Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
For politically obsessive terminally online weirdos, our habits will remain the same. For normies, they will be annoyed by political ad but otherwise remain unchanged. There is only a small, niche group of people that actually care, but aren't already enmeshed in this nonsense constantly.
federal enforcement of 21 as the drinking age
When I was young, I wondered if I'd stop caring about this one once I was well beyond the age that it was directly relevant to me, but no, the further I get from it, the dumber it seems. The arguments are so cliche that we've already all heard them a million times - these people are old enough to vote, old enough to fight in the military, but not old enough for a beer? Self-evidently ridiculous! We can even easily visit other countries with lower drinking ages and observe that nothing much happens differently without these dopey laws. Worse still, the effect isn't just on the underage, it's in pointless enforcement up and down the age spectrum. Nearing 40, I still need an ID to buy beer at a grocery store. Everyone involved has to pretend as though this isn't a completely retarded ritual, we all agree that there's really nothing to be done about it, the federal government decided that you need to card everyone and the company dutifully implemented a system where it's not even possible to sell a beverage without doing so. A small thing, really, but a constant reminder of how much I despise the petty, authoritarian weasels of the American federal government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
This depends heavily on our definitions of corrupt.
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If you mean "corrupt" in the sense of what is prosecutable under current SCOTUS interpretations of corruption statutes, it's almost impossible that any deal would qualify because Musk's companies do produce things that serve some legitimate government purpose.
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If you mean "corrupt" in the sense that the word is used colloquially to refer to someone receiving an obvious benefit that's outsized compared to the delivery, I would consider it an object-level question of what was contracted, what was delivered, and what was the price.
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If you mean "corrupt" in the sense of political patronage, I would agree that it is this for anything where Musk's company isn't the clear best choice. Of course he's going to get the benefit of the doubt.
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If you mean "corrupt" in the sense that a libertarian might use it, I would say anything above roughly $37 is a corrupt relationship because Musk has always relied on the government for massive grants and subsidies for projects of questionable utility.
Truth be told, my gut instinct is towards the latter. I remain unconvinced that Teslas are anything other than silly toys with superficial environmental signaling value. My inclination is to distrust large programs directed at friends of the government. But really, if pressed on the matter, I would lean towards the patronage model as a more realistic way to think about the world. Patronage seems very important to understanding how power structures actually work, is so ordinary in history that complaining about it being corrupt is about as useful as bitching about nepotism, and I don't really even have that much of an objection to it
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
Low: buried the dog.
Sorry man. We know they won't be with us long enough, but it's still rough.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
Not very often, only when I actually think about it. Honestly, I think 19-year-old me would kind of think current me kicks ass. On the flip side though, I am ashamed of the way I treated women that I cared about when I was young. I'm glad I'm not that man anymore, but I can't imagine that they should know or care about that.
My closest friends, at least just the very closest ones, are great guys though and I love when I go home and see them. If anything, I'd say that they turned out better than any of us could have expected and fills me with warmth to consider.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
I don't feel like I have any meaningful way to give input on changing motivations, but this part of things seems like a good area for focus. You don't need a degree to live your life and be independent. For many goals, a degree can be instrumentally useful, but if the core goal is really just earning a respectable living, you don't need one. You need to pick a specific skill, develop it, and show up and do it in a tolerably reliable fashion. Which skill? Whatever. Learn to do auto body, wait tables, drive a forklift, put shingles on... whatever. The specifics do matter to how much money and opportunity you'll have, but the point is that you'll make a respectable living and be a respectable man if you just pick something and do it well. You don't need a bullshit political science degree to make a buck sanding bumpers down for painting.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8d ago
I say this with pun slightly intended: The Dems appear to be mostly out of ammo.
They spent it at the right time. Michigan voters are already returning ballots in huge numbers. Remember, elections no longer happen on the first Tuesday of November, they happen over the course of five or six weeks and then take another week or so to actually count (or a month in California).
Aside from the egregious, aggressive, absolutely blatant 14th Amendment violation that makes this anti-constitutional, the most glaring thing to me is how incoherent the idea of a "forgivable loan" is. That's not what a loan is. Per Merriam-Webster, a loan is:
an amount of money that is borrowed, often from a bank, and has to be paid back, usually together with an extra amount of money that you have to pay as a charge for borrowing
If you're informing someone up front that you don't expect the money back, you are extending them largesse or patronage, or perhaps you are providing them a fee for service, but you are not offering them a loan. There were many things that were terrible about Covid spending policies, but this might have been the absolute king of them. The PPP "loans" were never really intended to be paid back, they were always a handout to keep things moving and allow businesses to skip out on doing actual commercial transactions. Framing them as "loans" was intended to attach a couple strings, but these were mostly just helicopter money dispersed with the knowledge that there would be a huge amount of outright fraud and even more casual fudging of the program to collect money. Maybe that was a good idea, maybe it wasn't, but these weren't loans in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, because they were called loans, now everyone that just took a totally normal loan with a totally normal expectation that they would pay it back thinks that PPP loans being treated that way justifies "forgiving" their loans too.
