What in my post implied Putin cares what ordinary Americans think? I mentioned him trying to appease a Russian domestic audience with a space station, and potential difficulties he'd have reining in the Donbass rebels, but I said nothing about Western public opinion.

BTW, your premise is wrong to an extent at least. All my comments got a -1 troll, the AC posting that Russia was a superpower got to +4 insightful, and everyone criticizing that blessed comment also got -1 troll. Which means the Kremlin apparently loosed it's merry band of paid internet trolls on Slashdot.

You could actually. $10 Billion a year for 10 years is peanuts in the context of a $Trillion budget.

The issue is that poisonous combination of a) deficit hawks, and b) partisan gridlock which makes it impossible to do anything that costs money. c), the ideological elites absolute commitment to low taxes on itself means that even during flush times (ie: the late '90s- early 2000s) it won't happen.

If you want the government to buy nice things that are not tax cuts you have to vote in the Democratic primaries so that the Dem who wins is not one of those free-market obsessives who are honestly convinced the economy grows much faster with a top tax rate of 38%; and then you have to vote for that guy in the General election.

"Leading" is a relative term in a world dominated by the US. We're a fifth of the economy. We're most of the military spending. We have the most advanced weapons. Our culture is known world-wide. The Chinese could compete with us, if they get a few more years of 8% growth and they can figure out their aging population problem. The Europeans could also compete with us, if they'd ever get off their damn asses and give their precious sovereign right to veto every-damn-thing to the EU.

Russia clearly belongs in the next tier, right along with the Japanese and other regional powers. But it's not like Russia can bail out small Latin American countries without noticing the hit to it's budget. But the top tier clearly could. So could the Japanese.

He would have confirmed this with Obama if he was still on his game. He clearly needs something to show his people that Russia is a leading nation among the entire world, and not just a regional power in Eastern Europe, and what better way then say "we're collaborating with the US on a space station no other two countries could build?"

Putin desperation is either good or bad. If he decides he can declare victory in Donbass and calm things down (and he has the political muscle to keep the Ukrainian separatists in line) it's good for the US. If he decides he needs some other victory to appease his critics then it could get really iffy, potentially nuclear war iffy if he starts supporting separatists in Latvia (which is 25% Russian) or something similarly suicidal.

"British system of 1789," so any present tense discussion of the British government is irrelevant.

And yes, in 1789 the Brits had a an upper chamber selected by the groups intended to run the nation (the House of Lords) and a frequently re-elected lower House that was intended to be the voice of the People (the Commons). The Upper was supposed to cool the relatively hot tempers of the lower, veto any attempts to replace the elite by popular vote, and generally wear the man pants.

The differences between Senate election (at the time Senators were appointed by the State Legislature), and inheriting a Peerage is precisely analogous to the difference between Presidential elections (by a House of Electors appointed by those states) and inheriting the Crown.

Depends on the market.

My job at Home Depot is probably more threatened by the current management's obsession with cutting labor costs then larger market conditions.

Lots of people, including contractors, would rather go a store with six locations in the County that has everything they need, with better then 50% chance of having a guy who can warn them about the tricky bits; then buy from a company with no locations in Cuyahoga County; or buy from a location with a 100% chance of having that smart guy on the other side of the fucking County. Especially since the specialty shop on the other side of the County is likely to have higher costs, because half it's staff aren't kids just out of high school thrilled to be getting 25 hours a week at $9.25. Which means management's unstated goal on replacing the $10-$20 an hour guys with said kids is much more of a problem then the Internet.

The internet is actually helpful, because it's really hard for Amazon to compete with Home Depot on shipping concrete.

We tried Annexing countless times. Literally. I can't count the times. Once during the Revolution, once during the War of 1812, another time in the 1830s when our Marshall in Detroit "accidentally" let Canadian rebels "borrow" the entire contents of the arsenal, numerous times in the late 1860s when the Fenians tried to conquer Canada...

They've always been quite adamant that they are quite happy to be her Majesty's Unamerican subjects.

And you're highly exaggerating our originality. The US System is precisely identical to the British system of 1789 except for three things: 1) instead of one document containing everything the Brits had multiple documents, 2) the King selected by much different means (descent from Electress Sophia vs. selection by the states), and 3) we had two levels of government (state and Federal). Other then that the whole thing is warmed-ovwer British mush combined with good-old American boastful bullshitting.

And the really smart people have done the math, and bought a fairly used but still reliable vehicle (ie: closer to $5k then $10k), that's gets at least 30 MPG. They maintain it at the dealer because they know he's only going to screw them over on the official bill; rather then screwing them over by trying to use plumbing parts in a car*. Then they drive it for at least a decade.

The easiest way to lose $3k a year every year forever is insist on having a recent-model $30k vehicle in your driveway at all times. The second-easiest is to try to keep a $500 hooptie running 365 days a year if you aren't a skilled mechanic.

