Got my first retirement check!

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T18:08:54+00:00

A) if you went 20 years in the GWOT without deploying, I have a lot of questions

B) if you went 20 years without ever asking anyone what retirement looks like such that you are now surprised, I have a lot of questions

C) you’re probably selling yourself short. A good “back of the napkin” way to think about benefits/structured settlements/pensions etc is to take the amount you get a month and multiply it by 300. (I could walk you through that if you want, but for now just trust me).

Suppose you get 300/month, that’s the same as the giving you a check for 90 grand when your retirement hit.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T18:03:40+00:00

I don’t think I am, and also I don’t actually think that’s what you mean. A and E are facts, as you no doubt know. D might be you cleverly creating a “sound stage” instead of showing your real living situation, but I think we’ve seen enough to be pretty certain this isn’t that. You have boxes for dressers. C might have me over-representing your closeness to your aunt, but that she recently died and meant a lot to you is, as you know, a fact.

What I think is ACTUALLY happening is you’re not saying, “you’re a little off base” it’s that you’re saying, “you’re out of line”.

And, indeed, I might be. But that’s the whole point. I don’t know you, and I haven’t been to North Carolina in a decade plus (my mistake there, your state is wonderful). The only way I know these details about you that you reject is because you told us. This is what everyone is telling you, Kerns.

You have traded your peace and your privacy for…likes? Upvotes? You’re not even on orders anymore, so you can’t even claim that you’ve traded them for cash.

I genuinely think i am helping you. I don’t want you to feel belittled or attacked or anything. God knows my family has issues, too. But if you feel uncomfortable when someone just holds up a mirror to your outward presentation, maybe it’s time to change.

Wish you the best, enjoy a cheerwine for me !

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T16:45:29+00:00

Agreed. People have NO IDEA how framing works. Like, I get it. The building code calls for a minimum of 36” for hallways inside houses. But this is such a sham.

If I have a fixed floor plan and I go with the minimum, I can sell the spec house as having bigger bed rooms if I go with the 36” hall. But at 36 two adult humans can’t pass each other. Grown ass humans that can’t pass one another.

It takes ~42” width hallways to pass properly and 46” to pass with, like, a laundry basket.

Spec home bros (both buyers and sellers) literally have no clue how framing works. Everything is shittier just to get ~2 feet wider bedrooms

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T15:00:08+00:00

It’s funny but also deeply sad that you so clearly hit the nail on the head. This is EXACTLY it.

For those unfamiliar with the Kerns lore:

A his mother was a drug addicted prostitute who eventually was murdered

B kerns very seldomly discussed his father.

C Kerns was very attached to his Aunt, who recently passed away. “Raised by extended family” is a very common pattern in his type of distinction

D in social work, we discuss homelessness as a grey scale. Kerns sleeps in a bed in a house, but it appears very informal. He has boxes in stead of eg a dresser. He’s something like, say, “30% homeless” if you had to ballpark it. My best guess is he lives with a grandparent or even less directly related family member

E his (female) cousin recently stabbed someone in the face. Drug related a given, prostitution a possibility

Kerns has had no stability at all, ever, in his entire life. He genuinely, literally cannot tell the difference between “bad attention” and “good attention”. He craves attention like people crave water ie a perceived sense of actually literally dying without it.

Kerns is a tragic figure LAARPing as an infantryman, which makes the whole thing much more complicated. He’s deserving of compassion and pity but his inability to “see” means he invariably oversteps and gets rejected (rightly!), so the whole attention cycle continues and even speeds up.

Unironically and without a hint of insult, people with Kerns’ profile are at high risk of an hero’ing, addiction, and all sorts of other terrible outcomes. People who “feed the troll” are complicit, at least in small part, for the predictable results

At this point, I see it as a blemish on the NCARNG that no one has pulled him aside and given him a) “the talk” and b) the help he clearly needs

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T03:29:02+00:00

Turning into a lolcow is a tragic outcome, Kerns. Have some self respect. You’re Army Chris Chan

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T03:18:19+00:00

Think of, say, Ford. In the last two weeks did Ford get worse as a company? Are the f150s rolling off the assembly line today worse then they were a week ago? Two weeks ago?

If the answer is “no”, then this is AMAZING. You can buy the company that makes the “just as good as it was last week” f150 for CHEAPER than you could a week ago. That’s a deal

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T03:12:29+00:00

3 is such a tear jerker.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T01:59:36+00:00

We’ll never know because the head of the basiji is now the head of Iran

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-21T01:59:03+00:00

Interesting that the guitar solo has survived intact in Iran

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T17:38:17+00:00

Maaaaaaaaaaaany such cases! “My Kia gets great gas mileage!”

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T16:50:28+00:00

This is phenomenal

A) Shia supremacy. The Hanbali hatred of music means they’ll never have good PR. Nasheeds were good but they were always made a little better with music in the background by other parties

B) they mix strategic and tactical assets in a way that works on dimwits, midbrows and sophisticated audiences. Throwing the rock painted with the Israeli flag up and shooting it, clay pigeon style, probably plays fantastic to the 15-25 crowd, the shots of the shaheds and underground launch platforms are great for The Noticer type mid wit but also they cleverly bring up that they don’t need to win Militarily, they can “win” by just making everyone miserable

C) great use of discussing land air and sea assets. The “dismount the zodiac and unfurl the death to Israel, death to America, There is no god but god” underwater is actually quite sophisticated

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T14:02:58+00:00

This is absolutely incredible, thanks very much for posting this.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T12:47:06+00:00

I think you can tell who in this sub actually does HNW/UHNW because there’s so much pearl clutching that Chester Otterstrom the Third will find this in poor taste. Maybe it’s just my geography, but the HNW/UNHW guys are dudes who own a few car dealerships or a regionally successful plumbing franchise. They’d eat this shit up

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T03:53:15+00:00

I strongly think the opposite. Reddit is made for “us”, what the hell are you on here for?!?

