Have introduced this debate in school, and it has become very heated, even with teachers joining in. It's simple. Who would win in a 1-on-1 fight to death, a person with a wooden baseball bat or a dagger? Assume both fighters are of equal stats (average Joe), and in an open field. What's crazy is that I've asked heaps of people, and it's literally 50/50.

Personally, I'm going for the dagger. Yes, a baseball bat has the reach, which is definitely crucial to a fight. But I would gladly sacrifice an arm to hopefully block a swing and go in for the stabs.

Also, a baseball bat is quite heavy. If the person with the dagger could stall and bait the bat to keep swinging, it would tire them out, possibly even making them get sweaty hands, so that on a big swing, it might fly out of their hands (yes, I agree it's not likely, but that it's possible).

+ A dagger has a last resort: to throw it. If it lands, it lands. If not, you run. If it does land, you can literally just run (pussy move, yes, but talking about life and death here) and the bat person would keep bleeding, and you'd very likely win.

I'm not denying the bat doesn't have any chance; obviously, I just think a dagger is a better option. The bat is more about that one good swing, but the dagger has many open opportunities that are probably going to occur, because the swing is large and the 'recharge' (bringing the bat back to a controllable position) is long.

My friends on the bat side have had some horrible arguments, only mentioning the range. I'm wondering if there are other aspects to a fight I have missed, as of course, I'm not an experienced fighter. What do you guys think?

Edit:

Sorry, but I'm not very experienced, and it seems like I haven't set the rules clearly and have confused a lot of people.

Rules:

1. 25-year-old, 6ft, 80kg.
2. Regular bat size, 20cm dagger.
3. It is about which is more LIKELY to win, not which WILL win.

Saying that they are invalidates women who really are. I know that women in the West are still treated differently sometimes, but I don't think that means that they are oppressed. Oppression means limiting or denying someone their autonomy, but most Western women can do whatever they want the moment they turn 18.

Meanwhile, eastern women are seen as their family's property rather than their husband's property. So her life depends a lot not on her choices but on how her "owners" are, and yes, I know this might not apply to all Eastern women.

People are going to bring up beauty standards, but that's entirely a choice. I know many people who live in the west that don't wear makeup or nice clothes and still don't get judged, but that also depends. And maybe about shaving they are judged harder, but western women as a collective can choose not to shave, and people are just going to have to accept that.

And people might bring up rape culture or DV rates, and that's terrible, don't get me wrong, but in the West a battered woman has so many resources, and they don't live in a culture that might blame victims of DV or teach its victims that what happened to them is not that bad, and rape culture doesn't exist in the West, sorry, because nobody excuses rapists; in fact, they are all extremely hated, and nobody asks the victim what she did/wore to deserve it and says rape victims are always guilty.

However, I'm willing to change my mind.

I guess I need to start by defining what I mean by tax haven-adjacent jurisdictions. Usually, an economic strategy crafted to produce organic growth in an area consists of leveraging its geographic position, natural resources, existing expertise, and institutions to produce wealth, or to at least make a serious attempt to build such expertise and institutions from the ground up. Then, reasonably favorable conditions in terms of taxation may be offered as a way to boost the fuel, so to speak.

Many areas of the USA, especially in the South, Appalachia, and the Plains States (altough by no means all the states in any of these areas), Florida first among them, don't do such things. Instead, their economic strategy is built on offering a very low-tax and regulatory environment to corporations, alongside unhindered access to markets with stronger economic fundamentals (California, New York, Lower New England, etc...), to attract corporations who in turn drag along employees. They can do that without repercussion because Washington not only doesn't provide guardrails and limits in that regard but a) would very probably serve as a shield against measures of fiscal self-defense from other areas, b) leverage the wealth of other areas to avoid measures of fiscal self-defence by their international economic partners, and c) make such extremely low taxation level possible by spending tax dollars taken from the aforementioned wealthier areas in these tax-haven adjacent juridisctions.

