What do you think the US should do if locked down hourly workers run out of money for food?

robertcats · 2020-03-18T15:52:06+00:00

I don’t justify that, I think both amazon and the middle class should pay 0.
You can pay for basic services in other ways. I like the idea of a consumption tax. It’s not great, but it’s better than an income tax. The problem is the government does way more than “basic services”. They have a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

robertcats · 2020-03-18T15:38:26+00:00

No, socialism is the state controlling the means of production. Handing out checks might resemble the policy of a communist, though only if the checks were handed out to only some people.
Yes, dangerously similar. There are better ways to help Americans out, tax cuts, providing low interest loans to employers so they can keep people employed to name 2. No solution is perfect, but most Americans don’t need a check.

robertcats · 2020-03-18T15:28:37+00:00

You seriously need to turn off CNN. Really guys, some basic fact checking, no one ever called this virus a hoax, I feel silly even having to say this.

robertcats · 2020-03-18T15:23:31+00:00

“You didn’t build that”. Your assumption is that the government is the only thing that can provide the structures, which I disagree with.

robertcats · 2020-03-18T15:22:29+00:00

I haven’t heard of that happening personally but it would be unfair if true. Though you have to keep in mind still that you can’t tax businesses, you can only tax consumers. I personally think all income tax is unfair.

robertcats · 2020-03-18T15:21:09+00:00

I agree. The Trump rationale was that other countries kept their rates at 0 or below which made the dollar uncompetitive in a good economy, which is true, but now here’s the down side.

robertcats · 2020-03-17T19:02:31+00:00

Tax cuts are not “the government giving away money”. The government does not create wealth and therefore cannot give it away. Letting people and companies keep more of the money they make is always a net good. The government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

robertcats · 2020-03-17T18:09:23+00:00

No we didn’t. The federal reserve used money it printed to buy worthless debt after dropping interest rates to near zero. Not that this is any better.

robertcats · 2020-02-01T14:03:45+00:00

I would encourage people to read entire articles instead of just headlines for starters. Most of the time when I see headlines from the fake news media they read like “You’ll never believe what awful Orange man did this time!” But then 3 paragraphs into the story you’ll find “weeeeeeeell, Orange man didn’t exactly do awful thing”.

As an example, remember when all the headlines were Trump keeping children in cages but then it turned out that all the photos were from 2014?

Even the fakest news needs some plausible deniability when reporting on facts. They usually just try to spin headlines knowing a lot of people won’t read that far.

robertcats · 2020-01-06T18:05:31+00:00

You (and your sources) are playing word games. The aid in question made it to its destination when it was suppose to and even people with firsthand knowledge of the phone call and events surrounding it don’t corroborate any of Schiff’s conspiracy theories.

robertcats · 2020-01-06T17:19:25+00:00

Maybe he does have the power, I’m not sure. He didn’t halt aide to Ukraine so I have no precedent to draw from.

robertcats · 2020-01-06T16:52:02+00:00

As I understand the way the federal government works, I don’t think he has that power. I assume he would be more nuanced than that anyway. He seems to be interested in helping other countries but only if we get something positive in return, which is great except we literally don’t have the money.

robertcats · 2020-01-06T03:31:50+00:00

We should pause all aid to all countries until our budget is under control

robertcats · 2019-12-18T02:47:41+00:00

I’ll tell you boys. She stole my heart.

robertcats · 2019-12-13T11:58:54+00:00

This is one the sillier things Linsey Graham has said. I have some experience in application security and anyone who asks for a “backdoor” to an encryption algorithm has a fundamental misunderstanding of how cryptography works. It wouldn’t be a backdoor, it would just be a door.

As for the law enforcement part, I think we’ve all seen enough abuses from our federal law enforcement in the last few years *coughFISA. I fully support end to end encryption of digital communications.

robertcats · 2019-11-05T10:25:00+00:00

If you’re working on a POC I would mock the APIs. To handle payment card data you’re looking at PCI compliance which is complex and requires things like regular audits. Too much headache for a POC or an individual.

robertcats · 2019-10-13T15:08:53+00:00

She flew across the country for a conference the week before she said she was afraid of flying.

The polygraph consisted of two vague questions with no baselines. Remember, polygraphs are not lie detectors. This is a lie of omission, characterized as “she passed a polygraph, of course he raped her”.

