To assume that he smokes weed? Of course, though it's legal in Ohio.
Only since 2023. His song came out in 2000, so he's had a long career of signing songs about how he breaks felony drug laws. edit: also still illegal at the federal level, and a felony if he had more than 3 ounces, sold it to anyone, or moved it across state lines.
BahRamYou
22hr ago
Ha! Sounds like a real-life case of rap album confessions! No real evidence but... isn't it safe to assume that the guy who made "because I got high" was probably in posession of narcotics?
Turns out, jury trials are there to protect the people from corrupt judges.
And to add a wildly unpredictable element. Usually biased towards charismatic, famous people.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I'm still getting up to speed on the details of this. But uh... grooming a 12 yr old is wildly different from winniing the attraction of an adult woman. What he did there was horrible.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Maybe something about soft power vs hard power? These types of leftist leaders tend to attract a lot of poor people as followers. Chavez was leading immigrant farm workers, so he had lots of votes but not a lot of money. That also tends to attract a lot of young student types, and idealistic women. If I can speculate uncharitably here, that would put him in close proximity to a lot of young women who believe in his cause, but aren't really attracted to him personally at all. Same with a lot of the modern male feminist types- they might be politically popular, but they still look like dirty hippies or weaselly student activists.
With the right wing leaders, it's the opposite- they don't get nearly as many female followers. But when they do, they've got all the traditional trappings of power that make them more attractive to women, so they can easily find someone willing to sleep with them.
BahRamYou
1d ago
So this is a good writeup of what the problem isn't, but I notice you don't actually say what the problem is that's creating such a shortage of doctors. Is it just that there's so much medical knowledge now, compared to the past, that it's impossible to find enough people who can learn all of it?
BahRamYou
1d ago
What about the things that are not so easily quantified in economic models?
eg:
- status- we want a job to make our social status higher than other people. Sometimes jobs can pay well but still be low status, like an oil roughneck
- sense of fulfillment- we didn't evolve to just sit around doing nothing, even if our needs are met. We need useful work to make ourselves feel psychologically fulfillfed. A lot of people struggle with this in early retirement.
- Darker traits- a lot of people really enjoy having power over other people. We might hire a human just to enjoy humiliating them and bossing them around, even if it does nothing useful. And there's certainly no need for the richer people to share all the wealth with people on the bottom.
But it all together and this might make for an ugly sort of cyber-feudalism, where a rich few control all the wealth and the vast underclass can only find work in humiliating servant type roles for the rich.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I agree. I always thought it was weird that they pushed so hard to get stuff named after Chavez, but never really made much effort to explain who he was or why he was important. Of course they needed a leftest Latino American to go along with MLK and Harvey Milk in the sainted trilogy of street names, but it seemed like they just rushed out the first semi-famous name they could find, and only later had an "oh crap" moment when they realized how bad he was.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Interesting. I don't really know much about their system, just that they have a "president" who doesn't do much and a "Supreme Leader" who sounds scary. But that all sounds pretty good. Just more evidence that Iran has some really good parts under the surface, its just ruined by an oppressive government.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Sounds good to me. And there's no need to rewrite their constitution- they already have some democratic elements on paper there.
BahRamYou
2d ago
First off what does winning look like, in the eyes of team Trump?
Ideally, Iran makes a credible and verifiable commitment to dismantling their nuclear weapons program and stop supplying arms to HAMAS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russian Federation, Et Al. Less Ideally, we turn them into a failed state that wouldn't be able to muster up a nuclear weapons program even if they wanted one. If the choice is between reducing Iran to Afghanistan-esque hodge-podge of pre-industrial warring tribes and giving the IRGC access to nuclear missiles we choose to turn Iran into another Afghanistan.
They've always been a bit vague on that. My guess is what they want is to use people from Iran's existing regime to run the country but take orders from Washington, similar to what the US did in Venezuela. As long as they stop selling weapons to terrorists they're free to run the country as they see fit, though of course we'd like to see some progress on human rights too. It's a good strategy, it just doesn't sound good in a press briefing.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Right now prices are a bit high, but volatility (as measured by VIX and options prices) is super high, suggesting there's a huge range of ways this could go. Sound reasonable to me.
My main opinion is still that the US military is giving an absolute master class of dominance right now. They've recently destroyed everything on Kharg Island except the oil facilities, so that Iran can still sell its oil while limiting its ability to attack oil tankers. If this goes on much longer, Iran just isn't going to have anything left, and the strait will be open again. Then oil will crash back to where it was before, at historically relatively cheap prices.
Of course, it's also possible that this all blows up tomorrow. In that case oil shoots up again. Bad news for China, and anyone else who relies on imported oil. But everyone is scrambling to find workaround for that, too. Rationing, strategic oil reserves, the Saudis sending oil to the Red Sea, nonconventional oil increasing production, coal... there are options, even if it's painful in the short term.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I agree that "readily available" is weesel wording, but 9% is a lot! Even 1% could swing an election. I went through this myself once when I let my driver's license expire while moving. I had to go through an annoying 3 step process: first buy something online with my new address, then use that to get a cell phone bill at my new address, then use that to get a new Drivers license. All of which involves hassle and waiting.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Well, in my memory (admittedly it's been a long time) there was hardly any line. You could pretty much just show up to the airport and walk right onto the plane, just pausing briefly to walk through a metal detector. It's still like that for busses and trains, so it's not impossible.
