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Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by chrisco255 on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:30PM (#18667468)
The job market might have been terrible 5 years ago, but this is not the case today. 3.7% unemployment in the U.S. Lowest since 1969.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by PeanutNore on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:50PM (#18667629)
The US is a big place, and there's plenty of localities within it where that 3.7% figure might as well be in a foreign country.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by divyahansg on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @05:38PM (#18668353)
Yes, but US labor force participation rate is 63%. Down 3% from 2007 and the lowest since 1977.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:33PM (#18667493)
It's kind of funny that most of the people that recognized that the headline unemployment number wasn't a complete picture of the job market when Obama was President have somehow forgotten that since late January of 2017.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by shittyadmin on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:40PM (#18667550)
Even if you look at those number they seem to be improving or relatively stable. Like it or not, the job market is getting better.

EDIT: I don't mean to say that's due or not due to anyone being in or out of office, you can observe those market trends dating back several years at least. Interest rate increases may put a setback on this growth going forward though, definitely something to watch.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by api on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:35PM (#18667504)
Every time the ruling party switches, followers of both parties warp into parallel universes with entirely different realities. Same thing happens for Democrats and their opinions of foreign military adventures. It's an unnecessary war when a Republican is in office, but it's a "peacekeeping mission" or a "humanitarian mission" when a Democrat is in office.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by digitaltrees on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:51PM (#18667646)
No they don't. You are just presenting false equivalence while ignoring the magnitude of the reality distortion field that republicans push with no close equivalent from democrats.

- Name a 10 year war democrats have championed... - Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided... - Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming (and before you say anti-vaxxers, that is not a mainstream democrat policy like Global Warming denial is...again, no false equivalence please)... - Name a democrat zombie policy like "trickle down economics" that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work...

Should I go on?

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by Rebelgecko on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:31PM (#18667924)
> - Name a 10 year war democrats have championed

Every democrat except one voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. To be fair, just because 99.5% of them voted in favor of something doesn't mean they championed it, although Obama did use the AUMF to justify the US's continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. As well as expanding military activities in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Turkey, Libya, Djibouti, etc.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by onething on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:19PM (#18667868)
I don't know if it is helpful to jump into political discussions, but I'll give it a try...

>...- Name a 10 year war democrats have championed...

I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed.

>... Name a democrat that questions the legitimacy of employment numbers or the objectivity of the data being provided...

Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.

>... - Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming

GMOs? Nuclear power?

>...- Name a democrat zombie policy like "trickle down economics" that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work...

No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:

- wasting money to require registration for the draft

- war on drugs

- DARE program

- three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)

Conservatives also support many/all(?) programs, but that just means both sides are wrong.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @06:05PM (#18668502)
> wasting money to require registration for the draft

But... that's a bipartisan thing, not a Democratic thing: no Republican Administration (which could do this alone, as an executive action) or Republican majority Congress has proposed ending registration since Carter reopened it as an executive action to prepare for potential war in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In fact, bipartisan legislation creating a committee to consider expanding the uses of the draft was passed in 2016.

> war on drugs

Again, not a Democratic policy.

> DARE program

Not a Democratic policy (and it works quite well to improve it's targets opinions of law enforcement; it doesn't do anything about drug abuse.)

> three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)

About half of states and the federal government have three strikes laws, and they are not more supported by Democrats than Republicans.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by onething on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @07:08PM (#18668798)
You will notice at the bottom of my posting, I had written:

>Conservatives also support many/all(?) programs, but that just means both sides are wrong.

The fact that conservatives support many or all of these programs doesn't make them good.

The OP had asked to name a democrat zombie policy ... that keeps being proven wrong and yet they insist will work... I don't think it is difficult to do that.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by forapurpose on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:28PM (#18667906)
> the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS?

"Other than the POTUS" seems to brazenly ignore the significance. For example, it would be absurd to ask, 'When Trump took office, what changed from Obama other than the POTUS'?

When Obama took office, the new POTUS' policies aligned to a significant degree with the anti-war protestors. Obama had opposed the Iraq war from the start and promised to withdraw, which he did (though the withdrawal was also required by the agreement Bush made with Iraq). Obama also wanted out of Afghanistan and, after a policy review, set a timeline for it (a criticized decision that was later changed).

