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[Dubbedinenglish]

Cutting support for public libraries? The fuck is the mindset behind that?

The poors need to spend less time using those free computers!

 

[sphagnum]

Cutting support for public libraries? The fuck is the mindset behind that?

Wasteful spending. There's only two books you need - The Bible and The Art of the Deal.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

I suppose I haven't read up on it much, but wouldn't the majority of eliminated jobs be bureaucratic positions in insurance companies? I assume most jobs that help people would remain regardless of the source.

If we nationalized the car industry or whatever we could make jobs and still get cars at the end.

 

[kirblar]

I suppose I haven't read up on it much, but wouldn't the majority of eliminated jobs be bureaucratic positions in insurance companies? I assume most jobs that help people would remain regardless of the source.

If we nationalized the car industry or whatever we could make jobs and still get cars at the end.

Even if its the same amount of jobs, you're cuting 100K to make 100K. It's both politically and pragmatically difficult to justify all those transition costs.

 

[nintendoman58]

This article is a great resource on how the budget proccess typically works.

http://www.vox.com/2017/2/27/14751872/budget-process-explained

Ah. Thanks for this.

 

[pigeon]

I suppose I haven't read up on it much, but wouldn't the majority of eliminated jobs be bureaucratic positions in insurance companies? I assume most jobs that help people would remain regardless of the source.

I mean, why would you assume this? I like you but this strikes me as an assumption that happens to confirm the thing you want to be true! You should be very suspect of those assumptions.

I gave one example in my post -- Kaiser is an insurance provider that also owns hospitals to unify its provider network, so that all Kaiser doctors work in a Kaiser building. If Kaiser goes out of business those doctors don't just hang around doing doctor stuff for free in these free hospitals. That whole system needs to be rebuilt in some way. It's not a straightforward problem to solve.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

I mean, why would you assume this? I like you but this strikes me as an assumption that happens to confirm the thing you want to be true! You should be very suspect of those assumptions.

I gave one example in my post -- Kaiser is an insurance provider that also owns hospitals to unify its provider network, so that all Kaiser doctors work in a Kaiser building. If Kaiser goes out of business those doctors don't just hang around doing doctor stuff for free in these free hospitals. That whole system needs to be rebuilt in some way. It's not a straightforward problem to solve.

Wouldn't those doctors just be reemployed underneath the public system though?

 

[HiResDes]

I get tired of trying to link people to every Trump article I see about some bullshit that he did, it's exhausting, does anyone know of any sort of composite that breaks things down in a concise fashion?

 

[shinra-bansho]

Looking a bit into international healthcare systems, France and Germany run multipayer systems with regulated non-profit funds insuring the populace. They use an all payer rate setting model with regard to prices.

This is funded largely by a 13 or 14% payroll tax with a legal incidence of 70% and 50% on the employer respectively.

How well would this go down with The American People (tm).

 

[Chumley]

I know we're down on Maddow right now but the Flynn shit she's showing right now is infuriating.

 

[ugaboga232]

Throw all the old doctors out! Eat or be eaten in this dog eat dog world.

Spoiler

please I want a lab and they are cutting the NIH funding

 

[AntraxSuicide]

Wouldn't those doctors just be reemployed underneath the public system though?

Right, but that's the "whole system needs to be rebuilt" part. You'd have to have the government go in and buy every one of these hospitals, plus I assume renegotiate all employee contracts if you let the company go bankrupt first and then bought it out (instead of doing it ahead of time, but that would just mean you're negotiating with the company, which wouldn't just sell you their entire property at cost).

This is also healthcare, not manufacturing, where you can't really interrupt service for even a few hours without probably getting a "government rollout of new healthcare system claims the lives of X people today due to bureaucratic red tape." or something.

 

[pigeon]

Looking a bit into international healthcare systems, France and Germany run multipayer systems with regulated non-profit funds insuring the populace. They use an all payer rate setting model with regard to prices.

This is funded largely by a 13 or 14% payroll tax with a legal incidence of 70% and 50% on the employer respectively.

How well would this go down with The American People (tm).

For context, the employer-provided health care tax exclusion costs the government $260 billion a year. The current payroll tax raises about $1 trillion a year.

 

[pigeon]

On a more serious note, the Democratic Party as a national organization routinely argues in support of other policies (globalization/free trade is the big one, like you've mentioned) that cause huge losses, and people nowadays often argue that it was an inevitability ("those jobs aren't coming back"). At the very least, there's now the benefit of "everyone has guaranteed health care, no matter what" as opposed to "cheaper consumer goods".

