I read and appreciate your response and that you agree about some of my points.


Also, if you write so much in one post it might scare people off from talking because they're overwhelmed with text :o Just saying it can be real thing.

Also, if you write so much in one post it might scare people off from talking because they're overwhelmed with text :o Just saying it can be real thing.

That's intentional. It's tiring to keep replying and nice to filter out people with low interest.

You make good points. I'm not basing any of my information in macroeconomics, only in finance. I do still think the US needs to hold off on a spending spree though. Earlier for "other people", I meant that the middle class's taxes don't usually get them much other than social security, which in itself isn't very much. The poorer people get most of the governmental benefits. I'm going to use college scholarships for example. My family has a high credit score, steady income, and apparently I'm excelling academically, but I'm not going to receive any scholarships from the government, and neither will my siblings. Meanwhile, people making less than us, have a low credit score, and are average to below average academically are receiving scholarships. People making less than us obviously is a reasonable reason to award a scholarship, but the other two aren't.

That was just an example. Both California and Texas pay more taxes to the government than they receive back. Both have the ability to survive on their own. Both would have very different types of government. The reason I dislike California and have anger towards it is because of its politics and Hollywood people. It's also the gathering place of the "emotionally fragile" and "poor me"s that sound like toddlers. All this while also having a crap ton of money, not wanting to give it away, but then saying how everyone should. NYC and Chicago also have the politics I dislike, but California takes it to the top. California is becoming a Communistic society. You're either poor or rich, and the rich have manipulated the poor. All the power is in the elite. Republicans are said to be authoritarian, but I would look at the Democrats. Why else would a blue president have signed the most executive orders of any other?

That was off topic, but California is a blue breeding ground. I'd say the red states are some of the least authoritarian. This conversation went to economics, which plays a part, but money doesn't solve everything.

I meant that the middle class's taxes don't usually get them much other than social security

Which middle class? Everyone but the obviously rich and obviously poor will claim to be middle class. The bulk of the social safety net benefits go to the middle 60% of the income distribution, though.

Meanwhile, people making less than us, have a low credit score, and are average to below average academically are receiving scholarships.

Need-based grant aid heavily subsidizes the gap between your estimated family contribution (EFC) and cost of attendance. If you're attending an institution where that gap is small, then of course you should not expect much (if any) grant aid; if you're attending one with a high cost of attendance, then you will find plenty of middle class students receiving need-based grant aid.

You could get caught in the 'squeeze' where cost of attendance feels less manageable for you than for socioeconomically disadvantaged peers (whose needs may be covered fully by scholarships) or wealthy peers (who can pay whatever), but that's a consequence of how university pricing works in the US. The current model creates a 'pay-what-you-can-afford' environment, which in turn creates 'charge-what-we-can' behavior (https://mattbruenig.com/2013/05/17/college-price-discrimination-is-impressively-effective/) and an environment rife for exploitation by make-work middleman jobs (when you're in college, notice how much administrative staff there is).

Discourse around college scholarships is like discourse around better preparing Americans to file their taxes: it forgets that the problem its trying to solve doesn't make sense. Just like how it's silly that the average American has to file taxes (for 90%+ of us, we're just telling the IRS what they already know), it's silly that college costs so much. We should tackle the root cause.

It's also the gathering place of the "emotionally fragile" and "poor me"s that sound like toddlers.

Who are you talking about?

Why else would a blue president have signed the most executive orders of any other?

You mean FDR? Well, for one, he had four terms and presided over the Depression and WW2. On the whole, the partisan distribution of executive orders has been about 50/50. Executive orders also make for a pretty poor measure of authoritarianism: would the involvement of Congress suddenly make an authortarian policy not authoritarian? EOs just happen when the president isn't able to get policies through Congress, authoritarian or otherwise.

You're all wrong
Everything you are all bringing up is missing the point and simply does not mirror reality if you look into it
You are all not even close to being correct and you need to take your time and actually look at what the issues are
Once you all become open-minded you will see that every point you brought up is wrong and biased

will move to california if I can, would recommend 10/10

RIP to the 3000 people who died on 9/11 and to the 1.5 million who died from its effects

Not FDR, Biden takes the prize. The emotionally fragile and poor mes are the ones who bash other people for their misfortunes and tell their supposed sob stories wanting donations and people to side with them about nonsense. Those who if told no would lash out and make a tantrum because their feelings were hurt. Middle class is defined anywhere between $42k and $250k as far as I can tell. These numbers are all definitions combined. Executive orders are things signed into law without the consent of the public, house, or senate. That is exactly what a dictator does. If something is passed in Congress, then there was 535 additional people to have a say in the law.

