I don’t know how well this counts, but just saw an announcement from Rackspace stating that they are proud to be partnering with Palantir and using their AI engineers to blab, blah, blah.

I think they’re a bit tone deaf on being so public with who they are partnering with.

Asking for a friend. No seriously, I’m trying to figure out how to best explain this to a friend as I’m having trouble enumerating how I can do it.

Maybe my memory is faulty, but I never remembered having to pay a surcharge to use a credit card. Now everywhere I go there are signs saying that there is a 2.5-3.5% surcharge to use a car (and others that say that there’s a 2.5-3.5% discount for using cash, I assume to get around wording)

So here’s an interesting one. I have a car with a 72-month note, that I’m halfway through. The payments are pretty high, around $1,100/mo (luxury sports car). I just checked the Black book value, and the value on other sites and I have almost $20K in equity in it right now. I also have enough saved up to pay it off and still have more than enough money left. The interest rate isn’t too bad, around 5.4%.

So what I’m trying to figure out, do I:

• Pay it off - takes a chunk from my extra money, but no more payments. That extra equity is locked up and could go away if the market changes over the next few years
• Refinance - I could see keeping the car another 4-5 years, and I could put a little extra from savings in to further lower my months costs. I don’t think I’ll end up upside down with how far ahead I am, but again, the equity is locked up
• Trade it in - this is the tricky part. I could get a good chunk off something, but I love my car, and also there’s no way I could get anything nearly as nice as what I have. If I were to lease I could easily cut payments in half, but I have another car on lease and don’t want two of them that way

I can’t make it with one car, otherwise I’d flat out sell it, and I understand the pros/cons of leasing. I’m also not a “something to just get me from point A to B” type of guy, I like my cars, so please don’t lecture on that. I’m basically trying to think about cash flow for the near term and the fact that having a car with $20K equity is something I need to at least figure out if it’s worth accessing that.

Only catch, you can’t use your wealth to fix th system, donate it or give it away. It’d only be for yourself.

I understand not every decade was a clean break, but each decade has fairly distinct defining properties. It feels like most of the 21st century has been a single run on with smaller changes. I know sometimes the definitions don’t come into focus until later, but I’ve been around since the 80s and I can distinctly remember the changes between the 80s, 90s and 00s as they were happening.

Even less than a 150 years ago that would have been impossible. And prior to that communication among normal people could take months.