Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder" channel.

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  5. Australian here: A number of years ago I was in a taxi in Sydney. Australian taxi drivers come form all over the world and they are a great source of basic information on places the media never report on. This particular taxi driver was from Liberia and I asked him "Liberia's a country we don't hear much about and what we do hear is mostly bad. So what happened?" He basically said when the French were in control it was basically developing and reasonably civil because they kept the various tribal issues in check. Then one day they just got up and left but handed all the weapons over to 1 tribe who then went on a rampage." The biggest problem with Africa is Europeans split the continent up according to what they wanted and that often upset the balances between the existing tribes and their boundaries. The most notable instance of this is in Namibia where there is the Caprivi Strip (in the North East). This strip exists because of a deal the Germans made with the British so that Germany could have access to the Zambezi River and a route to Africa's east coast, where the colony of German East Africa (now part of Tanzania). Its all detailed on Wikipedia. That strip runs right through the middle of several traditional homelands of different tribes. Those tribes now have parts of their homelands in Angola, Namibia, Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. The European colonial era made a mess of Africa from which Africa has NEVER RECOVERED. Americans should be the last to talk about this stuff considering they ignored the advice some of their own people gave before they invaded Iraq in 2003. Eric Shinseki to congress in a public hearing that not only was Iraq a significant amount of geography to cover but there were ethnic/tribal conflicts with centuries of feuding and violent history.
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  13. The amazing thing about this entire discussion is they are NOT even getting into the real issue which is the staggering power of Harvard and Yale which was where the Federalist Society started along with the University of Chicago. RIGHT NOW there are 4 Harvard and 4 Yale graduates on SCOTUS and the other one (Barrett) is a known FS member. When the last judge was selected the short list of 7 had 5 who were Harvard or Yale educated. Going back to the previous generation there were fewer Yale but more Harvard. You have to go back tot he 60s to start seeing more judges from a broader educational background. *Its as if America's other Law Schools simply don't matter. * FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America. Other than my personnel relationship with America, Australia is about to start spending several hundred billion on American submarines. JUST LIKE many other nations WE CANNOT AFFORD America to be unreliable and right now 4 out 4 sections of your governmental system are malfunctioning. A simple summary goes like this: SCOTUS is out of control and is handing out POLITICAL direction rather than legal decisions. The House is riddled with maniacs from BOTH parties who are more interested in which stock to buy or sell. The Senate is full of selfish geriatrics from BOTH parties who simply wont retire. The White house is being fought over by a pair of Geriatrics both of who are unfit for an office of that can decide the use of nuclear weapons. In ANY OTHER country Trump be in prison for January 6th and in many countries he would have already been executed. Notably Saudi Arabia and YES we know about the $2 Billion Jared has. Before anyone tells an Australian or anyone else NOT interfere let me inform you about AMERICAN interference in Australia. 4 AMERICAN companies (consultancies) basically run our government. One or more of Deloitte Australia, Ernst & Young (EY), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and KPMG are involved in almost every government decision at both the Federal and State level. Even when we get a change in Government either Left to Right or Right to Left all that happens is that certain government officials swap places with their counterparts in the consultancies. We ACTUALLY CAUGHT PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) committing industrialised tax evasion and fraud. Despite the public outcry nobody has been charged and PwC has recently received NEW government contracts. These consultancies and our government bureaucracy include many graduates of Harvard and Yale.
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  20. AUSTRALIAN HERE: For an outside perspective on this. I see the Federalist Society as a MAJOR THREAT to Western Society. FYI - I went to college in America (late 80s). I did engineering BUT a bunch of my friends were pre-law and they all loved explaining and arguing ideas on the US Constitution with me. So I got an unusual introduction to the US Constitution. I'd argue that any country could become a totalitarian dictatorship because that was the warning all Australians got from studying Orwell in High School. For generations everyone in Australia read Animal Farm or 1984 or BOTH in high school. So I was well versed in "If you're not careful this can happen!" My college friends, several who went onto become lawyers, would always answer that it was impossible for America to fall into a dictatorship (of any kind) because THE SYSTEM WOULD NOT ALLOW IT. The American system of CHECKS and BALANCES would prevent any group or any one person taking complete control. What we NEVER discussed was what a organisation like the Federalist Society could do given enough money. It just never came up. HERE'S the problem for the the rest of the world. We all do business with major American corporations. As was shown with the Steven Donziger case involving Chevron, IF an American company gets into trouble over sees they will drag the case BACK INTO the American Courts where the these corrupt judges owned by the Corporations RUN EVERYTHING and there is no contest. Right now in Australia we have a major scandal involving PwC (an American company) and their consulting to the Australian Government. That inquiry is turning up other issues with companies including KPMG, EY and Deloitte who are all American companies. We haven't yet heard about McKinsey or Boston Group but there are rumors out of Britain and Europe. Just the PwC scandal could end up in a litigation for well over $10 Billion. They actually tried to swindle (with their corporate clients who include other American companies) Australia out of $$$ Billions in tax revenue. What happens if they drag that back to an American court? The complete corruption of SCOTUS is a wider problem than just simply what it does to America. YES I will grant any American its more of a direct problem for you, but don't think its not a problem for us also.
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  29. I'm Australian but went to college in America in the late 80s. I can barely believe where America politically is these days. Sure America was always a bit of a basket case. I was there during Regan's second term and watched the 87 campaign season. It was bonkers by my standards. But this stuff is something else. Its like America has completely forgotten what made America such a fantastic nation. I studied engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and they dragged me into many of their discussions. So I got an odd education in the US Constitution. These days (and I have said this a lot in recent years) I believe the US Constitution is one of humanities finest achievements. Unlike Australia who inherited most of their constitution from the British, America started with a clean sheet and threw of a lot of stuff. Tt was fresh daring and brilliant. SADLY, it has been inherited by a pack of clowns with almost NO RESPECT for what it has. I used to be stunned and at times embarrassed by how well every American understood their nation because they'd all done CIVICS in high school. I was stunned to find George Buch de-funded it, because these days I want to see Australia have a similar class (but an Australian version) taught to every high school. I've seen the value it delivered and can now see the damage NOT having such a program has done. I really do want to see America back at its best because with the shear size of the US Economy the rest of the world will struggle to deal with issues like climate change and that's just one issue we have to deal with. There's also 3rd world poverty which is the source of the immigration problem the Right complain about. If we all stopped supporting dictators and helped those countries develop then there wouldn't be a refugee crisis.
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  70. Australian here - I went to college in America (late 80s). I did aerospace engineering but one of my humanities sequences was Classical Civilisation. In high School I studied (as many Australians did) Orwell (both 1984 and Animal Farm). My mother was a high school teacher who loved history and taught it when she could, but she loved explaining things from history to me. All those classes and lessons seemed like a waste of time to an engineer AND THEN Donald Trump arrived and then JD Vance and his Opus Dei goon squad added to that. YES in Australia we know who that lot are because there have been several scandals at high schools run by them. So yeah I am 100% in agreement with your comment. And for anyone else in the thread here's one of the greatest comments by any American ever. This is Henry Wallace former VPOTUS in the New York Times, April 9, 1944 “The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
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  106. ​ @Falcon2609  I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s). One of my college mates spent time in Central America while doing his PhD which was in "How to teach teachers to teach foreign languages" and his main (after English) language was Spanish. In one case (early 90s) the State Department made the arrangements and he was in a luxury villa in a small town in one of the Central American countries. Its been years so I can't recall the exact details but this is as close as I can recall what happened. One day he woke up to what he said was a scene out of Hollywood film. The house was full of immaculately dressed soldiers with mirrored sunglasses and pristine American made M16s. He was invited to have breakfast with Person 'X.' During breakfast 'X' asked him about the town and if he was being treated well to which he said "very well." 'X' then asked if he had any questions to which he sad "No" so 'X' prodded him with something like "I know there's that one question every American wants to ask someone in my position and they should ask." So my friend as tactfully as he could asked about human rights. Person 'X' said words to the effect "That's the question every American should ask and he'd answer it as soon as America wants to discuss what they'd done in Countries A, B, C,......." The crazy part of that is that I have heard people from the small nations surrounding Australia in the Pacific say very similar things about Australia. So I know (99% certain) there's things our countries do that we would never approve of. We don't discuss things and we should.
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  108. Australian with an outside perspective - 100% in Agreement. Kamala won the debate buy so much Trump refused to debate her again. She then had that disaster of an interview where she said she would not do anything different. Tim Walz should have flattened JD Vance but didn't. He simply should have thrown down and said "I get things done. Look at my record. I get things done." Kamala should have said the one thing she would have liked was Joe Boden letting her do more as VP which is why she picked Tim Walz. She could have said "I know I can give him a task and he will get it done." What would have been the counterpoint to that? No matter what JD Vance said they could have replied "Why don't you go deal with your cats & dogs problem first!" I think Tim Walz should have gone on Rogan with the instruction that every time he gets stuck he could have said "that's a great point, but at least I'll have time to work on it because I don't have to worry about cats & dogs" and when Rogan finally would stop him he could say "Well what do you want - people who want to do the job or people who want to speak nonsense about eating cats and dogs? I don't have every answer to every question but at least I want to do the job." Be blunt and be direct. This is the problem with Leftists the world over and we have EXACTLY the same issue with the Australian Labor Party. They are never direct and straightforward and always send confusing messages. Instead of staying focused on the TASK they keep finding ways to turn triumph into disaster.
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  113. AUSTRALIAN HERE: How do you think we feel about this? At the national level like many other countries (Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Britain, Europe,......) America is still out major trading partner and in many cases our most important security partner. Almost all international trade depends on the UD Dollar because as the World's reserve currency the deals are either done in US$ or the currency exchanges are backed by US$. So NONE OF US can afford America to malfunction like this. On the personal level I went to college in America on a sports scholarship. So I have a strong emotional link to America and there's people there I genuinely care about. I have never seen America in such a state as this. Its like everything that's great about America is being thrown in the dumpster by a pack of drunk clowns I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and through many discussions they schooled me in how America and the Constitution WORKED (or is supposed to work). I am of the opinion that the US Constitution is one of the finest achievements in human history BUT its also vulnerable. Unlike so many other systems the US Constitution was designed/intended to protect and nurture the general population and give every citizen a chance at a good life. Your constitution has things that were almost unheard of when it was created and the influence that has had has been a good thing for so many nations. HOWEVER, because it grants so many freedoms it's vulnerable to be being taken advantage of by people with selfish motives. The protection against such people was (past tense) the system of "Checks & Balances" which a small number of insanely selfish people have slowly degraded via their money and influence. SCOTUS and the Senate are effectively broken, the House is a malfunctioning clown show and the Whitehouse is a disaster zone. As an outside observer with a keen interest in seeing America get back to its best, I think BOTH major parties (Dem & GOP) need major clean outs of their entrenched elites AND TO BE FAIR I can say the same about Australia's main parties which have also become these cabals of entrenched elitist snots who see the rest of us as problems to be managed. I truly do hope America can get past this because with the world as it is and especially climate change we need America at its best.
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  125. Sorry this is long, but I think you'll find this interesting. I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s). Both my parents were high school teachers. In the 1970s Australia was importing American high schoolteachers because for a while we had a shortage. So I basically grew up around school teachers. One thing I noticed when I was in America in the late 80s was that America's education system was already showing signs it was sliding. I remember commenting on it to my professor one day and he told me that was BS. We just happened to be in the department office at that moment and one of the secretaries interrupted him and asked my professor if he was right then he should explain why her kids needs tutors in English, Math and Science. Back here in Oz I befriended a couple on the mid 90s. He was American she's Australian and both of them are high school teachers. So again I was around school teachers and I can tell you for a fact Australia has also STARED to SLIDE. Right now in Australia we have a significant skills shortage in things like welders, machinists, electricians,....etc. I am an engineer (aerospace) who works in industrial control systems and automation. The problem is WAY WORSE than people think. It actually goes back to the influence of the Chicago School Economics that was called Reaganomics in America, Thatcherism in Britain and Economic Rationalism in Australia. We now (collectively) call it neoliberalism. I was looking into it because its had a massive effect on engineering in areas like infrastructure and energy. If I try and explain either of those things it will take pages. Suffice to say Bidens $3 Trillion Build Back Better wasn't going to work because its really needs to be about $20 Trillion. The $1.2 Trillion Inflation reduction Act is like trying to put out a raging forest fire with a bucket. The real problem the Neoliberals have cause that's going to make everything that needs being done with infrastructure and energy is they have MASSIVELY interfered in education as well. I saw Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs) describe how American kids with a 6 month welding course at a community college are getting more money than the average college graduate BECAUSE of the shortage of welders. WE HAVE EXACTLY the same issue here in Australia. The Neoliberal economists flipped our education in the 1990s and instead of training the people we actually need to keep a modern society working we sent 80% of our kids off to universities to get a lot of useless degrees. In a single generation we went form 20% to 80% of our high school graduates going to college WITHOUT ever asking what that meant. Our Economists simply said we were flipping from a manufacturing base to a service industry base AND NOBODY ASKED what that meant. In 2005 I was on a mine site and asked how they were going with the skills shortage. The shift supervisor simply turned to me and said that if I had a welding ticket (fully qualified from a 4 year apprenticeship) he'd pay me $X and $X was $50K more than I was on at the time. At that time I had 15+ years experience and was told a kid almost 1/2 my age with a welding ticket was worth $50K more a year. 15 Years after that Mike Rowe is saying that American kids at 18 or 19 with a BASIC welding ticket are worth more than a college graduate. YEAH all those economists who decided to re-wire Western Society back in the 80s, 90s and 2000s really did a number on us all. AND HERE'S the killer problem. Every generation since the start of civilisation needed people who could teach the next generation and that was irrespective of what their society actually did. It didn't matter if they were into farming or fighting they still needed black smiths and carpenters. The moment that any society forgot to teach the next generation they were done. Go look at any empire in history. They became empires because they had skill sets that enabled them to expand. The moment they stopped training those skill sets they collapsed. Here's our problem across the entire Western Developed World - we stopped valuing teachers and as such we have LOST an entire generation of teachers. That has also included the people who can train teachers. So getting that back is a monumental task. Go and ask your mother how Texas expects to TRAIN the next generation of teachers? FYI - If you ask that in Australia it clears the room faster than David Copperfield can make stuff disappear. Again sorry for the long long long blurb, but education is a damn serious issue that NOBODY wants to tackle.
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  140. AUSTRALIAN here, with an outsiders perspective/observation on American Libertarians and why it matters.* They are always howling about Freedom, Liberty and the Slippery Slope to Authoritarianism when in fact they are only ever talking about THEIR Freedoms, THEIR Liberties and THEIR RIGHT to throw everyone else over the cliff of Authoritarianism. My way of describing them is a simple way is: "Libertarians demand the Liberty to strip other's of their Liberties" And so you all know - I went to college in America (late 80s) and even back then you could see that the American population (in general) was unaware of the threat the Libertarians were. One of the Koch brothers ran on the Libertarian ticket (as a potential VP) AGAINST Reagan claiming Reagan wasn't going far enough. I did engineering NOT poly-sci with no real interest in American politics BUT EVEN BACK THEN it was obvious how much of a future threat these people were. FURTHER, there are several Australian Libertarian Think Tanks (e.g. The Institute of Public Affairs) whose power and influence is growing through the support of American Libertarian Think Tanks. As to why American politics matters now (in 2024). 1) I care about America and have a lot of good friends there. 2) American is still Australia's most important trading and security partner. Simply put Australia cannot afford to America fail and in that Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Britain and a few other can't either. 3) America is still about 25% of the worlds economy and if it gets messed up by these clowns then the whole world suffers the consequences BECAUSE the US Dollar ($USD) is still the World's reserve currency and most of our international trade is either done in $USD or the currency conversions involve $USD or are backed by $USD. So if these clowns DESTABILIZE the $USD by being stupid (which they are), then its really bad for the other 7.6 Billion people on the planet. All international trade goes away. Its even bad for pariah countries like Iran, Russia and North Korea because even they do business in $USD.
