Playoff football is worth covering, no? Well I’m covering it either way. The Rams got shut down at home by the Falcons. (Just a little over a week after the team they share a stadium with got curb-stomped by the Buckeyes in Dallas, by the way.) Tennessee held on the beat the Chefs in a wild game. In Sunday action, the Saints did everything they could to blow their game against the Panthers, but we were still given the gift of Cam Newton crying when it was over. And there Jacksonville Jaguars outlasted the Buffalo Bills in a horrible game that, according to a lone Jags player, was filled with racial slurs. I’m sure that’s the first time Ngakoue was exposed to nasty language on the field, if it happened. I hope he’s able to get over it by the time they roll into Pittsburgh.
Incognito mode activated
In hoops action, Miami topped FSU in a clash of ranked opponents. Arizona State got off the schnide. Cincinnati won. Wichita State rolled. And lastly, Ohio State took down the top-ranked Michigan State Spartans in their first big win in a couple of years at least. Plenty of good hockey played, and your winners yesterday were the Islanders, Flyers, Crapitals, Blackhawks, Jets, Blue Jackets, les Canadiens, Lightning, Penguins and Las Vegas.
In the world of cricket, Australia ran riot over England and finished the Ashes with another thrashing of their guests from Limetree Island. The series ended 4-0, with the hosts claiming the cup back. And in soccer news, the world was stunned thrilled when Arsenhole, the defending champs, were knocked out of the competition in the third round. Aside from a few draws, most of the big name squads are through to the fourth round draw. Chelsea will have to do a replay and “we’re fucking Milwall” are through. And Liverpool took care of their crosstown rivals but broke many hearts this weekend as they sealed the deal to ship Coutinho to Barcelona for a record fee.
Big sports update there. If you don’t like it, feel free to bitch about it after you read…the links!
A BBC news editor has quit her post over the gender pay gap. Good for her, standing up and making all kinds of noise after walking out on the contract she had signed and the salary she agreed to during negotiations. I’m sure this will help her with any other network she seeks employment from, as it will do likewise for her most vocal supporters. But the pay gap is a serious issue, right? I mean, even in the world of non-profits it seems to be quite a serious issue. (What’s sadder: the hypocrisy or the inability of that little rat-faced fuck to count?)
At least one of these women has defended a convicted child rapist
Oprah brought the house down in a searing Golden Globes speech. Way to go, O! You finally put into words what every single person in that room refused to acknowledge during several decades of persistent and ongoing sexual abuse, tit-for-tat, harassment and other shenanigans. Those applauding were so brave for taking a stand against the things they knew had been happening forever but said nothing. I hope the rest of America takes notice of these brave souls who are now speaking out when its easy and hip to voice your opinion on the creeps they all sucked up to when they knew the abuse was actually taking place.
Only in Florida. Well, that or wherever that dude who played Chekov in the Star Trek movies lived.
Trump says he’s open to the possibility of talks with North Korea. This after the Little Rocket Man begged the SoKo government to let his country benefit a little from the Winter Olympics (when, oddly enough, nobody ever profits from them), and began to slowly walk back from his threats once the Americal president called his bluff.
That’s not got 50 stars on it, so…whatever.
The Iranian government doubles down against the west. I guess they never got the memo on never going full retard. Because this borders on full retard.
The NAACP says some members will be protesting President Trump appearing at a college football exhibition game tonight in Atlanta. They said his presence there is “a terrible decision and is disrupting the game”. I’ll be sure to scour through their history for similar statements when the last guy in the WH went to sporting events. Because if the NAACP is known for anything, its in their consistency of how they treated Obama relative to the other people who held the same office but with considerably less melanin while doing so.
I gotta give Elon Musk credit where its due: Space X seems to be doing well. Of course, its mostly busy due to the failed NASA programs, but its still always nice to see the market solving problems that government seems to screw up with regularity.
Stay warm. Stay dry. And have a good start to your week, friends!
A BBC news editor has quit her post over the gender pay gap. Good for her, standing up and making all kinds of noise after walking out on the contract she had signed and the salary she agreed to during negotiations. – society made her negotiate poorly
“I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally,” Ms. Gracie wrote, citing the Equality Act 2010, which states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay.
Women aren’t good at negotiating, so they passed a law to do it for them.
Doing the same job is not the same as doing equal work. Some people are much better at what they do than others.
Shitlord..
How dare you imply pay should be tied to a meritocracy.
In my experience equal work is rarely equal.
The first question I ask – is she doing equal work? If she’s an on-air personality, does her show draw the same level of viewership as those she’s comparing herself with? Does she share that spotlight with other contributers? If she’s a behind the scenes person, what’s the volume and quality of work product look like compared to the others in similar roles?
You’re all shitlords. Sure some unfairness will occur, but we need to reduce that gap. What could it hurt?
You realize it’s sexist even to ask such questions.
So the law requires them to give Katie Couric a paycut? After all she is making a lot more money than her male coworkers.
THAT’S DIFFERENT!
I know that some people actually believe this. But here’s the thing: if there’s some personality trait that makes women less likely to demand a raise, don’t you think there might be some careers where this alleged lack of assertiveness would make them less effective? Management or sales, for instance? In that case, it would be totally justified for women to be paid less on average.
Just for the record, I don’t believe that women are incapable of asking for a raise. This is anecdotal, but almost every woman I’ve worked with would actually be the first one to march into the boss’ office and lay out a case for why she deserves a certain day off or something or another. Come to think of it, I could believe that women are asking for benefits such as schedule flexibility instead of more money.
^^This.
Bobarian is willing to work until 9:00 PM because he doesn’t want to go home.
My daughter has 3 kids she’s got to get off the bus and all the sundry issues that go with that. She can’t work past 2:30 unless they let her take it home.
I usually ask for more vacation time in lieu of salary. It’s just a simple math equation. Everywhere I’ve worked over the last 10 years has had absolutely abysmal vacation policies.
You need to come work for the Swiss. They are serious about PTO.
Easier to pick the days you actually will work than the days you want off?
OF course, the pay gap is bigger now that she isn’t getting a paycheck at all.
There is more sammich making time now
Exactly. When her martyrdom expires in about a week, what then? Silliness.
Oprah brought the house down in a searing Golden Globes speech. – I remember back in the day I followed globes, Oscars etc. Now I didn’t even know they took place already. Who won?
Nobody.
Who won?
The people who watched something else.
^This is the correct answer.
Black dressmakers
Makers of black dresses
Good catch, you racist shitlord.
I ran a Google image search to see if my prediction of sexy black gowns came true. I found a few.
BET has your back.
HOT MAMA!: See Halle Berry Work A Sheer Mini Dress On The 2018 Golden Globes Carpet
I thought they usually flashed their boobs in protest of patriarchy? All I demand is consistency.
Speaking of black, any black actors snubbed? Any racial outrage at the winners? Or are they to busy with the sex thing now?
Their limited mental capacity only allows them to focus on one outrage at a a time.
RACIST!!!!!!!!!!!!
There were a few snarky remarks about how all the nominees for some award were men and shit like that, but it was a hell of a lot less preachy in that regard than last year. At least based on the bits I overheard; I was playing Mass Effect while my wife was watching it in the other room. I’m not sure, but I think maybe the sexual assault environment has Hollywood a little shook up. Like maybe they don’t want to bring too much attention to themselves because there are still enough skeletons lurking in enough closets.
Its hard to credibly preach to the rest of America when you support the requirement that half your actresses must fuck their way to stardom.
Oprah would get her ass kicked as soon as she stood up for her first debate. The only thing that makes her popular (to women) is that she’s perceived as above the fray. Wading into the slop would take the shine off of her candidacy faster than a SJW can type #metoo. Men don’t much care for her, and women would quickly become polarized when she starts spouting her pseudo-Marxist bullshit.
I also have to wonder how often she’s actually exposed to opposing viewpoints, or even overt disagreement. She may have a distinct disadvantage in the arena there.
Not disagreeing at all with the assessment about Oprah, but wonder how much this applies to most of the swamp creatures. I think during the last presidential debates, Hilary had her closest sycophants act as Trump during practice. I don’t think they could do a very good job leaving the echo chamber.
In the hypothetical world where I was preparing for the presidential debate (or anything of that magnitude), I would seek out and hire the best people I could find that believed in the opposing viewpoint to prep against, not one of my own people regurgitating lines they don’t believe. Of course they would be under a NDA and well paid for that too.
Somebody said something in some dumb speech last night about how Oprah told her all about what it’s like to be the only woman on a board of execs or some shit. What a load. Being Oprah on the board of directors of a company you created and named after yourself surrounded by people whose net worths are nowhere near the value of one of your homes is going to be a different experience than being a woman who has risen through the ranks of an existing company. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Oprah doesn’t hear the word “no” very often in the course of a day. That dynamic will change pretty damn quick when she enters politics.
If O is the only woman on those boards, it’s probably because she likes it like that.
I have a theory called “the only girl in the room.”
There’s a certain personal cachet to being the only girl admitted into the sacrosanct dude “locker room” (e.g., anything where only dudes are) on the basis that she’s cool/fun/worthy. Some girls like that and do not want to lose their status as Only Girl in the Room.
how Oprah told her all about what it’s like to be the only woman on a board of execs or some shit
That cries out for some fact-checking.
What boards is Oprah on? Has she ever been the only woman on those boards? Not hard to find out. I would be somewhat surprised if she was the only woman on any board for more than maybe a year.
I wouldn’t underestimate her. She knows what makes people tick and she’s capable of working a crowd.
Christ, is she still pretending that the skeptic’s movement was anything other than a springboard for ruining yet another club with feminist theatrics?
Oprah bored me to tear by saying what everything thought she would say. And was repeated ad nauseam last night
Guillermo Del Toro brought me to tears by talking about movie making and monsters being patron saints for imperfection.
The Iranian government doubles down against the west. I guess they never got the memo on never going full retard. – Boko Haram
I gotta give Elon Musk credit where its due: Space X seems to be doing well. Of course, its mostly busy due to the failed NASA programs, but its still always nice to see the market solving problems that government seems to screw up with regularity. – true but I like to think in a more libertarian America this would have happened years ago
Is he getting public money for it?
yes, some. But it is all fee for service.
Basically they launch some government satellites, the government would have launched those satellites with or without Space X but at a much higher cost. They also do supply runs to the ISS for the government with the same deal, government would have launched those supplies either way only Space X can do it a lot cheaper than Boeing, ATK, ULA, etc.
They did not however get any money for the development of their rockets. they did that all on their own.
So yeah they get some government money but there isn’t anything unlibertarian about how Space X operates
Sounds okay to me.
Which is basically why they were successful. That and they’ve had great success with smashing requirements creep, simply because they allowed the beast in only after they’d more or less finished development.
You’d be right.
Stay warm. Stay dry. And have a good start to your week, friends! – it is to damn hot. Goddamn it hope this don’t ruin the fruit
You seem a bit… active today.
Just had a break after a busy morning and wanted to see if I can get 5 answers in quick.
Ask The Pharmacist: Dissecting the weird and sometimes true headlines of 2017
If there’s money to be made they’ll pathologize it.
