RandomGuy

Yes, the ultimate quote mine is BACK! "What the hell?! What's going on? Desperate women love me!" "I got my degree under the tutelage of Dr. Pepper." "It's best to grab it out of someone's hand on the street. Because they'll chase you, but they won't file a police report over a stolen hotdog."

Shame I couldn't make this one. Though, it seemed like a couple of comments were aimed in my direction.

So wait, is the chat at 4 PM EST or 10 PM EST? This thread says the former, Ross says the latter on the front page.

1. What was your opinion on that Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco nearly five years back? I recall that blowing up to the point that even publications and groups that usually showed no interest in video games covered it. This question is not so much about the content of the endings themselves (since I'm not sure if you've even played those games), but more like: was the fan backlash justified, was Bioware's response sufficient, and does this whole event say generally good or generally bad things about the future of gaming in general, in your opinion? 2. Are you a fan of Mike Judge's work, besides Office Space? 3. Do you vote from abroad? (note: not asking WHO you vote for)

There's a lot of disagreeable things in this video, but I'll just stick to one particular point. Ross makes a point to mention that wages have been decreasing as a percentage of GDP, and uses this as evidence that the globalist corporations are draining wealth to the top. If I recall correctly, I debunked this exact same myth several months ago when he brought it up in another form (saying wages haven't kept pace with overall productivity increases) by pointing out, among other things, the deliberate exclusion of non-wage benefits in the chart he was using, which have risen massively in the past 40 years. Ross simply responded that he didn't study such things and that what I was saying sounded like gibberish; which is fine. However, I do have to get a bit annoyed when he proceeds to make another video mentioning this subject and repeats the same myth using the same fallacious logic (excluding non-wage compensation). In case the argument I made earlier was really that poorly put/difficult to understand/whatever, here's a video that I think quickly sums up the whole issue in plain and simple terms: fHm7P4TA97U tl;dr: actual compensation has risen more or less proportionally with productivity increases. Now, on using percentages of GDP to see what people 'should' be paid: this is also fallacious. Corporate profits and worker compensation should be measured as a percent of corporate income, not the economy as a whole, because the GDP is not increasing solely on the back of corporate profits. Federal government spending in general as a percentage of the GDP has increased quite a lot, for example. To relate to another one of Ross's points, defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been generally decreasing since the Cold War started, so you can't say that all that GDP is going to the "military-industrial complex" either. In the 21st century in general, defense spending is lower than it has been at any time since WW2 ended, except for the brief period between then and the start of the Cold War where the Americans genuinely thought that Uncle Joe would be their bust bud. Anyway, when we measure employee compensation (not wages) as a percentage corporate profits (not the whole country's GDP), we get this result: Employee compensation as a percentage of corporate income has consistently stayed at 10-13%. Currently it is much higher than it was in 1970, and just about the highest it has ever been- the exact opposite of what Ross claimed (I put a thin black line on the picture to make that more noticeable). And overall standard of living, of course, has increased massively, just as productivity has. So yeah, there's no dystopia here. To relate this back to Deus Ex, I don't think there's another level to Deus Ex either. It's a hackneyed, stock, sci-fi plot that cherrypicks a handful of statistics out of context to lend its story some credibility. Really no deeper than any cyberpunk dystopia story with an evil corporate or government villain. It's still a fun game, though. EDIT: As a bonus, Ross also tries to use the progressively lowering corporate tax rate as evidence that the rich are gaining more power at the expense of the common man. Someone better go tell that to the anarcho-capitalist hellholes of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Pages 173-175 the World Bank and International Finance Commission's report puts the effective corporate tax rate of the USA at 27.9%. By contrast: Denmark: 20.3% Sweden: 16.1% Norway: 24.8%

There's been doomsayers about oil every year since we started using it. Them being wrong about a 2015-2016 crash is only the latest of dozens of examples of this happening.

Malik mentions that she has augs to let her fly vehicles better, so there's that. This game was always so much more fun in a non-lethal playthrough. Short, forgettable gun battles become intense encounters as you have to strategize exactly how to stealthily knock everyone out with nothing but your fists, a short ranged taser, gas grenades, flashbang grenades, and occasionally tranquilizer darts. Usually the first two. As well as figuring out non-conventional ways to beat the superpowered bosses* (which works on all but one of them, and all of them period in the Director's Cut). It feels like you're cyborg Batman. *

With Clinton's 16-point victory in New York, the Democratic primaries are pretty much over.Three guesses on why she curb-stomped Bernie in that state, and the first two don't count. So, same pattern as always.

