solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
22hr ago
The libertarian idea echoed by Republicans that business owners are too special a class to fill out paperwork or obey laws is what is "primarily responsible" for widespread illegal immigration. Business owners are the original open borders constituency.
Yes, filling out paperwork has a cost. Paying competitive wages that command American adults and/or building one's facilities in a place that people actually live instead of staffing one's factory with migrant children in a rural nowhere county with less than 10K working-age residents is indeed more expensive.
Failing to govern also has costs. Republican politicians have spent the last 20 or so years either lying about being opposed to illegal immigration or being too spineless to actually enforce immigration laws if it meant irritating the Chamber of Commerce. Lying/failure to deliver has expensive consequences like incompetent populists winning primaries and becoming the face of your party. CPB/ICE's budget increase for the sake of deportations exceeds the budget for the entire Department of Labor.
If the right can't tell the Chamber of Commerce types (who, last I checked, are entirely incapable of mobilizing voters, let alone street protests) to take one for the team or try their luck with the Mamdanis of the world they don't stand a chance in Hell of accomplishing any goal that faces any organized opposition.
At this point the Republicans might as well give up and go back to the Reagan/H.W. Bush position of open borders.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1d ago
You write the regulation such that "Compliant Employer" is vicariously liable for any violations by the subcontractor, as is done to varying extents by OSHA and the NLRB.
For an example: busting Hyundai for using child labor. You would want to make the fines larger, but the principle applies. The factory and the temp agency are both fined for the labor law violation.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1d ago
It should be remembered that George Wallace was more of a showman than a committed segregationist, the stand at the schoolhouse door was an engineered photo op, and that most of the Southern Democrats were to the left of their voters on segregation. Wallace himself campaigned hard on segregation mostly because he lost the '58 primary while endorsed by the NAACP to a guy endorsed by the Klan (who lived long enough to endorse Barack Obama; Southern politics can be funny like that).
Immigration is another one of those issues where the vast majority of politicians from any party are to the left of their electorate. Steven Miller might be serious about mass deportations, but the Congressional GOP is not and has spent the last 20 years desperate to enact IRCA: Part Two. Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible. Even Trump spent most of his political career calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi before aping his platform.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
22d ago
More fun than H.W., FDR's Democrats won WW2 and proceeded to get smashed by a then presumed extinct GOP in 1946 over a messy economy.
Assuming that this person is correct and that ACA enrollment is increasingly becoming dominated by early retirees I would expect the enhanced subsidies to be reinstated fairly quickly A. because Bill and Shelly vote in midterm elections and B. because doing so is easier (and maybe cheaper) than expanding Medicare eligibility to 55+ or whatever.
I've already said that Mike Johnson's crusade against gamer NEETs on Medicaid is a smoke and mirrors show to distract from the fact that unless we undo the ACA's Medicaid expansion (which mostly covers the working poor), there isn't much we can tweak in terms of eligibility that will actually cut costs.
An unfortunate occurrence in the last few years is that the Great Recession through Covid era of stagnation in healthcare spending has ended and healthcare spending is again growing faster than the economy, such that we're rapidly heading for healthcare spending making up 20% of US GDP.
The above is why I assume that we're nowhere near a universal system. No country with such a system spends as much of their economy on healthcare as the US does. Germany is the closest and the US spends about 50% more of its GDP on healthcare than Germany. For reference, if we moved to a German level of healthcare spending we could nearly triple the defense budget (which is currently about 3.5% of GDP). For another fun comparison, what we spend on healthcare now is pretty similar to the entire revenue of the federal government. Put simply, I don’t think that the US has either the capacity to bring healthcare spending in line with other OECD countries (which would require mass firings and/or salary cuts that would hit a well-educated and engaged chunk of the electorate) or the ability to raise taxes enough to cover said spending, so I assume that the system will remain largely as-is.
Even if you’re cynical enough to regard health insurance companies as make-work programs for bureaucrats, they’re a necessary evil because they’re also the paypigs that keep the whole thing afloat. Privately insured patients are the only ones that medical providers actually make money treating (Off the top of my head, Medicare patients are close to break-even, Medicaid patients are a net-loss, and of course the uninsured are near-total write-offs.) and unlike House representatives are able to impose payroll taxes on corporations and the upper-middle class without getting kicked out of office in the next midterm.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
28d ago
Maybe I'm that guy? I try not to be a bitch about it, and probably call out sick a day every year or so, but I'm prone to being whiny about being sick in a way that I'm not about being, say, physically injured.
