There’s already an annual child tax credit: https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-child-tax-credit

I’m sure they didn’t even check if birth rates are influenced by this…

Music videos! Binging some of the live sessions posted by artists is a healthier time sink than most everything else on YouTube.

Celery salt is made from celery seed and salt. It’s not as salty as table salt: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-celery-salt/

Mid 40s. I feel older than I used to; but can still do everything I love so I’d not consider myself “old”.

British band “Jungle” has been in heavy rotation for me the past ~6 months. Specifically watch their music videos and the dance choreography. I suggest playing the entire album “Volcano” as one video.

It’s overvalued in my market at the moment, (Dallas) majority of properties sitting on the market for over half a year and making several list price reductions. COVID inflated the market a bit too much and it needs to come down… 10-20% would be a fair amount I’d expect it to drop over 2 years.

But there are a lot of external factors I’m not considering in my estimate: like idiotic tariffs, incompetent leadership at the state level, and a possible demographic shift depending on how people react to immigration reductions (and possibly net emmigration)… I give a significant chance something out of left field will upend the economy 🤷‍♂️. But who knows when the people in charge change their policies every other day and then insist their new opinion has always been their super secret plan all along…

Housing prices are sticky to go down because they’re also an investment. People (in aggregate) have a tendency to hold rather than sell at a loss. Also note it varies significantly across geographies.

Edit: also houses are not liquid so that also adds to the stickiness of pricing. It takes time for price signals to develop due to the slow (often over a month) & infrequent nature of transactions. It also matters that there’s an industry of professionals who benefit from keeping prices higher.

Republicans are so dumb :(

I don’t care about being “sexually desirable” to as many women as possible; I only care about being desirable to enough people that finding someone to start a relationship with is a practical possibility. This post is about my lack of understanding of how sexual attraction fundamentally works. I’m essentially asking if sexual attraction is highly polarized—targeting either strong masculine or strong feminine presentations—with minimal reaction to more androgynous presentations.

Added emphasis, as it kind of answers your own question. Being sexy to someone isn’t universal. There’s certainly things more women tend to find sexy; but it’s not an absolute by any means. Think of all the happily married people you have met (assuming you live in a fairly large community). Or even consider all of those in long-term relationships. Not every man in every relationship is super fit and sexy, right? Nor were all the men such when they first met their partner. It is not a requirement! And if you know enough such couples you’ll realize appearances of the men in them run the gambit from hot-bod to dad-bod and beyond. And if fact most people in happy relationships are far from the media archetype of “sexy male” as you allude to in your original post.

Not every woman is a lingerie supermodel; not every man is a bodybuilder or Hollywood heartthrob. Yet so many people are able to find relationships where they each find each other sexually desirable. Just randomly scroll through strangers (real poeple) on a social media of your choice and you’ll see happy couples with all variety of body types and appearances.

Imagine the loss in productivity from having so many people fired & quickly re-hired. Not just from those people; but the HR & administrative effort; the re-org of responsibilities among the other employees; and the nonsense time it probably took up in so many “mandatory departmental meetings” discussing what was happening…

Every Republican presidential term in my lifetime has had a recession start. None of the Democratic ones have…

Regan; one started each term. First Bush had one in his term. Clinton had none in his 2 terms. Second Bush had a HUGE one each time (dot com and great recession). Obama had none in his 2 terms. trump had one in his first term (triggered by covid & shutdowns; which his (in)actions intensified…). Biden didn’t have one (but; just barely… and only by the official definition [NBER]; he did have two negative real GDP quarters, so one could argue this point). Now we’re starting trump’s second term, so we’ll see (it’s pretty clear we’ll have a recession within 2 years).

This isn’t really debatable unless you ignore the evidence. Stock market and real GDP growth are overall way higher under Democrat presidents. One link for reference (but many more are available): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-021-00912-y

Given he put tariffs in place his prior term, good chance he actually does it again.

Things that can be done via executive order are highly likely … Because one of his staff will draft it and he’ll sign based on what they tell him it’s about.

Some lackey: “this is that tariff thing”.

Actual EO: contains whatever

Also use a towel or cloth on top of the rubber band so it’s gentler on your hand / skin.

Why it works: this fixes the problem of poor friction; metal doesn’t grip well against skin (especially if your hand is wet or oily). The rubber band grips well against the metal of the lid and your skin (or towel).

60% Local; 30% All; 10% Subscribed (still building out my subscribed list)

So if the difference is corporate consolidation… Sounds like that’s the real underlying issue then, not automation.

Economics has well established that monopolistic behavior by firms harms consumers & the overall economy (that’s why we have anti-trust laws in the first place).

Don’t conflate the one problem with another, as I agree the erosion of anti-trust laws is a bad thing and needs to be reversed. But that doesn’t mean firms further automating things is now also bad.

I’d also say “automation affecting the whole economy at once” isn’t unique. The industrial revolution was not isolated to one industry, its effects were economy-wide. Also true for the transportation revolution (trains & steam boats moved everything), telecommunications, and the internet…

If you’re not aware, look up the automation paradox: https://ideas.ted.com/will-automation-take-away-all-our-jobs/

Every* automation advancement has lead to an increase in employment, not decrease. Most often jobs in the immediate sector are lost, but the rise in supporting sector jobs are bolstered.

Classic examples are the cotton mill and combine harvester. The number of agricultural workers declined, but the number of jobs processing agricultural product increased. Or with ATMs, the number of tellers needed per bank location decreased, but the total employment in the banking sector increased (banks opened more branches, namely in places where it was previously cost prohibitive).

As more things are automated, what’s being automated becomes cheaper and more prolific, often increasing (or creating) new opportunities. There are so many historic examples of this, it’s hard to justify “this time is different” predictions… Even for things like AI automating white collar jobs.

*Edit: almost every. It depends a bit on how you count the secondary jobs, and where those are located (automation combined with offshoring results in a net decline in some countries, but increase overall).

Since the other reply was unhelpful: apps are supposed to have limited privileges and isolation from each other, yes… But the whole point of malware like this is that they figure out ways to break those restrictions and get escalated privileged.

You can get more technical detail from reading the report, in this case it looks like the app does not contain malware, but instead requests an update after install that contains the bad code and then breaks the app limitations and scans for the target banking applications and copies the security certificates.

Closing legal crossings will almost certainly increase illegal ones…

*Senator

The answer to regulatory capture isn’t prohibition though, because prohibition essentially means unregulated.

Prohibition is effectively the same as a tax on gambling from the point of view of gamblers, but the tax is just the additional effort people have to spend to not get caught or fines when they do. The difference is there’s no tax revenue for the governing authority to redistribute, fines go almost exclusively to pay for enforcement.