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Trump, Greta and MUCH more!! (British Comedy) And girls without sausages!!!
Batshit Bonkers Brittain
- Thread starter Uncle Gizmo
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This is a queer one... So's Bunny!
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Oh Katie!!!
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Katie Hopkins for Prime Minister:-
Isaac
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That sums up what liberals in the USA seem to be fighting in favor of, too.
Vote Republican.
This, @Thales750 , is an example of why I vote Republican- to get rid of this stuff and get back to schools focusing only on the required skills for professional advancement & functioning, which if I did lift-and-shift the effort from the stupid stuff over to the good stuff, our schools would easily be high achievers once again.
Is any party really fixing our schools? Of course not, but one party is more in the right direction than the other one, hence I vote for the better of two offerings. Republicans' support for school choice is a big positive factor.
I'm against privatization in certain contexts - prisons, for example - but I'm starting to warm to the increasing privatization of schools. Tie it directly to standardized testing, tie that directly to meritocracy, tie meritocracy directly to hiring and you have yourself the----Oh wait, that's the same formula we used to have, we just have to get BACK to it.
This is why Kamala's frequent critique of Trump "taking us backwards" just DIDN'T land with the American people.
Enough of us voters actually DO want to go 'back' in at least a half dozen areas.
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It never ceases to amaze me how good many of the progressive policies sound on paper and then how quickly they fall apart in the implementation. My generation was one of the last where children went to neighborhood schools. my school had 6 rooms for k-5. After that we went to a k-8 school a half mile further away - still walking since this was before "busing". As I was growing up, the country was rapidly getting rid of the small, neighborhood schools that small and medium sized towns had been using and consolidating into larger schools which could have "more" cultural options for children which sounded good in theory although, I'm not sure my early education lacked for culture. The art teacher came once a week. Over the 6 years, we did coloring, drawing, painting, modelling clay, admired the work of the great artists, etc. The music teacher came once a week. Same drill. We learned the minuet, square dancing, singing rounds, etc. The only additional benefit when I got to the larger school was was each grade had at least four classes so they got to divide us into A, B, C, and D "divisions". I guess they weren't worried about hurting our feelings. The advantage to this was that for the next three years, I got advanced instruction because my teachers didn't have any behavioral problems or slow learners to cater to. We also got to change teachers for different subjects which allowed them to specialize.
But the progressives never took advantage of the consolidation which should have allowed accelerated learning for the best students while still separating the problem children. Instead, they distributed the disruptive and slow learners so every class "benefited" from the co-mingling. Then we got to busing and no one was allowed to walk to school anymore. Both the weakest and strongest could have benefited from smaller classes while the middle carried on at a middle pace in larger groups because the teachers didn't have to deal with outliers at either end. Instead, the Progressives insist on lowering the bar so that everyone "wins" which means that in essence, everyone loses. That is education today. Everyone loses unless you are lucky enough to have been raised in a top notch district.
Today we have more administrators than educators. How's that for utter nonsense? Thank you teacher's union.
As a personal aside, my walk to school for those 13 years (never had a bus) was pretty spectacular and full of history. Over the river and through the woods and over the train tracks and uphill both ways
Here's a link that tells the story of Uncus Leap and shows pictures of my walking route in the winter. It was totally beautiful in the winter when everything was covered with snow and ice and pretty nice the rest of the year. Today my mother would have been arrested for child neglect. She walked my best friend and me both ways on day 1 and my friend's mother walked us both ways on day 2. After that, we were on our own. Although there were probably 50 kids from our neighborhood who walked that route every day to one of the three schools on the east side of the river so we were never really alone.
www.thedistractedwanderer.com
But the progressives never took advantage of the consolidation which should have allowed accelerated learning for the best students while still separating the problem children. Instead, they distributed the disruptive and slow learners so every class "benefited" from the co-mingling. Then we got to busing and no one was allowed to walk to school anymore. Both the weakest and strongest could have benefited from smaller classes while the middle carried on at a middle pace in larger groups because the teachers didn't have to deal with outliers at either end. Instead, the Progressives insist on lowering the bar so that everyone "wins" which means that in essence, everyone loses. That is education today. Everyone loses unless you are lucky enough to have been raised in a top notch district.
Today we have more administrators than educators. How's that for utter nonsense? Thank you teacher's union.
As a personal aside, my walk to school for those 13 years (never had a bus) was pretty spectacular and full of history. Over the river and through the woods and over the train tracks and uphill both ways
Here's a link that tells the story of Uncus Leap and shows pictures of my walking route in the winter. It was totally beautiful in the winter when everything was covered with snow and ice and pretty nice the rest of the year. Today my mother would have been arrested for child neglect. She walked my best friend and me both ways on day 1 and my friend's mother walked us both ways on day 2. After that, we were on our own. Although there were probably 50 kids from our neighborhood who walked that route every day to one of the three schools on the east side of the river so we were never really alone.
