The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
No bio...
User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
I've been "prescribing" smoking and lead for obesity for many years now. Perhaps eventually the powers-that-be will be desperate enough to try it. Probably not in my lifetime. (And I hate the stink of cigarettes anyway, and they DO kill you, so maybe work on that? I'm not sure if vapes work as well though, someone should do a study)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
The Obamacare plans in New Jersey are so bad that there's a lot of self-pay involved. The problem is you can't just self-pay it all (or self-pay and buy catastrophic coverage). You still have to pay the sky-high premiums for basically nothing.
But Democrats are dead-set against any rollback of universal, comprehensive, coverage with no real underwriting, and the Republicans don't care enough. And no one but evil libertarians wants to let anyone die because they can't afford treatment, even if that treatment is hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. So the only solution available is the only solution that was ever available, which is more socialism. With the usual failing result, but that doesn't make it go away, it's a positive feedback loop.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
Single payer will stop medical development and reduce care quality while not reducing costs at all.
whereas the US under a single payer system would probably still have the highest medicine pay of any major country, it just wouldn’t be so much higher because one central employer could negotiate centrally
When it's single payer it's not really negotiating any more. It's lobbying... and corruption. The common pattern with such monopolies is the union or association negotiates not with the government itself but the politicians. The politicians are happy to pay for favors for themselves with government money. Since there's a concentrated benefit (the union/association members, who are generally politically popular) and distributed cost (taxpayers), the union/association wins every time.
This won't occur with things like drug development because those companies are very unpopular; they can offer money but won't have enough to offer in terms of votes compared to the populist who says he's going to fix the prices of new drugs. And since the regulatory framework obviously isn't going away, drugs will be as expensive or more to develop. The US is now basically subsidizing the result of the world in drug development because of this. If the US goes to single payer, no one will be paying, so drug development will simply cease. The same will go for other expensive new treatments.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
What will the future of the US healthcare system look like?
Single payer, with the costs (paid by taxes) ballooning like they now do in the US, the waiting times ballooning like they do in Canada, and British-style dental care. Good news is we'll probably reduce old-people medical care with essentially-mandatory US MAID. And drug development will probably be cut back. The problem is that socialism is a one-way street; it's easy to get more but it tends to take an existential crisis to move it back. And there's always a constituency for more socialism -- anyone who wants more of what someone else has, or is perceived to have.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
Nicotine may be bad for fertility-per-sex-act, but I'll bet smoking is good for sex-act-per-unit-time. And drinking is good for increasing number of sex acts (up to a point, whiskey dick helps no one) and skipping contraception.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
As a society, we desperately need to re-taboo drinking, smoking, toking, and adultery.
At least all but toking are positively associated with the creation of children. (Maybe toking too)
We should take a precautionary approach to new compounds rather than the "generally recognized as safe" approach.
A precautionary approach means stagnation and ultimately being defeated by those who do not take it.
We should re-segregate society so that married men and women are no longer exposed to temptations outside of the home. (Which includes gender-segregated social circles, workplaces, and social media.)
So people who get married are required to lose half their social circle? Since if we have segregation BEFORE marriage, it's going to be a bit hard to make marriages come about.
You're going after the wrong problems. It isn't smoking, drinking, or adultery which is holding down TFR. Probably isn't estrogenic compounds either. TFR was higher before prohibition when the saloon culture existed, and higher during the 50s-70s when people smoked like chimneys.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
It's a reference the the aphorism (often attributed to Oscar Wilde) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. The idea is that if this fraud upsets right-wing people, Tim Walz will gain as a result, because for most of the voters of Minnesota, having those people as enemies is a positive good.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Stranger Things has been circling the drain for many seasons. It did its woke turn several seasons ago by making Robin a lesbian, which made Will's Big Gay Reveal anticlimactic. The best line in the finale is a repeat of young Will saying "I just want this to be over" shortly after the climax; he speaks for much of the audience, I suspect.
Keep in mind that the Duffer Brothers are younger than the characters they created; they are not Generation Xers; they're early millennials, born in 1984. This was not a story made out of nostalgia for a time period they remembered -- rather, only a time period they'd heard of. To the actual class of '89, Heather has Two Mommies was a joke; to the Duffer brothers, it was assigned reading. The show started out more as nostalgia for Spielberg movies rather than the time period itself.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime.
