Not saying anything bad about you at all, but I think this is a perfect example of a really common logical fallacy that we on the lefter side of things tend to make. Lots of us (more often than not, myself included) that anybody on the conservative side of things is simply conservative due to lack of information.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case. As a transplant to the South, I think the reality is that not only do plenty of supporters know that, even more very literally don't care.

Say for instance that you think abortion is murder. Nevermind all the reasons you're wrong or all the constitutional reasons you can't possibly make laws based off that without grossly violating women's civil rights. Just say you believe abortion under any circumstances is murder. Why would you care if you're in the minority? In that case, you don't want majority rule. You don't want popular opinion to "win." You will actively support people who want to tear down democracy and separation of powers, because you believe murder is always wrong, and all abortions are always murder. In your mind, your beliefs are on the same level as being an abolitionist back when the majority opinion was pro-slavery.

Then, you extrapolate that up to the dozens or hundreds of different talking points that people will attack with the same kind of zeal, the talking points and political opinions that people use to literally define what "culture" they identify with and you have a significant portion of the country who not only aren't phased by elected officials saying things like this, but actively want to tear down the concept of majority rule, and actively seek the destruction of democracy and representation.

The truth, unfortunately, I think is far scarier and more disturbing than a lot of us would prefer it to be--we can't simply educate people out of not supporting monsters, because the monsters under the bed are genuinely the ones they want in charge.

I think it’s easy for people sufficiently interested in this issue to write, or even read, an article like this to overestimate the interest that other people have in the subject.

The argument by privacy advocates going back to the DMCA has always been that people lack interest because they lack understanding. When Disney said "you can't tape football games" the country said 'the fuck you say' and everybody knew. On the other hand, when Sony said "we can sue you for millions if you make a perfect copy of your CD" things were much better hidden. "You wouldn't steal a car LOL" became the reaction of the world seven years after there was any discussion about it; this is one of the reasons everyone publicized the hell out of Net Neutrality despite the fact that it had very little effect on anyone in the moment.

Consider how often the first button is “OK” and muscle memory says it’s the one you click to make the thing you just requested happen.

That makes it "dark design", not choice.

Consider how many apps and services are already interlinked, and how hard it might be to figure out what might break if you opt out.

It's not hard to figure out what's broken. Try it. Does it work? Then it's not broken. Is it broken? Then it's broken. I switched back to iPhone about a month ago. I was delighted to discover I could delete Apple Maps. I was more delighted to discover that not only can I use Google Maps in Apple Carplay, but that it's radically more useful than Google Maps in Android Auto. Now - if I try to get Siri to look up an address, she refuses to talk to Google Maps. Apple helpfully asks me if I want to reinstall Apple Maps for that functionality and I cheerfully do not because the dumpster fire that was Apple Maps the last time I used it will never not be fresh on my memory, and having compared Google to Apple with my wife out driving around two weeks ago even a cursory glance at the AIs' chosen behavior reveals Apple to continue to suck.

Apple is making it a lot more inconvenient for me to subvert their native app. They are, however, allowing me to choose to do so. Thus, I continue to work around the lack of Apple Maps.

Surely at least 99% of ads are ignored. That means all businesses have to spend a lot more to reach their next customer.

Let's hear it for choice! Simon calls me up two or three times a month to honor me with the opportunity to advertise on kiosks at the mall. They can hook me up for a mere thousand dollars a month. "Sure," I say, "lemme see your demographic breakdown and visibility figures for those kiosks." There is generally a pained silence on the other end of the line, followed by a variation of "no one's ever asked for that before" or "why do you need to see that" or "what's a CPM." I then patiently explain that I have an advertising budget that I'm attempting to maximize the utility of and I'm not going to commit to an ad buy whose effectiveness I can't predict. The conversation goes sideways at that point.

Conversely, I have a double-sided jumbotron at a busy intersection. It's dying; it was installed in 2004 and hit end-of-life in 2018 so we're looking at dropping between $30k and $50k to replace it. Now here's the thing: when I told the company to give me a CPM breakdown on that sign, THEY DID. They divided the cost of the sign by the number of vehicles that encountered it daily times the occupancy rate (both figures available from DOT) over the cost of the lease and revealed that spending $50k on a sign is 20 times cheaper than Google AdWords. More than that, our intake surveys ask "how did you hear about us" which is how I know that 20% of our customers come to us through online search, 20% through insurance website search, 20% word-of-mouth and 40% drove by and saw the sign.

As a business owner, I don't feel compelled to spend "a lot more to reach their next customer." I will spend as little as possible for maximum effect. As a savvy business owner I will research that relationship until I'm satisfied. if an advertising platform wishes for me to "spend a lot more" they need only give me compelling evidence that my spend will be efficacious. Simon Outdoor fails. Daktronics wins. It's just numbers.

I recognize you're talking about targeted advertising and I'm revealing that my means-tested, tracked, and researched most-efficient ad buy is "fuckin' 4'x10' LED sign on a street corner." I think that's telling. We presume that because something is super-invasive it must be super-effective and it's simply not so. I made the point to the guy who literally runs the Internet for Warner Brothers that with all the cookies and stuff Warner has in my browser it's kind of astounding that they give me the exact same ad three times over six times an hour. He responded that while the cookies and such are clearly and obviously available, the advertisers aren't interested because when you're trying to move product, microtargeting is utterly ineffective. He didn't say it was offensive; wasn't his wheelhouse.

And look. I think we're spending $100/mo on adwords right now. We're also organically the second or third search result for any term that matters to me within the isochrones I care about. That's in a market where my nearest competition literally owns "birthcenter.com" (they're two or three links below us). As far as sponsored ads? We're number two of two because any term we care to spend money on we're automatically outbid by a major hospital conglomerate.

