Is "preventative care" even real; serious question, how much prevention can be done in a routine medical appointment that isn't really "severe lifestyle intervention".

It's the particular combination of helplessness and entitlement that drives me to hate. You have one highest responsibility in life and not only have you never gained the minimal skills needed to meet that duty, but in a crisis when handed the literal means to do so with instructions printed on the back you throw up your hands and seek public sympathy as a victim for being asked to participate in feeding your own child rather than being given ready to eat food prepared by someone else.

- video of life long SNAP recipient complaining about the free items she got at a food bank - holds up bag of dry beans - "I don't know how to cook this" I think we've found the problem, and also proof you've never been starving.

We have the technology to implement mandatory universal genetic registration to identify who fathered any given kid and put them back to work. Single mothers on food stamps are a problem we have by choice.

You need to pay SNAP forever so this single mom doesn't have to force her picky eater kid to eat something else to sustain his own life. No dad in the picture so now you're stuck with the bill. I think the reason media keeps selecting these unflattering portraits of poverty to highlight is leftists worship helplessness, and see people as more deserving the more broken they are. They love documenting these little puzzle box dysfunction scenarios which can't be disentangled within their own rules. The path of least confrontation is always accommodating and subsidizing the problem. Non-leftists see these same accumulating moral failures and self-imposed constraints as reasons someone is less deserving and needs outside intervention.

Apropos the SNAP discourse: 44% of adults on SNAP are obese. A further 28% are overweight. Only 2.5% are underweight I found that nugget a while back in a USDA report

An immigrant buying a phone doesn't make my phone more expensive because there's no shared resource being stressed. There's no space in we're all bidding against each other for the same phone capacity. At the same time manufacturing has economies of scale that lower unit costs of things that are produced on assembly lines. More people moving into the same city makes housing more expensive because space is naturally limited, construction has few economies of scale, and building denser is more costly. The mechanism by which "supply rises to meet demand" in housing is that the higher rents justify new types of permanently more expensive housing, but your individual rent is never going back to where it was in absolute terms.

For SNAP benefits to have moral urgency they need to represent the difference between health vs malnourishment, not having to settle for a less expensive source of protein than you wanted.

The article’s overall conclusions are mostly tripe, but it is a wonderfully accurate and evocative peek into the minds of the status-conscious urban new elite. Not Bushwick burnouts, but parents who really did ‘make it’ and are now worried about their kids failing back to Ohio.

Housing costs as percent of income aren't historically high and student debt just isn't an issue for most graduates. Millennials are owning homes and building wealth about on track with previous generations. I am boomer-pilled on telling others of my generation they spiritually suck and need to get over it. Social media created status anxiety and inflated life expectations far in excess of what is realistic. The lifestyle my parents had is now viewed as impoverished and low-status. Young strivers want socialism to make their dream lifestyle possible, which is why Mamdani is the candidate of the precarious urban middle class who want a Hukou ticket to live a privileged existence as one of the special people in the world's most in-demand city.

The Python Software Foundation is in dire financial straights — with only 6 months of runway funds remaining. Last week we learned that the Python Software Foundation turned down a $1.5 Million Dollar grant, from the US government, because Python did not want to adhere to anti-Discrimination and anti-DEI regulations and requirements within the United States. According to their 2024 annual report, the Python Software Foundation has been operating at a loss for some time — with their deficit in 2024 being just shy of $1.5 Million. In other words: That government grant could have (almost exactly) covered their 2024 deficit and put their books back into the positive. But Python’s commitment to promoting discrimination outweighed their desire to not go bankrupt. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10…

A theory behind big brands and franchises is they're supposed to standardize quality and reduce uncertainty for the customer. A Coke in one restaurant is supposed to be like a Coke anywhere else. And yet, there are many videos online of soda connoisseurs blind tasting Coke cups from different chains - McD, CFA, Wendy's - and they consistently nail which is which. You can probably imagine what "McDonald's Coke" tastes like right now. This seems like a failure of the brand to do its basic function, which is to uphold integrity and eliminate any "Coke arbitrage" between points of sale. Indeed, Coca-Cola promotes its own inferior product in the form of the Freestyle machines (seen at Wendy's) which are universally regarded by fans as dispensing the most recognizably terrible Coke of any restaurant. It's so bad I don't understand how at some point product labeling law doesn't intervene and say you can't legally call it Coke. The company seems not to care at all about their reputation in the marketplace. This is more consistent with the behavior of a monopolist, finding the minimum viable Coke machine for every partner they distribute with, rather than a competitive brand trying to win anyone over or set the rules for potentially cheap sellers.

All these old Chipotle menu pictures inevitably show little or no inflation-adjusted price change. What has changed in modern social media posts is everyone gets guac or one of the premium meat options they've added to meet our seemingly endless desire to pay more for lunch.

I'm on a crusade against this graph and its many variations. Young people aren't actually falling behind in wealth, and possibly even home ownership, relative to previous generations! But what is true, is young people have lower wealth "vs the average" or "as a shared of total wealth" because the older generation who preceded them are living longer and wealthier! In 1980 your grandparents were poor or dead, rather than having high net worth into old age.

Portland, Maine disproves all left-yimby copes. That city combined significant upzoning from urbanist groups with strict rent control and IZ from the DSA. The left-yimby dream, right? Except it turns out that upzoning doesn’t matter when you make building financially impossible.

Being a Strong Towns YIMBY urbanist has got to be the ultimate exercise in humiliation. Seemingly none of these people has clued in on the fact that the system they devote themselves to defending doesn't exist to accomplish any of its stated goals, and holds its most vocal supporters in deep contempt for their privileged existence. It's like they show up every week to model railroad club excited to talk about their trains, and get eternally rug pulled by entryists who make every meeting about hobby shop inclusivity and stakeholder engagement. Unsurprisingly, the divide is extremely gendered in a people-vs-things way, with a feminized bureaucracy consuming all resources and political attention, and autistic railfans on the outside complaining about headway and per-mile costs. Because the male nerds are also highly lib and gay they're in an ideological bind of being unable to call out the parasitic elements of their own coalition, who cannot be persuaded to serve the public interest and must instead be crushed with the same revolutionary hatred MAGA Republicans reserve for university faculty. Meanwhile if you're on team Car Brain you stay winning as everyone shows up to the community meeting locked in on the selfish objective of demanding more roads and street parking, which they continue to get.

i find it hard to believe that anyone legitimately believes that all embryos are equal. some embryos have the wrong number of chromosomes! it’s so obnoxious that we’ve made a political signal out of denying the incredibly obvious truth that people have unequal genetic endowments. ironic that this is a left coded thing—we need to first acknowledge that people aren’t remotely equal before we can create good policy to help them.