PreformancePertension
No bio...
User ID: 187
PreformancePertension
10d ago
But two big factors here seem to describe only a portion of the economy for a portion period of time. College? It was only since the mid teens that the US got over 1/3rd college degree attainment. Now it's pushing toward 40%, but college as a social norm is relatively new. Truly cheap credit is a post-2008 phenomena; a lot of the politics of the 90s were about how the cost of credit was quite high and was a push behind the Clinton deficit reduction - the average mortgage interest rate was in the 8s as recent as 2000, hanging out in the 5s and 6s during the 2000s before 08. Inflation and rapidly improving consumer goods I will definitely grant have been good since the early 90s, but half of this western social life package being suggested is really about the post-Great Recession period, so I'm not really convinced this is the core of economic sentiment for people in their 40s and 50s.
PreformancePertension
10d ago
I'm not really sure what this proves though - once they have his license plate, there are enough security cameras or automatic license plate readers in Northern Virginia that a sufficiently determined federal agency can look through footage to figure out where you were driving, and large companies have had video footage of the registers for ages. Court decisions on using license plate readers to track movements are a decade old at this point.
PreformancePertension
28d ago
I know exactly what you mean, and I'd like to say I've moved past it, but I completely haven't.
PreformancePertension
2mo ago
Well that's fine, but I don't see how you end up anywhere but the exact situation as today, less some Israeli military hardware. Fine, so our hands are clean. If Israel can't fight without our support, they end up in 2rafa's 3rd resolution, which will collapse immediately on the next attack; if they can, maybe they just accept being a pariah and just go to war as they need to for their security, cut a deal with China or what have you. Doesn't seem likely to produce an ethical improvement outside of American feelings.
PreformancePertension
2mo ago
Freddie de Boer has this as his preferred solution, but the 'well the Israelis should all become Americans' is a nice logical solution that's completely useless. It's just as unlikely as the right wing version of this ('give all the Palestinians Jordanian/Egyptian citizenship') - a solution you come up with when you realize that neither the Israelis nor Palestinians are going to give up anytime soon, but that you're ethically sensitive enough to still want a solution. But even if President Woke threatened Israel at gunpoint to concede to a maximalist version of the 2SS, we're just going to end up where we are now after the next attack from State-Palestine, whether or not the recognized government attacks, allows an attack, or is too weak to stop one. There's no point in any of this so long as a significant proportion of Palestinian society is willing to beat their own brains out on the border wall.
PreformancePertension
2mo ago
One sort of odd thing is that the $2 bill is not actually that uncommon, objectively: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircvolume.htm There are about half as many of them as the $5, and nobody would be especially surprised to see a $5. But people don't spend/circulate them for what I can only assume are reasons related to business cash drawers not having a dedicated slot, so you'll never get them as change.
PreformancePertension
2mo ago
Also, this is not a website that I expect anyone to particularly like this line of reasoning (I don't myself), but the reason we don't have bills higher than $100 is that law enforcement and governments in general dislike high value bills due to their use in crime - untraceable cash and all that. The ECB massively regrets putting out a 500EUR note and only printed them for a decade before stopping and trying to take them out of circulation.
PreformancePertension
2mo ago
Sounds like we're creating a lot of new jobs at Google figuring out how to automatically track a user's tax jurisdiction before they get shown an ad. I only vaguely remembered that there were a lot, but now that I look, I find out that Missouri has ~1,400 individual tax jurisdictions. Completely bananas.
PreformancePertension
2mo ago
(Source: some shit I saw on twitter but don't remember the exact account anymore)
I saw someone float the idea that gays now understand straight men much less well since it's easy to be out. A lot of gay men who work in Democratic politics have probably grown up in costal cities where being out has always been ok among everyone they interact with, and their social circles are either progressive men or other gay men. It seems fairly plausible at a glance but I wouldn't have much input beyond that.
