At some point we need to do real reform on the idea of rape and sexual assault.
Forcing a drunk girl in an alleyway or assaulting some girl on the jogging track should be penalised as harshly as murder.
Two people agreeing to go back to someone's apartment where alcohol is involved and there is no violence and just hazy consent is not rape.
We need to have a sliding scale with appropriate penalties.

Trump has a history of abusing people that predates his forays into politics. Ivana accused him of raping her in a deposition well before Trump was even a Republican and a lot of complaints came from his Miss Universe contest.  With Trump it appears to be more of a pattern.  

This accusation that Joe fingered this girl is like the girl who said Trump tied her up and raped her at Epstein's sex house.  Both stories are have people who support the victim but will not go on record, and both stories have questionable backers involved.  Yet one was instantly dismissed and the one against Joe is taking as fact.  Then people claim that Trump is being unfairly treated despite his accusers being instantly disbelieved.

I do not care about the charge itself as we all know without proof nothing will happen.  I am concerned about the Russian ties the lack of interest from most of the US about the power Russia has to influence our elections through social media.  I like neither guy in this race since they are not very different in the long run since a Biden win will not change all that much really as Congress will continue to fight about what powers a president can have.  But it greatly concerns me is that the US political system is moving in a direction where disinformation and the party that disinformation supports will block any attempts to keep the US election based on US interests.  



As for rape we are seeing the reform now.  In the last decade many major colleges too a zero tolerance policy to consent disputes for rape and it cost them piles of money as almost in every case the accused party won a major lawsuit.  In court, it is very hard to get a rape conviction when it comes too disputed consent as without proving a person a first committed a crime, it is very hard to them find them guilty of committed said crime.  This is not news though.  Treating rape acquisitions are convictions is part of the problem as people seem to think that most acquisitions lead to convictions, when only a minority do due to the burden of proof being needed and the nature of sexual consent itself.  Also people believe that false accusations always lead to convictions as well, when almost every high profile false conviction we seen in recent years has been shot down hard and fast.  And now the false accusers are ending up in jail with serious charges and at the wrong end of major civil action.  The reality that people want is already here in the legal system.  The media however makes it sound very different, in particular, bloggers.

Biden has a pattern of behavior as well. They don't call him "Creepy Joe" for nothing

My job and livelihood aside I keep reading via the postal reddit that any bills that proposed that help the post office (hazard pay, the trouble of closing down in a few months, etc.) will never make it to his desk. Dunno how true that is, but I kind would like to see us close down and just shut down. Even for a little bit. Just to see what kind of chaos it brings.

Trump hates the postal service and would kill it if he could.

Well Trump posted messages on twitter to liberate the states that oppose reopening.

Apr 17, 2020 16:28:18 GMT thereallt said:

Biden has a pattern of behavior as well. They don't call him "Creepy Joe" for nothing

A pattern of giving ladies kisses on the forehead or touching their shoulders isn’t really worth the comparison to Trump. With the exception of one woman, most of the women are clear they didn’t even consider his behavior harassment, just inappropriate behavior he should change.

Biden has a pattern of acting like a gentleman who was frozen in ice since the first world war. Sad he seem to refuse to change even this one little thing.   Been a about half a dozen who claim that Biden's hugs in public when meeting him were sexual assault.  But given most of the #MeToo movement involved far, far worse stuff that actually involved things of a sexual nature most of the complaints were ignored.

But of everyone running, and perhaps ever have run, Trump was the sole person to have someone testify in court that they violently forced them to have sex with him, to a point where the judge called the treatment of Ivana both cruel and inhumane. But them non-disclosures are strong. Ivana got her cash provided she never speaks of it. Amazing that people can pretend things like Don Jr not talking to his father for years because of the way he treated Ivana never happened though.

Trump's great defense for this was "You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”  He was the reason that NYC repealed the marital rape law. 

Not sure if others are old enough and were in the NYC area, but this shit was all over the news when I grew up.

