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Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo — Page 152

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Warbler said:

Wait, we’re hacking cars to commit assassinations? I didn’t know this. Who have we assassinated via this method, so far?

I don’t know, maybe this guy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)

Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard A. Clarke said that what is known about the crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack”. He was quoted as saying “There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car. So if there were a cyber attack on [Hastings’] car — and I’m not saying there was, I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.”

That was written 4 years ago.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/03/trumpcare_proves_that_trump_s_promise_to_take_care_of_rural_voters_was_always.html\

According to budget documents obtained by the Washington Post, the White House is mulling more than $6 billion in cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This would help pay for Trump’s promised increase of $54 billion for the Department of Defense. These cuts, which amount to 14 percent of HUD’s budget, would fall hardest on public housing residents as well as recipients of housing vouchers. They would slash $1.3 billion from funds for repairing public housing units, $300 million from rental assistance payments (including vouchers for homeless veterans), and $4 billion in community planning and development grants, eliminating programs to combat urban decline and poverty.

It’s difficult to overstate the harm of these cuts to HUD. Nationwide, the vacancy rate for low-cost units has fallen to single digits, and federal housing assistance has been stretched to a breaking point. “Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing,” wrote sociologist Matthew Desmond in his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Again, this is before Trump has done anything. Desmond also noted that in 2013 “between 50 and 70 percent of poor renting families spent half of their income on housing and between 25 and 50 percent spent at least 70 percent on it.” The cuts proposed by Trump would mean more housing instability and concentrated poverty, fewer opportunities for cities and localities to develop and provide affordable housing.

All of this suffering would be compounded by the rest of Trump’s agenda, from the “reverse Robin Hood” moves of the American Health Care Act to proposed cuts to food stamps and other assistance for the poor. The president’s promised aid isn’t coming. What is coming, however, is increased spending on law enforcement, new contracts with private prisons, and support for draconian policing strategies. Trump will “assist” the urban disadvantaged by criminalizing them even further.

Good luck, poor people!

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Alderaan said:

Warbler said:

Wait, we’re hacking cars to commit assassinations? I didn’t know this. Who have we assassinated via this method, so far?

I don’t know, maybe this guy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)

Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard A. Clarke said that what is known about the crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack”. He was quoted as saying “There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car. So if there were a cyber attack on [Hastings’] car — and I’m not saying there was, I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.”

That was written 4 years ago.

Smells like a conspiracy theory to me.

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SilverWook said:

People are actually buying this?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/09/us/book-best-seller-trnd/index.html

I thought about saying something derogatory about it, but then I realized it made a fair point. But then I read this book and it convinced me that I should actually vote for a Democrat, since there are plenty of reasons to vote against a certain Republican.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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SilverWook said:

People are actually buying this?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/09/us/book-best-seller-trnd/index.html

I dunno. Stack it up against most of the other recent conservative political bestsellers out there: Coulter, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Yiannapoulos. For the target audience, this book is the cream of the crop. Sure, it’s ultimately one single lame joke that’s really long and shockingly expensive, but it’s not easily disproven revisionist history, pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, or white supremacist propaganda, so grading on that curve it’s a pretty impressive literary achievement.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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This is near me: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/03/immigration_raids_allison_hill.html

Some parents are reluctant to drop their children off at school for fear of getting stopped, said Daniels, who is an immigration attorney. Instead, the children are missing classes.

“It’s really bad,” Daniels said. “They don’t just stop the person they’re looking for. They hassle everyone who’s around.”

My biggest issue with how illegal immigration is treated in this country is how we treat those who have already been here for more than a year. Once someone is settled in a place, it really is inhumane to deport them. you are ruining many lives, and that has a ripple effect in making this world a worse place. worse because: more poverty, more crime, less education, on and on.

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What’s more frustrating is when people just say “They could have just legally immigrated. It was their choice to be illegal.” Obviously these people have no idea how difficult we make it for someone to legally immigrate. Instead of pointing fingers at the immigrants I think it could be useful to begin looking at how our system can be improved.

