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Everything posted by Ghost of LL
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I think the implication is that he very much wants to watch his wife.
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The essay is about GenX from the standpoint that it's writing about how GenX white males didn't pay any price in connection with the implementation of DEI hiring policies. The people who are in power among GenX are disproportionately white males. And we didn't throw ourselves out of power. That's a bit part of the thesis of the essay, and it's a part with which I strongly agree. I'm not even disagreeing with the author's observations about the impact on his cohort of Millenial white males. I'm just saying I don't care.
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Good--then I've expressed myself clearly. We have managed to carry out some significant societal changes. I think a lot more societal changes are needed. And I don't think we've carried out the changes that have been made with just a whole lot of grace or foresight. But we're fucking GenX, man. What do you expect from us?
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My take-away from this is that Brisket is just too lazy to be a swinger, and I just think that's about (1) the saddest, but also (2) most Mexican thing he's ever written on this board. And he writes a lot of (1) sad and (2) Mexican things on this board.
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As a GenX man, I think that's largely true. But it's also not something I'm going to apologize for. As someone noted up-top, white men are only 28% of the population. But as I look around my peer group, white men are waaaaaay more than 28% of the GenX lawyers in this town. Or any town, for that matter. At my firm at at others, we've tried to increase diversity among the firm's lawyers and within the profession more generally. We haven't done anything illegal--we have a very good employment-law section that makes sure of that. But we have done things like sponsor programs at UT and Houston-Tillotson that encourage undergrads who are from diverse backgrounds to consider the legal profession. After all--it's real tough to hire a diverse workforce if all of the lawyers graduating law school are white. And let's just be real clear--it makes good sense to have a diverse workforce. Because we have a diverse client base. And juries and judges are often not white men.* I'll tell you--our current cadre of associates is still well more than 28% white men. And the primary beneficiaries of a lot of those efforts in the legal profession have been white women, which doesn't really address all of the issues we were trying to deal with in our various DEI efforts. But still--I'm not going to be too concerned about the fact that white males are slightly less over-represented in the legal profession than they used to be. But the point is that it's a price that we--i.e., GenX males--didn't pay. I think that maybe dovetails with the other thread on population reduction. These decisions maybe hit a whole lot different when it's your sons that aren't getting the opportunities because of the decisions you're making. But a lot of GenX males (and elder Millenial males) who are in positions of power don't have sons. Or if they do have sons, they have one or two who are so well-off that they're not terribly concerned about them getting an entry-level position. In the high-investment/low-number model of childbearing in which you have a small number of children in whom you invest a greater amount, do you really care if white males have relatively fewer opportunities if you're in the class of people who are making the decisions about DEI hiring? Not really. If you're in that class of people, your son(s)--you probably don't have more than one or two--are going to be very well educated. They're ahead of the game, irrespective of who else is playing. It's not that white male Millenials were handicapped. It's that white male Millenials who didn't come from an upper-class background were handicapped. * I have been in a number of CLEs with various women judges--some white, others not--in which those judges explicitly state that they prefer to hear from lawyers who "look like me." The context is that they're encouraging us GenX white men to let our female (or female non-white) associates argue in court more frequently. And I will tell you that there have been a number of hearings or appellate arguments in which I have sat there at counsel table and let a female colleague make the argument because I had heard that speech from that very judge. On the one hand, I don't really care--I've had plenty of appellate oral arguments; I've argued dozens of summary-judgment motions. They're no longer new or exciting. On the other hand, I've had plenty of appellate oral arguments; I've argued dozens of summary-judgment motions. So I have a lot more experience and can probably make a better presentation (particularly if it's going to require some on-the-fly improvization). In a vacuum, the client might be better served to have me argue. But in front of a judge who doesn't want to hear from someone who doesn't look like her, we have to make a different tactical decision.
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Ok--and as someone who is another quarter Luxembourger (no shit--my maternal grandfather's four grandparents all emigrated together from Luxembourg in the mid-19th Century) . . . fuck you! Luxembourg doesn't have just a whole lot in common with those Dutch herring-eaters. Now if you want to combine those three countries into a Greater Luxembourg with its capital at Luxembourg--a "Grousslëbuergesche Räich," if you will--perhaps we can talk about that.
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I do not mean to imply that there was anything behind Trump's statement beyond the fact that Trump is a complete and total idiot who doesn't understand math. I do mean to say that from a purely communications standpoint, Luttnick is on to something. If prices were to go up from $100 to $1,000, we'd (correctly) say that prices have gone up 900%. And in a world with the inflation we've seen over the past half-decade, people are pretty used to hearing that prices have gone up by high-double- or even triple-digit percentages. But if prices go down from $1,000 to $100, that's just a 90% decrease. Anybody with the least little bit of understanding of math understands that the 900% increase and the 90% decrease both denote a difference of $900. But what percentage of the American people do you think have that least-little-bit level of mathematical knowledge? 50%? Not a chance. 33%? I mean, maybe if you're lucky. It's probably less than 20%, if we're being realistic. Remember that most Americans read at or below a sixth-grade level. So purely from a communications standpoint, it makes sense to communicate it has a "700% decrease," even though that makes no sense at all as a mathematical proposition. Because you're dealing with a nation populated by morons.
