I was thinking as I went to bed last night that my generation foolishly created a Social Security Trust Fund with the idea of saving something to support us in our old age. Foolishly because we don’t have one dime more to spend that we would not have had anyway because we do not have to pay any FICA tax at this (retirement) poit.
Isn’t that exactly what the current generation of workers is doing — not building a Trust Fund of their own; ready to let the next generation be suckers?
Would not make a big lot of sense for one Trust Fund for one generation to always be building up while another Trust Fund was always drawing down, would it? Alternately, it would not make a lot of sense to be building and drawing down on the sole Trust Fund at the same time.
Always a big shell game anyway. The extra FICA money was diverted to pay for on budget items which otherwise would have had to be paid for with income tax — meaning FICA tax up; income tax down. Reverse when it come time to cash the bonds. Then as the Fund inevitably depletes we have to hear cries of: Social Security is running out of money!
Oh what a tangled political web we weave when first we use a shell game to deceive ourselves that we are saving money)
I don’t mean to be mean, but I am not diplomatic enough to think of another way to say it always scares me when someone can be so ignorant about how Social Security…or any “savings account”…works yet has strong opinions about what’s wrong with it.
The Trust Fund is not the primary means by which Social Security helps you save for your own retirement, The payroll “tax” is. But because of the larger than average size of the Boomer generation, the payroll tax was increased so that the boomers themselves would pay for their retirement themselves, just as all other generations have. That extra large Trust Fund is now being paid down to pay for the Boomer retirement. This is no different than you saving enough in your savings (retirement) account to pay for your own retiremement (in advance because there is no other way to “save” for future costs. Under ordinary circumstance the money you save in your Social Security account is used “the same day” to pay for the needs of the currently retired..that is to pay the currently retired BACK (with interest) the money they put in their Social Security savings account in their turn over a working lifetime. As the boomers “age out” (euphemism) the increased (1983) payroll tax will need to be increased a little more…not for the boomers, but for our own longer life expectancy. This was forseen at the time of the 1983 Reagan-O’Neill (Greenspan commission) fix. But Congress chose not to raise the tax to the full expected future need..wisely, i think. not to overburden the then present taxpayer, but to time the increase to match the now-current need… so those paying the increased tax would be those enjoying the increased life expectancy. There are those who think that instead of raising the tax a dollar per week to cover the increasing costs, we should just all be forced to work an extra two years.
Meanwhile the “pay as you go” financing of Social Security is no different from what any savings account, or investment account, does in reality. you get your money plus interest back from the bank when you need it because someone else is putting money into the bank that same day for exactly the same reason you did…they expect to keep it safe and get it back with interest when they need it. investments are less safe, but still depend on someone down the road being willing to pay you “back” plus interest or profit when you need the cash. this is what the stupids call a ponzi scheme, but it is true of EVERY investment. [what makes a Ponzi scheme a fraud is that it has no assets and will run out of “suckers”. The united states has infinite assets, and the people who pay the payroll tax are not suckers. SS has paid every person “back” for over eighty years and can continue to do so forever as long as the people need a safe way to save their own money, safe from inflation, safe from market losses, save from their own failure to save…either from imprudence or from never making enough money to save enough for retirement.
unfortunately, it may turn out that the people are too stupid to understand this.
The ‘full faith & credit’ expectation all Americans have with the federal guv’mint means that no matter what, social security benefits will be paid, so why worry.
full faith and credtit applies to the Treasury Bonds. It does not mean that Congress can’t change the law, and it does not mean Congess will increase the payroll tax to cover the expected costs of longer life expectancy.
the only protection we have from Congress changing the law, is that we can change Congress. that’s what the argument is all about:
Rich Liars crying Huge Terrible Great Big Unfunded Deficit! Get Rich In The Stock Market.
Other greedy idiots crying Make The Rich Pay.
And a voice crying out in the wilderness “its only a dollar per week per person.”
IMO, folks either expect soc-sec to go bust, or that
the guv’mint will bail it out somehow, because it’s
an entitlement. The hand-waving about how it’s financed
includes a belief that some federal department is covering
what is necessary (to keep it afloat) out of general funds.
thank you. this is more important than whatever it is we argue about from time to time.
i need to add, because i always forget to.. that Congress in 1983 also raised the retirement age rather than raise the payroll tax. this is because to a Congressman a balance sheet, even that he knows to be fraudulent, is more real than a sixtyish person, who may well have a longer life expectancy, may be in such physical pain or despair that retiring “early” is worth paying a little higher for their retirement.. which, having paid for it themselves, no one ought to be able to take away from them. the rich (means congressmen these days) have always had trouble understanding why the poor would even want to be able to retire.
[i don’t think ignorance is often intentional, except in the case of congressmen and other liars. But ordinary people, once they have believed a lie they want to believe, embrace their ignorance with a fierceness that might as well be intentional.]
oh, yes.. “may well have a longer life expectancy..”
or may not. “average” doesn’t mean “you.” but the average here is not even honest. the people with the longer life expectancies…pulling up the average..are the “rich”.. the ones who … after the fact…don’t “need” Social Security. had they had just a bit of worse luck they might have needed it very very much. But you can’t expect the lucky to have much sympathy for people less fortunate than themselves. after all, they are the favored by the gods, the meritorious, the rest of us are “losers.”
but no hope to appeal to their sympathy..or even prudence against the possibility that they could end up losing themselves before it is all over. nah, they are too strong and smart for that. but with a lot of work you might convince them that a population of losers will not help them get rich as much as a population of people not living in anxiety and despair.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Why do people support their past ideas, even when presented with evidence that they’re wrong?
The
Commitment Bias
, explained.
What is the Commitment Bias?
Commitment bias, also known as the escalation of commitment, describes our tendency to remain committed to our past behaviors, particularly those exhibited publicly, even if they do not have desirable outcomes…
*
[Commitment bias is the most powerful force exhibited among those that comment their opinions on the Internet.]
what floats my boat is the FACT Social Security can be made slvent forever by raising the payroll tax about a dollar per week per worker “as needed.” There are related facts..such as Social Security was designed deliberately to be worker paid, and has worked for over 80 years worker paid. But that’s enough to go on.
All those other things people believe are mostly irrelevant opinions, false facts..mostly irrelevant, and insane ideas based on half understood damn lies.
Might sound a bit arrogant to your ears…and obviously hard to prove to them as cannot, or will not, see. But you ought to have known that sometimes someone will have the right answer. And when he says there are exactly 26 sheep, while others are saying, no, there are no sheep, or, no there are a hundred sheep, and he offers to take your hand and go into the pasture and count the sheep with you, you might consider taking him up on the idea.
Johnson & Johnson said on Friday that it would break itself into two publicly traded companies, in the latest instance of corporate giants shrinking themselves to please shareholders.
The 135-year-old company, which employs more than 136,000 people, announced that it planned to spin off its consumer-products division — home to Tylenol, Band-Aid, Neutrogena beauty products and more — into a separate business.
That would leave J.&J. with its pharmaceutical and medical devices division, which includes its coronavirus vaccine manufacturing and boasts faster-growing sales and higher margins.