You completely ignored the part where I said some need more financial help to get in college. What doesn't make sense is that those who work harder or are smarter should then be backhanded and substituted for less smart or less hard working people. Another thing that gets me even more angry is that financial aid is entirely dependent on what your parents make and have. What if they don't support you? What if they're irresponsible? What if you've removed yourself from them? These are all questions that have been in my family. We've worked around them via military scholarships, but I'm not allowed to join the military. That door is locked.

The downward equality that comes with comunism just gives all the richness to the Party leaders usually

All communist states features mass programs that aims to improve the livelihoods of the most disadvantaged, including mass literacy movements, sanitary movements, redistribution of land, housing programs, etc... This is coupled with a tightly knit social security web that provides workers and peasants with much needed support. In history, after successful revolutions there were sharp increases in literacy, life expectancy and median income. Generally, such trait is well present in communist states and in socialist-leaning states in the third world(like Tanzania, South Yemen, the Indian state of Kerala...) Go for a web search.

The effect of these popular initiatives can be seen through the decreasing of inequalities in such states. For instance, communist Bulgaria once achieved a gini index of less than 20, which is markedly lowerer than those of any welfare state(at least 25+). The stable low continued until the 1990s, when "liberalization" came with mass privatizations and the formation of a corrupt plutocracy of similar authoritarian vein. Socially speaking, previously marginalized groups like women and minorities found their way into the regime(though the regime core remained rather homogeneous). Female employment was high, and several prominent ethnic Romani took government positions.

Communist forces also played a significant role across the Iron curtain. The PCF, PCI, SKDL among other communist parties were one of the main pushers that led to the establishment of welfare states in Western Europe. workers gained bargaining power through joining trade unions, many of which were associated with communist parties, take CGT for example.

Back to the other side of the curtain, it is undoubted that these governments suffered from authoritarianism, bureaucracy and stagnation, but despite their flaws, they symbolized an attempt to break from the capitalist system.

That takes us to the roots of communist and socialist movements in the 20th century. These "commies" did not come from nowhere and overthrow democratic institutions. Instead, they mostly came to power in underdeveloped states, and the regimes they overthrew (or tried to overthrow) were almost entirely composed of client states ruled by right-wing dictatorships. That list is long, encompassing Batista's Cuba, Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, Salazar's Portugal, Suharto's Indonesia, Mobutu's Zaire, Palevhi's Ian, juntas of Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic of Trujillo, Paraguay... These states had a corrupt elite class that drained its citizens and brutally suppressed them while receiving MILITARY aid from the US used for death squads and aggression. These client states were instrumental in the capitalist system as they provided extremely cheap (and very disposable) labour while selling off the country to the West through privatizations of resources and land. For instance, Guatemala's cultivable land was mostly owned by the United Fruits Company and laboured on by gravely underpaid and maltreated Mayan workers. These states number too much to be some kind of anomaly in the "Free World", so liberal commentators ignore them(while reactionary ones hail their atrocities. Want a helicopter ride?). In reality, they were integral components of the capitalist system. With these populations and territories the West could exploit but bears no responsibilities for, they can harvest resources and talents while transfering the shady part of capitalism to some remote places. So we now see "enclosure movements" and miserable peasants and factory workers in the third world, suffering from what capitalism claims to have grown out of. And the nation state ideology adds to this myth that portrays the West's success as a result of choosing the capitalist model that champions free trade, democracy, freedom, blah blah blah... In reality the capitalist system is a pyramid whre the West dominates the top, while the MAJORITY of the Free World's pupulation live in misery(a tiny portion of local elites are welcomed into the US to show its openess while indoctrinating them). The basis of such system is inherently unequal as it is based on centuries of colonialism that shaped colonies into rudimentary suppliers of resources and the markets of goods-dumping. Free trade only favours the advantaged as they control the rules, and democracy is fragile because any leader that tries to turn the table by "messing with" its Western-controlled resources would only get dumped. The cold war logic was: nationalization-business lobby jumps in-anti-communist hysteria(the target don't have to be real)-coup. Nowadays coups are still commonplace, like in Honduras and in Haiti (against Artiste). So the whole process was one of concentration, not of the common good. With the same amount of resource, a concentrated model obviously has more output than a dispersed one. While capitalism does this concentration through market means, communism brings in the state, under which citizens get more equal distribution through rather administrative ways. And the state (in theory) belongs to the people, so now the people (de jure) control the means of production(and de facto, in certain situations, like in agriculture where farmers are entitled to cultivate land, which functions as if they owned the land, though in principle all lands are nationalized).

