Prelude to the Apocalypse

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Iran War. When.

2021
3
6%
2022-2025
15
28%
2026-2030
7
13%
2031-2040
3
6%
2041-2050
0
No votes
Never
25
47%
 
Total votes: 53

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ED-057
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by ED-057 »

At the end, when humanity has completely destroyed itself, I wonder if the last two humans will still be arguing over which demonstrably corrupt political party was, in fact, less evil than the other.

Try this thought experiment: If Democrats proclaim that 2+2=3, and Republicans assert that 2+2=5, then who is wrong? If voting for Democrats results in a fascist oligarchy, and voting for Republicans results in a fascist oligarchy, then who is facilitating the fascist oligarchy?
Syria - seriously, seriously. The typical right-wing argument there is that Obama didn't enter the war
Obama (and by Obama, I mean the puppet masters) thought it would be cool if someone took out Assad. Even if that someone was Al Qaeda or Daesh. He sent weapons and money there. Now there is a war going on.

Obama thought it would be cool if someone took it out Ghaddafi. He sent weapons and money to Libya. Mission complete.

Obama thought it would be cool if Ukraine took some more foreign loans so they could become the next Greece, and also if we could poke a stick at the Russians somehow. He sent money and weapons to Ukraine. ...
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quash
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by quash »

BulletMagnet wrote:snip
I'm not saying that the likelihood of any kind of federal level ban on weapons is high, but there is a strong element on the left that would like to implement such a thing. They've already succeeded on a smaller scale in states like California and would have no reservations about doing such a thing nationally, given they had the political right-of-way to do so.

Why do you think the media reports on shootings more than they ever have, when violent crime is the lowest it's ever been?

(This past year may have seen a spike, but if you need to be told why then I have no hope for you)
Then you're standing in a coat closet with the light bulb burned out, and have been there for quite some time. As undeniably pathetic as the modern left can be, there's simply no comparison with the openly malevolent tripe that regularly passes for both "leadership" and "intellectualism" on the modern right.
The problem is that there are so few representatives of center-right anymore, which (falsely) leads people to believe that the average conservative is in line with right wing shock jocks, when it couldn't be any further from the truth. See: Trump's popularity, which is in staunch defiance of the party establishment.

Others here have pointed it out, but Trump is actually not a hardline conservative on the majority of issues. In fact, he's probably the most liberal candidate the Republican party has seen in years. You have to separate the signal from the noise with his campaign; what he's doing to rally support from hard-right from what he's doing to rally support from more centered people (the majority of voters).
The nation was at its most prosperous in all of human history when "conservative" meant "Eisenhower", labor unions were at their strongest and the top tax rate on the wealthiest was 90 percent. Finally stop sucking Reagan's dick and move steadily back in that general direction.
Labor unions and taxing the rich aren't going to do for us today what they did before. There's far too many underlying issues to simply pin it down to workers not getting paid enough and the government not getting enough money (the former being a half-truth that requires more evaluation than it's getting, the latter being patently false).

Not to mention that the few existing examples of old fashioned extortion mobs- er, labor unions, don't exactly make most people want to return to those days. The UAW getting a seat on the board at GM while that company was filing bankruptcy completely overstepped the intended function of a labor union, and if you're more than a notch away from being a socialist it shouldn't require any explanation as to why.
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BryanM
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BryanM »

quash wrote:The problem is that there are so few representatives of center-right anymore
We have hundreds of those. We call them democrats now.
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quash
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by quash »

They still champion authoritarian left social causes (to the public, at least), but yes, even most "liberals" these days are more to the right than most people would care to admit.
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BulletMagnet
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BulletMagnet »

quash wrote:I'm not saying that the likelihood of any kind of federal level ban on weapons is high, but there is a strong element on the left that would like to implement such a thing. They've already succeeded on a smaller scale in states like California and would have no reservations about doing such a thing nationally, given they had the political right-of-way to do so.
Oh come on, most liberals don't want much (if any) higher a degree of gun control than conservatives would be comfortable with - closure of the gun show loophole, more thorough background checks, longer waiting periods, limits on bulk sales to curb trafficking, bans on expanded magazines and assault rifles whose only practical application is mowing down multiple human targets...seriously, how "authoritarian" is that sort of consideration supposed to be? At least in comparison to the "if an escaped lobotomy patient can't walk into a daycare center with a bazooka on each shoulder, we're in slippery slope territory!" narrative that prevents the CDC from even doing any studies on gun violence.

Insisting most/all liberals want to ban guns is just as much a jackass move as insisting that most/all conservatives are racists.
Why do you think the media reports on shootings more than they ever have, when violent crime is the lowest it's ever been?
Because it gets ratings, which are far more important to the multi-billion-dollar conglomerates that own them than an informed, empowered voting populace (and, may I again remind you, has led to exactly zero gun control reforms, even from "authoritarian" Obama)? While we're on the topic, correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be reporting from the "media is controlled by liberals" sector, which strikes me as quaint when even "sooper-dooper liberal" MSNBC (itself an enormous canard) is under the thumb of a company famous for annually weaseling out of paying a penny in taxes (and whose former CEO basically pioneered the "mollycoddle the shareholders and executives, screw the workers" mindset of doing business).
(This past year may have seen a spike, but if you need to be told why then I have no hope for you)
No, no, humor me. This I want to hear.
See: Trump's popularity, which is in staunch defiance of the party establishment.
As I said previously, if Trump's ramblings were really was that far removed from "mainstream" Republican thought the party could have laughed him out of the race ages ago. So why haven't they pulled the trigger, if the gun's not already pointed at their own head?
Others here have pointed it out, but Trump is actually not a hardline conservative on the majority of issues. In fact, he's probably the most liberal candidate the Republican party has seen in years.
If his handful of (stated, at least) semi-deviations from the party's lock-step reverse-Robin-Hood philosophy really do make him the biggest wild card they've put up in living memory then that is, frankly, cause for alarm.
Labor unions and taxing the rich aren't going to do for us today what they did before. There's far too many underlying issues to simply pin it down to workers not getting paid enough and the government not getting enough money (the former being a half-truth that requires more evaluation than it's getting, the latter being patently false).
I'm not sure what numbers anyone (maybe a gaggle of hacks like the "if you own a refrigerator, as you're required to do to qualify for food stamps, you're not really poor!" Heritage Foundation) could produce to support what you're saying - nobody on either side of the spectrum disputes that the very rich (i.e. "outsider" Trump) now control the largest percentage of the country's wealth in a century and pay the lowest share of taxes, while everyone else has seen their wages stagnate or fall and their entitlements repeatedly slashed. The only difference is, the left says "this isn't right, we ought to change this", while the right says "the market has spoken, obviously the poor people aren't working hard enough (to compete with the overseas slave labor we've replaced them with), and if we give them anything they'll just get lazier, so let them all rot". So what, exactly, constitutes so major a snag that we can't even say "Rich guys, you've made out very well for a half-century now at everyone else's expense, it's time to switch things up a bit"?
The UAW getting a seat on the board at GM while that company was filing bankruptcy completely overstepped the intended function of a labor union, and if you're more than a notch away from being a socialist it shouldn't require any explanation as to why.
If I said I was intimately familiar with the bailout proceedings I'd be lying, but last time I checked the "intended function" of any union is to keep management from completely screwing its workers over, and presumably why they had a spot at the table (y'know, not like one of the guys Obama ran against built his fortune on helping failed executives get away scot-free while leaving employees holding the bag or anything)...once again, if I'm missing something major, please humor me.
Wenchang
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