The Tale of Indian Leap at Yantic Falls in Norwich
Long before English settlers purchased the 9-mile square of land upon which the City of Norwich, Connecticut sits, the land was owned a...
Thanks for thinking of me. I came here to get some opinions on spacing and indenting. Please take a look and give me your input.
Indenting and Spacing Revisited
Isaac
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Because they are usually platitudes that assume the possibility of some kind of utopia where "everybody wins".
Then the implementation begins to demand that those who were already winning start winning a lot less.
What sounded ideal turns into a zero sum game that, naturally, feels unfair to those who weren't losing in the first place.
This begs the question, is life more of a game with winners and losers and doses of charity doled out at the desire of the winners, or is life a strict effort to achieve an outcome for everyone? Liberals tend to believe the latter is possible, but their solutions generally involve redistribution of finite quantities of things rather than the way it sounds at first.
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Life is not a zero-sum game if you continually attempt to improve yourself. It is not, in the long run, a constant resource game in general - though now and then we hit a limit and have to work to overcome the limit. Like economics, where in short-term the money supply is limited but in long term it is possible to grow the economy. (That's an analogy, don't take it as strict gospel.)
You were trying to head me off with that last part.
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Actually, no... not specifically you. There are others here who actually ask me what I've been smoking and whether they can get some of it. But I'm not on anything. I'm just an out-there analogy maker.
Isaac
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It is interesting, the yin and yang of individualism versus collaboration and working together to try to achieve good positive outcomes versus seeing yourself as a little capitalist Island. I'm just reflecting on all these things in the new year. I see so many sides to every potential issue.
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People working in groups for a common goal can create miracles. People being told they have to give their time/money/intellectual product to support other, "less fortunate" people, not so much.
It's time the ordinary person recognized the difference between giving time/money because YOU want to help some person or group and the government taking money from you at gunpoint and giving it to some person/group they deem to be more worthy. The former is actual charity, the later is outright theft. Government does NOT belong in the charity business. SS is not charity. While i don't think the government should be involved, i also don't think it is charity. They have made it an "entitlement" but YOU personally pay for it over your working life so it is not charity. It is the mommy state ensuring that you end up your working life with "something" rather than "nothing". The reason it is able to work at all is because of the fact that if you don't live to collect, the government gets to keep your piece of the pie. That is why responsible people who plan and save for retirement are so resentful of SS. They could have done a lot better with that money over time AND what they didn't end up using could be left to their estate.
It's time the ordinary person recognized the difference between giving time/money because YOU want to help some person or group and the government taking money from you at gunpoint and giving it to some person/group they deem to be more worthy. The former is actual charity, the later is outright theft. Government does NOT belong in the charity business. SS is not charity. While i don't think the government should be involved, i also don't think it is charity. They have made it an "entitlement" but YOU personally pay for it over your working life so it is not charity. It is the mommy state ensuring that you end up your working life with "something" rather than "nothing". The reason it is able to work at all is because of the fact that if you don't live to collect, the government gets to keep your piece of the pie. That is why responsible people who plan and save for retirement are so resentful of SS. They could have done a lot better with that money over time AND what they didn't end up using could be left to their estate.
You literally have no idea how economics works do you. Literally zero. Everything you think you know came straight out of the Conservative brainwashing machine.
Why do you think you never, ever, suggest that we remove the cap from Social Security withholding? Have you ever even considered that possibility?
Do you know why your people hold Gates and Buffet in contempt? Because they both advocate increased taxes on the ultra rich. Everything you say, all of it, is designed to blame the poor people for your personal problems.
Very few people would have wound up with any retirement had it not been for SS. Maybe about one percent. you know the same 1% of the folks that make more than half of all the money. Dang Pat, your relentless blaming the government for every problem needs a little reconsideration .
Isaac
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I'm personally counting on and looking forward to social security in my retirement. In addition to other stuff of course
So much for my newer, less antagonistic, persona.
Isaac
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well I hate to say that, I mean I know it's not recommended, one should have one's own plan for retirement - I just cannot help it. When I look at my overall retirement projected income, SS factors in strongly, so I hope it's still there!
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Dang, Thales750, your relentless claims that we don't understand economics are a continued insult to some very intelligent people; people smart enough to make an inanimate object do their bidding (most of the time.) If you are so freaking smart about economics, write a book or several scholarly papers in an Economics journal and win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Put up or shut up. (That last statement was as a member, not as a moderator.)
I won't blame government for every problem, but I absolutely DO blame government for trying to tackle problems in ways that always SEEM to lead down the road of unintended and unwelcome consequences. Not all of the cases are economic, but many have the side effect of making things more expensive.
