Political Roundtable Part XXXIV

[Wizardspride]

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[montestewart]

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Nothing to see here, and you can't see it.

[AFM]

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Nothing to see here, and you can't see it.

The list doesn’t exist but it was created by Obama

Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!

[Zonkerbl]

Hey Zonk, again - the only point to read into that article is that Southern States are trying NOT to enforce immigration. And yes, they want cheap labor.

Also, in CA many of those working in the healthcare field would be affected. many would never have been allowed in and are now being pressured to leave. And that doesn't even count those in hospice care - many would be affected.

I will let AFM comment on construction costs. You might want to do a bit more research on the reasons for the increased costs to build housing. You might find that materials are the root cause. Also research when housing starts fell and when supply fell past elasticity in certain regions. It is supply and demand that is biting us hard right now.

Also, research if housing costs are a major driver of inflation - it might not be a small part of inflation, just sayin' -- MY TAKE -- Opinion -- we should "build baby build" and get out of the way of the developers to bring down the price of housing. To do that we need to keep local communities from blocking development, cut tariffs on goods used for housing development and stop doing stupid stuff on immigration to reduce the labor bottlenecks.

Two things that I know you know - economic expansion and employment are different, right?

AI most certainly has the potential to significantly enhance economic growth by increasing productivity and creating new products and services. Fully onboard with that (and invested in the trend).

However, the overall impact on GDP AND employment remains uncertain with respect to timeframes (sooner or later). Also, several teams that I am working with are short on labor which is slowing their time to market. When they say short on labor think H1B visas. Note: The number of H-1B visa registrations has dropped around 40% for 2025.

Let's cut immigration and cede AI to other countries, no?

"materials is the root cause" is exactly what I said? Material costs are rising and have been for the last thirty years because of increased demand *for commodities* from China. Wood. Stone. Other buildinig materials.

Housing costs are left out of the definition of inflation so no, rising houseing costs definitely don't count in inflation. However, the need to pay for your property in downtown locations is why downtown food is more expensive. Housing costs are really a wealth distribution variable, the higher they are in real terms, the bigger the disparity between homeowners and renters in terms of wealth.

This whole thread started with me talking about the liberal tendency to justify opposing Trump's immigration policies by saying "no one wants those jobs." That's a crock. We need immigration because everybody wants to move here and that lets us steal the smartest people through the h1-b program and it allows us to steal all the super determined "I am going to do this if it kills me" people and the fact that our entire nation is populated by such people and their descendents is why we are the greatest nation in the world. That is the argument for immigration. Not "no one wants those jobs." That's an argument for sticking it to poor people.

Saying "no one wants those jobs" is tone deaf and stupid and untrue. The very least you can do is understand that "no one wants those jobs" is the same as saying "I would rather stick needles in my eyes than raise wages to these scum who don't deserve to live." Look at who is saying it, like really look (Southern superfarms owned by extremely wealthy people whose entire sector exists only because they pay recently-freed-slave wages?), and ask yourself if that is who you want to align yourself with. It should be an easy decision.

I've been studying AI because I need to transfer out of being an "aid" associated worker, and I figure I can try to transition over to machine learning. You don't understand. Back when I first got my Ph.D. the biggest problem in econometrics was getting generalized method of moments models to converge. This is important because GMM models can handle non-linearity. Ordinary Least Squares is linear and only a first order approximation of relationships between things. But non-linearities are how we view the world. It is how tastes in music, art, movies are determined. If you want to predict what people will like, you need an algorithm that can handle non-linear relationships. If you want an algorithm that can understand spoken language or see images (and drive cars), it has to handle non-linear relationships. We couldn't do it. Then all of a sudden we could, in 2012 or so, because we figured out how to get neural networks to understand non-linear relationships for it. That is an astonishing leap forward. But we haven't *seen* it because once the ai boom started, Trump was elected and imposed his stupid China tariffs, which blunted the growth we should have been getting. Biden didn't undo the tariffs and then we got hit by COVID, but by the end of his Presidency the underlying fundamental growth being caused by AI started to explode through, although the Fox News propaganda network managed to convince everyone that explosive economic growth is bad if under a Dem president. And now Trump is doing it *again.* The DJIA has risen by exactly 0% since Jan 21st. Trump has been *horrible* for the economy. And the economy should be just exploding now with 8 years of pent up growth blowing up underneath us like a volcano. When it finally erupts it's going to be very disruptive. Meanwhile all the AI CEOs are deliberately manipulating things so only shareholders will benefit when it does erupt. Laborer will get screwed, and I'm not talking about ag laborers, I'm talking about coders and creators. And we're in a service economy now, THAT is where all the jobs are.

