The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Greenland was joking until it wasn't.
Not joking, trolling. And if it wasn't... why isn't Greenland under US occupation?
Gaza was joking (really funny joking, actually) until it wasn't.
What joking?
After Greenland, I am pretty tired of the "just trolling" defense. If he is trolling, it's fundamentally indistinguishable from when he is not trolling.
It's indistinguishable to you because you were successfully trolled. Trump never had any intention of invading Canada or Greenland; he just made ambiguous remarks and let the media get hysterical when he refused to rule it out.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
Careful, that consensus is breaking, too. DNI director seizing Georgia ballots just weeks after the takeover of Venezuela isn't a good look for the most fair election ever.
The Atlantic tells me that while a corrupt Fulton County prosecutor investigating Trump was fine, and the FBI faking up a damning photo of Trump's Mar-a-Lago documents was fine, the Trump administration investigating Fulton County is yet another unprecedented threat to democracy. It's all who/whom and not even subtle. And in a case with no stakes; no matter what the investigation finds, Biden's term is in the past, and anyway no one who matters will believe even the smokingest of smoking guns -- but of course that isn't going to exist, because if it ever did it would have been destroyed. And if nothing is found... well, no one who thought the election was crooked is going to change their mind either.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
"the salient thing about the Nazis is that they seized power and brutally eliminated all dissent, the Jew-killing just came later as a natural consequence"
This isn't true. The Jew-killing was a goal separate from seizing power and eliminating all dissent, not a consequence of it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
And if 'getting what's on the shelf' is a metaphor for survival? Maintenance of human dignity?
Then she dies or becomes undignified. Two very different things, I might point out. Bob may find it undignified to act as Alice's fetch-and-carry servant.
Can you be certain that the precedent that you set won't come back to bite you in the hindquarters?
Oh, certainly, because I'm setting no precedent at all. If the situation appears reversed, Alice-partisans will find some reason this principle doesn't apply.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
But it still also was a bad shot, in the sense that, as you say, with the benefit of hindsight we know he wouldn't have gotten run over.
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition, it was a good shoot.
it is claimed that literally not a single agent has been killed in the line of duty in the past few years
Nothing would change if a few ICE agents had been killed. The Twitterati would lie and say they weren't, and the actual media would ignore and downplay it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
Some jurors believe in the process. Others have a side. And this correlates with which side they're on.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Demonstrating that a minority of Democrats can do what a majority of Republicans (plus the President) can't do -- shut down a department of the US government. The Republicans, of course, were utter fools when they allowed DHS funding to be separated, because they lost all their leverage.
Most of these demands are entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.
- Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
- Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
- Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
Learning from the anti-gun people, are they?
- Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
- Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents.
Given the bad faith from Tim Walz, entirely ridiculous.
- Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
- No Paramilitary Police. Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
Police ARE paramilitary, and making them more uniform wouldn't make them less paramilitary. I'm fairly sure other civil enforcement is at least as varied as ICE, so this is BS anyway.
Several of the things they're objecting (e.g. stopping people who they suspect are aliens) to are authorized by statute, so this is exactly a minority getting to change the law.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
I guess she doesn't get what's on the shelf then, unless Bob is feeling magnanimous.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
There isn't any difference. Whatever issue they are focusing on at the time, whether gay marriage, the social program du jour, or some tax, will be framed as a human rights issue.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21hr ago
Google Books only provides evidence of the term to ~1990, though there's lots of speculation with it starting with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and I find a 1977 mention (in a book called _Wife Beating: The Silent Crisis) of the stereotype (referring back to Streetcar) without the term. Cops goes back to 1989, so the timing fits, but I have no other evidence.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Official definitions be damned, I'm in that-sort-of-diner central and only limited access roads are termed expressways. Nobody calls anything a "freeway", they look at you like you're from California if you do that.
The Conowingo Diner I mentioned was on a part of Route 1 that wasn't (and still isn't) divided, so it wasn't even an expressway by the MUTCD defintion. It was here, where the Royal Farms is, though IIRC Route 1 was two lanes rather than 3 when it was open.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
There's provisional numbers out to August 2025, though.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
As some general US-based commentary, it is true that the charming, cheap, accessible, "everyone knows your name" movie diner is virtually gone now.
I think this is a slightly different place.
The 24-hour diner wasn't charming. Cheap, certainly. Always looked at least slightly grungy. There were regulars, but also a lot of people who were just passing through. The waitress called you "Hon" (or local equivalent) regardless of which you were.
They are often on the side of the expressway.
There's been whole books written about diners, but I think it's probably expressways which were a large part of killing them. A lot of them were on old through routes (US Routes and similar, like the Conowingo Diner on US 1) that weren't limited access.
Some of these original diners still exist and are open though. Some have re-invented themselves as basically a nostalgia version of themselves, and there have been others purpose-built as nostalgia versions -- these are not cheap.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Might have been Heineken, who also mocked Sam Adams ("Benedict Arnold Pittsburgh Lager") and some other beer they called "Grandpa's Old Fuzzy Ale". Or Newcastle, which has mocked Stella before. I don't recall Yeungling doing mocking ads.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
But detaining someone on the suspicion of them being an illegal immigrant seems to be a-ok only if the arestee is not a citizen.
This is pretty clearly untenable, because it would mean ICE would have to be perfect.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The best strategy when playing a counterparty with an unknown strategy is not the best strategy against every possible strategy. If you know the counterparty's strategy you can do better, and sadly if you know it's "Always Defect", the best you can do is to match it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
It surprisingly hasn't gotten much press coverage, but opioid overdose deaths in the US are actually down substantially over the last two years.
Nothing really surprising about the lack of press coverage -- it would straightforwardly help Trump and Republicans.
I suspect part of it is that new lockdown-inspired addicts have either died off or dried up. Might not explain it all because the uptick started before COVID.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
There's a Boomer engineer with long hair in the famous 1978 Microsoft employee photo. That's software, though. I expect civil engineering remained conservative longer.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I wish Chesterton and Tolkein and others could actually see the world of today... What would they then think about the plausibility of their ideas?
I imagine Tolkein would decide he was entirely correct and immediately set about finding a way to sail West.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
It almost certainly does, but the "cadillac tax" was a half measure which would have resulted in the worst of both worlds -- everyone would get the mediocre offerings, but pay a very high price for it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I'm pretty sure we're not responsible for trans (Sweden) or "Free Palestine" (Arabs)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
That's not Stallman explaining, that's Stallman pontificating. There are certainly modern problems with surveillance, but I think few of them have anything to do with data collection by companies on the Internet. Constant tracking of my physical location directly by the government (e.g. EZ-Pass, street cameras, license plate cameras, tire RFID readers if they're real, etc) or proxies (cell phone, private CCTV, etc) seems a lot more dangerous.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
The best solution to an iterative prisoners dilemma was to alternate Tit-for-tat with cooperation, regardless of what the opponents strategy is.
No. If the opponent's strategy is "Always Cooperate" or "Always Defect", the best strategy is the same for total payoff, and "Always Defect" for their own payoff.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
No.
Apparently disputed. I'd guess the large change in hiring of women was mostly a matter of attitudes changing so that it was perfectly acceptable for women to be in classical orchestras, and blind auditions came along because of that too.
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