Tag: Politics

On The Coup

We have reached a point where Dick Cheney is making an appearance on the House floor to support his daughter in her belief that attempting a coup is, well, not the pinnacle of American democracy?!?

For a long time, I absolutely believed both parties in the United States thought they were trying to do the right thing for the country. I remember going to a rally against privatizing social security — one of Bush 2’s early initiatives. The local NPR station had a reporter meandering around looking for younger people to interview — looking, specifically, for people who were worried that their retirement wouldn’t include social security. I, on the other hand, knew the history of the social security system. It was started after people lost huge sums of money — some more money than they had (thanks, leveraged buying) in a stock market downturn. The basis of social security is, essentially, that you can realize greater returns in riskier investments. But you can also lose everything in riskier investments, and this program is the backstop against “losing everything”. In that context, how is it reasonable to consider allowing individuals to direct social security funds into riskier investments because they might be able to outperform government bonds?!? But … I got it. We were decades away from the great depression, and years before the crash of 2008/2009. Most people had only experienced upward movement in the market. And the question at hand was really “is this form of insurance against stock market crashes still worth it?”. I could look at pretty much any political debate and understand how both sides had a coherent argument and viewed their position as The Right Thing To Do.

Maybe that’s still true today — but it seems like conservatives have become more adamant about forcing their will on the nation to retain power. To make money. We watched a dude on MSNBC basically admit to participating in a coup attempt not because he was ashamed of his actions. Not because he wanted to make sure everyone understood what exactly happened. But because he wanted to sell his new book. Well, mission accomplished (I guess). He’s managed to get his name out there & we all know he’s got a book. Liberals can buy it to prove there was a coup and conservatives can buy it to see “the receipts” on stealing an election. (Receipts which have been promised on multiple occasions but which have never been produced).

I’m still hopeful that the end result of this mess is a viable third (fourth, or even fifth) party. Maybe some actual fiscal conservatives (not deficit spending dumped into the military industrial complex v/s tax for domestic spending). Some democratic socialist party that makes Bernie seem pretty middle-of-the-road.

Inverse of Citizens United

Representation in the federal government is not equitable — I’ve talked before about how some Senators and Reps represent a lot more people than others. Citizens United farther eroded the influence individual citizens have on the government. But, this past week, I’m beginning to wonder if corporate influence might not force policies supported by a statistical majority that cannot gain enough of a majority in Congress or the Electoral College to have impact.

Businesses don’t care what a thousand acres of land thing. Generally speaking, a company doesn’t consider 280k people in Wyoming as important as 18.6 million in Cali. So, while both groups of people have one Senator … a company looking at losing 18 million customers is a lot more apt to act than one looking at losing 280k customers. Now, obviously, a company would rather avoid conflict and keep both sets of customers. But … if the majority begins to consider inaction offensive? Corporate influence might force a more equitable position for the national majority.

GA SB 202

This particular component of GA SB 202 seems to beg for civil disobedience — first of all, are they really going to throw five hundred people into county jail for handing out water?! What if it’s medical professionals handing out water to prevent dehydration? It wasn’t a gift, it was a prescription for 250cc of water administered orally. Can you bring drinks for friends? The first time Obama ran, I stood on a long queue with friends. One friend ran over to Starbucks and picked up coffees and ice teas for us all. Would that be illegal under this law?

But, more importantly, the law precludes giving of gifts that include food and drink. Can you sell food and water for a penny? Can you barter with food and water? Trade that paperclip/pen/coupon (whatever detritus you’ve got in your pocket or purse/wallet) for a bottle of water?

John Thune’s Six Bucks an Hour

It looks like he’s eliding details for effect. Per NYT:

“In Mr. Thune’s first job, as a busboy, he was paid the legal minimum of $1 an hour. Mr. Thune has said he worked at Star for seven summers, ending up as a cook earning $6 an hour. He used the money he saved to attend Biola College in California.”

He’s got a neat sounding sound bite — I made 6/hr work for me *and* paid for Uni. And, I guess, the point is that you need to move up and get pay increases so you’re making 5x or 6x minimum wage. Republicans tend to be big on the ‘your own bootstraps’ thing without considering the bigger picture.

As a kid, he quite possibly wasn’t paying for housing, electricity, food, heat, clothing, home repairs, medical bills. Maybe he was, I don’t know the guy. But, if he was living at home as a kid … with parents footing all of the ‘adult’ bills? That 6$ an hour went a LOT farther. When I worked in high school, the 60% (or whatever) of my cheque that didn’t go to taxes was for gas (to get to work, so not needed if I wasn’t working) and fun money. Seemed like a lot of money at the time.

And, great, he saved up to pay for Uni. He graduated in 1983 — average tuition, room, and board that year was 4,167. Which was a significant increase from the previous years he’d have been attending. Four years of Uni from 1980-1984, using national average tuition costs, would have been 14,634$. Maybe add in some in books/fees. What that? 20k to get his degree. I was forking over 20k a YEAR tuition, books, housing, and food. And that was only a decade later. 4500$ in 1993 dollars would have been just over 7k in 1996. Because Uni cost has seriously outpaced inflation.

When I left Uni and had to pay for adult things? I was making minimum wage — 4.75$/hr which was increased to 5.15$/hr not too long after I started. I clearly recall *not* being able to make rent on minimum wage. Eating the cheapest (and completely unhealthy) stuff from the cheapest grocery store — which had expensive health ramifications. Taking a second job because, on top of all of the just-to-survive things I needed to buy, I also needed to start repaying my student loans. Without the benefit of a degree because I couldn’t afford to finish Uni. Yeah, I had some lucky breaks that let me take jobs that paid better. I’m not conceited enough to think it was only my brilliance and fortitude that got me out barely-scraping-by jobs. I happened to have gained IT experience in Uni before *everyone* had computer experience. I happened to live in a small enough town that a lot of people in IT knew each other, and I had a friend call me up when he was leaving a job and basically offer me the position. Not to be nice — we weren’t that good of friends — but he had gotten a great job offer within the company. The internal transfer wouldn’t go through, though, unless his boss OK’d it. And his boss was going to be a LOT more willing to sign off on the xfer if there was a replacement employee right there. My phone could have been cut off for non-payment when dude tried to call me. If I didn’t have a credit card, I wouldn’t have been able to buy one nice outfit to wear to the interview. Hell, dude could have called someone else before me.

Your Own Facts: TX Power Edition

I’m not sure how political discourse has any point if everyone maintains their own facts to support their preconceived conclusion. How can you fix a problem when you cannot even agree what the problem is? The power outage in Texas is a prime example. Someone got on Hannity and spouted off about how it’s all the windmill’s fault. Because, evidently, windmills are awful? Froze up and just stopped producing power.

But wind turbines absolutely work in freezing temperatures. See, for instance, Alaska — https://windexchange.energy.gov/states/ak — where it does occasionally get cold. The difference is that they spend more on the installation and winterize the windmills. It’s not *wind turbines* that have a problem, it’s *unwinterized* wind turbines that end up in freezing weather. Same is true of cars (you may need what amounts to an electric blanket for the engine to get a diesel vehicle running in cold weather, and the fuel can still jell at very low temperatures). And people — going outside in a coat, scarf, hat, boots, and women’s gloves seemed like being appropriately dressed for the weather, but I was invariably super cold and hated going outside in winter. Found out that normal women’s gloves don’t have insulation in the fingers (because it is, evidently, more important that my fingers look svelte than that my fingers aren’t nearing frostbite stage) and bought ski gloves. Traded the hat and scarf for a balaclava. Traded the coat for insulated overalls with a coat. Traded cute winter boots for waterproof Mucks. Winter is an awesome time to head outside now. It’s bulky attire, but I’m warm. Sometimes, when we’re shoveling snow in just-below-freezing temps, I’m too warm.

Other production sources shut down because they were inadequately winterized too — natural gas pipelines were blocked with ice, frozen coal piles made it difficult to keep coal plants online, solar installations were covered in snow, frozen pumps limited water to nuclear cooling towers … basically every form of electrical generation experienced limited production in the cold weather.

The benefit of spending more money on a precaution you use once a decade is certainly a valid debate — but the consequence of that decision need to be anticipated, to be accepted … and the problem needs to be communicated accurately. If it would have cost a billion dollars over the past decade (essentially the span since the “last time this happened”) to maintain winterized generation and delivery facilities … we opted to save a billion dollars with the current situation as the trade-off. Voters don’t like that? They can vote for someone who will demand winterization. Voters prefer saving the money, vote for the current people. Sucks for the 49% who vote the other way … but that’s democracy.

But that doesn’t work when individuals have “facts” to support what they want to believe. The reader poll in my county paper today asked who deserves the most blame for the power failure in Texas. 23% say windmills and green energy. Wind facility shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages. I haven’t seen numbers for reduction in solar generation … but wind production is the one being scapegoated.

It took a few days for reporting to include the fact Texas has its own power grid with smaller interconnects to other grids that aren’t sized to pull enough power to cover this outage. Even now, does much reporting include the fact Texas maintains its own grid to avoid federal regulations that would have required some winterization? That’s not lack of regulation, that’s intentionally designing a system to avoid existing regulations. Poor leadership is too vague to be meaningful — poor leadership at ERCOT failing to take some action in the past week or two that would have magically prevented problems? Poor leadership in intentionally maintaining a loosely connected grid that avoided federal regulations to reduce cost? Those are whole different types of “poor leadership” which may or may not be viable paths to prevent this from happening again in 2031.

