So the real purpose of the article? Create a trumped up controversy in order to generate hype before the IPO. Everyone is supposed to think the stock is cheap because of the controversy while thinking they are the clever one who sees the business model will work because the consumables are what matter. When everyone is the clever "one" they all buy the stock and the original investors get the profits.
If there is a gigantic Chinese elephant tossed under my nose why would I point out the obvious rather than highlighting the weasels that put it there? Am I supposed to support them hiding in the back asking little girls if they want some candy?
You certainly could and something like XFCE is definitely lighter weight. Personally I'm willing to invest about 15min in my desktop and want it feature rich. Considering Gnome and KDE were feature rich back when I ran my Linux desktop on a Pentium Pro there is no reason feature rich can't also be lightweight given how much faster the hardware is now and gpu graphics acceleration.
P.S. Short of a failed transmission or engine overhaul or some fancy german vehicle any individual automotive repair is going to come in around or below $1000. Compare that to your monthly outlay on your 4 year lease.
"I don't know what used car prices are where you live, but that doesn't sound like realistic advice where I live."
You can buy a 2017 Honda HRV today for $14k, It won't be worth more than $10k in 3-5 years I guarantee it. If you maintain them properly most cars are reasonably reliable for 10-15 years. There are plenty of cars that fall in that price range after haggling.
"Abusing the mileage? What's that? Most people put most of the miles on their vehicles for their jobs. Most of mine is commuting to work and back, with some for going to stores and visiting close friends and relatives. I'd be hard-pressed to cut 10% off my yearly mileage and still work and eat."
Abusing the mileage would be frequently using it for long range transport. Typical lease limits are a fine high end for most everyone 12-15k/yr. That is what planes, trains, and buses are for.
"Alternately, focusing on low TCO means not buying insurance on the car itself, so if you're in an accident and it's ruled largely or all your fault (and these things happen), you suddenly need to get $8-$10K to buy a new car."
I fail to see how buying insurance significantly impacts the TCO of a car you own and didn't pay for vs a car the bank owns and depreciates about 10%/yr for the first five years.
"I paid a little under that for a new car, on a four-year zero-interest loan. After three years, I will have paid off 75% of the principal, and the car will be worth a lot more than $8K, so I won't be underwater."
No, zero interest is effectively the same thing as paying cash. I take 0% whenever I can barring any fees and then readjust what I pay so it actually pays everything off in time since they are often tricks that become deferred interest if you make the payment asked for. But a car you buy used for 8k is still worth about 8k a year or two later. That brand new $35k car will have depreciated by 8k within a year or two.
Repairs are a thing but if you maintain a vehicle and it isn't a rental or salesman car they are uncommon until you get in that 12-15yr range. Trying to make you think used cars which have been taken care of are breaking left and right and completely unreliable is partly true in that not all vehicles has been well cared for, also a factor for long drives and roadtrips that aren't really in fashion here in the states anymore, and the rest an argument used to help people feel good about spending way too much on something that doesn't get you to work any more successfully than the cheapest car in the lot.
Cars are liabilities not assets, sound financial planning is to minimize liabilities.
You say that like the internet is some particular and singular thing.
"Blocking the Pirate Bay does not, in any way, prevent anyone from accessing the internet."
It prevents the creators and users of the pirate bay from free speech on the internet, the pirate bay IS the internet.
"not the part that happens between the Internet and some destination site you think you should have access to"
Destination sites/devices ARE the internet, there is no magical inbetween just a bunch of those sites/devices traffic might flow through between endpoints and they themselves can be endpoints. But hey, lets say I'm wrong and go with your logic and shut down access to all the destinations.
Why do people have such a hard time understanding that any policy which can be potentially applied to any given member of a group logically carries the same weight as one which is applied to every member of said group?
It's not the same it is far far worse. Blanket censoring is obvious and apparent, selective censorship is to blanket censoring what the line item veto is to bill veto. So long as governments can pick and choose who they want to be able to speak or who they want you to be able to see speaking there will be no free speech. They will control your mind by controlling the information you have to form your opinions, ideas, and biases. This is subtle and scary, it allows controlling your mind despite you thinking for yourself.
