FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
7d ago
I don't think it should be humiliating to join the metropole. That doesn't mean that it can't be made to be humiliating. Having sex with a woman isn't humiliating, but her demands can make it so.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I'm a firm believer in the CanadAnschluss, and think it should be offered in a brotherly manner. Canada should be ten states. There is no purpose to the border.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
I guess I'm trying to understand if there's some underlying logic, some theory of demographic-based moral responsibility I'm missing? Or is this all a kind of pre-rational responsibility assignment?
I read an essay once that described the use of slurs as a speech act primarily intended to communicate that I can use a slur to refer to you and you can't stop me. It's a verbal act to demonstrate power relations.
Forcing others to take moral responsibility for their co-ethnics is similarly an act of power relations. Who has to apologize for nothing and who gets to just live their life is a pretty clear example of power dynamics in action.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
Are you under the impression that Puerto Rican citizens are prevented from migrating to America?
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
And if we use North Dakota as the referent, twenty states wouldn't be enough!
I do think the funniest outcome to Trumpisme is the incorporation of Venezuela into the Union, resulting in an end to illegal immigration, as we'll simply have 25 million broke venezuelan citizens who will suck up so many low-end labor jobs and drive prices down so far that there will be no gap in the market for the illegal migrant to fill.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
8d ago
The oddest thing to me is the repeated insistence that Canada will be the 51st state, when Canada would clearly be states 51-61.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
27d ago
That's exactly my point! Americans feel perfectly comfortable saying that America's economy should remain the world's largest! We feel that it's the natural order of things! We don't reflect on what we're saying and what it means!
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
28d ago
The other angle of this argument is typically that our wealth was sent to China to enrich the elites. But if you look at everyday Chinese, their lives may be better than their parents generation but they definitely aren't good. The successful ones work crazy hours and there's a much larger precariat than here without a social safety net. If your father's generation was so much better off, where did the money go? Or did we just globally become less productive?
Not calling you out in particular, but "China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese." This may seem obvious, but I think China vs USA discussions often ignore or elide this point. China has a population about four times the size of the United States'. I think this is the most important fact about the world to consider when discussing such comparisons.
When we say "We want the USA to remain the biggest economy in the world, and not to have it surpassed by the PRC." We aren't just saying we want to be richer than China, we're saying we want the average American to be at least four times richer than the average Chinaman. That's an insane level of arrogance and privilege to state!
I can imagine my richer friend saying: "FiveHour, I hope my two kids are as wealthy as I am, and that your two kids do a little better than you did, but in my heart of hearts I hope that my two kids are always richer than your two kids." I could accept that.
If my richer friend said: "FiveHour, you have four kids and I have one, I hope my son is so much more successful than all your kids that he is richer than all four of them combined and it is important that this remain the case, it would deeply upset me if your four kids combined made more than my son." I would be dumbfounded by the weirdness of that position and assume he kind of hated me.
If China and America are equally wealthy as states, all the wealth that is in America can go to China, and just bring China's standard of living up 25% from where it was. (obviously this is a ridiculous economic concept, wealth and income are different and neither China's nor America's economies will make any sense with the other eliminated)
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
The "choice" in a local planning sense for a municipality choosing where to zone for AI, if you have a site for a 1,000,000sqft industrial building, is between a data center that might have two dozen or so permanent employees and a warehouse that would support a thousand unskilled jobs or a factory that would have 800 skilled workers.
So yeah, rounds down to zero.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
Strong disagree. Bikinis were at least mildly riskee when I was a kid, and twenty years later they are the default, to the point where the tyranny of the bikini is (in my mind) a women's freedom issue that isn't discussed enough.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
I might grant you the Dodgers or Red Sox, but probably not the Pirates, who generally only draw national attention when they have a star that's on the trade speculation stage.
At this point crypto is a known, if poorly understood, thing. The Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles is mentioned on national sports coverage more than the Pirates. Any financial investment news covers crypto at least in part, WSJ local business section CNBC etc. Most (substantial) Americans are involved in investing in some way. They're all aware of crypto, and at least peripherally involved in it but the way it correlates with other assets.
I'd say that more people follow the Pirates than invest heavily in or understand crypto (not a perfectly overlapping Venn diagram). But people are aware of crypto and know it impacts the world.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
Better still: large forested buffer around the building, reduces noise and makes it invisible from street level.
My father strongly believes that the future of data centers is in placing hydroponic greenhouses around them.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
I think the AI bubble is uniquely confusing, because the real estate pros building them out are treating it like musical chairs and the companies commissioning them are treating it like the Rapture. Real estate pros figure it's a bubble, in the sense that eventually they will be overbuilt and stop building, so if I want to cash in on it I need to do it right now before the music stops I can't wait around. AI companies treat it like the Rapture, it doesn't matter if they overspend now because AGI is right around the corner and then money doesn't matter. They're unconcerned with the idea that the music will stop, they're concerned with controlling the playlist because whatever song is playing today will be on repeat forever. Combine the two and you're getting a toxic bubble.
It's also a problem in my town because of prior government interventions to subsidize the construction of new office buildings, creating a glut of new office space, which in turn makes building office space impractical. So you have sites that would be perfect for an office park being turned into data centers.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
This is...not true. CNBC reports Crypto prices far more prominently than ESPN reports on the Pirates.
FiveHourMarathon
a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop
29d ago
I'm not anti-data-center as a general idea. But somehow every data center plan in my town is absolutely moronic.
My particular town has one main commercial corridor. On this corridor you have stores, movie theaters, banks, offices. People moving back and forth across it throughout the day. Now there used to be a major company headquartered there, they since moved to new offices down the road. Developers want to convert the old offices into data centers, a few million square feet.
My first thought upon looking at the plan was, you'd never do this in Sim City. You have one of your most prime pieces of commercial real estate in the region, and you want to turn it into a box that no one uses and nobody goes to. You want to give away that access, that site with easy walkability and simple drivability to literally everything in town, and turn it into a box that hums. You're going to take this prime real estate away from people.
It's just a stupid development choice. And I get that the market doesn't owe me Sim City type optimal decision making, but it's a weird thing. I'm not anti-data-center, but there's obvious good places and obvious bad places to put them, and so many of the choices made seem to be obvious bad places.
One of my favorite factoids: Osama Bin Laden was a huge fan of the Foundation series. And a possible English translation of Al Qaeda is "The Foundation."
Which actually makes a lot of sense out of Islamist political philosophy viewed through that lens. Al Qaeda was so angry at ISIS because they were worse than wrong, they were early.
Curious result, the two greatest titans of early SciFi both inspired legendarily evil murderers: Manson was a huge fan of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and obviously modeled himself after the main character.
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