So I kind of hope that the type of people that consider Rust Belt workers a necessary sacrifice for their policy views aren't the same ones that are suddenly concerned about any policy that may harm health insurance employees!

(this could be a reflection of how our society views blue-collar vs. white-collar workers, but that's for a separate discussion I suppose)

I mean, another way to say "cheaper consumer goods" is "everybody has way more stuff," or "you can carry a computer around in your pocket and get all the world's information on it." Those are not minor benefits.

But yeah, like I said, I've been thinking a lot about our society's failure to nationalize losses and how it's affected manufacturing employees in particular. You should avoid making the same mistake I did, and dislodging millions of people without a clear and coherent plan for immediately keeping them afloat!

My take on this is the opposite of yours -- I see you insinuating here that I think Rust Belt workers don't matter, but in fact, as I said before, I've been saying since 2012 that we have serious economic problems that need to be addressed in formerly manufacturing-heavy states. What I'm seeing is multiple people arguing that people who work for insurance companies are somehow "bad workers" and changes that will destroy their livelihoods don't matter because they're parasites or whatever. This strikes me as the kind of zero-sum worldview a leftist Trump might advocate. I think it's very problematic! Lots of Americans are white-collar workers that work for industries you might think are bad. They still deserve to eat just like the manufacturing workers! Also, they still vote.

Also in general I think people need to remember that jobs are fake ideas that exist to suck you into the capitalist mindset. There is no particularly good reason we should be coercing people to sell their labor by withholding food and shelter from them now that the second Industrial Revolution is happening and consumer goods are going to get as cheap as food got.

 

[soul creator]

I mean, why would you assume this? I like you but this strikes me as an assumption that happens to confirm the thing you want to be true! You should be very suspect of those assumptions.

I gave one example in my post -- Kaiser is an insurance provider that also owns hospitals to unify its provider network, so that all Kaiser doctors work in a Kaiser building. If Kaiser goes out of business those doctors don't just hang around doing doctor stuff for free in these free hospitals. That whole system needs to be rebuilt in some way. It's not a straightforward problem to solve.

Wouldn't those doctors just be reemployed underneath the public system though?

And just for clarity, the doctors don't need to be reemployed at all (unless somehow the Kaiser doctors are the ones directly handling insurance claims?).

They still get paid, they just get paid directly from the federal government. Which they're probably already familiar with, assuming they accept Medicare/Medicaid (and is why any American bill should build on that, since that infrastructure is in place already, in addition to the branding benefits for a campaign)

Now, you can make the case that they might get paid less, due to insurance companies no longer profiting as much, and the government enforcing prices in various ways (which is the primary way to save costs). And even if the Kaiser insurance side converts to a Medicare administrator, lower revenue may mean fewer people are needed to work there. But what I don't think is ever gonna work, is the concept behind the ACA, that somehow market-driven "competition" among insurance providers will one day lower costs (for them, or for patients). Whether it's Medicare for All or multiple private insurers, at some point the government needs to step in and say "You can't charge thousands of dollars for a bandaid" (extreme example of course) to actually make things affordable. And as soon as government does that, the potential for less people being needed at insurance companies is there, single-payer or not.

Otherwise, it seems like we'll just continue down the path where more people have insurance (good!) but they can barely afford it, they still go broke from surprise bills, etc.

But I 100% agree any people affected by those changes still need to be taken care of!

(hot take: I bet we've thought more about and considered potential job losses from this policy in the last page of this thread than most politicians did during, say, the NAFTA debate, lol)

 

[AntraxSuicide]

They still get paid, they just get paid directly from the federal government. Which they're probably already familiar with, assuming they accept Medicare/Medicaid (and is why any American bill should build on that, since that infrastructure is in place already, in addition to the branding benefits for a campaign)

I think the issue is that in this example, Kaiser actually owns the hospital and such, so if they go under or can't function, then that means the hospital does. I'm sure I'm not understanding, but I think what you've got here is a bit of "seize the means of production" going on. Those doctors could get paid as long as the government takes ownership of the hospital somehow (or I guess agrees to just pay their salaries for Kaiser, but that seems weird to me).

And again, since this is healthcare, there's no wiggle room of even a few hours to get that transition covered. It's got to be as smooth as possible.

