It wasn't a gamble at all, it was both reasonable and politically smart. Even many people who hated Trump's guts voted for him because they couldn't stand the idea of Hillary Clinton appointing more supreme court justices. I think that's what finally pushed Trump over the finish line.
And given the kind of people Obama had appointed before (Sotomayor, Kagan), Congress was not going to give him another chance. If SCOTUS had tilted any further to the left, Congress would like have taken drastic action, like simply creating three more seats, to be filled by conservatives. Obama and his appointees simply do not represent the American people.
it's a fact the Republicans just stole that seat. It really angers me to see them doing so much wrong and getting away with it again and again...
Thinking of supreme court justice appointments as property of the president is unacceptable. Congress is supposed to advise and consent, and the advised that the president should wait with the appointment until the next Congress and withheld their consent. That was a legitimate decision and it was a reasonable decision. I suspect that SCOTUS appointments is also what pushed Trump over the line in the election, because even people who hated his guts couldn't stand the idea that Hillary Clinton would appoint any more supreme court justices, in particular given the views she had articulated on the Constitution during the campaign.
Obama has done such a piss poor job with the two appointments that he did get that the public approval of SCOTUS has dropped by nearly 20 points, to a record low. If he had appointed another left wing activists like the two he did, Congress might have been forced to do something else, like increase the number of supreme court justices to 12, for example, and have Trump fill them with moderate conservatives. As it is, we are stuck with Sotomayor and Kagan, but the court may return to some semblance of balance and sanity with Gorsuch and (hopefully) a RBG replacement.
Medicaid, medicare, research, orphan drug programs, aid to 3rd world countries
None of those programs employ doctors.
you think all these programs are self-financing and make enough of a profit to pay doctors
I think those programs are one of the major reasons doctors are leaving the profession. They are also one of the major reasons American health care is so outrageously expensive and comparatively ineffective or even harmful.
They should start with fact-checking fake news like: "Women make 80% of what men do." or "Climate change threatens the future of humanity." or "Gun control reduces homicides." or "The welfare state helps people become productive members of society." or "Paying more for education than we do improves educational outcomes."
I suspect it isn't that kind of fake news that they are going to fact check.
4. MCS Admin (no idea what MCS is, but "admin" means clerical administration no doubt.. low barrier to entry, probably no degree required) -- black woman
"MCS" is "mobile cloud service", a technical role. You're projecting your own racism and sexism onto others.
5. Enterprise Architect (big on training, probably CS degree, decades of IS experience) -- white man
Yes, and that probably reflects the statistics of who enterprise architects are: most well-educated white males. Why shouldn't Oracle's ads reflect the demographics of their customers?
And to be clear, the fact that enterprise architects are rarely black women is neither due to discrimination or accident: it's a role that requires risk taking, systems thinking, and pretty tough political battles, and statistically, far fewer black women then white males do well on those dimensions.
Why? Statistically, women aren't working the same. Statistically, they drop out of the workforce more or work part time. Therefore, statistically, they get paid less. The one thing that isn't happening in significant numbers is discrimination against women.
2. Promote women more. Stop pretending you are promoting them, we know you aren't.
Why? Statistically, women don't have as many top performers as men, which is why statistically, they don't get promoted as much. Furthermore, the statistical lack of top performers isn't due to discrimination or gender roles, it's biological. The flipside is that statistically, women also end up much less in prisons and insane asylums, and that they live longer.
3. Stop hiring from your frat.
About 40% of people in Silicon Valley are foreign born; the majority of people at several companies I have worked were foreign born. People do tend to hire from their own ethnicity, but so what? If there is any gender bias in hiring, it's not from straight white males, who hire any woman they can, both because they constantly feel guilty about everything and because they actually like women.
Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person (hbr.org)
Yes, some companies burn people out. Some companies serve bad food in the cafeteria. Some companies don't pay enough. Some companies have smelly carpets.
It's still your decision to continue working for such companies.
That's because he WOULD fire them, rather than re-deploy those doctors to tend to other medical needs.
Actually the US president neither gets to "fire" doctors nor does he get to "redeploy" them; much as you may be lusting to have every country be a shitty as Cuba or Venezuela, the US isn't there yet.
Without a solid governmental foundation, all markets become non-free or in best case massively shrink.
Ah, a misconception and lie straight out of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf.
But he sees a major role of governments in allowing and encouraging accumulation, and investment in capital, as well as enforcing contracts, providing for safety of markets and goods, weeding out counterfeit goods, and in general setting the rules of the economic game. Without proper government intervention in the economy, he explicitly states that the markets would fail.
