His “math” for calculating each is surprisingly simple and not based on anything “reciprocal” https://youtu.be/j04IAbWCszg

Thank you for clarifying that this removes the requirement to spend the money where it was allocated. This answers my question and could indeed be worse than a shutdown.

Most MAGA Republicans would rather a shutdown than giving in to Democratic points. The alternative wasn’t Democrats getting one or two of their points in the budget in exchange for it passing, the alternative was a government shutdown.

I fully agree that when the Democrats have power they do absolutely nothing with it, but in this case I fail to see how they could have gotten any of their points in.

So although passing this budget was obviously terrible, how is it worse than no budget at all? No budget followed by a government shutdown would be the ideal case for Trump and Elon to take yet more power from Congress. The Democrats aren’t in any good position of power right now so expecting the budget to include any of their priorities is unrealistic.

Exactly this Russia still has elections and an “opposition”. You can still be in control without necessarily being in the presidential position just as Putin was while Prime Minister after running out of terms.

Let’s just hope that we don’t use that position to terrorize other nations further than we already have

Unfortunately that’s not how a large portion of the population sees it. To many the economy a president inherits matters more than the state they leave it in.

With the Trump appointed supreme court it definitely won’t hold up, but maybe it could delay whatever meaningless charges he can come up with long enough for another election. If we’re lucky enough to have another real election that is at least.

I wish they’d book Four Seasons Landscaping again. That was hilarious, a good indicator of the chaos and incompetence which followed.

Brain worms for everyone!

This is an amazing idea I love it

A3 TDI? I have one of those and so many breakdowns in the first year. Luckily the warranty they were forced to add from having cheated on emissions covered all repairs. Haven’t had any major issues for two years now on it thankfully, I’m not sure I’d recommend it generally but realistically with what you save on fuel cost the extra long term repair cost balances it out a bit.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. All retirement planning I’ve done is based on the assumption that SSA won’t be around by the time I retire. The fact that we can’t even remove the taxable maximum to retain some degree of financial solvency is proof enough.

I think the most likely course of action is that we will get some portion of our contributions back, but not the full amount. I just hope that they don’t raise the retirement age so much to try to retain the illusion of being able to get a full payout. I’d rather get a fraction of my contributions back at 67 than need to risk living to a much older age but receiving full benefits.

Yes

NYT forecast is 90% Trump now. It’s crazy that anyone would vote for him, really shows that policy plays no part in politics. It’ll be interesting to see how he tears down the judicial system to remove the many charges against him.

I miss the old topic specific internet forums so badly, but having tons of different accounts made the barrier to entry high so I understand why they died out.

Personally I’ve never had any issues with lines despite living in a heavily blue district. It’s worth noting that as election day gets closer more early voting locations open, voting the first day of early voting sounds like a bad idea in terms of lines. Obviously this isn’t going to be the case for every district, but when only a handful of places are open for the first day of early voting it’s inevitable they’ll be packed.

I personally have bigger issues with the fact that the majority of polling locations are churches and that political signage is allowed outside of them.

We’re not possibly going to flip but hopefully with abortion now restricted we’ll be closer to a swing state than in quite a while. The biggest problem is how heavily gerrymandered the state is, there are some crazy looking districts to get some parts of urban areas to vote red. A simple majority of votes really won’t do it in the state of Texas.

Offsite backup is not optional for anything important. It’s worth paying for AWS or literally any other online storage solution for that copy. You don’t want a natural disaster to lead to the loss of all your life’s photos for example.

I also personally don’t recommend doing your own software for anything related to backups, you can’t test edge cases easily and it could easily lead to loss of data. I once used an app that attempted to manage its own backups delete it’s online backup when it lost its local data as it attempted to back up the blank local data.

The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.

YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.