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I heard a poll today that shows the number of Republicans that consider themselves "Trump Republicans" is falling like an anvil on a coyote.
Best thing I have heard in quite a while.
With that I boldly predict that even if Trump is out of jail and runs in 2024 he will not win in Iowa or New Hampshire and that will send him off to the golf course of obscurity.

VT I'll gladly buy you the cold snack of your choosing should that happen!

If Trump doesn't run in 2024 its hard to see who the Rs could run in his place.

But if Biden doesn't run in 2024----as seems likely----then the Ds have lots of interesting candidates.

There is Kamala Harris, who Biden picked to be VP because she is a black woman.

There is Hillary who thinks she should be President because she is a white woman.

There is Elizabeth Sanders who thinks she should be President because she is an Indian woman.

There is Pete Buttiejudge who thinks he should be President because he is gay.

ANd possibly Bernie Sanders would run again, even though he is older then Biden.



I'm very curioius to see how this all turns out.

Cheers!

I heard a poll today that shows the number of Republicans that consider themselves "Trump Republicans" is falling like an anvil on a coyote.
Best thing I have heard in quite a while.

Not sure how good is that, if they still consider themselves Republicans. What I mean is, the Republican party has been running on a platform of denial of the truth since... not sure when, but at least since they decided to double down on climate change denial way past any reasonable scientist would deny climate change. When a party's platform appears to be "we'll say whatever lies work in the campaign"... Houston, you've got a problem. And it isn't at all clear to me that the Republican's platform has changed in that regard.

Democratic politicians have also told any number of lies, but they seem to have a decent amount of platform that is independent of the goal of telling whatever lies work in the campaign.

Plantagenet wrote:If Trump doesn't run in 2024 its hard to see who the Rs could run in his place.

The Republican Party's version of this guy?

EnergyUnlimited wrote:My take on subject:

1. Up to the end of next year most of Western governments will be advising to take 6th dose of "2 dose COVID vaccine" and those who refuse are going to be branded "antisocial" and in some countries "criminals".
Medical/scientific advisors (Fauci alike) are going to insist that from the very beginning they were telling about such need because they knew that vaccines will need top ups.
When challenged with records of what they have said at the beginning of 2021 they will insist that it is not their voice, on films are impostors and materials are manipulated.

2. Electricity in most of Western Europe will cost more than 1$ per kWh before next year ends. There will be rolling blackouts at least in some European countries in February or/and March next year.

3. Russia will be barred from SWIFT system, but they will care little about it due to launch of West independent system in cooperation with China.

4. Gold will go above $2500 an ounce.

5. Ms Harris will formally become an acting POTUS.

6. Somewhere there will be an exchange of fire between US and Russia or China, not necessarily a large one but still.
It will be direct, not by proxy.

Are you sure this is your take, and not the take your Russian pimp-handler told you to post?

I noticed you had nothing negative to forecast about Russia or China despite lots of bad news for both countries.

The lie that the "Bill will cost nothing" is such a whopper that it eclipses all GOP and Trump lies and even worse the doddering old fool actually believes it.
In my view the most interesting potential GOP candidate for 2024 is Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan. 65, Moderate, competent and with no baggage I know of.

vtsnowedin wrote: In my view the most interesting potential GOP candidate for 2024 is Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan. 65, Moderate, competent and with no baggage I know of.

I've been watching that one for awhile now as well. Good mention by the way, I had almost forgotten about him in all the caterwauling by the Trumpite bobble-heads soaking up all the oxygen near every mic that ends up near them. But that guy, I've seen him speak before and it was amazing, he didn't appear to be suffering from dementia, wanting to enrich his family business, fulfill some career goal just to say he did it before he croaks, or was owed a higher political position because of who he functioned as a doormat for.

DiggitySmiggity wrote:

EnergyUnlimited wrote:My take on subject:

1. Up to the end of next year most of Western governments will be advising to take 6th dose of "2 dose COVID vaccine" and those who refuse are going to be branded "antisocial" and in some countries "criminals".
Medical/scientific advisors (Fauci alike) are going to insist that from the very beginning they were telling about such need because they knew that vaccines will need top ups.
When challenged with records of what they have said at the beginning of 2021 they will insist that it is not their voice, on films are impostors and materials are manipulated.

2. Electricity in most of Western Europe will cost more than 1$ per kWh before next year ends. There will be rolling blackouts at least in some European countries in February or/and March next year.

3. Russia will be barred from SWIFT system, but they will care little about it due to launch of West independent system in cooperation with China.

