My friend recently lamented how numerous friends of his became Trump supporters due to the LGBTQ discussions happening in their children's schools. Regardless of how anyone feels about it, it's just not popular and it was a major reason that dickbag was re-elected. Even if it seems like the correct moral decision, the unpopularity of it led to a far worse situation. Choosing pragmatism and reading the room rather than ideological stances could have helped us prevail, but now we're all stuck in a reality far worse than a bit less tolerance toward a particular group of people. The worst part is that I fear we haven't learned our lesson, as I'm sure the negative replies to this comment will demonstrate.

Our Secretary of Education has promised to body slam illiteracy and suplex low math scores. She promises to be the undertaker of increased enrollment in colleges and the ultimate warrior of school safety. With her extensive background in our educational system and her stone cold attitude, there's no way she won't rock at her job.

Shit, Son, you've still got a lot to learn.

Creating a national sales tax

Tariffs are worse than a national sales tax. Sales tax is paid directly by the consumer at the time of purchase. Tariffs are paid immediately by the importer for all units, regardless of whether or not they can be sold. So it increases the immediate expenses of the company importing the goods, reducing their liquidity, and then they may never recover those costs since, unlike corporate taxes, the expense is paid regardless of whether or not the item is ever sold.

The more fuckwits who capitulate, the more pressure there will be on those who resist. This orange-utan is almost 80 years old and has spent his life eating like a child whose parents were out of town while doing as little exercise as possible. It's three more years at most - have some fucking self-respect and call his bullshit out for what it is. It's not like most Americans don't already know what's going on deep down inside.

Is anyone else tired of winning yet?

In what way does it fundamentally change the product? Does it stop keeping food cold? Does it stop generating a shopping list and displaying it on the screen? What fundamental feature in the product description does it stop doing or fundamentally change?

In the long-term, no one knows because the dickheads in charge can change the ToS on a whim and the next update can completely alter the behavior to whatever they want. This is why I refuse to buy almost anything anymore. If they keep pushing us, maybe we'll finally start to figure out that happiness doesn't come from materialism. More realistically, maybe we'll shift our materialistic values to older items that aren't capable of modern fuckery. Either way, the companies pushing this shit would reap what they've sown.

This is one of the oldest rationalizations for shitty behavior: "if I won't do it, somebody else will anyway". And that may be true, but why compromise your own principles and contribute to moral decay based on an assumption which may not even turn out to be true? If someone else wants to be an asshole to make easy money, then it'll be their reputation they're flushing down the shitter. And if society holds those people accountable, fewer people will be inclined to engage in that behavior.

I came here to say this. And with the current guy in the White House, I imagine they'll succeed in getting this implemented.

I'll be alright with this so long as the manager of my 401K gives me the option to avoid having any of my money invested in companies that don't release quarterly earnings reports. American companies love bragging about their earnings, so any company that goes out of its way to hide that data should be considered extremely questionable.

Government officials using personal devices to conduct government business has become normalized since at least W. Bush's administration. There should be an executive order to ignore all e-mails from government officials if it doesn't originate from a .gov address and the penalty should be immediate termination. Hey Donny, instead of waging wars on paper straws and low-flow toilets, why don't you use your power to get your administration in order?

I love how so many people in the comments are acting like the average person is a network engineer. "Stop being a luddite, grandma, and just deploy a self-hosted VPN container in your Proxmox cluster!"

NAT may not be intended to be a security layer, but there are absolutely security benefits when using it - especially for people who aren't savvy enough to implement a full security stack. Would you rather your grandparents have all of their computing devices publicly addressable at all times or behind a NAT? I doubt grandma's gonna get feisty enough to start adding forwarding rules to services on her laptop.

Ever noticed how much fewer "fun" cars there are on the road these days?

Actually, most things seem to be far less fun and far more subdued these days. Look at videos of concerts and people having fun in the 60s through the 90s and then look at videos of today. I'm only half joking when say that I wonder if they're putting sedatives in the water supply.

Women are the gatekeepers of sex and yet you are still somehow blaming men for this problem

Please reread my comment. None of my statements were meant to confer any type of blame. At this point, I'm just making observations about behaviors among different segments of society without casting judgment. Expressing blame isn't going to help anyone understand this issue any better, let alone begin to fix it. If you don't believe me, please reread my recent comment history where I pointed out that young men are suffering some very adverse effects of dating apps and social media.

If they don't want kids (many young women don't want kids), then why even waste time on boys and their toys?

Many young women do want kids, but having kids isn't nearly as high of a priority for modern women as it was with prior generations. Many modern women take marriage and having kids for granted, so they put them off until much later in life. Then in their 30s they're desperate to find a man and hope to score a buzzer-beater as their biological clock winds down. And unfortunately, for a number of women that never happens.

As you own research reveals, women are still having plenty of sex just not with men under 35. I imagine they are having sex with each other and they are still having sex with men that have more money (which tends to favor older men since they've had more time to accumulate resources).

I agree with this, but what happens to young men that spend their formative sexual years with few sexual experiences? Do they continue to pursue relationships and sex once they're older and more financially established, or do they get conditioned to a life of pursuing other endeavors?

It doesn't help that for some reason that escapes me, is why so many young men are also not engaged with working or gaining more education

I can't say I know the answer to this (I think a lot of research needs to be done on this subject), but if I had to guess I'd say it's at least some of the following:

• - Lack of male role models (many young boys are being raised by single moms and female school teachers)
• - Identity politics and media messaging (the future is female and masculinity is toxic)
• - Lack of purpose (if they're not as interested in becoming husbands and fathers, they don't need to worry about being a great provider and thus having a great job)
• - So many alternate forms of entertainment and distractions

No idea why so many young people aren't trying anymore because it's still possible to do what I just wrote.

The good news is that some academics are finally starting to take note and raise alarm bells (Richard Reeves and Scott Gallagher come to mind), but unfortunately much of society has a hard time believing that men's issues can be as serious as those of other groups. I've seen some people have moderate success by focusing on the side-effects these issues have on women and framing them as women's issues.

Almost every study I've seen on this subject rarely presents the numbers by gender, which could be hiding extremely important details regarding this decline, especially for young people. This article does provide information about each gender, but only for married couples. This won't reveal how trends could be starting with the younger generations. The studies that do provide that data indicate that young men are having significantly less sex while young women are much closer to the expected rates. This is interesting since:

• - Young men are at the peak of their sex drive
• - If young men are finding it more difficult to obtain sex at a young age, they may be conditioned to having little to no sex and thus seek it less often when they're older and their drive is winding down

Also, this is likely one of the biggest reasons for declining birth rates. Many people assume that it's due to economic situations, and while those are certainly a factor, the simple fact is that if people aren't having sex then they're not having babies.