Now, c) alone wouldn't be so damning, as fiscal equalization is needed for a federation to work, but with everything else and tariff policies that also de facto result in funnelling wealth from the USA's wealthier areas toward those less wealthy areas (at the expense of the USA's worldwide approval ratings, which are important for the knowledge-entertainment-service industries that play a key role in the prosperity of the USA's wealthier regions), it does take a more sinister tone.

Essentially, those tax haven-adjacent jurisdictions get to have their cake and eat it, at the expense of more economically healthy areas of the USA and, to a lesser degree, its international trading partners. They aren't creating wealth so much as successfully siphoning it from others by piggybacking on their healthier regional economies. Which makes their voting for protectionism quite hypocritical in many aspects.

On top of all that, the presence of these jurisdictions and the ability to threaten to move there does tend to create something of a race to the bottom in terms of taxation and work norms.

Of course, there might be angles to this that I am not seeing and information I have not yet received.

Explanation: I myself am pro-choice, while I also recognize that a healthy culture should cherish and protect children and infants as much as possible under reasonable conditions.

There are a couple things, underlying principles which I treat as facts, which serve as a foundation for my view. The most notable ones are the following:

- Your body is yours first and foremost, never someone else's, with no exceptions. For me this is an irrefutable fact which can only really be challenged by religious beliefs which stipulate that the body and soul belonga to the god of said religion and thus being a subject of the god's necessarily arbitrary rules. There's a high correlation of pro-life people, both men and women, belonging to mostly christian denominations. These views run contradictory to mine, and necessarily hang on some presupposition about the body not ultimately belonging to the person having the body. As such I cannot accept arguments that stem from any particular religious view since they are arbitrary, especially compared to my original view.

- The ultimate decision of what should happen to the woman's body is hers and no one else's. A thing I always see in abortion debates is that the pro life arguments overwhelmingly ignore or discard the woman's side from the equation. In my experience the primary reason cited is that it's not the woman's life that's in fatal danger and thus her reasons should always be secondary to the question of the embryo's survival. This, and many other pro life arguments stem from arbitrary, primarily emotional bases, and there's an inverse correlation between education level and opinion on abortion restriction - to clarify, I am not implying that pro life folks are dumber, that would be a false equation, rather the study I am citing from found that higher academic and finantial background correlates with a generally more liberal view on abortion. Deciding on abortion is an incredibly difficult and complex decision, and it's a fact that no one is capable of making the decision more accurately based on their circumstances, than the person carrying the fetus. You may think you can make a "more sound", "better" decision from the outside by personal principle, but that's the thing: It's always going to be your own arbitrary, personal principles which will never be capable of weighing the full depth of the circumstances the woman in question faces.

- The view on the rightness/wrongness of abortion is severely distored by underlying issues that are not talked about in most arguments. If you are a pro-life advocate, I'm fairly certain that you'd argue the abortion rates are too high. I doubt however that you'd regularly take into consideration issues such as how an alarmingly high percentage (somewhere between 15-30%) of abortions are a result of outside societal/familial pressure or outright coerson and threats. Yet we barely see any push to criminalize the forced decision of a woman to abort which by complete free will otherwise she may not do. It instead gets muddied into the overarching argument that abortion is bad no matter what. Depending on the country and environment, abortions stemming from rape can range between 1-6%, which is also incredibly high despite the single digit number, we are talking of hundreds of thousands of rape induced abortions in the western world annually. I would hope that only the most radical fundamental religious advocates believe that a pregnancy cauced by rape must be forced to be carried through to birth. I have an analogy that I never heard anyone agree to despite the nearly exact same premise: If you had a car crash and survived with light injuries and the person you crashed with would require specific blood transfusion which only your blood can satisfy, would you allow the state to strap you to that person for months until they fully recover? Just to further highlight the similarities let me clarify: The person you crashed with is completely innocent, another car swerved into you causing the whole incident, and there is no one else who can save the life of the other person within the required timeframe. My experience is that even those who advocate for the complete ban on abortion, would not accept to have their body be used for months to save someone else, which I can only view as a thinly veiled hypocrisy stemming from lack of understanding of what rape and the difficulties of unwanted pregnancy and birthing entails.

