pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
No bio...
User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
These foundational ideas are good as far as they go, but I think makes it clear the point the girl was getting at: these are the minimum basic requirements to be an American. Is there nothing more? Is that all there is? Sam might say, no there is nothing more. Everything else is an illusion or not genuinely American, but I think this is (a) profoundly unsatisfying for a lot of people and (b) not historically genuine. What are the aspirational aspects of being an American? I can think of a few things that I thing makes someone a good American:
- Industriousness and/or self-reliance
- Charity and respect for strangers
- Weak regard for social class
- Civic nationalism
I don't think there's anything the slightest bit untoward about desiring to live in an America with more people who share those values and fewer people who wreck the commons, bugger their neighbors, and exhibit antisocial behavior. Yes, it's possible to tolerate those who don't share these values, and it's better to grant dispensation than engage tyranny to force an outcome. But it is unpleasant and it would surely create a more desirable society if people would, through the power of assimilation and persuasion, voluntarily adopt such values. I'm baffled and increasingly despondent that people find this to be a totally unreasonable imposition, and demand that instead Americans give up these values to accommodate people who don't share them and don't feel inclined to change.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
women gaining ever more status and wealth
And weight
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
This is the most important point. You can't appeal to a "Rules-based order" by handwaving the rules, which explicitly do not guarantee Ukraine's territory against Russian perfidy.
pusher_robot
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4mo 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
2mo ago
I feel it is a necessary tonic to people who claim it is physically impossible for them to lose weight, choosing to blame the outcome on other people or nature itself. CICO is the reductio ad absurdum which proves that the ultimate locus of control cannot be found elsewhere.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Suppose that El Salvador decides he is rightfully imprisoned and doesn't feel like releasing him? How far do you think the court can go to mandate foreign policy to effect his return? Economic sanctions? Military blockade? War?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
A Martian settlement would not be a sealed system without inputs or outputs, so the example of the biosphere projects is less relevant than, say, the ISS.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Because the bureaucrats who implement the statutes can not be trusted to do so.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
I mean, that depends a lot on the attorney's fees.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8mo ago
The amount of energy being expended over Trump's recent visit to a McDonald's is kind of interesting to me. It seems to have generated an extraordinary amount of media and online attention. On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals. On the detractor side, they decry it an illogical and bizarre stunt, that it was fake because the store was not actually open, and compared it to Dukakis in the tank. Some have even doxxed the owner who wrote to the state to complain about labor regulations.
Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.
I think this is interesting because symbolically, it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's food as well as catering a White House dinner with it, widely seen as trashy and disrespectful. The imagery of Trump looking for all the world like a store manager from 3 decades ago I think also triggered some nostalgia - or perhaps post-traumatic stress - about the current state of customer service.
I don't have too much more to say and offer no predictions. It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Having no redress to those abuses - e.g., nobody has standing has to challenge or slow-rolling proceedings until the case is moot - is using the court system.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
"Safe, lethal legal, and rare." I've been fooled by this before.
That is to say, I believe you and believe your earnestness, but I just cannot conceive of how you would stop cultural slide on this without a solid Chesterton fence.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
To me the most parsimonious explanation is that there are details that are relatively probable but highly embarrassing to the federal government. For example, if Oswald did indeed start shooting, but that it was an accidental discharge from a Secret Service agent (possibly still alive) which blew Kennedy's head off and killed him.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
21d ago
Not if they rise to the level of seditious conspiracy.
pusher_robot
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2mo ago
Zorbathustrians, perhaps
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo 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
5mo ago
I think what you are missing is that there are parallel developments which call into question whether the high price is actually inherent to the technology in the way we've been led to believe. The most direct parallel here is space launch. Not very long ago, the price per kilogram to orbit was high enough to make satellites prohibitively expensive for anyone but nation states and extremely well-capitalized corporations. Human spaceflight was all but unthinkable for anyone except national astronautics programs. The conventional wisdom was that this is just the nature of the problem: rockets are expensive and expendable, development requires decades of engineering, and there are no real major technological advancements achievable without new fundamental breakthroughs.
