Florida State Seminoles

[BigRedMan]

RACIST!!! CHECK YOUR WHITENESS!!!

[bluetick]

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/10/ ... -good.aspx

http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/donald-tr ... ts-credit/

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/141266/ ... -obama-did

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ar ... 00/535842/

Gist: oprama dropped the unemployment rate and the stock market is riding high on the anticipation of corporate tax cuts

[bluetick]

In both the Obama and Trump eras, growing corporate profits have been the central driver of rising markets—with neither president primarily responsible. Right now, profits as a share of overall economic output are close to record levels, with loose monetary policy and steady growth helping American companies thrive. Earnings overseas—which have less to do with any policies in the United States—are helping corporate bottom lines, too: The best-performing stocks this year, as Justin Lahart noted in The Wall Street Journal, are those of companies making most of their money abroad, including Boeing, Apple, and McDonald’s. Plus, the latest bump up in the stock market does not come from policy changes in Washington, but from the West Coast, with Apple posting better-than-expected quarterly earnings.

Whatever or whoever is responsible for the market’s new highs, the gains hardly matter for most Americans. Only half of families own any equities at all, and most middle-class families have their net worth tied up in their homes, not in the markets. Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University, has calculated that the top 1 percent of households by wealth own about a third of all shares, with the top 10 percent owning 92 percent. Plus, all those corporate profits are not translating into bigger paychecks for American workers, with wage growth still sluggish despite the unemployment rate falling to a 16-year low. It is job, income, and wage growth that seems to best predict electoral outcomes. When the time comes, those might be better numbers for Trump to tweet about.

[sardis]

From the guy who gave us daily stock market updates during the Obama administration.

[bluetick]

From the guy who gave us daily stock market updates during the Obama administration.

True. I never bailed after the crash and those updates were a mixture of joy and relief. Some people didn't see it that way.. ...

[eCat]

I just remember being told manufacturing wasn't going to grow under Trump

[Cletus]

Manufacturing employment is not going to grow in any meaningful way under Trump. That was what he was promising and that's not going to happen. Production in the US has always been high and now productivity is growing rapidly as well. Automation is here and is only going to grow.

[eCat]

got it

[bluetick]

SCOTUS May Put a Stop to Gerrymandering-Run-Amok
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/for-t ... id=U142DHP

Hallelujah!

[Tree]

There have been some good decisions at the state level over the last year against Gerrymandering. Made for promising headlines but I wonder if they weren't just quietly appealed a week later and still nothing has come from any of it. And even if all Gerrymandering is fixed overnight, there is still some pretty serious damage that's been done.

[hedge]

OK, so we've been talking about guns, heroin, Vietnam, patriotism and terrorism, it all ties together. Prof said something the other day along the lines of “in theory I'm for drug legalization, but if my child died of on overdose, I know I'd be for prohibition.” I'm sure many people feel the same way and many more, obviously, are not for legalization in the first place. But if your child was killed by somebody with a gun, would that change your opinion of gun laws and the 2nd Amendment? Would you be for prohibition then? I am not equating guns and heroin, but at least with heroin, people do it to themselves, tragic as that certainly is. But if you get killed by somebody with a gun, you had no choice at all.

Moving on to mass killings with guns, there is always total media coverage and outrage (rightly so) whenever something like this happens, but I can easily see that from a Vietnamese person's perspective, it was like we sent thousands of mass murderers into their country, machine guns being the least of the weapons they were armed with in order to carry out wholesale slaughter. But yet many Americans would say we need to respect those people for “defending our freedoms” and also humbly gesticulate toward symbols of the power structure that sent them over there, i.e., the flag and the national anthem, as signs of loyalty and respect.

Now I can somewhat sympathize with the plight of teenagers who were more or less forced to go over there (without, of course, forgiving or even sympathizing with any atrocities anyone may have committed), but at the same time, wasn't that the excuse of many Nazi soldiers (and plenty of other soldiers throughout history, really), i.e., “I was just following orders, so it's not my fault.” I'm not comparing our military and government to the Nazis, but I can certainly see how the Vietnamese people might've felt like jews in Germany during the 1930's and 40's, with the only and very slight comfort being the fact that perhaps we weren't nearly as effective and efficient as the Nazi's had been.

But leaving aside statistical efficiency, how was it morally any different? It's not hard for me to understand how somebody thinking along these lines might not think that our national anthem is automatically deserving of unthinking “respect”. I realize that's not what any of these football players are protesting, but at the same time, many people who were showing similar gestures of “disrespect” and protest during the 1960's were criticized by basically the same folks and on the same grounds as the football players today are being criticized. I'm just saying there are no shortage of reasons that people of good will may choose to question the validity of reflexive “respect” toward the symbols of a nation that has undoubtedly done much good in the world, but also many things that might lead some to question whether it is deserving of automatic and universal respect.

I've got some thoughts on George Washington too, but this post is already too long....

[eCat]

I'm not sure I can add anything to that that would add to the conversation.

[eCat]

as for the shooter in Las Vegas.

