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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I went to a private elementary school where I was pretty picked on. One of my parents grew up poor and was an immigrant, the other grew up poor and rural, so neither really understood why I had a hard time socially in a suburban private school with mostly wealthy kids.They didn’t know how to help.

    I transferred to a public middle school where I was neither popular nor unpopular. My elementary years taught me to avoid relationships so I just tried to blend in and keep things very surface level with other kids. I had no close friends but I was not being picked on.

    In high school I developed a couple of closer friendships, but I would not say that I ever completely let my guard down. Like middle school, I wasn’t really picked on but I was certainly not one of the popular kids. I did let myself join athletics so I developed more self confidence, but social relationships were still superficial.

    I’m now in my 40s and have been confronting myself about the fact that other than my wife and kids, I’ve not let myself have too many close relationships. I know it was self protective, but it also kept me isolated. My wife cannot and should not be the one person who meets all my needs.

    I’m putting myself out there a bit more but man is it hard to make new friends at this age. Better late than never I guess.



  • I hear this a lot, and part of me understands the sentiment. But it’s important to keep in mind that these are state level politicians, not national. Representing their districts is a part time job. Most of them have jobs like attorney, doctor, business owner employing other people, etc. To stay absent would mean not only leaving these responsibilities, but it’s also leaving their spouses and kids. On top of that the state government started imposing $500/day fines. Then they sued and froze the accounts of Beto O’Rourke’s fundraiser to help them meet their expenses (that was just overturned by a judge this afternoon).

    When it became clear that other states were willing to redraw their maps to cancel out Texas’s naked power grab, it changed the calculus. They achieved the objective of drawing attention to the issue and they got other states to commit to action so that even if Texas redraws the map, it won’t matter on a national level. They’ve already paid significant personal cost. How much should they be expected to pay? Should their families/clients/patients/employees also suffer?

    I don’t know that there’s a right answer. Maybe this is the sort of tough call that defines real rebellions from performative ones. I do think that it’s easy to criticize from a distance because for most of us the principles and ideas are abstract. But for them the costs are already being felt in concrete ways.


  • I read elsewhere that they never sold it. I read the article but it seems to contradict itself. It says Costco “stopped selling” it, but it also quotes Costco as saying “Our position at this time not to sell mifepristone, which has not changed, is based on the lack of demand from our members and other patients, who we understand generally have the drug dispensed by their medical providers,” (emphasis mine).

    So either Reuters is wrong when it says they stopped selling, or Costco is lying when it says it’s position never changed


















    1. He’s a narcissist. People don’t get to his level of wealth by having compassion for the feelings of others. No billionaire ever gat there through their own hard work, they did it by taking advantage of the hard work of other people. He literally does not give a fuck. But narcissists aren’t typically born in a vacuum.

    2. Do some research on his upbringing. His father was a narcissist and did all he could to make his son unfettered by compassion for others through constant power games and humiliation. He was raised in South Africa where there was a huge macho culture and it was expected that the strong took advantage of the weak. Elon himself was picked on mercilessly by his classmates, though so he literally had to cope by suppressing his own emotions and not caring about the feelings of most others. I say “most” because the exception would be the fact that he was constantly trying to earn the approval of his father because of his twisted upbringing. Even after his parents divorced when he was 9, he eventually went back to live with his dad despite the constant criticism. In short, Elon learned during his formative years that compassion was a weakness and you can’t just flip a switch to unlearn that.

    3. He does copious amounts of drugs and sleeps with a constant stream of women to hide from any possible problematic feelings that would get in the way of his ambitions