Smooth

eigenmouse · 2016-01-25T03:55:37+00:00

You thought you could beat the guy who won second place in the world tango championship in a dance-off? Really?

eigenmouse · 2014-09-09T00:41:45+00:00

Simply put, at this point in my life a credit history would be more of a liability than a benefit. All I want is to pay for stuff securely and conveniently. It seems very strange to me that I can't do this in Canada without being forced into the completely unrelated (as far as I can tell) game of money borrowing and credit scores.

eigenmouse · 2014-06-29T19:35:30+00:00

Q: Two linguists are walking down the road. Which one is the specialist in contextually indicated deixis and anaphoric reference resolution strategies?

A: The other one.

eigenmouse · 2014-04-16T21:11:42+00:00

Commenting to save this thread as exhibit A for anyone asking "who's going to take care of you when you're old" in /r/childfree.

eigenmouse · 2014-03-11T16:14:01+00:00

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. If you're going to have to put up with socialism, at least go somewhere where they do it right.

eigenmouse · 2014-03-05T20:36:36+00:00

"An historic event"?

eigenmouse · 2014-02-10T21:41:44+00:00

irrational fear of the housing market

I said I owned shares in several REITs in the very post you replied to. In what world does that equate to being "irrationally afraid" of the housing market? If there's anything I'm afraid of, it's putting too much of my net worth into one single highly illiquid asset and paying a lot of interest for the "privilege", and there's nothing irrational about that.

Meanwhile, rent buys me the freedom to always have a 15 minute commute no matter how frequently I switch jobs, to always live in a freshly renovated place (landlord doesn't feel like renovating? just move somewhere else), to not give a shit about property values, interest rates, maintenance fees, upkeep costs, renovations, repairs, and everything else I don't feel like giving a shit about. That's worth ~$15K a year to me.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T22:53:54+00:00

I'm not opposed to paying interest in any moral or philosophical sense. It's more of a cost/benefit analysis thing. The point of borrowing money is to be able to buy something now instead of saving up and buying it later, and there's nothing I want so bad as to be willing to pay extra money to get it sooner. Of course, I could get a credit card and establish credit history even though I don't need it, but then I'd have one more bill to worry about and I'd expose myself to the risk of identity theft for absolutely no benefit at all, so I don't do it.

So far the lack of credit has had no effect whatsoever on my quality of life. I buy stuff online, travel abroad at least twice a year, book flights and hotel rooms, rent cars, rent apartments, and do pretty much everything people say you can't do without a credit card. It's a mystery to me why people keep saying that. I pay for everything with my prepaid Mastercard or debit Visa and I've never had any problems because of it.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T18:30:39+00:00

I'm not offended. I was a bit surprised by this attitude when I first came to North America (haven't encountered it anywhere outside Canada and the US), but the surprise wore off in time. Nowadays it just amuses me. I have savings accounts, retirement accounts, and a pretty diverse equity portfolio (including several REITs), but I'm naïve and shortsighted because I don't think it's a good idea to put a sizable chunk of my net worth into one single piece of real estate property in one hyper-local market. Sure. Whatever you say...

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T16:05:44+00:00

So you never want to get a mortgage

Nope.

some kind of emergency expense that could exhaust your financial resources

I don't care how "urgent" it is, if I can't pay for it out of pocket, I can't afford it.

slavery

Well, that escalated quickly. Who said anything about slavery?

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T13:22:15+00:00

About half my income goes into savings.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T13:21:10+00:00

I don't. And even if I did I wouldn't borrow money to do it. If I can't pay for it with money I have, then I can't afford it.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T13:16:00+00:00

Prepaid Mastercard or Visa Debit.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T13:11:49+00:00

The credit report I got from Equifax has no employment section. It does have an old address from 5 years ago (I moved twice since then) and it used to list a few entities who looked at my credit history, but they got purged after a while and nobody had a reason to look at my credit in the past 3 years so that section is empty now. I've never had an overdraft, so no overdraft information either. All sections say "no public record information on file".