No - material costs aren't the #1 thing that is driving up housing costs. It is a shortage of housing, followed by local communities slowing the development and adding additional hoops to jump through and then... material costs and labor. And just because it isn't reported in the inflation number doesn't mean it isn't inflationary (also, shelter category of the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

And the why on Trump's immigration policy isn't because folks don't to enforce immigration (a misdemeanor) with jackboots. His process is also one of the biggest waste of tax dollars. We are now putting dollars into ICE and the prison industrial complex and cutting jobs at NIH. That just doesn't make sense. Now back to you only point that we disagree. But only slightly. If you suddenly removed all of the illegal immigrants and those that are here legally (his plan) you won't have enough labor. Why? Our demographics. Our labor force participation rates (for those that matter) are at a near all-time high. If you are already employed in a city, you aren't going to move to a farm to pick crops - it just ain't happening. The correct phrase is: If you already have a job, you don't want that job.

And yes, duh on Trump and the economy - his non-economic plan stinks. Many saw this coming but... others got sucked in by the millions of murders coming across the border so they voted against their own interests.

And don't forget, he is once again burying us in debt. Yay! We get to default, raise taxes by an enormous amount or go with the old trusty stagflation. You might even see the dollar fall against other currencies?

You're contradicting yourself. You said materials are driving construction costs. Then you shake your head condescendingly at me and say it's scarcity that's driving housing prices up. The opposite of what you *just* said.

We're talking about construction costs. Not asset prices. Flow. Stock.

[dckingsfan]

"materials is the root cause" is exactly what I said? Material costs are rising and have been for the last thirty years because of increased demand *for commodities* from China. Wood. Stone. Other buildinig materials.

Housing costs are left out of the definition of inflation so no, rising houseing costs definitely don't count in inflation. However, the need to pay for your property in downtown locations is why downtown food is more expensive. Housing costs are really a wealth distribution variable, the higher they are in real terms, the bigger the disparity between homeowners and renters in terms of wealth.

This whole thread started with me talking about the liberal tendency to justify opposing Trump's immigration policies by saying "no one wants those jobs." That's a crock. We need immigration because everybody wants to move here and that lets us steal the smartest people through the h1-b program and it allows us to steal all the super determined "I am going to do this if it kills me" people and the fact that our entire nation is populated by such people and their descendents is why we are the greatest nation in the world. That is the argument for immigration. Not "no one wants those jobs." That's an argument for sticking it to poor people.

Saying "no one wants those jobs" is tone deaf and stupid and untrue. The very least you can do is understand that "no one wants those jobs" is the same as saying "I would rather stick needles in my eyes than raise wages to these scum who don't deserve to live." Look at who is saying it, like really look (Southern superfarms owned by extremely wealthy people whose entire sector exists only because they pay recently-freed-slave wages?), and ask yourself if that is who you want to align yourself with. It should be an easy decision.

I've been studying AI because I need to transfer out of being an "aid" associated worker, and I figure I can try to transition over to machine learning. You don't understand. Back when I first got my Ph.D. the biggest problem in econometrics was getting generalized method of moments models to converge. This is important because GMM models can handle non-linearity. Ordinary Least Squares is linear and only a first order approximation of relationships between things. But non-linearities are how we view the world. It is how tastes in music, art, movies are determined. If you want to predict what people will like, you need an algorithm that can handle non-linear relationships. If you want an algorithm that can understand spoken language or see images (and drive cars), it has to handle non-linear relationships. We couldn't do it. Then all of a sudden we could, in 2012 or so, because we figured out how to get neural networks to understand non-linear relationships for it. That is an astonishing leap forward. But we haven't *seen* it because once the ai boom started, Trump was elected and imposed his stupid China tariffs, which blunted the growth we should have been getting. Biden didn't undo the tariffs and then we got hit by COVID, but by the end of his Presidency the underlying fundamental growth being caused by AI started to explode through, although the Fox News propaganda network managed to convince everyone that explosive economic growth is bad if under a Dem president. And now Trump is doing it *again.* The DJIA has risen by exactly 0% since Jan 21st. Trump has been *horrible* for the economy. And the economy should be just exploding now with 8 years of pent up growth blowing up underneath us like a volcano. When it finally erupts it's going to be very disruptive. Meanwhile all the AI CEOs are deliberately manipulating things so only shareholders will benefit when it does erupt. Laborer will get screwed, and I'm not talking about ag laborers, I'm talking about coders and creators. And we're in a service economy now, THAT is where all the jobs are.

