In any other decade this would be by far the largest political scandal in US history, with non-stop mass media coverage, endless investigative journalism, universal public outrage, pop culture shaming, politicians resigning en masse, and criminal prosecutions. Today? A collective shrug from everyone like-minded, or who got caught on that particular side of the story. All the safeties have been removed these days, the ends always justify the means, and near total control of this country's most important institutions by the left (everything but SCOTUS, as far as I can tell) is the ultimate enabler of this tacit collusion.
I've got two teenage boys and an 8 y/o daughter and this headline alone hit hard. The boys increasingly have their own lives and a growing amount of independence (which is good and we allow/encourage) but these days, scrolling through old iPhone photos when they're wearing Curious George tee shirts and whatnot can get you emotional fast in a way that didn't happen before. They increasingly don't need us nor want us around every last second, and I get it, but it can be a bitter pill to swallow. We're extra appreciative of every last second with our daughter now, and we tell our friends with little kids the same cliched advice to soak in every possible moment while they're young. It really is a special time both for you and them and it's when you'll spend the most time with each other.
I remember years ago when I was studying various aspects of the health insurance market, there was one thing that really, truly alarmed me: the amount of Medicaid money spent on pregnancy-related care. It was shocking to me. Pregnant women who don't see their doctors regularly end up costing the system an absolute fortune. It is a sad plague among many of the poor who have lots of problems themselves, a big one being drug addiction. This is an extremely uncomfortable for many that they don't want to deal with, so they ignore or make excuses or deny, but it's a really sad reality. I've basically come to the conclusion that 95% of the problems in this country can be traced back to people who have no business having kids, having kids.
Ha, thanks. Seriously, this was not a run-of-the-mill journalistic mistake for which one apologizes for and moves on. This was so brazen I couldn't even believe it at the time, my assumption was that he was short Ubiquiti's stock or something. What Krebs did was so egregious and so extreme that I really have no idea why the world hasn't turned its back on him as a journalist.
I’m still bitter about this. The story absolutely reeked from the beginning and Krebs did nothing but unnecessarily sensationalize it like a tabloid journalist. I got downvoted a million times over when I pointed this out at the time, why I don’t know, it was obvious to anyone who wasn’t foaming at the mouth to pounce on Ubiquiti. In decades past this was a career-ending error…I wish it still was, I’ll never take a single word Krebs says seriously ever again.
The fed is going to try to put the economy into a recession by jacking up rates in the hopes that it eviscerates demand which will (maybe, but I don't think so) bring inflation down by balancing supply and demand. Fun times.
Seriously? Let's see, the two industries where the government has gotten deeply involved, healthcare and education, are so comically expensive one doesn't even know where to begin. How in the world is complete government subsidization, which will basically just turbocharge demand by making it "free", going to solve the problem? The bottleneck (as you correctly note) is labor, if you can't fix that then anything to increase demand is just going to make it wildly more expensive and completely dysfunctional.
I’ve researched this extensively and I don’t agree, so there’s that.
This is a common insidious tactic of the media…pay attention to how presumptuous they are especially in headlines. I can’t even keep track of how many baseless claims they make as if they’re accepted fact anymore.
Everyone else seems to have covered how cringe this was, how inauthentic it was, how this guy just made it about himself, etc. All true. I would add that I don’t see how a person this weak could ever be a successful leader/CEO. Sorry man, it’s a tough gig, suck it up and stop (pretending?) being so weak that you can’t handle it. Is this what people want in a boss/CEO??? I find it pathetic. Guy has zero business running anything or anyone.
Unless I’m reading this incorrectly, it sounds like she simply got into a skid after trying to overcorrect on final. This is one of the BIG no-no’s in flying, it gets a lot of people killed every year. Sounds like skids were especially dangerous in a Tomcat since they disrupted airflow to the inside engine. I only read the Wiki but it sounds like pilot error. Sad either way.
"Declaring the economy in or out if recession does not help anyone outside of propagandists and journalists."
Correct. This is exactly why the people who are altering the definition are entirely propagandists (sometimes known as politicians) and journalists. In this case, they work in unison because they happen to be on the same team at the moment, so journalists are hoping and begging the government to change the definition so that it provides them sufficient cover so that they don't have to write on their front pages that the economy entered into a recession, which is obviously bad for the cause. It's the tacit "Help me help you!" situation. Their approach is that if the government says it, by journalists' standards (for the moment, of course) that's good enough by itself to validate it. Voila!
This is all stupid anyway. Call it anything you want at anytime, it doesn't change reality.
I say this to people frequently: don't confuse the way things are vs the way you wish things were. It seems to be the source of so much poor decision-making and misery.
Pilot here. The MSFS flight model is so bad that I found it actually counterproductive. Also, the avionics are awful, they basically have a dozen of the most basic functions and that's about it. It's more like a game, not a sim. And yet, I do find myself using it still. Why? The graphics are insane. If I'm doing a flight to somewhere new, I like doing a simulated flight first in order to get a better understanding of the terrain and more importantly, layout of the arrival airport and visual cues. I still find it very useful for flight planning in that regard.
"bad faith" yet every relevant stat which you'd measure the health of a city, arguably the largest one being population gain/loss, is going the wrong way. So the whole argument about this being some sort of made-up political narrative is just provably wrong. Crime stats, population loss, budget deficit, credit rating, school strikes, school truancy, school poverty line, property values...I could go on. Take your pick. The scoreboard says Chicago is losing, this isn't some political conspiracy.
