Florida took game 1 in the CWS championship series. But the real winners were in the stands. Russell Westbrook won the NBA’s MVP award after being the first player since Oscar Robertson to average a triple-double. And it seems like every single one of the popular baseball teams on here, or perhaps its the teams of the most vocal fans, lost last night. Fortunately the Astros didn’t play and the Dodgers lost after reeling ten in a row off, which means the longest streak of the year will remain in Houston. Firstros back at home tonight against the Athletics where they hope to maintain their torrid pace coming into the All-Star break.
Serena Williams being classy
Oh, yeah. And I need to make sure I mention that Serena replied to John McEnroe’s interview answers. I could have called this a mile away. She could have easily just reiterated her comments from some years back. But she decided to accuse him of invading her privacy, even though he was merely answering a question and then a follow-up question. Furthermore, she did so on twitter…where she’d posted a dozen things in the last week alone. You know, because she wants her privacy. Christ, what an asshole. I only hope McEnroe replies with a little more science-based commentary and puts her where she belongs.
Anyhow, I’m sure you didn’t come here for sports, although sometimes those are the best people we can cover on a given day. Let’s see what kind of people we can talk about in…the links.
Fake news story claims three CNN employees. Plus, none of their chicks have nice legs and wear short skirts every day. So as far as I’m concerned, they’re no longer a legitimate source of information. Brian Williams was not available for comment.
There’s some evidence that the entire probe by the FBI into Michael Flynn might be in retaliation of a sexual harassment claim he helped a female employee make. Let’s see when NBC, CBS, ABC or the aforementioned CNN pick that one up.
Antifa bitches training to slap fight
Ladies and gentlemen, this video definitively proves we have nothing whatsoever to fear from the violent rhetoric coming from the far left. I’ll keep my guns just to be certain, but…holy shit, this is pathetic and hilarious and reassuring all at the same time.
Bernie Sanders is starting to feel the heat. I guess that’s to be expected when you and your wife are accused of using your office to influence a private business and bank fraud, respectively.
Suck it, New York, Chicago, LA, Boston and all those other progressive metropolises. Only one major American city made the top 10 list of “most joyous places on earth.”
Tennessee replies to California travel ban in an awesome way.
Just a few more days and I’ll get to do this.
That’s all she wrote for today, friends. Go out there and have a great day!
Of the two, I’d rather not have to deal with visiting Californians. I might just go back to Tennessee some day. I have no plans to go anywhere near California.
Hey, not all of us are far-left loonies! #NotAllCalifornians
He wasn’t talking about you, you’re one of the good ones.
*pats head*
When you play the averages, what are the odds any given Californian will be?
‘Insufferable’ is the word that comes to mind. ‘Smug’ makes a close second.
Having lived in CA off and on for 10 of the last 40 years, I won’t be going back for more than a week at a time.
That’s enough to keep down any desire to go back for another 3 years.
I’m with you. The wife and I will be spending parts of the winter in Memphis in a few years. (Once the youngest is out of the house.)
Just don’t fuck up and go to Nashville. Fucking hive of villainy and all that.
I visited Knoxville. The zoo was nice (except the reptile exhibit, the double-pane enclosures were too scratched to see the animals.) I should post more of the pictures I took there…
I’ve heard Nashville is fun to visit. Being planning on going. We always go to the Smokies
Nashville is the state capitol and they manage to divert a shit ton of state money to local projects. Memphis has more people (almost all of them dumb hill billies) than anywhere in the state but always has a divided legislative slate so they get screwed out of taxes all the time.
For example, Memphis was always the runner up for a NFL expansion. Their big stumbling block is that it isn’t a rich city and had a hard time luring teams. Then Nashville gives the Oilers a shit ton of state money to move to Nashville.
/Former Memphian
The hillbillies are in the eastern part of the state.
Memphis seemed mostly flat last time I was there.
Knoxville in the east has Oak Ridge labs, so those fuckers pull the smarts of the region up a lot.
Memphis is the hill billy magnet for the entire delta region. We get all the ambitious rubes from Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.
We’ve considered Knoxville area for retirement or vacation place. Problem is that I want land to shoot on without having to drive a half hour to hit Farragut or get to a decent grocery store. Between Oak Ridge to the north and the river South your options are limited for acreage at a reasonable price.
The true East of Tennessee is far enough from Knoxville to not get the Oak Ridge effect. You know, the part so far east that its in a special insert box on maps.
Yeah, the reason I was looking west of Knoxville was because of Farragut. Seemed like that is where most of the decent restaurants and bars where. How is the Tri-City area for stuff to do? I’m not talking bars where the only people in there are old drunks that have been there since breakfast. Some talent would be nice. I want land but I don’t want to be so far out in the sticks I can’t go anyplace decent. I know it’s not easy to find because that’s what everybody wants.
I swear, the last time I was in Nashville, we took a walk down whatever the main drag with music clubs is called, and every fucking one of them had cover bands, I counted four of them in two blocks that were playing the same song. It is no Austin.
Austin is where people go to be singer-songwriters, Nashville is where people go to be well-paid singers or songwriters.
My wife presented at a conference in Nashville last year and I tagged along. She did conference stuff during the day, leaving me free to walk around. I’ll say this: I wasn’t blown away, but I’d go back. I’ve been trying to scope out places to move, and I’d throw Nashville somewhere in the middle. Ironically, East Nashville, i.e. Hipster Central, was my favorite part. Good albeit trendy food, comfortable bars, nice houses, parks, and it looked very walkable. Funny thing for me coming from the DMV is that everybody, including the hippest hipsters, was as nice as they could be. And it actually made us nicer, too.
This was not my experience when I lived in Escondido.
My BIL lives in San Diego, so I’m sure I’ll go back out to visit one of these days, but aside from nice weather and the Pacific I could die a happy man having never set foot in California again. It honestly holds less interest to me than, say, Nebraska, mainly because I’ve never been to Nebraska.
You should have liked to have seen
MontanaNebraska?In a pickup truck, for sure.
“I’ve never been to Nebraska”
You’re not missing anything.
Oh, I dunno.
Isn’t basd pro shops buying them out?
As I’ve mentioned before. we’re planning a trip to Nashville and if we have time we’ll head out to Memphis.
You’d better not disappoint Tennessee.
Once you have had Memphis BBQ, you will finally fully understand Blazing Saddles.
And I don’t care how stupid or touristy it seems, go tour Graceland.
Nashville is a better place to live than to visit.
It’s not too bad if you can avoid the roving bands of bachelorette parties… and East Nashville…
I’m going to rant a little bit. I was born in Nashville and raised just outside the city limits, and, other than a brief stint in Houston, I’ve lived here my entire life. I barely recognize the city anymore. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of shit changes in 37 years, but even in recent memory, the face and character of the city have morphed in weird, unpleasant ways. Housing prices have gone through the roof, and traffic is insane. Personally, I blame fart-sniffing coastal elites coming in to take advantage of the comparatively low cost of living and a first-class TV/music production infrastructure, which would be fine (I guess) except they’re also importing the “progressive” value of shitting on the South, Southern culture, and Southerners in general. It’s super frustrating. True story: I once participated in a conversation with a TV producer who wanted to do a show about Nashville, and at one point of the conversation, she asked if we were excited that New York was finally bringing culture to Nashville. The hearty “FUCK OFF” she got ended that conversation pretty quickly, but man, that attitude is endemic among Nashville transplants, especially in the entertainment industry. They think they’re Prometheus bringing fire to the savages, somehow forgetting that Nashville’s been successfully capitalizing on entertainment for decades and decades. So glad I’m out of that scene. Holy cow.
Anyway. I love this place and I’ll probably be here for the rest of my life, but it really drives me crazy that some transplants (progressives) are actively attempting to undermine the very things that drew them to the area. Feels like there’s a battle for the soul of the city.
some transplants (progressives) are actively attempting to undermine the very things that drew them to the area.
That is what they do. They are like a zombie plague that needs to be contained.
I had a buddy who was a very good session musician. He would get lots of gigs in Nashville. One of his stories was that because of all the studios there, a lot of pr0n was shot there too because it was cheap. He claimed that they’d break for smokes and the smoking area was filled with session musicians and pr0n gals.
Any truth to that story? Asking for a friend.
That would be news to me. But I was only involved in production for a year or two, and that year consisted mostly of working on Christian music videos. My experience was probably vastly different than your friend’s.
I will say there used to be a ton more strip clubs downtown, but nowadays it’s mostly family friendly.
Xenophon.
Nasvhille’s best tourism agent.
And yet for some reason the local tourism board won’t hire me. I have no idea why.
Also I know I mentioned that if you had any questions about Nashville that I would answer them to the best of my ability. However, I have no idea if you responded to that since I currently don’t receive notifications for responses, and I’m not sure how to turn it on. As a stopgap measure I figure I’ll sit on this page for the next three days, constantly refreshing it in case you reply. My backup plan is to do a google search to see if there are any automated solutions. Backup to the backup is to actually just admit ignorance and ask someone.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they just stayed there and quit moving to Colorado. They’re trying to ruin our state too.
Tennessee is garbage and, as stated by me previously, the Ohio of the South.
But they have no state income tax.
Old joke: Why doesn’t KY fall into Alabama? Because Indiana sucks and Tennessee blows.
“California’s attempt to influence public policy in our state is akin to Tennessee expressing its disapproval of California’s exorbitant taxes, spiraling budget deficits,
runaway social welfare programs, and rampant illegal immigration”
Sick burn!
So North Korea says that Trumpf is totes Hitler. It will be interesting to see if any of the sane people on the left point to that and say to their crazy comrades “do you really want to be associated with North Korea?” I’m fully prepared to not hear that at all
Second!
Given that there are out and out communists, pro-castro socialists and Bernie Bros on the left, I don’t think North Korea is going to be a problem for them.
Oh, and Chavistas, Can’t forget them.
You’re talking about the same people that claimed that Otto Warmbier got what was coming to him because he tried to abuse his “white privilege” and broke North Korea’s laws.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say no.
Watching the antifa “training”. Good God these people couldn’t whip cream with an outboard motor.
I’d pay to see it, anyways.
I use a stand mixer. It’s easier than an outboard, and actually designed for the task.
Immersion blender, whips cream in under a minute. And allows for smaller batches easily.
But makes for a less funny image.
Besides, I don’t think it takes more than a minute for the stand mixer either. I’ve only ever done single pints of cream because that’s all the store sells of the correct type. It makes enough to cover two pies.
And these pies, they wouldn’t happen to be cherry would they?
Probably cream pies.
I tried an immersion blender but it didn’t really grab me.
That sounds like a euphemism to me.
It was like watching a shitty version of this.
And there are people out there that still accuse John Travolta of being straight.
His beard makes it hard to figure.
I wonder though…is antifa a false flag operation to draw our attention away from the real lefty bangers that are training in in the PNW somewhere off the grid. Becausenit almost seems mathematically impossible that why we’ve seen of the left is the best they’ve got at gooning it up. Hell, just by sheer numbers of available people, I could randomly select 50 people from American middle schools that could sweep through an antifa “demonstration” like a knife through butter with a little coordinated leadership. I find it hard to believe their shock troops are little more than a bunch of Nancy boy pussies.
Given that the demographics of Antifa weigh heavily towards basement-dwellers and academia (they did surveys)… I’d bet on the middle-schoolers.
And when you think about it, cosplaying as revolutionaries would appeal strongly to people who’ve failed at life – much like the appeal of communism and socialism to the same demographic.
4 chan vs Antifa. PPV would rival McGregor/Mayweather.
Here’s the thing, last I heard 4chan stirs up trouble in ways that play to their aptitudes. Antifa plays to their own weaknesses.
Yeah, my money would be on Jimbo, Dolph, Kearney and Nelson too.
And I’m talking about simple cardboard cutouts of them. The mere sight of bullies would probably trigger a shit load of the antifa into a retreat.
There certainly are tough people on the left, inner city thugs for instance. Problem is(for the antifas) they’re not really politically active, and don’t even get me started on how unwoke they are. And of course they’d rather fight each other.
Yeah, I often times think of these inner city thugs that would probably be pro-big government welfare & regulation (if they vote at all), and thus Democrat leaning. The thing is, a lot of these guys will be quick to call these boys wearing thick-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans “fags” on the street and beat their asses. These folks are not exactly welcoming to the gay and trans communities either…
Doesn’t it look too stupid to be a real thing?
I was thinking about this the other day, though. Consider a scenario where antifa demonstrators become increasingly violent. Eventually, you wind up with a full-blown riot where some anti-antifa gets badly injured or killed. You can’t really arrest a mob, and it’s hard to track down the individual(s) responsible. The “alt-right”, or whoever, starts showing up to demonstrations packing real heat. Maybe Oathkeepers show up in force. They’re still not going to open up on the antifa unprovoked, and by the time an antifa guy pops off a shot or two the cops are going to swoop in, and a good number of them will go to defuse the non-antifa side.
In a sense, then, the antifa have the advantage because they’re not showing restraint, and they’re not really being expected to because they’re 20-something hipsters throwing tantrums. The other side is typically the side that’s on the scene first, for a legitimate demonstration, while antifa shows up to fling poo. If you look at video of previous incidents, whenever there’s contact and the police notice, they swoop in and grab the non-antifa, because they’re typically going to be more reasonable and they’re taken more seriously. So in that regard, they’re up against not just the antifa, but the police.
Eventually you hit a flashpoint where the right just straight riots in return and you get the National Guard and martial law for a month. Or, and this is maybe more likely, you get real, honest-to-god skinheads who have no problem going to prison (where they’ll just link up with their friends in the Brand anyway) demonstrating in order to get an antifa response and then beating antifa into comas.
I don’t know. I’ve heard the bit about the right being the ones who actually know how to fight and know about guns, but I think that fails to account for the state effectively supporting antifa and the lack of restraint on the part of the antifa. I mean, these are people who believe that being on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26 is a human right. They have no concept of having to live with the consequences of their decisions.
Let’s put it this way, Nap. If someone I care about was ever hurt in one of these rallies Antifa attacks, I would seriously consider “joining” them in order to disrupt their plans by feeding information to the FBI and the local cops, while keeping backups to leak to all media (especially including the fact I had leaked to all media among the leaked materials, to make sure the MSM covers it). If that failed to create a definitive response from law enforcement towards these rioters, at that point, I know their routines and schedules, and can also give that information to crazy right wing groups.
I’ve been slowly coming to the same conclusion. By themselves, the antifa movement is just faintly pathetic. But they have the support structure, and the media is openly carrying water for them. That makes them dangerous.
Sloopy, have you seen the videos of the Berkeley riots? A large portion of these antifa people are skinny boys with thick-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans. The thing is, they’re like zombies – not dangerous if you find one alone, but extremely dangerous in large swarms.
The simplest solutions to all of this:
1. Do not allow masks at these rallies under any circumstances. If someone is in a mask, they take it off or they get locked up.
2. Anybody that brandishes a weapon goes to jail for rioting.
3. Use video to ID people committing crimes and charge/prosecute people with the crimes they commit.
The problem is that the cities have to pass these laws, and they side with the antifa people in all-black wearing masks. Also, the police have to enforce these laws, and they seem disinterested in getting involved (I don’t blame them, there’s no way they come out of one of these looking good to 50% of the country).
Have you seen what happens to people (and their cameras) who try to film antifa? It ain’t pretty.
The problem is that the cities have to pass these laws, and they side with the antifa people in all-black wearing masks.
