Sympthsical
Sympthsical's Journal
Profile Information
Member since: Fri Feb 14, 2020, 07:34 PM
Number of posts: 4,742
Number of posts: 4,742
Journal Archives
Jill Biden's "breakfast taco" may have been an inside joke
Which the locals would have understood, but it didn't play well nationally when bereft of context.
I did some quick searchy searchy, because I wondered if breakfast tacos were an Americanized thing. Instead, I found this rather lengthy article about the origins - and epic War of the Roses level fight - over the origin of breakfast tacos. Summarized: San Antonio (where Biden was) hates, hates, hates that Austin takes credit for popularizing breakfast tacos, when it was very much their own culinary convention for years. https://www.ocweekly.com/who-invented-breakfast-tacos-not-austin-and-people-should-stfu-about-it-6992058/ So the speech writer may have been playing to the audience in the room, but on a national level it just looked like pure cringe. The more you know. (None of this story is important. I'm just bored). |
Posted by Sympthsical | Tue Jul 12, 2022, 12:27 PM (16 replies)
News engagement plummets as Americans tune out
https://www.axios.com/2022/07/12/news-media-readership-ratings-2022
Cable viewership across the three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox News and MSNBC — is, on average, down 19% in prime time for the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2021. Those losses skew heavily toward CNN and MSNBC, which are down 47% and 33%, respectively. Fox's ratings are up 12% in that six-month span. The best part of statistics like these, anyone can read anything into them according to personal politics and taste. Everybody's happy! My current avoidance with news organizations is how dense and erratic the news cycle has become. One story dominates for a day or so. Forgotten. Dominates. Forgotten. "MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER!!!!" Forgotten perhaps by end of day. It's always been somewhat like this, but I think the clickbait nature of everything has rendered much of it exhausting and not worth the effort. "That story is eight hours ago. We need to re-engage eyeballs!" For me, it's at the point of reading a highly embellished headline that looks like the internet equivalent of skywriting and thinking, "No. I'm not reading that. I know it won't be worth it." |
Posted by Sympthsical | Tue Jul 12, 2022, 10:23 AM (12 replies)
Millennials are the largest workforce and the least wealthy -- why?
https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/08/11/millennials-are-the-largest-workforce-and-the-least-wealthy-why-politics/
Some highlights: In 1989, when Baby Boomers were roughly the same age as Millennials today, Boomers owned 21.3% of the national wealth. Millennials today own just 4.6%. This means that at their same stage of earnings development, Baby Boomers owned proportionally four times as much of the total wealth as Millennials. . . We're quite an entitled generation. Boot straps, people. Boot straps. |
Posted by Sympthsical | Sun Jul 10, 2022, 07:44 PM (30 replies)
I can't shake the feeling the Court is Congress reaping what it has sown
For at least forty years, Congress has again and again thrown to the courts and other areas what they themselves probably should have been managing.
Think of how many advances we've made as a society that never made it through Congress but were instead tossed at the courts to or federal agencies to deal with. Reproductive freedom. LGBT rights. Climate change policy. Once the Court well and truly flipped and started deciding, "Not our job. Not the EPAs job. It's Congress' job," there's chaos. Codifying those things we want to keep into tangible law rather than relying on the vacillating interpretations of five people is something we should have been doing all along. But there is forever an election on the horizon. Stop me if you've heard this. "Now's not the time, because the election is 12, 9, 6, 3 months away . . ." I'm not agreeing with the Court's recent rulings - far from. I am, however, suggesting that how our political system functions and how much we as voters and partisan actors have indulged it for so long was leading to this kind of inevitability. Congress has sacrificed many of its roles and functions to the executive and judicial branches over the past 50 years. What we're seeing now can be directly traced to it. When we left our basic liberal advances in the hands of a few, we imperiled their lasting power. Maybe it's time to stop writing everything on a political dry erase board and start doing things more concretely. Our representatives need to start taking stands and doing the work even if it makes their Novembers more difficult. Just my thinking at the moment. |
Posted by Sympthsical | Thu Jun 30, 2022, 01:05 PM (34 replies)
Senate passes the PACT Act
This was a long-needed bill to help veterans who are grappling with health problems due to toxic exposure during their service.
