• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade

chuckiechan said:
If they bought more from us they would have more leverage, but as it stands now there isn't a lot of economic ammunition left in China. China's economy is slowing, and we will continue to do our thing and in addition to that zealously defend our intellectual property which will have the greatest effect of all.
Click to expand...

I've said this before, I wish I could remember your reaction to it.
Tell me if you remember me saying:
"We'd better hope China doesn't decide to party like it's 1949."

See, thing is, being a totalitarian regime, China wouldn't hesitate to tell its wealthiest people that their assets are frozen for a while and that it is time to tighten things up and "sacrifice for the good of the country".

If President Xi wants to, he can put everyone back in drab Communist "pajamas" with one bowl of rice and a rusty bicycle for the next three years, just long enough to bring the American economy to its knees, then restart manufacturing just long enough to spook investors who are thinking of bringing manufacturing back to the United States, then bouncing back to commie 1949 austerity again.
 
Mycroft said:
Yeah...it's kind of hard for them to say "Obama did it" for this one.[/QUOTE ( bet they'll still try. They'll be giving Obama credit for anything good that occurs within the next decade, or two.
Click to expand...
 
Media_Truth said:
Make sure you don't get flatulation from all that gloating. Maybe this will help. If you actually read the report, you would have noticed this sentence.

The authors tweaked the index this year to account in part for the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, changes in human capital and the "Fourth Industrial Revolution"

Thanks Obama! For carrying through that horrific Cheney/Bush crisis!!!
Click to expand...
Told you!! Had to be at least one "Obama Nuh-uh".
 
ludin said:
ACtually if trump was into the next energy boom he should be heavily pushing for nuclear and hydrogen.
Hydrogen is going to take over the next energy for clean fuel.

If we start putting investment into getting the cost of hydrogen processing down and build an infrastructure
that is brand new growth sector that is not tapped yet.
Click to expand...

Hydrogen is unstable, that has been the problem with it. It is stable when isolated but unstable when exposed to the atmosphere as hydrogen can chain with other atoms creating something not much more stable than nitro glycerine. Scientists have not really found the fix for this, this means something like a car being rearended powered by hydrogen may do nothing, 100 of them may do nothing, but 101 being rear ended may take out a city block.

For it to stay stable it must be secured, in which making a leak proof system for it that can survive wrecks incompetent employees managing the tanks etc has become a challenge enough that it is not ready for primetime.
 
SLC said:
Texas is number 42 of debit per capita and California is near the top. I think California's total debt is north of 600 billion.

https://unionwatch.org/californias-statelocal-governments-confront-1-0-trillion-in-debt/
Click to expand...

Oh so now we're back to tugging on those "unfunded liabilities" numbers again?
Hey, did you know that the sum total of all unfunded liabilities on Earth are almost two quadrillion dollars more than the sum total value of every asset on the planet PLUS the total value of all labor of every working man and woman in the world for the last fifty years?

Of course, that's IF you were to calculate using the "75 year unfunded liabilities" graph.
So, the people of Earth owe a couple of quadrillion dollars and we're short.

And we haven't even included the unfunded liabilities of all the world's militaries yet, because for some reason, at least here in the USA, the military IS EXEMPT from all those unfunded liabilities scare stories.
Hmmmm, I bet that's one ginormous figure....didn't the Pentagon recently say that they're unable to account for a couple of trillion dollars?

Do us all a favor, let me know when you're ready to talk real figures and not this phony unfunded liabilities bull****.
Because that's what it is, bull****.
You got away with it one time, with the Post Office, forcing them to pre-fund health care 75 years into the future, for postal workers who aren't even born yet, for a post office that quite possibly might not even exist in the form we know today, and what will happen to all those billions slated to pay "intergenerational debt"?

I bet I know, it's going to go into some crook's pocket. Because crooks on the Right KNOW that unfunded liabilities talk is bull****. You got away with it once.
 
Well? How come I hear crickets all of a sudden?
Are all you unfunded liabilities doomsayers a bunch of gold bugs or something?

Lemme ask you something, what do our children need right this minute that will stand them in good stead financially 40 years from now? A good education, yes? The finest education that they can get, right?
So the idea of locking up a few trillion dollars and telling them we can't afford to educate them sounds incredibly stupid, doesn't it?
In forty years, do you think they will have suddenly found a way to magically turn their lives and earning power around without a proper education?
Do we need our infrastructure to last another twenty years? By all means let's sequester the money and not let anyone touch it, infrastructure be damned.
In fifty years, what will these kids, our future elderly and sick really need?
My guess is they will need doctors and nurses and caregivers all of whom need to be educated and trained and paid so that there are enough of them to meet the real needs. Good medicines and advances in medical technologies will need to keep pace with the needs of the future.
If we do not invest in these things NOW, TODAY, we will have set ourselves on a path where all the lock boxes of saved up taxes won't do us a bit of good fifty years in the future.

