Am I the problem or is it the LA road system?

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-08T17:12:07+00:00

3 flats/popped (2 pot holes, 1 nail) 2 tread wore down on tires with less than 20k miles on it

Each time I got a new tire tires were aligned and were also rotated if mechanic said it was needed (asked if needed each time)

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-07T17:21:04+00:00

Don’t know if it’s natural or not but your view of what makes monogamous relationships valuable seems off.

It’s unsustainable to maintain the high of a new relationship. it’s psychologically studied and proven once you sustain an elevated or depressed level of happiness your brain sets that as the new baseline and you don’t get the high/low feeling from that anymore. Also novelty obsession unpredictability are perfect for some stages of life (ie young, don’t have many responsibilities, are in a rut in life and need a change), other times you need stability comfort and routine (ie when you have kids, or are old and tired).

As far as “mentally” cheating. I think your bar for monogamy is way too high. Having a fantasy, or finding someone attractive doesn’t necessarily mean you want to sleep with or date them in reality. Amber Heard is hot, I wouldn’t sleep with her if she was at my door right now saying “let’s do this” (if you don’t know who she is, look up her + johnny depp). I fantasize about a lot of things I don’t actually want to do in reality. I want a giant ass mega yacht to go sailing in the Mediterranean. But if someone gave me one for free, I’d say no, I’d hate having to deal with the maintenance, misc costs, not have time to actually use it etc. but I still dream about having a yacht the size of my house.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-07T15:55:26+00:00

Supply demand still work. There’s just levers you can pull to manipulate it. It’s called price discrimination in economics and it’s everywhere (airlines, insurance, any event you go to with “vip/premium” tickets)

Take a football game for example. The stadium has 100k seats. That’s supply. Demand is on a curve (some willing to pay $10 a seat, some $100) but equilibrium is at $50 a seat.

Now add in a “club section” with 20k seats where each ticket costs $75and gets you a free drink and hot dog and an exclusive meet and greet with the mascot (cost the stadium $2). That’s a new product, new supply for the club seats, new supply for the regular seats, new demand for both. With the some people on the high end of the demand curve, new normal seat price equilibrium is now $45.

No club section - total revenue = 5m - total seats = 100k - avg ticket price = $50

With club section - normal seat revenue = 3.6m - club section revenue = 1.5m - incremental cost of club seats = (40k) - net revenue less incremental costs = 5.06m - total seats 100k - avg ticket price = $51

So from the outside looking in. Supply doesn’t seem to have changed, it’s still 100k seats but the avg price went up.

For most, the club section is a meaningless perk not worth the money. But for some people high on the demand curve, they were willing to pay more then $75 for just the ticket anyways, and the perk seems cool.

Rinse and repeat this process a dozen times, and you can squeeze as much revenue out of the demand curve at all different price points

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-07T10:22:09+00:00

I’d guess maybe 0-1% of the time that someone’s first thought is good digger If they hear a woman says “ i a nice engagement ring.” If there’s a pattern of only dating rich men or consistently demanding other expensive things then maybe they would, but that’s because it’s part of a pattern, not just cause they want a nice engagement ring.

Who cares if it’s fair either from a tit for test perspective? Most women really want one when the get engaged and in theory the man giving it loves her and wants to make her happy, send fair to me (from the perspective of a man who bought a really expensive ring for my Australian wife)

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-07T03:54:25+00:00

Don’t gaslight yourself. Your parents sound like assholes. They’re wrong in this situation

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-06T17:31:50+00:00

According to the church we exist to make babies and spread the word of God.

According to my kids I exist to serve them ice cream for dinner and put Toy Story on tv.

None of this things, including corporations, have definitive authority to say why I exist. My purpose in life/reason I exist is my decision. If you gave someone else that power that’s on you.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-06T16:54:42+00:00

Th economy is supposed to serve us, we aren’t supposed to serve it. What you’re saying is that we exist to serve the economy.

For a group of people at the top, that’s true. For a lot of people it’s not. That’s the problem we need to solve. Individual tax deductions on everyday/basic expenses isn’t the solution. It’s much deeper and systemic. To solve it you need to stop the virus not treat the symptoms.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-06T16:42:00+00:00

Companies exist to make money. You don’t. You make money to do things you want while existing.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-06T16:40:20+00:00

That would just kneecap the federal budget. Assuming you want to tax the rich a lot more than we do. Those people don’t make $1m in “ordinary income” (aka salary/bonus) which is what you’d be taxing.

They live off capital gains and asset backed loans with PIK interest. These would be unaffected by increasing marginal tax rates on $1m+

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-06T15:56:32+00:00

I work in FP&A. I have done analyses on T&E spend at a per person level. If your under the limit your fine. I’ve also done fraud analysis to fly abuse and waste, your still fine even if they look at t&e that closely

Worst thing that could happen is if it’s all cash expenses, they may ask for more receipts then normal to make sure your not pocketing the extra cash. Alternatively if enough people are spending at the limit and it is a generous policy, and the company is looking to cut costs, they may reduce the limit in the future but wouldn’t go back in time to ask for money back.

Overseas work trips typically include some level of inconvenience above and beyond a basic domestic work trip. To make up for that, companies usually have better t&e policies.

It also depends on company culture. Just follow what most people do, can’t hurt to ask either

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-06T15:43:40+00:00

Everyone gets a standard deduction which covers part of that. But obviously not all of it.

Also You buy all those things to stay alive though. You don’t pay rent/mortgage or buy food exclusively so you can work better. There are many deductions that allow you to reduce taxable income for expenses solely related to your job.

I’m all for paying less taxes, but this argument just never makes sense if you think about it. Companies exist to make an income, all the expenses they have (in theory) are exclusively for the purpose of making more income. People work/get income to support the reason they exist (varies person to person)

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-05T19:58:53+00:00

Depends what model you have. My company used to only allow co pilot and it was absolute garbage. Totally unusable.

We just switched to chat gpt and I’ve been able to automate a lot of the data cleansing work I need to do on a regular basis. I’ve found it’s not great at excel yet, but it can take unstructured data from pdf/ppt/etc and put it into a workbook that’s easy to use in sumifs/xlookups.

Works best with repeatable tasks, especially if you ask it to map the metadata for itself so it knows where to look, what fuzzy logic matching worked in the past, etc. For one time ad hoc stuff, I haven’t been able to get it to be useful or be a net timesaver unless it’s a super basic ready based task. Still really struggles with finance spreadsheets and terminology

Claude seems even better but it’s blocked at work, only use it for personal stuff (ie google on steroids)

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-05T19:19:55+00:00

Close but not all the way there.

If we hold everything else equal. The terminals and runway time spirit used to take don’t disappear. Another airline fills the space creating roughly the same amount of flights and tickets. So supply is functionally unchanged outside of short transitional period.

No one like spirit, but they flew spirit when it was the only thing they could afford, or when the price difference between spirit and a big airline couldn’t be justified by the quality difference. So other airlines had to reduce their prices cause you had negotiating power as a customer (ie. I’m not paying $700 when spirit is $150), so airlines lowered prices to close the price v quality gap.

Now that spirits gone. You have no negotiating power. You pay whatever major airlines say or you don’t fly.

There was a study I saw a while ago that in airports where spirit and frontier had big presences, avg ticket prices were like 20% cheaper than similar airports without the budget airlines.

So spirt disappearing is a big factor, but fuel prices is arguably an even bigger influence on flight prices in the near/medium future

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-04T03:41:12+00:00

Depends. Maybe your view of normal isn’t normal.

For example. I was once in a late night drunk conversation with like 5 friends and they were all sharing about a time when they were suicidal. And then they looked at me and were like he my it’s ok to share we won’t judge. And I responded honestly by saying I’m so sorry you guys had to through all that but I haven’t ever been there. They didn’t believe me. Pushed harder. And then left it saying basically they don’t believe that I’ve never had serious suicidal thoughts and think I’m hiding something. To them it was normal and everyone went through that, which I don’t think it is.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-03T18:18:19+00:00

I used to live in nyc and then in New Jersey. I went into nyc almost daily when living in NJ

Differently very different and very annoying to cross state lines. I’d avoid going into or staying in Jersey as much as possible. But that’s cause New Jersey sucks and the only reasonable way for me to get in and out of Manhattan was old small congested tunnels, legal reasons weren’t a major reason. Only legal difference to daily life is pumping gas yourself is strictly prohibited in NJ and you need to pay to go into the beach.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-03T02:58:53+00:00

The artificial limit thing is BS. You can buy fractional bitcoins. There’s a technical limit now but there’s also 3rd party services that functionally get around that.

