domain:forecasting.substack.com
hydroacetylene
2m ago
The QoL of agricultural grunt workers has, in every society in history, been pretty bad. Yes, you can entice some college kids to do a bit of it over the summer for unlimited booze and sex, but I am very skeptical they'll do enough of it to replace migrants. 'Picking crops' is just a job that always inherently sucks.
The cost advantage of illegals is also not the only reason that illegals are preferred by lower blue collar employers; I don't know if you've met native white and black trash but they're both just awful. Drugs, dysfunctional relationships, poor communication and attendance, legal issues, poor conflict-management, unreliability, theft and dishonesty, laziness, etc are way worse among our native underclass- and illegals are themselves not necessarily role models with that stuff. Lots of them are essentially unemployable because that's who's left over in a society like the US where huge majorities of functional and capable people 'make it' out of having to do shitty unskilled labor for a living.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9m ago
It would be, but to try out for the SEALs you've already enlisted in the Navy so that's pretty much the way it goes for many people who turn out to be only 99th percentile athletes rather that 99.9th percentile.
hydroacetylene
11m ago
As I keep saying, the conditions required to 'keep farms running so we can stock the shelves with a variety of produce' are not great, and first worlders will not do it without compulsion(or, I suppose, being deluded into halfway doing this for brief periods of time on partyfarms). Likewise lots of heavy construction labor etc.
Americans should mow their own lawns, watch their own children, etc. But the idea that we can replace illegal migrants and roustabouts with middle class whites is farcical. Manual laborers are by definition not middle class, at least when they're doing temporary grunt work.
No_one
12m ago
At this point tattoos signal nothing more than conformity or body dysmorphia.
Piercings are more serious, I'm not sure what they say except for 'lower social class' or maybe body dysmorphia.
No_one
14m ago
fine, but then why did every other Western nation that was looking to change calibers and was capable of indigenous weapons development also reject the idea
They were largely not sovereign nations and forced to do so by Americans due to NATO. I'm sure that e.g. had the Germans been left to their own devices they'd have kept making Stg.44s post war as the rifle's superiority was recognized during the war.
And honestly, no, the other ones don't really matter.
Sure, buddy. Sure. A communist Malaysia is okay, sitting straight on an important trade route and providing oil.
no other military would adopt a smaller cartridge until 5.56 NATO).
Japanese adopted 6.5mm in 1897.
quiet_NaN
15m ago
I do not know much about international trading contracts either, but I assume that most Chinese companies would not guarantee delivery to your porch at a fixed price. I would guess that in most cases, it is the importer who will have to cough up the unexpected tariffs.
hydroacetylene
16m ago
Middle class whites should not plan on doing crappy grunt work for a living. A certain amount of unfair labor practices is necessary to keep a society running and as far as I'm concerned a few Oaxacans and Hondurans are a win-win way to get that done. We don't need to import millions of welfare cases and deliveroo drivers but turning a blind eye to some construction and agriculture workers of questionable legality is better for everyone.
The underclass already lives a very similar lifestyle, just more degenerate. It would be great if they could be forced to do more work and less drugs, I just have little faith in their ability to do so(we're several generations past the point at which people who are willing to do work instead of drugs stop being poor in this country).
White non-underclass youths that want to make something of themselves usually do; they go from digging ditches for a plumber to assisting the plumber laying pipe to being a plumber themselves. I don't see the problem unless it's with 'there are Hispanics in the vicinity'.
No_one
19m ago
Are you really going to try and insist that not even 10 of their rightwing equivalents would cross the line at a lie?
a) Firstly, most people wouldn't think nobody would break b) there's no guarantee anyone would even care about a false-flag attack (nobody cares about this one)
So no, I don't think you could find ten rightwingers willing to pull a false flag like this.
this would be missing the point, much like firing at full auto at the ranges of this incident.
Effective range of light machineguns fired from a prone position isn't <100 meters.
hydroacetylene
23m ago
No, this was his currently married wife. I don't know if she divorced him or not(I'm happier not being further involved in this woman's life), but the mistress insisted on meeting his family.
It did not go well and he broke up with her. This is the ending of the story as far as I know, and I'm pretty happy with that. I don't know if the wife knew about his cheating but was OK with it being discreet(these women exist), or if she was blindsided. But the mistress was clearly crazy.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
26m ago
Yeah, but a lot of these women grew up in shitty conditions of broken families, single mothers, drugs and petty crime in the environment. They should know better. They seem not to, and I can't figure it out.
It's the same effect as doctor and lawyer dynasties, but in reverse. If your mom is a single mom with serial deadbeat boyfriends, your aunt is a single mom with serial deadbeat boyfriends, you have to learn to look at people that are not like you and say, "I am going to learn how to be like them and not like everyone else around me". This is a high bar to clear.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
28m ago
Huh, that’s interesting, I totally would have thought that the Marines would be the way more natural fallback but apparently not.
quiet_NaN
30m ago
Because they're not paying the tariffs.
The tariffs would be paid in the end substantially by the US customers in any case, if for no other reason than the manufacturers being unlikely to have the profit margin to just pay for them.
