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On February 19 2017 16:32 Zealos wrote:Show nested quote +On February 19 2017 15:33 thePunGun wrote:
You have to debate a troll like Milo and disarm him with reason and facts rather than censoring him. That's the main problem with the progressive left, they are intolerant towards anyone who doesn't share their beliefs.
How you treat people you disagree with (and how you conceive of people you disagree with) is key to win any argument really and that's why the illiberal progressive left is losing this fight. Who's this progressive left person you talk about? Sounds like s/he's not very open to debate? Just out of interest, should we be tolerant of any and all views? Regardless of how disgusting they may be?
On that note, seeing Larry Wilmore absolutely wreck Milo and his ridiculous "transgendered people = child molesters" idiocy was soooo satisfying. I get triggered hardcore by the hateful, condescending, shallow bullshit that Milo spews on a weekly basis about any given identity, and Wilmore made me so happy when he put Milo in his place about transgendered people, the gay community, and society's marginalization of certain identities in general. When it comes to recognizing the quantity of people who like him and what he stands for, Milo is just as clueless as Donald Trump. He's just a provocateur. Then the "Fuck Off" comment + cheering as a response to Milo's desperate belittling of Bill Maher's guests was just icing on the cake.
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All money spend on infrastructure in rural America will be a near complete waste. A short term boom during the construction only to fall back again as soon as the work is done. Infrastructure does not create economic activity itself,it just facilitates it. But if there is nothing to facilitate in the first place,then I don't see it working out. It will end up like the Chinese ghost towns I think.
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Putting this here because it involves Obama/Kerry diplomacy...and shows you Israel's willingness to find peace.
An Israeli newspaper reported Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned down a regional peace initiative last year that was brokered by then-American Secretary of State John Kerry, in apparent contradiction to his stated goal of involving regional powers in resolving Israel's conflict with the Palestinians.
Haaretz reported that Netanyahu took part in a secret summit that Kerry organized in the southern Jordanian port city of Aqaba last February and included Jordan's King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi. According to the report, which cited anonymous Obama administration officials, Kerry proposed regional recognition of Israel as a Jewish state — a key Netanyahu demand — alongside a renewal of peace talks with the Palestinians with the support of the Arab countries. Netanyahu reportedly rejected the offer, saying he would not be able to garner enough support for it in his hard-line coalition government.
Yahoo
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Milo is a guy I can not stand myself and I wonder why he gets so much floor time everywhere. I even doubt he is helping the case of the alt right in general. To have such a controversial and outspoken person/self proclaimed troll being a spokesman for the movement does help attract a certain group of people but at the same time it drives an even bigger group of people away. He is way to polarizing,works well with the internet community but it will fail in attracting a big following amongst moderate every day people I think.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On February 20 2017 01:05 pmh wrote:
All money spend on infrastructure in rural America will be a near complete waste. A short term boom during the construction only to fall back again as soon as the work is done. Infrastructure does not create economic activity itself,it just facilitates it. But if there is nothing to facilitate in the first place,then I don't see it working out. It will end up like the Chinese ghost towns I think.
It's possible that rural America is doomed to perpetual decline, and that there's nothing that can be done to save that part of the population. Maybe nothing can actually be done to stop the current demographics trends and all of the implications of what the decline of rural America will mean (hint: it starts with rural America but the decay travels upward). But I'm not convinced that doom and gloom is the inevitable reality. Unfortunately, it takes more than one would like to force people to act. I suspect we have an even bigger economic downturn in the near future (Trump's poorly conceived deregulations could be a catalyst) that would bring it all to the surface and force people to come to terms with the structural changes needed for a better future.
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On February 20 2017 01:10 pmh wrote:
Milo is a guy I can not stand myself and I wonder why he gets so much floor time everywhere. I even doubt he is helping the case of the alt right in general. To have such a controversial and outspoken person/self proclaimed troll being a spokesman for the movement does help attract a certain group of people but at the same time it drives an even bigger group of people away. He is way to polarizing,works well with the internet community but it will fail in attracting a big following amongst moderate every day people I think.
I'm not too sure that the alt-right really has any one figurehead, its not an organized group but a loose confederation of people from all across the political spectrum, from staunch conservatives to disaffected liberals; some like his antics others don't, but that doesn't really do harm to what their cause is about because its generally more nebulous than one person.
