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To whatever extent there will be cuts they will probably be for Republicans to lampshade their failure to extract major concessions. If the cuts were just the return of unspent Covid money that really wouldn’t be a big deal. The odds of even 10% of the cuts Republicans are asking for going through are nil. Cuts that large would ruin the economy by themselves and end Biden’s presidency, so he has no motivation to agree to them. (Also annoyed at the reporting of the Republican bill that doesn’t phrase it as what it is, five trillion god drat dollars in cuts to future spending. Five times as much as the 2011 sequestration deal, and ten times as much if you only count non-defense spending. If McCarthy’s bill is the best they can do then we are 100% headed for the Court.) Gumball Gumption posted:Putin was raised under state capitalism, not communism. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 20:50 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 20:47
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Nelson Mandingo posted:So can someone explain with more detail about using the 14th amendment to raise the debt ceiling? Most news that I'm reading just reports on the fact they're considering it and that's that. Okay in simple terms without more funding from congress the only tools available are issuing more money (the coin being a legal method to do so) or issuing more debt. The coin is hideously inflationary as a way of paying off debt, it looks really bad to just mint money to pay down existing obligations. Issuing debt is what normally happens, the problem being that the interest on that debt keeps piling up. Eventually issuing debt to pay debt will put you past that limit. The Fourteenth Amendment posted:Section 4: The theory is that the executive is constitutionally not allowed to miss debt payments, and so the lesser law purporting to limit the total amount of debt to an arbitrary number is an unconstitutional attempt to cause the US to default on debts, and that under the 14th the executive can simply issue more debt to cover those obligations, so long as non debt related expenditures still follow congresses budget. You might note that's how it works in most other democracies, where the legislature simply approves a budget and taxes and the executive is in charge of managing the exact details. The comedy option is a court telling Biden that he cant do that so long as minting the coin is legal, as that would be an approved method to pay the debt. The hellworld option is telling biden the just default.
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May 11, 2023 20:48
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Mellow Seas posted:Socialist revolutions kinda seem to eventually lead to state capitalism a lot, huh? Yeah, some guy named Engels wrote a bit about this. You might've heard of him. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 11, 2023 21:03
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:It's possible. But, saying Republicans will never fold is sort of demonstrably not true because they folded the last 12 years (although, 4 of those years were with Trump where they weirdly had no issue with raising the debt ceiling. So, I guess they have technically only folded 8 times.)
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May 11, 2023 21:09
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Automata 10 Pack posted:Huh? The result of the 2011 debt ceiling crisis was Obama passing The Budget Control Act, which… Had spending cuts if I remember correctly. And the 2013 debt ceiling crisis, while framed as a victory, still resulted in a new Obamacare restriction. They raised it twice in 2013, once in 2014, and twice in 2015. 2011 was the only one with a spending cut agreement.
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May 11, 2023 21:16
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:Yeah, some guy named Engels wrote a bit about this. You might've heard of him. Didn't really work out the way he theorized did it? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 11, 2023 21:16
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Mellow Seas posted:Socialist revolutions kinda seem to eventually lead to state capitalism a lot, huh? Yes? Historical illiteracy isn't a gotcha. Yeah a lot of them got as far as state capitalism due to the material conditions of the time. Not my fault y'all don't know the right terms. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 11, 2023 21:16
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The argument of "He was so partisan and stubborn that he refused to make a deal, damaged the American economy, and then abused his power to try and fix his mistake. All he had to do was sit down and make a deal!" is a pretty easy one to sell and people really aren't going to reward decisive action if the end result "economic damage, but less economic damage than if I did nothing." They will just see economic damage. No one who buys this poo poo reasoning is gettable.
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May 11, 2023 21:58
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Barrel Cactaur posted:Okay in simple terms without more funding from congress the only tools available are issuing more money (the coin being a legal method to do so) or issuing more debt. The coin is hideously inflationary as a way of paying off debt, it looks really bad to just mint money to pay down existing obligations. Issuing debt is what normally happens, the problem being that the interest on that debt keeps piling up. Eventually issuing debt to pay debt will put you past that limit. This is wrong, incidentally. The coin wouldn't be inflationary because it's not actually being spent or circulated in any actual sense - it wouldn't affect any existing debt obligations, it would just allow the Treasury to continue to create new Treasury bonds and use that to finance new spending as normal as it's essentially an accounting trick. The thing is, the debt limit is also an accounting trick, in that it doesn't actually impact spending or issuing debts except that it's an arbitrary number after which the government shoots itself in the face. Krugman's op-eds are traditionally somewhat, uh, questionable but the tweet thread that's referenced in the thread title isn't a bad primer. https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1653734738178310144
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May 11, 2023 22:05
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The FDA is ending the effective blanket ban on non-straight men donating bloodquote:Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finalized recommendations for assessing blood donor eligibility using a set of individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV. These questions will be the same for every donor, regardless of sexual orientation, sex or gender. Blood establishments may now implement these recommendations by revising their donor history questionnaires and procedures. Looks like the culture war is now a blood feud 
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May 11, 2023 22:12
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shimmy shimmy posted:This is wrong, incidentally. The coin wouldn't be inflationary because it's not actually being spent or circulated in any actual sense - it wouldn't affect any existing debt obligations, it would just allow the Treasury to continue to create new Treasury bonds and use that to finance new spending as normal as it's essentially an accounting trick. On the other hand it's absolutely inflationary in the sense that businesses will jack up prices and claim the coin forced them to do it. People still believe the level of inflation we're looking at now is because poor people are livin' large off of the stimulus they got almost three years ago.
