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comes along bort posted:I'm more curious what Virginia's gonna do since the coal ash from the Eden spill is all going to wind up there. Our House of Delegates is solidly Republican, but our Dem Governor apparently isn't going to go easy on them we've got a Democratic Attorney General who's pretty decent. Not to mention that it's easier to be tough on a company that doesn't do much business in your state.
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Apr 3, 2014 19:09
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Slo-Tek posted:71k as a household income with two earners isn't exactly balling. Two 35k incomes is keeping up with your rent and two running cars, but if you've got kids, and the sort of insurance you get with a 15$ an hour job, and anything that goes wrong, that is not a lot of cushion. Nobody's saying $71K is rich, or isn't middle class, or anything like that, just that it's not the lower-bound of middle class. We're just saying that a household making $60K or $50K a year is also middle class. The median household income in the US is $53K. They're saying that the lower bound of the middle class is 40% more money than the median American household makes. That's not how pretty much anyone else would define middle class.
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Apr 5, 2014 05:58
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Captain_Maclaine posted:And, if I remember right, is heavily invested in gold mining/exploration/futures as well. Another example, of course, of just what a ~*principled statesman*~ was the Doctor Congressman. Someone once made the good point to me that these sorts of relationships go both ways - if you're heavily invested in gold, that's a heck of an incentive to think that a gold standard is a good policy, but then again, if you actually sincerely believe that a gold standard is a good policy, investing in gold is just putting your money where your mouth is. That said, I'm not really inclined to give Ron "Crazy Uncle Liberty" Paul the benefit of the doubt here. But it's worth thinking about in similar situations.
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Apr 8, 2014 23:41
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eviltastic posted:Dunno if he did in 2012, but during that magical 2008 election season, the good doctor did not specifically advocate for a return to the gold standard. His pitch was for a "competing currency" system whose admitted purpose was to avoid any cap gains on gold holdings. It also would've introduced a lot of pointless opportunities for arbitrage and otherwise been a bad idea, but yeah, point stands, the stance makes sense given where he's got his money. Yeah, I'm not necessarily defending Paul, I'm just saying that it's possible in general for those sorts of confluences to run both ways. Of course, given that most politicians are horrible people...
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Apr 9, 2014 01:50
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Radish posted:Yeah "my ancestors used this land before the Federal Government and thus it's now mine" really isn't the road white Americans want to go down. I don't understand, I was always taught in history class that all the land west of the Cumberland Gap was completely empty because 'Muricans showed up. That's why it was called the "frontier", it was completely empty, like outer space. Tatum Girlparts posted:The best part about Leverage is almost all the over the top 'ha ha crazy rich people would never gently caress people over like that right?' are usually based on real things that happen. It's revenge fantasy based in reality. Pretty sure in a blog post, John Rogers, one of the Leverage show-runners, said that they had to frequently tone-down the real life stories because they came across as too cartoonishly evil for cable TV. Like the Season 3 premiere is based on the "Cash for Kids" judge/jail kickbacks scandal, but they had to make it about adults to make it believable for TV. My Face When posted:So I have a story to share about my local area. We have two army depots, Red River and Lone Star ammo. Besides the tire plant and paper mills, they are a major contributor to jobs and our local economy. In high school, the two depots were threatened to be shut down completely. There was a large public outrage to keep the two opened, which we won. However, it's been threatened again by BRAC. I feel like the previous answer only touched on this kinda vaguely. BRAC (Base Realignment And Closure) is a process by which Congress tries to save money by consolidating and closing military bases. The military comes up with a list of ideas of how to move things around and re-organize and what can be shuttered, and then Congress fights about it. Because military bases are such a huge boon to local economies, BRAC is extremely contentious in Congress with any congressman near a military base at risk fighting hard to keep it open. As usual in military matters the thoughts and requests of the military brass in these matters take secondary priority to Congressional pork (look at military appropriations for another example - we buy the military poo poo it doesn't want just because the factories are in politically convenient districts). AATREK CURES KIDS posted:What an awful budget. Over the next ten years: $5.2 trillion in spending cuts, $5.7 trillion in tax cuts, an additional $5.7 trillion in revenue from closing loopholes and ending deductions, and $7.3 trillion in additional revenue from economic growth. His plan only works if the economy grows at a rate of at least 5%* for the next 10 years. You might as well say Obama's budget balances if you assume healthcare-loving aliens give us a spaceship full of gold. Sorry to bring this back from a few pages ago, but how is Paul Ryan saving (or claiming he can save) $2 Trillion on repealing Obamacare? I mean the CBO projects that it'll on net cost money to repeal all of Obamacare, and the popular parts of it are the parts that cost money. So is he just gutting everything that costs money and leaving the painful parts and taxes in place or what?
