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On August 14 2016 02:09 GGTeMpLaR wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2016 02:07 PassiveAce wrote:On August 14 2016 02:04 GGTeMpLaR wrote:On August 14 2016 02:01 PassiveAce wrote:
Best case scenario is he's sending random, untrained, partisan supporters to polling places to... make sure their isn't fraud in entirely unspecified ways.
Doesn't look good no matter how you slice it. What about he's encouraging people to become polling observers Na that's just a recipe for disaster think of all the bullying they could do "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election! Please fill out this form to receive more information about becoming a volunteer Trump Election Observer." Does that sound like a neutral observer to you? There are no neutral election observers The people who would actually be neutral don't give a shit about observing the election. It's just the people who are politically active That's why you have representatives from both sides Unless you're twitter neckbeard user. Then you only want Clinton supporters doing it because the Trump supporters will bully people at the polls even though more Clinton voters are bound to be criminals of violent crimes/destruction of property
Well put.
Some days I think I'll take a rabid Trump supporter over the freak show that predicts and cites worry about violence and civil unrest in the event Trump loses. Adults acting like scared children with all this hand wringing. Get a grip.
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United States42008 Posts
On August 14 2016 02:09 GGTeMpLaR wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2016 02:07 PassiveAce wrote:On August 14 2016 02:04 GGTeMpLaR wrote:On August 14 2016 02:01 PassiveAce wrote:
Best case scenario is he's sending random, untrained, partisan supporters to polling places to... make sure their isn't fraud in entirely unspecified ways.
Doesn't look good no matter how you slice it. What about he's encouraging people to become polling observers Na that's just a recipe for disaster think of all the bullying they could do "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election! Please fill out this form to receive more information about becoming a volunteer Trump Election Observer." Does that sound like a neutral observer to you? There are no neutral election observers The people who would actually be neutral don't give a shit about observing the election. It's just the people who are politically active
It's not impossible. It's entirely possible to have someone be really interested in having a working democracy while also not being so interested in what that working democracy does.
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Norway28561 Posts
It's not impossible, but especially this election cycle I'm having a hard time seeing people be really interested in politics without having a clear opinion of which candidate is better, although I guess there is also the 'really interested in politics but Trump and Hillary are equally bad' crowd, and I judging by Stein/Johnson's numbers,that's like 15% of voters atm.. I don't think we should demand political neutrality from observers - but it's possible to not be indifferent to the result of the election without being an election observer because you're trying to keep crooked hillary from rigging the election.
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On August 14 2016 02:19 KwarK wrote:
It's not impossible. It's entirely possible to have someone be really interested in having a working democracy while also not being so interested in what that working democracy does.
Especially this election cycle, given how many people are invested in the system, but hate both candidates so much that they wouldn't vote for either of them.
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This is another case where it would be interesting to know more about what the campaign is doing, but because it's the boogeyman candidate, people leap to fear mongering. We don't need a random Twitter idiot manufacturing facts to fill in the blanks. We can do that on our own. We need information, which I think was the original role of journalists, does anyone remember those? Search Youtube for "Trump supporter attacked," "observers" don't sound like a bad idea.
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Yes, discount the manufactured facts of a random Twitter idiot, but search youtube for "Trump supporter attacked."
lol
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On August 14 2016 02:29 oBlade wrote:
This is another case where it would be interesting to know more about what the campaign is doing, but because it's the boogeyman candidate, people leap to fear mongering. We don't need a random Twitter idiot manufacturing facts to fill in the blanks. We can do that on our own. We need information, which I think was the original role of journalists, does anyone remember those? Search Youtube for "Trump supporter attacked," "observers" don't sound like a bad idea.
That's not what poll observers are for though...their function is ensuring no laws are broken by the volunteers running the polling place and to point out areas of improvement for the next election.
They're not security guards lmao.
They also, of course, can't possibly stop "Crooked Hillary from rigging the election" because it's almost impossible (not to mention pointless) for any organized rigging to happen at the level of the local polling place that a polling place observer can detect.
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On August 14 2016 02:34 farvacola wrote:
Yes, discount the manufactured facts of a random Twitter idiot, but search youtube for "Trump supporter attacked."
lol
On Youtube you can see evidence on film of one side being violent in the here and now. On Twitter someone can get you to believe "election observers" from the side getting attacked are secretly a retaliatory 1984 voter intimidation scheme, despite having no evidence for anything.
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United States42008 Posts
On August 14 2016 02:40 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2016 02:34 farvacola wrote:
Yes, discount the manufactured facts of a random Twitter idiot, but search youtube for "Trump supporter attacked."
lol On Youtube you can see evidence on film of one side being violent in the here and now. On Twitter someone can get you to believe "election observers" from the side getting attacked are secretly a retaliatory 1984 voter intimidation scheme, despite having no evidence for anything.
It's possible for both acts of political violence and flooding polls with your supporters to be wrong. This "yeah but they did" doesn't actually work unless people are defending the former.
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I chalk it up to both sides playing dirty politics in response to the perceived transgressions of the dirty politics from the other side
The cycle never ends
hate begets hate
etc
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
The Obama administration is urgently debating how to respond to congressional demands for the official report on Hillary Clinton's three-and-a-half-hour interview at FBI headquarters, as some inside and outside government raise concerns about giving lawmakers access to politically sensitive records of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email system.
During congressional testimony last month, FBI Director James Comey promised to respond promptly to lawmakers' requests for the interview summaries known as "302s" for Clinton and other witnesses, as well as other information gathered in the course of the year-long FBI probe.
"I'll commit to giving you everything I can possibly give you under the law and to doing it as quickly as possible," Comey told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee July 7.
Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sent Comey a letter the same day requesting the entire "investigative file" on the Clinton email issue. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also asked Comey for all 302 reports related to the case, requesting that they be turned over by the end of last month.
Comey and the FBI are pressing to send at least some of the requested information to the Hill soon, but others in government have stepped in to question such a move, officials tracking the debate said.
Among those involved in the discussions are State Department officials, since many of those interviewed in the FBI probe are current or former State employees.
Source
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On August 14 2016 02:40 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2016 02:34 farvacola wrote:
Yes, discount the manufactured facts of a random Twitter idiot, but search youtube for "Trump supporter attacked."
lol On Youtube you can see evidence on film of one side being violent in the here and now. On Twitter someone can get you to believe "election observers" from the side getting attacked are secretly a retaliatory 1984 voter intimidation scheme, despite having no evidence for anything.
And again, the difference being that the Democratic candidate or party are not enabling or encouraging these people while Trump is talking about rigged elections and calls for wannabe voter patrols.
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On August 13 2016 15:21 Slaughter wrote:
Is this a state by state variation thing? Do some states have it better off? I haven't seen the horror stories that people say they have with Obamacare IE really expensive plans + small amount of choices. But I see some people bitching about it and some liking it but usually these people reside in different states.
Ya there is a reason a lot of healthcare reform platforms take away the ability of providers to group populations by state. I mean you can make all the arguments you want that it has helped more people than it hurt nationally, it "may" even be objectively true my primary problem is that the people hurt are the ones who actually fund the thing which is fairly aggravating. The things I said are just facts in Alaska currently if you fall as a person who under the ACA is required to buy their own insurance. I do not know a single person currently in my social group who is buying their own health insurance and previous to ACA >10 of them did. Currently we are all using religious medishare type plans or uninsured and it pisses me off.
I mean Kwark is just an idiot. He doesn't know anything more about health insurance than he does about paying taxes or Russian subs.
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United States42008 Posts
Atreides, your complaint was that insurance was too expensive for you to afford but it's insuring against an expensive event. Healthcare costs in the United States are very high, currently just under $10,000 per capita. Some years it'll be $0, some years it'll be $50,000 but on average it's about $10,000 per person per year. That's about the amount you should be allocating to it in your annual budget (more if you know there are risk factors (age, planned pregnancy, health issues etc), less if you know there aren't so many). Insurance allows you to offset the awful years with payments made in the years where your health was fine. This is a good thing.
Refusing to get insured is just depending upon the state to pick up the tab if shit hits the fan and you end up with a $100,000 hospital bill. Requiring that people purchase insurance is requiring that people pay for their own medical care out of their own money. "But it's expensive and I wanted to buy other things and force the taxpayers to pay for my healthcare!" isn't actually an argument against that. Even if you get lucky and the event you refused to insure against didn't happen you're still on average a drain on the public healthcare resources.
But also it's not as expensive as you claim it is. Just buy the damn insurance. You complained a few posts ago that you were quoted $320/month. Firstly, I was able to find quotes well below that and secondly, $320/month isn't even especially expensive given the cost of healthcare in the United States. The insurance isn't overpriced, the event it insures against is. Refusing to get the insurance doesn't change that, it just passes the buck.
You've also previously claimed that people who get insurance through work don't understand how much it costs to buy it yourself. We do. It's part of our overall compensation. Instead of getting $50k gross we get $46k (or whatever) gross and health insurance. The idea that people who buy it themselves are getting uniquely screwed is absurd, we all get compensation in exchange for labour and we are all required to use some of that compensation to get health insurance. For some of us it's automatically taken out of our compensation, for others it's not. But everybody pays and everybody would rather have that money (and still have healthcare) given the choice. You're not alone in wanting to have healthcare and more money, you're just alone in blaming Obama for the fact that you have to pay for things in life if you want them.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Healthcare is much more expensive if you wait for shit to go wrong than if you do proper preventative care. Something that could be prevented with a $200 treatment can cost $20k if you wait long enough for a problem to develop. But expensive treatments are more profitable so the incentives are all fucked up. So if everyone is insured and gets cheap healthcare, the general cost goes down, and we also get rid of cost rises like increased ER payments because of people who can't pay their bills in the ER.
Most other even somewhat developed countries, even ones that aren't really considered first world, have figured this out a long time ago.
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On August 14 2016 03:43 KwarK wrote:
Atreides, your complaint was that insurance was too expensive for you to afford but it's insuring against an expensive event. Healthcare costs in the United States are very high, currently just under $10,000 per capita. Some years it'll be $0, some years it'll be $50,000 but on average it's about $10,000 per person per year. That's about the amount you should be allocating to it in your annual budget (more if you know there are risk factors (age, planned pregnancy, health issues etc), less if you know there aren't so many). Insurance allows you to offset the awful years with payments made in the years where your health was fine. This is a good thing.
Refusing to get insured is just depending upon the state to pick up the tab if shit hits the fan and you end up with a $100,000 hospital bill. Requiring that people purchase insurance is requiring that people pay for their own medical care out of their own money. "But it's expensive and I wanted to buy other things and force the taxpayers to pay for my healthcare!" isn't actually an argument against that. Even if you get lucky and the event you refused to insure against didn't happen you're still on average a drain on the public healthcare resources.
But also it's not as expensive as you claim it is. Also just buy the damn insurance. You complained a few posts ago that you were quoted $320/month. Firstly, I was able to find quotes well below that and secondly, $320/month isn't even especially expensive given the cost of healthcare in the United States. The insurance isn't overpriced, the event it insures against is. Refusing to get the insurance doesn't change that, it just passes the buck.
Firstly you originally made some ludicrous claim that I could get insured for less than the penalty (80$ a month or something?) and starting off with something so laughable, stupid, and uninformed is generally a good way to get someone to blow you off. This quoted post shows you are happily carrying on in your standard practice of pulling numbers out of your ass.
Secondly, the entirety of your argument for the government requiring individuals to purchase their own healthcare is fairly disingenuous. It is the standard one given though and nothing new or original. I will never understand why it is somehow the "states" sovereign responsibility to provide all healthcare for a certain part of the population but yet somehow the extremely small percentage chance that it MIGHT need to cover SOME costs in a hypothetical worst case scenario for some others is completely unacceptable. In reality, this is all total bullshit and the reason to require low risk individuals who pay taxes and fund the system in that way to also buy in to the insurance pool is because they are statistically more likely to pay more in then they get out of it and that is needed to keep everything afloat. In theory this balances out over your life and is a valid argument but the Kwark argument is pretty BS.
This is all mostly just opinion on both our sides and it was established long ago that my opinion on healthcare was different from yours and most of the threads so it's not like I brought it up. I merely made a comment responding to someone that for a certain set of the population there is still nothing but tax credits and then I stated a few actual facts about negative effects it had in my state and you jumped out of the woodwork.
I actually read all of this thread and ya I only usually post on healthcare because it happens to be issue I care most about for the last year.
Incidentally the only person who has said anything useful was Zlefin I think who when I complained that I couldn't even get a price through the marketplace linked me the marketplace calculator to determine if "you could afford insurance" or not (without giving you a price xD) and were liable for the penalty.
I didn't pay the penalty this year btw so obamacare agreed with me that I could not afford insurance (while offering zero assistance whatsoever) and am now in process of getting in to a religious medishare program despite not having gone to church since childhood which I do find very annoying. No system works for everyone but I am perfectly entitled to point out some of the flaws in the ACA and point out that it has made the situation worse for some people.
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United States42008 Posts
It was me who told you to get the exemption for people who can't afford Obamacare. Obamacare actually thought of people who don't have money to buy insurance when they wrote the law and built in an exemption from the penalty for that. See below.
On February 23 2016 05:10 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On February 23 2016 05:06 Atreides wrote:
See while thats great and all I have a philosophical problem with paying a 1000$ uninsured penalty, ie. a good portion of MY house payment so that someone else can make their rent AND have health insurance (which I don't have). I know, I'm an extreme right wing conservative with a hole in my soul.
Its not like there wasn't already welfare programs in place that provided financial assistance to people who needed healthcare and couldn't afford it. (Not that I feel like getting in to it, but my basic position is that health insurance in general pretty much fucks up the whole healthcare system.)
Its not like I make tons of money, I just happen to be 29, single, and self employed. A demographic which gets kind of screwed by taxes/obamacare and is also not really present on this forum. Did you apply for an Obamacare exemption?
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You lose a lot of credibility on your insults when you tally up your whole argument as "well thats just like your opinion man".
Low risk people buying into the same system as high risk people is fine because those low risk people might (and will) become higher risk people as time goes on. Being a dick when you're in a position to give and then begging when your in a position where you are in need is just being short sighted.
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Going to be honest, this election cycle is really making me question the merits of democracy in the USA. You have so many low-intellect voters - to believe any of the garbage that Trump is spewing out should be a disqualifying factor.
In theory, democracy only works well when you have an informed population - which clearly is not the case here.
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EPT
