U.S. Politics transition time how Orange became the new black

[Mexal]

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Why would you trust Assange in this?

And why would anyone believe the Russians wouldn't use middle men to get the information to Assange?

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, snake said:

On another note, The Washington Post has had to eat some crow with their Russian hackers targeting a Vermont utilities company story. 

It never happened!!

Perhaps this will teach them to be a little more thorough in the future before printing sensationalist headlines.

I wonder what the people who were worried about Fake News think about this.

Also, given the complete lack of publicly available evidence regarding the election hacks, those might eventually turn out to be unrelated to Russia as well. This is a fairly common propaganda technique: focus on a massive story illustrating your point (doesn't matter how false it is as long as it is splashy), build up a hysteria around it and then, once people have pointed out that your original story is nonsense, downplay its significance and argue that the point still stands. It worked perfectly with, for example, the Rolling Stone UVA story.

In this case, it is clear that some group or temporary alliance of groups within the establishment really wants to pick a fight with Russia. Here's a long Slate article about which, uncharacteristically for that outlet, tries to make a case that, in this one instance, Obama was wrong and Romney was right: Russia is a serious threat. It's almost certainly not true, but with some of the Democrats pushing this because it provides a neat explanation for their electoral failure and some Republicans (i.e. McCain et al) taking their side because they never got over the Cold War, they might be able to make some headway.

[LongRider]

6 hours ago, Sullen said:

hours ago, Commodore said:

Luddites lamenting automation are foolish

Oh, you mean Trump voters?  Or they will be when they find out that if any factories come back they will be filled to the brim with automation. 

[LongRider]

5 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

Fine, if you say Obama had no scandals. It's just as easy to proclaim Trump had no scandals.

One could say Trump had no scandals, if one is dishonest.

[Wrl6199]

5 minutes ago, LongRider said:

Oh, you mean Trump voters?  Or they will be when they find out that if any factories come back they will be filled to the brim with automation. 

I take it your a trump supporter

[LongRider]

3 hours ago, snake said:

On another note, The Washington Post has had to eat some crow with their Russian hackers targeting a Vermont utilities company story. 

It never happened!!

Perhaps this will teach them to be a little more thorough in the future before printing sensationalist headlines.

The word out of Vermont

http://www.timesargus.com/article/20170103/NEWS03/170109949

In a statement released on Friday, Mike Kanarick, director of customer care, community engagement, and communications for Burlington Electric, said utility companies in the United States were alerted by the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, on Thursday of a malware code used in Grizzly Steppe, the name DHS has applied to a Russian campaign linked to recent hacks.

“We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the malware signature. We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding,” Kanarick said.

According to the statement, the staff at Burlington Electric, a municipally-owned utility, is working with federal officials to trace this malware and prevent any other attempts to infiltrate utility systems.

[LongRider]

6 minutes ago, Wrl6199 said:

I take it your a trump supporter

aaaahhhhhh, not only no, hell NO!   

[DunderMifflin]

11 minutes ago, LongRider said:

One could say Trump had no scandals, if one is dishonest.

Or maybe they just don't agree with you. Or maybe they have a different idea of what scandalous is. Plenty of other possibilities besides proclaiming a hypothetical person as dishonest.

[LongRider]

1 hour ago, Mexal said:

And why would anyone believe the Russians wouldn't use middle men to get the information to Assange?

Wutttt?  Hide their trail to Wikileaks?  Now why would they do a thing like that?   

[Dr. Pepper]

7 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

Or maybe they just don't agree with you. Or maybe they have a different idea of what scandalous is. Plenty of other possibilities besides proclaiming a hypothetical person as dishonest.

Ooooh, so trendy to argue fact as though it's actually just opinion.  

