Yes really. Although they only get a portion of the haul, that's not how they pay informants.
If you read the article you'd see that's exactly how they paid informants.
Seems like somebody would have a pretty solid RICO case against the United States Federal government. And wouldn't that be interesting to see litigated in open court?
Odd things happen, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, yes.
Well, let's be honest: neither of those incidents were odd or unforeseeable. In the case of Chernobyl, we had an experimental reactor (and I don't mean it was new - I mean it was specifically built for them to screw around with and see what happens) designed with a highly positive void coefficient. It was an insane design that was not passively safe and it was purposely operated in a reckless manner. The "accident" that took that place down happened when they shut off the already limited safety features and ran more experiments. Keep doing that over and over in a design that isn't passively safe and you almost can't help but have it end in disaster. If nothing else, any rational person could easily see that what they were doing was dangerous as Hell. And the Soviets knew what they were doing was dangerous as Hell which is why they did it there and not next to, say, Moscow for instance.
In the case of Fukushima, the plant design's manufacturer (GE) identified design flaws in the plant's containment measures back in the 1970s. And they came up with a remediation plan and published it to everyone running that design. In the 1970s. And the company operating the plant at Fukushima chose not to do what GE told them they needed to do in order to ensure containment in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the regulators in charge of ensuring the plant was operated safely allowed them to do that. So the plant ran for decades with a known design problem and nobody did anything about it. So again, this wasn't exactly a surprise that as soon as something went wrong, bad stuff happened.
Ain't no magic here: if you run known-unsafe designs, you're risking bad things happening. If you run safe designs, then catastrophic failures do not (and, physically, cannot) result in catastrophic consequences.
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
And again, nuclear power is safer for human life. Accounting for Fukushima, accounting for Chernobyl (which by the way wasn't a power plant - it was a research facility conducting extremely dangerous experiments and a weaponized plutonium factory which also happened to have excess power to dump into the local grid, but that's alright, we'll include that one anyway because it still doesn't change the outcome), nuclear power is the safest source of power generation we have. Per kwh generated, it causes less loss of human life than anything else, including wind, solar, and hydro.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
Do they go terribly wrong? Because nuclear power plants operate around the world 24/7/365 at 90%+ operating capacity without issue. How often are human lives lost due to nuclear power plant accidents?
Per kwh generated, nuclear power results in less loss of human life than wind or solar. It's per kwh generated, so as you scale out, things only get worse for wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Running coal and oil power plants affects (at the very least) the local environment horrifically if nothing goes wrong. What do you think happens in the case of a major issue with nuclear power? You think the whole world gets consumed by a black hole or something? Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads. It's safer and more scalable than any other option. We already have nuclear power plants on a large scale and in great numbers, but you don't hear about them because they run for decades without incident. They run at 90%+ capacity day-in and day-out quietly providing power for people around the world.
Nuclear power results in less loss of human life per kwh generated than any other source of power. That includes solar, wind, hydro; you name it. Nuclear power is simply safer. We can make it even safer by stopping the resistance to replacing older nuclear plants with newer, better ones.
There were numerous teams around the world actively working toward powered flight at the time. As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era. It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances: we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life. It's the reason a design like the YF-12 would never be allowed to fly these days. On paper, the design decisions made to allow it to fly as high and as fast as it does are laughably insane. But it flew, and its 1950s design set records we still haven't broken.
Not really that surprising: the physics is relatively simple and well-understood. As such, all we're really talking about is choosing to avoid negligently flawed design decisions. The overwhelming fear of huge medical lawsuits is enough to at least do that much (though unfortunately often not much more, particularly on the security front).
No, yet more people die in the production, installation (this is the big one for solar), and maintenance of solar per kwh generated than they do for nuclear power.
Radiation is scary because you can't see it, but the dead don't care whether it was radiation or a fall or electrocution that caused it. Want to save lives? Push for nuclear.
Wind and solar kill more human beings per kwh generated than nuclear does. Build all the wind and solar you want; they're still going to be more of a risk to human life than nuclear.
