domain:greyenlightenment.com
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
27m ago
And, of course, religion is the perfect way to shield an inferior story (and writers), since you can just launder your failure with claims of the audience’s irreverence.
anon_
29m ago
I think the libertarian right is coming around to the fact that government is a necessary evil, and to that end it needs the powers to effect those necessary functions competently.
anon_
32m ago
That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
Moreover, in many other democracies that the US left idolizes, every contact with the government ends up being a check for immigration status, similar to how in the US all police will run you for warrants.
striker
42m ago
Finished The Human Stain (Roth) recently. I thought it was extraordinary. Brilliantly executed social commentary of late 1990s America.
Now reading:
- Cleanness (Garth Greenwell), which has some sordid master-slave gay sex. Sticking with it for some of the writing. For now.
- Irreversible Damage (Abigail Shrier), investigation of possible trans social contagion among teenage girls
- Lots of poems.
Who are the novelists telling state-of-the-world stories right now? I loved Tom Wolfe’s novels for their expansive representation of what he saw as the core story of an era (Bonfire of the Vanities 80s, A Man In Full 90s, I Am Charlotte Simmons 2000s). I have not read all of Philip Roth but got similar vibe from The Human Stain (written in 2000, set in the US of the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky of 1998).
Big, bold, often brilliant novels that take a snapshot of a moment in time and allow readers and the broader culture to make sense of things, and maybe see their own insanity reflected.
Our moment (narrowly: since Covid 2020; more broadly: since Trump/Brexit 2016; broader still: since Lehman Bros/global financial crisis 2008) is in great need of a literature.
Is anyone writing it?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
47m ago
An ancap argument is essentially the same argument.
striker
57m ago
Yes, this is the reality as I see it. Economics not adding up anymore for most / all legacy news media organisations, so they have to do one of two things, or both: cut news costs, or sensationalise the news to generate attention and win another round of the advertising money game.
pigeonburger
58m ago
Scott Presler would have been better, no?
pigeonburger
1hr ago
I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
I think most don't truly oppose it, but it risks alienating some member of their coalition, the sovereign citizen, anti-government types who think not having a national ID is impeding the federal government.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
He is the GOP’s attempt to replace Charlie Kirk. He has zero reputation among online conservatives but was somehow ingratiated into the GOP establishment, so they are rolling him out everyone.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
Couldn’t you answer the question by looking at communities that didn’t go down those roads. Off the top of my head, any form of Anabaptist community, Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Jews, or similar groups that chose not to go modern.
Roth IRA [income] limits are not that high. ~250K currently…
Dude, they're twice the median income for couples (119k vs 236k), and 2.5x the median income for singles (61k vs 150k).
unlike Roth you can get this money untaxed on the way in and on the way out.
I think you might be misunderstanding or misreading my question.
I'm not comparing making new Roth contributions to making new HSA contributions. I'm discussing the so-called “shoebox strategy” for how someone who has existing money in an HSA should treat existing HSA-eligible receipts that they don't have a burning need for reimbursement on—whether to hold on to the receipts without cashing them out to allow the money to grow in the HSA, vs other possible courses of action.
I've proposed a strategy that I think strictly beats the “shoebox strategy” in most cases, listed 2 edge cases where my proposed strategy doesn't beat it [namely: (a) someone who is not maxing out their Roth contributions and anticipates HSA exhaustion before age 60, and (b) someone who is already maxing out their Roth contributions and anticipates HSA exhaustion before death], and asked whether there are any other cases where my proposed strategy doesn't beat it.
After 60…significant amount of medical bills
In your example case, if those medical bills are so "significant" as to exceed 7.5% of your gross income, and your future self itemizes, my proposed strategy still beats the shoebox strategy, since while you still take the growth (on money your younger self did put into an HSA) out completely tax-free to pay the medical expenses, your future self doesn't thereby sacrifice the ability to get a that-year deduction for the medical expenses.
And even if they don't rise to that 7.5% threshold, or your future self doesn't bother to itemize, my proposed strategy leaves you no worse off than the shoebox strategy, since either way you're taking out completely tax-free growth (on money your younger self did put into an HSA) to pay for medical expenses.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
Underwater hockey has a difficulty with the underwater part, which requires special equipment and access to a pool. I think 7s rugby is a good game, or maybe Aussie football.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
One of my favorite bits of historical PR. "No, of course I'm not a king. As a proper Roman, I hate kings just as much as the rest of you do! I'm just the first citizen, with near-absolute power over the government and whose children will reign after him. Totally different!"
