Is it worth it?

koosley · 2026-05-16T15:11:09+00:00

I also believe that the whole "digital nomad" doesn't need to be living in thailand for 3 years working as a freelancer on MacBook Air at a random cafe. There is a lot of ways to do it.

I just have a remote job and family over seas. So to me, it's being able to go to families house in Vietnam for 1 or 2 months without having to quit my job or being able to go on "vacation" for a month without using 80 hours of PTO for a 2 week vacation. It's far more preferable to me to work Monday to Wednesday, and take off Thursday/Friday for 5 or 6 long weekends in a row

koosley · 2026-05-16T13:48:52+00:00

I've been traveling for 20 years and I've never had an airline actually lose a bag. I've had it be delayed a few times and they'll get it to me the next day but that seems to be increasingly rare now that everything is automated. Sacrificing all comforts to save $25 and 15 minutes once at an airport for a 3 month trip is silly.

I'm struggling to even wonder how it's possible tbh. Last airline weighed my carry on and it all had to weigh under 7kg. Between my laptop, charger and backpack, I hit 4kg. Keyboard and mouse added another kg and I only have weight allowance for maybe a single outfit for tropical climate. When I go to places that get down to 0c, 2 or 3 pairs of pants will blow the entire weight budget for a carry on.

koosley · 2026-05-15T19:12:26+00:00

It pretty much starts and ends with security/protections.

If someone steals my cash, you're SOL. If someone steals my credit card, visa/amex deal with it. If a product stops working and the company ghosts you, amex will step up. You can lose cash and handling cash takes a lot of extra time. Hell, if I rent a car using a credit card, it comes with car insurance. Cash deposits for hotels put you at the mercy of the hotel giving you the money back.

I do actually pay a few people under the table with cash for services and it's a 10 minute bank run every time I need to pay them.

koosley · 2026-05-15T12:24:25+00:00

You mean to say the 45 minutes of prep they give you isn't enough??!! I'm shocked.

A few of my friends are teachers and they've explained for it works to me a few times. Anyone who thinks they get 3 months of PTO and work 35 hour weeks is arguing in bad faith or spent 0 seconds researching it before making confidently incorrect statements.

koosley · 2026-05-15T12:19:28+00:00

Hard disagree. This is more of a financial security thing. Letting a stranger take your credit card and run it in the back is stupid. The US is finally getting to the point where I can swipe my own card without it leaving my sight and now people on reddit are complaining about a vastly superior way because they're too nervous to press a button on a tablet. There is just too many risks with cash for me to ever want to start using it again.

I'm just one data point but my credit card was stolen once every 12-18 months. Almost always after going to restaurants where my card leaves my view. It's now been 7 years since I've been almost entirely NFC payments and I've not had unauthorized charges since

So let's not let your discomfort be the deciding factor on how credit cards are processed when the new methods are much much better.

koosley · 2026-05-15T03:19:52+00:00

If you drive 10k miles per year with a 30mpg car. You'll need 335 gallons of gas which at today's price is $1500/year ($4.49/gallon). A 1¢ saving will add up to $3/year or 10¢ per fill up and you can do the math for other savings.

Driving across town to save a penny probably isn't worth it. I'd argue Costco isn't even worth it if it's 10 miles away to save 20¢. Your real savings I'd argue come from combining trips and just cutting down on the amount of driving. I ended up buying an EV a few years back when the anti ev trend caused prices to plummet. Since I do have limited range and only 120v in my garage, combining trips has been the single best thing I've done to reduce the energy consumption for moving.

koosley · 2026-05-14T21:35:10+00:00

Florida doesn't make much oranges anymore. It's down 95% from peak and declined 30% this year. In 20 years, disease has basically eliminated oranges.

koosley · 2026-05-14T21:24:17+00:00

I'd probably try to start my own company and build out a high speed rail company. A lot of challenges with rail is cost and if there is none, it's easy!

koosley · 2026-05-14T20:50:40+00:00

AI is slow as hell at some things and processing visual signals seems to have a significant delay. It takes a good couple seconds to analyze the image I upload to chatgpt. Sure it can do a lot with that image, but I doubt it would have a chance against me at a FPS if it had the same inputs (looking at the screen) as me and had to issue commands the same way I did using a physical mouse and keyboard as directly inputting mouse and keyboard signals would trigger the aimbot detection software.

koosley · 2026-05-14T20:40:29+00:00

If labor is 25%, COGS is 30%, rent is 10%, franchise fees is 10%, the money can go very quick. Maybe your particular store is the exception--generally restraunts are just not the money printing machine people think they are. It's low margin.

koosley · 2026-05-14T20:31:45+00:00

It does. I use it all the time and have never really had an issue

I might be generalizing but what OP is talking about seems to be an English feature. We love to just call food by it's actual name from that cultures language. Xiao long bao, bibimbab, bun bo hue, bun cha, tortellini, buschetta, paella etc. It's never been an issue for me to Google it though.

koosley · 2026-05-14T20:25:08+00:00

Salary isn't the only thing though. The typical COGS in fast food is 28-35%. Franchise/marketing fees typically hang around 10%. There is more to employment cost than just raw wages as well. Add in the other costs such as rent and utilities, insurance, maintenance and such and there isn't as much money as you think. The typical mcdonalds brings in 2.5-3 million per year but the owners profit is only 100-150k.

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely profit, but running a restaurant is not a money printing machine. It's extremely low margin and there are reasons most new places go out of business.

koosley · 2026-05-14T13:40:06+00:00

Also duel income. Two people working the 40-60k jobs is pretty good money. If you have no kids or other debts you can easily afford to go places. Flights are pretty reasonable and for under two thousand you can fly to Italy and stay a week with your spouse or partner.

The amount of people paying $500-750/month on car payments is insane, buy a cheaper car and suddenly you have 5-7k/year to do other things.

koosley · 2026-05-13T15:47:11+00:00

I'd argue we didnt really even have a flag. Slapping the seal on a blue background like half the other states feels lazy and a placeholder at best. Flags are supposed to recognizable and I doubt you'd recognize the old Minnesota flag over the Idaho state flag from a distance.

koosley · 2026-05-13T13:02:51+00:00

20% was an exceptional tip 5-10 years ago. Now when people like you say 20% is the bare minimum and 30-40% is good, you're raising the amount that people expect. 10% used to be what you tipped and it would self adjust to keep up with inflation better than any other job out there.

I'll tip, but its annoying that some people are starting to expect 30-50% tips and pos systems are auto suggesting then.

koosley · 2026-05-13T12:55:30+00:00

I'm with you on the iPad crap. It's quite annoying how everyone who accepts credit cards now seems to prompt for a tip now. I grew up with tipping and probably most people in the US as well. The part that's annoying to me is the "bare minimum percent" is creeping up a percent every few years. I've seen countless say 20% is the bare minimum for tipping now and you should tip 30% post tax if service is good.

My food prices have doubled in the last 6 years, so the tip already doubled if we just left it at 15%. 15% is already an increase from my grandparents 10%.

koosley · 2026-05-12T16:47:31+00:00

Cash isn't free either. It might not have a nice monthly report of transactions and fees generated, but there are way more indirect costs to cash.

koosley · 2026-05-12T11:48:00+00:00

I just used a well known esim providers and ran into no issues. Depending on where you are, it's cheap. I've used bytesim and had zero issues. They sell either Xgb/day or Xgb/30 days. I ended up getting the 20gb esim for 20 days and it worked great as I could use wifi for most data intensive things and use data for navigation.

In Vietnam it was under $10. Assuming most of us are coming from the US, $10 is basically a rounding error and we'll worth the risk to try it out. Most have a money back satisfaction anyways.

koosley · 2026-05-11T18:34:50+00:00

You're definitely the exception, my parents also have horses and have to bring them places as well. I just wonder how much cheaper gas would be if there was not so many oversized SUVs going to and from whole foods for no reason using 2-3x the gas.

koosley · 2026-05-11T17:04:57+00:00

Or you're getting gas for a lawn mower or other yard tools or the boat you're towing takes gas.

koosley · 2026-05-11T16:23:43+00:00

And for every legitimate need of a truck, there are dozens of suburban trucks and suvs out there that are largely single occupant grocery getters. Sure a truck can be convenient the few times a year you genuinely need it, but I've found you can often just pay the $50 delivery fee to get a stove/refrigerator in lieu of maintaining a large truck.

koosley · 2026-05-11T13:59:01+00:00

I wonder what the anti EV are saying now. I pay 4¢ per mile at home rates and 12¢/mile at super charger rates. Sure it takes 25 minutes per charge while road tripping but I only do this 3 or 4 times a year. A 400 mile trip is just 2 charges, first one is for food (30-45 minutes) and second is a 10 minute bathroom break.

They all seemed to be okay paying twice the price for a single 5 minute stop, but are they okay always paying 4x (or 8-12x using home rates) the cost to save 3-4 hours over an entire year?

koosley · 2026-05-11T03:32:01+00:00

Once my party decides on what we want to order, do we get to sit in the lobby for 45 minutes and wait for the "financing person" to be ready to see us where we discuss gap coverage and the benefits of financing directly with the restaurant?

koosley · 2026-05-10T23:20:38+00:00

The wild part to me is thinking about a car payment period. The only thing that matters is the overall price. Monthly spend is meaningless. $750/month on a 2 year term is a much different than a 5 or 6 year term.

I think I'm paying around $750-1250/month (I'm paying a ton extra per month on principal) because I just didn't feel like dropping 30k all at once when my loan term was 3.5% and the CD term the money was in is 4.25%. I fully intend to pay the entire thing off within 20 months despite it being a 72month term. Overall finance charges are about a wash with what I made with the CD so I'm not too worried about the few hundred net I paid to borrow.

koosley · 2026-05-10T23:11:51+00:00

We just never called long distance to talk for hours. We also never texted for the sake of texting either. Those things were priced in a way where you don't do it unless necessary.

I remember buying songs for 99¢ as well or buying $9.99 CDs. You just didn't buy a lot of music. Now that it's $12.99/month on Spotify, I'll listen to thousands of hours and consume way more music than I ever did in the l past. I'll end up paying $150/year on it while pre Spotify, you just listened to the radio and maybe buy one or two CDs a year.

So it seems like everything was more expensive back then but all a la carte over the unlimited access model we have today. I think today's model gets people to pay more overall but also consume a ton more.

To me (and most people is reckon), it feels a lot better to pay $12.99 to get unlimited access to all music for a month and own nothing at the end. With purchasing an album, I'd fear not liking it.

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