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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On September 04 2016 10:49 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2016 06:07 puerk wrote:On September 04 2016 00:53 Thieving Magpie wrote:On September 03 2016 23:57 puerk wrote:On September 03 2016 23:33 Yoav wrote:On September 03 2016 15:23 FiWiFaKi wrote:On September 03 2016 15:15 Toadesstern wrote:
try selling that to your people as a mexican politician without people going crazy with how much they hate the man Tariffs have always existed, they have always been the norm. Well, yes, but every major step forward in the eradication of the things was a step forward for the economy of the region doing so, starting with getting trolls out from under bridges and moving through keeping every petty feudal lord from exercising his ability to shake down traders for money and into the gradual demolition of mercantilist schemes. Tariffs are utterly foolish, especially in a world where increasing them ultimately puts your entire economy at a competitive disadvantage. But I know, we all have to talk about stagnating wages and not realize that in the last 40 years our quality of life for equivalent purchasing power has gone way up, thanks to cheap imports. Yeah, it would be great if wages were going up, and yes, we should probably raise income taxes at the higher end to smooth the curve, but you guys have been alive recently. Imagine if all the crap we get for super cheap from China was still produced in unionized US factories. We'd be poor as shit, even imagining we still made as much money (which we wouldn't, because cheap goods and services are a direct economic benefit to US companies and workers). it is not that simple. not partaking in the race to the bottom is not necessarily going to hurt all of the population. especially the stability and existence of a broad middle class of people with high and rising living standard and a feeling of economic participation, were not happening because of free trade but because unionized labor prohibited the race to the bottom. If you treat your workers like shit to compete with china, your workers can only buy cheap shit from china and your company runs out of work. German car makership is ridiculous at face value: the price for a new car that i would find desireable is so high compared to anything that happens in sectors with full devotion to the free trade race to the bottom (like smartphones), and yet it works out, because it strengthens communities, because it gives people a purpose, workers at the auto makers are proud of them and their work, not only because they believe in the product, but also because they get long term job security and good pay, which actually makes them able to buy them aswell. The real issue why this model will stop working, is not that countries have to give up competitive disadvantages like unionization to please the gods of free market™ but because labor demand is quickly collapsing under the pressure of automation replacing every last bastion of human endevour. Quicker or more determined pacing to the bottom will not aliviate the comming problem: people are useless to the economy as suppliers, and only useful as demand. Free trade even though a good idea in principle also will not adress that there will be no more place at the table for the people who are not owners of the means of production. The only way to solve this issue (if you consider fellow humans worth of living, thich not all of you do ofc. but i as a tiny cog in a machine working to replace other people with automation (document generation for banks) with software, i hold no illusions that i am fully replaceable as well, and i somehow cling to living) is massive redistribution of the gains of this comming new economy. "Massive redistribution of gains" => economics. How does stuff from one place, get transferred to another place, with both sides being happy. Free markets are what happens when one person has stuff, and other people want stuff, so they redistribute among themselves. This "race to the bottom" crap never makes sense to me--because "demand" only happens so long as there is a customer base able to buy. As more people lose wages, less stuff gets bought, less stuff gets sold, we move back to a more agrarian lifestyle. Automation becomes less valuable, and companies dissolve with lack of demand. Once things re-stabilize again, then we start back from scratch. Companies reform, automation takes precedence, people become sources of demand once again, etc... There is no "race to the bottom" where things stagnate down there--that's not how resource exchanges work. At some point, communities will find it easier to just make goods for themselves than afford goods from outside. You be okay that you don't have smart phones and go back to the old ways of life. Things eventually stabilize. The only "race to the bottom" is if the end goal is for everyone to have an upper class lifestyle instead of there being no end goal, and that the economy is just something that happens. If i have nothing of value i can not trade. There is no fundamental reason that everyone should alwas have some tradeable value. Your claim that "both sides" are "happy" with deals in our current economy is not only laughable but also insulting: people are forced to do terrible shit to survive. Nobody is selling their kidneys in india because it makes them "happy". The choice between survival and death is a faux one due to our inherent survival instinct. The second issue i take with your post is that you switch from individual views to societal to community level as it suits your argument, when a conistent scheme would fall apart: maybe societies can adjust to the shock if described on a community level, but those communities do not exist, people live in really really big cities, that are unable to dissolve themselfs into peaceful coexisting sustainance farmers in the wilderness. Current people, who do wage labor, who will be no longer in demand, who have nothing to "trade" to someone able to sell them food, provide them with housing and energy (cooking/heating), will suffer. Current people who are deemed by the owners of means of productions to hold no value (who are unemployable), actually already face those issues. Homeless people for instance suffer and die all the time. You saying adding millions and millions of people to the ranks who have no marketable value, will be fine, when current events already tell you the opposite is naive at best and dangerous at worst. I know it is on some level selfish of me to consider it a problem that i and all the people like me will inevetibly become obsolete. I like living, i like to have a warm dry flat, plenty of food, friends, social events and entertainment. When i become obsolete in form of labor, i can not become a sustainance farmer as you propose as i do not own land. I also am not prone to violence to obtain land and defend land against other people with the same urge for survival. In a time when everyone needs his own plot of land to sustainance farm in little communities as you propose, the demand for land will outstrip the supply thousandfold. That will inevetible cause violence, disruption and a lot of suffering. What you portrait as smooth downsizing is nothing less than social darwinism: some will survive and maybe eventually strife, but it will be payed and paved with millions of "losers" falling by the wayside. Creatures adapt to the environment or die out. That is how all things work. Pretending that there is value in maintaining your lifestyle just because you don't see the person you currently are or the society you're currently in being willing to adapt to the world around them is naive. The truth is that its shitty. The world is shitty. And people on the first world will not always be living in the first world. Countries can be the top of the food chain one century and be starving beggars the next. You just have to look at Africa and the Middle East to see how far down the shit-hole a multi-continent world power can get. How "smooth" the downsizing is a matter of scale. But yes, people will adapt to the realities of the time no matter what that reality is. Failure to adapt means you're shit out of luck. The world was not made so you can guarantee what the future will be. Change happens all the time--even if the change is something you find shitty. Here is the truth--no company will sell something that no one is buying. If enough people become poor by automation--companies stop existing. Period. End of discussion. And unless you think that means the human race becomes extinct--it simply means humanity will start over again.
