Stidmatt

I have an iPhone, and I use it to pay for Subway.

An Apple update occurred a few weeks ago, and since then, I have been unable to use Apple Pay without Face ID.

The problem was that the update made my default card to pay for transit go to None and I needed to change it back to a card.

Settings -> Wallet & Apple Pay -> Express Transit Card

Select the credit card you want to use to pay for your transit.

The discussion of civil war primarily comes from groups like Project 2025, which has received considerable press attention over the last couple of years. The issue is, does Project 2025 exist because America is a failed state or because Project 2025 is a profoundly anti-American psyops operation?

State of The United States of America

The United States has never been richer. We have some of the world’s highest household incomes, one of the best-educated populations, and a life expectancy in line with other developed countries. We haven’t missed any elections, and our military is by far the strongest in the world. We are the only global superpower.

There are some challenges: housing is ridiculously expensive, the government doesn’t fund higher education like it used to, 10% of Americans lack health insurance, and our gun laws and inequality lead to a higher homicide rate than one would expect from a highly developed democracy. These are solvable problems.

Our quality of life, on average, is among the best in the world. America is the opposite of a failed state; we are a highly developed country, not only that but the only global superpower today.

So why do people feel like we are behind? Why do people talk about revolution?

The first thing is that our rapidly growing economy has caused massive social shifts over the last 20 years. Gay marriage is legal, people are talking about police brutality in national media, and our country is fundamentally better off than we were 30 years ago.

If the United States were to deepen ties with our allies, we would be unstoppable.

Response to Obama

President Obama was one of the most significant presidents in our history, not just because he was our first African American president. Major civil rights advances were made regarding LGBT rights, and the stimulus package successfully avoided a long recession that occurred in Europe over the 2010s.

Through a combination of poor leadership at the DNC and pure racism directed against President Obama, we saw significant gains by the Republican Party.

But I do not believe Obama alone is enough of a reason to explain the sudden turn of the Republican Party into the party of Donald Trump. In four years, Mitt Romney went from saying Russia was our biggest threat, and he was correct, to Donald Trump doing Russia’s bidding, according to the Mueller Report. Mitt Romney won the primary in 2012 with over 50% of the vote in a four-horse race.

While Romney and McCain were Republicans, when someone in McCain’s audience claimed Obama was a Muslim, code in their mind for terrorist, McCain responded by saying, “No, he’s a good family man.” While Romney is a Mormon and shares their beliefs regarding gender, he did not attack Obama in the way we saw Trump attack Obama. McCain and Romney did not attack Obama with the same racist attacks we see from the modern Republican Party. Their policies had racism in them, such as the war on drugs and police brutality, but they did not do the crude, blatantly racist behavior that has now become the norm in the Republican Party. Both Romney and McCain won the primaries. McCain was 24 points ahead of his closest opponent, and Romney won a majority of the popular vote in the primary.

Obama does not explain what has happened to the Republican Party by himself. If he did, Romney would not have won the 2012 primary. Racism alone does not explain the swing of the Republican Party over the last ten years into a Russophile party.

Russian propaganda

This is where Russia enters the picture.

Russia is in a very different situation. Oligarchs run its economy while average Russians live in poverty. Their life expectancy is on par with Syria. Their population is shrinking rapidly. Russia is a country in crisis, and there is no way out under its current system.

Putin believes that the way to help Russia survive, at least in the short term, is to conquer Ukraine and other former colonies of Russia, but the United States stands in their way. If the United States kept allowing sovereign states who apply to join NATO, Russia would have nowhere to conquer. The solution to Russia’s problem is to make the United States feel like we are in crisis when we really are not.

Vladimir Putin is using every avenue he can to erode trust in our institutions and create distrust between democracies. The tools are deeply intertwined across both domestic policy and international relations. These tools include:

• Convince right-wing politicians that supporting Ukraine is against an “America first” ideology.
• Manipulating politicians on the left and right to pursue non-solutions to our issues will turn small issues into real problems.
• Manipulate politicians of both stripes that America must embrace protectionism, which weakens our economy and distances us from our allies.
• Support state sponsors of terrorism, such as the Taliban, Syria, and Iran.
• Manipulating Americans into believing China is our biggest enemy while Russia is the one spreading weapons to terrorist groups and dictatorships. We see this in Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
• Convince China to support Russia as relations with America decline as a result of Russian propaganda. China supported Ukrainian territorial integrity in 2014, but now they are arming Russia.
• Support politicians across NATO, such as Viktor Orban and Boris Johnson, who oppose NATO and the European Union.
• Convince states like Serbia that Russia is their protector against a hostile United States. This is, of course, a lie.
• Have their pundits tell Americans how our country is failing daily but never look at the complete picture.

