What brief message would you send yourself 5 years ago?
 

Maybe there is a better way of phrasing that.

My ex was still alive, but my dad wasn't. Unless I tried to help her buy a car again I don't have any idea what would keep her alive.

How much is a life worth?

I was seeing clients in the Phoenix area. My Accord blew a tire driving to Show Low and I needed to replace a bunch of stuff, but I did so for $200.

I started having problems with my Civic overheating.

I don't think my grill block helped.

I replaced the radiator fan, but I do think the radiator was bad, so maybe "Remove the grill block and replace the radiator when Chorizo starts overheating?"

I shouldn't have blown the head gasket in 2018 and I might still be driving that car, although she had 222,000 miles in 2018.

With car problems with 2 cars I accepted the full-time job in Page, which lasted 7.5 months.

Maybe if I opened my own agency 5 years ago that would have worked out better than Page.

I turn 43 in a couple of months and I still expect to be single, underemployed, and living with Mom.

I cannot think of anything that would make a significant difference.

If I reenlisted for a year at a time until I finally got accepted into grad school I would still be in--and undoubtedly dozens of pounds lighter.

Would I still be a Specialist? :)

That would have yielded another couple of thousand a year.

As frustrating as all of this has been, none of this is worth selling out a friend, but what about buying Gamestop for $4 in late July of 2020 and selling for $300+ 1/27/2021?

If I could only put together $1,000 it would become $75,000 in 6 months.

Wayfair went from $39.67 5 years ago to $169.83 on 3/1/2019, but then dropped to $46.30 on 3/13/2020, although it was well over $200 in late July of 2020.

Something must have spiked between 3/1/2019 and 3/13/2020, as well as between 3/13/2020 and late July of 2020, but let's stop here.

If I invested $250 in Wayfair 5 years ago it would become $1,070.27. If I sold and then bought again it would become $5,311.82.

If I put that into Gamestop it would become $475,155.58, but could I fit that in a brief message, and would younger me understand it?

Which leaves only one option: "Always support your car on concrete pier blocks and wood when working on gravel."

Buy Bitcoin, then sell it 4.5 years later.

There's a story that goes "Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water; after enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water."

Five years ago was what 2015? It's all a blur. The last few days though.... The XFi left rear was going flat over the weekend, so on Monday I aired it up and drove to Big B Tires, but they were closed on Monday's for staffing issues. Tuesday morning an air hose and fitting had gone down some quantum wormhole and I tried two or three places to but a used replacement.

So today I went to Harbor Freight and got 28 pieces for $14, including the ones it turned out I also needed; aired up the tire, and drove back to Big B. It turned out the tire was fine but the old valve stem was leaking so :thumbup: They asked for $20, I showed all I had was $18 and they let me out the door. So so far, drove for 10 months while I paid of the $1000, $200 in tires maybe a set of wiper blades and an $18 valve stem.

I never found a way out of the rat race, and I don't envy people in it today. The trick is to find something everyone wants and provide it. I picked low-cost energy-efficient housing but in 1980 no one wanted it. Now all I can find is people who are willing to talk about it.

Why can't I just let it go?

Sunk cost fallacy.

You might not have been wrong, except you were. Making something awesome is half the problem, with marketing the other half.

As you correctly stated, you have to find something everyone [would] want and provide it. These days you don't even need to find a majority market, but even an unserved niche.

Perhaps that's how trikes will soldier on.

The way to move on is to continue generating ideas. Let those that don't stick fade to the background, and those that do move forward.

When I looked up bitcoin's value Google showed it increasing something like 62x. It increased 10x between the start and when Gamestop was $4, so I started writing that you could put $1,000 in bitcoin, and sell it when it hit $10,000. I was doing this on my phone and I lost everything before I could suggest then putting it in Gamestop and turning it into $750,000.

However, Gamestop grew faster than bitcoin before Bitcoin's next peak and bitcoin was down when Gamestop peaked, so if you sold the latter at $325 you could buy bitcoin at $34,361.50.

Bitcoin then proceeded to hit $61,283.80 on 3/12/2021, while Gamestop dropped, so you could have turned $750,000 into $1,337,626.41.

Asking Google for the best stock of 2021, Nvidia went from $128.56 to $326.76 on 11/30/2021, a 254.2% increase, which would theoretically turn $1.3M into $3,399,835.14.

