chooky
23d ago
I think you underestimate how widespread the effects of Doge and changes to working conditions were. My family member worked on the nuts and bolts of building domestic physical infrastructure that you almost certainly believe are a good way for the government to spend resources. It is not the case that Doge-driven changes only affected questionable departments or competent people doing unproductive tasks.
chooky
24d ago
It is way too convoluted to argue that higher private sector pay denotes greater social value and that DOGE was thus correct to push out high performers. This is definitely not the path to government efficiency! A successful DOGE push out would have to be one in which the bad employees who couldnt find new jobs or who thought they would get fired or who were in unproductive jobs outweigh the "bad" cuts. It is probably not the case that literally everything done by one's preferred politician is perfect and awesome.
chooky
24d ago
I had a family member take the buyout because they started looking for a different job (since the security and flexibility that is the draw of a federap job is gone), and they scored a way higher-paying job. Like many buyouts, it would have been the case with DOGE that many takers were the capable employees you don't want to lose.
chooky
24d ago
And I guess the difference vs the past is that fielding, by far the most exciting part of baseball, has gone away because of the 3-outcome hitters you note. Boo.
chooky
25d ago
I asked one of my friends about why there arent very many good quarterbacks anymore a couple years ago. They said it was because defenses have gotten much more sophisticated.
chooky
27d ago
I found the climax of the quartet to be the darkest thing I had ever read in my life. I would describe book 1 as Greco, and by extension Ferrante, spectacularly embodying the ideal of a compassion and empathy through storytelling. In book 2, the values of the world, especially religion, get upended, setting us up for Greco having to reconstruct meaning in the next books. She basically fails, and her relationship with Nico eventually shows that she cannot even trust herself. In book 4, things fell apart to such a degree that I cannot even trust Greco's narration anymore. Harrowingly, what I took from the fourth book was that, no, we cannot, through stories, learn about others (like we can, for example, in Faulkner's Absalom) since even knowing oneself is hopeless - what is the fucking point of art if not that? And it can't do that. I didn't pick up a non-genre book for months.
I suspect my take is rather nonstandard, as is my belief that the fate of the doll from book 1 is completely ambiguous and a crucial part of the themes I proposed above. What I understand to be a lack of ambiguity in the TV show regarding this is why I refuse to watch the show.
chooky
29d ago
Canada's tariffs have ample exemptions for imports that are used as inputs to manufacturing so are not nearly as disruptive (or punishing to the US) as one might expect.
But... Lula has been president before. Why would we compare Lula to Chavez/Morales rather than Lula's previous terms? I do appreciate the irony of my question as a US citizen since Trump's first term did not really predict his second term, but still.
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