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PoliGAF 2017 |OT6| Made this thread during Harvey because the ratings would be higher

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C

CrimzonSamurai

Member
Ugh I hate 9/11. "Where were you?" I was in middle school arguing with a crying girl about whether a piloted aircraft met the technical definition of a bomb. It's clearly a missile, if anything.

Gotta be reminded of my social ineptitude and it's not even a federal holiday. Also I just keep hearing Rudy Giuliani's 2004 GOP convention speech echoing through time and space.
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
kirblar said:
The retirements sure are happening all at once though. Would make sense if they're trying to announce ahead of something lurking in the near future.
Click to expand...

This on the other hand is something I've been thinking about since last week. is there a horizon item?
 
A

adamsappel

Member
Pyrokai said:
Guys, I'm really fucking worried about one of the most important things the government does:

http://usa.inquirer.net/6257/problems-threaten-accuracy-2020-us-census

http://theweek.com/articles/723010/ending-daca-could-royally-screw-census-thats-problem-gop

Can we save it with a better Congress in 2018? I'm scared.....this would be horrible for 2021 - 2030. I'd worry it'd nullify any potential progress we can make with gerrymandering if SCOTUS rules the right way.
Click to expand...

Hey, look, it's another Constitutional requirement that the GOP doesn't care about.
 
A

Aaron Strife

Banned
Futurevoid said:
He's retiring:
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Stivers:

bagdad-bob.gif


Gary Peters carried this district in 2014 so there is precedence for a Democrat winning it, even ignoring the fluke special election in 2012.
 
A

Aaron Strife

Banned
I had a dream I was watching election night coverage in 2018.

We won 20 House seats and net 1 Senate seat (lost one, but won AZ/NV).

Note that these have never actually come true.

Sabato:

091117houseratings.png


The Tossups/Lean R list just keeps getting longer.
 
W

wutwutwut

Member
Elysian Fury said:
You do realize that one of the major tenets of his reforms is to remove meaningful legal recourse by capping damage awards for wrongful termination at laughably low amounts?

Do you think punitive damages for sexual harassment or racial discrimination in the workplace ought to be capped at 3 months of wages? How is that a significant deterrence at all?
Click to expand...
AFAIK the new proposed article L1235-1 means that the cap does not apply to discriminatory dismissals. I think outside of discrimination like you describe, setting caps on wrongful dismissals is a huge positive step forward.

Also I'd suggest not coming off as lecturing me on leftist thought. I used to be a leftist for a long time before I came to my senses.
Employers are inherently predatory and abusive. Which is why labor laws need teeth. Without any you're practically begging for widespread unethical treatment of workers.
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Labor unions are inherently predatory and aggressive. Which is why labor laws having too many teeth is dangerous. With too many you're practically begging for a 25% youth unemployment rate.
 
B

berzeli

Banned
Autodidact said:
Speaking of Europe, what are the projections for tomorrow's Norwegian elections?

I know the Labour Party has had the largest number of seats for, like, decades now, but the right-wing parties always form coalitions to stay in power.
Click to expand...
whyamihere said:
The Labor Party had a polling collapse in like the last month and are now going to be at parity with the Conservative party, or a little above. Centre party seems to have had a bump but doesn't really seem correlated with Labor's loss (nothing really does). So probably another Conservative/Progress government ☹️
Click to expand...
Taken from the Norwegian broadcaster, it's the latest poll they did + possible coalitions:
cackpGa.png

And explainer from wiki:
gLCPYlB.png

(R is Rødt, a party to the left of Socialist Left)

edit: To illustrate the fall of Labour:
KNNGbnt.png


Just over two hours to go, and it is very unclear exactly how things will go. Not sure if I'll watch it live, but the public broadcaster are nice enough that I can tune in to their online streaming if I'd want to.
 
K

kirblar

Member
wutwutwut said:
Labor unions are inherently predatory and aggressive. Which is why labor laws having too many teeth is dangerous. With too many you're practically begging for a 25% youth unemployment rate.
Click to expand...
You'd think that the behavior of Police Unions would clue people in to the negative side effects of normal ones that cause many people to dislike them, but the connection never seems to happen for people.
 
P

Poodlestrike

Banned
kirblar said:
You'd think that the behavior of Police Unions would clue people in to the negative side effects of normal ones that cause many people to dislike them, but the connection never seems to happen for people.
Click to expand...

Jimmy Hoffa wasn't really a peach, either.

Unions are a necessary balancing mechanism against corporate influence, but like any such system, if the two sides aren't in balance they'll start acting shady.
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
sphagnum said:
Good reason to spread the ownership of the means of production around then right?
Click to expand...

