Censorship like banning "Happy Holidays!"? You're correct that assholes in power have more effect than assholes out of power, but I don't see that as partisan. I rather like the tern "crybullies", but you appeared to be implying that they weren't going to like the Trump years, whereas lots of the crybullies I see are likely to.
Some of the cues are secondary sexual characteristics, but AFAIK that's mostly hormonal, and for assorted reasons hormones can be atypical for X-Y chromosomes and genital development. I saw someone on the street once with nice boobs and a nice beard, and couldn't classify that person by sex (clothes looked more male, so I'm going with masculine gender).
At least 95% of the time, perhaps 98%, this sex and gender stuff is uncomplicated: some people have XX chromosomes, vaginas, boobs, assorted curves, and dress and act like we expect women to, and some people have XY chromosomes, penises, facial hair, etc., and dress and act masculine. Some idiots seem to think it's more like 99.999%, and that there is no difference between biology and behavior.
There are a lot of people with genetic abnormalities that relate to sex (1% is still thirty million people in the US alone). There are a lot of people who don't develop the way their genitals suggest, due to hormonal abnormalities. There are people who cannot definitely be classified as male or female, chromosomes and genitalia being inconclusive. You're oversimplifying.
Gender is social. People who are biologically male generally display social behavior considered male, and the same for females, but it isn't necessary that that happens and never has been. I'm not in the practice of verifying people's genitals in social situations (never having been invited to that kind of party). I have met people who claimed to be non-binary, and have had a chance to examine neither their genitals nor their genomes, so I can't assign them as male or female.
Gender dysphoria is a real problem, and it is indeed abnormal. I don't see where you're going with this.
The left has not stopped referring to "male" and "female" as biology. The left has recognized that there are things that are biological, things that are biological that you would not have expected, and things that are not really ideological. Of all the women I associate with, I have checked the genitals of only one, and yet I treat other people as if they were indeed women. This is social behavior, not just biology, and the biology it depends on isn't necessarily genitals.
Enforcing speech codes, like all those people who wanted to stop anyone from saying "Happy Holidays!"? Those were almost all not leftists, so methinks you see what you want to see.
There are no criminal words or phrases, except maybe in an airport. There are words and phrases some people don't want you using, or in private places they control, but that's something completely different. I am a firm believer in free speech, but there is a fair amount of speech I want to stay legal and still strongly disapprove of.
Trump won because the FBI Director timed release of information for maximum political effect, Wikileaks went for maximum political damage, Trump's supporters didn't care if they were supporting foreign intervention and Hatch Act violations, and because he didn't actually have to win a popular vote.
Clinton's "deplorables" comment, while certainly unwise, was taken far more seriously than Trump's insults. The people who'd laugh off everything outrageous Trump said didn't do the same for Clinton, which strongly suggests that "deplorables" really didn't have the claimed effect.
The irony is that Clinton would have helped people hit by the modern economy more than Trump will. She wasn't going to fix it by a long shot, Sanders might have done a lot of good with a cooperative Congress, which he would not have had. Trump's history is of screwing the little guy, and the people he associates with are the business and financial elite who caused many of the problems in the first place.
You aren't very objective, are you? There's would-be censors all over the political spectrum. You almost certainly saw the right-wing furor over NFL players not standing for the National Anthem, and didn't realize it was an attempt at censorship. There are "special snowflake" right-wing Christians all over the place, butthurt about people not saying "Merry Christmas". Trump wanted a safe space in the theater.
If your news source referred to the left as "crybullies", and didn't bring up right-wing ones, you need to at least read some more objective ones.
That was beyond Obama's control. If you like your policy, you can keep your policy, but only as long as your insurance company allows you. That would have been better. The ACA is a very qualified success, and had a lot of unforeseen consequences, lots of them based on what insurance companies actually did.
I've never really dug into it, but IIRC there was a lot of unrest going on that day, much of it probably because of the video. At first, it seemed reasonable to think Benghazi was part of that unrest, and we found out later that was not the case.