Money today is used for people today. Money in the future will go to people in the future.
Unfunded liabilities is the biggest pile of stinking lies ever perpetrated on the American people.
It's another "ultimate con".
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Well? How come I hear crickets all of a sudden?
Are all you unfunded liabilities doomsayers a bunch of gold bugs or something?

Lemme ask you something, what do our children need right this minute that will stand them in good stead financially 40 years from now? A good education, yes? The finest education that they can get, right?
So the idea of locking up a few trillion dollars and telling them we can't afford to educate them sounds incredibly stupid, doesn't it?
In forty years, do you think they will have suddenly found a way to magically turn their lives and earning power around without a proper education?
Do we need our infrastructure to last another twenty years? By all means let's sequester the money and not let anyone touch it, infrastructure be damned.
In fifty years, what will these kids, our future elderly and sick really need?
My guess is they will need doctors and nurses and caregivers all of whom need to be educated and trained and paid so that there are enough of them to meet the real needs. Good medicines and advances in medical technologies will need to keep pace with the needs of the future.
If we do not invest in these things NOW, TODAY, we will have set ourselves on a path where all the lock boxes of saved up taxes won't do us a bit of good fifty years in the future.

Money today is used for people today. Money in the future will go to people in the future.
Unfunded liabilities is the biggest pile of stinking lies ever perpetrated on the American people.
It's another "ultimate con".
Click to expand...

Do you even know what unfunded liabilities are? Most of them are pensions that were promised to people in days where people didn't have to worry about actually paying it. Or people that would rack up huge amounts of OT right before retiring so that their pension was gigantic compared to their normal years. Very little actually goes towards investing in stuff.
 
ajn678 said:
Do you even know what unfunded liabilities are? Most of them are pensions that were promised to people in days where people didn't have to worry about actually paying it. Or people that would rack up huge amounts of OT right before retiring so that their pension was gigantic compared to their normal years. Very little actually goes towards investing in stuff.
Click to expand...

"Where people didn't have to worry about actually paying it"??
That is single dumbest thing I have heard in six months.
There is no point in even discussing this with you if you harbor nonsense like that and expect to pass it off as "alternative facts".
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
"Where people didn't have to worry about actually paying it"??
That is single dumbest thing I have heard in six months.
There is no point in even discussing this with you if you harbor nonsense like that and expect to pass it off as "alternative facts".
Click to expand...

Are you actually suggesting that people didn't promise public workers huge benefits and pensions due to the fact that they knew they weren't going to have to actually back it up for decades? You seem entirely ignorant on the facts.
 
ajn678 said:
Are you actually suggesting that people didn't promise public workers huge benefits and pensions due to the fact that they knew they weren't going to have to actually back it up for decades? You seem entirely ignorant on the facts.
Click to expand...

Framing that question that way borders on "have you stopped beating your wife?"

Pension funds require an employer to make contributions into a pool of funds set aside for a worker's future benefit. The pool of funds is invested on the employee's behalf, and the earnings on the investments generate income to the worker upon retirement.

You're pretending that thousands of employers were able to predict how the quality of the investments made on behalf of their pension funds would fare decades into the future.
If you're going to lay that expectation down, then by the same logic, how does anyone know what will happen to lock-boxed money squirreled away today for so called unfunded liabilities will fare?
Specifically, how does the US Post Office know if their pre-funded health care, mandated by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, will be enough to cover expenses 75 years from now?

Thanks to banking excesses, irresponsible lending practices, credit-induced asset bubbles, nobody knows what our economy will look like even twenty years into the future much less 50 or 75 years from now. Thanks to people like Trump, and a few other wild eyed true believers, for all we know it might become commonplace for elected leadership to deliberately default on all our debt obligations, just because Mr. Trump's entire career consists of not paying his bills.

I asked about the military...why isn't the military budget on that holy scareamungous list of unfunded liablities?
Simply put, locking up trillions of dollars in response to unfunded liabilities scare campaigns is a sure fire way of increasing the likelihood of unemployment today due to a poor economy and it doesn't do a damn thing to help a future government's ability to credit bank accounts with the right amount when the time comes. After all, it is just an accounting entry, nothing more.

