ndawg

I'm not raising any fucking kids in this hellscape. But even though I exercised muh pErSoNaL rEsPoNsIbIliTy and decided not to breed, other people's shitty offspring can nevertheless mow me down at a moments notice anytime I'm out in public.

I read his post as suggesting that we don't have firearms regulation that keeps us safe from gun violence. That doesn't necessarily preclude the existence of firearms regulation at all.

Oh, a "we only differ on degree, not principle" argument. OK. So, does the second amendment establish that I have a right to own a nuke? How about anthrax?

Regarding how to stop the bullshit, it's worth keeping the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (BAP) in mind: "it takes an order of magnitude more work to refute bullshit than it does to produce it."

Your rationale is preposterous. It can be used to justify believing in fringe bullshit so long as one can find any flaw, however minuscule, in mainstream news sources. In fact, I would guess that is exactly how you are using it.

I love seeing right wingers try to "shoot the moon" on message boards. "Hey, here's an idea! I'll just insinuate that everyone is in deep denial of something obvious right in front of their noses. Maybe if I don't address any of them in particular, and just confine my prediction to a reply to a fellow sympathizer, nobody will challenge me. And if they don't challenge me, it'll look to any bystander like I successfully demonstrated that this is an echo chamber right in front of said echo chamber!"

I wouldn't be surprised if he has an intellectual inferiority complex, i.e. he'd rather be seen as a genius by morons than how intelligentsia would judge him (as nobody special).

This morning, I've been poking around outside everywhere I could look for evidence that a hostile takeover of industry is afoot. Nearest I can tell, it appears that our free market hasn't been replaced with a Soviet style central planned economy just yet, but I'm hoping it arrives soon... once they tell us where the line will start for toilet paper and bread, my wife and I plan on setting up tent and camping out.

This makes sense. The GOP is a magnet that's managed to collect just about everybody in our society who 1. wishes they were rich and 2. lacks the fundamental skills needed to actually create value for other people.

Yeah, I should have been more specific, sorry. I meant that I think that, at least as it stands today, the government should have a more prominent role in raising awareness than in regulation.

I suspect, like drunk driving, our culture will benefit from some amount of public initiatives to help adapt. Someone getting caught off guard by edibles can certainly be extremely humorous, and I don't think we need to treat it quite the same way as driving under the influence, but the very real risks need to be socialized. There's a very real danger in high potency edibles.

It'll be the next three-syllable chant. 2016 was "Lock her up! Lock her up!" 2022+ will be "Overturn! Overturn!"

Please tell me your zoom background is a ledge with a mushroom cloud off in the distance and a glass of bourbon nearby.

I'm sure that before the very first hairlines of the Visigoths begin creeping up over the northern horizon, there were some Romans who really, truly did fear an incursion. But I also bet there were plenty more who loved to talk about it and sound like they were really in the know about future events, even though the reality hadn't really sunk in for them. We all had to realize this on own own, and in our own way.. but one of the ways I managed to figured out that conservatives are truly full of shit is that I could probe in to all their fears they loved to warn me about, and find out that they actually weren't really afraid. They were just blustering.

I'm curious how you are preparing for the day when we lose reserve currency status.

Meanwhile, in an executive conference room at headquarters, those McKinsey guys are killing it with a plan to gut the American workforce and move operations overseas. The American worker, after all, is hardly any better educated or capable than their third world counterpart. Sure glad the party of fiscal responsibility defunded our education system, am I right? Think about all the the taxes you didn't have to pay in order to give Joe Sixpack a future. Fiscal irresponsibility goes both ways. If you fail to provide for successive generations, you're as foolish as an overspender, no matter how much you posture yourself as thrifty.

Overall, I bet most of us probably expect a decline in demand for office space distributed unevenly across sectors. I envision a lot of office->residential conversions in the next couple decades, as well as a continuation of the trend towards coworking facilities, that allow office space usage to be elastic. Personally, I miss seeing coworkers in person, sharing a drink after work with them, and am fucking sick of being on Zoom calls. Work from home proponents often tout how much more focus they have at home, but when you happen to be collaborating with with other people, you lose focus over video chat. If you enjoy working with others interactively and solving challenges together, you're probably eager to get back to the office. If you're more reclusive in your work habits, you're probably elated that you'll never have to go back to an office again. Most people won't be firmly in one bucket or the other, but I know I'm more on the "eager to return to the office" side of the spectrum.

