Romney has a clearly laid out plan for what he wants to do. You may not like the plan, but he has one.
As numerous sources have pointed out, his proposals do not work mathematically. Coming to even this conclusion is problematic because Romney maintains his budget proposals cannot be scored". I don't think this satisfies a common-sense definition of a "clear plan."
Meanwhile Obama and Democrats in general have failed to produce a budget for THREE FUCKING YEARS. How can you vote for that kind of nonsense?
If you want to live in a country where there's a majority of backwards religious nuts, and you don't want their opinions affecting national policy, the only way to do that is to have an authoritarian government.
There's a difference between keeping people's religious opinions out of state policy, and forbidding the Establishment of a state religion. Teaching a religious doctrine with tax money constitutes establishment of a state religion.
Banks engage in vast schemes of money laundering, but in order to access them for this purpose you have to have a large amount of money to start, because the process of institutional money laundering is expensive.
Bitcoins and MMOs aren't expensive. You just send an email and voila.
The concern isn't the volume of currency being laundered. What does concern them is that these new technologies democratize and disrupt money laundering in the same way the Napster disrupted copyright infringement. Suddenly, instead of a few thousand professional criminals you have 100 million casual lawbreakers, who consider their marginally illegal act as nothing more than a nuisance that "sticks it to the Man," and any attempts to prevent them from buying their cocaine on Silk Road as "infringing on their freedom to $WHATEVER." Just as Napster and Bittorrent transformed piracy from a back-room hobby into a multi-billion dollar industry with an adjunct political movement and a complete shift in social mores.
Using floating point data types to store fiscal data is not so bad as long as you aren't running too close to the limits of precision.
You are aware that binary floating-point numbers are incapable of precisely representing extremely common fractions of currency, right? Even with a double, you can't express a number as simple as "0.01", or test it for equality with itself after a set of equal additions and subtractions.
Bonus question -> since I know a few of you are interested in getting into the financial district -> what is the natural consequence of using floating point data types for fiscal transactions?
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but Bitcoins are denominated as 64 bit integers. This value modulo 10e8 gives the value of a transaction in BTC.
S&Ls were FDIC insured (actually FSLIC insured). And while the FDIC is a government corporation, it doesn't spend tax revenue, its funds come from premiums paid by member banks.
Bailouts happen when so many banks bust at once, it threatens to overload the FDIC's capacity to either refund people's deposits (which rarely needs to be done), or promptly fold the banks and sell their depositor's accounts to a receiver (much more common).
There are definite rentier problems, particularly because the system pays people to not spend, and the biggest long-term threat to the system are speculators, but people who own slower hardware can join a mining pool, and thus the proceeds of mining can be doled out with much more granularity than you describe.
Also you're confusing the pipe with what runs in it. BTC are a value medium, they don't create value per se -- the slow inflation is an artifact of the money volume phasing-in to existence, the mining bounty is only meant to incentivize people to process validate the transactions, and in a few years you'll no longer be able to mine new BTCs; instead, people crunching blocks will collect transaction fees.
That way stupid shit like the TARP bill won't pass (80% of Americans were against it according to Gallup polling).
If we don't trust voters to pick the right people to rep them, why would we trust them to make the right decision on individual bills? It's the same system with the same problems, you're just changing the kind of questions you're posing to it. Why is polling on bills better than polling on representatives? Are people better at judging bills than judging people? That's pretty much a complete inversion of the founders' vision, not that that's a bad thing, it's just a very radical idea, with very little reason to it.
Voting is a small part of passing laws. The most important part of the process is the writing -- he who frames the question controls the process.
How do you prevent people from selling their voting rights? I assume this information would have to be public, since it's required to validate electors; since it's public, it can be transacted. You can say that you'd make it "illegal," but enforcement of such things is extremely difficult, particularly when some people, like party bosses, ward heelers, employers, religious leaders, etc. are in a position to put considerable duress on voters. That's why voting is secret, simply making it illegal to discriminate against voice votes is impractical.
Consider why that strategy is one you are afraid will work.
It's important to make the point that I don't think the strategy is fact-based; I don't think most political arguments are fact-based, and there's nothing wrong with that. The facts of the matter are irrelevant, in the end these are politicians making promises, promises which, from the White House, are impossible to guarantee. John Boehner and Eric Cantor will be the ones writing the law if Romney/Ryan wins, and they'll have to get it past Harry Reid -- it's impossible for a president to make any sort of specific promises on such a basis (it pisses me off that they even try).
