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Messages - Cainad (dec.)

#31
I think you're 75% correct. The missing 25% is the profit motive from privatized prisons and cheap prison labor.

Text of the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

This was the amendment that prohibited the practice of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. Notice the bolded exception, and consider who the United States tends to put in prison a LOT more than everyone else.

Taken from that angle, it starts to make much more sense as to why thing are the way they are. Criminal justice in the United States is deeply warped by profit motive (and, y'know, racism). It meshes nicely with "Get Tough On Crime" and "Zero Tolerance" attitudes: indulge people's gut-level desire to punish wrongdoers and spend effort on scooping people up to exploit, rather than spending effort on improving standards of living or community health.
#32
FAA Part 107. I suspect it matters a lot more in parts of the country where huge chunks of the airspace is controlled. We have a shit ton of airports down in Swamp Yankee territory, as it turns out.
#33
They told me they're looking to expand their team later this year/early next year. I happen to already possess a drone pilot license and have an educational background in spectral imaging/remote sensing, in addition to the other resume fodder I've accumulated so far. So I think I've got a strong chance.

Resume is in their hands. Now I just have to tolerate my current situation. I'll have to pay back my relocation bonus for leaving less than year after being hired, but fuck it. It'll be the best $1500 I ever spent.
#34
Quote from: Doktor Howl on August 18, 2018, 03:41:32 AM
Quote from: Cainad (dec.) on August 18, 2018, 03:25:46 AM
Got a new job in May, thinking a pay raise and a change in scenery would be the ticket out of my funk.

I'm not in a funk anymore, but the downside is that I now realize that this line of work is really not the way I want to spend the next decade, regardless of employer.

Luckily, I have an extremely specific set of nerd skills and credentials that hopefully make me an ideal candidate for a potentially WAY cooler job, in a less expensive part of the country. So if all goes well I only have to put up with this for a few more months.

What line of work are you in, now?

Environmental consulting. There's money there, but the kind of work I'd have to do to advance and start making more money is boring shit. Also, while the new employer does some pretty interesting work (EPA, Puerto Rico, Superfunds, etc), my old employer was honestly a better work environment and a lot of these new jobs are fucking grueling.

The potential new gig involves drones and spectral imaging. Much more my speed.
#35
Quote from: Doktor Howl on August 18, 2018, 03:43:12 AM
Quote from: Cainad (dec.) on August 18, 2018, 03:41:04 AM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 17, 2018, 11:21:33 PM
TUC?

The Unholy Consult, seventh and final book in Bakker's The Second Apocalypse series. It has... an ending. It definitely fucking ends.

Everything is properly fucked, then?

Fucked on the ontological level.

It's the biggest middle finger to traditional epic fantasy that I have ever experienced. I thought it ruled, but I am a bit of a literary masochist.
#36
Should probably mention that I finished reading Peter Coffin's Custom Reality and You a few weeks back. I'm gonna go ahead and recommend it generally, although it goes pretty far-out in a lot of places.

It will come off as very reminiscent of the BIP, but viewed specifically through a political lens. The gist of it is that neoliberal capitalism (a shorthand for whatever fucked up oligarchy of corporations and puppet states we have running the world is) has found lots of ways to extract value from people, and one of the most important ways is via what we here would recognize as the BIP.
#37
Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 17, 2018, 11:21:33 PM
TUC?

The Unholy Consult, seventh and final book in Bakker's The Second Apocalypse series. It has... an ending. It definitely fucking ends.
#38
Contrapoints rules in general. Peterson realized there was a SHIT ton of money to be made in developing and expounding on his anti-SJW platform, and he gets the side benefit of believing that he's saving Western civilization. He ticks many of the boxes for a charismatic cult leader.

Peter Coffin also has some content describing the JPB phenomenon (mostly as a way to get at more general points):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbk_4x70OG4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j66nyzeoO5M
#39
Got a new job in May, thinking a pay raise and a change in scenery would be the ticket out of my funk.

I'm not in a funk anymore, but the downside is that I now realize that this line of work is really not the way I want to spend the next decade, regardless of employer.

Luckily, I have an extremely specific set of nerd skills and credentials that hopefully make me an ideal candidate for a potentially WAY cooler job, in a less expensive part of the country. So if all goes well I only have to put up with this for a few more months.
#40
Quote from: Hoopla on August 17, 2018, 06:23:03 PM
I've also noticed recently that there is a slice of the progressive left who don't seem to be willing to accept when someone has done their time. Does the legal system mean anything anymore? How does a society rebuild something like a legal system? Is that idea as infeasible as the libertarians who want to rebuild the government?

I think it stems from a deep distrust of the legal system's ability to redress certain grievances.

Our society in general has a really hard time digesting the concept of someone having done their time, or having repaid their debt to society. What crimes exactly someone is most concerned about varies, but lots of people feel the need to twist the knife on anyone who's ever fucked up. Being a felon in the USA is practically second-class citizen status, no matter how much you're punished.

OTOH, the only voices I've heard (lol perception bias) calling most strongly for justice reform and rehabilitation are progressive voices. The ways in which the USA's penal system in particular is perverted by private interests and profit are especially strong rallying points.
#41
HURRY, THEY'VE ONLY GOT UNTIL JULY 23RD
#42
 :lulz: Glad you enjoyed.
#43
Yeah even for me I think the prose gets too purple in some spots (and I'm shamelessly into the style of the earlier books, which influenced my writing for several years and gawd I can't stand to read some of my old shit for that reason).

I think the intent is to generate a dreamlike sense, where nothing is literal. It works best when he's setting scenes with lurid descriptions of things like smells and textures, but gets kinda hard to follow when it's supposed to be a character's inner thoughts.
#44
Quote from: Cain on July 13, 2018, 10:32:43 AM
TFA was meh.

TLJ was actually good, though fuck me if it took some time to get there.  The showdown between Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker was worth the price of admission.

No doubt, TLJ's biggest sin is its pacing, which kind of sucks.

I am constantly flabbergasted by people who think Luke's character was mishandled or done a disservice by the film, though. What they did was so much better than anything I'd have come up with.
#45
Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 12, 2018, 09:31:39 PM
Quote from: LMNO on July 12, 2018, 09:29:04 PM
Luckily, TFA was a good movie.

But it was still a reboot.

Which is fine IMO, because The Last Jedi was very much not a reboot and it made a bunch of wieners really, really mad. This is made even better by the fact that it was actually excellent.

Currently 46% audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes vs 91% critical approval. A huge chunk of that is review-bombing by trolls, but still. Watching the total failure of some people to tolerate a deconstruction of their cultivated identity has been a joy.

(here's where I got the term "cultivated identity": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Lf1GcG5M4)