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
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
1yr ago
People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?
People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness. Relatedly, mental illnesses generally are viewed as undesirable, both practically and socially.
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today. In particular, race-swapping characters and even historical figures would require justification beyond "representation matters". Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
We agree that differences exist and that unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination. We explicitly reject equal outcomes as a reasonable policy goal.
pusher_robot
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3mo 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
2yr ago
Do we really want people cooking in their own homes at all? Even aside from the emissions and particulates, food cooked too much is carcinogenic and food cooked too little can cause food borne illness. Both of these are large scale health care problems. People also tend to use too much salt and not enough vegetables when cooking for themselves. And of course the kitchen is one of the most likely places for potentially lethal residential fires to take place, and the countless food prep accidents involving lacerations from knives and appliances. Ordinary stove tops can get hot enough to melt copper! This is incredibly dangerous as burns from hot oil or sugar can cause severe tissue damage and disfigurement.
It might be okay for a properly trained, licensed chef to cook their own foods, and I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to make a peanut butter sandwich or cheese and crackers, but the average person really is very likely to end up harming themselves in some way from long term diseases to death and dismemberment. Wouldn't it be a much safer, more efficient society if we left cooking to the experts and eliminated home kitchens?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
Poster's point is that Smith is explicitly advocating a "great replacement".
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.
My understanding is that this is effectively an opportunity cost tax. I.e., if you are sitting on a valuable plat which could generate 10 M$ in rents with 1 M$ of improvements, the market value of the plat should be about 9M$, and you would be taxed on that value, even if you were only generating 100K$ of rents (including imputed rents).
This is economically very efficient, as it encourages land to be used for its most economically efficient purpose. However, this butts directly up against peoples' real-world desires to "settle" - to establish a home in a place and be able to stay there indefinitely. If, for reasons beyond their control, the price of their property increases, they can be financially forced from their homes, which is about as soulcrushing as being foreclosed upon, while also seeming much more unfair. It destroys a person's ability to make stable long-term plans regarding a very fundamental fact of life. It also destroys residential community, by creating a disincentive to make a community that people want to live in, which has the natural effect of increasing property value. These are already problems with existing property taxes, that would be greatly amplified by taxing away all of the land value (leaving only rents).
After all, most people recoil about applying the same logic in other contexts: should a person's income tax be based on the amount of money they theoretically could be earning, if they worked as much as possible in the most valuable field they are qualified for, in the location with the highest salary? Hard-core utilitarians have seriously proposed this, but the concept of being treated as an economic ends with no function other than to produce social benefit, rather than a sapient being with noneconomic needs and desires makes most people reject this with prejudice.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
They do not currently have the names of any suspects or particular statutes in mind that may have been violated but they have started an investigation.
This does not seem like a healthy use of prosecutorial power. This is fully into "I'll find you the crime" territory, if we are opening investigations without even an articulable belief that a specific crime was committed.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
I predict that as he gets too old for leading man status, Cruise will be the new Eastwood: the Hollywood veteran who actually has a firm grasp on what makes a movie pleasurable for mainstream audiences, taking directing roles that give him lots of creative control and reliably turn solid profits, and the occasional vanity project to flex some underused acting muscles.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1yr ago
I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus most building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant are trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue.
I think a bigger factor is that this success goes directly against the carbon-reduction platform that is important to much of the Democratic party base. Democrats are not too keen to paint any fossil energy extraction as anything but an economic negative and ate a lot of criticism over things like blocking Keystone XL, even if from time to time they quietly throw their environmentalist base under the bus when it comes to opening federal lands for drilling. But politically, fossil fuels are "bad", and good things can't be caused by bad things, therefore shale oil and gas can not be responsible for positive economic developments. Lucky for them, the press is generally fine with not talking about the double-think taking place because stoking environmental panic is good for their bottom line (and some, I assume, are true believers).