Whelp, that’s a risky approach to the matter. When people don’t feel the police protect them, they learn to protect themselves.
Do not allow masks at these rallies under any circumstances. If someone is in a mask, they take it off or they get locked up.
How… libertarian.
Pretty much.
What’s the point of having useful idiots if you can’t beat them up (in self defense) when they get delusions of competency?
Short but fun.
Scaramuchi, Scaramuchi, Can CNN do the propagando.
Utterly unrelated, but speaking on behalf of everyone still harboring a hopeless crush on manic pixie dream girl era Natalie Portman, your avatar is extremely hurtful.
Pops out and grabs your attention, though.
icwutudidthar
I’m nipping this in the bud right now.
Keep us abreast of the situation, would you?
Tits OK. I’m sure this will end soon.
You and Elite had better be careful before sloop throws you in the pokey.
Don’t worry bra, I’ve got your back.
Or the rack?
Oh, Snap!
I’m surrounded by adolescent boobs.
OMWC?
That would be pre-adolescent.
You people are such boobs.
*narrows gaze at entire thread*
You’re just trying to see the photo better.
Oh, never mind, straffinrun.
CNN Producer admits the whole thing is bullshit.
nothing to see here move along people
Wow. I mean, I knew it, but how the hell are they still getting away with it with at least a third of the population?
My wife only watches MSNBC now. Guess what story she was talking about last night. Hint: it wasn’t about CNN being busted for fake news, or the Russia hacking intel possibly coming from a dossier provided by a private contractor paid by the DNC.
The war’s on, folks, and everybody’s already in their bunkers listening to the propaganda of their choice.
I’ve heard the phrase limited hangout used to describe what CNN is up to. Never heard of it before, but I can see it happening.
That was weird. Limited hangout.
Seems about right.
Who’s the women on the right in you avatar?
Incoming Georgetown Student Struggles To Pay For School That Sold Her Family Into Slavery
“I got a set-aside acceptance to a school for which I wasn’t qualified, and now they expect me to pay for it too!”
Why apologize to someone they haven’t wronged?
Exactly.
It’s funny that she will sell herself into student debt slavery to get a masters in journalism so she can get paid like shot for the rest of her life.
Jesuits were kick ass. For G’Town to do that shows how far we’re sinking.
So she’s “academically smart” but none of the various institutions handing out scholarships and grants, even the ones bending over backwards to give money to blacks, are giving her the money she so rightly deserves. As Kim Jong Il once said “I’m the smartest, most crever most physicry fit, but nobody else seems to rearerize it…”
Rufus and the other Canukistanis have some ‘splaining to do.
Great White North Franchisee Association? And you are now trying to export that shit to the USA?
You know, if you don’t like the deal you could always drop the branding and run as an independant restaurant…
It depends on who owns the land the building is on. McDonald’s pioneered the idea of owning the land their franchises were built on, and leasing the property to the franchisee.
So you’re saying Franchisees have poor business sense all around?
I have spent a shit ton of time doing IoT projects with QSR’s (Quick Serve Restaurants). A bunch of them are owned by wealthy folks who are semi-retired. Without working too hard you can pull 3-5K profit out of each one per month. If you own a few it adds up. All you have to do is a) hire one good manager at each store and let them run the day to day and b) drive around and check in on each store once or twice a week. Meet your buddies for coffee and chat with the manager.
Those owners were always banging on our door any time there was an increase in the minimum wage. That ate into that profit pretty quickly and they wanted to figure out how they could automate shit and cut back on employees.
Those managers should strike out on their own…
Problem is that it costs a bunch to buy a franchise. Most of those managers are ambitious poor people who are working their way up through the system. Good ones will own a franchise at some point, but for the mean time they are climbing the ladder.
That is why I always scoff at anyone who says stupid shit like “McJobs”. Sure starting out on the bottom of a QSR is a shitty job, but it is amazing how many poor people have turned that into a path up and out of poverty by demonstrating hard work on the job.
People who scoff at a McDonald’s job have never worked retail. Even more than Starbucks, McDonald’s is an environment where someone who’s willing to tow the lion and work hard can advance steadily and get into management. And they aggressively promote from within, so it’s the kind of company where you can start at the bottom and actually work your way up.
I’ve worked at factories like that too… If you show up every day and show them that you have at least half a brain, you might make supervisor in a few years. From there, you could even get into management.
And yes, I knew a lot of freestanding chain fast food joints are on corporate land.
The point is they can either be intependant and take the risks, or they can accept the security of corporate brand recognition in exchange for a smaller cut. They chose to bargain with the chain. I’m not going to have any special sympathy because the terms are getting renegotiated.
/lowers head walks off hoping to not be noticed.
RAISED PRICES ON COFFEE AND BACON!!!!
GAH!
Conservative Writer Urges Women to ‘Stay Fit’ for Their Husbands
Alternatively, be a fat slob and see how that helps.
Methinks this “feminist” is of the branch of the toxic tree that hates anything other than landwhales for being “too pretty”.
Women caring about their appearance is patriarchal oppression.
Not new to Glibs: “equality” is a dog-whistle and red flag for doublethink.
It’s also wonderful that she calls The Federalist “right-lurching,” like it’s the daily stormer. Probably for having headlines like “research suggests parents should question children’s gender dysphoria before it’s too late”… Crazy right-wingers.
Parents should certainly curb their children’s online habits. I’m beginning to think porn is a less destructive influence on young people than tumblr.
I’m pretty sure most dudes would prefer Barbara Eden from back in the day over the staff at Feministing.
I’m pretty sure most dudes would prefer Barbara Eden now over the staff at Feministing.
I’m pretty sure most guys would prefer Barbara Eden’s corpse thirty years from now over the staff at feministing.
I’m pretty sure most guys would prefer
Barbara EdenLarry Hagman’s corpse thirty years from now over the staff at feministing.Larry was a handsome man.
would
As long as I’m fantasizing, I’ll settle for young Julie Newmar. Not too bad old, either.
Gretchen Corbett.
OK.
You know what’s terrific for psychological fitness? Cultivating an active lifestyle and carving out time to work out and curbing caloric indulgence, wearing flattering clothing, dolling yourself up, you know, making the effort.
Oh, hey, imagine that, psychologically fit people are easier to stay married to.
And I’m sure the author spends every night fantasizing about fat, balding middle-aged men.
Oh man, that “self-defense” (it’s not self-defense when you guys start the conflict, FYI) video was pathetic. These people are never going to be a physical threat to anything. OT: now that John has come over, do you think Hihn and Cytotoxic will join the site too?
BULLY!
bully!
Do it right.
Anyway when did John make it over? I have seen him.
last night was the first I’ve seen him
Apparently yesterday. Last night after work when I went browsing through what I missed in the Afternoon links thread, I saw lots of posts by John. It is claiming to be the John from the other site.
He also misspelled “stare” so…
*glares balefully at TEE*
Cytotoxic goes by a different name now. According to legend and lore he is now known as “Chemjeff”. I think he got tired of being called a 12 year old… because he’s 13 now. His worldview summed up: drop bombs on Muslim countries and then after the smoke has cleared drop some visas.
Well, we have been getting along a little to well over here, with even larger disagreements being mostly civil. Plus these mostly logical discussions are just boring.
What, do you expect them to take classes in some martial art like karate? That would be cultural appropriation, shitlord!
OK fine, Krav Maga should be fine for them then.
Run-Fu is more their style.
Retro:
In 1992, Sheriff Morrisette speaks to Footprinters about Bigfoot
STEVE SMITH HAVE HEAD TO SHOW SHERIFF.
STEVE SMITH RAPE SHERIFF, BUT HE DID NOT ASSAULT DEPUTY
*polite applause*
Footprinters are like rain on your wedding day.
+1 STEVE SMITH HAVE ONE HAND IN HIS POCKET
McEnroe should reply with a tweet that simply says: “Karsten Braasch”.
Serena wasn’t defaulted from the doubles. Jeff Tarango was. And people still screamed racism.
Leslie Jones Accuses the Ritz-Carlton in Los Angeles of Racism
I’m gonna guess attention whoring.
Yeah, I’m sure the LA Ritz Carlton is totes racist and it’s definitely not Jones just being a gigantic asshole.
Is that potentially actionable if she can’t show how they mistreat black people?
“In your case, yes, indeed we don’t.”
Leslie Jones is Axel Foley?
Except bigger and not funny.
came here to post that clip, glad I refreshed
He’s the dude that does the voiceover work in those Allstate ads, right? When somebody’s voice changes. That’s Leslie Jones, isn’t it? Why was he even at the BET awards?
Leslie Jones: (Unpaid) Spokesperson for chartered schools.
I was willing to give Leslie Jones a mulligan on the first episode because my kid likes Sing!, but if this isn’t her doing a bit then it’s a sign of a deranged mind. I worked at a barbecue chain for a little while in my 20s and I swear to god I’m not making this up, the day that SS disability checks were issued we’d get at least four people who’d show up, eat an entire rack of ribs, ask to see the manager, and then claim racism when the manager wouldn’t refund their money. Leslie Jones would do that.
Keep it up, Leslie. Call everything racist. Drain the power out of the word. The world will be a better place when the most common reaction to that accusation is the rolling of eyes.
I asked for a complementary bottle of Fiji and they only had Voss — RACISTS!
Google hit with 2.7 billion euro fine for… promoting Google… I’m not familiar with EU law, but this seems akin to fining a company for hanging their name on the storefront.
If the UK can keep its laws and court system more-sane than the EU, Brexit will be a big win for them.
That’s a lot of money. And then I realize why do many but companies get in bed with government. It’s an insurance policy. If they don’t do that then they will just keep getting milked by the government for extra cash.
It’s not a fine so much as it is extortion from a body that is rapidly coming apart at the seams.
I keep getting warnings and new laws to observe on blogger to conform with….the EU.
Fuck the EU.
I work for a big multinational HQ’ed in Germany. It is amazing how fucking insane the EU regulations are (and will get worse in 2018).
The developers in my company that work in the EU are so risk adverse that it is crazy. They are terrified that data privacy laws or other regulations will cause them to get sued out of existence. Collect too much gps information? Even if the user agreed to it? Too fucking bad. You will get sued by some privacy activist.
You have to support the stupid “right to be forgotten” law. You have to have a process to allow people to complain. You have to support people who want to export their data to some competitor’s platform. It goes on and on.
If I were Google, I’d pull all my infrastructure out of the EU and tell them to go fuck themselves. They can’t win with all those regulations.
Maybe the US dickishness in regards to Volkswagen is retaliation for this?
Christ, what a mob assholes we have running this country.
Cops: Hundreds Watched Couple’s Lewd Display
Pennsylvania duo busted for trysting in Wilkes-Barre park
“It was so disgusting I almost couldn’t bring myself to stay here and make sure they didn’t escape before the police could arrive”
Analog sex is far more natural than digital.
That warm midrange, man.
And smooth highs.
You meant “thighs.”
Go on…
+1 AAD
The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital! -Steve Albini
Bullshit. It’s Kirby, there were twenty people there, tops, and that includes the cops.
For some reason, the park may have been more popular than normal?
/Parks and Recreation Marketing Campaign
“Hello, I’m Kyle McCure, you may know me from such movies as The Sunday Doubleheader and Rounding Third Base and Headed for Home…”
Is this what conservative feminism looks like?
Are they still whining because the two Female Prime Ministers were Tories who didn’t get there by way of Affirmative Action Quotas?
Tories who didn’t get there by way of Affirmative Action Quotas
My guess is that it’s just a matter of time until feminists insist that any woman who got there by any means other than quotas (or having the right husband or father, but that’s another story) is not legitimate from a feminist perspective. If a woman was able to succeed within the context of the patriarchy, obviously its evidence that she’s internalized its biases. Only a woman who holds the position for no other reason than that she’s a woman can ever truly be feminist.
What do we call women who betray women?
House niggers? Uncle Toms?
Wait, nevermind, that’s something else.
Nice visual. High emotion. Zero substance. 5 out of 5 stars. Would regurgitate to see if anyone argues.
a party vehemently against abortion and women’s reproductive rights
So, which is it? Abortion is not exactly conducive to reproduction.
They’re the party of forced pregnancies.
They force people to get pregnant?!
DUH!
What do you think denying people free tax payer funded abortions amounts to, huh?
Looking at that pic of Jane Sanders, I would say that no one needs 27 kinds of snack crackers.
If Houston is “joyous,” then “joyous” means “insanely hot and humid, insect-infested, snarled traffic, convoluted highways, crime-ridden, and sprawl beyond imagining.” Of course it does have great Asian food in the southwest quadrant.
My last time in Houston was for a conference at the Hilton in Greenspoint. Which I later found out was referred to locally as “Gunspoint.”
Wondered about Madagascar making the list.
Trying to measure a subjective feeling objectively is dumb.
Crime-ridden? Maybe in a few pockets. But if reckon our rate of crime is a bit lower than Chiraq. And our cops are a lot less corrupt. And our city and county government is a million times less corrupt. And there are no zoning laws. And the beach is less than an hour away. And we have loads of great golf courses. And the weather is a lot better than you describe it.
And anyway, at least we’re not Dallas.
“Less crime and corruption than Chicago” is not exactly an encomium.
When I checked into the Hilton, I asked the girl at the desk, “I like to go walking early in the morning, before dawn. Is it safe to do so around here?”
She cheerfully replied, “Sure, no problem,” then after a short pause added, “Unless you’re alone.”
You really can’t judge all (heck, even most!) of Houston based on Greenspoint. That and Sharpstown were my least favorite areas to work in when I was consulting. There is so much more, and better, in the city.
I’m not sure that dirty sand where the land meets the Gulf an hour from Houston is a “beach”. Maybe for someone from Ohio.
And anyway, at least we’re not Dallas. – I see you’ve thoroughly absorbed the local culture. Fuck Dallas.
You can drive your pickup on it and drink beer.
Wade out a bit and fish if you want.
If you go down to Corpus Christi you might score a large package of drugs a smuggler dumped.
Not only that, Matera was an odd choice. It was a ghost town that experienced a remarkable rebirth. Italy is loaded with hidden gems – loaded – so not sure why they settled on Matera.
Shanghai is an incredibly questionable choice as well. Incredible, sprawling, many things to do, yes. Joyous? Heeelllllll no.
Shanghai in July is hell on earth.
I can’t disagree. There’s great food of all varieties here though, not just in Chinatown. Though Bellaire Boulevard does have great food too.
I’m giggling, thinking of that poor hotel clerk trying to politely not start laughing hysterically at the thought of someone taking an early morning constitutional around Gunspoint.
My aunt lives in The Woodlands, which was a pleasant enough place…..but god help you if you want to go out and do anything after 8 pm. It’s as if the entire town flips over the “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign and hits the rack.
The Woodlands, aka “The Bubble”. Yeah, the only time there’s anything going on late there is when there’s a concert at the pavilion.
Houston is way too hot for my blood
But it’s a wet heat!
Hot and wet is fin if you’re with a lady but it sicks if you’re in Texas
Must be all the fossil fuels from Texas. Sort of payback
Cat owners are literally worse than Vikings.
For those of you who weren’t around for the fun of the Vikings stadium construction, there was a huge kerfuffle about the big glass walls on the new stadium. The Audubon Society claimed that it would cause birds migrating up and down the Mississippi to die in the millions. Speaking of millions, they also demanded that the Vikes use some special glass that would cost tens of millions extra. They never offered to help fund it with a charity drive from its members.
