happyjack

I'll stick to the favorite job that's "in my career" to keep with the theme I sense OP is wanting.

I did a lot of manual / hard labor in middle, high school, and college, and studied engineering.

My favorite job was about 6 years out of college where I got to combine all those. I was doing contract applied research for the private sector. Along with engineering systems and designing experiments, I was also machining, turning wrenches, taking samples, etc.

I find myself most happy when I'm running around / working with my hands at least 3 days a week and doing office / design work the other 2 (on average).

Mathematica - great options, easy to change fonts, save as .Tex pdf jpeg whatever - cons expensive and propriety

Matlab - large data sets, great built in functions - cons expensive and proprietary

Python - matplotlib, seaborn

Octave - free matlab

Bonus: Tikz. I've made some really neat stuff in Tikz when I used to work in research.

This comment really resonates with me. As someone who doesn't drink anymore, I've found how much of a hermit I am and how much I'm okay with that and how it's my true self. I really have few friends, and the ones I do I actually do activities with. My wife is the same way.

There's two sides to the immigration issue. On one hand, you can bring some very great people who are in terrible situations and will work their damndest to contribute and create a life for their family.

On the other hand, Western countries are very indebted and the only way out is growth. Immigrants tend to have more kids, and work harder, longer hours for less money.

There's a reason white millennials in north america aren't having kids and growing the economy: it just simply doesn't make sense. It's not obtainable.

I think this is just the beginning of a whole wave of open source behind paywall type of deal. Ubuntu put the Amazon store app in their distro, for Christ's sake.

The only downside I see to this (I don't care to get involved in the ethics or centos or "freeloading" debates/conversation) is gatekeeping / whistleblowing may get much harder. Granted, I don't care to or have ever looked at RHEL source code, but there is a lot of independent observers out there looking at code that runs servers and desktop software for very important things. Projects in my area that come to mind are scientific Linux and those spins that were directly supported by fermi and the like, and were based on RHEL. That code got put on all kinds of servers and desktops in very important applications.

This is a really interesting comment thread. I see everything from "leave Seattle move to Indianapolis" to Europe's economy, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, etc. a lot of fair and interesting comments from all walks of life.

I recently read Vaclav Smil's book, "The rise and fall of manufacturing in America." With the fall of manufacturing in America, I think America gave up on the one social agreement that makes capitalism work. If you keep your nose clean, stay out of trouble, and give 40 hours solid work a week to an employer, you can and should have the means to support a family and have a modest life. In my opinion, that's the only thing that keeps capitalism afloat if the top 2% keep to that agreement.

We're entering a new era of Victorian living. I think it's hard to argue against that. Politics are swaying each and every way to divide and conquer the majority.

Good to see a pilot here! I personally never see this aircraft ever getting certified. The SR22 was over $100 million total when getting their type certificate, and nothing was "ground breaking." It has a continental motor, Garmin avionics, NACA defined wing, etc. Sure, it's a composite and has a parachute, but I wouldn't call the design anything "revolutionary."

It's going to take hundreds of millions and an act of god to get this through the FAA. I don't see it taking the twin otter's place anytime soon.

edit: WIG out of FAA jurisdiction. Hope the Coast Guard is better to deal with!

I can tell by all the comments that not many people here are pilots or work with the FAA on type certification lol

1. I'd typically ask your lawyer or financial person (if you have either) for someone they would recommend.

2. If the owners actually believe in their business and think it's not a trend / fluke, they should be willing to play ball with the idea of a seller's note. Big red flag if they won't.

3. 5 is a good number

4. Sure, there are differences for different industries, especially if there is capital or large expenditures, etc. But you have to be able to pay the business back while still looking at growth, expenses, etc. etc. Beware of the "growth" trap and the "endless possibilities." If this business scaled that well or is worth 4x or whatever multiple, and it runs itself why are the owners selling?

I've had a mailbox.org account for the last 6 years, and have had a couple custom domains linked to it.

I honestly can't say I've ever received any SPAM. Not sure what they're doing on their end, but it's been seem less.

I get chills when I see someone's gmail opened on a browser and they have 4,000 unread messages in their ads folder.

My advice. I don't work in your industry but I find the following to be universally true:

1) hire a broker 2) do your damn-dist to have them sell you a good chunk of the business on a promissory note. it will force them to have skin in the game and force them to care about your success moving forward 3) ignore cash flow trends that aren't established for at least 3 years 4) don't ever pay more than 1.5-2 times the cash flow. ever

edited to add point #4

I think the honest reality is that the game is rigged and dependent on a perpetual 7% growth type cycle. We have indebted future generations so much that it's going to crumble or the next 200 years of western civilization will be held to debt service. Millennials in western countries aren't having kids, and are stuck paying student loans (and other debt) while a 2 bedroom home in some suburbs that doesn't have a rotten foundation is $400k.

How does the western world grow 7% (or whatever rate needed after taxes, inflation, and profit) perpetually with stagnating birth rates, lowering carbon footprints, and shrinking real wages?

I'm not sure it can.

I'm in the same boat, but as a contract engineer in science.

I have some cash savings, hate my day to day job, and dream of having a small machine shop producing aircraft parts (I'm a pilot and sell some aircraft parts on the side).

I think I'm too big of a pussy to turn down $150 an hour and find happiness (my current industry sucks and is is a cocktease).

I'm an engineer who does a lot of "applied research" projects. I've used (still do some) octave quite a bit.