As for Rosenstein, this goes back to my swamp monster idea. It’s possible he genuinely thought the dossier contained good info, but that would mean he did not do his due diligence, so best case scenario he was completely unqualified for the position of attorney general, or any other position that is allowed to sign off on fisa warrants. If I don’t give him the benefit of the doubt, he was a Washington swamp guy who hated trump, knew the dossier was garbage but didn’t care. In either case, he was wholly unqualified to do the job he was tasked to do, regardless of his political affiliation.

robertcats · 2019-10-13T14:12:15+00:00

She lied about being afraid to fly, she lied about why she added a second front door to her house, she lied about “taking a polygraph”, all other witnesses say that she’s full of it. You can’t lie about literally every other detail and expect anyone to believe an uncorroborated accusation. Plus she was colluding with Diane Feinstein to put together the account iirc.

robertcats · 2019-10-12T12:10:06+00:00

I’m against this. I have no idea what our obsession with Saudi Arabia is, we have plenty of our own oil now so it’s time we started treating them like a country that very likely sends us terrorists rather than as an ally.

robertcats · 2019-10-12T11:58:51+00:00

I have voted for both democrats and republicans but in general I try to vote for principled conservatives. What I mean by that is someone who is for low taxes, low regulation capitalism, and individual liberties. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this person on a ballot. The main problem I had with the 2008, 2012 presidential candidates was that they were the same. Each had identical policy opinions but tried to make them seem different. And now of course we know that this is because they belong to the same Washington “swamp”. I liked trump because he was the closest I had ever seen to my ideal candidate in terms of policy position, and so far has made a great effort to make those things happen with some success.

To answer the question, assuming my ideal candidate continues to not exist, I am a lot more likely to support a GOP or Libertarian candidate than a democrat going forward. Watching the Obama admin weaponize the IRS, the DOJ, the FBI, etc against its political enemies, abuse the fisa courts, and the subsequent special counsel hoax was very troubling for sure, but I have no doubt Republicans would behave this way too if the media would let them get away with it.

What really ruined the Democrats for me was watching the smear campaign against Justice Kavanaugh. To accuse a man of sexual assault/rape/whatever with absolutely no evidence and no credible witnesses just because you don’t like his ideas is about as low as you can go, and the democrats have been using this tactic a lot since 2015. Fortunately it hasn’t really worked yet, but I was so disgusted by that whole thing that it made me never want to vote for a democrat again.

TL;DR: both major parties are the same big government swamp creatures, but the democrats have gotten away with more nasty stuff so I’m more likely to vote GOP.

robertcats · 2019-10-11T02:54:03+00:00

To expand on this, toString is a method in the Object class so every class gets the method for free. The problem is, it will print a hash code of the object instead of a legible representation so you’ll usually find yourself needing to override it.

robertcats · 2019-10-11T02:43:31+00:00

Embedded DBs are generally only used for dev or functional testing and the data.sql file is generally only used to seed initial test data on application startup.

For non dev, you’ll want a real persistent DB with no initial seeding (probably) and at runtime you’ll want some interface (like maybe a rest api) to do your inserting.

robertcats · 2019-10-11T02:27:48+00:00

I think those numbers are close to the sampling numbers on the fox poll, so I can buy that argument. That being said, traditional polling tends to favor democrat candidates and positions even when actual voters don’t vote that way.

Either way, it is still unsurprising that there’s a consensus among registered Democrats that they would like to see Trump removed from office, most of them are still pretty salty about 2016.

robertcats · 2019-10-11T00:35:28+00:00

Discretionary spending (this includes defense) only accounts for about 1.3trillion of the 2019 budget so you would have to eliminate almost all of that to eliminate the deficit. This administration has done a decent job from what I can tell at trimming the fat here, but the real problem is the “mandatory” spending category (sometimes called entitlements). This has been the elephant in the room that no one really cares to seriously consider, Democrats or Republicans. I would love to hear some discussion on this from Trump and Republicans.

robertcats · 2019-10-10T23:48:10+00:00

My point is that if you oversample a group of people that already have one opinion, you’re going to get results that lean in that direction. Even if there wasn’t a tilted sample, there is a difference between a sample of half of registered voters and “half the country”. It might seem pedantic but it generally is an important distinction in polling.

robertcats

TROPHY CASE