I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?

When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that’s what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that’s glorified chat.

For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It’s a level of immersion that’s just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim’s Throat of the World…just no.

It’s not going to replace flat screen gaming. It’s hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I’ve had a headset for a year or two now, and it’s still amazing where it’s good. I’m better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.

Tried Skyrim, couldn’t make it stick - VR just isn’t right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it’s the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn’t be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.

Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I’m old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.

Yeah, rereading your text, I may have confused all the negatives and inferred that you support the post’s implication that they’re targeting children, but I meant to comment on the data in the context of ‘biggest bar,’ not to criticize opinions. Seeing OP’s chart, the first thing I wanted was a population chart, and I’m glad you’d already provided one.

The post title asks you to look at the “biggest bar,” which seems to imply that the biggest bars - children - must be targeted. OccamsTeapot population graph is important context because, as war-crimey as indiscriminantly bombing civilian populations is, intentionally targeting children feels so much like comic-book villany that people dismiss it as propaganda.

They do look pretty similar to me, but can’t say without numbers. Keeping in mind the population graph is a couple years old - half of a bar height - they both show a minor peak/inflection around age 30 that’s maybe 2/3 of the major peak around 5. Babies seem to be spared from the bombing, but that could be fewer births or increased non-violent infant mortality.

IMO, it’s not a great data set to claim Israelis are intentionally targeting children, but it is pretty good for saying they are not intentionally targeting military-age men.

There’s a lot more than Fox out there echoing the narrative that times are hard, inflation is killing you, and there aren’t enough homes to go around. Wapo and NYT would happily recount Trump’s claims that it’s because immigrants are taking all the houses and jobs while Biden policies are making everything expensive. Doesn’t matter if they follow up with long-winded explanations that his claims aren’t true, because most people stop listening when they hear there’s someone to blame.

Yeah, my niece, who is generally a worldly, progressive person, was talking about this guy whom she’s not ready to call ‘boyfriend’ yet, and part of that description was, “he’s, like, super into Hitler.”

Doesn’t that seem like kind of a red flag? ??

Autonomy is not “given.”

No. If you’ve been saving for 30 years, then you’ll have 30 years of accumulated 10±20% annual gains, which should be something like 16x your start, but could be 100x if you’re lucky or 1x if you’re not. Regardless, an historic crash on retirement day may take that down to 12x your start, which is still pretty good, and will be fixed by the following couple years.

My folks have been spinning off their treasures for a couple decades now. They waited until their kids had already established & furnished their own households, so a lot of it ended up in the category of “Yes, I can put this in the trash for you.”

Lifespans are at the awkward stage where the kids are too old and the grandkids too young to want any of those household staples.

I really enjoy lying in a warm, comfortable bed, especially a little groggy from sleep. I’m happy to wake up an hour or so ahead of my alarm so I can have that experience. That said, if my mind is really racing with anticipation of the day’s concerns, it kind of wrecks the lie-in. I’ll get up an hour or two early, have an extra special breakfast, start chores or some other thing I didn’t think I had time for.

You forget that a lot of the country thinks its problems can all be solved by jailing or shooting the appropriate target. Words bad; punishment good.

Does his vote still count if he dies between now and then? One of the infamous “dead people voting.”

Doesn’t matter: there’s no one to enforce the judge’s ruling and no penalty for refusing, so anyone who does decide not to certify an election faces…sternly worded letter? lawsuit? contempt of court if that goes against them?

As we saw through Trump’s first term, laws only work if there are penalties, and penalties only work if there is someone to enforce them.

Thank god he can’t run for President. I don’t think he’d be satisfied being one-among-many Senators or Representatives. Governor of Texas, though…

They released doorbell video of the incident. Dude’s running through the neighborhood, half naked, yelling incoherently. Runs up to the home, pounds on the door, rolls around on the porch, still yelling, something about his girlfriend. Bath salts type of crazy.

It’s not socialism if it’s for me.

Zebrafish need that rhythmic activity to form heart valves. They have unidirectional flow before the valves form, through some magic of resonance and pressure waves reflecting off arterial curves, and the resonance results in (IIRC) a stagnant spot where the valves will form. Do something to interfere with the mechanics and no valves form.

If you can be flexible on timing - put off the home purchase for a couple years if there happens to be a crash right at your target date, then a lot of volatility concerns fade. Of course, the middle of a crash is also when home prices will be lowest.

Vanguard’s actual asset allocation on their TDFs is https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/pubeducation/investing/LTgoals/TargetRetirementFunds.jsf and there’s a simple asset allocation - return calculator https://smartasset.com/investing/asset-allocation-calculator There’s a bunch of them around, that was just the first one with error bars that came up for me, but it will give you a better sense of both how much and how variable the full equity vs the ~60/40 TDF will be. I like error bars. To my eye, it looks like there’s not much difference in the 5-year median or 25th percentile performance, but a notable upside potential in the 75th percentile. That’s why I say, if you’re comfortable with the volatility, you might as well go all the way.

A target date fund on that horizon is going to be shifting its assets from stocks into bonds and TIPS, but is still going to have most of the volatility of VTSAX. If you’re comfortable with the possibility of having negative return over 5 years, then you might as well VTSAX. If you need for the savings to grow, then you probably want less stock exposure than a future target date fund.

For reference, the historical 5-year return on US stocks is anywhere from +30% to -10%, annualized. Even over 10 years, you’ve got about 1-in-8 chance of losing money. I mean, the stock market is definitely the best way for most people to grow money over time, and the economy looks pretty good right now, but Time is definitely doing the heavy lifting, and almost no one ever forsees the event(s) that trigger crises. 5 years is pretty short term.