Political So now what

Political discussions within
Cody said:
I know I swore I was done....


Yes, because the techno-crats (thanks for that @Herzog ) can profit there because we have a more skilled work force and relatively inexpensive energy prices compared to other places with similarly skilled available labor. But I don't think Trump anticipates much besides his next golf outing or trip into the Miss America dressing room. I don't think he has an inner monologue. He just spouts off whatever random thing comes to his mind, surrounds himself with his yes men to fondle his ego and say the rich old billionaire equivalent of "ya boiiiiieeeee", and is then emboldened to double down on it. Embellish it with some hyperbole, take a shot at someone that his followers also hate to draw some A to B connection, and boom. Let's go to Panama. It works so beautifully because once he says the next ridiculous thing and we all start talking about it, we forget about the last absurd thing he said and he never has to follow through with any of it.

Anyway...I'm so weak. Back to my troll-hole.
Click to expand...
Glad I can drag you back into the conversation.

I know Trump is an anomaly, but...... Way too late into my adult life I came to a deep realization that all the people you watch on TV or listen to on the radio are not at all like what they present to the public. That seems obvious and we all recognize they are putting on a face, but I don't think people really internalize how much this affects or perspectives. In some cases, like Christian Politicians or Mega church evangelists that means they are moral and wholesome in public and sexual deviant's in private. In many cases, like actors and musicians and a few politicians they are just different. They amp things up to be, well entertaining. In private, they are far more boring or normal than we think. I've spent a few days around a few semi mainstream actors through a family member in the movie industry and it really drove this home. I don't think any Democrat or Republican knows what Trump is actually like and I don't even know if Trump knows who he is other than a reflection of what he thinks people want him to be.

One thing I absolutely agree with you on is this "It works so beautifully because once he says the next ridiculous thing and we all start talking about it, we forget about the last absurd thing he said and he never has to follow through with any of it."

I don't see this improving anytime soon.


One seriously strange thing for me recently is reading comments about immigration, from Pro immigration people. SO many people saying things like "our crops will all rot in the fields." Multiple variations of that. Maybe I'm the dumb one who doesn't understand economics. I think if we get rid of cheap labor AND get rid of policies that allow people to live without working, these jobs pay better wages and be filled with US citizens. Not everyone has the intellect to be a tech bro. There are a lot of people who are capped at box movers. The problem is the box movers think they deserve genius level standards of living.
 
My brother works for a meat packing plant and he has got raises in the past when they deport half the employees. :D

I'm on the tech side and while H1B folks exist and are around they find it just as easy to ship my job to Uruguay to be done by an Indian there...
 
glockman said:
One seriously strange thing for me recently is reading comments about immigration, from Pro immigration people. SO many people saying things like "our crops will all rot in the fields." Multiple variations of that. Maybe I'm the dumb one who doesn't understand economics. I think if we get rid of cheap labor AND get rid of policies that allow people to live without working, these jobs pay better wages and be filled with US citizens. Not everyone has the intellect to be a tech bro. There are a lot of people who are capped at box movers. The problem is the box movers think they deserve genius level standards of living.
Click to expand...
My close to home example is hop prices for brewing. The world's largest growing region for hops is Yakima Valley Washington. I was up there for the harvest and every single major hop grower was very stressed out about what was happening because Washington passed some labor laws that restricted or limited the number of hours that either workers in general, or maybe specifically seasonal agricultural workers, could work in a week. All of those massive farms have essentially dorms setup, they bring labor in on work visa's for 4 months to do the harvest, then they all go home to their families mostly in Mexico. They were worried that they were no longer going to be able to keep their seasonal workforce because none of them would make the trip up to harvest if they weren't guaranteed at LEAST 60 hours per week of work. If they can only legally provide them with 40 hours (I fondly remember my first part time job too), then they need 50% more of them and would need more lodging and resources to handle them....but it was basically a non-issue because the laborers just went to a different state/country where they could get the hours they needed/wanted during harvest.

Hop prices have gone up 50% in the last two years, driven by this labor cost, and this is also in a market that over-harvested in 2020 and 2022 and was sitting on millions of lbs of surplus. Even with that much surplus, the prices were going up. Farmers have now started digging up hop fields and either letting them fallow, or are planting crops that they can harvest with less labor/more machines. So more expensive labor inputs, lower supply all equal higher prices. So now my COGS are up 25%, but can I just raise the price of my beer 25% and expect people to keep paying it? No. So I eat it, until I can't, at which point I go out of business and go get a job picking hops because unemployment is at 15% and nobody wants to hire a old, bald, fat, grumpy, lazy middle aged man ha ha. Honestly, I'd make more money.

