I support the number pad as well. I type in numbers into spreadsheets often enough that it’s useful for me.

If we were to delete, I’d say get rid of the F1 keys, get rid of Home / End, get rid of Num lock, etc.

I disagree. [Modifier] + C & [mod] + V works just as good as a dedicated button and you are using the space more efficiently by having multiple uses for one key.

Keyboard already has a lot of buttons. We should be considering which to remove, not any additions

Vulnerability is attractive. But not trauma dumping.

There’s a time and a place. So don’t be afraid of opening up, you just have to do it in an attempt to connect with people. Not to try and abuse their attention for validation.

Secondly, never pay for an app membership. It’s not worth it and you’re getting the wrong idea how it works.

Make a casual profile with some good pictures and send casual messages. Try to be light hearted and show a little bit of personality.

That’s all you need. Anything more is a red flag to most women. Realize they are trying to sift through hundreds of people. They maybe have a few seconds to look through your profile.

Also stop using the word cuck. Don’t be terminally online and read some books. Expand your perspective. Women are attracted to empathetic and intelligent men. Someone who pays attention and listens. They will give you a lot if you give it back.

You can stop pretending anytime. Go ahead and do the research. Maybe you assume you’re right and don’t know. Maybe you know you’re wrong and your pride doesn’t allow you to admit.

Who knows

So you give up pretending Biden has any other accomplishments?

I don’t understand what even to say to people who think bombing brown people is OK as long as the plane flying it has a pride flag.

I named his biggest accomplishments. There’s a reason he’s more unpopular than Trump, an already deeply unpopular president.

We are fucked as a country but I’ll be fine.

Infrastructure bill, climate bills (even though he’s also given more fossil fuel approvals than Trump and oil companies are making nearly 3x profit under him), OTC birth control… what else?

High inflation & high interest rates & high government spending on war.

I would support a candidate that would

A) reduce cost of living

B) raise wages

C) enact immigration reform

D) stop funding endless war

Right now neither candidate promises any of those items. Those 4 items would make a massive difference to virtually everyone in this country.

I couldn’t care less about trans bathrooms. Sure, they deserve respect and equality and all that jazz. But I’m sure they would also like a good paying job and being able to comfortably afford their rent and groceries a lot more than kids being allowed to go to drag shows.

Don’t you see how they’ve successfully managed to trick everyone into accepting these BS culture war issues as some sort of substitution for real meaningful change? They have their boot on your neck and you’re happy about it.

We’re accelerating downhill, I think there’s only a few years left before another big war

Protectionism against China check

Expansion of border wall check

Unconditional support of Israel check

Detention of asylum seekers at border check

Soaring corporate profits check

Massive number of oil and gas drilling approvals check

Virtually no meaningful legislation or policy that improves quality of life or lowers cost of living for working class Americans… check

Trust me. It’s not as different as the kool-aid would have you believe. You can’t just wave a pride flag around and pretend to be a progressive. I don’t buy it.

MAGA agenda is gonna happen under Biden too. Biden expanded border wall. Abortion rights are getting dismantled under Biden. Inflation and interest rates are pressing down on working class Americans under Biden - meanwhile corporate profits soar, especially oil companies. Oil companies are making 2-3x higher profits right now than during Trump.

Sure, the rhetoric coming out of white house is going to be more racist, more xenophobic, more anti-gay, etc.

But fundamentally I think the changes this country is going through is much deeper than presidential office. If Biden were a strong leader, maybe he would be able to stem the tide.

But he is not a strong leader. He is the last gasp of air that the establishment neoliberals are desperately trying to maintain. One last attempt to maintain the broken status quo of the great experiment we started under Reagan.

The tipping point has already been reached, a tsunami is coming and people should get ready for that

The same as if Biden wins. I don’t think the office of president is going to meaningfully change my life. It did not the last 8 years either.

Either way we’re headed to war, economic troubles, radicalism, etc. Biden and Trump are both stepping stones towards the authoritarian state capitalist system we have been cultivating for decades.

