I don't agree - much as I dislike gawker, the idea that a billionaire can bankrupt any media source they don't like should scare the bejeezus out of you. That's a world where the first ammendment no longer goes far enough - because that restrains the state from excercising a power that, not so long ago, only the state had. Now every elite has it.
Where would you draw the line ? Could Trump put media companies out of business for publishing critical pieces about him? What if he gets elected, can he do it while he is president or is THAT censorship now ? Even if he does it with his own money made before he was part of the state?
Do you see the danger here ? Private companies are the largest limiters of free expression in the world today, the biggest censors in our modern world are profit-driven businesses. How much censorship should we tolerate from them ? Should we limit it? How do we do so without risking actually doing more harm than good ? I'm not saying the answers are easy, frankly I haven't the slightest idea how to address this issue - but I do recognize that it is a very real issue. A genuine threat to freedom.
So you're saying if Trump gets elected we'll replace global warming with nuclear winter and it will be best nuclear winter, it will be yuge, the greatest ?
Climate, while much simpler than weather, is still rather more complicated than school grades. So 100% accurate ? No. But not 50% either - more in the 95%+ range. That's also not an entirely true assessment because you're measuring it the wrong way. Climate models are written by experts who are aware they can't factor in everything, and that some things are still being worked on, so they don't give you an exact temperature - they give you a range within which the outcome is likely to lie and, if you take the average over the period predicted for, they overwhelmingly do lie in those averages.
The one major discrepency is IPCC reports, there are several decades where the average warming was significantly higher than IPCC models predicted. The reason for this is that the IPCC is particularly conservative in their estimates, fear of being called alarmists have led to the IPCC only publishing the bottom end of the likely range and also excluding anything they don't have extremely high confidence in (far higher than any other science would need for a minor variable in a big set with limited influence) - as a result they tend to to somewhat under-predict warming.
The lesson from that is that IPCC reports should be read as an absolute best-case scenario, reading the papers they are based on - the upper limit worst-case scenarios should be considered as well and we can generally expect reality to lie somewhere in the middle between those.,
Actually - those regions are mostly using renewables already and expanding their use far faster than the US is - I live in Africa. Not least because it's cheaper when you're adding new capacity (which is what they mostly do).
Electricity is compared using something called Levelized Cost Per KW/H - which is a price worked out for the supply source, that includes the cost of construction to recoup, fuel and maintenance costs etc. etc.
There was such a comparison done in South Africa just this week - here are the numbers: New nuclear: best case scenario R1.30 per kw/h, more realistic number (using the fuel and maintenance costs of existing nuclear supplies and not assuming new nuclear will be cheaper) R1.50 New coal: between R1.05 and R1.19 depending on the capacity of the generator. Solar: R0.87 Wind: R0.52
Notice how the cost for wind is roughly 1/3rd the realistic rate for nuclear, and less than half the best rate for coal ? So building coal and nuclear is fundamentally stupid and happens exclusively where massive corruption is involved. It's arguable how well renewables compare with fossil fuels in established markets like the USA where lots of long-paid-off fossil fuel capacity exist, but it's no contest in emerging markets where new electricity generators have to be built and the construction costs factored into the retail price.
And that's without even considering time as a major factor. The earliest timeline for bringing new nuclear online is 15 years, new coal is between 7 and 10 years. A new solar plant of comparable output can be done in 2.
There is very little nuclear and coal construction happening in the developing world today and what little there is, is almost entirely driven by corruption. Literally big plant building companies bribing government ministers to build expensive plants rather than cheap ones. One of the worst culprits being the company that owned Chernobyl.
Either way - the risks that climate change presents to Africans (crop losses, starvation, plagues, droughts, floods) are also factors here. The harm from climate change will overwhelmingly hit poor countries far harder than rich ones -despite poor countries overwhelmingly being the least responsible for it.
It was, as per the article, there was a good explanation of it: a particularly well developed La Nina was able to (briefly) have a stronger effect cooling than greenhouse gasses had heating. The deniers were betting that, rather than an isolated event, it was proof of the overall pattern being wrong and that the temperatures would keep dropping.
