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I’m sure Miller has posted this, but it’s a great cook-off: http://

Decent podcast here. Regarding Russia’s “tactical” nukes, the guy says they haven’t tested one of them since I believe 1990; and posited that we’d see them hauling one out of storage, recommissioning (with 30 year old instructions and a bunch of know-nothing troops that have never seen the inside of one of these things), and then up to test before they actually used one in combat. Sounds logical, and ripe for accidents. Reminds me of the Kursk situation (not the conspiracy theory) - they were prepping to launch a leaking torpedo, hadn’t launched a torpedo in 3 years, shit happened. I mean if you haven’t done something in 3 years or 30 years, there’s going to be some serious rust. Like literally there may be no one in the Russian service that was hands on involved the last time they fired up a nuke, and from reports it seems they take the Allen Iverson view of training the troops. http:// https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-moscows-shadows/id1510124746?i=1000559239076

It’s a Guerrilla Safari Utility Vehicle. It’s really bugging me that I can’t figure out what manufacturer it is. I want to say Yamaha or Polaris but the hood/lights/grill is different.

Drone dropping a grenade onto a truck full of Z’s if you want to get your dead Russian soldier fix: http://

Cajun’s FIRE plan seems pretty solid. I may need to plan on another year of work to fund upgrading my 21’ to a 23’ to haul additional bikinis.

This is pretty close to my current mindset. The main exception is that I don’t mind spending my time working when I can just be creative and design stuff/build stuff/solve problems. Running the business/dealing with clients/arguing with upper mgmt I will gladly forgo once I don’t need the money.

Yeah you can’t regularly splurge on stuff and overrun the budget (which large numbers of wives have a propensity to do) and make FIRE work (assuming normal income levels). From what I’ve seen it’s better to have a frugal penny pincher, or a ~Hippy “possessions end up owning you”-type to do FIRE. Mr. Money Mustache got divorced a few years back, he said it wasn’t related to his FIRE lifestyle, but he seems like a somewhat difficult/inflexible person. That’s one reason why I could never FIRE like him or the “extreme” people; I can’t be that inflexible with kids and the budget. He literally didn’t have a second kid because it would have blown his FIRE budget. That’s a level of austerity that I’m willing to work a few years extra to avoid. Same with vacations, boat ownership, etc.

The Christmas tree garland is out of season, but does make it more festive:

I hope he feels appropriately guilty!

Luckily for me, the only guy I hang out with that has a net worth over $10M drives a pickup truck and smokes $8 cigars, and cuts them in half to save for later if he feels like he won’t be able to finish the whole stick.

Also meant to say: Thanks, but I don’t think I hit a home run on this. I would say I singled my way onto first, was sac bunted over to 2nd, and am waiting to see if a bat can get put on a ball to get me home. Small ball. Lots of factors and people involved.

I’m a grinder, and we don’t have a super exciting home life. It’s not sexy but I feel ok when I look at our portfolio knowing I can walk away from work if I want and am not a slave to debt. Also, if I quit at 50, I’ll only be at a ~$2-2.6M portfolio balance. Fine for paying for our current standard of living, but noting fancy, and way below some folk’s SoL. My wife is weird/OCD about money and is a real penny pincher, so that is a factor in this. Another factor is all of our immediate family/relatives are set financially and are good with money, so I know I won’t have a bunch of increased expenses dealing with them down the road. I have been very lucky in that regard. To be honest if I quit at 50 I’ll probably get bored and want some more spending money and may go back to work at some point to basically use all the money for fun stuff. Maybe I’ll just keep working but kick the fun budget up a lot. For me, that was the point of FIRE and what I’ve done, to get a foundation of wealth laid and then have options. I didn’t want to end up like the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry Glen Ross. On the wealth building side I missed many opportunities. We didn’t take some risks along the way that many of our cohort did that is bothersome now. We didn’t want to be landlords and sold all the houses we owned along the way that would have been killer Austin rental properties now. Passed on other investment properties that have doubled in value. Should have pushed more money into the market during the covid dip. Also, we hate having debt and have paid off houses at accelerated rates, when a more sophisticated investor would have allocated capital differently and been more leveraged; this has probably cost us a fair amount in the long run.

Do you use a rangefinder and are you planning on dialing turrets / holding over with mil dots, etc.?

Holy Shit what a dumbass kid and tip of the hat to you and the landowner for not letting that screw up a good thing y’all have going.

I’ve worked in commercial construction, heavy construction, utilities, consulting engineering, equipment sales, and O&G; and I’m sorry to say, for some reason the fraction of toxic socio/psychopaths trying to climb the ladder no matter the cost is much higher in O&G than anywhere else I’ve worked (even sales!). The exact scenario you describe I watched happen over the last two years at a small O&G firm I was at. I ran the Projects group and he was hired about halfway through my tenure to run the Operations group. It was depressing watching him turn a collaborative, profitable operation into a hyper-political, miserable, (and non-profitable) environment for everyone around him. He spent more time spinning stories and board slides excusing negative results and blaming other groups than he did actually solving problems. As you allude to, he didn’t have enough experience to actually know how to solve problems, he had spent much more of his career figuring out how to climb the ladder than building the skills/knowledge to make good decisions when you get towards the top. To keep this post FIRE related; I read The Millionaire Next Door about 20 years ago and used a lot of the information provided there. I made the decision fairly early in my career that it wasn’t my goal to own my own firm or be someone seen as important, I just wanted to make as much money as I could doing what I’m good at to build wealth and financial independence. I have worked my ass off building experience/knowledge to give myself career flexibility/portability and I’ve negotiated career moves decently to increase income and we have lived below our means, usually at a 20-50% savings rate. I started investing with Vanguard over 20 years ago and became a bit of a Bogle-head early on. We’ve never had any massive breaks or huge windfalls, just the slow and steady saving and investing. Two kids 12 and 9. College 529’s just about funded to my satisfaction. No debt. Currently trying to decide if I “retire” in a few years around age 50 (if I can get the healthcare thing figured out and my portfolio keeps chugging along - should be ok at 4% withdrawal rate at that point), or if I stick with working beyond that age either in upper mgmt or downshift to technical expert and just enjoy tech stuff and not have any mgmt stress. I’m currently running a ~30 person consulting group and definitely feeling some burnout. Wife hasn’t worked in 3 years, was doing part time contract consulting before that. Maybe once the kids are a little further along I can get her to take a low key job with healthcare and I can take a long sabbatical/retire/downshift/whatever.

The cofounder of CrowdStrike was on 60 Minutes this weekend and said the US could “takeRussia off the internet” (?) for some time as a response to cyberattacks. I don’t know what that means but the segment made it sound like “top men” are working on it. Hopefully for real.

MillerEP probably posted this but in case not, supposedly recent Wali sighting: http://

Tapatalk is really struggling and did the double post for me as well. The interesting thing is when Tapatalk can’t load a twitter link from MillerEP, it just loads a random surly topic. Like your clicking on Ukraine links and then the Surly “Beer 2018” thread pops up.

Good article. This is my favorite quote, probably the understatement of “After Stalin died, the Soviet Union became a much safer place to live.”

Good article. This is my favorite quote, probably the understatement of “After Stalin died, the Soviet Union became a much safer place to live.”

Another Moscow photo. http://

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