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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • or that mainstream (S&P, Nasdaq) financial investments were no longer sound, what can one do to prepare for “the worst”?

    Investors that factor in world markets would probably do okay as long as you’re talking just U.S. economic troubles. e.g. right now VT (total world stock ETF) is weighted 64.70% U.S. market due to market strength. So in theory if the U.S. tanked and other countries have better markets for investing then the weights would shift to the other side and maybe being closer to 30% U.S. vs rest of the world’s markets weighted towards 70%.




  • I suspect it’s partly a safety / comfort thing, female drivers don’t necessarily want to be hit on or harassed by every other male passenger they pick up.

    They do exist, I just assume they’re armed in case they pick up some dude that starts acting up… The one woman I personally knew that was an uber driver always had a weapon her on side of the car just in case.




  • No, not since high school / moving out of the house. I did live in the house for a few years after high school while commuting to a local college and working part-time (full-time during the summer), that certainly helped me get on my own feet even if it wasn’t specifically financial.

    My parents weren’t particularly wealthy. At one point they had even declared bankruptcy so I didn’t try too hard to get any school loans through them let alone anything else regarding money.


  • the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.

    Yeah don’t bother doing that. All that will accomplish is them gathering even more information on you, they rarely/never actually unlock your account & let you use it again. You’ve been permanently blacklisted on their service, just move on. And honestly you don’t need Paypal anyway.

    Similar stupid thing happened to me too I think about 10-15 years ago, I was using virtual credit card numbers that my credit card company was generating for me & Paypal thought that was suspicious enough to close my account & permanently blacklist me LOL.

    Fun fact: I did learn over the years that I can temporarily create new Paypal account(s) as long as I don’t use the same mailing/billing addresses or credit cards/bank accounts. But then it’s just a waiting game, they usually figure it out eventually and close the Paypal account yet again.


  • It’s the same here in New Jersey, or at least the city I’m in. Recently a fire inspector came by the condo building I was living in & failed ~ 60% of the units because they still had the old style replaceable battery smoke detectors. Apparently going forward we are/were supposed to be using sealed battery smoke detectors & replace them entirely every ~10 years when they stop working.

    EDIT: Not sure if that’s OP’s problem unless their alarm company is so cheap that they keep giving OP really old detectors to replace with.



  • In the northeast U.S. Zillow and their related sites (they own a few real estate sales/rentals sites) is where the majority of rental listings show up. Though keep in mind those are also markets with tons of real estate brokers doing the listings & whatnot. Plenty of owner/landlords also use those sites but I’m not too sure if it’s the same in other parts of the U.S.

    Those Zillow sites also have room / roommate search listings but a lot of people tend to join local Facebook groups for that or maybe use apps for that.


  • Seems mostly dead for apt rentals / roommate wanted type stuff. I used to use it years ago but nowadays it’s mostly scam posts and no one I know would use Craigslist for finding roommates / looking for rooms. The site itself has a reputation for having shady posters so people tend to avoid it.





  • It was fine. In NYC roommates and I have been in different apartments that were both 5 and 6 floor walkups. This was when we were in our 20’s - early 40’s. Thing is that after a few weeks you don’t really notice the stairs anymore. Bonus is your legs will be pretty strong!

    Sure we also had to lug groceries/laundry up the same flight of stairs, a bit annoying but nothing unusual. Didn’t have a car either so all that stuff would get carried x amount of blocks from the apartment or even a subway trip.

    In my late 40’s / going into 50’s I’m not so sure I’d still do those type of walkups anymore.

    PS - Yeah pay for movers when doing moves in/out of walkup buildings, you really don’t want to do that yourself. It’s fine when you only need to go up the stairs once/twice a day but repeatedly for a move is much harder.




  • Nice review!

    Way back I used to use TurboTax & eventually switched away from it when they started limiting how many tax returns you can complete with it (at the time I was also helping family do their taxes). It also doesn’t help that Intuit in general is a terrible company.

    At the moment have settled on H&R Block Deluxe + State, usually get it for $20 whenever there’s a sales promotion at Newegg/Amazon or wherever. Not fully on Linux yet so haven’t had to think about that aspect but I assumed you could still run it via Wine or a VM running Windows. (though at that point it’s also reasonable to switch to something web based)