting our powertrain to a propeller, flight control equipment, not sure if our suspension will survive landing, etc. Are we going to need STOL ability? Most potential flying car owners aren't gonna get hype about having to drive to their local airport anyway to take off... and then find another local airport to land. I think we're gonna need at least a couple hundred horsepower, but the Smart came with like 45-60hp to start (maybe 100hp later1, but it's not clear from the wiki article how much that affected the weight). But we're definitely going to get beefier, and that comes with additional powertrain weight, fuel weight, etc. Weight truly is the most predominant factor in aircraft design.
Maybe an Elon Musk tier person could thread the needle (and I guess he made comments to that effect in the last year), but I think it's still gonna be hard. I sort of doubt heavy batteries with an electric drivetrain is going to solve this problem, either.
1 - As an added note on the timeline for when technology existed, engines were much less efficient long ago.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Is this really what you've got? C'mon man.
Instead you were remarkably obtuse, and engaged in backseat modding while appending an edit clarifying that you weren't engaging in backseat modding. I appreciate the disclaimer roughly as much as I'd appreciate someone explaining at length why my house is an eyesore and then adding that they haven't called the HOA about it and aren't sure they would win if they did.
I did not think it was necessarily moddable. I realized that someone might think so, and I made sure to clarify. My point was that it was bad. It is, indeed, bad. You're so desperate to avoid that issue that you must try to make the conversation about something else, and this is the best that you have?! Your complaint is that it must boggle the mind for someone to think that a post is bad, but not necessarily moddable? C'mon man. Be serious.
The post is culture war because it has an outgroup
Read again. I said that it was an "indicator". I have separately believed and stated that certain AI issues appear to be culture war these days.
It's especially funny given that my far more detailed AI updates have been accused of not being Culture War material, in the CWR thread.
Read again. I specifically said, "it can be, depending upon the presentation".
a four-paragraph brief on the taxonomy of a shitpost is not the quality contribution you think it is.
Read again. Where did I ever say that I thought it was a quality contribution? I said that it was much less important. Please stop just making up bollocks shit to try to insult your interlocutors.
If you would like my help in using Claude to read better, pay me. See again how completely contentless that sort of shit is? How it's nothing but an insult? You can't even bring yourself to consider your own behavior, so you must deflect and insult again.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Thanks for clarifying something in my thinking. It is a shitpost. That is, it is shit. It is bad. It is not good. Coupled with the primary purpose being to get a dig in on your outgroup, it is quite off-putting. I feel like a simple bare link would have been far better. Even a not-dumb one-liner would have been nice. It's that you're faking like you're making an argument, but without making an argument. It's like "clown hat on; clown hat off" tier of feces.
I'll be happy to conduct an assessment of how you could improve such posts if you'll pay. I'll probably charge extra, FYI. (That is to say, this new habit of you also insulting your interlocutors by demanding that they pay for you to offload your thinking to Claude contains no meaningful content, is also extremely off-putting, and it should be beneath you.)
Reading this finally jolted loose a thing in the back of my brain. Almost a year ago now, I stashed this link with a note that I should look into the scheme at some point. Scroll down to the section titled "Box spreads".
...now having spent a few minutes looking at it again, a couple comments. a) If you don't do it right, you can really screw yourself over. There's a legend of wallstreetbets who did this, of course. b) There's now a FinTech company that specializes in doing this for you. An LLM tells me that they get paid by adding an extra ~0.5% to your rate, which is probably worth it if you don't feel like you really know what you're doing. c) I have no idea how long it would take to execute. From what I can guess from what I've read so far, they use a browser extension (a little sketch) to actually put the trade together in your existing brokerage account, so presumably, the actual execution of it all is extremely quick. But it looks like you probably need to do some setup in advance.
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