Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Rachel Maddow’s Ratings Tank After Mueller Report" video.

  1. MSNBC's "adpocalypse" is definitely taking place. Their ad revenue is directly tied to their viewership, and the Nielsen ratings are in the public domain. Good to see her losing market share to Sean Hannity. He gets more of the facts right. But he's very similar to her in droning on over and over with the same exact talking points, day after day. I don't see how that can be popular for either one of them, but I guess that's the American audience for you. For me, the 5th or 6th "bought-and-paid-for dossier" line was as many as I could stomach, and I haven't watched Hannity for a long time. Except for being WAY more truthful, Hannity is just as repetitive an attack dog for FOX as Maddow is for MSNBC. I'm OK with that, but let the ratings decide whether they sink or swim. Honestly, I'm GLAD that the masks (and the gloves) are off. I HATED the previous 40 or so years of total partisanship masquerading as "objective journalism" that the Internet has FINALLY exposed for all to see. The Press is SUPPOSED to be partisan! And everybody's supposed to KNOW what axe you're grinding! Personally, I'd just as soon listen to mostly Ron Paul and Jimmy Dore and have the two of you have regular knock-down drag-outs on the welfare-and-regulatory state. Let the polar opposites on the proper role and scope of government have it out. I think there's a HUGE middle ground on the "Yes, we measure our society by how our weakest and poorest are faring," and I think you'd be surprised at how compassionate we libertarian/classical-liberal types are when it comes to a social safety net. The MAIN sticking point is how close to the FAMILY you make the assistance. Progressives are always in a hurry and want to just pass one law for all 300-some million of us; whereas, the libertarian types want the FEDERAL government the hell OUT of it. Not their role. Compassion starts at home. Family. Clan. Neighborhood. Village. County. And on up the chain. It should never be a federal thing, unless we're being invaded or we just got hit by a giant asteroid (national-scale natural catastrophe). It's just too easy to lose personal accountability and personal responsibility the farther from the individual it gets. And it only takes one robber baron manipulating the fine print to fuck things up for all 300-some million of us. But for it all to work the best for the most, with minimal infringement on the rights of the individual, you want and NEED 90% of individuals with their shit together, followed by 90% of families picking up the slack, followed by neighborhoods looking out for the families in trouble, and on up. By the time it reaches the state level, if the underlying communities don't have their shit together, there's no hope for the state that's comprised of those underlying communities to manage. Food for thought? I'm leery of the Universal Basic Income, but that would definitely be a lot easier and cheaper to administer than a grab-bag of programs with all different kinds of standards, procedures and red tape, requiring an entire bureaucrat class, with so much overlap and redundancy (and duplicate bureaucracies). I tried to be site coordinator for a federal grant at my college. It was called CO-AMP (Under the LS-AMP umbrella), and the idea is to encourage underrepresented groups (women and minorities) to engage in and succeed in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math) disciplines. The entire grant was something like $7,000, and I saw all these deserving kids doing good things and wanted to reward as many as possible with as much as possible. So I built a rubric that factored in such things as need, likelihood of success, amount of progress, grades, etc. And I distributed the money according to the objectively-reasonable point system I devised, with the assistance and oversight of a few colleagues and higher-ups. It wasn't a TON of money for any one person. I had 20 or 30 candidates, and the top ones were getting something like $700 each, then it went down to $500. and so on down the chain, to maybe $200. Seems like "crumbs," but if you've ever been at the bottom, that extra $200 or $700 is HUGE. It's a family night out once a month. It's some better shoes. It's most of the price of a computer or smartphone or surface or iPad. It took a lot of doing to push through this zero-overhead thing put together. What the CO-AMP people wanted was to send one or two - maybe 3 - kids to some faraway conference, where they could get their pictures taken, and of course, fly ME around to get MY picture taken with these WONDERFUL and SPECIAL students. There were funds set aside so I could fly down to Birmingham, Alabama for a big circle-jerk meeting, where everybody virtue-signaled and (of course) got their picture taken. I want on that ONE junket, and I was disgusted. "How much for the plane ticket and weekend stay at the Hilton? $2,000? $3,000? Fuck THAT. That's $3,000 I could lump on top of the $7,000 earmarked for - you know - the people I'm supposed to be HELPING. So give me a $10,000 budget, with NO free vacations and the rampant grab-ass and partying that we wonderful bureaucrats so richly deserve on these larks (I mean "serious conferences."), and I'll put EVERY SINGLE NICKEL INTO THE POCKETS OF HARDWORKING AND DEPRIVED STUDENTS!!! Well that wasn't going to happen, so I just decided to forego wasting taxpayer money on a high-dollar photo opp. The kicker? What made me think of this in the context of UBI and simplifying the administration of public assistance? It turned out that EVERY FREAKING NICKEL I wangled for my "fellowship" recipients was taken OUT of OTHER assistance they received. So it was ALL just a big fucking waste of my and my students' time, IF they were receiving any OTHER federal assistance. So, rather than a reward for distinguished performance, with an admixture of real need thrown in, it was just a big circle jerk, and I was the fool. I COULD have made myself look like this White Knight/Savior, if I just played the game and took every opportunity to make speeches and have my picture taken with the one or two students that won the lottery and got to fly off to Nicaragua or Brazil or Canada or - even better - someplace overseas. If I were only interested in looking and seeming important, instead of just busting my ass to find the most deserving people trying to break into STEM on a shoestring budget (Maybe some BEEF in that next meal, instead of another round of rice and beans), it would've been much less work and I would've pleased the kind of assholes that run this kind of shit.
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