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Everything posted by Ghost of LL
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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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As I re-read Justice Sotomayor's dissent in Trump v. CASA, Inc., I hold out some possibility that Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagen were three of the four votes needed to grant cert. Kavanaugh concurred in that case specifically arguing that CASA wasn't a big deal because SCOTUS would get a chance to decide the EO on its (complete lack of) merits. Sotomayor was all "bullshit motherfucker, because the DOJ would know it'd get poured out and so it'd never petition for cert." And so once the DOJ did petition for cert, I think it's possible that Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagen voted in favor with Kavanaugh voting yes also because he kind of set himself up to do so with his concurrence in CASA. At least, I really really hope that's the deal.
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I miss the lawyer I was when SCOTUS was something that could be respected by people in the legal profession. That lawyer was so eager and energetic and thoughtful. It's too bad the Roberts Court killed him (and many others like him--looking at you, @Brisketexan & @DDD Dad).
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That's not true at all. Downtown you just get raped and assaulted. It's out by fucking MDW that you get raped, murdered, and raped. I didn't see this thread, but was his point that AMS is pretty unique among European airports in that it is very close to the city it serves and is well connected by train to Centraal Station (which is right in downtown)? So you could conceivably get a cheap rate on an airport hotel and use the train to be in downtown in less than 20 minutes? I mean, I still disagree. But I at least understand it as a discussion point.
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You're in Chicago for six days and you're staying at the fucking airport? What the everliving fuck? Airport hotels are for if you are in town for one night and you have an early flight out the next morning. That's it. If you're there for six nights, stay Downtown like a human.
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1) Russian dressing is the only proper dressing on a Reuben. Putting Thousand Island on it just turns it into a kosher Big Mac. 2) Russian dressing isn't proper Russian dressing unless it has caviar in it. 3) Aside from Katz's, the best Reuben I've ever had is at Scholz's. Damn--I'm hungry.
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Turnout in Williamson County is going to be critical for Van Epps. It is the most educated county in the district. But unusually for such a well-educated area, it is heavily Republican. Van Epps either needs to hold trump’s margin or run up the score with a good turnout. He doesn’t need to do both. But he can’t do neither.
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There's a real jurisdictional question in there. If Hegseth ordered a murder in the Pentagon, is it a crime under Virginia law even if it was carried out elsewhere?
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Yeah--I think that's kind of where I am. It's been probably 20 years since I was in Venice, but my key takeaways were: 1) It's incredibly hot, humid, smelly, and crowded (none of which should be a real issue in January); 2) Even so, you don't have to go far from San Marco to find yourself completely lost and wondering down the most magical little alleys; 3) It's expensive AF. 4) But . . . you can hop from bacaro to bacaro eating cicchetti and have a fantastic "meal" for 15 Euro. You can buy a day pass on the Vaporetto for 25 Euro and ride the boat all around the Lagoon. You can walk through some of the most amazing churches in the world for nothing or next to nothing. In other words, you can fill a full day in Venice doing all the Venice stuff for less than 50 Euro. Anyway--this'll be different. I figure a gondola ride will be nice when it's cold. I imagine the gondaliers have blankets underneath which I can get handsy with Mrs.LL--that's definitely something you can't do in the Summer.
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