enominezerum

Takes me back to the first broken mess of an environment I worked in. Change freezes were a day of life and lasted and, magically, nothing would break during that time.

Now, those change freezes even extended to preventative maintenance, one of the dual PSUs in a core switch went bad and we couldn't get an exception to replace it... for 6 months. We got an exception when the second one went down and we had to move a few connections to its still alive mate.

But author wants to surround themselves with smart people per another of their postings, obviously this can't be done in low cost of living areas...

The overall vibe I got from reading that post and a few more by Nate is "I found success, you can to, give me money to find out how."

There are also quite a few posts arguing against typical financial wisdom. Things like "yea, I could have made some decent returns investing my money, but it permitted me to become who I am" and "you don't need a budget", which all just starts linking back to referral links and other things that make Nate money.

The page about not needing a budget and that it eats into your productive time is extremely BS. Dude knows this, but it is something that will prey on financially illiterate people who are looking an excuse 'oh, this rich dude Nate said I didn't need a budget'. It also sucks because he then talks about automating credit card payments, if you don't have a budget and don't track your spending that is a HUGE recipe for disaster.

Even some of this writings about wealth vs money, while thoughtful in how they convey the concepts, fail to account for other concerns. Pointing out that a job only pays you while you work, but something like real estate rental may generate wealth, ignores just how much more complication there is in the later.

Which is my final complaint. I am not seeing the nitty gritty truth of just how much work is being put in in any of his writings. He touches on things briefly, but he doesn't really convey that there is a huge startup burden that is incredibly risky everytime you start something like building wealth.

I have always told friends and family to be prepared because you don't know what will come. Often I tell them this when their life and personal growth stagnates.

If you stagnate and spin your wheels, don't graduate college, you may miss that job opportunity at a dream company.

If you don't grow your career, don't earn what you are worth, you may miss out on your dream vacation or dream house.

Life is finite and it is entirely too easy to sit there a dink, smoke a joint, and do nothing. Existence wants us dead and it isn't until we push forward to bend it to our will that we can consider ourselves living. Nothing comes to those who wait except ruin.

Yea, this is why my IT program had such poor students in the higher grade levels. I would spend 8 hours on Saturday on labs and other students would breeze through them in a couple hours.

I asked them if they really knew what they were doing and they claimed they did, until after summer break when they forgot everything but I had literal muscle memory from typing commands and performing sequences.

I'd complete my labs for credit and then either reset and try to break them or complete the lab again.

In IT we call the 3x speed folks "Paper Tigers" they may have accreditations and exam certs that say they know a lot, but throw them a curveball and they can barely pass muster.

At least with the tracking, thieves are now using Apple Air tags to track and plan carjackings. With a Tesla, so much focus being on the app and connectivity, it is more likely that a person would be aware of this tracking or at least the capability of it. FWIW my wife knew about the location finding, she just had never actually followed me driving around.

She found out when I used it coordinate a birthday surprise at our place, I could tell when she left her office and was about 30 minutes away.

I say look for trends. I assume the best of people, but I am also on the lookout for trends that show the worst of people.

If this is someone that you encounter a lot, there is nothing wrong with being wary and observing their trends.

The option to escalate can severely get compromised if you give your superior the opportunity to approach their superior first.

Not only have you given your boss a chance to compromise your position but you won't have the rapport with their boss that they do. You are just a complaint and until there is a trend of these complaints they most likely will be handwaved away.

Maybe you haven't been through the circlejerk enough but the politics of a place totally shoot down your argument.

Oh, you know throwaway0a5e, they are a troublemaker. I have been trying to deal with some of their performance issues off the book to keep their record clean but you know don't like that and are now calling me out for whatever. You trust me, right boss?

Not who you asked but I was working full-time and started full-time community college night classes. Monday from 6am to Friday 3pm I was 100% dedicated to work and study, I would get maybe 5 hours of sleep a night and crash when I got home Friday.

The friend group I hung with treated me like an outcast and out of about 6 only one is still friends with me some decade later. I also had to pick and choose family get togethers and some of the last years of my parents life.

I did it because I saw their health ailing and I wanted to be able to fully support myself and my brother by being more than a minimum wage retail worker, it just sucks that that coincided with them all ailing so rapidly and eventually passing by the time I was a senior in college.

