Thanks to sprawling American car-dependent infrastructure, not even Bigfoot can walk to places anymore.

Ultimately any retirement system suffers from these weaknesses. You can have a retirement system based entirely on universal generous state pensions; it won’t matter. When the economy takes a hit, the state is less capable of generating revenue.

Exactly. For middle class folks who still have to rely on the stock market for retirement, the best option is to just buy dumb index funds and hold them til retirement. You aren’t going to be able to outsmart and out time the actual Wall Street traders who have PhDs in mathematics, access to microsecond trading, and a trading bankroll of billions. If you need to rely on the market, buy and hold is the only sane strategy. At least then you minimize the number of trades you make and the chances for the snakes to screw you over.

If you want real investment advice: no. If you’re investing for retirement, and you’re not near retirement age, you have decades ahead of you before you need these funds. You know those people who “lost everything” in the 2008 recession? Sure, some people lost their jobs and were forced to burn their retirement savings just to keep the lights on. But far more lost money because they sold when the market was in the toilet. The market did eventually recover, but the timing of the recovery couldn’t be predicted in advance, so they lost out on much of the recovery. The market went back up, but they still had their 401k sitting in cash. They lost money on the dip, and then they lost money again on the upswing.

Also, keep in mind that Trump’s policies mean that cash savings will be far more vulnerable in this crash than in the 2008 crash. At least in 2008, the inflation rate was basically zero. Cash didn’t lose much value just sitting in your savings account. But Trump is trying to weaken the dollar to make imports more expensive and US exports more appealing to foreign consumers. And Trump’s policies are expected to be rather inflationary. Cash is no safe haven right now. You could try to move your assets to foreign currencies and companies, but this crash is global. The US set itself up as the linchpin of the global economy after WW2. If the US stumbles, everyone stumbles. The only country that won’t be hurt much by this crash will be North Korea. But there really aren’t that many investment opportunities for foreigners in the hermit kingdom.

It sucks, but at this point you should just ride it out. If you still have decades till retirement, just ignore your retirement balance for the next few years. Just ride it out and remember that you’re investing not for today, but for decades in the future. Or consider the parable of Bob, the world’s most unlucky investor.

The “crash it and buy the dip” strategy only works if you’re confident that asset prices will recover after the crash. There is no guarantee that’s the case. Trump is doing damage to the US economy that won’t be easily recovered. Even if free and fair elections happen in 2028. Even if a Democrat manages to win. Even if they reverse every one of Trump’s economic policies. Even if all of this is true, Trump is doing damage that may not be reversible.

Let’s say you’re a company overseas that sells a lot of products in the US. You go to great lengths to make your products compatible with American markets and appealing to American consumers. Think of a company in China that makes products for Walmart stores. Walmart works closely with manufacturers. If you want to sell something at Walmart, you need to go through their processes, make products to their specifications, etc. You have to make custom versions of your product just for Walmart stores. Walmart is such a large market that it is worth it for manufacturers to do this, but it is a long and expensive process.

Imagine you’re such a Chinese manufacturer, producing products specifically to sell at Walmart. Now you get hit with a massive tariff. Suddenly your Walmart sales drop in half or more. You’ve spent millions tailoring your products to the needs and preferences of Walmart, and now that investment is just gone. Poof. Millions lost in an instant.

Now imagine that after 2028, all the tariffs go away completely. Are you going to be so eager to go through the process of interfacing with Walmart again? Would you invest those millions again, knowing that in 2032 another Republican arsonist can roll into office and put the tariffs right back up again? I think you would rather spend your finite resources tailoring your products to the consumers of saner countries.

Or consider US arms manufacturers. They’re losing a fortune on cancelled arms sales in Europe and other allied countries. The US is now showing itself to be an unreliable ally. As long as the US was a rock-solid member of NATO, countries didn’t mind buying F-35s from Lockheed Martin. But if the US’s allegiances can swing wildly with each election, that’s no longer the case. The F-35 is a modern fighter that runs on American software. Ukraine just found out that a lot of American tech can be remotely disabled at the flip of a switch. Even if a Democrat wins in 2028, and they’re the biggest NATO supporter in all of history, would you trust the US? Or would you rather buy something made in Europe that is less risky? If you’re Poland looking to buy a jet fighter, one from France probably looks a lot better than one from the US right now. At least France is unlikely to suddenly decide that Putin is great.

Or the ultimate issue - the US’s status as the world reserve currency. Trump is currently setting fire to the global trade order put in place after WW2. Remember. This system was built by the US. We dictated the terms of it. We built a system that gave us immense profit and benefit. And Trump is slaughtering the goose that laid the golden egg. The US gains huge economic benefits from being the wold reserve currency, and Trump is in the process of ending that. That isn’t something that can just be regained, regardless of who is sitting in the White House in 2029.

This is why I am very skeptical of the narrative that billionaires want Trump to crash the economy so they can buy cheap assets. Buying cheap assets during a crash is only a windfall if the prices of those assets go back up at some point. But Trump is doing a lot of damage to the US economy that simply won’t be easy to repair, regardless of what happens in the next election.

Also, even if you don’t know the answer to this, if you happen to know a better place to ask this question, please let me know.

I would say that you’re a civilian if you aren’t currently serving in the military, regardless of former military service. That’s at least how it works under international law.

That’s the problem with founding a state based on genocide and ethnic cleansing. When you’ve convinced yourself that you’re literally doing the will of God, when are you actually “done” with God’s work? Just how big is the “Jewish homeland” supposed to be? The Torah said that Yahweh gave the ancient Israelites all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. A fundamentalist Zionist can justify, based on a direct religious reference, that Israel can rightfully expand that far based on the direct word of God. And God never said the Israelis couldn’t conquer more land beyond those bounds. It’s a recipe for self-destructive never-ending conflict.

