The Water Cooler - 2013-08-08

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12:00 AM

fair enough,

it was cool though :) I had one sheet for all my savings categories which were expenses that covered more than one month, then I had all my expense buckets listed on each month. I just copied in all my expenses from my bank accounts, gave them a category, then with leftover (or deficits), I put into or pulled from savings respectively.

@NickC yeah, my biggest hassle is trying to figure out what to do with unspent money from different categories lol, because I pay rent and most of the utilities/groceries, and my roommates pay me - which results in a MESS in my checking account

yeah, those kind of situations are the worst

@NickC one thing I did which completely changed my perspective on money too was to actually create a second savings account and rename it to what it represented

suddenly I realized "oh, I have $$$$ but it's already set for an emergency fund" or house savings/etc

I came up with a system for stuff like that which was basically a list of reimbursements or reimbursables.

I wish my physical bank accounts could let me divide it into enough meaningful categories

I have several but not enough to split how it would really be useful for me.

aside from emergency fund, maybe.

12:03 AM

@NickC you can create additional ones though - I never thought to do this until I read something once :-) I have something like 3 savings accounts and a checking account right now

mine have no minimum balance or fees

@enderland I should come up with 3-4 top level categories and manage it that way.

@NickC I've got: emergency fund, recurring expenses (insurance/maintenance/etc), and house downpayment savings

and a checking account

Makes sense.

I need to create a "car savings" one too... :\ I did the math and realized a $5000 car in 5 years is still almost $100/month, lol

@enderland Good point. You'll be glad you did.

12:06 AM

@NickC people so underestimate the cost of cars. OMG. If I could effect ONE change in America it would be to make people realize how expensive cars are - even cheap ones

mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting

@enderland hehe i dont drive, i walk everywhere

and occassionally bus or coach or train

This is a subject I'm so passionate about, because I work and know so many young folks making $50k-$80k a year who just don't even care! ahhhh!

i save so much just on fuel costs

@RhysW yeah. the next time I move, it WILL be within walking/biking distance of work

I drive 25miles each way right now - but have a ridiculously low monthly rent/food/util cost

its a good move, helpful for money and health, no way to lose!

12:10 AM

right, it's such a good win - exercise + saving money + saving time (you don't have to both exercise AND commute)

saves on anger at getting stuck in traffic all the time too :P

lol, I've probably been delayed a total of 10 minutes by traffic in the past 6 months :P

midwest commutes FTW

haha nice the last time i got delayed was by a swan

anywyas, back to making homemade bread - be back eventually :)

cya later, thanks again for the tips

1 hour later…

1:23 AM

@RhysW yep!

@enderland I've read that one before, good article. Lots of good numbers to back it up.

@RhysW Thanks for the chat!

@NickC they just are really expensive :( my drive to work is 25 miles each way :\

hopefully will change by Christmas at latest, though

@NickC I've reading the YNAB website, pretty interesting philosophy. Maybe I'll cave and buy it :-) the mobile part of it would be nice

6 hours later…

8:07 AM

@enderland youre still here?! do you sleep atall? :P

2 hours later…

9:40 AM

@mods when you get a second can you delete a room for me? The room creation isnt very intuitive and i stuck it on the wrong site by mistake! :L

10:10 AM

@MichaelGrubey hey there

10:35 AM

@RhysW Morning mate...computer is having a meltdown :(

10:49 AM

@MichaelGrubey no worries mine was doing that the other day, makes it hard to hold a conversation!

@RhysW Need to have it wiped and get the OS installed. Screwed it with all the Java work I was doing

@MichaelGrubey haha, it dislikes java? :P

@RhysW Virus overload...

@MichaelGrubey what were you even doing? 0.o

actually i dont want to know

:P

@RhysW Mobile Development :P

It was a killer...moved on from that to web dev now starting with SQL changes so I can figure out how the website works

2 hours later…

12:37 PM

@RhysW yes lol, but I'm American so my schedule is different :P

@enderland ah i forget people in other parts of the world have different time zones :P

:)

@enderland question for you related to yesterdays conversation

sure

have you taken an interst in that vanguard thing he is suggesting?

