jerryskids

Tariffs can come and go with the swipe of a pen. If there is anything Trump likes more than tariffs, it's winning. Also himself. I don't think his end game is large permanent tariffs, but he may implement some if he thinks it makes sense as part of an overall brinkmanship play. If they don't work like he had hoped, he can easily undo them. It's not like threatening to drop a nuke, after all.

I do not know the details of either our trade situations or the specifics of the proposed tariffs to provide an informed response.

Why, he has a valid point. A major concern of opening women's spaces (including restrooms) up to trans folks is that it opens them up to abusers of all orientation.

I have offered serious reasons; did you forget already? The theoretical ideal free trade market presumes all parties have comparable cost structures, and that the end result is trade balance. You may have noticed we have neither with China. Hence, tariffs are a tool available to use to help balance things out. It is why Trump put tariffs on China his first go round, and Biden left them in place (recently increased them in fact). https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/politics/china-tariffs-biden-trump/index.html I don't recall you whining about any of Biden's tariff actions, or inactions.

Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83 Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple “Alice’s Restaurant” was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts. https://archive.is/hjhou#selection-675.0-679.130

Yes, I know. I thought it was simpler than a long title like "Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83"

Do you enjoy wishing failure on our country? What will happen to the cats?

It's a fascinating sociological phenomenon. The admitted Lefties on this site (Tim, Worms, Squissy) seem to be doing well and wishing the country success, but the alleged conservatives who have TDS (Gutter, Rusty) are apoplectic and seem to want the country to epically fail. It's going to be a fun 4 years watching these virtue-signaling women rooting for our country to do poorly.

No. Never heard of it until now. Interestingly, we lived right at that intersection in our good friend's condo three years ago between house sale and purchase, but it seems that Amy's had been closed for at least 6 years.

Dear me... https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/americans-see-ideal-salary-at-270k-6244340/ Have we as a society just decided to stop parenting with Gen Z?

Did you oppose the Inflation Increase Act? Student Loan Forgiveness/ vote purchase?

I don't think it's that hard, or needs a separate locker room facility. I've said here many times: my youngest daughter has Type 1 diabetes. She is free to pursue happiness... except where she isn't, in the interest of societal good. She can't join the military for instance. Trans adults should be free to lead their lives as trans, but not to enter women's safe spaces. I'll again exclude bathrooms, because I do agree that that is a complex issue. Agreed?

No

So, you agree with my first paragraph?

Thanks. I would argue though that it isn't that complex. Biological men in changing rooms, locker rooms, prisons, or other safe spaces should be a default hard stop. Same with women's sports. I can see the argument about restrooms, but my girls are in their 20s so it isn't as visceral an issue for me. Can we agree on the first paragraph?

Getting back to the OP: - @IGotWormshas been fine. Certainly salty, but he more than any other of the libs here is willing to acknowledge that the Democrat Party is broken and needs some fixing. - @OldMaidwas gone for a while, came for a day or two to yell at us, then has disappeared again. - Most of the others are generally here, although maybe not as much. - And then there is gutter, currently posting as @The Phantom's Phantom, who seems completely unhinged. I would not have guessed that he would be the one to take this L the worst.

One of our best friends works in finance at a major university. She said that they (finance) hated making low-tier bowls -- they typically lost millions of dollars.

Somebody mentioned Gen X -- if you click through to the link of the actual survey, Gen X is actually there, they just weren't called out in the article. Their answer was $212K, which is higher than millenials. This makes some sense. Gen X is by and large the generation raising kids these days, so it seems reasonable that they would consider a larger salary ideal vs. millenials. Boomers are largely retired, and don't need as much. Then there is Gen Z with their $600K... eesh. Perhaps you can argue that they are too young to have a reasonable expectation? Then again, we let these people vote as if they know something...

