Democrats DO have a platform. Unfortunately, while Republicans hold the state houses, Congress, presidency, and now the Supreme Court, they are utterly powerless to make anything on that platform come to fruition. Any bills they propose just get squashed, never even coming to the floor to be voted down, even simple, stupid stuff that has wide national bipartisan support. (Such as DACA, since you rather helpfully brought it up.)
In such a circumstance, about the only thing they CAN do productively is to keep Republicans from passing yet more stupid legislation undermining our economy and freedoms, which is what they've been much more successful at doing these past couple of years than I honestly expected.
Of course, that doesn't mean that every Democrat is in lockstep on every issue in that platform. We're not a hive mind, and there is sometimes ardent disagreement within the party over the nitty gritty details of how things can best be accomplished. For example, Bernie Sanders wants to have the federal minimum wage immediately go up to $15 everywhere. Hillary Clinton wanted to immediately increase it to $12 per hour, and allow individual cities where the cost of living is higher have the option of raising it higher as appropriate. Which way is better? I honestly don't know, I can see merits and downsides to both plans. But one thing I can say for damn sure is either plan would be better than the "Let's just leave it where it's been since 2009," or "Let's do away with the federal minimum wage completely!" plans that Republicans have embraced.
By the way, that Republican "Contract With America"? Very, very few of the items in that agenda actually got implemented. The dirty little secret that they didn't bother to tell anyone while they were hyping it is that the vast majority of the things on it would never get past the senate, let alone past a presidential veto. That whole thing was just a marketing gimmick. Yes, it was effective—if you define "effective" as getting people elected. But if instead you define "effective" as actually getting stuff done? Not so much.
Like it or not, that crown in recent history has to go to the Democratic Congress and Obama, who got the ACA passed. Like it or not, it was one of the most major overhauls of the health care system in our country's history. It was a huge undertaking, and even after it's been repeatedly undermined and gutted by Republicans, it's actually still helping people.
I'm not going to even try convincing you of how idiotic you are, but for others who might read that post...
1. The whole "neoliberal" accusation is a catch-all slur hurled at anyone who has the audacity to not want to go whole-hog down the road to communism. Socialism is fine for things that the private market cannot or should not provide, such as health care. And in fact, Hillary Clinton has been fighting for universal health care since the early 1990s--it's one of the reasons that right-wingers hate her so badly, because as first lady, she was doing that instead of being a nice, demure housewife. For everything else, the free market is the best way to go. The best systems of government in the world are a healthy mix of both, but the trick is in finding the right balance. Bill Clinton did a great job starting us down that road from Reagan's/Bush's deregulate everything strategy, and Obama did a great job pushing us further, as evidenced by the improvement in our situation today. This notion that anything short of turning the US into a communist country is "neoliberal" is idiocy pushed by the Tea Party of the left. It's also a great way to turn off the public-at-large. As a famous man once said, "if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."
2. Clinton's "superpredator" comment wasn't racist. It was an offhand comment that she admits she shouldn't have used in referring to how gangs at the time were no longer just groups of kids innocently hanging out. And in that respect, she was right--at the time crime was skyrocketing and there was a massive public demand that actions be taken to bring it down. And actions were taken. And it was brought down.
But this one comment keeps coming up from Bernie Bros as "evidence" that Clinton is racist. The reason this one quote comes up every time is because in reality, Clinton has a consistent record of fighting hard against racism. That's why she was endorsed by virtually every civil rights leader and won the black vote in the primaries by over 50 points. The notion that Clinton is racist is a ludicrous lie invented and propagated by the right-wing nuts, and believed by gullible left-wing nuts who are looking for any excuse, no matter how farfetched, to hate her.
3. Yes, I flatly deny that her voting record looks like a money stuffed republican. As a senator, she consistently voted for policies that benefited the poor and middle class, not the rich.
4. No, Trump supported Bernie because it was a split in the vote among liberals. And Trump has this uncanny knack for appealing to stupid people. The fact that you listened to him means... well... there's no tactful way to say it. You're a stupid person. And Trump's tactic worked, creating this "I'm going to vote for Jill Stein" bullshit. To be fair, Democrats were doing the same thing, trying to exploit the "Never Trump" split in the Republican party. The difference is that unlike liberals who buy into the opposition's divisive rhetoric and propaganda, conservatives stick to their ideological guns with religious-like fervor. This will continue being a problem into the foreseeable future because while both sides have stupid people, one side's stupid people are malleable enough for this tactic to actually be effective.
You forgot to mention that the reason those voters were purged is because they hadn't voted in multiple elections leading up to the 2016 primaries and hadn't replied to attempts to verify that they were still legally entitled to vote in the district in which they were registered. You forgot to mention that many of these voters were registered in multiple districts because they had moved, and the registration information on record was out-of-date, or because they had died. You forgot to mention that those voters were actually returned to the voter rolls prior to the primary and could actually vote. You forgot to mention that the areas that were purged, including the Bronx, supported Clinton over Sanders, meaning that this "illegal purge" actually disproportionately helped Sanders, not Clinton.
I see you've bought into the right-wing political war machine's hype.
What's that? You don't remember Trump supporting Bernie in the primaries in the hopes of peeling away Clinton voters? Because I sure as hell do. And I also remember the recent news about how Russia was supporting Bernie as well.
Now, in the heat of the moment, I don't blame you for getting caught up in the battle and enjoying the poisoned fruits of people who are antithetical to your beliefs as long as it helped your cause. But what separates people who honestly and constructively criticize their own side from those who are the Tea Party of the left is that with the benefit of hindsight, the intelligent people realize that they were being played, used as tools, and learn from their mistakes. The sniveling idiots keep harping on the same idiotic false allegations invented by the right-wing and Russia that they embraced during the election that caused us to end up with Trump as president because they're too proud to admit that they couldn't think critically enough to see the drivel they were swallowing for what it was.
