Man, just thinking back to the height of Covid when blue state scoldy people were like, The kids don’t need school or education! They can work in the fields and the mines like the olden days. They love it!
What the ever-livin’ hell was that about? Did they really believe it? Some appeared to. No one is going to be able to write a history of the Covid era that makes any sense. No one would buy a recounting of what actually occurred.
Fuck yes. Terrible human. I’m not a high empathy person, but I’d not feel morally correct allowing an animal I’d implicitly promised to care for just to starve to death. That hints at the future of the relationship there, too. Eject!
I do not give a single crap about Covid or anything to do with it. It’s now irrelevant to anything.
Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war.
This is 100% absolutely correct. Highest risk of world war and nuclear war right now since 1962. We are close to the edge and do not even realize it. We might step back from it. We might not. Time will tell. But it is right to be worried about this as history lately is rhyming an awful lot with what occurred in the 1930s.
It’s an enormous fuck-up that we didn’t help Ukraine and the rest of Europe push Putin right on out of Ukraine. We made that mistake, and now neo-fascists and authoritarians are emboldened everywhere. If Europe does not step up, the Baltic states and Poland will be consumed by Russia at some point in the next 3-7 years.
And Vladimir Putin, emboldened by Chinese production and intelligence support, and having staked not only his legacy but his regime’s entire reason for existence on the conquest of territory in East Europe, will have little reason to stop fighting no matter what the U.S. says. The U.S. could push Ukraine to cede land for peace, and it probably wouldn’t matter, because Putin wants all of Ukraine, and then he wants other European countries too
This is the problem exactly.
It’s strange is that there are maybe only a few hundred people in the entire country who understand how the housing market actually works and what drives prices. Tanta (Doris Dungey) was one of them before she died. I’m one. There were/are a few others, like Karl Case and Robert Shiller but the list is very fucking short for something so important.
Though one of the reasons the list is short is that the market is of supreme importance — thus, the better you can conceal what is occurring the more money you and your thievin’ friends and associates can make.
The societal-level misunderstanding is also because the housing market does not work like other, more-liquid markets where mobility is a given. People analogize selling a fuckin’ bagel or a TV to peddling a house when those things are as different as a jellyfish and a neutron star.
In another life, I’d write a book about how the housing market actually works, but ain’t nobody got time for that. I’ve got interesting people to hang out with and a trillion more books to read. Y’all do y’all’s own stupid without me.
I didn’t realize (parts of?) New Jersey had a culture similar to where I grew up in rural North Florida:
Sucks to be born into such a thing, trust me.
The first ten on today’s playlist:
The Internet Feels Dead, Doesn’t It?
A person born in 1992 does fucking not remember the early days of the internet. That’s so LOL-worthy. They’d barely even remember the middle days. The real early days of the commercial internet were people creating pages and writing out of interest, passion and desire to form a connection, to meet someone who also liked collecting 1950s bottle tops or glass power line insulators.
No one was making any money and it was a lot of fun. This era ended with the IPOs of many major tech companies in 1998-1999 (when the writer was eight years old). The early internet is mostly how I wish it had stayed. It was better in most ways; it at least it wasn’t a surveillance apocalypse as it is now.
Inflation comes in hotter than expected in March.
Hotter than expected if you’re a damn idiot. Funny that the “transitory” clowns — who were wrong and lying liars all along — are still throwing a victory party while inflation is already, predictably, ticking back up again.
No one cares about evidence. Or even being correct. Just sending the right signals.
Navies are obsolete, but no one will admit it.
This is not really true and it also goes further than this. This person just doesn’t understand modern warfare well, or historical warfare. Or, well, much of anything. It veers into “not even wrong” territory significantly.
Navies are not obsolete — no more than they were after the invention of aircraft. But the balance of power is shifting, as well as the strategies, tactics and practices of how a navy must operate in a drone-rich environment with the possibility of strikes by hypersonic missiles. The Russian Navy getting spanked in the Black Sea doesn’t really signify much either way. Their Black Sea Fleet operated more like a bunch of kindergartners and is illustrative of a decaying military structure with poor force protection practices operating in a tiny area than it is the future of naval warfare.
I don’t feel like writing an entire monograph on naval strategy and doctrine and the evolution thereof, but here’s the thing: drones aren’t magical. Neither are hypersonic missiles. Most likely in the future each Navy will have its drone swarm and will stand way, way off from each other as the drones battle it out. Then it will be a chess match of feints and approaches until one side or the other comes out ahead. Casualties will be high, but countries will still want what navies can provide even at that price.
As for subs and their detection, 95% of what the poster claims is absolute crap. The ocean is vast; finding and tracking a quiet nuclear sub is always going to be nearly impossible no matter how many satellites or drones you have. And then doing something about it before it disappears will be even harder.
Too many academics write authoritatively about topics on which they are completely clueless.
About 300-500 Russians die in Ukraine daily, and 50-100 Ukrainians. Just talking war-caused KIA here. That is insane.
I don’t think that’s a T-90M. It looks like it’d already been attacked before the engine drone strike and they were retreating. Whether it’s a T-90 or T-80, it has a crew of three and it’s not large on the inside — I have no idea how they fit four dudes in there.
That goofy-ass economists like Noah Smith deny what is clearly obvious is really odd. I know that the entire economics profession is invested in defending the status quo at all costs — but come on, just look at a damn graph. It’s so easy.
The first ten on today’s playlist:
It’s great to see that the degrowth “we must take away anything good from everyone” philosophy seems to be thoroughly failing. Good damn riddance, too.