Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 12K
  • Views: 633K
  • Politics 
HeelYeah2012 said:
If you think we’ve addressed improper nutrition, we’ll have to agree to disagree. By many measures, America is less healthy now than it’s ever been. Poor diet, poor exercise are the main two culprits.
Click to expand...
First of all, the middle sentence there is obviously laughable hyperbole. There is no metric by which one could claim that we are less healthy now than we've ever been. US life expectancy now is at least a decade longer than it was after WW2, and more than three decades longer than it was in the Reconstruction era. We may have a bigger obesity problem than we used to, but overall health is far superior than it used to be, in basically every way you want to measure it.

Second of all, it is absolutely right that poor diet and poor exercise are the main culprits in our unhealthiness, but those things are very difficult to fix because they are subject to personal choice. The government can do its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food - and already does a lot of that! - but you can't stop people from choosing cheaper, calorie-dense carbs over fresh fruit and vegetables and lean meats (which tend to be more expensive). Rest assured RFK's desire to remove niche food additives will do absolutely nothing to make us healthier on the whole; contrary to what many gullible people believe, there is not some "poison" being added to our food to make us unhealthy (unless you want to count sugar and sodium, both of which are harmful in the amounts in which we consume them, which is not what RFK has been talking about).

As for exercise, you do what you can to promote healthy choices - make cities more walkable, tax gasoline and disincentivize automobile use, build parks and greenways and trails and lots of free, easily accessible spaces. But you can't force people to use those things. And, of course, that all costs tax money.
 
Agreed @rodoheel. Removing niche additives from our processed foods to address the obesity epidemic is putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. There is almost an infinite number of better ways to improve health and nutrition in our country before reaching the "crazy anti-vax guy with radically insane views on health and nutrition should help make the government even bigger in choosing what you can and can't eat" stage of problem-solving.

In a vacuum I have absolutely zero issue whatsoever with saying that we should make a more concerted effort collectively to improve nutritional standards in our country. No issue whatsoever. Where I have an issue is that Republicans always, *always*, seem to have this magical ability to 1. identify a problem and 2. do literally the very exact thing that will do nothing to actually solve the problem. We see it with guns: they think the way to curb the gun violence epidemic is to....make sure more people have more guns, and with fewer and fewer restrictions on how they can buy them and who is allowed to buy them.

If we want to make a significant difference in improving health and nutritional outcomes in our country, let's do it, by all means! But it's going to require a ton of heavy lifting- and *gasp* expenditure of taxable resources!- to get it done, which means it is a complete non-starter on the right hand side of the political aisle.
 
heelinhell said:
and the beat goes on...

www.rawstory.com

Trump appoints Project 2025 author to be chairman of the FCC

Donald Trump on Sunday announced that he has nominated a Project 2025 author to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Trump, who earlier in the day sought an investigation into a political pollster, said in a statement that he has chosen Brendan Carr, the senior Republican...
www.rawstory.com www.rawstory.com
Click to expand...
I believe that this is a main reason the IC shut down the Politics board.
 
With the Laken Riley trial starting, illegal immigration is going to be a big topic. The fact that Laken's killer sneaked into the country, committed multiple crimes, wasn't deported and eventually committed murder, is a problem, IMO. People who go to the ports of entry, and follow the correct process, should be on a short leash. People who sneak in should be on an even shorter leash. He should have been returned to Venezuela before he had a chance to kill Laken.
 
ZenMode said:
With the Laken Riley trial starting, illegal immigration is going to be a big topic. The fact that Laken's killer sneaked into the country, committed multiple crimes, wasn't deported and eventually committed murder, is a problem, IMO. People who go to the ports of entry, and follow the correct process, should be on a short leash. People who sneak in should be on an even shorter leash. He should have been returned to Venezuela before he had a chance to kill Laken.
Click to expand...
I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details of the case but from what I am reading he had been previously arrested by both federal and state officials in multiple jurisdictions. Cannot understand how he was still around to be able to commit the murder of Laken Riley.
 
