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Comments
#unexpectedresults
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/investigation-continues-into-sunrise-raid-that-left-2-fbi-agents-dead-3-wounded/2373806/
(* - not actually close enough for me to be neighboring this, so I don't actually know that neighborhood)
(Not that I would be surprised to see Florida Man actually have one, given Florida Man's reputation.)
Wasn't sure I should post them, since they feel a bit biased in their commentary, though they do have a point which I hadn't thought of before, which seems rather obvious in retrospect: suburban developments bring in less revenue to cities per unit land area than do urban developments, or more generally speaking, denser developments. (By revenue I am referring to property taxes, which are the most common source of municipal revenue, to my understanding.) This leads to some paradoxical situations where a dull-looking line of older storefronts that experiences a lot of turnaround is more valuable to a city than a newly-developed fast food restaurant with a neat parking lot and lawn.
The "Ponzi scheme" argument is that the maintenance cost for a suburb eventually outpaces the property tax revenue it generates, making it unsustainable and driving cities to develop more suburbs in an attempt to make up for them.
Then again, perhaps I shouldn't be saying anything about bias since I already do have opinions on this matter; specifically I've long decried modern suburbs for being obnoxiously unwalkable and basically requiring residents to own and maintain cars, which -- even excluding environmental considerations -- is needlessly costly IMO. And yeah I could also write other criticisms addressing environmental unsustainability.
Amusingly, the guy whose videos I was thinking of posting is a Canadian living in Amsterdam, though he cites the work of a U.S. (specifically Minnesota-based) nonprofit called Strong Towns.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/city-of-miami-again-orders-la-placita-to-paint-over-puerto-rican-flag-mural/2380319/
My dad has gotten vaccinated; my mom is waiting. And I'm after them, of course.
I guess I could say that the Biden administration is doing a good job, but it's more like, it's doing the generally competent job that it ought to be doing anyway, and the Trump administration just somehow managed to be extremely incompetent.
So, like, you'd expect a competent national government to do things like firmly tell people to wear masks (and exemplify this behavior), do whatever it can to procure and coordinate the distribution of vaccines, and generally take the whole thing seriously. We're finally getting on that.
There's also some other related coronavirus stupidity coming out. For example, New York's governor Andrew Cuomo (D) has been withholding data about nursing home deaths. Apparently it might have something to do with someone being afraid of getting investigated. Whelp, that was a bad idea, to say the least.
Florida's still being extra stupid about COVID-19, and large gatherings of Super Bowl partiers were a thing recently.
Meanwhile, if fourteenwings were still around he'd have a field day with this:
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/02/11/weve-become-parodies-of-ourselves-california-democrats-bemoan-sf-school-board-1362846
TL;DR the San Francisco Board of Education is acting like a bad "social justice warrior" stereotype.
(Complaining about SJWs kinda loses its luster when every time you do so, you are patted on the back by some neo-Nazi who thinks this totally makes you bros, but I'll try to keep my head up.)
FWIW here's a broad-scale summary of what's going on: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/why-texas-energy-grid-unable-handle-winter-storms-n1258049
It's a couple days old but it still basically summarizes what's going on.
Note that Texas prided itself on having an energy grid that was independent of the national grid. (Though, I've heard someone point out recently that the board that oversees Texas's grid is for some odd reason majority non-Texan. And these people were appointed by the Public Service Commission, which in turn is appointed by the Texas state governor.) Also, Texas has rather famously had a de-regulatory approach to public policy.
And here's a closer look at what a college dorm in Texas is like currently.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-universities-power-outages-dorms/
My takes on the situation in Texas so far are:
1. The situation is horrible and critical.
2. It kinda shows how much we've come to rely on a variety of modern conveniences, particularly the assumptions that clean water and electricity are steadily and easily available, and just how critical the infrastructure is that provides these to us. (Ways to make this infrastructure more resilient -- or ways to reduce dependence on it -- are of interest.)
(Texas' blackouts) That's terrible, I hope it gets worked out soon.