You constantly confuse "is" and "ought". Just because natural selection exists as a concept, does not mean we should actively work towards a future where millions of people die and suffer, just because you think you will be a winner of this process because of your great adaptability.
Our current society strives not to let people fall through the cracks, a government empowered through the consent in the social contract redistributes resources to provide a dignified living standard for all.
I am arguing that this theme can be expanded in a way to cope with the comming disruption when we prepare in time.
You see it as wrong to even try to make the future better, than the grim alternative.
And the argument about companies not selling is a strawman:
when automation replaces the need for labor there is no company, as you say, but what you miss is what remains: there are owners and nonowners. Owners of the robots will still have everything, they produce it for themselfs and they have 0 incentive to let any non owner have anything from it.
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On September 04 2016 19:20 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2016 07:36 xDaunt wrote:On September 04 2016 07:30 GreenHorizons wrote:
This is what I'm talking about when I say Clinton is using rank ignorance/incompetence as a legal shield.
It's gonna be fun when the attack ads start rolling out. I feel disappointed that people here on TL pay any attention to attack ads, and not only that, seem to revel in the concept of them. No matter who is being attacked.
Personally, I'm sick of them already (Clinton and/or her PACs have already rolled out two in particular about Trump's comments about women and the disabled reporter that just repeat over and over on Twitch/other online VOD services) and "make America great again" ads that constantly appear in my sidebar. The price of being in a swing state and trying not to use adblock to support content creators, I guess.
It's interesting that Trump still hasn't started broadcasting attack ads in North Carolina as far as I can tell, though.
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One of the challenges I'll face when (more like if) I become a politician is how to make political ads that aren't dreadfully annoying. Pretty much all political ads are terrible, obnoxious, and annoying. I might just stick to something boring but inoffensive. though even that could get grating.
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Become a hardcore republican and make ads with lots of eagles, guns and explosions. Those aren't annoying.
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just demonstrate how you fry your bacon
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On September 04 2016 23:00 zlefin wrote:
One of the challenges I'll face when (more like if) I become a politician is how to make political ads that aren't dreadfully annoying. Pretty much all political ads are terrible, obnoxious, and annoying. I might just stick to something boring but inoffensive. though even that could get grating.
The kind of political ad that I would prefer is a clean ad which tells me what your policies are and what you want to do. No bullshit, no emotions, no fearmongering, no attacking your opponents, none of that shit. Just tell me what you want to do and why that is a good thing.
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Donald Trump’s tumultuous August has increased Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate, with a dozen states potentially in play — including previously uncompetitive races in North Carolina and Indiana.
GOP operatives still believe their incumbents and candidates can prevail against imperfect Democrats in states ranging from Pennsylvania to Nevada. But protecting the 54-seat Republican majority will require a near-sweep of competitive states that is looking increasingly unlikely.
“I think we’re in remarkably good shape considering the top of the ticket,” said Rob Jesmer, a former executive director of the NRSC. “But the X factor is Trump, so I don't know if our current position translates into holding the majority.”
In Indiana, former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh’s re-run suddenly added a new state to the map in July. Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats’ strength in North Carolina has Republicans pouring late money into the state to save Sen. Richard Burr. And some Democrats believe Trump’s unpopularity could help push Senate candidates forward in below-the-radar states like Arizona and Missouri — and maybe even beyond those — this fall.
To be sure, Marco Rubio’s surprising un-retirement and GOP Sen. Rob Portman’s strong performance in Ohio have made Republicans feel more comfortable in those traditional battleground states. But the new states on the competitive map have given Senate Democrats a much wider view of their path to the majority. Democrats are set to clear Labor Day tied or leading the polls in enough places to win the majority, and they lie within striking distance in even more, including states some strategists all but wrote off a year ago.
Democrats have long been favored in Illinois and Wisconsin, and polls now show them with steady if slim advantages in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, as well as larger leads in Indiana. A sweep of those states would give them control of the Senate, though Democrats also have growing concerns about keeping retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s seat in Nevada — both because of its symbolism and because it could decide the balance of the Senate.
Many Republican Senate candidates still run ahead of Trump in the polls — an absolute necessity for defending blue- and purple-state seats up this year. But wasn’t enough to keep strong incumbents like Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte from trailing consistently during Trump’s August doldrums.