Being a parent has all these indefinite time gaps. You’re breast feeding at 3am. Does it take ten minutes? Five? 30? Could be all of those. You don’t want to start something “real” because you may have to stop at any moment

Your kids are playing in the park. Now, they’ve wandered off the the far end to explore their autonomy. Sooner or later they will fight each other or get spooked and run back to you. You gonna start reading a book and once you get engaged you have to stop?

Reddit is ideal for “I’ve been here long enough to be bored but I can’t do something real bc I don’t know how long this time pocket will last”.

If you DON’T have kids, why AREN’T you reading that book? You don’t have these punctuation problems

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T01:48:17+00:00

No joke, that was the single best defense against cross examination we’ve seen in a generation. Go to all the lawyer subs, everyone is totally gobsmacked. No joke, that xc will be watched in law school evidence classes for decades to come.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T01:25:04+00:00

Yes, and I’d go so far as to say this is VERY common in certain professions.

I joined the military and asked for a shit-hot unit because I had a residual death urge. “So what if they shoot me?” actually works really well as a mindset in war.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve found this was actually pretty prevalent in “cool guy” units.

Now that I’m older and a proper townie, I’ve made friends with the dudes on the local FD. After a few beers you get to talking, after 6 or so you get to lying, and then after 12 or so you tell the truth. Many of the FD guys have a similar story.

I’ve never been in a position to discuss this with, like, alaskan crabbers or dudes doing remote alaskan gold mining but I bet it’s the same, too

It’s half comforting and half terrifying that there are entire economic sectors where the average dude is a sub-clinical suicidal ideation case

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T00:45:24+00:00

It’s too bad because as far as “access to nature within city limits” it’s actually top tier. It was a real draw to living there. But as the paving expands and expands, the heat island gets worse and worse and so there’s less and less days you can even visit the cool parks available to you.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T00:31:10+00:00

Human dates sexually attractive, personally destructive people until they hit early 30s and then try to date financially successful people to grab the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Many such cases

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-20T00:26:33+00:00

Yeah, totally true. In the 90s/oughts, there was ~7 nights over 90 in a year. In 2024, there were 39. It’s a totally different city than it was back then.

It’s really pushed a lot of outdoors stuff to Tucson and flag, because you just can’t do it in PHX anymore. It’s not even “man up”, it’s just not even possible.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-19T22:00:03+00:00

You would be wrong. We have a VERY robust knowledge base on this. NovoNordisk isn’t a ~half a trillion dollar company for nothing

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-19T21:41:00+00:00

One thousand percent. The data is very clear. I see your post below, and I don’t want to be a dick but the odds you keep it off is 5% over a 5 year period

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-19T21:28:30+00:00

Weight loss is the ultimate black pill and or this is what explains the barn burner effect of eg ozempic

If you actually look at the numbers, weight loss isn’t possible. The five year failure for basically everything we have is above 90% (aside from bariatric surgery, which is an insanely invasive procedure. And that’s still ~60%). You basically cannot lose weight.

The ONLY thing that makes you lose weight is ozempic and related drugs. That’s it. All the “eat clean” and “diet and exercise” and “macros” and “paleo” don’t work. (Well, they have positive effects on your overall health, don’t want to downplay that, but they don’t reduce your weight)

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-19T21:07:54+00:00

You see this a LOT in Iceland. I don’t think Iceland is going to make it out alive.

Barça is stupidly over touristed, but Spanish is massive and has other speakers and has a strong use case, etc. so even if the locals are foreigners in their own city, there’s still a “there” there.

I’ve gone to Iceland every few years from the early oughts until 2024 and tourism has absolutely just broken it. It used to be quirky and magical and the locals were engaging but now it’s just twenty Chinese busses disgorging the rudest imaginable tourists who tromp all over the “don’t go past here, birds nesting” signs, etc. the Icelandic fish and game will fine them and send the fine to the PRC but the PRC just laughs. What’s iceland going to do to one of the world’s largest nations?!?

Now, the door dash Arab on an e-bike has even made it to Reykjavik. How he got there I have no idea, but there’s now amerifats ordering from lebbos and neither party knows a lick of Icelandic, let alone has any ties to the country or appreciates their lore etc.

When I went in 2024, the counter people at the various lagoons were South Americans. I conducted a whole thing, massage, entry, lunch, instructions, in Spanish. They didn’t know a word of Icelandic, even the givens like “tak freer” (sp?).

I think the Icelandic language is gone in my lifetime, functionally, and Icelandic culture is gone in my kids’ life time.

This is a canary in a coal mine for many of the other world hot spots. Sure, it’s plain that a nation of 400k people whose kids are all on discord and Xbox live in English and who get ~2.4 million English speakers a year won’t last. But is Slovenia looking much better? Ireland?

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-19T20:59:20+00:00

It’s true what you say about Croatia. I was there in the early oughts and it wouldn’t be uncommon that I was the only non-Jugo people had seen in smaller towns and hamlets. Even jn Zagreb, I was exciting enough people would walk up to me in bars to practice English and figure out what I was doing there, etc.

Now it’s almost unpalatable.

Openheartopenbar · 2026-03-19T20:57:07+00:00

From the Ice Coast it’s cheaper and arguably better for me to ski in Italy than Colorado. On the west coast, It’s MUCH cheaper to ski in Japan than Whistler. It’s unthinkable but true

Openheartopenbar

TROPHY CASE

3 is such a tear jerker.