This made me laugh because I have no doubt it is one of the truest things John Boehner has ever said:
Much of the discussion – and laughs – focused on Boehner’s views on the current presidential candidates. Segueing into the topic, Kennedy asked Boehner to be frank given that the event was not being broadcasted, and the former Speaker responded in kind. When specifically asked his opinions on Ted Cruz, Boehner made a face, drawing laughter from the crowd.
“Lucifer in the flesh,” the former speaker said. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
I bet when this whole thing is over he’ll end up getting 27% of the GOP vote.
Luther M. Siler
I would be happier about this if not for the absolute certainty that Boehner would vote for him if he was the nominee.
MattF
It’s quite amazing when a politician (even as an ex-politician) says something like that. And, fwiw, Bob Dole also despises Ted.
MattF
@Luther M. Siler: Boehner has already said he wouldn’t vote for Cruz. Will vote for Der Trump, though.
Craigie
If he really had friends who were Democrats, he wouldn’t call them “Democrat friends”
Fucking GOP childishness…
Luther M. Siler
@MattF: Meh. Carly Fiorina didn’t seem too fond of him a couple months ago either and look where that got her.
Jack the Second
I have no doubt that Cruz is an unlikable sumbitch, but it’s worth noting that Boehner is an Ohioan.
joes527
Interesting that Carly hitched her wagon to this particular star. Unless she went to Trump and he flat out told her “not in a million years” she would have been better off telling Ted that she wouldn’t publicly accept ’till the convention. At least then she would have _some_ chance with the eventual nominee.
Matches what we know about her judgement in any case.
karen marie
I realize this is nit-picky but, Christ on a cracker, are there NO editors?
Also, here’s a link to what I believe is the original reporting. http://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/04/28/john-boehner-talks-election-time-in-office/
rikyrah
NOBODY likes Rafael.
NOBODY.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Mike E
A write-in campaign for Cruz… This intrigues me.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Cruz may be all the things Boehner and everyone else says he is, but Boehner could have pulled the rug out from under him at any time if he had been willing to break the Hastert Suggestion, especially on immigration, but he was afraid he’d lose his title and fancy office. Then he quit the job with the title and the fancy office. It galls me that this booze-soaked, gutless mediocrity has now joined the ranks of the Elder Statesfolk because he walked away from the mess he made.
karen marie
@Craigie: He’s got everyone doing it:
rikyrah
@joes527:
IF we are to believe The Enquirer, Carly was bought and paid for months ago.
Uncle Cosmo
Lest we forget, Lindsay Graham in an uncharacteristic (& quite competent) humorous vein:
I seem to recall that just after that he said there’d be 99 suspects for the murder. (98 I guess, now that Rhymes-with-lose has Mike Lee’s endorsement…)
HaTed
DistrusTed
RejecTed
& coming soon
EliminaTed!
burnspbesq
Cruz is the “deep Republican bench” we were told about so often in recent years. The pick of the litter.
Think about that.
MattF
@Uncle Cosmo: One supposes that the coroner’s verdict would be ‘suicide’.
Chris
@MattF:
Even more so when the politician is one of the only candidates still (sort of) standing against Trump, whom they’ve all been treating as some kind of Antichrist figure. Maybe they’re coming around.
Miss Bianca
@MattF: “Officer, it’s amazing how he just fell on that knife. And how that knife came to be in my hand, I don’t know.”
Uncle Cosmo
@Jack the Second:
Which almost (I said almost) gets him a pass for the “Democrat” crack, since IIRC that abomination was first popularized (if not coined) by former Ohio Senator Robert Taft back in the 1940s. (I said almost, goddamnit…)
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Of course Boehner, the former House Speaker, has reasons to hate Cruz, the Senator, that make him less than a dispassionate observer. Cruz crossed the Capitol and overtly tried to break things in the House. That’s not done according to those who value House and Senate traditions (as Boehner certainly did (at least verbally)). For all we know, Boehner could be behind the DC Madam rumors (not that I think he is) – he has to hate Cruz that much.
Cheers,
Scott.
VOR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I wonder if they are going to stop invoking the Hastert Rule as if it were an actual rule of the House. You would think at a minimum they would re-name it.
Percysowner
@MattF:
SenyorDave
@VOR: I wonder if they are going to stop invoking the Hastert Rule as if it were an actual rule of the House. You would think at a minimum they would re-name it.
IOKIYAR. Has this ever been more obvious in the Hastert case, with all sorts of “elder statesmen” of the Republicans falling all over themselves writing lowing letters of recommendation to try to keep that dirtbag out of jail? Compare that with how they acted when Weiner did his thing (not that Weiner covered himself with glory, but it was with consenting adults and as far as I know he did not break any laws).
bystander
@Craigie: Caught Jane Sanders referring to the “Democrat Party” on MSNBC this morning. Also unfair rules in NY primaries.
WarMunchkin
So if we do get the majority in one or both houses (big if, even with Trump, imho), what’s to stop Ted from just putting a hold on every bill? The (referencing above) … Burr suggestion is still active in the Senate.
Amaranthine RBG
Boehmer isn’t getting more appealing.
Uncle Cosmo
@MattF: Reminds me of a cartoon I saw, oh, must be 40 years ago:
Of course, he hadn’t seen Ted Not-So-Swift & his Basketball Rings yet…
Davebo
@Craigie:
What’s wrong with calling a Democrat a Democrat?
Calling the Democratic Party “Democrat Party” is incorrect, though I’ve always thought the complaints were trivial.
But calling a friend who happens to be a Democrat a “Democrat” is correct. Hell saying “I have lot’s of Democratic friends” would be idiotic so pull your panties out of your ass already!
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@bystander:
I’ve seen enough of her too, to last a lifetime. Has anyone asked her about poisoning poor Latinos, or her Burlington College grift? Or when she’s going to go back to searching for those past tax returns?
Iowa Old Lady
@bystander: I understand that Jane Sanders is defending her husband and has very little experience with national politics, but you don’t have to be very tuned in to know that “Democrat Party” is a taunt. What is wrong with her?
Poopyman
@Davebo: Yeah, I was going to say something similar until my link to BJ went squirrely. Neither “Democrat” nor “Democratic” fit as he spoke it. OTOH, Boehner has a long history of using “Democrat” instead of the correct “Democratic”.
Ya know, I always thought Raphael missed a golden opportunity by not naming his daughter “Vera”.
WarMunchkin
Paging Betty… who the f is this guy?
patrick II
@joes527:
Carly Fiorinia has no chance with Trump who has been quoted as saying that Carly is too homely for anyone to vote for. As Seth Meyers said a few years ago (following Obama eviscerating Trump at the Correspondent’s dinner) “It’s a good thing Trump owns the Miss Universe pageant. It will cut down his search for vice-president”.
scav
@SenyorDave: I mean, he was a Bible Study Group with Tom Delay?! Isn’t it axiomatic therefore that he is a good man, with all of his actions pre-forgiven and hasn’t he suffered enough? Consequences for not living up to Christian precepts are for the unwashed rabble pagan.
Jeffro
@joes527: I’m sure she now considers this to be a highlight on her CV: “nominated* as VP of the United States”
*sure it was before the convention, by one of the losing candidates, but you know, technically…
hovercraft
@burnspbesq:
The deep bench is all about the “narrative”, that the gop is strong and vibrant, whereas the dems are aging and stagnant. It’s the constant search for a new toy. The so called rising stars are an inch deep and a foot wide: John Thune good looking and dumb as a rock; Paul Ryan good on paper but as ineffectual as the rest of them; Kevin McCarthy all he had to do was open his mouth; and the fact that Joni Ernst is being mentioned as a possible VP is beyond breathtaking.
