So a few weeks back someone posted an article here about Super Recognizers. These are people that can instantly remember 80% of a persons face and can identify that face easily later on. It talked about how these people are getting hired by police departments across the world.

It caught my attention because my wife has always been freakishly good at facial recognition and recall. Well, she took the test, which led to another test, and today she received her official invitation to join Super Recognizers International!

This is a big deal because her company is about to go under and she has been considering leaving lately. This will open up doors for her to find work she can do from home on a flexible schedule. Thanks @skybrain for posting that article and thank you to the Tildes community for being here!

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Most California voters received their ballots this week, and as usual there are a bunch of propositions to vote on that we’ve barely heard of because nearly all election discussion is about national issues. So, what are you using to study up?

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Anything goes for this one: they can be general or specific, regional or global, IRL or digital, big or small, significant or insignificant. Pretty much any shared norm anywhere is fair game.

State what the current social norm is (and if it's specific to certain regions, cultures, or environments), why you want it to be different, and how you would improve it if you had the power to do so.

This will be a noisy thread. Please use the ignore feature if you do not want to see it in your feed.

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Debate starts ~90 minutes from the time of this posting.

Info from The Washington Post:

Location: The University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Moderator: Susan Page, Washington bureau chief, USA Today

Details: The debate will be 90 minutes long and have no commercial breaks. It will be divided into nine segments of 10 minutes each that the moderator gets to choose.

I'm interested in hearing your stories.

• What are/were your symptoms like?
• Do you know how/when you were exposed?
• What was your timeline of events, including symptoms, testing, quarantining, etc.?
• Did it affect other aspects of your life (e.g. employment, relationships, etc.)?
• Have you fully recovered?
• What's something about your experience that you haven't seen a lot of mentions of elsewhere?

And of course, feel free to share anything else not asked in these questions.

If you personally have not had it but someone close to you has, feel free to share your experiences with that as well.

META: If this topic is better served in ~health.coronavirus feel free to move it!

Whether it's thinking about a videogame, fantasizing your future, a new workout, pondering existence, etc. What do you spend your free time thinking about?
I like to spend a lot of my free time defining what a human is and what it means to be one, and I always enjoy watching as my ideas progress over time. So what is something you muse about in your free time? What do you like to sporadically think about and what questions do you often return to?

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A lot of things we live with have significant technical debt because they were designed and implemented without modern knowledge and understanding.

Knowing what we know now, in the present moment, what would you be interested in fundamentally redesigning if you could?

This does NOT have to be technology related, by the way, though it certainly can (anyone want to talk about redesigning usernames and passwords -- please?). It can pretty much be anything: NASCAR races, art criticism, specific social norms, sunglasses, etc.

In your explanation, don't just share what you're interested in tearing down, but how you would rebuild it for the better. What improvements would your methods bring to the table?

I really don’t have much to say, that’s 100% an honest question about something I truly fail to understand. I’m not opposed to having children if it seems right for some reason, but this is not a dream or project of mine. When I ask people about it, I get vague answers or stuff I cannot relate to at all. And some people seem to want to get married and have children just because they think they’re supposed to.

I’m really not in a position to judge, but I will probably politely ask further questions for my own education.

If that’s a sensitive topic for you and you don’t wish to indulge my curiosity, maybe this post is not for you! Everything surrounding parenthood tends to generate gratuitous animosity, so please be patient with my earnest ignorance.

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Is there any psychological thing behind it. if you are a changer why do you change your picture so often ? and what do you think about people who don't change it at all ?, and if you are constant why ? and what do you think about people who change it ?

it's not that important I know, but it has been in my head for long time not. why people change their prof pic, computer/phone background so often than others ?

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I read the Wikipedia article about "gaslighting" and know it comes from a 1944 film of the same name in which an abusive husband gradually dims the gaslights at home – while denying doing so – to drive his wife mad.

Yet whenever I see the term used (which happens a lot, lately) I can't make the connection. It seems people use it for the simple act of lying or denying something, which to me is mostly just... lying, not "gaslighting". Any kind of stupid, misguided act is getting the sinister "gaslighting" stamp as if it some 5d chess move when it simply looks like incompetence. The core principle of it seems to revolve around having a plan to psychologically manipulate someone but I mostly don't see the plan nor the actual goal. If anything untruthful you say about an important topic is "gaslighting", then the term doesn't seem to have a lot of value on its own. Wikipedia actually mentions "unconscious" gaslighting which seems to contradict its purpose of actually wanting to manipulate someone.