Like, I'm sick right now, have been since waking up with a sore throat on Tuesday, and things have been trending more worse than better over the last few days. It's not worth going to a doctor (stocking up on real sudafed and maybe some throat spray, on the other hand, is on the to-do list for tomorrow) over, and I'm not seriously ill, but this sucks and is a crappy way to spend my vacation. My throat/tonsils are sore as fuck, I'm still freezing under this blanket, and the super dry conditions (visiting family in the desert when I live in the humid South) plus nasal congestion are not a nice mix.
Oddly enough, I don't think I ever caught Covid in spite of having a roommate hospitalized with it in the pre-vaccine days. If I did it was a light enough case that I couldn't distinguish it from "generic flu-like illness that's over in a day or so", or a really bad hangover.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
The fun fact is that there's never been much of a right. The pre-FDR Republicans were either capitalists (Coolidge) or progressives (Hoover). Eisenhower was a general for FDR endorsed by Truman. Nixon was a pre new-left liberal. Reagan was an open-borders capitalist. H.W. Bush was the dream candidate of /r/neoliberal. W. Bush was a "compassionate conservative" whose signature domestic policy was more welfare for old people (Medicare Part D). Trump is an incoherent populist.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Take out the word "Jews" and insert the word "Russians" and I think you might get somewhere. This is especially fun given that American Jews overwhelmingly came either during the Russian Civil War (how we got Ayn Rand and most of the neoconservatives), during the Jackson-Vanik era (how we got Max Boot), or after the fall of the USSR (how we got Julia Ioffe).
"Well behaved" is a matter of opinion. Successful? Sure. Is having our politics Russified for the better of the country? I don't think so, and IMO neoconservatism is just Russian imperialism or anti-Russian imperialism waving an American flag. That they overwhelmingly subscribe and contribute to bog-standard anti-American Yankee progressive politics back at home is also not endearing.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Yeah, I understand why my friends left (The college town I live in has heavily gentrified over the last decade and become irritatingly expensive to live in relative to its fairly crappy job market. Hell, I was close to leaving myself before I landed my current gig.), but it doesn't make it suck any less that much of my social circle just vanished in the last five years.
Relatedly, my father has moved states every five years for work on average and has moved further and further away each time such that he now resides in some rural hellhole in northern Nevada a 30 hour drive away. I'm lucky to see him once a year (and to his credit he does help out with the plane tickets). My little sister moved to the other side of the country, the northeast, and I'm also lucky to see her once a year.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I can only speak for myself here, as someone who would broadly call himself aligned with JD Vance (millennial with a similar enough upbringing that I deeply sympathize with his reactionary streak, even if I'm skeptical about whether or not he has a coherent policy solution).
White consciousness would be unnecessary and arguably ridiculous in an America with Reagan era demographics, and I have no desire to live in a world of "affirmative action, but for the chuds" (I work a company that's something like this and in practice it frequently feels like working in Idiocracy.). When concerns about "diversity" or the "underrepresented" meant ADOS blacks it at least had a reason (and no, I'm not some Wignat who thinks that ADOS blacks aren't Americans. They are, if anything, among the most American ethnicities. Equity is probably not possible in my lifetime but if ADOS Americans and American Indians were the only affirmative action demographics it would be an acceptable outcome.), even if I strongly oppose the likes of Kimberle Crenshaw.
The problem now is that (especially if the left and libertarians get their way concerning immigration, and skilled/educated legal immigration is arguably worse here from a political perspective) we don't have mid-late 20th century demographics, and the "underrepresented" could be taken to include the entire world. It's entirely possible (and arguably probable) that white Americans will remain the sin eaters/punching bags for everyone else's problems long after they become merely the largest plurality, and long after it's become the case that white Americans merely fare "average" in terms of outcomes.
In practice, "diversity" is a means for white progressives to render their conservative white opponents demographically irrelevant given that skilled immigrants from pretty much everywhere assimilate into the educated white progressive milieu (and yes, American Jews are largely the alpha pluses of this group but it's fundamentally a gentile white, dare I say Yankee thing).
Beyond that, it's merely a matter of aesthetic preferences. Am I small-minded enough to find it especially grating to be condescended to about "privilege" by the kids of either robber barons, genocidaires, or some other variety of "civil war/political loser" (Allow me to pick on Konstantin Kisin for a second. I'm not going to take the word of someone who left Russia as a preteen child whose father got exiled by Boris Yeltsin's government for excessive corruption to be especially authoritative.) back home? Yes. Would I rather live in a place where people are mostly like me? Yes, and if that makes me a bigot so be it. I'm not a big fan of the Bush family but I don't see how things are going to get better for people like me if we hand Ramaswamy the keys.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Yes, but East Asians have mostly flown under the radar (aside from occasional generic Red Scaring about the CCP or Hyundai getting busted for breaking labor laws) due to being underrepresented in politics (and remember that American politics has lots of east coast bias, while most East Asian Americans live on Hawaii or the west coast). Fox News might as well be the Zohran Mamdani and Israel channel whereas I never hear anything about Michelle Wu.
