The Gaming Den

Pixels wrote:
I do find it amusing that term limits topped Trump's 100-day action plan. That will never happen.

Wat

It's not exactly news. He put out Donald Trump's Contract with the American Voter back in October. The only question is how much of it will survive contact with Congress.

hyzmarca wrote:The ACA itself is basically identical to Romneycare. The only reason the Rrepublicans hate it is because it has Obama's name on it. I'd bet that Trumpcare would be basically identical to Obamacare, with just enough changes to pretend that it's different, and the Republicans will love it.

OR, they just wholesale repeal what they can, leavings tens of millions without insurance, drive up prices, and just generally cause a ruckus. Then, they will loudly blame Obamacare as the reason for everything, repeating it often for the media's "both sides!" tendency to keep it a believable rhetoric.

Romneycare was passed by vetoproof majorities of Democrats in the Massachussetts Senate. We know they were vetoproof because Romney actually line-item vetoed a good chunk of it. It's really dishonest to say that Republicans basically like Obamacare as long as Obama's name isn't on it.

hyzmarca wrote:

Koumei wrote:And just like post-Brexit, already people are spraying swastikas on walls and abusing black people at every opportunity, because they have the thing they've been waiting for (but it's not about racism, guys, it's about disenfranchised... racists).

On the plus side, is this the most realistic path forward for the end of humanity, and for global annihilation to move forward? What with the most powerful country in the world suddenly getting some extra hardcore "fuck the environment and also health, and also nuclear proliferation is AWESOME" in charge, I can't think of a better* way without specifically funding some kind of apocalypse project.

*Better "for wiping our own species out", not better "for people at large".

Edit: also, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party (the crazy racist anti-intellectual party even compared to all of the other crazy racist anti-intellectual parties, of which there are like nine) have been celebrating this triumph for people of their ilk. Even our conservatives are going "Well fuck, this is going to be a tough ride."

Perhaps I'm a bit to weary and cynical, but I really can't see Trump as being anything particularly special or actually making sweeping policy changes. Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss, you know. Other than the ACA, Obama's tenue wasn't that much different than Bush's. I don't expect Trump's to be that much different from Obama's. It's too easy to just coast on institutional inertia.

That's not weary and cynical, that's stupid and pretentious. Being blase at this point is being willfully ignorant.

Even if you don't think that Trump so the doomsday scenario, he's still presiding over a Republican controlled Congress, with Supreme Court noms coming up, and a constituency that has wanted nothing more than to undo or shut down pretty much every aspect of government not involving blowing up brown people or making money.

virgil wrote:

hyzmarca wrote:The ACA itself is basically identical to Romneycare. The only reason the Rrepublicans hate it is because it has Obama's name on it. I'd bet that Trumpcare would be basically identical to Obamacare, with just enough changes to pretend that it's different, and the Republicans will love it.

OR, they just wholesale repeal what they can, leavings tens of millions without insurance, drive up prices, and just generally cause a ruckus. Then, they will loudly blame Obamacare as the reason for everything, repeating it often for the media's "both sides!" tendency to keep it a believable rhetoric.

It's most likely that he'll repeal the individual mandate, which is the least popular part of Obamacare, anyway, and maybe the subsidies. The marketplace and the Medicaid expansion would be much more complicated to roll back, and Trump himself said that he was going to keep the rule that insurance policies can't exclude pre-existing conditions, which is the most popular part of Obamacare amongst his base, because fuck the greedy insurance companies.

Insurance companies were grossly abusing pre-existing conditions as an excuse to not pay. But it's an inherent part of the nature of insurance that it can't cover existing needs, only potential ones.

If insurance companies don't have the ability to refuse to pay for conditions that were going to require treatment at the time the insurance was offered, they'll have to be much more picky and selective about which customers they take on.

If they don't have that either... well, how can they be expected to function?

Occluded Sun wrote:Insurance companies were grossly abusing pre-existing conditions as an excuse to not pay. But it's an inherent part of the nature of insurance that it can't cover existing needs, only potential ones.

If insurance companies don't have the ability to refuse to pay for conditions that were going to require treatment at the time the insurance was offered, they'll have to be much more picky and selective about which customers they take on.

If they don't have that either... well, how can they be expected to function?

No one really cares. Because fuck insurance companies.

People hate insurance companies, and will happily stick it to them.

Believe me, I sympathize, but reality must be given its due. Even if an insurance company were willing to make absolutely no profit, it still needs to take in more money than it pays out. And that means people have to pay in more then they take out, on average.

