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 Peregrine wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
In a piece of good news, one of those insipid bathroom bills was defeated in Anchorage at the ballot.

What amazes me about that is that it's in Alaska.

See my post about the Ballot Questions in Oklahoma.

We also had a House senate seat flip from Red to Blue, resulting in a lesbian senator winning a seat in a district Trump won by 40 points.

In Oklahoma.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ouze wrote:
What I never understood, beyond why anyone would possibly think those coal mining jobs would ever come back regardless of who wins the presidency, is why coal miners are treated with such reverence, and yet it's socially acceptable to mock fast food workers as losers. For some reason the 18k people in a dying industry garner substantially more respect and political attention than the 3.7 million fast food workers who had the audacity to demand the wage growth americans got shafted out of over the last 2 decades.

Probably because they are not minimum wage jobs. So they are seen as "better".

Of course the reason they are not minimum wage jobs is that they have a long history of actions by unions and labor groups standing up for workers and their safety, which is also seen in other manufacturing industries like steel and automotive.

But the same folks who look at these jobs as the kind of jobs we need more off, are also often the same folks who are against the unions who made those jobs the kind of jobs people want.

 Ouze wrote:
This whole time I thought I was a center-left guy because that's about where my beliefs lay, not because I was too ignorant to know that's actually the level of fascism I am comfortable with.

I think center left would edge more closely to how comfortable you're with the level of Stalinism

 Ouze wrote:
why coal miners are treated with such reverence, and yet it's socially acceptable to mock fast food workers as losers.

Same kind of cultural reason that we’re supposed to worship a guy who drove an army truck in Germany for 3 years but it’s ok to gak all over educators that are bringing up our kids and actually affecting the future of our country.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
This whole time I thought I was a center-left guy because that's about where my beliefs lay, not because I was too ignorant to know that's actually the level of fascism I am comfortable with.

I think center left would edge more closely to how comfortable you're with the level of Stalinism

In my defense, I am too ignorant to understand the distinction

Well, we all have stuff we don't understand.

Rosebuddy wrote:
Thinking you can mix and match from leftist and rightist policy in a technocratic attempt to reconcile two ideologies that are irreconcileable is doomed to fail.

On having your hopeless comprehension fail explained to you, you respond by just ignoring it and going off on one of your standard rants. Don't waste my time with this nonsense.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Steve steveson wrote:
What people need and what they want are two different things. People may need rapid change, but people are generally resistant to change. Unless it is something they can see immediately benefits them personally people generally like change to be slow, or not at all. This does not just apply to politics but to many areas of life.

The primary motivation for a lot of people is fear of loss. Lots of talk about changing this or that sounds to most people like just a bunch of politician talk, they'll either ignore it or only hear the bad bits. This makes any kind of real change incredibly hard, and almost always very unpopular when it happens. Policy that people took to the streets to protest against one decade will be the policy they will take to the streets to protect a decade later.

It's kind of dysfunctional, but it is what it is. And it is why reform tends to be small, incremental changes, typically from the center of political discourse.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ouze wrote:
What I never understood, beyond why anyone would possibly think those coal mining jobs would ever come back regardless of who wins the presidency, is why coal miners are treated with such reverence, and yet it's socially acceptable to mock fast food workers as losers. For some reason the 18k people in a dying industry garner substantially more respect and political attention than the 3.7 million fast food workers who had the audacity to demand the wage growth americans got shafted out of over the last 2 decades.

More than 350,000 people work in solar energy. Coal and oil combined had less than half of that. But as you say those coal jobs are seen as essential, and so important to the nation, somehow or other.

I read an interesting bit about fast food work a while ago. It made the point that people deam of the old manufactuing jobs and want them to return. But the assembly line worker was doing nothing that different to the fast food worker assembling a burger. And for a lot of history the assembly line worker was just as poorly paid and looked down upon as the fast food worker is today. It's just that over time the assembly worker unionised, and won better pay and better respect for his work. I'm not much of a union guy but that argument made an impact on me.

 Ouze wrote:
This whole time I thought I was a center-left guy because that's about where my beliefs lay, not because I was too ignorant to know that's actually the level of fascism I am comfortable with.

