_huayra_

> But if you live in the house, then just considering appreciation and expenses leaves out a huge benefit: you have a place to live without spending any other money.

What matters at the end of the day are the irrecoverable costs. When renting, it is just the rent. When owning, it is certainly not free: you're paying other irrecoverable costs (e.g. out of PITI+HOA, everything but P is irrecoverable; add on separate costs for when you must pay for repairs and it gets steeper). Sure, you have stability and can write off mortgage interest when you own (although the latter is an extremely unfair policy), but unless one is absolutely sure that one can stay in the home for close to ~7 years (the rough time it took for many HCOL cities in the US to recover their nominal prices from the GFC peak), it can be considered to be a risky time to make such a big financial commitment.

Ben Felix has some videos on this concept of "irrecoverable costs" which I find helpful to illustrate this, such as this one [0]. Although I disagree with his idea that leasing cars is a good idea (expressed in some of his podcasts), I find his ideas on renting vs. buying to be quite sound.

Personally speaking, I just doubled my compensation by moving from one HCOL city to another in the US because I was renting and not "locked in" to a mortgage. So many colleagues at my former place could not afford to come to the closing table with cash to close out their mortgage at a loss to move (the company I went to basically wanted to hire my whole team, but I was the only one who could manage because I wasn't committed to a mortgage). Eventually I do want to own a home myself, but it was eye-opening how poor of a choice it was for my former colleagues (although my choice to go to grad school during most of the QE decade probably more than compensates for this one win...).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Golcxjpi8

You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check.

I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.

When I lived in the UK for a bit, iirc people would use the term "builder" where I would say "contractor".

At least in American English vernacular, saying "he's a contractor" either means he builds houses, or he's an independent contractor (doing some "consulting-ish" work). The lack of context for that phrase is indeed confusing!

We can all have static IPs, but if you fragment the space too heavily (e.g. your home having an adjacent address as someone else on the other side of the country / world), no AS will want to carry your traffic. It's simply not feasibly to carry traffic to tiny prefixes that big giant routers can't handle in a few TCAM entries. This is kinda why we have IP in the first place (instead of no L3 at all).

This is also similar to the old way the phone system used to work. If you move across the country now, you can keep your cell number no problem (and maybe even landline too?), but in the Bell monopoly days, you most certainly could not move out of an area code and keep your number, as the number itself reflect some sort of hierarchical structure of the network. There may have even been further restrictions on the number prefix (XXX in XXX-YYYY), but I don't know that for sure.

I was annoyed by a lack of support for git worktrees in my current employer's dependency system (think virtualenv from python, but for everything). I fixed some scripts to be worktree dependent and tested it out thoroughly on the CLI, but as soon as I got the PR through with the change, I got a bazillion messages on Teams from people yelling at me that I broke their workflow.

Their workflow was basically "blindly point and click in Visual Studio because I don't understand even the basics of git. I miss the old custom in-house VCS and am very grumpy".

"Display Total Price (tm)"

...much further down the page in small font...

Total Price (tm) is our proprietary number we just make up because we actually hate you, our customer, and want to bamboozle you into spending far more than expected.

> From that point I've avoid great common usernames that one day might be too great

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-takes-over...

Is there a particular subset of the industry you specialize in? Curious where the leetcode-lite/free areas might be (unfortunately I'm not in one of them).

I'm adding this to my dotfiles because it just seems so dang useful, but this really seems to be the intersection of elegance and hackery that's the epitome of shell scripting. A close second would be that "fork bomb" that's just a bunch of :{}|{} or something weird like that, but `defer` here is actually useful!

They even added a "reverse incentive": you can park in any of the Amazon garages for free after 4pm or any time on weekends (as long as you leave by 2am, and even then the charges are pretty cheap if you blow past the deadline).

Everyone is hired in at a somewhat market rate, but it's the older employees who have become complacent and don't want to leave that are being underpaid. I know Blind is basically programmer 4chan, but if any TC postings on there are correct, I'm making more as a developer than some people who claimed to have worked their way up from junior dev and and are now manager :/

I'm still new at the company, but it seems like promotions are basically (at best) the accumulated COLA adjustments one ought to have been given, but they make it seem like some performance-based thing.