This is a guy who rented a hotel room overlooking an outdoor concert a few weeks back either in a failed attempt to follow thru or a dry run for the Mandalay Bay incident.

He had the means, he had the ability and he had the motivation.

So my question is - does anyone think this guy wasn't capable of loading up a box truck with ammonium nitrate and blowing up 100 people?

My point being is, until anything otherwise comes out, I think this guy was literally at the point where at 64, he just wanted to know what it would be like to mow down people with a machine gun and realized he'd have to die to find out. But if he couldn't get the machine gun, I feel pretty certain he'd seek other means to satisfy that desire.

[Cletus]

I probably should have seen this coming but it turns out that Trumps leadership last week when he did absolutely nothing about the situation in PR was far, far superior to the insane shitshow yesterday. The lack of empathy this guy has is pathological. He's broken.

[hedge]

Again I relate this to heroin (or any drug), pretty much anybody has to means to get whatever they want if they want to (as you say) satisfy that desire. Gun advocates argue that it would be pointless to legislate against them at this point b/c anybody could get one (and I tend to agree), but for some reason they don't see drugs as a parallel case. To me it's the exact same thing. And don't say "well, if the Founders thought drug use was such a big right, they would have included it in the Constitution" b/c that's ridiculous. I'm sure it never occurred to them that the government would or should have any role in those kinds of personal decisions so they didn't feel it even needed to be encoded in the Constitution, whereas the idea of citizens keeping arms (and most of the other items in the Constitution) were so revolutionary they had to be spelled out...

[eCat]

Again I relate this to heroin (or any drug), pretty much anybody has to means to get whatever they want if they want to (as you say) satisfy that desire. Gun advocates argue that it would be pointless to legislate against them at this point b/c anybody could get one (and I tend to agree), but for some reason they don't see drugs as a parallel case. To me it's the exact same thing. And don't say "well, if the Founders thought drug use was such a big right, they would have included it in the Constitution" b/c that's ridiculous. I'm sure it never occurred to them that the government would or should have any role in those kinds of personal decisions so they didn't feel it even needed to be encoded in the Constitution, whereas the idea of citizens keeping arms (and most of the other items in the Constitution) were so revolutionary they had to be spelled out...

I would agree - just as they didn't see the need to say you could kill and eat cattle - but they also wrote in the preamble that the intent of the constitution was to promote peace and tranquility, as well as the general welfare

The whole argument to prohibition, to illegal drugs, etc is it goes against promoting the general welfare of this country.

[hedge]

I wonder why it never occurred to the Founders nor any other politicians for a century and a half to outlaw drugs as a means of promoting the general welfare? At any rate, you could make the same argument (as always) with regard to the general welfare against tobacco, at the very least (if you just go ahead and admit you don't care about the welfare of any individual who chooses to smoke) in terms of the massive costs to society in general, most of whom don't smoke but still have to end up paying for the damage caused by those who do. The good news is that, IMO, most drugs (certainly the harder ones) are going to go the way of tobacco simply b/c of cultural pressure. Yes, local laws against public smoking also played a role, but education and a shift in the culture have done far more. It's just not cool anymore. Of course, that only took a century due to the lobbying and lies (for generations) of the tobacco companies, but eventually the truth will out. Same thing happened with crack (although much faster) and I suspect the same will be true of opioids...

[eCat]

I wonder why it never occurred to the Founders nor any other politicians for a century and a half to outlaw drugs as a means of promoting the general welfare? At any rate, you could make the same argument (as always) with regard to the general welfare against tobacco, at the very least (if you just go ahead and admit you don't care about the welfare of any individual who chooses to smoke) in terms of the massive costs to society in general, most of whom don't smoke but still have to end up paying for the damage caused by those who do. The good news is that, IMO, most drugs (certainly the harder ones) are going to go the way of tobacco simply b/c of cultural pressure. Yes, local laws against public smoking also played a role, but education and a shift in the culture have done far more. It's just not cool anymore. Of course, that only took a century due to the lobbying and lies (for generations) of the tobacco companies, but eventually the truth will out. Same thing happened with crack (although much faster) and I suspect the same will be true of opioids...

Laudanum was around well before the independence of this country. Jefferson was a habitual user of it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=TX7Ht ... &q&f=false

When you're getting small pox, cholera and god knows what else thrown at you, these types of drugs promoted the general welfare of the country.


the issues arose when it switched from medicinal to recreational

[hedge]

Jefferson had smallpox, cholera and god knows what else? Um, no. That's interesting, though. To think that the founding documents of this country were conceived and written by a junkie. Funny. You'd think he would've been more proactive in ensuring those rights for future generations, but junkies are an admittedly greedy and selfish segment of the population...

[hedge]

A Complete Guide to the US Presidents and Their Drug and Alcohol Use

https://www.projectknow.com/a-complete- ... cohol-use/

Not a whole lot of interest here, although these two caught my eye:

"Martin Van Buren drank so much that his nickname was Blue Whiskey Van."

"John Tyler was not known to drink excessively; however, he did treat himself with calomel, a toxic compound that contains mercury."

Never heard of calomel...