I’ve been trying e-books, usually when I find something I want to read it will say something like you are 38th in line. Minnesota.

Ha, probably not that advice.

There are other ways to grow high yield food without using pesticides if that’s your primary goal. Like indoor vertical farming in a controlled environment. Recently some growers have proven this is viable and profitable. Pesticides in any form are bad for the soil, bad for our health, and decimate the bee and bug populations, which fuck with the ecosystem. Wasting resources includes our natural resources, which are our biggest asset.

Yeah I agree organic pesticides are just as dumb. Bioengineering pesticides into your food takes the cake though, you can’t even wash it off. Not all organic growers use organic pesticides. I know several organic farmers and none of them use any pesticide, they accept the lower crop yield for higher quality food.

Every book I try to check out has a 3 month to 3 year wait-list. Not exactly a convenient way to read.

Medications

Sometimes worse side effects than the thing it’s trying to cure. Sometimes used to cure something that better diet and more exercise could take care of. Made by companies more concerned with money than your health outcomes. What’s to be afraid of?

GMO

Nothing wrong with GMO itself, but every company using GMO doesn’t use it to make food higher quality or taste better. They use it to engineer pesticides into your food, increase crop yields, and patent our seeds, for, you guessed it, money! Insecticides specifically can be neurotoxic to humans. What’s to be afraid of?

Maybe you should listen to your mom instead of badmouthing her to strangers on the Internet.

High interest debt is an emergency. Anything in the emergency category gets paid first. High interest debt is a trap, you can’t hope to meet any other goal in life if you don’t take care of that first.

For anyone with stable income, only debt who’s interest rate is at or above the potential interest you would earn investments should be paid down first. Any debt at a rate lower than you stand to earn, should be paid over time. Any debt lower than the rate of inflation should be paid as slow as the terms allow without penalty.

So my order of priority is: high interest debt>emergency fund>tax deferred investing>ira and investing>low interest debt>even more cash holding>debt below inflation.

I think they meant it doesn’t solve any problems because they never were the problem.

Sorry you’re getting down votes. I think you’re giving your honest perspective and that doesn’t deserve the dismissiveness. I do think you undersell how much Trump specifically had to do with misinformation though. I do really believe the culture around Trump really follows his lead, so when he was selling misinformation, you saw his followers parroting his misinformation which I do think was likely responsible for a lot of death.

We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn’t happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.

Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn’t account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It’s amazing that this fact alone didn’t end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.

If you don’t know what you are doing, and still young, just set a low cost broad market index fund or ETF as the place your retirement funds go. An example would be VTSAX or VTI. Disclaimer: I am not an investment expert or advisor.

Exactly, few people are laughing at people in any other tesla. It’s specifically this vehicle because it’s a impractical hunk of junk AND ugly as fuck.

I’m not at all optimistic. We have a broken system and what power we have left has been ceded to cynicism. Selling cynicism is powerful peoples most effective tool. Convince people they have no power, and they will just stay home. I’ve personally been involved with citizen lobbying many times in my life. I’ve been a part of minimum wage laws being passed, legal reform, net neutrality locally and nationally, school funding that saved schools, first amendment protection laws, etc. Locally, state, and federal. But it requires you have to get off your ass and actually try. Yes in south eastern states you have a bunch of crooked assholes that won’t listen to you, that’s why voting left is so important. Unlike the right, even moderate Dems will work with you if you force them to the table with popular political action. You have to elect them in and then do the hard work of political action.

Furthermore, lobbying is something ANYONE can do, you don’t need money, you literally schedule an appointment with your legislative office and then you go there and talk. I’ve done it multiple times, and it is absolutely effective. Those that get involved determine the future, not every politician is a criminal, many of them are people exactly like you and me. The got fed up with the system and ran for office.

Yes, our political system is fucked up, but selling cynicism when we still barely have a democracy makes things worse. We could have no democracy at all, and we very well might shortly. But while we still have one, I suggest actually fucking trying for once.

They aren’t mutually exclusive and both involve the same thing. The only reason money matters is because it is used to sway voters, people showing they are not swayed by the propaganda invalidates the money.

I’ve actually worked in politics, the amount of people that find it easier to give up because the system is deeply flawed instead of actually doing the hard work of change is astounding. If you want things to change, you have to make your voice heard on something more than lemmy. Representatives nearly all want to keep their jobs. If you show them your motivated enough to contact them, it shows them it’s important enough to you to sway your future vote. I’ve talked to many representatives in my life, at least on the left they generally see their job as representing constituent interests. If enough pressure is applied, they will often change their vote/introduce legislation, etc.

But they are not on lemmy getting the political temperature from keyboard warriors with more snark than braincells.

You know you can communicate with your current senator and representative right? Representative is literally their name, they represent you, if enough people apply pressure to the point they think their job is at risk, they will often magically have a “change of heart”.

Ahh, I misinterpreted your post as a complaint. I’m not a hypermiler, but I do find the efficient routes are often the lowest stress routes as well.

That’s in your trip options “prefer fuel efficient route”. You can turn it off.

Hopefully you mean ones still in construction… No need to cause an unprecedented environmental disaster after all.