the vast majority of bad loans were on investment properties. It was boomers buying houses to rent and flip with their life savings because they hadn't been able to save enough to retire on. That's what made the bubble burst so bad. The bubble wasn't driven by loans on people's primary domicile, so there was no effort to keep the properties. When it became clear they were going to lose money everybody bailed at once and the whole scheme collapsed. It might have lasted long enough to get to the next big tech boom if it was only low risk mortgages instead of rental and investment properties that made up the Credit Default Swaps out there.
is because capital costs and profit margins are too high. That sounds like a contradiction, and that's the trouble. Like a lot of things it doesn't work the way you'd expect it to.
Let's say you decide to compete with Comcast. You're gonna have to spend billions of your own dollars on infrastructure. You might be tempted because Comcast charges $100-$140/mo for something that costs maybe $10-$15/mo to actually provide. You could, over time, do it for $50/mo and make a killing.
Except Comcast knows this. They can and will drop their price to $20/mo and still make good money. Meanwhile you need to charge $50/mo for a decade or more to cover the interest on the loans you took out to finance all that infrastructure you built.
The real problem here is you're trying to put a square peg into a round hole. We _all_ want telecommunications. It's as essential and valuable as food and water. We couldn't live without it. Our civilization would collapse without the ability to spread information. For one thing we couldn't make enough food.
When something's that important and that universal you stop letting private corporations handle it. That's why we have a post office. But don't take my word for it, here's a much better list of the reasons not to privatize industries and how to tell the difference between something that belongs in the public and something that should be private.
fat lot of good it does me. I don't want to just be right. I want to be successful. I do what I can in my personal life to make that happen, but there's only so much you can do when the system is built to crush you. I've got family with illnesses, and thanks to the GOP's corrupt healthcare system (which the Clinton Dems went along with) I've spent the last 10 years struggling.
In another 2-3 years I _might_ finally get out from under all of it, I might not. It depends on what folks like you do next. Will you stop uselessly insulting me on/. with nonsense like "you so wolk" and realize that, as a member of the working class, the right wing who's taken you in and made you feel welcome while they roast you over a fire and dine on your flesh aren't your friends? I hope so. God I hope so.
if you'd bother to read it. Vote in your primary for the candidates who refuse corporate PAC money. At the moment that requires you to vote Democrat because there is literally no GOP politician who doesn't take bribes in the form of campaign contributions. There are plenty on the Dems side.
Any time you want you can end political corruption by committing to vote against anyone who accepts corporate PAC donations in their primary. You just don't want to because guys like Donald Trump tell you want you want to hear and make you feel good about yourself. They appeal to your baser emotions.
Thing is they have consistently left you high and dry with a nasty cocktail of trickle down economics, winner take all crony-capitalism and overt racism used to keep you divided from your fellows in the working class so that you'll excuse to gross wealth inequality they desire. Face it, you've been had. Sooner you admit that sooner you can show up at your primary and do something about it.
again. At this point I like to do this in every thread, specifically:
1. There's an election in 2 years.
2. Vote in your primary. Most people don't, meaning your primary vote has many, many times more power. Politicians don't fear losing in the general, they fear being primaried.
3. Vote for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money. Google "Justice Democrats" and "Our Revolution".
What follows here is pure, angry white man ranting. Stop reading if that offends you. Or just keep reading if you enjoy being offended.
4. Yes, this is a partisan issue. I know of no GOP candidates who reliably support NN. The ones that do have only done so when they could be sure no strong regulations would pass.
5. Speaking of partisan issues, I don't know a single GOP candidate who refuses corporate PAC money. I'm open to suggestions though. But until then I won't even consider voting for them. You can't serve two masters.
Folks like to act like everyone has America's best interests at heart. And it's divisive as hell to suggest otherwise. I'm sorry folks, but this is a science forum, and science is founded on evidence. The GOP has spent the last 40 years serving the rich and well connected. The Dems have been doing it since Clinton, but I can find a wing of their party who wants to serve the people (again, google Justice Democrats. Or go look up the Bernie Bros).
