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@TheGreatSunGod
Yup. And Israel's going to keep bombing Yemen back.
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The Trump Administration has announced a ceasefire deal with the Houthis to end the 1 & 1/2 year Red Sea Crisis, which saw the coast of Yemen used as a launchpad for terrorist attacks on maritime shipping. This deal does not apply to Israeli freight, but it is nonetheless a major step toward stabilizing global trade.
Discuss.
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@Greyparrot
The system left behind in Africa wasn’t just a setup full of white colonizers and exploiters, it was a full structure that brought people together under one flag, something that rose above tribal divisions. The British colonies, for example, were built by various people in various localities from all over England, working toward a common goal with a shared identity under one flag. But after independence, most African nations didn’t adopt that mindset, and they never assimilated that idea. They rejected the unifying culture that built and maintained those systems and fell back into tribal lines.
I would ask if it was really necessary for the colonizers to impose large multi-ethnic states, seeing how Europe is politically fractured but also prosperous. If each major African nation had its own country just for them, would the average citizen thereof have taken a personal stake in its success? Well, admittedly, there are sub-ethnic tribes so maybe not always, but as a counterpoint I would look to Rwanda.
When Westerners think of Rwanda, we think of the 1994 genocide. But what isn't as well known is that the Tutsis actually won the civil war and are ruling the country today under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a civic nationalist party. Rwanda's Tutsis are a minority in a sea of Hutus who drool at the thought of mass murdering them again and would do so if the government ever collapsed, so the Tutsis know they must stick together no matter what. As a result, they've built a cohesive political system. Rwanda today, despite having been decimated by the events of 1994, is much wealthier than neighboring Burundi (a country also comprised of Hutus and Tutsis), close to the economic level of neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, and one of the fastest growing economies in the world and the region. Since the late '90s they've fought several wars on the soil of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that should absolutely dwarf them on every conceivable level, and their army has enjoyed an outstanding degree of military success there.
I'm going to be honest here: the Tutsis of Rwanda are a Sub-Saharan African peoples who genuinely have my respect for what they've accomplished.
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@zedvictor4
Nationalism exists in the minds of people all across the globe...And therein extremism will always fester.
On the contrary, nationalism is one of the great constructive forces of history.
In pre-modern times one could speak of two kinds of society: those where loyalty is due your immediate kin, because they are your flesh and blood, and those where loyalty is due the ruler, because he is the ruler and he will put your impaled husk on public display if you disobey him.
Under the former, anyone outside of your immediate kin group is fair game for being killed and eaten, or at minimum you owe them no friendship or charity because they have no relation to you. But under the latter, there is only peace by itself. Your world is a formless cosmopolitan slop; kings overthrow each other all the time and it's a largely meaningless question of who the king or incumbent dynasty is. If the king's army gets crushed in battle and another king sweeps into your area, you shrug and pay homage to the new king. There is still nothing tying you to the people around you, much less strangers who live more than a day's journey away.
Nationalism, when it first emerged in the civilizations of Greece and Rome, and was rediscovered around the 18th and 19th centuries, shattered this dichotomy. It let people think in terms of extended kinship at the level of the nation. You don't love your fellow countryman to the same degree as you do your true family, but there is some degree of mutual affinity and mutual trust there. All members of the nation come together for common purposes, not just because the king orders them to but because everyone belongs to the group. There is a strong degree of civic participation for the first time. People become vested in the success or failure of the nation at large, without which things like democracy cannot succeed at a non-local level.
For this feeling to take hold, the group must hold to a unique and exclusive identity, that which sets its members apart from everyone else. This, I think, is a big part of why you have multi-ethnic African republics, whose names are generic place names in an old colonizer's language, where nobody cares about maintaining society. Politicians embezzle money, tinpot generals stage coups left and right, and people only really come together at the tribal level when tribal interests are threatened. Under such conditions it is hard for nationalism to take hold.
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It's also rich that a saying like this supposedly came from Germany, given that the war ended and all the card-carrying NSDAP members put away their Wehrmacht uniforms, donned business suits, and carried on with life as normal. Everyone knew someone who'd collaborated with the regime in some capacity or another, and it didn't create the kind of massive rift in West German society that this aphorism seems to imply. So by this logic, Germany only "stopped being a Nazi country" around 30-40 years ago.
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@Savant
If racists can have black friends but still not approve of black people, why must someone who associates with Nazis approve of Nazis? And if a racist has a black friend but hates black people, does the black person now become a racist who hates themselves?
Relatively little of the discourse around neo-Nazism is based in rationality or morality but rather can be chalked up to a cultural syndrome born from excessive propagandization.
In the grand scheme of things, bigotry is a vice but a relatively trivial one in itself, since it really just amounts to being a jerk. Thinking racist thoughts or even espousing racist sentiments about your neighbor is incomparable to actually going out and harming someone. It is objectively worse to, say, commit adultery or even get into a drunken fistfight, or even smoking around children, but there's no general expectation in society that we're obliged to completely shun the company of known adulterers or bar room brawlers or careless smokers.
The only reason there's still this sense of absolute hysteria around Nazism 80 frigging years after Hitler's death is because Western culture and politics are currently dominated by the left, which has defined itself by the cause of opposing any manifestation of in-group out-group bias by the majority group (but not minority groups, which in truth are no less inclined to bigotry). Neo-Nazism is a very intense form of bigotry associated with the majority group, which is why it gets singled out as the ultimate existential evil, to the point where a death metal singer is comfortable cosplaying as Satan but not as Hitler. And no, the reason isn't just historical Nazism's death toll, lest you wouldn't be safe going out in public while wearing a t-shirt with Stalin's ugly mug on it.
