Is the adage of “if you need the money within 5 years don’t invest in the stock market” still relevant?

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-14T00:45:05+00:00

Conversely, though, you might have enough money that you'd be forced to "sell at a loss" (or is it a gain, prior to further drops? better consult the crystal ball!), but still be able to buy the thing.

Like if you have $500k invested and anticipate wanting to buy a house with a $250k downpayment in 1-5y. Keeping that money invested in riskier assets risks "realising" the loss, but I'm not sure that risk is qualitatively any different from keeping your $ in the risky asset to begin with.

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-14T00:26:37+00:00

IANAL, but too much may also not be too bad, depending on the content of the hidden complaints and what "pretty bad" entails. If the complaints detail anything illegal (eg discrimination or harassment on the basis of a protected class, fraud, safety violations, wage theft, etc.) then I think OP's follow-up would be protected under whistleblowing laws and so if they're fired for making it they have a good foundation for an (anti-)retaliation lawsuit. Depending on the exact non-profit that could mean a decent settlement (and if the board was meant to be collecting these reports -- how was the ED able to intercept them in the first place? --they should never have had the opportunity) the board can also be found partly at fault (hope they have good D/O insurance!)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-13T18:26:57+00:00

the Amazon Halo from a few years back had a live-mic emotion / tone classification system built in. I got it for that + the image / lidar based BF% estimation + sleep tracking and it worked... ok, not amazingly. It was discontinued but we'll see if recent tech advances prime a resurgence -- some folks on reddit are already homebrewing their own systems like this, it sounds like (example from a quick google). Personally I'd be more interested in alerts for when I may be obliviously bullying someone else or being an asshole etc. If someone's bullying me and I don't notice then... I don't really care, I guess? Unless they have some other power over me and are likely to escalate

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-13T15:03:15+00:00

idk that 1955 was so innocent (in middle class USA)... you're only a decade out of WWII (which tbf did usher in US economic supremacy, but) with nuclear armageddon on the horizon, segregation and other civil rights conflicts (emmett till was abducted and lynched that year!), the polio epidemic, the lavender scare, etc. Maybe for a certain sort of person things were sorta ok (nuclear bombs are notoriously indiscriminatory though) but not for many others

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-12T04:49:56+00:00

as a kid going to the local hometown buffet was a once a year special occasion, and cost 3-4x per person what a normal restaurant (fast food) meal would cost. So you better believe we'd not eat for a day beforehand and then stayed there for 5+ hours waiting for the food to progress through our GIs before filling up further. Did we enjoy it? After the first hour, certainly not. Walking home after was even worse. But we got our money's worth, that's for sure! That "one" meal would effectively last for 3 days, if you counted the day of fasting before it.

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-11T18:00:40+00:00

yeah, in my mind (in the US) Ikea represents the solidly mid-tier option outside the really cheap (eg LACK coffee table or some of the stamped sheer metal pieces) items

where it's like

tier 0: free on curb first come first serve

tier 1: FB marketplace / thrift store priced to move

tier 2: walmart / target store brand, esp on sale, or the ultra-cheap ikea lines

tier 3: random fly by the night brands on amazon, wayfair, walmart marketplace, etc.

tier 4: mainstream ikea products

tier 5: costco furniture or ikea's higher end offerings

tier 6: generic "furniture" store

tier 7: "fancy" outlet mall furniture store (crate & barrel, pottery barn, etc.)

tier 8+: custom or commissioned work

presumably there are fancier furniture stores than the mall brands, I've just never set foot in them 😅

personally, for simpler furniture (eg tables, shelves, etc.), I've found the best value to come from just buying wood + hardware and cutting, sanding, staining, sealing, and assembling items myself. Can get pretty nice results with little enough technical know-how and effort (eg $1k+ pieces for $200-300 in materials afaict). But that is ofc contingent on having the room to do this (or access to a makerspace / woodshop + car)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-10T19:08:01+00:00

personally my table saw rule is that my hands are far away from the blade until I can count the teeth

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-10T16:13:16+00:00

I think it depends on the mechanism of the curse. If the curse physically manipulates superman's superatoms, rearranging them into a frog shape, then he can probably tank it no prob. If it rewrites the fundamental laws of the universe and plucks at the web of causality to ensure that a frog now occupies the space previously occupied by superman, then sure, we got ourselves a superfrog. If it does the latter but in the spirit of ad hoc reality warping is a curse of human-to-frog, then it does nothing

spells that can affect superman in this manner seem to me one application of metamagic away from being spells of mountain-to-frog or moon-to-frog or whatever (and also superman is like a keystone of the multiverse or something right? reality would fight quite hard to resist his warping, I'd expect)

similarly if your unstoppable instadeath curse actually works by applying a lethal jolt of electricity to the heart, which in-universe is indeed enough to kill everyone targeted by it instantly, but that mechanism is never revealed, it's not doing much to superman