Remember that this was supposed to be the deepest field ever, tells you all you need to know about the gop. If you don’t fall flat on your face in your first 5 minutes you are a rising star.
MattF
@WarMunchkin: They might want to ask Rick Lazio about how to debate Clinton.
ETA: Or, they might not.
Davebo
@Poopyman: I guess in theory he should have said “I have lots of friends who are Democrats” but seriously, this is parsing to the extreme.
It’s in line with the thousands of words written about Cruz in Indiana calling basketball goals (or hoops if you prefer) rings. Seriously? That’s what annoys you about Raphael?
God I can’t wait till this election is over.
LAC
@Miss Bianca: officer: “are those shoe prints on his back?
Seanly
@WarMunchkin:
Betty lives near Tampa doesn’t she? Broward County is on the eastern coast just north of Miami. It’s the sort of “he thinks it sounds clever, but it really isn’t” thing that
back on topic, Fiorana might be only slightly less odious than Cruz but not by much. Someone in a previous thread mentioned that it might not be good to campaign in Indiana that your brand new VP candidate is famous for firing 20,000 people from one company.
Frankensteinbeck
@VOR:
I cannot sufficiently stress how much of the asshole obstructionism of the last six years is Boehner’s fault, and his fault alone. Nobody has gone by the Hastert Rule before. Nobody. Not even Hastert. And not only has Boehner followed it slavishly, he came up with an even more draconian version. Then he got away with claiming nothing would pass because the Tea Party wouldn’t vote for it.
Brachiator
@burnspbesq:
In this case, litter which should be picked up and promptly disposed of in a garbage can.
Davebo
@Seanly:
30,000 actually.
Slag
Sounds like Cruz is the real antiestablishment candidate.
trollhattan
@joes527:
I think Carly suffers from the malady of feeling lifeless unless cameras are pointed her way. As to why Ted, other than the obvious he’s the only one who asked, he’s the lone candidate of the entire bunch who makes her appear humanlike by comparison.
? Martin
Because I must keep banging the drum:
The move to automation wasn’t just a way to save money. In fact, it wasn’t a way to save money at all, it was a way to turn out a higher quality product than a human could do. In the 60s there was precisely one product that you might own that would have manufacturing tolerances measured in microns and that was a Swiss watch that would cost you at least a months salary or more. By the 70s automation allowed for a range of digital electronics with similar or tighter tolerances that would cost 10s of dollars. Now you can buy devices that are machined to those tolerances (smart phones, etc.) Most of the products we most commonly buy today could be manufactured without a massive amount of automation.
And the automation was also good for worker safety. The solution to hundreds of thousands of miners getting black lung was to get the workers away from the coal dust, but the machines that were built to do that work didn’t require as many workers to operate.
These were not anti-labor efforts. They were pro-labor or pro-consumer efforts that had a side effect of reducing the number of jobs needed. The highlighted trade-off is a real one. Yes, mining jobs used to pay pretty well. You were also pretty likely to be dead before you were eligible for Social Security. That doesn’t strike me as as something liberals would embrace. The jobs that remain still pay pretty well and are much more likely to get to their retirement, there just aren’t many of them to go around. I get the pro-labor mindset, but you have to accept a range of trade-offs involved to get that. Yes, there are approximately half a million or more people manufacturing iPhones, but the vast majority are doing small assembly work. It is arduous. It is not a career. There are no skills being acquired, no future career being prepared for. Right now it’s unavoidable because robotics can’t yet work at that scale, but they are increasingly getting there as as they do, those job get eliminated pretty quickly. So it’s not durable either. I’m not sure why we would dream of the day we could have a bunch of low-skilled, dead-end jobs that are likely to be automated out of existence within a decade, yet that’s the platform several of our presidential candidates are running on.
lollipopguild
@Poopyman: If he had a son he could name him “santa”.
trollhattan
@WarMunchkin:
Boy, he sounds nice.
lollipopguild
@scav: Just like paying taxes, following the teachings of Christ is for the little people.
singfoom
@? Martin: It’s coming even faster than you think. Witness the weird beauty of Valve’s Steam Controller production line in Buffalo Grove, IL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCgnWqoP4MM
MCA1
@Davebo: Yeah, I mean, it’s not a big deal, but the former f’ing Speaker of the House should probably be expected to conquer that minor detail of syntax and leave no doubt. And as poopyman noted, Boehner was one of the most prolific users of “Democrat” as an adjective of them all, so I think it’s understandable that people might twitch and take it as his usual, casual bitch slap of condescension through not extending the party the courtesy to call it by its chosen name. Not a huge deal in any event, though. I’ve always thought the right way to put a stop to this is for Democrats to start referring to “My colleagues in the Republic Party…” at every opportunity.
As for Cruz, yes, it’s not substance. But good lord, his lack of style is astounding and remarkable. This is a (purported) human being trying to become the public leader of 330 million people. Most Americans want the President of the United States to show both analytical skills and an ability to relate to other human beings. Yes, it’s kind of dumb but it’s also sort of a proxy for “Do I think this person could manage the relationships/negotiation/emotional parts of being POTUS?” So Cruz picked like a 9.8 out of 10 difficulty dive and bellyflopped spectacularly. The whole thing showed poor judgment from the start, and was ripe for awkwardness and dorkiness. I mean, holding a rally in the gym used to film probably the single most cherished movie in Indiana? That’s bound to piss off a bunch of people anyway. And then, having previously declared that basketball movie to be one of is favorites, Cruz became the first person in the history of the world to refer to a basketball hoop as a ring. That’s just an epic pander fail.
lollipopguild
@LAC: The gun kept firing on its own until it ran out of ammo, That’s my story Officer.
trollhattan
@MCA1:
I sense Ted has at the very least, a sociopathic condition preventing him from relating to others. Asperger’s seems possible as well, but I’m no clinician, just a horrified voter. Thanks again, Texas.
Eolirin
@? Martin: Easy solution: Make service jobs pay really well. We don’t need more manufacturing jobs, we need the low skill jobs that we already have to have good hours, good wages, and good benefits.
Minimum wage increases, guaranteed benefits, stricter regulation and enforcement of employer abuses, and stronger service sector unions. There’s no reason we can’t replace the lost sector with a new one.
Iowa Old Lady
@Eolirin: Exactly. There’s no inherent reason a line worker at GM made a living wage but a line worker at McDonald’s doesn’t. Or for that matter, why a department store clerk doesn’t. Obviously this tied to the fate of unions and to gendered (and racist) division of labor, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Brachiator
@Davebo:
It certainly annoyed the shit out of a lot of the people in the audience, and they were there to support Cruz.
No, this is not the most significant thing evah! But when you draw attention to yourself with a big windup political speech in a state which you have made crucial to your future success, and you go out of your way to talk about how in tune you are with da peeples, and then you make an incredibly doofus error that da peeples will immediately notice, then yeah, expect it to be written about.
Especially when the candidate is otherwise obviously about two steps away from becoming a footnote in a Wiki article.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
You left out a bit.
With a plastic bag after your dog had deposited it.
? Martin
@singfoom: The concept is ‘lights out manufacturing’. Basically factories with no humans so you no longer even need to light the place.
Fanuc makes these industrial robots, so naturally their factory is nothing but industrial robots making industrial robots. 4 workers in the factory.
A Japanese company is opening a robotic lettuce farm next year that can grow 30,000 head of lettuce per day on a 1 acre plot. Traditional farms average 26,000 heads per year per acre, so this is able to produce around 400x more per acre. And it runs on solar power and recycles almost 100% of its water. It is an environmentalists dream (and we should be building them like mad in California), but there’s almost no human labor involved.
