$BDE

GTA VI is 4 weeks away, Battlefront 3 announced, Dunesday is in 2 months, and it's almost Christmas time.

Respectfully, you are a fucking loser 🤠

I'll say what a lot of people in finance won't say out loud. Plenty of jobs out there still pay $16 to $22 an hour. Full-time, that's roughly $2,770 to $3,810 a month before taxes. Now go find rent under $1,600. Add a car payment, insurance, gas, groceries, utilities, your phone bill. That's before health insurance comes out of your check. Before student loans. Before a kid gets sick and you're out $300 at urgent care. Before your car needs new brakes you didn't budget for. I've worked in personal finance for over a decade, so believe me, I'm not anti-budget. Budgets matter. But there's a point where telling someone making $19 an hour to "cut back more" stops being useful advice. You cannot budget your way out of $3,600 in unavoidable monthly costs on a $2,900 paycheck. The math isn't a discipline problem. Sometimes the spreadsheet isn't broken. The income is just too low to cover what it costs to be alive right now.

Matt, Just like so many I've responded to today on this thread, you argue against me like a collectivist would. You make sweeping generalizations about Boomers that are absurd on their face. "Your generation did this and that, and you're ALL evil selfish bastards" is the upshot. Really? Many of us conservative Republicans have argued for major reforms or even to phase out Social Security. That wasn't politically expedient or popular, but some of us agued for it anyway. For decades! Where were you then, Matt? I don't recall hearing your name mentioned. You weren't involved then, were you? I was. So were millions of Boomers. They were called Republicans (and Libertarians). And when Bush proposed a modest change to the program to invest 3% of funds in the stock market, many of us supported that as an alternative to it sitting around waiting to be spent by politicians. But no, even that was too "extreme" for Democrats. It went down in flames. You were about 15 then, Matt...so you probably don't remember. Bush's proposal would have saved the program in hindsight. DEMOCRATS were for the status quo. Not Republicans. Some lost their seats supporting it. I'm old enough to remember when Newt was Speaker and we had a shot at a balanced budget amendment. I was all for it. DEMOCRATS were not. It failed because of DEMOCRATS! It fell one vote short in the Senate. We fought like hell for that. What were you doing then Matt? That's right. You were only ten. Not your fault. But it wasn't the fault of "Boomers" either. It was Democrats. It was DEMOCRATS, Matt. Not "Boomers". It was policy choices made by DEMOCRATS repeatedly, decade by decade. You should know this. You're a semi-professional historian. It could be your next special. But do you really think that ALL retired Boomers haven't been screaming for cutting spending most of their lives? About half of them have been. I'm one of them. Look up how many times I've criticized my own President for absurd spending levels and having zero concern for debts and deficits. Trump even REMOVED the words "debt" and "deficit" from the party platform in 2024. How is $40T in debt, $2T in deficits, and $1T in interest "America First"? It isn't. So here I am... approaching retirement after 50 years in the workforce. I've tried repeatedly to advocate for reforms or abolition of Social Security and failed because of Democrats. I paid FICA taxes under threat of fines or prison by the government for 50 years (21 of which at the double rate for the self-employed). And now your argument is that I (and ALL Boomers collectively) are selfish and greedy to actually TAKE the benefit that they agreed to pay me in exchange for confiscating my retirement savings? I seem to recall you making an argument that you didn't want to "divide the right" by condemning certain people for their unpopular policy choices. "We need to unite.", you said. But here you are, Matt: Every Republican and conservative born between the years 1945 and 1964 are evil, selfish, greedy bastards who hate their children and grandchildren because they have the gall to collect a check from a program to which they were compelled to contribute their entire lives. I am a big fan of yours, Matt. I support any efforts you would make to alter or abolish Social Security. Go for it. Lead the movement. And good luck getting President Trump on board. But any plan has to be reasonably gradual. You cannot possibly expect middle class retirees to just rip up the checks that they have counted on for 50 years and end the program instantly. Nor can you vilify conservative and Republican Boomers for bad policy choices that they vocally OPPOSED for decades, simply because of their birth year.

Every piece of software is now open source. Every movie. Every song. Everything on the internet is open source now. Insane time we live in. You can get ai to remake anything you want.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

If drunk women can't consent then how can drunk men consent?

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BREAKING: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus reveals a staggering $42,000,000,000.00 net loss in 2025.

"what's the most esoteric piece of knowledge you know?" THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

America’s corporate governance system is broken, and it’s killing public companies. Look no further than Cracker Barrel: Decades of brutal mismanagement have seen one incompetent CEO after another walk away with a massive paycheck while customers and actual shareholders take a beating. Why does this keep happening? Because proxy advisory firms like ISS are corrupt. They blindly rubber-stamp failing boards year after year, protecting the corporate elite while burning shareholder value to the ground. The root of the rot is index funds. There's no question that indexing one's money is a smart financial move for most people. But just because you passively index your investments doesn't mean your corporate votes should be handed over to the managers of your fund so they can play politics. Right now, passive funds hold massive, unchecked voting blocks while having zero skin in the game themselves. It is time for a simple rewrite of the rules: We need to index the votes of index fund investors. Passive index funds should be forced to automatically split their votes to proportionately mirror those of retail and active institutional shareholders — the people actually doing the research, risking their capital, and fighting for performance in the companies they hold shares in. No more rubber-stamping. A change like this will immediately strip corrupt gatekeepers like ISS of their toxic influence. True accountability happens when lazy, overpaid boards actually answer to the stakeholders they represent, rather than screwing them over. Actual, logic-driven governance when your money is passive happens when your vote passively follows the voting decisions of the actual market. We need to stop letting passive capital protect active incompetence. By stripping index funds of their arbitrary voting power and empowering engaged investors, we will finally torch corporate cronyism and usher American capital markets into a golden age of capitalism.

this is in the files