Bernie vs Trump

[Lelouch Lamperouge]

8 and half months left till 2020 elections. 

99% that Sanders and Trump will be in the final round.

Thus, I only include these 2 in the polls.

Let's see how voting goes. Also, discussion is welcome

(If such topics aren't allowed please lock it)

upd:polls aren't working, how to fix it?

Edited February 14, 2020 by Lelouch Lamperouge

[Light Lover]

This is going to be an extremely interesting election isn't it @Lelouch Lamperouge? I still predict Trump will win with his army of diehard followers. It depends, did he actually live up to his promises? I don't live in the USA so I do not know. If he did the main things he said he would, I feel he (for worse or better) will win again, despite Bernie having a more moral platform.

[Leo Gura]

Our members are highly biased against Trump.

[remember]

@Lelouch Lamperouge am i allowed to vote here? i would probably mess the scores up as i am not allowed to vote in the us. but i still think about asking around if someone would want to donate his/her vote for me. i‘m the voiceless from abroad you know...

[remember]

wasn’t me... i didn’t vote...can i vote twice? maybe i ask them to donate their vote? pluralism was always welcome wasn’t it?

Edited February 14, 2020 by remember

[legendary]

Not much will happen unless the Berniecrats clean up the Democratic Party, win the senate and are able to appoint Supreme Court Judges. Sanders admits that one person cannot bring about the kind of change he envisions.

[Derek White]

@Leo Gura You should keep an eye on the Trump supporters .

[Leo Gura]

I'm watching you, devils

[Vladz0r]

If it does come down to Bernie vs. Trump, Big Pharma and Trump will likely pump unprecedented amounts of money, going into the billions, to try and slander Bernie and misrepresent his views. If 1 person, Bloomberg is literally spamming ads in upcoming states, the companies who are profiting billions will quickly step in to represent their constituents. I'm interested to see if any big investments will go into the Democrat side as well, because I'd like to see a real battle take place.

If it's Bloomberg vs. Trump though, I guess we just have to strategize and double down on capitalism. Protect your friends and family, try and convince them to invest and learn skills that will be futureproof as we move into this new industrial revolution of mass A.I. and autonomy. Maybe consider moving to China honestly, since they'll most likely win an A.I. war rather if we don't have a president willing to build up our relationships between the West and the East.

[sidaz10]

[Leo Gura]

[Haloman]

Odds are in favour of Trump. But 5 years ago when he won, it was 1,2 for Hillary and 4 for Trump.

[tenta]

Don't live in the US but hope Bernie wins.

[lmfao]

@Lelouch Lamperouge Trump as a person is kind of ugly to me. But that hasn't got much to do with his policies. He's just a typical republican for the most part. I know it's a meme to make fun of Trump fans who think Trump is secretly smart and playing 4D chess, but on some level I have to believe it if he's just so successful. So there's probs a method to the madness, albeit you might think the method is low consciousness. I hope Bernie wins. 

[Annoynymous]

@Lelouch Lamperouge i don't think making a poll here would reflect the national sentiment of the America. Most people in this forum are liberal and left leaning, so they are obviously going to go for Bernie although you can understand the state of of this forum by this poll result.

[docs20]

If I could vote, cause I'm not in the US Sanders with almost 0 doubt, even it if would be hard af to implement in just 4 years all of what he wants.

Edited February 16, 2020 by docs20

[Arcangelo]

Feel the Bern!

[Lelouch Lamperouge]

Bernie is winning 63 vs 10. results might be approx. 2100 vs 300 on elections day if voting goes in this pace

debates in LasVegas will start in 9 hours: Bernie, Warren, Pete, Amy, Biden, Bloomberg

 

[Lelouch Lamperouge]

Bloomberg - very weak performance on debates, i think he will drop out soon, he can't debate, its not his thing

even Biden was stronger than him, and i think Biden also will drop out eventually

Amy performed much weaker than last time, Warren on the contrary was much stronger than last time

Pete was weaker than last time, Bernie was on the same level

imo debates results:

1-2.Bern, Warren

3-4.Pete, Amy

5.Biden

6.Bloomberg

[Vladz0r]

There was a recent poll that had Bernie scoring like double the number of delegates or something come Super Tuesday, so it looks like those Bloomberg ads were just a collosal waste of money. 608 (40%) vs. 273 (18%) for Bernie vs. Bloomberg delegate counts by Super Tuesday from Nate Silver's recent poll.

