Rougarou

Disagree. I will take the longer flight or weirder hour to stay with AA because of the points and EQMs. I’m no Spanky but my points are usually good for at least 9-12 if not more round trip airline tickets and we bank on that to be able to take 3 vacations a year instead of 1 (Hotel and rental car points is another discussion). It’s an unpublished benefit of being able to choose your own travel and use your own credit card if you can set your schedule for the most part and have a tolerance for a longer flight or weirder hour if need be.

Because I like to make sure I get my overheard baggage exactly above my head. I can’t tell you how many first class guys come in last and then are romping down to 15C to find a spot for their carry-on. I get settled in and can work for a good 20 sometimes 30 mins before laptops have to be put up. It works for me, your mileage may vary (I’m in DCA right now by the way)

I’m here for a Bernie President! Don’t you go getting me excited now, I’ll hurt y’all if this goes sideways after I’ve let myself believe...

Last week I was on 7 flights, doing a road show in 4 cities in 4 days. Of the 7 flights, 5 had first class (the other two being tiny regional/envoy things), and I was upgraded in all 5 to first class. American Airlines is like the IBM of airlines. They suck, but they are so massive that once you are in, it’s impossible to get unstuck due to convenience (Live in Hub cities, flights available, etc.). Outside of the severely rough patch last year with striking workers and grounded planes, if you see airline travel as the equivalent of a bus in the air, all the fluffy stuff doesn’t matter (though it’s cool Delta just profit shares with all their employees the equivalent of 2.5 months of extra pay). All that matters is having the most options with departures and arrivals without any stops, being first on, guaranteed baggage space, and being first off with enough room to open a spreadsheet for two hours comfortably.

One time I got really drunk and bladed a guy (paddle got a bit sideways on me) and I'd never seen someone in so much pain. I felt really bad and still do. Be careful out there, boys.

Just read All The Pretty Horses. It’s really good and you can really start to see what makes him special emerge here (obviously not a unique opinion).

The first 30-40 minutes was epic. Sort of landed with a thud, but that's okay I still really enjoyed this film. Agree with Future that the burning city/night parts were pretty lame and the woman/child thing seemed like Sam knew the movie was light on emotional and character attachment so let's shoe-horn something in the weird part. All that being said, I read nothing about this movie except it was nominated so was pleasantly surprised (and thought the fat guy was going to be the protagonist and the blonde guy was going to die; should have known fat kids didn't make it through the war).

Have to agree with everyone else here; clouded judgment and stupid moves betray how weak a beta male Harry actually was. He doesn’t deserve the title/royalty, as it turns out, so it’s probably for the best of all involved. Imagine the resentment by his kids though, “you did what!? I could have had what? Now I go to some public school in Toronto?”

This is me too. I will say that I do understand the impulse and the emotional conflict of victims or family victims or crimes where they’ve been robbed of loved ones by extreme sociopathy or psychopathy who want justice by death and the perceived injustice by them still living, in prison. You need some real spiritual maturity, I would think, to be okay.

IDK about you guys, but I only drive on Toll roads. Can't be bothered to be backed up in traffic with a bunch of Nissan Sentra's, ya know? But as a normal human being I don't cry about paying the taxes for the side streets I use, etc. As most normal people don't. If there was a way to submit NTTA receipts and get a rebate for the taxes spent on roads, do you think people Libertarians would do it though?

Bear with me as I present an analogy that I can see M4A being like and what we should prepare for, for a successful model. Think of it like an Amusement Park (again, bear with me): M4A means that the US Govt pays your admission to the amusement park where the amusement park is a metaphor for general healthcare. Everyone gets in, those are the table stakes for M4A. Now, because there is no longer a barrier to entry and because new rides take time to be built and tested for safety, there is a back-up in lines and you must wait a bit longer for the privilege of going on a ride, whereas a ride is a metaphor for a specific service or specialty under the general healthcare umbrella. Then we should give the citizens of the amusement park the ability to use one or two given Flash Pass or Fast Pass to get in an expedited line. After that, you can buy more VIP passes or Fast passes to your heart's content and your threshold for wallet pain. Is that such a bad model? Or is that what Pete is saying we should do and people think it's trash?

