What does Trump have to do with conservatives?

Conservatives don't believe in punishing people with government. That's a leftist ideal.

epic troll dude

what's your real take?

epic troll dude

what's your real take?

I think you're confusing semantics with ideology. I refuse to adopt your definitions of political terminology. I am a conservative but you don't use that word in the same way as American conservatives. To add to the confusion, I bet most Americans don't really understand any of these terms. Regardless, just because I take issue with your caricatures I really don't see why you keep lumping me in with Fox or Republicans. Yes, I am a registered Republican but I rarely have anything defensive to argue on their parts anymore and I only occasionally catch a clip online from Fox News if it appears to be from a topic that interests me.

If anything, I've already figured it out years ago. I don't even know why you pretend to not notice that I'm clearly not the same Republican I was ten years ago. And, yes, I can clearly be classified as a socially moderate classical liberal but running around calling myself that makes about as much sense as calling myself gay every time I'm happy.

Registered Republican
Votes straight ticket Republican
Can't defend anything they say
Disagree with 90% of other Republicans about Trump
Ideologically opposed to their policies
I am clearly a liberal
Their policies specifically hurt me, my family, and my state
Hates being lumped in with other Republicans
Thinks the above makes him better

*Registered Republican
What would you suggest is my alternative?

I don't believe in miracles or soothsaying, but I have occasional dreams of the Notre Dame in Paris being destroyed and so today is ****ing unreal for me.

My dreams of inferno and chaos are always way more low-brow.

My dreams of inferno and chaos are always way more low-brow.

Apparently the 737 MAX 8 sensors would not warn if they reported differing data unless you paid Boeing a bunch for a software license??!?

What the actual ****? Not like a piece of safety hardware, but literally just a software option.

Whoever okay'd that decision at Boeing is okay'd for the guillotine.

I have no idea why it's the Notre Dame in particular. Or why I sometimes have any kind of apocalyptic dream at all..

My recurring apocalyptic dream is an asteroid crashes into the moon and then the moon crashes into earth. The thing that’s terrifying about it is that the dream always has such rich detail.

My recurring apocalyptic dream is an asteroid crashes into the moon and then the moon crashes into earth. The thing that’s terrifying about it is that the dream always has such rich detail.

Deciding what is optimal is the language and logic of Silicon Valley and it proceeds from the premise that the optimizer already knows the desired outcome in any given situation—if they didn’t, what would they be optimizing for? One of Yang’s ideas is for a “Digital Social Credit,” a name that invites comparison to the Chinese government’s social credit system. The idea is spelled out in detail on Yang’s website: “In order to spur development, the government should issue a new currency – the Digital Social Credit – which can be converted into dollars and used to reward people and organizations who drive significant social value. This new currency would allow people to measure the amount of good that they have done through various programs and actions.”

In the event of any disagreement over how to measure units of good, or how to track the rewards for designated drivers of significant social value who take part in sanction programs and actions, we can count on there being algorithms to sort out such matters. And if some troublesome person should question how we determine a definition of good that’s suitable for all Americans, or who controls the algorithms that make such decisions, Yang’s bet, and he won’t be that last to make it, is that promise of a thousand bucks a month, a truce in the culture wars, and a brake applied to the dizzying pace of change, will convince most people that they’d rather not push too hard looking for answers.

Implicit in his campaign is the possibility of escaping from one of the drearier and more interminable aspects of modern American life: the endless culture war. Take his approach to universities. There are two ways of framing the problem with American higher education. Conservatives see academic inquiry under attack from ideologically driven administrations, activist professors, and fragile, censorious students. Progressives, meanwhile, criticize universities as profit-maximizing institutions that leave students burdened with crushing debt, while affirming the academy’s role in spreading progressive social values. The terms of the debate have been locked for decades. But Yang cleverly organizes an end run around the whole moldy problem. He suggests “a gradual phase-in of a desired ratio of administrators to students of 1 to 30 as a condition of public funding as opposed to the current 1 to 21. The ratio was 1 to 50 in the 1970s – if we can get back to that level then college will be much cheaper.” In other words, rather than dealing at all with the motives, whether ideological or profit-driven, or attempting to push for a final status victory for either side in the campus culture wars, Yang goes around the problem to get out of it. Force schools to take money away from non-essential administrative cadres that justify their existence by enforcing political edicts, and give it back to students. At the same time, “stipulate that any university that receives public funding cannot increase its costs by more than the rate of annual median wage growth the year before.” Who knows if this will work, but can anyone bear another decade of rehashing the same tedious arguments that have been on a loop since the 60s?

What he says is the epitome of citing useless figures without understanding root causes.

Is it really? I'm not so sure I agree, in general at least. I admire him for having such an empirical approach to policy. Bracketing whether the data he has is right and whether he arrives as sound conclusions, when it comes to how he reasons about policy, it appears that he defines what the problems are by abstracting (or inferring) them from data, and then he devises solutions as responses to those problems.

It seems preferable to what many other Democrats are doing, which is devising policy ideas based on ideological commitments, and then using data to develop ex post facto rationalizations the policies.

We have a flat tire. How do we fix it??

Andrew Yang: The issue is that the current pressure in the tire is 1 atm. When the tire was not flat, the pressure was 2 atm. I propose we adjust the pressure until it it 1.5 atm.

What he says is the epitome of citing useless figures without understanding root causes. In any case, before the corporatization of universities, they were run mostly by professors and largely democratically. In fact, that's how they're still run. Our department is pretty much self-sufficient without any help from above. We make the exams, we give them, we assign grades, we deal with students. All the university does is a bit of clerical work, and they have some people making fat paychecks.

You could easily cut costs by trimming the fat and letting departments run themselves for the most part. That's already how things are pretty much done, little reorganization would be needed.

Optimizing arbitrary metrics is an ideological commitment just as much as governing from emotional pleas is.