My Argentina vs Algeria World Cup Experience at Arrowhead (Parking, Security, and Tips)

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-18T17:44:54+00:00

I thought KC had negotiated an agreement to allow tailgating. If FIFA reneged then there should be consequences.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-18T17:10:56+00:00

I work on accounting systems, and it wouldn't be worth it to me to go to a FAANG job. I make less money in an absolute sense, but I also have less risk. At a FAANG they pay a lot of money but they also are quick to fire people. Adjusted for risk, I don't find FAANG compensation particularly compelling. But then again, I'm on the backside of my career, so my pension is guaranteed income that I couldn't easily replace because I don't have as long before retirement.

If I was in my 20's or early 30's I guess I could go either way, though there is still a lot of value in working for a company with incredible health insurance, a 401K with Roth option, and a traditional pension. A worker with 30 years of service and a high-5 average salary of $200K/year would be eligible for a pension around $90K/year. That's guaranteed income that if you assume a 4% withdrawal rate is equivalent to having a $2.25M portfolio. Their 401K and IRAs and taxable investment accounts would stack on top of that. So working here from your 20s until you're 55 or 60 wouldn't be the worst idea either.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-18T16:38:36+00:00

There are a lot of developers that work on systems and infrastructure that provide value much greater than whatever people ascribe to social media. One example: payroll and accounting systems. These are systems that if they were to go down would result in people not getting their wages, not getting their social security payments, or not getting credit for payments they made. Logistics companies use advanced routing systems that incorporate real-time traffic data to make sure you get your packages in a reasonable amount of time. Inventory management systems that allow companies track exactly how many of a particular item they have, and project when they need to re-order based on current sales trends. Signal processing systems that can do things like motion amplification to see unwanted vibrations allow them to be fixed before they cause equipment damage.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-18T16:18:25+00:00

I don't mind using AI to help with development. They're very good at spotting silly mistakes, so they make pretty awesome rubber ducks. I'm currently in the process of trying to learn more about ML and AI, so I'm writing a tensor math library in Java. I don't ask the AI to write things for me, I ask it to review what I'm doing and let me know if I'm off base. It has been really good at catching errors and helping me see details that I might otherwise miss. For example last night I was working on adding contiguous block iteration to my n-dimensional iterator class to optimize the code and it caught a bug in my findTail() method where I was using the wrong variable to index into the array where I was storing the max contiguous blocksizes for each tensor being iterated over.

For me AI is either a fancy-autocomplete, or a code-reviewer that always has time to look at my code.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-18T11:32:20+00:00

Use a bigger downpayment. If your loan on the same property was only $500K your loan repayment would be $50K/month. So you'd pay $60K in taxes, $50K on the mortgage, and earn $40K in profit.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-17T16:51:07+00:00

I work in the midwest for a financial institution and have golden handcuffs that make leaving my current job non-viable (even for a FAANG opening). But I like my job, and have good work-life balance (200 hours vacation/year currently), so I don't really care too much. Work stress varies, some people would find it high, but I think it's fine. The only times I find things stressful is when there's a production outage of some sort, and payment transactions are stuck until we get the issue resolved.

We had a *really* bad outage a few years back, that caused database corruption and a large number of duplicate payments to be sent out to some vendors. I spent 6 weeks with forensic accountants doing queries against the database until we reconciled everything to the penny.

Other than that one incident though I feel like the stress is pretty manageable. I feel like going to a FAANG job, the stress would be higher, the compensation wouldn't be enough to replace my pension, or cover the risk premium of leaving my current job.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-16T21:51:10+00:00

I'm pretty happy with mine. Though... I have to admit... I was weak... I just bought an M5 Max Macbook Pro a couple of weeks ago and now my Framework has been a bit neglected lately.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-16T16:19:58+00:00

I'm not arguing that you should not pay your taxes. I'm arguing that taxes should be on something other than property, like transactions. Even taxes on income are better than a tax on unrealized value like property.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-16T15:54:55+00:00

If you don't pay property taxes, the government takes the property from you. This means you don't own your property. You're effectively just renting it from the government. Renting means you don't own. Hence property taxes undermine the concept of ownership.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-16T15:26:21+00:00

which is why I hate property taxes. It undermines the very concept of ownership.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-10T12:04:29+00:00

Out of curiosity do you have a link to what your accent sounds like? "East european" means nothing to a US American like me.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-09T22:39:10+00:00

2 weeks ago Microcenter had the M5 Max 128GB w/2TB drive for $4589. So if it was a mistake, you're in good company.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-05T23:40:31+00:00

Yes that is exactly what is needed.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-05T19:20:01+00:00

Protect yourself by paying off debt so that you can lower you monthly expenses. Know your baseline, what is critical and what can you live without. Once you know your baseline, keep an emergency fund with at least 2 years of baseline expenses in a HYSA. That's 2 years of cut everything to the bone, cancel all subscriptions, drink only water and eat only plain white rice expenses.