Nation of Islam believes that white people are apes and demons. They are powerless, but if in theory they had dictatorial control of the government they would likely genocide tens of millions of people or at minimum usher in a reverse Jim Crow. However, when Louis Farrakhan was an official guest at the 2005 meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, and took a photo with Obama (in effect, equivalent to if David Duke were a keynote speaker at the 2004 RNC and posed with Bush), that was treated as if it were just a slight faux pas.
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@AdaptableRatman
I have seen no proof of this, aside from the many kids with different women part. Which denotes being promiscuous and a deadbeat father, but not corruption in the sense this word is normally used.
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@AdaptableRatman
As a Conservative what I assume is strict Christian, the sxtenr you go to to defend Musk, a guy with 10 kids or something most by IVF with many different womem who he is a deadbeat to all except 1 named... x?He is the guy you are defending?
A non-sequitur to the question of whether or not he performed a Nazi salute.
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@AdaptableRatman
The people hearing dogwhistles where no one else can might want to consider if they themselves are dogs.
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@AdaptableRatman
We ought to be very alarmed at Nazi salutes. I think it is a sensible line in the sand.
Only if it can be reasonably proven that the gesture being performed is, in fact, a Nazi salute. A guy standing with a swastika behind him, or marching in a neo-Nazi demonstration, or who utters a neo-Nazi slogan, or who has known neo-Nazi affiliations, and who does the archetypal Nazi salute probably has the Third Reich in mind. None of that applies to Musk, and the gesture he performed was different from the archetypal Nazi salute in multiple ways, as I pointed out to the people who banned me.
Heck, I pointed out to them that the Anti-Defamation League (America's leading Jewish advocacy group) came out and defended Musk. Still didn't keep that idiot from sperging out and whipping out the banhammer.
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@AdaptableRatman
It was a private server, so the owner (who'd been largely absent from the site for a long time; it was a power-tripping mod who did the deed) had legal standing to ban my account. I'm not making a legal argument. It's about basic decency and courtesy, which the community in question has none of.
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@AdaptableRatman
Yes. Censorship has a place.
Maybe all of the opinions you hold are criminal and you should be the one censored. See how you like it.
If you are running around saying a Nazi salute is not a Nazi salute I am not sure what exactly you expected to happen.
Your reasoning and reading comprehension skills have hit rock bottom. Congratulations.
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@AdaptableRatman
I think the ones having the meltdown are anyone denying what that vile act was.
You mean an ambiguous gesture we have photos of high-profile Democratic politicians performing, suggesting either that: (A). much of the American left + Musk loves sieg heiling for a camera, or (B). the only way to determine an ambiguous gesture's intent is surrounding context, with there being no Nazi-connected context to tie any of these instances, Musk's included, to Nazism?
But even if I'm wrong, I was civilly arguing one way or another, whereas those who disagreed with me very quickly resorted to censorship like un-American cowards, in the process spitting on all of the liberal values they would readily claim to believe in.
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What kind of unhinged scenario is this? What does one thing have to do with the other?
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You argued that shutting down government agencies would be better for the economy because it meant more money in the hands of private sector businesses, I'm saying it's not that simple. When thinking of it in the sense of that money being spent right away (which will in turn pump it right back into the private sector) public agencies are far less likely to sit on that money so it is more economically stimulative.
Sure, but my point is that some kinds of economic transactions are more beneficial in the grand scheme of things than others, and consumption doesn't sit at the top of that list. Sure, it's a type of transaction that happens quick, hence more GDP since that's how it's measured apparently, but the time it takes for that money to get reinvested is slowed down. Instead of immediately investing money a company already has, they lose it and then wait until they can recoup it.
Relatively few people took their Covid stimulus check and invested it, save for the people who hoped to get rich quick on some fad stock (e.g. GameStop back when that was hyped, or whatever the latest crypto coin was at the time). I don't know of anyone who used the money as the first contribution to their 35-year retirement nest egg. It was 90% day-to-day bills, get rich schemes, or random crap they didn't need...and $3.1 trillion got added to the national debt in FY2020.
I bring it up only to make the point that you cannot leave consumption out of the equation, without that there's nothing for an investor to invest in.
Historically, the most successful economies (such as the Four Asian Tigers, and the ascendant early 20th century Protestant nations as observed by Max Weber) have been marked by profitable export to foreign markets coupled with domestic thrift, with the saved funds going toward improvement/expansion of these export enterprises. At some point, of course, what has been earned is consumed and enjoyed, lest there isn't really a prosperity to speak of, but most of this goes toward key life priorities rather than short term indulgence.
Putting aside the morality of it (that people who work/risk to earn money are entitled to keep what they earn and shouldn't have it forcibly taken from them beyond the level of taxation that everyone else puts up with to maintain a relatively small scope of essential government services), it's just better for a country's long-term flourishing that more money is concentrated in the hands of its investor class than its consumer class. Stimulus checks do the opposite.
That's not true. Companies pay taxes on their profits, which is what's leftover after all of this things you mentioned. Take salaries for example, a company will only pay an employee to do a job if it determines that the value the employees work brings to the company is greater than the salary they are paying said employee. If it's not then it doesn't matter what profit a company is making, they're not going to keep that employee on its payroll.
