2016 USA Presidential election thread II: And. Here. We. Go!

[tyven]

Market forces are no longer a thing thanks to big business somehow?

The only market force is whether or not a bakery will bake a cake for a gay wedding. duh

[Headspace]

Tucker is my favorite anchor on any of these shows, he was pushing his shtick a bit hard in this one but still hilarious, idk why people go on thinking they are gonna "own" him, Ive seen some college kids just get absolutely shit on this year on his show lol.

Explains everything.

12 years since Crossfire and Tucker still doesn't understand Jon Stewart's criticism of him.

Carlson is just upset that Teen Vogue is becoming a premiere source for hard-hitting political pieces.


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[BaneTheBrawler]

Broven I know you're joking but I just wanna say that as someone busily "bootstrapping" myself to a better life, I am keenly aware of just how absurd the concept of bootstrapping is. I am able to do what I'm doing because of countless "artificial" (government aid etc) social safety nets. Indeed, I might have died years ago, perhaps as young as 16, without them. Many people don't have artificial OR "natural" (parents, family, etc) safety nets, and that is unacceptable. 'course, even with those safety nets, I still wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing if I weren't fortunate enough to live in a region in which good employers compete with each other for a limited workforce.

It's still hard work on my part, but I sure as fuck didn't get here by myself.

[Day]

Explains everything.

12 years since Crossfire and Tucker still doesn't understand Jon Stewart's criticism of him.

Carlson is just upset that Teen Vogue is becoming a premiere source for hard-hitting political pieces.


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What does it explain?

[Zealot]

Market forces are no longer a thing, yes, or at least not in the sense they are commonly understood as. I don't understand how my metaphor could possibly have not been misunderstood.

Personally I think the entire concept of the Invisible Hand was always nonsense but whatever truth it may have held is assuredly gone in this era.

This is a bigger topic than I can reasonably enter from my phone and I see only frustration if I try to debate while hamstrung. I reiterate my point that your argument for government intervention is based on the idea that "the market has decided what these jobs are worth" and that is simply not true.

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[NynJa]

Well, B & C already seem to be the common practice around me. We've actually been told to cut BELOW bare-bones staffing levels before, passed down from our CEO through the email chain. Then they'll send guest survey results and wonder why the scores for service keep dropping company wide.

Cause the CEO needs to keep making in one week what the people who are actually doing all the dirty work make in one year.

Fixing that problem is another issue altogether. Even if Ksandra's "some sort of ratio that a CEO can make vs. his/her lowest paid worker" were enforced, they'd just play around with the books:
Transportation costs
expensive lunches
work clothing
"third cousin" on payroll
etc etc

[Fiye]

Don't forget bonuses.

[Thunder]

Market forces are no longer a thing, yes, or at least not in the sense they are commonly understood as. I don't understand how my metaphor could possibly have not been misunderstood.

Personally I think the entire concept of the Invisible Hand was always nonsense but whatever truth it may have held is assuredly gone in this era.

This is a bigger topic than I can reasonably enter from my phone and I see only frustration if I try to debate while hamstrung. I reiterate my point that your argument for government intervention is based on the idea that "the market has decided what these jobs are worth" and that is simply not true.

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Let's talk about it after the holidays then, I'd be interested to see why you think market forces aren't a thing

Idk what you believe market forces to be (because I can't come up with ways big corporations could have mitigated the effects I think about), and how big corporations can muddy things like, supply/demand, what buyers are willing to pay for something, what sellers will sell for, and all the psychological/social effects on the economy from behavioral science as it relates to people making decisions (includes things like a group of people being smarter than another and then taking advantage of them as much as the divide in opportunity/intelligence/'privledge' allows). I didn't understand the metaphor because I don't know what exactly the invisible hand is supposed to represent (that can also be mitigated by big corporations), and I surely don't know what the hell an invisible "middle finger" is representing lmao

And also, re your reiteration of my argument: the last three paragraphs of my last post should stand alone for gov. intervention even if it wasn't the market who decided what the jobs are worth

edit: typos/clunkiness

[NynJa]

Don't forget bonuses.

Joe the CSR: 10$ for surpassing 2mil in sales on the year
Me the CEO: 100,000 for my good hard work

[zoobernut]

Thunder, you make good points but you're coming from a flawed premise.

Artificially inflating wages would be a bad move, but right now they're artificially deflated. Employers are making more money than ever, employees haven't seen a change.

This same argument came up here years ago. The Congressional Research Service has a wealth of information on the topic. I was working on the issue at the time and remember seeing that if Wal-Mart paid all of its minimum wage employees $12.50 an hour and decided not to absorb a penny of that in profit margin, just pass 100% of the costs onto consumers, the average Wal-Mart shopper would pay an additional $7 a year. Maybe less, I don't remember it exactly at this point.

The argument that a minimum wage hike would disrupt the market is flawed because it assumes The Invisible Hand is still a thing. Big business whittled the Hand down to the Invisible Middle Finger a long time ago.

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I remember when you were working on this. I believe you also had evidence that it would save the federal government many millions or billions a year in social services that those employees would not need anymore.

[Xantavia]

Joe the CSR: 10$ for surpassing 2mil in sales on the year
Me the CEO: 100,000 for my good hard work

More like CEO gets a 100k bonus for slashing 50k in payroll expenses for the year.

[Aerin]

Wasn't sure which thread to put this under, but 35 Russian diplomats are getting kicked out of the U.S. as a result of the hacks.

Russia sanctions announced by White House

Obama also said in a separate statement that 35 Russian diplomats have been ordered to leave the country, and 2 Russian compounds are being closed under Thursday's actions.

...

According to statements from the White House and the Treasury Department, the government has sanctioned nine entities and individuals: the GRU and the FSB, two Russian intelligence services; four individual officers of the GRU; three companies that provided material support to the GRU's operations; and two Russian individuals for using cyber-enabled means to cause misappropriation of funds and personal identifying information.

Obama also said in the statement announcing that the diplomats have been ordered to leave the country, that those individuals and their families were given 72 hours to leave the United States.

[Zealot]

Twitter folks are accusing Obama of trying to start WWIII.

[Aerin]

I'm curious what those same Twitter folks would think is an appropriate response to such acts. Loads of Republicans (minus Trump) have been saying we should be doing more in regards to Russia for years now.

Looks like there will be more, but we might not hear about it directly.

"These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia's aggressive activities," Obama said. "We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized."

[Niiro]

They still don't believe Russia had anything to do with the hacking.

Also they write erotic fan-fiction about Putin and Trump.

[Krandor]

Taking a look at the_donald looks like they're going with the White House forging the official report released by the FBI/DHS.

This is a justifiable response if the government is now 100% convinced that the Kremlin was involved, but between stuff like this and the whole Israel thing motherfuckers really are lighting a match on their way out the door.

[kuronosan]

What? Lol

[Byrthnoth]

And why the fuck not? lol

Trump's plan is to burn it all down anyway! Just getting it started.

[NynJa]

Thats a pretty stupid course of action. If trump fails, now the republicans will just say "you fucking idiots started WW3 with israel and russia before trump was president".

[Fiye]

They're going to say that regardless lol.

I can't wait for what the fuck they're gonna do in 2020 if it looks like Trump and the Republican senate is gonna end up out the door after fucking the shenanigans in NC.