12:43 PM

yeah, though, Vanguard might be US specific

its in the UK too, a seperate branch

Vanguard aims to offer UK investors the highest value investment products and services available. The Vanguard Group launched its first index fund in 1976 in the US, and investors worldwide now trust it to manage $2.4 trillion worth of their assets.*

hmmm. In the USA it's a pretty popular company because it's not really a for-profit company, so it's much cheaper (on average)

i think they do the same thing in the UK as they do in the US, just in a different market of course

one of the "problems" I definitely suffer from in stuff like this is overanalysis paralysis, too

I kinda thought about that and realized even if I make suboptimal choices now (which thanks to the interwebs I doubt I am doing) I am still better off than spending and blowing all my money, now lol

from my brief reading stint, your money is spread out over all of the stocks when you go through them so you average out across the market, and then make the money based on the payouts those shares get you which you put back into vanguard to get more, i think

12:50 PM

@RhysW yep, that's the general idea behind "index funds" - you buy something which effectively represents the combined value of whatever the index is (so if it's the S&P 500 stock market or something else)

ima bit new at this money and financing stuff, i didnt even know there was anything more than just letting it sit in a bank account!

the one I have with Vanguard is - personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/…

that is a combination of American stocks, international stocks, and bonds (which tend to be safter)

i hear stocks, bonds, and all sorts of other buzzwords thrown around a lot but i have no idea what each of them really means

I read a couple books too, which helped

at least to get me SOME idea of the terms, too haha

I'm not sure of a good site for people in the UK - the ones I frequent are more USA specific (go figure! ha)

but spending time on forums and asking questions / lurking helped me a tooon

true, might just require a bit more dedication from myself to learning about it

1:01 PM

there are also a lot of people who would love to throw around terms so you spend lots of money on their services ;)

yeah im wary of those ones :P

thats part of how MMM convinced me, he didnt try to sell me anything after his blog posts

that's one of the things I love about the internet, unless I end up with an income of like 1M a year, I don't really need a financial advisor or anything

yeah, plus taking it into your hown hands teaches you so much more than giving it to someone else to deal with

yeah exactly! it is a slow journey though, like I said yesterday no one teaches you any of this

or even the basics, like what everything means

nope. they dont even acknowledge that it should be taught

which is crazy when you think about it

most of the population revolve around money yet not even 5 minutes is spent telling people how to properly use it

1:07 PM

yet you should always buy toys!

and the newest ones!

i went through that initial stage of buying stuff just because i had money, now im hoping to do some smarter choices with it

oh yeah. I need to seriously downsize...

when I move, it will be either a good thing I have so much @#%#@ or make me reallllly aware how much junk I have :D

@enderland me too, though i cancelled my order on a new laptop, my current one will do just fine for a few more years

I'm not sure if in the UK they have as many thrift stores, either, but I kinda realized there is almost no reason to spend lots of money on clothing

most of what I need I can get for 10% the cost there

my mind = blown after realizing that hahaha

i have the advantage of not actually growing so my clothes last me ages, but when i do i get some good sales normally

ive recently realised i do a lot of money saving things without thinking about it, because of the way i was brought up

@enderland oh dear, hoarded lots of things have you?

1:10 PM

@RhysW kinda, I was not someone who naturally spent money, but over the years I have accumulated lots of stuff (generally for cheap though)

I have most of the furniture for our 3BR 1200 sq-ft townhome...

i dont like to get rid of stuff either

reading Mr Money Mustache completely changed my attitude towards stuff

hes really smart and really good at writing

it's all basically really obvious, too, once you read it. "oh, duh"

yeah, im really surprised more people havent taken to the idea

not only is it straightforward so much of it is just easy

especially with the internet there to help,

1:17 PM

I'm going to face a fairly big decision in a few years regarding purchasing a home

purchasing? not renting?

owning in the Midwest is decently cheap

ah right ok

you can get a nice 3BR house for 150k or less

even in the $100k range if you are willing to have a smaller house

two secs, translating to £ values :P

1:19 PM

haha

64478.70 British Pound Sterling

is $100k

@enderland a small house in the USA is about the size of a large house in the UK

well it depends on where you live

so i could happily live in a smaller USA house :P

if you live in parts of CA it's like 500k minimum for any house

@RhysW yeah. some areas of the midwest are really cheap to buy, though, because of that I'm not sure if there will be many homes actually for sale by the time I want to buy

which is ok, I guess, just will mean I build up savings

haha, then do what MMM did and start a plot development company :P build your own house then rent out loads others xd

1:25 PM

I mean, randomly looking at an area I might consider buying in the next 5 years - a 3BR/1Bath 900 sqft house with a 2 car attached garage is $70k

