Red Mosquito

4/5 wrote:

LoathedVermin72 wrote:

cutuphalfdead wrote:Yeah but LV's attitude tends to throw away the good in quest of the perfect.

No. Perfect isn’t going to happen. I understand that. But we need to strive for perfect in order to achieve good.

But relative to human history by virtually any metric things have been getting better over the past two hundred years and most dramatically in the past half century globally.

Still very, very far from perfect, there’s no doubt. But at a time when global poverty is falling at the fast rate ever, I don’t understand the urge to attempt to dramatically remake society on behalf of the poor.

No, not the poor - just people who aren’t rich. Things have been broadly trending better, yes, but my generation has been getting fucked in the ass in the last decade or so. Wages are stagnant, housing is insanely expensive, and college is an obscene scam that guarantees no benefits anymore. And the rich are richer than ever. There are quite a few of us who are ready to burn shit to the ground.

LV gets it

Maybe it's time to take to Zuccotti Park and protest.

To a degree I feel you. I graduated college in the thick of the Great Recession and it took me a solid two years to get a real job and stop bartending.

But there’s a lot in that post to respond to. I suppose I can start by pointing out that the aveage starting salary for bachelor’s degrees in 2017/18 is about $52,000. That’s not far off median household income, so while I fully agree that the special status and high income that was previously implicit in a college degree has waned, they are still quite valuable.

4/5 wrote:To a degree I feel you. I graduated college in the thick of the Great Recession and it took me a solid two years to get a real job and stop bartending.

were you elected to Congress

Guillotines and gulags didn't save the peasants. The best way to avoid the horrors of poverty is to...



Act accordingly.

Sbrezins - your view?

96583UP wrote:

B wrote:

cutuphalfdead wrote:if you think warren is hrc p2 then you probably don't see much further than the fact that they both have lady parts

fuck you guys for making me say it, but chuds right.

did you read the subsequent explanatory dialogue or did you just skim to the end like none of that happened and we are all ignorant sexists

both are viable options

the latter we call the 'HuffPo' approach

I thought of that post earlier in the day before you guys ranted on for pages and pages. I have shit to do. I can't read everything some idiot on Red Mosquito posts.

LoathedVermin72 wrote:

LoathedVermin72 wrote:

LoathedVermin72 wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:

LoathedVermin72 wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:

McParadigm wrote:Bi_3, then?

I'm a fan of social stability and evolutionary change (which is why I ended up liking a lot of what Obama did). Ideas about governance, morality, scientific understanding, etc. these change over time in a society and we cannot be reactionary in how we deal with them at the national level. Issues like climate change policy and more importantly interest on the national debt are too important for the OMGPLASTICSTRAWS crew to handle without destroying our ability to deal with whatever comes next and the R's have proven spineless and ignorant too many times for me to go there, so I'm back to the Clinton dems with the full understanding they are corporate sellouts. I would rather have businesses run the country than those who claim to represent the 'working class'.

Saying you care about climate change and then saying you’re okay with business running the country is a complete contradiction. Under-regulated business is the #1 existential threat on the planet. Everything else is distraction. This is why “Clinton dems” are not the people who will make meaningful strides for change. They ARE the “plastic straws” crowd.

This is where we disagree. Globally, calling out Asia specifically, some unregulated businesses are an existential threat, but if we kill our ability to maintain leverage through economic, political, and military means then we are trading tomorrow for today and that's what hear all the time from progressives. An inability to see second order consequences in their policy goals. We need someone who understands that line between what is needed to maintain global dominance and drive meaningful and realistic domestic changes or we are ceding the future to China, Russia, and.. probably Iran.

Single-payer healthcare, environmental protection laws, and ethical regulations that stop corporations from exploiting workers will not stop America from being a world leader.

They will if they make us significantly less competitive relative to nations like China and India.

And where do we decide to draw that line? And who decides? We should all sacrifice our lives at the altar of ruling class profit because of some phantom foreign threat? And how is fucking single-payer healthcare going to cause us to lose world influence? Yeah, no, I’m not buying it.

In terms of who decides, well the combination of democracy and capitalism has served humanity very well over the last century. Not perfectly, but the major markers of global progress all show trends towards peace, freedom, and prosperity across the world meaning the combination of economic interests and an informed public electing representatives seem like a effective way to decide the what/how/when of public policy.

And I would caution you on the idea that China (or any other economic or political competitor) is a 'phantom threat'. Yesterday alone they became the first nation to land a probe on the far side of the moon and screwed over our most valuable company to the point where it lost tens of billions in value in a single day AND holds $1.2T in US debt. There are over 1,000,000 Chinese citizens in Africa right now buying up resources and building a new empire there. They also have the capability and will to send a million Muslim citizens to re-education camps and then station government employees in their homes to ensure they aren't still doing anything Islamic during peace time. They emitted more green house gases in the last 4 decades than the US has in it's history. Their active duty military in ~2x the size of ours. No need to mention the 'great firewall' and other forms of government brainwashing. As mad as people get about the US and it's policies, it should be abundantly clear to anyone with potato or higher level intellect that the next biggest alternative is far fucking worse.

