Who was that demon-sperm doctor? Close runner-up.

I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?

When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that’s what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that’s glorified chat.

For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It’s a level of immersion that’s just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim’s Throat of the World…just no.

It’s not going to replace flat screen gaming. It’s hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I’ve had a headset for a year or two now, and it’s still amazing where it’s good. I’m better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.

Tried Skyrim, couldn’t make it stick - VR just isn’t right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it’s the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn’t be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.

Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I’m old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.

RFK’s version of the conspiracy is that vaccines are a scam inflicted by private pharma. Given his druthers, he would probably outlaw not just vaccines, but all corporation-produced medicine.

Money doesn’t win the election, it’s more of an entrance fee, and campaign financing is more complicated than just ‘the campaign.’ You have to account for PACs, party, and all the free messaging from sympathetic media outlets. Bernie pinned his hopes on going viral on social media, and mostly demonstrated that it’s not a viable strategy, at least at the Presidential level. Might work OK for smaller races, like AOC, in a geographically small, relatively young district, but not nationally. Most people actively avoid political messaging, which is a fundamental problem if you plan to rely on organic distribution of a political message through social media. Especially social media controlled by billionaires that might be hostile to messages like ‘billionaires bad, unions good.’

The reality of American political process is that it takes at least a billion dollars to run a Presidential campaign. (Thanks, SCOTUS) That kind of money doesn’t come from unions, social activists, or proletariat donors. It comes from corporations and billionaires, and those people don’t like revolution.

Until someone can demonstrate that you can get more votes with progressive, worker-friendly policy proposals than with a well funded propaganda machine, the DNC is going to keep chasing the less conservative billionaires. And no third party will even be relevant.

Yeah, rereading your text, I may have confused all the negatives and inferred that you support the post’s implication that they’re targeting children, but I meant to comment on the data in the context of ‘biggest bar,’ not to criticize opinions. Seeing OP’s chart, the first thing I wanted was a population chart, and I’m glad you’d already provided one.

The post title asks you to look at the “biggest bar,” which seems to imply that the biggest bars - children - must be targeted. OccamsTeapot population graph is important context because, as war-crimey as indiscriminantly bombing civilian populations is, intentionally targeting children feels so much like comic-book villany that people dismiss it as propaganda.

They do look pretty similar to me, but can’t say without numbers. Keeping in mind the population graph is a couple years old - half of a bar height - they both show a minor peak/inflection around age 30 that’s maybe 2/3 of the major peak around 5. Babies seem to be spared from the bombing, but that could be fewer births or increased non-violent infant mortality.

IMO, it’s not a great data set to claim Israelis are intentionally targeting children, but it is pretty good for saying they are not intentionally targeting military-age men.

There’s a lot more than Fox out there echoing the narrative that times are hard, inflation is killing you, and there aren’t enough homes to go around. Wapo and NYT would happily recount Trump’s claims that it’s because immigrants are taking all the houses and jobs while Biden policies are making everything expensive. Doesn’t matter if they follow up with long-winded explanations that his claims aren’t true, because most people stop listening when they hear there’s someone to blame.

Fun fact: in the boiling frog experiment, the frogs were ‘pithed.’ Jam a stick in their skull and scramble their brain.

Frog spinal cords have a lot of reflexes. They’ll use one leg to wipe a painful stimulus off the other. They’ll jump. But they accommodate pretty quickly and won’t get excited enough to jump out of slowly warming water. Gotta have a brain for that.

Recounted here: https://archive.org/details/studiesfrombiol00martgoog/page/398/mode/2up

Original ref: Goltz, F. 1869. Beiträge zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches. Berlin, 1869, p. 127, etc Which is actually online: https://ia801200.us.archive.org/15/items/b22344937/b22344937.pdf

Dems definitely lack a coherent, interesting economic message. Any new proposal - medicare for all, UBI - immediately gets sucked into a quagmire of details. Turning to Republicans for the votes they need to win in general elections has been such a consistently losing strategy that I have no idea why they keep doing it.

Meanwhile Republicans keep running on “You feel poor and it’s Their fault,” continues to resonate, for varying definitions of “Them,” as long as GOP is out-of-power. It’s simple. It feels good. It completely absolves them of needing any policy more complicated than “Get rid of Them.” It’s a winning strategy as much as the Dems have a losing strategy.

Look how tight the labor market got when COVID took a million people out of the workforce. Trump’s talking about deporting 10 million workers and customers. You will absolutely see it, although it may be hard to connect the dots.

RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array ‘degraded,’ as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

Treasuries are nice because they’re convenient and low buy-in, but their yields are crap, sometimes a little above inflation, sometimes below. TIPS are a decent way to hedge the inflation risk, but (IMO) it’s still really for people who are more worried about losing their savings than living off it. (i.e.: if you have, say, $1e8, you can live pretty comfortably off $1e6, even $1e5 in a lean year, so your rate of return doesn’t really matter)

For me, personally, the limited bond exposure I have is all corporate and mostly junk, bought through my broker in the secondary market, with maturity 10-20 years out. Until fairly recently, junk bonds were the only way to get yields above 4%, and that’s kind of my mental benchmark for gaining relative to inflation. One downside of corporate bonds is they generally have a $10k minimum.

That drop was when the Fed was raising interest rates to stall inflation. Interest rates up, bond values down. But the drop in VTINX was only 20% over all of 2022, where OP is showing 50% in maybe the first quarter.

Incidentally, the sensitivity to interest rates is why I don’t like bond funds. If you buy actual bonds, you get the face value back at maturity, where bond fund are forced to mark them all to current market prices to calculate NAV. IMO, this negates the main “safe” factor in holding bonds.

You can’t melt through snow or ice by spinning your tires.

Yeah, OP isn’t telling us everything. He’s got a 50% decline in what looks like January 2022, where FSKAX and VTI were off by ~10%. Half that drop looks like it happened on one day. In fact, now that I look at it, it’s kind of reminiscent of a BTC chart.

No. If you’ve been saving for 30 years, then you’ll have 30 years of accumulated 10±20% annual gains, which should be something like 16x your start, but could be 100x if you’re lucky or 1x if you’re not. Regardless, an historic crash on retirement day may take that down to 12x your start, which is still pretty good, and will be fixed by the following couple years.

My folks have been spinning off their treasures for a couple decades now. They waited until their kids had already established & furnished their own households, so a lot of it ended up in the category of “Yes, I can put this in the trash for you.”

Lifespans are at the awkward stage where the kids are too old and the grandkids too young to want any of those household staples.