birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
13hr ago
I'd like to make it clear that I don't endorse this idea. It's more of a question of what happens when the system starts to break to the point that a sizable portion of the population can no longer engage with it.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Welp, now I have a new book to read.
birb_cromble
1d ago
That's precisely why I'm sticking to ETFs for now.
It's still fun to do the research, back testing, monte Carlo simulations, and all that, even if I do end up just buying more VTI/VT, SGOV, and SCHD.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I'm not spiritually prepared for day trading yet. It's only been in the last year that I've even been stable enough financially and emotionally to invest in equities outside of a retirement account at all.
If you do get into day trading, please occasionally fill us in.
birb_cromble
1d ago
My recent hobby has been investing. I'm putting a fixed amount of money into it and I'm treating it like a loss from day one. Given that I'm only really picking low expense ETFs for now, it's basically saving with extra steps. Nonetheless, I'm telling myself that every dollar invested is another minute closer to leaving the rat race.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm not quite sure where to ask this, so I'll start here.
I've noticed an increased sense of precariousness among both my blue and white collar family members and friends. I've never seen it so strong or so pervasive. Everyone is convinced that they will be out of a job soon, and a significant percentage think their entire industry will be functionally dead before they can retire.
It's really wild. It's people ranging from bartenders to retail to professors to writers to software developers to painters (art) to painters (houses). Really the only people who seem optimistic are servicemen. I don't quite think I've seen anything like it.
Either something really bad actually is coming or we, as a society, have really done a number on our ability to accurately predict the future.
What do you all think is going on here?
The question above got me moving down another line of thought shortly after.
Let's assume that the technocrat dream future is half true and some fraction of the population can live off capital gains in luxury forever.
What do you do with everybody else?
In the last few economic wipeouts, the answer seemed to be "let people fend for themselves until things correct themselves. The worst off can eat a shotgun or overdose in the meantime".
Imagine that the US had some sort of "survival guarantee", where you could, no questions asked, be granted housing and food that would keep you from starving or dying of any notable nutrient deficiencies unto perpetuity.
The catch is that a single person would get a spartan efficiency apartment in a giant, Soviet-style mega construct. A couple could get a similarly spare one bedroom. A family with with kids could get an apartment with one bedroom per two kids.
Food would be simple - rice, beans, rehydrated eggs, and other cheap staples. This might be served from a central kitchen like an army ness, or handed over in boxes.
You wouldn't get anything else. You'd just be guaranteed to not starve or freeze.
The constructs would be built in out of the way, inconvenient locations. If you had a car, it might be a 20 mile drive to the nearest grocery. A van would go into town and back once a day for those who didn't have a car.
The apartments would share qualities with prison cells and cheap corporate real estate to minimize costs and reduce maintenance overhead. Think concrete or sheet vinyl floors, one overhead light per room, bathrooms that are all plastic walls where the toilet is also the sink with a metal mirror, and other measures. The apartments come with basic furnishings (eg: a Murphy bed per room, maybe a kitchen table with chairs and a couch), but nothing else.
Internet and cable hookups would exist, but would not be covered unless the resident set up their own account. Electricity, heat and cooling (centrally set), water, and trash removal (accessible via central chutes) would all be covered.
How many people do you think would take up that offer? How do you think it would end up?
birb_cromble
2d ago
My guesses for how quickly this stuff will progress haven't done great
Reading over your prediction, are you certain that it was wrong, or that you wildly underestimated how much money people were willing to throw at the problem despite the quadratic curve? My personal prediction was that we'd see moderate efficiency gains that would help, but I never thought we'd wrap up over a full percent of the US GDP in it.
birb_cromble
2d ago
The help side is mostly for his wife, who's kind of overwhelmed.
With my dad, I've been watching more football than I have in years, since that's what he wants to do now.
It's been my experience that in the winter the amount in a multivitamin isn't enough. Also, the vitamin K in most multivitamins usually doesn't include K2 mk7, which is really important for making sure that your body puts calcium in your bones and not your circulatory system.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I've had mild success healing a tongue ulcer by packing it with salt for 30 - 60 seconds once a day for a day or two.
It's really uncomfortable, but it does seem to make it heal faster for some reason that I don't understand. I think it kills bacteria that are interfering with the healing?
I went down to visit my father over the weekend. As soon as I walked through the door, he asked me to sit down with him on a call he was on with an estate lawyer. Due to all the various contingencies, I am in line as a guardian for my youngest brother as well as a trustee for his bequests.
He also wanted to be there when discussing what he wants to leave me. My father has always lived fairly simply, and I didn't realize he was as well off as he was. He apologized that he couldn't leave me more, then told me what his intentions were.
It's a life-changing amount. I don't think I'd be able to retire today with it, but it moves my retirement horizon from 20 years from now to like... four years from now.
The whole time he was going over it, all I could think was "I don't want any of that. I just want my dad." It's an absolute mindfuck. I don't want to think about it at all, but it's very important to him that I have a plan on how to be responsible with anything that he leaves me.
End stage cancer treatment is very expensive, so all of this is up in the air, but I need to think about how to handle this.
On the purely medical front, the side effects of the chemo don't seem to be nearly as bad as he feared it would be. He's also on an enormous cocktail of drugs meant to keep those side effects under control. At least one of those drugs is an anti-psychotic, and at least one is an antidepressant. They're being used off label for appetite stimulation and nausea, but they're still having psychological effects. He's in a weird state where he knows he should be more distressed than he is, and he knows that should distress him as well, but it just doesn't.