...

youre kidding

another for $85k

thats like 45-50k thats crazy

like I said, housing in midwest is pretty affordable

texas is even cheaper lol

bit too gun toting for me in texas :P

screw that im going to the US then xD

1:28 PM

:D

damn, if I open my range up from 0-100k to 100k-200k lots of nice (from the interweb) places

lets see, a 3BR 1 bath house in the UK is

or, a 2500 sqft 4br/4ba was recently dropped from 220k to about 200k - so about 130k pounds

yeah a lot cheaper than in the UK

in the uk that would be about 250k in pounds

so like 400-500k in dollars

meanwhile in San Francisco a 2BR condo is basically 1M to buy

more popular location i guess

1:36 PM

yeah land is a bit harder to get out there ;)

MMM suggests not buying a house, i wonder if that extends to buying lots of properties and renting them out, because they succumb to the same problems as owning them and living in them

@RhysW most people do not properly calculate how expensive owning a home actually is...

he made some good points on how static they are and how easily influenced they are by things out of your control though

@RhysW renting gives you so much flexiiblity too

e.g someone builds a factory nearby then your properties worth drops massively

sigh, any ideas why XP wont let me change the proeprty of a folder to not be 'read only'?

2:10 PM

Are you doing anything with it atm or is it a system folder?

You can try take ownership of the folder which should allow you to overwrite the existing permissions.#

@MichaelGrubey i was but i since stopped and still cant change it

@MichaelGrubey already marked as the owner too, im on the local admin account

Have you tried doing it since encountering this problem?

Like manually change the settings of the folder to set the Admin account to take ownership control

chmod ?

oh wait, windows.. :P

@RhysW "Eve room"?

2:27 PM

Why unix :S?

@NickC yeah i made it here instead of on arquade the first time round

think i figured it out, source control is desperately trying to hold on to them and fighting me every step of the way

@RhysW Done.

@NickC much appreciated

1 hour later…

3:51 PM

Get Flux for starters and adjust your white brightness down very far — enderland 15 hours ago

how does that lead to

Enderland and @Yannis are right. This is a lousy question. Voting to close. — Jim G. 13 hours ago

4:08 PM

@enderland Comment removed.

4:19 PM

@NickC i think this is the first few times ive seen you in this room, have you changed timezone or something?

@RhysW I haven't been in chat for a couple months

@NickC ah that might be why, i always thought you were on at the opposite times to me, not sure why though

@RhysW I am on the west coast of the US

huh, i must have invented a backstory for you by mistake then

5:19 PM

@RhysW Because there is a file in the folder that is read only. That is most often the reason.

@Chad yeah solved it in the end, was something like that but it was 1 of 1000 and i couldnt find it xD

I said this at the beginning of TWP and I still maintain... This site needs active mods that are diligent and vocal in publicly condemning posts that do not meet standards.

@RhysW It is probably a system file that you dont want to change anyway

@Chad partly, turns out source control had hold of 1 file in there

6:10 PM

workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/13593/…

I don't quite understand why that Q was deleted?

I understand the person is kinda an arrogant twit, but I suspect that question (even closed) would be a wonderful reference in the future since we seem to have a high percentage of "I'm so damn awesome" people here

@enderland -10

@RhysW it also has +6

i think -10 just sends a signal that its not worth keeping maybe?

i think it should be kept personally

its a good question

a lot of people are like him

and dont genuinley know how to improve

we should judge on the question and answers not so much that the op is an arrogant Ass

0

Q: Don't brainsize me, bro (discussion on brainsizing question)

I think this question should remain undeleted. Lots of people on this site have asked questions where that entire question/answer sequence would be relevant. Since being active here, I have found a lot of people who post questions here seem to have an, "I'm so awesome, why won't the world work w...

discussion deleted-questions

@enderland dont taze me bro?

6:32 PM

@enderland Feel free to reask the question right. The op made no attempt to fix it and as it was it was a crapstorm

@RhysW I completely disagree. If a question is bad it needs fixed or axed. Even if there are good answers.

Bad questions are broken windows

@Chad the question is a good question, the OP is just an ass, and people are judging it on the op's personality not the question

6:48 PM

@RhysW The question could be asked as a good question the form it was in was not a good question.

