Lewis2
2d ago
Stock market going down? Woke (((Financiers))) are manipulating prices to try to force a panic and foment opposition to Trump.
Comments like this don’t help dispel that impression:
With uncertainty emanating from DC, some on Wall Street say it’s time to send an unambiguous message to the president and his team: Don’t buy the dip.
Stocks are cheaper than they were a week ago, so it’s only natural investors may take a break from the sell-off and load up on some bargain assets. But going into dip-buying mode risks rewarding Trump for playing chicken with the global economy. Like training a puppy, you sometimes need a negative correction if you want it to stop peeing on the rug.
”We need this market to crash — to keep the pressure on the administration,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, told my colleague Matt Egan on Monday. That is a frankly shocking comment from an analyst as prominent as Yardeni, who also happens to have a Ph.D in economics from Yale.
Lewis2
3d ago
The metropolitan area has also been experiencing a minor renaissance, with a new and different class of people replacing the previous residents. You’d need to somehow control for gentrification to get a true sense of the stats.
Lewis2
3d ago
These charts of food prices per hour worked in England may be of interest. Along similar lines, I happened to be reading some 100+ year old newspapers about a month ago, when egg prices reached their zenith, and I was interested to see that, correcting for inflation, eggs regularly cost more than $6.00 per dozen c. 1910–1920, which is higher than any of the highly elevated prices I saw recently.
I also recall reading in an old book of etiquette from the late 1800s that a gentleman should look to spend 2–3 months’ income when purchasing a suit. I cannot fathom spending a sixth of my annual salary on a suit today.
Lewis2
3d ago
Thanks to you and @TowardsPanna for the advice. I’ve never invested in anything but stocks and mutual funds with my IRA, and I didn’t think to look into other options. I also make much less than most people here and so can’t usually max out both my IRA and my employer-matched 401k. But then, I live in a low cost of living area and likely spend vastly less than most of you.
Lewis2
4d ago
Last year, and so far this year, I avoided putting anything into an IRA, expecting a stock market decline sooner or later. I still have a week to make contributions for 2024. Does anyone have any thoughts as to whether now would be a good time to buy, or whether I should just forgo any IRA contributions for 2024? (I did put money aside in my now decimated 401k.)
Lewis2
4d ago
The “Save as Adobe PDF” is helpful because it embeds fonts and images, which the normal “Save As” .pdf option doesn’t do. You do need an active Adobe Acrobat Pro subscription to use it though.
Lewis2
8d ago
Once upon a time, but not anymore. Almost a third of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, and the remaining two-thirds includes a high proportion of nominal believers and Christmas and Easter attendees.
Lewis2
8d ago
I think you’re confusing the Classical Period of classical music with classical music as an overarching genre. The latter encompasses everything from Gregorian chant to John Williams.
Lewis2
10d ago
Do you know if Trader Joe’s butter is anything like Kerrygold butter? I heard from many different people over a span of about 15 years that Kerrygold butter is the best butter. I finally bought some, and I have to say, I wasn’t impressed. I actually prefer regular old American-style salted butter.
Lewis2
10d ago
I have never thought to toast banana bread before, but I’ll have to give it a shot the next time I buy or make some. Thanks!
Lewis2
10d ago
I recently discovered the deliciousness of toasted croissants, which is not a type of bread I would have expected would be improved by toasting. In light of that experience, I’m wondering if there are any other types of bread that are not conventionally toasted but that are improved by the process. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Lewis2
14d ago
Or watch any high school sports. I’ve watched high school boys play basketball, soccer, and volleyball, and I’ve watched the same from college girls. There’s never been any doubt in my mind that the high school boys would smash the college girls almost every time.
Lewis2
14d ago
The people who actively push for position A may be doing so for cynical status jockeying reasons, but I think the organizational response that enables their success is an understandable, if unfortunate, reaction to decades of people using position C to argue for no consequences for immoral behavior ever. When people hear that Comrade Bob was accused of sexual misconduct, they immediately think of Harvey Weinstein and Father Jim, panic, and do whatever they can to avoid accusations of conducting their own cover-up. In that context, arguing for nuance is typically going to fail. Now, as those scandals fade into the background, there may be a chance to successfully push for position B. It seems to me that this is starting to happen, though that is admittedly just a gut impression.
Lewis2
17d ago
Not long ago, I was struck for similar reasons when reading a Joyce Kilmer poem: To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself. I can’t imagine coming across anything similar from a modern-day poet.
