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Author Topic: What will divide us next?  (Read 13607 times)

SHARK

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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #105 on: November 04, 2021, 01:00:02 PM »
Ummm...but Virginia just voted in a BLACK AMERICAN WOMAN as Lieutenant Governor of the state of Virginia. She is also a veteran of the US Marine Corps, and regularly takes photos carrying an AR-15 "Assault Rifle." I understand she's very Conservative, very pro-gun, and very much against the cock-sucking SJW's.

She's originally from Jamaica so she understands and loves what makes America so special and unique.

Greetings!

Hah! She's from Jamaica? SWEET! That's awesome! She sounds outstanding, in every way. Oh, I also heard that the racist, evil white people of Virginia *also* elected a Latina woman as the States Attorney General. Yeah, that's the chief Law Enforcement Authority.

A Black Jamaican woman as Lieutenant Governor, and a Latina woman as State Attorney General. What kind of racism is that? *Laughing*

Good! More and more Americans are waking up to how pathetic and insane the fucking Liberal Democrats are. Their whole ideology, their entire world view, all of their policies, goals and perspectives, are sickening. They are corrupt, poisonous, and fucking bullshit. The Liberal Democrats must be stopped. They must be resisted, crushed, and broken, driven into the gutter to wallow in the filth where they belong. America needs to rise, and be strong, prosperous, and united.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK
"It is the Marine Corps that will strip away the façade so easily confused with self. It is the Corps that will offer the pain needed to buy the truth. And at last, each will own the privilege of looking inside himself  to discover what truly resides there. Comfort is an illusion. A false security b

Pat
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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #106 on: November 04, 2021, 01:02:33 PM »
It's always boggled me that people put stock in government acting "better" than private citizens. We see the President, and congress, etc, flying about in private jets, enjoying health care perks, and making deals with corporations that secure their wealth and power while doing a half-assed job on the occasional project or plan that they campaigned on.
This is my non-partisan critique of all government, not just "those people". Both parties are guilty, and both get re-elected because they've locked down the process where we nominate new candidates.

Completely agree with you there. Government is made by people, and they are going to act just as selfishly as anyone else if you let them. Just take this story, from a year ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/congress-insider-trading-problem/608488/

But that's why we supposedly have a system of checks and balances in place. And if the system has stopped working as it should, then we need to adapt it so it works more efficiently again. If politicians are doing a "half-assed job", it's the public's responsibility to properly motivate them - for example, by reducing their possibilities to connect every decision they make to them making some sort of extra salary. That's what the democratic system is literally designed for.

But isn't that the root of the problem?  "The Government" or "The Company" is treated like a person without having the accountability of a person.  No, the government didn't decide on something - the *people* elected or appointed or hired into that government made the decision.  Likewise, a corporation didn't make a decision, the C-suite or board of directors made a decision or set a policy.

The collective *we* need to stop blaming nameless, faceless entities and start holding accountable the people shielded by their association with those entities. Name names. Fire people. Try and convict people. Make it so that corrupt people will no longer see government "service" as a viable career. Make it so that sociopaths are weeded out from positions of authority in publicly-held corporations.  It would help to have term limits for elected officials and it would help if interlocking corporate directorships were unlawful.
The "company as a person" problem is overstated, and mostly a distraction. In some ways, a company is legally treated as a person. But only in a very narrow fashion, for specific reasons.

And how exactly would you choose which individuals to hold responsible? Large bureaucracies, including governments and corporations, are systems designed to widely distribute responsibility. Some things can be pinned on specific people, but many other things are the result of systems in place that create certain outcomes, and it's not clear who created the systems, and even if it were they're often long gone anyway. The CEO and C-suite can set direction to a certain degree, but have to deal with a lot of inertia and can't just redesign the system from scratch. This is even more true in the federal government, which is morass of overlapping responsibilities created by accretion over centuries that allows blame to be shifted around like quicksilver in a beaker.

