hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I see your point, but professional writing is a skill that is probably difficult to easily replace not so much because of writing quality as because of the need to have them follow orders while maintaining that writing quality.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
On the other hand, by working in the US you get to live in a quirky but very pleasant first world country in which you can generally do whatever you want. By working in China, you get to live in a middle income industrial zone(you will notice that industrial zones in the US are not very popular places to live) under a brutal dictatorship, where the sky is literally blotted out with pollution.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Most of the US is not San Francisco.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Counterpoint- Argentina has experienced deep economic decline and continues to heavily subsidize meat production, to the point of having among the world’s highest per capita consumption of (normally very expensive) red meat despite being slightly poorer than Mexico.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
My philosophical basis for animals being below humans is that it’s a postulate. Yes, I’m aware that some animals we regularly eat are smarter than some people- pigs are smarter than my nine month old nephew, but sorry not sorry, I value him more than every pig on earth, and relative intelligence has no bearing on that. I also value other random nine month olds more than any arbitrarily large number of pigs, or for that matter whales(probably the smartest species regularly eaten by people) because animals are not people. If we kill them to eat them or make medicine from their bodies or wear them or because they’d otherwise cause property damage or whatever there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that because they are not people.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I’ve had an effort post on blue/red ethnogenesis floating around in my head for a while, but don’t know where to start. I’ve had another one on conspiracy theories that are simply false, but lead to meaningfully better outcomes, and their role in modern society that’s closer to getting off the ground but still unlikely to happen.
When the pope dies(he is in poor health) or is obviously on his last legs I will write an effort post on the current political situation in the RCC and it’s implications for the path forwards, but I don’t think it will necessarily be a top level comment.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I don’t expect a politically tumultuous US to be making particularly smart economic decisions.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Have we considered that the article may not be telling(or may not have) the whole truth as to what this crazy homeless guy was doing?
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I think 1) military recruiting is stunningly incompetent is true, but that it’s also leaving out that military recruiting is a lot harder than it used to be for reasons that are not actually military recruiters’ fault, so they’ll try more left-field ideas.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I’m pretty sure ‘dislike of military lifestyle’ is more ‘not wanting to do push-ups at 5 am and get shipped to wherever the hell Uncle Sam wants with no recourse while being subjected to random drug tests’, and not ‘concerned at the military’s embrace of gender roles’.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I mean, that, plus the military tightened medical standards for recruits, plus a series of extremely unpopular wars.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I think it’s worth noting that German-Americans mostly spoke German at home until WWI and so in 1942 a lot of elders in German communities were still not very assimilated.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Inflation generally can't be undone. It can be slowed down, but trust me, you don't want deflation. Great depression 2.0 is a best case scenario of what that looks like.
And as far as what caused inflation, it was covid spending. Covid responses cost as much as a major war and were paid for through moneyprinting. This was completely retarded and we should have let her rip, but we didn't and now we're stuck with it. We are probably on, not a best case scenario with regards to inflation, but close enough to one.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
The labor shortage was probably inevitable from generational effects.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Redact that part of the town’s budget, too.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
My experience in the US is that any youths with political interests are a bit nerdy, but at least for boys the more popular, the more likely to be on the right, with a major confound that artsy needs are usually to the left of math nerds.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I agree with you on the furries one now that I think about it, but I think the other factor is that dogs these days are pampered pets from whom nothing is expected. I admittedly don’t know much about the demographics of furries but I’d always assumed this was a perpetual adolescence phenomenon for whom ‘everyone likes you and you don’t have to do anything productive’ is pretty close to an ultimate fantasy- you’ll notice very few furries are farmers.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
They also legally suppressed the French language across the state. Cajun and Creole children were paddled for speaking it in their public schools well into the twentieth century.
This is technically true, but the dominant factor in Cajuns abandoning the French language was that their bosses were Texans who preferred English speaking workers, and Cajuns who had mostly been paddled for speaking French in school and then continued speaking it anyways stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming. The paddling mostly suppressed the Cajun language in a few holdouts.
The narrative that state pressure, rather than economic factors, was the main reason for the decline of the French language is mostly driven by Cajun academics trying to cast themselves as oppressed by a white anglo hegemony alongside blacks- my grandfather told me "my parents spoke French, but they never wanted to teach me". For the same reason you tend to see occasional books talking about how Cajuns were more likely to intermarry with blacks or whatever- being oppressed is fashionable, and LSU academics who got French department sinecures through nepotism and themselves speak standard, not Cajun French want in on the grift.
Actual working class(the vast majority) Cajuns are more likely to point to anti-Catholic or class biases as reasons for their poverty, and are often not shy about criticizing lazy or dysfunctional friends and relatives, with the implication that those prejudices are much reduced and so there's not a lot of excuse for not succeeding.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
The guy was gutter trash, same as any number of whites I've known.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Even animals recognize big and imposing as something to steer clear of, so I'm not sure it's evidence against being mentally unwell that they prefer to pick on women, old people, and small people.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
To note, America has a much higher mentally ill population.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Because natal bilingualism was not understood to be completely possible in the 1940's.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
It wouldn't even be a progressive thing, necessarily. Exiling your ne'er do wells is just good sense- it solves the problem more semi-permanently and is much cheaper than jailing them. Apartheid SA and the USSR both tended to deal with petty criminals by dropping them off in rural areas and not caring very much what happened.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
If you are a peasant under Jim Crow in the rural southern US, you are unlikely to know about them. And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.
I think a lot of it is just underestimating how much of the Cold War left was influenced by support for the Soviet Union. Most Cold War wars were against soviet allies specifically because they were Soviet Allies and the tendency’s aftereffects’ last gasps were probably opposition to the Iraq invasion.
I think later opposition to Iraq and Afghanistan is probably because they were unpopular wars started by a Republican.
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