The question of the organization of labor is sort of the topic on my mind lately TBH. Unions become problematic when they defend people who very much actually do need to be fired. To my broad understanding worker co-ops don't really run into this issue much because they tend to recognize that yes you still need to be able to fire people, even if the power to do so is sourced more democratically. But I'm also not entirely sure how co-op labor scales up and I worry that there's some self selection bias possibly going on. I want to incentivize the creation of more such organizations for sure so we can experiment.
 
C

chadskin

Member
Elections in Russia had a surprising result:
A coalition of liberal opposition parties has won a series of victories in local council elections in central Moscow, beating candidates from Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party.

The United Democrats movement took 11 out of 12 council seats in the Tverskaya district, a wealthy neighbourhood adjacent to the Kremlin. It also secured all 12 seats in the Gagarinsky district, where Putin cast his vote on Sunday. The opposition likewise upset the odds to triumph in a dozen other districts, the vast majority of them in the heart of the Russian capital.
Click to expand...
“This is a new era for Russian politics,” said Shkliarov on Monday. “Everyone is so shocked. It’s so symbolic that the opposition now controls the district where Putin is registered to vote.”

The vote represents a rare electoral success for Russia’s liberal opposition, whose candidates are often barred from standing for public office. This time round, however, the Kremlin decided to relax its grip on election registration procedures, in an attempt to hold what Moscow city officials hailed as “the most honest elections ever”.
Click to expand...
Although the electoral victories in central Moscow were greeted with euphoria by opposition supporters, United Russia still managed to secure about 75% of district council seats across the city.

Allegations of vote fraud in favour of Putin’s party were widespread, however. Golos, an independent election monitoring group, registered about 600 complaints. Video footage was also posted online of a district official in western Moscow apparently instructing polling station staff on how to falsify the vote count.

Turnout at Sunday’s elections was low, at about 15% – half the turnout at last year’s parliamentary polls. In other votes across Russia on Sunday, United Russia won every seat in 16 polls for regional governors. Opposition-friendly candidates, including Yevgeny Roizman, the popular mayor of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-biggest city, were kept off the ballot in most regions by election officials loyal to the Kremlin.
Click to expand...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...als-blow-to-putin-in-moscow-council-elections
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
The Technomancer said:
The question of the organization of labor is sort of the topic on my mind lately TBH. Unions become problematic when they defend people who very much actually do need to be fired. To my broad understanding worker co-ops don't really run into this issue much because they tend to recognize that yes you still need to be able to fire people, even if the power to do so is sourced more democratically. But I'm also not entirely sure how co-op labor scales up and I worry that there's some self selection bias possibly going on. I want to incentivize the creation of more such organizations for sure so we can experiment.
Click to expand...

ESOP companies.
 
K

kirblar

Member
sphagnum said:
Good reason to spread the ownership of the means of production around then right?
Click to expand...
We already have that. Individual autonomy. You aren't producing anything without cooperation from other people.
chadskin said:
Elections in Russia had a surprising result:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...als-blow-to-putin-in-moscow-council-elections
Click to expand...
a) I think we know what comes next (violence)

b) This is way worse of a spin than we had w/ either of the US/UK liberal seat pickups in congress/parliament over the past year.
 
E

Elysian Fury

Banned
wutwutwut said:
AFAIK the new proposed article L1235-1 means that the cap does not apply to discriminatory dismissals. I think outside of discrimination like you describe, setting caps on wrongful dismissals is a huge positive step forward.
Click to expand...

Alright, what about the people who get fired for refusing to work off-the-clock, or who blow the whistle on illegal behavior or safety concerns, or who get fired simply because they're about to be vested in the retirement plan? Do they deserve no recourse or protection?

Also I'd suggest not coming off as lecturing me on leftist thought. I used to be a leftist for a long time before I came to my senses.
Click to expand...

AKA I used to care about civil rights, but then I got wealthy and started valuing tax cuts and the performance of my 401k over them.

kirblar said:
We already have that. Individual autonomy. You aren't producing anything without cooperation from other people.
Click to expand...

Labor is not a free market. Workers operate under penalty of death if they fail to find a buyer for their labor. When being employed vs. unemployed is the difference between starving to death in the streets, it becomes fairly obvious why firms that commit even the most heinous abusive and unethical practices still have no trouble finding staff.
 
S

sphagnum

Banned
kirblar said:
We already have that. Individual autonomy. You aren't producing anything without cooperation from other people.
Click to expand...

Production isn't ownership or control. Labor is socialized, power is not.