4. Gold will go above $2500 an ounce.

5. Ms Harris will formally become an acting POTUS.

6. Somewhere there will be an exchange of fire between US and Russia or China, not necessarily a large one but still.
It will be direct, not by proxy.

Are you sure this is your take, and not the take your Russian pimp-handler told you to post?

I noticed you had nothing negative to forecast about Russia or China despite lots of bad news for both countries.

My take is that Russia and China will be just fine, even if the USA and its proxies start a war with either or both of them. The Russian civilization has been around for about a thousand years and will still be around in 2023. The Chinese civilization is the oldest, continuously existing, still surviving civilization on the planet, and will still be around in 2023.

Are you sure this is your take, and not the take your Russian pimp-handler told you to post?

People, it's quite possible to have objections to what people say without insulting them. I entirely agree that the post seems rather pro-Russian, and it's possible to say that without personal attacks. If you want to express your disagreement with a pro-Russian stance in forceful terms, this is an example of how it's done: This list of predictions consists on predicting that all of the Kremlin's wet dreams come true.

I support moderators that are pretty harsh with those sort of comments. Let's have adult conversations around here.

By the end of summer, the employment situation may have turned around.

At my work, people are starting to quit because UPS wants to cut everybody's pay. They offer a bonus to make up the difference to the old pay, but they won't make any guarantees about how long it will last, or whether the terms will change capriciously. My guess is their economist(s) have told them they don't need to actually change the pay rate. The people who are quitting, they must be saying, will be coming back soon.

I know that's not the whole story. It must be part of it. I wonder what corporate expectations are?

JuanP wrote:

DiggitySmiggity wrote:

EnergyUnlimited wrote:My take on subject:

1. Up to the end of next year most of Western governments will be advising to take 6th dose of "2 dose COVID vaccine" and those who refuse are going to be branded "antisocial" and in some countries "criminals".
Medical/scientific advisors (Fauci alike) are going to insist that from the very beginning they were telling about such need because they knew that vaccines will need top ups.
When challenged with records of what they have said at the beginning of 2021 they will insist that it is not their voice, on films are impostors and materials are manipulated.

2. Electricity in most of Western Europe will cost more than 1$ per kWh before next year ends. There will be rolling blackouts at least in some European countries in February or/and March next year.

3. Russia will be barred from SWIFT system, but they will care little about it due to launch of West independent system in cooperation with China.

4. Gold will go above $2500 an ounce.

5. Ms Harris will formally become an acting POTUS.

6. Somewhere there will be an exchange of fire between US and Russia or China, not necessarily a large one but still.
It will be direct, not by proxy.

Are you sure this is your take, and not the take your Russian pimp-handler told you to post?

I noticed you had nothing negative to forecast about Russia or China despite lots of bad news for both countries.

My take is that Russia and China will be just fine, even if the USA and its proxies start a war with either or both of them. The Russian civilization has been around for about a thousand years and will still be around in 2023. The Chinese civilization is the oldest, continuously existing, still surviving civilization on the planet, and will still be around in 2023.

The Chinese propaganda machine prints out another obscenity.

evilgenius wrote:By the end of summer, the employment situation may have turned around.

At my work, people are starting to quit because UPS wants to cut everybody's pay. They offer a bonus to make up the difference to the old pay, but they won't make any guarantees about how long it will last, or whether the terms will change capriciously. My guess is their economist(s) have told them they don't need to actually change the pay rate. The people who are quitting, they must be saying, will be coming back soon.

I know that's not the whole story. It must be part of it. I wonder what corporate expectations are?

This sounds more like rumor than fact the way it is stated. Is UPS actaully cutting "everyone's" pay, or is there talk among employees that "UPS wants to cut everyone's pay"?

When you say UPS is cutting pay, do you mean they're cutting salaries in the face of the inflation (which is obviously very bad), or they're ending Covid support, Covid danger bonuses, etc, which cuts net pay for people on the front line?

Not saying the second thing is "OK" until Covid is officially endemic (or functionally endemic for months), but the second thing is quite different in substance from the first thing.

A quick look, and I'm not finding a recent source re Google for "UPS cutting pay" that's more credible than a reddit discussion.

The discussion seemed to center around the contractual $15 an hour rate, vs. the seasonal bonus rate of $21. If UPS does seasonal hiring for the Christmas season and NOTIFIES people that's what it is (a seasonal bonus), then people getting mad at UPS when that pay is cut back to the NORMAL level is ridiculous, IMO.

