In theory a pension is stable, guaranteed income. The employer promises a monthly or annual payment for life, and they manage a pool of money to make sure you get that payment regardless of whether the market goes up or down. People like stability.

With a 401k you take on the market risk yourself. If the market tanks (2000 and 2008 come to mind) then your retirement funds are suddenly worth less and your payments to yourself (distributions) go down. Of course, if the market is hot you can also direct your investments to try and ride the wave. Greater risk means greater (potential) reward.

401k’s also have required minimum distributions that kick in as you get older. If you live long enough you will reach a point where you have been forced to drain the whole thing into your regular bank account. Then it’s time for another plan.

Your last paragraph is a good one. I fell in love with Sweden when I was there. Then I talked to some teenagers and they said they really wanted to live in America. It caught me off guard. I didn’t understand why they would want to leave a place that seemed so safe, secure, and comfortable. They said they wanted more flexibility and opportunity. Sure, they could get a stable living-wage job and keep it for their whole career, but in America they thought they would have more chances to try new things and reinvent themselves.

Whether our perceptions of each other’s countries are correct or not, for all of us the grass certainly looked greener on the other side of the fence.

I think this is the post you want:
https://lemmy.world/post/18159539

Edit: @RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world is also correct. It was cross-posted to multiple communities.

I think the answer to your question has several layers. I’ll start with the most general layer and get more specific from there…

The ActivityPub protocol, which Lemmy and Mastodon (and other services) use to communicate, is published by W3C and was developed by a group of people. This page on W3C includes a list of authors. It looks like at least one author has a Mastodon account; I’m curious to see if mentioning them here will federate to Mastodon and get a response: @cwebber@octodon.social

The main developers of the Lemmy software are @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml.

Each Lemmy instance (there are >600 of them) was started by a different person. This is usually (but not always) the first admin listed in the sidebar on that instance’s homepage. Sometimes the founder is not the most active admin; in many cases they have recruited others to help in order to spread the work and reduce the chance that the instance dies when the founder has some unforeseen life event. Here are a few people who started some of the larger instances:
@dessalines@lemmy.ml (mentioned above)
@ruud@lemmy.world
@sunaurus@lemm.ee
@TheDude@sh.itjust.works
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
@smorks@lemmy.ca (took over that instance from a previous owner)

And west through Idaho and into Oregon.

I think others have answered your question better than me, but I’ll chip in my two cents anyway.

The definition depends on who is saying it.

Within mainstream US politics, Republicans use “liberal” as a catch-all pejorative for any person or group further to the left of themselves. It is usually aimed at Democrats but could also refer to Greens, communists, etc.

The irony is that, in a broader political context, Republicans are very much liberals, too. People outside the US political mainstream who sneer about “liberals” are usually referring to this larger group, which basically encompasses the capitalist status quo in the “western” world.

Relevant SMBC:

If you win a state by one vote (offer not valid in Nebraska and Maine), you get all that state’s electoral votes.

I’m going to pile on to your good answer.

Since you only need 51% to win all of a state’s electoral votes, any additional votes beyond 51% could be considered excess votes that are not helpful. The system rewards candidates whose supporters are spread around, and punishes candidates whose supporters are heavily concentrated in a handful of states.

For example, in 2016 Hilary Clinton got 4,269,978 more votes in California than Trump. That’s 4,269,977 more than she needed to win the state. Meanwhile, she lost Michigan by 10,704 votes, lost Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes, lost Florida by 112,912, etc. Hell, she lost Texas by less than a million votes. If Hilary’s supporters in California had been spread around in other states she would have won the national election easily.

You might like this fun article from The Atlantic last week: Congress Accidentally Legalized Weed Six Years Ago

Here’s an archive.is link for those who prefer it.

The original, I believe:

The ghosts in Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988) would pursue Mario only when he looked away. When he faced them they would stop and hide their faces.

Mantises live solitary lives, and are cannibalistic. I assume it’s more out of indifference than hate, but it’s close to what you’re looking for.

Life insurance companies could conceivably do this already. They sometimes ask for blood tests (among other exams) as a precondition of granting overage.

Thanks for the info! I didn’t know any apps could do that.

Using a browser (not a phone app) go to the instance’s main page and look for the Communities button. That will give you a list of communities. Filtering by Local lists all the communities on that instance.

Here are some examples:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/communities
https://sh.itjust.works/communities

They can and do get sick. Here’s an example of bovine parasites whose life cycle goes from cow to grass and back again:

https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/managing-worms-on-summer-pastures/

Mass is conserved. If you split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then combine them back into water, you will have the same amount of water as when you started.

That’s assuming you don’t have leaky equipment in your lab, of course.

Water is the exhaust product. Once you have water, the potential energy in the original chemical mix has already been released.
H₂ + O --> H₂O + energy (in the form of heat or electric potential)

To break down water you have to reverse the reaction and put that energy back in. That’s how electrolysis works:
H₂O + energy (in the form of electric potential) --> H₂ + O

And since no thermodynamic process is 100% efficient, you will lose some of the energy each time you go back and forth between these reactions.

That FediDB stats page is confusing. It isn’t clear whether they only count instances that have joined Fedipact, or also include instances that have blocked Threads without joining Fedipact. A quick glance at the list suggests the latter. But in that case, there are a bunch of instances missing from the list.

The list on the Fedipact site is a better source:
https://fedipact.veganism.social/

As for admins versus users, here on sh.itjust.works we held a vote among our users. The result was overwhelming: 78% of users voted to preemptively block Threads.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397

(Edit to fix some awkward phrasing.)

It’s the same way you know the things outside your window are real. You look at the light coming to you from that object and make inferences as best you can. As long as new observations and inferences line up with old observations and inferences, then you can be reasonably confident that your growing model of the outside world is accurate. When something doesn’t add up then you revise your model and keep iterating with new observations.

There’s no difference whether the object appears to be within our solar system or far outside it. We see something and we interpret what we can from the available observations. Occasionally, if something is close enough and interesting enough, we send a robot to orbit the thing or maybe land on it and gather better observations, like how Rosetta/Philae visited a passing comet.