Sorry, but value is overwhelmingly better than growth-weighted equities. It’s not even close. We are talking about value doing 4.4% a year better on average for the past 98 years. Nobody should weight in growth for their retirement portfolio.

And value doesn’t have anything to do with dividends. Plenty of growth stocks hand those out like candy. It’s about fundamental value versus the market value of the stock. Value weighted funds are about catching value premiums from undervalued equities. Dimensional and Avantis make their bread and butter doing that.

Dividends are frankly, a total waste of time. They come from the value of the equity. It’s not free money. The stock price is reduced to give it to you. Just sell what you need to meet your goals or go with retirement income funds which actually pay interest and still hold equities (and maybe add ultra short bond funds in if you want). That way you can control it your disbursements better.

Most TDFs are designed for those kinds of use cases for a reason.

I grew up in a mixed pet family. My dad loves cats; my mom dogs. It was exactly the way you describe it, too. I get why people adore cats and dogs both, but they do draw different personalities.

Yes, you can’t expect an animal that basically tamed itself to respect your boundaries, and that’s why dog people don’t like them. They jump on the counter or try to break your coffee cup if it’s too close to the edge of the table.

But overwhelmingly, in my experience as a cat shelter volunteer, people who have owned catsand do not like them feel that way, not because Mittens got overstimulated and scratched them once, but because they cannot cope with their boundaries being disrespected all the time. It isn’t the cats fault, true. It’s just an animal acting the way it evolved to act–but let’s try to be understanding about why many people struggle with them as pets.

It really does take a certain personality to be okay with living with a cat.

I like cats, but this argument is dumb. The people I know who don’t like cats don’t like them precisely because cats don’t respect boundaries or consent the way dogs do.

I have no idea. I know the city animal control has it now. She is trying to get him released, though.

A friend of my wife and I got a pit bull a couple months ago. She was going on and on about how sweet he is and how he would never hurt anyone. Last week, it mauled her roommate. Nearly took his hand off while he was changing into his work clothes. His career is likely over and she’s still defending the dog.

Probably the allegations she had an affair with Trump aide Corey Lewandowski. As we all know, family values is when you cheat on your husband.

Congress is hopelessly broken, gridlocked and unable to pass policy on its own merit. That’s how we end up with quadrillion page omnibus bills every year. It’s a failed institution, and it’s been this way since at least Reagan.

That’s very true. It’s less that it can happen, and more that it’s happening with virtually every trade agreement at once, along with dozens of diplomatic norms.

That said, the authority of the executive is undeniably stronger today than back then. Congress has acquiesed its authority and powers on virtually every issue imaginable and it alternates between being too complicit and too incompetent to change that (and too gridlocked to achieve meaningful policy anyway).

There are too many metastisizing issues to count at this point.

It could take decades longer than even that. America has experienced mind-boggling collapse in just 4 months. The damage to its reputation will take an entire restructuring of the powers of the executive branch to overcome. I mean, who wants to make a deal with an admin, when every 4 years it can go back on its word?

We still have at least 43 more months to look forward to. The bottom hasn’t even begun to drop.

Is it more underreported than the notoriously underreported abuse in schools?

For real, we are on a post where an abusive career teacher got a ‘teacher of the year award’ no doubt in part for her behavior around students.

I am not doing this to whatabout abuse in the Catholic Church. I left it and won’t be going back. But it’s so odd to bring it up on a post about a teacher getting charged, the school clearly not identifying the problem (she had been a teacher for 11 years, it had been going on for a year, they didn’t report it and even rewarded her behavior prior to the reports).

Schools have a serious systemic problem here too, and I don’t believe we should deflect every time it makes the news. That’s all.

Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Got hit with three notifications at the same time and replied to the wrong one.

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You clearly didn’t read it. The rate not the raw number. Per the Dept. of Education, 5-7% of teachers are abusers. That is 20-50+% higher than the rate (i.e percent) priests abuse. The average school in America has several abusers in it.