What it's really about is providing a certain amount of people with a satisfying story to tell themselves. Moderates swoon for "mavericks," people who "buck their own party" and tell the "hard truths"; these low-information voters generally assume that any solution to a problem that is painful must be the right one. They crave to be told that America has been "indulgent" and "spending like a drunken sailor," on "luxuries" like health care or retirement -- this attitude is completely independent of the fiscal health of the country, its programs or anything else. They naturally gravitate towards these people not because of the actual policy goals, but because they say and do things that signal they are "serious."
I for one don't go into this style of moralistic narrative, I go in for different ones. But it's not about the actual laws that will get passed, it's about what sort of person people trust to write the law for them. As you say, Ryan "looks" like the adult in the room. And that's all it is, looks.
Actually, a lot of Catholic blood was shed there; not to mention marginalization and huge fines. Their tradition of religious freedom is not deep-rooted; it is recent.
Recent on a geological timescale, but the Catholic-Protestant conflict in England proper has been pacific since at least the time of the US founding. America didn't have a Catholic persecution in 1600s because it didn't exist in the 1600s, not because it's better or different. The American colonies systematically practiced anti-catholic discrimination, and this actually continued in the US long after the issue in Britain was basically settled. Ireland's a whole other thing though;)
What makes you think that?
Just an inkling. It's not really a part of my point, though, except maybe that in the UK, you're just as unlikely to find many who would defend the right of someone to obnoxiously defame a passerby with sin and damnation. Englishmen have a healthy anti-clerical streak Americans seem to lack.
What the hell is wrong with Herbert Marcuse or Michel Foucault? Have you read any of their works?
Besides, I challenge you to point to one policy of the Democratic party that's attributable to Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation or Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
I suppose next you'll be telling me Agenda 21 and the American Jobs Act were the dying works of Jaques Derrida...
That could also mean that Europe is dominated by leftism? When you find it normal to arrest a person for saying that "homosexuality is a sin", then you are quite leftist, yes?
No. But no true scotsman, I guess. The British have a long tradition of freedom of religion, however, unique to them, they also have a long tradition of libel and harassment litigation. The British have also locked up people for the crime of harassing fox hunters. It has nothing to do with economic or civil right ideology, it's just how they feel about people yelling obscenities. We are of course, very different on this count.*
These are foreign countries and their ways are strange to us, I reject the premise of the thread that "leftism" is some sort of international movement or trend. There are parties, they advocate policies that appeal to their constituencies. That is all that can be said with certainty -- wether the UK Labor Party or the German Green Party is "leftist" or not has no meaning in the context of the United States.
* The guy in your article, however, sounds like a candidate for the Westboro Baptist Church, and I'm not sure most Americans would come to their defense if they got arrested one day
Von Papen was a German intriguer, spy and Catholic Party politician in the first half of the 20th century, briefly Chancellor in the 1930s. He is most infamous for enabling Adolf HItler to become chancellor of Germany in his stead, by assenting to Hindenburg and Alfred Hugenberg in creating a sort of unelected junta government following a year where neither Von Papen nor Kurt con Schleicher were able to form a governing majority in the Reichstag.
Van Papen was a weak politician playing a weaker hand, like Romney. In order to consolidate his position, it was his bright idea that he could hire Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, buying off his seats in the Reichstag, while he, Hugenberg and Hindenburg pulled Hitler's strings, with them as a super-executive council and Hitler as the head of the Reichstag as a rubber-stamp body. Things obviously didn't work out that way, and when he belatedly spoke out against the Nazis he was nearly killed by the SS.
And if YOU could get away from the Soros/Think Progress/CAP/Kos talking points you might realize we aren't for 'tax cuts for the wealthy' we are for either keeping rates WHERE THEY ARE AND HAVE BEEN FOR A DECADE
A decade of tax cuts which the cutters in question promised to end in 2010, because otherwise they totally raped the deficit, and doing so it was the only way to get them past the Byrd rule and passed under Reconciliation rules. And at that, only after Trent Lott had the first senate parliamentarian fired for not accepting their fairy-story economic growth projections (which didn't pan out, either).
