TechyDad

My company switched up retirement plans and they held a seminar to explain them. The person running the seminar said that we should be putting 15% of our salaries into retirement.

Nice idea, but if I put 15% of my salary into retirement, then I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. I’m not living extravagantly or anything (buying something for $20 for my enjoyment seems like a splurge to me). Still, whenever I seem to be getting on a better financial footing, life throws me a curve ball. Need new hearing aids ($3,600). New a new dryer ($750). Might need a new car soon.

So either I need to be paid a lot more, I will be working until I’m 90, or I put away the money and go deep into debt but can retire. (Just kidding. I’m nearing 50. I likely won’t have enough to retire. Maybe when I’m 80.)

And his followers will excuse it in one of two ways:

1. It’s all fake. They’ll claim that the Democrats swapped the real list for the released “fake” list and that the real list has Biden’s name, not Trump’s. Their proof? Some YouTube video linked to from a Facebook post where a white guy wearing sunglasses in his truck says he saw the real list with Biden’s name on it!

2. Trump was undercover. They’ll claim that Trump was actually working undercover to expose these people. Being on the flight logs “proves” that he was only there to spy on these people. Why? Non-specific Excuse! Therefore, Trump’s name on Epstein’s list is actually a good thing and they support him more!

Meanwhile, the rest of us will scream in frustration.

Yes, they did. Before that, LEGO also released blind bag minifigures for Steamboat Willie and Minnie Mouse. I’m currently designing a LEGO MOC to display my figures with a small rendition of the Steamboat Willie boat. (I purchase my parts used from BrickLink to reduce costs.)

A mass reading would be a cool protest tactic. Get hundreds of kids hundreds of copies of banned books. Have them sit outside a state legislature - clogging up traffic to and from the building as they read to themselves. Have extra books on hand to give out to people trying to get through, while encouraging them to just sit and read for a bit.

My 16 year old has done that. He finds a book that’s banned, takes it out of the library (either physical copy, eBook, or audiobook) and then reads it. While doing so, he keeps an eye out for why it was banned.

He noted that one book was banned because one page describes a sexual encounter. It was about 3 lines and wasn’t extremely graphic. It just got the point to the reader that an event happened and then the book moved on. But apparently any mention of sex even existing is enough for a book to get banned.

Unless, it’s the Bible, of course. Then you can have daughters sleeping with their fathers and it’s all good for kids to read!

Some judges are already demolishing standing. The Texas judge in the Mifepristone case ruled that the doctors suing to stop the drug had standing even though they weren’t hurt yet by the drug’s use. The fact that they claimed that they might be hurt at some hypothetical point in the future was standing enough.

Meanwhile, in another case, a judge ruled that citizens don’t have standing to sue over infringements to their voting rights.

If they demolish standing, why not destroy jurisdiction as well? Of course, a ruling from the Supreme Court would likely be worded in such a way that red states could get anything they wanted while blue states had no rights to request anything.

If he successfully kept states from certifying their votes, then Congress wouldn’t have been able to name a winner on January 6th. At that point, the vote would have gone to the House. In the House, each states’ Representatives vote and the winner gets that state’s vote. The candidate who wins the most states wins.

The Republicans hold the majority here and Trump would have been elected President regardless of the actual election result. So keeping the election from being certified was a last ditch effort to overturn the election results and “win” despite the fact that he lost.

It doesn’t count. It was just a locker room insurrection!

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but I have had a bug (and part of its web) go into my mouth and down my throat while biking. Just thinking about it makes me want to gag. If, after that, you offered me a bike helmet with a front visor, I’d have put that thing on ASAP.

Now take that bug incident and make it happen at 30-50 mph? No way would I have my face hole exposed for bugs to invade! (And that’s totally apart from the safety issue.)

I didn’t factor in inflation as I was trying to keep it quick and simple. I also didn’t factor in any interest he might have received from a bank account. This was purely “he works minimum wage and stuffs all the cash he gets into a big jar - how much does he have after 50 years.”