We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. The challenge with nuclear is no different from any other project that deals with hazardous processes (and this includes coal and oil power plants among many other things): reasonable standards for building, operation, and inspection free from bribery, corruption, and incompetence, which are rigorously enforced. In some places (mostly the western nations), this isn't that hard to do. The designs are already rock solid and have been for a long time (minus the RBMK reactor designs, which were never a safe solution, but which weren't designed with safety as a high priority - they were experimental reactors and weaponized fuel factories). The plant at Fukushima was an early design which would have still be safe had the company operating the plant bothered to perform the remediation steps provided by the design manufacturer (GE) for known problems in the design. Had the regulators and inspectors forced them to perform those steps, even the plant's owners' negligence wouldn't have been allowed to carry the risk of the catastrophic failure following the earthquake and tsunami there.
We have great designs which have run at >90% capacity for decades on end without issue. We know exactly how to operate nuclear safely. In fact, per kwh, nuclear is the safest power production in the world. (yes, safer than hydro, solar, and wind - look it up, you'll find workers dying from falls, burning to death, drowning, etc). What we need to do is come up with a way to supply power to places with shitty governments at a rate that's cheaper than fossil fuel plants (for the environmental impact issues there) without giving them the opportunity to fuck up nuke plants or weaponize them. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal will all play their parts in our worldwide energy future, but the fact is that well-run nuclear is our best, safest, most sustainable option for a backbone. Nothing else scales like it except fossil fuels and those wreck our environment pretty badly until they're all used up (which is pretty shortly - relatively speaking).
So your solution to one group getting fucked by globalization and outsourcing is to fuck everyone else so we're all reduced to the same shitty level playing field?
Why don't we just stop everyone from getting fucked by globalization and outsourcing?
We aren't there with automation yet and it isn't yet their major enemy. Their jobs aren't being replaced by T-1000s, they're being shipped to places like Mexico, China, and others. It's this, repeated over and over again across the rust belt for a generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Please visit Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, or any of the other former US manufacturing powerhouses, and specifically the factory towns within those states, and tell the people there about the benefits of free trade. What's been happening for the past 30+ years is that masses of people who are second, third, even fourth generation into factory jobs, who've worked those jobs since they graduated high school, who've been raised themselves and went on to raise their families on the salaries and benefits of those jobs, who have since watches as their friends and family members have lost those jobs one after another, who've stood on the factory floor to hear about how their job is going away in 12-14 months and won't be coming back, who've had to go home to their wives/husbands/kids with the knowledge that the only job they've ever had or ever known is going away, who've had their homes foreclosed and their kids go from great lives to a welfare Christmas, who've wiped out their retirement funds just to try and keep going a little longer - those people have been told over and over by coastal elites from BOTH parties all about how great free trade is because of the cheap shit stocking the shelves of Walmart.
Despite the very obvious feeling from everyone at the top of the food chain, these people are not stupid. As they watch everyone around them - and finally themselves - lose everything they worked their entire lives to build with their blood, sweat, tears, labor, long hours, and tired backs, they're told over and over how good this is for them. They're not stupid. They're losing everything. Everyone around them is losing everything. Those who haven't already lost everything are having sleepless nights over and over because they see the writing on the wall and know they don't have a path forward. Their only hope is to somehow luck out and keep their job until their kids are out of the house and they're close enough to retirement to skate by.
Conventional economic theory isn't doing a goddamn thing for those people, their kids, their spouses, their families, their friends, or their towns. They're getting fucked every which way. And I'm getting a blender that breaks after 2 months because it's a cheap piece of shit built by someone who doesn't care halfway around the world. This isn't good for any of us. And it isn't good for the planet, either.
It's moments like that, repeated over and over again in places all across the rust belt, driven by globalization and free trade policies that both major parties supported. Trump is the first politician in a generation to really speak to those people in a way that made sense.
She clearly broke the law and others in the same position have gone to jail. She isn't in jail because she's "too big to fail". People with wealth and power don't go to prison in this country except in extraordinary circumstances. If you're caught high out of your mind on coke and heroin and you're poor, you spend years in prison. If you're wealthy (or even just rich and famous), you go to a rehab facility that's more comfortable than most resorts for 6 months.
That said, it sets an immeasurably dangerous precedent to be involved in any way in jailing political rivals. However, just as the switch flipped with each of his Republican rivals after the primaries were over, the same appears to have happened with the Clintons and President Obama now that the general election is over. Trump's pattern of behavior has been to say anything and everything required to beat you, but once he wins, you're an amazing person and a challenging opponent (probably because it's no great accomplishment beating a total loser, but beating the greatest is). His victory speech was nothing but conciliatory (even humble). What he said about the Obamas after meeting with them? Again, nothing but the nicest praise and respect.
