Bernardo de La Paz
Bernardo de La Paz's JournalYes, it is a major social change that can be & MUST be anticipated & PLANNED for.
Wealth and income inequality is a huge problem already, and it will get worse before it gets better.
The coming changes of robots and AI (sometimes AI on its own) will make huge changes in society whether we are ready or not. They are coming and pandering to coal miners in Pennsylvania is not going to stop it.
We should be ready and we can be ready.
Excellent. Also it is something to counter those who say "When they go low we should too"
When they lie, bury them in truths.
When they cheat, bury them in litigation.
When they slander, bury them in shame.
When they go racist, bury them in disgrace.
When they go ignorant, bury them in science.
When they go emotional, bury them in their own emotions.
Don't seek originality. Seek individuality.
You are an original.
If you make your photography as much you as possible, it will be as original as you can make it and you won't have to try to be "original". You already are original.
Don't fool yourself, NK can nuke Japan, maybe once. Once is too much.
On the other hand, NK can't be allowed to hold everybody hostage just because they can nuke Japan.
There are NO easy solutions, but we can be sure that tRump will find something and think that it is easy and then RepubliCONs will fall into line.
Probably the best solution is aggressive deterrence while seeming to do nothing. Ring N Korea with force such that if they do something really stupid they will get hammered and pounded. It drives war-mongers nuts, but containment has worked well in many situations and it reduces third party suffering to almost nil.
Being too overt and too showy and escalatory and chest-thumping is really bad strategy.
Examine the posting records of high velocity posters for CONCERN trolling.
Look especially for those who signed up recently (last few months) and have averaged more than 5 or 10 posts a day. Of course many of those posters are legitimate, but it is the first stage of filtering.
Then look among those for posters who have a high number of [font size = "+1"]concern[/font] posts. I'm not a star member (for various reasons) so I can't do this kind of research.
Concern trolling is a passive-aggressive way to get people stirred up. It is favored by trolls because it is not a direct frontal attack on a member or a community policy or community consensus.
"Why is Bernie not helping as much as he could?"
"Couldn't Hillary have tried harder?"
... and so on and so forth, etcetera, etcetera.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/1/632558/-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2014/01/13/enter-the-concern-troll/
The second is condescending, insincere, manipulative. It even says so in the Urban Dictionary definition.
The darkest moment is always just after the concern trolls start pouring in.
“I’m with you,” the concern troll says. “But surely you must see how this looks to people. Not me, of course. But other people. They might think horrible things of you. People might think you were self-centered, fat, slow, rude. Not me, of course. I’m with you. I have your best interests at heart. That’s why I want to warn you. I, you see, know how this ought to be done.”
There is some Faceless Someone out there who is absolutely merciless. That Faceless Someone is saying or might say Terrible, Awful Things.
The concern troll does not agree, of course. But the concern troll wants to make sure you know.
Truly, it is because of the fundamental principle: "Innocent until proven guilty".
Think it through. It's the "proven" part that takes time to build. In criminal cases you have to [font size = "+1"]prove the charge "beyond a reasonable doubt".[/font]
It's a high hurdle and we don't like it any more than a hard-right guy likes it when somebody (perhaps of color) is accused of violent crime. But we both live with it (when we pause to think about it) because we know that it helps protect the innocent.
This case is very large and complex. It is bigger and more involved than Watergate, which took two years. Watergate did not have a foreign antagonistic nation attacking us. It did not involved a rat's nest maze of numbered corporations and shady wire transfers. It did not involve tax-dodging sneaky business people highly skilled at hiding dealings.
Indict / impeach tRump & Pence on the same day: Force Ryan into Pres spot (stay with me here)
We don't want Ryan as President, but he doesn't want it now either because he wants to be 2024's Reagan to 2020's version of Carter.
If tRump & Pence go one by one, the one or the other will appoint VP successors and Ryan can politely decline if offered.
But if they both get incapacitated at the same time, per 25th Amendment, Ryan gets forced in automatically as President by the line of succession. Then he could resign but that would eliminate his chances of being Pres ever again. If he doesn't resign, then he becomes 2018's Ford and serves a two year term only.
