gyrfalcon @ gyrfalcon @beehaw.org

Posts

59

Comments

75

Joined

3 yr. ago

Moderating

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Hey, this post looks like it is just an ad for an ebay listing, which doesn't really fit in the gaming community we are trying to build on Beehaw. I am going to remove it here, but if that is not the intention, please repost it with additional context. Thanks!

This is a great resource, thank you for posting it! However, it would likely be a better fit for the Beehaw Programming community. Please post links like this in that community in the future!

As far as my main finances go, the biggest concern is that my FSA doesn't seem to like to work with my mail away pharmacy, so every order they request documentation of the health expense. I can get that, but the website for the pharmacy is a real pain in the butt to use, so it's a whole production. Luckily (or unluckily) my FSA is pretty much empty, so I'll have to tap the HSA I have from my old employer.

For my hobby investing account, I took my first profit! I sold half of my shares in MHO to recover my initial investment of like $30. I am going to spend some time with a stock screener to find where I want to put that money, and let the other half of the investment run in the hopes that they continue to do well.

For my paper account, I hit my profit target on my strangle trade and closed it. I may try some similar volatility strategies on single stocks rather than SPY, just to see how it is.

Hey, this isn't a terrible article but the source website is questionable at best. I am going to remove this topic, but if you have an article from a more reputable source please post it!

A human pedaling on a stationary bike IS a heater, if he's getting 100 watts continuous at the generator then he's probably producing a 2-3 times that amount in heat. Plus that's heat injected directly into him, so it's well retained by wearing warm clothes, no space heating needed.

I suppose that's what I get for just doing a quick google 🙃

That is really interesting though, my understanding is that Doom 2016 is known for running pretty well and achieving high framerates, or at least that was the sense I got from tech youtube when I watching that more. I wonder what the devs were doing in that case.

Not a game dev but I've done some programming and I love games so I'll take a stab. There's a few reasons I can think of:

1. That's how the engine they're using works. Game engines take a long time to develop, and so if you're using one off the shelf or from a previous project, it may be from a time when tying behavior to the frame rate was a low overhead tool for timing that would cause few if any issues. Given that Wolfenstein is a Bethesda title and they've made many games with similar engine level limitations, this seems most likely to me for this particular case.
2. They never intended to release it that way, and just set it up that way early in development to start getting to the real gameplay work. Then the deadline came around and it wasn't a high priority in terms of getting the game out the door.
3. Probably doesn't apply to Wolfenstein, but for indie games that have one or only a few developers, none of those people may have done much programming before, instead being more focused on other aspects of game design. So if you're learning as you go, there's a good chance some hacky things will make it in to the final product.

Sure, people are more than their political views, but I don't know that that means political comments made in tech content should just be ignored. The people making the content put them there deliberately, and there's enough tech content out there that at the very least if that bothers you, it's easily possible to find something that doesn't include those comments, if not something that includes political commentary that isn't bothersome.

On top of that, what some might call identity politics, others would call minority groups getting together and demanding that their voices be heard the same as others. Political divisions often reflect real life experiences and how they differ, and the only way to just ignore the political differences is to ignore important issues is people's lives.

Identity politics is also a 2 way street. I'm not familiar with tech podcasters specifically, but I imagine they're not getting the same kind of push back if the political commentary is putting minorities in a negative light.

What I am using far too many words to say is, dismissing the concerns of the OP because they sound a little bit too much like identity politics is not a nice way to contribute to this thread, and I encourage you to reexamine your post and think of nicer ways to contribute in the future.

Another relatively quiet week for me. I did join a gym, which based on some cancellation stories I've seen might as well be signing my life savings away, but I definitely don't have anywhere in my apartment to keep a rowing machine. I'm also nearing the end of my FSA funds about 5 months earlier than I had hoped, which isn't great but I still have some money left over in my old employer's HSA that I need to start spending before the custodian nickel and dimes me out it.

For my hobby account I have had some dividends come in which is nice, it means I have about 5 more dollars than I did before with a smidge more on the way.

For my paper account, my strangle is in the green, though if I was looking short term and had been smart I would have closed it sometime last week for a few hundred in profit, which for a week at a risk of about $10k fake dollars is not so bad, but I am hoping that by looking long term I'll be able to capture something more substantial.

Hey, I know this is probably a topic you are very passionate about. However the mod team is starting to see a pattern of behavior from you n terms of failing to assume good faith and turning arguments toward personal attacks. This is not okay going forward. While Beehaw is much larger than it was a few weeks ago, it is still very small; you will have to interact with everyone you speak with again, and there are no points for the biggest slam dunk on someone else in a comment thread. Consider if you would say the things you are writing to your next door neighbor, knowing that you'll have to see them again every day for potentially years to come.

https://archive.org/ is a great resource, their stuff can be a bit older but is still very useful.

Alright broad rundown time so I can reference on future posts:

For retirement I am currently following a portfolio allocation from Ben Felix, adapted for the U.S. by this website, with a 15% bond allocation. For those who don't want to click through, this is essentially a total market portfolio that makes sure to cover domestic and international equities, with a bias towards small cap value stocks, which historically have shown additional returns over large growth stocks. The bond allocation is more by accident if I am being honest, and I will probably gradually reduce it as I am pretty young and I find the arguments presented for lifecycle investing pretty convincing, though not actually convincing enough to leverage my retirement without the direct advice of a financial advisor. I am more or less hitting my target allocation now, as I just finished a 401k rollover and was able to get everything the way I wanted.

