Alabasata
1yr ago
Are we LARPing, or just throwing speeches at each other? 🤣
Consider the following:
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The benefit cliffs from tax subsidies are real, and most technician jobs pay in the shadow of them. Competent contributors without a strong social network seem to get the worst of both worlds. Especially if the work is structured to have compulsory overtime to meet legal deadlines, and face-to-face socializing is rarely possible during work hours.
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Everyone fantasizes about violence. Some people sublimate it better than others. I appreciate your honest distaste. It's less exhausting to communicate with masks off.
You're welcome to believe we deserve our hell, as I believe you've invented one for us by relying on Internet art and thirdhand stories.
Now, this might not be the thread for it. But are you ready for some productive conversation after we've puffed our chests at each other?
Alabasata
5mo ago
For a certain income level & standard of living, yes. I know where the "good school districts" are in my state, and we don't earn enough to afford housing in them. Cheaper states are a net decrease in quality of life for commute time, job prospects, and quality of community. It's a local maximum with a lot of activation energy to find a new maximum.
I'm aware this is not your problem to solve. The incentives are greatest for me to make lemonade where I'm at, and uncover opportunities where I'm at.
Alabasata
5mo ago
The life a neighbor 15 miles away probably isn't even worth saving. That's not the point.
However, the money I have represents enough power to affect an African. It is not enough power to affect a fellow American. When I donate to VLCOL-based charities I am buying an effigy of influence.
Feeling powerful feels good. That is enough.
Alabasata
5mo ago
Who says it has to be unilateral? It's very unlikely you're the only one who wants better conditions. You may just not know your probable allies yet.
Alabasata
1yr ago
I wrote a Dethklok-style song during the pandemic about that trend. It was cathartic to fantasize about burning those kinds of HOAs (and their contracts) to rubble.
The existence of keycard-locked and gated neighborhoods is a strong signal that most of the Americans that can afford them believe their surrounding society deserves low-trust interactions. This, in turn, earns a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy.
Alabasata
1yr ago
I am not surprised that the author fancied themselves mischievous and fun to be around after that exchange. Certainly no longer a "failed male" as I expect many transwomen often slotted themselves as.
I know I would have found the conversation delicious, were I on the recieving end of it.
Alabasata
28d ago
So I live in a Blue-ish neighborhood with a large immigrant population, I can point-for-point compare your predictions with what's actually happened.
We still have more churches than libraries. But our schools are closing due to lack of enrollment. If a church wants to move in, that's where the room is. And when it happens it'll probably be Black-led.
We had a titty bar about five miles west of my house. It got demolished, and a three-over-one apartment complex with wraparound services is in its place. I've never been to either - couldn't tell you what they're like.
We had a lesbian-owned bar across from the library. Mural-sized portraits of Frida Kahlo, Sandra Day O'Connor & other progressive saints were on the walls. They've since picked up and moved to a bigger location ten miles away. It wasn't a great place for me to drink, but others seemed to like it well enough.
We have an immigrant on city council. He's a Republican.
I won't go full Op-Ed and try to create a story about all this. It would create an incomplete map - and we know about the differences between maps & territories here.
None of this answers the original question: what is a "neighborhood character" that's worth defending?
Alabasata
11mo ago
I actually did miss your mention in OP, thanks for calling my attention to it. (I also actually have no idea who Bill Diblasio was before this thread, so am not keen to comment on him in particular.)
If the concepts of races get more defined than they are now, you'll find a lot more Diogenes "Behold!" cases cropping up. Blackness in particular is a more interesting thread after the Drake/Kendrick throwdown earlier this year.
I prefer to think of Black as an ethnicity, much like how the Jews are. It's less DNA than it is culture. "This is our music, these are our dances, this is how we tell history to each other." If you were raised in it, you are at least informed by that culture - even if you reject it later in life.
And because these identities are going to be internally & externally checked, the edge cases will keep coming. Generally, I'll defer to the groups who have more at stake to claim her or not.
Alabasata
1yr ago
Trump, an honorary Jew? I'm not seeing it.
A strong New York accent is not enough to make a Jew out of Trump. Noveau riche gaudiness is not enough to make a Jew out of Trump. Shamelessly leaning into "I want my accountants wearing yarmulkes, not daishikis" stereotypes is not enough to make a Jew out of Trump.
What are you seeing that I'm not?
Alabasata
1yr ago
When was the last time you've heard of people making real decisions based on fiction they've read or seen? Or based on news articles from only one color of the spectrum?
If kids see a cartoon about bullies targeting people with glasses, they're less likely to wear glasses. Adults are nowhere near immune from that kind of false-positive threat modeling. They're just a lot more effective at overreacting. See: post-9/11 reactions to Arabs & Muslims, Japanese internment camps, Pizzagate, parental advisory stickers.
People can and do put the cart before the horse when making decisions on which neighborhoods to move into. It's common, and no amount of 'rational threat analysis' will change that.
Alabasata
5mo ago
There are more. It's the first thing I thought of.
