MAGA cult members are rather infamous for constantly spouting absurd nonsense that could easily be disproven with a moderate application of actual facts and basic logic…

But they don’t care.

They are addicted to being aggreived, to blaming non existant or vastly exagerated problems on things that are either entirely or barely tangentially even related to what they are angry about.

My dad is a MAGA moron as well.

I can easily imagine him bitching about his 401k in exactly the same way, then I could get him to pull his actual balances over the last 10 years, showing him he is just factually wrong.

And then he would somehow either praise God or his own cleverness as to being the reason why he is the only person with a 401k who miraculously wasn’t affected by this massive stock downturn he knows happened to everyone else, and would then just loop back to ‘Biden is destroying everyone’s 401ks’ within 48 hrs.

They are cult members, their brains are impervious to anything that goes against their constructed cult identity.

The DJIA hit an all time high of about 45000 in Dec 24, not too long aftet the election.

It has been about 4 months since then, and the DJIA has dropped about 10%, to about 40500.

But before that, the average growth of thr DJIA, per year, for the last 10 years, was about 9%.

US median yearly wage is about $50k.

Avg Inflation for the last 10 years is about 3.5% a year.

Same for median wage growth.

Lets say you are 50, and have 150k vested into your 401k, the rough average for a 50 yo with a 401k, and you contribute 10% to your 401k, with a 50% (of your 10%, so 5%) employer match.

Ok then.

Here’s what your retirement looks like if these trends all continue.

You have $761k to live off of for 20 years after you retire at 65 and die at 85.

$38k a year.

Ah, but now lets just have a momentary 10% drop in the stock market, but hold everything else the same.

Now you’re retiring with $706k, a $55k loss, about $35k a year.

Ok, now lets say your wages only grow at 0.5% a year, the stock market growth for the next 15 years averages 1%, and inflation averages 6%.

Oh, well now your 401k is actually uh, $252k at age 65, $12.6k a year to live off.

If you think that’s unrealistic… the stock market didn’t top its peak in 1929 untill 1954.

That is a 25 year period with an average stock market growth of zero, over that time period.

The tariffs Trump just enacted average out to around a 22% effective tariff rate.

The Great Depression era Smoot Hawley tariffs were only 19%.

…Oh right, and thats all assuming you don’t get laid off.

So that’s a lot.of words to say your dad is a fucking imbecile, sorry about that.

My dad is also a MAGAtard, but he’s also all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, builds ghost guns in his garage… I now live many states away from him.

… Persians ate my face?

… The Bush era joke is still holding up:

Americans learn geography via which countries they (threaten to) invade.

… I guess it is just fully beyond a joke and is now just completely literally true.

Because Jesus did not like the idea of a Holy place being used for base commerce, and specifically for charging exorbitant currency conversion rates, as well as exorbitant rates for various animals such as doves, which were ritually sacrificed to atone for various sins.

The merchants in the outer court were… basically specifically permitted to operate there, authorized by the Pharisees, who in turn took their own cut.

Its… kind of similar to the rejection of indulgences during the later Protestant Reformation.

If you can only be free of sin or ritually cleansed by rituals that require fairly pricey things… and you are too poor to afford what is required for you to undergo that ritual, then you are basically paywalling your spirtual cleanliness, too poor to become right with God.

Its not impossible that Jesus could have basically stirred up a riot that overwhelmed the Temple Guards, the smaller cadre of Jewish, religious guards dedicated to just maintaining order at the Temple, and managed to escape in the chaos.

Its… kind of implied, out right stated at various points in various gospels, that Jesus basically just has a massive, literal cult following of randos that just show up where he is, or follow him around, beyond the named disciples.

It doesn’t take long after the temple shenanigans for Jesus to be betrayed by Judas, arrested by… either Roman guards, or a mix of Roman and Temple guards.

If there is any truth to the varying stories of Jesus life offered by the gospels, fucking up basically the most important public area in Jerusalem would absolutely be something the Roman garrison / prvosional government would crucify you for.

Local religious leaders complaining to their superiors about this Jesus troublemaker guy for months, hasn’t really broken any serious laws the Romans actually care about … and then he does that, now the Romans finally step in.

I may not have a totally historically accurate view here, but I think the Temple was specifically not guarded by Roman guards, as the Jews of the time would have viewed even their presence in the outer area as highly, highly sacrilegious, and instead the Temple itself had basically a small, local Temple guard outfit… sorta like the Vatican Guard in modern times, under the direct authority of the Pharisees.

