MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
27d ago
I think in some cases, she’s somewhat a hinderance. Not that it isn’t nice to have your nest to return to, but that’s a catch 22. For some people, the fact that you can afford to fail means that you don’t take things seriously enough. If not working means possibly sleeping in the car because you can’t pay rent, you’ll find the muscles to work full time. If failing out of college means poverty, class becomes much more interesting. I would actually suggest getting your own apartment or split Trent somewhere so that if you’re not working or doing the minimum it will be a risk to you.
I’d also recommend that if you’re not making it to class, maybe try either trade school or community college. If you’re doing community college, you can generally pay your way. That way the fact that you spent $400 a course might motivate you a bit more.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
27d ago
I think this is the fruit of the deep state long since being removed from any serious accountability for its decision making. It is now so partisan and blatantly so that a company that qualifies for funding doesn’t get it because of who runs it. An agency held to account for results would at least fear the wrath of elected officials for having done so. The FCC has so much protection from the official state that it can punish Musk’s company for his public crime think.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
I think a lot of this is down to incentives. Nobody wants to be the government that gives a bad economic report. You don’t want to be up for election when crime is up or unemployment is high or inflation is high. So there’s a lot of pressure on the agencies making these reports because your boss is a political appointee and making his elected boss look bad is going to hurt his career. As such, people are using formulas that are inaccurate and almost always in the direction of making the boss look as good as you can get away with. Which is pretty easy when you can change the formula to suit the purpose. Unemployment rates are hot garbage because basically it’s only counting people actively seeking work within a 3 month timeframe. Which means that if you’re not actively filling out applications, you’re not unemployed. This obviously doesn’t count people who are discouraged or retraining because their old skills became useless. U6 is more useful because it counts all workers available, and if anything overcounts as a full time student is counted even if he doesn’t want a job at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
Not only that, but quite often the older version of the product is no longer available. I may have the option of buying a 4K TV, but it’s not like I could choose an old CRT TV if I wanted one. Or in the case of shrinkflation, if you make packages smaller, than the old version isn’t available. People are not choosing the new one, the old one is gone.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
Which is kind of the point. If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results? If the polls say Trump wins, then it’s useful perhaps in business where you might want to long term plan for the future economic policies Trump brings. Or it might be useful to the various campaigns as a signal of where the weak points are. I suspect that they aren’t getting the polls generally available to the public, which are not about reporting the likely winners, but in motivating or demotivating various factions in the electorate. CNN isn’t trying to guess the outcome. They want to scare democrats into voting and working harder for Kamala and saying she might lose is motivation for people who are afraid of a Trump second term. If they’re wrong, it’s not like they get a black eye even.
I think what makes more sense is to try to gage enthusiasm and whether or not some factions of the base are not on board. Kamala has a big problem because of Israel Palestine. There’s a fairly large portion of the left that’s jumping to either staying home or voting Green Party. If they’re serious, I think that’s a problem no matter what the polls say. I don’t see the same divide with any issues for Trump. I see lots of people saying they can’t wait to vote for Trump. Both things seem important as data points.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
29d ago
I’ll go one further. I don’t think any poll is actually trying to figure out who will win so much as to convince the electorate of whatever the polling centers want to be true. There’s really no reason to bother with them other than to see if anything is changing within the narrative.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
30d ago
I’m not going to deny that at least some people think it’s nefarious. It’s just that it’s much more likely that FEMA is bean counting supplies gathered by other charities before letting them through to satisfy a process that’s in their handbook. Standardizing is generally okay. But then again this is a situation where time loss means dead bodies and everybody knows it. It’s not exactly the same as managing accounts in an office. The time spent adding traceability to a process in an office job and even using that to trace that information isn’t going to cause much of a problem because you have the luxury of as much time as you need to do that. If the cost of traceability is death, then I think honestly it’s a bit more critical to push back and say “why is it important to have a complete inventory of what First Baptist Church of Asheville is distributing when that will delay aid by a whole day and people will die without food?” Sure, there are some bits that you need to hold the line on, but trying to follow a checklist to the letter in a disaster zone just adds delay where none was needed.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
30d ago
I think a lot of this is down to history. Jewish history is full of “we thought we were safe, then the gentiles started forming mobs — again,” and recent Israeli history has been one filled with terror attacks, suicide bombings, shootings, etc. with a history like that, paranoia, and thus extreme reaction to threats is just part of the deal. From the point of view of Israel, if the country fails, it’s only a matter of time before they’re back in Nazi camps. And the only thing standing between Jews and Nazi camps is the Israeli security apparatus. So, unlike the USA where military forces are generally only used abroad and we haven’t had a mainland invasion since 1812, Israel has a history of exile and being victimized all the time, finally getting a state, having the surrounding countries try to kill them, nearly daily terror strikes. There’s no sense that letting up will do any good here. The US military can follow international law because it’s not at risk nor are its civilians. If we decided to fight a war with silly string instead of guns, the state still isn’t at risk. If Israel doesn’t go full bore, they risk being destroyed. So while the US military wouldn’t shoot preteens, it’s never been in the same position. They never had to think about whether the kid will grow up to try to kill them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
30d ago
The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.
