Month: November 2023

Whoppity

Chill Uncategorized

Housing, healthcare, schooling, have all greatly greatly greatly outpaced inflation.

Yep. Economists can deny it all they want, but I also used to buy Whoppers in 1999 for $0.99. Did that routinely. They were indeed also larger and higher-quality then as compared to now (fuck your fucking crack-ass hedonic adjustments bullshit, it’s all lies). A Whopper that cost $0.99 in 1999 should cost $1.81 now.

Instead, it costs $4.19. Check for yo’ damn self.

The Rent Went

Chill Uncategorized

My husband and I have decided to bite the bullet, and move our family of 4 in with my parents in May when our renting lease is up.

But Noah Smith swears up and down all is good, rent is fine as it is — when anyone with a fucking clue knows that rent is absurdly high and unbearable for many families and is only getting worse.

When I first started looking at rental prices in the late 1990s, a person working an ok job could get a two-bedroom apartment in most cities (outside of NYC and SF) and be fine. Now that is true nowhere in the entire country. Don’t tell me apartments have just gotten so huuuuuuge (hedonic adjustments) and have so many extra features that they are so much better that they should cost 3x as much in real dollars than they did 25 years ago.

Because that’s a fuckin’ lie and we all know it.

Anyway, it’s not like you can travel back in time and rent those supposed “worse” apartment for the 1998 price. Why do economists think so damn poorly?

Cash Money Baby

Chill Regular-ass Post

AITA for telling my sister-in-law how much my brother owes me when she tried to tell my nephews that I was an example of why they should stay in school?

Lord that reminds me of the terrible girlfriend I mentioned earlier and her even worse mother (to whom she was joined at at the hip — I’ve since learned this is always a huge, huge red flag in a woman).

One time, the mom made some comment implying that I was not good enough for her daughter because I didn’t have a college education. Then she did it again, more blatantly. That’s when I informed the mother that I made four times as much as her daughter did, even if you didn’t include the absolute killing I made in the stock market, and that I had paid for her daughter’s car in cash with money I’d made in a single afternoon on a stock. And furthermore, I paid 80% of all the bills and always had.

Complete silence after that. It was a dinner at our place and the mother left in a huff shortly thereafter. My girlfriend also said her mother “meant well,” but she absolutely did not.

(The mom assumed because I did not flashily display wealth and didn’t even drive a particularly nice car at at that time and that I came from rural North Florida and then the army, that I was poor. She in general just hated me because I otherwise did not tolerate her BS.)

DFT

Chill Uncategorized

I will spare you the details, but years ago a friend and I considered starting a company that engaged in, shall we say, less than savory sales techniques and approaches.

These days what we were planning to do back then seems tame, anodyne and not all fraudulent since the economy itself has largely moved into full-on scam territory. Now absolutely horrible rackets and ripoffs are the accepted way to do things and people cannot even imagine anything else — so much so that what we had planned to do seems positively beneficent in comparison.

This is a shift that has occurred over 25 years or so. Hard to believe when you think about it and how quickly people accept the “inevitable” that was very different not all that far in the past.

Scripted Rippeded

Chill Regular-ass Post

So, which “permanently temporary” solutions have you guys built for your business-critical production system today?

There are “temporary” scripts I wrote for a company roughly 13 years ago that are still running in prod. They tried to get someone to replace those scripts but the person brought on to do so was unable to complete the task.

I offered to help for a high consulting rate, which the company declined. So my lonely little scripts are still running to this day I’m quite sure. They aren’t even that complex, but you have to understand how Windows security permissions work very deeply to produce something equivalent — and most people, even so-called “experts,” do not.