Layoffs, sure. But raises are a cost incurred to mitigate the risk that a valuable employee will leave for greener pastures (or, sometimes, the product of a bureaucracy where one guy can be generous with company money and no one's around to stop him because their organization is lax). Companies are more inclined to accept this risk (not offer the raise) if they're forced to cover some other cost elsewhere.
Tax cuts have no impact on this. The idea that it would only makes sense of we think of companies as charitable organizations looking for ways to ensure the families of their employees remain fed. That is not the cooperate world works.
I didn't say or mean to infer that charity or a sense of goodwill was the driving factor here. See above.
It's also not true that stock buy backs represent a liability of some kind, all these companies are doing is increasing the value of these companies shares without any kind of innovation or investment.
I've heard this said before, but I'm skeptical. Wouldn't the bump only last as long as the buyback does? Since if you're a billionaire CEO like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos who sits on his portfolio for 25 years, what difference does it make if Amazon's value is exceptionally good for a couple of days or weeks?
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You know what?
After Canada's PM stood in front of a camera last night and dedicated his entire premiership to stoking the flames of anti-American sentiment, I don't mind shitposts to this effect anymore. If it upsets our peabrained neighbors to the north then I will gladly update my vocabulary. From here on out Canada = 51st state, and PM Carney = Governor Carney.
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@Double_R
Economic strength is driven by the frequency at which money changes hands. That's why economists hate fear and uncertainty so much.
To cite an old joke:
Two economists were walking down the road when they came across a pile of dog poop. Economist A said to Economist B, "I'll pay you $50 if you drop to your knees and eat it." Economist B agreed, ate the dog poop, and was handed $50.
Further down the road, they came across another pile of dog poop. Now Economist B said to Economist A, "I'll pay you $50 if you drop to your knees and eat it." Economist A agreed, ate the dog poop, and was given his $50 back.
At this point, Economist A stopped and asked: "Hold on, didn't we just eat dog poop and no one was better off for the experience?"
Economist B replied: "Nonsense, we just added $100 to the GDP!"
Again, this is a joke, but one that illustrates a point. Might've posted this joke here before, I don't remember one way or another.
This is why study after study shows that the most economically stimulative thing the government can spend money on is food stamps, because people who receive them will spend it quickly. The least stimulative? Tax cuts for the wealthy.
How is an economy that encourages consumption but not investment sustainable?
Imagine, if you will, that money is taken from a company that produces goods and given to a consumer for him/her to spend.
Many foreign goods are cheaper than their American counterparts, so much of what the consumer spends goes into foreign pockets; the only Americans who get a cut are shippers and retailers. Who contribute value to the economy, sure, but in another sense don't produce anything. And, I guess, a fraction of it goes to buying American produced stuff. But only a fraction.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned company is unable to spend that money on R&D or building/maintaining company infrastructure. Or, their employees lose out on a raise to break even, which depresses consumer spending.
"But most of the tax cuts would go to company bigwigs!" you might protest. Well, no. In 2024 the "median revenue" for a Fortune 500 company stood at $42 billion, whereas in 2023 (probably not that big a difference between 2023 and 2024) the average Fortune 500 CEO had a salary of $17.7 million. First, that's just barely not a drop in the bucket, and second, as the most powerful employee of the company the CEO is best insulated from cuts to his salary even if the company is forced to make cuts elsewhere, making this a moot point.
"Most of the tax cuts go to stock buybacks!" you might say next. Which seems to be correct based on evaluation of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, but also kind of misleading. In the absence of tax cuts, stock buybacks would still be happening, since they represent an outstanding liability a company will want to take care of at some point. But now, the stock buybacks will be paid for by making cuts elsewhere in the company's budget, such as to R&D, infrastructure investments, or employee salaries. Tax cuts let the stock buybacks happen without necessitating said cuts, or at least said cuts are rendered less severe than they otherwise would be. In other words, regardless of the saved money is directly spent on, tax cuts ultimately enable companies to spend more money on useful things than they otherwise would.
This is just hand waiving. Trump has gutted the agencies who's job it is to go after institutions who engage in fraudulent activities. There is no reasonable argument that that will not result in more fraudulent activities.
The CFPB only dates back to 2011. There were (and still are) redundant bodies predating CFPB. Biden's initiatives, of course, date back to 2021 at the earliest. We've had a functional banking system for centuries beforehand. The Cato Institute has argued that the CFPB ought to be dismantled.
(Though, to date, the Trump Admin. hasn't tried to completely abolish the agency and it might continue in a downsized form with a narrower set of responsibilities.)
But if, in fact, the small sliver of fraudulent or genuinely predatory transactions within this sector increases somewhat, this isn't the only relevant factor. In 2023 the CFPB reported that platforms like PayPal and Venmo are unsafe because they lack FDIC insurance. Had Biden won a second term, this might've eventually culminated in CFPB shutting down Paypal/Venmo or requiring them to pay for expensive (and thus far unnecessary) coverage that would heavily discourage competition and useful alternative banking services from emerging. Ultimately, it is poor, underbanked demographics that would pay the price for this development if it happened.
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There's what is stipulated in various international treaties, like the Geneva or Hague conventions, but not all of these have been agreed to by everyone. Things like sparing the lives of POWs are low hanging fruit. Everyone agrees on these points.