He isn't going after Clinton. He's on to the next thing. And thank goodness, because the rhetoric was terrifying.
Free trade reduces the inequality between wealthier and poorer nations. Great if you're in the latter. Bad if you're not one of the few elites in the former who can make that benefit you. It's not a win-win for both sides as the two-sides-of-the-same-coin major parties have been preaching in the US. It's absurd to believe otherwise. If the Democrats were actually still the party of the working class, they'd be fighting to retrain younger blue collar union workers for realistic transitions and protect older union workers (for whom retraining isn't realistic) from job exportation.
Free trade isn't great for everyone. And as soon as someone came along and admitted that (instead of trying to explain to a 48 year old factory worker who's losing the only job he's had for 30 years to free trade, who has no other skills or education, who has no prospects moving forward, but does have a wife, two kids, and a mortgage, how this is all somehow good for him), all sorts of lifelong Democrats suddenly showed up to vote for that person (who was very much not a Democrat). Let's stop lying about this "rising tide raises all ships" bullshit and start telling the truth: if you're doing something where the skills involved are limited and the labor costs make up a sizable portion of the total costs involved, you're going to fucked first by free trade (because it's cheaper) and second by automation (because it eventually becomes cost-effective). Step one is admitting you have a problem (and this also requires recognizing that these people actually matter). Step two is figuring out what you're going to do for all the third-generation 48 year olds with two kids and a mortgage who are in this situation. And whatever that is, it better be realistic for them and it better pay at least 85% of what they were making before or no amount of belt-tightening is going to keep them going.
The largest holder of US debt is the Social Security Trust Fund.
Eh, that's sort of true in a purely technical sense, but not really from any reasonable perspective. It'd be like if I pulled money out of my own savings account, wrote myself an I.O.U., and then spent the cash on hookers and blow. From a purely technical perspective, one would consider an I.O.U. (or US Treasury Note) to be a debt, but the debt is from myself and to myself. There's no one to go after if I "default" on it and there's nothing to prevent me from tearing up the I.O.U. or framing it on the wall and laughing at it. The US Federal government actually classifies it as "intragovernmental Holdings" and they're kept simply for accounting purposes. The idea that they'll spontaneously transform into cash one day is pure fantasy. The reality is that when cash starts flowing the other way, however much is needed will come out of the general fund and we'll either borrow or print (or both) however much is needed to cover whatever isn't sitting in the general fund's account. The Treasury Notes will be passed around, but again, this is simply for accounting purposes and it only being done at all because we've decided to do it that way in order to maintain the appearance that this is anything other than a pyramid scheme/shell game. It isn't even hard currency or any related proxy at this point; it's literally a number in a computer. It only has meaning inasmuch as we - the human race - pretend that it does.
Are these not the very same people who were losing their shit over the fact that candidate Trump refused to definitively state that he would accept the results of the election?
Please explain how any of this matters to a 45 year old factor worker with two kids and a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and food to put on the table. Explain what he's going to do when the job he's had since he graduated high school, the job that allowed his father and his grandfather before him to support their families, the only job he's ever known, is shipped overseas to someone who'll work 18 hours a day for $3 with no bathroom breaks. Explain why he'd vote for anyone telling him a "changing workforce", "new economy", or "rising tide" are good for him even as he sits there watching everyone he knows lose their jobs, their homes, and their ability to feed their families.
Because what I saw, Tuesday, is that they're turning the course of elections in this country in the direction of whoever gives them hope that's realistic for their situation rather than condescending arrogance. Doesn't matter whether Trump will or even can deliver on much of any of it. All that matters is their best shot at putting food on the table and keeping a roof over the heads of their family.
Please explain how any of this matters to a 45 year old factor worker with two kids and a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and food to put on the table. Explain what he's going to do when the job he's had since he graduated high school, the job that allowed his father and his grandfather to support their families before him, the only job he's ever known, is shipped overseas to someone who'll work 18 hours a day for $3 with no bathroom breaks. Explain why he'd vote for anyone telling him a "changing workforce", "new economy", or "rising tide" are good for him even as he sits there watching everyone he knows lose their jobs, their homes, and their ability to feed their families.
Because what I saw, Tuesday, is that they're turning the course of elections in this country in the direction of whoever gives them hope that's realistic for their situation rather than condescending arrogance. Doesn't matter whether Trump will or even can deliver on much of any of it. All that matters is their best shot at putting food on the table and keeping a roof over the heads of their family.