(And I say that as a person who believes we should throw a lot more executives, and many, many, many more government officials, in jail. But it's not a solution to the underlying problems.)

It's even harder to blame the voters, because any political system that's created will immediately attract the busybodies and other people who think they should have a say over what their neighbors are doing, and they'll immediately start tweaking the system to ensure they remain in power. They'll spend their entire lives doing this, making the system as opaque and murky as possible to disguise what they're doing. Conversely, the general public make poor watchdogs, because the improvements they can make in their own lives by learning all they can about the different candidates will be marginal, but require a vast expenditure of effort, thus leading them to the rational conclusion that it's in their best interest to throw up their hands and do nothing. It's not about "letting" the cronies and crooks in power get away with anything; it's that there seems to be no way to stop them, and all the sound and fury aimed in that direction amounts to nothing.

These are all systemic problems, not personal problems. We can't fix the problem that corrupt people will be attracted to loci of political or managerial power, so the solution isn't just better people or a magically more attentive public. No, the real solutions have to be systemic. In this case, limit the appeal of government to the power hungry. Circumscribe their powers, by hard limits and massive decentralization. If there's less power in one place, worming yourself into power provides less benefit; and having to lobby 50 or 70,000 different governments for corporate favors is a lot harder than lobbying just 1. Replace arbitrary discretion and fudging with clear rules that are applied consistently. If your job is just applying rules with little leeway allowed, then you can't benefit by granting boons to your friends or further employers.

These would be hard changes to make. It will require taking on the seemingly overwhelming number of people who screech when a single redundant program is threatened with excision, and the even larger number of moral busybodies who think they should be able to tell everyone else what to do. And even harder, it would require converting many of them. That's education, and the mission of a generation or two, not a quick fix.

3catcircus

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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #107 on: November 04, 2021, 01:19:13 PM »
It's always boggled me that people put stock in government acting "better" than private citizens. We see the President, and congress, etc, flying about in private jets, enjoying health care perks, and making deals with corporations that secure their wealth and power while doing a half-assed job on the occasional project or plan that they campaigned on.
This is my non-partisan critique of all government, not just "those people". Both parties are guilty, and both get re-elected because they've locked down the process where we nominate new candidates.

Completely agree with you there. Government is made by people, and they are going to act just as selfishly as anyone else if you let them. Just take this story, from a year ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/congress-insider-trading-problem/608488/

But that's why we supposedly have a system of checks and balances in place. And if the system has stopped working as it should, then we need to adapt it so it works more efficiently again. If politicians are doing a "half-assed job", it's the public's responsibility to properly motivate them - for example, by reducing their possibilities to connect every decision they make to them making some sort of extra salary. That's what the democratic system is literally designed for.

But isn't that the root of the problem?  "The Government" or "The Company" is treated like a person without having the accountability of a person.  No, the government didn't decide on something - the *people* elected or appointed or hired into that government made the decision.  Likewise, a corporation didn't make a decision, the C-suite or board of directors made a decision or set a policy.

The collective *we* need to stop blaming nameless, faceless entities and start holding accountable the people shielded by their association with those entities. Name names. Fire people. Try and convict people. Make it so that corrupt people will no longer see government "service" as a viable career. Make it so that sociopaths are weeded out from positions of authority in publicly-held corporations.  It would help to have term limits for elected officials and it would help if interlocking corporate directorships were unlawful.
The "company as a person" problem is overstated, and mostly a distraction. In some ways, a company is legally treated as a person. But only in a very narrow fashion, for specific reasons.

And how exactly would you choose which individuals to hold responsible? Large bureaucracies, including governments and corporations, are systems designed to widely distribute responsibility. Some things can be pinned on specific people, but many other things are the result of systems in place that create certain outcomes, and it's not clear who created the systems, and even if it were they're often long gone anyway. The CEO and C-suite can set direction to a certain degree, but have to deal with a lot of inertia and can't just redesign the system from scratch. This is even more true in the federal government, which is morass of overlapping responsibilities created by accretion over centuries that allows blame to be shifted around like quicksilver in a beaker.