 

[ugaboga232]

I mean, another way to say "cheaper consumer goods" is "everybody has way more stuff," or "you can carry a computer around in your pocket and get all the world's information on it." Those are not minor benefits.

...

Also in general I think people need to remember that jobs are fake ideas that exist to suck you into the capitalist mindset. There is no particularly good reason we should be coercing people to sell their labor by withholding food and shelter from them now that the second Industrial Revolution is happening and consumer goods are going to get as cheap as food got.

There is a great reason why this happens! Fake ideas are very real to the brain and we all have a donald trump inside of us that we constantly try to overpower with what little logical and rational capability our frontal cortices can provide. Sometimes the conditions are right that you express much more of your donald trump and the extreme case is you are donald trump and have a pathological need for stuff because it taps into one of the oldest circuits in the brain.

Tl;dr the good reason is theres a reason people like donald trump exist and that reason influences our society in many ways (obesity, opiate addiction, benzo addiction, basically all drugs and most mental health problems, greed, tribalism/xenophobia, etc.) and while you can educate/craft a society that maximizes the development of the more human parts of the brain, those parts are still retrofitted onto a lizard and fish brain.

 

[Vimes]

Forgot there was another Democrats Live tonight, guess I'll check out the vod after dinner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fskvc5UHZgI

 

[shinra-bansho]

First, kill all the doctors.

 

[FloydtheFathead]

First, kill all the doctors.

 

[ugaboga232]

First, kill all the doctors.

Can med students role playing grad students make the cut?

 

[pigeon]

I think people are underestimating how complicated the Kaiser problem would be but I also think debating the exact details is missing the point, which is just that there are a lot of different setups across the country for people to get healthcare and insurance is not a tablecloth you pull out leaving all the dishes in place. It's more like a tablecloth you pull out flinging dishes all the way across the room. I feel like part of the reason we run into conflict about "incrementalist" ideas is just that people underestimate the complexity of currently functioning systems and the difficulty of replacing or changing them, even when they're imperfect (in fact, especially when they're imperfect).

Everybody saying that we could very easily just change America over to single-payer with no disruption should remember the Republican politicians filing out of briefing rooms in January 2017 saying "wow, we can't just repeal the ACA at all, healthcare is really complicated." Don't be those guys.

 

[Freeza Under The Shower]

First, kill all the doctors.

by degree, profession, or anyone pretending to be one?

 

[benjipwns]

Can med students role playing grad students make the cut?

by degree, profession, or anyone pretending to be one?

Pol Pot wouldn't have bothered with these silly questions.

 

[Freeza Under The Shower]

Pol Pot wouldn't have bothered with these silly questions.

yeah, but we're trying to keep it a surprise. They'll never see it coming this time!

Spoiler

I wonder if cavemen already had this pattern. "She too smart! She get club! Me smartest now!" *gets clubbed himself* ah, the allure of being a Machiavellian prince and being scared of everyone. See a shadow, yell "FAKE NEWS!" immediately. Or in Trump terms: "fakey no fakey! Fakey no fakey!"

But in all seriousness, Democrats and Repubs alike would be very silly to even consider passing this budget if they intent to get re-elected someday.

 

[benjipwns]

I imagine the cavemen who attacked the ones who invented various forms of successful weaponry had a poor ROI.

 

[pigeon]

I imagine the cavemen who attacked the ones who invented various forms of successful weaponry had a poor ROI.

That's how I read it too, but I think the caveman was saying "she gets clubbed."

However the fact that his lack of conjugation is causing serious understanding problems is probably enough reason for evolution to eliminate him on its own.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

I think people are underestimating how complicated the Kaiser problem would be but I also think debating the exact details is missing the point, which is just that there are a lot of different setups across the country for people to get healthcare and insurance is not a tablecloth you pull out leaving all the dishes in place. It's more like a tablecloth you pull out flinging dishes all the way across the room. I feel like part of the reason we run into conflict about "incrementalist" ideas is just that people underestimate the complexity of currently functioning systems and the difficulty of replacing or changing them, even when they're imperfect (in fact, especially when they're imperfect).

Everybody saying that we could very easily just change America over to single-payer with no disruption should remember the Republican politicians filing out of briefing rooms in January 2017 saying "wow, we can't just repeal the ACA at all, healthcare is really complicated." Don't be those guys.

