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DeusExMachinima posted:Well that'll teach me to speculate off the cuff. In fact I probably would've been more likely to assume it was higher amongst middle-class whites since they're more likely to be in a car more often. The higher native death rate isn't that surprising though. Largely rural areas requiring car travel + lots of drinking, probably.  Cars have been getting massively safer over the past three decades (thanks to dirty government regulation, no less) as safety standards and tech have evolved. We'll probably see fatalities drop a bunch more in the next 10-20 years as automation eventually becomes ubiquitous. The wealthier you are, the likelier you are to be driving a newer, safer car with more/better airbags, better designed structural protection, and advanced mechanical/computerized control systems. A newer car will also have less mechanical wear and tear and won't be as battered by age, meaning stuff like brighter lights, better handling and braking, properly functioning airbags, and fewer driving obstructions or distractions (think about driving a cheap old car with a bad A/C and fogging windows or poor windshield wipers or broken seats or whatever. These things all make you less safe when driving) or components that could fail on the road. Older cheaper cars also tend to get less maintenance. It stands to reason that people driving old broken cars usually do so because they can't afford to fix or replace them. On top of that, the poorer you are, the worse the quality of your neighborhood and local infrastructure. lovely bad roads with poor lighting increase the risk of accidents and also cause more damage and wear to cars in general- also increasing the risk of accidents. Add the fact that poor people are likelier to be working longer or earlier/later hours than wealthier ones, often while supporting families with fewer resources and time, making them likelier to suffer the impairing effects of exhaustion and malnutrition. So when a poor person drives to her apartment on a ragged street with poor illumination at 2:30AM from an 11 hour minimum wage shift in her lovely old unsafe car, and she's overtired because she has 2 young kids on top of her job, and she can't see well because the seemingly perpetually damp windshield keeps fogging up, and she knows she shouldn't speed because the brakes are getting soft and she can't really afford to fix them but she desperately wants to get home, her chances of dying in a crash are higher than those of somebody who commutes to a house in the 'burbs down a smoothly paved highway at 4:30 pm in a 2012 E-Class with lane departure warnings, AWD, and three kinds of airbag. To put a cherry on top, your socioeconomic class and its resulting geographic effects also tend to have a major influence on the speed and quality of medical care that you get- further skewing survivability numbers. Even if your local hospital is top-class (like it is in the low-income areas around Boston), lovely, poorly maintained roads can dramatically slow the process of getting you there during the most critical window for survival. TLDR: Intersectionality is a bitch and she is everywhere.
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Feb 10, 2016 07:15
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FOD made a 50-minute adaptation of The Art of the Deal, as though it were a never-aired TV Movie from 1987. Also it stars Johnny Depp in a fat suit as the Donald, and it's loving glorious. http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/ad38087bac/donald-trump-art-of-the-deal-movie?playlist=467356&_cc=__d___&_ccid=1f7ace35e1645347 The cast list beyond Depp is top-notch too. Also ALF shows up. site posted:No! No primary chat! Go away! B-b-but they mercy killed the other thread on Monday! Now we have nowhere to go! I suggest you build a wall
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Feb 10, 2016 20:11
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Ashcans posted:You can spend an untold amount of time pointing out individual lovely spending decisions, but I think it's easier to cut through all that. The median household income for Huntington, NY is $110,000. If this family is hurting so badly living on $250,000, how tough must it be for those people making less than half their income? It's not like there are a ton of government programs propping up people in the six digits. Perpetual debt. computer parts posted:Most rich people outside of the East Coast don't go to private school. They create segregated communities and send their kids to public school. This is absolutely also the case in many, many parts of the East Coast and arguably the rest of the country. Anytime you see a Republican governor cut statewide education funding, you can bet that wealthier districts don't care because their schools are buoyed by local funds. I grew up in Southwestern CT in a town that was, like, 90% families because everyone moved there specifically "for the schools." The public high school I attended was better than any of the prep schools and private schools in the area, aside from maybe one or two big names, and that remains the case for virtually all of the towns in Fairfield County, CT. The only families I know who sent their kids to what are mostly Catholic schools were the really vocally conservative