who consistently said Hilary was in trouble and needed to be campaigning harder while everyone else said Trump didn't have a chance.
Again, his poll number's don't budge. If you ask people about issues they consistently oppose Trump. If you ask them about _Trump_ they consistently support him. Thing is, that's not how politics work in America. In America we have wedge issues (Abortion, Gun Control, Gay rights) that split the voters almost evenly. Then there's a small number of 'swing' voters.
Thing is those voters vote on their 'gut'. They don't rationally weigh options and policies. They vote for the candidate that makes them feel the best. This is why you can take a Trump voter, run Trump's polices against them and find they oppose Trump 70-80% of the time but they'll still come out and vote for Trump. Trump makes them feel _good_. His rallies are fun. He Makes America Great Again. Hillary (and the Milktoast right winger Dems like her) make everybody feel bad. They call you a racist and a sexist. They tell you how bad you are for not making it through college or not having enough money to get your kid's through college. Trump tells you he's gonna get your jobs and healthcare. Hillary says she's gonna leave things as is, with you unemployed and not able to afford a doctor visit even if you have insurance.
This is the reality of the American Political system. None of it was by accident. It was built this way to keep wealthy landowners in power. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do: provide the illusion of Democracy. I don't know how to fix it either.
A buddy of mine is absolutely fucked. Almost 50, lots of health problems, has a parent who just won't die and is weighing him down. Dead end job because they shipped his career overseas. Fucked. He's turned to phony-baloney "Alternative" medicine bought off Amazon to treat his various illnesses. Right now the symptoms can be lived with (albeit with a big hit to his productivity), but that's not gonna last. Still, he's convinced himself everything's OK, that he's getting better. That Homeopathy works. And that he's gonna get rich off some dumb ass crypto coin scheme he put $300 bucks into. Meanwhile he just starting working for some gig economy bullshit where they dictate everything he does but don't have to pay benefits or minimum wage.
He should be pissed that he and his parents got tossed aside like hot garbage. He should demand healthcare and a decent wage. He should be voting the the Dems primary to drive the party left and then in the general to drive them to victory. That's the problem I don't know how to solve. We're a nation of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires...
and haven't budged once since he got elected (+/- 2% for error). And he keeps doing worse things. He supports TPP now, and DACA, and H1-Bs, and looked the other way while Carrier Air and Harley Davidson outsourced jobs, and protected Chinese jobs at ZTE, and failed at Repeal & Replace... I could go on.
All these broken promisies, the first two absolutely critical to his base, and still his poll #s are at or near 40%. Meanwhile the Dems are getting ready to run another Milktoast Hillary-bot 2.0 "centerist" candidate in all their races and give up both the House and Senate and eventually another presidency...
Trump at least _says_ he'll do something. He's lying, but the lies feel good. So far the right wing corporate Dems don't promise anything but the same policies that got us in this mess. Meanwhile the few Dems like Bernie and Alison Hartson get hammered by the establishment Dems and shut down.
I don't see any sign of reckoning. All I see is business as usual...
because I don't trust Americans. They'll want to privatize it sooner or later because it's easy to convince 51% of the population that the private sector is so much more efficient (which is funny, since most of them have worked for mega corps and seen exactly how efficient private business is). Of course private enterprise isn't more or less efficient, but people expected cost savings and dam-gummit they're gonna get those savings... by dangerously cutting corners and/or running plants far outside their useful life cycle.
This isn't even hypothetical. It's exactly what happened in Fukushima. And the people involved got off Scott free too. They cried a little on TV and all was forgiven. Meanwhile lots of the clean up workers died of cancer already and thousands lost their homes and jobs.