In a free market, government at most enforces contracts and provides physical safety, that's all. The rest is social market economy crap that is contrary to free markets; in reality, it is motivated by political considerations, not economic outcomes.
He was liberal-democratic for the time, and definitely not libertarian or laissez-faire.
I said "free market economists since Adam Smith", not "Adam Smith". Adam Smith was the first to formulate free market economics as an ideas, but he wasn't a full free market economists.
As for "liberal-democratic", you are playing word games. Adam Smith was leaning towards classical liberalism, a philosophical movement that is almost diametrically opposed to what is called "liberal" or "democratic" in the US today.
That sounds very much like neither their existence or their relevance is the real issue for the deniers.
Like any little fascist, you divide the world into "us" vs "them", "true people" and "deniers". And like any little fascist, you are incapable of nuance or understanding. It's impossible to have a rational debate with people like you, so I'll just tell you to go to hell. Clear enough?
Interesting because it doesn't stop corporations from using government to have a long-term positive impact on the economy...
Free market economists, conservatives, and libertarians believe that any "use of government" by corporations has a long-term negative impact on the economy.
Of course, progressives don't understand this, which is why they favor cronyism and corruption.
I find it interesting that many pooh-poohers have suddenly switched from no, not true, not happening to nothing can be done. I mean, this is something like the fourth or fifth one in this thread, whereas even a week ago this was an unusual response.
There is nothing "sudden" about it; the view that government is incapable of having meaningful, long-term positive impact on the economy has been the primary message of free market economists since Adam Smith.
You're also posing a false dichotomy for what is really many separate issues: (1) has it been getting warmer, (2) have humans significantly contributed to it, (3) at what rate is warming to happen in the future, (4) are there policies we can adopt to reduce future warming, (5) is warming harmful or beneficial, etc. AGW activists and progressives love to conflate these questions to cover up the weakness of their evidence and then accuse their opponents of "suddenly switching".
But, good for you: if you're starting to notice that there are issues beyond (1) and (2), you may be starting to break out of your progressive propaganda bubble. I know it's a long and painful process, having been a progressive myself at some point before reading and educating myself on history and politics.
If we do nothing to reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions,
Short of completely wrecking the global economy or starting a major nuclear war, no government policy is going to have an appreciable effect on climate.
by the end of this century the Earth will be as hot as it was 50 million years ago in the early Eocene
according to a new study out today in the journal Nature Communications. This period -- roughly 15 million years after dinosaurs went extinct and 49.8 million years before modern humans appeared on the scene -- was 16F to 25F warmer than the modern norm
Yes, before the earth plunged into the current cycle of glaciation periods, which makes large parts of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for more than half of every 100000 years. (Not so) great times!
If we keep going and exhaust our supplies of fossil fuels like gas and coal, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could rise to 2000 ppm by 2250 [...] And because the sun was much dimmer then
Ah, the joys of science based on "alternative facts".
Your comparison is deeply flawed when speaking to an American. $40k would be very nice in some areas, and it would barely even pay the rent in others.
No, the numbers are about the same. I was simply saying "Canadian" because that's where you led me to believe you were from. Of course, you are cagey on the facts.
Goddamn Milton Friedman supported a fucking UBI, so don't act like you're too conservative for one.
Friedman proposed a negative income tax to replace all current welfare and entitlement programs to the poor; that's not because he thought it was the best possible system, but because he thought it was an improvement on what we have, and I agree. But such a system has no chance in politics and it's not what UBI advocates are aiming for. So, you are lying when you use Friedman as support for UBI.
My income tax would probably go up to about 70% under UBI, and I would simply retire early" Aww! Poor widdle baby throwing a tantrum.
As I was saying, financially, I don't care much since I'm not going to pay for it. Under the UBI, my income would decrease a little, but the tax revenue from me to the US government would go to nearly zero, because I'd simply change how I work so that it's not taxable. And that is true for most people with skills and higher incomes. The people who will suffer are people like you.
The crap you propose has been tried before, in endless permutations, it doesn't work. I've lived through communism and fascism before, I know how this works. It's simply sad when greedy, angry little brownshirts like you set out to wreck one of the few remaining free, functioning countries because you can't do math. Fortunately, historically, Americans have been smarter than that. And if you're Canadian, please go ahead, wreck your country, and serve as a warning and object lesson.
That doesn't follow with how progressive taxation works. Under a UBI system, people making $40k would not be paying an additional $10k in taxes.
Ah, so you think that under a UBI model, you would not have to pay more taxes, but you'd be getting more money. I think we are getting to the core of why you want UBI. I'm sorry, but that's not going to work out: as someone who makes $40k, you already make more than about 3/4 of Canadians, so you'd be lucky if your taxes wouldn''t have to go up substantially. And those making more than $100k only make up about 7% of total income, so there just isn't enough money there.
