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Clinton-Trump Debate Open Thread

The Donald, no doubt saying something truly awful
The Donald, no doubt saying something truly awful

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It’s Debate Night here in the USA. The debate proper starts at 9 PM Eastern, but you can start talking, yelling, whatever right now and for as long as you want. Should this be a no-trolls thread? Yeah, let’s make it a no-trolls thread. And no Trump supporters, obviously.

I will be live-screaming the debate here in my apartment. If you’re outside my window, enjoy!

Here is another pledge week capybara for you all. Two of them, actually, with some hot capybara-on-capybara action:

Sleepy Capybara says: Donate!
Sleepy Capybara says: Donate!

 

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Snowberry
Snowberry
8 years ago

Oh yeah, assuming he wasn’t just jumping all over the place with unconnected thoughts, at one point he implied that he knows taxes are too high because US airports aren’t fancy enough. That struck me as particularly weird.

Nikki the Bluth Wannabe
Nikki the Bluth Wannabe
8 years ago

Wow. I watched earlier, and it was really something. For this one, I have to quote Todd after BoJack’s troops debacle:
“Well, that went slightly better than the worst it could’ve possibly gone, so… hooray?”
(last 9 or so seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPwA6hAXVpQ)

Dalillama
8 years ago

@Snowberry

Oh yeah, assuming he wasn’t just jumping all over the place with unconnected thoughts, at one point he implied that he knows taxes are too high because US airports aren’t fancy enough

This is the level of deliberate ignorance we are dealing with. A man who has spent a lifetime in corporate finance, a man who is seeking the most powerful office in the country, apparently does not know that airports are not private enterprises, and are, in fact, built with tax money.

mildlymagnificent
mildlymagnificent
8 years ago

By the way. I missed the debate – granddaughter’s swimming lesson took precedence – but I’ve read all your comments and the NPR transcript.

I’ve also read the Time magazine reports – and I’m linking the “Vote Now” page. You’ll realise why when you vote and see how others have voted.

There are a lot of weird people in the world.

Snowberry
Snowberry
8 years ago

a man who is seeking the most powerful office in the country, apparently does not know that airports are not private enterprises, and are, in fact, built with tax money.

It was under the context of trickle-down economics raising revenues. Something along the lines of China and the UAE having better airports, so that’s evidence the US is becoming a third world country. This is the fault of politicians raising taxes too much. I think. At that point, a lot of what he said was barely coherent. Probably that wasn’t meant to imply that airports are private enterprises, but I’d need to rewatch or read a transcript to be sure.

Leo
Leo
8 years ago

@Ooglyboggles
Really don’t find the last Gifs cute, it looks like the cat (a predator, so this is creating more stress for the chicks) is on top of some of those chicks and they’re tight packed anyway. They may be simply going to be transported but their welfare doesn’t seem paramount, or they may be the male chicks before they’re killed. Reminder why I’m moving from vegetarianism towards veganism, but also really triggering (in the proper sense of being genuinely anxiety provoking), I can’t watch videos showing animal cruelty in the farming industry and know even non-vegetarians can find it upsetting.

mildlymagnificent
mildlymagnificent
8 years ago
Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

One question they usually ask here in debates is “what do you think is the most admirable thing about your opponent?”*

I’d like to have seen that one.

(* During our last election Cameron and Milliband were so sweet about each other I almost snuffled)

Skiriki
Skiriki
8 years ago

I find it pretty astonishing that there are media reports (including supposedly reputable media companies) of Clinton being “over-prepared”. What the fucking fuck. One cannot be over-prepared if they plan to be a president!

Policy of Madness
Policy of Madness
8 years ago

Something along the lines of China and the UAE having better airports, so that’s evidence the US is becoming a third world country. This is the fault of politicians raising taxes too much. I think. At that point, a lot of what he said was barely coherent.

Fun fact: in the 1800s, trickle-down economics were known as horse-and-sparrow economics. The analogy was that if you stuff a horse with enough oats, it will shit some out for the sparrows by the side of the road to eat. This analogy was provided by opponents, obviously, but it’s an apt one: a horse’s digestive system doesn’t work that way, and even if it did, yuckers.

And, of course, there are much more efficient ways to feed sparrows if that is your actual objective, ones that require far reduced expenditure in oats.

The idea that lowering taxes raises revenues is literally something a guy once drew on the back of a napkin, which has become conservative dogma despite zero evidence that it has ever actually worked at any time in the US. It makes some intuitive sense if you think that people will work less hard if they aren’t able to take home enough of their income, but we all know that “makes intuitive sense” doesn’t equate to “works in reality.” The actual evidence is that the US tax structure has never been on the part of the curve that would have this effect, at any time that this effect has been sought. It is hypothetically possible that taxes could at some point be so high that lowering them would increase revenues, but never has there been evidence that this has been the case.

Reagan really liked this idea, because he had some experience with having millions in income subjected to a very high marginal tax rate, and apparently he held a grudge about that for the rest of his life. But evidence: he didn’t actually stop making movies until he enter politics. So the high marginal tax rate didn’t, in reality, reduce his productivity. It just annoyed him.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ POM

The idea that lowering taxes raises revenues is literally something a guy once drew on the back of a napkin

As you’ll know the actually substantive argument wasn’t much better.

“If you had to pay 100% tax would you bother working?”

“Erm, I guess not”

“So the government wouldn’t get anything in tax anyway?”

