The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like. Still doesn't make it so. You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements (nor even pretending to do so the way FICA does); you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children. Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.
To misquote Lincoln, you might consider a tail to be a leg, but that don't make it so.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
This is because formal dance is dead (aside from the retro forms you aren't counting -- those are the proper PMC+ dance forms, but the PMC+ isn't comfortable with them except as retro) and informal dance is a peasant/prole thing.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
Or we could do the empire thing for real, and regularize the status of the various territories/associations (Guam, Marshall Islands, Puerto Rico, USVI, Greenland, etc). Personally I think the US would be bad at empire so I don't really suggest this.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
Except the one Janet Jackson did.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
It's not a coincidence: All those halftime shows have been produced by Beyonce's husband.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
As it is, the shooters -- particularly in the Pretti case -- are not clearly innocent. "We heard a gunshot and then we put ten rounds into some nearby person we thought was armed" is a pretty big fuckup. Even normal cops might go to jail for that if it was caught from multiple cameras. Regular citizens or gang members will definitely go to jail for it.
That isn't a fair summary of the Pretti case -- and it's a summary that could be used (unfairly) for the Rittenhouse case as well, which you may note ended in acquittal. The cops who shot Pretti may well be guilty, but I don't believe the outcome in a Minneapolis case would depend on their guilt.
The case against the Good shooter is weaker, but also something where I would not call it a miscarriage of justice if it a guilty verdict was delivered for a similar case in resulting from a neighborhood argument.
So a woman is intermittently blocking the road with the car, two random guys object to this, she drives right at one of them, he shoots as he is struck, he should be found guilty? No, if those two guys weren't ICE agents, there'd be little question of the validity of their self-defense cse.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
20hr ago
Everything I blame on liberals or communists or progressives or whoever can often be boiled down to simple economics, capitalism running totally out of control.
No, it's not. That's an excuse. They'll claim they're doing things for money when they're actually doing it for politics. Hard to say with Bad Bunny, but when they were making female Ghostbusters and cancelling Roseanne and Cops, it was quite clear.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
20hr ago
How do you get boomer conservatives to do something about this? Why do they just lay down and take it?
Laying down and taking it is kind of a distinguishing characteristic of boomercons.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
20hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
What Gringos Might Have Missed About Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show
Slate (though they seem to have changed the title)
Like the New York Times article they reference, they assiduously fail to notice that Bad Bunny is a natural born American citizen (by statute), and that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. And they imply that conservatives don't realize it either:
To conservatives in power, Puerto Ricans are no different from any other brown or Spanish-speaking people: potential criminals one and all, here to take something from good (white) Americans.
I didn't watch the show and I wouldn't have understood a word El Conjeo Malo was saying either, but certainly I can tell Slate is pissing all over white English-speaking Americans. And conservatives.
(Yes, many conservatives don't consider Puerto Ricans to be "American" in some sense -- and in some senses they clearly are not -- but I assure you Kristi Noem knows damn well she can't deport them)
I do find this amusing:
This is a world where an anime film can win the top spot at the U.S. box office, where the highest-grossing movie of the year is Chinese, where the most-watched Netflix show of all time is Squid Game, and where the longest-reigning song No. 1 song of the past year is by a group of K-Pop demon hunters
Slate, this isn't because that white American audience doesn't exist any more. It's not Koreans who pushed Squid Game to the top, nor Demon Slayer -- those were US audiences. Why did they watch that? Indirectly, because of YOU, Slate. Or rather, the progressivism Slate represents, that took over the US creative institutions and made them produce a lot more crap, leaving wide-open opportunities for foreigners.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
20hr ago
Not calling them DICKs would be a start.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I think that the fairness of a trial is a sliding scale rather than a boolean quantity.
One of the nice things about a trial is it cuts through all the shades-of-gray stuff and provides a result. There's a verdict, guilty or not guilty. If you say to the unjustly convicted man that his trial was only somewhat unfair, most people will realize you're talking nonsense.
