Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

[SnowFire]

Big cutbacks at the FAA, too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/white-house-endorses-plan-to-remove-30000-faa-workers-from-federal-payroll/2017/03/16/ce4a4e3c-099c-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html?utm_term=.65ac57a977f9
NextGen has indeed been a shitshow, but it's not clear it'd be less of a shitshow if done even more by contractors than it already is.

[Captain K]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-rabid-online-following/

Cool article about 538 analyzing Reddit to death.  No big surprises other than the news subreddits being a lot more centered than their reputations.

[Grefter]

Hat is just checking overlap of posts though,  and measuring by frequent posters.  It should work well for checking overlapping interests.   It isn't really checking the behaviours of voters who don't post which especially on big subreddits on less focused topics (like say News) then measuring just by the presence of comments isn't going to give the whole story.   News subreddits didn't go to shit because it gets bombarded by far right commenters, they went to shit because of vote stuffing by them.

For most stuff though yeah the method is good.

[The Duck]

https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/845008285916938242

we're the dumbest

[Grefter]

We didn't have a post about the Dutch election with Rutte winning over Wilders?

For posterity that was the blip on the radar where I nearly had hope for world politics for a day.

[dunie]

there was also van der Bellen in Austria 2016!

hopefully the tide gets taller. elections in the future, work to do...

[The Duck]

How's the French election? I think Macron was doing fairly well last I checked but I don't know much about it.

[Grefter]

I will throw this to our man in the field if he ever surfaces from a Yoko Taro haze.

[Fenrir]

Le Pen from the far right is first but likely to lose in the second round
Macron the centrist is doing well
Fillon the right wing candidate is getting one scandal / week and has plunged. Le pen has been in a scandal too but her asshole voters aren't going to care about it.
There are two left wing candidates that share a small pool of voters and don't have much hope (though I like Hamon. I'll vote for either him or Macron)

Macron would be the winner but you never know. He's getting a lot of pressure right now and might be hit by a scandal. He does like money

Yoko Taro for president 2017

[Fenrir]

Fillon had this image of austere and respectable right wing liberal who demands sacrifices from the people and won the primary thanks to this image. But then it was revealed he has paid his wife 1 million of tax money to do fuck all and he completely botched his defense. Then we learned he paid his kids with tax money before they graduated. Then we learned about his conflicts of interest re: Putin.
He has no credibility left and has gone full Trump / Berlusconi since then, along with most of the right, which has been really shameful. Dude is scum.
A lot of right wing voters fled to Macron since then.

Schadenfreude.

[NotMiki]

Everything still sucks, but let's take a moment to bathe in some conservative tears, shall we?

TEA PARTY MORE LIKE THE TEAR PARTY! BAM!

AHCA? A HORRIBLE CONSERVATIVE ASSKICKING! EAT IT!

GOOD THING Y'ALL STILL GET MAMMOGRAMS, YA BOOBS!

[dunie]

why sway

[The Duck]

Everything still sucks, but let's take a moment to bathe in some conservative tears, shall we?

TEA PARTY MORE LIKE THE TEAR PARTY! BAM!

AHCA? A HORRIBLE CONSERVATIVE ASSKICKING! EAT IT!

GOOD THING Y'ALL STILL GET MAMMOGRAMS, YA BOOBS!

I am amazed every time anyone thinks Paul Ryan is smart or a policy genius.

[Shale]

He just keeps getting promoted because he's the most convenient empty suit at any given moment. He took over the budget committee when they needed somebody to ignore all practical or policy considerations and yell about cutting spending. Said yelling set the stage for him to be named the token right-wing ideologue on the Romney ticket. That elevated his profile to the point where he could wrangle an assignment to the Ways & Means Committee. He did nothing there, but as a result of taking no actual stands on anything when Boehner went down Ryan was the only Republican in the party who (a) everybody knew; and (b) neither the Tea Party nor the "moderates" hated. And that's how you become Speaker of the House by getting your ass kicked in a presidential election.

[OblivionKnight]

*ahem*

Paul Ryan is a terrible politician.  I had some respect for the guy prior to the election campaign, but then he just stuck is his head so far up Trump's ass that I can't have any respect for him ever.  I think I have less liking for him than about anyone else in the government.  I am happy the AHCA is down for the moment.  Of course, people keep bitching about the ACA, why don't they work together and fix it?  80% of the problems with ACA are not the ACA's fault, it's our fucked up healthcare system, costs, etc.  Fix that, ACA is very solid, with a couple changes being all that's needed.  "Obamacare will explode" is not true from everything I've read and seen - our healthcare system might explode, but that would affect anything similar.  Stop this "repeal and replace" shit - it was never going to work, it was just stupid partisan rhetoric to get a fully Republican government to enact "your agenda", and that hasn't worked out.  People had issues with it because 1) you lied about it (lol, "death panels") 2) people don't understand healthcare (yes, healthcare is much more complicated than it seems - clearly, with the AHCA proposal, they showed they don't know how health insurance works). 

But, I'm not so naive that I think people will actually work together on this.  Frankly, if things explode, shifting blame to Obama or the democrats is stupid - if you know it's going to blow up and fuck over a ton of people, you need to prevent it from blowing up, or that's on you. 