Which, really, goes to show how ineffective online advertising is. We're basically pissing away that $100. Our business comes from being in the directories patients expect to look at, and in making the community aware of us through outdoor signage.

Which, once more, is probably why these discussions are so contentious. There's no there there. Nielsen ratings exist because the advertising industry demanded it of broadcasters; online advertising exists because it isn't tracked by Nielsen. As soon as there are auditable metrics for online advertising of any kind the whole thing will collapse.

I found this stuff because of a thread by Oren Cass:

This graph says a lot:

Humor an old man. That's what Google gives me when I look up "sky high view." I've been feeling introspective of late.

For debate in 10th grade I argued against the reunification of Germany. My argument was that reintegrating the failed state of East Germany with the western powerhouse of Europe would lead to an economic depression and social conditions likely to give rise to Nazism. The Soviet Union had just ceased to be but it was all safe in Yeltsin's hands so I made no considerations of a Romanian underclass, a North African diaspora or any of the other triggers that gave rise to the modern European neoliberal order but in fairness, I also made no considerations for the modern European neoliberal order spending itself to success. I had argued that the best thing we could do in Iraq would be to plant a bunch of McDonald's, give them a couple senators and a dozen representatives so it's not like I didn't grasp globalism, I just had a 10th grader's understanding of it. Not unlike half the Senate.

Meanwhile the think-tanks were busy arguing that the last war had been won and we were a couple warp drives and a holodeck away from our neoutopian destiny. Capitalism. The end. We had a Newsweek subscription back then and they had a little blurb about Sotheby's auctioning off the Soviet space program. Few years back I bought the auction catalogues off eBay. It's funny: in 1993 that's the triumph of law and order over the oppressive forces of Marxism-Leninism. In 2016 you can't see it as anything but the Imperialists raping the heritage of a people who didn't really have anything else. We get up-in-arms about Hobby Lobby raiding Iraqi antiquities but I can buy four FLOWN Orlov space suits on eBay right now. Look it up.

And the thing is? Any country's clandestine operators are criminal. By definition. And they work with criminals. Yeltsin? He was an oligarch who was working with us. Putin? he was an agent for the oligarchs who weren't and now he's one of 'em. We sat back and watched as a failed socialist state became a failed kleptocracy but failed to notice that Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet Union and Putin rebuilt Russia. Rebuilt it to serve his own interests? Hundo P. But have you looked around?

Can you taste it? Hope. Change. We were going to bank ourselves to heaven in 2008. The guy who started the Iraq War to secure a Project for a New American Century was out and the bookish black law professor with the middle name Hussein was in and if you could buy things with idealism we'd be plying flying cars across carbon-free skies. "India has more honors kids than America has kids!" and then they started setting each other on fire because WhatsApp told them to.

One of the books I read, can't remember which, had within the preface the notion that the United States didn't win the Cold War, the Soviet Union just lost it first. Neither economic system is perfect. One was demonstrably less perfect but that doesn't mean the other was without flaw and after it had no real rival its proponents doubled down on the stuff they believed in on the assumption that like fairies, trickle-down economics will live if only you clap your hands.

The KGB, which ran the Soviet Union, became the FSB which runs Russia. The constellation of appointed and elected roles for the nomenklatura may shift but they're still just stars in the sky. Gorbachev ruined the Soviet Union by believing in communism. He eliminated the waste and graft and gray markets and black markets and nepotism that was actually keeping the lights on and the whole fucking affair was over in six years. Another six years and the whole fucking affair was back.

I think the United States was stronger because it's a fundamentally stronger structure. I think the United States was stronger because individual determinism has been the backbone of American culture since before 1776. I think the United States was stronger because we have a tradition of innovation and at least pay lip service to liberty (selectively applied). But I also think that the Democrats believe in the experiment the same way Gorbachev did, and I think the Republicans are pragmatists.

Neoliberalism doesn't work for everyone and in the United States, the people it doesn't work for are over-represented. Fundamentally neoliberalism is unsustainable - it is a philosophy of wealth generation and wealth concentration that does not exist in equilibrium. You're only poor if your neighbors are rich and if you're virtuous and poor your neighbors are obviously sinful. For forty years I've been watching Republicans argue on morals and Democrats arguing on principle and for forty years the Democrats have been attracting people who haven't been left behind. Well, they've been attracting people who haven't been left behind but also don't immediately think "what's in it for me?"

Yeah I know this doesn't answer your question. Is Putin involved in influencing the President? Obviously. Is this how he did it? Probably one of many ways. Andrew Peek isn't a Russia expert by any stretch of the imagination, he's a Kennedy School kid whose wheelhouse is Iran. I have no fuckin' idea what that's about but at this point Andrew Peek has more foreign policy experience than most of Trump's cabinet which admittedly isn't saying much.

Masha Gessen wrote a book about Putin called Man Without a Face. It's about Putin, but it's also about the failure of a nascent Russian democracy to oppose the forces of organized crime, thereby leading to the ascendancy of the criminal underworld. At least when they were contained by the Soviet Union there was some idealism to somewhat steer the ship; once the FSB burned the Reichstag it was all Mafiya, all the time.

I think C Wright Mills coined the term "corporatocracy" because he knew no one would allow him to refer to the United States as an oligarchy. Thing is, in an oligarchy? The money only wins if everyone is playing fair. Otherwise to the underhanded go the spoils.