(And I say that as a person who believes we should throw a lot more executives, and many, many, many more government officials, in jail. But it's not a solution to the underlying problems.)

It's even harder to blame the voters, because any political system that's created will immediately attract the busybodies and other people who think they should have a say over what their neighbors are doing, and they'll immediately start tweaking the system to ensure they remain in power. They'll spend their entire lives doing this, making the system as opaque and murky as possible to disguise what they're doing. Conversely, the general public make poor watchdogs, because the improvements they can make in their own lives by learning all they can about the different candidates will be marginal, but require a vast expenditure of effort, thus leading them to the rational conclusion that it's in their best interest to throw up their hands and do nothing. It's not about "letting" the cronies and crooks in power get away with anything; it's that there seems to be no way to stop them, and all the sound and fury aimed in that direction amounts to nothing.

These are all systemic problems, not personal problems. We can't fix the problem that corrupt people will be attracted to loci of political or managerial power, so the solution isn't just better people or a magically more attentive public. No, the real solutions have to be systemic. In this case, limit the appeal of government to the power hungry. Circumscribe their powers, by hard limits and massive decentralization. If there's less power in one place, worming yourself into power provides less benefit; and having to lobby 50 or 70,000 different governments for corporate favors is a lot harder than lobbying just 1. Replace arbitrary discretion and fudging with clear rules that are applied consistently. If your job is just applying rules with little leeway allowed, then you can't benefit by granting boons to your friends or further employers.

These would be hard changes to make. It will require taking on the seemingly overwhelming number of people who screech when a single redundant program is threatened with excision, and the even larger number of moral busybodies who think they should be able to tell everyone else what to do. And even harder, it would require converting many of them. That's education, and the mission of a generation or two, not a quick fix.

I don't necessarily agree.  The collective we allows people to hide behind institutions instead of actively forcing them into accountability.  As someone who works intimately with the federal government, I see exactly how federal employees operate.  If 10 fed employees, 1 is competent and qualified, 1-2 are complete morons, and the other 7-8 are barely capable - to the point that contractors do their jobs for them while they perform the official but largely ceremonial duties.  And I'm not talking about ambassadors and such - I'm talking about GS-12 to GS-14 or so. 

A contractor does all of the heavy lifting to, say, put together a study or report, and the government employee hits the "send email" button on it.  Should that document get delivered to who it shouldn't (in a legal sense), the government employee isn't going to get in any trouble but the contractor would go to jail.

That's the point - as you go up in power and influence in government or industry, there needs to be *more* scrutiny, not less.  And it isn't a systemic problem - it's a character defect problem with the people that gravitate towards government service or float to the top (like shit in the toilet) into suites in industry.  At a broad level, it's all because of laziness in pursuing potential empoyees, in getting political candidates, and in interaction with lobbying groups.  People won't do the hard job of due diligence because they don't *want* to find out what might come up as a result.  This laziness and fear allows the corrupt(ible) to make bolder and bolder moves the further up the food chain they rise.  A guy who cuts a few corners as a middle manager ends up running Enron. A Hillary Clinton email server full of classified documents operating in a closet without an ATO is accepted.  It isn't until they reach the point that their own praetorian guard stabs them that their terrible behavior ends.  At that point, it's too late.

Prevention needs to be the order of the day.  The only way I know how to do that is term limits for the elected and preventing people from sitting on multiple corporate boards while employed in the c-suite of other corporations in a quid pro quo.

Rafael

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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #108 on: November 04, 2021, 01:32:49 PM »
The collective *we* need to stop blaming nameless, faceless entities and start holding accountable the people shielded by their association with those entities. Name names. Fire people. Try and convict people. Make it so that corrupt people will no longer see government "service" as a viable career. Make it so that sociopaths are weeded out from positions of authority in publicly-held corporations.  It would help to have term limits for elected officials and it would help if interlocking corporate directorships were unlawful.