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  145.  @nolongerblocked6210  I agree with that point exactly. Oversight has been the problem and it goes back further than COVID-19. Sorry for the long answer. You probably know some of this already. There's a really good short doco on Gain of Function by the German DW network posted 23 Jul 2021 here on YT. In it they highlight why there was the moratorium. They talk about how in 2011 a Dutch researcher announced they had made the worlds most deadly virus in their lab. The researcher was Ron Fouchier and he made a version of avian flu (bird flu) that's not normally contagious to humans but the few people who do get it have less than 40% chance of survival. Its more lethal than Ebola. He whipped up a version that's highly contagious to humans and NOBODY knew he was doing it until he made his announcement. Ron Fouchier tried to publish all his work and explain to the world how smart he was. Imagine some of the Doomsday cultists we have being fully informed on how to make a doomsday virus. Luckily the Dutch government shut him down and prevented his work being published. It was that sort of thing that caused the moratorium. THE SCARY THING happened after the moratorium. GOF used to be 3 areas of research. 1 - making viruses and other pathogens more lethal to humans 2- making viruses and other pathogens more contagious BETWEEN humans 3 - making viruses and other pathogens contagious TO humans from the natural environment. They dropped that 3rd are from the definition. It helped get the funding of a lot of programs back. Remember when Dr. Fauci had that stoush with Rand Paul and Rand Paul said (paraphrasing) "According to your definition that you wrote these NIH programs in Wuhan were Gain of Function" and Dr. Fauci replied "Your wrong that's the old definition." What Rand Paul should have done next is ask 2 questions. 1) When and Why did you change the definition? 2) What do you call these programs now? Those 2 questions would have exposed everything and instead Rand Paul was too stupid, too arrogant and so wrapped up in the politics he forgot there was truth right there for him to expose. The group Drastix uncovered a lot of the research papers that were published by the Wuhan lab and it details what they were doing and it was that 3rd type of research and it was done without supervision.
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  153. Billionaire Nick Hanauer in his August 2014 TED talk "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" included some very interesting FACTS about Henry Ford including how he paid his workers more than other companies did. That talk is still available here on YT. At 5:15 in that talk he says "So the model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time. He didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made." FYI - I am an aerospace engineer who has worked in the automotive sector. Elon Musk deserves some credit for slapping BOTH the aerospace and automotive sectors which had become stagnant and both of those industries NEEDED to be disrupted. Without his disruption I doubt (having seen the auto industry in action) would have started pushing EVs as they are all doing. I know that without SpaceX that Space flight would be far worse off because there WOULD NOT be the Falcon Rockets. HOWEVER that does not excuse his idiotic behavior or ridiculous claims about things like driverless cars or colonising Mars or the even more dangerous Neuralink nonsense. Despite the success of the Falcon rockets Starship is almost doomed to be a monumental failure due to its size and complexity. Plus the launch facility in Texas shows they are way too comfortable cutting corners on fundamental safety. They were lucky not to lose the entire site at the last launch. The FAA should have yanked their license to operate. As for colonising Mars I attended a guest lecture in 1987 as an undergraduate that was given by a NASA Engineer who'd just done a project on what it would take to colonise Mars. We were all fairly stunned to find out just how impossible of a task it would be without God like powers. Over 30 years later I am yet to see anyone prove they have developed any of the basic life support technologies that would be needed or the means to get there in any sort of a reasonable time period.
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  154. ​ @LookB4ULeap  You've just described how EVERY Democracy works. At its core democracy allows different opinions and policies to co-exist at the same time. Even in countries where there is absolute control there's almost always a different opinion even if it doesn't dare speak out. The biggest problem the world actually has with America right now is that too many Americans are so badly informed about the rest of the world. Even worse is how little Americans know of their own country. I'm a Gen-Xr and did my degree in the late 80s. I used to find it embarrassing how well my friends understood the US Constitution while I new little of my own. Even those friends who weren't pre-law or politically minded were well informed. BUT then they had all done CIVICS in high school. If there is one thing I would add to the high school curriculum of Australia it would be a Australian version of the civics class that all Americans used to do in high school. Since I can see the effect of what Bush and Cheney did by defunding civics. I think I can fairly claim that in defunding civics Bush & Cheney committed a "social" or "societal" crime against the American people. I think its one of America's major problems right now. Trump would never have gotten away with what he did if the American people were better informed and civics gave the American people the foundation of being better informed which is why I'd like to see an Australian version of it taught here. If America ever does bring it back the one thing they need to add to that class would be some basic world geography and geo-politics. Sorry for the rant
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  159. I'm Australian and this election has always had huge ramifications for us like its had for some other countries. The democrats are plagued by a group of OLD PEOPLE who just won't accept their time is over. Jimmy Carter is one of the rare examples of a Democrat getting out of the road while helping when he can. The Bidens, Pelosis, Clintons and Obamas on the other hand......... The ramifications of that attitude is staggering. I've looked at some of the stats and one that I have NOT YET seen anyone discuss is the voter turnout and its the REAL ISSUE America needs to look at. According to the stats on Wikipedia almost every election gets a larger turnout than the previous one as expected from population growth. 2012 is a rare exception, but it doesn't compare to 2024 with over 16 million FEWER voters. EVEN Trump is DOWN by 800,000 over his 2020 result. When you consider that he picked up a slab of young male 1st time voters that means a couple of million of his base give up on his nonsense. Harris is Down by 12.4 million compared to Bidens 2020 result and that means a gigantic slab of the people who turned up in 2020 just gave up. Independents were simply annihilated. Anthony Scaramucci said something the other day about the options people had. Here's some to think about. 1) If you're a college student who wants the Genocide in Gaza to stop. Do you vote for Kamala who's helped support it or do you vote for Benjamin Netanyahu's choice for President. 2) If your a mother who's son is stuck in the basement vaping and playing video games. Do you vote for DEI Kamala or the felon who brags about grabbing women by the pussy. 3) If your a father who's daughter is worried about boys in the locker room. Do you vote for DEI Kamala or the convicted felon who would grab your daughter by the pussy. 4) If you vote 3rd party or independent what's the point of actually voting when you get NOTHING for it other than an opportunity to wave your middle finger at the Democrats and Republicans who don't care anyway. 5) If your Gen-X, Millennial or a Zoomer do you vote for the party run by selfish old people who don't care about your future or do you vote for the party run by a narcissistic sociopath, liar and convicted felon who's surrounded by other narcissistic sociopaths, liars and convicted criminals NONE of who care about your future. America has alienated so many of its people that 16 million who voted 4 years ago GAVE UP ON VOTING. Simply it doesn't matter if you're being asked to eat a BULLSHlT sandwich or a CHICKENSHlT sandwich you're still being asked to eat a SHlT sandwich. Sorry for the rant but what just happened has GLOBAL ramifications and America is functioning like NASCAR on 5 cylinders.
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  162. Australia here: What you are describing is the HISTORICAL attitude of and excuses made by people here for most of the last 200 years (since white settlement) and I dare say for many other nations. I was in Canada a couple of years ago and the similarities with Australia were stark. New Zealand is similar to Australia as we were both settled by Europeans around the same time and have had similar issues. Like many other societies were are trying to move on and repair the damage done, but just as other places we to have these types of conservative (or regressive) people who just won't see that the rest of us are moving on. In general these are people who of whatever reason are afraid of change and it really is fear. Some are afraid of losing power (political or otherwise) and others just change itself, while for some it is an ideological issue. What is in Australia's, Canada's and New Zealand's favor is that we have at least started down the path to reconciling our past and not too many countries can say similar. Maybe we have a slight advantage in that our colonial history is more recent in terms of time scales as it only goes back around 200 to 300 years (a bit longer for Canada). For many others they have a lot more history to reconcile. We sometimes forget that the Jews, Egyptians, Persians, Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Romans,.... etc have complicated histories going back at least 3,500 years (1,500 BCE) and in some cases much longer. If you don't know the references recently made regarding Amalek by certain Israelis references events in the Eleventh Century BCE (which is over 3,000 years ago).
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  166. I'm an engineer who's been informally studying economics for a couple of years and YOU'RE RIGHT. The economics we are living with right now isn't capitalism as its been described or what people think its supposed to be. Clepto-Capitalism is a great description. Look at the very title of Adam Smiths book. Its "Wealth of Nations" NOT Wealth of the few and screw the rest. The interesting thing is that the work of Smith, Ricard, Marx and others were all in the vein of how do we (humanity) not go backwards into feudalism or mercantilism and yet what we have right now is a weird hybrid of feudalistic mercantilism. I've listened to a lot of the book talks Mark Blyth (Brown U.) has done. One was with a Eric Helleiner who's described what he calls neo-mercantilism and he's given the best explanation of what China is up to. At its core mercantilism is not simply about controlling wealth but also about political control at the nation versus nation level. What we now have are people who have no allegiance towards any nation or even society itself but their means of control is through economics. I recently watched a series of 4 talks by Damon Silvers for the UCL IIPP that Mariana Mazucatto runs and yeah I watched all 6 hours. The first of those talks is titled "Understanding Neoliberalism as a System of Power" Another great thing I saw recently was a video by Simon Clark titled "Global Warming: The Decade We Lost Earth" and he highlights that the whole denial campaigns that started in the first Bush Whitehouse had NOTHING to do with fossil fuels or solar or wind. Its was a political move by American Libertarians who are 100% of the mindset that NO Government should ever do anything except leave them to do whatever they like. What you call Clepto-Capitalism (which is an awesome label) is all about this small group of people getting what they want without any consideration of the rest of society, humanity or the planet. Their ideology is basically "We demand the liberty to strip the rest of you of your liberty!"
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  169. If you want to take that a step further and accept that at the most fundamental level communism is the communal ownership of property. Then by that most basic definition things like publicly owned companies where anyone can own shares in those companies are also a form of communism that overlaps with capitalism and democracy. Everyone is free to join or not join the ownership of an enterprise that is owned by a community of shareholders where each person is free to own as many shares as they like or can afford while the officers of that enterprise are democratically elected where each share gets 1 vote. I'm an engineer and I've been informally studying economics for a couple of years and one of the things I found is how badly most people understand some of the most basic concepts because of all the political culture war nonsense that's been raging. As an engineer we have things called basic principles that DO NOT CHANGE. The problem is that in Economics & Politics everything changes constantly. FYI - I'm Australian but went to college in America. I was there 3-1/2 years including the 1987 presidential pre-season. The single biggest issue with American politics is that the whole shitfest takes place in a manufactured bubble of noise and confusion. American politics is more Truman Show than reality. And before anyone asks yes I am aware that one of the WORST offenders in fueling the current culture war is Australian born Rupert Murdoch. But then we did try and warn you what he was like just as we had tried to warn the Brits and you didn't listen just as the Brits didn't listen. For reference go and watch or rewatch the 2004 documentary "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism"
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  201.  @myleslong5584  Thanks. It comes from 3 things. 1) I actually do care about America. I had this amazing time over there going to college and it hurts watching America tear itself apart the way it is. 2) No matter what any Australian likes or not, America is our most important trade and security partner. That has its pluses and minuses. Either way we need America to be stable and reliable. 3) No matter what any other country thinks or wants America is still 25% of the worlds economy. The US Dollar ($USD) is still the worlds reserve currency and MOST international trade is done in $USD or the money exchange is backed by $USD. NOBODY not even the Russians, Iranians or North Koreans can afford that system to be come unstable. Right now there's around $100 Trillion in Foreign Exchange (FX) Swaps held by banks, companies and others around the world. There's a Bank of International Settlements (BIS) report on it that went largely unnoticed 2 years ago. It raised the concern that over 60% of those swaps were held by non-American non-bank entities. Its NOT odd for businesses who trade internationally to hold FX swaps but there's also a lot of people using them like Casino chips AND IF the currency backing the swaps suddenly jumps up or down in value it can shock the entire global trade system. Better still is the fact that a couple of American states are now the favorite hiding places for money. There's little said about it but Idaho is America's equivalent of Switzerland and has a very secretive banking system. Its also a favored place for Russian Oligarchs to hide their money. Putin's worth around $200 Billion through various stocks and entities. Where that money is, is anyone's guess, but there's probably some in Idaho. So I really do mean it when I say NOBODY can afford America to become unstable or unreliable. Not even Putin. And Harvard, Yale and U. Chicago ARE the problem, because of what their graduates do and how they network together.
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  205. On your second point which you are also right about. I'm an engineer who's been informally studying economics for several years now. I got tired of clowns with economics degrees interfering in projects with their 2 favorite lines. "What's the business case for that?" and "Who's going to pay for that?" Sorry if this is long but here's a basic run down on what I found out. Even when I had those answers they still interfered because that's all they know what to do. Its doesn't take long listening to people like Mark Blyth, Stephanie Kelton, Marianna Mazucatto and others that there is a small but getting louder minority of economists who are calling for change. Mark Blyth for instance has his computer analogy and describes how capitalism has had 3 major versions so far, each that developed its bugs and needed to be replaced (or upgraded) and that we need a new system much like we do with computers. However the most startling thing I came across was only a few weeks ago when economist Steve Keen who (in an interview) said that economists DO NOT include energy in their models. AS AN ENGINEER I find that bizarrely ridiculous because EVERYTHING needs energy to work. This is where I think Marx, Smith and everyone since got it horribly wrong. Marx & Smith put everything in terms of labor, but then how do you value the work product of an ox that pulls a plow or the horse that pulls a cart or the cow that produces milk? Better still since Smith & Marx had seen the industrial revolution up close and then how did they value coal because that was the energy that drove economic growth? How did they value wind because that was the energy that drove the ships that moved the goods? As an engineer I can barely believe that the last 200 years of economics has been founded on a combination of stupidity and ignorance. 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂ Pardon me if I am an engineer but universally you can't have work without energy input, whether its by labor, animal, machine or by capturing natural forces. The efficiency of any economic system is therefore NOT profit margin but the efficiency of energy use to generate wealth and I say wealth rather than profit because profit is just a measure of capital return measured in monetary units and money is nothing but transferable debt where wealth is the accumulation of value which can also include things unaccountable for with money. If you are wondering on the money is transferable debt thing. Go and watch Gary Stevenson explain what money is here on YT.
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  210. As a counterpoint and some perspective. I'm Australian but went to college at Illinois so the Badgers are a rival. I went to Wisconsin a few times and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with Wisconsin or Wisconsin people. Every nation, state, tribe and village that's ever existed has had its idiots and at times let those idiots be in charge. We've got them here in Australia and we 've elected them to office too. We've done the "I don't like this person or that person so I'll try this person over here who's at least saying something different." YES - we do stupid things too. Here's a reason why Wisconsin is worth saving - the Green Bay Packers. Look across American pro-sport and there's this one anomaly. In stead of being the private property of some millionaire or billionaire there's this one team that's just owned by "normal people" (if you can call Packer fans normal). Do you know that's WHY the Packers have fans across the world? The Packers are the one club in America that people around the world can relate too. Its the one American club that's like all their clubs. If I put all the NFL fans in Australia in a room by far the biggest group are the Packer fans. Other than the Packers, the cheese isn't too bad and by Australian Standards at least Miller Genuine Draft is drinkable. American beer is so "not good" that Americans drink Mexican and Canadian beer when they can. So for Wisconsin to have made one of the very short list of American beers that's drinkable should be considered a plus.
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  231. Australian here: - This is similar to what's been happening here too. In May 2019 we had a federal election won by the conservatives and in December that same year the British conservatives also won. There were some distinct similarities to the losing campaigns of Australian Labor and British Labor to Hilary Clintons losing 2016 campaign. When I asked a Brit it they told me that some of the same campaign people from Hilary's campaign had been involved in BOTH Australian Labor's and British labor's campaigns. This is something people don't realise is going on. There are American campaign consultants going all over the world and getting involved with other people's election campaigns. Right now we are having a referendum to change our constitution to give the first nations people a "Voice to Parliament." Its similar to the system used in the Nordic countries with the Sami people. A year ago it had massive support, but that has been eroded by an American style campaign of lies and garbage pumped out on social media. JUST LIKE WHAT HAPPENED WITH BREXIT. In the case of Brexit Cambridge Analytica who ran the Facebook campaign of conspiracy theories and lies was owned by American LIBERTARIAN Billionaire Robert Mercer who also owns Breitbart News. The No campaign here is being lead by a couple of first nations people who are LIBERTARIANS and work at or have worked at Think Tanks with links to American Libertarian Think Tanks. You can easily check this. The Institute of Public Affairs one of Australia's most influential think tanks has a page here on YouTube - check the links it has on their homepage here. You'll find the Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute and others American LIBERTARIAN think tanks listed. Very shortly if they are NOT careful America is going to be told to FK-OFF and stop interfering in our nations.