Somebody has to pay for everything. TANSAAFL.

Occluded Sun wrote:Believe me, I sympathize, but reality must be given its due. Even if an insurance company were willing to make absolutely no profit, it still needs to take in more money than it pays out. And that means people have to pay in more then they take out, on average.

It's almost as if some areas of society, like health, could be better managed outside the profit seeking model.

Seems like you could lower the cost of healthcare in this country to start.

I have a background in property/casualty insurance.

Health Insurance if all kinds of fucking wrong.

The single biggest problem with Health Insurance is that insurance companies don't pay the same rate as individuals do. Property Casualty insurers do. If you total your car, GEICO doesn't call Ford and say 'I want the same car he had, but I'm only going to give you 60% of the market value'. They pay the full cost of the repair (or purchase value of an equivalent vehicle) less your deductible. Imagine going to a grocery store and making a selection from the meat counter with no prices listed. When you check out you find the person in front of you bought the same Ribeye Steak and was charged $0.39/pound but when you go to pay you find you're charged $49.99/pound. They negotiate reduced rates with providers that aren't available to individuals. As a result, the cost of 'not having insurance' is more than the cost of paying out what your insurance company pays if you didn't have it.

We like to talk about a 'market economy', but if you call up any hospital and tell them you're thinking about having a gall bladder removed, they won't quote you the full price up front. If they can't tell you how much you'll pay, how can you compare rates?

Health spending also covers a lot of different types of services. Emergency Services are different from chronic illnesses. A lot of young people would prefer to have 'emergency insurance' but aren't as interested in chronic care insurance. Now, if you only required people with chronic care to get the chronic care insurance, it would be too expensive by far. Making sure everyone pays a small amount so that those that win the 'suck lottery' are covered is how insurance is supposed to work. The requirement that everyone have health insurance isn't a bad idea (any more than the requirement that everyone have liability insurance for their automobile). But there's a problem... Insurance companies are decreasing the amount that service providers receive (negotiated rates) and increasing the amount that patients pay. The larger the difference is the more profitable they are. Your property insurance companies are regulated at the state level to avoid 'gouging customers'. Most of them aim to make roughly $0.05 or less on the premiums you pay. Many of them actually pay $1.05 for every dollar of premium that comes in. And they're still profitable!.

Now, I know what you're thinking - how do you make money if you spend $105 for every $100 you make? The answer is best explained by reading Warren Buffet's annual letters, but it comes down to 'float'. If you give me $100 today and I won't owe you the $105 for 9 months, I have 9 months to invest your money (say in stocks or bonds) to make up the difference.

Fundamentally, seeking insurance profits is bad for everyone involved. You're going to get sick; you're going to die. You will use health care. Now, most health insurance has a 'lifetime maximum' which may be a necessary evil because nobody wants to die but $30 trillion isn't a good investment in giving me a few more days of life.

There are lots of ways to fix health care that actually make sense. The single-payer health system is a good start. We also do need people to choose to be doctors, so paying them well is good. We also need people to develop drugs - for us and for everyone else. Drug companies argue that they have to develop 30 drugs to find one that's successful, so a 'hit' has to be expensive to pay for all the failures before. To address this, we need to have an investment in 'pure research' and pharmaceutical drug research, along with 'prizes' for successful drug development. What we don't want is a situation where a life-saving drug gets priced way too high but people HAVE to pay it so they don't die.

As part of keeping costs down, people will need to participate in regular health screenings. It could be as simple as '50% premium discount if you've had a screening in the past 12 months'. Right now, a lot of the costs are driven by people finding a major medical condition when it is expensive to treat, rather than paying money they don't have to find it and treat it early. This is a situation where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Almost like that phrase comes from exactly these types of situations.

Anyways, INSURANCE is a good thing. HEALTH INSURANCE is a miscarriage of justice. There's lots of reasons that it doesn't benefit from 'market competition' and as a result, insurance isn't actually keeping costs down - it's just using accounting tricks to hide how expensive it is and actually making the aggregate cost higher.

That contract's a goodun.

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Term limits on Congress. Basically turns the entire Republican establishment tea party in 2018, and eliminates institutional expertise. It's insane.

Hiring freeze on federal employees, for eight years, basically means a big chunk of college graduates cannot get work, that is crazy bad for wages and conditions.