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Apr 11, 2014 14:57
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Kalman posted:There's plenty of literature out there on how access rarely equals influence on the issues people care about enough that there's significant discussion; where access is influence is on issues where only one side cares enough to speak, so there's no counter-information to be had. Yeah, but in that case Comcast/GLAAD can turn around and given their money to those Senators challengers, who probably do agree with them or are at least persuadable. The end result is the same - the money guys are disproportionately more likely to get what they want than I am. Now I suppose you could go further and say "yeah, but it's not like Bringing Back Slavery PAC can buy their way to policy success - no politician (candidate or incumbent) would sign on no matter how much green" and that's true. But there's a wide range of policies that it is feasible for America to take and for money to push us to, and that's not exactly good just because "Literally Abolish Democracy" or something isn't in that range. Kalman posted:I note you ignored the "and other research has come up with completely opposite results" part of that post. That's true of most things in the social sciences. Also I'm less likely to take the reading advice of a guy who can't find the section on statistical significance in the paper he's allegedly critiquing. The paywall there makes it pretty hard to discuss or critique the claims of the papers. But generally I'm skeptical that research originally run in 1996 and re-run in the mid-2000s (the 2000 and 2008 are publication dates, not experiment dates) has a lot of relevance in a world like campaign finance where we've seen the ground dramatically shift every 2-4 years in terms of how campaigns are financed and organized and run. I can't read much about the experiments because of the access-wall, but I'm also somewhat concerned by the idea that apparently they used volunteer congressional schedulers who knew they were being tested on something? That sets off a lot of alarm bells for me in terms of design, but then I don't really know since I can't read the full papers. anonumos posted:This direction of discussion also does not address groups like ALEC of our political system, which write word-for-word legislation and then literally (not figuratively) bribe their favorite politicians to promote it/vote for it without even reading the text. These groups would never have the influence they have without money exchanging hands. Lots of money. Ungodly amounts of money. Honestly, politicians crave respect and you could probably get pretty far by skipping the campaign contributions and just keeping the complete soup-to-nuts policy & propaganda wing - if Fox News is blaring about something and respected conservative magazines are pushing it and you have papers from "prestigious" think tanks and you're getting the MSM to take the idea seriously, you're pretty far towards getting it enacted before you're writing campaign checks. Get a bunch of business moguls to suck up to the politicos about it and you're almost golden. Of course, moving all those mountains I just listed takes money too. Jackson Taus fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Apr 18, 2014 |
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Apr 18, 2014 22:51
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Fulchrum posted:I wanna know what the hell question could have led to him giving that answer. Its not like that context will help him in any way, but I want to know how he got launched into that, and right now all I'm picturing is him saying "apropos of nothing, here's what I think of the coloreds". Fixed that for you Fulchrum posted:The guy is not doing Animal Nuz here - he never suggested Republican racism could help the Dems take the House or the states, just help them maintain control of the Senate and pick up one or two House seats. Which is, again, what happened in 2012. I WANT TO BELIEVE. But honestly there just has to be a line. Though nobody has even won money on the Right-Wing Machine having decency or common sense WRT this stuff. Fried Chicken posted:PPP is completely legit. In the "we actually call people on the phone and ask their opinions" sense, sure. But they do so much playing and re-weighting of their numbers in the direction of "what we think the results should be" that it ends up pretty funky. At least, even the PPP guy's "rebuttal" sounded really fishy along those lines to me. haveblue posted:You do all that if you're a disciplined media wrangler with a coherent, pre-planned agenda. You do what he's doing here if you're a bona fide crank that a national party elevated to mascot status overnight. Speaking as a literal (very-low-ranking) Party Apparatchik, I don't understand how you could possibly try to put a guy like this in the spotlight and keep him there for weeks, and not have a media consultant on a plane to meet with him on Day 2. And it's not like he said something out of left-field about the Bilderbergers or something, this is really "How To Do Media 101" stuff - shut your yap about Race, Women, and Aliens. Don't even say nothin'. Always try to drag the focus back to your rights to this land and how the BLM sucks, don't get bogged down on any other political issue of any kind. Play it as "The LIBERAL MEDIA is trying to trap you so they can dismiss you, here's one simple trick to stop them". What I don't get is why both sides don't have twenty-something Media folks they can put on a plane the SECOND they hear stuff like this starting to blow up in their favor.
