netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
That sounds either kickass or pornographic. I could believe both.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20d ago
It was a comment by @lancbyw719n, a month-old account with four comments to his name.
Presumably this is the same guy who shows up, posts a few leading questions about race relations or immigration, never responds to comments, and then deletes all his posts. I don't know why he keeps coming back.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists,
Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.
It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues
There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.
But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
Millennials weren’t dominating the new car market in 2007. They were in their mid-twenties at the latest. While I didn’t find data for ‘07, over the last decade, the under-35 age group never exceeded 15%. The Flattening started when Boomers and Gen-Xers were buying the majority of new cars.
Same goes for houses. The median house-seller was born in 1960. By 2017, that had crept forward to…1962. It wasn’t the millennials who were choosing beige or grey or whatever.
You know what was wildly popular in the early 2000s? Apple products. Ones that looked like this instead of this. The 90s was blocky and garish, but we were living in the new millennium. We could put chrome and white plastic on things. Monitors and peripherals got thin and sleek. This might be the only time that software looked more skeuomorphic than the hardware on which it ran.
We’re climbing the fashion barber pole faster than ever. Modernism to postmodernism to high modernism to a colorful, psychedelic mess in only half a century. Add another fifty years of nuclear ennui, a pinch of Moore’s law, and stir. The memes of 2014 feel ancient in a way that 60s counterculture cannot, because the latter never really died so much as it was commercialized and co-opted. Well, we got used to that, and now it’s taken for granted that corporations will sell cheap merch representing your preferred minority.
So don’t blame the gays for sending your 70s-ass appliances out of fashion. Give them ten years, or maybe six months, and the barber pole will come back around.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
True, but they don’t help beat the allegations.
It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.
But of course that would come at some cost in Israeli lives. Understandably not popular in Israel.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Hmm. It might be possible to get trendlines for something like CS2. But then, I understand valve has a long history of detection vs ban waves. It’d be very hard to measure.
Perhaps survey companies that sell cheats to try and keep skin in the game? I seem to remember seeing a retrospective from, like WoW gold farmers or something. You might be able to measure revenue vs. player base for a common game.
Intuitively, I doubt that video game cheating is worse today than it was in the mid-2000s era of PC CoD hackers and the like. Or the golden age of Minecraft servers, maybe.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10d ago
I don’t know who that is, I don’t recall modding him, and I can’t find your quote.
But that is beside the point. Whether or not a comment is inflammatory, when you reply, you have to follow the rules by explaining what you mean. A single word “what?” is insufficient. It strictly drags the conversation down further.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
How exactly does one “offer the mantle”? I can’t think of any historical examples where one party politely set its opponents’ agenda.
If you’re actually asking why people aren’t blaming Democrats for Trump’s indiscretions, I assure you that they are. On this very board, even! If this is a suggestion that Trump might secure peace in our time by looting a little bit harder, well, you can consider me unconvinced.
I think people—voters—react to situations based on vibes. Losing my job to a financial crisis is bad. Cheap gas is good. Paying for someone’s abortion is bad. Defending democracy is good. Stick enough of these reactions together, draw a rough, inconsistent set of principles around them, and you’ve got yourself a political movement. The agenda of that movement, then, is largely downstream of its members’ reactions to whatever situations are most salient.
When the towers fell, public opinion was firmly in favor of massive retaliation. W was quite willing to oblige, and most of the opposition fell in line. There was never a dignified, first-principles discussion over who got to lead the charge. Even once the public soured on it, Obama picked up the bag and kept at it. Right place, right time.
There’s a bizarro alternate universe where Trump’s foreign and economic policies dovetailed into a strong COVID response. It’s one where the doomsday preppers felt vindicated as suburban liberals insisted that lockdowns are just racism. That possibility faded away as Trump began to downplay the virus. Once relaxing measures was Trump-coded, there was no chance in hell that Democrats would give up on the issue. Wrong place, wrong time.
The only way parties adopt an issue is if they’re in the right place when the vibe shifts. The only way for us to see a vibe shift on entitlements is if they somehow become obsolete. I think that either means mass mortality or mass productivity. I don’t believe the Republican Party can “offer” either.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
I mean, I could do both.
But I still can’t tell what part you find so inflammatory. Is it the assertion of higher Russian casualties? The specific ratios? Use of the word “favorite”?
That’s the kind of thing I’d have liked in your response. What specifically were you hoping to see? It’s very hard to respond to someone who’s just asking “what?”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Sure. If they can do those things, then they’re less disabled. How do you get from there to “handouts for people who didn’t have the intelligence or wherewithal”?
Imagine a more extreme case where a guy loses his legs and, thus, his lifelong job at the widget-stomping factory. If he gets disability, it’s not because he couldn’t make it in college.
Now say a doctor asks him, “hey, do you have any skills that could get you a different job? One that doesn’t require jumping up and down?” Here a college degree would be a mitigating factor for his existing, factual disability. The handout was never for failing college. It was for not having legs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20d ago
When you move a supply curve with demand held constant, you change price by changing quantity. Less labor for higher prices. This is appealing to the (remaining) workforce. It’s not so great to the customers.
Same as cartelization. Same as tariffs. Like every form of protectionism, it’s the customers who get the bill.
Given that I am a customer, rather than a competing worker, for jobs like construction, I don’t expect to see any benefit from slashing the construction labor supply.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Didn’t complete college and can’t do manual labor. Unless the good doctor is rubber-stamping disability for healthy young farm boys?
What work are they able to do?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
We ask that top-level comments have more meat on the bone.
Since we’ve asked you specifically about this in the last couple months, one day ban.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
I would say that marriage is firmly under “equal protection under the law.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21d ago
Hey, I’ve had a similar experience.
Not the nihilism, per se. The open tab with a strawman getting punched to thunderous applause. When it was fresh, I avoided responding cause I was at work and couldn’t do it justice. Then a week or two of waiting till the next Monday thread. After that, it felt awkward to bring it up like some sort of callout, and I quietly let it slip.
You’ve inspired me to actually put it in tomorrow’s thread.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Practice.
Someone wrote a good post about it a couple months back, but I couldn’t find it. It basically said you could train the skill efficiently by drawing real objects every day. Sufficient experience lets you move from drawing what you see to drawing what you saw, once, in a different pose and setting.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
I figured those were ruled out by the “back problem.”
I agree that, if they are doable, someone might well prefer them to scraping by on disability.
What I don’t get is where “IQ and wherewithal” come into it. Either the guy is able to do jobs or he’s disabled. A college degree adds some set of jobs, so it can take him out of the disabled category, but not put him in.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
Goesaert v. Cleary: “Only when the owner of the bar was a sufficiently close relative to the woman bartender, it was argued, could it be guaranteed that such immorality would not be present.” 1948. Overturned in 1976.
Schulz v. Wheaton Glass: it turns out making identical job listings but paying the women’s jobs less actually counts as discrimination. 1970.
US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.
I find it obvious that second-wave feminism was legitimately fighting oppression. The same is doubly true for racial minorities. There are plenty of reasons why the Civil Rights Act was significant, rather than a formality.
This weekend, I stumbled into a crossover post 1) between my favorite world-war-punk logistics MMO and 2) Steel Panzer. That wasn’t the weird part. Apparently the mod author had commissioned unit art from a Twitter artist with the following bio:
I suspect—but I can never be sure—that the guns are supposed to be the dealbreaker. Twitter is a foreign country.
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