MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
If Florida works like most states, taxing jurisdictions work out how much they want to raise, and then convert it into a millage rate. My gut feeling is that the null hypothesis should be that the total amount of property tax will stay the same and the millage rate will increase to compensate for the reduced base - not that millage rates will stay constant and spending be cut.
That would make the amendment a cleanish transfer from businesses, landlords and owners of expensive homes to owners of cheap homes - which you would expect to be popular. That said, supporters and opponents of the amendment seem to be campaigning as if it is a tax cut.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Agreed - My MIL maintained a fully functional kitchen garden on about half of her 1 acre lot (she had no interest in keeping animals), so I have seen it done.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Someone working in one of those fields (apart from mining) is presumably working in a small town, and they don't want 40 acres. They probably want to live in town, and if they prefer an ersatz homesteader lifestyle, they want 2-3 acres for a kitchen garden and a chicken run because they aren't going to be doing any serious farming.
The typical small town has 1-2000 families, so at 40 acres per family it is going to take up 100 square miles - i.e. some people are going to have a 5 mile daily commute on farm tracks.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The problem is that 40 acres isn't enough to support a family at a respectable working class standard of living by agriculture alone (homesteads were 160 acres, and homesteaders had a much lower standard of living than the 21st century respectable working class), so someone on a 40 acre plot is commuting into town for work (or has a truly fully remote job, but there are not many of those and they will be the first to be replaced by AI). And there are not that many 40 acre plots within tolerable commuting distance of jobs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Cajun French is generally easier to understand for metropolitan French speakers than Quebecois, because Cajun, like most creole languages, uses no inflections(yes, some inflections are written, but they are in the half of the French word which isn't pronounced).
Most inflections in Metropolitan French are silent too, except for the important ones which indicate verb tense.
It isn't a new thing, although greater access by dumb post-Christian women to Muslim men means it is happening more often. At a celebrity level, the most famous example was the failed marriage of Jemima Goldsmith (daughter of Sir James Goldsmith, who needs no introduction to British Motteposters and is probably best-known to US Motteposters as the inspiration for Gordon Gecko's rival Larry Wildman in the OG Wall Street movie) to Pakistani cricketer-politician Imran Khan.
Enough American women were marrying Saudis back in the 1990's that the State Department felt the need to publish some politically incorrect advice about why this was a bad idea - now unpublished, but the text is available here
France did have a baby boom and they had an even larger 1945-75 economic miracle than the US did (partially driven by catch-up growth from a lower pre-war base). The French call it the Trente Glorieuses.
The 1968 riots and the resulting far-left mythos of students as the revolutionary vanguard was an international phenomenon (though not global - there were no riots in the UK for example) - France was worse hit than the US, and the French 1968 riots really were student-led. Silent Generation professors like Foucault who supported the riots became major figures in gloabl Boomer leftism, and a bunch of American boomer lefties did summer or year-abroad programmes at the Sorbonne. So I think there is a connection between French and American boomerism, at least as regards the self-indulgent lefty politics and sexual deviance.
I don't know to what extent the non-leftist aspects of Boomerism are the same in France and America.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
The bank he was fined a half a billion dollars for defrauding said they were happy with the business they did and would do it again.
Trump only has to give personal guarantees on commercial mortgages (the lies he was fined for mostly relate to his personal real estate holdings) in the first place because the banks don't trust Trump not to screw them over in bankruptcy court. The vast majority of commercial mortgages are non-recourse, and accordingly the banks don't usually care about the personal net worth of the developer.
Writing a normal non-recourse commercial mortgage on a Trump building is sufficiently widely known to be a bad idea that there was a joke about it in Sex and the City.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
The problem with using "Art of the Deal" to understand Trump's approach to dealmaking is that it doesn't cover the most interesting and important aspect of it, which is how he rats out of the deals after he makes them.
The surprising thing about Trump is that most of the people who have done substantial amounts of business with him, in a wide range of capacities and over multiple decades and four very different careers*, say that he is dishonest, that his dishonesty hurt them personally, and that other people should shun him. And yet somehow he keeps finding new marks willing to do business with him. "Art of the Deal" is a book about how he takes the sucker, and the interesting and difficult bit of running cons at scale is how you manage the flow of new suckers into the game and the flow of angry suckers out of it.