The idea that lower taxes for the rich = rich benefit from tax policy is fine. It's also fine to say lower taxes for the rich = higher inequality, assuming all else is equal or that, even if you also have lower taxes for the poor(which Reagan did actually), they're not lowered as much as they were for the rich(or to put it better, the difference between the percentage of income taxes paid by the highest bracket vs the lowest bracket is bigger in the Reagan era and afterwards, say than it was in the 1940s-50s. That is true btw, even though it's also true that the lowest bracket in the 1940s-50s also paid a higher tax rate than they do now).

But saying that lower taxes for the rich = the rich benefit at the expense of everyone else is wrong. Robin Hood isn't the way the world works. Liberals would win over a lot more people if they just advocated cutting taxes for lower and lower middle income brackets, rather than going on with this high taxes for the rich nonsense(which achieves virtually nothing). But of course, that would require giving up on false ideas like the purpose of taxes is to fund government that would otherwise not have the resources, that government debt is bad, and other such ideas that both sides of the political spectrum believe in. What's even weirder is a lot of liberals nowadays seem to have an irrational love for taxes, as if they're a public good or something. It's a bit like believing in the tooth fairy. It might help if one puts the idea out there that U.S. healthcare spending didn't disappear after Reagan cut taxes so much, maybe people will get the hint?

It's also fine to say that you think inequality is bad, although I wouldn't use that as a proxy for prosperity, although maybe I'm misunderstanding BulletMagnet here. It's not clear what he means when he says the U.S. was more prosperous in the 1940s-50s than now, we all live much better now than people did then.

As for labor unions, forget about them. Even if you think they were very important in those prosperous decades in the U.S., much of their decline is due to the decline of U.S. manufacturing(which has to do both with external competition and with the fact that, as a country develops, most people would rather not work factory jobs, ok?), not to do with anything any particular American president did or could have done(short of nuking our manufacturing competitors more than we did, maybe). The power of labor unions isn't coming back, so why waste time lamenting them? They're a lost cause.
Last edited by Wenchang on Sun Sep 06, 2015 11:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BryanM
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BryanM »

like the purpose of taxes is to fund government that would otherwise not have the resources
I thought the purpose was to avoid run away inflation from injecting $4 trillion into the money supply annually. That's $13,333.33 per person - basically the equivalent of a universal citizen's wage.

Well... maybe if we lived in a Star Trek Communist regime where our computer overlords very carefully allocated and destroyed currency. In the meantime churn is just as good as we can do : /
Wenchang
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

BryanM wrote:I thought the purpose was to avoid run away inflation from injecting $4 trillion into the money supply annually. That's $13,333.33 per person - basically the equivalent of a universal citizen's wage.

Well... maybe if we lived in a Star Trek Communist regime where our computer overlords very carefully allocated and destroyed currency. In the meantime churn is just as good as we can do : /
Viewing taxes as a tool for controlling inflation is a sane view. Although of course, inflation is low in the U.S., so the justification for raising them(on the rich or anyone else) is pretty poor in my view. I don't even think the justification for not cutting them is very good.
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Xyga
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Xyga »

Screw S. Hawking I'm all for A.I.
Strikers1945guy wrote:"Do we....eat chicken balls?!"
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by o.pwuaioc »

Xyga wrote:Screw S. Hawking I'm all for A.I.
AI = humanity's downfall. If that's what you want, that's what you want, but I'd rather have no humans, no AI than only AI and no humans.
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BulletMagnet »

Wenchang wrote:Liberals would win over a lot more people if they just advocated cutting taxes for lower and lower middle income brackets, rather than going on with this high taxes for the rich nonsense(which achieves virtually nothing). But of course, that would require giving up on false ideas like the purpose of taxes is to fund government that would otherwise not have the resources, that government debt is bad, and other such ideas that both sides of the political spectrum believe in.
Mind you, I'm no economist, but I am aware that we operate under a fiat currency and that most of our debt is owed to ourselves. That said, when you talk about lowering taxes in one spot without raising them elsewhere (which offhand sounds a lot like the "cutting taxes is all you ever have to do to fix any economic problem" right-wing panacea, which to the best of my knowledge there's pretty much no evidence in favor of) you're also moving into territory that runs especially afoul of the dominant "government should be run like a business" or "government spending should be determined the same way families do theirs around the kitchen table" axiom most people are familiar with - as I said in a previous post, thanks to decades upon decades of liberal incompetence you'll have a LOT of work to do getting support for that, and the media being owned by people determined to keep the aforementioned narrative in place only makes it an even taller mountain to climb.
It's not clear what he means when he says the U.S. was more prosperous in the 1940s-50s than now, we all live much better now than people did then.
Sure, there have been plenty of technological/medical/etc. advances since then, but in terms of the majority of the population having access to some measure of financial security and/or general quality of life things have gone unmistakably downhill as the middle class has shrunk and more wealth and influence is concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. If you're doing okay then yes, you're almost certainly living better than the previous generation - thing is, far fewer people are doing okay today than back then, and the avenues that once existed for most people to make their way out of such a situation have been largely closed off. On that note...
Even if you think they were very important in those prosperous decades in the U.S., much of their decline is due to the decline of U.S. manufacturing(which has to do both with external competition and with the fact that, as a country develops, most people would rather not work factory jobs, ok?)
First things first, I'm only willing to believe so much of the "the jobs vanished because we didn't want them anymore" theory: when push comes to shove most people will do most any job they can get if they can make a decent living off of it. Frankly, there are only so many "premium" positions to fill at any given time, so even if you've got a roomful of super-qualified people eager to advance most of them will wind up back on the factory floor....IF the factory hasn't already been moved to Bangladesh and filled with pennies-a-day indentured servants by management, with labor powerless to protest.

Second, and IMO more importantly, what truly killed the domestic manufacturing economy - among many, many other things, literal and figurative - is the emergent prevalence of the "greed is good" approach to business, the idea that short-term personal gain is the only "legitimate" factor to take into consideration when making any decision, large or small. Put another way, at one point businesses included what they considered to be their obligations to their communities and their country right there in their mission statements - in otherwords, they recognized that they exercise an enormous amount of influence over many, many people's lives, and acknowledged that they should feel compelled to think beyond their own immediate needs and wants when operating their enterprises.

