User Panel
Quoted: I don't recall his post saying anything about border security..... why do you bring it up here? View Quote Because his post was normalcy bias, not predictively useful, or even very good at assessing which critical complex systems are important. Russia maintains a very decent ICBM system and very good SSGNs. Both are excellent power projection platforms. Yet Russia sucks at all sorts of basic stuff, like ground combat and drinkable water. |
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My wife has had the run around with a torn meniscus since March. I damn near got thrown out of the last ortho appointment we had for fucking up the MRI request for the third time.
America is sinking as fast as the titanic did, we’re about up to the poop deck. |
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Quoted: Define "functionally energy independent." For example, can we refine the bulk of the crude we produce? From where do the majority of wind or solar component come? What % of power is from nuclear or hydro from the US? What is the newest nuclear reactor in the US? View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: I'm going to assume you're talking about high speed passenger rail, otherwise I have some additional questions to ask you. The USA has no need for world class passenger rail. We all have cars. I was obviously referring to moving heavy freight. There is no practical difference between a freight rail line that ships containers from LA to NJ at 200 mph or at 50 mph. I even forgot to mention that we're the only major economy in the world that is functionally energy independent. Define "functionally energy independent." For example, can we refine the bulk of the crude we produce? From where do the majority of wind or solar component come? What % of power is from nuclear or hydro from the US? What is the newest nuclear reactor in the US? Well in the first part, we export more energy than we import. In the second, we have pretty much constructed the infrastructure needed to refine the unimaginable quantities of light sweet crude pouring out of our shale fields. In addition, we are building pipelines as fast as we can to fuel natural gas plants. Natural gas is essentially free between the Appalachians and the Rockies. It's a waste product. The tiny percentage points that are needed on a day to day basis are effortlessly filled by Mexico and Canada. Global trade outside North America could grind to a halt tomorrow and we basically wouldn't notice. Trade outside CONUS could halt and it would be an inconvenience. |
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Quoted: What's he right about. Its literally saying the "Chik-Fil-A has tasty lemonade" when asking about apple production. As it, its a misdirection that belies understanding. View Quote Attached File |
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Quoted: Now, if he wrote "We share a multi-thousand mile border with a nation slowly losing effective control of its nation" he would be right. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: I don't recall his post saying anything about border security..... why do you bring it up here? We are thousands of miles from the nearest country that can possibly threaten us. Now, if he wrote "We share a multi-thousand mile border with a nation slowly losing effective control of its nation" he would be right. Mexico as a state is not a threat to the USA. |
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Quoted: You get that the inflation of the last two years is actually worse in real wealth creation terms, right? View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: Are you really contending that things are far worse now than they were in 2008? Back when the world’s economy was in free fall? Because I remember 2008 very well. I’ll take 2023 over 2008 any day. You get that the inflation of the last two years is actually worse in real wealth creation terms, right? Show your math that supports this claim. |
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Quoted: You are precisely zero miles from the country that’s going to take you down. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: We are thousands of miles from the nearest country that can possibly threaten us. You are precisely zero miles from the country that’s going to take you down. Uh huh. I'm 15 miles from Canada right now. North Dakota's military assets by themselves by itself could conquer half of Canada. You don't have a military. The Trans Canada highway is the only functional link between your east and west. Yeah, you read that right. The only link beyond dragging stuff by dogsled across your country is a 4 lane bridge in Nipigon, Ontario. |
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Meanwhile in civilization...
