Stalking Rodgers

[Striker]

3 minutes ago, PossibleCabbage said:

Yeah, the whole "X program is insolvent" is just a game of chicken played by austerity wonks.  The US Government could fund basically anything it wanted for as long as it wanted.  The will is harder to cultivate than the way here.  Like we could absolutely do UBI in the U.S., but there's a significant number of people who think "kids get free meals at school"  is a moral hazard for some bizarre reason.

I'm not sure if I blame Reagan or the Tea Party era for the "WE MUST HAVE A BALANCED BUDGET" nonsense. A country is not a business and it's not a household.

Also, the welfare panic and tired tropes that constantly pop up despite most (an overwhelming majority of?) studies showing that fraud is very rare. Oh, and the fact that it actually helps people not starve or afford healthcare and other important things like that.

[Leader]

2 hours ago, 15412 said:

I am all for supporting them.  I am also 100% for making them pay for that support rather than gifting it to them.  They have the mineral and agricultural wealth to pay for it down the road.

The rebuilding of their country and the economic ties that come from them becoming a NATO partner will more than cover the "cost" - the majority of which is going to U.S. military contractors who are building/making the supplies - i.e. U.S. jobs and economic benefit being realized now.

[hitnhope]

thought this was a football forum

[Uffdaswede]

I can tell you from having worked in schools for forty years…

When I first started in a small district the kids paid for their hot lunches which were pretty dang good. The cooks leaned into the portions for big kids who were growing.

Two things were going on. The food was good and small town kids were used to eating meats, potatoes, vegetables and greens. Portions reflected need. The cooks slipped a sandwich and milk to the urchins from sh***y families that sent their kids with no lunch.

By the end of my career breakfast and lunch were free for everyone. By breakfast we mean corn syrup/coco puffs smashed into a bar and a box of corn syrup water and fruit extract. Lunch was better, but if you stood next the garbage can you would see tray after tray dumped with most “free” food and milk dumped without having been touched. There was nothing wrong with the food. Modern children come to school having been habituated to McDonalds and macaroni and cheese. They happily step up to the mandatory salad bar, dish themselves a variety of colorful and healthy foods, and then dump it since they would no more gnaw on a raw broccoli than they would an eraser. (Bad example. I’ve seen kids eat erasers.)

 Government tends to respond to emotional appeals to do “something” with programs that are too far away to respond intelligently.

 I have seen autism and spectrum disorders skyrocket over the last twenty years. Our food supply and children’s terrible eating habits are a prime suspect. What else is ubiquitous enough to explain it? Screen time perhaps, but the rise in autism preceded that.

Point being, just because you have free school lunches doesn’t mean kids are eating them or being nourished by them. (Ironically, high school kids from sh***y families are often very hungry. But they get the same size breakfast and lunch as a kindergartner.)

Free school lunches are very moral. They solve the problem of not having free school lunches. Let’s congratulate each other for being on the right side once again.

 

 

[TransientTexan]

1 hour ago, PossibleCabbage said:

The US Government could fund basically anything it wanted for as long as it wanted. 

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. 

[HokieHigh]

Interesting the jets signed t smith instead of bak

[HokieHigh]

1 hour ago, TransientTexan said:

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. 

Inflation is in your imagination. The economy is good. 

 

You will own nothing and you will like it. 

[thrILL!]

15 minutes ago, HokieHigh said:

Interesting the jets signed t smith instead of bak

Is it?  Bakhtiari made it pretty clear how he felt about the turf at MetLife after Rodgers got injured.  

[persiandud]

Tyron Smith was the best available OL in free agency, pretty big coup for the Jets to snag him. they added 3 starters to their OL 

[PossibleCabbage]

2 hours ago, Uffdaswede said:

What else is ubiquitous enough to explain it?

We're much better at spotting it.  It's like how left-handedness used to be stigmatized to the point where only like 2-3% of the people born circa 1900 are left-handed, but something like 13% of people born since 1960 are left-handed.  The 2-3% of people who were left-handed in era where that would get you beaten until you learned to write correctly were the people who didn't learn to hide it or escaped circumstances where they needed to, everybody else learned to write the other way to hide their natural proficiency.

I imagine Autism spectrum stuff is similar, in that previously people who were high functioning on the spectrum were simply not flagged as "abnormal" even if the degree of masking or performing being neurotypical was stressful.

[incognito_man]

35 minutes ago, PossibleCabbage said:

We're much better at spotting it.  It's like how left-handedness used to be stigmatized to the point where only like 2-3% of the people born circa 1900 are left-handed, but something like 13% of people born since 1960 are left-handed.  The 2-3% of people who were left-handed in era where that would get you beaten until you learned to write correctly were the people who didn't learn to hide it or escaped circumstances where they needed to, everybody else learned to write the other way to hide their natural proficiency.

I imagine Autism spectrum stuff is similar, in that previously people who were high functioning on the spectrum were simply not flagged as "abnormal" even if the degree of masking or performing being neurotypical was stressful.

I've never heard it explained this way before. Thought provoking. 

[Brat&Beer]

1 hour ago, HokieHigh said:

Interesting the jets signed t smith instead of bak

At this point, is it even known if Bakhtiari will be able to play again? Would think they need to know about that knee before a contract is signed. 

[oldmansmell]

2 hours ago, PossibleCabbage said:

I imagine Autism spectrum stuff is similar, in that previously people who were high functioning on the spectrum were simply not flagged as "abnormal" even if the degree of masking or performing being neurotypical was stressful.

There's also the fact that autism was diagnosed at rates 8:1 male/female in the 1960's, and a emergent hypothesis in the 1990's made it a component of the male-brain in overdrive. They did a bunch of studies that showed that most autistic girls were "tomboys" and overwhelmingly chose stereotypically male toys and games. Now I don't necessarily think those studies are wrong- they may actually be saying something important - but it does point to a problem in diagnosing girls. 

In terms of visibility, we also used to frequently institutionalize extreme cases, which there really isn't much ability to do now for, you know, decent reasons. 

Edited March 16 by oldmansmell

[oldmansmell]

5 hours ago, TransientTexan said:

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. 

I love this forum loophole.

This is a tough one, I both agree and disagree. We've leveraged the dollar against the international system, 10 countries currently are dollarized (I forget whether el-salvador is officially dollarized now or they've gone full bit-coin), and the vast majority, especially including China, would be devastated by an alteration to the post-Bretton Woods monetary system. Therefore we can effectively spend whatever we want, because our debt is essentially meaningless except for its inflationary costs. 

The caveat obviously is it possibly hurts American consumers, and potentially significantly. However, I am skeptical, and have worked on two papers highlighting mechanisms that debunk the connections between debt and inflationary growth (in our case in isolation). The problem is that we are actually quite good at spending, even if at the micro level it is often wasteful. World War II is probably the core example, where our extra spending eventually led to a massive growth in GDP that more than offset the extra debt. Furthermore, if we separate spending from, for example, quantitative easing (the Fed buying up a bunch of toxic assets like in 2008, or figuring out innovative ways to increase the money supply) the link between fiscal (government spending like you're thinking of) debt and inflation is almost non-existent. The problem is that QE was bad at allocating its balance sheets (put differently giving money) towards FDIC backed deposit holding banks (that's a bad way of saying it but I hope it makes it straightforward). Put a little differently, the FDIC banks have American consumers (like actual people), the other banks have accounts from predominantly American located companies that are owned by foreign multi-nationals (or American MNC's it doesn't really matter). They just sent it to Bermuda or Jersey, and viola we just gave that money away. The money we just threw out into the world was like 7 times more than the money we spent on stuff in our country - every time (it happened 4 times).