Nowadays, that sentiment has all but vanished. Even a highly self-interested businessman back in the '50's might have said "sure, I could move my factory to a country with no labor laws and save a bundle as long as I ignore any human rights violations that occur in the process, but at the very least the public wouldn't stand for it if I did, and are financially independent enough (and can access viable competitors) to boycott me". Today, not only do CEOs openly declare that those less rich than them are lazy scum that deserve whatever they get, but far too few among both politicians and everyday citizens can call upon any real, organized rebuttal to the "greed is good" narrative across a generation, and thus shrug their shoulders even when its application directly and repeatedly impacts them negatively. Moreover, as Wal-Mart et al swallow up competitors and drive down wages across the board, people are left with few affordable alternatives even when it comes to "voting with their wallets"...though this still hasn't affected the narrative one bit.

Before you say anything, yes, I know that inevitable march of technological progress is going to drive some people out of business no matter what. No, I don't believe that businesses should eschew genuine competition or all be headed by kumbaya philanthropists. What I WILL say is that when businesses demand, almost without exception, to control a greater and greater portion of people's lives, and insist that they do everything better than government does and that the latter should just stay out of their way, they'd better be willing to give something back (or at the VERY least be willing to assume a position where they can swallow their own screw-ups without suddenly demanding the public rescue them). If they truly want to find themselves woven so deeply into the fabric of civilized society, they very much need to acknowledge the limits of "enlightened self-interest". You don't get to declare yourself the responsible adult in the room and proceed to behave with all the self-awareness of a spoiled toddler.

...which, methinks, brings us rather neatly back to Trump.
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BryanM
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BryanM »

For what it's worth I mixed up Trump's and Walker's numbers on my estimato program (because Walker is the only pokemon with a higher pokedex number than Trump), and it turns out Walker was the only one possibly beating him in a head to head back in July.

But he's a has-been nobody now. I don't think I've ever seen a faster flame out before in my life: From possible #1 to tied to almost last place. I'd like to think the potency of the protesters managed this feat.

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Wenchang
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

BulletMagnet wrote:Mind you, I'm no economist, but I am aware that we operate under a fiat currency and that most of our debt is owed to ourselves. That said, when you talk about lowering taxes in one spot without raising them elsewhere (which offhand sounds a lot like the "cutting taxes is all you ever have to do to fix any economic problem" right-wing panacea, which to the best of my knowledge there's pretty much no evidence in favor of) you're also moving into territory that runs especially afoul of the dominant "government should be run like a business" or "government spending should be determined the same way families do theirs around the kitchen table" axiom most people are familiar with - as I said in a previous post, thanks to decades upon decades of liberal incompetence you'll have a LOT of work to do getting support for that, and the media being owned by people determined to keep the aforementioned narrative in place only makes it an even taller mountain to climb.
Cutting taxes is a way of raising the income of the people who you are having pay less taxes.
BulletMagnet wrote:Sure, there have been plenty of technological/medical/etc. advances since then, but in terms of the majority of the population having access to some measure of financial security and/or general quality of life things have gone unmistakably downhill as the middle class has shrunk and more wealth and influence is concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. If you're doing okay then yes, you're almost certainly living better than the previous generation - thing is, far fewer people are doing okay today than back then, and the avenues that once existed for most people to make their way out of such a situation have been largely closed off. On that note...
I think if you compare pretty much any quality of living standard(unless you count marriage or something) you will find people's lives have improved, not just among people who aren't poor. I think you're confusing relative inequalities with absolute living standards. People's life expectancy, literacy, access to health care, access to food, pretty much whatever you like, are better than they were in previous decades, across the board. All of those things have improved for the poor, and for everyone else.
BulletMagnet wrote:First things first, I'm only willing to believe so much of the "the jobs vanished because we didn't want them anymore" theory: when push comes to shove most people will do most any job they can get if they can make a decent living off of it. Frankly, there are only so many "premium" positions to fill at any given time, so even if you've got a roomful of super-qualified people eager to advance most of them will wind up back on the factory floor....IF the factory hasn't already been moved to Bangladesh and filled with pennies-a-day indentured servants by management, with labor powerless to protest.
I think you will find across the developed world that, as living standards rise, people are less likely to be willing to work manual labor type jobs for example. There are plenty of plumbing jobs open, and plumbers make about twice the average U.S. wage, but people don't want to do the job. Why would they? It's not like most unemployed people in the U.S. are dying in the streets or something, if they don't like a particular job, many of them will elect to be unemployed unless and until they can find a job they want.

Also labor does protest, protectionist trade policy has been and still is the position of U.S. labor unions. Maybe you should ask yourself what would happen if management doesn't move the factory to Bangladesh(that is assuming they could find enough people who would do the same work as the people in Bangladesh, which is unlikely). You think their competitors, either in the U.S., or foreign competitors, are going to do the same out of some sort of solidarity? Nope, all that would likely mean is the businesses who didn't move the jobs overseas would go out of business, and their workers would be in the same position. No amount of desire not to be greedy or government policy is likely to change this. Hell, most of our manufacturers were already going out of business decades ago, getting their ass kicked by competitors mostly from Japan.

It's not like you don't see the same exact pattern in terms of manufacturing decline in almost every other 1st world country. Look at the U.K., it's gone from the center of the industrial revolution to a tiny fraction of world manufacturing. You think it's because of labor union decline or not progressive enough taxation? They certainly didn't have any of that in the years of the industrial revolution. No, something else has changed.

I'm not even sure what you consider "premium" jobs. Many math intensive jobs, say finance or software engineering are not that hard to find openings in, the problem is a shortage of people. It's not the case that a majority of people could do such jobs.
BulletMagnet wrote:Second, and IMO more importantly, what truly killed the domestic manufacturing economy - among many, many other things, literal and figurative - is the emergent prevalence of the "greed is good" approach to business, the idea that short-term personal gain is the only "legitimate" factor to take into consideration when making any decision, large or small. Put another way, at one point businesses included what they considered to be their obligations to their communities and their country right there in their mission statements - in otherwords, they recognized that they exercise an enormous amount of influence over many, many people's lives, and acknowledged that they should feel compelled to think beyond their own immediate needs and wants when operating their enterprises.

Nowadays, that sentiment has all but vanished. Even a highly self-interested businessman back in the '50's might have said "sure, I could move my factory to a country with no labor laws and save a bundle as long as I ignore any human rights violations that occur in the process, but at the very least the public wouldn't stand for it if I did, and are financially independent enough (and can access viable competitors) to boycott me". Today, not only do CEOs openly declare that those less rich than them are lazy scum that deserve whatever they get, but far too few among both politicians and everyday citizens can call upon any real, organized rebuttal to the "greed is good" narrative across a generation, and thus shrug their shoulders even when its application directly and repeatedly impacts them negatively. Moreover, as Wal-Mart et al swallow up competitors and drive down wages across the board, people are left with few affordable alternatives even when it comes to "voting with their wallets"...though this still hasn't affected the narrative one bit.

