Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it true. You're just putting your fingers in your ears and pretending you aren't flat-out wrong.
I think any further discussion with you about financial forecasting, Keynesianism, or Austrian economics is pointless.
I agree. Your complete disregard for empirical evidence makes it clear that your ideas are tenuously influenced by reality, at best... I'd be happy to continue a conversation with you when you learn to incorporate basic facts into your reasoning.
The graph shows debt as percentage of GDP; the graph slopes downward not because any debt was paid off but because of economic growth.
We could go on a tangent about whether GDP percentage or absolute dollars is a better measure, but no need. You are still wrong: https://www.brillig.com/debt_c...
What makes you think that Jim O'Sullivan is a Keynesian? Plenty of people who reject Keynesianism build mathematical economic models (I do).
Anybody who uses mathematical modeling is not an Austrian economist, because Austrian economists eschew quantitative methods on philosophical grounds.
Furthermore, O'Sullivan may simply have been lucky.
MarketWatch explained that the chances of O'Sullivan being this successful is less than 1 in 37 million. He's been the best economic forecaster, far and away, for several years running. He's had to get lucky hundreds of times a year (that's how often he beats the consensus estimate) and do it many years in a row. That's not luck - he's using state-of-the-art quantitative analysis, which is explicitly rejected by the Austrian school.
But Austrian economists continue to put hyperinflation predictions out there that are easily proved wrong when said hyperinflation fails to materialize over and over.
You obviously are only familiar with a caricature of Austrian economics.
No, I'm citing the Austrian economists that claimed Obama's economic policies would cause hyperinflation. This was a common claim. If you think those are unrepresentative, show me an economist who is making good predictions without using mathematical models, like a good Austrian.
At the end of the day, something like economics is only useful to the extent that it has predictive power
Austrians don't dispute that economics is useful, they dispute that it is a science.
I never said that economics is a science - you are just distracting from the main point. Since you didn't respond to it earlier, I'll repeat my basic contention:
Either economics can make useful predictions, in which case it makes claims that are falsifiable, or it doesn't make useful predictions, in which case it's completely pointless.
Your graph doesn't show any debts being paid off; you're looking at the wrong graph.
What the hell are you talking about? It shows debts being paid off after the War of 1812, Civil War, WWI, Great Depression, and WWII. Only in the 80's did we start to charge up debt without paying it down.
Austrians don't just say that their theory is unfalsifiable, they say that all economic theories are unfalsifiable because economics is not a science.
At the end of the day, something like economics is only useful to the extent that it has predictive power. If it makes predictions, it is falsifiable. Keynesians use state-of-the-art mathematical modeling to make predictions. And some of them are damn good at it. So you can call economics "unfalsifiable" all day long, if you want. But Austrian economists continue to put hyperinflation predictions out there that are easily proved wrong when said hyperinflation fails to materialize over and over. Either economics can make useful predictions, in which case it makes claims that are falsifiable, or it doesn't make useful predictions, in which case it's completely pointless.
It's puzzling to me why anyone would want to listen to economists who hide behind such circular philosophical smokescreens.
The fact is as you stated: this was one of "the longest recoveries"; that logically makes it one of the slowest.
I think you misunderstand what a recovery is. From the wiki: An economic recovery is the phase of the business cycle following a recession, during which an economy regains and exceeds peak employment and output levels achieved prior to downturn.
The longest economic recovery in recorded U.S. history was in the 1990's, which was simultaneously the best economic growth since the 60's. A long recovery is a GOOD thing.
What Keynesians give you is a responsible adult model of economic behavior - pay off your debts when things are good, so you've got some room to borrow when things are bad.
Pay off debts? Are you delusional? When has the US government ever paid off debt?
Austrians suck at math, modeling, and basically all the modern tools of science, because fundamentally, they don't believe in them.
Correct.
Read the link I posted earlier. Austrians argue that no experiment or empirical evidence could falsify their theory. In this context, that's the same as saying it's a bunch of made-up nonsense that has no bearing on reality. It's pseudointellectual tripe masquerading as economics, and the nonexistent predictive power of the Austrian theory makes that clear. Keynesians actually use math, modeling, and some semblance of scientific rigor in their studies, instead of rejecting empiricism on principle. There's no comparison between the two.
You are making the claim that Obama is bad at predicting, and then using that admittedly bad prediction as your measure of his success. Your argument is self-refuting. If the prediction is bad, it's illogical of you to use it as a measure of his economic success. What's more, a bad predictor could be good at the economy, and a good predictor could be bad at the economy. Nothing about your argument makes sense. The only way we can really understand Obama's impact, short of traveling in time and re-running the experiment, is by comparing his presidency to others. By that measure, he's done quite well.
Obama's recovery is one of the longest in history,
Yes, and hence one of the slowest, i.e., one of the weakest and worst.
No, based on the metrics I provided. Repeating this same thing over and over doesn't make it true, and doesn't refute the facts.
If the Keynesian view were correct, the economy should have responded as he predicted. But, in fact, the economy responded like Austrian models predicted.
