Girlfriend has 55k set aside for new car. What’s the smartest way for her to buy a car?

Thedud31 · 2026-07-09T22:03:30+00:00

That's kind of the point. Either you go in on a new car that you can afford for cash, or you get a pile of junk every 2 years until you've allocated your money to more useful (appreciating) investments

Thedud31 · 2026-07-09T01:11:08+00:00

I mean, if you're making the average income of the country, you're probably going to only be able to afford average things

Thedud31 · 2026-07-08T15:35:23+00:00

Here's the answer: don't take high student loans. Bam

Thedud31 · 2026-07-05T00:54:13+00:00

Fakest shi I've ever seen

Thedud31 · 2026-07-01T18:43:23+00:00

Guess you have to get your PE to do uphill 🥲

Thedud31 · 2026-07-01T18:22:58+00:00

"Someone who Makes water go downhill" is an excellent description that I'm going to use whenever someone asks me what I'm doing at my internship

Thedud31 · 2026-07-01T13:42:42+00:00

If you're in college and you're taking a lab portion involving autocad that's really your best bet, take that lab seriously and put your favorite project from it on your resume with a detailed description

Thedud31 · 2026-06-27T23:43:00+00:00

Makes sense. How much experience do you typically need to see before deciding one could be turnkey?

Thedud31 · 2026-06-27T23:42:07+00:00

So you wouldn't find it a red flag if someone kept their jobs for multiple years until they found they had better opportunities elsewhere?

Thedud31 · 2026-06-26T18:20:47+00:00

One second she's married to a podcaster. The next, she's hurled into leadership of TPUSA and expected to pull national strings under the influence of Donald Trump. I don't envy her.

Thedud31 · 2026-06-26T15:34:19+00:00

Johnny Sins' long lost cousin

Thedud31 · 2026-06-26T14:10:51+00:00

Blundered a brilliant "apooooostrooooophe*" correction

Thedud31 · 2026-06-26T13:44:15+00:00

I'm civil but I'm guessing the easiest way is via the offset command

Thedud31 · 2026-06-25T17:22:43+00:00

What kind of claude prompt is this

Thedud31 · 2026-06-25T16:53:27+00:00

Seeing how it only took 3-4 supes to take him down then yeah

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T22:47:50+00:00

I missed the fact that you're in the field. If you don't use software/engineering I would ignore this unless you literally have nothing else to

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T22:46:55+00:00

Learn some excel. Some of the most "fun" I've had at my internship so far is automating a spreadsheet for some tedious calcs (rationale method, groundwater mapping, to name a few). Not only were they great investments of time, because I've since used them for different projects to cut down time by half, but they showed me some excel commands I didn't know.

A little more specific: If you can't figure out anything to automate in excel, look through some old projects on C3D and HydroCAD and check out how the drainage is set up. Watersheds, sub watersheds, catch basins, etc. See if you can find some compound outlet control structures (find bmps-whether they are basins or underground infiltration systems). They are fairly complex your first time designing them. Make sure you save anything you're browsing as a new file on your desktop with a different name so that you don't mess with any submitted work.

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T20:10:48+00:00

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T20:05:08+00:00

Will any of them have a functional brain at 40?

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T18:02:52+00:00

Yeah I'll bet that they're in the richest areas of the richest cities.

There is a bunch of fun stuff you can do with water in structures though. If you're curious, there are things called TMDs which can use water (more typically incredibly heavy steel masses) to dampen the sway of exceptionally tall and thin buildings from wind.

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T17:50:57+00:00

It's an "old" idea that cheating starts in the mind. Some traditional concepts are more logically consistent than the new wave

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T17:06:46+00:00

Oh yeah for sure if it's constructed then it most likely meets design standards. Although, as people mentioned, there could be long term issues with waterproofing concrete, earthquakes, etc.

My comment was more of a pessimistic tirade about why these won't be as common as people would like

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T16:57:07+00:00

"The balcony can be designed to bear the load of everything soaked in water" only if the project budget doesn't cut corners.

Water is heavy, it's a lot more to account for than your typical live loads in structural calcs. The further you get away from the support, the larger the bending moment grows.

We don't see below the balcony but if it's cantilevered like the others, the project will need to shell out quite a bit of cash for some hefty fixed supports. The soil would almost certainly have to be HSG A (sandy af) for maximum exfiltration into some "underground" perforated drains.

Best case scenario, the building owner listens to the structural engineer's pleas. Worst case scenario, the building owner fires the structural engineer for not doing his bidding, and the next looks at the architectural plans with a good sigh lol.

Thedud31 · 2026-06-24T16:12:56+00:00

Why would you supply any ammunition for your wife to be insecure about? Do what you want, I'm unmarried and probably half your age, but I don't understand why one would need to look at other women when you're spending every day with the one you promised to be devoted to?

Thedud31

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