What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

what if trump was one of us

why are we still ranking them?

look who didn't get invited to a Fantasy Congress league this year

people whose entire concept of human worthiness it tied up in work for work's sake yachts and gold plated toilets.

I used to work with too many 70-80 year old men who would. not. retire. They would have to eventually be tricked/forced out and given sunset agreements so they could still do some client meetings and get paid but at least they freed up office space. They literally did not want to leave.

and those bitches had so much support staff because they didn't know how to use computers or how to call people themselves.

I can sympathize with feeling strong enough to want to work as opposed to the seventy-one-year-old bag man at Publix who can't live on his Social Security check, but the imaginations of these men are limited to driving their wives to the beauty parlor. That's why my dad won't retire: he won't sit at home yet he's too old for manual labor.

^^^These were rich guys who only knew how to make money. That is all they were interested in, that is who they were.

There were some super-elderly partners who still occasionally came to the office at my last job, one of whom I suspected very strongly had to be literally spoon-fed by his assistant.

But it's the idea again that you are only worth something if you go to a specific place, during specific hours and are paid a specific amount for it. It's so boring.

that SXSW talk is good listening

the bits DJI quoted starts from a guy's question at 55:15. best part of that answer imo:

"... Our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources. Because now we are approaching infinite resources. And how do - - - capitalism is based on scarcity, and what happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial(ly). And that is what has happened. We have created artificial scarcity and that is why we are driven to work eighty hours a week when we are being our most productive at any point in American history. And so we... you know, we should be working the least amount we've ever worked... if we were actually paid based on how much wealth we're producing. But we're not, we're paid on how little we're desperate enough to accept, and then the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire."

wonder if she read Inventing the Future

Around 2009ish I was working at a bank that had hours like 8am-6pm and I put together a whole alternative schedule where I could do my same job but just in an abbreviated timeframe ( I think it was ~32 hrs/wk) and I was happy to take a salary cut and to do it on a trial basis to make sure I could cover all the work. It totally got denied because it would "look bad" to my teammates and because I wasn't going to use my spare time doing something work-related/enrichment, like going to law school or getting an MBA. It was so ridiculous (I quit). I forgot about it until my friend, who I worked with there, brought it up when I was consulting at her firm this past fall. Because that firm and so many other firms are all about "agile working" now.

they have to be. it's like work from home, once a few companies start doing it, everyone's going to have to either start or have trouble attracting top-rate talent

Harry Enten still dumb as a wooden pundit: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/16/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-polls-like-trump-poll-of-the-week/index.html

(The fact that AOC is not running for national office and therefore has no reason to give a shit how she's polling nationally does not occur to him until paragraph 11:

It could be the case that Ocasio-Cortez doesn't and perhaps shouldn't care that her ratings have gone south. She clearly has a core group of supporters and is able to drive the national press conversation. For her own electoral sake, the group of voters who will decide her fate are in a slice of the Bronx and Queens' sections of New York City.

There's also nothing unique about nationally known politicians being unpopular with the general electorate. As I have noted on Twitter, almost every single candidate running for president in 2020 is more disliked than liked among all voters.

Still...

get ready for lots more tedious silliness of this kind in the months and years to come

I think we are entering an era where every single politician with a national rep is going to have either essentially 0% approval from Dems and some measurable amount of disapproval among their fellow Republicans, or vice versa, which is to say that everybody's going to have negative approval ratings overall.

I have never been polled about a candidate in my life.

Or any politician.

Me neither. I’ve never been polled about anything. I guess maybe it’s because I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize

Try moving to a swing state.

maybe eventually enough state legislatures will pass the national popular vote interstate compact and everyone's vote will actually count again

I was polled and I voted for AOC over Joseph Crowley.