Best thing Trump and the GPO can do is announce an infrastructure investment plan that begins with replacing all the bad pipes in Flint. After that, come up with an agreement with Carrier to reverse the moving of 1,400 jobs to Mexico. Wouldn't take very many victories like that to secure blue collar Dems for another 8 or 12 years. Let's see the Democrats try to win anything better than town dog catcher without that group.
On the other hand, firms should not be sued when they have made all reasonable efforts to make their products as safe as possible and someone is injured or dies despite their best efforts. Rather, they should be able to properly apologize and make amends without placing themselves in a legally untenable situation wherein they risk an enormously overblown lawsuit.
Unfortunately, this would require a fair and equitable legal system, reasonable people involved on both sides, and reliable independent oversight ensuring product safety actually is being appropriately addressed. And we don't have any of that, so instead everyone sues in an attempt to get rich quick.
In China's case, at least....that's not how the fight would go down. Basically they can throw a bunch of obsolete aircraft, converted into drones, into the air. You *HAVE* to engage them (at long range you can't tell if they are armed combat aircraft or basically big dumb cruise missiles, but either way you can't let them prosecute missions).
So many issues I have with this. First of all, yes you can tell the difference between airplanes and cruise missiles. The thermal signatures, radar return indicators, speed, vector, etc make that much trivial. Secondly, if you put drones in the sky against any reasonably modern adversary (and that includes drones the US would field even against lesser powers like Iran, but certainly drones fielded by anyone against the US), C&C of those guys is going to change hands 20 times a minute. Drones with any remote control capability are useless. Drones without any remote control are incredibly dangerous - as much to whoever fields them as they are to whoever they're fielded against. Once you send them up, all you can do is hope for the best. And if you're going that route, it better be part of a zerg-rush power projection play over someone else's homeland because otherwise you're likely going to cause more damage to your own people than your enemy. And you don't have to engage them unless they're an actual threat. If they're just flying around in an area you aren't working to control, you just let them fly around burning fuel while you hit the targets you need to hit and shoot them down if you happen to have spare assets available. But again, drones are effectively useless unless and until someone gets A.I. that's leaps and bounds ahead of anything anyone has shown publicly to date. This thing isn't fighting parking tickets for people or helping them find a good movie to watch; it's flying combat sorties and needing to accurately distinguish friend from foe and fly and fight reasonably well to maintain cost-effectiveness.
The Chinese don't have to shoot down a single F-22, they just have to force the Combat Air Patrol to burn up the entire stockpile of AIM-120 AMRAAMs in theater. Once that is achieved, *THEN* they start putting all their good aircraft into the fight.
Block 1 CAC FC-1 Xiaolong (the cheapest version)'s unit cost is $25 Million. AIM-120C costs $350,000. China's military budget is $146 Billion US. Budget for only the US Air Force is $170 Billion US. So a $350,000 missile shooting down $25 Million aircraft; how's that going to work out in their favor? You think they can field more aircraft and build them quicker than the US can field AMRAAMs? You don't actually believe that, right?
...but I think there was also a RAND study of how air superiority over the Taiwan Strait would play out, and it was basically the same assessment: the US can't keep enough combat power in the sky (partly due to basing, air refueling, weapons stocks, etc...) for our qualitative superiority to be sufficient.
Taiwan would be a smoldering death pit if combat broke out, but if the US committed to winning an all-out conventional war against China, the first thing they'd do is wipe out the Chinese navy with subs while hitting air fields, munitions manufacturing sites, softer C&C targets, etc with long range cruise missiles, then pull all the carrier strike groups into the region (not all together because you don't want to risk nuclear attacks taking out more than one at a time) including the ones on standby to start building sustainable power projection from the coast inland, B-2s escorted by F-22s would pound the Hell out of everything the cruise missiles can't tackle, and within a few months, China's forces wouldn't be able to peak out from behind a rock without ordinance blasting them and the rock into the next life.
We can't protect Taiwan any more than we can protect South Korea. But we'd dismantle the conventional military of any foe on
More importantly, you have to know there's an enemy flying against you before you even know that you want to point a missile somewhere. For most pilots in combat with an F-22, the first indication they're going to have that there's an F-22 in the area is when there's a missile headed their way. Not exactly a favorable way to begin that engagement.
