It wouldn't solve the jobs problem, but Medicare for all would make their lives simpler.
It was well written, but I can't see a solution. Slowing or ending the phase out so people can work in the official economy, instead of having to work underground, seems like it'd only help a bit--since the issue is that they're in places with no jobs.
What comes next for the people in the story? It's hard to see what would offer hope of something different, particularly if their diagnosis means that they wouldn't be able to work for someone with a fixed schedule.
At 51, there's a long time ahead of nothing better to look forward to. Eventually root harvesting won't be possible, but if something easier existed, I'm sure they'd have tried it first.
Did you have some appropriate punishment in mind, ogged? Is your family still dreaming of a small-town relocation?
I just finished Dreamland; happy to discuss with anyone else who read it.
A disability payment you can live off of would be a start. While it isn't easy to live on disability in any state, other states aren't so shitty about it.
When I was working with the Mental Health people in Ohio, the payment for SSDI was more than $735/month. That was 20 years ago and I'm not adjusting for inflation.
2. Perhaps something radical like increasing the disability payment? I mean, as I understand it, about 40% of that type of increase gets recaptured by rising rents and prices, but you can materially increase the amount of money people have by just giving them more.
I have to say that her family should be ashamed, though. It would be a long day in the morning before I'd treat a family member that way - if there's bad history there, I'm not saying that her nephew or her brother has to have her live with them, but would it really kill them to kick her an extra fifty bucks a month, maybe buy her a bedframe and boxspring for Christmas, let her use the washer?
I am sure that I have mentioned this before, but when a friend was on TANF, she was allotted three hundred American dollars for rent every month, and that was a check that went straight to the landlord. You can't rent the worst single room in town for $300 a month. There's ways people work around this, and in fact the caseworker told us about several. (Not insignificant was that the caseworker was the only non-white caseworker we saw. The others were useless.)
I don't know what Kasich has done to Ohio. After I left the place started to go downhill.
This one mentioned if not recommended by Thorn. It's very engrossing, glaringly avoids discussing race in much depth, very American-newspaper writing style. Made me want to change careers.
It's probably too late to switch to being a heroin dealer. Once a job starts to make it into the trend pieces, you know it's about to get crushed with new training programs until the salary comes down.
Thanks. I haven't read it, but I'd be delighted if you good people discussed it so I don't have to.
The writing style is just cheesy enough to avoid actually glamorizing any part of the drug trade. That leaves me with no emotional outlet beyond the savior complex.
Huh. This recursive bout of self-loathing may be related to the neglected work computer I see over there.
MmeeeeEEEEeeeeee! I'll talk about Dreamland all day. I push it on all my friends.
I was mostly interested in the story of the overhaul of the heroin industry.
I wonder how many Russian prostitutes there are who have trouble making themselves pee during their off hours because Trump has paid them to pee enough times that it seems like work and getting started at work is always hard?
have to say that her family should be ashamed, though. It would be a long day in the morning before I'd treat a family member that way - if there's bad history there, I'm not saying that her nephew or her brother has to have her live with them, but would it really kill them to kick her an extra fifty bucks a month, maybe buy her a bedframe and boxspring for Christmas, let her use the washer?
I wondered at that too. She's one of seven living children, and one of the nearby siblings is evidently richer? But I'd also believe if that sibling told me about decades of sibling neediness, such that he won't give out anything now.
I had this other thought that I don't know what to do with, about the opioid epidemic. Which is that if it is extensive as it is described, it'll be a community-wide experiment in rehab (for the ones that live through it). Like, the first time that a big portion of a community is doing the 12-steps in roughly the same few years. The 12 steps have lots of problems, but they are a decent model for self-examination, taking responsibility and addressing shame.
It isn't that I'd choose those as a primary treatment for addiction, but they currently are the primary treatment in the States, and I wonder what it'd do to a culture for a whole lot of people to undertake them in the same generation.
15: The trifecta of the heroin industry disruption, the well-meaning but catastrophic pain treatment revolution, and American economic decline: yeah, David Simon should make a teevee show of it. Would watch artful exploitation of artful exploitation of human misery! Did you see this rather sweet story on Quinones' site?
I don't know where all the fentanyl is coming from, though: too recent for that book, I take it.
Looks like China. Well, we probably deserve that.
I didn't; I haven't followed Quinones' site. Thanks.
I think that was a good article. More generous benefits would be nice. I think a job guarantee would have some beneficial effects. Many people who are disabled would be able to work if the American working environment weren't so unforgiving.
I guess I should say that the article overlooks the fact that the gradient for benefits is a lot harsher than it implies.
A couple of years ago I found out I was eligible for a small pension as a disabled Vet. The money is nice but it comes to a lot less than I initially thought, because it resulted in cuts to my section 8 housing voucher, food stamps, supplemental SSI, and medicaid. I was pretty shocked when I found out seeing my psychiatrist suddenly costs me over $100 a pop.
26.1: It's a real problem, but the people in the article weren't affected by the gradient because they were at the bottom anyway.
23: Does anyone know what a semi-synthetic opioid is? What would be an example?