Even if the La Nina had held out, which it didn't, this would not have been the case.
Weather is very difficult, climate is comparatively much easier.
Because climate is an average - and averages are far easier to predict than specific individual cases.
If I draw the name of a random American school kid from a hat and ask you to predict their final grades this year... you have roughly a zero chance of getting it right. If I ask you to predict their GPA and you bet on '3' (the average) you have much better (but still high) odds. If I ask you to predict the distribution of grades for all graduating students this year and you have even a modicum of understanding of statistics you can bet on 'a normal distribution pattern' (that is roughly 25% fail, in the average pass range and 25% with A's) then you have 100% chance of being right - in fact, we are SO certain that this average MUST hold in any fair exam that if the grades FAIL to line up to a normal distribution that's sufficient evidence to criminally convict teachers or administrators of cheating !
So why can I predict the average scores for a class or a country with 100% success rates with no other information, and yet have near-zero chance of predicting a particular student's grades without a LOT of other information ? Because average are much, much more predictable than the instances they are averages off.
Climate is an average of weather over a long time. Climate, as an average, is therefore much, much more predictable than weather.
When shitloads of physical evidence, on the other hand, confirms something - it's almost certainly much more likely to be true than not true - especially when the contrary position is supported by a massive, steaming heap of no evidence at all (otherwise known as pure bullshit).
>When a court steps in to start legislating it is repugnant
That is literally what the ENTIRETY of all common law consists off - and most hardcore libertarian types consider common law the ONLY justifiable type.
Of course they are insane, and we do need governmental law as well - but to suggest that judges legislating is some massively anti-liberty idea or repugnant to the separation of powers is grossly ignorant. Legislating is, in fact, a time-honored and fundamental part of being a judge - seperation of powers ONLY comes into play when the issue being judged is ALREADY a matter of law the legislative branch.
Why could net neutrality NOT be implemented based on existing common-law principles ? They would in fact greatly support it, and judges extending it that way would be perfectly acceptable, not violate separation in the least and be far less prone to problems of regulatory capture, bribery^H^H^H^H^H^H^lobbying and abuse.
Thats a fine goal but it must be approached gradually. Do not try to get out of debt faster than you got in. Do not try it in a recession and for crying out loud do not try to do it by spending cuts - at least not by themselves. If you are going to cut spending you need to raise, not lower, taxes to make up the lost revenue.
But a recession by definition is a lack of spending. If government doesnt change it by spending you end up with a depression.
And its impossible to cause inflation by printing and spending in a recession. Its never happened except where a previous unrelated event destroyed the productive capacity of tge economy (war or plague usually). It takes all the print and spend a government can manage in a recession just to prevent deflation. Deflation = 2nd great depression.
An organisation who calls themselves geniusses yet spend their time in an organisation of self proclaimed geniusses.
Actual geniusses don't join MENSA - they are too busy trying to make the world a better place. They are in research laboratories painstakingly trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, working on vaccines for deadly diseases, finding ways get more energy out of cleaner technologies, digging through miles of dirt to learn more about our ancient ancestors and their cousins and the history of life, coding meticulous synchronization algorithms to keep the many dishes of the world's largest radio telescopic interferometer moving correctly together and discovering new galaxies by the thousands.
What they are not doing - is joining an organisation so they can claim they are geniusses. I know quite a few proud MENSA members... they all have one thing in common, they are idiots who can't think their way out of a wet paper bag and they joined MENSA because rather than own their stupidity their insecurity demanded they find some way to pretend it wasn't there by getting a bunch of other equally insecure idiots together so they can all reassure each other of how smart they all are.
It's the participation trophy of intellectual pursuits.
Trump is going to break Goldwater's record for worst landslide loss ever. Actually 'landslide' doesn't fit - avalanche is more apropos.
Clinton is a terrible possible president, somewhere between Dubya and Obama terrible... but Trump is the only candidate so absolutely atrociously bad that Clinton looks good next to him.