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If you read the article you'd see that's exactly how they paid informants.
Seems like somebody would have a pretty solid RICO case against the United States Federal government. And wouldn't that be interesting to see litigated in open court?
Odd things happen, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, yes.
Well, let's be honest: neither of those incidents were odd or unforeseeable. In the case of Chernobyl, we had an experimental reactor (and I don't mean it was new - I mean it was specifically built for them to screw around with and see what happens) designed with a highly positive void coefficient. It was an insane design that was not passively safe and it was purposely operated in a reckless manner. The "accident" that took that place down happened when they shut off the already limited safety features and ran more experiments. Keep doing that over and over in a design that isn't passively safe and you almost can't help but have it end in disaster. If nothing else, any rational person could easily see that what they were doing was dangerous as Hell. And the Soviets knew what they were doing was dangerous as Hell which is why they did it there and not next to, say, Moscow for instance.
In the case of Fukushima, the plant design's manufacturer (GE) identified design flaws in the plant's containment measures back in the 1970s. And they came up with a remediation plan and published it to everyone running that design. In the 1970s. And the company operating the plant at Fukushima chose not to do what GE told them they needed to do in order to ensure containment in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the regulators in charge of ensuring the plant was operated safely allowed them to do that. So the plant ran for decades with a known design problem and nobody did anything about it. So again, this wasn't exactly a surprise that as soon as something went wrong, bad stuff happened.
Ain't no magic here: if you run known-unsafe designs, you're risking bad things happening. If you run safe designs, then catastrophic failures do not (and, physically, cannot) result in catastrophic consequences.
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
And again, nuclear power is safer for human life. Accounting for Fukushima, accounting for Chernobyl (which by the way wasn't a power plant - it was a research facility conducting extremely dangerous experiments and a weaponized plutonium factory which also happened to have excess power to dump into the local grid, but that's alright, we'll include that one anyway because it still doesn't change the outcome), nuclear power is the safest source of power generation we have. Per kwh generated, it causes less loss of human life than anything else, including wind, solar, and hydro.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
Do they go terribly wrong? Because nuclear power plants operate around the world 24/7/365 at 90%+ operating capacity without issue. How often are human lives lost due to nuclear power plant accidents?
Per kwh generated, nuclear power results in less loss of human life than wind or solar. It's per kwh generated, so as you scale out, things only get worse for wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Running coal and oil power plants affects (at the very least) the local environment horrifically if nothing goes wrong. What do you think happens in the case of a major issue with nuclear power? You think the whole world gets consumed by a black hole or something? Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads. It's safer and more scalable than any other option. We already have nuclear power plants on a large scale and in great numbers, but you don't hear about them because they run for decades without incident. They run at 90%+ capacity day-in and day-out quietly providing power for people around the world.
Nuclear power results in less loss of human life per kwh generated than any other source of power. That includes solar, wind, hydro; you name it. Nuclear power is simply safer. We can make it even safer by stopping the resistance to replacing older nuclear plants with newer, better ones.
There were numerous teams around the world actively working toward powered flight at the time. As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era. It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances: we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life. It's the reason a design like the YF-12 would never be allowed to fly these days. On paper, the design decisions made to allow it to fly as high and as fast as it does are laughably insane. But it flew, and its 1950s design set records we still haven't broken.
Not really that surprising: the physics is relatively simple and well-understood. As such, all we're really talking about is choosing to avoid negligently flawed design decisions. The overwhelming fear of huge medical lawsuits is enough to at least do that much (though unfortunately often not much more, particularly on the security front).
No, yet more people die in the production, installation (this is the big one for solar), and maintenance of solar per kwh generated than they do for nuclear power.
Radiation is scary because you can't see it, but the dead don't care whether it was radiation or a fall or electrocution that caused it. Want to save lives? Push for nuclear.
Wind and solar kill more human beings per kwh generated than nuclear does. Build all the wind and solar you want; they're still going to be more of a risk to human life than nuclear.
We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. The challenge with nuclear is no different from any other project that deals with hazardous processes (and this includes coal and oil power plants among many other things): reasonable standards for building, operation, and inspection free from bribery, corruption, and incompetence, which are rigorously enforced. In some places (mostly the western nations), this isn't that hard to do. The designs are already rock solid and have been for a long time (minus the RBMK reactor designs, which were never a safe solution, but which weren't designed with safety as a high priority - they were experimental reactors and weaponized fuel factories). The plant at Fukushima was an early design which would have still be safe had the company operating the plant bothered to perform the remediation steps provided by the design manufacturer (GE) for known problems in the design. Had the regulators and inspectors forced them to perform those steps, even the plant's owners' negligence wouldn't have been allowed to carry the risk of the catastrophic failure following the earthquake and tsunami there.