If people don't want to do the hard physical work of sorting (often heavy, and at a fast rate all day on their feet) packages for $15 an hour, I understand that. If people expect holiday bonus rates to become permanent, that's unrealistic.

gollum wrote:

Outcast_Searcher wrote:

AdamB wrote:

Polybius wrote:Day 1 of 2022, Russia takes Ukraine while China takes Taiwan

NATO gets pushed out of Europe and US carriers all sunk in the Asia Pacific

Brandon gets sacrificed by the Deep State

is.gd/USAcamps

Oh the first will be wonderful to revisit in 7 days, the others we can chalk up for later. If this kind of overly specific, doom-centric all channels, all the time claptrap doesn't look like StarvingPuttyTat, I don't know what does.

Especially the decades long track record of such (endless) specific doomer predictions on this site, for decades.

Doomers might be off on their timing but the trend line is that things are getting worse.

Some things are getting worse. Other things are clearly getting better. Doomers tend to only focus on what's getting worse and pretend that what's getting better doesn't matter, or be in denial that anything can get better because it doesn't fit the doom mantra. (Same as it ever was).

For example, the internet objectively makes LOTS of things better re daily life. Look at all the driving miles saved and time saved, re procuring what is needed for daily life, thanks to the internet. And so much more ability to work remotely, along the same line. And the power to communicate and get things done and get access to information between the internet and smart .phones. And the power to easily navigate almost anywhere due to modern GPS NAV systems which are dirt cheap and very portable (if you buy them stand-alone). Think how much WORSE Covid-19 would have been if the internet didn't exist. What a nightmare, and how fortunate we are that this didn't hit in, say, the 70's. And of course, modern vaccine tech, despite all the whining and science denial from the anti-vaxxer crowd, since vaccines are far from perfect. (No human endeavor is perfect, but that doesn't make them all bad).

All my stock trades are now free at my choice of many fine brokers (except for the occasional very tiny exchange fee). All my stock option trades are dirt cheap with the same brokers. They could be free (plus the tiny exchange fees) at a broker like Robinhood, but I don't trust them, given their reputation, re competence, customer service, etc. In the 80's when I started trading stocks and options regularly, negotiated trading fees at a significant volume discount at a competent full service broker were roughly $30 or so per trade, on average. That's for 100 shares of stock or one option. Large amounts of money or many options, and the fees got MUCH, MUCH higher. And I had to call a broker or go downtown and sit at a green screen terminal. And every trade had to be made on paper, and I had to wait for a wire operator to send it to the exchanges. Then I had to deal with humans running away from the trades, front running, screwing up, etc.

Today trading is from the comfort of a PC or phone, anywhere there's reliable WIFI, and it's nearly instantaneous on a human time scale. It's all electronic and errors are few, as long as one uses limit orders to prevent issues with fast markets (like the May 6, 20010 flash crash, which crushed many market orders). So there's an example which has improved SEVERAL orders of magnitude in recent decades, and continues to improve.

EV's are objectively better than ICE's and bound to improve significantly for decades. Performance. Pollution. Total cost of ownership. And hell, ICE's are now so good that every time I buy a middle class car, the reliability, durability, efficiency, inflation adjusted cost, comfort, convenience, and safety -- I am just DELIGHTED by any car I buy from a quality maker, as long as I'm not stupid about choosing needless expensive add-ons or luxury models.

Lighting, re modern light bulbs, have improved a good two orders of magnitude in recent decades. A modern LED bulb lasts MUCH longer, consumes about a fifth the power for the same lumens, runs much cooler, is far more versatile, is massively more reliable with the right engineering (using many small bulbs vs. a single large one, so a bulb going out no longer means a failure for, say, traffic lights). Furnaces and Air conditioning has gotten MUCH more efficient and far cleaner overall.

The primary negatives re resources available per human is driven primarily by population growth, which humans COULD control easily with modern science -- if they'd just make that a priority. But they choose not to.

But MANY things you look at like crop yields over time, etc. have grown MASSIVELY over time, primarily due to science. And with modern financial instruments like futures and modern insurance, producing outfits can protect themselves from risk (for a price) like never before, for a huge proportion of commodities produced.

Pluses and minuses, same as it's been since, say, the industrial era once the steam engine was a thing. I know it's fashionable for most around here to only focus on the negative -- but another great thing about the internet is that now fact checking is really easy for multiple credible sources -- despite how easy it ALSO is to try and spread misinformation, which is blindingly obvious in modern politics, for example.

But if you ONLY focus on resources per human, population, and the effects on things like geopolitics, then yes, lots of things are getting worse. But that's no more "everything" in the life of the typical first world person than the earth is flat because flat-earthers who yammer a lot exist.