> both sides are wrong

This is true "political correctness" (a term that I think is almost always misused). The odds of both sides begin equivalent seem slim; it's not at all unlikely that of two parties, one would be significantly worse than the other. It's sort of like looking at two software programs and saying 'both have bugs'; sure, but that's meaningless - it's not at all surprising when one is much superior to the other.

But people like to be even-handed, out of some misguided (IMHO) view of fairness or not wanting to offend. But the stakes are too high; you wouldn't say that if you were choosing between airplane autopilot programs. In this case, if you make the worse choice then it can result in catastrophic climate change, nuclear proliferation, war, mass oppression, the undermining of democracy and liberty, and more.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by chrisco255 on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:45PM (#18668032)
I wish national politics were as simple and predictable as a computer program, but trying to paint an analogy there is quite troublesome, for the simple reason that there are hundreds, if not thousands of issues that government has to tangle with...and it often is the case that one party has a better approach to certain issues while the other party is better suited to deal with a completely different set of issues.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by forapurpose on Thursday December 13, 2018 @05:44PM (#18676828)
Joseph Stalin was probably better at dealing with some issues than Winston Churchill, but that doesn't make them comparable. It's a false equivalency.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by onething on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:43PM (#18668020)
>...When Obama took office, the new POTUS' policies aligned to a significant degree with the anti-war protestors.

What actually changed? We left Iraq at the timetable Bush proposed and I think Obama wanted to extend it past that but couldn't come to terms with the Iraq government. There was a troop surge in Afghanistan - the thing that was criticized when Bush did it. People have a right to their opinion and the right to protest, but it does appear the anti-war democrats weren't quite as active once the POTUS had a D by the name.

I don't have space to go over the foreign military adventures done by Obama, here is an overview:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/ob...

>...This is true "political correctness"

Not really. The OP asked for politics that didn't work and got consistent support. I listed a few ones that came to mind. I also think these bad polices are also endorsed by conservatives. Rather than attack the idea that people could ever be wrong, why don't you address the policies I brought up and explain why either they are great polices or that democrats don't support them.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by api on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @05:10PM (#18668188)
Yes, that's the sort of stuff I was thinking of. Obama ran on "change" and little changed. We also continued our relentless march toward total surveillance panopticon under Obama, and he did little to nothing to reign in the financial industry.

I do not believe there's a perfect equivalence. Lately the Republicans have been more enthusiastic about denying reality. But there's certainly a sense in which people view politics like a football game and just mindlessly root for their side.

We won't be rid of Trump and his ilk until we stop caring about parties and start caring about ideas.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @05:25PM (#18668267)
> I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office.

IME, The regular anti-war protestors continued the same recurring protests at the same locations during Obama's term that they had been carrying out under Bush (the same ones are, in many cases, still carrying them out under Trump.)

Media focus may have changed, but that's about alignment of the facts with pre-conceived media narratives, not the underlying reality.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by onething on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @09:53PM (#18669527)
Were there protests at Obama's residence, like Bush had when president?

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/politics/mother-takes-pro...

According to wikipedia, there were a couple of anti-war protests after Obama took office, but nothing compared to when Bush was president:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by digitaltrees on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @08:27PM (#18669190)
>... I think the OP might have been referring to the seeming disappearance of the anti-war demonstrations once Obama took office. What changed, other than the POTUS? We ended up leaving Iraq at the same timetable that Bush had proposed.

I recall many democrats complaining about not closing Guantanamo, or leaving Iraq faster. I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.

>... Well the unemployment numbers don't include the long term unemployed who would still like a job, etc so I would assume everyone should look beyond the simple number reported in the press.

I am not talking about the subtlety of the different measures of unemployment and whether we should quote the U6 or U3 numbers when we speak about unemployment. I am talking about large parts of the Republican Party calling all unemployment data fake, rigged, designed to help Obama and all of the other demonstrably false descriptions used to support their agenda. If you want me to dig up some news articles I will, but it was basically how republicans said hello for the last two years of Obama's administration.

>... Name an rejection of scientific consensus like Global Warming

Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.

Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully. Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.

I don't see how these two issues represent a "rejection of the science".

