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.

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

The filibuster is just a Senate rule, though, which they can rewrite any time they like (though usually only after an election).

The 2017 repeal effort used a budget reconciliation mechanism that is not subject to filibuster. In fact, a lot of the 2017 legislative awfulness used the budget reconciliation hack, where the Senate can change laws in order to ‘balance the budget,’ so long as (by convention) they don’t change policy. 2017 repeal, of course, famously failed because John McCain thought they shouldn’t use that process and voted against it.

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.

I really hope there’s a store called “Dead People’s Stuff.”

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.

https://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/period/pb_iig.html

Lead-204 is the only isotope that doesn’t derive from radioactive decay, and it represents only 1.4% of the lead on earth.

I really enjoy lying in a warm, comfortable bed, especially a little groggy from sleep. I’m happy to wake up an hour or so ahead of my alarm so I can have that experience. That said, if my mind is really racing with anticipation of the day’s concerns, it kind of wrecks the lie-in. I’ll get up an hour or two early, have an extra special breakfast, start chores or some other thing I didn’t think I had time for.

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.