This article points out the obvious. Cats kill a shit load more birds than all the building combined.
That is right! Somehow feral cats in North America have pulled off global extinctions.
Given what the birds left on my windshield this morning, I’m rooting for the cats.
There is a season.
Turn, turn, turn…
My old cat was a stone cold killer. He was declawed, we made him wear bells on his collar and he still came back with birds (and also mice, moles and chipmunks).
When the weather was nice, he would stroll into the house as I made coffee. He would plunk down in his favorite sunny spot to sleep all day and then go out at night to raise hell.
He came back once with a bunch of puncture marks across his back. I never figured out what almost got him, an owl, a coyote or something else.
I once had a cat like that. Not even very big, but the little fucker killed anything that moved ; mice, rats, chipmunks, squirrels, snakes, birds, bats, etc. etc. He loved to bring the dead into the house through a hole in the screen door. Cleared out the whole damn neighborhood.
The only thing that my cat feared was another big tom that lived up the block. When we’d be sitting out front and that other tom sauntered by, my cat would find a reason to go to the back yard.
MIne liked to bring his food in and play with it. I woke up more than once to the sound of him biting through the braincase of a squirrel under my bed. Fucker. I miss him. My wife moved in and he decided that I had broken the bachelor agreement. I hope he’s being handfed tuna by some little old lady who keeps a bunch of jenny cats she never bothered to spay.
Had a girlfriend once who changed her cat’s name from Eddie to OJ because he was a pure killing machine.
Yes, I’m dating myself.
“Yes, I’m dating myself.”
Well who else would?
Why would you declaw a cat, PJ? It’s borderline cruel!
It was the only way to appease Mrs. Holiness. It was declawed or no cat.
Besides it made him tougher.
So bring in some Koreans to take care of the cat population, problem solved.
Pfft. Koreans eat dogs. You are thinking of the Chinee. Get your stereotypes right dude.
Well now I’m embarrassed. I must commit seppuku.
… that’s the Japanese. Y’all got the whole trifecta!
And then what? We gotta import a bunch of Japanese to exterminate all the Chinese or Koreans we brought in to eat the cats?
I swear, I saw this on a show one Sunday night years ago.
Then you bring in gorillas to kill off the Japanese. The best part is that the gorillas will all die come winter. Problem solved. A “final solution”, if you will.
Nukes out for Harambe.
Hated Chinee!
Speaking of birds and the Vikings stadium….
*story also mentions the Vikes and the Sports Facilities Authority are spending $300K to decide if the stadium really is a killer.
Not NYT level, but not too bad for the JV.
I give it a C.
I like this, too:
I just got a bunch of garlic scapes from my aunt last week. I truly stink like a Korean now. I can’t resist them sauteed in butter though.
I’m pretty sure Minnesoda will never run out of loons.
Growing up in the Midwest I can assure you all of the loons that are too delicate for Chicago end up there.
Things I did not know – heard this from my potential adoptee and confirmed by my wife, citing a current case against a local school.
“Restraint” can be used as a method of punishment and control in Michigan. Special needs kids can actually be tied to a chair. Or in my adoptee case, kids can be pinned to the ground and held down with their armed pinned to the sides. He said it is often used for the smallest slight, depending on who is giving out the punishment. I can see cases where this could be
abused, or even leading to death (like a kid with asthma).
More info here
Thoughts?
and another article
My step brother once nannied for a couple of families with special needs kids (autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, ADD, etc). Both he and the parents took training in how to property restrain them and had to do it every so often. The school, though, was a different story. They had to spend upwards of a hundred grand building a special “safe room” specifically for the one kid so he wouldn’t hurt himself and the teachers wouldn’t have any liability for it.
“Right now, in Michigan anyway, it’s semi-anarchy,”
Yes the schools run by the state, where competition is strongly discouraged, is an example if anarchy. If only the state was more into be education, this couldn’t have happened.
Clearly they are not spending enough on education.
I could definitely see that being abused.
But,
My aunt had a special ed student they would restrain. Calmed him right down for the rest of the day. She eventually started the day off with it and would not wait for the kid to get rowdy. She figured it was working the same way as swaddling a newborn for him.
That is actually a legitimate therapy.
OT: Crazy old man shakes fist at
cloudCanadian music grants.http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/taking-care-of-canadian-music#t=2m
The derp is astounding.
Also note that he has a weekly program on the state broadcaster.
TVO? Are you Canadian?
I doubt B.T.O. got a grant – or any of those bands from the 60s. Andy Kim, The Band, B.T.O., Anne Murray, Paul Anka, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and so on…they all seemed to do just fine without one. Not sure why some of them would pull for grants and/or Cancon.
In YOW.
Would it have killed you to say ‘Ottawa’? Or OTT? Or Daniel Alfredsson?
Praise Alfie!
Wasn’t me.
Eric Trump’s New Haircut Reminds Twitter Of A Certain White Nationalist
You know who else had a hair cut that is associated with white nationalists…
Rachel Maddow?
Now we can’t even play. Nice.
Charlie Chaplin?
Edgar Winter?
Moby?
I feel bad for the kid. He’s what? 10? And he gets attacked verbally by leftist sociopaths?
You’re thinking of Barron.
Accoring to Eric’s bio he’s :
probably older than ten.
Physically at least
You mean the Trump Organization isn’t run by a 10 year old? But yeah, i was thinking of Barron. So I take it back. They can make fun of this guy as much as they want.
Interestingly, that’s almost exactly the haircut of Swiss Servator.
So… according to my well-placed sources – Swizzy is actually a white nationalist working for the Jewish Cabal who is secretly funding Glibertarians; who are a front political organization for destabilizing the western world, leading to anarchy and lack of roadZZZ!
SHUT UP!
*narrows gaze*
A special kind of derp.
She culturally appropriated Howdy Doody’s hair.
Isn’t Bruno a PoC?
Thoughts?
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE
This is how the EU ends.
Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia are forming a coalition which opposes demands by the European Union that they meet certain quotas on accepting migrants.
Uh oh, Austria. Not good optics…
Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth both make Austria-Hungary sound like a ptetty mellow, easygoing place before everything went sour. I say, bring it back. There must be a Hapsburg descendant around somewhere to pick up where old Franz Josef I left off.
Karl von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia. He had also already produced an heir, Ferdinand Zvonimir von Habsburg, so you might get a few stable decades from then at least.
Linkedin should have a category for potential restorers of hereditary monarchies.
Bring back the Austro-Hungarian empire!
It’s pretty much K-und-Karia! Just need Bosnia and bits of Romania and Poland to complete it!
You know what other Austrian didn’t care for foreigners?
I can’t think of one. I remember one Austrian guy who nobody could accuse of being Islamophobic.
Don’t forget the Handschar Division
They sure did buddy up when they identified a common enemy.
No Poland as part of that?
I hear all the Poles are working as plumbers and truck drivers in France and Germany.
When I visited Germany’s wine country, many years ago, I asked the proprietor/tasting room lady (one and the same in many properties in Germany, unlike say, Napa), “Who do you use for farm labor? You can’t use that many machines on a 30 degree plus slope. In the States, we have illegals, mainly Mexicans, to do it; who do you use?”
She replied, “Oh, we have Poles.”
No idea if they were expert at harvesting and grafting too. Which leads to another funny story that the people at Thomas Fogarty used to tell. Fogarty was a surgeon (and inventor of the embolectomy catheter) before going into winemaking. Surely someone with his manual dexterity could learn to graft grape vines just as well and as fast as these fieldworkers. Nope. Not even close.
The Poles already don’t allow any refugees.
Anyone remember those stories of “refugees” in the EU getting resettled to Poland and then promptly sneaking back across the border to Germany because the benefits were better in Deutchland?
Send the migrants home, these people are not refugees.
I think even the EU is admitting now that they are mostly economic migrants.
I don’t know how I can trust wave after wave after wave of males aged 16-35 flooding in from war-torn nations, largely leaving the women behind to be taken prisoner by psychopaths like ISIS.
If their homelands are worth fighting for, why aren’t they fighting for them? And if they’re not fighting for them, tgen why should we tolerate their numbers coming in and overwhelming enlightened nations that their core belief systems seem incompatible with?
Build a safe zone in western Iraq and/or truck them to Riyadh and train them to fight against their homegrown oppressors.
The House of Saud wouldn’t survive them being relocated to Saudi Arabia.
Didn’t Austria vote in a Green or left-wing party? I would think they support the migrant policy; whatever that is?
Wasn’t that overturned due to massive voter fraud?
That was the presidential race I believe. I don’t recall how powerful that position is within Austria.
They elected a president from the green party, but because they have one of those backwards parliamentary systems the president is head of state, not head of government and has little actual power.
By the way, thanks for the well wishes concerning the wife’s c**cer scare. Turned out to be a big NOT! Whew. She’s out having a few with her friends tonight and I’m with the kiddo. She earned it. Family. Don’t take it for granted.
good to hear!
That’s good! I’m glad everything is ok.
*high five*
Congrats. When do we get pics?
Four comments in. We’re really slipping.
His new avatar isn’t good enough?
It’s certainly titillating, but not sufficient.
*slow clap*
Congrats!
w00t! Thanks for letting us know.
Good to hear. Now you can breath a little easier.
Fuck c**cer! Great to hear.
Excellent news. Book a stomach pump for the wee hours of tomorrow morning. She deserved it.
Good stuff.
Thumbsu upsu!
Excellent!
That’s awesome!
Tell her to get wasted for Q.
So this was an elaborate scheme on her part to set up a ladies night out? You’re going to call her 30 minutes before it starts and tell her that you’ve got to work late tonight and can’t watch the kids after all, right?
Great to hear.
w000!
Woo hoo, congrats!
Fantastic news! How wonderful for you guys!
Congrats
Save the sharks
Who is Nina Dobrev?
Some actress. Who likes sharks. And looks good in swimwear.
Meh. I see better amateur talent every day I go to the beach. God bless the fashion designers who keep making the backs of fashionable swimwear smaller.
Skillet Lickers? Ah shucks, you sure know your way into your woman’s heart!
Gillespie said that immigration is the clitoris of the right, but skillets are the preferred clitoris of gentlemen Glibertarians.
mmmmmmmm–bacon!
I’m not a fan of the death penalty because I think the govt fucks up too much to be trusted. BUT, cases like this make me wonder.
Holy shit that is a twisted case. And read it because there is a sick plot twist in there.
That’s one the prison population may have to sort out.
If he’s in genpop and they find out what he’s in for, they will.
Sentences consecutive, totaling 52 years. Eligible for parole after 2/3rds, which is 34 years. I am not overly concerned about the sentence being too lax.
He won’t last 1/10 of that time in genpop. I’d give him 3-4 months before some ‘accident’ leaves him unable to walk.
Depending on who he manages to make friends with, he might serve his time and come out in one piece, but I doubt he’ll come out anywhere near fully-functional.
Stick him in solitary. That’s a fate worse than death. The don’t call ADX Florence a cleaner version of Hell for nothing.
Maybe I’m an unsophisticated rube, but this kinda sounds like BS.
https://aeon.co/essays/delayed-orgasm-the-sexual-technique-thats-better-than-sex
TW: Pretty long.
PS: “She isn’t currently a lesbian”. Wait, I thought it wasn’t a choice? Or is it? I can’t keep up. Yes, I’ll just go sit in the corner and put on my BIGOT cap.
Homosexuality is a choice when it needs to be a choice for the narrative of the moment, and it isn’t one when it needs to be for the narrative of the moment. Homosexuality is choice-fluid. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Open your mind, homophobe!
Our ancestors that faced death and pestilence at every turn on their way to subduing every nook and cranny of this entire planet must be so proud of us.
Hard men create good times; good times create soft men; soft men create hard times; hard times create hard men. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So if I’m Bannon, and I’m planning my diabolical, social media strategy over the next week, it looks something like this:
Friday: The Senate passes the AHCA+
Saturday: Trump tweets, “Homos are sissies”.
Sunday: Watch the Sunday morning news shows go all apoplectic.
Monday: Trump tweets, “America–Fuck yeah!”
Tuesday: 4th of July BBQ at the White House!
Wednesday: Business as usual.
Why Gun Nuts Lie – I Know From Experience
“I live in Texas. I’m a gun owner. I have a concealed handgun license. I’ve taught my kids how to fire weapons.
“I also understand and appreciate our Constitution. I’m fully aware of the 2nd Amendment, and how its authors wanted to prevent government tyranny. Considering what they had gone through, they had every right to demand such a thing.
“I know enough about weapons to have a near perfect score on my firing test, to know that the “c” in SR9c stands for “compact” to make the weapon easier to hide; and to know that the AR in AR-15 doesn’t stand for ‘Assault Rifle,’ but ‘Armalite’ after the original company who made the gun….
“Am I a gun nut? Maybe. But I like to keep myself skeptical and informed….
“I could hand you 50 AR-15s, give you 1000 illegal bombs, steal you a couple of tanks, and smuggle in some bazookas, and even let you fully train 500 of your closest friends.
If the government wants your shit, they’re going to take it….
“So stop acting like your little AR-15 is going to stop tyranny.
“Just be honest. You like it because it makes your pee-pee big, and when you fire it, it gives you a tingle in your no-no place.
“Trust me, I understand.”
This sounds a lot like the “I used to be a libertarian” posts some of you guys have linked to in the past.
“Stop acting like your little AR-15 is going to stop tyranny”
Funny how a bunch on illiterate goat herders in Afghanistan with little formal training and inferior weapons have managed to defeat the two major powers of the last century. I guess they never got the memo that armed individuals have no chance at defeating a big, bad government with all the fancy toys.
Don’t forget resisting brownshirt “antifascist” mobs, “social justice activists” trying to burn and loot your store while the National Guardsmen sit around pounding their puds, etc.
Doh! I was too slow.
But I think you are so clever and smart!
I’S TEH SMURTEST!
I never like this comparison, it’s dumb because it’s entirely ignorant of the actual military logistics, terrain and ROEs going in regards to the Afghanistan fight. We’re talking some of the best ambush and guerrilla warfare terrain on the planet, something that vast amounts of the United States lacks, not to mention the complete lack of infrastructure that favours lightly-armed guerrilla fighters. The Taliban also have the benefit of having large parts of the population economically dependent on them. And the current ROEs used in the conflict tend to get thrown out when its your own civil war. Even during the troop surge American forces were not engaging in the sort of tactics that would eliminate an insurgency. Afghanistan only defeated the Soviets because a bunch of these factors, along with massive foreign support, and they only beat the British because their expedition was incompetently managed and their supplies were cut off.
I mean, sure, if you want to be a guerrilla unit hanging out in parts of Arizona and Montana taking pot shots at convoys and planting IEDs, that’s fine. But you’ll never win or be able to take over major infrastructure (which the Taliban could, once everyone leaves). All it takes for you to lose is for the ‘loyalists’ to operate on par with the tactics that eliminated the Tamil Tigers. Right to bear arms is more successful as a resistance measure in a civil society, in a civil war? Not so much.
Now if a couple national guards and states, along with parts of the military seceded, that’s a different scenario altogether.
I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you. To make my point, let’s do a thought experiment.
Let’s say that the govt decided to go full totalitarian with 100% support of the military (a scenario I consider to be highly unlikely, but let’s run with it). There are ~150,000,000 gun owners in the US. Let’s say that 30% of them are willing to take up arms and fight. Of that 30%, let’s say 10,000,000 side with the totalitarian military. That leaves an irregular force of 35,000,000 people. I may be mistaken, but that would be the largest army in human history.