*Yes this actually happens. No I do not understand why someone would think a part meant for room temperature to possibly 130 Fahrenheit would work in a fucking internal combustion engine for any meaningful period of time. But I have actually witnessed a backstreet mechanic spend an hour trying to find the plumbing fitting that matched the one he'd pulled from a car.

Strictly speaking the reason nobody in the US supports large Hydro projects is that most of them have already been completed. It's not like we can re-engineer Iowa to be a huge plateau so that the Mississippi dam in Nebraska can generate power from a 100 ft drop.

Nuclear is virtually impossible to get support for anywhere because it's a classic Black Swan risk. Yeah if everything works you're Sweden and you've got no environmental impact, but if there's a disaster after the power company's fucked up safety procedures you're doing $100 Billion in damage. Moreover in a loosish union of sovereign states it's really difficult to convince one to accept all the nuclear fuel.

Interestingly enough I've never heard a single environmentalist group make all four of those claims. To my knowledge no actual environmental group makes any claims regarding wind power and birds, that entire conversation is all conservative anti-environmentalists talking to themselves.

In other words this is the equivalent of a liberal arguing that conservatives are insane because they a) strongly support local law enforcement's right to stop damn near everybody, while b) claiming that opposing government authority with your personally-owned firearm is your sacred duty. Yes both of those guys probably voted for Romney, but they aren't the same guy.

Who said anything about what I think? There's a difference between understanding the intellectual underpinnings of a movement and agreeing with it.

Regardless, very few social movements in the US are totally divorced from self-interest. Black abolitionists, for example, were quite self interested. Even white abolitionists tended to frame their arguments in terms of their own self-interest -- "we can't compete with slave wages," "the slave power will take our freedoms," etc.

As far as I can tell the only Americans who currently support a system that will not result in nice things for other people being cut while nice things for them get a healthy boost are very wealthy limousine liberals and relatively poor working class white conservatives. And both of those groups actually believe that in the long term they'll be better off if their nice things get cut.

The 1% argument isn't just about helping poor people. It's about helping the everyone including the upper bits of the Middle Class (ie: all of the 99% who aren't in the 1%). It's also about reining in the people who are are in that 1%. Among most of it's adherents the idea is that you tax guys like Mitt Romney, and use the money to pay for nice things for everyone. Thus you get proposals like a financial transaction tax, ending the 529 deduction, etc.

Paul Ryan is thinking about the helping poor people side of the equation. But he doesn't seem to think the Middle Class seems serious economic help, and if he proposes any new spending it will almost certainly be paid for by cutting some other spending, not increasing the tax burden of the 1%. Whatever he ends up proposing will almost certainly be mostly tax cuts targeted at helping poor people, plus some rethinking of how current government money is spent.

Depends on what you use the tax for.

I live in a very low-income Cleveland suburb (per capita income is roughly $20k). If you used the Carbon tax to pay for a much expanded Rapid (the local light rail service), or made the buses come every 15 minutes instead of every 40 or hour, most of my coworkers would probably stop driving their cars so much. They'd still need them for grocery-shopping, days when the kid would not go to fucking sleep so mommy really needs to sleep in, etc. but even if the tax doubles gas prices they'd probably save money if they just used the bus/Rapid three times a week.

BTW, this kind of thinking is one reason conservatives rarely get anywhere in the black community. If you think of a reason that a left-wing policy would hurt the poor (and blacks a) tend to be poor, and b) the ones who aren't tend to be very sympathetic to the poor), but the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supports it; your first reaction should not be "why are those morons voting against their own interest?" It should be "Why would those rational human beings disagree with me abhttp://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/03/17/0025235/politics-is-poisoning-nasas-ability-to-do-science?sbsrc=md#out their own interests?" In this case the reason is a combination of coalition-building the CBC, and the blacks who overwhelmingly support it, thinks a government dominated by white pro-Carbon Tax liberals would be better for it then the alternative), and a very different definition of their own interests (ie: many of them would actually prefer to drive less and bus more).

It's similar to what happens when Liberals ask "What's the matter with Kansas?" The answer turns out to be a combination of a) different priorities (many Kansans prefer a universe where they make slightly less money and abortion is harder to get), and b) different perceptions of their interests (Kansans tend to think of themselves as people who will be ricvh real soon now; or at least as people who only have a middle-class lifestyle because some rich guy can afford to hire them; which means that if you start talking about taxing the rich they get uncomfortable).

It's impossible with home equity, because most people don't actually know what their homes are worth.

Just do a survey of people at a dinner party about their guess as their home;s worth. Then use the Zillow zestimate tool. nLast time I tried this everyone was off by at least 25%, and despite the fact Zestimates are known to be high most of them were too high.

I get by on no home and $25k.

So if you didn't mind a) giving up your nice car for a slightly older one with better mileage, b) selling your house and moving to an apartment, c) declaring staycations to be the bomb, d) deciding that your kids would just have to live with a normal public school education and student loans, etc. you'd be fine.

But generally if you're the kind of person who actually buys a home, a couple cars, in a nice suburb with good schools, etc. you are not willing to do that kind of thing.