Doddering old man telling Americans the government really wants you to buy a thing didn’t help… shocking.
Desperation is not something people normally look for in the outfits they plan to spend a lot of money with for a purchase they hope to keep for a long time, and I literally couldn’t think of anything that looks more desperate.
It’s impossible to time the dip, for most people, for long term investments, best advice is to just execute dollar cost averaging.
Invest small amounts of money regularly and let it sit.
This is all predicated on the historical trend that, while the market fluctuates up and down over the short term, over the long term the economy grows and the market grows.
Buying in a down market on a long term investment is just capturing assets on sale. You wouldn’t normally avoid getting something at 10% off on the chance that it might be 30% off.
The only thing that should really send you away from the market for long term investing is if you think the system will collapse entirely or if you think this market is at the peak for between now and when you want to use that money.
Remember when the president made them put “don’t do drugs” on all the video games and then everyone stopped doing drugs?
There is nothing less cool than having the President begging people to do something. As someone that wants Elon to go broke, this is the best thing that could ever happen
All the US Champagne businesses must be so excited. Don’t let little things like the fact that Champagne means it comes from Champagne in France stand in the way of the US businesses…
We are the dumbest fucking country.
Look the government just doesn’t have any money. None for usaid, none for Ukraine, none for science or education or healthcare, there’s just no money.
Except I guess for performative bullshit like painting over this mural.
It took a lot of persistence and luck. I had found my wife a new doctor to do her medication management and I ended up just politely hounding her staff explaining calmly but firmly the catch-22 I found myself in.
The trick I’ve learned over caring for my chronically ill wife, who I love with all my heart, is to be very nice to the front line medical people but to never give up. They take crap all day from angry people, so I make it my mission to never yell at them, never get cross with them. I just explain what’s going on and my goal is always to get them on my side, be my person on the inside.
That worked here too. After calling a couple times and being nice, one person working the phone remembered me and I could tell they wanted to help. I just kept asking them for options, people like it when they can be part of solving the problem. They got in the doctors ear about this and suddenly if she did a virtual evaluation of my wife she could write a preliminary prescription to fill the gap.
Is this how things should work? No. Should you have to beg and cajole and get lucky that someone will help you? Absolutely not. But this is how I’ve figured out how to navigate this broken system.
Tl;Dr - Be very nice to office staff, be persistent, make it a problem you can solve together, keep reminding them that you are advocating for a flesh and blood human being you care about and that them just suffering will never be a good enough answer.
Also don’t get frustrated if you don’t make progress and need to call back, I think it only took calling 3 days in a row for them to figure out they better help me or they were going to have to talk to me every single day
Anyone that might be thinking this is an exaggeration, it is not.
My wife has adhd and takes vyvanse for it, a strictly controlled substance. I have to be extremely vigilant about making sure her prescription gets to the pharmacy and that the pharmacy fills it correctly.
We recently moved across country. Here’s a fun puzzle to work on.
The amount of times I had to explain this to people and just exasperatedly go “so should I just prepare my wife to go through withdrawal of this medication she has been prescribed and taking for nearly a half a decade? Is that ok with you, is that an ok patient outcome? Is that what you’d let happen to your wife”
Luckily shes married to an angry, persistent, yet very polite man who will shame the shit out of people until he gets it fixed. But I have no idea how she was supposed to navigate this alone, while facing the terror of withdrawal.
The article is worth a read. A lot of Americans don’t realize how much of Nazi Germany ideas had inspiration from and solid support in America.
WW2 provided two incredibly powerful antidotes.
For a few generations this carried us. But we shouldn’t forget history, Hitler looked to our eugenics programs for inspiration, not the other way round.
I was gonna put an /s on it but I thought it was more fun to leave it ambiguous.
The quotes are not real (except the “we won’t be held hostage by small dollar donors” is a paraphrasing of something that recently came out of some dnc think tank about what to do going forward)
Democratic leadership is coming out swinging on this one, telling their caucus that any member of the party that attempts to block this bill will be primaried.
In these unprecedented times it is an absolute necessity that democrats join with republicans to ensure their agenda moves forward. Americans want a congress that works again. Any member that dares to hold this great nation hostage to score cheap political points will meet with the full fury of the DNC.
When asked if they were at all concerned about the policies they would be enabling they responded
Our donors don’t pay us to worry about policies. We will not be held hostage by small dollar donors any longer. The only thing more dangerous to our democracy than the specter of fascism would be us breaking a single norm or polite convention.
When told that trump recently threatened to round up democratic lawmakers and execute them for the good of the nation leadership had this to say.
While we certainly disagree with their plans, we will hold our heads up high knowing that we had the integrity to pass the spending necessary to keep the gears of government turning.
At that point democratic leadership had to leave with one senior leader saying “I need to get back to dialing for dollars” and another stating that they “had to pressure more members to censure Al Greene for his despicable display of barbarism, shouting out the president, is there no decency anymore”
Skinner meme.
Was it a bad idea to have a ketamine addicted far right lunatic as ceo
No, it’s the markets who are wrong.
It depends.
When the group hurts you through its own incompetence, you can land in hard times and still believe the ideals of that group. The ability for people to rationalize things is incredibly powerful.
Now let’s say that the trump supporter is ready to no longer support trump now that they’ve been personally victimized. Where they end up can be a massive spectrum. Cult followers tend to idolize and forge parasocial relationships with their cult leader.
You might think that you are seeing them reject trumpism and all it stands for, when in reality it’s much closer to someone feeling betrayed by someone they believed they had a close personal relationship with. Their rejection of the cult has nothing to do with what the cult believes, but comes from a reaction to a feeling of betrayal by the beloved cult figure.
In that case the fertile ground to win hearts and minds isn't there. There are excellent case studies of this “embrace to change minds” strategy working.Daryl Davis converting 200 Ku klux klanmen is an inspiring story, and one that many point to to support the idea of embracing people instead of punishing them.
The problem is that this isn’t the same situation. Daryl Davis was willing to spend years talking with, and building relationships with people that actively hated him. He didn’t go to people who had a tiff with their local klan leader and tell them “it’s ok buddy, let’s be friends now, I forgive you.” Instead he put in a tremendous amount of effort to build relationships which made it impossible for these guys to continue to hold on to their bigoted beliefs
So what’s the danger in not treating these people like shit? Even if it were ineffective, isn’t it better to just be nice to them anyways? We have a contemporary example to draw from, reconstruction.
After the us civil war there was a difference of opinion much the same as the one we argue today. And we tried the gentler approach
Many argue that the confederacy and its ideals never truly died. The light touch, left many holding regressive ideals in places of power. They had not given up their ideals, they just couldn’t be a part of the group anymore.
In most cases the argument is somewhat moot. The most likely scenario is that my relationship (and most peoples relationship) with some random trump supporter that gets kicked in the nuts by trump will be the same as before, no relationship at all. In the rare situation that this person is someone you do plan to forge a relationship with (either net new or reestablishing some previous relationship) I think it is neither wise to “treat them like shit” nor “let them off the hook”
Instead it should be a careful assessment of what they actually believe. Do they still blame immigrants and trans people for everything that’s wrong in their life but just don’t like that trump fired then, then they can kindly go fuck themselves. They haven’t learned any lesson, they just don’t like that they had something bad happen to them. Sure give them a chance, don’t immediately piss all over them, but if the only problem they have is that it finally directly impacted them, they are no ally.
If it’s a catalyst for true and lasting change, sure nurture that.