ViperMan

I've got some legit questions for the "Elon's a Nazi" crowd: What are you concerned he's going to do? Is he expressing a desire to ethnically cleanse the country? Is the concern here more that he is "signaling" to a certain sub-element of our society? All of the above? I genuinely want to know. Best I can tell is he is a guy who is building electric cars, rocket ships, brain-body computer interfaces who is also pretty eclectic. I saw plenty of kids like that in public school growing up. They weren't Nazis. I can "get" that it wasn't a good look, but do any of you hold a serious concern out there that he's going to attempt to reboot the 3rd Reich? What direction are you concerned he's moving in?

From your keyboard to God's ears.

I watched it and I agree. I'll keep my eye on him going forward. Seems like one of those guys that has a true grasp of what the hell he's talking about. Which is surprisingly rare (and refreshing) these days. Talking to a family member, it's apparently the case that many of these home catch on fire from the inside. An ember will float into an air vent or the like and then ignite flammable material on the inside of the home and so on. I certainly agree that building codes and insurance have a big role to play going forward. As an aside, I can't help but also point at prop 13 as a contributing factor. This is perhaps one of the consequences of serially under-funding your state based on a property tax law that all but guarantees your local governments will be unable to fund basic services. The way I see it, this fire was a decades-long policy decision in the making.

The problem is that if it is the case that there are unstoppable fires, then we need not build in those areas. Ask me how much sympathy I have for New Orleans - you don't rebuild a city next to the ocean that is below sea level - or if you do, you accept the inevitable consequence of being underwater. Else, if the fire is stoppable, through preparation, forest management, etc, we should have been preparing for them. Said another way, the conditions that enabled this fire to happen should never have been allowed to manifest. It hearkens back to the Smoky the Bear commercials from when I was a kid: "only you, can prevent forest fires." It's almost like prevention has been on the menu for some time...hmmmm.

They'll probably do something along these lines, but it won't be available if you're over any reasonable income limit. See the following: https://www.ebikeincentives.org/eligibility/ They did the same thing with electric bikes, but they made sure that anyone who actually contributes to the tax kiddy isn't eligible. LOL. Someone who barely makes $45K per year ain't spending $2,000 on a bicycle, and hence probably doesn't benefit from the credit. It'll be the standard democratic "this feels and looks good" vs "it is good." True climate emergencies would necessitate removing all barriers to addressing "existential issues" - yet another reason (#69) why I don't take their "climate change" rhetoric seriously.

All the "could work" discussion begs an obvious question: why weren't we doing it before? Not to say that we can't do things better; we can and should. This is clearly driven by the times, however, and is yet another loop in the reactionary merry-go-round. I'm suspect for this, and this reason alone.

You can always "soft cancel" like I'm currently doing. Have some Fidelity accounts now and am slowly transferring a lot of my stuff their way. I'll probably just keep USAA to pay all my bills, and maybe some insurance products I've had for a long time.

VPN or not, isn't all your traffic encrypted while you're on https???

Pffffft. How could I forget lol. I remember it was only a couple of years ago the Dems were charging hard to codify Jan 6th as the second coming of Sept 11th. Nary a peep today. Maybe sanity still has a chance.

I've never been able to see the connection between term limits and resolving corruption. Am I to believe that a congress person can't engage in unethical behavior during their first term??? If anything, it just puts them under a time crucible to get all the goodies they're looking for run through as quickly as possible; it fast tracks whatever corrupt impulse is there in the first place. There's no inherent constraint placed on corruption by time. It may limit the time that someone has to become corrupt, but a good question to ponder is why don't we put 4-6 year term limits on officers? Why aren't we all corrupt by the time we're Lt Cols? I just don't see a connection there. The problem is lack of accountability and lack of transparency. When Nancy Pelosi was engaging in legislation that was going to benefit Nvidia and other tech companies while simultaneously purchasing stock options she knew would react positively to the actions she was taking, that all should have taken place within the public view. It wasn't classified. It wasn't secret. Basically I guess I'm effectively suggesting that congress people should be required to conduct all legislative business in full view of the public. I have no idea what that looks like, but body cameras would be a start. Drafting legislation? Put the computer screens on a YouTube stream. Meeting with a lobbyist? Have a camera crew there to stream it on X. Obviously this is ridiculous, but the core of the problem is our government is allowed to keep a lot of unsecret things secret.