"Those are services provided by companies. That isn't the same as the govt shutting down the whole internet. Shutting down a service or two because it breaks some laws of the land is business as usual. Shutting down the entire internet is not."
The President has the ability to veto bills but not line veto because selective line veto is considered dramatically more powerful. Selectively shutting down dissenting voices or those the government doesn't like for whatever reason (which is all violating a law of the land amounts to) is more abusive than shutting down the entire internet. The only difference between the two is when you shut everything down everyone is aware, when you silence only the voice everyone needs to hear they don't miss it.
Yes but some of the governments of the world doing this try to pretend they are the good guys. For instance following this policy would result in refusing to give new IP space to the US and EU.
These VPN services don't actually protect your identity, they provide another reference point of evidence against you that indicates not only were you alleged to do something bad online but here is a second account for the sole purpose of hiding what you are doing online and even shelling out money to do so.
No but someone should kill the computer that puts you on hold when call 911. If an operator screened the calls before using the hold button it wouldn't be such an issue.
It's tainted for anyone who doesn't want to invest in using the Unity desktop when it is going away. The sad thing is they are going with Gnome which once upon a time was a great desktop but now shares a lot of the crap that makes Unity terrible. They should standardize around KDE.
Don't confuse the stock market with the things it pretends to represent and loosely relates to. The stock market represents only perception and at the end of the day is a giant pyramid scheme. That is WHY it bubbles and crashes.
Geeks and nerds people who have a driving and obsessive love of accumulating knowledge and learning as an innate personality feature. They also have the capacity to do so but it could be argued that anyone who developed such a love would develop that capacity. Geeks are experience oriented learners and nerds are study oriented learners.
There is of course a certain amount of crossover. Given a course a widget with a presentation and labs both would learn base information from the presentation but the nerd would likely get more and take notes while the geek would retain the slide-deck somewhere for the links to reference docs. Then the lab portion the nerd would be focused on reinforcing memory through repetition with the assumption that the material should tell them everything they need to know assuming they take all classes. A geek might start with a lab scenario, maybe even do it, and then hypothesis everything he/she can from the information and test those hypothesis in a scientific method like approach with variations and self-invented labs.
Learning more and more about the world lends itself to appreciating science-fiction and fantasy and all the culture that has popped up around that but there are definitely geeks and nerds that have evolved immersed in a different sort of environment, perhaps surrounded by dude-bros that have more dude-bro like culture and mannerisms. Both geeks and nerds almost universally have characteristics somewhere on the autism scale so they are largely emulating culture and mannerisms in an attempt to best camouflage themselves and hide among those around them. Persisted long enough some of that might be even actually become part of who they are.
If you find a group of people who are obsessed with ghostbusters for instance, secretly under the hood you might discover it isn't really about ghostbusters but about other people flying a flag proclaiming openly that they too are weird so there is no judgement here... ghostbusters is just the rallying cry and something to talk about for people who can't do small talk and maybe even do fun stuff for kids while being weird together. Nothing is more isolating and makes you feel more weird than being intelligent, loving learning, and seeing what everyone else finds interesting to be boring and simplistic while there is a world full of interesting things and when you spot them and point them out everyone's eyes glaze over. Do you need to be a geek/nerd to be a ghostbuster? Of course not and geeks/nerds are the last people who are going to reject someone because they are different than them but the recent popularity of geek culture has lead to more and more people who aren't geeks/nerds to come because they doing these things is no longer considered so weird and it becomes less and less true that you can look at an unpaid adult wearing a ghostbuster costume and assume it is a fellow geek/nerd.
"No one "loves" Microsoft anything. It's just what they use at work so it's all they know."
There are certainly people who profess a love of MS solutions but I could see an argument that the reason they do so is because it's what they know and they are afraid to be the n00b to learn something different and better and/or are trying to mask their failure to figure out something with a steeper learning curve.
Other fair exceptions to my lists are people who switched to MacOS as a desktop solution when Apple slapped their GUI on top of BSD because it gave them a solid unix system with a polished interface with a broader support for consumer peripherals/games/etc. While I disagree with that call it was a fair and logical viewpoint that had a certain level of merit but also arguably isn't actually loving Apple. Similarly a decision to run windows on your desktop because it has the best marketshare, can easily make use of network file/print resources, and you are too busy hacking things that are actually a challenge to smack your head against the same sort of Linux on the desktop type issues you matched wits with years ago isn't actually loving MS. Also Microsoft hardware and PC games are really a different beast from everything else MS.
