Heraclitusstudent says

Are you saying women are bad engineers but are better than men at communicating?

Lol, too much truth.

There are good woman engineers of course, but women provably, scientifically have less interest and aptitude for engineering on average. And communicate better than men do, on average.

Even chimpanzee children have starkly different interests. Male chimpanzee kids choose to play with trucks, female chimpanzee kids choose to play with dolls. No one taught them that.

Wow, the news about all this was just so damn wrong.

Thanks for posting.

Seriously, the powers that be are using all our FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) accounts to compile dossiers on all of us. There really can be no doubt of that.

And those dossiers will be used when it is convenient to cause harm to anyone they choose.

zzyzzx says

Her face is even better than her tits, imho. Or maybe she's just my type.

Yes, the lower left picture is pretty good.

MrMagic says

Just wondering if you're going to show some consistency here? If so, it seems you missed some posts made by a poster beginning with "K".

@MrMagic Please flag any personal comments.

The good news is that the government may not be particularly competent at correlating all this data.

The bad news is that those companies are quite competent, and the SJW management is likely to hand it to the government on a silver platter, as long as it serves their ends.

OK, I could be wrong about diversity vs homelessness.

cmdrdataleak says

This kind of degradation and squalor only happens when a society is too fractured or addled to have pride in itself.

This. Without a sense of unity, of all being in the same boat, there is not much motivation for us to take care of each other.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"

What typically happens historically in dying empires is that some group from the sidelines with great unity and sense of purpose steps in with new rules and takes over. Eventually.

Kakistocracy says

In reality, the threat of government punishment permeates Americans’ daily lives more than ever before

This does sound almost exactly like the two dozen bots (IP addresses all from China or Thailand) that I deleted.

Someone is spending a lot of time and/or money to promote the idea that we should not trust our own government.

willywonka says

Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday said she was sorry after a handwritten note saying she's 'American Indian' emerged

"Emerged", lol.

Bet this was in the dossiers the DNC keeps on everyone, and they just chose to pull it out right now.

MisterLearnToCode says

So this is complete SJW bullshit.

The ultimate problem is that people like her are granted massive power, just for complaining.

Having power is enjoyable!

The right answer would have been for the university and yoga club to just ignore her, but no, they blew it and granted her power over them.

Yes, welcome back @curious2

The plural uses the feminine, with the exception of the dative (indirect object). Lots of languages associate the plural and feminine. I think this is because reproduction is associated at some deep level with women more than with men.

Another interesting tidbit about gender in German is the pretty obvious symbolism of the gender of certain words. For example tower (der Turm) is masculine, while tunnel (die Tunnel) is feminine. Children are oddly neuter (das Kind).

https://medium.com/@vvecsei/fighting-the-surveillance-economy-a-practical-guide-for-individuals-and-companies-cb9719fe1098

By placing a Google script or a Facebook pixel on your website and in app you pass on behavioral information of your users to these companies. This data is almost always “anonymized”, but it’s evident that customer profiles are connected to this information with high confidence, resulting in better understanding of their habits. Your usage of Google Analytics goes against the core principles of “caring about the privacy of your visitors”.

This is also true for any other third party tool that you use that processes customer data in some way — the issue of no consent aside intentional malevolence, sloppy internal policies and data breaches all pose a threat to the privacy of your customers. For (almost) every tool you use, there is a self-hosted and open-source alternative. Switch to Matomo from Google Analytics to collect and analyze visitor data. Use RocketChat instead of Slack to protect sensitive information you share within your team.

Chris2013 says

Der Tunnel has the masculine article der , not the fem. "die".

Damn, you're right. Must have been using it wrong for years.

willywonka says

Fairfax said he had a 'consensual' hotel room encounter at 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston when he was a John Kerry campaign staffer

But a woman told the Washington Post Fairfax used his weight to force her into oral sex and she was left crying and shaken

As ever, I am inclined to believe that the DNC has files on everyone (partly courtesy of Google and Facebook and maybe Apple SJW staffers) and chooses when to use them.

And as ever, I say that any woman voluntarily alone with a man has consented to sex with him and has nothing to complain about.

Another good reason why we need to stick with cash and never do away with it.

When everything has to go through credit cards and/or banks, then everyone has to comply with whatever SJW policy that credit cards and banks choose to inflict on us. Freedom of speech? Not if you can be seriously threatened with financial harm for speaking and have no legal recourse.

