admiralteal

GOP has been evil longer than Liz Cheny has been, though. Yet she still enthusiastically joined their ranks. ALL of her current actions are trying to clean and fix their reputation by aiming to expel the loudest and most obvious of their members because those most obvious members are revealing the true goals of the party instead of maintaining the kayfabe that keeps them civilly acceptable.

ALL of the GOP are correctly self-identifying conservatives. They want to maintain traditional values and power structures, even if those traditions stand in the way of fairness, progress, or justice. If they cared more about individual liberties than traditional values, they’d be liberals. If they cared more about the progress of society than traditional values, they’d be progressives. If they cared more about the social good of the nation, they’d be socialists. They tell you firmly and clearly they are none of these things, and they are right.

To be conservative MEANS you do not want a fair, just, sustainable, and successful society. It means you care more about tribe than anything else. To self-identify as conservative is no different than to say you hate and wish to make suffer anyone who doesn’t resemble and support you.

And yet, last I checked, she still refuses to stop identifying as a Republican.

The GOP is evil. If you identify as a member, you are also evil.

Also, Spotify is actively trying to ruin and fragment podcasts by running exclusive content. Fuck them with a rusty rake for trying to ruin one of the last mass interoperable platforms with their walled garden horse shit. Fuck them so much.

Don’t use Spotify. Even if they fix the app and make it good, don’t use it. They’re evil little fuckers. Use literally any other podcast app.

Ideally you use a spray bottle. Just give it 1 or 2 pumps, tops, then shake it about. The surface of the beans will still look and feel essentially dry.

Been normal to do this in coffee circles for a long time. It does not affect the burrs enough to detect.

You don’t do this in a coffee shop or if you’re grinding dozens of times a day, but most people are only doing 1-2 a day tops and that’s just not enough moisture to matter.

I like to imagine there are starfleet scouts with bullshit merit pips.

It’s 100% Google’s fault.

The recipe sites that would feed you the recipe right at the top are downranked in search because you don’t spend as long on them.

I think removing the stigma is the best pathway towards decriminalization.

It’s the exact opposite way around. Early car users were plowing their way through crowded streets, which were designed for and primarily used by human beings. The streets also had their fair shares of carts, horses, trolleys, etc., but they were primarily for people walking around.

The fledgling auto industry was under SERIOUS fire for the HUGE number of people getting killed by reckless, inattentive, unsafe drivers. Serious risk of cars being fully banned from many cities. So they ran a giant PR campaign to flip the blame. The issue wasn’t reckless drivers carelessly charging around crowded streets and killing people – it was actually the peoples’ fault for being in the streets (that had ALWAYS been theirs to be in previously and which were built for them by them).

Worked great. Streets rapidly became places people were not allowed to use – only cars were permitted, and nearly rent-free. A total hostile takeover.

Honestly, this is a real discussion we do need to have.

So many municipalities have over-expanded things like their water systems beyond the point that communities can afford to maintain them using the tax revenue generated by those communities.

Is it really doing right by a place to saddle them with a massive, expensive system they cannot afford to maintain? The federal dollars are going to show up, replace the system with a state-of-the-art one of at least the same size if not bigger, and then what? 30, 40 years from now, who will be there to give them the critical fixes they will still need? And in the meantime, their community will need to devote even more of its revenues (tax dollars) to maintaining the water system – but that means neglecting other things that ALSO need spending.

The shit happening in Jackson and Flint isn’t MERELY idiot government incompetence. It’s also a sign of urban decay affecting so many municipalities. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better at the rate we’re going as a society because we keep build build build-ing while pretending cities don’t need to be productive or have balanced budgets. But they do. Cities aren’t national governments. They can’t print money. If they issue bonds, they need to pay those bondholders back using real money collected from taxes. If they don’t have the money to do city things, they just stop being able to do city things. And it doesn’t look like bankruptcy when they cease to be able to do city things – it looks like potholes and busted, toxic water systems.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t get these systems fixed so they aren’t poisoning people. Of course we can’t be poisoning people. But the discussion needs to be more sensitive than just “spend the money fix the shit no matter what it costs.” Every city needs to think very, very carefully about how they may fix their systems to make them more sustainable in the future. No matter what they do, it is going to be financially devastating on some time horizon, but cities need to stop buying more infrastructure than they can maintain on debt and just shrugging the problem off to the next generation because that’s how we got to this problem in the first place.

side-note:

My proposed solution is to get the richer areas of the city/state to help pay for the poorer areas. Everybody has skin in the game as far as the benefits, so why not the costs?