The GOP is at this point irredeemable. There's nothing left there except a pro-corporate, pro ruling elite engine dedicated to shifting wealth upstream. You might have some social issues that are so important to you that you're overlooking that (abortion, gun control, stopping Mexican immigration, I'm already baiting a -2 troll moderation with this post so might as well go all in and keep digging). But if we're going to sit hear and tell ourselves we're a science and tech forum dedicated to evidence based reasoning then we can no longer ignore the obvious. Folks need to realize they're making a trade. You're trading your economic and political freedoms (the real ones, not the imaginary ones where you can have guns and pretend you can somehow overthrow a government with a modern army) for whatever pet issue keeps you siding with the GOP. If folks at least acknowledge the trade maybe they can start questioning if it's worth it?
Or maybe we're about to drag all of human civilization into another 1000 years of aristocratic dystopia. We'll find out in 2 years.
you were told there would be less competition, increased prices, bad outcomes for rural communities and a general tightening of mega corporation's control of the Internet. All of this is continuing apace nicely. Now, Net Neutrality is only one, albeit substantial, part in all that.
This is what drives me nuts about right wingers. Everything has to be simple, black and white. This is why we can't do anything about climate change. Because the damage not painfully, stupendously obvious.
It's the same folks who will argue, with a straight face and without irony or ill intent, that we can repeal regulations that were put in place to stop a problem because the problem no longer occurs... somehow completely missing the point that the problem stopped occurring because we put regulations in place to prevent it.
This is how we got the 2008 market crash. Regulations in place to prevent risky investment banking from mixing with safe mortgage banking were relaxed or eliminated in the name of "unleashing the free market" and "job creation". Those regulations were there for a reason. What's worse is because removing the regulations didn't immediately crash the economy folks act like it was middle class folks buying homes that crashed the country and not the billionaires gambling on them (nevermind that most of the defaults were not on people's primary residence but were investment properties themselves).
The world is a complicated place. Bad things happen for complex reasons and if you want them to stop happening you need to listen to experts because they spend years studying a problem.
TL;DR: For every sufficiently complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.
administration. So yeah, it's going to be approved. Here's where said administration's supporters chime in with "But Hilary".... You know, we had a primary right? and we had a perfectly good candidate who could have won and would in all likelihood have opposed this merger...
The job market still sucks except for college grads with STEM degrees. And that's about 15-20% of the population. They'll have 200 applications for qualified employees in two days and they'll probably still grab an H1-B off the rack at Wipro.
We've completely tipped the balance of power towards the ruling class and the CEOs (same thing really). What I don't understand is why folks don't understand this.
There's a left of center billionaire, mighta been Warren Buffett, can't remember, who remarked: There is a class war going on, and my class is winning.
needs to step in on the employees side. Very high paying jobs have severance to encourage you to give notice and plan your departure. That's maybe the top 30% of jobs if I'm being charitable. Meanwhile the bottom 70% get laid off the week before or of Christmas.
The reason workers need these protections is that we don't have enough information to function in a free market. We don't know if our boss is going to lay us off. But he does. He's got the entire company's books to go over. We've got what they make public every quarter if we're lucky. The prefect free market only works in a world of perfect information being applied perfectly.
Oh, and for my readers over one of the ponds, we don't really have unemployment insurance. This is something even folks living here have a hard time believing, but again if you're not in that top 30% then when you go for unemployment insurance the company will fight you for it.
Let me explain: Unemployment insurance is just that, insurance. Companies pay for it. It's not a tax and it's not paid out of the General fund. In America it's literally an insurance program with premiums. And it's optional. The only requirement is that if an employee applies and gets it and you're not paying the premiums you have to pay out of pocket for their payments. If course, if you fire the employee "with cause" or they willingly quit they're not eligible, and you don't pay. Furthermore if they do apply you can appeal their application... to an arbitration board... that you appointed.
