A lengthy piece about Murphy who may well be the first Millennial in the Senate.

Quote:Today Congressman Patrick Murphy is on the fast track to the United States Senate. After just three years in the House, the Democrat from West Palm Beach is the anointed star of his party, enjoying the full-throated backing of President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden – both of whom came to Miami in recent weeks to campaign for him.
Tens of millions of dollars will be spent to get him elected, with Democrats hoping to take back control of the Senate if he prevails.
Republicans, fearing no one can stop the handsome 33-year-old, have pressured Marco Rubio to jump back into the race and try and retain his seat.




http://miami.cbslocal.com/2016/06/22/the...ck-murphy/

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2...ent-213756

Quote:This is not a joke. Senator Al Franken should be the Democratic Party’s choice for vice president.
If I had said that 10 years ago, or even six months ago, the notion would have been preposterous: a former Saturday Night Live writer, perhaps best known as the mock self-help guru Stuart Smalley, Franken became synonymous with left-wing bombast thanks to his best-selling book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. He took the presidency itself as a joke, writing a satirical campaign memoir, Why Not Me, in which Franken wins the White House on a platform of eliminating ATM fees, only to be quickly chased out by the “Joint Congressional Committee on the President's Mood Swings...

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/2016-elections-al-franken-vice-president-213756#ixzz4CHifZkw4
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Call it Andy Stern meets Milton Friedman.

1. Give every U.S. citizen not in jail and over 21 a $12,500 refundable tax credit, indexed annually to the CPI.

2. Subject all income to a flat tax, say 25%, with no exemptions or credits whatsoever - no exceptions - besides #1 above.

3. Abolish the minimum wage altogether.

One side of our political divide wants to judge the poor for their laziness, while the other side wants to judge the rich for their greed.

But how about an economic policy that judges nobody?

(06-20-2016, 11:16 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: Well then, in the event of a draft, blue state inhabitants go and red state inhabitants stay.  

Quote:"Smarter" as per Eric's criteria.  Non sequiter.

Quote:That would be a case of prolonged adolescence.  Middle aged folks who think they can outdo some young buck who has been to boot camp are pretty much deluded, IMHO.  Now... Rags knows he's middle aged and confines gun usage only to squirrels and game fowl.   12 gauges and .22's are pretty mickey mouse wrt any sort of military sort of thingie. Of course since they're mikey mouse, .gov needs to butt out of that stuff.

Quote: there is a serious needle in haystack problem here. It is for that reason, the FBI botched Orlando.
What do the spooks want now?  Less worthless data populating their diskie dumpies?  Fuck no, stupid is as stupid does, they want more worthless data like adding spy stuff to lamp posts.   I mean really, I have to use the Ruskie's news to find out useful stuff nowadays.

Quote:The MSM = a bunch of worthless sycophants.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...an-stanley

Quote:To understand today’s global economy, look back 80 years.
 Just like in the 1930s, growth is being constrained by companies unwilling to spend, falling inflation expectations and governments backing away from fiscal stimulus. 
The trigger for the current malaise was the financial crisis that left a hangover of debt and deleveraging amid tighter banking regulations that are exacerbating deflationary pressures. It’s similar to the kind of shock that preceded the 1930s slump, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley economists led by Hong Kong-based Chetan Ahya...



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...an-stanley

Came across this piece today. It cites governmental regulations as the reason why Millennials are not entrepreneurs. I think it is a generational thing too. The Hero generation is generally raised to be followers rather than risk-taking entrepreneurs. Thoughts?

https://fee.org/articles/why-are-so-few-...IwQk0wPSJ9

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlin...haos-ahead

Quote:“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent that the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
– George Orwell

After a lifetime of watching financial markets, the speed at which traders react still amazes me. Sometimes it seems to me like they hail from the “ready, shoot, aim,” school of thinking. Economic trends almost never turn on a dime; and though we can look back and find a moment that was the exact bottom or top, there were forces building that caused people to move from one side of the boat to the other, tilting the economy or markets or society in a different direction. New data can alter our probabilities – but rarely as fast as trading algorithms seem to think. Long-term trends, by definition, change slowly.
I had that thought in mind when I asked Neil Howe to be our kick-off speaker at the Strategic Investment Conference and invited Niall Ferguson to wrap it all up three days later. As historians, they both gaze back through time to identify patterns and draw lessons. They were the bookends who framed the wide-ranging discussions in between. They have both been very influential in helping me develop my understanding of the world.
As I said two weeks ago, the experts I brought to the conference, even the ones I expected to be raging bulls, were mostly bearish. The surprise was Niall Ferguson, who has become the new raging bull. That’s pretty much the one thing you can count on at my conference: surprises! But you can see that even Niall is deeply concerned about much of what is happening in the world...



