aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
51m ago
It's just rare to be able to slay someone in their motte and Piers had exposed the soft underbelly of his motte.
aqouta
1d ago
It's very strange to try and portray one nation conquering and subsuming another as the pro-sovereignty position. Ukraine was the buffer zone, Russia is the one shrinking the size of the buffer here. Accusing the EU of wanting vassal states in opposition to russia which operates on the model of creating actual vassal states borders on absurd. BRICS does not exist, it's a joke, the two largest "members" of BRICS have a current live territorial dispute.
aqouta
1d ago
Is piers Morgan a nakedly progressive partisan? My understanding is that he's what passes for a respectable centrist type in bonger land.
aqouta
2d ago
In some parts he had clever prepared responses and seemed to navigate the conversation pretty well, but that's such a basic thing. It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.
aqouta
2d ago
finally got around to watching the interview. On balance I think Fuentes out performed but made a lot of errors. On the school shooting thing I think he needed to explain the per capita thing, when the fact check came back from Morgan and he said they both do school shootings at about the same rate he should have said "so your example of whites misbehaving is the one area the behave as poorly as blacks" I was baffled by him not making the point.
aqouta
12d ago
This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?
Yes, it is obviously rage bait and not the first of it's type. It's a reliable way to earn thousands of dollars on X, the everything app.
aqouta
13d ago
Your claim was that these developments were a plot to turn red areas more blue. This is simply not true. They are primarily built in blue areas and in red areas even if allowed they are subject to all the restrictions and in fact more restrictions than market rate housing. The red areas resist both. They resist density whole sale. Which is the original topic, red areas are NIMBY, they refuse to allow housing that land owners, developers and perspective tenants all agree on building. That's it, that's the whole story. You defending blocking, you defend people in red areas nosing into other people's property rights and telling them what they can and cannot build on their own land.
aqouta
13d ago
In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.
As someone in the business of financing the building of multi-family low income housing, when people try to build multi-family low income housing in places that happen to be red the goal is to make money, it is not to, in a 7 degree round about way, do gerrymandering. There are much much easier ways to go about gerrymandering than carefully leaning on the state HUD to favorably grant tax credits to developer proposals that might move a couple hundred residents into one district that may or may not vote blue. Keep in mind a lot of these low income housing units are earmarked preferentially for like veterans and LIHTC recipients are much less likely to vote than the average person. The hud doesn't really even control who gets housing directly even if it was behaving nakedly partisanly. Thinking these are vehicles for gerrymandering is like thinking stock traders spend a lot of their time and effort trading in such a way that left leaning companies fail irrespective of their earning's report.
In fact, far outpacing the gerrymandering interest is the Community Reinvestment Act requirements on banks, who are the largest funders of LIHTC. Banks are required to invest in the communities where they operate or face increased scrutiny. The Low income housing tax credit offers an attractive and stable way to satisfy this requirement. Plop down LIHTC projects in the red areas where you have branches and you've satisfied your obligations in a way that offers a generous and steady return.
aqouta
18d ago
And funnily enough I can imagine almost any of the antagonists in that story thinking they're the Peter Gibbons of the office story.
We recently had a guy come through that we had to terminate. It started off with him pushing back in a way that we actually mostly appreciated. We got flagged because one of our functional accounts that manages our ssrs data source used a non rotating password and we needed to vault it. Turns out there is no firm approved way to integrate ssrs directly with our password vaults. The solution that came down and he was asked to implement was to write a program that would run in the server, pilfer the key and cycle them manually. He rightly pointed out that this violated the whole purpose of a password vault, and we were on his side pushing for an exception. But when the powers that be declined to give us that exception he couldn't just shrug with us and do what needed to be done. He started getting into arguments with higher ups and in general bad mouthing our department. I don't know the exact thing that pushed it over the line but I heard actual threats might have been involved and eventually his credentials were apprupted deactivated.
He too probably identified with Peter Gibbons and thought those of us who just went along were hapless automatons because we were willing to degrade ourselves by implementing bad practices to get off a corporate naughty list.
In real life your office is full of real people living real lives. They're not one dimensional characters from a 90s movie about atomization. Some of them probably do suck to work with, some even in the ways lampooned in office space or the office. If you get too caught up in role playing Peter Gibbons you probably can succeed but it's not likely to make you any happier than he was in the movie.
aqouta
19d ago
Are there any alternatives that fit current events better?
