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[Gentlefish]

Golly, it's almost as if the department meant to audit the finances of American citizens and corporations should be funded. I would imagine there's plenty of money the government is missing there!

[Trekkin]

Orgs like clinton foundation should not exist, because there is no effective means to regulate them, EVEN THOUGH they do in fact, on occasion, do what they are supposed to do.

I think we're all agreed on this, but the difficulty lies in formulating a workable definition of "like the Clinton Foundation" in order to provide an alternative.

As SalmonGod said above, charity is a good thing at the micro level, and we probably don't want to make it illegal for people to give money to causes they support -- and, therefore, for people with a great deal of money to give a great deal of money to causes they support. (Carried too far, we could easily make Christmas gifts illegal, for example.) By similar logic, we want to get as much result out of our charity as possible, given the choice, which requires some form of administration to take advantage of economies of scale, avoid redundancy, and let people who don't know how to make the changes they want happen still contribute. It'd be absurd if everyone with a dollar and a concern about world hunger had to open their own soup kitchen, to take an extreme example. (It also follows that at some point the administrative workload increases until it's not tenable on a volunteer basis, but that's a separate argument about admin costs.)

If we don't want to shut down all charity or all charitable organizations, we're going to have to accept the potential for maladministration that's an inherent part of hierarchy -- and also the mutability of corporate entities that allows for both financial chicanery and also freedom. If we set a maximum size of charitable organizations, they'll just split into that-size organizations. If we make self-dealing impossible, we'll get reciprocal friend-dealing. The end result of audits is regulatory capture of the auditors. 

So what distinguishes the Clinton and Trump foundations from charitable organizations that we want that is both immutable and non-prejudicial?

[wierd]

That's why I suggested treating such orgs as an upper-bound, evaluating on realworld collected data on the intersection between "Amount of money in play" and "observed incidence rate of corruption"

Might even make it a 3D intersection, with a vertical axis of "Cost of administrative overhead", while you are at it.

It would then be possible to define a "rough" allowable size range, that by virtue of limits on size of operation, prevents that kind of wrongdoing, and which permits the maximal amount of proper action, and mitigates inefficiency from oppressive levels of oversight. 

Rather than be predictive, it would be prescriptive in function.  (Collect data first, use data to determine ideal size classes, enforce rules on size class to limit inappropriate behavior, restart cycle and amend as needed.)


If we combined that with some actually useful campaign finance reform (and killed super-pac bullshit with holy fire), we could limit the kind of international shennanigans that Clinton Foundation was up to, and by limiting the size of total operations to a monetary ceiling before requiring the charity to be split up, we can prevent "personal piggybank" shenanigans of Trump Foundation.  (at the very least, we can detect it much more easily, because attempts to use it for large personal transactions/tax evasion, would stand out clearly, because the total fungibility of the foundation is seriously curtailed.)

[Trekkin]

So your solution to reforming charities in view of the mutability of corporate entities is to run what I'm going to charitably call Pareto optimization on a small set in which one criterion is vague ("in play" being insufficiently specific to capture the degrees of financial separation between foundations, their heads, their corporations, their contractors, etc., and those distinctions being material) the next is subjective and confounds detectability with real incidence rate, and the third becomes fuzzy when one takes into account things like the foundation employing members of their target group or otherwise using administrative expenditures to accomplish their social goals. From this set, acting on the assumption that the Pareto frontier suggests a single allowable size range, we're going to force a trivial reorganization of charity assets into multiple smaller entities still under de facto unified control.

And then we're going to do it over and over again and hope the feedback loop converges even though we're operating on a parameter to which the system is already effectively robustified by virtue of changing it as part of its normal operations.

That...will not work.

[Dunamisdeos]

Oh no the Clintons do shady illegal things on the regular, who knew, oh no.

So what does this mean in a practical sense, do you think? Is this investigation going to find the Clinton foundation guilty of illegal wrong-thing-doings? If so, is anyone going to get in actual trouble? I'd say the latter is somewhat unlikely.

[MrRoboto75]

but her emails charity foundation

[bloop_bleep]

but her emails charity foundation

And both are completely valid reasons to despise her.

[Telgin]

Oh no the Clintons do shady illegal things on the regular, who knew, oh no.