If the best you can do to claim the Obama administration liars is an unsourced (and hence undated) claim that they said something that was plausible but false, you must think it one of the most honest administrations the US has had.
Speaking as a leftist, I don't really hate the man. I fear the President. Trump is basically a not-too-evil bad guy, and we've had those for Presidents before and survived them. He's completely unprepared to take on the power of the Presidency, and he can do a whole lot of damage without even realizing it.
At one time, a friend claimed that the Clinton administration was the most corrupt of the Twentieth Century. I was interested, so I asked "Why do you think it was more corrupt than the Harding administration?" and got what was essentially a blank look. Sheesh.
Farmers supply food. They're sunk without things other people make. It's an interdependent economy, and agriculture is not a big part of it. If the coasts had to, they could import food. It would cost more, but they're wealthy enough.
It would be really nice to be one country, working together. Trump doesn't seem to agree. In the run-up to his inauguration, he referred to people like me as "enemies", not, say, "opponents". Some Trump supporters take the attitude that they count and the people they don't agree with don't, and that Trump's loss in the popular vote doesn't count symbolically because the voters were Californians, not Americans. He's the most divisive President I've seen in my lifetime. Other Presidents have been divisive in the sense of pushing controversial policies that I frequently strongly disapproved of, but they at least tried to get people on board.
"Everybody should be able to afford to buy a house" is a lot older than the 80s, although the definition of "everybody" has changed. However that's not what I meant by centuries: for centuries children have had reason to expect that they'd do at least as well as their parents. This has changed fairly recently.
The CRA covered approving loans, not buying them. If mortgage companies were able to sell dubious loans, it was because banks were buying them. Many of these were investment banks, who didn't really need to worry about the CRA. When institutions that are not under any regulatory pressure are buying NINJA mortgages, something's seriously wrong with how people are running the financial system.
And, yes, foreclosures are expensive, but that doesn't mean much if housing prices are rising rapidly. Assuming it costs $20K, figure that the bank makes a NINJA mortgage for $200K, and forecloses when the house is worth $250K. The bank comes out all right. So, since housing prices will continue to rise, this isn't a real problem, right?
Nobody at GMAC-RFC was interested in the cash coming on on loans. I added that to the financial model myself, and nobody else ever looked at it. If they had wanted some summary of what was likely to happen with mortgage payments, they would have used it. (Another issue is that the model has no provisions for underwater loans, since those weren't happening in the period they were mining data from.)
What they were doing was selling off the income streams as tranches, meaning that the top quarter (or fifth or whatever) of performing loans would be in the top tranche, and the bottom quarter in the bottom tranche. The bottom tranche wasn't worth much, but the other ones were. It reminded me of complicated gambling systems that ignore the fact that the expectation of the sum is equal to the sum of the expectations, or, simply, you can't combine losing bets to get a winning system. They were taking NINJA loans, chopping them into tranches with credit default swaps, and actually selling them and making money. When the music stopped around 2008, whoever was holding the mortgage suddenly lost.
This was combined with systems for evaluating deals that made a range of predictions, and were rewarded according to an expectation that didn't include the risks of low probability. Any ambitious trader, being evaluated by such a system, would structure things to make as much money as possible with high probability, and pushing as many negative outcomes as possible so they'd be concentrated in the low 1% or 5% or whatever. If outcomes had been independent, that might have worked. When the mass defaults started, the worst-case consequences started happening all over the place.
It should be clear that the CRA was not the cause of the collapse, since institutions that weren't affected by it were fully in. It may have contributed in some manner, but it didn't cause the feeding frenzy where any up-and-coming dealer that dealt only in loans of positive value would at best get bad job reviews for underperformance.
My country set up a branch in the UK because it was in the EU and they spoke English there. We now don't know whether this is going to continue to work, since we don't know what trade arrangements between the UK and the EU will be.
The government publishes several unemployment figures with different bases. You can probably find some useful figure among them..