So what is it with the nice living standards of Europeans, and with the rise of Japan? The former is influenced by many factors like the centuries of colonial gains(in capital, technology and culture),the welfare state, state intervention in economics... A very short answer would be, because they fought for, and got the bread crumbs of capitalism. Japan had a similar case as its industries statrted the post war recovery through military production (for the wars in indochina and elsewhere), and of course Japan was an industrialized world power, not really a third world state. The third world only gets the bread crumbs of the bread crumbs. So where is the bread? 50% of the world's wealth is controlled by 1 percent of the population and the percentage is increasing fast. The bottom's net wealth is actually dropping.

To draw an analogy, people envy the life of (de facto and de jure) autocratic monarchs, as they can do anything they wish. But that does not justify absolute monarchism because the absolute majority of people can only be miserable serfs producing riches for the monarch but getting none in return. And of course monarchs in history actually can't wield ALL power. So the lives of bread crumb eaters and bread-crumb-of-bread-crum eaters could only be much less enjoyable.

Revolution was the only way of struggle during the cold war as the West kindly sealed off other possibilities. The democratically elected governments(many of which were not socialist, but liberal) of Mossadeigh's Iran, Arauz's Guatemala, Allende's Chile, Lumumba's Congo, Nkrumah's Ghana etc were overthrown by the West through coups carried out by the corrupt elites, but with the West's direct involvement. Refer to the 1973 Chilean coup and the 1953 Iranian coup.

These revolutionaries were the only forces that could bring justice to the people. But even such justice required bloody wars in which the reactionaries were responsible for the absolute majority of heinous abuses. Massacres, genocide(guatemala), arbitrary killings, rape, biological and chemical warfare(agent orange in Vietnam, swine fever in Cuba) were commonplace. But thrid world lives were too cheap for these elites to pay attention to. Only Hollywood-styled tales of (mostly middle class) escapes in pursuits of personal freedom interests them. As for the masses? Exclusion and demonization. Either their stories were completely ignored, or they were portrayed as faceless, nameless henchmen mowed down during some Hollywood-style killing frenzy. If it was not the extreme exploitation and oppression they suffered, the bright promises of an equal world, and the popular strength embedded in their struggle, how could an underdevelped serfdom-transfored USSR, along with third-world former colonies, take on the agglomeration of the most powerful capitalist world powers for a century? Their flaws may be deep, but they were on the side of equality and justice in a world deprived of these qualities, and for such stance they deserve a second look.

nicely said eduord.
in another topic I asked this question a few weeks back, "how many free hong kong"threads will it take to get warzone banned in china. what will be your estimate

The content doesn't get it banned, the influence does. So considering the current situation where this is a website rarely frequented by Hong Kongers, let alone mainland Chinese, I don't think it is possible. To get it banned, it needs to be at least some kind of online news service like the Guardian(still working) or the Independent(down), or some mainstream American news. After that, you need to follow the HK events some months ago and post articles about that. That would probably do the trick.

What doesn't make sense is that those who work harder

Careful, you don't know how hard other people work.

FW: Politics, religion

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note: Please do basic research on topics before making claims about them. My posts get awfully long and unpleasantly pedagogical right now... It's also a weird system when one party just says stuff and the other actually has to look into things else they get accused of "ignoring" or not refuting them.

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Not FDR, Biden takes the prize.

FDR signed 3728 executive orders, at a clip of 1.2 days/order. This is by far the highest of any US president.

Among Presidents in the Sixth Party System (modern political era):
- Donald Trump (R) signed 220 (#13765-#13984), at a clip of 6.6 days/order.
- Barack Obama (D) signed 276 (#13489-13764), at a clip of 10.6 days/order.
- George W. Bush (R) signed 291 (#13198-#13488), at a clip of 10.0 days/order.
- Bill Clinton (D) signed 364 (#12834-#13197), at a clip of 8.0 days/order.
- George H. W. Bush (R) signed 166 (#12668-#12883), at a clip of 8.8 days/order.
- Ronald Reagan (R) signed 381 (#12287-#12667), at a clip of 7.7 days/order.