Postby evilgenius » Tue 25 Jan 2022, 07:56:01

By the end of summer, the employment situation may have turned around.

At my work, people are starting to quit because UPS wants to cut everybody's pay. They offer a bonus to make up the difference to the old pay, but they won't make any guarantees about how long it will last, or whether the terms will change capriciously. My guess is their economist(s) have told them they don't need to actually change the pay rate. The people who are quitting, they must be saying, will be coming back soon.

I know that's not the whole story. It must be part of it. I wonder what corporate expectations are?

There was a news story today that there is a 80,000 shortage of over the road truck drivers and they can command $100,000 + salaries. That is probably where your quits are going.

vtsnowedin wrote:Postby evilgenius » Tue 25 Jan 2022, 07:56:01

By the end of summer, the employment situation may have turned around.

At my work, people are starting to quit because UPS wants to cut everybody's pay. They offer a bonus to make up the difference to the old pay, but they won't make any guarantees about how long it will last, or whether the terms will change capriciously. My guess is their economist(s) have told them they don't need to actually change the pay rate. The people who are quitting, they must be saying, will be coming back soon.

I know that's not the whole story. It must be part of it. I wonder what corporate expectations are?

There was a news story today that there is a 80,000 shortage of over the road truck drivers and they can command $100,000 + salaries. That is probably where your quits are going.

As long as there are lots of jobs and training programs for needed skills are viable, who can blame people for wanting to move to much better paying jobs, especially if the overall working conditions (all things considered) are similar?

As long as unemployment remains relatively low and lots of employers are seeking qualified and reliable employees, it seems to be a good time to change jobs for folks willing to be somewhat aggressive and try to improve their position.

Obviously, that can change a lot if the economy gets a lot worse. But despite all the doomer braying about how bad the US economy is, unemployment rates are declining significantly over time and approaching the pre-pandemic level.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-sta ... yment-rate

(Click on 5 yr, 10 yr, or 25 yr, to get more perspective re pre vs. post pandemic trends).

If Omicron dies down and we can manage not to have another major nasty Covid surge for 6 months or more, that might change if lots more people start actively seeking work, but all the news can't be constantly good (and that's normal, not doom).

Think how much WORSE Covid-19 would have been if the internet didn't exist.

If the Internet didn't exist, it would have been far more likely that the anti-mask and anti-vax movement would have been a lot smaller. AIDS happened before the Internet, and being an STD and sex about the most private thing there is, it would have been unsurprising if a massive anti-condom movement got started. It didn't, because the Internet wasn't facilitating it.

EV's are objectively better than ICE's and bound to improve significantly for decades.

How do you know they are bound to improve for decades?

The primary negatives re resources available per human is driven primarily by population growth

Population growth is slowing down significantly, so don't blame it for diminishing resources per capita.

But if you ONLY focus on resources per human, population, and the effects on things like geopolitics, then yes, lots of things are getting worse. But that's no more "everything" in the life of the typical first world person than the earth is flat because flat-earthers who yammer a lot exist.

You are effectively saying that the typical first world person wouldn't be affected by diminishing resources per capita because they live in the first world and still keep their share of resources. Problem is, those that don't live in the first world and know that there are more resources elsewhere often try to migrate to the first world, and that's something the first world person would notice. And if that doesn't work because the barriers for entry are made strong enough, and all their other efforts to redistribute resources to themselves by other means fail, then at some point the situation in poor countries gets bad enough that those factories or mining operations or industrial facilities in poor countries can no longer keep going, because there are riots in the country and/or shortages of all sorts of things. And then those cheap raw materials or products from poor countries are no longer available in the first world, and the first world person would notice.

JuanP wrote:
My take is that Russia and China will be just fine, even if the USA and its proxies start a war with either or both of them.

And who are the proxies, a group of tired and corrupt nations, a pack of old dogs with no teeth other than the nuclear weapons they dare not use.

The US is dying and those in control are probably just hoping that they can get out of the world empire business without too many cuts and bruises.

You should not underestimate the abilities of the American military. We have often seen them operate shackled by political "Rules of engagement" . Freed from such foolishness during a real attempt by someone trying to defeat us that enemy would find they have made a fatal mistake.

theluckycountry wrote:The US is dying and those in control are probably just hoping that they can get out of the world empire business without too many cuts and bruises.

Seems like Americans have heard that one before. When it comes from well off Australians enjoying a lush retirement and fast German motorcycles...well....it just comes off kind of as...jealous? I mean really, I suppose America could just let China have the place but those kangaroos are so cute!