The auto industry has completely automated the entire construction of an automotive frame. Humans are still needed for installing the dashboard and whatnot, but even things like wheels and doors are robot assisted to take the physical load off of the worker. It too will inevitably be fully automated. Shipping is likely soon to come. Packaging is already almost completely automated, the most modern port cities are almost entirely robotic, semis will probably be self-driving for port-distribution runs (very well defined endpoints and highways between with no need for the driver to unload) starting within 5 years.
BR
@? Martin:
Sorry when it come to farming this stuff is greenwashing — it’s far less sustainable, it’s just that they neglect to consider all the inputs and outputs of their systems. (I can explain more if you’d like.)
Hungry Joe
The dream of a Thunderdome convention in Cleveland is approaching fantasy. It’ll probably go more like this:
Trump arrives with the requisite number of delegates, many of whom will be wearing funny hats and Uncle Sam costumes. They nominate Trump. They nominate some desperate sucker for VP. Everybody goes home. Networks re-jigger their quarterly profit projections downward.
***SIGH*** And I was really looking forward to this. Seems the devolution will not be televised, either.
Tripod
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I’m a touch sympathetic for her, like why the fuck a dead campaign keeps running her out there as a surrogate?
Clinton isn’t spending anything on media in the states going forward, Comic Book Guy fired everyone (even if Bernie couldn’t arsed to be on the call), and the remaining primary electorate is drifting into WGAF territory.
It just kind of strikes me as an asshole who is making his wife clean up his mess.
Hungry Joe
@Eolirin: Re your ten points/suggestions: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Brachiator
@Iowa Old Lady:
Kinda depends on how much you want to pay for a burger and fries.
Tripod
@Iowa Old Lady:
Well…duh, but gender (and race) role norms are heavily internalized even by alleged progressives.
Ruckus
@? Martin:
Having worked in the machining field for a very long time I can say that you are 100% correct. There is still a place for skilled manual labor in this field (much smaller place now) but there is no longer a huge demand for unskilled. 40-50 yrs ago one could get a start as an unskilled worker and build the skills on the job over time. That is much rarer now. One has to have the basis for design and programing to get much of a job these days. And few are willing to teach that on the job. Schooling is imperative.
Iowa Old Lady
@Brachiator: I’m not willing to let the price of my burger be subsidized by a worker receiving sub-poverty wages. I’m hoping those aren’t the only options.
ETA: Also I quote that old union-buster Henry Ford who said he paid his workers $5/day because he wanted them to be able to buy his product.
SenyorDave
@Eolirin: There is one problem with this logic. You can’t get a 17 year old (at least not very many of them) to be a good line worker at GM. You can get them to be a good worker at McDonalds. Doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be paid a living wage, it just is different. For many people, McDonalds is a starter job, That’s not true for a line worker at GM
Ella in New Mexico
@joes527
Lucifer, meet the Queen of Hell. Queen of Hell, this is Lucifer. Now please go off someplace where we don’t have to witness the carnage while you two consummate this marriage of evil.
Iowa Old Lady
@SenyorDave: I grew up in Detroit. Working the line at GM was where fresh HS grads went.
Peale
@bystander: Yep. Tad Devine did that the other week. I’m waiting for their transformation into Fox News commentators.
Ruckus
@? Martin:
I owned a “lights out” mfg shop 25 yrs ago. I produced as much with one person as 5 people did prior. The machines never went home, much, much more rarely got sick, did much closer tolerance work – consistently, had a fixed cost basis – predictability, never came in hungover or smoked illegal substances in the parking lot at lunch………
Of course that one person couldn’t call in sick or come in hung over or smoke a joint at lunch because the whole thing would come to a screeching halt.
? Martin
@Eolirin: Right. And I pointed out how Apple has built out their retail operations to escalate the retail worker from standing at a cash register to being a customer service rep. For one, the worker density in Apple Stores is massive. A 5,000 square foot Apple Store can have 40 employees in it – that’s probably about what you’ll find in the department store anchoring that mall. The goal there is that customers should never have to wait to have a question answered or to check out. And the employees are relatively highly trained. My retail job trained me for 1 day, mostly on the mechanics of the cash register and the store policies. Apple training takes up to 2 weeks, and is focused on making the customer feel important and leave happy, moreso than on making a sale.
Apple has elevated the retail position from low-skill to moderate-skill, and the employee adds a measurable value to the buying experience (they listen, ask questions, and give reliable answers), something that cannot be replicated on a website or by a robot. When Apple added self-checkout they did it in a way that is customer friendly (pick up your phone, scan the bar code of the product with the build-in camera, confirm with your fingerprint – done) and which relieves the staff of a clerical task so they can focus on customer service – and they didn’t eliminate jobs in the process.
As a result, Apple Store employees are paid reasonably well and get benefits even for part-time employees. It could be better, but most people wouldn’t consider it deficient, and their turnover is low. Retail turnover rates are unbelievably high – about 75% per year. So about ¾ of the people who start a retail job are out of it within a year. Mostly voluntarily. At Apple it’s 19% and the average for all workers nationally is 15%. So the workers are generally happy with the job.
And its a model that should apply to many other sectors. It used to be you could ask the butcher for advice in the grocery store. That’s a similar model. When I go clothes shopping (which I am horrible at) I aim directly for the high-service retailers during working hours because I am looking to hire someone who has been picking and fitting clothes for people for years, who can tell me what’s appropriate for a given situation, what looks good on me, etc. I know I’ll pay a bit more for the clothes, but I’ll be a lot happier with what I buy. Some of it is demands from consumers, and some of it is businesses changing how they operate. Nobody goes to McDonalds looking for expertise on which hamburger to eat. But lots of people wanted a good customer service experience when buying a phone or computer, but all of the computer stores were geared toward nerds that didn’t want that, and nobody bothered to build a store for everyone else until Apple did. That was an underserved market, and there are a lot of those out there. We tend to make fun of them a lot – the breakfast cereal bar, for example, but they are filling a market need and they can usually pay well because they are delivering a product that the customer is willing to pay a premium for.
Consider how many people go out of their way to buy at an Apple Store which is guaranteed to be the most expensive place to buy that item. People line up to pay extra for an iPhone. No wonder they can pay their employees well – it’s the employees that create that behavior in the customer. It is something that people have decided has value and is worth paying for.
mdblanche
@burnspbesq: The “deep Republican bench” was truly a richness of embarrassments.
chopper
@Brachiator:
cruz’d that for you.
redshirt
@Slag: I waded into the cesspool of Free Republic to measure the mood and was surprised they’ve all turned on Cruz – he’s the Establishment candidate now. Did you know they all hate the GOPe, as they call it?
They’ve all gone over for Trump even though 3 months 75% of them hated him.
Ruckus
@SenyorDave:
That line worker job in Detroit was also a dead end job. Sure the wages/benefits were OK, but that really is the only difference between that and a McD’s job. OK that and the heavier lifting that might be involved. The cost of any one person is not that large of a cost point to the overall price of a burger, any more than it is to the cost of a car. Unless you are making one burger or one car. Which no one is.
dww44
@Davebo: Because of your comment I actually linked to the interview and read it. I fall into Craigsie’s camp on this one because in the sentence in which it was used, Boehner refers to his “Democrat friends and Republican friends”. He didn’t say my “Republic’ friends. So when it comes to the proper and improper use of the terms Democrat and Democratic put me firmly into my “panties are in a wad” camp.
Republicans do this on purpose, you know. That’s who they are, just as they will always vote for the Republican no matter how distasteful that candidate may be. I can understand that because in the last 30 years I can not think of a single time when I could actually vote for a Republican at the state or national level.
Applejinx
@bystander: Maybe he’ll lay her off.