All of these "free" IDs require you to supply a birth certificate. It wasn't until relatively recently that everyone born here was required to have a birth certificate. Often, birth certificates are lost, many times due to no fault of the person holding the certificate. (Fire, theft, etc.) Sometimes, they don't exist at all and never did. For many of these people, they can't get a birth certificate--and thus, no "free" ID for any amount of money.
For others, the cost of getting a birth certificate is prohibitively expensive. I just looked up how much it would cost me to get a copy of my own birth certificate. It would cost me $15 for a certified copy, plus another $10 if I want to have it notarized, which most places would require. While $25 may not sound like a lot to you, it's a serious hurdle if you literally had no money.
REQUIREMENT FOR ORDERING: If applicant is self, parent, legal guardian or legal representative, the applicant must provide a completed application along with valid photo identification, if a mail request, a copy of the valid photo identification must be provided. Acceptable forms of identification are the following: Driver’s License, State Identification Card, Passport and/or Military
Identification Card.
That's right, in order to get a copy of your birth certificate to get a "free" ID you can use to vote, you have to supply a valid ID that you could use to vote.
The truth of the matter is that prior to all of these voter ID laws springing up, voter fraud has never been a problem. The truth is that voter fraud, especially in-person voter fraud that voter ID laws are ostensibly trying to prevent, has never impacted the outcome of an election. The truth is that voter ID laws disproportionately impacts the poor, and especially disproportionately impacts African-Americans, who thanks to a history of systemic and systematic repression, are far more likely to not have birth certificates or other forms of state-issued identification.
So seriously, shove your rationalizations up your ass, because voter ID laws are nothing but new implementations of poll taxes, and the arguments you just used to justify them are the same fucking arguments that people used to justify poll taxes.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Democrats aren't going to take back Congress in 2018. Hell, Trump will probably be re-elected in 2020. And I am most emphatically not saying that because that's what I want. I hate Trump and the Republican party with a purple passion you cannot measure.
But the sad fact is that collectively, American voters are dumb as dirt. I mean, we're really, really stupid. Sure, there are a lot of good, smart people out there, but not nearly as many as idiots. I used to be hopeful and optimistic, but the 2016 election irrevocably changed that. We had a man running who literally said that he could get away with anything, including sexual assault, and who was a cultural icon of the greed and excess of our most decadent decade of greed and excess. People lined up in droves to vote for him.
And on the left? We still have a contingent of people, our own version of the Tea Party, who insist that Hillary Clinton is "just as bad," embracing weird conspiracy theories posited by the crazy branch of the right-wing, such as her "rigging" the primaries or deleting thousands of incriminating emails, things there has never been any evidence of her doing.
Some people (including Clinton herself) chalk all of these woes up to misogyny or Russian interference. Yeah, that had some impact. But personally, I chalk it up to a more basic truth: We Americans are collectively as stupid as they come. While most of the world praises intelligence and experience, we have an active disdain for it. When someone excels at something, we look for ways to take them down a peg because they're "elitist." Instead, we bow to the cult of Trump, where you don't have to be smart, motivated, and have a proven track record of getting worthwhile things done. You just have to have a larger-than-life personality and willing to say literally anything, even if it contradicts something you said two minutes ago. We'd prefer electing someone who's openly lying to our face because the person who's telling the truth must be hiding something nefarious.
I know, you're probably thinking that now that Trump has steered our boat straight down shit creek, people are finally waking up. I'll remind you that just a week ago, the people of Montana elected a man who literally physically and deliberately harmed another person because he was "sick and tired" of being asked questions about health care, the most important domestic issue facing America today. We pay lip service to teaching our kids to play nice, share, and be good people, but then we turn right around and reward people like Gianforte with being elected to what used to be an esteemed office. Which lesson do you think they're learning?
And before that, when Democrats lost a mayoral election in Omaha, Nebraska, the Sandersesque contingent came out of the woodwork yet again to point fingers at the national Democratic party for somehow failing to win the seat, even though that election was much closer than the one four years ago. And why? Because the DNC leadership criticized the Democratic candidate for being anti-abortion. Gasp! Democrats had the audacity to vocally support women's rights? No wonder they lost!
I always get amused at people who want term limits for Congresspeople, or who say things like, "Throw them all out!" What exactly makes you think that anything would be any different? I mean, the idiots in Kentucky who keep electing Mitch McConnell, the man who plainly stated that his number one political goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president (and, incidentally, who spectacularly failed at even that number one goal) would just find some other jackass to line up behind in the following election. Maybe even someone worse.
So yeah, I'd like to think that Democrats are going to make a resurgence in 2018. I'd like to think that 2020 will see a wave of blue overtake the country and finally sweep out the assholes and villains of the right-wing that have been holding this country back for decades. I can't help but roll my e
Unfortunately, it has become such common practice to request "kitchen sink" permissions that it's nigh impossible to find useful apps that don't do so. And the sad fact is that users have become so jaded to it that the money that app makers lose from people who value privacy is less than the money they make from people just clicking through on ever "OK" button they see to get their new shiny.
I wish I had an answer to this problem, but I don't. People are stupid, and there's not much you can do to fix that. Unfortunately, that means that people like you and I who do care about our privacy pay the price.
Maybe, but it was one particularly conservative Supreme Court overturning a couple of centuries of precedent. And even in doing so, that <sarcasm>bastion of liberal activism</sarcasm> Antonin Scalia had this to say in his majority opinion of the case you're using for reference (Heller v. DC):
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
I wish I had mod points to give the parent poster. I'm so sick of the "it won't do any good" cynicism posts like those above. You know what REALLY won't do any good? Sitting on your ass doing nothing except crying "woe is us" on Slashdot.