But there are a few nerds/geeks who love windows/apple. As long as windows is the market leader I could see some nerds never moving on. Geeks might start there because it is what is nearby but their adventures are going to start moving them into other spaces... I mean seriously, how long can any geek in modern times go before doing something with a raspberry pi.
"ATV4/Nvidia Shield are the only two playback devices worth using plex on right now for TV sets."
Which constitutes a broken condition for Plex given that no other streaming provider requires that level of overkill and Plex didn't either a year ago with the same content. The FireTV has no issues with 4k content that looks just fine blown up to 120" from Amazon/Netflix/Vudu (really, the only issue with these services is audio and missing content of course). Perhaps tuning for these overpowered devices resulting in poorly optimized choices that negatively impacted other clients. Or tinfoil hat, maybe they removed the options to tune the buffers from other clients to push people toward the Shield solution.
"Sounds like your friends are using low grade server hardware and low end players as well as low grade networks."
That depends on the friend. But an 8 mbit/s 1080p steam shouldn't have issues even on 54mbit wifi served from a raspberry pi without transcoding. If the device can play the file locally then it is obviously fast enough to decode as well if the stream is fast enough.
For myself I use 48TB (8x6TB wd nas drives) raw under ZFS on a server with 16 xeon 3.2ghz cores and 64GB ram for caching which I turn export via 4 8gbit fiberchannel links for multipath direct attached to the plex server host with similar specs mounting that ZFS volume. That connects with 4 1gbit ports (intel nics) aggregated to a pair of 48 port gbit managed switches (extreme summit, fabric is fast enough to max full duplex on all ports simultaneously) and all TV output devices with Plex clients are wired 1gbit (although I do have a consumer grade buffalo router w/dd-wrt configured to serve as an 802.11ac AP for mobile devices). I do have a few other BSD jails running downloaders and another 8TB raw local volume (6x1TB) on the plex server host which just serves as a place to download and process new content without putting any contention/using any bandwidth on the NAS volume. With my server and network configuration I should have no issue streaming to blu-rays re-packed without additional compression and with original audio to every TV in the house. I use FireTV boxes for clients because they are Android boxes with a solid spec for the same and hdcp 2.2 output for 4k support. Kodi is able to support passthrough audio to my receiver on these but passthrough aside with or without audio transcoding there should be no audio hiccups.
The only common factor I can think of is some flavor of BSD being under the hood and there was a known issue for months with MacOS servers and DTS audio with the audio stuttering issue that was only recently fixed. Given the relationship between the two platforms and the reduced popularity of BSD it could be that the fix needs ported to that platform as well.
I agree, even at $35k you are well into the territory where you know you could get a brand new car which provides the same function for half the price or something just off a lease that provides the same function for dramatically less not just one the sticker but a massively lower TCO. Buy a reliable used car from a sensible low cost brand, with low mileage for $8-10k, pay for it outright drive it for the next 7 years without abusing the mileage and keeping up with oil changes and you'll pay 50% of that again in upkeep costs and still be able to get $1500-$2000 on trade-in or ride it out to the first major repair and potentially get up to 5 more years and $500 when you junk it. Worst case $10k + 5k - $1.5k = $13.5k TCO and financial trouble will never mean loss of transportation. In three years a $35k vehicle will have depreciated by that much, you'll have paid very little principal and be upside down, and that is without TCO. The $175k car guy is going to lose an entire Tesla model S in depreciation.
Yes and that is unquestionably a terrible way to manage money. It is a decent way to actually enjoy money while you are young enough to do so. Managing money well provides a nice net and a big number for when you are too old to enjoy it (retirement) or to give to someone else.
I would certainly agree with this. That is the great secret of all the market tricks... the fanciest brokerages in the world spending millions and millions of dollars of trading algorithms and technology are trying unsuccessfully to come up with something that beats the S&P 500 over the long term. So skip paying anyone for advice and just buy into a low cost S&P 500 index (or the dividend aristocrats subset since it outperforms the overall index). You can improve things a bit by making short/mid term trades on the very obvious shifts, essentially shorting your own stock.
