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Snake Diggity

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Posts posted by Snake Diggity

  1. 28 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

    Look our government has its stress test and turns out it was not designed for this level of stupidity in the population.  We can look forward to restricting voting to property owners soon.  It is not going to look anything like the old system.

    I think the populace has been this stupid for a long time (possibly since the beginning), but technology (social media) made it incredibly easy for ill-intended authoritarian super-wealthy shitbags to take advantage.

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  2. 2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

    As I sit here and watch College Gameday while the president openly and brazenly robs the American people day after day, literally trying to take funds from the treasury now, while the rest of the government just allows it to happen, along with inflicting pain upon the weakest in our society on a daily basis, I realize that the game is over.  We aren’t going to fix this. He figured out we are too dumb and complacent to stop it now. If we had stopped him after January 6th, we might have had a chance. That will be the moment in history where the American experiment truly failed. Now it’s all over but figuring out which oligarchs get what. 

    When I read this post it’s actually amazing me.  He’s literally taking money directly from the Treasury and putting it into his bank account and nobody is making any meaningful effort to stop him.

    Im off the ledge.  Its over.  We are all just living in the epilogue.

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  3. 2 hours ago, Pig Bellmont said:

    Well, democracy was fun while it lasted 

    This is the type of thing that should spark something.  Ideally it would superjuice democratic voter turnout everywhere.  The motherfuckers are trying to intimidate people into not voting.  That HAS to be met with an overwhelming response of people asserting their rights.  If not it’s over.  It’s probably over.

    For awhile I have thought the final test would be Trump trying to remain President beyond 2028.  But now I think that’s too late and it’ll be the mid-terms.  If there’s not at least some kind of evidence that people are uniting against authoritarianism in some meaningful way, our democracy is finished.

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  4. If the Astros traded Jeremy Pena, Jake Meyers, and Mauricio Dubon and came away from the offseason adding Luis Arraez, Drew Rasmussen, Merrill Kelly, Victor Caratini, and 2 really good (Cam Smith level) prospects, how would we feel?

    CF Smith

    3B Paredes

    DH Alvarez 

    SS Correa

    LF Altuve

    2B Arraez

    1B Walker

    C Diaz

    RF Sanchez 

    bench: Urias, Caratini, Melton, Matthews

    SP: Brown, Rasmussen, Kelly, Javier, Arrighetti, Pearson

    RP: Hader, Abreu, Sousa, King, Okert, De Los Santos, McCullers

  5. 1 hour ago, Dbeasy said:

    There is one thing I forgot to mention about my strategy of winning over one friend at a time to be aware of Trump’s and the Republican’s shittiness.

    The whole idea originated from my success in flipping one guy who hung out closely with the other maga/conservative supporters in our group. 

    He had mentioned one thing to me year ago where he was confused about some stupid thing Trump had done. I used that as an opportunity to open a conversation. 

    However, I didn’t bombard him with thoughts, information and data. Instead I just provided a few key comments. And then over time I would maybe send him something here or there that was related to what we discussed. It took about six months, but by the end of he had had completely flipped. 

    He now is trying to flip one of our other guys, his best friend. I’m cautiously optimistic that between him and I we will have this guy flipped by January. 

    And there’s one other interesting side note. I knew nothing about Trump in 2015 when he ran for president. Being an independent, I liked the idea of a “business man” being in the White House. However, surly cloak room folks flipped me by well before Election Day, so that I didn’t vote for him. So surly flipped me in about 6 months too.

    One sad note from that time, even though I had flipped I remember after the election I still expressed hope that maybe all of his craziness would calm down now that he was president. Silly me. 

    You can flip one person in six months. Do it.  

     

    I was lucky that back in 2007 I read The Art of the Deal when I was in  a period where I was reading a shitload of biographies.  At the time I remembered Trump from being on a segment of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, and I figured “there’s got to be more to this guy”.  Reading that book cured me of that notion, and so going into 2016 I knew Trump was nothing but a smarmy trust fund baby douchebag.  So I’m proud that I never voted for him even though in 2016 I was still pretty conservative on quite a few issues.  That said, I never in a million years would have guessed that Trump would do as much damage to our country as he has done and is trying to do.

