Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]
assets.donaldjtrump.com
assets.donaldjtrump.com
Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it.
The scariest things for me are the backing out of climate change accords and the opening up of additional shale/gas/etc resources. We really don't need to be heading in that direction, energy-wise.
That's corruption, or the Establishment, or something.
If these statements were made by incredibly scholarly policy wonks who love nothing more than to learn about the government and think about how it could be improved, that'd be one thing (it'd still be a very suspect statement though). However, I can't imagine that this came from any place more scholarly than people assuming that none of this stuff could possibly exist for any good reason. If they want to get rid of specific regulations, they should just get rid of what regulations they think are unnecessary.
The policy also assumes that any new regulation would be equally unnecessary. It would turn any attempt to add a regulation into a political battle to not only add the regulation, but also a political battle to get rid of two others. This could cause needed regulations to not get passed because some vested interest has the political power to defend the two preexisting regulations. So it neither helps necessary regulations get adopted, nor does it help to get rid of unnecessary regulations. Again, if they think there are so many pointless regulations, just get rid of them. No need to bundle everything together like this.
It seems the thing to do would be hire interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law.
If this idea persisted for 50 years maybe they'd have to start repealing actual relevant regulations.
Sure, but how many of those exist at a federal level? Those are often city, county and sometimes state regulations.
It's both comical and sad that I think you're correct in that assessment, but only because it's been so gridlocked already, that it's just the continuation of what we know and what we know it to be pretty shitty.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/707
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/710
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/46
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2285
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1716E
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1730
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1762
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/39
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2074
Those are just from randomly clicking around Title 18 which are actual crimes. When you get into regulations you end up going through stuff like this:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/143.6
Yes the "repeal two regulations before imposing one" is just a gimmick, but there are an insane number of federal laws and regulations that are, at best, unneeded.
There may have been real problems with the Water Hyacinths as an invasive or endangered species, for example. And we certainly don't want to make it legal for people to change traffic signals at will!
I had actually expected to find oodles of needless cruft and "dead code", but I'm starting to think that it might be possible that most regulation is there for a reason... who'd a thunk it!
Both because it would help with the problem where people don't understand the intent of a law or regulation and so assumes they are stupid, and because it would make passing genuinely stupid laws and regulations harder if you have figure out ways to set out the intent and an "outcome test" in a way that doesn't xpose how bad it is.
A lot of laws would fall due to having been passed due to ignorance.
A lot of others would fail to pass in the first place because legislators would be forced to use legislators laying bare intent to punish based on morality rather than provable benefits to society - it's hard to get people to oppose laws where someone claims massive harm if a law isn't passed; it'd be easier to get people to oppose laws justified by a view of morality they may not share.
And even if they still pass, it provides a much clearer attack surface for people campaiging for a repeal.
But conversely it also provides a strong defense for laws with good purpose that actually work.
There's a lot of regulation around internet services and people under the age of 13. The primary effect of these rules has been that American internet services ask for your DoB and then ineffectively try to ban you from signing up if you say you're under 13. Do parents really need this?
Likely because proving intent to avoid taxes and tariffs is much harder than proving you've mailed something. I would bet it's a way to get around having complex expensive investigations for what was a common problem. Pass a law, now it's easy. You mailed tobacco? You're guilty. Case closed, problem reduced, taxpayer money saved.
Sure, but that's literally the case with every regulation. The point is to use them when the negatives of the behavior will likely outweigh the negatives the regulation might introduce. In a perfect world, there would be no laws, and free markets would work at peak efficiency all the time.
Now, I don't have enough information to argue authoritatively about the efficacy of this law, but based on the actual wording, where it says it's okay to do it for business as long as you've met all state and federal requirements means I think it's likely that for the most part it has little impact on individuals (who need to mail tobacco rarely) and businesses operating legally.
It's hard to prove that you are a criminal, but criminal goes out at night. So every citizen should stay home after 10pm.
The trouble with listing a dozen very specific laws like this and considering them all reasonable is this: what if the list had 1,000 items? 10,000? And with no way to know which are the actual meaty laws (like trademark law) and which are just specific instances of said laws (like Smokey the Bear).
This is a perfectly reasonable law that I would not want to see repealed. Don't you agree that it's bad for people to be allowed to impersonate mail carriers? It would facilitate identity theft through rifling mailboxes, make burglary easier, etc. What's wrong with that law?
> I don't see any particular harm from somebody wearing a postman uniform any more than say someone who wants to dress up as the UPS man.
You don't generally get official correspondence from the IRS through UPS. I'm fine with protecting the mailcarrier uniform. There are government expectations associated with that uniform.
Second, it is already illegal to forge correspondence correspondence from the IRS. Why make people who, for whatever reason, want to dress up like Cliff Clavin subject to six months in federal prison? Similarly, I agree mail fraud is real and one can abuse the mail for nefarious means, however again mail fraud is illegal and, in respect to your example, mailing anthrax the people is also already illegal.
I suppose the problem I'm trying to highlight here is a tendency for government, at times, to create laws that are, at best, silly, and, more often, harmfully over-broad in short-sighted attempts to stop behavior that is (or can be) readily addressed by existing laws. It can lead to harmful side effects[1][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcharging_(law) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
I do like the idea of simple laws, though, and I hope that a future civilization may flourish under the Golden Rule as its only law.
I don't agree on any specific difference between dressing up and impersonating in general, as I'm not sure how you are defining the difference, but to my mind impersonation is likely hard to prove, and if the desire is to stop the behavior, preventing dressing up is a useful way to make sure the law is enforcable.
I do agree there is a difference in importance between impersonating a police officer and impersonating a mail carrier, but in both cases I think the base reason is the same. To keep specific expectations and abilities granted to the individual as a government employee from being abused by others.
> Second, it is already illegal to forge correspondence correspondence from the IRS. Why make people who, for whatever reason, want to dress up like Cliff Clavin subject to six months in federal prison? Similarly, I agree mail fraud is real and one can abuse the mail for nefarious means, however again mail fraud is illegal and, in respect to your example, mailing anthrax the people is also already illegal.
Because if something is routed through the mail system we have a record of it, and information regarding it's origin. If someone dresses up as a mail carrier and puts it in your mailbox, not only is that record lost, but likely nobody around will pay any attention. Some random person putting something in your mailbox may attract attention, if only because those around might think they are trying to steal mail. Which takes us to stealing mail It's harder to steal mail when you have no business in anyone else's mailbox because it's illegal. Neighbors seeing a stranger rifling through a mailbox may be likely to call thge person out or even call the police. Preventing people from impersonating a mail carrier is very useful here.
It's worth noting that other carrier services are legally prevented from using your mailbox. Your mailbox/mail slot is considered federal property. There is thus a chain of custody when things are shipped through USPS, unless someone breaks the law.
> I suppose the problem I'm trying to highlight here is a tendency for government, at times, to create laws that are, at best, silly, and, more often, harmfully over-broad in short-sighted attempts to stop behavior that is (or can be) readily addressed by existing laws. It can lead to harmful side effects.
Sure, those exist. I don't think this is a good case of that.
If the goal is to aggressively double down on every single possible fraud case, where are the laws prohibiting dressing up as a forest ranger, environmental protection agent, President of the United States and various members of Congress (via those realistic-looking masks they sell before Halloween), USDA inspector, SEC controller, four-star Army general or any other government-related position of authority?
I can easily re-engineer a core business application in a couple weeks. It'll do most of what the existing solution does, will be unit tested, and easily extendable. But, it won't cover all those edge cases we've all forgotten exist and that one exception that's required for client 2 who needs red buttons instead of blue buttons and remember that time we ran into the problem where the year-end report took 3 days to run, and locked up the weekly reports because new years eve landed on a Friday which made Justin stay in the office until 2AM trying to get the database back online?
I'm not a law professor, or a lawyer, or in any way involved in law, but the similarities between a 200+ year old set of rules that govern our society and a legacy application that we can't simply turn off for 6 months why we re-engineer it to be "better, but does exactly the same thing" is frightening. We've got a piss poor track record as software developers being able to take on a massive refactor and not introduce more bugs, what the hell makes us think we can consolidate hundreds of thousands of edge cases in law and not miss a bunch of actually useful things?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/bug-system
"In the U.S., responsibility for food safety is divided among fifteen federal agencies. The most important, in addition to the F.S.I.S., is the Food and Drug Administration, in the Department of Health and Human Services. In theory, the line between these two should be simple: the F.S.I.S. inspects meat and poultry; the F.D.A. covers everything else. In practice, that line is hopelessly blurred. Fish are the province of the F.D.A.—except catfish, which falls under the F.S.I.S. Frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the F.D.A., but frozen pizza with slices of pepperoni is monitored by the F.S.I.S. Bagel dogs are F.D.A.; corn dogs, F.S.I.S. The skin of a link sausage is F.D.A., but the meat inside is F.S.I.S.
“The current structure is there not because it’s what serves the consumer best,” Elisabeth Hagen*, a former head of the F.S.I.S., told me. “It’s there because it’s the way the system has grown up.” Mike Taylor, the highest-ranking food-safety official at the F.D.A., said, “Everybody would agree that if you were starting on a blank piece of paper and designing the food-safety system for the future, from scratch, you wouldn’t design it the way it’s designed right now.”
For example, the United States has seven uniformed services with commissioned officers. Can you name them? Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, typically people can get immediately. Given a moment to think, most people also come up with the Coast Guard. But what are the other two?
The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is the sixth. Which most people kind-of get and realize that's why the Surgeon General wears a vice-admiral's uniform (in fact he is a commissioned vice-admiral -- not of the Navy, of the Public Health Service). They have a commissioned corps because part of their job is being deployed -- often alongside combatant officer corps from other services -- into emergency situations. They were organized for that duty along military lines by the first Surgeon General.
How about the seventh? Oh, that's NOAA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You know, the people who do the weather forecasts. They have a commissioned officer corps, and the director is a rear-admiral (again, not of the Navy -- a rear-admiral of NOAA). Why do they have a commissioned corps? Because they've historically rendered assistance to the military in situations where land and coast surveys and weather information were necessary, and commissioning them gave them protection under the laws of war (otherwise, if captured, they could be executed as spies).
Similarly, why is it that certain financial crimes get you investigated by the Secret Service and not the FBI? The Secret Service protects the President, after all, and that has nothing to do with finance. But originally they were chartered for the narrow purpose of fighting counterfeiting, back when Congress was reluctant to authorize a general-purpose federal law-enforcement agency. Then, since they had a good intelligence network across the country as a result of the anti-counterfeiting mission, presidential protection got tacked onto their charter (at that time, Congress didn't want to proliferate federal enforcement agencies). Today, they investigate some types of frauds and other financial crimes because it still falls under their original anti-counterfeiting charter.
You can literally write books about this stuff if you dive into the history of it, and you'll often find that there were good, rational, justifiable reasons for why things were set up the way they were.
GP's point was that redundancy has been accumulated over the years. Of course there's usually a rational justifiable reason, but that doesn't mean it's still a valid one.
Really interesting stuff on the uniformed services.
And yet... consider the Secret Service thing. Congress was reluctant to concentrate federal law-enforcement power in one agency. And the history of the FBI shows that may have been the right idea.
To me, this sounds like a quarantine law. All countries have these, e.g. it is not allowed to transport certain meat products or other foods across German borders.
> https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1716E
Once again, a "standard" anti-trafficking law.
> https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/39
What? Such things exist? Are these "traffic signal preemption transmitter" devices used in e.g. ambulances?
> https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2285
A ban on "drug subs", commonly used on the southern border these days. Gangs actually manufacture high-sea-worthy subs in the jungle.
> Yes the "repeal two regulations before imposing one" is just a gimmick, but there are an insane number of federal laws and regulations that are, at best, unneeded.
Unfortunately, you picked out the worst examples of "unneeded" laws.
Yes, they're used at some intersections to forcibly change the light to green. And they're basic IR transmitters so they're ridiculously easy to make.
Sure, it too should probably be consolidated - perhaps under the Lacey act or the Plant Protection Act or Alien Species Prevention and Enforcement Act. But it's not actually a dumb regulation, just an inefficient expression.
You can probably imagine that the letter carrier uniform one may have been in response to fraud. Same for the false weather reports - it's kind of useful to be able to whack someone on the wrist for publishing a hoax tornado warning.
I'm all for the idea of cleaning up our soup of regulations, but I think it's worth noting that many of them exist for a reason, and it's typically more complex than the famously silly "can't ride a horse in a dress on sunday"-type laws still found on some state books.
Putting my geek hat back on, It'd be cool if we could train an LSTM to de-dup laws... ;) But I guess in the meantime there are interns.
Some should be state laws.
It's very difficult for States to regulate those effectively because without federal funding, they are medium term losses that inhibit growth. One of the reasons the Federal Government gets such a bad rep is because they're the one who needs to take a tough position on this.
I would expect there to already be a federal law prohibiting fraud.
In that case, you have a choice between banning attempts, together with everything that is indistinguishable from an attempt, versus effectively giving fraudsters free reign, despite having a law that technically forbids successful execution of an attempt. Classic legal balancing act: how valuable is the freedom of dressing up as a postman compared to not having to question the authenticity of each and every on of them?
no postal service carrier uniform allowed on Halloween
I just assumed that over 250 years some cruft was inevitable.
There are entire books written filled with silly, outdated, or absurd laws and regulations (both federal and state).
Here's just a taste[1]:
> 18 USC §1382 & 32 CFR §636.28(g)(iv) make it a federal crime to ride a moped into Fort Stewart without wearing long trousers.
> 16 USC §551 & 36 CFR §261.16(c) make it a crime to wash a fish at a faucet if it's not a fish-washing faucet, in a national forest.
> 21 USC §461 & 9 CFR §381.171(d) make it a crime to sell "Turkey Ham" as "Ham Turkey" or with the words "Turkey" and "Ham" in different fonts
> 18 USC §1865 & 36 CFR §7.96(b)(3) make it a federal crime to harass a golfer in any national park in Washington, DC.
[1] http://www.freedomworks.org/content/19-ridiculous-federal-cr...
That should absolutely still be on the books. You'd have people cleaning fish in bathrooms.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/36/261.16
"The following are prohibited: (c) Cleaning or washing any personal property, fish, animal, or food, or bathing or washing at a hydrant or water faucet not provided for that purpose."
This is the sort of thing that would just be a normal rule, in a contract or something, in a privately-managed park. For a federal park, it's perfectly reasonable for it to just be a federal law.
You could also imagine a world where it's simply illegal to be in a federal park without signing a contract with the government, which would get these sorts of things out of the CFR, but that seems like it would be worse for the American people at zero benefit. And personally, I'd still call things in those contracts "federal regulations".
You could also imagine a world where national parks become privatized.
The issue here is that the statute authorizing criminal penalties covers a whole range of national park regulations, some of which clearly merit stiff penalties, and some of which are just about washing fish safely.
So to forbid washing fish at a faucet in a national park... you literally do have to make a federal law (or a regulation with the force of federal law).
This is also why they have their own law-enforcement agency (the United States Park Police): Congress was, for a very long time, reluctant to authorize a general federal police force, so many agencies have their own specific police force operating solely within that agency's jurisdiction. It also creates fun inter-jurisdictional issues since the U.S Capitol building has its own separate police force, but the Capitol building is on the National Mall, which is Park Police territory.
Here's the law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/9/381.171
This is one of a large number of sections of the law that define what food products mean, for every food product on the market, and lead to a consistent UX at markets. It's not like someone passed the Turkey Ham Font Sizes Act of 1947 or something.
It's these sorts of laws that prevent people from labeling, e.g., high-fructose corn syrup as "corn sugar". http://corn.org/facts-about-the-cra-petition-on-corn-sugar/
Trump has complained about "the FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects farmers to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food."
So, expect to see corn sugar in your sodas as soon as a new federal regulation gets passed. And something else, as soon as people figure out what "corn sugar" is.
More important context for the "ham" law is that the criminal penalty statute they're citing is actually meant to pair with this offenses statute:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/458
... it captures a bunch of other regulations by reference, including labeling laws, but that doesn't mean someone passed a law saying it should be a federal crime to use the wrong font for ham.
HFCS is probably not significantly different from table sugar as far as human metabolism goes.
The longitudinal nutrition studies in humans necessary to tease out the differences are difficult to perform well. I think it's worthwhile to at least keep in mind that these different sugars do have different effects on the body, especially given the levels of consumption we're seeing in the US.
What is dangerous is the suggestion that sucrose is safer than HFCS; it misleads people into believing they are making a healthy choice when they drink sugared soda made with cane sugar. They are not. Sucrose in significant quantities is extraordinarily bad for you, for the same reason HFCS is!
The metabolic pathways are different. If you want to argue that this is not a meaningful difference given the evidence we have, that's fine. I can understand that. I clearly stated that doing the kinds of studies that would be able to show such evidence are difficult to do. Do you think this is a fair assessment? I get the impression that you think I'm trying to muddy the waters. That's not the case.
The job of the SEC, for example, is to provide a framework for the public to safetly invest in and own parts of corporations while providing qualified investors more freedom to invest in riskier ventures. The SEC decides what financial disclosures best fulfill its job requirements and imposes fines on violators. However, the laws that actually punish executives for breaking SEC rules are written by Congress and the courts are the last step that decides whether Congress or the agency are overstepping their bounds.
Regulations as a landscape change much faster than laws and are consolidated all the time so there's a lot less cruft than the rest of our legal code would lead you to believe.
Still though, I think it's helpful to point out that the legal nature of regulations allows them to move faster and reduce internal complexity while the legal code is mostly append only.
And that's why we have so much red tape. Apparently there's a type of person who can't abide not having all possible minutia of life legislated.
Also, I don't think anyone is saying that they're critical to the functioning of civilized society, just that they're not ridiculous and outdated, and that being truthful about the topic of discussion is important in a discussion. We can, and should, debate whether they're needed! But we first need to understand what arguments there are in favor of keeping them.
It's something that sounds simple and good to someone who not only isn't aware of the details of what it would mean in practice, but also isn't aware of their own inability to understand the details and nuance, or that there are details and nuance. It was a Dunning-Kruger election.
High brow smack (condescension) like that and "basket of deplorables" are what America revolted against.
If the liberal left was truly smart, why did they allow the president to run up more national debt than all presidents prior...combined?
Why is that even offensive to anyone? Just because of someone's personal insecurity about not having a college degree in anything? I've worked around plenty of people without college degrees (4 year vet, USAF, enlisted), they have nothing to be insecure about... except for uninformed ideas about the world (IMHO).
Is it the subtle "I got this" confident arrogance of the expert? If so, then how is that any worse than a confidence and arrogance NOT based on intelligence/education/experience? (i.e., dunning-kruger)
If the liberal doctor says you have cancer and need an operation and the conservative mechanic says it's just soreness and to take two Advil, are you going to discount the doctor because he is liberal elite, or because he is full of himself and has terrible bedside manner?
If merely getting a college education makes you more liberal (as can be seen in exit polling), does that mean that merely knowing/understanding more things has a liberal bias? Doesn't that mean knowledge itself has a liberal bias? Does that sound like a preposterous conclusion to you? Modus tollens, and all that (not that even using the language of logical discourse is valued at all).
No wonder this "anti-intellectualism spring." Election as proxy-class-war and proxy-culture-war (not to mention proxy-gender-war), that much has been made clear.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov (RIP)
"The Intellectual Yet Idiot" from "Skin in the Game" by Nassim Taleb
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211...
I think the point you're making is that credentialed individuals shouldn't be blindly trusted; on the other hand, those that say that all experts are clueless are falling for the very same fallacy decried by Taleb.
That said, I appreciate your posting of this link; it was a good read (I'm not being snarky).
That said, I think there is certainly some anti-intellectualism on the Right and behind Trump's success (no surprise). However, I don't think the nation is awash in irrationality, racism, misogyny, etc (though that is the Left's scary, dishonest spin) and the election was, at least partly, a repudiation of the Left's posturing as the intellectual, reasonable alternative.
I would characterize the political alignment of government employees to be as diverse as the nation's. "The government" as a liberal-partisan force seems a bit inaccurate given that the House and Senate have had Republican majorities since 2012. That said, my exposure with U.S. government employees is limited to Defense/IC; I won't discount a bias --liberal or otherwise-- in NSF or other grants programs.
The LEOs blocked research into marijuana use for pain, nauseousness, etc. for decades because they don't want to admit that they dedicated their lives to a pointless "war" on drugs and they still heavily influence what gets studied today.
