Comment Re:It's Not Really Oracle (Score 2) 163
Yeah, I met the statement bitch once, and she was very clear on what she meant.
Yeah, I met the statement bitch once, and she was very clear on what she meant.
Wow, what's your occupation? Even being a software developer, my budget and retirement asset numbers are almost exactly an order of magnitude lower than yours...
How long it takes you to retire is a function of only one variable under your control
You mean 2 variables: savings rate and asset allocation. If you want a 50% savings rate to get you retired in 7-8 years, [most of] that money needs to be in the stock market or a real estate portfolio, not under your mattress.
They could also write in that if I click 'like' on a cereal facebook page I would have to kill myself, but that doesn't make it legally binding.
It doesn't have to be legally binding, it just has to make a court case drag on a bit longer. In a battle of attrition the company is always on high ground to mere mortals.
Loss of a lot in the 401k in 2008
The only people who lost money in 2008 were the people who did something stupid with it (i.e. who pulled out of the market and locked in their losses). Everybody who stayed the course made all their money back a couple of years ago, and is now way ahead.
What does "social security" have to do with anything? I'm a "20-something" and plan on retiring 10-15 years from now on just the assets I save myself. If I eventually get social security, well that's just a bonus.
(The hard part is not the lack of social security; the hard part is the shitty job market. Since my wife and I graduated college 5 years ago, at least one of us has been unemployed at almost any given time. We've learned to live on less than a third of our fully-employed income -- which is coincidentally why we'd be able to retire so quickly if we remain fully employed!)
she gets $1600 before taxes.. After taxes, she is at $1100 a month
Bullshit. Even assuming the worst-case scenario (that all of her income is taxable, which if it's Social Security and a pension then it almost certainly isn't), an Adjusted Gross Income of $1600 * 12 = $19200 means her taxable income would be $19,200 - $6100 (standard deduction) - $3900 (one exemption) = $9200. The federal income tax on $9200 is $930, which means her real after-tax monthly income would be $1522. (And before you say "what about state income tax," remember the example is in Texas where there isn't any.)
As for the rest of it, $1522 - $600 - $400 = $522 for food, telephone and car which (given that she's not racking up a bunch of miles commuting) is plenty.
FYI, it's possible to live well surprisingly cheaply in the US. My average spending over the last year has been ~$1700/month, and that's for 2 people living in a 3-bedroom house in a nice, walkable neighborhood about 3 miles from the center of a major city.
How much do you expect to spend per year in retirement? Take that number and multiply by 20 (assuming you think a 4% safe withdrawal rate is OK; or multiply by 33 for a 3% rate, etc.). Note that the safe withdrawal rate also depends strongly on your asset allocation.
See also: http://www.firecalc.com/, http://earlyretirementextreme.com/, and (my favorite) http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/.
Mail order? If I remember correctly, he went up to Canada ostensibly on business, and used his city credit card at the dildo store; that particular trip was what broke the scandal wide open. D'oh! If he'd just paid cash...
As for the quality of Canadian dildos, I have no idea.
Sorry, but time is not an absolute clock that ticks the same everywhere. Time is a local phenomenon, and only a local phenomenon. We all live in separate time frames.
If you accelerate to 99% of the speed of light, the Lorenz factor is a little over 7, which means that for an outside observer counting one year on the clock, you will only have experienced 51 days.
As your speed creeps closer and closer to c, the time dilation increases. If you could reach 99.999% of c, the Lorenz factor would be 223. For an outside observer watching you travel 100 light years from A to B, 100 years would pass. But for you, less than 5.5 months would have passed.
If you could maintain a 1g acceleration indefinitely, you could travel to another galaxy and back within a human lifetime. It's not feasible, though, as you require more and more energy to accelerate the faster you go, and as you approach c, you approach needing an infinite amount of energy for an infinitesimally small boost in speed.
but the pure electric car isn't going to be ready until a) massive updates to the power grid b) swappable batteries c) battery tech that lets cars go 500-1000 miles on a charge.
