Walker88

The 'right to bear arms' is not unlimited. It would be well within the power and authority of Congress to ban the sale and possession of AR-15s and the like. Though I can afford it, I cannot own an A-10 Warthog with a GAU-8 nosegun that fires depleted U-238 bullets, despite how effective it would be at 'home security'. Neither Jeff Bezos nor Elon Musk, despite being able to afford it, could not commission and control their own Carrier Group, or have a Trident Sub with missiles firing multiple nuke warheads. Nobody can own a drone firing the modified Hellfire "Flying Ginsu" that turned Ayman al-Zawahiri into mince meat. The 2nd Amendment was penned under entirely different circumstances than today. Standing armies---like the Brits---were hardly superior to a 'well-armed militia'. That is not the case today. A bunch of chubby trumpers with AR-15s would be no match to the 101st Airborne, so the 'battle against tyranny' has an obvious winner. The Founders could not conceive of a readily available weapon like the AR-15. With its typical 30-rd mag, it fires (usually) a 55 grain round with a muzzle velocity of 3200 feet per second. A user can likely run through 3-4 mags in under two minutes, provided the barrel doesn't heat up too much. A shooter like Stephen Paddock, understanding the 'problem' of an over-heated barrel, toted 14 AR-15s into his hotel room in Las Vegas, so that he could keep killing. An AR-15 has no possible use except killing and killing quickly. It is effectively a weapon of war. While not fully automatic, it is still as effective as the weapons soldiers used in Iraq and Afghanistan, since soldiers do not usually have their weapons set on full auto. An American can buy as many AR-15s as his wealth or credit allows. He can walk into a gun show and leave with 100 or more AR-15s and tens of thousands of rounds of ammo. An American can even buy a .50 cal sniper rifle, like a Barrett M82A1, whose hitting power from 2000 yards is greater than Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum from point blank range. Home security? Even an AR-15 has more hitting power than a 9mm or a .45ACP handgun, despite those handguns having a much heavier round (anywhere from 124 grain to 230 grain), because the muzzle velocity is so much higher, and E=mc^2 (so velocity is squared).

To some extent I know what you mean...all those fascist trumpers who want to overthrow the democracy and suspend the Constitution to which I took an oath. All those racists and Neo Nazis gunning down Blacks, Jews and Hispanics. The list of crazy, violent and/or gun-toting trumpers goes on and on. Michael Estes, Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, Patrick Stein, Adam Purinton, Jeremy Christian, Wade Page, Edgar Welch, Sam Woodward, James Fields, Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers, Ian David Long, Cesar Sayoc, Gregory Bush, Stephen Paddock, Christopher Hansson, Joseph Biggs, Patrick Crusius, Enrique Tarrio, Stewart Rhodes, Ryan Palmer, etc. By the way, you do know the Federal Govt has weapons that can take on these small (nickname for Richard) trumpers with AR-15s. Sadly, nobody can get to the cultists fast enough to prevent innocent deaths.

Just for using a phone or laptop and wifi....making your thoughts appear somewhere else far away the moment you hit "SEND"....would have branded you a witch by the very folks whose superstitions you believe. You would have been burned at the stake. "He's a witch !" "Common sense" would have dictated that without any visible connection, no way you could make your words appear so far away from where you sit. Obviously witchcraft and the Devil's Work. The zealots who would have killed you, sent you to eternal damnation, would have done so knowing their god would approve, because nobody could possibly conceive of radio waves, wifi, microwave towers.....even electricity. Because of SCIENCE, you get to control this devil's tool, or to put it another way, your deity has lost his powers, because science explained and exploited what superstition used to grant to the made-up deity. Today, you make the same mistake, using the same words. You are totally incapable of understanding the science related to subatomic particles, so you still subscribe to the superstition. You cannot burn us at the stake, but instead---as you have done with your comments---threatened us with eternal damnation, whether we are more moral people than you or your god, if we don't subscribe to your superstition. And you cannot see that you are just a 21st Century Dark Age cultist.

