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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by bolverk

  1. 2 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

    When I used to be a Republican pre-2016 Trump takeover, I would find myself on the same side of arguments with TennesseeHorn, Tahoe, Swam abc Clearlake on a pretty frequent basis.

    I feel bad and ashamed about that.

    giphy.webp

  2. 3 minutes ago, Tennesseehorn said:

    I make 5x what your net worth is internet cowboy. 

    Says the know and proven liar. Both Brisket and I called you out on the old board and showed that - not only were you mistaken/misinformed on topics - but that you willfully lied to the community.  

  3. 2 minutes ago, Tennesseehorn said:

    Because I actually earn money and don’t live in my Mothers basement like you do.  That’s such an dumbass statement.  You probably don’t even have a job.  

    You quoted him twice because you earn money and don't live in your "Mothers [sic] basement"? That makes zero sense.

    How drunk are you right now?

  4. 5 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

    Fuck that fat bastard.

    Over the last year or so, I finally came to peace with the fact that the fat man will never finish the series.

    5 hours ago, slorch said:

    bring it.

     

    It's as  good as anything else on TV...

    1

    Gagreed. I'll watch the shit out of it. RR, I don't think, has it in him to write any more novels, but his world and its stories are still in his head. If they can only come out on the screen now instead of on paper, I suppose I can live with that. I hope HBO milks his brain for whatever is left in there before he croaks. 

  5. 19 minutes ago, Bevo VIII said:


    Isn’t he too young to be a boomer in that show?

    I never watched the show, but Jeff Daniels was born in 1955. So, yeah, he is most certainly a boomer. As for the setting and time period of the show, I can only guess that it's supposed to be contemporaneous to our time due to the students filming him with their cell phones.

  6. 14 minutes ago, TDunk said:

    Holy shit, this was 5 years ago and still needs to be The posted.

     

     

     

     

    The only disagreement I have with this is a fucking Baby Boomer calling a 20 yo girl part of the worst.generation.evar. No, you are fucker. Every stat he cites happened on the watch of the leadership of his generation - not hers.

    Other than that, yeah, it is brutally honest.

  7. My 77 yo mom is in town, and we celebrated her birthday by taking her to her favorite restaurant (Golden Corral - no, I'm not joking), a movie (Book Club), and watched the Congress Bridge bats.

    Book Club sucks, but she enjoyed it. It's about 4 grandmothers (Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, etc.) reading 50 Shades of Gray for their book club and then getting horny and testing the dating waters again. All ends well for horny grandmas as they land their beaux. Awkward af.

    Kill me...

  8. 7 hours ago, krutov said:

    i had this username for years on shaggy.  long before trump.  you can check.

     

     

    2

    Krutov has a grand total of 99 posts from Nov 2013 until present on shaggy and has the same posting style: use of English spelling (e.g., neighbour) and lack of capitalization. Could certainly be someone's sock.

    • Haha 1
  9. No "new" news, but this is a nice discussion on the role that incentives play in the business recruitment game. There is, however, mention of both Amazon and Austin.

    Why Cities Can’t Stop Poaching From One Another

    SAN FRANCISCO — Near the bottom of the lengthy ballot San Francisco voters considered this week, in this state famous for its abundant and oddball ballot initiatives, Proposition I asked voters to establish a policy of not coveting other cities’ sports teams.

    The measure was part apology for poaching the Golden State Warriors from Oakland, part declaration of city principles (“San Francisco Will Not Endorse or Condone the Relocation of Any Team With an Extensive History in Another Location”). Voters, who said yes to several tax increases, looked at this largely symbolic measure and voted “no.”

    That result was perhaps predictable; coveting what others have is implicit city policy nearly everywhere. The doctrine explains why corporations are so successful at extracting tax breaks from competing communities, why sports teams know their relocation threats usually work, why Amazon’s HQ2 sweepstakes has prompted such a bloated bidding war.

    Economists largely agree that it’s bad economic development policy for communities to give in to this impulse, one-upping one another with handouts. That’s money diverted from education or infrastructure, and it goes to companies and teams that would most likely make many of these moves anyway. After all, they have to locate somewhere. If no one were playing the incentive game, someone would get them free. Instead, everyone is spending lots of money shuffling these prizes around.

    The more intriguing question, then, is not whether these deals make sense, but why politicians and voters are so keen on them.

    “It’s a little baffling, given that there seems to be such consensus on these programs,” said Nathan Jensen, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

    He and Edmund Malesky at Duke University argue in a new book that much of what’s going on here is pandering by politicians. Voters want jobs, which are hard to deliver. Ribbon cuttings and splashy announcements about, say, a new Foxconn factory in Wisconsin, a new Boeing plant in South Carolina or more Nestle jobs in Indiana are the most visible way to show action on an issue voters deeply care about.

    “Just like you could with immigration blame immigrants for crime — because it’s popular, even if you don’t believe it’s true — you can use incentives as a way to take credit for economic development,” Mr. Jensen said. “Even if you know a company is coming anyway.”