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  241. I'm Australian and this election has always had huge ramifications for us like its had for some other countries. The democrats are plagued by a group of OLD PEOPLE who just won't accept their time is over. Jimmy Carter is one of the rare examples of a Democrat getting out of the road while helping when he can. The Bidens, Pelosis, Clintons and Obamas on the other hand......... The ramifications of that attitude is staggering. I've looked at some of the stats and one that I have NOT YET seen anyone discuss is the voter turnout and its the REAL ISSUE America needs to look at. According to the stats on Wikipedia almost every election gets a larger turnout than the previous one as expected from population growth. 2012 is a rare exception, but it doesn't compare to 2024 with over 16 million FEWER voters. EVEN Trump is DOWN by 800,000 over his 2020 result. When you consider that he picked up a slab of young male 1st time voters that means a couple of million of his base give up on his nonsense. Harris is Down by 12.4 million compared to Bidens 2020 result and that means a gigantic slab of the people who turned up in 2020 just gave up. Independents were simply annihilated. Anthony Scaramucci said something the other day about the options people had. Here's some to think about. 1) If you're a college student who wants the Genocide in Gaza to stop. Do you vote for Kamala who's helped support it or do you vote for Benjamin Netanyahu's choice for President. 2) If your a mother who's son is stuck in the basement vaping and playing video games. Do you vote for DEI Kamala or the felon who brags about grabbing women by the pussy. 3) If your a father who's daughter is worried about boys in the locker room. Do you vote for DEI Kamala or the convicted felon who would grab your daughter by the pussy. 4) If you vote 3rd party or independent what's the point of actually voting when you get NOTHING for it other than an opportunity to wave your middle finger at the Democrats and Republicans who don't care anyway. 5) If your Gen-X, Millennial or a Zoomer do you vote for the party run by selfish old people who don't care about your future or do you vote for the party run by a narcissistic sociopath, liar and convicted felon who's surrounded by other narcissistic sociopaths, liars and convicted criminals NONE of who care about your future. America has alienated so many of its people that 16 million who voted 4 years ago GAVE UP ON VOTING. Simply it doesn't matter if you're being asked to eat a BULLSHlT sandwich or a CHICKENSHlT sandwich you're still being asked to eat a SHlT sandwich. Sorry for the rant but what just happened has GLOBAL ramifications and America is functioning like NASCAR on 5 cylinders.
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  250. Australian here - and there simply is no winners in this disaster and it was predicted. Way back in 2010 Jon Stewart interviewed King Abdullah II of Jordan. It was one of 2 interviews JS gave that I feel should have changed the world and NOBODY was listening both times. King Abdullah WARNED AT THE TIME that if the Palestinian problem was NOT dealt with it would take another generation before another opportunity would come along. He warned that the fanatics on both sides would take over and it would only be a matter of time before it collapsed into something really bad. It took 13 years but that day might have finally arrived. Around the same time there was the wife of a senior British politician who caused a complete shitstorm of controversy when she referred to Israel as "that shitty little country." The remark wasn't aimed at the Jewish people but that the situation in Israel that caused so much grief for the rest of the world. And for reference the other interview Jon Stewart gave was to a guy Obama appointed to control CEO & Executive bonuses to bailed out companies after the GFC. At the time "The Guy" was labelled "the most evil man on Wall St" in the financial media. It was part of the response Obama gave to the car companies after their executives arrived in Washington on private jets begging for money. Obama's response was (paraphrasing) "Fine you can have a $$ Trillion, but until you pay it back this guy decides the wages in your companies." "The Guy" limited all wages to something like $200K or $500K. It was way above average pay packets but it stung the executives real damn hard. It overrode any any contracts and bonus agreements. I remember Jon Stewart asking how much had been paid back. "The Guy" answered it was over 90% and when asked about the other $7 Trillion handed out by Bush and Obama he said something like 4%. It should have set a precedent for every handout by any and every nation since. Here in Australia we bailed out QANTAS for the COVID shutdown. After resuming flights they have made over AU$1.4 Billion and have refused to pay any of the AU$480 million back including a $24 Million bonus to the CEO and that was after he publicly stated QANTAS would not exist without the bailout. 2 LESSONS NOBODY LISTENED TOO.
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  266. Australian here: What Elise Stefanik (and others are doing) is what David Pakman labelled "toxic sport politics" which is where a politician DOES NOT care at all about what they are saying. All they care about is what will score POLITICAL POINTS right at this instant in the current news cycle and enable them to claim some sort of political victory. Although it might be most visible in America it is NOT simply an American phenomenon. We see the same sort of garbage from our politicians here in Australia and see it in other nations via the news. The rhetoric is similar, the behavior is similar, and the lack of caring at all about the consequences is similar and most importantly these sorts of politicians DO NOT CARE about the actual job they were elected for which is run the country (or state, or city or town) they were elected to run. I hear reports all the time how the current US House of Representatives has passed a record LOW number of bills and this its not simply low but less than 1/2 the previous record. This is NOT isolated to America either. We have the same sort of issues here, where promises to take things from policy to actions and/or legislation simply never happens. Go look at the complete disaster that Brexit has become for the British people. The failure of our political parties should be one of the most pressing issues across the entire Western Democratic World. At its core is the insane influence peddling of the super wealthy. Thom Hartman reported a while back that someone analysed the funding from billionaires in the 2022 American Midterms. America has over 500 Billionaires (by some reports). They collectively spent over $900 Million supporting candidates and of that money over $800 Million came from a small group of about 25 people. Here in Australia we less than 1/13th the population of America and as such have fewer billionaires. But our super wealthy and/or their companies have learned from your super wealthy on HOW TO INFLUENCE POLITICS. So we too have influential think tanks that they fund and other organisations that peddle various causes. I keep seeing here on YouTube short blurbs that support various mining interests and its pitched as if we all benefit. Notably Glencore the Swiss based multinational is one of those peddling political influence campaigns. Glencore might be Swiss but it was founded by American Billionaire Marc Rich who was pardoned (by Bill Clinton) for tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and sanction busting. I would also warn any American about complaining about foreign influence to any British person. Many of them know the disastrous Brexit vote was influenced by the work of Cambridge Analytica which was funded by American Billionaire Robert Mercer. This is the major problem of our time. Garbage politicians only interested in toxic sport politics who are funded by the super wealthy to keep our governments from functioning properly.
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  285. ​ @CuriousKey  I absolutely agree with that. I recently checked something. Bush 2.0 went to Harvard for his MBA Clinton went to Yale as well as Hilary for their Law Degrees while Al Gore went to Harvard for his BA. Obama went to Harvard as well as Michelle for their Law Degrees. Trump went to U. Penn another of the Ivy League colleges. Of the 9 SCOTUS judges 4 went to Harvard and 4 went to Yale. The other (Amy Barrett) who is also a Federalist Society member went to Notre Dame. Do you see the pattern? FYI - The Federalist Society was started by students from Harvard, Yale and the university of Chicago. In Britain the vast vast majority of government control in both the parties and public service is held by Oxford and Cambridge graduates. In Australia its less obvious but we have the same issue. Its not just a case of very narrow education (as in Law degrees) but also the concentration of power among graduates of a small number of select universities. This also explains that no matter which party is in power in our nations nothing seems to actually change. Either the elected members are lawyers or they have a legal advisor or they are economists or have an economics advisor and in both the Law and Economics the education is highly concentrated to a few colleges. I am actually an engineer and have been looking into the economics issue because of the incredible amount of interference in the engineering space by economists. That's how I know their education is so narrowly focused.
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  286. I AM LIKE Marc Andreessen in that I am ALSO an engineering graduate (aerospace) of the University of Illinois. I graduated the year before Marc Andreessen started his degree in computer science. So I never met him BUT I DO KNOW the environment into which he was able to develop his skills. In the late 80s UIUC was the World Center of Computing. Cray Supercomputers had moved the head quarters to Champaign and UIUC had NOT 1 but 3 Cray Supercomputers at that time. It was also heavily funded by both the Illinois State and the US Federal Government. UIUC hosted the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). On top of that UIUC hosted the core of the PLATO System which was a forerunner of the Internet. We also had rooms full of Apple, IBM and other desk tops we could just use however we wanted AND THAT'S the SHORT story. So for anyone doing a degree in computer science it was one of the best places you could be AND AT THE RIGHT TIME. When I was there the Plato system was a text based system which you are all lucky to have never used. So they was an opportunity to make this awful system look like and be user friendly like the Apple Macs we used to do our term papers on. Marc Andreessen stepped into that opportunity and developed (along with Eric Bina) the Mosaic program which was the first practical web browser. They renamed it Netscape and eventually sold it to AOL for $4.3 Billion. I do not begrudge Marc Andreessen for his success or wealth. He had an opportunity and made it work and with it helped to make the Internet function. WHAT I OBJECT to are his public stances on funding education. He got what he got because the State of Illinois and the US Federal Government FUNDED the university where he got that opportunity. So for him to come out and denigrate the US Federal Government as he often does is INCREDIBLY NARCISSISTIC and UNGRATEFUL. Marc Andreessen has what he has because the American people helped to fund his opportunity. To try try and deny similar opportunities going to others is disgusting.
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  288. I sort of agree but there's a lot NOT being said about Powell in this sort of discussion. Other than admitting what he said at the UN was wrong. Powell actually tried to stop the invasion, which is not as widely known as it should be. Its all covered in the 2004 PBS Frontline episode "Rumsfled's War." I saw it here in Australia circa 2005/06 and it blew the lid of who the people who'd caused that mess. A lot of finger pointing was at Powell because of his UN speech but that's only 1 part of it. Powell tried his hardest to get Bush to back away. He even had a private dinner with Bush and bluntly told Bush that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton and others were NOT military men and weren't experts in military matters while he and others were. That's why a lot of the political people ended up hanging Powell out to take the blame. The one military guy who is NOT mentioned enough is a Colonel named Douglas Macgregor who had made a name for himself as a tank commander in the first Gulf War at the Battle of 73 Easting. People like Powell and Eric Shinseki said invading Iraq would take several hundred thousand TO SECURE THE COUNTRY. Macgregor told Rumsfled, Wolfowitz and others that was nonsense and it would only take around 80,00 because the Iraqi was weak and disorganised from the sanctions. In that Frontline episode he's actually interviewed and says that. Powell, Shinseki and others tried to tell Bush and Congress that wasn't the point. The point was SECURING the country AFTERWARDS, which we know was a disaster. The Iraqi militias raided the military supply depots because there just wasn't anyone there to stop them. I hate the fact that despite making some mistakes that its ignored that Powell tried to stop the invasion. These days I find it despicable that Macgregor has NEVER been held accountable and these days he's trotted out as an expert by various think tanks and parts of the media.
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  292. That's a reasonably nuanced answer with merit but what we are talking about is a group of people who claim to be the ONLY GROUP capable of interpreting something written by people who are no longer alive. This is not simply a problem with the US Constitution its a problem with so many social & political institutions and the dogmas created by people in these "We know the truth!" groups. On another subject but equally plagued with dogma is economics and that currently has an incredible effect on our lives. There's the 2 competing ideologies of capitalism that came from people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo versus the socialism & communism that came from people like Karl Marx. Right now we are dominated by Chicago School neoliberal economics that was formulated by people like Hayek and Freidman. Most of us have NO IDEA what any of them were on about. We rely on people interpreting what they meant. There are 100s of acolytes who will all happily explain the virtues of what Smith, Marx and Ricardo wrote and champion their causes AND they will do it no matter what evidence there is that the systems they put in place HAVE FAILED. The pure socialism and communism of Eastern Europe FAILED, but you can't tell that to a Marxist Lefty. The pure capitalism of America and the West is FAILING but you can't tell that to a Freidmanite Capitalist. I'm Australian but went to college in America. I think the US Constitution is one of the greatest achievements in human history BUT BECAUSE of these people who claim to be the true interpreters its now regarded as a joke around the world. I think the original Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) is sublime genius but its been trampled on by packs of ideological M0R0Ns who act of of pure selfishness and arrogance.
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  294. AUSTRALIAN HERE - After our last major bushfires in 2019-20 the Right Wing scumbags at Murdoch Media did the same sort of crap and garbage. The smoke hadn't settled and they started making all sorts of claims especially arson and it wasn't just their Australian people. There's an infamous Tomi Lauren rant where she literally screeches that Australia is a nation of arsonists. Due to all the claims a full police inquiry was held. Sort of like one of your congressional hearings. Out of the 30+ major fires they investigated NOT 1 was found to be arson but a couple were inconclusive. Most were the result of lightning strikes combined with high fuel loads. YES in the end it was found that the severity of our fires in 2019-20 were compounded by several good years of growth from higher rainfall followed by several years of drought that dried it all out. Additional to that is that Australia's most common native tree species are Eucalyptus varieties which contain high amounts of natural oils. Go and watch either of the interviews Daniel Swain gave Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Adam Conover in recent days here on YouTube. California has been through an almost identical few years to what Australia had experienced. PLUS the native scrub in California is also like Australia's Eucalyptus high in oil content. What's going on with these Right Wing nutcases in America right now is the same garbage we had to deal with in 2020. At some point someone is going to lose it with these people and their garbage.
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  305. Me neither but then I think I might have been caught on this one too, because its a very fine line between 2 almost identical examples and unless you get BOTH questions up front it could (not would) be easy to jump on a simple answer like JP did and then get caught out. I'm Australian and really proud that Jim Jefferies has asked such a brilliant pair of questions. The British lawyer Jeffery Robertson used to come to Australia and do these hypothetical discussions with panels of people and this was his stock & trade. Ask the first question with the aim to get a simple straight forward answer and then flip it on its head with the follow up question. If you take that first question in isolation and say forcing (through law) a business to serve a particular person is authoritarian. Being honest its the government asserting its authority to make and enforce rules. So such a rule is authoritarian, but the point Jim makes is that Governments can make rules & laws that are good for everyone. This something people on the Right and especially Libertarians can't grasp. When they make a rule or law its NEVER authoritarian because in their mind they are preserving liberty and WILL FORCE that rule on everyone as they are doing in America with the abortion laws (and yes that's a big deal around the world). BUT WHEN other people make rules and especially rules or laws they don't like then Right Wingers scream foul and Libertarians being even further to the right go off their rockers. JUST SO YOU ALL KNOW - American Libertarians are pushing their agenda's across the world right now. Here in Australia we just failed to pass a referendum that (in part) would recognise that Australia's Aboriginal peoples (First Nations) in the constitution. The No campaign which was straight out fee mongering, was lead by people (including Aboriginal people) who are involved in Australia's Right Wing Libertarian Think Tanks and those Think Tanks have links to America's Right Wing Libertarian Think Tanks. FOR PROOF - go and look up the Institute of Public Affairs here on YT. The IPA is Australia's most prominent and vocal and well funded Think Tank. If you scroll down their home page to "Other Organisations" you'll see the links to Heritage, CATO,.... etc.
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  309. ​ @taranullius9221  Careful because although you are right about many things and that fact our immigration camps left a lot to be desired they were never close to concentration camps. I'll agree any day of the week we could have done better and should have done better. Many years ago when there were similar issues with Ethnic Vietnamese fleeing southern China, by chance I met a lawyer who handled some of those cases. She couldn't tell me anything about any case but I asked the general question of why these cases take so long. I think at the time they were taking 3-5 years. She basically told the single biggest problem is these people carry no identification. The first thing they do when they start to their journey is destroy everything that might link them to anything. That way they can't be sent back to anywhere because NOBODY knows where back is. This is why they get caught in limbo. They can't prove their claims and nobody else can prove or dis-prove anything. I also just checked what I could and Statista has a graph showing that at 2000 the number of displaced people in the world was less than 25 million. By 2014 it was over 50 million and by 2018 it was over 75 million. Its a gigantic global problem that nobody can fix because there's too much money for various people. From the corporations who pillage the 3rd world by supporting dictators to the arms traffickers who supply those dictators to the smugglers transporting people. THEY'RE ALL MAKING TOO MUCH MONEY to want to do anything.
