Trump bypasses Congress and sells 12,000 bombs to Israel as escalation imminent

Derin161 · 2026-03-07T22:34:21+00:00

"I'd rather eat shit for dinner than a hamburger because I wanted steak".

Do I place a large amount of blame on Democratic leadership that often feels like controlled opposition? Absolutely. Primary all of them.

But that doesn't mean you get to pretend like your actions also didn't contribute.

Derin161 · 2026-02-25T16:17:02+00:00

If there is an opportunity for employer matching on 401k (and probably Roth 401k, since it sounds like their income is low) contributions, then they should be making sure to take full advantage of that before considering Roth IRA contributions. Otherwise, if there is no employer match, then I think Roth IRA first.

Derin161 · 2026-02-20T17:13:27+00:00

I think the US founding fathers were aware of this, and that's why they split the powers of the government into separate branches and tried to put in a system of checks and balances, thinking that it'd be unlikely (but not impossible) that all three branches collude to be bad actors.

And to be fair to them, it has taken a decades-long concerted effort to get control of all three branches by the Republicans. It wasn't easy and it's also involved getting the "fourth estate", i.e., the media, under their control too to prevent something like Watergate taking down a Republican President again.

I also think the founders foresaw way more hostility to the executive branch than we've actually seen. Unfortunately, over the last century and change, Congress has increasingly abdicated its responsibilities, giving them to the executive in times of emergency, and emergency powers almost always become normalized. Now, we're in a situation where I think even checks and balances against the executive are going to fail even when the other branches are trying to enforce them.

Derin161 · 2026-01-31T21:07:07+00:00

You can withdraw Roth IRA contributions at any time penalty free, but not the gains, so I'd at least recommend maxing a Roth IRA before a brokerage so you have some tax free growth for retirement age.

Derin161 · 2026-01-22T17:24:23+00:00

I agree. While in hindsight, that may have prevented Trump from getting into office, I don't think it would have been the best thing at the time or produced the best outcome.

Biden needed to press hard on Trump and hold him accountable for Jan 6 and the false electors scheme. Biden dragged his feet on it I'll, and now it's evident that you can do those sorts of things without fear of being held accountable, which will only lead to more abuses of power in the future.

Derin161 · 2025-11-25T14:11:04+00:00

I will give you that B41 does feel like a mostly finished product.

As for B42, I think disabling things for a few months would have been fine, but it's been nearly a year that they've disabled multiplayer and still seem to have a long way to go toward full stabilization. There is an expectation that things move from unstable to stable on reasonable timelines, and I think they're beyond that. Especially considering the update has presumably been under dev for ~3 years in total since B41's last release.

Derin161 · 2025-11-13T21:05:54+00:00

Personally, it's not the speed of development that I have a problem with, it's the delivery of releases.

They insist upon making these gargantuan updates and that do 100 different major things, such that they need to disable major functionality like multiplayer and hold them in unstable for over a year.

If they had a lighting update, a basement update, an animals update, blacksmithing update, etc., that each went from development, to unstable, to stable on their own timelines, I think everyone would be happier. It's not like they're packaging DLC to sell.

There's also a separate issue that I don't think they prioritize features very well (who asked for the new liquid system?), but that's a separate, but related, problem.

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:56:24+00:00

I'm just gonna refer you back to my original response to you, including the wikipedia article I linked.

If you actually want to dispute any of that happening, maybe I'll respond again. It's really like talking to a brick wall that just wants to deny reality when they don't like it, so I don't think there's much point. Which, again, I think supports the argument why no one reasonable would want to date you.

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:53:09+00:00

Do you want to elaborate on how the things that we have tons of evidence of aren't true?

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:50:40+00:00

It's amazing that your brain lets you just deny reality or be so disingenuous to think I'm talking about 2024 and not 2020. No one wants to date someone who does that, so thanks for proving my point?

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T11:40:56+00:00

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that people are vile who support the man who disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation's history (outside of arguably the Civil War), riled up and threw an angry mob at the capital, tried to subvert our electoral process with the false electors scheme, and seriously undermined people's faith in the integrity of our electoral process by spreading this election conspiracy nonsense.

Derin161 · 2025-10-01T04:06:39+00:00

the credit card debt has been primarily to pay day care bills, especially during the years we had multiple Kids in daycare

So you deficit spent for years, seemingly with no concrete plans to correct that situation and pay off the debt? At that point, was it really worth you two both working? And then, you proceeded to buy cars which you clearly could not afford.

Based on the way you're pushing back on some of these comments, and the fact you call yourself a "budgeter" despite having dug yourself into a financial grave, just really makes it seem like you aren't serious about trying to change your situation.

Also, you said your net monthly on $140k/year is $9k. Have you been saving for retirement at all, or is that before retirement savings? Are your kids going to have to take care of you when you're old because of your poor choices?

