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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2752 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 14, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's your plan ... E? Maybe F. Yeah, F is better.

Whats your Plan F?

By Plan F, I mean the Plan you have for your life if everything goes to shit, but not by some horrible tragedy outside of your control. A house-fire, a weird accident -- these things you recover from with some combination of insurance, help from friends and family, and outright charity.

Plan F is closer to; "My ice cream business was going great! But then my business partner - who I knew used to deal a little coke - decided to commit insurance fraud and I'm broke."

For me, I think I'm on the periphery of a semi-hostile / hazardous area that has some sort of amazing natural resource. There's always work for a western / American "fixer" here. Logisics middle man. Plausible deniability bro. Even just a scout for hyper-aggressive capital deployment.

So, what's your Plan F?

Barring a large upheaval due to AI that I'm not seeing happening right now (though I'll admit it's not impossible), my profession is going to be in demand even if I lose my job. Even if I were to be unable to find a company to hire me directly, I'm confident I could sell my services as a consultant, there's a lot of companies that are too small to have a full time sysadmin on staff but would like to have one consulting. If I suddenly became unemployable in polite society, some of the skills I've developped around cyber-security would probably still make me employable in less polite society.

I'm currently in an apartment, but I'm looking into moving in a house soon, on a minimal mortgage (or no mortgage if I can swing it). That's going to go a long way towards securing my life from shocks. I'm also eyeing (small scale) homesteading; planting, canning, preserving, having chickens. Maybe hydroponics. In the meantime, I try to keep myself in a position where I could reasonably live in and work from my car if for some reason that became necessary. (As to why someone who's almost at the point of buying a house mortgage free is also preparing for the eventuality he might have to live in his car, it's a mix of timing and my pathological need to prepare and have backup plans, even if I have friends and family that would definitely take me in as Plan B to E).

I recently had an epiphany with regards to what I really want to do as a hobby, I want to go canoe camping and fishing. Equipment for these, to a high amateur level, has a relatively low price ceiling (ie, these are not really money pit hobbies after the initial investment). Once I have a paid off / almost paid off house, my paid off car, my hobby equipment, my food expenses reduced through homesteading, I think I'll be quite secure. My planning puts me at that point within the next year or two, without accounting for my wife starting to work within a year or so.

I have family abroad in a country with iffy relations with the United States, so I've always joked that if I had to do a runner I'd show up at my uncle's doorstep, and hopefully have squirreled enough money away from whatever white collar crime has caused me to flee the country that I'll be able to open an American theme hamburger restaurant.

Being broke wouldn't be such a big setback tbh, I'd need to like develop some beyond the pale predilections and then have them exposed or something to get ostracized from my friends and family. In which case I think I'd move far away and start over, maybe the west coast.

It strongly depends on what actually caused me to end up in such dire straits. Was it insufficient care taken when anonymizing patient details land me in front of a patient tribunal and strip me off my license? Did the UK succumb to the rage virus? Did the NHS finally crumble?

Usually, my backstop is coming back to India. Working with my dad and taking the reins. Looking for a job elsewhere. If I'm done with training by then, I could probably make a decent life for myself as a shrink, if not, well I suppose it's hitting the books and preparing for some other exam. I'm pretty good at that, even if it's hardly my preferred way of passing the time.

Either go to a monastery or work some crappy part time job in a rural area and live on welfare, spend time writing etc.

Shawarma/pizza stand. Both are extremely easy to make, the general quality is shit - so you will be hard pressed to achieve being worse than average, always in demand.

Buy a van. Be the guy with a van to help people move items. Friendly service. Will do value adds like moving shit into your house, or taking junk away to the dump. I can definitely help ensure all of the stuff is maximally recycled.

Bonus: can sleep in van when money is too tight for an Extended Stay., with Planet Fitness membership for showering.

Alternatively: mobile car detailing.

Work as an HVAC tech is literally always available, even with a DUI I could just work internally at a datacenter or hospital(so no company vehicle), albeit with much worse hours. If I get maimed and don't get a payout from it I'd have to get my contractor's license and work for a sketchy company holding insurance at a slight pay cut. The process takes about six to eight weeks of study and costs $1500 in books and seminars, but just having the license isn't a big enough economic advantage to justify it unless you're crippled or trying to start a business. I won't defend it, but it's hardly the worst example of regulatory distortion that exists(it's one moderately highly paid manager per company branch location- most white collar firms are way worse).

Non-driving related legal trouble would just mean working for a crappier company once done with the actual legal penalties. A collapsed business just means you declare bankruptcy and go to work for someone else again('I'm a good tech but I didn't know how to run a business' is a common enough story that everyone will accept it). There might be work life balance compromises, or much smaller pay compromises, but if worst comes to worst(unfixable drug addiction or something) there will still be a job there- even if it's a hotside restaurant equipment focused job(all those guys are alcoholic drug users behind on their child support anyways, and most of them got into it by being HVAC techs).

hotside restaurant equipment focused job

I'm guessing this means doing HVAC work for / in restaurants and - "hotside" - venting out the, well, hot air from ovens, stoves, hoods etc?

Hotside means you also do installation & maintenance of stuff like grills, fryers etcetera

I've never built a plan F in high fidelity. I can find a job anywhere - one sufficient enough to live on and stabilize. I really only need a cardboard box as a house if my family abandons me.

After that, I'd pick a career where you're trading loneliness for currency. Working on an Oil Rig (if they hire people over 30 for that?) is a great example.

Working on an Oil Rig (if they hire people over 30 for that?) is a great example.

Kinda tricky with the current state of outsourcing. My dad was an early Oil Rig participant as a UK citizen with military electrician training 50-odd years ago, and he essentially got grandfathered along with the industry to the point he later ended up a very senior Controls Engineer without a university degree by the time he retired. Circa 2020s the vast majority of rig workers are Filipinos, Indians or Bangladeshis since it's just not really commercially sound to pay a Westerner the multiplier on their base salary to make it worth it. You might be able to swing something in certain countries with stronger legal protections, but still likely requires a lot of time and connections.

Was he working in the North Sea? Half of Scotland seems to be involved in Oil and Gas, but my impression is that the overwhelming majority are locals/white.

Originally English/North Sea but ended up in Australia and working broadly across Asiapacific for essentially an Oil Rig Consulting Firm where developing world's pretty normalized.

Thought so. That didn't strike me as modern picture of the situation in either Britain or the US, which are the Default™ expectations, or at least what I assumed without this context.

I would've assumed Canada without the clarification.

Yeah fair. He didn't have a ton of experience in the US industry since it was essentially the only one that actually cared about him not having an undergraduate qualification whilst grandfathered UK credentials got him in everywhere else.

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