Divemedic

Social Norms

This article is a great illustration of the differences between Gen X and thier kids: 9 social rules Gen X learned as kids that completely confuse Gen Z today. Here they are:

  1. You must answer the phone—every single time it rings
  2. You never call someone after 9 p.m.
  3. You show up exactly when you said you would
  4. You don’t interrupt adults—ever
  5. If you borrowed something, you returned it in better condition
  6. You don’t talk about money, politics, or personal problems in public
  7. You respect the privacy of others (even if it’s inconvenient)
  8. You keep your problems to yourself and “tough it out”
  9. You don’t question authority publicly

Let’s talk about those: Rule 1 was because there was no such thing as caller ID. You answered the phone because people generally called because it was important, and you didn’t want to miss a call.

Rule 2 is about courtesy. My ass is in bed at some point just after nine. I don’t want some ass calling me at 2345, asking me what potato chips to buy. In fact, my phone is in “Do Not Disturb” mode at 9, and it doesn’t come out until 8 the next morning. Use a trick to bust through my DND mode for stupid shit and find yourself on the block list, because you are an inconsiderate ass.

Rule 3. Punctuality. That’s a sign that you respect (or don’t) the person’s time. If you tell me that you are going to meet me somewhere at 4 and you don’t show up on time, what you are saying is that your time is valuable but mine is not. Wasting my time is a guarantee that I won’t want to have anything to do with you- in a professional or personal capacity.

Rule 4: Children shouldn’t involve themselves in adult conversations. It’s unlikely that you have anything meaningful to contribute. You’re a child, and your life experience is exactly zero. That’s just a fact. However, as adults, we shouldn’t even be HAVING adult conversations in your presence. To this day, I don’t know how much money my father made, or even how much they paid for their house. It wasn’t my business to know. This concept also ties in to rules 6, 7, and 8. Mind your own business. If I want your opinion, I will ask you for it. Running around offering unwanted advice, or crying like a little bitch is a sure way to find yourself without any friends.

Circling back to rule 5: If I loan you something, it had better come back in the same condition that I loaned it to you. If it doesn’t, I expect you to make it right. If you don’t, don’t ever come back and ask to borrow anything, because I won’t loan you anything, not even a stick of gum.

Rule 9: There is a way to question authority, and screaming about it while you stamp your feet and shout about how things aren’t fair isn’t the way to do it. The person who wrote this article obviously doesn’t know that, which means he is still a tactless child who likely doesn’t get his way very often.

Gen Z needs to learn what manners are.

By Divemedic, ago

Poverty Calculation

We always hear about poverty, but just how does the government decide what poverty is? In the 1960’s, a formula was created to define poverty. It was assumed at the time that food comprised one-third of a family’s budget, so any family that earned less than three times the amount of money that it took to buy food for the household was assumed to be poor.

Every year, the government calculates what they think it should cost to feed a family, then multiplies that number by three to arrive at a figure for the poverty line. How do they calculate that? How do they know what it costs to feed a family? Easy. They look at what it cost a family in 1963 to sustain itself, then adjust that number for inflation. Nowadays, there are idiots claiming that this number isn’t accurate- and I will grant you it isn’t- but they are using that to claim the new poverty number is 16, that is, a family needs to make 16 times what it costs for food in order to not be poor: $140,000 per year for a family of four. If you are poor, you should get government assistance. By this math, 60% of our nation would be living in squalor.

That’s ridiculous.

Where is that number coming from? The leftists claim that this is because the cost of childcare, Internet, and cell phones. First off, if you can afford cell phones and Internet, you aren’t poor. There are people all over the world who manage to exist without those things. Social safety nets are there to make sure people don’t starve. They aren’t there to buy Pizza Hut, video games, and cell phone porn.

The left is invested in making this economy look bad. They want Americans unhappy with the economy. There is an election next year, and Americans vote with their wallets. The press needs to hammer this home every day: “The economy sucks, but Joe Biden’s 9% inflation was the best economy in the past 50 years. Vote for us.”

Instead, let’s use the World Bank’s definition: Making less than $3.00 per person, per day. Under that definition, a family of four would be living in poverty if they had a household income of less than $4,400 per year. I will even be generous- we live in the richest nation in the world, so make that $10 per person, per day. A family of four who makes less than $14,600 is below the poverty line.

Would it suck to make that little? Sure it would. Being poor sucks. However, $10 per person, per day would make you more wealthy than 61% of the planet. That’s why we can’t afford to keep importing more and more poor people- they aren’t enriching us, they are dragging us down into poverty with them.

By Divemedic, ago

Heretics

The left is angry (aren’t they always?) because Oklahoma University has suspended one of its professors. Why was he suspended? He gave an assignment to his class on transgenderism. The assignment was a 650-word essay reacting to an article about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender.

In her essay, Samantha Fulnecky argued that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. She cited the Bible to support her stance that eliminating gender in society would be “detrimental” because that would put people “farther from God’s original plan for humans.”

She received a zero on the assignment, not because she didn’t conform to the rubric, but because she didn’t conform to the professor’s opinion. The assignment doesn’t even require the students to be on topic or to apply anything they’re learning from the curriculum to the topic, but rather just to have read and reacted to the article. The grading standard for the assignment was 25 points, based upon the following criteria:

  • The paper shows a clear tie in to the assigned article (10 points)
  • The paper shows a thoughtful reaction to the article, rather than just a summary of what it said (10 points)
  • That the paper was clearly written(5 points)

Here is the paper:

In my opinion, the student DID have a clear tie in, so 10 points there. I would have given probably 7 points on the thoughtful reaction, and perhaps a 2 out of 5 for the last point, because the paper was poorly organized and had some errors in punctuation and format, not to mention that she apparently doesn’t know what a paragraph is. Still, that would have been 19/25, or a 76%, which is solid C.