    My experience with talking to MAGA or MAGA-adjacent friends has been wildly different from yours.  I have found it to be a completely hopeless, depressing endeavor regardless of who I’m talking to and how delicately it is handled.  For the most part, I’ve ended up just learning more and more shit about my friends that makes me question whether I can sustain our relationship at all.  Even the friends of mine who I assumed were pretty level headed and intelligent and just voted for Trump because they were going along with the folks in their bubble turned about to be total shitbirds.  Honestly one of the most depressing moments of my life over the last decade was when one of my best friends, a great guy who was a groomsman in my wedding, who has a masters degree and is not someone I would at all have considered a complete dumbfuck, suggested on our group text thread in all seriousness that Donald Trump Jr. might make a good GOP nominee in 2028.  Fuck me running I still cringe when I think about that.

    Anyway, I’m glad you’re making headway with people in your circle but I’m not holding my breath for any kind of mass conversion short of an economic depression forcing everyone’s hand, which I don’t think is certain but is possible.  Otherwise the best realistic case is that he dies and things slowly go back to “normal”, so all the MAGA/Trumper fucks just stop talking about it and we can hopefully forget that so many people close to us are morally bankrupt morons.

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  6. 2 hours ago, Sbbruin said:

    I almost never pay attention to the prices when I go grocery shopping.  Not because I like pissing money away, I just grab what I need and it costs what it costs.  But the other day I had to do self checkout and it would say the prices out loud.  And I was like "what?  that cost HOW much?"  WTF, shit is crazy expensive.  If you are living paycheck to paycheck, which a staggering number of people do, you have to make some serious hard decisions when shopping.  

    spacer.png

    I purchased 3 regular sized candy bars (Butterfinger, Reese’s Stix, Peanut Butter Snickers) at the Cstore last week.  $11.  wtf?!?!

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  7. 2 hours ago, HRSchenker said:

    Is the decline in AISD enrollment primarily due to enrollment in private and charter schools? Here in DFW we're seeing a bunch of school closures and consolidation despite some of these areas being the fastest growing in the nation. Lots of people fleeing to the burbs but those people either don't have kids or they're not enrolling them in public school. It's a very strange phenomenon. 

    Demographic shifts and flight to suburbs.  Lots of childless people moving into Austin and lots of families moving out to Dripping Springs, Lake Travis, Cedar Park, Leander, Round Rock, etc.

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  8. As I transition into an old, futurism is something I have become very interested in.  I’d love for this thread to revive and have regular dialogue.  
     

    Anybody have any links/books for recommended reading on futurism?  I have read The Next 100 Years by George Friedman; I think his prediction of Turkey as an increased regional power will come true.  And depending on how the next 10-15 years go, I think his prediction of the US as a continued superpower will be correct.  I’ve also read Homo Deus by Yuval Harari.  It was very interesting but I dont know how much of it will actually happen.

    One thing I was looking at today via AI is what % of current workers/workhours we would need to sustain the standard of living of various points in the past given current technology.  This is what it/we came up with:

    1750: <1%

    1950: 10-20%

    1980: 15-30%

    2000: 40-50%

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  9. On 7/13/2018 at 5:58 PM, Paper_jam said:

    Everything (transportation, goods and services, government, housing, quality of life) is gradually going to become more crowded, more expensive, yet shabbier, crappier and dumber. Prepare for a "Soylent Green" kind of world by 2100 or 2150.  (Unless you are in the executive, high political, or financial class, who will wall themselves off in private luxury communities.)