"The semi-synthetic opioids such as hydrocodone, hydromorphone, oxycodone, and oxymorphone are derived from the naturally occurring opiates and opium alkaloids (morphine and thebaine especially)."
http://www.opiateaddictionresource.com/opiates/types_of_opioids
It's briefly touched on in the article - as an unclear reason one subject lost benefits for a time - but it should be more widely recognized how absolutely fucking insane the SSI asset limit is - $2k for an individual, $3k for a household. Last set in 1989, never adjusted for inflation. Exempts one house and one car, but in practice it means you have to be very careful not to build up emergency savings.
1989 the year of the Taylor Swift album?
We could read Dreamland about drugs and Fantasyland about guns. Then compare and contrast.
32: Even if America deserves Trump, you personally deserve the pee tape for dealing with the Americans who deserve Trump.
I am still really eagerly waiting to hear from ogged about the worse punishment we deserve.
It seems like worse punishment is liable to fall on people who have the least responsibility for America's sins. Like if LA gets nuked by North Korea in response to an attack by Trump.
16: moby I love you so much.
right now in rehab we got oxycontin but more meth. maybe it's the location? I feel like the southwest has got a meth-y vibe. and booze obviously. it feels a little weird to be like "I crashed up on the jagged shallows of...just being crazy? I managed to not relapse and I'm just locked up in equine therapy jail anyway?" fuck this. and I'm so queasy. maybe it's getting a little better. fucking fuck everything. it'll be ok, I'm just having a moment. neither trump nor the link in the op are helping.
I think you get a stronger meth vibe out west, at least compared to here.
I hope you feel much better soon.
38: So sorry things are extra rough,al. Equine therapy sounds like it could be soothing.
They're on Craigslist. And I have a garage that I'm not using the whole thing.
Nothing looks as rented purchased as a rented purchased bird horse.
I walked 22,000 steps today. I need the help.
for the ones that live through it
Opioid withdrawal doesn't kill you. Alcohol withdrawal can.
I feel like the southwest has got a meth-y vibe.
Definitely a western thing. There's cops in places like Bmore that have never even seen meth. Out west the thing we don't see like the east is PCP. I'm in my tenth year on the job and have never encountered it.
I don't think I've heard of PCP since a re-run of CHIPS.
46: Right? I thought that stuff was long gone but apparently it's still a not uncommon thing.
It was supposed to make you super strong, which is why I always figured it was bullshit. They said the same thing about exercise.
48
Trump won't try exercise, but maybe he'd be open to PCP.
We ran into this problem with my mom. She would have lined to have worked part-time, but it would have cut her SSDI too much, and it's unlikely she could have kept a steady job, which would have meant constantly appealing her rate.
Sorry it's going that way, alameida. Tucson is methy, there's no denying it; when I was in the teenage psych ward it seemed like everyone else there (I was privileged) had been through a round of meth addiction. They didn't put us on horses. We played a lot of Uno, Taboo, that sort of thing. There was a moment during the Uno game where a black kid pointed at me (white kid) and said, "See, he got the best cards, and he (pointing at Latino kid) got the second best cards, and I ain't got shit!" It was okay for us all to laugh at it; we were all mental patients. I seldom saw black people in Tucson, but in the ward they were overrepresented.
The hospital brought in a dance therapist, must have been a first-timer, who spent about twenty minutes trying to engage us before quitting the room in tears. We were told in a vice-principal sort of way that our behavior had been inappropriate. Of course it was inappropriate; we were mental patients. I made provisional friends. Don't kill yourself, one kid told me, you're too smart; then found out he was going to juvenile hall, probably till eighteen, and broke down sobbing.
I might have been into horses this time of year, depending on the people involved. The mountains are important, the saguaros are important. I still see them when falling asleep. The city as city is of course a bunch of strip malls stocked with check-cashing joints, but I don't know how to solve that problem, and it doesn't help if Trump or worse is its just deserts.
Hi al! Hope it keeps getting better!
The Southwest is definitely methy; not sure to what extent the opioid epidemic is making inroads there. (It's been a huge issue in Alaska, but then the Northwest has always had a heroin problem so it's not very surprising it would spread here.) According to my sister PCP is very big in Philadelphia, which was a surprise to me.
I still haven't finished Dreamland. It starts down the street from my high school and much of it is local enough the places and people are familiar and resonant. But I still don't know what to do. We're pushing the city commissioners to work out the details of getting a needle exchange opened.
I worry about the rehab industry, where obviously repeat customers are more lucrative than successes. I know there are good people with good intentions working in that world but the for-profits creep me out.
56: The for profits are super creepy. Also, a lot of it doesn't have a strong science base. I mean, not everything good in mental health or health meets the RCT standard. CBT isn't necessarily the be all and end all, but.
There was something g on the radio here about upping the quality of treatment and not just providing more money.
My understanding (from a psychiatrist who supervised me in a gambling clinic) is that there's literally no evidentiary base for the concept of residential rehab. The length of it is arbitrary, the idea of being away from your family and community is arbitrary, etc. From a theoretical perspective, if you had an effective treatment, you would want to do that treatment while the person was living their normal life so that the things they learned generalized to their typical contexts more easily. And certain elements of treatment you can't even do when they're not in their typical context -- whatever therapy modality you're using, it's helpful to actually have the grist of the difficult encounters with triggers to use substances to work on, and to talk about the results of success and failure. The only value I can see in residential rehab is the enforcement of restriction of access to substances, and even then I'm sort of skeptical of that (with the caveat that I don't know a ton about substance abuse and the only addiction I was ever involved in treating was gambling). Eventually people are going to have to manage their own relationship to substances in their daily life; it seems less important to me to suddenly "get clean" than to first deal with immediate potential harms and then get about figuring out how to do a little bit better while dealing with your family and work and whatever other stresses you face. People need to be unaltered for actual treatment sessions, but they don't need to be abstinent to be working on getting better.
