WoodScientist

Elon Musk has personally now committed enough felonies to earn himself multiple life sentences. Let that sink in for a moment.

He either needs to stay in power forever, or he needs a pardon from the president. And if you're counting on that magnitude of a pardon, what other crimes might you be willing to do? If you already face potentially multiple life sentences, what's one more? I wouldn't put it past that bastard to be putting together that concentration camp at Gitmo so he can run unlicensed and involuntary Neuralink experiments on those poor people.

I never said this stops in 2026.

On the up side, I have always wanted to build a secret cabin in a national park....

And don't forget to primary the Hell out of any Democrat that has proven feckless and cowardly in this hour. Time for Fetterman to go, and many others. Anyone that voted against AOC for the committee seat needs to be primaried. Anyone that voted for a single one of Trump's cabinet nominees needs to be primaried. Purge the party. It is time for a purge.

I don't know. And frankly, I don't care. I have no desire for that level of wealth.

It is time we start demanding the resignations of current Democrats serving in Congress. We don't need to wait til the midterm. If there is a Democratic lawmaker, from a state with a Democratic governor, that isn't using all their power to resist? We need to start protesting these people, demanding their immediate resignation from office. Hell, if we wait til the midterm, then we'll be right back at the place of "well, they're better than the Republican..." And primaries are difficult due to the immense costs and incumbent advantage.

Democrats are completely in the minority right now. What better time than now to purge the feckless do-nothing corporate Democrats from the party? Forget primarying Pelosi, we should be hounding her to immediately resign. She should have no peace. Force her to resign in disgrace, and Governor Newsome can then replace her with someone who is actually willing to fight.

I know nothing. There is not a single fact in this universe that I can state is unequivocally true. Even the most established laws of physics are just our best explanations of our observations to date. They're held up pretty damn well so far, but we don't know why they are the way they are. For all we know they could be part of some larger pattern we cannot see the whole of. It is entirely possible for the laws of physics to change tomorrow. Tomorrow the universe could change state, and suddenly astrology would actually work.

There is no such thing as an absolute truth. There are only things that explain, to greater or less reliability, all the things we observe. And it is not necessary to have the same level of proof to accept all propositions.

If you want to convince me that astrology now works, I am going to need a whole lot of evidence. If you want to convince me that the universe has reordered itself, and that planets now go around the Earth, I'm going to need a ton of evidence. But the reason I demand such evidence is that these are very consequential things. The order of the universe and our place in it is one of those Big questions with a capital B. And the laws of physics matter. My background is in structural engineering. If the laws of physics are changing, I damn well need to know about it. But I'm going to demand quite a lot of proof for that.

But some things? They are simply not worth the effort to question the veracity of. Whether this story is true or not has zero impact on my life. I can assume it's true, and if it's not, oh well. We can never be certain of anything, and the level of certainty we can achieve on anything is a function of the amount of effort we put in to assessing its validity. And for casual stories? There simply isn't need to drill deeper.

The only time I feel it worth to drill into the truth and question such a story is if it's a story potentially being used to target a marginalized group or community. Hate groups and individuals sometimes deliberately spread numerous negative casual stories about members of marginalized groups, simply to associate that group with negative things in the public consciousness. If this story mentioned the race or sexual orientation of the homeless guy, I would be a bit more suspect and skeptical.

But otherwise, what's wrong with a little willful suspension of disbelief? There is ultimately no such thing as a true thing or a false thing, just a sliding scale of truthfulness. Not even the laws of physics are absolute. You cannot determine the truth or falseness of anything. You can only determine how much effort it is worth to put in to investigating a thing.

I don't need fo to speculate. I am someone that needs these qualifications. My partner and I are in our mid thirties and have a net worth over $1 million. And we crossed the threshold over $1 million in our early 30s.

My day today is going to be pretty mundane. I'm going to get up, feed the cats, and medicate the old one. Then I'll make some breakfast. After giving the spoiled rotten cats some after-breakfast treats, I'll eat my own rapidly cooling breakfast.

I'm not leaving the house today. The bulk of the day today will be spent working on some data analysis for my research work and cleaning up around the house. This evening, it's my husband's turn to make dinner, so he'll probably cook. Ideally, this evening I would like to spend some time in the wood shop working on this small wooden chest I'm making, but I might just end up spending most of the evening doom scrolling. Regardless, after our dinner, the old lady (our old cat) will get medicated again. And I'll go to bed between 10 and 11. My partner tends to stay up a bit later, especially on weekends. We have a big friend group on discord, and we do a lot of gaming with them on desktop. At the end of the day, I'll crawl back in bed. The bed is a big solid wood king sized wooden bed. It's of the Ana White school of design. It's made of Douglas fir and southern yellow pine. I know this, because I literally built my bed and sleep in it.

So commentary. Aside from the odd amount of woodworking, my life is pretty normal. We are objectively millionaires. Our net worth is between $1-2 million. But we have never inherited a penny, won a lottery, or been part of some corporate IPO. We did this the hard way. Hard work, frugality, and luck. That's how we've made our modest fortune. If you understand how we got it, you'll understand why we don't live some incredible lifestyle.

