The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Oxford has had an English department since 1894.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The value signal of a bachelors was already diminished pre pandemic because too many incompetents were getting degree mill slop, saturating the job market with useless cultural studies slop churned out by universities soaking in those sweet Pell Grants. The 30% of the cohort getting bachelors is still unimportant compared to the top 5% in Ivies. The lack of critical mass of competence seems real this time.
It'll shake out. Not cleanly, it's going to be painful for companies and universities, but it will. (BTW, Ivies are much smaller than 5%). In most of these cases, the students will not be able to complete a rigorous degree; they'll get their bachelors but in some lesser degree. This likely leads to smaller graduating STEM cohorts from the universities which degraded admissions standards. Since the better students probably went somewhere, it means companies looking for college hires will need to go down the university prestige chain to find as many as they used to, and probably be more selective about students from those higher up.
Some schools will likely pass these people through even in their supposedly rigorous programs. This will be very bad for the reputation of those schools a year after the first such class graduates. Also very bad for the overly trusting employers.
Can you simply git gud with an Agile cert and a self built site with 1099 proof of taxable income from a successful venture, as opposed to educationmaxxing?
I hope not; an Agile cert should be a red flag. And the skills it takes to succeed on your own (and make 1099 income) are very different than tech skills. Most techies couldn't run a business and most business owners couldn't do tech; the small overlap is where you get your founders, but it IS small.
Has the era of mandatory rectification of disparate outcome with forced racial redistribution ended?
No. Considering the results of the last US election, I expect the Democrats to come roaring back with a massive win in 2026 and a trifecta in 2028, and they'll bring wokism and all this with them. It seems a definite majority of the American people support this as long as its problems are not actually right in front of them in the immediate moment.
Is all this unimportant in an AI age where Scarjo can whisper ASMR opium?
I suppose the trades will still be there; data centers require a lot of electrical, HVAC, and plumbing.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
It is a point I keep coming back to. EVERY policy change in the past fifty years has favored women and their autonomy. You would EXPECT this to increase their comfort levels, and to increase their willingness to marry, since the risk of being left destitute is functionally nonexistent now. But lo and behold the exact opposite occurs. They're LESS comfortable... and LESS likely to marry. I don't know what you're supposed to do with a group who gets less satisfied the more privileges they're given.
Which makes this look like a positive feedback loop. And what you do is you stop responding in the way that perpetuates the loop. Which is why (in a related example) I get frustrated at people suggesting more maternity leave and subsidized childcare for working women and such as a way to increase TFR; the result of that is just the opposite.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
It’s pretty clear that isn’t a viable strategy for stopping this stuff.
They aren't trying to stop this stuff, they're campaigning for the midterms.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
But its also kinda incoherent to call for someone's arrest for Sedition while being the guy who is in charge of the agencies that would be arresting them.
Sure, because he's not actually going to order their arrests. He's just bloviating in response to obvious bait. Truth Social seems to be his preferred outlet for doing so.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
Crime reporting has black, white, Asian, and Hispanic as exclusive categories. However, these likely just reflect which boxes got ticked on arrest forms, and I doubt the arresting officer thinks too much about it. Guy looks white, wasn't speaking Spanish when he got grabbed, likely ends up in the white box.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
The weirdest I had is when some medical equipment company sent me to collections for an $80 brace. They never billed me the regular way for it in the first place, mind you, they billed the insurance company and when the insurance company wouldn't pay, they just sent me straight to collections. Not even the insurance company's fault in this case; when I called them they said it was covered but I hadn't met my deductible, which I'm sure they told the equipment company too.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
Presuming that compensation follows ability, shouldn't we just expect high ability people to be able to afford nannies and so forth?
No, taxes and the general cost of employing someone, and cost disease, have made that impractical for anyone who isn't a C-level executive.
Why wouldn't we look at policy such as expanded EITC for kids that would make it more affordable for careerwomen to have bigger families?
