Biden v. Trump Election Mega Thread
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1. Where do you think most of America’s food comes from?
2. Do you genuinely believe most people (or anything approaching a majority of people) in even the lowest population states are farmers?
Because firstly, the state with the largest agricultural output, by a factor of double the second, is also the most populous state. It’s fucking California genius. The rest is mostly in the Midwest, not the low population density mountain region or Alaska, and not the low total population of some New England states.
Secondly, most people in rural areas do the same jobs as everyone else, random service jobs mixed with occasional industrial jobs. That’s it. Basically nobody actually works in agriculture. It’s mostly corporate farming with some contractors during harvest season, many of those being non-citizens. Your entire conception of rural life is, well, clearly that of a rando Tory from the UK.
And yet big tech is being looked into to an extent and right to repair has been seemingly making gains.
Do they?
Or are they the same level of cutbacks that were happening before based on usage of boxes and locations which is being spun now as somehow an attack on said sector?
Well it was more absolute elitism in the early days because they didn't want the "Plebians" being able to truly have power to decide who became president.
Just pointing out how for some it's more about political gain than liking or hating the system in reality.
Because:
The first people to be shot under anarchist rule will be the anarchists.
and
All you get under communist system is corruption still going on and people getting screwed over one way or another by the one party.Churchill said:
Well here's some reasons.
1) Trump is better for the UK to get a trade deal with as the Obama administration (that Biden was VP in) said the UK would go to the back of the queue
2) To actually change the world you have to recognise the global reach of corporations and as such you have to stop global exploitation of people from less well of nations. That means a harder stance on migration which actually in the long run benefits those countries that were being exploited by draining less talent and skilled workers helping them develop more.
3) You want to push for changes to green energy etc you need the USA to not get into more wars to install friendly governments to get easy oil supply thus costs go up and corporations see green energy as the cheaper option.
4) Culling bullshit critical theory stuff that is used a lot to turn people against one another (and is said to have helped the downfall of occupy wall street) means people will be less about fighting one another and more about taking on the corporations.
5) China and it's love of censoring things via proxies being shut down is a good thing for most entertainment.
And yet no-one really gives to craps about who farmers think people should be in bed with......... except in Wales where there's sheep jokes to be made about farmers.
USA
This is a silly way to think. While I say that everyone's vote should matter equally, and farmers are not any better than anyone else, you should also understand that in order to operate a farm you really have to learn a great many skills to be able to run a farm at all. My family built their farm, my father was an engineer who designed and built nuclear power plants, designed and built pro race cars, designed microchips, designed and built robots, designed and built small planes that flew and dropped our lunches via parachute. Everyone growing up on the farm is a " farmer" too, as we all had to work the farm as well as go to school. I chose to become a doctor, one of my sisters chose to become a scientist, another one of my sisters is a teacher. In terms of voting however, no matter who you are and where you live, your vote should matter just as much as the next person.
On a farm, you have to have a good amount of skills and general knowledge in many areas, pretty much have to be a " jack of all trades", as farms often have to be self sustaining. You have to have a good deal of general medical knowledge. The first time I ever saw surgery performed was not in medical school, it was my own mother doing surgery on an animal at home on our farm to save it's life. You constantly have humans and farm animals injured, sick or giving birth to have to deal with and you have to know how to properly handle that or it will get expensive very quick. Of course not everything can be dealt with at home on a farm, and we had our share of many trips to the Hospital and vet, but you are able to handle many situations at home that most people even in the city would not be able to do so. Farmers also often have to repair equipment, some even take care of their own transport, or even take it as far as to do the entire operations, food to table all by themselves such as Braum's does here. Braums has their own farm, their own meat and dairy processing plant, and their own restaurants and grocery store combination where you can go and buy their own cheese, milk, ice-cream, meat, while you are waiting to get served a hot meal. All of their stores are within 200 or 300 miles of their farm I think. They do their own transport from farm, to processing to table. In the US we actually do have politicians who are farmers and know how governments work as well.
Unlike most city dwellers, farmers don't usually call someone else to repair things when they need something built of something breaks, they just built it or fix it themselves. When the washing machine broke, we just repair it ourselves, same goes for essentially everything on the farm and we didn't hire a contractor to build our home, my parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, brother, sisters, cousins and myself just built it, everything from foundation to roof ourselves. Electrical, plumbing, hvac.. everything. We just learned how to do and did it on our own instead of hiring someone else. The only thing we had to actually pay someone else to do was paying building inspectors to inspect our work, and we had it right the first time and passed our inspection with flying colors. The skills I gained from the farm were invaluable, and it was funny to see the look on my roommates and friends faces over the years when they see me tearing apart a washing machine, stove, air conditioner, refrigerator and fix it myself when it goes out while they were all busy trying to figure out who to call. The maintenance guy for a complex I used to live in used to call me " Princess Macgyver" and ask me how to fix something if he hadn't had to do it before.
