US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3454

On March 25 2016 08:33 Nebuchad wrote:


Do you contest that the only group which wasn't impacted by this, the early voters, favours Hillary?

On March 25 2016 08:35 Lord Tolkien wrote:


It depends.

In the United States, it absolutely certainly is on the federal level since we have an independent monetary policy, as well as the USD's status as the world reserve currency (and, free flow of capital, if we're going to refer to the Impossible Trinity). Due to the latter, we are essentially too big to fail, when USD makes up 80-90% of world reserves: at least until there's a swap to either an international basket of currency or people buy enough Euros or RMBs to reduce systemic dependence on USDs; prospect on that is highly unlikely for at least a few decades for many reasons.

The main case of austerity would be on either the state or municipal levels which don't have access to the same effectively limitless credit line we have at the federal level due to monetary and currency policy, or in the Eurozone countries which essentially gave up their ability to operate independent monetary policies by signing up for the Euro (in exchange for stable exchange rates/free movement of capital). In those cases it either requires bailout from above and, if none is forthcoming, tight austerity measures which are harmful to the short and long-term economic prospects of the entities involved.

On March 25 2016 08:33 Nebuchad wrote:


Do you contest that the only group which wasn't impacted by this, the early voters, favours Hillary?

On March 25 2016 08:40 oneofthem wrote:

uh why would it favor hillary when the rural voter group is least impacted and also prone to early voting?

On March 25 2016 08:46 Nebuchad wrote:


"Voters under 30 account for only 7 percent of Democratic early voters compared to 41 percent for the over 65 crowd."

On March 25 2016 08:59 oneofthem wrote:

this is not enough info you need ratio of youth vote in total, and ratio of other demographics.

On March 25 2016 08:39 oneofthem wrote:

i mean the idea that austerity leads to future expectation of lower tax and thus spurring spending and investment.

this was the logic of the ecb establishment

On March 25 2016 08:59 oneofthem wrote:

this is not enough info you need ratio of youth vote in total, and ratio of other demographics.

Two months ago, Stephen Hawking warned humanity that its days may be numbered: the physicist was among over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts who signed an open letter about the weaponization of robots and the ongoing "military artificial intelligence arms race."

Overnight we got a vivid example of just how quickly "artificial intelligence" can spiral out of control when Microsoft's AI-powered Twitter chat robot, Tay, became a racist, misogynist, Obama-hating, antisemitic, incest and genocide-promoting psychopath when released into the wild.

On March 25 2016 09:08 cLutZ wrote:

Not really. With regards to Greece the logic was, " you are spending money you don't have, never really had, and won't have in the foreseeable future so you must comport with the reality that you're not as rich as the French, ACS stop spending as if you are. " Almost no ECB countries enacted spending cuts in response to the fiscal crisis, aside from Greece, which leveraged 30 years of thier future for a decade of high living standards.

On March 25 2016 09:13 xDaunt wrote:
We are clearly screwed when AI shows up:



Go read the article to see what this thing said. The hilarity of Microsoft's failure is staggering. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.

On March 25 2016 09:06 Ghanburighan wrote:
A) DNC didn't organize the AZ primary, can't be their fault.

On March 25 2016 09:13 oneofthem wrote:

there were a couple crises mixed up together. concurrent to greece there was the aftermath of the 08 crisis and the resulting negative growth. austerity as described was advocated as a stimulus strategy for the negative growth problem.

google expansionary austerity.

in hindsight it's probably just a theory cooked up to get to the result that avoided the debt nightmare that germans are so concerned about. they didn't care for the short run problems.

On March 25 2016 09:06 Ghanburighan wrote:
A) DNC didn't organize the AZ primary, can't be their fault.
B) Part of the issue is that early voting time frames were cut.

Now, by your logic, from (b) and your claim that early voters support Clinton it follows that Sanders rigged this part of the primary to take more delegates as "more election day voters favour him" (lol)

This is manifestly idiotic, though, and should show reductio ad absurdum that smearing Clinton and the Democratic party as election riggers is unfounded.

It's also a manifestation of an instance of the reason that several people in this thread cited for Sanders to drop out: the campaign is becoming dirty and personal, and mud tends to stick.

P. S. I cannot parse what GH has tried to communicate in his last two messages. They don't appear coherent with the thread.

On March 25 2016 09:43 cLutZ wrote:

I'm aware of the idea and the rhetoric. The reality is the original set of "expansionary austerity" policy solutions was not implemented anywhere (aside from maybe some tiny Baltic States), and instead a focus on balanced budgets through tax increases, labeled austerity, was tried. Then those policies were seized upon by advocates of budget expansion as a strawman to talk against as "austerity" where it hardly resembles the ideas of simultaneously cutting budgets, taxes, and barriers to commerce.

Krugman is one of the main guys who sound like you sound have been making this dishonest argument for years, which is why I am so familiar.

On March 25 2016 09:45 GreenHorizons wrote:



Of course not because you guys are missing the the entire premise of what I've been saying. You're first mistake is looking at this contest in isolation which is absurd. Second huge mistake is that you all are ignoring that ~21% of the vote is still outstanding and no effort has been made by anyone to explain why or how it could impact the outcome.

You're arguing about relative impact while ignoring that the absence of the data to substantiate the obvious is intentional. This thread on this couldn't pettifog more if it tried and even those arguing that about the role Hillary and the DNC are playing are totally missing the point.