You're one hard hit on the head away from being an enter-centrist in relaxed-fit-waist fascism with fuzzy fascist slippers.

 d-usa wrote:

 Steve steveson wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 sebster wrote:
So start again, this time don't worry about kicking off on one of your boilerplate rants. Instead just think through the issue with no thought about what you'll post, just do it so you can get some understanding of what's going on. Start with an appreciation that a lot of people, arguably a large political majority, actually prefer moderate reform, for change to be slow and upheaval to be minimised. From there, you should be able to realise that centrism exists not just as political expedience used by some, but because it represents the default assumption of a very large portion of the electorate.

The great mass of people in the US are not ideologically devoted centrists, they just lack political education. That isn't to say that they are stupid and that they lack some kind of class consciousness or that they can't see that the two parties offered are uninterested in solving real problems. It just means that they're open to, say, decades of capitalist propaganda saying that the two existing parties are the absolute poles of real political thought. Never mind that growing amounts of people need rapid change to be able to survive. There's nothing inherently good about doing something slowly. Ask the peoople in Flint how long they want to wait for water that isn't poison.

What people need and what they want are two different things. People may need rapid change, but people are generally resistant to change. Unless it is something they can see immediately benefits them personally people generally like change to be slow, or not at all. This does not just apply to politics but to many areas of life.

This is something that was very visible during the last election, and something that is still visible as well. Take coal as an example:

The reality is that coal jobs have been hit by a large variety of factors: automation, cheap natural gas, global regulations on emissions. Even if we get an administration that is anti-regulation, every business in the United States knows that administrations alternate back and forth and that regulations will come and go. So the majority of corporations will continue to do business as if regulations still exist, because it's cheaper than pretending that they will never return and then struggle with compliance every time the administration changes.

One candidate acknowledged that those jobs are gone, and offered policies that allow workers to be retrained in other fields in order to gain employment and have careers, and policies that support workers that are unable to work.

One candidate acknowledged that those jobs are gone, stated that they can somehow force those businesses to ignore the fact that their competition is cheaper, and somehow bring jobs that have been gone for a decade back to rural communities. That candidate also ran with the support of the political party in favor of abandoning the safety nets that protect the workers hurt by coal jobs that are never coming back.

The "I don't want to learn a new skill, I want my old job back and pretend the global economic changes that caused these jobs to leave never happened to begin with" crowd was the winner.

The areas in question were already promised retraining programs under prior administrations that fell woefully short.

And honestly she hadn’t even tried to market it to those areas either, most of her campaigning was to run up the scoreboard in areas she was already winning.

Granted, the odds of anything passing in the current Congress was already nil.

Day #6 of the Oklahoma Teacher Walkout.

Our governor, some state legislators, and some gubernatorial candidates spend most of the weekend talking about how the teachers are loosing the support of the public,how they need to accept that there will be no more funding, that the budget is done, and that the capital gains tax exemption will not be touched.

Over the weekend, poll after poll showed a strong support for the walkout. Our conservative state paper ran a poll that showed an over 80% support for the walkout to continue. A group of teachers and supporters have marched from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. The crowd at the capitol is bigger than it has been last week. My wife is down there and says the energy seems to be stronger than last week.

So there doesn't seem to be an end in sight, and the legislature is currently at the unpopular end of public opinion.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

nobody wrote:

The areas in question were already promised retraining programs under prior administrations that fell woefully short.

History:

Trade Adjustment Assistance consists of four programs authorized under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and defined further under the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. § 2341 et seq) (Trade Act). The original idea for a trade compensation program goes back to 1939.[1] Later, it was proposed by President John F. Kennedy as part of the total package to open up free trade. President Kennedy said: "When considerations of national policy make it desirable to avoid higher tariffs, those injured by that competition should not be required to bear the full brunt of the impact. Rather, the burden of economic adjustment should be borne in part by the Federal Government.
...
The TAA has recently suffered several amendments. In 2009, the TAA program was expanded by the Trade and Globalization Adjustment Assistance Act (TGAAA) of 2009, which was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. These benefits were extended through February 2011 by the Omnibus Trade Act of 2010. After that, the program reverted to the pre-expansion provisions under the TAARA of 2002. In October 2011, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Extension Act (TAAEA) of 2011 was signed into law, reinstating most of the benefits included in the TGAAA of 2009. The TAA is authorized through December 31, 2014 but with some modifications. The TAA will operate under its current provisions through December 31, 2013. For the additional year until its expiration on December 31, 2014, the TAA is set to operate under the eligibility and benefit levels established by the TAARA of 2002.