It's mere globalist propaganda that white people "don't want" hard farm jobs. That's used as an excuse to import more illegals, or to prevent ICE from deporting the millions that are already here. Don't believe the propaganda.

White people would absolutely pick lettuce or tomatoes in the Central Valley if the wages for it were not driven down near zero by competition with illegals.

Of course we'd all have to pay more for lettuce and tomatoes, but we would also benefit from positive effects on the economy, which benefits greatly when poor people earn more. Poor people tend to spend what they earn benefiting local businesses, which then benefit bigger businesses in a kind of food chain. Richer people tend to just sit on the extra cash when they earn more.

Bizarre but excellent. What is the context of the photo?

@Trog2FdUp2C Try https://patrick.net instead of http://patrick.net (first one has the s for secure)

I never heard of Prager before.

But I think he's spot-on. Trump gets instantly rejected by a lot of people just because of his style, but he's actually accomplished a great deal and we are all safer and more prosperous because of Trump.

I don't care much about conservatism per se, but I do think traditional values became traditional exactly because they helped us survive into the next generation. Pretty much everything the current identity-politics left promotes is fatal to humanity in the long run: feminism, homosexuality, Islam, relentless division by race, promotion of grievance studies, open borders.

Trump's presidency is a massive win for freedom from an ever-more-oppressive thought police. It gives me hope that the left will not actually succeed in killing off humanity "for the sake of the planet".

Such memes are so far over the top that that they make me smile every time.

But there is some truthiness about them.

Trump is being shot at, and he is shooting back, and he's fighting for America against leftists who want to blame and dissolve the country to please globalists, and the whole spectacle has a weirdness about it very much like a president on a velociraptor.

Amen.

No trolling intended. I mean it all.

@curious2 I don't want to argue with you. I wish you happiness and a long life and freedom to live how you want to.

I just don't think homosexuality is a good thing for humanity in the long run. It's just one more vice like many others.

I am consistently amazed at the disregard for free speech in the UK.

The Nazi pug incident was just one of many where speech that would be protected in the US is actually forbidden over there.

It wasn't the same thing at all in Greece. Mostly pederasty, not that I'm a fan of that either:

The most widespread and socially significant form of same-sex sexual relations in ancient Greece was between adult men and pubescent or adolescent boys, known as pederasty.

And it was generally not exclusive. That is, even men who liked to fuck boys were not exclusively homosexual in ancient Greece. They generally got married and had kids.

The idea that homosexuality is somehow innate and exclusive is a modern invention.

CovfefeButDeadly says

I will note that Patrick has evolved politically partially as a result of the unreasonableness of the left.

@CovfefeButDeadly Yes, I think you're right about that. I feel driven away from the left. Like Reagan said, I didn't leave them, they left me. I started out from an exclusively Democratic family, but that was all about labor. My immigrant ancestors all just wanted a better deal for themselves as farmers or working people. It was just about wages vs profits for owners. Nothing about race, gender, gays. Both parties were about the same with respect to those issues.

But now the Democrats have substituted race, gender, and gays for the labor issue. They not only gave up the fight, they actively betray labor daily by supporting the biggest banks, globalization of manufacturing, and importing literally millions of illegals to keep wages down at the low end.

I don't think I'm overreacting. The Democratic Party has become a basket of deplorables joined only by their grievances. I wish they would get back to issues that really matter.

clambo says

every female has some level of self-doubt

I have also found this to be true.

What did Ilhan Omar do exactly? If she only claimed that AIPAC pays off Congressmen to support Israel no matter what, well, that is pretty much what they do as I understand it.

Now if she would only point out how the Saudis also use their money the same way.

Quigley says

massive unsold inventory.
This is not great for the car companies, so they relax their credit standards for losers and deadbeats

That is also my interpretation.

The auto market is similar to the housing market that way.

Sure, but that's a different issue.

I'm banning politics from this thread.

Ah, thanks for doing the math. Didn't quite feel right anyway. Off by 1000x!

Nah, I'm pretty humorless when it comes to humor!

@marcus Nothing against you personally. I'm glad you're here.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/13/ilhan-omar-is-right-about-the-influence-of-the-israel-lobby

I have sympathy for Israel for various reasons, but I think we should point out the corrupting influence of money in politics no matter which side it's from.