I don't disagree with you that "ideal" and "comfortably" are subjective terms which are open to interpretation, nor that we've had inflation. My point tho was the huge disparity between Gen Z and even millenials -- $600K vs. $180K. It perhaps speaks to the differences in interpretation of those words by the youngest generation, as well as expectations.

First, good for you on the self defense stuff. If a stranger picks up a kid and carries them out, and the kid just wiggles and cries, bystanders will presume it is a disciplinary situation. Gouging eyes and kicking balls though, that's not normal and gets attention. I would add to teach them to scream "you're not my father/mother!" as well. We used to work on this with kids in our martial arts classes (it helped that we had helmets with face masks, and cups). Anyway, I would propose that we are both concerned with different slippery slopes. Yours is that people use the bathroom issue as an anti-trans issue. That's fair. Mine is that letting them in bathrooms, if not in and of itself dangerous, is a step in the Saul Alinsky playbook of letting them into locker rooms, prisons, and women's sports. Sometimes the thing is just the thing, though. On the locker rooms and prisons, to me that is an easy hard stop. Similar for women's sports, definitely contact sports, but any where a biological male would have a competitive advantage. You legislate to the norm -- if there is some obscure case like the boxer who was identified as female at birth, you address that as a one-off. The bathrooms to me are a little harder; I'd default to "no" because of young girls in particular, but like I said, I don't know that any guy can truly empathize with the concerns women have in the presence of large men. I'd just as well let women duke that one out and decide. In the end, IMO it's unfortunate that opposition to biological men in women's locker rooms, say, is argued by both sides as whether or not the person is truly a woman. I think that distracts from the real concerns. I would prefer that my "side" take more of an approach of "we understand that you identify as a woman, but for the good of society, we can't let you into these spaces. Here is why." There are clear reasons, many of which I've mentioned already.

He won this thread.

I've been meaning to respond to this, as you repeatedly ask the above, but I hadn't gotten around to it. When I tried searching for statistics of violent crimes BY transgenders, all of the results were for violent crimes AGAINST transgenders. Odd. I tried both Google and DuckDuckGo. You would think that such algorithms would be sophisticated enough to understand my search. Regardless, I'm left to conclude that either such data doesn't exist, or they don't want me to see it. More importantly though, there is a danger in relying on past results to predict future results, particularly when the systems generating those results have undergone significant change. I point this out frequently to @The Real timschochet whenever he quotes statistics about the economic benefits of immigration. In the case of trans women, until recently we have had much fewer trans people, and those generally had to go through years of therapy, much of the latter end I presume in learning how to coexist in society. But now we have a social contagion (please don't argue we don't, you are too smart for that) and a large industry built around "gender affirmation." Think about that -- "affirmation" implies that we accept your belief as the default. Much has been documented about the comorbidities that trans folks have with other mental health issues; if you want me to search for some links I can. Somebody posted that link about the trans woman wanting to bang Mace's face into the cement until she dies. You can say that's a one-off, but such folks are out there. Also, this recent surge in trans acceptance (if not celebration) has begun to enable a class of sh1tty men who are predators but not trans to get into women's safe spaces. All of this is to say that you cannot look at statistics from the past in this instance. I'll end with a discussion I had with my wife yesterday on this topic. She is a taekwondo black belt so better trained than most to defend herself, but not large, 5' 1". I told her about this thread and she pointed out that women wear some weird stuff in the interest of fashion, and if you have a romper on, you are basically sitting in the stall nekkid. She didn't like the idea of a large man in the room, or the stall next door, while feeling so vulnerable. I like to think of myself as empathetic, but I don't think any guy can truly empathize with women on this topic.

Indeed. I would point out that gender-affirming care is often a euphemism for medical castration, but you claim to have me on ignore.

Unfortunately, that's all that's left.

I intentionally misspelled the word to avoid triggering folks like yourself. I'd say HTH, but you put me on ignore while not ignoring way more offensive posters, because you know that you have no response to my posts, like this one. Feel free to prove me wrong.