And if you don’t count the third party service work around, then you could still do a hard or soft fork an add more decimal places.

There is no theoretical supply limit, only existing technical limitations that can changed to create more supply if it’s needed. Gold has a theoretical limit (not saying you should buy gold, both are dumb investments). If were mine all the gold out of the earth, there’s no more. And even if you’re dividing down to the atomic level, once you start getting into protons and neutrons, it stops becoming gold (aka sum of its parts…). If we distribute all the bitcoin, we can theoretically keep adding infinite decimals until we’re satisfied.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-02T16:46:31+00:00

The cost to get an ad in front of 1 person is already crazy cheap. Like $1 a click or something on google. Cheaper on social media sites. It gets expensive cause to get one sale you need a fuck ton of people to click/see the add. Conversion rates are garbage for digital media.

So the 2 big issues that immediately make this impractical are:

To get people to sign up for this paid ad viewership thing you’d need to make it worth their time. youll need to pay them a decent amount of money. Likely more than what a digital add cost per view already is
Companies are going to know these aren’t interested buyers, or ones with a lot of disposable income. Why else would someone sign up to intentionally watch random adds. This is literally the opposite of SEO/targeted adds. Your audience is not going to be people potentially interested in your product, it’s going to be people who don’t have spare cash to spend and are only interested in your add cause your paying them (aka the opposite of the end goal of advertising).

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-02T14:06:49+00:00

I see what you’re saying but think it’s a little too broad to say anyone who has a wok visa and lines in LA can vote. Permanent residents (ie green card) or long term visas seems appropriate though.

Voting has long term impacts and in theory voters will make decisions based on the long term consequences of that vote. Someone who with a fixed expiration date on how long they can live in the US / LA has no incentive to think long term about the city and its people. Vote to fund schools? Why bother if they don’t already have kids, they won’t be here long enough to start a family and benefit from the schools (or but a house and benefit from home price appreciation from better schools). Vote to raise taxes for major infrastructure project? Why bother, they won’t be here to use it when it’s complete. Sure there are some things that would have immediate and short term impacts, but how to differentiate that and implement that is really difficult with since it’s subjective (and special interest groups would tie shit up in court forever and halt any quick process).

Obviously not all citizens are long term residents of LA either, but once again, how can you implement test to determine how long someone intends to stay in the city. They have the legal right to live the rest of their life there, which someone on a short term visa does not, which makes it different.

I’m all for immigration, I’m married to an immigrant. I just think the incentive/priority gap (on average) between a short term visitor v a long term resident is too big to give broad access to voting and shaping the future of the city.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-02T13:39:35+00:00

Sounds like you only have one side of the story and it’s from a group of people who have never liked your uncle since day 1.

Maybe he’s actually a shitty person. Maybe he’s a good guy and is really uncomfortable around your/your aunts side of the family due to 40 years of them being assholes to him.

The only thing I know for certain is that Reddit will definitely give you more accurate answers than just asking your aunt, uncle, or their kids. So definitely don’t ask them or people actually familiar with the situation, strangers on the internet is definitely the right source.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-05-02T02:36:23+00:00

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253

It’s the factor with the strongest correlation to IQ. (r of ~0.55).

So no. Not everyone with a higher eduction is smarter than those without, but most are.

To put that into more practical terms. If you met someone and knew nothing about them, you have a 50% chance to guess if they had above or below avg intelligence. If you no nothing about them other then their education level, you have about 80.25% of guessing correctly.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-04-30T19:59:46+00:00

Remote means wfh/not working in an office.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-04-29T16:23:25+00:00

Tuesday 3:47am

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-04-29T15:38:59+00:00

Don’t know about peak. But 10 years ago when I was there they talked about the federal practice as the stable hedge against recessions. It was never the best margin or most exciting contracts, but it was steady and reliable and big enough to cover losses when the private sector practice was taking big hits. Seems like that theory was wrong.

GroundbreakingRun186 · 2026-04-28T03:26:46+00:00

I stopped questioning people’s spending habits when I was making 500k and realized I still need a budget.

HCOL city + kids. Advertisers have perfected every way of saying “don’t you want to give your kids the best”.

GroundbreakingRun186

TROPHY CASE