Posts made by Spintendo

Republicans Search for Proof Their Tax Plans Will Pay for Themselves
by Jim Tankersley of The New York Times
Nov. 12, 2017

Republican leaders keep insisting that their plans to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over the next decade will not add to the national debt — yet economic analyses of the Senate and House proposals keep predicting that the plans will do just that. The disconnect is prompting House and Senate Republican leaders to hunt down — and promote — more optimistic forecasts, even if they exclude large parts of the tax bills from their analyses or assume growth-boosting features that are not, in fact, in the bills.

"When you’re in a political organization, you’re constantly model shopping," said Kent Smetters, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush, who is now the faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania.

Republican leaders have said the tax cuts they are planning will essentially pay for themselves. Lawmakers gave themselves, via their 2018 budget resolution, space for $1.5 trillion in revenue losses from tax cuts, but they have promised those losses will be offset by increased economic growth spurred by the tax overhaul. Finding a model that supports the ambitious economic growth projections is critical to their ability to pass a tax cut along party lines. The House and Senate bills have been introduced and amended at a rapid clip, and economists are only now beginning to plug their details into sophisticated models that predict how much additional growth the cuts might produce. So far, every so-called [desc=Also known as dynamic scoring, dynamic analyses predict the impact of a fiscal policy change by forecasting the effect of an economic agents' reaction to incentives created by policy.]dynamic analysis[/desc] that scrutinizes the full details of the bills and factors in economic growth finds that those plans would add at least $500 billion and as much as $1.7 trillion to the deficit.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan insisted last week that the House bill would not add to the deficit, even after an analysis by the independent Tax Foundation found that the bill would add $1 trillion to deficits over a decade. The Treasury Department has not yet released any economic analysis of the congressional plans. Economists at Goldman Sachs said last month that they expect tax cuts to generate enough additional growth to offset about a fifth of their revenue losses, equating to $1 trillion of net tax cuts losing $800 billion on a dynamic basis.

Dynamic scoring is inexact in the best of circumstances. As a result, only a few models have churned out consistent dynamic analyses that attempt to account for all the provisions of the House and Senate bills. The Tax Foundation has one. Mr. Smetters and his Penn Wharton team have another. Perhaps the most important scorekeeper on that front, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, is due to weigh in this week, with an analysis of the bill pending in the House. Ironically, the models that so far have produced the least optimistic forecasts for the Republican plan are the ones that most closely track the assumptions conservatives have long espoused about the economy: that racking up deficits and debt will hold back growth.

That is the case with the Penn Wharton model, which finds that the House bill would lose between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion over a decade in revenue. The Tax Foundation’s more optimistic model projects the Senate bill would lose $500 billion in revenue after growth effects. The one model so far to suggest that the bills could fully pay for themselves makes some growth-boosting assumptions that differ from the bills as drafted, and it excludes the impacts of personal income tax changes on the economy. That model has been criticized by economists who warn of the seven deadly sins of overly optimistic dynamic scoring models. This particular one commits Sin No. 2: Using estimates from 'similar' tax plans which are not actually similar.

Even though Bobby Brown and Robyn fought a lot during his marriage to Whitney, Bobby has stated in interviews before that he believes Whitney might still be alive today if her mother had accepted her as a lesbian, something Whitney's mother Cissy never did, even after Whitney's death.

What Conservatives Mean When They Talk About Government Overreach
by David Roberts of Vox
October 29, 2017

Before Donald Trump, GOP elite policymakers and intellectuals were in the grips of a comforting illusion: that their party was united around the principles of limited government and free markets. That is how the elite — with help from a compliant media — interpreted the Tea Party uprising that followed Obama’s election. Here were patriots devoted to reducing burdensome regulations and defending economic freedom. Post-Trump, this illusion has become untenable. Trump never paid lip service to conservative economic ideology. He doesn’t even possess the vocabulary, the catechisms that virtually every Republican candidate can recite by heart. He bypassed small-government ideology almost entirely in favor of white resentment. And Republicans, at least a plurality of them, embraced him for it.

"We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism," said conservative intellectual Avik Roy. "In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism."

This is evident from a New York Times story in 2016 on "rolling coal," which is the practice of modifying a truck’s diesel engine so that it spews thick, toxic black smoke. Some states, like New Jersey (and possibly Illinois, though not Colorado), are passing laws against it. Rolling coal seems to perfectly capture the inarticulate protest of angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention. This is not some sturdy heartland tradition with which meddlesome elites want to interfere. Rolling coal is new; it just caught on a few years ago. It does not improve the performance of a truck. It has no practical application or pragmatic purpose of any kind. It is purely aggressive, a raw expression of defiance: I can pollute your air, for no reason, and no one can stop me.

