Luigi Thirty posted:

For the latest in fraternitas delenda est, a pledge may have gotten thrown over a bridge at Clemson because he couldn't afford to buy the fraternity McDonald's breakfast. And one of the people charged with his death is the son of a Democratic representative from Delaware.

A Winner is Jew posted:

I mean the median income for the us is just shy of $52k which is still less than 15 years which was the point, 15 years isn't that long at all considering I've been married to my wife already for 1/2 that and I'm only turning 34 this month.

Relentlessboredomm posted:

This was the best interview and discussion of Snowden I've ever seen, thank you John Oliver. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M


Everyone should watch this.

"drakegrim" posted:

drakegrim posted:

$7.25 is a poo poo wage and it should be increase, but i think 15 is stretching it. I am not an economics major and cannot answer the question with accurate assessment, but i think 10 and hour is reasonable and fair.

Effectronica posted:

The fun part of economic orthodoxy is when it pretends that everyone could be a CEO and this would be a good thing.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

I've heard this but I don't know if its anything more than a platitude that came about after Vietnam. Didn't the US do an awful lot of regime changes during the cold war? Didn't the Soviets do likewise with Eastern Europe? Isn't there a fuckton of historical examples in general of an outside entity setting up puppet governments or otherwise dictating how things are run in their sphere of influence? I think its accurate to call it a lot more difficult and dirty than people would like to imagine, but taking a strict "can't ever work" approach seems sort of simplistic.

Likewise, I'm not really convinced that Iraq was "unwinnable" at the start (although everything about the idea was generally stupid, don't get me wrong). A lot of the terrible results came about since the Bush Admin. was generally awful at actually carrying out an occupation, from the "hailed as liberators" sentiment, appointing the living turd in human form, Paul Bremer, to manage Iraq, and otherwise doing basically nothing to prevent the establishment of an insurgency.

This may not be a very popular opinion.

SubponticatePoster posted:

Colleges are (supposedly) full of smart people, surely someone there understands they have something to bargain with.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Yeah and when people dare to mention it's because way more people are in a large city than a tiny suburb of a small city, all of a sudden the whiner brigade goes donkeyshit over how unfair people are being to the white flight suburbs not being counted.

Nintendo Kid posted:

When one says they're from Boston though, you call bullshit if they clarify with "I'm from Lawrence" (a town 30 miles away and almost in NH). But that's what you're saying is acceptable for St Louis? Ridiculous. Hell, Providence, RI counts as being in "Boston", if you go with the maximalist definition of St Louis required to boost it over 2 million.

Also of note: tiny in land Boston packs in 650,000 people all on its own.

Nintendo Kid posted:

People who are from the far-flung suburbs and exurbs may choose to claim they're from the city, but everyone knows they aren't. Don't give me this self-identification crap. Most people from the St Louis greater metropolitan area probably wouldn't claim to be from St Louis, especially when so many of them continue to actively leave the city or refuse to move back in after their parents/grandparents did. I'm sorry but you're not using any sort of technical definition from actual American geography when you're saying "its ok to say you're in Boston when you're dozens of miles outside even the inner suburbs/subcities".

Cities that actually cross state lines are very rare. Usually it's a situation like Bristol TN/VA or Texarkana TX/AR where it's a moderately sized town split across a land border such that the transition is close to seamless.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Self identification doesn't pay city taxes, and further no one takes you seriously when you live way out of the city all of your life but claim to be from there. Like it's straight up a thing you will get mocked for.

Most people don't see areas 20 miles outside the limits of the innermost suburbs to be the city.

They're not going to be more common, because people understand what cities are, and when they're not in them.

Frankly you seem to be really confusing like, the Australian usage of "city" for American usage. Most Australian "cities" have the city proper as tiny, no more than a few miles square central business district with minimal residents, but a measure of unified authority among the many independent towns and "suburbs" that make up the city. In American usage, such an arrangement is just called a metropolitan area (or if the population's small enough, micropolitan area).

Nintendo Kid posted:

No, they really, really do in American law and geography. I don't care that someone who lives dozens of miles away and never even visits thinks they're from the city, everyone knows they aren't. It's like trying to brag about how you can totally lift 400 pounds, just not today because you're sick or other such boasts.

Houston's a huge rear end city with huge city limits. Same thing goes with LA. Most of the people from the independent cities/town bordering or sometimes enclaved within them will make a point to say they're from that specific place if you ask where they're from. For example, Spring Valley, TX people are often real snooty about being from there, even though they're just a former suburb that managed to resist the annexations that nor totally surround it. Same goes for LA: people from Beverly Hills let you know they're from Beverly Hills.

Like again, you seem to be trying to conflate cities with metro areas in a way American people don't usually do. But you're doing it in a way that matches up very well with how Australians use "city".

Nintendo Kid posted:

I sincerely dispute that most people who have never been to a city consider themselves inside the city. Perhaps people who are severely uneducated and also never had to tell anyone their address do? Also, why would we not be talking about American law when we're talking Americans, and American cities in the American politics thread? Seriously are you foreign or something, is English a second language for you?

No, people in America really do understand that the city limits judge where the city stops and another place begins, in America, because that's how this country's system of government, society and history regard it. You seem to have a weird hang up about like the platonic ideal of the city but that's really quite irrelevant.

Anaconda may be legally termed a city, but your average person would consider it merely a small town and it'd only be important that you entered it if they had laws that you might be violating.

Again you seem to be just considering metropolitan area = city even though no person really thinks that.

icantfindaname posted:

Japan paid reparations, or at least large amounts of economic aid and low interest loans even if not marked specifically as reparations, to Red China as well as Taiwan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Japan_relations#1960s


Abe sucks, yeah, but lots of people seem to have a hair-trigger reflex of calling Japan a nation of revisionist war criminal Nazis basically any time the country is mentioned. I think basically every single East Asian country would be considered ultranationalist by most people's standards, Japan is probably the least bad of them, or at least is no worse than the others. From what I can tell the country is pretty racist but actually fairly non-nationalistic, even in TYOOL 2015 after years of lurching to the right a dude lit himself on fire in front of parliament to protest the proposed constitution change

Khisanth Magus posted:

I love all the people talking about Japan whitewashing what happened in ww2 because it's not like we live in a country that has always done it's best to whitewash and pretend it really want as bad as some people say for things like our treatment of the native Americans, slavery, internment camps for japanese-americans in ww2, and all the other crap that we as a nation have done that we do our best to ignore or pretend it wasn't that bad, and that is how it is passed on to the next generation. Is Japan different because they didn't win and only the victors get to rewrite history?