Prop 98. Like it or not, California has a school funding law put in place years ago by Proposition 98. It’s insanely complicated, but basically requires that 40 percent of the state budget go to K-12 schools. Using round numbers, if the state budget is $100 billion, school spending has to be at least $40 billion. If state spending goes up to $300 billion, school spending has to be at least $120 billion. Aside from being ridiculous, it also leaves only $120 billion for the health care bill. Oops.
It’s a fertile coastline of the most powerful nation on Earth, with amazing weather. (At least, that was my conclusion to this same question.) It would have to try hard to fail.
Which it apparently is.
I think I’ll stick to the Midwest and the East Coast.
“That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.”
In the future, all women are autistics on testosterone, and the global GDP per capita exceeds $120,000. Conventional gender as we know it has dissolved and been replaced by a neurotype inventory dynamically read from the global hypergrid.
That first bit would affect childbearing.
Does that stat hide a planet full of impoverished depth grovelers mining for nuggets of neoplasm, offset by a small cabal of multi-trillionaires?
Edit: shit, you ninja-edited in another sentence. I do that a lot. Is this hypergrid capable of sustainably manifesting unenumerably vast continuums of juvenile rage and fear?
An astute observation!
Childbearing has been replaced with artificial wombs in order to fine-tune the characteristics of neural development and orientation the future-market (not the same as the “future market”) demands. And yes, the cost of these systems and state-sponsored child raising is reflected in the GDP, and it is quite extensive, though hardly limited to multi-trillionaires.
Those territories with no state-sponsored child raising glitter spectacularly, but of course they are always on the brink of collapse. You know how it is.
As for the hypergrid, it depends on just how deeply you want to entertain the emotions of others in your hardware. I recommend not diving /r90k/. Oneness with the Universe is a little more difficult there.
“That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.”
In the future, all women are autistics on testosterone, and the global GDP per capita exceeds $120,000. Conventional gender as we know it has dissolved and been replaced by a neurotype inventory dynamically read from the global hypergrid. The largest political bloc is controlled by a rocky alliance between the National Globalists, the Post-Salvation Abrahamic Spiritualists, and the Small Animals subreddit.
All kinds of pop culture concepts cross the Atlantic Ocean and I’m fine with that. Some stay where they are and never make it here. I don’t think buying milk in 3.78 litre jugs will ever become the norm here.
Political science and activism concepts are constantly exported from the US. People here start to think in these concepts. Academics in the US get feedback about the situation here and interpret it through the lens of the status quo in the US.
I used to get exasperated at people using identity politics from the US without adapting the terminology (calling Frenchmen of Algerian descent African-American for example). I used to get exasperated at people assuming that health insurance was the most pressing concern in every country, or that any EU country could learn anything from Obamacare.
People are starting to assimilate Trump’s Mexican Border Wall Discourse in the context of the refugee crisis in Europe. For once I wish it was the other way round. I wish people in the US would say that immigration from Mexico is primarily a humanitarian concern, because of ISIS, but many “Mexicans” are actually from Morocco and Afghanistan. This is how it feels.
I wish people would sometimes act as if the main problem in US politics right now is too many parties in parliament, haphazard privatisation of state-run heavy industry, too much cheap but empty housing, organised crime in local government, or austerity measures imposed on the US by Germany, France and Britain.
Americans are acting like WE elected Trump TOO. Some of this might be in order to act as if THEY TOO elected Macron.
An Englishman is in the process of moving to Australia. The customs officer asks, "Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence?" He says, "Oh, sorry! I didn't realise that was still a requirement!"
Later the Englishman joins the army and is sent to fight on the Western Front. After being wounded terribly in an assault, he is rescued by an Australian unit and taken to a field hospital where he drifts in and out of consciousness. Unable to stand the pain any longer he cries out “was I brought here to die??” only to hear “nah mate, you was brought here yesterday.”
But also, like, @collapsedsquid, if you don’t intuitively trust the other direction because it can be supported by the “Capitalism is Perfect and Good Forever” crowd, I get that.
I also want to, like, specifically say that employers are not cutting hours to be jerks, employers are cutting hours because it’s not profitable to have the doors open for more hours. If you think of the problem as ‘employers jerkishly don’t want to pay employees well’ you’ll be very confused by behavior like ‘keep hours at this franchise, close this one on weekends, close this one on Wednesday afternoons’, yet those are the sort of decisions actually being made.
