slugsrbad wrote:I mean he is a small business owner now... don't you remember the push back he gave about a minimum wage raise?

I mean, BSG isn't the keystone to someone's life, but that's the biggest change I can recall for him.

Yeah that’s the biggest thing by far. Also the make my college loan disappear never sat right with me.

I think Trump is a lunatic and I voted as such.

phatj wrote:

Bucky wrote:i think i went pretty much backwards of that. OK, not really. I didn't pay too much attention to politics when i was younger, but i supported ross perot because i naively said that 'the country needs to be run like a business'. but the older i get, the more i see how unfair the world is to lots of people and how it is intentionally kept that way, the more bleedin' heart i become.

Pretty much me.

"Bleeding heart" vs rock-ribbed wisdom is a false construct, anyway. Ridiculously so.

i have never even heard of that so i don't even know what that means

I'm saying it's unfair to boil liberalism vs conservatism down to heart vs head. Conservatives have put forth a lot of dumb things -- many in bad faith -- over the past 40 years.

oh yeah, that's preposterous. do people actually think that's real? it's so weird it never even crossed my mind.

seems like the heart/mind thing is much older

i guess that's why us young guys don't know about it

I don't know which way I've gone. The head/heart thing seems specious though. It seems like the trend has been for right and left to become even more caught up in emotional constructs rather than practical ways of addressing things, it's just that one is more focused on resentment and the other on guilt. I do see more attempts to actually right things coming from the left (though often not practical), whereas the right seems focused on sheltering those not affected (usually shortsightedly). So I definitely still skew left, but often for different reasons than say 20 years ago.

In some areas, particularly LGBTQ+ issues, I've moved to the left over the last couple of decades, but I suspect lots of others have as well. Same goes for my views on the environment--but mostly because I think it's a lot more urgent now than in the 90s.

The biggest (and most destructive) trend I've seen take hold in the past few decades has been a rise of narcissism in our political discourse. We simply do not hear anyone at any point on the political spectrum talking about the necessity for shared sacrifice. No one wants to put their phone down while they drive, and the mask "debate" simply puts this into stark relief--far too many people do not care who they infect and are unwilling to take even simple and painless steps to mitigate the spread of disease. There's a claim of "freedom" no matter who is harmed.

I've lost a lot of faith in the so-called free market, because the models that supposedly show free markets to be the most efficient way to allocate resources don't seem to hold up well to empirical scrutiny. Even if they did, I believe that our economy is productive enough that we could easily sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for more equality in distribution. And free-market fundamentalists never seem to acknowledge that government actions are needed to solve both collective action problems and address externalities.

I've never been a purist in terms of politics--I am far more interested in getting things done, in making positive change in people's lives than in philosophical or ideological purity. If anything, over the years, I've become even more skeptical about the usefulness of ideology or philosophical foundations.

Finally, in the 90s I had a lot of faith that mostly smart people who knew what they were doing were running things and would continue to do so. That was obviously wrong. I find myself deeply conflicted about the tension between democratic input and bureaucratic expertise.

TenuredVulture wrote:I've lost a lot of faith in the so-called free market, because the models that supposedly show free markets to be the most efficient way to allocate resources don't seem to hold up well to empirical scrutiny.

I WATCH THE GAMES!!!!!!111!!!1!!111









But actually I agree.

Wolfgang622 wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:I've lost a lot of faith in the so-called free market, because the models that supposedly show free markets to be the most efficient way to allocate resources don't seem to hold up well to empirical scrutiny.

I WATCH THE GAMES!!!!!!111!!!1!!111









But actually I agree.

I don't know how serious you are, but baseball analytics in fact are empirical. In some respects, the "free market ideology" is more like choosing players on the basis of tools rather than statistical analysis.

Back-to-back negative tests say the docs

enough about his brain scan, how about his covid tests??

This is why drug development does not proceed on Trump's schedule:

Johnson & Johnson’s (NYSE: JNJ) COVID-19 vaccine trial has been paused over a participant developing an unexplained illness, Stat reported late Monday. The company later confirmed the move in a statement.

Yeah but Trump told me it was a cure:

"The president's case is a case of one, and that's what we call a case report, and it is evidence of what's happening, but it's kind of the weakest evidence that you can get," Schleifer said in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Schleifer added that there were "some very interesting aspects" in Trump's case, such as his age. He also noted that the president "had some risk factors," and that Trump "did not have his own immune system in gear when he was sick and he got treated" with Regeneron's treatment.

He added that Trump‘s case is "perhaps the most analyzed case report ever" but is "just low down on the evidence scale that we really need."

He noted that clinical trials are the standard for whether it's effective.

"The real evidence has to come about how good a drug is and what it will do on average has to come from these large clinical trials, these randomized clinical trials, which are the gold standard. And those are ongoing," Schleifer said. "We've got some preliminary evidence that we've talked with the FDA, and we're going for an emergency use authorization, because we think it's appropriate at this time."

Ghouliani to a bunch of nodding and agreeing jackasses in Philadelphia yesterday:

"People don't die of this disease anymore".

Too bad the 18 people in Pennsylvania that died from COVID-19 yesterday were not aware of that.

First Daughter Gooseneck clip seemed to be trying to push that it is revisionist history b/c the world was not taking COVID seriously, but the administration was. WTF

traderdave wrote:Ghouliani to a bunch of nodding and agreeing jackasses in Philadelphia yesterday:

"People don't die of this disease anymore".

Too bad the 18 people in Pennsylvania that died from COVID-19 yesterday were not aware of that.

They’re not considered people.

That western PA rally looks what Doc Tony calls a super spreader event. Going to be cleansing the rolls of Trump R's.

I figured that US was going to get close to 10x the COVID deaths by election day only to discover that the CDC has 2019-2020 count at 24000 - 62000. That is some gap. It looks like they publish a final number in January of the following year. Between 24K and 25K seems to be my mental flu season average. The CDC settled on 34,200 deaths for the 2018–2019 influenza season on 8 January 2020.