“but at least you got free email and a homepage so you could put up HTML pages with animated GIFs“
Aw happier days. So much creativity and the ability to communicate with other humans. Meeting randoms was a fun gamble!
95% of people would put an “Under construction” gif and never another update to that web space.
The first web browser was free!! NCSA Mosaic! However since few new users had download capabilities (because they never used command line FTP before), there were software distributes making copies and selling those on store shelves for a few dollars.
To beat Netscape, Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with the third edition of Windows 95.
Not quite accurate. Yes, at the time Windows 95 came out Netscape Navigator Personal Edition was selling on shelves for about $40-$50. If you bought Netscape Navigator Gold, it came with the Netscape browser and and WYSIWYG HTML editor which was a big deal back then because otherwise you’re using notepad to make your website.
Other WYSIWYG HTML editor sitting next to this on the self would be products like Hotdog or Hot METAL Pro:
However, Windows 95 at launch did NOT ship with Internet Explorer. For the launch release of Win95 to get Internet Explorer 1.0 you had to buy the addon package “Microsoft Plus: Companion for Windows 95” for $49:
Internet Explorer 1.0 sucked and Netscape was far superior for the day.
One other artifact from those days. There was another GUI operating system that was still around back then called OS/2. This was an IBM product from the 80s, and the last gasp of it occurred right before Win95 came out. IBM released OS/2 Warp (OS/2 3.0). A good chunk of the marketing was that it contained web browser (called WebExplorer). There were unsavy users buying OS/2 Warp thinking it was just an application when it was a whole replacement operating system.
I’m thinking of moving from my higher paying career field to one that will pay me a nearly break even salary (for this living area) because my heart just isn’t in this anymore.
How close are you to retirement? If you increased savings from [high paying career], how much longer would you have to work at it before you could stop working altogether?
I’m old enough to be experiencing this, but I actually like it like this. I had zero desire to own a Labubu when they came out recognizing it as just that generation’s flash-in-the-pan fad like beanie babies was for my generation.
So many online services are sold for things I do not care about so I have zero to manage on those.
I’m not seduced to buy the “latest slightly incremental increase in performance” item for 99% of products out there because I have something that does the job for me already.
Some of today’s pop music styles I don’t like, but there’s thousands of hours of music I do like (including a chunk of new stuff) so I’m not put out.
Its actually kind of great to be immune to so much of the advertising thats out there today because you simply don’t want what they’re selling because they’re targeting the younger generation.
Most people in their 40s are concerned about their plans for retirement are on track when they should be worried about their telomerase.
A couple of case screws and an old EVGA power supply and I’m yours for the night.
A plastic snap-case from the 90s, and old EGA video card, and a power supply is the best I can do.
“That’s them, officer, right over there”
Ohio also has a town named Versailles. Imagine the worst way to pronounce the name of the historical palace in France. That’s right, they pronounce it (VUR - SAY- els).
Because normalcy is subjective to each of us. If an unmade bed is normal in my house, then the unmade bed is what contributes to a sense of normalcy for me.
If those are the advantages then the same advantages could be accomplished by daily filling a cup with water, pouring out the water, drying the glass and putting it back in the cupboard. I’d argue the cup with water is far less effort and yields the same results.
I mean when, let’s say, I have one day, a week or a month left to live suffering from an illness
The likelihood you’ll have any clue your going to die in such a short time as a month is extremely low. You’re much more likely going to die in an instant through fatal injury or bodily failure like a heart attack or brain aneurysm. Lets say you live to 85 years old and are finally dying of something entirely predictable for old age like congestive heart failure or late discovered end-stage cancer. You’re going to be long past having any energy or ability to do anything about without help.
If you actually get some kind of clear guidance you’re going to die from a prolonged (meaning not instant) ordeal, you’ll likely be in hospice where they will give you amazing narcotic drugs in whatever massive doses you need so you feel no pain and are simply swimming in dopamine as your body gives out.
The takeaway is, there’s no point trying to spend your healthy hours trying to plan for something like this. No plan you can think of will be useful even in the extremely unlikely scenario, the conditions you imagine do happen.
/shitty conspiracy theory
…or was the constant exposure from X-rays keeping all of our cancer at bay. And with the removal of that lifesaving treatment, we’re all rapidly being overcome by our uncheck cancer.
Look at the data and see when LCD TVs first entered the American consumer market. With the removal of CRTs, our cancer rates exploded!! Coincidence?! (yes its just a coincidence)
You’re missing the point.
I’m missing the point? I’m contradicting your point from your first post where you said this:
All the “just save $X per month” advice hinges on this, but for some reason, finance “gurus” take our current longest bull run in history and pretend high returns are guaranteed.
I demonstrated your “longest bull [market] in history” point was irrelevant by completely excluding that bull market and showing coincidentally even higher returns from the period before. Simple investing in the S&P500 has been historically shown to produce consistent returns over time. Does that guarantee it will forever? Of course not, but its much more likely it will produce that not compared to all the other choices for investing.
Here’s the entire history of the S&P 500 from its inception in 1926:
You’re welcome to argue against that line for investing in something else, and in the short term, you may even be right. However, so far there isn’t a more consistent performer for growth over a long period of time.