- last minute flights to innumerable cities across an ocean, any ocean ... check - flights on time ... check - ortho scheduling for meniscus tears ... days - ortho scheduling for knee replacement ... two weeks |
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Quoted: Show your math that supports this claim. View Quote Are you arguing that the last two years of plus 9% inflation are actually better in wealth term than the dollar loss of 0% in a nominal dollar held from 2008 to 2016 in a S&P500 account (as an illustration of baseline wealth storage.) We are kind of arguing a couple of different things, and I sincerely want to get to a common understanding but the reality is that 10%+ inflation of last two years is basically a PERMANENT tax, regardless of macroeconomic conditions, right? |
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Quoted: Uh huh. I'm 15 miles from Canada right now. North Dakota's military assets by themselves by itself could conquer half of Canada. You don't have a military. The Trans Canada highway is the only functional link between your east and west. Yeah, you read that right. The only link beyond dragging stuff by dogsled across your country is a 4 lane bridge in Nipigon, Ontario. View Quote |
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Quoted: Uh huh. I'm 15 miles from Canada right now. North Dakota's military assets by themselves by itself could conquer half of Canada. You don't have a military. The Trans Canada highway is the only functional link between your east and west. Yeah, you read that right. The only link beyond dragging stuff by dogsled across your country is a 4 lane bridge in Nipigon, Ontario. View Quote it didn’t occur to me that that’s how my comment would read. I was talking about the US. America, or more precisely the thing that is currently wearing America as a skinsuit, is going to take America down. Same as every other empire. |
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Quoted: Quoted: Uh huh. I'm 15 miles from Canada right now. North Dakota's military assets by themselves by itself could conquer half of Canada. You don't have a military. The Trans Canada highway is the only functional link between your east and west. Yeah, you read that right. The only link beyond dragging stuff by dogsled across your country is a 4 lane bridge in Nipigon, Ontario. Maybe he should worry more about the fact that his country has a terminal demography and no military, and not the status of Washington DC. |
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Quoted: it didn’t occur to me that that’s how my comment would read. I was talking about the US. America, or more precisely the thing that is currently wearing America as a skinsuit, is going to take America down. Same as every other empire. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: Uh huh. I'm 15 miles from Canada right now. North Dakota's military assets by themselves by itself could conquer half of Canada. You don't have a military. The Trans Canada highway is the only functional link between your east and west. Yeah, you read that right. The only link beyond dragging stuff by dogsled across your country is a 4 lane bridge in Nipigon, Ontario. it didn’t occur to me that that’s how my comment would read. I was talking about the US. America, or more precisely the thing that is currently wearing America as a skinsuit, is going to take America down. Same as every other empire. Good to hear you're worrying about our internal problems. Hopefully you live in Alberta, and will be in one of the few places we choose to incorporate into our new order. |
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The air quality in my area is total shit today because of wildfire smoke from Canada.
Again. |
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Quoted: The FedEx truck just dropped a shotgun sized box at my neighbors house [ffl] , sitting on the porch. No signature. Im waiting on a police Magnum. Yep, down the drain View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: My package is running a day late…. FAILED EMPIRE!! The FedEx truck just dropped a shotgun sized box at my neighbors house [ffl] , sitting on the porch. No signature. Im waiting on a police Magnum. Yep, down the drain There is literally no difference between your town and a mud village in Mongolia. |
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Quoted: Are you arguing that the last two years of plus 9% inflation are actually better in wealth term than the dollar loss of 0% in a nominal dollar held from 2008 to 2016 in a S&P500 account (as an illustration of baseline wealth storage.) We are kind of arguing a couple of different things, and I sincerely want to get to a common understanding but the reality is that 10%+ inflation of last two years is basically a PERMANENT tax, regardless of macroeconomic conditions, right? View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: Show your math that supports this claim. Are you arguing that the last two years of plus 9% inflation are actually better in wealth term than the dollar loss of 0% in a nominal dollar held from 2008 to 2016 in a S&P500 account (as an illustration of baseline wealth storage.) We are kind of arguing a couple of different things, and I sincerely want to get to a common understanding but the reality is that 10%+ inflation of last two years is basically a PERMANENT tax, regardless of macroeconomic conditions, right? You claimed: Quoted: You get that the inflation of the last two years is actually worse in real wealth creation terms, right? That’s a big claim. All I’m asking is that you give me numbers instead of feels to back it up. |
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Historians and analysts always go into the minutiae of inflation, immigration, military losses, change in culture, etc etc....
and they're all fucking wrong. Bureaucratic complexity is the death of nations and civilizations, full stop. Attributing it to any other "reason" is akin to saying the guy with full blow AIDS died of a cold, or infected scratch. |
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Quoted: --The planes don't run on time. My wife is stuck in NC. United said the next flight out is Sunday. She found a flight from Greenville, SC and is enroute there now. I'll drive ~100 miles to the 2nd closest airport to us and have her home by a bit after midnight. --Medical care is becoming scarce--I have a torn meniscus. It was 3 weeks to get an MRI and an ADDITIONAL 6 weeks to get a simple appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. Talked to my mom this morning. She had to schedule an appointment to be seen at a MINUTE CLINIC. A walk in clinic. --Inflation--The price of things from groceries to cars continues to climb with no end in sight. --No one blames the Democrat in office. Conclusion: America is a failing empire. What other examples to you have? View Quote The sky is falling! Attached File |
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2018 a 50# bag of oatmeal was $50, last week I paid $65.
