(((Sarah)))

Like, doubling your money is an outstanding outcome! Stopping there guarantees a plentiful supply of dopamine! You've won enough!

Those are just not the thoughts they have the capacity to believe or behave in accordance with right now, so they end up experiencing extended losing streaks instead.

They don't do that because they don't have the thing in your head that says "that much money is enough". (Bad) poker players make the same error - they'll be up by $700, but all they can think about is making that number bigger, and so they end up down by $700 and that's all the money they have.

(I realize that you, personally, know this perfectly well, but your followers may not and anyway social media is a conversation, not a lecture.)

Like, an authoritarian ruler's guiding principle is "you people do exactly what I tell you to do", and that inevitably leads to bending and twisting and rejecting whatever orthodoxy they've been using. True believers are infuriated and will resist, even if that just means criticizing the dictator.

Somewhat hilariously but also horrifyingly, both Stalin and Hitler ordered the deaths of a *lot* of true believers. They're actually a threat to authoritarian regimes, because they expect it to behave in accordance with espoused principles and that limits what behavior they'll tolerate.

Which is part of why it's a moral outrage (in addition to a massive strategic error) that the government is deliberately failing to make sure the families don't have to struggle with the flipping basics of survival.

("Deliberately" because lawmakers repeatedly choose not to fix this.)

Yes! Which is a thing the services started saying at least by WWII. Like, the Pentagon as an institution is aware of it, and Congress is, too. I'm sure many people have testified to that effect in front of one of several different committees over the last 85 years, and anyway it's pretty obvious.

And also he literally says "I ain't no fortunate son" over and over, and he enunciates that part clearly. You really don't need to do a deep analysis here - not getting it pretty much requires flat out divorcing words from their meaning, experiencing songs like a flipping chimpanzee.

Admittedly I was raised on Peter, Paul, and Mary and my grandma had a giant painting of a major 19th century proletarian uprising and whatnot, so I had a category to put it in, but I was also a child who honestly didn't understand most of what was being said. It was just the vibe of the song!

I mean the tone of his voice alone suggests the singer is angry. Even before I could distinguish many of the words (I just refreshed my memory and it turns out I *still* don't know about a third of them) I knew it was biting commentary on the hypocrisy and unearned privilege of the ruling class.

I honestly thought the band's name makes their political philosophy perfectly clear all by itself.

Someone looked at the numbers and trends and is gambling that performing the obviously inevitable course correction immediately would pay off in the medium term (and possibly the short term, too). In theory, this kind of repositioning also means you still get interviews after the realignment.

And was extremely enthusiastic about displays of patriotism consistent with that perspective. We never ever skipped the Pledge of Allegiance or the frequently subversive song. I honestly didn't notice until I heard other people talk about the kind of patriotism displays they experienced in school.

Plus "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". She was unironically the kind of patriot who found all kinds of things happening in America absolutely horrific on principle, and that includes half the things standard libertarians are mad about and also everything the civil rights movement was against.

My 5th/6th grade teacher had us all learn to sing I think eight or nine different "patriotic" songs, and she moved to the US from Canada in part because she really believed in American exceptionalism and the values expounded by the Founders. Half the songs were protest anthems!

Which is why it's so much easier to sing than the actual anthem!

(For the uninitiated, it is not you or your entire class in school or half the people who sing before sporting events all being terrible at singing; "The Star-Spangled Banner" is legitimately a serious technical challenge.)

Is Portland Burning? No. See real-time Portland cameras, PulsePoint incidents, and sourced fact checks.

Hey, there's a preview image now! Yay! Anyway, Portland still isn't burning.

This requires acquiring enough bags and putting them in a place such that any stack or pile of all of them together *seriously* interfers with your ability to do something you do regularly. That or just a place you spend a lot of time looking at, like directly across from a toilet.

My dad and stepmom have a policy of annoying places to put bags, and whenever the bag collection in the kitchen gets too tall, they redistribute them to the cars. There's almost always at least two or three big bags in each trunk and quite possibly some in the backseat; empty bags never go inside.

Like, I read Washington's letters to Congress where he's like "my men are starving and losing toes to frostbite, if you want an Army at all you will fix this yesterday," it's not a new problem, but what's even the point of having the best logistics system on Earth if you neglect the troops' needs?!

I've never understood this thing where the US government allows so many servicemembers to live on the edge of or actually in poverty. Seems like a really obvious readiness/retention issue any competent commander should be aggressively interested in resolving immediately.

When I was a kid, my mom bonded with enlisted wives over couponing and communal purchases of a pallet of dried pinto beans and strategically raiding multiple Goodwills for new school clothes. The economizing stuff she did just because she grew up that way was a lifeline for these families. ☹️

Every enlisted wife I've known was on food stamps/WIC for at least the first few years, because the promotions didn't make up for the cost of another kid.

It's just like the grad school wives, though they often have stable employment (which means better pay) because they don't move all the time.

Walter Duranty - Wikipedia

Actually the history is pretty well-known; they had a pro-Stalin reporter soft-pedaling and outright lying about the Holodomor, the gulags, the show trials, etc. He got a Pulitzer for lying relentlessly about the starvation stuff, and everyone with power in the Times organization allowed it.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots back this up - I know people from all over the region and they all remember smelling/seeing it. If they hadn't cancelled school (citywide shutdown of schools, transit, sporting events, and even mail service!), we'd've all been on indoor recess due to the poor air quality.

Specific users go on repost sprees - I'm talking about fifteen posts over the course of 5 minutes - or repost themselves over and over. The people asking for this feature usually mean turning reposts off by user, because there's already an "only posts" feed.

The suit itself actually folds up really well, and the blower is pretty small for what it is. I'd say carry-on, just to significantly reduce the odds of TSA shenanigans.

They definitely took "Starship Troopers" at surface level, actively ignoring the approximately 500 clues that the human regime clearly constitutes the bad guys, because that just doesn't square with their worldview at all.

Still, it'd make a great student film.

Hah, too true. I'm occasionally reminded that some famous Hollywood person is, like, still alive by "yet another wealthy bozo in Malibu finally got in real official trouble over beach access" stories, since they always put any recognizable name in the headline.