Ironically, after working in production for over a decade, I’m hoping to go back to school for business management. Because it turns out that there’s zero career track and advancement potential if I stick with what I already know. Depressing shit.

Paul is 9-1, the one loss being a split decision, and 6 of the wins being knockouts. He’s inexperienced, but that doesn’t mean he’s not good.

I want to see Tyson knock him out in under ten seconds. But I don’t think I’ll get my wish.

Eh. I dunno. Tyson is in his 50s, and has a much shorter reach than Jake Paul. As much as I’d prefer to see him win, I don’t think that Tyson is gonna pull this off.

If I drop that name, that gives people enough to figure out which school I went to, what years, and they can correlate that with my post history to figure out exactly who I am IRL.

I’ve probably posted enough already that someone with a large enough database could do that already, but dropping names would make it much easier for just about any schmuck with an internet connection and decent search skill.

(And believe me, I would love to tell people the name of the pretentious dick that was the head of the department, but… Aaargh.)

I went to school for fashion design. (Hence interacting with a famous designer in school. Come to think of it, the head of the department at the time was someone with a significant international reputation. And I still think he’s a pretentious dick.) These days I do industrial print media, because I burned out hard in school, due to a combination of raging, untreated ADHD and 48+ hour days working in studio.

I would not recommend fashion design to anyone that has any interest in a healthy work/life balance, and fast fashion has absolutely gutted anything domestic that’s of any interest at all.

I… Can’t do that without giving away far too much personal information. Unfortunately.

Yes, definitely. It also forces the US to exploit more natural resources (which I oppose, since I like having forests and mountains). Things like 100% tariffs on electric cars or computer chips made in China would help the US catch up. Tariffs on lithium–I don’t think we have significant lithium deposits in the US–would just sharply raise prices. Tariffs on finished goods that are high enough make it cheaper to produce in the US.

Fundraiser at a very expensive art school. I was a scholarship student at a cocktail mixer, and I was at the mixer because it was being held in the department I was majoring in. All of the people that were attending were fine arts patrons, the kind of people that drop tens of thousands on art without thinking twice about it. I was–literally–a punk kid with tattoos and shit tons of piercings, and I was supposed to be pleasant to people with millions more than I’ll ever have.

Got to piss off a world famous fashion designer that evening, so that was cool.

TLA agencies would have no problem with a cover identity to “prove” who they are. Your average citizen is going to have a hard time buying a slightly used social security number that they can use to get an ID that will pass KYC laws.

Something I just thought of today…

Industry has been outsourcing for more than 40 years now. Manufacturing has been gutted in the US, and that’s wrecked labor. With the loss of the power of organized labor, money has flowed up from the workers to the executives. We’ve seen labor unions making big gains under Biden, but there simply aren’t enough people covered by unions in the US to reverse this trend. Right now we have a smallish-number of higher-paid information workers, a somewhat larger number of people in manufacturing, and a LOT of people in service-sector jobs that aren’t organized, or can’t effectively organize. An economy built largely around large numbers of low-wage service-sector jobs, with a small number of higher paid information workers just isn’t sustainable.

Tariffs that went on long enough would force manufacturing to be done in the US. And wages would have to rise, because if the workers can’t afford the products they make, then an economy collapses completely (unless you are exporting a lot). Yeah, it would be super-rough until factories were back in the US, maybe 10+ years. But our thirst for more and cheaper plastic shit from Asia is gonna be the death of us. (…That is, if climate change doesn’t do it first.) In that respect, Trump is kind of right, but the tariffs are probably going to be so harmful in the short run that people will reject any attempts to restructure the economy. I don’t think that Trump is principled in this at all; I think that it’s populist, and he’s a broken clock on this issue.

He is punching down and attacking a group of people who are suffering in “the new world” just like him, and a fucking bag of cookies is one of the few joys they can still aquire.

I know a lot of people that are quite overall politically liberal that feel this way. I know a lot of people that get upset at the idea of inmates being given “free” educations in prison because they still have student loans 20 years after school. People that support the ideas of helping people up, that are fully on board with LGBTQ+ rights across the board, think DEI is a good idea, think it’s critical that women have bodily autonomy, and so on, but still have a knee-jerk reaction to things that they don’t fully get, or haven’t had explained to them.