But this turned out not to be the case! SpaceX entered the market and proved that using iterations of well-known designs, hiring the right people and compensating them properly, and leadership pushing hard at schedules and milestones while also driving on costs, you actually could dramatically lower the cost to orbit beyond what anyone thought possible, while still being profitable!
So with this context, there's lots of reasons to be skeptical that the cost and feasibility barriers cited for nuclear power are real. As with liquid-fueled rockets, this is a reasonably well-developed and very well-understood technology. The bulk inputs are concrete and steel, inexpensive things we know how to build with. We don't need fundamental breakthroughs. What we need are industry leaders with the drive to engineer better reactors designed for safety and mass production and for the NRC to streamline the permitting process to something with clear, reasonable requirements. Unlike with rockets, we unfortunately also need reform in the building permitting processes that are also used to block or delay every other major infrastructure project, but I don't think that's an impossible dream.
So, your interlocutors may well believe that the cost factor, as real as it is today, not be inherent to the technology, and that we have everything we need to unlock the capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear power facilities as quickly and cheaply as combustion turbines, if only the right combination of leadership and policy falls into place.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
There are multiple meanings to "US Government is paying to house prisoners in ES". One is that the U.S. is basically paying hotel fees per prisoner to have them housed in an El Salvador prison. In this case, sure you could simply stop paying the fee and presumably El Salvador might feel obliged to release him. Another is that the U.S. is providing a block grant or something else of value of the privilege of having the repatriated nationals accepted by El Salvador at all, or as general compensation for the fact that many need to be imprisoned by El Salvador. In that case, it's not a simple matter of procedure but actual foreign policy to threaten to cut off funding over the disposition of a single individual.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
I have been using Pop! OS on laptops that don't support Windows 11. It seems nice.
Just a caution to the OP though: I've been down this road a few times, and family members did not really appreciate the benefits of Linux compared to the hassle of not being able to use the Windows apps they are used to. Even the ones I thought for sure only used web and email. In every case, I ended up having to abandon the effort.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Indeed, I try to keep "90% of everything is crap and always has been" in the front of my mind whenever talking about history and especially when I feel the creep of nostalgia.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
This doesn't make sense to me. Building and operating resort hotels is largely orthogonal to colonization settlement, especially where (as in the case of Mount Whitney and Antarctica) the insurmountable obstacles are legal, not technological.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
Did you parboil? The one thing I find a little tough about brats is that if you are grilling from cold, it can be a challenging to make sure they are fully cooked before the outside over-chars. I usually parboil the brats prior to grilling, in a bath of light lager and sliced onions. That way, they're fully cooked when you put them on the grill, and the only thing you have to worry about is imparting the grill flavor and getting the perfect char on the outside for your tastes. As a bonus, you can drop them right back in the beer bath to keep warm, and they stay nice and juicy for hours. And, the onions go great on top.
Agree that a gas grill is really just a gas range that happens to be outside instead of in your kitchen. No comparison.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
On the other hand, forming a complicated web of alliances, security guarantees, and geopolitical networks is somewhat the thing that escalated into WWI. It's worth considering that making security guarantees allows the opponent to decide when to trigger a large scale conflict.
The operational strategy is that of Blitzkrieg: by forgoing careful, methodical advances in favor of moving as quickly as possible, you incur substantial tactical penalties, but this is more than made up for by disrupting the abilities of your opponents to respond effectively. If your advice were followed, it would give the defenders of USAID ample time to challenge every single cut to the maximum ability possible, likely with multiple consecutive injunctions, as well as reorganize and potentially reroute funding to prevent the next most likely targets. Then, when those programs are cut, even if they have not already been rerouted elsewhere already, they will be well-prepared to immediately mount a defense-in-depth. The effort would be halted in a quagmire of legal proceedings and public propaganda for so long with so many challenges that the public would despair of any change and the political support would evaporate. That's why the only effective strategy can possibly be to cut as much as possible as quickly as possible, then give back only where it is tactically prudent to do so.
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