Jump to content

Brisketexan

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    43432
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    238

Everything posted by Brisketexan

  1. You could bet on Kirchner's take: “Milei’s plan is not anarcho-capitalism, it is anarcho-colonial. The recovery strategy is now clear: it’s oil, gas, mines, and grains. He wants to turn Argentina into an extraction country for raw materials. This pre-capitalism takes us back to the days of the Viceroyalty,” Or you could bet on the author's take: "A century later, Australia still manages to leverage its resource and farming wealth into a high-tech economy of top tier affluence. There is no foreordained reason why Argentina cannot do much the same." The problem is, the author's take misses one important point. "There's no reason" why Argentina can't follow Australia's path. The problem is, there is definitely a reason why it can't. That reason is "it's Argentina." Corruption, graft, and inefficiency are woven into its DNA. It is much, much more likely that Argentina will become an anarcho-colonial extraction economy, benefitting only those at the very top who have managed to take advantage of it. I'd love it if that was wrong, though. I love Argentina, I really do. Just saw enough with my family living there for 6 years to tell me which way to bet here.
  2. Don't forget "tort reform," and "let the regulated write all the regulations." Those do a lotta heavy lifting, too....to ensure that bad actors face zero material consequences for their actions. Those are really, really important factors.
  3. The hell of it is, where these groups START is often a place I have some sympathy/empathy for. Tea Party? Yeah, our gov't IS too beholden to special interests. But y'all had to go full Q-anon nutbar. Occupy Wall Street? Yeah, our system IS rigged to skew outcomes in favor of the capitalist elite who have set rules that favor them. But y'all had to go full-on "anything but agrarian communism is evil" and "all prosperity is bad." Pro-Palestinian activists? Yep, Israel IS killing the shit out of civilians and using starvation and such as a weapon. But then y'all have to go full-on "Hamas is cool," and "let's liberate everyone and everything willy-nilly." It sucks, because the original cause gets lost in the noise, and then discredited and derided as it has been here.
  4. Sure. You think Surly legacies are all like "I'm a third generation longhorn, from a family of successful and esteemed longhorns." Nope. Most Surly legacies are like this legacy:
  5. Brisketexan