So...

A) The administration can only do so much with a program that needs authorization and funding from congress.
B) One can look at what party is in favor of this particular program, and which party isn't.

And if we say that this particular program isn't very effective, do we then not propose any other program? Or should we abandon retraining programs completely?

 d-usa wrote:

 Steve steveson wrote:

Rosebuddy wrote:

 sebster wrote:
So start again, this time don't worry about kicking off on one of your boilerplate rants. Instead just think through the issue with no thought about what you'll post, just do it so you can get some understanding of what's going on. Start with an appreciation that a lot of people, arguably a large political majority, actually prefer moderate reform, for change to be slow and upheaval to be minimised. From there, you should be able to realise that centrism exists not just as political expedience used by some, but because it represents the default assumption of a very large portion of the electorate.

The great mass of people in the US are not ideologically devoted centrists, they just lack political education. That isn't to say that they are stupid and that they lack some kind of class consciousness or that they can't see that the two parties offered are uninterested in solving real problems. It just means that they're open to, say, decades of capitalist propaganda saying that the two existing parties are the absolute poles of real political thought. Never mind that growing amounts of people need rapid change to be able to survive. There's nothing inherently good about doing something slowly. Ask the peoople in Flint how long they want to wait for water that isn't poison.

What people need and what they want are two different things. People may need rapid change, but people are generally resistant to change. Unless it is something they can see immediately benefits them personally people generally like change to be slow, or not at all. This does not just apply to politics but to many areas of life.

This is something that was very visible during the last election, and something that is still visible as well. Take coal as an example:

The reality is that coal jobs have been hit by a large variety of factors: automation, cheap natural gas, global regulations on emissions. Even if we get an administration that is anti-regulation, every business in the United States knows that administrations alternate back and forth and that regulations will come and go. So the majority of corporations will continue to do business as if regulations still exist, because it's cheaper than pretending that they will never return and then struggle with compliance every time the administration changes.

One candidate acknowledged that those jobs are gone, and offered policies that allow workers to be retrained in other fields in order to gain employment and have careers, and policies that support workers that are unable to work.

One candidate acknowledged that those jobs are gone, stated that they can somehow force those businesses to ignore the fact that their competition is cheaper, and somehow bring jobs that have been gone for a decade back to rural communities. That candidate also ran with the support of the political party in favor of abandoning the safety nets that protect the workers hurt by coal jobs that are never coming back.

The "I don't want to learn a new skill, I want my old job back and pretend the global economic changes that caused these jobs to leave never happened to begin with" crowd was the winner.

Those workers won't be retrained. That's politician nonsense. When older workers lose their jobs, they almost never get something comparable.

And sometimes, jobs just go away and never come back.

Is it the government's job to make sure you always got your union job available to you?

 d-usa wrote:
And sometimes, jobs just go away and never come back.

Is it the government's job to make sure you always got your union job available to you?

It is if enough voters say it is.

 Frazzled wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
And sometimes, jobs just go away and never come back.

Is it the government's job to make sure you always got your union job available to you?

It is if enough voters say it is.

We'll just avoid going down the rabbit hole of guns then

Edit:

And even if it is the government's job to make sure you always have your coal job, how is that supposed to happen?

Should the government slap a "coal equalization fee" on all Natural Gas, until it is no longer cheaper than coal?

Should the government pass a constitutional amendment against all future environmental regulations to ensure that no law affecting coal will ever get passed?

Because even in the age of Trump and Pruitt, no utilities are going to invest in coal as long as natural gas is cheaper and because they know that as soon as there is a shift in the political winds the new plants will need expensive upgrades to become compliant. Unlike politicians, most companies KNOW that climate change is real and that these regulations will be coming down the pipe at some point. So they will always build today with future compliance in mind.

 d-usa wrote:
And sometimes, jobs just go away and never come back.

Is it the government's job to make sure you always got your union job available to you?

The irony of people asking for the government to intrude less on their lives while rigging the economy so they get their jobs back.

I forget the exact wording but Seb once said something that I think is really accurate: "A large number of Americans would rather fight to get back jobs that are already gone then fight to improve the jobs they already have."

Answer the question. What do all those displaced workers do?

 Frazzled wrote:
Answer the question. What do all those displaced workers do?

You are implying that they are shift less and good for nothings who can't reinvent themselves and doomed to a jobless feature here fraz

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
And sometimes, jobs just go away and never come back.