Do you know how we got to the point where a lot of elected officials don't care what people think? People sitting around grousing about how elected officials don't care what they think. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you're going to simply tune out of everything going on and not care or hold people to any standards, then really, why should anyone care what you think? I know if I were an elected politician, I wouldn't give a damn what people think who don't bother to let me know, or even vote. Why would I even waste my time?
I vote in every election and primary I can. I do write to my Congresscritters. I tell my friends what I think about stuff going on and the people who are in and running for office. And yeah, sometimes it doesn't do any good, especially being a liberal in the Bible Belt South. But you know what? At least I'm trying. At least I'm not just whining about problems. And sometimes, people actually do make a difference, especially at a local level. You don't have to save the world, you just have to care. If you don't, then it sucks to be you, but stop trying to piss on the parade of those who do.
By the way, for those of you in the "it doesn't make a difference" crowd, by all means, keep sitting on your asses. Your apathy gives people like me disproportionate say over things going on, so you know, thank you very much for that.
Fair enough; if you're so hung up on this issue that Cortana won't let you treat her in some kind of perverse way, then you are under no obligation whatsoever to use her as a virtual assistant.
But don't then sit around wondering why people like me judge you as being of poor character. And before you reply, "I don't care what you think of my character," again, such is your prerogative. But then, you probably also have no idea if I'm your boss (or future potential boss), your loan officer, the person evaluating your college application, your potential friend, a possible future customer of your services, etc. If you're willing to live with the consequences of doing so, then by all means, please feel free to use as slutty a virtual assistant as your tastes desire.
All other things being equal, I'd give raises and promotions to the people who demonstrate that they have a continuing interest in learning more and keeping abreast about subjects relevant to their field than someone who thinks that once they get their degree, they never have to learn anything else. So if you think that "quantifying the time spent in the classroom during professional development and training activities" = "worthless as shit", then hey, it's your résumé, good luck with that.
(Of course, that's just the practical monetary consideration of the matter. Some of us actually like doing these classes just to see what's new and to *gasp!* expand our horizons.)
*sigh...* Why do I bother feeding the trolls? Oh well, here goes, mostly for the benefit of everyone else who might have accidentally read your incredibly racist, stupid post.
The AVERAGE IQ of Africans is twenty or more points below that of whites. Care to discuss? One genius African doesn't negate that fact - meaning that the more Africans there are in a white country, the worse it becomes for whites. Which is why Africans don't want to live around their own kind, in AFRICA.
So, apparently, is yours for not knowing that racism is responsible for differences in things like average IQ and earning potential of African-Americans. African-Americans are just as capable of learning and performing as "whites" when put into an environment conducive to learning and free of the systemic racism that has plagued this country since its inception. If it weren't for people like you, there wouldn't be such differences.
And the likely reason most "Africans" don't want to live around their own kind is because the people you're calling "Africans" aren't, in fact, African. They were born here, grew up here, lived all of their lives here, have all of their friends and families here, and are integral to the culture that defines us as a society. They're not "African" any more than you're "European" because of your likely heritage, and making such idiotic statements is like claiming that you don't want to live around your own kind, in EUROPE.
And, of course, that completely neglects the fact that most people of African heritage in the United States aren't here because their ancestors came here voluntarily, they were shackled and forced to relocate against their will, likely by those who were your ancestors. And, of course, that unless you're a full-blooded Native American, you're just as much an "invader" here as those you look down upon--except even worse, because your ancestors came here willingly and by force.
So please, stop being such a tool, and the cause of the very problems that you're bemoaning.
Sounds to me like someone just didn't want to go through the administrative hassle of gathering the information, copying it, and handing it over. Obviously, that shouldn't be allowed unless the DOA can provide some evidence that it will compromise the privacy of an actual person.
As a former avid City of Heroes player, I wish that someone would do this for shuttered MMORPGs. There are so many, and unlike single-player games that will at least run on old hardware and/or OSes, shuttered MMORPGs are completely inaccessible by any means. (Well, other than server emulators, for the very, VERY few that are lucky enough to have them.)
A while back, I wrote an email to GoG basically telling them that I wish they'd consider approaching some of the publishers of shuttered MMORPGs and offering to host them, either buying the rights to the games outright or licensing them, and charging $10 or $15 per month for access to everything (or offer cheaper plans for limited access to one or some games). Because the playerbase of many of these games would be a lot smaller than the new flashy hotness MMORPGs, it probably wouldn't take that much in the way of hardware, and if they could negotiate access to the source code, they might even be able to rewrite parts of the game to run more efficiently or even release updates. I got back a response that boiled down to, "Thanks, but we're not going to do that."
I still think it's a market that's ripe, and someone at some point will exploit that and make a killing off of it.
Hmm... Anyone got some negotiating skills that could pair with my technical skills to get this done?
Not 100% of a product's or service's cost is human resources, and even the cost that is HR isn't 100% salary.
Prices tend to be somewhat sticky. Sure, you could pass on some of the labor costs directly to customers, but your competitor will take a lower profit margin to increase volume by stealing your customers. (Which, funny enough, is how Gravity got into business to start with.)
Even if you pass that cost on, it will likely only be after months or even a year or more, meaning that in the interim, the lag directly benefits those at the bottom,
I don't see anywhere that the company's skilled labor was making the company's minimum wage. I'd be surprised if they aren't making considerably more.
