If you don’t know what you are doing, and still young, just set a low cost broad market index fund or ETF as the place your retirement funds go. An example would be VTSAX or VTI. Disclaimer: I am not an investment expert or advisor.

I thought they die because they can no longer support their weight either because they can’t digest enough or hunt enough food to sustain their size?

Ask yourself if he would have said that comment to a white Christian. If not, then you have your answer.

Would he have mentioned a beeper if the recipient was a white Christian? It hasn’t lost any of it’s meaning it’s just that some people are incapable or unwilling to recognize it unless it’s backed by a nazi symbol, white hoods, or overt calls for racial violence. Your inability to recognize reality does not mean reality ceases to exist.

I’m not at all optimistic. We have a broken system and what power we have left has been ceded to cynicism. Selling cynicism is powerful peoples most effective tool. Convince people they have no power, and they will just stay home. I’ve personally been involved with citizen lobbying many times in my life. I’ve been a part of minimum wage laws being passed, legal reform, net neutrality locally and nationally, school funding that saved schools, first amendment protection laws, etc. Locally, state, and federal. But it requires you have to get off your ass and actually try. Yes in south eastern states you have a bunch of crooked assholes that won’t listen to you, that’s why voting left is so important. Unlike the right, even moderate Dems will work with you if you force them to the table with popular political action. You have to elect them in and then do the hard work of political action.

Furthermore, lobbying is something ANYONE can do, you don’t need money, you literally schedule an appointment with your legislative office and then you go there and talk. I’ve done it multiple times, and it is absolutely effective. Those that get involved determine the future, not every politician is a criminal, many of them are people exactly like you and me. The got fed up with the system and ran for office.

Yes, our political system is fucked up, but selling cynicism when we still barely have a democracy makes things worse. We could have no democracy at all, and we very well might shortly. But while we still have one, I suggest actually fucking trying for once.

They aren’t mutually exclusive and both involve the same thing. The only reason money matters is because it is used to sway voters, people showing they are not swayed by the propaganda invalidates the money.

I’ve actually worked in politics, the amount of people that find it easier to give up because the system is deeply flawed instead of actually doing the hard work of change is astounding. If you want things to change, you have to make your voice heard on something more than lemmy. Representatives nearly all want to keep their jobs. If you show them your motivated enough to contact them, it shows them it’s important enough to you to sway your future vote. I’ve talked to many representatives in my life, at least on the left they generally see their job as representing constituent interests. If enough pressure is applied, they will often change their vote/introduce legislation, etc.

But they are not on lemmy getting the political temperature from keyboard warriors with more snark than braincells.

You know you can communicate with your current senator and representative right? Representative is literally their name, they represent you, if enough people apply pressure to the point they think their job is at risk, they will often magically have a “change of heart”.

Obvious sarcasm getting down votes …

My family always played a variation of “oh hell” that we named “oh blueberry” because no one ever saw grandma say a negative word. Basically same rules but instead of going 1 up to 7, back down to 1, we went 1 up until we ran out of cards, which varied depending on players. If the table was large we would add a deck which altered the rules, I think first played was higher for ties.

Ahh, I misinterpreted your post as a complaint. I’m not a hypermiler, but I do find the efficient routes are often the lowest stress routes as well.

That’s in your trip options “prefer fuel efficient route”. You can turn it off.

I think you’re missing the point of predictive modeling. It’s probability of separate outcomes is built in. This isn’t fortune telling, there is no crystal ball. Two predictive models can have different predictions and they both may have value. Just like separate meteorologists can have different forecasts, but predict accurately the same amount over time, all be it at different intervals. IIRC, the average meteorologist correctly predicts rain over 80% of the time. They are far over predicting by chance. But if you look at the forecast in more than one place you often get slightly different forecasts. They have different models and yet arrive at similar conclusions usually getting it mostly accurate. It’s the same with political forecasts, they are only as valuable as your understanding of predictive modeling. If you think they are intended to mirror reality flawlessly, you will be sorely disappointed. That doesn’t make the models “wrong”, it doesn’t make them “right” either. They are just models that usually predict a probable outcome.

His model has always been closer state to state, election to election than anyone else’s, which is why people use his models. He is basically using the same model and tweaking it each time, you make it sound like he’s starting over from scratch. When Trump won, none of the prediction models were predicting he would win, but his at least showed a fairly reasonable chance he could. His competitors were forecasting a much more likely Hillary win while he was showing that trump would win basically 3 out of 10 times. In terms of probability that’s not a blowout prediction. His model was working better than competitors. Additionally, he basically predicted the battleground states within a half percentage iirc, that happened to be the difference between a win/loss in some states.

So he has exactly one chance to get it right.

You’re saying it hitting one of those 3 of 10 is “getting it wrong”, that’s the problem with your understanding of probability. By saying that you’re showing that you don’t actually internalize the purpose of a predictive model forecast. It’s not a magic wand, it’s just a predictive tool. That tool is useful if you understand what it’s really saying, instead of extrapolating something it absolutely is not saying. If something says something will happen 3 of 10 times, it happening is not evidence of an issue with the model. A flawless model with ideal inputs can still show a 3 of 10 chance and should hit in 30% of scenarios. Certainly because we have a limited number of elections it’s hard to prove the model, but considering he has come closer than competitors, it certainly seems he knows what he is doing.

All prediction models only give you odds, not flawless accuracy. He has been closer in every election than most everyone else in the prediction market.

He’s not polling, he is aggregating all of the polls into a prediction model. Either way it is just a snapshot in time.

but it does mean that Boeing got something wrong.

Comparing it to Boeing shows you still misunderstand probability. If his model predicts 4 separate elections where each underdog candidate had a 1 in 4 chance of winning. If only 1 of those underdog candidates wins, then the model is likely working. But when that candidate wins everyone will say “but he said it was only a 1 in 4 chance!”. It’s as dumb as people being surprised by rain when it says 25% chance of rain. As long as you only get rain 1/4 of the time with that prediction, then the model is working. Presidential elections are tricky because there are so few of them, they test their models against past data to verify they are working. But it’s just probability, it’s not saying this WILL happen, it’s saying these are the odds at this snapshot in time.

Hopefully you mean ones still in construction… No need to cause an unprecedented environmental disaster after all.

Yeah I’m only 10 lbs more than my wife and she is 5’ tall. I was the last in a long line of tall, usually thin, men for her. It’s definitely a type for some.

I am 6’ 6" and most of my life I’ve been between 145 to 165. So incredibly skinny, always under weight. I never struggled with women as an adult, but I also didn’t chase too many shallow women. When I was young i certainly got told by a few that they weren’t into skinny guys, but it was almost always by people that were incredibly socially controlled people, the type to “keep up with the Joneses” so to speak. Once I stopped chasing after people for the wrong reasons things improved dramatically.

Do you have close friends that are women? I wonder if there is a communication aspect to this if not. Do you date outside your culture? I grew up around mostly white rural Christians and they were more judgy about being skinny than other cultural groups, in my experience. Maybe something about rural people doing a lot more hard labor and it being culturally homogeneous.