I shit you not, at a place I worked that did mass layoffs they brought out the local Sheriff to intimidate the workers into signing paperwork that said they quit. Stuck 'em in a room (this was pre-cell phones for poor people) and wouldn't let 'em leave until they signed away their rights. I also had a legally blind buddy of mine who had to quit a job when the site moved to a place with no bus lines. He applied for unemployment, got it, then had to pay it all back with interest when the company won in arbitration because he could have use the company car pool program... that was started a week after he applied for his benefits at the new site... a month after we moved... and had no one in it except other folks without reliable transportation looking for rides.
people have been quitting jobs without notice forever. This is hardly anything new. Meanwhile real wages are barely climbing despite almost daily record stock numbers (save the occasional drop because they're skittish over a trade war brewing).
This means folks are leaving jobs so crappy they want to burn their bridges. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're going off to greener pastures.
is declining middle class. Dave & Buster's is doing great, but they're less like a traditional FEC and more like a kiddy Casino and even they have to pick their locations carefully and use nasty business practices to shift the risk of building their attractions onto the companies that build them (they don't actually buy most of those machines, they have some bizarre deal where the manufacturers pay them for floor space).
FECs need a vibrant middle class with a ton of disposable income, and, well, that ain't America in 2018...
All perfectly doable if we can just stop fighting among ourselves and spending 1/3 of our entire civilization's output on war and war profiteering.
Also, human population is in decline where ever you find significant technical civilization. Assuming we don't regress (which, don't get me wrong, a not insignificant portion of humanity wants to) then it's a problem that will solve itself. People don't actually breed uncontrollably if they've got options. Japan, Singapore and now the US with their declining birthrates prove that.
Folks mostly have a ton of kids as a kind of makeshift retirement program and between automation and productivity increases we just aren't going to need the vast labor pool we used to. We are going to need a way to distribute the wealth from the bots an A.I.s. Either that or we're going have have a dystopia where the 1% have everything and the rest of the world looks like a mix of Ethiopia, Somalia and the worst years of the American Indian Reservations.
that's mega, not giga. I can't bear to part with it even though I have no use for it now. It's a wonder of technology and mankind's genius rendered completely obsolete.
to weather such a storm. Not with their economy being what it is. It's times like this that I wish folks could stop wasting time dropping bombs and fighting over who's God is God and just get stuff done.
until the "New" Democrats, aka the Clinton Dems, shift the party to the right.
As for Chicago & Detroit: National problems (like the manufacturing base being outsourced or our disastrous healthcare system) can't be solved at the local level. Who knew?
for left wing candidates who oppose regressive taxes. That works too. Especially since in 2018 a cell phone is a necessity for any kind of job worth having.
as give away to rural communities. A rural voter has somewhere around 40x the voting power of a city voter thanks to our Senate, Electoral College and Gerrymandering. We need to get those folks to stop falling for this crap and get on the side of the rest of the working class.
We're exchanging like for like and both sides are (debatably) in the wrong. What makes this screwed up is we're not longer exchanging like for like. We're trading a persons life for money. It's mob tactics. Which, well, isn't really a surprise. Trump's had mob ties forever.
They're not going to get squat, but the GOP will get a photo op where they tell them they're gonna get Internet and the propaganda news outlets they watch will trumpet that. Then when the Internet never materializes they'll blame it on tax and spend liberals' job killing regulations.
Keep in mind I'm not necessarily blaming the Rural folks for falling for this crap. The big reason I want them to have internet is so they can stop watching cable and over air TV and get out of the propaganda bubble their in. I think it would be great for the country as a whole. Those communities have massive hospital shortages and problems with clean drinking water. The American left (think the Bernie wing of the Democratic party) wants to solve those problems, but they keep losing elections to rural voters (who, thanks to the Senate, Electoral college and gerrymandering have about 40x the voting power of a city voter) keep shooting down attempts to help them.