But then there are treaties that countries will withdraw from out of perceived necessity; for example, Latvia and Estonia (Poland and Lithuania might be next) have withdrawn from the Ottawa Treaty on Landmines because, in light of Ukraine, they've realized how important these weapons are for self-defense. On one hand, Russia itself isn't a signatory to this treaty (and has erected vast minefields in Ukraine), but even if Russia were, Russia has a massive size advantage. So the moral ideal that "landmines shouldn't be used in conflicts" must bend in the face of the right to national survival, which is the first law and priority of any nation.
Which is to say, there are things deemed "laws of war" which neither enjoy the consent of all parties nor are morally legitimate in all circumstances. Likewise, some rules are consented to by a signatory country that lacks the internal rule of law to keep from breaking its own treaties; for example, Nazi Germany.
Conversely, the Nuremberg Trials saw Nazi Germany tried not for war crimes it committed per the treaties it was party to, but per then-new legal concepts such as "crimes of aggression" or "crimes against humanity". In some cases, then, conduct can be retroactively made into a war crime by force of the victors.
Overall the concept of a war crime is shaky and poorly defined. It can't not exist at all, but it's shaky.
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@Double_R
The Trump administration has yet to produce any evidence that the man in the headlines is MS13 because he never had a hearing, which is the point here.
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@Double_R
Apples to oranges comparison. The government doesn't charge for it's services, it does the opposite, because government has a very different purpose than the private sector.
Sure, but that wasn't my point; point is, a given sum of money retained by taxpayers because of budget cuts has a greater chance of creating new private sector jobs than the number of public sector jobs created by that money being spent by the government.
Now to be fair, you could argue this isn't the case here since money specifically allocated to paying a public sector employee is kept by many pockets to be spent many different ways, but if those layoffs force the government to take on a smaller workload and spend less money each year than just the salaries it's doling out, then the end result is the same.
Granted, none of those benefits will materialize if the saved money instead goes toward lowering the deficit, but that's a price well worth paying if said reduction is anywhere near substantial.
There have been 9/11 conspiracy theorists since 9/11. That doesn't make it acceptable to put one in charge of Homeland security.
Fair, but it remains to be seen to what extent he'll refuse to bend to internal and external pressures; for example, in light of the Texas thing he's already endorsed the MMR measles vaccine. Some anti-vaxxers who've grown to trust RFK Jr. might now denounce him as a traitor, but a few might change their minds if the message to get their child vaccinated was coming from someone with his level of street cred within the movement.
Buteven if not, vaccines are just one part of HHS's mission. Enough positive reforms in other areas, such as getting random chemicals out of what we eat, could plausibly outweigh whatever damage he does on this front.
You think banks not ripping us off or company's keeping our air clean happens by itself?
The government's job is to enforce contracts and property rights. Insofar as a bank tries to violate either of these things, then yes, it's the government's job to stop them. But a Republican-sized government is up to the task. And, a bank can only "rip you off" in an involuntarily transaction. To frame voluntarily transactions as involuntary is doing no one a service in the long run.
From what I understand, the Biden administration made a big stink about banks charging fees for some services, such as overdrafts. I'm no expert on the subject but overdraft fees make sense; the customer is withdrawing money they don't have, which is effectively a loan. Overdraft fees let the bank recoup some of their costs incurred by people who never repay the loan, without which they'd be more inclined to deny the service to customers with poor credit. And, it discourages needlessly overdrawing, which might actually do some customers a service.
I work in a tourist attraction in NYC. Our business is down about 20% from last year, a significant reason for that is a loss of international customers. Our contacts in Canada who normally organize school groups have flat out told us they're not coming because of Trump. Just yesterday I sent an email to 4 individuals we were going to hire to tell them we don't have an open position for them to fill after having to downgrade all of our projections for the rest of the year. We cancelled the entire hiring wave where we were originally planning to hire another 9 people.
Okay. That is unfortunate. But we can't decide national policy on the basis of not angering foreign tourists who contribute a tiny sliver of our GDP.
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@TheGreatSunGod
What? Its not just talk in anime. They act in very weird way, the way no one acts...Do you want for your country to become like Japan?
Most people are able to distinguish fiction from reality. The same applies to most people living in Japan. And if some people who watch weird stuff go on to do weird things, perhaps it was their weirdness that drew them to watch it in the first place.
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I don't understand the people who believe there's some magic fountain dispensing good things to the world at no cost, and that meanspirited Republicans want to turn off the spigot so that the magic stops flowing. There is nothing the government provides that doesn't come at someone's expense on some level: either current taxpayers (who are deprived of the ability to spend that money on something else, such as on a service the government currently provides or investing in the economy) or our unborn grandchildren who'll be slapped with the enormous and still steadily compounding tab once they come of working age. Sometimes this cost is worth paying, and sometimes it isn't.
You lost your job because of Elon? STFU. Stuff it. Swallow it. Choke on it. We all have to suffer because you lack the ability to see truth and think critically.
Why lmao the private sector does a better at job creation and it's not even close. In 2023 the Fed employed about 0.61% of the US population with a budget amounting to nearly 23% of GDP. About 88% of US GDP in the same year came from the private sector, which employed about 40% of the population. To do the math, the private sector is about 16x more efficient at this purpose than the USFG dollar for dollar. Sure, the layoffs won't be fun for those on the receiving end, but they will find new jobs.