How about when you die and find out you backed the wrong horse, and Jesus was a fraud but Mohamed or John Smith or the Vikings or ancient Greeks nailed it? Pascal's Wager, which you sort of tried to plagiarize, ignored the fact that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of supreme deities manufactured by humans since Oldavai Gorge. It's almost like buying a lottery ticket, as you have many chances of not winning an invitation to the 'true paradise'. You also seem to assume that a non-believer (don't call anyone an atheist, as that is a disparaging term made up by the superstitious. To borrow from Sam Harris, YOU are an atheist with respect to the vast majority of deities, while non-believer just eliminate the last one. Also, why is there no term for those who don't believe in astrology? Maybe THAT superstition has finally died, so no need.) cannot be moral, and thus not be allowed into anybody's paradise. Deities are totally unnecessary for morality, and nobody's deity or prophet was particularly moral anyway. Do you think Moses came down with the stone tablets he chipped out and said, "Guys, I've got some bad news. No murder, no stealing" Morality emerges when humans decide to co-exist. Humans make rules so that we can be 'civilized'. No god rulebook needed. Also, it was HUMANS who decided slavery was wrong, that owning other human beings was wrong. Your Jesus had no problem with slavery. Really immoral guy, and totally undeserving of any paradise.

Your Jesus guy, if he did rise from the dead, missed his second chance to say owning other human beings is wrong. He certainly didn't say anything about it in his first 33 year iteration. I would call that pretty immoral, since theoretically his dad made everybody and loves everybody. I have no need for any deity, especially an immoral one like your Christian god. I always wonder what your deity was doing from quadrillions of years ago until he decided he needed some little creatures to tell it how special it was? Why bother with 200 billion galaxies, when a fish bowl would do as well? Get the fish to applaud and say, Great job, god ! Thanks for the plankton ! I question your spurious statement that 'half the scientists believe in god'. What constitutes a 'scientist' in your mind? You just made that number up, didn't you? Can you break it down to give the % for cosmologists and particle physicists? If your god---with absolutely zero proof of its existence and tales of simple parlor tricks written hundreds of years after your messiah died, then edited and selected from among many (plagiarized) 'spiritual texts' that others had written---could always exist, or come from nothing into existence, why can't the Universe, which DEFINITELY exists, be the same? I'll repeat something that seems to escape you. You toss out 'common sense' to suggest something could not come from 'nothing'. Common sense a thousand years ago said the Earth could not possibly be round, because we'd fall off. Common sense could not imagine a force that works on particles with mass, or even particles without mass under the right conditions (like photons). Your 'common sense' cannot imagine muons and quarks and bosons and all the other subatomic particles, and how some of them move in and out of existence. That reality is as far above your ability to understand as it was for a sheep herder in Frankia to understand gravity or electromagnetism, much less the strong and weak nuclear forces. Since the sheepherder couldn't understand gravity, he decided a god must be responsible for him not falling off the Earth, just as you need a god to explain what you are incapable of understanding. You also had plenty of choices (other than science), but chose the belief system most common in the land of your birth. Had you been born in Mecca, you'd likely be just as adamant about Allah and Mohamed, and if born in Salt Lake City you'd be wearing magic underwear and listening to the Greatest Hits of Donny and Marie. By the way, if you 'fully understand gravity' as you say, you are the only human who does, and plenty of physicists would like to have a chat with you.

The Earth is flat. Be careful, or you might fall off. Your inability to understand quantum field theory and gravity is the equivalent of people who 'knew' the Earth had to be flat, as they could not possibly conceive of the theory of gravity. You are merely the 21st Century example of a Dark Ages person, unable to understand reality, so you replace it with fantasy. There is zero evidence of any god from Zeus to Yahweh, yet you believe it always was and always will be. The Universe absolutely does exist, but you cannot accept it may have always existed in some form. There's something inconsistent there.

