Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Statement from Jerome Powell

federalreserve.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 871 posts

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#731

Post by bluGill »

eudamoniac wrote: post #663
mapontosevenths wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

datsci_est_2015 explains it better than I would just a few comments down, but this isn't what I mean. I mean that people who are semi-literate or illiterate are terrible thinkers. They are, in fact, fundamentally incapable of understanding the modern world they find themselves in and are CONSTANTLY taken advantage of. Bad thinkers make bad decisions, and are vulnerable to being manipulated in ways that good thinkers…

> people who are semi-literate or illiterate are terrible thinkers. They are, in fact, fundamentally incapable of understanding the modern world they find themselves in It is always funny to me that the people making this argument are usually also the people who would view a voting literacy test as abhorrent (not you, necessarily). To me, if we're assuming a large amount of people are too stupid to understand informa…

The problem with a test is whoever writes/grades the test can ensure people they don't like fail. Elections are often close enough that they only need to fail a few borderline (and pass on their sides) to control an election.

as such I'm forced to oppose all tests even though the idea isn't bad.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#732

Post by leosanchez »

Kephael wrote: post #482
pixelatedindex wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the renovations themselves but the cost is supposedly at 2.5B. Personally I don’t really mind but I also don’t think government buildings need to be all that fancy with marble flooring.

I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.

> The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010.

You have to consider labour costs are significantly cheaper in Dubai.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#733

Post by morgan814 »

Aurornis wrote: post #435
mapontosevenths wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder where you guys are headed. You need to know only two facts about America to guess that: * Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens. Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a…

> * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens. No, it's determined by the people who actually go out and vote. Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low. It's beyond frustrating to work with large groups of young people who are seemingly always talking politics and angry about something political, then to watch as half of them either forget…

> Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low

I understand why my age group has low turnout. It's a disgusting chore that I force myself to do.

In part, it might be a chicken and egg situation. My age cohort doesn't vote because candidates suck. Candidates suck because they pander to those who do vote.

Now to show my political biases:

In 2016 Sanders had a huge amount of support from young people but the DNC did everything it could to tilt favor away from him. He ran a hugely successful grassroots campaign taking small donations from individuals. Where did it get him? On stage with Biden - the anointed candidates with SuperPAC money. That is no small feat. His campaign ended only after the DNC guilted him into quitting as to "not steal votes". That's my perception at least. I temporarily changed my registration from unaffiliated to Democrat to vote for him in the primaries. Young people put in effort and showed up. It bought them exactly one legally rigged primary.

So every election I put on my clown makeup [0] and pretend like any of this is actually real democracy.

[0] https://rimgo.privacyredirect.com/ZUiVLyz

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#734

Post by gred »

zarzavat wrote: post #510
mikeyouse wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first term laid a lot of the groundwork for this term as well - had he not appointed three SC Justices, things would look very different. This court has said basically that all executive actions including pretextual investigations via the DOJ are legal and that there is no such thing as agency independence, even when written into the laws that created the agencies.

Yes, too much emphasis is put on Trump. He's just the President. This crisis has been 80 years in the making. It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended. By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power. Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standar…

> It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President

Sort of, but Congress also wrote a bunch of pretty broad, vague laws, delegating a significant amount of power to the executive via agency rulemaking, and it turns out the agencies are part of the executive branch and have to do what the head of the executive branch says they have to do (within the limits of those broad, vague laws). If Congress can't get back to smaller, simpler, more specific laws, and they continue to pass the burden of this complexity over to the executive branch to figure out, the executive branch will continue to wield outsize power.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#735

Post by murph-almighty »

eudamoniac wrote: post #663
mapontosevenths wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

datsci_est_2015 explains it better than I would just a few comments down, but this isn't what I mean. I mean that people who are semi-literate or illiterate are terrible thinkers. They are, in fact, fundamentally incapable of understanding the modern world they find themselves in and are CONSTANTLY taken advantage of. Bad thinkers make bad decisions, and are vulnerable to being manipulated in ways that good thinkers…

> people who are semi-literate or illiterate are terrible thinkers. They are, in fact, fundamentally incapable of understanding the modern world they find themselves in It is always funny to me that the people making this argument are usually also the people who would view a voting literacy test as abhorrent (not you, necessarily). To me, if we're assuming a large amount of people are too stupid to understand informa…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

The problem (like with voter ID laws in the US) is that it's a very slippery slope to voter suppression, and in the US we have a very creative history when it comes to voter suppression. You'd have poll workers who would present incredibly hard passages to read to voters based on a personal judgement call (read: black voters).

I (not OP) agree that dumb people voting is a problem but the alternative is to have arbitrary suppression of votes, which IMO is worse.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#736

Post by throwaway902984 »

immibis wrote: post #671
eudamoniac wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced that abortion is the worst thing the Democratic party could have ever taken up. You simply cannot sway a vote of a person who believes you support murdering babies. (I am pro abortion, but a substantial amount of people think it is morally murder.) Those people have to vote R their whole life no matter what. Nothing is worse than murdering babies. Democrats would probably never lose again if they public…

So many people didn't vote for the Democrats in 2024 because they didn't support Palestine and they lost as a result. If the Democrats become identical to the Republicans then why would any non-Republican even bother voting?

You are so correct in your first statement yet imply something in your second I think is so incorrect in a wider context that it strikes me like whiplash.

Paying lip service but not addressing that friction was a significant part of what killed the Harris campaign, IMO.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#737

Post by atmavatar »

spencerflem wrote: post #704
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is utterly delusional. I can’t comprehend of whatever mind virus made it so far into the American political discourse for this BS to still be parroted in 2026. I am blessed to be born in and to reside in a country with a comparatively much better-functioning government and voting system. You better believe that if I were American I’d be voting for the dems in a heartbeat. I’d be endlessly annoyed about it, espec…

I think it’s reasonable not to vote for a candidate that supports genocide. Maybe that’s not a line for you but surely you have a line that cannot be crossed somewhere

Neither candidate was ever going to push back against Israel's genocide of Palestinians.

While it was very disappointing the Democrats weren't exerting significant pressure against Israel, and Kamala gave no indication she'd act any different, it was delusional to believe Trump was going to be any different. He was very clear that he supported Israel as well, and he went as far as to claim he'd support Netanyahu even more strongly than Biden. Sure, he sabre-rattled a bit about wanting the war in Gaza to end before he took office, but he also indicated he'd support residual IDF actions (i.e., continued killings of Palestinians) within Gaza afterward.

There was never a candidate who was going to push back against Israel, no matter how much you or I would have liked for there to have been one.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#738

Post by JohnnyMarcone »

ryandrake wrote: post #643
twixfel wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a real choice in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Trumps opponent was every single time very different to him.

Democrats continue to offer up horrible candidates, and their idiotic primary system confirms those horrible candidates every 4 years. A slice of cheese could have beaten Trump, but somehow the DNC managed to offer up the most boring, milquetoast, unlikable, uncharismatic, centrist candidates they could find and beat him once out of three times. They're just kicking own-goals over and over, and they're not learning w…

Look up the build back better act that Biden proposed and tell me if you think that was centrist. It originally proposed extending the child tax credit (basically basic income for people with kids).

The Inflation Reduction Act, the negotiated paired down version was still the biggest climate bill in history.

He also attempted to cancel 10 to 20k each of student debt, a progressive priority. That was blocked by the Supreme court.

The list goes on.

If the electorate had given Biden a bigger majority in Congress he would have passed much more progressive legislation.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#739

Post by DerArzt »

jawilson2 wrote: post #706
Aurornis wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism. The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling. We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more…

We're still fixing the problems from Reagan. The USA and the world will be feeling the aftershocks 100 years from now.

And the planet is still feeling the after affects of British colonialism. That's how the future works, it's affected by the past.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#740

Post by throwaway902984 »

marcusverus wrote: post #697
Avshalom wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Yes Trump's FCC threats over Jimmy Kimmel were also wrong, but he didn't have a government agency doing it to citizens. so in this sentence do you think the FCC isn't a government agency or that Jimmy Kimmel isn't a citizen?

He's clearly alluding the fact that the Biden admin did far worse. The great sin of Trump's FCC was a single ill-advised tweet by FCC chair Brendan Carr... in which he threatened to enforce the law as written. For comparison, the Biden admin's FBI actively engaged in purely political media manipulation in service of the sitting president's campaign, such as when they lied to Facebook (and presumably others) to "prebu…

He wrote that the FCC wasn't a government agency. Hard to argue that is correct, or that their political pursuit of one of trump's "enemies" isn't actually political.

It was more that a tweet no, but an interview with Benny johnson, an avowed political figure paid by Russians at one point?

Post reply on HN