So, given its popularity, I'm curious if there might be a (succinct) definition of the term that helps me understand it properly? Do you think it's just a trendy term to throw at politicians doing shit you don't like? Am I missing an important detail?

About 15 years ago, I was impressed by a TV commercial. In a Bank of America ad about their investments in crappy neighborhoods (they didn’t phrase it that way), the spokesperson said the bank knew they’d succeeded, “when the flowerboxes begin showing up on front porches.”

Teams have the same sort of indirect indications, too, for good or ill. I’m writing an article about such non-obvious metrics that managers can use to judge whether a team is healthy.

One example is self-organizing get-togethers. It’s one thing for a manager to create team-building exercises. But when the team members arrange for such gatherings themselves — and it includes the whole team, not merely a clique — you know you have an actual team, not a bunch of employees working on the same tasks. (A negative “flower box indicator” of a project cancellation is when the company no longer refills the snack bar; but in this article I want to keep things positive.)

For managers and other leaders: What have you recognized as “flowerbox indicator”? I want to give examples that managers can use to recognize and celebrate success.

(We can have a great conversation here, but I do need to quote people by name, company, title if I use the input in the article.)

^{Admittedly this would be better under the panel setting of Kfwyre here but alas, I'm asking this question because I don't know about what happens to people under racism and organizing a discussion for people grouped by a plight you don't know about and have never experienced is probably a bad idea. Also IIRC "race" isn't really scientific. And please, correct me if needed. I know nothing about this.}

Either way, this is a pretty open-ended thread, the only 2 requirements I can imagine are the one in the title and that you state what 'race'/ethnicity you are and where you are (i.e black, US or Black, South Africa or Roma, most European countries and especially Balkan ones).

In this thread, @viridian said this:

Twitter, in my limited usage, has a completely different problem. It actively encourages you, by rule of the 280 character limit, to strip away all nuance and conversational tone. You can avoid this of course, but the UI ensures that you then suffer the consequences of having to

split up your posts into multiple tweets, which is bad by design in every single way for the user. Replies become distributed to different tweets, and thus inaccessible without a series of 2*(# of tweets) clicks. Everything about the design is just begging you to

box in the entirety of your thoughts to 280 character blocks, which I think is the single largest issue the platform has when it comes to encouraging thoughtful engagement. Twitter actives fights nuance and explanation, and so the platforms users follow the bad behavior

patterns Twitter encourages.

Completely agree, it is a bit of a feedback loop. You do have to say though that even the fact it's no longer at the original 140 characters is a concession to the fact that the kind of discourse that now happens on there rather than what it was intended for. I imagine designing something to handle both types of usage well while maintaining the platform's identity can't be easy.

(Okay, this one was said by @culturedleftfoot.)

It's certainly not an easy problem to solve, it may even be impossible. That said though, maybe a 280 character mass social media platform is just destined to be a net negative for society.

And it reminded me of this comment I wrote a while ago:

To be fair it the term 'social media' is pretty useless when it comes to describing a site's purpose. In twitter, for example, you have celebrities rambling about random aspects of their lives, politicians delivering serious to obviously canned responses to serious or made-up problems, anime artists sharing their work, YouTubers sharing sneak peeks for future videos or shilling out, all in the same platform, which is disponible in 33 languages across every continent except Sub-Saharan Africa. (which was started specifically as a SMS & microblogging site, hence the word limit). Not many 'social media platforms' actually have their intended purpose be their sole purpose, which can backfire intensely. Social media platforms might have decided to recommend people with similar opinions to you as an unintended consequence in order to find people with similar hobbies to you, rather than to create an echo chamber of radicals and stifle communication between different political beliefs.

(Not that the fact that's a real possibility excuses them from not doing anything to combat it once they realized that was one of the side effects of their decision for most or all of my lifetime.)

One of the IMO most underrated problems with the state of social media today is that social media platforms are used in far too many ways for any one site to be designed around.

YouTube for example is used as a meme-consumption feed, source of education, video-game feed, ASMR feed, news feed, music feed, child cartoon feed and more.