[Tibbs]

1 hour ago, The Great Unwashed said:

"I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat." - Will Rogers

More fuckheadedness by the DNC. Keith Ellison has emerged as the closest thing to a consensus candidate for DNC chair to this point, receiving endorsements from Sanders, Warren, Schumer, and influential unions who endorsed Clinton during the primary. But bad-faith objections to his chairmanship, which have run the gamut from him being a part-time chair to his being an anti-Semite, run the risk of further alienating the Sanders wing of the Democratic party.

Ignoring what either Ellison or Perez themselves have said, and focusing instead on the arguments their supporters have made, it's Ellison's supporters who from the beginning have focused on the Sanders connection in an attempt to gin up outrage against any argument that's made against him. 

 

The anti-Semite stories (garbage, I agree although in at least one case he could have chosen his words a bit better) broke in the media before he announced that he would step down from Congress if elected (and the part-time objection is hardly bad-faith unless the people who pointed to that as one of the problems with Wasserman-Schultz were bad-faith as well). And as for consensus candidates, that was precisely what Hillary Clinton was also supposed to be, at least measured by the strength of her endorsements. The bad-faith arguments go both ways: If the premise is that there's not a clear ideological or structural difference between the two most prominent candidates, then surely the question should be asked both ways: Is there a substantive reason for backers of a liberal candidate in Ellison to not consider a liberal candidate in Perez? 

 

There is an active attempt here being made by a vocal contingent of Ellison's backers to hold the threat of alienation over the selection process: They don't want an ideological progress, they want a stamp of approval from Bernie Sanders and argue that anything else smacks of dishonest establishment politics. Perhaps Ellison would be politically the wiser choice precisely because of that dynamic, but it's not a particularly honest argument either.

[snake]

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Your link goes to here, and I'm fairly certain we didn't break down that claim or that conclusion.

I'm guessing that this is the link. I appreciate the 'bitch, please' part of the article. That speaks to journalistic integrity; the only way it could be more truthful is if he put in a #micdrop at the end.

It is about what is truthful and not.  Crowdstrike has been less than truthful and it is a failing in the media that they just take whatever these guys say at face value and do not do their own checking.  What happens is that you get false stories such as the Vermont utilities hack with sensationalist headlines.  Then your getting into fake news territory. 

[snake]

1 hour ago, LongRider said:

The word out of Vermont

http://www.timesargus.com/article/20170103/NEWS03/170109949

In a statement released on Friday, Mike Kanarick, director of customer care, community engagement, and communications for Burlington Electric, said utility companies in the United States were alerted by the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, on Thursday of a malware code used in Grizzly Steppe, the name DHS has applied to a Russian campaign linked to recent hacks.

“We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the malware signature. We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding,” Kanarick said.

According to the statement, the staff at Burlington Electric, a municipally-owned utility, is working with federal officials to trace this malware and prevent any other attempts to infiltrate utility systems.

That's older news.  They have since determined that it wasn't a Russian hack and most likely the person got the malware from an unprotected site, which is code for watching porn on a company computer.

[all swedes are racist]

4 hours ago, snake said:

That's older news.  They have since determined that it wasn't a Russian hack and most likely the person got the malware from an unprotected site, which is code for watching porn on a company computer.

*insert josh marshall joke here*

not even that, I think it was just logging into yahoo email

[mormont]

9 hours ago, Mudguard said:

Obama has expanded the use of the Espionage Act to go after leaks and whistleblowers.  Your assertion that Trump was always going to expand the use of the Espionage Act in this manner is unsupported.  What's the basis for your assertion?

That's not my assertion. snake's assertion was that this enables Trump to muzzle the press: I have pointed out that Trump would have muzzled the press anyway. If you want to discuss the specific impact of the Espionage Act expansion, you need to do so with snake.

8 hours ago, Altherion said:

I wonder what the people who were worried about Fake News think about this.

Mostly, I think that the conflation of any journalistic error, inaccuracy or opinion with actual fake news - deliberate, bad faith invention of falsehoods for profit - is a tactic used by those who find the truth uncomfortable.