We have great designs which have run at >90% capacity for decades on end without issue. We know exactly how to operate nuclear safely. In fact, per kwh, nuclear is the safest power production in the world. (yes, safer than hydro, solar, and wind - look it up, you'll find workers dying from falls, burning to death, drowning, etc). What we need to do is come up with a way to supply power to places with shitty governments at a rate that's cheaper than fossil fuel plants (for the environmental impact issues there) without giving them the opportunity to fuck up nuke plants or weaponize them. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal will all play their parts in our worldwide energy future, but the fact is that well-run nuclear is our best, safest, most sustainable option for a backbone. Nothing else scales like it except fossil fuels and those wreck our environment pretty badly until they're all used up (which is pretty shortly - relatively speaking).
So your solution to one group getting fucked by globalization and outsourcing is to fuck everyone else so we're all reduced to the same shitty level playing field?
Why don't we just stop everyone from getting fucked by globalization and outsourcing?
We aren't there with automation yet and it isn't yet their major enemy. Their jobs aren't being replaced by T-1000s, they're being shipped to places like Mexico, China, and others. It's this, repeated over and over again across the rust belt for a generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Please visit Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, or any of the other former US manufacturing powerhouses, and specifically the factory towns within those states, and tell the people there about the benefits of free trade. What's been happening for the past 30+ years is that masses of people who are second, third, even fourth generation into factory jobs, who've worked those jobs since they graduated high school, who've been raised themselves and went on to raise their families on the salaries and benefits of those jobs, who have since watches as their friends and family members have lost those jobs one after another, who've stood on the factory floor to hear about how their job is going away in 12-14 months and won't be coming back, who've had to go home to their wives/husbands/kids with the knowledge that the only job they've ever had or ever known is going away, who've had their homes foreclosed and their kids go from great lives to a welfare Christmas, who've wiped out their retirement funds just to try and keep going a little longer - those people have been told over and over by coastal elites from BOTH parties all about how great free trade is because of the cheap shit stocking the shelves of Walmart.
Despite the very obvious feeling from everyone at the top of the food chain, these people are not stupid. As they watch everyone around them - and finally themselves - lose everything they worked their entire lives to build with their blood, sweat, tears, labor, long hours, and tired backs, they're told over and over how good this is for them. They're not stupid. They're losing everything. Everyone around them is losing everything. Those who haven't already lost everything are having sleepless nights over and over because they see the writing on the wall and know they don't have a path forward. Their only hope is to somehow luck out and keep their job until their kids are out of the house and they're close enough to retirement to skate by.
Conventional economic theory isn't doing a goddamn thing for those people, their kids, their spouses, their families, their friends, or their towns. They're getting fucked every which way. And I'm getting a blender that breaks after 2 months because it's a cheap piece of shit built by someone who doesn't care halfway around the world. This isn't good for any of us. And it isn't good for the planet, either.
You want to know why Clinton lost all those "blue wall" states? Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's moments like that, repeated over and over again in places all across the rust belt, driven by globalization and free trade policies that both major parties supported. Trump is the first politician in a generation to really speak to those people in a way that made sense.
She clearly broke the law and others in the same position have gone to jail. She isn't in jail because she's "too big to fail". People with wealth and power don't go to prison in this country except in extraordinary circumstances. If you're caught high out of your mind on coke and heroin and you're poor, you spend years in prison. If you're wealthy (or even just rich and famous), you go to a rehab facility that's more comfortable than most resorts for 6 months.
That said, it sets an immeasurably dangerous precedent to be involved in any way in jailing political rivals. However, just as the switch flipped with each of his Republican rivals after the primaries were over, the same appears to have happened with the Clintons and President Obama now that the general election is over. Trump's pattern of behavior has been to say anything and everything required to beat you, but once he wins, you're an amazing person and a challenging opponent (probably because it's no great accomplishment beating a total loser, but beating the greatest is). His victory speech was nothing but conciliatory (even humble). What he said about the Obamas after meeting with them? Again, nothing but the nicest praise and respect.
