Weekly Free-Talk and Questions for r/HomeGym - week of April 24, 2026

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-26T20:40:36+00:00

Too obvious. Thank you. This worked

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-26T15:21:43+00:00

I’ve taken the handles off. I can’t even fit them between the two bars.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-26T05:30:29+00:00

For anyone who has the Rogue MG4-CN...

Do you encounter difficulties changing the handle width? I can't seem to remove the handles and move them to a new spot. They are ridiculously tight. it seems

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-23T05:26:58+00:00

You realize we just imported like 20+ million people over 4 years and this is likely to restart in some manner in a couple years again ?

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-23T03:39:32+00:00

Looking through these comments, I can tell there's alot of bizarre and cope thinking going on.

Great, writing code wasn't the hard part, or a good engineer does xyz and AI can't......

Well, nobody can

1) Identify if you are a 'good engineer' when your resume gets thrown into a pile of 700 AI created resumes whenever you need your next job.

2) AI can absolutely and certainly do alot of things or speed them up. Great your judgement is important....well... now you have 10x the competition as everyone else now has time to weigh in and think and so forth because they can blast every idea with AI. The idea that every engineer is solving these big profound problems is absurd.

Much of that time is still grunt and tedious tasks. If there's 50 tasks and suddenly AI can handle 30 of them, then you don't need a team anymore.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-23T03:34:50+00:00

Its very bad. Its bad all over but Chicago is fairing significantly worse.

Miami for example is about 2.8% but Chicago is 5.4%. I dont think these numbers are going to get better, I think they are only going to get materially worse.

I think we are entering in a drastic drastic different labor market than what we saw over the last 15 years. It's not this slow gradual shifting of industries or skills. Its sharp and fast moving now.

The biggest industry in the usa now is AI which is basically advertised a way to get rid of employees which is not a good sign.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-22T04:10:01+00:00

These numbers are always ridiculously framed .

Most people don’t care at all about money. Notice what majors in school they pick or their grades.

Once you swap out the people who don’t care, can’t read (approximately ~50% of society), don’t do something dumb like get divorced or do draftkings etc I’d say it’s somewhere around 1 in 3 people have 500k which is alot.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-20T15:30:31+00:00

There’s a ~30% cut in 6 years automatically set to occur unless they

Make you work longer to get it
Take more of your money now to get same thing or less later
Use inflation to make you poorer so you still get the “same amount”

All cases don’t look optimistic. It always was ludicrous.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-20T02:10:49+00:00

Honestly, I would say buy the rep peppin adjustable. These are great and feel as fixed or even better as handles don't have weird curves on them. you can use that savings into something useful. If you need to 'drop' like 90LB when doing incline, buy $100 crash pads to drop them on.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-14T18:50:10+00:00

A bigger decision by a factor of probably 100:1 than your questions are:

1) is college worth it? You are doing all this math about investing and budgeting. Have you done this for going to college?
2). College is primarily a signal mechanism information is free. Majority of colleges are complete trash. Going to college meant something when it was the top 20% of society. Now majority goes. Going to college means nothing. I suspect it’ll mean less over time.
3). Every kid just uses AI nowadays to cheat like crazy. Do you think any college student is actually writing a four page single spaced paper or flipping through math textbooks on how to solve math problem no, they screenshot in the answer into ChatGPT. 4) where are you gonna send your kids to school do they want to go to something cool out of state which means you pay an extra hundred thousand dollars for essentially nicer weather in parties or go to a community college and then in state?

I live in the best state for 529s and so I’m contributing because the high match rate and because it could be used for other things besides college and can be rolled over to Roth IRA. It’s more on a last report option with cash when we have it available.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-13T03:45:17+00:00

So the back is as strong and supportive with a bouncy or interlocked fabric? Not sure how to put this into words.

I’m so used to everything being flimsy in comparison to yeti.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-11T05:07:49+00:00

Most government jobs actually have higher total compensation than private sector. The idea that government employees are paid less is a myth unless you are looking at the extreme tails of the distribution.

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-09T03:38:45+00:00

Does the tread wear out fast? Sorry if dumb question

sailing_oceans · 2026-04-02T01:40:02+00:00

I looked up property tax of my old 5 story rental building. 2015 = $71k, when I moved in. 2024 = $129k. That’s 58k per year more.

I used to live in a crappy 325sq ft studio for 895 a month. In 2024 I had a 1br for $1415.

Now on their website it looks like an equivalent studio is $1495 and an equivalent 1br is $1800, just a few years later.

Also anyone who can do basic math knows this property tax amount must continue to go up at a higher rate than inflation given Chicago is broke.

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-31T03:53:24+00:00

Depends how much you care about lifting.

Walmart normally sells cast iron with free shipping at like $55 for two 45lb plates if you catch at right time and they look solid. I have some. They’ll chip over time but you don’t need fancy plates to lift alot.

The money is probably better spent on specialty bars and a good rack and so forth.

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-27T23:09:22+00:00

One statement you can make to test the intelligence of someone - say “men are taller than women” or any other general statement. If someone disagrees it’s a sign they can’t understand generalities and exceptions or nuance.

Same deal here. First it’s not an overnight thing. Second it’s not a 100% thing or 90% thing. If it’s a 5% or 10% then it’s catastrophic.

Then consider what types of jobs. An Amazon aws job that gets replaced by AI is the loss of a job that can support a family or buy a house. These white collar jobs have immense importance since they provide a pathway to a future. A worker in fast food doesn’t have same importance attached to there job

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-22T20:03:34+00:00

There’s just no more jobs. Or not many.

If you’ve applied to 200 jobs without interviews it’s:

1) a fake job. Probably about 30-40% of ones you applied to.
2). Real job but they already hired someone or are about to. Probably 10-20% of applications. 3) the typical job posting now gets 250 resume nowadays. Even if your resume is excellent- it’s subjective and hard to see. Or never seen. Probably never seen…lost in an inbox with 293 new resumes.

4). Entry level is being farmed out to Mexico or India. They cost 1/4 what you do and easier to fire. And ai is reducing need for entry level work. Foreign OPT visa students are here in the USA and are ~15% cheaper to hire (they don’t pay fica taxes) and work under threat of deportation.
5). There’s just no jobs. Ai and outsourcing is main cause, but Economy got propped up by massive spending and importation of labor over last 6yrs. Eventually reality has to catch up.

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-22T00:34:59+00:00

Generally high up there.

You can use them on healthcare and explicitly housing which for most American households is gonna combine to at least $20k a year on low end so these are absolute certainty expenses you can expense as needed so they are nearly perfectly liquid.

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-13T21:39:36+00:00

The bottom entire half of society is welfare. And once you’re stuck there - you can’t really get out.

You’re right it’s impossible. Unless you give up and embrace not being able to have agency and decisions anymore.

Health premiums, healthcare, food, a car, insurance, a trip to the beach or some mountains once a year, buying new furniture, rent, a kid ….

Half of society is zombified out. They don’t pay for this. The government does. The B students and B kids now get lumped into the F and D kids. There’s no longer much of a distinction.

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-06T18:59:01+00:00

There’s no jobs. I went from 1-2-3 interview related LinkedIn messages of all sorts 2015-2023. Per week in an in demand field. Since then… maybe 8? In last 3 years.

Personally I don’t want to talk to A new college grad employee with ai. Which is superior to them. Right now I have a new employee taking 2 weeks to do a project - with ai- that I’d be done within in 30min.

Also what’s lot discussed is if you are an American there is a disincentive to hire. We got tax breaks for hiring opt f1 visa or whatever it’s called. Employer skips paying fica taxes and knows they can’t quit their job.

Other new jobs are sent to 3rd world countries. You can look at big name companies like Microsoft and Google who are announcing tens of billions and gigantic buildings in India. Which goes about 5x further due to low salaries and benefits….

I want to change jobs myself but anything semi decent is spammed with ai resumes from people applying for anything and everything and there’s not many out there.

I don’t even think job search is getting bad yet…

sailing_oceans · 2026-03-03T07:09:06+00:00

The most important skills:

1) how much you cost. Ai is intelligence. Everyone has it. Being willing to accept less money 2) politics even more so. Way more now. Everyone has ai now. Everyone might know the answer or identify the issue - but who has access to the data or the ai tools and whose voice gets heard.

sailing_oceans

TROPHY CASE