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That is honestly a really weird way to put this. Belgium wasn't a country until 1830. And even after 1830, it's hard to say that there was a coherent Belgian national identity. That didn't really come until World War I; but even now I know plenty of people would dispute that there can be a national identity in a country that low-key shouldn't really be a country. So the real question is this: are you a quarter Flemish or a quarter Walloon? This is an important question, because it determines whether I quarter-hate you. By the way--I kinda have the same conundruum. My grandmother would tell me that I was a quarter Czechoslovak--probably because it was easier to explain to a kid when Czechoslovakia was the political entity that had sovereignty over the village whence her grandparents came. But ummm--no. We're Czech. And if you want to get more accurate, we're Moravian.
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Oh my god yes.
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Compensation & WFH debate ($120K vs 240K)
Ghost of LL replied to Nice Guy Eddie's topic in Daily Texan
Honestly--and I mean no disrespect by this--but the fact that you've worked your whole career remotely answers so many questions about you and your posts. -
The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
Ghost of LL replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
You have a very good memory. California passed Prpo 187 in 1994 with 59% of the vote. It prohibited undocumented immigrants from receiving state-funded social services, education, and non-emergency healthcare and required state officials (e.g., teachers and police) to report suspected undocumented individuals to federal immigration authorities. It never went into effect, as it was blocked by various federal-court decisions. It was the high-water mark for the GOP in California. Since then, it has won exactly three statewide elections--two of which were by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Prop 187 isn't the only reason--such a complete political collapse couldn't possibly have just one reason--but it seriously damaged the Republican Party with Hispanic voters in a way that was fatal given its other weaknesses. -
BOOM MOTHER FUCKER - Will Muschamp's Triumphant Return
Ghost of LL replied to Nueces River Rat's topic in Football
What in the Gary Darnell is going on around here? -
Compensation & WFH debate ($120K vs 240K)
Ghost of LL replied to Nice Guy Eddie's topic in Daily Texan
I don't agree with that at all. There are plenty of employers that are wildly successful with a WFH model. They have lower overhead as a result of paying less in rent and they can often pay lower wages. At the same time, they may not have any drop-off in productivity. That's particularly the case when the employees are doing piecework or when they're doing a job that has high levels of employer monitoring (e.g., call-center work). Once upon a time, airlines had reservations centers. They were large buildings across that country that housed hundreds of agents physically on the phones. I don't think any airline in America today has one; they're all WFH. And for that kind of thing, that makes a lot of sense for the airline. It doesn't have the expense of operating a reservation center (or a dozen reservations centers around the country). And pay for res agents hasn't increased nearly as much as it has for in-airport employees, owing to the supposed "benefit" of getting to WFH. But at the same time, a supervisor can listen in on the call just the same as they did when they were all in the same building. The number of calls an agent takes is logged. And all of the calls are recorded. So the employer gets the same productivity for less cost. And that's not unusual. I'd say that is the case for most white-collar jobs. It's just not the case for most professional jobs. -
Compensation & WFH debate ($120K vs 240K)
Ghost of LL replied to Nice Guy Eddie's topic in Daily Texan
I don't view it as "commitment" or "ambition." I think it is more an an experience thing. In my line of work--which is the line of work of seemingly 95% of the posters on this board--much of the mentoring that young people get is just absorbed as a consequnece of being in close proximity. Listening in on a phone call, hearing people talk in the halls or in the next office over, running into a colleague in the breakroom and asking what they're up to, walking into a supervisor's office and asking if there's something you can do on this case--that's how much of the most valuable mentoring gets done. I'm not saying that mentorship can't be done in a WFH environment. I am saying that it's really hard. And if both the mentor and the mentoree are not real conscientious about it, it's not happening. If I need to hire a third-year associate--adn I really need to hire a third-year associate, BTW--I'm 100% going to take an assciate who has been in the office over one who has been exclusively WFH over his/her career, all other things being equal. It's not because of what I percevie as commitment or work ethic; it's all about the mentorship and training that I think that lawyer has gotten at his/her previous job. -
For those of you who love medieval history--and I know that you do--it's impossible not to see the parallels with the English wool export tax of Edward III. By the 14th Century, it was well established that if the king wanted to raise revenues from any kind of direct taxation, he had to obtain the approval of Parliament. And Parliament wasn't excited about imposing new taxes to enable Edward III to assert his claims to the French crown. So Edward imposed new taxes on the export of English wool. His successors then increased that tax. That brought in a fuckton of money that was completely outside the control of Parliament. By the reign of Henry V, it was nearly 2/3rds of the Crown's revenue. And that tax alone allowed the Crown to prosecute the Hundred Years War and brought the famous victories at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. It was, in modern terms, a slush fund for the English king to prosecute his military adventures in France. So yeah--if you don't see a danger in the executive imposing tariffs independent of congressional authorization that give it revenue that it can use to fund military adventurism without congressional approval, I'd really encourage you to read more history.
