Confessions of Atlas

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

More than any other single Atlas member, it was Beet who convinced me to back Warren in Aug/Sept 2019. By that point it was clear that Yang, Inslee, and Harris probably weren't going to be the next president.

Although, I like the fact that Warren has devoted roughly the past (24) Years towards issues such as Bankruptcy Protection and Financial/Banking Sector Reform (and is a verifiable expert on these subjects), these issues are peripheral to me, simply because, like many working-class Americans, we don't have enough financial assets on the table to have a stake in the system, and bread and butter issues like minimum wage increases, cost of health insurance, a tax structure that is overwhelmingly geared towards the money bags at the top, while we get no pay raises.

Mind you, Warren's interest in Household Finance precedes her interest in Financial/Banking Sector Reform and defined her approach to Bankruptcy Protection as well. She began working on this issue with Jay Westbrook, her collaborator in As We Forgive Our Debtors when she began teaching at UT Law in 1981. By the mid-1980s she was writing strong arguments against the conservative Law and Economics movement and its tendency to put theoretical economics over the empirical study of households and their situations. But the subject is highly personal for her as it ultimately derives from her childhood experience of her father's heart attack in 1961 and her mother's entry into the workforce. You can see this in her work throughout her career, like in The Two Income Trap, where she points out that single income households have a reserve worker that can pick up the slack.

For Warren, the Household is the unit of the economy and its financial condition is the prism by which she examines the economy more broadly. The 2004 video of her explaining the mechanism of the 2008 financial crisis, you see her framing it in terms of Household Finance. And her policies are built around this frame as well. The biggest household expense is Housing, so she released an aggressive housing plan early. In addition to Healthcare, which already gets a lot of attention, Childcare and Education are huge expenses, and she released detailed plans on those early as well. On the income side? When asked why she's running for president she says because a single minimum wage job is not enough to support a family. This approach of focusing on the micro and personal and expanding out from there is her signature.

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

(too lazy to get the timestamp right; can't quote directly from the thread)

Bernie is not a racist, but he is the opposition of the Trump era. The same tinge of nationalism, populism, identity politics-that-disclaims-identity politics, cult of personality, only with a left wing spin instead of Right.

Warren OTOH is the opposition to the Trump era. She is an economic progressive without being an economic reductionist, and insists on opposing the Trump right's misogyny, xenophobia and racism on its own terms.

[bagelman]

I check my posting history for recommendations way too often.

I get the sense that everybody does this. If you check “Who’s Online,” you’ll see that people are constantly viewing their own profiles. Like, is there a reason to view your profile other than obsessively checking your posts for recommendations? I don’t think so.

I view my own profile constantly.

[TheReckoning]

      I will sometimes post something really stupid just because seeing that I have no new alerts is kind of boring, and I want to post something that I know will get a reply.

[Aurelius]

I have olawakandi on ignore lately. 10% of his posts are gold but the other 90% are repetitive drivel. I trust that people will quote or sig the really good ones and this saves me from having to scroll past SECULAR DIXIECRAT Crt packing Blk judicial review Marbury yada yada yada for the 10000th time.

[Aurelius]

      I will sometimes post something really stupid just because seeing that I have no new alerts is kind of boring, and I want to post something that I know will get a reply.

I should do this more often.

I am gaining a reputation on this Blog for my steaming hot takes. Little do you all know that the ones I post here are just the tip of the iceberg!

[Crumpets]

I've apparently never posted in this thread, so here are a couple:

- When I was in high school, I did a project which involved writing an original one-act play. I ended up writing a super weird story about a rich brother and sister in Victorian England who are really flirty with each another and eventually get drunk and have sex. I still think it was a funny and well-written story, and I actually submitted it for a local award and got an "honorable mention," so it wasn't just insane ramblings. But also like, what possessed me to write something like that? I'm just glad I'm an only child so nobody got any funny ideas.

- When I was in 1st grade, we did a mock school election the day of the 2000 election, and I voted for Dubya for some godforsaken reason.

- I feel very left out of gaming culture. As someone in my late 20s, it seems like something I should know way more about than I do. I couldn't even tell you what games people are playing today or what people do/watch on Twitch.

- I almost never sit down and read a book. I was assigned so much reading over the course of my life that it just feels like work now and I don't get pleasure out of it. Which is a bit sad, because it's something I used to enjoy a lot. If I have some reason to read some specific book - especially if someone I have a crush on recommends it to me - I have no problem binge reading and getting as much out of it as humanly possible, but I almost always do it because I need to learn something or because I want to be able to talk about it with someone else, and basically never because I'm genuinely interested in what I'm reading. The last book I remember reading and enjoying for its own sake and not because I was reading it for work or for someone else was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I'm pretty sure I read in 2016.

[Kleine Scheiße]

Test post please ignore

[Kleine Scheiße]

^I CONFESS!!!!!!! THIS wasn't actually even a test. You have been bamboozled!

[T'Chenka]

Test post please ignore

No. I'm exercising my yellow avatar energy. Cope.