Nonsense. Austrian economists were predicting hyperinflation left and right, or maybe a deflationary default. Where is it? http://socialdemocracy21stcent...
Austrian economics gives you exactly what you'd expect for a philosophy that specifically rejects mathematical rigor and empiricism: total garbage, handwaving, magical thinking. And predictive power roughly on par with astrology.
But what Keynesians give you is slow growth and boom-bust cycles because the boom-bust cycles are caused by monetary policy and government spending in the first place.
Totally unsupported claim. What Keynesians give you is a responsible adult model of economic behavior - pay off your debts when things are good, so you've got some room to borrow when things are bad. This lessens the amplitude of the boom-bust cycle. Austrians just say "government is bad" and when you ask them to prove it, they stick their fingers in their ears. Austrians suck at math, modeling, and basically all the modern tools of science, because fundamentally, they don't believe in them. And really, they have to be that way, because if they used empirical methods, those methods would quickly reveal that their theory has no basis in fact.
We choose to shit out more carbon than we use. We choose to shit out more carbon than we use in this decade and do the other things, not because these shits will be hard, but because these shits will be easy, because laying turds will not require our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are not willing to accept, one we are willing to postpone, and one which we intend to leave for someone else to deal with, and the others, too.
FTFY... we shit out the carbon because it is easy. Not shitting it out is the hard part.
Objectively speaking, considering 14 different measures, Obama had a more positive impact on the economy than all but one of the last 6 administrations
Given the depth of the recession, that would have been true of any president, short of starting WWIII.
The recession was definitely NOT rock bottom. It could have continued to get worse. In some respects, it was more severe initially than the great depression, and if mismanaged it could have become one. While it is easy to look better than Bush, a president has it very much in his power to make a recession worse, or to mitigate it.
And the very article you quote says "Furthermore, while shortfalls do exist on the Obama end-of-term report card, his performance holds up more than adequately against other US leaders of recent history."
In what way does that quote refute my contention? The link supports my position - that Obama was decent, but not spectacular economically. There are several steps that Obama could have taken (or not) that would have dramatically changed the course of the recession. You are claiming that Obama was an economic trainwreck - that quote says otherwise.
What Obama should be measured by is (1) how his performance compares to his own economic predictions and promises, and (2) how the recovery compares to historical recoveries.
You're setting arbitrary goalposts here to declare his failure. Obama should not be expected to predict the future. He did better than expected on some predictions, worse than expected on others. As well, you are choosing to focus only on GDP, which is a limited picture. If you look at wage growth, jobs added, debt-to-income, and all the other metrics in my original link, you'll see that Obama was not just adequate, but better than most recent presidents. You'll also note that he IS being compared to historical recoveries there - Reagan and Clinton both presided over their own recoveries, and that link makes a direct comparison to them.
Obama's poor economic performance isn't surprising either: his stimulus package, fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and welfare policy worked as people expected it to and the way they have always done: they slowed economic recovery, employment, and growth.
Citation needed. This is just a baseless claim. "People" in this case were obstructionist Republicans, who predicted everything from hyperinflation to a full-on depression. Your Forbes "evidence" is a shamelessly partisan opinion piece. Obama's recovery is one of the longest in history, and healthier than comparable recoveries in many respects. I'll take slow-and-steady growth over boom-bust cycles any time.
Objectively speaking, considering 14 different measures, Obama had a more positive impact on the economy than all but one of the last 6 administrations. The economic health of the country, as measured by percentage improvement in wage growth, S&P 500 value, debt to income ratio, value of the dollar, and several additional metrics, places Obama second only to Clinton in terms of positive impact on the economy.
Now, are you going to provide some facts to support your own claims of economic disaster? The original contention was yours - you should back it up.
I am? I can call Trump an idiot narcissistic authoritarian moron based purely on the contents of his twitter feed and videos of his campaign rallies. Anybody who voted for him is, by definition, a supporter of idiotic narcissistic authoritarians. No guilt by association there. Or are you talking about the Bannonite thing? Once again, you are making the same arguments as Bannon, so you aren't guilty by association, but guilty of repeating his moronic nationalist tripe.
Globalism means one world government. Are people seriously in favor of this? It's a tyranny, one that would be inescapable. McCain was a globalist, not a patriot. A patriot would want us to continue ruling ourselves, not to try to expand our empire by endless war against countries that have done nothing to us. We can best serve the world by building ourselves as an example to follow, instead of a cruel empire that seeks to dominate by force.
First off, this is a strawman - McCain and the others who you would call "globalists" don't want this New World Order world government garbage that you imagine. You are manufacturing a pretend world to make it sound like you have a point.
Secondly, you are redefining words to make it sound as though you have something new to say. You don't. What you call "globalism" is just plain old imperialism, which has already been discussed ad nauseum by the postmodernists and used as an excuse to condemn any kind of constructive sociopolitical theory. Yes, imperialism is bad. No, the alt-right and Trumpism are not doing anything to address it. They are just selling white nationalism by another name.