But really, who's going to fill in that labor gap? Unemployed IRS workers? US citizens have to pay $1500 for a 2 bedroom apartment, they can't afford a 4 month per year job and they can't afford to pick oranges year round for $12/hour either.

So your idea is that by cutting back on social welfare systems that enable people to be paid without working, that private businesses will just all of a sudden be able to pay people more to work? Without charging more for the product? How would that work exactly? Is the .gov going to subsidize those jobs instead of subsidizing the programs (perhaps this has merit)? Even if they were to cut government welfare programs, or make them substantially more efficient, that money would just get reallocated to some other back-room deal to subsidize Oracle's 20 500k square foot AI centers. It should be left out to balance the budget, but we know that won't happen.

I just don't see a country that has seen massive cost of living increases over the last 50 years, able to just restructure it's entire labor force in an effort to regress back into an industrial economy, while still maintaining the basic standards of life that we all enjoy. Trying to compete in the globalized market for unskilled labor and manufacturing just seems like the absolute LAST direction we should be going. Rich companies will just automate, and cut out the worker before they pay them more than they can afford while being able to meet the price points the consumer's demand.
 
Cody said:
My close to home example is hop prices for brewing. The world's largest growing region for hops is Yakima Valley Washington. I was up there for the harvest and every single major hop grower was very stressed out about what was happening because Washington passed some labor laws that restricted or limited the number of hours that either workers in general, or maybe specifically seasonal agricultural workers, could work in a week. All of those massive farms have essentially dorms setup, they bring labor in on work visa's for 4 months to do the harvest, then they all go home to their families mostly in Mexico. They were worried that they were no longer going to be able to keep their seasonal workforce because none of them would make the trip up to harvest if they weren't guaranteed at LEAST 60 hours per week of work. If they can only legally provide them with 40 hours (I fondly remember my first part time job too), then they need 50% more of them and would need more lodging and resources to handle them....but it was basically a non-issue because the laborers just went to a different state/country where they could get the hours they needed/wanted during harvest.

Hop prices have gone up 50% in the last two years, driven by this labor cost, and this is also in a market that over-harvested in 2020 and 2022 and was sitting on millions of lbs of surplus. Even with that much surplus, the prices were going up. Farmers have now started digging up hop fields and either letting them fallow, or are planting crops that they can harvest with less labor/more machines. So more expensive labor inputs, lower supply all equal higher prices. So now my COGS are up 25%, but can I just raise the price of my beer 25% and expect people to keep paying it? No. So I eat it, until I can't, at which point I go out of business and go get a job picking hops because unemployment is at 15% and nobody wants to hire a old, bald, fat, grumpy, lazy middle aged man ha ha. Honestly, I'd make more money.

But really, who's going to fill in that labor gap? Unemployed IRS workers? US citizens have to pay $1500 for a 2 bedroom apartment, they can't afford a 4 month per year job and they can't afford to pick oranges year round for $12/hour either.

So your idea is that by cutting back on social welfare systems that enable people to be paid without working, that private businesses will just all of a sudden be able to pay people more to work? Without charging more for the product? How would that work exactly? Is the .gov going to subsidize those jobs instead of subsidizing the programs (perhaps this has merit)? Even if they were to cut government welfare programs, or make them substantially more efficient, that money would just get reallocated to some other back-room deal to subsidize Oracle's 20 500k square foot AI centers. It should be left out to balance the budget, but we know that won't happen.

I just don't see a country that has seen massive cost of living increases over the last 50 years, able to just restructure it's entire labor force in an effort to regress back into an industrial economy, while still maintaining the basic standards of life that we all enjoy. Trying to compete in the globalized market for unskilled labor and manufacturing just seems like the absolute LAST direction we should be going. Rich companies will just automate, and cut out the worker before they pay them more than they can afford while being able to meet the price points the consumer's demand.
Click to expand...
The other part to this that I believe a lot of conservative's ignore is what I call "practical reality" It's kind of like sex education. They think that by not teaching it, or teaching the absolute bare minimum that relates to puberty, or by not providing condoms to kids will somehow mean less teen pregnancy, or that not allowing abortion will somehow mean that more kids get adopted or that people will behave more "responsibly"

Practical reality has shown that neither of these things work the way they conservatives think in large scale. Sure, there will be some reduction in those things, but not nearly to the extent that we will see a big change. The ultimate result is either more people living in poverty, or growing up without parents around that likely turn to criminal behavior, or the .gov would be forced to step in and provide assistance, that they are all against.