1. What's the best city you've lived in? 2. What's the worst city you've lived in? (it's LA, isn't it?)

So, in other words, things are going how the Harvard paper said they were; as trade makes the country wealthier, the country becomes rich enough to actually slowly reduce its damage to the environment as it becomes cost effective to do so. China is at the beginning of that stage and will continue through it in 2030, when it is expected to replace 1/5 of its current energy sources with zero-emission sources. So basically exactly what happened in nearly every other industrialized nation. No cause for alarm, and no reason to start a trade war. China right now is just doing exactly what Japan and South Korea were doing a few decades ago. That includes a poor environmental record and sweatshops. The result of that is actually this: This is really the base of the problem. The emissions growth with globalization is due to increasing incomes (IE people in China are richer so they consume more). In the short term, you're going to get this problem no matter what you do unless you deliberately keep China poor. The best way to offset it is to heavily encourage as much free trade as possible. Multinational corporations tend to pollute less because they're advanced enough to not have to rely on coal so much, and bring in new more efficient technologies at lower prices. To quote a DIFFERENT Harvard paper: (which, by the way, is a very good read... though it's understandable if you don't have the time since it's 40 pages long) Pollution per capita (and energy consumption) is at an all time low, yet the US manufacturing output is actually larger than it has ever been. China's in trouble specifically because it uses less efficient sources like coal for many purposes because it's cheap, which they're working on replacing with nuclear and wind power. However to truly solve this problem, they need a US style petroleum revolution utilizing shale (they're starting to do this). If you can lower the price of natural gas to the point where its more cost effective than coal like we did in the US, economics will go to work in your favor and people will start buying cleaner burning propane stoves and building natural gas power plants instead. Until then, though, not just the factories but the average person cooking food that will contribute (most people in China cook with primitive coal stoves: "Perhaps 80 percent (by population) of world exposure to particulates is indoor pollution in poor countries -- smoke from indoor cooking fires -- which need not involve any externality"). What exactly is your plan to fix China's environment (or, rather, to make them go faster than they're going now) and why are your ideas superior to those of a panel of well respected economists who more often than not say the basic premise of what you propose will result in a net negative? It's not something any culture is accustomed to because typically complaints about how everyone is using too much resources turn out to be incorrect. The human appetite for ever greater consumption hasn't stopped at any one of these points over the past million years: That's literally the definition of the word. Specifically, bullying is "to use superior strength or influence to intimidate someone, typically to force him or her to do what one wants". Threatening to wreck China's economy and reduce hundreds of millions of people to poverty unless they apply the environmental standards you want them to is indeed an example of that. I never said it was entirely the fault of anyone. I just said that free trade has made sure China's average worker wage has risen four fold in two decades, that trying to make China cut down pollution quicker is not practical, and that the majority of economists disagree with your ideas. It's not a tactic, I'm stating the reality of the situation. If you cut back the level of trade with China, the average person gets much poorer. That is why those economists I cited said that refusing to liberalize trade with a country unless they apply the environmental standards you want was a bad idea. China's already reducing pollution. I think you're framing this issue disingenuously by saying that all that will happen is "the companies running these would make less profits"; one, you're underestimating the impact that will have (or at least I think you are, since I still don't know exactly what stricter standards you'd make a requirement), two... well