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ndawg

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by ndawg

  1. Just now, slorch said:

    Who says we aren't doing anything?

    Raise better fucking kids.  but hey, the guilt complex in America says that's impossible, so let's look to the guvamint for solutions, right?

    I'm not raising any fucking kids in this hellscape. But even though I exercised muh pErSoNaL rEsPoNsIbIliTy and decided not to breed, other people's shitty offspring can nevertheless mow me down at a moments notice anytime I'm out in public.

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  2. 1 minute ago, fattyflattie said:

    Of course not. But a better analogy would have been to say the FDA recognizes sugar is terrible for 90% of our country, then removes or regulates it.    His post speaks as there is no regulation, which is patently false. 

    I read his post as suggesting that we don't have firearms regulation that keeps us safe from gun violence. That doesn't necessarily preclude the existence of firearms regulation at all.

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  3. 2 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

    You understand there’s a fuckload of firearm regulations or no?  May not be as many as you would like, but it’s not an unregulated industry by any stretch of the imagination. 

    Oh, a "we only differ on degree, not principle" argument. OK.

    So, does the second amendment establish that I have a right to own a nuke? How about anthrax?

  4. Regarding how to stop the bullshit, it's worth keeping the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (BAP) in mind: "it takes an order of magnitude more work to refute bullshit than it does to produce it."

  5. 57 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

    No. It’s the tone of coverage I’m talking about. They escalate coverage of events to the point that people think these things happen everyday. Far from the truth. 
     

    In other news, defacto open borders policy has predictable results.

    Your rationale is preposterous. It can be used to justify believing in fringe bullshit so long as one can find any flaw, however minuscule, in mainstream news sources. In fact, I would guess that is exactly how you are using it.

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  6. 5 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

    Then correct those posters rather than make vague insinuations that certain people will ignore the truth for some conspiratorial reason known only to you. You're desperately trying to grab some moral high ground, not because the facts actually matter to you, but because you want to broad brush everyone else as having a mysterious and evil, "liberal" agenda. I deny you that hill. Now go sit in the corner and pout like the poor victimized conservative you want us to believe you are. 

    I love seeing right wingers try to "shoot the moon" on message boards.

    "Hey, here's an idea! I'll just insinuate that everyone is in deep denial of something obvious right in front of their noses. Maybe if I don't address any of them in particular, and just confine my prediction to a reply to a fellow sympathizer, nobody will challenge me. And if they don't challenge me, it'll look to any bystander like I successfully demonstrated that this is an echo chamber right in front of said echo chamber!"

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  7. 5 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

    He definitely adapted.  His CNN and MSNBC personas were completely different.   He’s a grifter, except he doesn’t actually need the money.   I guess he’s probably a right leaning narcissist and attention whore who mainly wants to be famous, like Trump.   Whatever keeps him in the spotlight and gets a group (doesn’t matter so much which group) to support him.

    I wouldn't be surprised if he has an intellectual inferiority complex, i.e. he'd rather be seen as a genius by morons than how intelligentsia would judge him (as nobody special).

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  8. This morning, I've been poking around outside everywhere I could look for evidence that a hostile takeover of industry is afoot. Nearest I can tell, it appears that our free market hasn't been replaced with a Soviet style central planned economy just yet, but I'm hoping it arrives soon... once they tell us where the line will start for toilet paper and bread, my wife and I plan on setting up tent and camping out.

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  9. 14 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

    The American Dream has become get all the money you can get your hands on and make sure no one else can get any.  It's a zero sum game.  

    This makes sense. The GOP is a magnet that's managed to collect just about everybody in our society who 1. wishes they were rich and 2. lacks the fundamental skills needed to actually create value for other people.

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  10. 3 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    I agree that it's real, but that's not an instant mandate for federal regulation.

    Unless you have a "dipshits with kids can't buy this shit" regulation, there's going to be some problems with that that most regulations, from any authority, are powerless to reach.

    Yeah, I should have been more specific, sorry. I meant that I think that, at least as it stands today, the government should have a more prominent role in raising awareness than in regulation.

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  11. 1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Mmmm, no thanks. I think states can handle that to the extent it needs to be handled.

    I suspect, like drunk driving, our culture will benefit from some amount of public initiatives to help adapt. Someone getting caught off guard by edibles can certainly be extremely humorous, and I don't think we need to treat it quite the same way as driving under the influence, but the very real risks need to be socialized. There's a very real danger in high potency edibles.