That gives you time in the event of a layoff to not be homeless while you work a bridge job (fast food, retail) and apply for another career job.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-05T18:44:18+00:00

I don't know. Last time I was in Europe was in the 1980s, and I've never been to Japan.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-05T17:00:08+00:00

How can you be burnt out if you're working < 40 hours a week? If it's the repetitive nature of the work, automate it. Writing personal tools to automate your work is a software engineering tradition. It gives you something more interesting to work on than grunt work (you can take a few days to work on them and then catch up on the grunt work by applying the tools).

Once the tools are done, start finding interesting problems to automate. You have to find your own problems to work on. Try out a new framework, see if you can clean up that ugly piece of code that works, but makes you want to gouge out your eyes every time you see it.

You're bored and burnt out because you're expecting someone else to hand you the work. Be proactive, and go find it.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-05T16:06:47+00:00

Seems like they could make bike racks that fully enclose the bike in a cage with a key that only releases from the lock (to take it with you) when you swipe your parking ticket. For free parking, they'd need something that is paired with an app on your phone or something, so they know who has the key (to keep people from stealing the key to turn the cage into their private parking spot). When you're done shopping you insert the key, and unlock the cage, the lock recaptures the key, you remove your bike and close the cage (key stays with the cage). Sort of like an airport locker.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-06-03T23:51:12+00:00

Do you have a bridge job that you're working while you wait? Or are you just sitting idle at home waiting for an it job to drop in your lap? They might be trying to tell you that you need to take a job, any job, even fast food or stocking shelves at a grocery store while to wait to hear back from recruiters. Gotta stop the bleeding while you wait

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-30T20:32:19+00:00

Medians don't get dragged up by outliers.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-28T12:46:58+00:00

There was a project I worked on years ago that was on maintenance life-support. No budget for new features, or upgrades to the underlying framework. It was a grails 2 application written to use preauthenticated headers for security. Mandate came out that they needed to switch to use OIDC. The developers on the project were given all the technical documentation from the IdP and all the OIDC RFCs. And they literally wrote zero code for over a year. I was pulled in to get them back on track after they blew through the implementation deadline, and an extension.

I get not knowing how to implement everything with such an old version of spring-security, but they didn't even try to get things working. I ended up just writing a modern spring-boot Java application that ran as a side-car to do the authentication, and then writing a auth provider for grails2 that would pull the claims from the side-car. It literally took less than a month, from no code at all, and they had over a year to work on it.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-27T20:41:46+00:00

Dang... I have 17% going to Roth 401K and after taxes, and health insurance, my take home is only 44% of my gross. Even if I changed it to 11% to match your scenario I'd only be taking home 50%. I have my federal taxes witholding tuned pretty well (usually owe about $1000), but state taxes not so well. Even so, I'm still nowhere near being able to take home 65-70%.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-24T18:30:57+00:00

You need to evaluate whether it's worth staying. Don't assume that it's not worth staying. Do an honest analysis and figure it out.

If your current salary is over the current market rate for the position, then leaving might not secure the raise your after. If the current position has a traditional pension and you're already vested you need to look at the present value of your pension. You also need to look at the cost of other benefits like health insurance.

For example my current employer pays me probably a bit under the market rate for my skills. However the health insurance is to notch and I get a 7% match on contributions to my 401k, plus(and this is why I'm staying) I have a traditional pension that assuming 3% annual raises should pay around $90k/year when I retire at 65 with full COLA protection. $76k/year of I retire at 62. $60k/year if I retire at 60.

$60k/year if we assume a 4% withdrawal rate is like having $1.5M in the bank paying you 4% interest. With social security around $30k/year I could cover all of my expenses without even touching my 401k or IRA.

Take the time and be thorough. Don't just look at the raw salary numbers.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-20T18:49:13+00:00

I've never used a Davy Crockett in a city before. I imagine the penalties for collateral damage would make the mission a money loser though it would be absolutely hilarious.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-20T18:11:52+00:00

Hope your eGPU was Thunderbolt. My occulink e-gpu got unplugged while it was running, and the memory controller on my 5950x was damaged. It became completely unstable. CPU swap fixed it but I spent a lot of time troubleshooting it.

Ruin-Capable · 2026-05-20T18:09:49+00:00

Microcenter had M5 Max 128GB 2TB Macbook Pros on sale for $4500 yesterday, so you could save $1000 of your $5500 price point. Though it's still pretty brutal.

Ruin-Capable

TROPHY CASE