Lurker > red sox 777

1. Impossible to run a campaign without money. If it's taxpayer funded, how do they decide which candidates get the money? If a million people decide to run, there's no way they can all get enough money to be able to run a decent campaign. Our current donation system solves that problem by allowing anyone who can convince people he's a strong candidate to receive their money and campaign.

2. Don't really like it. I don't think the lack of term limits is the problem.

3. No, the problem is: who gets to decide what is related to technology? As Thomas Jefferson argued: Congress has the power to establish a navy. A navy needs ships. Ships need copper. Copper needs mines. Mines need a mining company to operate them. So the government should have the power to regulate mining companies. He lost that argument, and of course today Congress gets away with passing off almost anything as constitutional by saying it affects commerce.

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I'm not rain man, but I guess I was a math major.......

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Conditions in China are improving remarkably fast. The people are very happy with the economic growth. People understand that they can't turn into a first world country overnight, China doesn't have the wealth to do it. But this is a country that was dirt poor 20 years ago. So we can't pressure China to improve working conditions any faster than it is already doing itself, which is historically fast. And remember the country is still run by the Communist Party, which at least nominally protects workers' rights.

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I guess you're right, most people avoid math whenever they can, even if it's just a single simple division. I can't imagine not having a rough idea of how much you're paying though.

I think there probably is cognitive dissonance about deductions though. People think their own deductions are justified but others' aren't. Mitt Romney is probably getting a lot of deductions for donating 10% of his income to the Mormon church, for instance, but people aren't giving him credit for that.

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I don't recall complaining about outsourcing, and I'd much rather have 10%ish unemployment with decent working conditions than full employment with China-quality working conditions.

You probably wouldn't feel this way if you were part of that 10%.

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Just divide the total you paid (paid taxes + withheld taxes - refund) by your AGI. It's not particularly difficult to make a rough calculation.

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Looks like, but isn't. I mean, sure, your average investment banker makes more important and independent decisions than your average fry cook, but it's not like they don't still have bosses who give them orders and such...

Bosses who either do not answer to the shareholders, or are doing a terrible job. These are very smart people who are doing a very good job of creating wealth for their employees at all levels of management. From the CEO down, everyone does well. But not the shareholders.

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Well, that's true technically, but it works better with the normal situation of the owners hiring employees and paying them. With investment banking, it looks more like the employees are the ones running the company.

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I was thinking of things like having an 8 hour workday instead of "as long as we can make it before people say f*** it I'd rather be unemployed"

Do we even have those laws on the books anymore? If we do, the DOJ or state attorneys general need to start investigating investment banks for violating those laws.

But if we don't: if investment bankers are allowed to work 100 hour weeks if they choose to do so, why not others? I don't think companies are going to be demanding that people work more than 40 hours anyway, because people want higher wages (per hour) to work longer hours. There's a large pool of workers right now, so there's no incentive for companies to ask people to work obscene hours.

Incidentally, finance is a very screwed up industry in another way than people normally think. It is the one industry in which large companies exist where the employees do better than the shareholders. Just compare McDonald's and Goldman Sachs- MCD is worth twice what GS is worth! It's a more profitable company. And it's probably because GS's profits are passed out to employees, so the shareholders, the owners of the company, never see most of them. I want to see a candidate use this to attack Wall Street for being closet socialists.

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I mean, it depends on what you mean by workers' rights. Things like saying the company isn't allowed to lock the workers inside so they can't leave- I don't think anyone opposes that. Things like saying the company has to provide people with healthcare- why is that even related?

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We wouldn't need to cut workers' rights, just wages.

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AND at the personal level. Romney cannot invest money he hasn't already earned, and he already paid taxes on it the first time he earned it, too.

I don't really agree with that line of thinking. All money comes from somewhere. If, say, I tune pianos, I'm getting money from customers. And those customers have earned that money somewhere (or were given the money by someone who earned it). So they were already taxed on it before. But I'd have to pay taxes on it again, and as earned income to boot.

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They'd have to find a crime to convict him of. I don't think they would go through with it.

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I'd think that people would know their tax rate since they have to pay taxes- how else would you know how much to pay? And if they don't pay taxes, they know that their rate is 0%.

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The minimum wage ALSO hurts employees as it creates unemployment. Specifically, it hurts the employees at the margin such as the youth, elderly, and discriminated against groups the most.

It doesn't hurt the elderly- elderly people generally won't work for minimum wage anyway. It does hurt youth and groups that suffer from discrimination, and surprise surprise, those groups vote the least!

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Although, there's a good chance that after 2 years of government by Congress (meaning the president does nothing, vetoes everything, and Congress overrides all the vetoes) the voters vote out members of Congress en masse when Ron Paul gives his support in the midterm elections to either a new party, or to something along the lines of the Tea Party.

