chooky
1mo ago
The fact that we don't means-test, which seems like such an obviously correct and non-controversial idea, is indicative of just how much of a third rail any meaningful cuts to SS are due to the old people voting bloc. Even though it is kind of crazy to oppose making it so that you don't collect SS if you are fabulously wealthy, the topic is like other third rails (guns, abortion) in that even reasonable changes are vehemently opposed. Unlike guns and abortion, though, you are probably not going to get the SC to intervene here, so the only possible approach is legislative. The "adults" from both parties need to get together and get real about SS, publicly contradicting party leaders who attempt to make the issue partisan, and see if they can't at least manage to means-test for the sake of the grandchildren. The Ponzi scheme doesn't have to go to zero - we just need to start cutting benefits as the current level becomes unsustainable. Perhaps another solution would be to embrace more official, non-citizen immigration so that we can have a bigger cadre of workers who pay into SS but never get to withdraw.
chooky
1mo ago
Something that may give you hope is that while I have an extreme aesthetic aversion to Trump, I will need Harris to run very very far away from her 2016 tax and financial platform to not consider voting with my wallet. I learned during Trump's first term that the sky would not fall, and Biden certainly failed to be the Obama redux I thought I was voting for. I suspect that more of my white collar, blue tribe cohort will be of a similar mind than you fear or Dems appreciate. Given the layoffs in tech and so forth, I also think that Dem efforts to talk up the Biden job market (which overheated and gave way to inflation, so thanks? a sin for both parties on this one thougb) will fall on somewhat deaf ears for the upper middle white collar workers.
chooky
2mo ago
What made you choose Circe over Song of Achilles? I have only read the latter, which was published first (and thus is the true beginning of this genre), and I found it completely amazing.
chooky
2mo ago
Does this mean that all special prosecutions over the past few decades are also viewed as illegitimate?
chooky
2mo ago
Walking a pleasant street to necessities is not easy to achieve in suburbia.
chooky
5mo ago
Why would this make you specifically racist? To me, this outcome is likely more driven by cultural/racial homogeneity than this homogeneity being of a certain race or not.
chooky
5mo ago
The discussions of HBO on here often make me feel like I am watching a different network. Euphoria has lots of sex and is a great show. White Lotus, particularly season 2, has plenty of sex and is good. In my view, the are the 2 best shows that HBO has made in a very long time, and The Idol, execrable as what I watched of it was, had lots and lots of sexualized scenes.
chooky
6mo ago
It may be that I am consuming a lot of mainstream media uncritically, but I am under the impression that the KKK and so forth did a great deal of damage to American blacks creating economic centers - for example, the Tulsa Massacre.
chooky
6mo ago
I have seen several mainstream articles discussing the show's shortcomings (e.g., Slate, NYMag, Ringer). Whatever the showrunner says, it doesn't seem like anyone really thinks the back half of the show was any good. The RT critics/audience disconnect seems to me like it is more an artifact of critics' scores usually being based on the first couple episodes.
chooky
8mo ago
To be honest, the base LLM-style AI seems far more reliant on "what humans already know" than augmenting it with some math laws. The former seems like a move closer to a truly thinking AI rather than one that just predicts what an answer would be without any kind of logic behind it.
chooky
8mo ago
Dune 1 is considered a true SF classic. If you liked 1, Book 2 is okay, tbough I'm not sure it adds a great deal that isn't implied by Book 1. Book 3 is not great and worth reading mostly as setup for Book 4 (God Emperor), which is a wild book that is worth getting to. Book 5 is pretty skippable and comes after a huge timeskip, so it is completely unnecessary to hitting the genre peaks of 1 and 4.
chooky
9mo ago
Oh dang. I never used klarna so had no idea. I figured retailers were okay with klarna because klarna gave them lower fees than card processors. There seems to be a fair amount of free money to pick up here at 5% money markets if you can figure out how to be time-efficient on exploiting.
chooky
9mo ago
Actually, I wonder what is the math on BNPL vs credit card rewards of 2-3% on average? There is some combination of time and interest rates that would make Klarna optimal.
I don't know if the amount of money to be gained is high enough to ever make my timr worth it, but I would happily let an app optimize my spending and then take a share of the profits from not blindly using credit cards.
chooky
10mo ago
I'll be very honest that I have appreciated a lot of the controversial race swaps from a viewer's perspective just because it helps with keeping characters straight. Part of it really is just the nature of the medium, in my opinion. (Movies, I would argue, are different from TV in that movies are usually guaranteed a certain wattage of star power, while TV showrunners do have to wonder if tbeir actors are charismatic enough for the audience to not be confused by all the brown haired white guys or whatever.)
No way. 3BP's dominance of sci fi was total. It would have taken the prize against almost anything.
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