Until you can convince America that Ronny Reagan was full shit when he said "Government's not the solution, it's the problem" then I want nothing to do with nuclear. I suppose if you could make it cheaper to run a safe plant than an unsafe one, but that tech isn't even on the horizon.
they use the word to hide the fact that they're actually in favor of sweeping societal and economic changes. They're not Conservative (opposing change and supporting the status quo). Heck, one of the most Conservative politicians in history was Hillary Clinton. She'd have kept everything as is, making only small changes to keep everything on course; and she polled terribly. As a rule "progressive" policies (Medicare for all, College for everyone, New New Deal, ending wars, infrastructure spending, living wage, etc, etc) poll in the mid to high 60s, yet their candidates can't seem to win elections.
What I'd like to see is an honest label for the entire movement. Maybe "Regressives", since they seem to want to roll us back to the early 1900s or even late 1800s. Except not quite because they wouldn't support the isolationism and anti-bank sentiment that was popular back then. I wouldn't call them Neo-Liberals because they stop all sorts of liberty (Drugs, abortion, Gay Marriage, etc). I'm open to suggestions, but it bothers me that they use such a deceptive label. If people knew their actual policies they wouldn't have a chance.
he literally said he wasn't smart enough to figure out if there is a number of carriers needed for competition to exists (there is, as has been pointed out on another thread it's >4). Thing is, it's his _job_ to know what that number is. If he's not smart enough to know it he's not smart enough to do the job he was hired for. He should be fired immediately.
Basically, He's not a leader, that's Trump. He's a bureaucrat. His job is to implement what the leadership tells him to do, and he just admitted he can't do that.
that's even remotely true. Give me a good gut feeling backed by faith and solid anecdotal evidence any day of the week. They just plain have more truthiness. Heck, "truthiness" is in Firefox's dictionary, so it must be true.
who's very pro-corporate. He then proceeded to pack his cabinet with pro-corporate lobbyists (mostly the same ex Goldman Sachs folks who have been running the show since Clinton). This isn't anything we shouldn't have expected. What I don't get is why anybody thought they were going to drain the swamp or change the status quo. The onion made fun of this, talking about how middle America was putting their hopes in a man who literally sits on golden thrones... Jeez. I don't even... I can't...
trying to push back at PCs becoming irrelevant for content consumption and even for some forms of creation. It's to be expected. Nothing to see here, move along.
businesses are just that, businesses. People tend to be pretty rational when it comes to making money; albeit not always very nice about it. For example, you see some reverse age discrimination at Walmart where they prefer older workers because though they're slower they always show up for shifts.
What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive. They take time off for their kids, their health, etc. They're not willing to work 60/hr a week with 20 of that unpaid in exchange for vague promises of promotion. There are a ton of other reasons too. So unless you've got a special case like Walmart where workers are so unreliable that it's worth taking the productivity hit for consistency or need highly specialized skills then older workers just don't make economic sense
This is an economic reality we all should face. The sooner we do the sooner we can talk about what to do with all these under employed (or unemployed) workers. If you're a young'un reading this now you're either going to join the older set or die. Literally. It takes years to set up a structure to protect people since there's going to be a ton of resistance. Now's the time to start supporting change.
As for that change, we need more retirement support and better wages. Maybe Social Security at an early age. Forcing employers to hire less productive old people is just going to be bad all around. The young guys will be mad when gramps can't keep up and the oldsters will work themselves into an early grave.
don't underestimate the power of gerrymandering, voter suppression and our corrupt system (e.g. the Senate & the Electoral college, both systems designed to limit Democracy).
If there's a chink in the armor it's the primaries. The best bet is to get pro-worker progressives in by showing up at the Democratic primary. And yes, that means joining the Democratic party if you have to. Take it over from within and take it back from the corporatists. Use the structure they built to fix things.
classes and castes are created by the ruling class to divide the working class against each other so they can take everything for themselves while we're busy fighting among ourselves. This pattern is so common I don't understand why it's not talked about more. In America it's skin color. In India Caste. In Japan (where virtually everyone is visibly Japanese) they use the line of work your family does. There's always something they use to divide the working class into manageable groups.