We are spending over a trillion more than we are taking in and Obama plans to do that into the forcastable future. That isn't a sustainable plan.
See this is what the election is going to come down to. The Republican platform is now "Vote for us, or else we will become Greece." And whenever someone voices and disagreement, factually or otherwise, Paul Ryan will do what he's done his entire career: he'll climb up on a cross, demand the spikes be hammered, and declaim from on high "They are doing this to me because I dared tell the Truth!"
And I bet this will work. American folk history is filled with valorizations of people who are persecuted for speaking out, even when the guy speaking out is lying through his teeth.
Among latinos in California this was absolutely not true until someone got the lunkheaded idea of staking the entire party on Propostion 187. The Republican party in CA has been at 35% ever since.
It's not that Republicans are racist, it's that they mock and ridicule people who earnestly believe they're the victims of it.
I do believe that racism does play a part, but I do not think it is intentional racism. Some people are just uncomfortable with Obama because of his skin color, but I think most of them try very hard not to be racist... Because, over time, people will get used to it. Actually, the best thing would be for Republicans to elect a black president.
At this point, I don't think it's about race per se, but really about the positioning of "racism" as a political issue. Republicans would be happy with a black president today, what really bothers them is a black person (of any party) who claims that racism exists, or that it's any sort of problem demanding remediation.
Republicans aren't racists, the pro racists have moved on to the Right-Libertarian/Paleo persuasions -- not for ideology, but for the leadership. Republicans, people who vote the party ticket, are just casual about racism -- they don't think it's a problem, they think nowadays racism is all a big joke.
For black people in the US, institutional racism lives in their memory somewhere between the Roman persecution of the Christians and the Holocaust (and yes it was that bad); for most Republicans, it's just all a big misunderstanding at GET OVER IT ALL READY!
Publically posting your residential address on facebook and publically announcing your holiday itinerary on facebook is also a nice thing.
Note that a residential address is not just something you post on Facebook, but something that exists in the yellow pages, on Google, and any number of direct mail, marketing, government, and tax databases -- it is public information which, by design, must be distributed to people holding any level trust, and is specifically not administered by the owner. Proposing that residential mailing addresses should be confidential or proprietary to the owner is completely unworkable, just as expecting social security numbers or the last four digits of your credit card should be confidential is unworkable. This isn't in the interest of having nice things, they're fundamental to state authority, society and commerce.
The whole point is that being able to publicly distribute your address shouldn't be a "nice thing," it should be standard operating procedure, and not an exception reserved for people who can afford security guards. It was for hundreds of years and I see no compelling reason to change that, certainly not on account of the laziness of Apple or Amazon.
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As numerous sources have pointed out, his proposals do not work mathematically. Coming to even this conclusion is problematic because Romney maintains his budget proposals cannot be scored". I don't think this satisfies a common-sense definition of a "clear plan."
The OMB submits a budget recommendation every year. The House also passes a budget every year, the last one was passed under the Budget Control Act.
You're confusing a knock against Senate Democrats with a knock against Barack Obama, a complaint which is itself baseless and relying on semantics.
There's a difference between keeping people's religious opinions out of state policy, and forbidding the Establishment of a state religion. Teaching a religious doctrine with tax money constitutes establishment of a state religion.
Banks engage in vast schemes of money laundering, but in order to access them for this purpose you have to have a large amount of money to start, because the process of institutional money laundering is expensive.
Bitcoins and MMOs aren't expensive. You just send an email and voila.
The concern isn't the volume of currency being laundered. What does concern them is that these new technologies democratize and disrupt money laundering in the same way the Napster disrupted copyright infringement. Suddenly, instead of a few thousand professional criminals you have 100 million casual lawbreakers, who consider their marginally illegal act as nothing more than a nuisance that "sticks it to the Man," and any attempts to prevent them from buying their cocaine on Silk Road as "infringing on their freedom to $WHATEVER." Just as Napster and Bittorrent transformed piracy from a back-room hobby into a multi-billion dollar industry with an adjunct political movement and a complete shift in social mores.
I see a reddit anti-misogyny thread in our future.
(decl (wars) (not (make one great))
You are aware that binary floating-point numbers are incapable of precisely representing extremely common fractions of currency, right? Even with a double, you can't express a number as simple as "0.01", or test it for equality with itself after a set of equal additions and subtractions.
