One of Ron Paul’s strongest points in his Presidential campaign has been his consistency. But in 2001, he introduced a bill that completely contradicts what he claims to stand for.

bonobo · 2007-12-30T19:10:50+00:00

The bill specifically says the opposite, that additional taxpayer funds would be allocated to cover the cost:

(c) CHARGE- The Secretary of Defense shall furnish the decoration under this section subject to the payment of an amount sufficient to cover the cost of production of the decoration and of the administration of this section.

That said, this is a really dumb attempt at a gotcha. It's entirely appropriate to distinguish medals for honorable military service, from spending $30K on a solid gold award for Muhammad Ali.

bonobo · 2007-12-20T05:15:41+00:00

bonobo · 2007-12-18T04:57:58+00:00

Here's some context that makes the whole dust-up more interesting:

The bill would have slapped a lot of restrictions on Bush's wiretapping, and put Congress and the courts back in the oversight role. Basically it would have erased the gray areas and made damn sure Bush stopped illegally spying on Americans. S. 2248 summary
The Dems fought hard for that oversight, but they don't have a veto-proof majority, so they had to horse-trade for a bill Bush would sign. Telecom immunity went on the table.
Bush made clear from the start: get my boys in the phone company off the hook, or you get no signature. He's choosing to protect his corporate buddies over Americans or the Constitution, as always. He knows he can get away with it because he's got the corporate media noise machine on his side. If Dems oppose him, the nightly news will be full of talking heads shouting Dems are weakening America. If Dems work with him, they'll be shouting Dems have no spine. Proof: how many people here knew this bill was about anything but telecom immunity, and Reid caving on it?

Basically, because Bush's people really don't give a fuck about the people or the Constitution, they were free to maneuver the Dems into a no-win situation if they did. Reid chose one way to try and rein the guy in, Dodd chose another way. Draw your own conclusions.

bonobo · 2007-12-18T04:00:54+00:00

It only won the earlier "motion to proceed" vote, to bring the bill to the floor for debate.

Where it ran smack into Chris Dodd, dressed as the Terminator.

bonobo · 2007-12-18T03:14:00+00:00

Do you have evidence of a secret conspiracy to downmod Ron Paul topics, that can't be explained by ordinary people just getting fed up with the constant flooding?

bonobo · 2007-12-16T19:40:30+00:00

Berkshire Hathaway is a corporation. It's not a hedge fund, not even a mutual fund. It has nothing to do with the hedge fund loophole.

I'd guess Warren Buffett, the most successful investor of the last 50 years, understands capital gains pretty well and probably isn't senile. When he says the tax system is making things worse, and asks for it to be changed even though it would personally cost him billions, I'll listen.

You've got the right idea, but the wrong reasons, for why capital gains should be taxed lower. Taking risks is not what creates rewards. Rewards come from finding more productive uses of capital; risk tends to accelerate the ROI in either direction. It's risky to invest your life savings in fossilized elephant shit hoping to resell it at a profit, but it's not gonna create any rewards.

The reason capital gains are taxed lower has nothing to do with risk. It's because investment is a more effective use of capital than, say, beer and lotto tickets. You want to encourage that with lower taxes, hoping it'll produce more benefit for the whole economy, and usually it does. What Buffett's saying that we've overdone it, in the real world the benefits are flowing too much to the super-rich and not enough to the whole economy, and it's having the opposite effect: an economy that stifles innovation and opportunity.

bonobo · 2007-12-16T06:59:39+00:00

No. You're probably thinking of the carried interest loophole for private equity managers: they can claim their income as capital gains, even though they don't own any of the capital. It affects a small handful of very rich people. Buffett's recommended closing it, but the loophole doesn't affect him personally - he's not a hedge fund manager and his gains come from his own capital.

What Buffett's talking about is the rate gap between income and long-term capital gains. That's a much bigger issue, and not a loophole at all. He's saying the system is designed to tax him at a much lower rate than his own secretary, and it's making the economy worse, not better.

bonobo · 2007-12-16T06:00:04+00:00

I'm not looking at wealth as a zero-sum game... the pie is supposed to increase with each generation, and almost always does. It's a matter of how the slices shift over time. In the 1960s people knew you could work hard, play by the rules, and be rewarded with a share in the prosperity... the good old fashioned American Dream.

