POLITICS SCHMALITICS

[CMRivdogs]

Just now, Tigerbomb13 said:

The algorithm makes the site unusable in my opinion. It’s all people that I don’t follow and don’t want to follow. It became too much of whack-a-mole to block all the people showing up in my feed. He then introduced the “for you” tab that has every person you follow’s posts in order. Sounds good in theory, but it’s impossible to keep up with every single Tweet. 

Right now Threads seems like everyone is throwing things on the wall to see what sticks. I'm hopeful that there will eventually be an option of just seeing people or topics you follow. I'm not crazy about the current hodgepodge but it's only day two. Let's see how things shake out once the shiny new toy feeling wears off.

[Tigeraholic1]

Reminds me of when Trumpies left for Parlor. Pretty sure they all came back, we will see how this lands.

 

[pfife]

a slight difference is parler is run by nazis whereas threads is run by nazis that are also the biggest and most successful social media company ever

[Mr.TaterSalad]

Sean O'Brien and the Teamsters are about to kick UPS' ASS BABY!!!

 

[CMRivdogs]

Posting it here rather than starting a new thread

 

[chasfh]

Nihilist bomb-throwing MAGAs are beside themselves with glee this morning.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1681616378392989696?s=20

[gehringer_2]

China is rolling out renewables and EVs at a pace the US can only dream about matching so the MAGA can save their glee. The problem with China is not that that they aren't moving faster than pretty much anyone on renewables, it's that their development aims have been so expansive that they are still rolling out new fossil at the same time as well -- we aren't going to change their mind on that, but it is also a transient situation, the former is going to overtake the latter.  Barking at China about global warming is wasted energy, they are already more committed than we are by any objective measure, but Xi is going to act difficult and confrontational because that is his general stance to the US. He's not going to give any US admin any kind of positive PR. I'm sure given the relative volume of renewable power the two countries have rolled out this is another case of the Chinese viewing Americans as both presumptuous and uninformed.

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

India is where things need to change.

Edited July 19, 2023 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

China is rolling out renewables and EVs at a pace the US can only dream about matching so the MAGA can save their glee. The problem with China is not that that they aren't moving faster than pretty much anyone on renewables, it's that their development aims have been so expansive that they are still rolling out new fossil at the same time as well -- we aren't going to change their mind on that, but it is also a transient situation, the former is going to overtake the latter.  Barking at China about global warming is wasted energy, they are already committed, but Xi is going to act difficult and confrontational because that is his general stance to the US. He's not going to give any US admin any kind of positive PR.

India is where things need to change.

Interesting point of perspective on EVs was in Panama where I was in May this year.   The malls had some Chinese EV dealerships (BYD) but absolutely nobody was driving them or any other EV or even hybrids on the streets.  It might be that Panama is in such an advantageous location at the crossroads of World trade that they have cheap fuel from Mexico and the Caribbean and nobody who isn't an Earth-first eccentric millionaire needs that for economic reasons.   

[gehringer_2]

10 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Interesting point of perspective on EVs was in Panama where I was in May this year.   The malls had some Chinese EV dealerships (BYD) but absolutely nobody was driving them or any other EV or even hybrids on the streets.  It might be that Panama is in such an advantageous location at the crossroads of World trade that they have cheap fuel from Mexico and the Caribbean and nobody who isn't an Earth-first eccentric millionaire needs that for economic reasons.   

Not to underestimate the importance of Taiwan in the current US/China chill, but even given that, I have to wonder if the US foreign policy establishment isn't ratcheting things with China more than just a little bit deliberately. My thesis would be that since we operated under the "wealth and markets would reform China organically" paradigm for so long, we were willing to pretty much give away the store in 30 yr of the previous relationship. With the realization that the paradigm was faulty, the US finds itself with no bargaining chips left - so what to do other than create some new ones. I think this is why the hardeneing toward China has been so bi-partisan. I don't think we really need much of what the last two admins have been hitting China with for our own purposes, but we do need to establish a bank of concessions to make in order to re-establish a more balanced negotiating status with it. And of course the howling from China must be at least in part because they see what has been basically a free lunch in previous negotiations with the West coming to an end.

Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but I were a US President, it is precisely what I would be doing. Much like the way Reagan drove the Soviets to the table by increasing pressure with things like the MX, that were in the end, created expressly to be bargained away.

