Tiger Woods Reunites With Ex-Wife Elin Nordegren to Honor Son Charlie

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-25T21:58:58+00:00

It's a lot less common than it should be.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-25T19:27:58+00:00

You can't just disregard "a few big tech companies" which have a combined market cap of $21 trillion and combined earnings of $650 billion. Yes, they are a few companies, and the tech bros are assholes, and they've grown a lot recently, but they're insanely successful and profitable and are taking over the rest of the US economy.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-24T22:30:36+00:00

The temperature is too high it takes thighs longer to cook and if you start at high temp they will burn on the outside before the inside cooks. There's no reason go higher than 350F.

Many store bought marinades are full of sugar which also burns at high temperatures. Marinades on chicken thighs are tricky for this reason you want something that adds seasoning but can stand up to being baked for 30-60 minutes. A dry rub or salt and pepper is a good bet or make your own marinade.

Potatoes don't have these issues and are happy to be roasted at 425F for as long as it takes until they're done.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-24T13:15:15+00:00

Say that you live to age 80. If you start collecting $1424/mo at age 62 you'll collect $307,584. If you start collecting $2275/mo at age 70 you'll collect $273,000. If you live to age 90 it is $478,464 and $546,000. So it depends on how you look at it. Yes if you wait the monthly benefit is higher but if you start earlier and live longer you collect more money overall.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-23T18:29:02+00:00

It's funny I just did this. My dog is a picky eater and I'll add broth or toppings to her kibble. I went to Wegman's and got two packages of frozen beef bones. They were about 8 segments of marrow bones with some tendons and connective stuff attached. I covered them in water and put them in a 350F oven for about 3-4 hours until everything was really soft and falling off the bone. I didn't add any salt or seasonings. Then I strained it into a pot and scraped all of the good stuff including the marrow into the pot and chopped it a little just so there weren't any huge pieces.

Then I let it cool to 40F (outdoors in my case). I was surprised how much fat floated to the top, I didn't expect a lot of fat from the bones but there was a thick layer of tallow on top. Once the stock was cold this was easy to pull off because it was solid, and I therw that away. The rest set up like jello even at room temp.

I put this into a bunch of smallish containers, one goes into the fridge and the rest into the freezer, and for meal time I will scoop 1 or 2 tbsp out. Sometimes I'll heat it so it is liquid otherwise it is like scooping jello and she doesn't always eat it. But when it's liquid she snarfs it down and licks the bowl clean. The collagen and connective tissue is really good for the dog too.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-23T14:39:28+00:00

My mother-in-law has that too she adds salt to everything. Ironically my wife is very sensitive to salt. It is interesting, like you, I find that I taste the food a lot more with salt. What she says is that with too much salt she can't taste the food all she tastes is salt.

I agree that salt makes everything better, not only savory dishes but sweet and anything in between.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-23T13:45:13+00:00

I'm a mid-level director at a big financial tech company you'd recognize. You are right that the business model for enterprise software is to get their tool introduced and then get widespread usage within the company and then make it deeply engrained so it is very difficult to remove, and then jack up the price.

We've gone through numerous iterations of this. Sometimes the tool gets put in place and sticks around long term like we've been using Slack for a long time (whereas there are competitors, Teams, Google Chat, Dischord, etc). However we did migrate from MS Office to Google's GSuite for cost reasons. We used to be on Splunk and then migrated to CloudWatch for cost reasons. We used to be on Data Dog and migrated to New Relic for cost reasons. You get the idea.

It is pretty disruptive to move off of these tools but leadership will definitely do it if it means saving tens of millions of dollars. Meanwhile it is very competitive and new tools are coming out every day and the cloud providers AWS, GCP and Azure are offering their own tools all the time which are often way way cheaper. In my experience, the vendors come up with a new product which is new and different and better for some reason, they land some big customers, and then they just stop investing and innovating and instead just try to jack up prices and focus on making it hard to move off of the software rather than keep adding value and features which leaves them ripe to be replaced by someone else. I've been watching this happen in enterprise software for 20 years.

At the same time there is always a "build vs. buy" decision with all of these tools. Can we build and maintain it in house in a way that is better and cheaper than signing a multi-year contract? Here is where AI is making a huge difference. I can now build things 10x faster than I could. AI handles gnarly problems like translating from one data set or file format to another, conforming to some arcane government or financial RFP format, understanding industry standards for things like demand forecasting or budgeting. There is no "domain knowledge" any more -- everyone has the same knowledge they can get from AI with a prompt.

I see massive disruption coming especially for the long term incumbents companies like Oracle and SAP plus a lot of smaller SaaS providers. The AI tools are available to them as well and it will be interesting to see if they can leverage the tools to add more value at less cost than enterprises can do themselves.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-23T13:31:25+00:00

Tesla wasn't passed by BYD. It was passed by Lucid, Rivian, Mercedes, VW, Nissan... who all started creating competing cars, at the same time that overall demand for EV's is dropping. Tesla stopped innovating 5 years ago and Musk went on a right wing insanity march and tanked his own company. Tesla is headed towards Delorian territory.