But there is a very big issue with something that does well in the long term... in the short term it can be doing very poorly and there is always the possibility the time when you'll need those funds will come at that point. Needing to cash out the investment for your kids college fund with bad timing could mean giving up 20 years worth of gains. In order for this strategy to actually be more than a huge gamble on this basis you need so much capital that you won't actually need the invested capital at any particular point. That is great for the very wealthy contributing nothing and collecting cream off the top, ideally with so much invested they can just collect some portion of the dividends to live on but for the other 99.9% it is just the least risky way to roll the dice and it certainly isn't a strategy that is ever going to result in being out of indentured servitude with a large chunk of your life thrown away, teets connected to the milking machine and having to borrow back the cream from your own milk with an interest burden.
"Now as far as stocks go... if you are worried about a "market crash" then you simply aren't playing the long game."
That isn't true at all unless you are assuming they will eventually come back and that the time you actually need to liquidate those funds won't be before that come back.
At some point though one must ask... if you have 60% of your income to invest why not work 60% less and reclaim more of your time? Money can always potentially be replaced, the time you have to waste making it can't. Sure, you'll have more when you retire but most 75 year olds would gladly trade a year of well off at 75 time for an hour or two of middle class and 25. Also, you may never live to that retirement and the additional stress of working almost certainly takes its toll on your heart health.
It all depends. First there is marital status. Earning $140k as a single male is an entirely different ballgame than being married and earning that same $140k. If you have a family you almost certainly want one person to stay home if possible and doing otherwise if you have a choice is essentially neglect. In a world where expenses are based on the assumption of dual earners that is a huge hit. And having a spouse means expenses go up. They want a larger home, new appliances, nice car, etc where a single male would have a cheap one bedroom and a massive influx of disposable income.
Slashdot Mirror
So the real purpose of the article? Create a trumped up controversy in order to generate hype before the IPO. Everyone is supposed to think the stock is cheap because of the controversy while thinking they are the clever one who sees the business model will work because the consumables are what matter. When everyone is the clever "one" they all buy the stock and the original investors get the profits.
*yawn*
If there is a gigantic Chinese elephant tossed under my nose why would I point out the obvious rather than highlighting the weasels that put it there? Am I supposed to support them hiding in the back asking little girls if they want some candy?
You certainly could and something like XFCE is definitely lighter weight. Personally I'm willing to invest about 15min in my desktop and want it feature rich. Considering Gnome and KDE were feature rich back when I ran my Linux desktop on a Pentium Pro there is no reason feature rich can't also be lightweight given how much faster the hardware is now and gpu graphics acceleration.
Collectively the nation fell into bad parenting policies in the 90's that are still the norm.
P.S. Short of a failed transmission or engine overhaul or some fancy german vehicle any individual automotive repair is going to come in around or below $1000. Compare that to your monthly outlay on your 4 year lease.
"I don't know what used car prices are where you live, but that doesn't sound like realistic advice where I live."
You can buy a 2017 Honda HRV today for $14k, It won't be worth more than $10k in 3-5 years I guarantee it. If you maintain them properly most cars are reasonably reliable for 10-15 years. There are plenty of cars that fall in that price range after haggling.
"Abusing the mileage? What's that? Most people put most of the miles on their vehicles for their jobs. Most of mine is commuting to work and back, with some for going to stores and visiting close friends and relatives. I'd be hard-pressed to cut 10% off my yearly mileage and still work and eat."
Abusing the mileage would be frequently using it for long range transport. Typical lease limits are a fine high end for most everyone 12-15k/yr. That is what planes, trains, and buses are for.
"Alternately, focusing on low TCO means not buying insurance on the car itself, so if you're in an accident and it's ruled largely or all your fault (and these things happen), you suddenly need to get $8-$10K to buy a new car."
I fail to see how buying insurance significantly impacts the TCO of a car you own and didn't pay for vs a car the bank owns and depreciates about 10%/yr for the first five years.
"I paid a little under that for a new car, on a four-year zero-interest loan. After three years, I will have paid off 75% of the principal, and the car will be worth a lot more than $8K, so I won't be underwater."
