Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
A bunch of the somalis convicted of that $250,000,000 COVID child food aid fraud had also been conning Medicaid for "adult daycare services." Some of them were still being paid for running non-existent daycares even after their fraud convictions!
It hasn't made the news much, but there's billions of dollars of theft out there.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
I always had the impression that Blago took the fall for Obama, and got hung out to dry rather than rewarded for it. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump had dealings with people on his side of the business.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
I'll join you on this lol. Just did my first little seasonal job of the year, and my winter exercises had not kept up my stamina.
Got about three weeks to get back in form for squatting and dragging heavy weights for 8-9 hours at a time.
Check out the IRA budget. I haven't even started to wrap my head around the scale of it. It's literally all the crazy "green new deal" stuff they ever asked for. I see articles from WA green groups about how they can't spend all the money.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
I think they confirmed that it was both serious and not actually her fault, because she was just passing down orders from FEMA HQ. But they threw her under the bus and pretended she was a rogue agent, with no further investigation.
Remember to take advantage of ISAs for tax free saving. You can put 4k a year into a lifetime isa with a government bonus of 1k, that's huge. You can withdraw that to buy your first house too, and keep it in bonds or something if you just want the money parked safe.
The UK has a ton of stupid little programs for saving and borrowing that you need to learn about by word of mouth. My dad made a tidy profit on a super low-interest loan through a government program when he bought his first house, even though he paid cash for it.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
Vanguard is one of the more popular in the US. I use Schwab, whose good customer service isn't really making up for everything else these days.
Would enjoy hearing what everyone here uses
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
Tbf "Google wallet" etc. does blur the line between tech company and bank.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
We'd be freezing in the dark without hydro. Nuclear hydro with possibly solar for summer export would work well for WA
I thought he credited hearing about it from the fight between sailer and mr stencil in the first essay, let me check
Edit, yes:
Finally, in 2024, twitter personality Will Stancil picked a fight with right-wing blogger Steve Sailer, who like many in right-wing media had released occasional articles touching on this case. Their scuffle stirrred up enough attention towards it to catch my eye
Funny how stencil gets to be a "twitter personality" while sailer is just a "right wing blogger"...
Don't we have everything but the creationism, soda, and divorce? We even have a football and country music thread now.
I'm out if we ever start drinking pop
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
I don't think you read the post, specifically the end of paragraph 3.
Paying for preventable catastrophic health bills because of stupid behavior is one thing. Yes, there's some moral hazard in giving a skydiver the same life insurance rate as everyone else, but insurance companies actually look at the risks and decide it's only worth charging more if you're an instructor or other high jump-count enthusiast. And the risk of base jumping will make your insurer laugh in your widow's face if she tries to collect.
But what's worse is the skydiver asking his life insurance to pay for his parachute and training on the theory that him dying by jumping without a parachute would cost them more money. This is the prep situation.
And what's even worse than that is the government forcing the insurer to pay for this (and raise costs on everyone else) because the national skydiving federation somehow became a powerful lobby that dictates government policy.
The sane solution, like we use for skydivers irl, is making paying for prep out of pocket a condition of obtaining health insurance at a base rate, just like not smoking or buying your own parachute before jumping.
If they don't, their insurance is void and we saddle them with non-dischargeable medical debt in exchange for their treatment (or we charge city gays with 6-7 figure incomes an actuarially fair rate for their coverage)
And if people can't deal with this, the only answer is "right, first we eliminate the influence of the national skydiving federation and fire any bureaucrat who had dealings with them. As well as any agency who gave federal grants to the "Chutes Over Chicago 501c" that seems creepily obsessed with holding skydiver storytimes at local kindergartens
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
Oh. I remember now
I mean, that just begs the question of why the rioters who showed up with Glocks get moral priority over their victims, which iirc he never even engaged with except to shrug and point to it being the Current Year of Our Floyd.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
The bit where FC wanted to kill TW
I've been halfheartedly searching for a car for over a year now, and still haven't found anything good. Used prices are still ridiculous, the new ones are bloated messes that slam your brakes for no reason, and I still can't import a Hilux
still resentful of the mods for not cracking down harder on the hostile reactions at that time, since it was such a rare perspective to get.