We're not there yet. But it sure seems like we're at the point where things either get better or they get ruinous. Someone on Twitter used a phrase like "epochal interregnum" and fuckin' Fourth Turning is 24 years old. Fucks predicted a collapse of global order starting in 2008... in 1996. The boomers want to burn it the fuck down.

So in that frame? I mean yeah Putin's money is fucking with American elections duh. Much the way it would have been fucking stupid for the CIA to NOT pay bin Laden clear up to the bombing of the Khobar towers, it would be fucking stupid for the KGB to NOT be cozying up with Trump. I'm not the first person to posit that Melania Trump is a Russian asset; fuckin' hell, man, if you look at a timeline of Trump's life his success is irrevocably tied to dating Iron Curtain supermodels.

We can argue about the metallurgy of the titanic. We can run Charpy tests on bits of hull and observe that a blunt force created too much shear for plates that weren't properly tempered. Bottom line, though, is it hit an iceberg.

Either enough people care about the way things were or they don't. That is the calculus we make every day, will continue to make every day. It might get bad before it gets good. It might get bad and stay that way for a while. Thing is? It has ALWAYS sucked to be Russian. It's sucked going back to before the Golden Horde. But for the past 200 years it's pretty much ruled to be an American and I think in the long run, it will continue to.

It's the short run that worries me, and the size and shape of our doom just doesn't seem important at the moment.

If this guy:

Prior to his current role, Jason served as Deputy Director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, leading postsecondary innovation efforts to improve the outcomes of disadvantaged college students by investing in colleges, universities and entrepreneurs pursuing digital and adaptive learning, student coaching and advising, financial aid innovation, and employer pathways. Prior to the Foundation, Jason founded and grew three investor-backed technology and services companies before holding a series of executive positions at Microsoft, SchoolNet, Kaplan and StraighterLine. At Kaplan, Jason led three education businesses as general manager or president, in addition to founding and leading the company’s venture capital effort.

doesn't "get it" then "it" shouldn't be gotten. If your business is investing in educational technology and you aren't allowed to point out educational technology that shouldn't be invested in, this whole artifice needs to come down, man.

These guys should be allowed to comment. If you're following them on Twitter, it's because you want to know what they think about stuff. A Zuckerberg and Thiel-funded libertarian spankbank that eats shit to the tune of $250m? We need the world to talk about that shit.

It’s just another excuse to do a party! Maybe i’m culturally unaware of traditions having grown up in a Russian household, but I feel there has been a proliferation of what I feel are corporation driven fake celebrations.

Take weddings with the engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, bridal luncheons... I feel that’s a bit too much. And they all have been codified with “what you’re supposed to do” down to the decorations and games. Has it always been like this and I was just oblivious?

I feel the same about the gender reveal parties. Feels like a fake occasion invented by the party industry. But maybe it’s just because it’s never been a thing in my culture and now I see my generation of people throwing these, with the parents a bit confused about what’s going on. I mean, I’m all about parties and I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade. We all need excuses to get together with friends and family and enjoy each others company. But there is a lack of authenticity in the cookies cutter nature of these that rubs me the wrong way somehow. Maybe it has to do with the fact that a lot of them are centered around giving someone presents and not the actual occasion.

About the transgender standpoint, maybe I’m talking out of line here, but gender does matter! If it was all inconsequential, there would be no queer movement. Celebrating that you’re going to have a boy does not mean you will not be supporting them in whatever gender indentity they will later identify as.

OH FUCK MUTHERFUCKER NOW YOU'RE WINDING ME UP

Because beer fucking sucks right now.

You know it, you just don't want to admit it - beer is straight-up bullshit at the moment. Yeah, sure there's a million tiny shitty little breweries out there but they're all being bought up one by one by AB InBev or SAB Miller and they all make fucking IPA. You know what IPA is? It's the beer you make when you don't have the room to make beer - IPA requires no refrigeration to make. It's that shit you made in your dorm room when the RA wasn't watching. It's that swill that tastes the same whether it's turned or not because they sell it to you pre-turned. It's that shit you drink because hefeweizens are too heavy - you know, the beer that they've convinced you to put an orange slice in it so it doesn't taste quite so much like pruno.

Fortunately for the beer companies, your tiny shitty little IPA from bumblesquatch colorado can be sold for fuckin' $2.50 a bottle because it says you need a lumberbeard to drink it or some shit, as opposed to $1.25 a bottle for pilsners that you're shipping from Canada or Copenhagen (or brewing down the street, but as we all know your dad's macrobrews have been fucking terrible for decades, that's why we started down this road). Unfortunately for the beer companies, nobody wants to spend fucking $9 for a sixer of Fat Tire anymore and the alternative you're offering them is fucking Michelob Ultra Organic or some shit which tastes about the same as Zima without the sugar, assuming you remember what Zima is. Fortunately nobody remembers Zima or Bartles & Jaymes so let's try selling them "summer shandy" or "radler" because a wine cooler by any other name would taste as cloyingly sweet.

LOOK AT THIS PICTURE.

LOOK AT IT.

Bud. Light. Lime. STRAW ber RITA. "Try it over ice!" What. The Actual. Fuck. This is AB InBev throwing their hands in the goddamn air and saying "we never knew why they liked our swill in the first place, mix a Kool-Aid packet in there and see if they buy it." Meanwhile the beer that everyone drank forever is fucking gone, yo. When was the last time you saw an Anchor Steam? I mean, I live 150 miles from the brewery and I have a hard time finding Weinhard's.

I used to drink Kirin Light. Now I can't even find Kirin.

I used to drink Amstel Light. I haven't seen it at the market in three years.