But also, the alt-right celebrates political incorrectness, because it wants to live in a world free of safe spaces and PC culture, which in their minds has allowed dangerous ideas like thinking there is nothing wrong with Islam, and that any criticism = islamophobia, which ends up working against gay and women's rights activists in muslim majority countries. So people like Milo are an anathema to PC culture which is a big bonus. Particularly because the more extreme elements of the left (at least one of whom actually comments on this very board, I'll let you work out who that person is  ) actually advocates physical violence against elements of the right as a way of solving problems.
When they do that of course, it backfires horribly, and the leftists (rightly) appear to be the authoritarians they purport to be fighting. So actually Milo ends up doing a lot of good for the movement, even though his trollish antics are probably pointless and emotionally harmful in and of themselves.
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On February 20 2017 00:40 LegalLord wrote:+ Show Spoiler [long quote] +On February 19 2017 18:51 ChristianS wrote:
Have you seen the 1-2 month training options out there? I mean, plenty of places exist that promise you a life-changing career with minimal effort, but the reality is usually that what they're teaching you just takes more than 1-2 months of night classes to learn.
Take programming, for instance. It's been talked about as a good solution to the ailing rural America problem. It's portable, so you don't need to move to the city. It's growing, so there will be plenty of jobs in the foreseeable future. And it's an industry that's had quite a lot of college-less successes, so you might not need a degree in it to succeed.
But are you really gonna take a bunch of miners in WV, put them in a room a couple nights a week learning C# or something, and then toss them into the job market competing with Palo Alto kids who grew up surrounded by tech people and learned their first programming language at 13? Programming takes aptitude, a lot kf technical familiarity, and a lot of interest in your work. You can take all of the boys in a town and send them into a coal mine, and they'll be able to more or less do the work. You can't put them all in front of computers and expect them all to be able to write programs or make websites or whatever. If they had the interest and aptitude, there are already all kinds of deals on websites like techspot.com that will sell you $946547 worth of educational materials for $.20, but a lot of them simply won't be cut out for that kind of work. Yes, I agree that many of the current "learn X in Y time" is complete unreliable trash. Part of it is that programmers have delusions of grandeur and think they can do whatever they please because software. Part of it is that we genuinely don't take education seriously below the university level. No, I wouldn't expect courses like that to be a career shift - that isn't very feasible - but it should be sufficient for lateral shifts to ease people into a related, but not fully analogous, line of semiskilled work. University work requires a university education, full stop. But semiskilled is more like assembling airplanes according to specifications provided by engineers, a more feasible skill to learn more quickly. The painful truth for a lot of things in the modern world is that we simply don't need all that many people to get things done. We just need a few people with deeper expertise. I'll give the military as my example. A lot of the reason why we simply don't use conscripts much anymore is because what really matters in modern warfare isn't lots of mildly trained meat shields, but rather a core force of well-trained career military folk who understand how to use the increasingly advanced weapons to their full potential. The draft didn't just go away because it was unpopular, it also just became less necessary. Like for all my earlier criticisms of drones, it's hard to argue that you need more foot soldiers when a lot of the hardware can just be robots operated from afar. Not in all circumstances of course, but in enough that you need fewer meatbags on the front. And the same thing goes for a lot of civilian occupations. There just simply isn't a need for a lot of people anymore. Sometimes they just have to compete on price with robots and foreign peasants, which is a losing battle. Often they're forced into minimum wage service occupations, which is a decline in the quality of life for sure. However, it's also important to think about where this leads, and I'm going to partially echo the argument of whitedoge (RIP) as to why this can't be just an "oh well, spoils of war" situation. Well of course there's the obvious reason that disenfranchised people will rebel and undermine the entire strength of the first world economy. It helps that the people most disaffected are disproportionately skilled at organizing for political gain and organized in militia groups relative to a more cityward population. Beyond that, we have that there is little point of production if no one buys stuff - which isn't great with wealth inequality. And another issue is a dependence on energy because, let's face it, machines don't run on the power of hope. And oil/gas/other energy supplies are some of the most complex and important issues of the modern world and will continue to be, probably forever. The Great Recession was, on the one hand, just a series of financial fuckups that hit the economy harder than before. On the surface at least, that's what it was, and that is a matter that has seen a resolution by now. But below the surface was a structural readjustment on the part of many companies. Truth is that their technology has outpaced their need for employing people for a while now (the 1980s or so are the start of this) and the recession gave the best excuse they ever needed to cull their workforce. So all the people left without a job continue to be left without a job. This, combined with certain poorly conceived forms of FP adventurism, are an existential crisis that genuinely threaten to compromise the nations that currently fall into the first world.