Joe Biden (D) has, to date, signed 57 executive orders (#13985-14041), at a clip of 4.1 days/order. This is a fast pace by recent standards, but it's likely to slow down over the entirety of his time in office (since presidents, as you realize, don't sign executive orders at a uniform pace).

On aggregate, the Democratic presidents of the Sixth Party System have signed 697 executive orders over 6,079 days in office- that's a clip of 8.7 days/order. The Republican presidents of this era have signed 1,058 orders over 8.766 days in office- a clip of 8.3 days/order.

Between 1981 and 2001, a new executive order got signed about every 8 days. Between 2001 and 2017, the pace slowed to about 10. Now it seems to have quickened since 2017 to about one executive order per week.

The partisan disparity you point to doesn't exist.

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The emotionally fragile and poor mes are the ones who bash other people for their misfortunes and tell their supposed sob stories wanting donations and people to side with them about nonsense. Those who if told no would lash out and make a tantrum because their feelings were hurt.

What makes you associate these people with California, exactly? Given your description, I've met these people all over the place; you seem to be describing out-of-touch cliques in general- the in-groups of every forum or congregation.

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Executive orders are things signed into law without the consent of the public, house, or senate.

Executive orders are not laws in the same sense as laws passed by Congress. Instead, they're a means by which the President, the elected (by the consent of the public) head of the executive branch, sets directives for their branch- e.g., by setting requirements for federal employees or changing the policies of federal agencies.

They're just a product of the separation of powers in our Constitution.

That is exactly what a dictator does.

The President of the United States is a (somewhat indirectly) elected leader subject to the will of the governed- they lose political capital if they enact unpopular policies (see: approval rating swings).

Their decisions are checked by the courts (which can overturn their orders or issue stays) and the legislature (which can remove them and has control over their immediate subordinates). They have to have sufficient popular support to win elections, and they can't win a mandate more than twice.

This is a far cry from authoritarianism or dictatorship.

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You completely ignored the part where I said some need more financial help to get in college.

I did not. I challenged your characterization of grant aid as "help" when in reality it's simply a form of price discrimination. Colleges set a high sticker price and then use their funds, mixed with some government funds, to give you a new price set about as high as you're able to afford. They squeeze as much as they can (because the ROI is still high even if the degree sets you back 300 kilodollars) and then the funds go toward various university initiatives (they gotta build those climbing walls to compete with other universities doing the same thing) and administrative staff.

You're framing the issue in terms of getting aid when in reality the system is functionally a government-enabled mechanism to have everyone pay as much for college as colleges can get away with charging. Once you view it as price discrimination, it all makes sense why you and so many others get taken advantage of.

Of course you get squeezed. If they're not charging you an amount that's a little bit uncomfortable for you to afford, they're leaving money on the table.

What doesn't make sense is that those who work harder or are smarter should then be backhanded and substituted for less smart or less hard working people.

Where is this fabled scholarship for having a low credit score? I can't find one.

Moreover, functionally, the system doesn't substitute students- entry and participation is managed through admissions, not aid. It just admits whoever it likes and charges everyone as much as they can afford (in principle; sometimes there are inefficiencies).

You're almost certainly still going to go to college and pay them what they ask for, even if you have to use one of your workarounds. From the college's perspective, then, the system is working as intended: they got you in and they got you to pay as much as you could.

Another thing that gets me even more angry is that financial aid is entirely dependent on what your parents make and have. What if they don't support you? What if they're irresponsible?

There are mechanisms for filling out financial aid forms without including your parents' income and assets; they just subject you to increased scrutiny (obviously), but if you are in this situation you have some options.

What if you've removed yourself from them?

If you get legally emancipated, then your parents' income and assets typically do not affect your financial aid.

But overall, I agree that the college scholarship system is broken- if you view it as a system of helping people pay for college. Though of course, it's not really that kind of system. It's a system to set prices individually at whatever people can afford to pay.

It's a hard problem to fix because, though the perverse incentives for colleges here are enabled by the government aid system (coupled with limitations on supply and artificial scarcity), you can't just shut off FAFSA overnight. Plus artificial scarcity creates a class of people (myself included) who now have financial incentives to maintain that system; though fixing the scarcity issue would benefit society as a whole, it would increase the relative market leverage associated with our labor (i.e., it would lower our wages). It's like how I now have my incentives aligned with maintaining restrictive housing policies in the SF Bay Area and not building public transportation from places like Sacramento: if we're able to broaden labor mobility, wages on aggregate go up immensely but mine go down.