Exactly. Checks and balances. Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers - and no significant backlash until very recently. Stories in newspapers, and mildly bad PR - but nothing beyond that. Many taps on many noses when what's needed is a proper, old-fashioned exorcism. Not a "socialist revolution", but the democratic systems all over the world actually doing what they were designed to do, which is to kick the butts of overly corrupt people. This will surely create a lot of drama - but so does cleaning out your own attic; sometimes, it's gonna be dirty.

Reaganism? Oh, you're one of those idiots who sees the world as two boxes, and anyone who disagrees with you is stuffed in the box you label "other". That box is random collection of all the random things you don't like. You're incapable of listening to what other people say or understanding what they believe, because in your hypersimplistic view everything that's not You gets lumped together and possesses the exact same properties.

Bezos has created an efficient system. So efficient, that billions of people have voluntarily given him billions of dollars. It's democracy in its purest form, with people voting with their money. Name one government that has done the same. While there are fuckloads of problems with wealth inequality, but here's the trick: Almost all of the problems were caused by the government. You're blaming Bezos, when you should be blaming people like Pelosi or McConnell. Most of those issues are rooted in special favors for cronies that favor the rich over the ordinary people, combined with massive debt and monetary manipulation.

The government does not create comparably efficient systems. The 1960s and 1970s were glorious exploration, but what were the 1980s? A shuttle service. And then they turned American astronauts into hitchhikers. The unmanned programs have been successful, but at a huge cost. In contrast, Space X, Blue Origin, and so on are taking people to space again, and doing it on a shoestring budget.

And you're on the side of perpetual totalitarianism. Yay.

Oh, come on. Words do actually have meaning. And what you're describing is just another spin on the faerie tale of trickle-down-economics - just supposedly from the Moon, this time. And for that matter, if you're really regarding your personal understanding of "efficiency" as more important than constitutionality - then you're the totalitarian, not me.  :P

Pat
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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #109 on: November 04, 2021, 02:32:22 PM »
The collective *we* need to stop blaming nameless, faceless entities and start holding accountable the people shielded by their association with those entities. Name names. Fire people. Try and convict people. Make it so that corrupt people will no longer see government "service" as a viable career. Make it so that sociopaths are weeded out from positions of authority in publicly-held corporations.  It would help to have term limits for elected officials and it would help if interlocking corporate directorships were unlawful.

Exactly. Checks and balances. Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers - and no significant backlash until very recently. Stories in newspapers, and mildly bad PR - but nothing beyond that. Many taps on many noses when what's needed is a proper, old-fashioned exorcism. Not a "socialist revolution", but the democratic systems all over the world actually doing what they were designed to do, which is to kick the butts of overly corrupt people. This will surely create a lot of drama - but so does cleaning out your own attic; sometimes, it's gonna be dirty.

Reaganism? Oh, you're one of those idiots who sees the world as two boxes, and anyone who disagrees with you is stuffed in the box you label "other". That box is random collection of all the random things you don't like. You're incapable of listening to what other people say or understanding what they believe, because in your hypersimplistic view everything that's not You gets lumped together and possesses the exact same properties.

Bezos has created an efficient system. So efficient, that billions of people have voluntarily given him billions of dollars. It's democracy in its purest form, with people voting with their money. Name one government that has done the same. While there are fuckloads of problems with wealth inequality, but here's the trick: Almost all of the problems were caused by the government. You're blaming Bezos, when you should be blaming people like Pelosi or McConnell. Most of those issues are rooted in special favors for cronies that favor the rich over the ordinary people, combined with massive debt and monetary manipulation.

The government does not create comparably efficient systems. The 1960s and 1970s were glorious exploration, but what were the 1980s? A shuttle service. And then they turned American astronauts into hitchhikers. The unmanned programs have been successful, but at a huge cost. In contrast, Space X, Blue Origin, and so on are taking people to space again, and doing it on a shoestring budget.

