If you buy less crap and watch your expenses it is not hard to build up a decent balance in your savings plan. Most folks instead choose to buy lots of junk and services, then freak out when they need to replace the roof, or have a car repaired. They can mostly manage to pay the loan payments and credit card bills used to cover those "emergencies", but can never manage to put regular contributions to their savings account.
In our house we have put all bonuses into savings, and have put most of every raise into automatic transfers to savings. Our roof replacement going on now is all cash. Our new fence this coming summer is already saved for. I am hopeful to get it up to 6 months of expenses to cover any loss of work within a year. We live within our means, which means planning ahead for the predictable expenses of life. We take few vacations, have no cable, and super cheap cell phone plans.
My only advice is to euthanize before she gets miserable, while she is still happy. It is better for all if the last days are good ones rather than wait until both she and your family are miserable.
We waited too long with a Labrador when I was growing up, to the point he was out of it and had to be taken into the vet's office on a stretcher. It sucked, and I vowed that my own pets would never go through that. More recently out Lab/Malemute mutt got bone cancer and we did not wait. We got enough good pain meds so he had a good last few days in only moderate pain, and he was still in good spirits sticking his head out the window on the way to the vet. I only wish I could have done the same for previous family dogs, and frankly for some of my deceased human family members as well.
We can't find homes for a ton of cats and dogs already, so what happens to all these super long lived animals over their lives?
I know it is horrible, but part of me is looking forward to not having any more dogs in a few years. I love our dog, but it costs a lot for vet visits, boarding, and generally makes it hard to just go do stuff when we have to make sure he gets bathroom breaks, walks, food, etc. I am sure those with teenagers have a bit of the same perspective, you love your kid but can't wait to get them off to college.
I'd be happy if we could easily deal with old/bad joints, failing eyesight, cancer, etc. Unless we can first properly deal with all the issues that go hand in hand with old age, why would you want you or your pet to live longer? I'd be happier with the assurance of good health for 85 years than assurance of life for 1000.
The radio in your phone is also a lot more complex. 10 years ago you probably had a dual band phone at most. Now we have >20 bands in an iphone. We now have carrier aggregation where you can recieve on more than one frequency at a time too.
Why does this matter? Radios have switches, filters, and tuneable antennas to keep all those bands playing nicely, and that results in more loss. It used to be just ~2 dB of front end loss to get to the LNA, now it is commonly 5-7 dB depending on the band and the phone specifics.
If you buy an ACME brand lock and it turns out to be crap, no surprise. When you buy one from the most recognizable name in lock brands it means there are a bajillion of crappy locks out there in the field with a pretty bad vulnerability.
The 5 button door locks are also trivial, we call them 'riff-raff filters'. Anyone determined appropriate your lab equipment will not be stopped by them, or much else.
Anyone bent on doing bad cannot be stopped easily, but those folks are pretty darn rare. Most honest folks don't need much beyond a piece of tamper resistant tape to be kept honest, and a cheesy lock is even better.
But I really don't like watching ports on TV. Never have.
Live sports are occasionally nice, but usually overpriced. I especially hate when there is a mysterious stop, only to realize it is for a commercial break. WTF? Why not time shift the TV watchers and catch up the 1-2 minutes of lag during real timeouts or halftime?
Besides, watching sports live at home just means you cannot skip the annoying commercials. DVR the sucker and skip the commercials and inane commentary for the bloated nostalgia panel during every gap in play (often during play). US style sports presentation is supremely awful to suffer through.
It finally is feeling like there is a snowball starting to roll towards buying a few specific subscriptions to stuff you like instead of a smorgasbord of crap you have to sift through. I have not watched "live" TV in my house in probably 4 years.
ESPN, QVC, and their ilk will hopefully be left high and dry with not enough folks willing to pay for them to keep them alive. ESPN in particular is the poster child of what I hate about cable. I don't want it, but must still fork over ~$8 a month in dues so the masses can cheer on their adopted tribal warriors and feel better through the accomplishments or failures of folks they have likely never even met. My guess is that on the open market ESPN will find itself in a death spiral where the current costs of operation cannot actually be supported by the few folks willing to fork over for monthly access. More than the money, I hate that I was supporting what i view as a negative influence on the country.
So in the future I can see us with a lot fewer options, but with a lot of the absolute crap gone. I am heartened by Hulu finally offering an option to be (mostly) ad-free. Netflix was already ad-free.
