solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system.
You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
FWIW, I also played a ton of videogames growing up. I lived in the middle of nowhere and "other kids to play with" weren't a thing that existed. I enjoyed the PS2 era, grew up on Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and Max Payne. My username is a reference to Ace Combat: The Belkan War.
Unlike you, I mostly played single player. LAN parties were a thing in boarding school such that I briefly became competent (but not good!) at Counter Strike: Source and had built a modest gaming PC, but I didn't get into the likes of WOW and wasn't very good at RTS games. Around 18 I mostly lost interest. PS3 games were slow to appear and Madden in particular was godawful after the switch. I never got into multiplayer online aside from Battlefield 3. That, and GTA 4 and the DLCs were the highlight of my time with the PS3.
I've occasionally had games reel me back in, but rarely. Far Cry 4 and 5 were fun but I wasn't impressed with Far Cry 6. Metro 2033 and and Ace Combat 7 were fun, but didn't keep me reeled in long term. My PS4 mostly collects dust these days and if anything I wish it could play the old PS2 games so I could give B7R another go.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
In lieu of something actually interesting (We're nearing "Three months on a bootleg Chinese GLP" and "10 months in a trucking office"; the latter has potential.), I present an update on [my bum elbow].
A month later, and four doctor's visits (one urgent care, orthopedist No. 1, CT scan, and orthopedist No. 2) later my HSA is soon to be some hundreds of dollars poorer (On that note, why does every practice seem to have its own app, and how do I even find what I owe after the insurance discount to pay it? Is someone going to mail/email me a bill at some point? I'm used to just paying urgent cares cash up front like a pleb.), my elbow thoroughly scanned and X-rayed, and the answer is about what I thought it was, something along the lines of "not great, not terrible".
"Wow, that's an ugly elbow. Can you move that thing?", the nurse for ortho No. 1 remarked upon seeing the X-ray with a tone of bemusement that I found charming. The urgent care doc had supplied a decadron shot and prescribed some variety of steroid shots for the road as expected, but referred me to his buddy at the local ortho clinic to try and get to the bottom of my elbow seemingly going on strike at random. Both ortho appointments were remarkably short and the questions remarkably repetitive, be they from the screening nurse or the doctors themselves. One wonders if anyone takes notes given how many times I had to answer "Why are you here?". "function normally limited but not intrusively bothersome, flare ups ranging from annoying to seriously intrusive and crippling, flare ups have become more frequent and severe with age". Ortho No.1 was more gung-ho about arthroscopic surgery. Ortho No. 2, apparently the "elbow guy" (Why didn't I get the elbow guy the first time?), was more conservative, advocating a "wait and watch" approach.
The verdict: Yup, the joint has lots of arthritis, the cartilage is gone, and there are some bone fragments floating around that might be catching and causing range of motion issues. Some nerve damage/muscle atrophy is visible on the left hand. That said: if it doesn't get much worse doing nothing might be the correct answer here. The bad news is that we're unlikely to achieve serious improvement with surgery (No lifting weights for you!). The good news is that it probably won't get much worse or at least won't get worse quickly and if the situation does degrade we can probably get you back to "not great, not terrible" with a scalpel.
Here's hoping this has just been an anomalously bad spring, things will stabilize, and I'll have forgotten about this by the time its solidly summer. I do know that traveling up north for Easter, driving through a big storm, and then smack into a major cold front was most likely the faux pas that provoked the latest flare up.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
14d ago
287, performed oddly well in cultural knowledge and most poorly in literary knowledge (The latter isn't surprising.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The US already had those cards given its ability to sanction or blockade pretty much any oil exporter at will and/or blockade China. The only reason that Chinese purchases dominated Venezuelan and Iranian exports in the first place is that they were pretty much the only ones who would buy from them thanks to US sanctions, and as much as the sanction discount was easy money for the Chinese it isn't that important. China also buys lots of oil (much more than from Iran and Venezuela combined) from Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries, along with Iraq. Are we going to sanction all of them as well?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I did a long time ago (The initial injury and surgical repair occurred a bit over 20 years ago when I was in middle school.). Since then, that arm was weaker but functioned well enough in my high school/college years, and what has transpired since has been a gradual loss of function/escalation of symptoms on "bad" days, easy enough to ignore until it becomes impossible to ignore.
I actually learned something at the doctor today. I'd been told when the surgery happened that I'd had a plate and two screws put in but he had it X-rayed today and apparently this isn't the case. The only other thing I'd been told was in my 20s, at a chiropractor being X-rayed for a different issue (car wreck). That guy was like "Your back is fine, but who did the hatchet job on your arm!?"
