The One True Politics Thread
 

Opening a new thread, since the old one has degenerated into juvenile chaos.

In this thread: engage in discussion. Post interesting things. Argue intelligently. Posit controversial ideas. Be civil. Act like a mature adult.

Do not meme-dump. Do not spam with the same shit over and over again. Don't be a dick.

Feel free to post photos, but don't just dump them without context or commentary. Use your grown-up words.

This thread is going to be actively moderated. No one will be banned for saying anything at all in this thread. But BS will be deleted without mercy.


I'll start:

I came across this documentary from 2014 largely at random.

It's two hours long.



Despite the passage of seven years and multiple congresses and presidencies, it seems more relevant today than ever. Almost prescient in parts.

An interesting example of PBS expressing what could be interpreted as a somewhat antigovernmental sentiment, and during a democrat presidency.

Good move Joe, I haven't been there in ages.

Your vid is not coming up for me, apparently only available in selected countries :dunno:, got a title/source? Thanks.

Well, that's unfortunate.

It's a documentary by Frontline (PBS) entitled United States of Secrets: Part One. Essentially a dissection of the covert functionality of the US executive office during the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies.

What's really interesting is that while it was produced in 2014, it's oddly prescient of the state of affairs here in 2020/21.

I dunno. In 10 years this thread will be fucked too. Joe will be married with 2.5 kids and have no time to moderate.

Or the cosmos corrects and Mr. Perez will be the president.

EDIT: Joe's video works for me.

Not a Meme, as this is what Joe looks like IRL:
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...228a0574a5.jpg

It's true, you know. :D



I do a lot of searching for things related to far-left liberalism, gender dysphoria, and so on as research in preparation for various online retorts.

One of the unintended consequences of this is that Facebook's AI seems to increasingly be of the opinion that I am a neurodivergant genderfluid communist. I deduce this mostly from how I've seen a shift in the content which it "suggests" to me.

And this is fascinating to me, because it's giving me a glimpse of how the other half lives, so to speak. I'm getting visibility into their echo-chamber, and starting to understand more about the how and why of some of the beliefs which you see the fish-mouth types parroting time and again.

This morning, the following was "suggested" to me:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...23ce908186.png

So, it ticks the boxes for helping people to identify as members of victim groups, which is unsurprising. And it attempts to attack the foundations of the US, which is also unsurprising.

What does surprise me a bit, however, is that it presumes complete and total ignorance of the constitution on the part of the reader.

Ms. Esposito is making a simple ad-hominem attack on the constitution based on the gender and race of its authors. But in her snide remark about "I assume it may occasionally need a few updates," she appears to be totally dismissing the fact that those white men also foresaw this, included a process for updating the constitution within itself, and that that process has been used on many occasions.

I doubt also that the people towards whom this infographic is targeted will realize that this is, in fact, the precise reason why they are personally allowed to criticize the constitution without fear of reprisal.

Or to vote.


I suspect not.


Anyway, it's really fascinating seeing all of these anti-democracy, pro-segregation, pro-hate memes come through my feed.

Fascinating and also terrifying.

I've been reading about that, and it's my understanding that if you're seeing lots of left wing content, it's due to FB having you pegged as right wing and vice versa. Anger drives clicks. You won't click on something you agree with, you'll click on the ones that get under your skin in order to prove them wrong.

Although I'm certain it's more complex than that and FB has many algorithms.

I would be very put-off to see something like that in my feed. If it became too pervasive, I would probably bail on FB.

I honestly don't care at all what the extreme left or right think, feel, or say. I find them to be irrational and annoying. Their words are not worth any of my valuable time at all.

Believe it or not, I think it was the more moderate people who are tired of the extremists that hired President Trump in the first place, and I would not be surprised to see him get re-elected. This goes double if he can mix in some of this innovative technology.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...3fd233a9a.jpeg

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5462f03e8.jpeg

I'm curious what everything thinks regarding an upcoming housing "correction." Will it be like 2008? With the increasing inflation, the Feds have indicated they are going to reduce QE and raise interest rates much more quickly than predicted last year.

The “experts” are all saying this time is “different because, well it just is…”, which is pretty much what they all said in 2008, 2000, and 1990. Housing prices are just like any other product and subject to the laws of supply & demand. Throw in a little media coverage at each end of the market swing to help things along and there you have it.

In some markets buyers are paying cash for 2nd homes then remortgaging the primary home to take equity out and replenish the bank account. In other markets, national real estate investment companies are buying up single family homes to make them into rentals. Go figure…

Now, this is interesting.

For one, I can see the logic in this. My maternal grandmother (the English-speaking one) used to have Fox News on the TV pretty much all the time. Now, this woman was staunchly anti-Republican, but it gave her something to get riled up over.

But for two, I also can't picture why FB would have me pegged as right-wing, unless they still think that the Tea Party are Libertarians. Which is possible.



On the housing thing, who the hell knows. I just bought a house last week, for $515k, which is about average for this market. Put $200k down, financed the rest. In retrospect, I should have made a lower downpayment, given that my mortgage rate is 2.125%, but what's done is done. (I was trying to impress upon the sellers the notion that I was very, very serious about this purchase, given how selective the market is in this neighborhood.)