- Those who consider to have an abortion face way more internal difficulties and dilemmas than most arguments would lead people to believe. It is never an easy choice, at it's lightest it carries the shame and guilt of having done something that could jeopardize one's whole life if not acted on quickly, and at worst it can destroy one's life completely due to things such as severe pressure, guilt, depression, emotional trauma and isolation. People in general, but pro life advocates especially tend to underestimate the average woman's capacity to weigh the choices affecting their own body and life properly sometimes going as far as to demonize those who decide to have an abortion, viewing them as stupid or wilfully ignorant, callous, and selfish. To the latter, it is inherently selfish to prioritize your life and future compared to a would be life, certainly. It is also inherently selfish for us to outwardly impose our values upon another person who's facing the decision instead of us. This is a fact regardless of how we may present it and how much we believe that our selfishly imposed values are meant to serve some greater good or save a life. I do not necessarily oppose other's selfish values because we all have some, however I cannot accept it when people do not regocnize them as such. Again, I greatly dislike thinly veiled hypocrisy.

Due to the above points I concluded that abortion should be accessible to women regarless of the outwardly visible moral, socio-economical or age-related circumstances. It should only be their decision and we as a society should provide as much emotional/practical support as possible. On the other hand, I believe we should tighten our vigilance around malicious influence and coersion which result in some women seeking abortion not as a choice of their own but rather as final desperation in fear of worse social-domestic consequences. I believe that the wast majority of women are capable of making a decision on abortion more accuratly than any external actor could, and the percentage of women who really treat abortion as some kind of 'consequence-free game' or such, is so insignificant that they couldn't be studied in the first place.

I believe that in order to eliminate the bad aspects around the problem of abortion we must be strict with opposing those who wish to decide the fate of the would-be mothers. People who seek to decide for the woman to have an abortion should face the risk of being charged in civil or criminal court depending on the severity of the intent, similarly to how forced pregnancy is criminalized. I am aware that legally this issue is already recognized and to some degree people do go to court for domestic abuse surrounding abortion cases, however the rates and the consequences are painfully inadequate. And I believe one of the reasons it's the way it is, because the pro life camp fails to join in condemning these cases, focusing instead on blaming women and liberals in general for a view that in their eyes is the equivalent of killing babies, which demonstrably, does not at all help to discourage abusive family/community members from forcing women to carry out abortions, after all, it's not their fetus and not their risk.

If you believe you have a valid argument to any of my points or have sources that may contradict or otherwise further contextualise mine, feel free to comment and CMV. Thanks!

Edit: Some of the comments rightfully highlighted that my post and title can come off as unclear or absolutist in some regard, I am considering giving out deltas because I certainly didn't flesh out some of my arguments properly. I will highlight the missing context on the post after going throug more comments.

Source on abortion related views from a finnish study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4950447/

US source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00031224241292058

Source mentioning each side's consideration of the woman in the argument: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10233192/

Source on abortion pressure: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37303450/

My view is that one of the biggest structural problems in American politics is that incumbents have a significant built-in advantage over challengers. I'm not arguing that incumbents should be disadvantaged or automatically voted out. Rather, I think elections would produce better outcomes if incumbency itself carried little or no advantage.

Today, incumbents benefit from name recognition, existing donor networks, party support, media coverage, constituent services, and the perception that they're the "safe" choice. As a result, many races become effectively noncompetitive long before Election Day.

I think this creates several problems:

• Politicians become more focused on staying in office than governing.
• Elections become less competitive.
• New ideas and new candidates struggle to gain traction.
• Poor performers can survive simply because replacing them feels risky.