The anti-tobacco scare-mongering is beyond belief. Researchers admit that nicotine is not the "most addictive drug in the world" per the propaganda, they can't even get rats addicted to it in isolation. It turns out it is nicotine plus chemicals in tobacco smoke that make smoking addictive and the cognitive and physiological benefits of nicotine are just starting to be known. The big problem here is that if research legitimizes nicotine use (even as a pill or whatever) it can threaten the cigarette taxes that many states depend on so it is opposed which is a pretty cynical way to fund your govt in my book. The "second hand smoke" hysteria is statistical non-sense pushed by the anti-tobacco zealots.
I think the climate research is politically tainted as well but I won't go into that.
So who should fund science? Industry? They won't fund any science. They will fund research into engineering and technology. But they won't fund basic science. Furthermore expecting industry funded research to be unbiased is like expecting turkeys to vote for a second Christmas.
(probably government-funded research)
I see your point about bias being present in grants distribution, but there is no better way that is apparent. Too liberal, and you waste money on useless research. Too conservative, and you stifle important research that has no immediately marketable use. Scientific grant administration is difficult. As to government employees being in charge of grant distribution, who else should perform this function? Where else would the funding come from? The U.S. is a world leader in scientific research due to its generous (in comparison) funding.
I am a person who tries very hard to be centrist with the hope of getting closer to some "universal truths" (my Facebook page is practically a monument to political moderation) and this is the most difficult time I've had in years of trying to do this.
He expounds on and develops this idea much more.
I hold it close to my core that critical thinking skills go hand-in-hand with a brighter individual and collective future. What do I say to someone who I think is falling into the trap of a logical fallacy that doesn't sound like I know better? If I think someone is misguided, am I supposed to listen to why they feel the way they do, then ask them to consider something not as wrong? What if they hold it true as their own set of Good Facts and are not open to conversation?
Or is the point of the article that maybe I'm objectively wrong about many policies I hold dear? LGBT equality, gender equality, etc, are causes that I'm actually wrong about and I should look at the other side for inspiration, regardless of where their 'Truth' comes from?
I'm deeply saddened that I not only observe and sometimes identify with the smug left, but I also have many conversations with family and friends who I would describe in a similar article with a different bent as the angry, illogical right. What do I do to reach those folks?
I'm also worried that their way of life is actually dying, because it is dying. Their jobs, their biggest source of pride, are disappearing, and attempting to repatriate them will likely result in big business investing in capital (robots) over labor (rural workers).
I want to support a smart policy that helps them get back on their feet. Is thinking that Donald Trump likely won't be able to bring them what they seek a smug liberal policy? If so, am I supposed to feel bad about thinking it, try to convince people about it, shut up about it, or none of the above?
Additionally, I think this is the type of article that appears when both sides live in an echo chamber. Yes, this is an excoriation of the smug left, but the smug left and this article only exists if we live in our own bubbles. The thing nobody knows and everyone wants to figure out is how to break down those barriers.
That's why people like Putin.
So now you taste by yourself what you did to the world with too much left liberalism. Good luck with that and have your own Putin as a result.
Each step must not make revolutions and counterrevolutions. Each step mustn't break people's minds. Each step must consider everything (not "goal for goal"). So conservatism is much more complex because you need to consider everything and with this knowledge make hard decisions, not just run to the sun with some hope that everything will be all right, like drug addicts do. For me, leftism and all modern liberalism is infantile and conservatism is for grownups.
Listen, really listen to them and think why do they have this opinion. What feelings are behind it. This is how you have a conversation with a person and not a lecture.
I think a difference I've seen this election is between verifiable facts and debate-able opinions. I can listen and probe intently until my partners face is blue but, for example, if they believe the world is flat, there's very little middle ground we can get opinion-wise since we fundamentally disagree about the shape of the earth.
I try to be as open as possible to differences in opinions and try my best to accept conflicting evidence to my world view. But, if someone is trying to convince me of something a couple google searches could easily disprove, I end up exasperated by the discussion. What do I do there? Not trust google?
My knee jerk thought is that these folks have been misinformed by people they trust. I want to help fix that, not lecture them. The tactics dont matter as much as the result.
This lead to rethinking pretty much everything I do. I think it can be summarized in one word - patience. I have to pick my battles carefully. I shouldn't jump to every opportunity to debate. I have to let some things go. I have to identify the good opportunities - where I can say something truly engaging, touching. Most importantly, I have to be brief. No long answers, at most just 1 reply after that. No battles, they can't be won on the spot but perhaps I will make the other party reflect on what I've said later. This means that I have be efficient, leading to thinking about the other people involved, why they have their position and how to bring to their attention that there are other just as credible positions.
A couple of quotes I find worthy:
Plato: "[...]if you talk to any ordinary Spartan, he seems to be stupid, but eventually, like an expert marksman, he shoots in some brief remark that proves you to be only a child".
Epictetus: "Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don't talk how persons ought to eat, but eat as you ought. [...] So that if ever any talk should happen among the unlearned concerning philosophic theorems, be you, for the most part, silent. For there is great danger in immediately throwing out what you have not digested. And, if anyone tells you that you know nothing, and you are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have begun your business. For sheep don't throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they outwardly produce wool and milk".
It does an excellent job of diagnosing the American Left's political and social ills. It left out the most important part: a solution. It never actually validated either ideology nor proposed a solution beyond "make sure to respect and empathize with the other side."
I feel you never actually addressed the veracity of the parent poster's statement, just the tone. It is a valid criticism, to be sure, but I would like more.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect
:)
"Trump capturing the nomination will not dispel the smug style; if anything, it will redouble it. Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?"
Wow, considering this was written in April, that ended up being remarkably prescient, eh?
Things having to do with sexual behavior are in the realm of irrational "out of the box" so to speak, trying to bring logic into the discussion doesn't bode well for either side and can lead down a long and treacherous path deep into the ontology of human psyche.
Things I'm talking about are "simpler" things like:
- gun control. most discussions with liberal anti-gun opponents end up in 2 basic scenarios: "guns are bad mmmk" or "you must be some kind of a gun-toting redneck"
- illegal immigration. this is a huge can of [il]logical blunders from the liberal side. but essentially boils down to "dis rasist".
- global warming or rather it's anthropological component. normally starts and ends by labeling the opponent "a climate change denier" no matter how adamant one is about trying to convey that this is specifically an anthro component of it that is being discussed.
- then there's the ever present "dis rasist" and "h8r" labels used every time there is a racial component to the issue. these are applied at will. don't like Obamacare (or anything Obama)? - "rasist h8r"; think the dude had a gun and not a book when a [black] cop shot him? - "major league racist"... etc ad nauseum.
there are other liberal sacred cows but these are just some of the ones talked about more often esp lately with the election and all.
I'm making the distinction of in-person discussions only because I do think sweeping negative statements have been made on both sides incessantly for years, but nowhere nearly as toxic or shameless as from the safety of anonymity. If that's the major source of "seeing both sides" for the public majority, seeing venomous Tweets and dismissive Facebook posts, it's no wonder that we're dealing with such a schism of understanding and fundamental respect.
Liberal crowds tend to be passive-aggressive in general ("give us our safe space you fn bigots or we'll burn something" :) ) so these in person discussions also only work in "private" settings.
Observing this as we speak - "stupid rural whites ("hicks" from the article we're discussing) are to blame for trump's victory" type vibe in the lib news + street protests.
If opinions are voiced in a respectful manner with the goal of achieving an understanding between those who think differently rather than a victory then the responses you receive are absolutely unacceptable, at least to me. I do hope you'll understand how someone can be wary to unquestionably validate generalizations about anyone, including liberals, without being provided much insight to the specific statements or situations that have preceded them. I personally respond well to self-reflection, as I find it important to keep mental context for my own emotions and motivations. From our conversation, allow me to offer some: I don't make the negative statements you've experienced but I have not dismayed them, not seeing them as equal to pain evoked from other derogatory statements like ethnic/gay slurs. Part of this is because my experience includes those derogatory statements coming from the mouths of those rural Americans so there is some "logical" motivation behind the statements being thrown back in their direction. Respect was not received, respect is not provided, and now here we are, worse off than before. Now aware of this, I will not enable a platform for those comments to be made regardless of the situation.
Sure. But, as an example, one would have to be [intellectually?] dishonest to turn a blind eye to rampant namecalling and smear campaign tactics "the left" has employed during the elections. Don't think you need to go as deep as to analyze specific situations to see that.
If the prospect of forcing millions of innocent women already suffering from a miscarriage through a trial (not to mention ALL the added cost and effort) doesn't horrify you, it should.
Secondly, over 50% of fertilized eggs never actually implant into the uterus and get washed out. If nature itself is tossing fully half of the fertilized eggs out, then a few more won't make much of an ethical difference.
you saying there's no difference between a fertilized egg and the fetus 2 hrs before childbirth?
Broadly, the uneducated US population has historically distrusted experts and competence, preferring uneducated populists with charisma. This has generally led to the US having worse outcomes in many many areas. You can review any particular situation you know something at an expert & educated level about; usually that's in mild disarray to poorly done due to this gap between educated understanding and the electorate's choices.
This urge was understood: hence why the original US constitution had no popular vote provision for the President. It is instructive to read the rationale for the electoral college on Wikipedia.
Consequently, I'm a republic fan, but not a Republican.
I would also note that Fox News & descendants have specifically operated in a post-fact pro-opinion mode for years and years, defining the situation and the worldview of much of the uneducated populace. It lacked only a candidate to run on the Fox News/Drudge Report platform.
One could also remark that technology is inherently a political statement, and that the social media of today inherently promotes poor discourse. Elections 2016 rode in on Twitter, and disinformation campaigns flooded Facebook. It's not on Facebook to censor lies, but it's on Facebook to meditate on the modalites of media.
But, as all good nerds know, code has no politics, and politics is dirty, and politicians are liars, and politics doesn't affect them. So it's better to write code and not think about the consequences. (sarcasm, there)
Well folks, it's time to think about consequences, and ponder the events of the post-WW1 era.
Could be wise to not end up on an anti-Trump list assembled from private Facebook groups and demanded by a thin-skinned egotist.
Well, on that note, I'll be zipping my mouth on this one.
pnathan out.
This also fails to address the survivor's bias that perhaps those who actually can enter college may already be predisposed to liberalism due to locality and family circumstances.
To abuse the old HN gripe, correlation doesn't imply causation.
Do you have evidence to support that? Because here is mine: Exit polling for the most recent election:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/el...
Scroll down to the "Education" and especially the "Education by Race (white)" sections.
Peripherally (I call it that because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence), look at the "Religion" section, protestant christians vs. "none".
You haven't answered the actual point of my argument, which is "college degrees don't necessarily bestow liberal viewpoints."
Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI)
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211...
(not aimed at you)
My most salient criticism is the slam against GMO's... I've done my own homework there and I haven't found solid evidence that there is something systematically wrong with all GMO's.
As to the wider point that more educated people are more liberal, there is plenty of evidence that liberal views are forced on people in the education system. That doesn't mean people are liberal because they are smart. If all universities were Christian, as they once were, that wouldn't prove that Christians were smarter.
So why people make so much hype about this 20%? Because they don't have much perspective and freedom in their mind to understand that. They just have very simple filters and Trump's lack of knowledge hits them. And now they can condescend to him and feel good.
But what about other 80%?
I happen to agree with you in concept, although I'd put knowledge closer to 30% (guesstimate).
In my line of work I would say that knowledge is a third of what I need, and the rest is a mix of patience, ability to learn things I don't know, humility and ability to work well with others.
Are these the traits you would look for or something else?
And how would you rank Trump on these? (or yours, if you have others)
So, it is emotional intelligence, persistence, will, ability to make friends, charisma, luck, fearlessness, high motivation, sensitivity, humility, ironic perception of the world, ability to resolve conflicts, ability to make boundaries, healthy aggression, ability to cope with your own aggression and aggression of others, ability to cope with doubts, deep understanding of other people, ability to learn things, ability to understand, ability not to divide everything to black and white, ability to break patterns in mind, lack of mind problems... etc.
You also not only need to know many complex things. You need to know unique things, and this things must create something like 3D network in mind. They must be linked with each other. The quality of this network and quality and uniqueness of facts are 100 times more important then amount of facts.
So if some liberal know many things like "LGBT is good", "aggression is bad", "people are equal" and usually they just repeat that over and over, this is nothing. They can read books, but reading by itself doesn't create links and facts that they read aren't unique. This is just something like propaganda but more subtle. They install kernel of left liberalism in their mind and that kernel controls them. They don't have ability to control it. They don't even understand that it's exist.
So if we look at this like points in RPG, I rank Trump higher than Clinton. He understands people much better so he has better emotional intelligence and many other things. He is good showman and this means that he has many social abilities. He is funny. He is businessman so he is very adequate in life. He has healthy aggression and this is good. He is more fearless. He doesn't fear to look stupid. He doesn't have much shame and I thinks it's healthy. He has charisma. He has healthy family.
For all the reasons people do/claim to vote for Trump because of, the "he says what's on his mind, he's anti-PC" always stood out the most, when things like this come up.
* Bringing facts to the conversation isn't acceptable.
* Calling Trump out for the things he actually says and does isn't acceptable.
* Insulting Trump by calling him an insecure man-child isn't acceptable, because he'll sue.
Trump was a buffoon 2, 10 and 20 years ago, and he is a buffoon now. That he somehow magically got elected doesn't actually change that, and it amazes me what we're all willing to forget, and how fast.
Merit doesn't actually matter anymore. We'll rather elect a misogynistic, racist, incompetent, inexperienced ill-tempered man than the qualified, boring, moderate woman.
Sorry for hijacking and possibly ruining your eloquent post, but all this honestly baffles me.
Also, following on your second point, if the Dems are so smart how could they not see that Clinton was a fatally flawed candidate. We'll never know but I think its likely Sanders would have won versus Trump.
All of the people positions of power in the DNC were pro-Hillary. That's why they were blinded. Their mind was made up before the election cycle even started.
> All of the people positions of power in the DNC were pro-Hillary. That's why they were blinded.
Running a campaign vs running a country is very different, no doubt. But many will make a case there. She has dropped the ball on the election, besides other list of things vs someone won against all odds (CNN projecting less than 1% odds of winning).
The interesting thing is much as people like to say Trump is stupid, anti-intellectual, just a TV personality, somehow he had intuition to poll in the right states at the right time, to understand what people want and respond do. All that while the both the Republicans, and Democrats, the media, the DOJ and POTUS where against him.
Taking everything away and just comparing based on those things, it is possible to draw some conclusions perhaps.
Interesting theory when she got more votes.
Actually, the majority of Americans agreed with Hillary Clinton. She won the popular vote by over a million votes. We just use an outdated system built to appease slaveholders that does not necessarily represent the bulk will of the people. Trump won on a technicality of our (antiquated and frankly awful) system, not on a mandate.
>If the liberal left was truly smart, why did they allow the president to run up more national debt than all presidents prior...combined?
The president doesn't make the budget or handle the accounting of the US. Congress does. Guess who controls Congress? Hint, not the liberal left.
It may have been built with slave/free state "fairness" in mind, but even today the mechanism serves to level out the tyranny of the majority, from the states' perspective.
While I agree that the electoral college is not the best system, we can't really know what the results would have been if the popular vote determined the presidency. Campaigns are optimized based on the electoral college and each would have been run differently on a different system. Also, voter turnout may have been different because you no longer have partisan strongholds which may discourage voting.
A plurality did, not a majority.
But still more than went with any individual alternative.
> Trump won on a technicality of our (antiquated and frankly awful) system, not on a mandate.
It's not so much antiquated as evil; it's designed specifically to magnify the power of voters in states with people counted for assigning representation that don't vote (primarily to secure slavery, but its continued to reward other forms of disenfranchisement since.)
Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to look up the difference :)
Wikipedia [0] also recognizes this meaning.
I like to add there is still 4 million votes that are being counted. Projection even from CNN is that Trump wins the popular vote.
[0] https://mishgea.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/geographic-lands... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-10/trumps-geographic-l...
This isn't true even on the face of it; it went up from ~10 trillion to ~18 trillion. And aside from that; the national debt exploded due to the economic collapse that happened months before Obama was sworn in. The accusation is wrong on the facts and disingenuous.
The money to the banks, I'm not so sure.
Don't forget Obama was handed two active wars that he had to fund. They were spending billions per day on military operations. He wound them down as fast as he could but it still took years.
> America hasn’t put its demons — including racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny — behind it. White people still make up the vast majority of the electorate, particularly when considering their share of the Electoral College, and their votes usually determine the winner.
By intentionally continuing to attempt to associate support for trump with a litany of unacceptable -isms that are the guilty burden of being white (men), he exposed the attitude that people are revolting against.
People really, really, really, don't like it when you deny or trivialize their experience. I think it was the final straw that led to the Trump victory.
This is a good thing to touch on, because it very handily demonstrates an area where differing opinions became a crux upon which the election turned. Trump was "on the record" joking around in a manner that, despite Clintonian assertion otherwise, is not at all uncommon, amongst men and women. It is, also despite assertion, not universally accepted that offensive words are equivalent to harmful actions. For instance, although I did not vote for Trump, I will never accept this precept as valid.
The racism and sexism are sort of victims of their own overuse. I've said, unto exhaustion, that fighting sexism with sexism and racism with racism is equivalent to fighting a fire with fuel, but political beliefs state that racism against whites and sexism against males is justified and therefore non-existent, so it gets deployed rampantly. This election is one obvious result.
Or possibly there's just a lot of it around.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/upshot/even-as-hispanics-l...
The parent of my comment was saying that this was abnormal, whereas it is (sadly, perhaps?) quite common in voting.
So apparently he's no more abnormal than McCain and Romney were, to those voters. Or at least they felt their other options this time were a lot worse. Or something. It's hard to draw a hard conclusion from the numbers here.
I don't think a person who's construction job was taken away by an under-the-table worker really cares what color the other person's skin is, the milk and bread he can't afford now leaves the same hole in his pantry.
Same thing for software development offshoring - is it racist for those out-of-work Disney engineers to want their jobs back?
This is a cycle.
I assert that it is probably no longer a factor for the majority of Republican voters.
I think this is the source of the narrative, rightly or wrongly. I don't see any evidence it had anything to do with the Reagan or Bush presidencies.
In my lifetime I didn't see the uptick in overt white supremacy until President Obama took office. I think it is a combination of cyclical liberal excuses and some legitimate labelling.
The more people insist it was racists and sexists behind the vote, the more they miss the point. Part of the Trump vote was reacting sharply to the labeling + ridicule technique.
There are other options. Learn more about why they feel the way they do, understand them. These are (most of our) countrymen, fellow humans at the very least.
Education, understanding, compassion. Not ridicule.
The poll states that 44% of the queried republicans said "No" to the question.
I've never believed that these polls offer wisdom into the mindset of people - they're too reductive and simplistic.
13% think Obama is a Christian. 77% are not sure if he was born in the US.
I agree the "mindset of the people" is more complex than this, and such a belief about Obama may not be the main driver of their voting behavior.
But they are being truthful about saying they believe what they believe, right? They either believe it or they don't. In my eyes this kind of mass susceptibility to conspiracy theories is a huge sociological phenomenon that should be explored.
The fact that the average American knows so little about the political process that they think the president can just tell a corporation where they have to employ people makes my head hurt. Badly.
The message of this election was: just lie to people. Even if there's no factual basis in our known reality to back up your statements, if you tell them what they want to hear they'll believe it. And that's really, really sad. I feel for the people who have lots manufacturing jobs, but the way out of that hole isn't voting for a guy who's going to remove any social safety net you previously had available...
How much did they try to understand Obama voters? Not at all. We got 8 years of racist attacks, "you lie!", and scorched earth tactics. I appreciate your invitation to be magnanimous but I'm not feeling it yet.
His message appealed to people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Yes, it's pretty sad that people were willing to vote for him despite the racism, sexism, and general demeanor. Did many really vote for that, or did they vote to get out of NAFTA and introduce protectionism under the idea that they might get some of their former glory back. They hear MAGA and think back to when Detroit had the highest average income in the country. When Flint didn't have poison in the water. It's about you first, others second. It's a powerful message, one that people who don't support trump seemed to fail to recognize under all the absolutely horrible awful things constantly coming at us.
Compare that to Hillary basically saying "meh, they'll vote for me". How much extra effort would it have taken to keep those 3 states democrat.
Yes, I supposed we could fix that by not complaining about them being racist and sexist.