Sarah Jeong exists but East Asian Americans aren't perceived as grievance mongering to the same extent as American Jews or South Asians. It probably also helps that the East Asian FOBs or would-be immigrants (and note that "Asian" immigration has been much more heavily South Asian in the last 20 years than used to be the case) don't speak English and/or are behind the Great Firewall while South Asians are more active on social media (See: the holy war on twitter over H1-Bs).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I have plenty of friends, some closer than other but it's rare that I go more than a few days without seeing or talking to at least one of them. As much as my bank account protests I'll usually wind up going to the bar at least a night or two a week due to getting bored with not talking to anyone.
If I have a problem with said friendships it's that seemingly half my friend group (early/mid 30s millennials) moved out of the city I live in over the last 18 months. I did pick up a new friend though, at a reddit meetup of all places. The date that ensued from that meetup was a failure, but the friend is entertaining (a touch crazy but actually smart and entertaining to talk to) and we'll be meeting up for drinks some time in the next week.
I had a best friend and have had a few others who are close. He was a total fuckup and disabled in his later years but a great conversationalist and drinking buddy and had a huge friend group, a real larger than life personality. We'd talk or exchange texts daily. He took his own life a few months ago. I'm glad he isn't suffering anymore or burdening his friends but I miss him. There's always something that I would've called him to talk about and well, I can't anymore.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
But if you replace this person with a random trucker or construction worker, you will discover why this person's job required a college degree.
I happen to work an office job at a trucking company. A lot of our office guys don't have college degrees, a lot of them are former drivers, and I would say that my employer is more willing to take a chance and invest resources into training someone than many (They hired me with a stale humanities degree and driving/dispatching experience from outside of trucking.), but as a rule the managers are either 50+ or have a degree. Similarly, while it's likely true that the best dispatcher would have driving experience there's a good chance that a random driver plopped into the office either isn't bright enough, lacks the necessary computer/literacy skills, or lacks the disposition/patience to sit in an office all day and be professional when things start going wrong. That, and the sort of drivers who have those skills make more money driving than the dispatchers and either aren't interested in management or are stuck in the golden handcuffs such that they can't afford to stick out the lower office paycheck long enough to make terminal manager.
And FWIW as someone who was a lousy student who nevertheless graduated with a 3.5 from a state school on scholarship I think at minimum a college degree demonstrates some combination of industriousness and competence (maybe not what you would call "smart", but one does have to attend some amount of classes, complete some amount of assignments, and pass some amount of tests) or at least some variety of talent to pass those classes with a smoke and mirrors show. Was I a pizza delivery driver first, an alcoholic second, and college student third? Pretty much, but I did write those papers, pass those tests, and was able to triage assignments and exams such that I made the grades I needed to with a minimum of effort. Was it a waste of an opportunity to be educated and/or network my way into a real career? Probably. Did pulling it off when I could've just dropped out and gone full townie demonstrate something? I'd like to think so.
Oh, and we tend to shuffle our dingbats into the safety department.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Update on the project car:
Things have gone relatively well with it. The rear bumper/taillight had more damage hiding under the plastic than I expected but I was able to accomplish a 7-8/10 result for the cost of a $50 taillight and some time with a hammer. It's not perfect and not even good if you look closely at it but an untrained eye has to look for it so good enough and getting a perfect result would require a real body shop/far more money than is worth to me. I also got the last of the mud out. The car cleans up nice.
I replaced the front brakes, replaced the two bad tires, and got a four-wheel alignment. The car drives like a dream now and the suspension appears to be sound.
I have the part for the touchscreen but it isn't acting up so it's a low-priority item that I'll get to whenever I have time or it acts up (in which case I'll make time). I did replace the headlights because one of the LEDs died and I'm not a fan of blinding oncoming drivers.
The muffler is another low-priority item. The squeaking is annoying but a new replacement is expensive and reasonably-priced used options haven't popped up near me. I'll sit on it and either a local option will show up or I'll make time to drive however many miles round trip. In the meantime the car runs fine.
