Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#841

Post by zigzigzag » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:03 AM UTC

rattray wrote: post #243

nkw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/711 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/707 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/710 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/46 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2285 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1716E https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1730 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1762 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/…

Hmm, I don't know how many of those truly are unneeded, at least without context on why they were created in the first place. There may have been real problems with the Water Hyacinths as an invasive or endangered species, for example. And we certainly don't want to make it legal for people to change traffic signals at will! I had actually expected to find oodles of needless cruft and "dead code", but I'm starting to…

The question is more one of costs and benefits. Anyone can argue a regulation is useful in the abstract.

There's a lot of regulation around internet services and people under the age of 13. The primary effect of these rules has been that American internet services ask for your DoB and then ineffectively try to ban you from signing up if you say you're under 13. Do parents really need this?

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#842

Post by RealGeek » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:04 AM UTC

aliston wrote: post #832

RealGeek wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A middle-class family will get a 35% tax cut. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure how our taxes could change for various income levels for married joint filers. This does not factor in any deductions. Nobody is getting a 35% tax cut. Tax rate for middle-class families will go down by around 1% only, and taxes will go up for low-income families by 2%. Single tax filers will also see an increase in…

Virtually nobody making 10 million a year pays a 39% tax rate. They likely take most of their comp as stock and pay the long term capital gains rate. If they're in finance/VC, they are taking full advantage of carried interest. They have financial planners who structure their portfolio to favor low-tax investments. They form S-Corps and trust funds to defer tax liability, get paid in distributions, write off all sort…

> If you really want to go after the wealthy, you need to tax wealth, not ordinary income

Trump has promised several more yuuge tax breaks and loopholes to wealthy:

- Repeal alternative minimum tax

- Repeal estate tax

- Reduce capital gains tax

- Reduce business tax rate to 15% eliminate the corporate alternative minimum tax.

A wealthy individual could just make an LLC, and funnel all his money into it and enjoy the 15% tax rate while working folks pay regular income tax of 33%.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#843

Post by Sacho » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:07 AM UTC

heartbreak wrote: post #739

seibelj wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not support building a wall, nor building a wall and getting Mexico to pay for it. However, if I was trying to get Mexico to pay for the wall, gosh darn it this document explains coherently how to do it! You can't deny that the administration is goal-oriented.

Not to sound like a "bleeding heart" liberal, but understand that the $24b per year in money that flows into Mexico from individuals living in the U.S. is money that goes to their families . The document even goes so far as to remind the reader that there is no social safety net in Mexico, which will compound the effect of cutting off income from family members living in the U.S. Is that who we are?

Yes?

It's weird that you prefer the people who have broken your own laws to enter your country, to the ones who have tried to go through your lawful process and failed. Where is your bleeding heart for all the would-be immigrants who tried to go were rejected by your legal immigration officers, who similarly might have no social safety net?

You cannot treat all of the world's ills as your own. You may have decided that illegal immigrants are part of the American identity, but a lot of the voters for Trump have not, and are rallying against that. Unless you convince them to treat illegal immigrants as part of their own, it's unlikely you'll find a "bleeding heart" argument to persuade them.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#844

Post by vehementi » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:10 AM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #595

So he's going to lower taxes on the wealthy, drop taxes on businesses, increase spending on military, destroy our national parks to extract oil, and lay off federal employees. This is going to help the middle class and the uneducated who are struggling through... magic. None of the lobbying stuff will ever see the light of day. The term limits won't happen. He's going to repeal the "illegal" Obama executive orders bu…

I thought this was post-election but it's just his propaganda from a few weeks ago. Nothing should really be taken any more seriously than anything else he's talked about

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#845

Post by vehementi » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:21 AM UTC

postcarnival wrote: post #679

josho wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump railed against the system that allowed politicians to be bought. It turns out his solution is to term limit congress. Sounds like treating a symptom not the root cause.

so what, then let's offer solutions and try to get them enacted? why all the armchair bitching on this site as if everyone is an expert just because they write code? what he did is nothing short of monumental and he WANTS to help America. If everyone is so damn smart then get involved and suggest changes. It's not like he's a fucking robot that is going to sit back and count how many marble statues he has in his gard…

Are you under the impression that campaign finance reform is a new issue brought up minutes ago on this forum, and hasn't been extensively researched with proposals before?

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#846

Post by _betty_ » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:22 AM UTC

jernfrost wrote: post #380

I hate Trump, but some of this isn't actually that bad sounding. I have some doubts though if such a divisive and hated guy can manage to get stuff through though. He has not made himself into a person people want to cooperate with. For some things though, he makes the problem sound way simpler than it is. E.g. removing existing regulations when introducing an new one and reducing government employees. We got a right…

I thing the idea behind the removing existing regulations rule works better for software than it does for laws.

