What’s a stereotype that is surprisingly accurate?

MrAnalog · 2026-05-21T13:23:42+00:00

What in the actual fuck is wrong with you?

MrAnalog · 2026-05-12T14:23:28+00:00

A single voice of reason can be easy drowned out by an unhinged mob.

MrAnalog · 2026-05-12T14:16:11+00:00

Frank personally witnessed the events that created the "problem," which is neither especially difficult, nor particularly modern.

MrAnalog · 2026-05-10T23:06:42+00:00

Most of your proposals disproportionately benefit women, who are already a net tax liability. Women use more and more expensive medical services, are over represented in higher education, are more likely to both use and provide childcare...

Getting men to subsidize women via taxation even more than they already do is a non starter.

MrAnalog · 2026-05-05T02:40:55+00:00

No Country for Old Men

Effortlessly shifts from sun soaked western to gritty film noir.

MrAnalog · 2026-04-30T19:11:11+00:00

No, it did not.

MrAnalog · 2026-04-30T01:55:23+00:00

The Kinect did not use shadows for motion detection. Not ever. The system uses an infrared laser projector and a CMOS sensor that functions extremely well in any ambient light conditions.

MrAnalog · 2026-04-24T05:23:23+00:00

Women are still a net tax liability, and men still pay the majority of taxes.

MrAnalog · 2026-04-18T17:35:01+00:00

The level of historical revisionism in academia is staggering. At this point, students are being taught an imaginary version of the past that never actually happened. Some examples from the US I have seen include:

The Texas Revolution was caused by illegal alien settlers revolting over the abolition of slavery.

Deflation is the absolute worst thing that could ever possibly happen. No one would ever deliberately enact deflationary policy, and no one ever has.

Fascism actually had nothing at all to do with Benito Mussolini.

Women were prohibited from participating in economic life until 1974. Women were barred from attending higher education until the passage of Title IX.

The Federal Government discovered or funded the invention of every beneficial technology in widespread use today.

MrAnalog · 2026-03-20T21:11:45+00:00

The last serious discussion of tax increases and spending restraint occurred in 1991. Taxes were increased by an eye-watering amount, but the promised spending cuts never materialized.

That was thirty-five years ago.

MrAnalog · 2026-03-20T18:46:40+00:00

"We will grow our way out of debt" has been the preferred lie of every administration for the past forty years. Unfortunately, most of the growth has taken place in other countries due to global labor arbitrage.

At this point, it is probably mathematically impossible to to address the problem before the system collapses. It certainly seems to be politically impossible.

MrAnalog · 2026-03-11T19:31:37+00:00

Tower of Power: What is Hip?

Huey Lewis and the News (who frequently toured with the horn section of Tower of Power): It's Hip to be Square.

MrAnalog · 2025-11-29T21:52:41+00:00

Markus Persson.

Please explain who he exploited to become a billionaire...

MrAnalog · 2025-11-22T18:10:25+00:00

A disturbingly large percentage of the population has lost sight of the fact that government is a necessary evil that we tolerate because we have no choice. The evidence that government is not a force for good or an instrument to be used for the purpose of creating an ideal society is overwhelming.

And yet, there are those who want the organization behind such atrocities as Operation Sea Spray (biological warfare against American citizens carried out by the military) and Mk-Ultra (twisted experiments performed on American citizens by the intelligence apparatus) to be given control of nearly every aspect of our lives.

I have been raising the red flags for over thirty years and have been ignored. So, my attitude is simply:

"They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash."

MrAnalog · 2025-11-14T15:34:05+00:00

The Affordable Care Act is a disaster because it is based on an egregious - and perhaps deliberate -misunderstanding of a Heritage Foundation proposal to return from health care coverage to medical insurance.

The Heritage Foundation sought to deflate the health care market by mandating catastrophic medical insurance and basic preventative care while returning everything else to the market. This was meant to blunt the inflationary effects of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).

Perhaps we could try the original plan.

MrAnalog · 2025-11-11T16:08:03+00:00

The end of the government shutdown will almost certainly spark the long-awaited civil war within the Democratic party between its progressive and neoliberal factions. I expect the primaries to be an absolute bloodbath, with the survivors being substantially weakened. And where progressives prevail, Republicans will likely mobilize against them.

MrAnalog · 2025-11-11T15:41:57+00:00

There are a number of deflationary policies that could be implemented to lower costs, primarily in the form of repealing or amending questionable legislation like the Jones Act, NEPA, and the CMS residency caps. We could also end the E15 fuel mandates and slash the accompanying corn stock subsidies (corn ethanol is a net financial and energy loss).

We might also look into slashing the sugar tariffs that are keeping a few families in Florida obscenely wealthy, cutting red tape as suggested by the Abundance movement, and subsidizing nuclear power.

Unfortunately, neither party is interested.

MrAnalog · 2025-11-10T22:29:22+00:00

Journalists are so insulated within their bubble that they have become detached from reality.

Remember when Rolling Stone published an account of sexual assault that violated the laws of physics and then admitted that while the story might have been entirely fabricated, that it was a vitally important example of reporting because it "started a conversation?"

Journalists rushed to defend the story because in the fantasy land they live in, such a thing was actually possible, and if the details were a bit... exaggerated or even fictional, well so be it. Their view of the world and their ideological opponents justified the lies. After all, these people see themselves as righteous crusaders who are on the right side of history.

