DBDr
6mo ago
Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.
I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).
The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)
The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.
All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.
I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?
DBDr
9mo ago
HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools
Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.
Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.
DBDr
11mo ago
If they die? Yes.
He clearly committed manslaughter, so he gets the punishment for manslaughter.
DBDr
9mo ago
After recently becoming rich (read: middle class in socal), I've started doing more rich people things; eg I'm a member of a couple museums I like near me, the gemological institute, and I bought a membership and season tickets to my local orchestra. Hence, I've been going to more soirees, concerts, events and such and have developed some feelings.
Re: Some types of 'cultural' activities are just better than other types. I know, I know, taste and what have you. That said: if the only thing that you do outside of work and buy shit is watch sports, I am tired as fuck of you. Even if I disagree with 80% of the people here on 90% of reality, at least your fucking here! That already give you a bunch of points or interest.
Everyone I meet at these highfalutin type situations likes dumb garbage prole entertainment. They watch sitcoms or NFL or MMA or whatever. The problem seems to be when that is the ONLY thing you consume.
Secondly: Man I love having a social circle that includes some cultural elites. A lot of dudes I used to be around in trade actually had more money than these people, but they spent it on eg a bigger truck or cloths or shitty furniture that is still expensive for some reason or vacations to Cabo or Acapulco. I know that finding these things to be fucking lame as fuck and boring makes me an elitist piece of shit but fuck man. Acapulco? You're gonna spend 10k for 7 days in a shitty hotel?
Basically, I am devastated but unsurprised to find that the better half actually do live better.
Also I got the subject of my most recent ban in the mail and it is fucking beautiful; a heavily used Stanley no. 8 type 9 jointer from 1900ish in nearly mint condition somehow; many carful owners. It is now my precious son and lives on a special shelf so I can admire it from my computer.
Also: What, should the entire apparatus of the civil state stand there, limp dick in hand, watching norm after law after precedent get dynamited?
The apparatus demands lubrication, and the only substance at hand is blood. It is good and necessary that blood should flow to feed the state. That is what the state is, that is what the state is for. The state is the threat of violence perpetrated against all by consent of all for the benefit of all.
There has been a defector; why should the government even exist if it can't punish one idiot failson of a fallen business empire?
DBDr
4mo ago
Your list of things to trigger and own the atheists betrays a complete lack of understanding of non-theist world views.
You are holding up a list of things that exist as though they are the same thing as a given religions idols (the cross, the prophet, the tablets, etc) when the whole point of atheism is that there is no such thing as an idol.
If you are a committed christian (or theist in general, I guess) your reality requires lots of maintenance. You have to believe in things for their own, not believe in other things because that would endanger the things you do believe in, hold things sacred for no reason other than because they are, abore things that are aborent for no reason other than that they are.
Atheists don't have to do that: they just have to not respect and privilege your personal reality over the shared reality that is the material world. Religion is the practice of having faith in things you can't deduce through empiricism, atheism is a rejection of faith, and anti-theism considers faith the be a type of negative utility delusion.
There is no special claim atheists have to uphold or special symbol they have to respect. All they need to do is shrug.
DBDr
5mo ago
I want to bitch about the blue collar middle class here for a second: Contractors are all liars and thieves, or thieves and liars.
Was doing some maintenance on one of our properties, in this case a leaking water line near a wall from god knows when; but was on the plans and part of the original construction. Fuckers ran that shit 100 feet through a slab and instead of spending an extra 50 bucks on fittings and labor to put a t to a hose bib for hose bib and draining purposes; they did four pipe bends to bring the whole fucking thing into the air, ran it into the wall, then back into the fucking slab. Turned a 30 min. solder job into a 8 hour hell march (admittedly because I didn't restock on slip to street couplings and wide radius 90s. Oh well) because I can't just tell the resident "lol i cut the water pipe no water till the grainger truck arives lol".
This a couple days after I went to replace a failing range hood to find it was venting through dryer vent (NOT TO CODE BIG FIRE HAZARD HOURS) and the dryer vent was venting into a cavity in the ceiling, and was actually not even connected to the range hood that had never had the plug removed so it wasn't venting at all.
I go to fix this, and find that the complete shitbags that did previous owners kitchen remodel installed a 3 layers of drywall and a 2*4 below the galvanized vent pipe that goes to the roof. These motherfuckers turned a 30 min. job into me having to cut a 2 foot access hole into the fucking kitchen ceiling because they also ran a ton of vents to a gas heater 100% blocking the crawl space; all in service of scamming their customer out of thousand(s) of dollar(s) and maybe burning their house down.
All this to say: Never trust a contractor. Never trust a tradesman older than 36 but younger than 68. I've never worked with one in that range that didn't try to cut corners or steal from their customers on the quote end.
