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Jimmy Carter has died

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Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#771
post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my understanding, the costs involved in the Soviet response to SDI were small, and had very little effect on national spending, so I don't see how that's important enough to mention. Surely the falling price of oil was more significant, yes? I'll bet the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was also more expensive. Since gadders' comment is flagged, I don't know the fuller context.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cnm73/did_r...

Some commentary about why you gave that link would be nice. I think you meant as a way to say "looks like you are right"?

That is, as far as I can tell, it agrees with me ("responses to SDI were not a major factor in either the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor in the end of the Cold War"), including by citing the same source I gave, the paper by Pavel Podvig.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone already has it, the cost is just absorbed by the public instead of being taken out of the taxes of the person receiving the emergency care, assuming they can’t afford the hospital bill.

Nope. EMTALA means hospitals have to evaluate, and if necessary, stabilize you, and that’s it. If you’ve got a growing cancer or some expensive chronic disease that’s causing serious problems, they’ll do what they can to stop those problems from killing you in any given visit, but they absolutely will not treat cancer with the intent of curing it or help you control a chronic disease knowing they’ll never recoup paym…

This is not much different from how many insured people approach their healthcare. My friends who live paycheck to paycheck do not seek medical attention unless it is some extreme life or death situation. Even though they are insured, they are afraid of paying copays and deductibles of $100-$500 for routine visits. If their annual physical results in even just a $50 bill, they will not go. Only when they are in severe 10/10 pain will they start to think about seeing a doctor.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

messaging is hard when prices never went down… you can’t send economist/finacial times article explaining what biden was able to pull of (albeit the raising deficit) to a farmer in oklahoma who is paying 80% more for his groceries…

> messaging is hard when prices never went down… The opposite of inflation (when prices go up), deflation (when prices go down) is never a good thing. But explaining that a bit of inflation is a good thing is something all economists agree on but most normal people can't understand. The fact that velocity should always be positive, and that "lower inflation" means lowering the rate of price growth, not deflation, is…

The opposite of inflation (when prices go up), deflation (when prices go down) is never a good thing

so if we have high inflation say due to global pandemic's effects on global supply and in response we get say 40-100% price increases (say milk was $1.00/gallon and now it is say $1.50/gallon, a modest 50% increase).

so now inflation eases, global supply chain in back to normal etc etc... we should expect now that milk prices will stay forever at $1.50/gallon (or higher) because now that would be deflation if the prices eased…?! :)

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree on your point regarding midterm reckoning, I'm afraid people DID vote for Trump, he even won the popular vote - which is mind numbing: Americans actually WANTED to install a proven criminal and rapist as president.

it is extremely short-sited to think in simple terms like this. what you should be asking yourself is WHY this happened - WHY did all these people come out to vote for Trump. We are not talking here about "MAGAs" - there are nearly not enough of them to win the election. every single state in the United States moved to the right in this election... so you should stop and think this through to figure out why would Ame…

Seems clear that (effectively) nobody is voting for fraud or rape.

But I've thought about it a lot, and I'm still clueless. Something to do with lots of people getting screwed, I guess. But why ordinary folks switch their vote from a party that serves the top 20%, to a party that serves the top 0.01%, that is still mysterious to me.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#775
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream With very good reason. Nuclear power leaves a 200,000 year head ache. Climate change is a mild problem in comparison, it will correct itself in centuries (taking most of civilisation with it, but mēh!)

I think it'd be easier to figure out how to manage that nuclear waste than burning humanity towards extinction and trying to deal with it when we get to it.

If oil/methane/coal waste was a solid cube that could be buried underground, instead of in the atmosphere, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#776
post #660
post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are talking about the 1953 coup, I've never heard that description. Everything I've read says the UK, with some degree of US support, overthrew the government. > And it's a little far fetched to call an armies call to take over the unstable situation a coup when the current head of the state is incapable to take any action because of a serious illness. That's exactly a coup. The people who conduct coups - and…

That next "civilian" was an Islamic extremist who took over because the other leaders of the revolution were too weak and foolish and were eliminated by the Islamic extremists. At that moment a military takeover would have resulted in a smooth transition of power to the next actual civilian government. Things are not always simple and straightforward.

> That next "civilian" was an Islamic extremist who took over because the other leaders of the revolution were too weak and foolish and were eliminated by the Islamic extremists.

Are you talking about 1979? I was talking about 1953.

> At that moment a military takeover would have resulted in a smooth transition of power to the next actual civilian government.

If you mean in 1979, that's quite a prediction when nobody knew what would happen, and nobody now can confidently predict paths untaken. it's hard to imagine how the military wouldn't have just furthered a civil war, being closely associated with the Shah. What was the military doing in 1979?

Also, why would the Iranian military make things any more 'smooth' than another power base?

> smooth transition of power to the next actual civilian government.

