If you have 100k saved in liquid cash, you definitely need to be investing that in broad scale index funds. Keeping it liquid means inflation is going to be eating away at your money over time, which is really not good. The whole market is pretty out of balance due to AI, but it’s better to get in now rather than trying to wait and see. You have time to recover from market crashes, just don’t panic sell if the market crashes.

If financial stuff isn’t your thing, you can also save for retirement in prefabbed vehicles called Target-Date Funds. These are kinda annoying as they have a decent amount of fees, but you basically set a retirement goal date, and they will automatically rebalance more and more conservatively over time. However, you are at a bit of a disadvantage if you start at 43. I’d recommend saving aggressively if you can afford to.

Renting vs buying is always a thing, and it highly depends where you live. Having money for a down payment is good, but I’d consider what 100k invested right now would do for you until you are 80 vs what a house would do for you instead. 40 years of interest could be better than a significant debt load, even with several market crashes.

Fwiw, if you don’t have a spouse or kids, I don’t really see much value in a house. Rent a cheap one bed and laugh all the way to the bank when a water pipe breaks and you don’t have to cover 75k in water damage.

Depends on where you live. Significantly flat area? Totally unnecessary. We have some 21% grade hills, and when you are behind five cars at a red light, you can’t even push off to get started because it’s so steep when hauling groceries or kids.

The throttle is the only way you can get the first stroke in to engage the motor as you also use your legs. Ebikes/escooters make up a huge portion of our micromobility culture.

It’s also part of the reason why bike culture never really took off here until electric bikes/scooters/onewheels became affordable.

I got a Motorola Stylus 5g 2024 for $250. There’s probably newer now, but it’s a decent device with a headphone jack, large battery, SD card slot, and a stylus. It feels similarly decent to my Z fold 4, which was surprising. I thought it would be laggy.

My favorite are the ones here, which look like plastic, but are actually reinforced steel and concrete. Someone’s in for a surprise, just like the people who park in the rush hour bus lane (their brand new Mach E was destroyed)

I do! :)

Poor thing :(

Looks cool! I hope they release a slider, someday. I miss my 00s era slider.

Does Europe have fabs? Or are they purely reliant on Asia and the US fabs?

For me, it wasn’t that, but the ribbon cable inside. A 20 cent part broke, but Samsung won’t allow techs to fix that. Their “fix” is to replace the hinge, inner, and outer screens, a $600 part. Maddening, considering the cable can be fixed.

Reminds me of my childhood :)

I wish I had this for pollen when I’m out biking in spring.

I always vote, local, state, and federal. I would never vote for candidates who specifically are out to destroy things, or do austerity measures. I also don’t vote by party, but by values.

Because few people vote in my area, my votes have enormous impacts on society at large, which feels uniquely powerful.

I love the woods a lot, so I voted for a candidate that wanted to preserve them. My singular vote alone counted as 2% of the entire state, and the pro-Muir candidate won. And that was me alone, I also talked to friends and family about voting, which they did.

It’s cool, but $2,000 is way too expensive, especially if it has issues and can’t last 5-6 years at least. My Samsung Z fold broke a few years in, and the cost to repair exceeded buying a replacement phone.

RIP birdwatchers and photographers, haha.

I’d much rather have a cutting edge nuclear plant nearby rather than a data center. Especially since the nuclear plant probably wouldn’t have much in the way of emissions, unlike gas turbines at AI data centers.

Woohoo!! So excited to see new extensions :)

It really depends on where these get implemented. If you want to live in a city, you don’t really need a car as much. Washington apparently built the world’s first floating train and appears to be leading the US in transportation infrastructure with trains and bikes. If anyone can pull it off in the US, it’s probably them.

This will only change with proper police enforcement. But the much bigger problem are car accidents, which disproportionately affect pedestrians, causing just shy of 6,000 accidents in my city.

Of the 25 killed, 16 were pedestrians in high speed areas like stroads and highway onramps. (300 total crashes into pedestrians)

Bikes had 260 crashes, zero of which were fatal, but many of which involved cars.

Vision Zero is working, and bike and scooter accidents will increase as usage increases. But slowing cars and making roads narrow to limit speeding will keep more people, including drivers, safer.

I love how pretty their eyes are :)

You probably can, but that might actually be a trailing cactus. Some of them do that by default!