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.
12hr ago
What good is "power and bridge day" if it just kills a lot of Iranian civilians while the military retains its ability to fire missiles and drones? As far as I can tell, to the Iranian regime, most of its civilians are just useless bags of mostly water, and they could use the water elsewhere.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
There actually is a replacement elite in Iran to seize power.
They can't. Either they don't really exist to any significant extent and most Iranians support the regime (which, since they're Muslims, might well be). Or they're so completely disarmed and leaderless, and Iranian state capacity so great, that they can't even make a try at it when the US has bombed the hell out of the regime. Either way, there's no one who can replace the regime.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The US never closed any waterway; except one, all the ships it stopped were sanctioned and unflagged or showing a false flag. The one was Panama-flagged, carrying sanctioned oil, and stopped with the permission of Panama.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
16hr ago
It was originally a link to an AI slop tweet that included the video.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19hr ago
You're claiming hospitality is race-blind, which is already being against racism. A racist doesn't (from their own perspective) treat a black family coldly "just because"; they do it because the black family is black.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21hr ago
You're in fantasy land here. You can (and the US and Gulf countries have) shoot down with a Shahed with a machine gun. It's just a small aircraft.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
21hr ago
That's AI slop.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
Before Iran closed the strait, it was generally understood that customary international law required the strait remain open. After they closed the strait, the many nations of the world made it clear that there was no such custom, so Trump closing the strait is perfectly in line with precedent.
Though I suspect when the Truth Social post is translated to action, the US blockade will end up covering only Iran's ports, and so be in accordance with prior customary international law.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
It's true that the US is a net importer of crude. In fact, the US tends to export light sweet crude and import heavy sour, because we have a lot of refining capacity for the heavy stuff that many other refiners don't have. But that crude is mostly coming from Canada, Mexico and South America, not the ME. And in January a bunch of Mexican heavy crude refining capacity came on line, leaving US refiners with a problem, at least until Venezuela happened. I rather suspect Trump knew all about that too.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
"Synthetic polling" is of course completely invalid, no better than "we made it up". But note it isn't even new with AI. You know those "studies" that say hiring managers are more likely to hire people with a name indicating one race over another? Some of them were done by polling college students asked to play the part of hiring managers.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
"Just" raise the top tax bracket to 50%.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
30 year old working men were not considered "young men" when that support was voluntary.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
If for any "racist" action you'd find it bad anyway through some other means, you're still opposing racism only covertly.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
as a younger person I've got the full expectation that whatever current plans for funding the elderly will be nuked from orbit by the time I'm in any position to get hold of them
Already being done. They're talking about means-testing Social Security and Medicare, and proposals to tax away the houses of those older people who have paid for them are a dime a dozen.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Ah, the protection money argument. The thing is, the west didn't use to have to handout masses of money to people to keep them from rioting. Crime and poverty are not as connected as is often made out.
Right. Besides, what do we do to functional people who don't pay their protection money? We send men with guns to drag them off to jail. Why not skip the extra step and send the men with guns to drag any rioters off to jail? The men with guns have to be paid either way, but the rioters don't.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
So perhaps your real complaint is that your hypothetical 30 year old working man is not getting the respect he (arguably) deserves.
Maybe they should have a special express lane on the highway for people who pay more than $50k a year in taxes.
There's no need. When the support was voluntary, respect was required because the support could be withdrawn from the ungrateful. Now that it's mandatory, the supporters are merely slaves (or "tax cattle") and need no respect.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Another race discussion, another of a slight variant on the same, very contrived "dark road at night" scenario. At some point you start to wonder if it's just a lack of originality, or there really aren't any other similar 'gotcha' scenarios out there.
Suppose one is simply walking down the sidewalk at night, hears footsteps, turns around, and is relieved to see a white person? Is that moral?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
That's the social contract.
The social contract is whatever society's representative (the state) says it is, and nothing more or less.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
You're trying to convince a guy who drove a model T in his youth that he didn't grow up with cars because we've got Teslas now.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
On Bluesky and Mastodon but not on X? Sorry, that's a damned good indication they're completely on the wrong side of the Culture War now; they've gotten their last dime from me.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Oh no, of course not. Gen X is 45-60 now; millennials are 30-45. The Internet graduated from being the domain of the specialist to general usefulness in the late '90s, so "just in time for" is still broadly accurate. At that point, Gen X was half past 35
The midpoint of generation X didn't reach 35 until 2007.
The Internet graduated from being the domain of the specialist to general usefulness in the late '90s, so "just in time for" is still broadly accurate.
The first commercial ISP was 1989. The original Eternal September was September 1993. And services such as AOL, Genie, Compu$erve, Fidonet, and standalone dialup BBSs were older, some much older.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
This is also just the natural result of Gen X aging into the Moral Majority position. They're not digital natives
LOL. The internet was not, in fact, invented just in time for the millennials. And digital networks existed before the Internet was generally available.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
I would rather be an enemy of the US than an ally of Iran.
And the result of this situation is that the US now has two more enemies (Spain and France)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.
We can talk about it, but not in any meaningful way. The metric isn't available. And it wouldn't be a floor.
You asked for things which would be a failure. Why is it amusing that failure is worse than the status quo ante?
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