[OldGimletEye]

20 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Well, it depends on what can be expensed and what is defined as "new investment".  E.g., if only for manufacturing, then IP heavy businesses (which, btw, are really where a lot of the games are played - think the pharma companies and tech companies) do not get this benefit.  But in any event, right now, a lot of profit is moved offshore to low or no-tax jurisdictions through income stripping (e.g., royalties, interest), especially through royalties, which erodes the base.  Additionally, interest expense is a huge tax shield that does not exist in any meaningful way under either plan.

Okay, just so I’m clear about the nature of my issue with current Republican House Plan with respect to corporate taxes.

Let's say there is this corporation. It’s looking to buy a a piece of machinery. Let’s say the machinery cost $100,000.00. To make things simple, let say the machine is expected to produce a stream of profit in the next period and then is completely worthless. Let’s also say the corporation’s cost of capital is 10%.

If the tax rate is 20% and it buys the machine this year, it saves $20,000.00 on its tax bill because it gets an immediate write off.

Now say, next year the machine produces $110,00.00 in revenue.

The present value of that revenue would be:

PV = $110,000.00/1.10 = $100,000.00

The present value if its tax liability would be $20,000.00. But, it already saved $20,000 by getting a complete write off in the year it bought the machine, so in present value terms it doesn’t pay any tax on it’s normal profits.

But suppose instead the firm, because its a monopolist or whatever, instead makes a revenue stream of $130,000.00. In short, the firm makes more than what was required to fund it’s capital investment. It’s collecting a rent in other words. And those rents in my view should get taxed more heavily.

In short, the 20% rate is more defensible under the old rules than under the new write off regime.

I get the usual argument that if an open economy has a higher corporate tax rate than other countries, then the incidence of taxes might actually fall on labor. But, right now, I’m not sure how well this actually would hold if the only reason for company to shift capital oversees was to find economic rents overseas. My suspicion would be that it would be more difficult for companies to find such rent seeking opportunities overeas.

I’d note I don’t necessarily have an issue with this “destination tax” as it would seemingly eliminate a lot of these profit shifting problems. But, I’m really suspicious about this 20% tax rate, if you are going to go to a destination source cash flow tax.
 

20 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Quickly found two explanations not behind a paywall (though one obviously old).  Basically you are thinking of an invoice credit method, which is what people are more familiar with.  The House Blueprint is a modified subtraction method.

This part may not mean much because of exchange rate adjustments. But, even though, I guess this is probably a tangential issue, I will explain what I meant.

Okay, if the manufacturers in the supply chain, didn’t have have to pay the VAT on the raw materials that eventually becomes bread, it seems the baker guy would have sold bread for about $450.00. Assuming that the tax incidence falls completely on the consumers they have to eat the cost of the extra $50.00, so they buy less bread. Let’s say foreign baker guy can sell bread for $450.00 in his own country and in the country where there is a VAT. Clearly the foreign baker guy has an advantage because of the VAT. In order to neutralize this advantage, you charge foreign baker guy a tax of about 10% when he sells in the VAT country and then you deduct about 10% from the domestic baker guy when he tries to sell bread in the foreign country. And its my understanding that is what happens in VAT countries in order to make the VAT neutral with respect to trade.

This obviously gets more complicated when you are talking about flexible exchange rates.

With this “border adjustment” plan, its my understanding that exchange rate adjustments are supposed to neutralize any price effects of imported versus exported goods. Businesses like Sprawl Mart seem to be worried about the plan. Maybe they don’t think the exchange rate will adjust or maybe not quickly enough. I have really no strong opinion about this. If exchange rates don’t adjust fully though, this could have a distributional impact.

But, I’d assume, the Trumpster will say this will help to close the US current account deficit. In reality though, Trump’s tax cuts are likely to make the current account deficit worse.

