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Eastwood

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Eastwood

  1. 13 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

    I'm not some rah-rah Government guy, but I fucking hate when people try to make the "benefitting from government" argument and simplify it down to "roads and social services".   I can't tell if the folks making that argument are being disingenuous or if they are just too stupid to contemplate how many places the government is interwoven into the fabric of things they benefit from.  

    You are some 50something dude pulling a couple to three hundred K a year working a job in some industry that is heavily regulated and high barriers to entry make it tough for competition to enter your market place thereby making it easier for the company you work for to pay you what they pay you and not forcing you to sweat....yea you just benefitted financially from the work of the government.

    You refinanced your mortgage in 2020 and got a sweet 2.5% interest rate, saving you 40 thousand dollars in interest over the life of your loan. Yea, when Covid hit and most of the private money in the market shit its pants and ran for the hills that was Fannie, Freddie, FHA, and their government mandate/implicit guarantee standing in there making that possible.  Unless you really think you get the rates you get because of just how fucking awesome you are.

    I could go on and on, but the idea that one is only benefitting from the government by using the roads, or drawing social services etc is just so fucking bad. 

     

    Well, that and their argument ignores simple economics. They whine about people benefiting off of social services without "paying" but don't realize that the business that they own/pay them large salaries requires, to various degrees, a lower wage-earning populace that needs to use those roads to get to those jobs and use those services to subsidize their low wages that benefit those companies. The analogy of the renter down the street who pays $900 a month benefiting from the same services as the home owner the other side of the street, even though they don't pay property taxes, is ignoring that the person who owns the real estate that is being rented to... wait for it... earn a profit. So, take that gripe up with the owner of the rental, not the poor person renting it.

  2. 4 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    That’s rich

    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.” 

    • Hook 'Em 5
    • Like 1
  3. 14 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

    No, it did not. But they responded as protocols post Columbine were developed. You do not always see evil, you have to react to it. 

    I guess you have never been in a situation where evil presents. See them run past the kid in the hallway? They had to move, find and react. That is what they did. 

    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. 

    • Hook 'Em 3
  4. 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. 

  5. 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. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  6. 1 minute ago, Valmy77 said:

    That is a shitload of money to piss away. I hope this one extra year in the SEC is worth it.

    Anyway glad we finally have a definite end date.

    We pulled the "fuck you money" card out of the deck and slammed it on the table.

    • Hook 'Em 2
    • Drool 1
  7. 9 minutes ago, NoName said:

    why would they want to run people to much more secure means of discussion and contact (IE Signal) when they can just have them all in 1 place and have  backdoor into DMs, etc?

    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. 

    • Hook 'Em 3
    • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
  8. 35 minutes ago, Grade of D as in David said:

    I'll take a guess and based on the o/g profits coming in last year, they'll find a way to not lower prices even if demand wanes. Hell, they'll probably go up.

    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. 

    • Hook 'Em 6
  9. 19 minutes ago, phdhorn said:

    Understandable, but way too paranoid.
    We are not going to have an event like that in my, my kids', or my grandkids' lifetime. People forget just how utterly unworldly the combo of events were, it's probably more likely I'll win the lottery than that happening.  Maybe somethng close (3-4 days) but nope, no 10 day not-yet-hitting-25 degrees after FIVE winter storms in FIVE days.  

    I'm certain of it.  Period.

    You arrogant ass, you’ve killed us. 

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    • Like 1
  10. 6 minutes ago, phdhorn said:

    Yeah, yeah I'm still alive. I'm not Missing in Action, at least that's what the Chinese and Russians told me at the ladies' garden meeting (yeah, it's a reference to something).

    Not a poster much any more, by design.  Weather? Sometimes if needed. This one's borderline.

    Seriously, what do y' want to know about this, if anything?  I'll try to answer.

    How long have you been a degenerate ginger and why did you pick the name MissingInAction?

    • Haha 2
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