The economy has structurally changed, and not for the better, recently, and millions of people voted for Trump because he said he'd do something about it. That means that specific measures that used to mean something no longer mean quite the same thing. Keeping the figures comparable is good, but they have to be interpreted differently.
Um, what? You get health care when you need it and can afford it. Health insurance helps you afford it when you need it. The health insurance system in the US is not good for health care for people in general, but health insurance itself is. Federal medical setups have all been crippled by not allowing the Feds to negotiate drug prices, like every other country does.
Part of the ACA was setting minimum requirements on plans. They still can be crappy, but there's ways they can't be crappy in. Many of those twenty million have good plans (I know a couple of people on them), and losing the ACA would mean throwing them off and letting some of them die.
The Federal government ran a small surplus using the normal smoke-and-mirrors accounting for some years in the 1990s. As far as fiscal responsibility goes, it's a lot better than running a large deficit despite the smoke-and-mirrors accounting.
I'm also amused by the scientists all over the world who are supposedly betraying science to support a US political viewpoint that's mostly misreported anyway.
Assuming that's actually true, it doesn't mean McCarthy was vindicated. He caused a lot of unnecessary suffering and ruined the careers of many harmless people. It's not like he said "There's a lot of Communists in government" and left that as his legacy. He persecuted people.
Much as I like logic, Aristotle's is way outdated. The guy pretty much invented formal logic, and then it got stuck for a couple thousand years.
Also, there's far more things out there that are just plain wrong than there are that are logically contradictory. I'd rather teach children things like "spot the BS".
Since 1980, Democrats have been the party of fiscal responsibility. Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II raised the deficit, and Clinton and Obama lowered it. I can track this back further, but I think Nixon and Ford were trying to be fiscally responsible, and that the deficit raises weren't their fault.
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Censorship like banning "Happy Holidays!"? You're correct that assholes in power have more effect than assholes out of power, but I don't see that as partisan. I rather like the tern "crybullies", but you appeared to be implying that they weren't going to like the Trump years, whereas lots of the crybullies I see are likely to.
Some of the cues are secondary sexual characteristics, but AFAIK that's mostly hormonal, and for assorted reasons hormones can be atypical for X-Y chromosomes and genital development. I saw someone on the street once with nice boobs and a nice beard, and couldn't classify that person by sex (clothes looked more male, so I'm going with masculine gender).
At least 95% of the time, perhaps 98%, this sex and gender stuff is uncomplicated: some people have XX chromosomes, vaginas, boobs, assorted curves, and dress and act like we expect women to, and some people have XY chromosomes, penises, facial hair, etc., and dress and act masculine. Some idiots seem to think it's more like 99.999%, and that there is no difference between biology and behavior.
Yup, the guy that really popularized "the mother of all X".
There are a lot of people with genetic abnormalities that relate to sex (1% is still thirty million people in the US alone). There are a lot of people who don't develop the way their genitals suggest, due to hormonal abnormalities. There are people who cannot definitely be classified as male or female, chromosomes and genitalia being inconclusive. You're oversimplifying.
Gender is social. People who are biologically male generally display social behavior considered male, and the same for females, but it isn't necessary that that happens and never has been. I'm not in the practice of verifying people's genitals in social situations (never having been invited to that kind of party). I have met people who claimed to be non-binary, and have had a chance to examine neither their genitals nor their genomes, so I can't assign them as male or female.
Gender dysphoria is a real problem, and it is indeed abnormal. I don't see where you're going with this.
The left has not stopped referring to "male" and "female" as biology. The left has recognized that there are things that are biological, things that are biological that you would not have expected, and things that are not really ideological. Of all the women I associate with, I have checked the genitals of only one, and yet I treat other people as if they were indeed women. This is social behavior, not just biology, and the biology it depends on isn't necessarily genitals.
Enforcing speech codes, like all those people who wanted to stop anyone from saying "Happy Holidays!"? Those were almost all not leftists, so methinks you see what you want to see.