It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.
OSHA is supposed to protect workers, but quite often the opposite happens as rules that do little to prevent serious injury often make it difficult to impossible to run a business. Which makes it a much cheaper and often better idea to have things made in China or India so they aren’t fined because of some cosmetic problems that have nothing to do with safety.
FEMA is so regulation heavy that it’s more a hinderance than a help in a disaster. Much of the aid in Helene is getting through despite FEMA, not because of it. And because of this the people no longer want FEMA around. I can’t blame them when a bunch of construction workers with heavy equipment can rescue more people in a couple of hours than FEMA and those they contract with can manage in a week.
It’s poor customer service. The people are not getting better transportation from the department of transportation, better education from the department of education, and so on.
Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.
They’re not necessarily “crazy”. I think they’re wrong in the sense that these groups don’t wish them to suffer. But at the same time the deep state serves the deep state and is mostly a jobs program for elites who are otherwise unemployable who have no idea how to get things done. They follow procedures off cliffs because they are not skilled enough to know how things actually work so they can’t or won’t bend the rules to get things moving in the right direction.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
30d ago
One thing I noticed about politics Now vs 2000 is that basically politics itself has become much more of a lifestyle than it used to be. There are entirely different default activities, and different fashion sense and different music and so on. And now there are political themed shopping — bulletproof coffee and the like. And I think that’s making polarization worse, as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political. I find it kind of exhausting tbh to have so much be political when it doesn’t matter that much.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the partisanship and the entrenched powers points in the other direction— hypernormalization. The hyper-normalizing simply means that most people have simply accepted that this is how it is and ever will be because the people in charge simply have no solutions to the issues at hand. This goes for democrats and republicans, and I think it explains the Cult around MAGA and Trump. Trump is popular because he’s giving hope of a world actually better than what we have now, and doing so in a way that’s very concrete. Not “slow the growth of inflation by X% over the next Y months” but “I want you to be able to afford groceries and gasoline again.” Not “we’re going to deal with the root causes of X,” but “we’re going to actually fix this.” Not “well, we should give illegals a court date,” but “we’re throwing them out.” It’s a similar appeal to other populist candidates— they’re addressing the real needs of real people with a promise that they can actually fix it, and of course they get very popular with ordinary people who want things to be more like the past where one income would feed and house a family (in an actual house even if it was small), where social deviance was not taught as normal to elementary school kids, where walking down the streets in major cities was not an open invitation to be assaulted and robbed, and where you didn’t see drug dealers selling openly on the streets.
I don’t think any party can actually deliver on getting us back to the turn of the last century where such things were possible. It’s the slow decline of the western world into moral decadence, sloth, corruption and decay. Such has been the way of every other civilization to exist. We’re in the late empire stages of decline. And unless we right the ship, she’s going to sink into darkness until some other civilization pulls up from the ashes of the Rules Based International Order to create something brand new.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think organs of consensus building are inherent to any group human activity much like a dominance hierarchy is. If you smash the current ones, you will find others taking their place. Think tanks are probably more effective than they look to us normal serfs on the outside of the power structure. Most of their work is laundered through the organs of consensus aimed at us — mostly media, political talking points, and influencers.