Even as stand-alone businesses, the J.&J. companies will be enormous. The medical division is expected to report $77 billion in revenue this year. And the consumer operations — which trace their roots to the company’s founding in 1886 as a maker of surgical dressings — are predicted to bring in $15 billion in sales. …
(Will one be called Johnson Inc, and he other Johnson Too?)
Employers are still struggling to fill millions of open jobs — and to hold onto the workers they already have.
More than 4.4 million workers quit their jobs voluntarily in September, the Labor Department said Friday. That was up from 4.3 million in August and was the most in the two decades the government has been keeping track. Nearly a million workers quit their jobs in leisure and hospitality businesses alone, reflecting the steep competition for workers there as the industry rebuilds from last year’s pandemic-induced shutdowns. …
Actual hiring has been slower to rebound, however, and was essentially flat in September, as businesses struggled to attract candidates. There were roughly 75 unemployed workers for every 100 job openings in September, the lowest ratio on record. Separate data released last week by the Labor Department showed that job growth rebounded in October but that the labor force barely grew, suggesting that employers’ hiring challenges are continuing.
(It’s actually hard to believe that Dems ‘have a grip’ in DC.
The three factions that make up each house in Congress
manage to keep anything of much consequence from
being turned into law, sad to say. Factions being the
left Dems, the right Dems and the GOP. But having
a Dem majority in each house does mean they get
to hold onto committee chairs & all the clout
that comes from that. That counts for much!)
You might not know this, but…
… Democrats now have a Washington trifecta — command of the White House and both chambers of Congress. If the results of last week’s elections in Virginia and elsewhere are any indication, they may not retain it after next November’s midterm elections. And a decade or longer may pass before they win a trifecta again. …
And employers never lie about how many jobs they could create if only..
..only the workers would work for less pay than it takes to buy groceries, pay rent, buy health insurance, and save for retirement.
and..
i know people who work off the books. i fear for them because they are not paying themselves enough, but they would rather take that chance that to put up with the way they are treated by bosses.
meanwhile that Trifecta is not working very well..because Joe Manchin….and, if one looks closely, the Dems Build Back Better includes more tax cuts for the rich than it does for fighting climate change. unless you count building superhighways and more bridges as fighting climate change.
Innuendo, supposition, conjecture is not a good way to make a point, at least with me. I do not like homework assignments where I have to find the fact you are referring to in your comment outside of your comment. A link would be nice so I can condemn it rather than wonder where your factoid came from or what has prompted you to say such.
November 12, 2021 Tax Policy Center
“The report, from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC), finds that when taking individual income tax and payroll tax changes into account, the bottom 80% of households would save between $700 to $830 on their tax bills next year, on average.
Meanwhile, those earning around $885,000 or more, the top 1% of households, would pay around $55,000 more in taxes in 2022. And those in the top 0.1% — those making $4 million or more — would pay an additional $585,000, per the report.
As you well know, other sites engage in this type of messaging to their readers. Dan and I do not intend for AB to do so. You can write it here and I and others will refute it and/or ask for you basis for making such a statement. Not meant to disparage you. I need a basis to defend you and I will.
as you know, i do not claim to be an expert on everything. i got what i said…after riguring out what you are talking about…from a trusted source i would have as much trouble finding again as you had finding some information that appears to have nothing to do with what i said. i was referring to the State and Local Tax Deduction which, as i understand, was limited…that is the rich could take no more than about 10,000 dollars of state and local taxes off their federal income tax. And that under the current BBB bill that cap has been lifted to 85,000. resulting in a total tax decrease for the rich than the BBB bill budgets for climate change abatement. And in my view..can’t find you a link for my view…the climate change abatement in the bill is questionable …looks to be spending more money (paid to rich people) to do things that will arguably reduce the rate of climate change…things that might in the aggregate to the exact opposite.
Whatever else it is, AB is not a scholar journal, and I do not expect to have to cite where where I get my opinions from. If you question them, be my guest. If I think it’s important enough, I’ll look for a link. But then I would hope you would look for links in the linked article and links in the links in the link until you get back to an authority you can trust.
Meanwhile the numbers you cite don’t seem to me to be actually on point. Maybe if we were civil to each other we could find a way to resolve the disagreement or misunderstanding…if it’s important enough.
maybe if you just asked nicely, “hey, Dale, where did you get that nonsense?” i would either say “can’t remember” and then no one would have to think about it”
or i would think,”gee, maybe i ought to look it up.”
or i would think “this is getting to be too hard” and go listen to Yves call me a liar because I don’t talk in the MMT special code.
I did not get my information from Jacobin, but this seems to also address the data you brought up. I will look further. and maybe provide a cut and paste so the link challenged as i am can at least get an idea what we are talking about and look it up for themselves if it is important enough.
One of the biggest fights at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow is whether — and how — the world’s wealthiest nations, which are disproportionately responsible for global warming to date, should compensate poorer nations for the damages caused by rising temperatures.
Rich countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of western Europe, account for just 12 percent of the global population today but are responsible for 50 percent of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry over the past 170 years.
Over that time, Earth has heated up by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), fueling stronger and deadlier heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires. Poorer, vulnerable countries have asked richer nations to provide more money to help adapt to these hazards.
At the summit, Sonam P. Wangdi, who chairs a bloc of 47 nations known as the Least Developed Countries, pointed out that his home country of Bhutan bears little responsibility for global warming, since the nation currently absorbs more carbon dioxide from its vast forests than are emitted from its cars and homes. Nonetheless, Bhutan faces severe risks from rising temperatures, with melting glaciers in the Himalayas already creating flash floods and mudslidesthat have devastated villages.
“We have contributed the least to this problem yet we suffer disproportionately,” Mr. Wangdi said. “There must be increasing support for adapting to impacts.” …
A decade ago, the world’s wealthiest economies pledged to mobilize $100 billion per year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. But they are stillfalling short by tens of billions of dollars annually, and very little aid so far has gone toward measures to help poorer countries cope with the hazards of a hotter planet, such as sea walls or early warning systems for floods and droughts.
Separately, vulnerable countries have also emphasized that they won’t be able to adapt to every storm or every hurricane or famine worsened by climate change. The world will continue to warm. People will continue to die from climate related disasters. Villages will continue to disappear beneath rising seas.
So, those countries, many of which still produce a tiny fraction of overall emissions, have asked for a separate fund, paid for by wealthy countries, to compensate them for the damages they can’t prevent. This issue is referred to as“loss and damage.”…
as needed means “whenever the Trustees Report reports “shot term financial inadequacy. That means that they “predict” that ten years in the future the Trust Fund Reserve will fall below 100& of the amount needed to pay the next full year’s benefits. Note that this would not mean the whole reserve would be needed to pay the next year’s benefits. Most likely it would not need more than about ten percent of it’s then balance to make up the payroll tax to benefit shortfall. Other things being equal (a “sustainable” payroll tax rate) a recession on the order of fifteen percent uneployment [five percent is “normal”] would take about ten years to deplete a normal Trust Fund Reserve (100% f a year’s benefits).