He isn't going after Clinton. He's on to the next thing. And thank goodness, because the rhetoric was terrifying.
Free trade reduces the inequality between wealthier and poorer nations. Great if you're in the latter. Bad if you're not one of the few elites in the former who can make that benefit you. It's not a win-win for both sides as the two-sides-of-the-same-coin major parties have been preaching in the US. It's absurd to believe otherwise. If the Democrats were actually still the party of the working class, they'd be fighting to retrain younger blue collar union workers for realistic transitions and protect older union workers (for whom retraining isn't realistic) from job exportation.
Free trade isn't great for everyone. And as soon as someone came along and admitted that (instead of trying to explain to a 48 year old factory worker who's losing the only job he's had for 30 years to free trade, who has no other skills or education, who has no prospects moving forward, but does have a wife, two kids, and a mortgage, how this is all somehow good for him), all sorts of lifelong Democrats suddenly showed up to vote for that person (who was very much not a Democrat). Let's stop lying about this "rising tide raises all ships" bullshit and start telling the truth: if you're doing something where the skills involved are limited and the labor costs make up a sizable portion of the total costs involved, you're going to fucked first by free trade (because it's cheaper) and second by automation (because it eventually becomes cost-effective). Step one is admitting you have a problem (and this also requires recognizing that these people actually matter). Step two is figuring out what you're going to do for all the third-generation 48 year olds with two kids and a mortgage who are in this situation. And whatever that is, it better be realistic for them and it better pay at least 85% of what they were making before or no amount of belt-tightening is going to keep them going.
The largest holder of US debt is the Social Security Trust Fund.
Eh, that's sort of true in a purely technical sense, but not really from any reasonable perspective. It'd be like if I pulled money out of my own savings account, wrote myself an I.O.U., and then spent the cash on hookers and blow. From a purely technical perspective, one would consider an I.O.U. (or US Treasury Note) to be a debt, but the debt is from myself and to myself. There's no one to go after if I "default" on it and there's nothing to prevent me from tearing up the I.O.U. or framing it on the wall and laughing at it. The US Federal government actually classifies it as "intragovernmental Holdings" and they're kept simply for accounting purposes. The idea that they'll spontaneously transform into cash one day is pure fantasy. The reality is that when cash starts flowing the other way, however much is needed will come out of the general fund and we'll either borrow or print (or both) however much is needed to cover whatever isn't sitting in the general fund's account. The Treasury Notes will be passed around, but again, this is simply for accounting purposes and it only being done at all because we've decided to do it that way in order to maintain the appearance that this is anything other than a pyramid scheme/shell game. It isn't even hard currency or any related proxy at this point; it's literally a number in a computer. It only has meaning inasmuch as we - the human race - pretend that it does.
Are these not the very same people who were losing their shit over the fact that candidate Trump refused to definitively state that he would accept the results of the election?
Please explain how any of this matters to a 45 year old factor worker with two kids and a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and food to put on the table. Explain what he's going to do when the job he's had since he graduated high school, the job that allowed his father and his grandfather before him to support their families, the only job he's ever known, is shipped overseas to someone who'll work 18 hours a day for $3 with no bathroom breaks. Explain why he'd vote for anyone telling him a "changing workforce", "new economy", or "rising tide" are good for him even as he sits there watching everyone he knows lose their jobs, their homes, and their ability to feed their families.
Because what I saw, Tuesday, is that they're turning the course of elections in this country in the direction of whoever gives them hope that's realistic for their situation rather than condescending arrogance. Doesn't matter whether Trump will or even can deliver on much of any of it. All that matters is their best shot at putting food on the table and keeping a roof over the heads of their family.
Please explain how any of this matters to a 45 year old factor worker with two kids and a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and food to put on the table. Explain what he's going to do when the job he's had since he graduated high school, the job that allowed his father and his grandfather to support their families before him, the only job he's ever known, is shipped overseas to someone who'll work 18 hours a day for $3 with no bathroom breaks. Explain why he'd vote for anyone telling him a "changing workforce", "new economy", or "rising tide" are good for him even as he sits there watching everyone he knows lose their jobs, their homes, and their ability to feed their families.
Because what I saw, Tuesday, is that they're turning the course of elections in this country in the direction of whoever gives them hope that's realistic for their situation rather than condescending arrogance. Doesn't matter whether Trump will or even can deliver on much of any of it. All that matters is their best shot at putting food on the table and keeping a roof over the heads of their family.