The US is vast with lots of empty, inaccessible space (not so much as Canada or Afghanistan, but still significant). Also, I think you underestimate the amount of support this irregular force would get from the populace at large. Fighters could blend in with local populations just like the Taliban and conduct guerilla campaigns then return to the vast empty spaces. Could they outright win? Maybe not. But they could carry on an endless insurgency that would sap resources and drain morale. Superior technology and even numerical superiority is a poor substitute for fighting spirit. I think the cost for the military to put down such an insurgency would be a pyrrhic victory because it would come at the cost of exterminating a large chunk of the populace. It wouldn’t really matter at that point anyway because the country would be dead as we know it. But saying that having an enormous, irregular militia is no match for the government, regardless of particular circumstances, is just plain wrong IMO.
Your force estimations are some of the most generous, optimistic and entirely inaccurate I’ve ever seen. They call themselves the 3% for a reason. You’re assuming that almost a third of males aged 15-64 will not just contribute to a military campaign but every single one of them will actively fight in it. This is absolutely nonsensical and not reflective of pretty much any conflict in human history, ignoring the realities of you throwing in people who own hunting rifles into some magical rebel force that will immediately form in response to some perceived slight. Not to mention the fact that you haven’t even separated out female from male gun owners (female infantry, even in a guerrilla scenario, are still vastly inferior). Your thought experiment falls flat on its face because, as I pointed out, this argument is based on entirely false assumptions on how insurgencies operate.
The US is vast with lots of empty, inaccessible space (not so much as Canada or Afghanistan, but still significant
Yes, inaccessible space that cannot support anything close to what you’re talking about.
Even if you take your figures seriously, you completely ignore the actual realities and logistics of maintaining the fighting ability of any force. Yes, you have the ‘largest army in human history’ (an army noticeably made up of plenty of green, inexperienced and entirely untrained personnel) but you can’t feed the bloody thing. Without modern transportation systems shuffling food into various population zones you are forced to acquire goods and loot the local populace, something that historically never ‘wins hearts and minds’. You’ve got guns, great. How are you supplying irregular ammunition to your irregular forces? Oh, convoys and production faculties you say? Those don’t make tasty drone targets. Your thirty-five million army would be plagued by supply problems, and on top of that, be completely chaotic with an incoherent command structure, resulting in plenty of rogue elements, so expect a lot of raiding, looting, sexual assaults, etc. being carried out, fairly or unfairly, in your organization’s name. That’s the nature of civil war. If you expect thirty five million armed citizens, most of which likely have completely different motives, to suddenly conform into a rational military command hierarchy before they’re hit hard by government forces you know nothing about insurgency. Also, it’s entirely laughable that an American gun owner is on par with a member of the Taliban who has been in combat zones and tribal conflict for decades. Americans are plenty soft in comparison. Expect mass desertions at the first sign of trouble. Your ‘fighting spirit’ comment pretends that all these American rebels are noble individuals willing to throw their whole lives away for principles. Utter nonsense.
Fighters could blend in with local populations just like the Taliban and conduct guerilla campaigns then return to the vast empty spaces.
Fighters who have just spent the last couple decades giving all their identifying information to a state that is rapidly growing its surveillance infrastructure could hide just like Taliban in almost feudal country. Sure.
I think the cost for the military to put down such an insurgency would be a pyrrhic victory because it would come at the cost of exterminating a large chunk of the populace.
A civil war is a Pyrrhic victory in the first place. The point is you will be eliminated and they will succeed. Great, you caused a generation of death and horror. They still get to do what they wanted, but now with a significantly cowed populace.
You basically have to ignore every reality of what organized opposition is actually like to pretend this is a realistic scenario that will result in a positive outcome for ‘your side’. It’s not a matter of ‘an enormous, irregular militia being no match for the government’, it’s a matter of a soft, largely poorly trained, poorly supplied, and poorly managed guerrilla force getting rolled by a competent, well-trained, and battle tested modern military with overwhelming air superiority. Again, the Tamil Tigers got wiped out for a reason, projecting how Americans operate in Afghanistan is bloody stupid because it’s not reflective of how civil wars actually tend to go. You have a highly romanticized view of how insurgencies operate given your nation’s history, a more modernized conflict would not go anywhere close to how you imagine. This time you don’t have an ocean separating you from the people who will stomp you.
You sound as if you’d almost relish the possibility. You’re correct it would be bloody, horrific and hellish. There would be no winner. As I said, relative strength, logistics, training and supplies all aside, it doesn’t really matter because if it ever gets to that point, the country’s already dead. The second amendment has, IMO, two primary purposes.
1. Personal self-defense.
2. Putting enough fear into the government that they would judiciously avoid such a scenario outlined above.
As long as there are enough armed people to act as a stopgap from becoming North Korea, I’m satisfied with that. I certainly do not have stars in my eyes that freedom loving, liberty crusaders would smite the evil govt and usher in an era of libertopia. If such a scenario did occur, I’m not sure they’d be rolled as easily as you assume, but even if they were at least there is the opportunity to defend oneself. Many (most) in similar situations never had that luxury. You also gloss over that the Tamil Tigers fought for 35 years before finally being defeated. Yes, they lost. What did any of it mean? Damn little, but you could say that about many conflicts. The option of fighting in a last resort situation is the primary reason 2A retains such broad support, rather than just either submitting and starving or being shuffled to a prison camp. All empires eventually fall, the US is no different; as the saying goes, on a long enough timeline all life expectancy goes to zero. Let’s both pray that these theories don’t get field tested in our lifetimes.
I love this logic:
Premise 1: 2nd Amendment is to help protect against tyranny.
P2: The Government is too Powerful to fight against.
Conclusion: Therefore you shouldn’t have any rights to any weapons.
I’m not sure if it’s quit non-sequiter, but it is definitely beside the point.
“Just be honest. You like it because it makes your pee-pee big, and when you fire it, it gives you a tingle in your no-no place.
“Trust me, I understand.”
I own guns.
I am retarded.
Therefore, everyone who owns guns must be retarded.
QED
Different people are into the same thing for different reasons.
I’m into the idea of forging my own 1911 for the same reason I’d like to build my own bike or build my own cabin.
http://www.jjfu.com/damascus/21qhandhd729kr8ml856nf007tqig5
It’s like saying that the Civil War was all about slavery. Maybe it was from an overall perspective, but almost 3 million individuals participated–and individuals do the same thing for different reasons. Some were abolitionists, and some were pro-slavery. Some were conscripted, and some wanted an adventure. Some did it because their buddies did it, and some of them joined for revenge or to resist incursions and slash and burn strategies by the North. Individuals do the same thing for different reasons.
AR-15s don’t interest me personally, but I still want the freedom to choose not to own one.
My folks are like that. They’ve never owned a gun and have never been interested in owning a gun, but they defend the right of other people to own them. Yeah, different people support the Second Amendment for different reasons. Incidentally, they’re not Catholic, but they support the First Amendment protections of the religious rights of Catholics, too.
I own a Mosin Nagant for two reasons. 1) It has historical value to me as the main battle rifle used against Nazi Germany by the Soviets (and because I’m too cheap to pony up for a Garand) and by the Lithuanian Resistance following WWII. 2) It’s actually a main battle rifle, aka, “Assault Weapon” and it even has a bayonet! So what if it wouldn’t be very effective against an actual military force? That’s not the point. If, God forbid, I had to fight the U.S. Military, I would work with others that are better armed than I.
Mosin Nagant? Are you planning to be the Simo Häyhä of your regiment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
That guy is a pimp and a half.
In pure infantry-engagement terms, you really don’t need much more. And I really think that sending Cav or Armor for anything other than intimidation into smalltown USA is unlikely. As a local you’d have intimate topo experience, presumably a support network, superior logistics and (after a few days) probably more boots on ground. Most important facility would be some way to protect (enough of) your gear from confiscation when the inevitable confiscations start.
Furthermore, a lump of lead in something near 30 cal, whether fired from an AR-10 or a Krag, is gonna leave a bruise. You really don’t need much more than a WW2-era battle rifle. It’s quite capable of conspiring with you to fend off an assault, even by guys with better armorment.
It’s actually a main battle rifle, aka, “Assault Weapon” and it even has a bayonet!
Technically, it is more of a battle rifle due to the caliber, not an assault rifle. Although in modern terms, as a bolt action it is neither.
I’d like him to explain why – if they are so unstoppable – our armed forces haven’t turned Afghanistan into a place of complete tranquility? Sure maybe the govt can take your shit, but can it keep it if they have a low grade revolution on their hands. Don’t you also have to factor in the deterrent factor? The govt isn’t going to be so quick to take your shit if they know that the first guy on the scene might get his ass shot off.
It always boils down to the idea that “It is OK for me to have a gun, but you guys are too stupid so we have to restrict them”, doesn’t it?
This is the worst case of projection I’ve seen since I was 12 years old and I went to see Batman and the movie theater started playing the wrong movie.
I’m always reminded of a passage from the Gulag Archipelago (I think) when I see things like this.
The prisoners were lamenting that if only they had ambushed the enforcers sent to get them with what ever makeshift weapons they could find, the communists would have run out of willing enforcers long before they could have rounded up everyone.
““So stop acting like your little AR-15 is going to stop tyranny.”
Idiot doesn’t understand the most common form of tyranny takes the shape of your local constabulary.
Wrong, numbnuts, on several counts.
1)The M-4 has largely replaced the M-16 as the primary firearm of the both the army and the Marines.
2)The M-16A2 and M-16A4 which comprised the vast majority of US armed forces’ M-16s were most certainly not fully automatic. The M-16A1 was the last widely-issued M-16 to fire auto. The A2 and A4 fire only in 3 round burst. There IS an A3 which is fully automatic but it was issued only in tiny numbers to some SEAL units.
3)The reason the military went away from full automatic after the A1 was because the majority of shots fired in full auto are wasted. Well-aimed semi-auto fire >>>>> spray and pray
THANK YOU! Just once, it would be nice if they hired people actually knowledgeable in the subject they’re writing about. I guess that’s asking too much.
Holy shit…..what a disingenuous, lying sack of shit this guy is:
This Ain’t Hell, whatever else you may or may not think of it (definitely not a libertarian site, way too much copsucking, but stalwart on 2A issues), compiles stories of people using their firearms to prevent crimes. On a daily basis.
O’Keefe strikes again!
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/cnn-producer-trump-probably-right-about-russian-witch-hunt/article/2627180
Leftists are of course saying “it was taken out of context”, which is ridiculous. What is remarkable about the tape is the producer gave the context. He didn’t just say “this is bullshit”. He explained why it is bullshit. He made the obvious point that any honest person with any sense should already know; that if there was any actual evidence supporting this claim, someone would have leaked it by now. The fact that there has been no such leak is pretty conclusive proof that this is a witch hunt. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying, stupid, or both.
Welcome, John. How is the Porsche? And IMS issues?
The “upgraded” IMS exploded a couple of years ago. So, I ended up getting the engine rebuilt at a place up in Connecticut. They put in the IMS Solution which is just the old 964 oiled system. So I now have the greatest 996 4S on planet earth. I will never get my money back. But I love the car and the engine will be paid off some day. And my wife didn’t divorce me. So there is that. It’s a long sorted tale that seems to have turned out okay. The only downside is that I can never really sell the car since its value as a driver will always exceed its value on the market.
Ah, good to know. I’ve been toying with the idea of going down the Porsche road with a lowly used Boxster S. I’m already throwing away good money on a fleet of BMWs (ok – Mini Coopers) so why not? I never thought I would become such a handling addict.
A Boster S is a great car. My advice would be to buy an 09 or 10 if you can afford it. In 09 Porsche finally gave up on the IMS bearing and went back to the old self-oiling system. So, those cars are pretty much bullet proof like the old ones used to be. They are also wickedly fast. A 2010 Boxster S is faster than a air cooled 993 generation 911. The other thing is that Boxsters are no longer flat sixes and no longer normally aspirated or come with a manual transmission. So, a Boxster with a normally aspirated flat six and a manual transmission is likely to hold its value pretty well. Those cars are getting towards the bottom end of their depreciation.
If you can’t afford one of those, get one that was made 05 or later. Those have the final design of the IMS bearing and have by far the lowest failure rate.
Good info to know. These days I only drive manuals, which is getting harder to do even with performance cars. At this rate when I’m an old man I’ll be stuck with a 20-30yo car.
You won’t be the only one. Manuals are for car people what turntables are for music people. Its what all the cool kids want.
I’m in the same situation. Looking to buy a used Porsche Cayman.
LH, we should talk Porsches and Mini Coopers sometime.
I’ve got two MINIs right now, with a third being bought this Thursday. All newer BMW ones though I would like to buy a vintage/Austin one someday.
My favorite: the 2003 Mini Cooper S. Sure it’s not very fast compared to a V6 anything these days, but that supercharger whine, and the close-spaced transmission along with the short clutch travel makes for a very fun car. The steering feels like its wired to your arms – great feedback which makes me want to do stupid things around corners.
I’ve owned several MINIs, my favorite being the first generation. The new ones are too big and heavy which is why I’m looking into a used Porsche.
When My father first saw the modern BMW Mini:
“That isn’t a Mini, it’s huge!” .
The other story is that my parents had to sell their Mini in ’69 when my mother couldn’t fit behind the wheel when pregnant with me. They did keep the Aston-Martin DB4 for a number of years after that, it didn’t do well in the US winters.
Yeah. That’s SOP for O’Keefe, claim it was out of context (sometimes it is) but when i watched the first blurb, it was hard to say that it was out of context. The guy volunteers that information man. It almost seemed like he was frustrated with the CEO of CNN for pushing something he saw that was blatantly false. It’s that strange thing where Individuals will know that what is happening is wrong, but will go along with it in the group because everyone else is doing it.
He can’t say it publically because not only would he lose his job and his career, he would likely lose all of his friends. Imagine being a Washington reporter and calling bullshit on what amounts to the last article of faith among your peers about Trump, it wouldn’t end well for you. These people are vicious to apostates.
We’ll get it right this time. Trust us.
Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy. In an era when liberties are under attack, it seeks to empower civil society to allow participation in the decisions that affect our lives. A huge state bureaucracy, of course, can be just as alienating and undemocratic as corporate boardrooms, so we need to think hard about the new forms that social ownership could take.
Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care) guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of their birth.
We can get to this Finland Station only with the support of a majority; that’s one reason that socialists are such energetic advocates of democracy and pluralism. But we can’t ignore socialism’s loss of innocence over the past century. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures.
Trumpian “populism” will be the death of us, but we should definitely give socialism another shot, because modern socialists have rejected totalitarianism. Honest.
Why does this always happen? In the beginning, they start to get it. They at least mention the danger of a huge state bureaucracy.
And then they hand wave it away in the very next paragraph.
They are going to think hard about it. They are going to come up with some new forms of bureaucracy that will work differently than every other bureaucracy in the history of civilization. They can’t tell you what those forms will be, but they promise they will happen and they are really thinking hard about it.
Figuring out a way to make government guide society without running over the individual is kind of the entire problem. And they, of course, have no solution for that problem but pretend they do. It’s like me selling you a car that I claim runs on tap water. Sure, getting an engine to run on tap water can be difficult. So we are going to have to think hard about new forms of engines that will run on tap water. Now, let me get back to the important stuff about the wonders of cars that run on tap water and why you need to give me your money and freedom in return for my promise to build one.
Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing, and health care) guaranteed as social rights.
And when the wreckers stop working because they are guaranteed one standard of living regardless of how hard they work or how much they produce, the collective will just have to deal with them the same way they deal with the exploiters who work outside of the collectives to create capital and use it to exploit people.
We have been down this road so many times. Why don’t these dumb asses be honest and admit they just want to enslave everyone and live off the fruits of their labors and plan to murder anyone who refuses to be enslaved?
So. Much. Derp.
socialism is an ideology of radical democracy
Yeah, In the sense that everything is the purview of other people to make decisions about your life. Not in the fantasy sense of democracy where when you say the word the world magically turns good and all the bad things go away.
A huge state bureaucracy, of course, can be just as alienating and undemocratic as corporate boardrooms, so we need to think hard about the new forms that social ownership could take
He’s got a good point there. I struggle to find any corporation that has been as efficient at killing people in masses as the government has. And since Violence is what the government produces, it makes sense that they are efficient at it.
Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market;
I See, if we just say things now, they will magically work the way we envision them. Do you even Econ Bro?
The term “worker-owned cooperatives” is one of the evilest lies ever told. The term “worker owned” sounds so enticing if you didn’t know any better. Hey, why can’t everyone own the company and work together? What the term and its supporters never mention is the necessary implication of the term; namely that if the workers own everything no one else can. Those worker-owned cooperatives will compete against each other. That means you as an individual can’t compete. The workers own everything meaning you own nothing. It’s not hard to figure out. Yet, for centuries people somehow have convinced themselves not to do so.
You read that description, and it’s almost exactly what Maduro is doing in Venezuela right now.
For those of you who haven’t been following, Maduro is calling a constitutional convention for the sole purpose of abolishing the constitution of Venezuela.
He wants to replace the entire federal government apparatus outside the executive with local workers’ councils.
It’d be like the old Weimer Republic conundrum again–should a democracy be allowed to vote itself out of existence?
Only there’s no way the opposition will participate in the constitutional convention elections.
Anyway, point is, that’s more or less what that article is talking about. Let’s get rid of this silly democracy with constitutional rights business, and get real democratic with workers’ councils.
One of the reasons the progressives have come up so short is that because they overestimate their appeal, they oversell their cause. The middle class was more or less happy with their healthcare before ObamaCare. The middle class isn’t entirely unhappy with its standard of living now either. They think the average American is going to support radical change–but most Americans aren’t living in crisis mode. They’re getting together with friends and family to have a barbecue over a long weekend, and they think they’ve got it pretty good . . . because they do have it pretty good.
And you tell me that we’ve got to fight back
For the suffering masses–whoever they are.
Maduro is having a hard time selling his change–and their inflation rate is up over 700% and their economy has imploded more than 30%. Why would average Americans want to change things so drastically?
Because of Trump?
He wants to replace the entire federal government apparatus outside the executive with local workers’ councils.
“Local workers’ council” is a fancy term for local mafia. If people like John Gotti had gone to college and learned about Marxism, they might not have ended up in prison. The Gambino family wasn’t a crime family. It was a local workers’ council for construction workers and garbage collectors.
Well, whatever they are, they aren’t a republic of laws that exists to protect people’s rights and put a check on the President.
Violence is sometimes the answer.
I don’t think Venezuela’s government can be ousted through democratic elections. The opposition might try peaceful protest in the face of government oppression and destabilize the government that way a la Tunisia, but short of that, they’ll need a violent revolution to get rid of Maduro and his cronies.
They have the world’s largest oil reserves. You’re not getting rid of them so long as they can continue to finance their own existence with oil–regardless of whether they can feed their own people.
At some point, things may have to get violent before they can get better, NAP or no NAP.
I have a friend who lives in Washington who is one of these think tank types who specializes in “political risk”. A few months ago she was talking about the various legal wrangling in Venezuela and I told her that none of that matters. Maduro will remain in power just so long as he has enough military and police who are willing to kill to keep him there. That is all that matters. The only thing that removes someone like him from power is the gun. The time to worry about legal niceties has long since passed and if the Venezuelans want him out, they are going to have to kill him and enough of his supporters to make the rest of them give up. She thought that was the most barbaric thing she had ever heard. The real issues here were legal and political. Sadly, she and that mentality are the vast majority of what passes for thought and wisdom in Washington. Thoughts like mine and yours are for ignorant knuckledraggers. If you ever wonder why the US government does so many stupid things overseas, my little example gives you a big reason why.
I read a recent article that listed all the drug trafficking charges that the Obama administration piled up on the Maduro government–and not just in his cabinet, the police, and the military. The Obama administration put drug trafficking charges on judges on the Venezuelan supreme court, too.
That means that if Maduro loses power, all those people will probably spend the rest of their lives in an American prison.
Even the Venezuelan supreme court has a vested interest in keeping Maduro in power.
There simply are no legal means to remove him left–none that reasonably attainable anyway.
You have to look at governments like that the same way you look at criminal enterprises. You don’t just join a gang. You have to commit some crime for the gang or they won’t let you in. The reason for that is the gang wants to have something over you so that you can’t walk away. Governments like Maduro’s work the same way. They only let people in positions of authority after they have been compromised by committing some bad act. That way, they can’t ever turn against the government without risking facing justice for whatever bad acts they have committed.
What’s sad is that they deliberately suppress those kinds of thoughts. A good friend of mine who is a liberal Democrat, but honest and willing to self reflect, uses me as a check on those kinds of idiocies a lot of the time, since he knows if I call him on bullshit, it will be accurate. However, if he tries to bring up that kind of harsh counter-factual to his supervisors, it gets shot down right away, since it isn’t the way they think. And he works for an international relations advisory firm, doing work for the government and private companies. This is the kind of thing that keeps my mom Contracting, because firms will internally lie to themselves to keep their culture consistent, and my mom is brought in to cut through the bullshit and achieve compliance in her field.
Our government and those around it is a giant bubble of groupthink. There are some questions that just can’t even be asked much less considered. For example, that the US should be the guarantor of peace and stability in every region in the world or the “power of choice” in every situation is something everyone in government of all political persuasions takes as a given. In the same way, socialists act like 1989 never happened and socialism is still a viable system, everyone involved in foreign policy thinks the system of US-backed collective security that arose during the Cold War continues to this day and anyone who says otherwise is a dangerous isolationist. The reality that that system was a product of the cold war and that the cold war is over and Russia and China object to that system and will continue to do so is not to ever be considered.
Yes.
It doesn’t matter a gnat’s nips how much they try to essentialize socialism to get out from under the stigma: there is no basic enough form of socialist philosophy that can simply plug into an extant society with minimal disruption. It’s not a USB device that extends functionality without totally fucking up the OS: it requires entirely reformatting civil society, and so however well-intentioned and minimalist the essential philosophy, it’s going to result in privation and riots and breadlines. That’s not an unfortunate misstep, it’s a necessary byproduct of upending market economies and nationalizing industries. You don’t toy with the incentives and restraints defining tens or hundreds of millions of people and their many, complex relations with one another and expect it to result in anything other than bloodshed and immiseration.
That NYT piece you posted yesterday advocating free-market healthcare had me worried I was in the Mirror Universe. Glad to see the NYT is back to being its regular old pinko self.
I want some of what he’s smoking.
http://pagesix.com/2017/06/19/jeff-zucker-viewers-trust-cnn-more-than-ever/
CNN boss Jeff Zucker says despite Donald Trump’s war on the network and what the president says is “fake news,” he is certain that CNN maintains the trust of its viewers, as it extends into digital brands to attract a younger audience.[…]
“…those who rely on CNN trust CNN more than ever.”
He’s probably right. He didn’t say they deserved their viewers’ trust, only that they have it. Basically it’s a statement on how retarded his audience is.
“More than ever” is a relative term. It just means they trust CNN more they have in the past. That doesn’t require viewers to have ever trusted them in the first place to be true.
Also, if ever more people who don’t trust them are switching it off, then they have a dwindling, self-selected audience of true believers. They’re not shredding their credibility, they’re cultivating a more elite audience! That’s the ticket!
+1 Spinal Tap
That is a good point. When only the true believers are left in the audience, your audience likely will trust you more than ever.
No, Peter King Is Not A Socialist
Fat dumbass SI writer Peter King professes his love for universal health care. Deadspin, who usually takes delight in shitting all over him (me too, Peter King sucks), defends him. He’s not a socialist!
Anyway, ironclad logic here:
More importantly, claiming that universal health care equals socialism is really silly. The idea that the government should take care of paying for health care is not a radical socialist idea any more than the idea that the government should take care of spraying water at burning buildings, or finding and prosecuting the guy who dumps a million tons of poisonous industrial waste into the food chain, or maintaining a system of national defense so that the country is not conquered by an invading army. It is generally compatible with most socialist ideas, but so is bathing, and nobody calls you a socialist for taking a shower.
Of the famous Peter King’s, he isn’t the worst.
It is generally compatible with most socialist ideas, but so is bathing
Not from the footage I’ve seen.
“claiming that universal health care equals socialism is really silly.”
Citation needed.
Damn, I completely glossed over this part:
Accordingly, all types of people, with all different types of professed political programs, are down with this. Socialists, sure, yes, but many others, too. There are libertarians—many libertarians!—whose idea of a minimalist “night watchman” government includes a universal health care system, for the same dweebishly rational reasons as inform all their other positions. You can’t get a whole lot less socialist than the frickin’ libertarians, man!
I’d like them to show me one actual minarchist libertarian who believes that such a government includes universal health care.
There isn’t one.
I’m all for universal healthcare. Let everybody keep their money so they can afford healthcare if they want it.
There must be some out there, to be sure.
Which libertarians are the referring to? Bill Maher?
Rationality is bad, mmmkay?
This underscores the blatant vapidity and mendacity of the left.
THE STUPID ASS LEFT:
You nerdy ass libertarians with your economics bullshit don’t feel for the common man! Just grind them under the boot heel of big business!!
ALSO THE STUPID ASS LEFT:
You dumbshit libertarians don’t fucking love science as much as us! Nate Silver just proved that the minimum wage can be $100/hr with charts and math! Sorry you’re just too much of a pussy to let go of your emotion to not worry about being “controlled”
You would think using exact opposite characterizations of your opponent would cause a moment of pause to ponder how that can be; but stupid ass left
That’s a horrible equivocation. Bathing is not associated with Socialism at all. They are separate. Nowhere in the socialist ideology do you then derive that you must bathe. Just because socialists are also human, and some of them think bathing is a good idea, does not mean that socialism indicates that bathing is good. Nor does any political ideology (unless you’re a Baathist?).
*يضيء النظرة*
…Right, and could you imagine if the feds nationalized showers or intervened as the single-payer for shower-related expenses? Shortages and rationing within months.
You know who else had nationalized showers?
I walked right into that.
You know who else…
See below, I should probably read up thread…
Well, I can sort of imagine. That is why I removed the restrictor from my showerhead.
A literal socialist Paradise! End the class hierarchy of smelling good!
Except government showers emit Zyklon B instead of water.
Flash Poll: Which is worse?
A: Peter King
B: Deadspin
Where does Gawker fit in?
c: Yes
Go on TV and make an ass of yourself, and *shocker* you’re fired.
That she compared herself to Nancy Grace as a positive is telling.
Fuck, listen to her for 10 seconds and you know she is a human time bomb. They are the people who everyone shuts down around because you know that some day she is going to explode and take you out if you are anywhere nearby.
Those are the same people who take the lack of pushback from anyone as vindication of their world view. The cycle continues until they are completely unable to figure out why they are in trouble for saying outrageous shit.
My cousin suffers from these. It’s supposed to be one of the most painful conditions a human can experience; mothers who experience them say that it’s light-years worse than childbirth. People have been known to commit suicide over the pain. Of course, the government has to save us from ourselves by restricting research on the devil shrooms that might offer these people some relief.
http://onlineathens.com/features/health/2017-06-26/people-s-pharmacy-hallucinogen-psilocybin-may-relieve-cluster-headaches
I have never heard of that. That is is just ghastly. I hope that drug works.
OK, I’m convinced, it’s our John!
It’s good to see you, man!
Good to see you. And it really is. Honest.
Has Sarcasmic come over? We need some back and forth over fat vs skinny women to be really sure.
Tits and Ass are proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Last I hear, Sarc was headed for a nasty divorce.
When the walls start breathing, you’ll know.
Alright, I’m convinced. Welcome to the Glibertariat, John.
Dire predictions have been made about how long you will last here; I’m betting that without a troll infestation pushing your buttons, you’ll be fine. I’m thinking we need a pool.
+1 Cat butt
I don’t think we will get a troll infestation. And I lasted longer than many on Hit and Run.
How long anyone lasts here isn’t entirely up to them. The admins have catbutted and banned a couple of trolls in pretty short order, that I know of.
Sadly, you have to. It is one thing to disagree. You want some of that. But there is an entire group of people who do nothing but go on boards and fuck with people. And you can’t have a board if you have those people on it.
It is also the manner in which you disagree. I’m hoping this board is civil and avoids juvenile name calling and derogatory personal comments. Sadly some lack the capacity for adult discourse.
That’s a shame. I only come here to wind Caput Lupinum’s stem. 🙁
… which is very small, I have to add.
Proposed Pain Ladder:
1. A personal invite to “Warty’s Workshop”
2. Cluster headache
3. A quiet evening ‘in’ with STEVE SMITH
4. Gall stones
5. Childbirth
Cluster headaches ain’t no joke. My neurologist said imagine someone sticking a screwdriver in your head and leaving it there for a month. He said that would be preferable to a cluster headache since eventually you’d probably become accustomed to the screwdriver.
I once had my sinuses “pop” during the landing of my flight. It felt like my skull was slowly being cracked in half.
It sounds like cluster headaches make that sound like a walk in the park. Godspeed if you’re afflicted
My dad used to get cluster headaches about 25 years ago. He’s a really tough guy. Told me once that when he got them, he could understand why people would commit suicide.
Oddly enough, he hasn’t had one since he divorced my 1st step-mother, 🙂
I had brutal headaches, probably migraine but maybe cluster, that came close to breaking me – puking, vertigo, pain, passing out kind of headaches. They came on while I was in my first BigLaw job, went away when I changed firms, then came back and peaked in my second BigLaw job. They disappeared when I quit the firm and my divorce went through, more or less simultaneously.
Another one for SCOTUS’ next term, they’re going to take up the New Jersey case where FedGov is disallowing them from allowing sports betting in Atlantic City. This could be an interesting one.
It’s funny, goddamn near every remaining social taboo has been aggressively dismantled in this our modern age, and the one bugaboo everyone can still seem to agree on is wagering.
Unless the state sponsors it, then it is a-okay.
It’s funny, because on my mind gambling is a waste if money. But I have a friend who lives it. On this mind, he gets free drinks, and a good time, and it’s worth the money he looses when he goes.
I had more fun taking pictures of the races than losing money on the horses. That reminds me, I got a pretty good shot of one race.
The only use I’ve ever had for a casino is the poker rooms, but I just don’t see how it arouses any passion from people as a moral issue, especially in this day and age. For a few hours worth of entertainment you can recklessly drop a couple thousand bucks at the craps tables on the strip, or you can spend the same amount taking in a NBA playoff game, or a broadway show, or collecting Beanie Babies. Every state has legal strip clubs of one type or another. There’s only 2 states where casino gambling is legal statewide. It’s just a weird hang up, I think.