If you go to the US, you will find that somewhere between 20 to 25% of Americans believe Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton run an international cabal where they kidnap, rape, roast and eat babies. QAnon. Logical it is not. Half the people in the world believe in fantasies where some deity or group of deities created a Universe of 200 billion galaxies, each with an average of a trillion stars, and in one average galaxy, around one nondescript star, put sentient beings to praise said deity or deities, and added a few rules like not eating pork or dressing females like giant eggplants or knocking up an Earthgirl, playing deadbeat dad, then letting the kid get nailed....all so some of the sentient beings could go to some celestial country club. Really odd initiation ceremony. Also seems a terribly inefficient way to get a little "You're so great" praise and thanks (which are very human needs and wants, hardly the needs of anything omnipotent and eternal). Plenty of people---even those who have watched someone disappear via dementia or Alzheimers---think that the instant the now-vegetative person dies, all of their memories, personality, etc. come back as they drift into some afterlife thing. There are even still people who think that stars and planets---which are never in the same position more than once in all of eternity---somehow dictate a person's life and fate, ostensibly due to 'forces', despite the lightbulb over the bed where they were whelped hits them with more electromagnetic energy than all the stars and galaxies in the Universe, and the gravitational attraction of the doctor or midwife delivering exceeds the gravitational forces of every other star or galaxy. Rather than anyone saying they're a Scorpio, it makes more sense to say you were born under a GE 100 watt and a Dr. Jones. All of these silly beliefs are driven by ignorance or hope. Ghosts are hardly any less logical. ALl were made up when ignorance reigned supreme, yet many are still carried today, despite zero evidence of their existence. All that being said, no way I would invest a satang with anyone who believed in fortune tellers or ghosts, and I even have a bit of trouble investing with anyone who believes in gods. I prefer folks who accept personal responsibility and make decisions based on an analysis of all the facts that can be known.

I'm likely Nouveau Riche, but try to behave like Old Money. Discreet. Anonymous. Not loud or boisterous. No logos (to tie into one of your earlier posts). No tatts. No spare tires, no beer belly, no excess adipose tissue. No red Ferrari and no yellow Lamborghini, and certainly no pastel Rolls Royce. Refused the Black and Platinum Mastercard and AMEX, but accept the special section at banks, because the lines are shorter. I've been told by several expats that "You're the only 'normal' expat I've ever seen in Thailand", whatever that means, though I think it has something to do with my shape, demeanor, lack of daily public drunken-ness, and failure to subscribe to bizarre conspiracy theories. Oh, and I'm happy. To add to your Asian anecdotes, I once took a JAL flight from Tokyo to NYC, At that time, JAL's Business class seating was 2-3-2, which kind of obviates the 'upgraded status'. I specifically chose a "No Smoking" seat. Soon after take-off, the Japanese man sitting in the middle of the "3", lit up a cigarette. I called the flight attendant and noted to her that I was in a non-smoking seat. She agreed. I was. I then noted the obvious to her...that the guy next to me was smoking away. "Yes", she said. "He is in a smoking seat." Anyone who has lived In Japan understands her thinking, or rather why she would think both the smoker and I are totally in compliance with the rules.

I'm enjoying the brain addled excuses of trumpflakes who whine about 'weaponization', think trump could 'declassify in his mind', wasn't asking Raffensperger to cheat for him, didn't hope the terrorists would have taken over the Capitol, or who think Michael Cohen just wanted to top up Stormy's retirement account when he gave her $130,000 I forget adult human beings can be that dumb and naive.. Going to be joyous fun when trump is cuffed, jump-suited, and locked up for the rest of his miserable existence. trumpflake tears will make the Thai monsoon seem like drizzle.

I cannot think of it offhand, but the Thais have a word for discreet elite brands that have no logo and only the wearer knows. Two examples are Brioni and Stefano Ricci. Back before I became gainfully unemployed (okay, I own a business in Thailand, but just for fun and a Non-B Business Visa), I used to wear both, Brioni suits and the Stefano Ricci shirts, plus Ricci or Brioni ties. I still have a closet-full of both, as they last, never go out of fashion, and I've maintained my fighting weight. I wear the shirts occasionally, but have precious little need to wear suits now. The only clothing I have that is logo'd are gym shorts and gym shoes. I don't care for logos, as they seem noisy. Neither do I like the clothes with silly, bad grammar sayings that are so popular in Japan, like "Be the One who forever, Life can be, as you were, do now. Energy". I have seen some funny sayings on clothes here. There is a Thai guy who works out in the same gym who sometimes wears a t-short that says "Eat More Pussy". I was visiting a temple and saw a praying, young, well-endowed Thai woman with a t-shirt that said, "Stop Staring at My Tits". I thought that possibly inappropriate for a temple, but what do I know?

I was remarking about who they would invite as part of the elite 100. Perhaps you've forgotten that Thailand is the center of the known Universe and it is assumed everybody would prefer to be here than anywhere else. Once vladdy turns them down they'll go after Nigerian Princes and Bollywood celebrities.