That said - I wouldn't advise a vote for a third party, much as I love Jill Stein, I agree with Dan Savage - the third parties have to actually start BEING parties. This running a president every 4 years bullshit isn't ever going to work. If the greens or the libertarians want to build a viable third party - they need to start at the groundlevel and work their way up. You don't aim for the presidency. You aim to put green and lp candidates in ever city council. Run them for every councilor spot in every race. Run them for fucking dogcatcher. For district judge. Run them in the small, cheap local races - and run them everywhere. Build a grassroots movement so you have candidates, so you have funding, and run them low level. Take over a few towns - show results, then maybe a state (Vermont could easilly go green if enough people run for state legislature - especially if a few cities have green councils). Then start running for congress and the senate. Get people in there - start reforming things. Get choice-rated voting in place so voting for your first choice cannot inadvertently be a vote for your LAST choice - by having enough people in congress to keep pushing that until it happens.
Do the hard work.. and maybe in 3 or 4 or even 5 elections time - THEN we can have a viable third party candidate running for president and maybe even win. It's all well and good for Jill Stein to complain that the lack of rated voting means thirdparty candidates like her are excluded since people who would want Her, or else Hillary know voting for is a vote for Trump instead. But she's not DOING anything to fix that. You can't fix that by running for president every 4 years complaining how the other guys ruined it. You fix it by starting at groundlevel.
Bernie is the only one who did it right. He didn't run for senate as an independent. He ran for mayor of Burlington. He lost. He ran again. He lost. He ran again and won - and then he did a damn good job. A really good job so he became very popular and won two more terms. THEN he ran for senate. And then he did good work in that senate (he is one of the single most productive and legislatively successful senators in history and THE most productive in the current government). For 2 decades. Only then did he run for president... and found there was no viable third party to run for... so, he was forced to join the democrats... and he almost won. We know he got sniped in some states where he DID win (Nevada for one). But the fact is - he came close enough to scare the pants off the party elites. The dems are running their most progressive platform since FDR - he forced them to change their tune.
And he did it - because decades ago... he had the guts to run for mayor.
If the third parties want to learn something from him, then do the thing he's been begging you to do his whole life and this whole campaign: organise, at ground level - and run for every office you can. Forget the presidency. The US is not a monarchy and the president isn't all that powerful anyway. The local mayor has a LOT more control over your life than he does. So maybe get 4 or 5 green or libertarian (or whatever variant you side with) candidates in the council - and then get one of them in the mayors position.
But if you haven't done that - then frankly Jill Stein and Gary Johnson has this in common: they are fucking america for their own egos instead of actually doing what their supporters and their beliefs require to progress.
I prefer the older term for the same thing - 'horse and sparrow economics', the idea being that if you feed the horses well there will be lots of seeds for the sparrows in the droppings.
It's more honest... because it outright admits that as far as republicans and libertarians are concerned the poor are literally expected to eat shit.
You don't even need the farmer anymore... just 10 minutes a week with a tablet to tell the robot what crops you would like to plant. It will plant them, water them, weed them and harvest them.
And the fact that those places are filled with billionaires running massive companies that are bringing in hordes of workers from all over who are desperate for housing (at the expense of the locals who aren't trained in the careers those companies want) have nothing to do with it ?
By the way - how many of those CEOs do you think vote democrat ? What percentage of their political donations go to the republicans and what to the democrats ?
You think Carly Fiorentina was a liberal ?
The people who work in those companies may be overwhelmingly liberal - but they are not the ones making the decisions, they just work there. Their biggest influence was to make the corporate culture in those companies tolerant on social liberal stuff. It's easy for a company to be pro-gay-marriage and pro-transrights and pro-choice... those things don't cost the company money and keeps the working plebs in the company happy so they don't question the business practises. Even Oracle was liberal on social issues when I worked there - and they were stealing 65-million dollars from Oregon's taxpayers at the same time (this is why I resigned and will never work there again... but almost nobody else did)!
We already do that, that's why corporations are taxed so differently from individuals.
I earn money. Government takes taxes. I have to pay my expenses out of what's left.
Corporation earns money. They pay their expenses. Government gets to tax what's left.
See the difference ? It's HUGE and those 'corporations are people' proclaimers never seem to realize that this absolutely flies in the face of the concept of 'equality before the law' - if they are people, they shouldn't get special treatment in laws. But the justice/practicality aspects aside - the reason we do that is exactly what you said: to try and encourage them to spend their money so they'll pay less tax.
The pattern of hoarding at the moment is proving that this incentive isn't working. The main reason is that they aren't paying taxes to begin with. General Electric was the largest corporation in America until recently (by some metrics they still are) and they go through most years without paying a single cent in tax. There are so many ways to cheat the system legally that they end up paying nothing - so there's no incentive to save on an expense of zero. Ironically one of the best ways for a corporation to spend money to reduce it's tax bills is to pay huge bonusses to major executives... which keeps the money in the business but gets it written up as an expense. Of course those executives have nice little corporate shell accounts of their own which receive the money and then spend it all on a payment to some other shell corporations which is entirely anonymous... and happens to, though there is no record of this fact, belong to the executive, who can then have this anonymous and shell company spend it all on a corporate yacht, which he leases for a nice big expense against his other income while owning the company he is making the expense too...
You see the problem ? It's entirely possible to create massive expenditures without ever letting go of the cash.
Both your claims are empirically false. The best long-term global studies have consistently found that moderate minimum wage increases have a nett ZERO effect on either inflation or employment. The few studies that observed any effect on employment rates at all couldn't get it with any statistical significance and those effects were increased employment.
Here is why you are wrong - for both counts: It seems obvious that a higher wage would lead to firings - but you're seeing it in isolation, the minimum wage also produces another force: increased demand. People earning more - want to buy things, to supply those things you need labor, so to fire people because of a moderate increase in minimum wage would COST you more money than it saves. But that wouldn't be true if inflation went up as the demand would be eradicated by higher prices, and it again seems obvious that raising prices is a natural response to a higher wage cost. Except that businessmen are not that fucking incredibly stupid. They can do the math too. They know that, if they keep prices the same, they can sell their products to all the workers at all the other businesses who can now afford it and previously couldn't.
The reason these things do not shift as you expect - is because shifting them would cost a business a fortune in potential profits. A huge increase may have these effects, we don't know since it's not been done often enough to study well, but a moderate increase leaves every businessman calculating that keeping staffing levels the same (or increasing them) while not raising prices will make him a lot more money than he can save by cutting workers or raising prices.
Businessmen are not stupid enough to raise prices or fire people over a moderate minimum wage increase - they cash in on it. They always THREATEN to do so beforehand, but they never ACTUALLY do so. The reason they threaten has nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of labor either. It's about power. If wages are low - then workers are desperate and accept any terms in their contracts and afraid to quit - which gives you great power over them. If wages are better, then workers can better themselves - and they start demanding decent working conditions and start refusing to obey unethical demands from bosses and all sorts of other things which authoritarian business-types do not like. Businesses love having lots of poor people who are desperate for work - as long as there are wealthy people SOMEWHERE to buy the stuff, a steady supply of cheap and desperate labor is good for business. But if you remove the cheap and desperate it doesn't make the business turn into an idiot - they make the best of the situation - by keeping prices the same and not firing people, so they can cash in on the increased paychecks of all the workers in town.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you don't hear it - I hear it every day.
Though I will grant you that the deniers never mention that - their too busy shouting alarmist bullshit about a world government and big scary taxes.
I don't agree - much as I dislike gawker, the idea that a billionaire can bankrupt any media source they don't like should scare the bejeezus out of you. That's a world where the first ammendment no longer goes far enough - because that restrains the state from excercising a power that, not so long ago, only the state had. Now every elite has it.
Where would you draw the line ? Could Trump put media companies out of business for publishing critical pieces about him?