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
shot down by trans activists
So to speak
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
I don’t see anything in the ensuing paragraphs that would narrow this meaningfully, although I welcome input from anyone with a sharper legal eye than I have.
Well, the text you quotes authorizes such waivers as are authorized by paragraph (2), so let's look at paragraph (2):
(2) ACTIONS AUTHORIZED.—The Secretary is authorized to
waive or modify any provision described in paragraph (1) as
may be necessary to ensure that—
And then a number of things that can be ensured is listed, but the most relevant seems to be the first, item (A):
(A) recipients of student financial assistance under
title IV of the Act who are affected individuals are not
placed in a worse position financially in relation to that
financial assistance because of their status as affected
individuals;
Ok, so this seems to allow that a waiver can be made to make it so that an "affected individual" is not made financially worse off by virtue of being an "affected individual". This leads to the obvious question, who is an affected individual? Helpfully, the statute tells us in Sec 5:
(2) AFFECTED INDIVIDUAL.—The term ‘‘affected individual’’
means an individual who—
(A) is serving on active duty during a war or other
military operation or national emergency;
Doesn't apply to ordinary borrowers.
(B) is performing qualifying National Guard duty
during a war or other military operation or national emergency;
Doesn't apply to civilian borrowers.
(C) resides or is employed in an area that is declared
a disaster area by any Federal, State, or local official
in connection with a national emergency; or
To my knowledge, this did not happen, i.e. the entire country was not declared a disaster area, so does not apply.
(D) suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result
of a war or other military operation or national emergency,
as determined by the Secretary.
This would be the one to hang your hat on, but would seem to require, at least, some demonstration that the borrowers suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of the national Covid emergency. Linking economic hardship to COVID-related employment problems is a possibility, but that's not terribly "direct", particularly since forbearance was already granted. And, this would not seem to obviously not apply to relief granted to borrowers who remained employed throughout.
So, I would disagree that the law clearly and unambiguously grants the Secretary this authority.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
10mo ago
I feel bad for JD Vance. I identify a little with him, and he's just getting hammered on bullshit day in and day out, over and over. I don't think he's doing great, but he can't get out of his own way.
I mean, it's almost impossible to "get out of your own way" when malicious hyper-scrutiny is applied to every facial twitch, and it's definitely impossible when people simply make things up and meme them into existence with the support of 24/7 news media. This is exactly the Mitt Romney treatment all over again.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
To do the work of dismantling their privilege
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8mo ago
Seems like it might be, if the blood transfusions were for treating a psychological condition, and the supporting science was sketchy at best.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
8mo 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.
She is well known for having scolded previous participants including Mike Pence, so I strongly suspect the goal is to portray her dominance by both interrupting Trump and throw him off balance and theteby goading him into a nasty retort, and also to contemptuously scold him if he interrupts her. I'm sure the idea is to exploit female sympathy to the maximum extent possible. It didn't work that great for Clinton though, so I doubt it's worth the bad PR of reneging a fair agreement.
ETA: I previously stated that I much preferred the debate with no talking over and everyone I discussed it with expressed the same. They should keep to these rules purely for the benefit of the viewing public if nothing else.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
Have you never grilled out and drank beer with friends on a nice green lawn?
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them?
The answer is bums, hobos, panhandlers, psychos, perverts, buskers, criminals, litterers, and generally obnoxious people, and the leaders that do nothing effective to stop them from shitting the commons.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
To use a recent example, Hamlin University, the site where a professor recently got accused of bigotry for showing a historical artwork depicting Muhammed made by Islamic artists, backed down on their support of the students who called for the professor to be removed.
No they didn't. The professor is still jobless. The most they admitted was that they may have gone too far by calling her "Islamophobic."
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership.
What "influence and leadership" does the U.S. have that is not transactional already? EU seems to believe U.S. "leadership" consists of them making decisions and us paying for it. Our "influence" in most other countries consists mainly of bribery in the form of foreign aid and trade concessions. This is all transactional already! What soft power we do have comes from cultural output completely independent of and irrelevant to our foreign policy establishment, and that has all gone to absolute shit anyways.