As of 1979, there hadn't been a democratic civilian government since ~1953; it was a foreign-backed, and IIRC military-backed dictatorship. Why would they install an actual civilian, democratic government if given the chance?

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#777
post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of research on election results and voting patterns. > You have to do that research yourself It's really on you or whoever is making the claim. > that isn't a question answered within HN's character limit It seems pretty straightforward to me. Who voted for what and why? If you don't know, then these claims are fabrications.

>There's lots of research on election results and voting patterns. Yes, thats the hard part. Lots of reach if varying quality and accuracy, before and after election analysis. Opinion pieces. So much to sift through. >It's really on you or whoever is making the claim. I didn't make the claim. But I want to emphasize that this isn't just a question you throw a link at. >If you don't know, then these claims are fabrica…

> Data will always be messy and debatable.

I agree, but we have no data at all in this discussion. People are just making stuff up like they are self-evident truths.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now flying is the worst consumer experience of them all and Budweiser is made out of rice. Is this winning?

Flying is incredibly less expensive largely due to deregulation, and Budweiser has always been brewed with rice. So, yes, this is winning.

The deregulation, more specifically, was repealing Prohibitionist policies that kept microbreweries from operating. Now we have microbreweries everywhere, offering superior alternatives to Budweiser, some of which have grown to be national level competitors.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#779
post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt all economists agree on that because it is obviously not true. For example if there was a period where the CPI dropped combined with increasing wages across the workforce, that'd be pretty great for most people. Deflation, in the abstract. is about as good or bad as inflation. Slightly better because a serious deflationary crisis is much less damaging than an inflationary one. You go to https://en.wikipedia.o…

Deflation is universally considered bad, I don’t think there are many economists, if any at all, who think it’s a good thing. The problem with deflation is that everyone stops consuming in hope of better prices, like Japan, and the way they dig out of deflation is via artificially inducing inflation. It is definitely an easier problem to solve than excessive inflation, but deflation usually underlines a bigger proble…

> The problem with deflation is that everyone stops consuming in hope of better prices, like Japan...

May as well say the problem with inflation is people stop consuming because things cost more, like Tuvalu. You've picked a random high performing economy and claimed that its existence shows that people buy less when prices drop (an exotic claim). It is an unusually weak argument because it contradicts basic supply-demand logic and you've put your fingers on no evidence.

One of the reasons democracy works so well is that voters ignore that sort of unsupported just-so economic mumbo jumbo and vote for change when their living standards drop. It isn't a great algorithm but it is a lot better than the alternatives.

Re: Jimmy Carter has died

#780
post #700
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re assuming that most women would rather share bathrooms with trans men than with trans women. I suspect that were these mad ideas ever to be fully implemented in practice, we’d find that that was not in fact their revealed preference. The truth is that most of the people currently stirring up a moral panic around gender are barely even aware of the existence of trans men and simply haven’t thought this through p…

It's a reasonable assumption that most women prefer to share female spaces with other women, regardless of how they look, and not with male intruders who have decided to disregard women's boundaries for their own pleasure while falsely identifying themselves as women.

Since the question here is what women would prefer, I haven't done an extensive search, but it seems at least a majority of women support allowing people to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/09/28/3-public-spl.... Interestingly, men are more strongly opposed than women.

I'll also leave this comment for thought. You're arguing that allowing transgender women into spaces reserved for women (unqualified) degrades the utility of them. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to this argument, but not universally. I think allowing transgender women into women's sports is maybe not right, because transgender women don't have the same underlying physicality as women who have grown up with female hormones. I think it's an interesting discussion about why we perhaps somewhat arbitrarily segment sports in this way but not others (why no under 6 ft basketball leagues?) and the role that genetics plays in sports vs training and practice, but I think it's a generally effective means of allowing a group (generally women) to have meaningful leagues where it's not just women + men who aren't very good but have a genetic advantage. As well with regards to prison, since this is already a segment of the population (people in prison) who have committed some crime, so trusting them in the way we might trust random people from society to act may not be the right choice.

That said, your comments make it sound like you don't respect the existence of transgender people in general.

In particular, "I don't see how this is a self-contradictory position. Women who've decided to call themselves men are in fact still women.", and "It's a reasonable assumption that most women prefer to share female spaces with other women, regardless of how they look, and not with male intruders who have decided to disregard women's boundaries for their own pleasure while falsely identifying themselves as women.".

The first is I think clearly denying the right of someone to identify as transgender, and the latter is a fallacy. I agree that women would not want to share the bathroom with "male intruders who have decided to disregard women's boundaries for their own pleasure while falsely identifying themselves as women.", but this is not an accurate description of transgender women.

If you think it's an inaccurate description of how you feel (that you do in fact respect transgender people) I would suggest that being more careful in your debate might help you to convey your arguments effectively.

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