It comes from a couple of ideological grounds and a mistaken self-view.
First there is the fiscal conservative idea that government should not forcibly take (taxes) and redistribute to the poor. That's "socialism" or "communism". That's what the Romans did through Herod. But paradoxically Republicons and christian RWAF adore Rome for its power and order and authoritarianism (lots of overlap between christians and RWAF).
Secondly, there is the idea that "god helps those who help themselves". It is the idea that hard work should be rewarded and needy people don't work hard. It is reinforced by the framing of language like "welfare queens". It shows itself in Republicon statements like Chaffetz saying that poor and people with pre-existing conditions need to choose between getting an Apple phone or health insurance / care.
The mistaken self-view is that they view themselves as "very charitable". They think that charities could and should do all the helping of the needy. They do not realize that the most charitable people, by percentage of disposable income, are the poor. The average RW christian is middle class and gives some money to churches and charities, many of which have high overhead, and some of which have CEOs and mega-pastors who live very high indeed.
So they overrate their charity and underrate the needs of people and ideologically endorse strict government fiscal conservatism.
ALL men were once pre-natal. ALL sons, grandson, nephews, etc. ALL male employees & underlings.
Ask RepubliCON lawmakers if they want their pre-natal grandsons to have the best chance of succeeding in life, whether rich or not.
Remind them that each dollar spent on pre-natal care saves thousands spent on post-natal and developmental and dependent adult care.
If we say that 1 in 10 people is disabled (an under-estimate) and that of those disabilities pre-natal care could be mitigated or reduced or eliminated them to the point of saving 20% in post-natal, childhood, and adult care, then it becomes very compelling. That would be 1 in 50, and let`s say that the savings are $100,000 over a lifetime (an underestimate).
1 in 50 times $100 K works out to a savings of $2K for every birth. If you spend even only $200 in pre-natal care, that is a very cost-effective savings, and that is an underestimate.
Unfortunately, Republicons are all about quarterly corporate profit reports and don't think much about the long term.
https://www.census.gov › Newsroom › Releases › Disability
Jul 25, 2012 - About 56.7 million people — 19 percent of the population — had a disability in 2010, according to a broad definition of disability, with more than ...
https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/
Jan 26, 2017 - A study in the United Kingdom found that the poverty rate for disabled people was 23.1 percent compared to 17.9 percent for non-disabled people, but when extra expenses associated with being disabled were considered, the poverty rate for people with disabilities shot up to 47.4 percent.
Boils down to convenience for ONE writer vs. convenience of 100s of readers. Assymetric
In the General Discussion forum, most threads have at least 300 views. Many have much more, but that would include multiple views as discussions progress. But let's assume 300 readers per Original Post and per most posts at the beginning of a thread as a lower bound on the number.
Dashing off quick OP with an opaque title and a sentence or two saves the writer time. Let's say it takes 30 seconds to do that. For comparison, let's say that a more informative title and several sentences summarizing key points and making a convincing case to view the video (live or YouTube) takes two minutes, 120 seconds for a little more typing and a little more thinking.
On the other side of the equation, a reader reading the better written OP can read it and decide whether to pursue it further within say 20 seconds. But dashed-off OP can easily take 60 seconds to puzzle out what it is referring to and then to glean from sparse clues enough information to decide to whether to pursue it.
However, to dramatize the case, let's suppose the difference in time is only 6 seconds instead of 40 seconds.
If there are 300 readers for every writer, dashing off an OP saves the writer 90 seconds and costs the readers 300 x 6 = 1800 seconds or half an hour.
On the other side of the ledger, if the writer spends an extra 90 seconds she/he saves readers half an hour of time.
Now, isn't it progressive and considerate to invest a mere 90 seconds to save the community a half hour?
Multiply that out by dozens of threads and it becomes easy to see that considerate writers make the community much more efficient.
[font size = "+1"]Who is the writer writing for anyway? Their own ego or the edification and enjoyment of 300 readers?[/font]
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Gender: Do not displayMember since: Fri Jul 16, 2004, 11:36 PM
Number of posts: 49,020