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May 11, 2023 23:30
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Seyser Koze posted:On the other hand it's absolutely inflationary in the sense that businesses will jack up prices and claim the coin forced them to do it. no, that is not generally how even greed based inflation works, mostly because the question then is "so why didn't they do it already?" I really don't think the coin is a particularly useful excuse even if you completely ignore competition questions, which is what brings us to the cause of current greed based inflation: corps that for one reason or another had customers and/or other corps over a barrel at some point. well, that and ongoing morally-poo poo responses to ongoing logistics weaknesses, to my understanding I'm actually not convinced that's something People Believe as a group either. That's generally a tricky thing to determine and one that requires data.
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May 12, 2023 00:17
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and yes also cartels or cartel-adjacent behavior, which still doesn't really have much to do with The Coin
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May 12, 2023 00:18
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Unlikely in the short or medium term. Also a problem with this ruling is that uh Natural gas is literally the only thing keeping California vaguely functional. It cannot, and will not, be able to sustain a power grid without it. Nuclear and renewables go together like oil and water due to the long ramp up/ramp down times on nuclear. Natural gas is quite literally the only option until battery tech improves.
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May 12, 2023 01:12
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The murderer who choked that innocent man to death on the New York subway is being charged with manslaughter. Can't wait to discover his social media history of chuddy bullshit.
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May 12, 2023 01:37
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Captain Oblivious posted:It cannot, and will not, be able to sustain a power grid without it. It can and it will, the relevant question is how fast it can do it.
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May 12, 2023 01:49
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GlyphGryph posted:It can and it will, the relevant question is how fast it can do it. Not for another decade at minimum my man. Ideology does not change the facts. You can go on CAISO’s website and chart out energy supply and consumption by type. We do not make it through an average day without rolling brown outs without peaker plants. Period.
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May 12, 2023 01:58
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Captain Oblivious posted:Nuclear and renewables go together like oil and water due to the long ramp up/ramp down times on nuclear. Pumped hydro is more realistic than massive battery arrays, in that it already exists. You do need large elevation changes over short distances for it to work. It has the advantage over regular hydro that it can be a closed (ish) loop and so it's less destructive to the local environment, or use seawater (which has been done once, in a pilot plant in Japan).
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May 12, 2023 02:18
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:Yeah, some guy named Engels wrote a bit about this. You might've heard of him. See: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm A bunch of left-wing critics of the USSR, holding that its economy was "state-capitalist" rather than socialist, invoked Engels' words to argue that Soviet planning was merely part of the same tendency of "statization" shown in capitalist countries the world over as the prelude to capitalism's doom (and as you might guess, these claims were first made decades before the deregulations and denationalizations in the USA, UK, etc. following the downfall of the "Keynesian consensus.") Marx and Engels did argue elsewhere that socialist society presupposed a high level of productive forces made possible by capitalism though, and I think this is a better explanation for the problems faced by the Soviet economy (i.e. that its degree of socialization was higher than the country's relatively backward productive forces allowed for) than by claiming the problems were caused by "state-capitalism." Enver Zogha fucked around with this message at 04:23 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 03:05
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Captain Oblivious posted:Also a problem with this ruling is that uh This is nonsense from a technical point of view. France ramps their nuclear power down every night.
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May 12, 2023 06:00
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Captain Oblivious posted:Not for another decade at minimum my man. Ideology does not change the facts. You can go on CAISO’s website and chart out energy supply and consumption by type. We do not make it through an average day without rolling brown outs without peaker plants. Period. Your rolling brownouts are an intentional choice that happens by design and not some innate reality of how the power system must function. You realize that, right?