Or, you know, gaming is just something that anxious, antisocial people do.
HEY! FU…
Hmmm, I don’t consider myself to be anxious, but I make up for it by being extra anti-social.
You might be on to something.
Trump says he’s open to the possibility of talks with North Korea.
Button measuring contest
Small hands make it look bigger.
Cat jumps into car and attacks driver, who is then run over
Does no one read the links? SMDH
Not sure what you’re saying.
I do
Holy shit, that’s cra…oh yeah, I read that earlier today.
That story seems very familiar.
and here I thought the whole thing was a euphemism for lesbian domestic violence
Something about angry pussy being life threatening.
Here you go.
I despise most 90s music. But this band always had a cool sound.
Ever watch Billy Corgan on Alex Jones Infowars? Good stuff
Question Is supplementation with calcium, vitamin D, or combined calcium and vitamin D associated with a lower fracture incidence in community-dwelling older adults?
Findings In this meta-analysis of 33 randomized clinical trials that included 51 145 participants, the use of supplements that included calcium, vitamin D, or both was not associated with a significant difference in the risk of hip fractures compared with placebo or no treatment (risk ratio, 1.53, 1.21, and 1.09, respectively).
Meaning These findings do not support the routine use of these supplements in community-dwelling older adults.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2667071?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social_jn&utm_term=1257616023&utm_content=content_engagement%7carticle_engagement&utm_campaign=article_alert&linkId=46431926&redirect=true
So for bone density basically squat more
“So for bone density basically squat more”
This.
…fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say ‘Me too’ again.’
I have a dream. It’s insane, but it’s a dream.
Rape may have been illegal for the last 4,000 years, but now these Hollywood moguls have finally figured how to stop it once and for all. Their aiding and abetting of such behavior was merely research to figure out the nature of the problem so they could best attack it. If we just drop our criticism of them and follow their lead, I’m sure we’ll be able to accomplish what has been heretofore impossible. This time, it’ll be different, because…reasons…
Brit held after Thai hooker plunges to death after ‘strange and extravagant’ balcony sex
It’s entirely possible this was accidental.
What was so extravagant about the sex?
It involved him chucking her off the balcony at the end.
Hot
At one point he ate pad Thai off her ass.
She jumped after being body shamed. He told her that her Thai ass looked padded.
::Throws Jimbo off balcony::
Thank you.
The money shot.
Shot her clear off the balcony?
DSB, the messy killer.
Because he let her keep the ” half-empty packet of sex drugs” even though he threw her off the balcony.
Oprah bought NBC from Microsoft?
NBC will be relocating it’s corporate headquarters outside of the US in the next few years, apparently.
We all get a free car? Yeah!
Wasn’t that cash for clunkers?
Right. Because you can trust NBC to be a rock for *objective* journalism.
Correct, they have an objective.
Heh. Just went into the comments. Someone had a pic of her kissing Weinstein.
LOL.
I’m not clicking that link…how bad were the other comments?
More like letting her have it.
I should share this on Facebook for all the “Faux News is Republican Right-Wing propaganda” friends. Cause, yeah, how exactly is this unbiased non-partisan journalism?
I thought it would have shattered the “unbiased media” narrative when the leaked emails revealed that many media outlets were in direct collusion with the Clinton campaign, but most Lefties still believe that Fox is the only network with any bias whatsoever.
Hey, it’s not the networks’ fault that reality has a left-wing bias.
Need to calm down? Science says sniff your partner’s shirt
STEVE SMITH never get SHIRT sniffed! SHORTS sniffed instead!
STEVE SMITH LEAVE SCENT ON LOTS OF “PARTNERS”!!
There’s a fire on the roof of Trump Tower.
Maybe it’s a HVAC thing.
Did Yusef go to sleep?
way late getting here but yes, good chance something went Boom in the Penthouse
Battered woman syndrome?
Prominent DNC donor Susie Tompkins Buell says she may not give $$$ to senators who pushed Al Franken to resign.
“We have to rise to the occasion, and not shrink away from it, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard,”
I’m such a juvenile sometimes.
Is it a crime if she asked for it and liked it?
Court orders Antifa activist to pay $11k for frivolous claims
She’s one psycho that definitely shouldn’t be on the streets, a dangerously insane human being.
She’s a middle school teacher in California… Let that sink in for a minute.
That doesn’t need to sink in, as it makes perfect sense.
It makes perfect sense why the CA wing of my family attended a private school.
Yeh, I remember reading about her a while go. Real loony bin stuff.
A natural for Antifa and the progressive ranks.
And more hot takes from my favorite idiot philosophy comic writer.
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/950107197471571968
Also
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/949419186731696128
This was funny
That just has to be parody. It has to.
I used to think so but it seems like to much to often to serious
Nothing says “I care about the poor” more than starving millions of them to death in the Ukraine.
to be fair Ukrainians are kinda sub human so that is okay
But they claim that wasn’t really Marxism.
Kool story, Karl.
RebelMetropolis
@RebelMetropolis
11h11 hours ago
More
Still not Marxism, but whatevs. Nobody defends Stalin. Capitalism has killed far more since 1649.
Funny, Capitalism creates more, and more desperate, poor folks than Communism. The very nature of Capitalism is to give the workers as little as possible, while producing wealth for those who do not work.
(((Impeach Trump)))
@cocktail_shaker
13h13 hours ago
More
I doubt a Fascist could ever change my mind. Republicans and Libertarians are why it will take #Gulag to make America great again!
Ah yes the not real Marxism …
Hey, another one of those ex-libertarians.
Funny, that seems to apply more to socialists.
Marxism, the ultimate exercise in virtue signaling.
https://twitter.com/RoxieBrookshire/status/949951079088885760
Check the pic.
Yes, she looks exactly like you think she does.
This from a person with a neckbeard made of fat.
CAT HAIR BASED COFFEE FILTER WHAT??????????
Did the Golden Globes mention Iranian women?
If they did, it was probably to chastize them for being bad muslims.
Not that I heard. I mean, I sure as hell know Oprah didn’t say shit about them.
Oprah is so fucken brace.
#THEREALPREZ
brave
I don’t remember were the Goop coffee enemas covered?
http://mashable.com/2018/01/06/goop-coffee-enema/
My friend: You watching the globes tonight?
Me: No
MF: Why not?
Me: I don’t care to watch leftist elitists pat themselves on the back.
4 hours later…
MF: You hear what that fucking (insert Hollywood star)said?
1 year later…
MF: You watching the globes tonight?
I didn’t know the Globes were on until Vice did their Sabo story. That dude might be the only renegade artist in Hollywood.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/01/06/photos-street-artist-trolls-golden-globes-we-knew-artwork/
his earlier stuff was better but still i like his “We all knew” work.
probably my favorite is his Planned Parenthood “Blacks Lives are only matter” ad.
That stuff is gold, so is the trolls he’s done before using Redbox kiosks.
9/10 men prefer big tits. The 10th prefers the other 9 men.
http://archive.is/RcmZV
4, 5 (in spite of the lip ring), 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17… egad! Too many! Orgy.
125% of statistics are made up on the spot.
15, 17, 32 even though she looks like she’s got one skinny arm.
I’m running late for the office. I’ll just take #9 and #14 to go and pass on an orgy.
Great collection today.
What’s beyond bunny boiler on the crazy spectrum? Whatever it is, 41 is it.
Is the Presidency Driving Us Nuts?
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455218/trump-obama-derangement-syndrome-rooted-myth-president-king
Not me but you lot most likely
Only progs and NeverTrumpers. Normal people are able to recognize people and opinions they don’t like without letting it ruin their lives.
So you’ve never listened to Patriot Radio or read the comments at Breibart?
He did specify “normal people”.
fair point, but it does conflict with the ‘Only progs and NeverTrumpers.’ line.
Swap “normal” for “healthy” and I agree. Normal implies majority, and it sure as hell seems like most people I see are losing their minds over this shit.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz – and his secret love
http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42568390
Living out his life in a suburb of Melbourne, the man who had been born Ludwig “Lale” Eisenberg to Jewish parents in Slovakia in 1916 decided to share his story.
“This man, the tattooist from the most infamous concentration camp, kept his secret safe in the mistaken belief that he had something to hide,” says Heather Morris, who spent three years recording Lale’s story before he died in 2006.
She has now written a book – The Tattooist of Auschwitz – based on how he tattooed a serial number on the arms of those at the camp who weren’t sent to the gas chambers.
Assholes on ICE
A brouhaha has erupted at a trailer park in one of Mpls older first ring suburbs. After a simmering feud with some residents, the park manager appears to have dropped the dime on them with ICE. ICE then showed up and deported the illegals at the park.
In the old days, that probably would have been the end of it. Today, the remaining immigrants got organized and protested the fact that ICE deported them (the reason it was a priority with ICE is that the main guy had already been caught and deported twice before). Lawyers, city officials and human rights commissions got involved.
I’m pretty much on the side of more immigration, but this story irks me. The root cause of the feud was that the family wouldn’t pick up trash out of their yard, let their kids run rampant and (allegedly) put nails in the park manager’s tires. If you are living here illegally maybe you should mind your manners?
“My Husband isn’t a Criminal” says the wife. Technically, he is. You’d think after 2 deportations, he’d try and come in the right way once. I don’t necessarily like the immigration policies that are currently in place, but it is the law, and unless the welfare state is completely dismantled, we will have to have immigration restrictions.
Yes, by definition, Illegal entry is a crime.
However there is one thing – If you’re deported there is a ten year blackout period when you are ineligable for a visa – because we threw you out (whether it was for being a criminal while otherwise legally here or for being here when you weren’t supposed to be)
Yeah, that annoys me. You might think the law is dumb, or you might be a really nice guy, or you might have had a good reason for breaking the law, but by definition if you break the law you are a criminal. By extension, yes, dammit, if you immigrate illegally you are an illegal immigrant.
They’re conflating law and morality. They may not think it’s wrong to cross the border illegally, but theyre saying it’s not a crime.
And they be wrong.
Meanwhile, my wife who teaches at an inner-city school just learned one of her brighter student was shipped back to India because of some Visa mix up. No Baboo!
It’s like when they were marching in protest under Mexican flags against Prop 187 back in ’94.
Regardless of how I felt about immigration, it was irksome to see people oppose deportation by marching under some other country’s flag. If you want to be an American, why is there a sea of Mexican flags and not an American flag in sight?
P.S. In the old days (two years ago), I don’t think ICE would show up–just because you called them and told them there were some illegal aliens milling about. I’m surprised ICE even bothered.
Hey, they have a lot of love and pride in the place that they are fighting against being sent back to.
The story said that the reason ICE prioritized it was because the main target had already been deported twice before. That made him a 3 time loser.
The question I have is about the wife. She seems to be legally here. I wonder if it is because they had an anchor baby?
Wait a minute! A curb stomping?
Exactly how many points did OS score that weren’t a direct result of turnovers by USC’s careless quarterback? 3?
That game was a gift. Good luck in the NFL and good riddance.
They forced those turnovers, you know.
And it would have been even worse if Meyer hadn’t let it turn in to the JTB4 show the whole second half.
I can’t think of a single person sitting in that stadium with me who thought USC was ever even in that game.
