domain:streamable.com
2rafa
11m ago
TIRM
23m ago
I think a modern draft would be a disaster. The draft was bad in the 60s and 70s. It would be horrible today. The backlash and mass noncompliance would disgrace our nation.
Too bad we collectively expended all unpopular draft resources on fighting North Vietnam. To this day there's none left over for anything important.
LateMechanic
53m ago
This is rather MMTers poking some fun at other supposed macro experts who don't actually have a correct clear grasp on how money or government funding works. He kept tripping over his words because his intuition was leading him astray, so "government prints money and then lends it" kept coming out. The correct, clear, simple answer is that government prints money in the form of bonds every day, and swaps them with central bank reserves where appropriate (like swapping between $100 bills, $1 bills, and quarters where appropriate, perhaps when trying to ride the bus or go to the arcade). The only clash is that people have pre-existing non-sensical stricter definitions of the word "money", so MMT generally prefers to sidestep a language intuition issue and just refer more broadly to what matters, financial assets.
It's already been nearly a decade since mainstream economists stopped trying to say MMT is wrong, and switched to "we knew that already", so I guarantee you MMTers aren't saying something as obviously wrong as "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation". And it's MMT who has pushed better & better verbal explanations to laypeople of all those interlocking balance sheets in IGI's linked NYFed diagram.
cjet79
55m ago
The lady in that video got on my nerve. She managed to compress so many bad economic ideas and implications into such a short few sentences.
I also had to double check the date on that video. Is someone seriously asking after the last few years why we don't just print more money? Have they been to a restaurant or bought anything recently? We did the experiment during covid of just 'printing more money' and then we had record setting inflation.
There is also the rather basic idea that if you expect to be paid back in X currency in the future then you have a vested interest in that currency maintaining its value. Its a way of signalling commitment to the future value of the currency. Its like a CEO offering to only be paid in stock options that don't vest for a few years. It would signal they are confident in the future success of the company.
TIRM
56m ago
Law enforcement and general government: 5%
Somewhat cynically: actual fucking governance: 5%
cjet79
1hr ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
I'm gonna stick by my statement. I don't think the example you give really contradicts it. The actual world we live in has a mix of both systems where the American government gets to flip a coin "heads I win, tails you lose". They regulate the industries, and allow those industries to be sued by individuals. From what I understand this is actually a little strange by international standards. Russia (for traffic stuff) goes more down the route of sue anyone but very loose regulations. And most of Europe goes down the route of strict regulations, but you can't sue (for a bunch of business regulations).
In general, I think in cases of death or serious bodily injury it makes sense to have a court involved. In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved. I'm not suggesting entirely doing away with courts. But courts are a terrible place for solving economic distribution questions. They are simply far too expensive (judges and lawyers are generally smart and capable people).
But people can already sue for bodily injury or death, so when I say an expansion of what you can sue for is laundering costs, I mean that generally any new thing that you can sue for. (and there are some old things you can sue for that I also think are bullshit, but I specifically listed those things.)
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
Tried it briefly. It's promising but I'd wait for the final release.
Pigeon
coo coo
2hr ago
I admit to having never played Atelier Totori and have only played about 10 minutes of Atelier Sophie, but I'd be very surprised if any Atelier game had "high impact sexual violence"...
EvanTh
2hr ago
No, they don't know it. I volunteer with the VITA program doing tax prep for low-income people, and most of my clients don't appreciate that the government is taking money from their paychecks to pay tax. I explain it to them every year, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't stick.
I'm pretty sure half my clients don't even read their W-2's or other tax forms, except to go "this's a tax form from my employer / bank / charity / etc; guess I'll bring it when I go do taxes."
EvanTh
2hr ago
The IRS does publish just that, with two pie charts and text, at the end of the Form 1040 instructions!
- Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement: 29%
- National defense, veterans, and foreign affairs: 15%
- Social programs: 33%
- Physical, human, and community development: 13%
- Net interest on the debt: 5%
- Law enforcement and general government: 5%
In fiscal year 2022... federal income was $4.897 trillion and outlays were $6.273 trillion, leaving a deficit of $1.376 trillion.
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, hardly anyone reads it.
gattsuru
2hr ago
Yeah. I think the more recent immigration bills also had to deal with the aftermath of the Gang of Eight attempt in 2013, which even contemporaneously was seen as Rubio getting punked by some embarrassingly useless compromises-in-name-only
freemcflurry
2hr ago
Evidence is a fuzzy thing. Toyota got mugged for millions because some old people stepped on the wrong peddle. Juries love people with dead relatives and they hate big corporations.
