I agree with your description of Norway. You're misinformed about Venezuela. They've nationalized at least oil, steel, aluminum, cement, gold, iron, farming, transportation, electricity, food production, banking, paper and the media. By nationalized, I mean that the government publicly announced their nationalization and directly controls how the groups involved act, rather than private owners.
From a story which is 5 years old, the number of private companies in Venezuela was 14K in 1998. In 2011 it was 9K. The government has been identified as running over 500 state-run industrial entities, at least 70% of which are losing money.
Is Venezuela 100% socialist? No, but they're mostly socialist in terms of government direction of the economy and they were being lauded as a wonderful example of how great socialism could be by people who are pro-socialist before their economy finished falling apart, which makes it much tougher to suddenly decide they aren't socialist anymore.
Sorry, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about. The government took over the economy and the current result is not only predicable, it was predicted by those opposed to socialism, i.e. "For more than a decade people opposed to the government of Venezuela have argued that its economy would implode." was written in 2013.
A "weak central government" doesn't nationalize huge parts of the economy, including all the most essential industries, like Venezuela had. That's (coincidentally, I'm sure...) when those industries then fell apart and stopped being able to produce nearly as much. A "weak central government" doesn't set wage and price controls with rationing and trying to make the government the sole provider for food.
All the attempts at having the government run the economy have ended the same way. It's not something which is even controversial among economists anymore. It's been proven by repeated experiment.
More to the point, I also understand the concept of amortizing the cost of something over the useful life of that something.
Your cost of electricity per watt from solar costs you the price of the solar system (including the opportunity cost of what you could have done with that money, i.e. a reasonable interest rate over the expected life) divided by the number of watts you're going to use over the life of the solar system.
Also, I wasn't responding to you saying that you "pay nothing", you actually said "my cost of electricity is zero". Big difference. Your solar system may have already cost you, but it did cost you.
It's also a bit telling that the special counsel's office went so far as to issue a statement that Buzzfeed's story about Cohen's congressional testimony isn't accurate.
Pretty sure that story's not going to pan out.....
"A People's History of the United States"? Yeah, that made it to what, #2 on the list of least credible history books in print for the History News Network?
A book so bad that the President of Purdue University issued a statement which said he “wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn's textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people" and "No one need take my word that my concerns were well-founded. Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren.”
Try getting your history from real history books based on primary sources, not left-wing nonsense designed to push an agenda by misciting secondary sources.
I'm not sure you and some of the other commentators with similar points realize how dense 5g deployments have to be. 5g towers are sited every 500 feet or so and each one is typically connected via fiber because of the bandwidth demands.
So if you have a good 5g signal, you also have fiber connectivity available within say, a 300m cable run at the most. Yeah, I can think of some weird scenarios where 5g could be used in an emergency, but fiber not be available due to paperwork or whatever, but if you're running the logistics of a surgery center at each end, they're unlikely to apply in 99.9% of the use cases.
Your connecting a surgical center, not a phone. That seems to imply a bit more of a fixed location, or at least a quantity of equipment being hauled around...
I'm thinking that if you're a hospital/surgery center doing remote surgeries, you might want to go ahead and spring for a decent network connection for the hospitals at both ends. Just speculating out loud, of course. Not like anyone is paying for the surgery, or that it's not already going to take way more expensive equipment than a decent network connection to do it...
Which of course, introduces the question, why use a 5g connection, or any wireless connection at all, when a wired connection using oh, fiber optic cabling, would be so much more reliable, not to mention faster in terms of both bandwidth and latency...
According to that article, as well as others, Schumer did offer to authorize the funding, but to only appropriate 1.6B (if you believe the White House budget director on the record about the meeting), in which case we'd still be in this exact same place where they are gridlocked over appropriations for a wall.
Does make one wonder why Schumer is so opposed to a wall now, if he was apparently fine with it before.
I included a link to the Heritage foundation refuting your statements. In contrast, all you've provided is your own bare assertions.
Dr. Rand Paul (elected official), has proposed a specific alternative bill or two (which won the support of Trump and most GOP members of Congress) which was not "over 90% identical to the ACA". Just the provision of using State-level block grants alone instead of Federal mandates removed the vast majority of the rules, regulations and restrictions within the ACA, not to mention the rest of the replacement. In the meantime, after McCain's betrayal, they've done what they can via the portions determined by executive order, which alone make up more than 10% of the ACA's original effect under Obama.
