Like they’re so shamelessly blatant about who their reader base is nowadays I just can’t
Here’s the article if you want to read it I can’t summon the energy 
https://web.archive.org/web/20240507210734/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/magazine/retire-early-saving.html
Long story short, kid has a rough childhood, develops a police scanner app in the wild west app store days, people pay for it for some reason, he’s a multimillionaire. Not exactly a career path you can scale.
if the success story was reproducible, they’d be reproducing it, not sharing it.develops a police scanner app in the wild west app store days, people pay for it for some reason
is listening to the scanner not a common pastime where you live?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen one (I don’t go in other people’s houses much anymore, and presumably most people don’t have a dedicated machine anymore), but it used to be super common to go in an older person’s house and see an emergency & police scanner in the corner. It was great for getting the latest, juiciest gossip and keeping track of what the pigs were up to, if you had the patience to listen long enough to decipher what they were saying. (As an unmedicated AuDHD kid, I did not.)
One of the most popular local Twitter accounts just did scanner posting all day for years, it was awesome.
Most police/emergency radio systems are trunked now, requiring more complex hardware to listen in. It makes using these apps a more compelling option, even though they’re charging money for(or inserting ads into) what is essentially public information.
More and more police agencies are encrypting their radios, so this will all be gone soon enough.
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I’ll happily help them end their careers.
If I ever see my neighbor with a Supercar and bazinga gadgets, I will be sure to give anyone who wishes to rob them their address
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All i need is my health, my solid gold house, and my rocket car
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That’s a Lamborghini Aventador
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I’m just surprised that it’s usually the otherway around, people see a Mclared and call it a Lambo, now the one time it’s actually a Lambo someone calls it a Mclaren
He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off. Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.
One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number.
The first quote sounds like religion: sacrifice everything in the here and now and you may enter heaven. The second quote just describes “passive income” schemes that depend on paying less taxes and the stock market, which is highly speculative and relies on actual labourers to do the work that makes these companies so valuable as they claim.
The article mentions three “tomes” of the FIRE movement: one by a former astrophysicist, another one by a software developer. Jobs paying above $100,000 are most common, which is just 6 percent of the US population.
My interpretation of the FIRE movement is that it is an attempt to revive the “American Dream” by telling you to live an ultra-minimalist lifestyle and “hustle” for in most cases more than a decade, and relying on the stock market and tax breaks instead of actually producing things with your own labour. It feels like an ultra-charged version of the capitalist mindset, realising the boot on workers but only caring about saving yourself. It’s the ending to ‘Ready, Player, One’.
Also, the author mostly writes about fashion and other frivolous stuff that rich people are interested in. No wonder that people living paycheck-to-paycheck weren’t mentioned at all.
999 people doing this same thing failed, 1 person succeeded.
Its a foolproof plan!
Allen Wong in his primary residence in Celebration, Fla.
Ewww, that sketchy gated community in Disneyworld? Jesus, Disney adults shouldn’t be allowed to have their own money. They would be much better off attending 90s kid daycare where they can watch The Lion King 1/2 on cassette tape and eat Dunkaroos.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having healthy financial strategies, sometimes to the point of obsession, and aiming for FIRE especially given our fucked up government who doesn’t care about us, as the author herself says
But every single person I’ve met who does this is a reactionary neoliberal
Is it actually possible to be a FIRE grindset guy and not turn into a reactionary neoliberal?
Unless you’re an entertainer or athlete or something and you can just sell your labour in a way that everyone wants to pay to consume specifically your labour you’re inevitably building your wealth on the labour of poor people
Yeah, FIRE is just living off dividends. If you coupled that with a steady treat supply, you’re just doing labor aristocracy/petty-bourgeois shit. I doubt most of these people plan to retreat to a small house, grow their own food, fuel and stop treat consumption for sustainable living.
I don’t follow football, but this morning I was reading a post about a somewhat local to me footballer, and how he still owns his first car, “so he doesn’t forget his roots”. There were loads of comments how much money he was worth. The man grew up in a terraced house and got where he is due to football skills. But Bezos or Richard Branson earned their money. Boggles the mind.
Almost impossible, some sort of base super structure theory going on here?
Anyways I kind of did that except I didn’t penny pinch, just tried to min max financial strategies (credit cards, options trading, interest rates, etc.) but like, maybe 60% of the extent of what FIRE guys do. Still way more than the average person
And tbh, yea, I did end up becoming somebody who’s weird with money and wealth despite intellectually being radicalized and now I’m still trying to unlearn all of that
I was never reactionary or a neoliberal even before radicalization, I was just thinking about money far too much
give me some money
Do you have an OF? I’ll subscribe to it
On a more serious note I give very often to mutual aid posts here. If you ever make one I’ll probably be one of the donors
FIRE is just trying to speed run becoming a capitalist. It’s definitely and undoubtedly wrong
It isn’t just your government though. It’s all governments, more or less.
Most governments give out free healthcare it’s not even close
Fair play.
That article seems entirely too long.
God he has the Elon Musk soythrower and everything
*blowtorch
It’s not throwing anything.
Fair