Moreover, when everyone has the basics in life than nobody is under anybody's thumb. The ruling class have power because they decide who lives and who dies by deciding who eats, has shelter from the elements, medical care and information. Taking that power away from them by guaranteeing those things means real liberty. Again, you're not free if somebody controls your access to food, shelter, etc. Also you're not really free if they control other people's access to those things. That's because when those people get desperate enough they'll be mobilized against you. This is another pattern that we see over and over again and nobody talks about.
The way forward is to declare all human life sacred and all humans due a good life and then implement that.
I'm worried about healthcare, wages, retirement when I either can't work or nobody'll hire me. I'm worried about school for my kids, especially college.
Surveillance is just a symptom of oppression. The root cause is always money. If you want to render it moot the solution is to make sure everybody (and I mean _everybody_, even lazy people and the ones you don't like) has access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation (the latter being required to effectively access the former).
Until we end the rat race we're going to be vulnerable. You're not free as long as somebody controls access to the things you need to live.
just to get my registration and haven't in decades. And in my neck of the woods we just passed laws requiring the DMV be properly funded and that you couldn't steal money intended for the DMV and stuff it in the general fund. After that the problem was solved. And that was decades ago too. The last time I needed a new license picture (lost my hair) it took 30 minutes during peak hours.
The DMV only sucks in "Starve the Beast" places that intentionally under fund government services so they can point and say "See! We told you government's the problem!". No shit when you set it up to fail on purpose it fails.
company getting a fat contract. That's what all these solutions to school shootings that aren't gun control and expanded healthcare are. It's worse than doing nothing. At least nothing is free.
or do you work for one and wrote it yourself? This is one of their talking points. It's always the same: We can't raise your pay because somebody else will just take it away if we do. Maybe it's the gov't. Maybe it's the businesses you shop at (funny that for Walmart employees).
It's a lie. No, employees making $15/hr don't pay 40% of their income in taxes. Even at $15/hr (the living wage as of 2018, though it's going to have to be raised soon) you pay about 15-20%. Less if you have kids. I know, I made that kind of money for years before getting a better job.
Tuition assistance is fine and dandy, but it's no substitute for a living wage. People need to live while they go to school, and it's unreasonable to expect people who couldn't make it through college in their teens & 20s to do it while working for a living in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Sure, some people have done it but they're outliers. You're being disingenuous at best and a right wing, anti-worker shill at worst.
which looks less like pie in sky and more like a rigorous economic study meant to find costs that were intentionally hidden to make fossil fuels seem cheaper than they are. If we're going to discuss cost we should be discussing _all_ costs. Not just what I pay at the pump.
it was basically an backhanded way to get me into a training program for the job. The way it worked they would send me to a specialized program for some skill they wanted me to have (that had no value outside of their business). If I dropped out I was on the hook for tuition. Also I had to pay out of pocket and wait for reimbursement, which wasn't paid out until 6 months after I graduated.
Fortunately I got out before they foisted it on me. The way it was structured I was basically paying for required training and then if they made enough money off me in 6 months I'd get it back. All the risk was on me. I'm not saying this is what it is, but it sure looks like it.
so adjusting my gross doesn't really make that big a difference. It doesn't 'pay' for my healthcare. At best it's just a discount. One that even at my income level (above median) I already get to write off.
I'm sorry, but you are wrong. Increasing tax deductions for medical expenses isn't going to solve the health care crisis. It doesn't make healthcare affordable for the ever shrinking middle class, let alone the lower castes.
weren't some thousand year old tradition but a marketing gimmick thought up in the 1920s was the thing that crystallized my cynicism. Finding out that when you told people that they didn't care (and it didn't dampen woman's love for diamonds) made that cynicism bitter. Thanks De Beers.
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who consistently said Hilary was in trouble and needed to be campaigning harder while everyone else said Trump didn't have a chance.
