Bay 12 Games Forum

You'd certainly have my support for 63ing all sorts of stuff. You gotta' be thorough if you're doing movies, though. Not just main characters. Everyone. Even the supporting staff. If you're basing it off an old movie you go back to that old movie, check the gender ratio of the extras, and invert it. You check and flip the friggin' birds in the background, to the extent possible. If you're localizing it in a language with gendered word junk, you flip all of that, too, and to hell with how incomprehensible it becomes.

Rule 63 that sucker to the hilt, and then get a rotary saw and get that hilt past the legal limitations of impalement.

And it was still an improvement, if for no other reason than being a diplomatic signifier of intent to at least fucking look like you're doing something. Damn thing wasn't binding at goddamn all -- functionally, signing it would have been pretty much exactly the same as not. But that wasn't the bloody gravity of it, it was major countries coming together and publicly announcing that, yes, they can all agree we have a fucking problem of notable magnitude and we need to at least fake working together to fix it well enough no one notices we're not trying too hard. Maybe even actually ruddy do something.

It was a step forward and another brick in a foundation to get shit done, not a silver bullet or monument to survival erected in the flaming asscrack of existence. Gravity of it was precisely that and not much more, and whoohoo now we get to not have even that.

Fun thing about sessions and the DoJ, though. Folks have apparently actually started going through with getting the guy disbarred, and on that front there's actually decent enough odds of it happening -- so far as lawyery ethics stuff goes, the guy's screwed up fairly hard in the last few months, and the bar critters tend to be not particularly forgiving. Which would lead to the interesting situation of most of the DoJ more or less being legally (or near enough) incapable of listening to anything sessions says when it comes to legal issues.

Be neat if we get to see exactly what happens when you have an attorney general that's not able to practice as an attorney, ehehe.

When you yourself is stuck in the mud, it's more important than ever to still have your dignity. The easiest way to feel like you have dignity is to look down on another group. Even if they have it just as muddy as you, if you draw a line between them and yourself you can act as if they are worse off so you can feel better. I wouldn't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if poor black people act the same way against "the white trash".

There's pathos involved, yes, but it tends to be a rather different sort of message and whatnot. You can see some of shit regarding police behavior over here for examples, heh. Occasionally notice some similar stuff regarding welfare, on a personal level. There's commentary, but a fair bit more annoyance with folks that are doing the same thing they are and looking down on 'em despite it, stuff like that.

Not really the same way, basically. Similarities, but there's some devils lounging about in the details.

Having gasoline taxes pay for the roads means that the people who use the roads the most are the ones who pay the most for it.

It doesn't, though. The folks benefiting the most from the roads are millionaires and whatnot -- people that get use from the transportation network as a whole rather than any particular stretch of road. The people spending the most personal time on the roads are paying the most, not the people that are getting the most use from 'em.

Gallons bought being equal, your average gas tax (which tends to be flat per gallon and whatnot) eats up significantly more of the budget of someone under the poverty line than someone making 100k or somethin', too. Which is most of the rest of it.

Some of the more major key measures of a regressive tax are impact and relative benefit. When a tax chews up more of your budget (as a proportion, mind, not raw dollar amount) than it does for someone else and you're getting comparatively little gain out of it, it's generally regressive. Sales and gas tax -- basically anything that's a flat amount per unit -- tend to be (if maybe not always are) some of the more common examples.

Stuff's basically the economic equivalent of that old quote, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." Few bucks a month in gas tax might be so little for a rich critter it would be economically advantageous for 'em to wipe their ass with it instead of find a roll of toilet paper, but for a poor bastard it can be the difference between being able to eat lunch or not a few times over the period, or that lunch being food or it being dime-ish pack ramen.

It's probably conceptually possible to rig things so it doesn't function like that (employer matching for some retirement/healthcare/etc. stuff is kinda' like that, iirc), but... well, I can't say for sure (cause, as noted, I haven't actually looked at the texas particulars, at least recently), but not even a matter of texas being texas, the US being the US I'd be pretty surprised, heh.

And ninja'd more or less by cript but to t'hell with it, it's typed it's getting posted.

It's more purple than it's been at roughly any point in my life, but yeah, on the net it's still fairly red. That said, texas isn't so much southwest as south, period. The thing's bloody huge. Chunks are southwest, south, (barely) southeast (I'm about as southeast as you get without actually being in south/central florida, and the far east bits of texas are a day trip for me if I'm feeling real frisky), probably midwest... seriously, texas may be pretty empty on the whole but it's friggin' gigantic.

People would talk about "poor people" as a kind of euphemism for black people (since blacks in the area were generally poorer) but really did not seem to understand what it was like to actually be poor.

This, though... I'd say a lot of it isn't really not understanding what it's like to be poor. Again, poverty and demographics being what it is* in a lot of these areas, there's very much a sizable white population that is entirely ruddy aware of what it's like to actually be poor, full on dirt floor poverty (seriously, I've had family in the education system help out the occasional white student living like that over the years), because they've been living it often enough for generations. The realities of what poverty entails are something rather intensely felt by a great deal of non-minority southerners, heh.

More what's going on there, imo, is just some kind of... disconnect? Like, you question individual things regarding a person's economic status, and everything will come up poor as shit, and either no better or outright worse than conditions in the more worse off predominately black/etc. neighborhoods in the region. Try to get folks to acknowledge they're in roughly the same situation as a ghettocritter or dealing with effectively or literally the same problems as the local black areas and you get stonewalled. It's normalized for 'em, for want of a better way of putting it. The stuff involved with that are either no major issue or outright virtue when a white feller's doing it, but spat on when it's not. That conditions and issues shared are near enough to identical it barely makes a difference is danced around at best, but that they're shared isn't really questionable. Right down to the bureaucratic corruption white people around here like to accuse black gov't staff of, heh.

You kinda' get the feeling that richer folks seem to think that poverty is some kind of equalizer or somethin', sometimes, I guess? That racist pathos would be less when people are getting shat on to the same-ish degree. And like, heeeellllllll naw. You might be rotting in a trailer park and on five different kinds of government assistance but at least you ain't black and you ain't admitting you're on the dole even if it's the only thing keep your kids fed and sheltered. Buncha' stuff like that. Hard to articulate much better at twenty 'til five in the morning, ahaha.

* Town I've spent much my life in is like 40% below the line, and had a census a few years back memorable for finding a black population of 1, ferex. Not 1 percent. Literally one dude, out of a population of a few hundred. Something like maybe a dozen anything else non-white. Plenty of folks 'round these parts that make an idle hobby of pissing on poor people that are, in fact, themselves poor people, and just have a great deal of trouble quite making the connection that they're pissing on their own foot in the process.

E: It's a representative example, but I had family (finally, they kinda' needed it pretty badly) get on food stamps in the last few months. Discussion among others basically amounted to, "They got it." and nothing else. No comment on virtue, no repudiation, no etc., so forth, so on. Just a fact, basically. Thing that happens, no need for anything else said. Meanwhile you talk about a local non-white family getting the same thing and the discussion likes to end up rather differently. System exploitation and abuse, trading steak for drugs, etc., etc. The usual passel of shite.

... mind you, there very much is a very, very large streak of racism involved there. Living around here, you notice how oddly consistent it is when folks talk about welfare fraud and whatnot they don't tend to mention when their cousin is doing it, or fred down the street or some shit, but would you look at that just as you're driving by a predominately black neighborhood the subject somehow gets brought up. Weird how driving by the trailer park don't prompt the same sort of discussion.

Kinda' like how there's a hell of a lot of poor as shit white folk out here and weirdly enough it's at least a plurality of the drug busts and whatnot that involve them, but it's always ghettos and black neighborhoods that have the drug and poverty problem. Lenny or whoever the hell is just down on their luck, y'know? Good people, not like those folks across town (coincidentally, said folks tend to be black or hispanic or whatev'). And yeah, the trash collector's dealing dope from the garbage truck but it's the non-white feller walking down the street that has people talking about the latest trafficking trends. Not the city officials literally making drug deals from the front seat of gov't owned vehicles.

For what little it's worth, I'm relatively sure a lot of it is fairly subconscious. Not explicit, aware racism, but that insidious sort of shit that has you casually using racial slurs because it's normal for the local dialect (there's a fairly well known variant of jury rigging that it took me until my mid to late teens to notice what the hell I was actually saying, ferex), or looking at two areas with similar economic/criminal/etc. setups but notably dissimilar demographic ones rather differently because everyone around you has been doing it most your life. Lotta' people I've met are racist as fuck but will swear up and down they ain't, and even believe it, as near as I can tell. They just don't quite grok that all that other stuff they spit vitriol about happens to have a demographic slant, and lo' and behold the story's always different when the shoe gets on the other colored foot.

... anyone happen to know what's up with those car lights with the blue... dots, I guess, in them? Looks almost like there's a single insert LED or somethin' inside the headlights. Just noticed the things in the last week or two, and some quirk of rear view mirrors makes the damn things offset from the light itself and move around based on which way you're looking at it. Kinda' distracting, frankly, which is bad juju for the road.

Wondering if there's some actual reason to it besides trying to convince the other drivers on the road they're hallucinating, basically. It seems both pointless and a potential risk factor (albeit minor) for accidents, and other than some "brilliant" idiot infesting someone's design process I can't figure out why it's being done.