DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
2yr ago
As a quick follow up to my previous post about the Canadian real estate crisis, we have officially entered the "escape debts using arson" phase of the problem.
A new Toronto mansion under construction was listed for 13.8 million dollars and didn't sell. Shortly after it burnt down.
Unfortunately we are also in the age of cheap home cameras, and a neighbour recorded four men dressed in black carrying gas cans.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/12/14/house-fire-north-york-york-mills-construction-toronto-fire/
DradisPing
2yr ago
It was also posted in a channel for gay hill staffers. He both expected and received zero blowback from it until people had a reason to go after him.
So there's probably a lot of crazy stuff in that channel.
I admit it's hard for me to see a single person consensually getting fucked in a senate hearing room as anything but an improvement from the norm.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I think it's a mix of trolling and a low effort scam. Post the auction with some code words associated with CSAM, hope someone bids. Deliver them the image of a cheese pizza as agreed. They won't be in an position to complain.
I doubt there are actually many purchasers.
DradisPing
2yr ago
When I heard this, I did feel an intuitive sense of disgust, but I had a difficult time justifying the feeling. What’s so bad about Disney that isn’t bad about going to Burning Man?
Disney is largely a girl brand but you were exposed to it heavily in your childhood. It's fairly common for adult women to still have a love for Disney. Men remember it as a childhood thing they were never that into.
Basically you're having a reaction to the perceived childishness of it. Kind of like how you'd react to someone asking to go to one of those adult kindergartens.
I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be. Star Wars fandom used to skew heavily male but didn't have event locations. Auto shows seem to have a similar gender split, but they aren't child focussed. Comic cons before girls in sexy costumes started going could work. WWE and Monster Trucks fit apart from the fact that they are seen as low class.
DradisPing
2yr ago
They only do that because they have correctly reasoned that in the modern western world people noticing their disproportionate success rate in society would lead to them becoming disfavoured compared to other groups, which is something nobody wants.
Another factor that I've heard and think is probably somewhat accurate is that they also want to avoid any pressure to feel a sense of noblesse oblige towards poorer whites.
DradisPing
2yr ago
A key thing to understand is that the two largest oil producers for most of the 20th century were 1: USA and 2: USSR. Political science types like to play up the battle of ideologies and play down the battle of the petro nations aspect.
Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things.
In the 80s the Reagan White House got the Saudis and some other gulf nations on board with a scheme to pump like hell and crash global oil prices. This was combined with advanced military research projects like SDI, sometimes called "Star Wars", forcing the USSR to dump even more money into military research.
As a percentage of GDP the USSR had already been spending what the USA would consider WW2 levels for many decades.
The cash crunch created a crisis in the USSR. They were looking at average Russians having to go back to only eating meat once a week like during the Tzar era. Soviet leaders assumed they could loosen the iron fist a bit, allow some market reforms, and keep the USSR going.
Instead the whole thing collapsed.
Of course there were other issues. Chernobyl made Soviet leadership look dangerously incompetent internally.
Now I don't know any good books on the topic. Reagan is a highly contentious figure and has only grown more so over the years. A lot of academics are loath to admit his gambit killed the USSR.
So books tend to be either ra ra Reagan or to play down what happened.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Why do I see weekly wishes of violence towards the developers who created the WebP format, and never towards the developers who refuse to add its support to their software?
I wonder where you actually see this, I've never seen anything like it.
But the issue with things like a new image format is that introducing WebP breaks people's existing workflows. It should have a huge advantage to justify that. But the advantages over jpeg are only significant in a few specific use cases.
It's probably similar to 7z. I hated it when it first came out. Websites would try to force you to use it and from my POV it just resulted in having to use worse software to decompress things.
DradisPing
2yr ago
There's also an aesthetic reason. The linear wave looks better in ads than a pea sized ball in the middle of the brush.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Yup, it uses Google Tag Manager for analytics.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Yes but it's toothless unless the DOJ takes up the contempt charge for them.
DradisPing
2yr ago
A less generous read is that the charges were brought so that he could take the fifth in his upcoming congressional appearance.
His lawyers have a fairly compelling case that he was given legal immunity to these tax charges with his diversion agreement signed relating to the gun charge. However that immunity would prevent him from taking the fifth in front of congress.
These charges in a separate district create a legal justification for taking the fifth, then later his lawyers can have the case dismissed.
DradisPing
2yr ago
Congress controls the purse and writes regulations. There's a lot things congress can do that these schools won't like.
Also you need to keep in mind the egos of the Presidents of top schools. They assumed they could make short work out of any questions and that lowly congressmen wouldn't dare be hostile to them.
DradisPing
2yr ago
They did it to Steve Bannon.
But generally no, it requires the DOJ to go along with the charges, and they only will for political reasons.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I haven't, I just got around to playing Cyberpunk in the last few weeks. I really liked it and I'm planning to get PL.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I have a simple solution to get things started quickly. Make donations to college sports non-tax deductible.
