busdriver

You should be watching MotoGP instead. Today's race was incredible.

That model has infected all of our politics. I feel like they all took a lesson from Ashton Kutcher's character in "That 70's Show" and the ultimate political brownie point is a "sick burn." We live in the dumbest of times.

A look at minimum wages at a national level is a bit clumsy. It assumes that nation wide, all low wage job markets exist in a monopsony. I'm not really sure why locality based minimum wage is bad and a federal floor needs to be set. That said, part of me would be okay with a minimum wage hike of something reasonable ($15 would works out to $30k/yr, which is higher than Germany) and pegged to some sort of CPI. Mainly so I don't have to listen to this shit anymore.

People follow the law for three reasons: 1. They believe the law is just 2. The are afraid of getting caught 3. It's just not worth it to fight back (minor nuisance) At the end of the day, the state only has force as a tool to enforce laws. If you aren't comfortable enforcing a law at gun point, it probably shouldn't be a law. All the stupid laws only work when everyone agrees that they're good and just. That requires a common culture of shared values.

I didn't mean to imply they're wholesome, good dudes. McInnes bailed partly because his joke got out of control, too many assholes were tagging along, and he got swept up into the mob mentality. I was thinking more along the lines of the original motorcycle clubs, before they went full on organized crime.

You happen to see a picture of the dude who took over "leadership" of that group after McGuiness bailed? The corporate press seems to have a complete inability to understand internet culture. My guess is they have to smash everything into the boxes that define their world view. And that's how you get a "white nationalist" organization with an Hispanic leader Old school men's club type gang is probably more accurate.

We've attempted to attack the supply side of the drug problem for decades. It has had zero effect. Heroine used to be the drug of trainspotting and 90's bands, now it's suburban. Pfizer doesn't murder it's competitors for trade violations, they go to court. If we took a fraction of the money spent on the "war on drugs" and put it towards treatment, the country would be far better off.

There is a ton of people advocating for something not F-35. Beyond that, no consensus.

Why does the healthcare discussion always revolve around public vs private funding of the same bill instead of figuring out how to lower the bill? There is a missing root cause analysis discussion. All we hear are the simple 30s sound bites that conform to the party line.

Not woke-ness. Good old fashion partisan politics.

It does seem like something needs to change, but I'm not so sure a constitutional amendment is what needs to happen. Our politicians are generally gross, and our national politic is so broken I don't really want them touching the constitution. They'd likely make it worse. At the end of the day, I think the root cause of the problem is the DNC/RNC. Politicians are beholden to national tribal politics, and toeing the line on the national party platform. There used to be a lot of room for argument within the parties; there were conservative democrats and liberal republicans 30 years ago. Kill the power of the DNC/RNC and bring back earmarks to encourage cooperation. I also tend to think both parties are headed for major change anyway, we're in the midst of a generational power transition.

Americans have been obsessed with race for far longer than 2008, not without cause. The GOP was founded in opposition to the expansion of slavery. I've been thinking about how this thing might turn out. The 1960's were similarly tumultuous, and the republic came out the other side better for it. The Iranian revolution was ostensibly led by both secular leftist and religious thinkers, but fed by large numbers of unemployed men. Obviously the Ayatollah ended up as the leader of record. I'm seeing a lot of similarities with Iran, with respect to varying ideologies within the political parties. I suspect things will get worse before they get better. I think the DNC and RNC as we know them now are finished. I think it's just a matter of time, with my only question being what comes out the other end?

To be fair, the first part may have been very much already escalated, intentionally by portions of the protester group. There is a lot we don't really know about that whole situation. The dude looked to be wildly inept at firearm handling skills. Depending on what was being said to them, his wife may have committed an assault. You calling them "shoe-less" is as much "othering" language as his.

I can't remember which podcast/youtube video I saw this in, but I seem to remember Brett Weinstein making the argument that the college kids were indoctrinating themselves to a certain degree.

Kaepernick was an employee that made public statements that pissed off the customers, who viewed his statements as offensive, who made noises that implied they would stop being customers. That's it. He certainly wasn't the first person to lose a job over that sequence of events, and it seems to have become quite common these days. Just one more example of the mass hysteria afflicting our society.