Once you're ready to start citing some facts (how about a link to the Heritage Foundation "plan" you say the ACA was based on?), then maybe come back.
Because the overall popular vote doesn't matter, people don't base their vote on it and they don't campaign as if it matters.
A significant percentage of people either don't bother to vote in States like CA where they know it won't matter, or vote for a third party candidate in states where they know it won't matter as a form of protest. Those votes would change if the overall popular vote mattered.
The total votes actually case for Trump/Hillary pledged electors in the 2016 election do not reflect what the vote totals would be for a national popular vote decided election. You're trying to take votes case for one thing and magically make them mean something totally different. Sorry, but they don't mean what you'd like to pretend them to.
Exactly. If Congress can get a bipartisan 2/3 to agree on something, then they can just ignore the President. If not, then I guess whatever is being proposed isn't universally supported enough to get passed.
Congress has delegated way too much to the executive branch over time.
For example, the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act requires the President to submit a proposed annual budget for the federal government to Congress.
Still, while the Constitution requires appropriations to originate in the House, it also requires a vote by the Senate and a signature or veto (and then 2/3 override) from the President before actually becoming law. So they're supposed to be involved in the process as well, otherwise those extra steps would be meaningless.
It must be tough reading the minds of all those GOP folks all the time to determine that what they really think is the exact opposite of what they all said before, at the time and afterwards.
And no, not even the Heritage Foundation supported the contents of the ACA. 20 years before, one person at the Heritage foundation agreed with (didn't invent) an insurance requirement being necessary for a similar plan Clinton was proposing. That and a bunch of Democratic politician and media lies later is the entire basis of the myth you're citing. Certainly the ACA doesn't contain anything like a "GOP plan".
The Democrats offered to vote for Trump's entire wall ($27b) in return for citizenship for the DACA kids. Republicans didn't even put that to a vote.
GOP Senators have gone so far as to introduce a bill do wall funding plus DACA, but the Democratic leadership currently refuses to even discuss a compromise like that, even after Trump's national address specifically suggesting both sides compromise to make a deal.
Graham was referring to a White House offer last January that would have codified DACA, plus implemented a variety of other controversial changes to immigration law, in exchange for border wall funding.
Unpaid government workers just collect unemployment and then have to pay it back when they get their backpay. It nets out to a forced paid vacation. I'm happy to take a bonus vacation if you just require me to do a little paperwork.
It's not like this has never happened to them before and they don't know what to do or how to navigate the system.
Actually, generally the federal workers who get furloughed don't go work a second job, they just collect unemployment.
Then when they do get their big paycheck for the time they were on forced vacation, they are required to pay the unemployment back.
Of course, some new workers are dumber than most and spend both the UI and the backpay windfall, then get caught out when later UI catches up with them and wants to get paid back and they've already spent it.
Source: Lived in DC for 8 years, heard it again from furloughed workers this time around.
Most of them, but “Feminist Mein Kampf” is probably the most over the top.
Literally taking the words of the person they consider the exact opposite of their ideals and merely dressing them up with some feminist language? Yeah, that's pretty pathetic it was "Accepted by Afilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, leading feminist social work journal."
Three points: 1. I don't care whose speech they're suppressing(left or right), just that they're suppressing speech based on it's content or who the speaker is. 2. For you, 40 incidents in a year may be "vanishingly rare", for me, that's ridiculously high in a country where people are supposed to understand free speech both as a concept and as a requirement on the government, including government sponsored educational institutions. 3. FIRE has a great feature where they list the content of and rate the speech policies of various universities. I contend that while a large proportion of those policies do not allow for free speech, we have a problem with free speech limitations on college campuses. It's literally the policy some places.
He did the equiv. of writing perpetual motion papers about the local Ferris wheel at the carnival and getting them published in Physics. It doesn't matter what the supporting data says if that's the level of work which can be routinely published in your "academic" discipline.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that obviously made up data with clearly flawed statistics in basic ways, which shouldn't ever pass peer review, easily does in certain less-than-scientific-disciplines. He never tried to pass any fake data off permanently as real, he revealed the whole thing afterwards, wasn't trying to permanently fool anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your description of Norway. You're misinformed about Venezuela. They've nationalized at least oil, steel, aluminum, cement, gold, iron, farming, transportation, electricity, food production, banking, paper and the media. By nationalized, I mean that the government publicly announced their nationalization and directly controls how the groups involved act, rather than private owners.