Ms. Fulnecky responded to the zero she received by filing a complaint for religious discrimination. The professor was suspended and the student’s grade was restored. As it should have been. She did the assignment, and should not be penalized for having an opinion that differed from the professor’s.

The professor gave her a low grade, but he was the one who made an error. I was a teacher for a few years, and I would occasionally give writing assignments just like this one. I would grade the papers based upon their use of logic, writing skill, and proper use of source material. I didn’t care which side of the issue the paper took, as long as it was well written. My mantra was that teachers are here to teach you HOW to think, but not to teach you WHAT to think. This professor isn’t doing that.

Look, the professor asked for a paper on students’ opinions. An opinion piece is just that- an opinion that isn’t based in facts. Some things just aren’t meant to be based upon facts. Some arguments are intractable – issues of personal taste or the subjective importance of certain values cannot be resolved empirically. In an argument like that, once both sides have expressed themselves as clearly as possible, if there is still no agreement then there is nothing left to do but acknowledge there is a disagreement, and leave it at that.

If I am holding a flamethrower and you are holding a lit match, it is true that we can both start fires, but pretending that we can just “agree to disagree” about which is better suited to the task of lighting a candle is nonsense. Had this student made such an argument, she would have been wrong, and deserved the grade she received.

In this case, you are asking students to argue about whether or not we should eliminate the position that a person born with DNA and genitals of a particular sex can be whatever sex or gender that they choose, not just forever, but changing on a day to day basis based upon that person’s feelings on that particular moment. Then you are asking them to apply logic to this, but only the logic of which you personally approve.

This professor deserves what they are getting.

By Divemedic, ago

Homicide’s Hidden Stats

The eleven counties in the US with the highest number of homicides are (in order from most to least):

  • Chicago (Cook County)
  • Los Angeles
  • Harris County (Houston)
  • Philadelphia
  • New York City (all 5 boroughs)
  • Wayne County (Detroit)
  • Shelby County (Memphis)
  • Maricopa (Phoenix)
  • Baltimore
  • Dallas
  • Marion County (Indianapolis)

Those eleven counties had a total of 4,758 of the 21,570 homicides in the US during the year 2020. Those eleven cities saw 22% of all US homicides that year, despite the fact that they contain only 41.7 million people, or about 12% of the US population. Those eleven cities have a homicide rate of 11.4 per 100,000. The only thing that shocked me about this was that St. Louis and New Orleans weren’t in this list.

In fact, diving in deeper, there are 31 counties where 42% of US homicides take place. The most violent 62 counties (2% of the counties in the nation) contain 25% of the US population, but represent 52% of all US homicides.

Contrast that with the 1634 counties who had zero homicides in 2020, plus the 502 counties that only had a single homicide, and you have 502 homicides out of a population of 32 million people, a homicide rate of 1.52 per 100,000. That’s right- 18% of the nation (60 million people or so) lives in a county with no more than a single homicide.

The part that doesn’t surprise me was, when I tried to analyze these homicide stats in comparison to the racial makeup of those counties, there was no information publicly available. Since we already know that more than half of all homicides are committed by blacks, it is not surprising that those stats would be hidden, and I am sure that it isn’t Asian software engineers or Amish farmers who are committing the murders in this country.

Sources:

  • John Lott’s report to the Crime Prevention Resource Center
  • National Association of Counties
  • FBI 2020 supplementary homicide report
By Divemedic, ago

Support from Paul

This article says that when poor people see rich people, they are more likely to vote for wealth redistribution. This is the exact reason why we are not a democracy. Flip it- suppose that the 51% of people who are the richest vote to make the 49% of the poorest become slaves. How would this be morally any different than the poorest 51% voting to take the money of the richest 48% for themselves?

This is just more communist horseshit.

By Divemedic, ago

The March

The statistic is 40% of rent controlled housing is occupied by illegals. This limits supply and raises the cost of housing.

Pew research estimates that there are more than 14 million illegals in the nation. The Biden years saw an unprecedented number of illegal entries, aided by the administration’s active participation. My guess is that 14 million is low, perhaps by 15-20 percent, putting the real number at around 16 million. One in every 20 people in the US here illegally, and the other 19 people pay for it.

Now comes news that our judiciary is divided along political lines, with Democrat appointed judges nearly all siding with leftist policies instead of the Constitution.

There is no coming back from this. Trump is a speed bump. All the left needs to do is stall for three more years before continuing their march to communism.

How’s that for a Christmas season cheery thought?

By Divemedic, ago

Class Envy

The left is pushing wealth taxes to the top of their agenda. This article from Reuters tries to make the case that Norway is an example of how wealth taxes can work. Norway is always used as the socialist dream, with all of the social programs that the left loves. What the left ignores is that Norway is not analogous to the US.

For starters, let’s recognize that Norway ranks among the world’s wealthiest thanks to oil, shipping, and fishing. In Norway, the government owns those industries. All of the profits from those industries gets funneled into a government wealth fund, which is in turn invested in companies in other nations, especially the US. However, Norwegian law says that they can only spend 3% of the fund’s $2.1 trillion balance each year. This means they need to find other forms of income to enable them to support the welfare state.

That means a wealth tax on unrealized capital gains. The entire nation is a welfare state, living off of investments made in countries with actual free markets. Since there are no nations that the US could siphon money from, this plan will never work here.

By Divemedic, ago

Selling Out

One thing I admire about Democrats is their cohesion. They stick together and follow the party line no matter what. Say what you want about them, they stay the course. Even though I disagree with them on nearly every point, they at least stick to their misguided principles.

Not so the stupid party, the Republicans. Proving that the Republicans will go back to their default state, selling out their voters, they are already caving and funding more Obamacare subsidies.

By Divemedic, ago