Indeed, I have a RSU vesting schedule 4 years from hire. It is financially unwise to stay beyond that on-hire grant vesting period, it seems.

In reality, there is no such thing as a "bank" in the sense that it's a big vault of money so you don't lose it in a house fire.

Every bank today is really a Highly-Levered Bond Fund. If we increase FDIC insurance to 100%, without commensurate changes in what banks are allowed to do with customer deposits, this seems like it would create a moral hazard where banks would be allowed to do all kinds of crazy shenanigans because they know they'll be bailed out.

To be clear, I'm for 100% FDIC insurance, but if we get this without getting much more stringent duration risk transformation standards (e.g. don't load up on long-dated treasuries in a low-rate environment), I think it could actually make the banking stability issue worse :(

I'm glad you pointed this out. The parent comment to yours is the equivalent of people seeing a big red map of the US during the presidential race and saying "how come the Democrats win when there's so much red?!", as if land can vote -_-

Jon Stewart recently did a fantastic interview with the defense secretary where he grilled her on this: https://www.c-span.org/video/?527213-1/comedianjon-stewart-d...

The problem is that of financial opportunity cost: the money keeping the "tank line" active by ordering excess tanks would likely be much better spent on other programs (or even merely not further ballooning the debt). Spending the same amount of dollars on funding the IRS, GAO, SEC, FDA, EPA, or even the USGS or NOAA would likely see much more direct benefits to US residents. Even direct assistance like food stamps or section 8 rent subsidies has a much higher multiplier than spending oodles of cash ensuring the US is ready to defend its hegemony.

When my neighbor's job gets taken away by ChatGPT, it's a recession. When mine does, it's a downright depression!

You got it, but also add: likely dealer bankruptcies because the overhead is absolutely bonkers (and is often required by brands to set up a dealership; every brand wants a bunch of air-conditioned space to show off their new models!).

This is also why you should never take your car to the dealer service center if possible. They try to rip you off so hard (and underpay their service techs) because they truly don't make that much money off each car (at least before the covid boom season, but as we see that is reverting HARD).

It just means they're not going to pay to float the cost of the car from the manufacturer. iirc the dealers "buy" the cars from the manufacturer, then resell them to the customers. In the interim, they must carry this floating debt while the unsold cars sit on the lot. This is often why you can cut great deals on cars they want to get out of their inventory: it's often better for them to take the principle hit instead of letting the car rack up more interest payments on the floorplan or take a sizable principle hit in a wholesale auction.

There is a "lowest price guarantee" on Google flights now, wherein they will reimburse you the difference if the flight goes lower in price than if you buy it at that time (through their platform / booking, at least).

To me, this is a signal that Google has used all of its price history data for flights to say "this is a bottom in price", and given they don't want to lose money hand over fist from mispredictions, they're probably right.

I usually set up a price watch on a specific flight I want, then every time it drops, I check if it got the "low price guarantee" stamp of approval and buy then. Even if I'm wrong, I'll get paid the difference either way!

I'm sure an actual OpenSUSE expert can correct me, but there is some "dependency SAT solver" that SUSE has that resolves software versions. Sometimes it can't figure out what to do, so it'll spit out some prompt during upgrade that can be a bit difficult to decipher (e.g. keep an obsolete dependency, uninstall the thing requiring it, etc). Sometimes I would choose the wrong thing and break something that was relying on some behavior, but not captured by zypper/yum (e.g. a cmake project relying on specific behavior of some native library). Ultimately, that was my fault for being lazy in the "untracked external dependency" department, and it's easy to roll back with snapper.

Does anyone work (or worked in the past) for a defense contracting company? I'm curious what the environment is like (e.g. is it a pressure cooker using ancient coding standards where everything requires a bunch of people with shiny metal on their work uniform to approve?).