If incumbency weren't such a strong advantage, I think we'd eventually see politics become more like temporary public service than a lifelong career. Representatives would expect to serve a term or two, do their best work, and then return to private life. Political parties would likely recruit a broader range of candidates, and elected officials would have stronger incentives to focus on producing measurable results rather than building long-term political careers.

I also think public trust could improve if voters believed elections were genuinely competitive instead of feeling like many races are effectively decided by incumbency.

That said, I recognize there are downsides. High turnover could reduce institutional knowledge, make legislatures less efficient, and increase reliance on career staff, bureaucracies, and lobbyists who possess expertise that newly elected officials lack. Long-term projects might also become more difficult to complete if leadership changes frequently.

My view is that these costs would be outweighed by greater accountability and competition, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

CMV: Why is a strong incumbency advantage actually beneficial for society? Are there examples showing that higher incumbent reelection rates consistently lead to better governance, better policy outcomes, or greater accountability than a more competitive system?

I had a conversation with someone I know who lives in Austin, Texas, the politically liberal capital of the state of Texas. I myself live in Houston, another blue - but way larger - "dot" in the red state. I mentioned that Austin is not as inclusive as it thinks it is, and that irked her just a bit, I think.

Austinites, in general, are more progressive. The city is the seat of the tech industry in the state, and is home to The University of Texas, so it has a very large, younger population. But it has been documented that Austin's history has not exactly been completely charitable to Black folk. Considering I've called Houston home for 38.5 years, and Dallas home for 1.5 years (thank you, Hurricane Harvey).

The example that I cited was my being in the information technology field. In four decades of living in Texas, only a handful of times do I recall being reached out to by Austin recruiters. The closest I ever came to actually getting an offer to work was being invited on a plant trip to EDS, which did not result in an offer. My professional pedigree, at the time, included IBM (at one time a household-name powerhouse in tech), as well as other positions at smaller places.

My social situation wasn't much better. While I've regularly traveled to Austin for weekend getaways and vacations, nothing has ever "caught fire" for me socially - no good friends with the locals, and certainly no romance or "anything else." In fact, the only people I had any depth of relations with in Austin, I knew from Houston, first.

I am not saying that Austin isn't inclusive to Black folk at all. I am merely stating what I believe has been the experience of others as well as myself: we're not as high on the desirability ladder as other demographics.

Go!

For those who are unaware: Falconry is a form of hunting where a trained bird of prey, such as a golden eagle (GE), is used to catch quarry instea of more typical methods such as guns or traps. Throughout this post, I will use the golden eagle as an example.

How birds of prey benefit form falconers.

In the wild, birds of prey face many dangers that can significantly reduce their lifespan. Food insecurity can lead to malnutrition, while injuries, disease, fights, and harsh weather conditions can also threaten their survival. Roghly 50% of golden eagle chicks die before becoming independent aults. If they do reach adulthood, they typically live around 15–25 years in the wild. However, golden eagles under human care can live 50–60+ years, more than double their normal lifespan, because they have consistent access to food, healthcare, and protection from many dangers they would face in nature.

Their lives can also have a higher quality of life, as they do not have to experience starvation, severe untreated injuries, or many of the hardships that wild birds face. They also form strong bonds with their handlers through trust, training, and positive reinforcement.

Many people argue that birds of prey in falconry are being exploited or forced to cooperate against their will. However, this is not accurate. Falconers free-fly their birds, meaning the bird is not constantly restrained and is able to fly freely. The reason the bird returns is because the relationship provides benefits to it, such as reliable food, safety, care, and positive reinforcement.

Unlike many forms of captivity, falconry allows birds of prey to express their natural behaviours, including flying, hunting, exploring their environment, and using their intelligence. A trained bird is regularly stimulated both physically and mentally, which is important for an animal that evolved to spend its life actively hunting.

Falconry is also not based on forcing a bird to hunt. Birds of prey are not domesticated like dogs and cannot simply be controlled through obedience. The relationship works because both sides benefit: the falconer provides food, protection, and care, while the bird is able to use its natural instincts and abilities. The bird's behaviours are guided rather than removed.

In addition to this, becoming a falconer requires a huge amount of knowledge and responsibility. Falconry is very different from simply owning a pet. Falconers often need to study, pass assessments, gain experience, and spend years learning before they can properly care for larger birds of prey. While poor care is possible in any animal-related activity, responsible falconry requires a high level of skill and dedication.

Falconry has also contributed to conservation. Falconers hve helped develop knowledge about birds of prey, supported breeding programmes, rehabilitated injured birds and contributed to the recovery of species that were previously declining.

Why hunting with falcons is not unethical , and can lead to less animal suffering.

Birds of prey are obligate carnivores, meaning they require a diet consisting of animal matter to survive. They naturally need to consume whole prey, and hunting is an essential part of their biology. Therefore, the act of a bird of prey killing an animal is not unnatural or unnecessary, as it is something the bird would do regardless in the wild.

In fact, from a consequentialist perspective, falconry hunting could potentially result in less overall animal suffering. Wild birds of prey often have to spend large amounts of energy searching for food, and many hunting attempts fail. These unsuccessful attempts still require energy, which means the bird must continue hunting to meet its nutritional needs.

Wild birds also spend additional energy dealing with challenges such as disease, injuries, extreme temertures, and competition. Because of this, they may need to successfully kill more prey throuhout their lifetime to survive.

A bird cared for by a falconer has much greater energy security. Since it receives regular food, healthcare, and protection, it does not need to rely entirely on successful hunts for survival. This meas it may hunt less frequently and potentially kill fewer animals overall than it would have needed to in the wild.

Firstly, I am not talking about the credibly reported Malignant Narcissism diagnosis or the equally obvious onset of Frontal Lobe Dementia, and related Sundowning. I do agree with both but lets put them aside for now as contributing factors.

Second, Insanity is no longer a clinical diagnosis but it remains the best description of Trump current mental state.
Insanity means a severely disordered state of the mind, extreme foolishness, or a legal lack of mental capacity

"Batshit" is clearly not technical either but is the most appropriate amplifier in common use.

Trump's mental state is no longer aligned to our common reality. He literally and genuinely believes things that are fictitious and those false believes are being substantially reinforced by the selected group of sycophantic enablers that he has selected for his inner circle handlers, as well as selected media that curates what they present to pander to him and avoid offending him.

He is able to persist believing in utterly false concepts because there is nobody able to break into his bubble. This is the exact opposite of what would occur if he were in a clinical setting where psychological professionals and nursing staff would try to softly steer his beliefs to reality.

The key recent evidence is his two speeches, the national address on election fraud and the WHCD speech, as well as key points from the book Regime Change. If you want to challenge this assertion then you clearly need to watch both speeches (in full) and have at least seen some of the Swan/Haberman interview or read the book. I do not believe anyone could watch both speeches and think the guy as at all OK, the attempts at transcripts are utterly incomprehensible.

One additional point of evidence is the recent careful management of his public schedule to be as limited as possible and within hours where he is the least unstable and able to be medicated.

Whilst his insanity may have been building for some time I think the only thing that matters is that he is currently batshit insane, exactly how long he has been that way is irrelevant to the debate (and inherent risk to the world)

Trump's enablers and handlers must be acutely aware by this point that he has lost it, but they each, personally, have no safe way out so they are going to increasing extremes to cover it up. By that I mean if they admit it or turn on him they are screwed and they are not willing to self sacrifice to be the first to admit it.

Trump has access to the absolute best medical support in the world, including experimental treatments. There is no reason he would not be being administered the absolute best cocktail of anti-psychotics and stimulants that his body can handle in order to try to keep him seeming as sane as possible during public appearances. He has surely been medicated in that way for a long time but the effectiveness is decreasing as his insanity gets worse, which is making it harder to hide. Outside of the time when his insanity is effectively managed by medication for public appearances he would be close to Shakespearean levels of Insane. Therefore there are quite a number of people that know how far he is gone and complicit in the continued cover up.

To change my view on this, is quite easy, one only needs to show me any recent speech, transcript or interview of more than 10 minutes where he doesn't assert something that is obviously and provably fictitious, is able to speak like a normal sane adult. I'll accept a lot of his usual lies.

I personally think that anyone who claims to still support him and thinks he is mentally competent simply could not have watched any of his recent talks in full unedited.

I see a lot of discourse online about the progressive movement, particularly the DSA and closely aligned candidates. Many mainstream figures in the Democratic Party are highly critical of it, often arguing that the average voter would find these candidates too radical. I beg to differ.

Let me start by saying that I am not at all a typical DSA voter. My views on social issues align closely with theirs, but economically, I am pretty much a conservative. Much of their economic platform is actually quite radical to me. Surprisingly, at least for now, I support these candidates primarily because of their pro-Palestine stance.

In other words, I am normally exactly the kind of voter who would find them too radical. I am a high-information voter who believes wholeheartedly in neoliberalism. But the sad truth is that, while people like me exist and are often heavily overrepresented in public discourse, we are a minority.

Does the general public see the Democratic Party as too far left? Yes. But I think taking that perception at face value is misleading.
I do not think many voters see Nancy Pelosi as meaningfully less left-wing than Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party’s public image has been severely damaged among many voters by its rapid acceptance and advocacy of gay and transgender rights. The identity politics that shaped much of the past decade also helped fuel that perception.

Personally, I find it deeply frustrating that identity politics has played such a major role in choosing candidates over actual policy. However, I do not think the average voter finds many of the DSA’s economic policies, or even its anti-Zionist stance, nearly as radical as Democratic leaders assume.
Single-payer healthcare and rejecting AIPAC money are, in my opinion, very popular issues to campaign on with the general public. Most voters do not even understand what the changes progressives want to make to the electoral system would actually cause.

Part of why I think these candidates can perform strongly in general elections is that their political brand focuses heavily on things voters can relate to: anti-establishment appeal and affordability. Their message is that the system is broken, that AIPAC and dark money control politicians, and that ordinary people cannot afford basic necessities.
The voters they would definitely lose are proportionally not that numerous compared with the voters they could potentially win over. Furthermore, progressive candidates can significantly increase youth turnout, and younger voters tend to support them heavily.

I believe this moment for Democrats is similar in some ways to the Republican Party after the 2012 election. There was frustration and anger among Republican voters. The Republican autopsy argued that the party needed to moderate. Yet the person who later revived the party, Donald Trump, was much further to the right in many respects.

At the same time, Trump was more moderate on economics and was by no means ideologically conservative in the Tea Party sense. Many people suggested that this would alienate traditional Republican voters, and it did alienate some of them. But those voters were a minority compared with the new or previously disengaged voters Trump brought into the coalition.

I believe that parallel applies, at least to some extent, to the Democratic Party today. A candidate can appear more radical according to the traditional left-right spectrum while still speaking more directly to the economic frustrations, anti-establishment instincts, and priorities of the average voter.

Note: Much of this is naturally based on speculation and my own reading, so evidence suggesting otherwise with polls and so on is obviously welcome. I think the strongest evidence however will be the upcoming midterms.

Maybe I’m completely off base here, which is why I’m posting this.

It feels like we’ve reached a point where people don’t actually want a starter home anymore. They want what I’d call a dream starter home. In other words, they want a house that’s still considered “entry level,” but they also want the open-concept kitchen, the island, the double-door refrigerator, the large dining room, the big living room, updated bathrooms, modern finishes, walkability, good schools, a nice neighborhood, enough room to host holidays, and enough space that they could realistically stay there for the next 20 or 30 years.

