u/Genzinvestor16180339

I know the evacuation at Dunkirk is treated as one of the defining moments of World War II, but I am curious why it mattered so much strategically and psychologically. Was it important mainly because Britain saved a massive number of soldiers, or because if Dunkirk failed the entire war may have unfolded differently?

I also wonder how people viewed it at the time. Did it feel like a victory, a disaster, or something in between?

I know there is still debate around how modern labels apply to people in the ancient world, but from what I understand Alexander the Great had relationships with men and it was not exactly hidden. I am curious how openly accepted this was during his lifetime. Did people around him openly know about it, or was it something more private that historians later pieced together?

Right now I use Medik8 retinol and I am working my way up. Should I just go to my dermatologist and get tretinoin? I am in my late 20s, but just curious. I struggle with no acne. I just want to look as young as possible without surgery for as long as I can.

So I never believed the anti vac people and still don't but do think its strange that statistically significant studied were never followed up on??

I went through the actual data of the Gallagher & Goodman 2010 study and here is what it found.

Across 7,373 boys from the National Health Interview Survey 1997-2002:

• 9 out of 1,267 vaccinated boys developed autism — 0.71%
• 22 out of 6,114 unvaccinated boys developed autism — 0.36%

Odds ratio 3.0, p = 0.031. Statistically significant. After controlling for race, maternal education, and household structure.

The study does not claim causation. It finds a statistically significant association and calls for larger follow up research. That follow up has never been done at adequate scale with proper controls.

There may be additional confounding variables not captured in the model. That is a legitimate scientific question. But the study is intact, the data is real, and the result is statistically significant.

Dismissing this debate entirely seems premature when the definitive study has never been done.

In the double slit experiment, particles behave like probability waves until measurement occurs, at which point the system collapses into a definite state. If the universe is fundamentally just fields, particles, and mathematical laws, why should the extraction of information change physical behavior? And if observation matters at the quantum level, does consciousness play any role in reality, or is “observation” purely mechanical?

Not even pushing a conspiracy here, I just went down a rabbit hole and the deeper I read the less clear this entire thing becomes.

The numbers are absurd. Around 1 in 150 kids in 2000. Around 1 in 36 now. Everyone talks about this like it is a settled public health emergency, but when you actually read the literature the answer basically becomes “it’s complicated.”

The mainstream explanation is diagnostic expansion. Broader criteria, better screening, more awareness, people who would have been labeled “weird” or “socially awkward” 20 years ago now getting diagnosed. Fine. But autism has no biomarker. No blood test. No scan. Nothing objective. It is entirely behavioral criteria written by committees that keep changing the definition every decade.

DSM-5 folded Asperger’s into autism in 2013 and diagnoses jumped again. So at what point is “we are finding cases we missed” just a cleaner way of saying “we changed the definition and more people qualify now”?

The genetics side is what really confuses me. Twin studies put heritability somewhere around 64 to 91%. Massive studies have found ~150 gene variants associated with autism. That sounds like something that has existed in the population for a very long time, not some sudden modern environmental event. But if that is true then where were all these people before? Society was not overflowing with visibly autistic people in 1980 compared to today.

The environmental stuff is real too. Advanced parental age, valproate exposure during pregnancy, prenatal immune activation, etc. There are actual signals there. But none of that remotely feels large enough to explain a 4x jump in twenty years.

The other thing nobody seems willing to say directly: are we even studying one coherent condition anymore?

Someone nonverbal who needs permanent care and someone who is basically functional but struggles socially are now under the exact same umbrella???? Does that actually help us understand causation or does it completely muddy the data?

are we maybe collapsing multiple completely different phenomena into one category because they vaguely overlap behaviorally?

I work in early stage investing and can give you direct feedback. Or what I would avoid doing.

I was curious: if you raise your first fund, say $10 million, when do you actually collect the capital? Do you collect it in tranches, for example $1 million per year, or only when you make specific investments? The latter seems inefficient.

What happens if an LP does not fund their commitment? It seems like bad business to sue an LP, regardless of the situation.

In addition, if you have not yet deployed the capital, where do you hold it? Do you keep it in cash equivalents or short-term bonds while waiting to invest?

What is the point of his plan can anyone explain it?I keep seeing mentions of Elon Musk talking about building data centers in space, but I do not fully understand the rationale. What problem is this trying to solve, and is it actually feasible from an energy, cost, and physics perspective?

Also, how does this tie into his broader goal of colonizing Mars? Is the idea to support infrastructure for a future off-world economy, or are these completely separate initiatives?

I have never found one I actually like. what would you include to make it exceptional? At this point, I am close to creating my own in small batches, as most options on the market fall short, with only a few that come close.

I have never found one I actually like. I’m curious, if you were designing one, what would you include to make the best eye patch possible? At this point, I almost want to create my own because most of the ones on the market are disappointing, with only a couple of exceptions.

Really, the question I am wondering is twofold: why did Jesus Christ and Christianity gain so much traction, not just early on but throughout history?

Second, are there other Jesus-like figures who did not develop as much traction, but could have in a slightly different world?

