Well, Spudalicious arrives later today, spreading 16 kinds of Idaho cheer. He, of course, descends just as our workload has demanded more and more from us, so he generously offered to sit on the couch, drink our booze, watch daytime TV, and toss out random criticisms of how we’re doing things. This is a true friend.
Birthdays today include a guy whose name sounds like a doorbell; a guy who fell asleep and lost his head; a woman who was woke before there was woke; a guy who was truly boss; a pioneer of my favorite art form; the very straightest gay man in Hollywood; the spirit animal of Elizabeth Warren; a woman who definitely had her fans; everyone’s favorite virgin; a guy who needed buttering up; the guy who coined the phrase, “What, too soon?”; the best unibrow in baseball history; one of the odder critters to inhabit Congress; someone who actually understands Congress; the best offensive lineman I’ve ever seen play; a guy famous for milk and cookies; a guy who was described to me as “The Hispanic Monopoly Man“; an actor who got my attention, interest, decision, and action; the only guy who could do a great impression of Jackie Gleason getting ass-fucked; the lamest Iron Chef; and my favorite skier with anger issues.
Whatever, let’s see some Links action!
Useful to know if we ever get invaded by the Irish.
I know this wasn’t the writer’s intention, but I came away believing no-one. TW: Long story. I think she’s paid by the column inch.
My only deep misgiving is the existence of this federal land (only peripherally mentioned, but the key) in the first place. Auction off the land, not leases. Cut our taxes. That will happen around the same time that the unicorn circling our house decides to land.
Didn’t he run out of room in his Twitter profile from all the syringe emojis?
I’ve probably used this song before, but really, Old Guy Music today can only be this.
“Ukrainian civilians reportedly kill Russian troops with poisoned buns and alcohol”
Huh.
Ukrainian civilians reportedly kill Russian troops with poisoned buns and alcohol
HM hardest hit.
Starfish Strychnine.
Isn’t it normal to take shots from navels and blow from buns?
There’s very little Ukraine coverage that in give any credence to.
https://mobile.twitter.com/kiraincongress/status/1510249049357791234?cxt=HHwWhMC91cfgvfUpAAAA
Take it all with a huge grain of salt. It’s all propaganda all the way down from both sides.
A different take
https://news.antiwar.com/2022/04/01/russian-forces-withdrawing-from-ukraines-northern-chernihiv-region/
Yeah, Ukraine got smashed and any other angle is just a fantasy.
Well, duh – it’s The New Yorker. Way back in the day, the Rev. GT & I subscribed for a year when they were practically giving it away. Never had time to read anything but the cartoons and the capsule Broadway reviews. (As I recall, they were singularly unimpressed by The Phantom of the Opera.)
“I liked the kitty.”
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IdubPKUYzSU/UBe_x0-G1tI/AAAAAAAACTU/4KPO2cYGMoU/s400/SeinfeldNewYorkeMine.jpg
PS. The cartoons are still mostly reliable, next time you’re in a waiting room.
I thought Rock Hudson was the straightest gay man in Hollywood.
Or Liberace.
Ya know, Liberace was one hell of a piano player. But he really sucked on the organ.
/exits Stage Left
::Rimshot::
Posted without comment
Good morning, Olde Man,
Some spuds go east while some are headed west. I have an idea that your friend will be working without a Food Handler’s Certificate, sticking it to The Man. Enjoy your visit, even if you have to hide the key to the wine celler.
He gets put to work almost immediately. Because I’m such a good friend. “Get out of that fucking easy chair and get these onions diced, you lazy mick, before I take away your whiskey!”
a guy who was truly boss;
Happy birthday Hugo?
Sorrell Booke?
https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/video/6220764-ice-cream-shop-for-dogs-opens-in-center-city/
Odds on it surviving in the new economy?
The “parents” will clean up the left overs, same as their kids.
/My pet bear identifies as a dog and likes ice cream.
a guy who was described to me as “The Hispanic Monopoly Man“;
I think of him as the guy who sings about yeast infections.
and my favorite skier with anger issues.
Except for Sonny Bono, who tried to take his anger out on a tree.
tree hugger
Low blow!
Wood knot.
So many directions that could take.
Be the wrong race?
Demonstrate insufficient wokeness?
Be the he in a he said/she said?
Fun in Isla Vista.
It is a beautiful island?
Me encanta, esa canción.
More hate music.
I LOVE THAT SONG THANK YOU!!!!
Not this for Old Guy Music?
That’s also one I’ve used before. And a classic of the contortionist genre.
