domain:epistle.us
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3m ago
4 million deportations by the end of 2028
I have no interest in a bet of any size, just curious about the details. Do voluntary self-removals also count? I assume all removals have to be documented, not vague estimates like most immigration stats are?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4m ago
I'm not impressed by K2 so far at all. I did a check with one of my usual questions, and it did horribly. It hallucinated that North Dakota borders Nebraska, and then claimed the vowels of North Dakota in order were o, h, a, and o. I'm also getting quite bad results on programming questions as well, things that the trio of frontier models (o3, Opus, and Gemini 2.5 pro) handle with relative ease. It's not even that cheap, only being on par with Gemini 2.5 flash in that regard.
I hear it's decent at creative writing, but that's sort of a wishy-washy benchmark. Maybe it will become the smut model of choice like R1 was for a while.
aqouta
6m ago
The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
Will this obviously wrong and tired narrative ever go away? Bernie doesn't win because people don't want a leftist candidate, even in the primary let alone the general, he would get slaughtered. His path to victory has always required all the more moderate candidates to split the more popular policy platform in so many ways that he could sneak through with a plurality but not majority. Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win by avoiding creating the specific conditions that they need to win without getting the popular vote is not "ratfucking".
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
9m ago
excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…
It is indeed somewhere in Innocents Abroad, so it was likely intended ironic but modern readers take it as literal.
WhiningCoil
10m ago
Yeah, so this art book is what I let my daughter browse through while I read the novel to her. But another friend of mine read this illustrated version to her son. Probably advantages to both. Giving my daughter a separate book I think worked for us because she had some control over what she was looking at while I read.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11m ago
Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election
Trump nominally ran in the primary for the Reform Party in 2000 and lost to Pat Buchanan.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
20m ago
Hey, you were the guy who had the picture book of the Hobbit for your daughter, right? My niece just caught the bug when my sister read her a bit from a traditional novel version, and I'd like to gift them something like what you described. Any info to point me in the right direction?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
22m ago
Enjoy, man. Every part of the process is great. Maybe not so much the cup, I guess.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23m ago
As I suspect that none of us has done a formal survey, we're probably literally talking about one or two local fast food franchises, which might be a case of a particular owner with a preference for hiring hispanics (easier to schedule full time, not as flighty so I'm not retraining all the time, less likely to slack off) vs one with a preference for hiring white teenagers (easier to keep them on short hours making your labor pool more flexible, better customer experience, don't seek advancement).
I know in my hometown, the Taco Bell is all local teenagers, the Burger King is the most busted methhead trailer trash you've ever seen, and what's left of the Wendys is all black women from the local city, must be on a bus route.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29m ago
I Read It So You Don’t Have To
Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin
How do you come clean without coming clean? How do you take your team out of a tremendous, historic, catastrophic failure and yet manage to convince everyone involved to change absolutely nothing? How do you protect the power and position of yourself and your personal friends, while letting everyone know that you’re Taking Responsibility? How do you present yourself to society and strongly say Mea Maxima Culpa while avoiding any consequences?
Well, Jake Tapper has gone back to an old standby in Original Sin: you find a goat, you put all the sins of the community on the goat, and then you drive the goat out of town never to be seen again. For Tapper and the Democratic Party, they want to put all the sins of the 2024 election loss on Joe Biden and his immediate subordinates, get rid of Joe, and ride off free of guilt or blame. Unfortunately, for all the promise of the title, Tapper fails to grapple at all with the earlier sins of the Democratic Party which lead them to the Biden presidency. It’s a fakakta head fake, a cheap attempt at a false accountability that leaves Tapper and the rest of the Democratic Party machinery safe to keep doing the same things they were doing before.
Personal opinion: This book was horrendous. I knew it would be bad going in, but my wife wanted to read it so I downloaded it off libgen and loaded it on our shared Kindle account, and we decided to read it together and discuss it. That part was fun. The book itself just made me mad.