And as for single payer healthcare, it's not the idea that is the problem it's the cost burden placed upon tax payers and businesses. The same way a $15 minimum wage push made McDonalds install touchscreen ordering systems in thousands of it's franchises, increasing the tax paid by individuals and businesses to cover healthcare would drive more people out of work, so we need a slow and methodical shift (likely over decades) away from the insane model we have to a non-publicly traded model, to a not-for-profit model, then finally to a government funded model. The key being a gradual shift to allow the market to adjust to the change. Thus the need to have experienced, patient, and economically literate representatives in DC... not progressive and "new green deals" or whatever the fuck those idiots called it.

The same way a $15 minimum wage push made McDonalds install touchscreen ordering systems in thousands of it's franchises

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdon ... -cashiers/

Finally, while reducing labor costs and overhead may be a goal of McDonald’s — along with most other businesses — the notion that the fast food chain is introducing self-order kiosks as a “pushback against demands of the left for $15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage” is unsupported conjecture (a subject we previously wrote about here). In fact, the original story came from a site called Neon Nettle, which offered nothing to support that assertion other than a link to the notoriously unreliable conspiracy site InfoWars.

McParadigm wrote:

The same way a $15 minimum wage push made McDonalds install touchscreen ordering systems in thousands of it's franchises

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdon ... -cashiers/

Finally, while reducing labor costs and overhead may be a goal of McDonald’s — along with most other businesses — the notion that the fast food chain is introducing self-order kiosks as a “pushback against demands of the left for $15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage” is unsupported conjecture (a subject we previously wrote about here). In fact, the original story came from a site called Neon Nettle, which offered nothing to support that assertion other than a link to the notoriously unreliable conspiracy site InfoWars.

Wow. Probably the worst argued "fact check" on snopes.

https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/3 ... ght-for-15

(But let's not derail this thread too far).

An opinion article written by a man who left the company in 1997 doesn’t make it more factual.

It’s hardly a stretch to think that if two things are substitutes, in this case low skill workers and touch screen kiosks, and the price of of one increases (low skill workers) while at the same time the price of the other decreases that it would begin to make financial sense to use fewer workers and more screens.

LMAO anyone arguing that we should wait decades to shift to single-payer is not someone I’m going to see eye to eye with.

4/5 wrote:It’s hardly a stretch to think that if two things are substitutes, in this case low skill workers and touch screen kiosks, and the price of of one increases (low skill workers) while at the same time the price of the other decreases that it would begin to make financial sense to use fewer workers and more screens.

Of course it’s not unreasonable to think they might be related. But whether or not it feels true is inconsequential to whether or not it is factually, demonstrably correct, and certainly doesn’t increase its worth as a point being deployed to demonstrate the factualness of another point a writer is making.

LoathedVermin72 wrote:LMAO anyone arguing that we should wait decades to shift to single-payer is not someone I’m going to see eye to eye with.

You're talking about a change that would cost tens of trillions of dollars and transform every aspect of the economy from federal banking rules to local college course offerings to core elements of supply in demand in nearly every state. It's not something we can just pass a law and do without devastating economic consequences. I mean it took five years to effectively phase out lead gas after the plan was developed and that is rounding error to what we are talking about here.

edit: If you want lasting, meaningful, real change then it has to be planned and executed correctly with full transparency and knowledge of all stakeholders.

McParadigm wrote:

4/5 wrote:It’s hardly a stretch to think that if two things are substitutes, in this case low skill workers and touch screen kiosks, and the price of of one increases (low skill workers) while at the same time the price of the other decreases that it would begin to make financial sense to use fewer workers and more screens.

Of course it’s not unreasonable to think they might be related. But whether or not it feels true is inconsequential to whether or not it is factually, demonstrably correct, and certainly doesn’t increase its worth as a point being deployed to demonstrate the factualness of another point a writer is making.

How would one do that?

Bi_3 wrote:

McParadigm wrote:

4/5 wrote:It’s hardly a stretch to think that if two things are substitutes, in this case low skill workers and touch screen kiosks, and the price of of one increases (low skill workers) while at the same time the price of the other decreases that it would begin to make financial sense to use fewer workers and more screens.

Of course it’s not unreasonable to think they might be related. But whether or not it feels true is inconsequential to whether or not it is factually, demonstrably correct, and certainly doesn’t increase its worth as a point being deployed to demonstrate the factualness of another point a writer is making.

How would one do that?

Inaccessibility of data isn’t a sound reason to treat conjecture as fact. “How does one even prove or disprove this thing” is a question best deployed when selecting your arguments, not defending them.

McP has an awesome way of bringing interesting conversations to a screeching halt.

run2death wrote:McP has an awesome way of bringing interesting conversations to a screeching halt.