I think far too often people assume farmers are " country bumpkins" when they really have to have a great deal of knowledge and skills to do what they do. While, yes they may lack specialized knowledge unless they specifically chose to go to school for that, they usually have a great deal many more skills in areas people do not usually have. There isn't anything a farmer cannot learn that someone living in the city can, they just have to choose to do so in addition to running their farm. Not all farms are even rural anyhow, we also have "urban farms" now as well and numerous farms existing in a metropolitan area like the DFW metroplex and surrounding areas. My families farm is technically located in the metroplex, only like 25-30 minute drive from Downtown Dallas. For a while, we used to make 15 minute beer/ liquor runs to Dallas when I was a teen when this was still a dry county ( no alcohol sold). There was like one other store closer but they charged like 10x as much so it was cheaper and just as quick to run to dolphin road in Dallas instead and get 10x more party supplies.. So yea, we could be out on the farm, but yet also just a few minutes away to clubbing/shopping/dining in Downtown Dallas.
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Certainly not dense urban city rooftops
And who makes the equipment? Who services it? Who works in plants nearby to process and pack it? that far equipment magically never break down eh?
Trump is pretty irrelevant for the UK to get a trade deal FYI, trade deals have to be approved by congress in the US. Trump can blabber all he wants, it isn't worth the paper it is written on without US congress agreeing to it. US congress has made it clear that any violation of the Good Friday agreement and not only will the UK NOT get a trade deal, they may even get sanctions in solidarity with Northern Ireland. Any hard border would be a deal breaker for any US agreement, and both Democrats and republicans in congress have made that pretty clear. ALSO Trump expects the UK to allow US foods contaminated with toxins that are banned in the UK, Biden OTOH is willing to raise US food standards and re-ban the toxins that were banned under Obama allowing more of US food to be safe to ship to the UK rather than expect you to poison your people too.
Hate to burst the Tory bubble there, but Trump has no intention of giving the UK a good deal, he just intends to exploit their new weakened position to his benefit is all. He doesn't have a compassionate bone in his body, so I wouldn't get your hopes up. He was cheering for the Brexit so that US companies can try to poach UK/ EU contracts hoping to use US position of strength and UK's now weakened position to let some of the US companies Lobbying the US government here for leverage to steal UK companies EU contracts, Trump had a great deal of US chemical companies lobbying him here, thus why he rolled back regulation on them as well, and they are salivating to replace the UK/EU chemical contracts with their own. :s
Biden or Trump, no guarantee of a post-Brexit U.S.-UK trade deal
U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden's recent warning that Britain must honor Northern Ireland's 1998 peace agreement to secure a U.S. trade deal adds new complexity to already tough trade talks between the United States and the U.K.
www.reuters.com
EU Moves on US Trade Deal as It Sends Trump Warning on China
The European Commission said it has begun work on a draft mandate for a trans-Atlantic accord to cut duties on industrial goods.
www.industryweek.com
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You skipped over California, which actually produces a volume of food disproportionately large when compared to its population for a US state, and is by far the most fucked over state by the EC, produces more food than any other state. Of the 12 states that actually produce an above mean percent of agricultural output, only Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa are from the bottom half of total population (edit- fun fact, the same number, three out of twelve, are on a major coastline). Your argument relies on a total fiction of American agriculture.
Factory workers from town, a guy they drive into town to see, factory workers from town, and once again most mechanics live in cities.
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And the UK so far is refusing to accept the toxin contaminated foods, Like it or not Trump can probably pull some strings even if the deal has to be approved by congress (hell the talks have been going on already so clearly the UK wasn't "At the back of the queue" as Obama put it). Hard Border wise who knows what will happen in the end there though the UK presently owning all of Ireland's debts may come into play.....
Most big city mechanics used to working on farm equipment are them?
Nah, you wanna argue the one place you can squeeze out a leg to stand on, agriculture has fuckall to do with the reality of the EC, as I already demonstrated. I’m not walking down this bullshit path for you so you can get off on owning libs now that they don’t let Tories own Pakistani boys as easily.
