Pitt1980
2yr ago
It'll be interesting to see how crowded a field it is.
In addition to Trump and DeSantis, Predictit is only giving odd for Haley, Youngkin, Pence, Pompeo, Romney, and Rubio. None of them are over 5 cents. With the possible exception of Youngkin who I don't know that much about, all of them seem like fairly Establishment GOP candidates.
My perception is that if the Establishment doesn't want Trump, all those candidates will play ball to cut deals for the promise to go away strategically, similar to how the Democratic field cleared for Biden.
I think what gives DeSantis a real shot is that he can realistically run to the right of Trump on how Covid was handled.
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Thanks,
That's basically enough to put the gay prostitute theory to bed, at least in my mind.
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Since I don't see a thread about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, what the hell, I guess I'll make one.
I'll probably do a poor job of cataloguing the current state of known facts, but as best I can...
Paul Pelosi's attacker was a guy name David DePape, he appears to have a fairly checkered mental health history, if not homeless, appears to have lived on the edge of homelessness, appears to have social media history that doesn't have zero overlap various right wing issues (apparently concerning Covid), but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts? I hope so, if not, my apologies).
Anyway, more interesting from my viewpoint, Hillary Clinton and Elon Musk exchanged tweets over various theories of the case. With Clinton basically saying this is Trump fault, and Elon linking to an article hypothesizing that DePape might have been a gay escort. Which the NY Times quickly declared misinformation (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweets-hillary-clinton-pelosi-husband.html), Musk deleted his tweet.
As best I can tell, the gay escort theory at this point is almost entirely based on conjecture.
Here's my question, if the conjecture turns out to be correct, will it come to light? What concatenation of events would keep it from coming to light?
Right now DePape is under arrest for attempted murder, its not apparent to me if he's lawyered up or not yet, I assume at some point he's going to have to go on record establishing a timeline for what he was doing in the 5 or so hours prior to the incident, if he met Paul Pelosi in a gay bar, that seems like something that would be fairly straight forward to corroborate with witnesses, if they arranged a meeting on an app, it would seem that digital corroboration would be pretty straight forward.
Not sure about Paul Pelosi's current ability to speak with police, but I presume they're going to establish a timeline for him as well.
If that is what happened, what would keep if from coming to light? (I anticipate some joke about DePape committing suicide, but, that would obviously drive a fair amount of theorizing were it to happen).
Follow up question, what are the consequences if either story pans out?
Yeah, the parallel occurred to me as well,
Maybe where I'm trying to go is that original colonization was driven by economic adventurism,
Maybe that economic adventurism hasn't really gone away,
But these days involves more getting the right signatures to lock Foxconn into producing iPhones at a favorable rate, and less getting people do things at gunpoint.
Or maybe you'll miss out on the economic value of getting Foxconn to produce iPhones at favorable rates if you start by waving around guns?
Idk, I don't have a theory fully fleshed out in my mind.
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Epistemological status - Straight brainstorm.
To what degree has the role of colonizer been taken over by the multinational corporation?
I've seen Steve Sailer repeat a theory (fairly certain he doesn't claim it's original to him, but I would have to do some internet searching to determine who he credits it to) that we may be past an era of conquest due to changes in what makes up the economic value of a place.
Ie, in 1850, most of the value of a place was the natural resources of a place, the farmland, the mines underneath it, that sort of thing. So you could fight a war on top of it, and if you won it, the economic value of what you won would remain largely intact.
In contrast, most of the economic value of a place these days is the human capital contained in a place. So if China decided they wanted to invade California (to pick an absurd example) they might militarily conquer it, but in doing so, all the engineers would flee, the urban centers would be destroyed, you could do it, but you couldn't do it and keep the economic value of what you won intact.
Instead, it makes more sense to try and extract what you can out of economic trade, that sort of thing.
Extending the analogy a bit, maybe political control over a place isn't particularly important as long as you have other levers to get what you want out of a place.
As long as Apple or Nike can set up a sweatshop (slightly tongue in cheek, but hopefully the point stands) in your country, and expect their property rights relatively respected [1], who cares if the local official has to write reports that need to be sent to Parliament or the State Department or not. The powers that be are able to get what they want out of a place, if anything, they're saving money having to pay for fewer bayonets.
[1] I guess at some point in the past there was real risk that multinational companies would have their investments expropriated by local governments, I guess maybe that was a larger risk when the USSR was giving support to various Marxist revolutionaries? That seems like something that's less of a risk than it used to be. Possibly due to levers like the IMF and World Bank and that sort of thing. Idk, I might be out in front of my skates in terms of knowing what I'm talking about.
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Given I haven't seen a price mentioned and that "Parler staff will still be working on the app", here's guessing he bought a small stake, possibly with future royalties, which was agreed to largely due to the free publicity Kanye brings.
Pure hunch, he might own 5%, almost no cash actually changed hands.
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Just as a data point,
I've watched a bit of the originals (but not completely), I've watched RoP not because I was particularly interested but because my wife is into that universe and wanted to.
(I'm willing to suffer through a boring hour of TV every week if my wife wants to watch something, fwiw I have very little sense for what wokeness I'm supposed to be upset about in this show.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but this doesn't seem like a gentle introduction into the universe, I constantly have the sense that I'm supposed to be getting references to the Peter Jackson movies that I don't get.