PreformancePertension
3mo ago
I guess that's a valid question these days - do we even want national legislators to represent a specific geography? My big-city House rep I can see is a party line liberal; that represents the district and I don't begrudge it, but when I look up her votes the single thing she broke with the party on was HR3633 (cryptocurrency regulation framework). I look up her social media, and 90% of her posting is on national issues, boosting other national politicians, Gaza, etc. My impression is that the idea of truly local representation has been broken for a while and that this dates back to the late 00s with the start of political nationalization and the decade-long earmark ban.
PreformancePertension
3mo ago
I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.
PreformancePertension
3mo ago
Good geographic district boundaries wouldn't matter if we expanded the House properly. The entire need to mess around with district borders is downstream of them being so huge that the decision has to be made, but fundamentally there's no good reason why the House shouldn't have a membership in the thousands, and it's the most straightforward solution we could have to a number of issues; it wouldn't require overturning SCOTUS precedents, it wouldn't require overturning CRA district rules (the smaller districts would be easy to make compliant), we wouldn't have to spend years in a domestic political fight about whether Americans would go for multi-member districts, and so on.
PreformancePertension
3mo ago
Another thing that happened in the .com era was the telecom bubble - massive build-outs of broadband and other internet transmission lines across the country that would turn a profit any day now as the internet took off. The internet did not take off on pace and a number of companies lost their shirts, but the infrastructure was already there and turned out to be highly profitable a decade later. I suppose I'm not sure I understand AI enough to know how much continuing investment the models might need in the future, but you can see a world in which one or more major AI companies go bust, and that frees up their models now that the cost of capital is sunk into bankruptcy, and they go on to be widely used.
PreformancePertension
6mo ago
Would just like to thank you for writing all this up about a world some of us rarely see.
PreformancePertension
1yr ago
How much posting on subreddits like that do you really think is organic and how much do you think is trying to spin up male attention? I'm not going to rule out the former but I'm going to mostly bet on the latter.
PreformancePertension
1yr ago
My general feelings are the same as his, and I would have quite happily voted for Desantis in the first Newsom and Newsom in the second - preferably Desantis first, but Newsom at least can tell which way the wind is blowing on the occasional issue, while Harris seems happy to roll the 2020 tape until it runs out beneath her.
PreformancePertension
1yr ago
Yes, it's very strange. The idea of her being a sort of Fremen nationalist along with her younger friends never really lands, and since that and being into Paul are essentially her only personality traits, it's unconvincing; she only gets to show off the first in one scene where it's little more than complaining Stilgar is old and religious. But I think this was fixable if you added just one scene and slightly changed another: Stilgar should be explaining to Jessica that the traditionalists are waiting for the Mahdi to start the terraforming project, while Chani in a separate scene with Paul can be advocating for starting the program on their own, especially as Paul starts to roll back Harkonnen control.
With Singaporean integration, everyone had to integrate. The Anglo-Singaporean culture represented by LKY, S. Rajaratnam, etc, was foreign to the Chinese as the Malays and Indians. Now, Anglo-Singaporeanism is primarily a creation of the Chinese elite, sure, but housing was part of a package of military service, language and education reform, so on, that deserves to be analyzed as a type of internal colonization. The plan was cooked up by an elite intentionally seeking to suppress racial conflict and that had used questionably-legal means to suppress opposition and other civil society. Politically infeasible in other countries? Today's Singapore couldn't even do it - in today's politics you can see other technocratic, hard-headed but unpopular policies like open immigration and explicitly pro-corporate liberalism are starting to bend and buckle under public pressure. Specific to housing, Singapore has always sold property as 99-year leaseholds with rights reverting back to the government. This is a ticking time bomb under the government as the first generation of housing blocks start nearing that date, and the buildings are wearing out earlier than then - the next decade or two is going to have a large wave of these repossessions. We'll see how the government deals with that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was extremely populist compared to past policy.
PreformancePertension
2yr ago
Amherst's economics department is fairly infamous for being left-wing/Marxist.
I believe the terrorism charges have already been dismissed due to the govt not introducing sufficient evidence.
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