No attempt at political correctness will ever impact the freedom to believe anything at all, hateful, loving, or totally rational. That freedom is fundamental to being human. It is not granted by any organization and cannot be revoked using any known mechanism, no matter what your opinion on those thoughts.
We don't need code to believe and express that we are free to say hateful things. Even those on the left believe they are free to say hateful things about people on the right. They've simply fooled themselves into believing that feeling justified about that hate means that they aren't being hateful.
Here's a spoiler alert for being human: everyone feels that exact same justification. It is literally meaningless.
Again its not about ism although they play a part. Its about establishment vs anti-establishment. Hillary Clinton was the candidate of international finance and military complex.
Because the prez doesn't actually get a say. Congress sets the budget and the prez is obligated to pay it. If the taxes that congress sets aren't enough to cover it, the prez has to borrow the money. Given that Congress has been controlled by the Republicans for the past... 6?... years, you're barking at the wrong crowd.
Congress is in a sweet spot here, where they can blame the president for the huge debt that is congress's doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
The Dunning-Kruger effect effect is itself an example of Dunning-Kruger effect but given that the Dunning-Kruger effect does not actually exist in general, the Dunning-Kruger effect effect may be the only instance of Dunning-Kruger effect that actually exists.
[0] http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11831408
Here's the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9740748
Canada has a variation on this law.
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-4.5/page-1.html#h-...
Regulations are issued by the executive branch, not Congress (repealing regulations is actually done by issuing regulations specifying the regulations to be repealed, so the process for repeal is the same.)
Also, "a regulation" isn't a well-defined unit.
Sounds like the meaning of the executive's order to 'repeal two for every one new' could be decided within the executive branch, then. And since everyone within the executive branch is responsible to the chief executive … maybe it could even work.
He can certainly try: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/20/365519963/...
In the general case, though, a lot of legislation gives the executive wide discretion as to the details of regulations, and so the president can direct his subordinates to change regulations however he wants, within what the law allows.
E.g. with a budget example the Congress might want to subsidise cantaloupe farms, and budget $100,000,000 for cantaloupe farmers, to be allocated 'as the Secretary of Agriculture may direct.' The president would be within his rights to order the Secretary of Agriculture to only allocate that money to cantaloupe farmers with a total net worth of under $1,000,000, or to give no more than $100,000 to any particular cantaloupe farmer, or (possibly — this one's a stretch) to prioritise farmers of the famed Golden Lucy cantaloupe before all others. But he can't direct that the money be spent on rutabaga farmers.
Similarly, if the Congress writes a law which gives the pertinent executive department some latitude, the President may order that department to exercise that latitude however he likes.
Edit: Also note that in the preamble it specifically says "Canadians and small businesses." This law does not impact, for example, environmental or safety regulations for real estate developers or utilities. Trump will almost certainly try to cut EPA regulations but something like the Canadian law would never allow that.
You're pointing to a proposal (or more succinctly an initiative). Saying it is nothing like an implementation is misleading.
The best thing for everyone would be for market-based solutions that have clear advantages. Solar, wind, electric cars, nuclear, etc.
Republicans, for example, will put solar on their homes and drive electric cars if there are obvious advantages.
Market based solutions only work if the market is fair i.e. all players are subject to the same conditions. The problem is (a) fossil fuels have large subsidies all up/down the chain and (b) fossil fuels do not have a surcharge for their impact on the environment.
You have to play the hand you're dealt, or whine about it, telling everyone how ignorant they are. In another decade, when the Democrats take Presidency or the Senate, maybe you'll get some offsetting charges. Of course, we'll have lost a decade and the problem will be much worse, if no forward progress is made.
Solar hasn't gotten cheap enough that some people really want it: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/las-vegas-utilities-really-don...
There are still numerous opportunities for people to convince Republicans to start believing in climate change and making the energy market fair and equitable to allow renewable technologies to compete. Look at what is happening with solar panels when their subsidies are removed. It's not pretty.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/solar-stocks-tank-and-lead-...
Furthermore, we need cheap clean energy everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels are not going away fast enough.
> Many people don't believe in Global Warming
Just read the comments of any Wall Street Journal article on solar, coal, or even Elon Musk. People don't want electric car rebates or carbon credits.
https://2cco2.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/eric-copt-global-warm...
I don't understand that you even made such entries.
I don't hear anything about the sun when climate change is brought up and it's over 99% of the mass of the solar system. Then you have people talking about feeling how warm it is when we are talking about small changes.
If it was 82 outside and you polled people, you'd get all kinds of results. But suddenly anthro climate pushers are super sensitive thermometers. They talk about weather events when you try to have a climate discussion all the time.
Questioning is science, especially when you can't prove it like the speed of light.
Everything I've seen so far suggests Trump isn't what blue-collar voters ordered for.
As for Congress, we also already have a good fix, we just never got around to passing it. Congressional politics are full of money because the districts are too large, on average. The districts are too large because in the 50 states, with 320 million people, we have only 435 voting members in the House of Representatives.
The solution is more Representatives and smaller districts; when you don't have to run a campaign in multiple expensive markets across a broad area, you don't need as much money (and can get to know your constituents better).
And it turns out... there's a constitutional amendment for that.
Way back in 1789 when Congress met for the first time after the Constitution went into effect, they submitted twelve amendments to the states. Ten of them were ratified quickly and became what we know as the Bill of Rights. The other two were not ratified by enough states, and were mostly forgotten.
Today, it's common for Congress to put a time limit on an amendment, saying it has to be ratified within X years or it's dead. But back then they didn't do that. So in 1992 a random university student discovered one of the two "forgotten" amendments and that it was still legislatively "live" -- it would take effect if enough states ratified them. He campaigned hard and got the amendment (which says any increase in salary for members of Congress doesn't take effect until after the next House election) ratified, as the 27th amendment.
The other one is still sitting out there, and would become part of the Constitution if enough states (currently, 27) would ratify it. And it changes the formula for how many Representatives there are, and how they're apportioned. The original text of the Constitution set a cap on the size of the House of Representatives, at one Representative per 30,000 people. The apportionment amendment would raise that to 1 per 50,000, and the version passed by the Senate would require increasing the number of Representatives as the population of the US grows.
So if you want real change in Congress, campaign to get the House of Representatives enlarged. There's even already an amendment available to help you, if you can get it ratified.
Sounds like a good thing then to filter out non-universally good ideas and a great measure to make it harder to buy politicians. Gov needs to do less, not more.
A minor correction to this fascinating story: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...), Gregory Watson, a UT Austin student, discovered it in 1982. The significance of the year 1992 (in this connection) is that that's when it actually became part of the Constitution.
He's actively seeking suggestions on his transition site.
Share your ideas.
Which is to say if, after electing someone to office, we immediately 1) forgot we voted for them, and 2) became completely unaware of their continuing existence and actions in office only then would elections be truly a sufficient substitute for term limits. Otherwise, given the choice, enough votes will be cast to keep the incumbent in office just because he/she is familiar. The thinking seems to go something like: well, that's the name I recognize, and hey, the world hasn't come to an end in the past few years, so... why not. Let's just keep 'em. Versus this other person who might do all kinds of things I can't foresee and may not like.
I can see arguments for term limits, particularly in positions where the composition of the electorate means the other major party isn't likely to seriously challenge the governing party's preferred candidate (usually the incumbent) which makes their position very safe indeed.
But anti-corruption isn't one of them. Arguably, from a point of view of anti-corruption, the incumbent needs the special interests a lot less than the new challengers...
The challenge of term limits is that they hurt effective politicans the most, so it's always got to be a balancing act.
I am of the opinion that politicians corrupted themselves by selling their ability to shape the laws that govern the country and decide who is punished and who is rewarded.
We must elect trustworthy politicians, we must make it harder for big money to interfere, and we must have faith in our government. It's hard for me to say right now, given our current president-elect, but it's true. There truly is no good alternative to democracy.
"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Speech in the House of Commons (11 November 1947)
Yes.
What kind of system is that?
Self-government[1] and/or a stateless society[2].
There are no examples of 350 million people being governed WITHOUT a government, and for good reasons.
There never is, until the first time. If nobody tried to do things that haven't been done before, there would be no progress.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ~~ George Bernard Shaw
I'm sorry, but that sounds like the kind of thing an edy 18 year old would say.
Please don't do that, this is HN, not Reddit.
I certainly think anarchy could work, if the underlying technological stuffs were the enforcers of equality.
*The book is called "Distress", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_(novel)
Please don't do that. There's no need to smear other sites. Ending the sentence at "Please don't do that." should suffice.
As much as we'd like to believe otherwise, virtually ALL progress is incremental. Technological AND societal.
I'm sorry, why should I feel obligated to give you an example? Like I already said once, there are no examples of something that hasn't been done... yet. So your repeated request for something that isn't required strikes me as kinda pointless.
Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, a jury acquitted the Bundys after they'd occupied a federal building and used threat of lethal force to keep federal authorities from evicting them. If you'll pardon my snark, this is what happens when you turn jurisprudence over to a handful of rednecks.
Along very similar lines, modern-day politicians make decisions affecting (in some cases) millions of lives and trillions of Dollars. The issues they decide on are complex, and ideally we'd want lawmakers to really work at their "trade:" To deeply study the issues and consult competent experts. Our current crop of professional career politicians, some of whom are evolution and warming deniers heading up education and environmental/energy committees are spectacularly failing to live up to this expectation, and there's no good reason to believe a selection of people randomly chosen from the population would do better, on average.
So in my opinion he hasn't demonstrated anything useful.
Promising to never accept special interest money, only to go on to actively seek out and take it a mere months later, proves that it's necessary to win in an election.
You can beat that moneyed system if you happen to be an eccentric billionaire, who happens to have been a household name for decades, who will say anything, racist, misogynistic, hateful, lies and false promises, to get the exposure to get elected despite not paying for it.
Just about anything else and you need money to get exposure, get on television, get yourself in the spotlight. He just didn't happen to have needed money to get exposure, but that's an exception, in exceptional circumstances, and limits potential candidates to those with exceptional media/wealth backgrounds. That's not a model that makes sense to sustain.
And there is a reason for that: "Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the military industrial complex and international finance capital."[1]
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16 [1] http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/09/the-rejection-of-wall...
But he had big money! :)
[1] https://twitter.com/harlanyu/status/165184504527462400/photo...
Of course you provide no reason at all except an unsupported assumption to believe that the size of the completely wrong thing that you cite is an indicator of unnecessary complexity, and the fact that you cite the completely wrong thing is a pretty good sign that you have zero knowledge of the domain from which to form a judgement.
"Read My Lips: no new APIs!"
On top of that, "regulation count" is not a natural category, since one regulation can specify an arbitrary number of things. If you replace A) No smoking and B) no littering with C) No smoking or littering, have you changed anything substantive? You have not.
Regulation complexity, of course, is a natural category, but it's hard to measure before the fact and doesn't lend itself to easily-applied "follow for a guaranteed reduction" rules.
I otherwise agree that the measure is too simple.
Washington D.C. may be where regulators work (though some of that is outside the District), but regulators are a very small share of the population. The vote in D.C. has little to do with regulators (it has a lot more to do with race, but even saying it was solely about that would be oversimplifying.)
Check who the Trump campaign says is going to be leading the switchover of the EPA. I think I know where most of the slashed regulations are going to come from.
The perception is that all these "horrible" duplications and inefficiencies exist.
The reality is that the duplications are actually slightly different business cases that are are difficult or impossible to generalize (it was easier to copy/mutate) and that seemingly irrelevant code has potentially far reaching and damaging consequences (oh, that was important?)
The essential problem is that we look at these individual lines of code instead of realizing that they grew as part of a dynamic system.
Refactoring code isn't a good analogy.
Try refactoring DNA.
It becomes quite tragic (or hilarious) when teams try to simplify such systems and instead end up breaking lots of business process that was ugly, but worked.
DNA/evolution is orders of magnitude more messy than that, but it gets things done more safely and efficiently than some refactoring efforts I've seen.
And his program is not only term-limits. mostly going after the criminals and clean up the mess. They should be worried, and are already crying.
Should be doable even with the press witchhunting him and later with the antiliberal nonsense he will come up to please his voter base.
The reason is because it's much much harder to repeal laws than to add new ones, so they tend to increase over time. Regulation bloats.
Not random selection, of course, but better than nothing.
Now you like LGBT, in 50 years you will kill them.
Same with many things.
The problem is that you do all this things to the world. And poor world must bend to your changing mind.
USA, keep this mind-changing insanity to yourself, ok?
Just so we're clear, 50-80 years ago I wasn't alive. ;)
But if you insist on doing things this way, you could make this sort of case about all sorts of countries:
"50-80 years ago, you were killing Jews in Europe; now you're not and are so happy about it." Well, except not everyone is happy, of course.
"50-80 years ago, you Japanese were enslaving people in countries around yours, now you're not and are so happy about it."
"25 years ago, you Swiss wouldn't let your women vote in elections in your canton, now you do and are so happy about." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appenzell_Innerrhoden#Women.27...
> Now you doing opposite and are so happy with it.
I dunno about _happy_. There are a bunch of people not happy with marijuana legalization, and a bunch more who are not terribly happy with it but are even less happy with the state of things.
Just like there were people who were not happy to end alcohol prohibition, but were even less happy with the state of things when prohibition was in effect.
> Now you like LGBT, in 50 years you will kill them.
Just like the Swiss will repeal women's suffrage and various countries in Europe will go back to murdering Jews, right?
Or perhaps, just possibly, that might not happen? Maybe?
> The problem is that you do all this things to the world.
Really? How, exactly, is "the world" affected by the legality or not of marijuana in the US? There's some interaction with our immediate neighbors due to attempts to eliminate smuggling operations, but other than that, what is this doing to "the world"?
>Really? How, exactly, is "the world" affected by the legality or not of marijuana in the US?
It's simple. CA accepts -> other states accept because they look after CA & NY & TX -> UK accepts because in such things they look after USA -> EU accepts because in such things they do what USA & UK do -> Russia accepts because in such things they do what EU do (yes, it is true).
5-10 years for each step.
I really fail to see how this is the "fault" of the US. This is literally one of the first things children are taught: "if all your friends went and jumped off a tall building, that doesn't mean _you_ have to", etc.
In practice, different places may want different approaches for legalization or not of such things, because of cultural or demographic differences. And that's perfectly OK, though may cause friction at borders.
IMO this is the best thing in there. The burden of complex legislation is incredible, and there are tens of thousands of pages that could be simplified and/or removed entirely. It'd be a very long time before we ran out of stuff to prune and the benefits of doing this would be enormous.
It's hard to overstate the benefits of individuals being able to actually comprehend the legal areas in which they operate.
Are "regulations" strictly countable? It sounds like trying to minimize the number of lines (or characters) in a code base. Fewer lines (or characters) doesn't mean it will be more readable.
So we want to add new regulation A. We have removed regulation B and C. Purely by coincidence the new regulation A is roughly the same length as A, B and C combined. But its one regulation.
You can view the text of proposed and implemented regulations in the Federal Register: https://www.federalregister.gov/ particularly under the Proposed Rules and Rules listings.
A rule will add to/amend/repeal some part of the Code of Federal Regulations. This can be anything from clarifying a few words or fixing drafting issues to implementing major regulatory changes.
It doesn't seem clear to me what this proposal would impact--does a minor amendment to an existing paragraph require a repeal of existing regulations? Would it need to meet some threshold of increasing regulatory burden--how would that be determined? What if it decreased burden?
You can look through daily issues and see that they tend to just be handling the daily business of the government. Today's includes changes to fishing zones (restoring access to an area that had been overfished a few years ago), adding more airworthiness checks to certain aircraft parts, reducing restrictions on certain tires for trailers, and adding restrictions against financial institutions processing transactions involving North Korea.
Would each of those need to repeal two prior regulations to take effect? What would quantify a previous regulation? And would they all be able to?
Why would you vote for an amateur politician instead of a professional career politician?
Aren't career politicians better than amateur politicians? If a politician is doing a good job, why would you artificially limit their term?
The branch of government with the highest approval rate is the Judicial branch, where Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life.
Another proposal which could have a similar effect would be to drastically increase the number of representatives so that each one represents a smaller number of people (say 50,000). Having many more reps would reduces the individual power and influence of any one rep in particular and could dissuade them from acting in their own best interest.
The assumption, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily wrong, is that "career politician" is undesirable. How about getting rid of "career software developers"? Get rid of those entrenched JavaScript devs that are only interested in feathering their own nests. "Career doctors"? The medical profession is really just a business, and it should be treated like one. Next time you break a limb, seek out an MBA instead.
Point is, the more I've been involved in politics (including running for office) the more I realize that you're not just going to march in on the first day and get stuff done. Kind of like that first day with that new codebase, eh? Now, I don't know that one out to be "Congress critter for life", but you don't just waltz in an go "my constituents want $THIS" and expect it to just happen. So a little experience might go further than electing the "outsider" who isn't "beholden to special interests".
"Career politicians" and term limits are an easy thing to point to that don't actually deal with the problem which in my mind has more to do with each individual representative carrying too much importance because there are so few of them. Also one person cannot reasonably represent the views of 1M constituents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_H...
I don't see how that follows. Wouldn't the limit encourage a congressional rep to cravenly maximize whatever personal benefits they can once they're in their final term? They don't need to fear re-election.
I defer to actual political experts to discuss the proposed solution and its nuances.
Terms limit worsen the revolving door, because the reps focus more on their next job than actually legislating. They become incredibly short term sighted.
The real fix would be to outright ban gerrymandering and force the officials to have to represent a mixture of political views.
Sadly, that quickly leads to huge compendiums of regulations covering a lot rather than neatly organized reasonably scoped regulations.
I'd read this more as a position and statement of intent than a concrete plan. The devil will be in the spirit of the execution, not the letter.
Term limits for State congressional representatives seems not to have accomplished that though: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/01/16/states-sho...
>regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is
>that considered feasible by any rational person? It might
>sound great if you don't think too hard about it.
I think that's the reason Trump becomes president of the US. It may sound ridiculous to you but he is 100% correct with that point. Everybody knows that there are too many government regulations, people across the whole political spectrum agree on that.
And although I'm from Germany, I can tell you rules that can be removed. For instance rules that require you to own a gun in certain counties, there are other actually ridiculous rules. There are YouTube videos about that and as a matter of fact these rules are not enforced.
We need to relax our constrained thinking to start modernizing outdated structures. It's sad that Donald Trump must do this job.
I've investigated the same complaint for EU law and all you can find is bizarre propaganda making ridiculous claims in bad faith – they make the regs sound absurd, but you can find out the real purpose within half a minute of googling.
Famous example: requiring Cucumbers (bananas etc.) to conform to a certain shape, including curvature for different quality grades. Reasoning: the retail industry wanted it (they couldn't agree on a common standard), it helps trade by establishing standard grades. It's also been repealed as a result of the populist pressure, but by then everyone had been using it and they just continued.
The thing is this: most laws were invented with good intentions and reasoning behind. But that doesn't mean they thought well enough about them.
But they don't agree on which ones should be removed. It's why "everybody knows" Congress is terrible but they keep getting re-elected. It's because everyone likes their representatives but hate all the others.
So they might want to start a program for that. Or they could start with one type of laws.
>It's why "everybody knows" Congress is terrible but they
>keep getting re-elected.
What would be the alternative? No Congress? ;) I mean it's there and it should certainly be improved.
> It's because everyone likes their representatives but hate all the others.
It seems so in the US, but in Europe there is also a trend towards this highly polarized direction. I hope people would take things easier and maybe try to understand the other politicians as well. For instance one could watch both CNN and Fownews. ;)
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/19-ridiculous-federal-cr...
I love my party, but in my district, my party's primary is the only election with a meaningful impact on anything. And my party has this district, in order to keep us from ever gaining a majority of our state's legislative caucus.
To drain the swamp, restore democracy. Any effort to decrease voter participation is inherently corrupting. Make it easier to vote. Make sure everybody's vote is counted equally. Of course, "counted equally" should be a matter of debate. Get rid of gerrymandering. Get rid of the electoral college.
And some of them are frightening. Frightening enough to make me want to steer clear, but the DNC did not put forward a candidate that made me feel any better. Calling for a Manhattan project to defeat encryption? Yikes.
America lost this election long before November, I'm sure of that.
The limits create a constantly revolving legislature that is easier to manipulate and will in general do a poorer job. If he really cared, we'd see something on campaign finance reform; but alas, he doesn't actually want to get money out of politics.
Very "rational" non-arguments. You must have thought hard about it to come up with those.
