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Presidential elections

I'm not taking the extreme position that Republican presidents do not do any good and that Democratic presidents do no wrong. Obama is quite unpopular now with some Dems even for Obamacare and not addressing the economy when Dems had the majority. I'm well aware that the economic effects of policies may not be felt until after a 4-year term. This also partly explains why I find it a little ridiculous to vilify Obama for not "fixing the economy" even though he made promises he obviously couldn't keep (I attribute that to politics more than a single person).

It's the ideology that bothers me. It seems like Republicans are content to cut taxes and let government sort out how it makes up the difference. That it's ok to increase the debt as long as they are not increasing spending, and further that it actually is ok to increase spending as long as it is going towards war. I don't blame Bush for the war in Afghanistan, I disagree with the war in Iraq, but I believe allowing the tax cuts to continue while engaged in these wars is irresponsible.

The problem seems like the increasing deficit and debt before Obama was just business as usual, but since Obama took office just before we hit rock bottom, the recession made anything short of laying off half the government somehow egregious. I'm not a fan of the US Treasury's no-limit, no-interest credit cards for financial institutions, but we already discussed whether we believed Obama could do anything to halt it.

Getting to things that are more directly controlled by the president, Obama's economic plan still fills me with much more confidence than Romney's. I don't say that because I'm an Obama supporter; I support Obama because of it. Cutting taxes so drastically seems like a very big mistake.

Presidential elections

author=harmonic
It's automatic that you'll find some way to deflect responsibility away from him. Seriously, it's automatic. Yawn...

Also, Hayekians and most other fiscal conservatives absolutely hate Ben Bernanke. You see, we don't vote down party/racial lines exclusively.


Let's say we do hold Obama accountable for his spending. Why exactly is he the one getting the brunt of the beating? The debt has been fast increasing since Reagan opened the floodgates with drastic tax cuts. Bush also cut taxes and further exploded the debt. Apparently the idea was to force cuts in government spending to make up for these losses in revenue, but it never happened, in their own tenures or afterwards. Obama is saying that realistic, responsible deficit reduction can only occur with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Romney's plan was do to exactly what Reagan and Bush did; cut taxes and "discuss" cuts in spending (without cutting education, popular deductions, or defense apparently). I cannot see any possible angle with which to view a Romney victory as more economically responsible than an Obama one.

Presidential elections

author=harmonic
Yikes, there is absolutely no one else on the fiscal conservative, or hayek/austrian economic philosophy in this thread except me. This is difficult odds. But as they say, most people thought the world was flat at a time. Seems pretty boring just having a giant echo chamber, so let's bring some balance to the table.


I appreciate that you welcome the handicap. I'm certainly not looking to tilt the thread in "our" favor ("we" being people who don't share your views but have no other established positions with each other). In fact I'm hoping to learn more about the economy, and you have given me new insights.

Before that, if by my positions I'm not a fiscal conservative, where does that put me? Fiscal liberal? The sound of it is scary, and my inclination is to reject it. I think a large part of the debate lies in what we all define "fiscal responsibility" to be.

I have no love for the Wall Street bailout. I don't have much to go off of there besides the sentiment of it, that big banks (GSE's or not) pull us into recession for their mistakes and then get our tax dollars to stay afloat BAD BAD BAD. Nevertheless, all the big players on both sides said it needed to be done, so it got done. US automakers, mired in their own debt from their own mistakes, took a much deeper and sudden hit with the recession. The auto bailout I am much more in favor of, as it produced much more tangible results; i.e. cars to drive. Seeing they likely would have had to liquidate assets that affect global markets, I'd like to think it also helped the American bottom line from loss of exports, although I realize this amount could be small. Both bailouts saved jobs. Your position on the importance of jobs is interesting, and where I think a key difference lies in our beliefs.

To me, jobs means money, and money means sales. We're still the world's largest consumer economy. All the jobs in China won't matter if people here in the US don't have the money to buy goods. More money, more sales, more growth. I think the gist of what you are saying (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it isn't jobs that we need so much as exports, whether they are produced by local jobs or not. We need something we can sell to the world. In principle, I agree with this. But as the largest consumer economy in the world, I think the importance of domestic jobs is going to provide the most transient boost in the economy. Meanwhile, we need to have a serious talk about domestic production opportunities.

This is all I have time for now while I'm at work, I'll read more when I get home.

Presidential elections

author=Solitayre
If Reagan had done all the things he said he was going to do we'd likely have very low National Debt right now!


He actually did what he said he was going to do: lower taxes across the board. What he PROMISED was that this would actually increase tax revenue. This is the idea the Republicans are still pushing to this day, but has failed, and caused only crazy debt.

Presidential elections

Regarding the fiscal cliff, sure, it's not the be-all-end-all economic disaster it might sound to be, but it's generally to believed to come at the expense of many jobs. Across-the-board tax increases coupled with reductions in entitlement spending is a rough combo.

To be sure, the Republicans have a lot more to lose out of this deal, but Obama doesn't want all of these cuts and tax hikes either (with the 1% being the notable exception).

Presidential elections

The efficacy of Obama's stimulus is debatable; the efficacy of the auto bailout is pretty irrefutable. None of these are things he wanted to do. The economy was in great recession, and these things were needed. Most economists agree his actions saved jobs.

Yet, while spending this money, he still managed to slow government spending by a significant amount. The deficit is what it was when he took office; when's the last time that happened? How can his spending be considered anything but responsible? I'd seriously like to know what policies of his are killing businesses.

Also, linking Obama's debt to GDP is flawed; GDP tanked with the recession which is obviously not Obama's doing.

The RMN band - auditions always open

Pretty awesome idea, Link. Makes me wish I could actually play an instrument.

For a lot of you, there should be a relatively cheap/easy way to record from your keyboards. Most keyboards have a headphone jack, and just about all computers have a line-in for microphones. If you go to Radio Shack and buy a stereo 3.5mm cable (it looks like a headphone jack on both ends) for a few bucks you can plug one right into the other, set your computer's recording device to Line-In, and voila; use Audacity or Sound Recorder to make some easy recordings. You may also need to buy a quarter inch adapter for the cable if your keyboard's output is that large.

This is an example of such a cable: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=12475706&retainProdsInSession=1

I can't play, but I have plenty of stuff to engineer mixes with (or I can record your stuff in you live in the Seattle area). Catch me anytime on AIM if you want: plainoldsean.

RMNv4 Feedback

Good replies! I'll respond to some visual and flow-related commentary, as I am planning to work on some design changes that focus on these aspects.

@Anaryu: The point size for front page fonts likely didn't change; the new font probably is inherently larger. This is something that I will be looking at.

@Mog: Did a hard refresh (shift-F5) ever fix that problem you were seeing? As Kenton indicated, it should not appear that way on any browser. If it is, I will look into browser cross-compatibility in more depth.

@Xeilmach: The flow of the site naturally does this; to draw more eye to trending topics and leaving the site-generated auto content down below. As you indicated, this might not be preferred by all of the site's users. I was considering adding a link up top somewhere that would page down to all of the Latest Submissions. Hopefully you'll find that to be a simple and elegant solution to your issue.

@Rhyme: Re: white space, it might seem a little OCD to have the headers not be centered in the available white space vertically, but it serves the purpose of the header better. They might seem to "float" a little more because the headers are stuck in that white space, which could be solved by offering different styling for the headers, which I was also considering.

Re: the ribbons screwing up when the screen is sized down, this will be corrected one way or another.

Re: the hard-to-read text in certain areas, if not already corrected, this will be addressed too

Re: all caps, it depends on the font. Since the font in use is pretty thin, I agree that all caps might be a little too clumsy. With the right font, one with more weight and width, it will look better, but ultimately we'll go with what looks best.

Re: main column being too bright in contrast with the background color, I tend to agree, and will definitely be considering something more elegant

@Mog et others: latest comments were pretty popular, the code is working, and I'd like to work that in to the front page as well. As a content item, that's more up to Holb, kenton, and anky, but I can make it work either way.

@Dyhalto: While we'll never design the site to be navigable without a horizontal scrollbar, I'm curious to know what breaks the design now as opposed to before? The previous version was width 980, so that would have had horizontal bars, too. This really shouldn't be all that different. Any issues I can address, I will.

@narcodis: good ideas about putting links in headers. A simple fix.

@nesfreak: Game pages will be looked at. I'd like to have a layout that allows the default layout to not only look nice, but play nicely with custom layouts. We'll see what happens.

@zephyr: Probably right about being able to compact things. The headers are probably larger than needed when we can use more subtle design elements to separate the content and make it more presentable. I will be looking at this.

@felipe: Did you ever get those things set back up? Those are pretty simple elements that shouldn't have completely stopped working, but I'll look at them if they did.

@link: The clickable links should all be the same color, as you indicate. Will be looked at. Also, regarding breadcrumb links at the top of forum threads, I don't see why I wouldn't be able to copy the code down below and put it up above. Maybe make it smaller and a little more eloquent so that it's not forcing everything down.

@Locke: Making an adaptable layout with as much predefined and auto-generated content as we have would be a pretty massive undertaking. Again, I'm wondering how the site used to look on a 800x600 display because WIP said it certainly wasn't adaptable before. On the other hand, I might look into making a mobile site layout as well.

@Rhyme again, re: all the "latest" sections, ding ding ding =) That has been fresh in my mind and will likely show up in some form in any design I come up with.

@alterego, narcodis, Solitayre, Darken: Thank you, alterego, for the effort in producing the mockup =) It, along with narcodis's revisions, implements some solid ideas, many of which I've had in my own mockups in the past. Let me break things down some more, then we can discuss (which may not be as effective as producing more mockups, but I don't have time for that now).

First of all, the header. It's come to my attention that donors do not see ads up top, so instead they get a massive white space next to the logo. Due to this, I would likely have the RMN logo share the same vertical space as the navigation bar, so that it looks good without an ad, and if ads ARE displayed, they merely push everything down a bit. For that reason, the larger logo should probably shrink down in size as seen in the mockup. I would probably do it similar to as shown.

Now, I have to disagree with shoving all the eye candy together. The "gamespot" section was indeed designed to serve as a separation between staff-generated content and site-generated content below it. The above-the-fold mentality of having all of that imagery there when the site loads is not needed, and can be quite overwhelming.

I can appreciate the desire for efficiency, but unlike designing a ui for a game, as an example, we have web browsers with perfectly functioning scrollbars; vertical real estate is not an issue, and to that effect we should use more of it to make things more readable. I like how cleanly organized narcodis's table of content below looks, but it is very cramped and has a "wall-of-content" appearance where the headings actually just kinda of get lost within those dark dividing elements. In short, you were right about providing the separation of sections, narcodis, but the dark gray lines and lack of vertical spacing between them removes that subtlety that previously was provided by white space.

All in all, I agree with many of the ideas put forward; what I'm going to be attempting to do is to execute them eloquently with an emphasis on readability.


EDIT: Look at Rhyme's latest post; this is an example of making subtle changes that improve readability. Slight changing of colors of the headings, and he left the slight vertical spacing after each element. A great example.

The Screenshot Topic Returns

@chana, yes, the letter spacing is messed up because you don't have the appropriate font installed (not your fault, the game was distributed without it). This is a well-documented issue.

http://rpgmaker.net/users/kentona/locker/Fonts.rar

Download and install that font to correct it.