BLM has an agenda. Most people in the streets and on facebook saying "black lives matter" are supporting the sentiment not the organization, or are only vaguely aware that the organization is more than just the sentiment.

There are plenty of words that already exist to describe the points that are trying to be made, none of those words are loaded with the emotion and horrific history of racism. Adding another meaning to a word that is so closely tied with lynching and Jim Crow is an organizing tactic. Not to mention so overly broad as to be almost useless as a tool for making any productive changes. unconscious bias agency structure lack of economic investment, [leading to] endemic poverty and crime [and] self destructive cultures and practices See plenty of words. So yes language evolves, but to claim that in this case it's due to a lack of ability to discuss the problem is a fallacy.

It's literally in the definition du jour. The woktivist arguement is completely tautological. From the Aspen Institute: https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/content/docs/rcc/RCC-Structural-Racism-Glossary.pdf Structural Racism: A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. Racial Equity: Racial equity refers to what a genuinely non-racist society would look like. In a racially equitable society, the distribution of society’s benefits and burdens would not be skewed by race. In other words, racial equity would be a reality in which a person is no more or less likely to experience society’s benefits or burdens just because of the color of their skin

A single CPI based estimation of real wage growth or decline is flawed. Everything is not inflating at the same rate. I also don't think income inequality is a very good measure of anything by itself. It might be a good indicator to look deeper, but by itself doesn't tell you much. It's like chasing metrics. An increase in minimum wage also isn't going to do much (if the underlying problem is a loss of manufacturing jobs) other than help drive inflation. Service industry jobs are already low margin sectors of the economy (the restaurant industry as an example). Thought this was interesting, I obviously can't vouch for accuracy, but it at least seems to match my own anecdotal experience (mainly that the fun stuff is far cheaper now). My main thoughts: -"Higher education" has become a scam box-check requirement for no good reason. - What is actually driving up the cost of healthcare? Nationalized healthcare seems like a great way to keep paying ever increasing costs without solving the root cause. Maybe Andrew Yang is right and we'll all be served by robots soon, better get on some nuclear power plants to power it all, Star Trek here we come......

The issues at hand are far more complicated than a simplistic and overly broad platitude. But thoughtful, nuanced discussions don't work with the advertising model and no one's righteous indignation fix will be met when it turns out that everyone is to blame.

That SCR with a rifle length wood handguard would be pretty. I'm envisioning a free float handguard that goes all the way out to the muzzle of a 16 inch barrel, kind of like a manlicher fore end. You'd probably have to glue the wood to a fiberglass inner tube.

The helos fly red air at WIC during the DCA vul every year, shot kill is sketchy trying to simulate a MANPADS, but it's not complete bullshit. Every couple of years a WUG will get the idea to drop down and try to gun one of the helos for shits and grins, it usually doesn't turn out good. Then the lesson gets learned for a few classes and they just sit off and snipe us with AIM-9Xs where we die before having a chance to react. So yeah, exactly like Zero says.

Actual studies/experiments, both pre-date the current insanity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843945/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2

I would assume there's a huge variable in population density and general culture that can't really be accounted for in the models, since they're just best fit curve differential equations. The public national policy making conversation centers around the major urban areas. There's lot of stupid running around these days though; the doc on base made a point of telling us someone had done a study to determine that temps would have to get up to 150ish degrees to kill the virus so the summer wouldn't be helping........... I'm not really sure why "they" thought that air temperature in the summer was the key variable instead of a change in human behavior, but what do I know. In any event, if my sarcastic cliff's notes is about what they're thinking, it's probably not a terrible way to calm the nerves of the panic monsters in the major urban areas.

Jesus, that video is patronizing. So to be clear the short version is: don't open the go back to work tap all the way, keep the stream of folks going back out to a medium pace so that when people start getting sick there isn't a huge pool of potential infectees to feed a spike and more tests available to catch a spike earlier (hopefully before it become a full blown epidemic). And support and feels and stuff.