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  310. AUSTRALIAN HERE: Sorry for the length of this comment. YES - we sadly have these types here too, but please note he is basically saying EXACTLY the same sort of nonsense that Larry Summers told Jon Stewart a few months ago and EXACTLY the same thing the new head of the Reserve Bank of Australia (our equivalent of the US Federal Treasury) Michelle Bullock also said her first day in the job, which is we need to RAISE the unemployment rate to counter to inflation. YES - we also know that inflation is being driven by supply chain issues, but just like all over the developed world economists and business leaders like Tim Gurner, Larry Summers and others DO NOT WANT TO ADMIT that the economic policies they pushed for the last 40 years (like off shoring production) lead to this situation. YES - Australia runs very similar economic policies to America because America got very good at exporting its ideas and this is most evident in economics. I'm actually an engineer and have been informally studying economics for a couple of years so that I can make better arguments regarding project management decisions. One of the things I have found is that Chicago School Neoliberal Economics has become the core of all economics curriculums across the developed world. Even at universities that teach some alternative ideas (like MMT). They have at the core of their curriculum Neoliberal Market Fundamentalism and its narratives that government is incompetent, that unregulated markets are the best decision making processes, outsourcing is brilliant, privatisation is best practice and consultants need to run governments rather than governments governing their nations. In various countries these issues manifest in different ways but they all come from the same school of ideas which is America's robber baron based Libertarian movement. NOTE - Chicago School is a reference to the University of Chicago where James McKinsey, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ronald Coase and others all taught. That university was in part founded by John D Rockefeller the biggest of America's robber barons and an ardent Libertarian. YES - America does export things and among them some of the WORST ideas in human history. Right now in Australia our major issue is consultants who have cost us over AU$20 Billion in fees that we know of and badly messed up our government institutions as they have done it. At the core of the current scandal is PwC who while advising our tax office on closing corporate loop holes were selling that information to their corporate clients so they could avoid tax by other means. Basically we are looking at the Australian equivalent of a RICO case against PwC. So far the enquiries into the consulting industry have heard of endemic fraud among the major players including KPMG, Deloitte and EY. McKinsey and Boston Group have so far avoided allegations. SO YOU ALL KNOW - property developers like Tim Gurner are considered among the lowest life forms we have in Australia. When driving a car we might swerve to avoid a snake but always plant the right foot for a property developer. We've had so many scandals in this industry news reports of "another property developer goes bust" are a cultural cliché. They all operate on business models that would make America's Sackler family (Purdue Pharma) proud and just like America is yet to reign in the Sackler's, Australia is also yet to reign in the property developers despite all the things they've done.
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  332. ​ @janecreek681  I though it sounded Orwellian. As an Australian kid who went to high school in the 80s I studied BOTH Animal farm and 1984 and hated both at the time. NOWDAYS I want to go back and thank my teachers for making us understand how democracy dies. Interestingly even though I did engineering (U. Illinois) a bunch of my friends were pre-law and they used to drag m into their discussions. I think it was because I could be relied on to put in odd or unusual ideas. One thing I used to always argue (mainly because it was all I had) was the Orwellian idea that ANY democracy could fail. They used to argue back that America could NOT fail because of how it was structured under the constitution. There are the 4 pillars (The House, The Senate, SCOTUS & the Whitehouse) and as such it was impossible for anyone of them to gain enough power to overrule the others. So I have had the American system of "Checks & Balances" explained and argued by a bunch of people many of whom are now practising lawyers. *What we never discussed, because it was never considered possible, was what would happen if a Mitch McConnell type simply refused to do his job like he did with BOTH Trump impeachments. the first impeachment was more obvious that Bill Clinton's penis being in Monica Lewinsky's mouth. The 2nd Impeachment was even more obvious than the first and BOTH time McConnell simply refused to do his job and Merrick Garland has since refused to step up and do his job as well. On Jan 6th. If anybody tried that in any other country they would have been in prison that day and in many countries executed shortly after the very short trial. So these days I am pretty amazed because the one argument I used to make and always had shot down is now what's happened.
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  346. Scott Galloway had this great comment a couple of weeks ago. "The only thing Biden is owed is to be buried in the same hole as Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Diane Feinstein." he went on to explain how these selfish geriatrics and their supporters did damage that will take decades to recover from. Remember Ginsberg was replaced with Amy Coney Barrett who was 48 when appointed. Barret is not only a nutcase member of a fundamentalist Catholic offshoot but she could easily be on SCOTUS for another 30+ years. The whole Feinstein case should have resulted in criminal charges for elder abuse and impeachment for the officials involved in covering up her state. More importantly going forward the Clinbamas need to be given their marching orders. If you look at the early days of the Kamala Harris & Tim Walz campaign it said more than anything else "CHANGE." This is the change form the old guard to the next generation. THEN the Clinbamas stepped in and hijacked the campaign doing things like bringing the Cheneys onboard AND THAT SCREAMED LOUD AND CLEAR - there will be no change, we're still in charge and it will be "More of the Same." They all forgot that Hilary lost in 2016 with "More of the Same" as her campaign theme. This is the real appeal of Trump to his voters. Even though the hard core of them are deranged many of them are just fed up with "Status Quo" economics. They are so tired of getting nothing and having no hope of change that they will vote for the Orange Gorilla and his wrecking ball. The real question is: What comes after Trump tears the system apart?
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  363. The corruption is debateable because there's always going to be the issue of who paid to get what done, BUT WITHOUT ANY DOUBT the narcissistic selfishness is the real problem. This is not just an American problem its starting to rise everywhere. I'm Australian and it might be more obvious that this sort of thing is happening in America but its actually starting to emerge across the developed world. There's been a failure of centrist governments everywhere because they have tried to appease everyone and ended up pleasing nobody. The more radical political people on BOTH the Radical Left and Radical right have seized on this. Its more noticeable with the Radical Right and they are louder and more vocal. The Radical Right also have a lot more political power and media power at the moment. There's no billionaire support for the Radical Left, but they are there and just as bat crap crazy as they have ever been. Where BOTH the Radical Right and Radical Left are going to come undone is the same reason they always come undone - their hypocrisy. Unfortunately we are heading towards a point where political violence is almost guaranteed. Just the other day I heard someone point out that we have forgotten that there were over 4,000 bombings on American college campuses in the 1970s and 1,000s of other protests (many violent) on other campuses across the developed world. I was young in the 1970s but I remember that there were times when it seemed like everyday there was another violent protest with a city on fire or another bombing or another hijacking. I don't want to see us go back to that part of the 1970s but I think its now inevitable we will because our political leadership is so poor and lets radicals like Roberts, Trump and others just get away with stuff.
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  387. Great Comment. I'm an Australian engineer who went to college in America (late 80s). A couple of years ago I started informally studying economics out of the frustration of the interference in projects by clowns waving economics degrees. What you are describing is yet more symptoms of neoliberal economics. One of the core beliefs of neoliberals is that Government SHOULD DO as LITTLE AS POSSIBLE because the private sector does everything better. At the ideologic level its more libertarian than liberal (and yes there's a difference). Liberals believe freedom isn't absolute and security and safety comes from having limits (laws, rules, codes, regulations,...). Libertarians believe that government should do nothing but protect their property and their interests. its an incredibly narrow minded and narcissistic view of the world. One of the main reasons I started looking into economics was because Australia like many other nations really wasn't doing anything regarding energy infrastructure. Its like they are all waiting for someone from the private sector to do it for them. This is standard neoliberal economics in reality. "The government should do nothing and let the market decide what to do." The problem is that if there isn't a business case or the private sector can get better returns elsewhere then NOTHING HAPPENS. Its not just an energy thing it happens to all forms of infrastructure just like you describe. Another aspect of what you describe is the idea that everything has to act like a business and make money. This is another of the idiotic fallacies of neoliberal economics. Its really obvious in Universities. In the 1990s they were told they had to "be more business like." Yeah fine a way to hear that is WE (the university) need to mange our money better and where possible have some form of ownership over IP so that the money generated helps fund the University. Great but its really easy to lose sight of the fact the PRINCIPLE TASK of a university like all forms of education is to EDUCATE the next generation so that they have the skills to keep a society functioning. By the same account government departments (no matter if they are local, sate or federal) have as their PRINCIPLE TASK the job of providing the necessary services to the community, state or nation that are required to keep it functioning. There is this idiotic concept among neoliberals that EVERYTHING HAS to be run as if its a "for profit" business. The problem is there is no business model that works long term for some of these basic services that any and every society needs. For some things there is no viable business model in neoliberal economics. Things like education, roads, communication services, health care services,.... The problem is you can't explain it to the professors in their ivory towers or to the super wealthy in their marble castles.
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  393. That's actually their purpose. If you go back to Reagans infamous "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." This is the sort of shitfuckery that Libertarians just love, because they claim it proves their point when in fact THEY are the sort of people THAT ARE the reason why government is the problem. Just hours after this vid was posted there's another one about an Ayn Rand clown named Norton who called in to debate Sam. Among the top comments was "The only thing I find interesting about Libertarians is trying to guess how long it will take before they completely contradict themselves. The over/under is usually 5 minutes." Look at Milton Friedmans comment on minimalist government (see below) and note the second part on the economy because if Friedman's advice had been taken by Reagan and Thatcher then they would never have rearranged their economies. Reaganomics and Thatcherism would never have existed because both are examples of a government rearranging their economies. This is the destructive stupidity of people like Matt Gaetz. They deliberately interfere and cause problems with government to prove that government is the problem. Plus note Friedman's point on legislating morality which is EXACTLY what the GOP tries to do. Its mindless. Milton Friedman said, "Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player."
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  394.  @clairewright332  Simple answer is "Not really" Its Left of the Libertarian view but America basically does NOT know what a real Left is in the first place because both your major parties are fundamentally to the political Right. America never had a union based political party like British Labor or Australian Labor. American has the Democrats who started in the South and were so far to the Right the Klu Klux Klan was formed out of them. The Republicans under Lincoln freed the slaves while the modern Republicans would re-introduce slavery in a heartbeat. Obama famously admitted his economics were in line with Ronald Reagan's. America doesn't have Left and Right it has Right and Far Right. Don't panic in Australia right now we refer to our parties as SHlT (Lib Nat Coalition) and SHlT LITE (Australian Labor). BUT what America does have that's similar to everywhere else is they have to political sides that basically see each other as the nations greatest threat. A couple of years ago there was a comment attributed to Johnathon Haidt that basically went "There's a cacophony where the Radical Left and Radical Right just scream at each other while the rest of us, trapped in the middle, are simply exhausted." I think that's essentially true in almost every developed nation right now. Each side just screams at each other and its exhausted the rest of us. Its very true in Australia and from what I can see Britain, New Zealand and Canada as well. Every public debate is framed in the context of "Its their fault because they are terrible and a threat to our way of life, our freedoms and our basic rights." You often hear lines like "We have to take our country back!" I even heard that from One of the New Zealand politicians recently and their politics is usually tame compared to ours. Fueling it all is a media (all of them) that's totally (and often fanatically) obsessed with attention. They will do anything to get their audience's attention and then lock it down with the right social media tags. AND IF a story isn't burning bright enough they will throw rocket fuel at it until it does. AND IF it causes both sides to be outraged at scream even louder at each other they see that as an invitation to throw even more rocket fuel at it.
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  395. ​ @kindGSL  I largely agree except that what you are doing is EXACTLY what so many other Americans do. You believe that America cannot fall and yet it almost did on January 6th. You had a President totally out of control and NOBODY willing to reign him in. That's as dangerous as it gets. I agree 100% it will be very hard to break America but you can break anything if you really want to. Since then American has utterly FAILED to deal with him and this is part of an ongoing issue with America NOT holding its top echelon accountable. Nobody at the top was held accountable for the invasion of Iraq. Nobody at the top was held accountable for the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Bagram AFB. Nobody at the top was held accountable for the 2007/08 GFC. On that there's a PBS Frontline on it where Lanny Breuer (Eric Holder's Deputy) says straight to the camera they chose NOT to pursue charges against the Wall St CEO's for economic reasons. Mitch McConnell could have simply said "NO, this is too much." and simply impeached Trump after January 6th and disqualified him from future office. I went to college In America and had these sorts of discussions 30+ years ago. I've heard all about the systems of "Checks & Balances" that would never fail and allow someone like Trump to do what he did. What NOBODY has grasped is that we are NOT living in the 80s or 90s when these systems still worked. Reagan was held accountable for Iran-Contra. I was in college in America as that went on. Bill Clinton lied about getting blown and was held accountable. Then 9/11 changed everything and ever since America's systems have slowly been broken. Back in the 80s or 90s if anyone had told an American that in their lifetime they'd see an enraged mob storm the capital chanting "Hang the Vice President!" they would have called you crazy and yet that happened and NONE of the instigators have been held accountable. If you had told anyone back in the 80s or 90s that half of Oregon wanted to split away and join Idaho they would have called you crazy but that is happening right now. American's are always talking about the "slippery slope." Well News Flash you are already on that slippery slope and sliding. The only question is how far will you slide before you wake up. And so we are totally fair Australia is doing the same sorts of stupid things and its mostly because we have had a lot of people go to places like Harvard and Yale and they wave their degrees in our faces AS PROOF of their irrefutable expertise. We have stuff going on here RIGHT NOW that could easily break our nation. Societies are fragile things and can break if you aren't careful.
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  396. TEACHING INUDSTRIAL ROBOTS: 2 of the most common tasks industrial robots do are welding and pick & place. Welding is mostly a matter of following the joint line between 2 pieces of metal. Pick and place is our term for tasks like stacking boxes on a pallet as in we pick something up and place it down which is a very common task in robotics. For all the robot guys out there. This isn't for you this is for all the non-robot programmers so things are more phonetic than code. Imagine we have a robot and has a gripper that closes to grab hold of a part and opens the let that part go and we want it to pick that part up from Point A place and put it down at Point B. To do the most basic pick and place we have to get the robot to know at least 3 points. There's the pick position (Point A), the place position (Point B) as well as a home position which we'll call PHome where its out of the road of everything else . Now to make a robot work we don't just tell it to go to a position because it will (in general) take the fastest path which might not be a straight line. Robots aren't that smart and will simply crash into or through whatever is in the road. Even the best anti-collision software (like airbags) only limits the damage. So we never just tell the robot to go to the safe position. In most cases we tell it to go vertically up to get clear of everything so it can then go directly to the home position without hitting anything. So we end up with a list if commands that looks a bit like this except its all phonetic rather than in code. 1-move (current location + home position height) 2-move (home position) 3-wait for a go signal. 4-move (pick position + vertical clearance) 5-move (pick position) 6-pick part (as in close the gripper) 7-move (pick position + vertical clearance) 8-move (place position + vertical clearance) 9-move (place position) 10-place part (as in open the gripper) 11-goto step 1 NOW TO MAKE IT WORK we have to TEACH the robot those 3 points and this is where the word tech has a completely different meaning to how normal people use the word teach. We take the hand control pendant and MANUALLY DRIVE the robot from point to point and when we get to the location we want with the right orientation we will go into the right menu on the pendant and RECORD that location and save it to memory. We don't stand there and tell it something. It doesn't have a camera and a brain to work it out. We have to MANUALLY drive it to the right location and record that location. Things like vertical clearances we'll work out along the way and just put them in as distances from the location. As things get more complex we have to go around things we just "teach" more points for the robot to go to or go through. We don't just move-stop-move-stop we'll also move-go through the next point, then through the next point,........ and onto the final point. For really complex paths which we get with things like welding and gluing we'll do the programing on a cad system then go out to the robot and "teach" it some reference points and then link the complex paths to those reference points. When we "teach" a robot we don't talk to it we don't read stories to it. We drive it to a location and record that location. Once it starts going it will simply crash into or go through whatever is in the road. The only comment in movies or TV I ever saw was a comment in the film the "Terminator" when he said it does not think and can't be reasoned with it just has its program and will do it. This is why we encase them in gages with interlocked gates for normal operation.
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  397. AUTOMATION SYSTEMS and LEARNING This is again another word we use in engineering that maybe we shouldn't because in engineering its nothing like what learning is for humans. The most common place in my work where we see this is in what we call closed loop control which is where we use some kind of sensor to loop back into the control system. The alternative to closed loop is open loop and we use the basic data of a system to estimate what's needed. Its simpler and suitable where accuracy isn't required. But where you need accuracy you have a sensor feeding back data. If you draw a diagram of this it has what looks like a loop - hence the term closed loop. Between the sensor and what ever you are controlling which could be the speed of a pump or the position of a control valve there will be some kind of algorithm and that algorithm will have parameters that need setting up. At the most basic level we call setting up algorithms "tuning" as in we are tuning the algorithm. More complex systems have statistical data analysis algorithms constantly refine the system over time. In essence these systems are LEARNING how to do the job better and better over time BUT THEY ARE NOT learning like a human being does. They just collect data and use statistical analysis (or similar) to refine the parameters. I once installed an oven on a process line. When we first set it up, its controller would take about 45 minutes to heat the up the oven and settle the temperature down before production could start. Over the first 9 months (or so) it collected enough data from each days start up to refine its parameters and got that 45 minutes down to around 15 minutes giving them about an extra 1/2 hour each day of production. The controller did that without any human involvement at all. To a non-engineer these days it might sound like we installed an AI on that oven - WE DIDN'T. As I said it was just a data analysis package. In past generations they'd usually task a young engineer to collect data over several months and do all that analysis by hand as a character building exercise. If you listen to what people are saying about systems like ChatGPT its not that much different except the data its analysing is NOT something as basic as a temperature or pressure sensor its analysing a massive amount of written information. But they do a similar thing in that they effectively average out all the data which is why some people are calling them stochastic parrots. The danger is assuming the stochastic parrot was trained on good data because just like having a faulty sensor causes problems so does a faulty data set for teaching a language AI like ChatGPT.