I worked for a startup where DARPA had given a fairly generous grant when I started my career (they made a medical training device that the military was interested in). I was jr, so I wasn't privy to the financial details of things, but overall it was very "waterfall-y" and a lot of form filling and box checking. WLB was overall pretty fair, but the key thing is that processes really hamstrung everyone (think MISRA style of coding standards) and morale was rather low. Pay wasn't great either so I left.

I just wonder now that I am more senior and have more financial responsibilities, is defense a financially safe space in case more tech keeps RIFing, even if overall comp levels are low.

Did you consider other RHEL-compatible distros (e.g. Alma, Rocky, or even Oracle Linux which I've found to work quite well despite the negativity towards Oracle)?

I'm glad to hear the Debian update process is smooth, as I'm getting started building a homelab this weekend with Proxmox (Debian-based). Definitely don't want to completely reinstall my hypervisor on a regular basis!

I've been having great success running their rolling release (Tumbleweed). I've basically rolled the same install forward for almost a decade on some machines with no real issues.

For people who want the "batteries-included" Ubuntu-like experience, but without the semi-annual release schedule (which often requires a complete reinstall in my experience; upgrading usually has messed up something on my servers), OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good option to consider.

edit: I primarily recommend this for desktop installations. Server installations may have different requirements, but for a daily driver that will work pretty much everywhere, it is a very good option to consider.

I'm pretty sure HELOCs can be called any, iirc, but I'm not sure if fail to pay the call means they put a lien on your house or force you into foreclosure.

When people say "you should buy real estate as an investment because you can't live in your brokerage account" and then do crazy stuff with their equity that they wouldn't even dream of when investing (e.g. Boglehead investors who HELOC for some net negative remodel) it really blows my mind...

As someone who has TAed a wide variety of undergrad (mostly systems / OS) classes and mentored new-grad hires and interns, my observation is that universities are under tremendous pressure to prepare graduates with "go-to-market" skills, and deprioritize fundamental classes and concepts.

To put it this way: I'm just about a decade out from when I finished my BS degree, and my CS courses were (in order):

1. A SICP-based intro course using Scheme. I loved this course!

2. A data structures course using Java

3. A machine structures / light hardware design (just to understand pipelines, caching, etc) in C and assembly

4. Now pick whatever CS area you want to study

I mentored a new grad from my uni who is just graduated, so is 10 years younger than me roughly. This curriculum was changed to:

1. Same SICP-ish course, but using Python

2. Data structures was cut shorter to make room for ML

3. C++ course to build some kind of "distributed system" (but no discussion of the fundamentals of how the ABI works, for example)

I had to explain very basic things to this guy (e.g. what the stack was, basic gdb usage), who was otherwise very bright.

That's not to say "the kids these days are all dumb!", as I have TAed some classes where some of the students were far better hackers / coders than I was, but I just think the funnel towards skills and technology that have Proper Nouns that can be put on the resume is an unfortunate pressure being placed on universities these days.

It's been such great schadenfreude to watch all of the libertarian tech bros beseech the FDIC and other government agencies to save their sorry selves. It's all about that FrEeDoM until your money goes poof I suppose...

The FDIC kinda reminds me of one of the few bureaucracies in the US that:

a) serve the American people (and not some shadowy cabal of billionaires intent on squeezing the average Jane and Joe in every conceivable way via capturing the tools of the state)

b) is staffed by people who are extremely qualified and truly enjoy their job (compared to the DMV in most states...)

It reminds me of this America in Decay essay [0], which goes over the rise and fall of truly great political institutions in the US before they became captured by conflicting interests, nepotism, and outright double dealing (think: revolving door between SEC and finance; don't want to put the screws too closely to your next potential employer). The FDIC is one of the last from that era it seems.

[0] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-decay

Was the Deluxe support helpful? I've also got into situations where I'm not sure about a particular thing (e.g. inadequate withholding for RSUs), and I don't want to pay Intuit more $$$ to talk to a CPA with these questions!

BMW = "Bring My Wallet" because those multi-thousand $$$ shocks won't replace themselves for free after 4 years

In the US it seems like they're built to barely make it to the end of the leasing period and then implode. They're really going to town with the "snap-in" fittings for hoses in the engine because putting a metal hose clamp on seems to increase COGS I guess.