I guess I understand the fear that if disability benefits are too high you'll attract malingerers, but really fhere must be a more direct way to deal with that. It's certainly no excuse for punishing people who really are disabled.
What to do any communities that are effectively "disabled" by the loss of their main employers is even more difficult. what does the science say about internal migration? We've had a great many mass migrations over the centuries.
People need to be unaltered for actual treatment sessions
Antisemitic.
The problem with internal migration is that wages are too low pretty much all and have been for a long time. If you were working for $12/hour, you might have been getting buy, but you aren't saving up a stake that would let you pay for a cross-country move to take a new opportunity. And if that new job is only paying $12/hour, you are taking a big risk. It's one thing to take a big risk that might let you move up in the world, but taking a big risk to just to barely get buy again isn't a very attractive option.
The other thing with disability is that there is no other provision for large numbers of people who are unable to support themselves. Malingering is the "solution" society arrived at by not dealing with the problem of structural unemployment. You pretend to be unable to work and we'll pretend that $700 is enough to live for a month.
Years ago, it was pretty common for people with mental illness to get basically forced into taking disability to get health care (the meds are expensive) because they was (and will be in about another year) no way for them to get health care without being disabled. Nobody thought of it as malingering since without health coverage they would be unable to work regardless.
In Southern Africa, when mines started pulling large numbers of laborers, a lot of societies adapted their age-cohort military service systems. So instead of a bunch of 18 year-olds camping and training and stuff they'd hike as a group to the city, and usually work and live together, then hike back at the end of their contracts. That was temporary migrant labor though, not permanent.
There's been a federal budget for retraining and adjustment since NAFTA or earlier, right? Why not spend that money helping people relocate instead?
Or states or localities could help people migrate and in exchange tax their remitted earnings for some time. Lesotho still gets basically all its income this way.
That would be giving money to poor people to help them without even considering whether some of them might not be white.
But possibly some of the brown ones would move to a blue state and not come back.
Thing is, America has a reputation for mobility. When people compare structural unemployment in the US vs EU this is always trotted out, "Americans will just up and go wherever the jobs are". And you have things like U-Haul, and I'm told the purchase price of a house standardly includes the big appliances too.
That makes it easy for basically middle class people to move from a place with jobs to another place with jobs. So corporations can fuck around with their employees. But, if you have purchased a house in an area where all the jobs go away, you can't sell the house for what you put into it which means that if you move, you lose your nest egg and, if you are young, probably default on your mortgage.
Between the real estate transfer taxes (which are unusually high here in this city) and paying the real estate people, moving would eat something like 10% of the price of your house in transaction costs. Plus, it costs thousands of dollars in fees to get a new mortgage, usually. Plus you have to pay to move and honestly I think a U-Haul is going to be pure torture for anybody but the young without many possession or damaged joints. Anyway, the well-off and the young are hoping around the country, but that doesn't solve this kind of problem.
When Levitt or whoever said a man with house would never be a communist because he had too much to do, it's sort of a joke but really true as well. The ideal of homeownership seems really systemically pernicious.
Of course Moby is right, the basic problem is too few jobs and too low salaries. Fix that everything else would be details.
There are problems, but I would have been my housing costs increase by hundreds of dollars a month if I didn't own. It's been pretty great. I don't think it actually saves the owner much money unless they can fix common problems without hiring somebody and if they stay put for over a decade, but both of those apply to me.
Also, Americans who are poor rely on informal social safety nets to a greater extent. Moving removes that backstop. Like, if you live near family or the same neighbors, it's easier to borrow and lend back and forth. Reputation as collateral, if you will.
We just bought a fairly inexpensive house, and the most conservative math says we need to keep it five years not to lose money. Moving, if you rent, generally cost us about $1500 to move semi-cross country. We did the packing, truck loading, and truck unloading ourselves. That is a lot of money to save up.
I believe I've mentioned before that I bought a place in Cleveland when I landed my first TT job, largely because I was assured by everyone that it was the magical key to financial security as well as the "adult" thing to do.
In fact it turned out to be financially a bad deal for me, although fortunately not ruinous, and even if I hadn't moved away, it still wouldn't be remotely worth what I bought it for.
Everyone lied to me, is what I'm saying.
76: African migrants deliberately built (and I assume still build) social safety nets in destination cities, based on place of origin, family, transitive reputation. There must be ways to foster that among Americans, if anyone cared to try.
You see that here, but you need a bunch of jobs all in one place so that a group of people can move in. When I go to church, there's a still a portion of the parish that is all descended from a couple of Italian villages and hang together like that. The ones born in Italy are all extremely old to the extent they are left. You can see more recent groups like that among the people who moved in from the crappier parts of Ohio and West Virginia. Of course, they keep in close contact with home because it's only an hour away. That's how I learned that everybody from Stuebenville is still a problem gambler.
79: True. But "a bunch of jobs all in one place" is basically a city. Maybe your destination needs to be bigger than Pittsburgh. Or Cleveland.
I've never lived anyplace bigger, so I wouldn't know.
