1. Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.

2. I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.

3. My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.

I am not Jewish, but I am married to an Israeli and have spent a decent amount of time in Israel, having traveled to many areas of the country.

The current situation is not surprising and it really comes down to one thing: LAND & RESOURCES.

All of the rhetoric about apartheid, anti-semitism, genocide, pogroms, etc, etc, etc are merely cover-ups for the real issue: Israel is a TINY piece of land that now supports close to 10 million people. The birthrate in Israel among everyone is among the highest in the world. Even secular Jews rarely have fewer than 3 kids. Muslim Arabs and Orthodox Jews frequently have 8, 9, 10 or more kids.

I have been visiting Israel fairly regularly over the last 20 years and I have seen the visible effects this uncontrolled population growth has had. Land is at a premium, everything is expensive and scarce, and it is FREAKING CROWDED. Towns and villages often support far more people than they were designed to support. Everyone there is worried about water and land and money.

And so you get to the real issue - this is about a fight over land. It’s a fight over which group is going to have a place for their own families and future generations to live there. It’s about fights over resources like water.

To understand why this is happening, you have to go back in history to the end of the slave trade. When the ability to kidnap people from Africa and bring them back to enslave them was legally ended, the white enslavers realized that the only way they could keep slavery going was to force people to breed more slaves. Google that history. It is utterly abhorrent but necessary to understand where the Republican Party is coming from today.

Since the end of slavery, a certain contingent in the U.S. has never gotten over the fact that they couldn’t legally have a sub-class of citizens that they could use for free or nearly-free labor. So they kept trying to find other ways to keep people oppressed, and they expanded that oppression beyond just black people and to any of the “less desirable” groups. Think not just Black people, but also Irish, immigrants, Appalachia. They pit these groups against one another because divided people are easier to control. But the goal is the same - have large groups of people poor for generations who have no other option but to work for slave wages and keep the people at the top very, very rich.

Slavery in the U.S. was a huge economic force, one that a certain contingent (the very wealthy) never got over losing. The next best thing was to create whole groups of people who are desperate enough to work for almost nothing. That’s what we have in this country now. And it works best if those people are constantly putting out more children. That keeps them even more stuck and more desperate, and it keeps a steady supply of cheap labor coming.

It’s no coincidence that they want abortion ended but also want to ensure those same people are continually subjected to sub-standard education, that those same people are “allowed” to send their kids to work (defeating years of progress through child labor laws), that those people are also unable to access higher education, government benefits, or virtually anything that could potentially make their lives better.

Yes, I have observed this and it is very frustrating. In many cases, these “articles” are opinion pieces being circulated by those with a financial interest in commercial real estate (or someone carrying the water of someone who has such an interest). Those who have any sort of financial interest in commercial real estate are going to be against remote work for obvious reasons.

Cities and real estate moguls arguing that people have to engage in an absolutely fruitless, draining, exhausting, expensive commute to keep a handful of people rich. They want to punish you to keep some elite people rich.

What needs to happen is workers need to fight back as much as possible. If your job can be done remotely, make it a priority to work for a company that allows you to do your job remotely. There’s NOTHING about my job that requires me to go into an office. I have worked successfully at home for many years and if my organization required me to come in, I would do everything I could to leave and find something else that allowed me to telework. If you’re looking for a job and have the luxury of being a little bit choosy, let recruiters know you will ONLY consider remote options.

Anecdotally, I think these opinion pieces are way overblown. My spouse was recently contacted by a recruiter about a job. The job was not remote and my spouse told the recruiter they would only consider remote-only options. The recruiter sighed and said, “That is what I keep getting told.”

I starting using Reddit in 2010 or so when I was going through health issues and was looking for information. I became very active on Reddit over the years, occasionally helping to mod a couple of communities. I am not a hugely “online” person, but I loved Reddit as a source of information and advice from actual real people. Particularly for those of us living with chronic health conditions, Reddit in particular was hugely important.

