Delta1212

To the extent that it mandates a bare minimum of coverage that all insurance plans must meet, disallows denying anyone coverage and provides government subsidies to lower-income people to help pay for whatever plans they get, yes. The expansion of Medicaid to cover a ton more people is probably the biggest step in that direction.

No he won't. That's a stretch at best and a Republican-controlled House is not going to impeach him over that. Even if Democrats retake the House in 2018 and, by some miracle, also retake the Senate, which isn't terribly likely given which seats are up that year, the wiretap claim will be old news by then and there is no way Democrats go for impeachment over it. There may be some scenarios where Trump gets impeached either by Democrats after 2018 or even by Republicans, but in no scenario will the thing he gets impeached over be a tweet claiming Obama wire tapped him.

Every time some politician does something scummy or worse, people complain about "politicians" as if this is only to be expected from anyone who is a politician and, implicitly, letting the person or people who caused the actual problem off the hook by making the case that anyone who could have been elected would have done the same thing. After all, they are all politicians.

Jack in the box is clearly "Generic male name in the box" since that's literally what it is.

There are two points to address there: One is that this means that every school is spending the same amount of money on the education of every student. Largely schools would get more money but would have to spent proportionately more money for the larger number of students, so every student in every school in the state gets an education worth the same dollar value in terms of resources applied to them. Now, the second point is that there are some opportunities for concentration in larger schools that are and would still be more readily available than in smaller schools. If 3% of a grade level is 30 students, you can have a class that specifically caters to the needs and interests of 3% of the school. If 3% of the grade level is 1 kid, it's much harder to justify paying a teacher to teach that same class to a single student. This is difficult to work around within a single school system. It would be a quite difficult task to equitably balance budgets across schools so that every school can afford the same programs regardless of the number of interested students, and this is also liable to create a lot of waste and wind up bringing the overall average opportunities down across the board. Now, one possible solution for smaller towns would be to establish magnet schools for gifted students or those who have specialized interests or talents that have developed by the time they enter high school. It's easier to offer enhanced opportunities in niche subjects or more advanced levels when you can pool what would have been classes of 1 or 2 kids in each of a dozen schools into classes of 15-20 in a single school. That gives people in smaller towns a more diverse set of options in a cost effective manner.

What about that makes you uncomfortable?

One potential solution is to have each town pay into a state fund for education and then divvy it up between each district on a per student basis.

Keep in mind that our new Education Secretary is pushing for a school voucher program that would essentially give money to parents to go to whatever school they wanted to send their child to, which effectively means that wealthy parents would get a subsidy for the private schools they're already sending their kids to at the expense of the public schools. It might open up the number of people who can then afford to send their kids to private school, but that either means that the price just gets driven up with the higher demand or more private schools open up to accommodate the demand, further draining public school funds. In effect, if the program supported by the current administration gets turned into law, wealthy parents who send their children to private school will no longer be paying any taxes toward public education for everyone else and may even wind up netting a subsidy to help pay for their child to attend private school at tax payer expense.

Some quick googling for budget breakdowns: The Social Security Administration's annual budget is just shy of $1 trillion. Medicare + Medicaid is a bit over $1 trillion. Adding them together gives you over $2 trillion that you need to cover just those programs unless you want to make cuts. That's not even touching the military budget which, even if you make substantial cuts, is still going to be sizable, nor does it touch any of the substantial investments you have been talking about putting money into. The current budget is over $4 trillion for the year. Assuming you can offset all of the spending you are talking about adding with cuts to the military budget (which I'm not sure you can do, but I'll grant you anyway for the sake of simplicity) and even manage to trim other programs down to make the total budget an even $4 trillion, that's the approximate amount you need to raise in revenue from federal taxes. ($7 trillion is federal + state + local revenue). So unless you are willing to make some substantial cuts, you need to raise about three times the amount of revenue you are saying you'd get from your current tax plan in order to cover costs.

Well, they aren't necessarily more expensive, but it depends on how you spend the money. A social program that generates $2 for every $1 spent is a good investment even if you have to borrow money with interest payments to fund it. In general though, yes. Our current spending is based on what programs and services people want, and our taxes are based on what people want to pay. And there is very little effort to get the two to line up. Cutting popular programs isn't popular and raising taxes to pay for them also isn't popular, so neither gets done and we continue running a deficit, which again, isn't popular.