Because policies of that sort have been used throughout the Western world for decades, and TFR has done nothing but drop. It just doesn't work.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
And yet, there was a baby boom when economic success per capita in the US was at an all-time high, with TFR far higher at that time than at any time after the US became an industrialized country.
Yes, the Baby Boom happened. But... that was it. TFR peaked in 1960, collapsed, and remained collapsed. You want that back, you probably need to win a non-nuclear WWIII -- and that condition is probably necessary but not sufficient.
Housing isn't going to make a dent. It's putting the cart before the horse anyway; the Levittowns and later suburbs were built because there were young families looking for houses; young families didn't form because there were now suburbs available.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
but economic conditions allowing for succesful, established men relatively early in life so they can support a family is atleast a very strong factor in play here.
As FiveHourMarathon said, "If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant." It's unreasonable to expect men to be successful and established before forming a family, and it's ahistorical too. They may have to be on a path to success, but that still is quite possible.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Believe it or not, there are alternatives to those dumb ideas. It could turn on a flashing LED -- this would help location AND not wake me up in the middle of the night unless it was actually in the room. But that's not allowed because it's not annoying enough and people might not see it. Even before LEDs, it could be hinged and when the battery goes low it could trip a solenoid to make it swing down and perhaps display a brightly-colored underside like a deer tail. It could start beeping on the first peak in voltage after reaching the alert level, or 12 hours after reaching the alert level. (That they start beeping in the middle of the night is not coincidence nor just only noticing it then; it's because when batteries get cold their voltage drops)
But if there weren't alternatives... if it's 0-dark-30 and I'm looking for the smoke detector that's emitting a high-pitched chirp once a minute, yes, I absolutely prefer it run down its battery.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Shockley was widely known as an asshole in his professional career. And he actually said "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street." so no, I do not believe he was "sufficiently apologetic" with his message.
Not that it really matters how polite you are, anyways. "[Your race] intrinsically sucks" is never going to be a popular message, and I'm always bemused by people who appear to think that the normalization of HBD isn't RaHoWa-complete.
It's actually been a popular message for years now, for some values of "[Your race]" -- in particular, "white". Which means there's even less reason to put blinders on to real racial differences -- it's co-operating with defectbot. The anti-HBD crowd is going to Notice places where other races have an advantage, deny places where white people have an advantage, and make up shit to slur white with being inherently oppressors. If this means Racial Holy War, so be it; it beats Racial Surrender Without A Fight.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
This is all a just-so story. Family formation and TFR were dropping at precipitous rates when housing prices were low. It is still true that 25-year-old men can be economically established; that they aren't attractive to 20-year-old women is for other reasons. It's fashionable to blame everything on housing (because it provides a reason for housing socialism, i.e. taking houses from everyone older than Gen Z and putting the previous occupants on an ice floe), but while housing is bad, it's not the reason for drops in TFR or household formation.
Mostly housing prices are high now because Millennials are doing catch-up homebuying, while Gen X is staying put and Boomers are stubbornly refusing to die. So demand is high. Supply is low for various reasons, but the biggest and intractable one is there's only so much land in desirable areas; back when housing prices were lower, many cities were utter shitholes and both jobs and population had moved further out. You can densify, but that gets you mostly rental pods and not homes. On top of that there's urban planners and their opposition to sprawl, and unwillingness to develop greenfields after the disaster of the GFC left many uncompleted exurban developments to rot.
Some of this will be solved; the boomers will die. The rest, probably not, so any relief will be quite limited. Unless the housing socialists get their way, and then housing will be like health care and higher ed, permanently.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
And the fact that she was only able to kill the Witch-king through a linguistic loophole is particularly galling.
English majors gonna English major; how could Tolkein resist the Macbeth callout?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
you are maybe thinking of page wire
Ah, yes, that's the stuff I was thinking of. Or maybe welded wire fence, which seems to be similar only welded instead of knotted. Guess that's more for sheep than chickens.