Source
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On September 04 2016 21:11 puerk wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2016 10:49 Thieving Magpie wrote:On September 04 2016 06:07 puerk wrote:On September 04 2016 00:53 Thieving Magpie wrote:On September 03 2016 23:57 puerk wrote:On September 03 2016 23:33 Yoav wrote:On September 03 2016 15:23 FiWiFaKi wrote:On September 03 2016 15:15 Toadesstern wrote:
try selling that to your people as a mexican politician without people going crazy with how much they hate the man Tariffs have always existed, they have always been the norm. Well, yes, but every major step forward in the eradication of the things was a step forward for the economy of the region doing so, starting with getting trolls out from under bridges and moving through keeping every petty feudal lord from exercising his ability to shake down traders for money and into the gradual demolition of mercantilist schemes. Tariffs are utterly foolish, especially in a world where increasing them ultimately puts your entire economy at a competitive disadvantage. But I know, we all have to talk about stagnating wages and not realize that in the last 40 years our quality of life for equivalent purchasing power has gone way up, thanks to cheap imports. Yeah, it would be great if wages were going up, and yes, we should probably raise income taxes at the higher end to smooth the curve, but you guys have been alive recently. Imagine if all the crap we get for super cheap from China was still produced in unionized US factories. We'd be poor as shit, even imagining we still made as much money (which we wouldn't, because cheap goods and services are a direct economic benefit to US companies and workers). it is not that simple. not partaking in the race to the bottom is not necessarily going to hurt all of the population. especially the stability and existence of a broad middle class of people with high and rising living standard and a feeling of economic participation, were not happening because of free trade but because unionized labor prohibited the race to the bottom. If you treat your workers like shit to compete with china, your workers can only buy cheap shit from china and your company runs out of work. German car makership is ridiculous at face value: the price for a new car that i would find desireable is so high compared to anything that happens in sectors with full devotion to the free trade race to the bottom (like smartphones), and yet it works out, because it strengthens communities, because it gives people a purpose, workers at the auto makers are proud of them and their work, not only because they believe in the product, but also because they get long term job security and good pay, which actually makes them able to buy them aswell. The real issue why this model will stop working, is not that countries have to give up competitive disadvantages like unionization to please the gods of free market™ but because labor demand is quickly collapsing under the pressure of automation replacing every last bastion of human endevour. Quicker or more determined pacing to the bottom will not aliviate the comming problem: people are useless to the economy as suppliers, and only useful as demand. Free trade even though a good idea in principle also will not adress that there will be no more place at the table for the people who are not owners of the means of production. The only way to solve this issue (if you consider fellow humans worth of living, thich not all of you do ofc. but i as a tiny cog in a machine working to replace other people with automation (document generation for banks) with software, i hold no illusions that i am fully replaceable as well, and i somehow cling to living) is massive redistribution of the gains of this comming new economy. "Massive redistribution of gains" => economics. How does stuff from one place, get transferred to another place, with both sides being happy. Free markets are what happens when one person has stuff, and other people want stuff, so they redistribute among themselves. This "race to the bottom" crap never makes sense to me--because "demand" only happens so long as there is a customer base able to buy. As more people lose wages, less stuff gets bought, less stuff gets sold, we move back to a more agrarian lifestyle. Automation becomes less valuable, and companies dissolve with lack of demand. Once things re-stabilize again, then we start back from scratch. Companies reform, automation takes precedence, people become sources of demand once again, etc... There is no "race to the bottom" where things stagnate down there--that's not how resource exchanges work. At some point, communities will find it easier to just make goods for themselves than afford goods from outside. You be okay that you don't have smart phones and go back to the old ways of life. Things eventually stabilize. The only "race to the bottom" is if the end goal is for everyone to have an upper class lifestyle instead of there being no end goal, and that the economy is just something that happens. If i have nothing of value i can not trade. There is no fundamental reason that everyone should alwas have some tradeable value. Your claim that "both sides" are "happy" with deals in our current economy is not only laughable but also insulting: people are forced to do terrible shit to survive. Nobody is selling their kidneys in india because it makes them "happy". The choice between survival and death is a faux one due to our inherent survival instinct. The second issue i take with your post is that you switch from individual views to societal to community level as it suits your argument, when a conistent scheme would fall apart: maybe societies can adjust to the shock if described on a community level, but those communities do not exist, people live in really really big cities, that are unable to dissolve themselfs into peaceful coexisting sustainance farmers in the wilderness. Current people, who do wage labor, who will be no longer in demand, who have nothing to "trade" to someone able to sell them food, provide them with housing and energy (cooking/heating), will suffer. Current people who are deemed by the owners of means of productions to hold no value (who are unemployable), actually already face those issues. Homeless people for instance suffer and die all the time. You saying adding millions and millions of people to the ranks who have no marketable value, will be fine, when current events already tell you the opposite is naive at best and dangerous at worst. I know it is on some level selfish of me to consider it a problem that i and all the people like me will inevetibly become obsolete. I like living, i like to have a warm dry flat, plenty of food, friends, social events and entertainment. When i become obsolete in form of labor, i can not become a sustainance farmer as you propose as i do not own land. I also am not prone to violence to obtain land and defend land against other people with the same urge for survival. In a time when everyone needs his own plot of land to sustainance farm in little communities as you propose, the demand for land will outstrip the supply thousandfold. That will inevetible cause violence, disruption and a lot of suffering. What you portrait as smooth downsizing is nothing less than social darwinism: some will survive and maybe eventually strife, but it will be payed and paved with millions of "losers" falling by the wayside. Creatures adapt to the environment or die out. That is how all things work. Pretending that there is value in maintaining your lifestyle just because you don't see the person you currently are or the society you're currently in being willing to adapt to the world around them is naive. The truth is that its shitty. The world is shitty. And people on the first world will not always be living in the first world. Countries can be the top of the food chain one century and be starving beggars the next. You just have to look at Africa and the Middle East to see how far down the shit-hole a multi-continent world power can get. How "smooth" the downsizing is a matter of scale. But yes, people will adapt to the realities of the time no matter what that reality is. Failure to adapt means you're shit out of luck. The world was not made so you can guarantee what the future will be. Change happens all the time--even if the change is something you find shitty. Here is the truth--no company will sell something that no one is buying. If enough people become poor by automation--companies stop existing. Period. End of discussion. And unless you think that means the human race becomes extinct--it simply means humanity will start over again. You constantly confuse "is" and "ought". Just because natural selection exists as a concept, does not mean we should actively work towards a future where millions of people die and suffer, just because you think you will be a winner of this process because of your great adaptability. Our current society strives not to let people fall through the cracks, a government empowered through the consent in the social contract redistributes resources to provide a dignified living standard for all. I am arguing that this theme can be expanded in a way to cope with the comming disruption when we prepare in time. You see it as wrong to even try to make the future better, than the grim alternative. And the argument about companies not selling is a strawman: when automation replaces the need for labor there is no company, as you say, but what you miss is what remains: there are owners and nonowners. Owners of the robots will still have everything, they produce it for themselfs and they have 0 incentive to let any non owner have anything from it.