* GC in his father's org, real estate developer in his own right, reality TV star and politician. I acknowledge that he was spectacularly successful in three of his careers - my problem with the man is his base character, not his lack of ability.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Knowing nothing else besides his degree, best guess would be that he's smarter than average,
Having a bachelor's degree at all shows that - it remains the case even in younger cohorts post HE expansion that most people don't complete one. Having a bachelor's degree from a 50th percentile university suggests ~80th percentile in whatever combination of g and conscientiousness that academia is measuring. Slightly higher if you are a white/Asian American or privately educated Brit who is on the wrong end of affirmative action.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
I live south of the river. Down here them's fighting words. Get your ponce arse back to Hatfield and the North or I'll set the Bushwhackers on you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Surely the point is that the joke remains funny, not that it remains relevant?
The only feminist comedy that is funny involves non-gender-conforming women mocking their own inability to gender-conform.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
I have met a lot of amateur politicians who genuinely believed in what they were doing. In my youth, I was one. We tended not to get elected. But your basic point is correct.
Among the people doing ward-level politics in the UK in the noughties, I would guess:
- 15% professionals and aspirant professionals to whom your comment applies
- 40% true believers
- 15% people mainly interested in getting laid (I have been to six weddings, including my own, of couples who met through youth and student politics)
- 30% people still doing it because their whole social life revolves around politics and they are too autistic to go out and meet some normies
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
To answer the question, most elected Democrats are hacks who are willing to do anything for personal advancement. Elected Democrats believe, rightly or wrongly (I genuinely don't know which) that being called racist will do more damage to their personal career prospects than hurting the party.
To respond to your empirical argument about what gets people called racist, the Great Awokening was all about Democrats and other left elites calling each other racist over intra-coalition political disagreements and personal beefs. And what we saw was that elected Democrats were willing to beclown themselves and the Democratic Party rather than risk being called racist. In addition, enough people have (for reasons which may have been good back in the noughties when they started doing it) pre-committed to calling voter suppression racist that there is no DPUSA Grand Ayatollah who could turn the racism accusations off for partisan advantage. Finally, there are large parts of the Democratic base who are sufficiently rabidly partisan that they will punish elected Democrats (including by calling them racist if the opportunity arises) for voting for any GOP-proposed bill even if they would normally support it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
33% is basically as high as you can get now in American politics.
Are you saying America was a different country the day before Trump launched the latest installment of ZOG vs Iran Nth: the oil-fired Boogaloo? Because his approval rating was higher back then.
Trump took a bullet for this country. If he only cared about himself he would have enjoyed retirement at the top of his field with billions of dollars in his bank account.
He has made more billions as a maximally corrupt second-term President than he did as a failed real estate developer or a successful reality TV star.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Trump II feels more like "Joffrey has banished Tywin and made Littlefinger the leader of the privy council".
This seems grossly unfair to Susie Wiles, whom I read as the straight man in this particular clown troupe.
Though if this is the game we are playing, the far more interesting question is "Which of the younger Trumps is Tyrion?"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
The Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not willing to risk being called racist by their own supporters in order to secure a partisan advantage. This is sufficient to explain their opposition to the SAVE Act or other dumb Republican voter-suppression proposals.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Unless you understood the JCPOA as I did, as tacit approval by all the signatories for Iran to obtain nukes and continue terrorist operations while obtaining nukes for the purpose of deploying them against Israel and ultimately the USA.
JCPOA was explicit approval by all the signatories for Iran to maintain, subject to monitoring that ensured they didn't actually enrich to weapons grade while the deal was in force, a nuclear programme that would get them to a place where a c. 2 year breakout was possible (i.e. working centrifuges and a large stockpile of reactor-grade uranium). Iran was complying with their obligations, and the monitoring ended and the breakout process began because Trump tore up the deal in his first term. You don't need to think that anyone was giving Iran tacit approval to nuke Israel for the argument you are making here to stand up, and none of the JCPOA signatories could have given Iran meaningful tacit approval to nuke Israel given Israel's own nuclear deterrent.
Why did a bunch of powerful countries give Iran approval to maintain a dual-use nuclear programme? Because a global coalition was required to contain Iran via sanctions, and it wasn't in the interests of Russia or China to do so (and most Westerners who are not aligned with the US Deep State were sceptical as well, including European elites and Obama's foreign policy team, because Iran was on our side against Al-Quaeda and ISIS at the time).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
TACO isn't a claim that Trump is acting out of character - the "A" is explicitly a claim that he is acting in character.
Though if you are going to argue about Trump's character based on Art of the Deal it should be pointed out that Trump didn't write the book, and the man who did has repudiated it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11d ago
I was on the committee of the Cambridge University Poker Society during the Poker Boom, and a few online poker execs came to speak to us - partly to identify potential future employees (though none of us wanted to work for them), and partly to pitch sponsorship deals to the club. At the time the sites definitely wanted to sign up smart players and things like rakeback were set up in a way which would preferentially keep non-degens on the site. I think the realisation that the flow of money into the ecosystem is fish-limited and that the rake is competing with the pros to get the fishy money came when the overall market got worse post-boom.
Also, in the era of a small number of networks and many skins, a skin that preferentially attracted smart players would be able to free-ride off other skins on the same network signing up the fish, although that wasn't obvious to me at the time. The best sponsorship offers we got were from obscure sites feeding the Party Poker network.
I believe in the old school logic of ius in bello - that there are certain destructive practices that armies are likely resort to out of sadism/schadenfreude/righteous anger despite the lack of practical military benefit, and that banning them is a useful precommitmemt that will help us resist our own desire to act out our vices when the opportunity arises.
On that model, punitive bombing of civilian targets is the sort of practice you would want to ban. Bomber Harris said out of one side of his mouth that bombing civilian housing in German cities was part of an "industrial web" attack designed to make the newly-homeless workers less productive. Out of the other side of his mouth, he said a lot of great lines about winds and whirlwinds that implied his real motivation was simply to inflict pain on a deserving target. If we hadn't bombed German civilian housing, the war would have turned out the same way, except for fewer dead British aircrew and fewer dead German civilians.
Bomber Harris can plausibly claim ignorance - it wasn't obvious in 1942 that you couldn't win a war using air attacks on civilian morale. His successors can't. But people keep doing it - see Brett Devereux on the long and undistinguished history of strategic air power.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11d ago
I don't get why Zelensky doesn't just go easy on the refineries for a few weeks to get some Trump brownie points.
The model that most people who are anti-Trump and pro-Ukraine have of Trump's policy is that he wants Ukraine to lose, and ideally to lose quickly*, but US domestic politics means he can't just sell Ukraine out the way Chamberlain and Daladier sold out Czechoslovakia or Nixon sold out South Vietnam.
If Zelensky shares this model, then Ukraine doesn't need Trump brownie points - he needs to retain the support of the marginal Russophobe Republican senator whose potential vote in an impeachment trial is his main leverage against Trump selling him out. And he can do that more easily by fighting hard and well and showing that Ukraine can still win with appropriate support than by making a militarily expensive show of support for a harebrained Trump admin scheme that is unlikely to actually move the pump price of diesel or the midterm vote. "Trump brownie points" only help Ukraine if there is a possibility that they move Trump to a stance of actually helping Ukraine win.
* There are multiple plausible motivations for this on Trump's part, with TDS sufferers focusing on the corrupt and/or treasonous ones, but given that MAGA Twitter is even more pro-Russian than Trump himself, they probably aren't necessary. Trump behaves in the same way regardless of whether Russia has paid him off, he honestly believes that a Russian victory is in the US national interest as understood from a MAGA perspective, or because he thinks a quick Russian victory is the best hope to avoid megadeaths due to a prolonged war.
many of their attacks on bridges and powerplants and other economic targets would be screeched of as WAR CRIMES if Trump did it
Attacks on dual-use economic infrastructure like bridges and powerplants are war crimes if the damage to civilians is grossly disproportionate to any potential military advantage gained. This implies that punitive bombing of bridges and powerplants absent a ground war (where to a first approximation there is no direct military advantage and the damage to civilian morale is the whole point) is much more likely to be a war crime than bombing of bridges and powerplants alongside a ground war. If Trump bombed Iranian bridges and powerplants in order to soften them up for an invasion, then it would be (arguably) a criminal war of aggression but not a war crime. Leftists would still be screeching WAR CRIMES because they are stupid like that.
The rise in LGB self-identification is driven women who only date men identifying as bisexual. They haven't been gayed, they are claiming an oppressed identity for clout. The much smaller risk in gay male self-ID is entirely consistent with less closeting over time.
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