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Highest deficit numbers for America. (with whatever hyphen you might want to add). EVER. RECORDED. Kicking the can down the road to artificially prop up the economy by multiplying the deficit in the short term is genius political strategy I must say. Surprised to see it work so well on here. There's a huge amount of confounding factors affecting deficit/employment, of which the President has little control over.

Top moment for Trump was calling out Joe's political answer. Top moment for Biden was talking about being a president for both red and blue states and a united America. Worst part was them accusing each other of corruption for 20 minutes at the start, but it recovered and it's a been much better debate on all sides including moderator.

Apparently Borat 2 features a clip of Giuliani reaching in his pants after flirting with Borat's "15" year old daughter after an interview, the irony is almost too good to be true.

Universal coverage arguments aside, here are less talked about fixes to costs I would push for that I think we could all agree on: 1. The residency program has been capped at the same level due to Congress since the 90s, shortage of doctors has followed since the population has grown significantly. Huge bottle neck at that point in the training pipeline so it needs to be increased. 2. Get rid of the 4 year bachelors requirement for medical school. Info is mostly useless. Most countries do 2 year premed undergrad on core courses + 3 year medical school. Would also help with student loan issue. 3. Redirect funding to preventative programs rather than curative programs.

President retweeted Qanon conspiracy suggesting Obama and Biden killed Seal Team 6... Thankfully it was removed, but unfortunately many Qanon supporters will see this as acknowledgement of the truth from the President and that he was forced to take down by the deep state. Here's the "CIA whistleblower" for what it's worth.

Oh yeah, plenty wrong with him... Just less bad than Trump's egotistic impulses, divisive rhetoric, policy positions, and cabinet appointees. You'll find very few people who are truly Biden supporters in the literal sense of the word, especially on here. I'll likely vote republican if he runs again in 4 years (so long as it's not someone like Roy Moore).

DDLVID.COM-1304639824289120256 (1).mp4

You're selectively ignoring the part where I discredit the chart I used using an example counterargument and specifically state to read the papers that explain how the causal link was isolated. Of course correlation does not equal causation, that's such an elementary argument to make and it's a strawman of what I'm actually saying. There is no way to practical way to prove to you in a forum why there is more than just a loose correlation between human activity and climate change. In medicine, one something passes the three sigma test (99.7%) the study will claim there was a statistically significant relationship found, whether it be lung cancer and smoking, drinking and blood pressure, etc. Despite the fact it is never a "proven" (in the sense of 100% certainty), doctors and scientists are of course always open to the 0.3% chance that there is no causal relationship or that the data can be explained otherwise. It's difficult to address what you linked because I'm not a climate change expert and it is very lengthy, but I'll certainly read it. The link between humans and climate change may not have three sigma certainty yet, but it is the conservative consensus is at least two sigma, which of course leaves the 5% possibility that there is no causal link. Since we mentioned models here as well, here a retrospective metastudy over the past 5 decades that analyzed the predictive capabilities of climate models. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019GL085378

You're being pedantic, but if you wish to play the semantics game I am more than willing to call you a climate change skeptic. The implication in "denialism" is a significant deviation from the status quo as agreed upon by experts. If you tell me the Sun will rise tomorrow and I say it isn't, it would not be a stretch to call me a Sunrise denier, despite there being absurd but logically sound arguments I could make that challenge the sunrise. For example, I could claim you are assuming the invariability of the laws of physics in time, which have so far held true but are "unproven" to continue to the future. Science never claims the certainty of anything with 100%, there are always baked in assumptions that you could challenge ad nauseum. When science claims something is a fact, it is choosing not to consider breaks in underlying assumptions from extremely low probable events (such as a break in the immutability of the laws of modern physics). Bigfoot and climate change are a false equivalence in terms of probability of being truth given certain assumptions, as are the sun rising tomorrow and climate change, so I hope it's clear why your claim regarding responsibility of proof (while true in a general sense) does not apply to established scientific claims. It would not be useful to sit here and go through the science that "proves" humans are the primary factor in climate change, in the same way it wouldn't be for me to explain general relativity and stellar physics to "prove" that the Sun will rise tomorrow, so I encourage you to read the research beyond reactionary commentary on cherry picked predictive failures in previous decades. Again, you could always argue something hasn't been proved, but at some point science says we will accept the assumptions and claim it as being true, always being open to the possibility that it is falsified in the future. So no, science will never prove anything definitively, but human influence on climate change is past the point where it is debatable in a scientifically productive sense. Going back to the earlier example, the scientific method as taught in high school (which you seem to be referring to here) is also impossible to apply to definitively proving the rising of the Sun. The climate is a chaotic, but deterministic, system which is theoretically computable to perfect accuracy given enough information. At any point in the last 800,000 years you could have predicted a rise or fall in temperature following a rise/fall in C02 within 2 degrees 99% of the time with only this data. You could challenge this and say that it could be that the causal link is backwards and that it's temperature which affects C02 levels, so again I'll refer you to actually read the research to see how scientists isolate the causal link. The science is clear enough to make a statement on the primary influence of humans on climate change. The politics are what we choose to do about it. Maybe we are just a drop in the bucket and have no reason to do anything when China and India pollute so much more. Maybe the economic costs of the Paris Accords do not justify the future costs in damage. I am more than willing to engage with those arguments on a policy level, but fundamentally there is still a rejection of the notion that humans cause climate change which cannot be overlooked if we want to debate the politics of it.

