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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • We have one side’s unilateral description of how they perceive the existing state of things and their changes. Folks are very likely to poorly characterize things in a way that would sound crazy to disagree. However the truth is usually somewhere in between.

    I have had very very vocal user that decry very deliberate design that the wider user base wanted as a “bug”. If someone read their rant without the wider context one would think my team was unreasonable and producing bad software. Even after fellow users took time to explain why they wanted his request rejected, he was quite adamant that everyone else was wrong.


  • It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.

    One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.

    So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.

    Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.











  • I’ve seen both. Our area has had, for a few years, mixed use zoning as a requirement. So a bunch of projects that clearly only wanted to do housing are doing what you describe: Housing and a meets minimum commercial/office effort. Notably while trumpeting “walkable” which is really code for “we don’t waste land on unprofitable parking lots”. So you have somewhat dense living and retail where the retail has zero parking, so the only people a business could hope to get are the people in the units immediately close by, which are not a lot, since each project seems to go for low rise housing. So you get three stories of apartments which is more dense than suburbia, but not nearly dense enough to sustain a dedicated retail presence.

    But there is this mall they’ve effectively renovated into a “downtown”, adding high rise apartments, and lots of them to the massive retail presence as well as big office buildings. Critically, also expanded to an insane degree the amount of available parking. It was a pretty failing mall (like most) and now it’s doing really well, both with high occupancy for their apartments and people going there for the rather nice retail. I think this was the first project and inspired the county to decide everything will be a success if it’s just mixed use, and they haven’t really come around to realize that they haven’t succeeded in forcing the developers to do viable mixed use by the current weak regulations.



  • Yeah, I could see how that could be an impediment to a campaign, but practically speaking, if he is the governor: -Bill comes in, he vetoes, the veto gets overridden, the governor didn’t matter.

    So whether he nixes it or Robinson rubber stamps it, the practical end result is the same. The optics may not be as good, but he’s hit his term limit anyway and I think his supporters would rather see an NC politician on the national stage instead of him looking marginally better doing symbolic vetoes.

    I too marvel that Robinson won the same election that Cooper won. I can’t fathom the voting public that would make that split choice. The districted elections were mangled to explain the state congress and the US house, but the fact that the statewide went “Tillis, Robinson, Trump, and Cooper” I just will never understand.


  • On the downside, he’s relatively unknown on the national stage.

    On the upside, it’s a natural progression, he served as governor for a full term and the timing is right to move on to the next political field.

    To add to your points, he’s a democrat who won the same exact elections in a state that Trump also won both times, a state that simultaneously elected republican supermajorities and a republican lieutenant governor while still electing him. A straight white southern man who is about as nonthreatening to GOP sensibilities as you can get without actually being a republican.


  • A non-duopoly choice is a 3rd Party candidate, Jill Stien, Green Party.

    Reading her platform, I’d say it’s a no go for me.

    Two bullet points back to back are “Have the UN Security Council hold Israel accountable” and at the same time “end the UN Security Council”. So which is it, use the UNSC to hold Israel accountable or the UNSC is a bad thing?

    Also on her platform, disband NATO and stop giving Ukraine aid. If we do this, then Ukraine and Russia will just hug it out and everyone will be happy. A few unrealistic things like this where it’s way too optimistic and paves the way for things to go horribly wrong.

    Then there are the good intentions, but bad consequences ideas. Pay reparations to third world countries for climate. Historically, “just dump money and resources” has been tried and you just give those to regional warlords that will make things worse. Need a more thought out engagement plan than that.

    Broadly some decent domestic policy goals, but pretty impractical foreign policy ideas.