quoththeraven

A non-political joke that may be relevant to forum members' interests. Sorry, no splashy graphics: Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks, months, maybe years. In honor of Jackhammer.

That's on a par with the ad for ham for Passover.

I get that. As the daughter of an engineer (chemical, not aeronautical) and a firm believer in Murphy's Law, the idea of flying in something made with materials whose long-term performance is unknown concerns me. Flying is so safe relative to other means of transportation that I'm not excited at introducing this level of uncertainty.

I was going to compare passengers to guinea pigs or, to be more up to date, beta testers.

No one obtains tenure without research publications. Hence, the term "publish or perish." It's true that the lab time involved in science research may be more extensive or taxing than is the case for research in the social sciences, much of which involves polls, computers, and statistics, but it's also true that the actual lab work is done primarily, if not entirely, by graduate students and lab assistants. Six hours a week doing research may be an expectation, but I would be surprised if it were enough to produce the amount and level of publications necessary to attain tenure unless California state universities are noticeably laxer than the private universities at which some friends of mine teach. I attended a state university on the East Coast, and one of my professors, although tenured and universally lauded for his teaching ability and service to the history department, was never promoted to full professor because of his lack of publications. He published his magnum opus after he retired.

To go back and add to the original discussion: A NYT blog post an academic I respect specializing in media and sociology tweeted recently with this tagline: "Compelling evidence that attaining a 4-yr college degree leads to 22% higher wages for 'marginal' students": http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/upshot/college-for-the-masses.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0 As to a point made above about political correctness on campus: Some professors feel under siege from their students. I don't get it. (Notice he doesn't include any examples, something that tends to undermine one's argument.) Here's a good rebuttal: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122010/professors-do-live-fear-not-liberal-students Excerpts: Schlosser suggests that the campus left has become more controlling and censorious over the past six years, but is that really credible? The highest profile, most striking case of academic censorship on campuses in the last few years doesn't fit into Schlosser's narrative at all. Steven Salaita had his offer of employment rescinded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after he tweeted vehemently in opposition to Israeli violence against Palestinians. The impetus for the dismissal did not come from sensitive students, but from donors. It was top-down enforcement of a conservative party line, in other words, not a bottom-up enforcement of a liberal one. .... It's no different than any other sector," said Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "The same thing could happen to you in corporate America if you say or do something that is considered unacceptable." Thomas isn't saying that teacher's [sic] should be fired if they do something the administration deems unacceptable, but that the pressures and realities of the university and the corporate world are not wildly anomalous. And white men in the university [such as Schlosser], as in corporate America, are not wildly disadvantaged.... As David Perry, a white man, says, "We still dominate the ranks of the professoriate, the higher echelons of administration, and basically the rest of the country." Here's an even more direct response from a former adjunct professor who makes the point I made on Twitter in response to the earlier article that his problem was with the administration, not the students: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identity Excerpts: I was a liberal adjunct professor at a large university until 2013, and my liberal students never scared me at all. I covered sensitive topics in my courses, including rape, capital punishment, female genital mutilation, and disputed accounts of mass atrocities. Our classroom debates were contentious, and forced students to examine their own biases. I kept an "on-call" list that pressured students to participate actively in those discussions. I did not use trigger warnings. I never had any complaints. I bring up my own experiences as a reminder that if the plural of anecdote isn't data, the singular of it sure as hell isn't, either. The fact that I enjoyed my time teaching doesn't tell you anything about the state of education in America — and neither does the fact that the pseudonymous author of this Vox article is a liberal professor who is terrified of his liberal students. .... In this case, that truthy conclusion is that the rise of identity politics is doing real harm — that this new kind of discourse, whether you call it "identity politics" or "call-out culture" or "political correctness," is not just annoying or upsetting to the people it targets, but a danger to academic freedom and therefore an actual substantive problem to be addressed. You're a professor. Why are you scared of students? In fact, a closer read of the article shows that the actual problem the professor faces isn't the rise of a scary new breed of students. Students, after all, have been complaining about their professors and just about everything else since time immemorial. Rather, if university faculty are feeling disempowered in their classrooms, that's because they do, in fact, have less power at work:the shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs and the corresponding rise in the numbers of poorly paid adjuncts means many university teachers are in a precarious position right now. .... In that context, it's hardly surprising that non-tenured university lecturers would take an extremely conservative approach to any perceived threat to their job security. As the "liberal