There are no criminal words or phrases, except maybe in an airport. There are words and phrases some people don't want you using, or in private places they control, but that's something completely different. I am a firm believer in free speech, but there is a fair amount of speech I want to stay legal and still strongly disapprove of.
Trump won because the FBI Director timed release of information for maximum political effect, Wikileaks went for maximum political damage, Trump's supporters didn't care if they were supporting foreign intervention and Hatch Act violations, and because he didn't actually have to win a popular vote.
Clinton's "deplorables" comment, while certainly unwise, was taken far more seriously than Trump's insults. The people who'd laugh off everything outrageous Trump said didn't do the same for Clinton, which strongly suggests that "deplorables" really didn't have the claimed effect.
The irony is that Clinton would have helped people hit by the modern economy more than Trump will. She wasn't going to fix it by a long shot, Sanders might have done a lot of good with a cooperative Congress, which he would not have had. Trump's history is of screwing the little guy, and the people he associates with are the business and financial elite who caused many of the problems in the first place.
You aren't very objective, are you? There's would-be censors all over the political spectrum. You almost certainly saw the right-wing furor over NFL players not standing for the National Anthem, and didn't realize it was an attempt at censorship. There are "special snowflake" right-wing Christians all over the place, butthurt about people not saying "Merry Christmas". Trump wanted a safe space in the theater.
If your news source referred to the left as "crybullies", and didn't bring up right-wing ones, you need to at least read some more objective ones.
That was beyond Obama's control. If you like your policy, you can keep your policy, but only as long as your insurance company allows you. That would have been better. The ACA is a very qualified success, and had a lot of unforeseen consequences, lots of them based on what insurance companies actually did.
I've never really dug into it, but IIRC there was a lot of unrest going on that day, much of it probably because of the video. At first, it seemed reasonable to think Benghazi was part of that unrest, and we found out later that was not the case.
If the best you can do to claim the Obama administration liars is an unsourced (and hence undated) claim that they said something that was plausible but false, you must think it one of the most honest administrations the US has had.
Speaking as a leftist, I don't really hate the man. I fear the President. Trump is basically a not-too-evil bad guy, and we've had those for Presidents before and survived them. He's completely unprepared to take on the power of the Presidency, and he can do a whole lot of damage without even realizing it.
At one time, a friend claimed that the Clinton administration was the most corrupt of the Twentieth Century. I was interested, so I asked "Why do you think it was more corrupt than the Harding administration?" and got what was essentially a blank look. Sheesh.
Farmers supply food. They're sunk without things other people make. It's an interdependent economy, and agriculture is not a big part of it. If the coasts had to, they could import food. It would cost more, but they're wealthy enough.
It would be really nice to be one country, working together. Trump doesn't seem to agree. In the run-up to his inauguration, he referred to people like me as "enemies", not, say, "opponents". Some Trump supporters take the attitude that they count and the people they don't agree with don't, and that Trump's loss in the popular vote doesn't count symbolically because the voters were Californians, not Americans. He's the most divisive President I've seen in my lifetime. Other Presidents have been divisive in the sense of pushing controversial policies that I frequently strongly disapproved of, but they at least tried to get people on board.
"Everybody should be able to afford to buy a house" is a lot older than the 80s, although the definition of "everybody" has changed. However that's not what I meant by centuries: for centuries children have had reason to expect that they'd do at least as well as their parents. This has changed fairly recently.
The CRA covered approving loans, not buying them. If mortgage companies were able to sell dubious loans, it was because banks were buying them. Many of these were investment banks, who didn't really need to worry about the CRA. When institutions that are not under any regulatory pressure are buying NINJA mortgages, something's seriously wrong with how people are running the financial system.
And, yes, foreclosures are expensive, but that doesn't mean much if housing prices are rising rapidly. Assuming it costs $20K, figure that the bank makes a NINJA mortgage for $200K, and forecloses when the house is worth $250K. The bank comes out all right. So, since housing prices will continue to rise, this isn't a real problem, right?