    The inverse is also true: Incentives help politicians deflect blame when a company bypasses them. At least they clearly tried.

    In survey experiments, Mr. Jensen and Mr. Malesky have found that people are more likely to say they’d vote for a governor when told the official helped secure a hypothetical thousand-job manufacturing plant. Independent voters even prefer a governor who offers generous tax incentives to score such a plant over a governor who secures investment without ponying up. These results suggest that politicians pick up votes by offering giveaways, whether they land companies or not.

    Mr. Jensen and Mr. Malesky have also found that directly elected mayors offer bigger incentives and demand less oversight of deals than indirectly elected city managers. In other words, the politicians most responsive to voters offer the most. That dynamic may help explain why even some public officials reluctant to bid on Amazon did so anyway.

    “What mayor could afford to be tagged as not being active on jobs?” said Greg LeRoy, the executive director of the group Good Jobs First, which has fought against incentives. “In the fall of 2017, being active on jobs was defined as bidding for Amazon’s HQ2. Then how could you not?”

    An Elon University poll conducted this spring of residents in 16 metro areas that are Amazon finalists found a striking amount of support for offering the company incentives. In Denver, 17 percent of people said the region should offer nothing. And that was the highest share of any metro. In nearly every community, more people said “we should offer as much as possible” than “we should not offer any financial incentives.”

    The question wording didn’t present alternative uses of the money, but that’s not how incentives are typically framed to the public. Respondents across these cities who supported doing whatever it takes to lure Amazon cited the additional tax revenue and taxpayers they expected the community to get in exchange.

    “Even in the most hostile communities for Amazon, like Denver and Austin, there’s still enough support that folks could run a campaign off of it,” said Jason Husser, the director of the Elon poll. In that poll and others, he said, voters don’t appear to be weighing the long-term costs of incentives (of, say, giving resources to companies and sports teams instead of schools). “They’re thinking about the prestige get, whether that’s an Amazon headquarters or a sports team,” Mr. Husser said.

    Politicians dangle incentives because voters want them to. And voters want them to in large part because politicians say that incentives make a real difference. “The dirty big secret,” Mr. LeRoy said, “is that they don’t.”

    Location decisions often ultimately turn on quirks like the C.E.O.’s personal preferences. And most companies, including sports franchises, have higher priorities than tax breaks. Amazon’s request for bids was full of them: a specialized labor force, a good transit network, an airport hub, major universities to produce workers and amenities to keep them.

    Consultants once had to contact cities to obtain all of that information, said Chris Steele, who runs the North American practice for the location strategies firm Investment Consulting Associates. Now much of it is easily accessible in public data. By the time consultants reach out to cities today, they really only need to ask two questions they don’t already know the answers to: What real estate is available? And what incentives are you offering?

    “It’s created an illusion that incentives are much more important in the process than they really are, and/or that it’s the only thing communities have left that they can actually do something about,” Mr. Steele said.

    Incentive deals also often include “but for” clauses, statements companies sign pledging that they wouldn’t come to town, or create these jobs, but for the incentives. Those lines offer political cover, too. And they further perpetuate the public belief that communities have to keep entering these bidding wars.

    In San Francisco, Allen Jones believes the solution, at least with sports teams, is for more cities to make a pledge like Proposition I. Mr. Jones, a longtime San Francisco resident, wrote the ballot initiative.

    “San Francisco has no excuse for taking from our neighbors when we have so much,” he said. And not long ago, he points out, the city was on the losing end of one of these deals, when the 49ers left Candlestick Park for a new stadium 40 miles south in Santa Clara County.

    “If we didn’t like it being done to us,” Mr. Jones said, “why are we doing it to someone else?”

  10. 9 minutes ago, TahoeHorn said:

    Is that good or bad?

    You know, you can find Senate subcommittee hearings on topics like that.  Guess how many of, say, 21 Senators on the committee will be there? 

     

    If they come at all they give a speech and leave.  On or two are designated to do their turn in the barrel and conduct the meeting.  You will not see 21 Senators in rapt attention.

    Anyone want to take bets on attendance this coming Wednesday on "Confronting Sexual Harassment and Other Workplace Misconduct in the Federal Judiciary"?

    https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/confronting-sexual-harassment-and-other-workplace-misconduct-in-the-federal-judiciary

     

    Wtf are you talking about? This isn't some quotidian subcommittee meeting.

    • Like 3
  11. 6 minutes ago, phdhorn said:

    This is just your juvenile way of reacting when someone might disagree with you.  Not unexpected, I've seen you do it a lot - including your admission of weakness by using ad hominem.  

     In any event, I don't give a fuck about your reaction.  I'm not trolling.  This was an article in that troll rag called "USA Today", the #1 read daily in the country.  And the article was about Canada's cracking down in illegally entering immigrants.  In actuality they're doing what should be done, going to the letter of the law.  I'm citing it as a good thing.
    