The Senate on Thursday passed historic legislation that would help millions of veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits during their military service. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/16/politics/senate-vote-burn-pits-veterans/index.html A video on what happened to one veteran after she was exposed (mild content warning, because what happened to her health is awful). |
Posted by Sympthsical | Fri Jun 17, 2022, 06:48 PM (3 replies)
U.S. inflation vs the world.
Thought this was interesting. Inflation rates in the G20. First number is current, second number is previously reported number.
China 2.1 2.1 Saudi Arabia 2.2 2.3 Japan 2.5 1.2 Switzerland 2.9 2.5 Indonesia 3.55 3.47 Australia 5.1 3.5 France 5.2 4.8 Singapore 5.4 5.4 South Korea 5.4 4.8 South Africa 5.9 5.9 Canada 6.8 6.7 Italy 6.8 6 India 7.04 7.79 Mexico 7.65 7.68 Germany 7.9 7.4 Euro Area 8.1 7.4 United States 8.6 8.3 Spain 8.7 8.3 Netherlands 8.8 9.6 United Kingdom 9 7 Brazil 11.73 12.13 Russia 17.1 17.8 Argentina 60.7 58 Turkey 73.5 69.97 https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate |
Posted by Sympthsical | Fri Jun 17, 2022, 04:57 PM (14 replies)
Asian-American Councilman attacked at SF's Land's End
So this shit is still going on:
A Bay Area elected official said he is recovering after he was attacked with a concrete block in San Francisco’s Lands End Saturday. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/millbrae-city-councilman-attacked-with-concrete-block-in-san-francisco/2917494/ Chesa Boudin did very little about anti-AAPI hate crimes, which was another reason he was recalled. A lot of the money and advertising against him originated in those communities. |
Posted by Sympthsical | Mon Jun 13, 2022, 01:26 PM (3 replies)
Washington Post fires reporter over Twitter slapfights
This is one the (out of a million) reasons I think Twitter is absolutely toxic to our culture. So many media figures and ostensible journalists seem to spend half their days trolling and trawling around it as if that were journalism. They constantly get into pissing matches and slap fights. Which is interesting in high school students - maybe - but less so in supposed adult professionals.
Inevitably, this happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/business/media/felicia-sonmez-washington-post.html Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post who in recent days has been at the center of a debate over the organization’s social media policies and the culture of the newsroom, was fired on Thursday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. It bears repeating for the billionth time: Twitter is not real life. Still, if you followed this as it unfolded like I did, it was a glorious trash fire. |
Posted by Sympthsical | Thu Jun 9, 2022, 07:04 PM (6 replies)
So we don't get mail everyday anymore.
This started a month ago. There would be days we didn't get mail. It's highly unusual. Both of us work from home and receive various work things in the mail regularly. During early Covid, we had family living with us for the first year, and we were getting tons of mail. Because we're both home all day, people send things here and we're kind of friends and family's mail depot. So having 6-8 pieces of mail daily is about our usual.
We started noticing it when I ordered a new debit card because my old one was wearing out. I kept checking the mail daily, and more and more days didn't have mail. At one point, we went from Thursday to Tuesday with no mail. Clearly something was up. Neighbors started posting on NextDoor about not getting mail. Finally, people started going to the post office about it. And these are some bullet points of what is being said: - They are extremely short staffed and we may or may not receive mail on any given day. This is suburban Bay Area. Can we fix the Post Office now? Mail only twice a week is kind of not great for even vaguely timed things. Still don't have my debit card. |
Posted by Sympthsical | Wed Jun 8, 2022, 10:22 AM (17 replies)
Man uses M-80s and a drone to annoy neighbors
This has been floating around my NextDoor for awhile, and they finally caught the guy.
It's almost kind of ingenious though. Annoying, frightening, angering. But ingenious. https://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/american-canyon-police-arrest-resident-using-drone-to-ignite-illegal-fireworks/article_87d10b74-e378-11ec-b43b-2f72ec230c94.html After hearing complaints of “large booms” over the past few weeks, the American Canyon Police Department arrested a man shortly after midnight Friday for igniting illegal fireworks using a drone, according to a department press release. |
Posted by Sympthsical | Sat Jun 4, 2022, 12:59 PM (6 replies)