domain:rifters.com
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
39m ago
I'm amazed that hardly anyone has mentioned what I think has to be the top practical reason to own a truck: they're the only vehicle class capable of towing more than trivial amount. That's why the pickup truck is practically indispensable to the suburban class (at least, here in benighted flyover country).
If you have have ambitions of boating, camping, jet skiing, four wheeling, motorcycling, or snowmobiling, then having a vehicle amply capable of towing the trailers or self contained mobile structures used for these activities is a prerequisite. And if you need a truck for towing anyways, might as well get one that can serve as a commuter and haul family and friends too. This is why the beds keep shrinking and the engines keep embiggening: the utility of the bed for cargo is secondary in most cases to its utility as traction motor.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
54m ago
For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
Heavily against mass immigration, but many of my friends are new immigrants of the type that I don't want to see coming here en masse. This includes some of the women I've dated (some even without PR visa).
I've thought about this before and have compared it to Ayn Rand claiming welfare. I'm against the policy, but while it exists I will exploit it in my personal life.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
TIL, thanks.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
Lovecraft was pretty intense in his writing, but in person he was usually pretty kind to his friends and relations. Even those who belonged to racial groups that he otherwise didn’t care for, like his ex-wife Sonia Greene, who he remained on good terms with even after the divorce. And he was nice to cats.
clo
1hr ago
Shanghai, although it's been a decade since I've been and has become much less kind to foreigners/laowai/like a weird, high-tech slice of Europe since I've been there.
Chengdu for food, views. Pandas are lame, not worth visiting for pandas.
You can pick any of the major cities in Hubei province and find a well-reviewed tour guide with English language skills.
In general, the further you go from an urban city center, the kinder and more generous people are. The trains are exceptionally good for covering distance if you want to hit up several places.
clo
1hr ago
But I never read his stories.
You built an image out of the man outside of the thing he is widely known for and then are surprised to find out that your image of the man doesn't match?
surprised_pikachu_face.png
Anyone who has even tangentially heard of I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream or any of its many, many derivative works could tell exactly who he is. Harlan Ellison is a viciously angry, frequently bitter to the point of actively poisoning his readers, incredibly gifted writer.
I give him a lot of slack because anyone filled with such seething, frothing rage is the exact opposite of the people who write soft pap dripping with apathy these days. His fiction has a lot of this as a result: he raged against what he saw as the dying of the light. The works he's become most famous for are alarm bells, warnings, bitter screeds, portraits of existential evil and beasts naked shivering in the dark.
And yes, he was also writing lurid scifi for subsistence, so churning out large volumes of work and acting out as a shock jock to get attention and eyeballs on his work would feed back into it.
anti_dan
2hr ago
That is called a siege. It is a legitimate military tactic, albeit one that Israel has not employed in this current engagement.
Let’s try this in different language, then.
I recently called you an anti-semite. Judging from this post, while you object to being called a neo-Nazi (fair enough, Nazism is a specific ideology), you would broadly accept the labels ‘anti-semite’ and ‘white identitarian’ or ‘white nationalist’.
When I say that you’re an anti-semite, what I mean is that your posts seem to me to have, as an animating principle, a very strong and irrational prejudice against both Jewish people as an ethnicity and Judaism as a religion. I think this is visible in both the subjects you choose to address and the normative valences you put on them. That is, I think that you consistently want to talk about Jews and steer every subject back to Jews, no matter how tangential they are to the topic, and I think that your judgement of anything involving Jews is prejudicially negative.
You constantly want to talk about Jews, and no matter what a Jew does, you interpret it in a maximally uncharitable light. The conclusion I draw from this is that you are anti-semitic. You just hate Jews.
Do I know what specific policy you recommend towards Jews, particularly in the 21st century United States? No, I don't. As Amadan and magic9mushroom have noted, you are strategically very cagey about that, and when you are directly asked, you respond evasively. You constantly suggest that something ought to be done about the Jews, but do not indicate what you think that something ought to be. It's a simple question, one which you surely must have considered, and you squirm to avoid answering it.
In this context I don't think it hugely matters. Maybe you want them all to be killed. It's a possibility. I will say that, at the least, I think that if they were all killed, you would not shed any tears. But maybe you just want them all deported or expelled, or want their property expropriated, or even just a social norm where non-Jews refuse to associate with Jews and treat them with scorn. Those are possibilities too. I don't care that much because even supposing that your 'secret' position is the mildest of these, it's still bad, and it's still motivated by a prejudice that is both irrational and worthy of moral condemnation.
And for the record, this would be the case regardless of the group in question. If you were obsessed with, I don't know, Tibetans, that would be equally as bad. If you had a similar level of both obsession with and hostility to Azeris, that would be just as bad. Jews have no special status. The same goes for Europeans, and if it's necessary, I condemn Ignatiev as well.
Let me then ask you straightforwardly: do you object to being characterised as anti-semitic? Do you disagree with the statement "SecureSignals hates Jews"? Or is that simply an accurate description?
to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately
I 100% believe waiting for further developments is better. Unless you are a direct actor, I believe there is negative value and insight following the news minute by minute. Without greater context, everything looks random and chaotic, offering no clearer understanding of the world. My own community transformed into a news feed and we've faced insight collapse, although some lovely contributors track less popular things, contextualizing them etc. illustrating the problem precisely.
