Is anyone else in the country seeing their net worth jump 150% since COVID?

In net worth? Sure, -$1000 is technically a 150% jump from -$400.

I think Sundays is the day when many of his closest advisers take some or all of the day off, so he’s just wandering without the distractions that normally keep him busy.

By this logic fat shaming is acceptable?

I mean, yeah, in many contexts. For example, when a professional athlete shows up to training camp after putting on a bunch of fat in the off-season, that’s fair game. It’s literally their job to maintain their bodies and if we’re allowed to criticize their job performance then we’re certainly allowed to criticize their maintenance of their physical fitness. There’s obviously a clear parallel here between that and other public figures where their intelligence may be fair game for criticism.

More broadly, when people are engaged in unhealthy habits of any kind (from smoking to sleep deprivation to overwork/stress to terrible relationship decisions to unhealthy eating/exercise habits), I think it’s fair game for loved ones to point that out and encourage steering their lives back towards healthier choices. I’m not advocating that we go and make fun of strangers, the range of acceptable conversation in our day to day relationships is going to be different.

No, that’s not OK to mock people’s medical conditions, and it’s always a good idea to exercise some empathy and humility to know that things might not always be as easy for others as for yourself. But I’ve never been on board with the idea that fatness is somehow off limits, in large part that I don’t believe that most people’s fatness is inherently innate. Correlations between moving to or away from high obesity areas (most notably between countries or between significant changes of altitude, but also apparent in moves between city centers and suburban car-based communities) make that obvious that fatness is often environmental.

TLDR: I make fun of Trump’s fat ass all the time.

But because intelligence is an inherited trait

I don’t think this is true, practically speaking. Intelligence is like endurance running speed in that there are heritable components to it, but at the end of the day environmental factors dominate on who is or isn’t faster than another.

I can make fun of someone for being dumb in the same way that I can make fun of someone for being a slow runner. It’s only problematic when their slowness is actually caused by something out of their control, like some kind of health issue.

The boring answer: criminal investigative files generally aren’t released, so they’re compiled in a way that mingles information about victims with information about suspects and witnesses and others potentially involved in criminal activity, intentionally or unwittingly, directly or tangentially.

If you want to export a list of all names in the files, you’ll want to filter out victims for sure, and probably mere witnesses. You definitely don’t want to out informants and make them vulnerable to retaliation.

So most law enforcement agencies simply will keep everything secret. The idea of releasing names from the file was unusual, and it’s not surprising that Trump’s own people refused to follow through, especially when it’s highly likely that Trump was in that list of names.

I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Yeah, that’s possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.

And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.

No, the Red Lobster insolvency was driven by declining sales and increasing debt, amid some shady corporate shenanigans with their finances. When they filed, they were about $30 million in the hole (even assuming their high valuations for their intangible assets).

Private equity owners (Golden Gate) made them sell off the land they owned, only to lease it back at above market rates. Then sold the chain to its biggest seafood supplier (Thai Union), who used the restaurant as an outlet for their wholesale seafood rather than as a standalone profitable business (which resulted in huge quality drop off and declining sales).

They were headed in the wrong direction, and the $11 million they lost on endless shrimp didn’t make a big difference. It was circling the drain anyway, based on big strategic errors (or just plain old private equity fuckery).

Oh wow, windows! I don’t think I can afford this place.

Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.

Here’s a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.

By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.

Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.

Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That’s only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.

So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month’s rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month’s rent.

The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.

1987: Black Monday

That one didn’t really matter that much to regular Americans. Less than a third of Americans owned stock back then, and that crash didn’t have an obvious cause from actual economic fundamentals. And the Fed managed to contain the liquidity crisis, as your linked Wikipedia page describes, so that the broader economy was largely unaffected.

Recessions matter. Stock market crashes only matter when they are caused by, or are the cause of, an actual recession in the real world.

That’s what I’m getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn’t released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.

It’s the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it’s going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.

slowly release the chemical energy to the ground

In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That’s dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.

That’s just not how chemistry works.

Every bomb, grenade, or other munition will have some kind of explosive substance, which contains a large amount of chemical energy that is ordinarily released very quickly as kinetic energy and heat, in a big explosion. These weapons are designed to where the explosive is resilient against accidental or incidental detonation. So there are a ton of safeguards in place to prevent these things from blowing up unexpectedly.

The problem is that the energy contained within those chemical bonds is still always going to be there. And there’s not an easy way to gradually release that energy. That’s why unexploded ordnance is usually disposed of by blowing it up, in place, with an external explosion. The deterioration of the safeguards around accidental detonation makes the whole thing less safe, so the safest thing to do is to detonate it in place.

Even chemical batteries, which are designed for gradual release of the stored chemical energy, can sometimes overheat and cause a runaway reaction of a battery fire. Deterioration of the device is bad for controlling how that immense quantity of stored energy gets released.

So if you have a device that is hard to accidentally detonate, how will you make it so that the explosive degrades over time, without causing an explosion at an unexpected time?

Am I crazy or are the comments in this thread all about different ages? Well, I’ll defend the existence of children’s music.

Children’s music is great for teaching young children (under the age of 2) the basics of music. A clear melody (often in C major), simple rhythm, some basic song structure, rhyming lyrics, and lots and lots of repetition gets children listening and singing at an age before they can form coherent sentences. These are skills they learn to encourage not just later composition and performance of music, but also basic human functions like speaking and listening.

They’re doing it with their books, their TV shows, and their games, too. Developmentally appropriate material is important for learning that category of art or culture, and provides a basis to build on after that.

Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone’s poor they won’t pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.

But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.

Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.

Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don’t have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.

Amazon is worse for those communities, though. They undercut retailers by even more, and then don’t hire local employees at all. In the communities where they do set up warehouses, the working conditions are even worse than Walmart.

That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.

No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.

The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.

In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.

Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.

Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.

Yeah it’s a somewhat standard reporting structure, of an intro paragraph about the stat, 4 paragraphs about a specific person’s journey from unemployed college grad living with parents and mowing lawns for extra cash to becoming a CFO in the span of 15 years, and then a longer description of what the stats show, then placement of those stats in context comparing to Gen X and Boomers, and important caveats in what the stats actually mean (unclear whether this makes millennials better off when they’re expected to face higher lifetime costs on housing and healthcare). Then it dives back into the anecdotes, including how most rich millennials perceive the fragility of their own financial position.

Here’s an archive.is link:
https://archive.is/Gr6qG