So you've got logistical and political resistance to contend with. Until you can, the system stays in place.

Going back to the point, though, college scholarships are a poor example of differential returns on taxpayer investment... because college aid isn't actually aid, and (just like with drug prices and hospital costs or the "savings" on your grocery bill because you used a loyalty card) a lot of the numbers are just price manipulation.

44% of grant aid is just institutional grants (i.e., the college adjusting their price). 25% is Pell grants, which are for exceptional financial need (i.e., actually poor people). Another 21% come from private, employer, and veteran/military grants. State grants are just 10% and tend to be concentrated in public universities. (see: http://collegeaffordability.urban.org/financial-aid/grant-aid/#/by_sector ; you can use this to explore grant aid breakdown by income and dependency status, too, and see that federal and state grants are basically negligible).

Plus this is a tiny portion of the federal budget anyway. It's only 10 aircraft carriers or 4 months' worth of r*ral subsidies.

Edited 9/13/2021 02:49:32

Communism and capitalism are the exact same system, if you can't see that then you will never understand history and how the world actually works.

>industry is dominated by a party composed of high-ranking special interest representatives
>the underclass is undercompensated
>education is about socialization and instrumentalizing people to serve the state and/or corporations rather than education
>foreign policy is dominated by the military industrial complex

Yes we all know the dude in the “nationalist” clan knows his history and would understand it’s complexity!

FW: Politics, religion

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RainB00ts actually has a point, although his perspective here is an over-correction imo. But the same underlying political structures create perverse incentives in both capitalism and communism, leading to the emergence of class politics and domination.

Where capitalism shines, though, is in how it manages and de-risks these structures. Liberalism, with its broad interpretations and applications of property rights (including rights to life and liberty), provides strong guardrails that limit adverse scenarios (e.g., the economic mismanagement and political repression of Stalin-era USSR or Mao-era PRC). Excesses become harder to implement in a free-market society, at least under present technological conditions. Markets price in information far better than any other system and, given competition, tend to align individual incentives with general welfare (e.g., there's outside rewards for risk-tolerance and competitive mechanisms in most industries that force suppliers to compete along customer preferences, leading to cycles of disruption).

But the underlying reality exists in either system (and under prior economic arrangements, like manorialism or mercantilism), because it's endemic to human society in general: people face individual incentives that sometimes encourage them to harm the whole, those in power have reasons to want to stay in power, and organized systems have incentives to self-perpetuate. The excesses of the Soviet Union or the political interventions of the United States represent merely a confluence of incentives (Stalin's consolidation of power, pressure from the impoverished citizens, and external security concerns in the former case; domestic economic demand, political currents, and the power dynamics of the US executive in the latter) channeled through the political and economic systems of each society, which themselves emerged from processes of selection.

About 12,000 years ago, our sedentary ancestors displaced hunter-gatherers. Sedentary societies weren't necessarily better to live in; indeed, high concentrations of people living alongside high concentrations of animals introduced novel problems like epidemics, sedentary life in many ways demanded more work for less reward, societal oppression became easier at scale (emergence of states, organized religion, large-scale war), and sedentary humans (likely) traded individual intelligence for social smarts. It wasn't until only a few centuries ago (around industrialization) that sedentary humans had better quality of life (past infant mortality) than the hunter-gatherers we wiped out.

But that didn't matter. Quality of life and choice didn't drive the settling-down of humans. Instead, sedentary societies simply grew faster and displaced hunter-gatherers. One system just propagated itself better than another, regardless of how well it benefit the people living under the system. Not to say that everything is merely evolutionary (certain conditions have to be true for deterministic differential propagation to occur, and the underlying incentives also have to relate to individual objectives, although what we want is also something that societal and biological evolution tend to drive), but it just has a lot of predictive value (and utility- we can apply this model to push our own interests by generating solutions that would succeed within its framework).

The same has been true since. There is a current of history and we merely swim in it. It's in our interest to try to understand the system instead of lazily playing team red vs. team blue, so that we can exercise power within it and try to tweak it to better suit our own interests. Why are liberal democracies able to thrive today? Where do their flaws come from? What would have to remain true in order for liberal democracy to be a viable mode of governance? Why are r*rals still allowed to exist, subsidized and un-eradicated? All worth thinking about.

Edited 9/13/2021 02:49:19