From my perspective it seems like we're the Sugar Daddy who is promised that we're really, truly, loved and fun to be with, so long as the wallet comes out. They'll say nice(ish) things about us exactly as long the checks keep flowing. One second later, we're monsters who are killing the entire world.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1yr ago
I agree a lot with your sentiment. Musk does happen to share a lot of my values, but he's definitely a snake-oil salesman to some degree, and I'd hate to work for the man, not only because I don't agree with his goals, but he's also very petty from what I've heard, and too confident in his own abilities where he has no real expertise.
A more charitable reading would be that Musk is uniquely aspirational - not for money or power, but for real technological progress. He really, honestly believes taking a chance on a technological leap forward is worth large investments even if success is not guaranteed or even highly probable. This is refreshingly different than most other businesses, which either tend to sclerotic, bloated enterprises trying to squeeze every last bit of profit out of absurdly well-tread technological paths, or absolute grifters who don't even intend to try to accomplish the goals they set, but do plan to enrich themselves along the way. This is why I think he is so valuable - he has both the vision to see openings for large progress, and the ambition to make an honest try.
People tend to lump Musk into the "grifter" category because his vision and ambition is usually larger than what turns out to be possible, but they ignore that what does turn out to be possible is usually still well beyond what everyone else thought was possible. This happens because he actually does take the time to learn the fundamentals, and because he understands important concepts that we have tended to downplay in the West, such as the importance and the benefits of engineering for manufacturability and vertical integration. In way too many businesses, especially public companies, nearly every single person in management all the way up to the board of directors is far more concerned with ass-covering and deflecting failure than they are with taking on challenges and engineering solutions.
That is why, to a mild degree, I am a Musk supporter. The future belongs to those who show up, and the rewards belong to those who take chances and solve problems. Humanity will stagnate if everything is left in the hands of committees and study groups, people who are not "too confident", and if failing to achieve total victory is deemed more shameful than never trying. Musk is, for whatever faults, a Man in the Arena. He's not a prophet, but he has a unique set of skills that has put him in a position to be a singular force for technological and material progress.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1yr ago
You're right, you wouldn't expect any different from the campaign and the partisans. The difference was the way the media treated it, the nauseating network of "fact checkers" and "journalists" who willingly, even gleefully participated in the smear job. It was no campaign worker but a "journalist" who used the debate forum to harangue and "correct" Romney's facts - erroneously! It was not just the Obama campaign and the DNC that mocked Romney for saying that Russia was the top geopolitical foe, it was also newspapers, magazines, late-night shows, and even straight news programs. What the Romney stomping clarified is not that Republicans would be subject to completely unfair smears from their opponents. It clarified that the media was also an opponent, and one so powerful that it could not possibly be defeated without attacking it directly. That is what Trump was not afraid to do, and that is why he won.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
What I find funny is it's almost certainly the "action" part of that formula that provides 90% of the appeal. I think that writers rooms are way to the left of the median American on values. The median American is still basically heterosexual, pro-family, pro-achievement, pro-justice, and generally in alignment with what we might call Western virtues, which cash out by starting as Aristotle described - courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, ambition, patience, friendliness, truthfulness, wit, modesty, and justice - and probably add some Nietzchean virtues on top of that: health, strength, and a will to power.
Make your show about a protagonist of any color that strives to achieve those virtues and you have a pretty solid foundation. What people are mostly not enjoying are shows that attack these virtues or celebrate vice. People do not enjoy the anti-social, the self-destructive, the celebration of weakness or bitterness or mediocrity. They generally don't sympathize with losers and incompetence.
