pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
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User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8mo ago
If they were truly valuable, they would be working in private schools where the school itself must generate revenue by performing valuable functions, not simply awarded money by the state which is extracted from captive taxpayers. Thus, they are not valuable, and are instead parasitic.
This is highly confounded by the fact that public spending has greatly crowded out the private school market. If your option is a public school which costs (after taxes and fees) nothing vs. a private school of about the same quality and costs thousands of dollars a semester, it would be irrational to take the latter option. If public schools didn't exist at all, there would undoubtedly be more private schools, needing to hire more teachers.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
9mo ago
I would say that size is irrelevant, as opposed to value delivered. A contract for $10 million that delivers nothing of value, I would presume corrupt. A contract for $10 billion that actually delivers, say, a moon base, I would not. These FCC grants have long seemed corrupt to me because huge amounts of money get paid out to companies that result in hardly anybody getting new connectivity. Questionable value for the amount provided, and then execution and delivery far below expectations.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
23d ago
I'm amazed that hardly anyone has mentioned what I think has to be the top practical reason to own a truck: they're the only vehicle class capable of towing more than trivial amount. That's why the pickup truck is practically indispensable to the suburban class (at least, here in benighted flyover country).
If you have have ambitions of boating, camping, jet skiing, four wheeling, motorcycling, or snowmobiling, then having a vehicle amply capable of towing the trailers or self contained mobile structures used for these activities is a prerequisite. And if you need a truck for towing anyways, might as well get one that can serve as a commuter and haul family and friends too. This is why the beds keep shrinking and the engines keep embiggening: the utility of the bed for cargo is secondary in most cases to its utility as traction motor.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I don't recall having seen this. Are you sure this wasn't something bundled from the hardware OEM?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
If so the only logical response would be to dramatically increase the scrutiny applied to granting of permanent resident status. It is unacceptable that we would be required to import people who seek to destroy us.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Doing this with an executive order is a naked grab for power from both the courts and congress, with no recourse for either.
Not so, executive orders are themselves reviewable by the Supreme Court.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10mo ago
There are prominent republicans opposing Trump, does that make them blue tribe?
Indubitably yes! Remember that the red/blue split was not supposed to cleave on party affiliation or even ideology, but cultural affiliation. A republican from, say, the northeast, who comes from money and lives on an estate is going to be blue tribe almost without fail.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10mo ago
My hope is that adoption of e-bikes will improve the behavior of cyclists as well, as it seems like the most annoying behaviors are driven by their desire to never lose momentum and especially never to come to a complete stop.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10mo ago
I'm not so sure. The media hate machine has, I think, been extremely effective against Musk. I think most Americans would enjoy seeing him in jail.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
11mo ago
It's tautilogically true that, without their most valuable assets, most people have a pretty low net worth.
I actually find the complete reliance on public pensions and no IRA or 401k like the vast majority of Americans a little concerning.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8d ago
Sure, but so does everybody else.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
16d ago
I own a 100-year old house myself, but my friend who has built new strongly recommends installing central vacuum lines during construction.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Working on replacing a couple of the hundred year old double hung windows in my house. Not really that challenging as far as home improvement projects go, if you order prefab vinyl pocket replacements. But I'm at the point now of being ready to install the new windows and am wondering is there is a better way to seal it on the outer stop than applying a thick bead of caulk and then working fast as hell to shim it true and square as is reasonably possible in such an old house.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Was up north with time to kill while watching rain fall on the lake. Read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama over the weekend. I enjoyed it, though the edition had an appalling forward. I can see why the ending was controversial, as the central mystery of the book is not resolved, but it did not bother me as much as I expected it would. Also started a novel Subsunk about various submarine rescue developments and incidents. However it was printed in 1960 and I suspect may be slightly out of date.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Why? Eighth Amendment? A cursory search did not find any case law on the matter.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Once it becomes clear that this is a long war, and that support for Ukraine is going to start coming out of the budget rather than existing idle resources, the goal is to maintain a leading role while dumping the economic cost on Europe. So say, first quietly and then loudly, that the US is happy to continue helping Ukraine, but after some reasonable period of time (3-6 months) they are not going to do so for free. Then follow through - based on the above analysis the Europeans will grumble, but pay up. The US should chip in enough to retain a seat at the table - say 10-20% of the cost.