Also, I've only ever been to Cleveland once. I'm sort of prejudiced against it because people made me to go the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and it annoyed me. It seems odd that I've been there so little despite having lived without two hours of it for over 20 years.
The 'reputation for mobility' America has may be outdated---perhaps from the time before the rust belt collapsed and the housing crisis on the coasts started? I've always thought Americans could be much more mobile if German policies towards housing were implemented. It is normal in Germany to rent for life, because there is widespread rent control and it is much harder to evict people. That alone is not enough---to prevent a NY situation where there is rent control but not enough housing, so that only a tiny lucky minority get affordable rents, they also have strong incentives for mayors to build more housing.
That is not to say that Germans actually *are* more mobile (I have no idea if they are)---I just think that setup makes more sense than the current American one.
I once saw a two Germans and an Austrian in Philadelphia.
I've heard of the German system and it makes a lot of sense. I'm personally prejudiced against ownership because it poved a massive albatross for my family.
I'm pretty sure you can just shoot an albatross. I think I read something about it.
||
"Salt, saccharine, cocaine, and, oddly enough, pigs' bristles. were the profitable commodities."
|>
I never once visited Cleveland in all the time I lived in Pittsburgh, so you're not alone there. I have also never once gone to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in all the time I have lived here in Cleveland(ish).
Does the river still catch fire? I'd like to see that.
Oakland used to have an array of clubs, like "Arkansas Club" and the like, for the black migrant community to organize based on where they migrated from.
64 is so true. That's why I said Medicare for All was really the best solution. If you get a crappy job at Target and earn enough to lose Medicare or Medicaid through disability you might be in trouble. Under MA law before Obama you mostly had to take employer coverage if you weren't disabled. Baker would like to bring that back, because he wants businesses to shoulder more of the cost rather than incrrreasing the Medicaid rolls. already 40% of the state budget, and it's hard to raise the income tax here.
On the crappy United Healthcare you might not have access to mental health coverage or the providersyou saw before. Special programs like PACT only take Medicaid. There is a way in MA to buy in to Medicaid if you've been disabled which is a partial solution.
93: No doubt. Not a good Polish-Soviet War though.
89: But I also lived in Columbus for 7 or 8 years. It's not like I was somewhere with a bunch of stuff to see and do.
72: Between the real estate transfer taxes (which are unusually high here in this city) and paying the real estate people, moving would eat something like 10% of the price of your house in transaction costs.
Don't I know it, having just successfully sold my mom's lake house up in NH. Not quite 10% for closing costs, but close enough (more like 7%). This is certainly something to pay attention to when considering whether to buy a home; though at least in my case, transfer taxes were split 50/50 between buyer and seller -- which I understood to be standard -- but perhaps it's only standard in NH.
Continuing, 72:
Plus, it costs thousands of dollars in fees to get a new mortgage, usually.
This I know nothing about, but frankly it makes me blanch at the notion of buying a home now - which is something I and my partner are considering. Obviously I have to put myself through a tutorial, and/or wade through the financials involved for the buyer of the NH house. That data I have!
You should make your own house, out of cob.
Dude, my current (rented) house is practically made out of cob. That's the problem. It is deteriorating.
You should offer to put more cob on it in exchange for a reduced rent.
We did that, for about 8 months. Repairs of various sorts, reduced rent. Then the landlord said that if we insisted on continuing with that, we would have to move out. (He's an idiot.)
So it is: we can't continue. So we're looking at buying some place. I guess the goal now is doing so in such a way as to be maximally prudent regarding the expenses involved.
Then you should build something with cordwood construction.
So it's easier to burn down out of spite?
Indeed I do not fully understand Moby's gallows humor.
It's a real thing that is not especially easy to burn down.
Oh now suddenly you don't have a sense of humor.
||
"There are stories of grounded pilots being butchered by Cossacks, being rescued on snowsleighs driven by sympathetic priests, or even being worshipped by awe-struck peasants."
|>
I bought a nice, solid house extremely inexpensively and am doing all I can to make sure no one ever opens a wall or does any repair that could disclose larger problems that need to be fixed. I do need to get a bedroom door, though, and am trying to decide if I think I could install it myself. I don't enjoy sawing but the rest is probably fine.
Thing is, America has a reputation for mobility. When people compare structural unemployment in the US vs EU this is always trotted out, "Americans will just up and go wherever the jobs are".
African migrants deliberately built (and I assume still build) social safety nets in destination cities, based on place of origin, family, transitive reputation.
via DeLong -- some comments on that subject.
Jacobs: You talk a lot about how, for white working-class people, their social networks, their kin structures, their lives are very much place-based in a way that means that the expectation that people just move to better jobs and the sort of head-scratching by economists about "why don't people just move to where the jobs are" doesn't make a lot of sense, if you think about it in the context of people's social-cultural lives.
From an economic perspective, it doesn't make much sense, and I think your work is kind of answering why this decline in labor mobility and decline in economic dynamism in the United States might be an economic puzzle, but in some ways, the sociology of it answers the questions.
Williams: Elites have what are called entrepreneurial networks--wide circles of acquaintances that are often national, or even global. And that's how 70 percent to 90 percent of professionals get jobs. Working-class and poor people typically have place-based clique networks of family, neighbors, and friends they've known forever. Nonelites rely on these clique networks to protect them from their disadvantaged market position, by providing childcare, elder care, and help with things such as home repairs.