ones- in hindsight, I appreciate how liberal my education was (because the faculty were well-educated and well-compensated) and I'm horrified by how grossly out-of-step with the national average it was in terms of quality and content, to say nothing of the travesties befalling underserved districts that my partner sees every day. Granted, as I've come to learn in my tutoring work, the more big private schools you have around, the more comfortable families are about spending $100k/year on tuition ON TOP of the property taxes that fund the frankly top-tier local public schools in their areas. There is no shortage of parents in Boston-area suburbs who have no trouble paying me $75/hour to get their kid into Concord Academy despite often paying anywhere from $11k to $20k in property tax for an enviably good "free" high school not five minutes away. Because why settle for a 90% shot of getting your brood into a top-tier college if they work moderately hard, when you can spend the equivalent amount in tuition to functionally guarantee that they'll at least score a few solid NESCAC acceptances? But while I'm not going to excuse the clearly out-of-touch spending habits of the NY couple from the article, fluctuating property values and their resulting taxes (which are generally going to be higher in wealthy, but still somewhat left-leaning New England towns) can vary widely, and it's unfortunately pretty common for people to have debt tied to those rising- and subsequently falling- assets. To illustrate, my parents bought the house that I grew up in for probably ~$150k around 1990. They've put some modest upgrades into it over the years but it's otherwise your standard '60s/'70s-construction 3-bedroom, 2.5 bath suburban house. Nevertheless, that house became worth about $500k in the early 2000's and ballooned to $650k or more at the height of the housing bubble. Now it's probably worth about $350k in today's market, and would probably be worth at least $75k less anywhere else. I think a plurality of legitimately middle-class New Englanders of my parents' generation moved into communities in the early '90s "for the schools," ended up taking out loans in the 2000's for any number of reasons against grossly inflated property values, and now have to deal with all of that debt. It's a big reason why you see so many people in their 40s-60s making $80k+ and still "barely getting by."
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Feb 18, 2016 05:24
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fosborb posted:What the gently caress is this poo poo Fifth-dimensional trolling? At face value, it's a stupid, stupid opinion.
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Feb 18, 2016 09:01
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Fried Chicken posted:When Jeb drops out I am going to treat myself to an expensive meal at a very nice restaurant and a lot of good scotch. Indianapolis goons are free to join me. Ooh, Boston-area goons should do something similar. Maybe Fishmech will show up and I'll finally be able to link a face to all of those hot, hot takes.
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Feb 19, 2016 22:19
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Luigi Thirty posted:Have you not seen the official Smartest Child in America contest that he won on television? We talking about a formative childhood memory long-past or a recent occurrence?
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Feb 19, 2016 23:12
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Fried Chicken posted:In Indiana the election commission has just held that 498 = 500 along partisan lines If you're not holding your nose and inciting your local teabaggers to make a national stink about this then I don't know what to tell you.
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Feb 20, 2016 00:37
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Yup! (this train was only ever going straight to hell) Haley: I'll support Trump if it comes to that
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Feb 26, 2016 21:51
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Talmonis posted:Then for the rest of us, pray. Pray that you're right. That when the American people go into the voting booth, alone and unjudged by their peers, that the inner xenophobe and inner racist don't say "Aren't you tired of being ashamed?" For all that we should be truly afraid of Trump getting uncomfortably close to the White House, and of formerly resolute anti-Trump Republicans dropping all pretense of scruples and falling in line behind him, we really haven't seen a true anti-Trump media campaign yet. There have been op-eds and statements and obviously people talk to each other but no real negative attack ads or anything like that. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars that GOP campaigns have thrown around this year something like less than 2% of them have been aimed at Trump. Likewise, the Dems have been only too happy to let the GOP be its ugliest self without any real oppo on their part--that all changes in the general. Until we see what happens when people start putting actual money into directly attacking Trump (before you point to Jeb!, he actually barely spent any of his ample warchest on the Notorious DJT), I'm not prepared to write off the American people as already lost to the Fash'.