I don’t think you fight most of these things by destroying the think tanks that already exist. You do so, much like other institutions that build consensus, by building alternatives. The greatest enemy of the public schools are home schools as they effectively remove certain children from the early indoctrination curriculum that schooling is meant to provide. The greatest threat to universities are trade schools and children skipping college to go into trades. Current media and social media are best countered by alternatives. If I can watch media with a different perspective, or news slanted in a different direction, or listen to music that doesn’t line up with Consensus, then the Consensus loses control.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
They’re largely propaganda machines in my opinion. They exist to create consensus around an idea and to craft legislation to turn that consensus into law. The “ideological tax” you speak of is how those groups get the money to get the job done.
It seems to go in stages with the propaganda stage going first. Issue comes up. Think tanks find research to support the ideological agenda the think tank has. Then they issue white papers that summarize that research and debunk the opposition narrative. At the same time they issue the talking points that get injected into the media by aligned media outlets and politicians. At that point they start talking about legislation to fix the issue or blocking bad legislation.
I don’t think you can get rid of them entirely. They’re a big part of how the elites control culture. If you weaken or destroy that system another will be created or co-opted. Power is power.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
To play devils advocate here, if the system is completely broken and unable to produce a good result on anything that matters, maybe a defect bot is exactly what you need. Cooperation with a system that doesn’t work doesn’t fix that system. I think that our systems are so broken at this point that we either do the major fixes we need or consign ourselves to the scrap heap of history where future civilizations will wonder how we let it all fall apart.
I don’t like Trump at all, I’d very much rather have anyone else. But on the other hand the hour is late and if we wait for something better we might be doing so in a completely failed state instead of merely a failing one. A third of Americans can’t read. We can’t handle disaster recovery, fix potholes, build aircraft, or fix train tracks. Large portions of most cities are no go zones, often featuring open air drug markets. Is Trump or any other “defect bot” going to actually be able to fix that? It’s one in a million. On the other hand the system that you think we should encourage cooperation with has failed in most respects. Risky surgery or slow decline into death?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It’s a lot easier to “corral your radical elements” when you have a firm grasp on most institutions and are firmly in power. They essentially don’t need the votes and vocal support of the far left wing. They can tell them to sit down and shut up because even if that 3-5% of far left tankie communist group stays home on Election Day, democrats will still have substantial power, influence, and support. They will have 240 or so electoral votes in the can. They own the deep state, the university, the media, and so on. The GOP doesn’t have th3 luxury of telling the far right to bugger off. They lose if that faction stays home, and if they lose, a lot of the current project of trying to reconquer the institutions will be put off for another generation or two.
And I would consider Mises and Heritage foundation to be fairly galaxy brained institutions. They put out plenty of projects exploring how a conservative might go on to solve pressing issues in our society. There are also church institutions that give reasons for social conservative ideas.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It depends. The health of the state is so bad at this point that I think keeping the status quo might be worse long term. The government we have, the old guard political class cannot actually solve problems, fix things, or come up with new ideas. FEMA can’t handle hurricane, but Cajun navy and private charities can. The government can’t handle education or health or roads. Trump might well be the shakeup we need. But I’m not sure because the amount of state capacity that will be wasted fighting every single step back will likely make it all worse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Honestly I’d be much more inclined to believe if physicists could explain how FTL or even near light travel is possible without an entire planet’s worth of mass for fuel. And NASA or SETI finding signals of intelligent beings. Or you know those huge space telescopes, it’s going to make me interested if they find evidence of life and especially intelligent life in space.
I’ve never heard the History Channel Alien guy explain why JWT or Hubble never found an inhabited planet.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’ve always seen that as a perception of social class. The left sees itself as the upper class ruling elites and the conservatives are seen as lower class. They’re “the help” the kind of people who fix your toilet, or install your new energy efficient air conditioner, or the ones who cook in restaurants or make stuff in factories or raise your food. They’ve called it Flyover country for decades because they see it as the places where the losers live.