So, for moving to make sense, nonelites need not only to find a better job; they need to find one that's so much better that they come out ahead, despite the fact they now have to pay for childcare and elder care because no family is close enough to help out. Another reason nonelites are reluctant to move is that their social honor is not portable. I was just living in the Netherlands; all I had to do is say I am a law professor teaching at one of the leading Dutch universities for people to want to get to know me. I tell the story in my book about going back to a high school reunion in a working-class town, and having someone ask a former classmate what he did for a living. The classmate got very red and snapped, "I sell toilets!" If your job is inglorious, you want to stick around people who know you, and know that you're a person to be reckoned with--not just a guy who sells toilets.
Another important point: If you're working class, the people in the communities you're moving to have the same kind of dense place-based networks you have--and they're going to make sure that good jobs go to people in their networks, not to you. This is just the kind of erasure of the realities of people's lives on the ground that, if I can say this respectfully, economists are so good at.
Honestly, toilets really sell themselves if you ever tried to shit without one.
"There are stories of grounded pilots being butchered by Cossacks, being rescued on snowsleighs driven by sympathetic priests, or even being worshipped by awe-struck peasants."
On the other hand, Finnish Farmers (Laurie Anderson track).
Oh, you'll always know your neighbor,
you'll always know your pal,
if you've ever been shitting,
in a toiletless stall.
There's no way we'll ever know who wrote 112.
112 neither rhymes nor scans, so 113 is probably for the best.
Like you never heard the Erie Canal song.
109 reminds me how painfully bad I am at entrepreneurial networking.
You should try using a set of Truck Nutz as your LinkedIn profile picture.
65: I don't know that that would help them get sober either. Tia, I sadly believe your post. but I'm not in horsie jail for rehab, so it'll be fine, right? horsie jail is better today; my nausea has abated quite a lot, they got me back on lithium, I got to go in the fucking pool I have been staring at through the bars like a starving Victorian urchin at a bread factory...if things work properly I can talk to the girls later. god they play some shitty pop music in tuscon. couldn't they even play a spanish-language channel? also, why must they limit MY access to my music. it's killing me.
The food isn't bad. If you like cheese.
Everything Donald Trump turns to shit. Lesson #NNNNN
Before Lord Putinfluffer ascended to his pyrite throne, I had pity and sympathy for my white fellow-citizens. Even the ones who were a bit racist. I was also exercised/enraged at the hollowing-out of the hollows a few valleys over from Pittsburgh (where even in 1986, many had never been to Pittsburgh, not to speak of further away). I would have read the linked-to article with sympathy and even agitation for my compatriots.
And then came came Lord Putinfluffer and his motherfucking racist hordes.
And I don't feel that way anymore. The FIRST FUCKING THING I think of is "where were these assholes when African-Americans were being decimated by drugs and the loss of anything resembling decent work for, oh, idunno, the last FUCKING FIFTY YEARS?"
And yeah, I know it's an uncharitable reaction, but I kind of revel in the knowledge that they're getting what they dished-out.
It's horrible to feel these things. Horrible. Everything Lord Dampnut touches, turns to shit. Even the consciences of his opponents.
I should have added: Yes yes yes, I could have started with the rage in ... 1980 with RoNnIe RaYgUn's Philadelphia, Mississippi rally. With Nixon's Southern Strategy. I'm not unaware of all these things. But decent, patriotic, and ... *American* sort that I am, I *still* gave a shit about these racist motherfuckers, even after growing up amongst them and getting that racism right in the tuckus.
Again, until Commander Heel Spurs and his deplorable hordes.
109: The question is: What changed? Americans used to be more mobile.
122 We're all prone to it. Most of us anyway. Thing is, the woman in the story, whose life sounded like it derailed in the 70s, isn't much to blame for the plight of anyone else.
124: I'd guess expensive housing in the areas where the most jobs are, and jobs that require more education and skills.
||
"Budyonny and Voroshilov had slept in a haystack and were woken accidentally by a stray Polish soldier, also looking for a billet, who might easily have captured them instead of being captured himself."
|>
94: The second time was definitely not a farce.
(Although if you look at them as Polish-Russian wars, they're just the latest episodes in a long series. Story goes that a post-1989 Polish defense minister gets asked what the country would do in the event of another two-front war. "First Germany, then Russia." "Why?" "Business before pleasure.")
107, 129: Ooh, Mossy, what book is that? It's not the Davies, is it?
84 et seq.: I've been a renter in Germany for nigh on 20 years now, and sometimes it seems the system is designed for people to have to stay put. Long, long lead times to get out of a rental contract, like 90 days at least, sometimes 90 days from the end of the quarter in which you gave notice. Possibly even longer if you've been in one place a long time. You have to time things really really well not to get stuck with paying double rent.
Deposits are steep; they tend to be three months' rent. If you wind up having to go through a real estate agent, then the tenant gets stuck with all of the fees. Landlords are like, I got the property, sucks to be you.
I don't know what people do if they have to quickly get out of, say, an abusive relationship.
Then there's the whole genre of housing benefits that were available to people within certain groups (unions, industries, etc.) but not to any old member of the public. If you get your low-cost housing as a benefit of working for the railroad, you're pretty well bound both to the job and to the land. Those systems have mostly faded, but again only mostly. Where I am now was built for naval officers just before WWII (I know, I know), and people who work for the federal government still have preferential early access to any units that come open. I presume they can keep living there if they cease being feds, but I do not know that for certain.