I could see this becoming a more frequent tactic, just calling handouts to fake businesses, affinity groups, and other favored constituents "loans" that are explicitly designed to never be paid. Really, it's a brilliant tactic, because the recipients don't even feel like they're just welfare cases, they feel like they've received a totally valid loan that they have met the terms of. I do wonder if there's an exploitable tax loophole here - no direct payments for me, thanks, I'll just take the money as a loan with no required payments until June of 2250.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.
Yeah, we should stop doing that too. Much of it is probably squandered or embezzled for the same reasons I would expect this to be. I don't want more of my money confiscated on the basis that maybe it'll help someone somewhere if we just shower them with more cash.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
This is my least favorite right-aligned argument. I'm not all that excited about funding Ukraine and Israel, but I'm also not all that excited about federal spending on hurricanes. States are big, they have economies the size of medium to large countries, this doesn't need to be a federal spending priority. If North Carolinians are getting screwed because of a lack of spending, they should take it up with their governor. The federal government should fill roles that are too large for states or require coordination solutions; a small coordination role for FEMA makes sense, but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
looney jumps the White House fence
These are the ones that really blow my mind. Some of the other stuff is genuinely difficult, but in these cases, we've got stuff like an incompetent Secret Service agent just getting straight up trucked by a crazy guy because she's too weak to do the basics of the job. Growing up, I thought that if you jumped the White House fence, you'd be immediately sniped, and if you weren't, you'd get blown up by mines, and if you danced around those, you'd get shredded by guard dogs. It turns out you just get confronted by a frail lady when you get to the door.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19d ago
There seems to be a genetic component to that even though this is also a field where there are those trying to deny race differences.
Shouldn't the quality of the field in general make you a bit suspect of the line of causality here? I don't doubt that Native Americans engage in a lot of dysfunctional alcohol use, but I do doubt that the alcohol is what's causing the dysfunction.
More broadly, it's just kind of weird that alcohol putatively reduces societal health, but a map of state-by-state alcohol consumption is just about anti-correlated with longevity. Similarly, many of the hard-drinking countries around the world are doing great, and the places that don't drink are dysfunctional hellholes with short life expectancies (with the exception of a couple wealthy Gulf oil states). I suppose this is largely a product of wealthier places being able to buy more alcohol and the individuals that drink the most aren't doing great (Simpson's paradox style), but it's hard for me to look at Germany and France and think that they're actually missing out on a ton of longevity and productivity due to all the beer and wine.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19d ago
Arkansas and Alaska both have high murder rates and low lifespans. I don't think alcohol bans are the reason for that, but they're not exactly advertisements for the edification that comes from these policies. In contrast, the hard-drinking Upper Midwest has low murder rates and long lifespans.
So, yeah, you can probably ban alcohol and reduce consumption significantly. That won't necessarily cause the Al Capone apocalypse. But it also won't usher in an era of long lives and peaceful living.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
Besides, it's not like you're looking to ban all bookshelves, this is about common-sense restrictions on assault shelves. Civilians do not need access to 14-foot-high bookshelves!
Jokes aside, it is interesting to contemplate where the lines get drawn on things that are concerning, things that seem obvious to some, and so on. Dozens of dead kids per year ain't nothing, but I have never heard anyone seriously propose bookshelf safety measures.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
I am not broadly sympathetic to the "took errrr jerbs" line of anti-immigration arguments. Maybe there's something there, maybe there's not, but whether it's immigrants or just other domestic laborers, I'm not impressed with rent-seeking in the form of artificially limiting labor supplies.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
Why do you think people watch current NFL games, and would not view older NFL games if they were less expensive?
Because, contra your claims above, current NFL games are a source of civic engagement, discourse, and philosophy. Of note, people do watch older games. The other day, I went back and watched a fun Bills-Patriots playoff game while I was cycling on Zwift. NFL Network televises old games that people watch. The advantages to real-time developments are that it's all happening live, we're engaged with something as a community of viewers, and there are few shared experiences in the modern world.
Do you think a rational consumer making rational choices would pick a shoe because it has the name “Messi” attached to it?
Yes. In the area where I do buy expensive sports products (running shoes), I can observe that the best runners in the world wear a couple specific shoes - if it were possible to run faster and win prizes wearing something else, they would do so (or at least a few would). I can be confident that the shoes on the feet of the guys running 2:03 marathons really are as good as it gets.
Moreover, "rational" doesn't mean that someone doesn't enjoy aesthetics, in-group symbols, and branding. You might as well suggest that someone that's truly rational wouldn't prefer a green shoe to a blue shoe when they're otherwise identical.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
The meaningful degree to consent to bodily harm is not clear for contact sports, whereas I think about almost all people would think it is clear for We who are about to die.