Lemmy talks a big game about the Catholics, and damn does that church know how to run a cover up, but schools are frankly ripe for reforms and accountability.

Teachers abuse students at a rate of 20-50% higher than Catholic priests. Not defending the priests or anything, but I think we forget how horrificly high the abuse rate of teachers is.

You know he actually did a Nazi salute right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy?wprov=sfla1

Speaking as a former Catholic, I honestly believe being more conservative will make the church more relevant. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, to be clear, but we see what is happening to more liberal Christian denominations universally–they’re rapidly declining. There are a number of reasons why that is, but liberal theology failing to retain members is a component there.

I think the most relevant issue the Church can bring to bear today is one that conservative and liberal Catholics alike tend to agree on. Even the most hard-line trad priests and laity I knew had a visceral hatred for laizez-faire capitalism (and often capitalism at large) and the commodification of the human experience. Pope Francis gave voice to it, and the next pope must follow suit. If he doesn’t, regardless of theology, the church is doomed.

My first rec would be Rod Bennett’s The Early Church in Her Own Words. It’s a good starting point that grounds you in what the early authors of Christianity were thinking and discussing.

Yeah, more or less. Spitballing, but it’s probably still more related to the Sun. The 25th would’ve been on of the first days studious Romans could tell the daytime was growing longer.

This whole period in Roman History is extremely cool. Maybe not to live in though lol.

I’m sorry, but your first claim, that Christmas is a co-opting of a pagan holiday (Sol Invictus) is just plain wrong. It predates Sol Invictus. Emperor Aurelian established Sol Invictus as a holiday in 274 AD.

Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235 AD) claimed Jesus was born 8 days before the Kalends of January, which corresponds to Dec. 25. It is vastly more likely, and much more widely accepted at this point, that Dec. 25 was chosen because Africanus (author of Chronographiae, an early attempt at a Christian timeline) and other early Christians believed the Annunciation was March 25. They just added 9 months to that and bam, December 25.

If anything was intentional about the 25th in particular, it would’ve been due to contemporary Jewish beliefs that Prohpets died on the same day they are born or conceived. Believing that Jesus was conceived on the 25th of March, the parallel 25th of December would not only have been chronologically accurate, but spiritually significant.

These early Christians existed well before the establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion. There was a substantial desire to distance themselves from Pagan practice at the time. Virtually all sources that it relates to Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, outside of a single margin note in the 12th century, are post-enlightenment.

Edit to address Easter eggs, in particular: Undeniably the symbology of the egg as representing life and death predates Christianity. Frankly, it predates the Roman religion too. It’s more likely that eggs came from Persian cultural practices, spread to middle eastern churches, then gradually migrated west.

That’s just how culture works and I honestly don’t see what the point of bringing it up is. Only the most simple-minded evangelicals would be scared of what amounts to adiaphora.

Are we obliged to belive that every religious practice from every religion ought to have been instituted specifically by its God? Religion is for us, even most religious people will tell you that. Islamic prayer forms are derived from Coptic Christians, Jewish and Christian thought intermingled; Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist thought has at various points cross-pollinated in fascinating ways.

I truly believe more non-religious people should read David Bentley Hart’s Experience of God. I think, if you can put up with his snark and dense prose, it would help a lot to understand what it actually means to believe in a God, rather than bottom dollar examples like rural evangelicals and Islamic extremists.

As far as Christmas trees go, the fact that we do not see a single example of one until the 15th century, leaves me confident that their adoption wasn’t related to co-opting ppaganism. European Paganism was dead and buried by then. Any practices that remained would’ve been perceived as cultural. The Christmas Tree probably had more to do with wealthy Protestants trying to distinguish themselves from Catholic Christmas traditions more than anything else.

Heck, the Vatican refused to put up a tree until the 1980s. That rivalry runs deep.