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Brisketexan

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Everything posted by Brisketexan

  1. Too big a landing strip?
  2. Learned to drive in Houston. Lived in Austin for decades. Houston drivers: homicidal, engraged, and aggressive. Austin drivers: clueless idiots. I prefer Houston drivers by a wide margin, because "homicidal and aggressive" is predictable. They are all trying to kill me, and I know and respect that. Austin drivers, on the other hand, will come to nearly a full stop on the freeway because they aren't sure if that's their exit or not, will turn from any lane (they prefer the middle lane, I think, because it gives them "options") with zero warning, shit like that. Mean is better than stupid.
  3. * Unless that judge is Judge Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, in which case all of his rulings have full nation-wide effect for.....reasons.
  4. FIF full Texas inclusivity.
  5. Summary of plan: "Hey, we're about to unleash a couple dozen robotic death machines onto your streets. We have no clue what they're gonna do. But you should know that they're really heavy and harmful to pedestrians, and when they catch fire, they really can't be put out. Good luck!"
  6. FIF this insane timeline. I mean, LITERAL enshittification.
  7. I hate him so much. And I'm really getting to hate this town. Chances of me dying from being plowed into by a deranged Elon robotaxi: now materially greater than zero.
  8. You know how we like to say "she looks nice?" Yeah....nobody should say that here.
  9. I mean, I gotta tell ya....it's kinda fascinating to watch entities like the FTC and the CFPB going full-on ANTI-consumer in their mission. Across the board, when it comes to regulating unscrupulous business conduct, the motto of our government is now "Dear American People: Fuck You."
  10. Brisketexan

    Austin FC

    Sigh. You could hide “suck” in a haystack, and this team would manage to find it.
  11. I mean, I presume that's it. By the way, as someone with foster responsibilities over a refugee with green card status....this whole fucking regime has us terrified. Beyond the usual parental lectures of "don't do anything stupid and get in trouble with the law" one always gives a teen, with a litany of the consequences, our lecture has to also include "or you could end up tossed into a hellish foreign gulag for the rest of your life." I mean, "roll through a stop sign, die in a Salvadoran gulag" is a fucking psychotic sentence to even exist, but here we are.
  12. You have to press TWO buttons to turn it on the way you want? What is it, a woman?
  13. What the actual fuck?
  14. "at levels the likes of which no one has ever seen before!"
  15. In the end, this is the bulk of it. And the hell of it is, while it's immoral and shitty, it's not entirely irrational. Why? Competition. In 1950, there was a pool of jobs for people of moderate skill and middling to decent intellect. Who was the pool of people who could be hired for those jobs? White males, almost exclusively. Truly, like 95% of those jobs went to white males, easy peasy. Then...the civil rights movement (both culturally and legally). Now, black people, hispanics, etc. are the competition. Think of autoworker jobs. Surely at the end of WWII, those were 95% or more white males. By the 1970s, a shitload of those jobs were going to minorities. But wait, there's more: WOMEN. Starting in the 1970s, women began entering the workforce - and colleges and universities -- en masse. So, for even the more "skilled" jobs....white males have to compete with women as well. Hell, I see this in my profession (legal) and my wife's (ordained, seminary-trained minister). College enrollment is 60-40 female to male. When looking at candidates to hire for legal jobs, or a seminary-trained job....the majority of the better candidates are female. White males didn't get dumber, or less qualified, in general. It's just that EVERYONE ELSE was, over time, freed from social and legal encumbrances that kept them from openly competing for the work white men had reserved exclusively for them. There used to be 10 million sweet-spot jobs open every year, and white males - being the only legit pool of candidates - got 95% of them. Today, those same 10 million jobs are sought by white males, minorities (male and female) and women. Used to be that white males got 9.5 million of those jobs. Today, they only get 6 million of those jobs. From the white male perspective, they just LOST 3.5 million jobs. And, mathematically, they're not wrong. The TLDR version: When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. To take it to the question, asked in callous and insulting manner as is the Surly way, what are we going to do with our mediocre white males? Because....relative to where they were 75 years ago, even 40-50 years ago....they're taking it in the shorts. And they are, in an understandably human way, pissed about it. I wish. The supply of Dunning Kruger "Conservatives" is near limitless. It is America's greatest natural resource.
  16. Hubris, ego, and narcissism are timeless. Sure, they're running at a cultural peak these days, but those are the things that have always gotten the rich and powerful in trouble.
  17. That cultural aspect is broadly eastern. Few are better in the world at it than Persians, but Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans....they all bring that to the table. If you know what mindset you're dealing with when you begin your negotiations, you can account for it and do just fine.
  18. Every single bit of this checks out in this timeline. Insane and irrational market cap of a piece of shit South African, as our official US government approach is to Make Apartheid Great Again. Every single bit of this checks out. All you have to do is envision any number of forks in the road, ask "which fork is the shittiest?", then choose that fork, and you'll end up with a scenario indistinguishable from our current reality.
  19. Brisketexan

    LBGTQ

    IT'S BAD, BUT AS ALWAYS IT COULD BE MUCH WORSE Yep, we're gonna start seeing that emblazoned on all state vehicles and such any day now.
  20. Yep, we were there right after you -- we had New Year's eve dinner in Flagstaff, and were in the park by that night. It really was a great trip, and an amazing time to be there. But yeah, the icy trails next to a bazillion foot drop were a tad unnerving.
  21. There's also this one, from the Grand Canyon: We went a couple of years ago, during the heart of the pandemic. Winter, snow, icy conditions. It was beautiful, but we also talked a lot about how hazardous many of the places were. Daughter found the book in the gift shop, bought it, and then proceeded to read all the stories aloud to us in the car. Does it say terrible things about our family that we laughed at several of them?
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