I'm drinking Sam Adams Light - and that'll work - but it is literally the only drinkable light beer left at my supermarket. They generally have three cases of Sam Adams, two cases of Sam Adams Light, five cases of Heineken, two cases of Heineken light, and an entire aisle of various and sundry IPAs.

And those fucking "summer shandys."

You know what I drink down here in LA?

They've got me drinking Russian beer, yo. I live in goddamn America, home of the macrowbrew and because the industry is pushing trasherita premix I'm drinkin' shit that's been shipped from SAINT FUCKING PETERSBERG.

Let's drive a stake through the heart of the whole goddamn industry. I'm so completely fucking over the direction it's taken. Kill this bitch so we can bury it and move the fuck on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jul/13/three-six-or-36-how-many-basic-plots-are-there-in-all-stories-ever-written

To the new users of Hubski, welcome! To the old users who've started commenting again, welcome back! To the lurkers, we know you're there and we appreciate you! To everyone who's switched to user-inactivated, you'll be missed, please consider coming back.

To every person reading this, I think you're awesome.

Keep in mind: for all intents and purposes, once you hit 25 you've chosen every brand you'll ever choose. This is one reason why advertising focuses heavily on teenagers and young adults; it's easier to hack a presidential election than it is to get your mom to switch dish detergent. Macrobrews are kinda fucked in this regard because those goddamn whippersnappers tend to buy a sixer of something expensive and semi-local, but only every now and then: my roommate will buy six Blue Moons about three times a year while my dad will buy a half-rack of Coors Light once or twice a week. So they're marketing to a rarified stratum: people under 25 who are deciding on "their regular beer" that they can get most places. The Most Interesting Man came out in 2006 so everybody they could (legally) influence back then is between the ages of 35 and 40. Time to do something new because they know that even if they kill off The Most Interesting Man, you aren't going to switch to Corona at this late date. You started drinking Dos Equis to set yourself apart from those choads.

The owners of the macro brews give no fucks, of course. 70% of beer sales in the US are controlled by one fucking company.

It struck me as wanting to be salty, and wanting to yell at someone else about the problems.

both the Democrats and the Republicans have been lying to the poor for decades, but the Democrats kinda sorta feel bad about it. it's that ambivalence that has left them crushed and despondent.

IT'S FUCKING STUPID. There are so many more poor people in the United States than rich people, so if they want power fuckin' rally behind the fuckn' poor people. I'm almost willing to give them a bye over the fact that it used to be hard to scare up individual donors and if you're looking for whales you're looking for the rich by definition but fuckin' Bernie Sanders.

The Democrats should have been just as gobsmacked by Bernie Sanders as the Republicans were by Trump but instead of going "oh shit we have lost our base" they went "it's Hillary's turn damn the torpedoes full speed ahead" and here we were, living in fear of Twitter.

What I'm apparently failing to explain is that I want more consideration, not less.

What you're explaining loud and clear is that you feel the people responsible for the truth on the ground are not giving it the proper consideration. When I called you out for arguing (as a grad student) that you knew better than the law, you doubled down:

That's not my luminary genius insight but professor after professor after professor has taught me.

I took one (1) acoustics class. It was taught by the two acoustics Ph.Ds at UW. And we started the class with one of the profs explaining the measurement rig he had pointed out the window: see, the buses outside were loud, but it was spring and soon the trees would be covered in leaves and it would be much quieter. et voila. Acoustics.

We believed him - I mean, I was 22 and the actual math of the attenuation of a shit-ton of leaves is intensive. Nonetheless we never did end up comparing beginning and end. Once I started working in the field I relayed this story to my boss and she laughed uproariously and showed me the B&K chart listing attenuation on the x and "meters of forest in hundreds" on the y.

These are acoustical professors with Ph. Ds prestigious enough in their department to fund a boat that flips on its tail for sonar studies. And we learned all sorts of great stuff about nodal analysis, resonance, deep channels and the like which provided a fundamental basis for the practical knowledge that I then picked up in the field. Because "practical knowledge" wasn't their thing - they were busy rewriting the theory. And for environmental acoustics, the theory was laid out by a dude a hundred years dead.

We'll disregard my profs' erroneous assumptions about the way environmental acoustics work. We'll even disregard the fact that when they were busted, they shined it on as if it never happened. We'll focus instead on their attempts to broaden the body of knowledge that we all benefit from and thank them for it. We'll even spot them the assumption that if my boss were to walk into that room and give them a lesson on the acoustical isolation of leaves, they'd listen interestedly, ask intelligent questions and have a rigorous debate about the mathematics at play.

Because nobody comes out ahead when we assume everyone else is a fucking idiot.

FIIC. Field Impact Isolation Class. A two-digit number that takes two trained professionals two days and ten thousand dollars worth of equipment to arrive at. Lucrative, no? I mean, we couldn't roll one for less than $3k. Which means we didn't get to roll them nearly often enough. And we spent a day burning through the math in custom bullshit Excel spreadsheets that sucked and that wasn't any fun either. So when we were presented with an opportunity to test some composite floors so we could build up some better mass law models, my boss paid me to schlep concrete and sand up to the 4th floor of a condo for six weeks so we could do our own testing. Contribute our own models. Put in our own research.

I billed out at $150 an hour, dude, and she sank 240 hours into it.

So I'm glad you're "all worked up." You should be. You "want the underlying assumptions, biases and structural issues unearthed and discussed" which can only mean you think they aren't. You "want to know in which context they work and in which context they don't" as if you think people don't fight over this shit every goddamn day. And I've been trying to say this a dozen different ways and you aren't hearing it, probably because it's offensive, and because it assails your worldview:

The experts in the field know more than the people they measure.