My best friend got his PhD at UC Santa Barbara – he told me that IV (during the school year) is the most densely populated square mile in the U.S.; no idea if that’s actually true. You probably can’t find more parties in less space though.
So, I’m trying to grow celery from stalk scrap. In a week it’s sprouted almost an inch tall.
Neat.
Did you put in water or?
Yup. Skewered and dunked it’s ass in a bowl of water.
What kind of lights are you using? Historically, fluorescents seem to be the consensus
I have one flourescent, two pairs of leds, and a great south facing sun room.
LED LED LED LED
LED LED LED LED
LED LED LED LED
LED LED LED LED
/Just giving you a hard time Hyperion
Daily Quordle 69
6️⃣4️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
Heh. 69. ?
36
58
3️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣8️⃣
6️⃣ 8️⃣
5️⃣ 4️⃣
4 7
1 6
nice
8️⃣6️⃣
3️⃣7️⃣
6 7
5 8
Sigh…
Daily Quordle 69
8️⃣7️⃣
9️⃣5️⃣
quordle.com
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜?⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜?⬜ ??⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜? ??⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜? ??⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜?⬜ ??⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜?⬜⬜ ⬜????
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?????
????? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
?⬜?⬜⬜ ⬜??⬜⬜
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?⬜⬜⬜⬜
?⬜?⬜⬜ ???⬜⬜
?⬜?⬜⬜ ????⬜
?⬜?⬜⬜ ?????
?⬜?⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
?⬜⬜⬜? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬜?⬜⬜? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
????? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
7 6
5 3
I should give up on Worldle. I suck so bad at geography.
Hole in one.
Worldle is too easy for me until they travel to the Caribbean or the South Pacific and then it’s GTFO.
I only got the last two because I was big fan of Stetsasonic in high school.
6️⃣5️⃣
4️⃣7️⃣
22 again today
3️⃣8️⃣
6️⃣9️⃣
4️⃣7️⃣
3️⃣8️⃣
8️⃣7️⃣
5️⃣9️⃣
Should’ve had my coffee before playing… Could’ve shaved 9 points off if I paid attention to the info provided to me.
Arbitrage
Mexico, which has been subsidizing gasoline to soften price spikes, said on Saturday the policy would not apply in the U.S. border region this week, citing shortages as more Americans drive south to fill their tanks.
The suspension of the subsidy from April 2-8 covers cities in the border states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California, including Tijuana, one of the world’s busiest border crossings.
Mexico’s finance ministry said in a statement there was a gasoline shortage in the area “from an imbalance between supply and demand.”
“In the United States, gasoline prices are higher than in Mexico, and citizens of that country cross the border to stock up,” the finance ministry said.
They should require proof of citizenship to buy gasoline.
We aren’t sending our best although some are, I’m sure, good people.
So let’s ensure there is a shortage everywhere else too.
Equality is a motherfucker.
“…so he generously offered to sit on the couch, drink our booze, watch daytime TV, and toss out random criticisms of how we’re doing things. This is a true friend.”
Somehow, this statement warmed my heart.
/HighPlainsGrifter*
*Almost my new handle after leaving TOS.
Mexico’s subsidy has been championed by the government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has long promised to insulate consumers from sharp price hikes at the pump.
In an interview with Reuters on Friday, Deputy Finance Minister Gabriel Yorio said Mexico planned to use the extra revenue from higher oil prices to subsidize domestic gasoline and diesel prices.
Team Bidenomicon must be pissing their pants with jealousy.
Only Gaia haters would subsidize fossil fuels.
The potatoes made their way more than 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) for processing, riding in
climate-controlleddiesel-powered rail cars.Gaia is about to burn up, but some people just can’t give up their french fries. Time to get moving on the electrification of the entire freight rail network. How, you say? Why, just pass a regulation mandating said electrification by 2030! Easy peasy.
Last WW2 German Trains Still in Service
https://youtu.be/bH96yjd6BKU
If diesel makes them feel jumpy these things ought to give them a stroke. The amount of black smoke smoke they belch out is impressive.
I don’t understand why everyone hasn’t gone all electric. They are practically giving electric vehicles away.
*looks at GIF for a few seconds*
Come on, even my simple ass gets the joke.
…Pablo Picasso was an asshole.
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
Much clever. So wit.
A letter reportedly circulating among Florida teachers is highlighting a thought-provoking sabotage of the state’s controversial new “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Since it’s now illegal to address gender identity or sexual orientation issues in schools for students from kindergarten through third grade, the letter recommends referring to all students as “they” and “them” to avoid “gendered pronouns” like “he” and “she”.