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I could see both parties teaming up against him and overriding his vetos sadly.

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Schools need to stop hiring their bloated administration staffs, and have the presidents take pay cuts. I thought the goal of being a university president was to help students learn, not become a millionaire.

I don't know if it's true for undergraduate programs, but I know law schools are literally judged (by US News) based on how much they spend per student. Like, a school spending $45/student on dinner at a relatively high end place with an important professor/judge is good, but just cutting tuition by that same amount doesn't help the ranking.

I'm pretty sure the top goals of most university presidents are:

1. Solicit donations from alumni.
2. Boost your school's ranking in US News.

Not sure which is more important.

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Where'd you buy vanilla coke? And even better......decarbonated vanilla coke. That sounds so delicious.

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Also, Apple HQ's street address is 1 Infinite Loop.

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Things are super cheap in China, you can get a lot of stuff for a small amount of money.

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What the U.S. government needs to do, posthaste, is enact a 90% labor/manufacturing "outsourcing tax" on all profits derived from foreign labour.

So Americans can pay triple the price for the same goods and workers in Third World countries starve instead?

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Uh, I didn't watch THIS year's state of the union at all, but wasn't it last year that Obama basically said "I don't care what they say, I'm going to use executive orders to go around them and do what I want"

No, he just said he disagreed with the Citizens United decision. He hasn't done anything to try to stop it, as you can see from all the Super PACs around now.

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There's a good argument the judiciary is the most powerful branch of government. The other branches haven't tried to disobey the Supreme Court in a long long time.......like since Andrew Jackson.

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And you think this will actually stop them from doing it? How cute!

Yes, because if they do it, they won't be able to use it to convict anyone. Why waste time gathering useless evidence?

One set of bureaucratic nightmarish regulations was replaced with another. Great.

Actually, corporate persons are now free to use as much money as they want on political speech, so we pretty much have no campaign finance regulations anymore.

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Obviously it is. The Patriot Act. The NDAA. Every piece of "gun control" legislation ever written. The incredibly ridiculous interpretation of the interstate commerce clause which seems to somehow make the 10th amendment irrelevant. It's sad to say, but we've reached a point where passing new laws is no longer even relevant, because nobody actually believes the federal government will feel constrained by their own laws anymore.

And yet the campaign finance laws were struck down. The justices just ruled 9-0 that the government couldn't put a GPS tracker on someone's car without a warrant, actually.

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I'm talking about the deregulation that went on up until the Clinton era

much of the financial regulation put in place after WW2 was opened up over time and we started seeing bigger recessions as a result

We started seeing bigger and longer booms as well after Reagan. In fact, the period from roughly 1983 to 2007 had the longest periods of growth and the most infrequent recessions in the history of America. We used to get recessions pretty frequently, every 3 years or so on average. Even better, the recessions we had from 1983 to 2007 were shorter in length than the previous average. Economists started to think we had made new ground in policies that promoted steady growth.

Of course, in fact, it was more like a volcano that hasn't erupted in a long time. A lot of magma had built up, and we had to have a really big eruption.

as far as being evil and just goes, I don't see how. if they have the power to negatively affect billions of people by making choices that maximize profit and ignore risk, they should be answerable to those people when the do so. not regulating banks would be evil and unjust.

Those are only the choices that maximize utility for the banks because they know the government will bail them out if they lose. Let's say you have $1000, and you have the option to flip a coin. If you win, you double your money. If you lose, you lose the money and the government pays it back. Wouldn't you make the bet?

Oh yeah, and 1000 widow and orphans have all placed bets on you not to lose money, so they will all starve if the government doesn't bail you out. That's why they have to do it.

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Remember there's nothing wrong with a single bank taking big risks and either making big profits or going bust, the problem is when the whole industry places the same bet on the same thing so that if that thing goes badly, we get fallout across the country.

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so just regulate the banks

it worked great for the 30-40 years we did it

1. That's evil and unjust.
2. That didn't work, our banks were heavily, heavily, regulated in 2007.

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Incidentally, Citizens United wanted to release a film they made called Hillary: The Movie attacking her during the Democratic Primaries in 2008, and that's what the case was about. I wonder if they were stealth Obama supporters if a Republican couldn't get elected that year.

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They have to convince the Supreme Court that they're not violating the law. It's not that easy.

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Remember, it's an effective rate. That means after write-offs, deductions, etc.

I know, but.....97%? 15% isn't very high at all. I'm pretty sure my parents have paid more than that for like 2 decades, and they're definitely not rich. Having more investment income than earned income doesn't even help this, because it'll draw you closer to 15% but won't get you under it. I dunno.