Nobody at GMAC-RFC was interested in the cash coming on on loans. I added that to the financial model myself, and nobody else ever looked at it. If they had wanted some summary of what was likely to happen with mortgage payments, they would have used it. (Another issue is that the model has no provisions for underwater loans, since those weren't happening in the period they were mining data from.)
What they were doing was selling off the income streams as tranches, meaning that the top quarter (or fifth or whatever) of performing loans would be in the top tranche, and the bottom quarter in the bottom tranche. The bottom tranche wasn't worth much, but the other ones were. It reminded me of complicated gambling systems that ignore the fact that the expectation of the sum is equal to the sum of the expectations, or, simply, you can't combine losing bets to get a winning system. They were taking NINJA loans, chopping them into tranches with credit default swaps, and actually selling them and making money. When the music stopped around 2008, whoever was holding the mortgage suddenly lost.
This was combined with systems for evaluating deals that made a range of predictions, and were rewarded according to an expectation that didn't include the risks of low probability. Any ambitious trader, being evaluated by such a system, would structure things to make as much money as possible with high probability, and pushing as many negative outcomes as possible so they'd be concentrated in the low 1% or 5% or whatever. If outcomes had been independent, that might have worked. When the mass defaults started, the worst-case consequences started happening all over the place.
It should be clear that the CRA was not the cause of the collapse, since institutions that weren't affected by it were fully in. It may have contributed in some manner, but it didn't cause the feeding frenzy where any up-and-coming dealer that dealt only in loans of positive value would at best get bad job reviews for underperformance.
I disagree that it's a change. He hasn't been in office a week yet, and sticking to campaign promises for a week isn't unusual.
And I keep wondering about second Brexit, involving at least Scotland.
My country set up a branch in the UK because it was in the EU and they spoke English there. We now don't know whether this is going to continue to work, since we don't know what trade arrangements between the UK and the EU will be.
The government publishes several unemployment figures with different bases. You can probably find some useful figure among them..
The economy has structurally changed, and not for the better, recently, and millions of people voted for Trump because he said he'd do something about it. That means that specific measures that used to mean something no longer mean quite the same thing. Keeping the figures comparable is good, but they have to be interpreted differently.
Um, what? You get health care when you need it and can afford it. Health insurance helps you afford it when you need it. The health insurance system in the US is not good for health care for people in general, but health insurance itself is. Federal medical setups have all been crippled by not allowing the Feds to negotiate drug prices, like every other country does.
Part of the ACA was setting minimum requirements on plans. They still can be crappy, but there's ways they can't be crappy in. Many of those twenty million have good plans (I know a couple of people on them), and losing the ACA would mean throwing them off and letting some of them die.
The Federal government ran a small surplus using the normal smoke-and-mirrors accounting for some years in the 1990s. As far as fiscal responsibility goes, it's a lot better than running a large deficit despite the smoke-and-mirrors accounting.
I'm also amused by the scientists all over the world who are supposedly betraying science to support a US political viewpoint that's mostly misreported anyway.
Since Trump's election, there's been a massive effort to get US data across the border to be stored internationally.
Assuming that's actually true, it doesn't mean McCarthy was vindicated. He caused a lot of unnecessary suffering and ruined the careers of many harmless people. It's not like he said "There's a lot of Communists in government" and left that as his legacy. He persecuted people.
Much as I like logic, Aristotle's is way outdated. The guy pretty much invented formal logic, and then it got stuck for a couple thousand years.
Also, there's far more things out there that are just plain wrong than there are that are logically contradictory. I'd rather teach children things like "spot the BS".
I don't see liberals doing it either. I don't know who caused the Inauguration Day violence, but there was almost none in the Saturday march.
Since 1980, Democrats have been the party of fiscal responsibility. Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II raised the deficit, and Clinton and Obama lowered it. I can track this back further, but I think Nixon and Ford were trying to be fiscally responsible, and that the deficit raises weren't their fault.