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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Seriously. For people saying things don’t change, look back forty years. Reagan was elected in a landslide, winning every state but Minnesota, while refusing to talk about the AIDS crisis, and people acted like it was what “the gays” deserved. Within the last forty years we’ve not only practically ended AIDS in industrialized nations, but we have legalized gay marriage in the entire USA.

    Go back sixty years and you’re at the Civil Rights Act. We just had the second major black candidate for president. She lost, sure, but the fact that she was one of the two candidates would’ve been unthinkable sixty years ago. Especially given that she would’ve been the second black president had she been elected.

    The world is not perfect, and the better choices are certainly often flawed, but lines don’t go straight up. Progress takes time. And it can be hard to see in the moment, especially with setbacks like this election. But we are better off now than we were forty years ago, or sixty years ago.



  • Woof, that sucks.

    The church I grew up in, which has a very “high church” liturgical style, just accepts that children make sound. There’s always a constant low-volume noise from anll the kids and people just ignore it. After all, Christ said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

    Church shouldn’t be about rigidity or the appearance of perfection, it flies in the face of the core of the Christian religion. But I don’t think most Christians really think about their faith in living terms, they think about the trappings and appearance and going through the proper motions (as is evidenced by the evangelicals flocking to hate-filled shysters like Trump).

    While there is certainly spiritual value in the ritual, it cannot be at the expense of the meaning. All rigidity does is make church suck.


  • This is what I’ve been saying all along. The Abandon Harris movement was orchestrated to disillusion voters and make them stay home. Just like what happened with Bernie bros.

    The logic of it was completely flawed. And every argument about how strategic voting is important under first-past-the-post, and how Trump would certainly be a worse choice on the subject of Israeli genocide, was met with “maybe you can support genocide, but I can’t.” Which didn’t address the issue at hand at all.

    Our country is full of rubes of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some fall for Trump’s rhetoric and vote for him, others fall for shit like this and don’t vote.











  • Yep. My wife and I are in our thirties and have good whole life insurance policies that will supplement our retirement accounts nicely in our old age. I’ve been paying into mine for almost two decades (maybe longer, my parents started it for me and locked in good rates when I was young), my wife’s is newer. We also both have matching retirement accounts and are making sure we hit our matching totals each paycheck to draw as much from our employers as we can.

    It’s not ideal, but with good planning (and stable income) you can still do well. Now, stable income is the important part. I’m a software developer, my wife works for a non-profit, so my income is generally a bit more stable than hers.

    I recommend finding a financial advisor. Our life insurance guy is great and because he gets commission on the life insurance plans he doesn’t charge us for advisory services (and also doesn’t try to sell us on other stuff, he actually recommended we NOT move our old 401ks from other jobs over to him because we’d end up paying him more than we’d make, he recommended we roll them into our current employer plans).