Am I the only person who thinks that OSU is going to be better now that JTB is gone? I completely understand how talented he is, but I think the offense will be able to better balance the use of their other talent on the field now that the qb isn’t some superhero dual threat 5th year.
Yes – Both those teams will be better next year with new quarterbacks and better balance.
They’ll be a lot better with a balanced attack and with a qb who does a better job leading receivers. JTB4 was a great leader. But he wasn’t a great qb.
I agree that USC played like shit. But OS played just well enough to let Darnell self-destruct. OS’s offence did next to nothing.
He threw one pick. The other turnovers were fumbles. You telling me the ball just fell out of his hands? Usually a fumble happens when someone gets hit.
And I suppose those 14 TFLs has nothing to do with Darnold s QBR of 35.0 either, right? Or He whopping 57 yards they got in the 36 carries.
Seriously, “curb stomping” is accurate.
I’ve been watching all season. He fumbles all the time when not making brilliant impossible throws like he did last year in the Rose Bowl. He’s the most inconsistent overrated QB in college. I’d take Cody Kessler or Matt Barkley over him in a second.
A curb stomping is hanging 50+ points on a team – with a least some of them not coming on turnovers. You Big Ten guys have lower standards.
A curb stomping is hanging 50+ points on a team
Typical PAC-12 “defense is optional” viewpoint. You can be curbstomped by a defense just as much as by an offense.
Just ask Ohio State.
/Clemson Fan
Exactly.
/Ohio State Fan
A European leader who is actually aware of history.
That dude is a rising star. I can see him, the new Austrian leader and the new Polish leader joining forces and leaving the EU.
I have no idea how the EU is administered. At some point won’t the countries skeptical of open borders take over or at least block some of the craziness?
Nope. The EU is a Totalitarian Bureaucracy. It is designed to prevent change of administration. The only way it changes is by breaking apart.
Not unless their names are France or Germany.
The EU is a shitshow because immigration decisions are based on the feelings of those two nation’s needs or wants, and to help with other countries that simply can not afford the mass migration and the public spending that the EU compels.
You would think so. I know there’s a lot of momentum and economic codependence, but it seems like Poland and the Czech Republic are gettin’ pretty woke to the end game of following EU immigration policy. I don’t think they want to trade avoiding short-term financial trouble for no-go zones in Warsaw and Prague. Hell, for that matter, maybe this is what drives them back into the Russian sphere of influence.
People keep talking about the exit of the core EU countries. I don’t see it ever happening for the original founders of the ECC. Those countries will sink or rise with the EU. Look at how hard it was for Brexit. Now imagine Germany, France, Italy and Benelux. Good luck with that.
Make the Anti-Ottoman League, or something?
We’ve had a history of immigrants forming ethnic gangs and living in their own enclaves and so forth, but I think the big difference is that the end goal was always to wind up getting a piece of the pie, so to speak. Within a few generations, most of that ethnic group assimilates. It seems like that’s not happening in Europe. I’m not sure if that’s to do with Europe having a different social dynamic, or because these particular immigrants are not interested in assimilation, or some combination, but there’s definitely a difference.
European countries have long histories of being ethno-states, and do not do assimilation well, if at all. Islam is a religion made by a bandit warlord to aid in conquests. Culturally it looks down upon western cultures as inferior and to be swept aside.
It’s not going to work out well, especially if you bring in a critical mass of belivers in the latter and then fail to enforce your laws at them.
The contrarian in me really wants to defend Islam, but it’s hard. Apologists say things like, “The violent bits are metaphorical”, or “Any religion would be objectionable if you follow it to the letter”, or “Moderate Islam is no different than Judaism or Christianity”. But of the three Abrahamic faiths, I believe Islam is the only one that actually tells adherents to go and find people who aren’t Muslim and convert them, by force if necessary, or to extort them if they refuse but won’t rock the boat too much. From my own experience, the Bible, particularly the New Testament, essentially tells you how to be a good Christian, it doesn’t explain why people who aren’t Christians should be made Christians.
Also, it’s my understanding that lying to infidels is not only allowed, but encouraged in certain circumstances. I don’t remember learning anything like that in Sunday School.
The Bible tells you to live as a good Christian to set an example and tell non-Christians about Christ. It does not tell you to convert them or kill them.
It’s full of good stories about proselyting gone awry.
Nobody who has read the Koran and Hadith says “The violent bits are metaphorical” unless they are lying. Murders and even genocides are celebrated and encouraged.
Indeed. The key thing to understand is Islam is a political religion as much as a spiritual one.
Islam did take root in the Balkans and they became, you know, balkanized. They were chased out of the rest of Europe after a millennium of bloodshed.
Balkans were balkanized hundreds of years before the Turks even got close.
So was Germany, France, and England – maybe the difference is that they didn’t stay balkanized.
Or maybe the difference is you shouldn’t dishonestly compare apples to oranges.
Yes, the Croats and Serbs would live in magical peace and harmony if it weren’t for those evil Muzzies.
The Welsh, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons, Danes, and Scots managed it.
History would suggest that there would be no peace between the Scots and the English, or the Irish and the English, or the English and the English…
One has to start looking at the factors of disunity.
And funny enough the overwhelmingly Christian Croats and Serbs didn’t. Almost like 19th century nationalist groups are somehow different than a random mash of medieval culture groups. After all, its not like those Welsh or Scots have any kind of separatist movements.
+300 States of the HRE
Quote of the day:
—-Michael Wolffe
“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-fire-and-fury-in-the-trump-white-house-1515369576
That’s from the “Author’s Note” before the . . . um . . . story begins.
ENB, Robby, and Wolffe must have all gone to the same school of journalism.
The left hasn’t learned their lesson from Reagan. You can’t throw everything at the wall and hope something will stick against a strong public personality. That tactic works on the Bushes, Doles, and Romneys of the world, but the Reagans and Trumps of the world are strengthened by the attempts. Trump will be known to history as Teflon Don.
I’m that sort of character/personality. The more you act like a retard towards me the more it strengthens my resolve.
That’s what I try to explain to people who think Trump is going to ‘resign’ or won’t run in 2020. Trump absolutely will run if he feels like it. Not running doesn’t strike me as an option at this point. Especially if you think he’s been grooming for this for the last 30 years; which seems to be the case is my hunch.
It would be interesting if someone interviewed the guy that wrote “Dutch”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch:_A_Memoir_of_Ronald_Reagan
There are a lot of parallels.
There hasn’t been a president Like Trump since Reagan, who connected with the American public over the hateful objections of the press, and it’s interesting that in both cases, the Reagan and Trump administrations gave these authors access assuming, apparently, that they would write it straight. That was never gonna happen.
If Trump isn’t paranoid, he should be–although being “paranoid”, in this case, isn’t in any way delusional. The fact is that pretty much everyone in the press and the media are out to get him. I suppose if I were in that situation and all their efforts kept falling flat, I’d become a bit of a megalomaniac, as well. All these smart people out to get me, but the harder they try, the more they make fools of themselves?
I must be a very stable genius!
Do you know who else was a stable genius?
Mr. Ed
Neigh.
+1
I saw last night WikiLeaks released that book as a PDF.
College football exhibition game?
You’re really letting your bias show sloopy.
The charter of the playoff selection committee is to pick the 4 best teams to participate in the playoff. The unanimous #1 team was clemson. There is no disputing that. Alabama soundly beat clemson on a neutral field. If you believed they were undeserving to be in contention, then their performance on the field contradicts your notion. Ohio state had two losses. There’s no getting around that.
UCF is the true national champion.
Here, here!
And hillary won the popular vote.
Lachowsky, UCF is the True National Champion, because all that this game tonight does is determine the true SEC champion.
If Alabama wins tonight, UCF will finish #1 in Colley rankings. And maybe Wolfe (regardless of who wins).
The charter of the playoff selection committee is to pick the 4 best teams to participate in the playoff.
Dumb charter. College football is heavily siloed by conference. Any playoff not taking into account the fact that there is only extremely limited inter-conference competition is shit.
8 team playoff: 5 power 5 conference champ auto-bids, best G5 team auto-bids, 2 at-larges. Anything short of that is a farce. What could Wisky or OSU have done in the playoff? What about Washington? We’ll never know because of the shit playoff.
G5 team auto-bid*
This – win your conference and you’re in.
You may be right, but that doesn’t change what the current system is and what the current charter of the CFPC is.
No, but it challenges the legitimacy of the result. When the best of some conferences have to massively overachieve just to be in the conversation (1 loss Wisky comes to mind), and a team like Alabama with a relatively soft resume and a 2nd place in their division gets the benefit of the doubt, do we really know that we’re watching the best 4 teams? Obviously, Alabama looks legit in hindsight, but so did OSU and Wisky.
I forgot my biggest rant. FCS games sbould be counted as losses for playoff and bowl eligibility.
Yes – unless you are playing ND State. It made me so happy to see Alabama lose the week after playing a scrimmage against Mercer.
Go Bison!
As part of the North Dakota State-Philadelphia Eagles fan exchange program, I concur.
Right on!
Even my son – who doesn’t follow sports at all – took time off from his video games to watch NDSU win another championship (he is currently going to NDSU).
It amazes me to see how big of a fan base NDSU has in my old stomping grounds of NW Minnesoda. They have hit some critical mass and I would bet that any decent football player in Minnesoda is just as likely to want to go there as to go play for the Gophers.
They do have a better record vs the Big 10.
Who doesn’t have a better record than the Golden Rodents?
16 teams, there are 10 conferences, there is no such thing as P5 and G5 (to the NCAA), need 10 autobids.
First two rounds hosted by better seeds. #1 and #2 get nice easy home games in first round against Troy and Toledo.
Based on final CFP rankings and my judgement for last 3 spots, the playoffs would have been:
Troy @ #1 Clemson
Penn St @ #8 USC
Boise St @ #4 Alabama
UCF @ #5 Ohio St
Toledo @ #2 Oklahoma
Miami @ #7 Auburn
FAU @ #3 Georgia
Washington @ #6 Wisconsin
2nd round would have then been:
Penn St @ Clemson
UCF @ Alabama
Auburn @ Oklahoma
Wisconsin @ Georgia
My “completely turn the system on its head” solution is as follows.
12 teams per conference in 10 conferences (cap FBS at 120 teams), 6 teams per division.
10 regular season games. 5 divisional, 3 cross division, 2 OOC FBS games.
4 teams conference tourneys. Top 2 of each division get in, games are set by seeding (semifinals can be cross division).
Once conference tourneys are set, the shit bowls get to pick up the eligible teams that aren’t in a Conference tourney.
After conference tourneys, you have 10 auto-bid teams. 6 additional spots for at larges are selected. The next set of bowls are doubleheaders, they get to pick teams that didn’t make the playoff to play in the first game, and they get a playoff first round or quarterfinal game as the second half of the doubleheader.
The semifinals are hosted by 2 of the NY6 bowls, and the rest of the NY6 bowls get choice of the playoff losers from the first 2 rounds.
National championship operates like today.
If I get to completely overdo the system:
36 teams in Div A divided into 4 conferences of 9 teams, geographically organized to minimize travel.
