domain:aporiamagazine.com
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
4m ago
Been getting a little time in, actually. Not much to show for it; I'm mostly just experimenting with procedurally instantiating objects in Unreal and marvelling at how they don't behave how I expect and at how difficult it is to do anything with the Unreal editor.
gakles
7m ago
Isn’t the solution to reduce executive power so whoever wins the next election can’t just destroy whatever’s been built? On the other hand, much of what restrained the executive was convention and tradition, which has been razed in the last 10ish years. This would force policy to become constructive instead of spoils based. I’m not exactly hopeful those in power (and the voters) will choose deescalation.
WandererintheWilderness
10m ago
I mean it all comes back to his trans kid, doesn't it? Who came out in 2020.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
10m ago
In terms of Joe, the best evidence that he didn't take bribes was that Republicans (a hostile party) subpoenaed his bank accounts and repeatedly found nothing of the sort.
Im not up to speed on how this discourse went, but I dont think kickbacks to Joe personally are especially relevant? He could have just played his part so that Hunter would have money. I mean whatever he was taking in at that point was mostly for the next generation anyway.
gakles
11m ago
My position of authority on this subject is pretty weak (1 american polisci class) so take this with a grain of salt.
I agree that fiscal responsibility is a component of right wing ideology, but I want to point out that the deficit is not just enlarged by govt spending but also by tax expenditures. When the govt encourages certain actions through tax deductions (say a student loan deduction) its losing potential revenue. Trumps 2017 tax bill reduced the fed revenue by an estimated 1.9 trillion over the following 10 years. Also studies (Tax Policy Center) say it didnt end up paying for itself. In this way the deficit can be expanded through means besides dems funding trans operas in latin america.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11m ago
I think that’s actually a terrible idea. While wealth is global and markets are global, citizenship is bound to a government and land, while the humans that create it are not. What I fear would happen is that not only would wealthy and smart people abroad not want to come here, but that a good number of people would renounce citizenship and simply go to a place with good infrastructure and low taxes. A smart country like Ireland or Russia or Korea could reap the benefits of our stupidity simply by not taxing the geese laying the golden eggs. All they have to do is resist the temptation to tax the free money coming in and reap the benefits of jobs created, inventions patented, wealth spent in their country by billionaires fleeing high taxes in America.
Wealth of any sort has pretty free exit, as do rich people.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
19m ago
Defense spending is the republican equivalent. They are just as happy to feed Baal, it's just that the prefer to put the food in a different mouth.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
21m ago
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
21m ago
The US unironically needs to raise taxes on the rich (I mean actual rich, not those earning large salaries). (Non-land) Wealth taxes are usually bad, but with the global reach of the IRS and their policy to tax worldwide income, there's no reason the US can't easily adopt a policy of taxing worldwide assets without too many bad side effects. This would raise significant money, imagine even a 1% worldwide non-US housing asset yearly tax on all US permanent residents and citizens (temporary residents get a pass because you don't want to discourage smart wealthy people from the rest of the world coming to the US), it would easily fill the black hole.
hanikrummihundursvin
26m ago
The Joe Rogan problem for the 'left' is "We control everything except this one thing". I don't see how that is propaganda having its limits. Just that one side is not completely omnipotent. The propaganda still works well enough. We wouldn't be where we are today if it didn't.
yofuckreddit
31m ago
I'm not a negative person by nature! I think this is the most intractable problem in American politics and culture. People with high IQs and (IMO) higher-than-baseline morality still cannot fathom cutting benefits. Our political class doesn't even have to deal with physical violence through riots, but they're still too scared to do what must be done.
The problem with the glass > half full approach is that I have not heard of a valid approach to solving the problem. It has only gotten worse during my lifetime. This was the most significant and serious approach to cut spending in a quarter century, and it failed miserably.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
32m ago
Because it's not an environment suitable to small scale agriculture?
Alabasata
34m ago
(Helen Lovejoy: "Won't someone think of the children?")
A YIMBY, /r/FuckCars or Tim Burton fan could use this to argue against any development where children would be driven to school by bus or their parents:
"Disconnecting children from their neighborhood robs them of the ability to learn from the excellence of those who live within it. They go off to college out-of-state not because of their wanderlust or Hero's Journey, but because they never learned of the value in where they lived. Thus the value must live somewhere else."
It is not hard to claim (with evidence!) that children live in an environment that was not built for them. They are less important to land use planners than any adult, cishet or degenerate. The adult outranks the child or the unborn, and rank has its privileges.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
49m ago
What is the point of this negativity? Do you just want to watch the world burn?
I truly do not understand why people take such cynical mindsets.
KMC
51m ago
A slop factory is still an improvement over what it replaced.
If we just look at things which are not just directly related to the changed political valence of the platform
Yes, setting aside the single greatest improvement possible it sure seems like nothing had been accomplished.
I'm a committed pacifist (in the style of the Amish), and I'm trying to raise the kids to also be pacifists.
There's a reason there's no Oakland Amish. This is not an argument against the values described, just a note on their evident limitations. Pacifism works when you live with other committed pacifists. Distance can replace walls and spears.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
56m ago
Because taking on sovereign debt is borrowing from your children and incurring a obligation upon generations yet unborn for your personal benefit.
If the alternative is someone else borrowing from my children for their personal benefit, it seems to me that borrowing myself is the better option. At least then I might be able to accrue something they might inherit.
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
I would be happy to plant trees to shade my children. I am not particularly interested in planting trees whose shade I am confident my children will never see.
Appeals to nebulous benefits are nebulous. Rather than platitudes, why not lay out a concrete case for how your preferred actions are likely to make the world better in a concrete way? Would that not be far more persuasive?
TeknOShEeP
59m ago
Okay, but let me turn the argument around- prove that the launches are not making a profit. You say they are just setting money on fire. I say that is a ridiculously high number of launches to just burn piles of money on, it's an order of magnitude more than their nearest commercial competitor, and if they were not making money there is no way that even Musk could bankroll it. A handful of launches to prove concepts? Sure, its an investment. But you need paying customers within about your first 5 or 10 rockets, and you need to be making money not too long after that.
We have examples of what vanity space companies funded by billionaires look like- Virgin Galactic is one, Blue Origin another. SpaceX does not look very much like these companies. It does look a lot more like actually profitable commercial space launch entities like ULA and ATK, except with what appears to be far superior design and operations.
I professionally walk in aerospace circles, and while I dont work for SpaceX, I've worked with them on some stuff, and they by and large come off as an incredibly serious, cost-focused entity. Far more so than even "legacy space" they are beating the pants off of at the moment.
Fiscal responsibility is a component of right wing ideology, but it is soundly rejected by the left. Conservatives may not be that responsible in practice, but even the idea is a nonstarter for the libs. Extensive spending on social projects is a cornerstone of their ideology.
The Democrats created Social Security and Medicare, and even if the Republicans don't have the guts to repeal it, at least they won't go for establishing a program even more of a boondoggle, which I'm sure the Dems would jump at.
PokerPirate
1hr ago
Parenting win?
My 3yo has a tough life. He's got two older brothers (4, 7) and all the neighbor kids are older. The 3yo is big enough to want to play with them all, but small enough that he's not quite capable of understanding their games or communicating his thoughts. So the neighbor kids end up picking on him a lot, calling him "poop boy", taking his toys, and other misc mischief. Because they're not my kids, I can't do too much to stop the neighbor kids from being jerks. I've managed to convince the older brothers that they have some sort of brotherly-responsibility to stick up for their sibling, but there's also only so much they can do.
The 3yo is tough and violent. He's been stung by bees ~5 times over the past year, and each time he shouts "die bee", grabs the nearest rock, and smashes the bee to death several times before running over to me/mom crying that he needs a band-aid. So he's pretty good at standing up for himself when the big kids are mean by trying to punch them / throw toys / etc. I'm proud of him for sticking up for himself, but we've been trying to work with him on helping him control his violence.
We found a new tool to keep his violence in check this week.
At the beginning of the week, one of the big kids came over and dumped a bucket of water on 3yo's head when he was playing nicely by himself. I had the idea that we could get revenge by using the hose. We setup an ambush for big-neighbor-kid around the corner of the garage, and 3yo got big-kid right in the face at point blank range. The shadenfreude was great. Big-neighbor-kid learned a valuable lesson about why other people don't like getting water dumped on them and not to mess with my 3yo. 3yo now is the only one with permission to use the hose, and everyone talks about how they shouldn't mess with him anymore. 3yo also has a lot more confidence interacting with both the neighbors and his brothers, and there's been much less hitting and throwing of rocks.
Overall I feel good about how this played out, but I have some questions about what this is teaching my kids about violence. I'm a committed pacifist (in the style of the Amish), and I'm trying to raise the kids to also be pacifists. The hose-to-the-face is obviously less violent than throwing rocks: there's no potential for lasting injury, and it's not nearly as "escalatory" since the big-neighbor-kid already used water as a "weapon". But there was still lots of "evil" in 3yo's heart. He clearly wanted revenge and specifically aimed for the big-neighbor-kid's face so as to cause maximum damage.
So the lesson here wasn't perfect, but I do think it was at least "directionally correct". One common failure mode of pacifism is to become a doormat for other people to run over you---basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting this failure mode---and I don't want to instill this failure mode into my children.
anon_
1hr ago
Have you looked at the projected electoral college map after the 2030 census?
Now look at 538 and try to figure out what path a D has to win here? Florida has been well lost (RDS doesn't get enough credit IMO) as has Ohio. So even if the D candidate wins the "blue wall" state and Nevada they still lose!
Of course, a lot can happen in 5 years. GA or NC might start to be in play, but even still, the Dems have to ring up a perfect set of victories with no margin for error. And their bench is not exactly exciting either: Newsom, AOC, Pete. Gretch is a good choice, which is why they probably won't chose her.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
Because taking on sovereign debt is borrowing from your children and incurring a obligation upon generations yet unborn for your personal benefit.
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
Goya: Saturn Devours His Son
AnonymousActuary
1hr ago
social security honestly has never seemed to be as big of an issue. Certainly the demographic slowdown is a bit concerning for anything like this, but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.
Medicare/Medicaid/health spending in general....much thornier problem.
Sorry man, but you taught your kid to respond to random violence with wisely targeted violence.
Unless you are operating on a very different definition of pacifism than I am, you are a bad pacifist, but if it’s any consolation, you are a good dad.
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