2020 General Presidential Election Thread

[Pelado]

WTF? Joe is after your nest eggs!


https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/.../#ece8a864eb08

Moli, please use your super accountant skills and explain what this means.

Yeah Moli, get to it.

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[Moliere]

Yeah Moli, get to it.

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Ha, no worries there. The democrats love tax breaks for the rich as much as republicans.


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[PaloAltoCougar]

In deaths per million, the US is comparable to or below UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden. Unfortunately, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and California, which love lock downs, bear a hugely disproportionate share.

California, which doesn't love lockdowns but which was among the first and most severe in lockdown policy, is waaaay down the list on deaths per capita. And the U.S. is on pace to exceed every European country but Belgium in deaths per capita within the next month or two.

[Non Sequitur]

Ted's diverse perspective is worthwhile and at times funny. You really want this place just to be a circle jerk in an echo chamber?

Juggling mimes are diverse and funny at times, but they don't add much. The problem I have with Ted is that he's not ignorant and he's not sincere. When my in-laws pimp for Trump, I give them a pass because they're ignorant and uneducated. Ted is neither, but he chooses a persona that behaves as though he were. Which leads to my next complaint: he's not sincere. When YOU say something with which I disagree, I respect it because I believe you're sincere. I can't say that about Ted. I might be full of shit, but when I say our country is facing an existential crises, I'm sincere. When I say Trump is a threat to our democracy, I'm sincere. Ted is not. He is certainly smart and clever, but ultimately he disappoints me.

[Uncle Ted]

California, which doesn't love lockdowns but which was among the first and most severe in lockdown policy, is waaaay down the list on deaths per capita. And the U.S. is on pace to exceed every European country but Belgium in deaths per capita within the next month or two.

Maybe someone should let California know that their lockdowns and mask mandates didn't really make much of a difference... From the AIER (American Institute for Economic Research):

Lockdowns and Mask Mandates Do Not Lead to Reduced COVID Transmission Rates or Deaths, New Study Suggests

A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha focused on countries and U.S. states with more than 1,000 COVID deaths as of late July. In all, the study included 25 U.S. states and 23 countries.

Based on their analysis, the authors present four “Stylized Facts” about COVID-19, which are:

1. Once a region reaches 25 total COVID deaths, within a month the growth rate in deaths per day falls to approximately zero. In other words, no matter the country or state and its policies, deaths per day stop increasing within 20-30 days of passing a threshold of 25 deaths.
2. Once that happens, deaths per day either begin to fall or the trend remains flat.
3. The variability in death trends across regions has fallen sharply since the beginning of the epidemic and remains low. All states studied, all countries studied, have become more similar in their trends and have remained so.
4. Observations 1-3 suggest that the effective reproduction number, R, has hovered around one worldwide after the first 30 days of the epidemic.

The paper’s conclusion is that the data trends observed above likely indicate that nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – such as lockdowns, closures, travel restrictions, stay-home orders, event bans, quarantines, curfews, and mask mandates – do not seem to affect virus transmission rates overall.

Why? Because those policies have varied in their timing and implementation across countries and states, but the trends in outcomes do not.
[...]
The authors reason that even if NPIs were effective early on, they do not appear to be anymore:

Moreover, given the observation that disease transmission rates have remained low with relatively low dispersion across locations worldwide for the past several months as NPIs have been lifted, we are concerned that estimates of the effectiveness of NPIs in reducing disease transmission from the earlier period may not be relevant for forecasting the impact of the relaxation of those NPIs in the current period, due to some unobserved switch in regime.

[...]

https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-and-mask-mandates-do-not-lead-to-reduced-covid-transmission-rates-or-deaths-new-study-suggests/

The working paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27719.pdf

And tell your boy, Biden, that he can take the mask off and come out of his basement to play.



He is usually not wearing his mask right anyway.

[Uncle Ted]

Juggling mimes are diverse and funny at times, but they don't add much. The problem I have with Ted is that he's not ignorant and he's not sincere. When my in-laws pimp for Trump, I give them a pass because they're ignorant and uneducated. Ted is neither, but he chooses a persona that behaves as though he were. Which leads to my next complaint: he's not sincere. When YOU say something with which I disagree, I respect it because I believe you're sincere. I can't say that about Ted. I might be full of shit, but when I say our country is facing an existential crises, I'm sincere. When I say Trump is a threat to our democracy, I'm sincere. Ted is not. He is certainly smart and clever, but ultimately he disappoints me.

Both parties are a f'n joke but I do find that Drumpf is far more entertaining given he makes so many more heads explode.

I do want to hear more about this existential crises that our country is supposedly facing. This should be good.

I think I do understand how folks think he is a threat to democracy. For example, he shitposts about #FakeNews and folks think that is going to somehow shutdown the free press. "OMG! Did you see what Drumpf said about WaPo?!? He can't say that!" Or he complains about the dipshit judges in the 9th circuit. "OMG! Drumpf can't say that about a federal judge!" Or he tweets about a dumbass reporter. "OMG! Drumpf can't state his opinion! He hurt that poor reporter's feelings!" Stop being snowflakes you snowflakes.

