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.
45m ago
· Edited 27m ago
Apartments are houses!
No, apartments are pods, in the "live in the pod and eat the bugs" sense. With a few exceptions for the ultra-rich, they're small, dark, cramped, noisy spaces that you can only enter and leave by passing by multiple other neighbors, at which point you are not in your outdoor space (which you don't have) but out on the street.
I grew up in a residential apartment building in India
And why aren't you still there?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
54m ago
Pigouvian taxes are just a more granular way of discouraging something instead of outright banning it.
That's how they're used, but that means they're not Pigouvian.
Sure, you do need to know the sign, but even if you're wrong on the magnitude, a wrong Pigouvian tax is usually going to be better than doing nothing.
No, if you know the sign but don't know the magnitude, you can overshoot and end up with much worse.
But I think one of the strongest arguments is that, if you don't know what's going to happen when you fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition, then be conservative and don't fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition.
That's just the Precautionary Principle, and it's a recipe for nothing but death.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Straw-man much? "Oh, you are against Trump, so you must love the Ayatollah".
Did I say anyone loved any Ayatollah? (Nope)
FWIW, I do not think that Iran gaining nukes would cause a catastrophe. I honestly think it is likely (90%) that they and Israel can successfully play cold war.
Iran's a lot bigger, physically; it could absorb a lot more nukes.
I would very much prefer if they elected a leader who championed peaceful coexistence, but while they let Nethanyahu and his allies run the show I have little sympathy for them -- unlike the Iranians, they could have simply voted for someone different.
They used to elect leaders who championed peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately their enemies always chose leaders who championed killing them all.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5hr ago
The housing market has not magically found a way around supply and demand.
What happened in the US in 2008/2009 was destruction of demand through the end of cheap and easy loans.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
The easiest way around 1 is to just, well (clears throat): BUILD MORE FUCKING HOUSES. Yes, politically difficult, but If I had it my way, I'd adopt a similar housing policy on the state level, like Japan does.
Nobody wants this. The old pro-growthers already have their houses; they are the Boomers that the Millennials and Zoomers hate. They tend to be NIMBY (though they are not BANANA - build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone). The Millennials are pro-urban, environmentalist and anti-sprawl, and don't see how this keeps them from getting houses; at best they want to build dense multiplexes for other people to move into so they can get a house. Many ARE BANANA, in effect. The Zoomers just see what the Boomers have and want it right now, especially if it means sending great-grandma to a home.
If you try to build, the Millennials will scream about corrupt developers and also demand "affordable housing" instead. Nobody wants to develop this and the old Boomers don't want affordable housing anywhere near them.
(Gen X, as usual, doesn't count)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
Lawfare did not work particularly well against Trump.
Lawfare failed against Trump. It took out Alex Jones, Rudolph Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and multiple right-wing protest groups (e.g. carrying Tiki torches during a protest turns out not to be protected by the First Amendment when done by the right). It has harmed randoms por encourages les autres, such as the college students jailed for saying the N-word and the Virginia man pantsed by the police for objecting to his daughter being raped by a trans student. And of course there was the decimation of the NRA as @gattsuru mentioned.
It's not that lawfare doesn't work. It's that Trump was particularly good at getting past it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
What does the anti-war side in the US want in the Iran conflict?
The humiliating defeat of Donald Trump. They want the US to leave with its tail between its legs, the Iranian regime in full possession of its nuclear capabilities, the strait in Iranian hands, reparations paid to Iran, and a break between the US and Gulf allies. And a NATO led by Canada and the Europeans. A subset would also like to see the US/Israel relationship broken, but I think anti-Trumpism is a far bigger factor than anti-Semitism.
They don't believe (probably accurately) that this would wreck the world economy; Iran, after all, would open the strait in this circumstance and any tolls it charged would be less damaging than full closure, which has itself not wrecked the world economy. They also don't believe that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a big problem, either because they have convinced themselves that the Iranian regime are the good guys actually (TDS at its fullest) or they figure Iran would be no worse than North Korea.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Ah, so if the SPLC only faked/supported ~700 of the hate groups, they're off the hook? That seems like a problem with the law.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
All of the ones I met in my 6-week stay reported some form of abuse, and I'm inclined to think becoming a crazy person is some downstream effect of it
There's one explanation that says sexual trauma causes these personality disorders. However, I believe a simpler explanation is the personality disorder results in fabrication of sexual trauma.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
So you're saying that even if they did exactly what I said, they'll get away with it because black people will never believe this?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups?
No, they're straight-up grifters who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and spending it both to create a problem and fight it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?
And this is why I am extremely skeptical of "Pigouvian" taxes. If you don't know the sign and magnitude of the externality, you can't tax (or subsidize) it to compensate.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
It requires more of a stretch compared to the other counts, but if they do get convicted, their reputation is ruined.
No, because they'll just claim it was a witch hunt against them by the Trump administration, and their donors will believe them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I'm blue tribe by upbringing, though I grew up near the edge of its territory at the time. I was a libertarian politically, not that uncommon in tech where a bunch of weirder blue tribe political positions thrived. My turn to the blackpill was employment at Google, where the progressives came in and basically curb-stomped all the weirdos. I was too cynical to reach for common ground and solidarity with the progressives personally, but I did watch them stomp friends who did so. But the progressives largely weren't Jews (though some were). And certainly not Israelis; I knew some Israelis and some of them were on the stompee side whereas most managed to keep out of it.
I am also Jewish (but in no way Israeli) by matrilineal descent, though I was never religious myself, which probably biases me. And I remember the cheering of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem after 9/11. So I have a side. My opinion obviously doesn't matter, but I do.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
At the moment, "not just X, but Y" is a really good tell. Not sure where the LLMs got it but they use it all the time in "persuasive" writing, and I don't see that particular formula organically much. Most of the others are less good. Many steeped in the culture war are likely to use "X wearing a Y suit", for instance. I'm a fan of the em-dash and have been since before transformers were a gleam in Kaiser's eye. And "rounding error", "in real time", "the kicker", "the X is the point" (also very culture war), etc are all common, so only weak tells. (on the other hand, "But here's the thing" seems to be either AI slop or human marketing slop)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
How does the vig compare to Fanduel, etc? I'm guessing Polymarket sports betting takes a much smaller rake than the legal stuff labeled as gambling.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
This should add credence to the belief that e.g. the groypers are "controlled opposition". But it likely won't; the lesson of ECHELON, AT&T Room 641A, and the Snowden revelations is that conspiracy theories are never credible even when there's precedent.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Fortunately I am not licensed in any jurisdiction and am thus happily free from both credibility in diagnosis and ethical strictures in same.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Nursing assistants do the diaper changes.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The condition that's not mentioned in the article but is the spectre haunting it is not Communism but borderline personality disorder. Or one or more of the Cluster Bs anyway.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Once a suburbanite has gone Democrat they never go back.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
When considering the culture war as a whole, would you say that accusations of racism or sexism have generally been false?
There certainly have been more false claims than true ones. Though not evenly distributed. For anti-semitism as applied to those opposing support for Israel, I believe the claims are mostly true in the US -- the bulk of the people actively opposing supporting Israel (as a whole; many will argue over details) are anti-semitic, and most of the rest are useful idiots who don't know which river or what sea.
Yes, but the contrast was much greater in 2008/2009. We're not talking going from 3% to 6% (in fact, 30-year-fixed interest rates actually dropped), we're talking entire classes of (very bad) loans essentially disappeared. No income, no job, no down payment? No house for you!
More options
Context Copy link