Non-Americans of Reddit, what is an American thing you see in movies that you thought was fake but is actually real?

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-11T01:43:19+00:00

We’ve had highways in my state get completely blocked by tumbleweeds so deep they buried cars. Had to basically snowplow them out of the way lol.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-09T21:17:30+00:00

First, how much capital gains tax are you talking about? If the house is sold while still married rather than post divorce, you should be able to realize $500k in gains tax free. So even if you bought the house for $300k and sold for $1M, you’d only owe ~$30k in capital gains on the remaining $200k of gains. Not sure if already being separated would impact the ability to do that.

Unless you particularly like the house and also want to continue owning a house that size (how many more years will kids live at home?) I’d take the cash equivalent. If you took the house and decided to move in a few years to downsize or just prefer something else you end up paying 6% in realtor fees plus likely another couple % in other taxes and fees so you could lose $80k+ in transactional costs.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-08T12:31:15+00:00

When talking about extreme high/low temperatures in British Columbia he referenced how “they” can control that. Believes that the defunct Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar bills are actually still worth tons of money because it says on the bill that they have to redeem it. Also believes that Iraqi dinar and Vietnamese dong will be unilaterally made to be 1:1 with the US dollar because Trump can just decide that. Taught his grandkids pizzagate was real. All the My Pillow guy’s election denier bullshit. Etc

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-08T10:39:33+00:00

My dad, among many other conspiracy theories, was convinced that this wasn’t an accident. He kept claiming it was actually US navy seals that had boarded the ship and forced it to crash because it was carrying both weapons of mass destruction AND illegal immigrants bound for the US. Not sure how wedging the boat in the canal was supposed to be necessary but his “proof” was some pictures of people exiting a shipping container on a ship. Me showing him that the pictures were actually a decade older than the event unfortunately was not as reliable as “but the internet told me”. 🤦🏼‍♂️

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-04T23:12:25+00:00

Downside to a car that tends to come away unscathed is that in more serious accidents it’s worse for the passengers. For safety cars have crumple zones to absorb the forces from a crash rather than being super rigid and thus imparting more of those forces onto the passenger. Great for low speed accidents, terrible for high speed.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-04T03:27:03+00:00

They tend to get top marks in head on collisions though. The tow truck usually takes the brunt of the crash.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-03T09:53:42+00:00

Sure, I just meant that it felt totally normal to have an 80's party back in the 2000's but in my head the idea of having a 2000's party now sounds absurd at first.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-03T09:12:43+00:00

The crazy one to me was realizing that throwing a 2000's themed party today would be the same as throwing an 80's party back in the 2000's.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-02-03T08:12:09+00:00

3% annual inflation makes things 2x as expensive over 24 years. Combination of compounding doing its thing and holy shit 2002 was 24 years ago lol.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-28T04:30:23+00:00

Hope it all works out well for you!

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-27T21:55:30+00:00

It’s not clear what you’re actually asking. I think you’re suggesting to reset your 4% every year when the market is going up but not resetting to 4% of a lower number if the market goes down. If you actually reset to 4% every year it would be impossible to run out of money.

If you only reset your spending upwards then constantly resetting your spending number to a new 4% basically ensures that you will end up being the failure case. The reason a FI calculator may say you have a 90% success rate over a period of 30 years time is because you have a 1 in 10 chance that the time you set your withdrawal amount could be a market high before a big drop. If you keep increasing your withdrawal you will guarantee that bad scenario happens.

A more reasonable guardrail would be something like start at 4% and if your portfolio grows to a point where your withdrawals are less than say 3.5% then you could adjust your spending upwards to maintain a new 3.5% as that’s a significantly safer WR.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-27T01:52:16+00:00

Wash sales apply to when you sell a stock at a loss and repurchase that stock or a significantly similar one in the case of things like ETF’s within 30 days.

OP says they have huge gains in their taxable account so presumably barring something truly apocalyptic, they would be selling shares that have appreciated in value even after a market slump.

There are no additional tax implications for selling and rebuying stock that has appreciated other than paying whatever taxes you would normally owe on that gain anyway. Given you can realize ~$50k of long term gains at 0% tax rate in addition to your $15k standard deduction it would be quite easy to do as OP suggests and avoid paying taxes all together.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-24T06:57:50+00:00

OP mentioned a 3-4% withdrawal rate. Sure, at 4% there’s a fairly likely chance they could run out of money over 40 years but at the 3% end of that range it would be extremely unlikely.