[Crumpets]

I have anxiety about talking over the phone, especially with people I don't know well personally. So as a result, my voice gets really high because I'm nervous, and lots of people think I sound like an old woman. I've been addressed as "ma'am" several times over the phone, and I've had people ask me to hand the phone to myself, because they're trying to call me and think I'm someone else, even members of my own family.

[T'Chenka]

I shot the sheriff

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

... but I did not shoot the deputy

[Schiff for Senate]

      I will sometimes post something really stupid just because seeing that I have no new alerts is kind of boring, and I want to post something that I know will get a reply.

NGL, I’ve done this once or twice myself. Lit the firecracker 🧨 and sat back and waited for the fireworks 💥

[Schiff for Senate]

I have committed voter fraud before, and that is a major reason why I support increased electoral security (I voted using an absentee mail ballot, with permission from the owner of the ballot and only for generally downballot races, but still, illegal).

It's always projection.

[Crumpets]

Back in ye olden days of c. 2004-5, I used to do a summer hiking camp led by one of my teachers at school. He was really into getting us to sing traditional Central European songs like "The Happy Wanderer" while we hiked, and his big thing was teaching us a bunch of polkas. Later, c. 2008, when I had my first "job" doing trail maintenance at a ski club, I stayed at the cabin there and they had all those same sorts of music on cassettes which we'd listen to on the boom box. It was really the only entertainment we had there.

So, the long and the short of it is that I'm really fond of polkas and really all those cheesy European folk songs from polkas to oompah bands to yodeling to whatever other random stuff the YouTube algorithm decides to throw at me when I'm on a roll.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I have anxiety about talking over the phone, especially with people I don't know well personally. So as a result, my voice gets really high because I'm nervous, and lots of people think I sound like an old woman. I've been addressed as "ma'am" several times over the phone, and I've had people ask me to hand the phone to myself, because they're trying to call me and think I'm someone else, even members of my own family.

If certain (even necessary) tasks require the use of a phone, I will postpone them, perhaps indefinitely. (fx I still have yet to cancel or modify my American phone plan with a service provider that apparently only has functional tech support via phone and during American work hours) I will even prefer to make the drive down to the store rather than deal with issues over the phone.

If I am willing to call someone for official reasons, I prefer to be in a room alone with the other caller on headphones. For whatever reason the idea of a third party being able to hear the call terrifies me--not because of surveillance concerns, but because of some sort of social cowardice disguised as courteousness. My off-brand Apple earbuds stopped working before I left the US (and I'm too lazy/cheap to find some new ones), so I even barely use Duolingo now with the speakers on unless the door is closed and I think my host family is out of the apartment.

[America Needs a 13-6 Progressive SCOTUS]

Back when the Adobe Flash version of Bloons Tower Defense 4 existed, I found a way to bypass all the games paywalls for free by downloading the swf file off the Ninja Kiwi website, and using JPEXS flash editor to change the games code (which was an extremely trivial coding task), and writing up a custom local HTML document to play the altered version of the game.

[Crumpets]

On the Wikipedia page for the Pig War, one of the alternate names given is the "Pig and Potato War." This is the result of an edit I made way back in the early days of Wikipedia, based on the source of "that's what they called it on a field trip I went on in 3rd grade, and I'm from Washington, so that's a legit source." And while I think that is a legit source, I have found no evidence that the war was called that in any other source before I made that edit. However, since I made that edit, it seems to have become a very commonly used name for the conflict.

And while that's basically the definition of harmless, it just goes to show how much influence random teens on Wikipedia can have in shaping how actual important things are studied. See also: Random dude who has completely upended all research on Scots by accidentally writing most Scots Wikipedia articles in what he thought was Scots, but that was actually just him trying to write English with a Scottish accent.

[Technocracy Timmy]

I’m gay.

[citizenZ]

I've had posts deleted for "trolling" and "hyperbole" that were intended as legitimate posts.

[Schiff for Senate]

I've had posts deleted for "trolling" and "hyperbole" that were intended as legitimate posts.

Does it count as a confession if most of us guessed it anyway?

[jamestroll]

I’m gay.

so am I.

But you are safe from me whitey.

[FairBol]

Thought this would be fun.

Hmmm...deep dark secrets.  Bless me Father, for I have sinned. 

I have spent time in a county jail cell.  It was a long time ago, and I was a different person at the time...but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. 

[PSOL]

My voyeurism makes me do things near condominiums near me

[Meclazine for Israel]

I have anxiety about talking over the phone, especially with people I don't know well personally. So as a result, my voice gets really high because I'm nervous, and lots of people think I sound like an old woman. I've been addressed as "ma'am" several times over the phone, and I've had people ask me to hand the phone to myself, because they're trying to call me and think I'm someone else, even members of my own family.

I only talk on the phone to detect anxiety and nervousness in people.

In business, the voice does not lie. I can tell if someone is going to purchase by the tone of their voice.

Seriously considering ditching the smart phone for one of these.


.

[LabourJersey]

I went to college with someone who is currently a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. I disliked him enough to consider making a donation to his opponent (I did not).