All the cybersecurity in the world won’t matter if a handful of manipulated idiots people shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.

As a fellow virgin, if you actually do want to not be a virgin, but see yourself as having “failed” then think deeply on what the reason is.

First of all, if you’ve “failed” then what did you actually try that failed? Do you constantly take steps to meet new people and find friends, male and female, whether in hobbies or online or anywhere? If not, why not? If you have, and therefore have lots of friends you speak with regularly, are you recruiting them to help you find a romantic partner? Meeting lots of people, making friends, and then asking those friends for help is a great way to accomplish almost anything. It’s much easier early in life, but it’s never impossible.

If you have taken steps to meet lots of people (and I mean a lot of people), but none of them or their single-and-looking friends wanted to date you, then did they give reasons? What is it about you that they don’t like? Are you taking care of yourself? Maintaining good personal hygiene? Dressing well? Do your peers find you unpleasant to be around? Are you simply boring? If you meet lots of people and all of them reject you, there’s likely something you’re not doing that you need to be doing. Work on yourself to be someone that people want to be around.

If any of what I’ve said here is relevant to you, even if it’s unpleasant to think about, it’s very important to be consciously aware of it so that you can accept that your current reality is one you’ve chosen, consciously or unconsciously… and that you can choose differently.

I’m one year younger than you, also virgin guy who would maybe like to have a partner, but through introspection and years of learning shit on the internet, I’m aware of the likely reasons I haven’t gotten one yet - I just don’t meet people, and when I do, even when we get along, I tend to fall out of touch immediately. I believe I likely have undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD along with some steep but situational social anxiety, both of which I know have and will continue to keep me from forming and maintaining many social connections that I otherwise could have, which I could be leveraging to find people to date.

So, I recognize what my stumbling blocks are, and that if I decide I really do want to find love and get laid, I have to deal with those stumbling blocks. For me, that will involve speaking to a head doctor and learning more precisely how my brain works and what strategies I can use to overcome those blocks. It’s not about fixing me, it’s about being able to be more me. But until I do that, I accept that my current status of “virgin, but maybe wants to change that” is there because I have, in some way, chosen up to this point not to change it.

If you figure out what your stumbling blocks are, or even if you haven’t, tell a close and trustworthy friend or family member about where you’re at, where you want to be, and how you feel about it. They might have options, or be able to help you take whatever steps you need to be where you want to be. If you feel like you just can’t make yourself do the thing, get someone else to give you a kick in the ass.

That’s wonderful, I’m so glad you enjoyed yourself! And I’m glad I was able to help :)

Remember that a dance party is a party - most people are there to have fun. I think the main thing to avoid, if you can manage it, is being so caught up inside your own head that you aren’t looking at the people around you. Keep your back straight, your head high, your eyes off the floor. Basically, avoid the posture of a shrinking violet and you’ll feel less like one. Even if you don’t feel confident, maintaining a pose that looks confident will keep some of your fear away, and it will passively invite others to interact with you, which boosts your confidence a little more with each person you talk to.

Even if you spend the entire party standing around and watching other people dance, as long as you are actually watching the event, and mentally present for what’s going on, you will gain something from the experience. Just remember that standing around and not talking to anyone is as much a choice as going up to someone and asking for a dance. Neither choice is wrong, but you have to live with what happens - or doesn’t - based on what you choose.

All that said, you can do this! We believe in you!

At first blush, that sounds really complicated for the voter to understand what happens to their ballot. Potentially delegating part of their vote to one of the candidates? That’s going to be a hard sell. Sure, the direct mechanics for voting seems simple, but the system that ballot would go into feels unlikely to lead to better satisfaction than STAR, and might even lead to less informed voters. Even reading your link several times, I’m still not sure I correctly understand how the delegated votes are supposed to work, because I keep going back to “Why would anyone want that?”

My takeaway is either what we value in a democratic voting system is significantly different in some key area, or I don’t understand how the delegation in DYN is supposed to work, but I suspect it’s the former. I’m not a political scientist or a voting system enthusiast though, I just happen to like STAR.

STAR voting offers the same benefit of “vote for as many as you want” without Approval Voting’s drawback of being unable to rank your preferences. I have yet to find a better method. It is, of course, miles better than IRV, both in complexity to the voter (rate candidates 0-5 stars) and simplicity of tallying the result (two steps).

I always advocate for STAR voting but anything is better than FPTP.

Also, all ballots should be printed, and they should be tallied by hand.

Unemployment is low because potential workers have either given up and stopped looking for work or are working literally anything because they will starve if they don’t; neither option lends itself to satisfaction with the economy. Labor participation rates have only just barely gotten back to their pre-pandemic levels, but a lot of people burned any savings they had to keep their heads above water, so on the whole they’re still further behind than they were 4 years ago, and they know it, but Krugman never cared to ask a real person, so he has no clue.

Low inflation is meaningless when economic mobility is lower than ever, with education and healthcare dropping in quality and availability while increasing in price much faster than the average. Most small businesses that went bankrupt due to pandemic half-measures have not reopened, because unlike billionaires, when regular people without an army of lawyers declare bankruptcy, they actually lose everything. In spite of all this, clueless clowns who barely know how to look at numbers on spreadsheets write articles wondering why regular people aren’t satisfied with such a great economy, and concludes a better outcome was impossible.

