US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1744

On August 09 2019 23:50 farvacola wrote:

Not only are soybeans a surplus good here, they are a crucial bumper crop that farmers rely on given its relatively flexible growing season and high yield/low cost.

On August 09 2019 12:00 IgnE wrote:
i mean you would admit, farv, that it does seem a little difficult to defend the idea that people having $12k more a year makes them worse off without sounding paternalistic. why raise the minimum wage if that were strictly true?

i get the feeling that ultimately objectors to UBI, even progressives, are tied to an accounting logic: UBI is not as effective per dollar as targeted solutions. it puts us all in good company with the effective altruists, where we can be unabashed in our paternalism

On August 09 2019 23:50 Liquid`Drone wrote:
The environmentalist/leftist opposition to trump has very little to do with trade wars. Leftists generally aren't opposed to protectionism (the people talking negatively about the trade wars are generally capitalists who are slightly to the left of the current republican party), and environmentalists oppose him because he claims that man made climate change (or even climate change?) isn't real and because he wants to increase/accelerate earthly exploitation.

If Trump had a radical environmentalist agenda where he wanted to stop globalization to lower emissions caused by transportation (and also decrease consumption altogether), there would be very little backlash to that aspect of his policies from leftists or green voters. But that does not make up even the tiniest fraction of his argument, so it's irrelevant.

On August 10 2019 00:11 KwarK wrote:

I think basically everyone has a vested interest in trade. Trade is a foundation upon which peace has been built in the modern era. China and Japan, for example, still have a lot of distrust, rivalry, and bad blood but they also need each other. The European Coal and Steel Community was explicitly created to achieve peace through trade and it has been an unqualified success.

Humans are inherently pretty dickish about other tribes but we’re also pretty greedy. It becomes a lot less appealing to bomb people when you’re trying to sell something to those people.

On August 10 2019 01:25 Mohdoo wrote:
I feel like a lot of people who complain about stuff being untested or way too new haven't worked in actual development. Stuff being shitty at first is always true. It is amazingly uncommon for some group of people to fix major issues with a quick, easy fix. Often times you gotta start with something new, which is a total mess at first, but rapidly improves, then starts to improve more slowly...then refinement...more refinement...more refinement...annnnnd...good enough.

The world is plain and simply full of low-ambition cowards with no idea what it takes to make the world better. They weren't there when people were developing vaccines or electricity or any of these wonderful things we have today. They are a bunch of mediocre...people... who do nothing but exist in the world and reap a load of benefits they've done nothing to deserve. All they can think to do is say "but that won't work amazingly at first, lets just keep rotting in our own filth instead".

"Why try to make a sewage system with all these leaks and problems when I can just shit in a hole outside?"

On August 10 2019 01:31 JimmiC wrote:
Very true, the bar shouldn't be perfection it should be does it make things better. If it does great do it and then continue to try to improve.

It is very easy to point out what is wrong or what could go wrong. It is much harder to come up with an actual solution and then deal with the questions and critiques.

On August 10 2019 01:05 RvB wrote:

You're calling Yang economically illiterate and in the same post advocate for rent control and public banking. He actually has some of the more sane economic policies (carbon tax, relaxing zoning laws and implementing a VAT).

On August 10 2019 00:41 Liquid`Drone wrote:


I don't disagree with any of this and I generally find myself a bit more pro-free trade than most of my comparably leftist friends. But I'm also pretty staunchly in the 'we all need to consume less' anticapitalism-camp - which I see as opposed to the 'free trade gives cheap goods to the consumers while providing jobs to people in poorer countries increasing living standards for all'-camp (even if I also agree with the descriptive statement I just made about that group).

Basically I think it's really difficult to balance environmental needs and causes (that I think trump everything in importance) with increasing living standards of the world's poorest 50% (which I think basically trumps everything other than the environment) and there's also some selfish 'I'm Norwegian so I want Norway to thrive' in there (which again is in conflict with both aforementioned goals as our obscene wealth is derived from harvesting resources that happened to be located in the sea outside my country and the harvest of which ruins the environment which is gonna most negatively affect those poorest 50% that I want to help). But this latter makes leftist Norwegians go 'we need to preserve local food production - that's one thing we cannot depend on the rest of the world for - but we also want to maintain some degree of animal welfare and decent worker rights, meaning that other countries that care less about these two will be able to produce far less expensive food - which means some tariffs need to be in place for the Norwegian consumer being willing to choose Norwegian-produced food which is a necessity for the preservation of Norwegian food producers.

I think trade wars are dumb as hell, if that's not clear. But I also think there are real reasons why a country might want to impose tariffs to protect local industry / worker rights - and I also think free trade goes hand in hand with a capitalistic pro-consumption society which I think we need to distance ourselves from. I don't see that transition as a particularly fun one to live through, however. And while Trump's reasons for engaging in a trade war has like, some tiny overlap with leftists in the 'protect local industry' part, every other argument he tries to articulate does not resonate at all with mainstream leftists reasons for being negative towards free trade.

Frankly, I also think some leftist opposition to 'free trade' is a relic from cold war opposition to IMF affixing economic aid with liberalization of economy (in a way that forced countries to liberalize their worker/property laws in ways that western workers/politicians would never have accepted), but I'm basing that on a collection of tidbits of information, I've never really delved into that myself.

