Rov_Scam
1d ago
It isn't a feature of the current era, either, but an excuse guys who can't get dates use to justify why it isn't their fault. Dating apps are easy mode compared to how it used to be. Yeah, you may have a better chance of getting that cute girl to talk to you if you ask her in the real world rather than like her profile on a dating app, but in the real world chances are you aren't going to cross paths. In the real world there isn't a seemingly bottomless well of single women advertising their availability. In the real world you might get a prospect once every couple months maybe she'll go out with you if you ask. I doubt there are many people who had a ton of game pre-app and are now getting nothing but crickets.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Yeah, I think most people here are missing the point. This isn't a question about rights; it's a question about moral tradeoffs. Is it worth saving a child's life if the consequence is that it makes a murderer harder to convict? I don't think most people would have to think too hard about that one. The 4th Amendment angle is just a red herring. If this is indeed a real interview question (and I have reason to doubt that it is), the point is that you're not supposed to think about whether the search can be justified.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
To piggyback on what @FCfromSSC said, your view is interesting, if only it weren't ahistorical. The reason Communism gained purchase on the left in the postwar years wasn't because it was enlightenment times ten, but because it was seen as an alternative to the enlightenment liberalism that ultimately led to fascism. Logic, efficiency, sceintific progress, and economic development didn't change our basic nature, it just meant that we could commit atrocities at an industrial scale while keeping detailed records of how much gold was extracted from the deceased Jews' teeth. Fascism wasn't a rejection of the enlightenment but the ultimate culmination of it. The Germans may have got there first, but this was the inevitable result unless the power structures were radically changed.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I think you're confusing the issues here. The ACLU may be interested in someone's right to change their name. I doubt they'd be interested in a procedural argument. You presented evidence that the Alabama DMV's procedure is inconsistent with Alabama law, and I have no reason to claim that it isn't. But the state legislature could change the law tomorrow and statutorily require a certain process for name changes, superseding the prior court rulings. Hell, there was a concurrence in the opinion you linked where one of the judges said that this would be a good issue for the legislature to take up.
So, if as @ulyssessword suggests, a court were to refuse a transgender person a name change, I doubt the ACLU would press the common law name change thing too hard. They'd probably raise a general civil rights argument and ask a Federal court to grant a mandamus order requiring the probate court to issue the necessary paperwork. Trying to raise the common law issue would actually be counterproductive, the likely fact pattern being that the transgender person was refused a judicial name change, then tried to get around it through common law and ran into obstacles. Arguing that the DMV and whoever else needs to accept the new name based on Alabama law concedes that the probate court was within their rights in denying the name change. This becomes problematic because if you win and the state legislature decides to formally abolish common law name changes, now they have to go back and make the civil rights argument again. They run the risk of getting a victory for one person that has no prospective effect.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
Would you mind expanding on this a little? In Pittsburgh everybody is Catholic and the few who aren't are some kind of mainstream Protestant. Megachurches weren't really a thing here until the late '90s and even now I probably know more Jehovah's Witnesses (and a lot more Greek Orthodox) than Evangelicals. The upshot is that anything I know about what the actual "religious right" is getting across the pulpit is more my own interpolation based on media reports rather than the actual cultural experience of living among these people, so it's hard to figure out what's widely believed versus what's overhyped by the media.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I remember seeing, at the start of Trump's first term, a meme on Facebook with a picture of Trump walking on the beach with Christ and the caption "Obama kicked you out, but I brought you back in" or something similar, and there have been several preachers of standing unknown to me who have stood on stage with Trump and called him Christ's vessel here on earth. The first item was probably the work of redneck fringe Christians who don't bother going to church or leading lifestyles that could be described as anything approaching biblical, and the second is probably from the wackaloon end of actual practicing Christians, but these poles are far enough apart to suggest that there's a broader element among religious people who think that Trump is doing God's work in a way that they don't attribute to normal politicians. Even openly religious politicians like Mike Pence or Rick Santorum never seemed to receive the kind of awe that Trump does, probably because they're humble enough to realize that such adoration is kind of sacrilegious.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
True "Open" relationships in which both partners are free to pursue other lovers as they choose and are doing so. They tend to just be a glide path to breaking up, or very loosely attached to begin with. Tend to break down due to gender imbalances, because a woman of any given quality can find a man much more easily than a man of a similar quality can find a woman.