Backwards from reality. The richest parts of town, with the new, state-of-the-art infrastructure and the vastly inferior and less productive land uses typically generate a lower or even negative ROI compared to the poorer parts of the city. The poor neighborhoods more often subsidize the rich ones. Look at e.g., the case studies made by Urban3, which Strong Towns and other urbanist organizations often write up. The older developments are funding the spending on new infrastructure even while their own infrastructure is so neglected it is poisoning people. And just throwing federal dollars on it is not going to force a change in behavior in the cities.

Personally, I’d like to see any fixes for these old water systems attached to e.g., adding land use taxes (that would affect large lot R1A single family homes FAR worse than traditional (poor) communities) or dis-incorporating unproductive (wealthy) suburban areas from the city to fend for themselves (since they can afford it, unlike the productive, poor neighborhoods).

One of several reasons we have so much reported “human trafficking” cases in the US is because our current laws make it so that any time more than one person is working in an organization involved in sex work, it can magically get redefined as human trafficking even if no workers were forced to be there doing the job.

There have been cases of two sex workers that were roommates being accused of trafficking each other because the material aid of being roommates qualified them as traffickers. Or drivers employed by a sex worker to literally escort them to and from clients/airports to take them to and from the airport being busted as pimps and traffickers.

And of course, the whole thing about interstate travel turning sex work into trafficking is loaded with its own horseshit. It’s just a reality for a sex worker that the “new girl in town” gets more business, so there’s a huge financial incentive for the worker to occasionally do some business travel.

On top of that, when a brothel or organization gets broken up, frequently all the sex workers are offered deals where they have to say they were trafficked and go after the businesses organizers, seen as the “bigger fish”.

For one layer worse, now hotels are being super, super hostile to “human trafficking” but really all their “warning signs” and policies are just meant to stop sex workers. So sex workers are forced increasingly to ply their trade in unsafe locations like cars / client accommodations instead of fairly safe hotels. Meanwhile, the hotels themselves ACTUALLY benefit the REAL human trafficking threat that we should be trying to address – immigrant wage slavery. Because the hotels frequently are the ones subcontracting things like cleaning to incredibly shady sub-minimum wage exploitative employers that are doing actual trafficking-related stuff. So many of the very things that are causing REAL trafficking are using trafficking to attack sex workers for no reason other than puritanical bigotry.

There’s infinitely more to say here, but I just can’t do the whole thing justice. Here’s a really good podcast episode on the subject that is sensitive and clear about how much nonsense there is in the current, widespread “trafficking” moral panic and how much harm it does compared to the good it preaches.

We do not need to legalize it to get rid of the stigma. Spreading and calling out stories like this for the dreadful, inhumane, closeminded bullshit that they are is how we get rid of the stigma.

Especially in places where cities/counties have adjacent jurisdictions. It’s one of the subtle-until-pointed-out signs of the pervasive US urban decay caused by building out more (especially road) infrastructure than an authority can afford to maintain.

Read a bunch of Strong Towns materials and you become very not-fun in the passenger seat of a car.

Building everything to be able to re-route to everything is WHY all the consoles are constantly exploding.

The country is ABSOLUTELY broken.

Even now there are people who look at a close election between Biden and Trump and genuinely think “Well, I don’t like Biden, so I won’t vote / will throw my vote away instead of voting against Trump.”

You have racists, morons, and fascists voting for Trump.

You have irrational moron progressives who will refuse to ever vote for anyone with a D no matter how bad the alternative and no matter how much good that democrat has provably done.

And you have dispirited progressives just trying to get their peers to show up to the polls and do the minimum possible effort. We’re seriously fucked because of this.

I used Inbox too, and also liked it.

