Circa 2012 my boomer parents had me job hunting in person AND hand-writing the cover letters. It got me two jobs so maybe it wasn’t the worst advice, but i would spend every day driving around and penning half a dozen letters for employers that, a lot of the time, weren’t even hiring.
Anyway, that (12 years ago) was the last job hunt i’ve ever done, it’s been nothing but networking and freelancing ever since
you wont be alone everyone finds a lifelong partner.
Calling that advice is like the opposite of a modern fortune cookie.
Don’t talk to strangers on the internet
Don’t believe anything you read on Wikipedia.
That infuriates me. “Oh but anyone can edit”. Yes, but see for how many seconds your stupid edit will last. It’s the single most rich and accurate encyclopedia humanity has seen, ffs.
Does anyone still say not to trust Wikipedia? They did so in the beginning and it certainly didn’t have to turn out trustworthy so that was good advice for a few years.
Now we see it’s the most trustworthy encyclopedia, and my kids’ teachers qualify it as “an encyclopedia is not an original source “, which is correct and a valuable distinction. They recommend it as a starting point but don’t allow citing it, as is correct.
People on Lemmy refer to it as NATOpedia.
Teachers should be using Wikipedia as an opportunity to teacher sketpism and following sources. I wouldn’t allow Wikipedia to be used as a cited source, but as a starting point for finding other sources on a topic.
My parents separated when I was really young, roughly 5 yrs old. As I grew up and had visitation with my dad he always drilled into me “women just want a man who can provide for them, in the end they all just want money.” Being young and obviously not knowing how crazy my dad was yet, I believed him for a long time.
Turns out when you treat people like they just want you for your money, that’s the only kind of people who will put up with you. Kinda self fulfilling. Found a nice lady now, happily married and caring about each other, not just money.
“When you first move into a house dont make any improvements for at least 6 months.”
I now see that its Terrible advice.
Haha, no.
When you first move in you see all the flaws that the previous owners got used to living with. Fix them while you’re still motivated to.
Why is it not good advice?
It’s meant to stop you from spending $30k on a kitchen renovation because you hate the way the cabinet doors open, not to fix health and safety issues.
I sold cabinets for a while, and at the time I lived in a little studio apartment, basically paycheck to paycheck.
People would drop $10-50k to have slightly nicer cabinets. It seemed so trivial to me.
But then again, I would spend $20 on pizza or whatever sometimes so I didn’t have to cook. I’m sure to someone starving, that would seem like a ridiculous use of resources.
It’s a strange feeling interacting regularly with people more wealthy than myself.
Very many home improvement tasks cause a bit of mess and having to move furniture around. If you don’t do them initially, it’s way harder to motivate yourself to do it when you’re fully moved in. Flooring/skirting/painting are the typical things you’ll want to do up front.
On the other hand, being able to re-create momentum when it has completely drained away is an excellent life skill to have.
Don’t make any improvements is a crazy proposition. But I agree with living in the place 6 months before doing anything drastic unless it is obvious. I live in a very old house. It took us a while to see the reasoning behind some of the features in our house. We were tempted to scrap anything that wasn’t typical in new constructions, but that would have been a waste of money.
I was happy saving up for a few months and observing the house to see where my money was best spent.
This is very true on codebases as well. There’s always this instinct to underestimate the value of what’s already been built.
I would argue that, rather than 6 months, you should really wait until after you’ve spent a winter in it. Lots of things that might seem odd during warmer months suddenly make sense when everything is cold, icy, and freezing.
Exactly this! We did not understand how our house operated as a system until we experienced it in both the freezing cold and humid summer. Most modern homes were designed to circulate air efficiently, but with a 250 year old home, things work differently.
For example, the wood burning stove was put in that place for a reason, and although it might complicate the couch/tv placement, the benefits of a properly placed heat source outweigh the feng shui of the room.
“If you love something set it free, if it comes back it’s meant to be.” Nearly cost me the best relationship of my life because I was a dumb, impressionable kid that believed in wise sounding words. If you love something, hold on to it. Work for it. Don’t let it go just to “see if it comes back”.
Same could probably be said for just about any seemingly wise sounding sayings.
I think it’s more about control than sending what you love away.
“Set it free” means let your love interest choose to stay or leave on their own, don’t try to keep them caged.
Depending on what you mean, it’s possible that your love you regret letting go of wouldn’t have lasted even if you had held it and fought.
Though if you mean you took that saying and thought it meant you needed to push your love away to see if they returned, then yeah, that’s not a great strategy.
Could have also meant just not working to maintain it. “Let it go” could (foolishly IMO) mean “stop feeding it”.
