MudMan

Man, it’s gonna be so hard not to comment on the nonsense if you guys keep putting Trump crap on World News. I really don’t want to block this as well as the US news channels, but I will if pushed.

Also, no, he didn’t assign everybody female, he made everybody non-binary, which is extra woke. At the point of conception no person produces any reproductive cells at all, so by his definition is neither male nor female. Plus it explicitly differentiates sex from gender identity, which I found rather woke, too.

I know nothing of the sort, and I honestly think it’s far less snobbish than the alternative.

I absolutely had nothing better to do than education, that much I give you. It’s a high bar, I was doing some really cool shit.

Thankfully, my government agreed with me on that one, and I’m more than happy to pay taxes for the rest of my life to make it keep being the case. And thankfully, my parents agreed as well. My dad was adamant I didn’t take a job on the side despite us not being particularly well off. Probably because he’s a left-leaning teacher himself and HE worked his ass off and paid all the taxes so we could all do that, not to have us drive living wages down by squatting at McDonalds, or whatever.

And sure, it was an investment in the way reading a book in my own time is an investment. It made me better at a thing and taught me things and gave me time to figure stuff out. It was certainly not an investment in my career. I haven’t submitted my degree with a job application once in decades of working for a living. Did alright anyway, wouldn’t have done as well without the things I lived and learned or the people I met and learned from.

Which is what education is for, in my book. If you’re looking at dollar input versus lifetime dollar output… well, you do need an education, so maybe you can get that while you’re making a fool of yourself getting that MBA or whatever.

I mean, if you want to get really trippy, the mushroom may still be able to sprout when you eat it, depending on what it is and how it’s prepared, so it isn’t even necessarily dead.

I’m saying the mushroom is probably winning this until you fully digest it/poop it out.

I’m not Chinese, so I can’t answer that.

I can tell you that’s absolutely not how or why I got my own degree. For which I paid barely anything, so hard to picture it as an investment. And it didn’t seem to be much of an “investment” for my classmates, many of whom paid nothing or were paid to do it.

We did think it was cool, though. Got to meet very smart people, both as professors and as classmates, some of which I keep in touch to this day. Got to learn stuff I hadn’t even considered and access technical means I couldn’t have afforded. Zero regrets, even if my degree is only very tangentially related to my current job.

So… does that answer the question?

Was coming to say this.

It’s a very… anglo conservative view to see education as a financial investment to get a job (and a working class person with an education as a waste of resources).

There’s an argument to be made about the labor market in China and how its working class is remunerated in an economy designed for cheap exports, but this framing is probably not it.

I’m pretty sure that statement just made several history books in your vicinity spontaneously combust, but you should still try to see if you can find any of the remaining ones and take a peek inside.

I was born just after the toppling of a fascist regime. My parents were both left wingers during the regime itself. I have voted for left wing parties my entire life, with some success because… you know, fascism in living memory is a hell of an incentive. You’ll find out.

But no, please, by all means do tell me how it works, I’m very curious.

Case in point.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter why he won or who you personally blame for it, the consequences will be the same. Those people who weren’t “fine with genocide” (which is an entirely fallacious argument, for the record), will now be “fine” with a whole bunch of other stuff whether they like it or not.

And I do not care. Screw them specifically. If this guy does leave or die by 2029 and there’s anybody friendly left standing they can poke me then, we can compare notes on rebuilding post-fascism. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear it.

I mean… no. Unless you have a time machine stashed somewhere.

This sent me to the archives to see the hordes of posts from left-leaning people saying they “couldn´t bring themselves” to vote for Biden or later Harris, let alone the outright tankies (who, by the way, are doing great at not posting about this or anything Trump-related lately).

I am determined to minimize exposure to this stuff for as long as I can, but since it’s inescapable today, let me at least point out that this is America starting to toss and turn in the bed it made for itself. I have little empathy for it as a unit.

And yeah, sure, I get that half the country didn’t vote for these idiots, but honestly it shouldn’t have been even close and at some point the rest of the planet has to cut ties and focus on building a post-America world. If you excuse us, we’ll be digging bunkers in Greenland, because apparently that’s a thing now.

Yeah, I’m not doing this again. Not waiting to see what of his random unhinged nonsense he ignores, fails to do or does anyway.

I suggest keeping this guy out of World News unless he… you know, actually does something. I’m sure the US channels can track every time he misspeaks and then has to pretend aliens landed in Nicaragua or whatever.

Hah. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. The outside unit is right besides the window to my home office and I could get some nice overclocking going with a tube and some tape by just opening the hot water.

Yeah, that’s the issue to be solved. Apparently there is some sort of contraption that includes fans to prevent the condensation, but whenever I asked the heat pump people they just shook their heads despondently and told me to let it go.

Hey, all my pipes are outside the walls. Maybe I can just build some sort of acrylic enclosure and put fish in there or something.

I’ve heard tell of mystery tech to make the water heat pumps make cold. I’m sure I’ll be more tempted to investigate further when summer comes.

Hey, it was still a 150W machine.

It was just devoting 100 of those watts to attempting liftoff.

This conversation is two steps away from rediscovering the concept of consoles and I’m here for it.

Gaming PCs are about to top out at 1500W, which is a very solid space heater. Honestly, it complements a heat pump just fine. If you can set up a fan pushing air out of your gaming den and/or home server room you’re at least starting to justify your stupidly wasteful setup.

I have to be honest, all the PC master race bros are deep into the awkward monkey puppet meme hoping all the AI haters don’t realize they’re using hardware that can easily run very competent genAI at competitive speeds to play CounterStrike. If you want to make and post that one you have my blessing.

But just to be clear, I believe it.

I just don’t do it.

See below, the idea is for rent control to take care of that, which is part of the package. Along with the government supposedly planning to build their own company to compete.

If they were able to manage getting this implemented, which is dubious for political reasons, it probably would work, but it’d take at least a few years and there are many ways the increasingly anarchocapitalist conservative forces around it can disrupt it. We’ll see. As a model for other places… it’s probably a good place to start looking, it just needs a legal framework where you can deploy all of it (rent control, direct government development and rental, fiscal pressure on speculative property purchases). Just one piece alone probably won’t do it.

The legislation being proposed also has a bunch of regulation regarding Spanish holdings buying property, including rent price controls. Depending on how you look at it, forcing foreign groups to set up shop domestically and be restricted by that regulation is the entire point of the tax hike.

Spanish media were reporting recently that some existing rental holdings were starting to dump real estate in response to the rent control, at least in Barcelona.

The bigger problem will be whether the legislation package passes in Parliament, where it needs support from conservative regionalists and then gets implemented at the autonomy level (think states, if you’re American), which is largely controlled by conservatives.

Oh, you have no idea.

You can have them by the fistful like this, shell and all.