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I wish I took a picture now that I'm posting about it. Spent new year's with a couple good friends drinking and being silly, but we went out for dinner at a new local brewpub/restaurant that was so busy we had to sit at the bar. I had a buzz to begin with but fortified it with a few G&T's over snacks and dinner. But what really made the night memorable was the bartender, a super cute blonde woman in her late 20's who was just working her rear end off. She was smiling at everyone, hustling like a loving pro, paying attention to everything and always had time to cut in and help us out, never left us hanging with empty drinks or anything. She was witty with the customer chit-chat and when she wasn't doing that she was humming along to whatever song was playing on the PA system. Basically she was killing it at her job and seemed to be in a great mood the whole time. She dropped "my husband" into the conversation pretty early in the evening to ward off too much flirting but it didn't keep me from superficially falling in love with her anyway. I tipped her 30%. Reminded me of the kind of woman I'd really like to meet, I always tend to go for perpetually unhappy narcissists who make me do all the work and blame me for anything less than perfection. Explains a lot about why I've given up dating, but that bartender really got me pondering again. Here's to 2015!
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Jan 2, 2015 08:49
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:06 |
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I had the "easy job" curse for most of 2006. I was in my sixth year of working for an awesome startup and the owner died unexpectedly in August '05. I spent the year after that waiting in the wings to do whatever was necessary to sell the company IP, but there was nothing to do but sit in my office and surf the web/chat with friends. Notice when I joined SA... I did about 12 weeks of work during that 52 week period, the rest of the time I hosed off, with full knowledge and permission of management. They needed me if it sold but were otherwise not developing the technology further. I was paid hourly with a time clock so there was zero coming in late or leaving early. I was sad but incredibly relieved when that was over, it was very de-motivating and I started to worry that I was falling behind in my skillset. Ironically my next job was worse. I was hired to design in plastic, with the promise that I would be trained on the job. Turns out nobody else there knew how to design in plastic either so after 6 months we had a major crisis because our new design was unmanufacturable. The management freaked out and hired an outside consulting firm to do our design for us (not assist, they took over) and my entire department sat on our asses for the next 4 months. I was working 9-4 with a 90 minute lunch and hating myself every day. The best part was that we didn't pay them enough to finish it so we got back a 90% complete design that we still had to scramble and kill ourselves to make work. After 2 years of that nonsense I got in a pissing match with the useless VP of engineering during a meeting in front of everyone and was let go the next Monday. My supervisor said "today is going to be your last day here" and the first words out of my mouth were "thank god". Being good at your job and having nothing to do is hell. Fortunately my current job is awesome with challenging work that I have too much of. Still hard to break the daytime web surfing habit though. Weather chat: Is there anywhere in the country that hovers between 50 and 80 degrees year round with less than 50% humidity? Because I think that's where I want to live. The closest thing is San Diego isn't it?
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Jan 9, 2015 09:56
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You guys getting excited about the tech specs of that generator, here's another mind blowing fact - two decades ago (when I was sort of involved in that industry) those things generated around $30,000 worth of electricity every hour. Back before Y2K when everyone was flipping their poo poo over the possibility of software generated blackouts, I just sat back and laughed. As if the power company would let that kind of coin slip through their hands over a software glitch. I used to design maintenance equipment for things like that, where they talk about downtime not in days or weeks but millions of dollars. Just to drive the point home. One of our customers did a test retrofit replacing a GE turbine with a Siemens turbine, and the project budget was 83 million bucks. Siemens had to promise that the gain in efficiency would pay the 83 mil back in 2 years. They paid it back in 8 months. And that was the improvement plus downtime over the GE turbine. Pretty mind boggling. Re-read this, I made a few glitches and have edited it like 3 times. Sorry. LloydDobler fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 08:35
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Holdbrooks posted:Neat, my grandfather was involved in y2k fixes in a lot of nuclear facilities around the country before he retired. The budget of these type of things is mind blowing. Yeah now you quoted me so I can't further correct my math. loving drunkposting and trying to remember numbers from 20 years ago. So yeah what I'm trying to say was that the Siemens turbine generated roughly 10 million dollars per month MORE than the GE turbine. The GE turbine was already doing something like 60 mil a month. So more like $80k an hour. Our machine that was one small part of the retrofit cost half a million dollars, it was my company's most expensive custom machine ever. They had it paid off in 6 hours of runtime.
