durdenhobbes
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User ID: 1307
durdenhobbes
7mo ago
side effect of absolutely shredding American international standing.
I'm not being obtuse when I ask: what value, exactly, does American international standing have?
durdenhobbes
7mo ago
I mean, fine. Forget the statistical stuff, and just focus on the top paragraph that I wrote regarding the lived election night experience. You don't agree that it was all pretty fuckin' weird?
durdenhobbes
7mo ago
It's not "evidence", exactly, but having stayed up all night on Election Night 2024, I was getting text messages from my Biden-supporting friends and family members basically throwing in the towel and saying congratulations. Then at midnight or so, when all the major swing states stopped counting because poll workers "needed to sleep", I thought it really strange that all these states in different time zones decided that at the same time. Then when the 4am ballot dumps came in (what happened to sleep?), and I saw every predictor index go from 95%+ Trump to Biden, I was forever convinced that it was a rigged election.
Too many inexplicable abnormalities. There were some significant statistical anomalies that came out later to confirm my suspicions, but they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.
durdenhobbes
7mo ago
I mean, a majority plurality of voters cast their ballots for Trump 11 weeks ago. It seems like he's got a pretty good sized pool of people to draw from.
durdenhobbes
7mo ago
I can assure you they don't come cheap.
In the paradigm most of us have become accustomed to, this is true. It appears that we're entering a new reality, where AI is likely to make obsolete millions (if not hundreds of millions) of jobs globally. For all the handwringing about bullshit jobs, a great number of people may soon find they preferred having to act busy versus having nothing to do at all.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
"Kayfabe" is a great way to describe the whole bureaucratic rot; it applies to a good deal of corporate jobs as well.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
If losing the competent people means also losing the people who are smart enough to maintain the deep state apparatus as the true power center of DC, then this would be a feature, not a bug.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
That's just it: I don't know who my probable allies are (or if they exist), and finding/mobilizing them will be part of my initially-unilateral effort. Meanwhile I have to live somewhere and send my kids to a school district today.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
I've never worked in government, but I've witnessed how bloat and apathy have rendered many workers borderline-useless in the private sector—where the profit motive demands efficiency. So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
The grass, in this instance, doesn't grow nearly as quickly as my children do, and I'm not going to gamble their early education on the hope that I can unilaterally drag an underperforming school district out of the mire.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
Even with the context that he said "my heart goes out to you" emphatically right before he motioned from his heart to the crowd?
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
75-80% non-fiction on whatever topic is of interest at the moment, and the remainder whatever classic/modern classic fiction I may have missed in my first 3.5 decades of reading.
durdenhobbes
8mo ago
I was a voracious reader as a child (best friends with the school librarian-type of nerd), and remained so through my early twenties. At some point in my mid-twenties, though, I consciously considered that I did not typically retain much beyond a nugget or three of wisdom from any given book. For the time invested, I felt like I could learn more about a broader number of topics by simply reading a well-curated selection of articles. Maybe it was my attention span being eroded by social media and technological overload, and this was my attempt to justify it to myself, but I do still largely believe it to be accurate.
I still read a handful of books each year, but I rarely come away feeling that it was a markedly better use of time than reading articles and journals (or even just reading The Motte). About the only major advantage I can identify is that book reading is decidedly higher-status.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
Feels like a poison-the-well tactic, no pun intended.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
One aspect of Trump that I feel like is under-discussed is his abstinence from alcohol and other drugs throughout his life. Close to 70 percent of American adults drink alcohol (and knowing a fair cohort of baptists and Mormons who drink semi-regularly, but would never self-report, I expect this number is actually higher), making him something of an outlier. Could it have any explanatory effect on his seemingly age-defying stamina and energy? His resilience in the face of social/legal/political headwinds that would sideline most men half his age?
Having made the recent decision to eliminate alcohol from my life, I've noticed immense dividends in terms of my own personal health both physically and mentally. Particularly when it comes to attacking difficult problems head-on, rather than kicking the can down the road. In conjunction with the RFK MAHA agenda, I wonder if a further shift toward tee-totaling (which Gen Z seems to be steering toward already) could be a side effect of Trump's second term.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
I keep seeing this PMC acronym, and I must've missed when it entered common parlance. Could someone please enlighten me? My search engine was no help.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
Do you mean you made a crypto bet, or you just expect crypto markets to respond positively to a Trump win?
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
I think USA Today or 60 Minutes would be closer to mainstream than NPR. I tend to think college professors (or those who envision themselves as their peers) as the prototypical NPR listener.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
Given the relative outcomes in terms of higher educational attainment, life expectancy, suicide rates, gender-specific advocacy/scholarships/celebration, etc., I can't believe there are still men who feel compelled to give up anything to further support women in 2024.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
-- Eat something you hunted/fished yourself, immediately, without intervening storage.
I took a bite out of a silver salmon that I had just pulled out of an Alaskan river, just because I saw Bear Grylls do it and thought it looked cool.
It was incredible. Core memory.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
A comedian calling West Virginia a mountain of white trash wouldn't make anyone bat an eye.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
Agreed. You didn't antagonize anyone specifically, you made factual statements with references, and there was no rule broken that I can identify.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
But the reason why it matters is not because the country needs to have an alert, mentally healthy person in the chair of the chief executive. It really doesn't.
That's one of the key underpinnings of the Trump/MAGA movement, though: it should matter. While the average voter (or even the above-average) has no real idea of how government functions on the daily, they still would like to believe that they have a vote that matters, and elected officials who represent them. If it's all unelected bureaucrats/deep state running the show, and everyone knows it? The show is over.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
Has Musk's star been waning? The Starship booster landing the other day was probably the technological achievement of my lifetime.
I apply the same structure to "conspiracy theory" evaluation as a prosecutor would to a criminal case: means, motive, and opportunity. The NBA is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, the value of which rests on delivering a compelling product to as wide an audience as possible. It's a cartel of privately-held organizations operating in lockstep under a commissioner whose job is to maximize the value of the league as a whole. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for a small handful of high-level NBA executives (whether they be corporate office or individual team owners) to work together in the interest of profit maximization at the expense of competitive fairness. Things like this trade, the Lakers-Kings '03 match fixing, Donaghy, etc., all point to what appears to be obvious collusion.
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