You, uh, missed a spot. Or, for one without a header, whether one can stop to piss in Albany without risking a felony. And it's not like these things are the only examples -- if I hadn't hit trans stuff separately, I'd be pointing out the entire circuit where the ADA now covers gender identity disorders, despite the explicit text of the ADA excluding that by name!
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
By which you mean they issued a NPR, and then changed basically zip in response to significant public comment.
Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related.
The statute, for whatever it matters, does not cover all pregnancy-related matters: it covers "pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions." It's... actually not that hard to notice the difference between a medical procedure and a medical condition.
Maybe that difference shouldn’t on net matter, or the doctrine of constitutional avoidance should rule. There's perfectly good fairness or policy reasons that it should, and perhaps in a world where the text was about pregnancy-related anythings and conservatives had eaten the administrative agencies, I'd be making arguments that they're betrayed trust in an important compromise.
And yet we're here.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation... I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions.
Yet rather than the answer to "It's no big deal" being "fine, then let me win" instead, we find that everyone insists it is both necessary and obvious, no matter how much they have to play with statute's language to get the job done.
Indeed, even were there some central case that were vital or some symbolic victory that should be a big deal to the progressive movement and a trivial one to conservatives, the religious freedom concerns that the EEOC itself claims never happen still can't get a "fine, then let me win". While "The Commission also received tens of thousands of comments asserting that giving certain accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, such as providing leave for abortion, infertility treatments, or contraception, would infringe upon the employer's religious freedom", the final rule gloss over any serious management or standard of those concerns, leaving such questions open to "defenses using a case-by-case analysis" and motioning to a statutory defense that only protects religious organization's ability to hire people of that religion.
((Spoiler: there's few cases only because everyone paying attention knows defending against a suit is high-risk and staggeringly expensive, and there's absolutely no guarantee that the vague religious freedom exceptions might apply until very late in appeals, so the EEOC can get 99.9% of the impact just by noisily threatening enforcement and then shrugging that their political opponents leave the entire topic like a landmine.))
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point.
Not only could I, eighteen thousand people did, as Halbrook points out in his link, but you're right to say that, too, is besides the point. The ATF and APA do not care about the little people. But it does make this rhetorical question more than a little obnoxious.
But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language.
But Congress did not write a law saying that you can not sell firearms as a hobbyist; it wrote that you needed an FFL to sell firearms to "predominantly earn a profit", and the ATF decided that included firearms sales that included a profit at all, or even if they didn't have a profit but might be motivated by the money. Congress has not even modified the statutory requirements for provisioning an FFL in decades! And I'll point again to the ATF happily ignoring the strict text of the statute whenever it decides that it knows best.
When you write that the government really doesn't like them, that's true in the sense that 'the government' means progressives, operating under a presumption that compromise means progressive interests get a large portion of what they demand, and conservative interests get fucked, and not in the fun way.
The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped.
I can separately argue that the law was badly intended, but I don't think there's anything insightful to point out that people want to ban guns entirely and make being an FFL as difficult as possible and impossible for many. Yes, duh, I predicted that literally before Biden was sworn in as President, I can't pretend to be surprised today. Props to you for at least admitting that the whole point is make onerous rules that drive hobbyists and part-timers from the field, but it isn't exactly some deep cover.
No, the problem as I'm trying to highlight is that there is a group of people who claimed at length that this was -- as held in the name -- a Bipartisan compromise that would include both further restrictions and clarifications protecting gunnies, and this didn't happen at all. The statute still explicitly recognizes private sales, but the ATF doesn't actually recognize any way to clearly comply with it in this rule-making.
In many ways, they would have been better served by flipping anyone who offered claimed concessions the bird. It matters, that for many, that is increasingly clear.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue.
It... actually was a pretty big controversy back in the 2008-2012 timeframe, as activists had begun disrupting church services, while both feds and state officials left the matter to civil litigation. The ADF actually brought suit with some limited success in that case, though both the org and the individuals were basically judgement proof.
At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring.
At the same 2008-2012 timeframe, the DoJ was highlighting increased use from the pre-Obama framework where it was largely perceived as targeting bad actors on the scale of arson or bombings. If you want to rest your argument on the masterful control of the DoJ Trump demonstrated, I hope you have fun, but I'm gonna have a hard time taking it seriously.
But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline.
The information that we can't see or find or read, even presuming it actually exists, does not actually do a good job of protecting trust, especially given the extent this glosses over a wide variety of other stuff in the reporting (Nota spraypainting an employee's face and threw a rock at them, and also spray-painted a police car). The lack of SWAT, I am sure, has a similarly plausible and similarly unprovable charitable explanation.