And since YouTube was designed mostly for video sharing, things like the comment section were of secondary importance and areas like educational or political content are greatly harmed by that since the YouTube comment section is basically impervious to serious discussion. The algorithm also appears to be basically universal for all these vastly different types of content. This also hurts educational and political channels (unless they somehow accommodate to that, usually by lying ala PragerU) but also animation channels.

Another example would be Facebook which originally (supposedly?) started off as a platform for connecting with people, apparently limited to universities initially. Now it's used for sharing memes, news, personal life updates and more, things which are fundamentally quite different from one another and probably shouldn't be under the same site, since the things important when it comes to spreading a news article are wildly different from those when spreading a meme (format?). (Or management, obviously.)

IMO, decentralizing social media along these lines into say news sharing platforms, meme-sharing platforms, image-sharing platforms, educational platforms, social platforms (where you go to make friends, which is what social media billed itself as early on IIRC) is IMO one of the more interesting but underlooked options and in some senses is looked on into with places like Instagram and pinterest (although obviously if these sites aren't regulated to provide privacy it's all smoke and mirrors and given this requires government action I don't blame people for ignoring this all that much).

So does anyone else have any more thoughts?

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I listen to quite a few, from ones related to my industry to ones related to my hobbies, to some just related to history or storytelling. Most of my choices have been at the recommendation of others, so I'm looking to add some to this week's lineup.

Queued up for my upcoming week:

• Citations Needed
• Darknet Diaries
• Reply All
• Rev Left Radio

If you don't know of a good recommendation, what podcasts do you have queued up for this week?

I’m pretty sure every dog owner thinks their dog is the best most unique dog in the world, and the same is true about cat owners, snake owners, etc!

So make your best case: why is your animal companion the coolest in the whole world?

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I've been thinking about note-taking a lot recently. I'm not a particularly great note-taker myself, though I do use a calendar and a to-do list. My SO is a habitual digital note-taker, but also a hand-written journaller too. I do neither of these things (and don't feel the worse for the lack), but I am curious about how my fellow tilderen feel towards notes in general, and journalling to a lesser extent.

Are you a note-taker? If not, why not? If so, how does it add value to your life? Do you prefer a digital or a pen-and-paper notebook, or even a hybrid approach? And do you have a system?

I don't mean an issue where you're maybe ambivalent or undecided beforehand, or if you've willingly made an /r/changemyview type of post. I mean an instance where you already have your own stance and come face-to-face with an opposite, more convincing and/or more factual viewpoint that compels you to change your perspective.

I'd like to think I'm more open-minded than the norm, and I can't recall it ever happening to me... which is not to say it's definitely never happened, but you'd think it'd have made an impact worth remembering. And frankly, if it actually has never happened, well, what's the freaking point of discussing anything?

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With the ever-growing stream of acquisitions and mergers, it got me thinking: Why do we permit companies to do this?

What would the harm be in banning this practice? If a company is becomes insolvent, release all of it's IP to the public domain, dissolve all patents/trademarks, and sell off physical assets to pay debtors (first of which should be former employees IMO, but that's a separate discussion).

Edit: I think my original intention of the post to kick off some interesting discussion has worked. Thank you to all current and future posters!

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I don’t even know where to start. I realize it’s not meant to be a coherent piece of text, but rather a (fortunately short) stream of related thoughts.

I could talk about when an ambulance took me to the hospital because I was so drunk I couldn’t even move.

I could talk about how with other friends I bullied people for no justifiable reason.

I could talk about how I can’t stop watching porn, and consequently how my sexual tastes diverged from the normal, making me guilty of engaging in and craving illegal content.

I could talk about how I wasted literally years trying to finish a bachelor degree, to the point where I am now lying to my family and friends about exams.

I could talk about the many other stupid things I did, some of which while being recorded by people who aren’t even friends any more and who could easily ruin my life by sending them out (not that they have a reason to do so, but nothing can change the fact that I am powerless).

I could talk about how I wish suicide was an option, but since it’s not, the best alternative is sleeping while enjoying dreams. Too bad you can’t sleep forever.

The list could probably go on.

I can’t seem to spend a day without dwelling on at least one of these (and other) burdens; be it a memory, a negative feeling, an evil thought, an action, or a combination thereof.

When I think about the past, I feel overwhelmed by nothing but regret. When I think about the present, I’m filled with guilt. When I think about the future, I feel fear (of life, of ageing, of death).