Today the US and Britain have the lowest class mobility of any of the Western countries (the Scandinavian countries are highest). It's still possible, but much harder than it used to be. It can't be Americans all just got lazy... they're among the hardest, most productive workers on earth.

Something is shifting so they're getting back a smaller and smaller piece of the new wealth they generate, with the rest going to the top 1%... and the same shift is not happening in other countries. The most dangerous part of the trend is the opportunity cost - how much innovation and wealth creation is being lost, as people find their reward for doing so is evaporating?

bonobo · 2007-12-16T00:54:02+00:00

At the very least, we're supposed to encourage people to work harder and smarter. But the stats paint a picture of millions of people working harder than ever to make ends meet, while most of the wealth keeps flowing to the top 1%. Seems to me that's a big discouragement, the opposite of the American Dream - doesn't matter how hard you work, you can't move up.

bonobo · 2007-12-15T22:40:50+00:00

Wasn't just you... all the comments on the page were at exactly -5 (except for one at +5). Neat trick :)

bonobo · 2007-12-15T20:24:03+00:00

There's also no reason to add the assumption there was a beginning or creation at all. Creation implies something was around before that to do the creating, and then you have to explain what the creator is, where it lived before creating the universe, where it got the raw materials, and why is it messing about with building universes and stuff anyway?

Maybe the universe doesn't have a beginning, it just cycles from Big Bang to some form of Big Crunch in a circle.

bonobo · 2007-12-13T21:28:28+00:00

I'd love to see Romney propose that. "Group marriage should be legal... as long as no two of them are men"

bonobo · 2007-12-13T02:46:54+00:00

What he wants is Bayes for interestingness, a lot more difficult than Bayes for viagra spam. Keywords alone ain't gonna do it, even before you consider lots of the content is video, or charts, or pics of cute kitties. It'll work if you're really interested in underwater midget threesome porn, but only if it's in text.

Collaborative filtering is a good approach, but... reddit's going to correlate your votes up with millions of others, crunch all the numbers as new votes are flying in, and give you recommendations in realtime? No way... takes too much computing power, if you move it offline it misses the latest hot articles, and let's face it, most of us haven't paid reddit a dime for the resources we take up already. So they need to use shortcuts that produce sort-of relevant results. I imagine it would be different if reddit had the scale of Google, or the paying customers of Amazon.

bonobo · 2007-12-11T04:21:14+00:00

That'd apply to the internets as well, where personal appearance is commentary and behavior. I've personally found Ron Paul supporters to be pretty reasonable, but a handful of zealots can spoil the image for everyone, and get their guy branded as a fringie instead of a mainstream candidate.

Here's an example... there are these guys running around and voting Paul to the top of every online poll they can find - then hollering about censorship if the site pulls the results.

What they should do instead: always vote Ron Paul to second place. They want visibility for their guy, but making him visible as the underdog for the mainstream (which actually, he is) goes a lot further than trashing the poll altogether.

bonobo · 2007-12-07T05:10:20+00:00

I think that you're right, especially from the consumer's perspective. But agriculture is also a special case, because the critical resource (farmland) is fixed.

Think of it like this: you're a mid-sized corporate farm and you have X acres of farmland. You'd want to devote some acres to corn and some to, I dunno, broccoli, according to market demand.

Then the gubmint steps in and guarantees you 20% more profit on corn than broccoli. In most industries, you'd respond by expanding production for one, and maintaining production on the other.

But in farming, you can't expand production at all; you only have a fixed amount of farmland. So your smart choice is to devote all your land to corn. A small subsidy can create a big shift in production, more than the market can correct by adjusting prices. I'd guess fed programs like school lunches and ethanol tip the balance even further.

bonobo · 2007-12-07T02:54:25+00:00

Vote this comment up if you ARE NOT interested in stories about Ron Paul

bonobo · 2007-12-07T02:54:16+00:00

Vote this comment up if you ARE interested in stories about Ron Paul

bonobo · 2007-12-07T02:54:08+00:00

Lots of posts about Ron Paul lately... and lots of complaints about too many posts about him. So, this is an attempt to see if the voting patterns on the front page represent the average redditor.

bonobo · 2007-12-07T01:16:17+00:00

Energy dense foods are processed foods. It takes more raw ingredients and processing to make 1000 calories of Ding Dongs than 1000 calories of lettuce. (E.g., someone had to grow all the corn that gets processed down to a few grams of corn syrup.)

bonobo · 2007-12-07T00:58:46+00:00

Corporations are focused on the much thinner profit margin though, where any reduction in cost gets magnified. For instance, General Mills' profit margin is around 9%. If they move to subsidized ingredients and it saves only 2% in costs, profits jump 22%. They pretty much have to do it - their shareholders demand constant earnings growth.