But on the whole the prevalence of tablets for easy internet browsing has filled a lot of the idiot box utility. Why watch the news when I can read what I want and skip around the fluff on Apple or Google news? Why watch the financial shows when I can look at the plots myself and read only the advisors i trust, not the wackos and cranks that CNBC is rife with?
Most have poor text display, and a lot of lag. On the whole they are often poor monitors.
Big monitors on the other hand are awesome. I am a big fan of my 40" monitor, finally it is big enough that I don't end up using all the corners for stuff a lot of the time.
Seriously, why is sending a file or blob of data not a better, easier experience? You have to attach it to an email, often with pretty limited sizes and/or number of files. They then live on in my email history.
I want to be able to send files to someone (often myself) or to a specific computer (again often to myself across the room or building). There is a need for this, and things like Dropbox and cloud storage are trying to address it, but it should be a more core function to computers and be simple, and secure without third party opportunities for failure/obsolescence. You can use sharing of a drive/folder, but often I am only sharing to get the file across and for no other reason and would prefer if it was a direct action to see the file arrive with a notification and click accept&save, rather than a passive one where it shows up silently in email or a shared folder.
I want to see the list of voicemails and quickly tap to hear, or swipe to delete. Needing to use a keypad and press 1 to hear, and 7 to delete is obnoxious.
We are all temporary employees for the most part. I was told I was likely to have 6-7 jobs in my career, and less than halfway through I am on employer #7.
The gigs might be getting shorter, but we have lived in a hire/fire economy for a couple decades now. Hire when you need folks, and cut them loose when you don't. Nothing new here. There are a lot of headaches with contractors that having employees actually avoid, namely the need to actually plan and think out a chunk of work before throwing warm bodies at it.
PC's are hugely powerful, yet strangely cut off from the outside world. How about bringing pack some ADC/DAC plus GPIO to the PC so that kids can actually do something with a PC beyond typing, web surfing, and playing games?
I wish every app would also respond to shutdown requests ASAP. Don't ask me to save, just save it as a _shutdown copy and shut the hell down. A fully graceful power down system for both software and hardware would be great for both normal life and power outages.
I'd be happy with an RFID tag in my wallet and/or phone plus some facial recognition for all the low security stuff. Just unlock as I approach or as I enter. Add a password on top for the higher security stuff.
Passwords rules need at least to be consistent. At work one system is limited to a maximum of 8 characters, while the other is a minimum of 8.
Elsewhere special characters can't be handled, while the next system requires them.
It got stupid to the point where I now keep hints written down for a bunch of occasional used passwords and user names, which mostly defeats the point of strong passwords. but after a while I just stop giving a crap and just want to get on with life.
Totally agree. My PC is in our bedroom, and LED's drive me nuts! I have a routine every evening where I set my mouse against my keyboard, or it shoots a sliver of blue light right at eye level. Then I turn off the monitor or it glows orange. I keep an old fleece slippe on top of my computer that I slide over the power button that glows green. I slip an old Amsterdam map over my USB switch that glows green. Finally if I have my work laptop in the dock I toss whatever is handy over the eject button and status LED's the glow blue and white respectively. I keep an old wrist rest over the laptop power cord that glows white.
WTF man?
If note for the gooey residue I would have used black tape, but have found no good non-marring alternative.
Crimea is a small 10,000 square mile area (think 100x100 mile square). Unless you have a lot of local storage in every city (giant city sized UPS), this is not a good example of your point.
I am still annoyed that Skylake still only comes with 4 meager cores and some lousy graphics I will mever make use of, and anything beyond that is a hockey stick price increase. Taunting us with 72 is just cruel.
What happens when the private insurance kills one of my relatives through penny-pinching on diagnostic tests or it decides that expensive cancer drug keeping you alive is just too expensive?
They die.
No system is perfect. None.
Our system has worse outcomes for more money than comparable countries with single payer healthcare. ACA has snubbed the costs and put in measures to improve outcomes, but these are just stopping our system from getting much worse rather than closing the gap of outcomes and competiveness that other countries enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy less crap and watch your expenses it is not hard to build up a decent balance in your savings plan. Most folks instead choose to buy lots of junk and services, then freak out when they need to replace the roof, or have a car repaired. They can mostly manage to pay the loan payments and credit card bills used to cover those "emergencies", but can never manage to put regular contributions to their savings account.