let's assume that you're right, and that the companies in question will do what you say, AND that they'll still function well rather than being unable to afford the new regulations and go out of business. What then? Who's paying for this? "The companies" implied it would be entirely on the backs of the rich, but this is not the case. It will be the average Chinese worker. Losses in profits will be passed down to them, rather than just making sure that a rich businessman has to live in a slightly smaller mansion. To reiterate what the economists and the Harvard papers said: it's not worth the cost, unless your proposed measures are really minor. As such, in a nation still developing like China, the best way to help the environment is to help make the people there wealthy enough to be able to afford to care about the environment. We're slowly approaching that stage. Much less than are saved in the long run (the long run includes a cleaner environment) by massively boosted wealth. The average life span in China rose from 71 to 77 between 1990 and 2014, after free trade really took off, despite horrible pollution. The increase in pollution wasn't anywhere near bad enough to offset the massive benefits gained from increased income across the board. And after 2014, their pollution started falling. China's playing the long game and it's working out well for them so far. I don't know. How many? Considering that China's pollution laws have been getting stricter and they've agreed to power themselves with 20% zero-emission sources by 2030? Nope. In fact continuing rather than hampering trade will help the environment, as it eventually becomes more profitable to not pollute that much. From that Harvard paper: I would like comprehensive proof that what China is doing now won't be enough, and that threatening to withhold trade is a way to fix this. Because I'm sorry, the experts just don't agree with you here. That wasn't my intention. Why don't you tell me what your non-flawed approach would be? Here's mine: continue free trade as this will result in the average person getting wealthier which will reduce pollution in the long term. Expand free trade to include relaxation on nuclear export regs so it's cheaper (China has a shortage of human capital to train engineers) to build, maintain, and operate nuclear plants, in the process creating a larger market for skills in the US. That's a bit hypocritical considering you called the TPP "absolutely monstrous", wouldn't you say? What does that make people who support it? Anyway, this is rather far off from my original post about compensation. I'll try to summarize my original point in a concise manner: excluding supervisory personnel (15-20% of the work force), using two different price deflators, and leaving out non-wage benefits gives a distorted picture, because the increase in supervisory personnel represent a shift of workers to higher paying jobs, the deflators clash with each other,* and a disproportionate amount of the new wealth has gone to non-wage benefits for workers (e.g. healthcare, paid vacation, pensions; all of them together are one third of the average worker's compensation), respectively. The reality is that compensation has been rising proportionately with production, per OECD and the St. Louis Federal Reserve (plus some economists who wrote an article). *Specifically, the chart Ross used uses the Consumer Price Index which overstates the rate of inflation because of inadequate adjustment for quality changes and inadequate adjustment for substitution effects, while using another deflator for production. As OECD says, "If you want to compare productivity and pay fairly you should use the same deflator for both—that is, the GDP deflator" (also called the implicit price deflator). Making the simple correction of dividing earnings by the Implicit Price Deflator (IPD), instead of dividing by the CPI, already closes about a third of the gap. I think that's all I have to say. Well, besides this: props to danielsangeo for the posts about the unemployment rate. I think knowing how people come to incorrect or disingenuous numbers like "40% of people are unemployed" is extremely useful (and interesting). Otherwise they just get thrown around and you have no idea where they came from. I see that happening on the internet ALL THE TIME, so it's nice to know how to debunk the most common ones in detail. EDIT: Spoilered the graphs. Post didn't need to be that big.