I think this also explains the perennial unpopularity of Christian media even during periods when the vast majority of people consider themselves Christians. For many, their Christianity is a moral counterweight to the ancient virtues they actually implicitly believe in.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
It suggests that at least in some job markets, the demand for black people far exceeds supply.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2yr ago
Possibly this wouldn't happen if women would just straightforwardly ask for help with things when they want it, instead of dropping hints and dancing around the subject, assuming their interlocutor will swoop in and fix their problems as a personal favor. With men, I simply don't offer help with anything unless they ask for it. With women, they will take this as gross indifference or deliberate rudeness.
I've found the recent imbroglio with Congress v. the University Presidents pretty interesting due to the somewhat conflicting reactions I've had and just wanted to post some thoughts.
For those not aware, the Presidents of Penn, MIT, and Harvard recently appeared before at a Congressional committee on the subject of antisemitism on campus. Somewhat unexpectedly, the video of the hearing went somewhat viral, especially the questioning of Rep. Elise Stefanik, who repeatedly asked point-blank if calling for the genocide of Jews would be a violation of the campus code of conduct, to which all the Presidents gave evasive answers. The entire hearing is actually worth watching, at least on 2x speed.
Some of my thoughts:
Rep. Stefanik has a trial lawyer's skill for cross-examination. Her questioning was simultaneously obviously loaded and somewhat unfair but also dramatic and effective at making the respondent look bad. However, I wish she would have focused more on the obvious hypocrisy of claiming to only punish speech that effectively is unprotected by the First Amendment, pointing out some of the more obvious cases where they elevated things like misgendering or dog-whistling white supremacy to "abuse" and "harassment" while refusing to do the same for genocide advocacy. In fairness however, other representatives did ask questions along those lines, though not nearly as effectively.
The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined to offer any real explanation of their underlying position or how to reconcile it with other actions taken for apparently viewpoint-related reasons. Stefanik was obviously getting under their skin, and their default response to grin back while answering like Stefanik was a misbehaving child was absolutely the wrong tactic. The Penn President came across so poorly that she felt she had to post a bizarre follow-up video to almost-apologize for not appearing to take it seriously while at the same time implying without really saying that calling for genocide might be harassment.
Their performance was especially frustrating because they were taking a position that I basically support: that the University will not police opinions, even terribly offensive ones, but will police conduct and harassment. It's not that difficult a position to explain or defend on basic Millian principles, but they couldn't or wouldn't do it. Granted, Stefanik would probably have cut them off if they tried, but they didn't try. They didn't use their time during friendly questioning to do so, and they still haven't. I want to support them in an effort to actually stake out that position. But--
It's hard not to think that the reason they haven't is because they don't believe it. Actions speak louder than words, and there have been a number of cases of Universities, even these specific ones, taking action against people for harmful "conduct" or "harassment" when the conduct in question is actually just expounding an offensive opinion. "Safety concern" has also been a ready justification for acquiescing to heckler's vetoes against disfavored speakers. I simply don't believe that they believe their policy requires them to allow hateful speech against Jews. I think they are lying, and that makes me want to not support them.
The episode seems to have especially impacted what I'll call normie Jews, who are reliably blue-tribe but not radically woke. On the one hand, I think they have a legitimate grievance against the hypocrisy of how the code of conduct policies are interpreted for some opinions vs. arguable antisemitism. On the other hand, I think it's bad policy to not be able to make antisemitic arguments ever, even if maintaining civility. I don't actually believe that hate speech is violence, even antisemitism, and I don't support their movement to make antisemitism a per se violation. On the other, other hand, the cause of knocking down the prestige of the Ivies and exposing their rank hypocrisy might be worth allies of convenience. On the other, other, other hand, as a SWM I feel like the prisoner in the gallows in the "First time?" meme. You have a grievance at their hypocrisy, but I have a grievance at your hypocrisy. Most normie Jews have had no complaints at all about woke people saying similar or worse things about "white people." Some of those woke people were themselves Jews, and I suspect that if the universities capitulate, it will be by making Jews a special protected class, which would further from the outcome that I want. I've had a superposition of all these reactions going on.
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