The rate of divorce is strongly associated with the age the relationship started at.
Two 18-20 year olds while still barely adults have a very low chance of being successful. Once they reach 24-25 the rate of divorce declines dramatically. By then they are usually making adult-ish decisions.
I designed my wife’s wedding ring. I drew it up the evening we decided to get married. I still have the drawing. I then found a small independent custom shop and had it made. The diamond is actually small but looks massive because of the design.
Cost me $1,200 for it. Most of it was in the hours of labor to make it back in '00.
My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.
They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.
Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.
Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.
Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.
The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.
My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.
Its referred to as barriers to entry. These are anything that prevents new startups from occuring. These can be natural or contrived.
As somebody who finally started their own business after 25 years of effort and a lot of luck I know these well.
The largest barrier is usually initial capital. Banks don’t give out loans to startups without assets. So if you have overall negative personal assets like large student loans, renting, car loans, etc you are fucked in getting a bank to fund your startup. I can’t get a line of credit for at least a year, probably 2. At least not one at a reasonable interest rate that doesn’t eatup all of my profit. I ended up taking a draw against expected revenue from a vendor who believes in me.
Health insurance (U.S), literally the reason I didn’t start my business 10 years ago & 5 years ago when I had 2 opportunities.
Business insurance: it took me 5 months to find somebody that would cover me.
Laws and regulations that create barriers to entry. These can be minor annoyance like fees and paperwork or major regulatory hurdles depending on the industry and country.
Infrastructure to conduct the business. I need highly specialized warehousing for 4 months of the year. I ended up renting from a company that is in a similar business as me that runs on a different cycle (they are empty when I need space). Building my own would require a loan… See above.
Available resources: Do competitors limit your available resources by market manipulation and anti-competative behavior. This is a huge one in industries dominated by oligarchies.
There are many more of these that are around.
Most of these can be alleviated by a fair sharing of revenue. 10 years ago I increased the companies net profit from $500K to $10million. They gave me 5% pay raise and $10k bonus out of a “Theoretical” $200K max.
I honestly would love to. Unfortunately my banking and accounting apps for my business won’t run on it.
Also the reason I have an iPad for two apps that are not on Android that I have to have for business.
M business laptop is W10 instead of Linux mint like my personal one for the same reason…
I am typing this on a pixel 8
Try disabling and removing the Google search bar. Can’t be done. Since Google search has gone down hill I never use it.
How about removing the the news feeds? You have to disable the Google app to get rid of it. If I want to read the news, I do a quick search. It’s not hard to do. I don’t need a news feed on my phone.
What about the stupid at a glance at the top of the home screen? It just takes up space for no benefit over the notification bar. It can’t be fully removed.
I also never us any voice assistant etc because it’s faster to type it in than repeat myself.
I currently have 19 apps on this phone disabled that I can’t uninstall… No fluff huh…
All of my apps are organized into folders and I am never more than one swipe and two taps away from opening the app I want. I don’t scroll, I don’t search, I know where everything is and have it opening in under a second.
I have used both iOS and Android for more than a decade. After every update on both systems I have to go through and delete/disable junk I don’t need/privacy issues.
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
iOS’s UI is terrible to use with everything taking twice as long as it should. So many illogical hidden commands.
Everything has gotten randomly harder to get basic things done.
My win 10 business computer with classic shell will stop being supported the end of the year… Oh joy…
Have played every version of BF since it came out. Haven’t purchased or played BF2042 since they abandoned BF1 & BF5 still full of bugs.
EA doesn’t give a fuck about the quality of their games anymore. To be fair, none of the major studios do anymore. They are too big and try to race through development to make sure that this years sales numbers are bigger than last year’s.
If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.
My wife’s Pomeranian.
All cuddles until you piss him off by going somewhere without him. Then your shoe is chewed up and in the middle of the backyard.
I caught him heading for the koi pond with one the other day. Little shit…
They made great fidget toys.
I loved my slider as well. They made texting so much easier. I went from one of those to a blackberry bold.
I am of the opinion that most “supply” issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.
All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.
Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.
With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.
The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.
The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.
Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).
She will just steal 2 blankets. One is never enough for a blanket thief.
Hazard of a previous job.
I spent most of a decade sharing an office with the most prolific commercial pumpkin breeder (he had a peduncle collection in his desk).
I then was his product manager and got to travel all over world introducing and naming new varieties. The most common and identifiable one I introduced for him was the medium sized one with the dark green warts (Warty Goblin). However about 70% of the varieties at the grocery store and patch are ones I named.
https://us.stokeseeds.com/hybridpumpkin-wartygoblin-0780267t.html
He was a very talented breeder and I got to let my inner kid free. I did get push back from people who didn’t understand the market for my official reason for chosing a variety. Apparently writing “because it’s cool” wasn’t good enough for them.
Almost there. Generally they start being harvested around the 2nd week of September.
Just eyeballing it, those have another 3 weeks at least. The prizewinner next to the of the road tend to color up early. They contain a gene called precocious yellow. The immature fruit are yellow that turn to reddish orange as they mature. Since they don’t have to wait for the chlorophyll degradation in a normal green immature fruit the pigments show up when the fruit is still immature.
Jobs was his own worst enemy for a while on the compatibility issue.
New OS launches- all your old programs don’t work on it.
Want to use a floppy to transfer files between a Dos/Win and a Mac? Nope, not compatible. When USB drives started coming out they dropped all support for floppy drives, even in machines with them installed.
Constant driver issues with all sorts of things. Many never got resolved. To be fair the market share for Mac’s was so tiny, offering support for them didn’t make business sense.
Want to play a game? Good luck. The majority of games didn’t work on Mac. Same reason as the drivers.
As for stability issues, for a while I ran a computer lab for a college 50:50 win/Mac machines. They both crashed about equally as often.
For lesser known subjects, a literature review in a dissertation works. It at least gives you a list of papers to review.
Been on my own since I as 17. The first few years were rough to say the least.
I worked 2 jobs, 30-60 hrs per week and went to college. I shared shitty apartments with some pretty creepy people. I moved so constantly I ended up paying for a post office box so I could get my mail. I did not have a vehicle (no car) so I rode a bike for up to 60 miles per day. Even all that wasn’t enough without government grants and student loans to pay for college.
Food was something that I ate when I had it. I spent a few months with mybe 4-5 real meals. Cornflakes and ramen where the bulk of my diet for a while.
I took the first professional job I could find. It was terrible but it paid well. I gained 50lbs to be at a healthy weight the first year. The next few years I jumped around jobs until I landed in one I liked.
The last few weeks before I graduated college I met my wife. Her family has become mine over the past 25 years.
Today my income alone puts us in the top 10% of earners. My wife makes close to the same. At many crucual times in our lifes we’ve taken advantage of government assistance. To be blunt, it’s not possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You need a helping hand once in a while no matter how small.
My newest computer is 5 years old. I see no reason to upgrade anything.
I use my 11 year old laptop with Linux mint on it as well. I maxed out the RAM on it and swapped in a Sata SSD, it boots in under 40 seconds and does everything I need it to do. It’s one of those cheap underpowered Celeron processors as well.