chooky
1mo ago
I am sure this has been asked before, but why is it that these purported consequences of the 1970s sexual revolution have not shown up until the past 10-15 years? It really took 50 years to come to a head?
chooky
1mo ago
My point is that if Erika Kirk did not genuinely forgive her husband's murderer and inwardly longed for violent vengeance, her taking a public stance either way almost certainly has zero impact on the actual outcome. Indeed, I would argue that there are strong incentives, both social and financial, to take on the forgiveness stance. While I am not doubting her sincerity (and I certainly approve of these incentives' continued existence as a plus for contemporary Christianity), I am not impressed by it.
chooky
1mo ago
What would it mean to not "forgive"... to proclaim a desire for vengeance? If so, that seems like a much more staggering path. Even after seeing his previous career, Trump's words at the funeral are the ones that are shocking to me, as I have no wish for ill to befall my American political opponents and indeed would like policies that I oppose to prove me wrong by being beneficial. (For one, it costs me money when the economy is bad!) All this to say that I think that you are simultaneously too cynical about basic standards for human behavior and not nearly cynical enough about the extent to which this is a cost-free, potentially calculated position: Erika Kirk doesn't legally really get any say in the punishment already.
chooky
1mo ago
Lucky thing for us is that Slay the Spire 2 and Hades 2 are going to come out this year too.
It does seem crazy that Silksong is $20, which seems to me like it is mainly a reflection of Team Cherry becoming fabulously wealthy (surely, right?) and not caring at all about money anymore.
chooky
1mo ago
Supposedly, the reason for fewer gears is that back wheels have improved to a bigger range of teeth, which means you can hit a similar range of gear ratios with only 1x12... and of course derailleurs are everyone's least favorite part of mountain bikes.
chooky
1mo ago
My main complaints are haphazard rather than targeted cuts, wild overcounting of savings from cuts, failure to make substantive cuts (i.e., no government departments are more in need of efficiency than Medicare), disorganized nature of cuts leading to short term wasted resources, simultaneously serving as a means of political revenge (e.g., cuts to DEI and arts, though I personally find these cuts acceptable given deficit) but also making a whole bunch of cuts to basic research and data gathering. In general, they did not seem to hire a good team for DOGE, which resulted in a great deal of disorganization, squandering political capital and what could have been an opportunity for a sustained, broad recommitment to efficiency.
chooky
2mo ago
Trump 1 was okay in my view, but Trump 2 has been a disaster due to SALT reinstatement and other OBBBA bad ideas, not to mention tariffs and DOGE's hyperincompetence. With the deficit expansion, I think the long term outlook is pretty bad.
That said, I have no problem with this H1B change given the clear abuses in the existing system.
chooky
2mo ago
There is no question that The Daily Show took a political stance and generally thought that Dems were correct and Reps wrong, but did it take stances that Republicans would have found offensive? A TV personality rather than a radio personality, if you will. From what I have of Kirk, he was much more of radio personality, taking more provocative positions and being much more blunt.
chooky
2mo ago
Surely, Jon Stewart was less controversial and much more of a celebrity than Kirk, who I had never heard of prior to his death.
chooky
2mo ago
It is strange that these shows would be so expensive. The content is largely free given that they are publicity vehicles for actors with new films and so forth.
chooky
2mo ago
I don't know about that. Do you seriously think that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Romney, etc., are ideologically or temperamentally down with Trump? I would say the Republican party has cohered around MAGA far more effectively than the Dems have managed to cohere around... anything. Republicans who have not come around have essentially been booted from the party, while a notable Dem example would be Manchin's more or less victorious showdown with Biden over BBB. (Manchin is no longer senator, but he lost from the right, not the left.)
On Sorkin, again, we are talking about someone so clearly dissatisfied with the putative nominee and VP in Harris that he writes an op-ed suggesting that Dems nominate a Republican, but you are somehow shocked that they later write a tweet endorsing Harris over Trump?? Do you want him to get mad and endorse a third party or something? Either a) he genuinely got caught up in the idea of Harris or b) he simply wants to convey enthusiasm in order for Trump to lose. His editiorial's thrust was very much that Trump's 2nd term would be very bad; once a nominee has been picked or settled upon, surely it would make no sense to be publicly milquetoast about that nominee.
chooky
2mo ago
I think you are greatly underestimating how centrist most people are. Harris' shortcomings, and Biden's/Clinton's before her, were well known and widely acknowledged, even though it is certainly the case that Dem commentators, as expected, fell in line.