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Jan 14, 2015 08:49
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I liked Black Mirror a lot, powered through them pretty quick. I hope they do more.
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Jan 16, 2015 09:15
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BrokenKnucklez posted:Has any one bought a car off copart? There's a Jaguar XJR (the strait 6 super charged model) for same near me that's ending in a few days. I figure if I can snag it for a 1000 and repaint it I'm going to break even or make money. (It has the n word sprayed all over it - I'll cover it with paint before it leaves) its a nice looking car other than n words all over it. I've bought all my cars for the last 20 years from Copart, except for my old one. What do you want to know? They charge pretty high fees, for a $1000 car it'll be like $200-$300. They also only store the car for 5 days, after that it's $20 a day if you leave it there. And they charge for weekends even though they're not open for you to go pick it up. And yeah you should be able to clean spraypaint off easily. The car wasn't prepped so it's not going to stick for poo poo. I'd take the acetone advice or plan on using rubbing compound and it'll knock right off.
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Jan 16, 2015 18:43
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Copart and IAAI are the two salvage sites that I've bought all my cars from over the last 20 years, through my dad's dealership. He's retiring and I don't know what I'm going to do. I mean, I'll probably sign up for a public membership but you're restricted from bidding on most cars.
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Jan 20, 2015 20:51
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NitroSpazzz posted:Someone tell me this is a bad idea - http://bringatrailer.com/listing/1989-bmw-318i/ I have a full S52 swap on hand... So bad it's good. How is that thing only 2600 lb? I would have guessed those would be way heavier. No wonder the little 6 cylinder scoots them around so good. I almost turned traitor on my beloved Volvos a while back, because I test drove an E30 convertible. It felt so fast, if it wasn't a poorly repaired high miler I might have been an E30 whore to this day. LloydDobler fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 15:40
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I'm trying to stop spending on cars and pay off consumer debt. Good god it's boring. All I do is eat and get drunk and watch netflix. Every time I do laundry it reminds me that another week has gone by where I didn't do anything except get a little more financially secure. Oh well, did my taxes, getting $500 from the feds, dunno about state yet. Around $6000 to go. If I completely stopped eating out and drinking, and had no surprise expenses I could pay it off in 4-6 months. But then I'd be even more bored than I am now. I don't even want to work on my cars because all I do is think of ways to spend money. Sigh. I hate trying to be a grown-up.
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Jan 30, 2015 08:20
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:06 |
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I don't know whether or not to call my debt consumer debt or a car loan, because I use a personal line of credit, but it's all because I bought a car. But it's my third car, a pure luxury not a necessity. I've always kind of felt that AI people shouldn't treat car loans as necessary anyway. We have the skillset to buy cars with cash and keep them running for pennies on the dollar compared to regular people. I've owned 19 cars and never had an actual car loan before, I either buy with cash or personal credit. Home loans and college loans are to me the only acceptable and mostly necessary credit to carry. But for most people a car loan is more necessary too.BraveUlysses posted:It's really only beneficial to people who have obscene loans, 500k and up because you can write off 25k in interest every year on the first few years of a 500k loan. The 100B annually we spend (keeping this as a tax break) overwhelmingly goes to people with 800k and up homes (this is so loving stupid). There should be a cap at 25k for interest deductions. True, and at the same time it's one of the truly stupid reasons to fool young people into buying a house instead of renting. "you can deduct the interest". So let's get this straight. Standard deduction is $6200, or $12400 for a married couple. Most people's effective tax rate is something like 15% (in terms of what you pay in taxes/gross income). So in order to calculate the tax savings, it's 15% of the difference between your mortgage interest and your standard deduction. I paid $9k in interest this year, and I'm single so my standard deduction was $6200. My effective rate is actually 17%. So my mortgage saved me $476 in taxes. Yay. If I were married It'd have been $0. Never mind that replacing my AC has cost me about $4500, and I've lived here 8 years. So what I saved in taxes has two more years to go before I break even on my AC repair. Just in time for me to replace the rest of the furnace. I love the freedom and comfort of owning my own place but it costs so much more than renting it's ridiculous.
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Jan 30, 2015 19:37
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