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washparkhorn

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Posts posted by washparkhorn

  1. 10 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

    I guess the idea behind using betting markets as a predictor is that people are rational actors with money?

     

    lol imagine that

     

    Yeah - not much reliability after 2016. 

    "One U.S. prediction market PredictIt, Clinton was trading at 81 cents before the debate, jumped as high as 87 cents during the sparring match, and settled at 83 cents after, said PredictIt spokeswoman Brandi Travis in an interview. That suggests an 83 percent likelihood she’ll win on Election Day.

    Another U.S. market, PredictWise, on Thursday morning put the odds of a Clinton victory at 91 percent.

    Irish bookmaker Paddy Power is so confident in a Hillary Clinton victory, its spokesman (official title: PR & Mischief Champion) noted a come-from-behind Trump victory would “trigger the biggest political payout in bookmaking history and leave Paddy Power with some very expensive pie on its face.”

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-online-betting-parlors-clinton-expands-her-lead-over-trump-bigly/

     

  2. "The Report" - a film starring Adam Driver regarding the Senate investigation into the CIA's torture program is not helpful to John Brennan, at all. Brennan is played by Ted Levine ("Buffalo Bill" (serial killer) from the Silence of the Lambs), who is even more terrifying in the film produced by Steven Soderbergh.

     

    The current CIA Director, Mueller and even Durham played a role in that matter. 

    A different affair but consistent with how the IC works to fulfill its mission. It is not kind to Zero Dark Thirty. 

  3. Meh. Vapid and shallow. Felt like a made for TV movie. 

    Given the subject matter - television news - there may not have been any way to make it deeper dive. A better screenwriter was needed. 

    Great acting by Theron and Margot. Kate McKinnon is strong in a supporting role. Even with their talent, the movie is disappointing. 

  4. 10 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

    People still listen to Michael Moore?

    Yes they do. He knows what went wrong in Michigan with Clinton against Trump. 

    For the rest of the nation? His opinions are less reliable. He is writing off a lot of voters, which is just ignorant. He has Michigan myopia. Good for the midwest - a battleground region. Elsewhere, not as reliable.

    Can Sanders win the midwest - yes. The deindustrialization of the Midwest left entire economic classes in poverty and ignored. The poisoning of Flint with lead affected everyone in that city - middle class, working class and poor. The affluent suburbs don't have those problems. Michigan has class strife. Sanders is good and hopeful on that issue. 

  5. On Russia as a campaign narrative, it is not a winner. 

    We are at war with Russia at this moment and have been for some time now. They are our enemy. We are dominating the economic war. We have simmering hot wars against their interests in multiple theaters of war across the globe. That has not changed since Obama. That will never change in any of our lifetimes. We are building our military rapidly. And rightfully. It now costs less to up our military capacity with the leaps in efficiency. Like industry, there is less reliance on humans and more emphasis on technology. We get a lot more bang for our buck these days, so we buy it. 

    The current flare-up is over a nuclear tipped missile Russia rolled out. The Russians are building massively fast offensive nuclear missiles that can likely defeat the missile defenses protecting our backyards. Will it work? Who knows. Can we outspend them to defeat it? Yes we can and will. 

    The Democrats and Republicans are united on this front. The USG follow the traditional American assessment of Russia, which welcomes engagement, but treats any act of aggression as a reason to assess our defenses and patch any holes. The Russian remain dangerous with their nuclear weapons and weapons delivery systems. Our diplomatic corp remains engaged with Russia, as they have been since WWII. FDR met with Stalin - perhaps the most evil despot to grace this earth since Hitler - but FDR's administration built our intelligence services. The CIA was born in the Himalayas in the China-Burma-India theatre in WWII.

    FDR knew what would happen at the end of WWII when the alliance with the Soviet Union ended. The civilizations were incompatible at that time. The ideology of the Soviet Union was horribly authoritarian and murderous. We knew horrors would occur when the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe - and they did. Putin was an Intelligence Chief for the USSR. We know him better than he knows himself. This is in our wheelhouse. The Democratic Candidates know this and support it. 

    But --- Russia raises doubts on Democratic credibility. Trump wants this election to be about Russia. We shouldn't give him the battlefield he prefers. Ukraine and impeachment - not great issues right now.

    Corruption - perfect issue. How do we get rid of corruption - remove it like rust with ballots. Don't overlook any potential voter.

  6. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
     

    With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

    He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

    Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

    — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'

    — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

    Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

    Emerson. 
     

    free your mind bc - you do make a difference in the minds of many, including my own. 
     

    cheers

  7. Warren and Sanders supporters are extremely compatible in terms of policy. We should remember that as the Republican-lite candidates step up their attacks on progressive policy ideas.
     

    Once the conservatives are cleared out, we can work out differences in timing.  

  8. So what role does evidence play for you in a discussion on neoliberal economic policy and MMT?  

    Do you care about austerity for the 99.9% and subsidies for the top.001%?

    What have those subsidies and backstops for the top .001% shown you about the nature of monetary policy?  

    Anything? Or has that light gone out for you?

    The world is a vampire - regardless of whether or not we are paying attention. And there is certainly enough media to overwhelm even the most curious among us. But there are still people out there paying attention. Perhaps we should listen to them about the nature of monetary policy and its ability to raise all boats, not just the super-yachts of the top .001%. Not intended as an insult bc, the mind is obviously still there but perhaps the spirit may exhausted, which is understandable. Cheers.

  9. 8 minutes ago, 6th Street said:

    So his solution for poor black voter turnout in Michigan is Bernie Sanders lol. 

    Not really. 

    He was talking about the 90,000 black voters in Michigan who voted straight Democratic Party, but left the top spot open - refusing to vote for another Republican-lite Democratic Nominee. 

  10. ·

    Edited by washparkhorn

    Michael Moore on how to guarantee Trump wins in 2020 - nominate another Republican-lite Democratic Party nominee - just like they did in 2016.

    Quote

    What happened was, is that the Democratic Party didn’t stand up in the way that they should have for what the youth wanted, for what people of color needed.

    And there were 90,000 people in Michigan, almost 90,000, who went to the polls, mostly Democrats, in very large numbers of them, in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Saginaw — these are all black cities, majority black. They stood in line in the cold for two to three hours to vote. They went in there, and they voted for state rep, state Senate, county commission. We don’t have dog catcher. We have drain commissioner, the person in charge of the sewage. That’s the lowest name on the ballot. They stood there. 90,000 voted for the Democrats all down ballot and left the top box blank. She only lost Michigan by 10,000, 11,000 votes. Ninety thousand wanted to send a message to the Democratic Party: “You forgot us a long time ago out here, and we will not put up with this anymore. We’re not going to vote for Trump, but we’re not going to tolerate you sending us another Republican-lite Democrat.”

    If we go that route — if we go that route, it’s guaranteed we will lose the Electoral College.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/12/26/michael_moore_predicts_2020_trump_victory_trumps_level_of_support_has_not_gone_down_one_inch.html

     

  11. A plus for Trump - extending Obama's rule that federally funded research must be free to the public. 

    I doubt he will go through with it, since the major publishers don't like it and his promises hinge on support by the wealthy.

    The Trump White House is rumored to be working on a beefed-up open access mandate.

    The potential executive order would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon as they are published. That would supersede a 2013 rule issued by the Obama White House that required federally funded papers to become freely available one year after publication.

    . . . Supporters of the open access model question how much value traditional scientific publishers actually add. The peer-review process is typically carried out by working scientists on a volunteer basis. Meanwhile, you'd expect the Internet to reduce the costs of distributing scientific journals. Instead, the cost of subscribing to scientific journals has been rising much faster than inflation in recent years. . . .

    "Research funded by taxpayers should not be locked behind a paywall," one long-time ACM member tweeted.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/publishers-blast-rumored-ban-on-paywalls-for-federally-funded-research/

     

  12. The positive evolution of America since 2008. There are signs America is waking up to the new economy:

    Spoiler

    Members of the new class of Democrats in Congress have made particularly effective use of populist, anti–Wall Street politics. Some routinely demand big bank heads answer for themselves and for the two-tiered justice system that enables them. “I represent kids that go to jail for jumping a turnstile because they can’t afford a Metrocard,” New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez informed JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, perhaps the top Occupy enemy, up there with Bloomberg and the NYPD, earlier this year. “Do you think that more folks should have gone to jail for their role in a financial crisis that led to 7.8 million foreclosures in the 10 years between 2007 and 2016?” When Dimon criticized Warren, saying she “vilifies successful people,” Ocasio-Cortez remarked, “Y’all, the billionaires are asking for a safe space—you know, in addition to the entire U.S. economy and political lobbying industry.”

    As the Democratic primary for the 2020 election wears on, it’s clear that the class-war politics some thought would vanish with the Occupy encampments has, instead, become commonplace. Public debate over now–presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax has been spun as an attack on billionaires themselves. Bloomberg, the ninth-richest person in America, is running for president, but in a climate in which wealth is increasingly a liability rather than an advantage.

    Mayor Pete Buttigieg, after Warren said he should open his fundraisers to the press, released a list of his top bundlers—supporters who have raised $25,000 or more for his campaign—but omitted more than 20 people from the worlds of Hollywood and finance. He is thought to have the third most billionaire donors of any candidate still in the race and is now protested at those fundraisers with chants of “#WallStreetPete!”

    Then there’s the senator from Vermont who championed Occupy from the start. “They are focusing attention on the most powerful entity in our country, which is Wall Street, which is also the most secretive, and also the most dangerous,” Bernie Sanders said in a video at Occupy’s height. “The protesters are now forcing a debate and a discussion in this country on the huge issue of income and wealth inequality… the floor of the senate is 100 feet away from us, and I got to tell you, there are very few people who talk about that issue.” He closed with something that has become one of his campaign signatures: “We have to ask whether it is morally and economically important that 400 people own more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people”—an enormous divide that has deepened.

    A decade on, Occupy has helped mainstream that which they were ridiculed for at the outset: illustrating, in the streets and elsewhere, how economic inequality is poisonous to democracy. Critically, Occupy named the people who currently benefit from this destructive order. They also took steps to hold them to account and bring others into the fight. Despite having little appetite for electoral politics, they gained some congressional allies, including those whose runs for the White House may have been unimaginable without them. In that regard, Occupy has already set the terms for the decade to come: demanding not just accountability from the financial industry but also that, in the face of political corruption and financial villainy, the people divorce their worth from the rule of billionaires.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/155989/democratic-party-learned-wage-class-warfare

     

  13. ·

    Edited by washparkhorn

    32 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Uh, no. Once again you’re peddling nonsense and I won’t insult you by suggesting you believe it.

    Let's stick with this decade for now. And, please, answer this question - which Republican is leaning on MMT, as you suggested?  

    I don't know of any. 

    Thanks!

     

    ps - and if you need to catch up on MMT and partisan politics, here you go. We should be talking about facts rather than gut feelings.

    https://theintercept.com/2018/10/02/modern-monetary-theory-conference/

    Quote

    WHEN DONALD TRUMP signed a huge corporate and upper-income tax cut into law in December, it seemed like there was one small bright spot. With the GOP-backed bill projected to increase the national deficit by $1.9 trillion over the first decade, at the very least the Democrats could finally quit saying that an increase to the national debt — the vice that trapped so much progressive legislation — was per se political suicide. 

    In fact, as many Democrats reckoned at the time, if they reclaimed power, they could then repeal those Republican tax cuts and redirect the revenue to new social programs.

    But this month, despite the sky decidedly not falling from the Trump tax cuts, Nancy Pelosi confirmed her intent to bringing back the “pay-go” rule, which requires all new spending to be offset with budget cuts or tax hikes. Pelosi first instituted the rule in 2007, effectively barring Congress from taking up progressive legislation that would increase the national debt.

    This stark contrast between Republicans and Democrats was front-and-center at the second annual Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) conference, held last weekend at the New School in New York City. The MMT movement, started in the 1990s by a few heterodox economists, has since grown into a vocal and eclectic mix of academics and activists, trying to change the way we think about government spending.

    In a nutshell: MMT proponents believe that the government can safely spend far more money than it currently does, and increasing the federal deficit is not a bad thing in and of itself — a public deficit is also a private-sector surplus, after all. 

    While typically we hear rhetoric that our political leaders must first “find” money through new taxes or budget cuts in order to pay for new programs, MMT proponents say that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works. In so-called fiat currency systems (meaning societies in which money isn’t backed by physically valuable commodities like gold or silver) governments literally create the money and tax it later to control for inflation and keep it in demand. 

    Inflation is still a risk, MMT advocates say, but it’s a much more remote risk than mainstream economists let on, and it’s one that can be addressed down the line if it arises, without so much pre-emptive austerity.

    The first MMT conference was held a year ago at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where Stephanie Kelton, one of the movement’s top economists, then worked. Kelton most famously served as the chief economic adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and before that as the chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, which was Sanders’s domain. (She now teaches at Stony Brook University in New York.) 

    About 250 people registered for that first conference, compared to this year’s more than 430. The attendees, while hailing from diverse disciplines, were overwhelmingly white and male — something Lua Kamal Yuille, a law professor and one of the few African-American conference speakers, pointedly criticized during her panel remarks.

    On Friday, Kelton gave a presentation titled “Mainstreaming MMT,” assessing how effective the movement has been in getting its ideas out to the public.

    By many measures, they’re doing quite a good job. Just last week, NPR’s Planet Money featured a podcast episode on MMT, and Bloomberg ran a story titled: “Trillion-Dollar Deficit? Whatever, Says New Consensus.” Kelton recently appeared on Jon Favreau’s popular liberal podcast, The Wilderness, and in the past year-and-a half, there’s been other deep dives into MMT in The Nation, the Huffington Post, and VICE.

    “First they don’t want to hear you,” said Kelton to her rapturous audience. “Then they ridicule you, then they attack you, and then you win.”

    While Kelton acknowledged the growing attention she and her colleagues have been receiving from mainstream outlets, she spent much of her public remarks focused on how their ideas are still unfairly cast by policymakers and the media. Paul Krugman, the New York Times economist, was a top target of Kelton’s frustration. In 2011, he blogged several critical posts about MMT, including to say that its adherents believe “deficits never matter.”

    “This became the way that many people, probably a million or more, were introduced to MMT for the first time,” said Kelton. She also pointed toVICE’s recent headline, “The Radical Theory That the Government Has Unlimited Money” as an example of being misrepresented as more extremist than they are.

    Still, MMT advocates struggled to decide just how they would frame their own movement. Were they radical or mainstream? Fringe or conventional? Rohan Grey, the conference’s head convener and president of the student-driven Modern Money Network, told The Intercept that they worked hard to “make sure there were different disciplines represented at the conference, so this isn’t seen as just a bunch of heterodox economists.”  

     

     

     

  14. The Cult, She Sells Sanctuary (1985)

    Lyrics:

    Spoiler

    Oh, the heads that turn Make my back burn And that heads that turn Make my back, make my back burn The sparkle in your eyes Keeps me alive And the sparkle in your eyes Keeps me alive, keeps me alive The world And the world turns around The world and the world yeah The world drags me down Oh, the heads that turn Make my back burn And that's heads that turn Make my back, make my back burn, yeah Hey yeah hey, yeah hey The fire in your eyes keeps me alive And the fire in your eyes keeps me alive Inside her you'll find sanctuary Inside her you'll find sanctuary And the world the world turns around And the world and the world the world drags me down And the world and the world the world turns around And the world and the world and the world and the world And the world drags me down Ah, hey yeah, hey yeah And the world and the world turns around And the world and the world Yeah, the world drags me down And the world Yeah, the world turns around And the world and the world the world drags me down Hey yeah, hey yeah Sanctuary, hey Sanctuary, hey

     

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