And now lawmakers are cracking down on it. But to diesel owners like Corey Blue of Roanoke, Ill., the very efforts to ban coal rolling represent the worst of government overreach and environmental activism. Will Guzzardi, a state representative who has proposed a $5,000 fine on anyone who removes or alters emissions equipment, received an email from Corey Blue, which said:

"Your bill will not stop us! Why don’t you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country I will continue to roll coal anytime I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars."

This sentiment symbolizes the core of the ethno-nationalist perspective, which is that the country’s social groups are locked in a zero-sum struggle for resources. Any government intervention that favors one group disfavors the others. Government and other institutions are either with you or against you. What FOX and talk radio have been teaching the right for decades is that native-born, working- and middle-class whites are locked in a zero-sum struggle with rising Others — minorities, immigrants, gays, coastal elitists, hippie environmentalists, etc. — and that the major institutions of the country have been coopted and are working on behalf of the Others. According to Rush Limbaugh:

We live in two worlds. One world is a lie, where everything is run, dominated, and controlled by the left. The other world is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two worlds ever overlap. The Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper."

That is the right-wing media’s message, delivered with relentless consistency: Government has become an agent of the Others. That’s what ethno-nationalists mean when they talk about big government — not that government is exceeding some libertarian theorist’s notion of constitutional limits, but that government is on the wrong side, backing the wrong team. From an ethno-nationalist perspective, government overreach is when government tells people like me what to do. The proper role of government is to defend my rights and privileges against people like them.

After all, even the strictest libertarian acknowledges that the government has a policing role, to protect citizens from direct harm. What could be more direct harm than having unfiltered diesel smoke blown in your face? But to Corey Blue of Roanoke, Illinois, the government is not protecting anybody — it’s targeting people like him, punishing him on behalf of the liberals, dope smokers, and heathens who prefer "eco-cars." Blowing toxic black smoke into the air "anytime I feel like" is his way of showing that it’s still his America, that he can still do what he wants and doesn’t have to follow a bunch of namby-pamby rules imposed by liberal bureaucrats. He and other coal rollers may dress this sentiment up in the language of small government, but what they’re expressing is a long, long way from conservative economic philosophy.

@Frederick:

it will be a HUUUGE savings for the USA with a wall.

He could raise tariffs on goods from Mexico, but we would have to quadruple our consumption of those Mexican goods for ten years. That 4 billion dollars is less than the 6 billion Trump wants to start with. That's before the wall is built. So when do the savings kick in, 15 years from now when the wall is done and we can sell all those Mexican goods we overbought for 10 years straight to pay for it?

I'll admit, 750 million a year is a lot cheaper than 6 billion a year. But if all the salary paid this year is supposed to be more than the salaries paid 15 years from now (when the savings from having that wall instead of active patrols kicks in) won't a lot a people have to be fired? Trump just asked for 350 million to hire more border patrol agents. That will hire 500 of them, but Trump said he wanted 10,000 new immigration officers and 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, so he still has a way to go. Will these be the people he will be firing in 15 years when the savings kick in?

@Frederick:

Now Jose is about to sneak in behind Irma

The Chicano storm sneaking in after the Lithuanian storm. A bit like Fabian replacing Hurricane Frederic.

@Frederick:

Trump called for a wall to keep out the Mexicans.. but so far it has not been funded.

I thought Mexico was supposed to pay for it. Did their check bounce

Appeals Court Limits Trump Travel Ban and Allows More Refugees
by Miriam Jordan of The New York Times
SEPT. 7, 2017

LOS ANGELES — A federal appeals court on Thursday reopened the country’s door to thousands of refugees who had been temporarily blocked by President Trump’s travel ban, and also upheld a lower court decision that had exempted grandparents and other relatives from the ban.

The ruling, from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Seattle, clarifies, for now, who is covered by the ban. In June, the Supreme Court allowed parts of President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring all travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries, and all refugees, to take effect while the court considered arguments over whether such a ban was constitutional. But the court said the government should let in travelers and refugees with a “bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,” without fully defining what that meant. The administration defined it as immediate family members and in-laws, but not grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.

The Ninth Circuit's 37-page opinion declared that definition to be lacking in substance: “Stated simply, the government does not offer a persuasive explanation for why a mother-in-law is clearly a bona fide relationship, in the Supreme Court’s prior reasoning, but a grandparent, grandchild, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, or cousin is not.” The court mandated that the government resume resettling refugees in the United States beginning in five days.

