US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3771

On September 02 2022 23:00 JimmiC wrote:

Then why do they have value?

On September 02 2022 23:42 JimmiC wrote:
Some good news I had missed. Sarah Palin lost in Alaska! Her opponent a democrat had run on a profish agenda. She is of course calling a scam and blah blah, because that is what Republicans do when they lose now. Side note is that what Republicans are teaching their kids for sports, games and so on? That if you lose just claim you won, call the other side cheaters and so on?

Anyway great to see and awful person who is full of lies lose. Maybe people are actually getting sick of all the drama and blatant lies, probably not but here is hoping! A big win for ranked voting. Gets the extremists out.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/sarah-palins-election-loss-sen-142451494.html

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
You're vastly underthinking, comparing national finance to personal fiance is silly at best and deeply embarrassing in general. The people who tell you something about "balance the budget" or "run government like a business" or "kitchen table economics" don't like you and want you to look dumb. Cutting taxes and increasing spending is dumb I agree, would you like to hear what party likes to do that the most and does it every time they're in power?

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Trying to cover your shell game of responsibility and credit with the "political football" comments are hilarious in retrospect. trying to "both sides" before instantly saying how the other side theoretically would have been worse isn't how arguments work. You can't just undermine yourself like this and hope people are persuaded. You even abandon your position and accept that trump was at fault for poorly running the program, and refusing to prosecute fraud like he should.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
I think student loans should be discharged in bankruptcy so I'm glad we agree?

Making loans dischargeable is hilariously a much larger amount of debt forgiveness than what biden gave us, thats just silly why would that make any sense to you.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
You don't know people with student loans if you think that they aren't in bankruptcy. Its really weird to use that argument that you can't be in bankruptcy with student loans while acknowledging that student loans can't be resolved through bankruptcy, then argue acknowledge medical debt isn't as bad and is much cheaper to forgive because it can be discharged through bankruptcy. Aggressively agreeing with me that student loans wouldn't be as much of a problem if they were dischargeable through bankruptcy and therefore is different then medical debt is weirder.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Then you offer a bizarre solution for no problem, if student loans automatically allowed people to have the bright futures they were promised when they took them out they would be able to pay them off and student loans wouldn't be so high. Then you say people should go into bankrupcy if they have crippling medical debt, which they already do.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Yale is a non profit research university. Simply stating that they have more administrators for their mission doesn't explain how thats bloat. Again the people who tell you "fire administrative bloat" don't respect you enough to explain any real issue to you and want to satisfy you with a buzzword that makes no sense if you thought about it for a moment. "delete administration" isn't a solution, you do realize that they made those jobs because they have stuff for them to do? Do you automatically assume people are incompetent at a job because they have that job? Do you assume they don't have degrees or PHD's of their own?

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Like I don't know who told you again that the only job that a university does is education but again they don't respect you to explain anything about universities, you should stop listening to these people. If someone told me the solution to a problem was to fire people who are doing a job and replace them with the exact same people you would hire for the job I wouldn't listen to them anymore.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Not understanding the job Nurses have in healthcare is just another example of this. A doctor isn't needed for the majority of what healthcare actually is. Increasing the supply of doctors when they aren't being hired. The unemployment rate for doctors
is reported at 6% and the gap between applications and positions increases every year. Nurses of various levels do most of the work at a hospital and the doctors are just the ones giving instructions to their nurses.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
I mean you are a "political footballer" but go on tell me how you're not angry at "Brandon" (we know you want to say fuck joe biden you can just do it) One of your suggestions was to tie it to income and that was something that the order did. You wouldn't have suggested if if you knew it was already apart of student loans and was helped by biden.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
I mean thats not how bankruptcy works but okay. You get it moved off your record in 5 years which you would know if you've ever known anyone to go through it. Useing the example of medical debt being lower because its absolveable through bankruptcy vs student loans being much higher when it can't works pretty good. I mean they would if their degree suddenly became inevitable for technological reasons or changes in the economy. Thats a pretty simple reason but okay.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Again perverting education to make it only about how economically viable it is is pretty disgusting but its much worse to get the idea that K-12 is enough to equip someone in modern times when so many jobs require advanced education. We know which side wants K-12 to get worse and they don't want it to be public anymore. We know college education and technical education is needed for every job good enough to not be a wage slave. We figured out colleges for training people were good well over a thousand years ago. I get being a reactionary makes sense for some people but going back a thousand years is a bit much to take seriously.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
At last at the end of this bit you reveal you have no idea how student loans work in the slightest by making arguments about "lenders being more cautious about giving out loans". The government issues these loans without looking at anything at all right now if you don't make enough money to just pay it off from your parents in cash. They're 100% predatory and irresponsible already thats the whole system. Trying to shoe-in perverted phrases like "universities to reconsider the value proposition of their product" shows a staggering level of ignorance on the entire system.