Apr 18, 2020 0:58:48 GMT c said:

Biden has a pattern of acting like a gentleman who was frozen in ice since the first world war.

Similar to @ck's spot on perfect line about Dynamite Kid, I fucking LOVE this line. I'll now forever think of Biden as like some sort of precursor to Captain America.

Not sure if they will hold to it, but freedom caucus is saying no more bailouts or stimulus plans until the economy reopens.

Apr 18, 2020 5:22:23 GMT c said:

Not sure if they will hold to it, but freedom caucus is saying no more bailouts or stimulus plans until the economy reopens.

This is really scary and I think Biden won't want to win the presidency if the restrictions are in place.
He has no chance of unwinding the welfare if the Dems hold the Senate and the USA will go broke.
"The Squad" has become the Dem's Tea Party and they are just as scary.




I am not opposed to deficits if they are for cash flow positive investment.
If you borrow for an appreciating asset, and it is appreciating faster than interest, you are winning.
So if you build a port and the freight flows faster and in higher volumes, then it is good investment.
You can argue that education is a valid definition of this... But none of the other policies.


This is what the USA should do coming out of this Coronavirus, build infrastructure.
Instead they will probably tie up Congress in trying to mandate the number of Black Lesbian Transgender Muslims should sit on the boards of Public Companies.


The idea that people are just willing to run basically an experiment with their economy is frightening to me.

Why exactly does welfare need to be unwound? Food stamp budget in the US is $26 billion. Free housing, $32 billion. These are hardly economy crippling numbers. Corporate subsidies were $92 billion by comparison.

The other benefit that welfare grants is medicaid and that is a problem, at $600 billion, but the GOP blocked the government being able to negotiate price to sabotage Obamacare and repeatedly has advised Trump not to engage in it, despite Trump wanting too. Just four month ago the House passed another bill that would allow the government to negotiate drug pricing, something Trump tweeting about around the time they passed it, and the Senate tabled it.

The price of $600 billion may seem like a lot but we just gave corporations and their top people a trillion dollar tax cut two year back. This was after Bush's $300 billion dollar a year tax cut that Obama signed to continue. These are tax cuts that 99 percent of America does not see any benefit too. Goods increased in prices, services increased in prices and wages stayed the same. The only change to American society was the rate in which inequality grew. There was absolutely no trickle down here and jobs that were created were mostly part time jobs working people 30 hours a week to avoid paying them benefits that come with working 32 hours a week or more. The average income in the US rose $30,000 last year. The median income did not move. That should tell you people are not benefiting from this increases.

This is made far worse as the largest corporations do not actually pay taxes in the US. Corporate tax is just 9 percent of tax in the US in 2017. American companies made 2 trillion dollars but paid 284 billion. Corporate tax rate in America is 21% so hard to see the math is off. The individual tax pay paid (bottom 99, making less than half a million a year) paid a trillion in taxes, or four times that which corporations did. Then they paid 400 billion more in payroll taxes to fund the various welfare programs and it can be argued the other 400 billion was paid for by then as well as they are hired at lower wages with the justification that the company pays half of the payroll tax.

So yeah I agree that welfare needs to be cut, but not social welfare that Americans universally agree is a good thing as for a century we support it with social security, but corporate welfare that replaced the military as our number 1 source debt that is costing us billions in interest just to pay off. We offer corporations zero interest loans by taking on the debt ourselves and billing the average tax paying for CEO bonuses. People pay taxes in payroll taxes to fund welfare and fund a third of welfare right now directly payroll they pay and another third with working for less money to compensate the company for what they pay. The rest is usually paid for via state taxes anyway that supplement medicaid funding. Of the total of 1.5 trillion in welfare, 800 billion is paid for currently federally, and if the government was allowed to negotiate healthcare prices, could be entirely funded by payroll taxes.