If we can point out the influence of AIPAC, maybe that will lead to more discussion of the influence of the Saudis as well.

Could be true. I went to Notre Dame freshman and sophomore years, and it was pretty clear that a large number of the priests were gay.

zzyzzx says

At these prices, I am not sure that I would be buying anything. Maybe AT&T for the dividend, even though I hate the company.

There are always bargains about. The hard part is finding them.

Rin says

Anything below $1B is a small potatoes firm trying to make it big and thus, you'll have to forgo the steady dividend check for the cap gains yield.

You're right. I do want contradictory things to some degree.

Andrew McCabe was far from the only FBI official to disgrace himself. Other now-fired FBI officials, such as James Comey and Peter Strzok, helped transform the FBI into a political weapon to sabotage the president through the baseless Trump-Russia investigation. There are still only two primary explanations for their conduct. The first is they were simply incompetent and commenced a probe without sufficient nonpartisan evidence. The second and more likely explanation is that McCabe and his cohorts were on a hell-bent quest to overturn the results of the election. Call it what it was: a soft coup attempt. Luckily for our republic, the coup attempt failed.

Seems like a good summary of the situation.

The people elected not-Hillary in spite of being force-fed Hillary. Then members of the FBI and the Democrats tried to nullify the election because it didn't go their way.

Ironically, democracy worked in spite of the Democrats.

I'm tempted to finally buy some TSLA even though it doesn't make a profit. Revenue doubled from 2017.

cmdrdataleak says

That’s because the percentage of white gentiles at Harvard isn’t 63% and the percentage of Jews isn’t 3%

They should have put in the numbers. Harvard undergrads are about 25% Jewish.

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-college-and-other-facts-about-Jews-at-American-colleges-437701

And from Harvard's own office of overt racism, https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics :

African American 15.2%
Asian American 22.9%
Hispanic or Latino 12.3%
Native American 1.9%
Native Hawaiian 0.4%

So 77.7% of Harvard's undergrads are not gentile whites, implying that 22.3% are.

So in spite of being 63% of the population, whites get only 22.3% of the spots at Harvard.

cmdrdataleak says

Today, we admit about two-thirds of immigrants on the basis of family ties and only 15 percent on the basis of skills. We need a course correction. We should limit family immigration to immediate family members—such as spouses and minor children—while greatly expanding the number of skills-based visas.

Yes, of course.

But Trump wants exactly this, so according the press, it must be evil.

I don't think the situation is quite that dark for humanity, just for the Democratic Party. And I'm fine with that. They betrayed labor and have a platform overt racism and sexism, so they deserve to fail as a party.

But I do agree that we need an inspiring and coherent vision for the future of humanity. Religion used to provide that, but now the only strong religion is Islam, which demands death for all who fail to worship Mohammed and celebrate his many well-documented robberies, rapes, and murders. Not a good vision.

Many things are actually going quite well. Solar power production is now cheaper that fossil fuel power production, so the only remaining impediment to it is good battery technology. This will not only be good for the environment, it will be bad for Saudi funding of Islamic terrorism. Win-win. World population growth is clearly cresting.

Sure, it's never an "unerring arc of progress", but in spite of various calamities, we are still here. I think the way forward is to look back at the traditional values that brought us down to the present day and admit they were actually pretty damn good, all things considered.

Ceffer says

Socialism may indeed have a bright future, because government corruption is one of the only guaranteed career tracks any more.

Yes, but what is the ultimate cause of corruption?

I say corruption inevitably arises whenever the government is composed of career politicians. They naturally look out for themselves, so they look to sell their influence. And they get better at selling it the longer they are in DC.

What we need are politicians who are new to politics. People who do have not yet joined the network of corruption. For a limited time only, they may act in the public interest.

This is why Trump, for all his faults, is a great president. The existing network of corruption hates him, and he has not yet started to work with it for personal profit.

There is a great short book called "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod.

In it, he gives the example of how trench warfare in World War I reliably degenerated into schemes of soldiers' saving their own lives by learning to cooperate with the enemy.

The French would stop shelling for a moment, and the Germans would do the same. In this way, a kind of communication channel developed. They then learned at which times of day they should relax, and which times they should get into the trenches and shell, the other other side cooperated.

Eventually, they would have lunch with each other, and then go back to their trenches for the 2pm daily shelling. The war was at a standstill.