Aww man! Not even $4 Million?! :D

I still don't know what message I would send back. "Buy bitcoin, sell on 7/31/2020, and buy GME. Sell on 1/27/2021 and buy bitcoin again. Sell on 3/12/2021 and buy NVDA, selling on 11/30/2021."

Does that count as brief? :)

It is crazy to think that I could have had a 4,000x return in 5 years if I just knew what to do when--you know, the exact opposite of reality! :D

I honestly don't know if I could have put together $1,000 back then, but maybe I could have told myself "reenlist for a year at a time and invest all Guard pay," which wouldn't have the financial results that "Do Uber Eats 20 hours a week" would, but far less stress! :)

I believe that I mentioned earning an extra couple hundred a year in the Guard. GoArmy.com says that pay is $5,940.90, but I always ended up missing sessions, and some clients dropped me when I went off to Super Happy Fun Camp.

If I did Uber Eats for 20 hours a week and made $10 hourly after expenses and destroying my Hondas, that would be $200 a week, and $10k annually, but I would probably eat worse, and exercise less, while if I were in my fourteenth year of service I would weigh 214 pounds or less--at least twice a year.

The last time I checked I was almost 40 pounds heavier than that.

I knew about Bitcoin back when it was like 50 cents. If I had put a couple hundred bucks in I'd have like $10M now. The thing is, Bitcoin is worthless and I realized it back then and would rather keep my couple hundred bucks than to not have it. I just got the timing wrong. Zero is coming, just not yet.

While I wouldn't refuse a boatload of cash, I'd rather come by it from producing something of value instead of from everyone else being poorer to make me rich. Another reason why my Lotto excitement would be much more subdued than the typical person. Wouldn't make me happy knowing I'm rich because low income people are fools with their money.

Speaking of which, I saw a lady buying Pepsi at Safeway the other day, and the clerk said the sale allows her to get 2 more for free. She didn't seem to care about the free pop, but allowed the clerk to leave the checkstand to get 2 more for her anyway. Then I saw her paying with food stamps. That's why she didn't care, because it was free anyhow, and that's why she's buying name brand instead of the cheaper knock-off brand. Then I saw her plugging money into the scratch off machine. I'm sure if she won all of her financial problems would be permanently solved :rolleyes:

Alternative way out of the rat race:

1. Live below means
2. Start investing early
3. Pick basic low cost mutual funds
4. Don't freak out and sell when the market drops
5. Wait for compounding interest to work its magic
6. Retire

That was the plan my wife and I zeroed in at at 25. The original goal was retire at 40. We missed it by a few years but unless the economy tanks in the next few years we will retire at 45.

"Money doesn't buy happiness, but it is a lot more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle"--John Wayne, allegedly.

This is like Homer's brain explaining to him that money can be exchanged for goods and services.

I could help far more people with almost $4M than [checks wallet] lint.

Other people's problems are rarely helped with money.

I might seriously target retirement at 50. My youngest (so far) would be 10.

BTW- I don't want to retire and do nothing, but instead have the freedom to work on what I want. Start a business or something.

Want to build tiny houses?

I had a wife that was working against me rather than with me, and I live below my means today.

If I could send a message back to 1980 it would be don't get involved with exotic dancers.

LOL

Women have a way of making men forget about long-term consequence.

I'd build tiny homes if I had a unique thought that made them somehow vastly superior to what already exists. I don't want to copy what others are doing, because then the best I can hope for is to be as good as them.

I want to do the things that I stand a chance of doing better than anyone else. That's where the most enjoyment is to be found, and the biggest benefit to society.

...if only I could get paid to tell people how their ideas are dumb.:thumbup:

Stick to boring dancers?

That is funny, it seems like whenever people try to provide goods they just go to waste. Here is a whole list of the most common items that well-intentioned people send after a disaster, which need to be warehoused, inspected, sorted, distributed, and half of it is thrown away.

In the end we may have caused as much of a problem as we helped.

However, if we donate money to the Red Cross, the Humane Society, or another reputable charity, they can order exactly what they need, and then distribute it when it arrives.

10 Worst Things to Donate After a Disaster

Perfect is the enemy of good. If run-of-the-mill tiny houses are better than what people have now, then they might be perfect for them for now.

I'm not saying they aren't worth building, only that there is already a market for it that is satisfied. If I could improve how things are done somehow, that would expand the market.