Before you say anything, yes, I know that inevitable march of technological progress is going to drive some people out of business no matter what. No, I don't believe that businesses should eschew genuine competition or all be headed by kumbaya philanthropists. What I WILL say is that when businesses demand, almost without exception, to control a greater and greater portion of people's lives, and insist that they do everything better than government does and that the latter should just stay out of their way, they'd better be willing to give something back (or at the VERY least be willing to assume a position where they can swallow their own screw-ups without suddenly demanding the public rescue them). If they truly want to find themselves woven so deeply into the fabric of civilized society, they very much need to acknowledge the limits of "enlightened self-interest". You don't get to declare yourself the responsible adult in the room and proceed to behave with all the self-awareness of a spoiled toddler.
If there's an industry that should be killed by short-termism, it's the financial industry. There you have much more ability to act in terms of short-term interest, more incentive to as well. And indeed, there have been numerous financial crises, all kinds of blow-ups, yet the size of the financial industry has grown. I don't think any of the things you describe can really explain very much of what has happened in the U.S. or world economy. Like I'm not sure how it's supposed to explain the move away from manufacturing jobs into service jobs(a detail which actually contradicts your Wal-Mart anecdote), maybe it's a conspiracy to get a bunch of people into office jobs, or maybe I'm right and most people don't want to spend all day sweating their ass off in a factory.

You think business in the 1950s didn't take advantage of overseas production? You think the average mom and pop store pays higher wages than Wal-Mart? You want to talk about short-termism? I think you have it backwards. All this overseas production has made many of the things people take for granted, like clothing for instance, cheaper to produce, giving Americans more access to them and to other things. What we're doing right now, communicating on electronic computing devices, would likely not be possible without these development. The idea that Americans are somehow harmed by this, just doesn't make much sense(most overseas workers aren't either btw, while literal slave labor does exist, most of the time, work is done by people, usually young women, voluntarily, and while conditions are bad, they're still better than being unemployed, which is why people do those jobs). It might if unemployed has ballooned as a result, but there's just not much evidence of that. You can look at historical data, from 1948 to today, the lowest unemployment we have on record is 2.9%, highest is 10.3%. Most years it's between 5-7%. In other words, pretty stable.

To the extent that there was less outsourcing in past years, you should keep in mind that there were also less countries whose economies were open to foreign investment(also most of those countries were like some parts of Africa is today, subsistence economies where most people had to grow their own food to survive, many also tended to be unstable, not the easiest places to create industries in, not to mention many were Communist, which is pretty much a non-starter, you'll notice we don't have too much stuff made in North Korea either) there was less infrastructure in place in those countries, and besides, many parts of America were still pretty poor in the 1950s. You could still just move your business down south and lower wages that way. That still goes on to some extent, although sometimes in weird ways. Like for example much of the auto industry work in the south tends to be Japanese companies like Honda. Meanwhile we've had to bail out U.S. auto companies, you think the high wages among union workers in those companies had absolutely nothing to do with those problems? I don't think sentiment, protests, or brotherly love have much to do with any of it. Nor do I think government policy could have done much.
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Mischief Maker
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Mischief Maker »

BryanM wrote:Image
The sad part is that he wasn't ruined years earlier by this.

Wenchang wrote:You think business in the 1950s didn't take advantage of overseas production?


As for outsourcing, that wasn't a huge thing in the 50s because we used to have these things called "tariffs." They were a means by which governments could shut down trade deficits by making the cost of paying tariffs outweigh the savings on foreign slave labor.

Back in the 90s we had this successful businessman by the name of Ross Perot run for president who, like Trump, deviated from the script. But instead of deviating by going full bore racist in politically correct times, he deviated by explaining how NAFTA and other free trade agreements in the works were going to destroy America's labor market. Take a moment and soak in this blast from the past.

I was a paperboy at the time, so I got to see in detail the retribution that fell upon his head for daring to speak against free trade. Everything from editorial cartoons to CNN Crossfire to Saturday Night Live made every effort to label Perot with the one word that is most responsible for the death of political discourse in this modern age: "crazy."

...and whaddya know? Everything Perot predicted came true.
Wenchang wrote:as a country develops, most people would rather not work factory jobs, ok?
Yeah, working in the food service industry is so much more dignified.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BulletMagnet »

