Steve's Politics Blog

Medium has the article Your app is an onion: Why software projects spiral out of control.

You start with the best of intentions. You hire a developer to build out your startup idea. But almost every week, it feels like the project needs tweaking. Features start creeping in, and the scope slowly expands.

This is why I developed this tool to create outlines in HTM. It is free for the taking.

For the first 30 or so years of my career I worked for people who had enough faith in me that they would let me do proper design before I implemented anything. For the last 6 years of my career, people thought that proper design as described in the article was wasting time. What little design I could do, I had to sneak in and keep hidden from management.

When I had had enough of the insanity, I retired.

YouTube has the video Vegas Shooting Taxi Driver’s Video ! Must Watch B4 Well You Know , The Take Down !.

Cori Langdon at Mandalay Bay In taxi line

As I was watching this, I was thinking that this is too detailed to have been staged.

I don’t know what is the significance of this video. That may only become apparent later, if at all. So here is something for our memory banks as the story unfolds in the corporate media. There is no telling if we will ever get the straight story on this event.

The Ring Of Fire has the article Watch Rachel Maddow Peddle Completely Debunked Story – Redacted Tonight.

There are obviously a lot of people interested in tense relations with Russia. They would be what the Pope calls “blood – soaked arms traders.” Too bad these people own our government and are able to frame our debates by owning our media.

Warning: X-rated for language that you probably hear almost every day.

Slate has the article Partisan Gerrymandering Got the Sotomayor Treatment.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a very simple inquiry that cut to the core of the case: “Could you tell me what the value is to democracy from political gerrymandering? How does that help our system of government?”
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Sotomayor then drilled down and posed an even sharper follow-up question to Murphy: “It’s OK to stack the decks so that for 10 years—or an indefinite period of time—one party, even though it gets a minority of votes, can’t get … the majority of seats?”

Murphy couldn’t come up with a truthful answer to any of these questions. Perhaps the Supreme Court can come to the rescue of this country.

Scientific American has the article Black Holes, Cosmic Collisions and the Rippling of Spacetime.

Gravitational wave astronomy, where we view the Universe not in light or particles but by picking up the vibrations of spacetime itself, is a true revolution in our view of the cosmos. We can only guess at what it might show us as we continue to feel our way forward into the vast unknown.

If you want an explanation of the concept of spacetime, look at my previous post CERN scientists simplify space-time in 3 short videos. That should clear up any questions you might have. 🙂

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Poorest Tax Payers to Pay the Most Under Trump Plan.

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and says that both Republicans and Democrats are financially illiterate when they speak about the deficit, and Trump’s economic experts are ‘completely disconnected from the real world.’

The title on the YouTube video is Trump’s Tax Plan Increases Marginal Taxes for Only the Poorest Tax Payer.

I was of two minds about posting this video. It has a lot of good information in it, but it has a few flaws. The flaws muddy up the message.

The good stuff you can get from the video include the fact that taxes do redistribute income (lately the redistribution is in the upward direction). Bill Black cares about tax cuts because it just redistributes even more income to the wealthy.

Bill’s explanation of the difference between the deficit and the debt is somewhat off point, but possibly exactly backwards. I am surprised that he, of all people, would confuse that issue. The national debt the accumulation of deficits over the years. I bet he wishes he could take back what he said.

Talking about losing political arguments, the one about taxes not funding spending may be literally correct, but is too strange a claim to be worth using.

Proto Thema has the article Russia writes off over $20bln debt to African countries.

“We have written off more than $20 billion of African countries’ debts as part of an initiative to help out the world’s poorest and most deeply indebted nations,” President Vladimir Putin told reporters after meeting with his Guinean counterpart Alfa Conde on Thursday.

There go those nasty Russians again. Trying to win over the hearts and minds of people by forgiving their countries’ debts. Why we can’t win their hearts and minds by pushing for austerity for those people seems to remain a mystery to our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. If the people don’t like austerity we can offer to overthrow their elected governments for them and introduce our own dictators to help them see the light. What’s not to like about what we offer compared to Russia?

Of course there is always this from my quotes page.

James Galbraith – posted here December 19, 2012 – source
A debt that can’t be paid won’t be paid.

Business Insider has the article A history of the US gold standard.

After expressing his own political views about the matter, the author shifts gears.

So instead, I want to lay out the facts of America’s past relationship with gold as a currency and dispel some of the misconceptions people might have.

I have not fact checked the article, but the story of our off and on relationship with the gold standard seems plausible to me. I record a link to this story on my blog because I think it is a good idea to have some perspective on our history with the gold standard.

Rawstory has the article Here is how the Republican Party has conned America for over 30 years.

And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005,

I am too young to have experienced the 1930s, but I am old enough to have studied economics before Reagan came upon the political scene. That is why I have been trying to promote awareness of the information in this article since before I started this blog.

It is definitely an uphill battle to get people to acknowledge what we knew for the 50 years preceding Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy.

TedEd has the article with videos CERN scientists simplify space-time in 3 short videos.

Space is where things happen. Time is when things happen. And sometimes, in order to really look at the universe, you need to take those two concepts and mash them together. Space-time is a pretty confounding subject to wrap one’s head around, though, so we asked CERN scientists (and all-around super nerds) Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie to break it down for us. Below, the full three-part series, complete with black holes, space-time diagrams and a load of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

You’ll have to click on the link to the article above to see the videos that they mention as being below.

Do these videos clear things up, or does it boggle your mind even more? Depending how you answer this question says something about you, but I don’t know what.