@El'endiaStarman I don't think it's a discussion worth having, period. Both sides are motivated by very emotional reasons and there's no real compromise or reasoning that can be done
"We're all gonna move to Canada" doesn't really solve any problems anyway, except for removing people you actually agree with from future elections. It's a fairly selfish sentiment.
@noɥʇʎPʎzɐɹC Erdoğan would destroy the Central Park and build malls. He would give Mexicans firearms and send soldiers to the border. He would close Harvard and open a cathedral.
@betseg The USA and Russia have been officially destroying theirs for years now. I think they're down into the thousands now, rather than the tens of thousands
What would be the point of nuclear war between US/Russia though? I don't see an angle for either side. Not many rulers are that eager to kill off many millions of their own people.
@TuxCopter Half the country thinks he's a straight-talking, successful, competent, honest guy who's going to sort out politics and solve the entrenched problems in the USA. And the other half thinks he's a crazy, idiotic, sex-abusing, racist, misogynistic, fascist monster. That's a gross over-simplification, but it is the essence of the problem.
@TuxCopter Personally, I take issue with his (successful!) use and/or expression of racism, xenophobia, and misogynistic statements to stir up a lot of people who agree with him. I also note how he is very unreliable regarding what he says he will do.
Oh, don't get me wrong - the dedicated haters will stay that way. But there are a ton of folks who were on the fence; heck, half the country just didn't vote at all. Those are the folks whose opinions might change based on performance... For better or for worse.
And, yeah, I have seen that happen with Obama. And with Bush (mostly the other direction). And with the first Clinton, for that matter.
Folks look back a year, 5 years, a decade later and think, "ok, that didn't work out so well" or "ok, that worked a lot better than I expected it to."
I didn't pay as much attention back in the 90s, so I didn't want to lump that in without knowing. Looking back it doesn't seem so bad, but I don't know what it was really like at the time.
@Geobits take all the crap that Clinton got during this past race, and add to it most of the crap that Trump got, and that's what we heard about the first Clinton for eight years.
He was cast as corrupt, misogynistic (to put it nicely), careless, fickle (again, politely)... I think most folks tend to remember him more positively now.
Of course, it helps that Bush showed up to take the blame for the first dot-com crash, 9/11, the housing crash... Some of which he deserved, some of which of course he couldn't have done anything about.
I suspect this is what tripped a lot of folks up this past campaign too; Clinton is remembered much more fondly these days among the younger folks, and folks who were involved in tech than he is by the folks affected by (or who think they were affected by) stuff like NAFTA.
It'd be nice if candidates would talk about jobs in terms of automation imo. It's going to be an issue for some time to come, but nobody seems to want to address it.
@Geobits include "mechanization" in that and it's been an issue for generations.
Problem is that solving the problems it causes without negating the advantages it brings requires a nuanced approach... Which doesn't fit well with politics.
So instead we get rhetoric that likes to treat "jobs" as some sort of Works Progress "give people shovels and make them dig canals" thing, which hasn't really reflected reality in... Well, again, generations.
Automation and the slow erosion of the workforce is a real and pressing threat to the economic stability of this nation that very few political candidates want to address.
There are significant underlying pressures which have no easy answers making them very poor topics for politicians who insist every conversation be able to end in a collapsible and easily digested sound bite.
The problem is FAR more significant and only likely to grow more pressing in the years to come as automation, robotics and near-intelligent machines continue to erode more white collar workers in the future.
Part of the issue is the inability of the job market to create new jobs for workers at the same rate automation is removing them.
This means a greater percentage of our society will become unemployed faster than they can learn new skills to replace those jobs.
Here is an essay on the subject including the related (and politically dangerous topic of "basic income")
A basic income (also called unconditional basic income, Citizen's Income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income or universal demogrant) is a form of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.
An unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes referred to as a partial basic income.
Basic income systems that are financed by the profits of publicly owned enterprises (often called social...
@Shog9 From what I've heard, a lot of the people who didn't vote at all chose that path simply because they couldn't stand either of the main candidates.
Which might well have been what I'd have done too, had I been an American.
@Randal'Thor The only problem with that is there are also local votes and ballot questions that will likely effect your daily life more than the actual presidency. So if you can't stand either just vote third party or write in Mickey Mouse for president, but still go vote.
@Skooba Well, I don't really know how the US voting system works. I was just talking about the votes for president, not anything else that might be voted on.
@Skooba Yeah, I voted on all the downticket races but left the presidential pick blank. I couldn't stomach voting for either Trump or Clinton but I wanted to vote for senator, representative, etc.
user132126
I don't believe that the US voting system is in any way an effective means of enacting any political change that is going to benefit me.
I decided beforehand that whichever candidate won, I was going to take the attitude "well, at least the other one didn't win". So far it's worked pretty well in keeping my spirits up.
user132126
8:24 PM
I'm not convinced municipal and state laws are things where my voting is at all effective, either.
@Shog9 There were some pretty exciting ballot measures. In the vein of voting system efficacy Maine coted enacted ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections
Like in PA we had a ballot measure "Should the state constitution be changed to read that judges be required to retire at age 75" (something to that effect). What they DIDN'T tell you is that it already says they must retire at 70. So, if people were not aware of the issue they thought they were voting to set the age limit, but rather they were voting to raise it... it got a 51/49 Yes vote....
@Randal'Thor thats not a bad way too look at from across the pond. at least the two gave toned down acceptance and conceding speeches. focusing on moving forward.
This room started as a room to keep out political discussions of TNB, and now it's populated with users from the entire SE network o_O
user132126
8:27 PM
And voting on local matters supposes I have the time to research all tho local issues and stances and pick candidates accordingly. How many people are up-to-date with everything on the local ballot? Skooba's example is perfect.
@Skooba Yeah, I'm really glad the losing candidate didn't start raving about how the elections were hacked, widening the rift in the country even more.
@CreationEdge I have to admit some of the local voting is pretty hard to find information on. My district was electing court judges and it was very hard to find information on any of them.
@CreationEdge You can just leave them blank. I did for some positions I couldn't find any meaningful information on. But if you truly don't care or know about any of it, then by all means.
our company chose to extend its lockdown (i.e., a ban on all software changes on production machines) for the rest of the week after the result was announced
This is why Trump won. To be clear: I, personally, despise the man. We all know his issues by now, so I won't repeat them. But. Having just found - and annotated - his "Contract with the American Voter", I find myself agreeing with far more of the things he's proposing than I thought I would. He's a terrible person, but he knows how to get some agreement, and that's what won it for him.
Oh, I screwed up the tax one. I missed the bit about the business rate. Maybe make that block orange.
@ArtOfCode It looks like our annotations were similar. I felt that some of his points needed to be explained more - and I understand that it's hard to explain stuff in detail in this small a space, but some points were lacking.
@ArtOfCode That could just be because HDE is American and therefore knows more about e.g. Obamacare to be able to judge those bits of the 'contract' better.
@ArtOfCode I think the major ones were my rejection of his rejection of Obamacare - simply because the system isn't that broken that starting anew would be better; there's still somewhere to start from, and it's actually decent - and the Restoring National Security Act.
@HDE226868 It'd probably be interesting, at some point when I have the time, to learn about Obamacare and about the education things he mentions, so I could have a better grasp of those.
I mainly judged my green on education on his proposed increase of technical education, which I think is a big win
@ArtOfCode Yes. Maybe I still have Treyvon Martin in the back of my head and unfairly associate community policing with shootings.
@ArtOfCode I can't give you an unbiased view of Common Core, to be honest. Think of it as blanket standards on another level to standardized testing. From what I know of UK standardized testing, though, this might be different.
That makes sense. I don't think we have anything comparable over here, unless you count PCSO's
@HDE226868 UK standardized testing is... pretty standardized. It's getting better at compensating for various disabilities, but in general it's pretty standard.
@Mazura Yeah, that's a different thing to PCSO's here then. Police Community Support Officers, basically like the police but without the powers of arrest.