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May 12, 2023 06:08
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:A Washington Post writer is reporting that some Republican leaders are considering letting the country get to the brink of default, having Biden invoke the 14th amendment, and not really challenging the legality of it in any meaningful way. This strategy is appealing because it can: Wouldn't this massively damage America's credit rating? From the point of view of an overseas lender / bond holder it is "the Republicans tried to go into default but were prevented. Next time they're elected....." The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 06:31 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 06:29
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DeadlyMuffin posted:This is nonsense from a technical point of view. France ramps their nuclear power down every night. Newer reactor designs can do pretty quick load following. For example, this 300MWe reactor can load follow at 15MWe/minute: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap300-smr I believe the way this works is not by reducing the reactors thermal output, but by redirecting some heat into a heat storage system like a large tank of molten sodium. When demand rises again, they can use the stored heat to generate electricity.
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May 12, 2023 07:15
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The Lone Badger posted:Wouldn't this massively damage America's credit rating? From the point of view of an overseas lender / bond holder it is "the Republicans tried to go into default but were prevented. Next time they're elected....." ...negotiate a "better" deal? (by holding the world economy and the value of their own currency hostage) Sounds perfect.
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May 12, 2023 08:09
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Pretty much every time, the Republicans claim they will hold the debt hostage, and every time their donors call up at the last minute and politely ask about what the gently caress they are doing. The actual problem this time is that a good portion of the House is actual fascists who don't give a gently caress and don't have a plan.
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May 12, 2023 10:29
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Name Change posted:Pretty much every time, the Republicans claim they will hold the debt hostage, and every time their donors call up at the last minute and politely ask about what the gently caress they are doing. The actual problem this time is that a good portion of the House is actual fascists who don't give a gently caress and don't have a plan. Yeah, before it was people playing the game and acting their part. Then they slowly got replaced with too many people who believed the whole thing.
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May 12, 2023 11:05
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Senator Bob Menendez is under investigation again. He was indicted by the feds in 2015, but was not convicted because the jury decided the government's evidence was too flimsy and that resulted in a mistrial. The feds could have chosen to try and charge him again a few years later, but the Supreme Court ruled in the Bob McDonnell case that bribery has to be connected to some official act in exchange for goods and they couldn't point to a specific official act that Menendez had taken This time, he may have performed an official duty in exchange for money from a Halal meat certifier. They don't have specifics and he has not actually been charged with anything yet, but they are looking into why a New Jersey Halal certification shop ended up with an exclusive contract with the Egyptian government to be their official global Halal meat certifier. The mayor of North Bergen, New Jersey has also been subpoenaed for questions relating to "specific local law changes in New Jersey" and others have no received new subpoenas for a different investigation into Bob Menendez that has nothing to do with the Halal meat certifier. There's no details about what this second subject they are investigating is related to. There's no direct evidence of any wrongdoing yet, but there is enough suspicion that the feds have been investigating it for about 9 months now and are still expanding the investigation. https://twitter.com/Tom_Winter/status/1656994968777400321 quote:Another round of federal grand jury subpoenas went out this week in connection with the corruption investigation into Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey.
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May 12, 2023 15:24
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I am kinda confused about mechanics there. Just how is he influencing the Egyptian government? Or does he have a separate role as Chief Egyptian Food Certification official or something (do imams do halal checking the way rabbis do for kosher?) Edit: so threatening their foreign aid? Well, that seems pretty similar to a certain Trump impeachment.
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May 12, 2023 15:46
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OddObserver posted:I am kinda confused about mechanics there. Just how is he influencing the Egyptian government? Or does he have a separate role as Chief Egyptian Food Certification official or something (do imams do halal checking the way rabbis do for kosher?) Details of the investigation aren't public, but apparently some people at the Department of Agriculture reported that they thought something suspicious was going on and several other Halal meat certifiers sued after they lost their own contracts around the same time. Menendez chairs the Foreign Relations committee and would have some role in deciding Egyptian foreign aid. His wife is also friends with the owners of the Halal certification company. He hasn't been formally accused of anything yet, but they are investigating. People are confused as to why Egypt would pick this somewhat small New Jersey Halal meat certifier to be their exclusive partner in the U.S. Combined with the lawsuits from other Halal businesses and someone from the Department of Agriculture reporting that they thought it was weird (but, do not have any direct evidence as far as we know) is what prompted the investigation. He hasn't been accused of anything and there is no public evidence, but the investigation has been going on for nearly a year and they just recently expanded it to investigate something else, so there isn't any hard (public) evidence that he did anything yet, but it isn't an open and shut case of "nothing happened here" either. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 15:57 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 15:54
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haveblue posted:The FDA is ending the effective blanket ban on non-straight men donating blood
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May 12, 2023 16:03
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This might be better for the power thread but is there a ELI5 reason we can't use renewables to perform electrolysis on water and then store the hydrogen for later use?