(hey, _I_ can say it ;P )
Kudos to Hilbots for tolerating a certain amount of static now that Bernie’s symbolically (and practically) lined up behind Hillary. Seriously. It’s going to be a big job to merge these constituencies (and will eventually have to be done lest the Dems fracture for good) and it only starts with Bernie scaling back to a staff size sufficient to documenting liberalism in California and Oregon. We’re now working out where party lines stand and how hippie we can make the platform’s broad strokes. Don’t panic. As Bernie and his staff in NH kept saying to volunteers and campaign workers, trust the process.
Be the process, not the ratfuckers.
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
And then got up and fell on it another 26 times.
? Martin
@Ruckus: Exactly. And just to be clear to everyone – I’m not advocating for this. I’m not saying that it’s some great thing that we’ve automated everything. I’m just saying that it happening and it’s not going to stop and you can either complain about it or you can deal with it. And anyone who truly cares about these kinds of workers needs to accept what is happening, focus on ways to support displaced workers through benefits and retraining and all of the things that Democrats support, and focus on how to make sure the next generation of workers isn’t wandering into a minefield through ignorance. The calls for a manufacturing worker renaissance is, to be generous, a dream turned into a lie. It’s delivering false hope to those workers that have gotten left out and false hope to the next generation that such jobs will exist for them. Tell them the truth, hard as it is, and tell them the options and help them get there. It’s not easy to tell men to go to nursing school, but fuck if there aren’t a lot of well paying jobs there, widely distributed around the country so you can probably stay in your community as well. An inexpensive 2 year degree can take you pretty far.
MattF
@Roger Moore:
“And then got up and fell on it another
2698 times.”The Senate has certain traditions to follow.
dww44
@MCA1:
Exactly. I’ve long suggested this in other forums, but have yet to convince any Democratic official to take me up on this linguistic pushback.
Germy
@dww44: didn’t that “democrat” party bullshit start with Rush Limbaugh?
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I hate this argument. It’s basically saying that poor service workers should be dumped on for the convenience and money savings of the middle class. No company should be allowed to base its business model on paying its employees a starvation wage.
les
@Brachiator:
Sorta, but only sorta. Labor costs aren’t a huge chunk of the burger/fry cost; and food isn’t the biggest expense in the worker’s budget, so overall win. Numbers are coming in on Portland’s (Seattle’s? fuckin’ old man memory) minimum wage raise, predicted to increase food and retail costs; not happenin’. Far less the conservative predictions of job decimation.
gene108
@Germy:
That’s what I remember. Rush’s explanation as told to me by other right-wing internet denizens is that “it is the Democrat Party, because there is nothing democratic about it”.
The Democrats being some sort of top-down mafia run by Ted Kennedy (alive and well at the time), Nancy Pelosi and “Dingy” Harry Reid.
Bob In Portland
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/gee-care-guess-whos-funding-anti-russian-protests-armenia/ri14125
Tripod
@? Martin:
Bill Clinton is really great at speaking to workers and communities in these circumstances. They should utilize him to counter Trump in the industrial Midwest.
Germy
@Roger Moore: The argument I always see is that the fast food jobs are just for high school kids who want a few extra bucks.
Except when I stop in at fast food places I see employees of all ages. Middle-aged women, seniors, some young people. If it’s just a high student job, then I would assume all fast food joints would be closed during school hours.
I don’t like underpaid, pissed-off people preparing my food. I don’t like people coming to work sick to prepare my food because they don’t get sick days. If anything, anyone ANYWHERE handling and preparing food should be paid much more. It’s a public health issue.
Germy
@gene108: Astounding how much influence that old fraud has on lawmakers. Scalia quoted him, Clarence Thomas listens every day.
Hungry Joe
@Germy: The first time I heard it was in the 1976 Vice Presidential debate, when Bob Dole referred to WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam as “Democrat wars.”
singfoom
@Bob In Portland: Villagers, neoliberal, Gulf of Tonkin, word salad!!!!ONEONEONE
This is your one response on this thread Bob-o. Enjoy your bile.
Truegster
@Brachiator: OR, how much compensation a McDonalds CEO makes as compared to his workers. Imagine a world where the CEO doesn’t make a “immortal God wage” and the person working day to day makes a “living wage”. The price of those clown’s burgers would not have to be raised. For a real life example, checkout the areas where the minimum wage was raised to $12 over a year ago. Your “fact” that the dollar menu must raise prices isn’t based in reality.
Germy
@Hungry Joe: Didn’t know that. By the way, what was Dole’s point? We should have stayed out of WWII?
Bob In Portland
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/04/meltdown-in-libya.html
burnspbesq
@Iowa Old Lady:
You’re not the typical consumer, then. Price elasticity of demand is an actual thing. And it affects how much it is possible to pay people to do certain jobs.
? Martin
@Germy: My Republican mom is visiting and she asked me why there were no teenagers at the McDonalds when she went by. I told her they were all capable of getting better paid jobs elsewhere since they were often entering with better skills than the workers at McDonalds (who generally had worse english skills).
She was definitely part of the ‘teenager’ argument, but I think she now sees that the low-wage jobs are all full-time immigrants or people who maybe have criminal records and are discriminated against better jobs where we live, and the $15/hr jobs are where the teenagers are. It’s exactly the opposite of what she expects.
Humboldtblue
@karen marie: I’m actually getting used to it. They aren’t the Republic party, they are the Republican party. We’re Democrats, not Democratics. Democratic is an adjective that describes a system of government. Democrats as defined as a political party aren’t any more democratic then Republicans. I haven’t tried this out on any linguists yet, but it’s been bouncing around my head.
singfoom
@? Martin: Aren’t enrollments at vocational/trade schools seriously up? I remember talking to a relative recently whose son is working as an electrician’s apprentice and he said the wait list for jumping from apprentice to journeyman is seriously long at this point.
Even then there’s not enough tradeschool jobs to absorb everyone. I keep wondering what the timeframe on universal basic income is going to be once all the automation really kicks in further….
cmorenc
It’s terrifying to consider how a man so deeply loathed by so many within his own party for his ruthlessly Machiavellian rat-fucking and total indifference to the political benefit of anyone within his party except himself – has managed to manipulate the GOP establishment into reluctantly supporting him and actively helping his plans to steal the GOP nomination right out from under Trump, despite winning several hundred fewer delegates in actual primary elections and caucuses. If Cruz were to somehow win the Presidency itself, he would be ruthlessly willing and able to do whatever is necessary to force the country into a theocratic far-right nightmare vision that would be structurally resistant to the revival of progressive institutions barring a successful counter-revolution by arms. Anyone he ran over and maimed in the process would be unavoidable roadkill to him, like bugs on a windshield in summertime.
Germy
@singfoom: Deeply held racist beliefs among lawmakers and many citizens will make any attempt at passing UBI an impossibility, IMO.
Tripod
@Ruckus:
It also ignores the demographic reality that the US workforce has gotten old. Only a punitive asshole thinks a job on the line is the answer for a fifty-five year old male, with typical fifty-five year old health issues. That’s when people retire from those jobs.
singfoom
@Germy:
I don’t disagree with you, but I’d add a modifer. “at this point in time.”
In 25 years, who knows what the political and economic landscape looks like. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I think it’s inevitable given population growth and automation.
Brachiator
@Iowa Old Lady:
No matter what you say, at a certain price point you will simply stop buying that burger.
I live in Southern California and am totally sympathetic to raising the minimum wage. But here in Southern Cal, the increased minimum wage, for the restaurant industry, will lead to an influx of illegal immigrants to take industry jobs, more unemployment of citizens and legal aliens, more automation, and decrease in the quality of some restaurant items.