If you're telling me this is designed to bring in new fans who haven't seen the movies or are already familiar with the universe, maybe they just failed miserably, but I think the actual answer is that you're wrong.
Pitt1980
2yr ago
I might rethink this
Its pretty discouraging to put effort into a post, and then crickets....
If you're actively making this happen,
that seems like a recipe for driving new users in, making them feel unwelcome, then immediately have them take off
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Has net performance improved since net neutrality ended?
I feel like a read somewhere once where Zoom as a thing people were regularly doing wasn't something that the internet of 5-10 years ago could handle technology wise.
Is there any connection to the improvements made following, or incentivized by, the end of net neutrality and the rise of video conferencing apps like Zoom?
Pitt1980
2yr ago
Lol, so....
First, I think there is definitely a "male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to" element at play here. Especially the 5-6 slot on ESPN (Around the Horn especially, and to a somewhat lesser extent Pardon the Interruption). Back in my 20s, I watched these shows basically every day. At a certain point it occurred to me how much of these show revolved around 'Is he right to be angry?', 'Is he getting the respect he deserves?', etc, and those shows started to lose their appeal (also somewhat around the time I had kids), and it started to seem like a dumb way to spend an hour of my life every day, I rarely watch those some these days. (There's a fairly entertaining Wait But Why illustration about this - https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/newspaper1.png from an entertaining blog post https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/sports-fans-sports-fans.html)
Second, I think there's an element of 'knowing all the names', that isn't necessarily 'royals for guys', but actually about appreciating the depth of the game we're watching. In its current form, sports isn't nameless interchangeable robots carrying out various operations. If you have a team you follow, whether 1 particular guy is playing QB vs another particular guy playing QB is going to make a big difference for how your team does. To varying degrees, that's true up and down the lineup and includes the coaching staff.
Maybe somewhat similarly, there seem to be a lot people who really get into music in a way I don't really understand. I play various music stations when I'm driving around, there are songs that I find catchy and enjoy, but that tends to be the extent of my engagement with it. There seem to be a collection of people who take their favorite bands very seriously, its seems as if they make their musical tastes a major part of their personal identity. For the most part that seems.... fine, but they're definitely experiencing music and a different level of intensity than I am.
I suspect your experience of sports is similar to my experience of music, which, all in all, is fine, different strokes for different folks.
[Its interesting that you mention being a teenager as when you sneered at "sportsball", I think that's probably the timeframe in which I was most into knowing the different names. If you're actually interested in the mechanics of it, my parents at various times got me subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News as birthday presents, they both came weekly, I read them cover to cover, I never threw them out (they're probably still at my parent's house), when I was bored in my room, I would re-read old issues. It's hard to estimate how much of my life I spent doing this, maybe 5+ hours a week from age 9-18 or so??? Idk, I have a fairly deep reservoir of sports names from a certain era. I don't follow it nearly as closely now that I've gotten older.]
Pitt1980
2yr ago
I got a twitter follow recommendation for you, I've really enjoyed following @TheHonestNFL, pretty technical football heavy, claims to be an anonymous ex-NFL scout, (I supposed no one really know who you are on twitter, if he's bullshitting, he does a pretty convincing job of it). Anyway, a lot of the content he puts out is Eagles based.
(on a larger scale, expecting some regression to the mean and not overreacting to small sample sizes, are typical good ideas when considering the NFL)
Good luck this year!
Among the GOP primary electorate, yes, I think a lot of people care.
(My older Fox News watching relatives, who I perceive to be well represented both in Trump's base and in the GOP primary electorate, care a lot).
A large fraction of that electorate wants the government to be small, and mostly leave them alone.
Covid response was the largest government intrusion into the average person's life in nearly everyone's lifetime (maybe since WWII?).
In large part, that happened on Trump's watch, while Trump's didn't directly cause much of it, he didn't do much to prevent it. (Its not obvious that he had the authority as President to prevent much of what happened, but those nuances tend to get lost in the branding of these things [and can probably quickly be summed up as 'he had the authority to fire Fauci, and didn't']).
One way to think of the GOP is break it out into 3 group - Bush style establishment, Trump loyalists, and anti-libs.
Bush style establish has a very limited voting block (ballpark, maybe somewhere between 5-25% of the GOP), but is over-represented in the various positions that have levers of power.
If the field clears for DeSantis, that might very well be helpful for him, I'm skeptical it will be decisive.
Trump loyalist will vote for Trump based on personality - it's not a winnable demo for anyone who's not Trump.
Anti-libs have largely supported Trump, but not because of who Trump is, but who he's against. They're happy/grateful that Trump got to nominate 3 SC justices, they're distrustful of GOP politicians who seem to get more liberal once they get to Washington. But it's what Trump stands for, not who he is personally.
Personally, they were embarrassed by Trump's twitter antics, they were embarrassed by "grab them by the pussy", they don't love that he's on his third wife, but they looked around, and voted for what they perceived as the lesser evil.
That's a winnable demo for someone who might be perceived as a better standard-bearer for the anti-lib perspective.
DeSantis's anti-Covid record gives him real credibility with that demo.
The exact breakdown on what percentage make up the Trump loyalists and what percentage makes up the anti-libs I think is somewhat of a mystery. And I think will ultimately determine who winds up the nominee.
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