This is the boiled down truth of it Also this: In essence, we have to be honest with people and ourselves that the top 50% are going to have to pay more for, best case scenario the same care, most likely scenario worse care and that this is a moral and ethical and values-based policy of doing what is right to be humans. It will need to be understood that this sacrifice is help people not die or suffer and yes, you will likely have to find other ways to save money or you will need to find ways to make more money to supplant the money you've lost. Just like, yes, slave owners had to figure out how to make money in other ways that don't include owning slaves if they just had to keep their wealth at the same levels, because it's wrong to own slaves as a human being. It's wrong to not give healthcare to everyone in your country, is the boiled down point, and you have to be okay giving up some of your cash to do it unless you are the poor/working class. And we need to be honest about it not being easy and affordable and it's going to hit a lot of people in their comfort zone. It's going to hit a lot of people in their feelings. It will seem unfair and be painful in the short term. But over time, we will learn to live in the world again. Just like most of us learned to live in a world without owning slaves. Lastly we need to be honest about the government and your employer: Are government workers smart human beings with real skills and abilities that are valuable to any organization? lol absolutely not (but they should still be afforded dignity). Will there be massive inefficiencies and waste? Of course. It's part of the calculus, though. It's baked in to the formula. Will the net promoter score or quality based scores of your 1) service 2) experience 3) cost and 4) quality of care be negatively effected? Almost certainly, if you are in the top 50% who have good to great insurance because you are a valuable, capitalist vampire with a graduate degree. But is it worth it to take a ding on these things so that the bottom half who have no insurance to even complain about and would love to gripe about a 2 hour wait time, can get some basic healthcare for when they are sick and maintain their health with yearly wellness/preventative appointment? That's the argument! Is your employer a soulless and cold and calculating outfit who cares only about the bottom line? Likely, if they are any good and worth working for. Do they only offer amazing health benefits because they have to? To compete with others to get top talent to drive shareholder value and grow? You betcha they aren't doing it to be nice! Will they pay their employers more because they will no longer have to pay 95% of their health insurance? lol. no way jose. These are the same folks who took the Trump tax cut to buy back stock and raise earnings as opposed to trickling down to the employees. We've seen the playbook and what they will do. Why do we pretend companies will grow a heart and do something different with healthcare? When someone tells/shows you who they are, you oughta believe them.

The idea is to sacrifice for the greater good because you need to realize your privilege is why you have amazing, employee-paid insurance and for a family of 5 you pay 1% of your paycheck out of pocket. You are privileged to have that perk and so you should think of others less privileged. On the thread about the working class being dead everyone is in agreement that government jobs are where the mentally slow and weak of society go to toil away for a life time of meaningful work stapling papers and filing away $500 hammer receipts, but whenever people talk about a nationalized or M4A, everyone seems to give the government the benefit of the doubt it won’t be a disaster and full of graft and embezzlement like the Medicare/Home Health industry Being run by Nigerian War Lords and Filipino confidence men.

That's cool and I agree. I didn't see the distinction initially why you would say what you said. I am for any and all genuine mass uprisings, revolutions and rebellions. Maybe it's just the Ole Miss in me showing.

I am on the planet where I think it is completely reasonable and good if Venezuelans rose up and overthrew Maduro so they could like eat and do other things besides weave baskets out of their currency because it is so worthless. Also would have been cool for the Iraqi folks to have handled Saddam. Are those opinions mutually exclusive? Maybe I am on the wrong planet, then. Where is Frog-eyes and his rapper girlfriend Grimey and their SpaceXship. I need outta here.

WELL! I actually enjoyed Green Book (but did hate The Shape of Water, like everyone else--or at least everyone else should have-- in my defense).

Didn't you say Pete sucked for calling for their own people to overthrow the South American dictator (maduro?) recently? I vaguely remember that. So if Bernie says it, cool, but Pete?nah fam, imma go on and get outta here.

OSCAR SO WHITE! talk not going away on twitter. Does that sort of stuff have any influence or affect on the Academy or you guys?