No, zero interest is effectively the same thing as paying cash. I take 0% whenever I can barring any fees and then readjust what I pay so it actually pays everything off in time since they are often tricks that become deferred interest if you make the payment asked for. But a car you buy used for 8k is still worth about 8k a year or two later. That brand new $35k car will have depreciated by 8k within a year or two.
Repairs are a thing but if you maintain a vehicle and it isn't a rental or salesman car they are uncommon until you get in that 12-15yr range. Trying to make you think used cars which have been taken care of are breaking left and right and completely unreliable is partly true in that not all vehicles has been well cared for, also a factor for long drives and roadtrips that aren't really in fashion here in the states anymore, and the rest an argument used to help people feel good about spending way too much on something that doesn't get you to work any more successfully than the cheapest car in the lot.
Cars are liabilities not assets, sound financial planning is to minimize liabilities.
"the Internet"
You say that like the internet is some particular and singular thing.
"Blocking the Pirate Bay does not, in any way, prevent anyone from accessing the internet."
It prevents the creators and users of the pirate bay from free speech on the internet, the pirate bay IS the internet.
"not the part that happens between the Internet and some destination site you think you should have access to"
Destination sites/devices ARE the internet, there is no magical inbetween just a bunch of those sites/devices traffic might flow through between endpoints and they themselves can be endpoints. But hey, lets say I'm wrong and go with your logic and shut down access to all the destinations.
Why do people have such a hard time understanding that any policy which can be potentially applied to any given member of a group logically carries the same weight as one which is applied to every member of said group?
It's not the same it is far far worse. Blanket censoring is obvious and apparent, selective censorship is to blanket censoring what the line item veto is to bill veto. So long as governments can pick and choose who they want to be able to speak or who they want you to be able to see speaking there will be no free speech. They will control your mind by controlling the information you have to form your opinions, ideas, and biases. This is subtle and scary, it allows controlling your mind despite you thinking for yourself.
"Those are services provided by companies. That isn't the same as the govt shutting down the whole internet. Shutting down a service or two because it breaks some laws of the land is business as usual. Shutting down the entire internet is not."
The President has the ability to veto bills but not line veto because selective line veto is considered dramatically more powerful. Selectively shutting down dissenting voices or those the government doesn't like for whatever reason (which is all violating a law of the land amounts to) is more abusive than shutting down the entire internet. The only difference between the two is when you shut everything down everyone is aware, when you silence only the voice everyone needs to hear they don't miss it.
Take a look at the history of the pirate bay sometime.
Yes but some of the governments of the world doing this try to pretend they are the good guys. For instance following this policy would result in refusing to give new IP space to the US and EU.
These VPN services don't actually protect your identity, they provide another reference point of evidence against you that indicates not only were you alleged to do something bad online but here is a second account for the sole purpose of hiding what you are doing online and even shelling out money to do so.
No but someone should kill the computer that puts you on hold when call 911. If an operator screened the calls before using the hold button it wouldn't be such an issue.
It's tainted for anyone who doesn't want to invest in using the Unity desktop when it is going away. The sad thing is they are going with Gnome which once upon a time was a great desktop but now shares a lot of the crap that makes Unity terrible. They should standardize around KDE.
Don't confuse the stock market with the things it pretends to represent and loosely relates to. The stock market represents only perception and at the end of the day is a giant pyramid scheme. That is WHY it bubbles and crashes.
Geeks and nerds people who have a driving and obsessive love of accumulating knowledge and learning as an innate personality feature. They also have the capacity to do so but it could be argued that anyone who developed such a love would develop that capacity. Geeks are experience oriented learners and nerds are study oriented learners.
There is of course a certain amount of crossover. Given a course a widget with a presentation and labs both would learn base information from the presentation but the nerd would likely get more and take notes while the geek would retain the slide-deck somewhere for the links to reference docs. Then the lab portion the nerd would be focused on reinforcing memory through repetition with the assumption that the material should tell them everything they need to know assuming they take all classes. A geek might start with a lab scenario, maybe even do it, and then hypothesis everything he/she can from the information and test those hypothesis in a scientific method like approach with variations and self-invented labs.