[SnowFire]

To give Ryan some VAGUE credit, I have to presume he was (ineffectively) trying to sabotage Trump back in 2016 - he "withdrew from active campaigning" after stick-hand-in-her-pussy-gate and all but anti-endorsed Trump, thinking that Republicans would be savvy enough to get what he meant, or care.  Hahaha nope.  I think his popularity dipped by 15 points after he did this.  Not a huge surprise he learned his lesson.

Leadership is a two-way street in a democracy.  Right now we have the voters leading the "leaders" and getting rid of anyone who doesn't toe the line, so it's no shock we get modern Paul Ryan, creature of whatever Trump wants.  If somehow Ryan changed, then some equivalent would most likely just become Speaker instead.

Also, not to kick the AHCA while it's down, but for all that it was a goddamn disaster that was not policy-thought through from the start, it somehow became even worse toward the end in the quest for votes in an utterly incoherent way, which is really really scary (if not unexpected).  You can have "crippled Obamacare" where there's mandatory minimum insurance requirements and flat subsidies based on whatever to help pay for them.  You can have "free market rulez!" where you throw away both the requirements and subsidies and let the magic of the market do its thing.  Well, in trying to get the Freedom Caucus votes, the AHCA threw away the mandatory minimum insurance requirements, but not the subsidies.  This is incoherent and should have been immediately vetoed by anyone who knew anything about policy.  That just means "Attention healthy people: I am selling 1 dollar insurance.  It doesn't actually cover anything, but we'll split the gov't subsidies 50/50 between us.  You can just go get on real insurance if shit goes down anyway."  Gov't fraud & waste central.  But I guess anyone who understood that in the Republican side had their caring ground away a long time ago.

[Grefter]

You mean the people who came in to power after a piece of policy came in were taking the chance to reform it in such a way that might compromise the very foundation of it in such a way that will ultimately be able to be used as proof that the original policy was a terrible idea in the first place?  And then when presented with a choice on whether to compromise it further for more votes after already attaining support from others, didn't fight too hard against the compromise?


Sounds familiar.

[The Duck]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/28/republicans-are-poised-to-roll-back-landmark-fcc-privacy-rules-heres-what-you-need-to-know/?utm_term=.e161599a9dab

So this low key bill passed and naturally it fucking sucks. One of TN's worst House members (which is a pretty hard thing to be) is Marsha Blackburn, who has gotten tens of thousands of dollars from Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc, and she's been pushing for this kind of thing for a long time. VPN, folks!

[SnowFire]

The darkly hilarious thing about that one is...

A) One of the arguments for it is that the FCC was being unfair because it wasn't regulating Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. as well.  But they don't have authority to!  The FCC is only for telecoms companies.  This is like saying that because gun shows exist, gun shops shouldn't have to comply with regulations and background checks either.  (Wait, that line of argument IS used.)

B) Also, "Hey, Google/FB/Amazon/Microsoft etc. have this data already, why can't Verizon/AT&T get in on the fun?"  Yeah, assholes, if a company screws up, there are ways to not use them.  Plenty of people who just don't use Facebook or only use non-logged in Google search.  Cable is much more a natural monopoly; yes, satellite companies exist, but they're much worse service.  And once you do use a cable service, there's no way to opt out; they get everything.  And...  they don't even *need* any data to do their jobs!  With Amazon, if they don't have your credit card and shipping address, this thing isn't working.  With Netflix, if they don't know your taste in movies, you get worse service.  None of those arguments has anything to do with providing good telecommunications infrastructure.

C) I think the Trump administration also nixed a rule that required good data stewardship practices and to avoid theft.  Say what you will about Silicon Valley, they generally have something approaching a clue when it comes to data security.  AT&T?  Hahahahahaha no.

[Grefter]

Info Sec is a cost center that provides no revenue.  Why should a business ever invest in it?

Is that enough question marks to signify sarcasm.


Edit - Not enough sarcasm, have some more.

I think you are being a bit harsh on the Snowfire, I mean they absolutely can use that data to improve their services.  If they monitor people's traffic and record it they could offer a special package to a user to prioritize their traffic to the MindGeek CDN for an additional fee!  That's value!

[OblivionKnight]

Well, today's comments from Paul Ryan have cemented my previous statement that he is my least favorite person in the government.

Said best by Bob Corker:

"We have come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president NOT to work with the other party to solve a problem."

Da fuq

[The Duck]

So, funny story...

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mike-flynn-willing-testify-return-immunity-n740836

[Cotigo]

It's kinda funny what'll happen when you get rid of loose ends by throwing them under the bus.

[Shale]

"We have come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president NOT to work with the other party to solve a problem."

Da fuq

Looking at the positive, it's awesome that Bob Corker was able to wake up from the coma he's apparently been in since 2002 and immediately resume his duties in the U.S. Senate.

[The Duck]

"We have come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president NOT to work with the other party to solve a problem."

Da fuq

Looking at the positive, it's awesome that Bob Corker was able to wake up from the coma he's apparently been in since 2002 and immediately resume his duties in the U.S. Senate.

I've been in TN a long time and doubt this will last more than a week.