Plus, Kilmer is most famous for his poem on trees (beloved by hippies everywhere), so I tend to think of him as a soft-hearted liberal. In reality, he was a devout Catholic, and he shared his church’s—and his society’s—negative views on suicide.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Partly “Innocent until proven guilty” and partly because communities which have the most murders also have the highest reluctance to talk to the police.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Did he have to, or did he choose to? It’s pretty common for Midwestern students to prefer to go to college somewhat close to home. A lot of us form lifelong friendships in high school, and going to college far away from home would tend to destroy those relationships.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I don’t think you’ve fully understood the objection. It’s not “somebody else would already be dealing with it.” It’s “Somebody else should now start dealing with it.”
A man jumped into a pond to save a drowning child. Halfway to shore, he stopped swimming and let the child go. From the shore, no one knows why—maybe he cramped up, maybe he decided he hated the kid, maybe there was some other reason—all the bystanders know is that he’s not going to keep helping the kid to safety. From that point on, it’s quite reasonable to ask why none of bystanders will jump in to take the man’s place instead of just standing around hurling abuse at him. If the kid’s safety is their true concern, they should do something to prove it. Otherwise their criticisms of the man ring hollow.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I think that’s most of it, but I think Eddie Izard also had a good point that Pol Pot and Stalin “killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that.”
Lewis2
2mo ago
Europeans absolutely have a shared history and culture, and, as with other racial groups, they form a distinct natural cluster. To take two obvious examples of shared culture, all European countries are historically Christian and trace their intellectual heritage back to Greece and Rome. That alone makes them more unified than “Native American” as a single ethnic category.
Lewis2
2mo ago
But you do have to kill God to do it.
But we did that 140 years ago. Nothing else should stand in our way.
Lewis2
2mo ago
there are too many people for the economy to sustain on its own
I’m struggling to understand why or how you think that is the case. Could you elaborate?
Lewis2
2mo ago
Unless Trump also orders more departments to move to Kansas or other non-coastal states.
Lewis2
2mo ago
Historically, marriage has pretty much always been primarily about child-rearing, which of course requires both a man and a woman, rather than pair-bonding, as most people see it today. In any society with that view, gay marriage is a ridiculous notion.
For the ancient Greeks, the highest love was that between two men (or a man and a boy) of equally high virtue. Those friendships were committed, largely lifelong, and frequently sexual, but they existed alongside opposite-sex marriages. The Romans weren’t quite as gay as the Greeks, but they generally didn’t see anything wrong with a freeman having sex with another man as long as he was the active partner (nobody cared what slaves got up to). Nevertheless, when Nero married two men (in one case as the active, and in another as the passive partner), all of Rome was appalled. If memory serves, we have other surviving sources ridiculing other purported same-sex marriages from that time as well.
Christians of course inherited the Jews’ extremely negative views on homosexuality, but even they saw clear differences between (chaste) same-sex friendships and marriage, usually extolling friendship as being the higher love. I believe St. Jerome even once wrote that marriage was only good because it produced children for the next generation of friendships to form. But the ancient Christians never condemned same-sex marriage because it just wasn’t a thing.
My understanding is that most Asian societies also didn’t really care about what sexual practices people got up to outside of marriage, as long as they also did their duty and had children within marriage (monks were of course excluded and apparently had a reputation for same-sex behavior).
Moving to the Middle East, even today in Afghanistan, there’s a saying that “women are for children and boys are for fun” (or something along those lines), which further emphasizes the universality of that link.
It seems to have been only in the past 150 years or so (at least in the Anglo world) that marriage began to be seen as obviously higher than mere friendship, and that the bond between husband and wife was seen as so special. I don’t know why that trend started, but I wonder if it might have had something to do with Victorian England’s strict anti-homosexuality laws leading to a de-emphasis on same-sex friendships just to be safe. Whatever the reason, that special bond started to redefine marriage. Once the Sexual Revolution and the pill severed the link between marriage and sex, and between sex and procreation, the common perception of marriage changed finally and completely. Now marriage is all about “the love of my life” and “marrying my best friend,” and all the tangled emotions that come with it. No-fault divorce helped here too, since it meant that the only thing keeping a marriage together—the only thing that actually mattered—was the emotional high of “being in love” with another human being. Once the high goes away, the marriage is dead, since those two are seen as completely synonymous. (Kids in such marriages are like houses, an asset to be divided when the marriage inevitably fails.)
With that redefined understanding of marriage, it’s completely arbitrary to restrict it to heterosexual pairings only. Two men or two women can love each other just as deeply as a man and a woman, and since that’s all that matters in a marriage, there’s no reason to deny it to them.
Now, take that final product, export it with McDonald’s, Elvis, and Levi’s, and you eventually redefine marriage for the rest of the world.
Oh, give him a break. Most people are bad at math, especially when dealing with such large numbers.
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