I have a Korean friend that just reported on facebook that today they were actually attacked. So he's driving on the highway and suddenly a car starts swerving into him and literally tries to run him off the road. The guy goes around him and starts yelling "chink" at him. THen gets ahead of him and slams on his breaks. THen goes to the other side and his girlfriendwhatever throws a bottle at him through the window and hits him.

Luckily he recorded the guy's license plate and has been to the cops already.

But man :( I feel so bad for him. TIred of trump supporters like this being empowered by him to do this crap

I find this funny

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wire..._headlines_hed

First doubts I've read about a big second stimulus (but much smaller stimulus still possible). Shutdown negotiations are not going to be tied to stimulus, jobs and payroll reports not as bad as feared etc.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/an...ays-2020-09-04

No idea what's in the smaller version but assume/hope it's much more targeted towards those that need it.

Game of chicken continues.

How is it a game of chicken? Dems wanted to and did pass a bill and were willing to cut the total by 1/3 or more. The GOP didn't have the votes to pass anything.

Congressional Dems doing more to help Trump get re-elected than Republicans are.

Yep. The GOP should have jumped on the Dems bill. The long-term jobless numbers are just going to get worse between now and the election.

dola

There was a time when the President saying the Pentagon brass are warmongers in collusion with the military-industrial complex would have been pretty big news.

I still think a 2nd round of direct payments will happen. Gives Trump a chance to send to send a check directly to people with his name attached to it but paid for by other people.

The Census Bureau just hired over 300,000 people temporarily, so that makes the jobs number a bit less impressive.

In about 3 weeks about 100,000 (Bloomberg estimates about 130k) airline folks will be losing their jobs unless more is done. That'll be fun.

I'm not sure where the unemployment number settles, but it will be well north of 4%. Right now there are two trends, some temporary layoffs are returning to work while others are losing their jobs permanently. At some point basically everyone out of work now will fall into one of those categories and a temporary recession will look more typical.

Sorry you are going through this. There are rumors my company will reduce 5-10% sometime.

My company has said no travel through Q1, 2021. Exceptions have to go several levels up the food chain. All of my clients are okay with remote work even if we are in the middle of a project. I'm going to guess business travel will suck until a vaccine is produced or Q2 at the earliest.

I read an article that said hotels are like 50-60% below their year-of-year. My first thought was how can there been that many people staying at hotels to keep them at 50-40% booked.

Really no good answers for the travel, hospitality & cruise line industries right now.

As someone who works in food service, you'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many people in lower-income brackets who can't get approved for an apartment are long-term hotel tenants.

I honestly don't know to whose favor this will play and depends if there is a noticeable dive/stabilization in unemployment, GDP or markets while they are playing chicken. If there is a dive, it'll help Dems.

Because Trump signed the executive orders 3-4 weeks ago (?) he can hang his hat on something and say congress is playing games. I haven't read much from Biden on this, he seems to be willing to let Pelosi run with it. I think this is the right Biden strategy at least for now.

You're right, think I saw a segment on the long-stay hotels & motels. Admittedly, I was thinking of the Courtyards, Holiday Inns, Hilton Garden Inns etc.

I was demoted, taking a 20% paycut to start, our group is losing 22% of pilot jobs. Every new hire in the last 6 years is getting cut. There are threats that those job losses could double in the next few months. I still have a job, but my job is very threatened. The company only needs about a third of our pilot group to operate the schedules that they are currently flying. A furlough of 12-24 months would cost me between 150k and 400k. That's a lot of lost revenue. We are a one income family. Cuts that deep would take YEARS for the industry to recover from. It takes months to get pilots and planes back on line, and there's only a finite amount that can be returned per year. The annual amount of revenue that airlines pump into the economy (5% of GDP and 1.7 Trillion) would drop so much that the overall economy would be impacted.

I had the exact same thought.

I've seen hotels offering hotel rooms as office space for workers who can't go into work but don't want to or can't work well from home. Must be pennies on the dollar for the rooms and I'm not sure how many people would or can do that, but not a bad idea to try to fill some space that would otherwise go empty during the work week.

The Times story on the GOP finances is pretty amazing. I don't buy the idea that they will face a cash crunch, but spending 800 million since 2019 is shocking, in a where did all that money go, way.

I'll never understand why so many conservatives give their money to the grift machine.

One of Trump's spokesmen, Jason Miller, has spent 800k in legal bills trying to avoid child support. He surely isn't the one paying those bills.

This particular thread was mind boggling.

https://twitter.com/EricLiptonNYT/st...85784838541314

"Aides signed these super broad documents and then when things went sour with Trump (it happens sometimes)"

:lol:

227 million passed through a single LLC with ties to the Trump family.

I doubt justice ever comes, but if it does...

Oh yeah totally this. I tried to wrap my head around how they afford it but who knows.

Even those. I have regular, long-term delivery customers who bounce from room to room every couple months at the Holiday Inn and Hilton Garden in town.

DoJ asks a federal court to let them take over the defense of Trump in his defamation lawsuit. They really are the President's personal lawyers now.

I like how Parscale used a million dollars to promote his own tweets.

Here's the McConnell proposal for the second stimulus totalling $300B. Far cry from the $2T to $3T that Pelosi wants. I think both sides are too far apart for anything quick to happen.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sen...bill-mcconnell
I'm generally okay with school vouchers but it has little/nothing to do with coronavirus impact. I think business immunity from coronavirus lawsuits (unless there is gross negligence or like) has to be in there.