This right here. There is always a certain degree of dysfunction present in complex systems. We can look at our outcomes, and compare them to other first world countries, and clearly see that we have more dysfunction than they have. We can also look at our states and see variation among them. The bleak reality is hiding in plain sight right in front of us, just like healthcare. The American political landscape isn't equipped to address dysfunction. We elect leaders on the basis of tribal identity and sound bytes, who promise "easy" answers. But "easy" answers don't even begin to address dysfunction, and at best they merely rearrange where the problems manifest. To actually correct dysfunction you need an approach that can't fit into a sound byte -- improvement has to happen holistically among the entire ranks, top to bottom. Ideology doesn't matter, except that dogmatic thinking is a limitation. And to correct dysfunction, you often have to try things that have a risk of failure, but American politics treats failure as fodder for oppositions to build a case against incumbents, rather than a data point to help correct and reorient. Education isn't going to get fixed by simple minded "fixes" like eliminating teachers unions, paying them more, etc. Poverty doesn't go away with by installing the "correct" macroeconomic principles. It's impossible to believe anyone who thinks they've got THE answer for what's going to fix any complex problem.

Do you have any idea what governs wait time in health care? Our private health system is like a living monument to market failure. Nobody in our health care system has any financial motive to reduce wait time.

That's a good point. I'd rather say that the Democrats need to get on the offensive and stay on the offensive until the GOP's power is reduced down to the level of its actual mindshare.

Right, because we're down to the wire. We have one chance to save the country. If the GOP regains power, we're done. The Democrats need to stop rationing their fuel (political power) and burn it all, hoping it's enough to break free from the event horizon. Not because that's a good strategy in general, but because it's what the circumstances call for. We need a hail mary or we're done.

I can't agree with this. Republicans have already given themselves "literal carte blanche to do anything they want." There is absolutely no reason to be worried about moving too strong against the GOP. They won't "retaliate," and not because they will exercise restraint, but because they're so far past the point where they have any need to exercise restraint at all. At best, the Republicans might choose to respect a Democratic filibuster if they found the calculus favorable.

How fucking ignorant and self unaware do you have to be to trot out a veritable buffet table of shitty, flimsy post hoc rationalizations and act like you figured out the “real” reason for a problem that numerous historians, sociologists, and civil rights activists have dedicated their careers to studying in depth.

If the problem we want to solve is wealth inequality, unless we plan on abandoning capitalism altogether, I think the goal ought to be to replenish America's supply of lower and middle class jobs. A carbon tax credit could be applied towards goods produced and sold in America, in order to offset the fossil fuels required to transport goods manufactured in Asia. This would help make up the disparity in labor costs that make offshoring appealing to begin with, without adding to the inherent burden that tariffs shoulder the consumer with.

This is fallacious reasoning, based on the incorrect assumption that decisions can be judged solely by the actions taken. Humans make decisions in order to produce outcomes, and those outcomes stem from the combination of both an action and condition, and not the action alone. Therefore, decisions must be judged by taking both into account. In the United States, unless parents deliberately intervene, all children are subjected to a condition where most characters will be white by default, and the few black characters that do exist will be cast into one of two typical roles that white writers tend to be limited to. For a white parent to take the deliberate action of further restricting their child's exposure to black characters would be therefore precisely the opposite of what the black parent in this case did. If the two actions seem the same, it's only because you aren't taking condition into account, which would be an error in your judgment. I am worried this comes across as stating the obvious, because we understand this intuitively elsewhere in our lives. Shooting and killing someone who is trying to invade our home is different from shooting and killing someone whom our spouse had an affair with. The conditions are different, so we judge the decisions differently. But white Americans tend to be in complete denial of the vast differences in conditions that black Americans are subjected to, and the conservative outrage over "cancel culture" is a great example of white Americans clueless about their denial/ignorance.