• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

$600 AU for six days work is fucking bullshit. You can't physically live off that in most places in Australia. That's a little less than my weekly rent in Quakers Hill.

That's top money for walking a bunch of dogs around the block for less than 2 hours per day! Of course, that wouldn't pass the socialists ideal of getting $600 per week sent to you without you lifting a finger. :rolleyes:
 
You mean a dictatorship or even worse, a theocracy is the only thing that may save the world?

No, a fanatical belief in pure, unadulterated capitalism will destroy the world.

laissez faire Capitalism is a kind of religion, with the belief the 'Free Market' will solve all problems. All hail the Invisible Hand of the Markets!
 
$600 AU for six days work is fucking bullshit. You can't physically live off that in most places in Australia. That's a little less than my weekly rent in Quakers Hill.

That's top money for walking a bunch of dogs around the block for less than 2 hours per day! Of course, that wouldn't pass the socialists ideal of getting $600 per week sent to you without you lifting a finger. :rolleyes:

Your definition of someone working six days a week and my definition of someone working six days a week are two very different things. I guess socialists have a better work ethic.
 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "All too often, “bipartisanship” tends to mean coming together to advance corp lobbyist interests, or raising the military budget ad absurdum. It doesn’t have to be that way. It can also mean building unconventional, yet principled coalitions to end our War in Yemen and more.… https://t.co/v0f7skRDjU" noting Skullduggery on Twitter: "WATCH: Vid clip from the latest @SkullduggeryPod, @AOC answers the question, "Are there any #Republicans you can work with?" LISTEN: Full pod ep here: [url]https://t.co/5h4lMjt1la -- @Isikoff @dklaidman @YahooNews #SkullduggeryPod #AOC… https://t.co/GqXcBjsQak"[/url]
Has a bit of this recent interview with AOC: AOC unfiltered | Skullduggery on acast She describes how she has good relationships with some Republicans, but that they are afraid to talk about that. For that reason, she is not revealing who.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "That’s bc I like: ✅ Solar panels 🛰 ✅ Turbines⚙️ ✅ Battery Storage 🔋 ✅ Electric Vehicles 🚛 ✅ Regenerative Ag 🐄 ✅ Jobs + Justice 🏗 ✅ Funding fuel worker pensions👷🏽*♂️ ✅ Structuring our economy so it doesn’t depend on continuous extraction of working people & the planet 🌎… https://t.co/tSzASaUCHQ" noting Manu Raju on Twitter: ""For some reason, Democrats don't like pipelines -- they don't like energy," Trump says in Minnesota, before pivoting to immigration. "Who do you think these countries are giving us -- they're not giving us their finest, I can tell you." He calls asylum seekers "a big con job""

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Alternative Headline: Republicans Mad at Government for Doing Its Job… " noting Sam Levine on Twitter: "House Republicans are upset Democrats are investigating voter suppression https://t.co/xVJ6p1HFGP" noting House Republicans Are Upset Democrats Are Investigating Voter Suppression Allegations | HuffPost "The Republicans accused the Democratic lawmakers of meddling in state election issues."
 
I just listened to Skullduggery: AOC unfiltered, and it's a very good interview. It starts with her first love, "the sciences", including some biomedical research that she had done as a teen. Research that earned her second place in a major contest and an asteroid named after her. Then about President Trump's rather veiled threats against Ilhan Omar. AOC claims that she is all too familiar with the type from her NYC days. Some shady real-estate developer who makes very indirectly-stated threats, threats that they can later deny making.

Then she gets to the issue of immigration. She thinks that ICE should be abolished because of inadequate oversight into its operations, though she was rather vague as to what would replace it. She also was very vague about whether to accept economic refugees. But she was correct about the incentives that privatized prisons can create.

On impeaching pResident Trump, she agrees, and she thinks that the biggest reason is emoluments. The second is tax fraud. The Russian issue mostly reduces to emoluments, in her mind. She also described how she has good relationships with some Republican Congresspeople.

About the Amazon deal, she opposed it because of the way that it was set up. It was not just tax breaks, but also outright gifts, like to construct a helipad, a place for helicopters to land. This in a town where housing is getting grotesquely expensive and whose subway-train system is getting very run down.

About breaking up large tech companies, she noted that it's an issue of what some company wants to be. A platform and a vendor?

She mentioned how she had no experience of the Soviet Union, and likewise for other younger Americans. Communism isn't the great villain that it used to be. Instead, we have social-democratic successes in Canada and northern Europe, and instead of government controlling business, business controlling government. They have also experienced declining standards of living, like it being difficult to do what their parents had done at their ages.

