I'm sorry, but there's an entire political ideology that believes that if it makes gas cheap, CO2's properties magically change, so I'm not interested in those who weight their subjective ideologies higher than objective reality.
So the answer is simple. TAx the living fuck out of the man. Set a base rate where taxes are progessive, but anything over that, and the tax rate goes up to 99%.
You understand that the American Revolutionaries never intended to set up a system where every single person had to opt-in for a tax. The issue was to have taxation with representation. You live in a representative democracy, which means that the obligation is that a majority of the elected representatives agree to the tax.
Trying to turn this into a moral issue is bizarre, since essentially your position boils down to "I want the right to abrogate any moral obligation I have to my fellow man, and that's totally moral!"
As it is, overall, the US has some of the worst overall health outcomes in the industrialized world, while it's health care system actually produces a larger overall drag on the national economy. So, if we're going to talk morals, you think it's somehow moral that overall people are more poorly served at greater overall cost, just because maybe you personally get to pay less?
Plenty. It's because we allow sociopaths to run companies. Sociopaths should be banned from all management positions, should be outlawed under pain of horrible death from having any power over any finances. They should be permitted, under heavy surveillance, to work flipping burgers at McDonalds or cleaning streets, but they should never ever be put in a position where they can affect a market or a pension fund or any significant transaction, and if they're caught trying to fuck around with their coworkers, they should be removed permanently from society.
Corey's a pretty good writer, and I literally just ate through all the books one after the other.
My list for the last month or so is a bit odd. I re-read Pride And Prejudice because I felt like it for no particular reason. Working on Red Mars right now, a bit preachy at points, but all-in-all not that bad. Should be done this weekend, and then I plan on turning to Becky Chamber's second book "A Closed and Common Orbit", really enjoyed her first book. I've got John Scalzie's The Ghost Brigades to read (loved the Human Division series). After that I'm not too sure. I've got a few more of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe books to finish up, so I think I might end the month with one of those. Sometimes there's nothing better than a hardboiled 1930s detective story.
Bannon is Trump's Ernst Röhm, and Bannon should ponder Röhm's fate if he is determined to keep his foot in the White House. Sooner or later the Kushners are going to push for their own Night of the Long Knives, and Bannon's exit might be rather ugly.
One thing that is going to happen is the ceasing of the use of fossil fuels. Even the jurisdictions making their fortunes (such as there are to be found these days) know it, which is why the smarter petro-states have set up large sovereign wealth funds.
One way or the other, the future won't be powered with fossil fuels. It's really that simple. So we're going to have to produce energy storage systems capable of replacing oil, and really, unless you know of some physical constraint, what we're talking about is a technical problem, and not some insurmountable physical barrier.
Even Nixon had his die-hard supporters at the end. Some people are just so emotionally invested they simply refuse to let go.
I dunno, maybe Trump will last four years. A lot of it depends on whether Republicans begin to feel that their fortunes and the fortunes of their policies are on the line. The failure to replace Obamacare, and now the growing popularity of Obamacare, are a bellwether of a dysfunctional party who seems prepared to throw away its Congressional majority. Now that isn't necessarily Trump's fault per se, but he is the one that went around bragging endlessly about how he's this big wheeler dealer and he'll get things done through his negotiating superpowers, and yet, when push came to shove, he just let the AHCA float away and his proxies just pointed at Paul Ryan and the Freedom Caucus and started shouting about how they're at fault.
Thus far the only thing we have been able to determine about the Trump Administration is that it will never accept any blame, it will find scapegoats, it will Tweet about them endlessly, it will have hissy fits and temper tantrums and kick up a big cloud of smoke. To imagine this guy negotiating a new NAFTA deal, or any deal, beggars belief. With each day he seems to act more like a lame duck, with little political capital, dwindling support even in his own party, and no actual policies beyond sloganeering. His cabinet seems pretty dysfunctional as well, Tillerson has apparently gone largely mute, other than some baffling talk on North Korea, and it's Jared Kushner who now suddenly seems to be the functioning Secretary of State.