But no, clearly it is that 26 billion in cash we pay to the poorest people that is the problem. Not the 3.7 billion in tax cuts to Wells Fargo, 2.2 to IBM, 3.5 to Bank of America, 2.9 billion to JP Chase, 2.2 billion Walmart, 5.6 billion to Apple, 1.7 billion to United Healthcare, 2.2 billion to AT&T, 1.2 billion to CVS, 4 billion to Alphabet, 1.4 billion to Comcast, 1.4 to Pepsi, 4 billion to Verizon...

And would you look at that, welfare to just 12 companies is equal to that of every person that gets a government check in the US. And this was simply found going down a list of top US companies and seeing how much they currently have in tax subsidies. A few larger companies that should be expected I could not find confirmed numbers for but most likely if I continued we could get there even faster. But no one complains that these companies need to have their welfare cut off...

And we cannot afford infrastructure in the US. Too much money being spent on welfare to rebuild our country. So we watch it slowly decay killing tens of thousands a year.

Crazy, a path is emerging for a Dem controlled Senate. Unless anything major happens the likely races will be

Colorado sees Gardner (R) face a strong challenger in Hickenlooper (D).

McSally (R) faces Mark Kelly (D) in Arizona.

Sara Gideon (D) faces Sue Collins (R) in Maine.

Cal Cunningham (D) faces off against Thom Tillis (R) in NC.

Take these four seats and it will be a 50-50 after Doug Jones likely loses in Alabama. Win the presidency and they get the tie breaker. Do not see Biden winning, and these races are tight still. Also the GOP in NC is doing all it can to block the black vote again, so remains to be seen if they can do it. But getting to 50-50 means with any fractions the GOP is in rough shape pushing one party bills.

c, I wasn't arguing for the defundinf of welfare to people, your country is basically third world in that department.
What I am saying is that it will be hard to unwind the stimulus spending of the Corona outbreak, already in Spain there is talk of pivoting to a UBI which is socialism by another name.

It is a basic principal of human crapiness, that the more you separate a person's income from their output, the less they do. There is no socialist nirvana hiding just out of sight.
So if the Dems hold the senate unwinding these temporary measures may not be easy.

On corporations, I moderately agree with you. Any company determined to not be paying their fair share of tax in a country, should be forced to pay a small percentage of total revenue spent. Ironically it is the USA that always blocks this as most of the biggest companies are incorporated in the USA.

Apart from that, you need to find a way to increase revenue without crippling investment.
Payroll tax is counter-productive as a number of taxes are.
Instead of higher taxes the USA has to find a way to get corporations based in the USA to direct their spending to the USA.

On the topic I raised earlier about education policy creating drones, the world has changed and this is now no longer viable. Because one 80k employee could do the work of 4x 30k employees.

What is killing innovation in the US is the separation of income and output. The scientists discovered the serotonin link in the brain were mostly graduate students making 10k a year. The person getting the grant for them to do the research and overseeing things make 100k. The person who patented the results made billions.

And most companies are not actually incorporated in the US. Only their shells are incorporated in Delaware. Until recently they were all incorporated in Ireland or the Nederlands to use the double Irish or dutch Sandwich tax loopholes to move money internationally through those countries to the Caribbean. Now most are reincorporating in the Caribbean. As they get negative tax rates they move the money back into the US without paying taxes into it via the Delaware shell. They receive the protections from operation in the US, as US companies, without the tax or legal liability. In particular they are using the Cayman Islands, Panama and Belize which has no corporate tax rates and rebuild their economies on these companies funneling their cash through them by offering to legally cloud financial transfers in their countries. The degree to which is done sounds like batshit crazy theory but major companies like Google and Apple confirmed they did it when they stop. A lot of the legal loophole involving Ireland and the Netherlands are set to end in Dec, but the Caribbean loopholes are still legal, which is why so many companies are admitted to moving money around this way now. The Panama papers detailed this all this too but that story got quenched hard as most of the media is owned by companies engaging the Caribbean loophole. Europe however did demand it's taxes and the Panama paper story resulted in billions being brought into those countries.