Wouldn't pass in a million years. Why would congress pass such a law against themselves? And as a constitutional amendment, it would require a 2/3rds majority.
Any Republican member of congress who goes against that is going against a core part of his platform.
Many fervent Trump supporters, including a number of influential ones on social media have stated that any elected Republican that doesn't support Trump's platform will see a challenge from a pro-Trump candidate in the 2018 mid-terms. It will likely be the end of them if they don't go along with it.
I can't imagine many Democratic voters will be happy if their representatives vote against an anti-corruption measure. Especially considering DNC corruptions and cronyism essentially cost them the election.
Trump is the social media president. I'm confident he'll be able to get support for this from the electorate.
Re the point of reducing regulation, Larry page actually recommended a variation of this to the president of South Korea to reduce legal complexity of its government:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/07...
"Reducing complexity, in fact, was a theme throughout the talk. Page recounted how when he was trying to simplify things at Google, he suggested the company take all of its rules and regulations and keep them at an easy-to-digest 50 pages. He even suggested a similar idea to the president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye. "I said, 'Hey, why don't you just limit your laws and regulations to some set of pages? And when you add a page, you have to take one away.' She actually wrote this down. She's great."
This is as stupid as having the president of South Korea say, "You should keep the code to Google to a page and half. It would make it easier to understand."
Seriously, this makes no sense beyond claptrap. Why 50 pages? Why not 1? Why not 5 million? Why an arbitrary limit at all? The whole idea hinges on the idea that somehow this is obvious and an intrinsic good. It's not. It's not even a metric worth optimizing for, because it has zero concern about actual societal effects.
It probably could have been worded plainly instead of adding a conditional. Federal laws should be considered in their own right, not in comparison towards other federal laws.
Wanton numerological regulation slashers should be wary of Chesterton's Fence[1].
On the scale of meaningfulness, this idea is somewhere between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and middle school kids playing with margins, spacing, and font size to satisfy a teacher's page-length requirement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus
Complexity is one thing (although it should be obvious that complex domains often require complex descriptions). But number is arbitrary.
Suppose there exists a set of three distinct regulations regarding ways to safely manufacture a drug, and a dangerous new process is invented for which there is wide consensus that a new regulation is required. Which two of those first three should be discarded? Must every new regulation be weighed in arbitrary relative value against every other possible combination of two regulations in that subject matter area? That department? The country? By reductio ad absurdum, the cut-two-to-add-one rule means that the ultimately correct number of regulations is one. And if it's not one, then there must be some higher "correct" number of regulations at which point the subtraction rule would no longer apply.
Your argument seems to be "whatever that number is, surely it's lower than what we have now". How is that number decided and by whom? Subject matter experts? Voters weighing ballot options written by government officials? Does the number somehow fall or rise to make room for new needs judged important enough? If so, by whom? Is one complex regulation better than ten simple ones? Are ten simple ones more "corrupt" than one complex one?
Unfortunately there's no obvious way to apply a tree-shaking algorithm to the full body of regulations, other than to have humans look at a rule and all agree that the "blue dress on Sundays during harvest" rule can be scrapped. And Chesterton's fence makes many of those judgments risky. So now we're back at politics.
There's a lot of big industry rich people who would love less regulation.
Squeeze the SMB and make it harder for new business to enter and survive in the market.
If you make a habit of making regulations long and multifaceted because scope to pass new ones is limited, it probably becomes easier to bury terrible ideas in amongst things people actually really want to pass.
Sure, but the priority order should be: complexity,length,number.
Simply concatenating 50 regulations into one super-regulation is not a win.
I think that, of these three, reducing complexity is the only one to which we should directly aspire; reducing the length and number of regulations is, I think, helpful only to the extent that it reduces, or at least doesn't increase, complexity.
Much like with code really. Your cleve 2 line function is really clever, but most of the time the easy to read 30 lines and 3 function version if probably better.
While the "+1 minus two guideline" has plenty of shortcomings in the long term, there is lots of low hanging fruit now, and it's an important mindset shift.
Guys, don't just add LOC. Refactor, clean it up and make it better. Remove blocks we don't use anymore.
The repeal of pointless old laws comes up relatively often here in the UK. Some of our laws are really old - the government was talking about repealing some that were passed almost 750 years ago recently http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30334812
That is exactly why all laws should have sunset rules built into them.
We should have listened to Thomas Jefferson who wanted all laws, even the constitution itself to expire every 19 years
But also, spending that time cleaning up old laws sounds an awful lot like "doing something useful that will actually impact people's lives".
As a very rough guide. Replacing one big function with two smaller functions is often better than replacing two small functions with one big one.
I ran into problems along those lines in the UK buying some stuff in Spain. Apparently "don't money launder" translates in to a 1 ft high stack of EU regulations that no one understands. I'm not convinced they are hugely better than the three word version.
It's easy to game. Now every new regulation is as big as two old regulations.
Doesn't sound that ridiculous to me, we have to find a way to eliminate useless/ridiculous regulations because they just pile on...
Its going to require an amendment to the constitution (which takes decades) and from experience a newbie MP Congress man etc will need one entire cycle to get to grips with the system and become effective.
Having inexperienced elected representatives just gives more power to the executive - which is not what I think Trump wanted.
The Gingrich Revolution was founded on term limits, and yet here we are.
"Additional shale/gas" makes no sense at least now because of market conditions. There's an untold huge level of zero-coupon debt hanging because of the last shale revolution. It does nothing to help use market discipline to wean us off hydrocarbons, but it might still be the "bridge fuel" even green people were touting ten years ago.
Myself, I think there was epistemic closure against any hydrocarbon activity in the chattering classes a few years back. This will make the compromises necessary to navigate emerging alt. technology more difficult.
Term limits are one of those things that Americans always expect to be good before they are implemented, but never actually are more satisfied with the affected institution after they are implemented. They attack a boogeyman (the "career politician" that is supposedly worse than the neophyte politician) that many politicians attack at the start of their careers (and many later, trying to construct themsleves.as outsiders) so often that people have internalized the idea that experience is a negative trait in governing.
We will exactly be heading in the wrong directions. One regulations for rich Republicans and remove 2 regulations protecting poor minorities.
"The public sector grew during Mr. Carter's term (up 1,304,000), during Mr. Reagan's terms (up 1,414,000), during Mr. G.H.W. Bush's term (up 1,127,000), during Mr. Clinton's terms (up 1,934,000), and during Mr. G.W. Bush's terms (up 1,744,000 jobs).
However the public sector has declined significantly since Mr. Obama took office (down 668,000 jobs). These job losses have mostly been at the state and local level, but more recently at the Federal level. This has been a significant drag on overall employment." [1]
I'll be surprised if he gets half these things done in the next 4 yrs, though most are so vague it's not clear what 'done' would mean.
[1] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/10/public-and-private...
I'm not sure what the breakdown of "more recently at the Federal level" is, but it doesn't sound very pro-Obama in terms of your argument, particularly since Trump is talking about the Federal government.
One of the primary argument against the federal government is the disconnect from local needs but most of the money is tied to federal mandates anyway (for example, the feds threatened road infrastructure funding to get the last few states to pass the 21 year alcohol age limit and DOE funding is tied to CORE). As a result the state/federal distinction isn't very precise.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/California_state_budget_and_finances
California is actually one of the lowest (42nd). The irony is that states where people vote for small government and lower taxes tend to receive a larger share per capita of federal money.
I think you're trying to make it seem higher than it is. Per your link, it's 25%.
This is going to help the middle class and the uneducated who are struggling through... magic. None of the lobbying stuff will ever see the light of day. The term limits won't happen. He's going to repeal the "illegal" Obama executive orders but leave the Bush ones in place because... they're illegal but he likes them?
The immigration thing will happen and result in massive backlash if I had to guess. None of the reforms will ever happen because he doesn't have the power to enact any of it, and the Republicans are NEVER going to agree to that when they're currently in power. His justice choice will never in a million years overturn Citizens United which is literally the only affect he could have on political corruption.
He's basically Oprah with tax cuts. Kidding aside, I think all politicians promise wide tax cuts, and this "contract" was written prior to him winning. So take most with a grain of salt.
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure how our taxes could change for various income levels for married joint filers. This does not factor in any deductions.
Nobody is getting a 35% tax cut. Tax rate for middle-class families will go down by around 1% only, and taxes will go up for low-income families by 2%. Single tax filers will also see an increase in taxes.
The biggest tax cuts will actually go the highest income earners, tax rate will go down by 6.42% for someone who makes $10 million. Maybe that is what Trump calls the middle-class?
Trump's proposed tax brackets vs current brackets
$18,000 Current: $1,800 (10%) Trump: $2,160 (12%) Change: + $360 (2%)
$36,000 Current: $4,472 (12.42%) Trump: $4,320 (12%) Change: - $152 (0.42%)
$75,000 Current: $10,322 (13.76%) Trump: $9,000 (12%) Change: - $1,322 (1.76%)
$120,000 Current: $21,542 (17.95%) Trump: $20,250 (16.87%) Change: - $1,292 (1.08%)
$250,000 Current: $57,913 (23.16%) Trump: $45,750 (18.3%) Change: - $12,163 (4.86%)
$500,000 Current: $143,665 (28.73%) Trump: $11,1750 (22.35%) Change: - $31,915 (6.38%)
$1 million Current: $341,666 (34.16%) Trump: $293,250 (29.32%) Change: - $48,416 (4.84%)
$10 million Current: $3,905,666 (39.05%) Trump: $3,263,250 (32.63%) Change: - $642,416 (6.42%)
The people hit hardest by "tax the wealthy" politicians are folks making large salaries (engineers, doctors, lawyers...). The mega-wealthy like Mark Zuckerberg make $1 a year in salary. If you really want to go after the wealthy, you need to tax wealth, not ordinary income and go after the complexity of the tax code.
Trump has promised several more yuuge tax breaks and loopholes to wealthy:
- Repeal alternative minimum tax
- Repeal estate tax
- Reduce capital gains tax
- Reduce business tax rate to 15% eliminate the corporate alternative minimum tax.
A wealthy individual could just make an LLC, and funnel all his money into it and enjoy the 15% tax rate while working folks pay regular income tax of 33%.
- It causes wealth to consume it's own base, depreciating all assets faster even in lieu of inflation
- It disproportionately punishes seniors, who are asset rich and income poor.
- It encourages the wealthy to move and hide assets offshore just like they do with income.
- Double taxation: Wealth is already taxed when it is created
- Punishes asset rich, low income businesses like grocery stores, farms, etc.
Secondly, you're forgetting standard deductions. It's $12,600 today; the Trump plan is to raise it to $30,000. So it would actually be:
$36,000 Current: $2,582 (7.2%) Trump: $720 (2.1%) $75,000 Current: $8,433 (11.2%) Trump: $4,200 (5.6%) etc…
(I hate the guy and don't think this tax plan is a terribly great idea, but the math above is wrong)
This is what I have the biggest problem with. The ONLY WAY we are going to continue making progress towards widespread clean renewable energy is if it is financially beneficial for corporations to continue investing in R&D. Sure, there are some outliers that will stick with it on principal, but the majority will go where the money is. Cheaper fossil fuels == less investment in renewable energy. Period. This is bad timing given the critical point we are at (so far as we know) regarding climate change.
This is pure short-sightedness motivated by the desire to deliver on his promise of creating jobs.
Even without subsidies or other incentives, I just can't see where the demand comes from to drive significant oil supply increases. I'm genuinely curious what the restrictions are that are throttling our energy industry.
"Environmental regulation". Who needs clean air or water. Superfunds Sites are cheap to clean up right?
Very interesting thought regarding local regulations; hadn't considered something like that at a federal level. It does also occur to me that this could just be a convenient way to make the opening up of large amounts of protected lands more palatable to the general public.
The late Professor McKay (whose book on information theory and ML is neat by the way) published a great book full of climate back of the envelope calculations, Whithout the Hot Air, which is available online[1]. He clearly disagrees with this statement, as seen in the recap figure on page 103[2].
"This theoretical potential represents more energy striking the earth’s surface in one and a half hours (480 EJ) than worldwide energy consumption in the year 2001 from all sources combined (430 EJ)."
Not back of envelope. Energy calculations worked through.
Asking for a friend.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-solar-panels-to-pow...
EDIT: Solar is a better investment than the S&P500. If US corporations were looking for some place to invest those trillions of dollars they won't repatriate [1], seems like renewables would be a perfect fit.
"Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home.
Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.10 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations. The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles."
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/u-s-compan...
The average coal miner salary is ~$22/hr, or ~$42k/year. 174,000 coal workers in the US @ $31,668k/year (the max SS benefit permitted) = $5.5 billion/year. This is not expensive, nor in perpetuity, only the years from now until they would've hit their full retirement age regardless, not to mention the cost savings from drug addiction and other social negatives currently occurring from the industry collapsing (please, please, please take the 2 minutes to read this footnote) [1].
People should not be harmed by our transition to renewables, and it is laughable that we can't afford to take care of those no longer employed within the economy.
This is not unprecedented. The shipping industry used redundancy payments to transition longshoremen out of the workforce when containerization exploded, funded by profits from the efficiency gains of containerization. I'm simply arguing for the formalization of the process, and administration through the Social Security Administration (one of the most efficient orgs in the US government).
To be clear: I am essentially advocating a bridge basic income for these workers. Not subsidies, not incentives. You quit your job at the coal mine or coal generator today, and you're retired from the coal industry.
EDIT: @derekdahmer & @ArkyBeagle: I'm not requiring someone to retire if they don't want to. I'm simply ensuring they don't fall into poverty. What more can be done when your job is destroying the environment? Allow it to continue? That is unacceptable. I'm not proposing welfare, I'm proposing financial freedom to explore other options to find purpose and self actualize.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/07/us/drug-overdo...
and it is laughable that we can't afford to take care of those no longer employed within the economy
e: the salary info wasn't in the comment when I replied.
Social security safety net is better than 0, which is where coal is going to regardless, no matter how much we attempt to prop it up. Can't compete against fuels with zero marginal cost. Every coal company in the US is currently bankrupt.
I am open to better ideas if you have them. My proposal removes coal-fired generation and provides for workers at the same time, affordably.
Your solution doesn't provide for the workers. I'm sure you're sincere, but a handout from the government is not perceived as a substitute for challenging, meaningful, and respectable work. Basic income proposals don't generally seem to consider pride, other than what I see as nebulous handwaving about how one would be free to pursue their dreams. What dreams are there in coal country when there is no coal? I don't see BI alone as helping to sustain or resurrect a community and associated way of life whose primary industry is one you've eliminated.
It's about identity. Free money can keep you fed but it can't give you a sense of pride and self worth.
If someone's job is their identity, and their job harms others, what are some other possible solutions? (Retraining runs into similar issues as you mentioned -- coal miners don't want to become keyboard jockeys, they want their sense of pride and self worth for doing the profession they trained for.)
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-03/from-coal...
They just want to grandstand about it.
That right there is pretty much the issue. We could take china's approach and specifically limit the use of heavy equipment to X hours per day, requiring everything else to be done by hand. But that's stupid pointless makework, that takes longer and costs more.
With free money, maybe some people learn a trade, start a band, write a book. Send people to school and maybe we get some value back in 5-10 years.
I understand that people want to take a job on the line at the plant, just like dad did. Well, tough. The world isn't like that anymore.
Policies might "encourage" Apple to do it's manufacturing in the U.S. A U.S. iphone factory would employ about 15 people. the security team that keeps people away from the machines.
The way to stop feeling useless is to stop being useless. Don't want money to help figure out what you can do? Well, ok, best of luck.
edit
This may come off as mean, bitter, heartless, uncaring, vile , reprehensible and whatever other adjectives you want to throw in.
Small towns are dying because there's not much reason to be there. We can subsidize them in a bunch of ways, but it's still just welfare.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. And they vote for someone who is going to give them a job.
"Tough" doesn't (didn't) cut it.
Rural areas are coping with exploding rates of meth, heroin, and opioid abuse, and a lot of that is directly caused by the absolutely shit quality of life they all have.
You're far from the first liberal to regard rural people with contempt, and that's a big part of why we now have President Trump to contend with.
Maybe it's time to start taking other people's problems a little more seriously.
But the writing was on the wall back then. There's like 4 jobs in the country where horseback riding is useful. It's nothing more than an expensive hobby for the well off.
> The obvious rebuttal to this is that those small towns now control the government.
No, not even remotely. A billionaire city slicker controls the government.
> Maybe it's time to start taking other people's problems a little more seriously.
Eh, maybe. I don't think we need to make it so damn hard for people to get ahead, or even have a chance. But, of course, my guy lost. But maybe not. No election coming up, all there is for me to do is figure out how big my tax cut is going to be, and figure out where that goes in the IRA.
No tariff is going to make my home town thrive. There are no jobs there.
I can't help but think of the duke:
Devlin: I don't know what to say. Never begged before. Turned my stomach. I suppose I should have been grateful that you gave me the job.
McLintock: Gave? Boy, you've got it all wrong. I don't give jobs I hire men.
Drago: You intend to give this man a full day's work, don'tcha boy?
Devlin Warren: You mean you're still hirin' me? Well, yes, sir, I certainly deliver a fair day's work.
McLintock: And for that I'll pay you a fair day's wage. You won't give me anything and I won't give you anything. We both hold up our heads.
But when i tell old friends from high school to come where the work is, they just shake their heads.
My friends that are too fucking hard headed to figure out something better than drinking and bellyaching. Go back to school? Learn a new trade? fuck no.
I'll help people learn to be useful, but i'm not interested in paying someone to make saddles. Sure, it's fun. Turns out they're just not good enough at it to earn a living doing it. Do fucking something else, and make saddles as a fucking hobby. Be a goddamn grownup.
As a, as you put it, "liberal that regards rural people with contempt", i think these three things would improve things for lots of people.
1. Pay police well. Like, double it, and hold police to very high standards. 2. Pay teachers well. Like, double it, and hold teachers to very high standards. 3. Tie tax rates for businesses to local economies. The worse the economy, the bigger the break, the smaller the business, the bigger the break.
But again, i'm a contemptuous liberal that just got told i'm full of shit.
So, seriously, what the fuck am i supposed to do? "take problems seriously?" that's a bullshit rhetorical jab that contains zero useful information.
As an adult, I find it really difficult to care about their problems at all. However, the fact is, unless we do show compassion and take their issues seriously, the current situation will only get worse.
People LOVE welfare as long as you don't call it welfare or give it to someone else. It's those other people that don't deserve it.
FWIW, this is how Trump voters are made. And at least in the U.S., the coal industry looks done.
Even if we doubled or tripled coal production, local economies in coal country would still be limping. It’s not like executives/stockholders of coal companies are dumping all their profits back into the local economy.
As a country/world we’d be better off paying former coal workers a living wage indefinitely, no strings attached, for nothing in return but keeping the coal in the ground.
The US already employs more people in the solar industry than the coal industry. We could conceivably make a policy like big federal wage subsidies to renewable companies willing to relocate to West Virginia or wherever.
Same story with the steel industry, auto industry, textile industry, etc., in other parts of the country.
And of course the coal companies are still willing to throw lots of money at lobbying, which buys a lot of influence among local politicians.
> We could conceivably make a policy like big federal wage subsidies to renewable companies willing to relocate to West Virginia or wherever
I wonder if the renewables need the labor? If so, I can see that working. If not, then really the only problem is how to handle political dissatisfaction in the short term, and (perhaps) thus our election today.
You can't discount pride. You can't discount being trained and good at a difficult job, and proud at being the one who does it. Money from the government doesn't replace that in the hierarchy of needs. And job retraining is tough when you're 40+.
And the paychecks it generates aren't really enough to justify even just the local impacts to health and the environment.
I guess from many perspectives that is a lot of jobs, but it isn't that many jobs.
1) Coal was already in decline in the 90s. This isn't a government problem. This is a supply & demand problem. The demand for coal has declined. 2) Automation has drastically reduced the number of miners needed to actually operate a single mine. The # of jobs needed simply will not materialize. 3) Coal is losing the competition to alternative energy sources. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/wind-and-s... ) 4) China has been operating at excess production capacity already (http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-coal-plant-binge-deepens-... )
This is a problem of a group of people failing to come to terms with the harsh realities of a capitalistic system. While their local and national leaders (I'm looking at you, McConnell) continually tell them that coal can be 'brought back'. It can't. Many of the same leaders know the truth, but to lie to the people is politically advantageous for them.
Four years from now Appalachian coal towns will be in worse shape, and even more pissed off. They need leaders that actually respect them to tell them the truth.
