You ain’t the only one! I gotta stop scrolling.

Money can be exchanged for goods and services!

I have a really hard time staying cool and collected when I discuss politics with people who hold right-wing positions. As a result, I never do volunteer work for political campaigns, because it seems like the only positions available are phone-banking and door-knocking. It’s frustrating; I want to help, but I feel strongly that I’d do more harm than good, doing either of those things.

Nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Great podcast, though.

You’re much better off not knowing, imo. Influencers are like Tinker Bell, in that they disappear if there aren’t enough people who believe they exist.

How about Anthropogenic Catastrophic Kindling (ACK)? Then we can at least get Cathy on board.

Hey, if we can make a pencil out of leaves, cephalopods can swim through our GI tract like species 8472 through fluidic space.

I’m looking forward to the inevitable Flop House episode.

While this is true, people still bear responsibility for the media they choose to consume. People wake up every day and decide to get their information from liars and grifters, because they prefer the way lies feel. It isn’t as if they don’t have options. Now, media literacy is definitely a problem. But the only solution is education, and that’s a silver bullet too slow to save us from all the extant ill-educated mooks.

When people tell me that their stubborn ignorance has reached levels so acute as to endanger the lives of everyone on Earth, I find it prudent to believe them.

I’ve just reinstalled Grim Dawn, having last played it some years ago, and am currently working my way through Act 2. I don’t frequently play ARPG’s, but I’ll try a new one when I get it in a bundle or somesuch. Mostly, they don’t hold my interest. Grim Dawn, vanilla and unmodded (I assume there’s some kind of modding scene; haven’t looked yet) still manages to scratch that itch for me. At some point I’ll pick up the DLC. Right now I just want to find something good enough to replace this crazy caster 2h sword I’m using, so that I can bring Albrecht’s Aether Ray back into the rotation!

I saw him spewing garbage on tv at the gym a few months ago; no audio, luckily, but they always have a tv showing fox news, and it was right in my line of sight. The ridiculous shit he was constantly doing with his hands had me cracking up. It was so over-the-top, to the point of parody. I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea that anyone takes the chucklefuck seriously, just based on his moronic gesticulation schtick.

So yeah, let him keep doing insanely stupid shit with his hands.

I really appreciate this take. It’s good-hearted and makes good sense. I’ll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.

Oh, crumb! I’ve gotten here way too late to make a joke about it not being a zero cum game. Ah, well. Next time!

Yeah, I think there’s also a lot of tone-deafness among economists, that seems to reflect a lack of understanding (or at least acknowledgment) that the economy is built on—and designed to perpetuate—massive inequality. The average person derives comparatively little benefit from an economy which is—on paper—booming, because the profits are overwhelmingly siphoned off by the wealthy. This is probably mostly a problem with the way the economy is reported on by the media, but economists are the face of that.

Economics is a soft science. Economics is not about describing how things should work, economics is about describing how things do work.

I mean, tell that to economists? In my experience, they are extremely dogmatic. With vanishingly few exceptions, every economist I’ve ever heard, seen, or read in any media acts as though whatever model they subscribe to is gospel, and that any issues you might have with it must therefore stem from a lack of understanding, rather than from the faulty assumptions underlying it.

ETA a recent example: Harvard economics professor and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman on Jon Stewart’s podcast.

Thanks for the write-up! Am also ex-11B, and this really takes me back. A lot of things I don’t miss about the army. Having a new officer come in and make some shitty changes, seemingly just to stroke their ego and put a bullet on their OER—that’s definitely on the list.

Can you see that you’re arguing against fictitious strawmen? You seem to be operating under the delusion that for all the dumb normies who have “bought into” the existing two-party system, politics is just a game that they play without understanding. You’ve reduced them all to NPC’s who lack the capacity to reason; obviously their only motivation could be mindless conformity to their “team”.

Is it your contention that it doesn’t matter what party controls the branches of government, because they’re both the same? While this is factually inaccurate, it would at least be in line with the actions you’re advocating. Speaking of which, how exactly do you imagine a “protest” vote would deny the subsequently elected government legitimacy? What force and effect do you foresee that action producing? Because anyone with a working knowledge of our electoral system can tell you that the only discernable result will be the empowerment of the minority party, which in this case seeks a fascist overthrow of our democratic system.

What you’re doing here is applying shallow, childish logic to a complex and nuanced problem, while pretending to have some high-minded motivations which—if they exist at all—clearly haven’t been thought through.

If you’re interested, The Flop House (long running bad movie podcast with three hosts and sometimes a guest; 2/3 hosts are former Daily Show writers [they are three cishet white guys, but not stupid or bigoted]) did an episode with Parker Bennett, one of the screenwriters of the '93 SMB movie. He’s got some pretty great anecdotes about making it!

What does libertarianism have to do with anything? The US health insurance industry is objectively evil. It exists solely to extract profits, while providing no service. It’s just a middleman between you and health care providers. It’s a poster child for regulatory capture and blatant corruption.