    As for the rest of the clamoring hordes, of course you completely misread the thing or my intent.  I don't fucking care.  You can shit yourself or you can talk intelligently.  Either way, 

     hqdefault.jpg

     

    But it IS funny watching some with absolutely no self-control shit themselves.   

    And on your "refugee totals" you'd better do some reading.  Your quote on "quota level" is embarrassingly off.  The article is talking about refugees.  The U.S. accepts over 1 million people per year.  Canada about 340,000 (both the U.S. and Canada have quotas, the U.S. about 3X Canada).
    
    On the Emma Lazarus poem, do you even know the history behind that?  Do you know the history behind U.S. immigration policy especially up to the 1990's?  No, you don't.  That's a whole 'nother argument.
    
    I'm not trolling, I've posted an article that simply made the fucking front page today, saying Canada is hustling to ensure that immigrants shouldn't expect to be able to enter the country, and whose policy is just as restrictive of the U.S.   Like this:
    
    Canada's immigration policy is actually stricter than the U.S.... they size people up for their potential for success and refuse entry if they feel they're unlikely to achieve it.  And Mexico is in another subject.
     The point of all of this except for the dumbshits that can't read/are blinded by their own hatred and ideology, is that Canada is just as, if not more, restrictive than the U.S.
    
    You wanna discuss the article, discuss the article.  You wanna fling monkey shit, it don't make a shit except to make you look dumber and less in control of your faculties.  Either way, have a nice fucking day.

    4

    I was referring specifically to this section:

    Quote

    The Canadian government has also increased the number of refugees it accepts to help ease the burden on European countries that are overwhelmed with people fleeing war and famine in the Middle East and Africa. The country is planning to accept about 43,000 refugees this year, increasing that to nearly 49,000 by 2020.

     Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been trying to limit legal immigration and has at times completely halted the refugee program in the name of national security.

    The administration is pushing legislation to reduce the number of legal immigrants admitted to the country, and it set a cap of 45,000 refugees for 2018, the lowest number since Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980. The administration may not even reach that number, however, as it has only approved 14,887 refugees through Friday with less than four months left in the fiscal year.

    And nice job of misquoting me. At no point, did I ever say "refugee totals".

  12. 2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    Latest scuttlebutt surrounds his directive to the EPA to relax asbestos regulations, which is something he's been banging on for at least 2 decades.  I'll send a slightly stale donut to the first person who correctly guesses where 55% of world's asbestos materials are mined.

    Where is Russia?

  13. If anyone's wondering why I'm so upset about this is that PhD, a very well-respected poster, comes in here and shits out this thread - all while remaining relatively silent on a myriad of other disgraceful shit going on right now.

    It's the sort of behavior one would expect from tinhorn, epicqueen, or dsa; not from one of surly's leading scholars and renaissance men. You're better than this, man.

  14. And to make sure you or anyone else reading this thread don't miss the point: On a per capita basis, Canada is accepting nearly 10 times the number of refugees than the US, and you dare to criticize them?

    Quote

    Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! 

    Talk about a misleading thread title.

    • Like 1
  15. Pathetic attempt at trolling. From your own article, Canada, a nation whose population is less than California, is announcing it is raising its refugee quota to a level that will actually be higher than that of the United fucking States.

    Why this sudden hard-on to criticize Canada, a country with a population that is only 10 times smaller than ours? Hmm... could it be that our piece of shit "president" is embarrassing himself by pissing off friends and coddling enemies at this very moment in that country?

    Nice job trying to deflect and distract from what really matters. PhD, I know you're a conservative, but I thought you actually had principles. I didn't realize you were such a partisan prick. 

    • Like 6
    • Haha 1
  16. 4 minutes ago, Chooky said:

    And if the DNC had anything resembling a collective direction or a goal they'd seize the popularity of the policy and force him to either co-opt the issue and jeopardize portions of that base or lose out entirely on the popular issue.  

    I stay fairly informed, lean a bit to the left and I still have no idea what point the DNC firmly wants to communicate.  Patting yourself on the back for not being an ignorant, orange buffoon isn't moving the needle.  Kissing your partner in a political ad isn't cutting edge.  Those large swaths of red that they lost right through the middle of the country aren't interested in a debate about gender pronouns.  Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi as the sun and moon of your universe won't carry the torch.  If the goal is to turn a wave into ripple, then the current stagnation is right on point.      

    We should just get Beto to write the DNC platform:

    https://betofortexas.com/issue/justice/

     

    • Like 1
  17. 52 minutes ago, Washpark said:
    What amount of evidence do people need at this point that Trump isn't compromised by Putin?
     

     

    This is what we've been warning about for the last two years. At Putin's behest, Trump is willing to trash the trans-Atlantic relationship that has been the foundation of peace and prosperity for 3/4 of a century. The signs of Trump's antipathy toward the West have been there since the beginning - even before suspicions of Russian support - including his support for Brexit (buddies with that fuckstick Farage) and his calling Nato "obsolete". Fuck anyone who supports this piece of shit. He's not just a traitor to the American people; he's a traitor to all modern Western values.

    • Like 2
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