impartialobserver

I must be wired differently. Something as benign as a pride flag would not prompt my being absent from school or work. This is not a zero sum game. Being tolerant of one group does not diminish the other.

I would say that most folks need to find more important issues than pronouns, drag story hours, and such. There was a drag story hour in my town in early April 2023. We had a group of protesters come (between 30 to 40) and with visible guns on most of them. The actual number of kids at the drag story hour.... 4. It lasted a grand total of 20 minutes because the kids were bored. I would think that the protesters should have found something better to do rather than sit in a parking lot and yell and scream.

Not to intervene but I think that you two are not talking about the same thing. Conversion therapy could be construed in two ways. 1. Surgical procedure where you remove/alter one's genitals and before/during/after the procedure you do hormone therapy. 2. Psychological intervention where you attempt to change one's behavior with no altering of the body. Changing one's thinking can work on rare occasion but only if the person truly was doubting this reality prior to any conversion happening.

Lets use Senegal for example. They have been independent since roughly 1960. The road to independence started in the 1940's. That is 63 years at the very least. Yes, there are some who were alive during the colonial era. However, the vast majority of the population was born long after 1960. are there remnants of the colonial era? Yes. First, the national boundaries were drawn by europeans who had zero knowledge of the tribes or settlement patterns. Those seemingly arbitrary boundaries have been at the root of a lot of conflicts throughout the continent. Next, the languages.. if Europeans never colonize, there would be a single digit number of natives who spoke French, English, Dutch, or German. Lastly, when you take resources in the past.. they can't be extracted and then monetized later. However, that is in the past and unless you can invent a time machine... there is no going back and fixing that. All they can do is make the best of what they have right now. Bad things happen.... truly strong and resilient folks move past it. Forgive but not forget.

Yet you keep responding..

Such an intellectual ^^^ Next thing you tell me is that "Ow my Balls" is your favorite show.

Not worshipping at the altar of someone or something does not mean that you hate them. Not celebrating my whiteness... does not mean that I hate other whites. This type of binary thinking is a sure sign that someone is incredibly insecure. By that logic, I hate the game of cricket because I do not watch it nor care about it.

I showed that your assumptions were unfounded. If you were so smart.. you would know to gather the evidence and then make the proclamation not the other way around.

Where it runs afoul at least when it comes to pro basketball is that ratings/revenue have continued to grow. Its hard to say that this quasi--socialist setup is failing when owners are getting rich, select players are getting rich, and TV ratings increase in most years. I know the NBA pretty well hence why I can fire away with this stuff. How have they leveled the playing field? First, they have made it increasingly possible that 18 to 20 year old kids are playing in their league. In the past (pre-1995), a player played in college basketball for 3 to 5 years. This weeded out the not-so-dedicated and the more injury-prone. Second, they have the draft which gives the worst teams the best chance of landing the best prospects. Third, it is no longer considered a deterrent if a player comes from a rough background. This rough background was weeded out by tough college coaches like Bobby Knight and Denny Crum. Now, if a college coach is too strict.. the player transfers or quits all the while their NBA draft stock is not hurt in most cases.

Sure, they are feeling the effects. However, do you really get somewhere by always looking in the rearview mirror?

I do not have the time to lay it all out but the thinking ( do not shoot the messenger) is that opportunity should correlate to outcome. If I let more x people into pro basketball then a certain percentage of them should succeed. Succeed would entail being viewed favorably, winning awards that have subjectivity built in (MVP and All-NBA selections), and them having long sustained careers. And when these favorable outcomes do not materialize it must be systemic.. society, the NBA, governments, etc.

I would say that waiting until they are 18 or even 21 is the best decision. As for pronouns.. I think both sides overreact. The left overvalues the importance of this and the right overreacts to it. Growing up, there was only 1 or 2 kids that I would have guessed were trans or close to it. Now, did I go home with them to find out? No.. but this was before the age of the internet and everybody wanting to know the business of others.

in the most general sense, leftism, is about leveling the playing field. Does it succeed in that? Sometimes. Does it push the envelope too much? Yes. Politics and human nature at the macro level is not a simple shell game.

It is true that most of the remote work is done by those who live in the cities already or want to. However, San Francisco is a great test subject. During the pandemic, the private sector made work from home the norm in certain industries. What happened? Traffic, traffic accidents, and certain crimes (reckless driving, car theft) went down while taxable sales in the non-SF area (Fairfield, Vacaville, and Novato) went up.

Another limiting factor in a lot of places out West is the terrain. Building on the side of a mountain can be done.. it just makes it expensive. We have some flat land here... 50 miles to the east and it looks like this

folks complain that the only homes being built are luxury homes. No one is building the starter home.. low price therefore lower profit. Luxury home being one is 2500 + sq ft of living space, 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 3 car garage, and usually in a gated community. They start out in the range of 750K to 850K in Sparks, 900k in Reno, and 1.5 million in Tahoe. This prices out the locals and brings in the CA expat. This entails building fewer but more profitable homes.

Builders can get the financing and while the permitting is expensive.. the main issue is that they do not have enough staff. That brings up the cost of labor. The cost of labor combined with the permits make building the low profit development untenable for builders. It also does not help that most of the builders here are from CA where the cost of living is even higher.

Back to the topic. Tucker Carlsen will be replaced by another one similar to him. The market is there and so the void will be filled.

Do not know about Canada but the construction industry is having a difficult time hiring folks especially in the Western US. The pay is great but the younger crowd is opting for the office job, technology job, etc. instead of the strenuous but rewarding work of framing, drywall, concrete, stucco, electrical, etc. They are doing so because their dad, brother, uncle is physically broken down and they do not want to be that way. Keep in mind, that there are ways to not have the bad back and bad knees but that gets left out. They simply see construction as this industry where you toil in the heat or cold, end up physical broken down, and usually have no work from late Oct. to late Feb.

I read the OP and just laugh.

Well, colonialism is over. Those nations in Asia, South America, and Africa that were once under the foot of various European nations need to figure out their own way. The colonizers were not exactly friendly and cordial so I can understand the bitterness and vitriol but that is in the rear-view mirror. As a side note, I go out of my way to read authors from non-traditional places. First, it gives me a different perspective on those places (not better.. just different). Second, while not impactful in the least.. buying novels from these nations seems like a great way to help them without donating to some charity. Purchasing someone's labor seems more valid than just giving them money.

To move Disneyworld from FL to GA would be astronomically expensive therefore not going to happen. Besides... without those tourism dollars, Orlando sees a sizeable decrease in jobs, population, and income. The politicians would not let that happen.

this reminds of me when I go back home to Idaho and folks tell me that Idaho has been ruined. What they are really saying is that it is not white enough and also too populated. Most of these folks earn more than in the past, have actual homes (not trailers or renting), and such...unlike the past.

It is somewhat hidden because when you buy a house.. this is not exactly a line item on a bill. You agree to pay the final asking price or not? The composition of that asking price is not part of the transaction other than stuff like title fees and such. The construction cost is not laid out in line item fashion either. We have seemingly undesirable land to the east of Reno. Lots of wide open nothing. Some places even have playa (dried up lake bed). Yet, new homes go for $500K and you start to think.. there can't be that much demand to live out on the open desert. The answer.. and one that I only found through public records requests is that the non-construction costs in these rural counties increased by 250% since 2011.

No whining. I have no issues with it. You just do not have the necessary character to admit that you were wrong. When you complain about rent control.. you are/were talking about government-induced rent control.