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Feb 26, 2016 22:43
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A Winner is Jew posted:I have some bad news for you then. No one expected Trump to make it more than a month. He's now in what, month 6 and with the highest delegate count and ahead in all the polls headed into super tuesday? He's talking about the General, tho? Remember that most of the American electorate voted for Black Satan the last time we had one of these, against a Republican who had managed to charm Massachusetts into letting him be governor, no less.
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Feb 26, 2016 22:55
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Nichael posted:Those are fair points. I'm just skeptical that there's a huge difference between, say, white voters not affiliated with the Republican party, and white voters who are. So you're basically struggling to differentiate between people who despise Barack Obama right now and people who don't?  Like, I know that Honky is literally the devil but come on, dude. Cut what still remains the single largest Democratic voting bloc some slack. For all that Hillary/Bernie/Vermin Supreme supporters are annoying, they're not all really only a gentle shove away from becoming Trumpian brownshirts.
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Feb 27, 2016 04:14
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Boon posted:I've noticed that for whatever reason Vice has a bad rap around D&D. Which is perplexing because their HBO series is some of the best consolidated reporting/documentary I've seen. It's residual "Vice=hipsters and hipsters=bad" held over from the '00s when most goons were still teenage nerds who felt threatened by poo poo like popular youth culture. Nelson Mandingo posted:Yeah I wonder how much it was the financial meltdown and how much it was republicans screaming SOCIALIST, SOCIALIST, SOCIALIST during the 2008 and 2012 elections and then promptly america not ending that changed peoples minds and accepting toward an actually self-described socialist candidate. Both probably have a hand in it but a lot of it has honestly been slow and steady demographic/cultural change. The Counterculture was simultaneously ages and not that long ago and terms like "Socialist" or "Atheist" don't nearly have the venom that they had when we were balls deep in the Cold War. Art and media changed a poo poo ton when the kids of the '60s got jobs, and now several generations of youth raised after that break have grown up to vote. Where pop culture aimed at kids once trumpeted strong Judeo-Christian values and "the American Way of Life" as a counterpoint to the godless Soviets, the last, like, four and a half decades have often openly encouraged us to question those trappings. At the same time, the technological growth of the last few decades and its resulting globalization have made youth more comfortable with alternative lifestyles and forms of governance. A kid raised in the '80s might have a much different opinion of a socialist France or gay people than his 'born in the '50s' dad. And a '90s kid who met some gay French people in an AOL chat room might feel his own way. Now kids can plug 'Gay...French...Porn' into their smartphones in between posts on r/socialism and have themselves a clandestine wank whenever they want so I'm sure their future politics will be fascinating. The times have always been a' changin'. At the same time, a lot of the old guard are still around- albeit in smaller numbers than before. A lot of the same Perot or Bush voters that the Simpsons mocked back in '92 will be pulling levers for Cruz or Trump come Tuesday. But they're no longer the voice of America in the way that they might have felt like they were 20-30 years ago or even during the Bush II years...or even the Nixon years and beyond. The same can be said about questions like "do you think BLM is too extreme?" Hip-hop has been a dominant cultural force in the American mainstream since the late '70s- about 40 years. In that time, issues of police brutality, resource inequality, and institutional racism have been regular fodder. If you truly vibed to NWA back in '89- or Run DMC in '85- or Jay-Z in '98- or Yeezy in '04- then you probably weren't shocked at all by BLM's platform. If, on the other hand, your opinion of Ice Cube was that he was a terrible influence who ought to be locked up for 'promoting gangsterism' and threatening to kill law enforcement officers, then you probably weren't going to be receptive to #BlackLivesMatter two and a half decades later. There's a reason why there's a huge age break on poll responses to that question in the '45-48' range (also because of the history of the civil rights movement and groups like the Black Panthers and their place in the social consciousness).
