1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
argumate

Pointless Shitstorm Timeline

mitigatedchaos

the issue here is that the “prominent person” in question has no intrinsic value, thus strip-mining them for news leaves them with nothing left.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have each said a host of problematic things over the course of their lives, yet strangely they haven’t been abandoned by everyone yet.

Trump was elected because of this and actively exploited it on purpose, a move most others cannot safely execute.

Intrinsic value isn’t the actual defense against it.  It’s more about a sort of social or political power.

Source: the-grey-tribe politics trump
the-grey-tribe

Pointless Shitstorm Timeline

the-grey-tribe

Sometimes, a prominent person P says something ambiguous and weird on TV. It can be pre-taped, but it has to be “live” like an interview or a late night talk show. The statement is possibly problematic when taken out of context, and only a small point in support of the main thesis.

For example: “If you don’t know what the candidates stand for, maybe don’t vote” or “Women’s child rearing work is important and should be valued”or “Black men have big penises”.

The talk show host asks next question. Someone tweets this sentence in isolation.

News Cycle I

“P said racist/sexist/fascist thing”

“Other people react to thing said by P“

“What twitter users think of P’s latest gaffe“

“Former friend condemns P”

“People distancing themselves from P”


Now our protagonist clarifies that they meant what they said, but they meant it in an innocuous, literal way.

News Cycle II

“P doubles down on racist/sexist/fascist comments”

“P still not apologising”

“Right-wing weirdos agree with P“


Now P must clarify that he really didn’t mean it like that. He does not agree with the weirdos at all and regrets any offense he may have caused. He clarifies his original statement to eliminate any confusion.

News cycle III

“P offers non-apology, repeats offending statement”

“We decided not to give P a platform any more”

“Has racism/sexism/fascism re-entered the mainstream? A political scientist explains, also P is terrible“


At this point, the actual statement by P is buried three clicks deep in these news articles. P thinks the original offhand statement was blown out of proportion. He tries one more time.

News cycle IV

“P: Concerns about racism/sexism/fascism blown out of proportion“

“P goes on offensive in racism/sexism/fascism row“


Q, a friend of P, tries to give a sympathetic account of the original statement.

News cycle V

“Q: P was misunderstood“

“Q defends P’s racist/sexist/fascist outburst“

“Q’s defense of P proves old boys networks still at work“

“P’s employer has still not fired racist/sexist/fascist P“


After Q, nobody wants to stick their neck out for P now, and nobody wants to be seen talking to P. People who defend P mostly do so anonymously.

News cycle VI (mostly think pieces, not news stories)

“People need to stop defending P“

“Stop saying racism/sexism/fascism is no big deal“

“Waffling about giving racist/sexist/fascist people a platform hurts marginalized people the most“


The media realise that there is nothing more to say, and smaller outlets/latecomers try to milk the issue one last time. Nobody wants to talk to P any more, and P is wary of any journalist who contacts him.

News cycle VII (still no news stories)

“The privilege of P-supporters“

“We’ve had it with pro-P trolls in our comment section“

“Why we don’t talk to P and why people like P do not deserve a right of reply“


P tries to find somebody who wants to talk to him, somebody sympathetic. He does not want to talk to anybody who previously painted him as racist/sexist/fascist.

News cycle VIII

“P sets record straight“

“P shows true colors, talks to far-right ‘newspaper’ “

mitigatedchaos

Repeat until so many people get fed up with racism accusations / fear unfounded racism accusations that a living meme gets elected President by showing he doesn’t care about racism accusations and plows through them like fresh fallen snow.

politics identity politics trump
toxicmutantslimefreaks
stuff-that-irks-me

(via Bill Gates: We Should Tax Robots That Take Jobs | Observer)

Are you going to tax my lawnmower, washing machine, or car because they do the work that people used to perform?

STUPID

redbloodedamerica

What’s amazing about this logic is that he closes by saying, “I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It’s okay.” Says the guy who has made billions through the luxury of selling software that is so high and demand and with a high barrier of entry from competition.  Not to mention the high level of human capital it takes to create his products.  His market doesn’t have to worry a lot about automation and manufacturing, especially since they moved away from physical packaging software; but just imagine those businesses that have a low margin of profit but need to heavily invest in cost-cutting labor supplied by automatic production equipment.  Those businesses would get hosed because they are not only getting taxed on the mass amount of labor they still need to employ but now also on the equipment itself.

I’d like to think that Bill Gates is just being a sympathetic sycophant to manufacturing laborers here but I believe he is smarter than that.  He is blatantly advocating for redistributing wealth by not only taxing labor but now taxing capital goods as well.  You would not only be taxed for the purchase of this equipment, you would then also be taxed on its perpetual use as well.  You may as well be renting it directly from the government.