I wouldn't build tiny houses for the same reason I wouldn't open a bakery. I know nothing about it, and there's already experts doing it better than I can.

If I had some idea to revolutionize baking, I'd jump in.

... I had looked into starting a taxi cab business back when everyone was running Caprices. I was going to run a fleet of Priuses. Good thing I didn't do that because the industry quickly switched to them, and then Uber killed the industry.

My dream job is bartender, so maybe I'll do that in retirement.

Maybe where you live you couldn't do better than existing bakeries, but around here we just have Safeway, and Safeway hardly had any fresh bread for a while because they don't make their own dough, so how fresh is it?

Walmart is much further away, I rarely like their baked goods as much as Safeway, and they do not even make bagels, the main fresh bread product we buy regularly.

Basha's is half an hour away and does sell bagels, but not with sesame seeds, which are my brother's favorite.

I actually looked up a recipe and bought the ingredients, but Safeway finally got their dough and started making bagels, although there is no guarantee that we will always be able to find some.

I worked in a bakery for a couple of months and got to the point where I saw the order for x batches of wheat, y batches of white, z batches of mixed, and then Dr. Seuss letters of other loaves we made each morning. I knew exactly how many pounds of which ingredient we needed, threw everything into the mixer, then into proofing bins which are indistinguishable from white garbage cans.

Then the rest of the bakers showed up when it was time to divide the dough, put it in pans, and bake it.

It doesn't take long to learn how to professionally bake bread. I did it. My problem was my pesky memory. Twice I forgot some ingredient and the dough didn't rise, which meant that when people came in asking for it we needed to ask them to return later.

I always try to learn from my mistakes and I realized that I could just glance into the mixer before running it, verify that I had sugar, salt, flour, yeast, and whatever else, and I was good to go, but I wasn't given a third strike.

I wasn't given a chance to have a third strike and Boss only had me open so he didn't need to wake up early. Nobody liked me and nobody wanted me there. He laid me off, except despite having been a manager for 10 years, he wasn't man enough to actually do it, so I needed to say it for him.

I don't know that there is room for a bakery in your area. Mine has room for improvement, but bakeries have come and gone. I don't know why. Was it supply and demand, advertising, salesmanship, or something else?

I read about a bakery that closed down just because the owner had health problems.

Was Baker a better baker than other bakers in the area?

I don't have any idea, but he made tons of mistakes, and his wife was terrible at business and with people, didn't recognize any of her own faults, and insisted on being in charge of everything.

After I was laid off I went to an established and well-known bakery a mile away and they had five times the variety on the shelf, but also sold sandwiches and other meals.

I don't have any idea how Baker stayed in business. He kept saying that he was losing money and I was doing everything I could on my own time to keep him from overworking himself, but apparently they are still around, and now they are making sandwiches.

Maybe he wasn't the best baker in the area, but he probably believed he was, and I think that more than anything he wanted to bake, so if that is what you want to do, and you find the right people to help you start your business right, there is no reason that you couldn't do all right.

I am sure that most places that could support a bakery already have one, but how accessible are tiny houses?

If I wanted one, would I find a lot and order a kit, a shed kit that I convert into a cabin or what?

How would I finance it?

I don't know how much demand there is for tiny houses, just that there is a great deal of room for improvement.

My client connected almost 20 minutes early or I would edit that more.

Falsify this: 3x10 mortise and tenoned rectangular frame with half-circle cutouts and the axles U-bolted directly to it. Shepherd/gypsy layout with glu-lam cruck frame with dormers. The subfloor would be Trex composite, so it will never rot out.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/member-f...e-schooner.jpg

And then Arcimoto robovalets will kill Uber.

I'm not looking to retire and do nothing either - that sounds horrible. We plan to travel full time. Who knows, maybe will we tire of exploring the world but I plan to give it a go.

I'm not retired, I'm 'between gigs' (for a decade now).

My plan was to hoard projects and materials and now I'm winnowing them. Today I'm knocking down old chipboard shelving to dispose of.

....still got a ways to go. :)

I've got a completely torn down DJI Spark drone on my desk (didn't realize motors had to be removed, 32 desolder/solder connections).

I've got 2 torn down Leaf EVSEs (chargers) on my floor because I don't have the right size ring terminals to convert to level 2.

