Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[smjjames]

I don't think Jeb actually has a ranch though.... Other than the family ranch that is.

[Egan_BW]

Spoiler: Shitpost. Do not read if you have opinions (click to show/hide)

"I find it funny how often you humans compare other humans to chimps. I'm not going to sugercoat it; all you hominids look the same to me." -Loud "Someone is doing all the raping" Whispers

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler: Shitpost. Do not read if you have opinions (click to show/hide)

"I find it funny how often you humans compare other humans to chimps. I'm not going to sugercoat it; all you hominids look the same to me." -Loud "Someone is doing all the raping" Whispers

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm just saying I know plenty of good monkeys in real life (actually, there is a photo of me held by some Americans I need to track down where a monkey at the steps of Batu Cave was politely tapping my shoulder and asking for peanuts instead of trying to thieve them like his cheeky m8s), so I can't be apeist by defending homo sapiens lives

[Egan_BW]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

wow I cant believe you just said that you bigoted apeist

[mainiac]

I think it's interesting to look at the contrasts between the two parties that underly a couple of party conflicts:

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/18/11041838/bernienomics-wonks
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/18/11057968/donald-trump-iraq-war-2002

What's interesting isn't so much the disputes themselves (they wont be a big deal).  What is interesting is the ground rules by which the disputes are assumed to be judged.  There couldn't be a republican version of the first and there couldn't be a democratic version of the second.

[RedKing]

Spoiler: Shitpost. Do not read if you have opinions (click to show/hide)

"I find it funny how often you humans compare other humans to chimps. I'm not going to sugercoat it; all you hominids look the same to me." -Loud "Someone is doing all the raping" Whispers

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm just saying I know plenty of good monkeys in real life (actually, there is a photo of me held by some Americans I need to track down where a monkey at the steps of Batu Cave was politely tapping my shoulder and asking for peanuts instead of trying to thieve them like his cheeky m8s), so I can't be apeist by defending homo sapiens lives

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

#SapiensLivesMatter

EDIT:
Regarding Jeb, I picture him standing in a cave somewhere in South Carolina, doing his best Shatner impression as he looks at the ceiling in rage and screams out "HAAAAAALLLLEEEEYYYYYY!!!!!!"

I'm wondering what Jeb's legacy will be now. My money is on "Please Clap". Kinda sad to see an entire political career reduced to one blooper moment, like Howard Dean.

[smjjames]

Without the context, since it was originally supposed to be a joke, I think, the whole 'please clap' thing sounds pretty sad. Not tears sad, just depressing sad.

[Frumple]

I'm wondering what Jeb's legacy will be now. My money is on "Please Clap". Kinda sad to see an entire political career reduced to one blooper moment, like Howard Dean.

Not when it's jeb's. Serendipitous or cheering, perhaps. Though I guess it's also diminishing of his cavalcade of screwups, too, which is something of a downside. Still not sad.

[Shadowlord]

Looking at the actual quote as well he says he's sure some are good people but his conversations with border patrol guards suggest otherwise; you must also consider that in Europe we had everyone bawling over every time someone pointed out immigrant groups were raping so many people and 2015 was pretty much the year of banterous validation on that where everyone who attacked the critics nervously tried shuffling the victims under the blanket. So I see the same kneejerk reaction in the USA and get skeptical because what you do we do later and what we do you do later.

I forget, did we look for statistics about this when we discussed this ebfore?

If we didn't settle it with statistics, are you sure it isn't just a few of them being bad apples, and it being reported intensely because it was unusual?

I mean, the news rarely reports on "routine" things - like murders in majority black cities, or on suicides unless they're cops or murder-suicides or otherwise sensational. There's rarely reporting on murders in general unless they're mass shootings, or happen to middle-class or upper-class people, or involve a pretty girl, as far as I can tell. So I wonder - if rapes are common in Europe, but usually perpetrated by someone the victim knows, would the news just virtually never report on anything like that because it's routine, unless it becomes sensational?

