EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 8689
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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. | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On September 08 2017 13:28 m4ini wrote: Sigh. 5:30am, i'm not entirely there by the looks. Yeah, i'm with you now. What are they supposed to do? I imagine they already did it, unless they are still waiting around for a cake all this time. Could a pious cake maker refuse to make a blasphemous cake for satanists with pentagrams all over it? | ||
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Simberto
Germany11497 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 08 2017 14:28 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/905458688428830720 Badness rating is pretty comparable with Trump I'd wager. Though Hillary is probably just being suppressed by the liberal media. | ||
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NewSunshine
United States5938 Posts
On September 08 2017 14:37 LegalLord wrote: Badness rating is pretty comparable with Trump I'd wager. Though Hillary is probably just being suppressed by the liberal media. She's overstayed her welcome, and is trying to remain relevant long after the election ended. People don't care much anymore. | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
On September 08 2017 14:46 NewSunshine wrote: She's overstayed her welcome, and is trying to remain relevant long after the election ended. People don't care much anymore. Hitchens predicted this years ago when he basically said she is self pitying and it has to be about her all the time. Almost like a therapeutic session for her. | ||
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Kyadytim
United States886 Posts
On September 08 2017 12:42 Nyxisto wrote: I'd argue the other way around, because devs are in high demand outsourcing some of the work is completely excusable, after all the official goal of the visa is supposed to be avoid labour shortages / high labour cost. If there'd be a horde of impoverished IT personnel lining up for jobs I'd consider it controversial, but I don't think that's the case anyway I went for an MS in software development, and my first job out of college was a position as a software developer in Hicksville, NY for $40k/year. That's on Long Island, for anyone unfamiliar with NYC suburbs. Apartments were literally out of my price range. If the H1B is supposed to be avoiding high labor costs, excessive use of it in the IT and software development fields has driven prices below reasonable in some areas. Also, while job hunting, I wasted hours each week on ads for jobs that tied back to Infosys, Cognizant, and Accenture, because they comprised something like 95% of the job openings. These things were disgusting. They weren't actual job openings. They were more like indentured servitude, where you agreed to work for them for two years in exchange for a two week crash course in Java and a bed in a barracks, and there was a vague promise of job placement after the Java course. So yeah, there was a lack of real job openings for actual jobs, and high labor costs never seemed like an issue. To elaborate a little bit more, what ends up happening is that the outsourcing firms flood the companies willing to hire from them. Those companies don't even post job openings publicly. Instead, they just hire from companies like Accenture, who provide extremely low quality room and board to their "talent," allowing the companies hiring from them to pay wages so low that someone can't actually live on in the area. This results in a glut of American devs who want to be compensated appropriately for their talents all competing for fewer jobs. The end result is things like that first company I worked for, where all the devs were paid poorly, on call 24/7, and generally working 60 hour weeks, because there's always another programmer to replace someone who doesn't want to put up with that. Basically, the abuse of the H1B visa is a significant contributing factor in an ongoing race to the bottom among companies that employ large numbers of technical staff. American workers often face a choice between working at places like Apple, Amazon, or Google, where they are very well compensated but also have to live at their jobs, or take jobs like my first one. It's not that the H1B visa program by itself is terrible, but it's been abused to create a situation similar to outsourcing manufacturing. It's not that companies are getting the best workers via the massive number of H1B visas, but that they're getting moderate quality workers at dirt cheap prices. Read this if hiring large numbers of moderate quality workers doesn't make sense to you: + Show Spoiler + If you don't understand why companies would intentionally pay less to hire inferior workers, what you're probably unaware of is that not all technical work requires high creativity. There's a lot of repetitive tasks that take time and require a basic understanding of the slight differences each piece of work requires. Setting up computers at an office from a template is one example of this sort of work. Customizing web pages is another. Working with HTML and CSS to get a website looking just right requires education and intelligence, but it has basically nothing in common with something like working at what used to be called Google X. There's definitely a spectrum of challenge between those points, but a decent number of them can be reduced to collection of simple tasks, each of which can be more or less reliably performed by someone who has only taken a 2-week crash course in the subject*. Enter the outsourcing firms. *The results are generally not what anyone would call good code, and are hell when it comes to maintenance, but they function. Just a note - it's not that there aren't jobs that provide a better wage and better working conditions, but in this industry, most of those positions are filled via the professional networks of current employees. | ||