Ditto Div B, C, D, E, F (I think that covers all the scholarship giving D1 teams).
8 conference games, 4 non-conference games. 4 conference winners go to 4 team playoff.
9th place in each conference (based only on conference games) gets relegated. Winner of conference in division below gets promoted.
Rejigger geographically if necessary.
If Ohio St and Michigan want to play every year, Great! Most of the time, I imagine they will both be in Midwest A, but if they arent, they can play a non-conf game.
Ditto any other rivalry (GT-uga may not always be in same division, but can play every Thanksgiving weekend anyway).
NDSU would be playing in at least B by now.
Any potential sloopy bias aside, I’m not stopping down to watch tonight. Something I never thought i’d say about a college football game with championship implications.
It’s just not moving my needle.
That’s the problem I’ve had with the CFP the most. The goal shouldn’t be to put the best four teams in the playoffs, it should be to finish determining the best team in the country. The regular season games and conference championships do most of the heavy lifting in this regard. If you don’t win your conference, you aren’t the best team in your conference and therefore can’t be the best team in the country so you should receive no consideration for a playoff spot. There are too many teams and not enough inter conference games to give two spots to any one conference.
It’s comments like that that make me actively hate TOSU.
I’m not sure why anyone would want to do this, but ok
Come back – we have a cell waiting for you.
Why just children of Cubans? Can’t we send Cuba all our progressives that think the Cuban government is the shit?
Then they can get the world’s greatest healthcare and escape Trumpistan. Why wouldn’t they want that? I’ll help with relocation costs.
South Dakota Police Declare Dead Body Found In Car Trunk “Suspicious”
https://jonathanturley.org/2018/01/08/132771/
As opposed to all those people who naturally seep into trunks when they die.
Maybe he was the lone wolf type and found a place to curl up and die when his time had come.
Sounds like a coyote tried to unsuccessfully smuggle someone out of the NoDak gulag.
*narrows gaze*
And it was one of your women! Man, the odds of getting lucky at the local honky-tonk on Saturday night in NoDak just got way lower.
Yep, gonna be a lot more guys heading to FarmersOnly.com now.
I called my dad this afternoon to wish him a happy birthday. We chatted for a bit before he asked me, “do you know what I saw last night?”
“Tell me,” I replied.
“I saw a man who has the same birthday as me in the ER. He would have turned 48 today”
http://5newsonline.com/2018/01/03/investigation-underway-following-deadly-officer-involved-shooting-in-ozark/
The story is short on details, but my dad was the doctor the cops brought his corpse to. Dad said he was shot in the back. The bullet went through his heart and killed him on the spot.
Furthermore, many of the deceased family and friends were frantically calling the hospital and asking for information. The cops were in the hospital telling everyone there that they were forbidden to give any information. After pronouncing the man dead, my dad went out to the parking lot and talked to the man’s family, against the commands of the police and told them everything he knew.
Thus is the second dead body the police have brought my dad in less than a year. This is in a town with a population of less than 4000. The last one was tasered to death in a jail cell. No action was taken in that instance and I doubt any action will be taken here. This shit makes me so fucking mad.
I’m reposting this from the other morning because it still posses me off. I talked to my dad about yesterday again and he’s still pissed too. I can’t stand the cops because of shit like this.
Something about a local story.
Seriously, good for your dad.
And as shit as big-city police tend to be, small towns are in some ways worse.
Should have released the squirrel
http://5newsonline.com/2016/09/01/prosecuting-attorney-declines-to-file-charges-in-franklin-county-inmate-death/
Here is the other dead body the cops have brought to my dad. As per usual, the police investigated themselves and found that nothing was wrong.
“It is my opinion that, given the methamphetamine intoxication and the sustained and multiple fights with inmates and resulting from exertion therefrom, contributing to the fatal acidosis, there is insufficient evidence to convince all 12 members of the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the actions of the officers caused the death of Cody Franklin.”
Via Instapundit, the GAO tried 72 times in 2015-17 to buy guns illegally on legit gun sales websites. They failed every single time.
“Eleven sellers attempted to scam the investigators after finding out they were prohibited from buying firearms with two successfully obtaining money from investigators but never sending the promised firearm.”
I think now is the time to crawl off the hot rock and get coffee
So it’s easier to illegally obtain a gun from the feds than a private seller? Cough cough fast and furious.
That’s awesome. It’s almost as if the claim that gun owners are the law abiding type holds water.
OT. You asked about revolver grips the other day. I don’t know if you saw my reply (it was much later).
Check out Altamont grips.
https://www.altamontco.com/pistol-grips/smith-and-wesson
YES!! I did see it and settled on their G-10 boot grip…Now to wait until Friday to pick up a night sight. I am liking the gold bead from Dawson Precision, but have been looking at the XS big dot as well.
Straffin now has the biggest baddest button in all of Asia.
A poor tourist caught African Salmonella and did not have a ball on his vacation.
Jesus Christ
“When it finally exploded I felt fantastic. I thought it was such a relief.”
What a happy ending.
Gives a whole new meaning to “blew his load”
If my nuts are the size of grapefruits, I’m going straight to the hospital and I’m not leaving until I can comfortably wear boxer-briefs. I’m not taking a bath in Epsom salts or whatever other folksy home remedy. My ass is going into a medically-induced coma.
That part has me confused. It happened the day after he went home from 10 days in hospital. Did they just let him lay there for 10 days and do nothing for it? You’d think they could have drained it off or something. Hell, amputation sounds better than what happened to him.
It’s the NHS, he’s lucky he got into the hospital at all.
“Only the size of a grapefruit? Not an emergency, come back when it’s a cantaloupe.”
If that’s what we can expect from our new socialist medical overlords, you can count me right out.
Also, it gives new meaning to “bust a nut.”
Quite a popshot.
Spewing laughter here
Yikes!
“However, one person who snubbed the dress code was actress Blanca Blanco.
Instead, the 36-year-old slipped into a sliced red dress – allowing her naked breasts and killer pins to be put proudly on show.
Many Twitter users hit out at the starlet, with one even saying they hoped she would ‘never work again’ for the snub.”
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/showbiz/672326/Golden-Globes-2018-Blanca-Blanco-red-carpet-black-dress
She’s the White People of movie stars?
She’s White White.
WOW. ZAH.
she’s 36????
Unless you’re wearing a black dress to testify against Weinstein in court or when you quit working for the studio because they’ve ignored your reports of harassment, you’re not actually doing anything. It’s the definition of virtue signalling. I mean, shit, they all wore black–to the award ceremony of an industry with an allegedly widespread problem of endemic sexual harassment. That’s like going to a barbecue with a shirt that says “Meat is Murder” and proclaiming your ethical vegetarianism while eating a hotdog.
“eating a hotdog”. Isn’t that exactly the sort of thing that has gotten so many in Hollywood in trouble?
Guessing it’s more like cocktail weenies, if you have to force it on others.
It was like watching the world’s most self-congratulatory funeral.
“Has Connecticut’s Governor Lost His Mind?
Raising taxes and increasing state spending didn’t work the first time Daniel Malloy was confronted with a budget crisis. So naturally, he tried the same thing twice more.
If insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, the governor of my home state of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy, should get his head checked.
Within a month of taking office in 2011, Malloy called for the largest tax increase in state history to close a multi-billion-dollar state deficit. His Democratic legislative allies delivered the hike, along with the spending increase he also requested.
Four years later, faced with a comparable deficit, Malloy offered the same prescription: a multi-billion dollar tax increase and more state spending. Democratic legislators once again obliged.
Two years after that, when 2017 brought yet another deficit, the General Assembly delivered a tax increase and a spending boost without any prompting from Malloy. Republican cooperation meant the tax hike was smaller (hundreds of millions instead of billions), but state spending levels remained liberal (up nearly 9 percent from 2015), and the governor signed the General Assembly’s bill into law.
That was eight weeks ago. Now the current year’s budget is over $200 million in the red, and the shortfall in the next biennial budget promises to be the largest yet: over $4 billion. Our state’s economy is collapsing before our eyes — and what does Malloy propose? More hikes, this time to the sales tax, the cigarette tax, and the real-estate-conveyance tax, as well as entirely new taxes on hotel rooms and e-cigarettes.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455193/daniel-malloy-connecticut-tax-spending-increases-insane
Detroit Is not an anomaly, but a pattern.
At strongtowns.org they refer to Detroit as the canary in the coal mine. Its not that they are different from most other cities, its just they were first.
And an appropriate story posted this morning:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/8/12-step-program-for-financially-insolvent-cities
Some people and businesses did’t get the message the first time and stayed in CT.
Just need to socialism harder!
hey it worked for Venezuela
the governor of my home state of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy, should get his head checked
Let’s not sugarcoat it: his thinking may be a little off.
“Let’s elect people based on their qualifications rather than the inconsequential aspects of their birth.”
https://twitter.com/MsBlaireWhite/status/950135808882704384
If that’s real, why did they list “Jewish Women” twice?
Apparently, it’s real, and they did.
https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/950036099149287424
Asians apparently a non-minority.
Asians are the white people of non-white people.
AAPI is on the list, but few people would know what it means.
Instead, the 36-year-old slipped into a sliced red dress – allowing her naked breasts and killer pins to be put proudly on show.
Many Twitter users hit out at the starlet, with one even saying they hoped she would ‘never work again’ for the snub.”
Apostasy is the most heinous crime.
If you’re doing something as a group that doesn’t make sense, it’s important for everyone to do it together. That way, outside observers will see that all members of the group believe it’s a good idea and assume they’ve thought it through. If you see dissenters, you immediately see a contrast to the groupthink, and it becomes easy to judge the actions of the majority as juxtaposed with an alternative.
Involuntary labor – a core principle of the Democratic Party for centuries!
anyone dumb enough to volunteer when they’re not politically connected and guaranteed a plum job should be allowed to do this. those shit ditches are gonna dig themselves.
Don’t Save, it is all pointless
If you are a low-wage worker who cuts your expenses to the bone in order to sock away $500 a year, on which you earn 8%, you will still not go more than a year in retirement without starving to death. The math just doesn’t work. We need to actually give people more money.
How did we reach this conclusion?
study found that four years after hire, the employees who were auto-enrolled amassed an average of $3,237 more in 401(k) contributions than those who were left to sign up on their own. (That number includes both employee and employer contributions, but not market growth.)
But the auto-enrolled employees also had an average of $1,563 more in consumer and auto debt than those who were hired before auto-enrollment. When mortgage debt is factored in, the picture becomes more complicated. The auto-enrolled employees owed $4,131 more, on average, on their homes than their colleagues who were hired before auto-enrollment.
It’s like those contributions never grow at all.
At most, this seems to suggest that “nudging” doesn’t work out.
I hate the nudge concept.
No, they have a point.
If your career track is going to have you below the median income for your entire career then saving for retirement is a pointless thing to do.
Take a person who is graduating high school this year they start their career at a job paying $15,000 a year and lets assume they reach their earning peak in the their late 40’s at $60,000 a year (roughly equivalent to $28k a year today) . If they put 10% of their salary into a 401k for their entire lives they are gonna hit age 68 with somewhere in the ballpark of $400,000 which after inflation is factored in would result in only about $125,000 in todays dollars. a 4% annual draw on that money would net them $16,000 in annual income or only about $5000 in todays dollars.