However, this does not mean that justice is better served by not having them tried, though I concede that there exists some level of unfairness where a guilty verdict is assured, and I would not want to send anyone to such a court (at least if I was not very much convinced of their guilt).
An assured guilty is "[s]ome level of unfairness", sure. A very high level of unfairness.
For the ICE shooters, I think the biggest difference from SOP would be that they would not get the cop bonus from prosecutors and juries. This does not automatically mean that they are found guilty.
I do not believe that. A Minneapolis jury will absolutely convict. Both in the Pretti case AND the Good case.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Relatively.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Probably well over 90% of the effort put into research is already useless. It hasn't gone unobserved that we keep putting more and more resources into research with fewer and fewer results (compared to the early-to-mid 20th century, for example). Many excuses are offered for this such as "the low hanging fruit is taken", but perhaps they're all false and the current methods of doing research are just extremely wasteful.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Don't be too jealous, if AI meets its promise they'll all be... well, they won't be saying "would you like fries with that" because the AI will do that too. But they might be delivering the fries until the robotics catches up.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The Somali parents in Minnesota in 2006 were a different group than the Somali parents in 2025. Once a foothold had been obtained and a Somalia-to-Minnesota pipeline had been set up, it was much easier for the less functional to migrate.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Men's contests often don't look like rock climbing or sailing; they look like war.
But I don't think we'll get the sci-fi world. Scarcity will be with us always. Even if someone has to create it (by violently taking control or destroying the means of production), though I don't in fact think that will be necessary.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Most art was already commodified, and it was commodity artists, not creative artists who got the most brutal axe.
Because creative artists got the axe a very long time ago. I expect the modal net earnings for a creative artist is already quite negative.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
You do realize how unconvincing it is to cite the top 5% of students as not really being all that useful?
When I worked at Google, about 5% of applicants got through the phone screen. A lot of them weren't all that useful.
Regardless of any unwarranted sense of self-worth, if they're doomed, then what hope is there for anyone?
Welcome to the black pill.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response.
Emotional health isn't what it's about. You've got people who work with physical things, people who do intellectual work, and people who play monkey dominance games at a high level. The latter are almost always indisputably on top, but that hasn't been entirely true in recent years; there's been significant status overlap between the intellectual workers and the monkey dominance people. AI threatens to throw the intellectual workers all the way down to the bottom -- not even so high as the privileged slave levels they had in ancient Athens, but all the way down to utter uselessness, like drug addicted alcoholic bums but not as sympathetic. The monkey dominance people are of course overjoyed at this, putting these interlopers in their place has been a nagging goal for a long while now. Nerds are more threatened by AI than normies because AI is vastly more of a threat to them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
It's your metaphor, you don't get to abandon it as soon as it turns out it doesn't actually support your case.
There's no limit to your principle; you can dress it up as a "slightly higher marginal tax rate" but nothing in your principle says it ends there. It can be a 100% marginal rate; more, it can require Bob to draw down his wealth to help all the Alice's in the world until he's got nothing left to help with. Or (as in your metaphor) it can require Bob's personal service with no limits to that either.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The STS (shuttle) was also a slow-motion dumpster fire. At least until Challenger exploded, at which point its pace increased.
I don't think it's a matter of time or talent, but just incentives. The public and the politicians were very interested in the moon program, and cared a great deal about results in the form of putting Americans on the moon (and getting them back!). Later programs didn't have either that mandate or that pressure.
Possibly almost as important was Werner von Braun's retirement, but that couldn't be the full story because there were a lot of things to the moon program besides the rockets themselves.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
NASAs competency has been consistently lousy since the end of the Apollo program, no?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
They aren't the same Somalis.
They certainly are not the same thing. The children will naturally expect to be paid for the labor they do for the retirees (childless and otherwise). You're proposing to tax childless people to pay the parents of those children, then charge them again for the labor. Two different charges.
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