If housing prices crash, I might use that opportunity to buy a second house. I might also create an S-corp and sell my own house to it at whatever the then-current market value is, in order to get a lower appraised value on the books for property tax purposes.

Yeah, what I've read is the reason "this time is different from 2008," is that mortgages aren't flooded with subprime loans that have been packaged up in CDS like they were leading up to the 08 crash.

Of course, it's all speculation. 2000 the burst of the tech bubble was a main factor, right? I just graduated high school that year so I wasn't paying attention to that kind of stuff, 1990, that I have no idea. I'd have to go back and research, I was only 8.

Congrats on the house purchase. Now that we know they are closing the OKC office at the end of the month, I wish I wasn't tied to this mortgage. Even though theoretically the house is worth about $60k more than I owe on it, we just aren't in a position to try and sell and move at the moment. I wouldn't mind renting for a bit as things keep cooling off, but that would be nearly impossible with 3 dogs and a cat.

Zillow says my house is worth at least 3 times what I paid for it in the mid 1980's. Frankly, I wouldn't believe it, but the tiny (less than 900sq. ft.) house on the corner went for about 3-4 times what I'd have guessed, so who knows?

Houses in my neighborhood always sell within 2 weeks unless they are grossly overpriced, and have underlying issues. And that has remained constant since I've lived here.

House I rented for a few years in an "improving" neighborhood out here in texas more than doubled in value during the ~4 years I was renting it (2016-2020, 300k --> 615k, landlord sold it at the end of that period). ZIllow now pegs it at 740k. There's supply and demand, and then there's so much cheap capital that it doesn't make sense not to have blackrock/zillow/EvilCorp go around buying up >10% of the single family home market. That said, they can absorb price fluctuations and obviously are not exposed to the whims of a specific local market, your average (maybe speculative) new home buyer can't say the same, prime-grade-credit mortgage or not, as @bahurd pointed out. We're on the precipice of perhaps the biggest new home building push in at least a decade, and yet still stories like @rleete mentioned are the norm.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...ce58b086dd.png

I'm no expert, but if we called it the Taper Tantrum back in 2013, I'd expect the name for it when the feds finally let off the bond-buying gas pedal this time around may not be so cheer-y.

Controversial thought of the day-

The "deep state" in the US government is mostly just competent and educated public servants that provide for our safety and prosperity without us even knowing about it.

Inefficient? Unquestionably.

Poorly managed? By definition, as they have new leadership every election, and the leaders are often as ignorant about how government services function as the rest of us.

Bad at PR? Federal laws actually dictate that this is the case.

The U.S. Federal Government is the worst form of government that's ever been attempted. Except for every other form of government that's been attempted.

I was wondering where you were at. I saw that doc recently and the 2nd part, too. Also saw the one on the Fed Reserve. The Minneapolis? Fed branch reserve director reminded me of the quip in the movie Roxanne, "KEEP THAT MAN AWAY FROM MY COCAINE!".

:bowrofl:

Is it just me, or has the fundamental definition of "normal, acceptable behavior from a high-ranking member of a Federal agency" shifted rather dramatically within the past year?

This is an interesting observation, and one which I'd accept without much hesitation as axiomatic.

There are definitely bad actors in government, no question about that. But my take is that those folks are mostly motivated by personal greed, which makes sense.

As to the rest of Federal government, well... they're mostly comprised of the sort of people whose best career option was government employment.

I'm reminded of the chief engineer at WLRN-FM in Miami, where I did an install about 15 years ago. This is a public radio station owned by the Miami-Dade school board. That guy was, to put it mildly, not the brightest tube in the rack. A strict 9-to-5er, he did the absolute minimum necessary to keep the station on the air. And what struck me most (apart from the fact that he literally wore socks with sandals to work) was how he could never stop talking about how he was a government worker. He's got a pension, and will be retiring in exactly X years and Y months, and the rest of us who were working overtime and moving figurative mountains to get this new studio done on schedule were just dumb.

As such, Hanlon's razor is never far from my mind when contemplating such matters.

^ I work with government employees and agencies from time to time, and I also have an internal debate about it. My thoughts are tempered by a few things:

- government employees usually accept less base pay/bonus than they would get for an equivalent job in the private sector in return for the pension and early retirement;

- I see a similar proportion of dummies, wierdos, layabouts and just generally bad people in the private workforce. Maybe more. The "invisible hand" sure isn't doing a very good job of keeping those people from fucking stuff up;

- Nobody in government work gets recognized for good work, only problems. The mindset is to keep your head down and try not to get noticed, even if you're a star. In the private sector, high achievers spend a good amount of their time self-promoting and are often rewarded for this. I've worked with people in CDC, FDA and NIH that are megawatt bulbs with million dollar educations and could pretty much name their price in the open market, yet they do government work out of a calling to public service.

Price's Law: The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.

My general observation: Pensions build less generational wealth than a well-managed private portfolio (or small business) that leaves an inheritance.

DNM

And you basically have to be convicted of a felony to be fired. Unless you're an elected official, than you can be arrested for drunken driving, kill someone, and serve no jail time. And in the private sector, if you have any kind of decent job, you're expected to produce tangible results or you will be fired.

And like DNM said, I wouldn't want to count a Federal pension for my retirement. Although, I don't really care about generational wealth as the lady and I don't have children and don't want children.