And you're on the side of perpetual totalitarianism. Yay.

Oh, come on. Words do actually have meaning. And what you're describing is just another spin on the faerie tale of trickle-down-economics - just supposedly from the Moon, this time. And for that matter, if you're really regarding your personal understanding of "efficiency" as more important than constitutionality - then you're the totalitarian, not me.  :P
You claim that words have meaning, and then in same the sentence refer to a fairy tale form of economics that doesn't exist and I never advocated? You don't just live in la la land, you can't even compose an argument or defend what you're saying without making up shit.

If you read what I've said -- which clearly you haven't -- it would be crystal clear I support strong constitution protections against the nightmarish totalitarian regimes you seem to favor.

Pat
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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #110 on: November 04, 2021, 02:41:27 PM »
It's always boggled me that people put stock in government acting "better" than private citizens. We see the President, and congress, etc, flying about in private jets, enjoying health care perks, and making deals with corporations that secure their wealth and power while doing a half-assed job on the occasional project or plan that they campaigned on.
This is my non-partisan critique of all government, not just "those people". Both parties are guilty, and both get re-elected because they've locked down the process where we nominate new candidates.

Completely agree with you there. Government is made by people, and they are going to act just as selfishly as anyone else if you let them. Just take this story, from a year ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/congress-insider-trading-problem/608488/

But that's why we supposedly have a system of checks and balances in place. And if the system has stopped working as it should, then we need to adapt it so it works more efficiently again. If politicians are doing a "half-assed job", it's the public's responsibility to properly motivate them - for example, by reducing their possibilities to connect every decision they make to them making some sort of extra salary. That's what the democratic system is literally designed for.

But isn't that the root of the problem?  "The Government" or "The Company" is treated like a person without having the accountability of a person.  No, the government didn't decide on something - the *people* elected or appointed or hired into that government made the decision.  Likewise, a corporation didn't make a decision, the C-suite or board of directors made a decision or set a policy.

The collective *we* need to stop blaming nameless, faceless entities and start holding accountable the people shielded by their association with those entities. Name names. Fire people. Try and convict people. Make it so that corrupt people will no longer see government "service" as a viable career. Make it so that sociopaths are weeded out from positions of authority in publicly-held corporations.  It would help to have term limits for elected officials and it would help if interlocking corporate directorships were unlawful.
The "company as a person" problem is overstated, and mostly a distraction. In some ways, a company is legally treated as a person. But only in a very narrow fashion, for specific reasons.

And how exactly would you choose which individuals to hold responsible? Large bureaucracies, including governments and corporations, are systems designed to widely distribute responsibility. Some things can be pinned on specific people, but many other things are the result of systems in place that create certain outcomes, and it's not clear who created the systems, and even if it were they're often long gone anyway. The CEO and C-suite can set direction to a certain degree, but have to deal with a lot of inertia and can't just redesign the system from scratch. This is even more true in the federal government, which is morass of overlapping responsibilities created by accretion over centuries that allows blame to be shifted around like quicksilver in a beaker.

(And I say that as a person who believes we should throw a lot more executives, and many, many, many more government officials, in jail. But it's not a solution to the underlying problems.)

It's even harder to blame the voters, because any political system that's created will immediately attract the busybodies and other people who think they should have a say over what their neighbors are doing, and they'll immediately start tweaking the system to ensure they remain in power. They'll spend their entire lives doing this, making the system as opaque and murky as possible to disguise what they're doing. Conversely, the general public make poor watchdogs, because the improvements they can make in their own lives by learning all they can about the different candidates will be marginal, but require a vast expenditure of effort, thus leading them to the rational conclusion that it's in their best interest to throw up their hands and do nothing. It's not about "letting" the cronies and crooks in power get away with anything; it's that there seems to be no way to stop them, and all the sound and fury aimed in that direction amounts to nothing.

