PoPville commenters stay undefeated. The actual post said "The woman did not seem to speak English or Spanish. She would not engage aside from raising her hand and repeating something I did not understand."
Nobody on an airplane has ever complained about what the parents had to do to get the baby in the seat behind them from kicking them in the back!
If I can't get you on "leave people alone they're not hurting anyone" can I at least point out it's a comical inversion of the attitude observed in every other area of American life towards infants and babies of "oh thank god they're finally sleeping!"
It's a perfectly honorable, ancient profession, if you don't want to give them what they want and need (money) just keep walking, most people do, I promise you will not hurt their feelings.
If this is the same woman I'm thinking about (she also often sits on Florida and 14th) I have actually seen do-gooders walk up to her and shout at her about how she's a pretty white woman and can get a job and doesn't need to be begging. I chatted with her a couple times, and she's a beggar.
Fascinating post start to finish, passed along completely without comment except to observe that of all the options the writer considered ("Roma child abuser?") simply giving the person money if she's so worried about her well-being didn't make the list.
As I am always saying about "provocation," the adult response is to *resist* the temptation to respond, while authoritarians use the *child's* response that "I am not responsible for my actions, since I was provoked." But that only holds if you are provoked to do something *bad;* this is good.
is this the gambling equivalent of putting the thermometer by your lightbulb to fake a fever and get out of going to school
I also selected castillian spanish (I think) at setup, no idea if the games and stuff are slightly different if you do a latin american spanish
I'm not sure when they start since I "tested" into a random place in the course. Hilariously, the Falstaff "shows" where he talks to humans about human stuff *end* at some point and I tested in PAST that point so I've still never seen one, I couldn't figure out what my partner was talking about 🤣
In my inner mythos this was because Bea is not the host but actually a *contestant* on a meta show, MST3K-style, where the only way to win is to not invest in random startups and every time she agrees to invest she loses the game.
They finally fixed it, but the sound effects were transposed for years, so there would be a "womp womp" sound when she agrees to invest and a trumpet salute when she tells them to kick sand.
One of the Spanish (I assume other popular languages too) duolingo class types is a silly Shark Tank-themed "radio" show where the character judges whether to invest in some cockamamie scheme.
This isn't special pleading, I like and voted for ranked choice voting, I am merely pointing out a consequence of ranked choice voting for electing leftist politicians in a city with a well-organized Moderate Sensible Center. Mamdani overcame it, hopefully Aparna does too!
But it introduces the orthogonal problem of allowing the Moderate Sensible Center to team up like this: it doesn't matter which *order* you rank Miguel and Brown in: as long as they get your first and second choices, they can cut out Aparna, despite her getting more of what we used to call "votes"
I only point this out because ranked choice voting is often cast as benefiting the left since people can finally vote for the candidate they "really" want but "know" can't win by ranking them first, solving the "go ahead, throw your vote away" problem.
I do not think it is the most likely scenario but it's certainly the biggest risk in this primary that Aparna will get the most 1st choice votes but the never-Aparna voters who rank Miguel and Brown 1st and 2nd will put one of them ahead in the later rounds.
I want what they have (kangaroos)
Unreal levels of Cop Excellence here.
Under a steeply progressive income tax system used to finance public services free at the point of service rich people would still evade taxes. You can't stop people from doing what they love and rich people /love/ evading taxes. But there wouldn't be anything for workers to "emulate"
But what is it overdetermined *by?* It can't be the fact that rich people send their kids to free daycare centers. On the contrary rich people send their kids to very expensive day care centers. It's overdetermined by the fact that neoliberalism, the ideology of rich people, demands means-testing!
Take everything I just said and then guess what kind of behavior it causes people to exhibit: it is worth doing virtually anything to get your reported income below $113k, especially since once you get into the program you are eligible until your kids go to school. Grifting is overdetermined.
Here's one I've been working on lately. DC has a means-tested childcare subsidy program, and the "subsidy" takes the form of a maximum monthly out-of-pocket amount. It phases out somewhere around $113k in income, but if you qualify for *any* subsidy it basically eliminates the cost of childcare
I think this conversation gets the causality exactly backwards: the scam and grifter economies didn't emerge because workers are *emulating* the rich (don't; your lawyers aren't as good as theirs), we are responding to the incentives created by the economic conditions they chose to impose on us.
hated landlords until I became one - tenants are just ungrateful Rhiannon Picton-James
I hated serial killers until I got that first rush of my hands squeezing tighter and tighter around a helpless delicate neck
I think my letter carrier has sort of decided to go to an every-other-day delivery schedule on their own initiative. I get Informed Delivery emails when stuff is supposed to arrive and they're perfectly *accurate,* except the mail shows up in batches 2-3 times a week. Fine with me but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
None of the defenders of Western civilization know the first thing about it
Cartoon head of a red dragon, a wisp of smoke from his nostril, and the words, 'Never Forget, Never Forgive, Dragon Remembrance Day, 23rd April'
Why on second viewing? I was cracking up the whole time. "Do whatever you want...Linda"