Not sure about your political persuasions, but sadly the inexpensive areas of California tend to be deep red as well.

Yeah, there’s kind of a big flaw in this. I’m in California, too. It’s a huge state, and there re giant swaths of it that don’t have especially high cost of living, but the population centers like LA and San Francisco are very, very expensive. Taking the median isn’t going to give you a realistic answer for most of us.

And you think that’s required for recognizing a Nazi salute? That’s whack.

Are you suggesting that a kid doesn’t have any insight into their parent’s behavior and that “experts” do?

It is absolutely an active coup on our democracy, and basically the whole party is complicit.

I’m case you’re wondering:

Chekhov’s gun (or Chekhov’s rifle; Russian: Чеховское ружьё) is a narrative principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary and irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired some time later in the plot. All elements must eventually come into play at some point in the story. Some authors, such as Hemingway, do not agree with this principle.

I knew what that was going to be before I clicked it. Good job.

That part is so frustrating. The other branches are the “checks and balances” we’ve always been taught to trust in, but the Republicans have become a cult that’s infiltrated all of the branches, nullifying those checks and balances. It’s horrifying.

I know someone with sickle cell, and it’s really horrific. It would be amazing if a cure was widely available. I’m the current atmosphere, it’s hard to imagine that happening, at least in the US, since it’s POC who suffer.

Not sure why some people are disagreeing - it for sure fits the definition. I’m not exactly sad about it - Musk is helping to rip apart the country and I have a hard time blaming people who feel that helping to rip apart one of his companies is about all they can do - but committing arson to further an ideology is terrorism.

Me too! I’ve voted consistently liberal, including for every minimum wage hike on the ballot. Also, I’m on the very trailing edge of the boomer generation, and much of the era you’re talking about was before my time. I did reasonably well because I was a computer science grad when that was an earlier thing, but still, I had it easier than my kids (who we’ve tried to help a much a we can).

I just retired after 40 years at over company, plus some college jobs. I’m 62, and social security was one of the things in my plan that made me decide I could retire My company was laying people off; I was secure, but my leaving allowed one more person to keep their job.

Now Trump is tanking my 401k and Elon is taking about cutting SS. I’ve never been more stressed about money.

Probably so

Didn’t they just elect a fairly liberal president?

I’ve thought for many years that the first true cybernetics will be artificial eyes. If they can get self contained optic systems that fit into the eyeball space, it should be trivial to allow them to see a much wider spectrum, plus macro and telephoto. That would be cool. A computer interface for them would be awesome, but I’d have trust issues with that as well.

No argument, it’s a surprise to the morons who were manipulated into voting for the guy, but most everyone else saw what was happening.

Seems like if that’s was the case, steep times wouldn’t matter. Why would tea steeped longer have significantly less metal in it than tea steeped shorter if they both got poured through the same filter?

From the article (emphasis mine):

It turns out that the type of tea bag matters. The team found that cellulose tea bags work the best at adsorbing toxic metals from the water while cotton and nylon tea bags barely adsorbed any contaminants at all—and nylon bags also release contaminating microplastics to boot. Tea type and the grind level also played a part in adsorbing toxic metals, with finely ground black tea leaves performing the best on that score. This is because when those leaves are processed, they get wrinkled, which opens the pores, thereby adding more surface area. Grinding the tea further increases that surface area, with even more capacity for binding toxic metals.

He doesn’t fucking care. The whole campaign was about doing and saying whatever was needed to get elected so that he could avoid lawsuits, make a profit, and dismantle government. Rich and powerful supported him because they saw ways for themselves to get more rich and more powerful. The richest man on the planet went all in, and now is personally helping to eliminate government agencies that were investigating his own businesses. They don’t care that the public gets unhappy, they’ve served their purpose.

This isn’t a surprise, it’s their plan going as intended.

I have to tell a true story about this. A bunch of years ago I got to work and had a voicemail from an employee. She said, “I’m not coming in this morning. My carbon monoxide alarm kept going off all night, and I hardly got any sleep. I’m just so tired.” The way she talked, she sounded really out of it. I was worried that she had a carbon monoxide leak which was making her not think straight, and that it could be fatal.

This was back before it was common for managers to have an employee’s personal number. I called HR to see if I could get it, but they didn’t want to give it to me. I spent quite a while trying to convince them to give it to me, or to call her themselves. I was making some progress when she called back. Said the landlord couldn’t get it to stop going off either. I asked if it could be because it was a real leak and she said she didn’t think so. I told her to at least open a window. Never really heard more about it. It was honestly pretty frightening.