New regulation must come with two regulation cuts. He can just veto anything that doesn't. That's insane levels of deregulation just to keep up with technology changes.

Officials of state not being allowed to become lobbyists. Means NGOs are fucked, no one who's worked for Obama will be allowed to talk to government at all. That's really dark.

No foreigners! Wow. He's actually going to check everyone who's raising money for Democrats to see if they're really Americans, and remember, Obama totally wasn't.

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NAFTA gone. So, prices in the US go up, and lose export market access, and massive retooling required. That is not good for prices or wages.

TPP loses the US. You'd think that would help other countries, but we seem to be keen on doing everything the US wants in the TPP even if we get nothing from them in return.

China be labelled currency manipulator. Dude, everyone manipulates their currency. It has real costs associated with doing so, and benefits, and you balance them.

Anti-trade platform in general. You could always argue that some worker is worse off because you buy cheap shoes and sell expensive computers, but there's some other worker worse off if you don't. Trade, overall, is very rarely negative, especially for the larger economy.

Holy shit, frack the world. Is that zero restrictions on drilling and mining for energy? That will get incredibly dirty and will make a lot of people very sick and then dead.

Pipelines, in your back yard tomorrow. Now with zero regulatory oversight, because remember, new regulations come with losing more regulations.

Killing the Keoto agreement. Like, just not paying because you didn't do what you promised, that's ... an interesting approach to international relations. No one will work with him on anything if he does that.

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Cancel Obama. Really, he's just gunna massively cancel everything Obama did.

Pro-constitution Judges. By which he means, anti-democrat Judges.

Zero federal cash for cities refusing to ask about alien status. Like, zero. Zero. So, enjoy having the police ask you for your papers, everyone who is not perfectly white. Holy shit.

Deportation. Oh, did you not have your papers on you, Mr Mexican? Get in the van.

No Muslims. He's not even kidding. Only people from nice white Christian countries will be allowed into the US, at all. Or Mexico, they have terrorist problems. Fuck Mexicans. Papers please?

tussock wrote:
Hiring freeze on federal employees, for eight years, basically means a big chunk of college graduates cannot get work, that is crazy bad for wages and conditions.

Actually no. Having actually worked in a Federal office during a hiring freeze, what actually happens is that for-profit corporations provide staff in Federal offices for much more than an actual employee would cost, but you can fire them at will because they don't have a union and they make much less than a Federal employee because they don't have a union.

It's corporate welfare, essentially.

The company I worked for was called Booze Allen Hamilton. They changed their name after an employee named Edward Snowden turned their name into shit. Worst job I ever had.

Then it gets worse.

15% company tax. Not stated but probably even lower high personal tax rates. When they say "middle income" taxes, they mean "everyone except poor people".

Trade tariffs. Presumably on everything.

PPP-style public funding of private profits around energy. You pay for it, unregulated, some rich guy takes the profits.

Private schools and religious schools and home schooling gets equal state funding to public schools, by reducing funding to public schools. No education requirements, if you want to teach kids nothing but how the bible is real and they are all going to hell for touching themselves for 12 years, then you still get full funding. Enjoy the stupid.

FDA goes bye bye. Red tape on new drugs is LOL, no.

Big tax breaks for childcare and eldercare. That is a huge hole in the budget, NZ did a bit of that and it's very hard to pay for with even 40% tax rates. There is no money for anything if that goes through. Nice though, if you're wealthy enough to get it all.

The wall. Paid for by Mexico. Not sane. But hilariously creepy.

Anti-black people funding. I mean, anti-violent crime by black people funding. I mean, ... no, that's pretty much how that's going to work. Also Mexicans. Papers? Get in the van.

No Muslims. Also, more bombs. Also, presidential control of internet infrastructure.

And, uh, apparently, NGOs cannot talk to the government any more. Climate what now?

tussock wrote:When they say "middle income" taxes, they mean "everyone except poor people".

No, when they say "middle income" they mean Rich people, Everyone under 70k falls into the "poor people who get tax increases" category for Republicans.

Any musings on the election results in an alternate universe with Bernie as Hillary's running mate?

I could muse that Bernie supporters would've backed him up, even if he lost some to the Bernie is a shill/traitor propaganda people were tossing out. Likely there'd be a bunch of conspiracy theories about Bernie being paid off, at least more than there already were, and that'd be something he'd have to deal with. Since Bernie speaks a lot he probably would've gotten more air time than Tim who I didn't even hear about outside of the week he was announced and the week of the VP debate. I'd even dare say Bernie would've gotten some of the people who stayed home to actually vote depending on whether or not the campaigners spend time pretending that he was going to basically be Hillary's Cheney.

