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 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?

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.

Precisely. If you make mistakes like this expensive enough for the police station then the problem solves itself. The real problem is that someone promised the police and the school a magic new technology that would make their schoolyard safer. So far the system probably has zero wins, and one spectacular failure. If the political and economic fallout for the failure is high enough then the school turns off the crappy system, and it encourages other schools to do the same. Potential new buyers for the system disappear and the vendor of the system goes out of business.

And we all win.

Eventually the school might even end up with an effective system that does roughly the same thing, but it will likely be structured in a way that makes it less likely that Doritos wielding young adults get assaulted by the police. It's hard to argue against safer schools. In any system like this false positives are going to be a potential problem. If you make false positives expensive enough, however, then you likely get the outcome that you want.

My oldest was born in 1999 and the hospital sent us home with a list of foods that we shouldn't introduce to our children until they were three years old. I remember this because both peanut butter and honey were on the list, and one of my favorite foods is peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I have six kids, and I got in trouble quite a bit over the years because I gave my infants bits of my sandwiches.

What can I say, they liked them...

It's a bit funny to me that I was actually right about that particular call. Most of the times that my wife and I disagreed about something I was definitely the one that was wrong.

Most new parents don't know anything about raising children, and even the worst parents are pretty motivated to do a good job. New mothers, in particular, are desperate for solid advice on what to do with their new child. My wife isn't keen on reading the instructions for any purchase that she makes ever. No matter what it is that she buys I am the one that has to read the instructions and teach her how the thing works. That was true with our children as well. However, she made me read every pamphlet that the hospital sent home with us when our babies were born dozens of times over. If she thought I was interpreting them incorrectly she would wait a bit, cross examine me again, and force me to show references. If one of those pamphlets would have said that the best way to insure that the child grew up healthy and strong would be to murder the father and sprinkle his blood over the baby by the light of a full moon then I probably wouldn't have survived the first full moon after my daughter was born.

Someone in the medical community decided that the best way to protect children was to keep them away from certain allergens, and they put that opinion into the pamphlets that get given out to new parents. I am sure that the people that came up with that strategy meant well, but in they theory was proven incorrect.

...and thanks for all the fish.

Most of the restaurants I go to don't even serve alcohol. Of course, I live in Utah, which is at the very bottom of the alcohol consumption per capita chart. Here restaurants all have normal fountain drinks, water, and then a wide array of specialty drinks, many of which are just normal sodas with some stuff added in.

Being a restaurant owner is hard. The margins on most food is slim. The margins on drinks (alcoholic or not), on the other hand, are ridiculous. There's a reason why sit down restaurants start you with something to drink, and why fast food places bundle sodas. To a very real extent these businesses make their money upselling you from drinking plain water.

Precisely. This is going to be used against the owners of the hardware, not for them. I suspect that these containers are very secure. It's just too bad that my phone is the one device that I own where I do not have root access. This security is not going to be used to protect my data from Google, but to protect Google's data from me.

Hooray!

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

In America we have essentially legislated against small vehicles. Our CAFE standards were supposedly designed to push us towards more fuel efficient vehicles, but the reality is that the easiest way to pass CAFE standards is to simply make the vehicle larger. So the United States ends up with larger vehicles, and the smaller vehicles that we do get tend to be more expensive than we should be. We have essentially legislated away the category of a ultra basic small car. That happens to be a pretty popular segment in most of the world. The small cars we can buy are nearly as expensive as their larger brethren and so they make a lot less sense.

EVs are an even better example of how U.S. legislation skews things towards larger ICE vehicles. The most popular EVs in most of the world are the most basic EVs. I personally would love to buy a basic EV to replace my current commuter car. I have a house and a place to plug in an EV. My commute is short and even the most basic EVs would be fine. However, the only vehicles available in the market are essentially luxury vehicles. I can buy a whole lot of gasoline for $30K, which is the least expensive new EV available here, but if I could get my hands on a cheap Chinese EV for $12K I absolutely would do that. For the price of the least expensive EV you can basically buy a Toyota RAV4 that is a much more capable vehicle.

Yes, verifying the citations is trivially easy, which is how these people get caught. You will notice that the lawyers in question say that it was an honest citation mistake and not "fabrication of authority" which is a legal term for a crime that carries jail time and fines. The problem with that defense is that the article that they cited doesn't actually exist. They say it has an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors, but I suspect that is legal speak for, "AI made up the article."

Now, if an article exists that happens to say approximately the same thing, and it just has a different title and authors then it is possible that the lawyers in question might be able to pretend that they really did just goof up the title and authors. If not, then what they did actually fits the definition of fabrication of authority. At which point I think that they should throw the book the fools.

The reality is that our current legal system relies heavily on lawyers not pulling these kinds of stunts. The system is adversarial, for sure, but it is generally assumed that the opposing counsel isn't making things up whole cloth. That's why fabrication of authority carries such high penalties. No one has time to check every citation. The assumption is that the person writing the brief is citing correctly and not misrepresenting what is actually said. The fact that these particular lawyers took it a step further and included a citation that doesn't even exist is absolutely ridiculous.

Yes. And they probably need to use Google Messages and not whatever Samsung (or whatever) sets by default. The Apple user also has to have iOS 18 and a carrier that supports RCS for iPhones, this is definitely not all of them, although the big three now support RCS on iPhone.

I suspect that there were lots of cases, in a company the size of Microsoft, where someone didn't get along with their boss, or had problems with a team that they were on, but that still had friends and allies in other parts of the organization. So they might get let go from one part of the organization, but when another part of the organization had an opening they then got rehired.

Like most rules of this type I would bet that the new policy has an interesting story. I would bet that one particularly toxic employee got rehired enough times that management finally created a policy against it. The whole point of the new policy is that people fired in this manner can no longer work for Microsoft for two years, even if some other part of the organization wants them.