Landlords are trying to break rent control regulations, claiming it limits their rights. (Or more precisely, at least as far as precision is available from what I heard on pop radio news, they are claiming that rent control regulations that vary by state amount to unequal treatment under the law.) They will probably succeed says my internal pessimist. On the other hand, at least there are lawmakers and people in power who are actually passing rules that benefit renters.
I'll toot my own horn, then:
http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/05/12/white-eagle-red-star-by-norman-davies/
He gets it: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/amp12781302/democrats-alabama-mississippi-progressives/
133, 4: That does seem good. I'll try it. I'm getting sick of novels.
134: A good review of a good book, short and readable. It dovetails neatly with the Deluge threads, missed opportunities for mutual security and a confederation of successor states in the east.
I was also struck by this, by D'Abernon, a British observer, writing in 1931:
It may be that communist doctrine repelled by force of arms in 1920 will later achieve the disruption it seeks. But should this come to pass, it will be due less to the military strength of the Soviet, less to propaganda, however lavish and persistent, than to disunion among its adversaries and to the strange incapacity to deal with the economic crisis which is today so grave a reproach to the intelligence of the Western world.The more things change...
I haven't heard Springsteen's Seeds for a long time and just had a look at the lyrics. Man.
Don't forget to watch the video too, so I get a royalty cheque.
He gets it: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/amp12781302/democrats-alabama-mississippi-progressives/
I got excited, then slgihtly disapointed. Here is the opening paragraph(s).
I'm reluctant to point this out, lest I blow the covert aspects of some good news, but it seems that, almost without anyone's noticing, very progressive African-American candidates have been getting elected to be mayors in cities in the very deepest parts of the deep South. First, it was Chokwe Lumumba, an actual Socialist, who was elected mayor in Jackson in Mississippi Goddamn. From Oxford American: . . . If I may repeat, this is Jackson. The one in Mississippi. Goddamn.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the demographics of Jackson. According to wikipedia Jackson is (a) 80% black, (b) smaller than I would have guessed (169K in 2010, down from a high of 203K in 1980), and (c) "Non-Hispanic Whites were 18% of the population in 2010, down from 60% in 1970."
I still think it's impressive, and notable, that they have a mayor who "declared a commitment to make Jackson the 'Most Radical City on the Planet.'" but I also think that demographic information is important and the fact that Charles Pierce both leads his article with Jackson and doesn't mention it makes me think he's not being totally upfront.
NickS: "Reading RTCB links so you don't have to."
Corker "begged" him for his endorsement, did not receive it and decided to retire because he "didn't have the guts" to run for reelection next year.
And you know what? That seems about right to me.
141- Seems like a strange take on it to me. I immediately took for granted that he was talking about majority black towns in the south. I'm pretty sure he was thinking of the claims I remember hearing that those black democratic voters in the south preferred conservative dems and didn't like progressives, or Sanders for that matter.
You didn't get that?
||
O, Great Hive Mind, should we get one backup drive that supports both Mac and PC or separate drives?
|>
YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. PLATFORM DIVERSIFICATION IS FUTILE.
Speaking of the Borg, I watched the first episode of the new Star Trek last night. I'm not sure what I think yet other than that it felt like Star Trek and I think that was the major issue, at least that I was worried about.
144.2, No, I thought his claim was about "everywhere" not necessarily majority black towns in the South. But your reading might be accurate.
So do you take the article as primarily addressing intra-Democratic contests, rather than the strength of Progressive candidates against Republicans?
A lot of people seem to be feeling the opposite.
149 to 147. Or anyone. I'm a contrary son-of-a-bitch.
148: the article's conclusion is that the Democrats should be going all out for the Alabama Senate seat. So, no, it's not about intra party contests in small majority black cities. It's about everywhere.
137: Thanks!
137 also: Social Democracy, saving capitalism from the capitalists for a good long time now.
148-1- There have been a lot of claims that anyone to the left is unelectable, that black Democrats are conservative, that a substantial part of the coalition will defect to the Republicans if offered a progressive.
I'm not straw manning here people have really said that stuff.
-2- I don't agree that follows. I'm not claiming leftys will always win either intra or outro.
I will say that if people want enthusiastic ground troops/ grassroots they need to offer them something to be enthusiastic about. I wish people would get excited about the same old same old, but they don't.
149 I have a feeling a lot of them will eventually come around.
Of course I even liked Voyager and Enterprise.
Couldn't stand the J.J. Abrams reboots though.
Detested the reboots too, though the most recent one wasn't bad. I also liked Voyager. It was the first Trek I saw, such that when I saw TNG it took me some time to figure out the Enterprise wasn't wandering the far side of the galaxy, cut off from home.
Hi for a single point of failure, with cloud backups for when the house burns down or floods or does whatever Texans do. Of you get two drives, make both interoperable.
153 - I think Pierce wants his argument to work both ways, but it really doesn't. "Run someone to the far left edges of the Democratic Party in places where that's a viable strategy" is a good takeaway (and I think will work decently well for the people of Jackson and Birmingham!), but his "Mississippi Goddam" reference surely is meant to indicate that Democrats should be doing something similar in the state, right? Because Democrats qua Democrats already ran Jackson and Birmingham; the action was in Democratic primaries.