I don't think it would be "easy" necessarily but I mean while I'm not an expert, Canada managed to make the switch relatively recently (1984) so they would've been largely private outside of the existing provincial systems before making the transition. I realize it's a bit trickier here because of the employer-based insurance but I can't imagine it's impossible.

So apparently my state ranks dead last for internet speeds too? Man we really are the worst. Wait fucking Utah is way better than us? Is the problem with our state government that we need more, not less Mormons?

 

[pigeon]

I don't think it would be "easy" necessarily but I mean while I'm not an expert, Canada managed to make the switch relatively recently (1984) so they would've been largely private outside of the existing provincial systems before making the transition. I realize it's a bit trickier here because of the employer-based insurance but I can't imagine it's impossible.

So apparently my state ranks dead last for internet speeds too? Man we really are the worst. Wait fucking Utah is way better than us? Is the problem with our state government that we need more, not less Mormons?

Everybody in Idaho who isn't there because of Deseret is there because of the white supremacist utopia they tried to found in the Oregon Territory.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

Everybody in Idaho who isn't there because of Deseret is there because of the white supremacist utopia they tried to found in the Oregon Territory.

Yeah but they could at least try to make it a white supremacist utopia with good internet.

 

[AntraxSuicide]

I don't think it would be "easy" necessarily but I mean while I'm not an expert, Canada managed to make the switch relatively recently (1984) so they would've been largely private outside of the existing provincial systems before making the transition. I realize it's a bit trickier here because of the employer-based insurance but I can't imagine it's impossible.

So apparently my state ranks dead last for internet speeds too? Man we really are the worst. Wait fucking Utah is way better than us? Is the problem with our state government that we need more, not less Mormons?

Not that I'm saying one way or the other, but you'd at least have to mention Canada's much smaller population. Maybe it's helpful to us to be 10X larger, maybe it's not, but it would need research.

 

[Teggy]

Tillerson says diplomacy with North Korea has ‘failed’; Pyongyang warns of war

Wonderful

 

[pigeon]

Tillerson says diplomacy with North Korea has ‘failed'; Pyongyang warns of war

Wonderful

Let's all take a moment to remember the time George W Bush told the North Koreans they were part of an Axis of Evil and they immediately dropped out of the denuclearization deal and started building a bomb.

George W Bush: literally personally responsible for everything that's gone wrong in the world since 2001.

 

[smokeandmirrors]

Wasteful spending. There's only two books you need - The Bible and The Art of the Deal.

Three. I'm pretty sure the Ayn Rand foundation or whatever the fuck it's called gives away copies of Atlas Shrugged.

 

[Dany]

Tillerson says diplomacy with North Korea has ‘failed’; Pyongyang warns of war

Wonderful

In his opening remarks in Tokyo, Tillerson appeared to give a nod to those reassurances, however. “North Korea and its people need not fear the United States or their neighbors in the region who seek only to live in peace with North Korea,” he said.

Tillerson is the former chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil and has no previous diplomatic experience. He has kept a low profile since assuming his new job and has not attended some meetings with foreign leaders in the Oval Office, leading to speculation that he has little influence within the Trump administration.

Tillerson did not go to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to meet staff Thursday morning, as is often customary. He instead stayed in his hotel, where he read and received briefings from embassy officials, a spokesman said.

Fuck is he doing then.

 

[benjipwns]

Canada's system is run by the provinces and territories. The federal government only sets a set of a baselines/guidelines.

Doctors and even some hospitals are private but paid for with public money.

It's not like the compassionate society in the UK.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Three. I'm pretty sure the Ayn Rand foundation or whatever the fuck it's called gives away copies of Atlas Shrugged.

I got a copy of Anthem just by asking them if I could have a copy of Anthem via email like a decade ago.

I did it as a joke just because there was no way they'd just give me a book. About a month later I got two copies of Anthem in the mail.

I don't know how Atlas Shrugged got so popular. It's like 40 million pages of garbage. Anthem is like 100 pages of garbage, but it's the same garbage as Atlas Shrugged, just condensed into a far easier and shorter read. I actually bothered to read it. Basically, "what if Rand actually had an editor who told her maybe it was time to stop typing"

The concept of the Rand foundation giving out free books is kind of funny.

