arch_8ngel

Fried chicken livers are awesome if they're done right. You can eat them by the bucket-full. (most bird/poultry organs are really good -- livers, gizzards, hearts, kidneys -- but the livers are the best) Escargot just tastes like butter. And while I've never had raw clams, raw oysters are great with some horseradish.

Surely a full-back tattoo costs way more than that, right?

I wasn't thinking of actual death benefits when I wrote that out, so if that's a thing, I'm not familiar with the election details to do it. I was actually thinking of direct spousal benefits that current (and FORMER, i.e. divorced) spouses can claim for the duration of their own lives (i.e. potentially well beyond the death of the original recipient)

What kind of pension not only decreases your social security benefit (assuming you paid your 40 quarters -- versus the type of pension where you avoided paying directly into FICA), but ALSO doesn't have survivor or death benefits for your wife?

Swords and Serpents has some interesting unique features, between the 4-player option (and I think you can mix-and-match party members, with each member getting their own password) and the combat dynamics (it is slightly more involved than just pressing "attack") Arcana is one of the few first-person dungeon crawls of that era that is story-rich. It breaks each of the dungeons into much more manageable chunks, as well. Very good for newbies to the genre.

How does one end up with lower-than-typical benefits, for a contribution level, without simply not having the 40 quarters of contributions necessary to be fully vested in the program? (ignoring the separate issue of choosing to take benefits early, at a reduction, or later, at an increased amount) Though with respect to early (age 62) vs late (age 70) benefit-start, the concept there is that your total payout from the program will work out to be roughly equivalent, no matter which option you choose. So on the one hand, if you can tolerate the lower cashflow of early withdrawals, you come out ahead investing the money earlier. On the other hand, if you can live without the cashflow until age 70, you can treat SS as "old age insurance" where the larger payout can make living to VERY old age more tolerable, financially, where you may be nearing the end of your nest-egg. But the total payout from the government should be roughly equal based on your life expectancy for your cohort.

Those prices above (from another forum where someone evidently had price sheet access) were apparently minimum orders of a million units. I'm sure that means that the LRG guys are paying WAY more per unit for their relatively small orders.

Social security is only regressive if you look at it as a tax alone, independent of the eventual payout. As a program, in total, it is not regressive. People that pay the maximum into social security do not see nearly the same benefit (i.e. the internal rate of return) as those who pay the minimum. You can certainly make the argument that it "should be different" -- but that would be a fundamentally different program than how social security is structured.

I am saying that Social Security has an "effective" internal-rate-of-return, based on how much you can expect to get paid out versus how much you contribute. That IRR is highest for the lowest income earners who contribute the least to the program. That IRR is lowest for the highest income earners who contribute the most to the program. The tax of FICA is only regressive if you look at it in isolation from the benefits it provides. If you look at the big picture, of the program in total -- both the tax/funding AND the payout -- it is fairly progressive. And you are completely misunderstanding what I am saying about how this tax impacts rich people. There is an income-cap/contribution-cap based on payouts. "Rich people" already get paid less-per-contributed-dollar than poor people. That is already a progressive implementation of the total program, end-to-end. You are conflating multiple "taxation fairness" issues, though, it seems. Because "rich people paying their fair share" OVER ALL, is DIFFERENT from whether they are paying that "fair share" on FICA SPECIFICALLY. On the latter issue, I would argue it is already "fair" -- that is, it is a government-administrated retirement and disability program that pays out based on your own contributions, with higher rates of return for those who contributed least to the program and lower rates of return for those who contribute most. On the former issue, you can pretty readily argue either direction, depending on your bent, but it isn't outlandish to suggest that at VERY HIGH incomes from capital gains the rates are likely lower than they could reasonably be. But you have to mechanize any changes to that in a way that doesn't hose up fairly "normal" levels of retirement investment withdrawals, if you don't want to fuck things up for a lot of "non-rich" people that are at a phase in their life where they derive the bulk of their income from investments. Unless you're trying to suggest that anyone that can live solely off their investments is "rich", in which case I'd seriously question your definition of "rich".

Does Detroit still have "urban trappers" that sell raccoon carcasses for meat? I remember reading that story a few years back during the depths of the recession, when "urban food deserts" were getting a lot of attention.

I'm going to dispute your understanding on the part in bold. If you are hitting the max limit on the social-security side of FICA, the benefits-per-contributed dollar have already been pretty significantly diminished compared to people on the lower end of the scale. "Rich people" definitely pay their "fair share" into that system, the way it is currently mechanized, and see a much much worse effective-rate-of-return than median-and-below earners, versus if they had been able to invest the income elsewhere. There may be other issues with how social security is handled, but "rich people" not contributing enough to the pot of money isn't one of them.

I don't have to be in anybody's "camp" to think that Trump is a moron who speaks at a 4th grade level, which is what my comment was about.

A lot of those little monochrome LCDs can flicker fast enough to manage 4 effective colors of greyscale. The effect was pretty popular on TI calculator games in the late 90s.

Trump doesn't ramble. He is a very stable genius who always gets right to the point of complex issues. And when he does ramble, it is on purpose, to show the importance of word salad in a balanced information diet.

Arcana is a fun lightweight entry into the genre.

A cursory search of "highest R0" seems to show the only R0's greater than 4 are all diseases that were eliminated via mass vaccinations, rather than containment.

I thought they were supposed to be notionally chicken flavored, hence the name. I like Butterfingers well enough, but had a bite of a chick o stick at camp as a kid and wanted to throw up.

Saw it on a flight last week. It was pretty OK. Certainly better than the last couple.

Do you also eat those Mary Jane's peanut butter bars? Or chick-o-stick? You're THAT guy?

Or, you know, just don't eat the part of the chicken that stomps in shit all day and cannot possibly be adequately cleaned...

SPAM is a great one to have in the pantry as a back-up item, along with oil-packed canned tuna. It is good for 2 - 3 years, is safe to eat as-is, but is greatly improved with a quick fry in a skillet. Makes decent breakfast sandwiches. And if you want to cube it, does a good corned-beef-hash style meal.

The Nazis obviously had much more extreme types of concentration camp, ranging from work camps to extermination camps. The USA put the Japanese (and to a much lesser extent, other groups) in a much less severe type of concentration camp that they chose to call "internment camps" to make them sound like they were "not that bad". The core term, though, is a fairly broad term for camps where political, ethnic, or other categorized prisoners are placed, generally without any real legal justification for it. It is kind of a disturbing turn that you want to equate this with holocaust denial. There is a fairly clear distinction in usage and severity between "Nazi concentration camps" and concentration camps, in the generic. But if you can't ever use the term "concentration camp" again, due to that taint, then you are really just cooking up a new word that essentially means exactly the same thing as the standard definition, because that is what the Japanese "Internment" camps were, and it is, essentially, what is/was going on with family separations at the border. (and "internment camp" isn't quite that term, either, as it is intentionally meant to soften/mask the nature of the terminology where specific groups are being concentrated together)

Vegemite? It is just REALLY salty with sort of an umame flavor profile. Not bad in small doses, if you're drinking beer.

Yeah, tried that once. Definitely not something I would ever try again.

If you are trying to downplay the badness of what the USA did to its own citizens with those camps, just because not a lot of them died while imprisoned there, I'm not sure this is a conversation worth having. While it certainly doesn't meet the Nazi-centric use of the term, it definitely meets the standard definition of the term, to where "internment camp" is just a politically more palatable term for "concentration camp" to try and separate it from that Nazi-centric usage. Just because some other governments did something even worse, does not make what happened here less wrong, and it doesn't change the actual definition of a term.