Indeed, yes, the guy who didn't destroy property or spraypaint anyone in the face could have gotten a plea bargain. Of course, Houck was found not-guilty, while Nota was caught spraypaint-handed. Interestingly, we do happen to have another example I linked where the people were actually guilty of a FACE Act violation against abortion clinics, and one of the protestors plead guilty, turned government witness, and got 10 months in prison for her plea deal.
Yes, I'm sure there's some post-hoc way that This One Is Different. There might even be ways to argue it that doesn't look hilariously biased (Davis conspired to block a hallway! something something sentencing guidelines! two counts, because Nota didn't do two illegal things at once!), though I'm not optimistic. But the readiness that people defending these disparities can discover that it is impossible to evaluate the merits or compare in any statistically meaningful way are starting to echo.
Skibboleth
3hr ago
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
Not only is the idea of students leaving for lunch unheard of, but using devices was strictly limited until I got to high school. It was a revelation actually being able to use my iPod at lunchtime when I entered high school. Maybe it's different now.
And once you were old enough to drive, you could technically schedule your classes with free periods at least in my area and leave during those, although it's strongly discouraged to leave gaps in the schedule. In my senior year of high school I had a free period in the morning and got to sleep in part of the week, which was heaven for a night owl like me.
Public schools are incredibly liability-averse and letting kids loose just isn't in their vocabulary. The US values freedom, but is terrified about children's safety to the point of neurosis. To some extent this reflects the safety profile of the US being different than Europe, to some extent it reflects the lower density and car-dependence of the US, to some extent it reflects our tortious legal system, but to a great extent I think it just reflects the neurotic substrate within American society.
How do they even stop you or know what you're doing?
Once the school day starts, almost no one is allowed in or out except in specific circumstances and those who are allowed have to be screened. In that way, schools are kind of run like airports.
Why do they care where you eat lunch?
They care because between the hours of 7am and 3pm, they're responsible for your welfare and if they let you leave and something happens to you, there might be civil or criminal liability. Parents would also be pissed, because the primary function of public schooling isn't education but daycare.
There's also the fact that if they let you out they'd also have to let you back in, and that opens a whole can of worms about random people strolling into the school or setting up a huge infrastructure to screen students returning from lunch.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3hr ago
That wouldn’t even be a correct interpretation of MMT
Having a correct interpretation of MMT does not in my experience seem to be a necessary precondition of being an MMTer.
pigeonburger
3hr ago
We always had computers as far back as my very first memories. We had a NES in the very early 90s. Then I was mostly a PC gamer, until my brother got a Dreamcast. Finally I got me a Gamecube as a late teen. After that I was an adult so it doesn't really count.
But I've played emulators when that became possible, played console games at friends places, etc...
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3hr ago
I didn't have any consoles growing up, my parents were very against them. I only had old PC games. My first console (eventually) was a PS2 my sophomore year of college.
sliders1234
3hr ago
Ok fair enough. Average human low liability but big corporate gets $30 million a life.
Though I guess solutions can be found when it’s necessary.
IGI-111
3hr ago
I guess I just meant cheaper than a century ago, but I hadn't heard about the US reserves finally being fully sold this year. I guess I should come to the Motte more often for more helium trading news.
But yeah probably no zeppelins anytime soon. Winged aircraft wins again.
sliders1234
3hr ago
That wouldn’t even be a correct interpretation of MMT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory
I think some butchered downstream version got all deficits are fake thing perhaps from the 2010’s where inflation was low so plausibly in their theory it was fake when inflation was below 2% and we had excess unemployment.
Hyperion
3hr ago
Your dates don't really line up though. Withholding isn't until 1943. You see higher income taxes earlier, after Roosevelt becomes president. You then see an even steeper rise in taxes in general as the USA becomes more and more involved in the war. Finally in 1943 you see withholding implemented, but this is after a decade of higher and higher taxes spurred on by the depression and war. After WW2 you see lower, but still high income taxes and finally income taxes come down after the neo-liberal revolution in the 80s. Withholding doesn't seem important in this picture.
drmanhattan16
4hr ago
The appropriate analogy would be "don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be", not "don't tell people their evaluation of your sex doesn't match what you say it is".
MMT covers a wide range of actual policy positions, some reasonable and some not. But in general it’s a retarded third world conspiracy that leads to stuff like Turkish and Argentine hyperinflation directed by idiotic leaders who reject any link between inflation and borrowing, not merely in theory but in practice. The unique situation the US and to a lesser extent other Anglo countries are in with regards to the effect of public borrowing on inflation is unique, and doesn’t prove MMT in any genuine way.
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