I suspect they will still do okay on the 5 year at 900,000 baht, albeit only to those who want to reside full time. Otherwise, snowbirds are better off just getting a Tourists visa and extending once, maybe making a visit to Malaysia or somewhere to go back to square one. Then Western winter ends and they go back home. Rinse and repeat. The "100 by invitation only" will go after Chinese seeking 'status' and maybe russians like putin or lavrov or oligarchs. Japanese are not that stupid nor status-seeking to be interested, plus the yen has tumbled to 146/$ (though for the wealthy that's no big deal). I think this could overlap and be cannibalized by the new LTV, provided somebody wants a $250K+ condo in Thailand, as one not only gets the visa, but has an asset they can live in. Not sure the Super Double Happiness Golden Fortune Beverly Hills Shores Elite Card will retain enough value to be considered an 'asset', and one certainly cannot live in it. Buy an upscale condo, get the LTV, and there's no reason to fiddle with any of the Elite Cards. A person could also toss some chump change at a small coffee shop, get a Non-B Business Visa, and be as free to come and go as the Uber Elite, paying a mere 1900 baht a year (plus tribute to an IO).

I guess it's because some of us believe in democracy and rule of law, and if the traitor trump somehow cheats his way into the WH again, everything I know of my country, and everything better people than you or trump sacrificed to build over the last 250 years goes up in smoke. I appreciate posting here is voiding into the wind, but it relieves the anger and frustration built up listening to that a$$hole or his ignorant, brain addled, loser goobers who have zero clue about what US ideals are, and who want to stop the work-in-progress that the US is. "weaponization", whataboutism, etc. are the straws of losers who think trump can turn their failure of a life into a success and get back at all the people who have achieved success in life. He sold them a fantasy, and so in need are they to salvage their miserable existence that they embrace his siren song and gulp down his Snake Oil.

Actually, those are people who accepted the election outcome. They did not concoct a scheme to appoint fake electors. They didn't claim Hugo Chavez rose from the grave, programmed an Italian satellite, and then had it alter voting machine votes. They didn't call SecStates where HRC lost telling the SecState to "just find me [enough votes to cheat and win]". They didn't host a presser at Four Seasons [home & garden] next to a porn shop selling adult toys (one-stop shopping for trumpers). Contrast that with trump, rudy, sidney, cheesbro, eastman, etc.

It's also illegal to follow an illegal order, so no way Meadows was acting in his capacity as a Federal employee. Nor was anyone else.

"stunning lack of imagination"? How can you say that! Why donny came up with those 'who coulda thunk that' nicknames like "Sleepy", "Low IQ", "Low Energy", "Shifty", "Pocahontas", etc. Imagine with that kind of cleverness how successful trump could have been on the Vaudeville Circuit or in the Catskills in the 1940s and 1950s. donny coulda been a contenda! You know, "many people are saying nobody makes up better nicknames then donny". His wit is only matched by his intellect. Who but donny could have suggested injecting Lysol or sticking a UV light up one's butt to cure Covid? I mean, where's the Nobel Prize in Medicine? He's a stable genius, you know.

Do you know how votes are counted in the US? I assume you don't, which is why you made your silly statement. For your homework, learn how votes are counted. Learn the safety procedures involved in getting ballots to counting centers. Learn when absentee ballots (like the one trump, ivanka, jared and others used to vote) are opened and counted. There's no mystery if you know how it's done. Ignorance of the procedure is fertile ground for embracing conspiracies and nonsense.

Maybe it's time you give up the shibboleth of 'weaponization'? You still cannot explain: ---Why trump stole TS/SCI, SAP, Codeword, HCS and RD docs, then lied about returning them. ---Why trump pressured Raffensperger to 'just find me 11.780 votes' AFTER Raffensperger told trump 3 recounts and investigations showed zero fraud. The ONLY explanation is trump meant "cheat for me" ---Why trump told Cohen to pay off Stormy, and then book it as a business expense ---Why trump told his goobers to come to DC on 6 Jan, as "it will be wild !", when 6 January was merely a pro forma certification of an election and such an activity had been done dozens of times in US history without ever being "wild" ---Why trump was intimately involved and approving of the fake elector scheme to subvert US democracy (according to (R) witness testimony under oath before a grand jury Sane people call what DoJ has done as 'following the rule of law' Cultists call it 'weaponization'.