Again, his poll number's don't budge. If you ask people about issues they consistently oppose Trump. If you ask them about _Trump_ they consistently support him. Thing is, that's not how politics work in America. In America we have wedge issues (Abortion, Gun Control, Gay rights) that split the voters almost evenly. Then there's a small number of 'swing' voters.
Thing is those voters vote on their 'gut'. They don't rationally weigh options and policies. They vote for the candidate that makes them feel the best. This is why you can take a Trump voter, run Trump's polices against them and find they oppose Trump 70-80% of the time but they'll still come out and vote for Trump. Trump makes them feel _good_. His rallies are fun. He Makes America Great Again. Hillary (and the Milktoast right winger Dems like her) make everybody feel bad. They call you a racist and a sexist. They tell you how bad you are for not making it through college or not having enough money to get your kid's through college. Trump tells you he's gonna get your jobs and healthcare. Hillary says she's gonna leave things as is, with you unemployed and not able to afford a doctor visit even if you have insurance.
This is the reality of the American Political system. None of it was by accident. It was built this way to keep wealthy landowners in power. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do: provide the illusion of Democracy. I don't know how to fix it either.
A buddy of mine is absolutely fucked. Almost 50, lots of health problems, has a parent who just won't die and is weighing him down. Dead end job because they shipped his career overseas. Fucked. He's turned to phony-baloney "Alternative" medicine bought off Amazon to treat his various illnesses. Right now the symptoms can be lived with (albeit with a big hit to his productivity), but that's not gonna last. Still, he's convinced himself everything's OK, that he's getting better. That Homeopathy works. And that he's gonna get rich off some dumb ass crypto coin scheme he put $300 bucks into. Meanwhile he just starting working for some gig economy bullshit where they dictate everything he does but don't have to pay benefits or minimum wage.
He should be pissed that he and his parents got tossed aside like hot garbage. He should demand healthcare and a decent wage. He should be voting the the Dems primary to drive the party left and then in the general to drive them to victory. That's the problem I don't know how to solve. We're a nation of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires...
and haven't budged once since he got elected (+/- 2% for error). And he keeps doing worse things. He supports TPP now, and DACA, and H1-Bs, and looked the other way while Carrier Air and Harley Davidson outsourced jobs, and protected Chinese jobs at ZTE, and failed at Repeal & Replace... I could go on.
All these broken promisies, the first two absolutely critical to his base, and still his poll #s are at or near 40%. Meanwhile the Dems are getting ready to run another Milktoast Hillary-bot 2.0 "centerist" candidate in all their races and give up both the House and Senate and eventually another presidency...
Trump at least _says_ he'll do something. He's lying, but the lies feel good. So far the right wing corporate Dems don't promise anything but the same policies that got us in this mess. Meanwhile the few Dems like Bernie and Alison Hartson get hammered by the establishment Dems and shut down.
I don't see any sign of reckoning. All I see is business as usual...
because I don't trust Americans. They'll want to privatize it sooner or later because it's easy to convince 51% of the population that the private sector is so much more efficient (which is funny, since most of them have worked for mega corps and seen exactly how efficient private business is). Of course private enterprise isn't more or less efficient, but people expected cost savings and dam-gummit they're gonna get those savings... by dangerously cutting corners and/or running plants far outside their useful life cycle.
This isn't even hypothetical. It's exactly what happened in Fukushima. And the people involved got off Scott free too. They cried a little on TV and all was forgiven. Meanwhile lots of the clean up workers died of cancer already and thousands lost their homes and jobs.
Until you can convince America that Ronny Reagan was full shit when he said "Government's not the solution, it's the problem" then I want nothing to do with nuclear. I suppose if you could make it cheaper to run a safe plant than an unsafe one, but that tech isn't even on the horizon.
they use the word to hide the fact that they're actually in favor of sweeping societal and economic changes. They're not Conservative (opposing change and supporting the status quo). Heck, one of the most Conservative politicians in history was Hillary Clinton. She'd have kept everything as is, making only small changes to keep everything on course; and she polled terribly. As a rule "progressive" policies (Medicare for all, College for everyone, New New Deal, ending wars, infrastructure spending, living wage, etc, etc) poll in the mid to high 60s, yet their candidates can't seem to win elections.