For Conservatives, Trump’s Deal With Democrats Is Nightmare Come True
by Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times
SEPT. 6, 2017

WASHINGTON — It is the scenario that President Trump’s most conservative followers considered their worst nightmare, and on Wednesday it seemed to come true: The dealmaking political novice, whose ideology and loyalty were always fungible, cut a deal with Democrats. Mr. Trump’s agreement with Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Nancy Pelosi to increase the debt limit and finance the government for three months did not yet represent the breaking point between the president and his core, hard-right base of support, but it certainly put him closer than he has ever been to tipping his fragile political coalition into open revolt.

Stunned and irate, conservative leaders denounced news that Mr. Trump had agreed to rely on Democratic votes to win congressional approval for a temporary extension of the debt ceiling and funding of the government until mid-December.

“Meet the Swamp,” read the headline on the Breitbart News site. Beneath it was a picture of Mr. Trump meeting at the White House with Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Schumer and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. Mr. Trump’s move further destabilized a volatile situation for his party, which many Republicans now believe is headed toward a reckoning it can no longer avoid. The party has, for years, been a group of political tribes gathered under one banner. And while Mr. Trump’s victory and unified Republican control of Washington camouflaged longstanding differences within their ranks, it did not reconcile them.

“I know for certain,” said Jenny Beth Martin, a founder of Tea Party Patriots, that grass-roots conservatives “did not work so hard last year to elect majorities in the House and the Senate and get Trump elected in the White House to enact liberal policy priorities.”

Pelvic Mesh Victims Disgusted At Suggestion of Anal Sex As Solution
by Christopher Knaus of The Guardian
Aug 28, 2017

Australian victims of faulty pelvic mesh implants have expressed disgust at doctors’ suggestions of anal intercourse as a solution to their ruined sex lives.

A disturbing email exchange between doctors emerged earlier this month as part of a federal court class action in Australia, which was launched by hundreds of women who had the devices implanted to treat common childbirth complications. The devices, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, caused chronic and debilitating pain.

The emails reflected a callous attitude towards women among French gynaecologists involved with the company. In the emails, doctors talk about alternatives to sex for women suffering painful intercourse. “It is no less true that sodomy could be a good alternative!” one doctor wrote. Another discussed the difficulty of raising sexual matters with his patients. The attitudes accord with evidence before the current Senate inquiry into the devices, which has heard women were advised to consider anal intercourse as a solution to the extreme pain caused by intercourse. “Our vaginas have been abused by mesh and now doctors are suggesting our anus be abused. Despicable! Only a misogynist could think this way."

The appalling comments show a complete lack of respect to the women involved, and suggest that a woman is nothing more than a receptacle to satisfy men and that "any hole will do". There is a clear pattern emerging of poor processes and advice which is leading to women having their lives severely impacted. The class action lawsuit continues in the federal court.

Canada Introduces ‘X’ as a Third Sex Category for Passport Holders
by Niraj Chokshiaug of The New York Times
AUG. 25, 2017

Starting Thursday, Canadians will have a new way to identify their sex on passports and other government documents: “X” will join the options of male and female.

The decision to allow the third category, indicating an “unspecified” sex, is intended to protect the rights of Canadians to identify by the gender of their choice, the country’s immigration department said in announcing the change. The Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship said in a statement that the designation was added to advance “equality for all Canadians regardless of gender identity or expression.”

The move is part of a broader push to embrace nontraditional forms of gender expression. A law passed in June amended the Human Rights Act to include nondiscrimination protections for gender identity and gender expression. Canada is not alone. At least eight other countries offer a third option on passports or national identification cards:  Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Malta, Nepal, New Zealand and Pakistan.

President Trump and the Baby-Sitters Club
by E. Williamson of The New York Times
AUG. 26, 2017

Why does Mr. Trump’s team treat him like a kid? He is the president of the United States and, as he says, “you’re not.” He lives in the White House, where he gets two scoops of ice cream instead of one for dessert. He is commander in chief, eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” with the Chinese president while he fires missiles at Syria. As he told the Russians, “people brief me on great intel every day,” with lots of pictures and “tweet-length sentences.” Mr. Trump’s staff makes sure he starts his day with a packet of good news about himself, compiled by Republicans who get up early to search for positive stories, headlines, tweets or, failing those, flattering photos. “Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one of the Republicans said.