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Feb 27, 2016 22:40
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punk rebel ecks posted:Well that is a huge thing. She was also responsible for the Democrats' initial plan to have no more than six debates this cycle and viciously stuck to those guns in the face of overwhelming opposition- going so far as to threaten the campaigns with repercussions if they participated in any unsanctioned events. Between that and the 2014 strategy of "bury any affiliation to Obama or progressivism," DWS pisses a lot of liberals off by giving the distinct impression that she buys into the GOP notion that progressivism can't work/is repellent to voters in America and that the only reasonable path to Democratic victory is to squeak through the center. 2014 congressional candidates were more-often-than-not insulated rather than put on the offensive so they had nothing to answer with when accused of consorting with (gasp) a popular president. So while the Teabaggers had their rage machine going at 11 many democrats who I suppose had just been expected to show up didn't. Also the DNC made the deliberate choice to hide President Obama in an appeal to "moderates" when they honestly should have flown him out to every single contested state as many times as possible. The entire strategy feels almost like a holdout from the Bill Clinton brand of "new Democrats". And while I don't think that the debate schedule was intended to sink Bernie's campaign in the way that some people often accuse, I do think that it was borne out of an idea that it wouldn't generate any traction and that he would need to be shuttered away quickly in case he became a liability for the party's image, like Dukakis in the Bush I years, while Hillary would also be insulated from potential controversy with a condensed debate schedule. I imagine that people in the DNC feared that Bernie would keep making enough money to stick around and be a Ron Paulesque go-nowhere sound bite machine that the Republicans could mine for attacks in the general. Regardless, it still strongly suggests that the party's idea of a strong offense is a good defense and shows a tremendous misread of their constituency. The fact that it seems as though DWS and company have been taken completely by surprise at how emphatically and broadly the Democratic base has grabbed the mantle of the left shows that they probably shouldn't be in charge of running the DNC at this moment. It's certainly not a reason to hate her but people are totally right to criticize her job performance.
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Feb 29, 2016 04:52
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vyelkin posted:The Secret Service is really good at preventing this kind of thing these days, and one of their ironclad rules is to not publicize attempts because they inspire copycats. I'm sure there have been attempts on Obama's life, but you'll never learn about them, and that's a good thing. I remember reading a solid article a year or two ago, it may have been in Motherboard or Ars Technica, about the SS and FBI agents whose job it is to monitor the absolute poo poo out of "the most vile places on the internet," as the article put it, for POTUS security threats. The basic takeaway was that there isn't a white power forum on the net that doesn't get regular attention from the Feds, to say nothing of 4chan/8chan/etc. And as we found out the hard way a few years ago, even a site like SA will have agents all over it in a hot second if there's so much as a shred of credible threat to sniff out. They don't gently caress around.
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Feb 29, 2016 16:56
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Trabisnikof posted:Plus, defending ACA would have done jack-all to help redistricting...the DNC def didn't have the money to do all of the above. That's my main problem with the "DWS ruined 2010/2014" narrative. We were going to lose hard and all the DNC could do is limit the bleeding. I don't disagree with you on that but we honestly wouldn't have lost any harder than we did, and we probably would've come into 2015/16 with a stronger, more unified message and base if the Dems had changed their rhetorical tack sooner (not that this primary cycle hasn't been a godsend for the Dems on both fronts, for all that we may find a panoply of reasons to bitch about it). Campaigns in 2014 never actually challenged the GOP noise machine on the charges that they were "Obama Democrats" or that Obama was the president and they were Democrats in any way that made sense. The sort of voters who resonated to that message weren't going to be won back over by even the most convincing show of stonewalling. President Obama did not need to wait until the end of 2015 to start aggressively reminding Americans that he was actually doing a pretty good job, regardless of what the chuckleheads in congress said. I don't think that any of the races that we lost in '14 would've magically "gone blue" with more visible progressive backbone, but the Democratic base would've been substantially more energized and cohesive in all of those places- which would only have been a good thing with the rhetoric climate of the last few years. zoux posted:I'm not supporting her, I know the reasons I think she should be gone. I'm calling out people who are talking about DWS like the Tea Party talks about Obama, and who have no idea why she's bad except that they've heard that she's bad. So you're turning a "do we personally think the DNC chair is/isn't doing an adequate job" question into the exact sort of purity slapfight that got this thread gassed a handful of weeks ago? I'm with you on 95% of what you post, but you're really not being reasonable here . computer parts posted:Which doesn't prove that she would've won if she had done so. True, but how many of those 41% would've been lost with a more pro-Obama campaign? What did Grimes stand to gain by burying any connection to Obama when literally every other voice in the election was blaring it from the mountaintops? Even if the vote count had stayed exactly the same it would've been a bigger local messaging win for the Dems than the whimper they ended with.