Sure having that extra $5000 a year in retirement is better than not having it but now compare the cost side. How much extra interest are you going to have to pay because you need to finance things you can’t save. How much quality of life are you sacrificing for 50 years for that small benefit over the last ~20? Would you have been better off just using that money to buy a house?
It is also important to note, that is all pretty much a best case scenario for the savings, an extended layoff or ill timed market correction and you could be in a lot worse shape.
Rampant idiocy in journalistic form.
Why is there this idea that a person must be able to stay in a low-wage job forever and raise a family of four on that income?
Because there is a large group of people who are dependant on the dependency of others for their own power.
And that there will be no raises or promotions for the person working the low-wage job.
I remember one of these minimum wage sob stories that featured a woman complaining about working at McDonalds for FORTY YEARS and not getting a raise or a promotion.
You stuck around for almost your entire working life and you couldn’t A) get a raise, B) get a promotion, or C) find a better job elsewhere?
Did just enough to not get fired. After the first couple of years, the managers realize they’re not going to get her to try any harder and let her coast.
Given McDs turnover, I imagine they appreciate not having to train a replacement.
Fast food restaurants actually seem to do a lot of promotion from within for those who do a good job. Most of my friends worked at Taco Bell throughout high school and a little bit after, and it wasn’t hard to move up to crew trainer, shift supervisor, etc. When I worked at McDonalds when I was 14, the regional HR manager was someone who had started working behind the register when she was a teenager.
I know that not everyone can become a supervisor, and sometimes the opportunity just isn’t there, but it runs contrary to this narrative that fast food workers are just stuck at minimum wage for eternity.
I have several relatives get their start at McDs. To my understanding you cannot become an owner-operator without working your way up the chain. They also do pretty well.
“What we have is a type of coup in which the great leader is disabled. He is propped up, sent out to read lines written by others and kept safely away from disastrous situations. This is not how our system works, however.”
https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/949767436026380289
And Trump is the crazy one, amirite?
“What we have is a type of coup in which the great leader is disabled. He is propped up, sent out to read lines written by others and kept safely away from disastrous situations. This is not how our system works, however.”
The Obama Administration?
Trump is really living in these people’s heads. TDS is a real condition. All I keep hearing is that we can’t take anymore of this disaster, the end is nigh. Yet, I have yet to hear even one of these deranged loons point to any specific example of what Trump did to cause this hysteria. Not even one. So are we supposed to guess what it’s all about? He beat Hillary? He tweets stuff they don’t like? He signed a tax cut bill? Imaginary Russians? Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see any grounds there for all the hysteria, let alone impeachment.
He’s upsetting the business model of the two party politics.
The way it is supposed to work is that you start out door knocking and envelope stuffing. Work your way up through the ranks amassing favors from other party hacks and currying favor with the press. Then you finally get to run for office.
Here comes Trump and he runs without doing any of the grunt work. He never got the “blessing” of the party hacks and he doesn’t follow the rules. He also uses Twitter to go around the MSM.
If Trump is allowed to succeed, what is going to happen to all those party hacks who have cushy jobs? Fuck, normal people running might actually lead to real cuts in the budget someday. That cannot be allowed to happen.
* The press is just as worried about the damage to their cozy setup with the pols too. That is why they are willing to play along.
Some of you were asking about this the other day:
http://www.climatedepot.com/2018/01/04/flashback-2000-snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-children-just-arent-going-to-know-what-snow-is-uk-independent/
(Sorry, I’m always a day or two late reading links)
I don’t think it snows too often in the UK. But occasionally it does and I’m guessing it will happen again in the future at times.
And it will be treated as another sign of the apocalypse when it does.
There are the same folk who assure us that the seas are rising. And maybe I’m the only one, but I haven’t seen any data anywhere that shows this rise. Maybe they’re talking about high tide, which actually does happen every day?
I think the new dodge is that the weigh of meltwater is lowering the seabed, so the seas aren’t rising the seas are SINKING! Old panic, new wrapping paper.
There will always be lunatics standing on the corner with “THE END IS NEAR” signs, it’s just that these people have an unusually large sign.
Sounds like we’re safe then. At least I can’t think of any disaster scenarios with the ocean being deeper but as the same level. But I’m sure they’ll come up with something.
MORE VOLCANOES! DA EARF IS ONE BIG TOOTHPASTE TUBE!
“This after the Little Rocket Man begged the SoKo government to let his country benefit a little from the Winter Olympics (when, oddly enough, nobody ever profits from them)”
Well, it’s not that Kim cares about whether or not the starving parasite ridden masses in his country benefit or don’t benefit from the Olympics. It’s just entertainment for him. If they win in a few events, he gets to gloat. If they lose, the sick fuck gets to hang them upside down and beat their feet with a stick. Either way, he wins.
Luckily it’s the winter olympics, they just lost their two best 100-meter dash prospects across the DMZ.
*wild applause, does the Wave*
Two?
Did I miss the story on the 2nd one?
Not as bullet riddled as the first (they missed) so no word on paracites.
+1 Norksprinter
I think an Oprah candidacy would go a lot like the last election. People on the coasts will think she’s so great, and convince themselves that everyone feels the same way. Anyone on the left will shout down any criticism of her. Then the great unwashed masses in middle America will hand her a stunning defeat.
“Then the great unwashed masses in middle America will hand her a stunning defeat.”
Not so sure about that. I think she has a lot of appeal to the “soap opera crowd” (ie: middle aged white women in flyover country, y’know the ones that carried Trump over the finish line) and she’s likely be able to reproduce Obama’s numbers among blacks. I have a bad feeling that she might win if she ran. Trump needs to keep showing results and fast if he has a chance against her.
This, don’t discount the hatred for Hillary, Oprah just doesn’t garner the kind of visceral reaction Hillary did/does.
There’s another important thing that needs to be pointed out: Trump’s appeal among voters was his outsider status, not his celebrity. It was truly an organic movement where the entire party apparatus was working against his nomination. An Oprah candidacy, on the other hand, would be met with fawning publicity and massive superdelegate/party elite support. It would be a celebrity candidacy without any of the rebellion, which I don’t think is as good of an idea than it seems.
I just don’t know if people think that hard. I think the election last time was all about “Hillary is about as unappealing to everyone on Planet Earth as you can get, she’s corrupt, she’s nasty, she’s ugly; ok, I guess I’ll vote for Trump.” Whereas Oprah will be looked upon as “cooperative” and “bipartisan” and “polished” and “sweet”. She had a talk show that was so inclusive and wonderful! And, BTW, wouldn’t it be so nice to have a black-woman president!
People are stupid and vote based on personality and very superficial qualities. I think she’d win.
She has the best shot at winning out of any of the candidates that I’ve seen so far, mainly because I think she is the only person in the country who can possibly unite the Obama Coalition. However, it’s incredibly difficult to take out the incumbent, particularly if the economy is good. Because Trump has been such a market-friendly president, at least so far, I think that he would beat Oprah in a neck-and-neck contest.
Even in 2015 if you said we’d be seriously discussing the likely outcomes of an Oprah Winfrey vs Donald Trump presidential race, I’d have not believed you.
Well, much depends on events, of course. A healthy economy and lack of foreign policy disasters would set Trump up to beat just about anyone.
But, as to Oprah, her brand took a major hit when she got political to support Obama. She will have a major challenge maintaining her public persona in the face of a brutal political campaign. The SJW/proggie hordes infesting the Dem Party will have to be placated to some extent, and she will have to walk an (impossibly?) fine line between saying the right commie drek to keep them on-side, and sufficient airy platitudes to keep middle America interested.
Oprah 2020 sounds like a better idea for Democrats than it actually is. She’s always been popular as a feel good, non-political figure, but people also forget that during the short time that she fangirled for Obama back in 2008, she lost a lot of her appeal among many folks. She got back her popularity because she stayed away from politics since then, even in 2012.
At least it would be funny to see the American Left rally around a talk show host after all their whining and crying about how Drumpf is “unqualified” because “he has no political experience”.
Also, if John still lurks here, he’s in his bunk for the photo to these links on the homepage.
Ooooh, the child-rapist apologist, elitist rich out-of-touch hypocrite just endorsed Oprah for President? Well sign me up!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/01/08/meryl-streep-just-endorsed-an-oprah-winfrey-presidential-run/
“President Oprah” sounds as absurd to me as “President Trump” did two years ago.
/oh fuck
I wonder how it is to live life with the ability to go to such extremes so quickly.
now she doesn’t have a choice
See how fierce and empowered she is?
Glenn Reynolds always a lone voice of sanity.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/08/heres-novel-idea-if-you-want-legalize-marijuana-change-law-glenn-reynolds-column/1011209001/
Congress absolutely *needs* to change the law; I predicted that once California legalized, it would force the issue. They’re not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube, but they’ll sure put a lot of people in cages trying to do so.
Of course “the law” in question is already unconstitutional and therefore invalid because the constitution gives the federal government no power or authority in this matter. That’s why they needed to pass an amendment to be able to prohibit alcohol.
You mean that thing written by old white slave owners? It’s, like, 100 years old or something. And it doesn’t even make sense! The “s’s” look like “f’s”!
They absolutely should make this happen. If only to watch the usual suspects do a 180 and wail against evil rethuglikkkans plotting to get people high.
If I could pick one thing that Trump would do right now, it would be to de-schedule cannabis. I know it’s not going to happen, but it would be too epic. The left would go into a meltdown they could never recover from. They’d be forced to do a complete 180 and rail 24/7 against legal weed. All the news on CNN for the next year would be about marijuana killing babies and grandmothers.
“Congress absolutely *needs* to change the law”
They will. They’ll move cannabis to schedule C. Which is the worst possible fate for legal weed.
But the auto-enrolled employees also had an average of $1,563 more in consumer and auto debt than those who were hired before auto-enrollment. When mortgage debt is factored in, the picture becomes more complicated. The auto-enrolled employees owed $4,131 more, on average, on their homes than their colleagues who were hired before auto-enrollment.
So- stupid people borrow too much money.
This reminds me of something I stumbled across a long time ago. Some sort of wealth building infomercial, in which the guy was saying, if you are paying credit card interest, instead of putting money in a low interest savings program, use that money to pay off the card balance, and stop running up debt. Then, start a saving/investment program.
In my quest to be debt-free, my pattern has always been to hammer the higher interest debts to get them paid down faster and pay out less in the long run. It’s not actually a bad idea if you can maintain the discipline to not rack up new debts and can afford to think long term.
(It’s a bit harder when your total minimum outlay is in the vicinity of your net takehome)
I used to be on that train, but Dave Ramsey convinced me that they psychological impact of paying the lowest balance off first was better. You can motivate yourself better when you get those little wins more frequently. Also, that usually sorts your debts into roughly reverse interest order, so you’re maybe paying a few hundred more over the life of the debt payoff in order to stay motivated.