No one can object to the intrinsic meaninglessness of life, unless you take into account religion (which I do not) or subjective purpose (which I could consider, but it’s impossible to consistently focus on that when you are reminded everyday of the underlying nonsense of life while fantasizing about suicide).

I often ask myself If I’m being truly honest with myself or if I’m semi-unconsciously sabotaging my existence just because playing the role of the victim is admittedly easier than fighting for your life.

I am ultimately confused by the reason why I am the way I am: is it because of my past (wrongdoing)? Is it because I suffer from a mental disease? Is it because I suffer from a physical disease? Is it because that’s simply how (evil) I am? I have so many questions and so little answers.

If I see myself in someone's child here then I'm deleting this thread, no questions asked /s

You should probably say/indicate your and your children's age and sex (can be plural, obviously.)

You can follow the Q&A format below but you don't have to.

A few questions that come to (my very uninitiated) mind are:

How much time do you spend on them?

If you aren't their biological parent:

(i.e you're @aphoenix not hetero and a parent didn't want to go through fkin birthing people an adoptive parent, for example)

• Where did you (uhh) find them?
• If it was an orphanage, what was it like there? (Can you even find children elsewhere if they don't have parents?)
• How many children were there to choose from?
• What led you to choose the child you picked in specific instead of someone else? (Dear God, is this an ethical question to ask?)

How do you parent them?

• Do you follow what they're doing on the Internet or how much they use it? How much?

• Do you encourage them to have a good diet? How much?

• Do you encourage them to do more chores? How much?

• When you do this, how cooperative are they? If they aren't, what do you do to convince them?

How do you and your partner split the time spent taking care of them?

What was the most unexpected thing about parenting to you?

More personal questions below. (You can avoid these, I probably would too tbh)

If you had a particular preference/expectation for what you wanted/expected your child to be and got something else, what did you do?

How did birth(-ing?) go? What was it like?

What was being/seeing your partner be pregnant like?

Is there anything you regret doing when parenting them?

Why did you have them?

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I'm having a hard time with this.

I stopped listening to some bands because of what they did, do or not do.

The guy from Inquisition turned out a pedophile.

Mgla, while not a nazi band per se, are at least nazi sympathizers. So i stopped listening.

Vektor: the guy is a wife beater, but there are is some controversy.

And i absolutely loved these bands. While i can find similar bands, it's not the same.

But what i am doing not listening to it? I'm the one not listening to it and that's it. I will never give them money (i threw my Mgla shirt away) because i obtain the music by another means.

I am not helping with their popularity because i'm the only one in my circle that listens to these subgenres of metal and i mostly do it alone.

So... what's the point of depriving myself of music that i like? They are the ones who suck, not me! But at the same time i feel bad listening.

What are your thoughts on this?

This question is inspired by the university of Michigan's grad student union's announcement that it will strike this week. As noted in the university's response Michigan state law prohibits state employees from striking and GEO's contract with UofM (signed in April) has a clause that prohibits work stoppages.

Are strikes performed in violation of the law (state or otherwise) or a contract justified? Why or why not?

I'm in line at a free covid testing site. It is a CVS minuteclinic. I have to use the normal drivethrough, and self administer the nasal swab.

What the hell is that bullshit? My wife went to a 'real' test site where a professional swabbed and she described it as a pap smear on the back of her eye.

So I'm going to a CVS so they can print a barcode, give me, an unqualified layperson a long qtip and a test tube to do my own test and drop in a collection box. Which they will likely ship to an actual lab.

And for all of this 'work', they get to bill my insurance for hundreds or more, which will likely mean rate hikes later.

Our healthcare system is a sham, and this is just further proof. Given I have to do it myself anyway, the government should just mail me a kit which I then drop off.

It would not shock me in the slightest if they actually just drop the tests in a dumpster and just send a 'negative' a few days later.

Edit: 40 min later, through line and swabbed. Yes, they just have Quest diagnostics empty the dropbox. 0 reason CVS should be involved.

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Note: I didn't want to clutter up the title, but "parents" in the title and below applies to anyone who raised you, whatever their role or relation.

As we grow up, our view of those who raised us changes. Some of their "unfair" rules might make more sense in hindsight, for example. I'm curious for answers to the following questions:

• What were your parents wrong about?

This is something that they legitimately missed the mark on, for any reason. You might have realized it at the time, or have come to realize it in hindsight. Either way, you can definitively say it was the wrong call now.

