By and large, you should ride it out unless maybe you're intending to retire imminently. Yes, the overall value of the portfolio is going down but generally speaking the market is always going up in the longer term. That was the advice we were given at least was to ride it out because you can acquire more stock at a cheaper price for the same amount of money you were already setting aside into those accounts.
(all assuming your day-to-day needs are met first and foremost)
I think it's fair to say that those "with power" are the ones that ought to be blamed, so I lay that on Harris and the DNC vs. the voters. I don't think anyone had illusions that Trump would be good for Gaza and the Palestinians, but neither party was willing to show a difference of opinion except to the speed of Gaza getting leveled.
I would also argue that Gaza was an important point, but not the whole point (or a symptom, not the cause). Democrats continue to think that if they just run the same playbook, clearly the "evil" of Donald Trump will speak for itself and they'll win. It clearly doesn't when he's not in power. The Democrats are spending this time hemming and hawing about bipartisanship. I couldn't find the article I saw recently on Hakeem Jeffries basically saying they have all three branches so we're going to find middle ground between us and them, but I think this from CNN is a great encapsulation. "Don't shut it down, we might get blamed. Don't make a big fuss over everything."
It's the toothlessness that gets to me. Why play nice with the Trump administration? Why not just go for the throat if the Democratic party believes that Trump is the existential threat to democracy they say? The Republicans sure love to whenever there's some opportunistic grift for them and maintain that the Democrats either haven't figured it out or are willingly choosing to ignore it. If there's a strategy to their approach, I cannot wrap my head around it.
So w/r/t the uncommitted movement (and others who looked at Harris v. Trump and just didn't bother turning out), I don't know how else you force the DNC to listen and doubly so if they choose not to collect the necessary data. You shouldn't back a candidate because the party says this is the person we're running or because the other candidate is so much worse. The candidate should listen to the voters and run a campaign that brings people in. If a key voting group isn't on board, it's on the candidate/party to figure out WHY and HOW to include them.
a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.
even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their “we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining” stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.
Thank you! It's one thing to philosophically not view what's happening in Gaza as a genocide or not want to upset the Israel lobby, but you have to know where the people are at. The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing. I have people on my team that I tell them that it's OK to make mistakes, just please make new mistakes each time.
It leads me to think the Democratic Party, those in charge, either are fine with what's happening now or are too stupid to reflect on why they lost, and neither of those are good options.
Nearing the end of the non-DLC portion of Pokemon Scarlet. I'm trying to finish my Pokedex before I jump to the DLC here and just have a little bit more focused breeding/leveling up the babies before I'm all set. I forgot how much fun a mainline Pokemon game is as it's taken up a lot of free time as I get towards the end. I do think this has been one of the better entries and the technical issues, while present, are nowhere near game breaking from what I've experienced.
The open world was a little daunting at first. They give you three "quest lines" you can follow right out of the gate and I was initially stuck trying to figure out where to go and what to do, especially since two of the quest lines are literally in two different directions. The region is basically a big circle/clock face. You start at 6:00 and the first things you can do when the game opens up are at 4:00 and 8:00. Once I got the hang of the travel down it was a lot easier to do, but they throw a lot at you to start.
"But muh shareholder value!"
I'm very happy with where I work generally but finding a company serious about a 4 day work week is really what would prompt me to look elsewhere. What I loved is how the article outlined several ways these companies tried to apply the 4 day work week (working all five days but two days are half days, rolling schedules, etc...) because there's no good one size fits all solution. I know my customers would never be able to wrap their heads around us just having Fridays off as a company, but these alternate schedules show a way it could still get implemented even in different departments with vastly different business needs.
Those have all been mainstays of some sort and we try to watch at least a couple every year we can. One of our favorites was A Christmas Story playing for 24h on TBS and we'd just "jump in" wherever it was!
I finally cracked into Phase 4 of Satisfactory when I haven't been able to do that before, so I'm enjoying seeing some new things but also feeling a bit analysis paralysis on where to go/what to focus on. Currently trying to build a cool sky train that connects my bases. Also working on the Castlevania DLC for VS and doing my best not to just "look up the answers" to all the new content. I don't have a ton of nostalgia for Castlevania outside of Aria of Sorrow, but I'm enjoying the sheer amount of new stuff they added in.
And lastly, Rise of the Golden Idol came out yesterday and consumed my evening. I loved that first game so much that this was a no-brainer.
OK, how do we know we're "beating fascism" and can back off? What stops Democratic leadership from arguing that the most boring ass middle of the road fiscal conservative Republican on the planet is "Trump 2.0" and must be stopped?
I don't disagree on what you said at all, but so much of this is a war of messaging and marketing. If an amorphous "leadership" just keeps arguing the Republicans are all fascists regardless of what their actions/deeds/etc...actually suggest, how then do we push back on that narrative without being called a Russian plant or Republican sympathizer? In an age of clickbait, outrage manufacturing and people isolating in their own news spheres, it's super easy for those with power to just lie and stay in power.
So so so many people keep pointing at Trump and saying "But he's the worst/we're all doomed/holy shit you need to vote blue no matter who" and comments about "perfect being the enemy of the good" so we should hold our nose and support Democrats.
I feel like I'm the only person who remembers how hyperbolic we all were about Mitt Romney or John McCain being existential threats to democracy. South Park literally made fun of everybody at the time pointing at how running such a divisive campaign let them distract the public from their real goal of stealing the Hope Diamond (obviously). How many of us would BEG for Romney at the top of the Republican ticket at this point?
So sure, Trump is the threat now. When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then? If it wasn't 2016 or 2020 or 2024 then when? Trump will eventually die and some new Republican will take his place as the leader of the party. EVERY Republican will be the next existential threat and we'll be scolded and told to hold our nose yet again and vote for the Democrat. If someone can tell me the "end date" where I don't have to choose between the lesser of two evils, I'd love to know when that is.
I don't blame other citizens for voting how they do. Everyone has to decide for themselves their red lines for support and in the privacy of the voting booth who they want to support. I do blame Democratic leadership for not learning a single lesson from 2016 about hand picking candidates and browbeating everyone into thinking that's OK.
It's a periodic thing here in Illinois where loud conservative voices want to secede because Chicago is a hell pit, a drain on resources, and they can't stand how much the Democrats control in the state. This is all basically bluster though because Chicago and the surrounding areas tend to basically fund any and everything downstate (the metric escapes me but it's something like the "blue" areas lose a dollar for every dollar spent but the "red" areas basically gain a dollar for every one spent). So if Chicago was suddenly its own state, they'd all be left with basically nothing.
As with so many right wing things, it's a grift/manufactured outrage to distract from the fact that those leaders don't know what the heck they're doing or are actively making it worse and scapegoating the liberals.
"But a dog isn't allowed to play basketball!" protests Democrats as golden retriever scores another two points.