Trump is going to pull what strings? Pelosi is who decides what they vote on at all in the house. The trade deal has to pass both houses of congress, not just the Senate here. Pelosi, along with the rest of the Irish Catholics in both the GOP and Democrats are not budging on Ireland, so the Tory government there better have it through their thick skulls that isn't optional, like not at all. It is not possible to have a US trade deal without the Good Friday agreement in place, any attempt to undermine it at all, would mean 100% losing any chance of a deal with the US. US has made it clear they support Ireland in that regard, so this hope of using their debt against them will just blow up in their face.
They having " talks" is meaningless, so I wouldn't hold your breath on that. Trump isn't budging on chemicals as they are his bread and butter. He is bringing them into his administration now not just letting him buy off his decisions. We literally have the chemical industry here in the US calling the shots on this now.
Former chemical industry official Beck, now at Trump White House, again interferes to weaken EPA action on dangerous chemicals: This time it’s PFAS - EDF Health
Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist. It was only in February that Reveal News’ Elizabeth Shogren exposed the Trump White House’s role in dramatically weakening the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) draft risk evaluation for the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), which is...
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After meeting with and listening to talking points from Dow Chemical Company, the maker of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, the EPA announced it would reverse its decision to ban the chemical, which is linked to neurological developmental issues in children.
Amid chemical industry lobbying, Trump EPA reconsiders risk of cancer-causing ethylene oxide
Facing tougher restrictions, companies that manufacture and use ethylene oxide are pushing the Trump administration to undercut federal scientists and adopt a dramatically weaker standard for the c…
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Internal emails reveal how the chemical lobby fights regulation
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www.theguardian.com
Companies That Made Big Donations To Trump Inauguration Are Benefiting From Presidency
Boeing, private prisons and chemical companies all gave significant cash gifts.
You can be guaranteed Trump ISN'T Budging on chemicals, they are who get to decide this now. Biden OTOH, will kick the chemical companies out and reinstate the bans and be willing to upgrade US standards so that the US food will be safe for trade. trump has no intention of doing that. Currently they charge a great deal more for uncontaminated food in the US, thus still feed to poor the toxins through the food they consume instead.
I cannot even eat a non organic apple here without my glands swelling up and I am like that kid in the Christmas story who can't put his arms down due to my lymph nodes swell up so bad. Most people don't realize how bad they are, but my body has difficulty removing the toxins from my system and has a horrible reaction to the pesticides in the food, so I have to strictly stick to organic foods, not drink the tap water here, only eat organic, free range, grass fed meats.. otherwise it is in the meat due to what they are feeding the animals as well. All of that food costs much more than those with the chemicals in them here. Trump has been trying to make this worse, not better, even trying to remove the labels allowing us to know the difference, which in my case would be detrimental to my health. Due to these changes, I have just been obtaining most of my fresh food from my parents farm or other local organic farms that can be trusted not to use those methods.
U.S. Apples Doused with EU-Banned Pesticides After Harvest
Most conventionally grown apples are drenched in diphenylamine, a pesticide banned in Europe, to prevent discoloration while in cold storage.
www.ewg.org
Banned in Europe, safe in the U.S.
Why are some chemicals banned in Europe while considered safe in the U.S.?
ensia.com
Over 1,000 Toxic Ingredients Banned in Europe But Not in US?
There are over 1300 substances completely banned (or at best, heavily regulated and restricted) from use in cosmetics by the EU Cosmetics Regulation. A more recent set of regulations called REACH puts further regulations on more than 500 of those toxic ingredients. By comparison, the United...
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US cosmetics are full of chemicals banned by Europe – why?
A long list of potentially harmful ingredients banned in the EU are legally allowed in the US due to historically relaxed regulations
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Why these food additives are banned in Europe—but not in the United States
Writing for the New York Times' "Well," Roni Caryn Rabin rounds up a list of food additives potentially linked to cancer and other health problems that are banned in the European Union but commonly used in the United States—despite calls to ban them.
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Trump USDA withdraws animal welfare regulation for organic farms, sparking backlash
The Trump administration rescinds Obama-era regulation for organic farms.
abcnews.go.com
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
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Trump’s new GMO food labels leave greens fuming - Washington Examiner
The Trump administration’s new labeling rules for genetically modified foods, going into effect this week, are provoking the ire of environmental groups who say the rules favor agriculture industry interests over environmental concerns about the rising use of toxic chemicals by farmers. The...
www.washingtonexaminer.com
If Trump gets his way, this will be the future for UK too, not just the US. I hope you realize this was the primary reason Trump wanted to do a deal with the UK at all, he looked at it as an opportunity for the UK to drop the EU food and safety standards so that he could sell this crap there too.
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Here, most everyone on the farm is a mechanic TOO, so they just fix it themselves and don't call anyone. I agree that you are going to have more mechanics in the city, but you have more of most people in the city, not just mechanics. My family though doesn't call anyone, they just fix everything themselves instead.
Nominally, but that changed after the war between Spain and the US in 1898 (or thereabouts). Colonialism is bad, we promise to make Cuba independent when we take it from Spain, so that's ok...but we never said what we'd do to Guam, Puerto Rico or the Philippines if we were to conquer and/or buy them, so...
Now that I think of it, nowdays that means they've have taxation without representation there for more than half of the US's history.
I didn't really mean that that those voters actually shifted rightwards: of course that didn't happen.
What I mean is that if voters stayed home, they could be sending the message that Obama's rightward shift has put them off..... or they could be sending the message that they don't care as much if the further right candidate wins. A strategist can be forgiven for concluding that if they find right-wing politics so off putting, then they would care about that.
Your methodology is also based on risk-and-reward, in reality: you've just differently evaluated where the greatest risks and rewards lie. Specifically, you see a greater reward and a lower risk in the progressive vote than the DNC does.
Risk-and-reward isn't a strategy. It's a thought-process that's behind every electoral campaign, right or left, won or lost. If lost, then there's some evaluation of risk or reward somewhere that was off-target. You believe the silver bullet is the progressive vote, having a higher reward than they give credit for. I hope to high heaven that's the case as well.
But it hasn't been demonstrated, and depressing the vote of one's own demographic through abstention only increases the risk and makes it a less palatable strategy to pursue.
I fully agree that both morally and strategically, the Democrats need to reclaim the progressive vote and stay the hell away from the right.
But quick question: only once? I'd count both of Bill Clinton's victories as well as Obama's second victory at least as victories for centrist Democratic candidates.
Firstly, as a state, Ireland has much less government debt than the UK, and the UK most certainly does not "own" that debt. It's owed to all sorts of entities, most of which are banks, which, even if British banks, the UK does not have the power to order around. The UK bailed out Ireland to the tune of only a few billion about ten years ago. That debt's mostly paid off already with the last tranche due in 2021 - there's no leverage there.
The UK also facilitated a rather larger bailout to the Irish economy (e.g. banks) and pretty much the same applies there. It wasn't that much, and it was mediated through banks who own the loans, so it's not owned by the UK government and whatever isn't yet repaid is again no leverage.
Finally, the reason the UK bailed out Ireland in the first place is because a whopping chunk of the Irish economy is tied to the UK. Ireland goes down, it costs the UK billions and billions of pounds a year too. Never mind a colossal diplomatic disaster, as it would infuriate not only the EU, but the USA with its strong Irish American lobby. If the UK wants to be that sort of global Billy No-mates, it may as well rename itself North Sea Korea.
Nationalist Brits drunk on their jingoism need to wake up to the fact that Ireland cannot be pushed around like it's 1920 anymore. It's got 450 million people and ~$20 trillion worth of economy directly backing it up that the UK doesn't, and another 330 million people and ~$20 trillion worth of economy unlikely to let it be bullied.
Is the UK still paying off the debts from the South Sea bubble? I recall hearing that somewhere but I'd rather hear it from an actual UK citizen who isn't a Brexiteer.
That Debt From 1720? Britain’s Payment Is Coming (Published 2014)
Prompted by record low interest rates, the British government is planning to pay off debts it racked up over hundreds of years.
Well, there you have it. The UK is a hard lesson that nobody stays in the ascendant forever.That Debt From 1720? Britain’s Payment Is Coming (Published 2014)
Prompted by record low interest rates, the British government is planning to pay off debts it racked up over hundreds of years.www.nytimes.com
I cannot stress how much I disagree with that. That is the stupidest, most asinine interpretation of events someone could have. If someone legitimately came at me with that line of reasoning I'd ask how many times they were dropped on their head as a child. I'd be asking if they were capable of walking and talking at the same time. I don't think there is possibly a stupider interpretation of events.
Obama was elected on a set of promises, which pretty much all of them were broken. He got a huge groundswell of support when he made those promises and then lost it when he reneged. That is so cut and dry as an interpretation that there is no room for an alternative unless it's your job to make up reasons to flatter your boss.
I never said it wasn't a risk vs reward, I just said their strategy doesn't work. Because objectively it hasn't. Meanwhile actually appealing to progressives, since they've only done it once, has worked 100% of the time in the general election.
It's why I put the qualifier "without a right wing spoiler candidate". I don't feel like tallying up the various county level votes to see who would win, but by raw popularity Ross Perot's voteshare going to the Republican candidate would give them the win in both of Clinton's elections.
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