Is it the government's job to make sure you always got your union job available to you?

The irony of people asking for the government to intrude less on their lives while rigging the economy so they get their jobs back.

I forget the exact wording but Seb once said something that I think is really accurate: "A large number of Americans would rather fight to get back jobs that are already gone then fight to improve the jobs they already have."

By and large, we have become firmly entrenched in our own "bootstrap" ethos:

Handouts and government assistance programs are for poor people, who are to lazy to work and who would rather abuse the welfare system than earn a living themselves. We don't need this kind of help because we are not poor, we are all just future small business owners who will be independently wealthy and self-sustaining as soon as we just pull on those bootstraps a little harder.

Hell, my in-laws are the perfect example of this mindset: 4 different sets of grandchildren would be at my mother-in-laws house for her to babysit. My mother-in-law got her house approved as an in-home childcare, and the government would pay her the going rate for daycare in order to babysit her own grandkids. For the July 4th holiday the families would pool together their SNAP cards to buy the food for the cookout with friends and extended family invited. A couple people collect social security for disability, and then a couple more would collect unemployment at any given point in time. All of them spend every opportunity to bitch about liberal welfare programs and how we need more conservatives to kick those welfare queens to the curb and stop this mooching at the government's tit.

So go figure crap like that out.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Frazzled wrote:
Answer the question. What do all those displaced workers do?

Well, some of them are old and will need earlier retirement. Some of them might need their income subsidized because other jobs without a union history pay less than what they are used to.

Some of them might decide to move somewhere where their skill is still useful and needed.

Some of them might have to go back to school and get new training.

And some of them will go "feth every other worker who isn't me, I want mine" and vote for policies that hurt the country as a whole and go against their own interest.

Then they watch Roseanne.

 Ustrello wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Answer the question. What do all those displaced workers do?

You are implying that they are shift less and good for nothings who can't reinvent themselves and doomed to a jobless feature here fraz

Given that many of those area's that coal was in don't have exactly much in the way of jobs or job availability.. What are those displaced workers going to do?

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

 Ustrello wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Answer the question. What do all those displaced workers do?

You are implying that they are shift less and good for nothings who can't reinvent themselves and doomed to a jobless feature here fraz

Given that many of those area's that coal was in don't have exactly much in the way of jobs or job availability.. What are those displaced workers going to do?

Do what every other person in the United States who has a skill that isn't in particular demand in that geographical area is expected to do:

Either get a job that is something different, get a different skill, and/or move to an area where your skill is needed.

Right then! Having lived in one of those towns for a while I can certainly mention the issues with such.

A different job: Many jobs in those sorts of towns tend to end up being service level jobs either working in a gas station, Walmart sort of supercenter or local variety, or a variety of other local area's that are trying to get by either as a craftsman. The issue with the last bit is that in many such towns there's already major competition with those that are already established and many times there's not much point in going further out with it.

Different skill: Same as the first, you can get all you want but most of the time you'll be getting low level jobs regardless of how good a degree and education you may have. If you are lucky you may be able to get an apprenticeship at a local shop for something major but in most cases you'll be out of luck

Moving: You already live in an area where you are struggling to make funds meet.. The issue is now you have to make money and somehow achieve enough to exit out and still have funds to move along with money to buy/rent in another city and have enough that you can potentially find a job in an area before your fund runs out and you end up on the streets.

At it's core many of these towns practically rely on people helping each other because there's really not much else. There's no people coming in and there's no jobs coming in to help refresh the population but you don't tend to have the money to be able to relocate either. So you're stuck in said dead end area just hoping that something will come along. You can say "Get a job elsewhere" but the reality is there's many barriers to achieving such.

 Ustrello wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Answer the question. What do all those displaced workers do?

You are implying that they are shift less and good for nothings who can't reinvent themselves and doomed to a jobless feature here fraz

Being someone doing that right now, I can safely say you missed the point. It's not that they can't try.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

At it's core many of these towns practically rely on people helping each other because there's really not much else. There's no people coming in and there's no jobs coming in to help refresh the population but you don't tend to have the money to be able to relocate either. So you're stuck in said dead end area just hoping that something will come along. You can say "Get a job elsewhere" but the reality is there's many barriers to achieving such.

So you can vote for policies that pretend that none of that is a problem and that we can magically make those jobs reappear.