If we could somehow get the message to them about how much the GOP is screwing them over we could fix just about everything.
their poll numbers say otherwise. Can you just imagine the shit storm if Obama pulled this crap? Take everything Trump's done for the last 2 years, put it down on paper, CTL-R / Trump / Obama and run a poll and see what kind of numbers you get.
My point is his base has stopped thinking and they're just feeling. Trump feels _good_. He tells them what they want to hear. He gives them simple answers to complex problems. It's classic demagoguery just like Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Mussolini did. Trump's not violent like them, he just like attention. So he'll fade into the background when his time's up.
Trump's paving the way for a real dictator. We, and most definately Trump's base (who've been crying about FEMA death camps since Obama got elected) should be freaking the heck out about that. Trouble is they mostly get their media from propaganda outfits (Fox News, Alex Jones, and now even NRA TV, go watch it, it's creepy as hell). So they can't see the very thing they fear most creeping up on them...
who tend to vote for them. Not that I mind rural communities getting the Internet, but not like this. Make it municipal broad bank. A country just did it for about $5 bucks a month. Verizon got billions of my money to build out rural fiber, kept the money and never did the work.
No more. Fund municipal broadband out of the General fund or tell the fuckers to fuck off. All this does is charge me $5 bucks a month (I pay for business class at home) for free money in AT&Ts hands.
Once again, we've got an election in 2 years. Show up at your primary and vote the fuckers out. Then show up at the general and put some real pro-consumer folks in. We had plenty of them in the primary in 2018 but so few showed up for the primary that most of these yahoo incumbents survived. Again, no more. Primary them and then vote in pro-worker and pro-consumer reps who refuse corporate PAC money.
Slashdot Mirror
the vast majority of bad loans were on investment properties. It was boomers buying houses to rent and flip with their life savings because they hadn't been able to save enough to retire on. That's what made the bubble burst so bad. The bubble wasn't driven by loans on people's primary domicile, so there was no effort to keep the properties. When it became clear they were going to lose money everybody bailed at once and the whole scheme collapsed. It might have lasted long enough to get to the next big tech boom if it was only low risk mortgages instead of rental and investment properties that made up the Credit Default Swaps out there.
is because capital costs and profit margins are too high. That sounds like a contradiction, and that's the trouble. Like a lot of things it doesn't work the way you'd expect it to.
Let's say you decide to compete with Comcast. You're gonna have to spend billions of your own dollars on infrastructure. You might be tempted because Comcast charges $100-$140/mo for something that costs maybe $10-$15/mo to actually provide. You could, over time, do it for $50/mo and make a killing.
Except Comcast knows this. They can and will drop their price to $20/mo and still make good money. Meanwhile you need to charge $50/mo for a decade or more to cover the interest on the loans you took out to finance all that infrastructure you built.
The real problem here is you're trying to put a square peg into a round hole. We _all_ want telecommunications. It's as essential and valuable as food and water. We couldn't live without it. Our civilization would collapse without the ability to spread information. For one thing we couldn't make enough food.
When something's that important and that universal you stop letting private corporations handle it. That's why we have a post office. But don't take my word for it, here's a much better list of the reasons not to privatize industries and how to tell the difference between something that belongs in the public and something that should be private.
fat lot of good it does me. I don't want to just be right. I want to be successful. I do what I can in my personal life to make that happen, but there's only so much you can do when the system is built to crush you. I've got family with illnesses, and thanks to the GOP's corrupt healthcare system (which the Clinton Dems went along with) I've spent the last 10 years struggling.
/. with nonsense like "you so wolk" and realize that, as a member of the working class, the right wing who's taken you in and made you feel welcome while they roast you over a fire and dine on your flesh aren't your friends? I hope so. God I hope so.