[Uncle Ted]

Ha, no worries there. The democrats love tax breaks for the rich as much as republicans.


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Yeah, and apparently they love to screw the middle class as well.

[Walter Sobchak]

I do want to hear more about this existential crises that our country is supposedly facing. This should be good.

Strange that President Trump is ending democracy but we can somehow just vote no on that and it’s over.

[Uncle Ted]

It seems folks are figuring out that Dems are all talk and just full of bullsh*t...

How Chaos in Kenosha Is Already Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin
As residents see fires and looting, some worry that local Democratic leaders are failing to keep control of the situation.

John Geraghty, a 41-year-old worker in a tractor factory, has barely paid attention to the presidential race or the conventions. Every day he focuses on survival: getting his son to sports practice, working at his job where he now wears a mask, and getting home to sleep, only to start over again the next day.
But when he woke up on Monday morning to images of his hometown, Kenosha, Wis., in flames, he could not stop watching. The unrest in faraway places like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis had arrived at his doorstep, after a white police officer on Sunday shot a Black man in the back multiple times. And after feeling “100 percent on the fence” about who he will vote for in November, he is increasingly nervous that Democratic state leaders seem unable to contain the spiraling crisis.
“It’s crazy that it’s now happening in my home city,” he said. “We have to have a serious conversation about what are we going to do about it. It doesn’t seem like the powers that be want to do much.”
[...]

Mr. Geraghty, a former Marine, said he was disturbed to see his town looking like “a war zone,” and he feared that the Democrats in charge were “letting people down big time.”
Politics for him had long been like a sport he did not follow. In his late 20s, he voted for Barack Obama, the first vote of his life. He did not vote in 2016, and he called the president’s handling of the coronavirus “laughable.”
Mr. Geraghty said he disliked how Mr. Trump talked but said the Democratic Party’s vision for governing seemed limited to attacking him and calling him a racist, a charge being leveled so constantly that it was having the effect of alienating, instead of persuading, people. And the idea that Democrats alone were morally pure on race annoyed him.
“The Democratic agenda to me right now is America is systematically racist and evil and the only people who can fix it are Democrats,” he said. “That’s the vibe I get.”
[...]
“I’m not 100 percent sure of anything yet,” Mr. Geraghty said of November. “But as of now I’m really not happy about how Democrats are handling any of this.”
[...]
Mr. Haight, 59, said he was a “lifelong Democrat” but had decided not to vote this year.
“It’s not worth it,” he said. “One’s as bad as the other.”
Priscella Gazza, a waitress at a pizza restaurant in Kenosha, was having the opposite reaction. She said she had voted only once in her life — for Mr. Obama in 2008. Her son has Type 1 diabetes and was hoping for health insurance.
“I’m not the one who would ever vote,” she said.
But after the chaos in her town, this year is different.
“I am going to vote for Trump,” she said. “He seems to be more about the American people and what we need.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/u...sin-trump.html

Maybe Joe should go to Kenosha and talk to these people.

[PaloAltoCougar]

Maybe someone should let California know that their lockdowns and mask mandates didn't really make much of a difference... From the AIER (American Institute for Economic Research)....

That's an interesting study and it would be nice if it proves to be accurate. But the conclusions are qualified (they conflict with several other studies) and require further scrutiny.

[Uncle Ted]

That's an interesting study and it would be nice if it proves to be accurate. But the conclusions are qualified (they conflict with several other studies) and require further scrutiny.

Yes, and Dr. Fauci would be right with his original recommendation...

[Commando]

That's an interesting study and it would be nice if it proves to be accurate. But the conclusions are qualified (they conflict with several other studies) and require further scrutiny.

I would be surprised since every other place that has effectively dealt with covid would now have to provide a different explanation of how they did it other than the one course they took, which was that of lockdowns and mask mandates.

[Moliere]

Wait, do people still think the full lock downs were a good idea? There’s a huge body of evidence that they did much more harm than good and that simple things like social distancing and targeted lockdowns on superspreader events/places like sporting events and bars is much more effective.


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[Uncle Ted]

LOL... Nancy Pelosi is now pushing for no debates: https://streamable.com/meo5ij Keep Joe locked in the basement!

[Eddie]

Wait, do people still think the full lock downs were a good idea? There’s a huge body of evidence that they did much more harm than good and that simple things like social distancing and targeted lockdowns on superspreader events/places like sporting events and bars is much more effective.


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I don't know about the general consensus - but a past co-worker who now works for a local public policy liberal think tank just issued a White Paper on COVID in Utah. When I asked for the reader's digest version, one of his lamentations was that Utah had "squandered the political capital needed for a shutdown."

So - I'm going to go with yes. Some people think they are a good idea and should still be happening.

For perspective - this is the same guy who thought that all state roads and freeways should be shut down every time there is a red burn day in Utah too. Keep people home from work for a day, and the inversion will go away - was his theory.