GenZ is the generation raised by helicopter parents, whose late-Boomer-to-early-GenX parents went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they never faced any challenges. Of course they'd have some odd ideas about how the world ought to work, after spending their entire childhood and early adulthood with Mom and Dad working strenuously to shield them from personal struggles, emotional distress, and the consequences of their actions. What remains to be seen is how those attitudes shift as the rubber hits the road and their parents lose the ability to protect them from the increasingly dire state of the world. I suspect it'll be an even three-way split between blithe entitlement, despair and withdrawal, and an impulse to step up and do something about it.
Sorry. Not casting aspersions on you, just despairing at the situation.
The math leans towards the former, but when the two hypotheses suggested by the data are "we are actively and selectively targeting noncombatants" and "we just don't give half a shit who we're killing," in a sane world you'd be universally branded as "the baddies" in the conflict.
I love it, but I haven't gone back to watch it since 2016 because it felt a bit too much like current events played for laughs.
There was a recent poll in Kansas that had Trump up 4 points, with a 4-point margin of error, in a state that he won by 15 points in 2020. Do I think my home state is actually going to go blue this election? No...but polls like these suggest the rural vote (in particular farmers, who for whatever else you might have to say about them, tend to at least have a political instinct for financial self-preservation that other rural voters seem to lack) not breaking nearly as heavily in his favor as it did last cycle.
Cops don't usually distinguish between net and gross revenue when they put out these kinds of press releases.
Eh... Contractors are charging what they are charging now because they can, not necessarily because materials and labor costs justify it. I've been slowly rehabbing my basement this year, and I'm doing most of the work myself because the quotes I've been getting to have somebody do it for me are so steep that about half the time they would cover me setting up a whole competing company from scratch in addition to material costs. That's not an exaggeration. For what the plumber wanted for a repipe I could buy all the tools I need, attend training, get certification and a license, set up an LLC, and go into business for myself, and still have enough money left over to cover my costs on the project.
Not that I think all that profit is going into the pockets of the tradespeople doing the work, well compensated as they are, but at the end of the day it's down to high demand and a shortage of skilled labor due to decades of us devaluing the trades as a career. If I'm in the top third of the income distribution and the only reason I can afford to maintain my very modest house is because I have the skillset to do it by myself, something's gone haywire.
I'm assuming that most of the people making these arguments (at least on Lemmy) are coming from the "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" point of view where they presuppose some sort of command economy scenario, with housing being a basic right provided by the state and work being an optional thing you can do if you want to.
Which is all well and good, but we're not in that society right now, and the suffering of the unhoused isn't something that just goes on hold while we wait for the proletariat to rise up. There are solutions that we can implement now that will make things better, which work better than, I dunno, then the government eminent-domaining every derelict property in East Waynesvilleboro, Pennsyltucky, and shipping homeless people there en masse, away from family members and support systems.
"this is non-non, non-non-non, NON-heinous!"
True as it may be that there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people in America, the expression misses the forest for the trees. In many cases, those homes are vacant for a reason -- they may be located in places like dying rural villages, or declining Rust Belt manufacturing towns where the local economy is severely depressed and there's no work to be had for residents. They may also be severely dilapidated and unsafe to live in. Solving the housing crisis isn't as simple as just assigning existing vacant homes to people who don't have them -- housing needs to be in the right place, and of decent quality, too, or else it's not doing any good.
In truth, NIMBYism is a gigantic problem even (especially!) in places where people profess to hold liberal and/or progressive values. It's a massive contributor to the housing crisis in California, for instance... and the attitude is not limited to Boomers, who are reaching the age now where they're as likely to be entering assisted living homes as they are to be stubbornly holding on to a house in the 'burbs that's appreciated 1000% since they bought it. GenX and even those us Millennials who are fortunate enough to own can be and often are just as guilty of NIMBYism as the old folks.
Do some reading about "the missing middle." In many cases the sort of medium-density housing like row houses or duplex/triplex/quadruplex designs that offer more comfort and privacy than a massive apartment complex but are more affordable than single family houses on large lots are explicitly regulated against in American cities, and local codes need to change in order to allow the sort of humane-but-cost-effective housing that will make a dent in the affordability crisis. Problem is, though, that existing homeowners see denser housing as a threat, both to the value of their own properties, and to the comfortable social homogeneity of their neighborhoods. At some level you need to have the power to force these developments through over the objections of the neighbors, undemocratic as that is, or else the problem never gets solved.