So. This never happened. Just like the predicted peak oil crisis ten years before never happened. Or that prediction that we'd hit peak oil in the early 1970s. Relevant article to hopefully end the thread:

I would assume so. All TPP really does is expand US law to other countries so the USA can profit from its IPs overseas. I'd be a lot more receptive to this argument if there was about to be some copyright law reform and it was ruined by the almighty TPP, but that is simply not the case. I don't really want to get into this, but it is simply not an issue that matters to most people. For the most part only a subset of 18-35 year old people on the internet care about it. (coincidentally, these people don't vote much). Anyway, the general population in all of the involved countries heavily support the TPP, because the average citizen in a TPP country isn't going to care that US copyright laws are now the norm. Instead they're going to notice something like "hey, those shoes I wanted are 20 bucks cheaper", or maybe "wow, I'm making literally three times as much as I was ten years ago and my country's GDP per capita is no longer lower than Congo's!".

See this is a good example of "one side of the story." It's long, but I recommend reading this article. HSBC had a whistleblower against it, a long trail of evidence spanning a decade, and a DOJ scared to bring criminal charges. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214?page=4 Here's a few highlights: "They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business." Anyway, this goes on and on and your article doesn't address half of what's mentioned. This is at the core of why I sometimes need multiple sources on some topics. I've read that article before. There's a noticeable lack of evidence in all of its claims. A lot of YELLING and pontificating on how the evidence exists, but that's about it. This would have been really useful when the DOJ was handling this case, as they explicitly didn't have enough evidence to convict HSBC of money-laundering then. I wonder if this Rolling Stone author had access to secret DOJ memos the public didn't get to see? Aside from that the article just confirms what I already said, that HSBC was only guilty of failing to follow proper anti-laundering procedures. You can argue about their motivations all you want, but the evidence didn't exist to convict them of anything worse in a court of law. To reflect this, part of the sentence was that they couldn't fail to follow these practices again in the next five years and had to both implement all the changes (confirmed by an independent monitor) and cooperate fully with the government investigation- lest it actually turn into a criminal indictment rather than a civil case. "As free trade expands, each one percent increase in per capita incomes tends to drive pollution down by 1.25 to 1.5 percent because of the movement to cleaner techniques of production." Free trade isn't bad for the environment nor does every economist view the environment as an externality. Free trade (or rather, the economic prosperity it brings) is bad for air and water pollution at the initial stages of industrialization, but later on it reduces pollution as countries become rich enough to pay to clean up their environments. We're seeing that happen right now in China, though to a small extent at the moment. Unless, of course, you're framing it as the choice between having an industrial economy and not having an industrial economy. I would recommend looking at the environmental record of the USSR and rethinking that position. I would also recommend taking a look at what pollution (which isn't only generated by factories) is actually costing China in lost worker productivity. Or maybe seeing what economists have to say about this issue. A statement was given to a panel of expert economists from across the country: "Refusing to liberalize trade unless partner countries adopt new labor or environmental rules is a bad policy, because even if the new standards would reduce distortions on some dimensions, such a policy involves threatening to maintain large distortions in the form of restricted trade". They were asked to respond based on how much they agreed with the statement. 41% agreed (8% STRONGLY agreed) 18% disagreed (none STRONGLY disagreed) 40% were uncertain or had no opinion The economists who agreed also had higher amounts of confidence in their answers than those who disagreed. Besides that, China has been cutting down on pollution in the past few years, passing a landmark green house emissions limit back in November 2014 (it promises to increase its use of energy from zero-emission sources to 20% in the next 15 years, and is currently investing heavily in wind and nuclear power). Given their current economic problems, you're not going to bully them into enforcing stricter regulations and cutting down their pollution even more by cutting off trade; if anything you'll get the opposite of your intended result since now everyone in the country just lost a shitload of money. It's also fairly unethical to reduce 1.4 billion people to abject poverty (which ending trade with China would result in, see the average Chinese wages before and after the implementation of free trade) because you care more about the environment than 1.4 billion people. If you're so concerned about the environment, your average Western uses many times as many resources as the average Chinese person while producing two to five times the pollution per capita. I don't see any of these people volunteering to swap places with Chinese peasants. The TPP is more strict on air pollution than NAFTA was and is a net good in this regard, though there's no way to know how effective it'll be until it goes into action (people have barely focused on the environmental aspects). Enforcement of the Montreal Protocol, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, CITES, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora will all be required. Failure to comply with these rules could result in economic sanctions. I'll also repeat again that it will result in massive increases to the income of Vietnamese workers, just like the trade agreements in China quadrupled the manufacturing wages there overnight. Being against it if you want to increase environmental standards and help the poor is insanely counterproductive, especially since it's not like TPP is coming in and crushing a better proposal. Does that just not factor in because "it doesn't do enough about pollution?" On that note, TPP is just the warm-up for the real prize, FTAAP, basically a Pacific NAFTA. That'll be great when (if) it finally passes.

You have apparently never read any of the leaked documents yourself. I have. It's bad for everyone NOT in the top 1% wealth bracket, or businesses. There's no need to read "leaked" documents (which have long been outdated), the entire text of the agreement is publicly available. The reaction to the "leak" was pointless fear mongering, as protectionists are prone to. Let me guess, you're all focusing solely on the copyright chapters? Or is it the usual myth about how TPP will let corporations control governments because it sets out the guidelines for corporations to sue for arbitration (btw this is standard practice already, WTO does this for its members) if a country passes a law that says "fuck this company in particular"? We can try that when it gets a success rate greater than 0%.