http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlin...haos-ahead

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlin...haos-ahead

Quote:“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent that the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
– George Orwell

After a lifetime of watching financial markets, the speed at which traders react still amazes me. Sometimes it seems to me like they hail from the “ready, shoot, aim,” school of thinking. Economic trends almost never turn on a dime; and though we can look back and find a moment that was the exact bottom or top, there were forces building that caused people to move from one side of the boat to the other, tilting the economy or markets or society in a different direction. New data can alter our probabilities – but rarely as fast as trading algorithms seem to think. Long-term trends, by definition, change slowly.
I had that thought in mind when I asked Neil Howe to be our kick-off speaker at the Strategic Investment Conference and invited Niall Ferguson to wrap it all up three days later. As historians, they both gaze back through time to identify patterns and draw lessons. They were the bookends who framed the wide-ranging discussions in between. They have both been very influential in helping me develop my understanding of the world.
As I said two weeks ago, the experts I brought to the conference, even the ones I expected to be raging bulls, were mostly bearish. The surprise was Niall Ferguson, who has become the new raging bull. That’s pretty much the one thing you can count on at my conference: surprises! But you can see that even Niall is deeply concerned about much of what is happening in the world...



http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlin...haos-ahead

Can one find meaning in life by finding some glorious purpose in personal misfortune, pain, and anguish? Or is this simply some "slave philosophy"? It sounds perverse to me, but for many it seems a necessity.

Contrast the ideal of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"... but those can be pipe dreams to people in miserable and intractable situations. Oppression is usually profitable or at the least it is an easy way of controlling people.

Well, this is embarrassing...

Quote:Millennials, those Americans now between 16 and 36 years old, are often spoken of as if they’re ushering in a new era of enlightened interpersonal relations. For example, in 2013 Time predicted Millennials would “save us all” because they are “more accepting of differences…in everyone.” That same year, The Atlantic stated that Millennials hold the “historically unprecedented belief that there are no inherently male or female roles in society.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote that Millennial men are “likely to see women as equals.”

If these characterizations are even close to accurate, we should expect the pervasive, damaging biases against women leaders to diminish substantially, if not end entirely, once Millennials assume positions of economic, academic, and political power. But before we start celebrating a coming age of gender parity, we need to ask whether there is any truth to these characterizations. Do Millennials really believe there are no inherently male or female roles in society? Do Millennial men really “see women as equals”? Unfortunately, the best information we have indicates the answer to both questions is no.

In February 2016 researchers at the National Institutes of Health published a study on how college biology students view their classmates’ intelligence and achievements. The researchers found that male students systematically overestimated the knowledge of the men in their classes in comparison with the women. Moreover, as the academic term progressed, the men’s faulty appraisal of their classmates’ abilities increased despite clear evidence of the women’s superior class performance. In every biology class examined, a man was considered the most renowned student — even when a woman had far better grades. In contrast, the female students surveyed did not show bias, accurately evaluating their fellow students based on performance. After studying the attitudes of these future scientists, the researchers concluded, “The chilly environment for women [in the sciences] may not be going away anytime soon.”

Millennial men’s views of women’s intelligence and ability even extend to women in senior leadership positions. In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.)

Moreover, according to a 2013 Pew survey of Americans, Millennial women are significantly more likely than older women to say that the country needs to continue making changes to bring about equality in the workplace, but Millennial men are the group most likely to say that all necessary changes have been made.

A glimmer of hope was found in the huge survey of Harvard Business School MBAs in a 2014 HBR article, which found that Millennial men were more likely than Gen X and Boomer men to predict that their wives would have equal careers, and less likely to do the majority of the child care. But that hope vanished when the researchers found the gap between what Millennial men and Millennial women believed was still wide: “Whereas three-quarters of Millennial women anticipate that their careers will be at least as important as their partners,” they reported, “half the men in their generation expect that their own careers will take priority.” The gap was similar when it came to child care responsibilities. Fewer than half of Millennial women believed they would handle most of the child care, but two-thirds of their male peers believed the same about themselves.

Taken together, this body of research should dispel any notion that Millennial men “see women as equals.” Indeed, this information raises a serious concern that unless something is done soon to change Millennial men’s attitudes toward women, these men ascending to the C-suite may hinder — rather than advance — current efforts to reduce the discriminatory effects of gender bias.

We have heard too many reasonable people make the argument, almost fatalistically, that the arc of history bends toward justice. That is true. But the arc of history bends because leaders work to bend it. Bias doesn’t just die out. Patience may be a virtue, but patience alone will not bring equality.

Quote:Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall.