Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[death tribble]

Currently the BBC says that Biden has 279 electoral votes to Trump's 214 with 4 states still counting. So how many electoral college votes are left ?

[Cygnia]

We have puppers back in the White House again!  ❤️

 

Major The Dog Came From An Animal Shelter. Now He’s Headed To The White House

[Hugh Neilson]

16 hours ago, TrickstaPriest said:

 

Good point, and I'm sorry for the diatribe on that Hugh.

 

To finish my thought though.

 

Automation just sort of runs over the entire issue with a steamroller.  In the example, a more realistic contract would be $10+ million, maybe even $15 million, for 100k machines.  But that functionally means each machine is being maintained/run for $150 a year.  Even if the value of the dollar collapsed, that would effectively mean they would just find or train workers willing to maintain those machines for the new economy, for effectively costing themselves the same rough rate.

 

The only change to that value rate is how difficult the task is to automate, and how much wear the machine parts take.  The former is the only real holdup, and only because of initial investment capital to take it that far.  Once they get it to the point customers will utilize the automated tools, the entire pay rate becomes irrelevant.

 

15 hours ago, Old Man said:

My understanding is that putting more money in the hands of people who actually spend it leads not to inflation, but to increased competition and job growth. After all, workers with more money can support more restaurants and other small businesses. As always, though, if there is evidence to the contrary I’d love to see it. 

 

It's funny how we see "competition" as a positive as compared to minimum wage.  Competition is expected to drive quality up and prices down.  The latter means that the business which best controls its costs wins, because it is more competitive.  Part of controlling costs is keeping labour costs down.  But that's not written in stone.

 

The reality is that competition is about giving the market what it wants.  If people looked at their product choices and declined the one crafted with foreign labour, then domestically produced products would be more competitive.  That's a big part of the drive to "Made in USA" (or whatever local country; I am not American).  But unless you will pay more for the same product because it is manufactured domestically, then those lower-paid foreign workers in lower-cost, lower-regulated and/or lower-taxed facilities are more competitive, as long as their reduced costs can offset the higher shipping costs to get the product to the location where you will pay for it.  Or they can ship it for less than the incremental cost for purchasing from your local bricks and mortar store when you order it online.

 

There's no question circulating more money through the economy helps it to grow.  Restaurants are a good example where there is a limit to how far afield I can direct my money - a restaurant in southeast Asia might give me a nicer meal for a lower price, but the added cost of getting there to eat it is a pretty major deterrent.  Even there, however. do we go get a burger and fries from the local restaurateur, where the price is higher and the quality similar, or do we pop into a huge chain for a cheaper McBurger, a Whopper, etc.?  How do you think they are able to price it lower?

 

Competition also drives wages.  Wages are simply the price for labour.  The more scarce that labour is, the more valuable it becomes.  One historical example (and this is frightening as I consider it, in light of the current health crisis) is how the Black Plague ended serfdom.  Suddenly, there was more work than workers to do it, so many workers migrated to larger centres where they could make more than they could farming for the local Noble.  Cut the supply of unskilled manual labour in half, and, if demand is constant, then competition for those hours will increase and the prices will rise.  Of course, with less people spending, the need for that labour will decline, offsetting some of the competitive pressure.

 

A major challenge of economics is the vast array of variables, which is why analysis typically focuses first on "assume everything else stays exactly the same and tweak this single variable".  That's really hard to test in a real-world economy, since the other variables also move.  My intro macroeconomics course many years back made that very clear from the first class, where our Prof went over a brief history of economics.  Every era ends with "and then X happened, which was impossible under the theory, so we needed a new theory".  At that time, the most recent was "and then, in the 1970's, we had high inflation and high unemployment at the same time, which was impossible".  Why was it previously impossible?  Because high unemployment should drive the cost of labour down, making it possible for prices to be maintained or even fall.   But labour had become a much lower component of the cost of finished goods, so when other prices rose (like energy costs) it could offset the falling cost of labour and we could still have inflation.

 

Complex problems have simple, easily understood, obvious wrong answers.  Just changing the minimum wage doesn't solve the underlying economic issues, so it won't simply and easily make everyone better off.

 

In microeconomics, that same prof taught me that "in economics, the real world is typically a special case".

[Greywind]

I guess having a comedy routine in here is acceptable if Trump is your target. All other politicians were off limits.

[Simon]

7 minutes ago, Greywind said:

I guess having a comedy routine in here is acceptable if Trump is your target. All other politicians were off limits.

I’m sorry...is the person who has been treading the line with being banned from this discussion voicing issues with the moderation here?

[Grailknight]

29 minutes ago, Greywind said:

I guess having a comedy routine in here is acceptable if Trump is your target. All other politicians were off limits.

 

While I disagree with the politics you seem to be espousing, I do sympathize with how you must be feeling right now. I had the same problems in 2016 when Trump won. It feels like a dark cloud will be overhead for four years. Maybe in four years, you'll get to feel the relief and joy that we feel about that cloud being lifted.

