hotel

I think you mean “all-inclusive” resort (that isn’t all inclusive and actually charges a gazillion dollars in random fees) that makes them feel like they’re experiencing local culture while actually just experiencing the effects of the resort chain exploiting the local population for cheap labor while cheaply imitating the culture.

Don’t worry, we Americans are definitely capable of escaping our cultural bubble! /s

Hasbro said they’d make it “genderless” naming it “Potato Head” and just provide parts so the kids playing with the toys can choose what attachments to put on in order to make it look more like a “Mr,” “Ms,” or just some mix of both.

Apparently it would only be an addition to the existing Mr and Ms line, so it wouldn’t even be replacing them.

Conservatives then went on a tirade online complaining that the left was trying to destroy traditional family roles and indoctrinate the children by preventing them from learning the valuable lesson of family from the Potato Head toys.

No, this isn’t satire, they actually got mad over this.

Trump has not established a specific plan

Democrats panic over guy with no plan saying we should magically make a thing different.

We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money

Even though the controllable loss was reduced by over $400m in just 2024, and the only increased uncontrolled losses were from things like pensions, y’know, the thing that people need to retire after doing work that serves the whole country, I guess we can always make it profitable by jacking up the cost of every single package delivery! Cuts for the working class!

And it will be a form of a merger, but it’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years.

Merger! Business words! We’ve fixed the system! If it remains the same Postal Service, but undergoes a merger, then that just implies the US government buying another entity to merge it into USPS. And if that’s not what he meant, then we get privatization with private shareholders demanding costs must rise to pay them profits on top of the existing cost to provide the service. Cost cutting!

Following his remarks, Democrat members of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Trump urging him to abandon any plans to reform USPS (emphasis added)

“Your reported efforts to dismantle the Postal Service as an independent agency would directly undermine the affordability and reliability of the U.S. postal system”

“We urge you to abandon immediately any plans that would either privatize the Postal Service or undermine the independence of the Postal Service.”

“Don’t reform this thing” is the same as “don’t dismantle, privatize, or undermine the independence of this agency” now? What a conflation.

Seriously, this entire article is just “Trump says he wants to do things to take an existing system that already works and either privatize or cut funding for it” and Democrats going “don’t do that we all still need to get our mail at a reasonable rate”

Don’t forget, private companies are under no obligation to provide service to any area deemed unprofitable, whereas the USPS is required to do so. And what areas are the most likely to be unprofitable for delivery companies? Rural areas. Which areas have the highest population of conservatives? Rural areas. If Trump manages to successfully implement his plan, don’t be surprised and come out with the whole “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face” argument.

A few reasons:

1. Market prices are more often determined by speculation than actual intrinsic value. People will say that the market is “efficient” in the sense that everything is valued efficiently based on the value it’s worth, but take one look at meme stocks and you’ll see that prices can easily be influenced by large volumes of purchases instead of any actual intrinsic value in the corporation being invested in. A lot of money being funneled into index funds can lead to the price of stocks continually increasing without actual value of the underlying companies being taken into account as much as you would think.

2. Fascism is supported by, and continues to support capitalism. Corporations benefit from capitalism, especially under a system where safeguards are removed and businesses can make larger profit margins as a result.

3. A lot of the changes Trump is making hurt working people, but don’t hurt corporations. (and often even help corporations directly) For instance, he’s making union busting easier, knows that any tariffs can simply be passed on by the companies without shrinking their margins, (just costing you more), is cracking down on legal immigration to the point that illegal migrant workers are even easier to exploit with the threat of deportation, etc. A lot of the bad things Trump is doing will only affect us, not corporations or the capital owning class.

Yeah, whether or not someone believes they have gender dysphoria shouldn’t affect if they get therapy or not. I’d recommend it regardless, it helps a bunch.

Of course there are, but as has already been shown through many attempts at creating welfare programs that directly test the means of the recipients, the administrative cost to provide funds to people based on highly specific factors about themselves (e.g. total net worth, rate of income, spending, cost to employ farm employees, profit margins, etc etc etc) can cost significantly more than blanket assistance.

It’s one of the reasons why UBI works so well compared to traditional welfare in administrative costs, since it doesn’t need to be means tested.

Now obviously this isn’t a one-to-one comparison, but let’s say we create an index just like the one at question here, but it’s specifically the “poor farmer’s index.” To do so, we need to:

1. Request extensive documentation from all farmers applying
2. Somebody then has to verify the net assets, income, expenses, etc of all farmers who apply to be listed in the index via that paperwork…
3. …and continue to verify that data over time, as it obviously changes year-to-year. The eligibility of every participant would have to be re-verified regularly, otherwise someone could become not poor, but stay in the index. This is a perpetual expense that grows linearly over time as more people are added to the index.

Who will do that work? Now somebody needs to be paid to do this, or spend many hours doing volunteer work just to verify eligibility. Now, in the end yes, that kind of system would be ideal for determining who needs the most help, and I would pick that system every time over a “black farmers index” if it existed in a functional form.

The problem is that it has significantly higher costs and requires consistent administration over time, something that is obviously hard to expect from a random volunteer project that, based on their staff information, only has 2 “Data Entry and Logistics” roles that are currently filled. Imagine two people handling the ingesting, data entry, and administrative tasks for all the farmers applying to this index across the entire United States, having to verify every single individual’s financial situation. It’s difficult, and costly.

So yes, as I stated just earlier in this comment, and in my original post, of course I’d prefer an index that directly assesses the economic viability of every individual. However, because doing so is costly, and we know that race is a good proxy for the estimation of general wealth, it makes sense to use that for a small, relatively inexpensive, independently run online site, that now only needs to verify one factor, that doesn’t change over time, to get a good enough approximation of lack of wealth.

This entire discussion revolves not around the ideals of what we should have, but what is feasible. If it is not feasible at the current point in time for such an organization to directly assess the needs of individuals, it makes sense to use a substantially cheaper to assess proxy, instead of not being able to have any index at all.

Group A is historically not discriminated against, and now on average, has a net worth of $100,000.

Group B is historically discriminated against, and now on average, has a net worth of $80,000.

In both groups, some will own more or less than the average, but the largest number of poorer individuals reside in Group B, because the average is lower.

On a per person basis, everyone has $20,000 to spend. Should they give it:

1. Exclusively to Group A? (and “discriminate” against Group B, but raise their average net worth to $120,000)
2. Exclusively to Group B? (and “discriminate” against Group A, but raise their average net worth to $100,000)
3. Split evenly between the two? (bringing Group A’s average to $110,000, and Group B’s average to $90,000)

Which option is most likely to uplift the most poor people to a less poor status?

This is why your argument of “discrimination” doesn’t hold up. The choice to make a purchase from Group A while ignoring Group B only entrenches existing wealth disparities. The choice to make a purchase from both evenly keeps the wealth disparity where it is. The choice to buy exclusively from Group B eliminates the disparity.

This decision is not being made because of race on its own, it is being made because of the common socioeconomic context within which people of color often reside. If white people were the ones who had a history of economic discrimination, even if all other actions regarding past and current racism remained equal, then economically supporting the white farmers specifically would make the most sense, because they would be most economically disadvantaged.

You cannot have a meritocracy when people start on uneven ground, and there is a very demonstrable difference in existing generational wealth between the races, as a direct consequence of past injustices. The way we fix that as individuals, and as a society, is by doing what we can to elevate groups experiencing a disparity until they no longer do.

Should we just stop using statistics then? Numbers don’t matter if they are about people? (I genuinely want an answer here. Should we?)

Statistically, one societal class of people needs more support than the other to have the exact same quality of life, generational wealth, and opportunities. Thus, when deciding who to buy, in this case, produce from, it simply makes sense to purchase from the group most disadvantaged, until their disadvantage is no bigger than the other group, and we can then switch from buying from “small black farmers directly” to “all small farmers directly,” because all of them would then need a near identical level of support, financially speaking, to get the same outcomes.

Because, on average, black people are more economically disadvantaged than white people.

Choosing to explicitly buy from black farmers will, on average, tend to support those with the least financial means out of the general population of farmers, whereas choosing to explicitly buy from white farmers will, on average, tend to support those who are already more financially advantaged.

One side is directly choosing to help those most likely to be economically disadvantaged, the other would be explicitly ignoring those with the least means in order to help those who already have the most, thus the situations are not quite comparable.

I personally would prefer an index that directly assessed farmers based on overall wealth to determine who you should buy from, but because that’s extraordinarily difficult to constantly update & maintain, verify, etc, it can just be easier to divide among racial lines since that still tends to produce a grouping that is relatively similar.

I’m not sure if this is entirely relevant, but depending on your local climate it could be related to the smell known as petrichor that you will often get when it rains/is about to rain on soil, which could be affected by the moisture in your local area that accumulated overnight then evaporating more quickly as the sun rises.

Local AI Tagging (Optional)

Finally a good use of AI that doesn’t overpromise functionality it can’t actually provide. Just a system for rewriting page text as tags. This is a feature I’ll legitimately use.

Of course he’s a real estate developer.

Oh no, that’s not him, that’s a different person. I was showing how those are the only two accounts on all of LinkedIn with the same name as him, and showing that his account is no longer there.

This man doesn’t even know the difference between AGI and a text generation program, so it doesn’t surprise me he couldn’t tell the difference between that program and real, living human beings.

He also seems to have deleted his LinkedIn account.

I think if I found out my country was doing a genocide with an unimaginably higher ratio of civilians murdered, I’d decry both acts, and not actively support the ongoing justifications made for a genocide by an apartheid based regime.

How have I never heard of this before!? I’ve been looking for exactly this for ages now.

Already spinning up a docker container!

I completely get that.

I mostly have just thought of housing as a different kind of beast, since unlike working a job, I don’t have to invest in real estate to save for a house or retirement, but doing so might make it easier to accomplish that.

The biggest problem is definitely going to be full on landlords and private corporate investors, but I don’t want to add any more to that problem, no matter how small my impact might be.

TLDR; I want to protect against systemic risk factors, as most of my net worth will be in the market, unable to support me during a financial emergency. It could also carry possible tax benefits, and make it easier to sustain mortgage payments on a home.

I’m mostly trying to ensure that if, for instance, my entire emergency fund is drained from a major medical emergency (or something similar) during that time, I have something I can rely on that is generally more stable to sell during that time, which will overall carry lower tax implications on sale than stocks that have already appreciated significantly more.

Plus, once I get to the point of being close to owning a home, I want to ensure no major financial event could potentially significantly impact my ability to afford mortgage payments.

I plan on investing as much of my income as I can to retire as early as possible, which means the majority of my liquid cash net worth will just be in my emergency fund, with a smaller additional amount in savings. I would prefer some level of extended, more stable assets, that will still grow at least a bit over time to meet my financial goals, but won’t be subject to as large drops as the whole market.

I don’t plan on investing much of my portfolio into real estate if I do decide to go that route, only 5-10% total, more as a hedge than as a primary strategy. Most of my investing is still in comparatively high-growth index funds.

I appreciate that take.

I just don’t want to be yet another contributor of many to a problem, y’know? Like how even though corporations are by far the largest contributors to climate change, I still try to reduce the excess emissions I possibly produce whenever I can just to help a tiny bit more.

I’m still investing in the stock market regardless, I just want to make sure that diversifying my portfolio won’t have an outsized negative impact on others since, well, that would suck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure if it adds any more clarity, but to be fair, this question was about morals, which is entirely subjective based on personal opinion.

Thanks for your addition to the conversation though, I appreciate it!

To be clear, I wasn’t talking about liquidations, I was talking about actual market performance. Housing is necessary, even during a financial crisis, whereas unnecessary purchases of goods from corporations become secondary. Thus, housing can stay more stable while stocks crash.

While the market does always go back up, to some degree, I want to be at least slightly more resistant to the possibility of a major failure, (i.e. multiple major tech companies going under from some highly unforseen event) that could lead to entire stocks not existing to go back up again in the future.

I would also theoretically be investing via publicly-traded REIT funds, which could be liquidated in the same manner as stocks.

Wouldn’t that then mean that there would be no rental apartments available and everyone would be forced to take a loan and buy a home?

Not exactly, first off, I mostly mean real estate that is required for survival. Housing, not including the types of places you’d use for a quick vacation stay like hotels, corporate office real estate, etc.

If there weren’t landlords, there would be a significant decrease in housing prices, due to a few factors, namely banks now offering lower-rate loans (since the higher-paying institutional investors are out of the picture), higher supply availability (instead of investor hoarding of empty rentals for property value over use by humans), and generally larger amounts of capital available to spend on new homes, rather than rent payments going to alternative asset classes in wealthy investor portfolios.

It also doesn’t mean no rentals would exist at all, but that properties wouldn’t exist solely for the purpose of being rented. (think someone renting a portion of their existing house, or adding an ADU, instead of buying an entire single-family home solely for the purpose of renting it as an investment.)

Landlording is only a problem because it reduces the supply of housing available for people to own directly, and by the extent of it existing, increases housing values. If existing properties are partially used as rentals by those who have extra space to spare, any of the issues I mentioned functionally don’t exist.