The generals figured this out, and the solution was obvious: keep rotating the soliders! Keep them new and unable to develop that cooperation with the enemy.

I'm not saying that soldiers should die. I am saying that the way to prevent corruption in politics is to keep infusing it, and even overwhelming it with new people, all the time. Overwhelm DC with people who don't know the scams and have not yet gotten the offers from the corrupt telecoms, banks, and pharma companies to sell out.

https://fenixx.org/2019/02/15/amerikaanse-politie-schiet-agressieve-moslim-neer/ (video of shooting in the link)

An 18-year-old man shot by a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy in Fountain Hills earlier this month now is being charged as a terrorist who was acting on behalf of ISIS, according to a complaint filed by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. The complaint filed Tuesday alleges Ismail Hamed "intentionally or knowingly, did provide advice, assistance, direction or management'' to the terrorist organization, which is listed under several formal names under which the organization is known, including the Islamic State of Iraq al-Sham. He is facing one count of terrorism under state law, a Class 2 felony, for that allegation.

The Muslim just wanted to stab an American policeman or get killed trying. He got neither.

OK, it ain't so.

From a reader:

notice how upset all the people are in the background -- GASP -- they're actually smiling and think this sex assault is FUN

OH HOW AWFUL

Another:

can't you just be nice and enjoy a beautiful moment in American history?

All of this could be solved if Democrats would take an honest look at their own racism and sexism, and admit that they have been projecting racism and sexism as a way to not feel guilty about devastating to the US middle and lower classes through the export of their jobs and the mass import of illegals.

But it's hard for Democrats to do that. And I understand that. Who wants to admit that they themselves have been the cause of the current problems?

The election of Trump was a desperate attempt by the poor to get some representation in DC because the Democrats have utterly failed them.

And it did work. Trump is actually representing labor while the Democrats continue to undermine their own credibility by utterly ignoring the real economic issues and just playing a tape loop of RACISM! RUSSIA! at max volume over and over.

Trump himself was once a Democrat, remember. But like Reagan, he didn't leave the Democrats, they left him.

marcus says

Patrick is there anything you can do to help with this ?

@marcus Well, I could go back to having specific topics with moderators for those topics. That is, be more like Reddit.

But that would also separate us more into exclusive factions who can't even hear each other, which doesn't seem like a good thing.

It's a hard problem.

d6rB says

"Reverse" racism is no different than racism...still racism. Unfortunately, it is treated differently in media.

This is true.

Did you know that Asian people are assaulted by white people at about twice the rate they are assaulted by other Asians?

It's true. Does this make Asians "racist" for being a bit nervous around white people?

Did you know that white people are assaulted by black people at about twenty times the rate they are assaulted by other white people?

It's also true. Does this make white people "racist" for being a bit nervous around black people?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6717925/Al-Sharpton-says-Jussie-Smollett-held-accountable-attack-staged.html

The Reverend Al Sharpton believes Jussie Smollett should be held accountable 'to the maximum' if it is found that the Empire actor staged a homophobic and racist attack on himself.

Sharpton was addressing the incident on Sunday after Chicago police said they were still seeking a follow-up interview with Smollett after receiving new information that 'shifted' their investigation of the reported attack.

It shifted after police questioned two Nigerian brothers, Abimbola 'Abel' and Olabinjo 'Ola' Osundairo, following allegations Smollett paid them $3,500 to assault him in an orchestrated, rehearsed attack.

Sharpton, a civil rights leaders, said the alleged attack on Smollett was a 'reminder of the times we live in' when it was first reported on January 30. ...

Smollett, who is black and gay, has said he was physically attacked last month by two masked men shouting racial and anti-gay slurs and 'This is MAGA country!'

He said they looped a rope around his neck before running away as he was returning home from an early morning stop at a Subway restaurant in downtown Chicago.

Smollett said they also poured some kind of chemical on him.

Reports emerged last week that the actor may have staged the attack to save his job on Empire with the help of the two brothers who he supposedly knew as extras on the show.

No, I don't see that as "whataboutism" in the least.

It's directly on point: staged fake hate crimes are themselves hate crimes.

What is Moosehead Pot?

My side is right, your side is wrong.

@Rin Did you take that picture?

A 2% tax on wealth can replace a 35% tax on income.

The unfortunate truth is that if you see black kids getting in your BART car, your risk of being mugged just went up tenfold at least.