• What were they right about?

There's probably a lot they did right, but in particular I'm interested in stuff that either seemed wrong to you as a child but you've now come to realize was the right call, or right stuff that you now realize is far more important than you did at the time.

Also, with any discussion of parenting it's important to remember that everyone's experiences are difficult and that some responses might open up about some difficult things. Please remember to be kind and empathetic in your responses!

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In my country (Brazil), it's probably the "Centrão". It's basically like, a dozen or so centrist/center-right/random parties who vote together as if they were a bloc for reasons which can only be explained with corruption, which seems to be the case. (The Wikipedia article ^(PT-BR) straight up says that it's a group that tries to approach the executive for political favors so yeah.)

I'm not sure how we deal with the US, given how much the US has to cite as strange, but a lot of the stuff on this site is already dedicated to the US.

I was inspired to make this thread after seeing the very interesting side-conversation going on here.

Guiding questions:

• Do you pirate media? If so, why? if not, why not?
• When, if ever, do you feel pirating something is ethical?
• Do you have a "code" that you follow for when it's right/not right to pirate something?
• In what ways is piracy damaging, and in what ways is it beneficial?
• If you used to pirate certain things and then stopped, what stopped you?
• If you used to pay for access to certain things and then went back to pirating them, why did you move back?

This is a very broad and deep topic with a lot of different avenues to explore (different types of media, different regions, archives, pre-release content, law, etc.), so I'm interested in seeing what Tildes thinks.

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I find it difficult to reach out to people, especially so publicly, but this shit is getting out of hand, and I need to let it out.

Tonight I couldn't sleep because I've lost some sensitivity in my left arm. You know how you get the numbness in your arm in the morning when you sleep on it at night? Except I haven't: it just started to go off slowly, fully functional but clearly numb in places. Tonight's different because in addition to my arm, like the last time, several other parts of my body express the same symptom: my right foot and my right shoulder. It's one of the most terrifying things I've experienced in a long time.

I think stress is finally getting to me.

I'm pretty sure it's stress because I'm an otherwise-healthy young male with no history of chronic disease – or susceptability to common ones, even – with a stable diet and lifestyle. I haven't had significant changes in my routines or preferences for a long time, except for the fact that I started walking more. I haven't been outside the city, let alone the country, for almost a year.

The only major thing that's changed is my living situation.

I've been trying to make it as an independent creator – writer, developer, designer, modder – for a year now, maybe two. I've been working on several projects publicly and a lot more privately: mostly writing, some development, my website included. It hasn't been arduous but has been very long without much result to speak of. I haven't been marketing myself a whole lot, and frankly, there isn't much to show aside from a lot of peripheral talk (like the production logs of the website or Mythos).

I live alone in a small studio owned by my parents. They also afford me a small weekly fund of about $27, for just about $110/mo.. Even in Russia, where I live, that isn't a lot of money – you get to buy just about enough food for a month, and that's it – but I get it for existing, so I don't complain. On the surface, it's a stable and excellent arrangement that I should be nothing but grateful for.

Last week, I made an error in telling my parents it might be a good idea to sell the studio and use the funds to move to a bigger city and let myself live off them while I develop my non-career career path (they've made it clear with anything but a written statement this studio is meant to be for me, and the ownership is but a formality to avoid paying more taxes). My mother lashed out at me: how stupid of an idea it was to rent when I have a perfectly-good apartment, and where would I end up when I eventually spend everything down to the last dime... I don't remember the rest of it 'cause I tuned it out, for the sake of my emotional stability at the time.

I haven't told them about what I'm trying to accomplish here: they think I'm looking for a site designer position. I haven't told them a lot of things: about my depression, about my anxiety, about what I like, what I want, what I need... I wouldn't want them to know 'cause I already feel trapped in their influence on my life. They've been helicopter-parenting my whole life, and every time I tried to gain that much autonomy and freedom, I've been met with resistance, and blame, and "what will people think of you", and even fake tears. There's no dialogue to be had, and the energy it takes to make any kind of meaningful progress is the energy I don't have.

So, I've been trying quietly to make it on my own.

