Kalbear

These are all amazing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/14/kate-middleton-princess-explanation-literature-satire/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_alexandra_petri&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_alexandrapetri&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3d11ea5%2F65f33a55715ef2295fc521b2%2F5972e372ae7e8a1cf4b1d8ff%2F3%2F23%2F65f33a55715ef2295fc521b2

As the prophecy has foretold, Joe Flacco is going to the Colts. Finally Jace's prayers have been answered.

Ukrainian lack of ammo and capabilities are becoming more acute and more dangerous: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-13-2024

Look man, I don't do that kind of stuff for free That's what my onlyfans is for. (seriously, a church parking lot is what you consider kinky? Do you also refer to their parts as 'thingys'?)

Alternately you're so plain you make yogurt taste spicy

I'm a basic douche but I'm not THAT basic

I did, but I didn't read all of the subsequent ones. Entirely my mistake. I think you're right - that is where I disagree. Because the election in 2020 was not about the economy; it was about Trump and what he represented. The economy was not what motivated folks in Georgia and Arizona to vote for Biden, IMO, at least not in the levels that we saw. And I think that the economy is vaguely okay enough that it won't be the main reason people vote in this election. It's not great, it's not terrible, it's 3.6 Roentgens. It's not like 2008.

You said he should run on the Biden economy. I'm sorry if I interpreted that as you saying that he should run on it as a central message. Hopefully you can understand my confusion. And while I appreciate your interpretation of what I said that's not what I meant; I am saying don't make it a central message or even a main message, any more than you should make immigration a main message - because people view Trump as better on both. If you make the election about the economy or about immigration you'll lose. That doesn't mean you can't ever talk about it, but you shouldn't go out of your way to emphasize it - at least not without having some real action to showcase or some real success (like, say a rate drop) to talk to. If you want to frame it as being positive about it when you need to talk to by all means, sure! But if you're going to go around and talk about the successes of the economy? I just don't think people are feeling that, especially the ones that you need to turn out. I think that the uptick in confidence is fine but it isn't going to be enough, and Biden is underwater on both the economy and things in general that I doubt it'll help him. I also suspect that the people who are swayable on the economy are more likely to come around to Biden regardless - they're likely ones who aren't happy about things but are getting better about it, and they were already probably doing okay to begin with. But those young folks? They aren't going to feel better about a slight change in inflation or a slight wage growth enough to counteract their malaise of voting. That's not going to fix how they view Gaza or Ukraine or the student loan promises or the climate promises or banning TikTok or the court system that wasn't acted on or the slow walking of Trump's charges or the idea that getting Biden in would, well, get rid of Trump. And maybe you're right - maybe they're impossible to get. In which case Biden is either fucked or has to hope that the economy is going to get way better. But my bet is that you can get at least enough of them...if you get them to really hate Trump.

You really can't because of those supply lines. You're basically betting on being able to hold it with whatever you're carrying. And you're dealing with a fixed position that has no built defenses and is cut off from most of whatever cover and firepower you have. Raiding might work, but holding? Not likely.

And this was why I was terse about it. I disagree with all of those things. All of those caveats, all of those things. You can quibble about whether or not you're choosing to say things are better than they were or they were good, but I don't agree regardless. I don't agree that you're going to win by putting nuance into things, either. In particular I disagree with the premise that you should be trying to go for malleable opinions. As you yourself stated dems have plenty of people to beat Trump provided they show up. The goal shouldn't be to change people's opinions on things, and telling them that the shit they're living in isn't shit isn't a good strategy in my mind. The goal should be to show that the opinions they hold are correct and make sure they do the thing you want them to. Namely, that Trump is a horrible person, was a horrible president and all the things they care about will be worse under him. It's very weird because these are the things you were advocating in 2016 and in general advocate - when you have two candidates that have high disapproval making people like you isn't going to work; you have to make them hate the other person more.

Again, that's not what you originally said: "the Joe Biden Economy is something to run on! The economic news continues to be entirely positive at the macro-level." If you want to run on it - and by that, I mean make it a central message - of things getting better I still disagree, mind you, but it's not the same thing. Mine would be to not RUN ON things getting better. If it comes up that's probably how I'd have to pivot and deflect briefly before going back and pointing out how Trump was the only POTUS in history who lost jobs in only 4 years and raised the debt in every single year he was in office. I wouldn't run on that as the primary thing. I'd run on not being Trump. I'd run on having to work towards repairing the damage Trump caused to domestic programs, to foreign relationships, to the trust in our legal system and judiciary, to the environment, to people's rights of privacy and government interference - and that the job is not done. And if Trump gets in office again, all that work will be destroyed in the very first day. Any progress made will be immediately wiped out and made even worse. Again I don't have a ton of confidence that even that will suffice; my major hope is that Trump just does some amazingly stupid shit that makes prior behaviors look tame, and combine that with some good news from Ukraine (again, against all odds) and Israel (ditto). But telling people that it's sunny when it's raining - or telling them that the rain isn't as bad as it was last year - I don't think will help.

