UnderpantsWeevil

Israelis don't believe it is their land. That's the rub

Joe Biden confirmed it by repeating it over and over again. Why would I need more evidence than that?

Innovation keeps being forced on you

It's not innovation, it's just ads.

The monthly payout of social security is based on how much you earned while you were working

But the lifetime payout is set by how long you live. Your total recoupment is based on the number of months you receive SS. There is never an age when you lose eligibility.

Even below that cap, there is a progressive structure, where those with a lower income see a larger marginal benefit.

People with low incomes have a host of additional problems - higher stress levels, poorer nutrition, less access to preventative and life sustaining medication.

This lowers their overall life expectancy and - as a consequence - the total recoupment they expect to receive from SS.

Well…the problem is reddit’s size.

They've never been shy about targeting certain subs and communities for shutdown when it suits their commercial interests. This has nothing to do with size and everything to do with the nature of the content itself.

These videos are pure clickbait. They feed engagement. They build up lots of enthusiasm both among content providers and active users. And, as a consequence, they make the company money.

But reddit bots flagged me of being abusive to other users.

Bots will flag any post purely based on keyword searches and AI parsing of sentiment. Its got nothing to do with your actual statement. But it also depends heavily on who you are, where you post, and how often other users flag you. Very possibly you simply got "Report" flagged a bunch of times by other users for some reason and that - plus a naive parsing - was all the AI bot needed to know.

But I'll also bet the post wasn't getting thousands of unique interactions and external visits. If you'd been a power-poster who was posting a face-cam rant rather than a text blob, I suspect you'd have been fine.

I would respect more restaurateurs for doing this.

WTYP. We did it on Tuesday.

none of the parties can afford losing voters on social security

The solution to this problem is to pitch SS as already in crisis and to campaign on a "fix" that makes it more solvent by reducing the number of people who rely on it.

Same story every time.

Because the problem is so big and there are so many consequences across so many districts to a change in SS policy, the easiest thing for Congress to do in the face of any proposed changes is to punt. However, we've seen SS cut successfully in the past. Reagan's "fix" to SS was to raise the retirement age (effectively a cut) and shift more of the tax burden onto the employees. Bush Jr came very close to a full scale privatization of the Trust, effectively turning the broad social program into a series of individualized 401k-esque savings accounts that the federal government would never suffer liability over. Obama can dangerously close to a big cut to retirement payments as part of the 2013 Debt Ceiling negotiations, only failing because Tea Party Republicans scuttled the deal and forced a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. Trump toyed with privatization again, with Paul Ryan's House championing a number of big cuts to Social Security that were ultimately parsed down to back-door cuts by way of how inflation was calculated (but this still ended up shaving billions off the next generation of program operations).

These cuts are always pitched as methods of preserving the program. They inevitably come at the expense of taxpayers, making the system less and less attractive to defend.

President Beeblebrox.

One of the worst things about trump is he gets his opponent to talk about how horrible of a person he is and not how horrible of a president he was.

It is easy to put all this shit on Trump's shoulders, when we've had decades of public policy that amounts to "The state cannot help you, only hurt you" reinforced by Drug Wars and untreated epidemics and trillions tossed into the burn pits overseas and an increasing hostility towards whomever is currently in office based entirely on your deteriorating economic and ecological conditions.

Running ads like this would actually change the “moderate Republicans” minds

None of this data is a secret. People post about it online and go back-and-forth on those talking head shows on it all the time. There are a number of conservative rebuttals, starting with a different set of graphs showing a different set of big scary lines when Democrats take office that go down when Republicans take office and ending with a fixation on conservative issues (number of immigrants, number of people in social programs, rising cost of fossil fuels, propensity of young people to self-report as being LGBTQ, volume of taxes paid, number of regulations, etc, etc) that tell a different story.

The issue is not that Ds lack some Killer Points, its that media is increasingly and overwhelmingly a product of conservative business interests. When Clear Channel and Sinclair and NewsCorp and Amazon/Microsoft/Facebook/Tesla shareholders own and operate all the venues of discourse, you're going to hear discourse that's biased to the opinions of these corporate bureaucrats and board rooms.

trump is basically Zaphood

He's not. Zaphood is this charming quick-witted glamor obsessed cartoon character with no real power or influence outside what he can get his hands on straight away.

Trump is a figurehead for a real national conservative political project encompassing tens of thousands of activists and bureaucrats. The folks surrounding Trump are the same ones who were surrounding Bush in the '00s. In some cases, they were the same ones surrounding Obama, Clinton, and Reagan. Guys like current Trump critic Mark Milley have been circulating in both parties for decades, always as a war-hawk preaching a more hostile relationship with Middle Eastern and East Asian states. There are dozens of other Mark Milleys still in Trump's orbit. There are Mark Milleys in Kamala's orbit.

That's one of the more frustrating aspects of this race. So much of what we're hearing from both candidates is just the liberal case versus the conservative case of "How To Bomb Iran" or "How To Seal the Border Against Evil Foreigners" or "How To Force People To Have More Kids" or "How To Get More Money Spent on AI".

Graphs like this seem to neglect what these historical presidents did with their power when they had it. You're looking at broad market and congressional spending trends without discussing what policies went into place and what consequences they had.

Becoming a parent is not necessarily about trauma and anxiety

No. There's a great deal of joy in being a parent, too. But a big part of caring for a child - particularly a toddler or per-adolecent - is having one eye open to the child's safety, constantly. Kids be doing crazy shit. Its normal and healthy, from a development perspective. But terrifying for a caretaker, whenever the kid behaves recklessly (or in any way the caretaker perceives as reckless).

Its an inherent trade-off. Watching a kid walk for the first time or ride a bike for the first time inevitably means watching them fall or crash. The agony and the ecstasy.