In another 2-3 years I _might_ finally get out from under all of it, I might not. It depends on what folks like you do next. Will you stop uselessly insulting me on
if you'd bother to read it. Vote in your primary for the candidates who refuse corporate PAC money. At the moment that requires you to vote Democrat because there is literally no GOP politician who doesn't take bribes in the form of campaign contributions. There are plenty on the Dems side.
Any time you want you can end political corruption by committing to vote against anyone who accepts corporate PAC donations in their primary. You just don't want to because guys like Donald Trump tell you want you want to hear and make you feel good about yourself. They appeal to your baser emotions.
Thing is they have consistently left you high and dry with a nasty cocktail of trickle down economics, winner take all crony-capitalism and overt racism used to keep you divided from your fellows in the working class so that you'll excuse to gross wealth inequality they desire. Face it, you've been had. Sooner you admit that sooner you can show up at your primary and do something about it.
again. At this point I like to do this in every thread, specifically:
1. There's an election in 2 years.
2. Vote in your primary. Most people don't, meaning your primary vote has many, many times more power. Politicians don't fear losing in the general, they fear being primaried.
3. Vote for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money. Google "Justice Democrats" and "Our Revolution".
What follows here is pure, angry white man ranting. Stop reading if that offends you. Or just keep reading if you enjoy being offended.
4. Yes, this is a partisan issue. I know of no GOP candidates who reliably support NN. The ones that do have only done so when they could be sure no strong regulations would pass.
5. Speaking of partisan issues, I don't know a single GOP candidate who refuses corporate PAC money. I'm open to suggestions though. But until then I won't even consider voting for them. You can't serve two masters.
Folks like to act like everyone has America's best interests at heart. And it's divisive as hell to suggest otherwise. I'm sorry folks, but this is a science forum, and science is founded on evidence. The GOP has spent the last 40 years serving the rich and well connected. The Dems have been doing it since Clinton, but I can find a wing of their party who wants to serve the people (again, google Justice Democrats. Or go look up the Bernie Bros).
The GOP is at this point irredeemable. There's nothing left there except a pro-corporate, pro ruling elite engine dedicated to shifting wealth upstream. You might have some social issues that are so important to you that you're overlooking that (abortion, gun control, stopping Mexican immigration, I'm already baiting a -2 troll moderation with this post so might as well go all in and keep digging). But if we're going to sit hear and tell ourselves we're a science and tech forum dedicated to evidence based reasoning then we can no longer ignore the obvious. Folks need to realize they're making a trade. You're trading your economic and political freedoms (the real ones, not the imaginary ones where you can have guns and pretend you can somehow overthrow a government with a modern army) for whatever pet issue keeps you siding with the GOP. If folks at least acknowledge the trade maybe they can start questioning if it's worth it?
Or maybe we're about to drag all of human civilization into another 1000 years of aristocratic dystopia. We'll find out in 2 years.
you were told there would be less competition, increased prices, bad outcomes for rural communities and a general tightening of mega corporation's control of the Internet. All of this is continuing apace nicely. Now, Net Neutrality is only one, albeit substantial, part in all that.
This is what drives me nuts about right wingers. Everything has to be simple, black and white. This is why we can't do anything about climate change. Because the damage not painfully, stupendously obvious.
It's the same folks who will argue, with a straight face and without irony or ill intent, that we can repeal regulations that were put in place to stop a problem because the problem no longer occurs... somehow completely missing the point that the problem stopped occurring because we put regulations in place to prevent it.
This is how we got the 2008 market crash. Regulations in place to prevent risky investment banking from mixing with safe mortgage banking were relaxed or eliminated in the name of "unleashing the free market" and "job creation". Those regulations were there for a reason. What's worse is because removing the regulations didn't immediately crash the economy folks act like it was middle class folks buying homes that crashed the country and not the billionaires gambling on them (nevermind that most of the defaults were not on people's primary residence but were investment properties themselves).
