refenestrator

I agree with your main point here but anyone who thinks violence as a political tool needed normalizing should not be listened to.

Oh, for christ's sake, it's been like 75 years if you include the OSS.

They're the department with an image of white-collar intelligence collection and a huge sideline in dirty fighting to maintain American hegemony. That's who they are, have been and who they will be.

They could just mean "the CIA's record, specifically". There's plenty there.

Ah, my information was bad. The study you originally cited specifically mentions CPI-U as the measure they were using.

I assure you I wasn't lying, and thank you for the correction. (perhaps consider not jumping straight to the lying accusation in the future).

There's still a conversation about housing taking up an increasing share of the pie that doesn't exactly shine through in that top line number, but no point in belaboring it.

That's against CPI inflation.

Consumer goods have gotten cheaper over the period, so even slow wage growth will outpace the CPI measure.

Housing, education and financial products including health insurance are not included in CPI measures -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/consumer-price-index-up-4-...

Robocop and Starship Troopers were criticizing ideology and norms that are widely yet unconsciously accepted in America. That's why they're good.

Anti-rival sniping is comparatively boring and we're all steeped in it all the time, anyways. It's the furthest thing from counterculture.

Why would Chinese censors have a problem with films making fun of American capitalism and imperialism?

Scala doesn't care about efficiency or cost of what it's doing, all the fun fancy features allocate like crazy.

If someone worships Musk like he's a cult leader, that's on them.

It's unreasonable to expect someone who's been shit posting on twitter for years to stop because people are for some reason taking him more seriously after Tesla 10x'd. He's always been a shit poster.

One small-town lawyer will go broke but two small-town lawyers can make a fortune.

They're the most egregious but academics in general suffer from the same flaw.

People criticize SSC because they're like "uh leave it to the REAL experts", but A) it's just opinions and B) the 'real experts' are unreadable, so I'll continue to ignore them while occasionally checking out astralcodexten.

The only things philosophers do are think and write, and somehow they are ass bad at writing.

SSC wouldn't have a niche if they could get concepts across without a bunch of obscurantist bullshit.

Having a family is the bedrock of society. If only the top 10% of earners had one, we'd find ourselves in some trouble.

It's legitimately hilarious, as a liberal, that the liberal half of the US whiplashed from "even discussing this is racist" to "we're actually positive of it on very little evidence" without any new information to speak of.

Conflict with whom is the question.

The US Constitution is younger than the Russian claims on Crimea and we're going to try and tell them about it? In between sponsoring coups in Latin America and the Middle East whenever we feel it's in our interest?

Crimea had been run by Russia in one form or another since the 1700s, and it's ridiculously important to them as a port.

Their reaction to losing it was arguably a defensive reaction rather than an offensive reaction, if you're taking the perspective that Crimea is part of the Russian empire.

Worth noting that, over the last 30 years, their sphere of influence has shrunk inward by a thousand miles, all driven by the US encouraging their neighbors to join the EU or NATO.

I'm not saying the USSR was great for eastern europe or anything but it's also unfair to call them aggressors for the couple of times they've resisted this continual inward push from NATO.

As of right now, TSMC is the same as a tripwire force, and IMO the Chinese leadership knows that. But hopefully that will stop being true as this Arizona facility comes online and we regain top-tier capabilities.

If it stops being a critical national security issue for us? I don't really care. Like, I'm for self-determination and all that but I don't care more about Taiwan than I do about Yemen, and I and the rest of America definitely do not care about Yemen.

By your definition that would be committing to an untenable position.

You could have the opinion without being a zealot about it to the extent that you're making up a guy to get mad at.

If I saw my supervisor taking home a young female employee, I'd go right to HR about it, done, next question.

The article concerns the year 1958, I'm pretty sure we were still using vacuum tubes at that time.

I think it's third party contractors, sorted by conversion rate with optics not really considered.

Which, yeah, sucks but I'm a sufficiently intense competition and all that..

All principles are rooted in that kind of pragmatism, starting with thou shalt not kill.

And it's valuable. Barely a year after getting people fired for takes was popularized during BLM, we see the cannon turned on journalists who wrote a pro-palestine essay in college. Nobody could have predicted it.

Not sure if you're aware, but way back when the ACLU supported Nazis right to march on pragmatic as well as principled grounds.

If WE are stopping the BAD GUYS from marching on OUR turf, then what precedent does that set for permitting a civil rights march in Selma?

Yes, but this is more the trans-administration national security blob than Biden people in particular.

The WSJ author had brought us other CIA-approved gems about WMDs in Iraq once upon a time.

You might be onto something with garden-variety liberals feeling 'free' to try and blame China now that Trump's out of sight, though.

The fascinating part is everyone did an about face on it overnight after the WSJ article.

We went from Facebook banning mention of the theory to everyone being certain it's right on the basis of "national security flack says someone who works at the lab was sick, during flu season".

Would have made a hell of a Sheriff.

Historically, minorities were allowed to have more children than Han Chinese, FYI. Han only reached the same child allowance recently.

Just last summer there was major flooding up and down the Yangtze. It used to be that lots of people died from these events, now that they have the river under control it's fine.

Calling it simply 'development' obscures the very real human benefits.

They were supposed to keep grinding away on the dirty manufacturing while we pocket all the profits via financial services and IP rents.