The Technomancer said:
The question of the organization of labor is sort of the topic on my mind lately TBH. Unions become problematic when they defend people who very much actually do need to be fired. To my broad understanding worker co-ops don't really run into this issue much because they tend to recognize that yes you still need to be able to fire people, even if the power to do so is sourced more democratically. But I'm also not entirely sure how co-op labor scales up and I worry that there's some self selection bias possibly going on. I want to incentivize the creation of more such organizations for sure so we can experiment.
Click to expand...

I always appreciate your posts partly because a.) it seems like they always start with "I've been thinking a lot about x recently" which makes me chuckle and b.) you then demonstrate that you have indeed been putting worthwhile thought into x.
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
The Technomancer said:
Oh sorry I don't mean "scale up within an organization" but "scale up as a greater percentage of availible labor opportunities"
Click to expand...

You said you wanted to incentiveize the creation of more such organizations. The most comparable version of a worker co op we have is ESOP. ESOP can have varying degrees of democratic representation in them though. For instance, the company I work for has upper management (at a branch level) vote to elect our board (at a corporate level). So it's more of a republic. Still ... the concept of company ownership is strong within our ESOP.

We performed so well as a company last year, we all got a 20% (based off of yearly income) disbursement into our ESOP plans and about a 40% increase in value. Every employee walked way from our yearly ESOP proud and wanting to perform for and stay at the company we work.

The transition of ownership from the public to the employee hasn't effected performance. We still use market based principles for the allocation of resources and labor.
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
sphagnum said:
I always appreciate your posts partly because a.) it seems like they always start with "I've been thinking a lot about x recently" which makes me chuckle and b.) you then demonstrate that you have indeed been putting worthwhile thought into x.
Click to expand...

2017 is a hell of a year man. I've got a lot of thinking to catch up on
 
K

kirblar

Member
sphagnum said:
Production isn't ownership or control. Labor is socialized, power is not.
Click to expand...
Ownership and Control without a stake in the game leads to a lot of problems. It's an issue both in public governance and with public corporations! (That "Shareholder value" SC decision has been a plague on us for eons.)

Democratizing decisionmaking is bad in large part because lots of people don't know what the fuck they are doing and you'd rather leave it to people who are and who will be directly affected by those decisions. For a non-business example: Old people being more than willing to vote Brexit because they're not going to live long enough to see the disastrous consequences!
Elysian Fury said:
Labor is not a free market. Workers operate under penalty of death if they fail to find a buyer for their labor. When being employed vs. unemployed is the difference between starving to death in the streets, it becomes fairly obvious why firms that commit even the most heinous abusive and unethical practices still have no trouble finding staff.
Click to expand...
If the problem is on the side of employees, don't fix it by changing the employers! Buttress the negotiating side of the individual (via a strong social safety net!)
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
kirblar said:
Ownership and Control without a stake in the game leads to a lot of problems. It's an issue both in public governance and with public corporations! (That "Shareholder value" SC decision has been a plague on us for eons.)

Democratizing decisionmaking is bad in large part because lots of people don't know what the fuck they are doing and you'd rather leave it to people who are and who will be directly affected by those decisions. For a non-business example: Old people being more than willing to vote Brexit because they're not going to live long enough to see the disastrous consequences!

If the problem is on the side of employees, don't fix it by changing the employers! Buttress the negotiating side of the individual (via a strong social safety net!)
Click to expand...

I think some of the conversation here is people talking past each other, a lot of co-op structures do still function with a management layer, just one that's accountable to the employees below, and the employees do literally have a stake in the game.
 
K

kirblar

Member
The Technomancer said:
I think some of the conversation here is people talking past each other, a lot of co-op structures do still function with a management layer, just one that's accountable to the employees below, and the employees do literally have a stake in the game.
Click to expand...
Co-ops are still private enterprises that can exclude new members, right?
 
W

wutwutwut

Member
Elysian Fury said:
Alright, what about the people who get fired for refusing to work off-the-clock, or who blow the whistle on illegal behavior or safety concerns, or who get fired simply because they're about to be vested in the retirement plan? Do they deserve no recourse or protection?
Click to expand...
Whistleblowing and illegal retaliation are also covered by the article and don't have a cap, of course.


AKA I used to care about civil rights, but then I got wealthy and started valuing tax cuts and the performance of my 401k over them.
Click to expand...
🙄 I'm not a supply-side idiot.

I care about civil rights and the welfare state, which is why I want there to be sustainable ways to pay for them.
 
W

wutwutwut

Member
sphagnum said:
Good reason to spread the ownership of the means of production around then right?
Click to expand...
Capitalism does a fine job spreading the ownership of the means of production through competition already. Monopolies and cartels are degenerate cases and should be handled accordingly.
 