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Kyadytim
United States886 Posts
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Biff The Understudy
France7884 Posts
On September 08 2017 16:15 Kyadytim wrote: I think Clinton's approval rating is probably substantially hurt by the assumption many people had that she was going to win the election. She snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Probably multiple times. There's probably plenty of people who were excited to vote for her who are now angry and disappointed and blame her for not running a better campaign, which drives her approval down. Americans really don't like, don't forgive and don't excuse losers, I believe. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23193 Posts
On September 08 2017 16:27 Biff The Understudy wrote: Americans really don't like, don't forgive and don't excuse losers, I believe. No, people really just don't like her and a great deal of them supported her because they thought it was the safe bet to beat Trump. Bernie Sanders lost and is the most popular politician in the country. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10692 Posts
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Kickboxer
Slovenia1308 Posts
On September 08 2017 01:52 NewSunshine wrote: A few questions. What do you think constitutes being "confused by their gender roles"? Is this a woman who didn't have the good sense to know her place and just watch the kids, or is this something else? Moreover, how does this directly link to having trouble in relationships? I for instance believe very little in gender roles, since it's a fluid concept to begin with, and I'm having no problems in my relationships/lack thereof. What in your mind equates the bucking of traditional gender roles with men and women hating each other? Without hearing further justification on these, it sounds to me like you're just walking away from these issues and adhering to stereotypes because it's easier, not necessarily because it's better. Am I wrong? I find much of what we have come to think of as "stereotypes" is in fact better understood as "archetypes". Yes, gender roles are somewhat fluid, but to a far lesser degree than we've come to believe (based not on hard science either, but instead on purely theoretical fields like gender studies, which I'm personally certain to be as close to "fake science" as official academia has ever gotten - and this is not just my opinion. There's an academic war being waged right now between clinical / evolutionary psychologists and the genderbenders as we speak). If you want a relationship between a man and a woman to be stable long-term, firstly, it's absolutely not "fun and games". Committed relationships take sacrifice and investment on both partners' end, in addition to certain specific personal traits, and are largely incompatible with the libertine and egotistical way we've come to raise young people of both genders. I can observe that those couples who have it easiest in this difficult process (I keep over-generalizing things for the sake of arguments. Yes, there are many outliers and exceptions to all of this) generally feature a rather traditionally masculine man, and a rather traditionally feminine (indeed, to some degree this means submissive) woman. So perhaps these are not social stereotypes, but rather biological archetypes we ought, if not aspire to, at least treat with some respect. For a funky pop-culture reference, see Lenny Kravitz's "American Woman"  Just think about your grandparents. I'm willing to bet they fit those boxes, and there's a high chance they've spent their entire life together and your parents have had a relatively harmonious and safe two-parental home to be raised in - a paramount privilege in life, and one we should strive to preserve as a society. Whether or not they were "happy" throughout this stretch is besides the point. Happiness is a relatively childish and vastly overrated existential category (certainly, chasing happiness, especially the capitalist-driven social-media-ego 'feelgood' happiness of our age hardly works for anyone, and is one of the major factors of depression and anxiety). What matters is whether they led a fulfilling family life and created a tightly knit functioning micro-society with familial patterns that can reciprocate throughout time, which strikes me as one of the great "quests" in life whose realization brings profound lasting satisfaction, i.e. the real type of "happiness". On September 08 2017 02:47 crms wrote: Could you please explain this 'simple biology'? As someone who went to school for evolutionary biology & anthropology I have no clue what you're talking about. The sexual escapades of women and how that is viewed is entirely socially constructed. You can see how females leverage promiscuity in a multitude of ways across a diverse amount of species including some of our closest living relatives like the bonobos. So unless you think human sexual activity is biologically unique, there is nothing biologically significant related to how many dudes a chick wants to bang and how fit that makes her. I'm not sure you are correct at all? Social constructivism as it applies to gender has been thoroughly disproven by now, and is absolutely dead in the water when it comes to hard science. Look up the Swedish studies on gender interests and inclinations, and how these express themselves once the societal factors have been equalized. They are very large, long-term, repeated and well cited studies that clearly show once you equalize the playing field, differences between men and women grow bigger rather than smaller, which can only be