The world is a complicated place. Bad things happen for complex reasons and if you want them to stop happening you need to listen to experts because they spend years studying a problem.
TL;DR: For every sufficiently complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong.
let the programmers & community decide by up-voting this if they care.
administration. So yeah, it's going to be approved. Here's where said administration's supporters chime in with "But Hilary".... You know, we had a primary right? and we had a perfectly good candidate who could have won and would in all likelihood have opposed this merger...
The job market still sucks except for college grads with STEM degrees. And that's about 15-20% of the population. They'll have 200 applications for qualified employees in two days and they'll probably still grab an H1-B off the rack at Wipro.
We've completely tipped the balance of power towards the ruling class and the CEOs (same thing really). What I don't understand is why folks don't understand this.
There's a left of center billionaire, mighta been Warren Buffett, can't remember, who remarked: There is a class war going on, and my class is winning.
and there are increasingly fewer employers ever year thanks to all the mergers and acquisitions.
needs to step in on the employees side. Very high paying jobs have severance to encourage you to give notice and plan your departure. That's maybe the top 30% of jobs if I'm being charitable. Meanwhile the bottom 70% get laid off the week before or of Christmas.
The reason workers need these protections is that we don't have enough information to function in a free market. We don't know if our boss is going to lay us off. But he does. He's got the entire company's books to go over. We've got what they make public every quarter if we're lucky. The prefect free market only works in a world of perfect information being applied perfectly.
Oh, and for my readers over one of the ponds, we don't really have unemployment insurance. This is something even folks living here have a hard time believing, but again if you're not in that top 30% then when you go for unemployment insurance the company will fight you for it.
Let me explain: Unemployment insurance is just that, insurance. Companies pay for it. It's not a tax and it's not paid out of the General fund. In America it's literally an insurance program with premiums. And it's optional. The only requirement is that if an employee applies and gets it and you're not paying the premiums you have to pay out of pocket for their payments. If course, if you fire the employee "with cause" or they willingly quit they're not eligible, and you don't pay. Furthermore if they do apply you can appeal their application... to an arbitration board... that you appointed.
I shit you not, at a place I worked that did mass layoffs they brought out the local Sheriff to intimidate the workers into signing paperwork that said they quit. Stuck 'em in a room (this was pre-cell phones for poor people) and wouldn't let 'em leave until they signed away their rights. I also had a legally blind buddy of mine who had to quit a job when the site moved to a place with no bus lines. He applied for unemployment, got it, then had to pay it all back with interest when the company won in arbitration because he could have use the company car pool program... that was started a week after he applied for his benefits at the new site... a month after we moved... and had no one in it except other folks without reliable transportation looking for rides.
Once again, the free market isn't.
the folks who bought them for Nostalgia will tire of them and they'll be clogging ebay before long.
people have been quitting jobs without notice forever. This is hardly anything new. Meanwhile real wages are barely climbing despite almost daily record stock numbers (save the occasional drop because they're skittish over a trade war brewing).
This means folks are leaving jobs so crappy they want to burn their bridges. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're going off to greener pastures.
this seems like a really, really bad idea.
is declining middle class. Dave & Buster's is doing great, but they're less like a traditional FEC and more like a kiddy Casino and even they have to pick their locations carefully and use nasty business practices to shift the risk of building their attractions onto the companies that build them (they don't actually buy most of those machines, they have some bizarre deal where the manufacturers pay them for floor space).
FECs need a vibrant middle class with a ton of disposable income, and, well, that ain't America in 2018...
All perfectly doable if we can just stop fighting among ourselves and spending 1/3 of our entire civilization's output on war and war profiteering.
Also, human population is in decline where ever you find significant technical civilization. Assuming we don't regress (which, don't get me wrong, a not insignificant portion of humanity wants to) then it's a problem that will solve itself. People don't actually breed uncontrollably if they've got options. Japan, Singapore and now the US with their declining birthrates prove that.
