Trump is being pulled in too many different directions to the point where nothing coherent is going to emerge from his strategies (or lack of). You can't promise Wall Street/Corporate America the moon and keep the economy running along nicely while rounding up and deporting immigrants, cutting federal spending, and implementing regressive taxes via tariffs. If he would have just limited himself to the goal of balancing trade while maintaining reserve currency status, I think that he would have had a shot to pull it off. But there is the very real risk that the rest of the world just starts routing around the US so even that is not a given. But when you combine this with all the other things he is trying to do, I think he is seriously risking sending the U.S. economy off a very tall cliff. That is also why he probably is so obsessed with lower interest rates. It is an attempt to try and jolt the economy before all the head winds from his policies start to have an impact.
Because how could the Democrats be certain that the Republicans wouldn't just use the same accounting trick again the next time that they wanted to pass tax cuts via reconciliation (which would effectively let them double count the "savings"). The Republicans have shown very little good faith in bipartisan efforts over the last decade and a half (as just one example, all the R's who voted against the IRA only to then campaign on the achievements of the bill later in the year).
So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
The democrats were elected to undo the damage caused in Trump's first term. And they let the damage start and happen on their watch, because.. according to you, for the sake of political benefit while ordinary people suffered and are still suffering from losing and not getting jobs. They will probably do the same again if they're elected, intentionally keep things broken for political gains. It's sad to see people support and encourage such behavior.
Perhaps OP can clarify, because I too read that as a snarky dig. Perhaps that wasn't their intention, but it felt off. The only place I saw a "subtle suggestion" for a donation was by clicking the "Support" link all the way at the bottom of the page. The site has probably the least intrusive monetization scheme one could implement without forgoing it entirely.
Same here, after reading this I looked into multiple sites and articles and I only find that "Support" link in the footer. Maybe they changed things recently?
We are at the tail end of a 50 year bull run powered by declining interest rates. Maybe ZIRP is the new normal and private industry R&D investment stays high, but I don't think we should gamble our status as an economic, scientific, and technological powerhouse on that and gut our government financed R&D programs.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
These organizations consist of political appointees and civil servants. It is customary to replace all of the political appointees. Civil servants however have a lot of job protections and can only be fired for a limited set of reasons. Typically, a new administration would appoint new political appointees to the various departments (many of whom need to be confirmed by the Senate) and those appointees would then exert their influence on the department by shifting priorities around and they could even alter the hiring process to target more "aligned" individuals for the open civil servant roles. But they cannot just do a wholesale house cleaning. The high level purpose and the budget/size of the organization is determined by Congress and the political appointees are constrained by that.
So this is in fact very different from how things normally work.
Passing laws to make it harder to vote, and easier to challenge a persons voter registration and ballot, and then running an operative campaign to specifically target voters on the other side of the political spectrum is a bit different than "just politics". Legal, sure. Ethical, moral, fair, absolutely not.
Eh, it’s all politics. I’m sure they are trying to win however they can, don’t sit there and be so naive to think the other side wouldn’t be perfectly happy to let illegal immigrants vote if it benefited them.
I’m all for fairness. For example I think we should weight votes, where everyone gets one vote for each dollar of taxes they pay.
I also want to see all landlords structure rental contracts so that the renter pays the property taxes, if rent was 2k a month but there are $500 in property taxes a month, rent would become $1500 plus $500 property taxes. That way the immediate effects of voting for tax increases is felt acutely and their blame can go on themselves instead of their “greedy landlord”.
> I’m all for fairness. For example I think we should weight votes, where everyone gets one vote for each dollar of taxes they pay.
You are joking right? Honest, question, what life experiences have you had that make you think that this would be a good idea. It would effectively mean a handful of billionaires would control the country.
> I also want to see all landlords structure rental contracts so that the renter pays the property taxes
It is a free market. Outside of a handful of places with rent control, nothing is stopping them from doing that. And if you think splitting out property taxes as a separate line item will somehow make tenants think that landlords, the vast majority of whom increase their rents to the absolute maximum that the market will bear, are somehow not greedy, I think you have a pretty bad handle on what it is like to be in the renter class.