professor" wrote, "In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody." That is a real issue, with real implications for education, and for academic freedom. But pinning the blame on students' embrace of identity politics is a mistake. If adjuncts and junior faculty members feel insecure enough to censor their teaching or work, then that's a problem in their relationship with their universities, not in their relationships with their students. Indeed, in that academic environment, it wouldn't matter if liberal identity politics disappeared tomorrow. Some students will always be unhappy about something, and if faculty are this nervous, that will influence their teaching. Indeed, the article notes that the only actual complaint the professor ever received was from a conservative student angry at his "communistical" tendencies because he refused to blame poor black homeowners for the 2008 financial crisis. The problem isn't the substance of student complaints — the problem is that university lecturers are so terrified of the effect student complaints could have. That's a problem to be solved by universities having faculty members' backs, not by somehow silencing the debate over identity politics. .... [T]he article garnered so much attention because it seems like it's raising new evidence that identity politics is a bad thing — not just a kind of discourse that some people dislike — by identifying real harm. In January, liberal writer Jonathan Chait took a stab at doing something similar in New York Magazine, critiquing political correctness by claiming it was an attempt to "expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies," and that such efforts were doomed to undermine the freedom they sought to protect. And now the Vox article seems to suggest that the harm is to academic freedom: even the professors are scared! These kids today with their identity politics are threatening the academy! It's not surprising that people are eager to grasp at such conclusions, because without some kind of real harm to point to, critiques of identity politics collapse in on themselves. As Matt Yglesias wrote in January, the term "identity politics" is generally used to refer to feminist or anti-racist critiques, but that assumes that traditionally marginalized groups are the only people with an "identity." "The implication of this usage," Yglesias wrote, "is that somehow an identity is something only women or African Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal." Citing the supposed threat to the academy is another way to claim that arguments against identity politics are rooted in pure reason and are trying to protect universal concerns, rather than silence specific concerns raised by marginalized people that we'd rather not listen to. (After all, if you're going to dismiss campus identity politics as a debate "in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed," as the anonymous professor does, then you need to come up with something beyond your own feelings to explain why that's a problem.) But "identity politics are bad" is the wrong lesson to take from the experiences of the professor who wrote for Vox. If adjuncts and tenure-track professors are disempowered in relation to their students, the solution isn't to attack students, as the professor did, sneering at undergraduates with too many feelings or an unsuspecting woman who had the misfortune of tweeting about the biases of scientific research and discourse. Rather, it's to focus on a university system that treats students as customers and faculty as the interchangeable means of production. If you care about academic freedom, care about that.

As partisan as things always have been -- and in some ways the rhetoric, if nothing else, was worse in the 19th century, when personal invective was considered par for the course, than it is now-- there was a time in my lifetime when there was more bipartisanship, especially on foreign policy, and less polarization. From what I understand, this might have been a leftover from WWII, when the country was mostly united. Nothing unites us as easily as a common enemy. The Civil Rights Act and other domestic legislation of the 60s could not have passed without Republican votes wrangled by Everett Dirksen behind the scenes. (In other words the Republicans still remembered their Civil War era roots and weren't white supremacists' party of choice back then.) Richard Nixon, may he rest in peace -- bright but neurotic guy who demanded his underlings put protecting him above their offices, which was his undoing -- was a lefty on domestic policy by comparison to Republicans these days. Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan served in an important policy position under Nixon. The EPA and the Legal Services Corporation were founded during the Nixon Administration. He may have made changes along the margins that favored business more than had been the case under LBJ, and his propensity for dirty tricks and seeing enemies around every corner led the FBI and CIA to even greater violations of civil liberties than before, but his administration and that of Gerald Ford largely continued LBJ's domestic policies. This unity remained even under Ronald Reagan, whose administration I still mostly despise but for whom I don't have the hatred I used to have. (George W. Bush's administration and reading excerpts from Reagan's diaries cured me.) Reagan and Speaker Tip O'Neill had a cordial working relationship even though they differed over policy, and O'Neill let his Democrats vote on bills instead of blocking them unless a majority of his party members supported them, as the House Republicans now do. It seems as though things went south starting with the Clinton administration, mostly because the Republicans decided that bipartisanship and putting the interests of the people as a whole first, as opposed to the people who could get them nominated, was no longer in their interests. I don't have any solutions to offer other than to suggest that we get the government we deserve. People complain about negative ads, but they work. They complain about sensationalism in media, but it gets clicks and attention. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

