guajalote
8mo ago
Because it's a joke that's been done many times with different islands as the punchline. I've heard the same joke with Australia or the UK as the punchline.
guajalote
1yr ago
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
I think it's very unlikely he will do this, simply because neither Trump nor most of his supporters care about this. I think you are making the same mistake as the media by assuming "Nimra" is a racist dogwhistle. It's not, it's serving a different set of purposes:
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It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't use her real name, which makes her seem fake and insecure.
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Like all Trump nicknames, it's a power play. If you can give someone a nickname and make it stick, it reveals a kind of power you have over them. And I think it's clear that Haley could not do the same to Trump in reverse -- all prior attempts at nicknames (Drumpf, Cheeto, etc.) have failed to stick.
guajalote
3mo ago
Richard Feynman's memoir "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" describes his relationships with his parents, his wife, his colleagues and friends, etc. and I would describe all of those relationships as basically functional and healthy.
Thanks, I guess I was slightly off, it's more like dozens per year. Still far more deaths than the total number of US school shooting deaths over the same time period (131 killed and 197 wounded in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools from 2000 to 2020).
guajalote
7mo ago
You can make this argument about anything. Many men would prefer an educated wife, therefore they would benefit from society shaming women who choose not to pursue an education. Does that mean women who do not pursue an education are "cheating the social contract?"
I scored in the top fraction of 1% on the SATs, so I don't think I've ever met a woman who "scored a noticeable margin better" than me, but I have dated several women I consider my intellectual equals, and I am currently married to one of them (a successful lawyer who went to one of the best law schools in the US). I have broken up with women who I felt weren't able to keep up with me intellectually because I found them boring.
But you raise an interesting alternative hypothesis, which is that maybe women are the ones selecting "intellectually superior" men to date, and that's why they perceive all the men they date as "needing to feel intellectually superior," because they actually are.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think you are conflating two issues that are mostly unrelated. Housing costs are probably being driven up slightly by increased demand due to immigration, but the effect is tiny compared to the supply-side problems caused by excessive red tape that makes housing expensive and difficult to build. The population of Houston, Texas is about 20% foreign-born immigrants, yet housing is extremely affordable because there is no zoning, no rent controls, and few regulatory hoops to jump through if you want to build housing.
Nobody worries about immigrants buying up all the food, or all the cars, or all the cell phones. If demand goes up, the economy will just produce more of these things to meet demand. It doesn't make sense to worry about immigrants buying up all the housing either, unless there's a problem on the supply side that makes it impossible to meet demand. Fix the supply side problem if you want to fix the housing problem.
guajalote
3mo ago
If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect.
A jury decides self-defense cases. If you can convince even one person out of eight that you credibly feared for your life or the life of another, you are not guilty.
Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun
Even a very addled person can understand "Lots of people around here have guns and there's no way to tell who. I had better not cause trouble (like swinging a makeshift halberd at people) or I might get shot."
Observably, this is what we see. The homeless objectively behave differently in places with guns versus places without.
Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy
Houston's government is entirely run by Democrats and vagrancy is not punished. The police force is smaller and less active than most comparable cities. Houston's police force is 5,300 (pop. 2.3 million) versus 11,000 in Chicago (pop. 2.6 million).
guajalote
3mo ago
It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it. I never carry a gun, but I look like I could be carrying one, and that by itself changes the way people treat me and others in public.
I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.
guajalote
10mo ago
The Jesus and Mohammed pics look like posters for a Marvel movie, like a live action version of South Park's "Super Best Friends." I wish Hollywood had the balls to make something like that.
guajalote
1yr ago
In my experience most high-level US politicians have an unreal level of charm in person that is almost impossible to fully describe unless you've experienced it firsthand. I've met several politicians who I intensely disliked from afar, only to find myself instantly charmed by them in person. Never met Clinton, but he probably takes this to another level.
guajalote
2yr ago
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?
In practice, I think things like party affiliation are the driving factors behind the correlation. But I also think there's a rather simple "underlying principle" that ties both decisions together.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you find an intelligent person who's fluent in English but totally ignorant of American history and law. You hand this person a copy of the US Constitution and have him read it carefully. Then you ask him to answer two questions based on his understanding of the plain text of the document:
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Does the Constitution allow the government to treat people differently based on their race?
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Does the Constitution allow the president to spend money without congress's approval?
