BahRamYou
2yr ago
Ah, OK, I missed that. I thought your wife was agreeing with the other office women. In that case, yeah, that changes my interpretation a lot. Basically in this sort of murky situation I would just trust whichever witness I knew the best, so in this case your wife.
BahRamYou
4mo ago
I would hope they'd be smart enough to do it where no teachers or untrustworthy kids are looking, which is not hard to set up in most schools. If they do get caught... probably a stern talking to in the guidance counselor's office. This whole problem starts with schools being extremely unable to really do anything to punish kids.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
Weird how sweatshops, prison labor, and human trafficking are still things then.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Well, the short argument is that it worked quite well in Venezuela 3 months ago. It also worked pretty well in Libya and Syria, if you'll overlook the civilians who died in the ensuing civil war. But it accomplished its strategic goals.
But my longer argument is that this is something unprecedented, qualitatively different from any air war the world has seen before. The US and Israel have had decades to plan this war, plus months to build up forces in the region. They have satellite and drone intelligence to locate all targets, complete air dominance, vast numbers of precision bombs, and now bunkur buster bombs to attack underground sites. They're striking something like 1000 targets per day, which is roughly equal to all the bombs dropped over the entire Bosnian air campaign. There really isn't much a ground force could do that isn't already being done from the air, unless you just want that political value of a man in uniform raising a flag. These days we could even deepfake that too.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
but they don't really have a good way to compel the Iranian government
Don't they? I feel like blowing up all of their leadership and military is pretty compelling. There's many reports of desertion in their army ranks already.
Also, the pressure to resolve things quickly seems to come mostly from foreign countries like Japan and India that rely heavily on Persian Gulf oil. The US is a lot more independant, and oil prices haven't really risen that badly, so there's no particular need for Trump to resolve this immediately. The only real threat is that he'll get distracted by something else and lose interest.
BahRamYou
9mo ago
yeah? where do you live, where it's a 30 minute drive to the opera house, live theater, and art gallery, or any other sort of cultural scene, but you can still buy a large suburban home for cheap? are you a time traveler from the 1950s?
BahRamYou
10mo ago
I'll have to yield to you on the books. Like I said I really haven't read much, and it was a long time ago that I read any.
I'm not saying that anything needs to be different in order to be good. Like I read a lot of manga that tends to stick to the same structure over and over again... I'm fine with that. Sometimes there's value in just finding something good and sticking with it.
I think Star Wars is weird because the Jedi are just inherently a bit silly. The originals somehow managed to make them look cool by only using their powers sparingly and not going into too much detail about their religion. But every time we see more of them, it starts to fall apart a bit. Their swords don't work very well for fighting in space, they talk a lot about pacifism but mostly they're going around fighting, and they never seem to achieve any sort of real lasting peace so they're just failing at their jobs.
The way I see it, it's sort of like a magic trick. It looks awesome the first time you see it. But when you go back to look at the same trick again and again, in great detail... you start to see the hidden wires and the magic falls off.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
Hop between these temporary jobs for their entire working life and
- Have zero substance abuse issues and
- Have zero contact with the criminal justice system and
- Make it to retirement age with no savings
But why do you not care about those people? Those are also human beings and our fellow citizens. We should help them, not make fun of them for being losers and go "oh well, sucks to suck, I guess we're going to remake society to make their lives even worse."
BahRamYou
1yr ago
Presumably those were all people who had a choice to have kids? At least the choice to not abort. You might hear differrently from women in 3rd world countries where they really don't have a choice (if you can even get them to speak honestly)
BahRamYou
2yr ago
Gay flags everywhere did not originate with the gays, it originated with PMC young adults using the gay flag as a way to gain status over their older rivals. A young PMC woman would ostentatiously support gays, showing she was more empathetic, and thus higher status, than her mom or her boss. This was a costly signal to send, as gays gave older people the ick.
That might be some of it. But part of it was a lot simpler than that- it was just a way for gay men to easily meet so they could hook up. This was especially important in the pre-grindr days, but even now they seem to like having a summer-long outdoor sex party.
Unfortunately, that means the rest of us having to endure all outdoor public places turning into a summer-long gay sex party, but whatdya gonna do.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel exactly the same way as you, that it's all just a gigantic tower of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism using big words to intimidate normies while not actually proving anything. Other times I think... there might something to this. I think the way it's supposed to work is like a big aggressively-growing business. They can't possibly explain the entire market/all of society, and they know there will be a lot of mistakes along the way. Still, they do their best to make a coherent plan, and muddle along through, and as long as it's more right than it is wrong it will make progress. It's a way to deal with incredibly difficult problems that are just too massive to handle in a simple, rigorous, step-by-step "scientific" way.