 

Are we wrong for celebrating? No. Did the comedy posts cross a line? Maybe?  They did not break forum rules but I can see and understand how they could be easily anger provoking.

 

In their defense, so many of Trump's actions have been comical that some last jokes at his expense are to be expected. Trump has provoked so much of it himself.

[archer]

56 minutes ago, Greywind said:

I guess having a comedy routine in here is acceptable if Trump is your target. All other politicians were off limits.

 

I would be more than happy to post Biden jokes. But the place where I go to look at jokes had a grand total of one Biden joke today, and I posted it. (edit: sorry, I posted 2 Biden jokes)

 

And I thought the "Biden Ikea cabinet" joke was funny, even if it could have been reworked some to be funnier.

 

Usually there's very little political humor, even in this very political year. Today, 20-25% of the jokes were political...and comparatively few non-political jokes were funny.

 

The election is obviously on the minds of jokesters.

 

edit:

 

And most of the Biden jokes I've seen over the last few months have been about him being old and/or having mental problems. Since I'm old and have mental problems, I tend to not find those kinds of jokes funny to start with. The Trump jokes which I find humorous tend to be about his actions or the events surrounding him, not things which are out of his control. 

[Ternaugh]

8 hours ago, unclevlad said:

I do like Eco Drives;  I have several.  If you want a beater, you cannot beat a BM-8180...and I generally don't like day-date, which this has.  My 8180 might be...15 years old now?  Gosh, I really don't know.  Plus an older Stiletto ultra-thin.  Then some upscale...Eco Drive One, Chronomaster.  Seiko's solar quartz work well too;  my one RF watch is a Seiko.  Mixed bag there;  the time zone doesn't register, so I have to manually set DST.  That shouldn't be the case, it should happen implicitly.  The indicator is built into the time coding.  

 

At this point, I simply won't buy a non-solar quartz.

 

I definitely agree about the solar watches. I have a solar G-Shock as my beater, and a Casio Edifice solar that's a little more dressy. The solar G-Shock and four of my Eco-Drives have receivers for the time signal, and it's absolutely wonderful to not have to worry about DST. This is the one that I tend to wear the most.

 

 

[Cancer]

1 hour ago, death tribble said:

Currently the BBC says that Biden has 279 electoral votes to Trump's 214 with 4 states still counting. So how many electoral college votes are left ?

 

DT, I recommend the BBC's site here.  There's lots of stuff you're more likely to get there, because it's almost too idiomatic for us USers; we tend to take for granted that all English-speakers know our system.  I admit being surprised every four years about how the vagaries of the US system catches non-USers by surprise.

[death tribble]

So Georgia, Arizona, Alaska and North Carolina left.

[archer]

2 hours ago, death tribble said:

Currently the BBC says that Biden has 279 electoral votes to Trump's 214 with 4 states still counting. So how many electoral college votes are left ?

 

The remaining states and their electoral votes are

 

Alaska 3

Arizona 11

Georgia 16

North Carolina 15

 

At this point, it's almost certain North Carolina will go to Trump unless a whole lot of Biden absentee military ballots arrived in the mail on Friday. I don't know if there's still any uncounted provisional ballots there.

 

Georgia will go to Biden. The still uncounted votes are largely in counties which have been going to Biden 3 to 1.

 

Arizona will be very, very close. But if counting trends hold, Trump is gaining but just barely too slowly to catch up before all the ballots will be counted. On Friday Trump was needing to get 59% of the remaining vote in order to catch up but was getting from 55-57% with each newly released count. So the percentage Trump needs to get out of the remaining vote has been going up with each announcement, meaning it's less and less likely.

 

In Alaska, Trump 118,602 and Biden 63,992 so far. It by law doesn't begin counting absentee ballots until Tuesday and that's expected to be half the total vote. Usually Alaska is a very Republican state. But Trump has demonized vote by mail so much that absentee ballots have been skewed heavily Democrat in most states because Republicans were reluctant to vote by mail. So nobody really knows how the absentee vote is going to go. Some Democrat political experts on the state have said that many of the small isolated towns which rely heavily on absentee ballots are strongly Democrat so they're at least publicly saying they're expecting the vote to favor the Democrats. Will it favor the Democrats enough to make up Biden being behind by 55,000 votes? I'm skeptical.

[Cancer]

8 hours ago, tkdguy said:

 

During our training session the trainer said that Texas isn't a red state; it's a voter suppression state.