Ehh. Whenever a lefty candidate loses there is an industry blaming the loss on them being a lefty. When a conservative corporate friendly Dem loses that industry says they weren't far enough to the right and kicks the left for their lack of enthusiasm.
There is certainly a degree to which both of those arguments are B.S. If the Republicans are going to vote for any Republican; looks at Trump, then maybe the Democrats will vote for any Democrat. The notion that some more Right wing Democrat will do better than a left-wing one in Republican area is largely unproven. If you are probably going to lose no matter what, why not swing for the fences, and build enthusiasm within the party.
158: Slightly surprised to find myself in complete agreement here.
147 et seq: Talking of reboots and sequels, I saw the new Blade Runner last night and enjoyed it very much. Good choice of director (he also did Sicario, Enemy and Arrival, and probably others I'm forgetting) and it managed to reference the original, while somehow avoiding being a lazy and incoherent Save-the-cat with some winks to the older film, which seems to have become the norm now that Hollywood has realised that "fandom" is similar to Republicans and that idiots will gobble up whatever is put in front of them as long as it has the right franchise name on it.
That got rather ranty, but my summary is: best resurrection of a franchise since Chris Nolan rebooted Batman; thank god Ridley Scott didn't direct this time.
(Also I liked the solar farms, and the fact that Future LA is now dark at night, instead of lit by oil refinery flares.)
Don't spoil Blade Runner. The rest of this stuff I'm never going to see, but I will see Blade Runner as soon as it's in the Redbox.
The first episode felt like Star Trek, the second a little less so, and the third felt like a very different show.
148-1- There have been a lot of claims that anyone to the left is unelectable, that black Democrats are conservative, that a substantial part of the coalition will defect to the Republicans if offered a progressive.
I'm not straw manning here people have really said that stuff.
I know that you're not straw-manning, but I also don't think the point you're making matches the article that Charles Piece wrote.
Look, my position here is mostly the D-squared, "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance."
What you're saying in this thread isn't a lie, but I think the Charles Piece article leans in that direction, and it's unfortunate.
I also think you're correct to say that there are a lot of people who will respond to any political event by saying, "this confirms what I already thought; everybody should be taking positions that I agree with." It's worth pushing back on that and saying, "what can we learn, how much should this change our prior beliefs."
In the case of the disputes between the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic party, I absolutely think the best think to happen is for progressives to start winning smaller races and demonstrating their ability to turn people out for non-presidential elections.
I'm not sure exactly how much the Jacksonville and Birmingham elections prove ( Chokwe Lumumba was the son of a former mayor, and it looks like Woodfin drew on support from Morehouse alumni networks, which might not be replicable. But, if we can start to accumulate examples of progressive candidates winning local elections that would be exciting.
Don't spoil Blade Runner.
Seconded. I probably won't manage to see Blade Runner in the theater, but I'm considering it.
(No further comments on Blade Runner, except to say that it merits seeing it in a theatre if you can make it.)
On topic: I've been to adult day care centers. The White House would lose certification so quickly if it really were one.
By unproven, you mean neither Gov Bullock nor Sen Tester are in office?
The first episode felt like Star Trek, the second a little less so, and the third felt like a very different show.
Damn, I watched the second episode last night and have to say that so far this fits.
I feel a little better now that the Republicans need 51 votes to get a bare majority in the Senate. If you play the national anthem and have a guy kneel, Pence will run away before breaking a tie.
126: Really horrific. I never reported my childhood abuse, and I'm very sympathetic to people who don't report being assaulted themselves. I wish our system didn't re-victimize people to no purpose, but as long as it does it's reasonable to opt out of participating.
Speaking of a tie, I'm wearing one today. Probably one of only three or four days I'll ever wear one on the job. Big day with big wigs today and I'm giving them a tour, I won't put one on for mere pence.
171 before seeing 170. That's truly horrible J, Robot
Up late with work. Who's here?
You know how cereal comes in these boxes, and inside the box a bag, which is never more than ~40% full? Why do they do that? It's insanely annoying. And they have to know this, because they themselves print "contents are measured by weight not volume" on every box.
Barry, did the bigwigs steal your weekend?
Hi! I wish I could offer fun stakes on any bets as to when I'll go to bed. On cereal, I know there was a serious scientific study at one point of why the nut clumps make their way to the bottom of the bag and the flakes stay at the top, or vice versa... shit, maybe now I have to look this up.
Phew, that didn't take long. Granular convection. I doubt there is a similarly complex reason for the gaping cereal-bag void. But perhaps!
It's like they're deliberately fucking with you. Big box of cereal! And it's all...empty! Haha! Fooled you!
Every two months or so, I saw my conditioner bottle in half (well, with a kitchen knife) to extract all the conditioner that stays pooled at the bottom no matter how you thrash away at it. I admit that this might have less to do with getting my money's worth and more to do with the violence inherent in the system.
I want to do that, but I'm lazy, so I just pour some water in the bottle and extract the diluted mix.
I save that kind of laziness for my job, apparently. I seem to have lost the ability to fool myself into thinking the job will suddenly become stimulating and a source of great personal and/or professional pride. I can't bring myself to give a shit about anything beyond bare maintenance and survival. That probably isn't healthy.
