A couple of months ago it was the hydraulic brakes (which involve an in-line pressure sensor that cuts the motor/activates the lights when the brakes are on), then last week the entire electrical system crapped out, and I’m not sure why.

Yeah, I’m in San Francisco, so it’s not overwhelmingly difficult to find a shop that services ebikes, but it’s still kind of a headache.

One additional factor to consider: maintaining an ebike is a much bigger headache than maintaining a regular bike or maintaining a car. If something breaks on my regular bike, I can diagnose the problem myself, get a replacement part in a day or two, and install it, or if I don’t want to do that, there are competent…

Fwiw, it doesn’t stop even if you have kids. I have two, and I still have random people pestering me about having more.

True, it’s a $5500 limit, but it’s also more than double the paperwork.

Look at the number of people who do backdoor roth IRAs. That’s a fair bit more paperwork for about the same benefit.

it seems like there is nothing a spectator could do to avoid a ball due to the speed that is moving

There are different strategies about how to split up the family for seating. We (mom, dad, 4yo, 1yo) usually book the two window seats and two aisle seats in the same row, and then offer to swap if someone else books the middle seat, but I’ve also seen people do 3 on one side plus the aisle seat on the other side, or…

Well, yeah. If you get into a hot investment, especially one that allows massive leverage, you can make a lot of money fast. You can also lose a lot of money fast.

Those all seem like even more of a reason to save.

Fair enough, I was thinking in terms of long term trends. If you’re planning on withdrawing 4% of your nest egg this year, and that turns into 8% because your portfolio got cut in half, then yeah, that’ll force you to re-plan your retirement a bit. Maybe cut back spending, maybe work a little longer.

Don’t pro athletes get scammed by their parents managing their money all the time?

I’d just like something on the menu that’s good but not too intense in any dimension. I was at a beer bar the other day where they had 7 beers that were 7.5% or higher, two sour beers, a blueberry beer, a smoke beer, a habanero beer, and a cheap hipster tall boy can. Everything came in a 10 oz tulip except for the…

“Living paycheck to paycheck” seems like kind of a weird measure. Like, a single mom stringing together minimum wage shift work is living paycheck to paycheck, but so is a tech bro who lives in a fancy apartment, drives a tesla, orders Seamless every day, and has a taste for exotic travel. Both may spend every dollar…

Even measuring from the pre-crash peak in 2008, VTI (low cost vanguard index fund that buys basically a little bit of everything) is up 6% per year (on a compound basis), plus a 1.5% dividend. 7% isn’t guaranteed, but on a decades-long time horizon, it’s a pretty reasonable estimate of what a boring low-cost…

I’m not a Kotaku regular or a huge gamer, but I’m probably more of a video game fan than the average Jeopardy viewer. I keep a console hooked up to my TV. I’ve been to PAX. I have friends who work in the industry. I can generally keep up with water cooler talk about video games. And I had no idea on 4 of the 5…

The problem I’ve seen is that in the last few years, as wholesale steak prices have shot up faster than menu prices, even the high end steakhouses have gotten squeamish about possibly cooking steak one degree past the desired doneness, since they don’t want some asshole customer costing them a steak, so they all…

Looking nice is nice, but what I really want is a printer that doesn't use my valuable color ink to print microdots on every document, and then refuse to print at all when the yellow ink runs out.

This just seems like a game of “hide the ball” where we haven’t found the ball yet. Usually, my first guess is that the city is giving away a piece of land (often for multi-use development, as in, “sorry, we can’t give you any money, but how would you like free land for your billion-dollar condo building”), but another…

My biggest issue with “heart points” in the new Google Fit is that it makes it really difficult to edit auto-logged exercise. Like, I can log “pushing a stroller” and earn heart points. But I can’t go point at an existing walk and say “oh, that was actually pushing a stroller.” My options are to either log it as a…