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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. It was one administrative division with Chechnya in the USSR and the Chechen insurgency frequently spilled over. Ingush and Chechen are closely related languages. It’s believable that this was Islamists from there but again— it’s going to be impossible to verify anything the Kremlin says, and no matter what happened the aftermath actions will serve pre-existing Kremlin goals.
  2. It could very well have been some Islamic/Caucuses based extremists. It’s important to remember that Russia’s security services are directed at repression and subterfuge and not keeping people safe. They have atrophied. It is unlikely we will receive reliable information from the Kremlin.
  3. Death toll in Moscow reportedly up to 40 and hundreds injured. Also reports that 4/5 gunmen escaped.
  4. In Moscow armed men cut lose with automatic weapons and have killed up to a dozen at a concert hall/shopping mall. Reminder that the U.S. Embassy warned about the potential for attacks recently. I will not believe this is anything but Russian authorities doing a replay of the apartment bombings absent compelling counter-evidence.
  5. One seat majority for the GOP. Gonna be amazing if one more goes.
  6. While it’s important to place the blame at the feet of Republicans, it is equally important to note that House Progressives and the Squad are joining forces with Mike Johnson to prevent a vote on a bill that their party supports and negotiated.
  7. None of the people who are pushing for a recall and shutdown are threatened. And they don’t actually care about their colleagues or ever getting a majority. Republicans yearn to be the permanent minority.
  8. Yesterday I was on a transatlantic flight and as I was watching a movie I kept hearing some odd singing that didn’t fit in with the soundtrack. After about 15 minutes I traced it to a seat catty-corner and across the aisle from me where a middle aged American woman was listening to contemporary Christian music on her iPhone with headphones in and singing along.
  9. Amateur, he should have lured the owner of the stolen passport to the bathroom and choked him unconscious and left him tied up.
  10. Q: Wow, young people are really down and pessimistic, what’s going on? A: Fucking government workers. LOL. Completely unserious.
  11. Oh, and we painstakingly crafted this entire continent that used to be home to major powers and the epicenter of war and turned it into our own little client kingdom of wealthy people and tourist attractions. And the people there actually like it. Lol, yes we need to defend our empire against possible barbarian aggression.
  12. Most of Europe is going the right way but the capacity has atrophied in a real way. The West made some strategic choices that are coming back to bite us. My blistering hot take is that the United States should be the one to step up because we can easily do it without breaking a sweat and because it’s the right thing and because it’s good for us if Russia loses.
  13. The public sector is inefficient compared to the private sector as experienced by the client because the public sector’s budgets, hiring authorities, and revenues are set by the legislative process which is not responsive to shifting demands, technologies, etc. Even the highly professionalized public sectors are vulnerable to this, as you can see when the Army decides it doesn’t need a base anymore but Congress says it does. And we keep electing people who tell you outright that they are going to deliver less efficient and good services in exchange for lower taxes. You can’t throw some genius MBAs at that simple dynamic and fix it. There are not a bunch of geniuses who ruthlessly manage geniuses in the private sector. They just are able to redistribute and invest resources in a quicker and more focused way because they don’t have a whole bunch of elected barons who are only accountable to voters they can dupe calling the shots. LOL, the private sector actively fucks up the public sector. The IRS has a pilot online filing system in some places that’s actually pretty good. It took this long and you can’t use it because private tax preparers have been lobbying to keep the IRS paper based and shit.
  14. I’d like to throw out two additional reasons COVID was uniquely bad for young people. Keep in mind that the 18-22 year old cohort was 14-18 in 2020. First, COVID was most dangerous to older people but the social consequences and responsibility fell disproportionately on the young. There were no PPP loan vacations, no COVID speakeasies, no cheating on masking. The kids were given the task of not making the olds sick. Unlike most crises where the grownups do all they can to ease things for the young. Second and likely more important— young people very much need grownups to keep their shit together when things are uncertain and scary. We did NOT keep our shit together. Vietnam is a good example, we had intense and even angry debates but we we all agreed it was serious and real. We subjected teenagers to absolutely insane shit, apocalyptic fear from some and total conspiracy raving from others. Takes from “it’s not real” to “all of you may die” to “fuck your dying grandma because I got an AirBnB in Panama City. “ And also announced how the doctors all lie and are making you sick. So I imagine there are downstream consequences when they see a good chunk of authority figures exit stage left from reality. Why should they have any trust in us going forward?
  15. Vaqueros to the Southland. Had been tough sledding for them in the WAC.
  16. What is her take on the mental health thing? Because the way the question is framed has strong vibes of “why do people in chemo die of cancer more often than people not in chemo?”
  17. Jaguars are awesome. They used to be at home in the RGV and up into brush country. They had a stuffed one at the Laguna Atascosia wildlife reserve welcome center that explained how they’d lived there and then been extirpated by mid-20th century. Still, I was obsessed, believing when we walked around that MAYBE they’d missed one, MAYBE one crossed over from Mexico and might still be lurking.
  18. There are so many non-market based incentives and tweaks that are at play here. The issue is that they are the status quo and attempt to use similar tools to get a different outcome is seems as market interference rather than rebalancing incentives. I don’t want to move cloakroom and to keep it on topic so I’ll leave it there. Every market is always regulated and the question is only “in favor of whom.”
  19. There’s also an escalating cycle with cars and safety. “Protect your family by putting them on the INSIDE of this family-crushing machine.”
  20. You do have a point but let’s draw a line under this for now.
  21. The house size thing (I also have a violent reaction to saying we build “homes” and not “houses”) is not just unrealistic consumptionism. Zoning and NIMBY has made it damn near impossible to profitably build smaller. All those post-War American dream suburbs couldn’t be built in most cases. More “fuck you, I want my house value to go up” mentality.
  22. Wow, you really want to protract this little game don’t you?
  23. Counterpoint that ties into the influencer lifestyle and fraying social ties: I cannot count how many weddings I have been to in my life (mostly pre-college) where the ceremony was at a church where the couple attended and the reception held at the church hall or a social club hall where a parent belonged or at a nice house’s yard that was a family friend or something. The cost was decorations, catering, clothes, and a few hundred to the officiant. And no one blinked an eye or felt they got cheaped out. The max expectation that was for rich people was a country club reception. Want another example? What about Little and Pony League having shirts sponsored by a garage or law office, and the coaches are all dads who got shanghaied into doing it? How the fuck did baseball become a rich kid’s sport where its travel team or nothing? What model do you think left mom, dad, and kid more well adjusted? I generally think that Michael Moore is a total ass but bowling alone touched a nerve. If you want a better mood join the Elks. Coach a youth sport. We’ve turned so many community activities into nothing or just businesses.
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