Return of the Jedi: Remastered

Lord of the Rings: The Darth Rush Definitives

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Well, we do have a nod-and-wink economy, and that’s a genuine problem. Huge sectors of our economy rely heavily on undocumented labor precisely because they’re undocumented. Undocumented means various legal protections afforded to documented immigrants are more flexible–wages, leave, insurance, workplace safety. Do they report abuses? Pfft, no. Immigrants come here undocumented because there’s a demand for exactly that. If they had legal status, the under-the-table economy wouldn’t want them nearly as much.

Like the drug war, the problem needs to be addressed at the demand side. It’s not a choice between undocumented on one side and documented labor on the other. It’s a choice between livable wages and decent workplaces on one side and cheap food and labor on the other. We’ve chosen the latter, via a two-tier economy, one for us, one for them.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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dahmage said:

This is near me: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/03/immigration_raids_allison_hill.html

Some parents are reluctant to drop their children off at school for fear of getting stopped, said Daniels, who is an immigration attorney. Instead, the children are missing classes.

“It’s really bad,” Daniels said. “They don’t just stop the person they’re looking for. They hassle everyone who’s around.”

My biggest issue with how illegal immigration is treated in this country is how we treat those who have already been here for more than a year. Once someone is settled in a place, it really is inhumane to deport them. you are ruining many lives, and that has a ripple effect in making this world a worse place. worse because: more poverty, more crime, less education, on and on.

I don’t know, but somehow it doesn’t make sense to me to write the our immigration laws saying “If you illegally sneak into our country and remain here illegally and manage to evade deportation long enough, Congratulations! You win! You can stay!” Sorry, but that is not how this works unfortunately. Besides doesn’t doing that encourage others to attempt to try to come into the country illegally? Also exactly how do we determine who is and is not “settled”? I don’t know what should be done with such people, but I am pretty sure the solution isn’t to just ignore the law and ignore the fact that they illegally came into to the country and are still here illegally and ignore that they have neither citizenship or visa.

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CatBus said:

Well, we do have a nod-and-wink economy, and that’s a genuine problem. Huge sectors of our economy rely heavily on undocumented labor precisely because they’re undocumented. Undocumented means various legal protections afforded to documented immigrants are more flexible–wages, leave, insurance, workplace safety. Do they report abuses? Pfft, no. Immigrants come here undocumented because there’s a demand for exactly that. If they had legal status, the under-the-table economy wouldn’t want them nearly as much.

Like the drug war, the problem needs to be addressed at the demand side. It’s not a choice between undocumented on one side and documented labor on the other. It’s a choice between livable wages and decent workplaces on one side and cheap food and labor on the other. We’ve chosen the latter, via a two-tier economy, one for us, one for them.

Ding ding ding.

Keep Circulating the Tapes.

END OF LINE

(It hasn’t happened yet)

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Republicans had a messed up coalition. They’ve always been lead by rich CEO and Judge Smails country club types, who were happy to flood the labor market with cheap workers and crush wages and break labor unions. But their rank and file members are mouthbreathing xenophobes in the post-civil rights era who were inevitably going to riot against those policies.

Then you have the Democrats, who once upon a time were actually liberals. Then they got taken over by the Clintons and corporatists, and turned into a tail party made up of well-off professionals who benefited from globalism at one end, and relatively poor and marginalized minorities at the other end, with no middle class in between. The Democrats no longer gave a **** about wages or socioeconomic equality–like the Republicans, the professional class were happy to flood the labor market with cheap labor, while the political class looked at these new migrants as potential new voters.

So you wound up with an unsustainable situation which both political parties enabled in order to make themselves richer, without concern for the long-term social consequences.

