Complain on the teacher eval?

Hope you're not being charged.

Weird how all those airlines didn't have to dot any i's or cross any t's before wheelbarrows full of money were rolled out.

They just have to murder 1 fewer person than team R and they become the lesser evil and entitled to your vote.

It's for the next round of payments. They aren't going back to take money away which was already sent out.

I started waking up to an alarm 7 days a week. It has helped me wake up earlier for work. Unfortunately, my sleep time is still 4am so I end up almost fainting from exhaustion at random times in the afternoon/evening. I'm not sure it's an improvement, but at least I don't miss morning meetings.

Omelas is a powerful parable, but it isn’t applicable to our society because we are all locked in; there is no decent society to go to, no place to escape to. We cannot leave.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” Is An Inapplicable Parable For Our Time

Omelas is everywhere. There is no road to lead you away from it. All the alternatives get bombed to smithereens or bullied into submission by the IMF.

Omelas' prosperity is widely shared. In our world, more and more of us struggle for daily necessities.

And if there were only 1 kid being tortured, I mean, that would be a nice change.

Omelas is a paradise compared to what we have.

Biden was on board with baby caging when Obama was President. I know it subsequently became a tribal identifier / catchphrase but it's not really something Trump came up with.

That would make it harder to collect data / spy on everyone so I'm afraid the tiny un-turn-off-able microphones are staying.

Yeah, exactly. The viewers are cheering on Walt and Skyler is the bump in the road, the unfun bitch yelling at the kids to stop having fun.

I mean, the showrunners also had Skyler do all sorts of shady things to make her seem "complicated". It was an attempt to make her interesting next to Walt but basically it just removed whatever sympathy viewers might have for a person in her situation.

A big chunk of the reason Skyler drives people up the wall into intense loathing / hating reactions (quote: "I hate her ever-living guts", quote: "I hate her ball busting, control freakish, white bread, housewifey milquetoast ways") is misogyny. She's a wife and the wife's role in a story is to support the male protagonist. 100%. No ifs, no doubts, no quibbling. Even if the protagonist is an antihero undergoing a downward spiral into crime and murder, the wife must help out, or at least, understand.

Skyler doesn't support her husband in the wish fulfillment journey of weak nerdy white teacher transforming into international drug lord badass, therefore she makes a lot of people's heads explode with hate.

I'm not saying this applies to any of you, I'm sure your reasons for hating her are valid and based on something totally unrelated. I'm just saying this is "a big chunk" of why Skyler is one of the most disliked characters in TV history.

If you're interested in watching a discussion of the extreme hatred of Skyler and an analysis go check out Jack Saint's video, Why Do You Hate Skyler White?

Oh wow, I loved this series but it was always a guilty pleasure. I assumed the protagonist's dumbass capitalist greed was a self-insert of the author. What a relief! I guess I'm kinda dumb not to realize it was probably satire, but how often is that true when you encounter a cartoonishly anti-communist character?

Please cry louder 4chan.

Hahaha from the Twitter thread:

Tanya the war mongering, sociopathic, chicago-school of economics obsessed salary-man manager, is not in fact a good, aspirational person. The Youjo Senki LNs own so much.

If you haven't checked out Youjo Senki (The Saga of Tanya the Evil) please do. The anime is great, the manga is great, the LNs are great. Lots of historical and military detail set in an AU where WWI and WWII are kinda smeared together with magic + rifles.

Not sure what they mean by "avoid OFA model"

In 2008 Obama built a massive army of enthusiastic volunteers, which he immediately shelved and told to go home and shut up. Then, when Obama was negotiating Obamacare, Rs conjured up right wing rent-a-mobs to protest against "socialized healthcare" and Obama had no ability to respond.

Biden doesn't have the army or enthusiasm. I guess item 1 is already a success? Where success is defined as failure?

you don’t want bitcoins to be generated forever because they would constantly be depreciating in value

That's not the behavior you want if you think people should use Bitcoin as a currency. You almost never want your currency to increase in value compared to the cost of goods and services. Because this means you're in deflation. Think about it: If all you need to do to get a positive return is leave your money parked in an account doing nothing with zero risk, you have much less reason to invest in actually productive activities where you have a chance of losing money. With deflation, it makes sense to delay all your purchases because everything will be cheaper the longer you wait. Under capitalism, this is a terrible situation. It gets even worse when you consider that anyone who owes money has to pay it back with increasingly expensive money. This is why deflation like what happened in the Great Depression or Japan in the 90s is so crushingly awful. An appreciating currency is about as great as a pail of spit but you rarely hear this from Bitcoin enthusiasts. Don't get me wrong, some people benefit. People who already have huge piles of currency they have no intention of using.