> It would effectively mean a handful of billionaires would control the country.
Is that not what we have already. Do you really think your vote matters?
I don’t think my tenants ever thought I was greedy. And I don’t think a vast majority of landlords who aren’t some big corporation are. Though people will think they are regardless, so just want them to sure the accusation of greed with that of the bureaucrats, and the public schools who simply flush money down the toilet.
I think if landlords structured rental contracts that way (and maybe give a $50 discount if you choose that option), you will see a huge amount of school levies fail which is a net win for society.
> Is that not what we have already. Do you really think your vote matters?
At least in the current setup, they are required to maintain and fund a vast propaganda apparatus, lobbying efforts, and political organizations in order to secure their power. And even with all that effort, they still only have a tenuous control over our institutions. Your proposal would literally just hand the keys over to them.
> I don’t think my tenants ever thought I was greedy
As a lifelong renter, who has for the most part had relatively good relationships with my landlords over the years, I can assure you that they do. At the very least, they probably don't have a very positive opinion of you, even if they are nice to you in person. After decades of financialization of our housing market, we now have an entire swath of our population locked out of the housing market. And if you think these folks like handing over a significant chunk of their income each month to a bunch of rent-seekers, I think you are solely mistaken.
So when I kept guy in the detached studio as a tenant when I bought the house, and just kept his rent what he was paying already and didn’t raise his rent over the 4 years I had the place, when I could’ve easily gotten 30% more in the market, he still thought I was greedy?
Or when I liked the idea of just giving him every December free for Christmas he thought I was greedy.
Or when he asked if he could pay half rent and then two weeks later pay the other half cuz his baby mama got arrested and he had to take care of his daughter and instead I just said why not just have a free month, he thought I was greedy.
Dang, I guess I should’ve just gotten all the money I could’ve if tenants feel that way regardless.
And a similar rule that at least one person will defend Russia, regardless of how truthful the accusations are. And in this particular case, NK troops fighting in a land war in Europe at Russia's side is a major geopolitical shift, whether you agree or not.
It’s a big shift, but from a NK/SK standpoint probably the bigger issue is what exactly NK got in exchange for the massive ammunition deliveries and the tens of thousands of troops they sent to die in Ukraine.
Whatever it is, it must be pretty big, perhaps advanced missile technology, maybe even new types of nuclear weapons. Either way it’s bound to significantly change the balance of power on the Korean Peninsula.
How about just basic energy inputs like fuel and fertilizer? This is a country that is so abysmally poor the state has a feces collection quota. Peasants must collect their daily dumps and give them to the state for use in the field or suffer the wrath of the local DPRK gangster.[0]
Perhaps that could have been true for the shipments of shells, but I can't see NK sending tens of thousands of troops to a meatgrinder that they have absolutely no stake in just for some fertilizer and oil. NK has the ability to demand much more strategic things and I'd be virtually certain that they have.
At this point it seems pretty likely tbh. Putin signed a new mutual pact with Kim earlier this year. There are videos of North Korean men receiving Russian military uniforms and signing forms in Sergeyevka. The US, Ukraine, NATO, and South Korea are all reporting incidences of North Koreans fighting and dying in the Kursk region. Putin has given wishy washy statements like "how we utilise the mutual pact is our business".
Have you tried making a "todo SPA" of your own with the help of these AI tools? I think it is useful for folks to take a step back and try working on something simpler/easier as an intro to these AI tools. And then ramp up the complexity/difficulty from there. When the tools don't work, it can be extremely frustrating. But when they do work, they really do enhance productivity. But it takes a little bit of time to figure out where that boundary is, and it also takes a little time to figure out how much effort to put into using the tool when you are near that boundary. i.e. sometimes I know the AI tools can help me, but the amount of effort I need to put into writing the prompt is not worth the help that I will get. And other times, I know that no amount of prompting is going to get me back something useful.