What if he gets elected, can he do it while he is president or is THAT censorship now ? Even if he does it with his own money made before he was part of the state?
Do you see the danger here ? Private companies are the largest limiters of free expression in the world today, the biggest censors in our modern world are profit-driven businesses. How much censorship should we tolerate from them ? Should we limit it? How do we do so without risking actually doing more harm than good ?
I'm not saying the answers are easy, frankly I haven't the slightest idea how to address this issue - but I do recognize that it is a very real issue. A genuine threat to freedom.
So you're saying if Trump gets elected we'll replace global warming with nuclear winter and it will be best nuclear winter, it will be yuge, the greatest ?
Climate, while much simpler than weather, is still rather more complicated than school grades.
So 100% accurate ? No. But not 50% either - more in the 95%+ range. That's also not an entirely true assessment because you're measuring it the wrong way. Climate models are written by experts who are aware they can't factor in everything, and that some things are still being worked on, so they don't give you an exact temperature - they give you a range within which the outcome is likely to lie and, if you take the average over the period predicted for, they overwhelmingly do lie in those averages.
The one major discrepency is IPCC reports, there are several decades where the average warming was significantly higher than IPCC models predicted. The reason for this is that the IPCC is particularly conservative in their estimates, fear of being called alarmists have led to the IPCC only publishing the bottom end of the likely range and also excluding anything they don't have extremely high confidence in (far higher than any other science would need for a minor variable in a big set with limited influence) - as a result they tend to to somewhat under-predict warming.
The lesson from that is that IPCC reports should be read as an absolute best-case scenario, reading the papers they are based on - the upper limit worst-case scenarios should be considered as well and we can generally expect reality to lie somewhere in the middle between those.,
Damnit... do you think he'll still fall for the whole 'black holes in space' gag ?
Have you stopped raping your mother yet ?
Actually - those regions are mostly using renewables already and expanding their use far faster than the US is - I live in Africa.
Not least because it's cheaper when you're adding new capacity (which is what they mostly do).
Electricity is compared using something called Levelized Cost Per KW/H - which is a price worked out for the supply source, that includes the cost of construction to recoup, fuel and maintenance costs etc. etc.
There was such a comparison done in South Africa just this week - here are the numbers:
New nuclear: best case scenario R1.30 per kw/h, more realistic number (using the fuel and maintenance costs of existing nuclear supplies and not assuming new nuclear will be cheaper) R1.50
New coal: between R1.05 and R1.19 depending on the capacity of the generator.
Solar: R0.87
Wind: R0.52
Notice how the cost for wind is roughly 1/3rd the realistic rate for nuclear, and less than half the best rate for coal ? So building coal and nuclear is fundamentally stupid and happens exclusively where massive corruption is involved.
It's arguable how well renewables compare with fossil fuels in established markets like the USA where lots of long-paid-off fossil fuel capacity exist, but it's no contest in emerging markets where new electricity generators have to be built and the construction costs factored into the retail price.
And that's without even considering time as a major factor. The earliest timeline for bringing new nuclear online is 15 years, new coal is between 7 and 10 years. A new solar plant of comparable output can be done in 2.
There is very little nuclear and coal construction happening in the developing world today and what little there is, is almost entirely driven by corruption. Literally big plant building companies bribing government ministers to build expensive plants rather than cheap ones. One of the worst culprits being the company that owned Chernobyl.
Either way - the risks that climate change presents to Africans (crop losses, starvation, plagues, droughts, floods) are also factors here. The harm from climate change will overwhelmingly hit poor countries far harder than rich ones -despite poor countries overwhelmingly being the least responsible for it.
> But because anthropogenesis is a sham.
Humans creating life is a sham ? Spoken like a true virgin.
It was, as per the article, there was a good explanation of it: a particularly well developed La Nina was able to (briefly) have a stronger effect cooling than greenhouse gasses had heating. The deniers were betting that, rather than an isolated event, it was proof of the overall pattern being wrong and that the temperatures would keep dropping.