NIMBYs whose main complaint about short-term rentals is the (admittedly significant) nuisance factor of having a "party house" next door... but also don't want a duplex or other multifamily housing arrangement across the street, where it might bring The Poors into the neighborhood and drive down their property values.
Fact is, though, that most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, and their financial situation only works out if they think of their house as an eternally-appreciating asset that they can continually leverage to pay off other debts. If the line ever stops going up, they're fucked. I hate NIMBYism, but we've made our society into such a hypercapitalist hellscape that on some level it's hard to blame people for it.
In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn't give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed -- it'd be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that's already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn't exist anymore.
Sure, there's the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve -- which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now -- hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it's much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.
The idea has merit, in theory -- but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the "code is law" status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it'd be preferable if they didn't need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that's insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
Here's the part where I explain the joke
The problem is that the broader Democratic electorate is a much bigger tent, with overall much more moderate politics, than online leftists are typically willing to admit. We're still only eight years past an election where Hillary Clinton took the Rust Belt for granted, and we all paid the price for that when traditionally solid union votes swung to Trump because he was boosting fossil fuel extraction while Clinton implicitly threatened the livelihoods of families dependent on coal and fracking jobs.
Healthcare you have a point on, but also keep in mind that the last time Dems had the votes for sort of sweeping reform was 2008, and what we got out of that was the ACA, which for all its faults was still a big step up over the status quo. Obama was going for a big bipartisan win, in spite of McConnell's announcing that he was killing bipartisanship in the GOP caucus, and that was a mistake, but perhaps an understandable one given that up to that point that's how Congress had always worked.
There have been windows of time since in which Dems have held the Presidency and both houses of Congress, but never with enough margin to defeat a Senate filibuster, and with DINOs like Manchin and Sinema standing in the way of filibuster reform. I do not doubt that progressives in Congress would move an M4A or public option bill through the legislature if, in 2025, the House flips back and the Senate stays Democratic in spite of the unfavorable cycle, but withholding your vote doesn't get you any closer to that happening.
Okay, but like... Even if the decimal point is supposed to be two places over, how often is Starfleet replacing people's shoes after they get embedded in the deck plates by a millimeter? Do the floors of transporter rooms get permanently rubberized after enough use? Does Chief O'Brien have a special floor razor tool to scrape shoes off the pad when they're too deeply embedded to pull out?
On the one hand Ricciardo's washed, he's been washed since at least his time at McLaren, and it was long past time for him to move on from F1.
On the other hand, RB as an organization and Marko in particular routinely handle the failings of drivers other than Max in ways that seem calculated to maximize humiliation. It's honestly reminiscent of the golden child/scapegoat dynamic that often happens in households dominated by a narcissist parent, and it's one of the reasons why I've always suspected that Red Bull has a particularly toxic team culture.
He built a homebuilt aircraft and that wasn't the thing that killed him, so he wasn't dumb by any stretch, but "smart enough to be dangerous" seems like a phrase coined just for him.
What's the harm in a little bit of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking?
image caption: a screen capture of a Facebook post consisting of an AI-generated summary of the Wikipedia page about the A-10, and a bad AI image of a fllightline dominated by misproportioned A-10 being serviced exclusively by M4-weilding infantrymen -- including, notably, one that appears to be mounted to a Hoveround.
EDIT: Realized they're both technically French missiles and that made it even funnier
Hat tip to Kolanaki, I see I wasn't the only one with this idea.
Kids can now eat without breaking the piggy bank – at least, at Thomas Ultican Elementary School – thanks to fifth grader Daken Kramer.
I know I shouldn't be wasting brain cells on this AI-generated boomer-bait, but I have so many questions:
- How is the guy in the middle holding that comically-oversized Bible with such a limp-wristed grip? That much onion-skin paper and leather binding must weight like 80 pounds at least. At a minimum I think he'd be tearing the thing in half under its own weight.
- This looks like it's supposed to be some kind of parade, but you'd think the honor guard would be in dress uniform instead of full tactical gear. Are they protecting the Bible-Bearer from some crazed terrorist hell-bent on a pointless gesture?
- If so, why all the pomp and circumstance, and why doesn't Heavy Bible Guy get body armor too? Is this an Raiders of the Lost Ark scenario where the Bible has its own supernatural protective powers?
- If the guy on the right is serving the USA, then what's the guy on the left's "USE" badge mean?
- If May 2024 is my best year, what will July 2024 be?
For serious, though, I pointed out after Austin last year that cutting across the entire track at the first turn of the first lap is awful racecraft from Sainz, and got shouted down by Russell-haters.
Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.