Maybe Trump's proxies shouldn't have been secretively communicating with the Russians. There's a lot of noise about the likes of Flynn being outed, but strangely little outrage about what they were doing, at least from Republicans.
There was no bugging of Trump Tower, and Trump's proxies got caught up because they're such arrogant buffoons that somehow it didn't enter the tiny brains that communications with Russian officials are ALWAYS monitored.
The rest of your rant is just a demonstration of your stupidity. The perfect Trump voter; a combination of bluster and low IQ.
Oh for fuck's sake, just how big do you think the risk is? Christ, most of the people here at least claim to aspire to reason, and yet over and over again the risk of terrorist attack is over-exaggerated by orders of a magnitude. Want to save American lives, then work to reduce the amount of sugar in processed foods, or work towards traffic safety. A reduction in heart disease of 25% would save more lives every year than all of the deaths in the Continental US from terrorist attacks... ever.
Clinton didn't lose the election that badly. She won in the popular vote, and Trump hardly won the electoral college by some sort of a landslide. If anything, the closeness of the race demonstrates that Trump is anything but the consensus winner.
I think one should concern oneself with both. The chief issue with any leak is whether the leak is actually necessary. In an ideal world, Congressional oversight would mean that no one would need to publicly leak alleged or potential misdeeds by public officials or high-ranking individuals. But would Nixon have effectively been pushed from office (yes, he resigned before his almost inevitable removal) if Mark Felt hadn't leaked Nixon's misdeeds to Bob Woodward?
In other words, apart from any legal restrictions on leaking information (leaks, more often than not, are illegal), there is the moral imperative for those that know that unlawful acts or abuses of power are going on to let someone know. Ideally, as I say, the way to do it that would be via Congressional oversight, but the issue then becomes "What will the politicians do with it?" Unlike Watergate, where the Democrats controlled Congress (though they didn't have the numbers to guarantee an impeachment and conviction), the politics plays the other way; in other words there was no loyalty to the Administration at play, whereas in this case, it is a Republican Administration under the microscope and a Republican-dominated Congress that by and large is looking into the microscope, and while there probably isn't quite the sense of unity there might have been under a traditional presidency, I can't imagine many Republican Representatives or Senators are thrilled at the prospect that they may end up having to impeach one of their own, even if Trump's true allegiances and ideology are pretty murky.
As to Rice, despite the bluster, I haven't seen anyone demonstrate that she in fact broke any rules. The attacks on Rice are simply bluster meant to obfuscate the true question, which is "Why were so many of Trump's advisers and proxies in such frequent contact with the Russians, even as the Russians were allegedly fucking over the Clinton campaign."
Generally having a role removed from your list of duties is seen as a demotion, and the timing of this, after Ivanka's official installation in the White House, is highly suggestive that the rumored power struggle between Bannon and the Kushners has resolved itself in the Kushners' favor. Also note that there have been rumors that Bannon and Priebus weren't getting along all that well either. I don't expect Bannon to work for that much longer at the White House.
Indeed, underlying all of this is the fact that the Obama Administration and the three letter agencies were doing their job. If Trump and his proxies didn't want to be outed playing footsie with the Russians, then, well, they shouldn't have been playing footsie with the Russians. This all comes down to the fact that Trump's minions, like Flynn, are not only of dubious loyalty to US interests, but are astonishingly stupid people. Who in their right mind would think that you could communicate with the fucking Russian fucking ambassador and not have someone in the US intelligence community not know about it? For fuck's sake, the Russian ambassador has probably been constantly and consistently spied on since the Second World War.
The stupidity of Trump's team, the arrogance coupled with ignorance, is just profound. It's stunning to think that such a group could ever achieve such high office, and the fact that Nixon was likely felled by someone in a three letter agency ought to have been a pretty goddamned good education. But one gets the impression that this band of thieves are almost proudly ignorant of how things work, and truly seemed to believe themselves to be untouchable.