chooky
2mo ago
Silksong, from what I can tell, seems to be explicitly designed to avoid much of the power creep of other metroidvanias, including Hollow Knight, hence the paucity of damage and health upgrades. But it may be that I am very dumb - I got through almost all of Hollow Knight before realizing that the nail upgrades even existed. (I do have the first needle upgrade in SS; getting the second seems like it requires quite a bit beyond merely beating Act I, which I have done.)
chooky
2mo ago
It seems like it would be more that sample size starts to get small at crazy high earners and that response rate is probably pretty low for extremely highly paid people. I'm also not sure what privacy issue there is when the max granularity is top 10% of households - this is roughly 30 million people or whatever.
We can also look at the CPS and start to get a lot closer to the question of "What is the normal income for working people in the US?", as there is a specific category of 18+, full-time. Average total money income was $96k in 2024, which seems pretty reasonable to me as an estimate. This sounds to me like it would also include that investment income you are looking for, though I don't think I agree that this should be included for the purpose of this exercise since the idea seems like it is to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker truly is valuable to a company and not easily replaced by a domestic worker with up to double the average earning power... is your idea on including all income to capture things like stock options as compensation or something? Even a 100% average threshold if using $96k would go a long way to fixing the problem of H1Bs frequently going to mediocre-tier workers. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-02.html
chooky
2mo ago
But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce. One approach would be to look at BLS CEX survey, which has annual average household income of $102k in 2023, with 1.3 earners, so really more like $78k per earner, which is in line with the income per earner for the 80-90th percentile. Top decile income is $168k, so we are probably not getting to $125k per earner until about the 90th percentile. (https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm)
Or you can look at average personal income directly, which gives only $67k in 2024, though I agree that this one is too low because it is everyone 14 and up. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N
$125k seems way too high as an estimate of average income, and $250k is an extremely high salary. I would think a more appropriate threshold would be around $175k. Though I am fairly confused on why a numerical limit on visas would be needed with high salary thresholds and required time commitments, which are already ensuring that you're only bringing in pretty rare abilities.
chooky
2mo ago
Watchman convinced me that the Mockingbird editor had a very heavy hand in that book.
chooky
2mo ago
You're right, my bad. I think I just remember watching countless book reports of Greenwitch in 5th grade, which was popular due to its low page count.
chooky
2mo ago
Pets! At some point in life, when your kids beg for a dog, actually say yes.
Keyless front door lock (like with a number code) is a spectacular lifesytle improvement. You will never lock yourself out, ever.
Otherwise, the acquisition of power tools and knowledge in order to not deal with ridiculously expensive and incompetent contractors is somewhat satisfying.
chooky
2mo ago
Sort of... it was ultimately the grandma's misunderstanding of the magic's source/purpose that created the anxieties that led to the magic not working anymore, but it was this abstract anxiety that was the antagonist rather than an outright malevolent force. The only stakes for the magic not working were that the magic was cool and it would be sad for it to not work. To me, actualization/fulfillment is a perfectly good goal for a story.
chooky
2mo ago
Greenwitch won the Newberry, so the series would be a pretty common read for 1990s kids.
chooky
3mo ago
Early 40s. The skiing injury/insomnia/gastric/heart items are all things that I would put in an acute, or at least "actual malady", category. Your friend's lingering ankle injury is probably more like a chronic condition than acute if we are being really choosy on our diction, but it is nonetheless something being clearly wrong, not the maintenance/preventative work that a nutritionist would generally be for someone without a physiological nutrition/diet problem. I am still missing the purpose of chiropractors, nutritionists, etc, for "normal adults".
chooky
3mo ago
The numbers have always been somewhat imperfect but very much not politically gamed, imo. I mean, did Trump want the BLS for the past three months to have changed longstanding procedure in order to put out drastically worse jobs numbers reflecting the estimated impact of the DOGE cuts and other things? Many government agencies are much more wedded to procedure and neutrality rather than a private sector financial analyst who would prioritize being right, though it is worth noting that the Atlanta Fed moved reasonably quickly to correct for the impact of gold imports on GDPnow.
For the BLS, however, this is now somehat changed, and there will be less trust until a real person gets out in charge again and says the right things.
I am far more nail reliant in Silksong than I was spell-reliant in HK, partly because the upgraded spells in HK were just completely OP. It always kind of hurts to use tools because shards are not actually that easy to rapidly acquire if you are aggressively using tools.
I do greatly appreciate tool repair being free for some tough act 3 battles.
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