Yeah, the latter is how it was explained to me. Like, literally break up with the person you love to see if they’ll fight for you to take them back. Or push them away and wait a few years to see if they magically reenter your life or something. Crazy, I think some people believe they live in a hallmark movie
I installed a gravitic emitter in my belt that makes it feel like she has to walk uphill to approach me. Let’s see just how much she loves me, and if it’s statistically significant in its difference between how much she loves approaching the cat.
Ah fuck, that’s a rough lesson to learn the hard way. Like so obvious in hindsight, but if you needed to learn it, you needed to learn it before you could see that.
You can always find it cheaper on Ebay.
This is actually somewhat true again now that Amazon has gone full monopoly abuse, but for a while Ebay was nothing but 1:1 with Amazon sellers and a serious lack of auctions.
Although you can go much lower with Ali Express and Temu, albeit with risk invovled.
I thought eBay in this context meant second hand? Because here’s the thing: i think second hand means you save a lot of money but you get less choice and less convenience; but platforms are getting good now so both of these factors are mitigated.
Anyway, eBay being 1:1 with Amazon is good enough for me, and i agree that AliExpress in particular is now better than Amazon in terms of price and choice. I don’t even know how risky it really is, they can refun orders right?
Just as casual conversation, what items or categories of goods do you usually deal with? Just wondering, as I myself have noticed “the boat” rocking back and forth between different online buying options for years. I live a pretty minimalist life now (used to be heavy tech) so I don’t buy much anymore and am pretty out of the loop now.
Effectively ALL of what I was told about what makes a satisfying and successful life. I was told the right thing to do is work hard, go to school, get a good stable job, get married, settle down, have kids, buy a house, own several depreciating assets.
Life is about being happy. Nothing else. Do what makes you happy, because that car, vacation, or other piece of consumer shit won’t. Nor will living by scripts somebody else wrote for you.
I had my house paid off at 30 and was traveling 5-6 times a year. High-level in the gaming, lottery and promotions industries. Misery. Now I have a humble life and I paint and craft things and I go dancing. And I’m happy. I could pick up the tools again and make a highly successful Steam game, but I won’t. I already proved my point in my career and creative output, and I don’t want to anymore.
Bro, won in life, now doing sidequests
I gave everything away and now I live a simple life where I volunteer, work at crisis shelters, do recovery mentorship, housing outreach and other things. I am happy and I do not care about the trappings of the material world anymore. I chased the hologram until I caught it and discovered its true nature.
Super curious here.
What game did you make?
I made several hundred games over my 20+ year career. I started making games for the world’s first touchscreen internet-enabled kiosks, the Playdium arcade in Toronto, etc. Moved onto online game development as senior dev for GameLoft.com, made the first online pari-mutuel gaming system, introduced online lottery technology to the world’s “Big 3” lotto companies. Made the first 3D tennis game. Honestly too much to even discuss as I could go on for hundreds of pages. Most people who are older than 30 have played my games and wouldn’t know it.
I’m older than 30.
Probably played one of your games.
It’s such a nutty claim for me to make… but I really believe any person on the Web circa 97-2005 and was involved in any kind of Web-based gaming has directly played at least one. Shockwave, Flash, Facebook no difference.
If you played any kind of web- or Internet-enabled, State-run lottery product anywhere in the world between 2010-2015 I would bet my actual life. And since the games I made were all localized for international audiences they were world-wide!
If you’ve been on a Riverboat Casino in the past 2 decades you’ve 100% played because I ran the game studio that made the games for a major supplier of riverboat Video Lottery Terminal games.
Holy shit… I never actually stopped and realized how many lives my crappy games touched…
This reminds me of this meme, I saw one time :
I agree, but i also get a chuckle out of getting the meme wrong on purpose: this man held the same job title for 21 years, but something about being Principal Performance Architect sucked so much that he retired within a year and became a goose farmer.
I’m happy for you. :)
“Fully empty your battery before charging it up again, it increases the lifespan of the battery.”
This was true before lithium-ion batteries became the norm. But for lithium-ion batteries, the opposite holds.
Remembering which of my devices are old method charging and which are new method is a pain.
I have several camping lamps from like 20 years ago that I almost threw out because they weren’t holding charge anymore, before I remembered to be fully draining the batteries and recharging them once a month. They work like new now practically.
What’s the opposite of “full empty your battery before charging it again?”
Don’t let it uncharge fully. You ideally want to stay in the 30-70% range as much as possible.
From time to time you want to let the battery go from 100% to shutting off, so the charging circuit can calibrate the reported capacity
If you’re a quiet dedicated employee your value will be recognized and rewarded.
Yeah, that doesn’t work well anymore. Gotta be a noisy dedicated worker, and be willing to move jobs a few times to start seeing the rewards
rewards mostly come from job hopping. Raises at every place I’ve worked arent callibrated to inflation, so your 4% raise that the boss thinks is so great is closer to 0-1%/
I put that into practice and just got promoted last Halloween! Let people know that you’re smart and interested in how your job works.