Also, “Mr.” and “Mrs.” should clearly be dropped for all teachers to conform with the law, the letter argues.
The strategy was spelled out in a “template” letter for teachers in Palm Beach County, according to the right-wing Moms for Liberty organization, which obtained a copy of the memo. The group posted the template on its Twitter site, and it’s now tearing through social media.
Petulant children are petulant.
It’s like dealing with fucking five year olds isn’t it?
Left to their own devices, five year olds don’t GAF. It takes years of “education” to develop that much stupidity.
Does anyone else remember acosmist on H&R? One of my favorite arguments he liked to present was that teachers who graduated from university education programs were a small percentage of teachers, and so any representative sample of teachers can’t be based solely on them.
Well, that may have been true (or not), but turned out to be irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what percentage of teachers are retarded lunatics, the retarded lunatics run the show.
While I don’t think that is true – my completely unsupported guess is that the vast majority of positions require an education degree, else why periodically do we hear about special programs to allow others to play, during teacher shortages or whatnot – it also doesn’t matter any more because the rot that has infested teacher education for so long has now spread to most other departments.
This is fair, too. The education departments may not have even been the leading edge of the spear, either, though most people don’t realize things like CRT date back to the 1990s and earlier.
But the fact is that the ground was fertile. Teachers are by and large obedient morons. They motte-and-bailey around with “good teachers” whom your straight-A suburban midwit-to-be child will generally have while the majority are just glorified babysitters. It’s just a question of figuring out which ideology you can saw them towards, and this ideology was carefully selected/constructed to do just that (and for far more professions than just teaching besides).
I didn’t meant to say “saw them towards” and don’t even know what verb I intended instead, but it’s funnier that way.
Critical legal theory was a Harvard development in the 70’s, and that mostly born out of Marcuse et al.
No. You have to have a bachelors and a teaching certificate, which you can only get out of the dept of (elementary/secondary) education, somoftentimes, your bachelors is something like “elementary education”. That’s to start. You have to get more degrees as your teaching career matures, even if you aren’t going into administration. The real problem is that the education depts are stocked with the dregs of higher education. If you can’t make it anywhere else, go to the dept of education.
Also, the point rhy makes is key. The KC public school district always has ads out for people woth a bachelors, and they will pay to help you get your teaching cert AND your masters because they are so hard up for teachers. Also, they pay fabulously.
That said, from what I have seen, the majority of my kids’ teachers were/are genuinely are good at their jobs. I have no complaints.
There are two problems with education departments at colleges. First, they do attract a lot of people that can’t hack a tougher major (and who like the idea of tenured employment). Second, they are all taught by people with PhD’s in education. If undergraduate programs are intellectual garbage, the graduate level programs are immersed in creative destruction (and not of the kind that replaces a thing with something more useful, but is focused on destroying what works and replacing it crap intended to be replaced with more crap later). New PhD’s all have to write novel dissertations and none of them have improved on John Dewey let alone Aristotle.
I like how being against the State turning your small children into little Marxists is now a “right-wing” concern.
All your children belong to us. /that’s what they really believe
Enjoy the declining enrollment, assholes.
I think she’s paid by the column inch.
You know who else got paid by the inch?
Hedwig Robinson ?
Linda Lovelace?
Ron Jeremy?
Mason and Dixon?
plastic surgeons?
Wow. $2K per cm? He should file for disability and make the government pay for it.
You know who else got paid by the column inch?
The builders of the Acropolis?
John Holmes?
Surprise!
The more contagious omicron subvariant BA.2 has become the dominant COVID-19 strain in the U.S., but international health experts are putting an increased focus on a new hybrid variant that may even be more infectious.
The XE variant is a recombinant, meaning it is comprised of genetic material from two other strains, which in this case are BA.1, the original strain of omicron, and BA.2, known as “stealth omicron.”
According to an epidemiological update published March 29 by the World Health Organization, estimates show XE is 10% more transmissible than BA.2, however the findings require further confirmation.
It’s back, and this time it’s going to kill us all.
Unless we do as we’re told by the public health experts.
Uh-oh, looks like the Ukraine’s becoming old hat. The perpetually panicked need to pivot to something to be perpetually panicked about so bust out the latest Covid variant.
That German dude needs another shot.
Just in time for Democrats to extend the remaining bits of theater and bring back some old ones!
Together we can whip this thing.