Still have batteries and discharger on my floor from last nights experiment to determine capacity of 40v batteries.

Plex just finished rebuilding after 4 days of processing metadata.

Various LiFePO4 cells awaiting construction into a battery pack.

These are just the projects sitting in my 10x10 office. Every other room holds unfinished projects.

Date night tonight, so none of these will be finished today.

Honestly, I consider myself "Mostly retired," I just need to maintain 8-10 clients for the rest of my life.

You could say that I am on a fixed income, but it isn't consistent. Mom asked me how much I brought home a week and it took a couple of hours to pull everything, then tabulate and graph.

She never looked at it.

At least I know exactly how well I'm not doing.

Considering they are illegal in 90% of jurisdictions they must be better or the man wouldn’t ban them.

Gotta get in the market of converting spent stronger than steel windmill blades into building materials

Certify as a 35ft R-license park model.

I believe it was Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change that had a chapter titled Why You Can't Make A Piano From B-52 Wing Struts. The product has to be designed for reuse. His example was a Heineken bottle that could be reused as a glass brick.

https://inhabitat.com/files/wobo_5.jpg
https://inhabitat.com/files/wobo_5.jpg

The man doesn't care, it's the prejudicial nimby's that worry about "property values" that do, then whine excessively to the city officials until they get what they want. BTDTMO

Those blades are pretty much garbage, not worth even the recycling value of the salvage materials in them. Might be stronger than a 2x4 or a sheet of 1/2" mushboard, though. Sticking them together and making the subsequent structure waterproof would be expensive, getting them somewhere else would be supremely pricey, processing them onsite to fit standard shipping requires big exotic equipment like removing a middle apartment in a 20 story complex. They arent flat or straight to commercial standards anywhere.

Like JSH, my retirement plans were pretty much in place, lifestyle altered. Only thing I would do differently would be relocate to somewhere less covid infested. Couple of million more doesn't make me any difference, just leaves more for the kids to inherit.

No need to stick them to anything at 20’ wide by 30’+ long…

Just chop them into 30’+ sections and set them in a circle building a pilon house
Composite Blades are very high R value, fill vertical gaps with custom cut, wood, glass, transparent plastic, spray foam, cement, whatever your fancy, leave the roof with a high overhang, waterproofing no longer critical insulation only required in the gaps formed by the twisting spires.
Considering the full blades will support about 10 ton each in compression at the base (even at their reduced strength) there should be little issue using them in place of as you said 2x4’s except they are 10-40’ wide instead of 4”
If 10 ton isn’t enough they are hollow, run some long strips of rebar and fill with cement , the fiberglass blade skin is anywhere from r20-r60 depending on how thick and close to the base you are

Outdoor non-waterproof park enclosures would likely be well served by a polin structure with a roof.

My thought was set in the ground as pillons they would make excellent highway barriers and walls in place of that ugly ass Rotted brown crap that is along every city bound highway

'Pylons'?

duckduckgo.com/?q=north+light+sawtooth+roof&iax=images&ia=images, else a ginormous teepee.

You Must Construct Additional Pylons!

I DDG'd for a reference and found Tensegrity Wiki*. :thumbup: A reference for Tensegrity Mast

https://tensegritywiki.com/wiki/Mast

https://static.miraheze.org/tensegri.../59/Tower2.jpg

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster 'anti-prism-based spiral mast' of these.


*Hosted by Miraheze.org, along with apparently 5000 others. See https://en.everybodywiki.com/Miraheze Another of those backwaters of Internet?

How about 100 to even 300 + ft for the new ones? 20 years ago, the 1mw Zond turbines were 747 wing spans and what kind of saw has a 20ft by 10ft throat, cuts composite, steel, and whatever filler they use nowadays? Never saw a carbide tooth band saw. Maybe diamond grit.

My understanding is the brown crap is designed to destroy itself sequentially instead of presenting a solid impact like a solid concrete barrier. Something about energy dissipation. High energy destruction and composite construction don't play together well. Can you say high speed composite death rain?

Frickin' lasers.

What makes a "FRICKIN" different from a conventional laser? Depth of focus I assume. citation, please

There was a segment on the news where some crews reinforce the bolts attaching guard rails to the posts, but those are actually supposed to give way after a certain amount of force, and if they don't they could be catastrophic.

No high-speed composite death rain, more like hitting a solid concrete barrier.