Iran launched missiles 30 mins ago. The ceasefire is over or rather is between certain groups, since multiple entities share/negotiate sovereignty within Iran. Let's see what this actually means, next week.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
Man... now I kind of want to not visit Japan, because I feel guilty about the prospect of making life suck for the residents there.
somethingsomething
2hr ago
You can throw things in the back without opening the door is the basic answer I think. Very casual, like you're getting stuff done on you're own time, your gear exposed to the elements etc. Work vans are more ubiquitous for actual company cars.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2hr ago
You know. The deep state. Them. The powers that be.
More seriously, if Trump convenes the extremely serious military people and they present him a limited menu of military actions he can do that is basically the same set of plans they've had for 20 years, that's the MIC at work. The names and faces can change but the dusty binder from the drawer stays the same.
anti_dan
2hr ago
It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.
I really don't think it would. I would describe their current conduct as studiously avoiding the general populace, but the nature of the place of combat means even an 'A' student is going to kill or injure a ton of "civilians" (a term I hesitate to use when the population has elected Hamas, and the only people who would have a chance if another election were held were people calling Hamas too soft on killing Jews).
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
For Hall of Mosses, remember to get there early. Parking can be tricky if you get there past 8-9 am.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
I've never seen a minivan on a jobsite here (working on new-built commercial/industrial buildings). It's all either pickup trucks or full-sized vans.
faceh
2hr ago
High Civilian death tolls according to whom.
I have such a hard time determining anything accurate here b/c both sides have major pressure to lie. And very early on Hamas got caught in an apparently blatant lie about a Rocket hitting a hospital, leading to civilian casualties. Note that Gazan authorities ALSO misstated the number of injured and dead!
So now I have to take all their claims with a veritable pound of salt.
Whoops.
And of course the October 7 event was specifically a bunch of Hamas warriors attacking, massacring and kidnapping civilians. So I'm pretty inclined to say "A pox on both your houses" for the duration of the conflict. Yes, I am aware that U.S. tax dollars and weapons are streaming to the Israeli side of the fight.
Finally, the incidents I CAN generally verify include a dude in the U.S. Setting Jews on Fire and another shooting two unarmed Jewish Embassy staffers.
Don't know of any incidents in the U.S. going the other way.
anti_dan
2hr ago
Caplan isn't that much older than I am, so he's mostly seen the same wars I have. These have been predominantly wars in Islamic countries, where his argument doesn't hold much grip on reality. We are talking about Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, now potentially Iran. These are territories where "Death to Israel" holds 90%+ popularity and "Death to America" is only a few clicks behind.
Mantergeistmann
2hr ago
Also, as I understand it, the government of Ukraine doesn't make it a deliberate tactic to hope their own population gets killed so they can get PR wins which bring international pressure on their behalf.
Mantergeistmann
2hr ago
I mean, you could say that avout any ceasefire. Most of them don't take effect immediately, and a lot of people keep their guns firing until the alotted time for various reasons (some professional, some personal).
Things will start to make much more sense once you understand that we are not playing chess (5-d, 3-d, or otherwise) Mr. Spock. We are playing poker.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
By my reading, only "officially", while the "true" agreement is for a simultaneous ceasefire as described in the previous sentence.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Hispanic men have a reputation for poor and/or reckless driving at times when the lower working class is going home from work(3:00-3:30 end times are pretty typical), but there's no real indication as to causation- driving in Latin America is notoriously poor(as everywhere else in the developing world) so it might be continuing cultural stuff other than the idea of cracking open a cold one on the way home from work. Presumably if that was the common thread DR twitter would mention the open container violations in their regular noting of an immigrant getting into a wreck in a school carpool line he had no business being in.
My intuition is also that 1) drunk driving accidents are disproportionately from 'not going home from a bar(think friend's house, family get together, etc)' because the barflies a) have a tolerance and b) stay later so there's fewer other cars to get into accidents with, and non-barflies are likely to have a plan for getting home safely from the bar and 2) far less drunk driving is due to straight spirits than you'd think because American heavy drinkers sensitive enough to cost to choose straight hard liquor are also sensitive enough to cost to not be doing their drinking in bars much. IME regular heavy drinkers seem to have a code to stick to beer or mixed drinks in social settings, and there's very strong ethnic patterns to drink of choice to begin with that override maximizing alcohol per dollar.
I hadn't considered that perspective. It isn't nervousness that I might be wrong that stops me from commenting on breaking news, it's the dearth of information. Anything I might say is going to be an uninformed opinion, and the same is true for everyone not in the administration. If people were able to argue without getting personal, maybe, but everybody gets so heated that even playful criticism wounds people - and to get like that over an event which doesn't have basic facts nailed down yet is madness.
But you are right about uncertainty and skin in the game promoting rational analysis over sophistry, and I loathe the idea of people thinking I'm scared of being wrong. So I would like to say I hope and believe that this is real and with that conditional I also hope and believe Netanyahu will retire within the next year.
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