I've got a (probably former at this point) buddy who makes less than $15K/year. He seems to have lots of time to listen to right wing propaganda podcasts and likes telling "jokes" about how minorities are problematic. He was never really interested in politics when we were growing up and I suspect never voted before 2024. Poor people have interests and opinions too.
How much cheaper is a boring 3-year old Toyota versus a boring brand new Toyota? Why would the person who buys a boring new Toyota unload it for a significant loss after just 3 years of ownership?
Keynes said something that has always stuck with me.
> Anything we can actually do we can afford
I find it increasingly paradoxical that supposedly, our collective economic capability routinely increases (implied by ever growing GDP), while our budget situation looks ever grimmer.
The anthropologist David Graeber wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs" that explored the subject. It shouldn't be surprising that a prodigious bullshit generator could find a use in those roles.
I read "Airframe" by Michael Crichton probably twenty years ago, and it was around ten years old at that time. I remember that that book talked about how the planes were unstable by design and required software to maintain proper flight characteristics, and that this was so because it was more efficient. The book is fiction, but I doubt it was far off the mark at the time. I suspect that there is no going back from this state of things, and so if there must be software, it should be good software.
That was the last Trump administration, where the Secretary of Ed was married to the CEO of Amway. The current one is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, so I'd say it's more the Pro Wrestling administration.
I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor."
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
Is it one of those things where it doesn't mean what it obviously means? I gave up studying the Bible because there were too many of those for me to follow.
But it seems to me like it would be crazy hard to push a camel through a needle. Also, it's one of those things where I think the translation is a bit off. Apparently the word in Aramaic is said like "gamla" which does sound rather like camel, but also meant rope, which makes a lot more sense in context, though still pretty difficult to get through a needle.
How do they do it in other authoritarian societies? I know that China exercises significant control over access to the internet, but I don't know how well it works.
Perhaps conservatism doesn't necessarily fit into a left-right spectrum neatly. I recently saw fascism described as a version of collectivism that caters to the right.
I doubt Kirk believed in anything, but he was happy to say whatever would get him attention and keep his benefactors happy. He wasn't particularly ideologically consistent, though to be fair, Republicans of his time weren't either.
I've seen it referred to as nut picking, and certainly it's something that both sides are prone to. I'd say the difference is that one side has chosen to elect an obvious malignant narcissist to represent them who literally declared war on Chicago over the weekend and regularly vilifies entire groups of Americans.
I've always thought that the middle class were proles as well, or petit-bourgeoisie at best. I don't think you're wrong, but one thing that I've noticed in my time of thinking about and discussing societal problems in the US is that nothing ever really seems to help the poor anyway.
> And it has little to do with guns. If someone really wanted to get to the guy, one would.
Disclaimer that this is early and I may be wrong, but I read that he had a security detail (which seems rather likely). I doubt an attacker with a knife would have had success.
Net cost to a national government and GDP per capita are not the same thing. Presumably these people become more productive by moving to more developed countries; that's the general reason that people immigrate to particular places. My impression without looking at the data is that US GDP per capita has continued to increase despite large (called a crisis by Republicans) numbers of immigrants during the Biden Administration. And given that these people are not citizens of the US, presumably they will not be eligible for all benefits granted to citizens which would decrease their cost to the government.
Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well the social safety nets work in these countries and how they could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is too different of a country to draw an analogy.
I often have a hard time telling if I'm being nostalgic. For me, 7 was peak Windows, but Win2K/XP would rank pretty close as well. I suppose the question for me is what have subsequent releases given us; what can we actually do with more recent versions of Windows that we could not accomplish back then?
Heidegger would say that all humans are thrown into existence and into circumstances that they did not choose. In some sense, we are currently on a large spaceship, and I assume some mission chosen for us by our predecessors.
There is a minimum weight requirement for bikes. I remember reading somewhere that they actually add ballast to some of them because they can be made so light.