~2004. My highschool civics teacher told the class that real estate was always a good investment because it only went up. I didn’t really trust him at the time though.
I mean, if you had money at the time and bought a house in one of the larger cities or their suburbs, you would probably be loaded by now, even though you would regret it for about 5 years after the crash
You have to be loaded to be loaded? Got it.
This “teacher” also would complain about wealth fare queens who had children just to claim more benefits, that the best thing that could happen to a country is to be invaded by the US because they’ll rebuild afterwards among other things and that every Union but teacher’s Unions were obsolete today.
Real estate can be a good investment, even pre 2008 crash. What can be dangerous is over leveraging. A primary residence isn’t really an investment, still worth buying though.
He was just echoing the same sentiment lead to all those house flippers. He was a wealth of conservative BS and that was just one of his thinly veiled prosperity gospel moments.
he was a terrible teacher.
the wealthy have always considered real estate to be a liability that requires constant upkeep. they are money pits.
this is why they truly own nothing but physical assets(gold, paintings,etc) and leverage any liquidity on acquiring assets.
The wealthy are buying up properties either to rent out or if they’re Chinese, to move their wealth to places their government can’t take it from. They absolutely own propriety, but not with the intent to flip.
Working hard will get you far.
This works as long as you apply some level of thought to it. Digging a ditch with a spoon is hard work, it’s unlikely to help you get anywhere.
Depends. For someone else? Maybe not. On yourself? Definitely.
Work hard studying and exercising. Self improvement I’d important, and its not related to job opportunities, but rather mastering the art of living.
Its always best to compromise
“In a negotiation about wearing black vs. brown shoes, compromise is wearing two different colored shoes. Nobody gets what they want and one of you ends up looking like an idiot.”
Paraphrased from memory from a book called “Never Split the Difference: Negotiate as if Your Life Depends on it”
Go to a four year college so you can get the best jobs.
Skip the line with a blue badge at amazon (not financial advice)
Oh wow that’s a good one! There was a time where it worked out great the vast majority of the time. Not so much now, definitely aged like milk
Nah, that advice is still correct. The 4-year degree provides a huge benefit over not having it.
It’s just that a lot of people don’t realize just how much shittier not having a degree in 2024 is compared to not having a degree in 1974.
So while the baseline has gotten worse, and the actual benefit of college has shrunk, it’s still easily worth the 4 year commitment and the tuition/opportunity cost.
There’s also a lot of things that people ignored from this advice. No one said get literally any degree, art majors have been the source of unemployment jokes since before I was born. No one also said take 5-7 years or more to get the degree either.
Right now trade schools are actually providing a better cost to income ratio than college.
It’s anecdotal but my friends in the Boston area were all making 120-150 in salary plus bonus before I was even out of school and I started in software at 65k and didn’t break into that level for another 4 years. Now I make 230 but they’ve all got houses and decked out retirement funds from having that good money when they were much younger. That extra 20-30k/yr in 401k and IRA funds with 5-6 years more growth time in the market isn’t something to shake a stick at.
Now I make 230
Yeah the break even point is like the early 30’s, even among people who are killing it in either path.10 years of $100k+ in your 20’s won’t be able to build up enough of a buffer against $200k+ after 30, when retirement ages are around 60.
It’s actually harrowing how little I have in retirement savings compared to them. I spent the first 6 years of my career paying off loans and only contributing up to my employers match. I was illiquid for multiple large economic events while they had cash laying around. They could buy cars when interest was zero. They had a house to refi when interest was zero. I feel like a millennial describing boomers but these are guys in their 30s who went to trade school.
For me to catch up I have to put money almost entirely in taxable accounts where their money and returns are shielded from taxes. They were actually able to use a Roth for many years where I was only real able to max one out for two years before my promotion put me out of eligibility.
The earlier you are in a market, the better off you are and trades put you into the market almost 10 years earlier than someone taking 4 years of college and then having 4-6 years of loan payments
Counter-point: not everyone is cut out for a four-year degree*. Some people are better suited for trade schools. My wife worked at a university and saw a number of students that were attending just because family wanted them to, but their heart wasn’t in it. Often they’d drop out with student debt and no degree to show for it.
*or at least when they’re young
a number of students that were attending just because family wanted them to, but their heart wasn’t in it
There are probably an even higher percentage of those in trade schools or entry level trades roles. You can’t compare the worst outcomes in one category with the best outcomes in another, and should instead compare medians.
The 4-year degree provides a huge benefit over not having it.
For average lifetime earnings.
So for some it may not provide a big help.
