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.

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.

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.

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.

I get political spam addressed to three different people who used to have my number. Real estate spam for one of them. Temp job offers for another. It’s annoying af going on four years.

CPUs have so many cores these days, that seems like a perfectly reasonable option. Declare a process ‘security sensitive,’ give it it’s own core & memory, then wipe it when done.

You forget that a lot of the country thinks its problems can all be solved by jailing or shooting the appropriate target. Words bad; punishment good.

Yeah, if this is what it takes to get new design nuclear facilities in the US, then I’m counting it a win, but I won’t count it either way until the watts come out. Who knows: if they run ok, an actual power company might even try one.

Thank god he can’t run for President. I don’t think he’d be satisfied being one-among-many Senators or Representatives. Governor of Texas, though…

It’s fascinating to watch. Vance, the old-school spin doctor, using euphemism, misdirection and weaseling to not-techincally-lie (eg, we want a national “standard” for abortion, not a national ban) versus Trump who just goes all-out loud, easily disproven, total bullshit. And that side seems to like Trump better, like they’ve been trained to recognize the used-car-salesman shtick, so it makes them uncomfortable even if they don’t recognize the lies, but the loud liar just cows any chance of disbelief with sheer volume.

I feel like there’s really interesting psychology to study there, among the…let’s say “reality challenged” population, if anyone could figure out how to recruit them.

It’s not socialism if it’s for me.

Zebrafish need that rhythmic activity to form heart valves. They have unidirectional flow before the valves form, through some magic of resonance and pressure waves reflecting off arterial curves, and the resonance results in (IIRC) a stagnant spot where the valves will form. Do something to interfere with the mechanics and no valves form.

If you’re technically inclined, Big Clive has a tutorial for ‘fixing’ most bulbs not to overdrive the LEDs by removing or changing a single resistor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HTa2jVi_rc

Yeah, it’s the screening that’s free. If that turns something up, then it transitions to “care.”

I’ve had the same experience with “wellness” check-ups: if I mention some complaint to the doc during the visit, it suddenly becomes “visit with complaint” and costs me $120.

Fun fact: for people over 45, colonoscopy screening for cancer is always free. If your insurance tries to make you pay for it, report them to your state insurance commissioner or the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. ACA made a lot of preventative medicine & screenings free.