@newtboy -- I used a credit card (Discover) almost exactly as you described while I was going to college. Get a balance to pay for normal stuff, but pay it ALL off at the end of every month.

But I don't think the credit card companies hate people like us for 2 reasons:

1) For every one of us, there's a buttload who pay the minimum rather than the entire balance.

2) In my case, I think that in 4 years of college I forgot to pay off my balance (simply forgot to send in the check) once or possibly twice. I remembered a bit late and called Discover to see what to do, and they would tell me to pay the balance (or the minimum payment, not that I actually did that) plus a late fee.

I can't remember how much the late fee was. Maybe about $20? Anyway, at the kind of monthly balance I was running (not high), I'd wager that $20 was equivalent to maintaining an actual balance and paying the interest for a month or two or three. Which makes Maher's argument that they are "profiting from people's mistakes" reasonably accurate.


...On the other hand, Discover had "cashback bonus" awards of .5 to 1% or so, from which I stocked up and claimed somewhere in the $50-100 range over the 4 years, definitely enough to keep me in the net positive range in spite of a $20 late fee or two. That tells me that the magnitude of my "mistakes" must have been tiny in comparison to average credit card users.

I don't think Discover is an evil company per se for "preying" on people that don't use the card in the same way that you or I would. Paying a $20 late fee was a fully reasonable thing to charge me with. On the other hand, there's many many examples of predatory type fees that really do take advantage of people for "offenses" that are way less egregious, even things that have previously been considered standard use of the product / service in the past (paying WAY more for an extra inch of legroom, checked bags, food, etc. on airplanes comes to mind). Many of those arguably do cross the line into "evil" territory, I think.

I'm almost never in Sift Talk, but I noticed this too. Used to be that to make the top 15 a video would have to get well over the 10-vote generic "sifted" status, but recently I've seen several occasions when there aren't enough videos with 10+ votes to even fill out the top 15 completely.

I'm not an extremely long-time sifter, I've had an account here for 8 years and lurked for probably a couple before that. But in general, the main reasons that I actually joined the community here when I rarely do anything more than lurk (no facebook / reddit / whatever for me) still apply:

Standard YouTube isn't a community, it is a toxic wasteland. Trolls are the rule, not the exception. By far.

On the Sift, I rarely participate by actually posting videos, but the comments sections on videos here are a massive breath of fresh air compared to other sites (particularly YouTube). That's what drew me here and has kept me here.


That being said, I think we've been losing some of the openness to different opinions that has been a real strength of the sift community. With such a divisive US President, I'm sure some of that is inevitable. But, while we've always been better about that than elsewhere on the internet, I think we're losing some of that advantage.

I think the sift leans left -- not extreme, but noticeably. I used to lean moderately right, although generally more in the middle on social issues. My time on the sift (and also NOT living in the US) has pushed me more to the left, again particularly on social issues, but even on the meat-and-potatoes stuff that I think actually belongs in the realm of government. I'm still to the right of sift average, but closer than I was. Credit for that shift in my viewpoints is definitely in part due to the sane, open-minded, and accommodating debates in comments here.

I recognize that it is hard to be accommodating to some of the sifters that are further to the right than I ever was. A certain basketball coach comes to mind. But even when viewpoints from sources like that veer into territory that we find intolerable, I think we here at the sift used to be better about rationally but firmly voicing disagreement without sort of ... picking a fight. If that makes sense.

Just speaking for myself, I think I've probably been upvoting videos less because a higher percentage of what is being sifted is political, and I get fatigued with the volume of that. That's very much tied in to the current situation and media environment, so there isn't necessarily anything to be done about it, but I'd wager that is partially responsible for the lower traffic beyond just myself.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

I'm confused.... who are the white people you're talking about?

Are you saying that white americans shouldn't feel bad that their country is fucking over one of it's own territories?

Or are you classing the latino people of Puerto Rico as whingy white people who should STFU about being fucked over?

Either way, it doesn't make much sense.

@MilkmanDan, as it happens, there was a referendum a few weeks ago and "become a state" won by 97%. This followed on from a 2012 referendum.

I think that until relatively recently, there was a pretty even 3-way split amongst Puerto Ricans to:
A) Stay a commonwealth / territory
B) Go independent
C) Become a US State

But recently (likely thanks to shit like the video is describing), "stay the same" support has been dropping dramatically.


From the US population in general, I think poll results (on the rare occasions the question gets asked) tend to remain a pretty even 3-way split.


I think the 3-way division of options wasn't doing them any favors for a long time; status quo remained because none of the 3 options could get a majority. So I guess here's hoping that their situation will improve now that they seem to have largely cast aside that 3rd choice.


(I should note that I am by no means an expert or even particularly clued in on this topic. I've been to PR twice, and loved it. My "info" comes largely from a High School report I did on the topic like ~20 years ago, and a continuing genuine interest that has motivated me to keep vaguely informed *read - I wikipedia it once every few years. But although I may be way off or out of date on my info in the post above, my hope that their situation improves to their satisfaction is sincere.)

Oh ya it's totally real. Smarter Every Day did a pretty cool series on helicopter physics that's worth checking out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEWzqsfeHM

There are many pilots that can do the tricks in this video, but Tareq Alsaadi is world class and I haven't seen anyone else do this between trees much less in the dark. He's beyond wizard, into demon territory.

I appreciate your argument, but I don't share your alarm.

Displaced by sea level rise (which would be a gradual thing, but I agree very serious), combined with droughts/floods might potentially fall under "decimation". But only, I think, to the historical definition of 10% dead. Include wars resulting from territory and resource squabbles (should that count as fallout of climate change?), and it could be (much) worse. But still not on a 4-year timescale.

Second, if we're already "way past the tipping point", it logically follows that blame for that can't really be laid on Trump. His policies can certainly make things worse, but I think that 4 years of terrible climate policy in ONE country on Earth (granted, a country with a lot of influence) simply aren't going to be catastrophically, drastically worse than 4 years of magically ideal climate policy (even in a hypothetical scenario where Nader or Stein or Clinton or whatever ideal person was president and could dictate perfect climate policy without being filtered by congress).


So to answer your question, basically no, I don't think that "raising our emission levels exponentially while advocating closed borders will have an irreversible negative effect on the planet and humanity."

One, "exponentially" is an exaggeration. US emissions under Trump won't be an order of magnitude higher than they were under Obama, or would have been under Clinton. In the range of 10% to 50% higher seems well possible, but 100% higher (double) would be next to impossible. Worse, yes. Exponentially worse, no.

Two, "irreversible" is a word I would hesitate to use because it carries an implication that there is some magic bullet to immediately fix things. If a plague wiped humanity off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it would take some time for climate to adjust to pre-industrial levels. Like you said, it might take 25-50 years before things even could start getting better. But eventually, it could be mostly like we were never here. Some things about climate would never be the same, but in broad terms, things could get back to "normal" eventually.

On the other hand, if the plague wipes us all out on the last day of Trump's 4 years in office, it might take longer for that adjustment to happen. But not by a comparatively massive margin. So that's why I dislike "irreversible"; depending on what timescale you are referencing things are either already irreversible, or pretty close to a statistical wash (what's another 4 years in a recovery timeline of 250 years, or 100 in 10000?), or not worth worrying about at all (on a geological timescale that doesn't care 2 cents about things like species extinctions). Does that make sense?

Finally, "negative effect on the planet and humanity" is something that I totally agree with. And that negative effect will be real and significant. But I don't think that the walking disaster that is Trump will make things inescapably, horrifically worse. Not enough worse that it makes a persuasive argument to me that I should have voted for Clinton (again, I didn't vote for Trump, but I didn't vote for Clinton either).

I dunno. Maybe I'm a cockeyed optimist.

It's not a joke. It's hypocritical, but quite serious. Because they focus on the fact that he appears to be under Putin's control does not mean they ignore his myriad of other faults....proven by the near weekly protests against his policies.