Spoiler: If you're wondering, statistics on suicide and homicide by firearm by race (click to show/hide)

Showing that suicide by firearm rates are much higher among white males (than white females, black males, or black females), and homicide by firearm rates are ridiculously high for black males:



The CDC PDF that came from. You've probably seen it before.

According to a 2009 report by the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2007 Latinos "accounted for 40% of all sentenced federal offenders-more than triple their share (13%) of the total U.S. adult population". This was an increase from 24% in 1991. 72% of the Latino offenders were not U.S. citizens. For Hispanic offenders sentenced in federal courts, 48% were immigration offenses and 37% drug offenses. One reason for the large increase in immigration offenses is that they exclusively fall under federal jurisdiction.

I clicked the link, it went to wikipedia, and then I clicked the citation, and there was no way to follow it to get to the actual source, so anyone could have just made up the numbers. vOv

But! If they're real numbers:
So what you're saying is that people were crossing the southern border to try to get into the US illegally before the financial meltdown, maybe some were bringing drugs (it's unclear), and that the federal courts were spending a huge amount of time dealing with them, right?

Christ, real life shitposting, all I can say is let us dispel once and for all this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world. That's why he passed Obamacare and the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and the deal with Iran. It is a systematic effort to change America. When I'm president of the United States, we are going to re-embrace all the things that made America the greatest nation in the world and we are going to leave our children with what they deserve: the single greatest nation in the history of the world.

"It's-a me, Marco-bot!"

[SirQuiamus]

Hahaha, the "small print" in Clinton's Wall Street reform plan is too damn small to read.
_{(no mainiac, pls no raeg)}

Here’s what really has me scratching my head–see those little lower-case Roman numerals in brackets? They look like footnotes. But there are no footnotes at the bottom of the page. As far as I can tell, Clinton’s campaign didn’t post the footnotes to the document anywhere. My guess is that there was a footnoted version circulated privately, and not including footnotes in the public version was intentional–but if so, why not take the fifteen minutes to clean up the document so it doesn’t have these mysterious footnotes to nowhere? This looks awfully sloppy, like Clinton’s team doesn’t take presenting her policy proposals seriously. It also makes me wonder if some of the people praising Clinton have seen details in the footnotes that are being kept secret. Or maybe not–but it’s still weird.

[mainiac]

I said back in the first debate that I thought it was frustrating how every time the debate turned to financial reforms the candidates stopped talking about their real plans.  I would guess the logic is that a complicated plan isn't something you can sell.  The upshot of the plan is that it carves out a territory of executive powers where the executive branch is actively exercising it's role role in disincentive risky behavior.  The active part is far more important then the size part.  What various government branches are expected to do sometimes turns out to not happen or to be delayed by legal ambiguity and that was a big part of the last crisis.  And at the end of the day to be honest we dont even know if it will work, it's just trying whatever we can, FDR style.

The claims that Sanders plan is unrealistic is much simpler, the numbers add up but they are unrealistic.  It's far outside the range of outcomes that prior studies and pilot programs have found.  I have zero respect for this writer saying "BUT EUROPE GUYZ" even if they are writing it in calmer, more wordy fashion.  Yes Europe does it cheaper, that means that in the long run we can expect such a shift.  But the long run means decades of market forces playing out, decades of regulators doing their jobs and decades of continuing to update the legislation.  Lower healthcare costs in 2070 are a great thing but we need to be worried about 2025 too.  And lower healthcare costs in 2070 dont happen if the efforts are abandoned in 2020.

When Obama was pushing the affordable care act there was a lot of long term cost curve stuff in there, community clinics, long term health maintenance studies, health record modernization.  The Congressional Budget Office assumed zero benefits from such programs.  The Obama administration expected that.  You want to invest in such efforts of course but you dont count your chickens before they hatch.  In order to make sure the budget will balance you assume the speculative programs will fail and hope to be pleasantly surprised.  Electronic medical records were a great example of why you should be so cautious, it should have saved billions or even tens of billions of dollars.  It saves that kind of money in Europe.  Instead of saving billions of dollars it taught us that American doctors cant find their assess with a map.  So dont assume that your new more efficient system will work, even if it works in other places.

