Hopeful Doc

And most the problems would disappear if they:
Limited votes to one bill at a time
Limited bills to, say, 5 pages
Didn’t get paid until all the appropriations bills were individually passed
Moved all stocks to a common ‘congressional portfolio’ that they were required to buy that’s also open to the public to purchase.

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thinking of either starting with the M4 Mac mini or the new MacBook air

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Pick the form factor you want. I bought a Mac mini to play around with when the ARM chips first released for reasons like you were describing- mostly the music recording software (as much as I love Ardour and Ubuntu Studio, I just wanted to play around with GarageBand).

About 4 months later it was time for a new computer. That generation MBA went on sale for like $800, I liked the speech recognition as much as anything else I’d used to that point, and the battery life was, at the time, significantly better than basically anything on the market worth talking about.

I’m not committed, and the gap of portable + powerful enough + long battery life is leveling back out. I’m not seeing a reason to upgrade yet after 4 years. When I do, Lenovo T14 will be a stiff competitor to a new MacBook Air. There’s plenty I don’t love about it- in particular their file manager, window manager, general lack of usable desktop as a launcher (it’s usable, but it’s semi-difficult to even just see the darn desktop. I guess to prevent the Windows-style desktop with 100 shortcuts scattered everywhere, but if you’ve ever used it, you probably know what I mean. It’s inconvenient to get to).

There’s some good, too- with the way I work, being sable to see who’s calling me and responding to texts is better than any windows/android version of software I’ve used. The iPhone mirroring (you can use anything on the phone like apps that aren’t available on the desktop) is ok but a little buggy. Convenient for the most part but not a huge part of my day)

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If I go the mini route what is recommended as far as peripherals?

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For the desktop, I’d use whatever keyboard I already owned, consider adding the mousepad. The mouse as an addition to the laptop seems to be semi-popular, but I don’t own one and don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I like my Logitech vertical mouse.

As far as ‘Mac keyboards’ go, there are a couple symbols you need to learn to translate to your ctrl, alt, and windows keys and you’ll be fine. If that’s difficult, Logitech, among others makes a keyboard with both sets of keys symbols on it. You can find mechanical keyboard caps if that’s your thing too, but I’ve never seen a mechanical keyboard with those shortcuts.

If using the MacBook Air, I wouldn’t buy any Mac peripherals. If using the mini, you unlock a little functionality with the trackpad. There’s also a way to put the trackpad gestures onto Windows if that’s your thing (I have a KVM with all wired peripherals and a windows, osx, and Ubuntu machine (well , it’s on proxmox and available from both of them rather than available by hardware switch)

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There is not a snowball chance in hell an office environment is going to Linux for its users. So stop with that option.

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Just out of spite I’m going to test drive 2-4 users on Mint, Fedora over the next few weeks and report back.

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Well you can get a good look at a T-Bone by sticking your head up a bull's arse, but I'd rather take the butcher's word for it.

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Will you can also get a look at butcher. Wait. No. It’s gotta be YOUR bull.

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hardly. If you can create the live USB Linux then you can handle modern Linux.

Just like windows, you don't need to know anything about Linux to use it. There are guides for absolutely everything you would want to do.

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1) end users ain’t making live USB.
2) end users ain’t reading guides.



I’m not talking about those interested enough to save their hardware. I’m talking about those trying to save company/business hardware and attempting to get regular joe using it.

Using chrome/Firefox/openoffice will be fine, and plenty of folks would but fine with it. But if they ever, say, needed to configure the firewall to let an app through or attempt to make setting changes that don’t have a GUI (mounting network drives comes to mind quickly), a lot won’t RTFM. And some that do will give up because it’s foreign and not as ‘easy’ as it’s been made with windows.

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Is to cancel my Netflix subscription and stop buying lattes and avocado toast?

Then I will be able to afford a house?

But what if I don't subscribe to Netflix, don't drink coffee, or eat avocado toast?

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I’ll bite:
1) small recurring expenses are often tied to how easy/important it is to retire rather than to buy a home. I’ve never seen this comparison. But the quick math:
Most people wouldn’t think of a Starbucks venti (large) latte as a ‘splurge,’ and $4.15 for something you could make at home for significantly less. Quick AI answer suggests that 16oz of beans will make you something like 32-64 cups of coffee. You can get them Anywhere between $5-20 per pound. Even with the added price of milk (and electricity and time) you’re looking at 75% cost savings for something that isn’t hard to do. Let’s say the cost of that home cup is around $1 (though you could easily drop it to almost 1/10 that and have coffee for a month for the price of the one latte if that was your thing). We’ll just use the $3.15 in savings. It doesn’t mean you can buy a Starbucks latte. And almost no one buys 365 of them a year. But it’s a quick point meant to prove a thing.
Here’s the thing:
Throwing away $3.15 is so easy you won’t miss it. Instead of throwing it into a cup of coffee and a line, throw it into a total market/s&p 500 type fund. You’ve just saved $1150 (rounded up a quarter).
What does that get you?
If you start this habit at 22 and work until 65, assuming a 6% after-inflation-adjustment return, you’ve got $228K from making a small but meaningful choice.