Learning more and more about the world lends itself to appreciating science-fiction and fantasy and all the culture that has popped up around that but there are definitely geeks and nerds that have evolved immersed in a different sort of environment, perhaps surrounded by dude-bros that have more dude-bro like culture and mannerisms. Both geeks and nerds almost universally have characteristics somewhere on the autism scale so they are largely emulating culture and mannerisms in an attempt to best camouflage themselves and hide among those around them. Persisted long enough some of that might be even actually become part of who they are.
If you find a group of people who are obsessed with ghostbusters for instance, secretly under the hood you might discover it isn't really about ghostbusters but about other people flying a flag proclaiming openly that they too are weird so there is no judgement here... ghostbusters is just the rallying cry and something to talk about for people who can't do small talk and maybe even do fun stuff for kids while being weird together. Nothing is more isolating and makes you feel more weird than being intelligent, loving learning, and seeing what everyone else finds interesting to be boring and simplistic while there is a world full of interesting things and when you spot them and point them out everyone's eyes glaze over. Do you need to be a geek/nerd to be a ghostbuster? Of course not and geeks/nerds are the last people who are going to reject someone because they are different than them but the recent popularity of geek culture has lead to more and more people who aren't geeks/nerds to come because they doing these things is no longer considered so weird and it becomes less and less true that you can look at an unpaid adult wearing a ghostbuster costume and assume it is a fellow geek/nerd.
"No one "loves" Microsoft anything. It's just what they use at work so it's all they know."
There are certainly people who profess a love of MS solutions but I could see an argument that the reason they do so is because it's what they know and they are afraid to be the n00b to learn something different and better and/or are trying to mask their failure to figure out something with a steeper learning curve.
Other fair exceptions to my lists are people who switched to MacOS as a desktop solution when Apple slapped their GUI on top of BSD because it gave them a solid unix system with a polished interface with a broader support for consumer peripherals/games/etc. While I disagree with that call it was a fair and logical viewpoint that had a certain level of merit but also arguably isn't actually loving Apple. Similarly a decision to run windows on your desktop because it has the best marketshare, can easily make use of network file/print resources, and you are too busy hacking things that are actually a challenge to smack your head against the same sort of Linux on the desktop type issues you matched wits with years ago isn't actually loving MS. Also Microsoft hardware and PC games are really a different beast from everything else MS.
But there are a few nerds/geeks who love windows/apple. As long as windows is the market leader I could see some nerds never moving on. Geeks might start there because it is what is nearby but their adventures are going to start moving them into other spaces... I mean seriously, how long can any geek in modern times go before doing something with a raspberry pi.
"ATV4/Nvidia Shield are the only two playback devices worth using plex on right now for TV sets."
Which constitutes a broken condition for Plex given that no other streaming provider requires that level of overkill and Plex didn't either a year ago with the same content. The FireTV has no issues with 4k content that looks just fine blown up to 120" from Amazon/Netflix/Vudu (really, the only issue with these services is audio and missing content of course). Perhaps tuning for these overpowered devices resulting in poorly optimized choices that negatively impacted other clients. Or tinfoil hat, maybe they removed the options to tune the buffers from other clients to push people toward the Shield solution.
"Sounds like your friends are using low grade server hardware and low end players as well as low grade networks."
That depends on the friend. But an 8 mbit/s 1080p steam shouldn't have issues even on 54mbit wifi served from a raspberry pi without transcoding. If the device can play the file locally then it is obviously fast enough to decode as well if the stream is fast enough.
For myself I use 48TB (8x6TB wd nas drives) raw under ZFS on a server with 16 xeon 3.2ghz cores and 64GB ram for caching which I turn export via 4 8gbit fiberchannel links for multipath direct attached to the plex server host with similar specs mounting that ZFS volume. That connects with 4 1gbit ports (intel nics) aggregated to a pair of 48 port gbit managed switches (extreme summit, fabric is fast enough to max full duplex on all ports simultaneously) and all TV output devices with Plex clients are wired 1gbit (although I do have a consumer grade buffalo router w/dd-wrt configured to serve as an 802.11ac AP for mobile devices). I do have a few other BSD jails running downloaders and another 8TB raw local volume (6x1TB) on the plex server host which just serves as a place to download and process new content without putting any contention/using any bandwidth on the NAS volume. With my server and network configuration I should have no issue streaming to blu-rays re-packed without additional compression and with original audio to every TV in the house. I use FireTV boxes for clients because they are Android boxes with a solid spec for the same and hdcp 2.2 output for 4k support. Kodi is able to support passthrough audio to my receiver on these but passthrough aside with or without audio transcoding there should be no audio hiccups.