This has been happening ever since Gerard Schröder was in office 20 years ago. https://www.dw.com/en/putin-and-schr%C3%B6der-a-special-german-russian-friendship/a-55219973

The United States of America is a free democracy with one of the strongest economies in the world. We have seen immense progress in civil rights over the last 15 years, and we were one of the only developed countries not to do austerity after 2008, and our economy shows it.

Again, we have a few issues that need to be dealt with. We need to build housing units to keep up with population growth, deal with climate change, and increase gun control. We also need a public option for health insurance to get our uninsured rate as close to 0 as possible.

But do not be fooled into believing populists who push us away from our friends, which means they are moving us toward corrupt dictators who want to harm our country. They have no real solutions to the problems we face.

Remember that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong. The inflation episode we saw over the last two years was global and focused on the oil market, which was a nice bonus for Putin when he invaded Ukraine. Inflation is almost down to 2% again today. We will hit our target by the end of the year. We also have not fallen into recession over this period, which is remarkable. If America elects a progressive who would reduce tariffs and visa restrictions with NATO allies, Russia would lose significant leverage, and Russians would start to wonder if the propaganda they are being spoonfed is realistic.

Project 2025 is the American wing of Russia’s propaganda machine. Why else would their book Mandate for Leadership include the following:

• Another school of conservative thought denies that U.S. Ukrainian supports in the national security interest of America at all. Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance and is one of the most corrupt nations in the region. European nations directly affected by the conflict should aid in the defense of Ukraine, but the U.S. should not continue its involvement. This viewpoint desires a swift end to the conflict through a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
• Thus, with respect to Ukraine, continued U.S. involvement must be fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.

Project 2025 and the rest of the Russian machine have taken over the Republican Party, which is why they support abandoning Afghanistan and Ukraine. They want to continue supporting Israel for purely religious reasons to prepare for the second coming of Jesus. Aside from that, the Republican Party has followed its desire to become an isolationist party.

Parts of the Republican Party will claim Russia is a threat to keep votes, all the meanwhile advocating for reduced support for our allies.

The Heritage Foundation, which was so hawkish in the 2000s, and part of Project 2025, is a dove regarding supporting Ukraine.

This is why Project 2025 exists.

We must understand that Putin’s attempts to undermine democracy and strengthen his authoritarian rule in Russia are larger than any one piece, and one must understand both the domestic and international aspects of the Russian propaganda machine to see the complete picture.

Russia has proven itself to be the most significant threat to democracy in the world time and time again for over 16 years. Project 2025 is their most nefarious project yet, as they have continuously refined their propaganda.

Conclusion

The most effective way to defend our country is to vote in every election for politicians who are not allies with Putin. We need clear-spoken defenders of democracy who, when interviewed by the media, will directly counter Putin’s lies.

As America becomes more prosperous and more free, the ability to roll back progress and go back to a country where civil rights are restricted will disappear.

We must ensure Project 2025 and their support of Donald Trump fail this year as badly as possible. It is a profoundly anti-American organization and must be defeated.

The goal of Russia is to undermine democracies around the world through covert operations. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation are obvious covert operations of the Russians to undermine American democracy.

The most impactful way to ensure they fail is to vote for Democrats.

Donald Trump does not offer solutions, only more problems.

Biden is far from a perfect president; his Israeli policy is foolish, and his Ukrainian policy is half-assed (fitting for a Democrat), but he can be convinced of better policies.

Biden is highly flawed and bad at public speaking.

Trump is an evil sexual predator.

America is better off with a Democratic trifecta so we can solve the three problems facing our federal government, which are the war in Ukraine, the crisis in Palestine, and our uninsured rate.

Only Democrats support abortion rights and gay marriage.

Three years into Trump’s presidency, we had a pandemic.

Three years into Biden’s presidency, inflation is coming back under control.

Trump will play right into Putin’s hands.

