ToDougie

Oh come now. We didn't need to tax future generations 37 trillion dollars into debt.

I don't know all of the economics, and I certainly hadn't considered what you laid out in your 2nd paragraph until I read through it--but as a father, I am certainly spending far less on games for my children/self. We just don't have the money.

Utter nonsense.

The US is over-leveraged and should be making spending cuts. Sorry folks.

Gamifying walking sounds like the onramp to dystopia. Can't wait until my health insurance company "mandates" this by raising rates for my employer and offering rebates for participants who hit X milestones.

What also frightens me is someone wanted to make this in the first place.

My experience with Capital One is very positive. Their support is always solid and wait times are reasonable. The app and the website work well, though they have introduced some dark patterns in recent years. They periodically increase my credit line without prompting.

If (big if) income taxes are significantly reduced (eliminated for tax brackets at $200k or less, and graduated meaningfully above $200k), then the tariffs will be palatable, while giving investors and industry the time to rebuild. The rebuild will not be possible without intensive deregulation and upheaval of some entrenched regulatory institutions. It is hard to believe that any of what I have listed is possible, but in my lifetime I have seen this country do all kinds of wacky things.

> If idiots and sycophants weren't steering the ship the US would have a state-run investment bank that partnered with private capital to offer investments to anyone who wanted to start a business.

Fwiw this sounds like an aspect of fascism. Just defining, not criticizing. It clearly works for China.

A friend from Sacramento visited me in SoCal and brought his dog along. We hung out for a few days, and eventually I found a bullseye rash on my leg but no tick anywhere on my body. I went to urgent care and they recommended I see an infectious disease specialist, pronto -- and to start doxy that evening. My bloodwork came back with too few markers for them to call it a case of Lyme disease, but the specialist felt strongly that we made the right decision to use the antibiotics.

Everyone always told me there is no Lyme disease in NorCal. Reading your comment helped me feel vindicated.

Independent institutions is an oxymoron.

Which probiotic?

People will just ship large quantities and then warehouse them in the US.

Sounds like you have some cool projects planned.... do you have any pics/links you can share?

You misspelled Wingdings. A common typo. The keys are like right next to each other.

I mind my manners, yes. Please and thank you. It feels right because my work is largely conversational. If I were coding, it might be different.

Firefox has some weird slowness with DNS that I have troubleshot to death. I still use it for almost everything, but sometimes I'll have an entire day of 30s page loading times.

Probably told him that since he and his government cannot account for tens of billions of dollars that the US gave them, and that we have evidence that Ukraine is selling arms to Mexican cartels (designated terrorist organizations), that we would no longer tolerate our relationship, as is.

Somehow all of the whiny commenters on here forget that DJT's first administration provided considerable CIA/Tier1 training and resources to the Ukrainian military. Then Russia invaded while Biden was president. They didn't invade on Trump's watch. They invaded while Biden was running(?) our country. Now, yet again, Trump has to go clean up the mess -- just like he did after Obama gave Putin the flexibility to invade Ukraine after his win in the 2012 election.

Exurbs don't want the people who live in the cities to come to them. That's the whole point of the exurbs. Everything about housing in the US is about getting as far away from the bottom quintile while remaining within the law.

> The unfortunate thing is that when I'm in conversations, I'm a lot dumber than I normally in.

That's OK. Everyone takes time finding their groove. There used to be days where I did not engage in any conversation until the afternoon, and so my speech always felt rusty. Now I'm at a point in my life where I'm having a chat at 6am, and that sort of thing continues throughout the day. But boy oh boy am I not very interesting to talk to for that first hour.

Anyways, I think most extroverts don't really care that someone appears a little jagged in conversation. They simply benefit from having a conversation.

truly fascinating comment..... will have to research this further!

At the end of the day, we (the citizenry) cannot afford to stay in debt. It makes our country weak.

Wrong signal. The problem is demographic. Not being mean, just a fact that a lot of people are illiterate live in the US, but were not born and raised here.

I don't want my children to have to learn at the pace of the bottom quintile. Obviously average and less-than-average people exist. But I will _not_ be hamstringing my kids to placate the whims of the state or some "modern" moral standard. I know how harmful it is because I went through it.

electricity rates in California are out of control in the summer because there is no competition.

Lowbeams on sedans are blinding me in my small truck (not lifted, headlights aligned as intended). Something must be done.

What have you been doing? Asking for a desperate friend (me).

> My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”

Watching my boys grab some paper and a marker and sweat quietly over a desk for 30 minutes only to walk over and hand me some crude drawing of "a little buddy I can put on my desk" always has me rethinking my station in life. Maybe I shouldn't be so tough on them.....

trying this with dietary restrictions and an aversion to glyphosate has been very difficult.

Children are the best. The highs in life are orders of magnitude higher, and the lows are _so_ much lower. But the baseline is incalculably higher. My children have made me feel so much more fulfilled. And they have also made me better.

I have complicated feelings about this...... mostly reminding me to love. Thank you very much for sharing.