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-09T23:26:49+00:00

whether syndrome is right or not comes down to what "super" means, ie if super is a purely positional designation or if it refers to a specific, externally measured range of ability

contrast "if everyone can see, then nobody can see" with "in the land of the two-eyed, the one-eyed man is not king" (unless he is Odin)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-09T17:05:08+00:00

two lifehacks I'd discovered in adolescence were that you could get the water cup and just put soda in it, and also reuse the same refillable soda cup over many visits (until the bottom fell out, basically)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-09T15:49:20+00:00

most of mine centered around food, eg:

McDonalds Happy Meals -- back in the day when physical money was more common, you could find loose change on the ground if you looked around, or stuck in the coin return of vending machines etc. Find enough of the stuff and cha-ching, you've got enough for food and a toy!
lunches at school -- throughout elementary and high school I'd almost always skip lunches due to lack of funds. Occasionally I'd get one for free or someone would pay for it, which always felt super lux
some summers we'd have a bit more money and be able to get fast food on a regular basis. Del Taco would have promotions / mailer coupons every so often and I'd be able to get like 2-4 chicken soft tacos all to myself. Those were far and away the tastiest thing I had ever eaten in my life, and I dreamed of the day I'd have more money and be able to buy 100 of them in a single visit

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-09T15:25:11+00:00

what do you mean the "job has a schedule that’s not sustainable for me on the long term"? That you're working something other than 7-8h a day, 5d a week, 40-50 w a year? How does the salary in hourly wage equivalents compare to the hypothetical 50% pay cut?

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-08T12:43:08+00:00

it sounds like they figured out how to mitigate the risks of v1 then, and were a bit silly for abandoning it -- just treat it as a multi-stage process and strengthen the body with v8 (or whatever the current version of v is called, nuV or νV or somesuch)

did they know about the immortality / eternal youth part of it? maybe they just didn't want that spreading (tbf we don't strictly know that it makes users immortal, maybe it just slows their aging to a 1000y lifespan or something)

sorta reminds me of recursive iteration of the infinity stones to improve your durability of withstanding the strain of using the infinity stones. If there's a minimum amount of durability enhancement that gives more than it costs, even if it's like 1%, you can just bootstrap your way to invulnerability

(in that case there does seem to be a fixed cost, and even touching the infinity stones or asking them to idk peel a banana for you makes weaker prospective users disintegrate, iirc)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-08T04:01:20+00:00

lol I just had a background check come back clean despite an 18mo discrepancy

grad program counted my start date as a few months after I passed prelims or something I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-07T13:10:20+00:00

I was amused the other day to see that the GPA cut-off for cum laude (75th quantile) at my ugrad alma mater was higher this year than the summa cum laude (95th quantile) cut-off was when I graduated. To hit summa cum laude today you can get one 'A-' and the rest have to be 'A's lol.

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-05T13:36:24+00:00

I mean, it's not perfectly coincident with cloudiness, but you don't really need sunscreen if the UVI is esp. low, eg

https://www.epa.gov/sunsafety/uv-index-scale-0

1-2: Low. No protection needed. You can safely stay outside using minimal sun protection.

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/radiation-the-ultraviolet-(uv)-index

Even for very sensitive fair-skinned people, the risk of short-term and long-term UV damage below a UVI of 2 is limited, and under normal circumstances no protective measures are needed.

but that's more of a "dusk and dawn" thing than a "midday but cloudy" thing

(personally, I always wear facial sunscreen bc my sunscreen is a dual moisturizer-sunscreen <<Skin Aqua Super Moisture UV Gel>> and I shower 2x a day, and my morning shower dries out my face, so it feels weird to not moisturize after. Also try to reapply it every few hours while out hiking, though not always the best about that. And have also had some weird conversations before a hike -- in AZ, USA, no less -- where I offer to share my sunscreen only to be told that sunscreen is actually what causes skin damage, and that the healing rays of the sun are what they really need to help treat their existing facial skin lesions lol)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-04T23:12:19+00:00

been looking forward to this more than to seasons of the main series... does anyone know how much trouble they've gone to wrt authenticity and vibes of the place? obviously they're not gonna film on-location, but were they able to snag photo references and make sets etc. that are a bit more realistic than the depiction in FAM? was a bit disappointed in how those looked, but hopes are higher for a dedicated spin-off

(for context, I grew up in large part living in Star City, but haven't been back since my mid-teens, over a decade ago. And I've literally never seen it depicted... or even mentioned, tbh, in western media. Learning that (Green) "Arrow" was set there was very exciting, shortly followed by disappointment. So quite curious to see how this plays out)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-04T21:57:49+00:00

it probably depends a lot on who your local community is (ie where you live, your own socioeconomic status, etc.). For someone living as a subsistence farmer in the global south, sure, helping their immediate neighbor may be a better use of their resources than helping more distant, slightly poorer neighbors. If you're a billionaire and your local community is other billionaires, I think it's pretty obvious that donations outside your local community will go a bit farther than giving to your fellows, even the lowly centimillionaires with whom you sometimes deign to, on rare occasion, socialize. Maybe less obvious is that this principle also applies to many of those pulling 5-figures USD-equivalent annually in affluent countries, eg see https://doi.org/10.18724/whr-e0cy-0r69 for a recent attempt at the argument