Well it seems like we got back to talking about how intractable the problem is. There's less and less need for unskilled labor. Unskilled laborers see their jobs going away and think it's because of immigration or free trade. But even if we shut the borders tomorrow, things can't just go back, it's like reversing entropy.
So we can fix roads and bridges and phone lines. Lawyers and professional services aren't a government service, they'll be in town if there's enough business to support them, which there presumably isn't right now. Internet and healthcare aren't just a rural issue, thry suck everywhere in the country. To farva's point I don't doubt that Michigan roads get fucked up by the cold, and that the state makes fixing them an even lower priority than fixing Flint's water situation. What I do doubt is that factories would open up there if only there weren't so many cracks and potholes.
I'd be interested to see what would happen if someone with some capital tried building a tech company in some rural town. Hire a bunch of locals at $30,000 a year with the understanding that you're gonna be training everyone mostly from scratch. Then you've got all of these unskilled workers banging their heads against, like, game development or something. They won't know what they're doing, they'll waste a lot of time, but you can lease a building for cheap and pay your workers very little. It might turn out to be one of these microloan-style successes where you invest more in people than they're supposedly worth, and they'll surprise you with what they can accomplish.
That said, I bet you'd find that they put out a bunch of buggy code and sloppy assets, because you're better off hiring skilled workers who will do stuff right the first time than hiring a bunch of amateurs and trying to fix their mistakes later.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
There's no hope without at the very least a university with an accredited engineering program. I'll tell you that much right off the bat.
Yes, the problem is quite troubling. I don't think "we need a 21st century FDR" could imply anything different.
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On February 20 2017 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
There's no hope without at the very least a university with an accredited engineering program. I'll tell you that much right off the bat.
Yes, the problem is quite troubling. I don't think "we need a 21st century FDR" could imply anything different.
I think you and companies overestimate a lot of semi skilled labour. Take something like a material planner at a company. They have more in common with the classical secretary dealing with scheduling a person (factory) than an Engineer, yet Engineers are hired for it. In other cases it isn't true but we have seen a creep in what is expected when you start a position, even if that isn't very relevant to the work at hand.
Low skilled labour is decreasing. Semi skilled is more or less static and skilled has increased a bit, though not as much as low skilled decreased and keeps decreasing.
Long term the danger is that some skilled labour will be replaced as well. Doctors is an excellent example, diagnosis and surgery are both things that would be better performed with computer assistance. If the first line of doctors can make a diagnosis good enough to send you directly to testing instead of referring you to a specialist the amount of visits and thus people needed is cut down.
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On February 20 2017 00:36 Chewbacca. wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2017 00:08 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Donald Trump’s family’s trips have cost taxpayers nearly as much in a month as Barack Obama’s cost in an entire year.
The US President’s three visits to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida since his presidential inauguration, combined with his sons’ business trips, reportedly cost $11.3m (£9.1m).
Conservative watchdog Judicial Watch estimated Mr Obama’s travel expenses totalled an average $12.1m in each of his eight years in the White House.
“This is an expensive way to conduct business, and the President should recognise that,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, speaking to the Washington Post.
“The unique thing about President Trump is that he knows what it costs to run a plane.
“Going down [to Mar-a-Lago] ain’t free.”
The three Mar-a-Lago trips in Palm Beach cost the federal treasury around $10m, based on figures used in an October government report analysing White House travel.
This includes cash for coast guards to patrol the exposed shoreline.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw also says it has cost local taxpayers $360,000 in police overtime for his three weekends in Florida since 20 January.
The Post also revealed it cost $88,320 to put secret service agents up in a hotel while son Eric Trump visited Uruguay to promote a Trump-brand condo tower.
Records show it cost $5,470 to put up secret service officials at the AlSol Del Mar hotel in the Dominican Republic, as they scoped out the area, ahead of a similar visit by Eric Trump.
The same records show more than $16,000 has been spent on secret service hotel bills for his two sons’ visit for a grand opening of a Trump-brand golf resort in Dubai.
The 70-year-old leader of the free world repeatedly criticised Mr Obama for his taxpayer-funded travel during his tenure.
He tweeted in January 2012: “President @BarackObama’s vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars----Unbelievable!” Source Wasn't Obama's African vacation trip alone reported to cost between like 70-100 million? Not that it justifies the amount Trump is spending, but it makes me question the $12.5 million average.
Obama wasn't there on vacation. That was Presidential work iirc. There is no reason for Trump to fly to Florida every weekend other than to allow him to hang out with his rich friends and enjoy then lavish lifestyle he misses.