That's it. That's my beef. That's my fundamental observation, that in any esoteric body of knowledge, the practitioners of that knowledge know more about that knowledge than the people who encounter that knowledge glancingly. No matter how broad your evaluation of mapping and GIS, it will never be as focused as the mid-level bureaucrat in some forgotten town who has jurisdiction over where roads go in his township.

The argument put forth in your essay is that the experts are fucking idiots. When I tried to find something about objective vs. relational you came back with "no, it's that the experts are fucking idiots." When I came back with "you know, the experts I've worked with seem to know their shit" you came back with "they don't know it nearly enough because research." So yeah. I'm fucking offended. Your argument hinges on the idea that the practitioners of a science are incurious about the theory of the science, which is the argument people always make, so often that you actually whipped out

So you sound to me like yet another arrogant engineer who thinks their numbers are always a good enough substitute for the truth.

Dude.

DUDE.

The "arrogant" engineers are the ones that know they know more than you and are sick of having to explain it. They're the ones whose knowledge is called into question because somebody just did a study somewhere. They're the ones being forced to (temporarily) rewrite their entire code of behavior because some expert somewhere in another unrelated field has better PR.

These are Assistive Listening Devices. They cost about $300 each, plus about $1000 for the transmitter. And thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, if you have an auditorium that holds more than a hundred people you have to have enough of them for five percent of the audience. That means if you have a school somewhere with a gym that seats 300 people, $5500 is going to be spent on shitty FM radios that nobody ever listens to... rather than band instruments, rather than gym equipment, rather than art supplies.

This happened because a well-meaning audiologist argued back in the mid-80s that deaf people were being left out of public events because they couldn't hear, and a lot of them couldn't afford hearing aids, so clearly any public building should be forced to pay to bring them in so that they would be "handicapped-accessible." And none of them ever get used - you wanna stick someone else's grody earthing in your ear? - but they're mandated by law and building inspectors across the US have to count the fuckers every time there's a permit issue. Millions of these things, mouldering away in closets.

Repeat for in-class reinforcement, smartboards, etc. What usually happens next is some journalist gets a bug up their ass to investigate waste and comes after whatever the it-thing is and administrators are pilloried for wasting money on that thing that only has one study to back it but ALS has hung on for three decades because the ADA was written by the Pope, effectively, so here we are. But fundamentally? People who don't know telling people who do know bones it for everybody.

My argument, simply put, is it's dangerous and offensive to assume that the people doing the majority of the work are in the knowledge minority. And the fundamental argument put forth by this argument - and by you - is that if we have a number, and everybody agrees on it, it reflects calcified thinking and oppression of the populace.

I don't want to paradigm shift my way to glory, I want people to stop and think about the values and methods they pick.

The only way you could want this is if you hold deeply the idea that "people" aren't already doing it.

And fuck right off with that shit.

I've noticed a peculiar thing happening to my psyche. Whenever I hear the words "intersectionality" "privilege" or "coal miner" I find myself losing all sympathy and empathy. My hackles are raised, my interest in debate plummets and I go full "plague on both your houses" mode.

I have a couple friends in West Virginia and I don't give a fuck about West Virginia. As a country, we were talking about doomed fucking coal jobs in the '80s. And when your two choices of employment are the Walmart and the prison, your local economy is end stage already.

And can we level for a minute? Those of us who grew up in the Mountain West were surrounded by ghost towns left skeletonized by an end of mining, agriculture, ranching, you fucking name it. Everybody moved the fuck on. And while I appreciate that the mortgage is an excellent instrument for trapping workers in place for better predation by corporations, fuckin' take the hit and leave.

I spent a lot of time driving through rural Arizona back in the late '90s. I spent a little time driving through rural Arizona in 2010. Know what I saw? New ghost towns. Places where it made sense to live when Clinton was president but totally didn't when Obama was. Empty houses, empty stores. Fuckin' sunrise, sunset. Know what we call the people who left squalor and risked everything to find new opportunity? YOUR ANCESTORS. Know what we call the people who stayed? We don't. They've been forgotten by time.

Given her mother’s health issues, Nicole Banks tries to compensate for Walmart’s departure by seeking out fresh fruit and vegetables in the surrounding area. But it’s not easy. The nearest replacement store, Goodsons, is too expensive, she says, and other Walmarts are an hour’s drive away along Appalachian roads that are as tightly coiled as the copperhead snakes that live in the local forest.

I mean, eat a dick. I grew up an hour from a fucking Taco Bell. Walmart? The first Walmart I ever saw was a two and a half hour drive away and even at the tender age of 11 I could tell it was a blight upon the community.

It was into this stunning setting that Walmart descended in 2005 on the site of an old Kmart, like the spacecraft of alien botanists that lands in the forest at the start of the movie ET. And there it sat: a massive gash of concrete encircled by nature’s abundance.

Talk about burying the lede. So a store with higher profit margins crashed, so Walmart came in with lower profit margins, until even they were just losing money. But somehow this is about Walmart leaving rather than fuckin' McDowell County returning to the primordial "largest mixed mesophyte forest in the world" as is good and just and righteous and proper. Know how many people live on South Georgia Island? Two. Know how many lived there when whale hunting was legal? Hundreds.

Wanda Church has been unemployed since that day when she cried as Walmart’s doors were closed for the last time; the company offered her a night shift at the next store along, but she couldn’t stomach the hour’s drive either way and wasn’t prepared to leave her home.

That howling sound you hear is every urban commuter reading this article and screaming at the top of their lungs that their commute is over an hour and that's just the way it is princess.