What Tapper offers is a mostly-disconnected and somewhat confusing series of anecdotes that add up to what a lot of people around here were absolutely on top of years before Tapper: Biden was cooked. However cooked you think Biden was, you’ll see evidence that it was worse than you thought it was. I won’t bother going point by point, we’ve tortured every incident to death already. Tapper tries to throw Biden a bone here and there, but for the most part he adequately massacres his goat. In the process a few close Biden advisers come in for a bit of trouble. Tapper labeled them the Politburo, and they are the villain of the piece, lurking, a sinister and undefined presence. Everything is ultimately laid at the door of some decision maker in Politburo or with the last name Biden. Joe, Jill, Hunter, and a few close personal aides are responsible for the entire coverup: denying the obvious, blaming the lighting or a cold or a long night, pressuring underlings into silence, making never-specified decisions in the name of the president without his knowledge, and generally operating the entire process of Weekend at Bernies-ing the President of the United States.
What Tapper doesn’t offer is any in depth analysis of actual policy decisions or tactical choices in government. This book is pure politics. He doesn’t at any point question who was where and when during crises in the Ukraine or Palestine. He doesn’t look outside the standard West Wing cast of characters in the political circle of the President, what was going on in the State Department or the DoD, what did the kids get up to when it became clear that daddy wasn’t home? How was it that the SecDef was out of commission for weeks without the White House even knowing about it? Did people start metering what they told the President’s office? Did they feel more comfortable defying the President’s wishes? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
My disappointment stems from the title: Tapper promises to trace to the root cause of the problem. Everything was paradise until this, then after this everything went wrong. But ultimately, he seems to be aiming to skate by what, to me, seem the obvious candidates for Democrats Original Sin:
-- The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
-- Obsession with Identity Politics: Biden, of course, didn’t actually lose the 2024 race, that honor was passed to Kamala Harris. Why was she there? Because she was (marginally) black and a woman. Tapper is pretty clear on this one, and states it directly, but never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak. It’s the lack of a talented VP who could be president, or at least win an election, forced everyone to Ride with Biden until it became obvious that he couldn’t win. And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent, leaving you in a position where you couldn’t be seen to skip over a Black Woman, but because she had to be a Black Woman she had no chance in the election.
-- Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
But Tapper doesn’t address any of these actual deep sins of the Democratic worldview, because that would require actual change by the Democratic Party, and change might lead to Tapper and his friends being disempowered. Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Instead he just blames it all on ol’ Scranton Joe, who will shuffle off to the great used Corvette dealership in the sky and leave the Dems to keep right on sinning just as they always have.
WhiningCoil
29m ago
Best of luck man, kids are the best.
shoeonfoot
33m ago
I'm willing to wager $10,000 with any poster here that the US doesn't hit 4 million deportations by the end of 2028 and that there will be at least 700,000 new naturalized US citizens every year until 2028.
shoeonfoot
37m ago
You haven't demonstrated that there are "massive differences" on average. What is "massive" anyway?
ABigGuy4U
40m ago
I think the risk of political violence is going up, but it no longer has the level of public buy-in you would need for a civil war. Especially for the youth, which is the primary demographic you would need for that. Zoomers are too checked out and there’s not enough of them, Boomers are too old, and Millennials finally managed to grab a small slice of the pie and are now just a bit too comfortable. I think the primary danger zone in the United States was 2014 to 2021. I think the chances of civil war in Europe are higher, but the most likely scenario is the Day of the Shed, when all the native peoples of Europe rise up and viciously cuck themselves to death Michel Houellebecq-style.
Tree
45m ago
No, I want you to be psyched! Life is the ultimate experience, anything can happen! One day you could find yourself in South Africa or Lebanon, without leaving Ohio! Everyone's in trouble. The only question is: are you on top of that trouble or not ?