Someone in some government agency says "There is a problem here." Someone else says, "Let's make a regulation to fix it." So they do exactly that by Executive fiat, and then, because of the broad sweep of the regulation, everyone else - including folks for whom there WAS no problem - gets stuck with yet another costly compliance.
In the "Loper Bright Enterprises" case, the National Marine Fisheries Service mandated that fishing boats going after Atlantic herring must have a government-certified observer on board, paid for by the boat's operator rather than the government, to assure compliance with regulations. But this observer could not be given other duties during fishing operations; i.e. he was on payroll but not productive. For small fishing companies that maybe only had one operational boat, the extra overhead tanked their profitability. Loper Bright Enterprises sued to overturn that rule and won at the level of the U.S. Supreme Court. A side result was the overturning of the Chevron Deference doctrine. As a result, the excessive regulatory fervor of the Executive Branch of the USA was suddenly exposed and only time will tell just how this all plays out. When we talk about the "Deep State" that discussion includes the bureaucrats of the USA Executive Branch of government.
Cases have been filed against Dept. of Interior regarding declaration of what is a "wetland" that ends up preventing people from building on property that they bought that once every few years gets a little wet when it rains. Many of these eventually win based on the "takings" clause in the U.S. Constitution, but all of them cost more money than people wanted to spend in order to build a nice little cabin.
Some cases against Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were filed because ATF 'new rules' ended up making people into felons because of having previously (before enactment of the regulation) purchased a particular accessory for their hunting rifle. No grandfathering, no grace period. If you had previously bought certain rifle accessories, you became a felon. Some of those cases are still ongoing, but the legal fees can be considerable.
Treasury Dept. rules got in the way of my step-daughter paying back a small loan from us - in the same year as it was borrowed - because it totaled a little over some threshold of money transfers. We got it resolved, but it involved expenditures of gasoline for the car to get to the bank in person, plus time away from work, so that the transfer could be done personally in the bank office.
Even local governments do this. I'm currently embroiled in a situation where I'm repairing a fence that got damaged indirectly by a tree in a protected right-of-way. When I went to repair the fence after fixing a tree problem and a sidewalk problem, I was told that an ordinance had been passed after the fence was built that would require me to restructure the fence shape vs. its original simple straight-line approach. That is going to require me to get a variance.
Do I blame government for every little problem? No. But I blame them for every over-zealous attempt to massively correct a minuscule wrong.
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I have recommended that, more than once. But you missed those posts. But since there is a cap on benefits, it makes sense that there be some sort of cap on withholding, say $250,000 which moves with inflation. Also, I don't remember the exact rules but if your income at retirement is above x, you can't collect ANY SS. Not being a socialist, I don't believe we should make you pay in if we are not going to let you collect at the end. But, since we can't see the future, we don't know what your circumstances will be at retirement age so you have to pay as you go just in case. I would still raise the cap but I would also pay out regardless of what your current income is. Only a socialist would remove the cap completely with the full knowledge that they were forcing, at gunpoint a significantly larger contribution than was warranted, especially since we would never pay anything in the end based on current rules.
Actuaries get paid the big bucks to determine what needs to be collected now in order to pay out benefits later. They aren't prescient so over time, adjustments do have to be made. Inflation may be worse or better than predicted, medical improvements make people live longer. Lots of factors come into play. Somehow, we never seem to reduce the required SS contributions though. I do want all you youngsters to pay close attention to this. Put a note in your file. Once the Boomers start dying off in great numbers, the bubble they caused will be gone. WILL the SSA reduce the required contribution somehow or won't they? I'm predicting they won't and people don't understand how this works sufficiently to complain. But once the SS contributions were funneled into the general fund instead of the "lock box", they became income that Congress could spend and Congress is NEVER, EVER going to give that up.
I'm really unclear on how you come to that opinion. Perhaps you could use concrete examples.
My beef with the government is that it is too big. It is inefficient. It is unaccountable. It is a black hole that just sucks up money. We absolutely need government. Without it, we would have chaos. I definitely lean libertarian but not to the point of no government. Congress has become a gravy train for members whose sole job seems to be to get reelected. How else do you explain the numbers who go in as middle income and retire (only after they can no longer be propped up to speak into a microphone) as multi-millionaires. They certainly don't spend any time reading bills before they vote on them. If they thought that was part of their job they would NEVER allow a multi-thousand page bill to be posted hours before voting commences . The politicians who campaign on making certain kinds of reforms become swamp people as soon as the ballots are counted and the campaign promises go the way of yesterday's fish. That is why Trump is so reviled by all politicians. He makes them look as bad as they are by actually trying to fulfill his promises. He won't always succeed but he makes a serious effort and it is only when Congress obstructs him rather than supporting him that he fails.
Always with the personal attack. When you can't argue a point, attack. It's a tactic you use consistently.