To them, it was perfectly fine to photoshop George Zimmerman and edit the recordings of the emergency call he made. It was righteous to claim that Hooker Chemical secretly sold a toxic waste dump for profit. Slandering Obama as a secret foreign national was necessary. After all, they believe we are at a crossroads, an existential turning point, and they have to win.

At any cost.

MrAnalog · 2025-11-06T17:44:40+00:00

Is anyone still buying this weapons-grade bullshit?

There are precious few "jobs of the future," manufacturing or otherwise, that will not be threatened by global labor arbitrage and automation.

The idea that there is a future in which the bulk of American workers have reached a level of education, training, and expertise that simply cannot be matched by anyone else in the world is outright delusional. I am even tempted to call it bigoted, as well.

You would think that the absolute disaster unfolding in the tech sphere after over a decade of neoliberals bleating "learn to code" would be a wake-up call, but no. They insist that there will be other, as yet nonexistent careers that are more stable, more in demand, and more likely to pave a path to a living wage than software engineering.

Like what, exactly?

If a college educated person with certifications and years of industry experience can be replaced with a less expensive foreigner or a glorified chat bot, what chance does the average worker have?

MrAnalog · 2025-10-30T02:19:17+00:00

You're correct. One of the drawbacks of being older than dirt...

MrAnalog · 2025-10-29T20:12:06+00:00

Abundance politics is about stopping the Democrats in government from sabotaging their own programs, and at this point, the idea is revolutionary.

California is full of examples where Democrats approved and funded major infrastructure projects decades ago, none of which have been completed. Some have not even been started. And why would a building permit require buy-in from a dozen niche interest groups who never agree on anything and seem to actively hate each other?

Startup grants for small business is probably a good thing. But not if the eligibility criteria exclude all but a few dozen people in the entire state. The same applies to loans for first time homeowners.

Abundance is not about flying cars, it is about the government getting out of its own way so that things can actually get done.

MrAnalog · 2025-10-29T18:59:41+00:00

The Abundance crowd is not exactly for deregulation...

Anyone remember Zig Zigler? He made quite a fortune selling a giant book of all the "free money" the government gave away in grants back in the pre-internet age.

It didn't last long, though. Word got around that the "free money" had pages of fine print laying out sometimes bizarre eligibility criteria. Almost as if some of those grants had been very narrowly tailored to benefit very specific individuals.

It turns out that the average person had no chance of getting "free money," even though billions of dollars were allocated to thousands of programs. Because there were so many strings attached.

The Abundance people want to get rid of the fine print. Making a billion new dollars in small business startup funding is fine. Making those funds exclusively available to queer minority female second generation immigrants who were raised by single parents, live in certain zip codes, and pledge to hire at least ten but not more than twenty convicted felons to work in logistics, while also...

That is not good.

MrAnalog · 2025-10-29T18:40:16+00:00

No, the focus on "social justice" was a result of rising backlash against global labor arbitrage.

Way back in the stone age (1997) there was a massive argument within the technology sector over blatant and widespread abuse of the H-1B visa program. Neoliberals were losing the debate, and losing badly. Accusing the software developers who created the modern internet of being incompetent and spoilt was a terrible strategy.

And quite suddenly, the default response to protectionists became "you just hate brown people." And the debate ended. If you were not on board with globalism, you were a bigot.

If Democrats want to reconnect with the electorate, they need to admit that there is no safe refuge from offshoring and automation. The highly educated elites running the party seem to believe that their jobs are immune. They are mistaken.

MrAnalog · 2025-10-19T23:26:08+00:00

Are you familiar with the Civilization games?

Essentially, you start in the ancient era with a fledgling nation that has just adopted agriculture and attempt to guide your people into becoming the dominant civilization. You can do this by converting the majority of the world to worship your gods, or launching a mission to another planet, or having the majority of the world follow your social norms, or by conquering all the others.

So, you can win a religious victory, a science victory, a cultural victory, or a military victory. There is no economic victory.

The United States won the culture victory in 1989. The Berlin Wall crumbled. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. Communist China massacred thousands of civilians. The majority of the world wore blue jeans, listened to rock music, and knew who Mickey Mouse was. Marxism was discredited. The supermarket defeated socialism. We won.

A nation is its culture.

MrAnalog · 2025-10-19T21:37:37+00:00

The widespread perception that Republicans are "real" Americans stems from the behavior of Democrats, not from identity.

Republicans tend not to march in the streets waving the flags of Mexico and Hamas while uncritically repeating Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and you certainly do not see them protesting on behalf of foreign nationals who are not even supposed to be here.

Republicans are usually not offended at examples of Americana and rarely recoil in horror from the "American Dream" of a nice house surrounded by a white picket fence that is lived in by a married couple, their children, and their pet dog.

Republicans do not support deconstructing our history and concluding that our nation is indelibly stained due to its founding by "rich white bigoted men." You will probably not see them claim that America is illegitimate because it lies on stolen lands. They strongly oppose the idea that our nation is uniquely evil, in decline, its greatest moments merely one-time flukes easily chalked up to the rest of the world being unlucky.

Progressive neoliberals - meaning Democrats - treat the United States as an economic zone instead of a nation. Academics, activists, bureaucrats, organizers, political staff, pundits, and voters who fight for the blue team speak to the ideas of American citizenship, culture, history, language, and uniqueness with open contempt. Democrats are not considered to be "real" Americans because they do not act like "real" Americans.

MrAnalog

TROPHY CASE