I have decided to keep the newer car and sell my old daily driver, the ricerboy Honda. That car is more fun to drive, but not that much more fun and I've had most if not all the amusement I'm going to get out of it, and it'll be easier to sell while being more expensive to keep. I have to put a fuel pump in it but that's a job that's more annoying (have to remove the back seat) than hard.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Not OP and my situation is different (dealing with a parent, i.e. mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD), but Understanding the Borderline Mother was useful to me for two reasons: One, for whatever it's worth, it was validating in describing an at times weird and other times so over-the-top experiences that it's hard to describe or expect outsiders to believe.
Secondly, I did use it as a screening question when picking a therapist in my early 20s, i.e. "Have you read this?", and I think that doing so was helpful for finding one that had a frame of reference for dealing with my situation.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what a book is supposed to do. If you're at the point of picking and reading one about a relatively niche topic like this you probably have a decent to good idea of what you're dealing with. Maybe a book written by someone with letters after their name gives you the permission to feel however about whatever but in the end what happened happened and there's no undoing that. There's only where you are now and how you choose to deal with it or not, and the hardest part about being a survivor of child abuse (Ugh, that term is a touch cringe inducing.) is realizing that as an adult you are the author of your life's story now. Nobody is going to give you free karma points to cash in on living happily ever after and what you do when you're in charge is on you. As an adult dealing with a shitty spouse or friend the same applies.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I haven't read the above two but Understanding the Borderline Mother is a lot. The good news is that Lawson's prose is engaging instead of dry.
Otherwise, however dramatic or severe some of the descriptions are, some of those were creepily accurate compared to my experiences with a mother who almost certainly suffers from BPD. I just laughed when I got to the bit about the Borderline Witch's motto: "Life is War". Sure as shit was for her, and she joined the Marines to learn how to win.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
They think it's a foregone conclusion that NYC is going to go to hell because of Mandami. They don't consider the possibility that once in office he'll be more pragmatic, which frequently happens when socialists find themselves in executive positions.
More to the point, would NYC going to Hell even hurt the Democrats? Granting that John Lindsay was something of an inverse Bloomberg in terms of party affiliation, his tenure as mayor actually being a disaster didn't hurt the Democrats. They held the Mayorship continually until Giuliani, won the Governorship of New York immediately following his tenure, and Carter won New York in 1976.
I do think that the GOP is at risk of reading too much into '24 as it did in '04. '24 in particular was weird. Between the Biden drama and inflation the election was arguably the GOP's to lose, and they barely won it (See also: the 2022 midterms.). Trump is polarizing but at least some variety of popular. The rest of the GOP are almost as polarizing and lack the charisma.
More fundamentally, the GOP as a party (Trump sort of has a direction, but it's a largely incoherent and surface level imitation of Pat Buchanan, and the GOP has neither the numbers or the consensus to push anything through Congress.) hasn't answered its post '06/'08 dilemma. Educated Republicans (aka. the Mitt Romneys of the world) aren't a big enough coalition to win Presidential elections (and probably not the House since Democrats have caught up to REDMAP), their priorities aren't shared by anyone else (Hint: 2012 was as white, male, and boomer as the college educated will ever be again.), and 40 years of largely uninterrupted culture war losses mean that they hold no sway with the high school educated base. The hardest of copers can note that Reagan got smashed in the '82 midterms, but there isn't an incoming equivalent of the 1-2 tail wind of crashing interest rates and oil prices that juiced the economy in the mid 1980s. Even getting rid of tariffs returns us to the baseline of late-stage Biden.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Same here, to the point that I kind of missed the boat on boomer hate. I was a Gulf War baby with Gen X parents and Silent grandparents.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Setting aside the silliness over cultural milestones (Are Generation Jones and Xennials really that similar?), in fiscal/political terms Gen X is rapidly approaching Boomer territory, aka. retirement. Expect our gerontocracy problems to get worse in the short term as Gen Xers (a larger generation than the Silents) retire faster than old Boomers and Silents die.
Why, for example, is there suddenly such a fight over enhanced ACA subsidies? It turns out that somewhere along the way the ACA became a defacto extension of Medicare Advantage for the 55-65 crowd such that the most common age for an Obamacare enrollee is 64. Hell hath no fury like that of Bill and Shelley.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I think it's worth considering that our current Vice President is not old enough to remember Reagan being in office.
