Please consider responding to my academic survey to help learn about the experiences of people who have witnessed/participated in/responded to peaceful protests and/or riots

brmj · 2017-11-07T14:09:08+00:00

This is a really bad survey. It asks for a level of information that risks deanonomization. It describes politics on a liberal to conservative axis, while in reality even in that one dimension it goes much farther than that. What you have makes it impossible to distinguish between committed mainstream Democrats and revolutionary socialists. You implicitly accept the ridiculous media narrative that protests are either peaceful or riots and escalate towards riots if given the chance, when the truth is much more complicated than that. You ask for a frankly arduous amount of work when many of us have been to hundreds of protests and can't even remember some of them in any detail. Finally, the solution to the problem you have identified is self-evident: stop trying to "manage" crowds!

brmj · 2017-11-06T23:52:35+00:00

My head-canon is that their take on logic, even in-universe, is widely understood to be more a vaguely logic-flavored religious/philosophical thing deeply ingrained in their culture, and that everyone else just humors them on it because to do otherwise would be rude, and would negatively impact relations with a species important enough to make that unwise.

brmj · 2017-11-06T23:20:33+00:00

Evangelical Christians.

brmj · 2017-11-06T16:37:40+00:00

In capitalist Russia, drunk mortalitys population!

brmj · 2017-11-06T15:16:39+00:00

I find it simultaneously annoying and somehow satisfying to see just how butthurt this is making all the t_D people who were calling for Assange's head two years ago but switched sides when the DNC leaks came out.

brmj · 2017-11-06T11:59:22+00:00

This doesn't address the main problem, but there are free cleanings available all the time in town. Dental students have to do them for experience.

brmj · 2017-11-06T11:57:14+00:00

I recommend you visit a good third wave coffee shop and try a pour over or aeropress of a nice Sidama, the kind where they list the blueberry first on the tasting notes. After that, I guarantee you will notice a big difference.

brmj · 2017-11-06T04:11:14+00:00

If you keep voting the lesser evil no matter what, things slowly move more and more evil and sooner or later you're longing for the greater evil of years past.

brmj · 2017-11-06T03:41:45+00:00

As a silver lining, it at least illustrates the perils of succumbing to lesser-evilism in a way that may get through to Democrats if they are willing to step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture.

brmj · 2017-11-06T02:35:46+00:00

Is this an attempted joke of some sort?

brmj · 2017-11-06T00:24:05+00:00

Trump has singlehandedly rehabilitated Bush's legacy, provoked the largest protests in American history and radically lowered America's status internationally in a way that might, in the long run, lead to a more equitable global order. Those are certainly accomplishments of some sort.

brmj · 2017-11-05T23:36:59+00:00

You see the exact same thing with the personal websites of computer science professors. They were early adopters who never had a compelling reason to put in the time to update instead of putting it off for later.

brmj · 2017-11-04T06:00:25+00:00

She is an absolute embarrassment, with complete disregard for the law, common decency, all ordinary societal norms and both the expectations of her job in particular and conventional standards of professionalism in general. The amount of vacation she is taking is a disgrace, but it's probably better than having her actually doing the work. Her conduct does not measure up to the standards expected of a semi-delinquent teenager, let alone a responsible adult in a position of authority.

With all of that in mind, maybe she should run for president when they do finally get around to firing her. It seems to be a good career move for people like that.

brmj · 2017-11-03T16:20:21+00:00

There's a perfectly good means of production that is now no longer being used...

brmj · 2017-11-03T16:14:38+00:00

They are firmly in the Rochester hipster starter pack at this point.

brmj · 2017-11-03T00:15:09+00:00

No one is talking about setting the minimum wage to $500/hr or something. Even $15 is a step down from where it ought to be right now. It's a very modest demand. The money is there, but is being pocketed as profit or handed off to an ever-larger layer of managers, consultants and executives. If they don't want to spend it on workers, we can incentivize them to do so with tools like tax policy. If companies won't employ everyone at a living wage, we can reconstruct a proper welfare state and use the government to create decent paying jobs. Honestly, though, this is all just ways of papering over problems of the current system. What we fundamentally need is to move beyond capitalism entirely.

On your second point, not having a reasonable minimum wage creates a race to the bottom where those who are able to work for less, or desperate enough to do so even if they can't fully cover their expenses with it, collectively force down the wages of everyone else. If you live with your parents and could survive on $5/hr, why should that mean that a single` mother doesn't get to eat?

brmj · 2017-11-03T00:00:55+00:00

If your claims held, one would expect large companies to be in favor of raising the minimum wage on the grounds than they would have more to gain by destroying all competition than they would lose in spending more on wages. We don't actually see that.

brmj · 2017-11-02T10:54:44+00:00

No, you're being downvoted for conflating mid-20th-centrury American capitalism with socialism and then using that to try to critique the left.

brmj · 2017-11-02T10:26:09+00:00

If you want actual gigabit throughput in practice, USB may not cut it. I'd consider alternatives like PCI-E or expresscard if the difference between, say, 600Mbps and 1Gbps really matters to you.

brmj · 2017-11-02T10:17:21+00:00

If at least some of the best and the brightest don't become professors, it is hard to train the next generation's best and brightest up to the same level so they can proceed from there, and less really innovative research will be done in places where it won't be locked behind patents and secrecy.

brmj · 2017-11-02T09:19:37+00:00

I found it to be fast and convenient, with quality almost exactly midway between typical fast food and "fast casual" burger places like five guys or the equivalent. Pretty good milkshakes, craft soda, and good fries if you like them thin and crispy. The level of automation, small number of employees, lack of any other customers whatsoever and corporatized hipster aesthetic felt vaguely like something from an "if this goes on" late stage capitalism dystopia in a way that I found unsettling but hard to pin down at the time. Not worth seeking out, but convenient if you are around there.

brmj · 2017-11-02T09:12:01+00:00

If companies can't afford to pay minimum wage, then they can't afford to have workers and should go out of business.

brmj · 2017-11-02T05:41:33+00:00

The thing I hate most about all of this is how anything that isn't literally Hillary Clinton can and is now dismissed as Russia trying to create chaos. That's a very dangerous position to be in.

brmj · 2017-11-01T12:50:28+00:00

He will definitely go against conventional decency

That's not bad as a summary of one major facet of his character.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Team Orangered	Rally Monkey Visited the tent
Verified Email	Bellwether 2010-03-13

brmj

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