Thats 30% inflation 5 years! |
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Quoted: --The planes don't run on time. My wife is stuck in NC. United said the next flight out is Sunday. She found a flight from Greenville, SC and is enroute there now. I'll drive ~100 miles to the 2nd closest airport to us and have her home by a bit after midnight. --Medical care is becoming scarce--I have a torn meniscus. It was 3 weeks to get an MRI and an ADDITIONAL 6 weeks to get a simple appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. Talked to my mom this morning. She had to schedule an appointment to be seen at a MINUTE CLINIC. A walk in clinic. --Inflation--The price of things from groceries to cars continues to climb with no end in sight. --No one blames the Democrat in office. Conclusion: America is a failing empire. What other examples to you have? View Quote 1 guess where OP is not from |
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I just got back from the grocery store.
The store was warmer than usual and I became concerned my ice cream bars might have been compromised. I'm lucky I don't live in Texas, where the entire state is on fire and very hot. |
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Quoted: Luckily neither of those affect a nation that literally hasn't had a successful new surface combatant program since the 1980s. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: Maybe he should worry more about the fact that his country has a terminal demography and no military, and not the status of Washington DC. Luckily neither of those affect a nation that literally hasn't had a successful new surface combatant program since the 1980s. I didn't realize the Ford class was that old. My apologies. |
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Quoted: That’s a big claim. All I’m asking is that you give me numbers instead of feels to back it up. View Quote It's not a big claim. A dollar invested in a S&P 500 fund in 2007 has lost no value in 2000 dollar constant terms, yet the value loss of the same dollar has accelerated 4 times the projected loss from 2000, during the same time, permanently? |
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Quoted: I didn't realize the Ford class was that old. My apologies. View Quote Ford is neither a surface combatant nor terribly successful. ETA: Ford class only breached its hilariously low build price (that Congress shit at originally) by somewhere between 18-30% depending on metrics used. Which is a mammoth success story for program management compared to the JSF, I suppose. Or, the LCS, since more CVN-78s will make it to FY2030 than LCSs, and the -78 will have more offensive firepower than the DDG-1000s. |
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Quoted: It's not a big claim. A dollar invested in a S&P 500 fund in 2007 has lost no value in 2000 dollar constant terms, yet the value loss of the same dollar has accelerated 4 times the projected loss from 2000, during the same time, permanently? View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: That’s a big claim. All I’m asking is that you give me numbers instead of feels to back it up. It's not a big claim. A dollar invested in a S&P 500 fund in 2007 has lost no value in 2000 dollar constant terms, yet the value loss of the same dollar has accelerated 4 times the projected loss from 2000, during the same time, permanently? That doesn’t explain, in any way, shape, or form, why you think economic loss due to inflation is greater than the economic loss experienced in the financial crisis of 2008. Come on, show us the loss through inflation and compare it to the loss in 08. As confident you are in this, you shouldn’t have to dance around it like you are. |
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Quoted: --Medical care is becoming scarce--I have a torn meniscus. It was 3 weeks to get an MRI and an ADDITIONAL 6 weeks to get a simple appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. Talked to my mom this morning. She had to schedule an appointment to be seen at a MINUTE CLINIC. A walk in clinic. View Quote I empathize. I had an issue and it took 5 weeks to see a regular doc, 4 weeks for an MRI, then 4 more weeks to see a specialist. Thankfully it ended there and I didn't need any surgery. I got really lucky on the "short notice" MRI appointment, but still had to drive to a hospital an hour away, then had to drive over an hour to the specialist because he had office hours at two facilities, and the close one was booked up for two months. |
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Quoted: I'll provide some counter examples. We have the richest zone of farmland on the planet. We have the most efficient network of internal transport on the planet. We are thousands of miles from the nearest country that can possibly threaten us. We have more long range projection power than any nation in the history of the planet. We're gonna be fine. Quit being a doomer. View Quote The same drivel posted by every past empire back to the Persians. |
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chicks with dicks,
8rd mags i cant breathe brandon for president atf/doj/fbi etc etc etc definitely circling the drain |
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Quoted: 51% of the country are child groomers, mutilators, rapists and murderers or at minimum they support them by voting pedocrat. View Quote Attached File |
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Quoted: Because complex systems don't necessarily fail catastrophically. There is as much a chance they die by degrees, and the ensuing suckage is just accepted as "part and parcel of modern life." Our Administrative State is engaged in managing decline, for a variety of reasons that are quite compelling to it. View Quote I’ve seen it described as such (managed decline) many times, and am starting to believe it myself. Is this just self-fulfilling prophecy at this point? If it’s materially true, Is there any foreseeable way to turn it all around? What will future case studies say about the decline of the American empire? |