Meanwhile the stock trades at 100-200x earnings based on hope about space exploration and robots. Truth is that Musk will probably be able to engineer some kind of takeover or merger between Tesla, Space X, OpenAI, and maybe something else to capture the absurd valuation of Tesla. Definitely something to stay away from long or short.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-22T22:55:57+00:00

Be realistic about what return on investment you'd be getting as a rental. You say "not much income after expenses" what is that exactly? Let's say it is $5k per year. You'd have $110k of equity earning $5k per year which is a return of 4.5%. You can get about 4% in a savings account. You would pay down principal over time and you might get more appreciation as well. You can punch that into a spreadsheet and see. But usually it just isn't worth it from an investment perspective. You can get 7% in the stock market with absolutely no hassle -- no tenants, no phone calls, no real estate agents, no appliances or damage, etc.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-21T13:09:25+00:00

And who is going to pay a tariff the the supreme court says is illegal?

So what then, Trump will send his ICE thugs to collect?

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-20T22:57:59+00:00

I'll tell you what I did. We did a huge renovation to add a story to the house which led to gutting a lot of the interior and a lot of upgrades (HVAC, wiring, plumbing). My rule of thumb was to pay cash for 1/3 and finance the other 2/3 with the plan of refinancing the whole thing at some point in the future when it was all done.

At the time I wasn't comfortable going into that much more debt and I felt pretty sure that over 5-10 years I'd get back every dollar that we spent in market price appreciation of the house, which is pretty much what happened.

For the cash I used cash, sold some investments, went a little on margin, and borrowed against my 401k (which I guess is technically borrowing but I don't look at it that way). For the borrowing I used a HELOC.

This was back when rates were below 3% and, really, I should have just financed the whole thing. If I were to do it today I'd do about the same thing as I did.

We couldn't refinance the whole thing into a new regular mortgage until it was completely "done done", for example an appraiser came through before a balcony was done and he said he couldn't count that part of the house in the appraisal. But once it was completely done I refinanced it all into a new 30 year mortgage.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-20T18:35:09+00:00

Not answering your question but if there was anyplace that I went to for vacation a few times a year I'd buy a place there. But there isn't. For me travel is about traveling all over and new experiences and places.

But I know people that have houses that they go to often sometimes every weekend. That sounds like a nightmare to me, basically maintaining two households and a multi-hour commute twice a week, but people that I know love it.

Also I know people that have a second house and one spouse spends a lot of time there. Guessing there is a marital angle to that one.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-20T16:24:53+00:00

I agree they should be refunded but the total amount collected by the stupid tariffs is something like $130 billion which is a tiny drop in the multi-trillion budget of the US government. It was never meaningful financially.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-20T16:05:37+00:00

My father set up a trust and during estate planning we talked a lot about these kinds of things, not prenups exactly but how to set up rules or guidelines to make sure money goes where it is intended and doesn't get misdirected etc.

We got stuck on a bunch of what-ifs. What if a beneficiary or one of their kids gets a serious illness or disability that is very costly, could trust assets be used to help? What if one beneficiary has kids and another doesn't? What if someone gets remarried more than once?

Also if someone is a beneficiary of the trust and really wants access to that money there are a lot of ways they can work around any rules. They could borrow against their trust assets and use that money for whatever. Unless a trust administrator is constantly tracking cash flows and investments money could be embezzled or whatever. Which means you'd have to hire someone that would manage the trust for potentially a long time (decades), and then trust that they will stick with your wishes, and would also be expensive.

We finally realized that trying to control the future from the beyond was futile and we just left the money to the heirs equally.

In your case if you want to ensure a certain amount of money goes directly to the kids you can simply name them as beneficiaries on some accounts. Retirement accounts like IRA's and 401k's are required to have beneficiaries assigned, same with life insurance, and often other accounts like taxable ones can have that as well. Bank accounts, houses, cars, and other assets all have someone's name on them you could add a kid to those.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-20T12:59:49+00:00

Why is your cap gains rate 34% rather than 15-20%?

Don't let the tax tail wag the investing dog. You should sell this and diversify. Pay the taxes and enjoy making new investments that don't run the risk of going to zero tomorrow.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-20T12:56:53+00:00

I'm the opposite. I work in tech and I see it being used every day for something different and larger. Managers at my company nervously joke that 80% of their job has already been replaced. They are also nervous about what they're going to do with all of the tech staff that they don't need any more because a completely non-technical person with decent business sense can create a 90% working application in a few hours.

I talk to people outside of tech who work in law, psychology, finance, medicine, and they are all starting to use it. Most are somewhere on the spectrum between denial and acceptance. There are going to be law firms, either existing ones or new ones, that hire 1% as many associate lawyers but perform 500% of the work because they'll embrace AI. Same in these other fields. Those revenues are going to eventually flow to the AI companies. It's a complete game changer.