The company had worked with all the employees who had lost their jobs to find them suitable transfers or give them severance pay. “We look forward to continuing to serve our Kimball area customers when they visit our stores in Bluefield, Princeton and MacArthur,” she said, (without referencing the hour’s drive.)

There are THREE fucking Walmarts within an hour. Workers at any supermarket chain you care to mention are quite used to suddenly having a shift an hour away. This happens in major metropolises and yes, I can say with authority that Walmart does it, too.

This is literally liberal disaster porn talking about those poor fuckers in coal mining country who no longer have a Walmart across the street but can drive 40 minutes to get to one. They're fuckin' 40 minutes from the goddamn interstate; time was going to forget them sooner or later and sincerely - from those of us "scots irish" who grew up in the goddamn desert, welcome to thunderdome, bitch.

Articles like this? They make me want the opioid crisis to accelerate, Obamacare to crash and global warming to destroy the economy of appalachia even faster. If the only thing that kept you hanging on was the talons of Bentonville Fucking Arkansas, you were ready to shuffle off the coil a long fucking time ago.

Get busy livin' or get busy dyin' and either way, know that I'm all the fuck out of sympathy.

Being a schoolteacher, Phillips has a theory for what happened when the store closed. “Socialization. We lost our socialization factor. Now it’s hard to keep track of people, there’s no other place like it where you can stand and chat.”

There was something else Phillips lost with Walmart’s departure. To illustrate the point, he reaches into his red pick-up truck and pulls out a loaded Para Ordnance Warthog .45 handgun and waves it at us, telling us not to freak as the safety is on.

“Bought this in the Walmart parking lot,” he says. “Guy sees me reading a gun magazine and asks me was I carrying. He offered to sell me the Para warthog and I got it for $775.” Phillips took his new possession home and added to his collection of 140 firearms.

no words

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

- Banksy, AdBusters interview backintheday

The issue is not that these choices are available, the issue is that these choices crowd out the sensible ones. There's a lot of fallacious product design in toothbrushes. At the same time, it makes sense to apply what we know about dental hygiene to what we know about human habit to what we know about materials science to what we know about merchandising because even an expensive toothbrush is what? $4? $5? That's before you get into the land of Sonicare and its ilk and there are justifications to that, too. I have a $140 toothbrush. It was recommended to me by my dentist over my $100 toothbrush because apparently I was brushing hard enough to require some repair at the gumline to the tune of $900 billed to my insurance. The difference? The new one tweedles at me when I brush too hard. First world problems? You betcha. Asymptotic improvement? Mos def. BUT it is innovation in pursuit of improvement.

Dollar shave club, on the other hand, doesn't help you shave better. What it does is provide you access to bottom-of-the-barrel no-name Chinese blades at substantial markup to you. Yeah - a bag of Bic safety razors is like $3 for 24 or whatever so obviously you don't have to purchase that, either, but Unilever spent a billion dollars buying Dollar Shave Club instead of, I dunno, making better razors.

Lather, rinse, repeat. You rightly state that you are not directly impacted by any of these deeply silly Silicon Valley choices but you are indirectly affected. As you state, you're a fan of Blue Apron - what if Silicon Valley spent $120m on improving the efficiency of produce delivery to wherever you are instead of $120m on ways to sell chopped fruits and vegetables for $10/lb?

Henry Petroski has argued many times that necessity isn't the mother of invention, luxury is - we do not invent a fork because we cannot eat without one, we invent a fork because it's easier to eat with one. The inventor/manufacturer profits off of the increase of ease he provides us, and we pay him gladly. The argument put forth in the article (not as clearly as it could be, no doubt) is that the Silicon Valley business cycle is not focused on efficiency, it's focused on inefficiency and predation. And while this is not universally true, the argument for "disruption" is not "make the world a better place" it's "break laws and make money until they legislate you out of existence."

I have thousands of hours of music on hard drives. I used to have hundreds of CDs. My access to music went up an order of magnitude with the advent of Napster... but I can't really say that MP3s improved the state of music. It used to be that technological innovation was largely in pursuit of quality-of-life improvement and that argument could easily be made about Napster et.al. However, the inefficiencies of the music market also provided a living for most of the people involved in its generation.

And that's another issue - companies like RentBerry and Fiverr are, at base, eliminating inefficiencies. However, in a marketplace that's even a little unfair or uncompetitive, "inefficiencies" are often the profit of the disadvantaged. On a perfectly level playing field, assembly line workers in Detroit should have no problems competing with assembly line workers in Guadalajara.

But.

This article is annoying because it stands on the premise that someone offering a choice to you is the same as you being forced to participate, and that a choice you don't agree with is somehow this nefarious plot to screw your life up. Fiverr doesn't exist to destroy the middle class dream. It connects freelancers with people who hire them.

Hi. Freelancer. Years of experience. Union member, skilled laborer. And where I work, the middle has dropped out. I'm one of the youngest people in my industry that I know of and my 20-year reunion was a while ago. See, used to be you started out as a gopher PA and then you became a set PA and then you picked up a skill and then you started making a little money and your network grew and you started making more money and eventually you had a wife and two kids and a house in the Valley. But now there's a sea of film school grads who can work for free because mommy and daddy understand that you have to do that for a while in order to get experience so they'll pay Janie's $1900/mo rent for a studio in Panorama City while she struggles for free until eventually it becomes clear that as soon as she starts to ask for money there's ten more Janies eager to take her place so eventually she's going to go back to live with her parents in Dayton and take orders at Applebee's while meanwhile, the guys that are actually hiring new kids who don't know what they're doing are generally doing it with their parents' money, too, and they're going to fail out within however long it takes for their folx to get sick of paying for their hobbies and in the meantime, we're all getting older and we're all hanging on to the gigs we have and the kids? The kids are not coming up because the opportunities that are available to them are a mirage.

