Early Retirement Extreme Forums

With "write off" do you mean tax advantages? As far as I know, tax advantages allow you to buy more car per dollar, but it still takes more dollars to buy a more expensive car. Yes. There’s something called section 179 equipment deduction in the US for small businesses. I guess if you’re ...

We will see how long this lasts. I’ve been shocked at the average price of newly purchased cars. In prior years it was driven by low interest rates but not anymore. Now it looks like big truck and SUV purchases are being used for business write offs. That’s what my neighbors seem to be doing. $80,00...

Yeah I hear Washington state has no smog check. My friends there drive their beat up cars around with Check Engine lights lit. Some friends in LA register their custom cars there to evade emissions requirements. IIRC They have some kind of crazy system where they take the car to WA and get tags, the...

The Prius gen2 looks like a very robust car. The failure modes are well understood and manageable. They are getting old and you have to look hard to find ones that aren’t consumed. The catalyst issue is interesting. I think that it is not as hot now since the price of the catalytic metals has plumme...

Those are good vehicles but there are some years in there that have issues. Some of the 4 cyl Toyotas have oil consumption problems that can rear their ugly heads as used cars. The early 2000s civics have a few years with poorly designed head gaskets that blow. A few years of F150s have poorly desig...

Huh, I got stuck in a family reunion all weekend and missed all the fun here. Great tips here. I do not recommend my diesel Mercedes cars here ever. They are a hobby that fits me quite well. The fixes I sometimes show demonstrate repairs that can be done at home to save money on any car though. That...

Missed a few days. Glad you solved the car issues. I had terminal on my Accord corrode badly a few years ago. I bought one of the clamp on ends from the auto parts store and fixed it. The thing to understand about starting is the currents are so high that it doesn’t take much resistance on a bad con...

Exit tax is a really cool concept. I’ve never looked at things this way but somebody recently explained the concept to me. Made a lot of sense. You can get out of all kinds of things if you’re willing to pay a one time penalty fee. The latest chapter of this story is my sister retired. Dad passed a ...

Always fun to read your updates. Man if I had Vevor when I was young. I just bought a Vevor AC hose crimper a few months ago on Aliexpress. Outstanding tool for $60.

Good to hear the log covid isn’t a permanent thing.

Unfortunately, beyond my current semi-decrepit/chubby state of being, my own ability to make hay through "play" is seriously limited by my strong tendency towards also actually saying things such as @7w sounds like an excuse to me. If I wanted to try this I’d just put a price on it and se...

This was the lady. I recall reading an interview she gave to the SJ Mercury while on lunch break…during the dot com bubble. The interview really got into the male vulnerability thing and how she played it.

The Dot.com Call Girl: A Silicon Valley Escort's Memoir Paperback – February 15, 2008

I wasn’t being terribly clear about the sick part. I feel people are free to get off in any way they like as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. What I meant is the whole cycle. Berating your subordinates. Feeling guilty. Then finding a sex worker to beat you up so you feel better. How about just ap...

@7w wow. That is an interesting story. Thanks for sharing. I’ll have to try to dig up the articles from the Silicon Valley call girl. My recollection was she was the other end of the spectrum of the dominance femme. She said things like these guys were just a bunch of emotional little boys inside an...

Also the fact that a lot of high IQ folk tend towards being drop-outs. For instance, one of my uncles was a typical highly radical1960s drop-out. He was part of one of the more dangerous anti- Vietnam War groups organized around a major university. Ugh. Reminds me of stories of the Weathermen. Kind...

Estimates of annual loses due to long COVID in the US is in the USD250B/yr range. (About 1% of GDP). That's people who are out of the labor force either full time or part time. This is data. But it’s all muddied up. For example an employer could have used the pandemic to clean house and mid career ...

@7w reminds me how a lot of ultra high IQ end up in mental hospitals or locked down in think tanks. There are some common endgames for really smart people. I worked at HP Labs which was founded by Bernard Oliver. One of Claude Shannon’s playmates at Bell. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard recruited him ...

Has the economy collapsed? If we have had a step function decline in IQ is there some kind of system response that we can readily observe? I’m still not convinced IQ is a great predictor of say GDP. It’s a stretch. I look out my window and people seem as dumb as they were pre pandemic. Same idiocy M...

From what you wrote elsewhere, they also look down on you. Perhaps it's a matter of different value systems - you value what you have and don't value what they have, and vice versa? Maybe everyone's just happy where they are? They are happy till they meet me and try to compete which is what we were...

Traditional individual intelligence testing loads pretty heavily on processing speed- This is a great point. Reminds me of my family. They’re super student high IQ overachiever types. But like most valedictorians they turned out to be duds in the long game. Fifty years later looking at the long gam...

The brain is plastic. I watched my father, grandfather and uncle recover from strokes and creuzfeldt-Jakob disease. In each case they all had severe damage to their brains and they managed to get back skills like reading, talking and walking. It took a year but they were very persistent about exerci...