Pongalh
2yr ago
Interesting. My friend drove a Tesla, or rather had the Tesla drive him, from California to Vermont. But yeah I'm pretty sure he stayed on interstate 80 for most of that.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Amazon's primary source of profit is absolutely not original programming. Or any entertainment programming. Their humdrum commerce business subsidizes this stuff.
Pongalh
2yr ago
But not adhering to racial identity allows you to partner with others. Racial particularists wall themselves off from that possibility.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah I think of the YouTube shooter as a kind of weird unsung hero or patron saint of those who are slaves to social media view counts. A uniquely 21st century kind of disgruntled.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I despair reading this. But the antidote to White identity - and woke identity - is likely Christian universalism. Hell (so to speak), even Muslims are not hung up on race, save for the Black Muslim heretics, an American phenomenon. They too are a colorblind universalist doctrine.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I walk a ton living in San francisco. But I also step over a lot of shit and see a lot of demoralizing stuff on the street. Couple days ago saw someone feeding a mouse near a dumpster to their pitbull.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I can't help it Australia is better on this for the same reason it was worse on covid lockdown. The natural rights libertarians that make up the US haven't quite made their mind up about reconcile things like this. But then they don't think much about city problems because they are just generally not city people.
I wondered why America is so uniquely bad at doing cities. It's vitally important to get away from our underclass in a way it's not in NZ or Australia. Because the distance between the underclass disposition and everyone else's is not so insanely large, I figure. Does it really boil down to America's essentially open and nature? We really did get all the poor miserable huddled masses. We got the worst people of Europe. The version of myself that remained in Ireland is less beset with personality defects.
I have a friend who lives in Australia. He says he misses the US, where he grew up, because Australia is boring. Plus he really really really hated lockdown. I guess the grass is always greener...
Pongalh
2yr ago
Interesting. I had no idea David Mamet was behind that movie The Edge. Interesting. That movie is kind of a "Hatchet" (remember that book?) for adults.
He has a background as a playwright which makes the outdoorsiness of that film an unusual fit for his repertoire, I would think.
Pongalh
2yr ago
There's an in-between zone of low code/no code skills that are useful and can keep you employed.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of fucking her."
Things will get tired. What you can imagine you can have will always be greater than what you can actually procure. One has to just live with that fact and begin de-prioritizing sexual variety.
There was about a two-year period in which I was with a woman who was into bringing other people into bed, but I knew it had a built-in but fuzzy expiration date. Kind of dysfunctional and couldn't go on for long.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Meghan had a lot of gall claiming that Aella was lying about her own experiences with prostitution. She said she was invested in giving it the most positive gloss she could because that's how she makes a living.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Those teens think Elon Musk is awesome. Few teenagers in the '80s thought of Lee Iaocca as some kind of badass.
Pongalh
2yr ago
The millionaire/billionaire biz celebrity phenomenon - Elon musk, Mark Cuban etc. - has meant that a lot of the reason for the praise these days for rappers and to some degree athletes is because they are thought of as savvy businessmen. "He's ballin, he got business smarts" is it greater part of discourse around adoration and adulation for celebrities than it used to be, in black fandom, as it were.
More and more, artists need to have side hustles and sponsorships and other things going on (just like the typical American, shunted into "being their own boss" by driving for Uber on the side) because high-profile, steady gigs are fleeting and scattershot compared to ages back.
Pongalh
2yr ago
"Philosophical consistency is not a tribal suicide pact," to remix a Bush era phrase.
If you dislike Big Pharma e.g. because you think it promotes drugs that aid kids being trans, you are not going to find left allies. If you dislike Disney because you think it will make kids trans through acculturation, you're not going to find left allies.
So superficially the right is running away right now with a lot of the left's historical whipping boys, but if you dig deeper there's a throughline, a continuity.
This puts the left in awkward position, yes, feeling the need to defend some of these institutions by default but having to squeeze in, "but..but here's the real reason you should dislike X corporation!", trying to steal back that thunder.
Of course if you are very young leftist you're not particularly interested in stealing back that thunder. It was never your thunder to begin with. You care about different things. A lot of it seemingly representational and media-oriented.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I recall hearing about radiology in particular, how it's already been subject to being upset by telehealth and cheaper overseas competition. But radiologist is still a good living.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Yeah. I had assumed melatonin wouldn't do anything for me. But I've been taking it, and it absolutely has an effect on me.
Tangentially - and I mean very tangentially - if you have any experience with those rhino erection pills? I had one recently and I was surprised that it seemed to work. I'm not entirely certain. Think a somewhat delayed effect, if there was one.
Pongalh
2yr ago
That's interesting. The more stoned I get the more I can totally forego alcohol. The downside is of course overeating.
Alcohol and amphetamines go together for me. But weed neutralizes that whole package.
Pongalh
2yr ago
I hear that, about finishing the whole thing. That's why I only buy enough at any given time to finish that night. Of course the downside is that ends up being more expensive. A 24 pack of whatever is more cost-conscious than doing one offs most days a week.
Pongalh
2yr ago
Part of a seeming trend of the left benefiting from participating in their protests. Had a girlfriend who got intentionally arrested at a Bay Area protest years ago, maybe for Trayvon Martin, I don't recall. Not only did it not hinder her career to have that on her record, it bolstered her credentials.
Woe be unto thee who is discovered to have been at January 6th or Charlottesville however. I recall news of a guy who worked at a hot dog shop in Berkeley who lost his job after it was discovered he attended the latter.
At the time it seemed farfetched but since then we learned that he really did sleep with a pornstar. If these events had happened in reverse I'd find it highly plausible he did that kinky Russian prostitute thing too.
The bigger lesson is that rich and famous people really are engaged in crazy things that the rest of us don't get to do. A separate moral universe.
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