durdenhobbes
No bio...
User ID: 1307
durdenhobbes
6mo ago
"Kayfabe" is a great way to describe the whole bureaucratic rot; it applies to a good deal of corporate jobs as well.
durdenhobbes
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
7mo 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
7mo 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
7mo 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
9mo ago
Feels like a poison-the-well tactic, no pun intended.
durdenhobbes
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo ago
Do you mean you made a crypto bet, or you just expect crypto markets to respond positively to a Trump win?
durdenhobbes
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo ago
A comedian calling West Virginia a mountain of white trash wouldn't make anyone bat an eye.
durdenhobbes
9mo 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
9mo 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
10mo ago
Has Musk's star been waning? The Starship booster landing the other day was probably the technological achievement of my lifetime.
durdenhobbes
10mo ago
I could be wrong, but I feel like an officer would probably look you up with the number, but then chide you with a "you need to carry your license when you drive" before he sent you on your way.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
This is pretty off the reservation, and I'm sure would have major drawbacks, but I was thinking about how much I hate the end of close football games. Specifically, the point at which the game becomes more about gaming the clock than it does playing one's opponent to the best of your ability. (This usually happens somewhere between 10 and 2 minutes remaining in the 4th quarter).
The only way I could think to solve this problem would be to eliminate the game clock entirely, and switch instead to a possession clock. Each team would get a pre-determined number of possessions, and would have, say, 3 minutes to score or punt. Clock stoppage would work basically the same as it does in the last 2 minutes of the current game (out-of-bounds, incomplete pass, penalty. Probably want to add stoppage on first downs like in college) and you'd get an elective stoppage or two per possession (to allow for running plays near the end of the clock). Turnovers don't count as possessions for the recovering team, so they become way more valuable as you'd be able to score and then immediately get the ball back.
No more useless kickoffs. No sitting on a small lead and milking the clock. Just balls out football from start to finish, unless it's a complete blowout, in which case the game wouldn't have been compelling anyways. Tell me why this would suck.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
I reject the terms "terrorist"/"terrorist attack" on the basis that they are wielded entirely on the basis of who presently holds political power and who does not. (e.g. your "terrorist attack" is another man's "mostly peaceful protest", etc.)
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
Gaza is roughly 141 square miles, with around 15.6k inhabitants per square mile. It's not like they'd have room for a military base even in the upside-down world where Israel allowed them to. They've been fenced in and treated like literal prisoners. So obviously any militant uprising is going to be near civilians by virtue of having zero alternate choices.
None of this should surprise anyone, and none of it should have happened in the first place.
durdenhobbes
11mo ago
What war has ever contained enemy combatants entirely separately from the civilian population? Even when a massive percentage of the military is deployed to a warzone, there are certainly plenty of personnel who still go home to their families each night.
It seems to me that the real argument becomes what qualifies as a warzone, and when.
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.
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