Ok, well, as stated above, having a government program to emancipate and then, from the parents' perspective, essentially kidnap 10-11-year-olds seems like a recipe for disaster no matter how academically competent they are. This also feels like an attempt to improve the education of the group of people who least need help: Those who do really well in the current schooling system. I think you'd also find that your school would still be dominated by people whose parents have money. Test scores are, broadly, a function of ability + resources to prepare with. Those with no ability won't test especially well even with resources backing them, but those with ability and no resources to learn also won't do well. So you'd wind up mostly with the smartest rich kids in your school, exactly the ones who don't need added help. Education reform needs to focus on raising the prospects of the students that are not already succeeding. That means tackling poverty, improving access to educational resources in areas that don't have them. Increasing both quantity and quality of teachers and reducing or eliminating financial hurtles to secondary education. And probably also putting a renewed focus on technical schools and apprenticeships. There are a lot of good jobs that "require" a college degree that don't actually require a college degree because

Doesn't seem like a rebranding, although I do seem some issues. Your tax plan is effectively a massive tax cut pretty much across the board. The only bracket that would see an increase would be those who don't pay any taxes now because they don't make enough to get above the standard deduction. Even with your proposed military cuts, you're not going to offset the inflated budget deficit you'd create unless you cut into Medicare and Social Security, and you certainly wouldn't have enough left over for the massive spending you're proposing be poured into your research/infrastructure/jobs program. I'm also a little unclear on the reasoning behind restricting immigration specifically during the implementation phase of the programs you describe, as I'm not sure how the one impacts the other.

It is much, much easier to get elected at the local level without the support of a major party than it is in the national level. That's more about local networking and campaigning on specific locally relevant issues rather than over-arching ideology. Local elections, especially ones in off years, have fairly small numbers of voters. It's possible for a smaller organization to coordinate the kind of face time with voters needed to get their candidate a decent chance of winning them over that anyone outside the major parties simply can't pull off in a nationwide scale. The people who do vote in the local election also tend to be more engaged and are more likely to vote on specific issues that directly and immediately affect them like schools and property taxes. If you can find a local problem, it's much easier to get people behind you on solving that problem than it is on trying to develop a national brand that people trust that out of the gate. If that's your benchmark for success, yeah. You're going to fall flat.

Yes, running for local office would be a good first step. There is a tendency to want to think that if you could just figure out the right message that would speak to people, you could send it out and people would flock to it. People don't avoid the minor third parties in the US because they lack a distinctive identity or perspective. They avoid them because they never win. There are plenty of celebrity endorsements of the Libertarians or the Greens. It doesn't make much of a difference. You don't win by having appealing ideas. You win by making people believe that you can win. Imagine you're starting a business and you need to attract investors. You don't walk into a meeting and tell them that you have a great idea. You're going to start a multinational company with dozens of subsidiaries and brand holdings that are each worth billions of dollars. Getting in on the ground floor of something like that is an investor's dream. That's how fortunes are made. It's a very appealing idea. But nobody is going to give you money because they aren't going to believe that you are capable of actually pulling it off. You can speak to everything a person wants and hopes for and still fail to gain their support because it's a better bet for them to back the person who promises half of what they want and is capable of delivering it than the person who promises everything they want and is incapable of delivering any of it. If you want investors, you get a loan for a single restaurant location. Then you prove you can make money on it and then it's even easier to get money for a second location. Then a franchise. Then you expand to multiple regions and then countries and so on. At each level of expansion, you can attract support based on your successes in the level before. If you want to build a political movement without massive funding right from the start, you need to start with similar "proof of concept" successes. Get some people elected to a state legislature, or even on a county or city/town level if that's what you can manage at first. Something to show voters that you have candidates who can win elections and that voting for you isn't throwing their vote away on a pipe dream. Unfortunately, doing that sort of thing also requires real-world leg work. You can't spark a movement from the comfort of your bedroom behind a computer screen. You need to meet people face to face. Attend open legislative sessions. Find out what issues are relevant and being debated by actual people. Get in touch with the kind of people who actually show up to protests and meetings and who will be willing to volunteer and go door to door to canvas for a candidate. This is not easy stuff to pull off and people make entire careers out of this sort of thing. One of the primary reasons that people stick with Ds and Rs is that it takes a lot of manpower and infrastructure to get people elected, and it's easier to work within an established organization that has all of that at its disposal than it is to start it all from scratch.

I think that is slightly hyperbolic in that no one is "irresistible" and looks are not "everything." They are quite important, though. No denying that.

There are two ways for a person to start a political career and they apply just as well to starting a political party: start local or start with a lot of money behind you.

No true Scotsman would struggle with that assertion.

Of course, and I acknowledge that it is to some extent a philosophical discussion about definitions, especially with things as they stand where we have bits and pieces but not really enough information overall to draw any truly informed conclusions about the nature of consciousness and surrounding topics beyond "They have something to do with the brain." The tidbits in different areas are fun to look at and explore how they support or detracts from specific ideas about how our minds work, but there are just too many open possibilities to come too firmly down on any higher level positions on the subject.

