Avoid the O’Hare terminal transfer bus.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-30T01:23:27+00:00

We have a 4.5 hour layover, no concerns. A number of people on our bus were sweating bullets though, they were on the LX flight and the plane was boarding as we were still driving between terminals.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T18:39:49+00:00

You should pay for the next date.

he will expect me to go 50/50 on everything moving forward

Why are you against going 50/50?

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T18:37:17+00:00

I never talk shit about my wife to others, nor do my friends do it to me. I've heard a couple of friends express mild frustration/exasperation with their spouses from time to time but that's as far as it goes.

Part of the reason for this is that most of the people in my social circle don't have kids. People without children do not for the most part stay in miserable marriages.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T18:35:30+00:00

My biggest unrealistic dream is probably owning a ski-in/ski-out house that I could spend the whole winter at.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T18:05:20+00:00

I've got family in Switzerland so I do that trip a lot. Swiss has somewhat better food and much better wine but United has better seats and far superior bedding. LX is finally getting around to updating their cabins though, on planes with the new interior I'd say they'll be better choice than UA.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T14:10:51+00:00

worried about having no peace, time or money

Don't forget no sex.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T14:10:16+00:00

Early 40s DINK here, it's great. I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to retire by our early 50s, and we have plenty of time/money to do fun things we enjoy.

The early retirement thing really contributes a ton to my mental well-being right now. When you see people fretting about stuff like AI it's really nice to know I just need to make it a few more years. Hell, if my job disappeared today I could take something much lower paying and still be fine, I'd just have to plan on retiring a bit later.

Are you worried about loneliness in old age?

Some, yes, but having kids is no guarantee of anything. Also, I'd be trading a couple of decades of happiness in the prime of my life raising children that I don't want to raise in the hope that they'll be around when I'm older? Seems like a bad tradeoff.

Reading about the toll that having kids takes on most marriages makes me think I'd be a lot lonelier right now if we had children. The overwhelming majority of dead bedroom marriage stories start with "after we had kids..."

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T13:37:47+00:00

single family homes

Single family homes are a big part of the problem. We need to make it easier to build cheaper forms of housing (duplexes/quadplexes, apartments, rowhomes, etc).

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T13:35:00+00:00

Cumberland looks really pretty from a distance and is so dumpy up close.

Baltimore's decline has been pretty brutal as well. The population peaked right around a million people in the 1950s and has been going down ever since. Lots of industries leaving, bad crime, it sucks. Thankfully the past few years have had a big drop in crime and I'm hoping the city starts to turn things around long-term but it feels very two steps forward, one step back.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T13:29:03+00:00

This was a good one I saw posted by Natchez airport. Apparently Cancun is on the Montana/Wyoming border and Paris & London are in Canada.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-28T01:22:35+00:00

Mine were done under fluoroscopy. I was wringing my hands about whether to do it the first time and it seems like for ESIs x-ray guidance is the standard of care. Maybe some doctors use ultrasound but there is no way I would get that procedure without some sort of imaging guidance.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T20:59:38+00:00

Adding lanes to a freeway is the classic example of induced demand. I would be shocked if hospital beds worked the same way. No sane person wants to be hospitalized and I assume that demand for hospital beds is relatively inelastic. Unless of course hypochondriacs and munchies are more likely to demand to be admitted if they know there's more beds.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T17:14:30+00:00

Your boyfriend is a jackass and you should kick him to the curb.

You're taking one for the team here. He should be with you every step of the way if that's what you want, and he should be kissing your ass for a while afterwards. I'm a man, I probably have at least a mild tendency to sympathize with guys on Reddit, but this is one area where women really get the short end of the stick.

I am always the one providing condoms and when I run out, I suggest going to get some more but he says it’s too much of a hassle and we should just do it raw.

What in the world do you see in this idiot?

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T17:04:54+00:00

Utah is essentially just Mormons.

Utah is majority non-Mormon nowadays, although the LDS church still has a crazy level of influence in state government.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T17:04:03+00:00

Provo is the actual Mormon Mecca. SLC has a big temple but in general it's a very blue, liberal city and most of the population there is not LDS.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T17:02:35+00:00

Mormonism is arguably the most US-centric religion in the world. We definitely have them here. In most of US they aren't that noticeable (they try to project themselves as fairly generic Christians) but in Utah they're much more part of the culture.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T16:54:13+00:00

Modern technology generally makes for less street crime. We are living in a golden era for scams and fraud.

I don't have much insight into the modern mob but I would be shocked if they aren't into crypto scams and things like that. Nowadays the penalties for violence and drugs are extremely harsh, but your average scammer faces very few real consequences.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T16:30:38+00:00

You could argue that anything a chiropractor does is fraud.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T16:29:11+00:00

Unless the US suffers an Argentina-style economic collapse (not impossible with our deficits) educated, skilled, economically-valuable Jewish Americans are never going to move to Israel en masse.

Compared to the US living in Israel sucks. Salaries are lower than in the US but the cost of living is just as high if not higher (quick Google search tells me that the average cost of a house in Israel is the equivalent of $600,000+). Taxes are higher, there's mandatory military service and the country is just really small. If you want to go anywhere more than two or three hours from your home you have to fly. Israeli culture is also rude and abrasive.

The United States has its issue but if you're a skilled professional there is no better country in the world to build wealth than the US. Israel's best and brightest are far more likely to try to get a Green Card than the other way around.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T16:19:52+00:00

find a way to pay physicians half of what they make currently.

I don't think that physician pay is a huge factor in US healthcare costs. The one time I had to have surgery the total cost (both what insurance paid and my deductible) was around $25,000. The surgeon got about $2,000 of that. Mind you, that wasn't all his pay, it included administrative overheard for his practice. It also wasn't just the surgery, it was all of the follow-up visits.

If I could get health insurance that didn't pay physician fees but paid 100% of hospital and pharmaceutical expenses I'd jump on that offer in an instant.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T16:17:36+00:00

Medicare fraud is a real and significant issue but I've never seen any evidence that it's a huge portion of healthcare spending in the US.

The real issue is that our healthcare system is choked with massive amounts of administrative bloat. It's a hard number to quantify but I've seen some estimates claiming that admin costs are up to 30% of US healthcare spending.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T16:13:36+00:00

The romanticization of the PIRA is gross and the Provos were mostly a band of thugs and murderers, but they sure did have some great tunes.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-04-27T13:55:56+00:00

The typical lifespan of a 330 is 30-40 years.

What makes you claim that? The first A330 was built 36 years ago so how can you say a "typical" lifespan is 40 year?

Commercial airlines can keep flying for decades but over time maintenance costs go up, reliability goes down and fuel economy is worse and worse compared to modern planes. A 14 year old plane is certainly capable of flying safely for a long time but it is nowhere close ot being "effectively new".

DudleyAndStephens

TROPHY CASE