But I don’t use Reddit anymore. The whole API fiasco was the last straw for me, and I also just didn’t see it remaining a vibrant place full of valuable information. So I deleted my accounts and left. Haven’t been back since.

And we need to make that process of getting kids who need it that basic foundational education as easy and cheap as possible. I would say the best thing we could do is make sure they have the opportunity to be de-programmed as soon as they are adults.

And sometimes they are living there and simply cannot afford to relocate. Relocating is very expensive in the U.S., especially if you want to relocate to an area that has better education.

This is actually a terrifying prospect that would only make the situation worse. The kids stuck there and being educated in this propaganda are the ones who will need higher education the most! It is not their fault their parents are living there. And while some parents may have a choice in the matter, many do not as relocating in the U.S. is very expensive and impractical for some families.

I actually feel like the opposite is needed - that public universities go out of their way to accept kids who were educated in Florida in the hopes of actually being able to educate them and break the cycle that is currently feeding this wave of fascism.

The thing is, they are only uncomfortable with it because some fascist politician is telling them to be uncomfortable with it. I am a same-sex married person with children. When people are face-to-face with a regular person like myself who happens to be married to someone of the same gender and has kids, most people actually have very little problem with it. But then some politician feeds them lies, lies that are then propagated on Facebook or Twitter, and suddenly they have an issue with the concept.

What is happening in Italy terrifies me. It’s terrifying because it is the same slippery slope Russia went down and the same slippery slope we’re heading down in the USA. We’re watching it happen in real time with kids who are transgender. The GOP is not stopping there. They have already shown they are a full-on fascists. They will not stop until the USA is their authoritarian utopia.

This is what gets me. Christian Selig pointed out in a number of interviews that Reddit could have easily made this work without alienating a huge segment of their user base. I get this vague feeling lately like CEOs are intentionally trying to tank their products, because no one so well paid could actually act so dumb.

Memmy has more customization options and I’ve found it to work a bit better than WefWef. For me, WefWef has been very sporadic in its functionality, with it sometimes just generating errors and requiring me to refresh.

I can’t imagine not using a password manager. I am a long-time user of 1Password and have been very happy with the service and apps. I recommend it to everyone. Worth every penny and then some IMO.

And I hope it fails as miserably as Twitter is failing. I’m so tired of these companies doing the crap they’re doing simply to earn a buck from people. It’s pure greed and I hope they all go under and end up failing.

Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.

I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).

I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.

I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.

Haha. Can’t see dark mode when outside. Otherwise, yes, I’d be full time dark mode.

Don’t know if that’s possible but what I do is create a note for a person - for example [[Jane Doe]].

Then I add the #people hashtag in the note which, thanks to the auto note mover plugin, sends the note directly to a specific “People” folder.

I then go in and add to the person’s note any info I want to save for them, such as where they work, email, etc.

This system had proven to be very helpful for work. Has helped me so many times recall where and in what context I talked with someone.

Health-related communities, particularly those for specific medical conditions. Those are the communities that really become a lifeline for people, help them through diagnoses or just difficult times, and can serve as an excellent resource. I was active on r/diabetes_t1 on Reddit and am trying to get a community started here on Lenny.world (!T1diabetes).

I use Reeder and like it. I also have Reader by Readwise and tried to use the RSS feature in that, but it didn’t work as well as Reeder last I tried it.

I don’t recall the specifics of the one article I read about this, but yes, I think being able to declare bankruptcy gives an out for at least some of the debt. I believe there was also some way that doing so protected Tesla but can’t recall exactly how that worked.

This just doesn’t seem like a “he’s just bad at running a company” situation. A company of Twitter’s age and maturity could have run itself for quite some time if Elon just let it continue on. He’s doing this intentionally for some self-serving reason.

Their failure to provide basic education is how they trap the next generation in the cult. Without a proper education, kids are trapped and it becomes extremely difficult to escape. It’s a feature, not a bug.