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There’s all kinds of FIRE (early retirement) calculators you can find online. They’ll take into account inflation and withdrawal strategy and help you understand what is realistic.

As for your assumed interest rate of 9.6%. That’s the biggest concern I see. Maybe that’s what the plan has gotten in recent years but the stock market has seen higher growth than usual in recent years. Historical averages are closer to 7%. You’ll likely want to assume less than 7% to keep your numbers conservative.

Either way, early and frequent investments are the keys to building wealth and an early retirement. So start doing those things and as time goes on you’ll build a more accurate picture of when you can retire.

It’s on the agenda to get a dedicated audio device this summer. I’ve been building up a collection of FLAC music to prepare. There’s 3 reasons for this.

1. I bought a Remarkable device a few years ago. Yes, they’re over priced compared to a Kindle, but I wanted to avoid Amazon lock-in. As an aside, they’re fairly Linux friendly, you can even ssh into them. Anyway, before that I would read physical books or use a cheap tablet, but the tablet fell out of favor because it was too distracting. Constant notifications, request for updates, etc. I’m so happy with my current ereader. I use it all the time, and when I read, I don’t have any apps trying to grab my attention. I’m hoping an audio player can give me that same experience back for music. I hate mowing the yard and having Siri interrupt my music to tell me about some message.

2. My AirPod pros were nice for the two years they worked. I’d probably grab another pair if I was still in so many Zoom meetings. Eventually though they started making a nasty buzzing noise and are now useless. I want to use my nice pair of headphones I’ve owned for a decade to listen to music.

3. I’m sick of paying a monthly fee to listen to the same 500 songs (if that) over and over. I’m old. I don’t listen to a lot of new music. The new music I do listen to usually comes from an article I read on NPR, not from the algorithms. I want to depend less on streaming services and have more control over what I consume, and how I consume it.

Yeah, I could probably find workarounds to all these problems on my phone by fiddling with notification settings and buying a cheap headphone adapter, but why should I have to? Why do I have to go out of my way to make something as expensive as my phone less distracting and more capable? I’m just choosing to slowly opt-out of that battle.

The direction I’m moving, and other teachers as well is to only consider in class work for assessment. Specifically pencil and paper work.

If you had asked me to predict what a high-quality education would look like post-Covid I would have said high quality videos made with great production value with rock star teachers and domain experts involved. Combined with local teachers offering a more personal tutoring like experience to clarify the videos.

If you asked me now what a high-quality education would look like in the post-AI future. I would say boarding schools that don’t allow phones, with almost all assessments being done in person with pencil and paper.

There’s no denying that technologies can make certain topics unnecessary to learn. Calculators can do basic calculus with ease these days and AI can summarize a text or write a bland essay or implement a simple intro to HTML assignment. But if the goal for education is to learn we have to limit the use of technologies that limit learning.

I suppose there’s another debate to be had about vocational learning and taking advantage of modern tools. That’s usually why I say “high-quality” education when discussing these things. For the average family AI is here to stay in education. For the schools for the elite, AI is an experiment which is slowly being kicked out.

I watched this video yesterday. What struck me was just how bad most of the suggestions were. Without the hype surrounding AI it’s hard to imagine a company thinking this feature was ready to ship.

I also found it interesting how many of the recommendations were for DankPods to make videos trashing on the MacBook Neo, including inaccurate statements about the product. If I was Apple I would be considering legal options for one of the world’s biggest media platforms recommending content creators falsely trash Apple's products.

I’ve been a daily Linux user for sometime between 25-30 years. I’ve used most major distros and the BSDs. For the last several years I’ve used vanilla Fedora Workstation. After a while you just want to use your computer instead of tinker with it.

I’ve noticed I spend less time on Lemmy than I did on Reddit. Some of that may have to do with content, but I think it’s mostly Lemmy isn’t manipulating what I’m looking at to keep the dopamine hits coming. It definitely feels like withdrawal at times.

I am learning to appreciate the joy of opening Lemmy after I checked it a few hours ago and not seeing anything new and having the freedom to close the app again.

It’s been a minute so I could be misremembering, but you’re not far off. Another word for public relations (the shaping of public opinion) is propaganda.

Edward Bearnays wrote a book titled Propaganda, where he talks about the need to rebrand the work of Propagandist after it became associated with negative influence during WW2. From what I recall he used the term public relations, but seemed to prefer the term propaganda.

He’s also the person infamous for convincing Americans that we should eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Another interesting story is about how he advertised to make music rooms in homes trendy, so he could help sell more pianos.

He talks about some of the early manipulation tactics advertisers use. Such as trying to sell you an experience instead of a product. Think of how modern car commercials show a lifestyle more than they show you the car.

It’s an enlightening book that shows that before the war, calling an advertiser a propagandist wouldn’t be out of place. Those propagandist manipulated us into calling the PR now.

Oh, and if I recall correctly propaganda comes from Latin and means “to propagate.”

I have a NAS with four 8TB Western Digital Red drives that are getting up there in age. I have been looking for a good deal to upgrade then with higher capacity drives for the last few years. Now I’m thinking when they fail I’ll probably have to buy lower capacity drives and be more picky with what data I keep around.

Maybe I’ll look into burning Blu-rays and CDs. I’m definitely not going back to cloud storage.

I’m already there. It’s peaceful.

Yes, cookbooks are the way to go. SEO and AI slop have made finding recipes on the Internet a frustrating experience. I've slowly built up a collection of about five to seven cookbooks. Those books offer me plenty of choices. For example, just a few days ago, I made buttermilk biscuits and ended up having four different recipes to compare. I also find myself flipping through them to discover new recipes. It's offline, peaceful, and I'm not bombarded with ads.

I’ve been teaching Linux to a lot of high-school age kids this year. I picked Fedora Workstation for us to experiment with. It of course, uses GNOME. Like I mentioned in the above post I talked to them for 5-10 minutes about GNOME design and how it’s supposed to be used. One thing that surprised me is how much the younger generation found GNOME intuitive as soon as they learned to use the Super key. Many have spent more time on iOS than they have Windows. So some of the common pain points for us older folks, like not having a task bar, preferring each “App” to be full a screen and switching between them felt very natural for the kids. Very iOS like.

You can of course have your different opinion on if this is good or bad or if GNOME shouldn’t be the default on most distro.

Perhaps GNOME is a good default for distro because it’s similar to the interfaces young people are growing up with.

I’ve found GNOME a pleasure to use. From my experience many folks that use Linux like to tinker with their computers. Even those new to Linux see a world of possibilities. GNOME doesn’t really embrace this tinkerer philosophy. They have an opinion on what a desktop manager should be and they’re constantly working towards that vision.

When I introduce GNOME to new people I explain to them some the project goals, design elements and how it’s intended to be used. Then I tell them that GNOME is opinionated on how things should behave and look, and if you try to force GNOME to be something it’s not you’ll probably end up using poorly documented or unsupported third-party extensions that break things. Generally the advice is, GNOME is great, but not for everyone, take the time to learn the GNOME way of doing things and if you don’t like it you're better off switching to another desktop environment than trying to change GNOME.