It is estimated the top 20 corporations in the US have 2 trillion in offshore profits that is being slowly brought to the US tax free to dodge 40 billion in taxes. Millions are spent each year in lobbying congress to make a tax holiday so the money can be brought into the US without any taxes paying paid on it. Being blocked in Congress by democrats but Trump may find a way to do it before the end of the year as he also is using it.



As for education, we are trying to break the mold with the STEM focus but the people who make educational policy only have a little training in science and math. The skills they believe are needed for innovation in science are not the actual ones students need. For instance algorithms are most important skill needed for automation and computing but they are not taught as part of educational education at all. Logistics is another area not taught but is greatly needed. Even programming is not generally taught. What we are training people for is essentially where the jobs are, in the service area or working with customers in various fields. I tried personally to question if STEM education is actually at all aligned with the goals of STEM education but get rebuked everytime by people citing dogmatically that certain skills are associated with science or technology that are not actually used in the process of science or technology itself. Almost no one in education policy though is a programmer and things like AI are basically seen as computer magic and not math. STEM getting co-opted by STEAM does not help as the arts are the justification for not having time to teach the skills needed to do computer work.

The very last paper I was working on before the decision to stop academia was made was on identifying the actual skills people need in STEM. What I got was math, logic, algorithms, programming, logistics, technical writing and communication. STEM getting co-opted by STEAM does not help as the arts are the justification for not having time to teach the skills needed to do computer work. The first three are to design computer based products, logistics is used in computing and in turning those products into automation and real world items while tech writing and communication is to share the knowledge with people in and out of the field. Will not lead to innovation directly, as we have no theory to provide far transfer, but it will lead to a refinement of the system and encourage near transfer to move them in novel ways. For true innovation people need time to actually innovate and solve problems without known solutions, something that education cannot really handle due to assessment issues. What standards do we hold students to if they do not produce an end product? Would would an end product even look like for most who cannot solve a problem that we have no solution for currently or provide solutions that cannot be confirmed? For instance how a particular memory is stored in the brain is not known, so trying to solve this problem students can create theories but we cannot determine if they are correct as we lack the science to verify most theories and thus far most of the actual attempts to answer fail when we try to verify them. So how would you grade for this? Currently we would grade based on the use of existing theory and application of a scientific framework, but that is not related to solving the problem but reviewing the design space. It adds nothing new to the knowledge we have.

At the PhD level innovation is required to get a degree usually but the innovation we do is not major breakthroughs but incredibly minor ones situated deep in a particular field. My topic was picking the cognitive and metacognitive processes associated most with knowledge gain during a computer learning task by using different algorithms in an ensemble method to produce plurality of results (instead of finding the one true result). It was a simple take an idea from one field (marketing) and applying it to another. The ideas behind what I was doing I believed was innovative in terms of the plurality of results and multimodels rather than picking what I personally believed was the best model and testing only one solution as is the way we are taught, but basically all I was doing was reanalyzing my professors work from the last 10 years, and potentially his professor's work as well with about five lines of code in R, recycling my thesis into the first two chapters of a dissertation, and explaining this framework to educational people to be used in other areas. Estimated 300 pages of text, with one decent idea.

But that is what innovation looks like on the PhD level. It is not the exciting discoveries but small movements of existing theory or refining methods.

Revealed today that most of the small business loans went to large companies with the average size of the loans being between 350k and a million. Some of the companies are using it to pay signing bonuses and have planned bonuses for execs still in the contract. So business as usual. Only 17 percent of the loans were for under 175k. Actual small businesses got nothing, as expected.

Apr 20, 2020 1:55:58 GMT c said:

Revealed today that most of the small business loans went to large companies with the average size of the loans being between 350k and a million. Some of the companies are using it to pay signing bonuses and have planned bonuses for execs still in the contract. So business as usual. Only 17 percent of the loans were for under 175k. Actual small businesses got nothing, as expected.

There's America for you. Vince had it right in 1999: no bigger heel out there than The Corporation.

Still my favorite stable to this day. So good.

Apr 20, 2020 3:09:11 GMT c said:

Still my favorite stable to this day. So good.