1) our trade policy has decimated our manufacturing base, leaving millions of Americans economically stranded
And you vote for an authoritarian billionaire to fix the problem? If you want a healthy economy for working people, we already know what works. Return to the good ol' days of American manufacturing dominance, when unions were thriving and the top marginal tax rate 90%. You'll notice worldwide that healthier, happier societies have lower inequality - the same is true of our own history. If you want to help the working man, help the goddamn working man, don't elect a billionaire idiot and claim you are doing something good for normal people.
2) our defense policy has engaged us in conflicts around the globe that in many cases have actually made the United States less secure.
Ok, so don't vote for war hawks. That generally means voting NO for republicans - Democrats have less warmongering generally, but a libertarian or other third-party would be better yet. Again, voting for an authoritarian blowhard is the WORST POSSIBLE approach if you want less international war.
and have added considerably to our bloated national debt;
If you give a single shit about the national debt, you should vote against Trump and republicans the first chance you get - did you notice the massive tax cut, and what that's doing to our deficit?
at least 11 million (and likely many more) illegal aliens have entered the United States, effectively suppressing wages for many working Americans, and adding tremendously to the cost of our education and public assistance programs.
Citation needed. There's no indication whatsoever that illegal aliens have suppressed wages - Americans aren't willing to work fields for any price. Immigrants, on the whole, greatly improve the health of the economy, pay taxes, and make the country stronger - there are lots of countries out there with flat or negative population growth, and it's not an enviable position to be in.
Russia didn't destabilize the Middle East, Russia didn't overthrow Gaddafi, Russia didn't arm and train Jihadists in Syria like al-Nusra, Russia didn't create the refugee crisis.
In many cases, it seems as though you aren't paying attention to the facts and instead are choosing an interpretation that fits your opinions.
You mean "facts" and "evidence" like "economists generally suggest" and "they were better than"?
You make a common mistake, which is to assume that because a statement is qualified, hedged, or relative, that it is less reliable than a proclamation of certitude. The exact opposite is the case. Liars and salesman deal in absolutes, which isn't appropriate for any moderately complex topic. Almost nothing can be proved in economics, politics, or any other soft science. Accordingly, people who care first and foremost about the truth always make the limits of their knowledge abundantly clear. The best we can do is look at the evidence and make an educated assessment - an educated assessment of Obama's administration shows that he didn't do anything revolutionary, largely followed the path set by Clinton and Bush before him, made a few mistakes, and had a few modest achievements.
I gave you my assessment of Obama's presidency. I didn't invite you to debate it and, given your biases, consider that pointless. I encourage you to do the necessary reading on your own why people reach the conclusions that I and many other reached about Obama and his policies.
You posted your opinions on slashdot - if you don't want people to disagree with you, don't post. Also, "do necessary reading" is the same thing as saying "I'm not going to support my positions myself". It's a non-argument. You are suggesting that the answers are out there somewhere, but you aren't going to give them. I can just as easily do the same: go educate yourself, surely once you are enlightened you will realize the superiority of my position.
If you won't accept that argument from me, you shouldn't expect me to accept it from you.
Supply a source to back up your claim that "hundreds of thousands" have died in uranium mining.
While you're at it, you now need to supply a source to support your equally absurd claim that 10-100 people have died for each nuclear power plant constructed.
You should make at least a cursory attempt to back up your opinions with facts.
The way I would put it myself is that Obama was rivaling Bush for being the worst president during my lifetime, creating massive moral hazards with his bailouts, paying off cronies in the energy and medical sectors, pushing through a disastrous healthcare reform package, massively interfering with the economic recovery, interfering with due process and freedom of religion in the US, weakening the US abroad, causing millions of people to leave the workforce, and expanding the abuse of executive power to unprecedented levels.
The problem with most of these claims is that the most compelling evidence suggests the exact opposite in many cases. Economists generally suggest that the bailouts were effective. The best evidence suggests that Obamacare did, indeed, improve insured rates and slow down the climb of health care costs. I'm not aware of any interference with freedom of religion, unless you are talking about gay rights? "Weakening the US abroad" is very vague, and I don't see any tangible way in which Obama differed much from either Bush or Clinton. It is not in one president's power to "cause millions of people to leave the workforce", and the trend that I believe you are referring to started long before Obama. In terms of abusing executive power, I agree that the executive branch should be curtailed, but disagree that Obama was doing anything that qualified as "abuse", and in a quantifiable sense his use of the executive order was not particularly remarkable compared to many presidents.
On due process (I assume you are referring to targeting US citizens with drones, and similar abuses of constitutional rights under the pretext of counterterrorism) I agree. As previously mentioned, I also think the bailouts should have been coupled with trust-busting, but they were better than just allowing the economy to collapse.
These aren't "policy disagreements", that's his record. The part that is astounding is how oblivious Obama and his fans are to his failures and lack of competence.
Again, it's not his record unless you can show evidence to support your claims. In many cases, it seems as though you aren't paying attention to the facts and instead are choosing an interpretation that fits your opinions. There are things to criticize about Obama, but the things you are choosing to harp on don't make you seem very informed, or objective.
It's a shame that there weren't any Democrats trying to contain a blowhard nut in the last administration; but that's because the last blowhard nut paid off his corrupt entourage handsomely.