Wenchang wrote:Cutting taxes is a way of raising the income of the people who you are having pay less taxes.
This is true, but there's only so far you can cut - even if you totally exempt someone making 10 bucks an hour he'll still be paying more than half of that for a one-bedroom apartment and much of the rest will likely go towards health insurance before you even factor anything else in. As you said in a previous post, tax rates have gone down for everyone in recent decades (though the top has seen much, much more "relief" than anyone else), but inequality has continued to soar, so other areas very much need addressing.
People's life expectancy, literacy, access to health care, access to food, pretty much whatever you like, are better than they were in previous decades, across the board. All of those things have improved for the poor, and for everyone else.
Overall this might be true, but as with taxes the effect has not been across-the-board; a quick bit of Googling found this bit (which only goes back to the 70's), and more interestingly this one (yes, it's from The Atlantic, but it got its numbers from the WSJ), which aside from the same overall trend as the previous chart shows that for poor women specifically life expectancy has actually gone down. The article notes that not every contributing factor can be reliably accounted for, but again, the bottom is obviously missing something that the top has (and I get the feeling that the answer is the obvious one).
There are plenty of plumbing jobs open, and plumbers make about twice the average U.S. wage, but people don't want to do the job. Why would they?
I'll take your word when it comes to demand, but if I had to guess in this particular case, I'd say 1) The training and certification required to become a plumber (not to mention having to own all your own tools/van/etc.) is too much of an initial time/money investment for many people to afford, 2) You'll still be paying through the nose for health insurance, even under the ACA, and 3) This particular profession, much like construction and others of the same ilk, offers no guarantee of work to be done; if the phone doesn't ring, you don't get paid. I can only assume that similar considerations apply for many of the jobs seeking more people, along with...
It's not like most unemployed people in the U.S. are dying in the streets or something, if they don't like a particular job, many of them will elect to be unemployed unless and until they can find a job they want.
As someone who's currently looking for work, I can attest that I've come up against literally hundreds of other applicants even when seeking a single part-time warehouse position, and this has happened more than once within a matter of weeks (and forget it if you try for an entry-level office position; they won't even consider you if you haven't already worked several years in their particular field). I'd be lying if I said I had no "basement" when it comes to the sorts of jobs I'd seek, but I don't think my standards are set particularly high, and I'd imagine the same is true for many people, especially those who, unlike me, have families to support and college loans to pay off (for the record, I do have a bachelor's degree). Hell, if McDonald's or Wal-Mart actually offered something resembling a living wage I'd be first in line to sign up to mop the floors.
No amount of desire not to be greedy or government policy is likely to change this.
As Mischief Maker noted in his post, at one point we managed to, if nothing else, take a fairly big bite out of the problem on the domestic front; mind you, I'm no isolationist, but I do think it would be nice if more people in positions of authority didn't leave every single facet of commerce to the whims of personal avarice. Again, I'm not versed enough in economics to draw a line anywhere in particular, but is it that out of the question to ever consider the harm your decisions might inflict on both interested and disinterested parties on these matters?
Many math intensive jobs, say finance or software engineering are not that hard to find openings in, the problem is a shortage of people. It's not the case that a majority of people could do such jobs.
It's true that not everyone can be a computer programmer, but I'd once again add that, even in many places where people off the street could easily adapt the skills they have to an open position, new employee training barely exists anymore; if you can't be directly popped into an active slot your first day you might as well not even apply (and until they find this elusive perfect match their existing staff can simply do more work for no additional compensation, and if they don't like it, there's the door). That's not a matter of people not being available, that's just management not wanting to make even a minor investment in its workforce, and another direct consequence of unchecked "greed is good" - in another era, a company with an attitude like that wouldn't be able to keep anybody, but these days they've got waiting lists miles long, and not because they've somehow become more lovable.
And indeed, there have been numerous financial crises, all kinds of blow-ups, yet the size of the financial industry has grown. I don't think any of the things you describe can really explain very much of what has happened in the U.S. or world economy.
As I mentioned earlier, financial firms in particular have managed to get themselves into a cushy spot where their everyday goings-on are subject to less and less preventative oversight, but when they get too big for their britches and the sky starts falling the government is forced to step in and save them. Re-implementing Glass-Steagall and similar Depression-era legislation would, I think, be a prudent step to take; if you're too big to fail, break up and remain responsible for your own decisions.
Like I'm not sure how it's supposed to explain the move away from manufacturing jobs into service jobs
Maybe my line of thinking is too simplistic, but the path seems fairly clear from here: corporations don't want to pay domestic workers the wages/benefits/etc. they fought (and sometimes died) to obtain, so they move more and more of their operations to places where they can exploit workers to a much greater extent (or replace them with machines), eliminating higher-wage positions (and crippling the remaining ones by making them compete against their counterparts). Since workers can't instantly relocate half a world away like capital assets can, they're forced to take what's left of the jobs on offer, mostly low-wage service positions (which, as an added bonus for management, they can still classify as "temporary stops" for employees even when they remain there for years, and can thus demand more and more from them in terms of both tasks and availability, while paying them as if they were high schoolers looking for spare pocket change).
All this overseas production has made many of the things people take for granted, like clothing for instance, cheaper to produce, giving Americans more access to them and to other things.
That's just the thing, though - if you'll pardon another trip to Wal-Mart, whenever the company is asked how it can pay its employees so poorly they answer "our products are cheap enough that they can afford to shop here". That's what you call a vicious cycle; by paying you so little we can keep products cheap, simultaneously limiting your options in where you can spend your money (i.e. putting it right back into the company's pocket) and using that as an excuse to keep doing it. It's one step removed from the time-honored practice of paying workers not in cash but with credits to the company store, and siphons cash out of the larger economy to dump it directly into the McDuck silo, hence the record profits these outfits keep reporting (and doing absolutely nothing with).
It might if unemployed has ballooned as a result, but there's just not much evidence of that. You can look at historical data, from 1948 to today, the lowest unemployment we have on record is 2.9%, highest is 10.3%. Most years it's between 5-7%. In other words, pretty stable.
The thing that gets ignored in this area (and constitutes the kernel of truth in conservative yowling that Obama is "cooking" employment numbers) is how many of the jobs being created/worked pay even a minimal living wage; I don't know if any such study has been done on the topic, but I'd wager that many, many more of the employed these days are going into debt to pay their bills than was the case in the '50s or '60s, since wages haven't come close to keeping up with inflation for decades now (but the "overall" job numbers still look good on paper).
Meanwhile we've had to bail out U.S. auto companies, you think the high wages among union workers in those companies had absolutely nothing to do with those problems?
I certainly won't come out in favor of every perk any union has ever demanded, but in terms of which side of the labor/management equation has gained decidedly more ground (and assets) over the past 40 or so years while the other has been forced to retreat the second things get tight, I'd be very hesitant to place equal responsibility for any industry's financial woes on both sides. Again, if you have any hard numbers to offer on this front, by all means present them.
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Xyga »

I don't know where the idea that people live better today than XX years ago comes from, all I see around me and neighboring countries like Spain or Italy who have it even worse, is that poverty is skyrocketing.
And it's not because we're in Europe that we're guaranteed to get some welfare money, housing and healthcare, far from it actually as the requirements and procedure for accessing those is getting harsher every year.
The number of homeless, people with children who work but can't pay for everything with minimal wage, young who give up on health insurance and skip expensive treatment, isolated eldery with insanely low pension who become hungry, all forms of criminality and violence are on the rise, etc etc

Being poor is being poor, it's no better today than before even in so-called 'rich' cuntries. Just saying, I used to be on the streets for a while, that was a decade ago when things were still 'alright', well, I still have nightmares of that time: when you have no money and nobody to give you a hand: you're out of society, you do not exist.
Kind of an eye-opening experience though, I recommend it for those who are not afraid to lose faith in most things they believe, like people, family, politics, or BS like "today it's bearable to be poor in a 1st world cuntry". :lol:
Later after a year and a half seeking a job and finding a high qualified one paid minimum wage, I've moved for a few years in a poor neighborhood, and un-learned all kinds of bullshit about the poor and minorities.

In all honesty getting that job and a salary for a few years didn't improve my life by much, as the working conditions were atrocious even for an office job, and the taxes unbearable.
The thrash guy in my neighborhood, he quit school at 14, did a bit more than me while smoking joints, really, and when my boss after a year and a half of cuts in the personnel and pays because "yeah crisis you know we have no choice please endure it boys and girls!", bought an Aston Martin more expensive than an average house we employees would need 20 years to pay...I decided a decade of experiencing that comedy was enough for my lifetime, but getting away from the shitstem withouth ending up on the streets again is a fucking huge challenge.
I must succeed because things are only getting worse out there, peole who have money basically have most of it, more than ever, and won't share a cent if they don't have a gun on the temple, because they're old and look down on all the young, and don't give a shit as they 'deserve' to enjoy the last remains of the 20th Century's prosperity. You have to obey them, be their slave if you want the penny that won't even be enough for paying any of your bills, and even if you tell them that's not enough for a decent living and your dignity, they will just say "stop talking nonsense, it was the same when I was your age, shut up and respect your elders"... AS IF fucking dumb useless asshole farts.
Yeah I hate the eldery more than anything, especially the 'newfarts' (retired baby-boomers). Useless, clueless, egoist, racist, sexist, and stinking (there are exceptions of course but the nicer ones form only a tiny minority in my cuntry).
I'd gladly send those rotting imbeciles to Syria on a boat and welcome the refugees fleeing death and misery.