Your child gets sick with e-coli. Stuff it. You get the measles, stuff it.
Not going to happen, and there were anti-vaxxers refusing to give their kids measles shots long before RFK became Secretary of the HHS. The CDC reported that between January 1 and October 1 of 2019, there were 1,249 cases of measles and 22 "measles outbreaks" in 31 states and New York City. At the time that was the most reported cases in a single year since 1992, clearly indicating an upward trend thanks to anti-vaxxers that has continued to the present.
Your bank rips you off? Stuff it. Your local health clinic closes? The air and water you breathe is filthy now? Stuff it.
Oh look, more stuff that's not going to happen.
You lost your health care, suck it.
I can see picture two scenarios here. Door A, Medicare/Medicaid is not significantly cut, and as a result this doesn't happen to a significant number of people. Door B, Medicare/Medicaid is cut badly enough for this to happen. The deficit shrinks by hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a cool trillion. The degree to which our national collapse is slowed justifies this. Worst case scenario, a lot of Americans lose but America at large wins. Best case scenario, RFK actually does a good job and shrinks the 7.24 million word corpus of HHS regulations to a compact size, removing costly and complicated hurdles to investment in the healthcare sector, creating market competition and improving service at all levels. Maybe at some point healthcare becomes affordable for most people without insurance, for the first time in decades.
They sold off public lands for logging near your home, stuff it!
Yeah no, I'm not particularly worried about this.
Fema isn't there to help you after the hurricane? Stuff it.
Again, FEMA can give nothing that isn't forcibly redistributed from someone else. And in some cases they do nothing but give you a tarp to place over your damaged roof. The long-term solution to natural disasters is to build more housing outside of disaster zones (such as those areas with a low risk rating for floods), and less within disaster zones, such as the Pacific Palisades. To subsidize housing located within disaster zones discourages this transition.
Your cousin dies of sepsis because she couldn't get an abortion, stuff it.
If, hypothetically, my cousin died in the process of trying to murder her baby, I wouldn't feel too bad about it.
You can't afford groceries and the food banks are closed, too fucking bad, go hungry.
I'll take "stuff that didn't happen" for $500. There's an ongoing bird flu epidemic which began before Trump took office, and this is driving up the price of eggs. But people don't need eggs to live.
Your income is down because no tourists want to visit your eatery?
If our friends would turn on us just like that after decades of subsidizing their defense over what's objectively a nothing burger, then some friends they were. Good riddance.
Your nephew gets disappeared by ICE, stuff it.
You mean my nephew was an illegal immigrant who faced consequences for his illegal actions, and either the facility he was kept in was overcrowded or he was sent to the wrong place on an administrative error because Congress refused to appropriate an extra dime to actually enforce our immigration laws and ensure that ICE was up to the task of managing the bigger caseload? Yeah, that's unfortunate.
You just spit on and dishonored every person who served our country and the family members of those who sacrificed for our freedoms...
Many who served our country and sacrificed for our freedoms voted for Trump, and this woman would gladly spit on them.
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"Oh no, I was arrested (presumably) for having CP on my computer. But watching cartoon characters talk to each other is where I draw the line! I have principles, dammit!"
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@Savant
I know some of Obama's takes aged badly, but his point about "horses and bayonets" seems relevant here.
While this is ostensibly true, I'd say it only applies if we're talking about a means of warfare that is obsolete. Our main rivals across the world aren't fast at work building up their cavalry forces and stockpiling bayonets. But the PLA, seeking to modernize, has been fast at working laying down warships armed with 21st century weapons and sensors. You know, the kind of platforms that the US Navy of 2025 is built upon. And they're able to build these a looooot faster than we can. Even if you claim that these ships aren't quite as advanced as their American counterparts, isn't there some point at which this quantitative advantage matters?
As for artillery, it's not just Russia. The Ukrainians are also heavily reliant on these weapons. High-end stuff like tanks and fighter jets have been strangely irrelevant this whole conflict, even though both sides do possess such. Stalin's old maxim that "artillery is the god of war" hasn't lost its edge just yet.
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@Savant
I never said or meant to insinuate that the Russian army is competent. My point was to illustrate how feeble the US military industrial complex is despite its bloated budgets. If this were the middle of WW2 our factories would be popping out as many shells in like a month as the US at present is able to make in 2 or 3 years.
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On March 5 of this year Brandon Johnson, current Mayor of Chicago, issued a tweet bragging about how the city has invested $11 billion to build 10,000 new low-income housing units. It costs $1.1 million for the Chicago municipal government to build a single "cheap" apartment.
In 2015, California commenced phase one its high-speed rail project, with the aim of constructing 776 miles of rail infrastructure. Phase one, which only covers 171 miles and less than half of which has been completed a decade later, will have a projected total cost of $106 billion, which comes up to about $620 million per mile.
In 2023 the US spent $1.9 trillion between Medicare and Medicaid, or between $5K-6K per US citizen, which in the same year was above the OECD38 average for total healthcare expenditures per capita. As you can probably guess, this is less than half of the total of what each person spends on healthcare. And for all that, we were ranked 55th in life expectancy, behind Albania and Panama.
Speaking of OECD, in 2021 we came in 6th place when it came to education spending at the primary and secondary (K-12) level, and 1st place when it came to spending at the tertiary (college/university) level. And what bang do we get for our buck? We are currently ranked 19th (out of 41 countries) when it comes to student performance. Which is admittedly better than I expected going into this post, but still.