>...No economist has ever proposed a policy called "trickle down economics". The pejorative is simply used by people to attack someone else's economic polices. Using a perjorative is simply an attempt to poison the well and prevent discussion. In terms of policies that don't work. but still get support... A couple that come to mind:

- Umm President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president. It has become pejorative because the policy has never delivered the outcomes it predicted and seems to also be casually linked to a large increase in income inequality. You can question the causal relationship, but when a policy is predicted to have a certain outcome, and seems to have a different, and seemingly negative outcome, it seems expected that it would get a bad popular opinion.

>... - wasting money to require registration for the draft - war on drugs - DARE program - three strikes (voted in CA, a heavy democratic state)

All of these are republican policies, I asked for one example of a zombie policy that democrats keep pushing in the face of overwhelming factual evidence that such policy doesn't work.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by onething on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @09:32PM (#18669451)
>...I don't recall any saying that it should continue and using going to war as a tool for pseudo-patriotic posturing.

It isn't hard to see that opposition to the war dwindled drastically after the president had a D after their name in 2009. Why was that? We only left Iraq at the time proposed by Bush (and even then Obama tried to extend it but couldn't get agreement from the Ira government)

>...Democrats don't reject that it is scientifically possible to genetically modify food, or even that any assertion that is is totally safe is false. Rather, there are three main arguments against GMO: 1. The risk posed to humans is still uncertain and poses an outsized risk, 2. Allowing a company to patent food, along with monopoly rights, is a dangerous social policy, especially when farmers are being sued out of business by GMO crop contamination (even when they take great pains not to use GMO seed), 3. Consumers should at least be notified about the presence of GMO in food so they can make an informed choice.

Right - and the above is a rejection of the scientific consensus.

>...Democrats are not saying nuclear fission is fake, but the severity of an accident makes even a very low risk of an accident a very asymmetric harm that should be weighed carefully.

Even including Chernobyl (which was an unsafe design that would have been illegal to built anywhere other than the Soviet Union), the scientific consensus is that nuclear power has been the safest form of power generation.

The positions of the conservatives on global warming is disgusting, but the refusal to accept the science on things like the above is also bad.

>...Further, we don't have a legitimate storage facility for nuclear waste.

It was a democrat who stopped that. Though next generation reactors will be able to use nuclear waste as fuel, so keeping the spent fuel around above ground might turn out to be the best approach. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

Unfortunately it was a democrat who stopped work on that design.

>...President Bush gave a speech describing his supply side policies as trickle down...

Let me guess, this was at a charity event or the white house corresponds dinner where you are expected to make fun of yourself.

>...that is not me being pejorative, that is, and has been, the common descriptive phrase first suggested by a republican president.

No. The first use of this was by William Jennings Bryan at the 1896 democratic national convention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

>All of these are republican policies,

Well let's see... It was libertarians like Milton Friedman who helped end the draft after the Viet Nam war. The registration for the draft was put back into place by Carter who was a democrat. Influential democrats like Charles Rangel have argued for actually implementing the draft:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/this-democratic-congressm...

A republican tried to insert language to end the registration but failed as democrats pushed to add women to the registration:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06...

Same goes for the rest - as I said in my original message, conservatives support many if not all of the programs I've listed. If you want to argue that democrats don't support "zombie" programs that don't work and waste money, then either show democrats have ended these programs or that these programs are not "zombie" programs.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by themacguffinman on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:48PM (#18667617)
Opinion polling doesn't support your neat "both sides do it" narrative:

> In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians.

> A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.

> The Post-ABC poll indicates somewhat greater consistency on the part of Democrats. Some 37 percent of them back Trump’s strike, compared to a statistically indistinguishable 38 percent who backed a strike in 2013.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by moosey on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:01PM (#18667724)
Nothing that Obama or Clinton did even came close to comparing to the wars started by Bush II. In order to find a comparable mishap on the part of Democratic governance and war you have to go back to Truman, and you won't find me defending the Vietnam War, nor Obama's use of drones.

> Every time the ruling party switches, followers of both parties warp into parallel universes with entirely different realities.

There is plenty of information that shows this to be untrue, especially in this case of warfare that you talk about, example:

> 37 percent of Democrats back Trump’s missile strikes. In 2013, 38 percent of Democrats supported Obama’s plan. That is well within the margin of error.