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  12. 40 minutes ago, Chooky said:

    "The courage to overturn elections."  The GOP will be squeamish about that sentence, for now.  At the beginning of 2022 it will be their slogan.

    It'll be the next three-syllable chant. 2016 was "Lock her up! Lock her up!" 2022+ will be "Overturn! Overturn!"

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  13. On 3/11/2021 at 2:20 PM, Brisketexan said:

    Agree.  When it comes to dealing with clients, a lot of what I'm selling is "myself."  My presence, my approach, my personality.  It's a LOT harder to do that over Zoom.  I have had to appear before clients several times recently, and it really bothered me not to be there in person.  That just can't be replaced.

    Please tell me your zoom background is a ledge with a mushroom cloud off in the distance and a glass of bourbon nearby.

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  14. 1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

    I love this.  I actually have a tiny amount in crypto currency as well, but it's just hysterical to me that this guy's fallback is an unproven prayer to the tech gods.

    I'm sure that before the very first hairlines of the Visigoths begin creeping up over the northern horizon, there were some Romans who really, truly did fear an incursion. But I also bet there were plenty more who loved to talk about it and sound like they were really in the know about future events, even though the reality hadn't really sunk in for them.

    We all had to realize this on own own, and in our own way.. but one of the ways I managed to figured out that conservatives are truly full of shit is that I could probe in to all their fears they loved to warn me about, and find out that they actually weren't really afraid. They were just blustering.

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  15. 13 minutes ago, GRHorn said:

    Your post explained how I would label something, then became somewhat disjointed so I lost interest. Also my eyes rolled back into my head when you mentioned Brisket and his ledge that he fantasizes about.

    You want to control spending by cutting military spending. That sounds fine. Will you count that as "savings" or would you roll that money into something else?

    You want to tax the rich. Fine. There's a CBO projected deficit of 2.2T this year. I'm not sure if that includes our recently passed stimulus, but I don't think it does. You cannot make up that difference taxing people. So if you think any of this matters then it's a spending problem.

    But honestly, it doesn't matter. Alea iacta est, Roma.

    There will be more massive stimulus programs on the way. There will be token tax raises/schemes to attempt to pay for it. The Fed will be forced to continue monetizing the debt. We will eventually lose our reserve currency status at some point in the medium term. 

    What happens beyond that is TBD.

    I'm curious how you are preparing for the day when we lose reserve currency status.

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  16. Meanwhile, in an executive conference room at headquarters, those McKinsey guys are killing it with a plan to gut the American workforce and move operations overseas. The American worker, after all, is hardly any better educated or capable than their third world counterpart. Sure glad the party of fiscal responsibility defunded our education system, am I right? Think about all the the taxes you didn't have to pay in order to give Joe Sixpack a future.

    Fiscal irresponsibility goes both ways. If you fail to provide for successive generations, you're as foolish as an overspender, no matter how much you posture yourself as thrifty.

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  17. Overall, I bet most of us probably expect a decline in demand for office space distributed unevenly across sectors. I envision a lot of office->residential conversions in the next couple decades, as well as a continuation of the trend towards coworking facilities, that allow office space usage to be elastic.

    Personally, I miss seeing coworkers in person, sharing a drink after work with them, and am fucking sick of being on Zoom calls.

    Work from home proponents often tout how much more focus they have at home, but when you happen to be collaborating with with other people, you lose focus over video chat.

    If you enjoy working with others interactively and solving challenges together, you're probably eager to get back to the office. If you're more reclusive in your work habits, you're probably elated that you'll never have to go back to an office again. Most people won't be firmly in one bucket or the other, but I know I'm more on the "eager to return to the office" side of the spectrum.

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  18. 9 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

    It's a complicated societal problem.

    It's no answer to say "we need to fix the schools."  Improving the schools and educational standards is a part of it, especially in disadvantaged areas.

    But just fixing the schools isn't going to solve the problem without fixing some other things wrong with society that prevent students from taking advantage of the educational opportunities presented to them.

    You could establish IB programs with 42 AP courses and pay all the teachers more than $100k in every high school in the hood.  And that will be great for the few dozen or hundreds of kids that manage to graduate those programs.  But it won't fix the problem.

    This right here. There is always a certain degree of dysfunction present in complex systems. We can look at our outcomes, and compare them to other first world countries, and clearly see that we have more dysfunction than they have. We can also look at our states and see variation among them. The bleak reality is hiding in plain sight right in front of us, just like healthcare.