I have absolutely zero stake in the matter.
There are billions of people in Asia who, because of this treaty, will have their labor be given value (even if that value is not monetary), and nothing I do will be allow to compete with that. If it is cheaper to make stuff there because that is what that society values labor at--then that's just the reality of the situation.
Even your little strawman accusation is just being in agreement with me: when companies have no one to sell to then they either dissolve (my conclusion) or they become self sustaining (your conclusion)--in either scenario they become disconnected from the populace and the remaining populace merely adapts to it. No more, no less.
Should you stop it? I mean, sure, you could. How do you stop people being willing to work for less than you? Punish them for not wanting as much? Do we invade China to force them to pay their people more? Do we invade India as well? What about Mexico--do we invade them to stop them from working in American farms? What if we have a UN treaty where we say its illegal to pay people less than a set value--I mean, third world economies are equal to first world economies right? No way is that bad! Wait... What happens if a country doesn't follow that rule? Do we invade countries for not having as much money as Germany? Hmmm....
Maybe we don't use force, let them be free citizens of this planet--oh wait, they're still willing to work for less than others and we still will have globalization happening because of it.
Maybe we should nuke the internet and travel? Any transport that isn't a horse and carriage we nuke from orbit to force countries to be unable to progress globalization? Yeah, we do that, and suddenly labor cannot be globalized! You'd have to pay local workers to do local work. Now a nuke will be crazy of course, something more realistic--like a wall! We can even have mexico pay for it! Oh wait, that's dumb too...
You know what, lets do the democratic thing, and pass laws in our countries to protect wages and hope china and india follow suite. Wait what--we already do that and they don't? Gee whiz, I guess you should... oh right--globalization is a naturally occurring thing that happens to any non-hive mind network.
Just because you live in a country who has the luxury to have overpriced cars because that is the social contract your citizens and your corporations have made does not mean that that is the same social contract in poorer countries. Don't be naive. My ability to survive or not survive globalization has zero effect on either my opinions of or confidence in globalization. It *will* happen no matter what we do. There isn't a magical christmas fairy land where there doesn't exists haves and have nots, where there doesn't exist people with stuff and people with less stuff. And so long as there are people willing to work more for less, and so long as those people are accessible--globalization will happen.
But! Companies will only continue to do this so long as there is demand for their goods. Once there's no demand--then they simply leave the market and everyone else starts from scratch, and the market continues. Because at its core, that's what an economy is--people trading resources with each other. Unless humanity is wiped out from existence, people will always trade with each other. This isn't some bleak distopian prediction of apocalypse, its being practical. So long as labor is cheaper elsewhere accessible, then the market will help those in need. The math is simple really--if the cost of making something is less than what the demand is willing to pay for it, then it stops being made, otherwise they will continue to make it. The only reason someone would ever pretend that this isn't how the world works is because they are imagining some kind of fantasy where in the future everyone fits in the haves category and there is no such concept as have nots. Money for all, high life for all, first world problems for all.
Don't be naive.
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i explicitly said that free trade and globalization is not a problem, but also no solution to the real problem we are facing which is the obsolence of labor through automation that is going to happen.
You totally strawman my whole position by shifting back to globalization when i repeatedly stated that i am not talking about globalization or free trade, as those are fine by themselfs but inadequate in dealing with the comming issue that not only our workers will become obsolete because of chinese, but also chinese will become obsolete. You can only shift around so many sectors: when primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of wage labor are gone, there will be nothing left for people to earn wages to barter for food and housing.
I am not arguing for anti globalization policies but for redistribution policies of the gains being made through automation.
When labor is worthless, people have nothing to trade. You tell me they will trade, but neglect to say what.
I exist at the whims of corporations able and willing to hire me because i can help them automate away bank paralegals drafting regulatory documents for their derivatives. At a point when all work is replaced that is approaching suprisingly quickly, tell me what i have to trade for my continued existence?