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I don’t think civics courses by themselves are a good answer here. Turning down the temperature on this stuff requires that the discourse changes as well. Civics and required volunteering are good ideas, as I think is the habit in some Asian countries to require kids to join clubs in school to kinda force proper socialization. But having a kid learn civics and join the chess club isn’t going to do much as long as he’s immersed in an online world in which it’s common to see content dehumanizing people who disagree with you and an algorithm that rewards him for participating in that dehumanization of his supposed political or social enemies.
The best thing we could do to stop this is to bring back and enforce minimum standards of decorum in media or at least mainstream media including social media. It’s unacceptable in a civilized society to be calling the sitting president and his party “fascist”, “Nazi” and “authoritarian”, and you should not be equating winning the next election to “saving democracy”. You should not be celebrating the death of a political opponent. You should not be allowed to dehumanize other people online. What we have right now is a bifurcated hate box that pushes people to radicalize and rewards them for doing so. Then we’re wondering why people participating in the hate box are popping off and shooting each other. And unless we deal with this directly, it’s just going to get worse as the algorithms push people farther and further down these pipelines with more sophisticated algorithms that know exactly how to keep people scrolling through millions of messages highlighting all the bad stuff the “enemy” is doing while hiding his answers or anything positive about him.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card.
No, the US is much harsher than that -- you need an Olympic MEDAL to automatically qualify, though I believe even bronze is accepted. Without that, an olympic athlete needs 3 of 10 criteria. Though two should be easy:
-
Evidence of receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence (anyone who gets on a national olympic team should have this)
-
Evidence of your membership in associations in the field which demand outstanding achievement of their members (the Olympic team itself should qualify)
Given those, he'd need to have one of
-
Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media
-
Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel
-
Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field
-
Evidence of your performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations
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Evidence that you command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field
Without any of them, no EB-1 for you.
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
- Roth IRA limits are not that high. ~250K currently, with for two-income family - or moderately well earning one-income - is not a lot. Once you hit that, no Roth for you.
- After 60, there will likely be a significant amount of medical bills. No insurance, as far as I know, covers 100% - especially not Medicare. So getting the money out of the HSA wouldn't be a big problem, however unlike Roth you can get this money untaxed on the way in and on the way out.
cjet79
2hr ago
Just finished System Delenda Est. Another good series from the author. Part of the end confused me. Feels like it left out a critical sentence or two.
Zephyr
2hr ago
I'd argue this is actually one of those areas where you can get away with it; Hephaestus is specifically the god of the forge and crafting, and does have a limp. It fits well within his character to have him develop a mechanism for easier mobility. I wouldn't object, for instance, to Artemis and Apollo being portrayed as redneck hunters armed with rifles, as it still fits well within their characters.
I feel like when situations come out like this, it's important to save ire for when the diversity for diversity's sake actually ruins the end product; like, the 2016 Ghostbusters wasn't bad because they chose an all female cast - it was bad because they didn't realize that the reason the original Ghostbusters was good was that it was more about the realities of starting a small business than it was about the paranormal. You could easily have made a 2016 "female leads" version of Ghostbusters that wasn't garbage; were I writing it, I'd have set it up as an allegory for the realities of balancing working at a small business with raising children and maintaining a household. You can even make the lead women in the show the daughters of the original cast; that way you don't shit on its legacy, while continuing to explore the themes that made the original great.
I think as long as you're sticking with the correct themes and characterization, you can get away fairly easily with including extra diversity; however, most of the people including the diversity have long since had their brains dissolved by the woke milieu, and can't write anything interesting that isn't just "diverse = good." It's not bad because of the diversity - it's bad because it's bad, and you're only seeing it because a lot of people have had their brains rewired to think 'diversity!' is the same thing as a good and interesting story, so approved it despite it's terribleness.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
FYI, you get the ability to break the damage cap in act 3. So hang on to those big hit builds, they'll come back in usefulness.
MotteInTheEye
2hr ago
Fair enough if you're complaining about free enterprise that you don't approve of, but it's rather different if the job in question is paid for by your own money taken at the proverbial gunpoint.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
US airports sometimes mix international and domestic gates. The difference is that on arrival international flights kick all the passengers over to customs and usually make them go back through security before flying onward. But that can just be rearranging a couple doors.