Certainly it is not. In fact, one of the most well-defined crimes in the US Constitution is just that. I imagine the British have similar crimes.
She can be punished for things she has done, she can't be collectively punished for crimes committed by her faction in a war.
She can be punished for joining that faction.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Too many to count; the issue is that, like face guy's proposals, you'll reject them because they involve some measure of browbeating prescribed to non-men.
The usual dodge here is "Both have to change. Now, let's start with the men..."
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8d ago
Male writers tend much more towards smaller age gaps between men and women, and try to avoid power differentials; female writers definitely do not. It is extremely rare for a male author to have a male character date his students, proteges, trainees, etc.
I'm pretty sure this reflects only on what is acceptable in the publishing industry.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
If literally any solution that inconveniences or upsets women is a nonstarter then it's not getting solved until we hit an actual crisis point.
Yes. But the precondition seems to be true and as South Korea shows, any crisis point is far off.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
Yes, but as far as I'm concerned that's all a loss. Execution is brutal and should appear brutal. The question for jurors when prosecuting someone for a capital crime should indeed be something like "Am I OK with the state cutting this guy's head off". Similarly, for the execution to provide sufficient substitute for the private retribution it replaces, it should be brutal if the brutality is justified.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
I was thinking firing squads would be reserved for military executions.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
They DID in fact face this problem. But the executive and the Supreme Court were willing to do something about it. The Feds sent in the National Guard to do desegregation, and the courts backed them up. And the courts have often done follow-up rulings to landmark cases to indicate that yes, they really meant that. For guns and abolishing affirmative action, they did not. That's because while they consider the rulings they made to be correct in an academic/constitutional scholarship sense, they want the opposite policies.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
And Gerstein isn't going to lose his job over this. This is his job; he's a Legal Affairs Reporter not someone who actually needs to know what the actual laws are or who to ask about those things. There's no one who can boycott Politico who could care.
This is what it comes down to -- his job is not to provide accurate legal analysis to inform Politico's readers. It's to provide legal-sounding reasons that their culture war enemies are obviously evil, bad, and wrong. And he delivers.
Worse, he probably gets the last laugh given the state of the judiciaries; if your case impinges upon culture war issues, and in particular if you're on the right/red/MAGA side, the leanings of the judge probably have a lot more with the outcome than any sort of legal reasoning.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
Not to sound like a dick, but I guess you're aware that women usually make exactly the same complaint in reverse?
It turns out it is possible for a complaint and its reverse to be made... and for one to be accurate and the other not. "I know you are but what am I" is not a killshot. The infamous OKCupid study that showed women rate 80% of men to be below average tells us this is likely to be the case here.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
Even if you could do that, it wouldn't solve most womens' problem, since there are far fewer chads than women. And the feasibility depends on you being able to betaize the alpha while still retaining whatever characteristics women find attractive. Which may in fact not be possible because it may be a literal contradiction -- the women making the complaint may be attracted to the very characteristics that also result in the men not committing to them. This is the often-denigrated but never disproved theory of "Chicks dig Jerks".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
Beheading is quick, tried and true, at least if you use the French innovation rather than messing about with trained headmen. Hanging is even more traditional, a little harder to get right but not THAT much harder. All this faffing around with electricity was just because Edison wanted to score on Westinghouse; there's no real need for it. And medicalizing it was even dumber.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9d ago
And I very much doubt that there aren't enough normies left in MN to vote Walz out -- he only won 52-45.
Now he'll win by more, because of the improved quality of his enemies.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10d ago
Perhaps its true; it would certainly partially explain falling fertility rates. Who would want to have kids when it's necessary to expose them to that?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10d ago
Very much "not slow" decay, and punctuated by bouts of destruction (the race riots, mostly in the '60s but some later).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10d ago
The rains of destruction aren't brought on by any action against the Somali fraudsters. They're brought on when the parasites sufficiently damage the host and the destruction comes as an inevitable consequence. Look at many large American cities in the 70s and 80s, or much of Detroit and Baltimore today, to see what happens.
They're called IQ shredders (by those who do) because the smart people move to the city and don't reproduce there, thus providing selection against IQ on a population basis.
More options
Context Copy link