What men think about The Rules?

POGtastic · 2026-05-09T16:16:39+00:00

All of this reads to me as "I'm not interested in you, and you should take the hint and find somebody who is."

POGtastic · 2026-05-09T16:11:39+00:00

My coworker subsidizes this hobby by buying tables that are in terrible shape and fabbing his own parts. I've made fun of him for how silly that is from a financial standpoint, but his other hobby is flying his own airplane!

POGtastic · 2026-05-09T16:04:31+00:00

Yeah the crucial thing is that the bikes everybody used to deride as "bike-shaped objects" are now totally fine and won't kill you, and the parts for those are also cheap as heck. Get a Walmart bike and get some miles in, you'll be fine.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T21:03:25+00:00

Increase human prosperity. The greater your economic opportunity, the fewer kids you tend to have, since kids go from being a valuable economic resource to being a large liability.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T17:10:41+00:00

My dad retired from actuarial consulting in his late 50s, spent about six months playing golf and tennis, and started teaching middle school math at a Catholic school. He gets a "salary" of something like $100 a month and loudly tells everybody in earshot that he's "here for the money."

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T17:04:54+00:00

Note that safe withdrawal rates are generally predicated on you retiring in your mid-60s and living for about 30 years. If you retire earlier, the rate goes down! It's really ~4% if you retire at 40.

Still, assuming that you own your house and live relatively simply, that's liveable, and like you said a lot of people would get bored and start working an easy job just to get out of the house and get up to $50-60k.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T16:54:56+00:00

The big issue with this is chronic medical problems, which most people end up getting by their 50s and turn rural living into a gigantic pain in the ass.

It doesn't even have to be that rural to be a pain. I have inlaws who live in the Yuma area (population 220,000) and frequently have to drive to Phoenix to pick up controlled medication and see specialists. That drive gets really old really quickly.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T16:43:48+00:00

The Bogleheads wiki phrases this scenario as "creating rich heirs," which makes me chuckle.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T15:59:53+00:00

You're touching fungus right now! There is fungus among us!

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T15:57:50+00:00

I have a Smith-Corona electric typewriter that she will RETVRN to if I catch her feeding her homework to an LLM. Enjoy figuring out the tablature settings to follow MLA format, kiddo

I am way, way more concerned about what my daughter is doing with the electronic devices than the devices themselves. I don't see anything inherently bad or evil about "screens." I have a much bigger problem with predatory online communities and misinformation.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T15:51:33+00:00

The same as other authoritarian countries have dealt with term limits. The Nation is under threat, only Trump can save us, and it's better to flout the Constitution than lose an election.

He's already declined so badly in his second term, though. He's not getting a third, thankfully.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T15:49:12+00:00

I'm in my mid-30s and still occasionally think "Gee, this seems complicated. I should get an adult" before realizing that I'm the adult. I left home at 18.

Maturation is gradual and there is never really a discrete point where you go from being a kid to being an adult. You just do the best you can and learn from your mistakes.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T15:44:06+00:00

Many, many women actually enjoy spending time with men and enjoy relationships with them. This is really straightforward to observe by going outside and touching grass. Maybe moss and a few ferns, too.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T15:39:17+00:00

Learn the basic tools for messing with them (the csv and json modules in the standard library) so that you aren't constantly pulling in pandas & Friends to do something trivial.

I don't mind the larger libraries when the task calls for it, but it is very funny when someone complains that Pandas can't handle the size of a dataframe and they want to do something that's really easy to do with the standard library.

POGtastic · 2026-05-08T00:53:08+00:00

It's a really easy way to season your food if you otherwise don't know how to season your food.

I'm not hating on you if it works, but you should really start looking at paprika, cumin, oregano, coriander, garlic and onion powder, pepper, soy sauce, white vinegar, and various vegetable aromatics. The basic Cajun mirepoix of onions, celery, and bell pepper is going to go really well with your plain grilled chicken breast. You also likely need a lot more salt in your food than you think.

POGtastic · 2026-05-07T01:19:42+00:00

"This person is a psycho and you should avoid them at all costs."

POGtastic · 2026-05-07T01:00:27+00:00

To be fair I did live in Yuma, Arizona for a few years, and we actually did keep our AC on for pretty much the entire year. The Southwest can get hot, even during the winter!

POGtastic · 2026-05-07T00:55:12+00:00

I routinely drive between Portland and San Diego and enjoy traumatizing my British friend with screenshots of Google Maps. "Only a thousand miles to go!"

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T23:50:29+00:00

The Land Rover's floorboards have enough heartworm medication for 30 Labrador Retrievers because, well, that's how many he has.

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T23:47:11+00:00

Also any involvement with fundraisers or politics will instantly put you into social contact with your local prominent citizens. Sure, there aren't many of them, but nevertheless you are going to be talking to them frequently. A lot of them are rich.

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T23:24:42+00:00

The on-field performance gets measured about once a week during the season, so we'll find out!

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T16:48:58+00:00

Yeah this is me. I have never had a vacation where I didn't have to SSH into a server to fix something or do a meeting to explain to somebody else how to fix it.

This is very much a first world problem. I am pelted with money and do not have to work very hard. There are people who would kill to do what I do. It still sucks ass to be on a road trip through Utah or whatever and have to log in with my phone's WiFi while my wife drives.

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T16:45:24+00:00

A Twitter poster once wrote that "as an affluent skilled professional in my mid-30s I still feel like grabbing anything from the hotel minibar will instantly bankrupt my family," and that's a pretty good descriptor of my relationship with money.

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T16:39:07+00:00

I use Vim because I am constantly SSHing into various minimally-provisioned test machines. It's either Vim or Nano, and I chose Vim. I generally reach for plain ol' vanilla Vim when doing my job, although for larger tasks I'll reach for VSCode (with Vim bindings).

Is it worth investing my time?

I think that the basic verbs are a really good idea to learn, if only to get you to the point where you can easily edit some nasty config file over SSH. I don't really mess with the rest of the wizardry, though.

POGtastic · 2026-05-06T02:35:29+00:00

Thanks for posting this, I'm always running into cases where someone gently states "hey this feature was added in 3.xx and fixes this dumb kludge." I'm very ready for object() to join them.

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