As to who she wants for president, she was rather diffident. She supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, but she would not commit to him at this time. She liked him, however, and she likes what Elizabeth Warren has been doing. She doesn't like Joe Biden that much, because he seems too much like nostalgia for the Obama era.

She is not sure whether she wants to run for higher office. She says that she wants to be useful. She has been reading Rebecca Solnitz's "Hope in the Dark", she is a fan of "Game of Thrones", and the final question was about the Yankees and Mets baseball teams.
 
I tracked down her asteroid at JPL Small-Body Database Browser It's

23238 Ocasio-Cortez (2000 WU111)

and it's a main-belt asteroid, about 2.5 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, with an orbit period of 3 yr 10 mo, an eccentricity of 0.13 and an inclination of 6.2d. Its diameter is 2.3 km (1.4 mi), its albedo is 0.16, making it rather dark, and its mean apparent magnitude is +18. Its size is a bit less than the distance between Yankee Stadium and Crotona Park in the Bronx, a bit more than the lengths of LaGuardia Airport's runways, and a bit less than the distance between the US Congress building and the White House.

Here is another one:

153289 Rebeccawatson (2001 FB10)

It's an outer-main-belt asteroid, at 3.5 times our distance from the Sun, at 8.2 km / 5.1 across, and with mean apparent magnitude +20.

Let us see if either AOC or RW could possibly see their namesake asteroids without using photography. So I went to JPL Solar System Dynamics and  Timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their moons, and found which ones were discovered by looking through a telescope.

Planets (Neptune: +7.8), Moons of Mars (Deimos: +12.45), Mo Jupiter (Amalthea: +14.1), Mo Saturn (Hyperion: +14.4), Mo Uranus (Umbriel: +14.47), Mo Neptune (Triton: +13.54).

So the best case for visual observation is likely +14.5. Both of these asteroids are much fainter than that.
 
Here ya go, Angelo!

https://www.businessforafairminimumwage.org/news/00135/research-shows-minimum-wage-increases-do-not-cause-job-loss

Extensive research refutes the claim that increasing the minimum wage causes increased unemployment and business closures. (See list below.)

The buying power of the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968 at $10.97, adjusting for inflation in 2015 dollars. The unemployment rate went from 3.8% in 1967 to 3.6% in 1968 to 3.5% in 1969. The next time the unemployment rate came close to those levels was after the minimum wage raises of 1996 and 1997. Business Week observed in 2001, “Many economists have backed away from the argument that minimum wage [laws] lead to fewer jobs.”

Numerous states raised their minimum wages higher than the federal level during the 1997-2007 period the federal minimum wage remained stuck at $5.15. Research by the Fiscal Policy Institute and others showed that states that raised their minimum wages above the federal level experienced better employment and small business trends than states that did not.

A series of rigorous studies by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, significantly advanced the research on minimum wage employment effects. Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders compared all neighboring counties in the U.S. located on different sides of a state border with different minimum wage levels between 1990 and 2006 and found no adverse employment effects from higher minimum wages.

The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment’s Spacial Heterogeneity and Minimum Wages: Employment Estimates for Teens Using Cross-State Commuting Zones found “no discernable disemployment effect, even when minimum wage increases lead to relatively large wage changes.” Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? analyzed the 1990-2009 period (an earlier version analyzed 1990-2007). Carefully controlling for more factors than previous minimum wage studies, the researchers found the answer is no.

Your link looked like one person's opinion. Extensive research has refuted the idea that raising the minimum wage causes fewer employment opportunities. Imo, if an employer can't afford to pay workers a decent wage, they don't need to be an employer. Being a business owner doesn't give you the right to live a lavish life style while treating the very people who you depend on to maintain your business, poorly. It's fine to make a much larger income than your employees as long as you are also paying your employees a wage that allows them to support themselves. It benefits society for workers to be paid a wage that allows them to obtain the basics needed to live without constantly worrying about not being able to pay for food, housing and utilities. People at the bottom spend most of their income, which also helps strengthen the economy. And, why should the government be forced to help working people because their employers refuse to pay them enough to obtain their basic needs?
 
Yet another version of eat the rich. It still doesn't work no matter how many guises you give it.

Calm your tits. Removing unearned perks and unwarranted control of an economic system that creates more poverty for more people is not eating the rich or hurting them at all.

The rich are the parasites of our system, no matter how many lies you and the people you suck up to tell about it. Entitlement is the psychology of wealth, and shame is the psychology of poverty, no matter how much the parasites lie about that.

So you respond to my pointing out that this is just another stupid eat-the-rich proposal with defending eating the rich. That is in direct conflict with your claim that when you eat the rich they magically regrow. You can't have it both ways.
 
