hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Ok, fair.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
A former submariner I talked to said they mostly shadowed chink subs in the South China Sea.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
To be even more fair, there's been like two ayatollahs.
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
Are you willing to post a deep dive on how Iran actually works?
hydroacetylene
17hr ago
In Iran? The elites over there are genuinely much more religious than the populace.
hydroacetylene
17hr 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
17hr ago
Calling an Iranian an 'Arab' is the fastest way to make him hate you.
hydroacetylene
17hr 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
17hr 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
17hr 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.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China. None of them wealthy, all of them with near-third-world-poor hinterlands that make the only difference here the ‘foreign’ part. Working in say, Chihuahua or Baja California Dei Sur is a much better deal than in Chiapas even if they’re technically the same country. Likewise why import workers from Laos when guizhao is right there.
I’ve heard that even Lebanon doesn’t have native Lebanese working the fields, Syrian refugees do it for Pennies. Even Iran seems to, de facto, make use of much poorer Afghanis and Tajiks for stuff like that.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This is a reasonable factor, but I think you’re significantly underrating how bad fruit-picking is. Getting college kids to do it is a no go when you can’t get ex-cons to do it.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Because the Mexicans, even if deported, can simply walk back.
The difference in prevailing lower blue collar wages between the parts of Mexico and Honduras which still have subsistence agriculture and even the poorest parts of the U.S. are vast, even if purchasing power in rural Mississippi and Monterrey or the DF is closer than you might think. And people who are willing to pick strawberries for a living are also willing to walk thousands of miles. There will always be someone willing to pay cash under the table for a slight discount to clean toilets or do temporary construction work or whatever at a daily rate greater than the typical unskilled laborer weekly salary in Guatemala or Chiapas. There will always be someone willing to rent out a spare bedroom for a week’s day laborer pay, in cash. I have heard illegal immigrants speak about this- o, so and so went home to Oaxaca, when he runs out of money he’ll walk back, and this time he’ll learn his lesson and stay. I kept his number in case there’s a big job after he comes back. And even with the difference in costs, those Oaxaca laborers are eating rice and beans and wearing rags at home, and hamburgers with jeans in good repair here.
In contrast Nigerians have little choice but to wait in line to do it legally if they want US wages again.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
No, that was a twitter commie. Decker is an ancap who throws out spicy takes.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Also while her rates are high, isn't her fan club by and large very high income? They could afford her if they wanted.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Prostitution as a spot(often quite literally, in the sense of a geographically contained thing. Ancient law codes were big into defining where the red light district could be) in society probably isn't horrible; it's the spreading out from this little niche that tends to be the problem.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It's pretty rare that male golddiggers were kept men, though. Usually dashing young military officers marrying much older widows and the like.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Mildly coercive labor practices+pay well above the going rate for unskilled labor has historically failed at staffing American farms with native workers. You could fly in a different set of third worlders, hold their pay in arrears until they get on the plane to go home- but you can't replace the need for migrants from shithole countries.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
When Georgia the state had a program to replace migrant farm workers with parolees, the produce rotted in the fields. Parolees almost by definition are more used to crappy, unpleasant conditions than the general public(they had after all just been in prison) and they stand a good chance of being imprisoned if they don't hold down a job- meatpacking plants, low level manufacturing, other big employers in shitty jobs love them for that reason.
Getting first worlders to do heavy agricultural labour is clearly an extremely difficult problem which has not yet been solved. In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
You can have some empathy for her(it does seem like her childhood was pretty bad) without approving of any of her decisions, or even refraining from judging her choices.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Aella grew up very Christian, albeit under the thumb of mentally ill calvinists. I'm doubting it would have helped.
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.
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