On August 09 2019 21:51 Pangpootata wrote:


Healing crystals and homeopathy do absolutely nothing physically but they make people feel good mentally and give them peace of mind, increasing their psychological well-being and overall quality of life. Is that really different from the effects of listing to music, watching movies, etc?



Milton Friedman advocated removing all social welfare and replacing it with a negative income tax (paying people proportionately based on how much their income is below a predefined level of income). Currently the US government spends about 18k a year per person on welfare including overhead costs for welfare programs. Do they get 18k worth of value? Perhaps most poor people know how to help themselves better than "experts", although there will definitely be a few exceptions.

On August 10 2019 01:43 brian wrote:



i wager you probably aren’t talking code development per se, but on the flip side of this you have the adage ‘i can save hours of planning with weeks of development.’

i work in IT development, we don’t release things to production or for public consumption if it isn’t passing our tests so idk, this generally doesn’t resonate. if it is shitty, nobody outside development sees it because it gets tossed. the steps you describe certainly
happen, but we don’t use the production// the general public as our testing ground.

A judge has barred the Trump administration from withholding public safety grants from the state and the city of Portland over Oregon’s sanctuary law that directs police not to help federal agents enforce immigration policies.

U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane also said the federal government can’t impose immigration-related conditions on the grant awards.

McShane, who is seated in Eugene, issued his 44-page decision late Wednesday in a case brought in November by Gov. Kate Brown, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and the city against President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

He found that two federal statutes unconstitutionally ban local and state governments and agencies from enacting laws or policies that limit communication with federal officials about immigration or someone’s citizenship status.

McShane ruled the statutes, identified as Sections 1373 and 1644 of the federal code, violate the 10th Amendment, which says any power not expressly given to the federal government falls to the states or their people.

Since 2017, the federal government has placed restrictions on Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance grants, known as JAG. The grants provide money to states, cities, counties and tribes for criminal justice personnel, training and equipment.

The conditions say the grant recipients must allow immigration agents access to prisons or jails , must give advance notice to federal officials when prisoners wanted on immigration detainers are to be released, and must certify that they’re complying with the federal statutes.

But McShane said Oregon and Portland “would, under any of these circumstances, risk public safety by eroding trust with immigrant communities or abandoning critical law enforcement initiatives funded by the Byrne JAG Program.”

He granted a permanent injunction and ordered the federal government to give the grants to Oregon for fiscal 2017 and 2018 that it withheld, with no conditions or penalties – a total of almost $5 million.

“The President of the United States and his Attorney General seek to advance their policy priorities by pressuring states and localities to comply with two immigration-related laws and by withholding federal funds from jurisdictions which refuse to assist immigration authorities,’”the judge noted.

McShane agreed with lawyers for the state and city, who argued the federal statutes are “unconstitutional intrusions upon their legislative independence” and that the funding conditions are contrary to the intent of Congress.

“Instances when the Attorney General may ‘withhold or re-allocate’ Byrne JAG funds were carefully delineated by Congress. When Congress wanted grantees to engage in or refrain from certain types of conduct — even information sharing — it provided for specific and measured penalties,” the judge wrote. “If Congress had shared the same concerns about grantees disclosing immigration-related information, it could have enacted analogous penalties. But it did not.’’

The state had expected to receive $2,034,945 from the grants for 2017 and $2,092,704 for 2018, while Portland expected to receive $385,515 for 2017 and $391,694 for 2018.

But the state didn’t receive notice of the grant awards for either year until last month because the U.S. Justice Department expressed concerns about the state’s sanctuary law. The state law bars local law enforcement from helping federal officials identify or detain anyone solely for violating immigration law.

Although the Justice Department made the money available to the state in July, the state can’t accept or draw from the money without risking penalties due to the sanctuary law, according to court records.

The city of Portland received its 2017 award last October but has yet to receive its 2018 award. It also would risk penalties if it accepted and used the money.

The Trump administration argued that the Justice Department’s pressure on states and municipalities to repeal their allegedly incompatible laws and policies “are essential to a properly functioning system of federal immigration laws,’’ according to court records.

Until 2017, the state had received the federal grants annually since the program’s creation in 2005, using more than $26 million to support programs for mental health treatment, technology improvement and drug treatment and enforcement. The state would like to use the 2017 and 2018 money to support specialty courts for drugs crimes or mental health cases or nonviolent felony offenders as well as to provide assistance to local crime victims.

Portland also had received the money every year until 2017, using it to buy bulletproof vests and special-threat plates for officers, acquire tactical medical kits, install GPS systems in its cars and add two victim advocates to the Police Bureau’s sex crimes unit. The city also has distributed some of the money to Multnomah County and Gresham to support a neighborhood prosecutor or an additional probation/parole officer.

McShane’s ruling mirrors similar ones by federal judges elsewhere in the country.

In December, for example, a federal judge in New York issued a permanent injunction barring immigration conditions on the grants for New York state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, Washington, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York City. Last October, a federal judge in California also ruled that the grant conditions were unconstitutional.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled a year ago that Trump’s order to withhold federal grant money based on state sanctuary laws violates separation of power principles that gave spending power to Congress. But the same appeals court ruled last month in favor of the Trump administration’s immigration conditions for other federal police grants.

-- Maxine Bernstein

On August 09 2019 22:44 farvacola wrote:
Its both the dual party problem and the lack of proportional representation, fixing those would definitely open up the field in a way the US desperately needs.