Not for me. I’d just be adding up all the future dollars wasted and looking at all those additional paychecks where I don’t get to use that money for something else. No one talked me into this strategy, and the psychological impact of being rid of the latest debt (school loans) was more of a “How much does that speed the next loan along?” than anything else. I did title the announcement exhuberantly becuse I felt it was expected.
I’m the same way UCS. Highest interest gets hit first. Mortgage is taken out of the running until it’s lower, but I still make double payments on that every month.
That makes sense to me, but partly because I like the idea of making fewer and fewer minimum payments a month. I’m not sure that the math works out, but I’d feel like I was losing less money if I’m knocking out the lower numbers first.
I think the psychological benefit is really only the third-best reason to do lowest-balance-first.
#1 is the risk-management benefit from knocking off a non-discretionary monthly spend as soon as possible. When that’s gone, you have a little breathing room.
#2 is that it now frees you to add that amount to the principal of the next-nearest one – it enables the rollup strategy.
Agree.
By the time I graduated with my undergrad degree I had a sizeable, but by no means outrageous, pile of student loan and (mostly) credit card debt. The “pay off the smallest debt first” strategy worked great for me. Knocked off the credit cards one at a time, then the car loans, then the student loan, and got to the point where the only debt I had was a house mortgage. I took a few years longer than I should have if I was really doing it perfectly, but I’ve had nothing but a mortgage to worry about for 15+ years now, and it’s been great. As soon as you really commit to the goal of paying off the credit cards, you realize that you can’t do that if you’re continuing to run them up. Realizing that early on was probably the biggest thing that made the strategy actually work, I really pity people who don’t learn that lesson.
Getting married a year before I graduated probably wasn’t the best financial decision. Picking a field that allowed me to quadruple my income over 20 years was a very good decision.
The one area (well, important one) that I disagree with Dave Ramsey is he suggests stopping 401k to get out of consumer debt (if you can do it in 1 year or less) while I say you have to get the free matching. At most places, that will be an immediate 50% return on income for the matching part — hopefully CC rates are well less than that.
For me, it is 83%, so really can’t pass it up.
I understand the rationale, its the same as paying small debts first, it creates intensity. But its hard to pass up free money.
Dave Ramsey is he suggests stopping 401k to get out of consumer debt (if you can do it in 1 year or less) while I say you have to get the free matching.
We’re heavy into the Dave Ramsey plan and I’m still contributing to my 401k to get the match. I’d rather spend an extra 6 months paying off debt and get 3 years worth of match money than the alternative. There’s a limit to the “intensity Uber alles” mentality and my limit is evidently somewhere in the low 5 figures
I took out a 401K loan, which I’m not happy about, but it will erase virtually all of my credit card debt in 3 years.
I’ve seen it said that if you’re carrying interest-bearing debt paying that debt off is effectively the same as investing that money in an interest-bearing account at the same rate. Thus, if you have $100, you’re better off paying down debt than investing it, all things being equal. There’s different advice that says that isn’t always the best strategy, but I think if you’re in a position where you’re looking for this advice and having to make those decisions, you’re probably better off getting clear of the debt.
Borrowing, in effect, to invest, has probably bankrupted more people than any other financial strategy. By a mile.
Pay your debts first. Period, full stop. The only exception is setting aside cash for your emergency reserves.
My dad likes to tell me the story of the ’87 crash, when had a whole bunch of buys done on margin. When it all came tumbling down, he was caught with a whole bunch of margin calls, and not enough cash to go around to pay ’em.
As a 16yo I never noticed that dire financial times were on us!
I was a freshman, but same thing happened to my Dad. It was the last time he used margin.
But this one is a sure thing. I have it on good advice that aardvark pelts are going to be hot! This $10,000 is going to be paid off in April with all the money that’ll be rolling in.
I believe in leveraging debt vs investments. We have a mortgage and 2 car loans. We max out our 401K’s and Roth IRAs, which money could easily wipe out the debt in a couple years. The mortgage interest rate is 2.75%, one car loan is 2.99% and the other is 0.99%. We can earn much higher rates of return on our investments so we just make the monthly payments on the loans.
Note: we pay off our credit card debt monthly. Our credit cards pay us in cash back, about $600/year. I don’t even know what the interest rate is on my credit cards.
So in your case you’re coming out ahead in the end. In my case, as a for-instance, we’ve still got a significant amount of not-low-interest credit card debt as well as student loans. We’re not finding any kind of investment vehicle that’s going to even balance out the interest on that debt. Once that’s done, then there’s probably a solid argument for just making normal mortgage payments and investing, but not yet.
I totally agree with your approach – to pay off the high interest debt first. That’s what I mean by “leveraging”. If the debt interest rate is higher than you can reasonably expect from an investment, then pay it off. But that’s why a person with high interest debt should still do the 401K to the matching limit – because the “rate” of free money is likely much higher than the debt’s interest rate.
We could probably get the math to work the same for us (right now, we have no car loans, a mortgage, and pay off the credit cards every month), but I would just rather own a car than hold a note on a car. Once you have the cash to spare to buy the damn thing, I’d rather buy it. Of course, our cars are ten years old and four years old, so they’d be paid off in any event.
I can understand that feeling – to not want to hold a note on a car. My wife and I didn’t have any car loans for over ten years. Then, in the past year and a half we both needed to get newer cars (we buy 2-year old cars and drive them for a decade). The interest rates we could get were so low and we wanted to use the cash for some near-term home improvements so that influenced our decision.
“Firestation #6 in Livermore, California, has a light bulb has been burning brightly since 1901. Named The Centennial Light Bulb, it was actually no different from any other light bulb made in that era. So, why don’t all light bulbs last for more than 100 years?
Back in the 1920’s, lighting companies formed a global cartel with the aim of boosting sales. Light bulb manufacturers intentionally cut the life span of all light bulbs to no more than 1000 hours. While the cartel eventually faded away, the 1000-hour rule has continued on for decades. This profit-boosting technique is called “planned obsolescence,” and is seen all too often nowadays with technology companies and their products which are intentionally made to be incompatible with older models.”
http://www.theblaze.com/video/watch-this-light-bulb-has-lasted-116-years-you-wont-believe-the-reason-why
I read the lighting companies did this to protect their customers because of battery life or something.
Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. Byron the Bulb.
https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
That light bulb is really dim, but it sure has lasted a long time. And of course, it wouldn’t meet today’s efficiency standards, so it would be illegal to sell it.
More durable lightbulbs are more expensive to make. And that centenarian bulb has lasted so long because it never gets intentionally shut off. I think they’ve lost power like 3 times over its life, meaning it has only been turned on 4 times. The initial warming up of the filament inside the bulb is what reduces its life. But the electrical cost of keeping every bulb lit at all times far outweighs any savings from not having to replace it. There were lots of bulbs manufactured before 1920; if they all lasted hundreds of years with no other considerations involved, then there would be far more examples than just the one.
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/950166478430629889
A 9-year-old drag queen?
Its cute when they’re just playing dress-up, and they’re not a junkie a few months from suicide yet
There was a time when a boy wearing girl’s clothes was doing it as a gag or just to see what it was like, not because he was a walking gender studies paper.
The reason it bothers me is because they’ve sexualized a kid.
Lactacia?
Someone get Alanis Morrisette on the blower.
Is North Korea a member of the IOC? Do they have a team? Will there be a 200 yard Minefield Sprint event?
Why is this even a topic of conversation?
“Who can go the longest without food” is their best event.
Competitive tapeworm infestation.
Are the medals awarded for “total weight” or “cumulative length” of tapeworms?
North Korea spends a lot on training (and feeding!) kids with athletic potential. From a young age. Though they’ve only won a couple of Winter Olympics medals (they’re better with the Summer Games)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_at_the_Olympics
I want to know if, due to this and her currently being indicted for multiple felonies, she still has a job with the Berkeley Public Schools….
oh silly me, of course she does! She probably got a promotion!
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10339
“Felarca, whom it identifies as a Berkeley Middle School teacher, was arrested twice in 2017 for incitement of a riot, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer”
Ah, I see, this is one of those peaceful protesters that people on the left say are being arrested for only protesting.
“WALSH: 58 People Were Killed In Las Vegas, We Still Don’t Know Why Or How, And Nobody Cares
And here’s a big one: Why haven’t we seen any video footage of Stephen Paddock whatsoever? Paddock carried out his attack in one of the most monitored cities in the world. You can scarcely find a nook or cranny of Las Vegas that isn’t under video surveillance. Yet not even one second of Paddock video has leaked? No video of him carrying the gun-laden bags into the hotel? No video of him checking in? No video of whatever went down between Paddock and Campos? Not even any video of Paddock at one of the many casinos he frequented? We’re told Paddock spent a lot of time in Vegas. There must be literally hundreds of hours of footage of him spread out between dozens of hotels and casinos. None of it has leaked? All of it was confiscated immediately?
That doesn’t make any sense.
None of this makes any sense.
And maybe it never will make sense, because nobody is paying attention anymore.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/24188/vegas-matt-walsh
I wouldn’t say nobody cares; it’s just that our elite betters would prefer that the rabble don’t know.
A guy broke his hotel window with a sledgehammer and proceeded to fire out it with rifles, because he was nuts.
The lack of video is pretty surprising. Every square inch of Las Vegas has a camera trained on it.
Is it possible there just is no explanation? It’s not like serial killers have rational reasons either.
Well, there’s two mysteries:
(1) The why (and maybe even the who) of the shootings.
(2) WTF is going on with the investigation?
TRUMP TIED UP ALL THE FBI RESOURCES BEING INVESTIGATED!!! AND THEN INVESTIGATING CLINTON!!!!
If that is the conclusion they arrive at based on the investigation, why not just say it? Instead it’s complete radio silence and I get the distinct feeling those charged with investigating would prefer that the unwashed masses just forget it ever happened. It’s just about the perfect atmosphere for conspiracy theories.
That a guy planned all this out and there was no reason, he was just nuts? I think the likelihood of that is so small as to be negligible. When crazy people start shooting people, they just go off and do it, it’s not premeditated and planned for weeks or even months. There was a motive as evidenced by the fact this was planned. We just don’t know the motive, there had to be one.
Yeah, the received narrative isn’t impossible, but it seems highly unlikely. My question:
This guy started buying quite a few guns long before the shooting, after never really buying guns before. If he was buying guns to conduct a mass shooting, why fuck around with bump stocks? He had the money, the smarts, and the time to get his license to buy full auto weapons. If he decided a year before the shooting that he was going to buy guns to kill as many people as he did, and went to the effort of planning and setting all this up, why didn’t he go full auto?
$10,000 for the legal full auto was doable, but the $200 tax stamp was too much.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a good question.
To me, the strangest thing is that here is a guy who no one knows anything about. It’s almost like his very existence has been erased. A live in GF who knows nothing about him, a very strange brother who knows nothing about him. No online history whatsoever. It’s beyond strange.
Someone cares. The left didn’t get their common sense gun control. What that has to do with all of this, I don’t know. But it’s the one thing that people definitely care about. This is one of the weirdest, if not the weirdest case I have ever seen.
Speaking of justified paranoia upthread, I’m coming to the conclusion, via my quest for online privacy, that the more you learn about surveillance, the more rationally paranoid you get.