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  401. ​ @benfaunce7496  Fair call. There's actually a couple of interesting things about this interview that's not being discussed. 1 - is the fact that here's professor Chemerinsky lamenting originalism and the federalist Society and yet on the Staff of the UC Berkley law school is John Yoo the infamous member of the Bush Administration who wrote the infamous "Torture Memo" that lead to all sorts of problems. John Yoo should be in prison not be a tenured law professor teaching anything. 2 - is the problem of ideologists taking their ideology too far. A couple of years ago I heard Jordan Peterson (when he still had brain function) describe how they know when people go too far on the Right (they get racist) but there's no clear indicator when someone on the Left goes too far. I think he was 1/2 right and 1/2 moronically wrong. At the fundamental level people have gone too far when they let an ideology dictate what's real rather than facts. We see this all the time with both Leftists and Right wingers. Its even with centrists who are so into appeasing BOTH sides that they never get anything done out of fear of upsetting someone. Look at all the Lefties who scream about capitalism these days. Emma Vigeland being an example of this who repeatedly say "Capitalism is the problem." She like many others forget the utter misery of what happened in Eastern Europe when socialism and communism were let run rampant. I find it amazing that the Green parties around the world are on the Left when some of the greatest environmental catastrophes were done by socialists and communists. There were no capitalists involved with the destruction of the Aral Sea or the destruction of the Chinese water ways. Which capitalist built all those coal fired power stations in China or ran their mines so badly they burned as much coal in the mines as they did in the power stations? Whenever we let ideologists go too far we are always in trouble its just a matter of what it takes to clean up afterwards.
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  402.  @benfaunce7496  I saw your comment about not being able to agree to progressive ideas and be a republican. I see your point but if you look at what the basics of what progressive, conservative or regressive mean than its easily possible to be a republican and be progressive and just as easy to be a democrat and be conservative. I'm an engineer so I tend to take some of these ideas at a very straight forward definition unlike poly-sci, sociologists and economists take these things and word salad them. To me a progressive wants to see progress, a conservative doesn't want change and a regressive wants to go back to some past state. As such I don't see a lot of conservatives as conservative but as regressive in that they want to go back to some 1950s "Happy Days" TV fantasy that never really existed. I see the word progressive as people who want to see the human race make progress IRRESPECTIVE of the social, technical or political issue. Although that mostly means they lean Left it does not exclude them being right leaning on issues like economics and industry. There's not many right leaning progressives but they do exist. Saagar over on Breaking points is one I know of. His buddy Marshall who does the Realignment is another. In an interview on Krystal Kyle and Friends, Jesse Ventura described himself as Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative. So he could be described as a right leaning progressive. I'll grant you any day that Right leaning progressives are rare but I do think they exist, but I'd also agree that I doubt many would vote Republican at this moment in time. That doesn't mean they haven't in the past. I'd also add to that I think its impossible to be a socialist and be progressive because at its core socialism with its "nobody owns anything and money doesn't exist" mentality is so close to ancient feudalism its scary. Probably the weirdest thing I see in all these ideologies is THEY ALL BELIEVE in some version of an impossible utopian fantasy that never existed but they all claim is easily attainable if we only do A, B, C,...
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  412. I'm Australian but went to college in America (late 80s) and it DID NOT surprise me Trump won. Anyone with a basic understanding of Americans could see it coming and plenty of people saw it happening. Sorry it this takes explaining. FIRST - Trump won because people were fed up with the status quo and voting for Trump was a way to stick it to BOTH the GOP and DNC. People FORGET he steam rolled 16 GOP stalwarts including a several favorite sons like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. That sort of election protest happens all over the world. Brexit was essentially a protest against the influence of Brussels, the French and the Germans. The Brits felt that since they rescued Europe (including the French) from the Germans then they should run Europe. They didn't like the answer and eventually protested with Brexit. Now the Europeans are making them pay for it. ON TRUMP BEATING HILARY 1) Prof. Mark Blyth at Brown U. predicted it because he could see the backlash against the globalisation that Hilary represented. Remember it was Bill Clinton who gave them NAFTA. 2) Rana Foroohar predicted it after the first debate, because when Trump threw the NAFTA & globalisation line at Hilary and she had no response. 3) I thought Hilary lost when she announced that she wasn't going to campaign in Michigan BECAUSE THEY'D VOTE FOR HER ANYWAY. I went to college at U. Illinois and knew that sort of arrogance was going to lose her the rust belt. They'd been been smacked again and again by globalisation. Go look at past presidential elections. Biden won Michigan and Penn Obama won all 3 twice Kerry won Michigan and Penn Gore won Michigan and Penn Bill Clinton won all 3 twice. You have to go back to Dukakis in 1988 to find a Dem who lost all 3. THAT'S HOW BAD HILARY DID and it was easily predictable because she was arrogant and flipped the middle finger at them. YES its an aberration how anyone in America voted for Trump, but if you consider that he represents a form of PROTEST against the machinations of the Wall St. and the Washington establishments then its actually easy to see why he won. WHAT IS TOTALLY beyond comprehension is how Trump and his goon squad were not rounded up IMMEDIATELY after January 6th and locked up. The Dems showed just how pathetic they are. They should have dragged Mitch McConnell and the money behind him into a room and told then BLUNT as F*CK that they could either help get rid of Trump and his goons or they'd unleash the FBI and NSA onto all of them and anybody with even the slightest link to January 6th would be thrown in jail INCLUDING. They should have said we will find our version of Joe McCarthy and stage our version of an Anti-American Commission and tear you apart inch by inch. Put it this way if Hilary had tried what Trump did what do you think the GOP would have done? Despite ZERO evidence against Joe Biden look what they are doing right now.
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  430.  @NYCBigBull  Yes and No. Its like so much of the entire COVID thing. Its so damn complex that everyone has somethings right an somethings wrong. Its why its so damn hard to say anything that's clear cut. ESPECIALLY once the politics gets into it. I'm an engineer and I find the whole change in definition issue to be incredibly egregious because in any area of science and technology you have to be incredibly clear to everyone when you change or adjust a definition or people get confused. I really can't stress how important that is. I can't say for certain but I think it was done to deliberately confuse people outside the pathogen research establishment to make oversight difficult. I have been in research and although most researchers are decent and honest some just aren't making it no different than any other profession. Bret Weinstein has been right about some things but then also horribly wrong about other things AND with the politics shoving people like him into a box its made it impossible to have a sensible discussion. David Pakman interviewed Vincent Racaniello who's incredibly well credentialled and 90% of what he said was 100% right. But right near the end of that interview he claimed that the Chinese weren't even working on the COVID-19 virus. I knew instantly that he had LIED because I was already aware that people had found the database records that showed Peter Daszak had delivered a bat known to host the COVID-19 virus from Laos to the lab in Wuhan. Its clear to me that there's a part of the pathogen research establishment who are more interested in protecting their funding and NOT having anyone check what they are up to. That's what DW were leading people to realise. Its what people like Alina Chan and others have been warning about.
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  431.  @NYCBigBull  Here's why I think it was a lab leak. Sorry if its long. The first 5 points aren't conclusive and are circumstantial but they are also fairly indisputable. 1) There was a lack of oversight at the Wuhan Lab 2) There were researchers aggressively pursuing their research which is more common than you think. 3) We know they were working on lots of corona viruses that naturally host in bats because Wuhan was publishing. 4) The Wuhan lab was NOT suitable for handling an airborne pathogen like COVID-19. Alina Chan (MIT $& Harvard) has explained that. 5) That lab like any other was full of people in the 20s and 30s (post grads and post-docs) who are the most likely people to get COVID-19 and be asymptomatic. In other words they could walk out the door at any time showing no symptoms. These next 5 points might also be circumstantial but they are absolutely indisputable. What we can say for certain. 6) We know the Americans were funding a lot of programs there via the NIH through a company called EcoHealth Alliance run by Peter Daszak because there are the documents to prove it. 7) We know other international agencies were involved in Wuhan because the funding bodies are listed on some of the published papers. 8) It was NEVER a weapon because nobody publishes the data on weapons research and the Chinese wouldn't be doing it with international partners either. 9) We know they were adapting viruses to make the jump from their native hosts to humans because that's in the published papers. That's the sort of research that was dropped from the gain of function research definition I mentioned previously. 10) We know that mice and ferrets are both used as intermediate species to do the jump from the natural host to humans. That's covered in the DW doco. Here's what clinched it for me. Early in the pandemic the Danish mink industry put down millions of minks when COVID ran rampant through the mink farms. Go and google "Denmark ferrets COVID" If they were doing what's called passage research to modify a virus and used ferrets as the intermediary species then it makes sense that members of the ferret family would be highly susceptible to COVID and minks are in the ferret family. No where in the world was any other domestic animal - cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, goats, cows,.... terminated at any level due to COVID. The only animal culls for COVID were Danish Minks. What's the conclusion. The version of COVID that first arrived in Europe was ALREADY ADAPTED to ferrets. AND Why would a bat virus be adapted to an animal on the other side of the world unless it had already had contact with members of that animal family? Its all been there in plain sight for all the world to see for 3 years. I'm an engineer not a microbiologist and I can see that. Why can't anyone else including Bret Weinstein?
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  435. Sorry about the other reply this is actually your comment I meant to reply too. I agree with this comment and there's more to that story. Other than admitting what he said at the UN was wrong, Powell actually tried to stop the invasion of Iraq, which is not as widely known as it should be. Its all covered in the 2004 PBS Frontline episode "Rumsfled's War." I saw it here in Australia circa 2005/06 and it blew the lid of who the people who'd caused that mess. A lot of finger pointing was at Powell because of his UN speech but that's only 1 part of it. Powell tried his hardest to get Bush to back away. He even had a private dinner with Bush and bluntly told Bush that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton and others were NOT military men and weren't experts in military matters while he and others were. That's why a lot of the political people ended up hanging Powell out to take the blame. The one military guy who is NOT mentioned enough is a Colonel named Douglas Macgregor who had made a name for himself as a tank commander in the first Gulf War at the Battle of 73 Easting. People like Powell and Eric Shinseki said invading Iraq would take several hundred thousand TO SECURE THE COUNTRY. Macgregor told Rumsfled, Wolfowitz and others that was nonsense and it would only take around 80,00 because the Iraqi was weak and disorganised from the sanctions. In that Frontline episode he's actually interviewed and says that. Powell, Shinseki and others tried to tell Bush and Congress that wasn't the point. The point was SECURING the country AFTERWARDS, which we know was a disaster. The Iraqi militias raided the military supply depots because there just wasn't anyone there to stop them. I hate the fact that despite making some mistakes that its ignored that Powell tried to stop the invasion. These days I find it despicable that Macgregor has NEVER been held accountable and these days he's trotted out as an expert by various think tanks and parts of the media.
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  447.  @CatarinaStone  AND SINCE YOUR SO IGNORANT There have been many alternatives to this disaster over many years. It never needed to happen at all. Do you realise that it was the Arab League who voted against the 2 state solution back when Israel was formed? The Europeans (Britain & France) who'd controlled the region since the end of World War 1, knew that there was no way the fanatics on both sides would never live in a single state together so they put forward a 2 state solution and the ARAB LEAGUE voted it down. Did you know there was polling before the 2024 October 7th attacks that showed Hamas was losing support from the Palestinian people. Hamas was basically operating as a collection of criminal gangs and could not afford elections. Did you realise that it was Benjamin Netanyahu who helped fund Hamas in the first place so that the Palestinians would be politically divided? That's why Palestinian elections weren't happening. Neither Hamas nor the Israeli RIGHT wanted fresh elections among the Palestinians or that political divide might have been extinguished. HERE'S A SOLUTION THAT COULD HAVE BEEN PUT FORWARD DECADES AGO. When ISRAEL gave back the Sinai to Egypt which it had controlled from 1967 to 1982 and forced the Jewish Settlers to leave that region could have been ceded to the Palestinians and Gaza instead of being a narrow strip of misery could have been massively expanded and the people of Gaza could have had the room to grow. Go look at the Wikipedia page for the "Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula" There were a few people at that time who suggested giving more land to the Palestinians in Gaza, but were shouted down by EVERYONE, because the last thing ANYONE wanted was the Palestinians to be anything else but slaves to the politics of the region. There have been many reasonable and sensible suggestions and solutions brought forward over the last 70 years but NONE of the active political entities want them because then what would they shout about. If you can and you want to be slightly more educated then go and look up the interviews Jon Stewart had with King Abdullah of Jordan on the daily show (2010 & 2012) where Abdullah laid it all out on how to deal with the Palestinian issue and the War on Terror. In a way Abdullah predicted this sort of thing would eventually happen.
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  465.  @dthomas9230  Yeah I have been informally studying economics for a couple of years. Mainly listening to a lot of lectures, book talks and discussions here on YT. I'm an engineer and simply wanted to learn how to speak to economists. You see - we get a lot of interference in engineering from people waving economics degrees. Any how - one of the recurrent themes (or memes) of neoliberalism (Reaganomics, Thatcherism,...) is unfunded tax cuts. These are tax cuts that are not matched by equivalent reductions in government spending or increases in other taxes. Famously the son of Reagans VP - Dubya gave tax cuts at the same time he started a war and people told him it takes REAL MONEY to fight a war. Yeah it didn't work out well. One of the great fallacies of neoliberalism is the concept of trickle down economics. Its basically where they give massive tax cuts to the top 10% who then invest that money into industry and thus create jobs. Those newly employed people then pay tax making up for the tax cuts given to the wealthy. It sounds simple and even might be considered logical. EXCEPT ITS NEVER WORKED and every time its been tried it lead to unsustainable government debt THEN a depression AND THEN a war or revolution. Its because of one very simple fact. Wealthy people DO NOT invest in economic growth they invest in profit growth. As Milton Friedman said "There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits..." Governments are the opposite. They invest (with some exceptions) in social growth - education, infrastructure, power stations, new technologies,... Its a distinction that to my engineering brain is obvious but I have NOT SEEN 1 economist voice that distinction. This is why there's the growing wealth gap, soaring energy prices, soaring food prices, soaring education costs,.... and on top of all that heaps of social unrest. All the neoliberal economists are trying it shut down government functionality when in fact they actually need government functionality because it feeds them resources like a trained, healthy, productive workforce who aren't wanting to hang the CEO.