    LBGTQ

    What, do you dream of taking over the Mineral Wells Ladies' Sewing Circle? Because that's what that top is MADE FOR.
  6. I don't fully agree with the bolded, because that implies that the chief kick they get out of this is external approval. I think it's equal parts internal self-satisfaction and approval FROM THEIR TRIBE/ECHO-CHAMBER. That is, they don't even get that much approval from their "side" of the political spectrum, outside of the small group of true believers that is their immediate "tribe." The other self-important pro-palestinian activists pat them on the back, but that's a relatively small group. The Q-anon-ers love each other, but they aren't lauded by the largest percentage of right-of-center people. It's about human nature and craving an identity and a tribe. It's non-partisan and across ideologies. Seriously, look at the people at Trump rallies. It's tribal, because IT FEELS GOOD. That's what we're seeing here, and what we've always seen about extreme ideological movements. It's why I've at least gotten a chuckle out of watching our local right-wing bunch jump all over this as some sorta toldyaso gotcha.....when the extremists on their side of aisle have actually ascended to positions of power and control. Mock the purple-haired Pro-Palestinian ideologues all you want....as you ignore the Q-anon/MTG/stollen election log in your own eye.
  7. Cool. Texas population in 1988: 16.67 million Texas population in 2024: 31 million It's damned near DOUBLE what it was when I started at UT. That means, by basic extrapolation, the pool of similarly qualified applicants is twice as big. But the campus isn't. The resources to teach those students aren't. If you have a school that can handle 50k students, and the pool of applicants doubles....that necessarily means that those non-god-level candidates who would have gotten into UT in 1988 have much lower chances of getting in today. And of course, the very FACT that UT Austin is more selective INCREASES its cachet -- seriously, having a degree from UT today means more than it did back in my day. It was a good state school in the early 90s. But now, due to the fact that its student body is made up of top 5% and such, it's an elite-level school. It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg thing. And from what I know of friends whose kids have gone to UTD, and UT Arlington....they're getting damned solid jobs out of school. The kind of jobs that the middle tier of students at UT got when they graduated back in my day. I mean, I get that everyone would love to walk on the UT Austin campus.....but it's not feasible. Shit, everyone would like to buy a modest home within a couple of miles of campus. You could do that easily through the 1960s. Today....not so much. Geography, and the fact that there is a finite supply of such properties with 5X as many people who want them now means that no, you aren't going to be able to buy a cheap house in Hyde Park.
  8. It means that what is happening with this group of naive true believers is what happens with ALL groups of naive true believers. They get caught up in a flurry of "causes" instead of focusing on a results-oriented path based on one cause or a couple of closely related causes. Pro-Palestinian activists/liberationists who started out protesting real-time genocide of Palestinians but are now calling for disability rights and a panoply of other predictable left-of-center shit? Meet the Tea Partiers....who started out protesting representatives who were too beholden to special interests but are now full-on Q-anon and "stollen election" nutbars. Same shit happened with the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. Same shit happened with the populist MAGA movement. True believers are more focused on how gratifying it is to "believe," and lose sight of the fact that maybe it would be better to actually achieve a result.
  9. In fairness to the "top tier publics," there are some limitations due to simple logistics, geography, space, growing population, etc. The answer isn't to have 100k students at UT Austin. The answer is to have the University of Texas system offer the quality of education that UT Austin offered in the 80s and 90s to a similar percentage of students (as a percentage of overall Texas population) as it did in the 80s and 90s. And....that is happening, to a reasonable degree. Look at UT Dallas - I'd wager that the caliber of students they are getting, and the education they are getting there, is on par with the middle of the bell curve of students at UT in, say, 1988. That's good. That's what university systems should do. Hell, that's what the California system has done - there are multiple damned fine schools in the state system. Due to simple logistics, not everyone who USED to qualify can go to UT or Berkely today. As many of us have noted, we wouldn't get into UT today. That means that we weren't god-level prospects back then, either -- UT had enough space where it wasn't as selective. So long as those good (but not god-level) prospects can get the same quality of education that they could have gotten at UT in 1988 SOMEWHERE in the system, then the system is doing its job.
  10. This is also true. And, even if he is defeated in November, the narrative won't change much. At that point, the prosecutions will be "THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS TRYING TO BURY ME TO COVER UP THE RIGGED AND STOLLEN ELECTION! ALL THE EXPERTS SAY I WON BY A BIG AMOUNT! ELECTION FRAUD!" And his cult will buy it. And people will die in the violence.
  11. Because he’s bad at his job and his whole office is reflecting that now. It’s the same reason that Greg Davis ran Hodges Mitchell up the gut 17 times for an average of .01 yards against Stanford…it’s because he sucks at his job.
  12. We back up to a green belt with a wet weather creek. In a wet year (so maybe this one), it sometimes looks like stars in our backyard. We’ve had hundreds of them, flickering on and off. And I never get tired of it. It’s magical.
  13. As have I. Its core vulnerability is that it's just a fucking mutual agreement. It's always been vulnerable to 1) abuse by the rich/privileged (ask a black dude from the past....entirety of US history....about that), and 2) a popular uprising against it. That is, when enough people simply opt out of the mutual compact that is the Rule of Law, it's over. "I have this piece of paper that says you have to do X." In a Rule of Law society, people do what the piece of paper says. In a Trumpian society, they say "fuck you" and go about doing whatever the fuck they want. Which means that the only way you can require anyone else to do anything is with force/violence....which is exactly how the Trumpanzees want it to be.
  14. This. Someone somewhere got the message of "hey....when people show up on your site to maybe buy something....totally stop them and interrupt the experience with a "sign up for our email list" email that has the tiniest x in the history of the world to close it. Because we don't want them to actually look at our product's page and buy it. We want to annoy the fuck out of them before they can buy anything." It's fucking maddening.
  15. All things in decent and orderly fashion, this is the way.
  16. You have to understand that these are people who very, very, very much want to "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"....but when called upon to actually implement policies that tie to specific situations and metrics from when we were "great".....they are 100% opposed to doing so. "Make college affordable to someone working a 20 hour a week job again" just doesn't get any traction, even though that's EXACTLY what they are talking about (they're just too dumb to know it) when they say "Make America Great Again."
  17. And...I mean....it's like you haven't even heard of Luby's. Also check Mi Madre's. For nicer W. Austin type options, Santa Rita or La Mancha or El Mercado. Again, surely there will be a wait, but you'll get in. Vazquez mexican restaurant is awesome, but not that nice/fancy.
  18. Take your mom someplace more stabby. Maybe Maximus out by the airport.
  19. Think of classic middlebrow mexican: Maudies, Joe's Bakery, Angie's, Juan in a Million. Breakfast/brunch at every one of those places makes people happy. No reservations, but plenty of seating, and you'll get in without a terrible wait.
  20. Yep. At this point, your best bet is to think of someplace unconventional -- like mexican restaurants. They'll have great breakfast food and drinks, but won't draw the crowds that are focused on "brunch."
  21. If you're not willing to take your mom to a skrip club, do you really even love her?
  22. 1) the reason to reduce/forgive existing loans is economic, not educational (crippling debt means that consumer spending and ability to get ahead for millions of people is fucked). 2) almost all of the people you're calling "deadbeats"....aren't. They've paid on their loans for years and years, and are still carrying a large debt load. Which, per point 1, is not good for us as a society. These things aren't mutually exclusive. And our solutions as to higher ed are going to have to be multi-faceted....so don't worry your pretty little head, nothing good will actually happen. We only try simple, one-dimensional things in this country. You know, the things that won't work or solve a damned thing.
  23. And all mentions of the fact that the earth is a sphere and the law of gravity. To be replaced by a chapter on chemtrails. We live in the dumbest fucking timeline.
  24. Brisketexan

    LBGTQ

    And from the looks, she's super into needlepoint and scrapbooking. NTTAWWT....in fact, maybe she'd like to buy my wife's old scrapbooking stuff.
×
×
  • Create New...