Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
Coming up on middle age, I don't care about cars as much as I used to, so I'm still driving a Scion that I leased a decade ago and then decided to purchase when the lease was up. Were I buying now, I would probably buy a Subaru, likely either a Crosstrek or an Impreza. I like hatchbacks for their practicality, the AWD is excellent in the winter, I think they look nice enough, and I'm not super price sensitive.
The main reason I'd consider spending more would be to get something with solid self-driving capabilities.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
The GDP is downstream of the general fuckuppery of the French and Spanish. They're just a lot less industrious than the Dutch.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Their per capita GDP is 10% higher than Germany, 30% higher than France, and about 45% higher than Spain. Their debt to GDP ratio is 45%. When you visit, the productivity and industry is quite noticeable.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Not at all. I view Russia as an adversary, although more of an annoying one than a serious threat at this point. In stark contrast, I view Europe as a loveable older brother that's a bit of a fuckup and needs to straighten themselves out. Many of my criticisms of European pathologies also apply to the United States though, so it's a bit like my loveable older brother that's kind of a drunk and doesn't really want to hear about it from me because I've been known to knock back a few myself. The only thing I genuinely dislike about Europeans is the tendency to smugly believe that there is some sort of superiority to the United States when I find such a claim absolutely laughable. Now we're at the point where my loveable, drunk, fuckup older brother still thinks of himself as better than me because acknowledging that he's broke and about to go bankrupt is just too hard to accept.
Huge caveat - I don't actually like to think of "Europe" as a single entity all that much because my experience with different places is very different. The Dutch aren't actually fuckups, for example. Also, to be clear, I really do mean that I find these places and peoples loveable.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Put simply, I think Elon Musk is an Antichrist. I'm not a religious man, but nothing seems to me to sum him up so neatly as the concept of an Antichrist. He has offered visions of salvation in the form of environmentalism, extraterrestrial travel, pro-natalism, and now DOGE. He is the richest man in the world and commands the world's largest microphone, using it to shape global opinion and change governments around the world. His relationship with the truth is flexible, to put it lightly.
If Antichrists are real, would they have many children via IVF with women like Grimes and Ashley St. Claire? Would he name them things like Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus? Absolutely.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
I'm more or less completely against it. The vast tracts of unspoiled land are an amazing part of the United States being what it is and speak to our history and our values. There is plenty of space for humans to live and settle within currently available land. Land shortages just aren't an actual problem that needs solving.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9d ago
Bonaire too! Or at least sort of. I suppose it's not really a country though.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
Relatedly, pulling out of Afghanistan. We finally did it, but the military leadership insisted on dragging their feet and doing it in an incompetent fashion to undermine Biden and it worked.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
The problem, for me, is that my options are not between an orderly phase-out and a stop-work order, but between a stop-work order and the status quo. I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble. If, like me, you want many of these activities curtailed, you just have to bite the bullet and accept that it's going to be an ugly process where every single person denied a previously received bit of American largesse informs you that you're literally killing children.
So, the solution, for me, is to say that the mistake is not in stopping now, but that we ever began the process of giving away so much American money that can never be redacted in the slightest and that is never enough to even begin to slake the demand.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
I am open to the idea that this is actually the best policy given a number of realistic political constraints. This does not move me to find it less galling that I'm stuck paying for people to live degenerate lifestyles. Avoiding HIV is absolutely trivial, but the "community" in question apparently insists on spreading HIV.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a network of public health centers in South and Central Los Angeles, cannot access $746,000 remaining from a $1.6 million grant used to provide prevention, testing and treatment for about 500 transgender people at risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.
When I was younger, I had developed pretty libertine attitudes about human sexuality and I still mostly have the same gut feelings, but every now and then, I bump into things that make me think the conservatives have a point. This is roughly $3K per person for STI testing and treatment. Why? Why do these people insist on doing such consistently risky behavior that they need constant STI surveillance? Even being somewhat promiscuous doesn't result in constant infections, the behavior here really just has to be completely outside the range of anything that most people would consider normal. As you note, the other Life Center apparently spends about five times that much per capita, clocking in over $15K per person.
Making everyone else pay for egregiously bad behavior is just galling.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc.
Is this your impression of how legal battles play out? My impression is that everyone does see through the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games but elects to play them anyway and award points to the person that most successfully weaponizes them to the preferred ends.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
Federal judge pauses deadline for federal workers to accept Trump’s resignation offer.
I was initially surprised by this, not because of any detailed reading of statute, but because federal employees can simply ignore the offer. I find it intuitively odd that proceeding with the status quo is fine, making this offer without a deadline might be fine, but making the offer with a deadline isn't fine. Concerns about enforceability seem at least plausible to me, but I really struggle to understand why a short deadline to make the decision would be a problem in and of itself. If you don't take it, well, you're just back where you were a couple Tuesdays ago.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
I don't think this is a realistic solution but somehow think it's still more realistic than just going back to the pre-10/7 status quo of waiting until a bunch of Islamists launch another attack on Israel. If you start with the presuppositions that Israel should exist as a Jewish state, that Israel is an important American ally, and that coexistence with a Palestinian state isn't possible, what are you left with? I'm not saying you should adopt those presuppositions, but they seem to be what Trump is working from.