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  467. The problem with these discussions is that EVERYONE involved is presenting opinion as fact, its just some are not twisting the facts. Joe Rogan , Rogan's guests, Sam Seder, Emma Vigeland and all the rest of the OPINION BASED MEDIA are all PARTS of the overall problem with emphasis on the word PARTS because there is not 1 single part to this. There are multiples of multiples of parts to this issue of opinion first facts second media. Sorry if this looks like an essay. I've seen that Bezmenov video numerous times and versions of it are posted on some of the most repulsive radical channels who think they are clever posting something they think is about "people people" when its actually ABOUT THEM TOO. This is Rogan's monster mistake in mentioning Yuri Bezmenov (see below). Its also Sam and Emma's problem because as another part of the opinion based media they are also part of the problem. They just aren't as much of a problem as Joe Rogan because at least they are trying to BALANCE or COUNTER BALANCE the misinformation and at least try and present facts rather than fiction. Where they are part of the problem is they cater to a specific section of society and that's one of the main issues with people like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Fox News, etc. All these outlets target their audience with some consistent themes and rarely ever present anything that might aggravate or turn off their audience. In the case of this channel think about how many "How dumb is Dave Rubin?" or "How narcissistic is Ben Shapiro?" or "How much of a maniac is Tim Pool or Steven Crowder?" video's do they post? All these channels no matter how much they care about telling people TRUTH what they are actually telling people is THEIR OPINION of what is truth. Its just that some of them back up their opinions with facts that can be checked and verified as fact. Case in point the "Twitter files." YURI BEZMONOV For those who haven't heard who he is, go check Wikipedia for more details, but basically he claimed he was a KGB agent who defected to the west in 1970 and settled in Canada. He was later fired form his job with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by Justin Trudeau's father Pierre on a request from the Soviet Ambassador at the time. That's another interesting point on free speech. He wrote several books and Essays using the alias Tomas David Schumann and on Wikipedia there are links to several of those works. In 1984 he did, what is now a famous interview which (with some hunting) you can watch here on YouTube. There are also shorter excerpts posted on various channels here on YouTube several of which SOME are fairly radical Right Wing channels who think they are highlighting the problem, but failing to realise they are a major part of the problem. The most relevant part of that Bezmenov video was where he describes the aim of what he calls "ideological subversion." In Bezmenov's own words (punctuation mine) "What do they mean by ideological subversion is. Is the slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures. Active in the language of the KGB or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country." Bezmonov was 100% RIGHT in that societies can (over time) be demoralised to the point where they cannot discern fact from fiction. Bezmenov was also 100% WRONG on the effectiveness of the Soviet efforts because as we know less than a decade later the Soviet Empire had collapsed NOT America. That's actually a great lesson for any nation. Sometimes the external enemy is less of a threat than your own political system. That should be the lesson Western Nations should have learned from but never did. We were to happy watching the Soviets collapse and declaring we'd won the Cold War. Instead we ignored the lesson and are now where we are. FYI - I'm Australian and we haven't learned form this either. Despite our sunny outlook and beautiful beaches we have some very serious structural issues that have similarities with other issues across the rest of the Western World. Jonathan Haidt was credited with saying, "There's a cacophony where the Radical Left and Radical Right just scream at each other while the rest of us, trapped in the middle, are simply exhausted." That explains so many of our issues and why they persist. Instead of solving problems we just yell at each other about them. Its that exhaustion that leads people to listen to people like Joe Rogan and Sam Seder without thinking or checking and just taking their words at face value. It makes manipulation of truth very easy.
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  473. Great point and that makes it far more than simply an American issue. Climate Change is NOT an American issue its an issue for the entire planet, BUT without the cooperation of several major players its an impossible task rather than simple an incredibly difficult task. 3 of the countries that have to be involved are America, China and Russia who are NOT getting on well at the moment. China and Russia for all their faults are simpler because we all know who makes the decisions in those countries - Putin and Xi. America is a lot harder because POTUS isn't in charge or Congress or the Senate and that's because SCOTUS has now taken charge. They are deciding what the other arms of government CAN'T DO. Its a very unusual thing. They ARE NOT deciding what the Government CAN DO or what it SHOULD DO they are deciding what it CAN'T DO. That basically means that no matter who the American people vote for they can't do what they want unless SCOTUS allows them, which is insane. FYI - I am Australian but went to college in America. I did engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and we often discussed things like the constitution. What bother's me more than anything is that this is the sort of thing that they assured me COULD NEVER HAPPEN in America. I had studied Orwell in high school (Animal Farm & 1984) and one of the main warnings Orwell gave was that ANY SOCIETY could fall into a totalitarian dictatorship. My friends argued that was impossible in America because of how the constitution worked. These days I would love to ask them how this has happened.
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  480. AUSTRALIAN HERE: This Political Culture War fighting for the sake of fighting and making as much noise as possible is not simply an American problem. It might be more prominent in America but we all have some version of this garbage. No matter what ideology a party has they all have these people who's job is to waste other people's time by making as noise and creating as much chaos as possible. Its more prevalent on the Right but the Left do it as well. How I know about this is because one of my best friends was involved in student politics at University in Australia. I actually went to college in America (late 80s). I was there during the 87 campaign season which was bizarre. One time when discussing the hopelessness of politics with this friend he told me I had know idea how bad it actually was. After hearing a number of horror stories including how those on hos own side tried to set him up. I asked WHY student politics so vicious and WHY the parties supported it? He said the parties used it as a proving ground. He said they wanted to know if people could "hack it" if they made it into parliament (congress). The actual party systems themselves are set up and operate like Districts 1 & 2 from the Hunger Games. They are internally ruthless so that they produce winners or at least potential winners. The actual capability of party candidates has NOTHING to do with their ability to do anything of value to any society. They have to first be electable and secondly be able to stay elected. if that means they are a hardcore ruthless berserker type culture warriors then so be it. What's perfect about such people is they are perfect for the billionaire class. They give the billionaires what they want while keeping everyone else distracted.
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  484. There's some great points being made but there's also some serious over-hyped BULLSHlT as well. Slavery was being practiced for 1,000s of years before Capitalism was a thing. Emma's a smart girl but damn sometimes she gets her wires crossed. I'm reading Adam Smiths "Wealth of Nations" right now. Yeah there's some dumb backward stuff but there's no mention of slavery. He talks a lot about labor, skilled labor and the value of labor. If you go and listen to Richard Wolff on Marx then you'll find Smith and Marx were contemporaries with differing views on the value of labour. They were both against the system that was in place BEFORE capitalism - a system called Mercantilism and it wasn't based on labor or slavery it was based on trade, but it did go hand with slavery and oppression. Go read up on the British East India Company. There's a great lecture by Mariana Mazzucato titled "Redefining Economic Value" (here on YT) About 7 minutes in she has a slide and goes through the different economic ideologies of the last few centuries and how they focused on different ways to create value. Between the Mercantilists and Classical Capitalists there was a short era called the Physiocrats who were pre-industrial revolution and based value creation around agriculture. They absolutely relied on slavery because tractors and combine harvesters didn't yet exist. They operated just as kings and emperors had going all the way back to the dawn of civilisation in Ancient Egypt. If you had large areas to farm you needed lots of slaves to farm it. That's why America had slavery they needed them to pick all that cotton and then pick out the cotton seed.
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  491. Australian here with an outside view and the same comment I left on another MR video. Yes the Trump Team of Chaos Merchants are a problem and the corruption we expect to see has no limit to the damage it will cause across the World. HOWEVER the American Left have utterly failed to ONE prevent this from happening and TWO accept any responsibility for what has happened. Anyone can see the panel of Democrat campaign staffers on Pod Save America just blow each other and accept NOTHING. In early 2019 Australian Labor Lost a similar election with a similar strategy. Later in 2019 British Labor with an almost identical strategy lost an also similar election to the clownish Boris Johnson. That strategy which was the same as Hilary Clinton's LOSING Strategy was: 1) Our policies are so great that EVERYONE will just vote for them. 2) The other candidate is so bad that NOBODY will vote for them. When I asked a Brit WTF was going on and why did BOTH British Labor and Australian Labor follow the same strategies as Hilary Clinton in 2016. That Brit told me that campaign staffers from the Clinton Campaign had advised BOTH British Labor and Australian Labor. The yesterday I watched these people YET AGAIN deny any responsibility. A few days ago I watched Destiny debate Cenk on the David Pakman show and Destiny CONFIRMED his belief the strategy of telling the progressives to get lost was RIGHT and THAT WAS AFTER LOSING. When will people learn that these Democrats ARE the REASON why Trump is back in power.
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  494. You're 100% RIGHT there's just 1 problem. LEFISTS across the world just DON'T GET these 2 points. 1) The Right understand that most of humanity don't want to hear the truth or facts. They want to be told they're fantastic and champions. Just look at how Hollywood promotes particular memes like the Marvel movies all do. 2) The Right NOT ONLY control more of the media but are incredibly good at delivering their message. Despite being a convicted felon, sex predator, incessant liar LOOK HOW WELL Trump and the people around him delivered their message. Despite getting made a fool by Harris in the debate and made to look like a M0R0N they kept on the rest of their message. "We can fix the economy and they can't!" I'm Australian and here's my way of using American football to describe American politics. The Democrats are like a team that's always racking up stats (running, passing,.....) but they struggle in the red zone and settle for fields goals too often. They are always harping on about stats and how often they score. The GOP are like that team that sucks but keeps finding ways to score touchdowns. Their offense is rabble but it scores touchdowns. Their defense is rabble but they hold firm in the red zone and get turnovers. Now imagine a game where: One team struggles to be coherent but their defense gets a couple of takeaways including a pick 6 and they find a way to convert a takeaway into another touchdown. Finally they scramble their way to a 3rd touchdown. The other team dominates racking up stat after stat but keeps stumbling in the red zone. They get 2 field goals and and then get a touchdown and 2pt conversion but then settle for 2 more field goals. Who scored on 5 drives and who scored on 2 drives? Who raved about their stats and but whined about missed opportunities? Who won the game 21-20?
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  496. ​ @ittt6339  I was in college in America in the late 80s and got to see the 85 midterm and 87 POTUS seasons firsthand and all I thought of was WTF isn't it good were aren't this bonkers. BUT I WAS YOUNG AND NAIEVE because by the 90s our politics was already following on. Interestingly in 2010/11 I saw the back 1/2 of a lecture on the death of journalism that was om super late one night. I didn't find out for several years that it was given by Robert McChesney who was a major contributor to the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004). He's the guy near the start describing the scene from the Godfather Part 2 about Cuba. In this lecture I saw he was describing how the ratio of journalists to PR people has flipped since the end of WW2 from 5:1 to 1:5 It to 50-60 years so nobody really noticed except a few academics like Robert. By the early 2000s across the Western World many journalists we simply gotten rid of because of the vast expansion in communications as well as the corporatisation by people like Rupert Murdoch who simply bought everything he could. the days of every town having its own newspaper ARE GONE because shareholders want profit not stories on Farmer Jones cows or the local kid with dreams of the big time. Later on I found the Robert McChesney is a professor at my Alma Mater (U. of Illinois) but I he started there after I graduated. There's actually a few really good interviews he's given that are here on YouTube. Every time I check I keep finding older stuff that says people like him were trying to warn us about these media issues for a long long time BUT NOBODY WAS LISTENING and now we are paying the price. And it's a recuring theme with a few issues. We are finding out just how bad the climate is as well as energy and water systems. Energy is of interest to me because I'm an engineer and that problem is so staggering that at times I wonder what will happen because I can't get people to listen and the media are so bad. We have so many stupid people making so many stupid claims we can't have a sensible public discussion BECAUSE at the core of it all is a media that thrives on conflict AND DOES NOT CARE.
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  498. I did Econ 101 as one of my humanities options to doing aerospace engineering. After a couple of lectures of this guy explaining yet another market type with yet another supply-demand graph I asked him (after class) what the math was behind these graphs. He asked what was I talking about and I asked again "you're drawing these graphs I was wondering what the math is?" He then asked what my major was and I said "aerospace and when we draw a graph there's a formula or there's data." I might NOT have all that conversation perfectly remembered but I'll never forget his reply. "This is economics we don't do math here!" I did press him further and he eventually admitted that at the higher levels they did some, but nothing like engineering. In recent years I have been trying to understand WHY economists are doing what they do. My main motivation is they have infected engineering with some very bad practices that's lead to some very bad outcomes, most notably in electricity generation and distribution and its a disaster across the entire Western developed world and its going to cost TRILLIONS to fix. Eventually I stumbled across the Australian Economist Steve Keen and he's what I'd call one of the rebel economists. He's been trying to expose and educate people to what Economists have done. The most amazing of Steve's revelations is that mainstream (classical and neo-classical) economists don't even include energy in there modelling. Another person I stumbled across who talks a lot like Mark Paul is professor Mark Blyth (Brown U.). He leads a unit at Brown called the Rhodes Centre and he does interviews like this one where he talks to other "fringe" economists, sociologists and others who have written books similar to what Mark Paul has written. One Mark Blyth's recent interviews was with George DeMartino’s who wrote the book, “The Tragic Science: How Economists Cause Harm (Even as They Aspire to Do Good)” The YouTube video title is The Rhodes Center Podcast: Does economics do more harm than good? There's a whole bunch of similar interviews with authors Mark has done and if anyone wants to get the gist of what these people are on about without having to get the book and read it these interviews are FREE and here on YT.
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  531. I'm a Victorian living in Queensland and WA did the right thing. The rest of Australia pretty much did the right thing and it save lives and there's been a staggering number of LIES told before during and since. In Early 2024 Gigi Foster the infamous economics professor who said (early in the pandemic) that we should do the Swedish thing because the elderly and inform would die anyway said on ABC QandA "At best Australia's lockdown saved 10,000 lives." Now there's a few things about that. FIRST - Gigi is NOT a never has been a health care expert and her claim to "just let them die" was met with scorn by other professors at her university the UNSW. SECOND - Simply saying to let 10,000 people die is sociopathic and a sign of mental illness. THIRD - AFTER Australia dropped its restrictions due (in part) to pressure from economists like Gigi Australia's death toll from COVID jumped from ~10,000 to over 20,000. FOURTH - She LIED about the number 10,000. Because I had gone to university in America I was watching the numbers closely via a website that had the entire World's official data. I'd heard Gigi and others make multiple claims about how we should be like Sweden. I knew the Swedish data and how their numbers were double or triple the other Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Denmark). I also knew Sweden's numbers were much worse than Australia. At the time Gigi claimed it only saved 10,000 (at best) had we taken her advice and done the Swedish thing and based on the Swedish result we would not have had 20,000 dead but over 70,000. How she got away with that lie was she used the average fatality rate for the World NOT the fatality rate for Sweden. Neither Gigi Foster or any of the other LIARS like Russel Brand have ever been called out for their lies or held accountable for their actions in stirring up trouble that did result in lives being lost.
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  537. I think you'll find that the counter argument for that will be the unborn child breaths via their mother. Before you howl back that also means that until a fertilised egg attaches to the wall of the uterus and connects to the mother via an umbilical then it is NOT a breather. There's also other problems religious fundamentalists utterly ignore. Here's 2 I know about but there are probably more. FIRST are those pregnancies like ectopic pregnancies where the fertilised egg or embryo is unviable and will not survive and the mother is likely to die without treatment. A friend of mine's older sister had one of these and by the time they worked out what was happening it was a drop everything, emergency surgery and hope she survives moment. I remember how worried that family was because for a couple of hours they did not know if she would survive and thankfully she did. However in certain American States right now that most likely would have resulted in her death because of the legal fight that would have delayed the surgery. SECOND are those pregnancies that the mothers system aborts by itself because there is something wrong. Many years ago another friends wife explained to me just how common this is thought to be. It might be as common as 80% or 90% of all eggs that sperm reach and fertilise either simply go though without attaching or are aborted for some reason during the pregnancy and at times well before the mother even suspects she might have gotten pregnant. Another friend of mine (a girl) kept having trouble having pregnancies progress beyond the first trimester. She had a number of pregnancies fail quite early but then also had to healthy wonderful girls. The doctors suspected but could not confirm that for some reason her system could not handle a male embryo and would reject it early on. So my problem with these people is that they would have let one of my friend's sisters just die AND they might well have blamed another friend of mine for her failed pregnancies and MAYBE locked her up.
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  541. ​ @TheDesertRat31  I 100% agree with that summary. I'm actually an engineer and I have been forced to informally study economics because of the influence of economists into the engineering world with some terrible consequences. Most notably the energy crisis is 100% the result of failed economics and like religious fault they refuse to accept any blame for their ideology AND make no mistake the issue with economics is an ideological one. The amazing thing I have found is that just like religions the economists are NOT taught to think but to follow the doctrine. This is why country after country can't solve their energy issues. Its also why America cannot solve their health care industry issues. The most amazing thing I have found out about economist is how disconnected from HISTORY they are. Since your a historian of sorts I suggest you go and watch the Rhodes Centre Podcast hosted by Mark Blyth and look for a book talk he had with Jacob Soll who's written about the history of the capitalist free market. Rather than being a "New Thing" its actually a very old idea. What Jacob Soll highlights is the disconnect from HISTORICAL CONTEXT. I think this is a major problem these days. We are generally taught so little history that we can't put some of these things into context. Both my parents were school teachers and I have friends who are also school teachers. We were all stunned in the late 90s when (here in Australia) there was a push to get rid of history and replace it with a new "social sciences" curriculum that would teach by doing case studies. When I asked how anyone could teach any sort of lesson with case studies and NO HISRORICAL CONTEXT they all just shrugged at me. That was 20+ years ago and these days the lack of context in so many discussions is bewildering, but there were also warning signs it was coming. There's the famous 2004 documentary "Outfoxed' about Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism where there was a clear warning about misinformation. Go watch Jon Stewart's latest Daily Show on guns. The disconnect from reality is staggering. In this time how do we get people to understand context when context has been killed off?