I have a small hobby investing account, funded from my hobby budget and currently less than $1k in total after getting a $100 bonus for funding the account. The investments there are mostly picked based on what I think is interesting, including the following:

• Funds
  • NTSX: Efficient core fund that uses futures to replicate a 90/60 leveraged stock/bond portfolio, for only 0.2% in fees
  • RSP: S&P 500 index fund that holds all 500 stocks in equal weight rather than market cap weighting. This keeps the portfolio from being mostly the top few countries, ideally improving diversification.
  • MUB: Municipal bond fund, this is a taxable account and I thought it would be fun. Plus lending to local governments makes me feel like I'm doing my civic duty.
  • VBR: Small cap value ETF from Vanguard, tries to capture the size and value premia. I also hold this in my retirement accounts for my domestic small cap value allocation.
  • DISV: Dimensional small cap value international fund, similar to VBR but outside the US. I hold similar fund AVDV in my retirement accounts
  • ICLN: Renewable energy fund, because oil companies suck
• Individual Stocks
  • These were selected on the basis of small companies trading at or near book who had consistently beaten earnings expectations around last fall. It's been mixed success, but a lot of fun! These are sized at ~1/4 the size of my individual fund positions
  • MHO: U.S. homebuilder, up around 80%
  • CLS: Software and hardware provider for logistics solutions, up around 27%
  • UNM: Insurance company, they do life and critical illness but not main healthcare, up around 17%
  • WRK: Paper packaging company, down around 30%. I let a cheap valuation blind me to the fact that they don't actually make that much money, and their Q2 reports were BAD.

For things that are too risky or capital intensive for my hobby account, I have a paper trading account. Right now this is mostly options strategies, and it's a good thing it's not a real trading account because I fat finger the app on my phone regularly enough that it would be a problem lol. Anyway, the main plays there are:

• Bullish call spread on F using LEAPS. This was originally a backratio spread which I think is a neat defined risk trade but I wanted to roll it out to a further strike date and messed it up.
• Poor mans covered call on GLD. I originally opened a relatively deep in the money LEAP position on GLD during the debt ceiling talks, thinking it would be a nicely leveraged way to get some exposure to gold in the event that things went south there. Happily, the government continues to function, and so I decided to use the position as a way to practice the PMCC, though realistically I should just close the position and take my loss.
• Iron condors on SPX opened on Fridays to expire on Mondays. Originally I thought this would be a very pure theta play, but upon further review I am shorting vega. I don't think this is an egregious trade overall given how volatility has declined in the last few months, though it has burned me the last two weeks and I think my timing and management of the trade could be significantly improved.

Would you care to explain the tax loss harvesting point? Is it just that the fund price drops a bit post dividend and you can squeeze out a bit more "loss"?

There are still some good credit card bonuses out there. I am working on assembling the Chase Trifecta, and right now that involves using the Freedom Unlimited card on all groceries to get 5% back. I don't think that promotion is still going, but I am pretty sure that both the Freedom Unlimited and Freedom Flex are offering $200 back on $500 in the first 3 months, though you do have to be careful about really churning them because I think Chase gets mad if you apply to too many cards in a certain time frame.

As far as FI/RE goes, on Beehaw at least that community is mixed in with general finance. I think we're just about the size to start having a viable general finance community, and if we split it up we would see even less activity.

Alright waited until the weekend so I could write this one because it might be long we'll see.

First off, I'm sorry you've had to deal with all this bullshit. I changed jobs last year, and even as someone who was getting interest and interviews in my search, it still made me want to scream pretty much the whole time, and it took like 9 months at varying levels of intensity. I can't imagine how frustrating putting in all that work and getting what seems to be worse than nothing back has been.

Second, I want to echo some of the comments in this thread emphasizing that some less traditional career paths may be open to you. The idea to apply at LMG is great, as is the possibility of freelancing. If you haven't already, you could also consider contract roles. When I was looking there were lots of recruiters trying to pick people up for technical jobs on 6-12 month contract. That may be different now, or you may have your reasons for not considering them just like I did, so I understand if it's not an option or if you've already considered it. If it works for you though, an employer may be less strict on what they think is the "right" background for a role if they know it's only for a shorter time. Also, I think I saw some discussion from you about considering a van lifestyle, which could be pretty compatible with freelancing or moving place to place for contract work, so that is something to account for as well.

Third, I want to encourage you not to give up. Employers frankly suck, and in the absence of better labor organization, changing jobs is the best way to get what you need. Even if all you can do for a week or a month at a time is the super simple instant apply stuff on places like LinkedIn, that's still progress. Or if you need to take a break for a while to keep yourself sane and make sure you're at your best when you do have a new opportunity, that's also a valuable use of your time. And if you represent yourself even half as well in interviews as you do in your writing I'm sure you can make a good impression, the challenge is getting in front of the right people.

Lastly, I actually want to thank you for this post. Job hunting is a super important aspect of personal finance that I'm not super able to write my own posts on since I'm pretty early in my career. I have been thinking of making a weekly discussion thread for this community, so if you want to continue to vent or journal about your search then it would be great to have more posts, either as standalone posts like this one or comments on the discussion thread.

Not sure if you got latter and former confused, but I for one am hoping things are calming down. That said, I know that this was midterms and since Trump wasn't actually on the ballot, it probably means a lot of the people who drove unrest last time around weren't motivated to show up.

Even better than just continuing to allow cars for people with disabilities, I think redesigning cities for pedestrians and cyclists is a great time to also make it easier for people to use wheelchairs or microcars too!