Dems, Dem-lites and Independents, who ya backing at this point and why?
POSTED BY: WISHIMAY
UPDATED: Monday, June 3, 2024 14:53
VIEWED: 19566
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I think I'm going with Booker.
I saw a clip of him on Ellen, he's articulate and seems like he knows how to act. He helped balance the budget in Newark for the first time in a decade. Rethugs will like that he's pro-gun and pro-enforcing gun laws we already have. Isn't threatened by LGBTQ. If he marries Rosario Dawson he'll have the geek parade eating out of his hands. Oh, and he'd like a woman VP, so that's a great first step on that front too.
Plus being black would piss off Trump, so that could only be a postive. 
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Seriously, no one has anyone they like? I get there's a lot of choices out there...
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Quote:
Originally posted by WISHIMAY:
Seriously, no one has anyone they like? I get there's a lot of choices out there...
I was going to respond the other day, but it's essentially:
1. None of them excite me that much - that's a bit troubling. I am encouraged and impressed by many of the Dem candidates as a collective and as individuals. They are all a major step up from what we saw in the 2016 GOP Freak Show. I like a lot of what I see in bits and pieces, but as soon as I say, "yeah, that one," I think of a situation where they might not do well, like getting along with the GOP, SO WE CAN GET THINGS DONE (tired of this nothing gets done business). Or debates with Trump. Or dealing with International leaders. Some of them have great ideas (Warren, Sanders), but that's not enough to win undecideds.
2. I would vote for a dead dog over Trump.
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Bernie. Walks it like he talks it, always has.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Bernie. Walks it like he talks it, always has.
Care to elaborate? What do you LIKE?
I don't have anything against him personally, but I've never thought him a strong enough leader, and he's darn near 80 now. If there is anything I've noticed about being President, the person needs to be in good enough shape to make it through 8 possible years with most facilities mostly intact.
That, and I don't support $15 an hour minimum wage, or "reparations" to anyone.
No teenager is worth $15 an hour and just about everyone can get Social Security.
This country is going broke and making decisions that would hasten that are counter-productive to us continuing to BE a country.
He goes too far with things and you have to be tempered with a basic reality of what people will abide without creating chaos and violence. It means he will always be a niche politician.
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Quote:I think he would have beaten Trump handily. He's sharp and healthy, much more so than the idiot we have now.
Originally posted by WISHIMAY:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Bernie. Walks it like he talks it, always has.
Care to elaborate? What do you LIKE?
I don't have anything against him personally, but I've never thought him a strong enough leader, and he's darn near 80 now. If there is anything I've noticed about being President, the person needs to be in good enough shape to make it through 8 possible years with most facilities mostly intact.
That, and I don't support $15 an hour minimum wage, or "reparations" to anyone.
No teenager is worth $15 an hour and just about everyone can get Social Security.
This country is going broke and making decisions that would hasten that are counter-productive to us continuing to BE a country.
He goes too far with things and you have to be tempered with a basic reality of what people will abide without creating chaos and violence. It means he will always be a niche politician.
$15 should be the minimum. Most people who work for minimum are NOT teenagers. People making an almost adequate income will spend more, and that benefits the economy.
How does he go too far? Guaranteed healthcare for all, like the rest of the first world? Why do we need profit-seeking corporations ripping us off for necessary services?
What does Joe want to do about for-profit prisons?
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
I think he would have beaten Trump handily. He's sharp and healthy, much more so than the idiot we have now.
$15 should be the minimum. Most people who work for minimum are NOT teenagers. People making an almost adequate income will spend more, and that benefits the economy.
How does he go too far? Guaranteed healthcare for all, like the rest of the first world? Why do we need profit-seeking corporations ripping us off for necessary services?
Sorry, image is important for that high of a public office. The only thing I feel when I look at Ol' Bern is constipated and disheveled. Shallow, but people want to back candidates that feel and look strong. Trump got elected MOSTLY because he reminded them of the high powered 80's vibe. Most people at the time had no clue what his politics were.
These are the problems with mandatory indiscriminating minimum wage.