But that's only during the first few years. High taxes tend to decrease tax revenue over time. My income tax would probably go up to about 70% under UBI, and I would simply retire early: good luck getting another dime of taxes out of me. High-income Canadians would just leave the country. In long term, people would simply not enter professions that require extended training (like doctors): they can never get the lost earnings back, because the high earnings that they would have made are now heavily taxed. And guess who is going to have to make up the slack? That's right: people like you, slightly above the middle of the income distribution, because that's the only place the government can get enough money. But at $40k/year, you probably haven't saved enough to retire early. So, enjoy your UBI.
And if I work at a salary of, say, $40,000, use that money to meet the requirements for my standard of living, and I constantly do lots of unpaid work, say, 8 hours a week, to help run local events?
You previously said that "If I could get this country to have a UBI that I alone am not eligible for, I would still support it.", which means that whatever your income is, you claim you'd be willing to do with $10000 less, since you said you'd be willing to be subject to UBI taxes without receiving the UBI income, and the two about balance out at the median income. So, your statements simply don't add up.
Of course it is "ad hominem" in the sense that it is about you. You said:
*I* want UBI because *I* don't want homeless people on the streets, starving children, and all that crap. Also, *I* care very deeply about the arts, and UBI would be about the best thing possible to happen to the arts.
Since you say that *you* want all these things, I think it is perfectly legitimate to ask what *you* have done so far to support the causes *you* claim to care about.
If you work, say, in computers and make a low-end salary of $100000, your taxes would go up about 20% to pay for UBI (from about 20% to about 40%), so you would be out about $10000 after accounting for UBI. So, why aren't you making that sacrifice now? In fact, if you actually donated $12000/year to some UBI-like charity, you would already get much of what a UBI would accomplish, because not only would you donate $10000 after taxes assuming you are around the 30% tax bracket), you would force others to subsidize your donation to the tune of $2000 because of the tax breaks.
So, if you actually "cared deeply" about the homeless or the arts, were actually willing to make the sacrifice, and you thought money was the answer, you already could do your part to contribute to those causes and you could even realize your political desire to force others to contribute as well.
Of course, as your piqued reaction shows, you don't actually contribute $12000/year to the causes you say care about, which means that all this talk about how much you care about starving children, the homeless, and the arts, and how you are willing to make the necessary sacrifices, is just hot air.
I don't care much about my take home pay outside of keeping a roof over my head
You're deluding yourself; based on your language, you clearly have a chip on you shoulder about your pay.
I want to make a lot of money. I want UBI because I don't want homeless people on the streets, starving children, and all that crap. Also, I care very deeply about the arts, and UBI would be about the best thing possible to happen to the arts.
So, how many tens of thousands of dollars have you donated to charities last year? How many hours per week have you volunteered for charities?
Well, you're bellyaching about a bad "work-life balance", about being "unpaid and underpaid". Either you make above average pay, in which case UBI makes your work-life balance and your take-home pay worse, or you want other people to give you free stuff. Which is it?
Your personal experiences, likely delusional, do not constitute adequate data to make such a broad analysis
No, but the economic and social science literature does. I suggest you read up on it. I simply happen to know from first hand experience which of those papers are accurate and which ones are fictional.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't a gamble at all, it was both reasonable and politically smart. Even many people who hated Trump's guts voted for him because they couldn't stand the idea of Hillary Clinton appointing more supreme court justices. I think that's what finally pushed Trump over the finish line.
And given the kind of people Obama had appointed before (Sotomayor, Kagan), Congress was not going to give him another chance. If SCOTUS had tilted any further to the left, Congress would like have taken drastic action, like simply creating three more seats, to be filled by conservatives. Obama and his appointees simply do not represent the American people.
Thinking of supreme court justice appointments as property of the president is unacceptable. Congress is supposed to advise and consent, and the advised that the president should wait with the appointment until the next Congress and withheld their consent. That was a legitimate decision and it was a reasonable decision. I suspect that SCOTUS appointments is also what pushed Trump over the line in the election, because even people who hated his guts couldn't stand the idea that Hillary Clinton would appoint any more supreme court justices, in particular given the views she had articulated on the Constitution during the campaign.
Obama has done such a piss poor job with the two appointments that he did get that the public approval of SCOTUS has dropped by nearly 20 points, to a record low. If he had appointed another left wing activists like the two he did, Congress might have been forced to do something else, like increase the number of supreme court justices to 12, for example, and have Trump fill them with moderate conservatives. As it is, we are stuck with Sotomayor and Kagan, but the court may return to some semblance of balance and sanity with Gorsuch and (hopefully) a RBG replacement.