I agree that this is probably just a glide path to breaking up, but I'm not sure if the dynamics are different for men and women. Sure, women might find it easier to find a man willing to sleep with them, but men are usually more motivated and less selective.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Thanks for posting this and defending it for me because I was going to post pretty much the same thing. I'm not a fan of when someone takes a term with a vague but widely understood meaning and then creates a very specific definition and uses the term as if that's the real definition. Academics do this a lot, but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.
Anyway, I think the rule should be that if the people using the term can't tell you what they mean by it exactly, it means nothing. It may make people feel smart to come up with a hyper-specific definition of LARP but then they just find the general public using the expression the way they want. So it's pointless.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
It's still irritating and anachronistic. It's like describing Da Vinci as an LGBTQ+ artist.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I used to practice title law, and while I mostly did oil and gas, I did an odd residential title here and there. Most policies, at least in Pennsylvania, specifically exclude any issues relating to zoning. There's already enough courthouse work relying on state law. Doing zoning would require us to know and understand the zoning codes for every municipality we dealt with and do in-person inspections to ensure compliance as well as an investigation into whether any nonconformities have been excused. I'm surprised the carrier caught this in the first place.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I think "homeschool prom" says it all right there. First of all, as much as homeschool parents like to protest that, no, their kids don't have any problem socializing because we make sure they have plenty of friends, etc., how many of these kids were ever in a situation with a member of the opposite sex who wasn't a family friend? I've known a lot of homeschool guys in my life and none of them were exactly players in the dating world until they figured it out with the help of friends who weren't homeschooled.
More importantly, though, I don't think this guy knows what a prom is. Prom is an event where it's expected you come with a date. It would be socially awkward for a member of either sex to show up without one, if only because 95% of the people there are going to dance with their dates all night. It's a formal event, not a dance club. What he's describing is a middle school dance, and it sounds like most of these kids are acting like one would at a middle school dance.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I have a Kobo and I can't recommend anything else. It has an integrated dictionary and basically no other functionality besides reading books (though it does have those annotation features you said you don't use). It supposedly has an associated store, but I've never used it. I bought it because it's the only reader I'm aware of that allows you to sideload books on it without jailbreaking it. That and they made a sensibly-priced waterproof version before anyone else.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
If you believe Trump is trying to dismantle the government and you think that’s a bad thing, why would you make it easier for him to do it?
Because a brief shock is much better than a gradual erosion, and temporary furloughs aren't as damaging long-term as permanent layoffs. Trump with the power a shutdown would give him gives America a sneak preview of how his political philosophy would play out if he had the unfettered power he seems to be looking for. He isn't going to be scrambling to do whatever he can to preserve the status quo; you're exactly right that he's going to use it as a blank check. America operating a shutdown with Trump at the helm isn't like a shutdown under Obama where it's a temporary setback while a budget is in the works—it's the ultimate destination of a Trump government. It's what America looks like if Trump gets everything he wants, and it's what America will ultimately look like if they keep passing Republican budgets that legitimize Trump's illegal impoundments. The only chance we have of getting out of this mess is if congress is willing to make a stand, and Democrats and a few Republicans would be the only ones willing to make that stand.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
It depends on the city. I agree that some transit authorities have problems with lawlessness and crime. But just because some transit systems have crime doesn't mean that all do. I've been riding Pittsburgh's transit system off and on all my life, and I never once experienced anything remotely untoward, even in bad areas. I've never heard anyone, including the most insulated suburbanites, express any apprehension whatsoever about using transit. And this is a system where anyone boarding an outbound bus or train pays upon egress, and that has a free zone, meaning bums can board pretty much without restriction, and we still don't have problems. I've used transit systems in New York, DC, and Chicago various times in the last 25 years, and my experience was no different, though it's been a while so this may have changed. I know that complaints about transit in New York are a relatively recent problem, and circa 2010 the idea that subways were dangerous was seen as a relic of the '80s.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I agree that the mass firings aren't something that can easily be reversed, and that the effects of this will reverberate for years to come. Ironically enough, this actually makes the Democratic position stronger when it comes to shutdown politics, not weaker, as you imply. The reason Schumer and some Democrats buckled the last go-round was because of a widespread perception that the party refusing to play ball will get blamed for the pain caused by the shutdown, and electoral consequences may follow. Less cynically, some may have felt that a shutdown was a losing effort that wasn't worth the collateral damage to those who would suffer because of it.
The events of the past few months, though, have made the Republican endgame pretty clear. If the Democrats can sell a government stripped to essential services as the inevitable result of Trump's cuts, then why bother passing a budget in the first place? It's a slow march to perdition. It will be easier for them to salvage what they have if congress makes a strong statement that it intends to keep government working as it had been regardless of presidential caprice.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Because for them, it might as well be. The war you're describing about giving up a small slice of land isn't the war Ukraine is fighting. Since the beginning, Putin has been consistent in his rhetoric denying Ukraine's existence as a separate people, attempted to take the capital at the beginning of the war, and is demanding terms that would not only cede larger amounts of territory than this "small slice" but also effectively end rump Ukraine's existence as anything other than a Russian satellite. I'm not sure how this is anything close to the breakup of the USSR, or what you're even getting at, really. What foreign power launched a full scale invasion of the Soviet Union with the goal of integrating territory into its own country?
So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.
Why? Those regions were part of Ukraine for over 20 years without any ethnic cleansing.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
To be fair about the Anthony case, at least the initial wave of support wasn't for his defense per se. Anthony was initially given a 1 million bond, which was reduced to $250,000 after a hearing, and his family was able to post the bond. Some fringe right-wing websites decided this was unacceptable and protestors started showing up outside the family's home and sending death threats. The fundraiser was initially to pay for alternative lodging for the kid, since being forced into hiding isn't easy for people of modest means.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
True, but most of the Ukrainian refugees left at the beginning of the war. It's not like war casualties where there's a continual drip drip for years. In 2023 and 2024, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of in-migration of any country, almost all of whom were returning refugees.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
Ukraine lost about a half million in casualties in three years of combat, in a country with a population of about 38 million. In World War I, Germany lost about 6.3 million out of 65 million total before calling it quits, and even then it was controversial. At a consistent rate of attrition, it would take Ukraine another 20 years to hit those kind of numbers. While you can argue about the population pyramid being more favorable to Germany, this is balanced by the fact that the relatively slow rate of attrition gives Ukraine a much bigger pool to draw from, including people not yet born. After all, Germany started another war 20 years after than one ended and managed to double their casualty numbers. Those of us who have never lived through a serious war don't understand how huge casualty numbers can get before they become unsustainable.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
I guess the Soviets should have just let the Germans roll over them, then, as soon as they started surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. 20 million dead could have easily been avoided if they had just seen the writing on the wall and given up.
I think the anti-car people need to get realistic. I'm in favor of better transit options, bike lanes, zoning reform, congestion pricing, and all the other things the armchair urbanists like, but cars aren't going anywhere. To tie in to my recent Pittsburgh installment, all of the recent affordable housing developments that are obstensibly based in the New Urbanist style have made modifications that "recognize the relity of the automobile". When Allequippa Terrace converted to mixed-income in the early 2000s and pushed out the riff raff around 2010, they became a somewhat popular option for Pitt students, despite effectively being a housing project. One of the biggest reasons behind this is because it's one of the few places near campus where it's easy to have a car, and Pitt's campus is in the middle of the third-largest commercial district in the state, and is only behind Downtown as the neighborhood with the best transit connections in the city.
The especially amazing thing about this is that most students who live at Oak Hill walk to campus, which walk is much longer and sketchier than the walk from the student ghetto in Oakland itself. So people are nearly doubling the length of their daily walk, and putting themself outside the radius of walkable amenities, just to keep a car. To be fair, this isn't the only reason, since Oak Hill is also newer and nicer and quieter than anything in South Oakland, and still comparably priced, so that factors into it, but when people are asking on Reddit about whether it's safe to essentially live in the projects, one thing often brought up is that dealing with a small amount of sketchiness is worth it if only because you never have to worry about parking.