Mr. Trump likes “unstructured time” to watch TV. His favorite station is Fox News Channel but he’ll watch any show where they talk about him. If they say something bad about him, he tweets. That makes everyone nervous. His staffers try to limit his screen time during the day and keep him from “calling old friends and then tweeting about it.” But then it’s off to bed with his phone, and “once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him.” Uh-oh! Mr. Trump says being president is harder than being a real estate tycoon, because, “These are heavy decisions,” and when you’re the president, “people want more and more.” They also try to stop you from doing things you want to do. Boo!

Failing to pass any big legislation, tangling with the courts on his executive orders, and worrying about the F.B.I. investigation into his team’s contacts with Russia makes Mr. Trump grouchy. He screams at the television, at staffers, and at Republican legislators, demanding that somebody make it stop. But when Mr. Trump’s advisers tell him what he might do, he likes doing the opposite — like when he fired James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., or stared at the solar eclipse. After he blurted out secrets to Russian officials in the Oval Office, his team worried about “leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders.” H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, tries to correct the president and keep him out of trouble. The president calls General McMaster “a pain.”

When Mr. Trump has one of those “moods where sometimes he wants to blow everything up,” his staff takes him outside. He sat in an 18-wheeler in the White House driveway one time. “Honk, honk!” went the horn. He sat in a red fire truck, too. “Where’s the fire?” Mr. Trump asked Vice President Mike Pence. “Put it out fast!” Mr. Trump went to Saudi Arabia, where they gave him steak and ketchup and put his photo on the side of a building. But most of all Mr. Trump likes when his staff plans field trips to rallies in red states, where he can campaign for president again.

Those rallies are fun, but back at the White House, nothing gets done and the president’s worn-out minders are warring among themselves. So they got John Kelly to be the White House chief of staff and enforce new house rules. Mr. Kelly makes sure the Oval Office door stays closed, keeping the president inside and the staff and random buddies out. No more visiting Mr. Trump without an appointment — that means you, too, Ivanka! No more back-stabbing. No more slipping the president goofy website stories that he confuses with facts. No more secretive executive orders, and no official phone calls without Mr. Kelly on the line. No more impromptu events. No more Mooch. And no more Bannon. But Mr. Trump keeps getting into trouble. He says the wrong things about neo-Nazis, and threatens to shut down the government unless Congress gives him money for the border wall that he said Mexico would pay for. He is bullying his allies and stomping all over his agenda. And, oh, does he tweet and yell.

Mr. Kelly is a tough guy. He was a general in the Marine Corps and commanded American troops in Iraq. He has gotten the White House staff under control, but not the president. A few days ago, he said he wouldn’t even try. Uh-oh!

Jamie xx featuring Romy
SeeSaw (Four Tet remix)

Irish fighter Conor McGregor looks good in advance of his boxing match tonight against Floyd Mayweather. Too bad he's gonna lose.  :blownose: Alas, I'm sure the $30 million paycheck he'll receive makes up for that.

@Frederick:

the commander of the 7th fleet was scheduled to retire in a few weeks.. but instead of waiting, they dismissed him NOW.

In the first incident on January 31 the guided-missile cruiser Antietam ran aground in Tokyo Bay. On May 9 the guided-missile cruiser Lake Champlain collided with a South Korean fishing vessel. Questions of whether the sailors were being properly trained and supported caused the admiral at that time to announce his plan to retire, in September. Then came the accidents on June 17 and August 21, which accelerated those plans.

Grizzly Bear
Mourning Sound

Commander of Naval Fleet Relieved of Duty After Collisions
by Eric Schmitt and Richard C. Paddock of The New York Times
AUG. 22, 2017

WASHINGTON — Two days after ordering a rare suspension of ship operations worldwide the Navy relieved the commander of the fleet that had sustained four accidents in Asia and the deaths of more than a dozen sailors this year. Vice Adm. Joseph P. Aucoin, the head of the Seventh Fleet, the Navy’s largest overseas, was removed Wednesday in connection with the four accidents since January, including two fatal collisions in the past two months, according to a statement by the Navy. The most recent collision occurred east of Singapore between the McCain and the Alnic MC, a Liberian-registered tanker about three times its size.

The admiral’s removal comes as the Navy is preparing to conduct an extremely rare suspension of ship operations worldwide for a day or two in the next week to review safety and operational procedures. More broadly, Navy officials are also investigating the role that training, manning and crew communications may have played in the accidents.