But in all seriousness, some people literally act like we’ll all be dead in 10 years because of AGI, climate (in Germany they often call them the ‘last generation’ protests ffs), elite mismanagement & evil and what have you. They just throw down their arms: "oh, we’re finished, it's over". The prospect of a civil war, properly considered, should cheer them up. It's not over till the fat lady sings.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
46m ago
This week you're all getting a break from all the uninteresting things I'm doing with kettlebells or jiu jitsu to talk about fertility treatments.
I know I'm not supposed to worry about it at all, that anything can happen at this stage, but I have to tell someone and I'll tell y'all because you I can't tell anyone who matters in my real life: after a little over a year of trying, my wife got a positive pregnancy test.
We'll have to confirm it, and hopefully it all works out, but I'm very excited.
We had what our doctor called "unexplained" fertility issues. Which is to say we were making love often enough, and individually our tests were coming back good, but no baby resulted. I guess its good the tests came back clean, but it was a little disappointing, in that when you go in for tests you hope for the doc to say something like "Oh, you actually have a very obvious, simple, and treatable common problem. You aren't doing anything wrong, you just need to do X and then it'll all work out." Sperm testing stressed me out, in that I feel like all versions of that are equivalent to "You're not really much of a man." Where female infertility, while surely bad, is so multifarious and complex, that it seems a little less bad. Like, where male infertility is "your engine doesn't have enough horsepower to move the car;" female infertility is "the wire harness came loose and the starboard vacuum sensor borked itself." Given, I'm sure Mrs. FiveHour felt the opposite way, that have slow sperm is better than being a woman who can't have a baby. At any rate, neither occurred, we were just stuck there with no baby for no particular reason. And hitting the age where while we could probably have a decent chance of getting it done, we might be under pressure pretty quickly.
Our insurance covered IUI, which is basically just optimizing the fertilization process. Mrs. FiveHour took some drugs to precisely trigger and optimize her cycle, then I was to jerk off into a cup, the facility would "clean" the sperm to optimize the sample, and then the nurses insert it directly into her uterus. We elected to give it a try.
This required me, of course, to jerk off into the cup, then immediately drive it across town to meet a very precise appointment time. I have never had a more stressful masturbation in my life. So much pressure! I really put a lot of effort into optimizing the production. I needed a good sample, I needed it to all go into the cup. And it's so weird carrying around a cup of my own splooge. I felt like such a bizarre pervert, in the car, then sitting in the waiting room. Not that I had much odds of getting into such a situation, but I would sooner be searched by a cop and have him find a gun or a half ounce of weed than I would have him find a cup of my own sperm. And the whole time I'm looking at the brown paper bag thinking, well that didn't seem like very much, I bet this was a miss.
I will note that according to my wife, as a personal achievement, that the doctor commented to a visiting med student who joined her for the procedure that the sample was "ridiculous" and that this was "definitely going to work;" they look for 5mm and I managed to hit 29mm. God I hope we don't have to do this again, because I'll have to try to top that. The natural male high-scoring instinct applies to everything with a metric.
I don't know if this will happen or not. We might not get a confirmed positive, it might not make it to term, or who knows.
But I'm praying this is our child. If for no other reason than I don't know how much more I can optimize my jerking off.
oats_son
47m ago
I agree, Western Europe is a disaster. But that is cold comfort, because if anything, I see Europe as just a sneak peak of what America will be someday. That may be backwards. It is Europe that has been aping us, after all. And, as you say, there are important differences, like our immigrants being a better fit.
Sloot
48m ago
Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.
Something tells me high school Asians working on their “soft skills” more will do little for their college admissions plight, and be negative for their plight if it comes at the opportunity cost of grade-, test-, or extracurricular-grinding.
At least in the case of Harvard, the supposed awful soft skills and personalities of Asian applicants were telepathically observed by members of the admissions committee from afar, sight unseen, and somehow overlooked by the wrong-thinking alumni interviewers who met and interacted with said applicants in person.