Biden will do his best to protect our friends and allies, even if I wish he had more qualified advisors.

The choice is obvious.

Happy Independence Day. Let freedom ring.

Slava Ukraine.

References

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/20/1246134779/the-reality-behind-civil-war-and-the-possibility-of-a-real-second-civil-war

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Allen Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House is a monumental study that correctly predicts the electoral college in every election since 1984 except 2000. He predicts Biden will win the election this year, with only 2-4 false keys. How can we use this research to dictate policy, both internal party politics and national policy, over the next 4 years in order to win in 2028?

Key 1: Party Mandate

Democrats need to pick up 6 seats in the House of Representatives this year and keep a majority through 2028. This both allows Biden to pass policy and is a key to the White House.

Key 2: No Primary Contest/Key 12: Charismatic Incumbent

Democrats need a clear candidate in 2028 who will carry the party with no serious challenger. It needs to be a challenger who can carry progressives and almost half of the New Democrats.

Key 3: Incumbent Seeking re-election

We will not have this key in 2028.

Key 4: No third party

Sticking to the platform will ensure third party candidates have a bad year. Our candidate must not be opposed to popular planks in our party platform.

Key 5/6: Strong economy

If Biden is like every other Democrat in the last century, we will have a strong economy.

Key 7: Major policy change

A trifecta can deliver a federal public option which will give Biden this key.

Key 8: No social unrest

Solving the crisis in Gaza and defeating Russia in Ukraine will ensure there is no social unrest on foreign issues. Passing a public option will reduce our uninsured rate, increasing the feelings of a strong economy for average Americans. These three policies will keep this key true.

Key 9: No scandal

It’s Biden. He is not scandal-prone.

Key 10/11: No major foreign/military failure and Major foreign/military success

Defeat Russia in Ukraine and solve the crisis in Palestine with a major treaty. These two accomplishments are worth two keys.

Key 13: Uncharismatic challenger

We have no control over this.

 

If Biden does those three policies:

1. Peace treaty with Palestine and Israel followed by legitimate elections in Palestine.
2. Arm Ukraine so they can defeat Russia and then have Ukraine join NATO.
3. Pass a health insurance public option.

These three policies will guarantee Democrats will win in 2028 more than anything else we can do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House

I gathered some data on US states. This is not longitudinal yet, but I still think it has some interesting trends.

To start, states which vote more democratically have the following trends:

• more bachelor’s degrees
• higher incomes both before and after taxes
• live longer
• more people have health insurance.
• Fewer people smoke tobacco.

The one downside is that the cost of living is higher, and housing is more expensive on average.

If you are trying to minimize your taxes, random forest regressors fail to give a robust predictive model for the total tax rate, with an R squared of only 1%, which is no explanation. This includes presidential results for the last three elections and the partisan voting index! Still, tax rates are fairly uniform and not explained by partisan affiliation, no matter how I try to torture my data.

The biggest correlate of living longer is higher home prices, and vice versa. Increasing longevity reduces house turnover, reducing available housing stock and increasing prices. So, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, if you want lower housing prices, kill grandma!

Or you can build more housing…

Long lives, higher incomes, high home prices, and bachelor’s degrees are strongly correlated.

	Life expectancy	Median household income	Bachelor’s degree	Biden vote 2020
Life expectancy	1.000000	0.752675	0.598726	0.541611
Median household income	0.752675	1.000000	0.848154	0.727764
Bachelor’s degree	0.598726	0.848154	1.000000	0.826395
Biden vote 2020	0.541611	0.727764	0.826395	1.000000

The relationship between bachelor’s degrees and incomes is the strongest correlation in my dataset.

An interesting finding is that increasing school funding does not lead to better SAT Math scores. The strongest correlate is a slower population growth rate as education funding increases. Neither does school funding correlate to tax rates as strongly as it correlates to lower population growth. This is worth further exploration. It also does not correlate with partisan affiliation.

States with more smokers lean Republican and have lower incomes.

Nothing in my dataset strongly correlates with SAT math scores.

In conclusion…

• Simply increasing funding for a program will not necessarily lead to better results. Emphasize quality of government more than increasing funding, at least most of the time. Pumping more money into an inefficient system will not lead to better results.
• Throwing more money at a problem like police or increasing border restrictions haphazardly works as well as spending money on education or fighting climate change without considering the efficiency of how the money will be spent.
• Tax rates in the ranges we see in the US today have a minimal impact on quality of life.
• Higher education matters.
• Smoking kills.
• Keep people in school, which leads to lower poverty and higher incomes, which leads to less smoking, which leads to longer lives.

Sources:

Housing cost	https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/housing-costs-by-state
other data	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_socioeconomic_factors
Education	https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state
State tax levels	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United_States
tobacco	https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/smoking-rates-by-state

Here are policies that are most likely to destroy your country:

• Nationalized agriculture will quickly cure overpopulation.
• Concentrate your economy in the hands of a handful of mega-corporations. The rich and powerful get significant benefits paid for by the working class.
• Increase the cost of housing. If a condo is less than 20 times the annual income, are you even trying to kill your country?
• Increase the cost of child care. If women can work and have children, you are just a feminist.
• Privatize education. Only the wealthy can afford to get the best jobs. This kills social mobility, which kills your population growth rate.
• Long-term economic depression. People have children based on relative terms, not absolute terms.

This is Korea. These are the policies of both North Korea and South Korea in one list that have destroyed the Korean nation.

If you instead want to build a society with stable growth and economic opportunity, do the opposite of these.

You can reduce the price of a good or service in two ways:

• Reduce demand
• Increase supply

Now, from the perspective of the United States, while we have one of the largest oil reserves, most of those reserves are shale. Shale oil is expensive to refine and particularly dirty compared to other sources of oil. If the price of oil drops far enough, America’s shale oil will no longer be profitable, and we will again force the owners of shale wells into bankruptcy. Setting up wells is expensive, and they must stay running for a while to recoup their cost. For this reason, it takes time to move wells successfully online and offline. It takes time to build, and it takes time to stop drilling. For this reason, America cannot drill baby drill our way to $1 per gallon of gasoline.

If you decide to give people cash to offset the increased cost of gasoline, demand will increase, pushing the price up. While government subsidies are helpful when there are long-term benefits from a good or service, such as education or health care, and a single player in an insurance market can reduce prices substantially, like with prescription drugs, the oil market is not one of those monopolistic markets. I am not opposed to all government regulation or even taking over entire sectors in the case of natural monopolies, but the oil market is not one of those sectors. It is not a natural monopoly, and it is not an insurance situation. The government should stay out of it. Sorry, Governor Newsom, gas cards are a bad policy.

It also is a strange situation where the government taxes and subsidizes a good. Pick a lane!

Suppose the US government decides to subsidize oil prices to a lower level while still having a gas tax (which is a bizarre combination of policies), that will either take tax revenue to subsidize a private good or print money to boost demand for a particular good, increasing the price overall. There is a point where printing money will cause inflation. It’s hard to know exactly where that will be; we don’t want to mess around with it. Printing money makes sense to pull ourselves out of recession, which is usually paired with deflation, but we don’t want to overheat the economy when GDP growth is up.

We need policies that raise people out of poverty, such as debt-free college, food stamps, and guaranteed health care. Subsidizing gasoline is not the way to do it.

The US cannot subsidize its way out of high oil prices.

Reducing demand can be done in several ways:

• Tax gasoline. Some of the tax will be paid by the producer, some by the consumer. You get a double dividend as well. You also don’t have to deal with the substitution effect.
• Upzone areas to increase tax revenue and lower the cost of housing. This makes transit more profitable to run.
• Implement mixed-use zoning so people don’t have to drive everywhere.
• Expanding transit, which is convenient and fast, will, through the substitution effect, pull people away from cars, reducing demand for gasoline. Transit needs to be built as a network, and larger cities should not operate out of a central hub. There are several ways to do this:
  • Reduce restrictive regulations (not regarding safety, however) to lower the cost of building transit so we can have more transit and less driving via the substitution effect.
  • Eliminate tariffs on foreign-built transit vehicles so transit agencies have lower costs and can expand.
  • Designate main arterials as transit only to make transit run faster. This one is free!

Simply making driving more expensive without upzoning, expanding transit, and mixed-use zoning will be a revenue source for the government. People need alternatives and have access to amenities near their houses. When you do both at the same time, you have a sustainable situation.

We can now implement many policies to reduce the cost of building transit and the need to drive, reducing financial strain on American families.

Zoning reforms are almost free to implement, reduce the need to drive, and increase city tax revenue per square kilometer, which can be used to expand transit.

This is a summary of everything I have written over the last 3 and a half years

Domestic Social: A

He supports the progress that was made under the Obama administration, abortion rights, gay marriage, trans rights, etc. Biden is a fantastic president on domestic social policy. He has not eroded American civil liberties; his court appointees are strong liberals.

He is among the best presidents we have ever had on domestic social policy. Only LBJ and Obama compare.

Solid A.

Economic: C

Biden is not to blame directly for the increase in oil prices since the invasion of Ukraine. That is the fault of Putin. He could have done a lot more to prevent the war, however, and that would have kept prices more under control.

Biden is a protectionist and his love of tariffs will cost America over the long term.

He supports the Affordable Care Cat.

I wish he would support a carbon tax.

But overall, while he is far worse than Obama on economics, he is not the worst president we have ever had on the economy by a long shot.

Solid C. Some good things, some bad things.

Foreign policy: F

He surrendered to terrorists in Afghanistan, supports Netanyahu, and has not done enough to ensure Ukraine wins the war. We would still have had a major inflation problem if he had done more, but the inflation would not have been as severe.

Social liberalism needs to be a bigger part of his foreign policy, and we must stop supplying Likud.

 

Trump receives an F on all three. He appointed justices who oppose gay marriage and abortion. His handling of COVID made it worse than it needed to be, which devastated our economy and many people died because of his choices. His foreign policy was to set in motion the crisis in Afghanistan with our surrender, did not support our allies, and did whatever Netanyahu told him to do. The only way Trump could have been worse is if he got more laws signed into law.

 

Neither President is perfect, both fail on foreign policy, but on domestic social policy, one of these men is clearly better than the other.

Stop sending arms to Israel.

Send arms to Ukraine with no restrictions beyond the Geneva conventions so they win the war this summer.

The truth is that Joe Biden is one of only two American presidents who lost a war; the other is Gerald Ford, who lost Vietnam. Biden’s approval rating plummeted after we abandoned Afghanistan to the terrorists, and his approval rating has not recovered since. So we now are faced with a presidential election with two deeply unpopular candidates.

I believe Biden can gain a lot more votes if he ends the war in Ukraine by giving them everything they need to push Russians out of their land and destroy Russian military bases in Russia, and makes a peace agreement in Israel and Palestine, combined with US recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

As usual, his foreign policy and defense teams have been massively miscalculating the situation in Ukraine. We live in a world where you can type in a prompt to ChatGPT and receive an answer within seconds. We live in a world where you can tap a button on the phone and have food delivered to your house within 30 minutes from across town.

This instant gratification does not extend to politics. We want everything unpleasant to be over now, and everything pleasant to be done fast, but this cannot be how we base our foreign policy. Sometimes, things will take some time. When we left a power vacuum in Afghanistan, the terrorists and their state sponsors were more than happy to fill the power vacuum. When we give Ukraine absurd requirements so we don’t cross Putin’s “red lines,” we prolong the conflict, and innocent young Ukrainians pay the ultimate price. This is their punishment for desiring to be free.

We need to be methodical and think through situations using game theory, and it is abundantly obvious the Biden Administration is not doing this. We need to look at the options we have:

• Afghanistan
  • Either we support a nominally government democratic government, training their security forces to the point of self-sufficiency and ensure they can educate their children, OR
  • The terrorists take over the country and girls will no longer go to school.
• Russia/Ukraine
  • Either we support Ukraine militarily until Russia leaves all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory and Ukraine destroys the Russian military, OR
  • Ukraine will be fully annexed into Russia, and China will invade Taiwan.
• Israel/Palestine
  • Either we recognize a sovereign Palestinian state and require the Israeli government to protect Palestinian civilians and send aid into Gaza, OR
  • There will be genocide.

There are no other stable third options in these three crises.

Biden can still win the presidency by forcing Israel to agree to a stable lasting peace and not sending them more military aid if they continue to violate international.

Otherwise people will not vote for him, and I pray we will keep the Senate so Trump’s second term will be as ineffective as the first.

Oh, and Democrats really need to kick Rafael Cruz (If he believes trans people should go with their name assigned with birth, so should he) out of office down in Texas if we have any chance of taking the Senate this year. The only potential reason we might lose is Collin Allred is a New Democrat.