TL;DR the meme/slang term "stonks" got popular because it resonated with the feeling of surreal meaninglessness of trying to read meaning out of every market fluctuation...especially when that meaninglessness is highlighted by disruptive actors.
Since she sang a cappella, this has led to a variety of "reharmonizations" on YouTube where people accompany her melody in such a way that highlights the...multitonal nature of this performance.
Credit where credit's due, I do think she has a strong voice. But other parts of the delivery could be improved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5gm75q/where_did_the_frankfurt_school_cultural_marxism/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ivbfo/were_the_original_members_of_the_frankfurt_school/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qhex6/is_the_term_cultural_marxism_actually/
AFAIK the fact that the term traces back to an actual movement is not terribly relevant.
^^ Well, if some Marxism thing were about economics it'd probably be called just plain Marxism.
Could go in the sustainability thread too.
I've been following this story on-and-off as bits of reporting have come out in the local news, but here's a pretty comprehensive write-up of what we know so far.
In short, former state senator Frank Artiles (R) bankrolled an old friend -- some dude named Alex Rodriguez (who apparently still had access to a home in the Miami area, despite living in Boca Raton, which is over an hour's drive to the north) -- to run as an independent in a competitive election in the Miami area, which featured incumbent state senator José Javier Rodríguez (D) vs. Latinas for Trump founder Ileana Garcia (R).
Rodriguez (i) did not campaign, and an investigation has since turned up that he got a bunch of money from Artiles, including cash, payments to Rodriguez's landlord, and even a fake sale of a Range Rover (i.e. a sport utility vehicle) to Artiles. It's not clear where Artiles himself got the money in the first place.
The result: of about 215,000 total votes cast, Garcia (R) defeated Rodríguez (D) by 32 votes, while Rodriguez (i) garnered over 6,000 votes.
This fradulent candidacy appears to be one of three different such cases that happened in 2020 in Florida.
For what it's worth, Artiles was state senator back in 2016-2017, and he resigned after using racial slurs and other profanities at his fellow senators.
FYI, the linked article is this:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/544178-idaho-legislature-shuts-down-after-six-house-members-test-positive-for
edit: oh lol it actually just embeds the linked article
"Duda is a moron."
There's been a case of "lese majeste" after some dude said these words, and this seems to be reaction on Twitter. It's not really relevant or anything, but it's political enough for this thread instead of Images.
My thoughts, which aren't really specific to this article's topic but broader thoughts on a related topic:
I wonder if there's a sort of broader politicization of business.
I think this began as an unintended side effect of ideas like "vote with your wallet" and "businesses should use their influence to do good".
But then people realized that this basically meant that they could use their interactions with business (either as suppliers or consumers) as an expressions of social/ideological goals that they think are worthy, and that in turn has exposed some deeper rifts regarding what people do agree/disagree with regarding what goals are worthy, exacerbated by other people who realized that such behaviors could be exploited for political gain.
To be fair, before said "politicization", how would we have expected people to choose how to do business? It'd basically just be who does something the cheapest and most conveniently. And money, essentially, formed a common social basis by which to measure whether something is considered a good idea.
But then the realization of secondary social effects opened up another dimension for evaluating business decisions.
Separately from this, there's also a focus on branding, and I feel that this was once mainly the realm of larger corporations (and was generally seen as very "corporatist" and impersonal in a dishonest way) but now with the rise of social media branding is now a thing even on the personal level.
This thinking and the tools available to do so enable a person to think about their own "brand", as a social token by which they are identified, and political views unsurprisingly can make up part of that brand.
Some days I wonder whether the advancement of standards of living is partly responsible for enabling such branding, as one doesn't need as much to cooperate with others in order to survive, in contrast with just seeking out one's niche, which in turn enables both a greater sense of romanticized individualism as well as the viability of fringe beliefs socially.
Though, ironically, people do still seek company, and one way they do so is to find compatriots of their belief systems, and in some particularly problematic cases, end up conjuring existential fervor in order to justify those beliefs and their dedication to them.