Do you really believe this? Like, really? I'm genuinely fascinated.
In what ways was Obama a blowhard? Or a nut? You can disagree with all sorts of policies, and there are criticisms that I could understand, but for an insult to stick it needs to have at least some shred of truth. Obama was one of the most restrained, sane presidents we've had in decades, almost to a fault - so calling him a "blowhard nut" just makes it sound like you've got some issues with mental wellness yourself.
McCain wasn't an American patriot. He was a globalist.
Are you aware that "globalist" is only a dirty word to alt-right Bannonites like yourself? Everyone else reads globalist as "not a rabid nationalist".
""Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. l could SMELL the Trump support."
Some quotes of people looking down on Bernie and Trump supporters doesn't prove anything except that there are people out there who look down on Bernie and Trump supporters. Big surprise. Are you equally shocked by people who hate Hillary supporters? Or Obama supporters? People behave dismissively towards those they disagree with, news at 11.
"They think they are far more dependent than they actually are. They're arrogant, they believe, and say in the surveys if the American people want one thing, and they think it's wrong, they're going to push something else. There's a massive disconnect, and the deep state is real, and it's a threat to our republic form of government."
This is the first interesting thing you've said, but here's the main problem: If you want to fix an entrenched corporatist bureaucracy, why would you elect a narcissistic authoritarian moron? It's like you've got cancer, and you don't feel like the doctors are making any progress, so instead you find a rabid doberman to attack you. At least it's not another one of those damn useless doctors.
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but every energy source has a cost in lives. People fall off roofs and wind towers and die all the time. Coal pollution kills thousands of people each year. There is no energy form that doesn't have some kind of danger associated with it.
And your links you like to throw around, simply ommit all the death du to nuclear. Hundred thousands died do to uranium mining
What are you talking about? Supply a source to back up your claim that "hundreds of thousands" have died in uranium mining. That's pure nonsense. Fuel is a pretty minor part of running a nuclear power plant, and the whole nuclear industry is so safety-obsessed that the actual power plants are safer by far than any other type. Nuclear also produces an immense amount of power, so one nuclear power plant can produce as much energy as 100,000 home solar installs. So, considering a huge amount of power per plant, for a tiny amount of fuel needed, and an insanely conservative safety culture, and extremely low CO2 emissions - if you want to save lives, want to limit pollution, want to slow down global warming, you should support nuclear power.
Or, you know, just stick your fingers in your ears and ignore logic.
We had quite a set of nuclear accidents, about 10 I recall, hardly a saftey record.
Sure, accidents happen. They also happen for wind, solar, hydroelectric, natural gas, coal, and oil. The only reasonable way to evaluate safety is to compare the deaths per unit energy for all energy sources, which equalizes all the various contributing factors and gives you a fair comparison. By that measure, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than everything else: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
And actually, we all know: nuclear is bad. So what is your point?
Blatant, baseless FUD. Nuclear has the best safety record of any power source, if you look at actual facts. Opposition to nuclear amounts to support for fossil fuels.
Did you take physics or statistics? Because pure math is often just manipulating symbols and so it's difficult to see the relationship with anything in real life. Being good at algebra doesn't mean you're a good critical thinker. But applied math (like physics and statistics) shows you how to use the formal methods of math to solve incredibly complex problems, gives you better tools for critical thinking than just about anything, and gives you practice using them in real-world scenarios.
I took many philosophy and English courses - they didn't hold a candle to Physics 101 for learning to really think clearly.
Contrary to popular thought you _can_ teach critical thinking. But you can't do it with Math. Math is too difficult a subject and there's no value in being 50% right.
I agree with your general sentiment (that humanities degrees are useful) but disagree that they are better than math at teaching critical thinking, or even as good as math. Honestly, there are two subjects that dramatically improved my critical thinking skills - physics, and statistics. Both of them use applied math to analyze and solve real world situations.
The thing that you point out (no value in being 50% right) is the exact reason that many STEM classes are better than humanities at teaching critical thinking. You can't learn to think clearly or accurately if you don't have external feedback showing you precisely where your thinking has failed. What makes critical thinking valuable is that you can evaluate an answer and figure out if it is wrong, and hopefully say why. And that's exactly the skill that you build in STEM classes, and particularly in classes that teach how to apply math. You try to think through a problem, find out that your thinking failed, and learn to catch logical errors. This makes you good at seeing through propaganda, and it makes you good at jobs where logical correctness is of key importance (in some fields it isn't a main priority, and can even be a liability).
Spending a bunch of time writing subjective essays that are subjectively evaluated by biased professors just teaches you how to be articulate and verbose, and how to tell people what they want to hear (these are all useful skills, btw, but are orthogonal to critical thinking). There are many, many folks who get a PHd in the humanities without ever learning to, for instance, tell at a glance what's wrong with a given statistic used in propaganda. The humanities are tremendously valuable to society and give you many skills as an individual - but critical thinking is not necessarily among them.
You are right that math is hard. But critical thinking is also hard. We get good at critical thinking by doing thinking that is hard, and learning to recognize logical errors.