Because we do not currently have a sustainable tax rate, once we reach “less than 100% of normal reserve it will take a lot less than 10 years to deplete the normal reserve.
and faising the payroll tax one tenth of one percent per year when we reach “short term financial inadequacy” would be “as needed” almost every year for about ten years and then every other year and then every few years and then every ten years and then never again. according to current projections.. the same projections that say Social Security is broke, flat bust! only they don’t say that, they say Social Security will do fine for at least the next ten years but after that the tax will likely need to be raised about 2% all at once. or we could raise it about 1.7% today and not have to raise it again for over seventy five years.
Try to keep in mind one tenth of one percent of a 50k workers paycheck is one dollar per week.
Note I am talking about the tax increase the worker would see. the employer would have to match that. confusing the employer who likes to say “it’s really the workers money” when he wants the worker to think SS is a bad deal (“it’s really two dollars per week!”) and still be able to say “it’s a jobs killing tax” meaning it’s his money and he wouldn’t pay it to the worker if the Social Security law did’t make him.
As for coming out of some young persons pocket, ease your worry. He is paying for his own future benefits, You already paid for yours. See, it’s like a bank account: you pay into your account while you are working and have the money. And the bank gives you your money back with interest when you need it. But the bank gets the money it pays you back from some young person who is paying into his account so he will have his money back with interest when he needs it.
And for those for whom an obscure act of Congress fifty years ago to take Social Security benefits away from an alien communist means that they have no legal claim on their benefits. well, i don’t think Congress will do that in broad daylight to all the people in America, but they might do it in the dark of night in a way the people won’t understand until it’s way too late. Which is why I keep shouting at them…don’t let them do it. Congress can change the law, but we can change Congress. It’s called democracy. And it works if we practice just a little of that eternal vigilence thing.
well, you can count it twice if you want. it’s still what it takes to pay for your retirement. it is really a good deal if you do the arithmetic.
i prefer to look at the self employed person paying both the employers share and the workers share. since the self employed person presumaby prefers to be self employed for reasons, taking on the jobs of both employer and employee i think he could count the workers share as coming out of whatever he would pay his employee, and the employers share as coming out of whatver his boss would otherwise retain as profit.
it’s no big deal unless someone is looking for reasons to feel sorry for himself, abused by having the government provide him with a safe place to save part of his own money to assure he will have ehough to live on when he gets old. or disabled. or the economy changes and his self-employment business becomes obsolete before he has saved enough for retirement. (SS as insurance will kick in at that point, basing his benefit on averaging his lifetime earnings and adjusting the benefit as a percent of earnings upward to get him over the poverty line.
or maybe the self employed should relax “knowing” the employers share for the not self employed is “really” the workers money, because, you see, if the emloyer did not have to pay the employers share he would naturally give that money to the worker… economists say.
god, what a nation of whiners we have become. social security is not welfare. it is not intended to give you a windfall just for reaching 65 or 62. it is designed to enable you to save for your own retirement enough money to live on when you can no longer work…saved from inflation, market losses, self employment losses, failure to save, failure to thrive…not to mention all that theft and moth losses we read about in old books.
oh, hell, yes/ i forgot about “regressive tax, regressive tax, awk, regressive tax” a stupid thing some economist (probably a liberal) thought up to make poor people feel bad because rich people don’t pay as much SS tax as poor people do.
actually, the rich pay more. they pay a lot more. it is their “more” that enables SS to pay the poor a lot more than they pay in. the tax is not regressive it is what pays for a highly progressive program that saves the poor from poverty.
what makes you thinkit is regressive, is that the rich pay a smaller percent of their income for SS than the poor do. They also pay a smaller percent of their income for groceries and housing and clothing… no doubt the liberals think someone should be standing at the grocery counter making people show their tax returns and charging them more for their groceries if their income is higher than the guy behind him in the checkout line. calling SS a regressive tax is like driving down the street and thinking all the houses you see are just “fronts” or stage props. of course we only judge things by their front end. why would we even ask ourselves what the whole thing looks like?
frankly it makes me a little sick to watch people twist their brains around trying to make Social Security look like a bad deal.
As international climate talks in Glasgow dragged into deep overtime, organizers released a new draft agreement on Saturday morning that they hope could be the basis for a new global deal to tackle climate change.
The latest draft, which is broadly similar to one released on Friday, calls on nations to return next year with stronger pledges to cut planet-warming emissions in this decade. Recognizing that countries are not doing enough to prevent a significant rise in temperatures, it urges wealthy nations to “at least double” by 2025 the financial aid that they provide to developing countries to help adapt to heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires.
The latest draft retains language calling on countries to accelerate efforts “towards the phaseout of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, recognizing the need for support towards a just transition.” Behind closed doors, negotiators said, that language faces opposition from oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
If it stays in, it would be the first time an international climate agreement explicitly mentions fossil fuels, which are the root cause of global warming.
That does not mean all of the haggling is over, however. Talks on whether to provide support to vulnerable countries that are experiencing serious climate effects now — a policy known in United Nations parlance as “loss and damage” — went into the early hours of Saturday.
Activists said the newest text appeared to have eliminated an earlier plan to create a “facility” to direct funds to poor countries, and that it does not commit countries to provide funding. The United States and Europe both opposed the loss-and-damage mechanism, several negotiators said. …
Climate activists said on Saturday that they were furious to see that the latest draft of a potential United Nations climate agreement had weakened provisions aimed at helping the world’s most vulnerable countries cope with today’s climate-fueled disasters.
The third and latest draft, released early Saturday by organizers in Glasgow, is the clearest signal yet of what diplomats from nearly 200 countries are likely to agree on at the close of the two-week summit.
But as ministers and others prepared to discuss the draft on Saturday afternoon, a major flash point was expected over “loss and damage” — one of the most politically contentious issues in the negotiations.
“I expect some drama,” said Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International.
The new text eliminates a reference to the creation of a facility that would have provided financial support for technical assistance to cope with losses and damages from ever fiercer storms, floods and droughts brought about by greenhouse gas emissions that wealthy countries have spewed into the atmosphere for decades. That already did not go as far as vulnerable countries wanted.
The new version calls only for dialogue to “discuss the arrangements for the funding of activities” to address poor countries’ needs. …
Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of … surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data — to its vision of connecting the entire world. Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world. …
These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law. The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon. A parade of revelations since 2016, amplified by the whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s documentation and personal testimony, bears witness to the consequences of this revolution.
The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions. …
all true as far as I know. but would we be better off if all this information was controlled by government? i am told that it is.
do you look at the electorate and really have faith that they would save us?
Just 11,000 votes here or there and Trump would be President, but my understanding is that Obama looked on and approved while all this “total surveillance” was being perfected.
I shouldn’t try to be too subtle. The 11,000 votes was a reference to Trumps call to Rafsenberger.
If you think Biden’s margin was secure you haven’t been paying attention to elections in this country much. All I am saying is what the sainted Framers said: “pure democracy” leads inevitably to tyranny.
as for the Electoral College…FDR didn’t have any trouble winning the small states.
FDR had no trouble winning southern states also,
because he was a Dem and in those days, aside from
NY I guess (where FDR hailed from), even the North
East was with the GOP. Something about the south
never voting for the party of Abe Lincoln I guess.