Or you can vote for policies that acknowledge everything you said and offer assistance with training, offer assistance with relocation, and/or offer policies to encourage communities and businesses to work together and diversify the economies in that city.

Oklahoma City is a giant town, so it's by no means fair to compare it to many of the rural communities that are struggling out there, but we learned that lesson and applied it.

During the O&G crash in the 1980s, Oklahoma City (and really Oklahoma as a whole) was hit hard. The city crashed along with the oil companies, and it took the city decades to recover. While the city recovered, they started to actively recruit other businesses and companies in sectors far removed from O&G. Energy is still big business in Oklahoma City, but now also have an active finance sector, health sector, manufacturing, actively helping Tinker Air Force base grow to help it survive alignment after alignment. As a result, we really did very well during the last oil crash (and the recession as a whole before then) and our unemployment rates were well below national averages.

 d-usa wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

nobody wrote:

The areas in question were already promised retraining programs under prior administrations that fell woefully short.

History:

Trade Adjustment Assistance consists of four programs authorized under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and defined further under the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. § 2341 et seq) (Trade Act). The original idea for a trade compensation program goes back to 1939.[1] Later, it was proposed by President John F. Kennedy as part of the total package to open up free trade. President Kennedy said: "When considerations of national policy make it desirable to avoid higher tariffs, those injured by that competition should not be required to bear the full brunt of the impact. Rather, the burden of economic adjustment should be borne in part by the Federal Government.
...
The TAA has recently suffered several amendments. In 2009, the TAA program was expanded by the Trade and Globalization Adjustment Assistance Act (TGAAA) of 2009, which was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. These benefits were extended through February 2011 by the Omnibus Trade Act of 2010. After that, the program reverted to the pre-expansion provisions under the TAARA of 2002. In October 2011, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Extension Act (TAAEA) of 2011 was signed into law, reinstating most of the benefits included in the TGAAA of 2009. The TAA is authorized through December 31, 2014 but with some modifications. The TAA will operate under its current provisions through December 31, 2013. For the additional year until its expiration on December 31, 2014, the TAA is set to operate under the eligibility and benefit levels established by the TAARA of 2002.

So...

A) The administration can only do so much with a program that needs authorization and funding from congress.
B) One can look at what party is in favor of this particular program, and which party isn't.

And if we say that this particular program isn't very effective, do we then not propose any other program? Or should we abandon retraining programs completely?

To clarify my position, and when you have a candidate stating “oh, we’ll just retrain you and then everybody can have a well paying job,” It shouldn’t be a surprise that her message gets rejected in an area that was already promised this multiple times (including under the candiate’s spouse’s administration) when no concrete plan is sold to the voters in question.

And honestly I agree, Republicans would have torpedoed any bill that was submitted that’d actually help. Given how poorly Democrats do at messaging I’d expect that even if she had won and tried to enact the plan, the failure would have been bad enough where any remaining blues in those areas would have been replaced by red in the midterms.

Agreed on all points.

 d-usa wrote:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

At it's core many of these towns practically rely on people helping each other because there's really not much else. There's no people coming in and there's no jobs coming in to help refresh the population but you don't tend to have the money to be able to relocate either. So you're stuck in said dead end area just hoping that something will come along. You can say "Get a job elsewhere" but the reality is there's many barriers to achieving such.

So you can vote for policies that pretend that none of that is a problem and that we can magically make those jobs reappear.

Or you can vote for policies that acknowledge everything you said and offer assistance with training, offer assistance with relocation, and/or offer policies to encourage communities and businesses to work together and diversify the economies in that city.

Oklahoma City is a giant town, so it's by no means fair to compare it to many of the rural communities that are struggling out there, but we learned that lesson and applied it.

During the O&G crash in the 1980s, Oklahoma City (and really Oklahoma as a whole) was hit hard. The city crashed along with the oil companies, and it took the city decades to recover. While the city recovered, they started to actively recruit other businesses and companies in sectors far removed from O&G. Energy is still big business in Oklahoma City, but now also have an active finance sector, health sector, manufacturing, actively helping Tinker Air Force base grow to help it survive alignment after alignment. As a result, we really did very well during the last oil crash (and the recession as a whole before then) and our unemployment rates were well below national averages.