PS: wanted to add that yes; it's indeed sometimes extremely hard to access training and get certificates to be allowed to do a job.
At least in France it is. Just one example: if I want to repair computer hardware I need two certificates:
- IT technician -> 6 months training 300km away, 10000€
- electricity tech -> 5 months training 500km away, dunno but I've heard it's even more expensive
NO WAY.
(before you ask if you don't make at stable 2000€/month already no bank will lend you a cent)
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Wenchang
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

Mischief Maker wrote:As for outsourcing, that wasn't a huge thing in the 50s because we used to have these things called "tariffs." They were a means by which governments could shut down trade deficits by making the cost of paying tariffs outweigh the savings on foreign slave labor.
Tariffs didn't shut down trade deficits nor did it stop outsourcing. Tariffs haven't been significant since the Great Depression.
Mischief Maker wrote:Back in the 90s we had this successful businessman by the name of Ross Perot run for president who, like Trump, deviated from the script. But instead of deviating by going full bore racist in politically correct times, he deviated by explaining how NAFTA and other free trade agreements in the works were going to destroy America's labor market. Take a moment and soak in this blast from the past.

I was a paperboy at the time, so I got to see in detail the retribution that fell upon his head for daring to speak against free trade. Everything from editorial cartoons to CNN Crossfire to Saturday Night Live made every effort to label Perot with the one word that is most responsible for the death of political discourse in this modern age: "crazy."

...and whaddya know? Everything Perot predicted came true.
I don't need to review either the populist or the leftist talk about NAFTA, at the time. I am all too familiar with it. It was perfect nonsense then, and it is now. The United States already had open trade with Mexico long before NAFTA, which was a pretty minor deal(at least for Americans, if you want to argue that it put Mexican farmers out of work or something you can argue that, though even there the impact was exaggerated), and the case that it made much of a difference to the American labor market is so poor I don't even know why you brought NAFTA up.

Ross Perot looks like an idiot now claiming free trade deals would destroy the American labor market, no such thing has happened. Go ahead and look at the unemployment data yourself. The year before NAFTA was enacted, U.S. unemployment was 7.3%. It immediately dropped the year after. It didn't get to that 1993 level or higher until 2009, and today it's lower than in 1993. So you're wrong, and so was Ross Perot, labor unions, etc. NAFTA's impact on the American labor market was trivial. Which is no surprise btw, since Mexico can't compete with the U.S. in many industries.
Mischief Maker wrote:Yeah, working in the food service industry is so much more dignified.
The fast food industry relies on young people working in the short term for much of its labor. Not really sure why you think it's a good comparison. Judging by your sarcasm, I wonder if you have ever worked a job where you're left hurting every day after coming home from work. Judging by your sarcasm, probably not.
BulletMagnet wrote:Overall this might be true, but as with taxes the effect has not been across-the-board; a quick bit of Googling found this bit (which only goes back to the 70's), and more interestingly this one (yes, it's from The Atlantic, but it got its numbers from the WSJ), which aside from the same overall trend as the previous chart shows that for poor women specifically life expectancy has actually gone down. The article notes that not every contributing factor can be reliably accounted for, but again, the bottom is obviously missing something that the top has (and I get the feeling that the answer is the obvious one).
Your first link supports what I said. Life expectancy has gone up across the board, but it's gone up more for higher income groups. Your second link does not show that life expectancy for poor women has gone down(it hasn't). It shows something much more specific, that life expectancy at age 55 for poor women has gone down. That's so specific it might well be anomalous(has life expectancy gone down for age 60? age 65? age 70? 80? how about 45?).
BulletMagnet wrote:I'll take your word when it comes to demand, but if I had to guess in this particular case, I'd say 1) The training and certification required to become a plumber (not to mention having to own all your own tools/van/etc.) is too much of an initial time/money investment for many people to afford, 2) You'll still be paying through the nose for health insurance, even under the ACA, and 3) This particular profession, much like construction and others of the same ilk, offers no guarantee of work to be done; if the phone doesn't ring, you don't get paid. I can only assume that similar considerations apply for many of the jobs seeking more people, along with...
Those reasons may be perfectly sound for explaining why you think plumbing jobs are not desired, you can come up with post-hoc reasons for just about any form of work. On the other hand, it's not like one could plausibly come up with a list of things that were bad about manufacturing jobs. Like that they're generally only concentrated in industrial cities, if you come from a small town(or even a suburb) you have to move far away to get them.
BulletMagnet wrote:As Mischief Maker noted in his post, at one point we managed to, if nothing else, take a fairly big bite out of the problem on the domestic front; mind you, I'm no isolationist, but I do think it would be nice if more people in positions of authority didn't leave every single facet of commerce to the whims of personal avarice. Again, I'm not versed enough in economics to draw a line anywhere in particular, but is it that out of the question to ever consider the harm your decisions might inflict on both interested and disinterested parties on these matters?
The reality is any changes you make are going to have benefits for some and disadvantages for others. It's very hard to draw a line anywhere in the sand.
BulletMagnet wrote:It's true that not everyone can be a computer programmer, but I'd once again add that, even in many places where people off the street could easily adapt the skills they have to an open position, new employee training barely exists anymore; if you can't be directly popped into an active slot your first day you might as well not even apply (and until they find this elusive perfect match their existing staff can simply do more work for no additional compensation, and if they don't like it, there's the door). That's not a matter of people not being available, that's just management not wanting to make even a minor investment in its workforce, and another direct consequence of unchecked "greed is good" - in another era, a company with an attitude like that wouldn't be able to keep anybody, but these days they've got waiting lists miles long, and not because they've somehow become more lovable.
That goes both ways though. It's probably true that many companies are less willing to spend significant time training people. It's also probably true that many more workers today are likely to have greater mobility and a higher chance of quitting some stable job on a whim. You seem to want to believe it's all a matter of corporate greed. I don't buy that. We're talking much larger cultural changes. The difference between the 1950s and now is not just about tariff policies, labor unions, corporate power, or whatever. Many people today do not have an aspiration to work the same job for 40 years, live in a small community, get married, have kids, and build a white picket fence around their little house(particularly underclass people). You make it sound like it's all a matter of greedy corporations, I say this isn't so. Average workers' aspirations have also changed, and no social engineering is likely to change them back.
BulletMagnet wrote:As I mentioned earlier, financial firms in particular have managed to get themselves into a cushy spot where their everyday goings-on are subject to less and less preventative oversight, but when they get too big for their britches and the sky starts falling the government is forced to step in and save them. Re-implementing Glass-Steagall and similar Depression-era legislation would, I think, be a prudent step to take; if you're too big to fail, break up and remain responsible for your own decisions.
My point in bringing up the financial industry, was that it's a bit strange to say manufacturing's decline must have much to do with greedy short-termism, since it's rather hard to act in a short term way as a manufacturer when compared with someone in finance. Yet the financial industry has grown.
BulletMagnet wrote:Maybe my line of thinking is too simplistic, but the path seems fairly clear from here: corporations don't want to pay domestic workers the wages/benefits/etc. they fought (and sometimes died) to obtain, so they move more and more of their operations to places where they can exploit workers to a much greater extent (or replace them with machines), eliminating higher-wage positions (and crippling the remaining ones by making them compete against their counterparts). Since workers can't instantly relocate half a world away like capital assets can, they're forced to take what's left of the jobs on offer, mostly low-wage service positions (which, as an added bonus for management, they can still classify as "temporary stops" for employees even when they remain there for years, and can thus demand more and more from them in terms of both tasks and availability, while paying them as if they were high schoolers looking for spare pocket change).
This line of reasoning takes for granted that manufacturing work is high-paying and service jobs are not. There might be some truth to that, but it's oversimplifying. Besides, it's not like you can't outsource service jobs as well. Or maybe you haven't noticed, I know when I have to call my local ISP about some issue I'm usually put on the phone with someone in India. Tons of service jobs have been moved overseas.
BulletMagnet wrote:That's just the thing, though - if you'll pardon another trip to Wal-Mart, whenever the company is asked how it can pay its employees so poorly they answer "our products are cheap enough that they can afford to shop here". That's what you call a vicious cycle; by paying you so little we can keep products cheap, simultaneously limiting your options in where you can spend your money (i.e. putting it right back into the company's pocket) and using that as an excuse to keep doing it. It's one step removed from the time-honored practice of paying workers not in cash but with credits to the company store, and siphons cash out of the larger economy to dump it directly into the McDuck silo, hence the record profits these outfits keep reporting (and doing absolutely nothing with).
For starters, Wal-Mart does not limit your options to buying clothing. Nor does it limit electronics, food, office/school supplies, or anything else. I don't think I need to waste time rambling off a list of alternate places one can get that stuff, the point is obvious. You have access to more varieties of things than anyone did in the 1950s or the 1980s or any time in the past, what's more one can order such stuff without even getting out of the computer chair, and it's not even close either. Also, if people who check you out at the counter were a high in demand, hard to fill position, they would be paid more(unless you can automate their jobs, but none of your solutions would fix that either), regardless of how much women in Myanmar are paid, and Wal-Mart would still be profitable. The reason they're not paid much is because there's no shortage of people who will take the job.
BulletMagnet wrote:The thing that gets ignored in this area (and constitutes the kernel of truth in conservative yowling that Obama is "cooking" employment numbers) is how many of the jobs being created/worked pay even a minimal living wage; I don't know if any such study has been done on the topic, but I'd wager that many, many more of the employed these days are going into debt to pay their bills than was the case in the '50s or '60s, since wages haven't come close to keeping up with inflation for decades now (but the "overall" job numbers still look good on paper).
Inflation adjusted wages haven't risen, although that's going back to the 70s or maybe 60s, not so much the 40s and 50s. They have stabilized, not fallen. Certainly it would be better if they had risen more(if one accounts for the impact of tax level differences maybe incomes have actually), but the evidence is not good for your claim that poor people are now worse off than those in past glory years. It's also worth noting that many poor people today have more access to various services like healthcare for example than they did in the 1940s and 50s, a lot of those programs didn't get going until the 1960s and 70s, and despite Republican rhetoric about people are lazy and need to get a job, the programs have largely been expanded since, even when Republicans are in office. Consequently, even people in lower income brackets in most respects live better lives.
BulletMagnet wrote:I certainly won't come out in favor of every perk any union has ever demanded, but in terms of which side of the labor/management equation has gained decidedly more ground (and assets) over the past 40 or so years while the other has been forced to retreat the second things get tight, I'd be very hesitant to place equal responsibility for any industry's financial woes on both sides. Again, if you have any hard numbers to offer on this front, by all means present them.
My question wasn't which side has benefited more, or even which side is more to blame, but to merely make the point that maybe, just maybe labor unions are not necessarily helpful to most workers in the long term.
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BryanM »