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If you thought next year might not be an absolute fucking bloodbath for the GQP, let this speech put an end to that. They have no ideas. They have no answers. They have no strategy. When things are good, you can get away with shouting about fake problems like transgenders or DEI. But nobody has time for that shit when they can’t pay the rent and they have no healthcare. And when that’s the deal when you have all three branches of government, that’s a big fucking problem. It’d be a big fucking problem for a Democratic administration. But they’d try something. It might not work. But it might. This administration? It won’t try anything. It has no idea as to what it might try. So nothing will improve. And there ostentatiously won’t be any effort to improve anything. They’re gonna get killed.
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Preach. I was in Austria this summer on vacation, and I stupidly left my blood-pressure medication at home. So I went to a doctor in small-town Tyrol without an appointment. I had to wait about a half-hour to see the doctor, as I didn't have an appointment. The doctor saw me, did a quick check-up, and gave me a prescription that I could fill at any apotheke. Cost for the doctor's visit--70 Euro. Cost for my meds that normally cost around $200 in the United States: 35 Euro. Of course, if I'd been an Austrian citizen, it all would've been free. But yeah--tell me again how we're the greatest country in the world.
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If you were picking a train trip to do, what would you choose?
Ghost of LL replied to Royalfan5's topic in Food and Travel
One train trip? Anywhere? It'd almost certainly be the Maharaja's Express in India. -
We may be entering a really very dangerous time that mirrors the beginnings of World War I. The fundamental reason for World War I was that the key players--Germany, Austria-Hungry, and Russia--all adjudged 1914 to be a more favorable time for the war that they viewed as inevitable than would be 1915 or 1916. Russia believed that its designs in the Balkans would be frustrated by Austria-Hungry's infrastructure improvements in eastern Hungry and its political liberalization (largely supported by the heir presumptive, Franz Ferdinand). Austria-Hungry and Germany believed that Russia's demographics would make it unstoppable in the coming years. They all were probably wrong. But that didn't matter--1914 it was to be. It may be rational for Russia to believe that if it wants to retake the Baltics, 2026 is going to be its last chance. After that, Europe's rearmament may make that impossible.
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Well, I mean, yeah. But you and I both know that Hispanics are not at all a monolithic group. And between South Florida and South Texas, it's a pretty huge variation.
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Going back to Alaska, I find it interesting that it supplied two of the four Republican senators who voted for extending the ACA tax credits. That's not an accident. Alaska has the highest ACA subsidy per enrollee of any state ($867), with the exception of West Virginia ($1,038).* That shouldn't surprise--heathcare in Alaska is expensive af. So if those subsidies and tax credits go away, there are a whole lot of Alaskans who are going to be very pissed and very without healthcare. Now, if you're a senator from West Virginia, who gives a fuck. You could anally rape every voter in the state and still win by 30 points so long as you have an (R) after your name. But Alaska is different. It's not exactly a "swing" state, but it is a state that has elected Democrats to statewide elective office in recent memory (and no--Joe Manchin doesn't count). I don't know how much of a chance Mary Peltola has. I will tell you, however, that she has a record of winning in a statewide election. And in a good Democratic year with the GQP doing everything it can to fuck over Alaskans, she might have a shot. * For those keeping score at home, Texas is right there in the middle at $536.
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Fuckers whose surname ends in "z" stanning for an overtly white-supremacist party will never not be amazing to me.
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I don't think you have to be a "moderate" or a "progressive." I think you just have to be angry. Elections in 2026 America are defined by anger. Republicans want you to be angry at immigrants and trans people. Of late, they've been pretty successful at it. Democrats in Texas havne't figured out who you should be angry at. That's kind of astonishing. The Republican Party has been in power for thity years. In that time, our schools have deteriorated, our electric grid has collapsed, our heatlhcare system is imperiled, and our taxes (for most people) have only gone up. Texas has gotten worse, and we're paying a higher price for it. There's literally nothing in Texas over which the state government has any say that is better today than it was in 1994. The only people who have benefited are a handful of billionaires. You want a target for anger--there it is: a handful of in-state and out-of-state billionaires and the Republican politicians they control.
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It's the nature of a second-term presidency. Every day that goes by, a second-term president is weaker. Every day, he has one fewer day to make appointments, to threaten retribution, or to promise rewards. And that's doubly true when everyone knows Trump is going to be too mentally gone to do anything after his term apart from drool and soil himself. Every day he loses power. And for each Republican, there's a tipping point day on which it is safer to piss off the second-term president than it is to stick with him. That day is a little different for each Republican. But for MTG and others, that day is already in the past. There's no one for whom that day is too far in the future. The last two years of Trump's presidency are going to be a complete shitshow. There's not going to be anything holding the GQP together. There's no clear successor; there's no unifying ideology. It's just going to splinter apart into recrimination and shelter-seeking.
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So exactly what leverage does Trump think the United States has to compel Ukraine to accept its (or any) peace deal? If Ukraine is able to keep up the fight without American aid, why wouldn't it do so? That's doubly true as Ukrainian sovereignty becomes every more important to Europe as it rapidly realizes that it can't trust the United States to protect it. Basically, all Trump has done is render the United States irrelevant.
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