Also, tariff evasion should be an expected consequence of having tariffs. To be fair, I think for most of the goods imported from China, enforcement is plausible.
Catching one container with cocaine in a harbor which processes hundred thousands of them is hard. Catching a container whose goods are priced to low on the customs declaration is easy if a significant fractions of the containers are undervalued. You just need to set up financial incentives which make it expensive to get caught (perhaps set up requirement that any importer needs to own a defined amount of seize-able assets per container they want to bring through customs per day), and your customs officers will pay for themselves.
shoeonfoot
42m ago
Further, these people mostly aren't the MAGA right, and the Trump Administration cannot be said to speak for them.
Yeah, that's exactly the crux of the issue. Lots of these people have claimed that some Trump move - bombing Iran, not releasing the Epstein client list, granting amnesty to farmers - will irrevocably sunder the Trump coalition and that their position is the true MAGA position and anything else would be a betrayal to the voters, but I think MAGA is whatever Trump says it is.
If Trump announced some kind of amnesty for farm workers, that would be MAGA. If Trump announced that "mass deportations" never meant every single illegal, that would also be MAGA.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
43m ago
Even if that weren’t true, you still have the knock on social effects— street crime, obviously violence between dealers, property damage, neglect of children and wife, probably can’t keep a job so we’re paying for his survival (and paying more now that he’s in jail), so it’s nothing but negative outcomes and I think even marijuana is a but suspect in this. I can’t think f any drugs (even alcohol) that make things better.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
58m ago
Liz Cheney is an unimportant bit player who hasn't been connected to the movement-right for years and Musk is specifically currently trying to start a party that's "neither left or right" (whether that's true or not, that at least is the self-description), so I'm not sure why these would be the figures for estimating this.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
58m ago
Did Rubin or even Clinton speak for the left? US parties are really more like coalitions and even the president shouldn't be thought of as the best representative of all the groups, they're the one whose tolerable to the most groups not usually their favorite.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners)
I do not think that the democrats are the party of plantation owners these days.
Most D voters are living in urban centers, not on rural plantations. They care about cities, LGBT, social justice and so on. By contrast, I would imagine that most plantations and orchards are in rural states. Any rural states which vote reliably for the GOP -- which I imagine are quite a lot of them might simply not be worth catering to by the Dems on a federal level.
Also, if it was true, then it would have made sense for Trump to go after the illegal immigrants working on farms first, thereby depriving his political enemies of resources. What he did is the opposite: he explicitly spared the farm workers. This suggests to me that he needs the farm and plantation owners, who likely voted for him at least partly.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.
And yet the work has to be done, and we don't yet have the robots to do it. All the unglamorous necessary toil to support civilisation.
NunoSempere
1hr ago
the ADIZ extends like a rectangle up into China proper
Thanks, I didn't know that!
HereAndGone
1hr ago
The running plot, such as it is, throughout the books is good but it's mostly "the Napoleonic Wars at sea" so unless you're absolutely fascinated by the minutiae of naval campaigns, the real interest is "ooh so this was what life was like on a ship at that time" and then it's "will Jack advance his career, will Stephen ever have a happy relationship, never mind they're best bros and we all love learning natural history".
There are just so many great lines (everyone's favourite is this one) (warning: TV Tropes link):
Stephen acquires a sloth in South America, and it immediately befriends everybody aboard. Except Jack, who for some inexplicable reason gets rebuffed- the poor thing cried when it first saw him. When he finally resorts to feeding the sloth bits of ship's biscuit soaked in rum, he soon wins its friendship but ends up turning it into an alcoholic. Thus leading to a line found nowhere else in literature: "Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
But Stephen is like me - all the nautical terms and explanations just go right over my head and don't lodge. Gluppit the prawling strangles, indeed!
Stephen: The moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw —do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there—no longer a social being at all.
You start off reading for the "Napoleonic Wars at sea" but then you sort of forget about that and treat it like 'Stephen's Big Natural History Expedition' and 'Jack climbs the ranks' so that the great world-shaking events become background, almost, to the little dramas played out in their world.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
I keep forgetting the Zoomers are now old enough to be making dubious fashion choices of their own. And Alpha are the upcoming new generation!
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Please tell me it was at least (1) his ex wife and (2) this bint wasn't the reason the marriage broke down. Because otherwise, if frying pans were meeting crania, I would not blame the (ex) missus one iota for the idiocy of both (ex) husband and new squeeze.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
I'm OK with "racialist right" or the euphemistic "dissident right", but "woke right" is just a snarl, an attempt to force an equivalence with the woke left. Further, these people mostly aren't the MAGA right, and the Trump Administration cannot be said to speak for them.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
1hr ago
Well the first two are ‘ this transcends yet IS anime ‘ and the last two ‘ ARE anime ‘ - meaning, just weirdo, brutal insanity. It’s a big part of anime with a long tradition.
Sure I wouldn’t recommend them to an anime non watcher, probably, but Elfin Lied is what got me into anime before even the classics.
In moderation, alcohol can create social cohesion. The moderation is the key bit.
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