Alue42

I'm making an educated guess that the 40,000 number is a complete exaggeration. That number is coming from Trump and Musk, not an actual spreadsheet or database. Look at by how much he exaggerated the square footage of his penthouse in Trump Tower, or the size of his crowd at his inauguration.

This year in particular, conservatives are not just a boomer thing. There was a surprising amount of young male voters for Trump this year, mostly led in by the podcasters/commentators favored by that demographic (Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, ya know, assholes). So it's no surprise Trump changed his tune on the tiktok ban because he now wants to make sure these people (and people taking about these people) can still share their ridiculous thoughts and therefore become a hivemind and then all support him. Initially Trump wanted to ban tiktok, and it had nothing to do with user security or Chinese data mining, though that's what the people around him made it into - it was because tiktok was how word was spread to embarrass him at his rallies.

All this to say - age has nothing to do with conservatism. Even back when I was in high school and college, there were always those asshole kids that cared way too much about their parents' wealth and how it was taxed and had the views of an old white man.

Didn't this also happen on Reddit when people were posting the alternatives? Links/posts got removed, the subreddit about alternatives got shut down

I am fully aware of the terrible things that have happened with ivermectin, the fraudulent clinical trials, the plagiarized data and papers, etc. The papers you linked to used patients that had already died, already been hospitalized, etc as data points, and various other forms of fraud and bad ethics. Does that negate the study that showed that pathway in which that medication is actually supposed to work if people had actually read it properly?

Edit to add: the paper I'm referring to didn't claim ivermectin cured Covid. It claims ivermectin treated the already existing parasites, thus giving the immune system a better chance at fighting Covid. Whereas the papers being retracted fraudulently claimed a link between ivermectin and Covid using false data.

In the beginning of Covid, a doctor in very rural India started treating Covid patients with ivermectin and they got better. So the doctor wrote a paper about it, and this paper was touted as proof that ivermectin was the cure for Covid, and nowadays everything.

Because schools don't stress science literacy, what people didn't notice in the paper was that WHY ivermectin helped these patients with their Covid infections is because they ALSO had multiple parasites because they were living in a very rural area and rarely sought medical help, and therefore their immune system was already overburdened dealing with the parasites. By treating the parasites with ivermectin, their immune systems were able to focus on Covid and actually fight through it. This was all explained in the paper, people just didn't read past the title, clearly.

Ivermectin is prescribed for humans - specifically in the cases of parasites. We need to get back to teaching science literacy and critical thinking in schools.

There are multiple issues with this method, though.

First of all, United Way takes a great deal of money of the donated funds off the top for themselves and only 7 cents of every dollar actually make it to the chosen organization. So it would be much better for you to donate directly to the organization so they receive 100% of your donation.

Secondly, when you donate money through your paycheck (or at the register when shopping), this is added to the the pool of money that the company claims as being donated as a "corporate donation" which comes off of their taxes at the end of the year and to make it seem like good PR for them (ie, "Publix gave X amount of dollars to charity this year"), all the while none of it actually coming out of their own account book.

Absolutely no one should know if you did or didn't contribute through your paycheck, and if that is being used as a reason to limit your promotion potential please speak to HR (I know you are no longer there, but others may need to hear this, or you may have a future employer that uses a similar system).

Exactly what ArchRecord said. The main things for federal are Medicare, Social Security, and some disability (other disability is state). Other than that, there are so many federal programs that are such small percentages. Why do you think Congress takes over a year to approve the budget every year? NPR and PBS combined cost less than $7 per taxpayer per year, whereas military spending costs on average over $5000 per taxpayer per year (depending on income, and spread out over each paycheck). National forests cost the average tax payer $28 per year.

Do you know how many programs there are in the federal system? And then also in each individual state system? That paystub would be impossible, and as ArchRecord pointed out, out, it would be listed as 0.0000x% $0.000x for each stub, not yearly. But you can look up the federal budget and state budget and see what each of these programs cost and what they are for each tax bracket.

Your paystub (in the US) should state how exactly much is going to Medicare, unemployment, social security, disability, and general state and federal income for various programs (highway repair, workforce development, etc depending how your state uses income tax). If this is not on each of your paystubs, speak to your payroll department.

I find this to be a breakdown of training, because the training was pretty clear years ago when I had clearance with the navy that we were never to use apps like this that could disclose location, not just while on-duty or on base, but at any time that our location could be given away. We were specifically not allowed to have Fitbits or other smart watches (Fitbit was the big one at the time) that could share location and any apps that wanted to know our location (yes, on our personal phones) needed to be cleared by IT because we were people that had been granted clearance and therefore could not give away critical location information.

The big scandal that got a lot of people into trouble was Pokemon Go, because not only did it use location, but I guess it used camera too? I didn't know, I didn't play it, but using cameras on base was a HUGE no-no, so using an app that shared location AND picture during your lunch break broke the brains of the COs.

It seems so weird to me that this is something that is so widespread right now. I didn't work for the navy anymore and haven't in a while, but I still follow the basic safety protocols about not sharing sensitive information.

But no one is impeding their right to travel freely from state to state - there aren't border checks at the state borders checking papers. They are freely able to travel. What becomes an issue is when they want to use a car, we've developed this thing about needing it to be registered and insured because it is an inherently dangerous activity, and taxed in order to cover the cost of managing this regulation.

This whole sovcit thing is so asinine. It stems from the idea of some people wanting to live "off grid" and outside the rules and regulations of civilization so they set up their own communities - like Sealand or Molossia. They just want a place of land where they can do their own thing, they know they don't have access to tax payer roads, water, emergency assistance, electric, etc, so they have to set it up themselves, but because they are technically a micronation and can be recognized by other countries as such, they'll do other things like create passports, currency, royalty, etc. It's all in good fun. BUT since they know they can't do everything on their own and they have to work with an actual functioning society to survive, they know they have to follow that country's rules while there, just like anyone else. (While shopping, working, visiting friends, whatever else)

How that idea of people humorously setting up their own sovereign nations got spun into all this nonsense is unbelievable.

As someone else mentioned, you probably hit snooze without realizing it while still mostly asleep. Snooze is 9 minutes. On this clock, the "snooze button" is literally the entire face of the clock. When the noise initially went off, if you rolled over and tapped the clock it would have reset the alarm.

I have this exact same clock. Are you positive it's not going off? You may have it set to be quiet in the beginning and ramp up to being loud over 15-30 minutes which is supposed to wake you up gradually. So perhaps you only noticed it going off at 10:46.

For instance, I want to be awake at 7, so I set mine for 6:30 with a 30min gradual wake up (sounds and light gradually go up for 30 min).

That setting is not required and you can have it just wake you up, but then it defeats the point of a sunlight alarm in my opinion.