I think something a lot of people are ignorant of which would be helpful when it comes to a lot of these kind of conversations is the actual margins in the businesses they view as the enemy. Walmart has a 3-5 percent profit margin. Oil companies make around 6 percent. Health insurance profit margins are around 4 percent. Fast food franchises can range from near zero to over 10 percent. Thanks to the cutthroat nature of capitalism in many industries, businesses run along the very edge of existing at all. You can’t mandate any significant savings to the consumer or increased payment to employees without actually making those businesses fail.
Not unless you’re very clever about it, and most of these plans are not.
(Note: Rehashing things I’ve said before, definitely a late-night rant)
I still find the fact that 46% of the country decided to vote for Donald fucking Trump of all people for President to be completely baffling at a gut level.
How could anyone possibly have been comfortable voting for such an obviously mean, selfish, low-IQ, inexperienced, incoherent, authoritarian, and unserious person? How could otherwise educated, moral, rational people, have voted for this man (as many otherwise well-educated, moral, and rational Republicans did)? I still feel like I live in a bad satire of America rather than the real world.
Even if I grant every critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and I try to inhabit the mindset of a person with conservative policy views, and I concede all the frustration with the cultural left that many on the right feel, I still don’t see how there is even a contest between which one would be preferable to run our military, our diplomacy, and our nuclear weapons. Like shouldn’t basic respectability and competence trump all else when the other candidate completely fails on those metrics?
I feel a deep shame whenever I think about the fact that such a horrible man is the face of my nation. I didn’t feel that way about Bush, I would not have felt that way about McCain or Romney.
Something is rotten about the right in this country, something so rotten that they all thought that somehow Trump was a lesser of evils choice. There were signs of this rot earlier: the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and Breitbart, the crazier elements of the Tea Party (Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Aiken), the radicalization of Republicans in Congress and state legislatures, but it wasn’t clear until Trump how deep the rot went.
The left is by no means perfect, not even close, and if this were another time with a more normal President I’d be more comfortable focusing more of my time on that. But there really is no equivalence between the left’s dysfunction’s and the right’s. Right now there really is something truly different, something scary, something very big and uniquely bad going on with the right at a systemic, sociological level that I don’t really understand no matter how much I obsess about it, at least at an emotional level.
Half the country was willing to accept authoritarian rhetoric. Half the country was willing to accept incoherence and stupidity and lying. Half the country was willing to accept meanness, endorsement of sexual assault, and racist rhetoric. Most Republican voters are not authoritarians, racists, sexists, liars, or mean, but they didn’t mind voting for it at all.
That’s terrifying.
I want you to imagine that there was a group within your country that had been mass kidnapping kids for sex trafficking with more or less impunity, for years.
The police refused to do anything about it. The politicians not only claimed it wasn’t happening, but celebrated bringing more of that group. The media gaslit you and said it wasn’t happening.
In fact, when you raised objections, you were sent for ideological retraining.
Of course, I’m not talking about the United States.
But suppose someone in the United States did know about such a thing happening. And the same cycle of “but it isn’t real” was being used by the same ideological groups to claim that what happened in another developed country was impossible, that it would never happen, and certainly wasn’t happening there and could not possibly happen here.
Approximately how many layers of “FUCK YOU” would they want to send those ideological groups as a message? Why on Earth would they care about those groups’ criticisms when said groups are a bunch of lying hypocrites?
Quite frankly, if you’re actually baffled that they could put Trump in the Whitehouse, you don’t understand Trump voters as well as you think you do.
And those Very Serious People that Clinton was the representative of? Clinton wanted even more involvement in Syria than Trump has so far actually provided. She said as much right before he missile striked that airbase, and we all know that the MSM would have been chanting “YASS, QUEEN, SLAY! #STRONGWOMEN” the whole time.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but the Serious People have worn down the value of being perceived as serious. If we get through to 2020 with no new big wars, I’m going to chalk it up as a victory.
imagine a species with brains so big they never bothered developing the concept of categories.
they have no word for “chair” as an abstract concept, only words for each individual chair they have ever encountered.
where we visualise simplistic venn diagrams, they see the entire scatterplot.
what would we make of them and what would they make of us, I wonder.
technically they could still have a word for chair, but it would unpack to a precise definition or set of specified references, so they would be physically incapable of having arguments over terminology.