This is just one more step towards the government controlling all private property.  If they can’t seize it outright, they will tax every aspect of its worth to redistribute as they deem fit.

It’s far from stupid, it’s downright devious.

antifeminist111

If robots are going to be so heavily taxed, then wont employers just keep hiring humans?

redbloodedamerica

I suppose it would depend on how much the tax would be.  If it is the same progressive income tax as employees have to pay then you would have to weigh the production output compared to manual labor along with the new added tax costs compared to what it would it would cost for actual employee costs like wages, benefits, and payroll taxes.  I still believe the employer would go with automation all the same.  

I’m not sure how they would calculate a tax based on the theoretical amount of profits they generated from the automated production.  What if the business does not reap a profit? Do they just not pay their robot tax?  Doubtful.  The government always gets its cheese.

toxicmutantslimefreaks

Personally, I don’t think that ai and automation will ever be sophisticated enough to truly replace human labor,

But it seems like no one has a viable solution to the problem. The republicans want to institute a base national salary, and the democrats want ever more bureaucracy.

mitigatedchaos

They said AI would never win at Go, either, but we all see how well that’s worked out.  It’s all but guaranteed that if civilization doesn’t collapse, AI will replace human labor.  The question is when.

But let me throw an alternate, mid-term solution at you that wouldn’t crash the economy: wage subsidies.  

If you lower the minimum wage, then make up the difference with direct-to-employee wage subsidies that decline as employer wages increase, you can accomplish multiple things.

  • Increase job choice and negotiating power of employees at the bottom, cutting down on exploitation and increasing job satisfaction.
  • Multiply the effect of welfare spending by leveraging private spending.
  • Recover some of the wealth lost through welfare spending.
  • Reduce the number of people on welfare.
  • Axe the welfare trap.
  • Lower minimum wage may reduce some market distortion.
  • Normalize working, including in highly-impoverished communities.
  • Keep people busy so they don’t take up constantly protesting as their new vocation.
  • Cut crime.  (The more jobs, the more dangerous criminal activity seems more like something for a chump to do.)
  • Reduce political opposition to automation.
  • Fund American jobs preferentially over foreign jobs.
  • Make illegal immigration less profitable.

And so on and so forth.  

The program can be implemented and tested incrementally.  It can be rolled back if it doesn’t work, or expanded if it does.  It will be less expensive since it displaces some welfare spending, and it multiplies the effect of money spent with private spending.

The main limitation I would put is that the subsidies are only available for goods and services produced for domestic and not foreign consumption.  The bureaucracy required shouldn’t be too bad, otherwise, since this isn’t an approach targetted at specific industries, districts, or means levels.

Source: observer.com politics capitalism robot jobpocalypse
wirehead-wannabe
thathopeyetlives

First question: What does one even do about Russia secretly interfering with our politics? If people are actually involved (and apparently Flynn was) you can impeach or disqualify them. Trump has been president for a few weeks and has managed to screw up royally, so we could kick him out, but earlier on… you’re kinda out of luck unless you want to totally screw up the politics. 

Second question: What is actually going on? Is Trump genuinely trying to be friends with Russia and enemies with China (stupid plan in a world that successfully avoids war!) or just Putin wants to weaken the USA with idiot leaders or what?

wirehead-wannabe

My gut feeling is that either that Putin blackmailing/threatening/bribing Trump, or that authoritarian leaders with a socially conservative support base flock together. Or both.

mitigatedchaos

Russia + China is not an unreasonable combination.  So yes, I think preventing that is part of it.  China is about to enter a period of decline, but it’s still more likely to become a global hegemon than Russia.

I think there are several things going on here.