This and the draft legislation making it illegal for the Fed to loan money starting in January make it clear the GOP is going to do everything possible to sabotage the economy if Biden wins.

Fuck the whole lot of them.

The business immunity shield can go to hell. If you want to risk people's lives, you pay the bills for it

SI

I was thinking more of small business owners with the use case (and other similar variations) ... I go to restaurant, enter for pickup, see people waiting in line not social distancing, get a positive on coronavirus and then sue the restaurant.

EDIT: I think airlines (and airports & TSA) also. If I chose to fly, I shoulder that risk and shouldn't sue airlines unless there is gross negligence.

lol

Trump is still saying Mexico will pay for the wall and his crowds are still cheering it.

^^^^^^ this... a thousand times this.

I want a really /strict/ definition of small business if we're doing that. Expect every meat packing plant and refinery and Amazon warehouse to try to wriggle underneath this.

Hell, Texas Education Agency should be on the hook for the bullshit they're pulling with mandatory hours for virtual learning and trying to enforce kids in schools so Dan Patrick can say he sacrificed other kids at Trump's altar to open the economy. Of course the local schools will be the ones on the hook because little Jimmy didn't wear a mask all 8 hours of the day never mind that you're asking 7 year olds to do what fucking adults can't be bothered to.

In short, fuck Mitch and his liability shield.

SI

I can see your point of view. I don't know the legalese but I can see a bunch of legit small businesses being crushed with threats of lawsuits.


Haven't mentioned this to the wife.

But if she gets really seriously ill with coronavirus because of having to teach remotely from the school and because school is starting to bring back limited students, I would seriously explore options to sue.

If she catches it but recovers shortly after, no problem. There's been some teachers testing positive (before reopening to kids) and sent home. Apparently there is X weeks they get, after that they have to use their PTO, and then not sure what happens after that.

If you want to read more about it:
https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/stat...39740663193601
Businesses are facing Covid-19 lawsuits. The GOP has a radical plan to shield them from liability. - Vox

The legal barriers are higher for plaintiffs wanting to sue than for businesses to sue anyone who brings a complaint against them. And they know they can try to sneak this by because it's too much minutiae to get into a sound bite. Mitch is going to be like "See... we tried to do a stimulus but this awful piece of legislation was a non-starter with the Dems. They're the ones standing in the way of your shiny new Trump check!"

"Well, it's the driver's fault for getting into a Ford Pinto. In fact we should be able to sue them for buying our shitty car. They should have known better"

So, again, fuck Mitch. I have no patience for this kind of willful disregard for human life in the pursuit of profits.

SI

Here's more details on the business protection.

I think #1 and #2 makes sense. Not sure how #3 should be worded legalese. There should be a process to positively conclude that it was caused by employer somehow.

My example above was more protecting businesses from consumers whereas the bill seemed focus on protecting businesses from employees.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/polit...ill/index.html

Protection for health care workers and businesses makes sense to me. The use case would be waiting in a dental office or having a cleaning, getting a flu shot etc.

Isn't this the risk that the business demanded to take when they demanded the government to allow them to open up? I know several businesses had customers sign waivers before they would allow them in for just this reason. I am not sure why this would need to be in the bill anyway. I feel like this is the same as the concussion discussion in football. The argument against the employee is simple. They could have got it at work or they could have got it on their way to work when they stopped at Starbucks, or when they picked up the mail, or that one time they mistakenly shook hands with the co-worker on the way into the office etc.

If Trump was a more traditional president, he should be seriously considered for the Peace prize for UAE-Israeli breakthrough. And certainly if he gets SA and other ME frenemies to join in "normalization" he should be way up there, just not sure UAE alone is enough to offset his other negatives.

Wiki says the critieria is "According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who in the preceding year "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

https://apnews.com/4ec1ce1ff6cf9d7321d9cad200650e2c

I'll be surprised if it doesn't go to the opposition leader in Belarus.

And the Israel/UAE peace deal is mostly hype and seemed to come with an agreement for the U.S. to sell the UAE a shit ton of weapons.

I keep wondering when exactly the UAE was any threat to attack Israel.

A memo went out dod wide today explaining the tax deferral and strongly encouraging everyone, especially young enlisted soldiers, to set up a discretionary allotment of 6.2% of their base pay. It goes on to reinforce the fact that you have to pay this money back so do not see it as or use it as extra income because from January through April of next year they can expect to pay 12.4% of their base pay in social security.

So if federal agencies are warning people not to spend this "extra" income then what exactly was the point again?

What i remember reading is Trump was not authorized to remove the tax but only defer it, only congress can say remove it. The thought is once it is "deferred", congress will formalize it and say no need to pay it back.

So yeah, smart thing is to save the "deferred" taxes in case it needs to be repaid but I'm thinking it'll be made permanent.

No way congress passes that since Democrats and rightly so view it as defunding social security.

Holy crap!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ge%2Fstory-ans



And Woodward is indicating he has tapes, but I don't know if this convo was recorded.

The only point of the tax deferral is to help Trump win the election. He doesn't care what happens to those people. If Biden wins they'll just say he raised their taxes.

You are right, it is "defunding social security" but there is precedence with Obama and congress (Pelosi supporting) passed it last time.

IMO, if not done, this would have too much negative play leading to Nov. I think there is a good chance congress will make it permanent.

It was indeed. CNN just played it.

Is it fake news if Trump says it himself on tape? Why the hell would he talk to Woodward on tape?

He's not a bright man. Woodward is the closest thing we have to a celebrity journalist - maybe Trump was blinded by the celebrity?