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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t get why people are getting so incensed with this answer. It’s an election, it’s not fully in his control. If he thinks he’s the best candidate to beat Trump, and he runs his campaign the best way possible, and he still loses, then that is democracy and the will of the people has spoken and there was nothing he could have done.

    It IS about saving democracy, and bodily autonomy, and the Supreme Court appointments, and he isn’t saying that it isn’t. He’s just saying all he can do is run the best campaign he can, and if the people still vote Trump then he accepts that decision.

    You can quibble with his assumptions here, he might not be the best candidate to beat Trump anymore, but that’s the right answer.












  • It was always short sighted tax policy. We’re just living with the blowback.

    But in 1954, apparently intending to stimulate capital investment in manufacturing in order to counter a mild recession, Congress replaced the straight-line approach with “accelerated depreciation,” which enabled owners to take huge deductions in the early years of a project’s life. This, Hanchett says, “transformed real-estate development into a lucrative ‘tax shelter.’ An investor making a profit from rental of a new building usually avoided all taxes on that income, since the ‘loss’ from depreciation canceled it out. And when the depreciation exceeded profits from the building itself—as it virtually always did in early years—the investor could use the excess ‘loss’ to cut other income taxes.” With realestate values going up during the 1950s and ’60s, savvy investors “could build a structure, claim ‘losses’ for several years while enjoying tax-free income, then sell the project for more than they had originally invested.”

    Since the “accelerated depreciation” rule did not apply to renovation of existing buildings, investors “now looked away from established downtowns, where vacant land was scarce and new construction difficult,” Hanchett says. "Instead, they rushed to put their money into projects at the suburban fringe—especially into shopping centers.

    http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled





  • I actually think you had a flawed process if you were projecting a Trump win in 2016, getting that “right” doesn’t impress me. Comey re-announcing new emails was 11 days before the election, there wasn’t time to see what people thought of it.

    Edit: The downvoters don’t remember the election. Clinton was winning basically every poll, her numbers peaked after the Access Hollywood tape and dropped from that peak, she was still winning polls by 4 points on election day. There are vagueries of voting behavior based on weather in different locations and the vote was super close in the swing states. Even with perfect state by state information adjusted by poll error, it was less than 50/50 Trump would win. It was a bad prediction.

    It happened to happen, because things with 40% odds happen 40% of the time, but predicting the 40% outcome is bad process.