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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • Local classified right now has a 29 foot sloop with extra sails, recent bottom paint, and a 9hp outboard plus dinghy for $5700 CDN. It’s been up a while, you could bargain down, the seller seems motivated. It’s a 1978 boat so really skookum fiberglass on that.

    A mooring buoy costs around $1500 to plop down but sometimes you can get one second hand for less. (Every Canadian is entitled by citizenship to a mooring buoy or two.)

    An equivalent RV costs around $15k with nowhere to park.

    People who assume that they are going to buy stuff new are just locked into a class-based mindset.


  • Around here you can buy a serviceable 29-foot sailboat for $5k, and a mooring buoy for $1k. It’s cheaper than a van by the river FFS.

    People who live on sub-40-ft sailboats are usually just hanging in there. Source: that was nearly me before my fortunes changed slightly. Boats are underpriced because they are a lot of work.

    My sister is a corporate executive. Her walk in closet is objectively larger than a 29-ft live aboard. Hell her ensuite bathroom is bigger than that and she lives in a duplex. You are lacking real world context I think.







  • I actually remain unconvinced by the non-scholarly sources people are providing, authoritatively claiming etymology on scant evidence, and believe they are relying on the self-reported motives of Maverick.

    ‘Gook’ is only generally used as a slur, and other uses are obsolete by a century or extremely regional and rare. In 1944 the slur was the predominant usage, particularly around Maverick.

    Do you have a more authoritative source?


  • Yes, good point, even though everyone in the US military at the time was using it to dehumanize the enemy and a military guy coined the term, I got caught up in etymology, and really it’s usage that matters.

    For a while, particularly in my youth in western Canada, the racist connotations were upfront and emphasized for added contempt.

    I think ignoring that historical usage is a mistake.

    [edit: I am just realizing that some accents pronounce it quite differently–in w. canada it was and still is pronounced like the slur]


  • Ah yes, gobble is turkey sounds. Where, in those sources, does the etymology of the rest of the word get examined?

    Nowhere, except by ‘elephant in the room’ inference: “first used by Texas politician Maury Maverick (1895-1954), … chairman of U.S. Smaller War Plants Corporation during World War II”

    Hmm.

    “so prevalent was the use of the word gook during the first few months of the war that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur banned its use, for fear that Asians would become alienated to the United Nations Command because of the insult.” [wikipedia]

    Hmmmmmm.

    “In modern U.S. usage, “gook” refers particularly to communist soldiers during the Vietnam War and has also been used towards all Vietnamese and at other times to all Southeast Asians in general. It is considered to be highly offensive.” [wikipedia]

    It’s not complicated or obscure. No need to whitewash this. Anyone early genX or older (edit: who grew up in North America) will remember.



  • Yeah I was pointing out that the prison system may be completely ineffective where it’s based on punishment. It’s a critical view, not prescriptive, and designing a new system requires a revolutionary approach, with consideration for the needs of the victims as well as the mental state of the perpetrators.

    I wasn’t proposing anything pat and simple like one-size-fits-all incarceration, completely the opposite, actually. Maybe forever in prison, maybe no jail time. Justice, in terms of repairing things for a victim, might mean a lifelong burden for the convicted, or something else entirely. It would necessarily be complex. More emotional, less rational people would have a problem with that since they can’t see justice without punishment.