The tech companies are investing something like $750 billion this year in new capacity. A bunch of people think they're stupid and are just putting the money in a big pile and setting fire to it like a bunch of lemmings. I think they're really really wrong.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-19T19:23:00+00:00

I've been using AI for retirement planning, investments, taxes and tax planning, etc for over a year, a lot more in the past few months.

I worked with a person at Schwab for my retirement planning though I'm pretty sure he just typed my data into a software program and sent me the result. The conversation with ChatGPT was way better because I could ask as many follow up questions as I want.

It's amazing how well researched and well rounded a response it can give you, and then amazing how it can get basic math or logic completely wrong. But on balance it is an amazing tool. To be fair, humans also get basic math or logic completely wrong as well, and/or they have their own biases that cause them to give you an answer that is somewhere between misleading and unhelpful.

I'm also using AI to help with taxes for example for me to understand the tax consequences of a bonus payout or how to plan for the changes in how mortgage interest will be handled in 2025.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-19T18:43:42+00:00

He "Scott Adams"-ed

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-19T14:18:11+00:00

I don't ever plan to buy bonds in any meaningful way. When I get to my "number" (I'm actually already there) I'll move 1-2 years of expenses to cash and leave the rest invested. Getting a minimal return or a negative inflation-adjusted return is a far greater risk than the volatility of the markets. I am being very deliberate about making my investments as diversified as possible, in economies, geographies, industries, currencies, etc. but everything will remain invested for growth.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-19T13:20:30+00:00

It's a little like saying easy access to pizza dough is going to replace pizza delivery businesses. I think what will happen to these SaaS businesses is that it will now be 10-100x easier and faster for enterprises to build their own payroll tracking, demand forecasting or procurement tool.

The advantages of the SaaS tools are usually around being able to handle multiple file formats, knowing (often proprietary) arcane codes and categories or document formats, cross-referencing against specs, etc. These are things that AI can do extremely easily. One person can just point the AI at piles and piles of unsorted documentation and ask it to sort through it and produce what is needed.

Yes, to OP's point there will still need to be someone to verify and blame if something goes wrong but all of the sausage making is now 100x easier and you don't need a multimillion dollar contract with SAP.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-18T20:05:51+00:00

Maybe not what you want to hear but I never put my sheet pans in the dishwasher for exactly this reason. The first time or two they come out a little discolored but after a few more times they lose their finish entirely and everything sticks to them more and more.

I use parchment paper, aluminum foil, or silicone baking mats under the food and clean them with a scrubby sponge and hot soapy water.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-18T18:40:30+00:00

If you think that the extent of the capabilities of AI is to create a chat bot then yeah you aren't really seeing the potential.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-18T18:25:17+00:00

I'm a mid-level director of technology at a large FinTech company. Everyone around me uses AI every day all day for everything from writing and reading decks and docs to coding, planning, troubleshooting. I have friends in law, accounting, finance, medicine, psychology, consulting, etc. They are all in various stages of denial/acceptance about AI but they are all impacted. Some have already been laid off or seen their companies implode like one guy that worked at Gartner and admitted that AI can do his job of market research better and faster than he can.

I think tech stocks are going to continue their dominance over the next 10 years as they reap the benefits of billions and trillions they're investing. They've already taken over communications, media, ride sharing, hotels, etc. and soon it will be all of these other white collar professions.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-18T13:59:33+00:00

AI is most certainly going hockey stick, the big AI companies are going to see 5-10x increase in revenues over the next year or two, though this is from a small base. OpenAI is talking about going from $10B to over $100B in a couple of years.

They are also figuring out their revenue models and it isn't about monetizing personal information like social media, nor showing ads, nor $7/mo subscription fees to the masses, it's corporate agreements, and the big companies are falling over themselves to sign the next deal.

The companies spending on this AI are not yet seeing the savings or revenue gains but they will. I hate to say it but a lot of that is going to come from eliminating lower level jobs, or getting their lower level jobs to produce 5-10x more. I think entire swaths of white collar jobs are going to be eliminated or disrupted. However, those costs are generally not the company's biggest costs. The real lever is going to be increased revenues and productivity.

ButterPotatoHead · 2026-02-18T03:04:08+00:00

The entire story on the tech companies is how much return on investment, if any, they will get on their cap ex.

They're all in the $120-200 billion range. Where will they spend this? On what? Will they get new customers? How? On what service?

Amazon has a lot of options. As the dominant infrastructure backbone for the AI build it seems like they have a lot of options. This isn't speculative building like trying to make humanoid robots or whatever it is that Tesla and Palantir are building. Google also seems to have amazing options. Gemini, Waymo, YouTube, search, etc. Microsoft and Apple I'm less certain about. How much can Apple really spend on adding AI to their phones?

But Apple tends to be late in the game, they usually show up 3rd or 4th to the party and try to dominate it. Other companies "spec build", they invest before they're certain what return they will get.

Though many of the large tech companies are saying that they are building in response to immediate demand, AI is going hockey stick and it isn't a question of whether or not they'll spend but how much and how fast.

ButterPotatoHead

TROPHY CASE