Israel’s MO is pretty obvious at this point:

1. Antagonize your neighbors just over the border until they start attacking you back.
2. When your neighbors retaliate against your harassment and violence, send in the military to secure a “buffer zone,” billed as a demilitarized zone like the Korean DMZ. Say you can’t have Jews and Arabs living right next door to each other, so a buffer is needed.
3. Once the buffer zone is established, let Jewish settlers in to build towns and cities in what was supposed to be an empty safety buffer.
4. After a few years, Jews and Arabs are once again on each other’s doorstep.
5. Start again antagonizing the neighbors (who are usually the same people you displaced a generation ago.)

This has been Israel’s strategy for decades. They’ve seized “buffer zone” after “buffer zone.” They let their people move into the buffer zone, and then suddenly they don’t have a buffer zone anymore. They use their own civilian population as human shields, putting them in a position where they are guaranteed to be attacked by angry people the Israeli government and settler forces are continually antagonizing. Then when they’re inevitably attacked, that can be used to justify expanding the borders even further. Oh, and none of their neighbors can resist this process through direct military action, as Israel has a nuclear arsenal. No one can afford to get in a total war with Israel.

I really don’t know where this ends. At this point I think the best thing for Mideast peace would be the Iranians, Egyptians, or Turks getting a nuclear weapon themselves. The only thing that’s going to stop the never-ending drive for Israeli lebensraum is if they expand until they’re up against someone too tough for them to boss around. And that’s probably going to need to be a country that is themselves a nuclear power.

The other problem with this expansion is that it gets baked into the Israeli society and economy. It’s a bit like what happened with ancient Rome. Their whole economy became dependent on this process of expanding, conquering peoples, subjugating and enslaving them, etc. They had to keep expanding just to keep their economy running. They paid their retired veterans with stolen land. The only way you can keep that model going is by expanding forever. And eventually they expanded beyond what they could manage. The same thing is happening in Israel. They have whole sectors of their economy dependent on this process of expansion and settlement. At this point, even if they wanted to, they can’t just say, “ok, we’ve expanded enough. These are our fixed borders now and forever.” They can’t do that without collapsing the part of their economy that is dependent on selling and developing all the land they take. They can’t have peace without causing a massive recession. They’ve become addicted to stealing land.

Grifters gonna grift. My guess is she decided she wasn’t ever going to be able to make a living as a fencer, and her other career prospects aren’t looking great. So she decides to make a buck by becoming a right wing commenter/grifter. She happened to be paired against a trans woman in a competition and saw it as her chance to make a buck and launch an influencer career.

Good luck!

It is a known problem that docs will often prescribe the minimum dose to get a trans person to leave their office, rather than the minimum dose to create hormone levels in the mid-range of cis men/women.

What do you call it if a leftist starts DIYing large numbers of bootleg Plan B and abortion pills?

Did she genuinely think if she seemed normal-christian-white-girl enough they wouldn’t touch her?

There are definitely some strains of thought of that kind in parts of the trans community, especially among the trans medicalist folks. There’s a subset of trans folks that believe the present upsurge in bigotry is due to the presence of nonbinary people, polyamorous folks, and any other trans folks that don’t present as conventional binary heterosexual. Her vibe really screams that. “I just have to show these police that trans people can be perfectly normal, and they’ll leave us alone!”

I see this belief as a tragic and misguided self-defense mechanism. It’s really hard to accept that there are simply people that will hate you for no reason. It is deeply hard to accept that there are people that want you dead, and there is nothing you can do to dissuade them. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if trans people simply all acted “normal,” then the hate would go away. This kind of thinking is comforting to some people. It at least provides a path out of the nightmare the trans community finds itself in. If we all just became straight-presenting, then everyone would leave us alone. It provides a kind of desperate hope. There is some path forward for the trans community to escape bigotry. If we just assimilate, we can end the madness.

In truth the recent upswing in anti-trans hate has nothing to do with the existence of nonbinary or any other less conventional form of trans folks. People that we would now call nonbinary have existed for generations. The recent upswing in hate is entirely artificial and the result of a deliberate propaganda campaign by Republicans. They lost on the same-sex marriage issue, they managed to overturn Roe, and now they need a new moral panic to rile up the base. That’s it. The trans community could be composed entirely of trans women that look and act like this woman and trans men that look and act like frat bros, and the recent upsurge in anti-trans bigotry would still have occurred. They needed someone to hate, so they found someone to hate. It’s fascism 101, always find and target the Other.

Want to know the real irony?

I mean there’s always this source if you’re feeling brave.

Sometimes the simplest things hit the hardest.

I mean, theoretically, it seems possible. I have some bioluminescent petunias I bought awhile back when I was really high. So you in theory you could engineer whatever cells generate ejaculate to produce a mild bioluminescent compound. It would take millions of dollars and would be an ethical minefield of a project, but in principle it’s quite possible.

That’s amazing that a patient can be infected by a tumor located 5,000 km away from their body!

Why won’t anyone love me?

Or here’s another idea. If this is actually a real threat, how about we treat it like one? We can simply choose not to develop certain technologies; we’ve done it multiple times. We’ve had the tech for human cloning for decades, but we decided it was unethical and to simply not pursue the technology. We could do the same for AI beyond a certain level of complexity.

Hell, if this really is a threat to the human race, I would fully support just outlawing computers entirely if that’s what it took. Fuck it, we’ll just go back to pen and paper. It would be an extreme step, but if that’s what it takes, so be it. We can go full Dune, “thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.”