Despite this, unfortunately the conservative political class do deny that humans are a significant factor in climate change. Tucker Carlson, PragerU, Charlie Kirk via TPUSA, and most republican congressmen now acknowledge it is real but claim it is a natural phenomenon that we have no hopes of controlling. Can't say whether it's just typical partisan bs in the modern culture war, oil lobbying power, or some combination of both, but it's an unfortunate reality. Best evidence of this is former Republican congressman Jim Bridenstine (who's done a fantastic job btw), acknowledging human caused climate change only after he became NASA administrator, ostensibly because he was freed from the political shackles that come with being a Republican congressman. Another interpretation is he sold out to the Deep State or needed to do so for political support for NASA, so I guess that will depend on your politics. Before I get smacked with the whataboutism, yes the Green New Deal was an alarmist and horribly written crapshoot, but one party has recently pulled us out of Paris Climate Accords and is pushing for deregulation of coal. Clean water and air fall more under environmentalist policy than climate change policy (though they are of course somewhat entangled), the global carbon footprint is the biggest issue at hand. What we need is a carbon tax and nuclear investment, both in building fission reactors and researching fusion.

Alex Jones, clearly

10 point swing in betting markets towards Biden, we'll see how the polls react.

https://www.airforcemag.com/docs/type/accident/

2020 keeps delivering. Phosphine, a significant biosignature, has been discovered on Venusian atmosphere. News was leaked today with a press conference expected tomorrow. No known chemical process outside of labs or microbes is known to produce it. http://astrobiology.com/2020/09/phosphine-detected-in-the-atmosphere-of-venus---an-indicator-of-possible-life.html

Indeed, and those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. A higher second peak in the fall that exceeds our hospital capacity will kill at a much higher rate than now where we have kept them under capacity. The overwhelming consensus is that the vaccine will be available by Q2 of next year so this is a non issue we thankfully do not need to consider. But since you asked, in the extreme hypothetical where was no end in sight for 5+ years, we should then find the policy limit at a local level that keeps hospitals right near their ICU capacity and keep it there until herd immunity is reached; then invest in hospital infrastructure/resources and continue to ease restrictions at the limit to accelerate herd immunity.

Agree with your overall points here, I'm just nitpicking in good spirit for the meme here cause McConnell said this in the Senate and it was pointed out that the previous administration did in fact leave a 69 page (nice) playbook after Ebola for future administrations titled "Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents" but known colloquially as “the pandemic playbook” that came from the team that was disbanded that I mentioned. Agree in general on the importance of cultural differences in their pandemic response success. Main reason I started with low hanging fruit was because I believed culture was one of the main driving factors driving their success and those actions from POTUS could lead us towards that culture instead of away from it.

Idk if you just didn't read or are being intentionally obtuse. I specifically stated their national contact tracing program as the most important policy they did and how we could replicate it here through the executive branch. I also mentioned their airport screening policies and how we could do something similar here.

Low hanging fruit would be the opposite of what I listed at the end. So wearing his mask and calling it patriotic shortly after CDC changed guidance rather than months after, putting political pressure on certain states/cities to SHUT DOWN instead of "LIBERATE", establishing a cautionary tone that encouraged a culture of safety in the national conscious rather than an overconfident one that fueled conspiracies such as plandemic, etc. One of the biggest factors in their success was their contact tracing program, so a national voluntary contact tracing program established through FEMA after the national emergency was declared could have been very effective. Airport screenings were another weak point of ours so implementing a general screening operation through TSA and a short turnaround testing operation through Customs for travelers visiting from hot zones would have been useful. In addition, disbanding the NSC pandemic response team prior to the virus was detrimental to our initial response and defunding the NIH funds for coronavirus research in May was a seemingly politically motivated mistake. Just to be clear again I don't put all the blame on the administration, so I don't think doing all this on their own would put us on par with those countries either.