If the only reason you got a degree was to make more money, then you probably deserve whatever hardship you have coming to you. Personally, I got a degree so that I could get a job doing something I wanted to do, not because what I majored in commanded the highest salary.
And congratulations, now you know how millions of people feel who got degrees or otherwise invested in vocational training or certifications in stuff that was hot at the time, but has since cooled down. I know a lot of IT people today who are living on beans because what all of the experts thought would be an unending fountain of money quickly turned into an offshoring nightmare, stranding hundreds of thousands of IT professionals in unemployment lines.
If you read a bit about Dan and Gravity, you'll find out that he's paying for the raises out of his own salary, which he cut from around $1 million per year to the minimum $70k per year minimum. He has promised not to pass ANY costs for the raises he's giving out to customers. That's a guy who values his company more than yachts, private airplanes, and other trappings of wealth.
In short, the argument you're making is the same one that has been made since a minimum wage was created, that it doesn't do any good because prices just go up to account for it. But every time the minimum wage is raised, prices have never gone up an equal amount. (Likewise, not raising the minimum wage has never caused prices to not go up.) So what you're saying is a gross oversimplification of the reality of the situation that causes your final conclusion to be wrong.
There are certain things you don't do....If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb... if you're anybody you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb really, but especially if you're muslim.
it shouldn't matter yada yada yada, but it does.
Thank you for your recipe for how to ensure that systemic prejudices remain in place, that the world never changes for the better.
To be blunt, this is the same attitude a bunch of white people had in the 1950s and 1960s when they said, "If you're black, you don't vote. You don't sit in the front of the bus. You don't eat at lunch counters. It shouldn't matter yada yada yada, but it does."
Is Ahmed some sort of boy genius? Eh, I doubt it, but the simple fact is that NO ONE, Muslim or otherwise, should have to just sit back and tolerate endemic racism. And if it were my kid that you were telling that that's just "the world we live in," well, you and I would have a problem. Maybe you were a liberal, but if you think that this is okay, that it's Ahmed who should have to change, then it is most emphatically not the left that's moving away from you.
Okay, fine. I think we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. There, I said it. I honestly wasn't aware that my comment made it unclear that I support that idea.
But I say it with two qualifications:
1) More importantly, I think we should redistribute income from the top to the bottom, and
2) I'm not proposing that we redistribute wealth equally or anything like that, a common strawman. I simply think that the system that has been rigged for at least the past three decades should be rebalanced so that, for example, CEOs are making a few dozen to a hundred times the salary of average non-management workers at a company instead of thousands of times the salary. I think that companies should be penalized for moving jobs out-of-country. I DEFINITELY think that the minimum wage needs to be raised and pegged to the cost of living so that we don't have to address the issue every few years. I think that the capital gains tax rate should be pegged to the top marginal income tax rate so that no one ever has to pay a higher tax rate because they make their money by working instead of making money from having money.
In short, I think that the harder and smarter you work, the more you should enjoy the fruits of your labor and productivity. But I think that you should reach a point of diminishing returns so that as you prosper, you're directly helping to provide others the opportunity and environment in which they can prosper also.
I've always said that I'm not jealous of those who are wealthy. If my company's CEO is making a billion dollars a year, more power to him or her. But then if they start laying off people, moving jobs overseas, freezing raises, cutting benefits, undermining worker's rights, lobbying congress to pass anti-worker legislation, etc. so that they can make just a little bit more, then we're going to have a problem.
This is oversimplified to the point of being incorrect. Your flaw is thinking that $1 corresponds to some unit of effort. In reality, $1 corresponds to some unit of productivity, whether it's you, a robot, some technological innovation, a new business process, or whatever.
Currently when companies realize gains in productivity, all of the additional money either gets paid out to the people at the top or reinvested in the company, which essentially pays it out to the investors. The employees get little or none of it, which is why the past three decades productivity has been skyrocketing and we've experienced an average of around 3.5% growth per year, but real wages have been stagnant.
One of the premises of a UBI is to ensure that some of that 3.5% growth ends up in the hands of the people who are working longer, harder hours, taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet, and actually creating the productivity gains that companies are benefiting from but not passing down.
No, actually, I can't. It's not satellites that are the problem. Gogo has been granted an exclusive Air-To-Ground (ATG) 3Ghz broadband frequency license by the FCC.
... who still thinks being able to get a wireless internet link in an aircraft doing 600mph at 35K feet is pretty fucking amazing. I can't believe people complain about the bandwidth - they should be grateful this tech exists at all.
Yeah, but the problem is that the service offered today is exactly the same as the service that was offered in 2008. There has been basically zero progress over the course of over seven years, and the price has been steadily going up for that service.
Imagine if computers had the same capabilities, the same CPU speed, the same RAM, the same form factor, the same monitor resolutions, as they did in 2008 but cost a lot more. Who would still be buying them? (Basically the same people who buy airplane wi-fi service--business customers who have to.)
In this day and age of malware being delivered even by supposedly reputable third-party providers, using an ad blocker is just plain responsible browsing. I'm sorry that web site owners are out some revenue for it, but if you want to make money off of me, you're going to figure out some way to do it other than leaving myself open to attack from malicious users.
There are a handful of web sites that I actually support financially specifically for this reason.
You don't need to directly observe something in order to prove that it exists. That notion is a load of hooey propagated by someone with no scientific knowledge or experience.
I have never been to New York City. There's a chance that I might never go. But I have seen ample evidence that it exists that I don't need to actually go there to accept as indisputable fact that it is real.
The key there is evidence. I don't reject the evidence of New York City's existence simply because I don't want to believe that it's not there. If, on the other hand, someone were try to believe that the city of Atlanta doesn't exist, I would take strong exception to that because I've been there and I know firsthand that it does exist.