According to Gallup polling, about 2/3ds of these at-large citizens believe in angels.
What is your basis for claiming individuals vote in their best interest?
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but Bitcoins are denominated as 64 bit integers. This value modulo 10e8 gives the value of a transaction in BTC.
S&Ls were FDIC insured (actually FSLIC insured). And while the FDIC is a government corporation, it doesn't spend tax revenue, its funds come from premiums paid by member banks.
Bailouts happen when so many banks bust at once, it threatens to overload the FDIC's capacity to either refund people's deposits (which rarely needs to be done), or promptly fold the banks and sell their depositor's accounts to a receiver (much more common).
There are definite rentier problems, particularly because the system pays people to not spend, and the biggest long-term threat to the system are speculators, but people who own slower hardware can join a mining pool, and thus the proceeds of mining can be doled out with much more granularity than you describe.
Also you're confusing the pipe with what runs in it. BTC are a value medium, they don't create value per se -- the slow inflation is an artifact of the money volume phasing-in to existence, the mining bounty is only meant to incentivize people to process validate the transactions, and in a few years you'll no longer be able to mine new BTCs; instead, people crunching blocks will collect transaction fees.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP HELP I'M BEING REPRESSED!
If we don't trust voters to pick the right people to rep them, why would we trust them to make the right decision on individual bills? It's the same system with the same problems, you're just changing the kind of questions you're posing to it. Why is polling on bills better than polling on representatives? Are people better at judging bills than judging people? That's pretty much a complete inversion of the founders' vision, not that that's a bad thing, it's just a very radical idea, with very little reason to it.
Voting is a small part of passing laws. The most important part of the process is the writing -- he who frames the question controls the process.
How do you prevent people from selling their voting rights? I assume this information would have to be public, since it's required to validate electors; since it's public, it can be transacted. You can say that you'd make it "illegal," but enforcement of such things is extremely difficult, particularly when some people, like party bosses, ward heelers, employers, religious leaders, etc. are in a position to put considerable duress on voters. That's why voting is secret, simply making it illegal to discriminate against voice votes is impractical.
It's important to make the point that I don't think the strategy is fact-based; I don't think most political arguments are fact-based, and there's nothing wrong with that. The facts of the matter are irrelevant, in the end these are politicians making promises, promises which, from the White House, are impossible to guarantee. John Boehner and Eric Cantor will be the ones writing the law if Romney/Ryan wins, and they'll have to get it past Harry Reid -- it's impossible for a president to make any sort of specific promises on such a basis (it pisses me off that they even try).
What it's really about is providing a certain amount of people with a satisfying story to tell themselves. Moderates swoon for "mavericks," people who "buck their own party" and tell the "hard truths"; these low-information voters generally assume that any solution to a problem that is painful must be the right one. They crave to be told that America has been "indulgent" and "spending like a drunken sailor," on "luxuries" like health care or retirement -- this attitude is completely independent of the fiscal health of the country, its programs or anything else. They naturally gravitate towards these people not because of the actual policy goals, but because they say and do things that signal they are "serious."
I for one don't go into this style of moralistic narrative, I go in for different ones. But it's not about the actual laws that will get passed, it's about what sort of person people trust to write the law for them. As you say, Ryan "looks" like the adult in the room. And that's all it is, looks.
Recent on a geological timescale, but the Catholic-Protestant conflict in England proper has been pacific since at least the time of the US founding. America didn't have a Catholic persecution in 1600s because it didn't exist in the 1600s, not because it's better or different. The American colonies systematically practiced anti-catholic discrimination, and this actually continued in the US long after the issue in Britain was basically settled. Ireland's a whole other thing though ;)
Just an inkling. It's not really a part of my point, though, except maybe that in the UK, you're just as unlikely to find many who would defend the right of someone to obnoxiously defame a passerby with sin and damnation. Englishmen have a healthy anti-clerical streak Americans seem to lack.
PS. This guy above is not a Troll. He is merely wrong. Do not censor this discourse.
What the hell is wrong with Herbert Marcuse or Michel Foucault? Have you read any of their works?
Besides, I challenge you to point to one policy of the Democratic party that's attributable to Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation or Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
I suppose next you'll be telling me Agenda 21 and the American Jobs Act were the dying works of Jaques Derrida...