     

     

    Winner

    On 7/13/2018 at 5:09 PM, Eastwood said:

    I remember stumbling across that website back in undergrad while doing some research for a project. Looks like that thing hasn't been updated in a long time. For instance, it said vertical farms will begin to become common in 2025. That is only 7 years from now and I don't see the need or the want to dump money into that, much less have heard about the desire to do so. Back when I originally read that 8 years ago, when peak oil and other Malthusian catastrophes were all the rage, that seemed like a smart, feasible solution? Now? It sounds like a massive boondoggle cooked up by Elon Musk.

    Just got back from Disney World and they have a ride called Living With The Land, which takes you through their onsite farm.  They had vertical farming there on a small scale that they use to supply some of the restaurants in the parks.

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  10. 53 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    How many fucking people do y'all think have nazi tattoos? What percentage of voters are you worried about alienating here? What percentage of voters do you think will be alienated by pretending that a candidate having a nazi tattoo shouldn't be a big deal? Think about the world in which "has a nazi tattoo" is a completely acceptable thing for a fucking Democratic candidate for public office to have. Think about what that would tell young men. Think about what it would tell Jews. Fuck, think about what it would tell all the young people who've recently been stomped on for advocating for Palestinian lives, which was characterized as unacceptable anti-Semitism.

    In two months those of you still stanning this guy are all going to be looking back at yourselves wondering how you could've been so dumb. I'm just trying to save y'all the time here. You know I'm right. 

     

    6 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    Chainsaw, "Politician says what I want to hear" is supposed to be the minimum they need to do to earn your vote, it's not supposed to mean you immediately agree to throw your basic sense and values into the garbage. I don't believe it's likely, but it's entirely possible that he's literally a fucking CIA plant they wanted to use to help steer voters on the left. His backstory could certainly align with that. Restless son of successful parents, joined the military to see action and got out and joined up with Blackwater to see more action. That's certainly a type of guy intelligence agencies like to recruit. But he said the right words about Gaza and used the term "oligarch" and now you're just gonna overlook all that plus a nazi death camp guard tattoo? A tattoo he clearly lied about and is only now removing while basically saying "fuck you if you got offended but yeah I guess I'll get rid of it"? 

    Again, this is not the redemptive arc you want it to be. He hasn't apologized, he hasn't demonstrated any growth, etc. He just said a few of the right things about a couple of topics you care about and you're willing to disregard a thousand red flags? You think the state that has re-elected fucking Susan Collins a hundred times is going to agree with you on this?

    I was wondering exactly what your theory was here, and it looks like “GOP CIA recruits Nazi to run as Democrat for Maine Senate”.

    That is fucking stupid.

    This guy got a stupid tattoo while drunk, didn’t know it was Nazi shit, found out, and is having it removed.  Now, getting that tattoo in the first place was not good.  And not finding out what it meant before now and having it removed was also not good.  Both of those things are really stupid and enough reason for a lot of people not to vote for him.  Nobody is “stanning” for him.  We just aren’t  flinging ourselves into conspiracy theory idiocy.

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  11. 34 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    You realize that Democratic party leadership just spent months coaxing a candidate into the race to run against him, right? He was never their choice. He didn't have to get party approval to run, that's not how it works. And it's absolutely plausible that he once held nazi beliefs, because he got a fucking SS death camp guard logo tattooed on himself.

    I know the party didn’t have to approve him entering the race.  But he didn’t come completely out of nowhere.  Even if he did (he didn’t), the party should have immediately sniffed this out and called it out.  “Whoa whoa whoa this dude is not one of us, he has a Nazi tattoo, errbody take a step back from this mf” is not that hard to do.  It’s especially important because now the guy’s campaign has momentum and dollars that could have gone elsewhere.

    If the tattoo is affiliated with nazism and he didn’t get it removed immediately after finding that out, he is an epic dumbshit and should be out of the race, for being too stupid to be a Senator.  But there is no reality where he is a secret Nazi.

  12. 16 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

    The Pod Save interview was clearly an attempt to try to get out in front of the Jewish Insider story, which was most likely a Republican hatchet job, not a Democratic hatchet job. That's not the type of place they'd leak this to. 