The Democrats are a joke at this point, because like Merkel and the neoliberals in Europe, they continue to advocate for open borders despite all of the obvious adverse social consequences that such policies have created, just so they can continue enriching themselves while adding minorities to their voter rolls. The minorities get promises that their civil rights will be protected, but the neoliberal economic policies pursued guarantee increased wealth inequality and lower standards of living for those same people.

Meanwhile the Republican party is fracturing apart. The Paul Ryan Republicans are devoid of any policy agenda whatsoever. They just want to run their businesses and make money and who gives a **** about anyone else in the world. The angry rural white voters who used to be their base are now on Team Trump and they would be happy to round up every dark skinned person in this country and put them in concentration camps.

Where are the adults in all of this?

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Disagree on many, many points.

First, Germany. Immigrant minorities gravitate more to the SPD than Merkel’s CDU, so if Merkel’s trying to pad her party’s demographics through immigration, that would be a stupid strategy. Also, it’s much harder to become a citizen in Germany than the US, so many immigrants, whose families have lived in Germany for generations, cannot vote. No birthright citizenship. Immigrants have even less electoral influence there than the US.

“Open borders” is a heavily abused term these days, so I don’t blame you at all for this. Nevertheless, the only open borders the US has are between one state and another state (same in Germany). The international borders are absolutely not open, nor is there any significant group advocating for that in either country.

The US has quite a lot of undocumented immigrants, but at least lately it’s a fairly static amount. The net amount of undocumented immigration into and out of the US for the past decade has been approximately zero–with possibly slightly more leaving than arriving. So the presence of undocumented immigrants is actually a very different issue than border security.

I think “social consequences” needs a better definition. The economic consequences of immigration has been well-studied and there really isn’t much one way or the other. Immigrant communities (documented, undocumented, refugee, etc) do have a lower crime rate than the general population, but I don’t think the numbers are such that they lower the crime rate of the country they live in by any significant amount.

Now I’d agree on some points–the coalitions are shifting, but not as much as they appear to be. Even back before unions had their backs broken, the upper midwest white working class was a solidly Republican demographic, the only question being how many votes the Dems managed to peel off. Reagan Democrats and Trump voters–in that demographic, it’s the same thing really. I’d like to say they loved Dems for strong union support/good jobs and abandoned them over free trade/job losses or somesuch, but AFAICT the evidence doesn’t really support that narrative. They mobilized against welfare queens in the 80’s, and bad hombres today. Lee Atwater was absolutely correct in his assessment of the electorate, and it’s still true today.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Warbler said:

dahmage said:

This is near me: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/03/immigration_raids_allison_hill.html

Some parents are reluctant to drop their children off at school for fear of getting stopped, said Daniels, who is an immigration attorney. Instead, the children are missing classes.

“It’s really bad,” Daniels said. “They don’t just stop the person they’re looking for. They hassle everyone who’s around.”

My biggest issue with how illegal immigration is treated in this country is how we treat those who have already been here for more than a year. Once someone is settled in a place, it really is inhumane to deport them. you are ruining many lives, and that has a ripple effect in making this world a worse place. worse because: more poverty, more crime, less education, on and on.

I don’t know, but somehow it doesn’t make sense to me to write the our immigration laws saying “If you illegally sneak into our country and remain here illegally and manage to evade deportation long enough, Congratulations! You win! You can stay!” Sorry, but that is not how this works unfortunately. Besides doesn’t doing that encourage others to attempt to try to come into the country illegally? Also exactly how do we determine who is and is not “settled”? I don’t know what should be done with such people, but I am pretty sure the solution isn’t to just ignore the law and ignore the fact that they illegally came into to the country and are still here illegally and ignore that they have neither citizenship or visa.

It also doesn’t work very well to punish a settled illegal immigrant, because more than just the illegal immigrant gets punished. that is why this is a tough issue. I think the policy that made the most sense is providing a path to citizenship. it doesn’t have to be easy, but it should be possible.

CatBus had some good points too.

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I don’t object to the path for citizenship idea.