chooky
2d ago
It is way too convoluted to argue that higher private sector pay denotes greater social value and that DOGE was thus correct to push out high performers. This is definitely not the path to government efficiency! A successful DOGE push out would have to be one in which the bad employees who couldnt find new jobs or who thought they would get fired or who were in unproductive jobs outweigh the "bad" cuts. It is probably not the case that literally everything done by one's preferred politician is perfect and awesome.
chooky
2d ago
I had a family member take the buyout because they started looking for a different job (since the security and flexibility that is the draw of a federap job is gone), and they scored a way higher-paying job. Like many buyouts, it would have been the case with DOGE that many takers were the capable employees you don't want to lose.
chooky
2d ago
And I guess the difference vs the past is that fielding, by far the most exciting part of baseball, has gone away because of the 3-outcome hitters you note. Boo.
chooky
3d ago
I asked one of my friends about why there arent very many good quarterbacks anymore a couple years ago. They said it was because defenses have gotten much more sophisticated.
chooky
5d ago
I found the climax of the quartet to be the darkest thing I had ever read in my life. I would describe book 1 as Greco, and by extension Ferrante, spectacularly embodying the ideal of a compassion and empathy through storytelling. In book 2, the values of the world, especially religion, get upended, setting us up for Greco having to reconstruct meaning in the next books. She basically fails, and her relationship with Nico eventually shows that she cannot even trust herself. In book 4, things fell apart to such a degree that I cannot even trust Greco's narration anymore. Harrowingly, what I took from the fourth book was that, no, we cannot, through stories, learn about others (like we can, for example, in Faulkner's Absalom) since even knowing oneself is hopeless - what is the fucking point of art if not that? And it can't do that. I didn't pick up a non-genre book for months.
I suspect my take is rather nonstandard, as is my belief that the fate of the doll from book 1 is completely ambiguous and a crucial part of the themes I proposed above. What I understand to be a lack of ambiguity in the TV show regarding this is why I refuse to watch the show.
chooky
7d ago
Canada's tariffs have ample exemptions for imports that are used as inputs to manufacturing so are not nearly as disruptive (or punishing to the US) as one might expect.
chooky
7d ago
Have we considered that it is simply on Netflix US? This also applies to much of the rest of the top list you cite, which makes me very surprised Jujutsu Kaisen is not on the list.
chooky
10d ago
Bad deal: Fancy carbonated waters (SpinDrift, eg) are super tasty, but that shit is pretty much the same price as a mass market micro beer (New Belgium, eg). Just way too expensive. If they could get their act together and scale manufacturing, I would drink these all the time.
Good deal: Video games. Do you guys realize that cartridges (Final Fantasy, etc) that cost $60 in the early 90s translate to ) like $150 today?
chooky
10d ago
I don't think the claim is whether Trump lies (all politicians lie) but in what service Trump lies. Probably, many politicians at least start out with the genuine belief that their policies are good ones that will help people, even if these goals eventually get subsumed by the idea that their party is better (so anything that keeps them in charge or, rather, prevents the other party's awful policies is worth it).
Trump seems to much more heavily prioritize self-enrichment and what he believes will be glory for himself.
chooky
12d ago
Brushing your teeth every day, applied to Iran's nuclear ambitions, would mean that we have to go bomb a uranium deposit or something every few years. Fine, whatever.
Trump seems to be attempting to extract a single tooth in the belief that it will remove the chance of cavities in all our other Iranian teeth, which will not work and is a pretty deranged dental philosophy.
chooky
13d ago
You are surprised Trump has a mental world model in which he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (and all other prizes, so if he cheats or commits fraud to acquire gains he is merely taking what is rightfully his)?
I thought that the 2025 tariffs were too obviously a bad idea to be real. Since then, no idea has been too deranged.
chooky
15d ago
Presumably, Skynet was indeed in the sky, i.e., space-based data centers, or the humans would have quickly just hit the data centers. Alternatively, Skynet, having the resources to build weapons and killer robots autonomously, would have also had the resources to build and fortify data centers - heck, its human designers may have even intended this.
chooky
20d ago
I recently had to pay someone to repair something at my house for a few thousand dollars. As expected, I am not able to pay the repairman via credit card, as they don't want the fees.
But I am able to choose Klarna at checkout and pay Klarna via a credit card, for which Klarna does not charge fees, and thus earn credit card cashback points on a large purchase that I would not ordinarily expect to. This seems like an unsustainable hack, right? I guess pay-as-you-go apps are one of the sectors currently transferring money from private equity to consumers, with the early days of Uber (when it was cheap and heavily subsidized by investor losses) being another recent example. Someone is losing approximately $100 on my transaction, and it seems like the loser is Klarna's investors, right?
Where else are startups currently just handing out free money?
chooky
21d ago
It seems like, from other replies, that Cofnas had good reason to expect retribution and that my assumption that he did not was wrong. I was not aware of the context that threats were made against others and presumably Cofnas himself. I figured that Cofnas just read the manuscript and made a quick blog post pointing out how obviously fake it was.
chooky
22d ago
It doesn't seem to me like there is a reasonable expectation that making a blog post that an obviously false autobiography is, in fact, false would lead to retribution. Recall, for example, the reveal that A Million Little Pieces, popularized by Oprah, was fake many years ago.
I will admit that I am not paying nearly enough attention to have any opinion at all on whether Cofnas' posting about Arday was mean-spirited or otherwise inappropriate, but I assume it was not. It sounds like (again, I am not paying attention to this topic) what is actually happening is that Cofnas' notoriety for the association with the Arday scandle has drawn attention to Cofnas' other online writings, which are... at minimimum, probably problematic for his employer. To me, this suggests a lesson about the dangers of real-name online problematic writing and/or earning notoriety if one has writing that would have negative consequences for one's employment.
Also, obviously, European free speech protections are not nearly strong enough.
chooky
22d ago
What is supposed to be "heroic" about Cofnas? I have zero problem with him uncovering Arday's fraud, but this seems rather more like "detail-oriented" or "actually paying a tiny bit of attention". Is he heroic for another reason?
chooky
23d ago
You need to change your victory proof to oil returning to, say, $70 per barrel or below. There is no doubt that the war is still screwing up the supply of oil, and the proof is the price.
chooky
23d ago
We should expect double digit inflation or very close to it over a 5 year period, as 2% per year works to 10.4% in total over 5 years. I'm not sure what you mean by "annualized", but typically that would mean "converted such that it communicates the rate of a given period's inflation occurring over a 12-month span". We have not even been close to double digit annual inflation pretty much ever - even 2022 was only 7%. But, yes, the Fed has overshot its target significantly post-pandemic and continues to miss in 2026.
I think you underestimate how widespread the effects of Doge and changes to working conditions were. My family member worked on the nuts and bolts of building domestic physical infrastructure that you almost certainly believe are a good way for the government to spend resources. It is not the case that Doge-driven changes only affected questionable departments or competent people doing unproductive tasks.
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