The problem with Creationists--and the reason it has NO place in a science class--is that they expect people to reject all evidence for a universe billions of years old and all evidence that the Theory of Evolution is correct in favor of another idea for which ZERO evidence exists, an idea for which mountains of evidence in fact disproves. That is the antithesis of science.
Slashdot Mirror
Democrats DO have a platform. Unfortunately, while Republicans hold the state houses, Congress, presidency, and now the Supreme Court, they are utterly powerless to make anything on that platform come to fruition. Any bills they propose just get squashed, never even coming to the floor to be voted down, even simple, stupid stuff that has wide national bipartisan support. (Such as DACA, since you rather helpfully brought it up.)
In such a circumstance, about the only thing they CAN do productively is to keep Republicans from passing yet more stupid legislation undermining our economy and freedoms, which is what they've been much more successful at doing these past couple of years than I honestly expected.
Nevertheless, there is still a clear Democratic platform. Seriously. They even publish it on the web so that anyone who wants to can go out and see it. There's even a section specifically on immigration.
Of course, that doesn't mean that every Democrat is in lockstep on every issue in that platform. We're not a hive mind, and there is sometimes ardent disagreement within the party over the nitty gritty details of how things can best be accomplished. For example, Bernie Sanders wants to have the federal minimum wage immediately go up to $15 everywhere. Hillary Clinton wanted to immediately increase it to $12 per hour, and allow individual cities where the cost of living is higher have the option of raising it higher as appropriate. Which way is better? I honestly don't know, I can see merits and downsides to both plans. But one thing I can say for damn sure is either plan would be better than the "Let's just leave it where it's been since 2009," or "Let's do away with the federal minimum wage completely!" plans that Republicans have embraced.
By the way, that Republican "Contract With America"? Very, very few of the items in that agenda actually got implemented. The dirty little secret that they didn't bother to tell anyone while they were hyping it is that the vast majority of the things on it would never get past the senate, let alone past a presidential veto. That whole thing was just a marketing gimmick. Yes, it was effective—if you define "effective" as getting people elected. But if instead you define "effective" as actually getting stuff done? Not so much.
Like it or not, that crown in recent history has to go to the Democratic Congress and Obama, who got the ACA passed. Like it or not, it was one of the most major overhauls of the health care system in our country's history. It was a huge undertaking, and even after it's been repeatedly undermined and gutted by Republicans, it's actually still helping people.
I'm not going to even try convincing you of how idiotic you are, but for others who might read that post...
1. The whole "neoliberal" accusation is a catch-all slur hurled at anyone who has the audacity to not want to go whole-hog down the road to communism. Socialism is fine for things that the private market cannot or should not provide, such as health care. And in fact, Hillary Clinton has been fighting for universal health care since the early 1990s--it's one of the reasons that right-wingers hate her so badly, because as first lady, she was doing that instead of being a nice, demure housewife. For everything else, the free market is the best way to go. The best systems of government in the world are a healthy mix of both, but the trick is in finding the right balance. Bill Clinton did a great job starting us down that road from Reagan's/Bush's deregulate everything strategy, and Obama did a great job pushing us further, as evidenced by the improvement in our situation today. This notion that anything short of turning the US into a communist country is "neoliberal" is idiocy pushed by the Tea Party of the left. It's also a great way to turn off the public-at-large. As a famous man once said, "if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."
2. Clinton's "superpredator" comment wasn't racist. It was an offhand comment that she admits she shouldn't have used in referring to how gangs at the time were no longer just groups of kids innocently hanging out. And in that respect, she was right--at the time crime was skyrocketing and there was a massive public demand that actions be taken to bring it down. And actions were taken. And it was brought down.
But this one comment keeps coming up from Bernie Bros as "evidence" that Clinton is racist. The reason this one quote comes up every time is because in reality, Clinton has a consistent record of fighting hard against racism. That's why she was endorsed by virtually every civil rights leader and won the black vote in the primaries by over 50 points. The notion that Clinton is racist is a ludicrous lie invented and propagated by the right-wing nuts, and believed by gullible left-wing nuts who are looking for any excuse, no matter how farfetched, to hate her.
3. Yes, I flatly deny that her voting record looks like a money stuffed republican. As a senator, she consistently voted for policies that benefited the poor and middle class, not the rich.
4. No, Trump supported Bernie because it was a split in the vote among liberals. And Trump has this uncanny knack for appealing to stupid people. The fact that you listened to him means... well... there's no tactful way to say it. You're a stupid person. And Trump's tactic worked, creating this "I'm going to vote for Jill Stein" bullshit. To be fair, Democrats were doing the same thing, trying to exploit the "Never Trump" split in the Republican party. The difference is that unlike liberals who buy into the opposition's divisive rhetoric and propaganda, conservatives stick to their ideological guns with religious-like fervor. This will continue being a problem into the foreseeable future because while both sides have stupid people, one side's stupid people are malleable enough for this tactic to actually be effective.
5. Russia helping Bernie Sanders is fact. It's a particularly inconvenient one that Sanders is lying about to this day, but that doesn't make it any less true.
They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted
You forgot to mention that the reason those voters were purged is because they hadn't voted in multiple elections leading up to the 2016 primaries and hadn't replied to attempts to verify that they were still legally entitled to vote in the district in which they were registered. You forgot to mention that many of these voters were registered in multiple districts because they had moved, and the registration information on record was out-of-date, or because they had died. You forgot to mention that those voters were actually returned to the voter rolls prior to the primary and could actually vote. You forgot to mention that the areas that were purged, including the Bronx, supported Clinton over Sanders, meaning that this "illegal purge" actually disproportionately helped Sanders, not Clinton.