Why the boolean logic?
In case you hadn't noticed, pure electric cars are stomping the ever loving crap out of the luxury/performance car market. So long as the cars are selling at a growing pace, they are here to stay and are ready for the people who continue to buy them.
And as long as this happens, manufacturers will make continuing improvements to the cars they make.
A) The power grid is constantly being worked on. As people buy more cars, the grid will be upgraded to match demand.
B) Swappable batteries might be one of those improvements. But they don't seem to be required, at least not yet.
C) 1000 miles on a charge? Show me any common car that gets anything like that range.
Lots of people expect the world to change all of a sudden. But it doesn't really. Instead, continuing incremental changes gradually make the world into a different place. Those incremental changes have rather drastically changed how people interact in just the 30 or so years that I can personally remember.
Then there's Greg Davis, former (R) Mayor of Southaven, who got caught racking up thousands of taxpayer dollars to take his secret boyfriend on trips and buy dildos in Canada. You can't make this shit up.
This is why we need to switch to LFTRs
No pressure vessel to worry about.
Hes not saying "dont do that", hes saying "dont be an obnoxious obstacle when this stuff comes up." Tell them theyre doing it wrong, if they insist, fulfill the request to the best of your ability, and make sure you have records of where you told them they were doing it wrong.
That would be fine if it were true, and if it were the end of it. But it's not. The enablers take over. If the bad ideas aren't stopped early by facts, their owners proceed down whatever path they've concocted, and the further they get without objection the more convinced they are that it's the correct path. An enabler will not tell them they're on the wrong path; or they'll say it once, but never correct them again for fear of losing their job (only a blocker says "you're still on the wrong path".) Without honest feedback about the mistakes being made, you can go a long way before realizing that you've led yourself astray.
One big problem is the belief that all problems can be stopped by governance processes. Therefore, all these processes are designed to be a form of change prevention. The idea is that by preventing incorrect changes, you avoid risk. But a process cannot distinguish between an incorrect change and a valuable change until after it has executed, so it must slow them all down equally. A process also handles the unknown poorly - it is designed to handle only certain changes, and everything else is awkward or not streamlined.
Change approval processes also encourage lies. When someone has to get a change through a process, they will tick whichever checkboxes will get them through the process with the least amount of effort, struggle, or paperwork; they will not voluntarily tick the box that ensures a microscopic review of their change, even when it may be appropriate.
Worse than all of the above, governance processes are hugely inefficient in that they're after the fact: create a large pile of changes, try to deploy it, then wait around days, or weeks to learn only then that the changes aren't approved. The feedback from governance is so late that the developer has long moved on to other tasks. Stakeholders get their changes in months instead of minutes.
Another sign the process is off the rails is if the disapproval is issued due to failure to follow the process, not with problems in the task being attempted. Too many failing processes leads further around the vicious cycle of process 'improvement', that then creates a process to follow the process, inserting delays into the delays. (Yo, dawg, I heard you like process, so I put process in your process...)
If you ever want to read a story about how bad process can get in the real world, read Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. He tells an interesting tale of just how far the Soviet Union's bureaucracy went, including goofiness such as one process that valued a machine by weight. The more modern machine that doubled production weighed less than the older machine it replaced, therefore the older machine was more valuable, and the budget rules that ensured progress did not permit replacing a more expensive machine with a cheaper machine.
Instead of after-the fact governance process, strive for continual, automated testing, starting with Test Driven Development. Have a repeatable method for delivering products that have quality built in from their very design. Once you've established the trust, you can minimize the processes. Something else valuable is a fail-forward philosophy: if you acknowledge that bugs will happen no matter what ("Failure is always an option"), you can often survive by putting in place the ability to recover from defects within minutes by being able to push out new patches. So instead of trying to avoid all risk by using a big process, you can get away with minimal process by accepting a little risk. This is a great approach because everything moves fast, especially the delivery of benefits.
By reading this comment, you waive all rights to the ownership of your car...
Variables don't; constants aren't.