What I'd like to see is an honest label for the entire movement. Maybe "Regressives", since they seem to want to roll us back to the early 1900s or even late 1800s. Except not quite because they wouldn't support the isolationism and anti-bank sentiment that was popular back then. I wouldn't call them Neo-Liberals because they stop all sorts of liberty (Drugs, abortion, Gay Marriage, etc). I'm open to suggestions, but it bothers me that they use such a deceptive label. If people knew their actual policies they wouldn't have a chance.
he literally said he wasn't smart enough to figure out if there is a number of carriers needed for competition to exists (there is, as has been pointed out on another thread it's >4). Thing is, it's his _job_ to know what that number is. If he's not smart enough to know it he's not smart enough to do the job he was hired for. He should be fired immediately.
Basically, He's not a leader, that's Trump. He's a bureaucrat. His job is to implement what the leadership tells him to do, and he just admitted he can't do that.
that's even remotely true. Give me a good gut feeling backed by faith and solid anecdotal evidence any day of the week. They just plain have more truthiness. Heck, "truthiness" is in Firefox's dictionary, so it must be true.
who's very pro-corporate. He then proceeded to pack his cabinet with pro-corporate lobbyists (mostly the same ex Goldman Sachs folks who have been running the show since Clinton). This isn't anything we shouldn't have expected. What I don't get is why anybody thought they were going to drain the swamp or change the status quo. The onion made fun of this, talking about how middle America was putting their hopes in a man who literally sits on golden thrones... Jeez. I don't even... I can't...
trying to push back at PCs becoming irrelevant for content consumption and even for some forms of creation. It's to be expected. Nothing to see here, move along.
and hard drives and memory and the NUCs and pretty much everything a that makes a computer a computer, so they've got a lot to do with it.
businesses are just that, businesses. People tend to be pretty rational when it comes to making money; albeit not always very nice about it. For example, you see some reverse age discrimination at Walmart where they prefer older workers because though they're slower they always show up for shifts.
What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive. They take time off for their kids, their health, etc. They're not willing to work 60/hr a week with 20 of that unpaid in exchange for vague promises of promotion. There are a ton of other reasons too. So unless you've got a special case like Walmart where workers are so unreliable that it's worth taking the productivity hit for consistency or need highly specialized skills then older workers just don't make economic sense
This is an economic reality we all should face. The sooner we do the sooner we can talk about what to do with all these under employed (or unemployed) workers. If you're a young'un reading this now you're either going to join the older set or die. Literally. It takes years to set up a structure to protect people since there's going to be a ton of resistance. Now's the time to start supporting change.
As for that change, we need more retirement support and better wages. Maybe Social Security at an early age. Forcing employers to hire less productive old people is just going to be bad all around. The young guys will be mad when gramps can't keep up and the oldsters will work themselves into an early grave.
don't underestimate the power of gerrymandering, voter suppression and our corrupt system (e.g. the Senate & the Electoral college, both systems designed to limit Democracy).
If there's a chink in the armor it's the primaries. The best bet is to get pro-worker progressives in by showing up at the Democratic primary. And yes, that means joining the Democratic party if you have to. Take it over from within and take it back from the corporatists. Use the structure they built to fix things.
classes and castes are created by the ruling class to divide the working class against each other so they can take everything for themselves while we're busy fighting among ourselves. This pattern is so common I don't understand why it's not talked about more. In America it's skin color. In India Caste. In Japan (where virtually everyone is visibly Japanese) they use the line of work your family does. There's always something they use to divide the working class into manageable groups.
