Achilles

And this is in the section you quoted?

Everything Obama did was a sign of weakness

All this may be true, but the section you quoted doesn't say that. Ah, I see. No, that was me putting the section you quoted into layman's terms. Apologies for the confusion. Because I don't think that "not liking how we do patents" means "patents shouldn't exist" or "patent protection shouldn't be a thing". Because I don't believe that two wrongs make a right (i.e. cracking DRM because I don't agree with it). Because I don't believe that China should be able to prop up part of its economy selling bootleg goods. The patent system needs reform. Theft is bad. Both of those things can be true at the same time. In fact, it may even be the case that they are separate things.

I'm not sure I follow. Posting summaries of what? Post actual text of what? I didn't read pro TPP press; I read the leaked version of the TPP (large parts of it anyway, not the whole thing cover to cover). Is the argument that "how things are regarded" should be the basis for action? Again, my young children didn't regard getting shots very well. Still needed to be done though, right? I'm not sure what this has to do with the section you posted or the question I asked in response. Hint: I think I've already stated that I agree that US patent law is - I think the term I used was "pants on head retarded". Does that mean there should be no IP protection until that's corrected? So again, what part of the section that you quoted within it's context do you disagree with. EDIT I guess the part where I'm stuck here is that you seem to be advocating for "two wrongs make a right". US patent law is stupid so international IP theft should be ok. What am I missing here?

My understanding of the argument is: Historically, the payments made into SS have exceeded minimums Various congresses have decide to "borrow" against those overages Now that baby boomers are hitting retirement age, money flowing out of SS is greater than money flowing into SS Decades of borrowing against SS surpluses means that there are insufficient reserves to cover Boomers Result is that by the time Gen-Xers want to retire, no more money in the SS to cover them Any or all of this could be wrong or no longer the case, but it is more or less the basis for the concern.

Republicans didn't have a problem with it when it was their idea. The out of control cost of health CARE is largely a function of providers being able to charge health INSURANCE whatever they want. The part of the ACA that was supposed to help correct this was gutted from the program. Single bloop.

So "small enough to drown in a bathtub" should have instinctively triggered 75 for me, not 90-99. Got it What I am describing is every experiment in libertarianism that I've encountered (ala the link @Pidesco provided on the previous page). Even now it's difficult to understand what it is that you want. "Small enough to drown in a bathtub" "minimal government supervision" All this sounds like 90-99 to me, so no, it doesn't clarify your position at all. You can't beat the drum of "government bad" at every opportunity and then expect the rest of us to assume that there's nuance in your position. So, had the government not placed restrictions on who could sell insurance, what would have prevented bad actors from creating sham insurance companies and selling crap policies to people who don't know better? As more people got access to healthcare and then immediately started using it, what would have been the impact on smaller insurance companies that don't have as much capital as larger ones? What risk would that pose to policy holders trying to get more healthcare as their insurance company quietly goes out of business? Is it possible that rather than maliciously throwing a bone to greedy insurance companies, the government took reasonable steps to ensure that the new system didn't collapse under it's own weight immediately after roll out? ACA was a single bloop. Had Mitch McConnell not been working so hard to make Obama a one-term president, had the GOP not turned it into a boogeyman to rile the tea party, had Kennedy not died in the 11th hour, it would have been a better bloop. We have a national catastrophic healthcare system; it's called "emergency rooms". That bloop would have accomplished nothing. Expecting low income families who write checks on wednesday, praying that they don't hit the bank until friday, to just belly up to the bar for non-emergency health care is unrealistic. Counting on luck to give you healthy kids... Let me tell you a tale of two pregnancies: In the first one, a couple makes the sexy time and ends up getting pregnant. Wasn't trying. Just kinda happened. Ok, fine, let's make a baby. Second trimester, mom finds out that she's not having one baby, she's having three. Doc says, "quit work, quit school. Hop into this bed and don't get off until you're not pregnant anymore". Mom goes on welfare because she can't work anymore. Babies are born premature (as is typical with multiples). Mom needs months to recover before she can go back to work and school. Second story: couple makes sexy time and ends up getting pregnant. Was trying. Second trimester, mom finds out that she's not having one baby, she's having two. Bonus! Again, babies are born premature (typical with multiples). One of the babies has a genetic disorder. Has to go to a different hospital. Needs a lot more care. Expensive care. Multiple surgeries in the first few years of life. Nurse screws up a thing after one of them. Kid now needs more surgeries to fix that thing. So why the stories? Because sometimes life throws you curve balls. "Let's have a baby" sounds great until life throws you multiples, or genetic disorders, or special needs. "Bring your checkbook" on the topic of healthcare, sounds an awful lot like "let them eat cake". I don't care whether that's for alheimers or band-aids. This

Yeah, I don't know that it was fun, but actually reading the source document is what differentiates someone who knows what the text says vs someone who believes what they've been told the text says. Granted I was working with a leaked version of the document, so I had to concede that what I was reading was not the final product, but still. The EFF claims were difficult to confirm because they didn't source them. A cynical read of that makes it look like they wanted to create boogeymen and knew that their audience would go along with it (because, I mean, who wants to read source material). They are generous with hyperlinks, and appear to be content to send readers down rabbit holes that lead to other articles they've published, so it's not as though they don't know how to link to sources or even care very much about making their articles "clean". Again, it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I read that section back in 2015 when TPP chat was all the rage. I'm still not reading anything that comes even close to sounding draconian. What part of that do you disagree with?