This is the same issue Dallas has with the rise of Plano/Frisco as it's own self-contained economic hub for jobs that lead to bedroom communities an hour away from downtown Dallas or Dallas proper.

But the delta between what you make in Stephenville versus Houston is usually equal to the delta in the cost of living in the bigger city, so isn't just a wash? e.g you make $500 more in Houston but you also pay $500 more in rent in Houston. The real win is to find the geo that has the above average pay higher than median average and a cheap cost of living to maximize your labor and earning potential. Those areas usually have a short shelf life before the cat is out of the bag, but that is absolutely what has fueled Texas/North Texas growth over the past 20 years.

You touch on tangential points about community and affordable housing and renters and it's a paradox. It is generally understood that renters are not good for community, home/neighborhood values, and accountability versus home owners. But working class folks need to rent and there are some cities where the rental market is 70%+ of all available homes and so of course people don't want to put roots in those areas and either use their homes as rental properties or sell and leave. The ugly truth of this is that working class/renters also have to own some of their behaviors and tendencies (which isn't always their fault, we've talked a lot about not having good parenting, quality education and wherewithal). If people trash neighborhoods or homes or live in such ways that home values are affected (e.g. put up with crime or fail to raise your kids well, which affects their behavior and learning which affects the public schools, etc. as two examples) you cannot reasonably expect people with the means to leave, to make decisions to own and live in such areas and raise a family in those environments. It's paradoxical and I know I sound like a decorum republican here but I'm not, but as a homeowner I've had to consider these things as well.

Two points: You aren't the working class. Sure, it's ideal to do as you say you have done but for the working class who might not have much disposable income to proactively invest in the stock market, over any period of time (or don't know how, are culturally afraid of it, or any other number of barriers to entry that poor people have that we don't) owning a home is a safer path to building wealth. If you have $2k and pay $1500 in rent for your 3bd/2ba or you pay $1500 in mortgage for the same house, if you only have a few hundred bucks left to live off of, it's obvious that owning the home is better over time. That's not even addressing that my previous point upthread was that for the lucky group of homeowners who got in before a blistering hot real estate market (I called out the specific cities and conditions. Your mileage obviously varies especially if you bought a house in the middle or close to the top of the bubble in valuations in Austin or California or wherever you are), they will outperform the market. Anecdotal I know, but almost everyone I know who bought real estate in Austin pre-2010 is doing handsomely off the profits. Some just took the $100k lump sum liquid profit from selling their house in the domain area they bought for $150k and some rolled it into a bigger home and sold the house for more. Same thing for those in McKinney or Frisco or Prosper or other exurbs that have grown triple digits due to white flight. I mean, are these points even debatable? Do I need to call @Catdaddyhorn and have him pencil whip everyone about how the lack of a path of reasonable real estate ownership for the marginalized works? He's researched and can cite scholarship which is a sight better than us throwing personal anecdotes into the ceiling fan.

It’s a way of keeping score. How can we know we are successful and happy if we can’t benchmark it against all the other data inputs, I mean people. You have to earn— really earn like shaggy 1%— and own the toys and take the trips and you’ll find riches mean nothing if the eye is never satisfied. And most of us are never satisfied. I struggle with it (consumerism, etc. decried upthread, so it’s not just the poor or working class), I won’t lie.

It’s a benefit because it can be a short circuit to lump liquid cash, if you are lucky enough to have bought a starter home in Austin or Dallas from 2008 to around 2016. The swath of people I know who did that have come out like bandits and been able to make $100k+ every third or fourth year in real estate appreciation. Even now with housing shortages, etc. it’s obviously a good economic benefit to own a home and have equity in real estate rather than save $1000/year by not having to call a plumber or buy stuff at Home Depot to fix something versus a landlord. At some point that yield curve will invert and it will not be a wise economic tool but for now home ownership in Texas (or California or Nashville or Northern VA or other either historically rich real estate areas or trending/hot cities) is a good idea.

Brad is bringing the fight to some of y'all on this thread who aren't used to being challenged like this, though. It's been for an interesting discussion tbh. 🍿