Being poor is being poor, it's no better today than before even in so-called 'rich' cuntries.
What? Don't you know we have refrigerators and effective liver transplants now. :smug face:
when you have no money and nobody to give you a hand: you're out of society, you do not exist.
Reminds me of the pol in San Fran that wants to sweep away the homeless for the Super Bowl.

To quote Is This Racist:

Ever notice how politicians who want homeless people off the street always mean, like, they want them to somehow disappear/go somewhere else? It’s never like, “I want there to be no homeless people because that shit is a heartbreaking tragedy,” it’s always like, “Literally, I would kill these people if I could.”
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Mischief Maker »

Wenchang wrote:Judging by your sarcasm, I wonder if you have ever worked a job where you're left hurting every day after coming home from work. Judging by your sarcasm, probably not.
Oof! I've been hit by the conservative "Check your privilege!" Aka. Argumentum Ad Hominem

You know, people give Skykid a lot of crap on this forum for making declarative statements of opinion about movies. But it's not nearly as annoying as when people in this thread make a point, often with links to corroborating evidence, and you respond with a hand-waving "No it isn't! This part of the argument is over," again and again and again.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

Mischief Maker wrote:Oof! I've been hit by the conservative "Check your privilege!" Aka. Argumentum Ad Hominem
Well, your response to the idea that people would not want to work certain jobs is just a sarcastic remark about how being a fast food worker isn't so great either. As if a fast food worker not being a dignified position is an argument against not working in a factory job for example.
Mischief Maker wrote:You know, people give Skykid a lot of crap on this forum for making declarative statements of opinion about movies. But it's not nearly as annoying as when people in this thread make a point, often with links to corroborating evidence, and you respond with a hand-waving "No it isn't! This part of the argument is over," again and again and again.
You posted a link to a clip from a presidential debate. How that is supposed to be evidence of much of anything I don't know. I mentioned employment #s that would disprove your argument, but it's true, I didn't provide a link.

So here you go: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

I dismissed your point, because it was stupid, simple as that. The cliché about tariffs protecting jobs, a cliché that's over 100 years old and is mostly uttered by people who have never in their lives tried to find out what the actual impacts of a tariff policy were. You certainly haven't, otherwise you wouldn't make a silly statement about NAFTA destroying the labor market that could be shown to be false with a quick google search in the capability of anyone so inclined.
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

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Wenchang wrote: As if a fast food worker not being a dignified position is an argument against working in a factory job for example.
Methinks he meant it as a rebuttal to your theory that factory-ish jobs have disappeared not because executives are purposely sweeping them out from under us but because people just don't want to work them anymore; the fact of the matter is, as more manufacturing, etc. jobs have vanished, workers have not been moving en masse into executive offices (and, as I mentioned earlier, there's nowhere near enough room for them there as it is), but behind the fryers at McDonald's and the like, which I doubt was their goal in most cases (and also stands as a point against the "McDonald's/Wal-Mart/etc. is mostly made up of 'transitional' workers" bullet point).
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

BulletMagnet wrote:Methinks he meant it as a rebuttal to your theory that factory-ish jobs have disappeared not because executives are purposely sweeping them out from under us but because people just don't want to work them anymore; the fact of the matter is, as more manufacturing, etc. jobs have vanished, workers have not been moving en masse into executive offices (and, as I mentioned earlier, there's nowhere near enough room for them there as it is), but behind the fryers at McDonald's and the like, which I doubt was their goal in most cases (and also stands as a point against the "McDonald's/Wal-Mart/etc. is mostly made up of 'transitional' workers" bullet point).
I said McDonalds was mostly made up young teenage workers who do the job on a temporary basis, a statement that is perfectly true. I don't believe I made that type of remark about Wal-Mart.

And yes, it's perfectly reasonable to think many people prefer working in food services than they do to working in harder, repetitive factory jobs, most of which don't have a very good reputation. Why else is the average welder 55 years old? It's certainly not because there has been a conspiracy by employers to keep young people out. It's not because the pay isn't good. You've mentioned plenty of anecdotes from your own life, how many young people do you know who want to be a welder or a machinist, how many young people do you know who have even considered working a job assembling some sort of product? The average age of manufacturing workers in the U.S. is 44, for higher skilled positions, it's 56!* Usually when companies move things overseas, get rid of their working staff, the first thing they do is get rid of the older, higher paid workers and find cheaper and younger people to replace them! But that's not the pattern you see in manufacturing, which maybe should make you re-consider your explanations.

All this talk by the way, in case you have forgotten was intended to make the point that labor unions in the U.S. have declined because manufacturing has declined, both because of external competition and because of a shortage of U.S. workers. This is starting to drift away from the point of bringing the subject up.

* http://www.shrm.org/about/foundation/pr ... iefing.pdf
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Xyga »

So there are manufacturing jobs to take in the US ? And the young don't want them ?

Lazy American kids !

Here there are no factories anymore. Even a Mac-job is a chance and yeah, I know most of the young would take anything as long as it guarantees a stable income for at least 6 months.
But you only get 1 to 3 months at best.

And a real job you can really life off ? Well, you better have an engineer, doctor, or lawyer's resume.

EDIT; THEY TOOK OUR JEHRBS !
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

Xyga wrote:So there are manufacturing jobs to take in the US ? And the young don't want them ?

Lazy American kids !
I never said anything about young people's preferences being good or bad, it's just the way things are.
Xyga wrote:Here there are no factories anymore. Even a Mac-job is a chance and yeah, I know most of the young would take anything as long as it guarantees a stable income for at least 6 months.
But you only get 1 to 3 months at best.

And a real job you can really life off ? Well, you better have an engineer, doctor, or lawyer's resume.

EDIT; THEY TOOK OUR JEHRBS !
Countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, to a lesser extent Italy who are in the Eurozone and are suffering largely because of that(although not exclusively because of the Eurozone), have problems that go far beyond anything in the United States. In those places(probably not Italy), it may prove to be the case that people's living standards will have decreased as compared with their parent's generation, or if not, only because many of the young people have simply left those countries to find work elsewhere(not that I'm predicting as much mind you). But again, those countries' problems are not really comparable to that of the United States.
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BryanM
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BryanM »

Wenchang wrote:I said McDonalds was mostly made up young teenage workers who do the job on a temporary basis, a statement that is perfectly true.
The median age in the fast food industry is 27.2.
for higher skilled positions, it's 56!*
You know who I prefer to hire for my brain surgery? 16 year olds with blank resumes.
Wenchang
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by Wenchang »

BryanM wrote:The median age in the fast food industry is 27.2.
Thank you for the correction. Still a lot younger than manufacturing of course.
BryanM wrote:You know who I prefer to hire for my brain surgery? 16 year olds with blank resumes.
Don't be silly. Not only is the skill difference there huge(in the paper I linked "high skilled" in manufacturing means 1. either a bachelor's or associate's in a manufacturing related subject, or 2. technical school training and industry certification. For medical professions it's quite different, more than twice the educational requirements, without even taking into account the challenge that the actual work requires and the fact that neurosurgeon is a specific, fairly specialized profession whereas I was looking at manufacturing jobs in general.), but there is a large growth in unemployed bachelor degree holders today as compared to a generation or two ago, which should mean a bigger pool of younger candidates, that is if they were interested in that sort of work. 56 is pretty unusually high. I don't know what the average or median age of neurosurgeons are, one link* gives the average age of neurosurgeons in Texas at 52.2.

http://www.aans.org/Media/Article.aspx?ArticleId=51347
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BryanM
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BryanM »

This one isn't about Trump, but is about that pointdexter Nate Silver who thinks the guy in a strong, stable position like Mitt Romney is going to flame out. Like I dunno, the GOP is suddenly going to not want to kick people out of the country, throw them in jail, and have welfare for white people? Anyway.

His current narrative is that Sanders only appeals to white people. That Hillary has some kind of magical fire wall in the African American base in the south and therefore can't lose.

I've seen many speeches by both these candidates, and when I see things like this... I wonder how much this guy likes smelling his own farts. He knows the wind is blowing in another direction, and it's not unreasonable to assume the movement will stop short of victory, but he's far too certain for someone who lived through the election of 2008.
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quash
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by quash »

@BulletMagnet: Here's a good rundown of why the GOP hates Trump, why Trump isn't a hardline conservative, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/opini ... .html?_r=0

These are basically the things I have been saying (minus the liberal pandering/moralizing), except now you get to read it from NYT.
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BulletMagnet
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by BulletMagnet »

I actually read that editorial in the hard-copy paper the other day. To be perfectly frank it would appear to support my assertion that Republicans can't attack Trump for the most blatantly stupid things he says, because much of it is basically in line with party orthodoxy, and are instead forced to criticize him for his deviations from the aforementioned, even (perhaps especially) when he manages to fall in line with factual observances.
Strange to say, however, Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil.

Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong.
Once again I ask: if Trump really is that far outside the conservative mainstream, why aren't they highlighting and attacking his most baldly outlandish proposals, i.e. the stuff that one might blame for casting the entire movement in a bad light (to quote Krugman, "So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he’s given credit for being? Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be."), instead of cherry-picking the small handful of ways he doesn't march in lock-step with the rest of the field? Why can they not simply wash their hands of him?
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Re: Trump: A real American Hero Dude

Post by trap15 »

Because the rednecks that vote R don't want to hear that racism is bad.
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