The crime issue is debatable based on various stats, and I would tie partly into my general comment about the culture having become uglier, but to me it felt like violent crime was a smog cloud constantly over the city. Sure, the odds of something bad happening to me or my family was very low in the absolute, but it was off the charts relative to others places. The reports of shootings and carjackings and armed robberies in my neighborhood were disconcerting and we would alter our lives to help avoid stuff. Eventually, I looked at my wife and said, "You know, we don't have to live like this. This isn't normal. It's only normal here." It's weird when you're surrounded by it every day for decades, like anything else it becomes normalized.
CPS is uniquely dysfunctional with the number of times they strike. I had three kids in Coonley and the mood was constantly adversarial. The teachers see everyone as the enemy. It was pervasive and nasty and it spilled into the classroom. Like many other things it's become self-sorting. The good teachers mostly want to take a pay cut to go to a private school where the culture is different, and same for families that place a high value on education. The public system is the residual, and I'd say this is proven in various grim stats.
I really just think the culture is ugly, I don't know how else to say it. Everything felt negative, everyone was angry. Leaders (and the majority who elect them) de facto support and enable all this dysfunction because for various reasons it's now part of their ethos. It wasn't until we moved that I understood it, and I admit it's very difficult to articulate. I'm not saying Chicago is a hell hole, but the future of Chicago is at best stagnant to me...real estate values partly prove that. Migration stats, especially among high earners, should be deeply concerning to anyone involved. I haven't even touched on how financially screwed Illinois is.
The city just looks checkmated to me. This isn't Rochester but it's clearly in decline. When the companies start leaving is when people should start taking it really seriously, and we just had Caterpillar, Boeing, and now Citadel all bail, Citadel quite publicly. We can debate all sorts of things but the scoreboard here, the ultimate things which we'd use to measure a city's overall health and direction, is deeply and objectively troubling.
Former Chicagoan here. Grew up in Evanston and lived in Lakeview area for almost 20 years. We moved to a small town in Colorado a few years ago. Chicago is just constantly running against the wind. Violent crime is a game-changer (property crime is one thing, violent crime another), public schools are dysfunctional, taxes are bad and only getting worse, weather is terrible the majority of the year, and there's nothing particularly interesting to visit within a few hundred miles (though I've always loved western Michigan). Chicago has a culture that's gotten progressively uglier and makes a lot of people generally not want to live there. I could go on, and I'm not saying anything unique. It's just running against the wind and prevents Chicago from ever really taking off and reaching escape velocity. It would take a real unicorn to jumpstart things more.
Btw you ask any former Chicagoan and they'll say the same thing: their only regret was not moving sooner.
Religions are belief systems that cause all sorts of wacky outcomes in the real world because the beliefs are based on the way they wish things were instead of the way things are. If more people understood that this is simply a novel religion, this would at least start making more sense.
Nope. Not even a little bit close. The world gets better for everyone every day. What you and many others dislike is that it gets better at different rates - sometimes vastly different - for different people.
Watch out for that envy, it's a mighty dangerous thing. The only one of the 7 deadly sins that isn't any fun.
What you're missing is that we're eventually (arguably right now) going to be referring to colds and other weak mutations of COVID as "COVID" still, and by virtue of still calling it COVID and still having these COVID dashboards, it's never ending. There is no end, it is a new normal for millions. Too many people's brains short circuited, too many people got anchored to March 2020.
My theory on gift giving is to get the person something they probably want but normally wouldn't, for whatever reason, buy themselves. Like a nice bottle of wine, a lot of people would love it, but would also feel silly spending money on it. It's obviously not always that easy to do this but anytime you can I've found it goes over really well. And yeah, it usually involves kinda silly luxuries like wine.
I don't know exactly how it's going to end for some of these states like California, Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. These places are the Venezuela's of the US. The amount of fiscal dysfunction is almost unfathomable, and at this point my only question is whether these places go broke in my lifetime or not. I assume they'll just get bailed out by a sympathetic federal government. It's just algebra.
I'd say that of the endless studies and pieces of data, 90% indicate masks do nothing. All pre-covid mask studies concluded they do nothing...there was even a paper about why people in Japan wore masks despite them doing nothing. The two most robust studies (Bangladesh and Denmark) concluded masks do nothing. COVID rates in nearby mask vs non-mask places (endless sources of this) show masks do nothing. The few things suggesting masks work are usually the product of data mining, aren't statistically significant, or have other fatal flaws such as not being able to distinguish between causation/correlation or behavioral factors. The CDC's own study was comically flawed, cut off before COVID spikes last November...it doesn't even qualify as amateur hour.
The idea that masks work is just wishful thinking from people who are anxiety-ridden. They're placebos, amulets. If people want to wear them, fine, but the notion that there's enough evidence to justify universal mask mandates is truly one of the sorriest aspects of COVID because it's so symbolic of how we've done away with reason and scientific process completely.
How about make it so that the "hidden" photos on a phone require a security code/biometric to access? I've always been shocked that this isn't the case with iOS (don't know Android), it seems so obvious and simple.
I'm from Chicago. The difference in the amount of crime vs what gets reported on in the Trib and local news is astonishing, and the number of people I know (myself included) who have left Chicago in the last couple years is wild. So, I lived it.