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TurkeyChew

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Everything posted by TurkeyChew

  1. What was posting a Dan Price tweet supposed to mean, in response? It seems a lot of people who like Dan Price and don't think him a half-baked attention horse, are replying that they think companies are purposely creating a bottleneck. But the article linked talking about the insane supply/demand which has driven freight rates through the roof (and thus accounting for the operating profit mentioned in the tweet) seem to say otherwise. And you are responding to a post about a blockade. Can you explain your point for those of us who are missing it?
  2. I figured this would be a Donda 2 thread bump; I like Danny Brown but I can see how others don't.
  3. Here is a cool link in real time, I think, to see Russia's troops and movements and placements for military buff/nerds: https://www.gfsis.org/maps/russian-military-forces
  4. Sorry for the confusion, I was just copypasta from an email that was forwarded to me like a newsletter. Here is another interesting interview from same source. I think it does a good job of distilling what a lot of folks have said in the last dozen pages or so and is a good 5 minute primer to catch people up just now wanting to know what is going on. The last question is particularly hilarious: -- The Russia-Ukraine conflict has officially replaced NFTs as the topic people love to talk about but don’t fully understand. That’s not a knock on anyone—look, even those of us who follow the news for our jobs haven’t spent the last decade immersed in Eastern European politics. But we know someone who has: Alex Kliment, a geopolitical analyst who helps write and edit the excellent Signal, a global affairs newsletter published by GZERO Media . We asked Alex some high-level questions about the situation to get a better grasp on what exactly is going on and why we should care. Can you give us a brief history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine? To start with, the “brief” history goes back a thousand years, because Russian civilization more or less began in what is today’s Ukraine: Medieval Kyiv was bumping while Moscow was still a backwater. This sounds irrelevant but Putin alludes to this all the time as part of his reasons for wanting to bring Ukraine under Russian control. After the middle ages, the lands of today’s Ukraine were part of various European empires, including, of course, the Tsarist and Soviet ones, both of which worried about Ukrainian nationalism and wanted to Russify the population and culture. (The Ukrainian language is related to Russian but different, think of Italian and Spanish.) There have been some particularly dark moments in their history: Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the 1930s. There’s a reason that Ukraine’s national anthem begins with, “Ukraine is not dead yet.” Since 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been an independent state, but it’s been caught in a tug of war between Russia and the West. There are a lot of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, particularly in the east and south, and those are areas where you find more sympathy for Moscow. Central and western Ukraine have tended to show more pro-Western sentiment, but it’s very, very hard to generalize. There are also a lot of family ties between the two countries—just about everyone in Ukraine has relatives somewhere in Russia. The Kremlin, for its part, sees Ukraine as a non-negotiable part of its sphere of influence. The idea of Ukraine ever joining NATO (which has been floated in various ways) is an existential red line for Russia. But there’s also this other thing going on where Putin openly doesn’t believe Ukraine is a legit independent country. For him it’s basically just a part of a greater Russian empire that it’s his destiny to resurrect. Most people in Ukraine obviously don’t love this view. On Monday Putin recognized the independence of two Ukrainian separatist regions: Donetsk and Luhansk. What the heck are “separatist” regions and why was this viewed as such a provocative move? In 2014, after a popular uprising ousted the pro-Russian president of Ukraine and led to a new, Western-backed government that featured some strident Ukrainian nationalists, Russia did two things: It annexed the Crimean peninsula, the only part of Ukraine where ethnic Russians were the majority. It also backed militants in two eastern provinces who set up breakaway statelets of their own. Russia said it was protecting Russian speakers—whose language rights were in fact under threat at the time—from genocide. The result was a civil war between those separatists and Ukrainian forces which has so far killed about 14,000 people and displaced close to 1 million. Since 2015 there’s been a peace deal on paper: the "Minsk agreements." It was a pretty good deal for Russia, actually. The separatist regions would remain part of Ukraine, but with significant autonomy and an effective veto over Kyiv’s foreign policy. They've basically been cat’s paws for Moscow to keep Ukraine from ever moving Westward. But that agreement was never implemented, in part because neither side could agree on who should move first. Now, by unilaterally recognizing the independence of the separatist entities, Russia is giving up on that peace agreement entirely, and (again, as with Crimea) forcibly changing the borders of a European country. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said this would be the biggest war in Europe since WWII. But there have been other European conflicts since, so what makes this one so much more significant? Well for one thing, it’s the sheer size of the players. Yugoslavia’s horrific 1990s civil war—the worst European conflict since WWII—took place in a disintegrating country of 23.5 million people. Ukraine has more than 40 million people and, mind you, one of the combatants is a nuclear power. Second, a central idea of post-war Europe is that you don’t redraw European boundaries by force, because that always ends very badly. And yet here is Russia, a major world power, doing just that. So Russia’s challenge isn’t only to a specific country (Ukraine) but to a whole order. Third, there’s obviously a huge economic dimension here. We’re talking about a war involving a country—Russia—that is Europe’s largest source of natural gas and is a major global oil exporter. No European war has involved anything close to this level of economic and financial risk to Europe since 1945. On that note, if Western leaders think Russia’s actions are so harmful to European security, why isn’t the US sending troops? The US public has little appetite for foreign military adventures—and after the past 20 years, frankly, who could blame them? There’s also an understandable reluctance to get into a direct conflict with a nuclear power over a country that is not, in fact, a NATO member. So the West is using different tools to try to manage the situation: arming the Ukrainians better, bolstering defenses in the NATO countries that border Ukraine, and hitting Russia with sanctions. What is the most likely outcome of the war? Is Russia guaranteed to capture as much territory as it wants? Will Ukrainian forces put up a fight? The Ukrainians are certainly no pushovers. They’ve been well-armed and trained by the West since 2014. That said, the Russian forces are just much, much larger, and in the event of a full-scale invasion, most military analysts think that the Russians could get to key cities quite fast. The interesting question, though, is what happens next. Invading a country is one thing, but actually occupying it—if that’s Putin’s intention—is another. The Russians would not, in most cases, be “greeted as liberators,” as the saying goes. I’m not a military analyst but I’m told that things could get very nasty in the event of urban warfare or a popular insurgency. And the West would almost certainly support efforts to make life hell for the occupying Russians. Serious question: Is Putin simply out of his gourd? Is there any world in which the benefits of an invasion outweigh the costs, or is he behaving like Tony Montana near the end of Scarface? A lot of people have wondered if Putin is nuts with this Ukraine stuff. I think it’s probably the wrong question. The right question is: Is he consistent? Certainly from a Western point of view it seems crazy to risk Russia’s economic stability and global standing over whether a neighbor wants to join NATO or not. But Putin is operating on a different standard. He and those around him truly believe—and have long believed—that Ukraine moving into the West’s orbit would be an existential threat to his regime and the security of his country in a way that Western sanctions just aren’t. Morning Brew's writeup did a great job explaining why Putin is probably OK risking sanctions to get what he wants here. So in a way he’s doing a kind of cost-benefit analysis that I’m not sure Tony Montana, in his final moments of inspiration, was similarly capable of. Putin may end up being wrong, but I don’t think he’s crazy.
  5. Just read this today re: Sanctions and Russia's ability to weather:
  6. I heard it was a former Cowboys executive who told an investigative reporter about it, who began...investigating.
  7. Which is it? Americans are smart and rational or Americans are stupid and irrational? I don't know about you, but paying 69% more for a Dodge Caravan is not something I'd be proud to do:
  8. Putin invading is an inevitability, based on sunk costs alone. I think the more interesting question is what does "invade" mean, in this sense. Is it a toe or foot over the line or is it a choke hold.
  9. Okay be honest. How many of us own a Youth Medium "Scots for Stafford" shirt? Seems like there are a couple. You can't hide!
  10. Whoa. Talk about some journal/writing therapy. You might take a break and come back and reread that. I definitely can't empathize, but I do appreciate and was moved with what I read as a heart-heavy resignation and hopelessness. I felt your exhaustion in those words. But you can't give up. Take some time and recharge and work on your wellness and health if you need to, but at some point you gotta get back in the game one way or another, I think. Otherwise you are just a voice from the sidelines, criticizing those who are doing.
  11. Actually, I think the following makes sense with the bifurcation of America we are seeing in the response to our falling. If we allow that the visceral feeling of ennui and malaise of us living in a mild dystopia is felt by all (both conscious and sub/unconsciously), then: Group A: Fighting it. They don't accept it. They want to channel their inner Dylan Thomas and not go gentle into the good night. We can still salvage America from being the aforementioned mild dystopia. Group B: Embrace it. Accept the new world order that is America in 2022. They want to ensure their position (or better their position) with the brokenness that widespread technology and connectivity has created and channel their inner Littlefinger and see chaos as a ladder. The above is not without a fair share of irony.
  12. When this thread bumped I thought it would be internet sleuthing to try and figure out which charity got his $5.7bn charitable donation last year (2nd only to B&MG foundation). The "Solving World Hunger" Theory has been debunked as the food people say it wasn't them.