So what does this mean in a practical sense, do you think? Is this investigation going to find the Clinton foundation guilty of illegal wrong-thing-doings? If so, is anyone going to get in actual trouble? I'd say the latter is somewhat unlikely.

I kind of doubt anyone will be in actual trouble, and if they are it won't be Hillary or Bill, but it may be enough to shut out another attempt by Hillary to run for president before we even get to the point of her losing out to Trump again.

[nenjin]

If both the Clinton and Trump foundations get wrekt by this, I’d call it a win for everyone. Then maybe the two sides will finally STFU about one another.

[Dunamisdeos]

But her (I don't want this problem to exist, time to meme it).

That video implies that the Clinton Foundation meddled in everything from American Politics to foreign relations, all using "charity" funds, while also just sort of spending that same money for personal funsies. That's like, 5 unique types of super illegal. It's the literal things we hate Trump for doing, it's just tax money instead of charity money in his case. There are even Russian ties implied.

If both the Clinton and Trump foundations get wrekt by this, I’d call it a win for everyone. Then maybe the two sides will finally STFU about one another.

Wow that would be just like if both sides of American politics were literally and figuratively as fucked up as the other, only to different social groups/issues. But that's preposterous. I must secretly be trying to trick you into not voting or some shit.

TL;DR - Find all current major political parties in the alps, change my mind. >:|

[smjjames]

Maybe Apple should detach itself from China if it doesn't want to be affected by the slowdown in that way? China certainly can't keep up it's high energy economy forever even if it wanted to.

Also, I'll just leave this here: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/423609-trump-suggests-vatican-proves-border-wall-is-moral

Meanwhile, neither side is budging in what they want....

[sluissa]

I forget if Apple was a part of it, but I recently read an article that suggested that there's a massive push to find manufacturing capacity in other parts of asia. I think India was a big focus, but elsewhere as well. There's supposedly a mass exodus out of China as an outsourcing location. Take it with a grain of salt, journalism being what it is, and especially financial journalism... but hey, it's interesting news.

[Karnewarrior]

Meanwhile, neither side is budging in what they want....

The Dems have no justification in giving in beyond sheer spineless appeasement, and Trump is psychologically incapable of comprehending that he lost something. So I expect this will continue on for quite a while, since it's the Senate Republicans that are the real breaking point here. Mark my words, if the stalemate breaks, it'll be because Pelosi got cold feet, or because Republicans threatened and/or carried out Impeachment procedures.

[smjjames]

Found this idea about fixing the Senate so that it's apportioned by population. Keep one senator in to 'preserve federalism' (IMO, it should stick with two per state as the base) and then apportion it by population. In the example given using 1/100 of population (I call it an example because it doesn't neccesarily have to be 1/100, could be 1/200 or whatever), the four big states get 12 (California), 9 (Texas), and 6 (NY and Florida). The one thing that the article doesn't address though is, how do you deal with voting for the larger numbers of Senators and keeping it free from gerrymandering. I guess California (with it's big OP chunk of 12 (and that's a Californian saying that, lol)) can do it in blocks of four if we were to keep the three 'classes' (blocks of Senators who have their election in the same year). It's just an idea though.

Meanwhile, neither side is budging in what they want....

The Dems have no justification in giving in beyond sheer spineless appeasement, and Trump is psychologically incapable of comprehending that he lost something. So I expect this will continue on for quite a while, since it's the Senate Republicans that are the real breaking point here. Mark my words, if the stalemate breaks, it'll be because Pelosi got cold feet, or because Republicans threatened and/or carried out Impeachment procedures.

The Democrats would certainly metaphorically burn her at the stake if she ever did get cold feet and caved.

Also, I wonder when the next debt ceiling limit point is? I wonder how the government shutdown will affect that. I don't think we've ever had a partial shutdown happening with a debt ceiling limit approaching. You can bet Trump will attempt to use the wall ultimatium there.

[smjjames]

Well, I mean you have to figure out how to deal with voting for more than one Senator at a time while keeping it statewide. Not an insurmountable problem since it's actually a type of voting system. I was just sort of mulling and rambling on as I sometimes do, and also thinking mainly about California since in the given setup it'd get 12, which seems like a bit much.