Whip
InflationCOVID Now!I put that button on my bag but nobody remarked upon it. It fell apart in the supermarket checkout lane, actually (no tab, just free spike).
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/04/02/2004-clip-shows-fauci-saying-the-best-vaccination-is-to-get-infected/
Chalk talk from a football coach
Every subsequent variant has been less lethal than the previous one, probably at least in part due to widespread immune exposure despite all of our “experts” attempting to keep our immune systems naive to COVID, but there is a hardcore bunch of COVID dead-enders who keep insisting that mass death is always right around the corner. Power is part of it, to be sure, but most just seem to be utterly batshit insane.
Stupidity knows no bounds
History, as curated by NPR
When the war ended, Stalin and the Soviets continued to occupy or dominate the countries of Eastern and Central Europe they had seized from the Nazis. The U.S. and its allies in Western Europe tacitly accepted this reality, which would remain a thorny topic for every president from Harry Truman onward.
Blah blah blah whatever. What I find most fascinating about this story is the ten year old file photo featuring a healthy, energetic Joe Biden face to face with Putin they chose to illustrate it with. It ranks right up there with hiding FDR’s wheelchair. I guess nobody remembered to bring a camera with them when they went to Poland last week.
Because those countries were so much better off under the Soviets than they were under the Nazis.
The Nazis wanted to exterminate all enemies of Nazism. The Soviets only exterminated some enemies of Nazism.
The countries that were, and remain, fond of their Soviet eras tend to be those with highly Slavic populations. The Nazis did not look kindly upon the Slavs, a fact which gets elided in most Western histories.
The greatest degree of hatred for Soviet occupation can be found in those places where the population isn’t Slavic: Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. It’s also not a coincidence that those countries resisted Soviet occupation the most, and were targeted harder for Soviet repression.
Ukraine is an interesting potential exception here. Ukrainian nationalism, outside of its EU/Soros astroturfed elements, is impervious to this analysis. Some of it seems to be about the Holodomor, which is understandable, though the Soviet famines were hardly confined to Ukraine.
Immediately after saying all of this, I double-checked something. Turns out that Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks (that last one should have been a giveaway) are Slavs, but they’re “West Slavs”. Romanians and Hungarians aren’t Slavs.
Saved me from nit-picking.
Romania is a Romance country swimming in a sea of Slavs and Hungarian spastics.
The Nazis made a real tactical error in Ukraine. They could’ve played nice and recruited a lot of Ukrainians with the opportunity to kill Soviets. Then, later they could’ve turned on them just the Bolsheviks did on the Makhnovists.
The list of errors made by the Nazis, or more specifically by Hitler, is rather long. The man seems to have stumbled onto victory and confused the competence of the German military and a heaping helping of luck and timing with his own genius.
He was a gifted demagogue. He also had a much better understanding of his enemies than they had of him. He wasn’t the Chaplin caricature.
Buying advertising on the cheap? There’s some history there, but it ain’t what NPR is portraying.
Putin
ate my homeworkstole my election.The lies that just won’t die.
I’d like to see the budgetary expenditures of our own intelligence agencies concerning political propaganda.
The perpetually panicked need to pivot to something to be perpetually panicked about so bust out the latest Covid variant.
Don’t worry. Big Fear has plenty of hobgoblins up their sleeve.
Slutty Sunday welcomes OMWC back and gives good wishes to SP.
https://archive.ph/7qwkl
And for the ladies and gheyglibs:
https://archive.ph/zIRqH
Nice addition to have both sexes, Q.
TW: Long story. I think she’s paid by the column inch.
Quality historical fiction demands excruciating detail.
NYU, the premier destination for the spawn of the elite.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/02/nyu-tour-groups-harassed-by-homeless-in-greenwich-village/
“He said the visitors to the school — where tuition, room and board will range from $78,440 to $84,169 next year — are none too pleased.
“You can see them visibly disgusted and say ‘I don’t want to apply here, I don’t want to apply here because I feel unsafe,’” the guide said.
He added that no one should forgo the school “just because a homeless person asks for money on the tour.””
Those applications get quietly filed in the trash anyway.
How about when a homeless person tries to stab you? It’s just a matter of time after all.
That was Columbia, not NYU as I recall.
Yeah, NYU is in a “nice” neighborhood.
I went to school in west Philly coming from a suburban upbringing and my first week a guy in a suit and tie comes up to me and very politely says: “hey, man. This is a really
embarrassing for me but I lost my wallet and can’t get home on the subway from work. I just need a couple of bucks to get there… blah blah blah”
Gave him a couple bucks.
