hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
I mean, we then have to compute 'how many illegal children are in public schools'.
I'm totally willing to believe illegals are consuming more in taxes than they pay in. Just want to point out that the math hasn't been done.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Americans will not do these things, and throwing money at it won't work any better than it does for public schools.
If you want Americans to suddenly start taking mass transit, build trains(not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in, boost ridership through heavy advertising as a premium for avoiding traffic, with tickets only sold as monthly passes, and fare evasion punished harshly.
This will not happen. Most Americans like driving, they like privacy in their own cars, and they aren't particularly price sensitive. Mass transit for traffic reduction suffers from the free rider problem and mass transit for cost reasons will never see widespread adoption in a country where even the very poor have cars.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Texas.
Ah, you enjoy breaking the speed limit while the other drivers pass you constantly.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
It sounds like all of Latin America- this is probably pretty standard for developing countries.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Yes, people complain about it. Sometimes it seems like ultra-online blue tribers looking for something to get upset at pickup truck drivers for and sometimes it's people making complaints about holding up the flow of traffic in high-entrance times when head-in parking would be faster. The latter complain much more calmly.
I've also seen 'head in parking only' signs which seem like they exist mostly to make checking parking permits easier.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Or- what most educated people believe- that illegals mostly pay taxes but don't collect much benefits because they aren't eligible and like to retire to their home countries(which are cheaper). This leaves stuff out like the cost of their children's public school education but there are true things in it and the actual numbers don't seem to have ever been crunched in an unbiased way. There's also the take that illegals are necessary because somebody has to pick strawberries and kill chickens and Americans are too spoiled to.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
The riots in 2020 were generated by preexisting real(if not exactly grounded in reality) grievances the black community- yes all of it- had with contemporary American governance. That's not the case for the 2025 protests.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
In a sense, this is ALSO one faction that is demonstrating that it has motivated, competent shooters on its side, so if something real DID pop off they are at least capable of carrying out deadly violence. The capacity for this violence is no longer just theoretical.
It's worth noting that nobody believes this though- I think my hunting club could wipe the floor with the entirety of antifa in an afternoon in an actual take-the-gloves-off civil unrest scenario, and the median American probably agrees with me. And that's leaving aside that my hunting club is not the entirety of red assets in a serious civil unrest scenario.
The modal outcome of some blue tribe mass-unrest enabled auspicious incident is 'the national guard just kills them all because it doesn't actually want to take orders from blue state governments trying to run interference'. I think both blue and red Americans are aware of this.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
Was it? Not all democrats, especially in Minnesota, are blue tribers(although that is changing). This could easily have been blue on red-tribe blue dog.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
I have a different take- there are so many reasons not to be violent in modern society because modern society has set it up so that being violent tends to end up with you being less likely to get what you want over the long run.
It is not hard to imagine a society where the elites are more violent than the lower orders- there have been quite a lot of them throughout history. But we live in the reverse. It's fairly plausible to me that for the very bottom rungs of society- the homeless, male(adult women in these communities are much better off) residents of the worst black ghettos, etc- violence is net positive on an individual level. But for everyone else? Violence decreases as you rise on the social totem pole for a reason and that reason is that people towards the top are better at avoiding maladaptive behavior. In polite society, the top four-fifths or so, willingness to resort to private violence is strongly correlated with being towards the bottom, starting with literal dogs.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
I’d long heard that Kruschev was the last true believer; there might obviously be true believers in important positions after that, but not necessarily in the top spots.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Ok, fair.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
A former submariner I talked to said they mostly shadowed chink subs in the South China Sea.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
To be even more fair, there's been like two ayatollahs.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Are you willing to post a deep dive on how Iran actually works?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
In Iran? The elites over there are genuinely much more religious than the populace.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The minimum viable level of public support for an autocratic regime willing to take the gloves all the way off is above 0%, but it's probably below 20%, and Iran has enough bribes to go around/genuine believers to keep that minimum percentage for long enough that the current leadership class will die of old age before it rots. Remember ~nobody relevant believed in Communism in the USSR in the eighties either, but a few leaders had to drink themselves to death(and these are fanatical Islamic clerics, so they'll live longer than severe alcoholics) before someone was willing to back down on the project.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Calling an Iranian an 'Arab' is the fastest way to make him hate you.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Jews are politically minorities in a way that does not exactly endear them to the far right.
Why so many secular far right wingers(and in middle eastern conflicts, when forced to have an opinion, I simply support whatever side is better for local Christians. Ethnoreligious prejudices are how the locals make their decisions, after all) hate Israel I can't say- it is after all Jews being somewhere else.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
For 7, it's more than 50%- because the worst handful of drivers bring the average down by much more than the best handful bring it up. This is one of those things where the mean, median, and mode are wildly different.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
- Yes, uncritically, and enforcement should get stricter.
- Yes
- No, they should be taken as recommended speeds.
- No to the passing only but yes to people can ride your ass/cut you off if you're in the left lane and they want to go faster than you are. Not speeding in the left lane is wrong without extenuating circumstances.
- Not quite guilt free but close to it.
- Depends what I'm driving- in my work van I should get a little bit of extra leeway. It's harder to see, turns slower, accelerates slower, and just plain takes up more space than personal vehicles and people should presume that, unlike them, it has to be there at a particular time. I apply the same rule to my own behavior towards eg semitrucks and trucks towing trailers.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Northern Mexico is wealthier than China and makes use of migrants from the India-poor south, although I suppose if we’re not counting workers from guizhao in shandong we’d best not count them either. So yeah, probably China- assuming they aren’t just importing Laotians and Cambodians.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Ok fair, I forgot about Paraguay.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Not defending the work ethic of ex cons, but that is the usual source of native labor for shitty low-skilled jobs because they will be arrested if they don’t hold down a job and decent ones aren’t available to them. Georgia’s program to replace illegals with de-facto corvée labour from the states parole and probation population didn’t go well.
Also college kids are by and large uninterested in doing much higher-paying, more exciting seasonal physical labor as it actually exists- there’s not a ton of guys working on their engineering degrees on fishing boats and oil rigs.
You can’t credibly sell that as a premium product to avoid traffic, though.
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