Here's another downside. If Bitcoins can't be generated forever, that means that even if the population increases and the economy grows, the amount of currency in circulation remains the same. More people chasing the same amount of currency in existence. This is also very deflationary. The gold standard suffers from the same problem, which is why it failed so badly no one uses it anymore. You don't want your economy to be straitjacketed by tying it to some weird asset whose size / volume is controlled by something weird like the number of gold mines on your planet.

That said, I once had a brief discussion about this with a Bitcoin fan and he told me Bitcoin actually has a mechanism built in which lets them increase the max number of Bitcoins allowed to exist. This would ... partially... address the problem. (Who decides when to activate the mechanism? Answer: People who have tons of Bitcoin already and don't want to lower is value.) Anyway, Bitcoin is just software which can ultimately be changed whenever people decide to do it. Anyway, our existing money system does this already, much better.

If Bitcoin routinely increases in value, it can only function as an asset like Jackson Pollack paintings or sports memorabilia or something. But we all know Bitcoin is highly volatile in reality, so it fails on that level too. Basically, Bitcoin is useful only for engaging in crime or tax evasion. Plus, it isn't truly anonymous (every transaction can be traced by design) so scratch out that supposed advantage as well.

Also used by lefties* who want ink that dries fast enough it doesn't smear all over their hand.

• Clarification: left-handed persons

I suggest NakedCapitalism.com, old school blog with daily links collection. They are not leftist but they are reality based and don't accept bullshit. Even if all you do is read the daily links post, without even clicking on any of the articles, you will be better informed than 99% of Americans.

Because I told my mom I support a living wage she called me a socialist who wants everyone to earn minimum wage.

Feel free to call me a socialist, I don't mind, but acting like it's a grave insult that will win points in an argument... I would be happy to earn minimum wage if it meant everyone would receive a living wage that included health care, retirement and other necessities.

Anyway, this is what decades of manufacturing consent and propaganda has done to the brains of our elders. Socialism is a scare word that ends all debate. (She also spent the entire conversation trying to talk about undocumented immigrants.)

The more desperate and insecure people are the easier it is for them to hate each other based on group identifiers. Rs and Ds drive everyone into precarious poverty then act shocked when racism, sexism, homophobia etc magically sprout up. What the hell were they expecting.

Obama successfully tanked his own presidency. If the Rs hadn't run a literal private equity robber baron, he would have ended up a first termer.

If Biden lives until 2023 he'd better hope the Rs considerately nominate Dracula because there's no way he gets a second term otherwise.

It's going to be austerity, austerity, austerity ... for us. The system is functioning perfectly for the 1%, they will never willingly change.

China only owns a small percentage of the debt. The majority is owned by US individuals and institutions.

If China wanted to sell of its treasuries immediately it could and the world would yawn. It would simply be exchanging an interest bearing bond for non-interest bearing currency... which is stupid, which is why they don't do it.

But the debt is a convenient scary story rich people tell to the poor, so please remember to be afraid instead of wondering why Trump inflated the DoD budget over his term multiple times and nobody blinked, but there's no money for health care during a freaking pandemic.

The federal deficit = savings bonds.

It's as simple as that.

Savings bonds are mostly owned by US individuals and institutions who want a risk-free return. Some are owned by foreign individuals and institutions who want a risk-free return denominated in dollars.

The bigger the deficit is, the more savings there are in the hands of the private sector. Woo scary.

To pay off those savings bonds, the federal government issues dollars. It pays off a dollar denominated debt instrument that pays interest with dollars that don't pay interest. It does this by changing the numbers in your savings account. There's no actual printing. If this kind of seems like a scam, it is. The point is the government can't run out of money, it is the printing press.

Theoretically, if the deficit is high enough we might get inflation. We haven't had much inflation in decades and the deficit is plenty high already, but basically, that's the excuse the 1% give when they spend all the money on toys for themselves and need to pretend there's nothing left for basic life essential needs.