VinoVeritas
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User ID: 2910
VinoVeritas
14d ago
Beyond my wildest optimistic dreams - what is happening
VinoVeritas
14d ago
I understand the dynamic you're describing and it all rings true except for I'm not convinced Elon's preferred outcome was having the poll come out in favor of the fella. Short of not hiring him in the first place, I think he would've preferred it just went away. But there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how we were regressing to the days of freely handing the enemy scalps and I think Elon maybe put the poll up as a result of the umbrage.
Although that's sort of just a little idle Kremlinology, sorry. Thanks for your thoughts, interested to see how it plays out
VinoVeritas
14d ago
Immediately thought of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2fZHou18Cdk
Seeing that '17 years ago' next to the view count was a real 'Holy shit' moment because it does feel like yesterday
VinoVeritas
14d ago
Is it just 'his own fans' now on twitter? I'm really asking, I'm still under the impression that none of the spinoffs took off enough to really change that 'everyone' was still on twitter.
Also, Musk is not the King, Trump is. Musk might be the sovereign of his own domain, but in the White House he is himself a courtier. One doesn't have to descend into Kremlinology to see that Elon was probably getting data to cover his ass. Or he might have just been genuinely curious, he does seem to do polls a lot for this kind of thing.
To your last question does anyone know how many employees DOGE actually has now? The memes took off so fast that this image of half a dozen guys reporting directly to Elon is already seared in my mind. Like my instinct is to say Elon personally let this guy go and the decision to hire him back is also his
VinoVeritas
14d ago
They can't get entrenched on this specific battle
This is true of 'both sides' (sorry, convenient shorthand) - but all they have to do is hire him back and go about their business. If anyone wants to blow up about it (which I imagine they would, biblically) then they're the ones getting entrenched, to their disadvantage. Presumably, new giant things will keep coming along for them to continue blowing up about.
Or, ideally they'd just do it this afternoon with an intentionally quiet announcement and everybody would forget about it by Monday after the Super Bowl.
Look at me, being all optimistic - feels good man
VinoVeritas
14d ago
Elon Musk just posted a poll: "Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?" (It's yes/no, pretty steady at about 80/20)
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887867644814020902
It didn't occur to me this was even an option, but bringing him back would be even better than not firing him in the first place (in my opinion).
VinoVeritas
3mo ago
"The debt isn't a bad thing." Okay, what would you call being personally 20 million dollars in debt if not a bad thing? Because apparently you're unaware they changed the rules so that candidate personally assumes the debt of the campaign
VinoVeritas
4mo ago
As a guy who would prefer to live in a stable republic, it drives me up the wall that there's anyone with the power to try this kind of thing in an election season. That it happens to be my candidate benefitting doesn't make it drive up my blood pressure any less, not unlike all these people dying without water and power from the hurricane.
VinoVeritas
4mo ago
I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.
Meanwhile I'm over here like "give me the nuclear codes"
VinoVeritas
4mo ago
But what about the 'no automation' thing? It would be cheaper to pay them all 620% more until the day they died than to agree not to automate
The same people who cannot properly digest milk because their ancestors never bothered to domestic cows
VinoVeritas
4mo ago
I am the son of these people, who did not write down their own drinking habits so they are only described to us by others. We can cherry pick whatever quote we like, for example,
"To continue drinking night and day without intermission is not considered shameful by any man"
Did they drink always or never or somewhere in between? Maybe even, were they people much like us? Or me at least
VinoVeritas
4mo ago
It's double digits a day from slipping in the shower, in case that feels like context
VinoVeritas
4mo ago
As with many, many, other things the 'American' man in question standing around the little stool with a bottle of liquor is not the same 'American' man who fought the war against King George.
Italians and Irish catholics drunkenly beating their suffragette wives is not why my WASPy ancestors fought the revolutionary war
6 or 8 months ago I finally took the hint that the days of cable were over and went from paying . $200 a month to .$50 a month for one of those meme services that had everything we needed. ('Oh it's on fubo. Check it out on tubi. Just hulu it.' Feels like that bop-it game from 20 years ago). It's worked out fine, but I was reluctant to admit just how much things had changed.