There's nothing like octave (or MATLAB) for scripting to "get shit done." There is a plethora of packages and tools to do whatever you need.

Need to import excel data and graph it? Octave is great. Need to connect to an sql database, pull data and export it? Octave. Linear algebra. Nuff said.

It's a great tool for engineers / scientists who don't want to "program" (although you can!) and want readable syntax to just git r dun. Also, there's a shit ton of m code floating out there on the internet and in engineering schools / university research groups. Octave isn't 100% m compatible but if you don't have a special tool boxes & functions you can get them to run in octave with a little debugging.

I love octave. It's gotten me out of a lot of binds.

Oh man, I don't really know what to say or how to begin. So many angles with this.

I'm about 75% through my job switch after working in a different career / industry for about 10 years (still do some projects 25% of the time in old industry).

I'm going to come from another angle on this one. What is your motivation? Are you bored? What are the soft issues? Do you have kids, a mortgage, what state of life are you in? Do you plan to be employed or self employed? Are you confusing working on cars / planes / ships as in engineer in an office on CAD with being physically on them and turning wrenches?

Ain't this the truth!

You're spot on. At the end of the day there really isn't any bargaining with them. They either forcibly sell to deal with bills or they literally die with it.

"But you can make money look at all the money I made in the past" while you look at their last 3 sales years and it was abysmal because they started to slow down / retire themselves.

Lot of great comments here. Couple things I've seen in America talking to Boomers who are (trying) to sell their business.

1) the owner is absolutely integral for day to day ops. These businesses in all practicality are people who are self employed at a high level (if owner isn't there, the place doesn't run).

2) the asking price for some of these businesses can be absurd, mostly due to the Boomer needing it to fund retirement, or a large injection of capital late in their life. They have a mentality that this is America, and it's our god given birth rite to grow indefinitely, etc. they've put their life and soul into it and sometimes don't see economic realities. Also, they cook the hell out of their books. A lot of this passes through the cracks because no accountant or tax person even understands the business or expenses.

I hope people realize I'm not just shutting on the EU with my post. It is legitimately hard to emigrate ANYWHERE, let alone another country that doesn't speak your language and has cultural differences.

Hell, I couldn't live, work, state a business in most of the USA and we all speak the same language and share a lot of the same culture, currency, federal government. Etc.

100% true. America subsidizes many states and sectors of the nation. But we are able to do this because there is a common representation.

So it's better to subsidize the union now, instead of deal with other countries refugees in the future?

I think the largest issues with the EU is that it is fundamentally flawed for one main reason: all these countries are tied to the hip to each other due to the currency and singe market, but cannot control the others economies or spending. It's like splitting bills with your unemployed brother in law.

For a common central bank and currency union, each country de facto has to give into a federalism of central debt issuance and budgetary powers. We have this in the United States: the federal government can run a deficit and print money, individual states cannot. We have a republic and California (most populous state) gets more representation than Wyoming (least populous).

For the EU to work long term, every country is going to have to give up more and more power / fiscal autonomy to Brussels each year for the currency to work. What happened when Greece was going to default on its debt? Germany stepped in, bailed them out, and started stealing their assets (airports, ports) because they weren't going to let the currency tank. Granted, Greece has some issues but whether they like it or not Greece defaulting on their debt affects the whole currency block. Greece issued its own debt.

The reality of the eurozone is that it has made rich countries exports cheaper (Germany, France) and made marginal countries poorer (Italy, Spain, Portugal).

If you grew up in Croatia speaking Croat and possibly English, do you really think the Greek labor market is open to you? Could you in all practicality relocate to Belgium and start a business?

Anti globalism sentiments are in every country these days. I personally don't see euro countries giving any more power to the European Commission, and I see the project ultimately failing.

My 2 cents. I don't have a dog in this race, and don't really think the EU is "good" or "bad."

I've used this setup before as well! LibreOffice Base is a great GUI and the form field is super customizable.

You stole my comment! I fly my Cessna 206 about 200 hours a year.

If there's bad weather ... I just wait it out or schedule my event the tail end of the trip. I won't fly commercial unless it's international now.

Track / archive it? I don't. There's too much shit out there. If it's something really interesting chances are I'm going to email it to someone, and the sent copy gets saved in my archive folder (I archive mail over 90 days) and can be searched later. I've also made notes on my phone of urls that dav syncs with my email notes folder.

This is my hot take ... it's 2022, and any "serious" or worthwhile site still has an RSS feed (HN, NPR, ESPN, Department of Energy, NOAA, etc.). That's how I scan / get the majority of my news / info. I have tabs on my reader for work, hobbies, weather, etc. Hell, even the small cow town I live in has an rss feed for city council stuff or the city softball league sign up.

I think that's really bad. I've never seen that high of overhead working private sector.

It's called indirect cost overhead. Universities take anywhere from 0-100% (yes, you read that 100% right) of money they take in.

I used to use an HD home run prime with rabbits ears and a plex server in my old apartment. They had a beta DVR that would scrub commercials (plex did).

In all honesty, I'm pretty burn out by how much content is out there. The most enjoyment I get from tv these days is watching classic drama 90s movies (Denzel Washington, Matt Damon, etc.)

My wife and I don't watch a ton of tv, but even with our couple of streaming services one can see how the bill starts to creep towards what traditional cable costs. I can't imagine watching commercials ever again.

I still think the og (Hbo) has the winning combination.

If can replace my 2001 Toyota Tacoma with 300k miles in 10 years with another Tacoma, I don't care what Toyota does with the rest of the line up.