I agree with you, but to be technical, Twitter changed dramatically. It mattered a lot who was in charge, and who was making decisions. Twitter got way fuckin' better. It's a clear example of how much modern organizational structure is literally useless / functions as a boat anchor. Personally I think we can extrapolate that same lesson to just about any organization you look at. Lockheed, military, government, McDonalds. You name it, there's probably a few departments of "workers" not contributing much. Probably the only orgs that don't suffer from that at some level are start-ups. The real tragedy is that all that wasted labor represents massive economic gains if it were to be rededicated towards actual productive pursuits.

Yet another misfire. No one has a problem with billionaires per se. We have a problem with certain billionaire's objectives. See the following: Bill Gates' climate / clean meat / no meat / spray vaccine efforts, etc George Soros' bank-rolling all manner of "grass roots" campaigns to modify society, wage lawfare, BLM riots, et al Peter Thiel and Elon Musk aren't trying to dismantle our sovereignty or take away any of our rights. See the difference? These conversations would be more productive if you'd come to terms with your oppositions' actual POV.

Wow, really surprised to see the lock-step agreement on paying congress people more, as if that was going to reduce corruption. Look at Pelosi. Just one data point. Got rich because she was in power and had access to a corruptible system, not because she was scraping by. Fine, pay Pelosi $650K/yr. Screw it, pay her $2M/yr. It'll always pale in comparison to what she made abusing her power. It simply isn't the panacea we're looking for. The solution isn't higher pay checks. It's a less powerful government. Axing massive Federal bureaucracy is a good first step. Forcing tax receipts to match expenditures is a good second one. Eliminating the ability of the Federal government to raise excess money without selling bonds directly to the American people would be a great final one. We used to have this direct veto power on what our government was doing. Things were much better then.

Soviet perspective. I think you meant to say Soviet perspective. Let's "re-imagine" that civil war being fomented, enabled, and supported by a neighboring superpower with a Communist ideology. Beginning in the early 1900s, with the help and assistance of that greater superpower, they begin undermining your democratic / nationalist / republican movement whilst simultaneously taking advantage of the chaos imparted by the second world war and a maniacal enemy that was running roughshod over your territory for the last 10 years. Now, "imagine" losing that war to said forces. This is not nearly as simple as you imagine it or as simple as your analogy presents it. You can argue that the US and USSR should have stayed out. Neither of us did. In the end, this is still about what it has always been about: opposing Communism and authoritarians.

Agreed. I have a feeling we'll see a lack of checklist execution and a rush to get the jet on the ground. If that's what happens when the checklist is executed and they set down at ~150 knots on brick 2, then holy shit, the 737 has some problems. I personally don't think this is the case. Obviously I stand ready to be corrected once the actual facts come in. /speculation I do wonder now, though, how far will a jet will (on average) skid on concrete like that with no gear. My gut tells me it's between 1.5 - 2.0 miles, but that's a pure guess. Anybody have any data on such a thing? Edit to add: my math says the plane went ~ 1600m in 13 seconds, so an average speed on the runway of about 240 knots. Off the end of the runway at around 150-170 knots. This is pure speculation.

I'm guessing that guy doesn't watch Seinfeld? Or the general for that matter...

Confirm this is the Army you're talking about?

I agree with this in theory, and it is true if you assume everyone is a mature adult, but I will say that in my experience, there is only one type of actual leadership, and it's leadership by example. All the other ones espoused in our AF trainings (inspirational, transformational, etc.) are all bullshit. Thus, it makes it hard to enforce a standard on someone if you're not adhering to it yourself.

Honestly, I don't see a big problem with the SNCO corps. I think the mass of our problems are concentrated in the junior enlisted noner / shoe house. I can't tell you how often I run into pure ambivalence about not knowing how to do their job, and their mid-level managers (E-5 through E-7) being accepting of this lack of knowledge / competency. Pick your support field. It's all of them. Your one-off Chief policing reflective belts or the length of time you spend in a deployed shower are honestly just pure fun from my perspective. They're the spice of life.

