Jump to content

Eastwood

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    2,899
  • Joined

Everything posted by Eastwood

  1. I always hated that argument. “They have access to the same resources as everyone else! Why are they so poor?” The answer is that it is systematic wealth and poverty. An analogy that I use for this has two 18 year olds. One grew up as a carpenter’s son and the other grew up without any exposure to carpentry. You take them to a workshop, give them all the same exact tools, materials, and working conditions. If you were to tell them “you have one week to build me a canoe. The one who can build the best canoe gets $250k for college,” who in the hell do you think is going to win that competition? The carpenter’s son is the odds-on favorite by a long shot. Sure, the other kid might win, but it would only be in absolute fluke scenarios. 99 times out of 100, the carpenter’s son wins that purely based on his exposure to carpentry growing up. The point is that mere exposure to households that have college graduates or hard working people or business owners sets a particular tone for a person as they go out into the world. So, what do we do with the people who grow up in abject poverty? The ones who grow up with a single parent on welfare? The ones who have deadbeat parents? Do we just toss them to the trash heap or do we give them an opportunity to compete with everyone that didn’t have to struggle growing up? The cynic in me says that the real answer is traced back to the haves and the have-nots. Those who have benefited from their institutional advantages don’t want to share. “I worked hard for this! Why do I need to help lazy poor people?” Well, you didn’t have to work as hard as that poor person would to get where you are. You had advantages that you can’t even perceive because they were so embedded in your upbringing. Something that is just every day for you would be absolutely life changing for a truly poor person. Take food security, for example. There are millions of children and teenagers that won’t know where their meals will come from over the summer. How in the world are they supposed to even think about their future when they don’t even know if they can eat in the present? There’s more than enough resources to go around. Progressive tax is one mechanism to spread those resources out. I’m not going to slap my paystub down on the table, but I do very well. I enjoy a lot of creature comforts and my kids enjoy a way better lifestyle than I did growing up. A flat tax would have me paying less, but I have no problems paying more with the hopes that the extra I pay will go towards bettering society. “Society grows great when old men plant trees knowing they will never enjoy their shade.”
  2. So TJ really wasn’t TPE. So much history in this community and we lose a little of it, bit by bit, every year. As he goes, so goes a piece of the HornFans/Shaggy/Surly lore. Vaya con Dios.
  3. On mobile, so can’t paste the whole thing, but now being reported on CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news/index.html
  4. Tucker Carlson leaving Fox News after Dominion settlement, per CNBC chyron.
  5. Now being reported on CNBC.
  6. Is this not on ESPN+? Everything I read said it would be.
  7. That image got compartmentalized so they could finish the job, but they will be unpacking it for the rest of their lives at great expense to their mental health and wellbeing.
  8. How many false starts over the last 7 years does this make this? If nothing happens by next week, the name “BlueAnon” will be well earned.
  9. I am one of those rare types that Brisket talked about that can exist in both the rural world and urban world. I was born and spent half of my childhood in Small Town, Texas. Half of my family still lives in Small Town, Texas and I visit them regularly. I live in a big city and frequent many downtown areas in other big cities around the nation. I’ve ridden horses, herded cattle with catahoula cowdogs, and pulled a breach birth calf out of a cow. I also have a post graduate education, work white collar, and have enjoyed big city comforts for two decades. I’ve seen the slack jawed Cletus and the homeless camps. I’ve talked to the proverbial big city welfare queen and the farmer who gets by on ag subsidies. Neither know a damn thing about how the other lives or how they got there, but they hate each other because they were told that they have to. They have been told that the other benefits off of their burdens. We’re all fighting the same struggle. It only looks different on its face. The divide is there, has been there for decades, and getting deeper. Anyone who can’t see that is in their own bubble. What this country really needs is an honest look at the other side. Unfiltered. You’ll stop seeing Cletus and Welfare Queen and start seeing people who are systematically suffering from the same issues.
  10. Think Devolution by Max Brooks, but instead of Bigfoot, it’s Bastrop hillbillies.
  11. If I was any good at Photoshop or After Effects, I’d put Elon in as Walter claiming that the elder Lebowski isn’t even disabled, then throwing him to the ground.
  12. That’s always the dream, isn’t it? Ground floor of a startup using other people’s money to build an acreage position, get a couple of wells flowing so you can show PDP and advertise some PUDs, then ride off into the sunset after acquisition until you get bored and do it all over again.
  13. The US home front is weak, but not with regards to China. China is one of the few issues where there is a majority consensus. Human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and how they handled COVID has created a unified front against China in the US for at least another 10 years. China may even have more bad will in the US than Russia currently has and that’s saying something.
  14. CNBC was showing stock ownership at 205% and Citadel was a major holder. Gee, I wonder what happened there…
  15. This video also applies to street racers…
  16. We pulled the "fuck you money" card out of the deck and slammed it on the table.
  17. Put on your tinfoil hats, gang, because we’re doing a conspiracy deep dive. The Saudis, with their entire modern existence tied to fossil fuels, targeted the narcissist who has been the face of the worldwide push to green energy and whose most popular and lucrative product is a direct competitor to the internal combustion engine. They back his Twitter bid knowing that he will have to put up stock to buy it, they have the psychological profile research that would indicate that he would become obsessed with Twitter and destroy his image, and simultaneously become a pariah to his target customers while potentially ruining him financially and getting removed from his own company. Sounds like a good movie script. And in reality, it always seemed really weird that Elon Musk would want to be cozy with the Saudi Royal family. Why not shack up with Exxon and Chevron while you’re at it. As to why the Saudis want to cozy up to Elon, it’s the same reason that they get close to anyone: looking for a good place to stick a knife.
  18. It’s a capital intensive endeavor and not all basins/assets are created equal. As prices increase, exploration fires up in areas with higher breakeven prices, supply goes up until it meets demand. Then demand wanes, prices go down, exploration wanes, supply wanes, and the bottom falls out. The industry takes about 6 months to respond to increases in demand, but about only 2 months to respond to decreases in demand. That’s why it is a boom/bust business. Everyone chases the high prices, produces themselves out of business, the healthiest companies devour the smaller, rinse and repeat until the final bust in 2063 or whenever. Saying that oil companies are jacking up prices never made sense. Their product is an openly traded commodity. They get paid based on the market indicies tied to their midstream contracts. They scored huge profit because the market dictated that the price of their product was very high in 2022. They’re not barreling oil and placing it on store shelves like it’s Coca Cola.
  19. You arrogant ass, you’ve killed us.
  20. How long have you been a degenerate ginger and why did you pick the name MissingInAction?
  21. The spike in the stock price feels like a bull trap that would unravel all the gains rapidly the moment some bad news hits.
×
×
  • Create New...