I read a lot of American history books, but I recently remembered I enjoy good satire, too (Mark Twain is one of my favorite authors). I want to expand into that genre. Recently read Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle", which was fine, but I'd like more. Any recommendations?
According to the article, the White House is considering pardoning 250 people as an homage to the 250th birthday of the nation.
On a purely personal note, I think such a move could be interesting. Imagine one pardon for each year throughout history, correcting an injustice in each actual year. You’d need a team of historians to research such a list, but it could be an incredibly educational experience in both history *and* justice. Yes, the bulk of the people would be long dead, but their names would be cleared, the record corrected, and the public educated. Lots of history has been swept under the rug of injustice in our past, cleaning it up would be good.
Whether this list under this administration lives up to that ideal is another matter.
I’ve been wondering how many people retire each month, and if that is helping the employment numbers stay fairly stable in light of various large layoffs.
Is it how many people “left the workforce”? Or are there other demographics in there (like medical leaves, etc.) so it’s not really a count of retirements? Is that statistic generally reliable? It always sounded like a politically-expedient number to me (“oh, they don’t count, they gave up”).
I Googled around and couldn’t find any good data on people who’ve left the workforce intentionally as a retirement. People have been saying, for years, that the Boomer retirements will lead to labor shortages, I’m just looking for stats to a) figure out the trend, and b) figure out if it’s having an effect.
Included in the $1bn amount was $635M from the Trump memecoin. Also in the disclosure were a variety of real estate dealings and Trump-branded products.
“White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly rejected any suggestion of ethical concerns and said Trump had proudly made the US "the crypto capital of the world".
"Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged - or will ever engage - in conflicts of interest," she said in a statement.
Our DM is constantly publishing new house rules. Little nitpicky rules on the smallest of topics. Rules for situations that haven’t even come up in game. Rules for different classes or abilities none of us even have (“in case someone wants to multiclass”). Sometimes *three houserule updates per day!* Rules for things that we shouldn’t even bother with at all because they only bog down the game. It drives me up the wall.
House rules should only be used to support the world you’re gaming in, and only if they’re actually relevant. They should *not* be used by DMs to “make things perfect”. It’s a frickin’ game, let it go.
Drives me up the wall.
If you’re not familiar with the Bricks & Minifigs debacle, here’s a tl;dr:
— A man collected Lego sets in the 90’s/00’s. He believes the sets are worth $200K.
— This man fell ill, and his son helped him set up a consignment agreement with a store, a Bricks & Minifigs franchise, to sell these sets. They agreed to sell them for a fee and give the original owner the rest.
— However, that store went under. The corporate office handed their entire inventory off to another franchisee.
— These new owners deny they have these sets. Basically, either the sets themselves or the ownership of those sets are lost.
— There’s also an argument about the actual worth.
— The whole thing is a mess of he said/she said, intentional lying, honest mistakes, legal tangles, and, of course, a bunch of YouTube dudes getting in the middle of all of this, making everything more of a mess.
The point of this post on this sub is to illustrate that collecting is NOT investing, and that people are screwing themselves when they collect piles of stuff filling their house because “it’ll be worth something someday”.
- you never truly know how much something is worth. You can research on eBay or various forums/subreddits, people can tell you all sorts of stuff, but in the end, it’s up to you to find a buyer and negotiate a price. If you can’t find someone to buy it for the value you think it is, then you can’t sell it and it is not worth that value, it doesn’t matter what Reddit says.
- this type of thing is practically a wide-open, total free market, where *everyone* must beware everyone else. Yes, laws still apply, but the regulatory structure is far weaker than trading in securities, and because the values are typically so low, there’s not enough to justify hiring lawyers. So you’re setting yourself up as prey to get screwed.
- because this is nearly a wide-open free market, it attracts scumbags. Hate to say it, but it’s true. People *will* try to rip you off, it’s guaranteed.
- you are responsible for upkeep and proper storage of all that stuff. If a mouse gets in the house and starts gnawing on the unseen corners of your boxes, whelp, there goes the value. You’re also responsible for accurate inventories, and making sure you cover yourself with proper contract. Be prepared to hire a lawyer to review everything if you think things are really that valuable.
- I think this case is going to end up screwing over *everyone* involved. The sick man loses his value, his son loses all his time and potentially money on hiring lawyers, the franchisees are already getting huge backlash, and the corporate parent has a public relations mess.
So, don’t collect for wealth. Invest in marketable securities, real estate, or other things that have rigid processes and legal frameworks to protect all parties. Don’t buy a bunch of toys and store them in your basement for 20 years and call it an “investment”.
There is a general feeling out there that the U.S. President has too much power. Even if you exclude Pres. Trump from the equation, this has been a common complaint over many decades. According to American lore, the last president who wanted to reduce his own power was Calvin Coolidge, however there may be others.
If a candidate ran on a platform of reducing presidential power, allowing more oversight, requiring more Congressional approval before acting in non-crisis situations, would that be appealing to voters? And if such a candidate did win the office and begin fulfilling that promise, would that be a good idea or not?