Our whole society builds upon extreme levels of labour division and specialisation. We did become a complex society of millions because only a tiny minority needed to work on food, and others could build, craft, innovate, plan, transport, communicate, provide services and more....
It implicitly works, because every person in this society respects the value of the currency it uses. The trust that you will be able to buy the stuff you want with it is the reason you work for it. When your work becomes useless, you have nothing to barter to the producer of food, because he does not want your personal service, your personal talent, as those are inflexible.
We are to many, too specialized and too disconnected in our immediate needs that we can not go to a functioning barter society, without losing a majority of people in the process.
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I think it is very naive to think that we (as humanity, not you and I) will not or should not eventually reach a sort of post-scarcity society where goods are basically produced by robots in the city where you need them assembled from resources acquired with the help of molecular manipulation or some such. That said, we do have to take into account the current situation we live in. Obviously.
Personally I think that, despite the current death-throws of religion such as demonstrated by certain perpetrators of extreme violence against humanity, on the whole we have been working towards that since the enlightenment with the help of scientific research and whatnot. But these things do not become very evident until we can look back on them in history, so I could be entirely mistaken about my observations.
But this kind of thinking can obviously be more or less dismissed in these discussions. Still, to call it naive could just as easily be considered short-sighted. The industrial revolution was about 100 years ago? We're going to run out of oil at some point, and we will surely find more useful alternatives to get things done within a similar timespan.
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US-China diplomacy: Spy agency tweet adds to protocol spat
A sarcastic tweet aimed at China and posted on the US Defense Intelligence Agency's Twitter account has fuelled a row over protocol at the G20 summit.
The tweet, which was quickly deleted, read: "Classy as always China".
When President Barack Obama arrived in Hangzhou there was no red carpet and he had to leave by a different plane exit.
There was also a row on the tarmac when a Chinese official shouted "This is our country!" as reporters and US officials tried to bypass a cordon.
President Obama called on reporters "not to over-crank the significance".
[...]
American reporters who travelled to the summit with President Obama from Hawaii said that Chinese security guards prevented them from watching the president disembark from the belly of the plane - something normally only done on high-security trips to places like Afghanistan - because there was no red carpet welcome.
"We were abruptly met by a line of bright blue tape, held taut by security guards. In six years of covering the White House, I had never seen a foreign host prevent the news media from watching Mr Obama disembark," Mark Landler of the New York Times reported.
When a White House staff member protested to a Chinese security official that this was a breach of protocol, the official was reported to have shouted: "This is our country."
National Security Adviser Susan Rice - one of the president's most senior members of staff - joined in the row along with her deputy, the New York Times reported, remonstrating with Chinese officials.
The South China Morning Post on Sunday reported an official as saying that China provides red carpets to welcome every arriving state leader, "but the US side... turned down the proposal and insisted that they didn't need the staircase provided by the airport".
[...]
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37269719
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On September 04 2016 18:26 Falling wrote:
Well I'll bite.
xDaunt, do you think that Trump is also incompetent and a liar?
Trump definitely is a liar in the vein of being a bad car salesman. His puffery is flagrant to say the least. His competency is harder to pin down. While he certainly has a problem with being impetuous in his engagement of the media, what I'd really like to see is the inside of his business empire to see what he's really doing.
On September 04 2016 20:51 Nebuchad wrote:
There is some dishonesty in asking the question to be framed in terms of 'do you think that Trump is also incompetent and a liar' when Rebs has clearly been arguing that he's worse on both counts. It artificially creates an equivalency in a place where Clinton supporters (or hell, even me) think there is none.
You could answer unequivocally 'Yes' to the question you want us to ask you and still completely disagree with Rebs on the initial point.
When attorneys receive specialized training to be trial attorneys, one of the things that they're taught is how to "chew their food." Good attorneys don't ask the kill shots right away. Good attorneys break it down and lead their prey right to where they want to go, one excruciating logical step at a time.
Here, I have made it abundantly clear that I think Hillary is dishonest and incompetent, so you can dispense with asking about that. What was less clear (before now, anyway) was whether I think that Trump is dishonest and incompetent at all, because I haven't really commented on it much. Thus, that is the proper starting place. The next question to ask is whether I think that Trump is more dishonest and more incompetent than Hillary, and why.
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On September 04 2016 10:13 kwizach wrote:This is a pretty spot-on piece on the coverage Clinton and Trump get in the media, on false equivalences and on the focus on politics instead of policy: Show nested quote +How the Media Undermine American Democracy
Twenty years ago I published a book called Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. The Atlantic ran an excerpt as a cover story, called “Why Americans Hate the Media.”
The main argument was that habits of mind within the media were making citizens and voters even more fatalistic and jaded about public affairs than they would otherwise be—even more willing to assume that all public figures were fools and crooks, even less willing to be involved in public affairs, and unfortunately for the media even less interested in following news at all. These mental habits of the media included an over-emphasis on strife and conflict, a fascination with the mechanics or “game” of politics rather than the real-world consequences, and a self-protective instinct to conceal limited knowledge of a particular subject (a new budget proposal, an international spat) by talking about the politics of these questions, and by presenting disagreements in a he-said/she-said, “plenty of blame on all sides” fashion now known as “false equivalence.”