I remember this one setup in an aquarium where you could move sand around and the Kinect would read how you have the sand formed and apply geological effects to it.

Pile it high, mountain, carve it out, water and eventually sea. It was pretty amazing as it was all projected into the sand in real time and looked just amazing.

Think it was running on some 1080 or 1080-Ti when that was king of graphics cards.

Yea, got hit up by a recruiter for a full-time position in the US. I always respond "what is expected salary". I get back "we are a small company and not comfortable discussing that due to our current financial status."

I didn't reply back. But, the recruiter told me much more than she think she did with that statement.

My first exposure to Sriracha was the 2014 lawsuit where a plant in California was causing issues.

Queue meeting my now asian wife whose family uses Sriracha in near about everything and it has basically replaced ketchup.

Matter of fact they use it so much it changed MY spice tolerance such that we now have Sriracha Ketchup instead of Heinz. We even went the extra bit and replaced American Mayo with Kewpie mayo.

American condiments can stand to learn from global condiments...

In an area where basic retail wages ~$10/hr with some experience, my no wife with no experience was netting $15-20+/hr after tips. This is despite her scumbag employer making her work an hour before and after service prepping and cleaning the dining area.

I was working 2x 20hr/week jobs and making less than her working a Fri/Sat/Sun..

Over here I have the opposite. I can't stand waking up and will sleep for half the day if I can. Always have been like this. Morning are the worst.

Though, I would attribute this to my mom being a major nightowl and me being one as well. 2nd and 3rd shifts have been the highlight of my life, but those roles are so hard to come by that I just accept a WFH job where I skirt the system and work later while still handling the morning meetings as needed.

Agreed. It is socially cool in areas to either wear or not wear a mask and society is too prone to judging someone for having it on/of.

Case in point is being in a Lowe's garden center, outdoors, 24 feet away from a guy. He still decides to yell at me to put my mask on even though he was the closest person to me and it was only him and me outside.

I don't mind wearing it either, it is a fashion accessory as my wife makes custom ones and we have a vinyl cutter to express our nerdy side. But, I won't be wearing one just for the sake of social posturing.

protip is to get an area code far away from where you live. If you get a call from that area code, chances are you can ignore it. If it is serious enough, they will leave a message.

Butm regarding spam, yea, it is pretty bad. My HOA piles on by sending letter about "canning spam" with links to spam removal sites and such that I just trash because I am not trying to fight that war.

Source is Anecdotal. I respond very well to caffeine, though I am a bit dependant on it. My wife, nothing. I can drink a Monster and feel good.

I am 6' 240lbs, she is 4'6" and 90lbs. I can almost microdose caffeine depending on what I am doing... Sometimes it is an energy drink, sometimes cold brew undiluted, sometimes drop coffee. Shoot, at Starbucks I tend to be a "green eye" type of man and laugh when they ask if I want space for creamer.

Unless I pound back a massive amount of caffeine within 2-3 hours of bed I have no issues sleeping; then again, I have never had issues sleeping and the few times I do forget and drink caffeinated before bed, it only delays me a few hours or results in me reading a novel into the night.

I quickly got addicted to Monster Energy drinks working at a Lowe's Hardware store across the street from a gas station; always been a caffeind. When the coffee ones came out I would do a 2 for and drink two during a break.

Anyway, at 21 I decided to use Jack3d, back when it was damn near Meth, it had DMAA in it. I didn't know this but being the 250lb 6' guy I was, slinging grills and landscaping stuff all day, I bucked up and took the "max dose" of it the first time.

Shit, I hit the gym, did extreme cardio on an elliptical for over an hour, lifted weights with some random ripped bros, and when my girlfriend came after work I stayed and ran further on the treadmill than her and her friend. Just the readouts from the elliptical and treadmill were almost 2200 calories.

Even afterwards when we went home I couldn't wait for us to shower before laying into her I still was so wired. A year later she was talking about that night...

Yea, I bet like hell someone that hasn't ever messed with stimulants can be turned sideways by them.