Zephyr
2hr ago
That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
As someone who is opposed to it, what I'm most worried about is the possibility of the government being able to 'unperson' someone. I live in Canada, where the government literally banned people who had not taken the COVID vaccine from entering a lot of establishments, enforced by presenting positive proof that you had been vaccinated. This severely curtailed my ability to participate in society until the restrictions ended.
Here are some of the wonderful things that a government could do with a national ID, ranked approximately in order of how long it would take the slippery slope to get to that point.
- Require it for the purchase of (guns/abortion drugs/hormones). Use the fact that the person purchased them as an excuse to '3 felonies a day' them.
- Require it for sign on to the internet, in the name of 'safety'. This would probably start by requiring it for access to online government services, then expand to being required for internet sign on for people caught committing a felony involving the use of a computer network (think like, child pornography, or large scale fraud), then to children to ensure they only access the 'safe' parts of the internet, then to everyone, as a generation has grown up thinking it is normal.
- Require it for transit (for example, to use a bus, or to start your car); track people's movement with this (to be fair, this would require a digital ID; to also be fair, the chances of it being non-digital in this day and age approach 0).
One thing I think is a very big disconnect between the left and the right is that a lot of the right (the libertarian/small government part) sees governments as (at best) a necessary evil, while the left doesn't necessarily think of it the same way. As someone who has libertarian leanings, what I see is that the government is constantly expanding its own power, while making decisions that are not to the benefit of the majority of its constituents. Elections tend to be shams, as we don't get to vote on the policies we actually want - we instead vote only on the policies we are allowed to vote on (for example, a large portion of Brexit was people voting against immigration; but the government decided it wanted more immigration anyways, so did that all on their own; in the last Canadian election, none of the parties that have ever formed government before ran on decreasing immigration - and we have roughly the same absolute amount of immigration as the US does, with 1/10 of the population). Here are the results of the last Canadian election; notice all the blue in Western Canada? It doesn't make a difference at all, as Quebec and Ontario voted to continue allowing Central Canada to loot the piggy bank in the west (and from my awareness, this occurs in the US too; cities have a lot of seats, and overwhelm the nearby countryside, even though the policies that are desired by the city are not in the best interests of the countryside). They also constantly violate their own rules; in Canada, it was determined that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was 'not justified' in breaking up the convoy protest against him and his COVID policies. He suffered no consequences for this action. The order in the Canadian military to take the COVID vaccine was determined to be unlawful; however, by the time the ruling came through, it was too late to seek recompense for it (as a member of my family personally experienced).
To take a slightly more 'hinged' take on it; right now, in the US, I think it's fairly safe to say that a large percentage of leftists consider the current government to not only be illegitimate, but evil on top of that. I can assure you that when Biden was in charge, a large percentage of rightists considered it to be the same situation. Both parties spend approximately 50% of the time feeling like they're under siege from a government completely unaligned with their values; why would they ever accept anything that would make it easier for the government to do evil things to them?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
The US was founded by people who rebelled against an overseas government they considered illegitimate (albeit for quite selfish reasons of their own). They were not against the very concept of government and notwithstanding that Thomas Jefferson quote everyone likes so much, they were not advocating regular revolts and coups.
The founders would be aghast and agog about many things in today's world. However, one thing you can definitely say about them is that they anticipated and expected that the future would be very different from their own time and they knew they could not anticipate or dictate to future generations what government they would choose. They set down guidelines and checks and balances they hoped would stand the test of time, but even in their era there were cracks showing, and there was violent disagreement over the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights.
There was also no shortage of nepotism and incompetence and self-centeredness among the elites, from the era of Virginia's dominance to Tammany Hall, and most certainly within the Confederacy.
The founders, if you took to the time to explain to them how institutions like the NSA came about, would eventually understand the concept of intelligence and national security, be concerned about privacy and individual rights, but would probably be a lot more upset about rise of federalism following the Civil War. (Though they would probably understand why and how the Civil War happened.)
Please put to rest this tired argument made by people like you and Kulak that "The Founding Fathers lived for violence and wanted regular bloodbaths, would be horrified that you have allowed (Thing I Don't Like), and cry from the grave for you to slaughter your political opponents." That is not who they were and it was not the world they sought.
I am not very up on Roth stuff, but wpuld things change if receipt storage were completely trivial? The way my, and I assume nearly all, HSA works is that I submit receipts to the conpany that manages the HSA, and then those credits for withdrawal and ready for me whenever I want to use them. There is no receipt tracking because I just submit immediately.
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