Make no mistake. I'm the other side of that divide. Comfortably. But the gig economy, in my industry at least, is a fucking meat grinder for those without protections. Multiply times everything.

I call Scotland "dude" because I'm from California, and she and I have that kind of comfort in our relationship.

For the record, I consider "dude" to be gender neutral ;)

The real question is, am I rude or inconsiderate or diminishing if I don't remember your gender preference and preferred pronoun to put in front of "coffeesp00ns"?

I'm honestly asking. I have no idea of ooli or War or rd95 or snoodog's gender, and only know Elizabeth's and Lil's because of their names, and know kleinbl00's because I know the guy in person.

IMO, no, you're not being inconsiderate. The nature of online discourse means that gender is generally a lot less relevant unless it is inherently a part of the topic being discussed - which is how it should be IRL as well. If we were in public, however, and I had spoken with you and told you the pronouns I wanted you to use, and presented as female, and you still used "he/him" for me, I'd probably be seriously uncomfortable.

The most important thing to do? If you don't know - ASK. I have never met a trans person who would be more upset by you asking their gender than they would be by you getting their gender wrong. And if you mess it up the second time around, just correct and don't make a big deal - We're way more scared than you are.

I do think it's a good case of due diligence to look up some of the linguistics behind trans stuff, just because It's not really going away any time soon so far as i can see. So, like email and internet and cell phone, it's something we all have to learn. the same thing might become the case if the community and/or english scholars can decide on what gender neutral pronoun to use (probably singular they because our language already sort of supports it - like taking advantage of a weird compatibility in a program).

So here's a basic rundown on some stuff that, if you know, makes wading through conversations

Transgender person - Someone whose gender differs from the one their doctor put on their birth certificate.

Trans(gender) woman - Someone who previously used he/him pronouns who now uses she/her pronouns. That person could have been assigned male by their doctor at birth, or possibly had unclear genitalia at birth and was raised as a male. Regardless, they now will likely be going by female pronouns.

Trans(gender) man - Someone who previously used she/her pronouns who now uses he/him pronouns. That person could have been assigned female by their doctor at birth, or possibly had unclear genitalia at birth and was raised as a female. Regardless, they now will likely be going by male pronouns.

genderqueer - One of many words used to describe people who don't feel strongly as either male or female. An example might be someone who dresses very androgynously and uses they/them pronouns.

Cisgender - Cis is the opposite of the latin Trans - Cisalpine Gaul, for example, meaning the area of Gaul on the Roman side of the Alps, and Trans Atlantic meaning across the Atlantic Ocean. A Cisgender person is someone whose gender is the same as the one the doctor put on their birth certificate. That means that a cisgender man will likely, but not exclusively have XY chromosomes and a cisgender woman will likely, but not exclusively have XX chromosomes. Chromosomes, and genetics, are complicated.

I gotta wonder if the gendering of anybody is really of material value

I mean, in a perfect world gender wouldn't be a factor in how we talk about each other. Men and women would exist perfectly equally. Trans people would still exist, but their taking of hormones to change their body wouldn't be a social issue, just a private one.

However, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where we put people into boxes because humans like little tidy boxes. Turns out that the world of human gender doesn't fit into our two box system of male and female, or even into some other cultures' Three gender box (though more boxes is likely better). So we are currently at a cultural turning point where we have to deal with trans people again. It's happened before (see the Weimar Republic for a recent example), and our choice has been to sweep trans people under the rug - Hopefully we can prevent that from happening again and start to change the way we look at gender.

Hope some of this helps.

I was busy. I have words. Watch this space.

_________________________________________________________________________

So. Furthering the conjecture and providing a little counterpoint, I believe that there are cogent issues raised but vital counterarguments left unasked. The author's analysis basically boils down to:

- The Trump administration deliberately gutted the State Department the same weekend they rolled out their Muslim ban in order to test the limits of executive power.

- They did this at the behest of Russia, which has sold of about a fifth of Rosneft without anybody really noticing.

- Trump has distanced himself from the American intelligence apparatus while also ramping up his personal security.

therefore, coup d'etat.

Did I miss anything?

All of this could be absolutely, 100% true and it does not support "therefore, coup d'etat." For example, sure: the Trump administration gutted the shit out of the State Department the same weekend they decided to write "ban all muslims" in crayon on a napkin and have Trump sign it. If you didn't want anyone from the State Department to tell you officially that it's a bad idea, unconstitutional and likely to cause unnecessary chaos for weeks/months/years, firing them all would be a great way to ensure your executive order gets rolled out how you want it.

If you wanted the State Department to lend legitimacy to what you're doing, it's exactly the wrong way to do it.

Right now, DHS is defying court orders and doing what Trump says. This is no doubt due to the fact that their lawyers looked over their charter and determined that they report to the Executive, not the Judicial, and that they're required to be goose-stepping thugs whether it's illegal or not. They are, no doubt, awaiting clarification or instruction from the chain of command their lawyers have determined they're bound by so that they can continue to do their jobs as charged.

But suppose Trump is literally Voldemort, Bannon is literally Skeletor, KellyAnn Conway is literally Cruella DeVille and RNCPRBS is literally Joseph Goebbels. DHS has a quarter million employees. You think they're all going along with this? Dunno about you, but at the airports I fly through they're mostly minorities and women. Shit, I've seen like a dozen in LA wearing hijabs. I've overheard them talking to each other in Seattle in Amharic.