Where are you choosing to spend your time discussing things like the Vice Presidential debate earlier tonight? Because I'm (obviously) slow on the uptake but even I'm feeling like the era of having a contentious space to hash things out with other intelligent people has gone the way of cable. Tens of millions of people watched, hundreds of millions saw the highlights, where is anybody bothering to exchange ideas about it? As opposed to just amplifying their collective agreement in group chats
I suppose not so many years ago everybody watched what happened on Dallas in their own living rooms and had to wait to talk about it until they were around the water cooler the next day. Times do change and I'm not meaning to be Miniver Cheevy, just wondering what the options are besides the groupchats.
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
I was once a juror on a murder trial where the guy filmed himself murdering the gal and throwing her in a trash can and they called in a city worker to testify for like 3 or 4 hours about his entire career in waste management and how trash trucks and cans work and the entire city's trash collection schedule, etc because apparently the DA didn't think that watching the video of this guy murdering the gal and throwing her into a trash can would be enough to convince us he did it
So presumably the answer to your question is because the DA considers it essential to have every possible witness testify in excruciating detail and charging a 'necessary' witness with a crime might throw a wrench in that desire
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
There's a real risk of dying if you are tackled onto pavement. Young healthy people die every day from less acute trauma. The tackler should be charged with the crime they committed.
But I'm comfortable asserting the appropriate (and 'legal' I suppose although I don't care about that) response to being tackled onto the pavement at a political protest is not to immediately shoot your tackler multiple times in the gut.
It wasn't out of nowhere, it wasn't the middle of the night, they weren't all alone, the attacker wasn't slamming Hayes' head into the pavement repeatedly - a George Zimmerman situation this is not.
Also:
- Many of my college buddies were from Newton, they cheerfully call it Jewton, and I haven't heard anything about this yet in the groupchats
- The reason the woman was not tackled is presumably because she was not a man
- Like the sun rising in the east, when violence occurs a non-white woman will be nearby to start making noises that are quite precisely like an excited ape
- Who cares whether Hayes' gun was 'legal' or not. Was it right for him to shoot the guy who tackled him?
No, the reality that 'two other pro-Israeli demonstrators' were readily available to pull off the attacker means the tackled fella was not in danger of his life after surviving the initial impact with the ground.
How could he have known the tackler didn't have a knife, how are you expecting a man who was just tackled onto pavement in a genuinely potentially lethal fashion to exercise perfect judgment!
Yeah, great point. I wouldn't convict this guy in court if you offered to pay me. I wouldn't have been at the protest, but I can put myself in the mindset and I might've shot the tackler too. Still, it's not absurd to me to have an arrest, investigation, and probably trial about this incident.
To that point - this guy bailed out for 5k and is facing 10 years max. I have more than one buddy who had bail set with a 0 behind this guys for things like repeat DUI or possession. I personally know at least one guy that was offered a plea deal for 12 years after DUI with injury and after a financial black hole of lawyering is serving 8.
In summary, if someone tackles you onto the pavement in the middle of the night when no one else is around and they start pounding your head into the pavement - by all means protect yourself by all available means! If someone tackles you in broad daylight and your buddies immediately start pulling him off you and you shoot him twice anyway - I would not take your case!
(I am not particularly predisposed toward charity for the argument 'trauma from the Holocaust made me do it' - but apparently Hayes doesn't even that going for him...)
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
Ah, diseases used to be named by places where they are first discovered
Ebola
Okay, I'm with you, Ebola river
Marburg
Not the same as Ebola, because it wasn't 'discovered' in Germany but rather scientifically categorized. But okay, still with you
Spanish Flu
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
Just...don't
(This is a what that fat guy from Superbad said in reference to changing his last name, quote not originated from but cited by article below)
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
No man I just acknowledge a healthy middle-aged man had a near-to-zero-as-makes-no-difference chance at getting seriously ill, much less dying, from corona. And that therefore the surgeon who could have saved my dad's life should have not zoomed in from the couch.