I don’t know if he meant the song that way, or what. I do know that the people coming into the White House in a few months aren’t likely to make things any better for people like him. Or people like you. Or people like me.

If you know anything about the history of punk music and east coast hardcore, Ian MacKaye was clearly one of the most principled people in the scene, and a genuinely good and decent person. So it’s really weird to hear that people ever got the weird idea that he was pro-racism or something.

Then again, The Dead Kennedys had to make “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” because they were sick of their shows being infiltrated by the wrong kind of skinheads.

An old soul in a new world… Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

I think that’s an uncharitable reading. Which is understandable, but still.

I think that there are a lot of people–myself included–that would like to be able to make a living doing something that seems to matter, or where you make something. Like, factory work sucks in most ways, but it still feels like you’re doing something. Spreadsheets and order projections? Staring at a screen all day, sending polite emails to people you’ll never meet about ways to spend a lot of money electronically?

This “new world” of work and socializing ain’t great. I think it snuck up on a lot of people, and now a lot of people are feeling like they don’t know how to navigate the new reality of depersonalization.

Here’s another song that explicitly references it. Better song too, IMO.

Maybe for some things, like working in fields. (Maybe. That would be a preeeeeettttttty good time for someone to pull a runner.) Probably not for construction, where you’d have to be giving inmates access to things that readily be used as weapons. Same with meat packing, where they’d literally be working with knives.

If people that are left of center can get their shit together some day, they really need to rewrite that amendment to ban all involuntary servitude.

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There’s no need.

Really.

If Trump does what he says he was going to do-and I don’t doubt he will–then the economy will crash on its own.

Tariffs will raise prices, and will drive inflation. Why will tariffs raise prices? Because the people selling will just add the price of the tariff to the goods sold. And unless the tariffs are the result of a new law, any incoming president can cancel them. That means that it would be a very risky environment to try and build domestic production in. The place I work for uses aluminum extrusion; we get it from a domestic supplier, and they get all their raw aluminum stock from China. When tariffs were enacted on Chinese aluminum, our supplier passed the cost on to us, and we had to raise our prices to account for our increased costs. So our customers had to pay more to get exactly the same product.

Deporting all of the undocumented immigrants will mean that we’ll suddenly have lots of jobs not getting done; most produce is picked by undocumented immigrants, a ton of general construction is done by undocumented immigrants, most meat-packing plants are full of undocumented immigrants laborers. We’ll suddenly be a negative unemployment; there won’t be enough workers in the workforce to fill demand. That means wages will have to rise, which will drive inflation, and housing costs will rise sharply because new construction will be so expensive with undocumented immigrants. One of the people I work with is undocumented; if he gets deported, then we’re up shit creek, because no one else can do his job as efficiently as he can, if anyone can do it at all (yay, lean manufacturing…).

I would place a financial bet on the economy crashing if Trump actually does what he says he will.

Fair enough.

I don’t really think that D.C. should be a state, but I think that it should have more autonomy for the administration of the city than it has.

To be fair, Harris had a contentious relationship with cops, when–IIRC–she didn’t pursue the death penalty for a cop killer.

Prosecutors have to work with police, but aren’t police. Prosecutors want to win, because that’s how they get elected. When cops do dumb, illegal shit, prosecutors get pissed because then they can’t win a case. Cops usually blame prosecutors for not locking everyone up. Prosecutors get pissed at cops, because cops botch investigations and make stupid, illegal arrests.

Of the two, I have much more respect for prosecutors. Prosecutors are often very good attorneys (in their field).

To reiterate a point: district attorney are elected. The public expects them to win cases. When they don’t, even if it’s because cops are handing them steaming piles of garbage, they tend to lose their jobs. Shitty, but true. We may say ACAB, but when it comes down to it, a prosecutor that refuses to, for instance, prosecute certain low-level crimes will tend to get voted out of office because it pisses off the constituents.

Unless either candidate OVERWHELMINGLY wins, there’s not going to be anything tonight, and probably not tomorrow. The last of the swing states won’t close polls until 8p (Mountain time, I think). Trump is almost certainly going to declare that he is the winner “by a lot”. Best case, we’ll know tomorrow morning.

So take a couple alprazolam, drink a couple shots, and black out until tomorrow.