Annual pass sharing is widespread in the immigrant community my family is a part of. I’ve half jokingly advised them to pull the race card if they ever get caught. “How dare you imply we all look the same?”
I would guess that it’s very much a pass-sharing thing—I’ve noticed that the level of security around passes has increased a great deal over the past 30ish years. In 2000, a Disneyworld Pass had no expiration date and was simply labeled by gender. In 2023, the same pass was date limited and had a photograph of the passholder digitally associated with it.
I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.
Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.
The tragedy is that people who are most likely to successfully FIRE have spent so long being laser-focused on making money to FIRE, that they neglected their (hobbies, social circle, health - underline as needed), so they find themselves in such a predicament.
Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.
FIRE isn't about job market, you can't control that. Though in tech most people are still making quite large incomes which does help.
Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.
FIRE is definitely about income just as much as it is about being frugal and saving. Having a high income is what enables the RE part.
There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.
That would not work well in the US with annual out of pocket healthcare expenses that can be up to $21.2k per year per family, or $10.6k per year for a single person.
Plus the monthly insurance premiums. Financial independence without a large sum of money does not make any sense, and a large sum of money comes from either inheritance, or income.
Obviously you need money and obviously you get it from income. But it is easier to reduce your expenses than to increase your income, and reduced expenses also result in excess income even with no income changes.
Yes there is a floor to this strategy. If you are going to the food bank to feed yourself because you don't have enough income you're unlikely to be able to reduce expenses enough to make this happen. But if you're lower-middle-class or above it is possible.
You are talking about retirement, yet I was working with people who couldn't stand the 2-week long annual leave (which is mandatory for every under contract of employment where I live) because they had nothing to do. 30, 40 years old people. It's terrifying.
> not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do
They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.
> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do.
It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).
The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.
The people that make it work usually take RE to mean “recreationally employed”. They aren’t sitting on a beach. They have a challenging project they are personally obsessed with that also generates income, but the income is largely just a way to keep score for them.
It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.
Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.
Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.
> The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.
Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?
I want this as well. Hopefully my Cybertruck will get unsupervised driving someday, but until then, it's the closest thing to the dream of electric off-roading, self-driving vehicle with huge cargo capacity. I've already stopped driving myself around 98% of the time, according to my FSD stats.
They are basically the car Homer designed in that famous episode of The Simpsons. They are the ugliest and and most impractical car ever designed. The fact that the bed cover blocks the rear view window should be illegal. Dozens of people must have told Elon how stupid using stainless steel for the body is but he ignored them all. The cabin looks incredibly cheap for an $80,000 car. It is a very bad truck.
I do have to admit the steer by wire system with adaptive sensitivity is neat.
None of the subjective things you said has any bearing on my lived experience of the past two years I’ve owned it. It off roads well. Holds lots of stuff. Backed up my whole house when we had a power outage. Safest truck ever tested. Drives itself. Looks awesome.
It ~objectively doesn't off-road well or hold lots of stuff compared with other vehicles in its class. That said, unlike the meanie commenter I'm glad you like your vehicle and very jealous of the self-driving! :)
Ah. Now I see why you’re so against it. My condolences. I did get my share of similarly deranged people flipping me off, until I moved out of the Seattle area. Now things are better :)
So the owner of a company makes a Nazi salute in public twice and makes many racist comments and retweets on twitter and you just shrug and buy from the company anyway? You are confirming everything I assumed about cyber-truck buyers. You consider me deranged and not Musk? That is just absurd.
Hey man I don't want to argue anymore. I bought a cybertruck, not a Musk. Musk clearly has some issues and I wish he'd shut the hell up, but in my opinion there's so much to do and be happy about in life that it's a waste of time to get mad and negative about things like car purchases.
I have no skin in the game for either side of this, but I looked pretty hard at his comment history and couldn't find anything even remotely sounding like that. All he does is express gratitude for the projects they collaborated with. Alacritty folks themselves are saying as much here.
There's some undercurrent of something that seems to be driving a lot of the rage in the comments here. Anti-AI/OpenAI/"VC money"/"the rich"?
To me, “work 40+ years and retire when you’re already physically and mentally slow” is the real nonsense. A sabbatical thrown in here and there doesn’t make up for it. I’m grateful that I live somewhere with high enough paying jobs that I can simply quit after just 20 years.
Is this complaint just for the sake of complaining? You print out the pieces, they connect various toys together. The units could be light-years for all it matters.
There's something about the internet that makes people want to moan in public about nothing.
Whenever I see someone in a current British television show use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia that insists that the United States is the only place in the world that uses imperial units.
Every post/comment is selecting across 100,000+ people worldwide for the individuals most likely to complain about it.
There’s no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office. (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just this reason)
I had a job, was relatively happy. Then I had kids, less happy due to severe lack of time. Now, have no job and still have my kids. Happiest I’ve ever been.
Anyone who has owned both HW3 and HW4 would know this. There’s a big difference between my HW3 Y and HW4 truck. The truck can drive itself almost flawlessly from start to finish and feels natural. The Y drives like a robot and occasionally makes mistakes. I would pay reasonable money to upgrade it to HW4 so that my wife isn’t stuck on old FSD.
Yeah but the point is that Tesla said you wouldn't have to throw more money at them to upgrade your Model Y to get new FSD. Maybe you knew that was BS from the start, or maybe you are a big enough fan that you're willing to give them a lot of leeway, but the lying is still bad.
Hardware obviously gets better over time and it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing for Tesla to say that HW3 is decent but HW4 would likely be required for future FSD capability. But they didn't do that. Maybe because they didn't want people to stop buying HW3 cars or maybe because they hate admitting that anything they do isn't perfect. Or maybe they really believed their own hype that software can magically compensate for inadequate hardware. Either way, it's not ideal behavior for creating trust in a brand.
Yeah it’s not ideal. The cars were good enough to buy given their capabilities at purchase time, no need for them to tell lies (or charitably, overly wishful thinking) to sell more cars.
reply