To those of you who have been helping me understand some internet security concerns in threads, which I really appreciate, I’m going to explain the following–not because I think I’m an authority on any of this but because I want to know where my thinking goes wrong (if it does). You can’t point out where I’m getting it wrong if you don’t know what I think and why. So take the following in that spirit.
Anyway, my latest concern is about viruses. Now, this is in Linux, which some people will tell you means that you don’t need anti-virus software. Whatever viruses you’re exposed to, they say, probably won’t affect your Linux computer. However, that isn’t the only concern. I’ll be emailing files to people on a regular basis, and I don’t want to become the email equivalent of Typhoid Mary. I saw a florist billboard ad, once, that read, “Nothing says ‘Sorry ’bout the Crabs’ like Flowers”. I don’t want to be the guy that sets off everybody’s antivirus program and has to send everybody an apology.
So, I start thinking about antivirus for Linux. I’ve already gone to the trouble of locking down the rest of the system via open source solutions that aren’t selling my privacy short, so open source is the first place you look–but there aren’t a lot of solutions like that. And can you trust a bunch of volunteers to find and roll out fixes for viruses in real time? The open source solutions don’t even scan work in real time. They scan files when you run the program. Indeed. How can a bunch of open source guys compete with a dedicated staff at a proprietary anti-virus company? Then I remembered something I might have read about Kaspersky. Yeah, you DuckDuck Goose that story, and you read that he’s pretty much presumed to have distributed spy software for the Russian intelligence services by way of Kapersky’s antivirus updates.
I hadn’t really thought about this before, but virus updates are a huge vulnerability for surveillance that way. You have to trust your antivirus updates. There’s no way around that!
There aren’t a lot of anti-virus solutions targeted at Linux users, anyway, but one of the few (and reportedly the best) is Sophos. Then I read this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111204032852/http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/01/british-software-helped-syrian-regime-crush-dissidents/
Sophos is terribly sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused (dozens are believed to have been arrested using the technology), and they apologized from the bottom of their hearts.
The question is whether to trust them, Kaspersky, or anyone else’s anti-virus software–TO SCAN YOUR EMAIL. I’ve worked hard to deny everyone access to my email. Why would I want them to rub their grubby hands all over my raw like that? Yeah, a proprietary company would have a lot to lose if their integrity were compromised–but in the real world, that doesn’t seem to have stopped Kaspersky!
My initial quest for privacy was mostly centered on fundamental observations about self-sufficiency, responsibility, and how those relate to credibly demanding freedom. It’s like complaining about social security giving me a crummy return on my money and saying that I could have done better for my own retirement if only I’d been free to keep my own money instead of handing it over for social security. That argument doesn’t have much crediblity if instead of saving for my own retirement, I turn around and blow all my savings on expensive vacations, gambling, and new cars.
And so it is with internet privacy. It’s one thing to say I want the government to respect my privacy rights, but how serious should we take somebody who says that and doesn’t bother availing themselves of free software to protect their privacy?
It’s just that I don’t think there’s anything we can do to protect ourselves from the government using antivirus software to scan our email.
I hope I’m wrong.
Somebody please tell me I’m wrong!
They make ISPs do stuff like this. They make Google do stuff like this. What’s so special about anti-virus companies that they’re presumed to be immune to bullying by the government?
Or is it just that there isn’t anything we can do about that?
I don’t know about anti-virus software specifically, but I have started receiving ads both on the computer and on the Roku right after talking about them to my wife. I mean, I say Hilton and within five minutes there are Hilton ads streaming. This has happened for all kinds of things.
Either the microphone in my computer or my cellphone is recording and feeding key words to advertisers. I have no doubts whatsoever. It’s happened too many times and with things I’ve never searched for before.
Microsoft scans the contents of your computer for use in advertising. They also own Skype, now, right?
Do you keep Skype on?
Google scans everything you do.
Are your using Alexa? That thing has to be listening all the time in order to hear your commands, doesn’t it?
I don’t use Skype or have Alexa. I don’t use anything voice activated inside my house. I keep my computer’s built-in microphone off and my camera covered with tape. If I have to use either the microphone or camera, I use an external usb plug-in.
We still keep getting these ads though based on spoken conversations. It must be recording through the cell phones.
Alternative possibility – the ads were always there, but you noticed them because you’d recently had a conversation about them.
It has been oft observed that one does not notice the frequency of an event until their attention is drawn to it – like how often you touch your own face in a given day.
I’ve considered that too, but it’s just been too many coincidences. It might be my wife’s Facebook app. It’s not voice-activated but it has something about audio recording in the TOS. I keep telling her to get rid of it, but she can’t do it for long.
As a rule I do not install Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social media app on my phone.
You should conduct some kind of testing by talking about a brand that you never use, then see if it pops up.
If you want real paranoia, read this. Compiler issues aside, relying on any given piece of software is going to open you to vulnerabilities, like those you mentioned, at least in theory.
i have no clue about the subject matter but if it’s principled personality you’re looking for, that Ladar Levison fella seems to be doing some interesting stuff with encrypted email on the dark web.
We had a discussion about him in another thread–or lavabit anyway.
He’s doing great work, and I’m thrilled to be sending him money for the service–but it isn’t all there yet.
Get yourself a lavabit email address, though, for sure. It’s more secure as is than g-mail, and in the future, you’ll want to use it for everything.
Computers are inherently insecure. Period.
You can take all sorts of measures, but your best defense is anonymity. Very few people (myself included) want to deal with the headache that real computer security requires.
For my business I use the Sophos platform (endpoint security and their firewall box). It’s probably the best system I’ve used to date, but does it protect me from the government? Hell no.
Some are more secure than others, and using Windows, Gmail, etc. is so fundamentally unsecure, it isn’t even funny.
Does everybody realize what it is that Cortana does?
Using Linux, VPN, encrypted email with Swiss service, ungoogled Chromium, etc, is fundamentally more secure–even if it isn’t perfect–and if you use all this stuff with Qubes–which I highly recommend–you’re reasonably secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS
Oh, and all the things I mentioned are free of charge. There are some secure implementations that will cost you in terms of convenience. DuckDuck Go is one example, where Google keeping track of everything in your email, your searches, your browsing history and Microsoft scanning your computer gives you personal search results that are far superior to DuckDuck Go’s search results. There’s a trade off with certain things between privacy and convenience.
Using encrypted email from Switzerland, Linux, free VPN, etc. isn’t like that–or hasn’t been for me. You need to think more about your driver support, but there isn’t anything I want to do that I haven’t been able to do. In fact, I’m happier with my Linux computer now than I’ve been with any other computer over the last ten years.
Any computer-wide virus scanner should be treated with suspicion because it runs at the highest level of privilege but is itself a piece of software with bugs and vulnerabilities like any other. Basically, and as the Sophos and Kaspersky cases illustrate, these are programs that can and thus will be abused. You are always trading off the risk that you were targeted through those tools against the risk that you’ve been hit by the low hanging fruit that they catch.
TLDR Teacher’s Unions mean males earn significantly less
Well that’s different because shut up.
where is that found? your link wasn’t specific enough for the lazy.
[Abstract
This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes. Our analysis exploits the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework to identify how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects the long-run outcomes of students. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data linked to each respondent’s state of birth, we examine labor market outcomes and educational attainment for 35-49 year olds. Our estimates suggest that teacher collective bargaining worsens the future labor market outcomes of students: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces earnings by $800 (or 2%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.50 hours per week. The earnings estimate indicates that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $199.6 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation, as well as reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which workers sort. The effects are driven by men and nonwhites, who experience larger relative declines in long-run outcomes. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining leads to sizable reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults. Taken together, our results suggest laws that support collective bargaining for teachers have adverse long-term labor market consequences for students.] – Abstract “The Long-run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining”- Lovenheim and Willen, Cornell University
thx.
men and non-whites hurt by education unions. the NEA solely profits white women apparently.
I know there’s at least a couple of other Mini owners here, so… doesn’t look like I’ll be taking part in Mini Takes the States this year. The announced route’s closest approach to Cleveland is a 12 hour drive away.
From Cleveland, it’s likely that Tallahassee would be the easier drive.
It maybe easier, but it’s closer to 15 hours for that drive. Little Rock is a little over 12 hours. Regardless, driving for 12 hours to then drive with a bunch of Minis does not sound like the best vacation. The two times I’ve participated in Mini Takes the States, the route went right through Cleveland, making it easy for me to jump on (2014 – Chicago to Cleveland; 2016 Detroit to St. Ignace to Green Bay to Minneapolis).
The events can be fun, and few things are as entertaining as watching a couple hundred Minis swarm past a semi on the freeway.
Just stay away from Italy, and you’ll be okay
So, why don’t all light bulbs last for more than 100 years?
I just replaced a bulb which was probably no more than six months old. Fuckers.
LED is the cure for that.
Well, I just had an LED bulb fail on me after just a few weeks, and others fail after a couple of years. I think they generally have longer life spans, but it remains to be observed in the wild.
I gradually have replaced all the lights in the house with LED as the others fail. First one that went in 5 years ago is still going, haven’t replaced a LED yet.
What brand are you buying?
The most recent ones were Philips. Not sure about the others, it was probably just whatever name brands they had at Walmart or Home Depot.
It was a Philips that ganked after a couple of weeks.
Hmm, that’s odd that I’m having such a different experience. The thing I like best about LED is that the LED Christmas lights I bought have been going 5 years without a single bulb needing replaced. The thing I always hated most about Christmas lights was the ritual of replacing bulbs before putting them up, every freaking year.
Avoid Feit and other off brands.
I’ve had good luck with Sylvania and other name brands.
RC, try returning that bulb. Should not have failed so quickly unless you have really flakey power, specifically surges.
Oddly enough, the ones I bought at Ikea for $2/bulb have lasted over three years. I bought and replaced all the lights my house when we moved in
.
All I keep hearing is that we can’t take anymore of this disaster, the end is nigh. Yet, I have yet to hear even one of these deranged loons point to any specific example of what Trump did to cause this hysteria.
He’s destroying Obama’s legacy!
if people are not forced to buy health insurance, then 13 million will not buy insurance and be uninsured!!!!!
By their own choice! We can’t just let people not buy whatever they don’t want to buy!
+1 “nudge”
You’ve probably heard the buzz about “raw water,” the hottest new drink in Silicon Valley. It promises benefits like “natural probiotics” and “beauty minerals” like silica—and as we just discovered, it’s a total rip-off.
A New York Times trend piece and several follow-ups profiled “Fountain of Truth” raw water. Made by a company called Live Water, it’s advertised as “unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water.” A 2.5 gallon jug of “Fountain of Truth” recently retailed for $60.99 (about $24 per gallon) in a boutique grocery store in San Francisco, prompting shock from consumers and horror from scientists.
As it turns out, the “Fountain of Truth” is perfectly safe to drink. That’s because it’s the exact same water that flows out of the taps in Oregon. At $64 for a minimum of four jugs, that’s an awful lot of money to pay for essentially the same water you can get out of your bathroom sink.
In other words, Live Water’s pricey “Fountain of Truth” is just the tap water from Jefferson County, which residents get piped into their homes for about one-third of a cent per gallon.”
https://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/silicon-valley-raw-water-live-spring-water-overpriced
Fools, money, easily parted, etc.