Last year childcare, which is literally just babysitting infants, toddlers, and young children, cost the typical household between $5,940 and $19,040 a year.
When a country threatens to pick a fight with the US, Americans often half-jokingly threaten back to "show them why we don't have free healthcare". War is the one thing we're good at, right? Well, at present Russia's factories are churning out 3x as many artillery shells as the US and Europe combined, and reportedly 10x as many tanks as us. China's shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than that of the US.
In the field of drones the MQ-25 Stingray, whose only mission is aerial refueling, will have an estimated price tag of $136 million. Yes, to reiterate, we proved unable to build a drone that didn't cost more than the F-35. What was supposed to be the ultimate cost-saving technology didn't do that for us.
In short, the US can't build anything that doesn't face massive cost overruns and quality issues. But this isn't even the worst part: no matter what the measure, prices are steadily compounding year after year, growing faster than the rate of economic growth or wage increases.
And every word of this was true before Trump took office this second time. Many people allege he will break America. Assuming for the sake of argument that this is true, he will simply make the inevitable happen a few years or at best a few decades faster than would otherwise be the case. I don't mean to say that this is a trivial thing, but it's true nonetheless. Someone with a 3rd grader's understanding of math can see that the path we're on is mathematically unsustainable.
No one who's been president in the last 25 years has seemingly made even a dent in any of these problems. They sign a bill that throws more money at Problem A or Problem B, and in the long run that problem gets more expensive to treat. There's been a lot of talk, but when it came down to it no one has offered us a genuinely hopeful and optimistic vision for America's future.
Trump himself is inept, that should go without saying. But he has empowered technocrats who know how to run organizations efficiently. Even cabinet officials with no such experience, like Hegseth, and perhaps those with genuinely insane beliefs like RFK Jr., may be more inclined to give competent outsiders a seat at the decision-making table and break through intergenerational cycles of groupthink.
They might make everything worse. But for the first time since this crisis began, our chances of staving off civilizational collapse by the middle of the 21st century are greater than zero. By analogy, America is a patient with otherwise untreatable cancer and a firm offers them an experimental drug that'll either cure them or kill them faster. That's our current predicament.
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I don't lift or do calisthenics at all. But on a very good day I can manage 4 miles straight on the treadmill.
Fittest I've ever been in my life. When I'm older I may pine for my youth, but not for the athleticism of my youth. Whatever my potential in high school or college was, I never realized it and I have no real idea what that might've looked like. If I can hit 40 and still be doing more than I was then, that should soften the blow of aging.
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@Mall
If that could be done with a snap of a finger, sure.
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It's the aggressive side of my brain. 90-95% of the time it's because I'm angry. When I get angry, I have almost no sense of proportionality and will say and imagine some truly insane things. Whipping out the crudest items in my vocabulary is par for the course when I'm in that mindset.
But on rare occasion, some mild profanity will come through as part of my edgy sense of humor, which chiefly revolves around the scenario where a wimpy fat dude (i.e. Hank from Breaking Bad) is howling like a monkey with pleasure because he's getting railed in the butthole. I basically tell myself the same joke over and over and over again, because to me it just doesn't get old.
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@Savant
I think I'd dispute that every intermediate step to achieve self-defense is itself self-defense.
I mean, if a given step is unrelated to or unnecessary for self-defense, then sure. But if there's just one option, and it entails doing X Y and Z, then I would consider a right to do X Y and Z as an extension of the right to self-defense at least in the context of this scenario. This tangentially relates to the 2A debate; what proponents are claiming isn't so much an inalienable human right to discharge a metal slug through a rifled tube and into the air via a chemical propellant, but rather that the right to gun ownership is an extension of the right to self-defense.
The idea of stealing some random third person's car to offensively defend yourself sounds ridiculous, but that's mainly because we live in an environment where this scenario would never come up. For that matter, the idea of pursuing to defend one's self sounds ridiculous since one could readily take refuge in the arms of the law and let them handle it.
But the international system is quasi-anarchic. There are no cops and each country must defend itself, which often means finishing a fight. For Israel, that means dropping bombs wherever Hamas targets are. It doesn't entail dropping bombs elsewhere, of course, but I don't see a whole lot of evidence of Israel doing that.
In case #5 that you described, where the third party physically can't remove themselves, I think killing them definitely isn't self-defense, even if there are other routes to argue killing them is justified. The self-defense distinction is important because utilitarian justifications usually require a higher bar to be justified than self-defense. Self-defense is basically a justification in and of itself, but utilitarianism requires that the good of an action outweighs the bad, and a lot of civilian warfare likely doesn't meet that bar.
I would suggest that #5 only partway applies in reality, since many hundreds of thousands of Gazans have ignored Israeli orders to evacuate zones where the fighting is heaviest. That's not to say Israel hasn't dropped a single bomb outside these zones, but the level of risk to the average civilian is significantly less there.
But sure, to some degree or another there is no escape. From the self-defense angle, there is some degree of moral dilemma.
I haven't touched on utilitarianism because that's a whole different animal. Utilitarians would claim that self-defense is not justified if it does harm without succeeding, or if doing so entails killing a greater number of assailants than your one self, or if doing so entails killing someone who would go on to enjoy a higher quality of life than you or contribute more to humanity. Per this school of thought, a first world citizen's life is worth more than a third world citizen's, since he would tend to experience more pleasure and be more economically productive over his lifetime.