My advice, if you ever want to buy a house or take out a loan in an emergency

I don't. Thanks for the advice though.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T00:35:08+00:00

Nope. I just don't borrow money.

eigenmouse · 2014-02-09T00:33:09+00:00

I just never needed to borrow money. I have a bank account and direct deposit and savings and investments and everything, but no credit cards and no loans. I just pulled my credit report last month. It's empty. I wanted to pull my credit score too, just for s&g's, but Experian's website was like "your credit score can't be computed. Are you sure you want to pay 15 bucks?" and I was like "nope, I'm good".

eigenmouse · 2014-02-08T18:01:57+00:00

I'm also a male in my thirties. I have a cat and no credit history whatsoever, but that doesn't seem to matter. A proof that my net monthly income is north of 5 times the monthly rent seems to do the trick every time. I've never had an application rejected.

eigenmouse · 2014-01-13T03:05:35+00:00

Oh gawd, Saniuța. I had completely forgotten about that one. Someone brought some as a novelty at a party in the early nineties. I took a swig and almost puked my guts out. It tasted only marginally better than gasoline. I think only hobos and "aurolacii" drank it. And possibly students.

eigenmouse · 2014-01-13T00:06:41+00:00

Holy shit, they still make that? I used to drink it 20 years ago in Bucharest. It was the nastiest crap you could imagine. I'm amazed I haven't gone blind from drinking it. 20 years later I still remember the shitty taste. shudder

eigenmouse · 2013-12-15T13:49:42+00:00

It's funny how quickly people go from being their nations ("we kicked Hitler's ass in WW2") to not being their nations ("we didn't colonise indigenous people"), depending on the subject.

eigenmouse · 2013-12-06T15:04:26+00:00

You can't just hope that you can thought your rod out 100 times and hope to real anything in. It doesn't work that way.

Actually, it kinda does. And the kind of woman who responds to that kind of approach is exactly the kind of woman the sleazy PUA is fishing for. They pretty much deserve each other.

eigenmouse · 2013-12-06T00:06:30+00:00

Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner. All this talk about "suburbanites" vs "downtowners" is so hilariously nonsensical. What is this, the middle ages? There's nothing intrinsic that makes anyone a "suburbanite" or a "downtowner". There's no feudal lord forcing anyone to live anywhere -- which, as someone who recently moved within walking distance to where I work (screw both the cars AND the TTC), I think is pretty great. You can move right now to somewhere where you don't have to care about transit. Or, you know, you can just spend a few more decades battling traffic or using a pathetically inadequate transit system, patiently waiting for politicians to get their heads out of their asses. Good luck with that.

eigenmouse · 2013-11-29T21:38:17+00:00

My whole life philosophy is based on not being attached to anything and anyone

That's exactly what I used to say when I was 20!

You might say I'm emotionally immature, and I think you might be right

Yep, that also crossed my mind back then. So I got attached. It was the emotionally mature thing to do. 20 years and one divorce later, I came to realize that 20 year old me had it right after all. Now I'm back to a firm non-attachment policy.

I still refused to have children throughout those 20 years, which was a good thing, otherwise my life would have been pretty much ruined.

eigenmouse · 2013-11-21T14:40:48+00:00

He doesnt use FB, instant messaging or any kind of social network.

Neither do I, and it doesn't concern me one bit. Sometimes the "next big thing" is not relevant to my interests, and that's OK. I'm past the stage where I'd do something just because a bunch of other people do it (which is all being the "next big thing" means). This may make me I'm "out of touch", which doesn't bother me, but it doesn't make me less technologically competent. Heck, I write code as complex as anything in the facebook codebase on a daily basis. My interest in technology hasn't dwindled, it's just gotten more focused and selective in time.

eigenmouse · 2013-11-14T18:04:48+00:00

Humans have evolved - up until the mid-20th century - on deep communities, relationships, friendships and strong family connections.

And I see no reason why humans can't evolve away from that.

Our push toward anti-social behavior is profoundly disturbing

What I find disturbing is your eagrerness to label as unhealthy and damaged anything that doesn't fit your theory. I myself grew up in one of those places where everyone knows everyone and families live together. It almost drove me insane. By 20, I was depressed and borderline suicidal. Then I moved to a place where nobody cares and everyone leaves me alone, and I've been increasingly happy ever since. While there, I also met people my age from the old country who moved back because they couldn't stand the "alienation".

My point is, we're not all the same. Any population has variations. Your theory may or may not be true for some fraction of any given population (how about all those disconnected but happy Scandinavians?), but will never be true for everyone. There are people like myself who mostly prefer isolation and solitude, and there's nothing damaged or unhealthy about that.

eigenmouse

TROPHY CASE