The [State of the Union] is... strong! (Milk is no longer oil!)

Synthesis

I don't think she should have only quoted the single crazy guy while ignoring available interviews given by program leaders or political leaders which attributed it to human error and irresponsibility. Apparently, that's the joke? The country's president said things about it. The actual program leaders said things about it. But they chose the wacky guy. That's the sort of shit I expect from Fox, personally.

She treated it as a humorous event, which struck me as stupid. I was a little confused as to why she brought it up at all (the year was filled with many botched launches from Roscosmos, after all), except that she does her occasionally technology blurb, while not really focusing much on the technology either in this case.

EDIT: Also, board (or my ISP) is slow--I'm surprised I haven't gotten a double-post yet.

Irond Will

spool32 wrote:

Well this is fun!

Buffet's secretary makes a lot more money than you.

...taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffet’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffet must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.

She just bought a second home, too!

Maybe it wasn't such an awesome idea for Obama to put her front and center for the speech.

they probably included payroll taxes. those are really the huge difference between people making tons of money and people working for a living.

mcdermott

Irond Will wrote:

spool32 wrote:

Well this is fun!

Buffet's secretary makes a lot more money than you.

...taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffet’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffet must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.

She just bought a second home, too!

Maybe it wasn't such an awesome idea for Obama to put her front and center for the speech.

they probably included payroll taxes. those are really the huge difference between people making tons of money and people working for a living.

God, that story is so ridiculous. The combined value of their two homes is still under like $400K. So they choose to have a second home rather than a single McMansion. Big fucking deal.

Also, she's married. Presumably her husband works. Nobody is claiming she is fucking impoverished. The point is that a couple that earns several orders of magnitude less (even if it is a combined $200K or so) still pays a higher rate than a multi-billionaire.

And yes, he's almost certainly including payroll taxes.

Caveman Paws

Did anyone really think Buffet's secretary was struggling to make rent and was subsisting off mac n cheese?

The example of Super rich guy paying less in tax then his secretary remains.

mcdermott

I'd actually be profoundly sad if the secretary for a multi-billionaire wasn't able to afford, at the age of 50+, a $400K house.

override367

Yeah, did anyone assume she made regular secretary pay? Presumably she's really good at her job and knows the man's schedule better than her own

I mean Buffet's time is worth millions of dollars a day, it's actually worth way more than he's paying her to make sure he has an efficient secretary, one fucked up scheduling could potentially cost more than 10 years of her salary

Hacksaw

Synthesis wrote:

I don't think she should have only quoted the single crazy guy while ignoring available interviews given by program leaders or political leaders which attributed it to human error and irresponsibility. Apparently, that's the joke? The country's president said things about it. The actual program leaders said things about it. But they chose the wacky guy. That's the sort of shit I expect from Fox, personally.

She treated it as a humorous event, which struck me as stupid. I was a little confused as to why she brought it up at all (the year was filled with many botched launches from Roscosmos, after all), except that she does her occasionally technology blurb, while not really focusing much on the technology either in this case.

EDIT: Also, board (or my ISP) is slow--I'm surprised I haven't gotten a double-post yet.

International issues are irrelevant; America is the world.

Maddow's right about PolitiFact sucking and that's all that matters.

Burtletoy

override367 wrote:

Yeah, did anyone assume she made regular secretary pay? Presumably she's really good at her job and knows the man's schedule better than her own

I mean Buffet's time is worth millions of dollars a day, it's actually worth way more than he's paying her to make sure he has an efficient secretary, one fucked up scheduling could potentially cost more than 10 years of her salary

I'm 90% sure that the secretaries at my company make more than me.

This doesn't bother me.

Synthesis

Hacksaw wrote:

Synthesis wrote:

I don't think she should have only quoted the single crazy guy while ignoring available interviews given by program leaders or political leaders which attributed it to human error and irresponsibility. Apparently, that's the joke? The country's president said things about it. The actual program leaders said things about it. But they chose the wacky guy. That's the sort of shit I expect from Fox, personally.

She treated it as a humorous event, which struck me as stupid. I was a little confused as to why she brought it up at all (the year was filled with many botched launches from Roscosmos, after all), except that she does her occasionally technology blurb, while not really focusing much on the technology either in this case.

EDIT: Also, board (or my ISP) is slow--I'm surprised I haven't gotten a double-post yet.

International issues are irrelevant; America is the world.

Maddow's right about PolitiFact sucking and that's all that matters.

Well in that case--Maddow's doing just as good a job as her contemporaries.

Julius

mcdermott wrote:

Irond Will wrote:

spool32 wrote:

Well this is fun!

Buffet's secretary makes a lot more money than you.

...taxpayers earning an adjusted gross income between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average rate of twelve percent. This is below Buffet’s rate; so she must earn more than that. Taxpayers earning adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 to $500,000, pay an average tax rate of nineteen percent. Therefore Buffet must pay Debbie Bosanke a salary above two hundred thousand.

She just bought a second home, too!

Maybe it wasn't such an awesome idea for Obama to put her front and center for the speech.

they probably included payroll taxes. those are really the huge difference between people making tons of money and people working for a living.

God, that story is so ridiculous. The combined value of their two homes is still under like $400K. So they choose to have a second home rather than a single McMansion. Big fucking deal.

Also, she's married. Presumably her husband works. Nobody is claiming she is fucking impoverished. The point is that a couple that earns several orders of magnitude less (even if it is a combined $200K or so) still pays a higher rate than a multi-billionaire.

And yes, he's almost certainly including payroll taxes.

It's obvious that right-wingers don't really understand the actual problem. They seem to think that the problem is that her taxes are too high, while the point is that Buffet's taxes are too fucking low.

And yeah, those are some cheap houses actually.

Julius

Synthesis wrote:

Preacher wrote:

What international issue does maddow get wrong that you are complaining about? I have watched her show for a while and I can't recall anytime she has taken an international stance that is wrong or out of touch. Not to mention she frequently has guests on her program that are more informative on topics than she herself is as well.

The guests are significantly better. But I can think of more than a few incidents--mostly pertaining to local happenings in East Asia (particularly China and Taiwan, but then again, I always think of news from where I'm from the most) which were just flat-out misleading (and not surprising, NPR would have mislead to). More recently, her coverage on the failed Fobos-Grunt mission immediately comes to mind--basically, it was just "Ho ho ho, look at those wacky Russians and their horrible space program, making the rest of the world suffer for it," while utterly ignoring the fact that space probes often fail in their mission at one point or another, and that--and to an American audience, this should be important--Russia also has the world's only regular manned space program right now. Which is ferrying American astronauts. Which she decided wasn't relevant, from what I remember.

All in all, pretty bad. I've seen Twitter and Blog posts that did a much better job relaying it. Hell, even just a few scant highlights from English Wikipedia are better. More and more, unless she brings an expert guest, she usually just alludes to these sort of happenings in a comical light. Thankfully, she turns down her stupid humor when it came to "mainstream" news events from outside the US (the Fukushima Reactor crisis, for example, was better, awkward forced jokes about Chernobyl kept at a minimum). Much closer in tone and handling to her usual domestic stuff, which is much stronger.

I suppose that's a pretty widespread problem American news media (and, thinking about it, you can encounter very similar problems in CCTV or NHK or news outlets in other countries). It reminds me a little bit of NPR's really fucking awful, deliberately misleading coverage of the August '08 War in South Ossetia--though I doubt Maddow's done anything that bad.

EDIT: In retrospect, I think a lot of what I'm complaining about was covered in the "Damn the Media!" topic we had a few weeks back which also brought Maddow into consideration. Clearly, no one's perfect.

In general media is bad at covering international stuff. Even when it's news about the US from another country (which due to size-differences usually means that the coverage is far more accurate) they make some silly mistakes.

override367

Burtletoy wrote:

override367 wrote:

Yeah, did anyone assume she made regular secretary pay? Presumably she's really good at her job and knows the man's schedule better than her own

I mean Buffet's time is worth millions of dollars a day, it's actually worth way more than he's paying her to make sure he has an efficient secretary, one fucked up scheduling could potentially cost more than 10 years of her salary

I'm 90% sure that the secretaries at my company make more than me.

This doesn't bother me.

Secretaries of high power individuals have really important jobs, the fact that people assume we would be shocked to find out a billionaire's secretary makes good money is more telling than anything - do they assume secretaries should be making a menial wage?

,8,1

Are you huMAN enough to quit your internet?

Quit the internet.

There is another world outside.

override367

,8,1 wrote:

Are you huMAN enough to quit your internet?

Quit the internet.

There is another world outside.

Wow, I hadn't considered this

Guys this changes everything

Synthesis

Julius wrote:

Synthesis wrote:

Preacher wrote:

What international issue does maddow get wrong that you are complaining about? I have watched her show for a while and I can't recall anytime she has taken an international stance that is wrong or out of touch. Not to mention she frequently has guests on her program that are more informative on topics than she herself is as well.

The guests are significantly better. But I can think of more than a few incidents--mostly pertaining to local happenings in East Asia (particularly China and Taiwan, but then again, I always think of news from where I'm from the most) which were just flat-out misleading (and not surprising, NPR would have mislead to). More recently, her coverage on the failed Fobos-Grunt mission immediately comes to mind--basically, it was just "Ho ho ho, look at those wacky Russians and their horrible space program, making the rest of the world suffer for it," while utterly ignoring the fact that space probes often fail in their mission at one point or another, and that--and to an American audience, this should be important--Russia also has the world's only regular manned space program right now. Which is ferrying American astronauts. Which she decided wasn't relevant, from what I remember.

All in all, pretty bad. I've seen Twitter and Blog posts that did a much better job relaying it. Hell, even just a few scant highlights from English Wikipedia are better. More and more, unless she brings an expert guest, she usually just alludes to these sort of happenings in a comical light. Thankfully, she turns down her stupid humor when it came to "mainstream" news events from outside the US (the Fukushima Reactor crisis, for example, was better, awkward forced jokes about Chernobyl kept at a minimum). Much closer in tone and handling to her usual domestic stuff, which is much stronger.

I suppose that's a pretty widespread problem American news media (and, thinking about it, you can encounter very similar problems in CCTV or NHK or news outlets in other countries). It reminds me a little bit of NPR's really fucking awful, deliberately misleading coverage of the August '08 War in South Ossetia--though I doubt Maddow's done anything that bad.

EDIT: In retrospect, I think a lot of what I'm complaining about was covered in the "Damn the Media!" topic we had a few weeks back which also brought Maddow into consideration. Clearly, no one's perfect.

In general media is bad at covering international stuff. Even when it's news about the US from another country (which due to size-differences usually means that the coverage is far more accurate) they make some silly mistakes.

You're preaching to the quire, so to speak. For news from China, I actually prefer CCTV to American affiliates of CNN or BBC frequently. Not a good sign.

nexuscrawler

Realistically Warren Buffett's secretary is probably in the worst tax bracket possible. the people who get fucked the worst by our tax code around fairly highly paid salary workers. People who qualify for the higher tax brackets but still work salary and don't have the tax dodging options of the ultra rich