That said, I don't have any illusion that the future isn't bleak in coal country. My extended family has become substantially poorer over the last two decades -- from middle class to poverty. Still, we're working with what we've got. Every job created changes a life. At the very least it can be a bridge toward more opportunity -- that McConnell funded job was for me.
Our people will probably never become well off, but I still hold out hope that we might be able to get by without deracinating.
The question I think is more important is not whether jobs will be good for Appalachia though (obviously they will do some direct good), it is whether the good that comes out of those jobs is at all in proportion with the harm from expanding our use of coal. It likely is not, the harm will be much greater.
In fact, in 5-10 minutes of specifically looking at the topic I still don't see why you're mocking the concept.
We get energy from coal by burning it then extracting some of the heat. The waste products are basically carbon dioxide and heat.
Clean coal is about capturing that carbon dioxide, which means spending energy to separate the CO2 from other gasses, then liquefy it.
This sequestration process costs about 30% of the energy originally extracted from the coal.
I fully support clean coal since it increases the price of coal fired electricity, meaning coal plants will become uneconomical sooner.
"The current episode of global warming is attributed to increasing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere. " - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
Also in the first few lines of wikipedia you will see that C02 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere. This small percentage has huge effects.
But the real problem is the carbon, which when burned produces CO2. If you take the carbon out of coal, you don't have coal anymore.
The only way that Clean Coal will work is by applying massive subsidies.
I, for one, support these massive subsidies as long as they are applied by MWh produced and are available to all producers, not just the coal burners.
Whether that's a commercially viable amount or not, I have no idea. And your last point, I agree with. We should certainly make the coal industry include externalities in their price as much as feasible, making for a (more) fair energy market.
No, we should mock people for entertaining the idea and being unable to muster enough knowledge and reason to start being very skeptical. It's basically the same sort of estimation that happens when watching Shark Tank and wondering, "Well, that's a nifty product. What are the margins?" Basic Thermodynamics isn't too far off from accounting. There's a big difference between "works technically, in theory" and "would it work in the real world?" Essentially, you're saying it's okay that people can spout basic science, but still can't apply it in their actual lives in a market economy. Shouldn't that be the lower bar?
I'm saying that the idea is completely compatible with science, and at a cursory inspection seems like a completely viable solution. There's no education problem involved in at least discussing it.
Is coal at ~70% efficiency a better solution than nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc.? I'm not sure, but that is sure as hell not snake oil.
If it takes you 30% of the initial energy to get to the heat->electricity phase, then the heat->electricity phase receives 70% of the initial energy. From that point, a 35% efficient transfer means 24.5% efficiency from the initial energy.
Liquid CO2 boils away (solid CO2, i.e. "dry ice" sublimates) as it cools, so it'll still be released into the atmosphere.
http://www.iea-coal.org.uk/site/2010/blog-section/blog-posts...?
My issue with the coal industry is they pushed back on any sort of regulation for 30yrs instead of innovating.
Imagine what they could have done if they had invested in clean coal technology in the mining areas of the US.
Instead, they are now complaining because they got lazy and solar and wind capitalized on their inability to get the job done.
Until you get into the particulars of burning coal and CO2 capture with feasible equipment (which aren't simple), for all you know the loss is 0.1%
This tells me nothing about economic viability - for a while the solar panel efficiency was rated in single digit percentages, and even today it's low double digits.
With that 30% waste incorporated what is my final cost of a kWh produced by an electric plant that's running 100% on clean coal?
The average US citizen probably knows that burning carbon-based fuels re-forms molecular bonds, in such a way that the resulting stuff (CO2 and water) embodies much lower energy. Just start applying that concept to the notion of capturing that carbon. The result is that you're going to wind up with a lot less usable energy, or that the stuff you wind up combining the carbon with embodies even less energy than the oxygen. But since coal is already one of the cheapest chemical fuels around, what in the world will that be?
In other words: Basic Thermodynamics. Unfortunately it's true: The average US citizen doesn't know enough basic thermodynamics to rule out obvious boondoggles. That's about the level of gullibility of a 19th century person who buys snake oil.
> the result is you're going to wind up with a lot less usable energy
Nothing in those "basic thermodynamics" conclusions, which I agree are obviously true, implies that it's commercially nonviable. Yes, it will by necessity be more expensive than dirty coal. Will it be more expensive than anything else? I'm not sure. It would require advanced knowledge of sequestering methods and the energy market. Certainly more than basic thermodynamics.
To be honest, you're the one making the mistake here by assigning "clean coal" to being snake oil with only basic thermodynamics in play. Without more knowledge than that, there's no reason it couldn't be the most viable clean energy option.
The important thing is: dollar-for-dollar, retrofitting is more effective than replacing.
The problem is that we HAD energy independence when we discovered oil in the Bakken Peninsula and what happened? Our fearless leaders who wanted to be energy independent had a great chance to tell OPEC to go screw themselves and what happened?
They let them go to war with OPEC. We lost jobs, oil companies shut down in droves as the race to the bottom happened. OPEC said it wanted to put them out of business and for the most part, the people in Washington talking big about energy independence let it happen.
I have no faith they will ever keep their word. We had a wonderful opportunity and they let OPEC drive our companies out of business and cost that region thousands of jobs. And in the process, drive up the cost of oil as well.
Unless of course you want to play some other game altogether.
> THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.
Is scariest to me given a Republican controlled Congress. The one sided control makes me nervous.
Of course, doing that is a much, much bigger job than I think Trump realizes.
0. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI0OTg
are the 2 most scary things on that first page. I really like his limitations on lobbying though. I hope they aren't too ham-fisted and easy to get around.
Subsequent generations will have to pay back the principal on this loan, with interest. And we will lose our opportunity to carve out a leadership position in the energy technologies of the 21st century, as well.
Now, certain people might be able to sidle into energy but it'll be pretty rough going.
I was simply trying to buck up '80s-'90s era control systems to stop breaking things and this was perceived as "they're takin' 'er jerbs." Nothing was understood. My interpretation is that there is considerable willful ignorance of how technology might be used in that sector that will never be broken. You're threatening people's identity if you do.
Just thorough testing ( at least to my lights what is thorough - I have 30+ years safety-and-life-crticial realtime embedded experience) was seen with a jaundiced eye. A "real oil guy" does it on a laptop on the jobsite.
The rest of your post is spot on. However, at least natural gas will be deadly cheap for the forseeable future. We had one project to try to capture flare gas, but it cost (much) more than the captured gas will ever be worth.
I don't think it only affects the existing members of the energy sector. Given the necessary financial motivation, there is a realistic opportunity for new competition in the renewable energy market rather than only relying on existing stablished companies to shift focus. Even if a group wants to move in to the renewable energy market on principal, funding will be a lot harder to come by with super cheap fossil fuel prices since investors (who are also motivated by money) won't see as much potential for short term profits.
I don't know if that's inherent to that market or just a temporary phenomenon. If it is inherent, then that makes for a barrier to entry.
We might as well have a nice economy while the world burns. There is no stopping this train.
Not if the tax is on removing it from the ground to begin with. And we could issue sanctions on anyone who doesn't impose the same tax in their own country.
There are two ways out of tragedy of the commons. The first is that everyone recognizes we're all better off not destroying the world with CO2 and everyone stops burning coal. That works perfectly fine if that's what everyone does.
But if you'll notice the comment I was responding to was arguing that not everybody would. Which is possible. In which case only the second option works, which is for the victims of harm to exert power until the perpetrators submit. And that can lead to war -- which is why everyone should stop burning coal now.
The attack on Pearl Harbor wasn't unprovoked, but failing to do anything would likely have ended up with the U.S. being attacked by a stronger set of allied opponents.
Does it have to be US investment? Some other countries (China, Israel, South Korea) have a greater urgency to diversify into clean energy. Why can't the US ride the coattails of that research the way other countries benefit from cheap solar panels and affordable electric cars developed and produced elsewhere?
> cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities
>Some of the 31 American cities are Los Angeles (the first since 1979); Washington, D.C.; New York City (see also Illegal immigration in New York City); Jersey City; Berkeley, California; Coachella, California; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Santa Ana; San Jose; Oakland; Salt Lake City; Dallas; Houston; Detroit; Chicago; Salinas, California; Minneapolis; Miami; Denver; Baltimore; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New Haven; Somerville; Cambridge; and Portland, Maine.
I see wide-spread exploitation of the "Sanctuary City" Law in San Francisco, especially in the Restaurants, Construction site and Janitorial jobs.
The Sanctuary Law, for those that don't know, forbids the Feds from asking employers about the immigration status of the employees / workers. This has caused 100s and 1000s of (mostly mexican and hispanic) undocumented immigrants to arrive and live in Sanctuary Cities (like San Francisco, LA, etc) and strain the local public services, while simultaneously being exploited by their employers.
Most get paid less than minimum wage (some even as low as 8$ / hour instead of the $13.75 min wage in SF), women get abused, sexually harassed etc (in restaurant jobs).
Laws exist to serve people, not the other way around.
Illegal immigrants often do not enjoy all the rights and privileges citizens of the United States do. Many underpaid, overworked, and denied benefits.
If we need more people in this country, we need to make it easy for them to come, and we need to treat them right when they arrive.
And I don't think open borders are a good idea for america in its current state.
SF doesn't keep illegal immigrants safe from deportation. It says "in these circumstances, we think it's more important that you cooperate with the city than it is for us to try to deport you, so we're going to call a temporary truce".
We all unwittingly break many laws day. Living in the US is inherently illegal, even if you happen to be a citizen. My point is that there isn't some binary division between people that break the law and those that don't.
If businesses need to be immigration police, they'll just hire illegal immigrants under the table (moreso), and be more exploitive about it.
If people are afraid to talk to the police, they won't. This breeds gangs & protection rackets, which presumably you don't want, because they increase crime.
As these problems will become worse and worse, the more we will try to crack down on illegal immigration, intensifying said problems. The tragic irony is that the solution is the cause of the problem and it is part of a nasty feedback loop.
I am guessing you are implying that the White Europeans "stole" America from the Native Americans. By that notion, you can keep going a few 100 years back in history and you'll eventually end up with "Living in the ___ is inherently illegal, even if you happen to be a citizen" for every place in this earth except that place in Africa where the human is supposed to have evolved and migrated.
2) Since they are undocumented, these workers also routinely get harassed, abused by employers. I've seen 1st hand female restaurant workers touched, rubbed, groped etc in the kitchen. They can't go anywhere to complaint cos they'll get identified and deported
3) Lastly, and this is 1 of my major concerns, whenever these undocumented immigrants needs medical assistance, the city's tax payers foot the bill for the ambulance, hospitalization etc since these people (don't mean it to sound like that) also don't have health insurance. 1 Restaurant owner in the edge of the Tenderloin district told me that this population accounted for over 70K of tax payers money in 2015 (not sure how he found that out).
Lastly -- and this is not something I subscribe to, but Trump made it a big deal as it is sensational and brings in the "angry white man" voters to his fold -- undocumented immigrants have committed violent crimes in San Francisco and in 1 such case, a lady was shot point blank range while she was strolling in Fisherman's Wharf (totally unrelated to deranged shooter) and Trump made it a case of "See we allow undocumented immigrants and they come and murder us."
I'm a little torn on #1. I definitely don't think anybody should be allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. But on the other hand, if these people are choosing to come to the United States to work these jobs because it's better than what they could get in their home country, it's hard for me to say they shouldn't be able to do it.
Isn't #2 the whole point of sanctuary cities? In theory, the undocumented immigrants in these cities should have no fear of going to police and other authorities. Whereas in other cities the police might actually be obligated to inform immigration officials.
#3 is interesting. Definitely undocumented immigrants make use of government resources, but they also help the economy by providing cheap labor. As far as I know, there isn't a strong consensus on whether the overall impact is positive or negative. For example, here's a brief article that explores both sides a bit: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thorny-economics-of-illegal-...
I thought it was a contract
A middle ground might be to make those the term limits, but require the representatives to not fill that position that 3rd or 4th term, but able to fill other positions and come back later. E.g.
senate (6) -> senate (6) -> congress (2) -> congress (2) -> congress (2) -> senate (6)
senate (6) -> senate (6) -> congress (2) -> senate (6)
This isn't really breaking new ground. Probably, you're just more engaged in this election and this is better covered.
Transparency? Accountability? Are you kidding me? This is the guy that brags about molesting women and won't even release his tax returns. Did you see who is going to be in his cabinet? Some of the slimiest and shameless career politicians of all time. Christie? Gingrich? When have these people been accountable ever?
They are comparing it to Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America" [1]. It brought Republicans control of both the House and Senate, partly as a reaction to Clinton's 1993 healthcare plan [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_...
(seriously, though... you're probably right)
On a side note this is one of the most naive things I have ever seen. I was a bit agnostic before, but wow this is literally handing Russia and China the keys to the global economy while thinking he is doing the opposite. Yikes, I really did not realize he was this under qualified.
China's actively seeking trade deals all over the world. The US taking a strongly antitrade position could improve their relative position. The devil is really in the details, though.
The geopolitical implications of Trump's isolationist position is going to be significant.
Since the China FTA came into effect, China has replaced the US as NZ's number 1 trading partner. The US is 4th on that list.[3]
Actual graph showing surplus:
[1]http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/feeding-the-dragon-lessons-of...
[2] http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/industry_sectors/i... [3] http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/nz...
If the US refuses to build trade relations, or becomes known for breaking agreements, then that gives China the opportunity to come in and instead establish their entertainment, technology, banking, and consumer goods companies. This would be clearly at the expense of the US and would gradually erode our economic influence around the world.
People around the world drink Coke, eat McDonalds, search on Google, get loans from Wells Fargo, buy stuff on their Visas, etc, largely due to these agreements. This money funnels back to the US to pay salaries, taxes and dividends.
So, short-term, US sheep farmers benefit from not having to compete on fair terms with New Zealand wool. But long-term, all other Americans lose as the income streams from established American companies are transferred to their non-US counterparts.
That's why the TPP is so important, it specifically excludes China because the goal is to further entrench US companies in SE Asia/Oceania. If the US backs out, then that gives China the opportunity to come in and sell the low-cost smart phones AND overpriced sugar water.
We are competing with China for trade partners and it seems backwards to me to forfeit.
What do you think they are doing with that money in tax havens? They buy US bonds and invest that money in our markets.
That's just one example but I was impressed when I saw it. And they have been adding 1 new LINE per year in Beijing, wheras we don't even add 1 new station per year in most US cities.
Have you been to China recently?
We spend most on military, social security and medicare. China doesn't.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Rv5UHrNsvcucvflDwwz_pqEjjH...
The US is eating the apples but China owns the orchard.
Or rather to Bermuda, to fill the 0.5% tax-free accounts. So the sheep farmers are screwed and everyone else is screwed too. This is why people reject free trade (or think they do that by voting someone like Trump, which is another topic).
http://smallbusiness.house.gov/uploadedfiles/april_recess_sm...
Well, ok. Aside from the misuse of literally, that's certainly a metaphor I haven't heard being applied to this problem domain before...
http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-liter...
There's a fat chance of that being true... uhm, I mean to say the opposite of "slim chance".
I thought only Arabic had those. I always thought it was stupid.
That said, most contronyms give absolutely no cognitive dissonance. That "to dust" something can mean to remove or to add something has rarely caused confusion. Only place I have ever seen it was in some old children's books, to be honest. Which is half the reason they are fun. Teaching kids contradictions is what keeps some of it interesting.
http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts-and-features/state-by-st...
There you go. Because you can't read: * There is in an individual mandate for insurance, you must have it, or you get hit with a tax penalty.
If you can afford insurance, we'll set up exchanges, and offer a subsidy to help offset the cost.
Employers over a certain size must offer healthcare.
* You can't drop people for preexisting conditions.
* You have to keep people on until age 27.
I can go on, but there's more.
If you're going to through out nonsense for premiums, I'll remind you that subsidies go up, and premiums always go up regardless of the law.
My car insurance premium goes up every year, Republicans say it is because of Obamacare.
Not saying the ACA is flawless, but I'm not confident that Trump and the GOP are going to improve the situation in the long-term. ("cutting the red tape at the FDA" might help a bit, though) It's still not clear exactly what actions they will take.
[0]http://kff.org/health-reform/fact-sheet/summary-of-the-affor... [1]http://kff.org/health-reform/fact-sheet/obamacare-and-you-if...
[Edit: And the downvote brigade strikes - for merely asking a genuine question. I guess this is an indication of the sort of thing that we can expect 'top down' from now on... Stay silent, never question, just obey the mandates... sigh]
[Edit2: And now plenty of upvotes in support after my last edit, as well as useful replies - thank you for restoring my faith in democracy and the fact the people are willing to discuss and deliberate policies in a fair and rational manner.]
Trump similarly faced an electorate that didn't like him or his opponent. She said "Like me!" and he said "Here's what I'll do for you." It was a smart thing to do. A much lower hurdle to have to jump.
Out of curiosity, in this era of disruption (for better or worse) where are the plans to disrupt politicians ? So many flaws yet we keep believing in the same democratic design every election.
There are two ways of changing the fundamental issues in a constitution: 1) violent revolution, 2) changes getting done in democratic process.
1) obviously works, but rarely (you need a LOT of support in the population in order to stage a coup).
2) I am afraid to say doesn't really work in America (or for that matter any major nation) any more. You have too many people who need the system to be "stable" for personal gain (reelections, in some cases continuing a supply of corruption money like with the private prison scandal, ...). You simply cannot fix issues like gerrymandering because it's too entrenched.
Today's politics are black boxes, form people to deal with it, elect some of them, let them do what they want, suffer the consequences. I don't think it's an adequate form of democracy for this century, it was alright before, with different economic structures, pace and technological basis; but today .. maybe it's my CS cursus speaking, maybe a more peer to peer system is needed.
Direct democracy can go badly wrong. Very badly wrong, and I don't neccessarily mean Hitler-level wrong. Just look at Switzerland, they are still struggling to implement a referendum from 2014 against freedom of movement in a way that doesn't kick them out of the EU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_immigration_referendum,_...).
Given the election results, I wonder what 'd happen if there was a US-wide referendum with the simple question "Deport all undocumented persons"...
ps: I misread your answer and went into a monologue, I'm rewriting this previous answer.
> Sorry, I should have been clearer. I didn't mean digital. I meant p2p in the abstract sense. Where the system interactions are simpler, less hierarchical and everybody is almost a peer. Right now people, the blood and roots of a nation are, pardon the pun, second class citizen that have to follow representatives out of trust without any direct power beside a vote. I say this democratic design isn't enough anymore. We need more educated people (better education is easily possible) that can organize more, understand and decide more, even if it means move their ass more, but at least they'll have real power, not just a ballot.
Yep. But, as it can be seen with Trump (with the fact that Republicans control the legislative (Senate, Congress), the judicial (because they have at least one open Supreme Court post to fill, with potential for three more, and they're life-long!) and executive by way of "elected sheriffs, who came up with that nonsense anyway?!) and before with the Obama deadlock!, even a carefully crafted system of checks-and-balances cannot ensure that the ship "democracy" won't sink.
> We need more educated people (better education is easily possible) that can organize more, understand and decide more,
I fully agree with you, however from an outside POV the US education system looks totally broken (homeschooling?! 7-figure-levels of debt upon graduation?! segregated schools?! vastly different quality of education depending on if the public school district has money or not?!). Germany isn't that much better, and a load of other countries also have massive problems in education. When I look at what happened to people in the "poor-ish" hood I grew up, all I can say is that I was fucking lucky. A tiny bit less luck and I'd probably doing drugs now instead of working in IT.
> even if it means move their ass more, but at least they'll have real power, not just a ballot.
That's yet another can of worms. Back when I was young and went to school, we had MASSIVE school strikes to protest an "education reform" (aka clueless politicians listening to elitist "concerned parents"). Fascist marches/demonstrations were met with massive opposition of all kinds - from peaceful demonstrations to open riots in the streets. Most of the opposition were young(ish) people. Today, I'm happy when I'm out on the streets if there are 50 people on the road to oppose fascists. The youth has gone lethargic, and the "middle-aged" mostly spend their time and energy in internal debates instead of progressing society.
2) the education paragraph was mostly daydreaming, I know how crazy it is, but people rarely talk about it as a premium need. So I mentioned it.
3) I have nothing to say here. Maybe the tides will have to be since the people aren't ready to divert them.
The very idea of giving anti-vaxxers a more direct influence over healthcare policy is almost Hitler-level scary.
