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
30d 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
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
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
1mo ago
On warrior-representatives: I'd be curious to hear your take on Jason Crow.
Alabasata
6mo ago
I'm not worried about death. That's inevitable.
Post-pandemic worried me. I heard a lot of stories about how people were profoundly affected by COVID & the lockdown. I...wasn't especially. I worked, I shopped with a mask on, I went home.
If my lifestyle was such that a national state of emergency barely affected my weekly routine...what parts of society have I missing out on all this time?
Dying? It sucks, but it's not a problem. Living on a pandemic-proof autopilot? Problem.
This may not answer your question about the Big Stuff. But hopefully this will help answer why I'm not especially interested in Big Stuff questions.
Alabasata
2mo ago
I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more
Go to any office supply store near you. Are TI-83s still for sale?
Alabasata
5mo ago
ELI5 how military action versus a drug supplier is winnable when the War On Drugs is winding down as ever-expanding legalization? I predict a lot of scope creep "since we're alrrady there anyway".
Alabasata
6mo ago
Khan Academy has pretty much solved this problem for pre-college math.
It depends on the goal you're trying to accomplish. I used KA as a private tutor to measure my student's work in between sessions. As anybody who plays music will tell you, it's the practice between sessions that makes a habit. Those who used it, tested better. Those who didn't - did not. Which is well and good if all you're trying to do is test surface-level knowledge. KA does introductory and standardized word problems very well.
I reflect also on how "passing the test" was insufficient for me to earn enough income to support myself. But that may be a problem that pre-college math was never meant to solve?
Alabasata
8mo ago
BreadTube would call this "sigma-coded" behavior, and they believe failsons from Red Tribe are more susceptible to it than Blue's failsons. Whether that's true is hard to say. I don't know if anybody has done the work to sort out whether Harris & Klebold were Red or Blue. That's not polisci I personally want to touch.
And then, most mass shootings that make the news & get talked about are also not most mass shootings. So many news consoomers get a slanted view of who's really doing the shooting.
Alabasata
9mo ago
This came up in a meeting with whitehairs. I claimed that setting up childcare on site would help attract parents. To which one replied, "Well, I'm a parent, and I don't see how that helps me any!"
My primary impulse is still "No, you were a parent." And there's some background wars of framing that go into this.
Alabasata
9mo ago
Survey about parenthood: how do you describe people whose kids have left the nest? I was under the impression that the social role of "parent" took a back seat when the kids move out, but a conversation with grandparents last night has gotten some responses I did not expect.
Some people always want to be referred to as parents once they've had kids...and my gut feeling is that I don't like unspoken implications of that. Haven't put it into words yet why, though.
Alabasata
6mo ago
Factorio: Space Age progress is going slow. The bare bones of the lava planet factory is automated, and its science is being delivered with few hiccups. The ruins planet factory is now underway & the first science packs are being crafted now.
Rolling for quality this go-round is still a chore. I knew enough to bring blue-quality advanced miners to maximize my rolling chances. Probably should have brought logistics bots with me instead of trying to build them from scraps scratch. Not to mention buildup of higher-quality materials on the lava planet occasionally creating jams & back up.
I wonder when I'll be ready to really start building the Mark II of home planet's base. Kinda thinking I should wait until unlocking some researches from the swamp planet first. But maybe I'll run out of patience first, so hard to say.
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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