From a story which is 5 years old, the number of private companies in Venezuela was 14K in 1998. In 2011 it was 9K. The government has been identified as running over 500 state-run industrial entities, at least 70% of which are losing money.
Is Venezuela 100% socialist? No, but they're mostly socialist in terms of government direction of the economy and they were being lauded as a wonderful example of how great socialism could be by people who are pro-socialist before their economy finished falling apart, which makes it much tougher to suddenly decide they aren't socialist anymore.
Sorry, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about. The government took over the economy and the current result is not only predicable, it was predicted by those opposed to socialism, i.e. "For more than a decade people opposed to the government of Venezuela have argued that its economy would implode." was written in 2013.
Those in favor of socialism went on and on about how wonderful Venezuelan socialism was for people.
A "weak central government" doesn't nationalize huge parts of the economy, including all the most essential industries, like Venezuela had. That's (coincidentally, I'm sure...) when those industries then fell apart and stopped being able to produce nearly as much. A "weak central government" doesn't set wage and price controls with rationing and trying to make the government the sole provider for food.
All the attempts at having the government run the economy have ended the same way. It's not something which is even controversial among economists anymore. It's been proven by repeated experiment.
I understand marginal cost.
More to the point, I also understand the concept of amortizing the cost of something over the useful life of that something.
Your cost of electricity per watt from solar costs you the price of the solar system (including the opportunity cost of what you could have done with that money, i.e. a reasonable interest rate over the expected life) divided by the number of watts you're going to use over the life of the solar system.
Also, I wasn't responding to you saying that you "pay nothing", you actually said "my cost of electricity is zero". Big difference. Your solar system may have already cost you, but it did cost you.
It's also a bit telling that the special counsel's office went so far as to issue a statement that Buzzfeed's story about Cohen's congressional testimony isn't accurate.
Pretty sure that story's not going to pan out.....
"A People's History of the United States"? Yeah, that made it to what, #2 on the list of least credible history books in print for the History News Network?
A book so bad that the President of Purdue University issued a statement which said he “wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn's textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people" and "No one need take my word that my concerns were well-founded. Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren.”
Try getting your history from real history books based on primary sources, not left-wing nonsense designed to push an agenda by misciting secondary sources.
Really? Someone gave you free solar panels and the associated wiring/circuitry?
I'm not sure you and some of the other commentators with similar points realize how dense 5g deployments have to be. 5g towers are sited every 500 feet or so and each one is typically connected via fiber because of the bandwidth demands.
So if you have a good 5g signal, you also have fiber connectivity available within say, a 300m cable run at the most. Yeah, I can think of some weird scenarios where 5g could be used in an emergency, but fiber not be available due to paperwork or whatever, but if you're running the logistics of a surgery center at each end, they're unlikely to apply in 99.9% of the use cases.
Your connecting a surgical center, not a phone. That seems to imply a bit more of a fixed location, or at least a quantity of equipment being hauled around...
I'm thinking that if you're a hospital/surgery center doing remote surgeries, you might want to go ahead and spring for a decent network connection for the hospitals at both ends. Just speculating out loud, of course. Not like anyone is paying for the surgery, or that it's not already going to take way more expensive equipment than a decent network connection to do it...
Which of course, introduces the question, why use a 5g connection, or any wireless connection at all, when a wired connection using oh, fiber optic cabling, would be so much more reliable, not to mention faster in terms of both bandwidth and latency...
According to that article, as well as others, Schumer did offer to authorize the funding, but to only appropriate 1.6B (if you believe the White House budget director on the record about the meeting), in which case we'd still be in this exact same place where they are gridlocked over appropriations for a wall.
Does make one wonder why Schumer is so opposed to a wall now, if he was apparently fine with it before.
I included a link to the Heritage foundation refuting your statements. In contrast, all you've provided is your own bare assertions.
Dr. Rand Paul (elected official), has proposed a specific alternative bill or two (which won the support of Trump and most GOP members of Congress) which was not "over 90% identical to the ACA". Just the provision of using State-level block grants alone instead of Federal mandates removed the vast majority of the rules, regulations and restrictions within the ACA, not to mention the rest of the replacement. In the meantime, after McCain's betrayal, they've done what they can via the portions determined by executive order, which alone make up more than 10% of the ACA's original effect under Obama.