It would have been really easy for these dedicated urbanist types to talk about how they could fit more units in and give the neighborhood a more cohesive character if they just eliminated off-street parking or relegated it to areas where there was literally no better use of the land, and maybe charged people an appropriate fee for it, but even in a low-income area that would be a hard sell. You'd certainly get less interest from the working class people who need cars to get to work, and the development wouldn't look nearly as attractive to people willing to pay market rate. It would turn into another case of forcing social experiments on poor people who are only living there because they don't have a choice. Part of ending concentrated poverty is recognizing that people with options expect certain amenities and are willing to pay for them, and are willing to move elsewhere if you aren't offering them. Getting people who aren't poor to live in a former housing project that's not in a trendy area was going to be a hard sell to begin with. In a trendy neighborhood people might be willing to jump through hoops for the privilege of living there, but not in the Hill District.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
I don't think it was so much about the amount of domestic bloodshed with Qadafi versus some unknown quantity. We had already been through Iraq and Afghanistan and weren't naive about what a power vacuum could look like. The problem was that it was a volatile time in the Middle East due to Arab Spring, and Qadafi had a history of sending troops into nearby countries and destabilizing them so as to get his own mini-sphere of influence. It was bad enough when he did it in places like Chad or Niger, but the possibility of something similar happening in Egypt was probably more than Western governments were willing to tolerate. This is all speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if the State Department wasn't adamant about this narrative when it came to selling the operation to the American public, because a history lesson involving the complex histories of countries they've never heard of combined with hypotheticals doesn't pack quite the same punch as "there will be civilian reprisals if he regains power".
Rov_Scam
15d ago
The regime change that Democrats ran against was very specific to what had gone on post-9/11. Democrats were by no means advocating any kind of peacenik isolationism; they were responding to a brash neocon foreign policy that suggested we could remake problematic countries in our own image by unilateral military action. We had attempted to do it in Iraq and there was talk suggesting we should try it again in Iran. To be clear, I was opposed to action in Libya at the time, but the context in which it occurred was very different from Iraq or even Afghanistan. One of the big problems identified in the years following the Iraq invasion was that by removing Sadaam Hussein without any obvious successor we created a power vacuum that ignited sectarian conflict that had been supressed by decades of Baathism. And then, as Colin Powell said. "You break it, you bought it". Combine this with the questionable justification, presence of US ground troops and the associated casualties, and lack of international cooperation, and it was an easy war to criticize.
And yet, the Republicans kept saying that the problem was a lack of all-out commitment. Hell, even as the war's popularity hit a low ebb in 2008, John McCain was running for president saying he wanted to commit more troops to Iraq. Libya had several advantages. There was an active civil war against the regime, and opposition leaders made a natural governing class once Qadafi was taken out. We weren't going to attempt to remake the government ourselves once the war ended. Limiting it to airstrikes decreased the risk of US casualties to near zero. And the whole thing was a NATO operation, not a unilateral adventure with a "coalition of the willing" that had the stink of a failed UN Security Council resolution. It would have, and did have, more in common with the air wars in the Balkans than with Iraq or Afghanistan.
Contrast this approach with what Republicans were saying at the time. They were criticizing Obama for not acting decisively enough. Qadafi, like Sadaam, needed to go; we didn't need to wait for NATO to see what they wanted to do; we needed to take control of the situation with massive airstrikes. The contrast was put in much clearer terms after the Benghazi attacks, which Republicans alleged could have been prevented had Obama taken the threat of terrorism more seriously and provided actual military support for the diplomatic mission in Libya. Instead, Obama was too much of a squish to stamp out terrorist influence along with Qadafi, and was allowing the country to go to shit. "We Came, we saw, he died" was offered as a pithy summary of the quick in-and-out operation that Libya was, and how we were able to take out a dictator without it turning into a quagmire.
This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
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