Yet another version of eat the rich. It still doesn't work no matter how many guises you give it.

Calm your tits. Removing unearned perks and unwarranted control of an economic system that creates more poverty for more people is not eating the rich or hurting them at all.

The rich are the parasites of our system, no matter how many lies you and the people you suck up to tell about it. Entitlement is the psychology of wealth, and shame is the psychology of poverty, no matter how much the parasites lie about that.

So you respond to my pointing out that this is just another stupid eat-the-rich proposal with defending eating the rich. That is in direct conflict with your claim that when you eat the rich they magically regrow. You can't have it both ways.

For fuck's sake, it's not eating the rich. They would still be rich without a system that makes them many times over filthy rich at the expense of everybody else.

Stamping your feet and claiming I'm saying something I'm not doesn't make it true.
 
That only works when wages are high enough to allow people to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. In the US, there are many people who work full time, but still rely on the government for help with food, and housing. I've worked with such people. One told me that she was embarrassed to be taking SNAP benefits. I reminded her that if her employer paid her more than 7.50 an hour, she wouldn't need to rely on SNAP. Then I told her that when someone like her was working but still needed government help, I see these programs as welfare for business, since they allow business to underpay their employees, then the employees need to receive help from the government to survive.

Make the minimum wage too high and she's going to be making $0/hr. You can't just wave a magic wand and decree that such workers are worth more.

Furthermore, the real cause of her problem is obvious--trying to raise kids on zero-skill jobs.

Capitalism doesn't work well without strong regulations, and decent wages for employees. That, I think, is why so many adults in the US, are embracing socialism. I don't think socialism, in the traditional sense, is the answer. We just need better regulated capitalism along with an adequate safety net. ( capitalism with socialistic programs )

They're embracing socialism because it's a way to take what they haven't earned.

There is no reason why a country with as much wealth as there is in the US, can't help all people have enough to eat and have basic housing. In the decades when I was a child, most people who worked full-time, even in a low skilled job, could still afford housing, food and basic necessities. Wealth disparity wan't nearly at the level that it is these days. Wealthy people didn't seem as greedy as most seem today. They paid higher taxes and paid their workers enough to live a basic, but comfortable life. Larger corporations were often unionized, which allowed workers to demand better wages, benefits and working conditions. Unions are all but dead these days. And, employers that treated their workers well in the first place, didn't attract unions.

You're looking at the time when the low wage jobs were pushed off onto the blacks (whose live of poverty was ignored) or other countries (because we were way ahead of them technologically. As they are catching up that's nowhere near as possible as it used to be.) The shit existed, it was just out of sight.

Furthermore, there's the issue of healthcare. The doctors save a lot of people that would have died back then--but often they're not to the point of being productive workers. That adds a considerable burden to our system (which we do not deal with well!)

The culture has changed, and it's not changed for the better. I don't think there was a single homeless person in my town in the 50s or 60s, but these days, homelessness is everywhere. Part of that is due to how we have failed our mentally ill folks, who make up a high percentage of the homeless, but a good part of it is due to the fact that people can no longer survive in low paying jobs. There are workers who are homeless. It's extremely difficult for them to maintain a job when they have to use public restrooms to bathe and sleep in tents etc. If you've never read about what some of these people must do to survive, I suggest that you do, as it will help you have a better understanding of what is happening in the US.

In the 50's and 60's most of those people were in the mental institutions--out of sight.
 
They would still be rich without a system that makes them many times over filthy rich at the expense of everybody else.

But rich isn't good enough. See, when you take away the many times over filthy rich part, you're actually imposing draconian restrictions on these folks. They're in fact victims when they can't reasonably afford a private jet of their own and have to "settle" for simply leasing a private jet when they need one. Or heaven forbid, flying first class on a commercial flight.

Don't you understand how much of a burden you're imposing on these people? I mean, to step down from having your own Gulfstream to having to rent space on a collectively owned G6 is near as anyone can get to communism.
 
$600 AU for six days work is fucking bullshit. You can't physically live off that in most places in Australia. That's a little less than my weekly rent in Quakers Hill.

Did you not notice the "studies" part"? That's part time work for a student!
 
Here ya go, Angelo!

https://www.businessforafairminimumwage.org/news/00135/research-shows-minimum-wage-increases-do-not-cause-job-loss

Extensive research refutes the claim that increasing the minimum wage causes increased unemployment and business closures. (See list below.)

The buying power of the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968 at $10.97, adjusting for inflation in 2015 dollars. The unemployment rate went from 3.8% in 1967 to 3.6% in 1968 to 3.5% in 1969. The next time the unemployment rate came close to those levels was after the minimum wage raises of 1996 and 1997. Business Week observed in 2001, “Many economists have backed away from the argument that minimum wage [laws] lead to fewer jobs.”

Numerous states raised their minimum wages higher than the federal level during the 1997-2007 period the federal minimum wage remained stuck at $5.15. Research by the Fiscal Policy Institute and others showed that states that raised their minimum wages above the federal level experienced better employment and small business trends than states that did not.

A series of rigorous studies by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, significantly advanced the research on minimum wage employment effects. Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders compared all neighboring counties in the U.S. located on different sides of a state border with different minimum wage levels between 1990 and 2006 and found no adverse employment effects from higher minimum wages.

The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment’s Spacial Heterogeneity and Minimum Wages: Employment Estimates for Teens Using Cross-State Commuting Zones found “no discernable disemployment effect, even when minimum wage increases lead to relatively large wage changes.” Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? analyzed the 1990-2009 period (an earlier version analyzed 1990-2007). Carefully controlling for more factors than previous minimum wage studies, the researchers found the answer is no.

Your link looked like one person's opinion. Extensive research has refuted the idea that raising the minimum wage causes fewer employment opportunities. Imo, if an employer can't afford to pay workers a decent wage, they don't need to be an employer. Being a business owner doesn't give you the right to live a lavish life style while treating the very people who you depend on to maintain your business, poorly. It's fine to make a much larger income than your employees as long as you are also paying your employees a wage that allows them to support themselves. It benefits society for workers to be paid a wage that allows them to obtain the basics needed to live without constantly worrying about not being able to pay for food, housing and utilities. People at the bottom spend most of their income, which also helps strengthen the economy. And, why should the government be forced to help working people because their employers refuse to pay them enough to obtain their basic needs?

The problem here is that states tend to raise the minimum wage in good economic times--and business does well in good economic times. What you need to look at is what happens in the next downturn.
 
So you respond to my pointing out that this is just another stupid eat-the-rich proposal with defending eating the rich. That is in direct conflict with your claim that when you eat the rich they magically regrow. You can't have it both ways.

For fuck's sake, it's not eating the rich. They would still be rich without a system that makes them many times over filthy rich at the expense of everybody else.

Stamping your feet and claiming I'm saying something I'm not doesn't make it true.

You're the one trying to hold two contradictory positions at once.
 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "GOP’s getting scared that up close, their constituents will realize I’m fighting harder for their healthcare than their own Reps 🙂… https://t.co/irdRj5rFT2" noting lesley clark‏Verified account @lesleyclark
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "What if a bold agenda rooted in improving everyday people’s lives is part of a winning strategy? What if the choice btwn big ideas+winning elections is a false one that crept up through outsize influence of💰in politics? What if, in a nation parched for change, we were water?🌊"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "If by “destabilize,” he means “disrupt for-profit insulin schemes bc the discovering scientist freely gave away the patent bc he didn’t want us to price-gouge life saving medicines,” then yes. (PS:#MedicareForAll is @RepJayapal’s bill, not mine - and am I proud to cosponsor it!)… https://t.co/FdiwFnGLg5" noting CNBC on Twitter: "UnitedHealth CEO warns Sanders', AOC's 'Medicare for All' plans would 'destabilize' US health system https://t.co/gF2qdsdJG4"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Reminder that we’ve taken progressive organizing straight into Trump country, rallied 5,000 people in the middle of a workday, and can do it again. In time, not a single GOP seat should be taken for granted. Wherever there‘s working people, we can win.🗳 https://t.co/1Mk4tr7TXI" noting They thought this was Trump country. Hell no | US news | The Guardian She and Bernie Sanders went to Kansas for a rally in support for Congressional hopeful James Thompson.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Surprise!💥 For months we’ve been working on a very special + secret #GreenNewDeal project. Now it’s ready to drop tomorrow morning. Here’s a sneak peek ⬇️… https://t.co/kWQmfYHAqs"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "This is a great, substantive dive on the #GreenNewDeal w/ Senate lead Sen. ⁦@EdMarkey:⁩ “When we were drafting the [GND], we looked to FDR’s 1944 State of the Union. He said that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security.” https://t.co/5MFcnL7y0D" noting Green New Deal: Ed Markey says “the era of incrementalism on climate change is over” - Vox
This was inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, which he stated in his 1944 State of the Union address (State of the Union, Full Text):
  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
  • The right of every family to a decent home;
  • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
  • The right to a good education.
He is better known for supporting the Four Freedoms of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. He was not able to follow up on his second Bill of Rights, because he died a little over a year after he made that speech. His successor Harry Truman did not follow up on it, sad to say.
 
Back
Top Bottom