OldSchoolSnapper

I'd still always pay down a student loan. Mine were a great source of stress for me in way that a house just isn't. I can't sell my degree if I enter hardship. But I can buy a cheaper house and customize it to my needs, and sell it at retirement if I feel like it. A mortgage is really the only kind of debt I don't stress over. I try to pay off cars within 12 months if I can't pay cash in full up front.

I think mortgage vs. investing is highly dependent on several variables. If I had a $600k (assuming WI prices) mortgage an outstanding balance like that would give me anxiety even if I could easily sustain that standard of living. At a lower-priced home (assuming it is well beneath means) I am much more comfortable paying the minimum and investing all excess. I think where a lot of people go wrong is telling themselves they'll do that and not actually doing it. Cars, boats, etc. I would never want to carry around regardless of rate. I totally get the mental peace of paying a mortgage down early and if you do pay it off early it probably does feel great. However if I ran an extra $500/mo through a simulator to see what it would have done in the markets over 25-30 years and instead chose to pay down a mortgage, I think I'd probably start crying at the numbers. In reality if you paid a mortgage off 8 years early or funneled that amount toward retirement instead, you probably are doing just fine.

I'm a huge fan of sausage in general (and strongly recommend checking out Bavaria Sausage Inc. in Fitchburg or online) so I agree it is better than pepperoni. I'm not a vegetarian or anything. I just always want to enjoy the crust, sauce and cheese on a pizza and think meat often overtakes those elements. To me the sauce on a pizza is 3/4 of the battle.

I'll eat and I think it's fine, but I feel like a rare person that actually would prefer no meat on a pizza. I'd rather just have mushrooms and diced tomatoes or something. On a good pizza I always feel like it overwhelms the flavor.

I was buying these a lot last year but found that I eventually got kind of sick of it. If someone wants a frozen pizza that's different, more bready, it's a good change of pace. I'd agree they're good, but not one that I can have routinely like a Jack's.

It's actually not. You can make dozens of things in them. When I originally got mine it was $200 though so it was much easier to accept I'd just use it for pizza. I have the pellet model and use it nearly every weekend. I'll second that it definitely has a learning curve, sometimes a steep one. I've had random weeks where I mess the dough up or over-flower and burn it...it can be an exact science. However when you nail it, the results are incredible. if you eat a lot of pizza and want to take the time to make great pizza they are very cool to have. I've never had delivery since I got mine.

Disney content returns. That was quick.

I saw that but they are dropping the price to $50. So basically the same as having YTTV and the Disney Plus ESPN whatever bundle for $13.99. So it shouldn't affect too much from a customer's perspective.

It certainly does happen where they will throw someone out for this...even before an interview. They either assume you are going to ask for too much or they are worried you won't stay around for long. I went to an interview last week just to humor myself I guess and I'm almost certain there will be an offer this week, as they contacted me for references on Friday. I don't think I've ever had that happen and not had an offer. The work was more engaging than what I'm doing and the operation much smaller, but now but I have a feeling it will come in way low, and I'd have to give up a bunch of cushy large-company benefits that I just don't think I'm ready to lose. I mentioned early on in the process I was ok with a lateral compensation move, but as things moved along and the reality of that decision set in, I chickened out a bit. I'd still do something for less $$, but this is also longer commute, likely loss of some PTO (currently have 5 weeks), some benefits, matching % is less, etc. It all starts to add up.

The last time I visited one of those hellscapes I had to drive half an hour to Spectrum to return a modem that was Charter's which they made a big deal of as though I had any control over that whatsoever. Haven't been a customer since.

Cable is sadly the optimal choice for anyone whose top priority is watching every single local sports game they can. I don't have cable and I know there is a lot of resistance to this idea but in my opinion it is the truth. It's not relevant to me because I'm simply not sitting down to watch 150 Brewers and 65 Bucks games for a multitude of reasons. If you're dropping in a couple times a month, it's an enormous price gouge. The rest of the service is awful. In my experience of saving a few dollars with other options, you do sacrifice some quality. When I've had cable, I can count on one hand the number of times I couldn't see what I wanted. With streaming there are issues much more frequently. I'm in a weird Spectrum pocket where the Internet service is $17.99 a month, so the VPN/streaming route is a massive savings for me. But I still end up not using it enough to justify YouTubeTV or something. Personally I would rather read a book or go snowshoeing/hiking than watch TV that often, but if someone is dead-set on catching all the Brewers they can, without a bunch of annoying flopping between junk, cable still wins. Unfortunately. I'm experienced in piracy and it's wonderful for me, but my Dad is simply never going to use a firestick and a laptop to see the Brewers. It just won't happen.

Is Red Baron that cheap? My Dad bought it all the time but I thought I remembered it being like $4 in the 2000s. Cheap to me is Jacks vs Orvs and Jacks is in a league of its own. Can still sometimes get a Jacks for $2.50, awesome deal.

I've had the best results using a crust that uses both 00 and all-purpose flours. There is a Roberta's dough recipe you can Google that I've used a bunch of times. Sometimes 00 can be hard to find. Glorioso's has it.

WI is actually a bit of a frozen pizza mecca. I remember reading somewhere that Green Bay consumes more per capita than Chicago, and WI is the national leader. If you go out of state, you'll find most grocery stores don't provide as many options as we have here.

Emil's is made in Watertown. A lot of fundraisers in my area (Washington County) use them.