No. But no true scotsman, I guess. The British have a long tradition of freedom of religion, however, unique to them, they also have a long tradition of libel and harassment litigation. The British have also locked up people for the crime of harassing fox hunters. It has nothing to do with economic or civil right ideology, it's just how they feel about people yelling obscenities. We are of course, very different on this count.*
These are foreign countries and their ways are strange to us, I reject the premise of the thread that "leftism" is some sort of international movement or trend. There are parties, they advocate policies that appeal to their constituencies. That is all that can be said with certainty -- wether the UK Labor Party or the German Green Party is "leftist" or not has no meaning in the context of the United States.
* The guy in your article, however, sounds like a candidate for the Westboro Baptist Church, and I'm not sure most Americans would come to their defense if they got arrested one day
I should have attached the wiki link.
Von Papen was a German intriguer, spy and Catholic Party politician in the first half of the 20th century, briefly Chancellor in the 1930s. He is most infamous for enabling Adolf HItler to become chancellor of Germany in his stead, by assenting to Hindenburg and Alfred Hugenberg in creating a sort of unelected junta government following a year where neither Von Papen nor Kurt con Schleicher were able to form a governing majority in the Reichstag.
Van Papen was a weak politician playing a weaker hand, like Romney. In order to consolidate his position, it was his bright idea that he could hire Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, buying off his seats in the Reichstag, while he, Hugenberg and Hindenburg pulled Hitler's strings, with them as a super-executive council and Hitler as the head of the Reichstag as a rubber-stamp body. Things obviously didn't work out that way, and when he belatedly spoke out against the Nazis he was nearly killed by the SS.
A decade of tax cuts which the cutters in question promised to end in 2010, because otherwise they totally raped the deficit, and doing so it was the only way to get them past the Byrd rule and passed under Reconciliation rules. And at that, only after Trent Lott had the first senate parliamentarian fired for not accepting their fairy-story economic growth projections (which didn't pan out, either).
See this is what the election is going to come down to. The Republican platform is now "Vote for us, or else we will become Greece." And whenever someone voices and disagreement, factually or otherwise, Paul Ryan will do what he's done his entire career: he'll climb up on a cross, demand the spikes be hammered, and declaim from on high "They are doing this to me because I dared tell the Truth!"
And I bet this will work. American folk history is filled with valorizations of people who are persecuted for speaking out, even when the guy speaking out is lying through his teeth.
Vote third party and watch the worst guy win, every time. Agitate for voting reform if you want your vote to be more pure and representative.
Among latinos in California this was absolutely not true until someone got the lunkheaded idea of staking the entire party on Propostion 187. The Republican party in CA has been at 35% ever since.
It's not that Republicans are racist, it's that they mock and ridicule people who earnestly believe they're the victims of it.
Let's replace that with "Franz von Papen" and avoid the Godwin ruling.
At this point, I don't think it's about race per se, but really about the positioning of "racism" as a political issue. Republicans would be happy with a black president today, what really bothers them is a black person (of any party) who claims that racism exists, or that it's any sort of problem demanding remediation.
Republicans aren't racists, the pro racists have moved on to the Right-Libertarian/Paleo persuasions -- not for ideology, but for the leadership. Republicans, people who vote the party ticket, are just casual about racism -- they don't think it's a problem, they think nowadays racism is all a big joke.
For black people in the US, institutional racism lives in their memory somewhere between the Roman persecution of the Christians and the Holocaust (and yes it was that bad); for most Republicans, it's just all a big misunderstanding at GET OVER IT ALL READY!
Note that a residential address is not just something you post on Facebook, but something that exists in the yellow pages, on Google, and any number of direct mail, marketing, government, and tax databases -- it is public information which, by design, must be distributed to people holding any level trust, and is specifically not administered by the owner. Proposing that residential mailing addresses should be confidential or proprietary to the owner is completely unworkable, just as expecting social security numbers or the last four digits of your credit card should be confidential is unworkable. This isn't in the interest of having nice things, they're fundamental to state authority, society and commerce.
The whole point is that being able to publicly distribute your address shouldn't be a "nice thing," it should be standard operating procedure, and not an exception reserved for people who can afford security guards. It was for hundreds of years and I see no compelling reason to change that, certainly not on account of the laziness of Apple or Amazon.