tldr: exercise, learn to cook, and start saving some money (keep your expenses low as long as you can)

I know a lot has changed since I was 18 but if I could give myself some advice to get a better start in life on a second try, here are a the first things that I would share.

1. Learn to take care of your body, it's the only one you get and it is much easier to work on your fitness and health when you are 18 than when you are 30 or 40 or whatever. While you have free time, this is a great time to learn and practice some good habits that you can carry with you for the rest of your life.

Two main ideas here:

• Find some kind of movement exercises that you enjoy doing and can make a routine of. You don't need to be an athlete or anything. It could be a daily walk, yoga, jogging, weight training, climbing, cycling, sports. For sports, I would look at things that are easy to keep up with as you get older, typically things with less structure or equipment requirements. For example, American football or volleyball might be harder to manage than tennis/pickle ball or indoor soccer/football. Don't make it a chore; you don't have to be great (or even good) at any of it, just find something that you want to keep up with. I know a lot of people also make connections with other people in some of these places (like climbing, cross fit, and sports gyms) but those also tend to be more expensive options.

• Learn to cook (if you don't already know how) and try to build a short list of reasonably healthy recipes that you enjoy and could live on every day, if needed. Try to focus on simple things to start, like eggs or oatmeal for breakfast, healthy sandwiches or wraps for lunch (try to minimize processed meats or peanut butter), for dinner maybe pastas, casseroles, salads, roasted vegetables & potatoes.

Try to come up with things that are quick and easy to make and especially things that can be made from staples that last a long time in the pantry or fridge. For a lot of people, planning, shopping for, and preparing food every day is a major challenge once when added to a job, school, or family. However, if you have a reliable list of foods that you can repeat without much effort, that takes away a major point of stress in your future life.

1. If you have a good relationship with your family, take advantage of this time to minimize your expenses and get some savings started. A lot of people are in a rush to move out and "start" their adulthood. If you are in a bad family situation, that may be the right move. If things are good, maybe get a low stress part-time job to earn a little income and get some experience.

For me, a big part of "low stress" is know that you can walk away at any time because you have a safety net. In my case, I can't quit my job because my family needs the income, which makes stupid things stress me out more than they should. However, when I was a teenager working low wage retail and fast food jobs, they did not stress me out because I knew I could walk out the door at any time without caring. From the outside looking in, my current job pays much better and is much more chill than working retail but I was way less stressed flipping burgers while living at home as a teenager.

The biggest "mistakes" I made after I graduated high school were eating a ton of fast food while going to college, dropping my gym routine when my parents canceled our membership when I was 20, and rushing to move out with my friends about the same time. The result of those things caused me to get fat and deeply in debt in my 20s and it took me all of my 30s to get back to even. I was probably around 35 when I got back to anything close to my high school graduation body weight and around 40 before my net worth went positive and I started any meaningful retirement savings.

This didn't make sense to my American brain until I realized it was Boris Johnson, so this is a joke for people in advanced nations where medicine is a basic service.

Well, he wasn't shot, choked to death, or mangled in the back of a police van at the time of arrest, so that's already a win for him.

I tried to sign up for an Apple TV free trial without an Apple device. It let me create the account, but then I had to "activate" the account, and I couldn't do it on any of my devices (android, windows, the TV that gave me the free trial). I talked to tier 1 and tier 2 support, they couldn't get it working either.

Then it gets even more ridiculous. The tier 2 agent asks me to upload screenshots of the errors I was getting for the tier 3 (?) engineers to review. Oh, I need an active Apple account to upload anything. I emailed the images and their email system stripped the attachments from the email. Tier 3 closed the ticket and banned my account. I talked to Tier 2 again and all they could do was put in a ticket to request I be unbanned...it was denied.

Finally, I gave up and asked them to delete my account. They said my account can only be deleted if I log in and use the delete account function. I pointed out how that was not possible and they said there was no other option. The whole situation reinforced my plan to never buy an Apple product.

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us

If you're having problems getting support from a Telecom company, file a complaint with the FCC. You are more likely going to get someone who can/will actually help you. This mainly works when you have a concrete complaint that is running into process/policy roadblocks. For example, if you've been overcharged by an amount that the normal agents don't have authority to credit or if you're having chronic service issues that aren't being resolved.

It is less likely to help if the issue is more subjective, such as asking for a large credit to compensate you for being inconvenienced by an outage (i.e. claiming the outage cost you business or work time). They'll likely offer a prorated service credit and a courtesy credit (like $25-50) and the FCC will likely consider that reasonable.

