ChickenLadyLovesLife

I want to say it would have been better if he'd driven through it while there was water in it, but it's nowhere near deep enough for that to be true.

trump full on drove his full motorcade into the reflecting pool

I assumed this was some kind of typo or something. They drove into the pool?

It's weird how Richard Linklater either makes movies that I love (like Slacker and Dazed and Confused) or movies that make me want to find him and hit him in the head with a brick. Waking Life was probably his worst movie ever (only Blue Moon is a contender) and it's just bonus points that it also happened to introduce the world to Alex Jones.

I'm not a billionaire ... I'm THE billionaire.

There was an incident in South Korea some years ago where a greedy developer built an apartment building with substandard concrete; the building later collapsed and killed a few hundred people. The guy was tried and convicted and as he was being frog-marched to his sentencing hearing, friends and relatives of the victims were coming out of the crowd and beating him while his escorts just looked away.

It's really enjoyable to imagine that happening here in the US, but then it's enjoyable to imagine winning the lottery, too.

I especially like graffiti on rail cars, it makes it a lot more interesting when I'm sitting at a rail crossing waiting for the train to go by. It's usually top-quality work and who gives a fuck what rail cars look like anyway?

IT'S A DYLAN SONG

EX TER MIN ATE

There's a builder of shitty, overpriced mcmansions where I live named "NV Homes". It took me a while to figure out what the name meant, and then it depressed me even more. Imagine going a million fucking dollars into debt to buy a giant cardboard box because you think it will make people jealous of you.

US Social Security is fundamentally not an investment plan. Workers who have not yet retired pay a special tax and this is used to pay benefits to those who have retired. Roughly speaking (using handy numbers) workers pay the tax for 44 years (ages 21 to 65) and collect SS benefits for 11 years (ages 65 to 76) and then die, so in principle four active workers support one retired worker. SS benefits are very small, something like a third of what active workers make on average, so more like twelve active workers support each retired worker, so the tax is a very affordable amount.

Much of the confusion over this resulted in the 1980s, when Congress recognized that the changing demographics in the future (like, 50 years later) would mean fewer workers relative to retirees. They chose to prepare for this in advance by raising the SS taxes slightly above what was needed at the time to support retirees and investing the surplus in US Treasury bonds. This Social Security "trust fund" is now being tapped to provide benefits without raising the tax rate -- as well as being used by Republicans to fool people into believing that when the supplemental trust fund is empty, Social Security itself will be "bankrupt". Not true, because even then SS benefits will continue to be paid, either in slightly lower amounts if the tax rate is not increased, or at the same amounts if the tax rate is increased to cover it.

Incidentally, this SS trust fund is a huge part of what allowed President Reagan to rack up enormous debt without destroying (at least immediately) the US economy. Treasury bonds were paying about 2.5% at the time, so the SS trust fund was essentially a source of cheaply-borrowed money to cover the government's general budget.

Something something the Dow of Poo.

The Rocketeer (1991)

As much as I love good animation, nothing can possibly replace 1991 Jennifer Connely.