In one telling, it would demand that poor Gazans forfeit their lives and their land to their affluent neighbors. In another, it would demand that the Israeli government on 10/8/23 do nothing at all, since even if their actions averted 4 or 5 additional 10/7s in the future it wouldn't add up to 50,000 lives saved. Or that, hypothetically, the Israelis must subordinate their lives and land if Gaza's women were to pump out a billion children. Naturally, anyone on the losing end of such a utilitarian calculus won't pay it any regard whatsoever.
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@Savant
I would say that:
1. If it's necessary for self-defense of your future self to currently and actively pursue your foe, then the right to self-defense entails a right to pursue your foe wherever he flees or hides.
2. If, in this scenario, third parties are willfully giving shelter to your foes, then the right to self-defense entails a right to count said third parties among your foes and behave accordingly, or at the very least to target their shelters. Just this fact by itself poses no moral dilemma for you; said third parties have effectively consented to become targets.
3. If third parties are giving shelter to your foes under duress (e.g. Hamas will shoot them if they refuse), so that their own pursuit of self-preservation comes into conflict with your pursuit of self-defense, then we get a profound moral dilemma. Both you and the third parties will choose to "resolve" the dilemma by making the selfish choice. There's no way around this; barring the presence of some overwhelmingly powerful outside force that's able to impose a solution, someone has to lose.
4. If third parties are not sheltering your foes, but are free to physically remove themselves from where your foes are yet haven't done so, then there is no moral dilemma. They've incurred no moral guilt but are responsible nonetheless for getting caught up in whatever happens where your foes are. There is no dilemma here insofar as 4 is truly distinct from 5.
5. If third parties are not sheltering your foes, but are not free to physically remove themselves from where the attacker are (e.g. to live their lives they must traverse roads and public spaces where Hamas militants are), then we get a lesser dilemma compared to 3. Having to quarantine in your home isn't the same as having a gun pointed at your head, but if a war goes on long enough then it's unreasonable to assume that the average person would or even could keep doing so.
The Gaza War is some inscrutable mix of all five.
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The AP has this to say about tariffs:
U.S. tariffs are generally lower than those charged by other countries. The average U.S. tariff, weighted to reflect goods that are actually traded, is just 2.2% for the United States (sic), versus the European Union's 2.7%, China's 3% and India's 12%...Previous U.S. administrations agreed to the tariffs Trump now calls unjust. They were the result of a long negotiation between 1986 and 1994 -- the so-called Uruguay Round -- that ended in a trade pact signed by 123 countries and has formed the basis of the global trading system for nearly three decades.
The European figure doesn't reflect non-tariff trade barriers; the EU has been called a "regulatory superpower", and has a lot of arbitrary rules that an import will be blocked if it doesn't meet, a famous example being US chicken (which, in fact, is perfectly safe for human consumption). As a result, in 2024 the EU imported $370 billion worth of US goods while exporting $605 billion worth of goods to the US, an enormous trade deficit and an increase of 12.9% from 2023 levels.
It remains to be seen if the Trump Administration (as opposed to just Trump by himself) is competent enough to renegotiate the balance of global trade. But let's give credit where credit is due; this is the first administration in 30 years to seriously try, and there is ample justification for doing so.
Likewise, I remember reading that something like 80-90% of US economic output is sold to American customers. Tariffs imposed at home will be painful to the American consumer, but the American producer will be insulated to some degree from the effects of foreign tariffs, and I view this as the most important thing in the long run. Right now choice foreign countries stand to lose a lot more money than we do from a trade war (and this is discounting the leverage we have in the form of paying most of NATO's bills), which is why, if we "let the man cook" for a few months or up to a year or two, we might see results.
Yes, free trade is good and protectionism is bad. Which is why we need to teach the rest of the world this lesson. A dismal year or two could yield a brighter half-century afterward, not only for us but for the world at large.
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But the Greenland thing is stupid. We need some kind of intact alliance with Europe if this is to work. Making them pull their own weight is fine, because deep down they know that's what they are supposed to be doing, but imagine if the Canadians stole Alaska from us and then were like "Hey, let's stay allies".
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What you're saying about Europe, Russia, and our need to pivot is Asia is the conventional wisdom but I say we need to hold off for another year or two. One study has it that Russia lost 360,000 soldiers in Ukraine last year, which was roughly on par with the number of new recruits (and not counting people who retired from the Russian military when their contracts expired; when put together, the Russian army is probably shrinking).
Those numbers are insane. If the US had to suffer one year of that for a foreign war that we could tap out of at any time, we would indeed tap out, and perhaps lynch the President who got us into that mess for good measure. Now for an affordable cost we can make the Russians repeat that in 2025 and then a third time in 2026. We Americans will be shopping at the mall and eating fast food, while the Russians will be pushing their nation closer to the brink of collapse. Even if they replace all their soldiers and the regime survives, at some point they'll have none of the well-trained people from before the war left over. The new people have gotten like 5 weeks of training and only know how to do primitive meat grinder tactics like we're seeing in Ukraine.
Seriously, we'd have to be idiots to pass up on this once in a lifetime opportunity. Our mortal enemy has volunteered to let us bleed them dry without us having to risk our own necks in the process.