Popcorn futures are limit up.

I hope that someone who believes higher tax rates on the rich will help people living paycheck to paycheck---and now, not in some past Golden Age when the US was the world's major manufacturer---can explain how. Do the math. How much additional revenue would be gained? How would it be dispersed to help those living paycheck to paycheck? How would the budget deficit be impacted? Also, if those living paycheck to paycheck suddenly got some sort of stipend, would they save it, pay off debt, or shop and spend even more? As I have written, I do not know the answer on how to address: 1) The level of public and consumer debt 2) The rapid rise over two decades of home prices relative to wages/income 3) The increasing obviation of labor pricing power 4) The Ponzi Scheme that is Social Security and pensions at a time when the age pyramid is inverting 5) The impact AI is going to have on even white collar jobs Yes, some nations have higher tax rates. How will they face tomorrow? Germany is in Recession, and masks much of its public debt in municipalities. Japan is a basket case, despite extremely high max tax rates. The UK is likely in Recession. The EU banking system 'solved' 2008 by printing money, handing it to banks, telling banks to load up on sovereign debt, then booking gains to mask bad debts and NPLs. That was great for a while. Spanish rates fell from 7% to under 1%, so the Spanish Govt could borrow more. Italy enjoyed the same benefit. Banks 'profits' and minimized reserve requirements on the sovereign debt they bought made their capital structure look better and less leveraged. Now rates are rising, and the massive EU banking system (double EU GDP, as opposed to the US banking system being only 80% of GDP) still carries lots of NPLs. As rates rise, sovereign debt will be more expensive to service. Banks will see their capital structure change as their sovereign bond holdings fall in value. 2008 was postponed. It is upon us again. While the US banking system was bolstered after 2008 when Obama forced banks to slash leverage, issue new equity, and sell off bad debt, things are deteriorating at the public level. For more than a decade, rates were near zero. As US debt matures and is rolled over, it is reissued at current rates, which are not longer near zero. Each 1% upward shift in the Yield Curve adds a few hundred billion$ more to the yearly deficit. Rates are 300 pips higher than 2018, so the rise in debt servicing costs exceeds nominal GDP growth. What is the limit of debt/GDP? How much can higher tax rates on the rich ameliorate that? Enter AI and human labor eradication. I look at the numbers. I look at personal income at various levels using the data BEA produces. I simply cannot make 2 + 2 = 5. What's worse is I think we're going to have to find a way to make 2 + 2 = 7 or 9. Lots of folks offering opinions here. In a big picture sense, what's the answer? I do not see one. Not in the US, not in the EU, not in Asia. Anybody?

I disagree. There have been times when increasing taxes on the rich helped, owing to the particular circumstances of the time. Clinton took advantage of his time. Such conditions no longer exist. The combination of globalization, technological innovation, labor obviation and the coming tsunami from AI, render Clinton's solutions useless. I have never been a proponent of using the term 'this time is different', but today it is time for that phrase. There is no solution. I don't even think Andrew Yang's idea of a monthly stipend to all citizens will help. I hope I'm wrong, but the math does not add up. We've carried this gambit as far as possible. but to use another overused term---Perfect Storm---a world that is globalized, where debt is around $280,000,000,000,000 and rates are rising, where bad debts have been masked by generous accounting and (previous) near-zero rates, where the Ponzi Scheme of pensions and Social Security is being hit by an inversion of the demographic pyramid, and now AI is coming to play PacMan to even white color jobs, says we are getting hit with a Perfect Storm.

Not sure this is another answer, but it is real world.... I spent many years working in Japan. I made a lot, so I was in a tax rate of---IIRC---75%. Maybe it was only 70%. I just know it was the highest rate. Japan still had massive budget deficits despite those tax rates. In fact, among G7 nations, the debt/GDP wasn't even close. Japan was Greece, albeit with more smoke and mirrors. Today, the Japanese economy is a basket case financially. Its population is becoming an inverted pyramid, while its pension system is massively underfunded. (I could write a long tome on the peculiarity of Japanese accounting that allowed this underfunding to happen and remain somewhat invisible.) Japan could go to a 99% max tax rate and they still wouldn't be able to make ends meet. They are just the canary in the coal mine, as we all have the same thing coming.