Moreover, when everyone has the basics in life than nobody is under anybody's thumb. The ruling class have power because they decide who lives and who dies by deciding who eats, has shelter from the elements, medical care and information. Taking that power away from them by guaranteeing those things means real liberty. Again, you're not free if somebody controls your access to food, shelter, etc. Also you're not really free if they control other people's access to those things. That's because when those people get desperate enough they'll be mobilized against you. This is another pattern that we see over and over again and nobody talks about.
The way forward is to declare all human life sacred and all humans due a good life and then implement that.
it's just turned off by default. See here.
I'm worried about healthcare, wages, retirement when I either can't work or nobody'll hire me. I'm worried about school for my kids, especially college.
Surveillance is just a symptom of oppression. The root cause is always money. If you want to render it moot the solution is to make sure everybody (and I mean _everybody_, even lazy people and the ones you don't like) has access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation (the latter being required to effectively access the former).
Until we end the rat race we're going to be vulnerable. You're not free as long as somebody controls access to the things you need to live.
Right after they removed "don't be evil" from the company handbook..
just to get my registration and haven't in decades. And in my neck of the woods we just passed laws requiring the DMV be properly funded and that you couldn't steal money intended for the DMV and stuff it in the general fund. After that the problem was solved. And that was decades ago too. The last time I needed a new license picture (lost my hair) it took 30 minutes during peak hours.
The DMV only sucks in "Starve the Beast" places that intentionally under fund government services so they can point and say "See! We told you government's the problem!". No shit when you set it up to fail on purpose it fails.
company getting a fat contract. That's what all these solutions to school shootings that aren't gun control and expanded healthcare are. It's worse than doing nothing. At least nothing is free.
or do you work for one and wrote it yourself? This is one of their talking points. It's always the same: We can't raise your pay because somebody else will just take it away if we do. Maybe it's the gov't. Maybe it's the businesses you shop at (funny that for Walmart employees).
It's a lie. No, employees making $15/hr don't pay 40% of their income in taxes. Even at $15/hr (the living wage as of 2018, though it's going to have to be raised soon) you pay about 15-20%. Less if you have kids. I know, I made that kind of money for years before getting a better job.
Tuition assistance is fine and dandy, but it's no substitute for a living wage. People need to live while they go to school, and it's unreasonable to expect people who couldn't make it through college in their teens & 20s to do it while working for a living in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Sure, some people have done it but they're outliers. You're being disingenuous at best and a right wing, anti-worker shill at worst.
for at least 15 years, maybe longer. As far as I can tell they seem to be winning.
which looks less like pie in sky and more like a rigorous economic study meant to find costs that were intentionally hidden to make fossil fuels seem cheaper than they are. If we're going to discuss cost we should be discussing _all_ costs. Not just what I pay at the pump.
it was basically an backhanded way to get me into a training program for the job. The way it worked they would send me to a specialized program for some skill they wanted me to have (that had no value outside of their business). If I dropped out I was on the hook for tuition. Also I had to pay out of pocket and wait for reimbursement, which wasn't paid out until 6 months after I graduated.
Fortunately I got out before they foisted it on me. The way it was structured I was basically paying for required training and then if they made enough money off me in 6 months I'd get it back. All the risk was on me. I'm not saying this is what it is, but it sure looks like it.
so adjusting my gross doesn't really make that big a difference. It doesn't 'pay' for my healthcare. At best it's just a discount. One that even at my income level (above median) I already get to write off.
I'm sorry, but you are wrong. Increasing tax deductions for medical expenses isn't going to solve the health care crisis. It doesn't make healthcare affordable for the ever shrinking middle class, let alone the lower castes.
blast processing indeed... This goes all the way to the top of plant Mobius. Wait... mobius don't have tops. Or is it mobii?
weren't some thousand year old tradition but a marketing gimmick thought up in the 1920s was the thing that crystallized my cynicism. Finding out that when you told people that they didn't care (and it didn't dampen woman's love for diamonds) made that cynicism bitter. Thanks De Beers.
one of these