I agree with you in general, and certainly there are rules that prevent the Kushners from being paid. But in this case, as I say, I see the Kushners as representing the only people in Trump's inner circle who aren't either Bond-esque villains or just out-and-out incompetent, and seeing as this is a man who seems to be very easily swayed, I'd rather have Ivanka doing the swaying than someone like Bannon. Hopefully Bannon's next stop is right out of the White House. I suspect that the underlying motive for this is that someone has convinced Trump that his troubles thus far are Bannon's fault, and certainly Bannon's stock has gone down with the failures of the two anti-refugee executive orders.
We're seeing the end result of the Kushner's formal installation in the White House. There were some indications early on that Bannon might actually have outfoxed the Kushners, and indeed there were even suggestions Trump wasn't all that happy with his son-in-law. But now that Ivanka is formally in the White House, there simply isn't any room for Bannon. Bannon was useful because his Alt-right credentials gave Trump access to a fairly useful demographic, but people like that are very dangerous to keep by your side too long.
The whole "Susan Rice story" is largely a concoction, an attempt at distraction from the fact that there is growing evidence of significant ties between Trump and Putin. It's almost like a Nixon supporter saying "Clearly Deep Throat broke the law, so Nixon should get off!"
Bannon lasted longer than I thought he would. For a time it almost seemed like he might be able to outmaneuver the Kushners, but having Ivanka installed in the White House and having Jared running around as an official messenger and errand boy demonstrates that in the end, the only people Trump will ever really trust is his family.
And that's fine by me. Whatever I think of Trump, I actually think the Kushners are half-way reasonable people, and it's a lot better having them whispering in his ear than that vile racist troll Bannon.
Nope, don't believe in God (but neither do I believe my atheism is scientific, though I do believe it is rational). And all the Big Bang ultimately says is "the universe was once very dense and very hot, and then began to expand." Perhaps you know as little about Big Bang cosmology as you do about AGW. Questions about what (if anything) started the Big Bang, if that is even a sensible question, are not meant to be answered by Big Bang and inflationary cosmology.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but there's an entire political ideology that believes that if it makes gas cheap, CO2's properties magically change, so I'm not interested in those who weight their subjective ideologies higher than objective reality.
It's too bad reality disagrees with you. I recommend you flee back to your basement.
So the answer is simple. TAx the living fuck out of the man. Set a base rate where taxes are progessive, but anything over that, and the tax rate goes up to 99%.
You understand that the American Revolutionaries never intended to set up a system where every single person had to opt-in for a tax. The issue was to have taxation with representation. You live in a representative democracy, which means that the obligation is that a majority of the elected representatives agree to the tax.
Trying to turn this into a moral issue is bizarre, since essentially your position boils down to "I want the right to abrogate any moral obligation I have to my fellow man, and that's totally moral!"
As it is, overall, the US has some of the worst overall health outcomes in the industrialized world, while it's health care system actually produces a larger overall drag on the national economy. So, if we're going to talk morals, you think it's somehow moral that overall people are more poorly served at greater overall cost, just because maybe you personally get to pay less?
Plenty. It's because we allow sociopaths to run companies. Sociopaths should be banned from all management positions, should be outlawed under pain of horrible death from having any power over any finances. They should be permitted, under heavy surveillance, to work flipping burgers at McDonalds or cleaning streets, but they should never ever be put in a position where they can affect a market or a pension fund or any significant transaction, and if they're caught trying to fuck around with their coworkers, they should be removed permanently from society.
It's almost as if Pizzagate was a load of alt right fake news horse shit
Corey's a pretty good writer, and I literally just ate through all the books one after the other.
My list for the last month or so is a bit odd. I re-read Pride And Prejudice because I felt like it for no particular reason. Working on Red Mars right now, a bit preachy at points, but all-in-all not that bad. Should be done this weekend, and then I plan on turning to Becky Chamber's second book "A Closed and Common Orbit", really enjoyed her first book. I've got John Scalzie's The Ghost Brigades to read (loved the Human Division series). After that I'm not too sure. I've got a few more of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe books to finish up, so I think I might end the month with one of those. Sometimes there's nothing better than a hardboiled 1930s detective story.
Bannon is Trump's Ernst Röhm, and Bannon should ponder Röhm's fate if he is determined to keep his foot in the White House. Sooner or later the Kushners are going to push for their own Night of the Long Knives, and Bannon's exit might be rather ugly.