I've said this before: I think Elizabeth Warren is superbright and her ideas, especially about the financial crisis and economic issues, are on the money. Her background is in law and economic analysis. She works from facts and studies, not assumptions, and she's willing to slay sacred cows. But ... she has never in her life run anything or been an administrator. She is a truthteller, not (as far as I can tell) a natural at legislative negotiation and compromise. She's not enough of a whore, to use Steven Kesslar's term. She is far more useful as a Senatorial gadfly and conscience than she would be running for preside, and her virtues are too intellectual and left-wing for her to win. Much the same can be said of Bernie Sanders. She'd also make a fine Supreme Court justice.

Huh. One of the reasons I avoided majoring in sociology, which us perhaps closer to my real area of interest than political science and history, is that at the time the department was the domain of doctrinaire Marxists. There were probably a couple of Marxists in the poly sci department, and as it was I wrote an honors thesis on Marx, among others, but they were not doctrinaire. This was forty years ago. Can you please point me to concrete data, as opposed to nonspecific grumbling and speculation, that freedom of expression (which I take to mean the professor's freedom to say what he wants) has been impinged other than when professors sexually harass or otherwise treat students on a basis other than merit? The cases of academic freedom of which I am aware concern tenured professors disagreeing with the administration finding themselves shoved out the door. Where is this indoctrination taking place?

I think my confusion has to do with the lack of licensing for artists and no central professional group enforcing standards, though tattoo parlors are supposed to comply with health mandates.

The biggest problem with tattoo parlors is that the profession is unregulated. I've seen posters here decry the nanny state and overregulation, but when health is at stake, some regulation is better than none even though it might wind up being administered in an overly bureaucratic way.

Another drawback of Uber: their ability (or inability) to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, which has caused some pretty ugly behavior, such as when a driver told a woman in a wheelchair that folds and fits in the trunk to take a hike (she accepted a ride from a female stranger instead), and has landed them in court. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/21/uber-disability-laws-don-t-apply-to-us.html Sorry, the "we're a tech company, not a ridesharing service" argument doesn't pass the laugh test. This is known as a "form over substance" argument. Guess what? Judges ignore the form and go for the substance. The employee vs. independent contractor argument is a closer call, but I'd argue Uber loses that one, too. Either it enforces companywide standards and policies, making its drivers employees, or it doesn't, making its drivers independent contractors, but without effective branding and with a highly variable experience that will be unhelpful to establishing a good reputation. I get the popularity, I really do, but I'm not sure the service works for me. I'd rather ride with someone with a track record who had to pass a test showing knowledge of the city who's also aware there are regulations governing her or his business. That is just not true with Uber, as these stories demonstrate. The whole "commercial use without notice invalidates your private auto insurance" bothers me because it sure looks like Uber's pricing is predicated on Uber's insurance being secondary and the driver's insurance being primary. If their drivers' insurance is out of the picture because the drivers are all relying on it when in fact driving for Uber invalidates coverage, Uber is undercharging and engaged in unfair competition, thereby legitimizing all the bitching and moaning by licensed drivers. Sorry, besides the fact my phone is too small for web-based apps to work (I think), I'm not too crazy about getting into some stranger's car without real-time monitoring. Can I tell Uber I'll only accept rides from women? Doesn't that complicate things? There are horror stories out there, and Uber can only be helpful after the fact. Another situation I'd rather avoid upfront than try to fix afterward.

That may in fact be a difference, but it's unclear and probably impossible to determine to what extent it's a product of social conditioning and to what extent it's inherent. Also, there's a lot of variability, and as is said in the thread about the extent to which escorts are fucked up, generalizations, while snappy sounding, can't catch life's nuances, as your second paragraph proves. The only thing we can say with certainty is that social conditioning plays a role. See research on operant conditioning, positive reinforcement, and many studies of gender stereotypes. There are other reasons women are less likely to hire escorts. Sexual shame, women as a group having less in the way of financial resources with which to hire escorts, a belief that monogamy is protective of women, concern about disease and safety, and a smaller pool of escorts from which to pick, since there isn't enough demand or money being made for an escort to survive on female clients alone. Women wind up seeing bi escorts because the straight escorts have to gear their shtick to muscle worship, domination, or whatever, and may not be able to transition easily to the kind of attitude and services women are likely to want.

There is such a thing as platonic love. That's how I'd describe the kind of love between client and escort (or escort and client, or both) that is healthy and okay to have beyond the session. I can't turn my emotions on and off the way some of you have described. I can either like the escort and love the experience, or I can love both, but for me, the love for both can't be confined to a session. It's when the client wants a romantic relationship or sex off the clock or becomes obsessed that trouble begins.

The day this happened, the talk on my Twitter feed was all about how these men who'd actually shot at cops were arrested without incident whereas other men who were unarmed and suspected of lesser crimes were killed. In fairness, in this case the cops knew the suspects were armed and probably felt more shooting would only lead to a bloodbath. OMG, I just made the very same case the Black Panthers made in the 60s. No wonder I was a Black Panther sympathizer when I was a teenager.

I like cowboys as much as the next person who likes dick, but the words "barn sex" make me think of hay poking my back and more unmentionable places. I feel itchy just thinking about it.

I like the photographs that look the least staged the best. That means the ones that are neither from porn (since those are obviously staged) nor are obviously of models. The exceptions: photos of celeb hotties. I will stare at photos of Jim Morrison circa 1967-68 all day long.

I also couldn't see them after you posted them (no image at all; the space was entirely blank), but can see them now.

No need to apologize for being a self-proclaimed "anal little twat." It's called "attention to detail."

As I understand it, Jayne on Firefly was the first to use the phrase "I'll be in my bunk." I see it used a lot in female-majority internet enclaves to praise erotic/smutty writing or art. I've also seen UNF (universal noise of fucking) and occasional references to lady boners. About the decor: I'm pretty sure that's a mirror behind them, but is that a circular cutout above the bed or another mirror?

I was going to guess dp as well. Between this gif and the previous one, I'll be in my bunk. (Thank you, Firefly.)

It's possible people who hire him now don't want the notoriety or think there's no need to post additional reviews. Or that Alencar has said not to. There might have been a drop in the number of people he sees, but as far as I know, he's still actively escorting. Of course, there could be other, more nefarious reasons, but they're not necessarily the case.

I'm not sure he'd switch for a first-time client, but the Legendary Dave out of DC is another possibility. So is Tyger Bhugghatti of Portland, OR. They work together out of Dave's Fuck House (it's actually an apartment) once or twice a year. That might be a better possibility for switching, as one of them would be able to keep track of what you're doing and help you do whatever it was you were doing to the other. Both are versatile as well. The caveat to check first about how they'd feel about being bound during a first appointment would also apply to Raul.

Contributing to the thread Jackhammer started is the best tribute possible. Well done, Daddy.

I haven't checked since I got back from DC, but before I left I paid $1.69 a gallon in Bergen County, NJ. Of course, the prices I paid on my way home were much higher ($2.37 at a Hess station on RI Avenue in DC); I should have waited until I was in MD to fill up.