No - material costs aren't the #1 thing that is driving up housing costs. It is a shortage of housing, followed by local communities slowing the development and adding additional hoops to jump through and then... material costs and labor. And just because it isn't reported in the inflation number doesn't mean it isn't inflationary (also, shelter category of the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

And the why on Trump's immigration policy isn't because folks don't to enforce immigration (a misdemeanor) with jackboots. His process is also one of the biggest waste of tax dollars. We are now putting dollars into ICE and the prison industrial complex and cutting jobs at NIH. That just doesn't make sense. Now back to you only point that we disagree. But only slightly. If you suddenly removed all of the illegal immigrants and those that are here legally (his plan) you won't have enough labor. Why? Our demographics. Our labor force participation rates (for those that matter) are at a near all-time high. If you are already employed in a city, you aren't going to move to a farm to pick crops - it just ain't happening. The correct phrase is: If you already have a job, you don't want that job.

And yes, duh on Trump and the economy - his non-economic plan stinks. Many saw this coming but... others got sucked in by the millions of murders coming across the border so they voted against their own interests.

And don't forget, he is once again burying us in debt. Yay! We get to default, raise taxes by an enormous amount or go with the old trusty stagflation. You might even see the dollar fall against other currencies?

You're contradicting yourself. You said materials are driving construction costs. Then you shake your head condescendingly at me and say it's scarcity that's driving housing prices up. The opposite of what you *just* said.

We're talking about construction costs. Not asset prices. Flow. Stock.

Thanks for that - let me clarify.

Housing prices and rental prices are primarily driven by scarcity.

New construction prices are primarily driven by the permitting process. Secondary costs are construction costs and those are driven by material and labor.

But the net, net of this is that the reduction in building permits and housing starts is the root cause problem that needs to be addressed.

Now if your point is that In building construction, labor costs typically account for about 30% of total expenses, while materials make up 70% for new construction - right there with you. But the point. If you drive up those expenses either through tariffs or reducing the labor available, you are going to hurt yourself. And we are doing both.

[Wizardspride]

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[Wizardspride]

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[Benjammin]

I am enjoying watching Trump twist himself in knots with his cult members over the Epstein lists.

Sent from my Pixel 9 Pro XL using Tapatalk

[Wizardspride]

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[AFM]

I'm constantly reminded of George Carlin's line: "When you're born on this planet, you're given a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in this country, you get a front row seat."

[dobrojim]

One wonders if/when a tipping point will be reached
in the gullibilty of Golfy's supporters and how quickly
it will be recognized by other elected GOPers?
For years their sycophancy has been unbounded.

[Zonkerbl]

I just can't understand, if true, why MAGA is suddenly getting mad at Trump about being a pedophile. How is this a big surprise? I had just assumed they were ok with it.

[Wizardspride]

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[AFM]

There is literally zero chance a family values guy like Trump would do anything with minors. His moral compass is too strong.

[closg00]

What a shame, the Dump DOJ controls all of the Epstein stuff from top to bottom, some of the evidence has probably been destroyed, I wonder which loyalist got that job.

[montestewart]

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Cover up? No, just doling out petty retribution. Nothing to see here.

[Bonscott]

If democrats cared about the US as much as they care about illegals this country would be so much better off

[Zonkerbl]

If democrats cared about the US as much as they care about illegals this country would be so much better off

Why did you vote for a pedophile?

[dckingsfan]

If democrats cared about the US as much as they care about illegals this country would be so much better off

Why did you vote for a pedophile?

Leading question equaled.

Or you could have answered with "if Republicans cared about the US as much as they care about illegals this country would be so much better...

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requirements-immigration/

and

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Bonscott will disappear again...

[Wizardspride]

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