Having actually seen some of those programs it's a mixed bag.. You get some that are actually well enough off but provide only jobs that tend to be outside the town to begin with.. But at the same they have a very specific number of people they can do this with and honestly they don't help the issues of the town in general.. At the rate most of these tend to work you might as well start figuring out how to dismantle the town and get everyone elsewhere.

The others I've seen are preparing you to work at Wal-Mart which isn't.. exactly something anyone wants to end up for. And given the size of many of those small rural towns they really cannot go the way of Oklahoma city because they honestly don't have anything comparable to the size and/or infrastructure already in place. So while that's an interesting anecdote, it doesn't apply to places that quite literally survived and thrived only because of one specific industry with no other massive infrastructure.

It doesn't help that many policies on the matter of retraining and relocation have been promised and failed on other accounts that I've seen.

nobody wrote:

To clarify my position, and when you have a candidate stating “oh, we’ll just retrain you and then everybody can have a well paying job,” It shouldn’t be a surprise that her message gets rejected in an area that was already promised this multiple times (including under the candiate’s spouse’s administration) when no concrete plan is sold to the voters in question.

And honestly I agree, Republicans would have torpedoed any bill that was submitted that’d actually help. Given how poorly Democrats do at messaging I’d expect that even if she had won and tried to enact the plan, the failure would have been bad enough where any remaining blues in those areas would have been replaced by red in the midterms.

One of the sad realities in politics is that we expect our candidates to have big elaborate plans with all kinds of fleshed out details to fix all these problems, but also fail to acknowledge that it's really not their job to come up with all those details and that they will likely never be able to actually do even a fraction of what they said they would do.

Realistically, "we will help workers affected by the changing economy and loss of certain sectors of our industry" is probably as detailed of a plan as we should honestly expect, same as "we will make those jobs come back". There is no way any POTUS is going to get more in depth than that, because any plan will have to come up through a highly-partisan legislative environment and be something that can be stomached by all 50 states before it ever gets to the executive branch where it can be finished and put into practice.

We want actual "plans" and details from our candidates, but we should all know that it's never going to happen under our current political system. If we had a parliamentary system we could have a unified message of "vote for Blue/Red Party, and we will push Plan X, and President Blue/Red will enact our plan we pass". But we don't have that system and with our separation of powers each branch has their own agenda even if they share colors. So even if the agree on a basic plan, the details will be all over the place.

I've been lucky enough that I've never been unemployed throughout my adult life. I'd like to think though, if I was, that I'd not vote for a comforting lie over a hard reality.

Today in the news, I heard that some French people born in the United States of America have to pay their taxes to the USA, even if they never even worked there. They went in France 50 years ago, and have to pay taxes.
I am curious to know more about that. You have to pay your taxes even abroad ? That seems to be a great idea to avoid tax optimization

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Having actually seen some of those programs it's a mixed bag.. You get some that are actually well enough off but provide only jobs that tend to be outside the town to begin with.. But at the same they have a very specific number of people they can do this with and honestly they don't help the issues of the town in general.. At the rate most of these tend to work you might as well start figuring out how to dismantle the town and get everyone elsewhere.

The others I've seen are preparing you to work at Wal-Mart which isn't.. exactly something anyone wants to end up for. And given the size of many of those small rural towns they really cannot go the way of Oklahoma city because they honestly don't have anything comparable to the size and/or infrastructure already in place. So while that's an interesting anecdote, it doesn't apply to places that quite literally survived and thrived only because of one specific industry with no other massive infrastructure.

It doesn't help that many policies on the matter of retraining and relocation have been promised and failed on other accounts that I've seen.

Yeah, Oklahoma City is huge and is very lucky to have done such a good job. It really is a different story for towns where quite frequently the jobs showed up first, and then the town developed around that industry to support it before the industry went away.

And the truth is, sometimes it would probably be better for everyone involved to just take that town out behind the barn and shoot it and get everybody to move on and call it a day.

But really, what politician is going to run on that platform? I'm not pretending it's a plan that I like either, people have spend their entire lives in those towns. There is a certain pride to be the Xth generation of your family in this place. There is a certain pride to be the Xth generation [industry] worker in your family, doing the job that your father did, and your grandfather, and your uncles, and your brothers. My family has a strong history of working in corrections, and I can tell you that my father had a certain pride in his voice when I transferred to the prison system. Almost my entire family has also served in uniform, and it meant a lot to my father when I commissioned and it means a lot to me to be one more person who will represent my family and our history every time I put on that uniform.

