Mostly, yes.

I’d like to find a better way to phrase "why aren’t you . . . " questions. It carries an accusatory tone in text, even if you don’t intend that. The answer is almost invariably going to be either “I didn’t know it existed” or “because reason X”. Neither case justifies the accusatory tone. Maybe if the “I didn’t know it existed” answer was something so basic that they really should have known it existed, but probably not even then.

FWIW, you’re not totally off. There’s a direct link between JWs and Adventists, though JWs don’t like to admit it.

The two are interrelated. Charles Taze Russel (founder of what is now called the Jehovah’s Witnesses) was associated with the Millerites. Lots of their doctrine was copied from the 7th Day Adventists, including the numerology of the timeline that gets them to 1914 as “the” year. That one was supposed to be just a step along the way, but after WWI happened, it was a lot of pointing and saying “see, we predicted something big would happen”.

I have seen SQL written by professional Oracle DBAs. What I learned is that I do not want to look at SQL written by professional Oracle DBAs.

Cats in the wild tend to share food with their friends. They must think we’re some rude ass motherfuckers when we push them away from our own dinner.

Except people take that method seriously all the time. All the objections I raised were one’s people have actually thrown back at me.

I’m tons of fun at parties. Everybody loves seeing my collection of bottles from defunct soda companies.

You know, maybe we shouldn’t be taking estimation advice from a 1980s science fiction movie that amounts to a systematic method of lying.

Yes, I’ve used it before. Yes, you can hopefully have everything average out in the end. Yes, project managers demand estimates. None of these are good reasons to back up how fundamentally flawed it is.

Also, in practice, they’re usually only good at one or two of the things on the list (at best) and hack their way through the rest. As much as people make fun of overspecialization, it happens in every field for a reason.

She wrote the papers on General and Special Nugget Shape Theory.

The stock portion is reduced, yes, but there’s almost always some kind of mix of stocks in the portfolio. That’s not necessarily the main issue.

First, you may not get to choose the timing. A lot of older people got trapped in the 2008 downturn. They were planning on retiring a few years out, but they lost their jobs and never got them back. Not only was their portfolio unprepared just based on when they planned to retire, but also the stock crash killed a chunk of what they had. Double wammy of losing their job and destroying their portfolio.

Second, inflation hits hard. If there’s a period of high inflation right when you retire, that can really hurt your savings regardless of how it’s distributed. One of the things those forced 2008 retirees had going for them was that we had a period of relatively low inflation for the next decade. If you took out housing (older people often own their home outright), inflation was sometimes negative.

Capitalism, even when it generally makes line go up, does so in a spiky way. Those spikes cause problems that tend to hit the working class the hardest. Sometimes in ways that cannot be recovered.

There are some liberal economists, particularly of a Modern Monetary Theory bent, who do argue for policies that would flatten growth in return for predictability. Capitalism always goes for the sugar rush of high gains, though. For example, the Fed left rates at rock bottom for far too long, thus letting the market continue extremely high gains (over 20% per year of the sp500, when 7% is a typical long term average). Likewise, you have corps chasing high profits and assuming post pandemic pent up demand would continue indefinitely. Which is now leading to layoffs while major stockholders continue to sweep it in. Both of these lead to the recent high inflation.

I think the efforts to flatten it out are doomed. Capitalism can’t solve its own problems.

Ehhhh, it varies widely and depends on the specific foods. Often, it comes down to different choices where both are valid, but come with different tradeoffs. Such as washed vs unwashed eggs.

As for food poisoning rates, theres big differences in how the numbers are counted: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9887690/#:~:text=The US Centers for Disease,people getting FBI a year.&text=For comparison%2C in the UK,people getting FBI a year.

Probably the biggest issue in the US is the widespread availability of cheap HFCS.

There are certain restaurants that everyone says are absolute trash, and yet they stay open.

My wife and I call them Shitty Tacos, and sometimes we say things like “would you like some Shitty Tacos tonight?”. The answer is often “yes”. Especially if we can’t decide on anything else.

The old plan was that you’d have three things in retirement: Social Security, a corporate pension, and a 401k. Each of these has problems, but if any one of them fails, then the other two are still there to provide enough.

Problem is, pensions have all but disappeared, Social Security gets fucked with, and 401k’s are highly dependent on market conditions at the time you retire.

I’ve met him; we rented some office space from one of his properties. Extremely chill guy. Does not understand Internet fame. He charged us a fee because we forgot to mop the floors on the way out, but that was about the worst you can say about him as a commercial landlord.

But if it makes you feel safer, enjoy your bliss. I just hope for everyone’s sake you focus on steering the car to safety instead of pulling the parking brake if you ever lose control of a car.

If this is your version of “impersonal”, you need to recalibrate.

And no, I’m not wrong. Total brake failure still happens, and a separate system is still important.

Uhh, master cylinder failing would result in all brakes failing. Things these days are internally partitioned so that front and back are separated, and thus complete failure is unlikely, but still possible. It used to be all in one, and the e-brake is very, very important in vintage cars because of it. Less so now, but there was no good reason to change it besides manufacturing cost.

You’re making an awful lot of assumptions on my driving skill based on (checks notes) wanting a redundant system.

Yeah, it’s been pretty common the last few years. My wife’s 2021 Mini does it.

There’s a theory about Alice in Wonderland that Lewis Carroll was satirizing the absurdity of the increasingly abstract mathematics that was popping up at the time. Now, I don’t think that theory holds weight–Alice in Wonderland doesn’t need to be anything other than a whimsical children’s book–but he did apparently write some things along those lines. This post is a pretty good example of something that would throw him into a rage.

Yes, it is. The fact that it’s often considered a “parking” brake doesn’t change things.

If the hydraulic lines spring a leak or the master cylinder fails, the mechanical line from the e-brake is still functional.

That’s more a statement against car ownership in general. Repairs are going to happen. Making the e-brake into a switch that activates solenoids by way of a CAN bus to microcontrollers doesn’t change that. If anything, it’s likely even more expensive.