Ever since Reagan, “the economy” has been in service of the stock market and shareholder primacy has been the rule of the land.
Reagan sucks for lots of reasons, but that condition about the stock market and the economy you’re describing existed long before Reagan. The Great Depression during the Hoover administration (also a shitty president for the time) shows that clearly.
This isn’t something that should be assumed natural.
Natural? All of these rules and economies are human constructs. There’s nothing natural about nearly anything humanity does. I find it odd that “isn’t natural” is even a criticism in this conversation.
Some people are going to have far less resources to expose themselves to good luck that can actually benefit them in way that can change their outlook.
I agree completely. That is the part that is out of our control that I referenced.
Unfortunately, “luck” for most of us is how much money we have and the social standing that money offers to expose us to lucky situations.
I could agree or disagree with you on this depending on how we are defining things here. If a person comes from money and social standing, goes to ivy league school law school, and is offered a great job at a prestigious law firm right out of school I wouldn’t call that luck, I’d call that systemic. I’d probably even say it was a forgone conclusion that someone in that situation got the job. The “lucky situation” here for this person wouldn’t be getting the job, it would be born into money/society.
For any of the rest of us, crawling through law school to ending up in a chance meeting to get offered that same job, the job offer would be the “lucky situation”.
Overall, I agree with your premise even if we put the definitions in different places.
it’s just that opportunities to improve one’s situation just don’t appear often enough to be taken advantage of correctly.
This goes to the heart of my main point. Each of us can positively affect the number of opportunities open to us that may be lucky with our own actions. You can’t plan for luck, but you can learn all kinds of things which, in some strange way in the future, make you eligible to take advantage of a lucky opportunity.
I can give you an example from my own life. When I was younger I poor and trying to cram as much video onto a writeable CD. I dived into learning video compressions methods so I could be cheap and save on CDs, putting more on each. Years later I at an employer, the company has a problem because they need video sent from a rural location back to the main office for analysis by engineers in a very short amount of time and the rural local only had a very very slow satellite internet connection (this was way before Starlink existed). I saw what they problem was. The video files were too big for the slow connection. I asked if they were willing to take a massive hit to quality to get the video files transferred. They were happy to! I gather the software and wrote a solution that they could use at the rural site to compress the videos before transferring using almost identical approaches to my writable CD compression methods. I got promoted an a $10k raise because of it.
Had I not tried to be cheap on CDs, I would have not have learned nor been lucky enough to take advantage and get that promotion.
Now try a situation where the government and Fed aren’t pumping trillions of dollars to help the market.
Sure thing, lets eliminate anything from the current bull market that starts at the bottom of the 2007 crash. Lets end in 2006, and begin 19 years early in 1987 (to keep the same sample length from the prior example).
The same $10k in the S&P500 on Jan 1 of 1987 ending in 2006 would be $91,857. This would be a 818.57% total return and a 11.73% compounded annual growth.
You’re welcome to run your own numbers. Here’s the simple S&P500 calculator I’ve used for our discussion here.
All the “just save $X per month” advice hinges on this, but for some reason, finance “gurus” take our current longest bull run in history and pretend high returns are guaranteed.
Most of the estimates I see are the opposite, they assume the worst such investing everything right before the 2008 Great Recession crash. As in investing $10k in the S&P500 on Jan 1 of 2007 (before the crash) would give you $75,670 today. That’s a 656.70% total return or a 10.65% compound annual growth rate. So yes, the great bull market is in there, but the start included is the absolute worst time to invest, but the returns are still good. Most projections are more conservative with only expecting a 7% return (over time).
A lot of what happens is luck
I agree with this, there will always be a level of good and bad luck that is out of our control. However each of us has the ability to increase our footprint of good luck or reduce our footprint for bad luck (never to zero bad luck though). If the good luck of a job of a lifetime is available to you but requires you know how to speak French, then that is only good luck if you spent time earlier in your life learning to speak French. In this case, learning French in the past increased amount of good luck you could harvest in life.
Alternatively, if you have an asshole friend that likes committing petty crimes or picking fights, you increase your footprint for bad luck by hanging out with them. That drunk guy at the other end of the bar would have simply been a forgotten thought a couple of days later, but your asshole friend antagonized that guy and you ended up with bad luck getting sucker punched instead that night because of your asshole friend. In this case, choosing to hang out with asshole friend increased the amount of bad luck foisted upon you in life.
Your body starts falling apart faster if you don’t maintain it.
There’s a corollary here that I don’t see anyone talking about. If you set a good plan to maintain your body fitness from say your mid 30s on, one day you’ll be doing that same reasonable workout routine and then you hurt yourself because its too much. Yesterday it was fine, the prior 15 years it had been fine, but now its not, and you have an injury you need 3 to 6 months to recover from. You think its a fluke and, once healed, you go back to your fitness routine and you injury yourself in a different way. Another 3 to 6 months of recovery.
There appears to be a need to modify or abandon parts of your fitness routine as you get older, but there’s no guidebook on what to stop doing and when, nor what to be doing instead.
I think another thing IBM was counting on was OS/2 Warp came out about 6 months before Win95 so folks were expecting a radical change in OS.