Post a controversial opinion

Was that your summary of it

Flopson OTM throughout, incl about the Bowie

Oh! You pretty things beyond thunderdome

I'm fine with Bowie not releasing any more good albums.

my friend is now a QA engineer for manufacturing, formerly worked on the production line, think he kind of misses the production aspect and hates the non-union management-track crap he deals with now

with factory work, assuming it's *good* factory work, you end up being able to go home and leave your work at work, and created something. some call centers are just sieves of misery

one of my best friends from high school was very competent at his job, and ended up being the person who called people behind on home mortgage payments to work out payment plans. it was very seldom someone who was just irresponsible, mostly people talking about their spouses being on disability, sudden illness, family tragedy. and it wasn't a position that led to promotions -- even if he was good at it, he'd just be given more difficult cases.

I'm fine with Bowie not releasing any more good albums.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 3 December 2015 03:32 (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Controversial opinion itt

more boomer artists should retire, spend their dough, drink Campari, and never return

dismantling of the liberal consensus, capitalism retrenches the lines of global exploitation that were meant to be vanishing with the colonial program

1) how many people are even aware that these two things happened? if you walked up to people on the street and asked them "has the liberal consensus ended" maybe 25% of them would know what you were talking about and say yes?

2) conservatives and non-anti-capitalists exist, so maybe half of those 25% cheer the former and are actively happy about it. maybe 1% of people are anti-capitalist? so 99% are cool with the latter. so you've got 6.25% of people who wish the liberal consensus hadn't ended, and 0.25% who are sad that capitalism hasn't ended

3) how many, among these 6 and 0.25 percent, feel actively sad about that, like to the extent that they are bummed out about it on a day to day?

re 1: 'how many people are even aware that these two things happened' is not the point, 'how many people on low incomes lead worse lives than they would had the anglo-american political climate not shifted' is the point. it's a pretty high percentage!!! i would look up some numbers on food poverty but w/e

re 2: if you're not at all bothered about continuing exploitation of the under-developed world then no matter how happy you are you are not leading a 'sweet life', you are morally vacuous and/or mentally subnormal so whatever?

anyway bye comrades i gotta go do some goalless physical labour in my spare time to develop a body physically attractive by a set of arbitrary standards totally unreflective of the sedentary lives we lead now that our 'work' lives are mostly aimless sitting around, peace out guys, viva la revocion

i think that is the short version of this stage of society -- people are finally realizing the get-things-done jobs are good, but too many are disappearing, while the misery sieve ones are still there. makes ppl of my ilk realize the social safety net needs to be a lot larger because it'd alleviate the call center traffic while keeping the people who need that work afloat

more boomers in general should float off into the sunset

Thomp u mad cranky lately what's on ya

do pictures exist of darragh with a cat

ftr i love (and do want) kids and hate (but could maybe grow to like if I got to know some cool ones) cats

well darragh i sorted out my sort of homeless and can't hold down a job type problems but i moved to a country i don't speak the language in the process, it's been a ... transitional year

mh otm about .. all of these kinds of jobs, incidentally

xp yeah but they've got weird food there so

Ooof...grats on the good stuff and commiserations on the tough stuff thomp

thanks man

j this is 4u:

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_9aOJ0whHVs/maxresdefault.jpg

of all the people i have been around this year, the dudes (who were mostly brothers/cousins) who i hired to build my garage and do some assorted construction stuff seem to have their shit most figured out. a couple of them worked with my dad, the main one at the same company and his cousin was actually in some construction union classes w/my dad a couple nights. they either do home stuff on the side outside of their day jobs, or have their own businesses. loved that they got shit done and i basically tried to not be the dude who chatted them up and got in their way in some weird patriarchal way, as i have seen ppl do.

the union class my dad and luis were in was pretty much their version of a "working styles" class which cracked me up, same shit i do as a corporate dude every few years. they had generational types -- here is how you deal with boomers, millennials, how they address situations differently!

not really the thread for it, but working w/that whole situation was great

is that just everything they serve put onto one bun, that seems efficient

Unless you think the most ethical think humanity can do is to die out, in which case your ethics places other species ahead of humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement

idk the typical ilxor is also like a caricature of leftist intellectual who moan about life under late capitalism. most people don't think about that shit, and depending on what your kid majors in neither will they. u know?

― flopson

This. God.

― MONKEY had been BUMMED by the GHOST of the late prancing paedophile (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 December 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

God has it pretty sweet under late capitalism.

1) how many people are even aware that these two things happened? if you walked up to people on the street and asked them "has the liberal consensus ended" maybe 25% of them would know what you were talking about and say yes?