So last night I dropped $80 on a nearly 100 year old 2 pfennig German coin. It is made of near worthless zinc, and wasn’t even legal tender when it was produced, much less now. People call me a nerd or idiot for doing that, but no one thinks I’m immoral because of it and that a law must be passed to protect me.
But if I had taken that $80 to a casino and spent it on an hour worth of entertainment guessing what number or color would come up on a roulette table…hide your children!
It is one of the more bizarre puritanical streaks people have.
CNN maintains the trust of its viewers
A fiercely loyal cohort numbering in the dozens.
There are libertarians—many libertarians!—whose idea of a minimalist “night watchman” government includes a universal health care system, for the same dweebishly rational reasons as inform all their other positions. You can’t get a whole lot less socialist than the frickin’ libertarians, man!
PETER SUDERMAN IS NOT A LIBERTARIAN.
Neither is that simpering boob Soave.
Suderman’s arguments yesterday against the Senate bill/AHCA were almost as bad as Chapman’s over the weekend.
And Chapman’s article against cutting Medicaid over the weekend was the very worst article I’ve ever seen at Reason.
It was worse than Shikha saying that deporting Illegal aliens is like enforcing the fugitive slave act.
Suderman is completely contradicting everything he’s said in recent years. Gilmore was giving it to him yesterday for that, and it was barely scratching the surface.
Calling Soave a boob is an insult to breasts everywhere!
I can’t believe they gave him time off to write a book.
I’m hoping that’s like when instead of firing CEO’s, they give them more time to spend with their family.
I ignore his articles.
Who wants to read his book?
Can you imagine being Robby’s book editor?
He can’t go two paragraphs without saying something untrue, foolish, or self-contradictory.
Oh, I do. Badly.
You mean as comedy?
Sure. It’s like watching bad movies for the unintentional comedy.
When it’s published, I shall waste no time in obtaining a copy.
I’ll buy it only if he calls it To Be Sure.
To Be Sure, It’s Problematic
Just for the sake of reference, here’s Suderman from yesterday contradicting what he’s written before–seven ways to Sunday:
http://reason.com/blog/2017/06/26/cbo-senate-health-care-obamacare#comment
Just look at the headline:
“New CBO Report Says the Senate GOP Health Care Bill Would Make Obamacare’s Problems Worse”
Then look at this quote from his own article:
“Starting in [2020], CBO estimates that premiums would be lower than under current law by about 30 percent.”
P.S. 2020 is when the Medicaid eligibility cuts start to take effect.
Too bad Crusty and Citizen X aren’t here to call you a sexist for calling someone a boob.
Sparky used to complain about Groovus often agreeing with RC – did he ever bitch about Crusty and Citizen X? Those two – and I like X, meh on Crusty – are joined at the hip.
My complaint about Crusty, and for that matter many of the remainers, is the hipper-than-thou stance. Yes, we get it dude. Taking a side is soooo lame.
There are very, very few remainers I’d like to see here.
I’m pretty much in agreement with all of that. Sparky is just plain insufferable, almost as much as Nicole and Hazel.
Only one major American city made the top 10 list of “most joyous places on earth.”
Please tell me the residents plan on celebrating by riding recklessly though the town on horseback shooting off six-guns into the air, screaming “Yaahhawwww!!!” Because that would just be awesome.
Uh, only recent immigrants from less well disciplined gun cultures do that in Houston. Everyone else just drinks margarita slushies and gets loud.
I keed. I keed.
Try driving around the South Valley in ABQ on New Year’s. You’ll get plenty of the drunken ranting coupled with celebratory gunfire. There’s always at least one person that gets injured/killed from falling bullets every year. Commodious knows.
I was driving across the San Pedro bridge yesterday with the windows down and the city had a crew out burning weeds along the bike path behind the interstate wall, and I thought Damn, I miss living in the valley.
riding recklessly though the town on horseback shooting off six-guns into the air, screaming “Yaahhawwww!!!” Because that would just be awesome.
You forgot drunk and blindfolded.
Today in hot women of Twitter, I give you Anchilla Van de Leest. Anchilla is a model, producer and privacy activist from the Netherlands. I have no idea what she has to say about privacy but I certainly want to hear her say it.
https://twitter.com/ncilla?lang=en
Look forward to reading your submission, John. Write one up.
I will. I am going on this really stupid road trip with my father at the end of this week. We are going to meet in Canada and drive up through the Canadian Rockies to Alaska and then back to Canada. The more I think about it the more I think I was nuts to agree to it. The trip up will be pretty cool but I have a feeling the trip back is going to get a bit long. But I am committed. It is going to be a once in a lifetime thing. And I get along with my dad, so it should be fun. I always wanted to get him to go on a trip but figured it would be to New York City or maybe Germany or something. But he never wanted to do that. He decided out of the blue he wanted to do this. And with two people and spliting the costs, it isn’t that expensive. So I said yes. So I will be out of pocket for a couple of weeks. Assuming I don’t get eaten by a bear or run over by a moose, I will submit something when i get back. Promise.
How is that a stupid road trip? It sounds awesome!
It is just so long. We should have driven up and flown home. It is not a stupid trip. It should be awesome but it is kind of a crazy trip. It will be like 12 days of driving 8 hours or more every day. But, it should be cool. See places I never thought I would see and likely will never see again.
And she’s Dutch. You know what that means…
Splitting the bill?
She likes black licorice?
She’ll pay for her own dinner?
You’ll put one in her oven?
The Dutch gene pool produces some of the hottest, if not THE hottest women in human history.
And without further adieu, I am proud to present the most anti-libertarian, dumbest article in the history of Hit & Run:
http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/25/illusory-savings-from-cutting-medicaid#comment
Congratulations Chapman, you had some stiff competition from Dalmia and Soave, but you reached down deep for the golden derp on that one.
Even for Hihn, that is one helluva meltdown.
Dude really needs some Thorazine. Not joking.
He didn’t even understand that I was in favor of cutting Medicaid.
He somehow thought I was against cutting Medicaid–I guess because Shrike said (without any reason to do so) that I defend Medicare.
There’s no addressing that kind of derp. He’s unhinged.
UnHihnged?
When you’ve got Shrike, Tony and Hihn all chiming in, it’s time to leave. At least for me. If you guys enjoy that, enjoy.
The Straff does not abide.
…nor suffer fools gladly.
Wow.
Not taking is giving.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” means you can’t get more out of less government–and that’s what being a libertarian is all about.
The only correct point in Chapman’s toilet paper worthy article is that the GOP constantly tries to maintain that they’re going to help everyone by cutting services, an argument which constantly gets skewered.
Instead, the GOP should argue that by cutting Medicaid, they’re pushing people back into a health care market which will (or should) better serve them. Unfortunately, they’re not doing enough to restore an actual market for people to participate in. They’re just dancing around the edges of reform.
I don’t understand how Democrats aren’t rejoicing at this proposed bill. It extends the life of their shitty healthcare system and makes Republicans arguably responsible for it.
How does cutting the Medicaid rolls by 14 million people and ending the individual mandate extend the life of their healthcare system?
How doe moving people from Medicaid to private insurance with subsidies–like Milton Friedman would move kids from public schools to private schools with vouchers–extend the life of their healthcare system?
The bill makes the government smaller by cutting $880 billion in spending, and cutting Medicaid eligibility.
The Republicans aren’t heralding that because those things are unpopular in swing states and with moderates.
The Democrats are lambasting it because they see the libertarian things it does.
Reason staff aren’t supporting it because they’re either clueless or they aren’t really small government, anti-socialist libertarians.
Because I don’t that Obamacare is sustainable, and this slightly extends its life by making it less of an economic disaster.
But it’s still an economic disaster waiting to happen with the preexisting conditions and community rating system. And it will overall still cause a race to the bottom in insurance quality.
It isn’t sustainable, but this is what it looks like when it crashes.
The implosion is already all around us. It’s falling in around our ears.
The alternative to this probably isn’t something better than what’s been proposed. It barely squeaked by in the House because it was so libertarian, and it may not get by in the Senate for the same reason–they don’t want to cut Medicaid and ObamaCare basically is the Medicaid expansion plus some bells and whistles.
If they don’t pass this, they’ll probably reauthorize the backstops, protecting the insurance companies from their losses. If it continues imploding from there, the solution probably won’t be cutting Medicaid–it’ll be single payer and nationalized healthcare.
Certainly, cutting Medicaid and getting rid of the individual mandate are good things–regardless of whatever else we do. Refusing to do good things in the hope that things will get worse and force a more libertarian solution just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
If they can’t get cutting Medicaid passed now, they’ll probably turn to more socialist and authoritarian solutions just to get something passed. Doing nothing is the unpardonable sin in election campaigns, right? And we’re not talking about libertarians. Trump can get support for doing something socialist from moderate Republicans and democrats if he has to. And he doesn’t want to stand for reelection after doing nothing.
One of the problems we have to contend with is that making the government smaller isn’t very popular.
From both Chapman and Suderman’s article, you can find the following three facts:
1) The CBO says 14 million people will be cut from the Medicaid rolls in 2020.
2) The CBO says there will be savings of $880 billion over ten years.
3) The CBO says that insurance premiums in 2020 will be 30% lower than they are now.
The first one of those items is massively unpopular–but it’s what makes the other two possible.
And it’s not just that without 1), there is no 2) or 3), it’s that there can never be a lowering of insurance premiums in a market without cutting Medicaid (or Medicare) from where they are now.
In those cases, I think the right thing to do is to pass the libertarian legislation even though it’s unpopular, and let the people either reelect you or not based on the outcome. It’s the outcomes that are truly important.
I didn’t oppose ObamaCare because it was unpopular–I opposed it because it was authoritarian and socialist. I certainly wouldn’t support authoritarian and socialist policy just because it was popular.
It works the other way, too.
If cutting Medicaid is unpopular, but that’s the only way to improve the system, then it may be okay to advocate good policy and try to win people over to it over the course of the next election.
Libertarian capitalism isn’t necessarily popular–yet. I advocate those policies anyway. We’ve got a chance to do something massively libertarian here. Jesus, I hope they do it.
It’s not like I’m advocating that anyone’s rights should be violated like were violated under the ACA. Quite the opposite. I support the ACA, in part, because it stops government violation of people’s rights via the individual mandate.
And it’s not just that without 1), there is no 2) or 3), it’s that there can never be a lowering of insurance premiums in a market without cutting Medicaid (or Medicare) from where they are now.
A sizable chunk of commercial market premiums goes to cover cost-shifting from government programs, especially Medicaid. I think you can absolutely lower premiums without cutting Medicare or Medicaid. Cutting them without doing anything else will lead to a couple of results (probably both at the same time, because it will reduce revenue to health care providers:
(1) More cost shifting and thus higher premiums.
(2) Less capital investment in health care and reduced supply – longer wait times, etc.
OCare was built on the belief that moving some of the current uninsured into Medicaid would result in less cost shifting, because the costs of the uninsured also get subsidized by commercial premiums. Premiums haven’t gone down during Medicaid expansion, but that doesn’t mean they will go down because of Medicaid contraction. Cost shifting is only part of the problem – OCare also added a raft of requirements for commercial insurance that ran up the cost as well.
Deregulation of both health care providers and health insurance will reduce commercial premiums. Reducing top-line revenue to providers may or may not – it depends on what the people who have been kicked off those programs do for health care.
If you really want to lower premiums,
I think it’s important to understand that the AHCA isn’t cutting reimbursement rates per se. It’s cutting the eligibility requirements.
We’re not talking about cutting the reimbursement rate per patient. We’re talking about cutting 14 million people from the rolls. We’re making the Medicaid percentage of hospital admissions smaller.
I would be concerned about the rate of uncompensated care going up as the number of people on the Medicaid rolls went down, but that isn’t the way it’s happened in the past.
As the Medicaid rolls doubled, there was virtually no impact on the rate of uncompensated care. It was between five and six percent before we piled those people onto Medicaid, and it’s between five and six percent now. If taking people off Medicaid increases the percentage of deadbeats, then the percentage of deadbeats should have decreased as Medicaid enrollment doubled.
This time with the link:
http://www.aha.org/research/reports/tw/chartbook/2016/chart4-5.pdf
“uncompensated care” is listed up top.
the AHCA isn’t cutting reimbursement rates per se. It’s cutting the eligibility requirements.
If you pay me the same rate on half as many patients, my top line revenue goes down. Health care facilities are hugely cap[ital intensive with high fixed costs – its the top line that counts.
As the Medicaid rolls doubled, there was virtually no impact on the rate of uncompensated care. It was between five and six percent before we piled those people onto Medicaid, and it’s between five and six percent now.
Be very careful about how people measure “uncompensated care”. It doesn’t necessarily, or even usually mean, pure charity care for the indigent uninsured. It often includes the actual costs of providing Medicaid (and even Medicare) that aren’t covered by the reimbursement from those programs. It varies, but a good rule of thumb for hospitals, at least, is that Medicaid covers maybe 25% of the actual cost of providing the service. You can increase Medicaid enrollment without putting a corresponding dent in “uncompensated care” – a reduction, but not an elimination of uncompensated care, for the newly covered population.
Medicaid can actually make things worse if it induces the newly covered to make more use of health care services. What we see is that this population is used to going to the ER for their care, so they keep doing so only more often. The net impact on our top line is positive, but our uncompensated care is basically unchanged, as is our our bottom line. The effect on cost-shifting is probably roughly a wash.
“If you pay me the same rate on half as many patients, my top line revenue goes down.”
Not if you’re losing money on those Medicaid patients.
If you’re losing money on half as many patients as you were before, you’re losing less money and your bottom line is more profitable.
Not if you’re losing money on those Medicaid patients.
Top line revenue, Ken.
If you’re losing money on half as many patients as you were before, you’re losing less money and your bottom line is more profitable.
That depends on their usage patterns. If they keep coming to the ED anyway at the same rate, we lose more on them. If they go away entirely, our bottom line goes up. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
They put a footnote on what they meant by uncompensated care:
Uncompensated care represents bad debt expense and charity care, at cost.
I do not believe that bad debt is about Medicaid or Medicare.
There’s another footnote there on the private payer calculation (3) saying that they had to adjust for changes in the way those bad debts are accounted for. In other words, the bad debt appears to be accounted for within each category separately. If private payer bad debt is accounted for under private payer rather than “uncompensated care”, then bad debt due to Medicaid and Medicare probably isn’t listed under the “uncompensated care” category either.
The upward pressure on health insurance rates due to Medicaid is because Medicaid puts downward pressure on the bottom line.
Alleviate that pressure by making hospitals more profitable, and, according to the CBO calculations, insurance rates drop by 30% from where they are now in 2020.
Losing top line revenue to suddenly become profitable–without gouging private pay patients for 150% of cost–is the free market goal here, right?
That’s what the solution looks like.
I don’t see the appeal of continuing to keep Medicaid enrollment high–if that’s what’s causing insurance rates to be so high.
Certainly not because if we fix the problem of Medicaid forced gouging, it will make people go to the ER because they’re used to getting medical care now.
Both Republican plans cut the Medicaid rolls and make those people eligible for subsidies to go buy care on the private market. If they’re used to medical care now, maybe they’ll use their subsidies to buy health insurance.
I’d have to look at our AHA survey to see what is really included in bad debt and charity care. I’ve seen unreimbursed cost included in uncompensated care – it shouldn’t be “bad debt”, but keep in mind this is a lobbying organization that generates reports to get political results.