The only common factor I can think of is some flavor of BSD being under the hood and there was a known issue for months with MacOS servers and DTS audio with the audio stuttering issue that was only recently fixed. Given the relationship between the two platforms and the reduced popularity of BSD it could be that the fix needs ported to that platform as well.
I agree, even at $35k you are well into the territory where you know you could get a brand new car which provides the same function for half the price or something just off a lease that provides the same function for dramatically less not just one the sticker but a massively lower TCO. Buy a reliable used car from a sensible low cost brand, with low mileage for $8-10k, pay for it outright drive it for the next 7 years without abusing the mileage and keeping up with oil changes and you'll pay 50% of that again in upkeep costs and still be able to get $1500-$2000 on trade-in or ride it out to the first major repair and potentially get up to 5 more years and $500 when you junk it. Worst case $10k + 5k - $1.5k = $13.5k TCO and financial trouble will never mean loss of transportation. In three years a $35k vehicle will have depreciated by that much, you'll have paid very little principal and be upside down, and that is without TCO. The $175k car guy is going to lose an entire Tesla model S in depreciation.
Yes and that is unquestionably a terrible way to manage money. It is a decent way to actually enjoy money while you are young enough to do so. Managing money well provides a nice net and a big number for when you are too old to enjoy it (retirement) or to give to someone else.
Which is a sure indicator we are in a bubble again.
"the easy choice is an S&P 500 fund"
I would certainly agree with this. That is the great secret of all the market tricks... the fanciest brokerages in the world spending millions and millions of dollars of trading algorithms and technology are trying unsuccessfully to come up with something that beats the S&P 500 over the long term. So skip paying anyone for advice and just buy into a low cost S&P 500 index (or the dividend aristocrats subset since it outperforms the overall index). You can improve things a bit by making short/mid term trades on the very obvious shifts, essentially shorting your own stock.
But there is a very big issue with something that does well in the long term... in the short term it can be doing very poorly and there is always the possibility the time when you'll need those funds will come at that point. Needing to cash out the investment for your kids college fund with bad timing could mean giving up 20 years worth of gains. In order for this strategy to actually be more than a huge gamble on this basis you need so much capital that you won't actually need the invested capital at any particular point. That is great for the very wealthy contributing nothing and collecting cream off the top, ideally with so much invested they can just collect some portion of the dividends to live on but for the other 99.9% it is just the least risky way to roll the dice and it certainly isn't a strategy that is ever going to result in being out of indentured servitude with a large chunk of your life thrown away, teets connected to the milking machine and having to borrow back the cream from your own milk with an interest burden.
Unless of course your investments don't recover or the things you actually need that money for come up before it does. Or you die tomorrow.
"Now as far as stocks go... if you are worried about a "market crash" then you simply aren't playing the long game."
That isn't true at all unless you are assuming they will eventually come back and that the time you actually need to liquidate those funds won't be before that come back.
At some point though one must ask... if you have 60% of your income to invest why not work 60% less and reclaim more of your time? Money can always potentially be replaced, the time you have to waste making it can't. Sure, you'll have more when you retire but most 75 year olds would gladly trade a year of well off at 75 time for an hour or two of middle class and 25. Also, you may never live to that retirement and the additional stress of working almost certainly takes its toll on your heart health.
It all depends. First there is marital status. Earning $140k as a single male is an entirely different ballgame than being married and earning that same $140k. If you have a family you almost certainly want one person to stay home if possible and doing otherwise if you have a choice is essentially neglect. In a world where expenses are based on the assumption of dual earners that is a huge hit. And having a spouse means expenses go up. They want a larger home, new appliances, nice car, etc where a single male would have a cheap one bedroom and a massive influx of disposable income.