Also worth a mention is that contact sports aren't particularly dangerous to life and limb compared to things like cycling. An 18-year-old elite women's cyclist just died at the world junior championships. The spring, the defending Tour de France champion suffered a crash that shattered his collarbone, fractured multiple ribs, and punctured a lung.
Safetyism is not a superior approach to life relative to accepting that virtue requires some risk. I have never heard anyone claim that cycling is a bloodsport because people get hurt badly sometimes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
Getting together with your friends to grill, drink some beers, and watch your local football team is civic participation.
Discussing the evolution of two-high safety looks with disguised underneath coverages is discourse and philosophy.
Microplastic exposure in youth as a result of the NFL... come on man.
I doubt that murders will really have gone up massively with a persistent ban, but I would also expect that alcohol consumption that would diminish sharply with a small on/off switch would be down by less with a long-term, planned, codified ban. Telling people they can't buy something for a few weeks might engender a few oddball workarounds, but it doesn't result in the development of long-term, sustainable institutions of illegal production and distribution (which we see develop with any in-demand black market item).
I do agree that there's a stylized version of American Prohibition where people just accept a simple narrative and engage in some motivated reasoning about how their preferred policy was the right thing in all ways. I'm sure there really were tradeoffs and that some sorts of violence would go down with alcohol bans. Ultimately, I'm against prohibition because I like alcohol and don't like the government, not because I have high confidence that it actually increases violence. I don't think this is a luxury belief in the traditional sense - I am aware that this is probably bad for some people and I don't think I gain any performative social esteem from holding it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
20d ago
Yeah, I'm on board with this. Someone saying, "I want more money for my job" is rational and often sympathetic. Someone saying, "I could be replaced by a robot, but I'll break your stupid fucking robot so you'd better just pay me" is a criminal and should be destroyed. The government explicitly favors the criminal thugs that would prevent businesses from improving efficiency, which makes the matter that much uglier.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
Yes, I think this is a good explanation for why Democrats are fine with electoral shenanigans and blatant First Amendment violations. I couldn't have said it better myself. When people are convinced that their opponents are honest-to-god fascists, they can convince themselves that they're actually patriots for some minor foible like counting ballots received after election day in violation of black letter law or telling people that they should just list themselves as indefinitely confined so they don't need to provide ID to vote. Most of the people articulating these sorts of ideas really believe it, they really think they're the good guys saving the Republic.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
Also, while I find all of those things grating, a meta principle that questioning an election means you don't get to run in future elections is a terrible set of incentives. Cheating to win becomes that much more appealing if no one in the political sphere is even allowed to say, "my opponents seem to have done a lot of cheating". A strong norm of never questioning election is only a good thing if elections are actually of unquestionable integrity.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying?
This reminds me of my previous post on the brutal NPR fact check of Trump.
Really though, I think it was a poor choice by Vance to even remotely accept the frame as a "fact check". His answer is excellent and correct. When speaking to me, I will hear "fact check" in this context as meaning "pedantic bullshit that's irrelevant to the core claim". I will hear his explanation of how these migrants have become technically temporarily legal, and think, "exactly, the fact that this has a veneer of legality is the core problem, we must stop this". But yeah, other people still believe that a media "fact check" is actually just them checking the facts, so I think it would have been smarter to say something like, "you agreed to not argue with Governor Walz and I about our statements".
My stance on January 6 and the quality of the 2020 election has already been articulated at length. I think it's politically unfortunate that the more popular position is that January 6 was a calamity and that the 2020 election was good and fair. I suspect that Vance's honest position is much closer to mine that Trump's, which is that the 2020 election was bad and unfair, but not exactly "stolen". Either way, he's kind of stuck because he can't directly contradict Trump, but also doesn't want to say very unpopular things. I'm not sure what I would say in his spot. I suppose pretty much the same things - his opponents egged on riots all through 2020, insist on keep elections insecure so we can't actually trust them, and want to censor anyone that questions the quality of elections. Maybe that's a losing position, but it's one that I do sincerely believe is basically accurate.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22d ago
We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is.
I greatly doubt that this would actually result in expedited processes. The legal profession is hardly alone in finding that the amount of putative work that exists tends to increase to meet the number of individuals that are doing that work, but it's a stark example of the phenomenon. The United States has no shortage of attorneys, but legal proceedings have tended to increase in length rather than becoming quick and straightforward processes. Much like many of the other issues caused by endless legal wrangling and treating obvious bullshit as worth 120 day waiting periods, these aren't problems with no known solution to man, but problems created by the legal profession and the love its practitioners hold for artificial complication.
Yeah, I neglected to mention that part, that these laws unambiguously do not work. The idea of a bunch of teenagers just deciding that they have to be sober because it's illegal to drink is comical. No one is actually being saved from binge drinking by a 20-year-old not being allowed to have a glass of wine with a steak. But hey, on the bright, every now and then my wife neglects to bring an ID with her and it saves her from having a dangerous intoxicant with dinner.
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