Obviously an engineered species. No naturally evolved species could afford that level of power consumption.
You know I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much fandom posts about something without ever developing any secondhand sense of what the fuck it’s about as RWBY
My ex likes it, but others in the same group don’t understand the appeal, including me. She is a fan of scythes, though.
What if Earth is already the property of some galactic empire that hasn’t gotten around to settling us yet because they just purchased us off of another galactic empire a few decades ago?
What if the leaders of said empire tells its citizen to colonize Earth, and they start taking over our cities and land. They find it justifiable because we don’t use the elements in Earth’s core like they do so we don’t really own the planet.
We’re pushed to Mars, where only 1% of humanity lives in relative peace but a lot of hunger and a few international struggles, which the aliens feed into. They eventually settle Mars too, pushing us to the moons of Jupiter, then Saturn.
Eventually the empire becomes a bit nicer, and builds us a bunch of reservations throughout the solar system, though only a few of them are on Earth. Today we’re a minority in our own Solar System, mostly running Casinos on Mars or giving tours of the ruins of our once great cities. The aliens stopped calling us Meatbags though. Now they use the more respectable Native-Earthling term, though they’ll rarely acknowledge whatever nationality your ancestors had before they came.
The message of this gets over the head of a lot of people and it’s making me kinda sad.
implying we wouldn’t nuke the aliens or, if we were gonna lose, just plain nuke earth out of pure spite
no see you can’t think of it realistically you gotta take in the Extremely Woke Message that is Super Deep and Really Makes You Think
Maybe we can strike some sort of bargain where they agree to judge Islam by the same criteria.
A lot of the moral implications of Transhumanism fall along some pathways and not others.
Do you want to make a thousand copies of yourself, or do you want to have superhuman strength?
The latter is not actually that morally complicated compared to the former, but it’s still very much Transhumanism, unless you draw a boundary in which the body is a tool for tool use, and the mind is not, and thus the latter is functionally equivalent to “Humanism, but with powered exoskeletons.”
But for me, of course, it was never the forking that I was interested in, it was the youth, beauty, and power. (Well, okay, intellect, too, but that still fits fine with no-brain-duplications limits.)
So a future where prosthetic robot arms and mechanical backup hearts exceed their native human capabilities, but upload civilization does not occur, is convenient for me. All of the most terrifying implications of Transhumanism descend from the upload civilization bits, not the robot arms bits.
A LOT of right-wing stuff right now is designed to wind people up.
This is part of why some Left/Liberal organizations are having identity issues over whether they’re the Cool Subversives still. It used to be that the right wing were the uptights and the left wing were the shitposters, but not anymore.
I prefer being the uptights.
Understandable, but it’s partly to move the Overton Window to make room for more uptightness later on. The goal is to loosen the grasp of progressivism.
Under the new rules, homes that are not occupied for at least six months of the year are subject to a tax of one per cent of the property’s assessed value. The deadline to rent out empty dwellings was July 1.
Fazli said many of the people he has talked to are thinking of renting or selling their properties. He recently met with a woman who owns three empty properties in Vancouver — and says one of them is now listed for rent, another will be listed shortly and she is thinking of selling the third.
“This is a scenario of someone who is kind of in a panic now and needs to rent them out,” he said. […]
amazing
Why were they empty?
they’re meant to be investment properties, bought, left empty, and then sold a year or few later for huge profit as housing values continue to rise. it’s a massive part of the bc housing bubble, and why despite so much new construction it’s still so difficult to find rental housing
the fact that these landlords are panicking because they might have to actually use their housing properties as housing rather than finance capital is deeply funny
See THIS is a good idea to do, because far too many people leave property vacant rather than let it be used.
they’re essentially hoarding empty properties to drive the price up, and everyone suffers for it. now it’s not profitable anymore. good job, canada.
I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. An individual person or group doesn’t benefit from buying property to make the price go up unless they manage to get a monopoly, right?
Also, what’s the logic between not renting them out? Is it about being able to sell on a moment’s notice?