First, I know full well the Laffer Curve was always a joke. Nobody knows its actual shape, and even if someone could plot it, the curve is likely also dynamic and changes over time. The Laffer Curve was just a cheap trick Republicans used to justify Reaganomics. As for taxing the rich now, it won't help, because the problem as it exists today is nothing compared to what's coming. This isn't the 1990s. I like Clinton, and he 'succeeded' by doing 2 things: one was sitting back and letting the internet bubble run its course. That resulted in massive tax revenues, though much of that was capital gains on IPOs. (When the IPO Bubble blew up, the solution was to make credit easy and let everybody build 'wealth' through property, which led to house prices rising 300% while wages rose only 20%. Great until it blows up, which it did in 2008). Second, Clinton's SecTreas Ruben figured a way to borrow from the Social Security Fund and Military pensions so that the debt was off balance sheet. The budget wasn't actually balanced, but it looked good. Every POTUS since has done the same thing (which is why the yearly reported budget deficit never matches the actual increase in National Debt....under trump the National Debt grew by $7,800,000,000,000 while the yearly deficits added up to less.) Another difference from the Clinton Era is that the world is much more globalized. Labor has lost a lot more pricing power, so the needs of those who earn less are much greater---or the percentage living paycheck to paycheck is much greater---so that the tax increase on the wealthy to do what Clinton did would be so great as to disincentivize people or make them move their wealth and businesses offshore. Much of the exporting of jobs to Mexico, China, etc. was related to Clinton's tax increases. Nothing is done in a vacuum. Every act has consequences, most of which are only apparent after the fact. The thing that will exacerbate this most of all, however, is AI. With all the job losses coming, the rich could be taxed at 100% (and assume they keep working, which they would not) and still the needs of the obviated would be so great that no budget could be balanced. This is unprecedented in all of human history. As I wrote, I have no solution because I do not think there is one. Taxing the rich could work when there was much less globalization, less technological innovation, and no AI. Clinton took advantage of his time, and wisely so. That time is gone. We will see social disruption on a scale I would rather not imagine.

Tell us what can be done? Labor has lost pricing power. The world is competitive. Darwinian Socialism is with us, meaning if a person doesn't have a marketable skill---something not everyone can do---that person has no pricing power. The inflation that is only a part of the problem is a direct result of the $24,000 per American in new debt the previous President inflicted on the country. The problem of labor's loss of pricing power is not new. The initial 'solution' was encouraging people to build 'equity' in property. We had the 3-income household up until 2008---Dad, Mom and Home Equity loans. That has led to a three-fold increase in the price of the average home in the US (and rise in rents commensurate) while incomes are up only about 20% (this over a 20 year period). That asset bubble and easy credit worked until 2008. There is no solution. Taxing the rich won't help. Society is on the brink of a crisis never seen before. Labor has lost enough pricing power just due to globalization. Globalization isn't exactly exporting jobs, either; it's moving them to a way station on the path to oblivion. Technology has replaced labor, and AI is only going to make it worse. One estimate done by a US Think Tank puts jobs losses due to AI at 47% of all jobs. Poof! There are not new jobs coming along, or retraining to give folks a skill. This is not the McCormack Combine, which---though it decimated agricultural labor---sent people into the factories of the Industrial Revolution. The article is about the US, but this issue will be everywhere. Many people will be obviated. Totally unnecessary. We can't all cut each others' hair and do each others' nails. Nations are going to have to consider a basic stipend to allow the obviated to live. People will have to find meaning on their own, because for most it will not come through a job. Do you have a solution? I don't. I'm glad I was smart enough never to produce kids, because their world is not going to be pretty. If there is any bright spot, it is that fertility rates are tumbling. Most nations are now below the replacement rate (that rate is slightly above 2 kids per couple). Some nations---e.g., South Korea---are so low that not even half of a couple is being replaced. That is bad for pyramid pension structures and social security, but good for labor.

trump is a greater threat to US democracy and rule of law than any of the jihadis in the tribal regions of Pakistan or Afghanistan that we were given authority to eliminate. Ideally---since we cannot fire a Flying Ginsu at him---the law will take care of the traitor and put him away for the rest of his miserable life. As for his cult, they can slither back under the rocks from which they crawled.