S

Suikoguy

I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Holy crap did FL get lucky.

I'm back sitting at home with power and internet after evacuating Saturday night due to threat of storm surge. The eye was so tame compared to Charley. The house is fine, the yard not so much.

The whole situation could have been magnitudes worse for a much larger area.

Everglades City, Marco Island and parts of Naples will need help.

Fun Fact:
Donna made landfall on September 10th in 1960, taking pretty much the same path:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Donna#/media/File:Donna_1960_track.png
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
wutwutwut said:
Capitalism does a fine job spreading the ownership of the means of production through competition already. Monopolies and cartels are degenerate cases and should be handled accordingly.
Click to expand...

Capitalism does many things, but access to the means of production is not one I would broadly grant it. The vast majority of people do not have any significant degree of ownership over the product of their labor. Which, fair, they traded that ownership away in exchange for payment but the eternal critique of capitalism is that that dynamic is exploitative and people are not fairly compensated for the value they create (and I say this as someone with some hefty critiques of the labor theory of value)
 
K

kirblar

Member
The Technomancer said:
Capitalism does many things, but access to the means of production is not one I would broadly grant it. The vast majority of people do not have any significant degree of ownership over the product of their labor
Click to expand...
And that's fine? They have ownership over their labor and resources. You make an agreement to sell your time to others in exchange for money.

If I agree to install a toilet in a new house, that doesn't give me a right to ownership of the house!

The problem is that the degree to which the returns to physical capital and labor accumulate has massively altered and the consequences of that- we need to update our tax systems to deal with the imbalance.
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
kirblar said:
The problem is that the degree to which the returns to physical capital and labor accumulate has massively altered and the consequences of that- we need to update our tax systems to deal with the imbalance.
Click to expand...

We do have a tax system that deals with the imbalance. It was changed over time by those in power (generally those with capital) to benefit them more in the labor/capital dynamic.
 
W

whyamihere

Banned
huh.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...est-9-11?t=1505147507607#update-1505147507000

Mississippi HD-102: This is an open Republican seat in Hattiesburg. The candidates in this nonpartisan open primary are attorney Cory Ferraez, former legislative assistant Missy McGee, Air Force vet Casey Mercier, and social worker Kathryn Rehner. Of the four candidates, Rehner identifies as a Democrat and has the support of the DLCC; if she were to win, she'd break the GOP supermajority in the House. (The other three contenders are all apparently Republicans.) If nobody wins a majority, a runoff between the top two finishers will take place on Oct. 3. Our preliminary calculations show Donald Trump winning this seat 47.6-47.3, a margin of 23 votes.
Click to expand...
 
K

kirblar

Member
Fenderputty said:
We do have a tax system that deals with the imbalance. It was changed over time by those in power (generally those with capital) to benefit them more in the labor/capital dynamic.
Click to expand...
Yes, and at the same time they deliberately altered the tax system in the '80s, globalization/IT/automation/etc greatly expanded the ratio of the imbalance.
 
F

Fenderputty

Banned
kirblar said:
Yes, and at the same time they deliberately altered the tax system in the '80s, globalization/IT/automation/etc greatly expanded the ratio of the imbalance.
Click to expand...

Right but you've essentially created a self sustaining system of exploitation. As long as those in power (the ones with capital) have a greater ability to affect the rules than those who don't have capital (power), then your point is moot. What's needed will not be accomplished.
 
T

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
Fenderputty said:
Right but you've essentially created a self sustaining system is exploitation. As long as those in power (the ones with capital) have a greater ability to affect the rules than those who don't have capital (power), then your point is moot. What's needed will not be accomplished.
Click to expand...

I think we all broadly agree on this. Fuck Citizens United etc etc
 
K

kirblar

Member
Fenderputty said:
Right but you've essentially created a self sustaining system is exploitation. As long as those in power (the ones with capital) have a greater ability to affect the rules than those who don't have capital (power), then your point is moot. What's needed will not be accomplished.
Click to expand...
Other countries have dealt with this better tho! The US has some unique issues (oh hi there racism) keeping this from happening.

The next time we get a DDD setup, we need to go HAM, because we know they'll kick us out in 24 months anyway regardless of what we do. We just need to go HAM without being dumb about it.
 
B

Bonen no Max'd

Banned
The Technomancer said:
I think we all broadly agree on this. Fuck Citizens United etc etc
Click to expand...
Are we? I seem to remember it wasn't a big deal that large powerful capitalists were paying our most recent presidential nominee disgusting amounts of money for doing nothing.

Also this is ignoring capital's political power that exists outside electoral politics. Offshoring is just as political as funding a campaign.
 
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