I'm not going to focus on the main meat of that response in light of of its content (I should note that I myself have no authority here beyond taking a couple of basic economic classes, which I plan to fix later- most of my info just comes from reading various articles in my spare time), but there are some points I feel need to be addressed: Except, that's not what the EPI is doing. They're looking at median wages for a category of workers while excluding supervisory workers and non-wage benefits (and using two different deflators). As a result their conclusions differ from OECD's and the Federal Reserve's. By the latter estimates, the average person (not just the statistical average) IS benefitting from the productivity increase. Of course the results are going to look bad if you deliberately exclude 15-20% of the workforce (specifically a well-educated and high-skilled portion) and act like pensions and healthcare don't exist. That's where the majority of the productivity gains are going to. The truth is that labor's share of the economy is more or less at the same level it was at 40 years ago, and is constantly fluctuating throughout the decades, rather than there being a conspiracy to drain wealth to the top: You mean besides the fact that the Justice Department didn't have enough evidence to even indict HSBC on money laundering charges? No one ever proved that it shifted around money for the cartels or Al-Qaeda-linked banks. Rather, they proved that its internal documentation processes were inadequate to show that it had not been doing so. Do you know what HSBC's violation was and why they got away with a fine? They failed to follow anti-money laundering regulations. That's not the same thing as intentionally laundering money. A $2 billion fine is also far from a slap on the wrist. As a civil charge, rather than a criminal charge, they couldn't send anyone to jail. Though, you'll never hear me object on HSBC being an incredibly shitty company; it was literally founded so drug dealers could put their profits somewhere. This isn't actually indicative of anything. The vast majority of workers at these companies would drift towards the lower income brackets because the vast majority have no higher qualifications. It doesn't say anything about the median worker, and it doesn't change the fact that real compensation has been consistently rising. Incredibly misleading. We bailed out the banks because the banks failing means we go into a depression. Not bailing out the banks is cutting off your nose, ears, lips, and eyes to spite your face. Even calling it a "bailout" is iffy, since what actually happened is that the government loaned money to the banks which they paid back with interest years ago. It literally costed the government less than nothing. The "American people", and everyone who complained about it costing the taxpayer money, were wrong. The average person doesn't actually know much about economics. In other news, water is wet. TPP is a watered-down common sense trade agreement that's been unfairly demonized by anti-free trade protectionists (despite free trade being agreed on by almost every economist as great). It is actually very good for workers; it's of minor benefit for Americans (but a benefit regardless, due to an expanded market for US services and cheaper products- a LOT of our clothes come from Vietnam), but it's set to massively increase the income of workers in Vietnam, just like the Chinese free trade agreements, which roughly quadrupled the average Chinese income in less than two decades. That's ignoring the fact that TPP also contains regulatory rules and standards that its members must follow. Removing tariffs and other trade barriers is a good thing. Economists have been explaining this since at least 20 years ago, though this argument is arguably hundreds of years old.

On the new economy making people 'unequal' (but still way richer than before, it should be noted), this can be fixed by relatively simple policies: just adjust taxes to fit the new economy. Cut outdated tax deductions that primarily benefit the wealthy like the mortgage interest deduction and put that money towards workers via tax credits like the EITC (or just do a direct wage subsidy if people aren't too prideful for that), slightly raise the top marginal income rate, and raise the real estate tax rate. This OECD paper recommends something similar. Here's a practical version that can easily pass the US Congress: the mortgage interest deduction which a lot of middle class people are intent on keeping actually barely benefits the middle class ($523/year on average for families in the $40,000-75,000 annual income bracket) whilst overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy. Get rid of it and the fed saves about $100 billion a year (98.5 if you want to be specific- again, just mortgage interest deductions). If you take that money and give it to the bottom 40% (about 60 million people) of income earners (graduate it so it doesn't suddenly cut off), then it's an additional $1,640/year for lower income workers. A lot more, once we actually narrow that bracket down to people who actually need government aid (e.g. part-time workers usually don't). Again, just one, barely noticeable tax deduction that barely benefits the middle class and, in absolute terms, wouldn't even be noticed as missing by the upper classes. There's a lot of "small" deductions like this that we can get rid of.

So? This doesn't at all support your assertion that people are not getting paid more than they were 40 years ago. One, this blog doesn't actually address the point. It goes on about how average compensation differs wildly from median compensation (offering no real evidence to back them...) while completely ignoring the main issue, that they act like non-wage compensation doesn't exist and outright ignore 20% of the work force in order to manipulate the numbers. They try to handwave this by saying "well even compensation has cumulatively grown eight percent faster than wages over this time-period we're still right"- but by all indications, they've grown faster than that, enough to keep up with production, as shown by both OECD and the Federal Reserve. Then they lie again when they say they look at "median compensation" before they go right back to just using wages with no further comment (and never even addressing the part about excluding supervisory workers). I'm much more inclined to trust OECD when they outright state that real compensation is a better overall indicator of the benefits to the typical worker, than I am to trust this. Finally, to quote OECD again on why the numbers used here are intentionally misleading: You can't use two different price deflators for productivity and pay (like the EPI did) or else the data will be disconnected from reality. Two: the EPI is a private interest group paid for by the unions that has repeatedly outright falsified its 'data' (that chart was from them; as another example, they were no better when trying to argue against H1B visas). I don't trust a single word it says, and highly recommend against anyone using it as a source.