Does a human decide to drown in the ocean?

I think you have missed the point I was making about knowing where the thought is going while I'm still in the middle of it: I am not actually in the middle of the thought. I have already had the thought. Articulating it mentally is how I bring it into focus at the conscious level. Every thought you have, every feeling, all of your awareness is dictated by the same mental pathways that determine your decisions and actions. There is no independent conscious observer that lacks the ability to make decisions. Those same processes doing all of the puppeting also create the experience of consciousness, because apparently being able to recognize our own thought processes is useful. In order for you to lack free will in the way you are arguing, there must be a conscious entity that exist separately from the subconscious which is then being manipulated to believe it has control over things that are actually being controlled by subconscious processes. My perspective, and I think it aligns with the perspectives of some of the other people you are arguing with, is that consciousness is an experience that the subconscious generates for itself in order to better monitor its own thought processes. To say that "consciousness" is not in control then seems to me to be like saying that "vision" is not in control. Or that "hearing" is not in control. And then saying that the self is vision and so we don't have free will. Thoughts and decisions entering our conscious mind are being delivered up for internal review after we have made them. Your consciousness is something that you do, not what you are. We identify most strongly with the way we experience thoughts because that process is used to analyze our internal state instead of external inputs, but I do think that this is perhaps just as much of a category error when attempting to define the self as assigning that label to any of the other senses. Adding this, because I think I have a more succinct analogy: What we experience as consciousness is the story we tell ourselves about our own thought process. The story is not the thought itself, anymore than a map is the terrain, and there is a delay caused by having to tell the story, so by the time we hear the story, the decision it is about has already been made. And because we are hearing the story, we identify as the listener and say "I didn't really make this decision; I was just told a story in which I was the decision maker, but I didn't hear it until after the decision had already been made." But in fact, we are both the storyteller and the listener, and in identifying too strongly with the listener, we are failing to recognize that we are listening to our own story.

There is a bit of a feedback loop there, though. Consume what you want from a source you trust because they are telling you what you want to hear, and you'll start taking the things they say more seriously regardless of whether you initially agreed with it, especially when the overall theme is fitting all of the parts together into a cohesive narrative that makes the perspectives that are new to you dovetail nicely with the pet causes or ideas that drove you to those venues in the first place. This is why you have large blocs of people who are both pro-choice and believe climate change is a hoax, despite those two issues having ostensibly nothing to do with each other. The hard split on a majority of issues means that if you gravitate toward one "side" because of one particular view on one or two issues, you are likely to be exposed more to information that supports all of the other issues of that "side", reinforcing identification with that side as a whole and driving polarization as there are fewer and fewer common issues that people can reach across the aisle to work together on and fewer and fewer people who are in the middle agreeing with some issues presented by one party and other issues presented by the other party.

Citation on the sexual orientation thing? I'd like to see the context, and TEDx is occasionally iffy as a source even when the talk isn't being summarized second hand.

Things always continue on as normal right up until they don't. People have a habit of taking the status quo for granted.

Without the present order being sustained, pretty much any wealth that you can't hold in your hands or defend in person effectively goes *poof*. If you want to see how much government contributes to the massive accumulation of wealth, look at how well people accumulate wealth in countries with failed states. Education for yourself and your workforce, infrastructure and physical defense of your person and property are huge contributors to the ability to grow and accumulate wealth, often on a level that most people who have lived their entire lives in stable countries take for granted.

Depends on how you define the self. One of the things we have is the capability to self-monitor our thoughts. If the self-monitoring function is the totality of what you think of as "you" then yes, your free will is limited to possibly some circumstantial override functions that allow you to block decisions. Otherwise you are a prisoner looking out of the window as some other entity drivers the truck and tricks you into thinking that it's you doing the steering. On the other hand, it could be you making all of the decisions and it just takes a bit of extra time from when you make a decision to collect your thoughts, so to speak, and process them in a way that allows you to self-monitor those decisions. A bit like a signal delay that your brain automatically filters out in the same way it filters out the blind spot in your vision from where the optic nerve is. Then what you are really experiencing is not an illusion of control but a functionally more representative version of what is actually going on. If the thoughts you think are simply the end results of your actual thoughts served up after processing in a more easily analyzed form, then it's not terribly surprising that there is a delay from when those thoughts "actually occur" and when you become fully conscious of having them. After all, I know where the end of this sentence is going as soon as I start it even though I haven't immediately finished thinking "out loud."