> In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post–ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians.

> A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/gop-voters-love-same-...

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:05PM (#18667761)
Have to go back to Truman? You seem to have forgotten Vietnam...
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by moosey on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:16PM (#18667847)
For most intents and purposes, that's who started it.

anti-communistic fervor was, and is, a massive boondoggle.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @05:01PM (#18668125)
Truman started Vietnam because of anti-communist fervor? Seriously? That was his fault and not Johnson's (who was actually president at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin)? That's... a pretty strange interpretation of history.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @05:39PM (#18668360)
> Truman started Vietnam because of anti-communist fervor? Seriously? That was his fault and not Johnson's (who was actually president at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin)?

The US was fighting in Vietnam, against VC, before the Gulf of Tonkin. The French fight against the VC from 1950 was paid for by the US and supported by US military advisers and equipment, and the US took over the French military role in 1955 (which is why 1955 is the usual cited start date of the Vietnam War, though even that is arguably late); there was a major escalation in direct US troop involvement in the Vietnam War under President Kennedy.

Johnson didn't start the US involvement in the war in Vietnam, unless you think he was running US foreign policy (including directing the military) out of his Senate office, independent of the White House.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @06:10PM (#18668525)
I didn't know we had advisors there starting in 1950 (under Eisenhower). I was dating from Tonkin. Still, those were (mostly?) advisors rather than front-line troops. Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin, which means under Johnson.

Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @06:52PM (#18668716)
> Still, those were (mostly?) advisors rather than front-line troops.

Initially, but that stopped being true well before Tonkin.

> Per Wikipedia, ground combat troops first came after Tonkin

Not sure which Wikipedia page you got that from but see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Assistance_Command,...

Which discusses, among other things, the 1964 MACV/MAAG-Vietnam reorg due to the scale of combat deployments straining the advisory-oriented command structure, and a similar issue prompting a naval command structure reorg in 1966.

(Those reports were under Johnson, but thet largely addressed strains produced by the ramp up under Kennedy.)

> Still, in no case is it reasonable to say that Truman started it.

Sure, Eisenhower or Kennedy are more reasonable.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @07:01PM (#18668767)
I was at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War, which said:

> By 1964 there were 23,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, but this escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Lyndon B. Johnson authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000.

"Ground combat units for the first time" was the phrase that, to me, said that the US was now there in a full war condition.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by eli_gottlieb on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @10:14PM (#18669602)
>it's a "peacekeeping mission" or a "humanitarian mission" when a Democrat is in office.

Bull-fucking-shit. The Boston Commons tankies were out every Saturday protesting "illegal war" this and "unconstitutional" that through all of Obama's term.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by ArchTypical on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:01PM (#18667725)
Even on HN, you're going to use the intentionally politicized value (people still tracked on unemployment, contractors sometimes, etc): https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

instead of something close to the actual? https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53452

I don't understand how people are still this lazy.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by noja on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:04PM (#18667743)
> I don't understand how people are still this lazy.

You didn't give the value.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by CuriouslyC on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:07PM (#18667781)
Factoring in overall labor force participation, it goes from 3.7 to ~3.8. Saying 3.7 is politicized is pretty hyperbolic.
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by momentmaker on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @03:42PM (#18667566)
Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by chrisco255 on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @04:54PM (#18668075)
I'm well aware of the ability to twist statistics, but the unemployment rate is a decent yard stick for measuring changes in the labor force. And barring some underlying change in methodology for finding the statistic, it shows a trend over time in a positive direction: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

Wage growth is also ticking up: https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx?pan...

Which aligns well with the low unemployment rate.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by sroussey on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @06:08PM (#18668517)
Labor participation rate is a better number to follow. The headline you are quoting assumes you have a job once your unemployment runs out.

Look around any city and see the homeless. It’s been increasing, and not just in SF.

Re:The Sharing Economy Was Dead on Arrival by tryptophan on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @10:21PM (#18669632)
No its not, unless of course you are implying the growing elderly population should be working and the fact that they are not is somehow a problem.

The metric(U3/U6) has also been measured the same way forever. Is trumpler now measuring people as employed once their unemployment runs out at a greater/lesser rate than before? I would guess no. This means comparisons across time are valid, despite the metric having flaws.