Assuming…you know…Biden will lose his record for oldest president ever and the gerontocracy continues.

Gotta think 2029 brings the biggest drop in age for a long time, JFK was 26 years younger than Eisenhower. We could beat it with a 56 year old in 2029. Vance would break that record if by election or…you know…but I think Whitmer would be 56 exactly. Wes Moore, Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro would all break it.

Honestly thank god even Trump isn’t narcissistic enough to think he looks good without a shirt.

It all works without it being a specific conspiracy to create terrorists so I don’t know why you added that part. Maybe he’s just a piece of shit who does bad stuff that creates cohorts of people who hate him and America because he doesn’t know about, think about, or care about them.

There’s no amendment protecting mini blinds.

Jeb! is a hole in the theory, not every major states governor who is the son of a former president can become president themselves.

Overall kind of a lot of turnover actually…only one Clinton became president, and he was never VP. The other Clinton got beat out by the first black president for the nomination in 08, and then she lost to some guy who had zero political experience.

If anything, we learned that being black doesn’t exclude you from being president, being female doesn’t exclude you from being a major party nominee, and you can still become president even running for office for the first time at age 70. The promise of the statement is more true than ever.

He’s never finishing the series. He’s going to be 76 in a month, he still has probably most of Winds to finish after 13 years, the math doesn’t work out to getting A Dream of Spring, let along the fact that this story is way too big to satisfactorily conclude in 2 books at this point, and even if it could be done it would be complex and difficult and take longer than usual.

I’m irrationally still hopeful we get Winds. But that is it.

If the Trump campaign paid for it as an ad, I’m not upset by it assuming anyone else could have paid to promote an alternative political candidate.

If it’s an in-kind donation to the campaign, that’s troublesome.

Real answer, Elon made it more friendly to the far right (the racists and Nazis) and unbanned a bunch of them who had previously been banned for being too racist and Nazi. Then he introduced a subscription service where you pay to have Twitter spread your content.

So that started a doom loop: The far right bought the additional views, people who didn’t appreciate the extra racism and Nazi views on their timeline left Twitter, but the view boost was paid for so it kept pushing those views to the fewer people who remained, then THAT volume of hate pushed more people away, etc.

It probably got to the point that they couldn’t keep paid views high enough with just people who care about politics and they had to just push at all costs, eventually to you.

This happened at my work with internal docs as we switched from an ancient intranet to a new service that had a ton more features but no backwards compatibility so all the pages got updated to PDFs with helpful links that went nowhere and it caused chaos for like 3 months.

It’s all a hypothetical, feel free to just decide you are that type of person. No harm in it.

In real life though, if money is no object, the difference between a 2017 normal car and a 2025 luxury car is literally just “do you want extra features and a bigger screen on a car that will last longer?” It just doesn’t make sense to get the cheaper version, unless you are giving up something else because you only have a limited amount of money.

It was always short sighted tax policy. We’re just living with the blowback.

But in 1954, apparently intending to stimulate capital investment in manufacturing in order to counter a mild recession, Congress replaced the straight-line approach with “accelerated depreciation,” which enabled owners to take huge deductions in the early years of a project’s life. This, Hanchett says, “transformed real-estate development into a lucrative ‘tax shelter.’ An investor making a profit from rental of a new building usually avoided all taxes on that income, since the ‘loss’ from depreciation canceled it out. And when the depreciation exceeded profits from the building itself—as it virtually always did in early years—the investor could use the excess ‘loss’ to cut other income taxes.” With realestate values going up during the 1950s and ’60s, savvy investors “could build a structure, claim ‘losses’ for several years while enjoying tax-free income, then sell the project for more than they had originally invested.”

Since the “accelerated depreciation” rule did not apply to renovation of existing buildings, investors “now looked away from established downtowns, where vacant land was scarce and new construction difficult,” Hanchett says. "Instead, they rushed to put their money into projects at the suburban fringe—especially into shopping centers.

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled

The “spandrel hypothesis” is the front runner explanation. Essentially we didn’t evolve to have chins but rather evolved other things that are helpful, and the chin is a byproduct of that other evolution. Not harmful so it didn’t get selected away, but not helpful.

This is why I don’t take family photos with a hat or flag that announces my political affiliation.

The actual reason why is that everyone was expecting Hillary to win and she had vowed to “end private prisons.”

So everyone was calculating in a 90% or whatever chance Hillary wins, with some percentage chance she actually fulfilled her promise. Instead they got a 100% chance they would stay around for 4 years and probably get a tax cut. Pretty big adjustment is appropriate.

(Also old 2016 articles about Hillary are so quaint. They even mention Obama closing Guantanamo lmao)

Yeah the guy who was going to pass permanent corporate tax cuts and temporary individual tax cuts, funded by chaining individual tax brackets so taxes go up for individuals after 10 years, won. That’s great for corporate profits. And great for the 10% who own 90% of stocks.

It’s horrible tax policy and detrimental to the majority of Americans but it absolutely should make stocks increase.

The one example I’m familiar with is a name brand ice cream company that produces the store brand ice cream too…in that case the recipe is different, cheaper ingredients to cut costs to the bare minimum. But using the machines for a higher volume saves money.

I’m sure ‘same exact item’ does happen too but just ‘same manufacturer’ doesn’t mean exactly the same item.

Can’t believe Harriet Tubman got all that infrastructure up.

I feel like weight class doesn’t do it. Women have higher body fat %. Is a welterweight woman athletically equivalent to a welterweight man? I don’t think so.

Not for House or Senate. Age just isn’t a close enough metric for what you’re trying to fix.

If you’re concerned with age-related decline, vote them out if you see signs of it, or if they would reach whatever age your limit is during the term.

If you’re concerned about longevity in office, use term limits or reform campaign finance such that longevity in office doesn’t grant too high of an incumbent advantage.

SCOTUS, sure. I think Canada has appointments until 75. Does not seem meaningfully different from appointments for life except less randomness on open slots.