I was also using the federal minimum wage. Obviously, many states have higher minimum wages so he might have made more than the federal minimum wage had he been free to move to another state.

Of course, the $500,000 figure only accounts for money that he would have made. It doesn’t include all the suffering he had to endure or the fact that the state basically ended his life at 21. He didn’t get to live his life and his future life is going to be rough. Not only does he need to adjust to life out of prison, but he likely has nothing. It’s not like many places are rushing to hire a 71 year old with no job experience for the last 50 years because they were in prison. The money he gets should at least be enough for him to comfortably retire.

Are these big strong people with tears in their eyes?

Seriously. We went from “you spelled potato wrong or screamed slightly weird so no presidency for you” to “you’re quoting Hitler? Well, no big deal. It looks like you’re still the frontrunner for your party.”

About 16 years ago, a friend of mine was getting married. I attended his wedding at a former plantation in South Carolina. (Nowadays, I’d question this decision, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.) While there, I decided to take a tour of the grounds. After all, it was beautiful there and I wanted to learn about the history of the place.

That’s when I realized how much they tried to sweep slavery under the rug. They referred to the slaves as “workers” and never used any term that would lead one to believe that they were “employed” against their will. If you didn’t know US history and took that tour, you’d have pictured a group of men getting hired, working an 8 hour day, and collecting a paycheck. This was certainly not what had happened there.

I sometimes wonder if they’ve updated their tour. Would they today actually acknowledge what took place there or do they still talk about the “workers.”

$175,000 for 50 years? He’s 71 now so he went into prison at 21. That means he spent virtually his entire life in prison. He could have done so many things, but instead he needed to sit in a prison cell. All because he was wrongly convicted.

And because I’m a math geek and need to figure this stuff out, $175,000 over 50 years is $3,500 a year. If we calculate what he would have earned at the federal minimum wage over that time frame (ignoring bank account interest or inflation just to keep things simple), we’d get over $500,000.

They’re giving him a third of what he should have earned at bare minimum. (And that ignores all the other horrible things involved with being wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years.)

I needed Unicode symbols for a story I’m working on. (I want to use them as “magic runes” so I could type them into a document, but without using the standard “runes” that are typically used.)

Shape Catcher let me draw what I was looking for and then get a list of Unicode characters that matched that drawing. It’s not exact so if there’s no perfect Unicode match, it will give you ones that are close. This actually turned out to my benefit as I found shapes I hadn’t considered but which worked nicely for my uses.

That last one actually did come back with a report - that said little to no fraud took place. They spent millions of dollars and used some shady practices with the ballots, but even they couldn’t find anything.

His girlfriend has the evidence. You wouldn’t know her. She goes to another school.

The whole “Elon swings hard right while trying to sell electric cars” is crazy. It would be like me selling “roll coal” kits and deciding that my market had to be Progressives because I was going to insult everyone on the right.

And the whole “she spilled some mildly hot coffee and got dollar signs in her eyes” narrative was cooked up by McDonald’s. They couldn’t win in court, so they tried to shape the public narrative to portray the poor woman as seeking a payday.

In reality, she only initially wanted McDonald’s to pay her medical bills. They could have made the entire thing go away for $20,000. Instead, McDonald’s opted to spend likely millions not only on lawyers, but on a public relations campaign to defame this poor woman.

Oh, these things are definitely interconnected. The War On Drugs was started mainly for racist/political reasons. Nixon couldn’t say “let’s arrest all the black Civil Rights leaders,” but if he could find a drug that black people tended to use (either for real or stereotypically used), he could arrest them for drug possession/use and disrupt those troublesome groups.

And many mental health issues can have their root in money issues. To give myself as an example, I’ve recently been feeling a ton of anxiety over my job. I know I’m talented, but I’m plagued by self doubt and worry about being let go and needing to find a new job. At 48 years old and with a family to support, this can be a lot of pressure. The pressure increases my anxiety and which stresses me out in a feedback loop. Perhaps I could benefit from therapy, but that costs money which then gets added to my financial woes. So I’m stuck with “dealing with it” as best I can. Yay capitalism?