For a few years now I've been predicting the populist conspiracy theorist realignment where maga and the DSA left join up and the technocratic democrats absorb the never trump republicans. These rifts seem to be where roughly all the actual energy is. Of course I might be biased because I'm putting most of the people I most disagree with in one party that I can efficiently oppose.
aqouta
19d ago
Uh, you can in my experience roll your eyes at the up the chain authorities when they're being unreasonable or making bad choices. I think some people take the office space metaphor too literally, in reality your boss himself can be in the same circle of people rolling their eyes at people up the chain. There is a balance of contempt you should have for the "When I wake up in the morning, I first think of how I can best generate shareholder value" mindset but there is also an understanding you have to have to have that, whatever dumb stuff they want you to do, they are paying you and you need to give like at least a 60% effort. People who get this balance wrong mostly make their coworkers miserable more than any "the man" that they rage against then their coworkers don't really want to share in their laughing at the higher ups circles. Also the 90s era boss hatred bred a generation of "cool bosses who are on your side" that were lame but then found synthesis in a "we're all in this together" attitude that is usually actually pretty decent. Of course this depends a lot on where exactly you end up.
aqouta
19d ago
according to a quick check Grindr does indeed have age verification, they ask you for your birthday when you join and check if it pegs you as at least the legal age of your region.
aqouta
20d ago
THIS IS WHY AGE VERIFICATION ON SEX/PORN SITES YOU MAROONS YOU MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THIS IS THE HELL WHY.
Age verification on sex/porn sites doesn't do anything, that stuff is hilariously trivial to circumvent. Like you might as well try to ban drug by requiring people to say "I promise not to do drugs in here" every time they enter any building.
aqouta
23d ago
Did anyone actually believe this though? The Smollet case was notable for being so obviously wrong and there being many people who fell for it.
aqouta
24d ago
Why they thought this would be in their interest is anyone’s guess.
Depending on who "they" is. If it was your job to report on crime and there was a group of people who would hound you if you included the race when it was embarrassing to racial minorities and another group that would hound you if you excluded the race when it was embarrassing to racial minorities then removing your discretion is a strict improvement to your wellbeing.
aqouta
25d ago
I do want to object to the idea that athletes are necessarily jocks and not outcasts. As someone who did lots of sports growing up you get all sorts on the field and the asshole QB of 90s movies never really struck true in my experience.
aqouta
25d ago
If you know the rate of the complication and the cost change then a simple financial insurance product could normalize that cost.
I am the furthest thing from a socialist but I really do think medicine is one industry where our system just doesn't work. We don't have the stomach to let an actual insurance industry that can accurately price risk exist and exclude the sick poor and because we don't have that stomach we must have a universal insurance program and if we are to have a universal insurance program then that program will be a monopoly and the government is the least bad option to run that monopoly.
edit: as we're all airing our grievances with the medical system I had a new issue I haven't had before this year. Anticipating pregnancy related expenses this year I set up a healthcare spending account that got $150/pay period that I could spend tax free. No pregnancy and so minimal expenses and the money doesn't roll over. So I've got something like three grand that will just poof into nothing in a few months if I can't find something medical related to spend money on.
aqouta
28d ago
Yes, no one wanted them to keep those weapons, and yet giving them up seems an obvious mistake in hindsight.
aqouta
1mo ago
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
I mean yeah, I don't think the idea of HPATMOR was that is was supposed to be a realistic protrayal of children. It was a vehicle for delivering Yud's philosophy. I found it grating myself but not really for this reason.
aqouta
1mo ago
Perhaps an embarrassing fact about me: I listened to Harry Potter almost every single night from the ages of 8 to 18. I probably got through the series about once a year. This has given me almost no material advantages in my life, other than providing a very convenient series that I can use to supercharge my language learning.
This is actually nearly true of me as well actually. had them on tapes and fell asleep to them.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
Is it not possible that the fact that you think these are the bounds of the debate is the result of negative polarization in a world where practically everyone who has heard of the problem has spitballed their own cause and solution? People retweet the most ghoulish posts by their outgroup back to their ingroup, not the reasonable proposals.
Being broke wouldn't be such a big setback tbh, I'd need to like develop some beyond the pale predilections and then have them exposed or something to get ostracized from my friends and family. In which case I think I'd move far away and start over, maybe the west coast.
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