On Wednesday, the search for the missing sailors continued aboard the ship and at sea. The Navy said it was widening the sea search area with the passage of time. Divers have found remains of missing American sailors in the flooded compartments of the Navy destroyer John S. McCain, which collided with an oil tanker on Monday off the coast of Singapore. Ships and aircraft from five nations have been searching for the sailors near the site of the collision, in waters claimed by both Malaysia and Singapore. On Tuesday afternoon, the White House issued a statement expressing “great sadness” over the deaths of the sailors aboard the McCain.

The collision was the second in two months involving a destroyer from the Seventh Fleet, which is based in Yokosuka, Japan. In June, the destroyer Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off Japan. Soon afterward, searchers found the bodies of seven missing sailors in its flooded berthing compartments. After the collision on Monday, Adm. John Richardson, the Navy’s top officer, announced that all 277 Navy ships worldwide would take an “operational pause” to review basic seamanship, teamwork and other “fundamentals.”

More creepy animation from another ministry on YouTube

Sigur Rós
[desc=Icelandic for "fuse"]Kveikur[/desc]

Users of VPNs Might Be Placing Their Data At Risk
by Lauren Silverman of NPR
August 17, 2017

Some VPNs promise anonymous browsing for free, some with additional fees, all while claiming not to share data. But this is not always the case, according to one of the first major academic reviews of VPN providers. Researchers from across the globe tested nearly 300 free VPN apps on Google Play and found that those services don't always deliver on their promises.

"If you're not careful with choosing your VPN service provider, the medicine might be worse than the illness," says Nick Feamster, a computer science professor at Princeton University. He says tens of millions of people have downloaded VPNs — and many don't realize they're not as secure as they claim. What researchers found in their academic review was that nearly 40 percent of the VPN's injected malware or malvertising on user's hardware. And nearly 20 percent of the apps didn't even encrypt a user's traffic.

In one example of this, the Center for Democracy & Technology filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission this month alleging the VPN Hotspot Shield collects data and intercepts traffic. If true, that would be a direct violation of claims by the company's policy to "never log or store user data." When choosing a VPN, safety comparison charts such as this one comparing 183 VPN's can be helpful. Note: you must sort the columns to place VPN's with green boxes (the best) towards the top and the middle and worst columns (yellow and red) towards the bottom. The most important columns appear to be PRIVACY Jurisdiction, PRIVACY Logging, and TECHNICAL Security. You must sort each column separately - which is slightly annoying.

It's been said that the "safest" option currently available is to set up your own VPN server and connect only to that. For anyone willing to perform their own setup, Ars Technica has provided this guide on how to do so.

@raphjd:

The International Red Cross refers to an OPTIONAL PROTOCOL to raise the age to 18.

Canada subscribes to that "optional protocol." So everything you said after that is worthless, showing you have no clue what you're talking about. That's what's pathetic.

The only part of international law which is regarded in Khadr's case is how it is interpreted by the Canadian Charter. The Charter is the only "law" of significance here, and according to the Charter, 15 is a child. I noticed all your pretty "research" doesn't mention one thing about that.

Canada has a duty to protect its citizen children under Section 7 of the Charter. Knowing this, the Court ordered the government to request his repatriation. A Federal Court of Appeals upheld that order, adding that the violation of Section 7 occurred during Khadr's 2004 interrogation. That interrogation was a process contrary to Canada's international human rights obligations and contributed to Khadr’s ongoing detention so as to deprive him of his right to liberty and security of the person, something guaranteed by Section 7 of the Charter. Nothing you've said changes any of this.

@raphjd:

Canada does not have jurisdiction over it's citizens outside of Canada.

The Charter ALWAYS applies to the participation of Canadian officials in acts later found to be in violation of fundamental rights protected by the Charter. In this case, there was significant government participation in the illegal process of the deprivation of Khadr’s liberty and security of the person as it applies in the Charter. International law has NOTHING to do with this point.

More than just a jurisdictional question as you've framed it, Canada's requirement to secure a citizen's liberty and security of the person includes interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel in order to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that this youth has been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of those interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors. This goes AGAINST the Charter's standards regarding the treatment of detained youth suspects. Despite your claim, the court HAD THE JURISDICTION and THE DUTY to determine whether a prerogative power asserted by the government infringed on the Charter and, where necessary, give specific DIRECTION to the government about the REMEDY. In this case, the courts gave that direction AND remedy to Prime Minister Harper, and he ignored BOTH.

As international law is clearly not your forte, why don't you do some studying on the Canadian Charter instead — Section 7 specifically — and when you're all done we'll see how much of it you're able to understand (although my guess is not much).  :blind: