FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Did the previous administration do that to random travelers and immigrants, or are you referring to something else?
Because, yes, if I were an immigrant, stricter enforcement at ICE would be a bigger concern for me than virtually anything else when deciding where to live.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
The cheapest Macbook Air on Costco (where I got my last one) is still $650. While the OS leaves something to be desired at times, the actual physical laptop itself is far superior in construction quality to everything I looked at five years ago. To get a similar quality aluminum case and solidity of function on a windows laptop would have cost me twice as much at the time.
Given that an even-decent quality Chromebook will run you in $400 range, you are better off splurging to get a nicer item, given how many hours you'll spend using it.
At least, that was my reasoning when I bought mine.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Yes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Everyone is lying constantly about the purposes of all immigration laws and law enforcement all the time. Debating it in public is more or less completely pointless.
These kinds of public displays of gratuitous kafka-esque cruelty are meant to scare current immigrants and potential immigrants, as they realize the power that the Federal Government has to fuck with them at will. This is leading a lot of green card holders I know who are from non-shithole countries to "jump before they push me" and consider moving home.
This kind of "enforcement" will have no impact on the job market, but it publicly displays to people that they aren't safe from stupidity and cruelty, and that they should rethink immigrating to or remaining in the USA. Deport 50 criminals and you deport 50 criminals; imprison one rando for doing the dishes and you terrify dozens into self deportation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.
A lot of this is the psychological shock for government workers to find themselves unsure about their futures. Government work has long been understood as a bargain* for the employee: the employee gives up significant salary and upward mobility, and receives in turn a relatively easy job and close to complete job security. You don't make as much money, but you'll never get fired. Current government workers have built their lives around that bargain. They "knew" they were giving up other opportunities, but in exchange they were getting job security.
Now that bargain is being shaken up. Whether anyone has actually been fired or not, they know they aren't wanted, and that their firing might be only a matter of time. This is devastating if you thought you would never be fired.
*One can dispute the accuracy of this bargain, some government workers seem very well paid, but it probably turns into dueling-nit-picking about what the same workers' potential earnings in the private sector would be. Regardless, this bargain is still understood as being in force even if it has factually decayed. Most government workers will tend to compare their careers to the best of their peers in the private sector and find they made less, not to the worst, so even if a government salary is higher overall it still will be perceived as middling.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
If they're light and fun, that's what Fridays are for.
If they're personal, they probably fit into the Wellness Wednesday thread broadly construed.
If they're neither fun nor personal, then such a thread would probably devolve into low-effort driveby rageposting of "thing I saw on the internet pissed me off" and "fuck my stupid outgroup" level stuff that would rapidly enshittify the forum.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Angel Numbers. Essentially a superstitious belief that the appearance of certain numbers provides meaning.
We're surrounded by numbers, from car mileage to receipts to credit cards. My wife and I have long had a joking superstition that single-digit order numbers on Wawa receipts are important and mean something will happen (for those of you less fortunate, Wawa order numbers go from 000-999, and Wawas are open 24-7 so they reset at random). She did get her first real job the same day we got the 001 receipt for the first time.
Looking for random patterns is fun.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Rhyming (or other forms of meter like alliterative verse) has obvious benefits for memory, so in the sense that it sticks in my mind more quickly that kind of language is going to be more useful for getting across an idea in a sticky way.
I think we're going to get into a discussion here over what constitutes grasping or conveying meaning.
Consider the Clarihew
George the Third Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.
Would the sentence
George III was a pretty bad king.
get across the same meaning more quickly?
Probably yes, in the sense that you'll get what is being said in less time and can move on. But more people will remember the Clarihew, a week or two from now there's a good chance that a good percentage of them will be able to repeat it back to you even if they only read it once. I myself looked that poem up just now, after reading a reference to it in a children's book (I want to say one of the Indian in the Cupboard series) twenty-five years ago. So in that sense the couplet "George the Third, Ought never to have occurred" gets the reader to grasp the meaning and retain it much more quickly than the same message in prose. People will hear George III mentioned, connect it to "ought never to have occurred," and recall that he was a bad king. It would take reading much more prose to get a similar average retention rate.
This has long been the purpose of poetic meter, from marketing jingles to heuristics to nursery rhymes to epic poems.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?
我们有办法
This reminds me more of a PJ O'Rourke column from the early 1980s where he proposed that Reagan was a bad president, but would make a great King.
It's interesting to consider a Commonwealth that includes the USA, because the USA would naturally begin to dominate it. From the Commonwealth Games to economic deals, the club goes from being primarily "Former British Possessions" to primarily "America and Friends." This could be the Atlanticist vision of Brexit. Or it might be scuttled by Trump's mercurial nature.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
I'm against annexation, but I think we should have an open door policy to apply for voluntary association and incorporation. We should be open to becoming the United States of the world. No first world nation needs more sovereignty than Alabama has.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8d ago
I suspect over thousands of messages with someone who you are hanging out with in person, such subtleties would become apparent in text.
It's perfectly possible to get along with someone via text and not in person, but it would be odd to get along via text, meet up and not get along, then go back to the exact same text dynamic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8d ago
What's your current take on the ongoing Ukraine diplomatic drama? Are the Trump Talks likely to lead to the Trump Treaty? Or are they just ongoing comedy and flailing? What does a durable peace treaty look like these days?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Because being in the US illegally is in most cases a status offense, there's no exclusionary rule. Agents will claim in arrest reports that everyone "immediately volunteered that they had no papers and were in the country illegally." There's not much point fighting that story, because it doesn't get you anywhere.
