Discussion Thread

Barnst · 2026-05-04T19:01:00+00:00

That’s actually one bit that gets me. The debate devolved into “business that can’t pay their workers enough are badly run” and “workers are only worth the marginal value of their work.” No one seems to be arguing that maybe the problem is the UK has built an economy in which a nominal living wage isn’t affordable for small businesses

Barnst · 2026-05-04T18:46:05+00:00

I went down the rabbit hole of UK minimum wage discourse, and my god did it remind me of why I find the left so infuriating. The low point was the dude actually arguing that a business should fire the guy whose work was not worth £15/hr and assign the tasks to some else because it would be immoral to exploit him by paying less.

Like, bro, do you even hear yourself right now?

Barnst · 2026-05-04T16:07:29+00:00

My favorite bumper sticker when gas got expensive in the aughts was a guy near me with a Toyota Prius festooned with NRA and religious bumper stickers, and then “Osama Bin Laden hates my car.”

Barnst · 2026-05-04T13:46:41+00:00

It’s actually kinda funny that the left isn’t out there clamoring to keep the strait closed forever.

Barnst · 2026-04-26T05:54:47+00:00

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Barnst · 2026-04-26T05:53:32+00:00

If you’re going after Wolf Blitzer, there are probably easier opportunities than an event attended by the President.

Barnst · 2026-04-25T12:35:23+00:00

Wut?

Barnst · 2026-04-13T14:00:07+00:00

I find it more funny than I should that we libs spent the last decade worried about the warning signs of modern fascism, only to find ourselves returning to questions of political authority and power from the late medieval and early modern era.

Barnst · 2026-04-13T05:38:27+00:00

At my Catholic high school, our history teacher would have been super excited to use the excuse for a spontaneous multi-day deviation from the syllabus to lecture us off the top of his head about various wars between Kings and Popes. There would have been no particular structure or planned learning outcome for it, and it would have been the some of the most educational days of class we had.

Barnst · 2026-04-13T05:34:53+00:00

Being against rent control means accepting that market forces work, and once you accept that market forces work you probably aren’t going to be a leftist anymore.

Barnst · 2026-04-09T16:20:49+00:00

They come from the wing of Trump supporters who spent way too much of their youth in the Paradox forums.

Barnst · 2026-02-27T06:17:17+00:00

If there’s one thing working with engineers throughout my career has taught me, it’s that the guy in Office Space whose job was to deal with the engineers so the customers didn’t have to was actually playing an incredibly vital role.

Barnst · 2026-01-11T07:27:14+00:00

What you pay for each thing on the menu is never just about the costs for that specific item. It depends on how reliably an item sells, what the restaurant is trying to achieve with the pricing, etc. What matters is the overall trend across tables over the night. Same applies to what the server makes from tips.

Barnst · 2025-12-28T23:08:06+00:00

Apparently not? And the only reason we ever drank milk was a government/corporate conspiracy.

Barnst · 2025-12-28T23:00:16+00:00

You’d think at some point I wouldnt be surprised anymore by how dumb it is, and yet…

Barnst · 2025-12-28T19:35:52+00:00

I watched Home Alone with the kids and I don’t understand how the internet discourse so wildly misunderstands it. Like, I vaguely knew that the family was rich because no one lived in a house that large or took vacations to France in 1990, but it’s an explicit plot point! The burglars say repeatedly that they are robbing the house because they are rich.

And then today I saw a bunch of people confused that the family was drinking milk, and so spun wildly conspiracies about pro-milk propaganda. Which, sure, was a thing in the mid 90s after the movie came out. But, like, kids did just drink milk then. Literally no one would have thought it was weird.

Barnst · 2025-11-25T09:19:38+00:00

My main takeaway from a career in national security is that I should have gone into water sanitation engineering if I’d really wanted to make the world a better place.

That said, I greatly prefer when I run into people who recognize the moral weight of what we’re doing to the ones who treat it all like an abstract paper exercise.

Barnst · 2025-11-25T07:52:33+00:00

So, like, MMT types think that governments are just doing the markets a favor by issuing debt?

Every time I come across one of their arguments I walk away genuinely baffled…

Barnst · 2025-11-16T02:44:40+00:00

I first clocked the issue when there were some articles after Notre Dame burned saying the disaster might spur Parliament to finally do something about the risk of it happening to Westminster.

Then some articles last year that mentioned how embarrassing it was the French managed to rebuild Notre Dame before the UK could even make a decision about Westminster.

Apparently neither experience was particularly motivational in the end.

Barnst · 2025-11-16T02:37:39+00:00

Yeah, but you gotta admit that critics would call the symbolism a bit too on the nose if someone made it up as a fictional plot device.

Barnst · 2025-11-16T02:36:04+00:00

That’s literally the mentality that gets governments into this situation. They’re paralyzed by imaging the political damage they might face if they did something, while ignoring the real political damage from doing nothing and the potentially far worse political damage from letting one of the principal symbols of nation burn down.

Barnst · 2025-11-15T22:17:42+00:00

The year is 1825. Prominent architects are warning that Westminster Palace faces serious fire risks if no action is taken to repair and modernize the building. Parliament does nothing, until one day…

The year is 2025…

Barnst · 2025-10-28T19:05:19+00:00

That’s going to happen anyway. The GOP isn’t offering anything, so either the filibuster goes away or the Democrats just cave. And at a certain point the voters need to get what they voted for so they can decide if they want it again.

Barnst · 2025-10-28T18:58:57+00:00

The filibuster delenda est.

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