I may respond to the rest of this later, but right now I just really want to point this out, because this misconception bugs the heck out of me whenever it gets brought up: 2:25 in the video: "Except whoops, we're getting paid about the same as we were 40 years ago, despite all this extra prosperity!" This is false. I mean, technically it's true... but you're (deliberately?) excluding a rather important piece of the pie with your focus on wages. That chart just uses (hourly, judging by the fact that it's nearly identical to this similarly dishonest piece) wages, which ignores employer provided benefits, and is thus intentionally misleading. It also uses two different price deflators for productivity and compensation, further increasing the supposed difference (the CPI overstates inflation in the overall economy). Also, "major sectors" and "goods-producing workers" excludes 15-20% of the workforce, just like the chart it's a clone of ("This explanation is further suggested by Figure 3 data showing that in 1998, 14.6 percent of the workforce was in some category of supervisor or manager, and in 2008, the number was nearly the same at 14.6 percent"). Once you adjust for these factors, real compensation looks more like this. Federal Reserve economists have come to the same conclusion. Here's a pretty good explanation on the truth behind these numbers by OECD. The problem isn't that rich people are eating up money, the problem is much of the growth in compensation has been eaten up by non-wage benefits like pensions and healthcare for retired workers and by supervisory personnel. Over the past 30 years there has been a meteoric rise in the number of managers due to the requirements of the new economy. Managers now make up a bigger portion of the US labor force than ever, which is why that chart you used looks so disconnected from the reality.

Why not? Clinton's lead is mostly super-delegates and Sanders is leading in all the states coming up. How are you so wrong about everything? 1. Clinton's lead of 317 pledged delegates is still unassailably big. 2. New York is one of only a few states to be polled for the Democratic primaries this month that hasn't already been voted on (it also has the most remaining delegates besides California), and these polls are extremely lopsided in favor of Clinton. The state with more delegates than the others combined next Tuesday, Arizona, is heavily pro-Clinton by all the polls. Other March state polls that heavily favor Clinton include Maryland and Pennsylvania. Three guesses why.

A vote for Bernie is a vote for regression into 19th century nativism (and anti-intellectualism), not improvement. Every "good" policy he had was going to be poorly implemented, if they passed, and they never would have passed (while Clinton mostly has better thought out and easier to pass versions of the same policies). Every batshit insane idea he had (e.g. withdrawing from the WTO, terminating all free trade agreements, reducing worker visa quotas, reducing immigration, cutting support to the SDF/Kurds in Syria, not bombing ISIS in Syria, demanding Saudi fucking Arabia and the other Gulf States lead the fight against ISIS in Iraq, etc.) would have been trivial for him to enact.

This has more than a little to do with someone who insults huge swaths of the population (e.g. anyone who isn't an Atheist, anyone who doesn't share his opinion on certain companies, anyone who works in law enforcement, anyone who votes for Hillary over Bernie- which in practice means most black/Latino Americans, etc.) in vulgar and hyperbolic ways in literally every thread he posts in. Often before shifting to a specific person. It's frankly very old at this point. Of course you don't, they're full of sources and data. Such things are sacrilege to a living stereotype like you. On an unrelated note, tell me again about how there was no Armenian genocide. You can just stay in your echo chamber where educated people don't flock to Hillary, economists don't disagree with almost every single one of your golden boy's policies, and where the world actually conforms to that nonsensical wall of text you posted a while back, where you ranted about how Bernie is going to win. Meanwhile people in this reality will be laughing as his more fanatical supporters go deeper and deeper into the state of denial.