His only mention of consumer prices is an aggregated consumer price index, which is a “mere” 19% increase over pre-pandemic levels, and from that he concludes people are dumb babies because wages rose by about the same amount. This take is particularly insulting because he has definitely seen this chart and the numbers it’s based on:

If that’s a great economy, I’m a firebreathing dragon.

But the line about:

Well, God, if you’re five-foot-three and you’re three-hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds

Given the rest of the singer’s lyrics and their general rhetoric, I think that line is more about a welfare system that does nothing to address the reasons one is in poverty in the first place while rich men degrade those who are in it as if it’s somehow a poor person’s fault for being poor.

Rather than degrading the obese poor buying snack cakes with food stamps, I think the implication is more likely that taxes ought to pay for good nutritious food, help getting healthy, and help finding work, so that people can start relying on themselves instead of the government. That’s the vibe I get from the guy.

But the antisemitic connotations seem like a stretch to me. To [assume] that criticism of capitalists is automatically antisemitic seems pretty antisemitic to me in it’s own right.

I agree completely. People are far too quick these days to pull the antisemitism card, and from this article, it reads as highly disingenuous. I don’t see anything racist in the song either, and indeed the article in the OP does not even contain the words race, racism, or racist, despite its presence in the title. Paired with its oddly forceful and off-topic accusations of Ukraine as a hotbed of fascism, it’s clear that website is little more than a useless tabloid rag.

Agreed. Given the rest of the song and what the writer has said about it, my guess is that even the part about welfare is less about the people and more about the system that puts people into welfare and keeps them there while rich men kick down at them.

Btw, here’s a non-amp link for that article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/25/rich-men-north-of-richmond-oliver-anthony-republicans

Ah yes, the Kubrick Stare. A staple of the villainously deranged.

It’s almost silly to look into bird deaths and realize just how low wind power is on the list, even with its rapid growth in recent years. It was recently estimated that with the expected growth of wind power, it will be killing about 2.2 million birds a year in the US… in 2050. Meanwhile, power lines kill anywhere from 12 to 48 million a year right now, fossil-fueled power plants kill as many as 14 million a year right now, communication towers kill over 5 million, cars 60-80 million, pesticides as much as 90 million, and cats well over a billion. Every year. The numbers aren’t that hard to find. Replacing all fossil-fueled power plants with wind turbines would be a net positive for bird populations, and the facts make that very clear.

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/08/22/pecking-order-energys-toll-on-birds
https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/weekly-data-how-many-birds-are-really-killed-by-wind-turbines/

You can still do that by adopting kids someone else made. No sense adding to the population when some kids already don’t have parents.

Jon Stewart, Trae Crowder, and Beau of the Fifth Column are three more excellent examples of positive male role models.

If he was the kind of guy who secretly collects barbie dolls, somehow I don’t think his take on WAP would have been such a self-own.

It’s literally being born to die.

They say the same thing about Jesus, actually. Word for word, some fundies actually believe that’s part of the symbolism of his birth, that “swaddling clothes” were what they put on dead bodies for burial, symbolizing that baby Jesus, who was said to have been wrapped in swaddling clothes, was literally born to die. The reality of course is the Greek phrase is extremely common in ancient literature, the rest of the Bible included, and just means they wrapped the baby in strips of soft cloth as was customary for newborns, no death symbolism there at all.

A huge part of the issue is that Congress steals our social security money on a regular basis

My understanding is the raiding of SSA funds is a myth. The Old-Age and Survivor’s Insurance (OASI) trust fund simply isn’t keeping up with inflation (particularly the big inflation spikes, like in the 80s, and like now) and is paying out slightly more each year than it brings in, leaving it unable to pay full benefits by around 2034 or so. But it’s more than just inflation leading us to this result.

Every generation since the 70s has been getting poorer as the wealthiest siphon off more and more of the available money for themselves, leaving less getting paid into the fund by newer generations to help counter inflation. People who do make decent incomes currently also tend to stay in school longer than they did 50 years ago, and pay their way with loans rather than working some simple job, so they’re waiting longer to start paying into the system to begin with. All that plus average lifespans having increased since 1939 (though more recently it started dropping) means the SSA’s revenue has to either be increased by raising the social security tax, raising the cap on that tax, or both; or benefits have to be cut by increasing the retirement age or just paying out less to every beneficiary. That last one will happen automatically once it no longer has enough in the trust fund to pay the full amount, and the goal should be to avoid that. However, to my knowledge only an act of congress can increase the OASI trust fund’s income, absent an unforeseen economic boom.

I think most people should be willing to accept paying a little bit more in taxes so their parents or grandparents can keep getting their fixed incomes, but it often feels like a very loud portion of Americans are totally against all taxes and dig their heels in, refusing to pay one cent more to maintain something they like that in legal reality cannot be re-appropriated to something they don’t like, no matter how much we whinge about it being a ponzi scheme.

I’ve always loved the irony of the argument that if the government pays for healthcare, there will be “death panels” that decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. Because those already exist under and directly because of a system of private healthcare funding where if you don’t have enough money, you’re refused treatment. Meanwhile under a system of public healthcare funding, people get treatment based on who’s most in need of the resources available, and that’s only if the system is already over capacity.