A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

Yes. CA is looking to get single payer, but that has a longer runway because America.

California comes pretty close.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage.

What an absolutely believable conclusion announced by an absolutely credible organization that has no motivation except to publish the unvarnished truth.

The West is not “continuing the war at will.” That phrase has no meaning in this context. The West is supplying Ukraine with the means to continue to resist the illegal Russian invasion.

The West would in fact have the right under Just War theory to enter into combat operations in Ukraine against Russian forces, and to operate combat operations against Russia up to and including invasion. Because Russia is the aggressor, Just War theory gives other nations the right to participate in the resistance of aggression.

This may be the most poorly written article I’ve ever read. It’s completely unintelligible.

It must have been written by a really poorly trained LLM and just posted without anyone having looked at it. Forget artificial intelligence - this is artificial stupidity.

I have read about individuals doing this, but to my knowledge it has never happened in any sufficient numbers to tilt a primary in any state.

Some states run open primaries, so that any person can vote in any (but only one) primary. Other states run closed primaries, such that any voter who has registered as a member of that party can vote in that particular party’s primary. Yet others (eg, California last time I checked) have mixed modes. I believe the CA GOP primary is closed by the Democratic primary is open.

You can tell relatively easily by the number of votes in any given primary election whether they’re consistent in terms of turnout with previous years. As far as I’ve ever read, they tend to be year over year consistent. The one trend that has been noted in recent years is a small but as far as I know steady increase in independent voters (who as stated may or may not be able to vote in primaries depending on their state, but based on number of votes cast do not seem to have been a deciding factor in primary votes).

I generally have suspected that the idea of people switching parties to act as primary spoilers is largely just projection, as we tend to expect malfeasance of the Other, but the hard truth is that you can barely get large numbers of people to vote in actual elections, much less in something like a primary.

The civilian shipping lines that were attacked without provocation were and are part of the international community, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. In addition, US military vessels were directly and repeatedly attacked, which international law permits as deserving of a military response. The US would be within its rights to start an attack using tomahawks as well as loitering drones over the territory to hit vehicles and personnel.

There are plenty of legitimate governments - and to be clear, by “legitimate” we usually mean the government recognized by the international community, whether or not any given people think they’re good guys or whatever - who do not control all of the territory they claim.

The point is that if a territory is under control of a foreign or rebel group and is attacking international civilian or military assets, then the international community can respond if the country that has claims to the territory cannot. I’m not even sure that the Yemeni government is in a position to coordinate strikes at this point, but that would be the standard approach otherwise.

If the Proud Boys took over south Texas and started launching military attacks against Mexican military facilities, and the US government was unable to stop them, Mexico and the international community would be within their legal rights to stop them.

It is in no way a breach of Yemeni authority. th government has no control over the territory in question, and it is being used to make repeated military strikes against US military and international civilian targets. This is entirely legal and justified under both US and international law. I’m just surprised it took this long.

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has both of those covered.

Reality is more complicated than that. The crime bill and the war on drugs at the time had significant support in the black community, including political and religious leaders.

Excellent analysis!

I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”

I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.

I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”

Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.

“Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.

I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.

Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.

I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.

“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”

Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.

I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.

businesspost.ie

I wonder if it leaked from one of their support centers in Ireland.

The point isn’t to disguise them. The point is to call attention to their country’s misdeeds by refusing them the honor of flying their colors. Perhaps the individual athletes should still win medals, but the IOC wouldn’t assign the credit to Russia, who would not be eligible for them.

I think that you are under informed and miseducated as to both the dynamics of complex adaptive social systems - particularly human ones but also as a theoretical concept. You’re also under formed about the diversity of actual human societies.

David Graeber was arguably the most gifted anthropologist of our generation, and both explicitly and repeatedly disproved your assertions as being native to humanity through rigorous investigation of actual human cultures spanning the globe and the past 10,000 years. I strongly encourage you to look into some of his books.

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The minimum you should target for contributing is the max company match - so in your case that sounds like 3%. In general, you should make sure you’re putting enough aside into an emergency savings fund (usually 3-6 months of normal expenses) and after that prioritize retirement savings.

In your company’s 401k, you’re going to be limited in terms of investment vehicles. The default is usually some kind of targeted date fund. Those spread your invested dollars across multiple industries and international funds. The benefit to the targeted date funds is that they rebalance your portfolio so that your money moves to more stable (but lower return) investments as you get closer to retirement. Some programs are very limited in their options, but I think that they all have targeted date funds.

Another possibility is using an index fund that tracks something like the S&P. These funds also are diversified (although not so much as the limited date ones). The reason a lot of people like them is that there are several alternatives that have a very low fee schedule versus managed funds - if you pay high fees, you’re cutting into your growth. The Vanguard funds are among the most popular for that reason. However, that may not be available through your 401k.

Basically your 401k should be a set it and forget it kind of thing. Pick a percentage, pick a fund, and don’t think about it until next year. You should review it annually, and you do have the option of increasing your percentage contribution if, for example, you get a 10% raise and want to start contributing 4% instead of 3%.

The person you’re meeting with possibly will not be allowed to give you investment advice. They can review your options and answer your questions, but if it’s just an HR person and not a financial advisor, don’t expect financial advice. You’re going to want to go in there having read these threads.

The big thing is not to overthink it at this point. I’m going to hazard a guess that you’re relatively far away from retirement, so getting in now is absolutely the right thing to do, but it also leaves plenty of time for you to educate yourself more. The part about meeting the 3% match at a minimum is just because that’s basically free money. If you are making $30k, your 3% would mean putting $1k per year into the 401k. Your company would match that, which means you’re making money right from the start.

There are multiple websites that allow you to calculate your retirement savings based on your age and how much you invest per year. It’s good to become familiar with the way the math works. Your 401k may provide such a service, but there’s plenty of free ones as well.

Good luck!