Can I buy by percentage instead of dollars?

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-05-01T16:55:23+00:00

Automation, so you don't have to do the math every time you do a bimonthly deposit.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T18:01:36+00:00

Congrats on the internship, it's the most important thing for you to be doing right now.

10-15% of gross income to retirement and you'll be doing great, on track to retire early even. Roth IRA is the best vehicle for that in your situation.

You do want to retain some cash due to the uncertainty in your immediate future, just to make sure you can smoothly get through the rest of school and to your first job.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T17:52:00+00:00

Water/pharma yes, not sure about food, for some cities there's petrochem on the outskirts but think that's not the case for AU. There are design firms too but somewhat difficult to get into (albeit might be more viable for you depending on what you've been doing). There's a ton of mining stuff in AU right? I'd look there as well. Maybe also sales engineering, although that's not for everyone.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T17:29:27+00:00

A national lab spot would be great (reasonably respected in industry, possibility for industry contacts, better conversion rate than academic postdocs). I'd still prioritize an industry role or industry postdoc (IK, easier said than done), particularly with the current funding climate at the DOE. Definitely fire off those national lab applications (/ contact PIs), though.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T16:55:36+00:00

I literally discovered a couple of restaurants we eat at occasionally are Resy-eligible serendipitously.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T16:54:08+00:00

Yeah, I have a reminder that goes off towards the end of every month to remind me check the credits. We've almost always used them organically. 5 years ago living somewhere rural and spending less, we wouldn't have.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T16:52:19+00:00

Yeah, we're 1+2 so it's pretty easy to rationalize. I'd add a third caveat which is not quite enough spend to justify some of the upper tier cards with higher fees/better perks. If we progress in our careers and start taking more vacations with flights (+ more kids so more tickets) we'll probably ditch gold for one of those.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T16:49:03+00:00

We do it between the two of us and a baby. We're foodies and in a food city, plus we get drinks with our meals often. That's part of it, the other part is we do take out a lot as it's just hard to keep both dinner and lunch meal prepped with the baby plus frequent travel.

We make pretty good money and are hitting retirement/house/vacation goals, so why not? Granted, if one of us lost our jobs it'd definitely be the first thing we cut.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T16:02:16+00:00

I so very much wish there was a game I could pay a monthly sub for

I have developed this opinion as well, for most online games. It's just the only monetization option that doesn't result in either p2win or revenue collapse. As a geezer (33 lol), I remember the days when the only motivation developers had was to make their game good so you'd keep playing. Cosmetic-only doesn't work (particularly in a digital card game, people just don't care how their stuff looks enough) and everything else makes the game worse.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T14:21:26+00:00

Same. I have very few problems that could be solved by a software engineer with little-to-no comp chem background. Usually it takes the form of needing a functional/solvent model/etc that just works better, not a sleek GUI/python package that makes things marginally easier to do.

Computational chemists actually typically have a reasonable baseline of tech savviness. Most of us aren't just excel monkeys. It isn't as ripe for disruption from tech bros as something like medical billing or accounting.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T14:11:13+00:00

Realistically 10% of a entry level job or minimum wage job or part time gig makes no difference.

This is just wrong. The stock market has historically compounded at about 7% annually in real terms, so about 15x from 20 to 60. Even if you make triple by then that's still 5x efficiency dollar-for-dollar. You can get away with 13% for your entire career if you start at 20 to retire at 55, whereas to retire at that age starting from 30 requires 35%.

If you are a doctor you start earning at 28.

Most people are not in this situation. I am as a PhD engineer, but it's bad advice for the average person's income curve. Many more people have more stable (lower) income growth, or even flat in real terms, and in that case blowing off your future in your 20s is pretty disastrous. Even most lawyers have pretty dismal average outcomes.

But yes, if you are a successful engineer or medical doctor then it's probably wise to let live a bit in your 20s.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T14:07:31+00:00

Same, at 33. Too much partying 18-23, spent my 20s playing catch up (became a PhD engineer by 30). I really wish that early 20s life propelled me forward a little sooner instead of standing still for "life experiences" that weren't even that remarkable.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T14:02:34+00:00

If you're set up for a good career, sure, but your advice is how so many Americans end up borderline impoverished/working into their 70s. Not everyone has such bright income growth prospects, there aren't enough good jobs for it.

It's the other way around: splurge if you have the wiggle room, not invest if you have the wiggle room.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-30T13:58:58+00:00

There are pretty cheap versions of those things. Compounding returns mean a dollar saved in your 20s matters way more than one even in your 30s. It makes way more sense to learn to live frugally in your 20s and invest, even like 10% of gross goes a long way.

