freemcflurry
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User ID: 106
freemcflurry
24d ago
At the beginning of the conflict western countries accepted Ukrainian refugees on very generous terms but did not accept men fleeing the draft from Russia. Morally this feels right but practically it's completely backwards. If you want Ukraine to win you should only accept their children and old people. You should bribe able bodied Russian men between 18 and 30 to seek asylum which would deprive Russia of both soldiers and workers.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
It's more than a little suspicious to me that every solution to climate change is something the left already wanted to do for other, unrelated reasons. What a coincidence that to fight climate change we have to become vegetarians, have fewer kids, demolish the suburbs, redistribute wealth to minorities and abolish capitalism.
The idea that you need an advanced degree in "library science" to help school children pick out books is absurd. They'll still have the books, it just sounds like they're getting rid of the librarians and using the space for other things as well. I don't think every school needs a full library with dedicated staff.
And anything that "increases inequity" can't be all bad.
Books will remain on shelves and students will still be able to borrow books on a honor code system
freemcflurry
11mo ago
Caesar had an army and was a military genius, Trump doesn't and isn't. He has no way to credibly threaten a coup.
freemcflurry
1yr ago
I don't get the point of this. "Don't complain because it could be worse"? That applies to literally everything. Don't complain about losing your job because they could throw you in jail. Don't complain that they shoot dissidents because they could torture them first. Don't complain about torture because they could get your family too.
I don't think regular protestors who got waved into a government buildings by the police should sit around thinking about how lucky they are to be treated more leniently than a failed coup leader in Turkey or Russia.
freemcflurry
1yr ago
It's only a poorly compensated job if you don't count pensions and 3+ months of vacation per year.
freemcflurry
1yr ago
all the fallacies have revamped English names
No true Scotsman Person of Scotland.
freemcflurry
5mo ago
They don't even need the edgy 4chan humor part. That reddit post listed "follows Ron Desantis on Twitter" as evidence of Nazism.
freemcflurry
11mo ago
Air Force pilot Brian Shul, the author of the internet-famous SR-71 speed check story, died of a heart attack yesterday. It's a fun little read for anyone who hasn't seen it before.
https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blackbird-speed-check-story
freemcflurry
3mo ago
After 12 years of public school what percentage of adults remember how to do anything but basic arithmetic? PIAAC puts 10% of adults in the US at numeracy level 4 or above. The sample question they had for level 4 gave you table of expenditures for three months and asked you compute the mean.
Chicago spends about $30k per pupil per year which would put them at around $360k total for 12 years of schooling. I just can't imagine there isn't a better way to spend that money given the absolutely abysmal results we're getting. The usual answer is that we need to keep doing what we're doing but more and better. The problem is we've been trying that for half a century now with no meaningful improvements.
freemcflurry
9mo ago
Sometimes I wonder if most of the economic growth we get from improved technology and productivity just gets swallowed up by more beareaucracy and regulations.
freemcflurry
11mo ago
The immigrant Air Force recruits undergo seven weeks of training, and once that process is complete, they are sworn in as citizens.
Wow, that is a very fast track. You'd think they'd at least have to serve out their term before getting the reward. I expect we'll see a lot of immigrants join for seven weeks and then find some way to back out (injury, vague mental illness, pregnancy) before they get deployed.
freemcflurry
1yr ago
I have two main criticisms:
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It's way too long and meanders a lot with the Ender's Game homage / rip-off in the middle. Granted that may just be an inherent trait of serialized fan fiction
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It fails at conveying it's main idea. The main thesis as I understood is introduced in the scene where he spills some sort of prank ink on Hermione and then teaches everyone a Very Important Lesson about Science: you have to actually try out your ideas and make good faith attempts to prove yourself wrong instead of just assuming your first guess is correct because you're smart. But then he doesn't do any of those things for the rest of the book and instead just instantly knows the right answer to everything by thinking about it really hard because he's smarter than everyone else. Which is how I think Yud sees himself and is why both he and his character are so insufferable
freemcflurry
1yr ago
Arizona's voucher system. Any public school aged kid in the state can instead get a yearly check for $7,000 that they can take to a private school or use for homeschooling. You can't reform the public school system but you can let people opt out entirely.
freemcflurry
1yr ago
It's just really boring. The dialogue is wooden and the actors don't help. They recite lines like "this place is so evil the torches give no heat". The peasants sit in bars and are racist against the black elf. I assume this is so we can learn a Very Important Lesson later on. The action scenes look like video game cutscenes. The elf soldiers wear identical uniforms and bitch about regulations like they're 19th century conscripts instead of immortal warrior aristocrats.