BahRamYou
4d ago
They still had some basic security in the 90s, like metal detectors. They just didn't have weird sweaty guys giving you a pat down, or confiscating your nail clippers. The real security upgrade is the locked cabin doors + better background screening and counter-terrorism in general. We could go back to a more relaxed boarding process. They've already given up some of the worst bits of security theater, like making people take off their shoes and belt. I don't know how much they even search people's carry-ons anymore, I always put a ton of junk in mine and they hardly ever stop me.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Takes longer than a couple months to train elite pilots! Those guys who died in Midway all had years of experience. I dont see any realistic way for them to replace that. If anything, they should have switched to Kamikazes sooner.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Yeah, it makes sense. Reading Bean's blog, i got the sense that the reason the Burke class was so successful was that they designed it with enough space to handle decades of future upgrades, but that's really tapped out now.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I think this piece from Ross Douthat is the most likely explanation. Trump is a bully, and while he's obviously no military expert, he has an uncanny sense for knowing when someone is weak. Iran was weaker than they'd been in a long time, so he seized the chance.
BahRamYou
6d ago
I've seen a lot of discussion about that, with various ideas tossed around, but this is all just aimless speculation so far.
Some people say they just made it big to appeal to Trump's ego, with no real thought behind it. In that line of thinking, the extra tonnage is just a mistake.
Some people say, it's a work in progress. The extra size can easily be filled up with more missiles like the old "arsenal ship" concepts with 500 missiles.
Some people say, it's a political maneuver to get Congress to fund what they really want, which is a future Cruiser/Destroyer. So just take that armament, but away the excess tons, and call it a destroyer/cruiser.
Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship. It's proposed with three untested weapons systems (high energy lasers, railgun, and hypersonic missiles), and maybe nukes, so they might as well wait a bit to see how those shake up before committing to any one big weapon system. Some extra tonnage also helps a bit with survivability, which makes it a bit more of a real "battleship."
BahRamYou
6d ago
Of course, that place is no longer in business, because the world can’t leave a good thing well enough alone.
Still very common in Japan, for what it's worth. During my time there I always really enjoyed the izakaya culture you described (although there's also ones that people go to just to get hammered to hit on women or whatever). I think it kinda depends, though, on having a very hardworking backroom/owner to keep up with all the food orders while working for minimal pay to keep costs down. Otherwise it's just too expensive, so people do what you did- buy their drinks from a convenience store to pregame, then have just one drink, or don't even go at all.
Submarines were absolutely vital for the American effort in the Pacific, and were responsible for sinking something like 60% of the enemy tonnage throughout the course of the war. My favorite chapter in the book was one in which we followed the submarine crew of the Wahoo and its crazy Skipper "Mush" Morton throughout most of 1943. Unlike the Allies in the Atlantic, the Japanese didn't really give much of an effort in developing anti-submarine tactics, because of the "low prestige" of the job, nor did they really ramp up their own submarine attacks on American shipping. This seems like a huge oversight.
I sometimes want to write a cynical version of the American war in the Pacific. We often get the "heroic" view, of daring pilots and fearless marines raising flags. But the cynical view starts with Japan as basically a 3rd world economy, stretched to the breaking point on long-range shipping, completely dependent on resource imports. The US starts with the completely broken Mark 14 torpedo as a result of institutional incompetance, but once they finally get a working torpedo, they quickly sink the entirety of the Japanese transport fleet, which had no defense at all. The home islands are left starving and quickly surrender. The entire "island hopping" strategy was a wasted effort except for propaganda purposes.
The two worst examples of this were lack of pilot rotations, meaning almost all experienced pilots were killed in 1942-early 1943
I know this is conventional wisdom, but that one always rubbed me the wrong way. It was obvious (even at the time) that the Americans had vastly more material resources- if Japan was going to have any chance at all of winning, they needed to win quickly. Pulling back experienced pilots to train new ones seems like a very American-centric way of thinking, that they'd be able to sustain a very long war with heavy casualties. They needed to repeat something like Pearl Harbour or Tsushima rapidly, not keep up in a war of attrition.
BahRamYou
8d ago
it appears that everyone in this thread except me has not bothered to set his image.
That's what I'm talking about. And most people don't have anything else to really distinguish themselves either.
BahRamYou
8d ago
How do you remember all that about everyone here? It's really hard for me to remember who anyone is here on sites like this where there's no profile pic or anything.
BahRamYou
8d ago
Yes, I think this an important point that often gets missed in popular discussion about the war. The people with more military knowledge already know it and take it for granted, but the people with less knowledge about modern military equipment don't know and don't think to ask. There's basically two types of weapons for an air war like this- the high end and the low end. When the media reports things like America is running low on weapons They're talking about the most expensive, high-end weapons. They do get used up quickly in the opening stages of the war, but those stages also don't last long. It's a very high-intensity war. Dropping JDAMs means they're dropping regular old bombs, and they can keep that up basically forever with no fears of running out or even spending much money, as long as they can protect the bombers.
I vaguely remember him having a commercial that ran on late-night 2000s TV, hawking his CD with a really low budget ad. It ran alongside that guy in the crazy suit ranting about how to get free money from the government. So yeah, I'm not surprised that he's not super rich... actually I'm kind of impressed that it actually launched a successful career for him, in the days before youtube or spotify.
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