Ok, that's true for subatomic particles, i'll give you that. But does that scale upwards, is the ultimate question?
It does - quantum mechanical weirdness has been demonstrated with quite massive (in a physics sense) molecules: https://www.sciencealert.com/p...
If this is how the building blocks of reality behave, then the obvious concern is that macroscopic objects have the same bizarre behaviors - which prompted Einstein to wonder if the moon is there when nobody is looking.
Here's another interesting possibility that the original false dichotomy excluded: What if only some of us had free will? In Quantum Night, author Robert J. Sawyer explored that idea.
Glad you pointed that out! I actually read that book a while ago myself, very thought-provoking.
Slashdot Mirror
Your question:
The answer: Many times in its history. Indisputable fact. Your opinion is in absolute contradiction to reality.
Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it true. You're just putting your fingers in your ears and pretending you aren't flat-out wrong.
I agree. Your complete disregard for empirical evidence makes it clear that your ideas are tenuously influenced by reality, at best... I'd be happy to continue a conversation with you when you learn to incorporate basic facts into your reasoning.
What would be truly impressive would be if your username matches your daily transportation.
We could go on a tangent about whether GDP percentage or absolute dollars is a better measure, but no need. You are still wrong: https://www.brillig.com/debt_c...
Anybody who uses mathematical modeling is not an Austrian economist, because Austrian economists eschew quantitative methods on philosophical grounds.
MarketWatch explained that the chances of O'Sullivan being this successful is less than 1 in 37 million. He's been the best economic forecaster, far and away, for several years running. He's had to get lucky hundreds of times a year (that's how often he beats the consensus estimate) and do it many years in a row. That's not luck - he's using state-of-the-art quantitative analysis, which is explicitly rejected by the Austrian school.
No, I'm citing the Austrian economists that claimed Obama's economic policies would cause hyperinflation. This was a common claim. If you think those are unrepresentative, show me an economist who is making good predictions without using mathematical models, like a good Austrian.
I never said that economics is a science - you are just distracting from the main point. Since you didn't respond to it earlier, I'll repeat my basic contention:
Either economics can make useful predictions, in which case it makes claims that are falsifiable, or it doesn't make useful predictions, in which case it's completely pointless.
So which is it?
I'll see your iPhone 6s and raise you a 5s... bought used on Craigslist.
What the hell are you talking about? It shows debts being paid off after the War of 1812, Civil War, WWI, Great Depression, and WWII. Only in the 80's did we start to charge up debt without paying it down.
At the end of the day, something like economics is only useful to the extent that it has predictive power. If it makes predictions, it is falsifiable. Keynesians use state-of-the-art mathematical modeling to make predictions. And some of them are damn good at it. So you can call economics "unfalsifiable" all day long, if you want. But Austrian economists continue to put hyperinflation predictions out there that are easily proved wrong when said hyperinflation fails to materialize over and over. Either economics can make useful predictions, in which case it makes claims that are falsifiable, or it doesn't make useful predictions, in which case it's completely pointless.
It's puzzling to me why anyone would want to listen to economists who hide behind such circular philosophical smokescreens.
I think you misunderstand what a recovery is. From the wiki: An economic recovery is the phase of the business cycle following a recession, during which an economy regains and exceeds peak employment and output levels achieved prior to downturn.
The longest economic recovery in recorded U.S. history was in the 1990's, which was simultaneously the best economic growth since the 60's. A long recovery is a GOOD thing.
Oh, I don't know, through most of its history until the advent of delusional Reaganomics?
Read the link I posted earlier. Austrians argue that no experiment or empirical evidence could falsify their theory. In this context, that's the same as saying it's a bunch of made-up nonsense that has no bearing on reality. It's pseudointellectual tripe masquerading as economics, and the nonexistent predictive power of the Austrian theory makes that clear. Keynesians actually use math, modeling, and some semblance of scientific rigor in their studies, instead of rejecting empiricism on principle. There's no comparison between the two.
You are making the claim that Obama is bad at predicting, and then using that admittedly bad prediction as your measure of his success. Your argument is self-refuting. If the prediction is bad, it's illogical of you to use it as a measure of his economic success. What's more, a bad predictor could be good at the economy, and a good predictor could be bad at the economy. Nothing about your argument makes sense. The only way we can really understand Obama's impact, short of traveling in time and re-running the experiment, is by comparing his presidency to others. By that measure, he's done quite well.
No, based on the metrics I provided. Repeating this same thing over and over doesn't make it true, and doesn't refute the facts.
Nonsense. Austrian economists were predicting hyperinflation left and right, or maybe a deflationary default. Where is it? http://socialdemocracy21stcent...
Austrian economics gives you exactly what you'd expect for a philosophy that specifically rejects mathematical rigor and empiricism: total garbage, handwaving, magical thinking. And predictive power roughly on par with astrology.
Totally unsupported claim. What Keynesians give you is a responsible adult model of economic behavior - pay off your debts when things are good, so you've got some room to borrow when things are bad. This lessens the amplitude of the boom-bust cycle. Austrians just say "government is bad" and when you ask them to prove it, they stick their fingers in their ears. Austrians suck at math, modeling, and basically all the modern tools of science, because fundamentally, they don't believe in them. And really, they have to be that way, because if they used empirical methods, those methods would quickly reveal that their theory has no basis in fact.