[digitalpigsmuggler]

[digitalpigsmuggler]

[romad1]

16 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Not to underestimate the importance of Taiwan in the current US/China chill, but even given that, I have to wonder if the US foreign policy establishment isn't ratcheting things with China more than just a little bit deliberately. My thesis would be that since we operated under the "wealth and markets would reform China organically" paradigm for so long, we were willing to pretty much give away the store in 30 yr of the previous relationship. With the realization that the paradigm was faulty, the US finds itself with no bargaining chips left - so what to do other than create some new ones. I think this is why the hardeneing toward China has been so bi-partisan. I don't think we really need much of what the last two admins have been hitting China with for our own purposes, but we do need to establish a bank of concessions to make in order to re-establish a more balanced negotiating status with it. And of course the howling from China must be at least in part because they see what has been basically a free lunch in previous negotiations with the West coming to an end.

Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but I were a US President, it is precisely what I would be doing. Much like the way Reagan drove the Soviets to the table by increasing pressure with things like the MX, that were in the end, created expressly to be bargained away.

MX, GLCM, and Pershing II were all built because of perceived need to update the nuclear arsenal to match -- frankly insane levels of Soviet defense spending in the late 60s and 70s.   The western European allies demanded that we build the latter two and then when the Soviet's applied pressure through the Left in those countries, it took a ton of political will to deploy them.  

China...man.  The game is so different with them.  They built up as a powerhouse of industry and workshop of the World and now they are determined to become some bizonkers hermit kingdom like North Korea.  

[gehringer_2]

28 minutes ago, romad1 said:

MX, GLCM, and Pershing II were all built because of perceived need to update the nuclear arsenal to match -- frankly insane levels of Soviet defense spending in the late 60s and 70s.   The western European allies demanded that we build the latter two and then when the Soviet's applied pressure through the Left in those countries, it took a ton of political will to deploy them.  

China...man.  The game is so different with them.  They built up as a powerhouse of industry and workshop of the World and now they are determined to become some bizonkers hermit kingdom like North Korea.  

So when MX was proposed, being young and impressionable still in full Vietnam anti-war reaction mode, I wrote Carl Levin to oppose it. Got back sort of form lettter kind of thing. But I almost fell off my Lazy-Boy when a number of years later, after all the deals had been done with the proper assignments to the ash bins of history, I got another letter from Levin, unsoliticited - that basically said, "See, this was the plan all along, I really am a peacenik at heart!"

Edited July 19, 2023 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

8 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

So when MX was proposed, being young and impressionable still in full Vietnam anti-war reaction mode, I wrote Carl Levin to oppose it. Got back sort of form lettter kind of thing. But I almost fell off my Lazy-Boy when a number of years later, after all the deals had been done with the proper assignments to the ash bins of history, I got another letter from Levin, unsoliticited - that basically said, "See, this was the plan all along, I really am a peacenik at heart!"

Weirdly -- for this conversation -- i worked briefly and boredly, in the USAF Acquisition and Modernization shop for ICBMs during the late 90s.  This was a very painful time for me professionally.  They basically hired me to write a policy paper to promote the ease in which a conventionally-armed Minuteman III could be fired off to destroy some tunnel in Iran or Iraq or whatever.  I had to research Russian and US arms control agreements and the policy status of those agreements.  A lot of focus on the trashed state of Russian ballistic missile warning satellites at the time.   Basically, we could have launched anything we liked at the time and there was no other entity in the World that would be able to track it -- besides the US. 

There were much better ways to attack underground targets.  Something falling at those speeds from space were actually not going to be effective for all sorts of physics reasons. 

 

Edited July 19, 2023 by romad1

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

China...man.  The game is so different with them.  They built up as a powerhouse of industry and workshop of the World and now they are determined to become some bizonkers hermit kingdom like North Korea.  

they can't square that circle though, you can't be a closed society and be merchant to the world, the contradiction in that won't fly. Xi may want it both ways but no-one has made that combination work. If he closes China, he is going to kill it's economy and technical progress. China may have enough momentum built up that it may take a while, but it will happen. What Xi wants to do is make the Chinese want the leadership model he wants to run. That's a big component of what his COVID strategy was about, prove that his model saved more lives. In the West we tended to miss this aspect and only see that he was 'being repressive' because that's our model of him. But to a large extent he was trying to sell his system by providing a result he could market as a better mousetrap. That's why it was so easy for him to turn on a dime and walk away. He was not dumping an ideologically driven program, he was marketing his management as a product and it was time go with V2.0 of the product.