attributed to biological factors and flushes the entire social constructivist hypothesis down the toilet. Yes, I know 'gender studies' claim exactly the opposite is true, but the academic merits of this particular field are absolutely atrocious (non-repeateble "experiments", zero citations, idiot instruments such as "autoethnography", tremendous cherry-picking and distortion of facts, we can go on for a while). Also, as far as I know, human females are extremely choosy partners compared to the "other" great apes? Chimpanzee and bonobo females will mate with any male that isn't physically prevented from boning them by the other males (talk about sex positive lol). In humans, the females pick their own mates selectively, based largely on their (perceived) socio-economic status, and this is posited to be the driver behind the entire competence hierarchy & arising competition among men. Basically, female sexual selection is the primary motor of inter-male competition? We call this "hypergamy" - the propensity of human females to mate up and across dominance hierarchies, and the connected programming of men to want to climb those hierarchies in order to impress women. I know of no historical case where human females would leverage their promiscuity in any way? Can you name an example, apart from those few extremely exotic matriarchal societies where everyone parents children together? | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
Somewhere in the southern California city of Anaheim, less than five miles from Disneyland, three-porta potties – two pink, one gray – are locked in a city storage facility. It’s not where they’re supposed to be. They were meant for a dusty homeless encampment that sprawls along the west bank of the Santa Ana River, and is home to hundreds of men, women and children in tents and other makeshift shelters. But the toilets are sitting unused after being confiscated by the city, and the residents have nowhere to relieve themselves except in the bushes, or in buckets, or in the cramped privacy of their own tents. Activists are up in arms over the primitive conditions in which camp inhabitants are living, and which, in their view, the local government appears to have sanctioned. “This is a public health crisis for the homeless community,” said Mohammed Aly, a homeless advocate and lawyer who helped install the toilets. Not least it was a case, he said, of providing people with simple human dignity. Aly pointed to a recent Hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego as an example of what could happen if local leaders don’t take swift action. Fifteen people have died and hundreds more have been infected, most of them homeless, in a city where 24-hour restrooms are lacking and one of the best defenses against the disease is hand-washing. Even as the outbreak dragged on, San Diego was slow to provide temporary sinks. The closest public toilet to the Anaheim camp is over a mile upriver from where many riverbed residents live. So when the porta-potties arrived in May, after being purchased and delivered by local activist groups, they were a welcome alternative to walking half an hour or more to use the bathroom, or taking the more popular route of relieving oneself in a bucket and dumping the refuse in the riverbed. But just 72 hours after the toilets were installed, there was bad news: the council of wealthy Orange County insisted the porta-potties be removed from their land, saying their presence was unauthorized. Aly subsequently moved them about 300 yards, out of the county’s jurisdiction, and onto city land. That lasted a week, until the city, too, ordered them removed, citing local ordinances regulating the installation of porta-potties. When Aly and other activists didn’t remove the toilets themselves, the city government confiscated them, and took them into storage. At a city council meeting at the end of August, the toilet issue sparked several hours of vociferous debate and public comment, and one homeless advocate held up a bag of what reportedly appeared to be feces, asking onlookers “What do you do with this on a daily basis?” But the meeting concluded with council members deciding to take no action on the toilets, punting the issue back to the county. The city says it prefers to take a long-term view of resolving the situation rather than investing resources in short-term needs. A local nonprofit recently received a $720,000 county contract to provide services and outreach to the community, and perhaps install bathrooms and showers, while pursuing the end goal of dismantling the encampment altogether. Even so, city and county officials seem reluctant to make too many accommodations for the riverbed residents, worried this will further entrench the encampment. “This is part of a bigger issue, and the bigger issue is helping people off the riverbed,” said city spokesperson Mike Lyster. Many in the encampment are unable to work because of disabilities or mental illness. Others are simply unable to keep up with the cost of living in Anaheim. Disneyland is its number-one employer, and recent protests excoriated the company for paying wages so low that some of its employees ended up homeless, and slammed the city over its homeless policies. Source | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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SoSexy
Italy3725 Posts
How retarded can you be to support something like that? | ||
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Artisreal
Germany9235 Posts
I personally would prefer the name Donaldus Destroysus to be honest. | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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FueledUpAndReadyToGo
Netherlands30548 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
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