  • Trump actually does have some level of respect for authoritarian rulers, I think.  Even I sometimes look at China and think about what could be accomplished if all the NIMBYs were stopped from holding up projects, even though I know actually doing that wouldn’t work out so well.  But I think half of it on Trump’s part is just signalling.
  • The sanctions over the Ukraine, as far as I can remember, have not actually been lifted and are likely to stay in place, as far as I can tell.
  • Russia itself is less powerful than it has been, both in terms of its economy and its conventional military.  They couldn’t really invade America even if they wanted to, and they aren’t going to become a global hegemon.  China is a much greater threat to America’s global power long-term, depending on just how bad all their looming crises become.  China also sticks out more to his base because it wasn’t Russia that the jobs got offshored to.
  • Trump is probably seeking to cooperate with Russia when it suits America’s interests, rather than just fight Russia across the board.  In part, he wants to signal this to Moscow.
    • This also depends on just how you define “America’s interests”.  If you think of democracy or global capitalism as being synonymous with “America’s interests”, then I don’t think Trump agrees with you.
  • Trump probably does find Islam threatening in a way that he does not actually find Christians, Hindus, gays, transgender people, etc threatening.  So, let’s suppose he wants to drain the migrants out of Europe.  Right-wing parties are gaining steam, and others are shifting right on the issue.  But so long as there is nowhere to put the migrants, the media can pelt the nativists with stories about migrant suffering.  Enter the Syrian “safe zones” plan from his campaign.  Paying off the construction of temporary housing and mass issuing of rations is cheaper than a lot of military action, it keeps the migrants out of Europe, and it creates somewhere to put them for when they leave Europe without triggering the same level of media-based political fallout.  However, to do this, he needs support from Russia/Putin.
    • Trump is signalling that he does not care if Syria is ruled by a tyrant.  He’s willing to compromise if it gets him his safe zones.
Source: thathopeyetlives politics trump
argumate

Health insurance must pay for exoskeletons #1yrago

mostlysignssomeportents

An independent review board has ordered an unspecified health insurer in the northeastern USA to reimburse a patient for a $69,500 exoskelton from Rewalk, whose products enable people with spinal cord injuries to walk.

The board found that the exoskeleton was “medically necessary.”

https://boingboing.net/2016/02/19/health-insurance-must-pay-for.html

argumate

this is awesome but you know, anyone still wondering why healthcare eats up more and more of GDP

anaisnein

Not that I’ve looked at the math or anything, it’s 2:40 am and no. But unless there’s a digit missing in that pricing, the health economics of that thing have got to be a total slam-dunk. I don’t doubt the payor resisted paying because resisting payment is what payors do. If it’s a novel device that isn’t on approved formulary lists, which probably if new thing and not many candidates, that alone is plenty for at least one line of nope. It doesn’t require an actual rational objection based on the value proposition. SOP would be bog-standard automatic bureaucratic obstructionism framed as a best practice in cost consciousness. It’s only a story because someone got pissed off enough to deploy the courts and a journalist thought the device looked cool.

Try pricing five days in the critical care unit on a ventilator for a dying eighty-seven-year-old with advanced dementia, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease, found short of breath and tachycardic in bed at the nursing home, rushed to the hospital, and admitted with sepsis and pulmonary edema. Including imaging and cath lab. Then get back to me about unjustifiable Cadillac expenditures on luxurious medical devices that enable (a very small number of) paralyzed people with normal life expectancies to walk again, for less than it costs to put a remote monitoring device into a heart failure patient’s chest, which, statistically, costs less than *not* doing that because it reduces hospitalizations by just a tad.

Source: mostlysignssomeportents healthcare politics
bambamramfan
theintercept.com

Trump Official Obsessed Over Nuclear Apocalypse, Men’s Style, Fine Wines in 40,000 Posts on Fashion Site

Michael Anton, the director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, wrote more than 40,000 posts on Styleforum.net, some of them controversial.
bambamramfan

aka Decius

Okay this is mostly hilarious as a profile of some NRXer’s online presence in a way that probably feels deeply familiar to anyone reading this from the dashboard of tumblr dot com.

Probably not actually relevant as a political matter, because he was an appointee of Flynn and so unlikely to stick around.

And not to be grinding too much of an anti-right hammer today, you can see how David fucking Plouffe (aka the engineer of Obama’s grassroots army in 2008) was fined by an ethics board for improper lobbying for Uber.

It’s not the individual, it’s the system.

mitigatedchaos

Honestly, I didn’t find anything in there particularly outrageous. Homogenous societies do seem to have the better stats he mentions, Islamist terrorists really do exist and would love to nuke New York. I think the risk he assigns it is overestimated, but potential nuclear attack is one reason I don’t want to live in New York.

politics
argumate
argumate

the idea that Milo can’t be racist because he’s Jewish or can’t have regressive gender politics because he’s gay is just strange, I mean isn’t that the exact kind of identity politics weirdness that he and his acolytes decry?

or is it supposed to function as a tu quoque to his opponents?

I mean it just seems like the correct response to allegations of racism or sexism or whatever would be to own it and stick to his guns.

mitigatedchaos

It may be operating on the theory that if this brute categorization is weaponized and shoved in the Left’s face enough, they’ll get the idea that Venn Diagram Intersectionality is dumb and cuts the corners off of people to get them to fit in the overlapping circles of identity prescribed for them.

If that is the intent, it won’t actually work, though.  We’re talking about the same political movement that pushed identity politics so much that white nationalism is starting to come back from the dead.

politics
Top Photos