I got to this point with games a few years ago. My coworkers (all big gamers) were amazed that I would wait for games to be on steep sale or just play older titles. My first job out of high school was working in a game store where I fell into the rat race of having every shiny new thing I could afford and getting hyped up on the hyper competitive nature of everything.

Really, it was Destiny 1 and Halo MCC that broke me hard of this habit. Between the games being broken or lacking, and me not enjoying the PvP aspect of Destiny 1, I just stepped away from it all.

Now I am content to game for the sake of burning time. I don't like PUBG, but I have it to play with friends while we drink beers and shoot the bot infested unranked, the final moments are tense and fun and if we fail at least we had the fun of getting there.

I got XBOX game pass and just pop in games to try them out now, no worries or hassle of returning since it is Netflix style gaming.

Even on my phone I have loaded up old games where I turn on cheats for mad fun. I am currently playing Pokemon Sun and whenever the baddies start a match with "I am stealing your Pokemon" they face my 100% started with 100% critical chance and I just lob a Master Ball and steal their Pokemon. I enjoy walking through walls and just being ridiculous in it while still enjoying the story and atmosphere of the game. (all the fun, none of slowness inherent in those games).

But I do agree. I don't know how many times I would work my 9-5, try and game some, get upset at the losses, and just wallow out the rest of the night, skipping other stuff I wanted/needed to do. The highs certainly weren't worth the lows.

Part of why when folks say video games aren't addicting, I ask why CoD put in the prestige system. It keeps hitting you with that dopamine of 'yea, just unlocked something' which constantly throws you back into combat where something else gets unlocked.

1:1 meetings are just as important in my opinion as an open door policy. Yea, you are my boss's boss and have a lot more reports, you probably get pulled in a lot more directions than I as an IC. I understand why, as teams and companies grow, things get more distanced. Even Linus over at LTT laments that his new hires never get the same 1:1 time his earlier employees had.

But, the topics talked about need to have action take on them. Unless you just don't have any power at all, which I can believe. Quarter after quarter at my old company we would mention that the tasks and direction our org were taking weren't the best, would lead to problems, and that we weren't staffed nor compensated individually enough for the new work and responsibilities being loaded onto us. It fell on deaf ears and when I left we had already had almost a full team leave. Shoot, the whole reason I got that job is because they needed folks so bad they took someone not entirely skilled in that area to pick up the slack. The cycle just kept repeating and here it is, MONTHs later, and I hear the same thing.

Suppose grindhouses are good for cutting your teeth at least.

My old manager had "optional" 1:1 meetings that were decent enough provided folks above him didn't schedule over them.

We would talk about projects I am working on, their general status and if I have blockers, if the team is working good from my POV, administrative stuff like PTO, performance reviews. He also had varying interests so there was some personality there such as what game you playing, what shows you watching. We even shared a bit of "how things at the homefront".

We were both in our late 20s/early 30s and he was relatively new. He didn't want "that manager" because lord know that company had a lot of managers that existed to attend meetings and divy work up with nothing of benefit to the team.

But, I can echo what you are saying. I have had manager that hold meetings just to dodge work and claim they did some managering that day. Yea, daily 2 hour "team lunches and planning sessions" doesn't do anything for the fact we need to get work done boss.

Just keying in on the school portion draining you of energy, I think of just my high school English classed alone. Read a Novel a month and have weekly tests. Between that write a 5 page paper about the literary elements of each chapter. Fall behind a bit and good luck catching up with all the other work thrown at you. Try to bring this up to a teacher and you get told "What another teacher assigns isn't my responsibility." Bring it up to administration and be told "We trust our teachers to do what is best".

Those who had internet turned to sparks notes, got good grades, good grades meant scholarships and an easier time in college. Those without went further in the hole as they were most likely working after school and trying to bring in extra money to help the family.

Between all of this, it is easy to find yourself mentally exhausted where all you want to do is endlessly scroll things. I can even find myself being drawn to social media when I have had a particularly stressful day at work. Come home exhausted, sit down, scroll, scroll, scroll. Think about the stuff you want/need to do, realize scrolling just requires thumb movement and no thought. Put the phone down after an hour or two and wonder where your evening went.

Ultimately teaching youth responsible habits, whether they be a phone, computer, or anything, is on the parents, but, outside forces really don't make things easier.