Honest to god what did you think the experience for someone getting a student loan was?

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
If you can't execute people because of an executive order (you can and presidents do it all the time) then the classification system isn't based on executive power. People have been executed for sharing classified information. Trying to play a shell game that its from congress reveals that the classification system is based on legislative power and not executive, meaning trump can't declassify things on a whim without going through any system other then his mind powers. The president can have people shot, blown up, or have a missle with blades attached to it to kill people. I don't know who told you they don't but also I don't know who told you that laws written by congress were also invented by executive decree. Theres a massive gap there that you don't explain.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:

Yes thats what treason is called they've killed a lot of people for it long before trump. I actually quoted you for this line. Its a pretty simple system of sharing state secrets that get people killed should be treated as having the responsibility of getting people killed, due to your direct actions that led them to be killed. Making a system that isn't arbitrary is the literal cornerstone of justice. I can understand manning getting a life sentence at a fed supermax instead of the death penalty but its still a capital crime that lots of people have been executed for.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
In 2016 they influenced the election by saying less than a week before the election that they were investigating Hillary for capital treason, only to find nothing new and not elaborating further. The labtop story is the most hilariously poorly organized conspiracy I've ever seen. Stonewalling an investigation into something that has no proof it is legit and follows no chain of evidence, meaning that its wildly ilrelevent to any prosecution, is just being normal. Russian agents spreading that information like it was at all any relevant to his father wasn't influencing the election. We have solid evidence of russian disinformation campaigns I don't know what cognitive dissonance the labtop gives to trumpers but there's no juice there at all.

Futher more unlike trump Hunter biden is no where near the white house and didn't get a job in the inner circle or security clearance given to them by their father.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
The idea that people with student debt don't need help is wrong and your opinion but projecting it like its a fact is just silly. The idea that it can't be given to other groups when the other party gave it to groups that really didn't need 4 times that is wildly dishonest.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
The idea that the people whos student loans were forgiven weren't also going to pay for the student loan forgiveness through increased taxes from being better off economically as a result is wrong but also bizzare that you would swallow without an issue and have such confidence to say it out in public.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
The economic stimulus that proportionately heavily favors the poor isn't fiscally irresponsible isn't voting buying and is vote buying when you decide to make it look like you're cutting a personal check to people instead of the thing that has been done many times in the past are not contradictory statements. The difference is when trump did something different.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
Adding in that women medical debt being different from normal medical debt is just your sexism showing but its pretty funny that republicans want women to have more medical debt due to the complications and death from forced birth policies even when its medically enviable, yet you now want to complain that debt would be a whole worse thing to forgive.

On September 02 2022 03:40 Sermokala wrote:
I would love to see any information you have on how much they're telling you the border wall would cost to build that would totally be effective and how much it would cost to maintain it. I beg you if you respond to nothing else please tell me where you get the numbers on how much it would cost, specifically including the mountainous sections and not just the less than 20 miles of new wall that cost billions already.

On September 03 2022 06:36 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I gotta admit that when you said Yale had more admins than students I couldn't believe that was true. Seems like it isn't, fully - they have slightly more admins than undergraduates, but the total student body is more than twice that.

That said - I think a 2.4:1 ratio also sounds completely bonkers and it's hard for me to understand the necessity for that. The university in Trondheim has about 40000 students and 7700 employees - but more than 5000 of those teach or research (or both) - and while I don't have the exact numbers, it seems like there are about 1800 admins for 40k+ students. I think even that sounds like a lot - and the discussion of administrative bloat is actually slightly present here, too. Imo, it's also a well run university - I always got the help I needed whenever I needed it, even if I had pretty weird/rare requests when I studied there.

I really, genuinely, don't understand why 4700 undergrads and 7,357 graduate students need more than 5000 administrators to handle their needs.

On September 03 2022 05:23 oBlade wrote:

Both?


I have no idea what most of this means except again, the CARES Act was a bipartisan act of Congress, and that the fraud under the PPP loan programs was merely one aspect of that law, and that much of the handouts, pork, and frankly thievery happened elsewhere in itemized parts of the law that were simply given as grants, like the airline bailout which I believe you are the one who mentioned earlier, except hundreds and hundreds more smaller cases of that. So getting worked up at me over Trump "refusing to prosecute fraud," first of all, if you pass a law that explicitly gives someone money, no questions asked, I don't see the basis to prosecute them for taking it.


You literally just said

So I'm about to move on from being gaslit unless you can figure out what you believe before tricking my eyes into the volunteer work of doing it myself.