I think at least half of the conspiracy theories started as jokes. They know that their ruling class sees them as idiots, and they might well choose to have a bit of fun pretending to believe in weird stuff just to annoy their betters. Jewish Space Lasers is certainly a joke — I know of no one anywhere who believes that the Jews have space lasers.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the thing with Trump is that like or hate him, he’s not beholden to traditional politics or norms. He’s the guy who wants to get things done and build things. Whether or not he’s right about all of this, I think is up to personal opinion. But what scares people is that he sees those norms and systems as obstacles to be overcome rather than rules to obey at cost of doing the thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think I might go as an Amish woman or something. I dunno.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean wouldn’t that just be plain old ordinary network security protocols. I’ll agree that you aren’t going to get to 100% trust here, but the point I’m making is that we can do a pretty good job with similar things all the time, yet somehow in the case of securing the election, it’s like there’s a bizarre mental block where it’s not worth trying to do these kinds of things because we won’t get to 100% trust or 100% hack-proof immediately. We trust that kind of technology to get packages around and to validate property transfers and bank transfers all the time. Nobody I know is thinking that UPS is going to lose their packages. The big problem isn’t UPS losing packages, it’s porch pirates.
Now secondly, providing that you keep the original ballots, finding the back door hack is dead easy because you have the data that produced the original count, and if you recount the same ballots, you get the same numbers and if you don’t, there’s a problem. There are also fraud detection techniques that are known in statistics and forensic accounting that would be fairly useful in determining whether the results on the computer are likely fraud. Even if none of that in isolation is enough, if you do good chain of custody, have good network security, have the original ballots, and use forensic accounting and data science, this system would probably be more secure than most other systems that we use daily. At some point, it’s good enough.
And I think a lot of the distrust is exact that nobody is willing to put forth the effort to secure the election to the same standard as even my Amazon order. In fact, when someone tries to add a layer of security, even fairly common sense stuff like government IDs, the resounding answer is NO. And so you can’t shakes the suspicions because it often looks like the government is hostile to the idea of making the system harder to tamper with or vote without having the right to do it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think this might be a just so story. There was no serious investigation, no evidence presented, no experts testified in congress. So it’s sort of an odd proposition to suggest that a thing nobody even attempted to do could not have possibly changed anyone’s mind.
The position became very entrenched by now because every cathedral organ was screaming at them that “there was no fraud”, telling them that these were either stupid or bigoted for daring to think that, and telling them there was no reason to bother to ask questions, let alone investigate anything. At the same time the alternative press is reporting on reports of anomalies, there’s the president talking about fraud and filing lawsuits. Those lawsuits were not taken seriously and were dismissed on standing. In short the public was very loudly told nothing to see here, and no investigations happened.
Imagine the opposite. There are claims of fraud. And instead of being summarily dismissed, the attorney general of the states involved open investigations. Now there’s going to be evidence presented. If a pipe is supposed to have burst, then there’s going to be evidence that someone actually called a plumber who fixed that pipe. If ballots are showing up people are going to investigate where they came from. Computer experts would examine the voting machines and even publicly test them. Now there’s at least the sense that the system is looking at the claims. And whatever they find is publicly available. People can look at the data on the voting machine and decide, but at minimum it’s not summary dismissal. If you do that when Trump claims fraud, you can point to sworn testimony in court, a witness cracking on cross examination, or at least some evidence that he’s wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the legitimacy of elections is probably one of the most important things to protect in a democratic society. If people don’t believe the election is fair, eventually it’s going to go much farther than it did in 2021. Voting is the alternative to warfare and revolution. And if people don’t trust the election, they won’t accept the results. The best remedy is to take the accusations extremely seriously and do a thorough investigation, and if nothing is found, fine. But the tactic used in 2020 of blanket dismissal, condescending comments about disinformation, and generally mocking the very idea not only didn’t reassure the public that the government was committed to fair, open, and honest elections, but often pushed people the other way. The perception was “the government isn’t going to look at the evidence, and is going to simply label all of this as disinformation and call anyone who dares to question it a conspiracy theorist, so why should I believe it?”
On the other side, I think a lot of the issue here is about this being as much a jobs program as a broadband program. Satellite broadband doesn’t employ a lot of backhoe drivers.
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