Either way, I wouldn't have been surprised at all if it was 80% or even 90%. And it probably won't hurt Romney much, because people are well aware that they pay a lower rate than him.

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That seems kind of hard to believe. The 97% anyway. I'd think pretty much all doctors, lawyers, and engineers pay a higher tax rate than that.

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He just contradicted himself.

We should bail out people who bought houses at the peak.
No more bailouts.

What? I guess the part about regulations explains it- that's what he really wants!

No more bailouts is what's needed. We need people to believe there will be no more bailouts. Only then will banks stop taking extreme risks, when they actually believe the government won't bail out bets that fail. So......pass a law banning the government or the Fed from bailouts. Even that might not be credible enough though, because it could just be repealed next time there is a panic.....and the banks will know that.

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Also: MWC, why not go to UK? State schools are pretty good deals.

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Don't worry, people can stay in school as long as they can get government money to go to school . And they can get government money as long as the government can borrow money. And the government can keep borrowing money as long as it can print the money needed to repay it. And it can print the money as long as people believe in the government's financial system. And the people will believe in the government's financial system as long as people believe in hope and change. And people will believe in hope and change as long as Obama is president.

That's why you should vote for Obama!

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CNN is politically biased?* Why? Because conservatives said so?

I'd say they have a "global" worldview, as opposed to Fox News's America-centric worldview, and they try to act as though this were the objective point of view. Which isn't bad, just they don't do it with anywhere near the blatancy of Fox News.

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4 classes sounds like a huge teaching load for a professor! Guessing all the status designations are tied to research and seniority?

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He didn't need to be on the ballot for people to vote against him.

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Indeed. Things have been turning up markedly the past couple of months, if that continues until November, Obama may be okay, but if not, he has an uphill struggle.

And that's why this election is perfect for Mitt Romney. Romney is a bland, standard, politician that no one is passionate about. But that is exactly what Republicans want this year, because that will put the focus squarely on Obama, the politician that people are passionate about. And if the election is about Obama, he will lose barring a big economic turnaround in the next 10 months.

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You'd think we'd get low turnout, but I think historically we've had some of the highest turnouts when the candidates had basically the same positions and it was all about personality and personal attacks. Also, Obama will bring in the votes (both for him and against him). I always thought it was surprising that the 1860 Presidential Election got more votes than the secession referendums that were held across the South in the months after. Surely seceding from the Union is a bigger deal than choosing a president for 4 years? I guess Lincoln was that hated, that they had to go out and vote against him.

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I'm not arguing for or against same-sex marriage being legal. I'm just arguing that the absolute right of gay people to marry people of the opposite sex must not be infringed, and that they should continue to be given the same rights as straight people. And they should be able to enforce those rights by passing themselves off as straight people if they wish, and in any case should not have their sexuality questioned. Don't ask, tell if you like.

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Well, if you can discriminate against homosexuals by denying them the right to marry because of their sexual orientation, what else can you do? Make them use separate public bathrooms? Giving them the right to marry other homosexuals isn't even a satisfactory solution- it's just separate but equal. If homosexual marriages are legalized, then we must allow heterosexuals to marry members of the same sex if they wish and homosexuals to marry members of the opposite sex if they wish.

Right now, and indeed for the whole course of history, gay people have enjoyed one major advantage no other minority or oppressed group has had. They are legally indistinguishable from the majority. You cannot have something like separate bathrooms for black and white people with gay and straight people because you cannot distinguish a gay person from a straight person, either by looking at them or by some legal distinction. Right now there is none.

There probably isn't much reason to fear this kind of thing in the future, but hey, I can envision it happening. I've noticed that some grad school applications already ask for your sexual orientation, though it's still an optional question. If it's ever a mandatory question, that will be bad.

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*Imagines Galileo being elected Pope*

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it's cute when sephg does it since he's actually kinda funny

you need some more practice

I'm serious. The right of homosexual people to traditional marriages must be protected. Whether or not you think homosexual marriages should be recognized.

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70% of voters maybe. Loads of gay marriage supporters are the same people who don't vote. And if you don't choose to vote, you have no right to complain if your opinion counts for less.

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let them make their own club

aka civil unions

That's fine and all, but gay people who want to marry (someone of the opposite sex) should not be denied. This is a fundamental human right given by God.

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CNN is what I was thinking of.

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Well I'm more or less neutral on this issue myself, but we don't want to discriminate against homosexuals (who have no choice in the matter) by saying they can't marry!

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See, Fox News doesn't pretend to be objective, so it's less insidious than mainstream media which pretends to be objective while promoting their worldview.

On the education, trying to scrub slavery away is dumb, but I do like that they want to have students compare Lincoln and Davis's speeches. That particular change is the opposite of whitewashing our history.

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