The key difference is if ordinary bankruptcy (it does happen once in a while that someone can discharge their student loans in bankruptcy), discharging debt means it disappears, it just stops existing, the obligation is erased. "Forgiving" debt without plausible justification by executive order (illegal) or law (legal, but stupid) means Joe Blow or his children get to foot the bill, because Uncle Sam covers the tab. This is why every time you see Peter Doocy ask the press secretary how much this will cost, and she says she doesn't know, but it's paid for, that's what she means. It goes on that national debt that there's no reason to worry about because countries aren't households as you say.


I submit you may have missed where this came from, because that's not what I said.
I said make student loans forgivable in bankruptcy.
-You said that'd be stupid, it would be much more than Biden's $10k per person.
I said, can you support that with evidence, given that you'd have to
1) know the rate of how many people go into bankruptcy, and know the value in student loans that they hold that WOULD GET discharged if that were permitted
2) know how many MORE people would go into bankruptcy DUE TO it becoming possible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, then add these #1 and #2 together and conclude that it's higher than Biden's $10k per person plan.
3) have confused the fact that discharge in bankruptcy stops debt obligations from existing after everything is liquidated to pay whoever you can, with the concept of the federal government paying the bill for student loans they forgive, of which the federal government is the guarantor - which is a fair mistake to make given how unclear this administration has been about their plan, how little transparency is, and the sudden shift from the same party saying what they are doing would be illegal, to suddenly announcing it mere months from an election.

Like what you implied was far more than 30% of student loan debt is held by people who declare bankruptcy. My question is are or would bankruptcy rates be that high. I was actually curious, if you were just making things up then okay whatever~

Did I say people SHOULD go into bankruptcy somewhere? I'm not sure where you get that. Except that it's true that if you suffer crippling debt from student loans, going into bankruptcy is not as recommended as if you suffer crippling medical debt, because the latter can be discharged by bankruptcy whereas the former can't so what would be the point?


I think that the mere existence of something is not evidence of its necessity. Yale's administrative population has increased while their undergraduate population has decreased. Warren Buffett could hire you to make sandcastles for $90k a year, it's not defensible just because you have something to do.

Administrators generally shouldn't be people with phds because they should be out doing actual useful things in their fields; however, it is a sorry state of affairs that the route of administrator in a university after graduating with a nonsense degree from a university is more lucrative than becoming one of a hundred teaching assistant phd candidates fighting for scraps with one available professor position.

I'll bring this up again later but you aren't clear on what you think universities should do. Yet you apparently want the president to be able to force the taxpayer to cover public loans for a private product, not because it's something pure, because it's some kind of sacred education that serves the public good, but also not because it helps people towards financial success which it so often doesn't which is why you think debt relief is a sound policy to begin with?


Has it not occurred to you that there may not be enough positions? Why do my relatives get told to wait 1 or more months for appointments in any civilized country yet alone the greatest in the world?


No sir, I knew it was a part of the president's plan, and I think it is one small part of addressing the multifaceted issue of ballooning university costs and student loan debt. I maintain that it's not the executive's job, but Congress's. Like there's a constitution that covers these things. In unrelated news, what's your problem?


You misunderstood the example. Medical debt is lower BECAUSE THERE IS LESS MEDICAL DEBT HELD BY PEOPLE. It's a simple question:
Let's accept the premise that money is limited, that the federal purse is not infinite, fair enough so far right?
Given this, we can't spend money on everything, choices have to be made. To make choices, should we flip coins and see which public policies we get this year, or try to compare, do a cost-benefit analysis, look at evidence, and do the one which is best.
Now. Given that medical debt is less than student debt held by people.
Why not forgive ALL MEDICAL DEBT, i.e. ALL of a certain kind of debt, instead of something like 20-30% of another kind of debt, which will be at current levels again in 3-4 years anyway?
Are you able to answer this in a plausible way besides the fact that indebted college attendees are MORE LIKELY to vote for the party of the man signing this order, than indebted patients are to vote for him?


Also, as to your fear of degrees becoming "inevitable," one of the issues with college is degrees are not inevitable, many people actually drop out still with crippling loans and little hope.


I am suggesting that K-12 education in the US is not globally competitive. Obviously if you want someone to do something, and you give them a piece of shit, they won't be able to do it well. I am suggesting that part of the solution may in fact be to give them something useful to begin with, rather than use the first piece of shit as a requirement to sell them a second piece of shit with interest.

Many jobs require degrees simply as a matter of course. It is not necessarily the job that requires a degree in the performance of its duties, but the job listing. This is an effect of a job market saturated by degree-bearing imbeciles.

Do you believe public or private universities prepare students for career/life better, or no difference?

Almost NOBODY studied in universities 1000 years ago, when they did, they were younger, and they studied for shorter lengths of time except, coincidentally, for a career track in the academy, which was run by the church. In no country I'm aware of was a university education (or degree, which didn't exist 1000 years ago) a requisite for or predictor of financial success. You didn't need to take out a loan from your feudal lord for possibly several times your expected annual income in order to become a flourishing blacksmith or cobbler. People did apprenticeships. Open a book.