Cigarettes are usually a better option for the concept, because people really do buy 365 packs a year and don’t skip days when compared to things like coffee or avocado toast. $5.21 per pack is the cheapest average price in the country. $10.53 is the highest. Median around $8. Using $8 and the same career because this hypothetical human who made the choice between an unnecessary habit and dedicating the (seemingly) trivial amount of money to retirement and waited until 22 to make the decision: $580K. 4% of which would be a tad over $20K, and $20K/year in retirement (trinity study, long retirement, never run out of money, almost always end up with more money than started, etc…can provide more detail for anyone suggesting I don’t understand it, but that’s as good a short summary as I’ve ever seen) is almost always a ‘step up’ from where someone was considering retiring (that’s a hell of a vacation a year more).


The point is that small decisions compound drastically.

But a $750K house? I don’t understand what your point in using this is. Outside of a couple HCOL areas, a home of that price is considered pretty luxurious. I don’t think anyone is arguing that everyone deserves luxuries accommodations. I don’t think anyone suggests the math of living in one of these areas is comparable to living in Many, LA. Housing is almost always a direct function of current earnings and job stability rather than good saving from any financial advice I’ve ever read. While they both deal with money, they’re just wildly different things.


Now, the final part:

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Also can you point me in the direction of those $500 beater cars that are always being talked about while you're at it?

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I have always struggled with car math. Or, really, I’ve always had unreliable transportation that left me stranded a few times a year, missed work, etc until I bought a new vehicle. I bought two used cars right out of college/med school. A Camry with 180K that I drove to about 230K. Lost a timing chain, blew a head gasket shortly after. The car was cheap ($2000), and over 4 years, I probably spent about that much in maintenance on it. The next one (bought on 2d notice because of the catastrophic loss of the Camry) was a gentler-used Ford Fusion around 100K miles. It actually didn’t break down, but I wound up putting about 50% of what I paid for the car into maintenance annually on it. At that point, I made the ‘bad’ financial decision of buying a new car and actually having a (sub-4%) note on it. It has been much more pleasurable to put the first 150,000 miles on my truck than the last 50,000 of either of those vehicles. That said, as my truck enters its ‘later years’ and turns ten soon, I’m tempted to find a gently-used Camry/accord sub 30k miles. But the price off doesn’t really justify not buying new. Heck, I just looked up certified used Toyota, and they want $17K for one with 100,000 miles on it. The traditional view of car ownership advice (buy 3 year old car and never sell it etc) has changed drastically in the last 5 years, and for the last decade has been a little overly optimistic in my opinion. It may still apply to uber-luxurious things whose values plummet rapidly, but the economics of ‘everyday cars’ has become financially crippling (maybe slight hyperbole) to anyone near median income who intends to live without significant debt. That said, holding onto a car is still the smart strategy. And people can/should feel free to finance one. But the smartest decision is to buy one, pay it off, but continue saving the value of the note of your last one until you can buy the next one in cash. It hurts way more to spend $40,000 in one day than $48,000 over 5 years for some reason. So it actually helps you spend less in a couple ways, oddly enough.




TLDR- $750K homes are probably going to remain reserved for those making $250K/y or more unless you’re willing to make very significant sacrifices in other areas. But anyone within the realm of median income has the opportunity to make smart decisions and retire a millionaire (and I am talking about having a million dollars. Not considering ‘millionaire’ to be the lavish rock-star lifestyle that so many people tend to think it is).

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I still don’t care about women’s basketball.

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I don’t either. But my wife had me into TikTok for a couple weeks, and somehow or other I keep getting Angel Reese lowlights and related videos, and they’re honestly the reason I haven’t deleted the app yet.

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felt like all the pressures of the world disappeared

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I had a professor describe benzodiazepines (Valium, Xanax, klonopin, Ativan, versed, etc) as “the best drug for anxiety. You don’t care about a thing in the world until it’s time to take another benzo. And that’s the problem with them.”

Synology with directory server.
Join computers to domain
Write login script to map the drives appropriately
Each user has their own login; it works on every computer.


You can install the RSAT on one desktop and use more advanced group policy features if desired.

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green eggs.

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I bought a Louisiana Grills kamado smoker about 5 years ago from Costco for around $400. I don’t really feel the need for a different grill anytime soon, still.


Things that have really changed it for me since I bought it:
1) kick ash basket and can (holds fuel different and changes/optimizes convection and makes it far easier to clean (if you don’t clean it regularly, it cooks way different)
2) woo ring

Even if buying a much ‘nicer’ kamado than mine, these upgrades really should be the standard equipment.


Recently got a fan-style temp controller. Only used once so far but plan on breaking it back out this weekend for a much longer/slower/lower cook. Not sure I like how ‘automated’ it is, because it already takes such little time/effort moving the vents.



I’ve got good friends and family with Masterbuilt Gravity, offset charcoal, pellet, propane vertical smoker, BGE…turns out they all can make good food. Don’t stress.