I've been using depression-induced mood swings to maintain some degree of order in my life, but recently it's become impossible. My apartment is a mess, and I keep up only what I immediately need; even that takes a lot. I had a brief few days of victory recently when I push through sleeping later and later until I started waking up very early, when I feel most energetic and positive – and even that eventually washed away. It's a good day when I'm able to get one thing done. The rest of them I weather out as best I can, including spending much more on comfort food (and gaining proportional weight) than I should. It also usually involves a lot of gaming and mindless watching of Internet videos, for what seems to me obvious reasons.

I've been through periods like these before, but they've never felt quite so hopeless. I need to make money to get the freedom I need, which I can't do because I barely have the energy, which is because I can barely afford to live through the week with the vices that keep me steady, which I need because I don't have the freedom I need...

I'm not lazy. I can work long days. I have been working long days on projects that promised some degree of "more freedom". Back when I thought Intergrid would be my saving grace, I'd work studiously to make it happen by a set deadline. Earlier still, I'd work for $80/mo. on a website redesign that didn't go through. (It was for a friend, and what may be a quarter of rent for you had been almost double my monthly allowance, and it was perfectly enough 'cause I was enjoying the work.) I don't waste my days on senseless entertainment if I can help it: I have several projects I'm working on when I can, that I enjoy doing and would do for free if I had a financial base otherwise.

So why not find a job?

The jobs I did hold previously – a couple of days each – gave me no hope for finding something locally. I live in a semi-rural region of Russia where modern job opportunities aren't very present. People here work hard physically but not intellectually. (First-world problems, I know, but at this stage I can't afford to waste what little energy I have.) Jobs elsewhere? I don't think I'd cut it. For all my experimentation and trying things out and showing bits and pieces here and there, I don't have a portfolio worth a damn, and the last time I tried making one felt like grinding my teeth on a metal rail. That $80/mo. job I had, I had because I mentioned to a friend that I could take that thing he wanted to do for him, and he said "Yeah, okay, you've been talking a lot about web design so far, handle it for me". I don't think someone who doesn't know me would be that trusting.

So it feels like doing something I enjoy – which doesn't take away what little energy I have – is the only way for me, at least at the moment. Make enough to be able to move out to most places in Russia and not have to worry about food and the roof over my shoulder.

What I'm going to try is stick to a schedule. I prefer to take my time, work out the kinks and iron out the bugs before publishing something. Given the circumstances, however, it may be time to employ some mental tools. I've heard advice before about publishing a story, or a sketch, or an episode of the podcast every month, or ever week, as long as it's on rails. Good story? Bad story? It goes out. I have a few stories I want to tell, but I've been keeping 'em "unlisted" for a long time now, hoping to work it all out beforehand. Maybe rough as they are, I'm better off with them seeing the light of day. Like I said: I'm not lazy. I just need to find a way to make it work.

Not submitting a link. Last thing that scumbag needs is web traffic.

But...let's suppose every one of this items actually came to pass in a reasonable form. There is some stuff there even I would legitimately want. So let's see the good/bad of Trump's lies, and discuss.

I'm bolding things that are (IMHO) obviously very, very bad. Italicizing ones that might be good, but are likely just lies. Striking out anything that is blatant pandering that the president has 0 ability to act on.

The purpose of this mental exercise is to see how people who don't keep up with politics might fall for the rhetoric. Know your enemy and all of that.

JOBS

• Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months
• Create 1 Million New Small Businesses
• Cut Taxes to Boost Take-Home Pay and Keep Jobs in America
• Enact Fair Trade Deals that Protect American Jobs
• "Made in America" Tax Credits
  • I like the idea of trying to locally source stuff. Tax Credits are not how to do it.
• Expand Opportunity Zones
  • Eh, sounds good on paper...but will likely just be another loophole.
• Continue Deregulatory Agenda for Energy Independence

ERADICATE COVID-19

• Develop a Vaccine by The End Of 2020
• Return to Normal in 2021
  • Maybe if we actually did what we needed to do. I don't have my hopes up.
• Make All Critical Medicines and Supplies for Healthcare Workers in The United States
• Refill Stockpiles and Prepare for Future Pandemics
  • Yay for fixing your fuck-up way too late?

END OUR RELIANCE ON CHINA

• Bring Back 1 Million Manufacturing Jobs from China
• Tax Credits for Companies that Bring Back Jobs from China
• Allow 100% Expensing Deductions for Essential Industries like Pharmaceuticals and Robotics who Bring Back their Manufacturing to the United States
• No Federal Contracts for Companies who Outsource to China
  • Outsourcing bad. But China isn't the only place.
• Hold China Fully Accountable for Allowing the Virus to Spread around the World
  • God. Damn. It. I have no words.

