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Vahakyla posted:When I, as a healthy young homeless man, actively collected bottles in Helsinki, I could easily get into 15 euros or more per hour. holy poo poo dude You can collect cans here but it is usually more like 1-2 cents per can
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Sep 9, 2014 03:44
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Cythereal posted:So I'm now reading on a couple of political news websites that the GOP, which is terrified of Ebola being used to attack the US or being spread by dirty immigrant children is... slashing the requested funding to fight Ebola. Because Obama wants money to fight Ebola, and the GOP's stances on issues all take second place to "The opposite of what Obama wants." makes sense when you realize that their preferred reaction has never been "well let's do something about this ebola, then", but rather "let's ignore the issue and let everyone else gently caress off and die". PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 23:31
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iirc didn't kerry run up big leads against bush on the economy issue? Republicans might have a weird lead on the economy right now, but I don't think it is irrevocable. SquadronROE posted:I just really don't understand how football can be that overarching. I mean, it's a game. The team isn't even comprised of people who are local, as they are scholarships handed out to kids from other states.  inbound, possible derail (but I don't think so), watch outI dunno how many of y'all goons played high school football or anything like that, but I did, so I'll take a stab at explaining some of the phenomenon from a participant's perspective, particularly as it pertains to Bumfuck Small Town USA. - First of all, this is a sport that a large percentage of people have experienced in a very direct manner. You're looking at 50-60 dudes per high school team, plus dudes who wanted to/whose dads wanted them to be on those teams but who couldn't for whatever reason, plus other people like the marching band, cheerleaders and such whose activities are generally subordinated to those of the football team. While on one of these teams, there is a "football isn't just a game: it's a way of life!" mindset that is encouraged by coaches, school faculty and fans (parents and former players). Participants are expected to gear their entire lives around football, which becomes an accepted justification for missing class, reneging on other commitments, and getting away with dumb poo poo. When I was in school, players would get up at 5:00 A.M so that we could get to school early and lift weights for an hour to an hour and a half before classes began. Practice (or after-school workout sessions, in the offseason) would be held every day and run until 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, meaning that some kids wouldn't get home until after 8:00. An expectation of commitment that all-consuming naturally breeds fanaticism, even in cases where it hasn't been present since childhood. - Kids flock to do this because (in some cases) they enjoy the sport, because it is the activity that most reliably confers a certain level of prestige, or because it is a family tradition. More generally some combination of all three. - Most of these kids' athletic careers end the moment they play their last snap in high school. I think something like 5% of high-school football players ever get to see the field as part of a college team, of which many wash out, many never make it off the bench, and many are disillusioned because playing kickoff coverage for Blandsville Junior Technical College is not the glorious experience they grew up watching on Saturday teevee. - This creates a large cast of disappointed young men (and women, when you look at girls who had been similarly invested) who devoted the best four years of their lives (a sobriquet commonly applied to high school rather than college, in Smalltownsville) to an institution that didn't actually do anything for them in the long run. These become disappointed middle-aged men, disappointed old men and so on. Romanticizing that institution is a much more comforting response than saying "wow, that was stupid, I probably shouldn't of spent literally all of my teenage years to that sport", so former players generally become the most fanatical of all fans, vicariously reliving their glory days by providing a zealous support base to their high-school alma mater and to any prominent professional or collegiate teams in the area. They induct their eventual children into this same behavior, so fandom becomes a generational practice. - There is, therefor, a sort of feedback loop where fanatical participation breeds institutional fandom, which breeds fanatical participation, etc. I'm not sure how you'd go about solving the chicken/egg dynamic there, but that is the process. Other factors: - In impoverished and especially minority communities, sports have historically been seen as one of the few routes to success that is ~comparatively~ open to them. Becoming a famous sports hero, while highly unlikely, seems a lot more plausible to a poor kid than attending a top-10 college and becoming a Wall Street mogul or some other process that is a lot more demographically closed (the main reason I don't resent how massively overpaid pro athletes are is that a huge proportion of them come from genuinely impoverished backgrounds and I enjoy seeing them get rich more than I enjoy a lot of things). And even for those who don't have super ambitious dreams, there's still the hope that maybe you can get a half scholarship or financial aid kickback from your crappy local college that will allow you to afford school. There is a reason "I gotta impress the scouts so I can escape The Streets/The Mines/The Steel Mill" is such a common narrative trope in Americana. This kind of thing then contributes to the feedback loop mentioned above. - High Schools and especially Colleges deliberately take advantage of sports fandom as a recruiting and community-building tool, and students (even ones without athletic backgrounds) love buying into this because it is nice to feel like you belong to a tradition. - As alluded previously in this thread, local/regional ballteams are often the most prominent, long-lasting or successful public institutions in an area (the lattermost of these is especially important when you consider the perspective of otherwise-undistinguished locales. There's a lot of "Well maybe Somewhereburg is a better place to live than Nowhereville in almost all respects, but at least we have beat 'em at ball for the past six years running!" that goes on), so it makes sense for people to latch onto them as a source of pride. It's a huge political and economic factor in Small Town USA, when you consider the massive cultural weight associated with it. There is usually a huge degree of social overlap between booster clubs, local business associations and city/county/magistrates' councils, for instance. I know that in my hometown, the composition of the school board would always fluctuate wildly according to our desperate desire for our ballteam to suck less. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 21:54
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Teddybear posted:Is it bad that I hope they accidentally shoot each other? One side lines up on the US side, one side sneaks to the Mexican side, they're too stupid to know what's going on, and a bunch of hicks with power fantasies remove themselves from the equation with no innocent casualties. y'all know that if shots were fired they would somehow manage to gun down at least one pregnant mexican girl, suspecting her of smuggling Islamic Ebola Bombs under her blouse. If you need to wish for something, wish for them to fall into a sinkhole or something on the way there.