Presumably the whole scene would have taken place in the ‘Court of Gentiles’, the rather large open space that is inside the outer Temple walls, but not inside the barrier, the Temple proper.

I’m not saying that this did for sure happen, but it does at least to me seem plausible.

Everything Mel Brooks.

Airplane!

The Producers

Blazing Saddles… etc.

So many of his movies have such memorable lines and jokes that still hold up today.

… Can the replicator produce a cubic meter of this?

Hope that lake doesn’t have any breezes or gusts.

… Also, assuming you just did the calc for neutralizing the weight of said person…

Even if there was no wind… they could not walk.

Walking requires weight to work.

A surface you can push off of.

It seems like the picture shows one guy with walking sticks, which I guess might kinda work if the lake is less than about 2 or 3 feet, or under a meter deep… not too many lakes like that.

Maybe something like stilts… or … huge snowshoe/flipper type things… might work?

Vance: Pulls out a box of crayons with a big dopey smile, shakes it a bit.

Ah, ah? Hehehe.

Marines: Absolutely no change of expression or behavior.

On the contrary, a 100% yearly tax from the assesed value of the property, enacted after the property is vacant for 12 months straight, would be a strong motivator for your idiot uncle to actually visit the property, and/or the rest of you to just renounce or disclaim yourselves from ownership of what you described as a near worthless asset, and then let your idiot uncle eat 100% of the improperly assessed value’s vacancy tax.

Elsewhere in this thread you state the house is basically worthless, the land is worth 40k… but idiot uncle thinks both the land and house are worth 200k together, if I read your right.

Organize everyone other than idiot uncle into a plan to disclaim themselves from the inherited property provided the uncle ponies up 40k ( or maybe more if your idiot uncle can be duped into such ), so your parents in the trailer can just buy another plot to park their mobile home, and idiot uncle can deal with his idiocy.

I mean, that seems to be a reasonable plan with or without the proposed vacant property tax, unless there are more complications between the … non idiot uncle parties to the estate.

I don’t know for certain of course as I don’t know your locale, but… you could probably find another plot of land for about 40k?

Idiot uncle thinks its worth over 4x that, so… from his perspective, this would be a steal, to basically gain sole ownership? Let him deal with selling or demo/refurbing the house/land.

… Or have ya’ll already tried something like this, and idiot uncle refused?

The bus driver was actually great too, younger than me, maybe early or mid 20s, before the wheelchair bound guy got on, we bitched about microtransactions in games, and I was able to confirm that yes, games did not in fact always used to be like they are now, with dark patterns and what not… he sounded like a lot of his friends were trying to gaslight him into just accepting the enshittification as normal, that its always been like this.

My leg is busted and I can only hobble around with a cane. Finally got accepted into seeing a physical therapist, outlook is good, but its gonna take a while to recover.

Recently took a paratransit ride.

Fully disabled guy in a motorized wheelchair got on.

Within minutes, after he asked me what happened to me, we were joking about how he would probably, actually be able to beat me in a race.

Its actually perfect. No notes. No possible improvements.

This deserves some kind of award.

Honestly, this takes more effort and is more creative than making a profile on a dating app.

It is also pretty honest.

… I don’t think this is likely to actually work, due to the obvious red flags, but it is probably more likely to actually work than doing this same thing on an app.

Whew, yep, its a tough job, but Petey’s got a good head on 'im and rolls with the punches, somebody get that man a drink!

Err. Uh. I mean… Do we have O’Douls?

EDIT: Also, dear God, the sub headline:

Trump asked if hackers can break into Signal…

You might as well ask a dog what its favorite shade of red is.

Unironically, he is a psycho/sociopath.

He doesn’t have genuine emotive expressions.

He only has performative ones.

… This is resting psychopath face.

https://psychcentral.com/health/identifying-psychopathic-stare#non-verbal-cues

Of course the stare alone isn’t enough to ‘diagnose’ him but uh, combine it with the rest of his personality traits and history… doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

Same, an actual good quality, properly made and assembled mechanical pencil will just keep going and going, and if you treat it well, you never need to replace it.

Kinda like a decent quality safety razor.

All you gotta do is treat it right and replace the razors/graphite, nets out to saving money after probably a month or two of decent use.

I edited in some actual comprable vehicles and looked up some prices while you made your reply.

… Yeah, I have no idea how you can afford a Tesla Y but not find a comparable alternative.