However, that might be preferable to slowly going over a cliff.

Fun. I went to post that and it saidI didn't have a back button!

I finally found it, right next to the Any key.

Here in Arizona we have a freaking astronaut for a senator. I don't know where I saw "Freaking astronaut," but now I feel compelled to mention it whenever it comes up.

https://www.quirkbooks.com/sites/def...s%20sharks.jpg
https://www.quirkbooks.com/sites/def...s%20sharks.jpg

Oh frickin includes sharks. Now I understand

How do they make them?

We have access stuff that will cut big where I work,
waterjet with no bottom shrouding is generally the easiest and most dangerous for on site.

Composites aren’t that difficult to cut, just slow and potentially costly, I’ve even seen that you can split composites in certain directions like a log splitter

The trouble is that commercial interest don’t want to just cut the material they want to shred it into small wood chip or smaller pieces to recycle which would be extraordinarily energy intensive and expensive

Haven't been involved for 20 years, but back then they were made like a Rutan moldless aircraft.

I can't imagine a mold for building them today, but they could

Yeah they are just “airplane wings” and get tossed at 80% strength

There have already been a couple “artistic” uses of segments of the windmills for bicycle lean tos and solar panel mounts but normally they just use the center body segments

If we could send them to Mexico they would find uses for them.

Never said they were useless, just that the newer stuff isn't flat, smooth and lump free like they look on tv and a huge PITA to seal. Somebody built a roof from a 7x7 series airplane.

Mexico had some that ought to be scrap by now but I suspect they figured out how to delay obsolescence

If you don’t care about “catastrophic failure “ like the Aricebo dish collapse you just let the run until they break.

Given they are built for hurricanes there is little reason not to run these things in non-human accessible areas until failure

Might get an extra 20 years out of one if high winds don’t catch it wrong, possibly longer but the drivetrain needs maintenance and repair occasionally so it would be a liability any time a maintenance crew goes in

And of coarse the human explorer dumbasses will probably get crushed by one at some point as well

I took a puddle jumper to a couple islands in Nicaragua, and the plane was from something like 1950. After looking at the flight hours, I had calculated the plane would need to have flown for 8 hrs a day, every day, to accrue that many hours. Talk about ROI.

Aircraft generally are required to be disassembled and fixed every so often, so moving parts aren't that old. Spars and skins don't normally fail. 30,000 hrs isn't uncommon.

You can yaw a turbine 90 degrees to the wind which derates the loading significantly and takes a couple of minutes and there's a huge blade brake for maintenance

The lightning strikes taking out a blade was survivable for the tower, not so much for the transmission or hub. The after fire wasn't survivable however. My wife jokes about thunderstorms and wind farms: "Pick me, pick me, pick me!"

Hey OP, sorry to necro, but this spawned a relevant discussion to #1, not necessarily to #2-#39, though:
https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1664780947

It's a different premise--unless you are 11--instead of going back 5 years you would go back to when you were 6, which brings up my first question of time travel:

Do you Quantum-Leap yourself or is this more like "Back to the Future?"

If you Quantum-Leap yourself you would only be able to bring your memories. If I go back 5-6 years I could [hopefully] memorize [and remember] those trades I specified in #1, but two things:

Why wait until I am 37 to save the world with $100B?I take care of things because I try to be responsible, not because I want money, but you can do good things with money.

There would be a huge difference between going back to 1985 when I was six and to 2016 when I was already technically middle-aged, but the fun part is that the weirdos were going back further:Do you have any idea how much information this is, ignoring what I figured out for the last 5 years?

IBM had a low of $5.13 in 1980 and high of $12.02 in 1986. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...-price-history

"Circuit City’s shares, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange, increased more than 8,100% during the 1980s, from an adjusted-for-splits
price of 26 cents a share at the beginning of the decade to $21.75 on Friday." http://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...-73-story.html

Dell went from $5.50 in 1990 to $51 in 2000--but stocks split so much that 1 stock became 96: https://www.1stock1.com/1stock1_172.htm

Apple had a low of 20¢ in 2003 and high of $9.92 in 2010. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/c...-price-history

I did the math, but it is meaningless. If you have a billion in Dell stock and you try to sell all of it when it peaks you won't have a billion.

You may not be able to buy a billion of Apple stock, at least not for the same price, and what is the point, anyway?