I believe that mathematically fair models for precinct shape have been described[1] -- such model could provide the basis for estimating the gerrymander induced vote-reflects-voter-will-error -- and the subsidy system could encourage population shift to try and approximate the results that would occur if the precincts had actually been drawn "fairly" ...
Yeah no.
Be involved and be informed, locally If not at a state or higher level.
- do note, that politicians (humans) have long since "hacked" the human cortex. They program you, and other humans by finding authority escalations, buffer overruns, Trojans and privileged executions all the time.
Right now, malware itself has become the OS.
To fix this, people need to be aware of how politics and cognition works.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
He will claim that he did indeed achieve them despite all evidence to the contrary.
If you manage to corner him on the argument, he will blame you for the failure.
* edit. Not sure what the downvote is for. Trump has used both tactics outlined above. He was always against the Iraq war despite evidence to the contrary. When he was under the impression that he would lose the election he cast blame elsewhere (election rigging).
He will delete it from his website and claim it never existed.
"All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered “extreme vetting""
A typical quote, and hardly the most disturbing thing he's said on the campaign trail:
""Torture works. OK, folks? You know, I have these guys -- "Torture doesn't work!" -- believe me, it works. And waterboarding is your minor form. Some people say it's not actually torture. Let's assume it is. But they asked me the question, What do you think of waterboarding? Absolutely fine. But we should go much stronger than waterboarding. That's the way I feel. They're chopping off heads. Believe me, we should go much stronger, because our country's in trouble. We're in danger. We have people that want to do really bad things! Remeber the power of weaponry. This isn't 100 years ago where we fight hand to hand combat. This is weapons that are so destructive -- so destructive -- that the world could end. We have to be very strong, we have to be very vigilant, we have to be very tough. Waterboarding is fine, but it's not nearly tough enough, OK?"
From http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/06/politics/donald-trump-torture/:
"...we are playing by rules, but they have no rules. It's very hard to win when that's the case," Trump said, adding that the United States' ban on waterboarding is a sign of weakness. "I think we've become very weak and ineffective. I think that's why we're not beating ISIS. It's that mentality," Trump said, adding that ISIS "must think we are a little bit on the weak side."
He has backpedaled on the issue since then, but the fact that he said this stuff in the first place is disturbing enough.
Democrats have generally been opposed to torture. That's half the country right there. For the other half of the country, a huge part of the Republican base are Christian voters, who ought to be at the tip of the spear of the fight against torture, but in practice seem to neither explicitly condone nor condemn it. But I'll be charitable and assume that the evangelical segment of the party is steadfast against torture, meaning that at least 2/3s of Republican voters are against torture. That leaves no more than 1/6th of the US population on board with torture. That's still pretty messed up, but I'm trying to be optimistic. :(
The most obvious case is getting a password. (or lock combo or crypto key, or anything else that you can verify) You torture until you get a password that works. Obviously, there should be good reason to believe that the person knows the password.
Another case is where you know many things but not everything. You ask about all that you want to know, including things you already know. The things you already know are the honesty check. Answers to the unknowns are assumed to be dishonest until you start getting correct answers for all the things you already know.
Who's this "you" you are talking to? Unless DT's been hanging out in HN, there's no way you're going to get an accurate answer.
1) The whole border wall thing is just ridiculous. I thought he had given up on that. Why would Mexico have to pay for that? If the US wants to build a wall, fine, build it and pay for it. It doesn't make sense to demand that Mexico pay for it. It's like building a wall on your property and demanding your neighbors pay for it.
2) The FDA thing is scary. Regulations and processes are there for a reason. I'll be very wary if this goes through and I ever have to take any medication that's not established in the market.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/01/49223579...
The point that EpiPen was given temporary monopoly by the FDA was almost completely lost in most of the news stories I read. It's a facet of the story that I think is important, but left out.
To be an informed citizenry, we need to know all the angles and be able to filter the BS. Kudo's to NPR for bothering to get the full story.
Its not that easy :)
https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/Pay_for_the_Wall.pdf
Specifically, he will threaten to disallow wire transfer of money from US to Mexico by non-citizens. Since that is a revenue source they greatly depend on, he suggests they'd rather fund the building of the wall. If they agree to fund the wall, then the ban on transfers will go away.
Obviously I'm "sticking to the metaphor", but legitimately that Big Bend area is one of those reminders that this "wall" concept is ridiculous for other reasons. That area and others along the border awfully remote, which will make managing the infrastructure and obtaining people to work there a headache. It will also make building the actual infrastructure extremely challenging and probably quite expensive. Not that Trump would care, but it's certainly not an environmentally friendly proposal either.
If the economy is such where Mexicans still want to migrate, there's other possibilities. No wall will secure the sea for instance, unless you build that "wall" around the entire Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean. (Beachgoers won't be happy about that.) The wall does not stop exploitation methods such as visa overstays or smuggling in the heavier trafficked borders. Even the Berlin Wall -- well more fortified than any 2,000 mile could ever be -- was breached 5,000 times in its history, so there's a good chance that even these remote areas might get some activity.
How much is America willing to pay for "a wall" to stop the immigrants? Enough to wreck the economy? Well, that's one sure way to prevent Mexicans from crossing over. :)
Or I guess, you bounce money through Belize or something.
Either way, it doesn't sound very effective.
Singapore has the lowest rates in the world. Sometimes regulations have the intended effect.
"People will smuggle illegal guns from abroad. Or buy the parts and assemble them. Or get a machine shop and make them."
A regulation, no matter its aim, does not require 100% compliance to be an effective deterrent. I'm not saying this plan will work, but a generic "people will get around it" argument is not illuminating.
Well, kinda, but not to same degree. Wired money is obviously way easier to smuggle than physical goods...
In this thread someone said it's like trying to stop the import of illegal drugs. Regulations seem to work for Singapore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalenc...
Deterring what? "Illegal immigration" or "people walking across the border"? If it is the former, then that plan is just so stupid to be of any value. Banning transfer of money from US to Mexico to make Mexico pay for "building a 10 ft high border-wall" is ... wow, just saying that out loud feels weird.
(PS: I'm neither an American nor a Mexican!)
I'm not making a judgment here, just trying to clarify the worldview.
Now is the time for a startup to emerge that makes Bitcoin _EASY_! Easy like my-grandma-can-do-it easy. This actually finally might be the thing that makes BTC!
The break even point is around 60k.
Candidate: "We're going to build a wall between us and Mexico. It'll cost us $7 billion."
Electorate: "Umm. That's a lot of money. Let's do something else with it."
If that's how people would react, they should react the same way even if we're getting the money from Mexico. Money is fungible, and as much as our hearts enjoy poetic justice, it shouldn't matter where it's coming from.
There are a couple of situations where we would still want it built, even if its cost exceeded what we were willing to pay ourselves. One is if this is a cooperative, non-zero-sum situation: if Mexico were getting some value from the wall, they might be willing to pay some of the cost, beyond what we can extract via tariffs and seized remittances. The other is if Mexico is terrible at negotiations, which is likely what Trump is assuming.
Is that who we are?
It's weird that you prefer the people who have broken your own laws to enter your country, to the ones who have tried to go through your lawful process and failed. Where is your bleeding heart for all the would-be immigrants who tried to go were rejected by your legal immigration officers, who similarly might have no social safety net?
You cannot treat all of the world's ills as your own. You may have decided that illegal immigrants are part of the American identity, but a lot of the voters for Trump have not, and are rallying against that. Unless you convince them to treat illegal immigrants as part of their own, it's unlikely you'll find a "bleeding heart" argument to persuade them.
I haven't decided that illegal immigrants are part of the American identity, but I do consider the people not in America who are receiving money to be innocent bystanders (with the exception of drug money, but the cartels wouldn't be stopped by these sanctions anyway).
That was the heart of my point - with a limited budget of resources, you simply cannot help anyone. At that point, you are faced with some philosophical questions - should I be maximizing some global 'goodness' factor, or should I be working for the local group that I am supposed to represent? In the end, the leaders of democratic countries are elected to represent the will of their voters, not to better mankind(unless that is what the voters want!).
If Trump and his supporters believe that a wall will improve the situation for the US and American citizens, then I don't think arguments about the welfare of others(whom they might even view antagonistically) will sway them.
I found different arguments much more persuasive - arguments that removing illegal immigrants would not bring jobs back to American citizens, because they were a net economic positive and creating demand as well as supply.
However, these arguments seemed to be drowned out by the loud, resonating narrative on how evil and racist the supporters of Trump's policy were, which I can only imagine hardened their resolve to get it through. An especially easy angle that Trump could pursue was the disregard of rule of law by illegal immigrant supporters, which I feel could have received a lot more attention and understanding from Trump's opposition.
Okay? So fucking what? Saying "Today I am going to do everything I can to make sure I shoot myself in the face" is also a "goal-oriented" approach.
I can't believe what is happening to my country.
> The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
> Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished
> Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime
Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=does+increasing+punishment+r...
And eventually the trade war turns into a shooting war. We've seen the script before.
FWIW this document isn't dated that I can see but it does refer to election day like so:
"On November 8th, Americans will be voting for this 100-day plan to restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities and honesty to our government"
So I assume it was written before the election
When buying a house, wouldnt you try to negotiate for seller concessions like paying for repairs?
Trumps wall comments were always in conjunction with discussing the massive trade deficit with Mexico. If we are in a stronger position to negotiate with Mexico, why wouldnt we negotiate the best deal we can get?
If you really think about it. We only need this wall because of Mexico, so why should we pay if we dont have to?
If you really think about it, we don't need the wall at all because people will just dig holes underneath it, like they have with all the other walls and fencing we have built.
1,954 miles is a long way to go - https://theintercept.com/2016/10/18/best-of-luck-with-the-wa...
Obviously it won't be foolproof, but that's pretty good.
Perhaps Trump should ask Israel for help in building his wall.
I'm sure he will ask them for engineering help and guidance.
From your comment, I think you'll love the next 4 years. I just pity the Palestinians.
I'm sure they'll welcome yet more pity to wallow in.
So, really the wall is more of a symbol than actual border security. Sadly, it's a symbol that resonates with a disturbingly large percent of the population.
Yes; but you typically do that before you buy the property, we've had texas for a while now.
All the talk about trade deficit with Mexico makes it sound like people think we just cut Mexico a check every year. As a nation, we receive goods and services for that deficit. It isn't money on the table.
If the trade deficit with Mexico has to do with import/export inbalances to favor that deficit, I see no reason not to try to renegotiate it.
Again, I have no real working knowledge of these issues, just a cursory and uninformed opinion.
People flee Mexico because it's an extremely poor country with a horrible government and is controlled by drug cartels. Screwing the country over further economically sounds like the worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it seems like a very good way to exacerbate the problem.
Perhaps that's why private prison stocks are up so much on Trump's election. His actions are clearly going to increase the flow of illegal immigrants into the US, and now that these people can be tossed into federal prison for mandatory minimum sentences. So the end result is, the federal government will be on the hook for something like a quarter million dollars for each one of the people caught crossing the border.
Trump just created a (12 million illegal immigrants * $250k/yr each * 5yr minimum sentences = $15 trillion) market.
First, I am just a random uneducated and ignorant American, so take my two cents for what it is...only two cents.
From my vantage point, cutting off the drug cartels access to the US market could potentially do wonders to shifting the balance of power and helping Mexico in the long run.
Also, as unpopular as it is, the US governments first mandate is to protect it's citizens. Sometimes that means making tough choices that doesn't help everybody, but responsibility takes maturity and a willingness to consider unpopular options.
>His actions are clearly going to increase the flow of illegal immigrants into the US, and now that these people can be tossed into federal prison...
I think missed the key word in his contract "CRIMINAL". He is not talking about people who broke the law by illegally imigrating. He is talking about FELONS who ALSO came here illegally. They certainly don't belong roaming our streets unchecked.
Contributing illegal immigrants is a different discussion, but convicted felons, rapists, murderers, etc... who come here illegally belong in Mexican prisons and should be mexico's problem...if they can't do it, than yes, well put them in prison...to KEEP YOUR AND YOUR FAMILY SAFE.
As for the use of the word "criminal", I think you may be the one misunderstanding in this instance. That word is used to refer to those Trump plans to deport, but on the second page you'll note:
> establishes a two-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a previous deportation
No mention of criminal there—if you get caught more than once you would go to federal prison in the U.S. for a mandatory minimum of 2 years.
He states very clearly he is only deporting the 2 million Criminals...not the 11 million Illegals.
I really think you are the one who misunderstood his intent.
Edit: I relooked at the contract and I see where we are both coming from. There are two sections that address illegal immigration. The first, which I was focusing on addresses WHO WE WILL DEPORT. The second section, discussing the wall, mentions jail penalties for people who are deported and re-enter.
In short, if we only deport the people trump says hell deport in this agreement, than I am right. If he deports all illegal immigrants, than you are right. Personally, I think the belief he will deport more than the dangerous criminals is not really reality based, despite his campaign rhetoric...(but, I've been wrong before.)
Here is the quote: " FOURTH, begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back."
It's one thing if you are already here, a functioning and contributing member of society where relatives are citizens, etc... IN that case, I can appreciate policies that give a path to citizenship...
But, at some point we need to stop the flow of illegal immigrants. Not just to keep out the bad actors, but also to protect the integrity of our legal immigration process. Someone, somewhere has to be too late...
So, if you come across the border and we catch you and deport you, and you try to come across again, Jail sounds like a reasonable deterrent to encourage you to try the legal routes.
One thing that people don't seem to get is that some things are zero sum, and empathy with the little guy isn't always the right side. As individuals, we have the freedom to decide who we want to be, and how we feel about these sad stories...but as the American Government, they have a different value system and priorities that they need to filter these policies through.
Immigration is a tough issue. There is a sincerely held and reasonable position on both sides.
Do I think we should throw people whose only crime is illegal immigration into Jail? No. I am not even sure that Jail works and shouldn't just be completely abolished...But, we have to draw the line somewhere...
Trump is drawing that line at convicted criminals and people who aren't yet across the border. I think thats a fair stance that isn't unreasonable.
edit:spelling
If you think a wall is going to do this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. A physical wall is going to slow the cartels down for a week while they round up a bunch of Mexican citizens at gunpoint and force them to dig tunnels into the US, build submersibles to get here via waterways, and just go buy a dozen ladders. There are literally people that can climb a 10 foot wall without a ladder.
Or drones.
basically all the shit they do now except just carrying it accross.
Maybe you are right, but whats the alternative. The status quo of doing nothing?
I will almost always side with action vs. inaction. (not to say I'm right, just to say I would rather try and fail than not try because some random naysayers have more faith in the cartels than our ability to secure a border.)
Edit: I copied and pasted the wrong quote, so I fixed it.
What if someone said the reported problems are overblown and immigrants actually help our economy?
On second thought, you might be on to something here.
Mexico can't ever improve while the US continues to steal their despondent youth for low cost landscaping, house painting and wait staff. The very people with the courage and energy to leave their home countries to improve their lot are precisely the people needed to effect change against a corrupt regime. Our tolerance of mass illegal immigration is actually immoral; their are tens of millions of victims left to suffer bandit republics and kleptocracies because that small fraction of their populations that would otherwise have had the motivation to pick up a weapon and do something about it are instead occupied hanging drywall somewhere in the US.
Their options are working with the cartels or terrible local economy in Mexico, or going to the US to earn drastically more valuable dollars to send home to their families. I mean, we are being immoral by letting them stay here, but they are only so desperate because of how unimaginably damaging the US has been to Mexico. We mess with their government, incentivize them to sell us drugs by having so much demand for them, and exploit their natural resources. If anything, this is why I don't get anyone who thinks its JUST the immigrants fault - why do you think people commit suicide, or would think it's worth it to cross a border where they could be jailed or shot? Hint, it's because the alternative is so much worse. And anyone who is aware of even the tiniest bit of history knows exactly why the alternative is bad.
What about the natives (Mexican or US)? They're gone and people don't care. Why should ALIVE US citizens support something leading to THEIR poverty and death?
Before the US was a country, Mexico was poor. It's still poor now. It'll still be poor 3000 years from now. It's not the US's job to help them.
I've had that remittances argument thrown at me so many times; do you honestly believe ---- I mean actually and genuinely believe ---- that transferring money back home is somehow equivalent to participating in the fate of your nation personally as a worker, parent, voter, dissident, etc.? Citing remittances is just another lame attempt to rationalize tolerating illegal immigration because admitting that there might actually be a great benefit to these countries if the US stopped stealing their youth is abhorrent to the leftist mind. You're so wrapped up in your SJW views you won't allow yourself to see the real damage.
Remittances don't fix anything. None of these nations that export their youth and collect remittances ever get better; Mexico, Haiti, so many Middle Eastern and North African nations, former Soviet republics exporting their youth to the EU... they fester on as failed states forever because the people they need to deal with the fail just leave for greener pastures. Individually you can't blame them, but the collective outcome is tragic. All remittances do is allow origin nations to subsist on a trickle of hard currency and continue feeding wealthy nations with more young.
> We mess with their government, incentivize [sic] them to sell us drugs by having so much demand for them, and exploit their natural resources.
All of these same conditions apply to Canada yet, somehow, Canada isn't a third world kleptocracy.
> If anything, this is why I don't get anyone who thinks its JUST the immigrants fault
Your 'anyone' that blames only immigrants is a mostly a strawman; there are despicable people in the world but that's not who elected Trump, despite what you think. We know employers create demand by employing illegals, and we know those employers buy politicians to oppose securing the border. We know drug abusers in the US create demand for narcotics, and we know securing the border will hinder their supply from Mexico, dealing a great blow to Mexican drug cartels; yet another important benefit of securing the border.
ps: their enthusiasm got to me. Somehow, no matter how low Trump's speeches were, if he manages to spin calmer, safer, leaner lives for people in America I'd be happy. If. Because if it goes as I imagine, grand but failing plans, hope backpressure, the disillusion will be grandiosely sad.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538397/
"Each drug is estimated to cost $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in cash outlays per approved biopharmaceutical"
This particular problem means that lots of very promising cancer drugs never see the light of day.
For example for Neuroblastoma there is an approved drug called dinutuximab https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-drug.... This is the only approved drug for treating pediatric cancers that was approved in the last 10-20 year.
Meantime significantly more potent (and possibly effective) drugs are in clinical trials, eg: Hu-3F8 at MSKCC. But... given the cost and enormous amount of red tape needed to get the drug approved (combined with very small market) odds of them getting approved in the next 10 years are not that high.
Something needs to change, but I am not sure exactly what.
You did?? He's been personally promising to build it 3-5 times a day to tens of thousands of people in every competitive state in the US. It's kind of hard to miss...
>> Why would Mexico have to pay for that? ... It's like building a wall on your property and demanding your neighbors pay for it.
Except the neighbors -- to stretch the analogy a bit more -- have their children, pets and a few spare vehicles in your yard and have become accustomed to browbeating you into not complaining about it. Trump et al. plan on altering this dynamic.
They're not just hanging out in your yard, they're contributing to your household's economy and are friends with your own kids. In fact, your daughter told them to keep the pets in the yard because she loves them so much.
Suddenly asking the neighbors to build a thick fence and stay the hell out will get your other family members very upset, and also means that you'll have to do more cooking from now on. Tough choices for the family dad...
- Cancel payments to U.N. climate change projects
- Remove two existing regulations for every new regulation
- Drastic tax cuts
- Massive immigration changes
On the bright side, this is a sure-fire recipe for deadlock.
One of the major issues is that we've had several hiring freezes in the US civil service in recent decades. It causes a bathtub effect. You do reduce the workforce through attrition, but eventually you have to hire again and hire almost exclusively junior people (< 25 or 30). So you end up with a massive gap spanning around 15-20 years of age and experience.
You lose a great deal of institutional knowledge (particularly critical for civil service which has many long running programs (for various reasons both good and bad)). Contractors don't really suffice in this regard because they (the employees, not necessarily the companies) tend to move much more frequently. It's going to be a problem.
Color me shocked. : )
This wouldn't be true if government pay was competitive (low pay partially offset by, particularly, pension benefits means entering government mid-career except as a box-checking thing to move to a private position leveraging the knowledge of government is discouraged, but entering at a junior level for a full career is less discouraged.)
Of course, the kind of people embracing starve the beast aren't going to mitigate the skill impact by improving pay.
Total compensation for civil servants is quite a bit higher.
Working as a civil servant is much nicer, but it's not cheaper for the government.
But unless things have changed drastically you're not going to make more money working a government contract.