 

On Socialism

Socialism is only considered bad because we get sold on the idea that The Wrong People will benefit from our hard earned tax dollars. GoFundMe’s for medical bills are acceptable socialism because, by crowd-sourcing funding, you get to individually screen each case to ensure your money only goes to The Right People.

Evidently enough people in the US feel it’s worth risking medical bankruptcy to avoid some undesirable’s bad behavior racking up taxpayer funded medical expenses.

Same with tuition-free state schools. Rich kid might still pay a heap-o money and go to a private Uni. But they also MIGHT go to the state school and then my taxes are covering that tuition. Seriously, if the state school is so awesome that rich folks are sending their kids there, or some small handful of rich misers send their kids to the stae Uni because it’s free … we’re all graduating Uni with tens of thousands in debt to avoid those horrors?!

Campaigning Without Ads

I’ve seen some stats on what’s been spent on political campaigning this year — and it made me wonder what if they didn’t put so much money into advertising and cross-country tours. What if each party selected something from their platform and put the money into “fixing” the problem. Maybe the Republicans could take three billion dollars and build a private organization that patrols the border. The Democrats could take five billion dollars and create a non-profit that pays for medical procedures. It would certainly be reported by the news — you’d hear about who was doing it and what they were doing. And, instead of ClearChannel and whomever making a load of money selling airtime … the campaigning would actually accomplish something the party thinks needs to get done.

Censorship?

This may be a paranoid thought, but … a bunch of high-profile people’s Twitter accounts were hacked today, and the messages posted asked followers to send Bitcoin. Twitter shut down these accounts for a few hours.

There’s obviously a profit motive here — as of 11:30 today, they’ve garnered over 118k (and have been clearing the money out, so money isn’t just an unfortunate consequence of the hack).

The target list that is hyped includes a lot of big names, and it’s interesting to see which names seem to create the biggest bump in transactions to the wallet.

But the one that stands out to be is Joe Biden — and, yes, it looks like his account was hacked.

This looks like a proof of concept test to me. Now, it’s possible that Trump wasn’t hacked because it is so implausible that he’d be giving back to the community. But forcing the platform to shut down a bunch of accounts, including a number of your political opponents, is a brilliant approach to disrupting campaigning. Seems like a next level move from a government-sponsored intel group looking to interfere with elections after their troll accounts and advertising attempts get shut down.

Marketing Fail

I find it ironic that the Republican, who brought us marketing campaigns such as the “Death Tax” which would cause Paris Hilton to pay taxes on her hypothetical inheritance but didn’t mean jack to 80% of the country seems unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to effectively market pandemic response.
 
Social distancing is a horrible phrase that speaks to isolation. OK, you don’t congregate in one big lump of humanity at the beach or discotheque. Why isn’t figuring out innovative ways to interact a national pursuit? Physically distanced social interactions — either online or in person. A few decades ago, I had friends who would all get on a call to watch a movie or TV show together. Start writing letters again (help out the post office, too). Back in March, when the lock-downs started, I surprised a lady at the grocery store by helping her look for her parent’s preferred type of coffee as I stood on the checkout queue. She didn’t have to get near me, I didn’t have to get near her, but the “social distancing” campaign had her thinking “head down, don’t talk to anyone”. We’ve got patio chairs set up under the big maple tree in our front yard. Two families sitting 10′ apart can easily converse, hang out, enjoy nature, etc. Putting chairs on either side of the fire pit is about 8′ apart too.
 
Then there are the masks. Social trends have convinced people to wear all manner of wild kit. There’s no way it couldn’t have been presented as some awesome fashion trend. I’m curious if it’s *masks* or *orders* that the non-mask wearing public finds so objectionable. Like, would they be down with wearing a confederate flag mask? What about helmets — we can dress up like astronauts, scuba divers, motorcycle riders. I introduced my daughter to pandemic safety by calling it the zombie apocalypse. It’s fun to get the masks and gloves on to take the recycling down the the drop-off point where she stands guard in the car watching for zombies. Or get a superhero cape and mask, adopt a secret identity. Not something I recommend when it’s 95 degrees … but when it cools off again, pretend you’re a less murder-y version of the invisible man with the head wrapping and sun shades.
 
The Republican promotion of preventative actions reminds me of the court-ordered PSA commercials that tobacco companies air. They have technically said what the court has ordered them to say, but there has been no attempt to engage the audience. Or attract attention. White screen, black text, monotone voice-over repeating what the text says.