We choose to shit out more carbon than we use. We choose to shit out more carbon than we use in this decade and do the other things, not because these shits will be hard, but because these shits will be easy, because laying turds will not require our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are not willing to accept, one we are willing to postpone, and one which we intend to leave for someone else to deal with, and the others, too.
FTFY... we shit out the carbon because it is easy. Not shitting it out is the hard part.
Given the depth of the recession, that would have been true of any president, short of starting WWIII.
The recession was definitely NOT rock bottom. It could have continued to get worse. In some respects, it was more severe initially than the great depression, and if mismanaged it could have become one. While it is easy to look better than Bush, a president has it very much in his power to make a recession worse, or to mitigate it.
And the very article you quote says "Furthermore, while shortfalls do exist on the Obama end-of-term report card, his performance holds up more than adequately against other US leaders of recent history."
In what way does that quote refute my contention? The link supports my position - that Obama was decent, but not spectacular economically. There are several steps that Obama could have taken (or not) that would have dramatically changed the course of the recession. You are claiming that Obama was an economic trainwreck - that quote says otherwise.
What Obama should be measured by is (1) how his performance compares to his own economic predictions and promises, and (2) how the recovery compares to historical recoveries.
You're setting arbitrary goalposts here to declare his failure. Obama should not be expected to predict the future. He did better than expected on some predictions, worse than expected on others. As well, you are choosing to focus only on GDP, which is a limited picture. If you look at wage growth, jobs added, debt-to-income, and all the other metrics in my original link, you'll see that Obama was not just adequate, but better than most recent presidents. You'll also note that he IS being compared to historical recoveries there - Reagan and Clinton both presided over their own recoveries, and that link makes a direct comparison to them.
Obama's poor economic performance isn't surprising either: his stimulus package, fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and welfare policy worked as people expected it to and the way they have always done: they slowed economic recovery, employment, and growth.
Citation needed. This is just a baseless claim. "People" in this case were obstructionist Republicans, who predicted everything from hyperinflation to a full-on depression. Your Forbes "evidence" is a shamelessly partisan opinion piece. Obama's recovery is one of the longest in history, and healthier than comparable recoveries in many respects. I'll take slow-and-steady growth over boom-bust cycles any time.
Here you go, straight facts:
https://internationalbanker.co...
Objectively speaking, considering 14 different measures, Obama had a more positive impact on the economy than all but one of the last 6 administrations. The economic health of the country, as measured by percentage improvement in wage growth, S&P 500 value, debt to income ratio, value of the dollar, and several additional metrics, places Obama second only to Clinton in terms of positive impact on the economy.
Now, are you going to provide some facts to support your own claims of economic disaster? The original contention was yours - you should back it up.
You're using the guilty by association fallacy.
I am? I can call Trump an idiot narcissistic authoritarian moron based purely on the contents of his twitter feed and videos of his campaign rallies. Anybody who voted for him is, by definition, a supporter of idiotic narcissistic authoritarians. No guilt by association there. Or are you talking about the Bannonite thing? Once again, you are making the same arguments as Bannon, so you aren't guilty by association, but guilty of repeating his moronic nationalist tripe.
Globalism means one world government. Are people seriously in favor of this? It's a tyranny, one that would be inescapable. McCain was a globalist, not a patriot. A patriot would want us to continue ruling ourselves, not to try to expand our empire by endless war against countries that have done nothing to us. We can best serve the world by building ourselves as an example to follow, instead of a cruel empire that seeks to dominate by force.
First off, this is a strawman - McCain and the others who you would call "globalists" don't want this New World Order world government garbage that you imagine. You are manufacturing a pretend world to make it sound like you have a point.
Secondly, you are redefining words to make it sound as though you have something new to say. You don't. What you call "globalism" is just plain old imperialism, which has already been discussed ad nauseum by the postmodernists and used as an excuse to condemn any kind of constructive sociopolitical theory. Yes, imperialism is bad. No, the alt-right and Trumpism are not doing anything to address it. They are just selling white nationalism by another name.
1) our trade policy has decimated our manufacturing base, leaving millions of Americans economically
stranded
And you vote for an authoritarian billionaire to fix the problem? If you want a healthy economy for working people, we already know what works. Return to the good ol' days of American manufacturing dominance, when unions were thriving and the top marginal tax rate 90%. You'll notice worldwide that healthier, happier societies have lower inequality - the same is true of our own history. If you want to help the working man, help the goddamn working man, don't elect a billionaire idiot and claim you are doing something good for normal people.
2) our defense policy has engaged us in conflicts around the globe that in many cases have actually made the United States less secure.