It basically boils down to Leave things tidier than when you arrived.

No massive refactor projects, just fix up little things when you're in the area. Sure you never end up with a particularly nice codebase but it's not getting worse and it's not costing the business massive amounts to make something prettier for little benefit.

Also works well with backlogs, especially for client projects, you want a new feature? what are you willing to drop off the backlog to get it?

It's generally well known that most products contain a crap tonne of unused features and removing them reduces technical debt (eg potential bugs, overweight/slow apps).

I don't see it as a hard rule to sell in software.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#847

Post by cnnsucks » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:24 AM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #310

davemel37 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't make sense to demand that Mexico pay for it. It's like building a wall on your property and demanding your neighbors pay for it. When buying a house, wouldnt you try to negotiate for seller concessions like paying for repairs? Trumps wall comments were always in conjunction with discussing the massive trade deficit with Mexico. If we are in a stronger position to negotiate with Mexico, why wouldnt we neg…

> If you really think about it. We only need this wall because of Mexico, so why should we pay if we dont have to? People flee Mexico because it's an extremely poor country with a horrible government and is controlled by drug cartels. Screwing the country over further economically sounds like the worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it seems like a very good way to exacerbate the problem. Perhaps that's why priv…

>> People flee Mexico because it's an extremely poor country with a horrible government and is controlled by drug cartels. Screwing the country over further economically sounds like the worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it seems like a very good way to exacerbate the problem.

Mexico can't ever improve while the US continues to steal their despondent youth for low cost landscaping, house painting and wait staff. The very people with the courage and energy to leave their home countries to improve their lot are precisely the people needed to effect change against a corrupt regime. Our tolerance of mass illegal immigration is actually immoral; their are tens of millions of victims left to suffer bandit republics and kleptocracies because that small fraction of their populations that would otherwise have had the motivation to pick up a weapon and do something about it are instead occupied hanging drywall somewhere in the US.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#848

Post by laichzeit0 » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:28 AM UTC

RealGeek wrote: post #833

laichzeit0 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with making people come through a door in a wall? You realize some people have homes with walls around them and they actually prefer visitors to ring the doorbell and wait for you to let them in. It's the exact same principle. If you lose sight of this very simple concept then you need to go back and see where you overcomplicated it. You don't see people like Richard Feynman going "oh this quantum mechan…

How will a wall stop illegal immigration? Couldn't traffickers just use ladders to climb the wall?

I'm guessing he's going to make it difficult and monitor it. Maybe they'll start blowing it up in places. But hey Mexico is gonna pay for it, so they'll be forced to pay for the fixes too (a guess). Maybe after a while Mexico starts realizing that this wall is fucking expensive if they're not stopping people from getting over it. So maybe they'll start patrolling it themselves and trying to keep people from illegally scaling it. Right now it costs them nothing, so they have no incentive to do anything about it.

Who knows.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#849

Post by burgreblast » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:30 AM UTC

redler wrote: post #751

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #43

Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. The scariest things for me are the backing out of cli…

This is not unlike how an opposing party will criticize a bill based on its number of typed pages. The thump of a couple of inches of paper on a podium makes for great and reductive theater. It's likewise naïve to consider the number of regulations to be a direct barometer of the goodness or badness of regulation in general. Next we'll see the refactoring of existing regulations into smaller or larger components to a…

How do you guys deal with re-factoring code? Imagine a codebase that has been largely additive for 100 years.

While the "+1 minus two guideline" has plenty of shortcomings in the long term, there is lots of low hanging fruit now, and it's an important mindset shift.

Guys, don't just add LOC. Refactor, clean it up and make it better. Remove blocks we don't use anymore.

Re: Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

#850

Post by vehementi » Thu, Nov 10, 2016, 8:34 AM UTC

ainot wrote: post #168

gdulli wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It's something that sounds simple and good to someone who not only isn't aware of the details of what it would mean in practice, but also isn't aware of their own inability to understand the details and nuance, or that there are details and nuance. It was a Dunning-Kruger election.

> The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority High brow smack (condescension) like that and "basket of deplorables" are what America revolted against. If the liberal left was truly smart, why did they allow the president to run up more national debt than all presidents prior...combined?

Oh man really? They just voted for the obviously bad candidate out of spite because mean Leftist Boogeymen were being condescending on the internet? It turns out after all that Trump supporters didn't have any legs to stand on, or any ideologies, or wishes, they were just like "you know what everyone, I'm tired of being called X, let's revolt" and that's why? Man, that's almost like the ultimate self-discredit of the movement.