I just think people think we live in a magic, "if/then" world.
If we deport ALL workers and make it harder to get the cheaper labor
Then the lazy Americans that are on .gov assistance will be forced to work and fill those jobs.

The practical reality is that at least for the next few years, as either automation or these lazy people get up off the couch, the rest of the country has to endure shortages and higher prices, and it will not result in the large scale employment of lazy Americans, or the automation frenzy that they expect. The business will decide if it's worth it and many will likely exit the industry or switch what they do to better handle the uncertainty. That can then result in loss of products. If there is a void, someone will fill it right? Maybe, but the timeframe to do that pushes out even further.

So it never is as simple as people want to make it. There are immediate consequences to some of these policies that most Americans don't want or won't put up with. The long term consequences will take a long time to sort out and will likely lead to other unintended consequences that most Americans don't want or won't put up with.
 
Ahhh, the sex education enigma. If you ignore it, then it will go away. Oddly the only thing that has ever proven effective at reducing unwanted births and lower abortion rates is sex education and access to contraception and birth control. Yet, somehow people still believe if you remove those things, kids will just stop having sex....but that's a different topic for a different time lol.

I still go back to how incredibly nuanced this all is, and how we have never lived in the now until now. Nobody knew how to deal with the pandemic then, and if we have another, it will be it's own unique problem. Use as much of the past to make informed decisions about the future, but it's never as black and white as people would like to make it out to be.

The frustrating thing, and I promise this is not targeted towards anyone here in this discussion, but in my circle of people/family that always want to engage in political discussions (rants), it's always the ones with the least experience or education that have the most hard line stances on things that they really don't have any clue about. I have a family member that is 22, barely scraped through HS, lives at home still rent free and is thinking of possibly going to be a lineman. He's a hard worker, not stupid, so would be an excellent career path I think. But I just don't think he's all that qualified to weigh on on the nuances of foreign policy and the impact of tariffs on global economics (or how to handle a global pandemic, the efficacy of vaccines etc (which is also ironic that he's somewhat of a plague enthusiast personally, but absolutely got his dog vaccinated lol)). But, he can be the highly informed singular consensus on things. I have business degrees and decades of experience purchasing imported finished goods and raw materials from all over the world, and the only definitive thing that has taught me is that I only know just enough to know that I don't know shit....and anyone that thinks they know enough to take an absolute position probably doesn't even know enough to realize that they don't know shit either.
 
Pike2350 said:
The other part to this that I believe a lot of conservative's ignore is what I call "practical reality" It's kind of like sex education. They think that by not teaching it, or teaching the absolute bare minimum that relates to puberty, or by not providing condoms to kids will somehow mean less teen pregnancy, or that not allowing abortion will somehow mean that more kids get adopted or that people will behave more "responsibly"

Practical reality has shown that neither of these things work the way they conservatives think in large scale. Sure, there will be some reduction in those things, but not nearly to the extent that we will see a big change. The ultimate result is either more people living in poverty, or growing up without parents around that likely turn to criminal behavior, or the .gov would be forced to step in and provide assistance, that they are all against.

I just think people think we live in a magic, "if/then" world.
If we deport ALL workers and make it harder to get the cheaper labor
Then the lazy Americans that are on .gov assistance will be forced to work and fill those jobs.

The practical reality is that at least for the next few years, as either automation or these lazy people get up off the couch, the rest of the country has to endure shortages and higher prices, and it will not result in the large scale employment of lazy Americans, or the automation frenzy that they expect. The business will decide if it's worth it and many will likely exit the industry or switch what they do to better handle the uncertainty. That can then result in loss of products. If there is a void, someone will fill it right? Maybe, but the timeframe to do that pushes out even further.

So it never is as simple as people want to make it. There are immediate consequences to some of these policies that most Americans don't want or won't put up with. The long term consequences will take a long time to sort out and will likely lead to other unintended consequences that most Americans don't want or won't put up with.
Click to expand...
I love that you spent time writing about "practical reality" and wax about how "conservatives" can't think beyond their nose because that's how you perceive them to be. It's all strawman and ironic. Are you exempt from this "practical reality" and does it only affect the people in your novel? This is some serious fluoride induced "moral relativism" philosophy.
 