Who knows...what I do know now is that the doctor who saw me today wants to refer me to an orthopedist so that we can figure out what is going on with the joint.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
This is more yelling into the void than anything useful, but I managed to combine bad luck and bull-headed foolishness to reap myself a lot of pain.
Long story short, due to an old football injury that may or may not have had a "hatchet job" of a repair that I foolishly didn't fix in my 20s while under my father's health insurance (and until very recently lacked the sort of health insurance/savings to fix it since) my left elbow in normal times suffers from what I believe to be an entrapped ulnar nerve, a limited range of motion, weakness in the arm and hand, etc. Ordinarily it doesn't hurt that much, just makes for a weak arm that isn't very useful such that I can't do pushups, accomplish much lifting weights, or use regular dental floss. It's annoying but harmless and easy to sweep under the rug and ignore most of the time, especially when we're probably talking about needing a fairly serious surgical repair that until recently would've put me out of work for at least six weeks (Now I have an office job and would just be a slower typist.).
However, every once in awhile (and these seem to get worse with age, currently in my mid 30s) my elbow will suffer from a sufficiently severe arthritis flareup as to be crippled, and today has been one of those days. At best, we're talking about somewhere between 0-10 degrees range of motion in my elbow, constant throbbing pain that I'd rate around a 3 or 4 out of 10, and an instant jolt of pain if I move or twist the joint wrong. I'm pretty sure the cause of pain here is the swelling pushing the entrapped ulnar nerve into something solid, like someone with a screwdriver poking in at one's funny bone.
Anyway, duty called and a dear friend of mine needed an emergency car repair, stat, a brake caliper and rotor replacement (existing caliper was hyperextended and leaking fluid and the rotor was trashed). It was too late to get it to a shop, the friend needed it for a work trip tomorrow, blah blah blah. I knew it was going to suck but didn't see much good in saying "sorry man, good luck!" and going home to sit and feel sorry for myself so I worked through the pain, got the job done (I strongly advised said friend to run by a shop and have them check the torque on the caliper brackets, but am otherwise confident in my work and am reasonably confident that the bolts are tight enough, just not as sure as I'd like to be from working in the dark with limited space.), and the brakes work now.
Right/nice thing to do, but holy fuck that was the wrong move in the elbow department. We're now firmly in "joint is paralyzed" territory and that constant pain is now a more consistent four. I needed help putting my jacket on as I left. This sucks, and unless things dramatically improve tomorrow I'm probably going to wind up spending a few hours and a couple hundred bucks at an urgent care getting loaded up with enough steroids to fix this (This was likely the outcome anyway.). Ah well, such is life, and I have money in an HSA to pay for this now! Take better care of yourself than I have.
Oh yeah, happy coincidence: When this happens my elbow freezes at such an angle that my left hand falls in the right place on a keyboard and it's only slightly painful to type.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Yeah, he's definitely not a film guy, but he's fun for a casual shitposter.
On that note this season's Raiders were arguably the worst team they've trotted out since '06, so I didn't spend much time watching. That season ending tank bowl against the Giants was pretty funny, though.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
This isn't artful. It's impotent thuggery. ICE isn't in the business of prosecuting fraud and no Somalis or white liberals will be punished by their presence. Their bakers remain and will remain thriving, and that is what offends me.
Fact is, Trump is a tough talking liar who lacks conviction and echoes the last person to give him advice. Most of his coterie are corrupt and/or incompetent. He would've been a respectable mayor of NYC but is out of his element as President and the rest of the GOP are mostly worse. Voting is cheap and Hillary/Kamala losing was fun but giving these people an iota of support or emotional energy is a waste of time.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
This is a punitive expedition and I could not support it more
So what happens when it turns out that the Somalis are overwhelmingly citizens and/or legal immigrants, thanks in large part to George H.W. Bush and the Republicans who held Congress throughout the 90s, and then a bunch of churches juiced up with money thanks to George W. Bush? For the record if there's going to be punishment I think that it needs to start there.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
But to win, maybe you have to bring the fight to middle class and upper middle class liberals in blue states. Maybe white progressive Democrats in Minnesota have to fear ICE. Maybe that’s what it takes.
I'm sympathetic to that take, but until Republicans so much as sniff toward taking on the business lobby I will assume that they are not serious about immigration restriction and remain the anarcho-capitalist liberals that were Reagan through Romney concerning immigration.
Remember: Business owners are the original open-borders lobby, always have been and always will be. Fealty to capital is not governance but failure to govern and an invitation to be defeated by anyone who values things other than money. One would think that the GOP would've learned from the last century but they did not and will not.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
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.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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).
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
More options
Context Copy link