-fewer employees
-fewer hours for current employees or removed perks like tips, free food/parking, etc.
-replacement of employees through automation
-increase in prices of products or services sold
-greater purchasing power for workers with the revenue going back to businesses they patronize and products or services they avail of or purchase
-decreased interest in college education since minimum wage jobs are paid almost the same or can be more than what jobs requiring college education pay
- high minimum wage laws create a barrier to getting a job that the privileged are better able to overcome than the underprivileged. When jobs are scarce, then immigrants, workers with few skills or little education, and those with limited English proficiency are going to have a harder time convincing employers that their labor is worth $15 an hour than their better-skilled, native, English-speaking competitors.
A factory near here is hiring 500 people at $15-$18 an hour. Adults can do more than get by on that HERE, until you double what they pay for goods and THEN you create MORE people UNDER the poverty line. There are so many people here that ALREADY can't pay for food, despite the "All Americans are fat" trope. I think the problems are that many people need to work part-time or the ones that can't work or people that are gig paid aren't getting enough. There's no way I could work full time in my condition and still feed myself if I had to, but I'm not quite disabled, either. Signing up for disability with hubbs working would only get me $75 a month, so it encourages people to not get married to keep benefits. People that CAN work usually get paid what they can live off of, it's the people that can't that don't fit the system.
Carte blanche healthcare for all is also not a solution. It sounds good, but at the end of the day it will drag us all down with the sheer enormity. Not to mention trying to justify your own healthcare expenditures to people who don't know you or your name without looking at a chart is ASININE, and that's what will happen. We have a system in place it just needs to be FIXED.
I think maybe a better solution might be better regulation of healthcare costs by state.
No matter where you go in a state an x-ray should cost the same, because they are providing necessary services. There are prices on walls in doctors offices in France. In Australia, people are entitled to binding estimates before they go in for elective surgery. They are starting to do that here, but you have to find it on their website and the try to cross-reference their costs with your insurance which is madness. Speaking of insurance AND hospitals, let's limit the amount of profit they can make off of other people's health like Japan does.
The most prestigious hospitals in Japan are large, mostly public institutions with medical teaching programs. Investor-owned for-profit hospitals are prohibited in Japan. A corporation may own and manage a hospital, but it must be for the benefit of its emplo
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The scary things is is that all of that ^ is prolly going to be immaterial in 10 years anywho. Doc AI and Amazon Tech will change how we do EVERYTHING medical anyway...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/27/amazons-newest-service-uses-machine-
learning-to-extract-medical-data-from-patient-records/
The company claimed that Comprehend Medical can accurately identify “medical conditions, anatomic terms, details of medical tests, treatments, and procedures.” In turn, patients can use the service to help manage different aspects of their treatment, including scheduling healthcare visits and prescription medicines or determining insurance eligibility.
Of course, the uploading of medical records to the cloud for machine-learning analysis might beg questions from patients about how Comprehend Medical will ensure their privacy. Amazon says patient data is encrypted and can only be unlocked by customers who have a key, and that no data processed will be stored or used for training its algorithms. Comprehend Medical complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
AI in the Exam Room
Several groups have met with success in modeling deep-learning AI to DR screening. Players range from big fish in computer science to high school students. It’s too soon to tell which, if any, of these efforts will be commercialized and widely accepted by medical professionals, but here’s a look at early movers in AI for DR.
• Google’s DeepMind. London-based AI firm DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014, is working with Moorfields Eye Hospital to develop algorithms for early detection of DR and age-related macular degeneration. The team is reviewing fundus photos and optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans from more than one million exams that took place at Moorfields in 2017.13 In addition to imaging, the dataset will also include each patient’s demographic information, disease status, treatment history, imaging devices used and time elapsed between visits. By combining imaging with exam data, the team is exploring not just automated grading of fundus photos and OCT scans, as in other AI efforts, but also the feasibility of developing “novel quantitative measures for specific disease features and for monitoring the therapeutic success.”13 The work is ongoing and results have yet to be announced.