One thing that is going to happen is the ceasing of the use of fossil fuels. Even the jurisdictions making their fortunes (such as there are to be found these days) know it, which is why the smarter petro-states have set up large sovereign wealth funds.
One way or the other, the future won't be powered with fossil fuels. It's really that simple. So we're going to have to produce energy storage systems capable of replacing oil, and really, unless you know of some physical constraint, what we're talking about is a technical problem, and not some insurmountable physical barrier.
BEcause there's nothing worse than a reasonably competent executive.
Sorry, but history is going to put Obama and Trump in considerably different categories.
Even Nixon had his die-hard supporters at the end. Some people are just so emotionally invested they simply refuse to let go.
I dunno, maybe Trump will last four years. A lot of it depends on whether Republicans begin to feel that their fortunes and the fortunes of their policies are on the line. The failure to replace Obamacare, and now the growing popularity of Obamacare, are a bellwether of a dysfunctional party who seems prepared to throw away its Congressional majority. Now that isn't necessarily Trump's fault per se, but he is the one that went around bragging endlessly about how he's this big wheeler dealer and he'll get things done through his negotiating superpowers, and yet, when push came to shove, he just let the AHCA float away and his proxies just pointed at Paul Ryan and the Freedom Caucus and started shouting about how they're at fault.
Thus far the only thing we have been able to determine about the Trump Administration is that it will never accept any blame, it will find scapegoats, it will Tweet about them endlessly, it will have hissy fits and temper tantrums and kick up a big cloud of smoke. To imagine this guy negotiating a new NAFTA deal, or any deal, beggars belief. With each day he seems to act more like a lame duck, with little political capital, dwindling support even in his own party, and no actual policies beyond sloganeering. His cabinet seems pretty dysfunctional as well, Tillerson has apparently gone largely mute, other than some baffling talk on North Korea, and it's Jared Kushner who now suddenly seems to be the functioning Secretary of State.
Maybe Trump's proxies shouldn't have been secretively communicating with the Russians. There's a lot of noise about the likes of Flynn being outed, but strangely little outrage about what they were doing, at least from Republicans.
There was no bugging of Trump Tower, and Trump's proxies got caught up because they're such arrogant buffoons that somehow it didn't enter the tiny brains that communications with Russian officials are ALWAYS monitored.
The rest of your rant is just a demonstration of your stupidity. The perfect Trump voter; a combination of bluster and low IQ.
Oh for fuck's sake, just how big do you think the risk is? Christ, most of the people here at least claim to aspire to reason, and yet over and over again the risk of terrorist attack is over-exaggerated by orders of a magnitude. Want to save American lives, then work to reduce the amount of sugar in processed foods, or work towards traffic safety. A reduction in heart disease of 25% would save more lives every year than all of the deaths in the Continental US from terrorist attacks... ever.
Clinton didn't lose the election that badly. She won in the popular vote, and Trump hardly won the electoral college by some sort of a landslide. If anything, the closeness of the race demonstrates that Trump is anything but the consensus winner.
Really? Did Rice actually break any laws? It strikes me that her conduct is part of her job, no?
I think one should concern oneself with both. The chief issue with any leak is whether the leak is actually necessary. In an ideal world, Congressional oversight would mean that no one would need to publicly leak alleged or potential misdeeds by public officials or high-ranking individuals. But would Nixon have effectively been pushed from office (yes, he resigned before his almost inevitable removal) if Mark Felt hadn't leaked Nixon's misdeeds to Bob Woodward?
In other words, apart from any legal restrictions on leaking information (leaks, more often than not, are illegal), there is the moral imperative for those that know that unlawful acts or abuses of power are going on to let someone know. Ideally, as I say, the way to do it that would be via Congressional oversight, but the issue then becomes "What will the politicians do with it?" Unlike Watergate, where the Democrats controlled Congress (though they didn't have the numbers to guarantee an impeachment and conviction), the politics plays the other way; in other words there was no loyalty to the Administration at play, whereas in this case, it is a Republican Administration under the microscope and a Republican-dominated Congress that by and large is looking into the microscope, and while there probably isn't quite the sense of unity there might have been under a traditional presidency, I can't imagine many Republican Representatives or Senators are thrilled at the prospect that they may end up having to impeach one of their own, even if Trump's true allegiances and ideology are pretty murky.