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Feb 29, 2016 20:24
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Fried Chicken posted:20,000 voters have left the MA Democratic Party to become Republicans or Independents Yep, all of 1.3% of the registered Dems in the state. Chill out. Also, the Boston Herald is our local Right Wing tabloid that primarily caters to the sort of old Catholics who buy newspapers at checkout counters, so don't expect anything resembling a politically balanced shake when it comes to this sort of stuff. There's a sizable contingent of "socially/fiscally conservative but voted lifelong Democratic due to union/ethnic ties" among working class white people in the Boston area- think retired Irish and Italian Catholics. This kind of a switch was totally expected and shouldn't scare us at all beyond the usual "any vote for Trump is a vote too many."
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Feb 29, 2016 22:41
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Woof. Les Moonves: Trump's run is 'drat good for CBS' quote:Donald Trump’s candidacy might not be making America great, CBS Chairman Les Moonves said Monday, but it’s great for his company.
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Mar 1, 2016 04:28
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Talmonis posted:My loathing of hippies and their supposed hatred of Are Troops took over at the worst time. The unfortunate thing is that the split between military and civilians has only gotten worse as the political rhetoric has polarized. I forget where I read it but a recent study commissioned by the Armed Forces apparently found that something like 85% of people under the age of 30 pegged the likelihood of themselves ever enlisting or seeking work with the military at somewhere between "extremely unlikely" and "never". Recruitment numbers for the past, like, decade have also been way lower than aimed for. The reality is that the military has kind of self-selected itself into a bit of a hole, and while the organization itself has made big, appreciable strides in the name of progress, it can't shake the perception among youth that a disproportionate number of its most vocal volunteers paradoxically despise the commander in chief (yes, I know that's actually broadly untrue), among any other winger stereotypes you can think of. I'm sure that this trend will have bigger ramifications in the future- potentially driving the Pentagon's autonomous tech roadmap to seek to do more with fewer and fewer specialist personnel. Ultimately, they're more out-of-step with most young people than ever- and if the last NFL season's ad blitz was anything to go by, they still have a ways to go. Fried Chicken posted:The WSJ has a wonderful meltdown today by Bret Stephens about "how is it we are proving the liberals right about everything they said about us?!?" It's behind the WSJ's paywall and you didn't quote it for us? 
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Mar 1, 2016 16:36
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Combed Thunderclap posted:I especially love it because this, in addition to the NRO meltdown, shows how totally in denial the Respected Conservative Thinker class of the GOP always was about a large percentage of their constituency. I'm starting to realize a lot of the conservative intellectuals really couldn't hear the dog whistling all this time. Denial is a hell of a thing. (Although yes, quite a lot were just always being willfully obtuse or grinned and bore it for the sake of keeping the voter coalition together.) My partner and I are both academics and she has family members on the conservative side of the aisle- the truth is that being a Professional Conservative Intellectual requires very little actual intellectual rigor or challenge and a great deal more loyalty and high-functioning obtuseness. Great Conservative Intellectuals are valued not on their actual competence at being authorities in a given field, but on their ability to protect conservatism and conservative interests. In Conservative scholarship everything ultimately lives or dies by how well it hews to the established party line and message. If you have the right credentials from the right places (or good enough to be massaged/good enough for the base, in the case of passing AP history teachers off as climate experts) and are willing to sell your credibility for seriously fat stacks and/or buckle down in the face of withering reality, you can write yourself a blank check courtesy of any number of conservative think tanks, publications, and policy groups. It doesn't matter if you graduated with a 2.0 or if the entire field hates you. Seriously, anybody with a Masters in Earth Science willing to deny climate change on public record could probably scoop up a $300k/yr "consulting" gig from Heritage while wearing jeans to the interview.
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Mar 1, 2016 17:12
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