In AZ, Medicaid expansion is funded by a tax on hospitals. Our Medicaid revenue is up, but netted out against the tax, we’re probably $1 – 2mm ahead. We should be $10 – $20mm ahead, but the state is skimming the federal matching funds to pay for other shit.
We haven’t been able to attribute a single penny of revenue to the insurance market “reforms” in OCare.
“In AZ, Medicaid expansion is funded by a tax on hospitals.”
That’s just adding insult to injury.
Or burning the candle at both ends.
It’s evil.
Increase the cost of treating patients by expanding the Medicaid rolls and “pay” for it by taxing the providers?!
Makes want to believe there really is a Satan, and he’s setting healthcare policy.
Cutting back Medicaid coverage would save taxpayers some cash, but only by taking it from others.
That is a really interesting sentence. I would be curious to know how exactly the government or anyone really is supposed to save money without necessarily taking it from the people you are currently giving it to. Sure, cutting off your cable service and watching Hulu and Netflix will same you some cash, but only by taking it from Comcast. That is literally the same logic as Chapman is using here.
Chapman is more than anything, really stupid. You can’t write that sentence off to dishonesty, because it is so stupid that someone being dishonest wouldn’t think it would help their cause. Chapman really is that dumb.
The funny thing is this is all just a waste of time. Even if this bill actually passes, the Medicaid cuts are political theater only. They’re designed to be killed at some point in the near future and will be.
I’m not saying they should be, of course, but they will. It’s a game.
Republicans are the party of pretending to cut stuff and Democrats are the party of pretending to care.
Medicaide is for poor people and a joke anyway. Most poor people don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up for it. Medicare is where the action is and is a real program. Medicaide is nothing but a government jobs program.
I’ve always thought the great irony of Medicaid is that it completely relies on the private compassion of doctors.
Doctors cannot really make money serving Medicaid patients and most who do throw in some Medicaid patients at the back of the line out of the desire to help people only. They charge more to those with private insurance to compensate (so it’s not just our taxes that are paying for it).
I disagree.
They’re designed to go into effect after the next election–because they’ll be cutting 14 million people from the Medicaid rolls and those people can vote.
Regardless, I’m not against cutting Medicaid because some future congress might reinstate it any more than I’m against legalizing marijuana because some future congress might make it illegal again.
We’re not talking about theater. We’re talking about law, not theater.
If the Senate passes this and Trump signs it, Trump will take credit for it. Campaign promise kept!
And then the Democrats won’t be able to reinstate the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion unless they can get majority control of both houses of congress and a Democrat in the White House.
I suspect cutting Medicaid eligibility may seem surreal to a lot of people because it’s never happened before. We didn’t think it was possible. Well it is possible. And if the Senate passes it and Trump passes it, the Democrats won’t be able to reinstate it unless they win huge in 2020. But that’s always the case with any pro-capitalist, pro-libertarian outcome.
Future congresses can undo the smart things we do today, so we shouldn’t do smart things today?
Ok, good points.
You’re telling me putting off important offsetting budgetary considerations to 2021 and 2025 is a cynical punt? Say it ain’t so!
That’s… something, alright.
I see the comments got Hihn’d and are their usual shitshow.
Cutting back Medicaid coverage would save taxpayers some cash, but only by taking it from others.
Christ on a crutch is that some weapons grade derp. Not giving is taking, etc etc.
Also, I really wish every stupid fucker who ever argued about the wondrous benefits of Medicaid had to actually use it. I’d like to see Chapman sit in a filthy Medicaid clinic and wait for 4 hours (with an appointment, mind you) because they have to cram through 300 patients a day to make money, to spend 8 minutes or less being seen by a bottom-of-his-class physician assistant or nurse practitioner who can’t diagnose anything but strep throat and the clap, with 30 year old equipment that more often than not doesn’t work, and then lecture me on how “comprehensive health insurance is a good thing to have”. It was certainly comforting to my dad while he was dying from sepsis from a prolonged infection that never got properly addressed despite repeated visits to the local Medicaid mill.
That is a rough story. It’s getting pretty bad here with the national healthcare system. Difference is that the medical professionals are all well educated and still have a sense of honor demanding they do the best job they can despite the negative incentives. Over the years, I’ve seen more and more misdiagnoses and the amount of time spent with the doctor dropping.
Jesus Christ.
I went back and clicked on your link, Ken, and it’s nothing but white space, intermixed with the odd comment from paloma, gaoxiaen, rudehost, and a few others. Everyone else, I’d chucked into Reasonable awhile back.
No wonder I (and a bunch of others, I’m guessing.) left.
This is the same guy who wrote that the problem with Obama’s recovery policies for the 2008 financial crisis was that interest rates weren’t low enough, that money wasn’t cheap enough and that the government wasn’t printing and handing enough of it out to the banks. Let’s just call him, Chaptron the Invincible.
And she’s Dutch. You know what that means…
Stick your finger in the dyke?
^^ winner
I have a Russian Blue. He plays fetch and he’s definitely a helluva lot smarter than your politician.
http://domesticcatworld.com/russian-blue-cat
I have had a Siamese tomcat and a little female tuxedo that would play fetch. My current cat is this giant calico that is 100% spooky kitty. She wouldn’t play fetch if you put a gun to her head.
A Russian cat, eh? Can you confirm his whereabouts last November 8th?
He did come home with a surprising amount of rubles that night…
I’m not a cat person. I mean I like cats…just not in my home.
However, if I ever change my mind, the Russian Blue is what I would get.
My Indians scored 13 unanswered runs after being down 9-2 to win 15-9.
So baseball went from being awful to amazing in 2 hours.
I’m a Phillies fan. Existence is pain.
Cutting back Medicaid coverage would save taxpayers some cash, but only by taking it from others.
Let me guess (I’m sure as fuck not going to read it).
If you cut government-payer coverage, those sick people won’t be able to push their costs off on somebody else (i e, the taxpayer), but will be expected to actually be financially responsible for the services they receive. What a fiendish plot.
Yep. The text after that sentence reads The reduction would raise costs for low-income people and most likely degrade their health.
It would also increase the financial load on hospitals, which treat a lot of people who have no coverage. A study by scholars at Northwestern University and Columbia University figured that each new uninsured person costs nearby hospitals an average of $900 a year.
You could make the same argument for every government service no matter how inefficient or unnecessary. Sure you can save some cash by not paying for that downtown sports stadium. But the reduction in cost would raise the costs of operating for the local NFL team and degrade their financial health. It would also increase the financial load for fans, which pay for the football team but now will see higher ticket prices as the team passes the cost of building the stadium along to their customers.”
That is the exact same logic that Chapman is using here. And it is just as valid in its own screwy way as Chapman’s point. Chapman sees the reality that if the government doesn’t pay for something someone else will have to if they want it to happen and takes that to mean that the government not paying for it is some kind of zero sum game such that cutting spending really isn’t cutting spending. It is some first rate stupid, even for Chapman.
Fun fact: Oregon’s Medicaid lottery, which predates the ACA, did not result in any improved health outcomes. If giving people Medicaid doesn’t improve their health, then taking it away won’t reduce it.
It did not make people healthier because insurance is not the same thing as care. Moreover, there is no magic power to preventative care. One of the many and bigger lies that the people who wrote Obamacare told themselves was that preventive care made people healthier. This is one of those lies that only intellectuals are dumb enough to believe. On the surface, it makes some logical sense. If you treat people early, they are healthier, right? The problem is that when you think more deeply about it, something intellectuals never do, you quickly realize it is not true. Why? Because if it were true, insurance companies would be paying for more preventative care than they do. Insurance companies more than anyone have an incentive for their insureds to stay healthy. And if preventive care made people healthier and consume less health care than it cost, insurance companies would be paying for a lot more of it than they do.
The fact is that preventative care rarely makes much difference. If it did, not only would insurance companies be paying for it, people would rarely be sick. No one wants to be sick and nearly everyone would pay for care that prevented that even if they had to do so out of their own pockets.
More than that, most diseases and health problems do not lend themselves to preventative care. If there were some form of care that could prevent them, they wouldn’t exist. You know what a great example of preventative care is? Vaccines. People want to act like all preventative care works like vaccines and it doesn’t. In fact, almost none of it does.
Most “preventative care” that actually works isn’t medical or at least doesn’t require a trip to the doctor. Food safety, clean water, prophylactics, first aid, etc.
What passes as preventative care is essentially medical testing on asymptomatic people. Which is expensive right off the bat, and produces false positives, which are also expensive to clear up. The savings on early detection of disease are also questionable – depending on the disease, early detection doesn’t necessarily mean a quicker, cheaper resolution of the disease – it can be more expensive.
So, yeah, a scam.
Very true. And ironically, the same idiots who drafted Obamacare are also likely to not see those things as important or take them for granted or worse be actively against them in the name of the enviro religion. DDT was one hell of a method preventative care for tropical diseases.
It’s a little unsettling when the Supreme Court is unanimous. It’s a serious job, they should be animous at all times.
F**k censorship.
Seems like something HM should have posted.
I don’t see what you did there.
I’m still not sure how to categorize this “Circa” news source.
aside from their ‘we format everything for mobile even on the regular web’ thing…. can’t really figure out their partisan slant or their relative degree of bullshit-clickbaityness
Black off duty cop shot by white officer. Shot cop’s lawyer says that he can’t believe he was treated like an “ordinary black guy”.
No, really.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/06/25/a-black-off-duty-cop-tried-to-help-stop-a-crime-another-officer-shot-him/?utm_term=.2132800f163b
Oh for fuck’s sake!
“See, we’re totes cool with gunning down ordinary black guys. But one of our black guys, man, that’s just different.”
The tone-deafness is revealing, isn’t it?
Here I thought maybe something like this would lead to introspection about excessive police force, not some tired racial re-tread. Silly old idealist me…
Anyone here work in B2B-type acquisitions?
I’m trying to get a basic idea of what people who buy commercial products for their companies do when looking for new solutions (for example – just an example! – if you work for a service company and you need an asset management solution for your technicians – how do you get started researching various options? What’s the next step after you’ve found some options?). It’s a huge difference in marketing when dealing in the commercial space vs. consumer space, especially on the internetz.
We’ve been tasked with pushing the commercial/B2B products on our web site as our top priority. Just looking for basic info to get started.
No – but our B2B solution, provided by our ERP vendor, was a complete disaster. It also didn’t work very well for the retail side, especially with the tax calculation portion.
Do you work on custom solutions, or with existing products? As an example, the way that salesforce promotes themselves is going to be different than a firm that works with making salesforce kind of worthwhile will promote themselves.
We have our own products we’re selling in the IoT/M2M space. Some of them are platforms on which customers can develop their own solutions, or use one of our certified add-on solutions. Some are just straight-up installation of the product.
– Go grab a report from Gartner on which vendors are in the magic quadrant.
– Engage them in a bake-off on features/functionality/price, which will vary in thoroughness depending on how big a purchase this is and how core to the mission it is.
– Collect their bids, possibly bid them against each other for a couple iterations if it’s big enough to be worth the effort. Contract terms review is included in this process.
– Make decision and purchase.
That’s for stuff that’s relatively sizeable. For penny-ante stuff, we’ll just buy whatever widget the requestor decided they wanted by googling it and/or playing with the demo version.
The company I’m still working for operates in a bit of a different method.
– Make decision
– Get Gartner reports
– Put together a requirement document
– Watch demos
– Buy the one they decided on first, even if it doesn’t meet all of the requirements
– Defend decision using the sunk cost fallacy
A tried and true process to be sure, with optional “boondoggle trip paid for by vendor” if you’ve got a real player on the team.
OOps – HTML fail
Do you do this online, or do you contact a sales rep personally? What kind of interactions do you have with the potential suppliers’ web sites, if any?
Personally, I make sure the criteria for the bake-off are well-defined, and I deal with a meat-world entity as high up the food chain as I can find. I expect to end up dealing with a subordinate of the guy, but I avoid website interaction as far as possible.
Talking to a person immediately singles you out as ‘serious’ and gives you a known path to deal-makers.
I use the website exactly like you use a candidate’s resume in a hiring situation — I’m skimming it to make sure that you check all the right boxes to decide whether you get short-listed for the “interview”, but I’m not using it to make the decision. Once the short list has 3 or 4 vendors on it, then I’m contacting sales reps and arranging demos and presentations in person.
Things I would look for:
– First and foremost, a clear description of the functional capabilities the product/thingy/whatever has. DOES IT DO WHAT I WANT OR NOT? In some kind of easily digestible checklist, table, or matrix form. A collection of thoughtfully curated screenshots is most welcome. I might sit through one or two short demo videos if they are focused on showing me what the thing does.
– If you’ve got a matrix comparing your functional capabilities to competitor products, I’m probably going to take the time to look at it. Yes, it’ll be skewed in your favor , but I might see something there that I think “ooo, I didn’t think of that but now that I know about it I need it”.
– Information on pricing and/or different pricing models (i.e., per user, per transaction, enterprise licenses, whatever). It’s not an automatic DQ if you don’t specify any pricing, especially for larger-scale or more custom solutions, but if it’s there I’ll look at it.
– If you have a list of flagship customers, I’ll look at it. Mostly what I’m looking for is, “do they know how to deal with a company the size of mine?”. I don’t really care about all their “testimonials”, I just want to know if you understand how to service a gigantic/big/medium/small customer.
– Obviously, overall look and feel of the site makes an impression. Again, it’s a resume. I expect it to show a high degree of polish and to look like someone bothers to keep it up to date.
I think those are the main things. I’m not spending hours researching the website, any more than you’re spending an hour reviewing a resume. I’m hoping to get in, understand whether this should make my short list or not, and get out in 10 or 15 minutes.
Super helpful! Thanks!
I’d start crashing industry conferences, conventions, and trade shows for whatever industry you’re serving. The important ones may not be the ones in Vegas if your targeted market is concentrated elsewhere.
In commercial real estate, FWIW, those networking opportunities are crucial for finding out what’s going on in finance, which banks are lending and if they want both your first and second born children as collateral, what markets are hot, as well as looking for development opportunities and land. A lot of it is about developing personal relationships with people. Many of our investors are other developers because of that. And when we need to know what’s going on in one of their markets, we can go to them directly.
So, we get a lot of information by talking to other people in the markets we’re developing in, and each of those markets usually has a periodic networking event where we get the really important information. Sometimes those events are when an economist is invited to talk to us at a winery in Temecula. In other markets, it might be to watch strippers boxing in downtown LA. Apart from other developers, we get most of our useful information from brokers–and the important conferences are usually put on by the brokers themselves.
If your company knows the important conference (again, it might not be a big convention in Vegas), they might contact whatever association is putting it on and offer to help sponsor it. Then you get a slot to speak to all the important players in one room, and more importantly you get a chance to meet, shake hands with, and drink with them.
I can’t emphasize enough, the guys you want to talk to probably aren’t congregating in Vegas. They send their underlings to Vegas.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. Take it for what it’s worth.
We engage in a shitton of trade shows. Ours is usually the most visited booth (because we’re awesome). Looking more for how purchasing/acquisitions interact with a potential vendor’s web site vis as vis decision-making. Do you even look at the vendors’ sites? If so, is it early in the process?
I don’t know anything about that.
In case I wasn’t clear – we’re trying to beef up our B2B WEB presence. We already do all the old-fashioned marketing stuff: trade shows, in-person sales, etc. Our IoT product revenue is increasing, so we want to make sure our web site enhances the other marketing efforts.
