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I haven't been able to pay attention to politics for the past week plus, anything important happen besides the revelation that in TYOOL 2014 any jackass can apparently breach Presidential security? I assume not since it's do-nothing election season. (Besides ebola and war in the middle east I guess)
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Oct 2, 2014 19:46
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re EC chat The institutions were created by people with a typical elite's contempt for the lower classes. The fact that the institutions reflect that contempt and today's elected officials largely share that contempt shouldn't be too surprising.
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Oct 2, 2014 19:50
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computer parts posted:The real answer is because it takes a lot of effort to get rid of the EC and effectively it is already gone (faithless electors are rarely a thing). There's a framework in place to completely eliminate it in all but technicality (some states have amended their constitutions to pledge their electors to the national popular vite contingent on states controlling a plurality of EVs saying the same thing). Unsurprisingly these states are mostly high-population and blue states.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:52
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Really though Silver has a point. Any model that assigns a 6-sigma probability (or whatever it was) to any event that has ever happened since the big bang is a model with wrong assumptions. Unfortunately being a public intellectual who didn't come out of academia he has the disadvantage of lacking the training of putting all criticism in hilarious academic purple prose.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:57
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eviltastic posted:Privatized tax collection has been attempted in pretty recent memory at the federal level. The programs were widely regarded as a failure. I know privatizing of collections has happened in some municipalities, dunno about the state level. Republicans occasionally kick up dust about restarting the federal thing. Well they've already contracted out filing your taxes to Turbotax et al instead of having a single official government questionnaire so we've got these rich groups with an interest in the status quo.
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Oct 27, 2014 18:28
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Joementum posted:Has that happened? I'm trying to think of another Democrat who campaigned for President on populist rhetoric, but then governed as a pragmatist, but I'm having trouble coming up with any examples. It would really be a testament to the short memory of our political society if this hypothetical President managed to campaign for reelection by falling back onto largely the same stance.
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Oct 27, 2014 21:34
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My very liberal mom is in a book club with friends of hers from across the political spectrum (a few old hippies and also a bunch of members of the Glenn Beck/Fox News crowd). A few years ago they read some postapocalyptic novel where an EMP knocked out all the electronics and the country fell apart and the only guys who survived were the rugged individualists who had all the guns. My mom was kind of worried about the EMP thing after she read it because all the Fox News folks treated it like it a real threat. Then she asked me if it was something that could actually happen and I was like no and then she got over being afraid of it. fake edit: I just remembered the best part, it had a foreword by a certain possible leader of the civilizing forces telling us how big a threat EMPs were.
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Oct 28, 2014 00:05
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:My dad unironically argued that if we cut the minimum wage, then businesses would be more willing to hire millenials for "job training, since kids don't need the money from flipping burgers that much" and giving them job experience so they can move on to better jobs, and shouted me down when I said that they wouldn't hire people out of the goodness of their hearts if you cut the minimum wage and that they would just pocket the extra change and keep the same amount of workers. I honestly feel insulted that he expected me to take that argument seriously. Anyone who actually thinks that firms would act in any sort of paternalistic manner like this would be a really lovely businessperson, holy poo poo.
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Oct 28, 2014 03:22
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FaustianQ posted:Not to fully devolve into a minwage derail, but what is an effective, easily processed argument that has supporting links to studies that raising the minimum wage will not cause runaway inflation? Besides "The historical record disagrees with your assertion, and labor costs are small fraction of product costs", which apparently the counter argument is "but Big Business will just push it all onto the consumer so I suppose you should shut up and eat poo poo because it can't be fixed, ever". Are you asking for facts and evidence to convince someone who has rejected the facts and evidence that exist? Cheekio posted:If they did, the McDonald's owner across the street who didn't would get ahead and put them out of business. It's just math at that point. Your time's running out to get the election ad money. Also I think this is basically what Vox is trying to do.
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Oct 28, 2014 03:50
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Amergin posted:If I invest in capital and expand production capacity, would I not also need additional personnel to go along with that capacity? Not necessarily since the truly transformative capital goods we're dealing with today are so technologically advanced that they increase capacity purely through increased productivity without having to hire more people, or increase capacity while making humans to various degrees redundant through automation. You could argue that previous eras of transformative technological change with new technologies for capital goods like looms or whatever ended up increasing the return on labor without the need for government intervention because of some confluence of (a) the growth in profits was so much bigger than the ROI on capital goods that some trickled down or (b) there ended up being a net gain of jobs and wages but taking into account the actual inputs and outputs of today's capital goods there's been zero evidence that's been the case for decades. Shear Modulus fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 19:54
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loquacius posted:Guys, I looked at the Senate projections on HuffPo and it was really depressing The public and media have short memories.
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Oct 29, 2014 20:30
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Remember the days right after the shutdown ended, when everyone was certain the GOP's days were over unless it could actually change its message? What happened to those days?
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Lote posted:Yeah. I don't really know who can hate on the Vice President. Ridicule? Sure. Are they trying to imply that, aside from Dick Cheney, that opposing parties hated Al Gore and Dan Quayle while in office? Lots of people hated Tipper because of the parental advisory stickers.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:16
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computer parts posted:Sid Meier finds him endlessly amusing. Dan Quayle is basically second only to Yogi Berra in quotables like these.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:36
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Talmonis posted:This is primarily what led my 18 year old self to vote for George Bush. I wonder how many kids coming of age during those days were driven to the GOP because the Clinton administration made noises about violent video games and music to mollify the "pro-family" crowd.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:00
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:50 |
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Kalman posted:Payroll taxes. That's the obvious one, but most of the federal tax expenditures for individuals only benefit the middle class and rich (home mortgage interest deduction, charitable deductions, retirement savings deductions, higher education deductions, etc).
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Oct 29, 2014 22:51
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