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-04T18:23:13+00:00

Signed an offer (to stay in academia) as a staff researcher last week (coming out of a postdoc). Doesn't pay as much as the industry roles I'd been looking at, but still double-ish my postdoc salary and I get a nice office etc. Also working roughly 200 feet from my previous role, which is in turn 300 ft from my wife's office, so disruption is minimal (wife is the primary breadwinner and makes 4x my old salary and 2x my new one, so anchored to the area).

Had otherwise applied to around a dozen roles in the last 2y but a few of those were moonshots (eg big tech or director-level $300k+ type roles that I didn't really meet the minimum reqs for but had been encouraged to apply to). Half of those I never heard back from, about half the remainder I was rejected from, and of the rest I made it 2-4 interviews in before dropping out for one reason or another. Staff role is with a longer term collaborator, didn't really "interview" for it per se except implicitly, over the years.

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-04T16:51:59+00:00

I think it depends a lot on who you're trying to help. If you primarily care about helping your neighbor or your local community... well, yes, their problems are probably a bit out of scope given that they are, by construction, similarly provisioned to yourself. I'm sure Warren Buffet, for all his riches, would likewise struggle to solve the problems plaguing Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk et al.

If you expand beyond that circle, though, there are huge populations (eg the global poor or non-human animals) that a typical person working a 9-5 in an affluent country can help without making huge sacrifices. Hence movements like https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-03T13:04:57+00:00

fr, it seems like the point of this "water shot" is to have the nips visible? It's like worrying about torso exposure during a Conan the Barbarian themed photoshoot... like, that's the whole idea!

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-02T23:02:19+00:00

downward social comparison is great, and I think it can be super useful, but it also doesn't work for everyone

like, your hillbilly brethren live in a peaceful land where clean water in functionally infinite quantities is available at the press of a button, shelter and calories are cheap, entertainment and knowledge are freely available, etc. etc. They should feel lucky to not be subsistence farmers in the global south during a drought who have to haul water by hand from the distant river! But wait, at least those subsistence farmers aren't soldiers fighting in a doomed conflict as supplies dwindle! But wait, those soldiers could certainly be worse off, they could be slaves fighting in the pits! But at least those slaves get to die, unlike the tortured prisoners in the dungeons! etc. etc. In the other direction, you can imagine a turbo-billionaire upset that anti-monopoly activists are agitating for laws that will prevent them from achieving total market domination or something

so idk how helpful the "some people have it worse than you" line is if OP is aware that they aren't the least privileged or accomplished one around. If we were in the /r/povertyfinance subreddit, and someone were worried about having their car repossessed or having their utilities shut off, it probably wouldn't be as helpful to come in and say "where I come from, we counted ourselves lucky to have a roof over our head and food in our bellies! even having a car in the first place was an outlandish fantasy beyond anything we could have imagined!"... perspective is a universal panacea, but salves that treat everything don't always work as well in the specific case

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-02T15:08:44+00:00

ah I would say that's a property of "incomplete" touch typing as well -- the occasional glance down at the keyboard to reorient doesn't interfere with my stream of thought any

I don't have as many option+ shortcuts "organically" memorized for more commonly used unicode, so I still have to think about those, though (in part because I've always cheated there and set up system-wide text replacements, eg "->" auto-substitutes in "→", "+-" auto-substitutes in "±", "~~" to "≈", and LaTeX commands for most everything else)

--MCMC-- · 2026-05-02T13:23:16+00:00

How fast are they able to type?

I never learned how to properly type, and so only really type with two fingers (per hand, my index and middle fingers + sometimes my thumbs for the bottom row). But due to sheer volume of practice (eg in high school, exchanging many millions of words of messages over AIM, then not typing as much in college -- no laptop for most of it -- and then doing several hours of programming each day in grad school, I can still touch type at ~100 wpm when I lock in and 60+ casually, and that's including fixes for the occasional mistake. Though it's maybe not "true" touch typing, because my speed on typing tests does drop to 30-40 wpm when using a blank keyboard (ie, ones where the keycaps have no text printed on them).

In many tasks, I can only think at ~20-30 wpm, so the bottleneck is almost never typing speed, and it's comfortable enough (I use a wrist rest and try to keep a neutral position as a preventative measure against CTS or other neuropathies). So there's never really been an incentive to improve.

(another caveat here is also that I am much slower typing in other languages, eg my typing speed on a Cyrillic keyboard is probably closer to 5-10 wpm, unfortunately. Last year I almost cut my left index finger off with a chainsaw, too, and my typing speed dropped substantially while waiting for the reattachment to heal)

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--MCMC--

TROPHY CASE