NASA and DoD research labs are still dealing with the experience and cultural gaps from the hiring freezes of the 90s. I think for a lot of Americans it's easy to think of the "lazy bureaucrats" of the federal government (which definitely exist) and see a freeze or Reduction in Force as an overall good thing. However, every freeze and RIF has long lasting damage in the federal scientific community.
- Yes. Too many regulations by unelected bureaucrats. Sounds good to me. I'd rather have one clear and meaningful regulation than two "up for random interpretation."
- Yes. Tax cuts for all working people. Let people decide what to do with their own money (spend, save, donate, etc.). The bigger the government, the smaller the individual.
- Massive immigration changes? Not really. The pamphlet seems to enforce existing laws regarding criminal illegals.
Tax cuts are all well and good in a vacuum, but how are we realistically going to pay down the national debt when we enact a massive tax cut on top of a tax rate that is already at historically low levels?
Some people say we can cut all of this government bureaucracy to make up for tax cuts but we'd have to take a figurative axe to all of our federal agencies to get to a point where we can afford a massive tax cut and pay down the national debt.
Otherwise we'd have to enact big cuts to Medicare/Medicaid, defense, and Social Security as well, which people seem loathe to stomach.
My working assumption is that the military is mismanaged, and spends trillions of dollars on wasteful projects. I think you can get a pretty big tax cut by just managing the military better.
> Restoring National Security Act: Rebuilds our military by ... expanding military investment;
It reminds me of the "plan" to replace the ACA/Obamacare. Sounds great on paper but probably does fuck all to address the real issues.
The first method is to control costs on military projects, and audit their finances. I think he'll do fine on this boring executive work, though I don't think better project management alone is going to get a 35% tax cut on the middle-class.
Second, there are foreign members of NATO that are supposed to pay 2% of GDP for a defense pool that are not doing this. He wants to pressure them into paying their share for protection. Since he's mentioned this, supposedly some countries have started paying into it.
Third, he doesn't actually want to go to war. War is pretty expensive, so building up a military to project strength without actually using it could be cheaper if we pull out of all on-going wars.
But... it's already by far the most well funded and advanced military in the world with a navy that ensures the US can deploy strength anywhere quickly.
I find it interesting that in the US people are comfortable discussing improving military efficiency, yet its taboo to discuss reducing the size of the military.
With a concerted effort it would be a major accomplishment to improve military efficiency by 5-10%. Or you could cut the military budget by 40% and still outspend every other nation's military. Yet, I don't recall ever hearing a candidate suggest reducing the military's budget. Hell even after the cold war didn't spending go up after a brief decline?
IMO, the causality is Economic might --> military might + "soft power" --> superpower (look at how China's trajectory). Prioritising military over economy in peace times seems short-sighted
There are some situations where US aircraft will fire half-million-dollar heatseeking missiles at empty sky, just in case enemies fire SAMs. That's an expensive habit.
The military doesn't constrain itself financially unless it's forced to. They care more about the mission and the warfighter, as they should. But the guys in Congress who are tasked with constraining the military are too chicken to endanger their support from active duty, veterans, and their friends and families.
Here's a hint: we're not going to pay down the debt anytime soon. I would expect the debt to increase by $8-$12 trillion over the next decade if Trump gets all the tax cuts and programs in his agenda.
The electorate hates taxes. At the same time it loves government spending. There is no political will to cut spending in any meaningful way. The last Republican vice president declared that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" - a line that Trump has echoed.
We don't want to pay down the national debt. Each treasury note is a promise to provide the holder with real goods and services later, and we need to make those promises to our aging citizenry. We do this in part with the intra-governmental debt that the Social Security Trust Fund holds. Regular citizens also save for retirement, and they hold and demand Treasury bonds as well.
You don't have to buy Treasuries to save for retirement. There are all sorts of bonds, foreign and domestic.
We should be spending more wisely, but debt economics is not as simple as it seems.
Treasury rates are only effectively negative because the government is printing money to buy treasuries. That's not going to end well.
The corporate bond market cannot soak up trillions of dollars in safe investments. In fact, low interest rates can simply result from high demand for treasury bonds because they are a "sure thing."
We've had quite a bit of asset inflation. Sure, the consumer products you buy that were made in China aren't going up, but Zillow says my house is worth more than double what I paid five years ago. You can't tell someone looking for housing there's no inflation.
Did you ever stop and wonder why infrastructure costs so damn much in the US? Why a rail segment going from nowhere to nowhere in California costs seventy billion dollars, or a new bridge ten billion?
>The corporate bond market cannot soak up trillions of dollars in safe investments. In fact, low interest rates can simply result from high demand for treasury bonds because they are a "sure thing."
Low interest rates are the result of artificial demand for bonds. If the government would stop monkeying with the bond markets they could "soak up" enough to cover domestic savings. Foreign governments would have to find somewhere else to park their money, but that's not the end of the world.
Housing bubbles come and go, they don't impact real inflation.
Unfortunately, libertarians would throw away all of our influence in global finance for an isolationalist paradise, but it won't work. If Russia and China aren't economically dependent on us, do you think that would actually mean less military tension?
You mean..it's gained value a few short years after a major crash? How surprising.
But China and India are on the same planet as us.
What the hell. How ignorant is that.
If you care to make a point worth replying to about 'china and India cleaning up their own messes' (despite the US having the highest CO2 emissions per capita in the world by a huge margin, over 2x that of China's and nearly 10x that of India's, and for a far far far longer time) then be my guest.
Wait, so you agree with him then, that US has a waaaay bigger mess than china(1/2) and india(1/10), and that the US should clean up its own (biggest) mess first, before the other two?
Your country has historically contributed far more than its fair share of greenhouse gasses, and these small payments (from the richest country in the world) help other countries reduce emissions and show that you recognise that.
But nope. Let's drop all that so we can prop up some failing coal towns for a while longer.
The issue with climate change is that the people making the bess are not the same ones who suffer from the mess. So our mess isn't just ours. And their mess isn;t just theirs.
It really should have to be explained to you.
A family of 4 with a median household income of $50k/yr pays close to nothing in federal taxes. Tax cuts don't help the people that need it.
Near-zero chance that Trump will clean up any of America's environmental mess. Near-certain chance that he will significantly add to America's environmental mess.
We've seen this over and over from Senators in both parties. The filibuster is dumb as a procedural tool, but as a political tool it's invaluable for Senators who want to make a career out of the Senate.
The Treasury doesn't care if other banks won't lend them money, so long as the Fed will, and the Fed always will.
I'm all green peace and pro-nature, but is it really such a bad thing? I have no idea, what that money is actually spent on, and UN seems to be pretty... well, pretty useless organization, to be honest. To what extent do these billions prevent/slow down melting of ice caps and drough? If they don't, then what's the matter? It seems to be better to spend money ob the lesser something, than on greater nothing.
This is the same approach DJT and the Republicans want to take for health care. Think about that race to the bottom for a minute. Denied and dropped for making a single claim? Good luck, totally legal in [insert small state here].
Without the individual mandate insurance marketplaces don't work so I assume repealing Obamacare will immediately lead to millions of people being thrown off health insurance.
Truly a great victory for America.
Germany has universal healthcare, but high income citizens can (could?) opt out to private insurance. It's good when you're young and single as it's way cheaper. But for most people it becomes more expensive than the goverment system by the time they're married and get kids.
1-We must do something 2-{This} is something 3-Therefore, me must do {This}
You won't find many of us arguing against the first assertion, but I don't think real numbers say that it's insurance regulation that made the prices go up: It's the fact that the risk pools are full of very sick people. While deregulation would separate the sick from the non sick, it would make sure the sick would not be able to afford insurance at all.
The ACA is working great for people that make so little they get subsidies. It's also not a problem for those of use that work at places that compensate us with well over a thousand a month worth insurance. It's the people in the middle that are in trouble: They either access the ACA unsubsidized, or work for employers that hire a lot of low paid labor, leading to godawful health insurance. I worked at places where the insurance we got was so flimsy, the ACA made it illegal: Huge deductibles, coinsurance along with lifetime maximums that made sure that if you got something bad, insurance would cut you off.
Health insurance in this country has been in an awful trend since at least the Clinton years. the ACA only helped some. We don't need a repeal, but something that subsidizes you too. Health savings accounts and insurance across state lines ain't going to help, but it's going to give us sicker people that just have access to the emergency room and go bankrupt, like in the last of the Bush years.
Not everyone. In NC alone, there are 377,000 people who make too little to qualify for ACA subsidies yet are not covered by Medicaid. That's a lot of people, and that's just one state. There are 19 other states that also don't have expanded Medicaid.
http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts-and-features/state-by-st...
Even with subsidized ACA, the Bronze plans are pretty shit. Average family deductibles in 2017 will be $12,393, with the average monthly premium for a 40-year-old costing $350. Other than 1 checkup per year and female care, these families get to pay $1,000+ per month in premiums (assuming 2 adults and 2 kids) and another $12,000+ on top of that before their plan does much of anything for them.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/26/obamacare-deductibles-are-on-...
Even with a subsidy I don't think it makes sense for a lower middle class family to pay $5,000-10,000 for 3-5 checkups, and $20,000+ if they actually need to use that coverage. Yet they'll be hit with a tax penalty if they don't do that.
How is this good?
http://m.indyweek.com/indyweek/pat-mccrorys-refusal-to-expan...
The tax penalty is rather modest, and there are alternatives to health insurance such as religious health co-ops that control costs.
I visit the US every year to see friends. Some of whom are Arab-American. I'm seriously worried that I'm going to find myself on the receiving end of 'extreme vetting'.
"... Cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back."
Denying tourists from entire countries will result in a loss of jobs. You don't cut of your arm because of a papercut.
Trump's own wife overstayed and worked illegally on a visitor visa.
I've debated this approach with friends in the past. From a game-theory perspective, does this promote or hinder political corruption?
I'm inclined to believe that term limits would actually encourage corruption.
1) If senators have to find a job after 8 years, surely that encourages the revolving door between industry and government, as they need to find another job .
2) If excellent and popular politicians have to be replaced before they fall from popularity, and it still costs a lot of money to get elected, then candidates will become more beholden to special interests (as they can't campaign on their track record or political capital). This would also dilute the overall quality of legislators.
3) If the average candidate has little or no political record, then how can we root out those who are beholden to special interests? At least currently we can look at who they have taken money from over the years in the public records that are available. If every candidate is a blank slate, who hasn't been subjected to oversight, it will be much easier for a candidate to be secretly bought without the public having a chance to spot it.
The real problem is not that there exists career politicians, it's that they experience extreme conflicts of interest due to being permitted to engage in insider trading [1], that they are not restricted from taking jobs in the industries they regulated while in government [2], and that there is a massive flow of money into politician's campaigns from special interests [3].
A more credible solution to these problems is advanced by Represent.us: http://anticorruptionact.org/whats-in-the-act/
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/congress-argues-cant-inv... [2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/ [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Or even if we assume an asymptote of quality improvement over time, surely we want to have more politician-years spent during the peak of their quality, rather than in their first 4/8/16 when their output is less?
The idea of term limits implies that politician's utility becomes negative at some point in time, and that just doesn't fit with my understanding of how negotiating and learning how to build consensus works.
I'd love to see some hard data either way on this one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Feinstein#Mass_surveill...
The natural counterargument is that there are probably other ways of dealing with the Feinstein problem without the nuclear option of term limits.
Specifically, the party doesn't field a credible contender to her, as she's right up in the core of the party elite. "Top 2" was supposed to encourage challenges from contenders similar to the party incumbents, but I think we'd be better served by a proportional representation system (STV or similar).
And if the core problem is that the party parachutes in stooges and backs them with the full weight of the party's campaign funding and infrastructure, then I don't see how term limits solve the problem; out with Feinstein, in with another party-blessed elitist who only cares about surveillance when it is used on fellow members of the elite [1]. I'm sure they can find someone who has not served a day in public service to carry on her agenda.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/28/nsa-surveillan...
An example, Nevada voted to open its electricity market this week. Everybody should be able to choose the provider they want.
But to do this, there need to be regulations in place. Independent companies need to know how they can use the grid, the company who owns the grid needs to know what it can charge for the usage of the grid.
If you let such a market without any regulation, there won't be a market, because the grid owner won't let anyone use its grid.
So removing regulations is not always a good thing. Most of the time regulations were put there for a reason.
What?
And if there are no regulations about it, the grid owner doesn't have to give you access to its grid. So you can't supply your electricity. So the customers can't exercise their right to choose.
What can the public do to prevent him from opening energy reserves and backing out of climate change agreements?
Are there efforts going on to prevent this?
Building a wall along the Mexican border...I don't see the thinking behind the decision.
And building a wall and kicking out immigrants is so backwards. We need to be more united as humans and work together, not put up more barriers.
He's specifically talking about ILLEGAL immigrants. People that did not come in through the door. If you fail to prefix the word immigrant with illegal in any immigration discussion you're deliberately distorting Trumpian policies.
Who knows.
The fact if a large developed nation supports climate change or not is moot when the developing world does not give a flying shit about it.
This is a clear policy proposal, contrary to everything I had read that said he had no clear plan.
- Did you check out either candidate's websites?
- Were you aware of Hillary's equivalent?[0] Was this reported in the news sites you frequent?
[0]: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/
I'm asking the questions honestly. I did know of Trump's contract (though I don't remember how I came across it), and didn't look at the Clinton campaign site. I don't recall anything in the news about either.
I read news websites every single day and never saw anything close to the clarity of his positions presented here.
I don't have time to look for documents on candidates websites. I rely on (and pay) the media to present information because I'm busy. This should have been reported fairly, though maybe that bias is actually true.
I do remember reports from within the Trump campaign that they had a difficult time keeping him on message. One of the benefits of message discipline is that it limits the opportunities for the media to report on things other than what you think is important for your campaign.
I think the media in general has fallen down on the job (which I have my own reasons for that I'm not going to bring up here), but I think a lot of that has been due to what they find gets people to view their ads as subscription numbers have fallen and they've needed to rely on online ad revenue. This is a serious problem. We've gotten to the point where we no longer have a generally accepted shared source of trust. If Trump were hammering home his Contract with the American Voter, I think you would have heard about it, regardless of media bias.
I do think relying on the media in this day and age (and thank you for paying for it, as do I) to present the information you require is a little bit foolish. If you find it's lacking something you need, unfortunately I think we need to dig for ourselves.
If you've got ideas on how to figure out how we can once again get to some shared, trusted sources, I'm all ears :)
It's not supposed to be informative, it's clickbait. It's entertainment. It's drivel.
Also, r/The_Donald is has been an excellent aggregate for all things related to the campaign.
Also, see Wikileaks to get an idea of how bad the bias/corruption has been in the media (ex: CNN giving HRC questions in advance of debates [0], CNN asking HRC campaign for input regarding questions for Donald in exclusive interview [1]); this should help you understand the scope of the situation and why you haven't been getting good reporting from mainstream news.
How is that even remotely accurate, considering the Chairman of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, is Trump's campaign chairman?
Then you also have to look at the tone in which things are presented. For example, at the top of Breitbart right now: "At Last: The Lena Dunham Meltdown You’ve Been Waiting For ‘I ached in the places that make me a woman’" There may not be anything factually inaccurate in that article, although I haven't checked all the quotations myself. But it seems pretty clear that this is a pretty shameless gloat. I mean, they acknowledge it as such in the headline. I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with looking at varied sources, if you do so critically. I would suggest looking at an article in Breitbart, then finding reporting on the same thing from a more mainstream (call it left-leaning if you want) outlet - say the Washington Post or the NY Times. Compare the statements of fact, sure, but mostly compare the tone of the articles and ask yourself what picture they're trying to paint. Obviously what comes off as neutral and what biased would depend on where you yourself sit on the spectrum, but regardless I think it's a valuable exercise.
To take it further, where the two sources differ significantly, check facts. And it doesn't mean just find a source to corroborate them, as there will always be an echo chamber of sources repeating the same things on both sides. Instead you need to dig a bit deeper.
The easiest example is a quote. It's amazing how often people are misquoted, or the quotation is interpreted differently than I would view it. Very often these days you can find video of the original quote, and interpret it for yourself.
Now, the veracity of a statement is a bit more difficult than just whether or not someone said something. Often you can start by checking wikipedia, then look to the sources it references, for a good start.
Also, as you elude to, consider what is not being reported.
I would add, look for neutral sources too. Wikileaks for example.
At the end of the day, we should hopefully arrive at an accurate picture of the reality of a given situation. Ie: to figure out what the hell is going on. To call a spade a spade.
"... trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas can now be brought back at a 10% rate."
"Establishes tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers ..."
So a company can more easily bring back offshore billions to the US, but at the same time, new tariffs are put in place that make it harder to lay off people, thus effectively discouraging the company from spending that money on creating jobs in the country?
Seems like the net effect of these seemingly bold new rules could be practically zero.
It's odd that Trump is a businessman, yet his list of solutions includes all kinds of tariffs and trade restrictions to rein in business. There's a reason Western countries don't use tariffs much anymore: they're counterproductive if you want to stimulate growth. But I guess that old economics lesson is about to be put to another test.
It's pretty clear he was never a good businessman. He was good at finding loopholes and exploiting people and policies. Now I imagine we'll start to see that kind of shoddy policy making at a national level. And "shoddy" is giving him a large benefit of the doubt. It feels like an intentional attempt to maximize short-term benefits with complete disregard for long-term consequences.
Don't you find it silly to call a person with a net worth of $4 billion "not a good businessman" keeping in mind that he made this money doing business
- My definition of "good businessman" is more than just maximizing one person's profits over all other considerations.
- It's clear that Trump has achieved a significant portion of his gains through legal threats. He has underpaid contractors, and his main response has been "Sue me if you want the rest of your money. But it will cost you more than it's worth to sue me." This is not my idea of a "good businessman".
- I don't have any faith in his stated net worth. I wonder what his actual worth is, if you could get an accurate assessment of his assets. I also have no idea how his election affects his actual net worth.
He did far, far worse as a businessman than he would have had he done nothing.
Based on that alone, I can call him not a good businessman.
Matt Levine wrote a great article on this idea: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-do...
Maybe the best line: "For one thing, if he put all his money in index funds and reinvested all the dividends for 41 years, he'd be dead, because you can't buy food with reinvested dividends."
An example of such a miscommunication in Europe right now: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37799805
Obviously you can, you mean shouldn't. I'm sure wisdom will prevail.
0 - http://www.businessinsider.com/state-and-country-trade-maps-...
For some things though, he makes the problem sound way simpler than it is. E.g. removing existing regulations when introducing an new one and reducing government employees.
We got a right wing government in Norway thinking much along these lines promising removal of red tape, fewer public sector employees etc.
They failed. Reality is just a lot more complicated. Instead they have resorted to stupid tricks to make it look as if they are reducing public sector employees. They more some employees to other organizations which are not technically part of government. They they can make the statistics look pretty. But they are still paying for the services of these people.
The problem with e.g. reducing public sector employees is that every new government has big ambitions they want to happen YESTERDAY. That can only happen by public sector employees making it happen. The more ambitious your changes, the more new bureaucrats you frequently need to hire to get this done.
New ambitions typically also means a lot more rules and regulations have to be added.
I know this problem well from Software development. We want to reduce the number of useless lines of code. Except from users and managers there is a tremendous pressure and incentive for new functionality to be added. That means more lines of code not less.
Laws and regulations will be the same. People want the new stuff. They don't want to hear that you spent all this time removing stuff which doesn't really give anybody anything new, except a nice refactored law book.
Likely you are going to need to hire lots of people to actually start cutting down on regulation. Identifying what can be removed and figuring out how the rephrase things requires actual work, which somebody has to do. And if they are doing that they are not implementing the new policies of the administration.
It basically boils down to Leave things tidier than when you arrived.
No massive refactor projects, just fix up little things when you're in the area. Sure you never end up with a particularly nice codebase but it's not getting worse and it's not costing the business massive amounts to make something prettier for little benefit.
Also works well with backlogs, especially for client projects, you want a new feature? what are you willing to drop off the backlog to get it?
It's generally well known that most products contain a crap tonne of unused features and removing them reduces technical debt (eg potential bugs, overweight/slow apps).
I don't see it as a hard rule to sell in software.
Okay, okay. I can hope, can't I?
> FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
> SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.
Can't see a reason to complain about any of these (though I've posted objections in other threads about other measures, mainly here [1]). Can anyone spot issues on these measures?
This will (necessarily) require more oversight. But I think we should be prepared to accept some regulation/oversight of the political process itself, given how critical it is to the functioning of society.