I see you've bought into the right-wing political war machine's hype.
What's that? You don't remember Trump supporting Bernie in the primaries in the hopes of peeling away Clinton voters? Because I sure as hell do. And I also remember the recent news about how Russia was supporting Bernie as well.
Now, in the heat of the moment, I don't blame you for getting caught up in the battle and enjoying the poisoned fruits of people who are antithetical to your beliefs as long as it helped your cause. But what separates people who honestly and constructively criticize their own side from those who are the Tea Party of the left is that with the benefit of hindsight, the intelligent people realize that they were being played, used as tools, and learn from their mistakes. The sniveling idiots keep harping on the same idiotic false allegations invented by the right-wing and Russia that they embraced during the election that caused us to end up with Trump as president because they're too proud to admit that they couldn't think critically enough to see the drivel they were swallowing for what it was.
THEY'RE NOT FREE, you idiot.
All of these "free" IDs require you to supply a birth certificate. It wasn't until relatively recently that everyone born here was required to have a birth certificate. Often, birth certificates are lost, many times due to no fault of the person holding the certificate. (Fire, theft, etc.) Sometimes, they don't exist at all and never did. For many of these people, they can't get a birth certificate--and thus, no "free" ID for any amount of money.
For others, the cost of getting a birth certificate is prohibitively expensive. I just looked up how much it would cost me to get a copy of my own birth certificate. It would cost me $15 for a certified copy, plus another $10 if I want to have it notarized, which most places would require. While $25 may not sound like a lot to you, it's a serious hurdle if you literally had no money.
Oh, and the kicker? From the application form:
REQUIREMENT FOR ORDERING: If applicant is self, parent, legal guardian or legal representative, the applicant must provide a completed application along with valid photo identification, if a mail request, a copy of the valid photo identification must be provided. Acceptable forms of identification are the following: Driver’s License, State Identification Card, Passport and/or Military Identification Card.
That's right, in order to get a copy of your birth certificate to get a "free" ID you can use to vote, you have to supply a valid ID that you could use to vote.
The truth of the matter is that prior to all of these voter ID laws springing up, voter fraud has never been a problem. The truth is that voter fraud, especially in-person voter fraud that voter ID laws are ostensibly trying to prevent, has never impacted the outcome of an election. The truth is that voter ID laws disproportionately impacts the poor, and especially disproportionately impacts African-Americans, who thanks to a history of systemic and systematic repression, are far more likely to not have birth certificates or other forms of state-issued identification.
So seriously, shove your rationalizations up your ass, because voter ID laws are nothing but new implementations of poll taxes, and the arguments you just used to justify them are the same fucking arguments that people used to justify poll taxes.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Democrats aren't going to take back Congress in 2018. Hell, Trump will probably be re-elected in 2020. And I am most emphatically not saying that because that's what I want. I hate Trump and the Republican party with a purple passion you cannot measure.
But the sad fact is that collectively, American voters are dumb as dirt. I mean, we're really, really stupid. Sure, there are a lot of good, smart people out there, but not nearly as many as idiots. I used to be hopeful and optimistic, but the 2016 election irrevocably changed that. We had a man running who literally said that he could get away with anything, including sexual assault, and who was a cultural icon of the greed and excess of our most decadent decade of greed and excess. People lined up in droves to vote for him.
And on the left? We still have a contingent of people, our own version of the Tea Party, who insist that Hillary Clinton is "just as bad," embracing weird conspiracy theories posited by the crazy branch of the right-wing, such as her "rigging" the primaries or deleting thousands of incriminating emails, things there has never been any evidence of her doing.
Some people (including Clinton herself) chalk all of these woes up to misogyny or Russian interference. Yeah, that had some impact. But personally, I chalk it up to a more basic truth: We Americans are collectively as stupid as they come. While most of the world praises intelligence and experience, we have an active disdain for it. When someone excels at something, we look for ways to take them down a peg because they're "elitist." Instead, we bow to the cult of Trump, where you don't have to be smart, motivated, and have a proven track record of getting worthwhile things done. You just have to have a larger-than-life personality and willing to say literally anything, even if it contradicts something you said two minutes ago. We'd prefer electing someone who's openly lying to our face because the person who's telling the truth must be hiding something nefarious.
I know, you're probably thinking that now that Trump has steered our boat straight down shit creek, people are finally waking up. I'll remind you that just a week ago, the people of Montana elected a man who literally physically and deliberately harmed another person because he was "sick and tired" of being asked questions about health care, the most important domestic issue facing America today. We pay lip service to teaching our kids to play nice, share, and be good people, but then we turn right around and reward people like Gianforte with being elected to what used to be an esteemed office. Which lesson do you think they're learning?
And before that, when Democrats lost a mayoral election in Omaha, Nebraska, the Sandersesque contingent came out of the woodwork yet again to point fingers at the national Democratic party for somehow failing to win the seat, even though that election was much closer than the one four years ago. And why? Because the DNC leadership criticized the Democratic candidate for being anti-abortion. Gasp! Democrats had the audacity to vocally support women's rights? No wonder they lost!
I always get amused at people who want term limits for Congresspeople, or who say things like, "Throw them all out!" What exactly makes you think that anything would be any different? I mean, the idiots in Kentucky who keep electing Mitch McConnell, the man who plainly stated that his number one political goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president (and, incidentally, who spectacularly failed at even that number one goal) would just find some other jackass to line up behind in the following election. Maybe even someone worse.
So yeah, I'd like to think that Democrats are going to make a resurgence in 2018. I'd like to think that 2020 will see a wave of blue overtake the country and finally sweep out the assholes and villains of the right-wing that have been holding this country back for decades. I can't help but roll my e
Wow, that sounds almost unbelievable. I would have thought that the result would have been just the opposite. Oh wait, it was. As multiple studies have shown.