TitanNC said:
I believe that this is a main reason the IC shut down the Politics board.
Click to expand...
If I read the FCC section in P2025 correctly (unlikely), it seems that they want to change Section 230 to prevent social media platforms from censoring protected speech. That’s quite a can of worms and would seem to invite the potential return of political speech to IC.
 
finesse said:
What is the plans for the almost half the illegal immigrants that overstay their visas? Border security doesn't address that.
Click to expand...
Same plan as all the others who don't get deported: Trump will lie and say he fixed it and half the country will believe him.
 
There is some kind of fallacy inherent in the arguments that immigrants are committing crimes but I don’t know if it is a recognized one or has a name.

It is a valid argument to say that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the population at large. The response is always that so and so would be alive today if we didn’t have immigrants and while true that seems fallacious considering the crime rate disparity. (I am not using Laken Riley as an example as her perpetrator had previous legal problems which makes that story a bit different.)

IMO that argument boils down to an argument that if we have more people we will have more crime - not necessarily at a higher rate but more in absolute numbers. And of course that is true.

Their argument makes no more sense than saying that we should get rid of people from Burlington because someone in Burlington went to Chapel Hill and committed a crime, a crime that would not have happened had we removed all the people from Burlington 100 miles a way.

Someone needs to develop that thought, maybe wrap it in a mathematical framework, and give it a name.
 
CFordUNC said:
I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details of the case but from what I am reading he had been previously arrested by both federal and state officials in multiple jurisdictions. Cannot understand how he was still around to be able to commit the murder of Laken Riley.
Click to expand...
Confusing to me as well. Situations like this only fuel anti-immigration fire.

I am very sympathetic for the people who come here, want to be good "citizens" and work to send money back to their families in Mexico or wherever.
 
The problem is the hate and ignorance that started the fire. As long as that drives an essentially minor issue, we're not coming to a solution.

Face it. We need the people. We need the labor pool. Let's accept it, start a guest worker program and separate drug enforcement from immigration. They are only tangentially related and distract from a solution to either because of that.
 
Last night we had a family discussion about illegal immigration. It was an interesting conversation that covered several topics and led me to what I believe are some fundamental truths about the situation.

-Every country has the right (actually, the responsibility) to control its borders. Illegal immigration is problem just on this concern. Its paramount to be able to monitor who's coming in.

-The Republicans have been using illegal immigration as a convenient campaign issue for nearly 20 years. They have little incentive to actually solve it. This election was the clearest example...it was the main issue for Trump, it was the constant drumbeat that has marked his campaign.

-The dirty little secret is that America depends on the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide in certain key industries (agriculture, construction, child care, meatpacking, etc). I love how the immigrants are the ones that get hunted down and pay the price. Start locking up the business owners who hire them and we'd see a compromise mighty quick.The US is currently at full employment; where the heck are they going to get the millions of laborers they will need? If Trump accomplished his campaign promise of sending back every illegal immigrant, the negative impact on the US economy would be severe.

-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally". The current setup makes it basically impossible for an unskilled or low-skilled laborer to gain a visa to the US. Heck, in the last Trump administration they made it harder to get all sorts of visas (I'm still traumatized by the renewal of my tourist visa...took about six months). A drastic overhaul is needed in the approach. I've advocated for a guest worker program in the past.

-We have a tense situation around the world between the developed and underdeveloped world regarding immigration. More people wanting to hop on the boat than is possible. Long term, the solution is the economic development of the third world (economically, politically, socially). Thats quite a daunting global challenge, but I'd like to believe that it can be achieved. Costa Rica (as well as other countries) does not have an emigration problem for the most part (we have more immigrants than emigrants). Why? Because in broad strokes people like to live here. My concern is that objective takes concerted leadership from the developed world...hard to achieve when someone wants the lion's share of the kill.
 
There is definitely a ton of nonsensical spending in the federal budget. I'm sure there's opportunity to save billions.

I have very little faith that Muskrek will be able to go about it in a objective way...there will be a political bias to the machete they wield.
 
CRHeel94 said:
-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally". The current setup makes it basically impossible for an unskilled or low-skilled laborer to gain a visa to the US. Heck, in the last Trump administration they made it harder to get all sorts of visas (I'm still traumatized by the renewal of my tourist visa...took about six months). A drastic overhaul is needed in the approach. I've advocated for a guest worker program in the past.
Click to expand...

There was legislation to fix some of this in the border bill Trump got squashed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top