My husband and I are both from STEM backgrounds. My background is in structural engineering, his computer engineering. He's worked continuously since finishing undergrad. I worked in industry and teaching for quite awhile before coming back to school to get my PhD. I'm currently working on a PhD in Civil Engineering and Wood Science. My username is very much literal. Currently my partner is our main breadwinner, but we both worked, saved, and invested prior to me starting my program.

I got on the property ladder relatively early in life. In 2012, a year out of college, I bought a townhouse in a rough neighborhood in the big city we in at the time lived in. I bought it for $92k and about $3k total down. It really was that ridiculous. The builder had gone bankrupt and was offering incentives to offload units in this half-finished townhome development. It was weird, but it got me out of renting. That development is weird; I think there are still big concrete foundations of unfinished buildings sitting out in the rain there to this day.

For several years before meeting my now husband, I lived with roommates. I rented out the two spare bedrooms. My roommates paid the mortgage. I had some major medical expenses at the time, $60k or so, that I had to work my ass off to pay for. For a long time I essentially worked two full time jobs. I worked at an engineering firm by day and tutor at nights and weekends. And in those years, I lived on very little. But I did get past the medical expenses, and afterwards that frugality allowed me to really ramp up savings. Eventually I met my now-husband. After dating for awhile, we sent the roommates packing, and he moved in. While we were living together pre-marriage, he chipped in to the household expenses, though less than what the roommates together had been paying. And when he moved in, he was paying less than what he had for his one bedroom apartment before.

But yeah, we've just continued to chug away at it. He's always maxed out his 401k and IRA purchases. I've often maxed out my 401k and always my IRA. And before we got married, I even managed to pay off the mortgage on that townhouse. I paid off a mortgage before I was 30. We moved states for me to pursue my PhD, and now we have a house with a mortgage on it, but it's quite manageable. We entered our marriage each with a net worth of about $300k.

The thing to understand about the wealth we have is that it's basically all in our house and retirement funds. We sold the townhouse for about $130k when we moved out to the West Coast. We bought a house, a nice but pretty modest 2000 ft^2 bog standard suburban house. We bought it for $360k, which seemed insane at the time, but we were able to put over 50% down. Now it's gone up in value to near $600k, and we have a mortgage for about 1/4 of its value. We're not paying the mortgage down early, as that thing is locked in at an interest rate on a 15 year note at a rate lower than the inflation rate. We're riding that thing til it's over, or we have to move.

Overall, our balance sheet is pretty basic. We have about $100k in a taxable brokerage account. That's kind of our emergency emergency fund. Then we have our house. And the rest is in various retirement accounts. We have less than $20k in actual cash at any given time. We're millionaires, technically, but all that wealth is just dedicated to securing our future, not to living lavishly.

In addition to keeping our housing costs low, we've always been cheapskates when it comes to vehicles. For years my only vehicle was a Taiwanese scooter. And the only car we have now is the mid 2000s Toyota that my husband has had since college. He works from home. I don't even have a parking permit on campus. My main way to get there is an old e-bike I bought secondhand on Craigslist a decade ago. That or the bus. I am quite literally a millionaire that rides the bus.

And that is the key. We have certainly gotten lucky. We finished school at a time where the property market was at its lowest. We've had some luck in getting jobs, etc. But we're talking regular everyday luck, not win-the-lottery luck. And that, combined with grit and frugality, has allowed us to sock up a decent nest egg.

But again, if you met me on the street, you wouldn't know it. You might even meet me on the bus. I'll be the mid 30s woman, wearing an old backpack and clothes from a local thrift shop, clothes I've sewn holes up in.

I don't look like a millionaire, but I am one. The reason I am one is because I do not look like one.

TL:DR: I am The Millionaire Next Door.

Happy Day of Thor to you this fine afternoon!

It's called conservation of energy. The flame is hot and represents a local concentration of thermal energy. In order to concentrate this heat, thermal energy must be drawn from the outside air, greatly cooling it. This causes the air around the flame to appear black on film, as it is giving off much less light than the flame.

/s

It's just common sense. There's no shortage of federal land in mainland US to build camps to hold migrants in. It's a hell of a lot more expensive to fly people to Cuba than to hold them in some place on the mainland. This means they're actually deporting fewer people than they otherwise could by directing those resources to more immigration enforcement stateside. The only benefit of holding people in a secretive military base in Cuba is that it becomes very very difficult for the press and human rights groups to gain access to them.

I was a bit flippant about the Neuralink trials. But whatever they're doing to these people, it can't be anything good. Even just using them for cheap slave labor wouldn't require this level of secrecy. We do that to regular prisoners in the US all the time.

This should be obvious. You don't gather thousands of people, people with effectively no rights, in facilities that are deliberately difficult to keep tabs on them...unless you are planning on doing something horrible to them. If it's not unlicensed Neuralink trials, it's going to be something equally bad or worse. Why would you be surprised if a Nazi like Musk does Nazi shit? Once you decide a group of human beings doesn't count as human, there are few limits to the depravity you will sink to. Unlicensed Neuralink trials? Secret organ harvesting operations? Drug development and medical experimentation? Target practice for military drone development? Large scale forced sexual slavery and pornography?

When you stop seeing people as human beings, then there is precious little you cannot justify doing to them.

And they called me mad for doing the work I do. MWHAHA!