    The American political landscape isn't equipped to address dysfunction. We elect leaders on the basis of tribal identity and sound bytes, who promise "easy" answers. But "easy" answers don't even begin to address dysfunction, and at best they merely rearrange where the problems manifest. To actually correct dysfunction you need an approach that can't fit into a sound byte -- improvement has to happen holistically among the entire ranks, top to bottom. Ideology doesn't matter, except that dogmatic thinking is a limitation. And to correct dysfunction, you often have to try things that have a risk of failure, but American politics treats failure as fodder for oppositions to build a case against incumbents, rather than a data point to help correct and reorient.

    Education isn't going to get fixed by simple minded "fixes" like eliminating teachers unions, paying them more, etc. Poverty doesn't go away with by installing the "correct" macroeconomic principles. It's impossible to believe anyone who thinks they've got THE answer for what's going to fix any complex problem.

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  19. 22 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

    I mean what's the cheapest tax rate of all government run healthcare? I mean also I've had this discussion before, but what health care has the shortest wait time?

    Do you have any idea what governs wait time in health care? Our private health system is like a living monument to market failure. Nobody in our health care system has any financial motive to reduce wait time.

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  20. 1 minute ago, Biff Tannen said:

    It's not even really a hail mary though.  We have the ball and could run it down their throats into the fucking end zone, but we are refusing to because of some misplaced idea of "decorum" that the Rs have proven they could give two fucks about.  

    That's a good point. I'd rather say that the Democrats need to get on the offensive and stay on the offensive until the GOP's power is reduced down to the level of its actual mindshare.

  21. 26 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

    We're basically saying "we have one party that's insane and will do anything they can to grab power and oppress people", and at the same time we're making it easier for them to do those insane things in the future.

    Right, because we're down to the wire. We have one chance to save the country. If the GOP regains power, we're done. The Democrats need to stop rationing their fuel (political power) and burn it all, hoping it's enough to break free from the event horizon. Not because that's a good strategy in general, but because it's what the circumstances call for. We need a hail mary or we're done.

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  22. 1 hour ago, BradInATX said:

    Imagine thinking that doing something that gives Republicans literal carte blanche to do anything they want next time they have the three branches of government is smart.

    I can't agree with this. Republicans have already given themselves "literal carte blanche to do anything they want." There is absolutely no reason to be worried about moving too strong against the GOP. They won't "retaliate," and not because they will exercise restraint, but because they're so far past the point where they have any need to exercise restraint at all. At best, the Republicans might choose to respect a Democratic filibuster if they found the calculus favorable.

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  23. If the problem we want to solve is wealth inequality, unless we plan on abandoning capitalism altogether, I think the goal ought to be to replenish America's supply of lower and middle class jobs. A carbon tax credit could be applied towards goods produced and sold in America, in order to offset the fossil fuels required to transport goods manufactured in Asia. This would help make up the disparity in labor costs that make offshoring appealing to begin with, without adding to the inherent burden that tariffs shoulder the consumer with.

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  24. 9 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

    I'm not saying it was abhorrent etc.  I just got a chuckle when I imagined how a white mother who went to those lengths to shield her children from anything black would be perceived.  Definitely an odd story, to say the least.

    This is fallacious reasoning, based on the incorrect assumption that decisions can be judged solely by the actions taken. Humans make decisions in order to produce outcomes, and those outcomes stem from the combination of both an action and condition, and not the action alone. Therefore, decisions must be judged by taking both into account.

    In the United States, unless parents deliberately intervene, all children are subjected to a condition where most characters will be white by default, and the few black characters that do exist will be cast into one of two typical roles that white writers tend to be limited to. For a white parent to take the deliberate action of further restricting their child's exposure to black characters would be therefore precisely the opposite of what the black parent in this case did. If the two actions seem the same, it's only because you aren't taking condition into account, which would be an error in your judgment.

    I am worried this comes across as stating the obvious, because we understand this intuitively elsewhere in our lives. Shooting and killing someone who is trying to invade our home is different from shooting and killing someone whom our spouse had an affair with. The conditions are different, so we judge the decisions differently. But white Americans tend to be in complete denial of the vast differences in conditions that black Americans are subjected to, and the conservative outrage over "cancel culture" is a great example of white Americans clueless about their denial/ignorance.

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