These are all systemic problems, not personal problems. We can't fix the problem that corrupt people will be attracted to loci of political or managerial power, so the solution isn't just better people or a magically more attentive public. No, the real solutions have to be systemic. In this case, limit the appeal of government to the power hungry. Circumscribe their powers, by hard limits and massive decentralization. If there's less power in one place, worming yourself into power provides less benefit; and having to lobby 50 or 70,000 different governments for corporate favors is a lot harder than lobbying just 1. Replace arbitrary discretion and fudging with clear rules that are applied consistently. If your job is just applying rules with little leeway allowed, then you can't benefit by granting boons to your friends or further employers.

These would be hard changes to make. It will require taking on the seemingly overwhelming number of people who screech when a single redundant program is threatened with excision, and the even larger number of moral busybodies who think they should be able to tell everyone else what to do. And even harder, it would require converting many of them. That's education, and the mission of a generation or two, not a quick fix.

I don't necessarily agree.  The collective we allows people to hide behind institutions instead of actively forcing them into accountability.  As someone who works intimately with the federal government, I see exactly how federal employees operate.  If 10 fed employees, 1 is competent and qualified, 1-2 are complete morons, and the other 7-8 are barely capable - to the point that contractors do their jobs for them while they perform the official but largely ceremonial duties.  And I'm not talking about ambassadors and such - I'm talking about GS-12 to GS-14 or so. 

A contractor does all of the heavy lifting to, say, put together a study or report, and the government employee hits the "send email" button on it.  Should that document get delivered to who it shouldn't (in a legal sense), the government employee isn't going to get in any trouble but the contractor would go to jail.

That's the point - as you go up in power and influence in government or industry, there needs to be *more* scrutiny, not less.  And it isn't a systemic problem - it's a character defect problem with the people that gravitate towards government service or float to the top (like shit in the toilet) into suites in industry.  At a broad level, it's all because of laziness in pursuing potential empoyees, in getting political candidates, and in interaction with lobbying groups.  People won't do the hard job of due diligence because they don't *want* to find out what might come up as a result.  This laziness and fear allows the corrupt(ible) to make bolder and bolder moves the further up the food chain they rise.  A guy who cuts a few corners as a middle manager ends up running Enron. A Hillary Clinton email server full of classified documents operating in a closet without an ATO is accepted.  It isn't until they reach the point that their own praetorian guard stabs them that their terrible behavior ends.  At that point, it's too late.

Prevention needs to be the order of the day.  The only way I know how to do that is term limits for the elected and preventing people from sitting on multiple corporate boards while employed in the c-suite of other corporations in a quid pro quo.
The system is designed that way. Do you have a nonfunctional department, or is your department riddled with useless people? Can't fire them, hell no. The best solution is often creating an new department with some vague name and purpose, sending all the people you don't want over there, where they check in each day, check out, and collect a paycheck for the rest of their lives. While generating reams of paperwork that mean nothing and saps the will of anyone reading them. I am not fabricating an example. This is a serial numbers filed off version of a story I've heard from people in the trenches.

The only solution is to shrink the bureaucracy. And the only way to that is to change the system, and change the incentives, to prevent the bureaucracy from ever growing to that extent. A few scapegoats won't change anything, term limits are one of those ideas that sound great, but have very little practical effect, and blaming it on laziness is absurd.

Shasarak

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Re: What will divide us next?
« Reply #111 on: November 04, 2021, 03:58:03 PM »
Oh, come on. Words do actually have meaning. And what you're describing is just another spin on the faerie tale of trickle-down-economics - just supposedly from the Moon, this time. And for that matter, if you're really regarding your personal understanding of "efficiency" as more important than constitutionality - then you're the totalitarian, not me.  :P

"Faerie tale of trickle down economics" answered in on easy to understand picture



Who da Drow?  U da drow! - hedgehobbit

There will be poor always,
pathetically struggling,
look at the good things you've got! -  Jesus