Unfortunately, it has become such common practice to request "kitchen sink" permissions that it's nigh impossible to find useful apps that don't do so. And the sad fact is that users have become so jaded to it that the money that app makers lose from people who value privacy is less than the money they make from people just clicking through on ever "OK" button they see to get their new shiny.
I wish I had an answer to this problem, but I don't. People are stupid, and there's not much you can do to fix that. Unfortunately, that means that people like you and I who do care about our privacy pay the price.
Maybe, but it was one particularly conservative Supreme Court overturning a couple of centuries of precedent. And even in doing so, that <sarcasm>bastion of liberal activism</sarcasm> Antonin Scalia had this to say in his majority opinion of the case you're using for reference (Heller v. DC):
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
I wish I had mod points to give the parent poster. I'm so sick of the "it won't do any good" cynicism posts like those above. You know what REALLY won't do any good? Sitting on your ass doing nothing except crying "woe is us" on Slashdot.
Do you know how we got to the point where a lot of elected officials don't care what people think? People sitting around grousing about how elected officials don't care what they think. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you're going to simply tune out of everything going on and not care or hold people to any standards, then really, why should anyone care what you think? I know if I were an elected politician, I wouldn't give a damn what people think who don't bother to let me know, or even vote. Why would I even waste my time?
I vote in every election and primary I can. I do write to my Congresscritters. I tell my friends what I think about stuff going on and the people who are in and running for office. And yeah, sometimes it doesn't do any good, especially being a liberal in the Bible Belt South. But you know what? At least I'm trying. At least I'm not just whining about problems. And sometimes, people actually do make a difference, especially at a local level. You don't have to save the world, you just have to care. If you don't, then it sucks to be you, but stop trying to piss on the parade of those who do.
By the way, for those of you in the "it doesn't make a difference" crowd, by all means, keep sitting on your asses. Your apathy gives people like me disproportionate say over things going on, so you know, thank you very much for that.
Fair enough; if you're so hung up on this issue that Cortana won't let you treat her in some kind of perverse way, then you are under no obligation whatsoever to use her as a virtual assistant.
But don't then sit around wondering why people like me judge you as being of poor character. And before you reply, "I don't care what you think of my character," again, such is your prerogative. But then, you probably also have no idea if I'm your boss (or future potential boss), your loan officer, the person evaluating your college application, your potential friend, a possible future customer of your services, etc. If you're willing to live with the consequences of doing so, then by all means, please feel free to use as slutty a virtual assistant as your tastes desire.
All other things being equal, I'd give raises and promotions to the people who demonstrate that they have a continuing interest in learning more and keeping abreast about subjects relevant to their field than someone who thinks that once they get their degree, they never have to learn anything else. So if you think that "quantifying the time spent in the classroom during professional development and training activities" = "worthless as shit", then hey, it's your résumé, good luck with that.
(Of course, that's just the practical monetary consideration of the matter. Some of us actually like doing these classes just to see what's new and to *gasp!* expand our horizons.)
*sigh...* Why do I bother feeding the trolls? Oh well, here goes, mostly for the benefit of everyone else who might have accidentally read your incredibly racist, stupid post.
The AVERAGE IQ of Africans is twenty or more points below that of whites. Care to discuss? One genius African doesn't negate that fact - meaning that the more Africans there are in a white country, the worse it becomes for whites. Which is why Africans don't want to live around their own kind, in AFRICA.
So, apparently, is yours for not knowing that racism is responsible for differences in things like average IQ and earning potential of African-Americans. African-Americans are just as capable of learning and performing as "whites" when put into an environment conducive to learning and free of the systemic racism that has plagued this country since its inception. If it weren't for people like you, there wouldn't be such differences.
And the likely reason most "Africans" don't want to live around their own kind is because the people you're calling "Africans" aren't, in fact, African. They were born here, grew up here, lived all of their lives here, have all of their friends and families here, and are integral to the culture that defines us as a society. They're not "African" any more than you're "European" because of your likely heritage, and making such idiotic statements is like claiming that you don't want to live around your own kind, in EUROPE.
And, of course, that completely neglects the fact that most people of African heritage in the United States aren't here because their ancestors came here voluntarily, they were shackled and forced to relocate against their will, likely by those who were your ancestors. And, of course, that unless you're a full-blooded Native American, you're just as much an "invader" here as those you look down upon--except even worse, because your ancestors came here willingly and by force.
So please, stop being such a tool, and the cause of the very problems that you're bemoaning.
Sounds to me like someone just didn't want to go through the administrative hassle of gathering the information, copying it, and handing it over. Obviously, that shouldn't be allowed unless the DOA can provide some evidence that it will compromise the privacy of an actual person.
As a former avid City of Heroes player, I wish that someone would do this for shuttered MMORPGs. There are so many, and unlike single-player games that will at least run on old hardware and/or OSes, shuttered MMORPGs are completely inaccessible by any means. (Well, other than server emulators, for the very, VERY few that are lucky enough to have them.)
A while back, I wrote an email to GoG basically telling them that I wish they'd consider approaching some of the publishers of shuttered MMORPGs and offering to host them, either buying the rights to the games outright or licensing them, and charging $10 or $15 per month for access to everything (or offer cheaper plans for limited access to one or some games). Because the playerbase of many of these games would be a lot smaller than the new flashy hotness MMORPGs, it probably wouldn't take that much in the way of hardware, and if they could negotiate access to the source code, they might even be able to rewrite parts of the game to run more efficiently or even release updates. I got back a response that boiled down to, "Thanks, but we're not going to do that."