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Apr 25, 2014 04:00
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Other than wanting to avoid bloodshed is there a single sane reason that these idiots haven't been declared to be in rebellion against the government and removed? Because that'd drive enough crazies over the edge that you'd end up with a bigger militia problem then you started with? Hieronymous Alloy posted:Maybe this is old news, but looks like the Cliven Bundy situation is breaking down: If you're one of those militiamen, the best case scenario is that some other militiaman gets killed. You get to be a hero just for being in town, and you get the escalation you were looking for. You just don't want to be the guy who gets shot. Magres posted:I don't know, specifically, how the BLM releasing the cows played out so I didn't want to assume I'm not a lawyer, but I think Brandenburg v Ohio set the threshold at speech designed to incite "imminent lawless action" as opposed to merely a "clear and present danger". Again not a lawyer so I can't go into specifics on it, but it seems like a relatively high bar.
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May 1, 2014 19:08
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I would think that there's a difference, legally, between 'we're going to shoot you if you keep taking those cows' and gathering up to rabblerouse about ARE RIGHTS and EVIL GUBMINT AGENTS.
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nutranurse posted:Only soldiers who kill other people should be able to qualify for free housing and have the government take care of their college tuition, and only veterans who have actually lost something tangible (like an arm or a leg or something) should get the free healthcare ride. These are the soldiers who actually do/have done things, the rest are a bunch of loving freeloaders. I realize you're trying to distinguish between actual veterans of war and violence and "Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers", but you're doing a really lovely job of it. Plenty of soldiers come home with psychological, not physical, wounds and are really hosed up when they get back, and they need care just as much as the guys who lost a leg if they're going to function in society and lead a normal-ish life after the service. On the flip side, some of the more crucial jobs don't involve shooting people (medic for starters). And the reality of today's counter-insurgency warfare means that many "non-combat" roles are still fairly dangerous - the enemy (much less an IED) doesn't care if you're officially designated as a truck driver or as a combat trooper, he's still gonna go at you for wearing the flag. Also, offering what amounts to a bounty to our troops for killing foreigners seems like a terrible idea incentive-wise. US Foreign Policy goals (and hence US Military goals) are almost never measured in body counts.
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May 6, 2014 22:53
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nutranurse posted:lol that post was a super-joke. I think you're ridiculous for thinking I'd actually advocate for what, as you point out, amounts to turning our troops into bounty hunters. That's freep insane, man. In my defense, we do have a guy in this thread who doesn't think that living on the streets causes emergency health problems and appears to be sincere. And I was mostly talking about the other stuff, not the actual "pay per kill" stuff. Amergin posted:Nobody has responded to my comment on the private donors. It's not like there are private donors and business-owners begging to be allowed to help the poor but getting chased off by the government. And we're struggling to get companies to do job trainings/re-trainings for non-homeless people. Also we have an existing job shortage in the country, so helping a homeless guy beat out someone on UI for a rare open position just swaps which of the two guys winds up homeless. It's a nice idea, but it's pretty darn far-fetched and impractical. Nessus posted:If you think private charity would magically fill in the gaps and provide equal or greater levels of service, I think you have a high bar to prove. Now you may well prefer private charity for other reasons, although I think preferring the moral virtue of private charity to "the actual relief of the needy" tends to go against most theories of morality. And there is certainly a role for private charity in these operations. Bingo - if the solution is private charity, why hasn't the problem been solved? Also charitable donations are pro-cyclical - people donate to charities much more during booms than busts, and it's during the busts that those dollars are most sorely needed.
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May 7, 2014 00:58
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