Trump is considered racist for wanting to secure the borders. Both parties leadership, made up of out of touch elites, have decided that illegal immigration is good for their interests, voters be damned. Dems need to have more people on gov assistance and the GOP wants cheap labor with no rights. I dislike Trump but if both sides are demonizing him then he is probably on the right track.
"By the way, it cost us more — the S&L crisis cost the taxpayers more than the TARP did in 2008. So, I don’t know why he would cite that. In fact, the failure of a very large number of smaller institutions turned out to be much more expensive to the taxpayers. In fact, as far as the bailout of 2008 was concerned, we made money on that in the money that was extended to financial institutions.
And, by the way, it wasn’t just to big ones then. It was to small ones as well. The only institutions that weren’t able to pay us back were the auto companies. And I don’t think — I thought it was a good idea to pay them.
As to size, the question is not just to the size, but what would happen if they couldn’t pay their debts. And that’s what people ignore. We did two things in the legislation to deal with that. First of all, we made it much, much less likely that they would get so indebted that they couldn’t pay them back.
It’s not their overall size. It’s the indebtedness that’s the threat. You could not now have an AIG, which got itself $170 billion beyond what it could pay off in derivatives, because we do not allow institutions under the law now to get so indebted without the capital to back it up.
Secondly and most importantly, what we said is this: If a large institution can’t pay its debts, it fails. It is not too big to fail. It is put out of business, by law. No federal official can advance any money to pay its debts under the law until it is dissolved.
What then happens is this: It may be that we would have to borrow from the taxpayers to pay some of the debts, not all, as the previous law required, but if we have to pay some of the debts to prevent the failure of a large institution from having serious economic consequences, the treasury secretary is mandated by law to recover every penny from large — other large financial institutions.
And, again, it’s not the size of the institution, but the size of the unpaid indebtedness. Well, we have dealt with that by reducing the indebtedness and requiring that the institution will be dissolved if it fails."
"to get the amount of energy stored in a single AA battery, we would have to lift 100 kg (220 lb) 10 m (33 ft) to match it. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet). It is clear that the energy density of gravitational storage is severely disadvantaged."
It's almost incredible that a AA battery can do that much work, but I checked the math:
Alkaline AA Battery =~ 3 Wh =~ 10000 Nm
Gravitational Potential Energy =~ kg * m * 10 N/kg
100 kg * 10 m * 10 N/kg == 10000 Nm == AA Battery
It also puts into perspective how much solar energy is available. A single 200 W panel (~5 sq ft or ~.5 m^2) can charge hundreds of AA batteries per day, and thus would require lifting more than 10000 kg by 10 m to store a single day's output from just that one panel!
Do people understand systemic injustice, and what coming from being a nation of slaves merely 150 years ago, and having legal injustice until merely 40 years ago and implicit injustice until today can do to a people?
A mere 70 years ago Jews were being chased through Europe and killed like dogs. My only point was that there are bigger problems than racism. The roots may be from Jim Crow and such but the lack of progress is disheartening and seemingly intractable.
>A mere 70 years ago Jews were being chased through Europe and killed like dogs.
However all of them were white, educated (a lot of them highly educated), and managed to migrate to places where they fit with white society and were not persecuted for being jews anymore. Blacks didn't have that.
>The roots may be from Jim Crow and such but the lack of progress is disheartening and seemingly intractable.
Well, lack of progress is relative. From just-freed slaves, peniless and uneducated, now there is a decent black middle class.
But if your grantparents were dead poor (think Jim Crow blacks in the South in the 20's and 40's), then you don't get to jump that far in a 3 generations.
Especially if your father had to face discrimination (in schooling, hiring, loans etc) up until the seventies or even more.
Latinos have the same problems.
Jews, Italians, Irish not so much -- they started from much better position than slaves, and they are white so could fit in to business etc better. Besides they didn't originate from places like Alabama, Mississippi, like most of blacks who migrated North did etc -- they came to NY, Chicago etc.
I think that most problems faced by black people in the US are a result of racism. Sometimes that's overt direct racism. Sometimes it's institutional racism. Sometimes it's the end result of years of policies that had racist origins.
I personally think, Europe and the US have a problem with their underclass. This fuels racism, because claims like "more blacks are criminals than whites" are indeed true, but not because they are black, but because they are in the lower class. With stagnating economies it is much harder to rise out of it and with technological advancements it becomes harder and harder for them to stay employed.
I would call it racism, because the term expanded to be about more than just color of skin. I do not think about it in a redneck-raises-confederate-flag-and-points-shotgun-at-black-sense either but more in the way key points of society like education are structured.
Just carefully back up you claims and nobody on HN will harm you. Being offended by mainstream media and believing you alone know the truth while all other follow the government like sheep is usually the narrative of actual racists.
None of those groups you are thinking of, including black immigrants from Africa, experienced Jim Crow and the extension of those policies in the Drug War and school-to-prison pipeline. Or are these not the white racist "cultural issues" you are looking for? Treat people the same and you get the same results.
I believe what most Europeans would think is that the main problem for Blacks in the US is poverty, and that poverty is related to racism, some of it historical.
Looking at NBA, football and US sports in general, I don't believe that. These problems are usually more complex than "it's just racism". We have that kind of problems in Europe too.
I don't know the psychology of racists but in Europe I see very often a pattern, when person A feels discriminated by person B, A would rather blame racism or xenophobia if he can, than admit he is discriminated because he has different social class, different culture|religion|sexuality, lower level of education or intelligence, unpleasant behavior or physical appearance, etc.. So when an individual gets along well with several people of a different race but he's accused of racism by others, I tend to believe the source of conflict is not racism but some other "unspecified" reasons.
Yes, I very much agree that poverty and the lack of education should be forbidden (racism and xenophobia already is). We only have to work out how to efficiently impose universal education, respect, equality, fraternity while still preserving the liberty.
>That's just classism, which is as bad as racism or xenophobia
Depends on the kind of classism (and the direction) -- because upper classes DO have power, money, etc, and it's not some basic human right or morality to believe that they should.
Else, we can describe anything with an "ism" and say it's bad. "You hate murderers? That's antimurderism".
I think most Europeans know, that most places in the US are safe.
For me the difference is, that I live in the most dangerous city in Germany (statistic inflated due to giant airport) and would still walk through every street here at any time. I do not think that I would do the same in some parts of LA. So maybe my understanding of LA is a bit cartoonish - and granted you do not walk in LA anyway.
I didn't visit US and I don't intend to do it soon(ever?), but I would have some "cartoonish" fears like: being detained/harassed/turned back in the airport for possible stupid/hostile remarks I made (who knows when, who knows on which forum) about US gov or foreign policy; Or being shot without witnesses or strangulated to death by some psychopath policeman because "resisted arrest" and so on..
Many of us see the USA through your "Hollywood window", media reports and statistics. Imagine how easy it is to be worried about your personal safety.
The reason I do not plan to visit is because of that image about gun-totin', mentally unstable nation out of touch with reality with bizarre and secret laws which are in the worst case enforced by trigger-happy people with less than 5 months of training. Terrifying.
But you aren't actually safe from them in a different continent either: attending to a wedding in Mid East can be lethal...
"The Germans were bad for sending the Jews to the gas chambers but the Americans were bad too for running articles about Hitler's homes" is pretty weak sauce.
