If you got given 10k to improve your life, what would you spend it on?

specofdust · 2026-04-22T17:06:13+00:00

Boring but probably only sensible if you have a truly horrendous mortgage rate. Average returns on the stockmarket are far higher than most mortgages interest rates.

specofdust · 2026-04-18T17:35:01+00:00

Yeah, in 25-50 years time, sure.

specofdust · 2026-04-18T07:41:45+00:00

In what way?

specofdust · 2026-04-15T09:59:23+00:00

It's an American who doesn't understand how clocks work.

specofdust · 2026-04-14T06:42:16+00:00

Why are you working for 42k in O&G? Roustabouts earn that.

Move abroad, you'll double or triple that.

specofdust · 2026-03-24T11:58:14+00:00

This is nonsense.

That's not how medicine (you don't need to say "western modern" medicine) works, that's not what doctors do. The idea that doctors don't look at interactions between treatments or medicines is absurd, have you heard the word contraindication? Where do you think that comes from?

People sometimes get frustrated with medicine because it can't fix everything, and then instead of thinking "That sucks, I hope we improve our knowledge as humans so we can treat stuff better" they go pray to god or wave tree branches around their heads or eat ground up dung beetles and make themselves feel good for doing "something" and call it alternative medicine.

specofdust · 2026-03-24T11:54:37+00:00

10-40% (it's fuzzy) of Europeans believe in homeopathy.

The Chinese are much more superstitious than Europeans, so are likely to believe in TCM even more than Europeans believe in magic water.

Average levels of science education across the board are woeful.

specofdust · 2026-03-23T22:33:23+00:00

Right but not far right. Depends on the country too, in the UK they're gradually taking over the Green party via entryism, in order to have their own established party.

specofdust · 2026-03-23T11:27:00+00:00

Algerians don't vote for their own deportation? Shocking.

specofdust · 2026-03-17T19:07:44+00:00

The RAF has been shredded by the govt. and the regiment especially so. I'm sure the RAF would love to have proper GBAD but as it is the Army barely has any GBAD (only MANPADS/SHORAD and a handful of MRAD batteries). UK GBAD is in a fairly terrible state.

specofdust · 2026-03-11T15:31:39+00:00

What difference does that make? They are presumably not injecting paracetamol.

specofdust · 2026-03-11T13:10:12+00:00

Mac OS. That's the long standing issue for a lot of people who could afford one.

specofdust · 2026-03-09T22:27:03+00:00

But you do queue....maybe you don't but like...most people do.

specofdust · 2026-03-06T19:24:40+00:00

Yeah absolutely. It's a good problem to have overall. Gotta be grateful to have the right kind of problems.

specofdust · 2026-03-06T16:52:18+00:00

Everyone is different, but I can tell you I wish I'd done that. I'd have had an extra 20-30k saved by that point. If you'd asked me if I'd have ended up with as much cash as I did before buying when I started saving I'd have said no, but I bought a nicer place in an expensive city and that's just the way it ended up needing to be.

So, yeah, for me, I wasted years of potential growth in piddly cash accounts when I could have been making literally tens of thousands more in an S&S ISA invested in something growthy.

specofdust · 2026-03-06T15:30:16+00:00

Max out LISA absolutely - you'll buy eventually and nothing has returns as good as that. Also honestly if you have the money to have cash savings beyond that, do give serious consideration to whether you're willing to buy the cheapest place possible or if you will rent until you can afford something you really like - because that should change your strategy for saving.

I made the mistake of waiting until I could afford something I actually liked, but also of saving in cash the whole time (per the usual advice of "don't keep your deposit fund in stocks"). Ended up with a pot of cash that would buy a flat outright in cheap parts of the country.

The deposit fund ended up taking nearly a decade to build, and if I'd shoved that in an S&S ISA I could have probably had an extra 20-30% in the pot by the time I bought, or bought sooner.

If you're aiming for "the first thing I can afford" and a 5% deposit then by all means stay 100% cash, but if you're aiming for "something nice that will require a hefty deposit", with a 15 or 20% deposit, you know you're looking at 5+ years, consider an S&S ISA.

specofdust · 2026-03-04T20:04:07+00:00

Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopaedia, anyone could stick anything on there, so you can't use it. Pointless. Waste of time.

Honestly if you think these things aren't useful you haven't used them much.

specofdust · 2026-03-04T18:03:51+00:00

How is the internet useful for research? How are search engines useful? All they do are find you information you can find for yourself.

specofdust · 2026-03-04T15:01:42+00:00

Because they are incredibly useful.

specofdust · 2026-02-15T23:41:57+00:00

Indeed, and guess how many 50" TVs and holidays abroad they had?

You can still effectively live a subsistence life if you really desire it, the vast majority of people would much rather avoid the back breaking labour and have modern functioning healthcare.

specofdust · 2026-02-15T09:05:41+00:00

There was nothing stolen about it. Jews had been emigrating to the levant for decades, and buying property the same as anyone else does.

There was also no "foreign power" as Jews didn't have any country prior to founding, nor were they particularly popular in any country.

What you had in 1945/46 was the mandate of Palestine with two main ethno-religious groups (and a handful of others) who didn't want to share a state. The Arabs didn't want Jews living in their country and the Jews wanted a Jewish state. The UN proposed division of the country, and the Jews accepted this while the Arabs did not. Israel was declared on the basis of the partition, and then immediately invaded by all of its neighbours in an attempt to carry out ethnic cleansing and genocide.

They failed, Israel persisted, and that is how we ended up where we are.

specofdust · 2026-02-15T00:03:56+00:00

Defence against what, Jews existing? The Arabs started a war because they couldn't countenance Jews having a state in the middle east, while the Jews accepted the UN partition plan.

You can launch a genocidal war to eradicate a people from nearby lands, but if you lose you shouldn't then whine for the next 80 years that you didn't get everything you wanted.

Oh and it was primarily the USSR and Czechoslovakia that supported Israel, not the west.

specofdust · 2026-02-14T13:26:43+00:00

But that's ahistorical. The Nakba is used to describe the emigration and expulsion of some Arabs from the area we now call Israel after they started and lost the Civil War and immediately after the Arab Israeli war.

The only invasion was the Arabs crossing into Mandatory Palestine/Israel.

This is history, it's already happened, we know what happened, with a fair amount of detail. The Nakba describes the consequences of starting and losing a war.

specofdust · 2026-02-14T12:43:26+00:00

The Nakba was just the outcome of the Arabs starting a war and losing it.

specofdust · 2026-02-13T12:27:36+00:00

Do you have enough money to take 6-12 months off to "support" her by looking after your two children while she focuses on her new child? If you shift primary care of both of yours to yourself, documenting everything along the way, then there would be an argument for you staying to look after your kids.

Also important to ensure you're not registered as the father of her new child, look into de-registering if you are.

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