Through the rise of Donald Trump, I’ve been watching to see how these patterns of mind might reassert themselves, particularly in the form of normalizing Trump. Source
I read that and IMO its a cop out. First, it all but ignores how much thier focus on " style over substance" instead shunting that all under the umbrella of "procedure", which is a much more favorable portrayal of it. Second it ignores the reason for thier lost of trust, which leads to his "false equivalence" which is a near total incompetence in articulating opposing views even as a "devil's advocate". Thats why most interviews either are fawning, or devolve into the interviewer disrespecting the interviewee (saw a guy on some late night news program call his subject a child just a few weeks ago). Moreover it necessitates "round tables" because 2%? 10% if we are generous, of NBC, ABC, CBS news' "newspeople" could articulate and defend the, for instance, pro-life position in a spontaneous debate.
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Canada11354 Posts
Well alright. I will do it again.
xDaunt, do you think that Trump is more dishonest and more incompetent than Hillary, and why.
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On September 05 2016 02:23 Falling wrote:
Well alright. I will do it again.
xDaunt, do you think that Trump is more dishonest and more incompetent than Hillary, and why.
On the issue of honesty, they're both pretty bad, and I find it hard to draw any meaningful distinction between the two. One thing that I will give Trump is that I think that he has been more consistent with his platform since he started campaigning than Hillary has. And one of the big problems with Hillary is that she has always been a moving target policy-wise. Now, you may wonder why I think that Trump has been consistent with his platform. Here's why: unlike a lot of people, I view what Trump says with a little bit of charity, thus I don't create inconsistencies where there really are none. For example, I didn't see anything inconsistent between Trump's press conference in Mexico and his subsequent rally in Arizona.
As for competency, I do think that Trump is more competent than Hillary. Living outside the bubble of the liberal echo chamber that is nitpicking everything that Trump does, I have yet to see something that suggests to me that he would be an incompetent president. Though we can't see the details, Trump manages a multi-billion dollar business empire and, in doing so, has created a bunch of wealth for himself and for others. Yes, you can point out individual failed ventures, but failures happen in any business. I'm more interested in the overall macro picture, which seems to be pretty good. In contrast, when I look at Hillary, I see someone who has demonstrably failed (and sometimes catastrophically) pretty much any time that she has attempted something of significance, from Hillarycare in the 90s through her numerous foreign policy bungles as secretary of state. Like I remarked during her convention, the only things that she has really done well at are the smaller ticket projects that she has spearheaded, thus I think that she is best suited to sticking to those.
That said, I'll agree that there's a significant amount of gray area between Trump and Hillary on the issues of honesty and competency such that it could be argued either way that one is better than the other. The clear tie-breaker for me is that Trump's platform more closely fits my policy preferences than Hillary's does. And it certainly helps that he's a helluva lot more fun to support than Hillary is.
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On September 05 2016 02:44 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 05 2016 02:23 Falling wrote:
Well alright. I will do it again.
xDaunt, do you think that Trump is more dishonest and more incompetent than Hillary, and why. The clear tie-breaker for me is that Trump's platform more closely fits my policy preferences than Hillary's does. And it certainly helps that he's a helluva lot more fun to support than Hillary is.
Curious where you fall on Clinton trying to sew up Kissinger's endorsement? Would it increase your confidence in her foreign policy at all?
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On September 05 2016 02:10 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2016 10:13 kwizach wrote:This is a pretty spot-on piece on the coverage Clinton and Trump get in the media, on false equivalences and on the focus on politics instead of policy: How the Media Undermine American Democracy
Twenty years ago I published a book called Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. The Atlantic ran an excerpt as a cover story, called “Why Americans Hate the Media.”
The main argument was that habits of mind within the media were making citizens and voters even more fatalistic and jaded about public affairs than they would otherwise be—even more willing to assume that all public figures were fools and crooks, even less willing to be involved in public affairs, and unfortunately for the media even less interested in following news at all. These mental habits of the media included an over-emphasis on strife and conflict, a fascination with the mechanics or “game” of politics rather than the real-world consequences, and a self-protective instinct to conceal limited knowledge of a particular subject (a new budget proposal, an international spat) by talking about the politics of these questions, and by presenting disagreements in a he-said/she-said, “plenty of blame on all sides” fashion now known as “false equivalence.”
Through the rise of Donald Trump, I’ve been watching to see how these patterns of mind might reassert themselves, particularly in the form of normalizing Trump. Source I read that and IMO its a cop out. First, it all but ignores how much thier focus on " style over substance" instead shunting that all under the umbrella of "procedure", which is a much more favorable portrayal of it. Second it ignores the reason for thier lost of trust, which leads to his "false equivalence" which is a near total incompetence in articulating opposing views even as a "devil's advocate". Thats why most interviews either are fawning, or devolve into the interviewer disrespecting the interviewee (saw a guy on some late night news program call his subject a child just a few weeks ago). Moreover it necessitates "round tables" because 2%? 10% if we are generous, of NBC, ABC, CBS news' "newspeople" could articulate and defend the, for instance, pro-life position in a spontaneous debate.
I would argue that's a deficit in the pro-life position.
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I'd be surprised if the numbers were that low, as it really shoudln't be that hard to put up a decent pro-life defense.
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On September 05 2016 00:28 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2016 21:11 puerk wrote:On September 04 2016 10:49 Thieving Magpie wrote:On September 04 2016 06:07 puerk wrote:On September 04 2016 00:53 Thieving Magpie wrote:On September 03 2016 23:57 puerk wrote:On September 03 2016 23:33 Yoav wrote:On September 03 2016 15:23 FiWiFaKi wrote:On September 03 2016 15:15 Toadesstern wrote:
try selling that to your people as a mexican politician without people going crazy with how much they hate the man Tariffs have always existed, they have always been the norm. Well, yes, but every major step forward in the eradication of the things was a step forward for the economy of the region doing so, starting with getting trolls out from under bridges and moving through keeping every petty feudal lord from exercising his ability to shake down traders for money and into the gradual demolition of mercantilist schemes. Tariffs are utterly foolish, especially in a world where increasing them ultimately puts your entire economy at a competitive disadvantage. But I know, we all have to talk about stagnating wages and not realize that in the last 40 years our quality of life for equivalent purchasing power has gone way up, thanks to cheap imports. Yeah, it would be great if wages were going up, and yes, we should probably raise income taxes at the higher end to smooth the curve, but you guys have been alive recently. Imagine if all the crap we get for super cheap from China was still produced in unionized US factories. We'd be poor as shit, even imagining we still made as much money (which we wouldn't, because cheap goods and services are a direct economic benefit to US companies and workers). it is not that simple. not partaking in the race to the bottom is not necessarily going to hurt all of the population. especially the stability and existence of a broad middle class of people with high and rising living standard and a feeling of economic participation, were not happening because of free trade but because unionized labor prohibited the race to the bottom. If you treat your workers like shit to compete with china, your workers can only buy cheap shit from china and your company runs out of work. German car makership is ridiculous at face value: the price for a new car that i would find desireable is so high compared to anything that happens in sectors with full devotion to the free trade race to the bottom (like smartphones), and yet it works out, because it strengthens communities, because it gives people a purpose, workers at the auto makers are proud of them and their work, not only because they believe in the product, but also because they get long term job security and good pay, which actually makes them able to buy them aswell. The real issue why this model will stop working, is not that countries have to give up competitive disadvantages like unionization to please the gods of free market™ but because labor demand is quickly collapsing under the pressure of automation replacing every last bastion of human endevour. Quicker or more determined pacing to the bottom will not aliviate the comming problem: people are useless to the economy as suppliers, and only useful as demand. Free trade even though a good idea in principle also will not adress that there will be no more place at the table for the people who are not owners of the means of production. The only way to solve this issue (if you consider fellow humans worth of living, thich not all of you do ofc. but i as a tiny cog in a machine working to replace other people with automation (document generation for banks) with software, i hold no illusions that i am fully replaceable as well, and i somehow cling to living) is massive redistribution of the gains of this comming new economy. "Massive redistribution of gains" => economics. How does stuff from one place, get transferred to another place, with both sides being happy. Free markets are what happens when one person has stuff, and other people want stuff, so they redistribute among themselves. This "race to the bottom" crap never makes sense to me--because "demand" only happens so long as there is a customer base able to buy. As more people lose wages, less stuff gets bought, less stuff gets sold, we move back to a more agrarian lifestyle. Automation becomes less valuable, and companies dissolve with lack of demand. Once things re-stabilize again, then we start back from scratch. Companies reform, automation takes precedence, people become sources of demand once again, etc... There is no "race to the bottom" where things stagnate down there--that's not how resource exchanges work. At some point, communities will find it easier to just make goods for themselves than afford goods from outside. You be okay that you don't have smart phones and go back to the old ways of life. Things eventually stabilize. The only "race to the bottom" is if the end goal is for everyone to have an upper class lifestyle instead of there being no end goal, and that the economy is just something that happens. If i have nothing of value i can not trade. There is no fundamental reason that everyone should alwas have some tradeable value. Your claim that "both sides" are "happy" with deals in our current economy is not only laughable but also insulting: people are forced to do terrible shit to survive. Nobody is selling their kidneys in india because it makes them "happy". The choice between survival and death is a faux one due to our inherent survival instinct. The second issue i take with your post is that you switch from individual views to societal to community level as it suits your argument, when a conistent scheme would fall apart: maybe societies can adjust to the shock if described on a community level, but those communities do not exist, people live in really really big cities, that are unable to dissolve themselfs into peaceful coexisting sustainance farmers in the wilderness. Current people, who do wage labor, who will be no longer in demand, who have nothing to "trade" to someone able to sell them food, provide them with housing and energy (cooking/heating), will suffer. Current people who are deemed by the owners of means of productions to hold no value (who are unemployable), actually already face those issues. Homeless people for instance suffer and die all the time. You saying adding millions and millions of people to the ranks who have no marketable value, will be fine, when current events already tell you the opposite is naive at best and dangerous at worst. I know it is on some level selfish of me to consider it a problem that i and all the people like me will inevetibly become obsolete. I like living, i like to have a warm dry flat, plenty of food, friends, social events and entertainment. When i become obsolete in form of labor, i can not become a sustainance farmer as you propose as i do not own land. I also am not prone to violence to obtain land and defend land against other people with the same urge for survival. In a time when everyone needs his own plot of land to sustainance farm in little communities as you propose, the demand for land will outstrip the supply thousandfold. That will inevetible cause violence, disruption and a lot of suffering. What you portrait as smooth downsizing is nothing less than social darwinism: some will survive and maybe eventually strife, but it will be payed and paved with millions of "losers" falling by the wayside. Creatures adapt to the environment or die out. That is how all things work. Pretending that there is value in maintaining your lifestyle just because you don't see the person you currently are or the society you're currently in being willing to adapt to the world around them is naive. The truth is that its shitty. The world is shitty. And people on the first world will not always be living in the first world. Countries can be the top of the food chain one century and be starving beggars the next. You just have to look at Africa and the Middle East to see how far down the shit-hole a multi-continent world power can get. How "smooth" the downsizing is a matter of scale. But yes, people will adapt to the realities of the time no matter what that reality is. Failure to adapt means you're shit out of luck. The world was not made so you can guarantee what the future will be. Change happens all the time--even if the change is something you find shitty. Here is the truth--no company will sell something that no one is buying. If enough people become poor by automation--companies stop existing. Period. End of discussion. And unless you think that means the human race becomes extinct--it simply means humanity will start over again. You constantly confuse "is" and "ought". Just because natural selection exists as a concept, does not mean we should actively work towards a future where millions of people die and suffer, just because you think you will be a winner of this process because of your great adaptability. Our current society strives not to let people fall through the cracks, a government empowered through the consent in the social contract redistributes resources to provide a dignified living standard for all. I am arguing that this theme can be expanded in a way to cope with the comming disruption when we prepare in time. You see it as wrong to even try to make the future better, than the grim alternative. And the argument about companies not selling is a strawman: when automation replaces the need for labor there is no company, as you say, but what you miss is what remains: there are owners and nonowners. Owners of the robots will still have everything, they produce it for themselfs and they have 0 incentive to let any non owner have anything from it. I have absolutely zero stake in the matter. There are billions of people in Asia who, because of this treaty, will have their labor be given value (even if that value is not monetary), and nothing I do will be allow to compete with that. If it is cheaper to make stuff there because that is what that society values labor at--then that's just the reality of the situation. Even your little strawman accusation is just being in agreement with me: when companies have no one to sell to then they either dissolve (my conclusion) or they become self sustaining (your conclusion)--in either scenario they become disconnected from the populace and the remaining populace merely adapts to it. No more, no less. Should you stop it? I mean, sure, you could. How do you stop people being willing to work for less than you? Punish them for not wanting as much? Do we invade China to force them to pay their people more? Do we invade India as well? What about Mexico--do we invade them to stop them from working in American farms? What if we have a UN treaty where we say its illegal to pay people less than a set value--I mean, third world economies are equal to first world economies right? No way is that bad! Wait... What happens if a country doesn't follow that rule? Do we invade countries for not having as much money as Germany? Hmmm.... Maybe we don't use force, let them be free citizens of this planet--oh wait, they're still willing to work for less than others and we still will have globalization happening because of it. Maybe we should nuke the internet and travel? Any transport that isn't a horse and carriage we nuke from orbit to force countries to be unable to progress globalization? Yeah, we do that, and suddenly labor cannot be globalized! You'd have to pay local workers to do local work. Now a nuke will be crazy of course, something more realistic--like a wall! We can even have mexico pay for it! Oh wait, that's dumb too... You know what, lets do the democratic thing, and pass laws in our countries to protect wages and hope china and india follow suite. Wait what--we already do that and they don't? Gee whiz, I guess you should... oh right--globalization is a naturally occurring thing that happens to any non-hive mind network. Just because you live in a country who has the luxury to have overpriced cars because that is the social contract your citizens and your corporations have made does not mean that that is the same social contract in poorer countries. Don't be naive. My ability to survive or not survive globalization has zero effect on either my opinions of or confidence in globalization. It *will* happen no matter what we do. There isn't a magical christmas fairy land where there doesn't exists haves and have nots, where there doesn't exist people with stuff and people with less stuff. And so long as there are people willing to work more for less, and so long as those people are accessible--globalization will happen. But! Companies will only continue to do this so long as there is demand for their goods. Once there's no demand--then they simply leave the market and everyone else starts from scratch, and the market continues. Because at its core, that's what an economy is--people trading resources with each other. Unless humanity is wiped out from existence, people will always trade with each other. This isn't some bleak distopian prediction of apocalypse, its being practical. So long as labor is cheaper elsewhere accessible, then the market will help those in need. The math is simple really--if the cost of making something is less than what the demand is willing to pay for it, then it stops being made, otherwise they will continue to make it. The only reason someone would ever pretend that this isn't how the world works is because they are imagining some kind of fantasy where in the future everyone fits in the haves category and there is no such concept as have nots. Money for all, high life for all, first world problems for all. Don't be naive.
So are you for the TPP? If so, why? Globalization is going to happen anyway. What does the TPP do for us?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 05 2016 02:56 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On September 05 2016 02:44 xDaunt wrote:On September 05 2016 02:23 Falling wrote:
Well alright. I will do it again.
xDaunt, do you think that Trump is more dishonest and more incompetent than Hillary, and why. The clear tie-breaker for me is that Trump's platform more closely fits my policy preferences than Hillary's does. And it certainly helps that he's a helluva lot more fun to support than Hillary is. Curious where you fall on Clinton trying to sew up Kissinger's endorsement? Would it increase your confidence in her foreign policy at all?
Hillary is very clearly playing up her support among the pro-war elements of government. I expect that it will lead to a lot of poorly thought out FP interventions across the world that will end badly for the US.
A few years later, some of her supporters will try to spin her support for terrible intervention the same way they did for her support of the Iraq war. She's just misled like everyone else or something when she clearly played a pivotal role in it all.
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EPT
