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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. 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.
  2. It’s been kind of an explicit deal. We made a lot of Foreign Military Funding available as grants to the Poles, Czechs, and others to help backfill.
  3. There have been some seen in those markings. And kind of an open secret they use them as a baseline for testing and developing sensors.
  4. Kind of a weird broken at both ends system. It is wonderful we de-stigmatized mental health treatment. But I think we have a lot of fairly normal and healthy people paying for therapy while we have a lot of REALLY sick people who can’t pay for it and aren’t getting it. There are some really weird incentives to making medicine a profit center.
  5. Yep, it’s related. Just pointing out that these aren’t things we’d have a shortage of so hopefully won’t take as long
  6. I would imagine that the Nighthawk has some really similar characteristics to PRC and RU “stealth” fighters. Having them as aggressors that can simulate near-peer opponents will be super useful.
  7. These aren’t things that have been flowing to Ukraine. This is the Poles upgrading the F-35s and F-16s they have on order or already delivered to go beyond air policing.
  8. Exactly. Like some sort of polite Politbureau.
  9. My hot take on the Balkans is that the United States was in a unique position to cool shit down because no one really knew or cared about the various Mystical and Ancient Balkan grievances and so we were just identify the pressing problem (the Serbs were being assholes) and sort things out from there. It is not always to our benefit to have too much context, it can lead to decision paralysis and empathy for manipulative actors. And this is not a knock against you, but there’s a generation of senior folks who learned at Holbrooke’s knee and who gave their lives to understanding the Balkans. We almost know too much and people got too emotionally invested. And now we can’t just get a coherent and clear action together. And the Serbs are still being the assholes.
  10. Yeah, I mean— I am furious about climate change. And all of us olds have had decades to do something but instead we pretend it’s not happening. Maybe the youngs really do need therapy because we constantly gaslight them.
  11. I’d kind of like a slow shift to where she starts disappearing from archived photos and stuff. And the palace just acts confused when asked. To gaslight people into believing she was a mass hallucination like the Sinbad genie movie.
  12. Housing costs are fucking insane and it is truly nuts that in the United States we are going through it. We just aren’t building and there is another huge issue. We’be told people forever that their house is the biggest investment and not a place to live. We have TONS of actual boomers sitting around in houses that should have been sold to a young or growing family a long time ago so they could downsize. But the incentive is to sit on them, for good reason. I don’t blame them for that but do blame them for NIMBY refusal to just build more normal size houses.
  13. Let me preface this by saying that COVID was dangerous and we did the best we could with hard choices. That said: - It absolutely wrecked young people’s shit to all go home for like a year and half. We forget that a year is a damn long time to a kid and that people 15-25 are the ones who most need to be around peers. We are still unwinding what that means and of course in the U.S. we did it the hard way. - Youth social media is WACK. I really believe TikTok’s algorithm is tweaked to show young people videos of people who are unhappy and unstable and want you to feel that way, too. I am a huge believer in mental health and therapy when needed but there’s a whole, very popular genre, of influencers insisting that normal life challenges like going on a bad date or having a shitty job for a while are in fact brutal trauma.
  14. I am sitting in one of my favorite haunts in Prague, sipping a cold lager in one of the few true Czech places left in the Mala Strana. And reading this and thinking on it is hitting me hard. My roots back home aren’t as deep as Brisket’s. At least one branch that dates back to pre-1836 and the rest between statehood and shortly after the Civil War. Almost all of them the typical Scots Irish, people who get bored with something as soon as it’s built and who aren’t happy without something or someone to fight with. And they wandered all over Texas, too. Trying but never mastering anything from farming to wildcatting to running a grocery all over the state from Wise to Ector counties. Before moving south, learning Spanish, and trying to do something along the Rio Grande (getting it ready for the stolid Swedes and Germans who had the tenacity to actually turn the delta into a garden). But aways Texas. Which offered plenty of space to wander and find things to struggle against. Until it didn’t. And I left and haven’t come back. And my daughters are a marvel, living in 5 and 4 countries in under 12 years. Never blinking at anything foreign, gracious, brave, broad minded. If pressed, home would be the Valley, where their grandparents are and where they spend every summer. But while they think of it as home, it’s clear— home doesn’t think of them the same way. They are not from there and never can be. And when their grandparents are gone, what will it be? Likely just memories of sand and mesquite and bird calls and the big sky. There’s a cost to the gift of never feeling out of place anywhere— you also never really feel at home. And I wonder at whether they’ll want to keep the gift once the full cost is known.
  15. Nilgai are a different one to me. I know some ranches manage them (and you can make a killing selling guided hunts). But in the lower RGV and brush country they are just feral. There’s too many of them. They don’t belong there, really. Kill all you want how you want. Most nilgai hunts are a challenge anyway.
  16. I didn’t realize till I moved to Europe that they don’t have black bears and that all the bears are brown bears— of which the grizzly is a subspecies. Anyway, there are now somewhere around 1000 in Slovakia which is a lot for a small country of 5 million. Here’s one that stirred up things in Liptovsky Mikulas, which is a decent sized town.
  17. I thought for some reason @troph was being extremely polite and using Early Modern English to show the bugs their way off the court.
  18. Absolutely. Dog fighting is still a thing with money involved and the serious dog fighters breed and pore over genealogies as much as any show-dog breeder looking for the perfect poodle. And there are people who don’t fight dogs but want a “tough” looking dog and there are breeders for those types of pit as well. Somewhat counterintuitively, the dogs bred for looks can be much more of a problem when it comes to people than the fighting strains. Those breeders just cross chunks of muscle together with no regard for temperament and health. The fighting dogs are much more predictable. They are ALL dog-aggressive.
  19. I think you get farther with a humane approach aimed at both safety and animal welfare. I can recognize that many of these dogs are beloved pets and they need to be neutered and treated kindly. And it is an animal welfare issue. Pits overwhelm the shelter system and are much more likely to be mistreated, abused, and used illegally. Breeders are the source of the dogs. People who like dogs should want to see these breeders put out of existence, they are the ones supplying grist for the animal abuse mill.
  20. Sedlec Ossuary is in Kutna Hora, weirdo. You’re not being a good bot.
  21. Nice to see this thread bumped. This is where I was today:
  22. It excludes all companies that are not making personal data of Americans available to the following nations:
  23. I’m not in favor of euthanizing all pits but I am in favor of sky-high insurance rates, HOA, muni, and similar breed bans, and mandatory neutering/spaying. Dog aggression is bred into the breed. So sorry about your doodle. As I’ve said before- these dogs are not endangered species or occupying some sort of vital role in the ecosystem. It’s just canis lupus familiaris that’s been bred to do something (fight and kill dogs) that we no longer need or even want. Unless you want to dog fight, there are dozens of breeds that can occupy the exact same role in your life for a loving, strong, energetic pet. The “owner not the breed” is just such bullshit. We freely admit that pointers are bred to point, border collies to herd, labs to jump in water and mud, terriers to go after rodents. That they WANT to do it. We only play this fucking game with the dog that was bred to rip other dogs to shred.
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