Even if the La Nina had held out, which it didn't, this would not have been the case.
Weather is very difficult, climate is comparatively much easier.
Because climate is an average - and averages are far easier to predict than specific individual cases.
If I draw the name of a random American school kid from a hat and ask you to predict their final grades this year... you have roughly a zero chance of getting it right.
If I ask you to predict their GPA and you bet on '3' (the average) you have much better (but still high) odds.
If I ask you to predict the distribution of grades for all graduating students this year and you have even a modicum of understanding of statistics you can bet on 'a normal distribution pattern' (that is roughly 25% fail, in the average pass range and 25% with A's) then you have 100% chance of being right - in fact, we are SO certain that this average MUST hold in any fair exam that if the grades FAIL to line up to a normal distribution that's sufficient evidence to criminally convict teachers or administrators of cheating !
So why can I predict the average scores for a class or a country with 100% success rates with no other information, and yet have near-zero chance of predicting a particular student's grades without a LOT of other information ?
Because average are much, much more predictable than the instances they are averages off.
Climate is an average of weather over a long time. Climate, as an average, is therefore much, much more predictable than weather.
When shitloads of physical evidence, on the other hand, confirms something - it's almost certainly much more likely to be true than not true - especially when the contrary position is supported by a massive, steaming heap of no evidence at all (otherwise known as pure bullshit).
>When a court steps in to start legislating it is repugnant
That is literally what the ENTIRETY of all common law consists off - and most hardcore libertarian types consider common law the ONLY justifiable type.
Of course they are insane, and we do need governmental law as well - but to suggest that judges legislating is some massively anti-liberty idea or repugnant to the separation of powers is grossly ignorant. Legislating is, in fact, a time-honored and fundamental part of being a judge - seperation of powers ONLY comes into play when the issue being judged is ALREADY a matter of law the legislative branch.
Why could net neutrality NOT be implemented based on existing common-law principles ? They would in fact greatly support it, and judges extending it that way would be perfectly acceptable, not violate separation in the least and be far less prone to problems of regulatory capture, bribery^H^H^H^H^H^H^lobbying and abuse.
Serial killers urge judges to stop convicting homicide cases.
Thats a fine goal but it must be approached gradually. Do not try to get out of debt faster than you got in. Do not try it in a recession and for crying out loud do not try to do it by spending cuts - at least not by themselves. If you are going to cut spending you need to raise, not lower, taxes to make up the lost revenue.
But a recession by definition is a lack of spending. If government doesnt change it by spending you end up with a depression.
And its impossible to cause inflation by printing and spending in a recession. Its never happened except where a previous unrelated event destroyed the productive capacity of tge economy (war or plague usually). It takes all the print and spend a government can manage in a recession just to prevent deflation. Deflation = 2nd great depression.
An organisation who calls themselves geniusses yet spend their time in an organisation of self proclaimed geniusses.
Actual geniusses don't join MENSA - they are too busy trying to make the world a better place. They are in research laboratories painstakingly trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, working on vaccines for deadly diseases, finding ways get more energy out of cleaner technologies, digging through miles of dirt to learn more about our ancient ancestors and their cousins and the history of life, coding meticulous synchronization algorithms to keep the many dishes of the world's largest radio telescopic interferometer moving correctly together and discovering new galaxies by the thousands.
What they are not doing - is joining an organisation so they can claim they are geniusses. I know quite a few proud MENSA members... they all have one thing in common, they are idiots who can't think their way out of a wet paper bag and they joined MENSA because rather than own their stupidity their insecurity demanded they find some way to pretend it wasn't there by getting a bunch of other equally insecure idiots together so they can all reassure each other of how smart they all are.
It's the participation trophy of intellectual pursuits.
>What did we ever do to you American
And they often do it to a larger extent. I have a lesbian friend who donates eggs four times a year. She has well over 19 biological children by now.
>What did we ever do to you Americans
Celine Dion and Justin Bieber.
>Did we not say sorry enough to you guys for something? Sorry.