HEALTHCARE

• Cut Prescription Drug Prices
• Put Patients and Doctors Back in Charge of our Healthcare System
• Lower Healthcare Insurance Premiums
• End Surprise Billing
• Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions
  • Wait, didn't ACA do that?
• Protect Social Security and Medicare
  • They obviously mean by increasing age to collect, privatizing, and actually trying to dismantle it. But you know...would be good if they did the opposite of what they've tried to do the last 2+ decades.
• Protect Our Veterans and Provide World-Class Healthcare and Services
  • How about for everybody else too?

EDUCATION

• Provide School Choice to Every Child in America
  • Yea, let's do away with church/state separation and also enable crippling debt from kindergarten. /s
• Teach American Exceptionalism
  • I have no words. This is basically the worst thing ever.

DRAIN THE SWAMP

• Pass Congressional Term Limits
• End Bureaucratic Government Bullying of U.S. Citizens and Small Businesses
  • Nice soundbite...but 'End Bureaucratic Government' is code for "Let's stop regulating to prevent discrimination and other things that are generally good ideas"
• Expose Washington’s Money Trail and Delegate Powers Back to People and States
• Drain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organizations That Hurt American Citizens
  • Yea...cause the USA is the bastion of all that is good and does no wrong /s

DEFEND OUR POLICE

• Fully Fund and Hire More Police and Law Enforcement Officers
• Increase Criminal Penalties for Assaults on Law Enforcement Officers
• Prosecute Drive-By Shootings as Acts of Domestic Terrorism
• Bring Violent Extremist Groups Like ANTIFA to Justice
  • Somehow I think the actual Nazis won't be targeted by this.
• End Cashless Bail and Keep Dangerous Criminals Locked Up until Trial
  • End monetary Bail. Anything else: bad.

END ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS

• Block Illegal Immigrants from Becoming Eligible for Taxpayer-Funded Welfare, Healthcare, and Free College Tuition
• Mandatory Deportation for Non-Citizen Gang Members
• Dismantle Human Trafficking Networks
• End Sanctuary Cities to Restore our Neighborhoods and Protect our Families
  • I can't bold this one hard enough
• Prohibit American Companies from Replacing United States Citizens with Lower-Cost Foreign Workers
  • Nice soundbite, but give Unions power again and those kinds of problems will resolve themselves.
• Require New Immigrants to Be Able to Support Themselves Financially

INNOVATE FOR THE FUTURE

• Launch Space Force, Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon and Send the First Manned Mission to Mars
• Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure System
• Win the Race to 5G and Establish a National High-Speed Wireless Internet Network
  • Not sure who you're 'winning' against, but whatever.
• Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air
  • Um....yea.... how about everybody gets those things?
• Partner with Other Nations to Clean Up our Planet’s Oceans

AMERICA FIRST FOREIGN POLICY

• Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home
• Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share
• Maintain and Expand America’s Unrivaled Military Strength
• Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans
  • That sounds a lot like 'Continue with Endless Wars'
• Build a Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System
  • Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped bombing everybody else this wouldn't be needed.

Sorry, couldn't resist adding my additional commentary. So yea, looking over it again...very, very bad. But enough gems in there that the uninformed that only hears about those might fall for it.

I had my first cigar yesterday. I've been overthinking too much. Too much time alone in the dorm. My roommate came in after I got back from dinner, and saw I was kinda stressed. He said "take a look at this" and pulled out a box from under his bed. He cracked it open, and I saw some cigars, a lighter, some other equipment I don't recognize. He asked if I wanted to have one. I said sure, though I've never smoked anything before.

We left the dorm during the twilight hours and hit up some hiking trails. He busted out the lighter and lit us both up. I was pretty intimidated at first, but it actually tasted quite nice. Sweet, a little bitter. We walked a slow mile as twilight turned to dusk, just talking guy stuff. Workouts, growing up, music, whatever. I thought it was an excellent way to wind down the day and keep my mind where it belongs, here and now. It seemed to be something of a ritual, a little pleasure to be had on occasion with a friend or two.

Do you guys take a similar approach to tobacco? Maybe some other little rituals like coffee, or beer, or tea, or a walk on the beach?