Same, got an EUV and it’s been a great daily driver, no complaints. It’s a solid car for the price and back when it had tax credits it was a steal. With gas creeping up, it’s almost paying for itself when coupled with home solar.

Agreed and when you find a small, indie company making good stuff, they may get bought by a megacorp who ends up worsening the product.

From what I can tell, a Certified B corp label seems to be a decent indicator of meeting at least a minimum standard of ethics. Hopefully more businesses start to put people of profits.

Agree we should be aware of what we’re consuming. Think the rise in certain diseases is correlated to diet and gut health. Lack of fiber, too many preservatives/sugar/etc. is getting more common in modern diets.

IMO it’s the convenience factor you have to try to overcome in most cases.

Some practical things we’ve been doing is buying more produce locally. We go to a weekly farmers market nearby or shop the perimeter of the grocery store only and avoid the center aisles. The trick is to use what you get before it goes bad (which natural food should, it’s a red flag to me if food is shelf stable for months). So we got a slow cooker and now it’s pretty easy to throw a bunch of vegetables in and have dinner ready without much effort or clean up.

The other trick is to just not have snacks in the house, otherwise we’ll end up eating those pretty quickly. I love potato chips, but if we don’t buy them, I don’t miss them and end up eating fruits or something else.

It’s a win-win, because it’s relatively cheap (beans and rice is cheaper than packs of ramen) and healthier.

But yeah it’s an uphill battle and getting increasingly difficult and more expensive to find food that’s good for you unfortunately.

I don’t want big name celebrities doing voice over for animated movies. Give me actual VAs

I’m seriously considering getting a Fairphone gen 6 in case my current phone goes down anytime soon. How’s it been as a daily driver?

Right now I alternate between DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Google results have been getting worse and the forcing of AI summaries was the final straw for me to stop using even the !g shortcut in DDG. At least DDG let’s you disable them.

Waking up late on weekends, making a good cup of coffee, throwing on a record, and just relaxing before the day gets going.

Playing an instrument and jamming with others.

Finishing projects. Making stuff by hand.

Taking long walks with my dog.

Reading outside.

Music and dancing.

Being amongst nature.

Kubernetes has one too, K8s

As others have mentioned, the common guidance is to figure out your annual expenses, i.e how much you need to live off of, and divide that by safe withdrawal rate (typically ~4% based on the Trinity study) to come up with a total amount needed to retire early. So for example, if you determine you need $60k/year, the formula would suggest saving $1.5M (60,000 ÷ 0.04 = 1.5M).

The basic idea is save a big enough nest egg so that you can live solely off interest, meaning you never touch the principal and your account grows in perpetuity.

The hard part is two-fold IMO:

estimating your average annual expenses is difficult due to lots of variables, e.g.

• health care costs vary greatly (if you don’t have access to public healthcare) and tend to increase with age

• housing costs can either decrease (if you own your own home and payoff your mortgage) or increase if you rent or have to move/refinance/etc .

• Inflation should also be accounted for. This can be difficult to project for the remainder of your life, so some tend to just look at historical inflation, but there’s no guarantee the future will follow the same trend

How to choose what investments will allow you to earn a return in excess of your withdrawal rate. For example, if you’re withdrawing 4%, you need your investments to earn a higher rate than that to avoid having to dip into your principal.

• The common guidance (from say Buffet, Bolgeheads, etc.) for most people is to invest in low-cost index funds (availability depends on your country). I emphasize “low-cost” because there was another study that showed the only sure-fire predictor of alpha (performance above a certain benchmark, like the S&P 500 if you’re in the US) is the having low management fees. Historically, this should return anywhere from 5-10% but again past performance is not indicative of future returns.

• While you’re young and have more time in the market, you genreally want to invest in higher risk/higher reward type investments. Idea being you benefit from higher returns while having more time to weather downturns. Then as you age, you can shift towards lower risk/lower reward investments, like bonds, so you’re not as exposed to market fluctuations.

One last thought, there are also variations of FIRE, like Barista FiRE, Coast FIRE, where you don’t have to completely stop working but are financially independent so you can choose where/how hard to work.

Good luck