Most likely, but also renting is a headache that often doesn’t have great margins, and renters can damage the property. That they’re even able to do this, however, suggests that there are still issues with insufficient housing construction.
My family used to own a set of small storefronts in the middle of a small town, which we rented to a number of small businesses, including an old-fashioned barber shop there since before I was born.
It wasn’t really a net source of income.
A LOT of right-wing stuff right now is designed to wind people up.
This is part of why some Left/Liberal organizations are having identity issues over whether they’re the Cool Subversives still. It used to be that the right wing were the uptights and the left wing were the shitposters, but not anymore.
Of course, part of the issue with whether the guy in the CNN story is an actual wannabe doxxer, is that there is no reason to trust that Leftists (that you don’t know personally) are telling the truth. They lie so fucking much as a group. They lie about the conditions in Europe.
They lie about sexism. They lie about who is and is not a Nazi, and then commit violence based on those lies. They twist statistics, by, for example, making “made to penetrate” not be counted as rape and then using those same stats to claim that sexual violence by women does not exist.
The issue here being that for the correction to go around, there has to be some credibility. That credibility has been burned repeatedly, much like we shouldn’t trust anything non-trivial that former President GWB says (or many of the GOP pols generally).
It isn’t that the Trumpists don’t care about the truth more than other ideological groups, it’s that they know their enemies control the loudspeakers and non-governmental institutions, and they expect their enemies to always lie and not care about the truth. It’s similar to the phenomena of right-wingers shitposting because they know they’ll be called Fascists regardless, so they’ve decided to wind people up over it and make them look ridiculous.
“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”—
This reminds me a bit of Mezangelle, which I could never get into but always loved the aesthetic of. It’s easy to imagine a religious or magical permutation of Mezangelle.
I mean if nothing else, the majority of misogynist men appear to be in sexual relationships with women at various points in their lives, and are hence “getting some” without fundamentally shifting their opinions.
The “dude hates women because he can’t get laid” thing irritates me from a number of directions.
Dudes who get lots of sex from women frequently hate women, dudes who want sex with women but are “volcel” or not interested in “sluts riding the cock carousel” or whatever manosphere redpill grossness is floating around have some weird shit going on and probably need hugs and sympathy for other reasons but that doesn’t excuse the fact that lots of them just hate women.
But that’s just some of the straight dudes.
I’ve known a lot of *deeply* misogynistic/femmephobic/transphobic gay men and at least a couple of very misogynist ace folks. I know a *TREMENDOUS* number of misogynist straight women, who are sexist as fuck and fighting daily battles with their own internalized misogyny but who are certainly not motivated in their contempt and hatred for women by a desire to fuck them. Misogyny in gay men, straight women, and ace folks at least proves that misogyny can be completely divorced from an unfulfilled desire for vaginal sex.
I think the reason we hear the “he’s just mad because he’s not getting any” is because there is a not-insignificant number of men who will be more vocal about their misogyny when they’re single and having trouble “pulling” - that’s where you get stories from women in bars who get called stuck-up bitches or who are told all women are the same gold-digging whores and whatever, because some dude tried to hit on them and got shut down. I heard an awful lot of this kind of thing as a comforting shoulder to many a geek who wanted to know what was wrong with him and why girls didn’t like him and went for the jock or the dude with the motorcycle or the asshole with the tattoos. But I also ran LGBT clubs and was the shoulder for a lot of gay men discussing how disgusting vaginas are and how they don’t even want women around (and I understand that a lot of that probably is a defense mechanism for young men being pressured into performing heteronormativity who are totally uninterested in women and ambivalence can easily become revulsion when you’re pressured into doing things you don’t want to that aren’t right for you; I feel less sympathy and understanding for older gay men I know now who continue to regularly discuss how icky vaginas are and how women are cock-hungry because they’ve got penis envy and aren’t whole without a dick in them somewhere, what the fuck you sound like radfems)
I’m rambling too much, but here’s what I’m trying to get down to: many women hear the most vocal, vicious, misogynist things from men they’ve just turned down or from men whose catcalls they’ve ignored. I think the reason a lot of women default to “you just can’t get laid” as an insult to misogynists is because their mental picture of “misogynist” is “that guy who chased me for two blocks because I wouldn’t smile” or “that guy who screamed at me in the bar” or “that guy who called me a bitch in science class because I didn’t accept his promposal” or “that asshole who said I put him in the friendzone when I wouldn’t sleep with him after a breakup because I just thought he was my friend.”