This is not fair to the black kids who would do no such thing as much as it is unfair to you. But it remains a fact that the media steadfastly refuses to even mention.

No, talking about how women demand to have their cake and eat yours too.

KgK one says

India 1% n Chile 13% divorce rate most western countries 50%.

When women get everything they want, they are unhappier than ever.

I bought some at $37.22 but kind of regret it, even though it's up slightly.

I just don't see a great future for them, or even for cars in general.

I've made my own alcohol now and then, but it's really not worth it unless you happen to love the process or the chemistry.

Similarly, I've baked my own weed (240 degrees for 40 minutes in a toaster oven kids, or shut just won't work) and made brownies, etc, but it's also a lot of work.

So the big producers do have a place and some of them will make money.

BTW, I've read that "pot" is for the Spanish "potacion" (potion) which was brandy and marijuana somehow, but haven't found a good recipe. If you know one, please post here.

@OccasionalCortex this is a hard problem. "Trolling" as I see it is making deliberately inflammatory remarks in order to enjoy the resulting flames. It's not fun, but the right answer imho is just to ignore it. If you ignore it, they don't get their payoff and are disincentivized from doing it again. If you "feed the trolls" by responding with obvious anguish, the troll wins and is incentivized to do it again.

You can put the troll on ignore, and be done.

People used to not use ignore because they didn't like the idea of a troll mocking them where they could not easily see it. (You can always log out or open a new "porn" window to see the site completely unfiltered.)

But since the moderation policy is simply not to attack other users personally, that should not happen. And if it does, let me know. I can downgrade the privileges of repeat abusers (who keep insulting the other users) so that everything they say will have to go through moderation.

Therefore, pat I've suggested this before but can you please edit the ignore button? Noone else should effect my pat.net experience, and vice versa. Agree or no?

@CBOEtrader So you do want to see the comment of people who have you on ignore? You could log out to do that, but I admit that is inconvenient.

It's a dilemma: you'd like it more, but the person ignoring you would like it less.

Huh, what to do? What principles am I trying to promote? That's also kind of a dilemma. I'm promoting the right to speak (except for insulting other users), but also the right not to have to hear from certain people. Maybe the right to have people not see your comments is not an important right.

And once you've ignored someone, why should you have to do it again? I can see that you might have changed your mind after 30 days, or not find them annoying anymore, and that might get more discussion between the parties going, also a goal.

All right, I agree. I'll make ignore one-way tonight.

If you ignore, you don't see the user. But the ignored user can still see the ingnorer.

OK, it's done.

Now you should be able to see comments by people who are ignoring you.

And another request is done. The default comment list length is now 80 instead of 40. So you won't need to click the "next >>" button as much to see more comments.

MisterLearnToCode says

Taqiya!

Yes, Islam encourages Muslims to deceive non-Muslims, but also, Muslims deceive themselves.

That is, they really believe that Islam is peaceful in spite of daily massacres committed by Muslims explicitly in the name of Islam:

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

You can still block people by clicking ignore next to their name.

The difference is that when you block them, now they can still see your comments. Before, if you ignored someone, that would also hide your comments from them.

That was actually pretty confusing, and so was another reason to stop doing it.

Hi @CBOEtrader now I'm doubting that it's a good idea because it would be a real responsibility to keep your site going, and Wordpress already offers free blog hosting up to some level of traffic and they are pretty good at it. How do I compete with free?

I really appreciate your vote of confidence, but after no one took it up I moved on in my mind to ideas about redundant self-hosting, where you'd use your own home computer and even your phone to host a site, and your own sites would stay in sync so even if one copy went down the others would still work. But even that is not fully baked.

Yes, it's possible, but are there enough readers to make it worthwhile?

CBOEtrader says

or just use search the search function it would accomplish this goal

Yes, maybe there's some way to use search to do it. You could just put a keyword in a post, and search should find it. So I could move search to the top, and also have some pre-filled searches where you just click on a button to see, say, #housing.

There used to be a coastal train line up the peninsula to SF. I read it was mostly to bring agricultural produce from Half Moon Bay and similar areas up to SF.

It would be very cool to resurrect that line and give SF commuters a new place they could live without driving to work.

There was also a line over the coastal range to Santa Cruz, but people in Santa Cruz have objected to it being re-opened because they don't want more people commuting from Silicon Valley.

These would be public goods and it seems wrong that NIMBYs can block them for their own selfish reasons.