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  553. Australian here with a simple question: Do any of you Americans realise just how much this garbage affects the rest of the World? FIRST - Lets be clear I am not being Critical of the vast majority of Americans. I went to college in America on a sports scholarship. I love the place, the people and the culture. BUT there's a small minority of American who just can't keep their noses out of everyone else's business and its starting to PlSS US OFF. Go look at what happened with the Steven Donziger case and how an American Corporation dragged the case back into the American Federal Court System. The actual case had NOTHING to do with American law or the American judicial system, but look what they did. Right now here in Australia we have a major scandal involving PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) and how they conspired with their clients to defraud Australia out of BILLIONS of dollars in tax money. In delving into that scandal we also found other nefarious consulting activities involving EY, Deloitte and KPMG with McKinsey hiding in the shadows. THESE ARE ALL AMERICAN COMPANIES and they are interfering with our government as they are doing all over the Western World. If you go and watch John Mearsheimer's lecture at Yale on American Liberal Hegemony he gave at Yale. Its one of 4 he did at Yale 6 years ago and its easy to find here on YT. I think Mearsheimer' a turd of a human being but he's also a very intelligent turd and his assessment of American Liberal ideology and its NEED TO INTERFERE in other countries is 1,000,000% on target. As Mearsheimer puts it, its hardwired into their nature to think they have to fix ANYTHING and EVERYTHING they think or perceive others are doing wrong OR that they know better. The problem is when you combine the American Liberal need to interfere with the American court system they can run to when it falls apart makes it a nightmare for the rest of us to deal with BECAUSE the American courts will protect American Corporate interests no matter what the evidence says. We all learnt that with the Donziger case.
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  558.  @MrLifter20  America didn't sell its soul in the civil rights era it sold its soul after it when Ronald Reagan adopted the "Greed is Good" nonsense of Milton Friedman, renamed it Reaganomics and then slowly gutted America from the inside out. Reagan then Thatcher (with Thatcherism) then others like Australia with what we called "Economic Rationalism" sold our souls to the top 1% and their profits. One of Milton Friedman's contemporaries British economist and another of the Chicago School Ronald Coase tried to get the US government to auction off the air frequencies for TV when it first emerged. It was REJECTED and REJECTED and REJECTED because they all knew it would lead to media monopolies because the people with the most money would be able to out bid and then control the new media of Television. But they gave Coase the Nobel Prize and then the world started auctioning off everything they could. I first heard about this when Mark Blyth (Rhodes Centre Podcast) interviewed Elizabeth Popp Berman about her book "Think like an economist." Its here on YouTube. Interesting when the American Economists went to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet System they convinced the Russians to auction off the state assets. In their ignorance they didn't realise the only people in Russia with any money were the KGB officers and other government rats. That's how the Russian Oligarchs got their hands on some of the worlds richest resources for pennies on the dollar. When you look at the origins of the current conflict it traces back to those auctions and who got control of what. So in a way the entire disaster that is the Russia-Ukraine war can be traced back to Reagan selling America's soul to the "Greed is Good" of Milton Friedman. I just watched an interview with Larry Wilkerson and he hinted at something I have suspected for some time that the reason America blew up the Nord Stream pipeline (and yes it was America) was to help the American companies sell liquified gas to Europe. Ships cannot compete with a pipeline. Another case of "Greed is Good."
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  574.  @richardvinsen2385  Simple answer - scholarship. Its now one of my life goals that if I get lucky (financially speaking) then some other kids will get to have what I got. There's one downside to the scholarship system. When you're in your late teens early 20s you just don't have the life experience to appreciate how FORTUNATE you are. I distinguish the difference between fortunate and lucky as: Anyone can be lucky over anything, but it takes appreciation of that luck to turn it into being fortunate. Like many others I was lucky to get that scholarship but remained lucky because I was too young to appreciate it. These days with an extra 35+ years of life I consider myself fortunate because I can now appreciate it. I did aerospace engineering during Reagans Star Wars era so without that scholarship there was no way for any non-American to get into that course because it was so oversubscribed at that time. It annoyed the crap out of me that I had to take these darned humanities courses because there were people who claimed it would make better people out of us engineers. I was wrong and they were right. These days I am finding those classes to be incredibly useful because that stuff helps. For example - on of and maybe the single biggest issue in the world right now is the energy crisis. Forget everything else, without energy everything collapses. Thanks to having done ECON-101 I can explain what went wrong. The energy crisis was caused 100% by economists who thought they could manage the energy systems of the world the same way they managed other things based on free market ideology. Thanks to having done classes like ECON-101 I can explain why that was never going to work because an energy supply system is fundamentally NOT like a supermarket or the stock market. In a supermarket or the stock market there's choice in abundance. You can choose this milk that milk, this meat that meat, these chips, this chips,...... etc. There's no choice in the electricity supply because there's there's only 1 energy grid your house can connect to. Yanis Varoufakis the famous Greek Economist explained that a while back and it also applies to water and wate water. Could you imagine what the cost would be to build and maintain multiple energy grids and water systems in parallel so people could have choice. So the free market model is impossible to make work with energy and water because it can't give the basic choices needed to make it work. Sorry but the free market economists caused the energy crisis, not the War in Ukraine or anything else. But try being an engineer and explaining that to an economist. You have a better chance of herding cats.
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  589.  @gnubbiersh647  Ok. I think the simplest thing is people have gone too far when they put an illogical ideology before basic reality and are willing to use violence to defend their position. What does a racist do other than put an ideology of my version of homo sapiens is better than your version of homo sapiens and I'll kill you if you disagree. What do Qanon clowns do other than put fantasies ahead of reality. Most don't get violent but Jan 6th proved some do. Over on the Left. What did the Soviet, Chinese and other communists and socialists do other than say we are all equal and if you disagree we'll kill you to prove it. Don't get me wrong I don't find communism capitalism, socialism, religion or distrust in government to be inherently evil, BUT IF you take it too far and lose grip on basic reality and then start getting violent to defend your position that cannot be logically defended then you are (at least) starting to go too far. Where the Left differ is they have more variety of ideologies than the Right. They also tend to be slower to react violently but when they to they wind the dial up to 11 and go straight to rage mode. Like they did in the French and Russian revolutions. Nobody should forget Mao killed millions with his great leap forward. "Who needs farmers they only feed people. We need factory workers they make stuff. Oh - you disagree here let me send you to the re-education camp." Nobody should ever forget the killing fields of Cambodia where a French educated clown decided to take a country backwards a couple of hundred years to an agricultural feudalist state. Pol Pot started by killing every teacher, every lawyer and anyone with an education so that nobody could ask questions like: "Is taking our nation backwards a good thing?" Jesus handed out free health care, fed the poor, gave free education and condemned the greed of the religious leaders of his day. Try asking an gun loving White Christian Nationalist who takes millions of dollars from his followers to explain that.
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  597. ​ @maxpowers123  I'm SORRY I didn't realise we were including IGNORANT M0R0NS today. So let me explain some things. FIRST - I am an aerospace engineer and during my final semester we had a guest lecturer one Friday who worked for NASA and had just completed a study for NASA on the what it would take to terraform Mars. He told us some blunt truths that aren't in the science fiction books. This is one of the basics - How much air would you need for a 1km thick Earth Compatible atmosphere? The surface of Mars is 144,370,000 km² and that means the volume of a 1km thick layer of air has a volume very close to 144,370,000 km³. For a planet its within 1%. A cubic meter of standard Earth air weighs 1.2kg. and there's 1,000,000,000m³ in each 1 km³ In metric tons that 1,200,000 tons of air per km³ and you need 144,370,000 of them. So when you can explain where Elon is going to find 173 TRILLION TONS of air then you might be considered something other than a M0R0N. AND THAT'S BEFORE we work out how to hold that much air to a planet with only 1/9th the mass of Earth. AND THAT'S BEFORE Elon magically explains how they will make any of the basic cycles start working. Like a water cycle, an oxygen cycle, a nitrogen cycle and a carbon dioxide cycle. AND THEN THERE'S that slight problem that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field strong enough to stop the sun stripping away that atmosphere. So you also need to spin up the molten core of the planet. Now if you'd like I can also explain why Jeff Bezos is also full of SHlT for his claims about space industries.
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  610. ​ @davidhutchinson5233  What prove Jesus existed? You would have to be insane NOT to accept he existed. You can debate the narrative and interpretations people use but not the existence. Do you know that several contemporary historians of the time like Josephus said he existed. No historian doubts the writings of Josephus or that he lived in that time period. If you want to criticise the So called Christians and their insanity fine. I AM ON YOUR SIDE. I think its pretty obvious I have NO TIME for them or their stupidity. But to argue if Jesus existed or not is just as ridiculous and is like trying to argue if the Earth is flat or round. And just in case you didn't know the reference that Josephus makes about Jesus is actually regarding one of his brothers and it highlights just how bad the narratives have been and for how long they have been in place. One of the more ridiculous parts of Catholic Dogma was that Mary is the eternal virgin. That's NOT in the Bible at all. Many critics of Christian practices point out what happened in Nazareth on one occasion. The locals and these were people who knew Jesus and his family got incensed when he tried to teach them. Its in Matthew 13:54-57. That actually point out that he's JUST the carpenters son, who's mother is Mary and that his 4 brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas and his sisters are right there. AND WE KNOW THESE ARE NOT his disciples because there's a passage where his bothers go and tell him to be with his disciples. So that whole Catholic narrative of the eternal virgin is bunk. Historically speaking Josephus agrees with the Bible, but disagrees with Christian tradition. Then there's things like Christmas and Easter which also aren't in the Bible. They're just traditions taken from other cultures. More than a few academics have written on the subject that Christianity didn't defeat paganism but subjugated it by adopting many of its practices and most of that was done by the Catholic Church way back in Roman times at its foundation. This is actually a common across all the religions. Most religious people have never taken time to read and think. Instead they sit and listen and blindly accept.
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  622. I'm Australian and we've had our share of the illegal immigration issue. For us its a little different to America and a bit more like Europe in that they arrive by boat and its the boat thing that causes so many of these tragedies. FIRST OFF let me say I have no issue with anyone wanting a better life for themselves or their family. We should commend and praise any parent who wants a better life for their children. HOWEVER - I find it egregious that when tragedies like what happened off Greece this last week that people blame the easiest which in this case is the Greek navy. The Greek navy didn't overload that boat and it takes no great understanding of boats that if you overload a boat that badly then its almost guaranteed to sink. The SHORT ANSWER is we found that smuggling people into Australia is incredibly profitable and unlike drugs the punishments aren't really punishments. At $10k per person, a 100+ people on an old boat is a lot of money. At several 1000 people a week its an industry. The LONGER ANSWER is we've had similar tragedies off the coast of Australia with many people drowning. We finally started asking asking hard questions like: WHY are they always in decrepit old boats that can barely float? The Indonesian fisherman simply sold their oldest boats to the smugglers so they could BUY NEW BOATS and you don't waste a good boat on a 1-way trip. You can't blame a poor fisherman who'd like a new boat being paid enough money to get that new boat. The smuggling involved so much money that it simply allowed a generation of Indonesian fishermen to get brand new boats. Most of the time the fishermen also took extra money to crew the boats to Australia. Getting locked up became another bonus on top of that. Under Australian Law all prisoners get a daily allowance. Its not much money but to an Indonesian fisherman its more money than they make fishing. Our own laws made it even more profitable. On top of that we found many people who had settled in Australia sending millions of dollars out of the country to either pay off their debts or fund more people smuggling. Instead of these people looking after themselves and their own families they were sending money to the smugglers. Then there was the huge cost in BOTH money and time in our courts to handle it all. Most of that was paid for by the Australian taxpayer, which is why we ran out of patience. Then finally there's the even uglier side of people smuggling where people are basically sold into slavery AND we did have some of that in Australia. In the end we found that the biggest problem is the money and the only way to deal with the criminal syndicates was to cut off their money supply. That took some of the harshest laws on the planet which had us labelled in some very ugly ways. These days we have some of the most liberal minded Europeans who labelled us in very ugly terms coming to Australia to ask how we did it. Its not the people who come that we see as a problem its the criminal syndicates who make it happen. They are ruthless people with no respect for human life or dignity.
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  628. ​ @cobra8888  EXACTLY and its ingrained into America society to such an extent that its become normalised. Look at how the GOP treat the Democrats. When we do "it" its fine. When you do "it" you are an enemy of humanity and we must destroy you. Here's an example from history. Bill Clinton got caught getting blown by Monica Lewinski. It was uncovered by SPECIAL COUNSEL Ken Star who went OUTSIDE his original scope which was to investigate the Clinton's Whitewater real estate deal. The IMPEACHED CLINTON for lying about getting blown and find him GUILTY. Meanwhile at the same time House Speaker (technically the 3rd most powerful politician on the planet) Newt Gingrich gets caught accepting $5 Million from Rupert Murdoch while having an affair with one of his staff and that doesn't even get investigated and even to this day he flips it all off as nothing. On the flip side of that: Here's an interesting fact about Jack Smith the guy trying to get Trump into court over the documents. From for the 4+ years BEFORE being assigned as Special Counsel to investigate Trump's documents case he worked for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the Hague prosecuting War Crimes from the Kosovo War. Now the Kosovo Specialist Chambers are NOT specifically part of the International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) but Jack Smith operated as a Chief Prosecutor in a court prosecuting people from another country. The insanity of that is that All American Service personnel are protected from being similarly prosecuted by international courts (like the ICC) when President George W. Bush signed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, (informally referred to as The Hague Invasion Act) in 2002.
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  632. Australian Aerospace engineer here - I did my degree in American and have classmates at NASA. I truly feel for what you guys are facing. Here's something you and NASA can fight back with. I did my degree in the late 80s and when the Challenger accident happened. In the aftermath there were many people who called for NASA to be chopped up and sold off. In response the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) commissioned a report into the value of NASA. I forget who did that but it might have been Deloitte. Eventually the AIAA notified everyone with a summary. In those days the AIAA published a monthly magazine called "Aerospace America." In one of those right inside the front cover on page 1 was a letter to members from the President announcing this study. It was took difficult to analyse all of NASA so they just looked at the Apollo Program because it has finished and they could check money spent and assess it against money earned from technology spinoffs. The basic summary was the Apollo Program was FINANCIALLY the greatest investment in human history having returned in tax (yes tax) over $9 for every $1 spent. By tax they meant the taxes paid on profits earned by companies and income tax paid by employees of those companies that were using Apollo derived technologies. By that stage 100s of American companies and 1000s of American people were producing goods and services based on Apollo derived technology. You see in making it to the moon many new materials and manufacturing technologies were developed. By the late 80s things like digital computers, aluminum alloys, plastics (including Teflon) and a pile of manufacturing technologies and techniques had not only filtered out into American industry but was giving many American companies technological advantages over the rest of the world. Remember by the late 80s companies like Microsoft were emerging and a lot of the computer tech had history in the Apollo Program. Basically Apollo wasn't just a few small steps by 12 guys across the Moon. It was bunch of giant leaps forward in technologies many of which are still earning the American people lots of money. its a story few people know about. I hope you guys can find that report. I'd suggest asking the AIAA to look at issues they might still have of Aerospace America from 1986 & 87. best of luck.
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  654. I think your numbers are WRONG, a bit like most of Jordan Petersons numbers. You're being too kind, I think its more like 1% style and 99% LOOK at ME. On the 99% of Scientists thing. If you take 1,000,000 (million) scientists and/or engineers (and there's a lot more than 1M on the planet) then 1% is 10,000 Scientists and engineers who don't believe in climate change. So its every easy to make a claim like: "I went to a conference where there were 1,000 Scientists and engineers and they all agreed there was no Climate Crisis." and you would be telling the truth. I am an aerospace engineer and this is why people like Jordan Peterson will NOT debate actual scientists and especially not engineers. For those unaware engineering is the profession of APPLIED MATHEMATICS. The rest of science comes up with the math and we APPLY it to real world situations. Its also why Economists hate us lie we are the spawn of Satan. Whatever models Economists have they are decades behind where engineering is. This is also where an engineer can flatten some of Jordan Petersons claims. At Oxford or Cambridge a few years back he claimed we should be listening to people like Bjorn Lomborg who was on a UN Committee that included Nobel Prize Economists. FIRST the Nobel in Economics is fake its not a real Nobel at all. It was instigated by the Swedish Central Bank and was never sanctioned by the Nobel family (see Wikipedia). SECOND William Nordhaus who won the FAKE Nobel for economics for his modelling of climate change economics has been slammed and ridiculed by BOTH the Left and Right. Evn the CATO institute has claimed he's a moron. Sorry to ramble on but Peterson, who I genuinely believe WAS ONCE a good university professor, has now lost his mind on this stuff.