I'm well aware. Just wanted to point out it's an example of the "reduction to absurdity" fallacy where you mischaracterize an opposing argument to make it seem ridiculous. It's only dumb if you only take it at face value to that extreme end, and nobody is saying that only deaths matter and nothing else. When people argue that mortality is an important measure they do so under the context of other industriazed globalized countries that have fared better. Nobody who says mortality is the most important measure would argue NK is doing the best at managing COVID because it ignores the obvious point that NK has no COVID to handle in the first place (or that they lie and employ draconian policies). That's why I followed with countries that someone who highly values mortality would actually make an argument for.

Considering nobody goes there that would be a dumb argument to make. How about highly globalized democracies such as South Korea or Japan which have much higher population densities, much higher at risk population demographic makeup, and have less cumulative deaths than we have had in 1 day with a lower loss of GDP over the last two quarters. There's economic research that shows the fallacy of the trade-off between economic outcomes vs preventative measures. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560 Our case fatality rate suggests our hospital system have done a good job at keeping people who are infected alive, but our casualty rate suggests we did not do a good job with preventative measures, and there was no economic trade-off in doing so as made clear by countries cited. It's not the end all be all of metrics but to say it's of limited value is disingenuous, especially considering we can compare economic and health outcomes to other countries. There is certainly a debate to have regarding federalism and individual liberty here, with countries like Taiwan adopting extremely concerning policies such as tracking people on quarantine via cell phone GPS and having officers search the public for citizens on quarantine. It is clear however this is not necessary to have an effective response, and the point stands that the leadership and messaging from the administration has been extremely ineffective. Examples include political pressure by tweeting to LIBERATE X state, endorsing mask use 5 months into the pandemic, budgetary cuts that eliminated programs dedicated to pandemic response from previous years, and a string of concerning tweets at the onset including "were going very substationally down, not up". And yes of course local leadership everywhere is also at fault, but I'm addressing the original issue of why we can't just ignore criticism towards the President because we have a federalist system.

To make matters worse when prodded on the failures of the national response claims "I don't take responsibility at all" while rating himself a "10 out of 10", the most toxic of all leadership attitudes to take in a crisis. I think it's important to also mention the active undermining of historically apolitical institutions. Some examples include: publicly pressuring the Fed to lower interest rates, the Bible photo op ordeal with the General Milley, tweeting about active high profile judical affairs such as Gallagher and Crozier, picking a partisan oil lobbyist as head of EPA, politicizing NASA's commercial crew success, leaving state department positions vacant, putting alt righters such as Miller and Bannon in positions of power, etc. If you're cynical enough to believe that all our institutions are working against American interests, or that there's some secret society headed by Soros running all our institutions, then I can't blame you for voting for him. In any case, Presidents get too much blame and credit for the economy; federal government policy/manning, foreign affairs/treaties, and cultural leadership are what the President actually have control over, and for this election I think Biden is less of a dumpster fire. Not say all the the President has done is bad, of course. He earned a lot of praise from me when he chose Mattis for SecDef. However Mattis' words shortly after his resignation leave little else to be said about the state of the executive branch.

I'll trade for any truly woke #WW1GWA patriot to explain Qanon. Latest right wing conspiracy theory. Relative sent me this golden nugget on fb unironically

Usually when people say it's a misunderstanding of economics they are operating under the assumptions of econ 101. But arguing against a higher minimum wage with econ 101 knowledge is like saying black holes don't exist because Newton's Laws forbid them. It's a toy model of the actual dynamics which eventually break down in the real world, and there's substantial research (with empirical data) that shows that the low wage market resembles a monopsony. Under the monopsony model, increasing wages actually increases employment (obviously if you go past market equilibrium then you get detrimental effects). Under monopsonies there is inefficient dead weight loss with excess profits going to employers in a similar way to how monopolies have dead weight loss with excess profit going to supplier. If you think monopolies are a danger to a well functioning free market capitalist system then I encourage you to look into the research on monopsony and minimum wage. If you're free market to the point of allowing anticompetitive monopolies then you would be consistent in being against minimum wage increases, but usually when I discuss this with conservatives they are against monopoly power and have not considered monopsony theory of minimum wage. IMO minimum wage should be increased until the monopsony threshold breaks down, which currently seems to be around the ~12-15 dollar range, beyond which you start to get lower employment (based on current research). This isn't even taking into account the effects of higher wages on money velocity and demand, which would also have beneficial effects on economic output. Now I don't expect the average American to have to delve into economic theory to justify this, so I'd put a provision in the law that would automatically lower the wage back if employment decreases by more than say 5% to increase public support. Sorry for the word vomit but hope that was clear enough. I think the "living wage" talking point on my side of the aisle is ineffective because it completely ignores the (important) conservative talking point on employment, but hopefully this can at least show you that there's some space for agreement here (pro market/economy).

https://www.airforcemag.com/acc-aims-to-cut-pilot-training-time-by-up-to-half/