Mexal Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 Looks like Gates is going to plead guilty today. This should up the heat on Manafort. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongRider Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 2 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said: Surprise, assholes! When you keep propping up those who are promising to disenfranchise you... you get disenfranchised! Trouble is, it affects those that didn't do that as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jace, Extat Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 15 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said: Trouble is, it affects those that didn't do that as well. Everything burns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted February 23, 2018 Author Share Posted February 23, 2018 3 hours ago, Martell Spy said: This Is What Life Without Retirement Savings Looks Like Many seniors are stuck with lives of never-ending work—a fate that could befall millions in the coming decades. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/pensions-safety-net-california/553970/ When I was in my teens and twenties we went to the US a few times, the longest time as guests at a friend’s condo in West Palm Beach. My older brother went to university in Tennessee, Lincoln Memorial, and driving down there for graduation was an eye-opener. But the big eye-opener came a decade later, when my brother and I were both working and started taking my mom and dad down to Vegas for 4 day weekends, once or twice a year. Little old people love Vegas and nickel slot machines. What struck my parents immediately was how many older people, and just downright old people, were working. Everywhere. Our favourite waitress at one hotel was in her 70s. We asked her why she still worked. Dumb question, right? She had to, to eat. Don’t get me wrong, there are poor old people in Canada as well. But there are pretty good income-support programs to lift people above the poverty level. There were scandals in the 60s and 70s over starving seniors, especially with raging inflation, and payment amounts were increased at that time. And God only knows what will happen to this working generation, sucked in by low interest rates to spend, spend, spend. But you don’t see old people working everywhere like you do in the States. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maltaran Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 This is probably a stupid question, but does the government not pay a state pension to old people in the US? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fez Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 4 minutes ago, Maltaran said: This is probably a stupid question, but does the government not pay a state pension to old people in the US? Almost everyone can get Social Security*, but the way the benefits are calculated pretty much everyone gets between $15k-$19k per year. Which, if that's your only source of income, can be pretty hard to live on; especially if you had a much higher income while working but didn't save anything. *A handful of state employees in certain states who started working decades ago don't, but they have a different pension system instead. It's complicated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IheartIheartTesla Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 Looking at a slight uptick in the generic House ballot for Democrats (~+8.5), no idea what is driving it (might be Parkland, might not be). Seems a bit untethered from President Littlefinger's own fluctuating fortunes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paladin of Ice Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 16 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said: Everything burns. Who's the guy on top of the pile of money in this situation? Personally I vote for the Kochs and Thiel. On the prior page there was talk about quotes from the Florida students that should change minds about the issue of guns. A quote that really made a few things hit home for me was from a doctor whose hospital treated a bunch of the kids from the Parkland shooting. Quote I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before. In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments. I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage? The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal. Link. Maybe it's just me, but imagining 15 year old kids or the grade school kids in Sandy Hook writhing on the ground, crying and screaming in pain with literally blown up insides... that just reinforces to me that, faced with the sort of gun issues this country has been dealing with in the last 20 years, the availability of these guns needs to be severely curtailed. Yeah, I know that there are places where wild animals necessitate a gun with greater stopping power than a handgun, or where guns are needed because it's a long drive from your house to the nearest police station, but nobody's target shooting hobby or nostalgia for the first time dad taught them how to shoot outweighs the right of hundreds of people to live their lives without suddenly their organs being turned into mush inside their bodies because it was far too easy for the wrong person to get a gun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Chatywin et al. Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 15 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said: Jim Jefferies was right. Whenever a sub came in my school we wanted to make her cry. It wasn't personal, we just had some shit to work through. And that was in the days of NetZero. LONG before internet trolls were a thing. Funny that you mention Jefferies, because his rift on guns was exactly what I was thinking about when I posted that. There’s so much truth to what he said. Quote Is homeboy a Jew? A non-practicing one since I was nine, when in the middle of playing Moses for my temple’s Passover play I stopped and looked at the rabbi and asked if he could have seen a mirage. Obviously that didn’t go over too well with the congregation. Quote Nothing like a nice clip job! Wouldn’t you like to know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Wedge Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 1 minute ago, IheartIheartTesla said: Looking at a slight uptick in the generic House ballot for Democrats (~+8.5), no idea what is driving it (might be Parkland, might not be). Seems a bit untethered from President Littlefinger's own fluctuating fortunes. President Littlefinger? You give the man too much credit. More like President Robert Baratheon. Bulldog your way to the throne and then let everyone else run it into the ground while you're golfing in the Kingswood, wenching, railing against unverified reports during "executive time," and sleeping through small council meetings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 3 minutes ago, The Wedge said: More like President Robert Baratheon. Bulldog your way to the throne and then let everyone else run it into the ground while you're golfing in the Kingswood, wenching, railing against unverified reports during "executive time," and sleeping through small council meetings. But Robert Baratheon at least knew his