“I suppose so”

“See, just extrapolate from there”

(Honestly folks, that genuinely was the case used)

EJ (The Orphic Lizard)

I like my job. I’d do it even if we had the system Locke proposed in First Treatise (100% marginal taxation above a subsistence level.) I don’t work hard because I’m getting paid more; I work hard because I enjoy it. I acknowledge my privilege in being able to say this.

I would not have said the same about some of the jobs I’ve had in the past.

Whenever I’ve heard people say that high marginal tax rates decrease productivity, I’ve always reflected on this and thought that it meant that the people who’re saying it hate their jobs.

Mr Trump, why do you hate your job? What would you rather be doing? What is stopping you from doing it?

Skiriki
Skiriki
8 years ago

PoM: I hate to be that person…

…but actually, horse’s digestive system will pass through quite a lot of oat kernels, which were then feasted upon by sparrows. Decline in horse-based locomotion has caused a blow to house sparrow populations, on top of other complications and changes in lifestyle.

This is not unusual; Egyptian vultures feast on lion dung, since the big cats have inefficient digestive system as well (and why dogs find domestic cats’ poop so irresistible, too).

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

I can see why my mates in shitty low paying jobs hate paying tax; especially when they perceive* that they’re subsidising people who aren’t putting in the same effort they do.

That tends to fuel off the books cash in hand work though rather than a reduction in productivity. It probably doesnt make that much difference to the economy as they’re spending that cash rather than saving it so they’ll be paying VAT etc.

(* Not saying they’re correct in that perception. Things like the benefit cap though are far more popular with my poorer friends than my wealthier ones.)

reggie, the neighbour's cat
reggie, the neighbour's cat
8 years ago

Just in case you thought only the right wing US media and commentators repeat cretinous and ridiculous conspiracies about Hillary’s health: http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/2016-us-presidential-debate-ross-cameron-says-hillary-clinton-has-dementia-20160927-grpa91.html

Failed Australian politician Ross Cameron apparently thinks Hillary has dementia and that she wears pantsuits with long jackets to hide a colostomy bag.

Fun fact about this failed politician – he was Mr Christian family values and then got caught out having an affair and living with his mistress in Canberra while his pregnant wife sat at home in Sydney.

Kat
Kat
8 years ago

Hillary looked like she was having fun, right from the start.

Donald? He looked grim and angry, right from the start.

She laughed at him a few times, and he looked like he was having a hard time not laughing along with her.

A Rose for Emily
A Rose for Emily
8 years ago

Alan Robertshaw,

The mathematics is actually sound. It assumes without proof that tax revenue is a continuous function–I.e. loosely speaking, that it HAS a “graph”–and that revenue is a function of tax rate. Those are Laffer’s actual errors, but the assumptions are not bad in a “local” sense: very small shifts in tax rates, all else equal, can be modeled well this way. So you could also say that his error was to falsely extrapolate from local to global.

In any case, if a function is continuous, equals zero at X=0 and at X=100, and is positive somewhere between, then it’s mathematically provable that the maximum value does occur, and is found somewhere between 0 and 100. This statement is not debatable.

Laffer also misleadingly drew the graph as a single hump, though. It’s perfectly possible that there are multiple points at which a maximum is achieved. That sketch informs false conclusions: it leads you to suppose that if lowering taxes raises revenue, then the optimum rate must be less, and if raising taxes raises revenue, then the optimum rate must be more. If the graph has exactly one hump, that’s true. But there could be two humps, or fifty.

This type of analysis is done all the time to find the best price for something, but it only works for small perturbations.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ Skiriki & POM

What’s that posh coffee that’s been through some animal’s digestive systems first?

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ a rose for emily

So you could also say

Heh, you could probably say. I once demonstrated on this very site that I had trouble working out what 10% of a 100 was. 🙂

But thanks for the explanation. I remember when someone demonstrated his graph it seemed intuitively wrong but I wouldn’t be able to say why with mathematical proof. It just reminded me of that thing in The Simpsons

“And what if your family don’t like bread? What if they like, say, cigarettes?”

Skiriki
Skiriki
8 years ago
Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

They say satire died when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize; but it is increasingly difficulty to tell satire from real news these days:

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ skiriki

Thanks; I’ll be adding that to my list of “Foods that were invented as the result of a drunken bet”.

reggie, the neighbour's cat
reggie, the neighbour's cat
8 years ago

@ Alan
It’s Kopi Luwak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak
Civets used to sometimes eat coffee cherries but they don’t digest them much. Someone made some coffee out of them, apparently it was good, and now there are cages of civets force fed coffee beans. So from happy accident to exploitation of animals.
So a pretty apt analogy for trickle down economics.

Edit: and I should refresh the page before writing an answer!

Weird (not wired) Eddie
Weird (not wired) Eddie
8 years ago

Any of you watch The WB network’s show “Supernatural”? This whole year is an episode come to life….

numerobis
numerobis
8 years ago

Scildfreja reminds me I have every animal I’ve ever hit or seen hit in my brain, pictured at the moment of impact. Thankfully it’s only a handful yet. But still, the feathers off that pigeon bouncing off the van in front of me on the overpass above CA-85 on El Camino midday in 2000 (seriously, that’s the level of detail I recall), the sickening smack of that small bird in northern NH this spring, the bump of slush right around a bend in the mountain road in PA shortly after the plough let me go first, which turned out to actually be a dead deer…

I guess that memory-forming trick opens up our brains’ ability to learn from serious error — but also to suffer PTSD?

I haven’t identified a mistake any human made in any of those events that I could avoid making, other than the very act of driving. Cars should be banned.