This will probably impact many small merchants as well (especially clothing and shoe stores, specialty shops, etc).
I have a friend, very militantly liberal, who angrily says that if a business cannot survive after an increase in wages, those businesses are probably very inefficient and probably should go out of business. I could sympathize with this argument, but I see too many empty storefronts. Businesses fail, but new ones do not easily take their place. BTW, this is not just because of wage increases. Greedy landlords raise rents and impose additional costs as well.
I’ve seen this up close and personal, and sometimes I have even voted with my pocket book in response. My favorite local eatery, just steps from my home, fired some waitresses and hostesses and replaced them with illegal immigrants (I helped one of these people find a new job and learned the details of her firing). I don’t eat there anymore because I did not like the way that the owners treated the people involved.
Eateries can only raise their prices so much in order to compensate. And fast food places like McDonalds used to pay in effect supplemental wages to teens and other people who needed part time jobs and extra cash to augment family incomes, not adults who were primary breadwinners who obviously need a living wage.
The national economy is going through some major, and painful, adjustments. The solutions, even with increased wages, are not simple.
Automobiles cost more than burgers.
mdblanche
@cmorenc: I’d say their embrace of Cruz comes down purely to 1) they loathe and fear Trump even more, and 2) they’re no longer able to produce a better, viable alternative to either of them.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Seattle will give you a natural experiment; if the costs of eating at McDonalds deviates significantly from other cities with similar cost of living but lower minimum wage, you can make that argument. It’s currently very unclear that the costs in higher wages to maintain a decent quality of life for workers will require price increases that exceed the elasticity of demand for those goods.
Until there is solid data otherwise, this is a hypothetical concern at best.
Edit: And if it does prove to be that you can’t maintain decent quality of life without making things too expensive, you’re left with shift wealth transfer and guaranteed basic income. But you should start with the labor end.
Paul in KY
@? Martin: There’s not a lot of automation in those Chinese plants that employ millions. The ones that make the cheap trinkets, etc.
lollipopguild
@Tripod: I have talked to people who worked at a local Ford plant who said that Ford had a 30 years and you are retired policy, 30 years on the line and you are worn out.
Brachiator
@cmorenc:
He’s following the rules set up by the GOP, even though he is terrible. Unfortunately, Trump is not much better.
Paul in KY
@Germy: It was a gaff.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
I wonder if Cruz tells himself that they hate him for being perfect.
singfoom
@Brachiator:
Your concern regarding illegal aliens displacing legal workers due to wage increases is something to be concerned about, of course, but that’s not the case in all localities. It’s still early to draw concrete conclusions across the board, but the evidence so far is that increased minimum wages don’t produce more unemployment as the common bugaboo is invoked.
Barry Rithotlz and Invictus have been covering the Seattle example for a long time:
http://ritholtz.com/2015/09/food-per-capita/ – there’s tons more links there
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-04/we-ll-find-out-soon-if-minimum-wages-kill-jobs
Brachiator
@Eolirin:
True enough. And I’ve heard a lot of good things about Seattle.
Not quite. California raised the minimum wage and made some other adjustments regarding wages and salaries. The net impact, going back to 2004, was that companies began moving out of the state.
The idea of a guaranteed basic income assumes that you will always have sufficient wealth to transfer. This is not necessarily true.
Paul in KY
@Enhanced Voting Techinques: ‘Everybody hates me, because I’m so popular!’
Applejinx
@singfoom: Yeah, absolutely. By the time people are talking about ‘you must go train for this, that’s where the jobs are!’ it’s already too late, and you end up with some pretty horrible ‘experts’ when their sole motivation was ‘so I won’t starve, I better go get this credential so I can get a job’.
My brother sees this in applicants for professional programming jobs. I’m a college dropout and crazy artist type and when I tried his ‘programmer job application test’ he came up with, for his corporate workplace, I did better than about half the credentialled, college educated applicants he sees.
People don’t learn to think just by going to computer school. People don’t learn to care for the sick just by going to nurse school. The ‘specialist of the week’ retraining thing is not really a pleasant scenario. There are a lot of people I would just like to assign to ‘consumer’ as a job (ie, UBI) because they’re fine at that but I wouldn’t want them cooking my food, building the bridge I drive on, programming my operating system or taking care of my old Mom…
Applejinx
@Paul in KY: Human (slaves) are cheaper and more fun to build. Doesn’t make them the end point on the ‘cost effectiveness vs. efficiency’ line.
Even if you are fine with starving them and burning them to death and keeping them caged like animals, automation is STILL more profitable when things scale.
It’s like trying to dig a hole through a mountain using the bare hands of human slaves, versus technology. Sweatshops are a productivity dead end even if you don’t care about morality at all.
Cermet
@Humboldtblue: Just stop this nonsense, please. The issue is calling the democratic party the democrat party. It was not calling a member of the democratic party a democrat. Yes, you are correct and this argument is pointless but thugs did and do call the democratic party the democrat party and that is being insulting.
singfoom
@Applejinx:
I’m a developer with 10+ years experience and I’ve interviewed a LOT of junior developers. One, interviewing people for development jobs (or anything) is an art form, not a science. I used to believe in those tests, but honestly at this point, they’re bullshit. I don’t care whether someone has the credentials, I just care that they’re good at problem solving and willing to learn.
There’s an inherent need and appreciation for problem solving in most development jobs, and that’s not something you can teach. But a lot of places insist on you having specific languages before taking a job which is fine, but if you can’t learn a new language on the job, it’s not the right place for you. YMMV
Technocrat
@Germy:
That would have been true twenty years ago for certain. But now that “Working Class Americans” (wink) are being affected by lack of unemployment, the issue is becoming more mainstream. You’re certainly hearing about UBI more lately.
Humboldtblue
@Cermet: I know they do, Cermet, and I know why they do it, I am just wondering from a linguistic standpoint if they happen to be correct.
Miss Bianca
@LAC: Nothing to see here, move along…
Brachiator
@Truegster:
People falsely assume that there is a simple zero sum game where CEO salary equals the salaries of all of the lower wage employees. This is not true. But I have no problem with laws that would limit CEO pay. The impact on wages and prices would be minimal, but it might make some people feel good.
There is a lot of good work by smart economists on dollar menus at fast food places. The prices are, of course, held down, by competitive pressure. McDonalds, Burger King, Jack in the Box, all have Value Menu items and have to keep the prices low. But they can and do juggle the quality of the items. And these are loss leaders that hopefully lead customers to buy higher priced menu items.
I don’t know about where you live, but the fast food places out here also began to accept food stamps (or the electronic payment cards). So, you try to offset increased costs by making it easier for poor people to become reliable customers (reliable income stream).
Good economists also look at the importance of 99 cent only stores to restrain prices. These stores have to find a way to restrain prices even as the wages of their employees increase.
ed_finnerty
@BR: 30000 vs 21000 per day so 50% increase
still impressive but not ridiculous
Gelfling545
@Roger Moore: Exactly. If your business plan relies on your employee benefits coming from the government, you missed a step somewhere. If you can’t compete and pay a living wage you’ll just have to be dealt with by the ” free hand of the market” they’re always yapping about and go out of business.
Paul in KY
@Applejinx: I guess I was commenting on a line in the excerpt Martin had, about the PRC blinking out of existence, If those jobs (from over there) paid a decent wage, there would be hundreds of thousands of people over here who would want them. Maybe they wouldn’t want them after doing it for 10 years, but they would want them at the start.
Tom Q
@Cermet: Referring to “the Democrat party” was a constant in the rhetoric of Sen. Joe McCarthy; anyone using it today is doing it for the same dismissive purpose.