A lot has changed, electorally speaking, in the past
50 years or so. Since LBJ and the passage of the Civil
Rights Act really. And now we have the shrinking white
majority (err, plurality) to deal with.
The following steps must be completed for an amendment proposed by Congress to be added to the United States Constitution.\
Step 1. Passage by Congress. Proposed amendment language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses.
Step 2. Notification of the states. The national archivist sends notification and materials to the governor of each state.
Step 3. Ratification by three-fourths of the states. Ratification of the amendment language adopted by Congress is an up-or-down vote in each legislative chamber. A state legislature cannot change the language. If it does, its ratification is invalid. A governor’s signature on the ratification bill or resolution is not necessary.
On a highly distorted congressional map that is still taking shape, the party has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.
(This is how the GOP gets around the advantages that
again, my guess is that you don’t have to turn on Facebook to get surveilled. any and every electronic communication device you turn on reports where you are and what you called up and stores it in a data base. sounds huge beyond imaginaion to me. well, not quite beyond.
looks a little like the two way televisions in 1984. but we love them.
i think is a natural result of the way brains work. something of a last in first out system functionally but not based on stack memories, but simply weight of associations… so, for example… a lie gets to be believed..evenwithout knowing it…if you hear it often enough it becomes part of the association architecure and does its thing without ever saying a word to you. i see this in Social Security “debate”
People who are on the “side” of Social Security incorporate the lies they are arguing against into the premises of their argument and so defeat their own case. there is a way to beat this, but it takes what is called “thinking” (which is not what other people call thinking). but we mostly don’t have time or inclination to do that.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
and keep on doing in spite of myself. once, a long long time ago I was talking to a college adminstrator and said i felt like The Catcher in the Rye. He said “that’s what everybody says.” I think he and “everybody” were thinking of Holden Caulfield and his tough guy potty mouth pose. I had more in mind the children dancing in the rye so near to the edge. If I remember.
I think Voltaire’s advice is good and I admire the people who take it…without ever having heard about it. Even I would rather mend fences and dig ditches and talk to horses outstanding in their own field, than fight for truth, justice, and the american way. but we are doomed by the sins of our fathers, perhaps ourselves, to warn and watch them fall.
for example, Dobbs here tells us we are eagerly awaiting facebook to provide us with smart glasses that track our eye movements and tell us the player’s statistics only when we glance at him on the tube.
i believe i may have seen something like this in a horror movie. spoiler alert: the hero is killed by his lover when he tries to take her glasses off.
‘for example, Dobbs here tells us we are eagerly awaiting facebook to provide us with smart glasses that track our eye movements and tell us the player’s statistics only when we glance at him on the tube.’
I don’t know about the ‘eagerly awaiting’ comment. I post
stuff like this only because I am something of a futurist.
Yet another crisis is also unfolding for American farm exports.
The same congestion at U.S. ports and shortage of truck drivers that has brought the flow of some goods to a halt has also left farmers struggling to get their cargo abroad and fulfill contracts before food supplies go bad. Ships now take weeks, rather than days, to unload at the ports, and backed-up shippers are so desperate to return to Asia to pick up more goods that they often leave the United States with empty containers rather than wait for American farmers to fill them up.
The National Milk Producers Federation estimates that shipping disruptions have cost the U.S. dairy industry nearly $1 billion in the first half of the year in terms of higher shipping and inventory costs, lost export volume and price deterioration.
“Exports are a huge issue for the U.S. right now,” said Jason Parker, the head of global trucking and intermodal at Flexport, a logistics company. “Getting exports out of the country is actually harder than getting imports into the country.”
Agriculture accounts for about one-tenth of America’s goods exports, and roughly 20 percent of what U.S. farmers and ranchers produce is sent abroad. The industry depends on an intricate choreography of refrigerated trucks, railcars, cargo ships and warehouses that move fresh products around the globe, often seamlessly and unnoticed. …
U.S. farm exports have risen strongly this year, as the industry bounces back from the pandemic and benefits from a trade deal with China that required purchases of American agricultural products. Strong global demand for food and soaring commodities prices have lifted the value of U.S. agricultural exports more than 20 percent over last year.
Still, exporters say they are leaving significant amounts of money on the table as a result of supply chain problems. And many farmers are now struggling to keep up with soaring costs for materials like fertilizer, air filters, pallets and packaging, as well as find farmhands and drivers to move their goods.
A survey by the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, which represents exporters, found that 22 percent of foreign agriculture sales on average were being lost as a result of transportation challenges.
Delays at ports have particularly hurt products that move in corrugated metal containers, like cheese, butter, meat, walnuts and cotton. …
With a critical turning point in the warming of the planet’s atmosphere less than a decade away, world leaders meeting in Glasgow struck a contentious agreement on Saturday to address the climate crisis that falls well short of blunting its worst effects.
Reached after lengthy late-night negotiations, the agreement pushes countries to strengthen near-term climate targets and move away from fossil fuels;indeed, it is the first time fossil fuels are actually named in a global climate accord. But it did not call for the kind of aggressive action that scientists say is necessary to avert disastrous climate problems, such as plans for a rapid shift off of fossil fuels to keep atmospheric warming in check. …
The United Nations climate talks, called COP26, ended Saturday evening in Glasgow with the issuance of a final agreement that Alok Sharma, the session’s president and a Cabinet minister in the United Kingdom, called “imperfect” but said showed “consensus and support.”
US climate envoy John Kerry, who led the country’s efforts to reclaim its position as a global leader, said that the agreement “raises ambition,” and that “we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
The Glasgow talks were not devoid of successes. There were agreements to cut methane emissions, phase out fossil fuel vehicles, and more. But world leaders failed on several key points, including steps that limit the warming of the planet to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, as set by the Paris Agreement.
Instead, global warming would rise by a calamitous 2.4 degrees under emissions pledges made by countries in advance of the Glasgow meeting, according to an analysis by Carbon Action Tracker.
The nearly 200 participating nations could not even agree to eventually phase out the use of fossil fuels, a move seen as a fundamental benchmark.
“Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement following the closure of the Glasgow meeting. Guterres called for the phasing out of coal and putting a price on carbon emissions,and for developed nations to make good on a pledge to provide $100 billion in climate financing to support developing countries.
“We did not achieve these goals at this conference. But we have some building blocks for progress.” …
… The new deal will not, on its own, solve global warming, despite the urgent demands of many of the thousands of politicians, environmentalists and protesters who gathered at the Glasgow climate summit. Its success or failure will hinge on whether world leaders now follow through with new policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And the deal still leaves vulnerable countries far short of the funds they need to cope with increasing weather disasters.
The talks underscored the complexity of trying to persuade scores of countries, each with its own economic interests and domestic politics, to act in unison for the greater good.
But the agreement established a clear consensus that all nations must do much more, immediately, to prevent a harrowing rise in global temperatures. And it set up transparency rules to hold countries accountable for the progress they make or fail to make. …
Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to focus on the metaverse — a more fully embodied version of the Internet that people will access through virtual reality and augmented reality devices. Because Zuckerberg foresees the metaverse going mainstream in the next five to 10 years, he has changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms. And in what could become a remarkable case of life imitating art, Meta plans on releasing a virtual reality headset that tracks users’ eyes.