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May 12, 2023 16:09
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cat botherer posted:Men taking PrEP are still (basically) barred, which is lmao and completely backwards. Only respectable gays that are pretty sure they don't have HIV! PrEP can get the virus down to basically undetectable levels that make it very close to impossible to spread through sexual contact, but you can still become infected with small amounts of the virus from a blood transfusion because of the huge amounts of blood you are transferring directly into veins compared to sexual contact. PrEP can also weaken the virus enough to give false negatives on an HIV test. You basically just have to wait longer before they have a more secure method, but the PrEP issue makes sense from a scientific and risk management standpoint. The cost of making it much more inconvenient for a small amount of people taking a certain medication to donate blood is probably lower than the cost of accidentally giving some people HIV with a blood transfusion. Both from the perspective of the individual people and the damage it would do to people's trust in getting a blood transfusion or blood donation. quote:Though these antiretroviral drugs are safe, effective, and an important public health tool, the available data demonstrate that their use may delay detection of HIV by currently licensed screening tests for blood donations, which may potentially give false negative results. Although HIV is not transmitted sexually by individuals with undetectable viral levels, this does not apply to transfusion transmission of HIV because a blood transfusion is administered intravenously, and a transfusion involves a large volume of blood compared to exposure with sexual contact.
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May 12, 2023 16:15
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cr0y posted:This might be better for the power thread but is there a ELI5 reason we can't use renewables to perform electrolysis on water and then store the hydrogen for later use? 1. High-pressure tanks, which have very low volumetric energy density. 2. Liquefaction to a few degrees above absolute zero (still expensive, bleeds off H2, etc). 3. Absorbtion into metal hydrides (expensive, not scalable) Even batteries are cheaper and more practical for grid storage.
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May 12, 2023 16:19
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cr0y posted:This might be better for the power thread but is there a ELI5 reason we can't use renewables to perform electrolysis on water and then store the hydrogen for later use? We can but it's hard to store because it's such a small molecule that it gets into the metal and makes it brittle. If it were just stored for on site use at a generator that might make things easier than trying to use it to fuel cars, which would require a huge amount of infrastructure that we don't have.
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May 12, 2023 16:21
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I'm a trans woman (so in the eyes of the FDA, a man) who takes PrEP prohphylactically. Taking PrEP requires HIV tests every 3 months (and every single time I've tested negative). So proactively, responsibly making myself less likely to contract or transmit HIV means I still have the icky gay blood. Incredible.
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May 12, 2023 16:28
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Doctor Yiff posted:I'm a trans woman (so in the eyes of the FDA, a man) who takes PrEP prohphylactically. Taking PrEP requires HIV tests every 3 months (and every single time I've tested negative). So proactively, responsibly making myself less likely to contract or transmit HIV means I still have the icky gay blood. Incredible. The problem is that you can't know who is taking it prohphylactically and who isn't. HIV tests will show up negative for both of them, but one of them will end up infecting someone with HIV if they receive the transfusion. The downside to making people taking a certain drug wait longer for better tests to donate blood is much lower than the downside of accidentally infecting someone. I don't believe there are any major countries or organizations that let people actively taking PrEP donate blood. The Red Cross requires you to wait at least 3 months from your last dose.
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May 12, 2023 16:40
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I understand that. No good deed goes unpunished I guess. 
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May 12, 2023 16:58
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cr0y posted:This might be better for the power thread but is there a ELI5 reason we can't use renewables to perform electrolysis on water and then store the hydrogen for later use? There are much simpler, cheaper, and less potentially explosive ways to do this. For example, you can pump water from a reservoir at low elevation to one at higher elevation. When you want to generate that back into electricity, you have a turbine on the outlet of the higher elevation reservoir that the water flows through back into the lower elevation reservoir. There are numerous other grid-scale systems like this.
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May 12, 2023 17:21
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cat botherer posted:Hydrogen is a mofo to store. It's really one of the least convenient ways to store energy. Your options are either From my brief foray into energy policy (and too agree) hydrogen is not cheap to make yet. Last I read natural gas providers are the closest to making hydrogen somewhat affordable via pyrolysis. And there is no storage infrastructure for Hydrogen either. As Cat pointed out batteries have advanced a lot but a lot of what the BIF/IRA legislation does is ramp up production of battery production and supply chain production to move to electrification.
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May 12, 2023 17:46
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GlyphGryph posted:This is pretty much perfectly in line with PETA's openly stated ideology as I'm familiar with it, so I've never really understood this criticism. They aren't and never have been opposed to the death of animals, but rather to their exploitation for human purposes. "PETA kills their animals instead of returning them to captivity and the possibility of what they see as continued ongoing harm" is what I would expect. This is from a few pages ago, but I do not understand what you are trying to say. I lived in Norfolk Va for a time, and PETA ran animal shelters that people reasonably believed they should take kittens to so they could find forever homes and they were just murdered. I have no idea why you think people making sure people know that PETA kills animals is actually a self own on those pointing it out.
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May 12, 2023 18:32
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