He's literally still a user here btw, pedophiles just have tougher skin (to their chagrin, sadly)
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
Link it
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
I don't think you believe that
https://lgbtlifecenter.org/events/
"Youth matter LGBT+ affirming youth groups" and drag shows, mostly. They also run a housing grant ring. Basically a gay church but paid for entirely by taxpayers.
Very common media trick, noting a single uncontroversial thing and pretending it's the whole thing.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
Ahhh, I always wondered about your name.
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
Welcome back. That's a name I haven't seen in a long time.
Has anyone been checking out the reddit and hacker news reaction to TW's FAA scandal follow-up?
He's downvoted to -44 on /r/atc, which applauded his essay last year. Highlights from the comments:
Trace, the truth of the matter is you think you deserve a ton of credit for bringing this story to light. But this story has already been brought to light, been analyzed, and it’s nowhere close to the actual scandal of FAA hiring.
The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.
There are only two sides right now. There are the neoconfederate fascists intent on dragging us back to the antebellum era, of which Trump, Vance, and Sailer are definitely a part. And there’s the rest of us.
You don’t have to be on their side if you don’t want to be. But if you choose to be, at least be honest with yourself about what you’re doing.
The top-voted comment on hackernews is accusing it of being a rehashed non-scandal laundered by authoritarian fascists. But the actual comments are mostly in favor, or pointing out that there's suddenly a lot of brand new accounts defending the FAA & claiming "this wasn't real DEI."
Grendel-khan describes the reaction:
The left outside the institution at fault swears up and down that something like this would never happen, and it's just right-wing disinformation, and you're probably a closet right-winger if you believe it.
The left inside the institution at fault swears up and down that this is a good thing and it's obvious that it's happening and why are you making such a big deal of it?
Taking it for granted for a moment that a lot of this stuff is totally astroturfed by blueanon orgs with AI-assisted spamming, it looks like doubling-down and tripling-down on full spectrum information manipulation is still the only strategy on the menu, even as it's increasingly failing and backfiring outside of totally controlled environments like reddit and bluesky.
So, what are the next four years going to look like? Is there going to be any evolution in strategy? Are they correct that just repeating a party line hard enough will bring people back into the fold?
I think that right now it's easy to point at this sort of frantic concern-trolling and laugh, but in a few years the average voter won't remember anything about some FAA hiring scandal except that "Trump used a tragedy for a culture war attack on minorities." Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.
So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
Moldbug and especially Thiel may absolutely despise the press, but they see the manipulation of public opinion as a quirk of "demotic" regimes, and have no time for it themselves. Moldbug in particular dismisses color revolutions with the over-simplistic "why does the dictator not simply shoot the revolutionaries with crypto-controlled weapons?" Thiel is quieter but clearly sees controlling the murder drones and spying rings as more important than propaganda. Musk is the only one of Trump's big backers who thinks control of social media is important, and I'm convinced that's because of his showman's instincts and desire for attention rather than some strategic policy.
People here have been talking as if the left will shift to violence and hard power in response to their usual methods failing last year (more assassinations of Musk & Trump, etc.). I'm a lot more worried about them doing the same thing they always do and getting away with it, because people don't have lasting immunity to propaganda.
I'm getting a bit sick of a few things. The end of automatic money market rollover for one, the half-functional phone app, the loss of their old 2% cash back card (I don't understand the point of an Amex plat). The home loan company they partner with (rocket whatever) is notoriously scummy too.
The lack of any exchange fees is nice, but it's not like I buy or sell more than a few times a month anyway.
Their half-ass international system is a huge pain. Had to move a few hundred k over from Europe, and all incoming transfers go through citi, to Schwab's citi account, and you have to write "pay to Steve @schwab acct #694201488" on the bottom and hope the euros know what the fuck they're doing. they didn't, so it took over a month to finally get it sorted out.
A brokerage should be capable of handling international transfers better than that. Not having their own system is amateur hour.
More options
Context Copy link