Emil's is good, and made in Watertown. Pretty sure they used the same packaging photo as Tombstone. I know Tombstone is very popular but I never really liked it. I'd rather have a Jack's. Found it to be too much sauce and too pillowy. I generally prefer a crispy pie. Costco recently had Roncadin which I tried and also found it to be really good, then it was gone on my next trip.

I liked Ghostbusters. Yeah a lot of fan service but the fans deserved it. I thought 2016 film was an abomination.

I'm not going to quote because it's too much text but I'm confused as to why you quoted two blocks of text and insinuated they contradict each other when they don't at all. Anyway, firing and layoffs are different, sure, but usually firing is very easily justified. Layoffs are pretty often comical and ambiguous. After living though several at F500s, there is no effort made to discern who's worth keeping and who isn't in a layoff. Really valuable guy everyone loves? Nah, he's in the wrong department, get rid of em. I could go on but I'd be here all night. And again, I'll repeat that I've never been laid off. So this isn't some vendetta.

You know you aren't getting some Cannes film with Halloween...but the one from 2018 seemed to do a nice job of entertaining and at least inserting a plausible story given the circumstances. I love Michael, just thought this one was a lot less creative than the last.

Watched Halloween Kills on Peacock. Thought the "new original" was a lot better. This one felt really silly and I found the central theme of "town must stop Michael now, themselves!" really schticky. For fans that just want to see Michael be Michael, it delivers that...but I thought it was silly, even for Halloween series.

Exactly. And I remember every single company that had a person CALL me to tell I wasn't selected. Because I can fit them on one hand.

You guys are taking this in a way I never intended it to be. This has nothing to do with evil corporate America or "fat cats that I despise." It is simply the reality of the situation and a set of conditions that employers fostered for decades. You're assigning all kinds of bitterness to me that I don't harbor toward anyone. I just find the whole experience "cold," so I don't think companies have a leg to stand on when whining about this sort of thing. And I dunno why you're telling me it isn't possible. I've witnessed hundreds of people get fired from my company without notice on the same afternoon, more than once. Sure it's a "layoff," I don't think the people losing their job care much about the semantics. The point is the same. They wash their hands of you the second it is convenient to do so. To clutch pearls over some no-show interviews, lol, please. As far as this goes: "Sometimes it is simply about being a nice person and treating others they way you want to be treated." Precisely. The vast majority of companies haven't treated candidates this way, so they can sleep in the bed they made. Of course, they get to do under the guise of "doing their jobs" so that makes it OK. This isn't about some ax I have to grind. I've never been fired, I've been at the same company for a decade. These are all just things I've watched happen from the sidelines, witnessed friends and family do this silly interview game. There are few things more sad to me than an unemployed person desperately seeking work, and getting their hopes up by a recruiter who Houdinis half-way through the process. And while I can't question your personal experience...I REALLY doubt that candidates ghost more than recruiters...but I digress.

They got a better offer and don't want to bother with pleasantries. You know, sort of exactly what employers have done for 40 years. Who cares about screwing corporate America. They can do what they want. My whole point is that employers created this dynamic. They are to blame, so I laugh at them crying about it now. They can dock your pay if you show up late once, fire you this afternoon and tell you to get bent, schedule an interview and then just not pick up the phone, but expect 2 weeks notice if you quit and cry foul if you ghost an interview. Childish? Please. The amount of leeway you guys are giving these places is frankly surprising. I have to wonder how extensive some of your interviewing experience is if none of these things have ever happened to you. And these aren't one-off things either. I've literally had Google Calendar invites that HR people simply don't show up to and I never hear from them again.

Yeah...I'm with igor here, I don't really see this pro-active hiring you speak of. Even at the huge company I work for, the vast majority of recent grads are on-boarded via a huge internship program and dismissed at the end of summer if they aren't hired. They don't get fired, just don't get offers and that basically means you aren't good. But they are crappily paid hourly employees for a summer so the company can avoid some risk. One thing I'm happy to see is the unpaid intern slavery trend that was huge when I graduated from college appears to gone. It should be illegal. If you couldn't tell, I find many aspects of the corporate hiring process pretty gross, but no, I'm not really disgruntled. I'm fine and feel treated fairly; I work at home...it is a pretty good gig, but in the end, personally speaking, all corporate jobs are just jobs to me. I never cared for the work, I just found more interesting pursuits far less lucrative and was always a pragmatist. My goal very early on was to take as much money as I could from Corporate America and quit in my 40s. That's still my plan. I still believe you owe your employer some basic decency and a certain standard of quality, but the relationship has always been strictly business to me. I'd shrug my shoulders and hold no grudges if I were fired tomorrow...but as I said, nope, I won't do trial projects for free to "impress" you. I know I do probably sound disgruntled, but I just don't have any delusions about the working world. I'm a cog that would be sent off to increase EPS by a 1/100 of a cent, and that's something people should always remember.

You sort of hit one of the biggest flaws I find with employers hiring processes. What is the biggest thing 95% of them seek? Experience. What do they want? Someone who has already done the job for which they are hiring. The flaw with this should be obvious, but somehow, employers haven't caught on: Why is someone interviewing for a job they already have? Because they hate it. Yes, there can be relationship conflicts or geographical considerations, but in my experience, most of the reasons people leave a job really do boil down to a person not liking the work, but inventing a list of other reasons. So employers hire someone to do a job they clearly already hate, and what happens? After the honeymoon, surprise, surprise! A new list of contrived grievances arises. And they still can't figure it out. You got a crappy employee because you hired them to do the job they were escaping from.