Rich left wingers fund left wing organizations. Rich right wingers fund college football.
Republicans need to start football shaming the wealthy.
DradisPing
2yr ago
"I'll repeal Obamacare and give everyone MUCH BETTER healthcare!"
This is always framed as a swipe at Trump, but it really shows how incompetent the establishment GOP is. They have hundreds, if not thousands, of people working for think tanks, policy assistants, lobbyists, etc who were supposed to be crafting a Republican alternative to Obamacare. They had multiple votes to repeal Obamacare before Trump was a political player.
It turns out they had no plan. Apparently they were just cashing paycheques and playing Candy Crush.
John McCain repeatedly voted to repeal Obamacare, campaigned in 2016 on repealing Obamacare, then cast the deciding vote to save Obamacare. He was hailed as a hero by the press for opposing Trump, but he knew that there was no plan to replace Obamacare for all of those votes and during his campaign.
Trump just assumed someone in GOP healthcare policy had done their job in the past six years.
Legislation is the job of the legislative branch. The President should have input, but he shouldn't be expected to go into more depth than broad strokes about ideas he supports and opposes.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I'd recommend "The New Right" by Michael Malice, "Ship of Fools" by Tucker Carlson, and "The Case for Trump" by Victor Davis Hanson if you want to understand them.
One of the major issues is that the bureaucratic technocrat class has devoted most of their energy into setting up systems to prevent them from every having to face any serious consequences.
Pete Buttigieg is a great example. His Secretary of Transportation appointment was supposed to be an easy resume builder on his path to his Presidential run. He's been cocking it up, but everyone knows it won't hurt his political ambitions.
California should be the crown jewel example for bureaucratic Dems. But wherever competent management is needed you can see total failure. Electricity has been a disaster for over 20 years. The high speed rail project started planning in 1996 and has been a total failure throughout every step. Water planning is a disaster. Forest management to reduce fires is absent. The homelessness camps are entirely caused by mismanagement.
I could go on and on.
But to make it worse, DC is filled with people who have open contempt for the residents of "flyover states". They devote all of their energy to social signalling and fail at their actual jobs.
DradisPing
2yr ago
I've been enjoying the "Murderbot Diaries" audio books, but I finished them all.
I also enjoy Total War Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires, but I use cheat engine to give myself a huge amount of money and just set about purging chaos.
DradisPing
2yr ago
The stealth is quite good. Many of the gigs and other side jobs have thieving or installing a virus on the network as a goal. You get a bonus for remaining undetected. You can get cybermods to be more stealthy and can hack cameras / turrets / etc.
DradisPing
2yr ago
They were big in the early 2000s, I think the PS2 God of War games popularized them.
Resident Evil 4 was famous for overusing them: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o1_3SdXcdMU
RE6 had a menu option to automatically pass all QTEs for people who hate them.
DradisPing
2yr ago
So this article has some recommendations: https://theworthyhouse.com/2019/04/16/on-francisco-franco/
You want to look at biographies of Franco to understand where he was coming from instead of just a book about the war.
Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, published in 2014, by Stanley Payne
Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator, by Enrique Moradiellos, 2018
DradisPing
2yr ago
Can you imagine being dumped by a girl because she wants a man old enough to buy her cigarettes? But you're 27?
It'll be interesting to see how the tobacco ban plays out for immigrants. I'm guessing that in 10 years the law just won't be enforced for PoC.
Weirdly, the usual weed legaliser types were in favour of the ban.
That's not surprising, the weed legalizers generally aren't libertarians. They just really really like weed.
DradisPing
2yr ago
On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
I think there are a few factors.
A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning. However they've been incredibly distracted the last few years by the Afghanistan withdrawal, China, and focussing on Ukraine / Russia as well as neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe. Note that the right wing party in Poland just lost.
Pro-Hamas protests have brought longstanding issues with integration of people from poor Muslim countries to the forefront. The excuse from the internationalist types has always been that they just need time, but after 20 years of hearing that people can see the situation has gotten worse, not better.
Another issue is a general economic decline in Europe. Things aren't awful, but they aren't great and there's less faith in the long term outlook. So people aren't feeling as generous as they used to.
DradisPing
2yr ago
There's a recent history of grassroots anti-government organization in Ireland, what with "The Troubles" and all. Also a stronger sense of tribe. That was the whole point of the Irish independence movement after all.
The UK is much more authoritarian and has a long history of sicking the police on people who oppose immigration from it's colonies, that's been expanded to broader immigration.
France likes to protest against it's government, but it's more formally organized with a lot of union involvement. There isn't any blue collar community organizing that can lead to a rapid response like this.
Macron isn't shy about cracking down on protesters in a hard violent fashion. As seen in the yellow vest protests a few years ago.
The carbonation makes the drink taste less sweet, Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so I suspect you just have a sweet tooth.
I'm reminded of when someone did a big study of children's breakfast cereal. They compared generic and name brands.
After crunching the data they learned that kids preferred whichever one had more sugar.
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