It's going to take a LOT more sorry's to make up for that. Maybe a few more Bryan Adamses and you can start calling it even.
Trump is going to break Goldwater's record for worst landslide loss ever. Actually 'landslide' doesn't fit - avalanche is more apropos.
Clinton is a terrible possible president, somewhere between Dubya and Obama terrible... but Trump is the only candidate so absolutely atrociously bad that Clinton looks good next to him.
That said - I wouldn't advise a vote for a third party, much as I love Jill Stein, I agree with Dan Savage - the third parties have to actually start BEING parties. This running a president every 4 years bullshit isn't ever going to work.
If the greens or the libertarians want to build a viable third party - they need to start at the groundlevel and work their way up. You don't aim for the presidency. You aim to put green and lp candidates in ever city council. Run them for every councilor spot in every race. Run them for fucking dogcatcher. For district judge. Run them in the small, cheap local races - and run them everywhere. Build a grassroots movement so you have candidates, so you have funding, and run them low level. Take over a few towns - show results, then maybe a state (Vermont could easilly go green if enough people run for state legislature - especially if a few cities have green councils).
Then start running for congress and the senate. Get people in there - start reforming things. Get choice-rated voting in place so voting for your first choice cannot inadvertently be a vote for your LAST choice - by having enough people in congress to keep pushing that until it happens.
Do the hard work.. and maybe in 3 or 4 or even 5 elections time - THEN we can have a viable third party candidate running for president and maybe even win. It's all well and good for Jill Stein to complain that the lack of rated voting means thirdparty candidates like her are excluded since people who would want Her, or else Hillary know voting for is a vote for Trump instead. But she's not DOING anything to fix that. You can't fix that by running for president every 4 years complaining how the other guys ruined it. You fix it by starting at groundlevel.
Bernie is the only one who did it right. He didn't run for senate as an independent. He ran for mayor of Burlington. He lost. He ran again. He lost. He ran again and won - and then he did a damn good job. A really good job so he became very popular and won two more terms.
THEN he ran for senate. And then he did good work in that senate (he is one of the single most productive and legislatively successful senators in history and THE most productive in the current government). For 2 decades.
Only then did he run for president... and found there was no viable third party to run for... so, he was forced to join the democrats... and he almost won. We know he got sniped in some states where he DID win (Nevada for one). But the fact is - he came close enough to scare the pants off the party elites. The dems are running their most progressive platform since FDR - he forced them to change their tune.
And he did it - because decades ago... he had the guts to run for mayor.
If the third parties want to learn something from him, then do the thing he's been begging you to do his whole life and this whole campaign: organise, at ground level - and run for every office you can. Forget the presidency. The US is not a monarchy and the president isn't all that powerful anyway. The local mayor has a LOT more control over your life than he does. So maybe get 4 or 5 green or libertarian (or whatever variant you side with) candidates in the council - and then get one of them in the mayors position.
But if you haven't done that - then frankly Jill Stein and Gary Johnson has this in common: they are fucking america for their own egos instead of actually doing what their supporters and their beliefs require to progress.
It does when the ONLY things that are cheaper are high end tech products... unless food, shelter and water are cheaper, your life ends up being worse.
I prefer the older term for the same thing - 'horse and sparrow economics', the idea being that if you feed the horses well there will be lots of seeds for the sparrows in the droppings.
It's more honest... because it outright admits that as far as republicans and libertarians are concerned the poor are literally expected to eat shit.
https://farmbot.io/
You don't even need the farmer anymore... just 10 minutes a week with a tablet to tell the robot what crops you would like to plant. It will plant them, water them, weed them and harvest them.
And the fact that those places are filled with billionaires running massive companies that are bringing in hordes of workers from all over who are desperate for housing (at the expense of the locals who aren't trained in the careers those companies want) have nothing to do with it ?
By the way - how many of those CEOs do you think vote democrat ? What percentage of their political donations go to the republicans and what to the democrats ?
You think Carly Fiorentina was a liberal ?