And your advice is to tell them that things are fundamentally sound at the macro level. I'm sure that'll make a real good sound bite to folks who are having problems. I'm guessing that that'll be your strategy for other areas too - that sure, Gaza is bad but the rate of civilian deaths has been going lower recently and only 10 kids starved to death recently, so...be grateful, you deadbeats!

I think this is just pedantry and I appreciate that! So I'll state it more clearly: I do not think that telling young voters that things are going to be better under Biden is a winning argument. I don't think that focusing on Biden at all is going to be a winning argument. Instead, I would advocate arguing against Trump as the only real way forward that will work. I don't have a ton of faith that'll work either, mind you, but I think it's more likely to work than getting someone young people view as not energetic, not in touch and doing a bad job to convince them that THIS TIME he'll do better will. I did - but it is still 70% of young voters (which break heavily for dems). That's not great! More importantly, I think that any argument that tells those people that things are going to be better and good without actual concrete action will make it more likely that those 70% do not vote. Oh man, that's so lame. This is making me rethink the prophecy.

I think you'll not be able to influence them by arguments. I certainly don't think that Biden is going to be able to. I think that if he wants those viewpoints to change he'll have to actually do some things. Per that poll it's not overwhelmingly Trump voters, either: and Again, it's only one poll so take it with some grain of salts here, but this is pretty consistent with other sources of data I've seen and is the basis for my viewpoints here. In particular those young voters have been told a bunch of things by Biden that did not come to pass - student loan forgiveness, climate improvement, behavior of foreign allies, economic and inflation - and a lot of it landed with exceptional compromise or simply didn't affect them at all. Or actually got worse (like with Israel and Gaza). Trying to convince them after 4 years of these statements that no, really, things are going to be better with another 4 years is not something I think is going to win them over. Convincing them that as bad as things are they're going to be WAY WORSE under Trump I think might work.

Because even with rent leveling off, that's still not good enough. Same with inflation leveling off. Saying things are getting better is just going to make them look at things and see how they're not going great. Lol, oops! I don't think that they're going to be influenced by arguments, no. I think they'll be influenced by actions. And if you're not able to take actual actions (which as far as I can tell the government is almost entirely incapable of doing right now) making the argument things are going to get better is not going to be very helpful. I'd also say that for the most part the people who think things are going to be fine are not the ones you'll need to convince to vote for you. They'll likely be okay. It's the 30% of people who think things suck that are the ones you're most in danger of losing, and to them telling them things are going to be better will, IMO, turn them further away; it'll land like McCain's 'the economy is fundamentally sound' in 2008.

Look at those immigrant trees, taking English jobs

I don't understand this at all - is this similar to the idea that you should look at all the games to figure out where you're weakest by analyzing strong games? The numbers on housing in general are really bad in every urban area, and significantly worse than the averages for rent and ownership. This isn't new to Biden, but it is a lot more pronounced thanks to the cost of money. Saying that it's exceptionally bad in the bluest states ignores that it's a bad thing in places that dems need to win a lot of votes, and that will be harder to do. It'll be especially hard to do if you're saying that things are doing well or improving because it doesn't feel true - and it turns out for those cases it really isn't true. It's just not getting worse as fast. I think you lack charity in reading my posts and expect charity in reading your posts. I don't see that tracks (and amusing to me that's the same thing I linked, which means you didn't bother reading it), especially because that very same poll indicates that only about 30% of people think that the economy is going to be better later. Telling the people that think it's fair - the second lowest value - that it's going to be better when most people don't think that is likely not going to resonate - at least not without significant action. Mostly, though, I think this is a major rabbit hole that isn't that valuable; when approval ratings are as low as Biden's (33% by that same poll) your only hope is to attack the other person, which is what I said before. Unless Biden can deliver some big wins and turn people around significantly - which so far he has not been able to publicize or take credit for in any substantially successful way - he's better off not running on things that people have rejected and should instead run on the other guy being absolutely terrible.

My wife's father worked there for 30 years as their primary electrician, and knew all sorts of interesting things about it. We have a bunch of merch from there too. Apparently it's about as awesome and horrible as you would think. It is also not a great hotel any more, at least by modernist standards.