Towns like that, and jobs like that, are about more than just the economy, and numbers, and training programs, and helping people move away. There is history attached to those jobs and those towns. Families have their entire identity attached to doing that particular job, in that particular industry, in that particular town.

But that doesn't change the reality that these jobs are gone, and they won't be coming back, and that those towns are dying a slow and painful death and that there is nothing we can do to save them. But even if we can't save them, we can acknowledge the painful process for all those involved rather than just focusing on the clinical sterile process of proposing programs to help them. Even if you have good intention, it's easy to speak in a way that takes what little dignity people feel away.




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 godardc wrote:
Today in the news, I heard that some French people born in the United States of America have to pay their taxes to the USA, even if they never even worked there. They went in France 50 years ago, and have to pay taxes.
I am curious to know more about that. You have to pay your taxes even abroad ? That seems to be a great idea to avoid tax optimization

Yeah, dual citizens have to pay in both countries. There are exemptions to income amounts and stuff like that, and I don't know the details. My brother lives in Germany and has to file in the US every year and pays $0.

Even if you have good intention, it's easy to speak in a way that takes what little dignity people feel away.

I agree with much of what you said there but this is the biggest thing I've seen.. You kept saying "They vote for policies that end up hurting them" simply because they are getting promised something that sounds nice without being insulting

When I've seen the democrats speak of these area's it's always in that same elitist tone with that same constant insult of being nothing of worth except to fly over to the more "progressive and better cities". Insulting them and their way of life and with such a derisive tone (that's constantly been sprinkled throughout this thread as well) that it makes it hard to swallow anything. It doesn't help that many policies from them seem to have failed to account for them as well. When all you hear from this party is constant derision and the only reason they seem to want to help you is out of misplaced pity.. Why would you want to take that?

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Right then! Having lived in one of those towns for a while I can certainly mention the issues with such.

A different job: Many jobs in those sorts of towns tend to end up being service level jobs either working in a gas station, Walmart sort of supercenter or local variety, or a variety of other local area's that are trying to get by either as a craftsman. The issue with the last bit is that in many such towns there's already major competition with those that are already established and many times there's not much point in going further out with it.

Different skill: Same as the first, you can get all you want but most of the time you'll be getting low level jobs regardless of how good a degree and education you may have. If you are lucky you may be able to get an apprenticeship at a local shop for something major but in most cases you'll be out of luck

Moving: You already live in an area where you are struggling to make funds meet.. The issue is now you have to make money and somehow achieve enough to exit out and still have funds to move along with money to buy/rent in another city and have enough that you can potentially find a job in an area before your fund runs out and you end up on the streets.

At it's core many of these towns practically rely on people helping each other because there's really not much else. There's no people coming in and there's no jobs coming in to help refresh the population but you don't tend to have the money to be able to relocate either. So you're stuck in said dead end area just hoping that something will come along. You can say "Get a job elsewhere" but the reality is there's many barriers to achieving such.

Guess they're screwed then. Because all of those things you shot down can all potentially work, trying to bring back obselete jobs certainly won't. Which raises the question of if people like you even want things to work out or would rather make excuses for people mooching off welfare.


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 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

Even if you have good intention, it's easy to speak in a way that takes what little dignity people feel away.

I agree with much of what you said there but this is the biggest thing I've seen.. You kept saying "They vote for policies that end up hurting them" simply because they are getting promised something that sounds nice without being insulting

When I've seen the democrats speak of these area's it's always in that same elitist tone with that same constant insult of being nothing of worth except to fly over to the more "progressive and better cities". Insulting them and their way of life and with such a derisive tone (that's constantly been sprinkled throughout this thread as well) that it makes it hard to swallow anything. It doesn't help that many policies from them seem to have failed to account for them as well. When all you hear from this party is constant derision and the only reason they seem to want to help you is out of misplaced pity.. Why would you want to take that?

This is entirely accurate. HRC isn't disliked because of her policies, it's because she's an arrogant, toxic person who looks down on those she's trying to help. Evidence says she would do a good job because she is reasonably skilled at government but we are left with the sense she is doing it to 'win' by proving how good a job she can do as opposed to any genuine care for the American people. And I don't blame anyone for disliking her because of that. But I still think a vote against Hillary was idiocy because Trump is those negative qualities magnified plus being massively incompetent plus being mentally disabled.