121–130 of 176 posts
"Government doesn't work. Elect us and we'll prove it!" --One of the two major political parties in the US. We get the government we voted for, so I guess that's the one we deserve.
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This is what boggles my mind. We had progressive candidates running this cycle that were outright commiting to trying something different. Yet the majority of the voter base ran towards people promising the same strategy as previous administrations. Either this crisis is magnified on HN and the majority of the voter base is unaffected by the pandemic or something else is going on.
The Democratic party made the correct bet that they could use their media apparatus to discredit progressive candidates, get away with cheating in Iowa, and use Obama to get the other moderates to concede with promises of internal advancement. It was corrupt and repugnant, but a strategically sound approach to make sure they're headed on the ticket by a center right leader (which their donor base demands).
Also, we shouldn't forget that Michael Bloomberg decided to run last-minute as a Democrat, with the Democrat party changing the applicant rules so that he could specifically run.
The whole political apparatus is entirely corrupt. I'm not sure voting helps at this point. We have a massive amount of people who are on the last of their savings, with no unemployment benefit coming their way to help out. This may be the beginning of a revolution, if people are angry enough, maybe.
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The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
Just one example: city people trying to ban guns statewide while rural people live in places with dangerous wildlife (and more) will cause preventable deaths. In a city far more freedom must be curtailed in order for people to tolerate living near each other and rural folk often live out there precisely because they can't be happy making that trade-off.
You could just as easily say "old people are trying to pass laws that make lives miserable for young people, we really ought to have fewer representatives for old people", and it would make exactly as much sense as saying the same thing about a geographic location. There are a million different ways you could slice people up into representatives, but we end up settling on geographic location because... reasons, I guess.
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The economic data ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL#0 ) is showing deflation. The quantitative easing has so far been deflationary. The Fed can lower interest rates, but it cannot make people spend. People are unemployed and scared, they are not borrowing money, and it shows in the lending data as well ( https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/current/default.h... ) where we can see falling numbers in…
I am speaking anecdotally here but.. Deflation? I can’t think of a single product that has gone down in price and numerous things are more expensive. In particular, virtually every single food item at the grocery store is more expensive than it was in March. Am I the only one who has experienced this? It seems like basic staples (milk, eggs, flour) are substantially more expensive than a few months ago.
That's technically correct, though of course does not feel like it for many people. To the average consumer, a "phone that can play today's games" is the same measurement today as it is next year, and if prices don't change, they might not consider that "quality increase".
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The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
> The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%. You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the h…
I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well.
At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people.
But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
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I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but this failure extends across both parties in the United States. The refusal by politicians to take on Capital owners is pushing people into homelessness, loss of healthcare, or danger in low wage jobs, all of which further exacerbate the pandemic. The mainstream of the Democratic Party has advanced little that would address any of this, mostly quibbling over means testin…
This is what boggles my mind. We had progressive candidates running this cycle that were outright commiting to trying something different. Yet the majority of the voter base ran towards people promising the same strategy as previous administrations. Either this crisis is magnified on HN and the majority of the voter base is unaffected by the pandemic or something else is going on.
There's a massive, massive class divide between generations and ultimately this pandemic is going to explode it even further. We're still in the fingers-in-our-ear phase.
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If you were to break down the argument even further, let's say Kansas had a farmer that owned 90% of the land. The remaining 10% of the land was shared between 1000 people. Why should that single farmer be allowed to control the entire state over the rest of the 1000 people?
I'm not making that argument, either. I guess I'm playing devil's advocate. I honestly don't think either scenario is correct, so what's the solution?
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In my experience access to credit besides credit cards has been extremely limited. My wife and I looked into several different personal or short term loan options for our upcoming IVF cycle(approx 30k$). Most banks have either stopped offering them completely or made the requirements much harder. The two of us with credit scores of 750+, combined 200k annual income and little existing debt couldn't get approved for a…
Is there a reason why you can't get by on $170k?
It's not a terrible hardship given our current situation but given the volatility in the job market it certainly makes us uncomfortable.
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Almost 40% of homes in America are owned free and clear (no mortgage). https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2019/07/26/nea...
>Almost 40% of homes in America are owned free and clear (no mortgage). looking merely at owned homes is ignoring everybody that rents. Renters falling behind on their rent are equally likely to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums are listed. (and that in fact goes to my point about "your rent/mortgage is someone else's asset", a renter who's not making mortgage payments is probably still putting someone else's mor…
So before you can have any faith in stats, you have to know the source and how the research was funded and by whom (this is before we even begin to talk about methodology flaws). If you do not know that then you cannot trust the stats at all. They are indeed worse than damned lies.