I’m not saying that it’s right or it’s good that people default to “wants and can’t attain straight sex” as the handwave for misogyny, I’m saying we should figure out where this is coming from. Homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality are probably a significant part of the answer, but lived experience of women being personally attacked (either verbally or physically) by men whom they’ve rejected is probably another part.
And, yeah, a lot of this ends up throwing LGBTQIA folks under the bus - an adult who menstruates and is freaked out by tampons is assumed to be childish or a prude instead of sex-repulsed or penetration-averse or experiencing dysphoria; an adult who doesn’t seek (primarily straight) sex is assumed to be broken.
And that’s all fucked up.
So yeah, feminist folks, you are perpetuating the cycle of toxic masculinity when you use “this loser can’t get laid” as an insult (also when you use “prude” as an insult - there are lots of good reasons people aren’t interested in sex or aren’t interested in hearing about sex in lots of contexts, oversharing when someone is uncomfortable with it is violating their consent).
And I’ll just end my rant with “can we just try not to be jerks to each other? That’d be swell.”
So you have that, but also there is a conflation of “what straight women want or find attractive” with “good” which this is a part of.
Ok, but I don't only want people to have enough money to live on (though I very much want that!). I also want business to *stop exploiting people*. And I haven't been seeing people propose alternative means for doing that?
If people had enough money to live on regardless of whether they took a job, then businesses would have to offer conditions good enough people wanted to work even though they didn’t have to work to survive. Giving people enough money to live on is also the best way to make sure they don’t work under exploitative conditions.
So this backlash, the death threats, the intimidation, the violence, all of that is justified?
The backlash in terms of people rightfully decrying CNN and raising cain, I think that’s a very good thing. Obviously the more extreme response I don’t condone, much in the same way I don’t condone a bear eating the drunk moron who tries to wrestle it. But much like trying to wrestle a bear while shitfaced, trying to police public discourse in the age of the internet has consequences, and reporters are not magically immune to the consequences of their extremely poor decisions.
We teach people that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. We seem to forget, however, that the same thing applies to freedom of the press.
Through our inductive proof, we demonstrate that anime was a mistake, and also that not-anime was a mistake. Thus we establish that abstract thought itself is an error. (Sample of Output from Victim of Miyazaki Virus, Datalinks, 2110)
so which of these premises sounds best for a short story or a fiction podcast
the head of a space mission in the early 1960′s can see Rod Serling lurking in the corners, and has to do everything he can to avoid the space mission turning into a Twilight Zone episode (”No astronauts named Adam. If one of our men is half of an Adam and Eve pair, everyone on Earth will die to set it up!”)
something detailing or tangentially describing the professional / political rivalries between the world’s two types of superheroes: sparkly magical girl princesses and dark edgy 90′s antiheroes. (”Well, why can’t I put some pouches on this skirt? I don’t have anywhere to put my phone or keys!”)
an after-action report (maybe a board meeting of EvilCorp, maybe a post-war truth and reconciliation commission between Earth and the Alien Army) taking place in the world of an imaginary generic video game: the game just got beaten by a speedrun and the denizens of the world try to figure out what the fuck happened
androids are real, are self-aware, and don’t have equal rights. the things they actually want and need as far as rights and necessities have nothing to do with what humans would want in their situation (they don’t care about being “enslaved” but STOP MAKING US USE ALTERNATING CURRENT), and neither the pro- nor the anti- android rights factions of humans really pay attention to what they actually want in favor of acting out a drama that reinforces their own identity
We can only say that a company and a prospective employee have equal leverage, and thus achieve an actually-fair deal (in a number of senses, but not all senses), if they actually have equal marginal/proportional consequences for not taking the deal.
For low-skilled workers in a work-or-starve environment where employment is scarce, that means that the executives of the company will potentially be out on the streets begging if they do not hire the worker.
Minimum wage, however, among its many other effects, can close some of this leverage gap.
Now of course, there are ways of managing this while retaining markets and capital, but not if you accept Capitalism as a morality in itself.