The next week I encountered the same guy with the same story.
Never gave to any again.
The bums in Philly were expert level.
I met the same guy in Austin, car out of gas on the freeway. Had his own can. I showed him my MN license plates, said I needed money to get back home and he walked away, not worried about his car getting towed, apparently. Nice guy, too.
In Berkeley they were less well dressed, more demanding and more threatening and that was 35 years ago.
It’s a well played scam for free gas. Encountered the same in New Mexico. Offered 10 bucks on the pump and he declined
Had a guy come into a shop I worked at in Houston with a sign saying he was deaf and jobless and could he have some $. A day or 2 later, a guy I worked with and I were going out to make a delivery and we see the same guy washing his newer Camaro in a parking lot not far from our shop. I drove through the lot and say “nice car” “thank you” he responds and I go “Oh, you got your hearing back, good for you.” He just waved his dismissively and said “fuck you” and we on our way.
“I need a couple bucks to catch the bus back home to New Jersey” is probably the most common ploy in NYC.
The office building I worked in up in NoVA would occasionally get those people. They got off at the wrong Metro stop and needed money for the fare. They couldn’t explain why they were asking over a half mile from the station. Sometimes it was for money for gas even though their car wasn’t anywhere near our building.
He added that no one should forgo the school “just because a homeless person asks for money on the tour.””
Once those students have been properly indoctrinated in social justice theory, they will be proud to hand over Daddy’s ill gotten loot to the street bums.
Like Marx and his wife’s dowry.
A pretty good Sky News Australia mashup of Aussie police brutality footage during Covid:
https://youtu.be/dXFroXYBFEQ
Just following orders mate, just following orders.
[affects Rod Sterling pose and voice]
Imagine if you will, a trip into the mind of the deranged, where the road signs all mean the opposite of what the words say. At the next turn you will venture into the twilight zone.
Is the blank page some sort of wry commentary…?
I think you can hover over the link and see everything you need to know.
Exactly. That’s why I asked.
If that was intentional… well done!
Link is working for me. [shrugs]
What a shithole
America’s bias against immigration is self-defeating in almost every dimension. “Immigration is a geopolitical cheat code for the U.S.,” says Caleb Watney, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a new think tank in Washington, D.C. “Want to supercharge science? Immigrants bring breakthroughs, patents, and Nobel Prizes in droves. Want to stay ahead of China? Immigrants drive progress in semiconductors, AI, and quantum computing. Want to make America more dynamic? Immigrants launch nearly 50 percent of U.S. billion-dollar start-ups. The rest of the world is begging international talent to come to their shores while we are slamming the door in their face.”
——-
But I should stress that declining fertility isn’t always a sign of female empowerment, as indicated by the large and growing gap between the number of children Americans say they want and the number of children they have. There are many potential explanations for this gap, but one is that the U.S. has made caring for multiple children too expensive and cumbersome for even wealthy parents, due to a shortage of housing, the rising cost of child care, and the paucity of long-term federal support for children.
Population crisis; soon there will be no one left.
TW: Atlantic
I’m not sure the guys standing in front of Home Depot are Nobel-Laureates, but appearances can be deceiving/
The motte and bailey of immigration. Motte: We got Einstein! Bailey: we get millions of non-Einsteins.
And I wasn’t aware we are “slamming the door” on “international talent”. I vaguely remember Orange wanted to cut the number of legals and I don’t know if he achieved it but aren’t we still welcoming hundreds of thousands every year?
Some quick google-fu shows over a million legals a year and far more than any other nation.
“Slamming the door.” ?
I thought the problem was too many people. Someone should do a study.
You got the grant, I got the result you want!
So it sounds like they are advocating for a complete change in how the US does immigration. Get rid of our current family based system and move to one more like Australia or New Zealand where immigration is skill based. Sure, I could go for that. Of course, they don’t really mean that.
The basis for the system won’t matter if the quotas are practically infinite or the “points system” is like Whose Line. The goal is more immigrants, the same as the goal for “free college” is more indoctrination/dependence not more selective admissions.
Oh indeed. I know what they want is more cheap labor to do construction work and cleaning on their nice houses. They wouldn’t mind some more doctors and maybe some high level engineers and such. As long as they vote the correct way, They definitely do not want more competition for their lines of work.
