Brew

This whole college process sucks. I always thought make the grades, the ACT score, and have the extra curricular activities and you could go where you wanted and they would throw money at you. Oldest is a senior and is applying now and I was clearly wrong. The advisor she is working with has told her that her top 3-4 choices probably aren’t happening because of ultra low out of state admittance and the rest aren’t giving away money. Seems most colleges through the NE and East coast have moved to only or mostly need based and away from merit based and application numbers are through the roof at the same time. I also had no idea there were undergrads approaching $100k a year now. We toured Wake recently and it’s right at that with room and board. I’m not looking forward to the next few months as she’s been seriously stressed about it.

I helped out one of the bartenders at one of the places we go with a tax issue she had. This place is constantly busy and she made about $40k a year working a lot. 25%-30% or more on a tip means more to them than it does to me.

We typically eat in the bar or at the bar since it’s just the two of us. I tip more to cover for the lack of drinks running up the bill. I also throw in an extra hundred or so at Christmas at the main places we eat. It’s all a trade off and worth the price.

I can’t wait for all the additional service charges to keep getting stacked on and those on here that will start staying home. May actually be able to get in somewhere without waiting after that. If you frequent places, tip well. It makes a difference. We’re eating in one of the 3-4 sit down places we eat regularly right now and one of the ladies that usually waits on us (not tonight) stopped to say hello and bring extra drinks because she saw we were running low. The tip/fee/etc is the cost of eating out and having a decent experience. We also don’t drink alcohol or eat appetizers, so I tip well to cover for that as well. The $100 guy above is definitely the asshole and anyone that thinks the same way is also the asshole. Just stay home if it’s that big an issue or go through the McDonalds drive thru.

We stayed there last October because of the connection to some TV show my kids like and the location. They had renovated some of the rooms, we stayed in the part that was not renovated. It was well past its prime at that point and was not worth what we paid in comparison to other places we looked at. The location was excellent, but we’ll be staying somewhere else next trip.

How in the world do you overheat 2 different fairly/brand new X24’s? I’ve been religious about changing impellers every two years and don’t remember ever having an overheating issue but those look too new for it to be an issue. Hopefully, it went into limp mode fairly quickly as overheating an inboard can quickly lead to catastrophic engine failure.

I find it entertaining that you think some random guy you don’t know on the internet owes you an explanation of anything. Agree, disagree, whatever you want to do with his original post, but to still be going on about it this much after the fact is a little ridiculous.

Ummm, I have some more bad news for you related to East TN and fires. This is the last place (maybe next to last behind FL) you want to come if TX politics and the direction of the state bothers you. We’re in the middle of a huge red migration that will be further compounded by the Ford announcement and other things going on in the state.

Ummm, I have some bad news for you unless it is just the heat you are trying to escape.

Never met anyone that thinks they make enough money or has enough saved or has enough whatever. There is always someone further up the ladder to compare yourself to. Combine that with the fact that most people’s spending habits track with income growth and there are plenty of people at each level living paycheck to paycheck which makes them feel like they aren’t rich even though statistically speaking they are.

In the percentiles we are discussing, those two people are still in the top percentiles together. That’s hard to fathom because of their difference in means, but that just goes to show you how much different the other 90% or whatever live. I don’t have to worry about my credit card declining, my utilities being turned off, what I’m going to have to give up to buy groceries, how I’m going to pay for a repair, etc which is a different life than the vast, vast majority of people live. Some of you look around and only see other versions of yourself and think that must be normal, but you are looking at very small samples of what are ultimately outliers in the world.

I’m not sure which is a more interesting turn in this thread, the $250k income is average or the bootstraps piece. They both fail to realize that they are missing such a large swath of people in their versions of the world and all they see are the top percentiles where some things might look average. I like to tell myself I pulled myself up by the bootstraps also. I came from not much (nothing would not be a fair assessment), started working full time at 14 (my mother got her boss to hire me on), went to college as the only one out of the family (grandmother actually called in favors after I failed out of first school), and started here when I was 21 (scout master for the year I did scouts was the managing partner.) I’ve reached the top of the ladder in my field and run a firm in the top tenth of a percent in the country all because I found my bootstraps (also had some really good timing to go along with being really good at what I do.) I talk to a lot of people coming out of school and into our offices every year. There is a serious lack of hope with them on being able to achieve the same things. My 1-2 years are moving back home, they don’t know if they will be able to buy a house or do other things that have always been expected. Combined with everything else going on, it’s a weird time out there to be on the earlier side of your career/life.

Depends on the boat type and whether you are looking at wheel width or full trailer width. However, max legal trailer width is 102” so the wheels are generally going to be right inside that number. With guide poles taken into account I would think you would be a little over that and closer to 106” depending on the pole layout.

It’s nowhere near 99%, we’ve had very few people even comment on it. Use your debit card if it’s a problem and you don’t have cash.

Our CC processor gets the charged fee, we don’t. The 3% add on goes to them and we have a lower negotiated debit/ACH fee. I’m amazed people spend this much time worrying about all of it. If I go eat, I just pay what it is they tell me to pay. It’s ludicrous to get butthurt over a CC fee as long as they are up front about it. It would never occur to me to turn around and leave because of a CC fee, an auto tip %, or much of anything else actually.

Why should I give a flip about your points, all points have done is run up the fee charged to the vendor. Plus, what protections do you need on your cash purchase at the bar? We pass on the fee. We’re in a service business with large fees and got tired of clients using cards on $50k contracts when they can just ACH it and I just have to pay 1/10 if a percent.