Ok, so don't vote for war hawks. That generally means voting NO for republicans - Democrats have less warmongering generally, but a libertarian or other third-party would be better yet. Again, voting for an authoritarian blowhard is the WORST POSSIBLE approach if you want less international war.
and have added considerably to our bloated national debt;
If you give a single shit about the national debt, you should vote against Trump and republicans the first chance you get - did you notice the massive tax cut, and what that's doing to our deficit?
at least 11 million (and likely many more) illegal aliens have entered the United States, effectively suppressing wages for many working Americans, and adding tremendously to the cost of our education and public assistance programs.
Citation needed. There's no indication whatsoever that illegal aliens have suppressed wages - Americans aren't willing to work fields for any price. Immigrants, on the whole, greatly improve the health of the economy, pay taxes, and make the country stronger - there are lots of countries out there with flat or negative population growth, and it's not an enviable position to be in.
Russia didn't destabilize the Middle East, Russia didn't overthrow Gaddafi, Russia didn't arm and train Jihadists in Syria like al-Nusra, Russia didn't create the refugee crisis.
You mean "facts" and "evidence" like "economists generally suggest" and "they were better than"?
You make a common mistake, which is to assume that because a statement is qualified, hedged, or relative, that it is less reliable than a proclamation of certitude. The exact opposite is the case. Liars and salesman deal in absolutes, which isn't appropriate for any moderately complex topic. Almost nothing can be proved in economics, politics, or any other soft science. Accordingly, people who care first and foremost about the truth always make the limits of their knowledge abundantly clear. The best we can do is look at the evidence and make an educated assessment - an educated assessment of Obama's administration shows that he didn't do anything revolutionary, largely followed the path set by Clinton and Bush before him, made a few mistakes, and had a few modest achievements.
I gave you my assessment of Obama's presidency. I didn't invite you to debate it and, given your biases, consider that pointless. I encourage you to do the necessary reading on your own why people reach the conclusions that I and many other reached about Obama and his policies.
You posted your opinions on slashdot - if you don't want people to disagree with you, don't post. Also, "do necessary reading" is the same thing as saying "I'm not going to support my positions myself". It's a non-argument. You are suggesting that the answers are out there somewhere, but you aren't going to give them. I can just as easily do the same: go educate yourself, surely once you are enlightened you will realize the superiority of my position.
If you won't accept that argument from me, you shouldn't expect me to accept it from you.
Supply a source to back up your claim that "hundreds of thousands" have died in uranium mining.
While you're at it, you now need to supply a source to support your equally absurd claim that 10-100 people have died for each nuclear power plant constructed.
You should make at least a cursory attempt to back up your opinions with facts.
The way I would put it myself is that Obama was rivaling Bush for being the worst president during my lifetime, creating massive moral hazards with his bailouts, paying off cronies in the energy and medical sectors, pushing through a disastrous healthcare reform package, massively interfering with the economic recovery, interfering with due process and freedom of religion in the US, weakening the US abroad, causing millions of people to leave the workforce, and expanding the abuse of executive power to unprecedented levels.
The problem with most of these claims is that the most compelling evidence suggests the exact opposite in many cases. Economists generally suggest that the bailouts were effective. The best evidence suggests that Obamacare did, indeed, improve insured rates and slow down the climb of health care costs. I'm not aware of any interference with freedom of religion, unless you are talking about gay rights? "Weakening the US abroad" is very vague, and I don't see any tangible way in which Obama differed much from either Bush or Clinton. It is not in one president's power to "cause millions of people to leave the workforce", and the trend that I believe you are referring to started long before Obama. In terms of abusing executive power, I agree that the executive branch should be curtailed, but disagree that Obama was doing anything that qualified as "abuse", and in a quantifiable sense his use of the executive order was not particularly remarkable compared to many presidents.
On due process (I assume you are referring to targeting US citizens with drones, and similar abuses of constitutional rights under the pretext of counterterrorism) I agree. As previously mentioned, I also think the bailouts should have been coupled with trust-busting, but they were better than just allowing the economy to collapse.
These aren't "policy disagreements", that's his record. The part that is astounding is how oblivious Obama and his fans are to his failures and lack of competence.
Again, it's not his record unless you can show evidence to support your claims. In many cases, it seems as though you aren't paying attention to the facts and instead are choosing an interpretation that fits your opinions. There are things to criticize about Obama, but the things you are choosing to harp on don't make you seem very informed, or objective.
It's a shame that there weren't any Democrats trying to contain a blowhard nut in the last administration; but that's because the last blowhard nut paid off his corrupt entourage handsomely.
Do you really believe this? Like, really? I'm genuinely fascinated.
In what ways was Obama a blowhard? Or a nut? You can disagree with all sorts of policies, and there are criticisms that I could understand, but for an insult to stick it needs to have at least some shred of truth. Obama was one of the most restrained, sane presidents we've had in decades, almost to a fault - so calling him a "blowhard nut" just makes it sound like you've got some issues with mental wellness yourself.
McCain wasn't an American patriot. He was a globalist.
Are you aware that "globalist" is only a dirty word to alt-right Bannonites like yourself? Everyone else reads globalist as "not a rabid nationalist".
""Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. l could SMELL the Trump support."