But these gmail features aren’t remotely like inbox. They hide the emails behind alternate tabs. Ones you cannot configure yourself. With nearly no indication instead of putting them front and center (but grouped together). They make it harder to see and understand your inbox instead of easier. This post being a perfect example – tons of people didn’t even understand what was going on because of how awful the feature is.

Inbox was killed and its main features lost with it. They were not folded into gmail.

Whoa, there’s remotely tech-savvy people who don’t turn off 100% of that “new” inbox sorting stuff? Color me surprised.

That Social/Updates/Promotion shit is absolutely trash shit garbage useless. It does nothing to improve email experience. It exists to serve you ads.

Intuit and H&R Block are the reason we have this depraved, inhumane, anti-consumer tax system. They’ve created the laws that make it necessary to use tax prep software. They should not be rewarded for this by getting business for that very tax prep software. Everyone should say no to TurboTax.

irs.gov/freefile

There are always a bunch of perfectly good competitors to them listed. Use those competitors. For most people it’s totally free.

It’s not a lie. There’s no malicious intent. It’s just not even wrong. It so fundamentally lacks understanding of the underlying bureaucracy, technology, product lifecycle, and surrounding politics politics that it amounts to nothing.

And the overall point still stands. We should be skeptical of these kinds of intrusions into our devices from the state. We should resist them as a default posture.

You legitimately do not understand that there are alternatives to YouTube. It’s fucking embarrassing.

Give me quality service for what I pay, or I go elsewhere.
Apparently not. You’ll keep going there no matter how much you claim to hate them.

And that’s no small part of why Google has such market control. Because people like you give it to them enthusiastically.

PS: it’s Rumble. That’s the actual alternative (with a HEAVY emphasis on the “alt” in “alternative”) you could use to watch Rossmann if you really are so passionate about how bad Google is. Plus Rossmann also is one of the cofounders of GrayJay.

Not that you’re asking for an argument, but I do want you to know why I, and many like me, find this whole life-from-conception argument totally ethically unpersuasive. And it’s not the usual nonsense of “it’s just cells” because, as you well know, that’s an unimpressive and pointless debate. Whether a fetus is a human or not is fundamentally subjective. And so I’ll grant that it is, because I have total confidence in my pro-choice position even then.

The issue with the pro-life position is not that it asserts that abortion is bad. Frankly, I don’t give a crap if you or anyone else thinks it is bad. Again, that is subjective. A personal preference. The issue with the pro-life position is that it always seems to assert that abortion must be banned and even criminalized. That’s what pro-life is. It doesn’t mean “I think abortion is bad”, it means “I think abortion should not be allowed.”

My position isn’t that abortion is good. Mine is that the pregnant person has a right to choose. I think the moral calculus on when and whether it is good or bad is FAR too complicated to form a rule, and so we must leave it up to the biggest stakeholders to figure that out privately.

I think a lot of things are bad, but having a preference against something is different than justifying use of the state’s violence to prohibit it.

A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, PDF - 1971. Hardly new, and I doubt you’ve never seen it, but ultimately it is still the line of argument that I do not think has been convincingly rebutted. This essay is still probably the most sound and straightforward work of philosophy that shows that banning abortion is impermissible in an ethical society, and it presumes life from the moment of conception just as you do.

My extreme summary of the point it is making: at the end of the day, you have two competing human rights. You have the right to autonomy of your own body against another’s right to life. Both are undeniably rights a person has – and highly related ones, at that. When these rights are in tension, we need to make a choice as to which is supreme. And the consequences of giving life supremacy over autonomy are disastrous compared to the consequences of giving autonomy supremacy over life.

Rather than empower the state to take any and all actions necessary to protect life, we instead must impose a limit on the power of the state – it may not violate someone’s ability to make choices about their own body functions, even if to protect the life of another.

I’d prefer to be in a world that has no abortions at all. Just as I’d prefer to be in a world without contagious disease. One way to get rid of all contagious disease is to systematically euthanize every sick person at their first sniffle. Problem solved! Such is an abortion ban.

We get rid of disease by investing in research and healthcare and doing our best to use it maximize efficacy with fair triage, vaccination programs, etc… We get rid of abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies from the get and by creating a world so supportive and safe for pregnant people that they do not want to terminate it.