Side effects or not, at least he's eating now. He's lost enough weight that I can feel his bones when I hug him. We're all hoping that the appetite improvement keeps up. The doctors have said that losing too much weight during chemo can be harmful.
My youngest brother seems to be taking things better than I have been. I don't know if it's because he's compartmentalizing, or if he just hasn't grasped the magnitude of what is happening, or if it's because this has been going on for such a long part of his short life already that he's had a chance to come to terms with it. Thankfully, he has a huge extended family who are always there to support him.
My step-mother is trying hard to keep it together. She and my father run a small business together and she's trying to pick up the slack.
I've been trying to help out with household tasks whenever I'm down, but she's very particular and it feels like trying to help just results in more work for her. I want to help, but I'm not really sure how I can other than just physically being there because my father likes to have me around. Unfortunately, that means that I get to sit in a chair as my dad falls asleep and I get to listen to him struggle to breathe.
I'm not sure if I'm really looking for advice here, because I don't know what to ask.
Maybe the only thing I really can ask is what you can do to help someone who's clearly overloaded, but can't stand it when something isn't done the way they would do it, and doesn't know how to explain what they want?
birb_cromble
3d ago
I've started taking ZMA in an attempt to dampen an overactive cortisol awakening response. It seems like it's helping a little.
birb_cromble
4d ago
humans have become worse at coding in the last 30 years.
Have they? It seems like for the category of "motivated, experienced developers who do it for a living or as a serious hobby" you might be right, but it seems like there are an awful lot of people who would have had no ability back in the 90s who can bang out a half-assed python script today.
birb_cromble
5d ago
What is the difference between a financial advisor and a financial planner?
birb_cromble
7d ago
My crew has picked up SCP: 5K again after a long hiatus. If you like janky tactical shooters and survival horror, it might be worth your time.
birb_cromble
7d ago
And I understand that it's basically there for coding already
So far that hasn't been my experience. It gets uncannily close,and if you don't pay attention it's fine, but for any reasonably sized project the code tends to be rife with bugs. It's not just one kind of bug either - it varies from braindead stuff like not closing resources to subtle misunderstanding of APIs and business requirements.
The consistent thing I see from its biggest cheerleaders in my company is a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia, where they use it to do something they themselves don't know how to do, and are then blown away by the "quality" of the output. I end up getting assigned to fix it a few weeks later after the hype has died down.
birb_cromble
9d ago
The front of her car contacted the agent that shot her.
Have you ever been hit by a car? Even at parking lot speeds, they hit hard enough to wreck your shit. If you go under the wheels, the driver's intentions don't matter.
birb_cromble
9d ago
As somebody who could probably dodge the water bottle and somebody who's been hit by a few cars, I wouldn't have wanted to be that ICE agent.
birb_cromble
10d ago
My only New Year's resolution is to save more money in 2026 than I did in 2025. So far, I'm about $125 under last year's total spending.
It's not much, but it's a start.
birb_cromble
10d ago
I'd recommend supplementing with calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin K2 (mk7) if you aren't already. I've been regrowing some bone myself lately and it does seem like it's improved my recovery.
NB: I live in an area that gets basically no sun 9 months out of the year, so it may be more that I was deficient than anything.
birb_cromble
12d ago
At 20/days/month and 8/hrs/day, that comes out to about... $31.25/hr per kid.
I'm realizing that I genuinely have no idea what a price is for childcare.
Is that high or low?
birb_cromble
12d ago
birb_cromble
12d ago
Trump Train is going after him regardless of his job. If they can tie him to the ongoing fraud cases, they will.
I'm not sure if I buy that. Trump has a terrible track record of actually using the force of law against his political opponents. Even if Walz is guilty of a crime, it seems more likely that his AG will show up and give a speech on Fox News rather than actually indict.
birb_cromble
12d ago
I don't have children, and other than largely raising my one brother I don't have a clear and visible "childcare pedigree". The end result of this is that a lot of my friends and acquaintances who do have kids tend to confide in me because I appear to be an uninterested party.
So far as I can tell, what this guy is saying is true for a majority of men who have young kids. Pretty much every father I know has admitted that he can't wait until his kids are older, and that simply being around them is exhausting.
If you go in for evo-psych, that makes sense. In an ancestral environment, the man would be away from children, hunting. He probably wouldn't be interacting with them regularly until they were old enough to be taught.
I think this guy's mistake is simply being either too honest or too autistic for his own good. A solid 90% of modern society functions on rampant lying - no normal guy wants to admit that they'd rather work a sixteen hour shift getting his balls crushed at the ball crushing factory than take care of a toddler, and whether they consciously recognize it or not, they don't admit it because they know it'll make everyone else around then experience an uncomfortable amount of self reflection about their own life. It's better to just say Kids Are Wonderful And There Are Absolutely No Exceptions Full Stop so everyone can feel like they are good people doing good things.
A guy like this breaks the social contract, which is probably part of why it blew up. This is pretty much the childcare equivalent of saying that yes, that dress does make you look fat.
As somebody who is also hypermobile and has joint issues, it's actually not too bad. You just have to know your limits and be willing to tap out when somebody has you dead to rights.
The broken fingers, however, are a lot harder to avoid.
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