Put on the big girl pants and own your fuckup

We play this game every four years. New President, new crisis, new media cycle of people screaming “This is only happening because you voted for the Other Guy!” Congress and the White House change hands, and then we do it all again.

Nobody seems to want to confront the fact that these kids were camped in the middle of a fucking flood plain at the start of Hurricane Season. Or that the constant cuts to state agencies and monitoring services - cuts that have been ongoing since the Nixon Era, under virtually every administration - have degraded our ability to prevent these kinds of tragedies well past the point of a single administration tinkering around the edges of policy.

We all just want to screw our eyes shut and say “Your kids deserved to die because you voted wrong”, which is an fucking insane thing to believe and exactly the kind of magical thinking that got us to this point.

Unfortunately, we’ve got a national media landscape that is absolutely choked with reactionary messaging and fascist propaganda.

I can’t really blame a woman way out in West Texas - absolutely swimming in the slurry of AM Radio and right-wing press and arch-conservative religious institutions and social circles - who comes of age thinking that the “Pro-Life Party” actually gives a shit about the lives of young children while the “Far Left Socialist Party” wants to feed your innocent white babies into a Chinese Muslim wood chipper.

Probably doesn’t help when the liberal party that ostensibly represents the state’s enfranchised opposition spends half their time insisting “Actually yes! Immigration and tax cuts and oil drilling and Israel are the things that matter most! Those conservatives are just doing it incorrectly. They should govern more like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom!”

I’m dreading going into 2026, when the national big topic of conversation is going to be whether George Soros paid ISIS illegal immigrants to install the windmills that caused West Texas 9/11.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke

The authors present quantitative data to demonstrate how American middle-class families have been left in a precarious financial position by increases in fixed living expenses, increased medical expenses, escalating real estate prices, lower employment security, and the relaxation of credit regulation.

The result has been a reshaping of the American labor force, such that many families now rely on having two incomes in order to meet their expenses. This situation represents a greater level of financial risk than that faced by single-income households: the inability of either adult to work, even temporarily, may result in loss of employment, and concomitant loss of medical coverage and the ability to pay bills. This may lead to bankruptcy or being forced to move somewhere less expensive, with associated decreases in educational quality and economic opportunity

Among the expenses driving the two-income trap are child care, housing in areas with good schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi conclude that having children is the “single best predictor” that a woman will go bankrupt

Warren and Tyagi call stay-at-home mothers of past generations “the most important part of the safety net”, as the non-working mother could step in to earn extra income or care for sick family members when needed. However, Warren and Tyagi dismiss the idea of return to stay-at-home parents, and instead propose policies to offset the loss of this form of insurance.

Warren and Tyagi attempt to overturn the “overconsumption myth” that Americans’ financial instabilities are the result of frivolous spending – they note, for instance, that families are spending less on clothing, food (including meals out), and large appliances, when adjusted for inflation, than a generation prior.

Normal people either can’t afford these devices or don’t have time for all the hassle

Had a friend who was getting by on $2k/mo and got herself a $1400 top of the line iPhone, because her carrier gave her a reduction in her monthly payment plan (for an obscene amount of debt and locked-in service on the back end). Her brother jail-broke it for her and did the normal “cleaning off all the bloatware” due-diligence.

This is just something we all put up with in the modern day. “Normal people” have a harder time navigating the bullshit, but its a lake we all have to paddle through.

Reminds me of getting a notice in Middle School, decades ago, about how a pager was considered “drug paraphernalia”

There was also a big Bloomberg-Era push by the NYPD to arrest any woman carrying condoms on her person, on the grounds that a woman carrying a condom must be a sex worker.

Yeltsin was such a drunk idiot

Backed by the US in a coup against the Russian government

Putin wouldn’t be President of Russia if the US and the USSR had been able to settle their differences without a 60 year long series of proxy wars and regime changes. Neither would Trump, for that matter.

You played yourselves.

Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.

Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.

Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones

What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?

…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand

Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century

Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away

More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”

I am a professional encoder and I always put all my codes in a single big file marked EXE for faster execution.

chinese companies are notorious for stealing IP

American companies sell the ip to China in exchange for access to capital and labor, then claim they’ve been robbed when the Chinese firms innovate and expand on the patents they’ve acquired.

The end result is a car company that produces better vehicles than anything an American or Japanese or German company can manage.

Curiously, these superior vehicles are “stolen” while the Teslas keep exploding under home grown technology.

Holy shit, are we still on Grey’s Anatomy?

A lot of these subsidies (both in the US and China) are implicit. Chinese state rail networks operate at cost, allowing cheap transportation of materials and labor. American borrowing is heavily subsidized through the Fed Credit Window, which keeps rates in the low single digits while corporate bonds and consumer loans can be 2x-30x as high. Both countries cut corners on environmental enforcement and subsidize waste management. Both countries subsidize education and incentive R&D through their university systems.

The real benefit BYD enjoys - even above its Chinese peers - is vertical integration. They own everything from mining interests to technology patents to dealerships. This is a deliberate consequence of Chinese trade policy, which requires foreign investors to partner with Chinese nationals in order to own and operate capital. Consequently, Berkshire Hathaway - a large early investor in BYD - cannot dictate Chinese vehicle manufacturing policy from a private office in Omaha. Chinese locals benefit from the innovation, the domestic capital, the experienced labor force (which can migrate to local competitors), and the increased economic activity it produces.

China is insourcing it’s wealth aggregation, which has a cyclical compound benefit over time.

Don’t forget the Lt governor has more power than the governor

That stopped being true decades ago, when Perry was granted a bunch of appointment power under the Republican legislature.

The Lt. Gov set the agenda in the State Senate, which made the position a bottleneck in the legislative process. But Senate Republicans are in total lockstep. The real legislative power rested with the House calendars committee for a few sessions, as the legislature was only in session for a few months every few years and the House could kill a bill by timing it out.

But of late, Abbott has excercised his ability to call “emergency” sessions liberally. And since he can get the agenda in these sessions, he can bully the House Reps into compliance by dragging them back over and over again until they concede.

you just really want me to be racist

I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.

Cool, I never made that claim.

How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

Scams all the way down.

there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.

They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.

Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.

Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.

Texas won’t need to go blue for this to backfire

The GOP has a lot of techniques to drive down voter participation and soften up democratic opposition. Rewriting the districts just lets them define the terms of engagement.

This is as close as I get to optimism about state politics though.

Until we get a Wisconsin-style full-state flip and some replacements at the state level, or a Federal DOJ willing to drop the hammer on all the little parasites skittering around the state, there’s very little the state-level Dem Party can do to resist this kind of malfeasance.

Abbott’s been consolidating more and more power in Austin as the various municipal and county level seats have flipped to Democrat. With Trump at his back, the state is increasingly feeling like a single-party dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_Texas#History

Rigging the districts is a long-standing Texas tradition, running straight back to the state’s founding. Under the current map, the State Senate is so meticulously drawn that Texas would need a 60/40 Dem voting majority to have a prayer of flipping it.

Abbott is trying to squeeze yet another ounce of tomato juice from a crushed can.