Jeffro
LOVE
THIS
Peter King manages to one-up Boehner: comparing Cruz to Lucifer is unfair to Lucifer
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/pete-king-ted-cruz-lucifer
We may not hit Peak Wingnut, but I don’t think there’s any higher to go for Peak Popcorn than this week, holy cow…
Bob In Portland
Yellowdog
@Tripod: I have come around to the theory that Jane is actually the toxic mastermind behind this campaign. She is so dismissive and mealy-mouthed in her public statements. She is not a political novice; she knows exactly what she is doing.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: In absence of a sudden resource scarcity (say, global warming making food impossible to get), or near complete economic collapse, both which would result in a lot of people dying anyway, I’m not sure how the US will ever be in a position in which there isn’t enough overall wealth to guarantee a basic quality of life for every citizen.
Linnaeus
@? Martin:
If Democrats are going to do this, they need to do it in a much more comprehensive fashion than anyone’s done so far: more robust unemployment aid, more robust training aid, more robust health care aid, etc. This will cost money, a lot of it, and if we’re not willing to pay for it, then the idea is just as much a lie as saying they’ll get their manufacturing job back.
It’s also vitally important, IMHO, to have some respect for the audience of this message and understand that they know what’s going on in their communities. Kay talks a lot about this in the context of political organizing and mobilization, but I think it also applies here. Don’t brush aside people’s questions and concerns out of an assumption that they’re ignorant. Don’t be like the Annie Lowreys of the world and tell them that their difficulties are no big deal because at least they don’t live in Zimbabwe.
Democrats need to do this in a way that comports with longstanding Democratic values. Many of the same problems that we faced in the “old” economy will still be present in the “new” one, and Democrats should be ready to deal with that.
Marc
@Brachiator:
A million dollar CEO salary doesn’t impact workers at a large company much. A hundred million dollars is a thousand a year for a hundred thousand workers, or ten thousand a year for ten thousand workers. And there are plenty of overpaid executives below the CEO level.
The greed at the top has gotten so offscale that it is impacting ordinary workers.
Paul in KY
@Yellowdog: I’ve known several politicians (mostly Repubs) where the wife was the cray cray one who pulled the strings.
Eolirin
I think something that often gets lost in these discussions is that while there can be replacement for lost jobs with new types of jobs, and that while care needs to be taken to make sure that the new jobs pay as well as the old ones, this only really happens at the macro level – individuals and individual communities will be devastated by these sorts of shifts. The 40-50 something coal worker with no college degree isn’t going to have an easy time getting new work even if there are retraining programs or good benefit programs, and his community is likely to collapse when the local mine closes.
There are too many single industry towns that lack the infrastructure to adapt to changing markets and there are barriers to migration that can trap people in those places. There are no easy solutions to those problems.
Brachiator
@Eolirin:
I’d like to see someone run the numbers on this.
Also, wealth is not the same thing as income. There is the presumption here that there will always be some group who can amass sufficient wealth that can be converted into income to be distributed. This is actually a kind of odd trickle down theory.
Also, at some point would you be willing to limit the total population, to reduce the total number of people who could receive a basic income?
Marc
@Brachiator: we manage to cover the expenses of, say, children. And pensioners, and prisoners. In the limit where incomes fall, so do prices, no?
Linnaeus
@Eolirin:
There are no easy solutions, I agree, but I question if there’s any political will to do the hard ones.
Technocrat
@Gelfling545:
And then what? Everyone who used to work for you is now looking for another job. So you take the pool of employers who could compete with subsidies, reduce it to the number of employers that can compete without subsidies, and let everyone rely on THOSE to eat?
It’s sort of magical and handwavy to assume that there will exist a set of hypothetical businesses that will be profitable at any arbitrary level of labor costs, and exist in great enough numbers to support the workforce. Government subsidy is likely if not inevitable, although you could argue about whether the employer or employee gets it.
Chyron HR
@Bob In Portland:
That’s nice, dear.
NorthLeft12
@Craigie: Yeah, I caught that too. Assholes can’t stop being assholes I guess.
redshirt
@Yellowdog: I have an inside source to Jane Sanders dealings at Burlington College and her management style sounds horrific.
redshirt
@Chyron HR: I feel like suddenly the BiP fever dream has broken. We’re free!
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Yes; there’s an inherent limit to how many people the planet’s finite resources can support, given what we can achieve technologically, and you can never go over that. If we were close to the limit, population controls would be necessary.
We’re not anywhere near that limit though. And we’re not terribly likely to be any time soon. Outside of global warming we have distributional and efficiency/overconsumption problems, not scarcity issues.
Wealth is a fuzzy concept in absence of resource scarcity, but it kind of doesn’t matter in any event; the question ultimately boils down to one of two possibilities: we either have more people than we have resources to provide the basics for them to survive, in which case people are going to die, straight up, until that is no longer the case, nothing we can do about it, or we don’t, in which case people not having housing or food or medical care is a result of someone else having a greater share of resources than they need.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
You know one thing that would bring back lots and lots of blue-collar construction jobs that couldn’t be sent overseas?
Rebuilding our infrastructure. Ain’t no way to remotely lay railroad tracks from LA to Las Vegas, among many other needs. But God forbid we should point that out.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne: Or converting our energy infrastructure to renewables. So many freaking jobs.
Eolirin
@Technocrat: So, no, no one makes an assumption about things being viable at any arbitrary wage value. That would legitimately be crazy, especially if phased in quickly. At a wage value in which workers can afford food, housing, and medical care, with a little left over though? Yes, and not only yes, but in absence of that you end up with a lot of unnecessary death, which diminishes the size of your economy.
Remember that for the economy as a whole spending equals income, and that there’s a much higher propensity to spend at lower incomes. Business in general should benefit from increased wages at the bottom via increased demand. And especially so under current economic conditions.
Eolirin
@Mnemosyne: That may not be true in another 5-10 years. Robots and drones are getting pretty sophisticated. :p
les
@Eolirin:
True. And the numbers are coming in, and prices aren’t going up. Think: what costs go into a burger? Capital outlay, ingredients, utilities, franchise fees, taxes, profit, packaging, labor, etc. What portion is labor? If labor goes up 50%, the price of a burger ain’t going up 50%. If labor’s 10%, that’s a cost increase of 5%. And not all of a cost increase translates to price increase. Biz owners and front groups have made this same argument for every change ever, from child labor laws to 40 hour week to overtime to every benefit labor’s ever extorted from their worthless asses. Every gain for labor was going to drive them out of business. Fuck ’em. If nobody thinks their dollar menu is worth $1.05 or $1.10, let ’em die. Somebody else will sell food.
Mnemosyne
@singfoom:
Frankly, most government agencies nod and wink at the use of illegal workers unless there’s another motive for them to get involved. If caught, the worker gets punished far, far out of proportion from how the company that hired them does.
If we ratcheted up the penalties for hiring illegal workers and really made companies who hired them hurt financially, they would stop hiring them, but no one is willing to do that. It’s disgusting.
Bill
@? Martin:
If that’s really their goal, they’ve failed miserably. Apple Stores are among the worst retail experiences I’ve ever had. Disorganized “Geniuses”(the word “genius” has never been misused as much as in using it to describe Apple Store employees.) standing around admiring each other’s beanies and ignoring customers. No way to just walk in to the store, pick up the item you want, walk to a register and pay. And good luck if you need to get something fixed. You have to make an appointment, because of course walking in and just talking to someone is too difficult. Show up for the appointment and stand around while your designated “Genius” finish up a conversation about how awesome Mumford And Sons is. And inevitably have your “Genius” tell you the problem can’t be fixed, so you’ll just have to buy a new one.
I’ll go to great lengths to avoid the Apple Store.