Not sure that making your house look like a chicken coop is the Chad solution here though
A guard made of chicken wire wouldn't look any worse than some of the official monstrosities
I don't know if my area has such a rule (it appears there is one for landlords but I don't see one for homeowners), but my relevant windows are not only free, they have a convenient ledge for kids to climb up on to make their jump easier.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
You know that insurance companies consider complying with their side of the contract to be completely optional and something only to be done under pressure, right? Their first response to a claim or request for pre-authorization or payment is a reflexive denial; that costs them nothing after all, and might make the claimant go away. So then the provider has to have their people spend time arguing with the insurance company and then MAYBE they pay or maybe they'll only pay for some of the codes and disallow others. The insurance company's reluctance to pay what they agreed doesn't appear on any of those contracts.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
I was thinking of some much wider stuff I've seen, but that must not be chicken wire.
The point is that it has to be LEGIBLY -- that is, documentably -- able to support the load in that particular application. It's not enough that it works, you have to be able to prove it works to the bureaucrats. Which with any sort of improvised solution, you can't.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
I have a bow window containing four casement windows each of which meets these requirements. This is a replacement window; there used to be a triple-window -- two double hung and one fixed window -- there, and both double hungs met those requirements. A large number of houses in my development have such windows (or a bay with two double hung and one fixed), they're not some exotic thing. Fortunately I'm in neither Canada nor New York so no guards or opening-prevention devices required.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Except most people would bump that up to 75 and not consider it speeding
They can consider it what they like, 75 in a 70 is speeding. You're not demonstrating that speeding isn't faster by showing that driving 5mph over the limit is indeed faster than driving at the limit.
Which completely evaporates when you realize that if you do 20 over the limit for 100 miles straight your chances of getting pulled over are close to 100%.
LOL, no it's not. I've driven from Florida to the Northeast twice -- about 900 miles each time -- and gotten pulled over once per trip. A warning once and a ticket the other. And yeah, I was doing 20 or more over most of the time (note that the speed limit was mostly 55 and 65, not 70). On one of those trips I averaged nearly 70mph, including stops.
Plus you're now skittish and won't drive over the limit.
Nope.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Alerting you that it's running out of power instead of leaving you unaware that it has silently failed is the alarm functioning properly.
That's what you and the bureaucrats say. I say waking me up in the middle of the night with such an alert is broken by design.
As for actual alerts, so far I'm a dozen or so to zero for false-to-real ratio. Most due to cooking, some due to shower steam, and a couple due to defective detectors that just went off for no reason.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Granted becoming a cocaine dealer is beyond my (current) risk tolerance
Pro tip: One way to increase your risk tolerance is to start off as a cocaine user.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Speeding is fun (or at least more fun than driving the limit), but it also significantly changes travel times. Not for trips to the mailbox, but many longer trips. Including with lights, since the lights are typically not synchronized to the speed limit (and as I mentioned elsewhere, sometimes they are synchronized to a speed significantly above the limit). For trips mostly on the highway it's basically linear.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
From what I've heard, they can certainly "send it to collections", in the sense that they can give it to an internal department to harass you about it. But they can't actually sell it to real collectors who ostensibly have a legally enforceable debt that they can collect from you, and who ostensibly have a legal justification to put marks on your credit score. I'd be curious to know if these individuals you know actually got marks from this specifically.
Not only can they do so, there are debt collectors who specialize in medical debt.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5d ago
Like many modern systems, it's one that relies on the charity of good faith actors to subsidize deadbeats.
Not charity. The good faith actors have something to lose -- credit rating, property, time in court if they're sued by the collections agency. The deadbeats don't. So it's anarcho-tyranny. YOU, respectable working-to-upper-middle-class person, must pay those hospital bills. You might be able to knock them down some but you will pay or you will go to the poorhouse. YOU, Mr. Frequent Flyer drug-seeking deadbeat, you're fine, carry on.
Employees of the United States government conspiring to suppress accurate press reports by pressuring private companies to do so, and quite likely successfully changing the result of an election, is far worse than some rioters gatecrashing a session of Congress.
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