If the Establishment Democratic Party had been even somewhat content, they would've coerced Biden and Pete to dropout earlier, and/or started up Bloomberg's campaign earlier. Currently they've been splitting the moderate votes just enough that Sanders is able to clutch out every state more and more. It looks like Biden has lost his ground in even South Carolina, so we may see a 4-0 before Super Tuesday. Sanders and Biden poll pretty well with Black  and Latino voters depending on age group, though it's slowly moving over from Biden to Bloomberg, while Pete has never gotten much support from these demographics to begin with. Bernie gets more of the 18-35 Black and Latinos while Biden/Bloomberg would get the older ages, of course. It's hard to gauge the data, but it looks like Bernie's pretty much got this thing locked up.

I'm looking forward to the months of mudslinging that will occur, and I want to see if the DNC will continue to trash Bernie or actually support them in hopes of "uniting the party." All these big figures on TV, including the News and informal stuff like Whoopi Golberg on The View act like completely cuckolds beholden to the Establishment, who wouldn't know good policy if it hit them in the face. I think that Bernie has a big sleeper majority in the youth that will actually come out to vote in November. Us college-aged kids are lazy and don't want to go home to vote or mail in our votes. I remember in '16 it felt so uncertain that it seemed like we were losing steam with canvassing and on-campus support at my college, by the time our primary came. 

I think Bernie's plans are far from perfect, mostly because I don't see where the incentives are going to come from. I don't see how the taxes won't just trickle down to the middle class, I don't see how raising the minimum wage won't also negatively affect people looking for work in our increasingly automated country, and I don't see the point of emphasizing college as the "new high school" when our public school systems are literally collapsing. I'm still curious to see how an infrastructure investment is going to help young men and women in a society that has become increasingly physically weaker and reluctant to blue collar labor.

Personally I think we need to work on these things first, as it'd be a bottom-up approach of getting more wealth into the pockets of people at the poverty line and middle class:
School System complete reform - I made another post of it, but basically teach actual useful things in school, not just STEM. Utilize tech better, standardize good open source curriculums, etc. I love how companies like Google and Samsung are doing wonders for laptop use in the classroom. It's made an impact when schools can spend a mere few thousand USD to get a set of ~30 Chromebooks and a charging cart to share with a few grades. Bill Gates has expressed an interest in this as well, though I don't see him doing big changes to our school system which has been in gridlock for a long time.
A national investment in public transit - long-term goals for electric vehicles with autopilot as standard. The goal of this should be to improve the public system, rather than to yield a high ongoing profit. Good US public transit systems like SEPTA don't shoot for huge profit margins, for example. Let's aim for something more along the lines of China than Japan in this aspect. Let's be real, we want to see that crispy Hyperloop, and go from New York to LA in a day by train, and anywhere in between.
Housing price regulations - cost of living isn't in line with national or local minimum wages.
Solar investments starting in areas where it can reduce the cost of electricity sooner. If you've seen Elon Musk's remarks about the potential to power the entire world with 100 gigafactories, and if you've seen the recent solar panel and battery tech, and things like Tesla's solar grid impact in Australia, I think you'd see why there's been a spike in optimism for solar since 2018 compared to even a few years prior. You can buy a 300W solar panel to generate about half of that, from China, for under $100. If you can figure out the installation aspect, it'd take a few hundred dollars to offset most of the electricity produced in a small to medium sized home or apartment. It's not really a pipe dream in the slightest to go solar at this point. People are estimating we'll need solar at a grid level and neighborhood level to get the electricity rolling. 
A nationalized homeless association - this is like a real longshot, because it can be incredibly hard to get people back into the system and get them a job. It took me a year with 50 interviews and thousands of applications to find a job making even $15/hr even with a computer science and teaching degree, so we'd need massive changes to get earned income into the hands of homeless people. I couldn't believe how screwed the school district is, and that I couldn't get any tech company to hire me without prior programming job experience. I still think there's potential for organizations that can feed the poor more optimally, but whatever. I've had friends and family who were homeless or at the poverty level, so this hits home to me.
Student Loan refinancing for lower monthly payments - I think if we could maybe reduce the minimum loan repayment amount and lower the interest rates slightly, this could be good. Loans are a tough thing to fiddle with, though, as they can cause a lot of economic issues when things like interest rates are changed. Loan forgiveness would be great but again it's a longshot. I'd be happy to have my $45k of debt gone, but I'd also much rather people never get into my situation to begin with - but not necessarily by making public college tuition free. I'd rather people actually get more informed about the system and the jobs themselves. My younger friends who are very smart, valedictorians in their school, are still clueless about career aspects in college. It's just not part of our culture to do this type of long-term research and come up with solid plans and data for what jobs actually exist in our local area. Hence why everyone goes into Business, the arts, computer science, education, etc., and winds up leaving college, works at home, changes majors, gets into an unrelated field, etc. 
Welfare and Food Stamp Reform - update the law that forbids people owning a car of $4500 or more getting rid of their ability to get food stamps. Either raise this value or repeal this law completely. The idea is to keep people from spending money on "things they don't need" but for many people, getting reliable transportation costs this much. If you're traveling into the city from outside the city, you might be tossing $2k a year in public transit alone. I think that as more EVs with autopilot emerge, insurance prices should be regulated so that a car can becomes more of an asset than a liability. There's a lot of other things that can be changed, I just haven't reviewed enough aspects of the rules here.
Telecom price regulations - Currently I'm very pleased my telecom prices in my area, but that's because there's strong competition between Comcast and Verizon. Internet is a necessity, and so is having mobile access to it. I think that there are good budget plans, but unfortunately I have seen too many people in poverty that still have a phone with Sprint or AT&T/Verizon, paying like $60-80/line. With ongoing infrastructure investments, I think Uncarriers (ex. Metro, Cricket, Google Fi) are providing great options, but these options disproportionally give savings to middle class people who know about them, because they don't have as many store locations and they require some research to learn about. It would be great if we could somehow get vital info like how to save on food, electricity, and other essentials out to the public, but currently our news system and government websites range from being subpar to being complete garbage.
A real public news station for the people would be great. We currently don't have news that isn't funded by big companies like Bloomberg, Comcast, Verizon, etc. Local news stations in my area generally just show crime in my city all day. 
Healthcare reform - kind of obvious at this point. They've sucked us dry with healthcare and pharmacy costs for far too long. This will be a huge undertaking to reform. I'm glad I have no ailments that need medicine, but I know plenty of people paying up the wazoo for insulin, surgeries, insurance, and more. I like Yang's approach to this, and Bernie's looks promising as well. It's tough in a country that's already strapped for doctors, so hopefully technology and improvements for learning can produce more hybrid roles in hospitals that don't require 8-10 years of schooling, but can provide quality care and a wage that is fair to both current doctors and future healthcare practioners. I've had plenty of good and awful prorofessional doctors, so clearly this 10 year track system isn't  going to work for expanding healthcare to every US citizen. It sucks that they have to memorize tons of crap for 10 years in school and take on monstrous debt to get paid handsomely, but currently it is a for-profit career, and statistically a lot of doctors feel that they aren't able to make the type of impact they want to make.

