Growing up in Seattle, beginning in the 70s, I’m pretty sure Snoqualmie isn’t Amazon or Microsoft’s fault.
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Nah. I can’t stand Bellevue.
Rural Washington is a conservative mess for the same reason rural Oregon is.
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I had to double check your chart with CO being red, then I saw it was from 2008. Same goes for rural CO, that @enso said. It’s a “feature” of the western states.
aka the great “City vs. Rural” divide. Cities are generally Blue and rural areas are generally Red. This applies in California as well.
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Yep. I grew up there.
Similar in Australia.
The rural districts elect regressive agrarian socialists (socialise the droughts, privatise the good years, bash the wogs and poofs), the wealthy urban districts elect plutocrats, the working class urban districts elect bent careerist union apparatchiks.
Everyone votes for a mix of interests and prejudices.
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Never apologize for sharing a story, but if it comes up again I hope you’ll remind your son that there are adults who are pushing laws to make life difficult for his friend. There are still a lot of people laboring under the belief that your son’s friend being transgender is a big deal and something that concerns them.
But your son’s attitude shows how the demographics are changing, and there is something reassuring about that. In spite of the slew of recent laws targeting transgender people I notice that “conservative” lawmakers don’t want to talk about marriage equality anymore because they not only lost the fight but enough of the country has turned on the issue that their opposition makes them look bad. And it’s extraordinary how quickly the country turned. That gives me hope that soon the laws targeting transgender people will look just as ridiculous as the anti-marriage laws–and, in fact, they already do to much of the country.
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And I actually live in Snoqualamie (Everett, to be specific).
Yes, WA has some regressive tax structures, I fully agree. Even so, as a barely (if that) middle class couple, my wife and I pay significantly less of our income in this state to survive, vs. DC-area MD (which we just moved from), yet wages are the same, or even higher.
Why is this so? For one, MD, like many so-called “liberal bastions”, simply hides the costs, as fees and such, instead of taxes. They also have a state income tax and WA does not. Again, this IS “regressive”, especially combined with the higher sales taxes — because, unlike MD, counties and cities/towns can tack on their own addition to the sales tax, as well, bringing it up from 6.5% (just slightly over MD) to as high as 9.9-10% in some places; ugh — but we STILL are significantly better off than when we were in MD, at very nearly the same income. It’s that simple.
It doesn’t hurt that the weather is much nicer, just about all of the time.
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A truer description of conservative moral’s will rarely be found:
State lawmakers can claim to be acting conservatively, Cochran said, but they’re not responsible for the consequences of their decisions. “The state’s dumping responsibility on local government,” he said.
Those living up to the lofty standards of “do as I say, not as I do” morality will necessarily demand you take responsibility for and correct the devastating and misguided decisions (and thievery) they indulge.
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This reminds me of John Oliver of chicken farming. The company explained that the farmers own the land and the farming equipment, the company just owned the chickens. John Oliver summarized this: “So the farmers own everything that costs money, and the company owns everything that makes money.”
Also, my family economic historian has been telling me that municipal bonds are going to be at the center of the next global financial collapse just as housing prices were for the last one. To his credit, he says, “I’ve been saying this for a decade now, and I haven’t been right yet.” But I keep seeing reasons to think he’ll be right soon enough.
I think at this point economics as an academic discipline has as much going for it as 
s do as an ethical movement. A typical person thinking of “an economist” is going to think of a columnist or TV personality who is shilling for the rich in an attempt to secure a place as a favoured servant when we return to feudalism. A typical politician looking for advice on how to manage the economy of the a nation turns to those same people.
I’m just hoping that at least some sizable portion of the population looks at the transgender rights fight, thinks back on gay rights, and thinks, “Are we really just about to do this entire thing all over again? What the fuck?!?”
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We’ve actually had discussions about proposed bathroom laws – how the beliefs of elected officials can affect those we hold dear. I did see this recently, however, and I think it’s perfect. (source: Can we please? - Imgur)
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It only works if said cow has a uniform distribution of milk.
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I want to see that sign on bathrooms everywhere. 
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It’s having socialism for the upfront costs (the people get to fund shit) and privatizing the profits (corporations get to economically benefit).
These people are driving our society into an economic ditch, and we’re letting them…
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Rather than pay rates to maintain their town’s infrastructure, they mortgaged everything to build slave-labour camps. They should have stuck with the monorail.
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Nice!
I’m find fond of this one because it asks what kind of facilities you are looking for rather than how you look/act/are constructed:
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Stumbled across this today:
Y’all managed to break QI’s instinct for comedy.
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Well said, I was ready to make the same comment. Investment isn’t fuel, it’s catalysis – it lets you use the projected profits from a proposed enterprise’s future operation to fund the start of that same enterprise. But if the projected profits don’t materialize, the economy doesn’t grow – some stuff gets sold at fire sale prices and that grows the economy, but much of the initial investment must be written down and that counteracts the incidental growth that came from, say, building a factory and producing a bunch of cheap plastic widgets.
Over the last few decades we’ve seen wages go down, and that means demand has gone down. The response has been to decrease interest rates (and when they hit zero, just pump liquidity into the financial economy). This makes it cheaper to borrow money, but that only creates the illusion of economic growth.
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Easy, there, it doesn’t snow all year.
