The Tibetans invented wind powered prayer wheels a long time ago, so it weirdly makes sense that Buddhists would rush to embrace this stuff too.

I think that the alternative, letting the wrong puberty run its course and risk severe suicidal ideation and lifelong self-image issues is much worse than not addressing the issue, citing “misdiagnoses” as the reason.

Christian-supremacist social authoritarians are the ones pushing transphobia in the US and elsewhere, and they always like to bring up the “what if the kids are just going through a phase and make a wrong choice and regret it later…” angle. It’s a bad-faith argument because they fundamentally do not believe it is ever possible for being transgender and transitioning to be the correct choice. For anyone, ever.

Their position is that all trans people are wrong and crazy and sick, and need to be saved by Jesus to come back to the truth that they are actually cisgender like everybody else in the world. Because they deny the existence of trangender people as a real thing, it’s something made up by Satanic perverts and cultural Marxists. Ideally kids never even find out trans is even a thing, because it would be illegal to talk about it. Failing that, they need to be psychologically tortured at a pray-the-gay-away conversion camp. If they still can’t be made normal, they need to be disowned and discarded; the woke mind virus got them.

You can chart up the statistics, here’s how many adults regret trying to transition as a teen, versus here’s how many adults regret not being allowed to transition sooner. Doesn’t matter. None of the people in the latter column “count”. It’s similar to trying to show how few instances of voter fraud there are vs. how many people are disenfranchised by voter ID laws. They don’t really care about the research, the logic, the fairness, the math. They care that their side is the only right one and that the only people being hurt are the others.

Also I believe conservative men want for transfem kids in particular to go through the ‘wrong’ puberty because it makes them easier to spot. The majority of their own sexual experiences are one-night hookups with drunk strangers. So they fear accidentally mistaking one for a “real woman”, because if they did that would make them gay. No, they want trans women to stay as a PornHub category where they belong.

They care more about that than teens killing themselves, because that’s just what being a right-winger is. The absolute selfishness is as core to conservative identity as the bigotry.

The wheels have fallen off some time ago but the bottom has not yet worn through from dragging it up to the curb each week.

Let’s be real though; that savings you were able to wipe out by overspending when the cost of living went up wasn’t nearly enough to matter anyway. The amount of savings that matters is in the low 7 figures. If you are very careful and disciplined and organized, and sacrifice most opportunities to live well on your time off, and lucky enough to avoid major catastrophe- you can* achieve that after an entire lifetime of selling your soul to the capitalist machine in 40-hour increments. So that for your final 10-to-20 years before dying of old age, you get to maintain a humble working-class standard of living without having to work, and that is a successful life. The American Dream.

*Or at least you could acheive it, under more favorable economic conditions than what we have now or can expect to ever see again in the future.

If you have a 401(k), is it really your retirement savings or is it just your surviving a layoff and not becoming homeless for however many months it takes to find another job savings? That depends entirely on how big it is right now. And if you have to use it for the latter while it’s still at its current size, the chance of being able to use for the former goes down significantly.

Also, if you paid off all your debts would you still have savings left over? If not, then you don’t actually have any savings.

Maybe young people are choosing sports betting over investing in stocks and bonds these days not because they don’t understand economics and finance, but because they do. A small, very high-risk chance of making enough money vs. a low-risk chance making definitely not enough money- that could be entirely rational.

Because if you’ve only saved almost enough to retire, you still have to work until you die to make up the difference; just at a low-paying part-time job. You know, the hardest, worst jobs involving the most actual work.

Ok that was a heavier rant than I originally meant to write in response to a lolcat shitpost on 196. Maybe more directed at the dozen or so boomer-coded, survivorship-biased, victim-blaming Marketwatch op-ed articles I’ve hate-read for whatever reason.