Cheaper products are little solace to those with no jobs and no money to buy any of them.
Best thing Trump and the GPO can do is announce an infrastructure investment plan that begins with replacing all the bad pipes in Flint. After that, come up with an agreement with Carrier to reverse the moving of 1,400 jobs to Mexico. Wouldn't take very many victories like that to secure blue collar Dems for another 8 or 12 years. Let's see the Democrats try to win anything better than town dog catcher without that group.
On the other hand, firms should not be sued when they have made all reasonable efforts to make their products as safe as possible and someone is injured or dies despite their best efforts. Rather, they should be able to properly apologize and make amends without placing themselves in a legally untenable situation wherein they risk an enormously overblown lawsuit.
Unfortunately, this would require a fair and equitable legal system, reasonable people involved on both sides, and reliable independent oversight ensuring product safety actually is being appropriately addressed. And we don't have any of that, so instead everyone sues in an attempt to get rich quick.
In China's case, at least....that's not how the fight would go down. Basically they can throw a bunch of obsolete aircraft, converted into drones, into the air. You *HAVE* to engage them (at long range you can't tell if they are armed combat aircraft or basically big dumb cruise missiles, but either way you can't let them prosecute missions).
So many issues I have with this. First of all, yes you can tell the difference between airplanes and cruise missiles. The thermal signatures, radar return indicators, speed, vector, etc make that much trivial. Secondly, if you put drones in the sky against any reasonably modern adversary (and that includes drones the US would field even against lesser powers like Iran, but certainly drones fielded by anyone against the US), C&C of those guys is going to change hands 20 times a minute. Drones with any remote control capability are useless. Drones without any remote control are incredibly dangerous - as much to whoever fields them as they are to whoever they're fielded against. Once you send them up, all you can do is hope for the best. And if you're going that route, it better be part of a zerg-rush power projection play over someone else's homeland because otherwise you're likely going to cause more damage to your own people than your enemy. And you don't have to engage them unless they're an actual threat. If they're just flying around in an area you aren't working to control, you just let them fly around burning fuel while you hit the targets you need to hit and shoot them down if you happen to have spare assets available. But again, drones are effectively useless unless and until someone gets A.I. that's leaps and bounds ahead of anything anyone has shown publicly to date. This thing isn't fighting parking tickets for people or helping them find a good movie to watch; it's flying combat sorties and needing to accurately distinguish friend from foe and fly and fight reasonably well to maintain cost-effectiveness.
The Chinese don't have to shoot down a single F-22, they just have to force the Combat Air Patrol to burn up the entire stockpile of AIM-120 AMRAAMs in theater. Once that is achieved, *THEN* they start putting all their good aircraft into the fight.
Block 1 CAC FC-1 Xiaolong (the cheapest version)'s unit cost is $25 Million. AIM-120C costs $350,000. China's military budget is $146 Billion US. Budget for only the US Air Force is $170 Billion US. So a $350,000 missile shooting down $25 Million aircraft; how's that going to work out in their favor? You think they can field more aircraft and build them quicker than the US can field AMRAAMs? You don't actually believe that, right?
...but I think there was also a RAND study of how air superiority over the Taiwan Strait would play out, and it was basically the same assessment: the US can't keep enough combat power in the sky (partly due to basing, air refueling, weapons stocks, etc...) for our qualitative superiority to be sufficient.
Taiwan would be a smoldering death pit if combat broke out, but if the US committed to winning an all-out conventional war against China, the first thing they'd do is wipe out the Chinese navy with subs while hitting air fields, munitions manufacturing sites, softer C&C targets, etc with long range cruise missiles, then pull all the carrier strike groups into the region (not all together because you don't want to risk nuclear attacks taking out more than one at a time) including the ones on standby to start building sustainable power projection from the coast inland, B-2s escorted by F-22s would pound the Hell out of everything the cruise missiles can't tackle, and within a few months, China's forces wouldn't be able to peak out from behind a rock without ordinance blasting them and the rock into the next life.
We can't protect Taiwan any more than we can protect South Korea. But we'd dismantle the conventional military of any foe on
More importantly, you have to know there's an enemy flying against you before you even know that you want to point a missile somewhere. For most pilots in combat with an F-22, the first indication they're going to have that there's an F-22 in the area is when there's a missile headed their way. Not exactly a favorable way to begin that engagement.