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@Dr.Franklin
BUT a judge pulled some bullshit reason and declared it "unconstitutional", meaning it was voided, thats right in the United States of America a judge can declare something VIA THE CONSTITUTION to shut down something that WAS DEMOCRATICALLY DECIDED ON.
Okay, so if 51% of the public were communist and voted in a referendum to seize your property and then lynch you and your family and all of your neighbors, it'd be wrong for a judge to keep them from doing this?
Also, how do judges get appointed? By elected officials, right? Meaning judges are, in fact, indirectly elected officials. But their appointments are greatly staggered over time, meaning the judiciary as a whole doesn't reflect the mood of the public at one given moment, but rather the public's aggregated attitudes over time, which lean less radical. Furthermore, rules like the filibuster tend to discourage the appointment of judges who are too radical, since an appointee has to be acceptable to at least a few members of the other party.
It's no accident that the judiciary is the least partisan of our three branches. The public has its short term passions and prejudices, which they express at the ballot box. But their excesses are tempered by the moderates in robes. Overall our system is pretty balanced, which is why it's survived 236 years, a civil war, two world wars, many recessions and depressions, etc.
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@Double_R
This looks like an opportunity for us to come together in bipartisan agreement - This is really, really bad... Right?...Right?
Both the adjective "bad" and the qualifier "really, really" depends on: (1). The extent to which Patel was serious as opposed to this being campaign trash talk; (2). The extent to which he's still keen on carrying this out now that an enormous mantle of responsibility has been thrust on his shoulders; (3). The extent to which the named individuals are truly innocent of any crimes; (4). Patel's genuine belief, or absence thereof, in their guilt; (5). Patel's willingness to take illegal actions to go after said people beyond legal investigations of them; and (6). the degree to which he wouldn't actually be blocked from taking said illegal actions.
So far, all of these are largely unknowns. But assuming for the sake of argument that yes, Patel has the intent to knowingly and illegally target people who've done nothing wrong for political reasons, and the means to have this actually amount to something, then yes, this is bad. Politically motivated prosecutions are bad and have no rightful place in America.
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@Double_R
Curious then to hear your thoughts on Trump picking the guy who published and enemies hitlist and stated publicly that he would use the justice department to go after Trump's political enemies as his FBI director.
Citation, please.
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@Moozer325
Just about my whole family's been watching Severance, and it's pretty good IMO. It leans a bit too hard into the "mystery box" storytelling convention popularized by Lost, and random plot beats that probably won't go anywhere, but who knows. Maybe one day we'll find out what's up with the goats and whatnot.
There's a lot of interesting characters, moreso the innies than the outies. I hate how dark tinted everything outside the overly bright severed floor is. Presumably there's some symbolism behind it, but I don't know if it fits since there's no hard evidence the outside world is a dystopia. I'm also confused about when this is supposed to take place, with the company's 19th century origins and strange blend of inexplicably analog and outright impossible technologies suggesting alternate history as much as a plain future setting. I've got maybe 4 episodes left of Season 2 but I hope Irving and Cobel aren't off the show for good.
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Petty and contrived "scandal".
Does Trump really want to play this game? Once he's out of office, Democrats will be scrutinizing the breakfasts he had in the morning to find some bullcrap pseudolegal reason for why his presidential actions were invalid. And if they can get some wingnut lefty judge to sign off on this, it just might stick.
Gee, I wonder what this development will mean for rule of law in America. Only good things, surely. /s
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@whiteflame
There's not much to say. UHC denies a huge number of claims, this fact was heavily scrutinized after the company's CEO got shot, and I pointed out that they don't have the money to behave otherwise.
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Secondly, the politics of this would be terrible for the democrats. They do not get to claim the republicans shut the government down when they are literally the ones who voted against keeping the government open. They will get blamed for the shut down.
Agreed. Every time Republicans demanded a shutdown over the past 10 years they took immense flak for it. There's no reason why Democrats should be insulated from the consequences when it's their turn to attempt the same.
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That honestly wasn't a very good thread IMO. It was a few sentences long and the sentiment expressed was pretty basic. Had my Programmatic Civicism thread been remembered well enough to make the cut, I would've been really proud of that.
But I'll take what I can get, lol.
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@Barney
I don't know what that means, but I guess whiteflame if he's willing.
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@IlDiavolo
The video is referring to the moment Nixon abandoned the gold standard.
Then no. There's a finite amount of gold in the world, and if a process were developed to economically manufacture it, the price of gold would collapse, making it useless. A global economy that we expect to keep growing needs either a steadily expanding supply of fiat currency or some better substitute for gold.
Some countries, instead of gold, have used currency pegging, meaning a local "dollar" is exchangeable for a foreign "dollar", assuming their value was the same. This is done to stabilize such and keep its value from collapsing, but most economists view this scheme as unhelpful in the long run and advanced economies tend not to rely on it. For example, see the so-called "impossible trilemma":
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@IlDiavolo
I can't envision a pyramid scheme that takes centuries to collapse, nor one that tangibly enriches the average participant as opposed to a small minority of them.
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@Shila
I wouldn't trust cybersecurity advice from Wylted...
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@sadolite
2008?
(Holy cow. I joined in late 2013 but with so many OGs still around I guess I'm not even old guard at this point.)
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Really though, there's a way to do this that all the long timers who actually left did, and just making a thread isn't it. I'm calling 50/50 he'll be back within a year.
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