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Elephants and Jackasses...

Discussion in 'Permanent Threads' started by Nettdata, Oct 14, 2016.

  1. downndirty

    downndirty
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    "No, see....more white. You got the French part down at least. Just stop with the whole being black and poor part."
     
  2. Juice

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    Another shit-hole brought to you by colonial France.
     
  3. dixiebandit69

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    Haiti: a literal shit-hole country.
     
  4. Popped Cherries

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    My best friend and I grew up going to the same church. His brother ended up becoming a missionary. His parents LOVE this. He's a missionary in fucking Italy....Nothing like spreading the "True" word of God to the oldest, most established version of Christianity.
     
  5. Aetius

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    That man's name? Pope Francis.
     
  6. bebop007

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    I had my first experience with this when my wife and I visited Ireland. We were hanging out in Galway's city center and noticed a bunch of people doing these Jesus-y/Christian plays.

    I was confused and then my wife (who grew up in Wheaton Illinois-think of the town in Footloose) informed me they were there to convert people.

    Convert the Irish.........to Christianity.

    Evangelicals! Because nobody is Christian enough!
     
  7. Fiveslide

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    Oh, but their baked goods... *muah*. The french side of St Maarten was pretty fucking dirty in spots, just the way I like it.
     
  8. Crown Royal

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    See: Muslims.
     
  9. Aetius

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  10. xrayvision

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  11. Aetius

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    When he mentioned the cop killing a "white woman" on Jan 6, I thought "well that's a bit of a mask-off moment" and then he just started dropping N-bombs like he was over Dresden and I was like "oh, there's no mask at all."
     
  12. SouthernIdiot

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  13. Crown Royal

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    A scoop coming from them has zero credibility. And that sounds like a too good to be true scenario coming from a magazine famous for cooking up too-goo-to-be-true scenarios.

    I’ll believe it when I hear it elsewhere, more than once, because it sounds like Twitter-speak put into a full article. Besides, Trump IS behind Jan6, period. He instigated it, wanted it, supported it and your senate bent over and took it up the ass to save face. They will NEVER concede they did anything wrong. Ever. And he will never face Justice because the people running your country are lip service-spewing cashwhore pussies who won’t go after Trump for real.

    Why waste time and breath on an impossible task?
     
  14. downndirty

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    I can't see anyone in Congress being dumb enough to get caught helping plan January 6th. Helping organize the protests? Sure. Saying some dumb shit that might be seen as encouraging them to show up armed and act aggressively towards democrats? Maybe. Explicitly telling them how to get inside the building, disrupt the proceedings and harm Congress people? God, I hope not.

    That said, the blanket pardon thing is not a good look right now. It seems a lot was lost in translation between: "protest, get rowdy and if you get arrested (for typical protest shit: refusing to disperse, etc.) we'll pardon you." and a blanket pardon for WHATEVER you do. Treason, it would seem, was on the table for a pardon, and since it damned near happened....

    From a convo with an economist:

    "It's not the low skilled workers who were unemployed. They were 'essential' and kept working throughout the pandemic. And the high skilled workers all worked from home. It's the middle who were unemployed. And the economy has been chugging along without them. And I'm worried that the economy has figured out that they might not need all those middle-skilled workers. They'll either have to upgrade their skills to be like us . . .or slide down....

    Till von Wachter looked at folks who were displaced from jobs from a mass job loss event Even in manufacturing, it took folks about 12 years to get back to where they were wage-wise when they lost their jobs. I have a bad feeling about the effects of the past two years on the middle class.

    This is what happened in 2008, as well. Those folks still haven't recovered. The businesses just managed without them, and the culprit was most often labelled automation. IE, we got rid of them during the downturn and the work they did got absorbed in a new system or re-org...

    Don't even ask about the long term effects for those who graduated in the past two or three years. The ones who did get jobs got much lower starting wages than had they gotten jobs two or three years earlier. And since most folks' pay raises are a function of their base pay (a X% increase), this ripples through their wages for decades later. And it'll also affect their retirement savings/Social Security/etc since that's also a function of their wages. And that's for those who got jobs...It's not going to be pretty."

    Fuck.
     
  15. Aetius

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    I think Boebert and Greene are both dumb enough and delusional enough that's it's possible. Gohmert is definitely dumb enough in the abstract, but he's been around Washington for too long to make that kind of rookie mistake.
     
  16. Dcc001

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    If what your economist friend is saying is accurate (or close enough)...were the lockdowns a good idea? If the choice is between a spike in death rate amongst the elderly and medically vulnerable vs. many decades of economic devastation that impacts at least two generations and creates a otherwise unseen amount of poverty - which is the lesser evil? I mean, it's like choosing between syphilis and gonorrhea*.

    It'll take years for this to play out and really know what the effect of the pandemic and the lockdowns truly were.

    *Don Cherry quote.
     