DBDr
9mo ago
Nor is it fraud to sign a piece of paper saying you believe.
It literally is fraud to do that though, is the thing. That's what fraud is.
DBDr
8mo ago
I'm taking my third month long vacation in the past 12 months; given that we are probably seeing the very end of the covid price extravaganza that let me go to japan and london from Socal for a couple hundred bucks; this time filling out my map of Europe with Romania, Bulgaria, and greece (which I somehow managed to avoid up until now.) If I don't go now, I'm probably gonna not go for a long ass time; prices look like they are bouncing wayyyy back up.
I'm really gonna miss covid; that whole situation was so fucking convenient to me. Cheap plane tickets, cheap lodgings, cheap car rentals, incredibly cheap train tickets (including that summer ticket in Germany that was all local and national and some international rail with unlimited rides for like, 12 dollars or something. Shit was wild; I hope they do that again.), and short lines.
I guess It has to end eventually though, or all the places I like will go bust. This is me bidding a fond Farwell to the Coronavirus era, I really hope the people who want me to eat the bugs and live in the pod don't also make me go back to the fucking office.
DBDr
9mo ago
I mean, not specifically.
But signing your name to something you know isn't true or tricking some else into similar is the dictionary definition of fraud.
DBDr
5mo ago
As someone who has a fake going on the computer job and a degree, I've gotten roped in to tutoring/babysitting a psuedo family members kids. They go to one of those classical academy style charter schools everybody is excited about and got dANG: These 3rd - 5th graders don't know how to fucking read.
They are learning through something like systematic phonics (probably), where you learn letter and syllable sounds first; resulting in two kids who REALLY slowly scan through a sentence like human recursive descent parsers and one brighter middle schooler who totally ignored the teachers and taught himself how to read on his own by simply picking up a book and plowing through it.
Interestingly, one of the two kids in elementary is doing pretty good in math, so I gotta assume that the IQ is there. Little dude might be a little dyslexic, who knows?
Apropos: Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own? What are the kids reading these days? I'm gonna see if I can't find them a bigass children's science encyclopedia, that was my jam as a little babu but I welcome any suggestions from ya'll.
DBDr
4mo ago
As an SJW: You can't win. It is as impossible for you to win as it is for me to will big communism into existence ex nihlo.
We are currently playing Culture War by a set of rules that gives me infinite tries and only allowed you temporary victories; and it is the same set of rules that means I can vote in as many elections as I like and choose between two dudes representing corporate interests but one has the pride flag.
So, I win the culture war. You loose the culture war. Maybe you make some headway here or there, but in the end all your causes will fail and all of mine will succeed, until they move beyond me and I become the reactionary.
Unless there is some sort of radical reorganization of society; until the socialist or ancap revolution really comes, this is just how it do. Capitalist realism baby!
DBDr
9mo ago
I know this isn't helpful, but my flinch reaction to dudes who have masculinity problems is to scoff and feel contempt.
Like, what's so fucking hard about it? And then I remember normal mind bias and tell myself that what I just said is "Listen, picking up heavy stuff is easy! Just lift more than you can lift!"
I will say that building your masculinity on the attention of a particular woman or women in general is cuck behavior, and needs to be discouraged wherever possible. Even the MGTOW dudes still construct their whole identity around women, you gotta stop that shit.
But that runs into "Just stop feeling that way! Lift more than you can lift!" again.
DBDr
9mo ago
The most intractable problem, with the fucky-est answers of all.
My own deeply unhelpful yet deeply held belief is that nobody can teach anybody anything; you simply place people in various combinations of prison/laborcamp/cult/skinnerbox and alternately whip them/ give them treats until their brain falls into the correctly shaped hole and they learn something almost by accident.
's why I find the various flavors of Xavier's school for the gifted deeply unconvincing also. You mean to say your product works when every rule is followed by committed users who were probably going to succeed regardless? You don't say.
DBDr
8mo ago
Not to pile on to a totally unrelated thread as I do just that; but a conception that allows both views (and which I think is true in most cases) is anti-abortion as a cultural signifier.
Ie, most compelled-birthers (probably) have no real concept of what a fetus is and (probably )do not believe in their hearts that an embryo is alive (which we can observe from the prevalence of abortions among anti-abortionists being only marginally smaller than everyone else of their race and class).
It's not that they are doing it to own the libs, it's that they are doing it because they have to do it to be part of the club, style of thing.
DBDr
9mo ago
This is pure anecdote; but the main problem I've seen for working class types during my time in Europe was rent and durable goods.
Every other thing is cheaper and of much higher quality than what is available in the US. Eg, a loaf of bread in Parris is .79 cents; the same loaf of bread in the US is either 4.99 or can't be bought at all; eat this dogfood instead.