Must not undrestimate the value of some nice looking jugs (to explain the joke in romania jugs can be slang for tits, though i did not mention this in my post)
In America too jugs can be slang for tits!
https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/sexy-flbp-6.jpg?w=500&h=666
In English, the plural for any noun can be slang for tits.
Take a look at her high yield stocks!
+2 Yuge tracts of land.
Hell there used to be a porn mag named Juggs
“porn magazine”
Haha! You are old.
*slinks off to hide his own geezer stash of printed boobs*
Hey not old enough to have had a subscription.
Just old enough to have stumbled on an uncle’s stash of them
We should let this catch on. There is no better way for these people to learn, than the “hard way.”
“Gwyneth Paltrow wants you to squirt coffee up your asshole using this $135 glass jar”
https://boingboing.net/2018/01/06/rectum-damn-near-kilt-im.html
Butt chugging rides again!
That has been a thing for a while. I used to know this batshit crazy hippie chick…
Oops. Clearwater cites bike shop for city-owned bike rack
http://www.tampabay.com/news/localgovernment/Oops-Clearwater-cites-bike-shop-for-city-owned-bike-rack_164163281
CLEARWATER — The city’s violation letter used bold letters in all caps to describe The Path Bicycle and Ride Shop’s alleged offense.
“INSTALLED SPIRAL BICYCLE RACK ON SIDEWALK WITHOUT PROPER PERMITS AND INSPECTIONS,” it declared.
The Path owner Gary Keener was dumbfounded when his landlord forwarded him the notice last week. Because he didn’t install the brand new bicycle rack on the sidewalk — The city did.
It’s Florida, dude.
Florida Man works in government too.
Naturally, if he complied with the violation letter and removed the bike rack because he didn’t have permits and licenses for it, he would immediately receive another violation letter for removing the city’s bike rack without permits and licenses.
Kafka approves.
Sounds about par for the course for Florida police.
“Clearwater is the worldwide spiritual headquarters for the Church of Scientology.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearwater,_Florida
Living in a fantasy
Some legal experts warned the conversation about Trump’s fitness could be dangerous to democracy.
“The 25th Amendment would require, for mental incapacity, a major psychotic break,” said former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. “This is hope over reality. If we don’t like someone’s politics we rail against him, we campaign against him, we don’t use the psychiatric system against him. That’s just dangerous.”
Nonetheless, the president’s Twitter feed continues to reignite questions about his fitness for office.
On Wednesday, Lee and two other medical professionals released a statement following Trump’s late night Tweet baiting Kim Jung Un into a potential nuclear war. “We write as mental health professionals who have been deeply concerned about Donald Trump’s psychological aberrations,” the statement read.
“We believe that he is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threats. … We urge that those around him, and our elected representatives in general, take urgent steps to restrain his behavior and head off the potential nuclear catastrophe that endangers not only Korea and the United States but all of humankind.” The statement, released on behalf of the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts, was signed by more than 100 medical professionals.
Can we declare these hysterical banana republic coup delusions part of Obama’s legacy?
National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts
I’m wondering about where this organization came from and who funds it. Anyone want to bet against Soros money?
An organization with “concerned” in its name is inherently suspect.
Just like they don’t understand that you cannot impeach a president because you don’t like this, they also don’t understand that someone is not crazy because they say things you don’t like.
“We believe that he is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threats. …”
The person who wrote that is no doubt unraveling. Meanwhile, there is little doubt that what Trump is doing has been effective, as evidenced by Lil Rocket Man’s recent about face on his behavior.
Well, Obama did his level best to turn the US into a Banana Republic, so sure, let’s call it part of his legacy.
ethics violation?
That picture… reminds me of what an Asian guy once told me when we saw a huge fat lady. “Is not human, is whare!”.
I still give Disarm some jukebox love from time to time.
Just read Oprah’s speech, she’s got a lot of nerve comparing modern overpaid attention whores to a little girl who was gang raped. That takes chutzpah.
Yep. The whole problem lies with “those men” over there, and “that culture” over there. Not those of us who enable this sort of behavior by looking the other way because it helps our careers or because we agree with somebody’s politics.
Icky white deplorables are the problem, as they have always been and always will be.
Jeebus Christ, she has to go back 75 years for her example of patriarchal oppression? I can think of some more recent examples of women raped by powerful men who escaped punishment, but on reflection, those were white women so I guess they don’t count.
It’s the Anecdote Olympics.
You’ve got to find a fresh one that nobody knows about.
And then send it up to Harvey Weinstein’s office for a personal interview.
Or at least find an anecdote where somebody involved is still frickin’ alive. “A bunch of guys who have since died did something to someone else who has since died” doesn’t exactly have a lot of urgency to it.
You have to wonder if that story is what inspired Grisham’s “A Time to Kill”
She lived, as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.
Good grief.
So last night around 1am I discover my bathroom pipes had unfrozen, but apparently not the shower drain. I had left the shower on slightly so the water could flow once it unfroze and clear out of the pipes, but since the drain didn’t unfreeze it flooded the bathroom. Fun!
I think you and I disagree on the meaning of the word “fun”.
I was going to ask how you froze a drain, but then I remembered that P-traps held water to keep the sewer gas at bay.
How did your drain line get so cold you froze your p-traps off?
I didn’t freeze it, the weather did. But that is where I still sit this morning, the drain still isn’t open, but the pipes are free. Now I just hope the drain opens, because I’m assuming the washer drain is frozen as well and I would prefer to wash all the wet towels from cleaning up the mess before they get musty.
Just set them outside and they’ll keep for a long time without getting musty.
Warmed up today, you should be all set soon.
Our mudroom is a little colder than the rest of the house and the water line to the washer froze as my wife was trying to use it (she does the laundry because I’m a cis het shitlord). After it thawed, the water wouldn’t stop even after the breaker was turned off. It looks like the water valve gasket was cracked, probably by ice, and I’m hoping this is the source of the continuous water pour.
$30 and 10 minutes of labor to fix is nothing, assuming that’s the culprit, but the mudroom flooded before we realized and it will take a few days to get the part shipped.
“Man overdoses on Viagra in airport, strips naked and hurls his own poo at everyone”
http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/08/man-overdoses-viagra-airport-strips-naked-hurls-poo-everyone-7212334/
So, Viagra’s side effects include turning you into a monkey?
“It’ll turn you into an animal in the bedroom!”
Eh?
Are they sure it wasn’t just a leftist with TDS? Because sounds exactly like how they all behave.
LED is the cure for that.
I have not seen a full spectrum (just like sunlight) LED bulb. I like halogen for the harsh whiteness of the light. The LEDs in my ex girlfriend’s bathroom made you look like like a drowning victim who washed ashore after a week on the bottom of a lake.
You can get LED bulbs that are the same color temp as halogen (also my preferred light). You can also get high CRI bulbs in halogen white that render colors better. They are really nice, but also pretty spendy.
They make them, you can buy them on Amazon and other places. Sometime they are used in panels for growing things, like weed you know.
LED grow lights
But they also just make regular bulbs that are full spectrum.
Why would you want to grown weeds? They do just fine on my lawn.
Most name brand bulbs have the color temperature on the label, though you may have to look for it. 5000 is daylight, 3200-3400 is warm white or the same as a standard incandescent.
Halogen is 3000. For me it hits the sweet spot between “warm” (which can look kind of muddy) and “cool” (which makes everything bluish and washed-out).
“‘No trousers on the tube day’ this year was as awkward as ever”
http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/07/no-trousers-tube-day-year-awkward-ever-7211019/
This will lead to unintended consequences?
Guy gets his penis stuck ‘jumping over Tube station barriers’
Blonde haired girl in the beanie: would.
the photog did a good job following the same group of 4 young ladies.
Do you think they understand that these policy position don’t line up with the average person? Basically all the pro-choice women I know still subscribe to the “safe, legal and rare” paradigm and don’t personally like abortion but consider it a necessary evil. I don’t think calling abortion “sacred” is going to change minds and could, in fact, deter potential supporters. This is so absurd that it almost seems like a false flag from pro-life groups.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/cleveland-billboards-abortion-good-medicine-gender-equality-life-saving-sacred/
Have you seen anything from the left as of late, say the past 10 years, that doesn’t seem absurd to the average person? They should have just stuck with free shit, that was actually working.
Pretty sure whether you can even get an abortion doesn’t really depend on your gender (your subjective self-image), but on your sex (your biology). Unless we have changed the definitions again.
This DREAMer shit should be a cake walk for Trump, the easiest sales job he’s ever done. Just frame it as Vets vs. Illegals. “We have a finite amount of money and we’re spending it supporting people who are not citizens of this country, while our heroes are dying waiting for care at the VA. Why do we take care of people from another country before taking care of our own Vets?” True or not, it’s a winning argument.
All he really has to do is what he’s doing. Just tell Democrats if they want to keep DACA, they have to help build a wall. They won’t do it, DACA expires, Trump blames Schumer and Pelosi for not being able to make a deal. Done.
That line of reasoning will never work on people who believe that every single business owner has a Scrooge McDuck vault of coins and we could fund literally anything if only we would tax them at 95%.
Bring back fucking DDT and the problem goes away.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-08/good-morning-baltimore-orkin-says-your-city-is-a-bed-bug-mecca
I read somewhere that the bed bug problem has more to do with a combination of washers that use less water, “green” detergents” and lower water temps.
This is so absurd that it almost seems like a false flag from pro-life groups.
It makes you wonder.
NoDak cops waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind the times!
Fargo police resolve situation of suicidal woman believed armed with a gun
Uffda. It is like they don’t even know that the best way to respond to a suicidal person is to shoot the shit out of them.
Speaking of death by cop, how long before one of the antifa thugs get it? I’m surprised it’s taken this long.
Pfft, Antifa is sooooo 2017. Now it’s all about black dresses.
Well, so far antifa has been careful to only riot where the police are under orders to allow, if not assist, the riot.
I know. But the cops will eventually get tired of that and just off one of them. They know nothing will happen except for a paid vacation. And they’ll just say that the person was attacking them and for once they’ll probably be telling the truth. What part of death by cop antifa doesn’t understand, I’m not sure, but it’s coming.
They wanna die anyway right? They’re just providing a service; the serve part of protect and serve.
Hmmmmm….
The Fargo cops might not be the best investigators either.
Missing Fargo man found dead in his home
A NoDak was reported missing Jan 2nd. Cops find him in his home on Jan 8th when they finally get around to checking there.
I was starting to feel emotionally assaulted on and othered, but then I remembered that you live in Minnesoda and I felt a lot better about myself.
I was starting to feel emotionally assaulted and othered, but then I remembered that you live in Minnesoda and I felt a lot better about myself.
Then the squirrels showed up.
So, I hear there was some event on TV last night about a bunch of elite multimillionaires patting themselves on the back about how woke they are.
If they had Halle Berry doing handstands in that black dress I would’ve watched it. Otherwise, Dr. Pol reruns are better.
In my office building
too cool
Nice beanie also.
I thought the dog hair was an especially jaunty touch