People are going to be fine as long as they do what every person in Latin America did under the military dictatorships supported by the US. Shut up, do your job, and don’t make waves.

Don’t worry, it can’t last forever. These systems have a tendency of falling apart eventually. The next manifestation will be better. Just like WW2 had to happen to bring us our post-60s civil rights era society.

I’m a bit cynical here and I think the country is headed down the same path whether Trump or Biden wins in November. We’re seeing pseudo-fascist rhetoric increase in frequency. We’re seeing authoritarian and militaristic policies pass virtually unopposed through our political system. War is virtually guaranteed with either candidate.

I know this opinion may be unpopular but I don’t think this election matters very much. There are of course potential differences- such as access to abortion. If Biden wins, maybe there’s more hope. But that’s really it- just hope. Democrats have had majorities dozens of times since Roe V Wade was ruled and never wrote abortion into law.

I don’t think it’s suddenly going to change in the next 4 years which looks to be a potentially very dangerous period of time geopolitically speaking. Biden isn’t going to have very much political capital to spend and the Overton Window is gradually shifting right.

Instead of looking only at this election, look at the next. And the one after. Do people think MAGA will go away? The world is in economic and geopolitical restructuring- instability breeds radicalism. The problem will likely only get worse. Especially with another weak Democratic administration.

Which brings me to the answer to your question. I have dual citizenship in South America. The only reasons I would leave the US are if there is a WW3 scenario or some sort of clear descent into a form of fascism. We’re toying with it right now, but it can get a lot worse.

It probably won’t be much better in my home country if I’m being honest, but there will be less chances for war. Any global war will inevitably involve the US in some capacity.

I think Israel in its current state is beyond saving

I think the fundamental issue with Isreal is that it was started as an ethnostate with the national religion explicitly endorsing their own population as “special” and “chosen by God”.

That ideology would never be compatible with a modern cosmopolitan liberal democratic society. All races and religions and people should be of equal worth. Any ideology that views itself as somehow special would always degenerate to apartheid and brutality.

Add in the fact that Jews are some of the smartest and most industrious people on the planet and you have a very dangerous country. You mix willingness and capacity and you get action- what we are seeing in Gaza today, and really what we’ve been seeing for decades.

I guess that is a long winded way to say, I agree. Israel in its current manifestation cannot be saved. It would require a total deconstruction of their ideology and to be frank, that probably isn’t happening anytime soon.

Maybe after WW3.

There are benevolent kings every once in a while. Doesn’t mean monarchy is a good system in the long term. Nordic countries have some of the highest wealth inequalities in the world. They keep the working class content with the programs and benefits. They have been able to afford it up to now, but the system is straining.

In the long term they cannot sustain this and we see it with their indicators slowly falling over time to match other Western European countries.

French & UK citizens are not fans of their government.

Less power the government has unnecessarily, the better. Doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t have power, just we need a mentality that we always need to be trimming the fat.

What do you mean? You think I don’t support taxes or something?

I consider myself a libertarian and I believe in free healthcare. I think certain industries should not be run for profit. It creates perverse incentives that harm the common man. For example healthcare.

If there’s a profit incentive in bealthcare, there is incentive for drug companies or hospitals to raise their prices. This would mean less people getting treatment or more people in medical debt.

Another industry I think shouldn’t be for profit is education. We want an educated population. It should be encouraged, so it should be free for anyone who wants it.

In my view, libertarianism is a perspective that the government should interfere with the personal liberties of the individual as little as possible.

Every single government action should be heavily scrutinized and challenged. Some actions are justified. For example regulating healthcare I think is justified. You are taking away the liberty of starting a hospital - but the benefits outweigh the costs.

I believe that cooperatives should be encouraged if not explicitly mandated for large companies.

I think to Chomsky’s conception of anarchism. Look at all hierarchies of power and challenge them. Some are justified - the power a father has over his child. Some are not - the power a cash advance place has over their customer base.

I think governments often make mistakes and through heavy handed actions end up screwing the average person. By dramatically limiting government action, you help prevent this.