When you start allowing yourself to go with assuming things will work, you start entering the realm of unreaslistic predictions.  You start entering the realm of this:

Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible. "In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion," he writes in an email. "With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative." (Authors emphasis, not Thorpe's.) The Sanders camp revised the number down to $241 billion when I pointed this out.

As far as I know, republicans haven't started attacking the Sanders healthcare plan yet.  That means that the people who attack it are all democratic policy writers.  And democratic policy writers pretty much unanimously want some form of socialized healthcare.  The evidence is overwhelming that socialized healthcare is a good way of doing things.  When they say it's unrealistic it's people who fundamentally believe it's a workable idea, the path of least resistance in fact.  Their problem is not with the idea, it's with the plan.

[Flying Dice]

For once I'll offer some insight into a particular point of the campaign instead of shitposting.

I've seen more than a few times talking about Sanders in terms of him only being strong on a handful of issues, and only talking about those issues, as if it were a weakness. Well, obviously a candidate who is perceived positively on a wide swath of issues has an advantage, but we're looking at the second point. It's commonly accepted in the study of American politics (and other more-or-less direct-election systems) that it's highly advantageous for a candidate to address only their strong issues while ignoring or diverting discussion from everything else--I'm certain I've mentioned this before.

Intentionally or not, by so heavily emphasizing his core policy positions, Sanders is (largely, but not entirely) focusing attention on points where he's strong with the Democratic base. Maybe not the party leadership, but fuck the party leadership, at the end of the day they aren't the ones casting all the votes. That is, I suspect, part of why he's polling so well, especially in head-to-head comparisons against the Republican candidates when compared to Clinton: almost everything he talks about is something that he's relatively strong on, and as has been previously noted he doesn't really have any scandals (real or fabricated) to divert attention. Likewise, by not really talking much about issues where he's weak, the end result is that when voters think about him, they largely think about things they perceive as positives (if they're left-leaning, at least).

In the primary race, that's Sanders' main advantage over Clinton, that he has and likely will continue to focus voter attention on his strong points, without the various distractions. It's questionable whether it'll be enough, but I think that a lot of people are perceiving him as a better Democratic candidate in no small part because he's spoken mostly on points that he's viewed favorably on.

However, a great deal depends on whether this is intentional on the part of Sanders and his campaign--if it's not, and he's drawn into discussing issues where he might be viewed less favorably (within the left, for example, as far as national security is concerned, I don't think anyone would argue that Clinton doesn't look better, unless you're talking to an outright pacifist), he could lose ground in the primary--if he makes it to the general election I don't see many Clinton supporters swinging over to whatever wingnut ends up with the GOP nomination. It'll be interesting going forward to see whether Clinton's campaign actively tries to shift the narrative away from Sanders' strengths.

[PTTG??]

Hold on, it's entirely reasonable for future savings to be larger than past expenditures, especially in health care in the united states, where expenses are rising and expected to rise faster.

Saying you assume zero benefit when you actually expect some benefit but don't want to lose face if it's too low is at best a consequence of a broken system. You need to have a "real" estimated success rate and a "real" range of expected outcomes, or else you can't actually decide what is more or less effective.

If you assume zero, then you open yourself up to saying "well, I'm not going to get any chickens no matter what, so why buy eggs?"

[Shadowlord]

Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible. "In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion," he writes in an email. "With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative." (Authors emphasis, not Thorpe's.) The Sanders camp revised the number down to $241 billion when I pointed this out.

Two words: Martin Shkreli

[mainiac]

We're gonna make him charge negative prices as a court settlement?