And the other problem is that the cult of personality leadership system has this problem of dying with the leader. The Chinese are supposedly the world's longest term thinkers. On that premise there have to be other constituencies interesting in the future of China on a time frame longer than the rest of Xi's natural life that know better than to like getting on the cult of personality train (again).

What I think Xi wants is a society open for business, education and technology, but politically repressed/passive by choice. He wants the Chinese to view Western style politics as 'disharmonious' and thus counter to deep cultural preferences. And who knows, maybe he can pull it off, it is a different  place with 3000 yrs of diverged cultural DNA from ours. Of course Putin/Russia has achieved the passivity with a repressive program, but it's the passivity of the dead, and comes only at the cost of gutting every other aspect of the nation. 

Edited July 19, 2023 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

6 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

they can't square that circle though, you can't be a closed society and be merchant to the world, the contradiction in that won't fly. Xi may want it both ways but no-one has made that combination work. If he closes China, he is going to kill it's economy and technical progress. China may have enough momentum built up that it may take a while, but it will happen. What Xi wants to do is make the Chinese want the leadership model he wants to run. That's a big component of what his COVID strategy was about, prove that his model saved more lives. In the West we tended to miss this aspect and only see that he was 'being repressive' because that's our model of him. But to a large extent he was trying to sell his system by providing a result he could market as a better mousetrap. That's why it was so easy for him to turn on a dime and walk away. He was not dumping an ideologically driven program, he was marketing his management as a product and it was time go with V2.0 of the product.

What I think he wants is a society open for business, education and technology, but politically repressed/passive by choice. He wants the Chinese to view Western style politics as 'disharmonious' and thus counter to deep cultural preferences. And who knows, maybe he can pull it off, it is a different  place with 3000 yrs of diverged cultural DNA from ours. Of course Putin/Russia has achieved the passivity with a repressive program, but it's the passivity of the dead, and comes only at the cost of gutting every other aspect of the nation. 

Some of my reaction to this I can't share.   The cultural dna thing is real.  The infection of global ideas is happening but in the same way that alt-gothy kids in the middle of Red State America listen to music that isn't from the culturally appropriate "young country" playlists assigned to them.  

[chasfh]

The Federal Reserve launches FedNow today. Get ready for a whole torrent of alt-right red hat conspiracy theories surrounding that.

Personally, I can hardly wait to dump PayPal and Venmo. Like I'm going to trust them with my money more than the Federal reserve? As if.

Hopefully a Kremlin-contr ... er, Republican-controlled government won't outlaw it when they (inevitably?) come into power.

[gehringer_2]

12 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Personally, I can hardly wait to dump PayPal and Venmo. Like I'm going to trust them with my money more than the Federal reserve? As if.

Yeah  - I'm on board with this. Don't do a lot of Venmo - have had issue with the app, but we do keep an account at a separate bank from our regular accounts for paypal so we always have an absolute limit on our liability there. It may be overkill but seemed like a good idea at the time....

[The Ronz]

Will FedNow be considered a "third party" payment system like PayPal, etc.?

Meaning if you accept more than $600.00 in FedNow payments - for whatever reason - that money will be considered income via a 1099?

[gehringer_2]

34 minutes ago, The Ronz said:

Will FedNow be considered a "third party" payment system like PayPal, etc.?

Meaning if you accept more than $600.00 in FedNow payments - for whatever reason - that money will be considered income via a 1099?

they are talking about it being used for payroll processing which is generally considered 1st party. IDK, I'm not sure it's necessarily the transfer method per se that always determines 1st vs 3rd party but it's a fair question and I freely stipulate it's not something I know much about. 

Edited July 20, 2023 by gehringer_2

[CMRivdogs]

From what I've read from the FED website, it seems like an agreement between member banks to expedite payments between two parties. There is no real explanation about how it would work in real life.

There is to be no app. Just an agreement of sorts between participating banks

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about.html

 

[chasfh]

On 7/20/2023 at 10:22 AM, The Ronz said:

Will FedNow be considered a "third party" payment system like PayPal, etc.?

Meaning if you accept more than $600.00 in FedNow payments - for whatever reason - that money will be considered income via a 1099?

It’s considered income only if it’s income. If it’s P2P, or P2B, or B2P as in a refund, then no.

[mtutiger]

Unpossible!

[Mr.TaterSalad]

On 7/19/2023 at 12:40 PM, digitalpigsmuggler said:

Back the blue right?

 

[pfife]

It is my unsolicited opinion that most of the posters in this political forum would like the movie Oppenheimer.   I just watched it and I thought it was really good.