Play Nice Random Chat Thread V

[Snake_Baker]

The worst part about is, they’re so polarised, there’s going to be some battles on the streets.

You can definitely blame the Dems for the majority of that, and yet they turned their backs on the best candidate that either party could put forward!!!



I just don't get it, and I assume that U.S. politics is the same as Australian politics, in that the parties exist to serve the personal agendas of the people in them, and not for the greater good of the common people.

It's a ****ing terrible state of affairs. The people are getting short circuited by the political parties.

 

[B4Bear]

The worst part about is, they’re so polarised, there’s going to be some battles on the streets.
And you can see what’s going to happen a mile off, Trump will win on election night, mail in votes will come in declaring Biden the winner, off to the Supreme Court for a verdict.. regardless of which cracker gets in, the American people lose.

Have you seen this? we’re looking back to the future.

Jews For Trump car parade stirs protests, fights in New York

Skirmishes broke out between supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump as a “Jews For Trump” convoy of hundreds of cars draped with American flags and Trump 2020 banners rolled slowly through Manhattan and Brooklyn over the weekend. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, called...

news.yahoo.com

People attacking Jews? Or a political rally turning violent.

That they are Jewish is incidental I would have thought.

 

[DesertRoo]

People attacking Jews? Or a political rally turning violent.

That they are Jewish is incidental I would have thought.

political rallies turning violent is unacceptable in a modern day democracy.

The signalling out of a race and the rise of antisemitism is another distributing issue altogether and it’s happening all over the world.

 

[CharlieMortdecai]

The worst part about is, they’re so polarised, there’s going to be some battles on the streets.
And you can see what’s going to happen a mile off, Trump will win on election night, mail in votes will come in declaring Biden the winner, off to the Supreme Court for a verdict.. regardless of which cracker gets in, the American people lose.

Have you seen this? we’re looking back to the future.

Jews For Trump car parade stirs protests, fights in New York

Skirmishes broke out between supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump as a “Jews For Trump” convoy of hundreds of cars draped with American flags and Trump 2020 banners rolled slowly through Manhattan and Brooklyn over the weekend. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, called...

news.yahoo.com

International crisis group have issued a warning of genuine risk of election-related violence due to:

• Trump implying that he can only lose if the other side cheats
• Trump questioning the validity of the electoral process
• High number of arms in the general community
• Presence of extremist groups

They are not saying it is likely, but is a legitimate risk.

 

[B4Bear]

political rallies turning violent is unacceptable in a modern day democracy.

The signalling out of a race and the rise of antisemitism is another distributing issue altogether and it’s happening all over the world.

So is conspiracy to kidnap Governors, but here we are.

A juvenile and largely uneducated population with access to 300 million+ firearms.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[LuvtheKangas]

Except of course that the costs of electricity have gone up in real terms since the early 21st century.

Probably. But so have housing prices. And the price of telephone calls have gone down. I suspect gas and water are probably close to the same in real terms. There are industry specific factors at play, along with significant demographic changes in the relevant period. It's easy to cherry-pick if you want to support an argument.

My point was not to initiate a detailed examination of pricing structures, but to highlight the fallacy of being challenged to nominate a utility for which the price has gone down since privatisation.

 

[DesertRoo]

So is conspiracy to kidnap Governors, but here we are.

A juvenile and largely uneducated population with access to 300 million+ firearms.

What could possibly go wrong?

they need an external enemy to unite against.. a boogieman.

 

[koshari]

In NSW you can't sell solar power to the grid. You can offset your usage but you don't have the opportunity to profit from your excess production the way you should be able to and that is down to corporate lobbying. In this case privatisation on a large scale is interfering with what cousld be a free(-ish) market.

Whilst the same is true here in Victoria, the actual difference between the wholesale and retail price of electricity makes it a lot smarter to offset anyway, take the typical wholesale price of electricity generally being round 4c Kwh. as a retail consumer we pay closer to 30. so offsetting the unit of energy effectively saves you near 10 times what you would get back for it selling on the wholesale market. having said that sometimes the 30 min dispatch even goes negative!
On the other hand if the system goes to VOL its $5 per Kwh but this is a pretty rare event ( extreme summer days etc...).

Therein lies the key issue - cost neutral might be higher than you imply. They might need to charge more to "pay for itself".

so far we havnt even discussed the social benefit that came from these type of agencies, the amount of trades people and engineers trained in the SECV was huge and many went on to work in private industry saving these buisnesses the burden of training them with their own funds.

 

[B4Bear]

Whilst the same is true here in Victoria, the actual difference between the wholesale and retail price of electricity makes it a lot smarter to offset anyway, take the typical wholesale price of electricity generally being round 4c Kwh. as a retail consumer we pay closer to 30. so offsetting the unit of energy effectively saves you near 10 times what you would get back for it selling on the wholesale market. having said that sometimes the 30 min dispatch even goes negative!
On the other hand if the system goes to VOL its $5 per Kwh but this is a pretty rare event ( extreme summer days etc...).



so far we havnt even discussed the social benefit that came from these type of agencies, the amount of trades people and engineers trained in the SECV was huge and many went on to work in private industry saving these buisnesses the burden of training them with their own funds.

This can not be emphasised enough. The vast, vast majority of trade apprenticeships were through large government organisations, electricity, councils, military and the like.

Now, business refuses to pick up the training liability they need for there to be sufficient homegrown trades. So what do they do? Some dodgy visa scheme with the backing of government and the business council.+

 

[Joycey]

That intelligence agency in China isn't messing around with the Hunter Biden stuff. They've come out and said they have 10000 images/videos of him and have been leaking them every 5 minutes for the past 24 hours. They've hinted that some of them are of him with underage women. We already know that he started seeing his dead brothers wife but then left her when he got a stripper pregnant. Now this agency is saying they have proof that he slept with his niece too. I shudder at the thought...even more so considering she is 16.

They also leaked an image of Nancy Pelosi's son with a young asian girl that is tied up. Some disgusting stuff going on with these elites that think they can do as they please. I get that the children of rich people tend to have a free pass but this is next level

 

[Scallop Industry Thug]

Im very comfortable stating that Trump is a far more urgent and dangerous threat to democracy and the wellbeing of society in general than Biden and Harris.

 

[Scallop Industry Thug]

The sun is shining, lockdown is over, I can see my Mum and Ill have a couple of hours of listening to trade radio, and all the nuffs phoning in their trade proposals.

Life is good at the moment.

 

[Themanbun]

International crisis group have issued a warning of genuine risk of election-related violence due to:

• Trump implying that he can only lose if the other side cheats
• Trump questioning the validity of the electoral process
• High number of arms in the general community
• Presence of extremist groups

They are not saying it is likely, but is a legitimate risk.

I read in the Atlantic, unsure how true, that both parties are spending record numbers on solicitors. Their conclusion was that they expect the loser in a close election to perhaps not concede...that'll be fuel to the fire I imagine.

 

[The Other Dean]

Trump one-upped him though while reiterating how he's the least racist person ever, with the unintentional and completely brilliant "The audience is so dark I can't even see them." Total best line of the night.

I was a fan of this one, too.

Yeah, I don't think there was ever any doubt on that front, Donny.

But above all else, the thing I find the funniest about the last presidential debate was the need to introduce a mute button. All because a guy who's both an adult and the POTUS has proven himself to be completely incapable of behaving in a mature and respectful manner.

And then there was the renewed references to a health plan that has been promised for the last 4 years but is still yet to materialise.

And of course the Covid stuff which is a constant source of surreal obfuscation and doublespeak. ("We have the best tests!" Really? How so? "We're rounding the corner". Nek minnit, the US is breaking their own records for most daily infections.)

Joe and the Dems may be woefully inept but at least I'd back them in to deliver a coherent and responsible Covid plan that doesn't rely on fabricated timelines for a vaccine or deliberately downplay the risks of the coronavirus in a borderline criminally-negligent manner.

 

[The Other Dean]

I like the blokes social values.

Steve Earle from a Rolling Stone interview a couple of years back.....

"We've never had an orangutan in the White House before. There's a lot of 'What does this button do?' going on. It's scary. He really is a fascist. Whether he intended to be or not, he's a real live fascist."

"The Republican Party is about the wealthiest people paying as few taxes as possible and letting go of as little of their wealth as possible and making an environment for them to be able to make more. We've gotten to the point where they're almost unapologetic about it."

Another great left-leaning artist. I often wonder if it sucks for your average right wing type to know that the vast majority of quality music out there has been made by artists with left-leaning proclivities and/or social justice concerns. Guess they just tune out the lyrics. Far easier than indulging in self-reflection or questioning deeply-entrenched political beliefs.

 

[CharlieMortdecai]

Guess they just tune out the lyrics.

I've got to admit there is an awful lot of rap music I really like where I have to do this.

 

[The Other Dean]

I've got to admit there is an awful lot of rap music I really like where I have to do this.

Not so much on the left/right side of things but, yeah, the misogyny is rife in hip-hop. Particularly old school rap.

That said, speaking as a fan, there are plenty of (hip-hop) options that still deliver without it.

 

[Themanbun]

I know people here think I have some pretty radical ideas on the economy, but the purity spiralling from the left in the US election is bizarre (Greens have a habit of doing that here, too).

Biden is a shit candidate but in terms of covid response, climate change and the minimum wage alone is a huge improvement on what they've got. I guess the logic is that he might lure some of the swing voters across. I'm pissed Bernie got shafted again too, but they tried purity spiralling last election (Hillary worse than Biden) and we've tried four years of Trump. It hasn't done the left any favours.

 

[Tectonic]

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[ferball]

This example highlights what I'm saying, too, in the sense that having among the cheapest electricity in the world is incompatible with generating sufficient profits - notwithstanding pumping all profits back into the infrastructure - to meet the capital and maintenance costs of the level of infrastructure required to effectively service a population that has more than doubled since the government asset sales.

I hate expensive electricity as much as everyone else, but if we were getting cheap electricity from the government, it would come at a cost somewhere else (reduced community services, e.g. health and social security, and/or significantly increased taxes). Again, there needs to be a balance and for essential services there should be some tariff ceiling and/or government subsidy, for example.

I'm not arguing from an economic theory viewpoint at all, it's simply the practical reality of fiscal constraints.

We could manage our sales of gas overseas more intelligently IMO.

That could provide us with cheaper electricity.

 

[ferball]

It is not a straw man. It is a simple question. Are you paying more or less?

And I don't do coffee, disgusting sh*t that spoils clean water.

I read that while enjoying a lovely homemade espresso out of some of the cleanest water left on earth. Yeah... The coffee is still great.

 

[ferball]

Coffee is not the point, as I had assumed you would understand.

Pick anything you were regularly paying for 30 years ago and join the dots.

Like most people, I am paying more for absolutely everything than I was then.

Ironically there is one thing on the market around here that has barely seen a price change in the last thirty years.

There are all sorts of interesting discussions that could be had around that lack of inflation.

 

[B4Bear]

We could manage our sales of gas overseas more intelligently IMO.

That could provide us with cheaper electricity.

Manage?

Successive governments have allowed the majority of the natural resources to be shipped overseas for peanuts, whilst allowing the same companies to gouge the shit out of the Australian population.

This is why people like me loath corporations. The net benefit of us having gas for example, does not go to Australia. It goes to a few big corporations, much of which is owned by overseas entities.

It is disgraceful, both sides do it and it has to stop.

 

[ferball]

Story goes, faced with the Soviet Union, whos vast wealth and centralised power meant they could focus expenditure to build everything quickly and effectively. Democracy had it flaws, one being it’s a slow ineffectual beast, think of what’s happened with the nbn.
neoconservatism was a strategy to combat this by taking as many decisions out of the public hands as posible. Once in private ownership/Wall Street, investment could be focused for more then four years ahead, it was merging corporate and government, meanings national investment and strategy would be able to face the might of the Soviets.
A lot has happened since then, the illusion of the Soviets fell, instead of being a super power, they ended up having complete ineffectual leadership that was seen be dodgy and corrupt, they lost the people.
after the fall of the Soviets, the same neocon system was kept in place, centralising wealth in the US and other countries.

The rise of China, USSR was never anywhere ingrained in the world with supply lines, manufacturing etc as the Soviets.
China was brought on board in the west as two things, defence, as they always butted heads with the soviets, once onboard the west thought they could convert mainland to the same system as HK and secondly a source of cheap labour for capitalist pushing for globalisation.

Now we’ve got two issues as I see it, how to fix the power grab neoconservatives, maybe a public investment fund, that sits outside of parliament?

and secondly what the hell to do with a rising China? The logic above has created a zombie machine that resembles Soviet state that the west simply just can’t just disconnect from. Before Xi the west might’ve been able to convince China of open markets, now forget about it. so what happens, does the US let China become the leader in the pacific, confront?

It's interesting that the USSR failed because it's market well it's networks of resource distribution weren't effective enough.

Probably cos they didn't grow via markets and in response to demand. Unlike China.

 

[LuvtheKangas]

We could manage our sales of gas overseas more intelligently IMO.

That could provide us with cheaper electricity.

Sure, that's just one example of the many aspect of the economy that could be managed better.

I was just making the simple point that capital is scarce, and as soon as a chunk of government capital is used for one asset / program, then by definition there is less for other assets / programs. There is no imperative for governments to own these assets, but there must be appropriate regulation. It's a balancing act to optimise the outcome (have I said that already?).