Just another chapter in, "OK, if what you're telling me is that giving these guys a dollar today means I owe them a dollar every day for the rest of my life, then I am against all new expenditures".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
Are A-F correlated in any meaningful way? I prefer the interlocutor that just disagrees with me in a consistent, predictable way to the guy that says, "I like to think through each issue" and winds up with an incoherent dog's breakfast of views.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
Beer is a pretty good example that's adjacent to that. Right now, Modelo is one of the most consumed mass market lagers. If you increase the price by 25%, many people will elect to consume fundamentally similar American substitute goods (e.g. Budweiser). Supply lines and distributorships complicate this somewhat, but demand shift would certainly be expected under standard models.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
This was one of the reasons that I insist that policy decisions were the major drivers of Covid-era inflation. Not only were massive supplies of money printed and distributed, but governments banned or severely restricted major sectors of the economy for a long period of time. That money is going to go somewhere.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
My lab actually seems like a pretty good choice. She's easily trainable and has natural hunting instincts that are useful with almost zero prey drive. While she's surely not as adept in a combat situation as other dogs, I'm probably already in deep shit if I've arrived at that point, but she's large enough to make someone else an easier target. Their cold tolerance is impressive, they're great swimmers, and they're about as adaptable and flexible across a wide variety of roles as any breed. Ultimately, I think flushing and fetching prey is probably the biggest thing a dog can bring to the table after protection.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19d ago
Tariffs on Canada are incredibly stupid and I haven't heard a coherent defense of them.
Tariffs on Mexico, I'm agnostic about. There are demands to make of Mexico that I support making. Whether tariffs are the best way to get there or not, I don't know.
Tariffs on China are good. Full stop. We should buy less from China.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
Effective Altruist Amos Wollen published a defense of PEPFAR on the 29th, which doesn't steelman the programs' current critics, but does address the current politics of the programs.
Man, that's pretty charitable to just say it "doesn't steelman". To wit:
In response to a tweet by right-wing PEPFAR advocate Richard Hanania, many of his followers expressed their grievance at the country with the largest share of the world’s GDP shelling out a small sliver in foreign aid to do something unambiguously good:
As for whether the US has reason to set aside a skimpy sliver of its budget for a programme that has saved easily more than 20x the lives that the Iraq War stole, the most important justification for PEPFAR funding is that saving that many lives is straightforwardly morally good, and failing to engage in a baseline, easily-affordable level of Christian charity when that many lives are at stake is Satanic.
OK, well, I'm not Christian, so that line of defense isn't really going to work for me. More importantly though, this doesn't actually meet the argument head on, it just insists that you have to agree that it's morally good because it's such an eensy-weensy-teeny-tiny expense that does so much good. Without arguing about just how eensy-weensy the program is or how much good it does, this prompts a couple immediate thoughts:
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If it's so tiny, why is it critical for American taxpayers to cover it? Things that are so tiny and so good should be pretty easy to convince people to participate in voluntarily rather than via confiscation.
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In the event that there's really a coordination problem, that it can't be done via charity for some unclear reason, why isn't it an internationally shared expense? It's super-duper tiny, barely costs anything at all, and does so much good, so it should pretty easy to get the UN to fund this instead of it just being a responsibility for the United States.
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This argument is fully general for anything that you just think is good in the federal budget. It precludes ever cutting anything if its advocates say that it's really important and doesn't cost that much anyway. If it's true that nothing that supporters think is good and costs less than eleventy bajillion dollars can ever be cut, fine, I'm probably just going to oppose more or less all new programs since they can apparently never be ended or shifted to the private sector.
At the end of the day, my real question is why the hell HIV spreads so well in Africa. I've read the explanations and they just don't really make much sense to me. In the United States, Europe, and Asia, HIV just spreads really poorly among heterosexual populations that don't use intravenous drugs.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
If you learned for a fact the election wasn't stolen, and you had been shouting otherwise, you'd be forced to consider how you contributed towards lowering societal trust by lowering its faith in our democratic process unnecessarily.
If I learned for a fact that it had zero effect on the election, I would still not regret mentioning to people that I think it's very bad that the clerks of the two largest counties in Wisconsin encouraged people to lie on election forms to avoid providing identification and a large number of people did exactly that. I can imagine this washing out to zero actual difference, but it's still very bad and I'm not the one bringing social trust down by noticing that. Even if this (and the million and one other examples of violations of clear law with Covid as justification) had no effect, I would still favor restoring trustworthy elections where people vote in person with identification.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
23d ago
[Insert Performance Enhancing Drugs joke]
Speaking as someone in that age bracket, I don't think the attractiveness of myself and my wife has changed dramatically from our mid-20s. We're both plainly older than we were a decade and a half ago, but just as slim and fit as ever, and with the added benefit of much better sartorial taste and the money to support it. I'm not saying there's no difference, but our attraction to each other and likely to others hasn't changed dramatically over the years.
I do think this is a basically reasonable expectation and as I've aged, I've become surprised by how willing other people are to become frumpy at such a young age and just chalk it up to age rather than their sedentary lifestyle and disinterest in style.
Seconding @FiveHourMarthon, don't worry too much about the original plan, focus on the process. Things go up and down, they don't go the way you want, such is life. Consistency over long, long periods of time will prove itself out with gains.
Great job!
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