It was very odd to me to visit a Costco in Sacramento recently. I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees. Shoppers seemed fairly evenly split between Asians (mostly Chinese and Vietnamese) and Arabs, with most women in hijabs and even a few in niqabs. The staff was mostly Vietnamese or something like them. I couldn't understand the English of the person at the checkout.
In fact something I've seen a lot more of in general is immigrants with different strains of unintelligible English trying to communicate with each other only semi-successfully. The other day it was some Sikh guys arguing with a Cambodian proprietor. I could mostly understand each but they couldn't understand each other. Considered offering to translate but decided it would be rude.
Corvos
51m ago
I see, thank you. Would I then be correct in saying your position is broadly that long-term economic growth will eliminate the vast majority of these jobs in a reasonable timeframe (let's say 30 years) so that long-term tradeoffs (demographic change, long-term transfer of whole economic stacks to other countries, overproduction of elites, socioeconomic resentment, etc.) are not really relevant and we can focus purely on short-term plans to minimise immediate (<30 years) disruption whilst maximising economic growth to the levels required?
TitaniumButterfly
52m ago
What do you think it would take for indigenous Europeans to reverse this process, in terms of both will and policy? Is Europe so senescent that it will end with a whimper? The current leaders are a lost cause, but is the younger generation cottoning to what's happening and starting to ask dangerous questions? I have almost no window into this as I don't understand the politics.
Offhand my guess is that, when the welfare states inevitably collapse, the immigrant populations get much more belligerent and manage to provoke even Europeans into self-defense -- first locally, and then increasingly with a resurgent European identity. But again I have no idea how plausible this is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
54m ago
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something, and is generally not in great financial shape to boot. Often times they advertise their mental illness diagnoses.
This struck a little too close to home for me.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
56m ago
If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead?
Higher IQ, ability to speak English fluently, lack of third-world habbits.
NullHypothesis
1hr ago
From the same article:
Surprisingly, teens from high-income households are more likely to have summer jobs than those from low-income households. The Department of Labor found that in 2023 households earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year had teen summer employment rates of 46%. For households earning less than $60,000, it was below 30%.
This might seem counterintuitive. You’d think rich teens would have the luxury to spend their summers traveling or pursuing hobbies, while working-class teens have to work to save for college and other expenses. It turns out that teen jobs are actually the luxury.
Statistically speaking, the households in the middle to upper-middle class are more likely to have teen summer jobs than poor households. Maybe there is something to learn from the wealthiest group in America. Asian kids growing up in households where they have to study all day would probably benefit from having a summer job in a customer facing role since they would learn to interact with larger segments of the population, which would improve social and communication skills. Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.
Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The reason conservatives are not dominating top tier colleges is not because their kids worked a summer job.
There is a significant reason for the drop in teenager summer jobs that the article does not address or mention, which is the increase in the minimum wage. It's simply more expensive to hire people now than in 1950. Wealthy neighborhoods are less impacted because businesses there have more money to be able to afford to hire temporary work. Meanwhile, most businesses in low income neighborhoods are operating on razor-thin margins. They might have been able to afford teenagers to work for $5 an hour, but at $15 or higher they simply cannot afford to anymore. Cheap labor is one of the main reasons to hire a teenager over any other demographic; make all labor more expensive and there is less of a reason to hire teenagers.
One factor is immigration. Many of the jobs formerly held by teens are now held by immigrants, especially in food service, by far the most popular industry for teen workers. High-immigration states have the lowest teen summer employment rates, including California (24%), New York (29%), Nevada (24%), and Texas (29%). The states with the highest teen summer employment rates, at 75% and 67%, are Maine and Vermont.
Factor in immigration, which increases the supply of labor, and it's obvious why teen summer jobs are on the decline. If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead? It's not Maine and Vermont that's responsible for the drop in the nation-wide teenager employment rate.
That jeopardy clue is going to hit so hard one day.
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