I like a rare steak, but I prefer that my bread be cooked all the way through.

It’s like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.

The US VP went to NATO and said, “NATO was great when we shared democratic values; now that we’re focusing on xenophobic nationalism and cultural purity, NATO is not our style.” The old East-West world balance has been teetering for years, and now it’s time we all go to war again.

I want to know why it’s not “Trump Land.”

Show me a third option. If there’s beef and chicken on the menu, you can’t get a Mercedes.

All those people out in the street protesting for civil rights, fighting the Pinkertons, and refusing to work like inmates? they fucking voted. They got their people into office, and those people fixed the laws.

So, I guess your argument is that ACA is bad because all it “really” did is enroll poor people in Medicaid? Or that the extent of their insurance coverage depended on the insurance they got?

You’re comparing your idealized plan with what got implemented, rather than what got implemented with what came before.

It’s not like Democratic administrations gave us the voting rights act, gay marriage, interracial marriage, and abortion. Medicare & Medicaid. Ended Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell. The ACA may not be very close to universal healthcare, but it is a huge improvement on what we had, and it decreased the uninsured population by 15-20M.

There’s a lot more to want from a progressive party, but they have, slowly, made things better. Sometimes, the wing nuts claw those improvements back, and “Ratchet Effect,” “Both Sides,” etc are great propaganda for cowing opposition to the wing nuts.

Normal eggs are $4/doz for me, too. I see that box labeled ‘cage-free’ with ‘organic’ & ‘pasture raised’ nearby. Those are super bougie eggs, and I think they’re around $10/doz where I shop (and have been for years).

I’m from a reasonably upper-middle class background; reasonably successful in a top-10 metro. So’s my brother, but he’s gone the McMansion & country club route where I’ve tended more modest. I don’t like visiting them. Their environment just rings all my class warfare buttons, triggers all my “you don’t belong here” warnings & the obsequiousness at the restaurants & venues they prefer is just gross. I mean, I’m a middle-aged white guy, dressed like all the other mf’s in the neighborhood, so I do “belong;” it just feels wrong.

Everybody gotta find their own comfort zone, and we have to appreciate that our friends & family can have different tastes. Sometimes, that does mean dressing up in funny costume & hanging out in uncomfortable spaces to share in their joy, but there’s tactful ways to explain/prepare your fam for unfamiliar situations, and there’s “Come here and let me dress you.”

Rich donors would want their kids exempted.

I’ve already seen some of the Fox crowd calling for periods of national service, arguing that a year of “real work” would be good for today’s lazy, screen-addicted youth. I can’t see them getting an actual draft reinstated, but I can definitely see them making federal student loans contingent on “National Service.” That would have the added benefit of making old people and rich people functionally exempt.

Depending on how you count, 49.8% of voters, 47.9% of registered voters, or 31.6% of eligible voters. The only forum where Trump got a actual majority is the electoral college.

That said, 31.6% voting for him and 37.7% saying, “meh, whatever” doesn’t really feel like popular opposition.

That’s the mistake: putting it in the open ban list instead of the shadow ban list.

Dev acting in #resistance or dev making an honest mistake? I suppose we’ll never know.

On the flip side, do you think a Swiss person living in Asia would be ignorant that 8 is a lucky number?

I’d buy that if he didn’t start his statement with “I live in Switzerland.” 8 may be a lucky number for him, but he absolutely knows what 88 means.

Boomers are just at the (hopefully) tail end of a long tradition of bad marriages. No fault divorce has only been in the US since the mid 1970s, so a lot of boomer parents were kind of stuck with each other. Today, there’s at least the possibility of parting amicably, before it all really turns to shit. The parents of boomers were a lot more likely to be coerced into early, or even arranged marriages by social and economic power structures. So boomers were brought up in environments where shitty marriages were common fodder for comedy.

By the time Gen-X & esp Millennials are born, women get a lot more autonomy, both parents frequently work and have active interests outside the home to temper home stresses, and it’s much more common to break up bad marriages and try again.

It really is amazing how much better life can be if one is not locked into rigid social structures.

I suspect they’re multiplying all of the 1-in-X probabilities, and if they come up with less than 1-in-8 billion, then they call that unique. If they were actually comparing your values against a hash of previous visitors, then the second time you visit, you’d no longer be unique.

eta: screen size and various hardware measures are probably the lowest probability fingerprints, but they’re all highly correlated - there’s a few million Pixel 7’s out there, but you’ve probably got like 1-in-1000 screen size and a couple other 1-in-500+ hardware, and that would push you to “1-in-billions,” even though there’s millions of people with the same fingerprint.

In US metros, they’re typically around 2% of the home value, with discount maybe 50% for owner’s primary residence. Depending on the locality, the home value may be reappraised every year only only after a sale. If you bought a $100k house, planning retirement on $1000 annual taxes, and the area gentrifies your house to $500k, the extra $4k/year in taxes can be a budget buster.

Is your company paying part of the deductible? I can’t get an HSA-qualifying plan with deductible under $6000. Also single and old.

Once you hit 65, you can withdraw HSA funds for any purpose, tax free, like a Roth IRA. 401k withdrawals will be taxed as ordinary income, so an HSA dollar is worth about $1.20 in a 401k.