Remember the government is not your friend.

It’s all just fancy statistics. It turns words into numbers. Then it finds patterns in those numbers. When you enter a prompt, it finds numbers that are similar and spits out an answer.

You can get into vectors and back propagation and blah blah blah but essentially it’s a math formula. We call it AI but it’s not fundamentally different than solving 2x + 4 = 10 for x.

I’ve lived in a few different states and I was born in a foreign country. I absolutely love Florida. South Florida is an amazing place with great weather and great people.

It all depends on the cultural lens which you use to look at it. One shopping plaza looks different to a Jew then it does to a Brazilian then it does to a Haitan. The Jew may come for the hummus lunch place and the Brazilian goes for the Brazilian nightclub. They exist in the same physical space but it’s like a parallel universe because they don’t see each other. I find this so fascinating.

When you take the time to really explore you see a massive depth of different cultures. I love living among immigrants, including many fresh people right off the boat.

Up north it simply isn’t the same. In Chicago there’s a lot of Latinos, but they’re virtually all Mexican. In South Florida you get every single type. Brazilian, Venezuelan, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Central American… Mexicans are a minority.

I don’t know if there’s another place in the world that has such a diverse mix of people from around Latin America. So many opportunities and interesting things to do.

I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I hate the government, but I refuse to move.

Couple of things

There was a 62% voter turnout in the 2020 election. 46.8% of voters voted for Trump.

0.62 x 0.468 = .290

So actually, 29% of people voted for Trump.

If we do the same calculation for AfD in 2021. 76.6% voter turnout in Germany and AfD got 10.4% of votes.

0.766 x 0.104 = 0.799

So the difference looks like 29% to 8% US to Germany.

But you have to remember the US and Germany are different political systems. There are only two parties in the US, so each of the big parties (DNC, GOP) have many different factions. Moderate Republicans would be an entirely different party from Trumpian “MAGA” Republicans if the US had a party system like Germany.

They functionally ally together in order to form a government, much like different parties will do in parliamentary systems in Europe.

So if we for example take the center-right Christian conservative party and add that to AfD, which in my opinion more closely resembles the GOP, we get the following numbers.

76.6% voter turnout. AfD got 10.4% of votes. CDU got 24.1% of votes.

0.766 x (0.104 + 0.241) = .264

So we’re actually looking at a ratio more like 29% US to 26% Germany. Fundamentally not that different.

And last thing I’d like to add. Shifts in the political Overton window like we’re seeing right now happens at an exponential rate. It’s why Germany in the early 1900s went from a liberal democratic society to full blown Fascist dictatorship fairly quickly.

I think the process has started in the US first, but the movement is shifting to other countries too. US news is emphasized because of the importance of the US as a superpower, but this process of the hard shift to the right is happening in many countries.

We see it not only in certain parties gaining ground like Fratelli d’Italia, Sweden Democrats, Rassemblement National, Alternative für Deutschland, etc - but the rhetoric changing. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that would be rare a decade or two ago is seeing a large increase.

We see populist like Argentina’s Milei, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Canada’s Poilievre, etc all following the footsteps of Trump and being wildly successful. People globally feel insecure and it’s a ripe environment for these types of right-wing populists.

I view the US as the leader of the Zietgiest right now, much like Germany was the leader of the Zietgiest during WW2. It’s leading the pack, but we’re all headed towards the same destination.

It’s because our media is manipulated. When Saudi Arabia commits war crimes, it’s more or less ignored. When Russia does it, it’s plastered all over the media. China suppresses protests, it’s an authoritarian hellhole. When we do it, it’s law and order. In China the great firewall is censorship, here when we ban TikTok it’s justified.

I suggest everyone read Chomsky’s manufacturing consent. It goes over many historical examples like above and the mechanisms by which it happens

There are right wing populists in virtually every democracy these days. It’s not an issue unique to the US. I think it’s a byproduct of our times. Economic uncertainty + geopolitical tensions and war = hard shift to the right.