Socialists in Congress expose how big capitalists rip off US taxpayers. Ex: tax-money helps pay for drug research but none of the "private" profits made on those drugs flow to the public that invested. So taxpayers subsidize drug company "private" profits.https://t.co/lClcYvPBYx

— Richard D. Wolff (@profwolff) March 19, 2019

not trying to defending big pharma here, that's for fucking sure, but the counterargument to that line of thinking is that the benefit to taxpayers comes in the form of greater availability of drugs, improved effectiveness of drugs, etc. obviously there are a ton of issues with that (for example, miracle drugs like oxycontin), but it's not like taxpayers funded a private yacht company and never see any changes in their lives - it's medical research that directly affects the drugs that become available.

similar areas where taxpayers are providing the funding for R&D and don't see "direct" returns: NASA, DARPA.

the question is whether the pharmaceutical research that's being funded by taxpayers would still take place if it was entirely funded by the pharmaceutical industry. i have no idea about that.

again, not saying that big pharma doesn't totally abuse the system and that maybe (like they allude to in the clip) it would be possible for them to funnel some of their ludicrously high profits back to the government. but i don't think it's scandalous or unusual that drug research is partly funded by taxpayers, or that taxpayers don't see a "direct" return

could part of the issue be *what* they research? the old point abt how they're super focused on things like the latest viagra improvement, or developing specialized patents for a nasal spray so that they can keep a dirt-cheap migraine drug at $3,000 a dose or w/e. but i dunno how much if any of that stuff comes from public dollars, or is possible because public dollars are subsidizing the r&d operation as a whole....

Time Cover Story: http://time.com/longform/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-profile/

AOC now officially too dumb AND too smart:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-trump-nematode

Schrödinger's GOP punching bag.

nematode is not a bad burn really

very millennial, I like it

It's ... interesting ... that only 23% of Republicans haven't heard enough about @AOC to form an opinion, compared to a sizable 44% of Democrats https://t.co/PIoWFDjUiK pic.twitter.com/ybf0YhykSa

— Brett LoGiurato (@BrettLoGiurato) March 28, 2019

Hmmmm curious

as usual, AOC had a good rejoinder to that, but come on, this thread can't be ALL @AOC tweets

Because of her I kind of want to get my birth chart read. My spouse would totally disown me though.

AOC is so great. She is my benchmark.

your birth chart read?

https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-birth-chart-astrology.html

well this is def the right thread for it

lol @ the update there

otm

in my opinion, astrology is bad

in my opinion, anyone who takes astrology even 1% seriously should have to live on an island with nothing but astrologers

Aleatoric oracles are fun and cool, no problem.

People being super into astrology makes me feel very sad

it's weird, i feel like astrology was a joke for like years and years and now i see that shit all over the place

i guess maybe it's a 70s thing, millennials love their unicorns too

My spouse is an astronomer. He even gets prickly when people talk about biodynamic wine (using astrology and moon phases for growing/harvesting grapes).

I should totally tell him he needs to figure out how to do my chart.

idk I've dealt with astrology quacks my whole life -- there was no hiatus

i think like 70 percent of my friends all actively engage with and keep up with their astrology? they also know it’s all bullshit. sometimes i think it’s fun

yeah it's fun and relatively harmless, or more harmless than instead believing the descendants of Ishmael will have a home at the Temple Mount or whatever

I grew up around Christians w/ this absurd snobbery about astrology and it's like, yeah mom, well the tide *really* is out and you *really* are on your period, so lets's dial it down a little

I may have mentioned it before but my mother’s family joined the JWs in the 1950s to get access to childcare during a family crisis and once my grandfather decided it was bad to be affiliated with them, actually became an astrologer to freak them into leaving the family alone.

talking about astrology is more a social faux pas--especially because people who do it will not stop even if you give them a ton of signals that you don't fucking care. It's like people going on about their RPGs.

It's ... interesting ... that only 23% of Republicans haven't heard enough about @AOC to form an opinion, compared to a sizable 44% of Democrats https://t.co/PIoWFDjUiK pic.twitter.com/ybf0YhykSa
— Brett LoGiurato (@BrettLoGiurato) March 28, 2019
― Karl Malone, Thursday, March 28, 2019 9:01 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm fairly certain if you drilled down that Republican subset to "Republicans who watch Fox" that 23% would almost completely disappear. I genuinely think most Fox viewers are already convinced she's the second most powerful politician in this country aside from Trump.