    The likeliest explanation is that he's a fucking idiot and he's always been a fucking idiot. That's why he was a jarhead in the first place, that's why he and his boys got nazi tattoos they probably thought looked cool as shit, and that's why he's posted a mixture of completely fine and reasonable and very stupid shit all over Reddit (and probably elsewhere online) for the past decade. His politics have probably evolved somewhat but are likely still largely incoherent because he's an idiot, but he figured out how to speak in a register that appeals to liberals and leftists who are looking for someone who seems like they'll actually fight Republicans. I get the appeal and why people are trying to defend him, but this guy ain't it.   

    Nobody gives a fuck about info from Jewish Insider.  The tattoo story got legs right before the podcast interview so the guy had to ask about it.  They might’ve discussed it before the interview but it’s extremely unlikely that the Jewish Insider piece was why he went on the podcast.

    If the tattoo really does have nazi affiliation, and the dude was made aware of it anytime before 2 weeks ago, and didn’t get it removed, then he’s an epic dumbass, and that would be what would disqualify him as a candidate.  And it’s damning of the Democratic Party leadership that this wasn’t sniffed out before he even announced his candidacy.  But it’s really not plausible that the guy is some secret nazi or ever actually held nazi beliefs.

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  13. 39 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

     

    Astros prospects showing really well in the fall league.  Janek has been one of the best overall players in the whole league so far.  Sullivan is playing really well.  Hicks and Brito have been extremely good thru 2 appearances each.  I expect that Wohlgemuth and Leach will be like Danny Meszaros but overall Houston’s farm is looking good based on what we’ve seen in Arizona so far.

  14. Just now, SubliminalHorn said:

    Yeah I guess ineffectual that trump isnt going to step down or anything. But it creates momentum. We need more of these. They may eventually a weekly or daily thing if things get worse enough 

    I am probably just being cynical.  But I looked around, and even though there were tens of thousands of people down there, I just saw a bunch of people who voted for Harris and Biden and Clinton.  I didn’t see anyone acting nearly angry enough; people were acting happy and enthusiastic.  And even though it’s millions of people across the country I don’t think any one in power on either side is going to really take any kind of positive action because of it.

    We’ll get a temperature check in 12.5 months with midterm results, but things just feel too far gone.

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  15. I just got back from the one in Austin.  It was my first political rally/protest of any kind.  The crowd was very large, but to me it felt…ineffectual.  Im glad I went but I think the time for that stuff was 2-10 years ago.  I was surprised there weren’t more Trumpers out there.

    I still predict we don’t get out of this mess without a lot of violence and an economic depression.

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  16. 28 minutes ago, YChang said:

    I wonder how soon we organically just have anti-Abbott protests here? His naked political ambition is just plain gross at this point. And the sad thing is no one outside of Texas cares about him. 

    I don’t understand what he’s gunning for.  He has zero chance of getting on the 2028 POTUS ticket.  Is he aiming to be in the next cabinet?  He really sold out quickly.

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  17. 27 minutes ago, Lamar said:

    That’s fine. This thread, and my comments, are regarding Austin ISD School Consolidation. You want to talk about vouchers for Brownfield, go start a thread.

    Other states? Austin is a city. Austin has Montessori, charter, magnet, public, private, home, all-girl, etc….school options. Pick your preference. 

    You can’t be serious.  Have you done ANY reading whatsoever on this topic?  What evidence can you cite that shows vouchers improve outcomes for students in the lowest 50% of household incomes?

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  18. 2 hours ago, ZB'Tejas said:

    Opposite? I thought the voucher system did have some mechanism for prioritizing disabled and low income families? I'm not totally in favor of vouchers and am more focused on Austin continuing an open transfer system so I have more choices... but as a resident of East Austin where the school choices are already rough and only going to get worse as they consolidate ( awful ones joining the mediocre ones or vice versa) I would like some good options. My preferences is not private but I have plenty of neighbors that do not send their kids to public and instead go for private or charter. Furthermore as our 60% of our school tax dollars dollar go outside of Austin I can see that vouchers could be attractive when your options that are paid for from tax dollars are not great.

