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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • This reminds me of a story about a French ship that landed someplace, and a native of the area walked down the beach and greeted them, saying “Bonjour.” Shocked that the locals spoke perfect French, the sailors asked “Parlez-vous francais??” and the local, confusedly asked “what did you say?” in the local language.

    As it turns out, both the local language and French had apparently arrived at more or less the exact same word for a greeting by pure coincidence.


  • I see, so you understand that an economy exists, but not that it has many different interlocking pieces that can be examined in different ways. Let me see if I can break it down for you:

    When you spend money at the store, when the store pays its employees, or when it buys goods from other vendors, are all examples of what is often referred to as “economic activity”. This can take many different forms at many different scales, in much the same way that a walk around the block is not considered an international flight.

    For example, you go to the store and purchase a head of lettuce to make a salad. The store buys that lettuce from a local vendor who gets it from a local farm. That entire chain of transactions would be considered part of the “local economy”.

    The fact that the US buys more than half of its aluminum from Canada would be considered “international economics” as the transactions involved take place between two different countries. In this way, you can examine different economics from as small a scale as you buying eggs from your neighbor who has chickens to the macro-economics of multinational corporations dictating the stupid price of RAM by effectively buying goods that don’t exist with money that doesn’t exist while handing the same 20 dollars back and forth to inflate their stock value to a disgusting degree. Hell, you can even pick out specific sectors, like with the aluminum example: when Trump started his pissing contest with Canada with tariffs, the American car manufacturing industry said that tariffs on aluminum would cause them to shut down plants within 6 weeks.

    So when we talk about the economy of California, people are talking about the farms, the restaurants, the businesses that exist in the state. The people who work and live there, and the money that flows between them all. If these companies were to pull out of California, they’d be leaving all of that behind. Even ignoring the idea of the loss of sales, they’d also be losing the experience and skill of the people that they employ in the state, and the “value” of the property that they have there - whether that’s real estate or more logistics based like renting storage for goods or the cost of transportation from a manufacturing facility in a new location.








  • I am constantly reminded of a song from the early 2000s called Bastard by Ben Folds, especially the lyric that goes “spread the facts on the floor like a fan. Throw away the ones that make you feel bad.”

    The Republican party is a cult through and through, and the way cults work is that they give the desperate and victimized an answer to their troubles. They tell them that it isn’t their fault, it’s someone else’s. Specifically, it’s the Outsider’s fault. They appeal to their emotions and create an insular bubble against anybody who says anything that goes against what they believe. Because if you aren’t with them, then you’re against them. And that makes you an Outsider, too. An enemy to be hated and vilified.

    So they decide on their answers before they’ve even seen the facts, and any that don’t fit what they want can be safely discarded as the enemies’ lies poisoning their glorious truth.

    And what makes this even harder to combat is that there’s a tipping point for most people beyond which it’s incredibly difficult to come back from. You have the real crazies who don’t care anymore, if the leader says babies are delicious, then they’ll start boiling cooking oil, but for most people in a cult, the thing that truly traps them even if they’ve realized that the cult is wrong, is that they’d have to admit that they’re wrong. And not just that they, themselves, are wrong, but that everything they’ve done, everything that they’ve believed, for years and years, is wrong. And it’s a rare kind of person who can look down from the summit of that mountain and accept that every step they’ve taken up it has been a step in the wrong direction.

    I’m also reminded of Nazi Germany. The people turning in Jews weren’t the monsters at the top, like Heimlich Himmler, they were “good people” - the neighbor who always has a pocket full of dog treats when they go out for a walk, the owner of the local grocery store. The people you walk past every day at work or on the street. Your mother, father, aunt, or cousin. Your friends. “Bad people” are never “bad” people. They’re just people. There’s footage of Hitler that’s been floating around the web for decades at this point that people almost unanimously say is unnerving: it’s Hitler, sitting at a table outside, who turns to the person holding the camera and gets up, saying “What are you doing, filming an old man like me? I should be the one filming a beautiful girl like you!” People are unsettled by it because it’s simply Hitler being human, like anyone else. He’s not acting like the monster that we see in our heads. He’s just…a person. And that goes for all of the worst monstrosities to ever walk the planet - and the most gentle of saints. Each and every one of them is…just a person, who, like everyone else, believes that they’re the hero of their story.






  • I didn’t know “any license plate reader” also scanned your phone as you went by and added your dog to their database to better identify you as an individual.

    They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

    It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.



  • …you do realize that pensions and 401K’s are what companies replaced actually paying their retired workers a living wage with so that they both didn’t have to pay retirees and to forcibly inflate their own wealth with the wages of their workers, right?

    If you work for a big enough company that they provide either of those two, a certain percentage of what you make every week is taken by the company and put into the stock market via index funds (like the NASDAQ, which nows invests your money into SpaceX) and sometimes their own stock without you ever having any say in the matter. It’s not “excess”, it’s wage theft.

    If you’re investing in SpaceX directly, that’s one thing and you deserve what you’re going to get just like the people buying Teslas. But there’s very little difference between this and billionaire bailouts on your tax dollars.