 

 

My eight years in Texas (while I was in grad school) made this very, very clear.  They've been working at suppressing votes from the Wrong People since at least the early 1870s, and the function is institutionalized among many agencies at both state and local levels.  I have seen it asserted that among the official functions of the Texas Rangers is keeping the Spanish-speaking population in a state of subservient suppression, and I am willing to believe this, though as a Hopelessly White Guy who stayed in college-student slum areas (as opposed to ethnic-separation slum areas) my entire time there, I never saw this in action in first person.  This case happened in Houston about a year before I arrived, and it is fully in keeping with the understood functions of sustaining terror by local law enforcement agencies in Texas.  In general, only when they make the mistake of systematically preying on nonlocal whites do the police there get smacked down, as happened to Humpy Parker (sheriff in Coldspring, Texas, about 50 miles north of Houston) for deciding that people in cars with rock station stickers on them also were acceptable targets. 

 

I saw hints of similar things in my two years in Indiana ... it was my first experience with gerrymandering (I lived literally a block south of the congressional district boundary, which was drawn right through the midline of Bloomington, IN, to suppress the educated liberal voters who worked at the university there) in the first person.  I was not in Indiana for a presidential election, though.

 

I know there are such things that go on here in Washington, with my folks living in Yakima County, which is dependent on large pools of migrant farm workers, and which has a significant tribal population that the rich whites clearly believe must be kept in check, and the city government of Yakima itself is strictly controlled by old money, and in no small way is that affiliated with organized crime.  That commensalism between organized crime and ethnic prejudice/suppression is not acknowledged as much as I think it should be, but it's very real and makes solving the problem even more difficult.

[unclevlad]

At this point, the major importance of Georgia and Arizona going to Biden is...call it insurance.  A couple days ago when it was just "ok, Arizona and Nevada will be enough" is when I started to relax.  But if Georgia and Arizona both go to Biden, then a reversal of any one of the late-deciding, highly contested states won't change things.

 

I'm hoping, too, that this will be reason enough to stop any one state from electoral college shenanigans.  It would take several states acting together, and...well, maybe that's possible, but *that* much collusion seems unlikely.

 

Who knows, Trump might even concede and stop the legal actions.  I doubt it, tho.  

[Cancer]

5 hours ago, archer said:

It's no surprise Nevada is taking so long to count their ballots.

Anyone smart enough to count in Vegas gets kicked out and banned for life.

 

This is the one worth repeating.

[archer]

4 minutes ago, Cancer said:

 

This is the one worth repeating.

 Yeah, that was a personal favorite.

 

I was surprised to not see any jokes about Pittsburg Stealers but maybe that was too obvious...or too mean.

[Lord Liaden]

6 hours ago, archer said:

 

Congratulations to a man who just secured a job for the next 4 years!

Jim Carrey really is an American treasure and I'm happy that he'll be gracing our TVs for many Saturdays to come.

 

 

On behalf of his native Canada, you're welcome.

 

 

 

[Hermit]

4 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

On behalf of his native Canada, you're welcome.

 

 

 

ALLLLRRIIITTY THEN!

 

[TrickstaPriest]

3 hours ago, Greywind said:

I guess having a comedy routine in here is acceptable if Trump is your target. All other politicians were off limits.

 

I did see a few jokes in here on Biden.

 

But I won't give any leeway on jokes deliberately spreading "fake news" that I'm aware of.

 

This is doubly true of fake news in support of a president (and his major supporters) that appears to have tried to incite a civil war.

 

I'm still angry about what Alex Jones did here.

[TrickstaPriest]

I will add - I'm being specific in wording.  I appreciate truths regardless of who they are in support for.  But I do not let lies pass if it causes people literal, actual danger.  This is regardless of the subject

[archer]

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

On behalf of his native Canada, you're welcome.

 

 

 

 

As I keep telling people, Canadians and Mexicans are both Americans.

[Lord Liaden]

I've met very few citizens of the United States who like to be reminded of that.

 

But it does beg the question of what to call them that wouldn't sound silly?

[archer]

24 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I've met very few citizens of the United States who like to be reminded of that.

 

But it does beg the question of what to call them that wouldn't sound silly?

 

I've had arguments with many citizens of the US who, oddly, insist that Mexicans and Canadians are not Americans.

 

As for names, I've suggested Mexico of America and Canada of America....

[dmjalund]

8 hours ago, archer said:

Congratulations to a man who just secured a job for the next 4 years!

Jim Carrey really is an American treasure and I'm happy that he'll be gracing our TVs for many Saturdays to come.

 

Am I missing something? Is this because he did a good Joe Biden impression somewhere?

[DShomshak]

Heard on the radio yesterday that Washington State Sec'y of State Kim Wyman is investigating possible instances of vote fraud in our all-by-mail system.

 

Three ballots, out of more than 4 million.

 

She's a Republican, btw.

 

In the same statement, Sec'y Wyman sugtgested it's high time the rest of the country adopted some uniform absentee/mail-in ballot system.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

 

1 hour ago, dmjalund said:

Am I missing something? Is this because he did a good Joe Biden impression somewhere?

 

https://scroll.in/video/977976/watch-maya-rudolph-plays-kamala-harris-and-jim-carrey-is-joe-biden-on-saturday-night-live

 

Carrey's done this a couple of times before on Saturday Night Live over the past few weeks.