US Politics Mega-thread - Page 10030

On March 07 2018 12:59 GreenHorizons wrote:


So? Why do you keep focusing on that, like you don't spend plenty of time berating senators you didn't vote for?

On March 07 2018 12:59 GreenHorizons wrote:


So? Why do you keep focusing on that, like you don't spend plenty of time berating senators you didn't vote for?



Really?

http://investor.signatureny.com/directors/barney-frank

On March 07 2018 13:01 Plansix wrote:
No.....why would I waste my time trying to influence a senator that has zero reasons to care what I want? No one from my state supports this bill.

On March 07 2018 13:04 GreenHorizons wrote:


No.....why would I waste my time trying to influence a senator that has zero reasons to care what I want? No one from my state supports this bill.

On March 07 2018 13:08 Kyadytim wrote:
I'm more or less with GH on this one. This bill is attempting to fix things that are not in urgent need of fixing if they're even broken at all. Too many new exemptions and loopholes. I agree that smaller banks probably do need the help, but I'm not sure that Democrats are getting enough out of it to be worth the other components. Of course, there's plenty of people talking about amendments and changes, but experience tells me that anything not already written into the bill is probably not worth thinking about.

My understanding is that Democrats are trading off the conservative win of deregulating big banks in some ways for the neutral element of deregulating small banks in some ways and the liberal win of some small consumer protections. Dems definitely could have pushed for a bill just narrowly targeting small banks, and they could easily have tried to push some consumer protection stuff like the free credit monitoring for military members and then forced Republicans to explain why they weren't willing to work with Democrats to deregulate small banks and help protect the military from things like identity theft.

They also just tossed away a really easy campaign point of Republicans trying to free up large banks to potentially crash the economy again when the large banks are already doing extremely well.

On March 07 2018 13:11 Plansix wrote:


You don't think this will be an issue come 2020? The VP candidate you did vote for was one of the people supporting this.

Pretty sure I’ll get to vote in a democratic primary, so not really a big deal.

And signature bank is often rated as the best small bank in the nation. They only operate in 3 states.

On March 07 2018 13:22 Plansix wrote:
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Good talk.

On March 07 2018 11:31 Plansix wrote:

Maybe you should just read first, like the rest of us did.

On March 07 2018 11:02 Danglars wrote:

Trump was criticized for a relatively accurate perspective at a time where it was verboten from mainstream media sources. A little later, a liberal outlet told the left it was okay to talk about the problem instead of dismissing it existed, and then suddenly everybody's on to discussing it without ample respect for the pioneers of the discussion.

This forum is one of the last places I expect honest historical and contextual analysis, so this is all basically pissing in the wind as far as I'm concerned. The basic cognitive dissonance of the left does not allow Trump to be right/mostly right on anything ever. This feeds into a lot of resistance to the left's smug insults, because the right knows it's an uneven playing field. And Trump's been criticized rightly (like Charlottesville initial comments, tariffs, gun control due process, chaos in the wake of Hope Hicks or Rob Porter) as well, but a little of that is lost in the midst of dishonest backlash that goes further than what is true about the issue.

On March 07 2018 08:51 Toadesstern wrote:

iirc the quote from Der Spiegel is translated and when I looked it up it still looked bad but not thaaaat bad. But yeah, I've mentioned this time and time again, Trump is on collision course for the sake of collision.
He wants to win and in his mind making other people lose means you win by default. So he's literally out there trying to make other people lose because that's easier than to figure out what would be good for the US and does in his mind equate with winning, because duh, the others aren't, right?
That's basicly his gameplan with everything he touched, be it Mexico, Canada, EU, S.Korea or whatever else.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson privately warned senior trade officials on Tuesday that President Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum could endanger the U.S. national security relationship with allies, according to five people familiar with the meeting.

My F grade is also not based on Reich’s politics, which are quite different from my own. I award it instead for Reich’s incorrect facts and his embarrassing misunderstanding of basic issues about which economists agree.

One side question for Reich: The U.S. became the world’s richest and most powerful economy in the late nineteenth century, decades before Ford’s bargain. Reich may want to explain how that could happen without employers agreeing to pay workers enough like the enlightened Henry Ford.

Ford’s $5 wage to convert his workers into Model T customers is an urban legend that thinking economist dismiss as nonsense. Henry Ford’s employees would have had to buy forty cars each to absorb the half million Model T’s rolling off his assembly line in 1916. Ford could sell his Model T’s only if wages were rising generally throughout the economy, not just in his own factories.

Ford raised the wage to $5 because labor productivity was soaring, not because he wanted to create customers. In 1909, his assembly line produced one Model T at his Highland Park plant every 12 hours. By 1914, it had fallen to one car every 96 minutes, and by 1920 to one Model T a minute. (See Henry Ford and the Model T: A Case Study in Productivity). Ford could afford to pay auto workers producing one car a minute much more than those producing a car every twelve hours. He also expanded his market by passing productivity gains on to customers. The Model T’s price fell from $825 in 1908 to $360 in 1916. With generally rising wages and a falling price, Ford became one of the richest men of his era.


Ford Motors was no exception in 1914. Wages were rising throughout the economy because of massive increases in productivity, not because Ford and other employers wanted to pay workers enough to buy their products. Few principles of economics students would fall for this one, but Reich does. That’s ten points off his grade, right there.

Reich’s essay goes from bad to worse as he explains the causes of the Great Depression. Reich must answer a tricky question: If the 1914 basic bargain explains the “virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages,” why should the economy collapse fifteen years later in 1929?

Reich has a ready but false answer: “In the years leading up to the Great Crash of 1929, employers forgot Henry Ford’s example. The wages of most American workers stagnated even as the economy surged. Gains went mainly into corporate profits and into the pockets of the very rich.” According to Reich, greedy and short-sighted American employers fell into the Marxist trap. They wanted everything for themselves. They reduced the wages of their workers, who could no longer buy what was being produced. Per Reich: The myopic capitalists created the conditions for a classic Marxist crisis of over production, which we today call the Great Depression.

Reich draws conclusions without checking the facts first. If he had googled Historical Statistics of the United States 1789-1945 on line, he would have discovered that wages rose sharply from 1915 to the Great Depression. Moreover, Simon Kuznets, in his pioneering statistical studies at the NBER, found that labor’s share of national income was on the rise and capital’s share falling in the roaring twenties. In short, Reich uses false facts to support his proposition that the Great Depression was caused by corporations taking too much and paying their workers too little. Making up statistics to prove a theory is an automatic F. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.

On March 07 2018 19:31 Wegandi wrote:
Do people still listen to Robert Reich? More reasons not to:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/09/10/robert-reichs-f-minus-in-economics-false-facts-false-theories/#13e75764507a

Google’s artificial intelligence technologies are being used by the US military for one of its drone projects, causing controversy both inside and outside the company.

Google’s TensorFlow AI systems are being used by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Project Maven, which was established in July last year to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse the vast amount of footage shot by US drones. The initial intention is to have AI analyse the video, detect objects of interest and flag them for a human analyst to review.

Drew Cukor, chief of the DoD’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team, said in July: “People and computers will work symbiotically to increase the ability of weapon systems to detect objects. Eventually we hope that one analyst will be able to do twice as much work, potentially three times as much, as they’re doing now. That’s our goal.”

Project Maven forms part of the $7.4bn spent on AI and data processing by the DoD, and has seen the Pentagon partner with various academics and experts in the field of AI and data processing. It has reportedly already been put into use against Islamic State.

A Google spokesperson said: “This specific project is a pilot with the Department of Defense, to provide open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object recognition on unclassified data. The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only.”

While Google has long worked with government agencies providing technology and services, alongside cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, the move to aid Project Maven has reportedly caused much internal debate at the search company. According to people talking to Gizmodo, some Google employees were outraged when they discovered the use of the company’s AI.

“Military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively discussing this important topic internally and with others as we continue to develop policies and safeguards around the development and use of our machine learning technologies,” said Google.

Both former Alphabet executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, and Google executive Milo Medin are members of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises the Pentagon on cloud and data systems.

Google has a mixed history with defence contracts. When it bought robotics firm Shaft, it pulled the company’s systems from a Pentagon competition, while it cut defence-related contracts on buying the satellite startup Skybox. When it owned robotics firm Boston Dynamics, the company was attempting to make a robotic packhorse for ground troops, which was ultimately rejected by the US marines because it was too noisy.

The company’s cloud services division currently does not offer systems designed to hold information classified as secret, where its competitors Amazon and Microsoft do.

When Google bought the UK’s artificial intelligence firm DeepMind in 2014 for £400m, the company set up an AI ethics board, which was tasked with reviewing the company’s use of AI, although details of the board were still not made public three years later.