  13. I think you stumbled upon the answer on accident here. The black gang-banger (specific race descriptor yours, not mine) is killing over ethereal concepts like "[dis]respect" because the practical value of life in the day-to-day world they inhabit has lost it's value. Life is fast and cheap in that culture and environment. These days we live in a broader American culture and environment where practical value (read: American Happiness Reaches 5 Year Low) is such that our only dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin hits are coming from fighting and conflict and hating each other and the other team. Oh, and Drugs/Booze. I blame the internet revolution, personally, but there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. The question is what do we do now that we live in a mild dystopia?
  14. Kroenke is a genius. He used a football team as a Trojan Horse to get control of the largest amount of undeveloped land inside a major metro-area in our lifetime. Seriously, he got in Inglewood (LA suburb) over 500k square feet of retail, 2,500 homes and commercial office space which is 3x the size of Disneyland. That was the play, football was the angle to getting there.
  15. Yea nobody cares when the record is corrected to reflect the full story and whole truth, I know. It’s a microcosm.
  16. I go to a meeting and come back to a ton of hilarity here. @DDD Dad You are right in the beginning. What you stated was absolutely the intent. What I think you missed-- what everyone missed except for Longhornfan and the mods, because it's been a conversation handled in private as these should be-- is the following. I'll field your questions after you've reviewed the below and gotten caught up to speed: 1) I was brought back from bannation. I was given a reprieve and allowed to continue to be a citizen of this community. Yay! 2) Longhornfan got offended because he was called out multiple times for being grossly wrong. That's another conversation for another time. The net effect of this call out was he was upset and wanted me gone. He admitted to spending his entire lunch hour going back into my not-very-prolific posting history and negging every post, literally hundreds within the hour, no matter the context or content of post, in the effort to singlehandedly ban me. He admits this freely. 3) That behavior was bad faith and outside of the bounds of what I initially decreed (and, again, is actually against the rules of this board and is deemed harassment. I've appreciated Longhornfans light touch after being warned further by mods-- note: reporting posts in private works) and thus in my eyes I was actually not legitimately banned. 4) This is why I created the new handle, yet continued to keep the same syntax (Animal ending in -key + Tobacco product), because I was never hiding myself as a poster. I used to think nothing was funnier than when people would jump out of their Lazy Boy to proclaim "It's DONKEY! look at his user name!" as if they were Robert Langdon and a genius in cryptography and were brilliant, which was funny because I was being obvious. But now I think the funniest thing is watching a bunch of you do the message board posting of Brendan Frasier clapping and being wrong, because you disagree with my core belief system and politics and wish to be rid of the meddlesome priest.
  17. This is either ignorant or dishonest, depending on your knowledge of the situation. Good times, indeed.
  18. Do you really not see how you are splitting hairs on the hairs you tried to split earlier? There is an obvious sub-text of distinction between a public university with a merit-based entrance process and which requires payment (tuition) to attend versus the free public school system for any/all in a certain zip code despite ability, that we were obviously talking about. Further, how would socialism apply to private schools? Why or how would we be talking about anything but free public school systems for you to debate why compulsory is still not a descriptor that is adequate to make my point? It seems like you are trying to nit at definitions and, when that doesn't quite scratch the itch, quibble at nits that don't even make sense for the sake of it-- which is why I used the term pedantic. I don't hate or want to do away with anything. I was simply agreeing with Gourmand with him saying public education is socialized education. I want to keep it around for those who need it, and if it's good enough for you and yours, more power to you. The military's primary benefit 1a) is to protect the lives of citizens from foreign and occupying forces and subjugation. 1b) is to those who have property that needs protecting, sure, I'll give you that. Either way, I'm good with the socialized national defense and socialism in that use case.
  19. 1) My attitude toward socialized education is clear. This is an unpopular, but earnest opinion, but public school is not my standard as someone whose role is to steward my children to the best of my ability. That's it and that is all. 2) My point was to try and get Gourmand to understand that calling public schools "socialized education" is not wrong. How you feel about socialized education is a secondary matter. If I erred at all as a "debater", it would be in adding my personal opinion, stance and belief, in an attempt at being funny and stilted (though 100% honest), which aroused the ire of some as misogynist and elitist. I will own that. 3) I don't see a reason why you can't apply the same level of scorn for the astonishing waste of defense funds (often with little ROI) that the discerning family has for public education which costs a fraction of the same amount with the also necessary goal of creating better citizens and participants in the republic?" Have at it, I will probably mostly agree with you.
  20. The socialism vehicles we have in this country (Medicaid, Medicare, the military as an employer and retirement fund, etc) are of exponentially more utilization and benefit to the “not rich”, though?
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