They probably notice Sanders and Trump crossing over on many issues, not just general anti-establishment rhetoric. Mostly trade and immigration, but also probably both candidates being in favor of spending less money on the defense of other countries. As we all know, well educated voters are the ones that vote for the Sandinista/Castro/USSR fanboy who never had a chance in the election and who can't do basic fact checking when writing his plans. Also, people with postgraduate educations (which lean towards Clinton according to all the exit polls) are "low information", while 18-24 year old middle class white college students (who make up a big chunk of Bernie's support) are the most qualified voters. Oh boy, your post has it all! "Low information voters" (let me guess, you mean those pesky minorities?), "Hillary will do nothing positive and make us all slaves of the corporations", "informed people vote for Bernie", the works! All this coming from the guy who praised the plan that called for saving more on prescription drugs than the country spends in total, "forgot" about the insane piracy rates of indie games, thought Sanders winning the bluest states actually mattered while Hillary winning all the big swing states didn't, trusted general election polls while at the same time trying to dismiss much more reliable primary polls, and advocated for protectionism against the advice of pretty much every economist! With quality supporters like you, I honestly can't figure out why Bernie is getting smoked so badly. You're like every negative stereotype of a Bernie supporter (extremely and unjustifiably arrogant, entitled, blind to the political process, Internet Atheist who talks down to people with different religious beliefs, pointlessly mean-spirited and aggressive, etc.) rolled into one. The only part you're missing is some vaguely racist and condescending spiel about black and Latino voters being "uninformed and voting against their own interests".

Heh, called it. Sandernistas and Trumpers cross over in their love their anti-free trade, anti-establishment, anti-immigration, anti-"elite" rhetoric (which in practice translates to "educated professionals are worthless and don't know what they're talking about", to make the former stances consistent). They also tend to be overwhelmingly middle class whites who either work/worked in a low skilled labor job, or who go to college/recently got out of college. A lot of crossover should be expected. Sanders labels himself a socialist because he was/is a Castro/USSR fanboy. He's not a follower of Keynesian economics, he's a follower of the grade school version of Keynesian economics, also known as batshit insane economics, also known as autarky. It's not Keynesian economics if you don't cut spending ever. He is in no way mainstream. Sanders' economic policy is identical to the populist measures used in countries like Venezuela and Argentina which generally consisted of "institute tariffs and other protectionist policies, borrow and spend lots of money, if we can't borrow, print money". This never works in the long run. To wit, he hired Stephanie Kelton as an economic advisor. Kelton is one of the biggest proponents of MMT, which is widely agreed to be nonsense.