But that does allow for a lot of bullshit to get through too... it's hard to tell!
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Yes, I think this an important point that often gets missed in popular discussion about the war. The people with more military knowledge already know it and take it for granted, but the people with less knowledge about modern military equipment don't know and don't think to ask. There's basically two types of weapons for an air war like this- the high end and the low end. When the media reports things like America is running low on weapons They're talking about the most expensive, high-end weapons. They do get used up quickly in the opening stages of the war, but those stages also don't last long. It's a very high-intensity war. Dropping JDAMs means they're dropping regular old bombs, and they can keep that up basically forever with no fears of running out or even spending much money, as long as they can protect the bombers.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Well.. if there's anything Elon Musk is good at, its making ideas that seem silly turn into reality, right? But I fear this might be beyond even his powers.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
If you're going out there regularly, building houses as fast as possible for competitive market prices, then yes you're in the trades.
If you're just doing it as a hobby for yourself then no, because that doesn't affect the overall market. It would be the same if some carpenter or plumber wanted to dabble in SD in his free time.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.
The main problem is scale.
You want more eggs? no problem, raise wages and get more chicken workers.
You want more strawberries? No problem, raise wages and get more strawberry workers.
You want more of everything, across the board, espeicially in low-wage manual labor jobs that are hard to automate? Well... now you've run out of workers. You can raise wages as much as you want, but you're not going to magically get more workers out of thin air. It might have been different in 2010 when US unemployment was high. Now it's near record-lows, there's just not a lot of slack left in the economy. Or do you want to put my 90-yr old grandma at work building houses?
BahRamYou
1yr ago
If the government takes $50,000 for every birth within the USA each year, and puts it into a broad market fund returning 6% a year (this is conservative), at age 70, that's worth $2,953,796.51.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that the stock market isn't a magical money machine. There's no particular limit on money being invested- banks create money out of thin air all the time. The reason stocks appreciate is that we limit how much money banks can create, and that the economy overall is growing. If the government throws in an extra 10 trillion dollars into the stock market, all that happens is that stocks overall grow slower because they're weighted down by all this useless government money.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
do you have a link to it, or remember the author's name? I wanted to read it again but I can't remember it.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
To be clear, I didn't mean kids who have severe mental issues- they probably belong in special-ed or juvenile detention. (but what will you do witih them after they turn 18....?) Just basic, normal kids who might sometimes misbehave or slack off a bit, but are perfectly capable of following simple directions. There's no reason to think they'd be any worse at doing most low wage jobs than the people currently doing them, other than lack of experience.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
I would trust plastic surgeons to use their professional judgment and follow the hippocratic oath to not do any surgery that makes a woman less hot!
BahRamYou
2yr ago
Yeah but... that's with all sorts of legal and ethical rules.
Ask yourself. If there were no rules. You could own a slave. Human chattel. Do whatever you want. Do you really not think you could make money from that?
BahRamYou
2yr ago
Probably not (i didnt know he was an Antifa activist) but i think the basic gist is true. Huge inequality between the big accounts with tons of followers, and the "common folk" who follow but are not followed.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
we could use selective abortions and IVF sex-selection to produce larger ratios of girl babies. Most parents seem to prefer girl children these days, anyway, if they have a preferance.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
...do you think that people in Russia, China, and other countries had some sort of fair democratic election over whether they wanted to join the communist bloc? They didn't. It was enforced upon them.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Sure, just so long as you realize that you're talking about some strange hypothetical situation of "pure air power" that's never actually been tried. In real wars, countries use every asset they reasonably can, which includes spies, commando raids, and allying with local dissidents. The operation in Venezuela is about as close to "pure" air power as you're likely to ever see, they only sent in special forces for one brief helicopter raid for political reasons when it obviously would have been much easier to just strike Maduro from the air.
Why do you put war crimes in scare quotes like it's some kind of joke? Your argument is "it's OK for US soldiers to commit murder and rape because other armies in other wars did even worse shit." Think for a second about how stupid and fucked up that is.
This is the 3rd time now that you've just straight insulted me. We're just two nerds on the internet typing words, so there's not much point to that. But if we were two grunts this is the point where I'm supposed to punch you in the face, right? Establish dominance by physical violence and all that shit. What a great system.
So imagine we've done that. I've punched you, you've punched me, we've both got some brain damage but we're best buds now. I'll also buy you a shitload of booze if that helps.
Are you willing to admit that maybe... just maybe... the rank-and-file of the US military did some bad stuff in Afghanistan? Or are you still going to be like "no we were perfect angels! We did nothing wrong! It was those evil officers and stupid civilians who caused all the problems!"
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