I'm picking one up secondhand after typing on one at a meet, and I'm curious how people feel about all the foam. Did you like it with the case foam, plate foam, PE foam, all, none? I'm getting the meme aluminum plate and planning on using light linear switches.

For four decades, patient savers able to grit their teeth through bubbles, crashes and geopolitical upheaval won the money game. But the formula of building a nest egg by rebalancing a standard mix of stocks and bonds isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has.

I've been speaking to our VP about keyboards - he was curious about the boards I had lying around and mentioned he's looking for something lower impact, as he suspects he's starting to get arthritis. He types a ton, it's basically his entire job to write proposals and emails.

I don't know if he's quite ready to jump off the deep end for something like a ZSA Voyager, and most likely he'll end up trying a mass produced scissor switch board with a numpad first... but are there any other recommendations in between a $100 mass produced logitech ergo board and a $350+ ZSA that are ortho & low profile?

I'm doing a black/red TKL build for the Milkyway Half-Blade keycap GB that should be delivering by the end of the year. I've never done a full aesthetic match on a build before - I've got a custom red ano aluminum plate on order and I'd like the switches to match too, at least for initial build+photos. I'm mill-maxing the board so I'll probably put these switches in something else since my wife is the main TKL user and prefers clickies.

Here is the pantone swatch of the keycaps. I'm already going to have a lot of black in the case and red in the PCB+plate so if the switches adopted some of the grey-blue I think that'd be neat, but any other mix of red and black could work too. Worst case I will probably just find the closest weight, highest rated all-black linear I can find.

So any good recommendations? Ones I'm aware of that seem well reviewed and close in weight but don't match color-wise are:

• Gateron Oil Kings (~55g) I have these in a DM Austin on alu and know I love them
• Gateron Ink Box Pink (~50g) I don't know much about these except the ink blacks are very highly recommended
• Durock Linear L1/Yellow (~55g)
• Cherry MX Black (~55g) the OG
• NK_ Cream, Cream Pro & Dream (all ~55g) I hear good things, especially the pre-broken-in Dreams sound nice
• Everglide Aqua King Linear (~55g) Don't know much about it but saw at the top of a few recommendation lists for linears
• Alpacas (~62g) popular mostly for BCPs I think?
• Divinikey Oni (~43g) I've heard these in one build and they sounded incredible but they seem to be perpetually out of stock, and wrong color

I have been trying to make threads on wayfarershaven.eu, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org and lemmy.world. For weeks. Comments work but links/photos/posts do not. They obviously never actually make it to the instance... sometimes I can delete them, sometimes I can't.

Initially I was just testing on lemmy.world and assumed it had to do with their constantly going down due to bot and DDOS attacks, but it seems like this must be a kbin problem.

It's becoming pretty tiring. I don't really want to bother participating anymore if I'll never be able to post anywhere other than kbin.social.

What are you invested in? Target date funds, ETFs, individual stocks? Do you think of your portfolio as aggressive, neutral, or conservative?

It occured to me the other day in a discussion about lifestyle creep that a lot of discussions about retirement assume you earn at the 10- or 20-year historical average returns of the S&P500, but it would be very unusual to be 100% in the S&P500 for your entire working life. So, the effect of small changes in cash infusions (i.e. splurging on large but infrequent purchases) is lessened when you consider that most people will be invested more conservatively and real returns will be lower.

So what do you have setup?

Currently about 70% of my retirement account value is in a 401k, which is 100% in FFLDX, a Fidelity target retirement 2055 fund. I'm not as pleased with the returns on this. It says I'm up 11% 1Y but I frankly don't believe it because it's worth barely more than the cash that's been put in to it in that time. Our fund picks for our 401k are kind of crap. The other 30% account value is in a Roth IRA, which I have distributed as:

55% FXAIX (FID S&P 500 ETF)

20% FSPSX (FID international ETF)

15% FSMAX (FID domestic whole market ETF)

10% FXNAX (FID bond ETF)

I would consider this overall rather neutral, maybe even conservative considering my age (31). What do you think?

The advanced retail sales report showed a seasonally adjusted increase of 0.7% for the month, better than the 0.4% Dow Jones estimate. Excluding autos, sales rose a robust 1%, also against a 0.4% forecast. Both readings were the best monthly gains since January.

It seems as long as consumer spending remains strong the risk of recession is low despite the rapid Fed rate hikes.

Today is Montblanc Heritage 1912 <B CI> with Aurora Black, taking notes at work. What about you?

Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn't been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.

These are photos from when I first took delivery of my Nakaya, an aka tamenuri (red urushi lacquer) Neo-Standard, from back in 2016. The nib was an SF with added flex cuts, and though it ran dry fairly quick, when it was primed it wrote in an almost brush-like manner. It was very unique, but difficult to use every day, which is part of why I got rid of it.

The big, beautiful nib of the Montblanc 149 is what first captured my interest in fountain pens. Many years later, and many pens tried, I have a handful I really just love writing with and I still think the nib designs are some of the most beautiful.

1950s Montblanc Slimline, XXF
Modern Montblanc 146, BB CI
1960s Montblanc 149, EF
Montblanc Heritage 1912, B CI

Gross domestic product was expected to increase at a 2% annualized pace in the second quarter.

In the face of persistent calls for a recession, the economy showed surprising resilience despite a series of Federal Reserve interest rate increases that most Wall Street economists and even those at the central bank expect to cause a contraction.