From my observation, a lot of the web strategy comes down making your site say as little as possible about what your product actually does, so potential clients are forced to talk to your sales guys. 😉
…only kind of joking, actually. I’m not on the marketing side of things but from what I’ve read and inferred the emphasis really is on making your site a funnel for contact info.
When it comes to big clients, a lot of that goes through RFPs, big IT consultancies like Accenture, IBM, or whatever the agglomeration of CSC and HPES is calling itself, and channel partnerships (a lot of overlap between the latter two, of course).
Let me ask this: if it’s an area you’re not that familiar with (or, hell, even if you are familiar with it), would you ever just straight up Google something like “lone worker tracking solutions”?
Well, I’d probably start with duckduckgo.com, but I’m paranoid.
You can certainly get a lot of peripheral information. I learned a lot about the developer community for SalesForce before we even shortlisted the product. It was one of the reasons I thought (and still think) that the platform is mostly hype, and getting that last 15% of the functionality you need is very very painful (we still bought it because the logo is pretty, apparently)
So sure, search the web – because some technologies advance so fast, that research you bought from Gartner (or whatever, if you did) may well not reflect the landscape today. You’re only gonna get a feel for that via a web search.
Sort of? I’d definitely start with Gartner or similar before google, but if I couldn’t find what I wanted there then what I’d be searching for is some “respected” industry rag’s most recent article on “the 10 best systems for xyz”. I would not just google “systems that do xyz” and then start clicking vendor site links UNLESS the thing I was looking for was so esoteric that I couldn’t reasonably determine a prevailing “top N” list.
You’ve been very helpful! I appreciate it!
My colleagues are obsessed with SEO for our IoT products, but I’m trying to steer them away from spending too much time on that. I just don’t think the web site is ever going to be the main driver of these kinds of sales, but we do need to make sure we’re covering the basics and making it easy for potential customers to contact us.
One of the things about SEO is that the ‘O’ bit tends to get expensive if you’re constantly revisiting it, especially if you want to stay on the first page for any search of “Wi Fi connected sex toy”. And really, who hasn’t typed that query in at least once – per day?
You’ll
blowexpend a ridiculous amount of time and effort getting, AND STAYING in that ranking, and really, most people’s initial search queries are so broad and often so poorly constructed, that all that effort could go to waste. How many of your target audience are this generation’s Alistair Cooke? (and if they were, why would they need a WiFi connected sex toy?)Should you guys do SEO? Sure. Take a few days to read some books, execute your good-enough-for-the-internet plan, and forget about it until the next HBS intern brings the issue up in a meeting. Then your marketing guys need to get back on their rolodexes and start developing sales channels. As Badolph says, identify market peers, build a capabilities matrix and leverage that.
I am well-versed in SEO. And I am on the marketing team. I just don’t want to spend much effort in pursuing SEO as some kind of be-all-end-all. Our IoT team is great at sales – our IoT sales are killing it compared to the rest of the company these days. We just need our web site to be the best it can be to complement the more traditional sales efforts. I don’t want to do anything else with SEO – I want to ficus on what acquisitions people are looking for when (or if) they visit a vendor’s web site.
That seems like sound thinking to me, especially for b2b versus consumer/retail offerings.
Oh, in that case, succinct message, spelled correctly that doesn’t have any red flags on Grammarly.com and avoids all but the most essential buzzwords.
Make it easy for visitors to self-route to the right team. That covers business business.
The meta-business of appealing to VC/PE/ACQ? All the stuff you’d expect as a capitalist, broad brush indicators of business growth, industry quotes, market aspirations.
My firm has an active PE group, but they’re not really looking at the tech space, but I trust their general business acumen. Just like reviewing resumes, there are immediate disqualifiers that they’ll apply. Spelling errors, hyperbole – all the normal stuff that will crash-land a candidate’s application for a job. Press releases are great, if they’re topical. Once they’re stale, pull ’em down, our guys aren’t impressed unless they’re recent, or outline some kind of news that subsequently panned out as a huge win for your business.
My only suggestion, as someone who’s researched technical solutions (as both a consultant to someone searching, and searching myself), is to offer as much information about your solutions as you can – up to and including a live demo if possible. NO ONE doing early research wants to “contact a salesperson” before they have any idea of whether or not the product will fit their needs. The typical approach we took as consultants was to determine what features were needed, using the framework of Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Would be Nice features and comparing the products against that. Once we narrowed stuff down that way, we compared price, interoperability with existing systems, etc. Then we’d make a recommendation from there.
Tough week for Trump’s critics: Flynn may have been targeted by the FBI for retaliation, CNN retracts a Russia story and fires high-level staff, another CNN editor is caught on camera admitting to their lies, SCOTUS upholds travel ban, the Sanders are being investigated for bank fraud…
So Salon declares it “No Trump Tuesday.” Or to be accurate, “T***p-Free Tuesday.”
It’s S***n-free everyday for me.
Is Trump-Free Tuesday on top of Fact-Free Everyday?
random question (and one related to my impending increased family size):
How do you handle alcohol with your (teenage? preteen?) offspring? It seems, based on what I saw in college, that kids who have very little alcohol access go crazy with drinking once they are free of parental restraints. If drinking wine – let’s say at dinner – is part of the normal routine, will this make a more responsible drinker? Or if you let your son or daughter have an occasional beer, will that “forbidden fruit” mentality go away.
I know when I was a freshman/sophomore in college I did a lot of drinking at parties. Once I turned 21 and could buy the appeal dropped a lot. I didn’t become much of a boozer again until I became part of the 90s punk rock scene here.
Possibly, and this has long been touted as a better option. Usually pointing to the always loosely defined “Europe” as an example of how this works.
But then you go to Europe and realize they’re all a bunch of chain smoking drunkards, so who knows.
I tend to think it’s all about the individual. I was never allowed to drink at home and didn’t really drink in high school. I got to college and obviously drank more, but I never went through that “forbidden fruit” phase of ridiculous excess at the first sight of freedom. The ridiculous excess came later and had nothing to do with the forbidden fruit mentality.
I’d guess for every goody two-shoes who turns into a raging alcoholic/slut/etc. once they taste freedom, there are just as many kids raised in relatively permissive homes who go down the same path.
Every kid is different. The unfortunate thing about adopting one is that you won’t really know right away how his values are, and you didn’t get any input in forming them. So it might be tricky to try to ascertain at first what the best approach would be. From what you described before, it also sounds like you have a lot of people up your ass going through the adoption process. Not sure if they keep following up with you afterwards, but you don’t want to do anything that might get you or the kid in trouble.
My parents almost never drank, but from when I turned 17, 18, they’d let me have one if I wanted it. I usually didn’t. Just wasn’t the type back then. it took adulthood to turn me to the bottle.
Yeah – we’re keeping things very very legal in our house.
He did tell me that he has smoked weed in the past but he won’t in our house.
Yes. Pour your preteen a smallish glass of wine for dinner. Something that a kid could drink like Lambrusco. I grew up like this and by high school, I was probably the only kid in my class that wasn’t a retard about consuming alcohol. Same was largely true of college. That and weed is really more my thing.
My cousin’s household though, his parents were strict prohibitionists of all things. His first year out of high school he got shitfaced and knocked up some girl he didn’t even remember fucking. Of his younger sisters, one got a DUI at age 20 and the other was briefly hospitalized for alcohol poisoning while in college. There’s really no doubt in my mind that they all entered a life of freedom completely unprepared because of their sheltered upbringing.
Broadly speaking, I think you’re right. Being a Euroweenie, I made sure that my kids saw adult friends and family members drinking socially, and (one of the good things about CT) on holidays like Xmas and 4th July, the kids have been permitted to drink alcohol under parental supervision at meals. My daughter isn’t a fan of wine, and occasionally drinks (from) a 12oz glass of ‘tame’ beer with sprite – the nearest analog to Shandy that America can provide.
My son’s potentially a different story. He’s far more susceptible to peer pressure, and just about to turn 16. We’ve done a low-key psyops program on him about how ridiculous drunks are, and we’ll have to keep an eye on him. I suspect he’s going to end up in a some kind of social event with his peers where alcohol is available, pretty soon, but I suspect (with all the prideful hubris a father can muster) that he’ll stick with cheap American swill and throw up after 2 Michelobs.
I’m decidedly pro-“Explode the coolness myth” on the issue. The thing I have to hide is the fact that when I used to get (very) drunk (very) frequently as a 17 year old, it wasn’t to be one of the cool kids. I was training to be the next Van Morrison.
Re: Shandy.
I’d like to apologize on behalf of all Australians for any role our nation played in bringing that abomination to life.
Putting sprite in Australian beer is one of the only ways to make it palatable.
Booooo!
I don’t give a XXXX for anything that you guys export.
Concession:
Some of the beers you don’t export are pretty good.
Everyone knows it’s clamato or GTFO.
I’ve been seeing a lot more of the breweries branching into Radlers, Shandies, and milds recently. You have to watch some of them, as the brewers don’t seem to realize one of the attractions of those beers is a low ABV (if your Radler is over 5%, just call it a damned fruit beer). At least the Stiegl Radler is finally getting stocked by some of the bars on my cycling routes.
The return of mild is a very welcome development. Mild & Bitter was my go-to summer drink back in Blighty.
It’d be nice to re-develop the relationship.
You hit it exactly, we would let them partake in appropriately managed amounts especially at family gatherings, backyard BBQ’s, etc. just to take the mystery out of it, starting somewhere around 14 or 15. It probably helped that we also model “moderation” as a behavior ourselves, neither of us pounds drinks down until we can’t walk straight. They’re both at the age now where we can begin to see how it’s panned out and so far looks pretty good. One of them enjoys alcohol but acts like a responsible adult, the other so far just isn’t very interested.
I think that’s a good approach. The thing about teenagers is, they don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of adults, so they will be pretty cautious about their intake, and will see drinking in healthy social settings being modeled by responsible adults (yeah, yeah, assumes facts in evidence). Teenagers want to be accepted in those kinds of settings, so they will start self-moderating their drinking and behavior and hopefully the habit will more or less stick.
This is true.
I was allowed to have a beer or two after I think 16. at home, with my parents. Usually this happened on a holiday or gathering. I had sips and random stuff before that at home, but 16-17 is when I started taking them up on the offer.
You’re right about not wanting to embarrass yourself. I would barely drink around my parents and their friends.
Usually, the other 16 year olds at the house (my brother and a family friend) would drink a bit more when we went back to play video games or stay by the campfire.
By senior year, I would drink a bit at a party we’d go to, but I didn’t want to be stupid drunk.
My friends house, we’d drink a bit more. What I would call just over the line.
In the beginning of college, I let loose for a month or so. I hadn’t yet really seen what the other side of the spectrum looked or felt like.
My parents did a good job. They said I could, which took most of the allure out. then I drank with them, which took the “I’m so cool” factor out.
Then they let me have a friend over, and I had a different but controlled environment to drink a bit more.
by the time I was left alone at school, I felt good.
I still got pretty drunk that first week or so, but I was always the one keeping everyone in line, making sure we’d all get home.
Didn’t drink at all until after high school, and not much until my mid-twenties. My parents weren’t ragers by any means, but drinking was a pretty constant companion and they made no effort to hide it. It normalized alcohol enough that it was just something my yuppy folks did.
My parents gave me my first sip of beer at age 8 and my first sip of gin at age 10. I think demystifying it plays a big part in future responsible behavior.
I used to suck on the limes from my parents’ GNTs and bloody marys when I was around 5 or 6. Was allowed to drink beer when my parents had parties when I was about 16 or 17.
I can count on maybe 2 hands how many times I’ve been really fucking drunk in my life.
Growing up it was normal to have a sip of beer now and then from like 5 onward. As teens we were allowed to drink as long we were responsible. So I don’t know the forbidden fruit thing. As adults I’m the heaviest drinker in the family, and I was the one who drank the least as a teen. So I don’t really think there is a connection there. Just teach responsibility. However, with adopting you may not know if genetically he may be predisposed alcoholism or anything. I’d say allow him to make his own choices, just make sure he’s responsible.
Need MOAR backdoors pleaz
http://abc6onyourside.com/news/nation-world/new-cyberattack-causes-mass-disruption-in-europe
Aurora Snow agrees with you.
Young woman (like, early 20’s) in the kitchen just now: “Who even is OJ Simpson? He’s just famous for being famous.”
LOL? Or *headdesk*?
He invented a very popular orange drink. Duh.
The Juice is loose!
…she single? Sounds like my type.
Cup size?
I remember teaching Astronomy at the local Community College a couple of years ago and it was revealed that at least 75% of the class didn’t know who Jean Claude van Damme is. I went home and wept.
If Amazon would ever get of full their assess and release more episodes if Jean Claude van Johnson…
Off not of full.
Wtf is with autocorrect getting worse these days?
Beets me.
*headdesk*
And…I really feel old.
I aint even saying
….
i do think there’s a strange sort of popular, collective-solipsism* that is encouraged by younger people’s 24/ connection to the internet.
(*these two words may not make any sense put together, but let me run with it for a minute)
basically, the assumption that they’re “the most informed generation ever”, therefore information not already in high-circulation among them is considered super-esoteric
it really just amounts to big blind-spots, where they’re unaware of what sorts of things are ‘common knowledge’ among other groups.
You mean they don’t even Socrates?
Too dead, white, and male.
They don’t Rumsfeld
they don’t know what they don’t know
“who?”
USC athletic dpt.
He used to run through airports.
World-famous glove model.
I think Bernie’s seat could be up for grabs, but not by a republican.
Someone could call him out on his trade policies being similar to trump.
He’s ‘anti immigration’
He isn’t against guns enough.
VT’s so odd though, hard to tell what they want. fedmoney, i suppose.
I don’t think they’re gonna dump Bernie. It’s an image thing; he’s “Independent” and “iconoclastic” and “the vanguard of the progressive movement”. Then again, if the DNC goes after him it may just permanently break the Dems in two. So here’s hoping.
As half-decent has Trump has been so far on at least ‘gesturing’ in the direction of reducing regulations in many core areas (EPA, FDA, Dodd frank, etc)…. my lowest expectations are for any substantial change in the Ag-subsidy area.
I know he made ‘gestures’ in that direction as well…
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/01/farm-subsidies-trump-budget-cuts-has-agriculture-industry-worried.html
… but i think the way he does businesses is to always demand far more than he actually wants, then quickly compromise. and i think the political stakes are too high in Ag. I think he’ll get some regulatory pullbacks in things like Finance and EPA etc. but not farmers.
I think death will claim Bernie before he ends up losing his seat.
I doubt he’ll end up in jail. his wife might, Burlington college is dead and it’s on her shoulders. Fraud for a loan to buy fucking lakefront property. There were plenty of spaces available in south burlington. but she wanted to be the college on the lake. because UVM’s 10 minute walk was too much.
VTers have had a love affair with Bernie since the 70’s. He climbed the political ladder exactly as anyone who lived in VT in the early 80’s would have expected him to do.
Yeah, his first mayor run, right? From what I remember it was very close.
After that, everybody fucking loved him. Burlington had a big boom in the early 80’s. Most credited Bernie.
I credited IBM and Digital, but whatevs.
In a hemp loincloth, hefting a mighty lucerne hammer, atop a hill of the bloodied skulls of his vanquished foes?
Maybe I know different Vermonters from you.
Wow. It can actually be of the more miserable places to live in this world, especially if you have to get somewhere.
Only if you’re on the other side of Houston from that somewhere. Or 290 is involved.