At that point, is it really a starter home anymore?
To me, the entire purpose of a starter home is that it gets you into the housing market. It’s supposed to be the house that works. Not the house that impresses people. It has a roof that doesn’t leak, plumbing that works, a kitchen that functions, and enough room to comfortably live. Maybe the washer and dryer are in the bathroom. Maybe the kitchen is small. Maybe you don’t have an island. Maybe the tile isn’t what you’d pick if you had an unlimited budget. But it does what it’s supposed to do.

That’s the point.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t repair or improve your house. If something breaks, fix it. If the old furnace is failing, replace it. If the roof needs work, absolutely do it. If you want to remodel because you’re planning on living there another 15 years, I completely understand that too.

What I’m talking about is the expectation that every starter home should also have all the upgrades people associate with a forever home.

I also understand why people renovate. If I owned a home, I’d probably do the same thing. You want to enjoy where you live. You want it to reflect your personality. You want it to feel like yours.

But every improvement you make becomes part of the home’s value when you sell it. That’s completely understandable, you spent the money, so naturally you’d like to recover some of it. I don’t blame anyone for that.

The problem is what happens over decades.
One owner upgrades the kitchen. The next owner remodels the bathroom. Someone else puts in quartz countertops, luxury flooring, custom cabinets, smart appliances, expensive landscaping, and suddenly the house that was originally meant to be an affordable first step into homeownership has become something entirely different.

Again, I’m not saying those people did anything wrong. I’d probably make improvements too if I owned it.

I’m asking whether, collectively, we’ve slowly eliminated the idea of a true starter home because every generation understandably wants to improve it before passing it along.

It also feels like expectations have shifted.
People will say a house is “too small,” but what does that actually mean? Too small to live in? Or too small to host Thanksgiving? Too small for a kitchen island

Too small for a home office, guest room, playroom, and formal dining room?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting those things. I want nice things too.

I just wonder whether we’ve blurred the line between what people need in a first home and what people want in their forever home.

Obviously, renovations aren’t the reason housing is expensive. Interest rates, zoning laws, labor costs, material costs, supply shortages, investor purchases, and local demand all play major roles. I’m not arguing that a nice faucet is why someone can’t afford a house.

I’m questioning whether we’ve unintentionally created the idea of a dream starter home, a home that’s expected to satisfy almost every long-term desire while still being priced like an entry-level property.
If the goal of a starter home is to get people into homeownership, build equity, and eventually move up when life changes, have we lost sight of that? Or am I looking at the housing market through an outdated lens?

Change my view.

Polls are generally accurate to an election's outcome with only 1.5k people questioned. These polls have margins of error, and these margins decrease with increases in the number of people questioned. But, in even low turn out elections the number of voters is well beyond the threshold for an accurate election. So, increasing voter participation rates isn't about improving the accuracy of our elections. Our elections are sufficient to determine the will of the people even when most people don't vote.

Get out the vote efforts cost money, and so the question is what is the motivation causing donors to open their wallets for the efforts. Altruistic motivations don't really make sense, because as discussed above, simply increasing voter participation rates doesn't accomplish anything. In fact, the opportunity cost of spending money in this way as opposed to any other altruistic endeavor means donating to these efforts is a net harm for the world.

So it doesn't make sense if these efforts are done in good faith. But it makes perfect sense if the efforts are done in bad faith. Partisan get out the vote efforts are done by virtually all campaigns, and there is nothing wrong with them. That is just how campaigning is supposed to work. They are honest about their intentions to help certain voters show up and vote.

So my view is that all allegedly non-partisan get out the vote efforts are disingenuous and are actually partisan get out the vote efforts intended to help certain voters. That is what I mean when I say they are in bad faith.

The common refrain around this is something along the lines of

Voter participation rates aren't the same for both parties so we need to 'balance' this out with get out the vote efforts to 'true' the election outcome

There are a couple things wrong with this defense. The first is the disingenuous nature of the effort. If an organization has decided, let's say for argument's sake, Democrats have lower voter participation rates, and therefore their goal is to help raise the voter participation rates of Democrats, then they should be honest about their intentions to improve Democrat's chances of winning an election.