What is the point of “ramping up” though? You don’t learn much about how to prompt in the process, you just get worse results. So now I have my useless todo and ramp up to my code and it falls face first in the mud in the next sentence. I can chew up everything for it and explain where it’s wrong or re-prompt with clarifications, but the problem is, I write code faster than that and with less frustration, cause it’s at least deterministic. And I’m neither a rockstar developer nor too smart.
What I would like from LLMs is a developer’s buddy. A chat that sits aside and ai-lints my sources and the current location, suggesting ideas, reminding of potential issues, etc. So I could dismiss or take note of its tips in a few clicks. I don’t think anyone built that yet.
Look up welfare trap. Many benefit programs are implemented such that they go away the second you start working. This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare. Even if Y>X, it often makes sense to stay on welfare because you might have to start paying for child care, or buy a second car to get to work, etc...
> You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive.
Modern society has put significant constraints on how I can pursue survival. I can't just go and fish in the ocean, because there are regulations on how and what I can catch. I can't just go and farm a little piece of land because almost all land is owned by someone or something. Of the many reasons I think UBI is a good idea, a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society. I think fishing regulations are good thing, but they also curtail my ability to subsist, so I think UBI is a good compensation for that.
> This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare.
Yes, sure, but this applies to UBI as well. If Y is not worth my time actually doing the work, after you pay for that card and child care, would I bother? Is UBI a comfortable life, or is it bare minimum to live?
>a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society.
I don't mind this argument, but lets remember that in order to assert your natural rights you need to actually work. If you were allowed to fish and hunt, you would have go out and do it. UBI suggests you can just do nothing and be handed a living.
I would much prefer we provide unemployment or disability to anybody who wants it because I want to live in a compassionate and caring society, but we don't have to call it a UBI, give it to everybody, and turn the world on its head.
Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
It does not. THE primary difference between UBI and unemployment is that UBI does not disappear once you are unemployed. So in my hypothetical scenario above, the person would be making Y+X. Assuming UBI is paid for via income taxes, and that those income taxes are applied progressively, at some point up the income ladder you will be paying more in taxes than you receive in UBI, but at the lower income scales it is all accretive making for a strong incentive to work.
> Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
I think we should have a UBI and then combine that with eliminating the minimum wage. Maybe we limit that to just nonprofits, but the goal would be to make it easier to pay people to do work that is currently not incentivized in our current economy. For example, near me, I volunteer for beach cleanups and at the community garden. These groups are well funded, but they need to rely on volunteers because the minimum wage near me is over $17 and the operations are very labor intensive. If you have a UBI, the idea of paying people a few bucks an hour to clean the beach becomes much more palatable. Right now, we need to try to strong arm companies into paying livable wages, but there is only so much economic activity that is profitable at those levels. A UBI that provides very basic subsistence (we are talking squalor levels of assistance, FYI), combined with reducing barriers to employment would go a long way towards resolving some major ills in our current economy.
With UBI, the job effectively pays more, and the incentives to take it are stronger.
A hypothetical example with arbitrary numbers:
You get $20k/year in benefits. You are offered a job that pays $30k/year, but then you have to pay $5k in taxes and you lose the benefits. The job would effectively pay you $2.5/hour after taxes, which is not very attractive.
With UBI, you get to keep the benefits, but you pay a 40% tax for all earned income. Your after-tax income would be $38k/year, and your effective wage would be $9/hour after taxes. Still not very good but much better than the $2.5/hour.
Yes. Moreover, all prices will jump 3-100x, so UBI will be useless anyway: you must go to work or die in poverty. UBI is also known as "true socialism".
If UBI is revenue neutral, whether by increasing taxes or cutting other programs or some combination of both, then it would not increase inflation. You should brush up on your macroeconomics.
Any income, that is not backed up by a product or service, changes the equilibrium, thus accelerates inflation. I saw this multiple times already in my own country.