… we should acknowledge Meta has too much business savvy to throw away $10 billion this year on a project that lacks a serious financial upside. After all, eye tracking is the Holy Grail of advertising. Moving beyond tracking clicks on the commercial Internet could someday generate a fortune. And let’s face it, distrust has never slowed Zuckerberg down.
Although multiple companies, including Microsoft and Snap, are contributing to the creation of a metaverse, Zuckerberg emphasizes that it will have a single “defining quality”: the feeling of presence. For example, Zuckerberg’s launch video opens with him waxing poetic about users jumping into a virtual reality home space that recreates aspects of their existing homes, contains creative objects that don’t exist in the real world, and offers a dramatic view of whatever the user finds moving. …
<a href=”https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/12/opinion/facebooks-next-privacy-nightmare-will-be-sight-see/?event=event25″>Facebook’s next privacy nightmare will be a sight to see</a>
Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to focus on the metaverse — a more fully embodied version of the Internet that people will access through virtual reality and augmented reality devices. Because Zuckerberg foresees the metaverse going mainstream in the next five to 10 years, he has changed the company’s name to Meta Platforms. And in what could become a remarkable case of life imitating art, Meta plans on releasing a virtual reality headset that tracks users’ eyes. …
… we should acknowledge Meta has too much business savvy to throw away $10 billion this year on a project that lacks a serious financial upside. After all, eye tracking is the Holy Grail of advertising. Moving beyond tracking clicks on the commercial Internet could someday generate a fortune. And let’s face it, distrust has never slowed Zuckerberg down.
Although multiple companies, including Microsoft and Snap, are contributing to the creation of a metaverse, Zuckerberg emphasizes that it will have a single “defining quality”: the feeling of presence. For example, Zuckerberg’s launch video opens with him waxing poetic about users jumping into a virtual reality home space that recreates aspects of their existing homes, contains creative objects that don’t exist in the real world, and offers a dramatic view of whatever the user finds moving.
…
Eye-tracking technology is also likely to play an important role in augmented reality glasses like future versions of the ones Facebook has rolled out with Ray-Ban. When these glasses overlay digital elements like text and images on your view of the world, their knowing where you’re looking will make it possible for them to do it in a minimally distracting way. Imagine, for example, an augmented reality sports app that shows statistics for a player only when the user is looking at them. …
[i have trouble managing the out of sequence “conversations” that seem to dead end with no “Reply” option.]
you said, “I don’t know about the ‘eagerly awaiting’ comment. I post
stuff like this only because I am something of a futurist.
I have never used Facebook, and never will, BTW.”
this [my comment here] is unimportant observation re difficulties of communication, not any kind of criticism at all.:
my earlier comment, to which yours quoted here is a reply, did not mean to imply that you said we were eagerly awaiting. it was my observation about “us” which i hoped i made clear by citing the hero killed by his lover when he tried to take her glasses off. “we” as a society are eagerly awaiting our own self-destruction. we don’t really need the magic glasses, the internet itself is doing the job without them. hell, we were doing the job ourselves just fine before the internet.
i guess being “a futurist” means you post comments about what other people say about, or plan for, the future without having any opinion about them.
as for your not using Facebook: good for you. are you using AB to take its place?
i don’t see the slip or typo you are referring to. I said I may be using AB as a kind of Facebook, or I might as well be using AB as a kind of facebook.
I don’t use facebook but I suppose it is a way for friends to get together on the internet for whatever friends get together on the internet for. I can’t see that is very different from what we do on AB…except we theoretically talk
i don’t see the slip or typo you are referring to. I said I may be using AB as a kind of Facebook, or I might as well be using AB as a kind of facebook.
I don’t use facebook but I suppose it is a way for friends to get together on the internet for whatever friends get together on the internet for. I can’t see that is very different from what we do on AB…except we theoretically talk about economics or politics and don’t (theoretically) have to be “friends? whenever the ads let us see what we are typing, or AB doesn’t freeze up for unknown reasons and wipe out everything we are trying to say.
I was thinking as I went to bed last night that my generation foolishly created a Social Security Trust Fund with the idea of saving something to support us in our old age. Foolishly because we don’t have one dime more to spend that we would not have had anyway because we do not have to pay any FICA tax at this (retirement) poit.
Isn’t that exactly what the current generation of workers is doing — not building a Trust Fund of their own; ready to let the next generation be suckers?
Would not make a big lot of sense for one Trust Fund for one generation to always be building up while another Trust Fund was always drawing down, would it? Alternately, it would not make a lot of sense to be building and drawing down on the sole Trust Fund at the same time.
Always a big shell game anyway. The extra FICA money was diverted to pay for on budget items which otherwise would have had to be paid for with income tax — meaning FICA tax up; income tax down. Reverse when it come time to cash the bonds. Then as the Fund inevitably depletes we have to hear cries of: Social Security is running out of money!
Oh what a tangled political web we weave when first we use a shell game to deceive ourselves that we are saving money)
Denis
I don’t mean to be mean, but I am not diplomatic enough to think of another way to say it always scares me when someone can be so ignorant about how Social Security…or any “savings account”…works yet has strong opinions about what’s wrong with it.
The Trust Fund is not the primary means by which Social Security helps you save for your own retirement, The payroll “tax” is. But because of the larger than average size of the Boomer generation, the payroll tax was increased so that the boomers themselves would pay for their retirement themselves, just as all other generations have. That extra large Trust Fund is now being paid down to pay for the Boomer retirement. This is no different than you saving enough in your savings (retirement) account to pay for your own retiremement (in advance because there is no other way to “save” for future costs. Under ordinary circumstance the money you save in your Social Security account is used “the same day” to pay for the needs of the currently retired..that is to pay the currently retired BACK (with interest) the money they put in their Social Security savings account in their turn over a working lifetime. As the boomers “age out” (euphemism) the increased (1983) payroll tax will need to be increased a little more…not for the boomers, but for our own longer life expectancy. This was forseen at the time of the 1983 Reagan-O’Neill (Greenspan commission) fix. But Congress chose not to raise the tax to the full expected future need..wisely, i think. not to overburden the then present taxpayer, but to time the increase to match the now-current need… so those paying the increased tax would be those enjoying the increased life expectancy. There are those who think that instead of raising the tax a dollar per week to cover the increasing costs, we should just all be forced to work an extra two years.
Meanwhile the “pay as you go” financing of Social Security is no different from what any savings account, or investment account, does in reality. you get your money plus interest back from the bank when you need it because someone else is putting money into the bank that same day for exactly the same reason you did…they expect to keep it safe and get it back with interest when they need it. investments are less safe, but still depend on someone down the road being willing to pay you “back” plus interest or profit when you need the cash. this is what the stupids call a ponzi scheme, but it is true of EVERY investment. [what makes a Ponzi scheme a fraud is that it has no assets and will run out of “suckers”. The united states has infinite assets, and the people who pay the payroll tax are not suckers. SS has paid every person “back” for over eighty years and can continue to do so forever as long as the people need a safe way to save their own money, safe from inflation, safe from market losses, save from their own failure to save…either from imprudence or from never making enough money to save enough for retirement.
unfortunately, it may turn out that the people are too stupid to understand this.