Also, there's this common "feature":

Dr: "You need this procedure."

Me: "How much will it cost me?"

Office Manager: "I won't know until I bill your insurance and find out if it is covered."

Me: "What is the cash price I would pay you if it isn't covered by insurance."

Office Manager: "I have no idea."

I once had to post a position that was specifically made for my employee, but my recruiter was awesome. I told her there was no possibility I would pick anyone else, so she suggested I make the requirements hyper specific. So, I met with my employee and we worked up a list of 10-20 things that she had done in her career and put them all in as requirements to qualify.

I received no other "qualified" applicants, so I only had to interview the one. My next meeting with her I said, "this is your official interview, do you have any questions for me?" She said "no" and I congratulated her on being selected for the role.

I used to work for a call center that had an automated call out system, so you didn't have to talk to anyone or give a specific excuse. However, at some point management instituted a policy requiring supervisors to call their employees to "check in on their wellbeing." I don't even have to be cynical to know the real purpose because I was in the meetings where they talked about it as a tactic to reduce absenteeism.

"Funny" story - at my prior employer, my department would outsource a bit more labor overseas each year to reduce costs. Year after year we were able to deliver 5-10% cost reductions, mostly through outsourcing. When I started with the company, we were about 40% outsourced, when I left we were over 80%, but it took many years to get there.

Over the years, we could have returned vastly more money to shareholders if we had outsourced more quickly, but our department leadership understood that they have to show improvement every year, so its bad business to save all the money at once (even though the savings would increase profitability permanently).

In the last 2 years, many of those leaders have moved on to other roles, in part because they understood we were nearing the end of the road for that strategy. I would be very curious to see how the next 2-3 years goes for the new leaders, but I also had a good opportunity to leave before things get ugly.

Stock "news" is stupid, the Switch 2 announcement has been expected for a year. The only news is that the company confirmed it will launch this year, which was already expected. Real news is when we start hearing what games will be available at launch (or soon after).

At my old company we would ban customers that were repeatedly abusive to customer service agents. Agents had the right to hang up on customers that were being abusive and if the same customer kept getting reported, eventually they would receive a letter from the legal department telling them to stop. If it continued, they would get banned.

I remember one guy was so bad that a director got the phone system to automatically route any calls from him to his mobile line and put him in his phone book. He would very politely greet him by name as soon as he picked up the call to make it clear that he wasn't ever going to get through to anyone else.

Apparently these rules exist in my house also. Just today, my Gen Z kid forbade me from ever saying rizz or Ohio again. Luckily, I don't live near Ohio, so I don't need these words for any functional purpose. In particular, she told me that Ohio has been over for, like, a year and I'm out of date on slang.

I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.

They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.

I'm not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.

Wow, 1st class, I didn't realize out of context comics paid so well! :)

I'm really impressed with how quickly you've made such a huge life change, that takes some serious courage for you and your family. I would love to follow along behind you, but have no path for it, so I'll have to stick things out and hope for the best (or not worst) here.

It's helpful to know that if I ever leave the US, I'll have better healthcare. I don't even need to spend any time researching that aspect.

It drives me nuts that my state has "deregulated" natural gas. All natural gas in the region is supplied to every home by a single company (the same one as before deregulation). I pay at least $35 a month all year just for the privilege of being connected to it.

BUT, I don't actually do business with that company. I get to pick from a dozen companies that all provide front-end billing for my natural gas. They advertise how much they will charge per therm used (plus an admin fee), but that price is on top of what I pay to the company actually providing gas. If I have an issue with the gas, the supplier comes out to deal with it, not the company I pay every month. And, I have to change companies every 6-24 months to maintain the advertised rates, otherwise they increase my cost after the new customer price expires. Its fake competition that added an extra step to the process and increases prices compared to the regulated version that used to exist.

That would be a lucky outcome for Intel, they can't compete with AMD's current fab (TSMC).

I was only ever interested in these company's services as a way to save money. They are no longer cheaper than a hotel, so I would rather stay at a hotel.

I'm with OP, year-month-day is the superior format. Its consistently sortable, even as a text field (like with file names).

I used to judge people for going about their daily lives with headphones on (like shopping) as being antisocial. In the last few years, I've come to realize they were just quicker to realize how annoying our society is and I'm increasingly likely to join them.

Recently I went to a mall and visited all the department stores. One of them had a guy playing a piano live and my first thought was "how quaint". Then, as I sat and waited for my wife to try things on it struck me that I wasn't hearing horrible music played over speakers - the piano was really nice. Why can't places go back to playing relaxing music like that (even recorded)?