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Sep 12, 2014 18:31
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Alter Ego posted:The problem with this is that it's a good argument to make if you're talking to a room full of wonks, but it doesn't work so well in, um, Kentucky. I think he is pretty confident of reelection by this point (most folks here in the state consider it a foregone conclusion) and sees no harm in trying to pad his numbers by picking up the middle-class swing voters who tend to favor "welp, at least he Gets Things Done!" rather than doubling down on his hick base. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 18:51
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Yeah, you can develop Funny Feelings about whichever sex you're attracted to well before you know what sex is or what those feelings mean. Hell, I probably knew pretty definitively that I liked girls by the time I was about 7 or 8. Someone else would be watching a Grownup Movie, there'd be an actress in her underwear, I'd get this strange flushed feeling that I didn't understand but knew I liked. That kind of thing. I'm sure it often takes longer than normal for gay kids to figure these things out, considering it's a counternormative, there's a lot of social pressure to feel otherwise, etc, but to say that they need the full context of human sexuality before they can qualify as gay is dumb.
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Sep 12, 2014 19:17
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I'm'ma spank this thread and you're gonna like it
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Sep 13, 2014 08:43
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Berke Negri posted:Forks and knives are instruments of western imperialism anyways. We should be instructing children to eat with their hands so that they can A) grasp the consequences of their actions and B) not have instruments of death at hand casually. baby can electrocute self if she sticks her fingers into an outlet baby can't electrocute self if she sticks wooden/ceramic chopsticks into an outlet chopsticks are better than fingers therefor, we must draft a resolution of surrender to the Red Chinese this instant
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Sep 13, 2014 08:48
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I started eating hotdogs cold out of the fridgerator when I was about 3 and didn't realize they were supposed by be cooked until I was about 6 so basically y'all are all guilty of over-informing your children about how food works anyway
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Sep 13, 2014 08:57
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My Imaginary GF posted:Food is the most fundamental source of ethnic identity, and so issues around precise and proper food use are issues around correct identities. my grandfather did not lose an eye to the White Guard just so some menshevik dog could prescribe my child's condiment use Anyway, while I was whopped as a child, these whoppings were nowhere near the level of what AD did and I do not think I sustained any permanent or even lasting emotional damage from them. Simultaneously, I can recognize that responses to these things vary and that other children might be more powerfully affected by a similar experience, know that I did not like being whopped and don't think I benefited from it, and have never seen anything remotely like a preponderance of evidence that whoppings might be beneficial. Therefor I will never whop anybody (under the age of 20 or so), even moderately. This seems like the best position for an ex-whoppee to take PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 09:14
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Might be one thing if the fuzz had spotted them canoodling in an alleyway at midnight, but this poo poo seems to have happened in broad-assed daylight
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Sep 14, 2014 21:30
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as a Kentuckian I can confirm that rand paul is Bad At Senate I don't really comprehend where his following comes from, other than the part that is spillover from his dad I guess. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 17:47
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Grapplejack posted:I have no idea why people bitch so much about the royal family but you never hear them talk about the Old Money families like the Hiltons, the Rockefellers, or the Du Pont family. Nobody expects me to bow to a Kennedy or a Lowell if I should happen across one (which, admittedly, is not going to happen, as they do indeed inhabit that same sort of rarified sphere). That may seem like a trivial, cosmetic thing, but those expectations of ettiquette and special deference really stick in people's craws. People also complain about the cost of maintaining the royal lifestyle from largely public funds, but that is true of any Head of State. So yeah, it is mostly just the whole concept of the titles.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:46
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92% of white americans believe they would be welcome in Galt's Gulch
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Sep 29, 2014 17:15
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My Imaginary GF posted:
I don't know, there is a surprisinngly high proportion of young women who both care about politics and go to college looking for an MRS degree. These already vote Republican, however. Brannock posted:I wonder if there's any chance of politicians using the Ebola thing to fight for universal healthcare. Y'know, the uninsured are much less likely to go in to get checked up on minor symptoms. Probably not. I am curious as to how this will affect national approval ratings as we hit the midterms and gear up for 2016 primaries, though. Republicans will hammer away with "flaky Dems failed to close borders and quarantine brown people, exposed America to pestilence", while the Dems should be able to spin "POTUS has commited more resources to stopping this disease than any ten governments combined, would have done more if he did not have to worry about a Republican HoR holding the purse strings". Gonna be a PR battle if more cases turn up.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:40
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My Imaginary GF posted:
One thing to take into account is that, unlike in Africa, survivors and their stories will be all over the American national news. If one of them complains about long waiting lines and bureaucratic inefficiency, it will be a PR blow against government-run healthcare. If one of them complains about not going to the doctor earlier because they could not afford it, it will be a PR blow in favor of healthcare expansion. Particularly with the first case being a non-American in Texas, I'm sure Texan candidates are already planning to rope it into anti-immigrant platforms.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:59
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There was also "Obama chose a mannish wife because he cannot come out as gay until after his presidential term is up". The Right wishes it could land a wife as bangable as Michelle PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 21:46
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Trabisnikof posted:Why would they want to marry the hired help? I dunno about marriage, but I do know racist rednecks have a strange affinity for interracial porn. Nobody fetishizes black bodies quite as well as weird throwback white-supremacists.
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Oct 1, 2014 22:55
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