    Vouchers make the problems caused by recapture worse, not better.  Incentivizing residents to pull their kids out of the system means less resources for the district.  Not just the reduction in funding but also the reduction in other resources brought by families who can afford private schools.  I pointed this out in my email to the decision makers in this current process; my 2 kids have a combined 18 years of schooling left, so pulling my kids out of AISD means a reduction of ~$270,000 in funding to the district over that time.  On top of that, my wife and I have donated several thousand dollars per year to our kids’ public schools via fundraisers etc., and my wife volunteers a couple hundred hours per year at the school, and that all goes away as well.

    There’s a logical theory that vouchers could eventually improve an education system by having private enterprise build up to offer quality affordable options, but that’s only possible over a very long time frame and with a lot of luck.  The guarantee is that in the short and medium term, poor urban kids get royally fucked even worse than they already are.

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  19. We’ve been mostly satisfied with Baldwin elementary.  We lost our really good principal to retirement this year and they’ve been bleeding good teachers like everywhere else, so I’m not all that happy about the trajectory.  But when I researched private schools 5 years ago I was just not impressed with any of them.  I just think our society has deprioritized education and so good schools are few and far between.  We’ve kind of decided to just ride it out in AISD.  If our kids become super unhappy or are just not progressing then we will be forced to do something but I don’t know what that would be.  I really hope my oldest can go to LASA and that it’s still as good as it is now in 4 years.  My youngest is not going to be able to go to LASA so if Bowie sucks then we will have to do private, but that’s still 6 years away.

    I learned during preschool that nowhere is going to meet what I think the standard ought to be, so childcare and education are going ti be constant disappointments for me until my kids are grown.

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  20. Listened to the live Q&A session tonight.  The director of planning came off pretty sharp but pretty much every other person, including Superintendent Segura, came off pretty unprepared and incapable.  The call started late, had technical difficulties, then had 10+ min of the consultant moderator going over needless administrative points before they actually got to the Q&A.  
     

    Anything on this topic should always be prefaced with the fact that AISD is only in this position because of the restrictions that state and federal govt have put on them; give the district $800M more in funding and all of a sudden every body with kids in AISD would be more than satisfied.
     

    I am focused on SW Austin and here were my other takeaways:

    Seems like they focused more on distance than commute when redrawing zones, which is stupid as fuck.  They moved a bunch of people from Gorzycki to Small middle school, meaning families are going from a 1 min commute to a 20+ minute commute even though the distance is only a couple miles different, because to get to Small they’ll have to go thru the Y (290/71 split) in Oak Hill.  To their credit they said they are looking at it so I have hope they’ll fix it.  This was the only change that affected my family so I’m hopeful, but if they don’t fix it a ton of well-resourced people are going to be fucking pissed.  It doesn’t seem like they put much thought into how many families will go private due to these changes and how that will affect district funding.

    Eanes being its own thing is really fucking up the high school zoning.  There are a bunch of kids in SW Austin that are gonna get royally fucked having to go all the way to Crockett or Austin High instead of Bowie, when really most of them should be going to Westlake if they aren’t going to Bowie.

    Segura gave lip service to a question about transfers for folks who purchased a home specifically for the schools they were zoned to; he said they were looking at it, but my takeaway is that those people are fucked.  Same thing around families who have been rezoned between kids and want their subsequent kids to go thru the same vertical the previous kids went to.

    Overall most of the responses were non-answers, especially during the academic and transfer portions.

     

  21. 1 hour ago, austingirl said:

    I posted this Wired article in a different thread a few weeks ago, but it's well worth the read.

    The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession
    Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

    Thanks for posting.  I read that when you posted it earlier.  There’s some bullshit in there but overall it’s a pretty clear picture of why Thiel is evil and crazy.

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