A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
A stupid phone was not available the last time I hot a new number.
I avoid google and amazon. What do you use them for? What do you require of them?
Wow... really no stupid phones at all anymore?
It's been a while since I had a cell phone at all, but if things haven't advanced THAT far yet, you could always go on ebay and buy a used flip phone and just take the SIM card from your smartphone and put it in the flip phone.
Personally, I use Google quite a bit. Just the search engine on my home computers. But it has quite a lot of great uses to it. Amazon is probably where I do a majority of my purchasing. I don't buy much, but being on my budget I'm always looking for the best price, and usually Amazon is it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:What's the diff between eBay and amazon?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Wow... really no stupid phones at all anymore?
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
A stupid phone was not available the last time I hot a new number.
I avoid google and amazon. What do you use them for? What do you require of them?
It's been a while since I had a cell phone at all, but if things haven't advanced THAT far yet, you could always go on ebay and buy a used flip phone and just take the SIM card from your smartphone and put it in the flip phone.
Personally, I use Google quite a bit. Just the search engine on my home computers. But it has quite a lot of great uses to it. Amazon is probably where I do a majority of my purchasing. I don't buy much, but being on my budget I'm always looking for the best price, and usually Amazon is it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Amazon is more like a store, where they have deep shelves of stocked items you can, fairly reliably, find over time.
So anyway ... anyone up for a rational, fact-based, and civil discussion about the topic?
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After many years of limited success against long-term homelessness, Finland decided to adopt the US 'Housing First' model on a national scale.
www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0321/Finland-s-homeless-crisis-nea
rly-solved.-How-By-giving-homes-to-all-who-need
MARCH 21, 2018 HELSINKI, FINLAND—As anyone who has visited Europe recently can attest, the scourge of homelessness has reached epidemic proportions.
The only exception to the trend is Finland, according to FEANTSA, the European Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless. There, homelessness is, remarkably, on the decline.
Per the latest statistics, the number of homeless people in Finland has declined from a high of 18,000 30 years ago, to approximately 7,000: the latter figure includes some 5,000 persons who are temporarily lodging with friends or relatives. In short, the problem has basically been solved.
At the core of this was a move away from the so-called “staircase model,” whereby a homeless person moved from one social rehabilitation level to another, with an apartment waiting for him or her at the highest step. Instead, Finland opted to give housing to the homeless from the start, nationwide, so as to allow them a stable environment to stabilize their lives.
“Basically, we decided that we wanted to end homelessness, rather than manage it,” says Juha Kaakinen, CEO of the Y-Foundation, which helps provide 16,500 low-cost apartments for the homeless.
To be sure, one of the reasons why Finland has made such strides in resolving its homelessness problem is because successive Finnish governments have made it a national priority. The elimination of homelessness first appeared in the Helsinki government’s program in 1987. Since then virtually every government has devoted significant resources toward this end.
Around 10 years ago, however, observers noticed that although homelessness in general was declining, long-term homelessness was not. A new approach to the problem was called for, along with a new philosophy.
The optimal solution, a group of four experts appointed by the Ministry of the Environment found, was Housing First. “Solving social and health problems is not a prerequisite for arranging housing,” they observed. “Instead, housing is a prerequisite that will also enable solving a homeless person’s other problems.”
The concept behind the new approach was not original; it was already in selective use in the US as part of the Pathways Model pioneered by Dr. Sam Tsemberis in the 1990s to help former psychiatric patients. What was different, and historic, about the Finnish Housing First model was a willingness to enact the model on a nationwide basis.
“We understood, firstly, that if we wanted to eradicate homelessness we had to work in a completely different way,” says Mr. Kaakinen, who acted as secretary for the Finnish experts. “At the same time right from the beginning there was a national consensus that the problem had reached a crisis point. ... We decided as a nation to do something about this.”
Changing course
As a result, in 2008 the Finnish National Program to reduce long-term homelessness was drafted and put into place. Helsinki and nine other Finnish cities committed to the program, with the Ministry of the Environment coordinating its implementation, and local governments and nongovernmental organizations, including the Y-Foundation, joining the team.
One of those goals was to cut the number of long-term homeless in half by producing 1,250 new homes, including supported housing units for tenants with their own leases, and around-the-clock presence of trained caring staff for residents who needed help.
At the same time, the extant network of homeless shelters was phased out. This also involved phasing out the “old way” of thinking about homelessness. “There was some work to be done on attitudes,” concedes Kaakinen. “Some of the people in the NGOs found the idea of unconditional housing hard to accept.” Also some staff had difficulty with not forcing tenants with alcohol or
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
What's the diff between eBay and amazon?
Sometimes I can't tell if you're joking.
Let's just say that you probably aren't going to find many flip phones on amazon. They sell mostly new products, although you can find people selling used items through them. Ebay is an auction site, although many people do "buy it now" which essentially eliminates the auction part and only sells for a specific price.
If you want a dumb phone, here's one for $1.99 plus $3.75 shipping. You'd have to have a plan with AT&T to use it though.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/AT-T-Flip-Phone/232705759581?hash=item362e581
95d:g:iJ8AAOSw~P9apg7j
If you wanted to buy something like this, make sure that it's a phone that accepts a sim card and it is for the network provider you use. I can help if you have any questions.
......
Here's one for Verizon service. It's an auction starting at .99 cents, but you could just buy it now for $12.99 if you wanted. It's also $5.00 shipping. It comes with a car charger, which is nice because I'd imagine it would be hard to find one that works with the older proprietary phones these days.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Verizon-Flip-Phone-Average-Used-Condition/263
555548109?hash=item3d5d2283cd:g:5DgAAOSwk6larXyD
EDIT: Yanno what... I'd ask the seller a few questions on that one before you bought it. The listing says it's a Verizon phone, but under "Network" in the specs it says AT&T. Dumb mistake, but you don't want to pay $18 for something that won't work on your network.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The Real Enemy of the White Working Class Is … the White Middle Class
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/03/the-real-enemy-of-the-white-wor
king-class-is-the-white-middle-class/
Middle and upper-middle-class whites support desegregation, but only because they have enough money to flee the city for the suburbs, where they live in white communities and send their kids to private white schools. Needless to say, working-class whites are stuck in the city as their neighborhoods become steadily blacker.
Because of this, working-class whites feel a deep sense of betrayal. They are angry not just—or even mostly—at blacks, but at affluent whites. These folks have supported segregation for decades, and by voting with their feet they make it plain that they still support it. But they’re willing to throw their fellow working-class whites under the bus for the sake of buying peace for the business community.
This is the root cause of working-class white resentment toward—well, blacks, of course. But if you dig down, their real resentment is toward the political establishment that, in their view, cynically sold them out.
This is a big part of why working-class whites are always on the lookout for politicians who rail against the establishment. Or the swamp. Or the elites. Or the deep state. Sure, they prefer Republicans, who are opposed to affirmative action and callout culture and political correctness. But when push comes to shove, what they really want is someone who will take a wrecking ball to the establishment that screwed them. That’s why some of them thought well of Bernie Sanders: they might not have liked his tolerant racial politics, but that was secondary to the fact that he wanted to bust up elite control of the country. That’s what they want too.
Donald Trump, of course, appealed to them even more: he also wanted to bust up the elites and he had the right racial politics. So they put him in the White House.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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On Thursday Trump tweeted: "Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don't threaten people Joe!"
That tweet came in response to comments former Vice President Joe Biden made in a speech in Florida on Tuesday in which he said of Trump: "They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, 'If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him."
That Trump decided to respond to Biden -- and that he responded the way he did -- shouldn't be dismissed. It provides -- as almost all of Trump's tweets do -- a window into who he is, how he sees the world and what being the President of the United States actually means to him.
Here are three thoughts on what Trump's tweet tells us about him.
3) Trump is very, very frustrated
www.cnn.com/2018/03/22/politics/donald-trump-joe-biden-tweet/index.htm
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The increasing pressure is crushing down on Trump -- from a series of civil lawsuits brought by women alleging affairs or unwanted groping, from special counsel Bob Mueller's probe into Russian election meddling, from the lack of close confidantes left to him in the White House.
When you have that much pressure on you, you need to find ways to blow off steam -- or risk exploding. Twitter has long been Trump's pressure release valve, the way he feels he can communicate in real time with the people who truly "get" him -- his followers.
Tweets like the one proposing a fight with Biden are indicative of a man who feels trapped by his office and hemmed in by a series of issues that he has little to no control over.
Twitter is what he can control, where he can be himself. I'd expect more tweets like this rather than less as the Mueller probe goes on -- and interviews with Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels air over the next few days.
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 partisan gender gap among millennials is staggeringly large
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/22/17146534/millennial-gender-g
ap-partisan
Women born after 1980 favor Democrats 70-23.
Women are more Democratic than men, and younger voters are more Democratic than older ones. The former has been true for decades, and the latter is a trend that’s at least 10 or 15 years old. But a new Pew survey using a huge sample to allow for insight into demographic details shows that the intersection of these two trends is staggeringly large.
Among millennials, which Pew identifies as people born between 1981 and 1996, men lean toward Democrats by 8 percentage points — far and away a bigger tilt toward Democrats than older cohorts of men. But millennial women favor Democrats by a staggeringly large 70-23 margin.
That means that even as millennial men are the most Democratic-friendly cohort of men, the millennial gender gap is also by far the largest of any cohort. In the Silent Generation, women are 8 points more favorable to Democrats. Among boomers, it’s 10 points. Among Gen-Xers, it’s 11 points, and among millennials, it’s 21 points.
That’s driven by what seems to be an explosive change in millennial women’s political sentiments over just the past two or three years even while most other groups’ views have stayed relatively stable.
Young people are, of course, notoriously fickle midterm voters. So how much this shift in sentiment is translated into a shift in actual policy outcomes will hinge, critically, on whether this big bloc of younger women shows up in November. But it’s fair to say that while a certain amount of gender polarization is nothing new to the political system, the scale that we are now witnessing among younger people is unprecedented.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How Obama's Data Crunchers Helped Him Win: https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-team/index
.html
Obama, The "Big Data" President: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-the-big-data-president/2
013/06/14/1d71fe2e-d391-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story.html?utm_term=.8c1e2dbbf0e0
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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America: Land of the Lawless
www.laphamsquarterly.org/rule-law/land-lawless
1) Let’s start with systematic violations of the law that escape enforcement year after year. First, the health care industry, in which at least 10 percent of what our country spends goes down the drain from computerized billing fraud and abuse. According to Harvard professor Malcolm Sparrow, author of License to Steal, this 10 percent figure represents the minimum amount. Applying it to this year would produce a fraud amount of about $350 billion. The fraud is rarely prosecuted.
In 1992 the Government Accountability Office estimated a comparable 10 percent drain, but Congress continued to starve the enforcement budgets of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice. These agencies recover less than $3 billion of what’s defrauded from Medicaid, Medicare, and Tricare military insurance each year—appallingly low, given that commercial crooks defraud an estimated $60 billion from Medicare alone.
2) Also under-reported are the crimes that take place in the lawless zone of wage theft. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute—which draws on surveys of state labor departments and attorneys general as well as data from the Department of Labor and class-action settlements—estimates $50 billion a year is stolen from mostly low-income workers, while terribly weak enforcement budgets and priorities led to the recovery of only some $2 billion in 2015 and 2016 combined.
The EPI examines wage theft through minimum-wage violations, overtime violations, tipping violations, and employee misclassifications. On average, it finds that workers suffering minimum-wage violations are cheated out of $64 a week, or $3,300 annually—all while the federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 an hour. Such theft is clearly illegal. But in 2016, the EPI reports, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division had only a thousand investigators responsible for 7.3 million workplaces. And workers rarely file private claims anyway, as they are often forced to sign away their right to go to court in order to have a job in the first place.
Aside from the rare case of stolen-wage restitution, employers are almost never prosecuted under criminal laws.
3) As Congress cut the IRS budget over the past decade (with inflation adjusted, down more than 25 percent from 2009), the agency has been increasingly unable to enforce the law against what it says is $400 billion a year in “uncollected taxes”—a sum that does not even include huge “avoided taxes” that flow from corporate lobbyists driving their agendas through a greased Congress. The result of this, says Robert McIntyre, who was the director of Citizens for Tax Justice for many years, is that citizen taxpayers have to pay more taxes and receive fewer public services or else incur larger government deficits.
More at www.laphamsquarterly.org/rule-law/land-lawless
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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