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  667. AUSTRALIAN HERE with an outside perspective. That's a very interesting thought and considering how Western politics in general works totally plausible. Below this line is a copy of a comment I made on this and its sort of a warning to the Democrats NOT to get carried away with this news. _____________________________________________________________ YOU have only won a MINOR BATTLE. There's still a War to Win. I suggest you all go and review Sun Tzu's the Art of War RIGHT NOW. FIRST - The Dems now have to get back all of the Joe Forever Crowd and just as the Bernie Bros and others were kicked in the guts and hated it so will the Joe Forever crowd hate this. SO STOP GLOATING SECOND - Harris is NOT a good pick for President. She might have been a good pick for VP but you are all forgetting just how badly she campaigns. Remember that she could NOT even win her home state of California. HOWEVER if she were to stay on as Gavin Newsom's or J. B. Pritzker's VP them it would be a very smart move on her part and an almost guaranteed win. Yes - I know there's the issue of both here and Newsom being from California but that can be dealt with. She might not be a great campaigner but she'd tear JD Vance apart and that would be worth seeing. *THIRD - * The Next POTUS whoever they are has a couple of insanely hard tasks to deal with. 1) An out of control SCOTUS. This doesn't just affect America its affects anyone who has to do business with America because as Chevron showed American companies will drag their foreign issues back into US Courts where there's almost zero chance of justice. 2) An out of control Israel. This isn't just a disaster its a disaster encased in a catastrophe swamped by a tsunami. Everything that Western Democracies fought the Second World War and then the Cold War over - Freedom, Democracy, Equality of Opportunity and Basic Human Rights has been trampled over. 3) Wealth inequality. Bernie Sanders had the Congressional Budget Office update an earlier report on Family Wealth to now include the years 1989 to 2019. Its easy to find on the CBO website and you can download the data for all the graphs. There ahs been little reporting on this report but it is damning and shows that for the past 30+ years the Top 10% of the American population who did things like the GFC has done insanely well, while the Middle Class has had to fight for what they can get as the Bottom 50% have been trampled into the pavement. This is why Trump was able to tap into anger and despair and win in 2016. 4) Climate Change. A month before he won office in 1992 George HW Bush said at a campaign rally that "Global Warming was the challenge of our generation." That notion was hijacked by his chief of staff John H. Sununu (father of Chris), Nobel Prize Winner William Nordhaus and the oil lobby. After those 4 things there are other things. Sorry but Kamala isn't up to the task, but MAYBE if she stays on as the next VP she can do some great work because I think she probably understands these tasks and how hard they are.
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  678.  @tommyrotton9468  1 THING Trump DID DO that was good for everyone: He did NOT start a New War, even though it is fair to criticise that he also did NOT END either the Afghanistan or Iraq Wars. ANOTHER THING Trump did was shake up the dependence of western nations on international supply chains and get the trade agreements rewritten. Although smashing things was neither helpful or productive. ANOTHER THING Trump did that was good for EVERY Western Democracy was remind the entrenched political establishments that they can be thrown out on their asses when they just stop caring. 1 THING Joe Boden has NOT DONE that is BAD for everyone across the developed world is END the influence of billionaires and billionaire funded think tanks in American politics and with it world politics. ANOTHER THING Joe Boden has NOT DONE is reign in the idiotic clowns ON BOTH SIDES of American politics. He's President of America NOT and that means acting for the American people NOT just the DNC. He should have dragged Sinema and Manchin into the oval office turned off the cameras and microphones and smacked both of them with a Louisville slugger. After that he should have dragged Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shoeless and told them to do their damn job or get TF out. ANOTHER THING Joe Boden has NOT DONE is end the insider trading of politicians and their families. This totally stinks. They do stuff that would put any of the rest of us in jail. Like most of the world America need leadership not geriatric clowns and NEITHER Trump or Biden are the solution. IS 3 EACH FOR BOTH OF THEM ENOUGH FOR YOUR IGNORANT BRAIN?????? Take your garbage attitude and M0R0NIC ignorance, go back to school and THIS TIME, LISTEN TO THE TEACHERS!
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  685. There's a tragedy in this discussion and that's DESPITE Tim Pool being a walking talking turd of a human being he's also right in some ways. He's basically quoting form the standard playbooks for TV Advertising. Emma as usual is so right about how much of a disaster Tim Poole is, but as she sometimes does she lets her "men bad" and "patriarchy evil" feminism get in the road of her brain. Why do advertisers pay huge money to models who smile nice, look good and have (to quote Tim) large breasts? Why do the political advertisers and strategists use emotionally charged attack advertisements? BECAUSE IT WORKS and YES that's a cold narcissistic view of the mob psychology of the general population but don't forget that 50% of the human race has an IQ of 100 or less and they don't care about nuance or substance. They want nice concise simple answers so they can go and enjoy their time doing other stuff. This is where Lefties go wrong all the time. They think that the entire population will just sit quietly and listen to them and feel wonderful about it. There's a really great scene in the film Gladiator where Senator Gaius (Derek Jacobi) describes how Rome works. Just search YouTube with "Gladiator senator Gracchus" and he explains to the indignation of another senator that the new emperor isn't dumb at all because the new emperor knows how Rome actually works. Go watch what he says and then compare it to Trump and how people like Tim Pool speak. They know their audience and they now how to get that audience pumped up for more because they know the difference between the Roman Senate and sand of the Colosseum.
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  691. The worst part of the whole IDW was that a few of them actually are fairly intellectual, but then lost their minds over things instead of staying objective an rational. Sam Harris is a perfect example. He pushed the whole "be rational" and pushed the term "moral ambiguity" as in "there is no moral ambiguity" over what Hamas did on 7/10. BUT THEN he suddenly dropped the whole rational discussion when it came to Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza. Yeah being rational and clarifying ambiguity was fine until he had to face the reality if his own people and "the morals of genocide." Brett Weinstein along with his brother Eric was also once (past tense) a respectable intellectual but then lost his mind during COVID and his brain hasn't stop failing since. Jordan Peterson was once (past tense) a respectable college professor. I watched a couple of his class lectures a few years ago and he was an excellent teacher who engaged well with his students. BUT since his drug issue his brain has done nothing but malfunction. Ben Shaprio did Law at Harvard. You can't get into Harvard Law let alone finish without a decent brain, but he's also a narcissistic maggot. Douglas Murray is the British version of Ben Shapiro except he uses the the Eaton/Oxford upper class snot nosed "I'm superior" British thing instead of Shapiro's Harvard arrogance. There's a few others who are also fairly (or once were) smart people and there there's the clown brigade who think they are smart. Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin are both as dumb as a box of rocks EXCEPT they (and others like them) know they know what engages with their audience. HOWEVER the worst of them all will always be Bari Weiss. She was the one who wrote about and labelled them the IDW. She's since been found out as a liar and fraud who make stuff up, but like Rogan and Rubin she knows what engages with her audience.
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  707. Australian here and I went to college in America. Your not quite right. What they voted for was CHANGE just like they did in 2016. What they have done is REJECT the Status Quo politics of the Democrats and that's NOT an American thing either. This is happening across the developed world. People are tired of the Liberal Elites and their Status Quo politics where they get what they want and the rest of us get left out. There's a Congressional Budget Office report on Family Wealth that Bernie Sanders commissioned. It shows that form 1989 to 2019 the Bottom 50% of America went NOWHERE while the Top 10% GAINED close to $60 Trillion in wealth. Here's the most basic data. Bottom 50% in 1989 were worth $1.4 Trillion and in 2019 they were worth $2.3 Trillion a gain of $0.9 Trillion Top 10% in 1989 were worth $24.3 Trillion and in 2019 they were worth $82.4 Trillion a gain of $58.1 Trillion So the Top 105 with 1/5th as many people gained over 60x what the Bottom 50% gained over those 30 years. Per person those Top 10% gained over 300x as much wealth per person in the Bottom 50% Just go and google "congressional budget office family wealth" Its the report NO Democrat or Republican wants any American to see because it lays bare just how bad BOTH have been in managing America's economy. So when Hilary said "more of the same" she asked to get rejected and she was. And when Kamala said "I'd do nothing different" she asked to be rejected and she was. Trump tapped into the "we want change" undercurrent that's been building in America for decades. AND YES we have the same issue here in Australia AND BOTH SIDES of politics here refuse to acknowledge it.
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  708. Australian with an outside view: In 2020 74,223,975 people voted for Trump and in 2024 73,407,934 voted for Trump ALMOST 1 million FEWER In 2020 81,283,501 people voted for Biden and in 2024 69,076,028 voted for Harris OVER 12 million FEWER. This is the opposite to what's been happening in American elections over the last few cycles. 2000 105,421,423 2004 122,295,345 2008 131,313,820 2012 129,085,410 2016 136,669,276 2020 158,429,631 2024 142,380,403 Except for 2012 when there was a slight decrease American elections have been getting larger and larger turnouts which should NOT be surprising because America's population has been steadily growing from the 282 million in 2000 to the current 335 million. The TRUE RESULT of this election is that almost 16 million Americans saying "we don't care anymore" which is part of the general feeling across the entire developed world that NOTHING CHANGES no matter who we vote for. Go and look up a 2022 Congressional Budget Office on Family Wealth. I have checked the Australian data and British Economist Gary Stevenson describes how Britain is eerily similar. The very first graph shows how the Bottom 50% of the developed world have gone NOWHERE for around 40 years. Other Data like Branko Milanović's famous elephant graph show how wage stagnation for the bulk of the developed world has caused this. There's just no way for most of the developed world to change their lives for the better. This is what Milton Freidman and the Chicago School Economists gave the world via Reaganomics, Thatcherism, Australia's Economic Rationalism and what we now generally call Neoliberal Economics. CENTRAL to Milton Friedman's ideology was that governments are good for nothing and expressed eloquently by Ronald Reagan's famous "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." So Governments around the World started to privatise, de-regulate and hand control of their central banks to the ECONOMISTS. These days most policies are written by Think Tanks and managed by consultants most of whom are ECONOMISTS or MBAs with economic training or Lawyers with economic training. In the PBS Documentary "The Untouchables" about the 2008 GFC (which can be seen here on YT) Former United States Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer (around 50 minutes in) describes how ECONOMIC EFFECTS are a consideration in criminal cases. That's why none of the executives were ever charged. SO THIS BEGS THE QUESTION: Why vote at all, when the government can't get anything done because ECONOMISTS have re-wired how government works and no matter what "We the people vote for" nothing changes? FYI - We have our next Australian Federal Election next year and I fear that the same clown brained campaign strategists who helped fabricate this disaster in America will be here doing the same thing.
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  749. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS GRADUATE HERE which is the same college Andreessen did his degree at. I graduated in aerospace engineering the year before (88) that Andreessen started there (89). What he is NOT explaining well is HOW LUCKY he was to be there at that time. When I was there the PC desk top industry was just getting started and those companies were dumping truck loads of stuff on us. My department one day got a couple of dozen AT&T desktops with UNIX operating systems. We had 2 rooms full of Apple McIntosh's with this thing call a GUI (graphic user interface) and a mouse. We did all our term papers on them. The really cool kids doing PhDs got a CRAY-2 Supercomputer to dop aerodynamic simulations on. Then they got a CRAY-XMP64 to do even bigger more complex simulations on. Then CRAY moved to Champaign because the US Government set up the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). On top of all that there was one of the Worlds first wide area network & data base systems called Plato. It was a precursor to what you all call the Internet. Its was ghastly and horrible to use in my time. By Andreessen's time it was obvious that for wide area networks to become viable they had to become user friendly. There were several teams working on that and through GOOD LUCK Andreessen and the team he was on developed Mosaic the precursor to NetScape. You can read about this on his Wikipedia page. HERE'S THE POINT Like all the tech bro-billionaires we know about these days Andreessen is JUST LUCKY. He was in the right place at the right time and got the right breaks and his product prevailed in a competitive marketplace. Suckerberg is the same he wasn't the only person developing social media. Musk and Thiel are the same they weren't the only people working on secure internet transactions. ALL OF THEM got lucky breaks that enabled their pet project to thrive and these days NONE OF THEM respect any of the work others did that made their work possible in the first place. That's what I hate about them. They just have no respect for the rest of the STEM professions or the people who work in them.
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  752. I half agree, because I don't see the problem are people of immense wealth ITS HOW THEY GOT THAT WEALTH and then how they hang onto it. When you look at Theil, Yarvin Andreessen, Musk, Altman they are mostly people who got lucky with timing and have no grasp that they were just lucky. Sorry if this is a longer explanation but I have an example. I actually went to U. of Illinois where Andreessen went and finished my degree in aerospace just before he went there. So I know what the state of the computer systems were when he got there. The amount of money being pumped into that place on computing by the US government via agencies like DARPA was staggering. Tons of money went into the supercomputing centre. We also had one of the main cores of a system called Plato which was was (in a way) a forerunner of the internet. It was horrible use with everything in text. YES text, with NO pictures, NO videos, just straight ASCII text. To say it sucked does not do justice to how bad it was to use. In that space lots of people were working on ways to make systems like Plato useable by non-engineers. Andreessen and a guy named Eric Bina came up with a program called Mosaic. Basically they made Plato as easy to use as an Apple McIntosh. Their company became Netscape which they sold for a ton of money (see Wikipedia). And there's the problem Andreessen was just lucky to be at the right university at the right time with HEAPS of GOVERNMENT FUNDING. If Andreessen had been one of the elite programmers he would have been working on the Cray Supercomputers not Plato. So he wasn't an elite programmer but got insanely lucky. And that's my bit with these people. Most of them are just lucky and instead of helping other people get lucky they are instead trying to crush other innovations or absorb them into their mega-corps.
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  755. AUSTRALIAN HERE with an outside perspective. YOU have only won a MINOR BATTLE. There's still a War to Win. I suggest you all go and review Sun Tzu's the Art of War RIGHT NOW. FIRST - The Dems now have to get back all of the Joe Forever Crowd and just as the Bernie Bros and others were kicked in the guts and hated it so will the Joe Forever crowd hate this. SO STOP GLOATING SECOND - Harris is NOT a good pick for President. She might have been a good pick for VP but you are all forgetting just how badly she campaigns. Remember that she could NOT even win her home state of California. HOWEVER if she were to stay on as Gavin Newsom's or J. B. Pritzker's VP them it would be a very smart move on her part and an almost guaranteed win. Yes - I know there's the issue of both here and Newsom being from California but that can be dealt with. She might not be a great campaigner but she'd tear JD Vance apart and that would be worth seeing. *THIRD - * The Next POTUS whoever they are has a couple of insanely hard tasks to deal with. 1) An out of control SCOTUS. This doesn't just affect America its affects anyone who has to do business with America because as Chevron showed American companies will drag their foreign issues back into US Courts where there's almost zero chance of justice. 2) An out of control Israel. This isn't just a disaster its a disaster encased in a catastrophe swamped by a tsunami. Everything that Western Democracies fought the Second World War and then the Cold War over - Freedom, Democracy, Equality of Opportunity and Basic Human Rights has been trampled over. 3) Wealth inequality. Bernie Sanders had the Congressional Budget Office update an earlier report on Family Wealth to now include the years 1989 to 2019. Its easy to find on the CBO website and you can download the data for all the graphs. There ahs been little reporting on this report but it is damning and shows that for the past 30+ years the Top 10% of the American population who did things like the GFC has done insanely well, while the Middle Class has had to fight for what they can get as the Bottom 50% have been trampled into the pavement. This is why Trump was able to tap into anger and despair and win in 2016. 4) Climate Change. A month before he won office in 1992 George HW Bush said at a campaign rally that "Global Warming was the challenge of our generation." That notion was hijacked by his chief of staff John H. Sununu (father of Chris), Nobel Prize Winner William Nordhaus and the oil lobby. After those 4 things there are other things. Sorry but Kamala isn't up to the task, but MAYBE if she stays on as the next VP she can do some great work because I think she probably understands these tasks and how hard they are.
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