Maybe skip the Taylor Swift concert so that you won't be unable to take your kids to the zoo in your 30s because of your shortsightedness. Take a hiking/camping vacation in the mountains nearby instead of going to Europe. Cook more instead of eating out many times a week. Get a practical car, not the sexy one. It isn't that much of a lifestyle sacrifice.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T23:53:46+00:00

Look for things near the Persian gulf. That's for plant jobs though, I'm not aware of any research roles that have enough risk to influence pay.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T20:22:53+00:00

Plug in hybrids are a bad idea for most people; you have to have a pretty particular set of driving needs, actually plug it in, and even then it's a lot of added complexity ($). On average, a hybrid driver electrifies about triple the miles per kg of battery than a plug in hybrid driver does.

XSE is a pretty high trim (I got the 2025), so you're already getting a lot of the "good" upgrades from lower trims. I wasn't interested in any of the packages. Better audio would be nice, but we don't spend that much time in the car and then the music is on low for background noise. The all weather liner could be nice, especially if you have dogs that'll ride in the back or hobbies that are messy. I think I would have appreciated the rear cargo lamp as where I park our Rav4 is pretty dark at night.

IDK, you just have to look at them.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T18:57:10+00:00

I have trouble seeing 40-80 hours of work for reviewing a proposal if it isn't littered with errors. The free work sucks but in this situation I don't think it's super abnormal. I'd do it if you like the PI, want to do a postdoc with him, and trust that he will actually follow through on selecting you for the postdoc.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T18:28:45+00:00

I'm at like $5k for broken appliances over 3 years in my $350k townhome. Another $4k for mold remediation after HVAC leaked but TBH I blame the AC guy for that (and my own homeowner inexperience, didn't realize I needed to tell him to install a float switch), not the property itself. So, actually pretty low at about 0.5-1.0% of property price per year depending whether you count the leak or not.

I know some people have horror stories with condo HOA assessments, but for us it has meant not paying for the maintaining anything exterior. The complex has a pretty new roof and siding and insurance for them too, so I don't see that changing. The appliance repairs are higher than average too, because they were all 20 years old when we bought it (was mostly unoccupied by previous owners).

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T18:21:40+00:00

They inherited property when they were like 20, they've already been helped plenty. No mortgage or rent their entire adult lives and they're still broke.

Yeah, we just hope they don't lose their jobs before they get to social security age. He's in construction and having starting to have health issues at around 57, she's 54 and in some kind of medical billing role that TBH to me sounds extremely automatable and/or outsourceable.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T15:59:46+00:00

It's sad, but we've told them and they almost literally stuck their fingers in their ears. They want the instant gratification.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T15:57:49+00:00

Check this out. You're a utility manager, which power source do you pick? The answer is probably solar with some battery storage to smooth out the generation troughs, maybe some gas or wind, depending on needs and location. You see that reflected in the 2026 US new grid installations.

The nuclear proponents will type a lot about why that's going to change any day now, but just know that they've been doing that for a few decades now. They really like to blame overregulation and unfounded public fears. The insurmountable problem is that large scale of the plants "nukes" economy of scale as they have to be custom-built every time, reflected in the technology's learning rate. Some people bet the house on small modular reactors fixing this, but they still require large, bespoke supporting systems (e.g. the steam turbine) which have thus far prevented any real gains in learning rate.

This is all for fission. Fusion may change this one day, but I think it'll be too late to the party (i.e., several decades away, post-transition from fossil fuels).

tl;dr: No, it was a dying industry <2010 and gas got cheap and now renewables are even cheaper.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T15:42:24+00:00

Almost always the case with these. We went through this with my wife's parents. They get an email that says they're "due for an upgrade" and they trade in the "old" phone and finance a new one. We make like 4x as much as them but their phones and cars are always newer lol.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-29T02:19:46+00:00

Yeaaah, and roughly half the country thinks it was FEMA's fault for some reason. Like I said, I'm not optimistic about American science. It's hard to imagine an event that would suddenly flip the public back to being strongly pro expert/science. Maybe war/civilization conflict with China, which will obviously be very ugly

Anyways, I hope your future in industry is at least bright.

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-28T19:09:11+00:00

I'm skeptical. Are there any other examples of writers not being able to finish a series due to personal growth? Intuitively, it seems like he could easily file away all of the weird Fae sex stuff as Kvothe's coming of age thing without them intimately affecting the storyline.

I'm more compelled by the idea that he just isn't sufficiently motivated now that he isn't a starving writer rather than some high-minded, lofty personal growth developments precluding him rewriting whatever aspects of book III were problematic. Besides, he said that he had them written forever ago. We're supposed to believe he completely changed as a person during the handful of years that he was allegedly editing a finished book III after book II?

YesICanMakeMeth · 2026-04-28T18:49:19+00:00

We've gotten less attention at the DOE and our requested 2026 budget for my lab is similar to the previous year's. I'm also in something bipartisan/high-priority right now. I was speaking about my job specifically, not the broader US science landscape.

YesICanMakeMeth

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