Print

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

[MrRoboto75]

For that price Wisconsin could just flat out pay their salary from state coffers for between 4 and 15 years without those people ever having to work during that time period.

But I don't want to provide basic income, I want to turn people into Dinosaurs!

[Playergamer]

Alright, here's my take on that article.

At the end of the article it's mentioned that they don't get all the incentives unless they expand up to 13,000 employees, so we'll assume that number. That's a little more than 200k per job, about five years at the average salary.

I see literally nothing wrong with this.

I kid, I kid, but I consider this very acceptable. Industrial jobs tend to create and support more jobs; a 50k average salary for 13,000 people can support a pretty big town. Assuming the factory sticks around, it's more sustainable than just paying them 50k each from the state budget.

I really wish that article said where in Wisconsin this factory would be. I'm curious how 50k stacks up to cost of living in the area. The negotiators for the state could've done a much better job, but I think it's not too terrible a deal.

Edit: Old but gold article, relevant. It /is/ written by a manufacturing dude, but the point gets made.

Edit2: To clarify, I don't particularly support this deal. Wisconsin is in a fairly strong economic position and doesn't need to spend so much cash on one deal. But at the same time, someone has to defend it, right?

[redwallzyl]

As a capitalist, might I say that the problem you guys are having is that you think human life actually has value? Once you correct that, it'll work itself out.

Wasn't putting a price tag on human life a capitalist idea? You know, like the Ford Pinto case.

Anyone can put price tag on life. You do it all the time, every day. You can convert it into seconds, dollars, anything.

As an example: the very root of most criticisms of aggressive counter-terrorism is precisely that: the number of lives saved relative to the cost in time, effort, manpower, peace of mind, etc. And you can calculate very precisely how much we spend on terrorism, and how many people die to terrorism and how many plots are stopped, and come to a rough estimate of the value of a human life in counter-terrorism dollars. And what would be the alternative to thinking like this? You could, you know, say "every life is precious",  but logically that demands that we put infinite resources to the business of counter-terrorism. Alternatively, you could say "Terrorism is worth the price of not having counter-terrorism", but then you're willfully ignoring potential cost-effective solutions that could save many lives for very little price. For anyone for whom both of these alternatives are immoral, the question comes down to simply "how much are we willing to pay for how many lives saved?" Money is simply the medium.

Also, have we discussed Bannon's exit already?

I would describe more as you can't call human life "priceless", but yeah, I agree.  Money and property isn't just materialist crap, it keeps people alive and happy.  At least some of it does.  If you spend 50 million keeping one person alive, but then you have to cut a bunch of money out of a housing initiative, did you actually "save a life" net?  Maybe, but it was at the cost of reducing many people's quality of life, which is tied to length of life anyway...

Of course, society is built on the faith that we won't murder our neighbors even if there's nothing stopping us.  So applying that math directly is kind of useless, if you have to justify letting someone suffer by saying "saving them isn't worth it" that person is going to start questioning why they have to pay taxes or follow laws.

edit: changed "correctly" to "directly", I think the math is useful I just mean that complete utilitarianism is kind of insane even tho partial utilitarianism has good things to say

You can put a price on everything and people have:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild
up to and including straight up basing an entire legal system on it.

[Max™]

As a capitalist, might I say that the problem you guys are having is that you think human life actually has value? Once you correct that, it'll work itself out.

I've been saying the whole time that we need to correct it, with the "it" being the idea that since Stalin and Mao were horrific and communists, then capitalism is the path to beneficence, which is nonsense, going from "lets put a dictator in charge and hope they don't kill tens of millions of people" to "lets throw money at greedy fuckers and hope it doesn't end up with tens of millions of people dying" is what I would call... an overcorrection.

Of course, society is built on the faith that we won't murder our neighbors even if there's nothing stopping us.  So applying that math directly is kind of useless, if you have to justify letting someone suffer by saying "saving them isn't worth it" that person is going to start questioning why they have to pay taxes or follow laws.

You pay taxes to maintain belief in the rightness of the government performing certain services _{and to keep the money supply under control} and you believe money has value because you can use it to do things like pay taxes and purchase goods or services.