I still think it's a market that's ripe, and someone at some point will exploit that and make a killing off of it.
Hmm... Anyone got some negotiating skills that could pair with my technical skills to get this done?
Well, except that:
In short, the argument you're making is the same one that has been made since a minimum wage was created, that it doesn't do any good because prices just go up to account for it. But every time the minimum wage is raised, prices have never gone up an equal amount. (Likewise, not raising the minimum wage has never caused prices to not go up.) So what you're saying is a gross oversimplification of the reality of the situation that causes your final conclusion to be wrong.
Wow, Ahmed called you a filthy infidel? Sorry, I wasn't aware that you knew him personally and he had such animosity towards you personally.
There are certain things you don't do....If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb... if you're anybody you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb really, but especially if you're muslim.
it shouldn't matter yada yada yada, but it does.
Thank you for your recipe for how to ensure that systemic prejudices remain in place, that the world never changes for the better.
To be blunt, this is the same attitude a bunch of white people had in the 1950s and 1960s when they said, "If you're black, you don't vote. You don't sit in the front of the bus. You don't eat at lunch counters. It shouldn't matter yada yada yada, but it does."
Is Ahmed some sort of boy genius? Eh, I doubt it, but the simple fact is that NO ONE, Muslim or otherwise, should have to just sit back and tolerate endemic racism. And if it were my kid that you were telling that that's just "the world we live in," well, you and I would have a problem. Maybe you were a liberal, but if you think that this is okay, that it's Ahmed who should have to change, then it is most emphatically not the left that's moving away from you.
Okay, fine. I think we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. There, I said it. I honestly wasn't aware that my comment made it unclear that I support that idea.
But I say it with two qualifications:
1) More importantly, I think we should redistribute income from the top to the bottom, and
2) I'm not proposing that we redistribute wealth equally or anything like that, a common strawman. I simply think that the system that has been rigged for at least the past three decades should be rebalanced so that, for example, CEOs are making a few dozen to a hundred times the salary of average non-management workers at a company instead of thousands of times the salary. I think that companies should be penalized for moving jobs out-of-country. I DEFINITELY think that the minimum wage needs to be raised and pegged to the cost of living so that we don't have to address the issue every few years. I think that the capital gains tax rate should be pegged to the top marginal income tax rate so that no one ever has to pay a higher tax rate because they make their money by working instead of making money from having money.
In short, I think that the harder and smarter you work, the more you should enjoy the fruits of your labor and productivity. But I think that you should reach a point of diminishing returns so that as you prosper, you're directly helping to provide others the opportunity and environment in which they can prosper also.
I've always said that I'm not jealous of those who are wealthy. If my company's CEO is making a billion dollars a year, more power to him or her. But then if they start laying off people, moving jobs overseas, freezing raises, cutting benefits, undermining worker's rights, lobbying congress to pass anti-worker legislation, etc. so that they can make just a little bit more, then we're going to have a problem.
This is oversimplified to the point of being incorrect. Your flaw is thinking that $1 corresponds to some unit of effort. In reality, $1 corresponds to some unit of productivity, whether it's you, a robot, some technological innovation, a new business process, or whatever.
Currently when companies realize gains in productivity, all of the additional money either gets paid out to the people at the top or reinvested in the company, which essentially pays it out to the investors. The employees get little or none of it, which is why the past three decades productivity has been skyrocketing and we've experienced an average of around 3.5% growth per year, but real wages have been stagnant.
One of the premises of a UBI is to ensure that some of that 3.5% growth ends up in the hands of the people who are working longer, harder hours, taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet, and actually creating the productivity gains that companies are benefiting from but not passing down.
I can't. Gogo has been granted an exclusive Air-To-Ground (ATG) 3Ghz broadband frequency license by the FCC.
No, actually, I can't. It's not satellites that are the problem. Gogo has been granted an exclusive Air-To-Ground (ATG) 3Ghz broadband frequency license by the FCC.
... who still thinks being able to get a wireless internet link in an aircraft doing 600mph at 35K feet is pretty fucking amazing. I can't believe people complain about the bandwidth - they should be grateful this tech exists at all.
Yeah, but the problem is that the service offered today is exactly the same as the service that was offered in 2008. There has been basically zero progress over the course of over seven years, and the price has been steadily going up for that service.
Imagine if computers had the same capabilities, the same CPU speed, the same RAM, the same form factor, the same monitor resolutions, as they did in 2008 but cost a lot more. Who would still be buying them? (Basically the same people who buy airplane wi-fi service--business customers who have to.)
Yay, monopolies!
In this day and age of malware being delivered even by supposedly reputable third-party providers, using an ad blocker is just plain responsible browsing. I'm sorry that web site owners are out some revenue for it, but if you want to make money off of me, you're going to figure out some way to do it other than leaving myself open to attack from malicious users.
There are a handful of web sites that I actually support financially specifically for this reason.
You don't need to directly observe something in order to prove that it exists. That notion is a load of hooey propagated by someone with no scientific knowledge or experience.
I have never been to New York City. There's a chance that I might never go. But I have seen ample evidence that it exists that I don't need to actually go there to accept as indisputable fact that it is real.
The key there is evidence. I don't reject the evidence of New York City's existence simply because I don't want to believe that it's not there. If, on the other hand, someone were try to believe that the city of Atlanta doesn't exist, I would take strong exception to that because I've been there and I know firsthand that it does exist.
The problem with Creationists--and the reason it has NO place in a science class--is that they expect people to reject all evidence for a universe billions of years old and all evidence that the Theory of Evolution is correct in favor of another idea for which ZERO evidence exists, an idea for which mountains of evidence in fact disproves. That is the antithesis of science.