So they accuse you of being here illegally you come back and say you're a citizen. At some point you'll need some evidence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
"Our Super Yenta, with a measured IQ of over 9000, has studied over 200,000 successful relationships and over 300,000 unsuccessful relationships, in order to determine what subtle factors in communication can indicate relationship compatibility. Super Yenta has no ulterior motives: she doesn't want to hook you up with her niece, she's a computer without feelings that rates relationships only on objective criteria discerned from training data."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
I'm not entirely sure if it's true or not either over time. There were lots of very destructive wars of succession throughout the middle ages that featured virtually no political disagreement between the factions. Arguably in WWI, the combatant governments were all closer to each other in politics in August 1914 than they were to any of their successor state governments 20 years later, and certainly it impacted the populace.
But at one end you have some platonic ideal, which would be something like an ideologically-identical VP killing the POTUS and assuming the presidency. As long as the violence is limited to the POTUS, it would have no impact on me, and shouldn't end a golden age.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
Perhaps. But it certainly indicates that you shouldn't build your country or bet your life on US promises.
Which is what we're asking people to do when we support their opposition movement abroad.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9d ago
How does my saying that it is Good, Actually imply that it's terrible? I'm in favor of the dismantling of the foreign policy apparatus.
What I'm pointing at is the only way to do it is to be mean, is to be cruel, is to be reckless.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
That example is probably illustrative for me: I don't really care about celebrities who call themselves Women or call themselves Catholic. I'm concerned with the application of legal and social protections to people based on their self identifications.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
As a side note, the Trump administration seems to REALLY hate US assistance to foreign countries and they're doing their damndest to shut it off.
It's one of the more effective ways to force an isolationist, and therefore marginally more autarkic, policy on the country and on his successors. Breaking promises (whether or not those promises ought to have been made) and mangling relationships is Good, Actually; because it prevents a future Democratic or normie-Republican president from putting the pieces back together.
It's like if I had control of my blackout drunk friend's phone, and I wanted to use the opportunity to force him to dump his girlfriend, I need to do so in a maximally cruel way that he can't patch up when he sobers up. I need to do and say things so horrible that (assuming that both he and his gf will think he was the one who said them) it will be impossible to get past them.
Trump and Co. aren't just trying to change American foreign policy, they're trying to destroy it, mangle it, leave some future Newsom or Buttigieg admin with no credibility to build it up again. They're not just trying to trim the fat from the federal government, they're trying to make working for the federal government seem both pointless and insecure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
I disagree, I actually think the reverse is true: we are all less able to contemplate the killing of politicians with equanimity because of political polarization.
JFK's assassination is, even in most conspiracy theories, only ever alleged to be marginally important to the course of US Government policy. JFK might not have gone into Vietnam quite the way LBJ did, but he still would have fought the Cold War. Kill HW and replace him with Dukakis, or Clinton and replace him with Dole, and the changes expected would be mostly marginal.
Kill Trump, and replace him even with another Republican and we're in a very different place right now.
To put it another way: if all politicians are within a few degrees of agreement on every issue, then the question of who is in charge is mostly a matter of personal ambition, and two politicians killing each other over personal ambition doesn't really impact me, even if I find it horrifying. If party politics is fraught, then who is in charge has policy implications, which will impact the average person's life.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
(In this regard it has more in common with a religion than a subculture.)
Nitpicking: Religions, and society, absolutely gatekeep religious affiliation wherever you accrue benefits from that religious affiliation. Traditionally, vaccine exemptions and Conscientious Objector draft status required a showing of genuine religious faith that had been consistently practiced for a period of time. Getting married Catholic requires you to submit your baptismal paperwork and go to pre-Cana classes. I've never particularly sought religious mutual-aid, but if someone were to reach out to me on the basis of our mutual Catholicism or love for early Black Flag or hatred for the Dallas Cowboys or whatever, there would be a certain degree of gatekeeping involved. Gangs use costly signaling procedures to gatekeep membership because both the gangs themselves and MOPs will be expected to treat you differently because of your gang affiliation, and it is important to keep that from being watered down.
What deference or privileges are expected from goth identification? What's the expected social or professional consequence of addressing a self identified goth as a prep or a jock?
The point at which I'm free to roll my eyes at transwomen claiming to be women, the same way I'm free to roll my eyes at a poseur-punk who doesn't know who Minor Threat is, is the point at which I no longer care about Trans issues one way or the other.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
I'm suggesting that the AI will likely pick up on patterns you and I don't, subtleties that predict relationship outcomes more reliably than the participants themselves.
The average single has zero training examples of what a text conversation looks like in a relationship that leads to marriage. At best, they may be able to conference with a few friends who may have experience of one text conversation they lead to marriage who may be willing to read a few messages and render an opinion. A hypothetical YentaGPT could trivially review months of messaging and compare it to thousands of examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships.
Just as a great baseball coach can judge a player from how they grip the bat, a great relationship coach could judge from a text conversation.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
The problem here being that goths and punks are under no obligation to accept other people. They may choose to do so, or not. Subcultures are the location of constant infighting over who qualifies and who doesn't, and different people disagree on it.
The question of definition takes on a different valence when definitions are legally binding and screwing up the definitions can get you into legal or professional trouble.
I never even said they opposed it. Merely that they were frightened of it happening to them.
I might or might not oppose Stop and Frisk but I know it's not happening to me either way. If it started happening to me in my town, I might consider moving, whether or not I opposed it in principle.
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