The question is if anyone can stop him from doing this. Just wait for the story to break that he spent more in 8 months than Obama spent in 8 years. That isn't going to play well, even with his base.
I don't mind the children expenditures as much. They are generally just doing their jobs. I'm sure Clinton's and Obama's daughters would have done similar things if they weren't in school at the time.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On February 20 2017 02:43 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2017 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
There's no hope without at the very least a university with an accredited engineering program. I'll tell you that much right off the bat.
Yes, the problem is quite troubling. I don't think "we need a 21st century FDR" could imply anything different. I think you and companies overestimate a lot of semi skilled labour. Take something like a material planner at a company. They have more in common with the classical secretary dealing with scheduling a person (factory) than an Engineer, yet Engineers are hired for it. In other cases it isn't true but we have seen a creep in what is expected when you start a position, even if that isn't very relevant to the work at hand. Low skilled labour is decreasing. Semi skilled is more or less static and skilled has increased a bit, though not as much as low skilled decreased and keeps decreasing. Long term the danger is that some skilled labour will be replaced as well. Doctors is an excellent example, diagnosis and surgery are both things that would be better performed with computer assistance.
In the context of "creating jobs" I don't think it matters whether you get semi-skilled or skilled labor. The issue is still the same: work requires fewer people. Profit goes to those who own the means of production.
Skilled labor is endangered too, yes. Hence my earlier talk on H1B labor etc. But those problems are a little less pressing at the moment.
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On February 20 2017 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
There's no hope without at the very least a university with an accredited engineering program. I'll tell you that much right off the bat.
Yes, the problem is quite troubling. I don't think "we need a 21st century FDR" could imply anything different.
Part of the problem is that "education" is often something of a misnomer. Often the job of universities isn't to give people job-relevant knowledge and skills, but just to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Like, I got a BS in biochemistry and I'm working an entry level job in a pharmaceutical research lab. I barely apply any of the stuff I learned for my degree; I mostly need understanding of basic chemistry concepts I learned in first year gen chem, maybe even high school chemistry. And even for those basic concepts, the company has training procedures which don't seem to assume understanding of those concepts, which is good because people don't seem to remember their undergrad. I've got a coworker who barely seems to understand what "concentration" is, and yet he has "chemist" in his job title.
But it's nice that everyone has a relevant degree, because everyone at work is biochemistry-minded. They probably were before they got to college, but the company only knows that because of the degree on their resume. The actual "education" portion of the college experience is a minimal part of what the company cares about; the university is just certifying that these people would make adequate chemists, not necessarily manufacturing chemists out of ordinary people.
This means even if my rural game studio had deep enough pockets to give everyone in the town a university-level education, the workers would still be worse than if you just hired a bunch of fresh graduates from the same university. They took the same classes, but they didn't undergo the same selection process.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
My point about universities is a little bit roundabout. It's true, you don't always need a specific degree to be able to do a specific job. But to have companies that are willing to come to your local area to set up shop, it is an absolute necessity that you have a well-established and reliable apparatus of higher education. Industries are built around universities.
The logistics of the CC/trade school system are a bit more... interesting, to put it that way, but at least equally important.
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Canada11349 Posts
and I loved religulous
Is it really any good? The only part I am familiar with (having an interest in ancient civs) is the part where he is browbeating people with the same factual mistakes that Zeitgeist made: trying to compare Osiris/Horus to Jesus. With even a moderate familiarity with Egyptian mythology, you would find there are NOT many virgins in their story, quite the opposite. Most of the claims to the parallel cannot be traced because if you go searching, they were only asserted, but they never actually say which Egyptian tablet or stele 'kings from afar' or 'star' or 'teacher by twelve' or 'twelve followers" (you could maybe count three or four?) came from. Most of the claims simply don't exist, the rest are patently false. You can find some Egyptian parallels from a source (and it seems that's where a bunch of the claims originated). . . a psychic from the 1800s. ...given all that, I wasn't feeling super compelled to see beyond that original clip.
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re: light education talk, 538 had a good point to be aware of
fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard
Media misconceptions don’t end with admission. “College,” in the mainstream media, seems to mean people in their late teens and early 20s living in dorms, going to parties, studying English (or maybe pre-med) and emerging four years later with a degree and an unpaid internship. But that image, never truly representative, is increasingly disconnected from reality. Nearly half of all college students attend community colleges; among those at four-year schools, nearly a quarter attend part time and about the same share are 25 or older. In total, less than a third of U.S. undergraduates are “traditional” students in the sense that they are full-time, degree-seeking students at primarily residential four-year colleges.