None of those programs employ doctors.
I think those programs are one of the major reasons doctors are leaving the profession. They are also one of the major reasons American health care is so outrageously expensive and comparatively ineffective or even harmful.
E.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
So, cutting funding for those programs would probably be quite good for both doctors and patients.
They should start with fact-checking fake news like: "Women make 80% of what men do." or "Climate change threatens the future of humanity." or "Gun control reduces homicides." or "The welfare state helps people become productive members of society." or "Paying more for education than we do improves educational outcomes."
I suspect it isn't that kind of fake news that they are going to fact check.
"MCS" is "mobile cloud service", a technical role. You're projecting your own racism and sexism onto others.
Yes, and that probably reflects the statistics of who enterprise architects are: most well-educated white males. Why shouldn't Oracle's ads reflect the demographics of their customers?
And to be clear, the fact that enterprise architects are rarely black women is neither due to discrimination or accident: it's a role that requires risk taking, systems thinking, and pretty tough political battles, and statistically, far fewer black women then white males do well on those dimensions.
Why? Statistically, women aren't working the same. Statistically, they drop out of the workforce more or work part time. Therefore, statistically, they get paid less. The one thing that isn't happening in significant numbers is discrimination against women.
Why? Statistically, women don't have as many top performers as men, which is why statistically, they don't get promoted as much. Furthermore, the statistical lack of top performers isn't due to discrimination or gender roles, it's biological. The flipside is that statistically, women also end up much less in prisons and insane asylums, and that they live longer.
About 40% of people in Silicon Valley are foreign born; the majority of people at several companies I have worked were foreign born. People do tend to hire from their own ethnicity, but so what? If there is any gender bias in hiring, it's not from straight white males, who hire any woman they can, both because they constantly feel guilty about everything and because they actually like women.
I have trouble with this "full genome" unit. Can you please express that in "football fields"?
OK, if you must, let's express that in metric units: it's about 1.6 x 10^-9 moles, or 1.6 nanomoles, of bytes.
Cherry-picked speculations.
Yes, we have been during a warm period for about 20000 years. That's the way glaciation cycles work.
Keep demonstrating your ignorance of basic science.
Yes, some companies burn people out. Some companies serve bad food in the cafeteria. Some companies don't pay enough. Some companies have smelly carpets.
It's still your decision to continue working for such companies.
Who knew!
Actually the US president neither gets to "fire" doctors nor does he get to "redeploy" them; much as you may be lusting to have every country be a shitty as Cuba or Venezuela, the US isn't there yet.
Ah, a misconception and lie straight out of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf.
In a free market, government at most enforces contracts and provides physical safety, that's all. The rest is social market economy crap that is contrary to free markets; in reality, it is motivated by political considerations, not economic outcomes.
I said "free market economists since Adam Smith", not "Adam Smith". Adam Smith was the first to formulate free market economics as an ideas, but he wasn't a full free market economists.
As for "liberal-democratic", you are playing word games. Adam Smith was leaning towards classical liberalism, a philosophical movement that is almost diametrically opposed to what is called "liberal" or "democratic" in the US today.
Like any little fascist, you divide the world into "us" vs "them", "true people" and "deniers". And like any little fascist, you are incapable of nuance or understanding. It's impossible to have a rational debate with people like you, so I'll just tell you to go to hell. Clear enough?
Free market economists, conservatives, and libertarians believe that any "use of government" by corporations has a long-term negative impact on the economy.
Of course, progressives don't understand this, which is why they favor cronyism and corruption.
And those who understand that science has little to say about (3-5) also understand that (1) and (2) are irrelevant.
There is nothing "sudden" about it; the view that government is incapable of having meaningful, long-term positive impact on the economy has been the primary message of free market economists since Adam Smith.
You're also posing a false dichotomy for what is really many separate issues: (1) has it been getting warmer, (2) have humans significantly contributed to it, (3) at what rate is warming to happen in the future, (4) are there policies we can adopt to reduce future warming, (5) is warming harmful or beneficial, etc. AGW activists and progressives love to conflate these questions to cover up the weakness of their evidence and then accuse their opponents of "suddenly switching".
But, good for you: if you're starting to notice that there are issues beyond (1) and (2), you may be starting to break out of your progressive propaganda bubble. I know it's a long and painful process, having been a progressive myself at some point before reading and educating myself on history and politics.
Short of completely wrecking the global economy or starting a major nuclear war, no government policy is going to have an appreciable effect on climate.
