After making 210k/yr and living expenses, OP does not seem to have anything left to invest. Budgeting advice should be a priority.

Some basic knowledge is helpful for things like cleaning, cooking and building bo ... err ... homemade fireworks.

I prefer bars of sintered cocoa powder.

If you allocate everything statically or on the stack, your code won't link if you run out of memory (if your linker correctly performs stack usage analysis, otherwise you can still run into a stack overflow).

If you drive a BMW, pedestrians will avoid you.

I'm thorougly convinced there is a way of interpreting these four words that doesn't lead to mass murder. Really.

x=x+x
x=x+x
x=x+x

Three additions. At the end, x will containt eight times its initial value.

8", 5.25" or 3.5"?

I'll gladly have a look at your advertisements as long as they do not interfere with the page I am trying to view. In your interest, I will block anything that is intrusive (popup ads, anything that hogs 80% of my CPU time due to poorly designed flash, etc), since encountering these things makes me less likely to buy your products and diminishes my view of your company.

Maybe if you have a really bad compiler and a simple, non-pipelined CPU.

I tried to out-optimize my compiler on a simple (ARM Cortex-M3) CPU, and it was really close, but the compiler still beat my hand-optimized code by a few percent, probably because the compilers programmers spent much more time reading the CPUs datasheet than I did.

I've mostly given up assembly. C, if done right, is just as fast and much more readable.

The product containing my first work project is still being sold. Naive as I was, and lacking tutoring/guidance from more experienced folks, I wrote most of it in assembly on a DSP with lots of ... interesting features - six-stage pipeline, delayed instructions, tons of internal states to keep track of (fractional mode, etc), zero-overhead looping, circular buffers in hardware, etc. I hope I'll never have to touch this code again.