partial_accumen

You are 100% correct, EXCEPT for the emergency cash flow thing is backwards. Let’s say you have $20,000 for a car. If you put that whole $20,000 to buy a car, and an emergency comes up where you need $5,000, it will be much harder to get a loan to pay for that on the same terms as a car loan.

What you’re describing there to me is an anti-pattern. If you have to spend $20k to buy a car and you blow through your entire emergency fund to do it bringing your emergency fund to $0, you’ve already made a mistake. To use your numbers, if you have $20k and you need a car. You buy a $15k car. You have a fully paid off car, and an extra $5k in the bank for emergencies. Further, I still make a car payment, but to myself, every month that goes into savings to buy the next car outright. Its easy to do because I don’t have a real car payment to a bank. If money is ever tight, I can choose to not make my “car payment” to myself giving me more flexibility, liquidity, and less overall worry. A year after this purchase and even after the $5k emergency, I have $3900 positive in savings from my “car payment to myself” and still have a paid off car.

On the other hand, if you put $2,000 towards the car and borrow $18,000 at 3% for 5 years, that’s $325 a month, give or take depends on fees. Now you still have $18,000 free for emergencies, and you’re theoretically still making money at your job, so you can keep building that neat egg with interest.

Continue to play that out with a more likely bad case scenario. You start with $18k in the bank, and you’ve now leveraged your emergency fund to also cover car. You have your theoretical $5k emergency dip into it leaving you with $13k in the bank. A year later, you lose your job. Your car payment is still due, you have the remainder of the real car payments to make at $325/month to the bank. So now you’re drawing down your savings (and the money you would have paid off the car with) just to live on. You can try to sell the car, but its depreciated and you’re not going to get even enough money to pay off the bank note. You took on the worry of this and this risk everyday for five years to try to make about a measly ~$1k profit.

I’m not saying this is exactly how its going to happen, but in your scenario the possibility exists for this. In my “buy the car outright” it doesn’t. How often in life does everything go perfectly for you? My experience says, not often.

Obviously most people aren’t thinking this far ahead, but even if you have the cash, sometimes it actually makes sense to take out a loan.

Here’s where the “makes sense” becomes subjective. If your definition is absolute most cash value extracted, then yes.

However there’s a certain mental cost that you don’t escape by having to make sure you don’t get screwed on the initial loan terms, have the cash for the pay the installments, make sure the payments get to the lender, follow up on any customer services issues that occur over the life of the loan, navigate any life events which can restrict or restrain your cash flow being able to make payments (like layoff or illness), possibly liquidate holdings to free up cash to make the payment, keep track of the cash you would have spent on the car in an external account earning the best return you can get (with varying interest rates or market conditions).

…or you can pay for the car outright one time, and never think about those things again for that car possible for a decade or more. Today’s life is filled with many such mental burdens. The value in being able to simply never have this worry is very underrated in my opinion. This is one component to approach a care-free lifestyle while still maintaining your responsibilities and freedoms.

I think the online thing is about to start dropping.

The graph stops at 2020…the height of the pandemic where everyone was stuck in physical, but not virtual isolation.

I agree with you except my guess is that has already dropped if post-pandemic data was introduced.

“Donald Trump says to vote on January 5th. The liberal media is telling you you should vote in Nov instead. Who do you believe?” /s

Also, Hell has frozen over, Geraldo Rivera endorses Kamala Harris.

I was sure you were being sarcastic. You were not. source

“Ex-Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera endorses Kamala Harris over ‘sore loser’ Donald Trump”

“In a lengthy social media post, Rivera called Trump “a sore loser who cannot be trusted to honor the Constitution. This is why I am voting for Kamala Harris to be our 47th President.””

This is great when it applies, but there are lots of things in life that aren’t fun and no amount of effort will make you “learn to love the process”.

For most things like this its “hate the consequences of NOT doing the thing more than doing the thing.” The shortcoming of this is that you may not get all the way to the end goal because the consequences are fewer for getting part way or most of the way there.

Probably easy for them to maintain

Agreed. I made the maintenance comment as to why pizza vending machines aren’t more widespread.

I think you’re joking, but in case you aren’t, the answer is: no. Digestion takes a surprising amount of energy from your body. You can either use that energy for running OR digestion, not both at the same time. If you are trying to full speed sprint after eating a meal, your parasympathetic nervous system would assume you’ve decided that running at top speed is more important and shut down digestion freeing up energy to use your muscles for running. It might also decide that having the undigested food in you may be a risk, and cause you to throw up.