I say this to celebrate it, not to denigrate it: we had two days of protests at ten different airports this weekend over 109 detained travelers.

A quote over the article:

It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?” relatively quickly.

Supposes that the protestors represent the minority opinion. They do not. We're rapidly reaching not protest fatigue, but protest normalization. I dunno about your Trump-voting Facebook friends, but mine were pretty goddamn quiet this weekend. They were the only ones. Moving on, Russia:

I mean, sure. It's entirely possible that this is all at the behest of Russia. It's entirely possible that Trump is doing it to get a fifth of Rosneft, just like in the dossier, for lifting sanctions against Russia. But sanctions haven't been lifted yet. More than that, any sanctions lifted can be reimposed by Congress with a supermajority if I'm not mistaken. Finally, throwing the nation into turmoil at the behest of an enemy power for personal enrichment is treason and/or terrorism and/or espionage. You wanna talk impeachable offenses, each one of those is a federal capital offense. So if Trump's gonna take the money and run, he better run far.

But right - he's gonna take over the country:

Especially if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have remained loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this creates the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police services which are not accountable through any of the normal means, answerable only to the President.

Pretend none of those people are thinking, feeling human beings. Pretend they're orcs. There's 300,000 orcs willing to do Sauron's will. oh shit what will we do?

You might be interested to know that before you get dumb and talk army vs. fbi or any of that shit, there's about 800,000 cops in the United States, all of which have a long-standing interagency beef with everybody that isn't cops. Does the author really expect every other organization in the United States to roll over as the DHS attempts to consolidate power?

Does the author really think the Trump administation thinks that's going to happen?

Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.

The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.

The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that.

The aims of crushing various groups — Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press — are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.

This can be absolutely, positively 100% true and still not matter. I don't know if you've been watching this administration. They aren't speaking like the Lords of Creation addressing the mortals from their seats in Valhalla. They're speaking like David Koresh from the basement. They don't answer, they lash out. They don't respond, they attack. The only support they've gotten - from anyone - comes in the form of "not objecting."

A source familiar with Booker’s exchange with CBP officials told The Daily Beast that officials with the agency refused to see him face to face. Instead, Booker wrote questions on a piece of paper which he handed to police officers, and those officers gave the paper—along with a copy of Brinkema’s ruling—to CBP officials. Those CBP officials then wrote out their answers to the senator’s questions, according to the source. The source described it as a half-written, half-spoken game of telephone.

Those are your goose-steppers, by the way. The shock troops at the front of the new totalitarian wave. Doing everything they can to not have their names attached to this travesty. The simple act of doing what they're told and throwing 100-odd people in secondary hold for the weekend has them hanging their heads and hiding under desks.

Do you really think they like this any better than you do?

___________________________________________________________________

Look. Putin came to power by killing 300 innocent people and blaming it on terrorism. Theoretically, Trump could do the same. After all, without the Reichstag we've got no 3rd Reich, right? Except Putin was already popular. And at the Reichstag fire Hitler and Hindenberg had 80% of the vote. Neither of them were under investigation for colluding with foreign powers.

And there's something... confounding about the dualism necessary in these discussions. Either Trump is a greedy manchild bent on personal enrichment or he's a Manchurian candidate idealistically bent on sweeping the Muslims into the gutter of history. He can't be both.

Mr. Bannon told a colleague in multiple conversations during the presidential campaign that he knew Mr. Trump was an “imperfect vessel” for the revolution he had in mind. But the upstart candidate and the media entrepreneur bonded anyway.

In August 2015, Mr. Bannon told Ms. Jones in an email that he had turned Breitbart, where employees called certain political stories “Bannon Specials,” into “Trump Central” and joked that he was the candidate’s hidden “campaign manager.” He hosted Mr. Trump for friendly radio interviews and offered tactful coaching. This August, with the Trump campaign foundering, Mr. Bannon took over as chief executive.

Washington Post

Somebody's being used here, and somebody's using. The author's argument is that the Trump administration is using us because the Russians are using them. But do we really believe that Putin has a tighter leash on Trump than the rest of us? That Bannon does?

Or are we looking at the thrashings of an insular, inexperienced administration attempting to ramrod through everything they can while deliberately avoiding anyone who can tell them no?

_____________________________

Look. Russia has already benefitted immeasurably. This was a triple grand slam for Putin. Anything that happens from now only puts them further ahead. They have no real risks to worry about. But they're not crazy. They know that an erratic puppet on the throne will cause chaos and discord. They also know that whenever you put someone divisive in charge, you aren't going to get a lot of unity.

Don't get me wrong. This is all crazy shit, and many of us, myself included, certainly didn't predict it'd get this dumb this quick. I'd argue that's because we overestimated the acumen of the Trump team, not underestimated.

They're shifting the transmission into reverse without putting in the clutch. Gears are grinding. Sparks are flying. And Donald J. Trump, the man who doesn't exist if he isn't on television, is being pilloried by nearly everyone. Do you think he likes that?

Reading all this doesn't make me think "how long have we got?" it makes me think

how long has Steve Bannon got?

I don't wanna beat up Star Wars too much. The original film was a seismic disruption to the entire industry. It came out like 9 months after Logan's Run - you want some cognitive dissonance, watch Box and the Star Filters in the Disco Cave and then sit down to Alderan. Star Wars broke the mold, shattered the industry and remade it.

And honestly, it borrowed from good sources. It's just that once Star Wars and Empire were done, nobody was ever going to tell George Lucas what to do ever again so we kind of get Ewoks all the time now.