A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 4 of 725
Quote:You ain't right about "Nobody" investing. The 1% don't have economic control of everybody in Texas, it only seems like they do but they really only control the wage-slaves in the lower 99% who were born to follow their wealthy superiors. There is a professor who invented the lithium-ion battery and works at the University of Texas at Austin. If the oil barons of Texas had the control of everybody you imagine, the barons would have shut him down. And he has got another battery, better than lithium-ion. Give it twenty or thirty years for the new battery to go from laboratory to a consumer product (for electric cars), about the same amount of time as lithium-ion.
Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
Nobody in an area that makes money off of oil is going to invest in battery storage technology for 2 reasons.
https://news.utexas.edu/2017/02/28/goodenough-introduces-new-battery-t
echnology
Off to another subject explained in a manner only Democrats would believe:
The world learned a counterintuitive but central insight about capitalism during the 20th century: It’s just too productive. It tends to create much more supply than there is effective demand.
This doesn’t mean that capitalist countries don’t have children who go hungry or people who need to buy a new car but can’t. Far from it. Rather, it means that capitalism is extraordinarily inventive and usually generates the physical ability to produce that food and those cars — but not enough customers who can afford to buy it all. Simultaneously, there will be a small number of billionaires at the top with far more money than they could ever spend.
These frequent gluts of supply are why capitalist economies often fall into slow growth and even long-term recessions and depressions. When there’s more stuff than can be bought, factories fire some of the workers making it, then the workers who were fired are forced to buy less, then the factories fire more people, in an ongoing vicious cycle.
One of the best weapons against this, as the U.S. and the rest of the world discovered by ending the Great Depression via World War II, is for the government to run deficits by cutting taxes or increasing spending or both. Well-designed deficits will put money in the pocket of people who don’t have much and will spend it.
But even if deficits generally make life better for most people, from the perspective of the 1 percent, they’re politically repellent. A fast-growing economy means low unemployment, which puts more power in the hands of workers and less in the hands of employers. It also may generate higher prices, which reduce the value of most kinds of bonds. (A classic explanation of why we have the ability to choose to create economic booms, and the intense resistance among the rich to their countries making such a choice, is the 1943 article, “Political Aspects of Full Employment” by Polish economist Michael Kalecki.)
Thus, Republicans pretend to care about deficits during Democratic administrations because they’re desperate to prevent their opponents from benefiting from deficits’ positive effects. Meanwhile, Democratic deficits are often run up with social spending rather than tax cuts, which Republicans oppose because they worry the spending will lead to future tax hikes. (And some just don’t like social spending, period.) But when the GOP takes power, it immediately discards its rhetoric to try to utilize deficits’ usefulness for themselves.
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/03/donald-trumps-disgusting-remark-on
-puerto-rico-is-more-revealing-than-he-knows/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The problem is that Democrats on the other hand don't care about deficits at all.
I think we have a thread about the rest of the world doing what they can to untie the US dollar from oil as a result of our deficit.
Deficit spending doesn't fix anything by itself. It's only creating more problems.
And don't kid yourself. People have died for alternative energy solutions before. I'm amazed that we're actually making some progress on that front now. I only believe that it is allowed to happen these days because people who control everything see the writing on the wall. Alternative energy will come, but it will be on their timetable and they will still make all the money off of it when it does.
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Quote:The Republican Congress wants to increase the deficit in order to give the wealthy a tax cut. Congress might not pass it because some Republicans and most Democrats won't vote for it, but the tax cut is always a GOP project, decade after decade.
Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
The problem is that Democrats on the other hand don't care about deficits at all.
I think we have a thread about the rest of the world doing what they can to untie the US dollar from oil as a result of our deficit.
Deficit spending doesn't fix anything by itself. It's only creating more problems.
And don't kid yourself. People have died for alternative energy solutions before. I'm amazed that we're actually making some progress on that front now. I only believe that it is allowed to happen these days because people who control everything see the writing on the wall. Alternative energy will come, but it will be on their timetable and they will still make all the money off of it when it does.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-05/gop-budget-kicks-off-effort
-on-tax-cuts-now-comes-the-hard-part
What if Trump gets lucky enough to end the inheritance tax because some Democrats act stupid by voting for Trump's tax cut? What will the rich (and Trump's family after he is dead) do with their extra money? They might do a little more charitable giving, not more than one tenth, but mostly they will buy more stocks, bonds, buildings and politicians. They are buying more control of the USA. That won't do good for 6stringJoker, but he probably doesn't care enough to be a force not to be ignored by the wealthy and their government. What Congress should be doing is a tax increase to force the wealthy to sell stocks, bonds, buildings. The wealthy would have less and less control over the USA as the years slowly go by. But that ain't gonna happen, is it? 6stringJack doesn't care very much, the vast majority don't care, while the wealthy are extremely passionate about increasing their control. Their energetic search for more money and their long range planning is why they are getting wealthier and more in control. The lower classes are too indifferent, too ignorant, too slow to stop what is happening. They only take action once every four years, but the wealthy keep at it 365 times a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You make some good points, but you ruin them with your partisanship.
Democrats are not the friends of the "99%" you make them out to be.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
I see we've attracted a couple of trolls, both with the first initial J. That said, the biggest problem with the Democratic Parties direction is that they are locked into identity politics.
That's a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics. This is good if you are a minority. Joining forces helps to expand your powers. It is however not right for a political party to do this. They are supposed to represent everyone not just minorities. This is why so many white voters feel disenfranchised from the party and why the party has lost a thousand legislative seats nation wide in the last decade.
I'll say it again.The biggest problem with the Democratic Parties direction is that they are locked into identity politics.
That's a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics. This is good if you are a minority. Joining forces helps to expand your powers. It is however not right for a political party to do this. They are supposed to represent everyone not just minorities. This is why so many white voters feel disenfranchised from the party and why the party has lost a thousand legislative seats nation wide in the last decade.
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I will agree with that again.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I will agree with that again.
Me too. I think hell just froze over.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Quote:Some people voted for Trump, the richest President in history, because he could not be bought. But selling themselves as indispensable men is what the rich do to become wealthy.
Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
You make some good points, but you ruin them with your partisanship.
Democrats are not the friends of the "99%" you make them out to be.
Here is another extract only for Democrats. A Republican might say "You make some good points, but you ruin them with your partisanship", but it does not mention D's or R's, it simply does not respect some ideas that R's think were handed down by God as part of natural law:
www.edge.org/conversation/tim_oreilly-reality-is-an-activity-of-the-mo
st-august-imagination
I remember a conversation I had with Walt Mossberg in which he recounted a conversation he had with Steve Ballmer who, at the times, was the CEO of Microsoft. He told me he’d said, "Steve, if you guys would be 5 percent less greedy, the world would like you 100 percent more." I'm now watching that dynamic play out again with Google where, despite their "don't be evil" philosophy, they're becoming the focus of antitrust investigations.
I look at these patterns in platforms in which they start out with a burst of optimism and creation of public value, then gradually they start turning away from that. I'm trying to understand why that is.
It seems to me that the same pattern we've seen with technology platforms is playing out today in our broader economy, where financial markets in particular have turned into an extractive monopoly rather than a support system for our economy. Something like 85 percent of all corporate "investment" today goes to dividends and share buybacks. Very little goes to actual investment in people, building things, and R&D. It's all going into financial gamesmanship.
Looking at the pattern of algorithmic systems like Google and Facebook, I started thinking about how that applies to financial markets. A system like Google has hundreds of factors that are being taken into account, but they all have a master objective function, a fitness function, which is relevance in search results and ads.
Facebook's fitness function, their objective function, is to produce content that's engaging. We saw how that went wrong with fake news. Mark and the Facebook team are trying to deal with that. They're wrestling with the fact that they had this idea about how to build an engaging product, and it's been subverted.
I look at our economic system where inequality is increasing, and I ask myself: Is that also a system that's dominated by an algorithm? What are they trying to optimize for?
I started to realize that thirty or forty years ago was the point we told companies that there's only one thing to optimize for, and that is shareholder value. That's the point in the '70s where you see this great divergence between the increased productivity brought on by technology and the actual benefit to the economy, where you see inequality soar, where you see people not doing as well as their parents. I came around to thinking that in some ways financial markets are that rogue AI that people like Elon Musk have been talking about.
Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk and everybody use these artificial thought experiments, like the AI which follows its objective function of making paperclips. Musk used one recently about the strawberry-picking robot that decides humans are in the way of its picking strawberries. Those aren't realistic. What is realistic is a world in which you have an increasingly algorithmic financial system saying, "Hey, optimize for corporate profit because it drives stock price. Never mind what happens to the people. Never mind what happens to society." We're in that AI-driven situation.
What do we do about that? How do we debug the objective function of an increasingly automated economy, of an economy that's do
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Good article.
Wen skamz and mistakes are too big, peepl cant see them.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Good article.
Wen skamz and mistakes are too big, peepl cant see them.
Gee... you mean like everybody who voted for Hillary?
It's not as if the Democrats had anybody decent up against Trump.
You've got 3 years. Do something about that.
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