And the deletion of this means that someone can ask that good question with out it being closed as a duplicate of the crapfest

@Chad my mistake, i didnt see the recent edits

7:13 PM

@enderland man this MMM guy has written a lot of blogs...

7:23 PM

@RhysW yeah he's put out a few :)

7:52 PM

@enderland they all seem fairly accurate though

1 hour later…

9:18 PM

@Chad: @jmort253 is an all-star. He's been very active! I think we're all set.

1 hour later…

10:47 PM

in The Whiteboard, 6 mins ago, by gnat

looking for volunteers to put "draw attention" bounty on my question about f-fake-hotness-score. I was planning to do it myself tomorrow, but decided that if someone else does, it will look less like one man effort. (readers who'd follow the links sprinkled over the question would find out that it's indeed more like a ten man effort, but people rarely click the links)

23

Q: In hotness formula, discard answers when voting evidence indicates that these are not good data points

In current version of “hot” questions formula (Qanswers * Qscore)*, all answers are assumed to equally contribute to question "hotness score", including even those downvoted into oblivion. Suggest to discard answers when there is a strong evidence that these do not provide good data points for a...

feature-request voting stackexchange-button hot-questions answer-quality

10:58 PM

@gnat unfortunately i dont have enough rep to do that (i dont think) otherwise i would

oh i can!

what sort of text are you thinking for the bounty message?

@RhysW for draw attention, I usually leave it empty

I found that in this case, the reason speaks for itself

done

though i ironically cant upvote it now :P

@RhysW thanks! upvotes will come along, while it's hanging there. That's why I keep my bounties hang as long as possible. The longer the exposure, the more chances for upvotes

@gnat no worries, im surprised it hasnt got more attention

wrt bounty text real hard stuff for me are reward-answer bounties. For these, I try to do my best to get the message across. An example at Programmers (quite a pity messages aren't kept so it will go away after awarding:

> This answer is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty. "That's right, let's start talking about a monad..."

9

Q: How to create better OO code in a relational database driven application where the database is poorly designed

I am writing a Java web application that consists mainly of a bunch of similar pages in which every page has several tables and a filter that applies to those tables. The data on these tables comes from an SQL database. I am using myBatis as ORM, which may not be the best choice in my case, sinc...

java design web-development database object-oriented-design

there's a link, and bold font and all the bells and whistles

@RhysW well I think it has got rather decent attention. It's not considered a hot topic despite the word "hotness" :)

thing is, not much sites that suffer directly. Programmers and Workplace are top victims I think

many other sites are sort of "protected", we discussed it in another MSO question...

@Sklivvz yeah I heard about that. I think rules allowing mods to unilaterally delete meh answers do a good job of taming the problem, be it concrete-programming at SO or famous back-it-up at Skeptics. At sites I am active though (Programmers and Workplace), such formal rules are hard to impossible to establish. I for one would not want to rely on mod discretion splitting meh and okay answers neither at Programmers nor at Workplace (with all due respect). — gnat Jul 26 at 11:52

The topics accepted by Programmers and TWP are... problematic when it comes to objective evaluations of answers. But then, that's why these sites exist... — Shog9 Jul 26 at 15:10

simply speaking, at Workplace and Programmers, there isn't objective criteria that would allow you to flag a meh answer and expect it deleted

By the way sort of "protected" I mention above, is not quite full protection. I mean,...

...really, say guys at SO are protected from direct impact. Meaning when they see meh, they can flag no-code and get crap deleted. But thing is, it's SO users who look at collider and who visit "sticky" questions and who pick the crappy attitude and they get back to SO and get posting meh answers there

and, well, there are hundreds and thousands of them. And meh attitude gets spread over multiple questions and SO mods only can delete minor part of crap that has been influenced through collider

> they start thinking it's the norm. That's what low quality answers in hot questions teach readers. That's what "educated" readers spread further, to their answers to other questions. That lowers overall quality of answers in multiple other questions, that is the site-wide damage

> This makes it look like good questions are those having many meh answers, the effect that is amplified by these questions being highly visible to collider audience - hundreds and thousands of SE users. Misguided users spread acquired attitude further into other questions and answers, posting stuff that follows what they saw at the "cool" ("hot") questions.

nobody is really protected, collider spreads it across all the SE network

11:17 PM

yeah we have a difficult rating system

because its all so subjective

@RhysW difficult and in the same time interesting. It's for a reason that I spend more time at Programmers / Workplace than at SO

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