Donald J. Trump (For everyone else except Victor)

You watch it? Did you notice that the birthright thing he counted as authoritarian? Yeah the court stopped it for nowt, but that doesn't mean Trump wasn't trying to be a dictator. It doesn't mean Trump or any of the trumpy people have any respect for the constitution.

I think this proposal, which Trump proposed and Kamala parroted, is misguided. But the problem you are identifying may not be a problem, and if it is, there is an easy fix.

I suspect that a tip would be defined as an additional payment that does not have to be made in order to receive the service. In other words, if you decline to tip in a restaurant, you will not be arrested for theft of services. I doubt that independent contractors/small business owners would want to operate on that model But if someone was concerned about this problem, then it would be easy to limit the exemption to tipping in certain hospitality sectors.

Fewer employees at the IRS means fewer audits. which is why Biden bragged a lot about hiring many more.

Fewer employees at every regulatory agency means more time to write new additional rules, less ability to enforce existing rules.

Fewer employees in the DOJ means trying fewer cases.

And so on and on: fewer employees mean less real world impact of the existence of government in the lives of residents of the country, ie reduced scope, size and actual power of the federal government.

It's kinda incredible you want to deny that reducing the federal workforce is a direct way to reduce the size, scope and power of the federal government.

I agree. Luciom's belief that reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy inevitably diminishes the power of the federal government can only be described as childlike.

In any case, it certainly doesn't reduce the power of the president. Trump isn't taking these steps because he wants to save money or increase our personal freedom. Trump believes, probably correctly, that many career government employees are an impediment to his personal authority. He wants to remove as many of those impediments as possible.

"empathy hacking"

Is this the new "virtue signaling"? I loved that one. Conservatives are out here proudly demonstrating their pathological lack of empathy and basic humanity in general.

Like, in an exchange between microbet and Luciom, microbet is not "signaling" his "virtue" or other personal characteristics to anybody, he's just flatly a more virtuous person than Luciom and it naturally shines through in his posts.

Libs and the left get banned all the time. I've been banned countless times. I have also been insulted in every possible way and my opponents don't receive bans. We just whine about it less than you types do.

Learning via Wall Street Journal editorials (which heavily lean to the right)! I'm shocked that you would read one editorial and immediately advocate in favor of shutting down a government program! Not an ideologue at all, no sir, just some poor contrarian searching for the truth...

Inso is a George W. Bush-style Republican reactionary and racist. He's also, and check this out... A CREATIONIST!

Just stop the mealy-mouthed stuff and put on your MAGA hat.

I get it's a joke, but you calling a hardcore Communism hater and basic lib d2_e4 "Soviet" has launched my lawn mower high in the sky.

This is just wrong on its face. A dozen IRS employees could send out more audits than a team of 100, depending on how the organization is managed. The # of IRS personnel does not change the scope of the IRS's authority.

I love it that Rococo called Luciom's reasoning ability childlike at almost the exact same moment that Luciom posted a page of the most base-level toddler like reasoning ever.

Watched that clip. I'd forgotten how awesome Jon Stewart is. Loved the bit on Dr. Phil.

I disagree with him, though. The chipping away within our system will slowly erode that same system and I have no doubt there's plenty in the works outside that system as well.

TIL that there are people who believe that if you hire 10 times more employees to do something, nothing changes and the end result is the same identical outcome as before.

And i get called childish if i believe that firing people necessarily reduces the extent of what an organization can do in practice, vs non firing them.

To be fair, it's hard to maintain a 50 post/day volume without losing quality.

POW! Right in the feels.

Time to eat a Carfentanil-laced Snickers, Mr. Marx. You get annoying when you're awake.

So shutting schools due to COVID, worst thing ever and crime against humanity

Shutting schools on the orange man’s whim, very fine and bigly good

Got it

Lmao, Karl you know I’m always loathe to ban you because you’re on the Crossnerd power ranking, but rules are rules ♥

Many schools where my wife's brother lives (eastern Oklahoma) are closed right now because of the flu.

Luciom never understood that schools have closed their doors due to illness for as long as I can remember.

Stopping to pay for something isn't the same as mandating someone else something , i hope this helps.

btw crime against humanity was to keep them closed when it made absolutely no sense at all to do so, while in the same areas private schools were open, when most if not all other first world countries and reopened long before and so on.

Shutting down the schools in march 2020 for a few weeks wasn't insanity, because it's a normal response to viral diseases, *when they are very dangerous for children*.

Once we understood covid wasn't dangerous for children, it was actually less dangerous than a normal seasonal flu, keeping the schools closed yes, was a fascist abomination.

But, again, in the real (=non leftist) world, denying to pay for something ISN'T taking you something away.

You do not starve people if you refuse to give them free food. You do not force someone to be a homeless, if you don't give him free housing. You do not shut schools down, if you stop funding them with federal money.

THE STATE CAN PAY FOR THEM TO STAY OPEN if the state thinks it's a proper way to spend taxpayers money. Or they can charge parents to stay open.

For 3 days or a week, for diseases that were very dangerous for children.

Never even 1/10 of what democrat teachers union did in some places for covid, a disease that is particularly NOT dangerous to kids.

He doesn't live in America. How would he know this?

Another mistake that Luciom often makes, and just made again, is assuming that children getting infected with covid only affects children. Or that only children are present in schools.

He also seems to think that private schools necessarily make correct decisions for some reason.

This is not an exhaustive list of things Luciom routinely gets wrong. Obviously.

He doesn't know this. But he pretends to. Which is the problem.

During the times you often refer to, that's all that happened with covid. A few days or a week.

Post vaccine release schools weren't closed (actually virtual) any more than absolutely necessary. A week or a few days when spread was massive.

You really and truly need to get it through your skull that this doesn't only affect children. Jfc

My blood starts to boil every time I read someone say some BS like this.

My wife is an educator. To say that there was NO REASON to close schools during a pandemic is the most 20/20 brainless, dehumanizing thing you can say. To begin with... who teaches those kids? Mostly 40+ y/o women, with a large % in their 50's+. To say their lives don't matter at all is beyond insulting.

We didn't know enough about the disease, but everyone pretends like we did. For Gods sake, people were spraying cardboard delivered packages w/ Lysol.

This revisionist history w/ ZERO concern for the people who actually taught these children (who yes, kids were less likely to GET covid, but could still pass it on), is infuriating.

You were making this point while I was typing up my last post.

Ya... my wife and her colleagues basically concluded that our society didn't value their lives. They were PISSED. And I mean, many of them left their profession just because of this issue.

My wife specifically is a bit of a germaphobe and in her 50's. This freaked her the fk out, because people just didn't know enough at the time. And she was being forced back into a classroom petri dish because of it. She wasn't even a classroom teacher (she actually models lessons for teachers, and write curriculum). But because of teachers getting covid, or leaving their profession, she was forced back into the classroom.

It wasn't a pleasant time in our household, let's just put it that way.

The complete list is certainly exhausting.

Yes, exactly. Even if schools had zero adults, those children GO HOME and into their communities and spread it. People like Luciom have ZERO IDEA about how disease spreads and how to control that spread. Literally zero. They also don't care. They only care about using arguments to further their braindead ideologies.