The people who work in those companies may be overwhelmingly liberal - but they are not the ones making the decisions, they just work there. Their biggest influence was to make the corporate culture in those companies tolerant on social liberal stuff. It's easy for a company to be pro-gay-marriage and pro-transrights and pro-choice... those things don't cost the company money and keeps the working plebs in the company happy so they don't question the business practises.
Even Oracle was liberal on social issues when I worked there - and they were stealing 65-million dollars from Oregon's taxpayers at the same time (this is why I resigned and will never work there again... but almost nobody else did)!
We already do that, that's why corporations are taxed so differently from individuals.
I earn money. Government takes taxes. I have to pay my expenses out of what's left.
Corporation earns money. They pay their expenses. Government gets to tax what's left.
See the difference ? It's HUGE and those 'corporations are people' proclaimers never seem to realize that this absolutely flies in the face of the concept of 'equality before the law' - if they are people, they shouldn't get special treatment in laws. But the justice/practicality aspects aside - the reason we do that is exactly what you said: to try and encourage them to spend their money so they'll pay less tax.
The pattern of hoarding at the moment is proving that this incentive isn't working. The main reason is that they aren't paying taxes to begin with. General Electric was the largest corporation in America until recently (by some metrics they still are) and they go through most years without paying a single cent in tax. There are so many ways to cheat the system legally that they end up paying nothing - so there's no incentive to save on an expense of zero.
Ironically one of the best ways for a corporation to spend money to reduce it's tax bills is to pay huge bonusses to major executives... which keeps the money in the business but gets it written up as an expense. Of course those executives have nice little corporate shell accounts of their own which receive the money and then spend it all on a payment to some other shell corporations which is entirely anonymous... and happens to, though there is no record of this fact, belong to the executive, who can then have this anonymous and shell company spend it all on a corporate yacht, which he leases for a nice big expense against his other income while owning the company he is making the expense too...
You see the problem ? It's entirely possible to create massive expenditures without ever letting go of the cash.
Both your claims are empirically false.
The best long-term global studies have consistently found that moderate minimum wage increases have a nett ZERO effect on either inflation or employment. The few studies that observed any effect on employment rates at all couldn't get it with any statistical significance and those effects were increased employment.
Here is why you are wrong - for both counts:
It seems obvious that a higher wage would lead to firings - but you're seeing it in isolation, the minimum wage also produces another force: increased demand. People earning more - want to buy things, to supply those things you need labor, so to fire people because of a moderate increase in minimum wage would COST you more money than it saves.
But that wouldn't be true if inflation went up as the demand would be eradicated by higher prices, and it again seems obvious that raising prices is a natural response to a higher wage cost. Except that businessmen are not that fucking incredibly stupid. They can do the math too. They know that, if they keep prices the same, they can sell their products to all the workers at all the other businesses who can now afford it and previously couldn't.
The reason these things do not shift as you expect - is because shifting them would cost a business a fortune in potential profits. A huge increase may have these effects, we don't know since it's not been done often enough to study well, but a moderate increase leaves every businessman calculating that keeping staffing levels the same (or increasing them) while not raising prices will make him a lot more money than he can save by cutting workers or raising prices.
Businessmen are not stupid enough to raise prices or fire people over a moderate minimum wage increase - they cash in on it. They always THREATEN to do so beforehand, but they never ACTUALLY do so. The reason they threaten has nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of labor either. It's about power. If wages are low - then workers are desperate and accept any terms in their contracts and afraid to quit - which gives you great power over them. If wages are better, then workers can better themselves - and they start demanding decent working conditions and start refusing to obey unethical demands from bosses and all sorts of other things which authoritarian business-types do not like.
Businesses love having lots of poor people who are desperate for work - as long as there are wealthy people SOMEWHERE to buy the stuff, a steady supply of cheap and desperate labor is good for business.
But if you remove the cheap and desperate it doesn't make the business turn into an idiot - they make the best of the situation - by keeping prices the same and not firing people, so they can cash in on the increased paychecks of all the workers in town.