Most of my hopes and are for improving the lives and costs of the necessities of the lower and middle class people. Minimum wage increase is a bit of a complex issue.  Even within my city, a dollar in the northern part is like $0.30 downtown, a 20 minute train ride away. I think bringing down the cost of things and improving the infrastructure will have a bigger impact than increasing the minimum wage overnight and cauing millions of layoffs. If more and more people can accumulate capital, they'll have more financial and social freedoms and ultimately some real autonomy over their lives. 

If we get Trump, our fate will really be in the hands of capitalism and the few billionaire and millionaire philantrophists that eventually come back to save their beloved countries. It won't be a total loss. Your transit system will continue to suck for another decade. You'll start to wonder why you can ship items free from west coast to east coast, yet you pay so much to drive or bus to work. Your friends, family, and enderly will continue to stay stuck in their lower class state as social security benefits continues to deplete. Getting disability and healthcare will become more and more competitive to acquire. It'll still be just as hard to start your dream business since you won't have any healthcare to fall back on, despite capitalism being a supposed pro-business economy. Your utility prices will continue to soar as we move onto solar and privatization continues to provide "competitition" until more and more mergers inevitably happen. In fact, if you're middle class, you'll still see a lot of price drops in transportation costs due to autonomous vehicles. Maybe you'll even see a few dollars in tax cuts. Hey, maybe some things you buy on Amazon will get a few cents cheaper. Good to see that they're giving back. You'll continue to live in the paradise for the upper middle class and try and find ways to save and hopefully retire before your soul is completely sucked away through wage slavery. Personally I'll just save up and defect and contribute to another country with better civil liberties, where I ccan rest easy at night. We ought to improve our relationship with China and begin to see them as an ally again. To think we'll win a war with China is hilarious, as they keep investing more and more into African countries and their infrastructure, increasing their allies, and looking to reclaim their former countries. For a while our nuclear weapons basically didn't even work, but I guess we know our conventional weapons work since we keep testing them to bomb defenseless children in the Middle East.