Don't be dumb. If you talk to ppl in terms of depressed wages and working conditions and the fact that not only 'factory' work but also a lot of well-paid work technical work in heavy industry (steel) is disappearing - and the ongoing destruction of communities that depends on these you will get a different type of conversation.

I think Orange is the New Black sucks and is racist

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/sep/09/carbon-emissions-planes-shipping

This was really interesting, thanks! Admittedly, my question was largely based on the premise that airlines are unlikely to change the number of flights they schedule based on whether or not I book a ticket (although obv the overall aggregate demand makes a difference) but one more car is on the road, generating emissions, every time I drive anywhere. NB: I usually prefer to rent a car instead of flying to go back to Ottawa because it is cheaper and I enjoy driving.

idk the typical ilxor is also like a caricature of leftist intellectual who moan about life under late capitalism. most people don't think about that shit, and depending on what your kid majors in neither will they. u know?

― flopson

This. God.

― MONKEY had been BUMMED by the GHOST of the late prancing paedophile (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 December 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

poverty, homelessness, housing crises exist in the place that I am from and the place that I now live more than they did say 10 years ago - it's not the sole purview of effete leftist liberal arts grads to be concerned about these things

i care about all those things and realize they aren't on a continuous path of improvement. i even have a part time contract job studying things related to that. like here's a graph i made today that charts real weekly earnings of the bottom 10% of workers (horizontal axis) against the share of the income distribution held by people making 200% of the median income (vertical axis) (in Canada)

http://i.imgur.com/jPgU54y.jpg

and yet... i'm still optimistic. sometimes i think focusing too much on the plight of workers in the rich countries misses the forest for the trees. like, have you seen this graph by branko milanovic?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUXukb8WUAA-AHj.jpg:large

so much of the economic anxiety you read about in the guardian or new york times is worrying about people between the 85th and 95th percentiles of global earnings--while people in the lower percentiles have done really good!

i don't wanna get super into this cause last time i came out in favor of modernity on ilx shakey called me an idiot and hurt my feelings, but ya idk i think things are ok

that graph above is pretty crazy actually: over the same period the bottom 10% of workers' weekly real wages increased by 15$, the share of total earnings of people who make double median income increased by 6%

i'd like to see the version of that graph that uses the same units for both axes (either real earnings by $, or share of total earnings as %)

i can hook you up no problem

wait which one, branko's or mine?

last time i came out in favor of modernity on ilx shakey called me an idiot and hurt my feelings

no memory of this, but I apologize for hurtin yr feelings

thank you

xpost yours!

and actually, i guess you can deduce the % just by what's on the graph. if weekly earnings for 10th percentile workers went from 245 to 260, then they increased by...6%? so the weekly wage increased by 6% for both 10th percentile workers and people making 200% of the median income? i'm probably fucking something up.

yeah it's a weird graph cause it's levels on one axis and a share on the other, i was inspired by the graph in this blog post http://crookedtimber.org/2015/08/12/up-and-down-left-and-right/ but i don't have gini (and i don't really like gini) so i used high earners' income share. i just finished cleaning the data for this project and that was one of the first graphs i shot out. pretty pumped to dig in

i do love a good graph! just wanted to make sure i was interpreting it correctly

can't stand stevie wonder's harmonica

adult people probably should not care about star wars

deep dish pizza is good

I don't care about Star Wars that's for sure.

Marc Maron is a better comedian than Louis CK

The US Constitution really does guarantee the individual right to own firearms so even though it leads to the deaths of thousands we're stuck with it

can't stand stevie wonder's harmonica

Insufficiently controversial tbh.

All of Lindsay Buckingham's songs on Tusk, except for Tusk, are underworked coke-addled sketches that go nowhere. the raspy banjo sound is horrible.

Better.

It say controversial, not scary.

Stevie Wonder's harmonica is tolerable. He doesn't use it on every song. DYLAN, on the other hand, should have given the harp a rest more often.

In health care, rationing/death panels are not only good but necessary. I'm down with single-payer health care being provided for all, but you can't get there without triage and rationing. Collectively we pay like a gazillion dollars a day to keep oldsters alive for slightly longer. A fraction of those dollars could be vaccinating children / feeding hungry people for far more long-term benefit. Kill granny. Yes, even mine.

OTM

Ask me again in 40 years, but I think I would volunteer to live until a certain set age, at which point I'd be "sent to live on a farm". I don't want to be an ornery oldster tenaciously clinging to life out of spite. And having an endpoint in sight would significantly reduce anxiety about when the sweet embrace of death would finally claim my shambling, decrepit shell of a body.

we should have an auction. the highest bidders get to avoid kiling their grannies

you've got it backwards