[Commodore]

read this tweetstorm on the Russian hacks, pretty scary stuff

It reads like a script from The Americans

 

[Mexal]

26 minutes ago, Commodore said:

read this tweetstorm on the Russian hacks, pretty scary stuff

 

Thanks for the link. Scary indeed. Scarier knowing our President-elect is more interested in trusting Julian Assange's word then any of this analysis. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, The Great Unwashed said:

It's absurd to state that Ellison's backers are trying to "gin up" any outrage outside of the outrage felt over baseless attacks of anti-Semitism from some of Clinton's biggest donors.

And supporters of the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party are already alienated. That's sort of the point. Perez would be a fine candidate under normal circumstances, but in this case, he's being pushed as a more palatable alternative to the establishment wing of the party based on his close ties to the Obama organization and Clinton campaign. 

It shouldn't be Ellison or Perez. Neither have any experience at party building. If the DNC was smart they'd look at all 50 state party chairs, identify the most successful ones and bring them in to determine who has the best strategy that would translate to the national level.

[Werthead]

This article is interesting from a US foreign policy perspective at the four major flashpoints that lie ahead for the new administration. I'm not keen on the "worst case scenario" for each one being presented, but it does raise valid questions.

The first one raised is the Middle East, but interestingly doesn't focus on ISIS (which is pretty much toast, if the last strongholds can be reduced and retaken in the next few months) but instead on state-actor levels. The article notes that there hasn't been a direct state-level confrontation between Middle East power players for a long time, but that if Trump does tear up the Iranian deal, that will likely lead Iran into restarting its nuclear programmed (helped by Russia) and risk a response by Israel, especially an Israel emboldened by unflinching American support. An Israel-Iran confrontation would force the US to take Israel's side and Russia Iran's, and lead to the very quick dissolution of the Trump-Putin bromance (although the article oddly doesn't go into this). Rolling it back, it would certainly increase Saudi-Iranian tensions in the region considerably even in a best-case scenario.

The second is in Europe, with American reluctance to back up NATO potentially triggering a Russian intervention in the Baltic States that, quite simply, Putin would never risk in a million years if the US made it clear it would abide by its treaty commitments. More dangerous is that, no matter Trump's desire to stay out of it, Congress will not let the United States step back and let Russia roll across Europe again, forcing a confrontation at a later time when Russia is more powerful. However, this part of the article I think underestimates Putin's grasp of timing. Although that can fail and Putin can get greedy and overreach, so far he has shown restraint and a desire not to fight too many conflicts on too many fronts and may not choose to risk an intervention in the Baltics until the situations in Syria and Ukraine are more resolved to his satisfaction.

The analysis of North Korea is the most interesting, because Trump clearly didn't give much of a shit until it became clear how close North Korea is to putting nukes on missiles capable of reaching Hawaii and Alaska, at which point he indicated on Twitter that he would not permit that. However, the article doesn't take account of the fact that Trump may order an attack on the North Korean nuclear facilities unilaterally, which could have dire consequences (a North Korean artillery strike against Seoul, followed by the outbreak of war and a Chinese intervention to prevent America and its allies taking the entire Korean peninsula). However, this analysis ends with the suggestion that even if a major war is averted, Japan may feel emboldened to develop nuclear weapons and emerge as a much more militarised country more willing to take on China in the region, which wouldn't be an ideal outcome either.

The last analysis is of China in the South China Sea and is a bit cursory, which is odd given this is the one area where Trump has already started stirring up trouble (over Taiwan). Obama's attitude towards China in the region was actually sensibly robust: ignoring Chinese claims, sailing ships through the area and daring China to do something (they didn't) and cultivating stronger ties with Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan and so on. Trump's anti-Chinese rhetoric is more dangerous in this regard and could trigger anything from a naval blockade in the busiest sea lanes in the world for trade to an all-out Chinese invasion of Taiwan which the United States would be utterly powerless to prevent.

The real danger identified in the article is that Trump may say something blustering and foolish on Twitter, decide to back it up and then the whole thing starts spiralling out of control very dangerously and to unforeseen ends, which may overcome any illusory benefit from Trump saying nice things about Putin and Kim Jong-Un.