Old boats whether inboard or outboard are great, electronics have ruined the ease of use and ease of working on them. When I bought the 2020 Nautique 210, I picked it up from the dealer right after they had closed (time zone difference screwed me up) so we didn’t go over anything. I’ve had boats all my life, don’t need a walk through anyways. I took it home, pulled it to the ramp to drop it and take it to the lake house, and there was no key anywhere. Shit, where’s the key? I called the salesman (it’s getting late on a Saturday night at this point) and he was like you idiot, it’s a key code push button, there is no key. Just enter 4 0’s and hit start. I still couldn’t figure out how to do some things with that boat 2 years later when I sold it because everything was computerized.

Interior isn’t great on it which is why it’s priced there. It’s all a roll of the dice sometimes, but in the last 10 years I’ve had 2 93’s, a 96, an 07, an 06, and a 20. I buy low hours in good shape, have the motor looked over, and go about my business. There just aren’t many places for the old ones to go bad as long as you get them compression checked. Starter issues and changing the impeller have been about it. Never had a driveline issue or a significant electronics issue. Had a buddy buy an 07 230 last year, motor blew his first time out. He got an overheat alarm on the test drive and bought it anyways like a dumbass. $15k later, he learned his lesson in getting them inspected.

I don’t know that it would be a major issue because of the distance from the bow to where it would become an issue as long as you were 3 feet by a distance of 12-14 feet out. The deepest point varies by boat type just for the record. For some, it is going to be close to the back. For others it may be mid boat. The older/smaller boats are going to tend to be further back because of the hull style, but an X series MC isn’t going to have much difference between the middle/back of the boat. A Nautique GS 24 will be a little more rear centered with draft, but with either the major damage that can occur will be at the back of the boat with the running gear and may actually be further back in distance than the R6 because of the location of the running gear. The R6 probably sits higher in the middle though.

I need to stop looking at this thread, it has me looking at boats again. If I keep looking I’m going to end up buying a boat before the summer is up which is going to cost me a new kitchen in exchange. That 230 I posted on the last page is calling my name.

I missed the part on the bunk style setup, typically wake boats will cradle fine as long as it’s not a drive on platform or a sling. Anything that cradles using bunks will cradle in the trailer location. The draft on a wakeboard boat is generally going to be around 30 inches at 22 feet or less, a little more as you go up in size. However, that draft point is 2/3 of the way back in the boat versus with an I/O where it is at the rear of the boat. An R6 will cradle in under 2 feet of water with the motor tilted up to the water level. An X22 needs 32ish inches solid (maybe not comfortably) to cradle, so that is a legitimate issue to consider. You don’t want to be in a scenario where you risk hitting the cradle with a prop on an inboard. It can go really bad, really fast. On surfing older wakeboats, keep in mind they weren’t built for surfing. That is a much more recent phenomenon. It’s also why the size of the boats have jumped so much in recent years because they need to sink them further to generate a wave. My late 2000’s X-1 and 220 were garbage to surf unless we had enough people/weight to move things around to configure the wave. Even then something like the R6 has a better wave. Honestly, my 2020 210 wasn’t great to surf because the boat just wasn’t big enough. You need a wider beam, taller freeboard, and a shit ton of weight on a corner to get the proper wave or you need a bunch of electronic/mechanical goodies that force the physics side of it. Old wakeboats don’t have those things but enough weight can cure most things Working on the engines, I would much rather have an older wake boat. Most all run variants of the GM 350 or Ford 351 blocks and are very simple engines. Even with the advent of EFI, they still aren’t very complicated and they are easy to get around.

Honestly, because I’m a wake snob and think all of these companies attaching “wake” to their products are full of it. I think if you really want to board/surf, buy a boat designed for it. If you want to cruise a lot, buy a Centurion that actually has a decent deadrise. The newer wake boats run much better than the older ones anyways and aren’t terrible in open water/long runs. I ran my Nautique 10-15 miles on the river occasionally and it was passable, so I would rather go that direction. I also paid $110k for it brand new versus the stupid numbers the R series are selling for. Saying that, Cobalt’s design is as close to one that works as well as anything that I have seen. It comes with a massive price tag and it’s still an I/O that’s using some “smoke and mirrors” to get to a decent wake product, but if the goal is to cruise mainly with some surfing mixed in then it probably works. I’m also not a fan of the reverse drive system and the location of it. I’ll be curious how it holds up long-term. I know 4-5 people with R4’s and R6’s. They have all been happy but they typically still surfed my boat when we were out.

Having a large office in Memphis, spending a lot of time in Memphis, working with a large number of medical clients, and living not far from Memphis, your last two posts are a little bit over the top. I’m not saying Memphis is great, hell not even good, but the sky isn’t falling quite as fast as you are saying. The problems Memphis is having as it relates to medicine are playing out across the state in the way we have dealt with Medicare, certain political topics that don’t need to be discussed here, shutting down of rural hospitals which are putting immense pressure on the larger hospitals which trickles down to quality of life issues for doctors that take call, etc.

Let’s see female, check. Brazilian, double check. Sounds like Onlyfans is the best play here. To your earlier point and slorch’s response, the last few years years have really skewed what is reasonable from an income perspective/retirement perspective going forward. Housing has gotten out of balance and a lot of other things have as well and it’s been compounded in states with large influxes of people. We’re talking to new hires now that can’t afford apartments/rentals locally which is a strange discussion where we are located, but it’s a real issue.

Vendor can pass on up to 3% on a credit transaction as long as it’s clearly stated. The points game has really screwed up payment processing. Everyone wants to use a CC for everything now.