Eolirin
@Mnemosyne: Doing that without having a path to citizenship/legitimate work visas, etc, could result in having a large population of unemployable people who lack the financial means to leave the country though.
We need to do that, but it needs to be part of a comprehensive approach, there’s too many people already here.
Technocrat
@Eolirin:
See, I understand how you can guarantee benefits. The government can do it by fiat. What I don’t see, is how you guarantee wages. Wages are subject to lots of unpredictable factors (profits, market size, traffic, price and demand elasticity, etc.) that simply aren’t under anyone’s control. Sure, you can guarantee that a job will pay it’s employees X, but you can’t guarantee that that job will last any particular length of time at that wage.
Benefits are permanent, or at least predictable. Wages aren’t.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin:
It’s a popular strawman on the part of the people who think the minimum wage should be $0, though. “If we can set the minimum wage to $15 an hour then we ought to be able to set it to $15,000 an hour. Everyone will be rich, right? See the problem, liberals???!!”
Villago Delenda Est
HaTED
Villago Delenda Est
@Technocrat: They seem to be pretty permanent if you’re a CEO.
Eolirin
@Technocrat: You can’t, but you generally don’t need to. Minimum wages at the level we’re talking about don’t generally increase costs enough to be all that disruptive.
Soylent Green
@trollhattan:
Could y’all please stop using Asperger’s Disorder as a ready-made explanation for why certain people are flaming assholes? This is a gross insult to many many people who suffer from this autism spectrum condition (such as my SO) who are very nice people and not assholes. Any good clinician could make the same point.
Cruz being an asshole is just something he is very good at. No DSM classification required.
Mnemosyne
@Eolirin:
Well, yes, there also needs to be a way to help the people who are already here and getting screwed, but unless you crack down on the employers, you’re always going to have more people arriving because there are jobs for them, and then the people who are already here get screwed from both directions.
Since I’m already using the word, let’s admit that it’s like prostutution. Arresting the hookers on the street corner does almost nothing to cut down on the trade. The only thing that does that is arresting the johns. You can’t get rid of an illegal market by arresting the workers and leaving the employers alone to find more worked.
Bob In Portland
@Chyron HR: Did you make up that quote or did you make up that quote? Remember, your candidate bathes in the praise of Henry Kissinger.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: And you yearn to suck the cock of Vlad Putin.
Brachiator
@Eolirin:
We’re not talking about planetary resources, just something more basic.
If you are talking about paying every citizen a basic income for all their life, without regard to whether they ever get a job, then a question arises. If human beings will be by definition surplus, why not impose population controls? Why permit a person to have 3 or 4 kids if those children would never be expected to add to the economy?
The government does not have infinite amounts of money to hand out.
It’s not a fuzzy concept at all, and it does matter. The population of the US is currently 323 million. If you paid everyone the equivalent of $15 an hour ($32,200 annually) for 80 years you have to come up with a big chunk of money from somewhere. You also have to ensure that you have some small group generating new wealth, although I have no idea what their incentive would be to do so.
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: Hmm. BiP fever? Are there still fascists in Ukraine? Yes, even though you pretend there aren’t. Hillary Clinton is going to approve the TTP as soon as she’s elected. The NED is already trying to subvert Armenia’s government.
If sticking your head deeper in the sand cures your fever your fever isn’t the problem. Everything’s still there, even when you pretend not to notice it.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
A huge amount of our current immigration system is built around keeping immigrant workers- documented and undocumented- too afraid to complain about working conditions. Punishing undocumented workers instead of their employers has exactly that effect. So does making work visas tied to the employer rather than the employee.
Bob In Portland
From ConsortiumNews:
No matter how much you pretend, reality is just around the corner and it’s wearing jackboots.
Technocrat
@Villago Delenda Est:
Carly Fiorino would disagree ;=)
singfoom
@Mnemosyne:
@redshirt:
I’ve been yakking about this to my friends for years. I still do not understand why we have not had combined state and federal push to cover as many rooftops as possible with photovoltaic cells. Every single time I fly into Chicago, I see the acres and acres of just warehouse roofs that could have a bunch of solar on them, not to even mention residential installations.
Where I live there are lot of distribution warehouses near me, with more going up all the time, and it seems like a no brainer, build these new warehouses with solar on the roof built in, zero out your energy operating costs and sell the excess to the market.
If only I had the capital required to start a company doing that.
singfoom
@Bob In Portland: Bbi 3haete cto Bbi dyrak, da?
Bob In Portland
@singfoom: I’m guessing most people reading posts here don’t speak, what, Russian, Ukrainian?
So, essentially, I hope you enjoyed your post. It wasn’t directed to me.
Bob In Portland
@singfoom:
When you skipped the class about money in politics you missed why we aren’t converting to renewables. You may not have noticed, but the series of wars we’ve engaged in in the Middle East have to do with controlling petroleum-based reserves. And the probable next President of the US likes those wars. Do you think that there’s any connection?
Nah, couldn’t be.
You folks are willfully stupid.
Mnemosyne
@Bob In Portland:
Bob, if you don’t understand Russian or Ukrainian (or, presumably, Armenian) and keep linking us to articles by supposed “experts” who don’t understand the language, why are we supposed to think you’re an expert?
A Ghost To Most
@Bill:
phoebes from highland park
@Craigie: That’s what hit me, too, when I read it.
Bob In Portland
@Mnemosyne: Don’t know whether or not they know the languages. It’s a stupid, illogical bar to set, though. But then you were the one quoting Yarosh a few years ago about what happened in Maidan Square. Heh heh.
And weren’t you the one who’s sure that JFK’s assassination wasn’t a coup because you would have heard about it, right?
Technocrat
@Matt McIrvin: @Matt McIrvin:
Ironically enough, this is a pretty egregious strawman. But no, “an arbitrary wage” doesn’t mean “a zillion dollars per hour”. It means a wage with no specified bounds. “High enough to be a living wage but low enough not to cause economic disruption” is more of a prayer than a definition.
Gin & Tonic
@singfoom: Понимаю. Man, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s that faux-Cyrillic using Latin shape-alikes. Easily twice as hard as reading properly transliterated Cyrillic.
les
@Brachiator:
We’re already paying that much in total. We need mechanisms to redistribute. If wages had simply kept up with productivity and inflation, we’d be much of the way there. We’ve let rentiers and the 1% capture and keep too much of the income and wealth. When it’s spread out, everybody does better–lok at graphs of income under Dem presidents, it goes up for everybody, not just the top or bottom. Our economy is 70% consumer driven; what do you suppose happens to the whole pie when consumers have more money? What creates more jobs and wealth: Rmoney making $20 mill, or 400 families making $50K?
Applejinx
@Brachiator:
Real question: have you ever, EVER been homeless, unemployed, superfluous? Or have you always been a hypercapitalist coffee achiever? My impression of you is that you’re an awful capable individual (note lack of comma) and maybe you have just never taken your nose off the grindstone.
I had a lousy fall and winter, because my work was in the doldrums: I’ve expanded my product line about as far as it can do in a certain sense, and new quirky ideas I tried didn’t catch on. It felt like I had nothing to offer. That’s bad. Then, I branched out into some new things: mixing, guitar lessons. It turns out that I feel a lot better knowing I did something to help others, that I was part of the world.
I’ve been on Social Security Disability. I’m one of the few who got off it using a PASS plan, and I can tell you from experience it’s way worse than UBI because you’re not likely to become a Fortune 500 CEO from such beginnings, and there are some major penalties for transitioning, so it’s REAL easy to end up in a place where you’re substantially worse off than if you’d just rolled over and played dead, learned to work the system. And yet I still did it.