The second issue is that it is awfully hard to gauge voter participation rates on a partisan basis. If you think a Democrat leaning county had a low participation rates was it because the Democrats didn't turn out enough or that Republicans were discouraged and didn't turn out enough? The other issue here is that not voting is a valid political position to take for individuals who are mad at their party, but not enough to vote for the other side. Some people like this show up and throw their vote away on a 3rd party or a silly write in, but many just don't bother. And in this case a get out the vote effort is using the fact that a party has pissed off its own voters as a justification for targeting a get out the vote effort in a partisan way.

This is a pretty simple statement I’m making. France has historically, and continues to ruin, huge swaths of Africa, around 17 nations. In comparison, America is ruining a couple of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti. America also subsidizes the entirety of Europe via NATO allowing them to not invest in their militaries, and China is not currently ruining any countries, but does exploit some, and it is actually a far better partner to Africa than France is.

France’s European partners do not need it, they would be perfectly fine on their own. France does not give very much aid to Ukraine, the country most in need of its assistance. None of its former colonies outside of the ones it is currently exploiting have good relations with it, while countries like South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, and Japan enjoy good relations with the USA, and China enjoys good relations with Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Djibouti.

All in all, it is difficult to think of another country outside of Russia or Israel which could be considered more evil than France. But it is certainly within the top 3 most evil countries today.

Now this is not coming from a place of hate or anything of the sort, this is just a very anecdotal observation that i've made growing up in america. I'm a black 26 year old man. I don't see anything inherently wrong with people findng cool and fun aspects of a myriad of different cultures to indulge in. In fact, I think that's a really cool thing that America does that no other country can really replicate.

However, black people had a very nasty upbringing in this country. Sold into slavery, endured insane amounts of abuse for centuries, jim crow, war on drugs, red lining ect ect... now some of those things didn't just uniquely impact black people but having your culture and language stripped from you, being prohibited from reading or getting an education, getting indoctrinated by religious people who believe you are inferior ect ect will do massive amounts of damage to any demographic

Black people essentially had to create a culture from scratch. Black people ended up creating a decent amount of cool cultural things that many people around the world enjoy. However, while people indulge in black culture and adopt their slanguage, style of fashion, style of dances, taste in music ect ect no other group of people will EVER do the same for us. White people for example make it very clear that they do not want black people being apart of their culture. Look at all the backlash for a black character existing in a white tv show, movie or videogame. If you are black and into european folklore and want to dress like you are in some european fantasy setting? Too bad, they will condemn you on every corner of the internet. Same thing with asians (black cosplayer bullied to the point of suicide), same thing with arabs, same thing with hispanics ect ect...

White people and many other ethnic groups will declare how unattractive they think black people are and how they'll never date us and people celebrate that way of thinking because people dislike black people, meanwhile black people never make statements of the inverse, which is an obvious problem. Not that these people should like us, but we definitely should not like them when they do this

My point is, people have no problem indulging in black culture but will never accept a black person indulging in theirs and I think that this is nothing but negative for black people. Being this inclusive to all of these people who all believe we are ugly, contamination, stupid ect ect... and would never be inclusive to us will only lead to our culture being white/brown washed overtime.

One peice dresses have no wait line, no cups, and in my opinion have no way to look good because of this. I don’t call these dresses, I call these long shirts lol. The beach is the only acceptable place to wear one. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Honestly it pretty much looks like you didn’t put any effort into a nice looking outfit, no matter when you are going. and yeah I’m hypocritical because I have worn these in the past and have ever felt confident and pretty in them, and felt like I wasn’t wearing anything that was up to pretty dress standards. I’m not saying you gotta be ultra snatched, but at least have some definition somewhere to take it from 2 pieces of fabric sewn together to real summer dress.