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Quoted: snip If it’s materially true, Is there any foreseeable way to turn it all around? snip View Quote If Tainter's view is correct (and IMO it probably is) the collapse happens when the value the complexity offers is less than the investment, and man, doesn't that descript a whole lot of the federal government at the moment? The way to turn that around is for the value to be higher, I don't see how that happens. It's certainly higher to a fresh illegal immigrant but surely not to the average taxpayer and increasingly even large businesses. A reformation to bring down the cost -- which probably means wiping out a massive amount of administrative government -- seems like the only way to balance that equation, and that's the exact opposite of what governments do, so it's probably a case of having a collapse of higher levels of government and then rebuilding at a more local level. I don't see a way around that without sudden enlightenment of the political class and a bunch of government employees willingly giving up their jobs -- both seem super improbable. Some of the complexity extends to other aspects of society outside government, there's likely a number of large corporations that are probably also too complex and expensive for the services they offer to be supported long term, and ironically a lot of those are afloat because of largesse from the government. So rather than turn it all around, it's collapse and reform that's the path through it. The issue is I suspect a lot of the commies are trying to get into position to control the reform, seemingly unaware that it's largely their doing that the collapse is happening. |
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Quoted: If Tainter's view is correct (and IMO it probably is) the collapse happens when the value the complexity offers is less than the investment, and man, doesn't that descript a whole lot of the federal government at the moment? The way to turn that around is for the value to be higher, I don't see how that happens. It's certainly higher to a fresh illegal immigrant but surely not to the average taxpayer and increasingly even large businesses. A reformation to bring down the cost -- which probably means wiping out a massive amount of administrative government -- seems like the only way to balance that equation, and that's the exact opposite of what governments do, so it's probably a case of having a collapse of higher levels of government and then rebuilding at a more local level. I don't see a way around that without sudden enlightenment of the political class and a bunch of government employees willingly giving up their jobs -- both seem super improbable. Some of the complexity extends to other aspects of society outside government, there's likely a number of large corporations that are probably also too complex and expensive for the services they offer to be supported long term, and ironically a lot of those are afloat because of largesse from the government. So rather than turn it all around, it's collapse and reform that's the path through it. The issue is I suspect a lot of the commies are trying to get into position to control the reform, seemingly unaware that it's largely their doing that the collapse is happening. View Quote Well yeah, it seems apparent that these fuckos have infiltrated EVERY level of the administrative/ bureaucratic state especially. So if they’re (still?) the ones “in charge” when the house of cards collapses, won’t they be the same sinister tools pulling the levers for their glorious “rebuilding” phase, a la BUILD BACK BETTER? Or when you say “rebuilding at a more local level”, do you literally the mean the federal government will cease to function for all intents & porpoises, and State level government will rebuild from the ground up? Because outside of a constitutional (and possibly existential) crisis, I don’t see how that could happen. Then again, it may take an existential crisis (a real one) to wake us up? |
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The violence in the big cities
ANTIFA/BLM Low educational achievement among youth Epidemic levels of illegal drug use Failure to prosecute felony crimes Politicization of Federal law enforcement and the Courts against the opposition party Arrest and prosecution or political opponents Untreated mental illness rampant in our communities Pay for play White House politics COVERED UP by the news media Undefended borders and loss of our sovereignty Children of unwed mothers, solely supported by the tax payers A cult obsessed with the murder of babies I could go on but I am just so tired |
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Quoted: years from now you'll look back and realize 2023 was the salad days. /media/mediaFiles/sharedAlbum/laugh-29.gif View Quote Attached File Attached File |
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Quoted: --The planes don't run on time. My wife is stuck in NC. United said the next flight out is Sunday. She found a flight from Greenville, SC and is enroute there now. I'll drive ~100 miles to the 2nd closest airport to us and have her home by a bit after midnight. --Medical care is becoming scarce--I have a torn meniscus. It was 3 weeks to get an MRI and an ADDITIONAL 6 weeks to get a simple appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. Talked to my mom this morning. She had to schedule an appointment to be seen at a MINUTE CLINIC. A walk in clinic. --Inflation--The price of things from groceries to cars continues to climb with no end in sight. --No one blames the Democrat in office. Conclusion: America is a failing empire. What other examples to you have? View Quote Democrats/never Trumpers will continue to vote for this stuff. It's like the kid riding the bike meme....they'll be the cause of the problems and will cry, "those darn MAGA white supremacist, cult members!!!!" |
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Yesterday I told my office manager to order an office chair. It arrived today. This empire is thriving.
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If America is an empire, it's been a failing empire for at least a century. A successful empire exacts taxes and tribute from the territories it protects.
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