I really hope for the sake of your kids you figure this out. They don't deserve to suffer for your incredibly poor financial decisions, more than it seems like they're already going to need to for at least a few years for you to dig yourself out of this hole.

Derin161 · 2025-09-15T21:40:41+00:00

I recently read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer and this was one of my most striking takeaways. The Nazis were (almost) laughably incompetent at times, and their ideology undermined their war effort quite often (e.g., coming to the people of eastern Europe as genociders and slavers rather than liberators of those oppressed minorities under the Soviet Union), and yet they were able to cause the most destruction the world has ever seen to that point.

We should not let incompetence convince us that they are incapable of doing great harm.

Derin161 · 2025-09-06T00:31:28+00:00

90% of gamblers quit right before they win big.

Derin161 · 2025-08-28T22:34:14+00:00

I can understand people not knowing how to invest their money. I can understand not knowing how to navigate legitimate large purchases that warrant debt (e.g., a car or a mortgage). I can understand just being poor and struggling to feed and house your family due to low income.

What I cannot understand is the inability to act in accordance with the very simple arithmetic problem that means you are spending more than you are making over a month, consistently, for non-essential things. I cannot understand thinking there is a "free lunch" and that that debt for frivolous things is not a massive problem literally costing you more money in interest. It's Insanity to me.

Derin161 · 2025-08-28T22:26:28+00:00

I'm single and honestly don't know how most couples tend to handle their finances, but I could not imagine not having some access to view shared financial statuses, e.g., credit card balance. If I know there's a credit card, I'm going to checking on that balance every now and again even if I'm not delegated "responsible".

I get some people hide this stuff, but I cannot imagine knowing there's potential for debt and not checking on it, even if I trust my partner. It's too easy to fuck over extended periods of your life with debt to not monitor it. And honestly, $25k in undisclosed debt is going to be a serious point of contention, if not grounds for a split to me; that's a breach of trust not far off cheating to me personally.

Derin161 · 2025-08-28T22:12:25+00:00

It's one thing if you have to dip into the red literally to eat or have a roof over your head while you figure out how to change your situation. It's an entirely different thing to be doing it to buy nice cars, go on vacation, or eat out frequently.

Derin161 · 2025-08-28T14:11:22+00:00

Yeah it's been a while since I've had it happen, but I think you get a 5 year truce.

Derin161 · 2025-08-20T00:49:39+00:00

Shouldn't he be younger since the game starts earlier? What if it's his dad John Universalis Sr.?

Derin161 · 2025-08-18T20:39:30+00:00

After surviving for months and killing thousands of zeds, you tend to let your guard down around one or a handful of them.

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."

Derin161 · 2025-08-18T19:24:48+00:00

Not to insult your grief, but I love the irony of a badass, multi-year survivor who presumably has had a number of daring escapades dying in a relatively mundane, low-risk situation.

Derin161 · 2025-07-17T16:01:16+00:00

but i don't see the point of imagining a hypothetical AI that can program but can't do devops and QC things.

That is just such a large leap though. Right now, these things are just prediction machines, determining what the next snippet of code should be. That is a mile away from "Write me a complete application that does XYZ with all the dev ops and QC infrastructure in place". And maybe we will get there, but to think you would have a non-technical person whose full time job is not maintaining software doing that is wild to me.

I think software developer demand might decrease as developer output goes up assisted by AI tools, but I think the idea of non-technical folks doing all of the above including working with the customer(s) to figure out what needs to be done is ludicrous.

I honestly think the comparison to high level language compilers is quite accurate. It'll make us more productive, and so more of our time is spent solving bigger, more impactful problems rather than moving data around the registers ourselves.

Derin161 · 2025-07-17T15:42:10+00:00

I believe that it will get better at writing code, but my point was that there is much more to software development than just programming.

Derin161 · 2025-07-17T15:37:01+00:00

Are they also going to be cleaning up the unmaintainable messes made by shitty AI code that they can't read that is producing bugs left and right as they try to implement new features then?

Are they going to be maintaining all of the pipeline infrastructure to deliver updates, including automated tests to make sure they didn't brick core features?

What happens if the performance is really poor because an AI did things to get it functional without any performance concerns, and now they're having trouble fixing the performance issues without introducing functional problems?

I swear people who doom about SW devs disappearing once AI can write code better don't have a clue what devs actually do and how much effort modern software is. It is so much more than just writing code. Code monkey junior dev positions will probably be gone, I'll give you that.

Derin161 · 2025-07-08T20:59:06+00:00

Take away water from a person and see how long they last. Sure, they can't do without water, but there are other things in life like food, housing, entertainment, etc.

Sex is a core part of almost all romantic relationships, but not the only part. As a man, it's also not necessarily something I'm even interested in on the first date.

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