Folks mostly have a ton of kids as a kind of makeshift retirement program and between automation and productivity increases we just aren't going to need the vast labor pool we used to. We are going to need a way to distribute the wealth from the bots an A.I.s. Either that or we're going have have a dystopia where the 1% have everything and the rest of the world looks like a mix of Ethiopia, Somalia and the worst years of the American Indian Reservations.
that's mega, not giga. I can't bear to part with it even though I have no use for it now. It's a wonder of technology and mankind's genius rendered completely obsolete.
to weather such a storm. Not with their economy being what it is. It's times like this that I wish folks could stop wasting time dropping bombs and fighting over who's God is God and just get stuff done.
until the "New" Democrats, aka the Clinton Dems, shift the party to the right.
As for Chicago & Detroit: National problems (like the manufacturing base being outsourced or our disastrous healthcare system) can't be solved at the local level. Who knew?
for left wing candidates who oppose regressive taxes. That works too. Especially since in 2018 a cell phone is a necessity for any kind of job worth having.
as give away to rural communities. A rural voter has somewhere around 40x the voting power of a city voter thanks to our Senate, Electoral College and Gerrymandering. We need to get those folks to stop falling for this crap and get on the side of the rest of the working class.
We're exchanging like for like and both sides are (debatably) in the wrong. What makes this screwed up is we're not longer exchanging like for like. We're trading a persons life for money. It's mob tactics. Which, well, isn't really a surprise. Trump's had mob ties forever.
They're not going to get squat, but the GOP will get a photo op where they tell them they're gonna get Internet and the propaganda news outlets they watch will trumpet that. Then when the Internet never materializes they'll blame it on tax and spend liberals' job killing regulations.
Keep in mind I'm not necessarily blaming the Rural folks for falling for this crap. The big reason I want them to have internet is so they can stop watching cable and over air TV and get out of the propaganda bubble their in. I think it would be great for the country as a whole. Those communities have massive hospital shortages and problems with clean drinking water. The American left (think the Bernie wing of the Democratic party) wants to solve those problems, but they keep losing elections to rural voters (who, thanks to the Senate, Electoral college and gerrymandering have about 40x the voting power of a city voter) keep shooting down attempts to help them.
If we could somehow get the message to them about how much the GOP is screwing them over we could fix just about everything.
their poll numbers say otherwise. Can you just imagine the shit storm if Obama pulled this crap? Take everything Trump's done for the last 2 years, put it down on paper, CTL-R / Trump / Obama and run a poll and see what kind of numbers you get.
My point is his base has stopped thinking and they're just feeling. Trump feels _good_. He tells them what they want to hear. He gives them simple answers to complex problems. It's classic demagoguery just like Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Mussolini did. Trump's not violent like them, he just like attention. So he'll fade into the background when his time's up.
Trump's paving the way for a real dictator. We, and most definately Trump's base (who've been crying about FEMA death camps since Obama got elected) should be freaking the heck out about that. Trouble is they mostly get their media from propaganda outfits (Fox News, Alex Jones, and now even NRA TV, go watch it, it's creepy as hell). So they can't see the very thing they fear most creeping up on them...
who tend to vote for them. Not that I mind rural communities getting the Internet, but not like this. Make it municipal broad bank. A country just did it for about $5 bucks a month. Verizon got billions of my money to build out rural fiber, kept the money and never did the work.
No more. Fund municipal broadband out of the General fund or tell the fuckers to fuck off. All this does is charge me $5 bucks a month (I pay for business class at home) for free money in AT&Ts hands.
Once again, we've got an election in 2 years. Show up at your primary and vote the fuckers out. Then show up at the general and put some real pro-consumer folks in. We had plenty of them in the primary in 2018 but so few showed up for the primary that most of these yahoo incumbents survived. Again, no more. Primary them and then vote in pro-worker and pro-consumer reps who refuse corporate PAC money.