At Chipotle he raised prices four times between 2021-2023, while he quietly cut quality, ruined the brand, and shrank the portions. Pocketed over $100M across his tenure while the stock ran 773% due to his short term strategy and before demand could decrease. Then left as the shrinkflation backlash went viral. People caught on to the horrible quality and the labor cost cuts as well. Same-store sales fell 1.7% in 2025, first annual decline since 2016, stock down 37%.

At Starbucks the short-term playbook is different but the structural problem is identical. He's buying traffic with labor wages and benefits rose from 27.4% of sales in 2019 to 31.9% in 2025 and it's working. Q2 just posted 7.1% same store sales growth, the strongest traffic performance in three years. But operating margin has collapsed from 15.4% in 2019 to 7.9% in 2025. He's admitted the company needs to cut $2 billion in costs to get back to pre pandemic margins by 2028.

Here's the trap: the traffic recovery is built on more baristas and better experience. The moment he cuts labor to recover margins, the experience degrades and the customers leave again. He's explicitly ruled out discounting, coffee prices are up 18% year on year, and a $9 latte has a ceiling.

My guess is the 2028 margin targets slip, the narrative breaks, and he's gone leaving whoever comes next to explain why the turnaround didn't actually fix anything structural.

PS: Taco Bell is the outlier genuine turnaround, held up after he left. Everything since follows the same arc. But I don't think he had the clout to be able to do that then.

Just a thought happy to be wrong but just a trend I noticed but not tons of data points don't know how many companies this man plans being the CEO.

The average drink is now $7–$9. When people can make it at home for ~50 cents.

Q2 FY2026 already showed demand comes back at current prices. US transactions were up 4.4% while ticket still grew 2.6%. So this isn’t a “no demand” problem. But it also doesn’t mean pricing is optimal, it just means they fixed operations enough to bring core customers back.

The unit economics are where this gets interesting. Product costs are ~31% of revenue, so every drink has ~69% gross margin. The marginal cost of the next drink is basically just ingredients. Labor, rent, and that $500M investment are already in place. So even if you drop a drink from $7 to $5, you’re still getting ~$3 of contribution on something that costs maybe ~$1.50–$2 to make.

Now layer in behavior. There’s a huge group of customers sitting on the margin choosing “I’ll just make it at home.” That decision flips fast once price moves into a more reasonable convenience range. $3–$5 feels like a quick purchase. $7–$9 feels like a decision.

Sooooo

• High prices maximize revenue per order but push marginal customers out of the system
• Lower prices reduce ticket but can meaningfully increase frequency and bring back lapsed users

And because most of the cost base is fixed, those incremental orders are high-margin.

They don’t need to turn Starbucks into a discount brand. But even a modest move down on core items could pull a lot of at-home consumption back into stores and increase total profit, not reduce it.

Or am I missing something? I don't understand why they would price so high when i am sure they have very good margins due to their huge supply chain.

NO POSITION

Starbucks filings show comparable transactions fell 10% in North America while average ticket rose 4% net revenue still declined. This implies they've moved past the revenue maximising point on the demand curve, where marginal willingness to pay among lost customers was lower than the current price, but the volume loss is outrunning the per-unit gain.

With product and distribution costs at only ~31% of revenue, gross margin sits around 69%. At that contribution margin, even a $1 price reduction that recovered a meaningful portion of lost transaction volume would likely increase total gross profit. The elasticity math seems to favour stimulating demand over extracting surplus from a shrinking loyal base.

So is Starbucks rationally sacrificing revenue to protect brand positioning i.e. pricing above the revenue-maximising point deliberately as a signal of quality or is this a genuine pricing error where they've misjudged the elasticity of their marginal customer?

Not asking a “what if” question, but wondering how close they actually were to winning the war, and secondly, if they had won, whether it would have been realistic for them to maintain their empire for any substantial length of time.

I ask this because there have been shows about it, but it has always seemed unlikely to me. Even if they had taken the majority of Central Europe, the U.S. would likely have intervened and defeated them, not to mention the USSR?

Further even if the US/USSR did not have the military power, would have been fairly difficult to reprise all those individual cultures or was Nazi Germany goals different?

I always feel like I pull my skin to much with my fingers and some of my thicker creams I always take to much with my fingers. Is this an okay thing to do use a Q-tip? Or any concerns?

I always feel like I pull my skin to much with my fingers and some of my thicker creams I always take to much with my fingers. Is this an okay thing to do use a Q-tip? Or any concerns?

Modern humans have existed for roughly I think around 300k years but what we would recognize as behaviorally modern humans, with complex language, symbolic thinking, and culture, only appear around 70,000 years ago? If that is correct then recorded history, however, only covers about the last 5,000 years. That still leaves a very very large gap roughly 65,000 years, where humans had the cognitive capacity for complex societies but left limited direct records. And did not seem to do much of anything?

So then is it plausible or likely that civilizations could have developed during this window to a high level of complexity, whether comparable to ancient Egypt or even something approaching early modern technological society, and then been wiped out in a way that left little to no clear trace???

What kinds of evidence would we expect to find if such civilizations had existed? Do people look for this?