In our house we have put all bonuses into savings, and have put most of every raise into automatic transfers to savings. Our roof replacement going on now is all cash. Our new fence this coming summer is already saved for. I am hopeful to get it up to 6 months of expenses to cover any loss of work within a year. We live within our means, which means planning ahead for the predictable expenses of life. We take few vacations, have no cable, and super cheap cell phone plans.
My only advice is to euthanize before she gets miserable, while she is still happy. It is better for all if the last days are good ones rather than wait until both she and your family are miserable.
We waited too long with a Labrador when I was growing up, to the point he was out of it and had to be taken into the vet's office on a stretcher. It sucked, and I vowed that my own pets would never go through that. More recently out Lab/Malemute mutt got bone cancer and we did not wait. We got enough good pain meds so he had a good last few days in only moderate pain, and he was still in good spirits sticking his head out the window on the way to the vet. I only wish I could have done the same for previous family dogs, and frankly for some of my deceased human family members as well.
We can't find homes for a ton of cats and dogs already, so what happens to all these super long lived animals over their lives?
I know it is horrible, but part of me is looking forward to not having any more dogs in a few years. I love our dog, but it costs a lot for vet visits, boarding, and generally makes it hard to just go do stuff when we have to make sure he gets bathroom breaks, walks, food, etc. I am sure those with teenagers have a bit of the same perspective, you love your kid but can't wait to get them off to college.
I'd be happy if we could easily deal with old/bad joints, failing eyesight, cancer, etc. Unless we can first properly deal with all the issues that go hand in hand with old age, why would you want you or your pet to live longer? I'd be happier with the assurance of good health for 85 years than assurance of life for 1000.
The radio in your phone is also a lot more complex. 10 years ago you probably had a dual band phone at most. Now we have >20 bands in an iphone. We now have carrier aggregation where you can recieve on more than one frequency at a time too.
Why does this matter? Radios have switches, filters, and tuneable antennas to keep all those bands playing nicely, and that results in more loss. It used to be just ~2 dB of front end loss to get to the LNA, now it is commonly 5-7 dB depending on the band and the phone specifics.
The more details come out the more it sounds more like he is turning into a well meaning Lex Luther...
If you buy an ACME brand lock and it turns out to be crap, no surprise. When you buy one from the most recognizable name in lock brands it means there are a bajillion of crappy locks out there in the field with a pretty bad vulnerability.
The 5 button door locks are also trivial, we call them 'riff-raff filters'. Anyone determined appropriate your lab equipment will not be stopped by them, or much else.
Anyone bent on doing bad cannot be stopped easily, but those folks are pretty darn rare. Most honest folks don't need much beyond a piece of tamper resistant tape to be kept honest, and a cheesy lock is even better.
But intel keeps telling us we only need 4 cores for games?!
But I really don't like watching ports on TV. Never have.
Live sports are occasionally nice, but usually overpriced. I especially hate when there is a mysterious stop, only to realize it is for a commercial break. WTF? Why not time shift the TV watchers and catch up the 1-2 minutes of lag during real timeouts or halftime?
Besides, watching sports live at home just means you cannot skip the annoying commercials. DVR the sucker and skip the commercials and inane commentary for the bloated nostalgia panel during every gap in play (often during play). US style sports presentation is supremely awful to suffer through.
It finally is feeling like there is a snowball starting to roll towards buying a few specific subscriptions to stuff you like instead of a smorgasbord of crap you have to sift through. I have not watched "live" TV in my house in probably 4 years.
ESPN, QVC, and their ilk will hopefully be left high and dry with not enough folks willing to pay for them to keep them alive. ESPN in particular is the poster child of what I hate about cable. I don't want it, but must still fork over ~$8 a month in dues so the masses can cheer on their adopted tribal warriors and feel better through the accomplishments or failures of folks they have likely never even met. My guess is that on the open market ESPN will find itself in a death spiral where the current costs of operation cannot actually be supported by the few folks willing to fork over for monthly access. More than the money, I hate that I was supporting what i view as a negative influence on the country.
So in the future I can see us with a lot fewer options, but with a lot of the absolute crap gone. I am heartened by Hulu finally offering an option to be (mostly) ad-free. Netflix was already ad-free.
