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.

The quarter percentage point increase will bring the fed funds rate to a target range of 5.25%-5.5%.

During a news conference, Chairman Jerome Powell said inflation has moderated somewhat since the middle of last year, but hitting the Fed’s 2% target “has a long way to go.” Still, he seemed to leave room to potentially hold rates steady at the Fed’s next meeting in September.

I've tried lots of pens over the years. The ones I can remember:

• Conid Bulkfiller Regular
• Cross Aventura
• Jinhao 159, X450, (also whatever the Safari clone is, 777 I think?)
• Lamy 2000, 2000 Amber, Safari
• Montblanc 145, 146, 149, 320, 1912, Slimline
• Nakaya Decapod, Neo-Standard
• Parker IM
• Pelikan M200, M600, M800
• Platinum 3776, Preppy
• TWSBI 580, Eco, Vac 700
• Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age, Dark Age
• Waterman Phileas Blue

I'm not much of a collector, so I have cycled through and gotten rid of almost all of these. I only have around ~10 now, just the ones that I really like, or are sentimental, or are just super unique. One brand that's escaped me is Sailor. I've read about the 21K nibs and how people fawn over them. I know there are die-hard Sailor supporters and it seems to mostly revolve around this nib. But, $300+ for a proprietary cartridge/converter that isn't made from unique materials seems like a lot.

So, if I was going to "try" Sailor, as a manufacturer, where does it make sense to start to see if I get it or not? Do people prefer the Realo (piston filled) variants? From what I can tell here and on /r/fountainpens people are mostly content with the C/C versions. So is it just the unique colors? Or is it just the 21K nib and nothing else matters?

/r/personalfinance was one of my more frequented subreddits and I find it pretty valuable. I figure I should try to help get the ball rolling over in the Fediverse and it seems like this is the most active substitute so far.

The "rule" as it were is that to have income in retirement broadly in line with your income before retirement, you need to hit 1x your salary by 30, 2x your salary by 35, 3x by 40, etc. This rule works well for people who 1) start working at 25 and 2) do not experience significant pay raises, as either of those things will set you significantly behind.

Ultimately I use this as a target for what my 401k contribution should be, since I'm already maxing a Roth IRA each year and my company match is fairly low so maxing that is easy. But I definitely can't afford to max the 401k, so I use this to help gauge where I really ought to be in between those bounds.

The way I calculate the target for a year is just sum up my gross income from paychecks for that year. This means it includes salary and bonus but not RSUs. The stocks are too volatile to make the accounting easy, and thus far haven't been a significant fraction of my income. Then, multiply by the factor for the age I turn in that year. It looks like this:

2023 of course are estimates, I won't know those real numbers until ~mid November. "Actual" is the reported balance of my Roth + 401k in Fidelity at the end of the first trading day in November.

A few explanatory features. I started my current job in 2018 but only worked about half that year. I only had a tiny rolled over 401k from a job in grad school. So I've had both reasonably large raises and obviously started super late (even for someone who went to grad school - but hey at least I got in-state tuition!).

It looks like I'm not doing too hot. I started late, wasn't contributing enough in 2018 and 2019 clearly, in 2020 I was saving for a house and finally got serious about contributing in 2020/2021. Maxed a Roth for the first time in 2021. If 2022 hadn't been so astonishingly terrible in the stock market I'd have been steadily gaining ground the entire time though. Now I'm contributing about 21% of my income and since the market is doing better this year I'm back to gaining ground again. I like the rule, even in my "worst case scenario" because it's fairly aggressive and keeps my from spending too frivolously.

So do you use the rule? How closely do you track it? Are you gaining or losing ground? How close to retirement are you?

What is a Grand Tour?

A Grand Tour originally refers to an extended journey through continental Europe, for educational purposes. These journeys were undertaken by wealthy young men as a rite of passage, who visited many historical and cultural sites along the way, seeking to expand their knowledge and appreciation of the classical arts.

Though there is no more need for the aristocracy to elevate themselves above the common people, the desire and effort to broaden one's horizons remains a noble purpose.

Grand Tour is a relatively new contest format over at NE, the parks are incredible, I strongly encourage everyone to at least give them a look, and if you have or are willing to make an NE account, please vote!

What I'm getting at is you can be made a mod from other instances, but I don't see any way to perform moderator actions unless you have an account on that instance. Is there any plan to fix this? Otherwise seems more likely to push people to duplicate communities rather than join in moderating ones that happened to have become popular outside of their home instance.

My most expensive keyboard.
Driftmechanics Austin R3 Purple
Alu plate
Gateron Oil Kings L+F
Staebies
GMK Posh
Plate foam + case foam from stupidfish

Here is a sound test comparison of the board with and without foam.

With:

https://streamable.com/dow9fs

Without:

https://streamable.com/j2l9vi

What is a Grand Tour?

A Grand Tour originally refers to an extended journey through continental Europe, for educational purposes. These journeys were undertaken by wealthy young men as a rite of passage, who visited many historical and cultural sites along the way, seeking to expand their knowledge and appreciation of the classical arts.

Though there is no more need for the aristocracy to elevate themselves above the common people, the desire and effort to broaden one's horizons remains a noble purpose.

Grand Tour is a relatively new contest format over at NE, the parks are incredible, I strongly encourage everyone to at least give them a look, and if you have or are willing to make an NE account, please vote!