Let's Talk Politics

Cheeto decided not to plan it for that day and made it look like it was his idea to renege

I saw the jaywalking incident and wondered about the story.  It looked like it was in a subdivision with very little traffic.  I thought they must have been talking about The Strip or NYC where jaywalking can really present a danger.  Was that just total BS charges by the cops?

I'm with you on the too old to protest thing. It's hard enough just to keep it together without getting gassed or run over by a cop car or a redneck in a Hawaiian shirt. They gassed one of the crowds here again last night.  The protesters are not going to stop though. 

I used to know a lawyer who still lives in the block on Monument Avenue where the Lee statue is.  His family has lived there for generations and he has a picture of one of his ancestors in his full Confederate General uniform in his home office. I wonder if it's the noise or something else that might be keeping him awake at night.

I thought I was challenging its merit by calling it slippery slope reasoning. But I can take a shot at it piece by piece, which will be helpful in demonstrating how remote the probabilities are. I shall be generous as I can be, though.

"Suppose that we begin to see an increase in Covid cases large enough to justify another shut down."

I think it is almost certain to happen in certain regions but almost certainly will not be nationwide, or even statewide in most cases. So let's give that probability a 50/50 chance or .5

"Just as income starts to trickle back to states and they can stop paying out huge sums for relief, the brakes get thrown on again. Only this time, the Feds have already paid out $4 trillion and are going to be really stingy and state and local governments have to do like Mitch said and file for bankruptcy and/or default on bond payments."

Letting states en masse file for bankruptcy is good political fodder in a speech but I think is so unlikely that I would give it a probability of less than one percent. But I am being generous so I'll give it a 10% chance or .1

"Power bills for water and wastewater utilities don't get paid so pumps get turned off."

That will never happen either. Emergency funding for the states will almost certainly be supplied to keep the sewers pumping the $%^e. But I'll be generous again and give it a 10% chance or .1

So far the very generous probability of your scenario, all of which, it seems to me, would be necessary for your conclusion, is .5*.1*.1= 0.005 or one half of 1 percent.

My real view is that the first probability is .3 the second probability .01 and the third .005 giving a probability of 0.000015 which makes this less likely an existential threat than asteroid 2006 QV89.


"Society falls apart from the ground up."

I laughed at this last bit because if you look up Slippery Slope Fallacy in Britannica the example is: " legalizing prostitution is undesirable because it would cause more marriages to break up, which would in turn cause the breakdown of the family, which would finally result in the destruction of civilization."

Trump's first appointee wrote the majority decision also. How interesting.

He must be soooo proud!

"cute but a ridiculous display of statistical manipulation"

I was being generous. The real probabilities are possibly much slighter. But it is not manipulation. That is how probabilities actually work except I did not factor in the probabilities of a cure or treatment which would only reduce the likelihood of us falling down your slope.

"How long do you think US government debt will remain the worlds safe place for money? What will happen if the municipal bond market collapses because municipalities can't meet their obligations?"

The FED can buy both indefinitely to prop it up.

"I agree that the chances are low but I believe the ramifications of failing are so great"

And others can reasonably argue an opposing position without being unpatriotic.

"Would a weakened dollar hurt or help the US?"

It would help. And a 35% fall would still mean it had not given up most of the gains since the great recession.