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On February 20 2017 03:13 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2017 02:33 LegalLord wrote:
There's no hope without at the very least a university with an accredited engineering program. I'll tell you that much right off the bat.
Yes, the problem is quite troubling. I don't think "we need a 21st century FDR" could imply anything different. Part of the problem is that "education" is often something of a misnomer. Often the job of universities isn't to give people job-relevant knowledge and skills, but just to separate the wheat from the chaff. Like, I got a BS in biochemistry and I'm working an entry level job in a pharmaceutical research lab. I barely apply any of the stuff I learned for my degree; I mostly need understanding of basic chemistry concepts I learned in first year gen chem, maybe even high school chemistry. And even for those basic concepts, the company has training procedures which don't seem to assume understanding of those concepts, which is good because people don't seem to remember their undergrad. I've got a coworker who barely seems to understand what "concentration" is, and yet he has "chemist" in his job title. But it's nice that everyone has a relevant degree, because everyone at work is biochemistry-minded. They probably were before they got to college, but the company only knows that because of the degree on their resume. The actual "education" portion of the college experience is a minimal part of what the company cares about; the university is just certifying that these people would make adequate chemists, not necessarily manufacturing chemists out of ordinary people. This means even if my rural game studio had deep enough pockets to give everyone in the town a university-level education, the workers would still be worse than if you just hired a bunch of fresh graduates from the same university. They took the same classes, but they didn't undergo the same selection process.
That's a great point actually. College has almost turned into a required tax to pay, consisting of massive amounts of time and money, to have a chance at landing a decent job; there is so much wasted time with credits never remotely used in the field, and not nearly enough is taught to prepare the individual for what they will face at work. I have a comp. science degree, graduated 4.0, took honors classes, etc. yet about 80% of the knowledge I use on the job, I learned in private study, both through internet tutorials, books, and experimenting privately learning certain programs and languages. I know for certain fields, such as medicine, private study is not feasible, but at least in the tech arena, this is a problem.
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Anyone have better sources on the Sweden "refugee crisis" stuff? It seems like Trump was quoting a Fox News segment that aired ... yesterday lmfao. I can't find any non-right-wing sources other than The Guardian talking about it or offering the other perspective. But I can totally see how bad it sounds if you watched Fox News and believed that segment, but I also know... it's Fox News.
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On February 20 2017 04:13 Blisse wrote:Anyone have better sources on the Sweden "refugee crisis" stuff? It seems like Trump was quoting a Fox News segment that aired ... yesterday lmfao. I can't find any non-right-wing sources other than The Guardian talking about it or offering the other perspective. But I can totally see how bad it sounds if you watched Fox News and believed that segment, but I also know... it's Fox News.
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On February 20 2017 04:43 Yurie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 20 2017 04:13 Blisse wrote:Anyone have better sources on the Sweden "refugee crisis" stuff? It seems like Trump was quoting a Fox News segment that aired ... yesterday lmfao. I can't find any non-right-wing sources other than The Guardian talking about it or offering the other perspective. But I can totally see how bad it sounds if you watched Fox News and believed that segment, but I also know... it's Fox News.
No, I just said, the Fox News segment aired the previous day and it's clear that it's where Trump got the impression there are problems in Sweden in his speech. There is plenty of coverage of the "refugee crisis" in Sweden over the last year unrelated to Trump news, but most of them appear to come from incredibly biased sources. I wanted to know more about the situation because it doesn't seem like any sources I've found is refuting the problems in Sweden, regardless of whether Swedish people continue to welcome refugees.
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On February 20 2017 03:33 Falling wrote:Is it really any good? The only part I am familiar with (having an interest in ancient civs) is the part where he is browbeating people with the same factual mistakes that Zeitgeist made: trying to compare Osiris/Horus to Jesus. With even a moderate familiarity with Egyptian mythology, you would find there are NOT many virgins in their story, quite the opposite. Most of the claims to the parallel cannot be traced because if you go searching, they were only asserted, but they never actually say which Egyptian tablet or stele 'kings from afar' or 'star' or 'teacher by twelve' or 'twelve followers" (you could maybe count three or four?) came from. Most of the claims simply don't exist, the rest are patently false. You can find some Egyptian parallels from a source (and it seems that's where a bunch of the claims originated). . . a psychic from the 1800s. ...given all that, I wasn't feeling super compelled to see beyond that original clip.
Yea it's good, but yea it's some what like what you mentioned. He listens to both sides, but then debates with facts. The whole point of the documentary was showcasing the ignorance in the US still, and to push doubt among religious people.
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EPT