This is the part that seems like the lynchpin to me. Suppose that the Europeans reasonably believe, as they have for 50 years now, that they can call America's bluff here and either not pony up, or only pony up for things that are not useful to the war effort like expanded benefits for servicemembers? Are we willing to back that up by writing off Europe? Is Europe able to hold us hostage by putting a knife to their own throats?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
If you choose to repeatedly engage in an activity that you know has a high risk of death, that's just suicide with plausible deniability. I don't consider someone who loses a game of Russian roulette to have suffered a "fatal accident".
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5mo ago
The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?
No, it's literally impossible. Remember, you're dealing with people with sufficient motivated reasoning to pretend to be confused about words like "man" and "woman". People with years of critical theory training that teaches that meaning is subjective, and concepts constructed.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8mo ago
Maybe if you get the mocha/lattes you'd be pushing 1400 but their coffee (that is not actually offered in the US locations, so maybe it doesn't apply as much) is good enough there's no reason to bother.
What? US McDonald's definitely serves filter coffee. It's very popular and there was even a notable lawsuit over it.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10mo ago
Nuclear power as it is currently available to us does not provide enough energy returned on energy invested for it to be a viable option even without the costs of dealing with waste.
Compared to what? As far as I know it easily beats under reasonable operating assumptions almost everything except for fossil fuels. Are you talking about energy return on investment or financial return on investment? The cost of uranium that France paid has nothing to do with EROI. But in any case, the cost of uranium is, at this time, a miniscule cost of nuclear plant operation. The current high cost of nuclear plant operation has much more to do with deliberate regulatory sabotage than the inherent cost of the technology. There are, as we speak, newer, safer, more efficient reactors that have been designed and even passed through the arduous DOE approval process such as the AP1000 - not hypothetical in the least - but the high cost of legal construction delays and regulatory uncertainty makes commitment to construction very difficult and until very recently the DOE has been extremely reluctant to approve almost any experimental or prototype reactors, often on the grounds that the technology was not proven and so the risks could not be quantified - an obviously self-fulfilling state of affairs. They are being deployed in other more pragmatic countries. That said, I personally thing the prevailing LWR uranium cycle is terribly inefficient and a technological dead end, but it still generates an incredible amount of power.
That has started to change and in addition to the small modular reactors that are nearing market availability, serious followup to the molten salt reactor research that was done in the 1960's may finally be moving forward. However, I don't anticipate this will change many peoples' minds about whether they oppose nuclear power - it will just change the reasons. And sadly, the U.S. is playing from far behind other countries, especially China, in terms of building and testing experimental and prototype reactors. I don't doubt that many other countries will be deploying Chinese reactors, which we will of course refuse to do out of sheer pig-headedness and because we still have lots of fossil fuels to consume, and all the while people will be claiming that nuclear power just isn't practical enough.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
19d ago
None of that is necessary to keep a car at home.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
27d ago
Isn't the reason that if you wait until puberty is nearly complete, it becomes much harder to pass in the future?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
I mean, plenty of Asians preferred living in the US (where they were a minority) to living in Asia, because by and large, being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US.
I think there's a reasonable fear that the "being an ethnic minority is not that bad a deal in the US" is only the case because of the unusual and ahistoric forbearance of the existing ethnic majority. There's a disquieting dearth of places friendly to ethnic minorities that are not run by white people.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
If you're a Millennial, this Windows 95 theme ambient track is probably pretty nostalgic.
Obviously the 6th Amendment does not apply if the government is not prosecuting them, and a deportation proceeding is not a criminal trial. Foreign nationals being tried by foreign courts have no 6th Amendment case with the U. S. Government.
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