Good climate for primates and mammals, and generally life on the planet. Milder, wetter conditions everywhere. More arable land, fewer deserts. We should be so lucky. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, if not for any other reason, than that it will take a couple of thousand years for the polar ice caps to melt.
Yes, before the earth plunged into the current cycle of glaciation periods, which makes large parts of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for more than half of every 100000 years. (Not so) great times!
Ah, the joys of science based on "alternative facts".
No, the numbers are about the same. I was simply saying "Canadian" because that's where you led me to believe you were from. Of course, you are cagey on the facts.
Friedman proposed a negative income tax to replace all current welfare and entitlement programs to the poor; that's not because he thought it was the best possible system, but because he thought it was an improvement on what we have, and I agree. But such a system has no chance in politics and it's not what UBI advocates are aiming for. So, you are lying when you use Friedman as support for UBI.
As I was saying, financially, I don't care much since I'm not going to pay for it. Under the UBI, my income would decrease a little, but the tax revenue from me to the US government would go to nearly zero, because I'd simply change how I work so that it's not taxable. And that is true for most people with skills and higher incomes. The people who will suffer are people like you.
The crap you propose has been tried before, in endless permutations, it doesn't work. I've lived through communism and fascism before, I know how this works. It's simply sad when greedy, angry little brownshirts like you set out to wreck one of the few remaining free, functioning countries because you can't do math. Fortunately, historically, Americans have been smarter than that. And if you're Canadian, please go ahead, wreck your country, and serve as a warning and object lesson.
Ah, so you think that under a UBI model, you would not have to pay more taxes, but you'd be getting more money. I think we are getting to the core of why you want UBI. I'm sorry, but that's not going to work out: as someone who makes $40k, you already make more than about 3/4 of Canadians, so you'd be lucky if your taxes wouldn''t have to go up substantially. And those making more than $100k only make up about 7% of total income, so there just isn't enough money there.
But that's only during the first few years. High taxes tend to decrease tax revenue over time. My income tax would probably go up to about 70% under UBI, and I would simply retire early: good luck getting another dime of taxes out of me. High-income Canadians would just leave the country. In long term, people would simply not enter professions that require extended training (like doctors): they can never get the lost earnings back, because the high earnings that they would have made are now heavily taxed. And guess who is going to have to make up the slack? That's right: people like you, slightly above the middle of the income distribution, because that's the only place the government can get enough money. But at $40k/year, you probably haven't saved enough to retire early. So, enjoy your UBI.
You previously said that "If I could get this country to have a UBI that I alone am not eligible for, I would still support it.", which means that whatever your income is, you claim you'd be willing to do with $10000 less, since you said you'd be willing to be subject to UBI taxes without receiving the UBI income, and the two about balance out at the median income. So, your statements simply don't add up.
Of course it is "ad hominem" in the sense that it is about you. You said:
Since you say that *you* want all these things, I think it is perfectly legitimate to ask what *you* have done so far to support the causes *you* claim to care about.
If you work, say, in computers and make a low-end salary of $100000, your taxes would go up about 20% to pay for UBI (from about 20% to about 40%), so you would be out about $10000 after accounting for UBI. So, why aren't you making that sacrifice now? In fact, if you actually donated $12000/year to some UBI-like charity, you would already get much of what a UBI would accomplish, because not only would you donate $10000 after taxes assuming you are around the 30% tax bracket), you would force others to subsidize your donation to the tune of $2000 because of the tax breaks.
So, if you actually "cared deeply" about the homeless or the arts, were actually willing to make the sacrifice, and you thought money was the answer, you already could do your part to contribute to those causes and you could even realize your political desire to force others to contribute as well.
Of course, as your piqued reaction shows, you don't actually contribute $12000/year to the causes you say care about, which means that all this talk about how much you care about starving children, the homeless, and the arts, and how you are willing to make the necessary sacrifices, is just hot air.
You're deluding yourself; based on your language, you clearly have a chip on you shoulder about your pay.
So, how many tens of thousands of dollars have you donated to charities last year? How many hours per week have you volunteered for charities?
Well, you're bellyaching about a bad "work-life balance", about being "unpaid and underpaid". Either you make above average pay, in which case UBI makes your work-life balance and your take-home pay worse, or you want other people to give you free stuff. Which is it?
No, but the economic and social science literature does. I suggest you read up on it. I simply happen to know from first hand experience which of those papers are accurate and which ones are fictional.
You can have whatever work-life balance you want by working as much or as little as you want... and getting paid proportionally.
What you want is for others to work and pay you while you enjoy your leisure time.