I predict that no turkeys will be voting for Christmas, and no Congressmen will be voting for limits on lobbyist dollars.
How Mexico will be forced to pay for a wall built by the US will make for a good TV show.
Private prisons are about to make a killing with the 2- and 5-year mandatory prison terms.
So weird - thanks for linking that by the way.
By the way, the scheme is already in place. It's part of the limited immigration "reform" that Obama managed to get from the Republicans. There's a minimum guaranteed prison time before deportation.
So the 2-5 years minimum is just bonanza.
We're so utterly and completely fucked.
Please Elon Musk, if you're reading this, make Tesla and SolarCity come faster so we can still experience snow no matter who runs this country
So they'll get richer overall and a part of them will lose their jobs.
> He promises to label China a currency manipulator, but the only consequence of that would be that America would have to engage China in talks on the currency’s value, which would have no practical effect.
The downside is pissing off China, which the US needs to get along. There is no upside -- China won't change its behavior because of a label.
The difficulty will be in keeping a straight face during talks designed to go nowhere.
Whether or not they are genuinely pissed off, they act offended at the bargaining table and make negotiations more difficult than they might have been. They have been known for doing that kind of thing in the past because it plays very well with the people at home.
It's not surprising as he heavily critiqued the deal with Iran - a deal which opened up trade of a lot of oil from the country.
1. Renegotiate NAFTA and TPP. I opposed both as they were mainly just for the richest to get richer moving jobs & playing games behind peoples' backs. He might clean them up a bit or make them favor U.S. more.
2. Foreign trading abuses. He griped about that on the Oprah show especially pointing out how the Japanese make it nearly impossible for him to do business in their country. He said many of the countries supposedly have trade agreements to make it easy but they trip us up with little obstacles. He'll probably stand by that.
3. Shift from UN to American infrastructure. I have doubts climate change strategies will work at all given how they're partial with lots of noncompliance. Meanwhile, those infrastructure aren't getting much support. Lesser of two evils.
4. Cancel unconstitutional EO's of Obama. I'm for doing that for all Presidents. He should start at Bush by vetoing Patriot Act, mass surveillance, etc. We know he said Obama for a reason, though. (sighs)
5. My family and many local businesses were affected heavily by illegal immigrants where lots of people lost jobs. We've also been hit with the fine letter of the law repeatedly. I'm for tight immigration policies & fair enforcement of law. Opposite of this coin is he should start arresting or fining any business owners that knowingly hired illegal immigrants just to be fair. There are two sides to that problem.
6. Tax Simplification. Often good.
7. Discourage offshoring. Should've been doing that along with maintaining a strong industrial base domestically. A huge chunk of our economy is financial engineering. Need more real stuff.
8. Child and elderly care. Sounds good.
9. Help veterans part of the National Security Act. They've been getting dogged by the system pretty bad that I've seen.
* Killing Obamacare and leaving millions without health insurance (but lowering premiums!)
* Lowering taxes on high earners
* Child care credits for high earners and not for the poor
Would all benefit us. The angry cynical part of my brain kind of urges me towards a "you know what, all those white-no-education-economic-malaise people who voted for him are going to get just what they deserve.".
But there's also all the fascist stuff about deportations and walls and I don't want to live in a me me me society anyway, so I'll do what I can to fight this garbage.
Among other things, I just signed up for the ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/secure/renew-your-aclu-membership
The just use of the law is to punish those who violate the rights of others, not those who don't meet our personal moral standards on acting altruistically. The latter is treading on theocratic ideology.
Sorry, but once the worst effects of climate change kick in, your infrastructure won't last terribly long at all.
The evidence I've seen is solidly in the "we're screwed no matter what a few companies or countries do" territory.
I am from India, and here is my observation. Why do American voters expect their "politicians"(be it democrat/republican) to stop offshoring, when these guys seem to have absolutely have no control over individual companies doing that ? Isnt offshoring an individual company/corp's prerogative ? The voter expectations and the laws, look mutually exclusive to me.
They do have quite a bit of control. The companies are doing it primarily because they lobbied politicians to pass laws and treaties to make it easier for them in the first place. Such things can be reversed although the consequences will be huge. Shouldn't be done suddenly which is what I don't like about what he'll probably do.
Far as voter expectations, those against globalization see the government there to meet their needs. This includes protecting their jobs and wages. The offshoring has been negative for those here while positive for them elsewhere (eg India). Incentivizing companies to hire Americans and pay them well increases quality of life here plus gives us stronger, internal economy.
Enacts new ethics reforms to drain the swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.
...means overturning Citizens United? Because if it doesn't, then this is just propaganda.
I agree. But it appalls me to think why any rational person would support an openly racist and sexist to lead a nation who doesn't pay tax? Even illegal immigrates pay taxes - http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-01/study-undocum.... I find it ironic.
The very short answer is that I'm not going to presume how others voted how they did, on either side, at least without asking them. I know that I don't subscribe to all of the views of the candidate I voted for, so I'll grant others the benefit of the doubt they didn't either. There are a lot of different issues, and people hold different positions of those issues, and prioritize the issues differently as well. There are some single-issue voters out there. I'm not. I'm not going to assume you are, either. I may not agree with the positions that someone else holds, or their prioritization of them.
I know I'm not perfect or have all of the answers. I also know that I've changed my positions on issues over the course of my life. I have hope that we can figure out what issues we have in common and work on those together. I also hope that by talking with one another we can come to agreements and be willing to change our minds.
At this point, the election is over. We have choices on how we move forward. My hope is that we can move forward together, and given how split the country is and how unhappy people were even with the candidates they supported, I think this is possible. I hope you do, too!
Thanks again for reading through this and sticking with it.
Thanks you. You response is somewhat similar to what a politician would say, equivocal and indirect. Basically, you avoided my question and did not say anything meaningful unfortunately.
> I know I'm not perfect or have all of the answers. I also know that I've changed my positions on issues over the course of my life. I have hope that we can figure out what issues we have in common and work on those together. I also hope that by talking with one another we can come to agreements and be willing to change our minds.
That's why I'm asking the question and hope you would have the answer. But sadly like many others, you are not forthcoming to share but instead wanted us to talk to others for answers. Why is it so hard to share? Why can we get a straight answer to a simple question?
> At this point, the election is over. We have choices on how we move forward. My hope is that we can move forward together, and given how split the country is and how unhappy people were even with the candidates they supported, I think this is possible. I hope you do, too!
Again, not exactly the answers I was hoping for. But thank you for the positive attitude. We all need it.
The vote was pretty evently split, and voters had an effectively binary choice. Both candidates had record low favorability numbers. I don't believe that people wholly subscribe to every position held by the candidate they chose. (Hell, I don't believe the candidates even wholly subscribe to every position they publicly held. Politics in democracy is about compromise, which unfortunately has apparently become a disparaged trait.)
I also think it's worth recognizing that the people that are expressing the most vitriol are not representative of the population as a whole. The anonymity and distance on the internet can bring out the worst in some people. As can the actions of crowds.
That also means that there are very likely things that we can agree on, things we think are worthwhile. It would be a massive failure on all of our parts if we can't figure out a way to accomplish those goals we have in common. I'm not ready to give up on us yet. You've been participating in the discussion as well, so I hope you're not giving up either.
Hillary Clinton lost the election but is winning the popular vote
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/donald-trump-hillary-...
Is this all made up BS plan that could never be achieved?
It can happen here.
Not a bad idea.
begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.
Only the criminal ones. OK
Thirty years is a long time to be elected, re-elected and re-elected and ...
Basically, without term limits, politics turns into a game of power plays and re-election campaigns, instead of actually representing the constituents.
How are you going to pickup who to run as a president, since usually most presidents candidates (except Trump, obviously) comes from senators and congress?
Where would candidates like Bernie Sanders be if he is not in congress for so long?
Is this explained anywhere?
http://www.apsanlaw.com/law-246.List-of-Sanctuary-cities.htm...
Since this list is most of your bigger more liberal cities (LA, SF, NYC), I do wonder what it means to cut off all federal funding to those cities.
The prospect of those people being too scared to call 911 if they witness a crime is something I am decidedly NOT looking forward to.
THIRD, I will direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.
Has nobody told him what this is going to do to the economy? The rest of his proposals he will have to get past congress and the courts, but this is one he can do all on his own.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/20/365467914/...
EDIT: Never mind, he said ...cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.
Donald Trump implored his fans to boycott Apple's products in February [1].
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/19/politics/donald-trump-apple-bo...
Foxconn has manufacturing plant in Vietnam. Vietnam is cheaper than China.
Human labor is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
The bigger problem is that since the Democrats and media took the "Literally Hitler" approach, no policies got discussed even though they were available in plain sight. Now whether you like them or not, he's won, and people had no opportunity to understand the policy differences between the candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_100_days_of_Franklin_D._...
many contracts start out this way then turn into actual contracts full of legalese. in government context that would be legislation.
this isn't a bad start at all if a reasonable amount of it actually happens.
Comcast/ATT/Verizon: nice startup you got there... would be a shame if anything happened to your traffic.
Pardon my naivety but who does this target?
Trump has expressed a preference for private industry to do things for the government, because they do it better. Accenture, Deloitte and KPMG are prolly the federal IT of the future
Plus a certain percentage of these people take the diverse base of experience and go start something useful. Teaching a bunch of smart, ambitious people about how the process actually works and then letting them go start their own operation seems like a recipe for job creation.... (and finding better ways to replace the status quo)
Also, in practice, contractors build a thing as fast as they can, then leave and never come back. Agencies that lean heavily on contractors generally don't have a deep bench of technical talent, so they get stuck with a maintenance nightmare that they didn't build and have a hard time understanding.
My feeling is that contractors tend to build differently than people who will have to support the system for however long the law it is enacting exists...
18F is housed within GSA and so is somewhat isolated from political interference. That said, private contractors don't like it and will seek to label it as a wasteful project (already started--there was an attack article on HN last week).
The U.S. federal government under Obama had started to take some small steps toward modern digital competency. My expectation for a Trump administration is a complete reversal of that. Who's going to champion technology? Trump?? Mike Pence? Giuliani? And how many young talented developers are going to want to take a pay cut to eat bureaucratic shit in DC for Donald Trump? The allure for USDS was Obama himself.
Not saying it will survive an entire Trump presidency, but I think it's not on the chopping block immediately. I do worry that they won't be able to expand as planned though to have mini-USDS people in each Agency because of the hiring freeze.
Here is his presentation: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/two-years-of-the-us-digital-se...
Without that sort of personal investment from the president (or someone else very high up), I don't know how effective the USDS can be, even if it is funded. In my experience the main ingredient in organizational change is will, not technological know-how.
And again, the question is who in technology wants to be associated with a Trump administration. Even the tech-savvy Republicans I know cannot stand Trump. Maybe that will change as the reality sinks in.
Then, add to that the fact that these people are ensuring the big pigs don't get to eat at the trough? Yeah, not looking good.
I think I would be looking for a private gig right now if I were in 18F/USDS.
15% seems like a lofty goal, even 25% would be drastic. Unless a corporation can be confident that there will be significant growth in the economy, they are likely to hoard the savings than reinvest them.
Just some of the words that stuck out to me.
The TV show created many jobs (producers, editors, filmers, the 'assistant' (spokesperson...) position being fought for) and those who were "fired" (never really hired to begin with, were they?) failed to meet the job requirement. Which was to be the best business-person. A meritocracy, as things should be, rather than being based on race/gender/filling some sort of diversity quota.
In reality they became spokespeople when they won. But that wasn't what the show was about or portrayed. Trump was portrayed as the "hard/rough" sort of boss and the "You're fired." was just the slogan/catchphrase which worked wonderfully as a TV catchphrase/slogan. It was short, memorable, and people knew where it was from.
There was a whole lot more creation than destruction....
So what makes a white or asian person the "better choice" than the black or latino person? Why should their race be a deciding factor in whether or not they are hired for a position? Education opens opportunities - especially in knowledge-based fields.
I'll take a strong, uneducated worker for a manual labor job over an intelligent toothpick because the stronger worker will be better for the job.
At the end of the day, why should [x] be chosen over [y] if [x] is better suited for the job? Is [x] not a person? Does [x] not matter? The only reason to select [y] is to pay a lower wage, they are easier to take advantage of, racism, or sexism.
It's almost like you can't just look at the verbs alone and distill very useful meaning.
cancel every unconstitutional executive action,I think we need some claification on what is "constitutional"
Ok, I'm on board with all of those... Then, besides a few other points, it just gets worse and worse the further into it you go.
If he accomplishes all 6, or even half, that's great. I just hope he won't have enough time to ruin everything else. At least now (especially after Dubya) we know we need outsiders vigilantly watching every move (and non-move) he makes.
Does this mean the LGBT rights to marry will be taken back?
So if Trump pulls off his "huge tax cuts" he'll be undermining his plan for health savings accounts. Classic Trump cognitive dissonance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zDPdwKL-7A
You can skip to 15:40.
Title: O-TRU-102316-Contractv06.indd
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PDF version: 1.3I wonder if they allow me to enter US.
I hope Trump won't go that far (i.e. banning from entering US because I was born in Uzbekistan).
I'm not convinced Trump fully understands what NAFTA entails. He talks a lot about the importing of goods manufactured in Mexico and the export of American jobs to Mexico, but to my knowledge he hasn't talked about any other aspect of it. Surely the tech sector would freak out and raise a stink if all their TN employees had to leave overnight.
The CBC has a high level article covering the ambiguities around getting out of NAFTA. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/donald-trump-nafta-trade-1.3657...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/13/trump-policy...
I have no power to decline or negotiate this contract. I did not vote for this, nor did the majority of Americans.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
If he does this alone, then he's made a huge impact.
I'm really concerned he might be assassinated.
There's other stuff he can do on his own authority (e.g., a hiring freeze), or that requires the power of the presidency (e.g., nominating a justice).
It's a fair point. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the 'term limits' mean, whether they are similar to presidential term limits (my original assumption) or not.
The question I find myself wondering is:
Is the range of possible upside equivalent to the range of possible downside?
My intuition is that there's a limited amount marginal improvements except in special cases but the potential downside goes from bad to worse to flat out catastrophic.
Maybe it is like how most programmers can improve a code base, but a single bad actor could fuck it to hell and back with greater ease.
I'm looking at you Dianne Feinstein. Evil bat-witch.
>I'm really concerned he might be assassinated.
Over a toothless regulation that affects only a small percentage of Congress and mostly guys ready to retire anyway?
No single action could increase the power of lobbyists and unelected officials not directly accountable to voters more than this, it's true. It would be an enormous impact.
I think corruption is like a weed. It grows when you become acclimatized to your environment and start to exploit it.
Term limits get us closer to a part-sortition. From the wiki:
Author James Wycliffe Headlam explains that the Athenian Council (500 administrators randomly selected), would commit occasional mistakes such as levying taxes that were too high. Additionally, from time to time, some in the Council would improperly make small quantities of money from their civic positions. However, "systematic oppression and organized fraud were impossible". These Greeks recognized that sortition broke up factions, diluted power, and gave positions to such a large number of disparate people that they would all keep an eye on each other making collusion fairly rare.
Reducing the average level of experience in the particular legislative institution, and in legislative affairs generally, of the first group increase the relative advantage in systematic knowledge and effectiveness of the latter two groups compared to the first.
Term limits aren't sortition (it's not random, and political parties and the donor class are actively involved in choosing who stands for seats and how much support they have, so, the effects you point to in sortition of breaking up factionsome and reducing corruption simply aren't present.) And, in any case, the level of complexity of a modern nation of 300+ million people different considerably from that of ancient Athens.
That's a good point. How would you solve for X here?
> Term limits aren't sortition (it's not random, and political parties and the donor class are actively involved in choosing who stands for seats and how much support they have, so, the effects you point to in sortition of breaking up factionsome and reducing corruption simply aren't present.)
I was thinking broadly of the system being more or less organized and how in some way incompetence may be less truly dangerous than a bad actor abusing the system.
How about we simply put restrictions on politicians and their interaction with mass media? This many minutes on television, paid for by the State so you don't have to scrounge around for cash? That is just a half-baked example, I take it you understand what I mean by it.
Corruption is a problem in every country but I don't think lobbying and donors exert such an influence in my country Ireland (could be naive here!).
> in any case, the level of complexity of a modern nation of 300+ million people different considerably from that of ancient Athens.
Ha! True. We need a new OS, that is for sure. That is why Patri Friedman (seasteading) has so many of my sympathies.
On top of that, this significantly weakens congress's position when raising funds for elections. They've got to dance to the right tune quickly, they can't slowly ramp up a career and build a brand. With their bargaining power lowered...ugh.
America is probably going to get totally fucked now. And no, not necessarily because of this. But this policy proposal is the best Trump could come up with? This isn't even half-baked, it's fucking flour in a pot and he's calling it cookies. How can this be called a contract.
This is not to say that term limits are bad. But just term limits alone may not be enough to curb corruption.
Career politicians are the worst.
Completely disconnected from the people because the only thing they know is how to get elected and work the system for personal enrichment and job security.
They help pass laws which affect people and the economy they've never participated in. The bad ones are hard to get rid of. Kind of like tenured professors. So you might lose an exceptional one from time to time but they can switch houses or branches in that case.
If you like no term limits, why do we have one for the President?
Why does Trump want US citizens to die because they cannot get health care?
The Impossible Dream...
Why? Remember Trump ran as a Populist..but both political parties are somewhat Corporate Shrills...
Not saying it cannot happen..but probably not in his two terms..
the most concerning aspect of trumps policies is that regarding climate. but thankfully renewable energy is now well on its way. its not a fragile infant anymore -- it will survive trump if not explode into popularity under trump despite his stance on the environment.
the trump movement was a grass roots movement. People voted for him because he said that he will stop companies from outsourcing their work with simple tax implementations. they lifted him from obscurity and into the presidency. take a look at the other times he ran and you can see what his campaign would have been like without the grass roots element: nothing. trump would not be president if people in the mid-west had good employment and a sense of financial security.
and as for the sexual assault thing, i would rather have trump be elected than see bill clinton back in the white house because bill clinton is literally a rapist. i know it may come as a huge shock for liberals -- being a liberal it was a huge shock to me -- but its true. i know this is not the most reputable source but before you disagree with me i would like you to watch this video of a woman recounting the event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHh73fkDUIs
and another
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug7diBO3XYY
i very much doubt that someone who could easily make a nice living in hollywood as one of the best actors in the world would instead decide to publicly accuse one of the most powerful men in the world of one of the worst crimes possible.
heres an article from npr (one of the most liberal new organizations on the planet) addressing the issue and offering absolutely no evidence to contradict it.
http://www.npr.org/2016/10/09/497291071/a-brief-history-of-j...
if anyone can point to evidence that proves her wrong then please let me know. im impartial.
For the first time in generations the USA finally has a president who isn't a puppet. And this contract allows us to keep said President accountable from day one. Nerds rejoice! Fear not the knee-jerk comments from un/mis-informed trendies and especially ignore the talking-point bots still hating on Trump via whatever is left in the Soros/CF payroll account. After years of trying they ultimately failed and clearly cannot impact the will of the people at the end of the day. MAGA.
Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. Half the country finds him personally repulsive. His presidency will be more contentious than any other in memory. Like any other politician, he will not deliver on his promises and he will not fix complex problems just by being willing to "get things done."
There will never ever be any shortage of people genuinely willing to criticize Trump for free.
You say Trump won the election but lost the popular vote; ok I'll give you that (ignoring for a moment the culture of criminality of the Clinton campaign and the possibility for election fraud ) but the margin of that popular vote is only by a 0.2 to 0.7% lead [0]. Hardly more than 50% if even.
Regardless, if I'm not mistaken, the popular vote doesn't determine who becomes President so this argument is flawed because if popular vote did determine who became President then the Trump campaign could very well have optimized their campaign to win said popular vote; requiring a different strategy but one that could very well have been successful just as they were at winning the battleground states as they did, and as so few predicted.
You say that half the country finds him personally repulsive. Why is that? I just laid out some facts about the media collusion and attempts to smear and disrupt his character and campaign. Why is your angst not directed at the sell-out mainstream media for helping to coordinate the propaganda which is now so deeply rooted in people's opinions towards the now President to be?
Finally, maybe it would be better to give the new President a chance to implement his promises before judging him on that regard. Maybe he is not like any other politician, after all he's the only President to ever take office who has no prior position in politics or military.
[0] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2016/presidential-...
Although the count hasn't yet finished - California could tip that a few % points upwards.