limitations well enough to install decent, trustworthy men as Hand. If Trump surrounded himself with a bipartisan mix of actual administrators, his bad instincts would only gradually seep in over time. What we have instead is much worse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted February 23, 2018 Author Share Posted February 23, 2018 38 minutes ago, Maltaran said: This is probably a stupid question, but does the government not pay a state pension to old people in the US? 33 minutes ago, Fez said: Almost everyone can get Social Security*, but the way the benefits are calculated pretty much everyone gets between $15k-$19k per year. Which, if that's your only source of income, can be pretty hard to live on; especially if you had a much higher income while working but didn't save anything. *A handful of state employees in certain states who started working decades ago don't, but they have a different pension system instead. It's complicated. Iirc, some of the people we spoke to talked about medical bills.... Another thing the elderly don't worry about here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted February 23, 2018 Author Share Posted February 23, 2018 12 minutes ago, Maithanet said: But Robert Baratheon at least knew his limitations well enough to install decent, trustworthy men as Hand. If Trump surrounded himself with a bipartisan mix of actual administrators, his bad instincts would only gradually seep in over time. What we have instead is much worse. HAHAHAHA! Baratheon faced a Deep State he knew nothing about! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted February 23, 2018 Author Share Posted February 23, 2018 I'll repeat what I posted in the gun thread: Right at this moment Trump is telling people at the CPAC conference, "they are going to take away your 2nd amendment rights", and urging the attendees to go out and fight in the mid-terms like they never have before. "I love you, I respect you, I appreciate everything you've done for the country". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Chatywin et al. Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 3 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said: And John Kerry tried taking on that narrative in 2004. It got him absolutely nowhere. It's such a recent narrative too: the US got into both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam under Democrats. Bob Dole even went so far as to talk about "Democratic Wars" in the 1976 VP debate. The Republican/military thing is based off the Culture Wars of the 1960s and 1970s, Reagan's 1980s posturing, and the hatchet jobs against George McGovern and Michael Dukakis. Never mind that McGovern was a decorated Air Force veteran. One of the things I could never wrap my head around when I was writing my thesis was the 1972 election. As you said, McGovern was a decorated war hero and yet he was painted as a liberal hippy while Nixon did next to nothing in the war and was labeled a proud veteran. But what was even more shocking is that the polling data shows that people overwhelmingly supported McGovern’s policy positions, and yet Nixon won in a historical landslide. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ormond Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 12 hours ago, Fragile Bird said: The things a person learns when reading stories about the events in Florida. Did you know there is a car fatality death belt in the US, in the Deep South and the Great Plains that correlates with gun fatalities and states that refused to expand Medicaid? From a Paul Krugman op-ed in the NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/guns-nasty-brutish-trump.html?action=click&contentCollection=Media&module=Trending&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article US Politics takes many strange twists and turns. It's not exactly news that car accident deaths are higher per capita in rural than urban areas. I've known about that statistical fact for decades. It also seems odd to me that one of the most obvious factors in this isn't mentioned in the linked article. I am sure part of this is that people drive faster on poorly maintained roads in rural areas -- but surely one factor in this must be the average distance between the site of an auto crash and the nearest emergency room or trauma center. It is no surprise to me that Montana is the state with the highest per capita traffic accident death rate -- in most of that state, it probably takes hours to get someone from a crash site to a hospital. Contrast that with Ohio, which has a fairly low rate even though it has a lot of "rural" areas -- but Ohio is also chock full of medium sized cities, so even most of its "rural" areas are probably not that far from a trauma center. I'd like to see county level data on this, as I think statewide comparisons may be less meaningful. The one that's hard to explain at first glance is Alaska -- maybe it's because a very high percentage of their population lives in the couple of big towns, or because many rural Alaskans just don't drive cars at all in the winter, having to rely on snowmobiles or other vehicles which might not get into the statistics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 18 minutes ago, Ormond said: I'd like to see county level data on this, as I think statewide comparisons may be less meaningful. The one that's hard to explain at first glance is Alaska -- maybe it's because a very high percentage of their population lives in the couple of big towns, or because many rural Alaskans just don't drive cars at all in the winter, having to rely on snowmobiles or other vehicles which might not get into the statistics. Alaska's driving profile is totally dissimilar to any other US state. The majority of VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) occurs in the summer, and even then there isn't nearly as much movement between cities as there is in the continental US, because the distances are often prohibitive. A lot more transportation is done by boat and air. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maithanet Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 Also Rasmussen has a poll with Trump's approval at 50/49, the first time he's been in positive territory in their daily poll since last March. Other polls have actually been going the other way for him the past week or so, but I expect we'll be seeing a presidential tweet of this outlier poll before too long. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IheartIheartTesla Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 1 hour ago, The Wedge said: President Littlefinger? You give the man too much credit.. I was referring to his tiny hands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mexal Posted February 23, 2018 Share Posted February 23, 2018 3 hours ago, Mexal said: Looks like Gates is going to plead guilty today. This should up the heat on Manafort. Plea hearing is at 2:00pm. Gates is likely to plead guilty to one count conspiracy, one count of lying to FBI. This is the third member of the Trump campaign to plead guilty and 4th person overall. Pressure is going to ramp up on Manafort real fast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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