TIRM
23hr ago
Congestion pricing could be a wonderful tool to help steer more people to mass transit
I suppose. But I also really don't want to be "steered" in this one manner. They almost entirely lack pull incentives to make me voluntarily want to use mass transit. So instead they use push incentives that are naked attacks on suburbanites by urban enthusiasts. I notice how disgusted they are by me and my lifestyle and wish to avoid the punishments they have in store for me.
TIRM
23hr ago
red states will benefit from an influx of [Californians and New Yorkers]
Spicy opinion in light of Californians desperately fleeing poor governance but then importing it with them.
TIRM
23hr ago
it appears they made a mistake
"Oops. Looks like I, a career bureaucrat, accidentally foiled the Republican executive I derive all my authority from yet again. I sure hope these accidents don't keep happening every time a Republican is elected president."
TIRM
1d ago
white liberals who unironically believe this is a railroading because their brains fell out.
They're the only group with significant outgroup bias. And they outnumber black Americans. Naively I would expect most donaters to be them.
TIRM
5d ago
TIRM
5d ago
getting a mediator, and when he presents his relatively unbiased, fair compromise
Specifically in the case of the war in Ukraine? Russia keeps invade and taking territory. A "compromise" in which Russia gets part of Ukraine and Ukraine keeps part of Ukraine is merely the starting point for the next invasion in a few years.
TIRM
10d ago
Trying to determine what liberal white women are thinking about Trump and modern America, I found some fun subreddits.
/r/twoxpreppers is for women prepping for the worst. And supporting each other in their decisions not to arm themselves. Sure, they think we are entering the Republic of Gilead and they will be cattle in a living hell. But, that doesn't justify such extreme actions as buying a gun or in any way preparing for violence. Accusations of LARPing are too common, but these people are actually LARP resistance. Not even trying.
TIRM
10d ago
Trump is very comfortable with gay men. What little evidence I am aware of shows he doesn't care about trans people.
A journalist asked Trump what bathroom a transwoman would need to use in Trump Tower. He said he doesn't care.
Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn. An interesting guy worth a googling.
TIRM
11d ago
I have no reason to think this is real. In fact I suspect it is entirely imaginary.
TIRM
12d ago
I don't think this was miscommunication. Mike Johnsons was referring to a recent executive order, Biden denied signing such an order. News articles phrase it correctly as a ban on new export permits. But there is no transcript of the actual conversion
TIRM
12d ago
Am I supposed to be holding the fact that he followed through on that against him?
I see this a lot. Trump campaigns on doing something. Then he does it. People are blindsided and demand that Trump supporters be equally shocked and regretful of voting for him.
TIRM
12d ago
To add to this: Mike Johnson claimed he had a meeting with Biden in which Biden denied recently signing an executive order to block natural gas exports. So Biden either signed it and forgot, or staffers signed it for him without his knowledge. Either an unelected cabal was the real president and/or his brain didn't work.
TIRM
14d ago
TIRM
14d ago
At this point the first and second top level comments are deleted by author.
I don't feel very bound by this meme format. If there is a strained analogy about leopards and eaten faces, then I would like to point out the predatory behavior of the Biden administration aimed at tech companies. To follow the format anyways: "When Biden said he would break up monopolies and trusts, I didn't think he was going to target my tech monopoly!"
These tech companies and their owners are historically big supporters of Democrats. They were extra big financial supporters of Biden in 2020. Their reward was the Biden administration attacking them. Saying they are monopolies to be broken up, blocking acquisitions so they don't grow bigger, threatening regulations intended to choke their businesses. It's a real scorpion and frog or "I didn't think the face eating leopard would regulate my industry" situation. And then of course Democrats acting betrayed when major tech companies and their owners donate a million dollars to the Trump inauguration. I listened to Pod Save America for a while, "how could they do this to us?" was a theme for a bit.
There was recently a face eating leopard unleashed upon the tech industry. Her name is Lena Khan and she was the FTC commissioner under Biden. Using novel legal theories she went after tech companies. Mostly trying to stop acquisitions. Rhetoric about breaking up monopolies before they start. She ultimately did not have a great track record in court battling major tech companies, but she sure tried to eat their faces.
There are other recent examples of Democrats unleashing the leopards on tech companies. And then of course the predictable horror and shock that "techbros" would (at the last moment before the election) be mildly hesitantly Trump-curious as an alternative to the outright predation of the Biden-Harris administration.
I would frame this as tech leaders being between a rock and a hard place. On one side Democrats pathologically opposed to big business to the point that they attack the largest American tech companies. Not seeming to care if they are breaking something important. Or realizing they are making enemies.
On the other hand: Donald Trump.
TIRM
17d ago
Henry Kissinger: "It's a pity both sides can't lose"
(commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)
TIRM
21d ago
For this one person, their job is to work on a laptop. Could be done remotely. Everyone had to show up in person.
TIRM
22d ago
The larger point being they could at any time pass a law removing or modifying this particular presidential power. Every day they chose not to.
TIRM
22d ago
Buy a Vanguard index fund. Don't worry about dips or peaks. The stock market was lower last September. People are making a very big deal about a small bump.
TIRM
22d ago
The "experts" in health had a collective point in the era of COVID lockdowns. Very long lockdowns good, enormous riots better. It reached the point of comedy with "racism is the real epidemic".
I'm sure the great majority of cancer and HIV researchers didn't sign some pro-lockdown (but not for riots) statement. They kept quiet while the loud ideologically motivated few spoke collectively for them and advocated for the most ruinous policies of the modern era.
And now, who could have forseen there would be a backlash against all of them collectively? Having so thoroughly burned their credibility and made such bitter enemies out of mainstream Americans.
I think medical research in particular and scientific research in general is valuable and important. That's one reason why it is so horrible that they almost all kept quiet while the experts speaking for them called for schools to be closed for years. They choose a controversial partisan side. And now the other side holds a Federal trifecta.
TIRM
23d ago
George Floyd was murdered and his murderer is currently in prison. The system worked, to the degree it does for handling murderers after the fact.
I would rather point to Michael Brown of "hands up, don't shoot" fame. He severely beat a cop with his bare hands. Fractured skull while in a car wearing a seat belt level beating. But Mr. Brown failed to take the cop's gun despite trying. Many cops have retention holsters and merely grabbing the grip of their gun and pulling won't get it out. Michael Brown then briefly ran away, but stopped, turned and charged the cop. It was then this cop defensively and justifiably shot an unarmed man to death.
Despite attempted railroading by the Obama administration, this cop escaped criminal punishment for his entirely justified defensive shooting of an unarmed man. Good thing Yudkowsky doesn't have some special veto power to punish this cop regardless. There's a reason we don't just cut knots. We need unruined un-carved-apart basic government institutions.
Someone here recently criticized drivers for "selfishly trampling" on this shared infrastructure by driving their kids to school. You have the opinion that these roads are not for use by suburbanites.
A tiny portion of my taxes are spent on roads. Having paid my taxes, I feel entitled to use of public roads and entirely unsympathetic to people saying my use of public roads is actually bad.
Every now and then I get roped into visiting the nearest major city for some reason. I drive my big SUV though its streets. No one can rightfully tell me to keep in the suburbs or block my use of public streets.
And I notice the sneering contempt new urbanists have for suburbanites. I'll not pretend anti-suburban policy is neutral and just coincidentally harms me. They declare me prospering to be a negative externality and propose suitable Pigouvian taxes to correct the problem. They cannot make me want to live in an apartment downtown or ride a train to work. But they could possibly make me too poor to live any other way.
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