This seems to be across the board for food, cloths, services, the whole shebang.
On the other hand, Europeans seem to make less money.
On the other other hand, Ya'll work a LOT less, like a lot a lot less.
On the final hand, once you get above US 70k purchasing power equivalence, ya'll seem to pay quite a bit more in taxes.
I'd like to see a breakdown of what the actual differences on the ground are instead of the theoretical economics of it, but I don't trust any of the breakdowns I've seen. Either conservative "European mothers eat every second child to prevent starvation" or librul "Non gmo locally produced by women owned businesses Milk and honey rain from the sky twice a day and three times on weekends."
DBDr
4mo ago
A: It won't happen.
B: If it does, it they get iced by dudes with rifles because AI can't violate thermodynamics and energy density is energy density.
DBDr
9mo ago
Hey, can we get a specific book recommendation thread?
I've been reading too much politics and philosophy and history; I need some Arts and Sciences in there.
I've been going over my copy of The Art of Fermentation; which is a fairly comprehensive pass over world fermentation traditions and a recommended read of your are interested in food history; or want to try some weird ferments of your own.
DBDr
8mo ago
The diversity of human experience, right?
It let me stop being a human beast of burden and get on the social capital accruing section of the ladder.
Truly proves meritocracy is a myth: no covid, I work for wages until I'm dead. Yes covid: I get a degree, and now I own a house and have a funded retirement and all sorts of shit; where as you (maybe?) get absolutely fucked by the thing that helped me immensely trough no fault of your own and with no way to stop it (I assume).
DBDr
5mo ago
Coming from the opposite place (a socialist with a history in the shovel swinging strata):
You've really nicely explained to things I've always just taken for granted in here.
A: there is an such a thing as elite capture, but there is also such a thing as "Dude, nobody fucking likes you". The level of authentic dislike or lack of interest in conservatives and conservative politics people have is wildly underestimated in places like this; right down to me polling my crew of redneck proll tradies over lunch about the transes and the SJWs and the majority answer being a combination of "I don't care" or "What the fuck is that?"
B: So, in an attempt to solve A we switch to a more salient message: these groups are attacking you, destroying your "way of life", the fact that your life is worse than your dads or your granpappys is because of THIS! And that might work in the short run. It will work in the short run, even. But dudes I used to work with and still talk to who fully bought in to Trump style messaging are getting woke to the fact that nothing in their lives improved even with a three branch R sweep; that their boss still buys a new corvette every other year but their kid had to move back in 8 months after moving out or they would end up homeless.
The current problems politicos need to solve are the (1)disintegration of community sentiment and the (2)disintegration of the economic middle; and the strategies of the parties have been to say "Just hold hands and thing happy thoughts and we'll slap a few bandages on it and if you complain about (1) in the wrong tone you have 5 cousin fucking teeth you pathetic FUCK" from the dems, and "(2) is good actually you comunit bitch but actually both are because of immigrants(brown) and the gays but we won't actually do anything about either".
Both major parties aren't attacking the root of the problem, but people notice that the D's attack the symptoms and the R's at least will sympathies with your grievances. Both parties are fucked in the long run if nothing changes, but the R's are fucked sooner because they keep not even pretending to do anything with the policy goals of the bottom of of the top bottom alliance. (except abortion, and look how that's turning out.)
DBDr
9mo ago
ANNECDOTE TIME!
As someone who has actually done it; it certainly effected my crops negatively in zones 9 and 13 (beans, avocados, stone fruit, nightshades, corn, rice, etc etc)
Corn has done fine every year; but everything else has had complete failures a couple times due to the seasons becoming unreliable. I've had killing frosts as late as april; when I look at the journals people had before they never went past late feb/early may.
I've also had complete failures of stone fruit due to temps swinging between 60-90 degrees in a couple days; which again was never reported in any of the journals going back 60-80 years.
Also, I've had failures of some squashes and such because the pollinators either swarmed early or late due to the seasons starting early or late; which is annoying as fuck.
Basically; my growing seasons are still perfect but the timing has became unreliable; which sometimes leads to completely unavoidable unpredictable total failures.
You can't put up frost cloth when you have no warning it's gonna sudenly drop below 40 after a 72 degree day.
DBDr
4mo ago
We're entering in to the time of year when I need to diet or exercise and this year I choose exercise.
Right now I'm 220ish; my most fit weight when I was wrestling and competing in martial arts and doing manual labor was 240ish. I'm going to see if I can get at least to 230 in the next couple months without going to the gym at all.
I set up a heavy bag for extra cardio, and I'm going to move a couple tons of sand and gravel by hand over the next while, I'll see if that plus expanding my usual calisthenics will turn enough fat into muscle to get me back up there.
The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
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