Once you're ready to start citing some facts (how about a link to the Heritage Foundation "plan" you say the ACA was based on?), then maybe come back.
Because the overall popular vote doesn't matter, people don't base their vote on it and they don't campaign as if it matters.
A significant percentage of people either don't bother to vote in States like CA where they know it won't matter, or vote for a third party candidate in states where they know it won't matter as a form of protest. Those votes would change if the overall popular vote mattered.
The total votes actually case for Trump/Hillary pledged electors in the 2016 election do not reflect what the vote totals would be for a national popular vote decided election. You're trying to take votes case for one thing and magically make them mean something totally different. Sorry, but they don't mean what you'd like to pretend them to.
In the only votes in 2016 actually cast for President, Trump won a big majority, 304 to 227, or 56.5% of the vote compared to Hillary Clinton's 42.3%. 7 votes were case for others in the election.
Exactly. If Congress can get a bipartisan 2/3 to agree on something, then they can just ignore the President. If not, then I guess whatever is being proposed isn't universally supported enough to get passed.
Congress has delegated way too much to the executive branch over time.
For example, the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act requires the President to submit a proposed annual budget for the federal government to Congress.
Still, while the Constitution requires appropriations to originate in the House, it also requires a vote by the Senate and a signature or veto (and then 2/3 override) from the President before actually becoming law. So they're supposed to be involved in the process as well, otherwise those extra steps would be meaningless.
It must be tough reading the minds of all those GOP folks all the time to determine that what they really think is the exact opposite of what they all said before, at the time and afterwards.
And no, not even the Heritage Foundation supported the contents of the ACA. 20 years before, one person at the Heritage foundation agreed with (didn't invent) an insurance requirement being necessary for a similar plan Clinton was proposing. That and a bunch of Democratic politician and media lies later is the entire basis of the myth you're citing. Certainly the ACA doesn't contain anything like a "GOP plan".
I'd be interested in a citation for:
GOP Senators have gone so far as to introduce a bill do wall funding plus DACA, but the Democratic leadership currently refuses to even discuss a compromise like that, even after Trump's national address specifically suggesting both sides compromise to make a deal.
For a last time around example as well,
If that's not enough, there are also places offering 0% loans to tide people over until they get their check.
For most, it's not their first (or even fifth) shutdown, so they've adapted to planning and dealing with it.
They also just collect unemployment in the meantime, then have to pay it back after they get their check.
Unpaid government workers just collect unemployment and then have to pay it back when they get their backpay. It nets out to a forced paid vacation. I'm happy to take a bonus vacation if you just require me to do a little paperwork.
It's not like this has never happened to them before and they don't know what to do or how to navigate the system.
Actually, generally the federal workers who get furloughed don't go work a second job, they just collect unemployment.
Then when they do get their big paycheck for the time they were on forced vacation, they are required to pay the unemployment back.
Of course, some new workers are dumber than most and spend both the UI and the backpay windfall, then get caught out when later UI catches up with them and wants to get paid back and they've already spent it.
Source: Lived in DC for 8 years, heard it again from furloughed workers this time around.
Most of them, but “Feminist Mein Kampf” is probably the most over the top.
Literally taking the words of the person they consider the exact opposite of their ideals and merely dressing them up with some feminist language? Yeah, that's pretty pathetic it was "Accepted by Afilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, leading feminist social work journal."
Three points:
1. I don't care whose speech they're suppressing(left or right), just that they're suppressing speech based on it's content or who the speaker is.
2. For you, 40 incidents in a year may be "vanishingly rare", for me, that's ridiculously high in a country where people are supposed to understand free speech both as a concept and as a requirement on the government, including government sponsored educational institutions.
3. FIRE has a great feature where they list the content of and rate the speech policies of various universities. I contend that while a large proportion of those policies do not allow for free speech, we have a problem with free speech limitations on college campuses. It's literally the policy some places.
He did the equiv. of writing perpetual motion papers about the local Ferris wheel at the carnival and getting them published in Physics. It doesn't matter what the supporting data says if that's the level of work which can be routinely published in your "academic" discipline.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that obviously made up data with clearly flawed statistics in basic ways, which shouldn't ever pass peer review, easily does in certain less-than-scientific-disciplines. He never tried to pass any fake data off permanently as real, he revealed the whole thing afterwards, wasn't trying to permanently fool anyone.