That said, this Millennial Republican voter's opinion is that Reagan is both overrated and over-hated. Why? Because he was mostly a continuation of Carter's neoliberal agenda with a more optimistic presentation. Good or bad, neoliberalism should be understood not as something imposed by the GOP (who, let us remember, never controlled Congress during Reagan or H.W. Bush's Presidencies) but also as a change in elite consensus within the Democratic Party. Pick something that Reagan is blamed or credited for and odds are that Carter really started it. Union busting? Carter appointed Volker whose interest rate hikes wrecked the sort of private sector jobs that were heavily unionized. That big military buildup? Also started under Carter, and for all his peacenik vibes post-Presidency he took a more confrontational tone toward the USSR (compare Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski to Nixon's Henry Kissinger) than Nixon. Maybe we buy the idea that Reagan didn't care much about AIDS but I've yet to see a convincing argument that the US handled it radically worse than the rest of the developed world. Most Democrats voted for Reagan's tax cuts. As Governor of California Reagan was hardly a conservative firebrand. He signed off on tax increases while legalizing abortion (and he'd go on to screw over the pro-lifers again by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court) and no-fault divorce. Free trade and immigration? The Democrats have been free traders more or less continuously for the party's entire existence, and Congressional Democrats were more likely to vote for Reagan's amnesty than members of his own party.
IMO his legacy is outsized for both sides because it allows a certain brand of Republicans to act as if they had more to do with the good things that happened than is arguably the case and a certain brand of Democrats to avoid facing the fact that they'd largely been betrayed by their own party's politicians. Amusingly, certain right-wing ideologues figured it out first, which is why both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan ran campaigns against Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
I've read that argument by historians before, but I'd add this: The US simultaneously deployed a huge amount of soldiers in WWII while asking a relatively small number of them to do most of the actual fighting. Something like one in sixteen American soldiers saw serious combat during the war.
By contrast, the US deployed far fewer troops during the Vietnam War and asked those who did to do a lot more fighting. The USMC deployed and lost more Marines in WWII than in Vietnam, but those who did deploy to Vietnam suffered a higher casualty/fatality rate than their counterparts in WWII, with around 3% of those deployed Killed in Action in WWII vs. 5% in Vietnam.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
I do believe that to some extent the plight of the "traumatized" (Let's pick on first world child abuse or domestic violence survivors for an example.) is that they were simply left behind by life getting so much better for everyone else that they find themselves surrounded by people blissfully unable to relate to the idea that bad things happen (I'm wildly oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.). When then "engineered" (I think the shrinks call this "securely attached".) become somewhere between the majority to the vast majority depending on what social circles you're running in, it can perhaps be alienating for those stuck by circumstances in the old ways with a different way of looking at people and the world at large.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
The newer Russian planes are fine compared to anything short of an F-22/35, but they can't build them quickly enough or at all (in the case of MiG 31s, or non-Flanker strike aircraft like the Su-22s and 25s, Tu-95s, etc.) to afford chucking them into the teeth of Ukraine's air defense network Gulf War style and they didn't start the war with huge numbers of them thanks to having next to no procurement budget during the 90s and 2000s. Does the Su-57 do anything that an Su-30/35 or MiG 31 can't also do (The R-37 is indeed clever.)? Who knows, because they've only built ~30 of them.
Mind you, even before being provisioned with Patriots and so on Ukraine started the war with a very good ground-based IADS thanks to being either the second or third-largest operator of the S-300 and other 80s era Soviet SAM systems in the world, especially given an all you can eat buffet of NATO recon. It would've been a tough nut to crack for anyone not named the USAF.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
My understanding is that contrary to stereotype the Russian Air Force has been extremely risk averse in how they employ their aircraft because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.
The VKS basically did nothing other than relatively ineffective close air support with frog foots and helicopters (which, on a side note, proved quite effective at using anti-tank missiles at the extreme of their range against Ukrainian armor during the '23 counteroffensive) or lob missiles from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses for the first year and a half or so of the war (notably expending a large number of them to little effect during Surovikin's campaign against the Ukrainian energy grid).
The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses) and their development of the Geran series of suicide drones. The latter has provided a cost-effective way of attacking into the teeth of Ukrainian air defenses and saturating them such they more frequently achieve hits with their ballistic missiles.).
Congress and the Judiciary are overwhelmingly pre-2020 and Twitter is not real life. No Republican politician, let alone Democrat, would dare utter the words "Black people destroyed urbanism in America". Steve King was castrated by the House GOP for less.
Illegal immigrants (and, really, most first-gen legal immigrants) have almost nothing to do with woke. Those people are mostly Made in the USA Americans like Kimberle Crenshaw with a helping of highly educated second-generation children of legal immigrants.
The GOP does have some genuine restrictionists (motivated by, if nothing else, being able to read exit polls), but the party as a whole is squishier than their rhetoric and quick to sell out to whatever lobbyist shows up. The old school labor types who used to act as a brake within the Democratic Party are all but extinct.
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