As to Rice, despite the bluster, I haven't seen anyone demonstrate that she in fact broke any rules. The attacks on Rice are simply bluster meant to obfuscate the true question, which is "Why were so many of Trump's advisers and proxies in such frequent contact with the Russians, even as the Russians were allegedly fucking over the Clinton campaign."
The US has carried a constant debt since the US Civil War. Debt is literally what makes the world go round.
Generally having a role removed from your list of duties is seen as a demotion, and the timing of this, after Ivanka's official installation in the White House, is highly suggestive that the rumored power struggle between Bannon and the Kushners has resolved itself in the Kushners' favor. Also note that there have been rumors that Bannon and Priebus weren't getting along all that well either. I don't expect Bannon to work for that much longer at the White House.
Indeed, underlying all of this is the fact that the Obama Administration and the three letter agencies were doing their job. If Trump and his proxies didn't want to be outed playing footsie with the Russians, then, well, they shouldn't have been playing footsie with the Russians. This all comes down to the fact that Trump's minions, like Flynn, are not only of dubious loyalty to US interests, but are astonishingly stupid people. Who in their right mind would think that you could communicate with the fucking Russian fucking ambassador and not have someone in the US intelligence community not know about it? For fuck's sake, the Russian ambassador has probably been constantly and consistently spied on since the Second World War.
The stupidity of Trump's team, the arrogance coupled with ignorance, is just profound. It's stunning to think that such a group could ever achieve such high office, and the fact that Nixon was likely felled by someone in a three letter agency ought to have been a pretty goddamned good education. But one gets the impression that this band of thieves are almost proudly ignorant of how things work, and truly seemed to believe themselves to be untouchable.
I agree with you in general, and certainly there are rules that prevent the Kushners from being paid. But in this case, as I say, I see the Kushners as representing the only people in Trump's inner circle who aren't either Bond-esque villains or just out-and-out incompetent, and seeing as this is a man who seems to be very easily swayed, I'd rather have Ivanka doing the swaying than someone like Bannon. Hopefully Bannon's next stop is right out of the White House. I suspect that the underlying motive for this is that someone has convinced Trump that his troubles thus far are Bannon's fault, and certainly Bannon's stock has gone down with the failures of the two anti-refugee executive orders.
We're seeing the end result of the Kushner's formal installation in the White House. There were some indications early on that Bannon might actually have outfoxed the Kushners, and indeed there were even suggestions Trump wasn't all that happy with his son-in-law. But now that Ivanka is formally in the White House, there simply isn't any room for Bannon. Bannon was useful because his Alt-right credentials gave Trump access to a fairly useful demographic, but people like that are very dangerous to keep by your side too long.
The whole "Susan Rice story" is largely a concoction, an attempt at distraction from the fact that there is growing evidence of significant ties between Trump and Putin. It's almost like a Nixon supporter saying "Clearly Deep Throat broke the law, so Nixon should get off!"
Bannon lasted longer than I thought he would. For a time it almost seemed like he might be able to outmaneuver the Kushners, but having Ivanka installed in the White House and having Jared running around as an official messenger and errand boy demonstrates that in the end, the only people Trump will ever really trust is his family.
And that's fine by me. Whatever I think of Trump, I actually think the Kushners are half-way reasonable people, and it's a lot better having them whispering in his ear than that vile racist troll Bannon.
Nope, don't believe in God (but neither do I believe my atheism is scientific, though I do believe it is rational). And all the Big Bang ultimately says is "the universe was once very dense and very hot, and then began to expand." Perhaps you know as little about Big Bang cosmology as you do about AGW. Questions about what (if anything) started the Big Bang, if that is even a sensible question, are not meant to be answered by Big Bang and inflationary cosmology.