I would imagine the requirement would be high foot traffic. Food has an incredibly short shelf life compared to other vending machine contents. That pizza vending machine likely has to be serviced/refilled/cycled every 2 or 3 days. The cupcake ATM would be slightly longer. Most of the cupcake ATMs are attached to the cupcake bakeries, but allow customers to buy from the ATM outside of business hours or when the line of customer is really long inside.

Bro, do you even vend?

Pizza vending machine in Seattle:

Cupcake ATM in Beverly Hills (and 3 other cities I’ve been in including Orlando FL and Las Vegas):

If they’re indeed peacekeepers, then they failed their job miserably. As it stands, their only usefulness is being human shields for Hezbollah.

How many Hezbollah are you saying were in the UN base when Israeli tanks broke through the gates?

For this discussion, you’re really torturing the definition of a bus if you’re going to use BRT to mean busses. BRT does not meet most peoples definition of “city bus” as the conversation up to now has suggested.

I’m not saying BRT is better than light or heavy rail, but that should be a more common path for mass transit that is not utilized in the U

BRT would nearly always be a zero sum solution to make your statement true. You would have to subtract from current roads that accommodate traffic to create BRT to meet your metric. Land, espeically in dense cities is nearly always already allocated. If anything besides the zero sum BRT, light rail would likely be a better choice than BRT because it can subterranean or elevated with fewer building challenges/dangers.

I’m not saying BRT is better than light or heavy rail, but that should be a more common path for mass transit that is not utilized in the US

I’m interested in an example of a city you have a in mind that BRT would be a better choice than city busses or light rail.

He represents radical change, a concentration of government power in the executive branch. Sweeping changes under the guise of helping “real Americans” and harming the usual scapegoats (immigrants, gangs, socialists).

While we know Trump is a conman, I would understand this as a rationale for those that didn’t believe he was a conman, except we’ve already HAD 4 years of a Trump Presidency. If he was promising these great reforms for the little guy, why didn’t he do any of them in the 4 years he was in office? Why do people think this time will be different?

There also seems to be a stigma against buses, though, where people are more willing to take a train than a bus.

I’ll absolutely take a train over a bus if they are going to the same destination.

• train has fewer stops meaning train reaches the destination faster
• train has ultimate right-of-way, and doesn’t have to stop for pedestrians on the tracks, red lights, or other things
• trains in some cities, go under waterways meaning more direct routes than busses
• there’s more space inside trains and usually more choice of seats. Standing is also an option which isn’t allowed on most busses
• acceleration and deceleration are more predictable and comfortable
• nearly all metro light rail trains are powered by electricity, while many city busses remain diesel

Why are are even calling them UN peacekeepers if they prevent violence from one side, but allow it on the other?

Yeah that laundry list of excuses reads like “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” instead of legitimate concerns for the electoral process.

“The allegations included reports of paid FPF petition circulators signing petitions on behalf of deceased individuals, forging or misrepresenting elector signatures of petitions, using electors’ personal identifying information without consent, and perjury/false swearing,” the report claims, noting that “more than 20” of the 911,000 signatures were from now-deceased Floridians.

If I’m reading this data right more than 730 Floridians die every day of the year, and considering these petitions usually have to be have the signatures collected and filed months before the ballot, even assuming that whole process only took 2 months, that would mean 43,800 Floridians had died in that time. It would actually surprise me if the number of dead signatories to the ballot measure were as low as 20.

I’m guessing they’re probably familiar with large trucks so they knew what had to be done.

I know almost nothing about large trucks, but would assume I could just mash the brake pedal (probably with my hands because its faster than trying to climb into the occupied seat), and bring the truck to a stop. That would buy enough time for someone with large truck knowledge to secure it properly.

(I take personal issue with how sensitive they are these days, as they frequently find tumors that never would have actually caused a problem because they are very slow-growing, leading to over-treatment)

Is it your conclusion that that detriments of possible over-treatment on you personally are more dangerous than possible continued growth of an unchecked tumor?

The immediate left is the lane of oncoming traffic (you can see this late in the video looking ahead). To the left of the oncoming trafffic lane is a meter or so of grass, then a drop off to a ditch. You can see the left tall grass early in the video.