And perhaps more to the point, it is not swift to deny dying people even oddball chances at survival when the official paths have been closed. For whatever reason.
I am the one advocating for more access to 'healthcare.' You are advocating for more compliance to the 'healthcare' system.
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
Okay :)
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
I can laugh about it with you and also gesture toward every other time we've tried to be clever with God
It's only funny and endearing if the end result is not a pile of a million dead baby skills a year
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
Donald Trump could literally shoot someone on 5th Avenue and I wouldn't vote for Kamala: OR: the Republic is dead, God save the Republic
I am not the average American voter. I went to 'college prep' - one of the best - instead of high school. And while I was there, I took more than two full years of college courses. On the "AP" tests for credit I got a perfect score in every course but one, which in the immortal words of Jordan Belfort, really pissed me off. I went to a top 20 undergrad on a merit scholarship as a straight white guy with married parents. Yadda, yadda, this post is not about my bona fides because yours are all much better
Nothing could get me to vote for Kamala or any democrat ever again. Nothing could convince me the 2020 election did not have just way too many ballots cast for both candidates. Nothing. A voice could descend from the clouds insisting that if I love Christ I must vote democrat and I'd think it was a trick of the devil.
This is deeply concerning to me as someone who got over the "what if there's an invisible space teapot" question when I took a philosophy class at Stanford one summer as a teenager because I asked my parents nicely and they were thrilled to pay for it. I just looked up to check the program was called EPGY and apparently shut down in '18.
If I can't think of anything that would change my mind, that tautologically means to me that my position must be indefensible. But I gesticulate wildly toward the national debt, the open border, the limitless unfunded mandates and all the rest and enjoy this 1% chance that something might change with Trump vs my visceral certainty that nothing will change without him.
Please forgive me if any of this seems like prideful ignorance - it's meant to be quite the opposite. This post is hoping to invite open discussion on what I consider to be the tension here. When you have the guy who took a summer school philosophy class at Stanford for fun disregarding his best instincts for want of action, what's going on with the guys who are just getting increasingly mad with no framework through which to process their lived experience?
VinoVeritas
5mo ago
That presumes the people who received medical care in lieu of my father would not have been better served by staying home. Which the official corona statistics seem to suggest because the average age of a corona fatality was above the average life expectancy and the survival rate of those who sought treatment was lower than the rate of those who didn't
('Ackshualllyyyy that's what we'd expect since sicker people would be more likely to seek treatment.' Fair enough, but it holds true if you normalize for presenting symptoms)
Also but importantly, it's weird that I have to say it again, but it's not like there was a binary choice between my dad and someone else. This was not triage after a battle. I had multiple zooms with the surgeon while he was on his couch in his sweatpants.
Lastly and not for nothing. I would have gladly paid whatever had I that kind of money but it was 7 figure stuff to bring the surgeon here. Had travel been 'permitted' for him then he'd also still be alive
The reports of DOGE's demise may have been premature. Things apparently move at lightning speed now, so the easiest thing is a timeline of what happened this morning to resurrect DOGE before the weekend.
Elon posts a poll asking if the fired DOGE employee should be rehired: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887867644814020902
JD Vance quotes the poll, giving his support to the fired employee: https://x.com/JDVance/status/1887900880143343633
In the press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister, Trump is asked about his opinion. He says 'I don't know...I'm with the Vice President': https://x.com/GuntherEagleman/status/1887950091937530324
Elon says 'he will be brought back': https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887957783783391423
It's like for the first time in my lifetime people said 'no, we don't do that anymore.' And our leaders now share values sufficiently enough that they didn't ignore the sentiment or just listen and commiserate, they actually...obeyed. Pretty much instantly.
I had made a comment earlier today after Elon posted the poll about how the ideal scenario would be to quickly hire him back before the Super Bowl/whatever new developments break on Monday. Beyond that, I don't want to write too much about my own personal opinion because it's fairly scattered as I'm more than a little giddy from surprise at the moment. But, I am interested in your thoughts as this seems positively seismic.
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