Spoiler

My economics class forced me to read Atlas Shrugged, jesus christ oh my god that was awful why did they forsaken me like that. What 18 year old high school Senior wants to read freaking Atlas Shrugged

 

[sc0la]

Let's all take a moment to remember the time George W Bush told the North Koreans they were part of an Axis of Evil and they immediately dropped out of the denuclearization deal and started building a bomb.

George W Bush: literally personally responsible for everything that's gone wrong in the world since 2001.

As much as I love shitting on the GWB administration, I don't want to let Trump off the hook for the shit he is doing.

 

[B-Dubs]

Spoiler

My economics class forced me to read Atlas Shrugged, jesus christ oh my god that was awful why did they forsaken me like that. What 18 year old high school Senior wants to read freaking Atlas Shrugged

Why would an econ class read Atlas Shrugged? That makes no sense.

 

[RastaMentality]

We had to read Anthem for senior year in AP Lit. majority the class thought it was steaming garbage.

 

[benjipwns]

We The Living is Rand's only good work, it's the only one with characters.

The Fountainhead is better than Atlas Shrugged only because it actually has a plot and is like 500 pages shorter.

Objectivism is a totalitarian cult.

You can get lots of free stuff like pocket constitutions all the way up to full books and such from places like Heritage or Hillsdale or Mises Institute (or your local Congressman's office for the pocket constitutions, i think they're printed by law...usually is the same for your state representatives for your state constitution) that I've taken advantage of over the years.

I even have the official history of the Heritage Foundation ("Leading the Way") they commissioned before suddenly withdrawing it from the market and stopping printing. I've never read it so I have no idea if it reveals that they started with human sacrifices or something before moving into policy papers and that's why they put the kibosh on it.

 

[sphagnum]

We read The Jungle. I thought it was boring but mostly I disliked it because of the aesthetics of Eastern European names.

 

[B-Dubs]

We read The Jungle. I thought it was boring but mostly I disliked it because of the aesthetics of Eastern European names.

By Upton Sinclair?

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

We read The Jungle. I thought it was boring but mostly I disliked it because of the aesthetics of Eastern European names.

I read this for the library science class I took in high school and it was probably the most a book every changed me! I thought the end at the time was sad though, because I "knew" socialism wasn't going to work out.

I haven't gone back to read it again since then. I remember each chapter having the structure of "thing is getting better, except now it is catastrophically worse." The parts I remember being the cheeriest were in prison!

I'd maybe make an exception for something like The Crucible or Inherit the Wind. If only because The Crucible movie from the 90's or whatever is so bad it's good. And Inherit the Wind is funny.

tbh The Crucible was made a thousand times better by the fact that it followed The Scarlet Letter, which is possibly the worst book I've had to read for class.

 

[AntraxSuicide]

Why would an econ class read Atlas Shrugged? That makes no sense.

You can get all sorts of idiots teaching in high school. As a math professor, looking back, I'm not convinced my math teachers in high school had actual degrees. They could only work the same problems from the book (AKA with solutions).

 

[sphagnum]

By Upton Sinclair?

I was a neoconservative back then so I wasn't too interested in reading red propaganda

 

[benjipwns]

The Jungle is terrible too, really everything you get assigned in high school is complete garbage.

I'd maybe make an exception for something like The Crucible or Inherit the Wind. If only because The Crucible movie from the 90's or whatever is so bad it's good. And Inherit the Wind is funny.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Why would an econ class read Atlas Shrugged? That makes no sense.

I don't know. It was a joint project between economics and AP Literature. This was back in '08, I think there was some kind of Rand revival during this time.

We'd read a chapter a month, so it was an all year thing lol, it went on forever

The Jungle is terrible too, really everything you get assigned in high school is complete garbage.

I'd maybe make an exception for something like The Crucible or Inherit the Wind. If only because The Crucible movie from the 90's or whatever is so bad it's good. And Inherit the Wind is funny.

I liked not a penny more, not a penny less because it was like The Sting and Ocean's 11

Also a weird book to read in High School. Not that I'm complaining about that one, I like that book a lot

I also liked Heart of Darkness, Caesar and Lost Horizon

 

[The Technomancer]

The Jungle is terrible too, really everything you get assigned in high school is complete garbage.

I'd maybe make an exception for something like The Crucible or Inherit the Wind. If only because The Crucible movie from the 90's or whatever is so bad it's good. And Inherit the Wind is funny.

The two novels that stuck with me from high-school were The Plague and The Color Purple

The Scarlet Letter can fuck off

 

[sphagnum]

I had to read obasan twice