Definitely not! I'm feeling that myself right now, but I'm running out the clock on a contract, so I hope I can get some pride back at a new job.
Hmm, that was some passage of time. I'm totally failing to be entertaining here; it's just grim. Maybe I need some midnight cereal.
I'm eating a carrot. Munch munch, crunch.
Editing, writing, rearranging product documentation. It's dull beyond words. My mind is miles away. I have switched to traditional sleepytime music and consumed a few squares of 85% dark chocolate: anything to induce a state of flow.
Successful application of your obvious intelligence will reduce the suffering of end users and thus increase the number of mouse orgasms in the world.
And I like your thinking. Maybe I'll go and buy some chocolate products after sunset.
Yeah, I probably hit that benchmark once a month. It's that "successful application" part that seems to need work. It's nice to imagine all those desktop peripherals in a state of bliss, though.
Fat smiling Chinese guy. He always makes me happy.
||
Asked by Gallup in January 1942 how the Germans should be treated after the war, 41 per cent of [British] respondents wanted to prevent Germany from ever making war again, 18 per cent wanted to shoot the Nazis but to leave the rest of the German people in peace, 16 per cent wanted to punish the German people but not extract vengeance, and 7 per cent wanted to 'invite the Germans to our democratic world.' Only 11 per cent wanted to exterminate them.Gotta love the "only".
And of that 7%, 25% specifically wanted to invite only 75% of Germans to our democratic world... I had better sleep. Enjoy your chocolate!
My your dreams overflow with ecstatic electronics.
177 No, just my morning. It went very well indeed I thought.
You know how cereal comes in these boxes, and inside the box a bag, which is never more than ~40% full? Why do they do that?
The bag is pressurised with nitrogen and then sealed; this has three purposes. First, using nitrogen rather than air means that the cereal lasts longer (no oxygen around). Second, the sealed bag excludes moisture which would make the cereal go soggy. Third, the sealed, pressurised bag withstands load better, so if the box comes under a load the cereal inside won't get crushed.
The third reason is also why the bag is only partly full - because that way the bag can carry load by itself, without any of the load falling on the cereal. If you imagine a bag absolutely jammed full of cereal, there would be no way for any load to come on the bag and not crush some of the pieces of cereal inside.
Same holds for bags of crisps. Until they're opened, they're pressurised, and that stops the crisps inside from being crushed.
specifically wanted to invite only 75% of Germans to our democratic world...
If this is a reference to partitioning Germany, it's anachronistic - the survey is from 1942.
re: 193
To be fair, I wonder what percentage of that 7% had just had a family member killed by the Germans. Bearing in mind the Blitz had only just ended.
The solution is clearly steel-reinforced cereal boxes. It's as if no-one is even trying.
In context, the author is comparing and contrasting the indoctrination and murderousness of British and German troops.
I should add that "contents may have settled in transit" - so however full the bag looked when it was packed, it'll look less full when you open it at home.
I wouldn't say most bags of cereal I have in the UK are only 40% full. More like 70%-80%. But maybe that's just the types I eat.
Crisp bags though, are definitely misleadingly sized
Seriously, logistics-wise, the bags are trucked to to the retailers inside big cardboard boxes. Why not reinforce the big boxes, fill up the bags, increase the weight per truck load, and make your customers happier?
Wait, ajay, are you still there? I was about to fall asleep...
Cereal with higher mechanical strength, like granola, is sold in bags that are almost completely full. The problem is that you are eating WEAK CEREAL.
I am, in fact, complaining specifically about granola. Maybe I'm getting decadent American granola instead of the hardworking socialist kind.
198 vexed me so much that I couldn't settle down and am back to work. Win-win... I guess...
You can't go to bed until you've made a communism-themed cereal joke in the other thread.
You're probably right. I don't think I can do any better than "Silly rabbit, Trix are for the sons and daughters of the proletariat," so it's just as well.
129: In Alistair Horne's To Lose a Battle, he recounts that the last people to see the French army group commander, Billotte, alive were a group of British soldiers camping in a shed by the roadside who had found a bottle of milk and were about to share it, when a French four-star general walked in and called out "Ah! Du lait! Excellent!", necked the lot and walked back out to his car. Later that night he was killed when the car hit a truck, but this didn't become clear for a couple of days of confusion and liaison officers searching the countryside to find out if someone somewhere was in charge.
Horne is a bit unreliable on a lot of French things but I think there is consensus Billotte wasn't a gem.
200+ comments and no one's made a Billy Joel reference with the OP title.
197 These are cereal facts. Learn them. Remember them. Use them.
207: isn't all granola decadent (ie sugar filled) muesli already?
||
Is the White House basically just Stephen Miller and his laptop these days?
He jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls' track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex. (The White House, reaching for exculpatory context, noted that this was a girls' team from another school, not his own.)
|>
a group of British soldiers camping in a shed by the roadside who had found a bottle of milk and were about to share it, when a French four-star general walked in and called out "Ah! Du lait! Excellent!", necked the lot and walked back out to his car. Later that night he was killed when the car hit a truck
Yeah, right. "When the car hit a truck". That's their story and they're sticking to it...
It's a kakistocracy. All of that stuff about how the government needed to be small to avoid oppressing people was because they knew what they were planning to do if they ever got into power.
I guess 216 was on-topic, in the strict sense.