Pre-Mean Street Posse of course 

Biden seems old hat at this point, Trump was caught on tape bragging about literally the same things he was accused before he ever even considered running for president...and got elected. Don't get me wrong, not condoning it in the slightest, just Trump and his supporters focusing on it are just hypocritical.

It's like Honey Boo Boo calling Precious fat.

Apr 20, 2020 3:49:30 GMT iNCY said:

Apr 20, 2020 3:09:11 GMT c said:

Still my favorite stable to this day. So good.

Pre-Mean Street Posse of course 

Fairfield County boyz will fuck you up.  Realist stable to me since they were based off the rich kids in my area.  Though my town was where the kids went when they could no longer afford to live in Greenwich and needed to downsize to million dollar houses, the kids needed to start to attend public schools and they lost access to the company jet and the parents had to take the train to NYC after the black friday crash.

Man oil prices went negative today in the stock market. That is pretty damn crazy. Time to fill the pool with some sweet black gold.

Apr 20, 2020 23:45:07 GMT c said:

Man oil prices went negative today in the stock market. That is pretty damn crazy. Time to fill the pool with some sweet black gold.

I thought I misread that. How's that possible!? So big oil will pay me to go fill up right now!?

Basically oil prices dropped because reserves are filling to capacity and the oil pumps are almost never turned off so they will pay people to take the oil to keep them running. But yeah if you had a place to store it, producers will pay you to take the oil away if you collect it this month.

Apr 20, 2020 23:45:07 GMT c said:

Man oil prices went negative today in the stock market. That is pretty damn crazy. Time to fill the pool with some sweet black gold.

Yes, the power of an artificially inflated commodity.
There is plenty of oil, the producing nations just conspire to keep production low so that prices are high.
Then when the world goes south nobody wants to cut their production because they need the income and it is every OPEC bastard for himself.
You can imagine with no airlines flying that must be in itself and enormous reduction in energy consumption.

We interesting to see if companies embrace work at home culture or return to requiring people to be in the office, which is essentially wasteful spending if they can do the same work from home, while taking on a lot of the expenses from the office on themselves. If work from home culture catches on companies could save millions, while employees come out ahead after you factor in time spent commuting. Fuck it also helps the environment and even the economy as people set up office space in their houses. It is win/win for everyone except one of the most powerful lobbies in the world, the energy lobby. We interesting see if we continue wasteful spending or commit to saying fuckoff to the energy lobby who is screaming not only for opening the economy but getting people traveling again.

Oh shit, Trump just tweeting he is closing the borders. No more legal immigration. Not sure if this will also be for visas or not but could be really bad.

Apr 21, 2020 3:45:52 GMT c said:

We interesting to see if companies embrace work at home culture or return to requiring people to be in the office, which is essentially wasteful spending if they can do the same work from home, while taking on a lot of the expenses from the office on themselves. If work from home culture catches on companies could save millions, while employees come out ahead after you factor in time spent commuting. Fuck it also helps the environment and even the economy as people set up office space in their houses. It is win/win for everyone except one of the most powerful lobbies in the world, the energy lobby. We interesting see if we continue wasteful spending or commit to saying fuckoff to the energy lobby who is screaming not only for opening the economy but getting people traveling again.

This reminds me... Will we be able to write off business expenses for 2020 related to working at home? Internet, desks/chairs, ink/paper, electricity, coffee, etc.

Apr 21, 2020 3:49:39 GMT c said:

Oh shit, Trump just tweeting he is closing the borders. No more legal immigration. Not sure if this will also be for visas or not but could be really bad.

I've got a lot of expatted colleagues up in Boston from our Italian and Australian legal entities. Does this mean they're trapped forever, gonna get deported, can't visit their families in the meantime? The deputy PM's mom died back in Malaysia last week, and she was pretty torn up about not being able to travel home to burn the body.

He's closing the borders, but tweeting for states to liberate themselves and be free to roam. Makes heaps of sense.

The threat isn't from the outside Donny, it's from within.