The answer to both questions is clearly "no" if you're just reading the text of the document without bringing any external knowledge or biases to bear. In order to answer anything other than "no" to both questions, you either need to come up with complicated interpretive arguments or you need to just not care about the text of the Constitution.
So I think a rather simple underlying principle unifying both decisions is: "the plain text of the Constitution is binding."
Regardless, I am not aware of a real-world situation where a federal judge has been consistently "wrong" while otherwise doing his job (i.e. showing up for hearings and issuing orders in a timely fashion). For example, a federal district judge ignoring a direct order from the circuit court would be shocking. Perhaps some examples of this exist, but I am not aware of any, and presumably it would be grounds for disciplinary proceedings.
guajalote
8mo ago
So should we burn down murderers' houses? What's the point of destroying property as punishment for a "crime" (which in this case is not actually a crime and which no one has been convicted of yet)?
guajalote
4mo ago
I don't know whether the data exists, but my understanding is the vast majority voluntarily resign, probably over 90%.
guajalote
7mo ago
Because if it were, you would have no problem with people becoming addicted to drugs and other substances.
I have no problem with people becoming addicted to drugs and other substances. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I have no problem with it because it's none of my business how they choose to live their lives.
guajalote
2yr ago
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
guajalote
8mo ago
The government regularly ignores well-documented violations of the law, particularly where those violations are non-violent (e.g. speeding, immigration, drugs). Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.
guajalote
1yr ago
How is that a "legitimate security interest?" I understand "legitimate security interest" in the above post to mean something like "clear threat to the safety of Russia's citizens." I don't doubt that Russia would like to have a warm water port but I don't see how not having one poses a clear threat to Russia or its citizens.
guajalote
1yr ago
In my experience, things like low housing costs and a robust economy are far more conducive to poor people's standard of living than a robust wellfare state. Houston, for example, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. The country of Canada has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents, with cities often much higher than that; for example in Toronto the rate seems to be in excess of 322 per 100k.
So while I would agree that Canada is more "concerned" about poor people, it's not at all clear to me that Canada is actually providing a better standard of living for poor people.
guajalote
1yr ago
I admit that there are areas where my model breaks down - my Steam library can't really be considered physical, it barely touches the physical world excepting that CPUs and GPUs are needed to make use of it.
I think your model breaks down all over the place. Obviously raw materials are not irrelevant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of a modern developed economy.
Go dig up a shovelful of dirt in your backyard. That dirt contains most of the raw materials needed to build a CPU. But there are many, many orders of magnitude difference between the value of that dirt and the value of a CPU. Almost all that value comes from intangible things:
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The knowledge and time of skilled electrical engineers and chemists figuring out how to design and fabricate CPUs.
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The university system that educated them and provided the foundational knowledge they built upon.
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A legal system that enables companies to enter into and enforce contracts with one another in a reliable way
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Systems of IP protection that incentivize R&D expenditures in CPU development.
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Consistent law enforcement and property rights that allow companies to invest billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication equipment without worrying a government or criminal organization will take it away from them.
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Financial institutions that will lend money to these companies if they don't have billions of dollars sitting around to build semiconductor fabs.
On and on. It's intangibles (almost) all the way down.
Healthcare is about using physical goods like surgical equipment and drugs.
Like CPUs, surgical equipment and drugs are mostly made out of cheap-as-fuck raw materials that are then synthesized into useful things. It's engineers, chemists, biologists, lawyers, etc. that make it possible for this stuff to exist. And of course much of healthcare is made up of other sorts of intangibles, like medical training. Surgical equipment isn't of much use without surgeons.
Yes, you need to have ways for savings and loans to be allocated - but savings and loans are just claims on real goods.
You act like this is trivial, but it's not. There exist countries in the world today where you can't trust banks to hold your savings and the average person can't get loans because the economy is too unstable and risky. These are the so-called "shithole" countries, and they're shitholes not because of a lack of natural resources but because of a lack of the kinds of intangible goods I've been talking about.
guajalote
5mo ago
If you're going to invest in the stock market, put the money in an index fund as suggested. I've been making around 10% annual returns doing this. You're not going to beat the market making risky bets because you don't have better information than the market. Trying to pick stocks is just gambling.
If you are truly dead set on out-performing index funds, then you need to invest in something that you have more direct control over, like a business you own or a property you manage.
Houston's homelessness rate is about 30 per 100K. Denmark's homelessness rate is about 112 per 100K.
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