But on the whole the prevalence of tablets for easy internet browsing has filled a lot of the idiot box utility. Why watch the news when I can read what I want and skip around the fluff on Apple or Google news? Why watch the financial shows when I can look at the plots myself and read only the advisors i trust, not the wackos and cranks that CNBC is rife with?
Most have poor text display, and a lot of lag. On the whole they are often poor monitors.
Big monitors on the other hand are awesome. I am a big fan of my 40" monitor, finally it is big enough that I don't end up using all the corners for stuff a lot of the time.
Seriously, why is sending a file or blob of data not a better, easier experience? You have to attach it to an email, often with pretty limited sizes and/or number of files. They then live on in my email history.
I want to be able to send files to someone (often myself) or to a specific computer (again often to myself across the room or building). There is a need for this, and things like Dropbox and cloud storage are trying to address it, but it should be a more core function to computers and be simple, and secure without third party opportunities for failure/obsolescence. You can use sharing of a drive/folder, but often I am only sharing to get the file across and for no other reason and would prefer if it was a direct action to see the file arrive with a notification and click accept&save, rather than a passive one where it shows up silently in email or a shared folder.
Why isn't voicemail a built in functional app?
I want to see the list of voicemails and quickly tap to hear, or swipe to delete. Needing to use a keypad and press 1 to hear, and 7 to delete is obnoxious.
We are all temporary employees for the most part. I was told I was likely to have 6-7 jobs in my career, and less than halfway through I am on employer #7.
The gigs might be getting shorter, but we have lived in a hire/fire economy for a couple decades now. Hire when you need folks, and cut them loose when you don't. Nothing new here. There are a lot of headaches with contractors that having employees actually avoid, namely the need to actually plan and think out a chunk of work before throwing warm bodies at it.
PC's are hugely powerful, yet strangely cut off from the outside world. How about bringing pack some ADC/DAC plus GPIO to the PC so that kids can actually do something with a PC beyond typing, web surfing, and playing games?
Brilliant!
I wish every app would also respond to shutdown requests ASAP. Don't ask me to save, just save it as a _shutdown copy and shut the hell down. A fully graceful power down system for both software and hardware would be great for both normal life and power outages.
I'd be happy with an RFID tag in my wallet and/or phone plus some facial recognition for all the low security stuff. Just unlock as I approach or as I enter. Add a password on top for the higher security stuff.
Passwords rules need at least to be consistent. At work one system is limited to a maximum of 8 characters, while the other is a minimum of 8.
Elsewhere special characters can't be handled, while the next system requires them.
It got stupid to the point where I now keep hints written down for a bunch of occasional used passwords and user names, which mostly defeats the point of strong passwords. but after a while I just stop giving a crap and just want to get on with life.
Totally agree. My PC is in our bedroom, and LED's drive me nuts! I have a routine every evening where I set my mouse against my keyboard, or it shoots a sliver of blue light right at eye level. Then I turn off the monitor or it glows orange. I keep an old fleece slippe on top of my computer that I slide over the power button that glows green. I slip an old Amsterdam map over my USB switch that glows green. Finally if I have my work laptop in the dock I toss whatever is handy over the eject button and status LED's the glow blue and white respectively. I keep an old wrist rest over the laptop power cord that glows white.
WTF man?
If note for the gooey residue I would have used black tape, but have found no good non-marring alternative.
Crimea is a small 10,000 square mile area (think 100x100 mile square). Unless you have a lot of local storage in every city (giant city sized UPS), this is not a good example of your point.
Corporations are people my friend.
Just not people when it comes to criminal acts. I can't pay a fine to get away with manslaughter. Corporate "persons" can.
NASCAR and the NFL are just high budget drinking games.
Drones, meh.
I am still annoyed that Skylake still only comes with 4 meager cores and some lousy graphics I will mever make use of, and anything beyond that is a hockey stick price increase. Taunting us with 72 is just cruel.
They die.
What happens when the private insurance kills one of my relatives through penny-pinching on diagnostic tests or it decides that expensive cancer drug keeping you alive is just too expensive?
They die.
No system is perfect. None.
Our system has worse outcomes for more money than comparable countries with single payer healthcare. ACA has snubbed the costs and put in measures to improve outcomes, but these are just stopping our system from getting much worse rather than closing the gap of outcomes and competiveness that other countries enjoy.