First, I don't think any of this will happen without massive consequences. Disrupting the labor force will suck. Think about the 2008 mortgage crisis. If we just kept avoiding the fall how much would a single family home be? $10 million dollars? Is that better or worse for the overall health of the economy? I'm not even smart enough to entertain that. What I also don't understand is the millions of people who are not looking for work? How does that work? What do you eat, where do you sleep? I don't get any of that. My simplistic non nuanced view is that they have to get a job at some point right? We are all super spoiled and accustomed to a standard of living that can't continue for another 50 years.


Cody said:
The frustrating thing, and I promise this is not targeted towards anyone here in this discussion, but in my circle of people/family that always want to engage in political discussions (rants), it's always the ones with the least experience or education that have the most hard line stances on things that they really don't have any clue about. I have a family member that is 22, barely scraped through HS, lives at home still rent free and is thinking of possibly going to be a lineman. He's a hard worker, not stupid, so would be an excellent career path I think. But I just don't think he's all that qualified to weigh on on the nuances of foreign policy and the impact of tariffs on global economics (or how to handle a global pandemic, the efficacy of vaccines etc (which is also ironic that he's somewhat of a plague enthusiast personally, but absolutely got his dog vaccinated lol)). But, he can be the highly informed singular consensus on things. I have business degrees and decades of experience purchasing imported finished goods and raw materials from all over the world, and the only definitive thing that has taught me is that I only know just enough to know that I don't know shit....and anyone that thinks they know enough to take an absolute position probably doesn't even know enough to realize that they don't know shit either.
Click to expand...
I get this and I can only imagine what a bar owner gets to listen to from inebriated patrons. I am fortunate enough to work with people so smart that I'm sprinting to keep their dust in site while they intellectually stroll. Until you see that a bunch, the depth of human intelligence seems like it's only a few inches above your head. It's not, I'm average intelligence at best and there are people so much smarter than me, they may as well be aliens. We aren't the same animal.
 
Herzog said:
This is some serious fluoride induced "moral relativism" philosophy.
Click to expand...
When you were talking about how chlorine/chlorine dioxide (or any of the chlorine/ammonia derived chloramines) that should be used to treat malaria because of their "safety", and the justification was that they are used to treat tap water. My first though was how ironic I found it to advocate for the continued use of highly toxic chlorine derived chemicals in water, but I bet he HATES fluoride lol. Big Chlorine gots ya!

FWIW, I didn't think his use of the term "conservative" was meant to be othering or discriminatory. It wasn't absolute, and he even provided a very valid example of what he was talking about. I'm surprised it was interpreted as an attack that warranted a personal attack as a response. Sometimes you don't have to defame the other person to rebut their position. You can just like, counter it, or something.

Personally, I think it goes both ways. Some liberal people believe that if you take guns away from citizens, then gun deaths will go away. Some conservatives believe that if you stop talking about sex, then people still stop having sex...or if you remove all of the unskilled and undocumented workers, then other citizens will just naturally fill those jobs at the same replacement wage. The use of terrible inductive logic is not exclusive to conservatives or liberals.
 
Cody said:
When you were talking about how chlorine/chlorine dioxide (or any of the chlorine/ammonia derived chloramines) that should be used to treat malaria because of their "safety", and the justification was that they are used to treat tap water. My first though was how ironic I found it to advocate for the continued use of highly toxic chlorine derived chemicals in water, but I bet he HATES fluoride lol. Big Chlorine gots ya!
Click to expand...
One being a necessary in small circumstantial amounts, the other being a toxic waste byproduct that lowers IQ. :)
 
Houndoc said:
I am not going to get into the did he or did he not do a Nazi Salute debate (a loose-loose proposition), but if you watch the video with your eyes open you will see the differences.
Both touched over their heart, from there the arm and hand motions are very different.
Click to expand...

If you're not going to get into the was it or wasn't it, what is your point? My take on your post is that your point is Musk did a Nazi salute and whoever the other person is, didn't.

On the one hand, I honestly don't care if it was or wasn't. Either way. By either person. Just don't care.

But it really blows my mind that people think it was. Seriously, I can't wrap my head around how that is even remotely plausible. Or how this is of any relevance to anything.

- DAA
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top