Some quotes of people looking down on Bernie and Trump supporters doesn't prove anything except that there are people out there who look down on Bernie and Trump supporters. Big surprise. Are you equally shocked by people who hate Hillary supporters? Or Obama supporters? People behave dismissively towards those they disagree with, news at 11.
"They think they are far more dependent than they actually are. They're arrogant, they believe, and say in the surveys if the American people want one thing, and they think it's wrong, they're going to push something else. There's a massive disconnect, and the deep state is real, and it's a threat to our republic form of government."
This is the first interesting thing you've said, but here's the main problem: If you want to fix an entrenched corporatist bureaucracy, why would you elect a narcissistic authoritarian moron? It's like you've got cancer, and you don't feel like the doctors are making any progress, so instead you find a rabid doberman to attack you. At least it's not another one of those damn useless doctors.
As no one dies to the energy ...
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but every energy source has a cost in lives. People fall off roofs and wind towers and die all the time. Coal pollution kills thousands of people each year. There is no energy form that doesn't have some kind of danger associated with it.
And your links you like to throw around, simply ommit all the death du to nuclear. Hundred thousands died do to uranium mining
What are you talking about? Supply a source to back up your claim that "hundreds of thousands" have died in uranium mining. That's pure nonsense. Fuel is a pretty minor part of running a nuclear power plant, and the whole nuclear industry is so safety-obsessed that the actual power plants are safer by far than any other type. Nuclear also produces an immense amount of power, so one nuclear power plant can produce as much energy as 100,000 home solar installs. So, considering a huge amount of power per plant, for a tiny amount of fuel needed, and an insanely conservative safety culture, and extremely low CO2 emissions - if you want to save lives, want to limit pollution, want to slow down global warming, you should support nuclear power.
Or, you know, just stick your fingers in your ears and ignore logic.
We had quite a set of nuclear accidents, about 10 I recall, hardly a saftey record.
Sure, accidents happen. They also happen for wind, solar, hydroelectric, natural gas, coal, and oil. The only reasonable way to evaluate safety is to compare the deaths per unit energy for all energy sources, which equalizes all the various contributing factors and gives you a fair comparison. By that measure, nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than everything else:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
And actually, we all know: nuclear is bad. So what is your point?
Blatant, baseless FUD. Nuclear has the best safety record of any power source, if you look at actual facts. Opposition to nuclear amounts to support for fossil fuels.
Did you take physics or statistics? Because pure math is often just manipulating symbols and so it's difficult to see the relationship with anything in real life. Being good at algebra doesn't mean you're a good critical thinker. But applied math (like physics and statistics) shows you how to use the formal methods of math to solve incredibly complex problems, gives you better tools for critical thinking than just about anything, and gives you practice using them in real-world scenarios.
I took many philosophy and English courses - they didn't hold a candle to Physics 101 for learning to really think clearly.
Contrary to popular thought you _can_ teach critical thinking. But you can't do it with Math. Math is too difficult a subject and there's no value in being 50% right.
I agree with your general sentiment (that humanities degrees are useful) but disagree that they are better than math at teaching critical thinking, or even as good as math. Honestly, there are two subjects that dramatically improved my critical thinking skills - physics, and statistics. Both of them use applied math to analyze and solve real world situations.
The thing that you point out (no value in being 50% right) is the exact reason that many STEM classes are better than humanities at teaching critical thinking. You can't learn to think clearly or accurately if you don't have external feedback showing you precisely where your thinking has failed. What makes critical thinking valuable is that you can evaluate an answer and figure out if it is wrong, and hopefully say why. And that's exactly the skill that you build in STEM classes, and particularly in classes that teach how to apply math. You try to think through a problem, find out that your thinking failed, and learn to catch logical errors. This makes you good at seeing through propaganda, and it makes you good at jobs where logical correctness is of key importance (in some fields it isn't a main priority, and can even be a liability).
Spending a bunch of time writing subjective essays that are subjectively evaluated by biased professors just teaches you how to be articulate and verbose, and how to tell people what they want to hear (these are all useful skills, btw, but are orthogonal to critical thinking). There are many, many folks who get a PHd in the humanities without ever learning to, for instance, tell at a glance what's wrong with a given statistic used in propaganda. The humanities are tremendously valuable to society and give you many skills as an individual - but critical thinking is not necessarily among them.
You are right that math is hard. But critical thinking is also hard. We get good at critical thinking by doing thinking that is hard, and learning to recognize logical errors.
IMO, buttbuttinate is a much more fun example of that problem than clbuttic. That whole wikipedia article is comedy gold, btw.
Ok, that's true for subatomic particles, i'll give you that. But does that scale upwards, is the ultimate question?
It does - quantum mechanical weirdness has been demonstrated with quite massive (in a physics sense) molecules: https://www.sciencealert.com/p...
If this is how the building blocks of reality behave, then the obvious concern is that macroscopic objects have the same bizarre behaviors - which prompted Einstein to wonder if the moon is there when nobody is looking.
Here's another interesting possibility that the original false dichotomy excluded: What if only some of us had free will? In Quantum Night, author Robert J. Sawyer explored that idea.
Glad you pointed that out! I actually read that book a while ago myself, very thought-provoking.