pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
No bio...
User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8d ago
Then who makes money from the food industry.
When margins are low but volume is high you can still make good money. But in a commodity market, economic forces will generally push average profit margin to $0, so it's not surprising that margins are usually low and sometimes negative.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
The central units are generic and easy to get, cost only a little more than a nice portable unit, and the sweepers generally conform to one of only a couple standard types. The rest is just plastic tubes and wall ports. Biggest advantage is that the central unit can exhaust to outside, so heavy filtration is not needed to reduce fine particles and dust, and the power of even a low end central unit can't be matched by any kind of portable vacuum cleaner. The central unit typically has a collection bin you can remove and empty, like a shop-vac.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d 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
9d 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
15d ago
I don't think they are especially angry, but older liberal women especially seem to have an unfortunate tendency to speak publicly as though they are talking to children and struggling to make themselves understood, rather than struggling to persuade. Maybe this is a factor of mistake theory vs. conflict theory, but I think it really annoys people, like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner by speaking English, louder and slower.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
6d ago
None of that is necessary to keep a car at home.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
13d ago
👉👌
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
15d ago
They've already demonstrated bad faith by maliciously not enforcing the law in just the prior administration. We would need some kind of signal that they were serious about departing from this practice, or any statutory promises about future enforcement are worthless.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
16d ago
The stats are what they are. Do you reject this information, or doubt its accuracy? I'm in that category, AMA.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
18d ago
They can't (legally) vote, but they do count towards apportionment.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
27d ago
Agreed. Forcing cities into receivership that puts state legislatures into an oversight role can only help Republicans. Even in Illinois, the Democrats don't control the state as strongly as they control Cook county.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
29d ago
And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality
I just can't unsee in my mind Col. Nathan R. Jessup: "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall." Of course, that's fiction, and as the ur-conservative in an Aaron Sorkin film, he of course went to prison. But I agree it does point to something real, and unfortunately for liberals their institutional hegemony put them in a position to purge enough of these types from positions of power and influence such that they are gone, probably permanently. And now they need to either surrender, or pick up a rifle and stand a post.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
9d ago
Yes, I think generally similarly-sized SUVs have a higher vehicle curb weight, which cuts into towing capacity. Trucks also generally have much better rear visibility.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
14d ago
One way would be to have some institution, powerful and widely respected by social consensus, but without access to the tools of violence and completely separate from the state, capable of directing people's behavior and social status via moral force instead of the policeman's truncheon.
Voltaire originated the witticism that in the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since. Well, now Man has killed God, and God is likely to return the insult.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
29d ago
Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rhetoric
This really is way out of date. For a lot of people in cities and suburbs, 99% of driving tasks are within a hundred miles or so of home and an EV provides lower TCO, the more so the more miles you drive. It especially makes sense for a family that already has an ICE car to use for road trips. I am even aware of militia-adjacent preppers that are high on EVs due to being able to fully sustain them off the grid.
I personally will probably want to replace my 2012 Fusion at some point in the next few years and am waffling between EV or ICE. I don't tend to drive a lot of miles so TCO is probably a wash unless gas prices go way up, but the raw performance of electric and idea of being able to "refuel" in my own garage is really appealing. Having to charge on road trips is the biggest downside.
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
25d ago
Then they can't reasonably complain about deploying the national guard.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2mo ago
I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.
What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.
There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.
Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!
The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?
So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.
Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?
Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
If it is indeed hopeless, than we can at long last dispense with the concept of building anything for the future. Loot what you can, while you can.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
Housing is a natural investment vehicle for two reasons:
- It's an asset that is likely to hold its value over a long time, and
- As an investment asset, it provides you housing for "free".
In other words, while property is not a completely safe investment, it's a relatively safe one (if you're smart about it), and unlike other relatively safe investments like index funds and treasury bonds, you can live in it. Notably, it doesn't need to greatly increase in value for this dynamic to be controlling. That's just a quirk of certain spots becoming much more highly desirable.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
14d ago
Obviously, but I think the TRA would argue that this is exceptionally unusual and outweighed by the QoL improvements of early transition.
I strenuously disagree, but I do think that's the actual crux.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
25d ago
Except that no such thing happened, the German-Americans are today mostly integrated into mainstream English-speaking society.
I think it's noteworthy that the proximal cause for this was a war waged by America against the mother country, with no small amount of pressure applied to assimilate. We do not really do that at all any more. More likely the opposite, I think: by the undisputed teachings of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-American intellectual output, assimilating to hegemonic values generally and white capitalistic American values specifically is morally wrong.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
14d 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
The year is 2050. Mass unemployment has been forestalled by government revenue per employee maximums. Practically speaking, this means the vast majority of jobs are sinecures, but the social prestige of being sinecured to a particular firm or brand has skyrocketed in value, and likewise the PR cost of sinecured associates can potentially be Bud-Light-level apocalyptic. As a result, sinecures at highly-desirable firms often take on substantial relations efforts on behalf of the firm for free, both to maintain their sinecure, acquire additional sinecures, and potentially rake in social media influencer consulting fees), but also to increase the social prestige of the firm overall, and by proxy, themselves. Having multiple sinecures is possible for people who are motivated to do things that increase brand value or mindshare, and people with exceptional social desirability may acquire many more. Income supplementation via gig work will still be possible for things that can't be done as well by computers and robots or require the human touch, though naturally the returns will be low since the supply is huge. Of course, anyone with valuable sinecures must be on good behavior in public, for bringing disrepute or negative reaction to the firm will mean instant termination, and potential blackballing.
Those who have been blackballed or otherwise unable to merit a sinecure on the basis of their social worthiness must provide by going and doing actual labor, probably many hours of grinding gig work, or finding a valuable contracting niche. Most actual work below executive level done at the firms is performed by independent contractors, who supplement their sinecures (if they have one) with hourly contracting fees. And of course, there's always welfare, but which only provides at sustenance levels.
You might better have used the term "understandable" rather than "fair". By calling it a "fair response" you are invoking the connotation of "fair" as "just, right, natural" which strongly implies that you believe that socialism is the correct outcome.
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