I prefer something more along these lines.

Would.

Well I don't know what MIC is, and as the US we have business doing whatever the eff we want. We created and maintain the post-war order, and until the victor of the next world war emerges, we get to do as we please, seeing as how the entire Western world owes their existence to us. Anyway, moving on. That is precisely what their objective was but they failed. See: their attempt to move directly on Kiev in the first couple days of the war which stalled. Toppling their government meant they got to achieve all of their other objectives. They went for the throat but missed, now they're in a knock-down, drag-out Royce Gracie-style grappling fight they hoped to avoid. You remember that part of the war, right? Don't you? They attempted to go straight to Kiev to overthrow the government of Ukraine. Like you agree that happened? Or don't you? They failed at that, and re-directed their efforts to the eastern portion of Ukraine, the Donbas. But that's all in the past now. Russia was unable to overthrow their government, which would have enabled them to gain their primary objective: control of east Ukraine's oil and gas resources. They tried, and were unable to seize the capital. Instead, they settled for their secondary objective and re-directed all their combat power where it was actually needed. Partially because that's what matters to them strategically, partially to save face. You see, Russia is basically an oil supplier to Europe. If they don't have that leverage over Europe, they lose a lot of political power (and money). If they have to compete with Ukraine for who gets to supply Europe with oil and gas, that's bad for Russia. They don't want to do that, but admitting that you're going to war over oil is politically fraught, as we have learned over the last decades, so it's never the spoken reason. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b2201E#:~:text=However%2C additional source rocks possibly,unit were not estimated quantitatively. "The Dnieper-Donets basin is almost entirely in Ukraine, and it is the principal producer of hydrocarbons in that country." It's all right there for you if you care to look at it. This war is about economic power - i.e. it's like most other wars. This one is about oil and gas. And it is definitely in our strategic interest for multiple reasons: We don't need the majority of NATO beholden to Russian energy We don't need Russia at their full strength for whenever China decides to do whatever they're going to do - look at it as intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Grind them down now, so we can save the majority of our combat power for the Pacific I could go on, but if these obvious ones didn't occur to you, you can do some homework on those for a while. He is floating peace talks because he's hedging. Or he's doing it because he thinks it's feasible. Or he thinks our support for him will run out. Who the hell knows, he was the one who was attacked! He has every interest in stopping the violence against his country. I'm sure he would have sued for peace earlier if it was possible. For the record, I just want you to put it in writing: you think Russia's efforts thus far constitute success? Like for serious?

To have internalized this as "success" is the ultimate moving of the goal-post. To not recognize it as such? Well I can't even begin to grasp at the words that would be required to describe such a mental pretzel twist. Yet here we are. Vietnam was a larger tactical success for the US than this is for the Russians. And so is every other war we've ever fought in - including those we've "lost". There is no way that this can be considered a successful operation from any perspective. Russian, or otherwise. You not giving even the slightest inch on this - when it is obvious to literally everyone - lays bare how wholly captured you are by whatever your daily propaganda diet is. You are an ideologically bound to their "success". Winning is Losing. Losing is Winning. Every day this drags on, Russian objectives recede further and further.

That would be good. Next up: replacing Tulsi. I'm not sure who's a candidate, however.

I actually don't have a problem with Biden pardoning the gun and drug charges. I'm opposed philosophically, but they are relatively uninteresting charges to have dismissed, and they "make sense" given the fact that it's his dad. I fundamentally disagree, but I can see it from a cynical, dem, hypocritical world-view. That it's such a blanket pardon - covering crimes (both known and unknown?) against the United States that go back as far as 2014 - IS a major problem, though. It raises major questions about just what the Bidens have been up to since then (i.e. Ukraine, etc.). What does Joe know? How can a blanket get-out-of-jail free card even be hypothetically legal? What if he had killed someone during that time frame? Would a murder charge now be off limits? Part of me is happy that Joe Biden is laying bare the absolute rank hypocrisy of the democrats, but I am concerned, though, as it does continue to degrade our society and government.