I mentioned the EFF briefly earlier and I'll do so again here since it appears that a lot of their material, at a glance, appears to be the same. They claim that the TPP would do X or Y, but did little to back any of that up. Most of my experience with TPP went something like this: Friend - "The TPP is going to do X" Me - "Where did you read that?" Friend - *mentions a thread on reddit* Me - "Did they source it?" Friend - "No" Me - "Do they say where?" Friend - "Sounds like it's in the [Y] section" Me - *Reads [Y] section. Reads section before it. Reads section after it. Reads [Y] section again* Me - "Yeah, it doesn't say that. At least not there" Rinse. Repeat. The EFF rarely quotes the document and where they do, quotes it in a limited way which makes it difficult to determine the context. There are lots of things they could have done to add transparency but didn't. Perhaps because their hands were tied. Perhaps because it benefits them to create boogeymen. Again, it's been a while: China's IP theft was irrelevant because the object of the exercise was to cut off China's ability to market stolen IP. If no one in the region would trade in bootleg items, then China's ability to profit from them would be diminished. To which you'll say "black markets". To which I'll say, "which is why the US was sweetening the pot with other incentives and threatening a very cold shoulder if violations were found". Yes, funny how each partner country tried to do stuff that benefited them You could argue that the US went too far or bargained too hard or gained concessions that it maybe didn't deserve...and I would probably agree with you without much of a fight (we're in total agreement that US patent law is pants-on-head retarded). But if your argument is that the US wasn't bending over backwards to give everyone else what they wanted without any regard for their own interests, then I'm not sure we're going to agree on how negation works or the meaning of the word "compromise".

Again, it's been a while: wasn't the IP thing about, "hey, could you stop stealing ours"? Something something china = land of a 1,000 bootleg dvds, etc, etc. We need sweetener for that? Again, it's been a while: wasn't the "sweetener" bolstering other economies in the region so that they would help act as a check on China? Again, it's been a while: wasn't there stuff in there about easing up on human rights abuses, human trafficking, labor laws, etc. Not sweetener enough? Or maybe not what you mean by sweetener? Or not what the people who were happy to deal with Trump instead would think of as sweetener? Again, it's been a while, but giving my young kids medicine or subjecting them to vaccination was more about doing what needed to be done for their long term health vs their short term happiness. I'm sure they would have thought much better of me at the time if I skipped the shot and gave them ice cream for dinner instead. Cuz that's what winner dads do.

Sure, but that doesn't tell me anything other than no one wanted it. My kids didn't want to take their medicine or get their shots when they were young either.

It's been a long time and at no point have I been an expert, but I seem to recall the IP stuff being fairly tame (in the "leaked" version), but made out to be a boogeyman in the media.

Evidence of a stable genius

Of course it is. Anyone who's taken their nose out of Atlas Shrugged long enough to see how the real world actually works knows this. The final sentence in your post is the funniest thing I'll read today. Bravo. EDIT Consider this: you and I share a love of books. Based on some of the exchanges we've had, I think it's fair to say that our tastes even overlap at times. For the sake of argument, assume for a moment that you and I are the most well-read members of the forum (not likely, but we're having thought experiment time right now). The fact that you and I can't agree on the most important take aways from the same ****ing books should tell you a lot about how foolishly optimistic your post sounds. We can't even get people to not cheat on **** that doesn't matter, yet it's realistic to think that bad actors will somehow regulate themselves in a free market? Come on, man. @Pidesco Libertarian football:

Everything past the 2nd paragraph is behind a paywall. I'm assuming it goes on to talk about some crappy situation that Obama tried to head off with the TPP

Correct. Without all that pesky gobermint oversight, we can go back to finding **** in our food and poison in our "medicine", just how god intended. On the bright side, I'm sure some entrepreneurial libertarians are standing by, waiting to sell us testing kits so that we can spend all those hours we used to waste on things like sleeping ensuring that we don't accidentally kill our own family members. And then, obviously, when some percentage of our neighbors die because some bad actor intentionally sold worthless goods, the surviving family members can drop all their other responsibilities and aspirations to chase down said bad actor for a heaping dose of mob justice.

Happy Friday!

Speaking of humor... ‘Fraud Street Run’ from Four Seasons Total Landscaping raises thousands for Philabundance

Wow. You seem triggered. Did you read what I was responding to for context?

Reasoning errors = hard center?

Ventilator stats are nice, but this should probably include ECMO utilization which has been a far more severe bottleneck (and which I don't see anyone talk about).

Saw something on 538 the other day that said AP won't call Georgia if it looks like a recount is likely.

There's content and then there's delivery. I like AOC a fair amount of the time, but I think she has a habit of falling down on the second part of that equation.

So... Ballots can be an intimidating mess. I know lots of people who I would consider to be civic-minded that emotionally check out on some of this stuff because it feels so esoteric. All this to say, it's not uncommon to see some people come in, get their ballot, vote for POTUS, and return their ballot with everything else blank (ngl, that's exactly what my first ballot looked like). I've heard more than one "man on the street" interview where these are precisely the types of ballots people are calling fraudulent.

To be fair, it's ain't over till the electoral college calls it.