Personally, I’d like a 25 percent or so increase in our legal immigration, with a system more or less equally divided between skill based and family coupled with several hundred thousand 2 year work permits. No citizenship granted to anyone that cam illegally. Couple that with no longer allowing a border free for all dominated by the cartels would be a good start. I can’t imagine anything like that happening anytime soon. Although if current trends continue and we see more and more Hispanics voting Team Red, I would expect the Donks would quickly pivot back to a hawkish position on illegal immigration.
“The U.S.” Just some nebulous agent there – probably greedy corporations.
I know, let’s have the federal government throw more money at the problem.
The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast. Higher education is already fighting for its life in the age of remote school and rising tuition costs. Imagine what happens if, following the historically large Millennial cohort, every subsequent U.S. generation gets smaller and smaller until the end of time, slowly starving many colleges of the revenue they’ve come to expect.
Oh, noes! Starving colleges of the young suckers they have come to rely on.
Smaller class sizes for the win!
Malthusians hit hardest.
…there is a hardcore bunch of COVID dead-enders who keep insisting that mass death is always right around the corner. Power is part of it, to be sure, but most just seem to be utterly batshit insane.
I seriously believe it is ego-driven. These people (want to) believe they are literally saving humanity from an extinction level threat.
Good point. It’s the first time they’ve found such a clear purpose in their lives. That purpose being, of course, to make our lives living hell. Insert C.S. Lewis quite about the tyranny of omnipotent moral busybodies.
Keep it up and there will be some mass death, just not in the way they’re expecting.
I thought the problem was too many people. Someone should do a study.
The real crisis is the lack of control. If the government isn’t in charge, bad things happen.
Another tidbit from that
Even if you’re of the dubious opinion that the U.S. would be better off with a smaller population, American demographic policy is bad for Americans who are alive right now. We are a nation where families have fewer kids than they want; where Americans die of violence, drugs, accidents, and illness at higher rates than similarly rich countries; and where geniuses who want to found new job-creating companies are forced to do so in other countries, which get all the benefits of higher productivity, higher tax revenue, and better jobs.
Wut? Where are these genius job-creators going to escape this barren demographic wasteland? To the EU?
Or does this include people like Musk who put factories in China so they can escape the yoke of the EPA and environmental law firms who act as surrogates of the EPA?
Our tax receipts are upwards of 4 trillion…
where families have fewer kids than they want
Revealed preferences over stated preferences – how does that fucking work?
Perhaps if the impediments to starting a business didn’t include hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats whose only purpose is to involve themselves in your productive efforts by hindering them….
@kbolino, I wanted to tell you I appreciate your contributions here. The way you explain things is clear and in a way I can understand.
I hope kbolino is around Tues night (assuming my next non-fiction piece drops then).
I will endeavor to persevere be present.
Meant strike not em, oh well.
It touches on topics we discussed in Friday’s Stoicism post.
Cheers.
Though you make me feel a little guilty for throwing around phrases like “retarded lunatics”.
Hey, we’re not all lunatics.
I have, in my past, entertained the notion of becoming a high school English teacher. My student teaching semester, I had wonderful kids, yearbook and AP English. But what happened was, my cooperating teacher, who loved the kids and loved teaching and was very good at it and had been doing it for 22 years, was allowed to do very little teaching. She was being pressured into administration (I deduced that it was on pain of her job). She hated that she couldn’t make up her own curriculum (I showed her my creative ideas that she loved and said, “Good luck getting to teach it”). She hated parents who would question her about the slightest marked-down grade or behavior problems (not nicely). She hated, most of all, the administration for forcing her to do exactly what she hated doing.
She said, “Get out now and don’t look back because you will hate every second of it.”
So I did.
I was thinking of maybe being a German teacher. Fortunately, I have an older brother who entered and exited music teaching before I made that mistake and I got an earful of how the profession really works.
And back to this:
where geniuses who want to found new job-creating companies are forced to do so in other countries, which get all the benefits of higher productivity, higher tax revenue, and better jobs.
Speaking of zero sum thinkers. If those “geniuses” have come up with truly worthwhile products and/or services, we all benefit by increased productivity, or enhanced enjoyment of leisure time, or whatever metric you care to use. Double entry bookkeeping, FTW.
For example, everybody who has an Apple phone benefits, not just the tax collector, you fucking nitwit.
you make me feel a little guilty for throwing around phrases like “retarded lunatics”.
Why? It’s concise, and to the point.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/world/2022/04/03/covid-vaccination-shots-sell-forged-passes-germany/50017927/
Dude…
Are we going to have this story linked 90 times?
Meh. You expect me to look at *all* the links?
why don’t they just type up their own?