It's not so much that anything about it is actively terrible, it's that there's also nothing good about it. Not because it's not faithful to Tolkien but because the writers failed on their own terms.
freemcflurry
27d ago
But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.
The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion. So it's a pretty arbitrary standard that can go either way depending on the judge.
freemcflurry
5mo ago
If the above is true, I don't know why there isn't a mob in DC with pitchforks demanding to cook and eat the bureaucrats responsible for flying the economy into the ground and royally fucking everyone who isn't independently wealthy.
All of the stimulus and money printing was wildly popular at the time (and probably still is). People love getting checks from the government. They don't connect printing a ton of money with inflation, they instead blame corporate greed. The other side of the coin were the coronavirus lockdowns but those were also broadly popular in most places.
freemcflurry
6mo ago
I'm sure a lot of it is partisan but I do think, even setting that aside, that things just feel shitty. Yeah inflation is slowing down but the inflation that already happened is still here. For 10 years before 2020 prices barely budged so I got used to certain numbers in my head. Now every time I go to the grocery store I feel irritated that chicken breast is $4/lb when my brain is telling me it should only cost $2/lb. There are still random shortages showing up occasionally (contact lenses is one I noticed) which I don't remember ever happening before 2020. I'm reading about layoffs constantly in the news so I feel like I don't have job security even if statistically I probably do.
Homelessness and panhandling have exploded like nothing I've ever seen before. The downtown area of my city always had a few homeless, but it's just unreal now with tent cities and stoned people walking around like zombies with festering sores all over their skin. Even in the suburbs a lot of major intersections now have somebody standing there with a cardboard sign.
So yeah I make more money than I did a few years ago, but everything just feels precarious and unpleasant in a way it didn't before. It's like asking somebody about the weather when they're standing in the eye of a hurricane, it feels fine now but I'm not exactly celebrating yet.
freemcflurry
9mo ago
Just because the fluting was originally invented to hide joints in wood doesn't mean it's not good independent of the reason it was invented. Art can benefit from limitations of the medium like that. In the original Jaws movie they intended to show the shark a lot more but the robot shark was a pain to work with so they only showed flashes of it until the finale. That limitation made it a much better movie. Today they could easily put a CGI shark on screen for 90% of the run time but would that be a good idea?
freemcflurry
10mo ago
What would staging a coup look like in the Vatican? If you're not the Pope, what options do you have besides schism?
freemcflurry
1yr ago
I went back and read some of them recently and I think the blue tribe would have to have dropped them by now anyway, even without Rowling. It's true that they're anti-racism to a degree, which was part of the appeal, but there are other aspects that would be very troubling to the left today. For example, government officials are mostly incompetent, petty tyrants. The wizard newspaper prints only fluff pieces and official propaganda. It's not a book with that supports the "trust the experts" style of government that's been a staple of leftism for a long time but has ramped up even more since 2016. Several of the evil characters are fat and the books harp on it as a sign of poor character.
freemcflurry
1yr ago
We have a generous welfare state, no IQ requirements for voting and award jobs and university admissions based on a racial spoils system. Adding a bunch of low IQ people is a complete disaster. If we were a dictatorship with no welfare state then yeah it wouldn't make as big of a difference.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Move a Finn to America and within 5 years he'll fit in. When he has kids you won't be able to tell them apart from anybody else. Move a black person to America and 400 years later they're culture is still wildly divergent and they have different outcomes from white Americans on every measure you could think of.
Anyway I think you're overestimating how much in common you have with black people. Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter.
With Europeans you have deep similarities and superficial differences, with other races you have deep differences and superficial similarity.
freemcflurry
5mo ago
Agreed that it's not a huge percentage, but how many of that two million have titles like "Mail Carrier" or "VA Hospital Nurse"? Most of them aren't going to be able to do much to stop anyone's agenda. If they're carefully chosen then 50k could make a big difference. If nothing else it gives you a lot of people in senior positions that can start firing troublemakers pour encourager les autres.
Yeah I would actually rather have all of my history erased and forgotten than have the credit stolen by the woke. I would rather nobody know who George Washington is than have the minstrel show musical version be the only one that survives. It's more dignified be Ozymandias, king of kings even if all of your works are forgotten, compared to watching another miniseries about the Apollo program where Neil Armstrong is a strong, independent black woman.
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