I think that TikTok will likely try and sell and the people that should want to buy it will...not. Because it's just better for them to not buy it, let it die, and then get their users (like was said before). People will bitch and will remember who signed it into law, and be unhappy right as an election is happening. Also, as I pointed out above giving more power to Meta and X is not exactly the big win for privacy, influence operations or behaviors that you might want to protect US consumers from that you think it is. Finally, the idea that if they don't divest it proves the point of the law is ridiculous; there are a whole lot of reasons that a company may not want to divest, the least of all being that they can't get a reasonable return on their investment. They already explored selling TikTok off a couple years back and they found that it wasn't a good deal for them - and it had nothing to do with needing Chinese-controlled. As to Uyghur - TikTok has been downgrading ALL political content as of late, in response to criticism that their audience actually skewed pro-Palestinian. Searching for Ugyhur and getting 4 total hits is not a statistical analysis or particularly useful. For a better test, try searching for Palestine and see how skewed the results are. Or try the same test on Meta to see what actually comes up. I don't know that that's the case; Europe seems to have a very different relationship with Chinese systems compared to the US. And there's the real rub - what does it matter? Elon Musk owning X and Trump owning Truth Social are both significant dangers to US governance and power, and are being used to cause damage already. Same with Meta. Regulation needs to happen regardless of ownership. Killing Tiktok in the US won't solve that problem, and killing Tiktok now doesn't solve any actual problems.

I think that's fair and also largely meaningless as far as TikTok goes. That would make a lot more sense if China wasn't an absurdly large economic partner of the US; there are a whole lot of actions we could be taking to do something about China's influence around the world that we should be considering before doing something like this. To me this feels like a ridiculously big own goal that also ignores all the actual data harvesting, targeting behaviors and influence actions that exist on social media right now and have been successful since 2015. TikTok in theory could be more harmful (though it would be VERY obvious very quickly of it getting enshittified in that way) but Facebook, Instagram, X and the like are already being used like that. That it almost certainly will alienate younger voters and energize Republican voters is icing on the cake.

This might not be as great a point as you might think given the self-selection of people on this forum

It's not irrelevant in cities in very blue states - it's cities in ALL states, and since the majority of cities are blue that kind of matters when dealing with swing states. It's more true in San Francisco and Seattle, and that's fair, but it's also accurate in Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Phoenix and Atlanta and Detroit and Las Vegas. Mostly, I wasn't talking specifically to your comments about rent (though those are ALSO too high, they're at least not going insane any more) - it's the feeling that things are better at the macro level. Using economist values you're right - but that's irrelevant because there are a whole lot of things that economists willfully do not use that are utterly fucked for people. No, you said "the Joe Biden Economy is something to run on! The economic news continues to be entirely positive at the macro-level." Forgive me if I used fewer words to say the same thing. In any case I disagree with that regardless - I don't think that the economy is something to emphasize heavily, at least not in a broad or generic way. If you want to highlight specific things maybe that'll work, but polling indicates that this isn't a winning message - only 44% of dems think that the economy is good right now, compared to 57% of the overall population in 2020. To me this feels a lot like Biden pivoting to slamming Republicans on immigration - it feels good to point out the hypocrisy, but when you're bringing up a point that the other group is considered strong at you're likely just going to lose the conversation while making the conversation about things they're better at. No, not like that! Because that's not the existential hope that people need going forward. We're talking about giving hope that the US will be a functional republic. That the world will not be burning. That wars aren't going to be crushing refugees left and right. I'm sure that a whole lot of people in the US don't really care about those things as far as their primary choices - I said as much above - but for the youth voting, the voting bloc that Dems really need to vote for them - those are the things that they need to see. And they're not seeing it. Saying that the economy is slightly getting better just rings hollow when they're looking at no savings, no long-term jobs, no careers, no housing or wealth building and a world that is in a late-stage capitalist collapse.

It's funny hearing someone say how cousins is about empty stats while touting qb playoff wins as a good stat. Rex Grossman went to the superbowl. Nick Foles won a superbowl. QB is definitely the most important position but that doesn't mean it is the only one.

Apparently RFK Jr. has reached out to Jesse Ventura and Aaron Rodgers to be his running mate. Holy fuck we live in such a stupid timeline https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/rfk-jr-aaron-rodgers-jesse-ventura.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240312&instance_id=117442&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=62607880&segment_id=160588&te=1&user_id=22745856cc8b56416cc6c344655eb99f