It's also a self-inflicted isolation from one's neighborhood, and that carries knock-on effects where it becomes harder to put down roots. Less chance to see the talents of your neighbors, less chance to share your talents with their families, less Slack in your systems to absorb actual shocks.
Maybe you don't value that as much as I do. That's okay.
Alabasata
9mo ago
The pun is appreciated, though the conclusion is not. In my deferens, it's always taken at least two to tango when children are made.
Kamala Harris was accepted into Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the Blackest sororities you can find. I trust them to vet & measure Blackness better than Donald Trump (or TheMotte) can.
If she's Black enough for them, she's Black enough to me. Total distraction of an issue, not unlike talking heads asking if Obama was Black enough during his primaries.
ASIDE: Is there a programming term for classes with predefined variables that are declared but not defined? It's the only analogy I can think of that approximates the issue.
Alabasata
11mo ago
I'm a bit hazy on Cerebus, but I seem to recall he had a bit of a brain-break during Church & State II. Where, like, not many of the remaining 200 issues were actually worth reading.
Gorgeous scenery, though.
Alabasata
1yr ago
I rarely have dreams I remember through the morning. Though after becoming a dad, they do come a little more easily. Maybe it's the sheer emotion of being with my little sprog, maybe it's the long-term management of raising her. Hard to say. Emotionally-charged moments do tend to get the dream machine cranking harder.
Today, I dreamt about the loss of control of who is in my house. I remember I was in a house larger than my current one - but still believed it to be mine - and being shocked that people I disapproved of were in it. The details are very fuzzy of how they got there, or how they tried to remain despite my protests.
Last night, in a fit I threw one shelf of my medicine cabinet into a laundry basket. The clutter was so bad I couldn't see the back of it any more. We ended up having far too many expired items. Also, duplicates of stuff that might have been bought because we couldn't see what we had? Anyway, the first shelf was finally ordered & visible and all was right with that little corner of my world.
It's possible the purge triggered that line of dreaming. I'm not a strong believer in cause-and-effect here. Possibly other causes I'm not aware of as well.
Alabasata
1yr ago
What's your take on Sam O'Nella or Max Miller?
Alabasata
2yr ago
That's not entirely wrong with "The Vagina Monologues", but there's a bit more to it.
Alabasata
1mo ago
(Helen Lovejoy: "Won't someone think of the children?")
A YIMBY, /r/FuckCars or Tim Burton fan could use this to argue against any development where children would be driven to school by bus or their parents:
"Disconnecting children from their neighborhood robs them of the ability to learn from the excellence of those who live within it. They go off to college out-of-state not because of their wanderlust or Hero's Journey, but because they never learned of the value in where they lived. Thus the value must live somewhere else."
It is not hard to claim (with evidence!) that children live in an environment that was not built for them. They are less important to land use planners than any adult, cishet or degenerate. The adult outranks the child or the unborn, and rank has its privileges.
Alabasata
4mo ago
Sort of? Back in the late 00's I went on a torrenting binge of some of the big series: Transmet, Preacher, and Cerebus. Already read Sandman in the early 00s, and wanted more DC/Vertigo-themed stuff. They were some of the big ones talked about back then.
Are they still recommended? No idea, not my scene any more.
Alabasata
4mo ago
UBI would be a new inflationary pressure, as it directly increases the money supply. Our Federal Reserve would need to to interpret that as another tool along with interest rates - if they were to employ it effectively.
(I'm not sure how things work across the pond.)
Alabasata
7mo ago
Swapped out laptops due to a hardware error. Now running a x10 science/railworld run, as per my usual style.
Just got back up to running space science again. Only shipping up raw material after placing enough platform to support iron/steel smelting. It's a slow run to craft things in space that only require iron, but the long-term resource savings are worth it, I feel.
Probably won't hit Vulcanus again until next week. I'll be more ready than last playthrough.
Alabasata
9mo ago
Just picked up Bastiat's "The Law". It's...fine, I guess. It deserves to sit next to Communist Manifesto as an example of Romantic political pamphlets - their use of language points to their beliefs as self-evident truths. They don't wish to persuade, only to start talking points that they hope others repeat. For 1800s Europe, I guess that worked? It's still used on Twitter, Tumblr & Reddit today - so the technique seems useful enough.
But at least I finally have an idea of where "taxation is theft" came from. I wasn't fond of the idea before, and this book doesn't do it any favors.
Alabasata
2yr ago
Your value judgements on manner of death don't make sense. "A strength that is greater than your own" can be interpreted in a great many number of ways.
An adult human is capable of 2 kW from time to time. It's pretty easy to buy sodium lightbulbs that are rated at 1000 Watts. By that logic, it's somehow not-shameful to die to three large grow lights - whether by burning or by a slow increase in heat or some other creative method- but not by one large grow light.
How?
The downside of school choice is more car traffic and less buses.
As a travelling technician, my quality of life is much lower during the school year. Urban planners trying to minimize car traffic hate this trampling of the commons. And a certain striver mentality is going to look down on parents taking shortcuts to go where the good schools are instead of applying "the grass is greenest where you water it" and actually getting involved.
It's all tradeoffs in the end. On the whole, I'm no fan of your solution.
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