Recently retired at 60. Want to increase my hiking and other activities. Anyone else out there hike on the regular? What’s your general routine? Weekly? How far? Do you have a hiking buddy or go solo? Just trying to get a baseline.
I currently do about 4 miles max. New England so elevation isn’t an issue, although some trails are surprisingly rugged, even compared to the West (I’ve hiked a lot of National Parks and some of the trails here are actually steeper than out west for odd reasons I haven’t figured out). I’d like to expand that to 6, but I’m taking it slow.
According to a recent CNN poll, political independents are roughly 47% of adults in the U.S. This is the highest level since 2015.
CNN poll: Political independents hit their highest level in a decade
Couple of immediate observations:
- the move to “independent” takes from both Democrat and Republican parties.
- we’re 47% of the population, but have less power than either Democrat or Republican. How do we capitalize on our plurality to get a saner government?
- I don’t recall what was going on in 2015 that made independents so high. Granted, Trump has tarred over a lot of memories of administrations past, but I don’t recall what was going on in the country at that time to raise the number of independents.
These “negotiations” are either between parties with no authority, perhaps low-level Iranian functionaries, powerless bureaucrats, or ex-pats in other countries. The US government is not negotiating in good faith anyway, which is the same as no negotiations happening. The Trump administration is simply making things up, declaring successes or failures to manipulate the markets; and Iran has not sent anyone with true authority to any meetings because they’re afraid of more assassinations. This entire adventure is a charade. For evidence, just look at all the flip-flopping coming from Trump himself. For date, this will be proven once cooler heads prevail, which probably won’t happen until Trump is out of office.
A rain shadow describes an effect where mountains are tall enough to block rain storms from passing, leaving desert conditions on the far side.
However, if you look at the Sierra Nevada for example, the rain shadow areas on the eastern side will often get feet of snow in the winter months. It’s only the summers that are dry from the rain shadow effect.
What’s going on that blocks rain but permits snow to such depths?
BBC is reporting Iran damaged 20 US military sites more extensively than admitted by the Trump administration, who requested blackouts of the data. Pentagon officials have said damage sustained during the war is $29B. Attacks have also occurred on nations supported by the U.S. in the region, notably Kuwait. Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei says "the nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases.”
Been increasingly unhappy with DDGs search results, it seems only marginally better than Google itself.
The Trump administration is again telling us a deal is “right around the corner”, while Iran is steadfastly refuting it. Yet oil futures are down. At what point does the market simply not believe the wolf-crier?
I know most of us love self-checkout, scheduling things online, shopping online, paying bills electronically, it's all good.
But there are still populations who are simply not capable of the simplest online tasks. I'm here at a health care affiliate (not an ER) that requires online scheduling, and there are elderly folks & boomers here who are confused and frustrated, and frankly, they're most in need of these services.
Places need to keep "old school" options open for those left behind as tech advances.
Fact is: it'll happen to you, too, it's not just a "boomer problem"
More tales of woe from the FLGS.
I’ve posted before about the West Marches-style campaign hosted by our local gaming store. When you have a public game where anyone is invited, as long as there’s room at the table, you can have, well, issues. It’s the way it is.
The store has a Discord channel for their game. Newbies post a lot, trying to figure out when games are, how experienced they need to be, etc., which is all good. New people to the hobby need to learn.
Yet recently someone recently joined, an “experienced” player, and right away went into long diatribes on trying to work around the rules (which are almost 100% RAW, because there are so many new people there’s no way “house rules” would work). And when I say long, I mean looooong. Just huge rants on how wizards should be smart enough to figure out how to wear chain mail armor, or how a 7th level artificer should be able to craft legendary items.
I can’t tell if the guy has even played even one session, he just went right to asking for a whole bunch of rulings on hypotheticals and odd combinations of nonsense. There’s also a lot of Main Character Syndrome going on. Now it looks like he’s picking fights.
Typically people will emote for sessions they want to play. I know I’m not the only one who’ll keep an eye out for his name and elect for different times.
If clickbaity articles and videos are to be believed, AI has ruined education. Students can simply throw problems into AI and it will burp out answers, or they can have AI write their essays. Apparently, the long-standing teacher crisis is compounded by teachers either quitting outright out of frustration, or simply throwing up their hands and letting AI do all the work. There are kids in high school and college who lack problem solving and can barely read or write over a 5th grade level. This bodes ill for the future of the country.
This brings up two questions:
First, is this true, is AI killing education as these anecdotal stories suggest? Seems to me the “Johnny can’t read” problem has existed for decades, long before AI, is it any different today, or has AI made it worse? Is there merit to the clickbait stories?
Second, if it *is* true, how can education be adjusted to account for AI? It seems we need an overhaul of the entire system, it starts in grade school. What would be some good approaches to fix the problem? How can we teach in the presence of AI who can seemingly solve any problem?