SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
23d ago
realizing that the government's deficit is the private sector's surplus, which most people find desirable and wouldn't want to cut.
You're reasoning from an accounting identity, and I won't stand for it.
Yes, in order for the private sector as a whole to be a net creditor, the government must be a net debtor, but that's meaningless. There's no reason we should care about the private sector being a net creditor.
Note that this does not mean that the private sector can't accumulate net positive wealth without government debt. Private wealth did not decline along with net federal debt in the late 1990s, but grew rapidly. Real wealth is physical assets, not entries in a ledger.
It's true that if government doesn't run deficits private investors can't invest in government bonds, but they can buy private bonds or invest in equities. The government borrowing doesn't alleviate private actors of the burden of borrowing so that others may be creditors, but adds to the burden of private borrowers by driving up interest rates and reducing the amount of capital corporations can get by issuing stock.
If there's enough demand for government bonds that government can borrow at rates low enough to invest in infrastructure that will add enough value to pay for itself, that's a reasonable thing to do, but government borrowing does not, in itself, enrich the private sector.
Under no circumstances should the government borrow 6% of GDP at 4% interest at the peak of the business cycle in order to subsidize middle-class consumption.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Is it your position that the surrogates are criminals, too, or that they're willing victims who are just too stupid to know what's good for them?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Make more Jews, please. We're running out.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I have a 10x coworker, and from what I know of our company's pay scale, he makes around four times what an entry-level engineer makes, and probably twice what an unremarkable mid-career engineer makes.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Things go up and down
Ideally more than 13 times.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
You can still get a lower premium with a high deductible, right?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Any major Social Security savings are going to have to come from legislation, because the formulas for payouts are dictated by law. Maybe they find some people cashing dead parents' checks, but I don't expect that to be more than a small single-digit percentage, if that. Plus there's no real room for discretion, since payouts are only based on contributions and age of retirement.
There's some room for fraud in disability, but rooting that out without inspecting each individual on a case-by-case basis might be tough. Maybe they can look for doctors with anomalously high rates of diagnosing disability that can't be explained by specialty.
There's a lot more room for fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, because there's much more room for discretion. Again, reviewing individual cases is probably not possible, but maybe they can find providers with anomalous numbers.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I'm 100% on team HBD, because that's where the evidence strongly points, and I'm sick of midwits trying to smear those of us who can actually follow the science as racists, but "normalize Indian hate" sounds an awful lot like actual racism to me.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
He's an executive branch appointee acting with the permission of the elected President. That's how the executive branch has always worked: The President appoints people to oversee various aspects of the executive branch, because it does way too much for one person to micromanage. The President can fire him at any time if he disapproves.
If there's a problem here, it's that the executive branch is doing things the executive branch has no authority to do, not that an unelected appointee is making decisions.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Anything's possible, because laws aren't real, but the President has a constitutional mandate to "take care that the laws be executed faithfully," which includes making the expenditures specified in law. Anyone who's "harmed" by the reduction in spending (e.g. by getting laid off, or by not getting the benefit of the legally mandated spending) has standing to sue, and contrary to the histrionic claims of the left, I think the conservative majority on the Court actually cares about upholding the law.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Payroll expenses are about 5% of federal spending. Laying off half of the employees would have only a minimal effect on total spending.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.
No, it's more that they stop believing in the ability of democracy to deliver liberty. The whole point of competitive government is that exit is a better guarantee of liberty than voice.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
"Gulf of America" is kind of silly, though. The US borders many bodies of water. The Gulf of Mexico is the one that has Mexico on the other side.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
he is seen as a well-meaning dorky guy who likes jews so cannot be bunched with ss sympathisers
You are greatly underestimating the power of motivated reasoning.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Might have to wait for third-gen. A lot of second-gens seem to spend their whole lives seething with resentment over white kids making fun of their lunches in elementary school.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
For the time being, this can at least somewhat plausibly be explained by cultural fit. Most Jews have been living in the US for generations, while most Asians are first- or second-generation. Asians also skew towards quantitative ability, while Jews skew verbal, which is more important for success in things like politics.
Thirty years down the road, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more Asian representation outside of STEM. Hopefully they're better than Ro Khanna, Kshama Sawant, and Pramila Jayapal.
I just realized that the closer you get to New England, the more specific a background "Yankee" denotes. Overseas, it means an American. In the US it means someone from the Northeast. In the Northeast it specifically refers to someone from New England. I assume that this regresses further, and that in New England it refers to someone from Massachusetts, where it refers to someone from Boston, that within Boston it refers to a specific neighborhood, and that within that neighborhood resides the One True Yankee.
I'm agnostic as to whether it's a hereditary title or one that comes with the house.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Booze seems just part of the culture here--which is bizarre in a way when you think of how many people just can't drink in Japan without going full ゆでだこ (an oldish term meaning boiled octopus, referring to the redness of face many get after consuming even a little booze).
This is caused by the accumulation of acetaldehyde, a toxic intermediate product of alcohol metabolism, in the blood. They're literally poisoning themselves.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I quit drinking cold turkey 4 days ago.
I assume you're talking about Wild Turkey on the rocks.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I don't think I cried at all when my mother died, due to a combination of:
- She had been ill with a terminal neurodegenerative disease for a few years at that point, so we all saw it coming.
- I had moved across the country over a decade earlier, and since then had only seen her for a week or two so every year, so we'd grown apart.
- Honestly, I just didn't enjoy being around her much in the years leading up to her diagnosis. She wasn't mean or anything, but she was much more negative and complained a lot more than she had before. In retrospect, I think it's likely that this was a preclinical effect of the neurodegeneration.
I was sad, but in a sort of abstract, detached way, and not in a way that was deeply painful.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
posted memes about feds on Jan 6 and even questioned the deaths of officers on that day
Precisely zero officers present at the Capitol on January 6th died on that day. Brian Sicknick died the next day. We can't completely rule out that it was caused by the events of the previous day, but the conclusion of the autopsy was that he died of natural causes. The other four deaths were suicides. Possibly one of them, Jeffrey Smith, was caused by a TBI sustained in the attack, but I don't know how strong the evidence is there. Two of the suicides were six months later.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I just got promoted for the second time in seven years as a software engineer at the same company, and my income has more than doubled over that time period. And this is slow for my company; I had a lot of issues focusing during mandatory WFH during COVID, which was a major speedbump for my career progression. I could easily have been promoted a third time, nearly tripling my income, if not for COVID.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Yeah companies want them because they can't leave.
They can, though. There's some paperwork, but it's absolutely possible to change employers on an H-1B visa. It's not even that rare—in 2023, there were 76k approved change of employer petitions, down from something like 120k in 2022 (due to a slowdown in tech hiring generally).
This is pretty bleak: Adjusted for inflation, South Africa's GDP per capita is up less than 7% since 1974.
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