SirEDCaLot

Answer is simple. Invite him to come over some Saturday. Go find something else to do when he arrives. He can go take your sister out on a date and they can hook up. Then you get back and play RDR with him. Everybody wins :-)

My thoughts exactly. I have absolutely no sympathy for Nazis, or anyone else who thinks mass murder and genocide were good policy. But one of the things that makes a free society different from Nazi Germany, is free expression. If we limit free expression to only things the people in charge want expressed, no matter how noble the intent that starts us down a very dark path very quickly.

The way we fight Nazis and racism is not by beating them up or jailing them. It's by teaching each other and our children why they are wrong, by learning and understanding what it is like to have racism directed against you. And thus, we defeat racism not with force but with empathy.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the sort of policy that would make Hitler proud. It's the sort of policy that would be enacted in Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia.

There are a lot of moneyed interests who want us all fighting each other. They want that so they can continue to extract the wealth of the nation for themselves. So while you explain why you've no need to listen to anybody, you are helping them.

Ever see a magic show? The magician sets up the trick and the cute bikini clad assistant jumps around and flashes her hands to capture your attention so you don't notice the magician has just palmed your card instead of shuffling it. Elon is the assistant here. Everybody is focused on him and his stupid salute and all of the crazy things people like him say and do, and people are not focused on the real question of how to stop the fact that Americacs people are being bled dry.

I would encourage you to read the story of Daryl Davis, he is a black musician, most famous for becoming friends with a number of KKK members. Those people were used to being hated by black people and vice versa. All Daryl did was talk to them, listen to them, find elements of commonality. I think like 40 or 50 KKK members have left the organization because of him.

I realize the American educational system has gone downhill, but surely at some point somebody taught you the concept of nuance? That not everything is black or white, good or evil? That sometimes things are shades of gray? Sometimes good people do bad things, bad people do good things, etc? And that not everything is as it first appears at face value, you have to look deeper to understand?

I for one am very much a student of nuance.

I think we would both agree that of late, Elon has somewhat gone off the rails. But that doesn't mean everything he has ever done or ever will do is automatically bad. I can dislike his current politics and the way he is approaching this efficiency project, without having to shit on everything he's ever done.

Thus, I remain a fan of SpaceX and Tesla, for the simple reason that they both lead their respective fields technology-wise. As someone who has owned a Tesla for years (going back to the days when everybody loved Elon), I can confidently say from personal first-hand experience that it is a fantastic car. The fact that I now disagree with many of its founder's politics doesn't change the car in my driveway. It was a fantastic car when I bought it and it's an even more fantastic car now as FSD gets further refined.

I ask, for the good of our nation, please avoid black and white thinking. A population unable to grasp nuance and uninterested in looking deeper for motivations and questions below the surface is easily manipulated with range bait news. Republicans have been doing this for decades. Democrats have just started in the last 4 or 5 years.

Pilot here. I fly little airplanes for fun.

Much of the ATC system is already understaffed by a good amount. Becoming a controller is not super easy, nor is it for everyone. You have to pass a fairly stringent medical test, background check etc, and then you go to their academy for a while. After that, they will assign you wherever they need you, which may be nowhere near where you actually wanted to live. What you make depends on where you are and what you do. So for example, if you man a small airport in the middle of Idaho, you make less than if you are an approach controller near JFK. Each position that you might work requires its own training and certification, and I don't just mean each physical location I mean like each chair, each working position. That's because each sector of the airspace has its own quirks, where traffic usually comes from and usually goes to, defined airways and GPS points and procedures and that sort of thing.

My point with all this, is that hiring and training new controllers is significantly harder than most other jobs. To use the earlier example, and approach controller near JFK is doing one of the most difficult and stressful jobs in aviation, and is easily making six figures. But to get that guy there, getting him trained and certified on everything took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. If he resigns, whatever salary you save on him is a drop in the bucket compared to what it will cost to replace him.

Private sector controllers are a thing. Many small airports contract out their tower operations, but this is generally done at small regional airports.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of places where fat needs to be trimmed in the federal government. I don't believe ATC is one of them. And is certainly not a place where I want fat aggressively trimmed, because when you lose experience you reduce safety.

Quite true. Especially since we don't seem to study history anymore. Forget world history, we barely seem to remember our own history past 6 months ago.

Problem is, the status quo of the last 20 to 30 years is significantly different than the status quo shortly before that. Income inequality is through the roof. The middle class is stagnant. There's much less upward mobility than there previously was. And for the majority of the people, that are on the lower half of the income spectrum, costs have gone up and up and up and wages have not. For 15 to 20 years people kind of dealt with it because standard of living was pretty decent before that. But you can only squeeze so much blood out of the turnip. People see boomers who were able to have a house and a family on one average 40hr/week income and they say what the hell we now have both partners working full-time and we can barely afford ourselves let alone a kid. That's why make America great again is such a great slogan, because it invokes those days when the American dream was still alive.

I would say Republicans are much more responsible for the extraction of the nation's wealth, but Democrats happily sat by and fiddled while Rome burned and were eager participants in the extreme offshoring of all American manufacturing type work in the '90s and 2000s. There was a ridiculous idea that this would somehow make life better for Americans, that everybody would get retrained to do computers or something like that, and we would become a nation 'better than' having to build our own stuff. Obviously that didn't work out.

Come to today, and while Democrats I think have better policies for the average worker, none of their messaging addresses the major systemic problems that need to be fixed.
Obama's did. Hope, change, yes we can. That was what the country needed. He won on a platform of radical change. Unfortunately he turned out to be a moderate change president but I think he generally did a decent job. What was Hillary's platform? The only thing a lot of people learned about her is that she's too stupid to hire decent IT people who use encryption, and that she has a private and public position on things, in other words don't tell the plebs what you really think cuz they won't vote for you. Then you have Kamala, magically frocked by some DNC elites to sit in the big chair, who ran a pretty boring campaign that seemed to, like Hillary's, be based on 'I'm not Trump so of course I'm going to win'. Obviously that wasn't good enough.

If the DNC wants to start winning the White House, they need to clean their own house. Get rid of all the status quo dinosaurs like Pelosi and reform the party into one of the people. Find someone like Bernie and put him in charge. Ditch wedge issues like gun control that only cost votes. And make a party platform that focuses on the common man. Not just the blue man, every man. Then you win elections.

Then they will continue to lose elections. Not being Trump obviously isn't enough.

This is exactly it. It's white Trump wins. Why people are willing to overlook all of his craziness- because his platform is one of radical change. He may be crazy and he may be full of shit but at least he is talking about change. And when you're hurting and you see the entire country hurting and you see nobody in charge giving a fuck, or worse telling you this is how it's supposed to be, you want radical change.

They also failed to put forward any real new ideas or new candidates. If you read the room even a little, you see that the American people are pissed off and want change. Obama got elected on a platform of radical change. Trump got elected on a platform of radical change. Hillary and Kamala, no radical change in their platform, both lost to the radical change pushing Trump.

Put forward some younger candidates with new ideas and new energy, put forward some populist policies, stop playing on identity politics and expecting that everybody who's black or female is going to vote for you by default.

Actually do that and you win elections.