Still awaiting the comedy from Bannon leaving, here's my guesses:

1. Trump will come out and say it was on good terms.

2. Bannon will take the olive branch.

3. Trump will turn around and say Bannon was a backstabbing nazi scumbag.

4. Bannon will endorse Bernie Sanders for some reason.

5. Trump will say something about how Hitler wasn't such a bad guy in the end.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

6. Trump Jr. will be discovered to have attended a fraternity Halloween party dressed as an SS Officer. 

[nenjin]

Man I must be way out of the loop, I didn't know Bannon was leaving. I guess the memes haven't started to circulate yet.

I wonder if this is the end of serially hiring and firing people as the establishment kicks all the kooks out of the Administration and Trump starts to play ball with with the establishment.

[redwallzyl]

Man I must be way out of the loop, I didn't know Bannon was leaving. I guess the memes haven't started to circulate yet.

I wonder if this is the end of serially hiring and firing people as the establishment kicks all the kooks out of the Administration and Trump starts to play ball with with the establishment.

Ha Ha good joke!

[Playergamer]

From what I've seen, the parting looks pretty cordial. I think this is just a mutually reached decision that Trump should align himself more with the mainstream, and Bannon'll go back to officially running Trump's alt-media.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Man I must be way out of the loop, I didn't know Bannon was leaving. I guess the memes haven't started to circulate yet.

I wonder if this is the end of serially hiring and firing people as the establishment kicks all the kooks out of the Administration and Trump starts to play ball with with the establishment.

Not so, the party establishment has never been weaker in the administration. Most of them were packaged with Priebus, and they left when he did. There really aren't any establishment contacts in the White House at this point.

Right now? You've got Pence and his religious nutters, you've got a vestigial nationalist group that's basically holding on due to Jeff Sessions alone, you've got the Mattis/McMaster/Kelly military contacts who are at risk due to how badly they fit with the rest, you've got the Mnuchin/Tillerson all consuming maw of capitalism that also might be at risk now that the councils are out...and you've got the Trump family.

Of those, it's really just the religious right and the Iron Circle of Trump that are going strong. Oh, and the secret/not-very-secret dissident groups in the bureaucracy's non-Administration hires.

If Trump's goal is to pass Absolute Crown Authority and disband the Council so he may be unto Caesar, he's doing a decent job of it. The only sticking point is that he can't fire Mike Pence, and he seems to tolerate his crowd more than the rest.

[smjjames]

The only sticking point is that he can't fire Mike Pence

Not without a really, REALLY, good reason. The only recent (as in the last 100 years) case for the VP being fired or resinging is Nixons first VP when he got caught up in his own scandal.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The only sticking point is that he can't fire Mike Pence

Not without a really, REALLY, good reason. The only recent (as in the last 100 years) case for the VP being fired or resinging is Nixons first VP when he got caught up in his own scandal.

No, I mean, he can't fire Mike Pence. The Veep is like the Prez, they can only be impeached. He could pressure Pence to resign if something big came up, but anybody else Trump can still say "You're Fired (TM)" if they refuse to resign and pretend to play nice.

[smjjames]

The only sticking point is that he can't fire Mike Pence

Not without a really, REALLY, good reason. The only recent (as in the last 100 years) case for the VP being fired or resinging is Nixons first VP when he got caught up in his own scandal.

No, I mean, he can't fire Mike Pence. The Veep is like the Prez, they can only be impeached. He could pressure Pence to resign if something big came up, but anybody else Trump can still say "You're Fired (TM)" if they refuse to resign and pretend to play nice.

Right, right.

Pence has kept himself mostly clear of the Russia scandal and the worst mostly seems to be making some bad staffing choices and possibly lying about not knowing that Flynn was compromised. We'll see what Mueller finds.

[EnigmaticHat]

In Watergate Nixon's VP resigned anyway, in spite of not (IIRC) being very connected to the scandal.

[smjjames]

On the whole debate with the confederate statues, I found this: Putting them in a sort of 'memento park' with the historical context around them might be a workable idea. The main idea would be to put them into context in a sort of outdoors museum or something.

There are plenty of open air archaeological sites that visitors can go to, for example (and not the only example), look at how slaves at the time lived, so, the idea isn't too far off.

[MrRoboto75]

The only proper Civil War statue we have here in Manassas is basically where the battle(s) took place anyway.  Stonewall Jackson, I think.

Other than the reenactors that blow through every now and again, I don't know of anyone that cares too strongly one way or another.