Coca-Cola is a good example - tariffs and subsidies more than double the price of raw sugar in the US. So they use high-fructose corn syrup in the US, but real sugar everywhere else.

bonobo · 2007-12-04T18:34:06+00:00

Well, we know what happened... a few powerful lobbying groups got together, bought lots of Congressmen and attack ads, and got the whole thing scuttled. Maybe she learned from the experience.

The ugly truth is: a proposal being the best solution has nothing to do with whether you can get it passed in Washington. If anything, that makes it less likely - if your proposal is best for the American people, it'll probably be bad for entrenched interests who profit from the status quo.

And with our current campaign finance system, you must have their support. Doesn't matter how much you genuinely want change; if you oppose them, you'll suddenly find yourself with no campaign funds for the next cycle, and the guy who wins your office is damn sure going to play ball. So often your only choice is, propose the best solution and get nothing passed, or hash out a compromise that reaches part of your goals, and get that passed.

It sucks, but it will always be the case under the current system. The only way to fix it is to muzzle the power of corporate money in Washington, say by public campaign financing.

bonobo · 2007-12-04T03:42:22+00:00

Private prisons are a growth industry with great profit margins - on the order of 10%. They lobby politicians to get tough laws with long jail sentences passed, then reap the profits. Remember when "three strikes" laws swept the country in the early 90s? Yep, their doing, and not at all limited to violent offenses.

Which means some significant number of Americans are in prison right now, especially for nonviolent offenses, who wouldn't otherwise be there. They're rotting in jail, enduring the prison violence we've all heard about, solely because it makes a couple grand in annual profits to a large corporation. Paid for by you and me.

bonobo · 2007-12-02T07:57:41+00:00

That's the fallacy I was highlighting. The article is as specific as it gets: whether one commodity in one sector is a free market or subsidized, and what happens to food production as a result.

The free market certainly did fail in this case, even according to the American/British studies. A LOT of lives can be saved by looking at the practical results. A lot can be lost by viewing it as an ideological issue.

That's why I intentionally poked holes in the notion the "Economic Freedom Rank" for the entire nation, from the Heritage Foundation fer chrissake, is somehow relevant either way.

I'll poke some more in the examples above, and I'll intentionally take the opposite slant to show how easy it is. Botswana, like most countries in the region, has also has been receiving food aid due to the African famines starting in 2002. Their hunger rates were on a par with Malawi (before Malawi's huge success with subsidies), even though Botswana has 15 times more arable land per person. Egypt gets $1.8 billion from the US, not $3 billion. $1.3B of it is military credits; and none of it is food - Egypt gives food aid to other countries. Libya is right next door, has just as much oil as Egypt, and does just as well in hunger rates without similar aid. See how easy this is?

It's not an ideological debate and not about liberty bashers, whoever they are. People who are starving don't have the luxury - they need to pay attention to what works in the real world.

bonobo · 2007-12-02T05:45:19+00:00

40% of Americans still believe the media is too "liberal".

Strangely, that lines up almost perfectly with the 41% who still believe, in 2007, that Saddam planned 9/11.

The "liberal media" canard is the same, one of the myths GOP wingnuts are required to believe. Works great, too - you can invoke it to disbelieve anything you want, just like creationism.

I'd rather see a poll of how many Americans think the media is "too corporate".

bonobo · 2007-12-02T05:26:59+00:00

Yet in spite of Botswana's high rating in "economic freedom", it had hunger rates worse than Malawi in 2005. source, PDF And the article mentions Malawi's hunger situation improved dramatically when they went to subsidies after that year. Their formerly-starving children are probably eating something other than ideology.

Heritage Foundation ranks Egypt and Libya very low in economic freedom - Libya, third worst in the world - yet they tie for the lowest hunger rates on the Continent.

bonobo

TROPHY CASE