I agree with basically everything you said, other, obviously, than the part where you said my reasoning was laughable. I honestly would have thought you were responding to someone else, but you quoted my entire original post. What I said was entirely factual. If I would have saved $50/week for the last 30 years at 8% (the SP500 would have done better than that) I would now be sitting on a pile of cash that is larger than the median net worth of people 45-50 years old in the United States. That's just from that one theoretical investment. As someone that has been saving this sort of modest amounts for more than 30 years I can personally attest that, at least during my lifetime, this sort of small incremental investment makes a huge difference over time. So, while past performance may not indicate future returns, telling me that my advice is laughable is pretty disingenuous. I am literally just laying out a basic math equation. It is possible that future people will not find investments that deliver these sorts of returns, but just about any reasonable stock market investment in your lifetime (assuming you are 30 years old) would have delivered at least those sorts of returns.

I didn't say anything about buying a house, although I did imply that spending 10% of your rent (that apparently the original poster had trouble paying) on takeout was probably a poor choice.

Loyalty programs and credit card use are fully evil. I couldn't agree with you more on either of those points. I also agree that home ownership is far more expensive now than it was when I purchased my first home. My oldest child just bought a house, and my next oldest is piling up money for a down payment, and so I am aware of what things look like. That being the case I still tell them that they should be investing for the future while they are young. It doesn't take much if you start while you are young enough.

You mean "unanimous consent" requires unanimity? Quelle surprise.

You would be surprised how little money it takes to make a big pile if you have time on your side.

There are a million websites that will do these calculations for you. Here's one that will let you start with $0 and save $50 a week for 30 years at 8%. It's not even the one that I used for my original quote. If you really thought that my numbers were faked then you should spend some time playing with one of these websites to get an idea as to what is possible. The really crazy thing is if you take that same $325K and leave it invested at 8% for another 10 years (without adding any more money) it more than doubles.

I drive a 1996 Honda Civic that my father gave to me brand new in 1995. It doesn't have air conditioning, and I am tall enough that I have never really fit inside. In recent years it has become sort of cool to people that like Civics, but that's definitely a new thing. The car is a piece of crap at this point, and it was never more than the most basic form of transportation, but it is still my daily driver. Sometimes I think of the money that I have saved not having a car payment for the last 30 years and it boggles my mind.

Saving $50 a week for 30 years would put you over the median net worth of Americans aged 45-54 (according to this article by Fidelity.

If you can afford to . I am old enough that I am probably not going to get another 30 years of growth out of my saved capital. You've earned yours, there is no reason to feel bad for being able to afford delivered meals. If you happen to like the restaurant experience you might want to consider not using Doordash, as its business model is burning traditional restaurants to the ground. I expect, over time, we will see more and more food preparation businesses that don't really have a place to go and eat. They will just have a kitchen and a place for delivery people to pick up food. Personally, I sort of like getting a restaurant quality meal and being able to eat it in the comfort of my own home. I tend to pick up my meals, but I live close enough to the city center that I can comfortably walk there, I feel bad when I tip poorly, and I am cheap enough that I try and avoid tipping situations altogether.

I still drive though. No sense letting the food get cold.

Carry out means, that I get the food I want, in a time frame that is convenient, and I don't have to worry about noisy restaurants or inattentive wait staff. If you want to pay extra to have someone deliver the food, that's your prerogative. No one is forcing anyone to drive Doordash or run a restaurant. They want you to pay them for these services. Why not take advantage?

However for the cases where there are accidents where the robotaxi is considered at fault then someone has to take the penalty.

People laugh at this sort of thing, but $50 a week for 30 years is $78,000. If you got an 8% return on that money (and over the last 30 years you would have had to work pretty hard not to get that) you would end up with $325,593, with $247,593 of investment returns. Not to mention the fact that if you are having trouble making rent you probably should steer away from spending 10% of your rent bill having food delivered to your house.

It's actually worse than that... your calculation is off by three orders of magnitude. 1.4B users, not 1.4M.

At a trillion dollars a year they'd need to increase the cost by a factor of more than 4 and increase the paid user count to 1/8th of the entire planetary population just to cover capital spending. If you charged corporate America $30k a year for each employee made redundant by AI you would need to replace ~20% of the entire productive US workforce to cover just those costs.

Oddly enough, buying ponies for those million little girls would cost less around 1% of the proposed annual spend here. You could also buy a backhoe for a million little boys for another couple of percent or so.

"Corporate America" typically has non-management advancement tracks. When I worked for Siemens, engineers were well compensated, senior engineers were more well compensated, and principal engineers made more than the managers they grudgingly agreed to work for.

I first read it as remove lawyers.

Try Bluey. Seriously. It's a parenting show disguised as a children's show.