  17. malisbad

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    I think the bonus 246,054 dead of working age alone makes the lockdowns worth it (not to mention those with long term disability due to the illness) *1. Without them, it probably would have been New York, but everywhere. The lockdown also showed people that they don't need to be at the office all the time, that they aren't nearly getting paid enough to life off the shitty jobs out there, that their bosses don't give two shakes of a rat's dick about them (if it was ever unclear). The economic devastation was just incredible wealth transfer to a few individuals and corporations, and could easily be reversed through wealth transfers.

    *1 CDC Provisional Death Data: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku
     
  18. downndirty

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    He works for BEA, so I trust his take on stuff.

    FFS. The lockdowns had no way of being certain the spike in death rate was going to impact the elderly and medically vulnerable. Also, there was a very real concern that you could get your balls sued off by not keeing your employees safe. Cricisim in hindsight is pointless. Should we have locked down, knowing the long-term economic impacts? Yes, assuming the other option was do nothing.

    The economic devastation wrought by the virus was going to happen no matter what the countermeasures were. Imagine, I dunno, 2x the cases we have now. That's 1.5 million dead, about a third of which were working (going by current labor force participation rate). That means billions, possibly trillions of lost wages, output and consumption. That's 6-8 million with long-term chronic health conditions, and 70 million cases front-loaded when we understood the least about it and had no real handle on countermeasures. There's no guarantee it wouldn't have been worse, and I think we can safely say there's a pretty high likelihood that without the lockdown, we'd be in much worse shape today. Again, "get the initial response right" and everything is much easier. Lockdown was an important part of buying us time to get a handle on things, and getting the response down.

    Uncertainty and mass death are far worse for an economy than temporary lockdowns. Without locking down, businesses would have been free to ignore safety measures at their own risk, meaning they have liability for what happens on their premises. Same as if you get salmonella from a Chipotle, you sue them for shitty health practices. Well, imagine the economy when you're getting sued by every employee or patron who got this virus and could contact-trace it back to your place of business.

    Not to mention the fact that we live in a society, whose emphasis is to keep people alive, not an economy that needs to be kept at full steam at all costs.

    The models can be wrong about economic growth and the long-term impacts of the pandemic. They get the impacts about being dead right every Goddamned time.

    I have a feeling that we will see major legislation to address the economic impacts of this, in what I hope will benefit the labor and middle class. Something that fundamentally shifts the economy to provide a living wage to more folks and/or break up some of the monopolies will change the assumptions of the current models and hopefully the outcomes. If not, this shit is bleak as fuck.
     
  19. Juice

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    It’s too bad his site is no longer up, Philalawyer had a really good blog post years ago about how the white-collar middle class was absurdly bloated and would be course-corrected at some point.
     
  20. downndirty

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    Eh. I mean, a company can spend money on staff any way it chooses. An outsider's perspective on "productive" is kind of useless. In a service economy, you have wide disparities in value (the difference between the best server in the house and the worst can be vast, but the volume they serve can't be changed very much...ie, the best may serve the same # of burgers, but get way more money for it, but the food still has to go out). Some companies run lean, some don't. I woked in sales jobs that had a massive impact on the company's bottom line, and my productivity was measured as such. I worked in other jobs where the value of my work wasn't in the impact to the company's bottom line, but the risk it ran if no one did my job. That risk can be deemed acceptable to some small companies, and unacceptable to large ones.

    I will say that this middle chunk of folks is where a company's resilience lies. Their future leadership has to come from somewhere. The folks who step up when shit gets hard usually reside in the middle group. Execs find it easier to bounce, and the lower-skilled folks are too much of a risk. Also, this is the bridge between technical skillsets (flipping of burgers) and non-technical (selling of flipped burgers). Doing away with this group entirely exposes you to risk that those two skills don't need to be combined. Also, the work still needs to get done at some point, so when these jobs go away, that work gets shifted onto contractors for example, or suppliers. That, in turn, puts more of a burden on purchasing or HR, or legal.

    These jobs are popular because they are mythologized. They are at major risk of automation: information processing is now perilous for humans to do in most cases. They provide a living wage, often the lowest point on the org chart to do so, and a little power to make the employee feel their position is deserved. And, I think at some point that became the default American dream: not a factory job but an office job. Like the rest of the American dream, it's just becoming more fleeting...

    I agree it's bloated, but because we over-emphasize the importance of the managerial and administrative work. Hiring a gritty, uneducated front-line staff is to be avoided, they are the undesirables, and the white collar folks are just aghast. Hiring a 20-something who can jiggle the excel the way you need to and manage some relationship that is annoying or risky is a more pleasant experience that solves a "problem". Also, in our office cultures, I think the budgeting wars are fought over these kinds of resources, whereas the front line folks are more rigidly managed. A chain restaurant has a staff of x, with little variation...it's down to a science, and having too many people is simply not possible on multiple fronts: the part-timers won't work there if they don't get the hours, the restaurant isn't profitable with too many folks on the payroll, the feet coming in the door determine the feet working the floor, etc. The corporation managing that chain can have a TON of variation, but it's the top of the pyramid: one corporate office, overseeing thousands of individual outlets.