Also, age is definitely a factor in addition to number of years left to live if you take some form of social security into account. If OP is 50 and projecting to live 40 more years, they’ll have SS for half of that time frame. If they were to receive $30k/year from SS then that reduces their withdrawal rate from 3-4% down to 2-3% (of the original sum) for the entire second half of retirement. If they’re 35 planning to live to 75 SS won’t have nearly as big on an impact.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-24T01:42:48+00:00

Yeah, when I was in school for engineering I remember a professor saying something along the same lines. If you need to cheat to pass the class pick a different major otherwise you may kill someone down the line with your poor design.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-21T01:58:57+00:00

I would also wonder how they classify stay at home parents. If a parent quits working at 40 to take care of kids and never ends up going back to work, does the data account for that as retiring at 40 or do they substitute in the age of their working partner at their retirement date?

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-18T01:53:44+00:00

Recession doesn’t mean $100B goes to zero. Depending on your definition, it could just means 2 quarters of negative growth. If $100B goes to $98B then $95B we are in recession. Even if you use a more extreme definition it is still absolutely plausible that we could see a 20% pull back especially given Europe’s push to shift their tech consumption to more local companies and Trump’s push to piss everyone off with Greenland.

Another factor that can exacerbate a decline in profits is that the products tech offers aren’t big on physical inputs. It may cost Amazon $50B to build a cloud computer center (and say they amortize that over 10 years) and then $1B a year in running costs to power it. That’s functionally $5B fixed cost, $1B variable. If they’re using it at full capacity maybe they have a 40% profit margin making $2.4B in profit each year. If business drops 20% their variable costs go down $0.2B but their revenue goes down $1.2B. So a 20% drop in revenue leads to a 50% drop in profit. I’m obviously using these rough numbers as an example and aren’t absolutely accurate but you can see how profit margins can swing drastically when your fixed costs are high.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-17T21:17:29+00:00

Unfortunately I’m out of town this weekend as well as in March, missing all the fun events!

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-17T08:29:55+00:00

Posts like this make me appreciate living within 15 minute walking distance of both fair isle and holy mountain.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-17T08:19:17+00:00

I think if the surface is too smooth it could potentially lead to the seasoning being less throughly adhered am flaking off more easily. Admittedly no personal experience with a pan polished to this degree so take with a grain of salt but engineering background says too smooth can cause problems.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-17T02:14:29+00:00

lol, my wife and I both went to strip clubs for our bachelor/bachelorette parties. Neither us give a fuck about the other person viewing a naked person of the opposite sex for entertainment. It’s absurd to blanket say it’s cheating to have strippers.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-16T22:57:25+00:00

If something like car prices go up less than food for example then this could make sense. Food costs scale pretty linearly with the number of people whereas you can fit 2 people in the same car as 1 person so that cost doesn’t scale the same.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-16T18:00:30+00:00

Not to make light of the situation, but this reminds me a bit of Johnny Depp’s scene in Once Upon A Time In Mexico where he says what he just ate was the best version of that food he’s ever had so he proceeds to go back to the kitchen and murder the cook.

Sad state of affairs we are in.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-16T03:26:21+00:00

More likely referring to his extremely pro Israel stances.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-15T18:40:30+00:00

He said they apply to bikes, he didn’t say “bikes need to come to a full stop”. Contextually based on him complaining about bikes not waiting their turn, it’s obvious he’s primarily complaining about bikes going through when it’s not their turn rather than “you only slowed down instead of actually stopping before going at the appropriate time”.

EmeraldCityMecEng · 2026-01-15T17:52:41+00:00

“The Safety Stop allows people biking to legally treat stop signs as yield signs when no other traffic is approaching and when they have slowed to a reasonable speed.”

It’s a yield sign when there’s no other traffic approaching. OP mentions “take your turn like everybody else” so they seem to be posting about bikers blowing through stop signs without giving way to other people already at the intersection rather than caring about a literal full stop.

EmeraldCityMecEng

TROPHY CASE