• EyeLogic. A smartphone app now under development, this uses an algorithm built from analysis of more than 75,000 fundus images found in the Eye Picture Archive Communication System (EyePACS) telemedicine database. Published results show 94% sensitivity and 98% specificity for diabetic retinopathy.14 Given that the technology identified cases that need further evaluation and treatment with high reliability, the authors conclude that a fully data-driven AI-based grading algorithm has the potential to be used to screen fundus appearance in patients with diabetes.
Created by 18-year-old Rishab Gareya of San Jose, Calif., the work earned him a $50,000 scholarship to Stanford.
• Eyeagnosis. A second teen techie, 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu of Herndon, Va., created an app that uses a 3D-printed lens as a smartphone accessory to enable self-administered eye exams. The AI was designed using off-the-shelf Microsoft code and a database of 34,000 retina scans from the National Institutes of Health.15
Tests performed at a hospital in Mumbai found the app can “spot diabetic retinopathy with the accuracy of a human pathologist,” according to IEEE Spectrum.15 It also can identify retinal microaneurysms. The app remains in testing.
• Dr. Grader. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) developed this AI platform and is about to deploy it at 20 general practitioners’ (GP) offices in Western Australia. The software was built from an IBM database of 88,000 retinal images in the EyePACS library. At-risk patients “would usually be referred to a specialist for screening, waiting six weeks or more—now it can potentially be done in a single 30-minute visit to a GP,” according to
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Tulsi Gabbard. She has a better foreign policy.
There's one problem with Federal minimum wage, just as there is with Federal payment schedules for Medicare: The cost of living varies greatly across the country. What might be a living wage in some places barely meets poverty level in other places.
Plus, as long as you;re committed to "free trade" then much of that money will fly out of the national economy to pay for cellphones, clothing, cars etc made elsewhere. If you really want to stimulate the economy you have to take a fundamentally different stance on "free trade" and take a protectionist stance with native industries and with employment. The "free flow" of money, goods, and people will not allow you to do that.
As far as healthcare is concerned, that too would take a different approach. There are several ways to approach the problem: one of them is to eliminate the horrible inefficiencies of the health insurances by having the government take over the insurance function. Plus, as the only "buyer" of medical services, the Federal government would have huge leverage in setting prices. Instead of competing on prices, medical services would have to compete on outcomes.
OTOH that sets up a centralized flow of money which parasites are always attracted to. another approach is DEcentralization: fostering competition by (as WISHY suggests) posting standard prices, instead of these "secret pricing" deals that each service provider has with the various insurances.
Anyway, until we control our military spending these are all pipe dreams because the military just sucks everyone dry.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .
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How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color?
Despite data to the contrary, the media continues to distort Sanders' politics and the diversity of his supporters
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/12/17/how-come-so-many-bernie-
bros-are-women-and-people-color
Bernie Sanders: Bringing people together
The first person I ran into at the gathering was, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders himself. I told the senator, "One of the things that's really frustrating to progressives who support you is this narrative about your not being a feminist or not being anti-racist." Then I asked, "How can we push back on that, given how much the corporate media seems to be interested in that narrative?"
To which he replied:
What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent. We want Medicare for All, we want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, we don't want our kids to be living in a planet ravaged by climate change. So we are making progress. We expect opposition to continue. And we're gonna do the best in this fight that we can.
When you look at corporate media, you're looking at media owned by large, often international corporate conglomerates, which are owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country or in the world. They will do anything and everything they can do to protect their own interest and they will say anything about anybody that they want.
During a panel discussion later that day, he went spoke further about the dangers of divide-and-conquer strategies deployed by the enemies of equality:
When people are pushed aside, when people are hurting, you have demagogues who step in and say "Our problem is that Mexican who is picking strawberries." So you take that anger and frustration and pain that people are feeling and you turn them against people who are in worse shape than [they] are. And our job is to bring people together and say, "No. It is not some Mexican who is picking strawberries who is our enemy. It is Wall Street, it is the fossil fuel industries, it is the drug companies, it's the insurance companies." Let's stand together and take those people on.
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