Bernie would have gotten some portion of the "fuck the establishment" demographic to vote D instead of R. I don't know if that would be enough, though.

Man, it really sucks that Trump won the electoral college; his policy proposals are terrifying.

But at least I have more Leonard Cohen albums to look forward to.

FrankTrollman wrote:So... Hillary actually got more votes than Trump apparently. That is a thing that happened.

Remember really early in the 2012 election when it first appeared that Obama was going to win the electoral vote without the popular vote? Who was that asshole tweeting rabidly about the injustice of that? Man, I bet he'd be super pissed at the current state of affairs.

I am not inclined to accept this election as legitimate.

While I wholeheartedly agree... what does "not accepting it as legitimate" entail? It's not like a person can just opt out of governance and say "Actually that's bullshit, I don't have to participate in society". If your answer is "actually write my US citizenship off completely and become a Euro", then fantastic, that is an answer that can probably make your life marginally better and other people living overseas should probably consider doing the same. If it's a Soviet uprising with tanks and marvellous facial hair, I approve but also am slightly confused about how doctors get access to these things.

He loves fascism, and the FBI love him (largely because fascism is basically half the purpose for their existence), so I can see him going on a crazy path of having regular protests gunned down and "dissidents" arrested. So there really isn't much room for "not accepting" it as it stands, never mind anything drastic.

Well, we do have roughly forty days before the electoral college actually votes. That's a good bit of time in which people can make their displeasure known and at least try to convince some Electors to turn faithless, or agree to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, by which states which are part of the compact would award their votes to the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner of their individual state.

Obviously that's all pretty much a long shot. The NPVIC is probably our most likely hope, and I don't think getting the remaining states that are considering it to agree to it would actually shift the needle enough. Another possibility might be to get states to agree to reward their EC votes proportionately, but given that an EC vote is worth more or less depending on state, I have no clue whether that'd actually help either.

Prak wrote:Well, we do have roughly forty days before the electoral college actually votes. That's a good bit of time in which people can make their displeasure known and at least try to convince some Electors to turn faithless, or agree to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, by which states which are part of the compact would award their votes to the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner of their individual state.

Obviously that's all pretty much a long shot. The NPVIC is probably our most likely hope, and I don't think getting the remaining states that are considering it to agree to it would actually shift the needle enough. Another possibility might be to get states to agree to reward their EC votes proportionately, but given that an EC vote is worth more or less depending on state, I have no clue whether that'd actually help either.

I don't know if that would play well, Dems trying to invalidate Trump's election after making a big stink about his reticence to concede in the event of his loss. It might be shitty and anachronistic, but the Electoral College is in the constitution, and is not just some dirty trick the republicans pull (like voter ID laws, limited polling places, and voter intimidation campaigns).

Hiram McDaniels wrote:

Prak wrote:Well, we do have roughly forty days before the electoral college actually votes. That's a good bit of time in which people can make their displeasure known and at least try to convince some Electors to turn faithless, or agree to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, by which states which are part of the compact would award their votes to the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner of their individual state.

Obviously that's all pretty much a long shot. The NPVIC is probably our most likely hope, and I don't think getting the remaining states that are considering it to agree to it would actually shift the needle enough. Another possibility might be to get states to agree to reward their EC votes proportionately, but given that an EC vote is worth more or less depending on state, I have no clue whether that'd actually help either.

I don't know if that would play well, Dems trying to invalidate Trump's election after making a big stink about his reticence to concede in the event of his loss. It might be shitty and anachronistic, but the Electoral College is in the constitution, and is not just some dirty trick the republicans pull (like voter ID laws, limited polling places, and voter intimidation campaigns).

It doesn't have to play well. It has to stop the government from being all controlled by the party of wilful delusion and deliberately hurting everyone who isn't a ridiculously rich old white man at the country's expense.

Dems are the good guys in this conflict and given how fucking stark it is and how fucking evil their enemies are they should've been playing dirty pool from the word "go".

It does have to play well because then you'll have the other half the country ready to tear shit down instead. It would affirm all of the fear mongering Trump put out there about rigging the election. I'd think the only way to get it to go over at all would be for him to lose his upcoming court cases which they could use as an excuse to vote Hillary and even then I don't know if it'd be enough.