Jesus Christ...they aren't upset the he wants to normalize relations with Russia, they're upset that he seems to be a Russian agent, as do many of his cabinet, and they fear he'll do things to benefit them instead of actually working for America.
People are upset at his people illegally, treasonously 'talking' to the Russians about removing sanctions and other subversions of established federal policy and law before they were in power and bold faced lying about it under oath and publicly uncountable times, not for having normal or legal diplomatic discussions. They won't accept it when the next president takes control on Nov. 8 and reverses their policies before taking office.

The emails themselves had no new information, it was the implication that they did, and that the investigation was still actively under way that hurt her. The media absolutely covered that, what are they talking about?

It's not about escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, it's about abandoning normal policy and giving Russia what they want, carte Blanche to expand and reform the USSR.

I guess they forgot that Russia is building it's military on it's borders and expanding it's territories into our allies countries, and that's why NATO moved, to protect our allies, not to provoke poor little innocent Russia. Just fucking duh.

They aren't necessarily shills for Russia, they are, however, being shills for Trump, and Chomsky now seems to be moving in that direction based on this video. This is the most idiotic thing I've heard from Chomsky, as it completely ignores reality and reason to lambast people for being worried their president may be (as all evidence indicates he is) an agent for one of our worst enemies.

Sorry Chomsky, big fail.

It probably was. If they make any noise around humans at all, it's the warning growl that you'd expect. Unless you're intruding on their territory or threatening their young, they will slink off soundlessly if you come near.

I've been wondering about the pipeline theory, it would be much easier for them to tie into Iraq's pipeline systems and just go through Turkey, wouldn't it? Who would think a pipeline through non friendly territory would work? The Syrians could sever it at will.
As a distraction, it could work temporarily, but it opens Trump up to more, new, constitutional issues on top of international ones and only distracts from the Russian debacle temporarily.
No matter what, you're correct, it's a total shit show.

Really hard not to get a sense of smug superiority since uBlock Origin has kept me from seeing any of this Youtube ad crap for years. And somehow, I don't even feel guilty about it.

While the uninformed masses wallow pitifully in a mire of advertising, I gloriously dance on the surface of their pit of writhing flesh. I, God among insects, transcend their hellish torture of video ads and clickthroughs, reveling in the ability to watch whatever I want as soon as I click the play button! Muahahahaha!

...OK, maybe that strayed slightly beyond "smug superiority" and into "disturbing sociopath" territory. But it still feels good!

The title, which you posted, claims this video is proof. Period. Take responsibility for what you post and/or stop posting pure lies. Edit: I don't believe for a nanosecond that if I posted a video titled "X provides proof Trump is having sex with his daughter" and the video had nothing but ridiculous opinion and innuendo (actual fake news) that you wouldn't call me a liar.

Proof: July27, 2016....he publicly requests that Russia hack Clinton in a speech. This is treason, unequivocally asking a foreign nation to interfere in our election. Tube chop is down so I can't cut it out and present it to you, but you won't mind listening to hours of Trump insanity to find it, will you? In case not, here's the quote....
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily....by our press"

Who cares? Anyone listening to him that can't determine if "I don't know Putin" or "We're great friends with a close personal and working relationship" is true. The president being truthful is important....and this one is not.

Trump has already been worse at controlling Russia, he's allowing more illegal military build up without any response, allowing more illegal military actions without response, indicating he intends to remove the sanctions imposed because of their interference in our election (on his behalf), and stating that Croatia is now Russia, and East Ukraine soon will be, tacitly supporting their expansion into our allies territories.

Russia and Korea are both problems. Trump has also not done a thing about Korea, waiting days after missile launches to even discuss it with Japan is not an appropriate reaction to missile launches aimed at our allies.

No, I absolutely don't feel safer under Trump, I see many countries 'testing' him, and he's either ignored or completely failed each and every test. Korea alone has broken international law with missile launches repeatedly, and assassinated citizens of other countries in public. Clearly THEY feel safer with Trump....safe to build up their arsenal and threaten us with nuclear war. Russia clearly feels safer too. The only ones not safer are our allies and ourselves.

You contradict yourself. You said he is delivering what he said.
If, as it seems, you admit he's failed to deliver on any of these promises, what do you mean by that?
So far, all I see him actually deliver is hypocrisy and ineptitude, no uncontested victories, no ability to unite, and a seriously dangerous plunge in international respect with nation after nation ignoring/violating treaties and expanding their militaries and territories in a blitzkrieg (China, Russia, N Korea, Israel, Iran, etc).

4weeks in and you throw in the towel? He's not emperor yet, but he's on track to get us there by declaring the media an enemy of America, the Judicial branch partisan political activists, international obligations and law negotiable, and nuclear war acceptable. 1 year and 11 months to go before a new congress and likely impeachment if that power hasn't been striped from them by then.

The "Cabbage" strategy is basically the board game Go -- it's like the Asian chess. Surround territory and claim.

@enoch,

neo-conservatives
I've said in a couple other threads if I was American I'd have(very sadly mind you) voted for Hillary. Not sure, but that should really lay the neo-con thing to bed right there. Doesn't mean I won't agree with them if they notice the sky looks rather blue...

the MCA of 2006 and the NDAA of 2012
I don't base or form my morality around American law, so when and how it's deemed lawful or not for an American president to order something doesn't change my opinion one inch on whether the act is good or bad. Sure, it deducts a lot of points when a President breaks laws so that factors in, but if it's legal for a president to shoot babies we're all still gonna call it immoral anyways, right?

you find that it is the region,the actual soil that a person is on that makes the difference between legal prosecution..and assassination.
Between act of war, or peace time legal prosecution with proper due process.

this is EXACTLY what happened with afghanistan in regards to osama bin laden.
and BOTH times,the US state department could not provide conclusive evidence that either bin laden,or awlaki had actually perpetrated a terrorist act.

Sorry, but regarding Bin Laden that's a lie. The US state department held a trial and convicted Bin Laden already back in the 90s. The Taliban refused to extradite him then, and demanded they be shown evidence. They were shown the evidence and declared that they saw nothing unIslamic in his actions. Clinton spent his entire presidency back and forth with them, even getting a unanimous order from the UN security council demanding Bin Laden's extradition.

Smugly claiming that the US refused to provide any evidence to the Taliban because they were being bullies is ignoring reality. after spending several years getting jerked around by the Taliban claiming each new act of war launched from their territory wasn't their fault nor bin Laden's fault left a less patient president after 9/11...

now,is hannity guilty of incitement?
should he be held accountable for those shot dead?
by YOUR logic,yes..yes he should.
Can't say I'm very familiar with Hannity because I avoid Fox news at all costs.
Did he praise the killings afterwards and declare the shooter a hero like Anwar?
Did he council before hand in his books that killing those people was moral or just or religiously blessed like Anwar did?
Did he personally meet with and council/mentor the shooter before hand at some point as well, like Anwar did?

I have to ask just so we really are comparing apples to apples and all. If the answers are yes(and from Fox I suppose I can't completely rule that out just out of hand), then yeah, he's as guilty as Anwar.

now what if hannity had taken off to find refuge in yemen?
do we send a drone?

If he goes to Yemen we just laugh at our good fortune that he decided to kill himself for us.

To your point, if he finds a similar independent state to continue promoting and coordinating attacks as part of an effective terrorist unit killing new civilians every week then yes, bombs away.

Now if either he or Anwar remained in the US you arrest them and follow all due process. Oh, and to again shake the neo-con cloud you don't get to torture them by calling it enhanced interrogation, it's still a war crime and you should lock yourself up in a cell next door.

My whole thing is that setting up a state within a state and waging war shouldn't just be a get out of jail free card under international law. Either the 'host' state is responsible for the actions or it is not. If responsible, then like in Afghanistan it initiated the war by launching the first attacks. If not responsible, then it's declared the state within a state to be sovereign, and other states should be able to launch a war against the parasitic state, as has been happening with Obama's drones in tribal Pakistan.