Okay. And? Your point is? "Oh, well we have illegal immigrants - but don't worry it's only 12 million!" The point is that deporting them is impractical and would be disastrous for local economies. You're removing 12 million laborers from the market overnight, often for jobs no one else will take. When a US state(Georgia) kicked out a bunch of illegal immigrants, farmers couldn't find Americans replace the immigrants despite offering a high wage ($16/hr) and the country being in the middle of a recession. As a result food simply rotted in the fields. Except they totally do pay property and income tax. You're making shit up. Additionally, due to the complications that come from them being undocumented, the taxes they pay are consistently favorable to the U.S. Immigrant tax payments total $20 to $30 billion more than the amount of government services they use. So you're quoting a random right wing pro-Trump website with no academic credentials and an axe to grind against immigrants in an attempt to disprove a commonly quoted figure that the Department of Homeland Security still uses (according to DHS estimates, "the number of illegal immigrants peaked around 12 million in 2007 and has gradually declined to closer to 11 million.", as of 2012). Yeah, nice try. So they're assuming the peak immigration rate stayed the same even though the DHS said it declined. And they also neglected the possibility of anyone becoming legal during that time period. How reliable. The tax dodging you just made up? This is kinda like saying civil rights protesters should've been punished for the crime of using white-only bathrooms and water fountains. The current immigration laws only exist because to limit immigration from Latino and Asian countries. Why should they follow it and stay in an area where they're making about $5,000 a year? Because blatantly racist and outdated laws said so? The opportunities they have here are such that median immigrant household income after taxes was $36,000 in 2007 (adjusted for inflation, today that's $41,500; in 2013 it's $40,500). This puts them about 30% higher than the median household in France (which was $31,112 in 2013), though with an average household size of ~3.2 compared to ~2.3 for France. You're making shit up. Most mainstream economists disagree with you. But hey, knowing that would require to actually read all the sources I post, and that must be really difficult. I'll try to make it simple. A panel of expert economists from across the country were asked what they thought about low skilled, cheap labor: The only reason immigration is limited despite the economic benefits is because union members and nativists hate foreigners, and turn out in droves to vote for people that agree with them like Sanders and Trump. It's the same reason why Obama had to expend so much political capital passing a common-sense trade agreement like TPP. Those who run drugs across the border generally want to stay in Mexico rather than the USA, where they can continue getting their supply of drugs. Cartel activity is entirely separate from illegal immigration, you're again making shit up by conflating them. 1. Breitbart? I was wondering when you'd manage to drag up a source even more unreliable than your last. Truly you have out done yourself. 2. Their logic, like the last "source", is full of shit. This is how I'm sure you didn't even bother to read my previous sources, because one of them addresses this exact bullshit argument and those exact figures. In short, they only bring up federal crimes. Federal crimes are a tiny minority of all cases. When we look at total actual crime rates... Both of your 'sources' outright lie in addition to committing lies by omission. The sources specifically said illegal immigrants. Nice try. That immigrant is less likely to commit a violent crime than you and can achieve higher worker efficiency than you. Therefore, we should have you deported and replaced, for the good of the country. It's only logical, and you're all about that, right? Bar drastically altering or abolishing the country quota limits, that's impossible. Currently, no country can make up more than 7% of permanent immigrants coming to the USA. This means that, say, Croatia, with 4 million people, can send exactly as many immigrants as Mexico with 125 million, or China with 1.5 billion. To put it in simpler terms, "current immigration policy, provides for an annual worldwide limit of 675,000 permanent immigrants". This means that the maximum number of Mexicans can come here legally this year is 47,250 bar certain special family situations (if they're extremely lucky, and Mexicans get all of Latin America's 'refugee' spots on a separate list, that goes up to... 52,250). You know, 7% of the total. Anyone else from Mexico who wants to come is shit out of luck. Hence why people cross in the first place, before even getting into all the other hurdles with coming legally. Unless Trump plans to massively raise the immigration limit and remove per country quotas (LOL), yes, he hates immigration, and wants to stop people from becoming Americans. Oh, so now it's not "ban all Muslims", it's "be pretty strict on who gets in"? So basically keep doing what we're doing? They should be more scared of our country's own sky-high murder rate rather than potentially being one of the literally 45 victims of Islamist terror in the USA in the past 15 years. 80% of the Paris attackers were French-born or Belgian-born citizens who were radicalized in their own countries. Preventing refugees from coming wouldn't have stopped them, and France having problems with its Arab communities is an issue far older than ISIL. Apparently you don't read my posts either, though with how you've ignored every source that shouldn't really be surprising at this point. I'll say it again for posterity: 1. It's economically inefficient to shut out potentially valuable workers because of religious beliefs. 2. It's illogical to even consider terror attacks as a statistically relevant factor given how sparse they are here and how tough immigration standards are already. 3. It's against the constitution, which says that the government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". Banning people based specifically on religion is clearly making a law respecting the establishment of one religion over another (because, you know, other religions are not banned) Conspiracy-nut "Eurabia" nonsense that doesn't prove any of your points. Cite some actual sources to back up your ideas. No, blatantly dishonest right-wing rags do not count. Exodus: 31:14 "Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it is to be put to death" Deuteronomy 17: "2If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the LORD thy God, in transgressing his covenant, 3 And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; 4 And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel: 5 Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die." Chronicles: 15:13: "that whosoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman." You're full of shit. Stoning is very lenient by comparison, I'm sure. Prove right now that all Muslims believe their religion's equivalent of the above quotes for Christianity. I've known several Muslims from other countries and none of them have tried to murder me for being a heretic. I know that ISIL has not killed any people in the USA. I know I know that most of the people fighting ISIL right now are Muslims. I know that ISIL's brand of Islam is inherently hostile to even other Islamist extremists. Going on about ISIL when trying to think up excuses for spitting all over the US Constitution is backwards and hilarious. It's not remotely the problem with bringing over a bunch of refugees (there are some... which doesn't matter to the USA anyway, since that's not we're doing and not what anyone's advocating we do), and it absolutely has nothing to do with banning ALL Muslims including ones from countries where ISIL has no significant presence.

Except all his policies that actually matter (i.e. what he can actually do with presidential powers) are identical to Trump's. They're both peddlers of bullshit.