This 1000 years ago thing is extremely lacking. People have been killing their political opponents for many thousands of years more. Must mean we've figured out it's good, right?

The government checks financial need, and there are private student loans too.
You are waffling between knowing the whole system is predatory and the taxpayer should pay for it and college has intrinsic value we have to support but also they have to think about more than just the kind of jobs they can get students qualified for. Not to be annoying but it's hard to trust what you're saying at any given point.


I should have been more clear. You cannot execute American citizens inside America by executive order.

The people who have been executed for espionage, were so condemned by laws, for example the conveniently named ESPIONAGE ACT, written by Congress. I already linked the current order regarding classification which dates from the Obama administration but here it is again. I wish you might do yourself the favor of reading it before talking about it.


You can understand her getting a life sentence instead of the death penalty, okay. I would like you to be more clear to yourself and me. Do you SUPPORT the prosecution of Chelsea Manning and/or Edward Snowden or not, and let me know why they do or do not deserve to share a room with Trump.


1) You can't know if something is legit if you don't investigate it
2) Why was Thibault ejected from the FBI if he did nothing wrong?
3) Why did Thibault want to avoid investigation of the laptop if the son has nothing to do with the father?
4) Why did the FBI pressure social media into quashing the laptop story as election disinformation if the son
5) Do you think, irrespective of any evidence of Hunter selling access to his father as VP and more or pay-to-play, that a federal government agency has the right to decide for the American people whether they get exposed to a story about the potential future President having raised a son who is screwed up enough to document himself committing multiple felonies and not bother picking up his laptop just to get away with it later?


I haven't said that people with student debt don't need help. I've said, or I hope I've said to people who read with a little more disinterested approach, is that not everyone with student debt needs help, or certainly needs the same amount of help. Otherwise, what differentiates student debt from any other kind of debt, again, as I asked, anyone with a mortgage or automobile financing should also "need help" under these standards. Certainly public policies designed to help people should help those who need it in proportion to how much they need it.


Okay Sermokala. You are in a room with 9 other people. Two of them want to be president of the room. Five people want to vote for the first, who is already president, and the other five want to vote for the second. You want to vote for the second. The president of the room declares a Sermokala Forgiveness Program. Each person will give $10 to the president, who will then take the $100 and give it to Sermokala who might want to reconsider his vote.
Did you help pay for the program by being better off?


I couldn't parse this sentence. I have my own run-ons to be fair though.


I don't think forced birth policies are enviable, medically or not, and may I say, sir, it's a damned offensive sight that you think that's pretty funny.

Was a hypothetical you didn't get, but thanks for the flippant accusation of sexism, I always say you can't spell sexism without sexi. The point is forgiving medical debt based on people being in need of relief from medical debt is a universally understandable (though debatable) proposition. While Democrats forgiving medical debt solely for women, or Republicans forgiving medical debt solely for men, or in fact the opposites of these, it doesn't matter who, would plainly be vote buying.


My understanding is that estimates were like $10b-$50b for different kinds of wall and different proposals, and we are suffering some more delicious government waste from the fact that Biden administration, as part of their knee-jerk rejection of anything Trump (like they did for oil and gas leases), stopped construction of what wall there was causing us to end up paying more not to build anything.

On September 03 2022 03:55 Gorsameth wrote:
So can we call this the single greatest theft of classified information in US history?

On September 03 2022 11:21 Sermokala wrote:
For what its worth I think a widespread structural reform to the entire education system is needed. More focus should be put on county to county systems of community colleges and technical schools. Having the first two years of education at low cost CC's or TC's when they are very general and can be standardized much better would make secondary schooling much more available and can be easily justified to be no cost to students. Then having public universities for specialized field specific education for the second two years to focus their missions while justifying their costs due to the careers that they are directed for. Then the highest level of master's programs and research universities can be let wild to continue the important missions that they do.

Its not a bold claim to say that the university of Minnesota has done more for peace between India and Pakistan than nuclear proliferation has.

On September 03 2022 20:38 gobbledydook wrote:


I'm not sure 2 years of specific field instruction is enough to train say, accountants, who normally only require bachelor's degrees.

On September 03 2022 07:53 Acrofales wrote:


It's clearly bonkers. But don't forget that the University of Trondheim doesn't also organize its own housing for most of the students, run a few definitely-not-professional sports teams (and their gigantic stadiums) and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I don't know about. Universities in Europe are almost exclusively centers of teaching and research. There's generally a single sports complex, a few restaurants, a botanical garden, and maybe some limited housing on campus, but anything beyond that is left to the students/faculty to organise themselves. Many university campuses in the US are almost towns unto themselves.