Why would anybody get off these dependency things? Because people want to matter. Never mind ‘generating new wealth’… though man, I’d like to be the Dorito concession for a UBI world: you have no idea how this would transform small and local business, to set the base wealth level at ‘able to buy things’. That’s more than _I_ can say right now: I can manage food and my bills, provided I can give guitar lessons and mix songs. There’s a lot of economic activity I’d get involved in if I could. I would spend money on things to make and do: I have plans.
It just seems like you have never even tried to be a bored slacker person with nothing to offer, so you have this weird idea that people LIKE being that as long as someone pays for the couch and Doritos. It seems like you think everybody would want to be that. I think you’re mistaken, and it matters: and even the couch people play their role, as consumers, directing wealth to those people who are willing to make and do things.
singfoom
@Gin & Tonic:
Apologies, don’t have the need to type in Cyrillic alphabet much anymore so don’t have a quick keyboard switch setup. I’ll look into it for next time.
patroclus
@Bob In Portland: The nuclear deal with Iran was all about preventing a war with Iran – and Obama, Clinton and Kerry’s advocacy and implementation of it was a tremendous accomplishment – especially in the face of virtually unanimous Republican opposition, who variously want “to bomb the shit out of them” and “carpet bomb” them. These facts seem at odds with your statement. Moreover, under Obama, reliance on solar energy has tripled here in the U.S. – the growth of the solar industry, and the emphasis on it by Democrats, is another accomplishment of the last 8 years, following the previous 8 years, when the Middle Eastern wars got started. You seem to have your facts wrong. Try again.
? Martin
@singfoom:
And that’s really the punchline to all of this. There are opportunities where labor is shifting but ultimately the automation is shifting people to not work (voluntarily or involuntarily). Either we’re going to have to embrace a future where full employment is a lot lighter than what we have now (with pay to compensate – work half as many hours for double the wage) something like universal basic income needs to arrive paid for by the cheap GDP we’ve created.
Effectively, we need to collect payroll taxes on robots.
Grumpy Code Monkey
This appears to be the consensus view of Congressional Republicans who aren’t in the Freedumb Caucus. It makes me wonder if, in the highly unlikely event that Cruz won the nomination, there wouldn’t be a shadow ratfucking operation by Republicans to tank Cruz in the general. Yes, their agendas align for the most part, but if it means working with that miserable son of a bitch, it might be worth postponing in favor of four years of Hillary-bashing (which would have to be more fun).
Then again, my track record on predicting this sort of thing is…not good.
? Martin
@ed_finnerty:
No, it’s 30,000 per DAY vs 26,000 per YEAR. It’s a 400x improvement in land usage. That’s 400 acres of land that doesn’t need to be dug up, animals and plants displaced, water wasted, and so on. Crops grow 24/7 since there’s no night cycle. There’s no water loss to ground seepage or evaporation. And you can build it anywhere – in the arctic, in the desert with only modest changes.
Brachiator
@Applejinx:
You make a huge error when you assume that analyzing a problem, looking at it cooly, is the same thing as lack of empathy.
And I don’t give a lot of biographical details for various reasons, but your impression of me, apart from being irrelevant, is also ridiculously wrongheaded.
I wrote about UBI before. I noted that it appeared to work in a test city in Manitoba, Canada, in the 1970s, but nobody did any follow-up. But no one has seriously considered the implications of UBI in a world where (according to some projections) up to 47 percent of people might become permanently superfluous because automation has eliminated their jobs.
And if you accept the proposition that the world may consist of people who might never have a job, and you insist that they have a right to income to live a productive life, then you best believe that someone will ask the question, shouldn’t we be able to limit or reduce the total population of people whom we are going to pay?
A true, tangentially related story. A friend is a hyper-progressive. She believes that no one should be able to make more than $300,000. After this amount anything you make should be taxed by the state and redistributed to everyone else. She and her family were fairly comfortable, and she had a vacation home in Big Bear, California. One day we were walking to lunch in downtown Los Angeles and passed a homeless person lying on the sidewalk. My friend very seriously, but very casually noted that she thought that all homeless people should be put to sleep, for their own good.
chopper
@? Martin:
with massive inputs of energy almost anything is possible, innit?
Kathleen
@bystander: Is she auditioning for a Fox gig?
Ruckus
@Bill:
He didn’t say it was perfect. It is still better than most of the other stores selling the same types of goods. Yes sometimes you have to wait, but that’s the fault of being popular, not of training. What is good is that when you have a need, someone can help you. Even if it is eventually rather than NOW. Where else do you go to get the type of service that you get at an Apple store? No where that I’ve seen. It does help that the way the products are designed and built around a core concept and that everything flows from that, along with not that many actual choices.
Kathleen
@hovercraft: Yes. National rePublican Radio repeats this trope.
Kass
@gene108: I think using ‘Democrat’ party was thought up by Frank Luntz. I could be wrong, but this usage is a real good way to piss me off, like many others. It’s like someone talking to you nicely at a dinner party, but keeps kicking your ankle under the table.
NotoriousJRT
@burnspbesq:
Pick of a different kind of “litter.”
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Except that’s not at all what I ever suggested; government is not meant to pick up the entire tab, it’s meant to fill in the gaps where minimum wage and labor protections are insufficient. There’s more than enough money in the economy as a whole to do that.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Also, wealth in dollar terms is absolutely fuzzy, because it simply has no meaning beyond what we agree upon; wealth is entirely about resource scarcity, not money, which is a social contrivance.
J R in WV
@Bob In Portland:
So, Bob, how much a click do you get paid by Russia-Insider ???
Because no one here is going to click on that. No one. So your net is zero. Bye!
Barry
@Tripod: “I’m a touch sympathetic for her, like why the fuck a dead campaign keeps running her out there as a surrogate?”
After her performance at Lucent and HP, she doesn’t deserve sympathy.
And anybody who buddies up with Cruz deserves to get humiliated and betrayed.
Matt McIrvin
@Kass: “Democrat Party” as a slur from Republicans goes back way further than that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
It’s at least as old as Wendell Willkie’s campaign in 1940.
However, I also have no problem with “Democrat friends”; that just means “friends who are Democrats” to me.
J R in WV
@redshirt:
And fix the waste treatment systems so they deal with modern pollution, like viagra and valium in the waste stream.
And replace the water systems, so that the water coming to your sinks is purified of everything, not just chlorinated to kill some disease-causing organisms.
And replace interstate and other high-volume bridges and roads.
And stop building new schools every whip-stitch, build them so they will last for generations, like they do in France. Or at least do build new schools where the old ones are dangerous, and can’t really be used to teach modern subjects.
And build a new power grid that doesn’t waste energy, but stores it for high-need events like morning showers.
Building the infrastructure we need on borrowed funds at the current interest rate will provide a major thrust to the economy. It will provide additional taxes a year or two down the road from the beginning of the project, which will need to be planned and organized to last for decades. But we did it once before, when the Democratic party was able to keep the Repugnants from interfering with the big plan. It was called the New Deal.
Rural Electrification was part of it. Paved Federal highways, too. and sewers.
J R in WV
@Bob In Portland:
Bob, there are still fascists HERE in America. We don’t have to worry about those in other countries when we have them in power here.
J R in WV
Can someone release my comment about the need to treat the waste stream for chemical products not allowed to be discussed, please? Thanks!
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
Actually, there are locally owned and operated computer shops that repair and work on and provide professional advice to people not using Apple products. I can point to at least three locally, and this is a small town.
Of course, it’s harder to do that for Apple products, because Apple won’t sell repair parts to independent businesses, will they?
redshirt
@J R in WV: Yep. It’s win-win-win and thus it can’t happen in today’s political environment.