I could explain this further, but what’s the use?
The ‘full faith & credit’ expectation all Americans have with the federal guv’mint means that no matter what, social security benefits will be paid, so why worry.
Dobbs,
is this humor?
full faith and credtit applies to the Treasury Bonds. It does not mean that Congress can’t change the law, and it does not mean Congess will increase the payroll tax to cover the expected costs of longer life expectancy.
the only protection we have from Congress changing the law, is that we can change Congress. that’s what the argument is all about:
Rich Liars crying Huge Terrible Great Big Unfunded Deficit! Get Rich In The Stock Market.
Other greedy idiots crying Make The Rich Pay.
And a voice crying out in the wilderness “its only a dollar per week per person.”
full faith and credit applies to
IMO, folks either expect soc-sec to go bust, or that
the guv’mint will bail it out somehow, because it’s
an entitlement. The hand-waving about how it’s financed
includes a belief that some federal department is covering
what is necessary (to keep it afloat) out of general funds.
Believe whatever ‘floats yer boat’.
Thx, saved me the time. and I agree there is no use to explain further. such ignorance has to be intentional.
EMichael
thank you. this is more important than whatever it is we argue about from time to time.
i need to add, because i always forget to.. that Congress in 1983 also raised the retirement age rather than raise the payroll tax. this is because to a Congressman a balance sheet, even that he knows to be fraudulent, is more real than a sixtyish person, who may well have a longer life expectancy, may be in such physical pain or despair that retiring “early” is worth paying a little higher for their retirement.. which, having paid for it themselves, no one ought to be able to take away from them. the rich (means congressmen these days) have always had trouble understanding why the poor would even want to be able to retire.
[i don’t think ignorance is often intentional, except in the case of congressmen and other liars. But ordinary people, once they have believed a lie they want to believe, embrace their ignorance with a fierceness that might as well be intentional.]
oh, yes.. “may well have a longer life expectancy..”
or may not. “average” doesn’t mean “you.” but the average here is not even honest. the people with the longer life expectancies…pulling up the average..are the “rich”.. the ones who … after the fact…don’t “need” Social Security. had they had just a bit of worse luck they might have needed it very very much. But you can’t expect the lucky to have much sympathy for people less fortunate than themselves. after all, they are the favored by the gods, the meritorious, the rest of us are “losers.”
but no hope to appeal to their sympathy..or even prudence against the possibility that they could end up losing themselves before it is all over. nah, they are too strong and smart for that. but with a lot of work you might convince them that a population of losers will not help them get rich as much as a population of people not living in anxiety and despair.
Why do people support their past ideas, even when presented with evidence that they’re wrong?
The
Commitment Bias
, explained.
What is the Commitment Bias?
Commitment bias, also known as the escalation of commitment, describes our tendency to remain committed to our past behaviors, particularly those exhibited publicly, even if they do not have desirable outcomes…
*
[Commitment bias is the most powerful force exhibited among those that comment their opinions on the Internet.]
Fred C. Dobbs
what floats my boat is the FACT Social Security can be made slvent forever by raising the payroll tax about a dollar per week per worker “as needed.” There are related facts..such as Social Security was designed deliberately to be worker paid, and has worked for over 80 years worker paid. But that’s enough to go on.
All those other things people believe are mostly irrelevant opinions, false facts..mostly irrelevant, and insane ideas based on half understood damn lies.
Might sound a bit arrogant to your ears…and obviously hard to prove to them as cannot, or will not, see. But you ought to have known that sometimes someone will have the right answer. And when he says there are exactly 26 sheep, while others are saying, no, there are no sheep, or, no there are a hundred sheep, and he offers to take your hand and go into the pasture and count the sheep with you, you might consider taking him up on the idea.
If ‘Social Security can be made solvent forever by raising the
payroll tax about a dollar per week per worker “as needed.”’
is all that’s needed to keep my benefits (and Mrs Fred’s too)
arriving every month, and that this is coming out of the
pockets of those currently paying such taxes (not us), then
I am all for that. But, what does “as needed” mean exactly?
Johnson & Johnson will break itself into two companies
(Will one be called Johnson Inc, and he other Johnson Too?)
The number of workers quitting their jobs in September was the highest on record.
Democrats May Have a Long Wait if They Lose Their Grip on Washington
(It’s actually hard to believe that Dems ‘have a grip’ in DC.
The three factions that make up each house in Congress
manage to keep anything of much consequence from
being turned into law, sad to say. Factions being the
left Dems, the right Dems and the GOP. But having
a Dem majority in each house does mean they get
to hold onto committee chairs & all the clout
that comes from that. That counts for much!)
You might not know this, but…
And employers never lie about how many jobs they could create if only..
..only the workers would work for less pay than it takes to buy groceries, pay rent, buy health insurance, and save for retirement.
and..
i know people who work off the books. i fear for them because they are not paying themselves enough, but they would rather take that chance that to put up with the way they are treated by bosses.
meanwhile that Trifecta is not working very well..because Joe Manchin….and, if one looks closely, the Dems Build Back Better includes more tax cuts for the rich than it does for fighting climate change. unless you count building superhighways and more bridges as fighting climate change.
Dale:
Innuendo, supposition, conjecture is not a good way to make a point, at least with me. I do not like homework assignments where I have to find the fact you are referring to in your comment outside of your comment. A link would be nice so I can condemn it rather than wonder where your factoid came from or what has prompted you to say such.
November 12, 2021 Tax Policy Center
“The report, from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC), finds that when taking individual income tax and payroll tax changes into account, the bottom 80% of households would save between $700 to $830 on their tax bills next year, on average.
Meanwhile, those earning around $885,000 or more, the top 1% of households, would pay around $55,000 more in taxes in 2022. And those in the top 0.1% — those making $4 million or more — would pay an additional $585,000, per the report.
Tax Policy Center, T21-0255 – Build Back Better Act as Reported by House Budget Committee, by Expanded Cash Income Percentile, 2022
As you well know, other sites engage in this type of messaging to their readers. Dan and I do not intend for AB to do so. You can write it here and I and others will refute it and/or ask for you basis for making such a statement. Not meant to disparage you. I need a basis to defend you and I will.
Thank you.
Run
as you know, i do not claim to be an expert on everything. i got what i said…after riguring out what you are talking about…from a trusted source i would have as much trouble finding again as you had finding some information that appears to have nothing to do with what i said. i was referring to the State and Local Tax Deduction which, as i understand, was limited…that is the rich could take no more than about 10,000 dollars of state and local taxes off their federal income tax. And that under the current BBB bill that cap has been lifted to 85,000. resulting in a total tax decrease for the rich than the BBB bill budgets for climate change abatement. And in my view..can’t find you a link for my view…the climate change abatement in the bill is questionable …looks to be spending more money (paid to rich people) to do things that will arguably reduce the rate of climate change…things that might in the aggregate to the exact opposite.
Whatever else it is, AB is not a scholar journal, and I do not expect to have to cite where where I get my opinions from. If you question them, be my guest. If I think it’s important enough, I’ll look for a link. But then I would hope you would look for links in the linked article and links in the links in the link until you get back to an authority you can trust.
Meanwhile the numbers you cite don’t seem to me to be actually on point. Maybe if we were civil to each other we could find a way to resolve the disagreement or misunderstanding…if it’s important enough.
maybe if you just asked nicely, “hey, Dale, where did you get that nonsense?” i would either say “can’t remember” and then no one would have to think about it”
or i would think,”gee, maybe i ought to look it up.”
or i would think “this is getting to be too hard” and go listen to Yves call me a liar because I don’t talk in the MMT special code.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/congressional-budget-office-reconciliation-bbb-gottheimer-dems
Run,
I did not get my information from Jacobin, but this seems to also address the data you brought up. I will look further. and maybe provide a cut and paste so the link challenged as i am can at least get an idea what we are talking about and look it up for themselves if it is important enough.
Who Has The Most Historical Responsibility for Climate Change?
Fred C. Dobbs
as needed means “whenever the Trustees Report reports “shot term financial inadequacy. That means that they “predict” that ten years in the future the Trust Fund Reserve will fall below 100& of the amount needed to pay the next full year’s benefits. Note that this would not mean the whole reserve would be needed to pay the next year’s benefits. Most likely it would not need more than about ten percent of it’s then balance to make up the payroll tax to benefit shortfall. Other things being equal (a “sustainable” payroll tax rate) a recession on the order of fifteen percent uneployment [five percent is “normal”] would take about ten years to deplete a normal Trust Fund Reserve (100% f a year’s benefits).
Because we do not currently have a sustainable tax rate, once we reach “less than 100% of normal reserve it will take a lot less than 10 years to deplete the normal reserve.
and faising the payroll tax one tenth of one percent per year when we reach “short term financial inadequacy” would be “as needed” almost every year for about ten years and then every other year and then every few years and then every ten years and then never again. according to current projections.. the same projections that say Social Security is broke, flat bust! only they don’t say that, they say Social Security will do fine for at least the next ten years but after that the tax will likely need to be raised about 2% all at once. or we could raise it about 1.7% today and not have to raise it again for over seventy five years.
Try to keep in mind one tenth of one percent of a 50k workers paycheck is one dollar per week.
Note I am talking about the tax increase the worker would see. the employer would have to match that. confusing the employer who likes to say “it’s really the workers money” when he wants the worker to think SS is a bad deal (“it’s really two dollars per week!”) and still be able to say “it’s a jobs killing tax” meaning it’s his money and he wouldn’t pay it to the worker if the Social Security law did’t make him.
As for coming out of some young persons pocket, ease your worry. He is paying for his own future benefits, You already paid for yours. See, it’s like a bank account: you pay into your account while you are working and have the money. And the bank gives you your money back with interest when you need it. But the bank gets the money it pays you back from some young person who is paying into his account so he will have his money back with interest when he needs it.
And for those for whom an obscure act of Congress fifty years ago to take Social Security benefits away from an alien communist means that they have no legal claim on their benefits. well, i don’t think Congress will do that in broad daylight to all the people in America, but they might do it in the dark of night in a way the people won’t understand until it’s way too late. Which is why I keep shouting at them…don’t let them do it. Congress can change the law, but we can change Congress. It’s called democracy. And it works if we practice just a little of that eternal vigilence thing.
So, ‘raising the payroll tax about a dollar per week per worker “as needed.”’
actually means ‘a few dollars MORE whenever necessary, as needed’. So be it.
I sort of figured that.
What is wrong with this is that self-employed people (*) have to
pay this regressive ‘tax’ twice, once for themselves and again
for the erstwhile ’employer portion’. The US does this sort of
funding all too often (as with medical coverage.) It needs to be
connected to progressive general income (& wealth) taxation.
(* – of which we seem to have more of, every year.)
well, you can count it twice if you want. it’s still what it takes to pay for your retirement. it is really a good deal if you do the arithmetic.
i prefer to look at the self employed person paying both the employers share and the workers share. since the self employed person presumaby prefers to be self employed for reasons, taking on the jobs of both employer and employee i think he could count the workers share as coming out of whatever he would pay his employee, and the employers share as coming out of whatver his boss would otherwise retain as profit.
it’s no big deal unless someone is looking for reasons to feel sorry for himself, abused by having the government provide him with a safe place to save part of his own money to assure he will have ehough to live on when he gets old. or disabled. or the economy changes and his self-employment business becomes obsolete before he has saved enough for retirement. (SS as insurance will kick in at that point, basing his benefit on averaging his lifetime earnings and adjusting the benefit as a percent of earnings upward to get him over the poverty line.
or maybe the self employed should relax “knowing” the employers share for the not self employed is “really” the workers money, because, you see, if the emloyer did not have to pay the employers share he would naturally give that money to the worker… economists say.
god, what a nation of whiners we have become. social security is not welfare. it is not intended to give you a windfall just for reaching 65 or 62. it is designed to enable you to save for your own retirement enough money to live on when you can no longer work…saved from inflation, market losses, self employment losses, failure to save, failure to thrive…not to mention all that theft and moth losses we read about in old books.
oh, hell, yes/ i forgot about “regressive tax, regressive tax, awk, regressive tax” a stupid thing some economist (probably a liberal) thought up to make poor people feel bad because rich people don’t pay as much SS tax as poor people do.
actually, the rich pay more. they pay a lot more. it is their “more” that enables SS to pay the poor a lot more than they pay in. the tax is not regressive it is what pays for a highly progressive program that saves the poor from poverty.
what makes you thinkit is regressive, is that the rich pay a smaller percent of their income for SS than the poor do. They also pay a smaller percent of their income for groceries and housing and clothing… no doubt the liberals think someone should be standing at the grocery counter making people show their tax returns and charging them more for their groceries if their income is higher than the guy behind him in the checkout line. calling SS a regressive tax is like driving down the street and thinking all the houses you see are just “fronts” or stage props. of course we only judge things by their front end. why would we even ask ourselves what the whole thing looks like?
frankly it makes me a little sick to watch people twist their brains around trying to make Social Security look like a bad deal.
Dobbs
glad you figured that. i probably needed to be reminded that most people don’t know what the hell i am talking about.
A new draft agreement goes up for review
Activists slam the new climate text’s language on disaster aid as ‘appalling.’
Activists slam the new climate text’s language on disaster aid as ‘appalling.’
Facebook & surveillance capitalism
Dobbs
all true as far as I know. but would we be better off if all this information was controlled by government? i am told that it is.
do you look at the electorate and really have faith that they would save us?
Just 11,000 votes here or there and Trump would be President, but my understanding is that Obama looked on and approved while all this “total surveillance” was being perfected.
Perpetuating the big lie?
Biden won the popular vote by a substantial
margin over Trump, about 7 million votes.
All progressives know this is what matters,
even if the Electoral College disagrees.
I shouldn’t try to be too subtle. The 11,000 votes was a reference to Trumps call to Rafsenberger.
If you think Biden’s margin was secure you haven’t been paying attention to elections in this country much. All I am saying is what the sainted Framers said: “pure democracy” leads inevitably to tyranny.
as for the Electoral College…FDR didn’t have any trouble winning the small states.
FDR had no trouble winning southern states also,
because he was a Dem and in those days, aside from
NY I guess (where FDR hailed from), even the North
East was with the GOP. Something about the south
never voting for the party of Abe Lincoln I guess.
A lot has changed, electorally speaking, in the past
50 years or so. Since LBJ and the passage of the Civil
Rights Act really. And now we have the shrinking white
majority (err, plurality) to deal with.
These days, the two parties being mostly entrenched;
only about 4 states matter in presidential elections, so
those states will be very hard fought while the rest just
watch. (Except TX, GA, FL VA, et al.)
As for the Constitution, and amending it, maybe doing
away with the extra electoral votes essentially due to
Senate seats, the same attitudes that pervade the
Constitution (small states matter!) make it all
but impossible to make small states matter less.
Go figure.
Oddly enough, if you take away the electoral
vote advantage enjoyed by small states (all states really,
but more advantageous to those with smaller populations)
– an extra two votes vaguely associated with their Senate
seats …
If you take those seats away, then choosing a President
becomes, in effect, a matter decided by popular vote,
and the large population states have in effect a
larger say in the decision. The ten states with
the largest population have a majority of
votes – period – under such circumstances.
Unfortunately, two or 3 of them don’t as a
rule vote the way the others do.
But taking those extra votes away – disenfranchising
the Senate so to speak – would require a Constitutional
amendment ratified by a majority of states, and that
majority simply does not exist.
Actually, amendment ratification is even
more unlikely, as super-majorities are
required at every step.
The following steps must be completed for an amendment proposed by Congress to be added to the United States Constitution.\
Step 1. Passage by Congress. Proposed amendment language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses.
Step 2. Notification of the states. The national archivist sends notification and materials to the governor of each state.
Step 3. Ratification by three-fourths of the states. Ratification of the amendment language adopted by Congress is an up-or-down vote in each legislative chamber. A state legislature cannot change the language. If it does, its ratification is invalid. A governor’s signature on the ratification bill or resolution is not necessary.
Amending the US Constitution
Republicans Gain Heavy House Edge in 2022 as Gerrymandered Maps Emerge
(This is how the GOP gets around the advantages that
the Dems have while dominating urban populations
in the most heavily populated states, of course.)
again, my guess is that you don’t have to turn on Facebook to get surveilled. any and every electronic communication device you turn on reports where you are and what you called up and stores it in a data base. sounds huge beyond imaginaion to me. well, not quite beyond.
looks a little like the two way televisions in 1984. but we love them.
Whataboutism? Put on yer tin-foil hat!
Back in the day, there were rumors that
a certain guv’mint agency had a tap on every
telephone switch which gave them access to
data on who was calling whom. Ooga booga!
This one I can supply a link to. It’s Edward Snowden
One has to wonder if the venerable US Postal
Service has not been keeping detailed records
one who was mailing letters (& whatnot!) to
whom, over the 230+ years of their existence.
Those dastards!
Facebook & surveillance capitalism
Ron
commitment bias
i think is a natural result of the way brains work. something of a last in first out system functionally but not based on stack memories, but simply weight of associations… so, for example… a lie gets to be believed..evenwithout knowing it…if you hear it often enough it becomes part of the association architecure and does its thing without ever saying a word to you. i see this in Social Security “debate”
People who are on the “side” of Social Security incorporate the lies they are arguing against into the premises of their argument and so defeat their own case. there is a way to beat this, but it takes what is called “thinking” (which is not what other people call thinking). but we mostly don’t have time or inclination to do that.
Coberly,
Surely you are correct. That is why I like my outside work. It is far easier to move wood and dirt in the desired direction than people.
“tend our own garden”?
or, for those who like links: https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/cultivate-own-garden-voltaire/
which spoils it. by talking to much. as i am doing right now.
and keep on doing in spite of myself. once, a long long time ago I was talking to a college adminstrator and said i felt like The Catcher in the Rye. He said “that’s what everybody says.” I think he and “everybody” were thinking of Holden Caulfield and his tough guy potty mouth pose. I had more in mind the children dancing in the rye so near to the edge. If I remember.
I think Voltaire’s advice is good and I admire the people who take it…without ever having heard about it. Even I would rather mend fences and dig ditches and talk to horses outstanding in their own field, than fight for truth, justice, and the american way. but we are doomed by the sins of our fathers, perhaps ourselves, to warn and watch them fall.
for example, Dobbs here tells us we are eagerly awaiting facebook to provide us with smart glasses that track our eye movements and tell us the player’s statistics only when we glance at him on the tube.
i believe i may have seen something like this in a horror movie. spoiler alert: the hero is killed by his lover when he tries to take her glasses off.
link for comment below:
November 14, 2021 at 9:12 am
‘for example, Dobbs here tells us we are eagerly awaiting facebook to provide us with smart glasses that track our eye movements and tell us the player’s statistics only when we glance at him on the tube.’
I don’t know about the ‘eagerly awaiting’ comment. I post
stuff like this only because I am something of a futurist.
I have never used Facebook, and never will, BTW.
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Facebook’s next privacy nightmare will be a sight to see
Dobbs
reply to yours @ 11:55 a.m. Nov 15
[i have trouble managing the out of sequence “conversations” that seem to dead end with no “Reply” option.]
you said, “I don’t know about the ‘eagerly awaiting’ comment. I post
stuff like this only because I am something of a futurist.
I have never used Facebook, and never will, BTW.”
this [my comment here] is unimportant observation re difficulties of communication, not any kind of criticism at all.:
my earlier comment, to which yours quoted here is a reply, did not mean to imply that you said we were eagerly awaiting. it was my observation about “us” which i hoped i made clear by citing the hero killed by his lover when he tried to take her glasses off. “we” as a society are eagerly awaiting our own self-destruction. we don’t really need the magic glasses, the internet itself is doing the job without them. hell, we were doing the job ourselves just fine before the internet.
i guess being “a futurist” means you post comments about what other people say about, or plan for, the future without having any opinion about them.
as for your not using Facebook: good for you. are you using AB to take its place?
I suspect I may be. or might as well be.
‘I suspect I may be. or might as well be.’
Freudian slip or typo?
Either way, it may be true.
Fred
i don’t see the slip or typo you are referring to. I said I may be using AB as a kind of Facebook, or I might as well be using AB as a kind of facebook.
I don’t use facebook but I suppose it is a way for friends to get together on the internet for whatever friends get together on the internet for. I can’t see that is very different from what we do on AB…except we theoretically talk
Fred
i don’t see the slip or typo you are referring to. I said I may be using AB as a kind of Facebook, or I might as well be using AB as a kind of facebook.
I don’t use facebook but I suppose it is a way for friends to get together on the internet for whatever friends get together on the internet for. I can’t see that is very different from what we do on AB…except we theoretically talk about economics or politics and don’t (theoretically) have to be “friends? whenever the ads let us see what we are typing, or AB doesn’t freeze up for unknown reasons and wipe out everything we are trying to say.