In the end, the only real unfunded "liability" is the development of our nation.
 
beerftw said:
Hydrogen is unstable, that has been the problem with it. It is stable when isolated but unstable when exposed to the atmosphere as hydrogen can chain with other atoms creating something not much more stable than nitro glycerine. Scientists have not really found the fix for this, this means something like a car being rearended powered by hydrogen may do nothing, 100 of them may do nothing, but 101 being rear ended may take out a city block.

For it to stay stable it must be secured, in which making a leak proof system for it that can survive wrecks incompetent employees managing the tanks etc has become a challenge enough that it is not ready for primetime.
Click to expand...

Actually it is unstable but they have designed safeties precautions into that.
https://www.slashgear.com/fuel-cell-safety-why-hydrogen-cars-like-hondas-clarity-are-safe-19479069/

Honda's tank and a safety value if there was a fatal collapse that it would release the hydrogen in a controlled way.
the other one is that it takes a 50 cal to puncture the tank.

https://www.computerworld.com/artic...gen-fueled-cars-arent-little-hindenburgs.html
 
Last edited:
ludin said:
Actually it is unstable but they have designed safeties precautions into that.
https://www.slashgear.com/fuel-cell-safety-why-hydrogen-cars-like-hondas-clarity-are-safe-19479069/

Honda's tank and a safety value if there was a fatal collapse that it would release the hydrogen in a controlled way.
the other one is that it takes a 50 cal to puncture the tank.

https://www.computerworld.com/artic...gen-fueled-cars-arent-little-hindenburgs.html
Click to expand...

But a high speed collision can cause a massive rupture even if anything below a 50 cal could not, plus there is various upkeep, how many people have their systems checked on a regular basis for leaks? That is something they must engineer in as well since many drivers let things leak make noise or basically drive them until they fall apart knowing there is a problem, hydrogen must be made safe for that as well.

The reality is if it were that easy it would be widespread, however it is not that easy, they found a system that is effective but still need to engineer fixes, it is much closer than any other green energy method of being viable but still not considered safe.


Edit: I believe there was an issue as well with hydrogen tankers going boom or up in flames as well, only wonder how to engineer the fuel stations to prevent morons from blowing them up, already have a hard time with gas stations now as I got to watch the remnants of a gas station that blew up right near where I work, the gas station tanks were sealed by the employees but the refueling tanker exploded not too long after a drunk driver hit it while filling the underground tanks.
 
Last edited:
beerftw said:
But a high speed collision can cause a massive rupture even if anything below a 50 cal could not, plus there is various upkeep, how many people have their systems checked on a regular basis for leaks? That is something they must engineer in as well since many drivers let things leak make noise or basically drive them until they fall apart knowing there is a problem, hydrogen must be made safe for that as well.

The reality is if it were that easy it would be widespread, however it is not that easy, they found a system that is effective but still need to engineer fixes, it is much closer than any other green energy method of being viable but still not considered safe.


Edit: I believe there was an issue as well with hydrogen tankers going boom or up in flames as well, only wonder how to engineer the fuel stations to prevent morons from blowing them up, already have a hard time with gas stations now as I got to watch the remnants of a gas station that blew up right near where I work, the gas station tanks were sealed by the employees but the refueling tanker exploded not too long after a drunk driver hit it while filling the underground tanks.
Click to expand...

They are on the road right now. do you not think they haven't tested massive collisions to those tanks?
you remind me the first time gasoline rolled out into cars. gas is way more dangerous.
 
beerftw said:
Hydrogen is unstable, that has been the problem with it. It is stable when isolated but unstable when exposed to the atmosphere as hydrogen can chain with other atoms creating something not much more stable than nitro glycerine. Scientists have not really found the fix for this, this means something like a car being rearended powered by hydrogen may do nothing, 100 of them may do nothing, but 101 being rear ended may take out a city block.

For it to stay stable it must be secured, in which making a leak proof system for it that can survive wrecks incompetent employees managing the tanks etc has become a challenge enough that it is not ready for primetime.
Click to expand...

They are currently developing a solid state fuel cell the runs on ammonia (Nh3). If/when that gets commercialized, that will change a lot of things. There are also some companies that are looking at making hydrogen production a lot cheaper... using solar energy for hydrolysis. Get those two technologies commercialized , and you will see a huge shift in this. Either that, or graphene suprecapcitors or other forms of solid state batteries.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom