Merry X-mas! We had our Jul-board last night. We always eat late at night!
- Limpa Bread & Crisp bread, (Made by me.)
- Potato Sausage. (Mostly meat. Made by Robert.)
- Jansens’ Temptation. (Potato dish, made by Robert.)
- Cucumbers in dill sauce. (Made by Jim.)
- Gravlaks (Made by Jim.)
- Bond ost.
- Ham (Heated by me.)
- Demi-tasse.
- Aqua vit.
- Red wine.
Mom’s coming today.
Have fun!
Interesting! I had to google half your feast.
It was traditional cuban for Christmas eve; pork, black beans and rice, plantains. Tonight is roast beef, hassleback potatoes, garlic lemon green beans and rolls. Chantilly cake for dessert. Nothing fancy, but yummy all the same!
Aqua vit and wine ??
Feliz natal, paz, e saude no proximo ano. Vamos esperar que as pessoas na esquerda verde comcordam que compromiso e’ chave no futuro.
(Happy Christmas, peace, and health in the next year. Let’s hope the people on the green left agree that compromise is key in the future.)
j ferguson,
I drank wine. The others had aqua vit.
Jim and his brothers like all things Swedish for Christmas eve.
Fascinating, and I had some ham myself as a Swede here in Copenhagen on Christmas eve. Meanwhile all Swedes learned on TV that the ham was actually more of a midsummer dish, due to reasons of conserving it. Seems this is a Swedish table, while some spelling has made its way through Denmark or Norway. At least it’s really Jansson’s.
Sören F,
I have to admit I winged the spelling. I’m not at all Scandinavian so tend to never remember which spelling is which country! (I’m mostly Irish & miscellaneous UK with some Cuban. )
That said, I’m pretty sure Jim’s Dad just liked to have dishes he remembered. He had no idea which were really “Christmas”. He was born in Sweden but moved to the US when he was a little kid– probably around 5 years old.
I forgot: we also had sugar cookies from the classic American cookbook “The Joy of Cooking”.
Hope you had a merry Christmas, Lucia!
..and a great mostly-christmas table – would have loved it! Americans with Swedish roots are admired each year nowadays with the show Allt för Sverige 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allt_för_Sverige
http://www.greatswedishadventure.com/
oooohhhh. Jim and his brother’s should have been cast! 🙂
Lucia, how do you get assigned to this critical task. Was that one of those pre-sliced Honey Ham types that you think you have overpaid until you use the leftovers for sandwiches and scalloped potatoes.
If you get the kind with a bone, you can use the bone to make ham stock for beans or split pea soup.
I forgot that added bonus, DeWitt. I can verify that it makes great tasting split pea soup.
Kenneth,
No. It was a $0.49 /lb smoked bone in ham from Butera. I’d made these before and Jim and R&D have decreed them better than some super-expensive hams. (Jim bought a super-expensive ham last year and we all said: “should ave used the 49 cent a pound stuff.)
The method of preparation:
1) Put in a crockpot with an remote sensing thermometer inserted.
2) Turn crockpot on high.
3) When sensor approaches eating temperature, pour in a mixture of melted butter, honey and mustard (which should be heated in the microwave and blended.)
4) Cover more and get to eating temperature. If necessary, set crockpot warm.
5) Slice and serve with mixture of juices and honey mustard.
Later one, use bone from hopping john.
lucia (Comment #166291)
Lucia, you are much too modest when you listed your ham assignment as heating it up. I now need to retract my sarcastic remark.
I’ll have to try your ham and recipe in the near future.
Kenneth,
Really, the time commitment is modest. It’s about 4 minutes to put in the crockpot… wait. Then 4 more to mix the honey, mustard and butter and heat in the crockpot. The juices don’t evaporate, so this works out quite nicely. Buy cheap, cheap, cheap ham!
Not the time but the timing -that’s where I could screw-up and particularly so after a couple of glasses of wine.
I think it’s also very difficult to screw up the timing. I set the remote thermometer to beep– but really the timing for putting in the honey mustard isn’t critical. I just prefer it to be after some ham juice has formed. You could probably put it in just before serving and that would be fine.
Once the crockput is on “warm”, you could probably let the ham sit for hours. That makes it perfect while others are making things like “Janssen’s Temptation” and so on.
I am doing New Years eve dinner this year and will be keeping it as simple as possible so that my socializing will not get in the way of the meal preparation. Surf and turf with a butter lettuce salad and with appetizers that will be made before the socializing starts. Apple pie will be provided by our guests.
We are going to Chevy Chase Country Club to dance.
http://www.chevychasecountryclub.com/new-years-eve-2017
We went last year after the Willowbrooke Ballroom burnt down.
Interesting thought experiment. I am in California for Christmas and recently visited Los Angeles and Hollywood. I was two miles away from Hollywood at Vermont and sunset. The area was run-down and had many small businesses that seem to be scraping along. In 2022, the minimum wage will rise to $15, an hour in California and some local cities such as Santa Monica are raising the rate faster than the state.
…….
Los Angeles has a very serious homeless problem, and about half a mile from where I stayed it was like a third world country. On Saturday and Sunday people put blankets on the sidewalk and sold various wares. Very similar to what occurs in China.
…….
Personally, I don’t see how the smaller mom-and-pop businesses can survive the rising minimum wage unless they hire illegal aliens. I hope that studies are done which will show who benefits among workers and who is hurt. I suspect that many blue collar American citizens will be hurt by the high minimum wage. Considering the leftist slant of the universities, I wonder whether this issue will even be addressed.
… ..
I will also note, that I visited traditional Chinatown in Los Angeles about 3 years ago and none of the vendors charge sales tax unless you bought your purchase with a credit card. The use of credit cards was highly discouraged. Chinatown is about 1 mile away from courthouse, so everyone in power has to know what is going on and nobody wants to enforce the sales tax against these vendors. ( at least as of 3 years ago, and I would doubt that anything has changed.
JD
Travel tips for future visitors to Los Angeles. Hollywood itself is a dump. For instance, the Walk of Fame is nothing and there is $5 souvenir store right by it. However, the studio tours are very good. I went to the Warner Brothers tour and the Paramount tour and highly enjoyed both. They show you how the movies were made and have many interesting exhibits, including for instance, the cars from Batman, which my children really enjoyed. Also, the main character from The Transformers was also exhibited, and it was interesting to see.
JD
JD Ohio
I saw similar things on some bridges in Italy a decade or so ago. I would be surprised if it doesn’t still occur.
Well….. or having lots of small business have no “employees”. I’m not sure how traceable monetary transactions at farmers markets or flea markets are. But the the traceability is probably only slightly higher than blankets laid out on the ground in informal market areas. The people selling may be illegal aliens. Or they may be legal residents and US citizens for various and sundry reasons would prefer money they don’t report to the IRS.
Of course not. I would suspect many also don’t report profits to the IRS unless you pay by check or credit card. It’s possible the IRS or the state might catch them somehow, but if their suppliers don’t keep much in the way or records, it might be difficult to do so.
Lucia, “Of course not. I would suspect many also don’t report profits to the IRS unless you pay by check or credit card. It’s possible the IRS or the state might catch them somehow, but if their suppliers don’t keep much in the way or records, it might be difficult to do so.”
…
I really don’t know how sales taxes are enforced in California. However, my mechanic in Ohio has about a $30,000 judgment against him for sales taxes and he simply had a two-person business. What bothers me is the suspicion that the people not paying the sales tax are either legal or illegal aliens and potentially it is harder to enforce the law against them because they can always go back to their Homeland. This puts American citizens, possibly, at an economic disadvantage. Personally, I’ve never seen such blatant disregard of the sales tax in such an open and obvious place. If it had been in one of the more run down portions of Hollywood 10 miles away from downtown, it would be understandable. But right in the Heart of Los Angeles, I don’t get it.
The IRS is a different matter because it is far away from the action. However, there is a 9% sales tax in Los Angeles and if anybody wanted to enforce it in Chinatown, they couldn’t enforce it to some extent and send a message to the vendors that everyone is on equal grounds.
JD
I would estimate that a large percentage (which I will hereby define as somewhere between 0% and 100%) of businesses that don’t accept credit cards are not reporting all their income, avoiding employment taxes, or are even involved in money laundering. It has been my observation that Chinese restaurants in Florida are the most likely to refuse credit cards.
There are good reasons to not accept credit cards such as avoiding the fees associated with them for small margin products, especially for small transactions, but that has to be balanced against the loss of business for inconveniencing customers.
The most blatant avoidance of sales taxes are online business such as Amazon. States eventually coerced most of the big players to collect taxes by threatening to cut off all state purchases unless taxes were collected.
I’m not passing judgment on whether states should get sales tax from online purchases, as states are going to get their money one way or the other. If not sales taxes, some other tax mechanism will be used. If sales taxes are an efficient way to collect tax income then this may actually be a good idea. As I understand it you are duty bound to send sales tax to the state if the online business did not collect it. I imagine there is approx. 0% compliance here.
i wonder sometimes when I see what you are reporting if tax avoidance is really the issue. It probably is in the restaurants but I would think that a lot of these folks wouldn’t be making enough to pay much if anything.
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j ferguson,
Motivation to not report income can vary. If they have low enough reported income, an increase in documented income could result in loss of benefits like food stamps or assistance with rent. A person might also want to avoid having to pay creditors. Or child support. Or alimony. Or they might want to buy illicit things. Or they may just not want money their spouse doesn’t know about so they can spend it without arguments about whether it should go for something else. Or they may be incompetent with paperwork. Or they could be illegal aliens.
Tom Scharf,
The restaurants near here all seem to accept credit cards. But if it’s a breakfast or lunch joint, I imagine they get plenty of cash business. Jim’s Dad loved to go out to breakfast and I think he paid cash fairly often. It was more a habit than anything. Older people were sort of in the habit of paying cash below a certain level and only using cards above a certain level.
I know when I was a kid, grocery stores didn’t take credit cards; now they all do.
That said, I think more and more people use their card for all sorts of transactions.
I’m reminded of the time i tried to hire a “homeless” guy with a sign that said “Will work for food”. He wouldn’t work for the $100 I offered for about 6 hours of helping me clean up my yard after Hurricane Andrew. He actually told me that he typically made about four times that much most days with the sign at that South Miami intersection. And best of all he didn’t have to shave before going to work (my thought).
When Jim and I were driving to Chicago for dance lessons, there was always a beggar at a particular intersection just off the exit ramp from I-90. There seemed to be a total of 3 who took turns– but the intersection was always occupied and the same ones alternated. I suspect they made plenty relative to flipping hamburgers. I would seriously doubt they declared that income!
JD, I’ve seen reports that the housing codes are ignored entirely for all the lawnmowers and janitors. Near suburbs, they will be living 10 at a time in makeshift shacks.
J Ferguson : ” i wonder sometimes when I see what you are reporting if tax avoidance is really the issue. It probably is in the restaurants but I would think that a lot of these folks wouldn’t be making enough to pay much if anything.”
There really is no issue pertaining to the ability to pay taxes. The sales tax belongs to the state and is paid on top of what the vendor receives. The issue to me is a competitive advantage one, not a matter of inability to pay taxes. The Chinatown vendors effectively have a 9% advantage over other people who are actually charging sales tax. Just for clarity, I will note that historical Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles is really Vietnamese now and the Vietnamese are selling clothes that are made in Vietnam. There are many more Chinese in the Arcadia and Whittier areas than in historical Chinatown.
JD
Wife lived in Bangkok for 5 years with starter husband. We both like Thai food but often find no-one in Thai restaurant who can speak language. They are Chinese.
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But then there was Chinese restaurant in Conroe Texas in late ’70’s – maybe still with no Chinese either. Polish guy had bought it from Chinese couple who were retiring and they showed him how to cook with wok and make the things they offered.
While I’m at it, JD, do you know wy Chinese call themselves “Chinese People” and not just simply Chinese?
J Ferguson,
Maybe because English is not their first language.
Hi SteveF,
My thought was that “Chinese people” is how it works in Chinese. more or less just as you say.
Independent contractors could also choose to not report income pretty easily. In theory all my customers are supposed to send out 1099’s (payments to independent contractors) to myself and the IRS, but I find only a small percentage do that, usually the bigger businesses.
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On that subject, HOORAY for tax breaks to “pass through” businesses. I imagine this would had saved me at least $100K over the past few decades. Better late then never. I imagine this is going to be exploited so much it will need to be tightened up. I am being incentivized to take as little salary as possible and report as much as possible as business profit.
Tom,
“I am being incentivized to take as little salary as possible and report as much as possible as business profit.”
There has always been that incentive, since you have to pay FICA and medicare on salary, but not on net profits. The IRS has (I believe) always had rules about how much active owners in pass-through businesses have to declare as salary, and I think it is “a salary commensurate with work actually preformed”. That is, a salary comparable to what you would have to pay someone else to do that work. I expect the same rule will continue to apply. That said, the 20% deduction on the net profit in pass-through businesses will reduce taxes at least moderately for most active owners, though other changes (limitations on deductions on interest and sate and local taxes, loss of personal exemptions) will certainly mean some pay a little more.
Yes, a lot of people don’t realize contractors have to pay both business and personal sides of FICA and Medicare on their salary. Some people get a big tax surprise in their first year of contracting because of this (and some don’t even realize they have to pay these at all).
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The double payment of these taxes is somewhat offset by being able to write off business expenses, and contractors typically get paid more than employees.
I was amused when the media reported how low support for the tax bill was. Buried in the poll details was that only 14% of people thought they would get a tax break, 50% believed they will pay more.
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The facts are 80% of them actually will pay less taxes, and only 5% will pay more. Good luck finding that factoid in 98% of tax bill stories.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/12/20/daily-202-the-tax-bill-is-likely-to-become-more-popular-after-passage-here-s-how-republicans-plan-to-sell-it/5a395b3c30fb0469e883fcf2/
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As usual the media never bothered to look in the mirror and ask how it came to be that people believed this. Could it be deceptive reporting? Fake news? Surely they did their very, very, best to correct this false impression. Surely they ran endless fact checks on incorrect statements on the tax bill effects. They obviously wouldn’t just the flood the zone with stories of how unpopular it is without mentioning people didn’t even understand what was in it. They would handle this just like the ACA, right?
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Much of the confusion / deception is with the sun-setting of tax cuts in ten years to meet requirements to prevent a filibuster.
Tom,
Looks like Jim and I will pay less. Most people will know whether they are likely to pay more or less by February when their withholding goes up or down.
Some of my tutoring work is as a contractor (through Wyzant). Others I get paid by check. It get 1099’s from Wyzant. The income stream in the form of checks would probably be pretty easy for the IRS to find in the event of a random audit. After all: I deposit them. The bank has a record of that.
Cash transactions are harder to trace. Cash transactions by people selling wares displayed on blankets in a street markets have got to be one of the harder things for the IRS to trace.
I don’t know enough about crypto-currency to say much with any confidence. But I have to imagine that crypto-currency is has the potential for lots of untraceable – by -the- IRS transactions.
They have to audit you first to find out, if you reported less income than the 1099’s reported my guess is you get audited immediately. If everyone did what they were supposed to do, the revenue checks would be easy and automatic. Realistically most small business owners barely know what is going on and live in constant financial chaos. I imagine IRS auditors hate doing small business audits when it is likely indecipherable what really happened half the time and egregious errors are common due to ignorance. I’ve had the IRS send me back money a couple times and I use QuickBooks and an accountant.
Lucia, how about I-55 & Cicero(coming back from Midway)?
Tom,
“Much of the confusion / deception is with the sun-setting of tax cuts in ten years to meet requirements to prevent a filibuster.”
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Indeed, and that is blatantly dishonest reporting…. virtually no MSM news organization explains that nearly all taxpayers will pay less federal tax, not more, with the few exceptions almost all wealthy people in high tax states. Democrat politicians are even worse, of course… they open with “this is the biggest theft of public money in history”… blah, blah, blah. Such nonsense does at least add clarity to the ‘progressive’ mindset: all personal income belongs to ‘the public’, and you are only allowed to keep the portion ‘the public’ (that is, progressives) think you deserve. Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment was just a hint at what most ‘progressives’ actually think… government exists mainly to regulate private economic activities and to tax and re-distribute private income, so as to make an ever more egalitarian society. Which is of course why progressives reject even the possibility that different people have very different abilities, interests, and skills, and so make wildly different contributions to human well-being.
I’m extremely interested in seeing the results of the combination of tearing up regulation and the business tax cuts in the years to come. I never thought I’d have the opportunity to see the two rolled out simultaneously. Either our economy will really take off over the next several years or I’m going to have to seriously reconsider some of my theories.
mark,
This is rather late in the current business cycle for the best results. With luck, it will delay the inevitable recession for a couple of years. But it will take some really good luck. One problem, of many, is that the Fed is planning to raise interest rates and trim its balance sheet in 2018 and beyond. Other central banks may do the same.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166325): “This is rather late in the current business cycle for the best results.”
I think that depends very much on how one interprets the data. Do you look at official unemployment rate? Then there is not much room for growth. Or go you look at shrinkage of the work force due to people giving up on looking for work (or whatever has caused it)? Then there is a lot of room for growth. Do you look at the duration of the current expansion? Then it must be close to an end. Or do you look at the slow rate of expansion and the lack of productivity growth? Then there is a lot of potential expansion still to come.
If we do get a strong expansion, it should be the death of Keynesian economics. But it won’t be, since Keynesian economics is already a zombie.
Bjorn Lomborg has an op-ed in today’s WSJ about how the burden of green energy policies that raise the price of energy in the developed world hurts the less well off far more than the well to do.
There was also an article about how money is being withdrawn from mutual funds even though stocks are setting records. The tone of the article seemed to me that such behavior was foolish. I think its sensible. Pouring money into a market that looks overpriced and overdue for a correction would be foolish.
DeWitt,
Thanks. That’s true. Still, it should be interesting to see what happens.
Past performance is not an indicator of future results.
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I think one sage piece of advice is: Do not try to time the market. One philosophy is to assume you are an idiot and assume everyone else is too.
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The article in the WSJ was that for the duration of the recent run-up individual investors were taking money out, an indication that a lot of people missed out on recent gains. 300% over the last ten years. I think 2008 rightly scared the crap out of them. Nobody saw it coming and nobody will likely see the next bust either.
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“Corrections” are usually on the order of 10% or so. People are nervous ironically because of the great success over the past decade, and things look rosy for 2018 as well. It’s kind of a “too good to be true” feeling.
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If one was to try to time the market, you get in at the bottom, not the top. If only you knew where those were….
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Speaking of idiots:
Krugman, NYT Nobel economist Nov 2016: “Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
Krugman last week: “On election night 2016, I gave in temporarily to a temptation I warn others about: I let my political feelings distort my economic judgment.”
Speaking of idiots, round 2:
Richard Thaler, Nobel economist, Oct 2017: “If it (the market rise) is all based on some kind of expectation of a tax cut, surely investors should have lost confidence”
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/video/2017/10/10/krugman_says_stocks_not_in_obvious_bubble_but_risks_exis.html
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The dismal science indeed. I look at economists similar to climate scientists. Much better at telling you why something happened than predicting what is going to happen next.
Tom,
That’s by definition. It has to be a drop of 10% or greater to be called a correction. And then it’s only a correction if it’s temporary.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/correction.asp
The problem is that you don’t know whether it’s only a correction when it happens until after the fact. If you’re 100% invested in stocks and have no additional source of income to invest, it can take quite a while to recover. I’ve seen estimates that it took well over twenty years to recover from the crash of 1968, in part because the inflation rate in the 1970’s was so high. It took less time to recover from the 1929 crash because it was a period of deflation.
Passive investing in market index ETF’s is likely going to fuel the next crash.
I had to talk my niece down from basing her precipitous investment strategy change on the election result and acting on a suggestion of a Krugman. Everything Krugman writes is based on politics and very little on economic judgment – unless you can call the Keynesian justification for the less principled instincts of politicians economic judgment.
When Clinton had a Social Security plan, Krugman wrote about how Social Security is in crisis. When Bush had a plan, suddenly it was not a crisis.
Krugman is the most comically wrong economic guru ever. He is no id!ot, but is most certainly a fool who displays consistently poor judgement, and not just in economics.
Pardon the off-topic remark, but three years ago I realized something in connection with one of this site’s threads, and that thread just popped into my mind in connection with a Willis Eschenbach discussion I had a couple weeks ago. Since this site’s previous thread is closed I’ll pass along a cross reference here.
Dr. Liljegrin objected in the thread at http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014/hotwhoppers-sou-doesnt-read-wuwt/#comment-134705 that my critique of Robert Brown’s silver-wire proof was too mathematical. Over the holidays I had occasion to perform a computer “experiment†at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/14/where-the-temperature-rules-the-sun/#comment-2696344 that some may find more intuitively appealing. It suggests that interpreting Fourier’s Law in the way Dr. Brown did leads to energy conservation’s being violated.
As I’ve mentioned before, the discrepancy has no practical significance; it shows only that Dr Brown’s logic was faulty.
But that’s not what I realized for the first time in this site’s above-mentioned thread. What I realized then is that at altitude a gas’s different-mass sub-populations will have different mean kinetic energies. The second plot in my comment at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/14/where-the-temperature-rules-the-sun/#comment-2696349 depicts that phenomenon.
Again, sorry for the interruption. Please return to your political discussion.
Joe,
I believe you are interpreting this incorrectly:
This is not complaining that your critique is “too mathematical”. It is simply pointing out that math is math and physics is physics. Math is not physics.
If you say so; I won’t dispute what’s math and what’s physics.
Independently of how you characterize it, though, statistical mechanics, which is what I used in the closed thread, is abstruse. So I wanted to link to an “experiment†that’s more straightforward, i.e., that between collisions deals only with simple ballistic motion. (Unfortunately my code kept getting chewed up whenever I tried to post it, so readers couldn’t run it. But the WUWT thread does have the resultant plots.)
Joe
If you find it so, then it is so to you.
Yes, it is so to me.
I congratulate you if you don’t find it abstruse.
Joe Born (Comment #166338): “It suggests that interpreting Fourier’s Law in the way Dr. Brown did leads to energy conservation’s being violated.”
No, it does not. Your interpretation leads to a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If you are right, we could build two columns of different materials and get different temperature gradients along the two columns. Then we could use the temperature differences between the columns to drive a heat engine. Infinite free energy.
Joe Born: “As I’ve mentioned before, the discrepancy has no practical significance”
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In addition to the perpetual motion machine, the difference would radically alter vertical temperature gradients in the environment. For instance, the deep oceans would be hot, not cold.
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Joe Born: “What I realized then is that at altitude a gas’s different-mass sub-populations will have different mean kinetic energies.”
No, the oxygen molecules have the same average kinetic energy as the nitrogen molecules and the argon molecules and the water molecules. The equipartition of energy guarantees that. The result certainly can not depend on altitude, since the molecules have no way of knowing where the surface of the earth is.
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It sounds to me like you are throwing around mathematical equations with no understanding of the physics involved, generating nonsense as a result. Which I think is what lucia is saying.
Mike M:
If you are a serious person, you’ll do the “experiment” and then tell me specifically why my conclusion is invalid. Your conclusory statements don’t move the ball forward.
Specifically, try a two-molecule “gas” with total energy E and different molecular masses m1 < m2. What will the mean kinetic energy of the m2 molecule at altitude E/m3g such that m1 < m3 < m2? How about that of the m1 molecule?
If you get the answer right and it doesn't give you pause about your interpretation of the Second Law, then you're missing something. If you're no willing to do the experiment, then we have nothing to talk about.
The fact is that entropy is maximized by (for a macroscopic gas) a non-zero kinetic-energy gradient. I won't go through the math, but it's true.
Joe Born,
Your analysis could only be true in the Earth’s atmosphere above the turbopause at about 100km. Below that, turbulent mixing guarantees that all non-condensing, non-reactive molecules are well-mixed and their concentrations do not depend on mass and altitude so they all have the same average kinetic energy at any given altitude.
With small numbers of molecules such that the Maxwell-Boltzmann energy distribution doesn’t apply, you can get odd results. As I remember, there was a paper a few years back pointing this out. But the Second Law still applies.
College football rules all:
http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=22011556
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I’m no particular fan of Alabama, but I love the drama.
Joe Born (Comment #166344): “If you are a serious person …”
I most certainly am a serious person. I taught thermodynamics (among other things) at the university level for more than 20 years.
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Joe Born: “… you’ll do the ‘experiment’ … ”
By ‘experiment’ you mean a calculation. Doing that properly requires an enormous amount of programming. You don’t seem to have taken the trouble to do it right. Here is an online version that does not violate the fundamental laws of physics: http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/md/InteractiveMD.html
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Joe Born: ” … and then tell me specifically why my conclusion is invalid.”
Because it violates the fundamental laws of physics, disagrees with empirical observations, and is contradicted by detailed molecular dynamics simulations.
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Joe Born: “Specifically, try a two-molecule “gas†with total energy E and different molecular masses m1 < m2. What will the mean kinetic energy of the m2 molecule at altitude E/m3g such that m1 < m3 < m2? How about that of the m1 molecule?"
All the molecules will have the same mean kinetic energy, depending only on temperature and independent of altitude. If you got a different result, you screwed up the calculation. How did you treat the collision dynamics?
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Joe Born: "The fact is that entropy is maximized by (for a macroscopic gas) a non-zero kinetic-energy gradient. I won't go through the math, but it's true."
The math is simple. At equilibrium, dS = dQ/T. Unless T is uniform, the entropy is increased by the transfer of heat. Therefore, at equilibrium temperature is uniform. You will find that, in some form, in every book on thermodynamics and every book on statistical mechanics.
Mike M.
It’s not worth he effort to discuss these bizarre machinations. Real gases have ~3 * 10^16 “particles” (atoms or molecules) per liter at one millionth of normal atmospheric pressure, not 3 per liter. Discussing the temperature of a one-millionth atmosphere gas is sane, even if uninformative. Discussing the “temperature” of 3 molecules per liter is so strange that it beggars belief. Observable behaviors (like net energy flows and actual temperature measurements), not to mention standard texts on how statistical mechanics leads directly to the laws of thermodynamics, say thermodynamics is perfectly correct for any macroscopic ensemble. Joe Born is wasting his own and everyone else’s time by harping on this lunacy.
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Maybe just for fun we could consider the wave-particle duality of atoms and their sub-components and make insightful calculations of the influence of that duality on the “temperature” of 3 atoms. On the other hand…nah.
Tom,
It looked to me like Georgia lost because they simply got too tired in the second half to play at the level they did in the first. ‘Bama’s depth (and size) won the game for them. ‘Bama’s change in quarterback also made a difference, of course…. the Georgia defense had to run more and faster in the second half due to the change in quarterback, but weren’t able to.
Lucia,
Does your blog have rules about sexual harassment? 😉
I am thinking of writing a commentary on the portion of the DC Appellate decision in Mann v Steyn that claims that multiple investigations cleared Mann. For some reason, a substantial portion of that decision relies on 1075 CRU emails. Can’t imagine that there is that much there relevant to Mann v Steyn, but I would like to be able to skim through the emails in a readable format. (As opposed to searching keywords in a database). Is anyone aware of any readable file with respect to the CRU emails? If so, I would appreciate a link.
JD
J Ferguson “While I’m at it, JD, do you know wy Chinese call themselves “Chinese People†and not just simply Chinese?”
I thought you knew the answer. I looked it up and found no answer. However, both terms are logical to me.
One interesting note is the Chinese name for the US (without tone markings) is meiguo, which literally means beautiful country. I would ascribe part of that to a feeling on the part of some Chinese that the US is a sophisticated (although sometimes arrogant) country. I would compare that to the way that many Americans look at Paris.
JD
Steve F.: “Observable behaviors (like net energy flows and actual temperature measurements), not to mention standard texts on how statistical mechanics leads directly to the laws of thermodynamics, say thermodynamics is perfectly correct for any macroscopic ensemble.â€
Quite right if by “perfectly†you mean that we could never tell the difference. As I said, the only reason why this matters at all is that Dr. Brown made his proof qualitative instead of quantitative.
He was attempting to disprove the Jelbring hypothesis: that at equilibrium the atmosphere would have a lapse rate of $latex -g/c_p$, where g is gravitational acceleration and $latex c_p$ is heat capacity per unit mass. His proof would have been fine if he’d made it quantitative, if he’d said Jelbring’s hypothesis is wrong because his lapse-rate value is orders of magnitude greater than the proper value, a value so small that as a practical matter it couldn’t be detected. But then he would have had to establish what that proper value actually is.
Instead, he adopted a qualitative proof: he tried to finesse around establishing the (again, exquisitely small) correct value. Specifically, he claimed not that the proper lapse-rate value is extremely small but that there would be no lapse rate at all: “The magnitude of the [lapse-rate-cause temperature] difference, and the mechanism proposed for this separation are irrelevantâ€
He based this contention on his interpretation of Fourier’s Law, $latex \dfrac{dQ}{dt}=-\lambda A\dfrac{dT}{dx}$. And his reasoning makes perfect sense if, as Mike M. does, you just invoke your magic formulas without considering the assumptions they were based on and their resultant range of applicability. Equilibrium, after all, means no heat flow, whereas Fourier says some heat definitely will flow whenever the temperature gradient $latex \dfrac{dT}{dx}$ is zero, no matter how small that gradient value is. So Dr. Brown concluded there couldn’t be any gradient at all.
And he later emphasized this by saying, quite correctly, that the silver wire he used was actually superfluous: “Nor does one require a silver wire to accomplish this. The gas is perfectly capable of conducting heat from the bottom of the container to the top all by itself!â€
While that observation was correct, I believe it also gives a hint at his conceptual problem: he invoked the gas’s thermal conductivity without stopping to reflect that the thermal conductivity comes entirely from particles’ following simple ballistic trajectories between collisions. In the case of a gas Fourier’s Law emerges entirely from the behavior of such ballistic molecules, so it is applicable only to the extent that it’s consistent with the molecules’ ballistic/collision behavior. Fortunately, if your gas consists of $latex 10^44$ particles, the lapse rate is so small that engineers can consider it zero with impunity: Fourier’s Law is “perfectly good†by Steve F.’s way of thinking.
But that doesn’t mean it’s precisely zero, and it doesn’t make Dr. Brown’s logic valid
SteveF,
No rules about sexual harassment. You can even discuss gender stereotypes.
JD Ohio,
http://www.di2.nu/foia/foia.pl
Steve,
Thanks a lot for the link. I found 152 Mann emails. May simply have to copy each one to a word file and then scan through them. What would be even better for me would be a pdf of all of the emails.
JD
Joe Born,
Your analysis is unrelated to physical reality, and quite silly.
J. Ferguson:
The Chinese word for China, zhong guo, is the same as the word they use in “Chinese person”: zhong guo ren. So it’s literally “China person.” You might say that makes the word for China the same as the word for Chinese, but you can see the problem with looking at it that way.
Steve F.: “Your analysis is unrelated to physical reality, and quite silly.”
Just a prediction: Eventually Mike M. will back off from his absolutist statement about my getting the physics wrong to saying like Steve F. does now that all the time he really meant only that the discrepancy I’m pointing out is too small to worry about in thermodynamics.
Which is true unless, as Dr. Brown did, you try to extend thermodynamics to where its writ doesn’t run.
Lucia,
“You can even discuss gender stereotypes.”
.
OK: I find that on average, women are much more attractive than men. That could just be me though. I have observed men are on average quite a bit taller and stronger than women. I have observed that women can have babies, but not men. I could go on for a while describing similar observations, but that would quickly make me very not-PC. I have observed that among the very PC crowd, observed reality (AKA reality) is often an unacceptable substitute for desired reality (AKA PC reality).
Mike M.: “You don’t seem to have taken the trouble to do it right. Here is an online version that does not violate the fundamental laws of physics:â€
Okay, use that one, although I didn’t see how to take the statistics we’re looking for, so you’ll have to eyeball it.
Crank the gravity all the way up and notice the molecule speeds. Do you really think those of the ones at the top of the heap average the same as those of the ones at the bottom?
Mike M.: “All the molecules will have the same mean kinetic energy, depending only on temperature and independent of altitude.â€
I won’t tell your students you got this one wrong. Don’t feel bad, though; it was a trick question. The mass-m2 molecule could never reach altitude E/m3g; that would violate conservation of energy. But the m1-mass energy could go that high and higher, so its mean kinetic energy for that altitude would exceed zero.
Mike M.: “How did you treat the collision dynamics?â€
I just restricted motion to one dimension and randomly determined whether the molecules should collide or just “pass through†each other. Between collisions (or bounces from the ground) the motion was just ballistic.
For collisions, of course, momentum and energy were conserved, and energy was conserved on bounces.
The molecules were modeled as point masses, so collisions occurred (or not) when altitudes coincided.
Joe Born,
You’re assuming that T is always a linear function of the average kinetic energy in a gas. But T is defined by heat flow. Objects have the same temperature when there is no heat flow. T for a gas can be considered to be proportional to the average kinetic energy when the number density of gas particles is high enough. At thermal equilibrium in a column of gas under the influence of a gravitational field, there is no heat flow by the definition of thermal equilibrium. The fact that there may be a tiny gradient with altitude in the average kinetic energy for a sufficiently dilute gas is completely irrelevant. The gas column is exactly isothermal, dT/dh ≡ 0, or it wouldn’t be at equilibrium.
J.D. Ohio:
An alternative explanation is that the mei in mei guo was really picked phonetically instead of by meaning. Rather than provide a character for every syllable in “America” they did their best to match the second syllable only.
Just my guess, though.
Joe Born (Comment #166360): “Just a prediction: Eventually Mike M. will back off from his absolutist statement about my getting the physics wrong to saying like Steve F. does now that all the time he really meant only that the discrepancy I’m pointing out is too small to worry about in thermodynamics.”
OK, so how large is the discrepancy to which you refer and what is the physical basis for it?
Damore has filed a suit.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/01/most-interesting-parts-of-james-damores-class-action-filing.html
It sounds like something people enjoy reading just for the chuckles & footnotes.
I had to look up “dragonkin” to find out if it’s some sort of actual creature or…. (e.g. “preying matiss” like? ) Anyway
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dragonkin
I think I must become a dragonkin.
Joe Born,
“For collisions, of course, momentum and energy were conserved, and energy was conserved on bounces.”
This is nonsense. That is not how molecules (or atoms) “bounce” off actual surfaces. They “bounce” at very random angles over a wide range of speeds…. with the mean “bounce” velocity depending on the temperature (AKA molecular motion) of what they are “bouncing” off of.
SteveF receives a lifetime ban from the internet for not appropriately maligning men who have never contributed anything useful to civilization, ever.
.
Most teams fold to Alabama under the sheer weight of superior talent. I thought they were toast when the FG kicker choked at the end of regulation. It takes guts to bench your 25-2 starting QB in the national title game. Hope he can mentally recover from that, ouch. He was stinking it up though. I think Georgia has few good years ahead of them.
Joe Born,
A single molecule doesn’t have a temperature. Absent collisions, it has a fixed total energy, kinetic plus potential energy.
For a sufficiently large number of molecules that have a Maxwell-Boltzmann energy distribution, there will be mass m2 molecules that will reach E/m3g. At that altitude, those molecules will still have a Maxwell-Boltzmann energy distribution, if there are enough of them, and will have the same average kinetic energy, for all practical purposes, as the molecules at lower altitude. In the absence of turbulence, the number density of low mass molecules will be higher than the number density of high mass molecules, but there will be no heat flow at thermal equilibrium.
The Damore filing is here:
https://www.scribd.com/document/368689407/Damore-vs-Google-Class-Action-Lawsuit#fullscreen&from_embed
Steve F.
For a thought experiment, you could define the surface as a perfect reflector with infinite mass. That’s not his problem.
DeWitt Payne: “The fact that there may be a tiny gradient with altitude in the average kinetic energy for a sufficiently dilute gas is completely irrelevant.”
Well, no, it’s actually the whole point: Dr. Brown said heat would flow no matter what the gradient is so long as it’s non-zero.
I know your theory that the kinetic energy corresponding to a given temperature is different at one altitude than at another (so that no heat flows despite the tiny kinetic-energy gradient), but on that point we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I favor Dr. Brown’s definition: “Temperature of a monatomic ideal gas is one thing, and one thing only. It is a direct measure of its internal, disorganized (equilibrated) average kinetic energy.â€
Joe Born (Comment #166363): “The mass-m2 molecule could never reach altitude E/m3g; that would violate conservation of energy.”
Nonsense. Conservation of energy does not apply to individual molecules unless there are no collisions.
.
Joe Born (Comment #166362): “Crank the gravity all the way up and notice the molecule speeds. Do you really think those of the ones at the top of the heap average the same as those of the ones at the bottom?”
I can’t tell. The ones at the bottom sure look busier, but that could just be that there are a lot more of them. When colored by speed, it seems there are mostly yellow at all heights, with some blue and red at all heights. So any effect would seem to be small. It would be nice to be able to download stats.
Addition: You can. Click on “data” at the lower right. For “data type” select “all atoms”. Then click on “write data” to get a list for all the atoms.
.
Joe Born (Comment #166364):”I just restricted motion to one dimension and randomly determined whether the molecules should collide or just “pass through†each other. Between collisions (or bounces from the ground) the motion was just ballistic.”
Given a choice between such a calculation and fundamental principles, I will go with the fundamental principles every time.
“Note the use of the term transgenderism, which, well, isn’t how anybody in 2018 should be talking about the transgender community.”
.
Guess I’m a bit behind the current rules of polite society as this didn’t make any sense to me. I suppose it is the ‘ism.
.
With the current victimhood Olympics companies are in a no-win situation. There will be multiple screams of discrimination no matter what happens. It’s legally safest to discriminate against white males currently. There is no safe space here.
Lucia,
Not surprised by the lawsuit. Not surprised by Google saying they plan to fight the suit in court. They will no doubt try to have the suit dismissed before it goes to discovery (or heaven forbid!) public trial. What I am not sure about is if Google management has the good sense to settle the suit if it is not immediately dismissed. The amount of bad publicity (and the unfavorable political attention it will attract) is almost unlimited; the sanctimonious seldom display good judgement. It is a bit like Delta Airlines initially defending physical abuse of a seated passenger by hired security thugs. Does (Alphabet) management really want Google to be broken up into several smaller companies that have to compete against each other? Probably not, but that is the potential downside they face if they continue to act like jerks.
DeWitt,
“For a thought experiment, you could define the surface as a perfect reflector with infinite mass.”
.
And you could also define that a several arch angels ride around with each atom in the universe, like divine Maxwell’s daemons. A perfect reflector of infinite mass doesn’t exist, and we both know that.
Joe Born,
That would be true if you could measure temperature directly. But you can’t. You can only measure physical properties that are proportional to temperature. For example, if you put a thermometer into your highly dilute gas column at high altitude, it would no longer be a microcanonical ensemble and the calculated small discrepancy in the average kinetic energy would disappear.
Steve F.,
A black body doesn’t exist either, but we talk about them all the time. It’s a thought experiment.
Joe Born is talking about a microcanonical ensemble. That can only exist in a perfectly reflecting container.
Blackberry. Netscape. AOL. Yahoo. MySpace. Nokia. Palm. Etc.
.
The current tech behemoths might be getting a bit overconfident in their futures. They don’t need to alienate their customers by taking unnecessary political stances. Building a good search engine does not make one a moral leader. It’s unclear how they got those confused.
.
I give ESPN credit for how it handled Trump standing on the field for the National Anthem last night. They basically said “There is Trump” and added no further comment. Perfect.
.
This is also the way China handles him. They ignore all the noise and just concentrate on what actually happens.
Steve F.: “They ‘bounce’ at very random angles over a wide range of speeds…. with the mean “bounce†velocity depending on the temperature (AKA molecular motion) of what they are “bouncing†off of.”
Do try to keep up. We’re talking about a thought experiment in which the gas is thermally isolated. The gas’s total energy doesn’t change. So it can’t get any from the walls: there’s no wall temperature in the experiment.
Anyway, in the one-dimensional case from which I was extrapolating there’s no choice in direction: it’s always back up from the single, ground wall.
I suppose that in a three-dimensional simulation I could make the bounce directions random. But the thought experiment deals with simple classical physics, in which trajectories are completely determinate. So, since the (determinate) xy position would perform the function provided by the random collide-or-not decision in my one-dimensional simulation, I probably wouldn’t make that choice. (Still, it might speed up the simulation.)
Yep. I’m also thinking “photons”.
Joe Born
Its funny to read you try this “keep up” ply. Other than you, no one here thinks you are “ahead” of anyone.
Mike M.: “Conservation of energy does not apply to individual molecules unless there are no collisions.”
Yes, a molecule can gain energy from another molecule, but it can’t gain more than the total energy of the system. At altitude E/m3g the m2-mass molecule’s potential energy would be (m2/m3)E, and, since m2 > m3, that would exceed the total energy E.
Are you sure you’ve taught this stuff?
DeWitt,
“That can only exist in a perfectly reflecting container.”
.
And since those containers do not exist, neither does a microcanonical ensemble exist. We all recognize that perfect black bodies do not exist, nor do surfaces which are perfectly reflective. Joe Born is essentially insisting on conditions which do not exist, and cannot exist, to “prove” that thermodynamics is less than accurate in some non-existent ideal world of his creation. It is complete nonsense, rubbish, and a waste of everyone’s time. Columns of gas do not self-generate temperature profiles due to gravity. That is all there is to it.
Joe Born (Comment #166385): “that would exceed the total energy E.”
So you were literally talking about 3 molecules, not 3 types of molecules? If so, I misread you since I assumed you were trying to say something meaningful.
.
I just ran some simulations at http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/md/InteractiveMD.html
500 molecules, maximum volume, maximum gravity with the X10 box checked, defaults for everything else. Downloaded 5 sets of data (as per Comment #166375), combined them, sorted by altitude, and calculated the average kinetic energy for each group of 500. No variation with altitude, other than the roughly 5% random noise expected from such small sample sizes.
Steve F.,
That’s not what he is doing. He is not arguing that a column of gas under gravity will always have a lapse rate of g/Cp. He’s arguing about a minor point in a post by Robert Brown, not disagreeing with the general conclusion. It’s both unimportant and misguided, but so what.
Of course microcanonical ensembles can’t exist in the real world. That doesn’t make them useless or the concept wouldn’t exist. If the column has real walls, it’s no longer a microcanonical ensemble because the gas particles can exchange energy with the walls. Again, so what. Thought experiments that use ideal conditions that can’t exist in reality are a common thing in physics. If it doesn’t work under ideal conditions, it usually doesn’t work in the real world either.
Damore — The complaint is not written in legalese. This may be an interesting case. I think Damore is paddling upstream simply because the environment in Northern California is not sympathetic to conservative causes. A sample from the complaint–
” Google’s open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender, barred by law. Google’s management goes to extreme—and illegal—lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and
1
In addition, Plaintiffs intend to assert claims under the Private Attorney General Act of California, when those claims are perfected.
3 Complaint
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 male employees and potential employees at Google. 5.
…..
Damore, Gudeman, and other class members were ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males. This is the essence of discrimination—Google formed opinions about and then treated Plaintiffs not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in groups with assumed characteristics. 6.
Google employees and managers strongly preferred to hear the same orthodox opinions regurgitated repeatedly, producing an ideological echo chamber, a protected, distorted bubble of groupthink. When Plaintiffs challenged Google’s illegal employment practices, they were openly threatened and subjected to harassment and retaliation from Google. Google created an environment of protecting employees who harassed individuals who spoke out against Google’s view or the “Googley way,†as it is sometimes known internally. Google employees knew they could harass Plaintiffs with impunity, given the tone set by managers—and they did so. 7.
….
Google employs illegal hiring quotas to fill its desired percentages of women and favored minority candidates, and openly shames managers of business units who fail to meet their quotas—in the process, openly denigrating male and Caucasian employees as less favored than others. 8.
….
Not only was the numerical presence of women celebrated at Google solely due to their gender, but the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with “boos†during company-Google who were responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of hiring and firing decisions during the Class Periods.”
I would hope that booing white males would constitute discrimination in California, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
JD
Mike M.,
The difference with 500 molecules is probably far too small to detect with an experiment with a precision of 5%. Joe seems to think it’s important that Robert Brown’s ‘proof’ that the rate of change of average kinetic energy with altitude is identically zero isn’t perfectly accurate for a microcanonical ensemble. But when a silver wire is thermally connected to the column of gas at different altitudes, a microcanonical ensemble no longer exists and the vanishingly small difference in calculated average kinetic energy with altitude ceases to exist.
Mike M.: “Given a choice between such a calculation and fundamental principles, I will go with the fundamental principles every time.â€
I agree with that sentiment; my toy simulation does indeed have its problematic aspects. But its purpose was to serve not as a proof but rather as a plausibility demonstration for results obtained from first principles in a paper by Román, White, and Velasco and expanded upon in a comment they wrote.
They found that gravity imposes a kinetic-energy gradient if the gas is finite. Of course, 10^44 particles makes the atmosphere close to infinite, but—need I say it again—we’re talking about a theoretical proof here, not about practical application of thermodynamics.
Joe Born,
That’s the paper I was thinking about above. The problem, as I have said above, is that you can’t directly measure the kinetic energy distribution as a function of altitude without destroying the microcanonical ensemble and invalidating the calculation. Thermally connecting a silver wire is just such an attempt to measure the average kinetic energy. So Robert Brown isn’t talking about a microcanonical ensemble and the Román, White and Velasco paper is irrelevant.
But the main point is still that even with a tiny average kinetic energy gradient, the heat flow is still identically zero by definition and thus the temperature gradient must also be identically zero. You simply can’t have it both ways.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166392): “That’s the paper I was thinking about above. … So Robert Brown isn’t talking about a microcanonical ensemble and the Román, White and Velasco paper is irrelevant.”
OK, so this is, at best, a minor technical point that has nothing to do with the real world. A tempest in a nano-particle. But I am not even sure it is that. I see no reason why fixing the energy should matter. The papers are in the European Journal of Physics, which is not a research journal, and seem unsupported by anything in the research literature. A waste of time.
Mike M.,
Yep.
I was bored.
All this was dealt with at the time, as I remember.
Mike M.,
Thanks for the cool link in your comment 166387.
MikeM
It’s not a tempest because mostly people are ignoring him.
At *most* Joe’s point appears to be that when Brown made a claim about “Temperature gradient”, that claim is only true in the limit where the concentration of temperature is defined. Otherwise, if there are so few particles that temperature had no meaning, then the claim is not true.
After that, he dives into some mathematical grinding (this time by computer program) to show that in the limit where temperature s not defined then….
I’m not sure why anyone should care.
DeWitt,
” He is not arguing that a column of gas under gravity will always have a lapse rate of g/Cp. ”
.
Who said he was? Not me. He has been arguing, for no apparent reason, that gravity enduces a small, impossible to measure, reduction in kinetic energy with increasing altitude….. but only with a container which cannot exist, at concentrations so low that they are not really an ensemble of atoms/molecules but idealized individual particles. The worst part is that it is all utterly irrelevant to what got the madness started in the first place: the bizarre claim that the atmospheric lapse rate is caused by gravity, rather than by convective mixing due to heating from below. How many wacko threads about lapse rate on blogs like WUWT need there be until this crazy idea is heard no more? I do not know, but Joe Born is not helping by suggesting there is any lapse rate at all due to gravity. As you know, and as Joe should know, there is none.
Lucia,
“I’m not sure why anyone should care.”
.
I care only because it encourages people who do not have a clue about lapse rate to continue believing nonsense. Just as it is better to appeal to people’s better angels, it is best to appeal to people’s less stupid angels.
Damore apparently had a very good working record at Google. If he had specifically emphasized this at the time of the kerfluffle, it would have been much harder for Google to fire him. Instead it appears that it was more important for him at the time to make his political points. From his complaint:
…..
“23.   Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his
work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance
review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of
Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received
approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his
annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately
$150,000 per year.
24. Damore was never disciplined or suspended during his entire tenure at Google.
25.   Based on Damore’s excellent work, Damore was promoted to Senior Software
Engineer in or around January 2017—just eight months before his unlawful termination by Google.
26.   Damore did not have any direct reports, did not supervise employees, did not assign work to other employees, and was not an integral or crucial part of the hiring and firing process…”
JD
JD Ohio,
His performance was never the issue. Believing that the company would ever countenance an employee questioning the founders leftist policies was his error. I think there is a good chance they will ultimately regret firing the guy…. depends what the ultimate cost turns out to be.
DeWitt Payne: “The difference with 500 molecules is probably far too small to detect with an experiment with a precision of 5%.â€
That’s true; in two dimensions the predicted kinetic-energy drop would be less than 1% over the altitudes inhabited by 99.9% of the molecules.
But there’s more to it than that. The tiny average lapse rates we’re talking about are much smaller than the lapse-rate variance; you need an extremely long record to measure the lapse rate reliably. I needed a simulated week and a half for one-dimensional motion.
So Mike M’s snapshots of two dimensions tell us nothing; he’d have to take hundreds of thousands of them to pull the average up out of the variation.
DeWitt Payne: “So Robert Brown isn’t talking about a microcanonical ensemble and the Román, White and Velasco paper is irrelevant.â€
I’m afraid you don’t understand the logic either of the microcanonical ensemble or of Dr. Brown’s “proof.†As I pointed out above, even Dr. Brown recognized that the silver wire was superfluous to his argument, so what that leaves is the isolated gas column, which even you would recognize is analyzed according to the microcanonical ensemble. Therefore the Román, White and Velasco paper is completely on point.
Even when the (again, superfluous) silver wire is added, moreover, you still have a fixed-energy system, so that doesn’t meet the canonical-ensemble criteria on which the results you remember from school are based.
I suggest you review your statistical mechanics and specifically the derivation of Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution; it’s based on immersion in an infinite-heat-capacity heat bath. So, although macroscopic finite-energy systems approximate that distribution, they don’t meet it exactly.
Mike M: “OK, so this is, at best, a minor technical point that has nothing to do with the real world.â€
Just as I predicted above: He backed off from saying it’s wrong to saying it’s not a real-world thing–which is what I’ve said from the very beginning. I’ve said repeatedly it’s relevant only to Robert Brown’s theory.
SteveF: “His performance was never the issue.”
When this occurred, I assumed that was the case. However, some employees have small blemishes in their record, which can be used as after the fact justification for their firing. This is not the case with Damore. He simply followed Google’s invitation to comment using an employee forum. Apparently, he had an exemplary record as a software engineer.
JD
Joe Born (Comment #166403): “Just as I predicted above: He backed off from saying it’s wrong to saying it’s not a real-world thing …”
No I have not. I still think it is wrong. But now I know that in any case it is irrelevant.
.
Joe Born: “… which is what I’ve said from the very beginning.”
No, you have contradicted your self on that, for instance by claiming that you could see the effect in the molecular dynamics simulations.
.
Joe Born: “I’ve said repeatedly it’s relevant only to Robert Brown’s theory.”
But it is not relevant to that. Once again, you sow confusion.
Joe
Which means temperature is not defined. You can’t deem any claim about “temperature” based on a solution where temperature is not defined.
Continuum mechanics is by definition based on a limiting case. To show Brown wrong, you need to show that he is wrong in the limiting case where temperature is defined.
You can do all the math you want in a case that is not the limiting case. But in then you are looking at a different physical system from the one that Browns choice of language refers to.
So: to show there is still a deviation in the limiting case using your method (which is a clumsy one for this purpose):
Run it with
1) N particles.
2)10 N particles.
3)100 N particles.
4) 1000 N particles.
And so on. Then show this gradient does not vanish in the limiting case.
If you understand physics and terminilogy (and statistical mechanics) you will know this is what you have to do. Do it. Then show us the plot.
MikeM
Definitely not relevant because Brown uses the term “Temperature” which means he is discussing the limiting case where temperature is defined. Born has done nothing to engage the limiting case or show what happens in the limit. Zip. Nada. Bupkiss.
As far as I can tell, people have been explaining this to Born over and over. He doesn’t get it. This means Born may not understand a physical concept. Either that or he doesn’t understand physical terms that invoke that concept (like “temperature” or “continuum”) or he doesn’t understand math (“the limit”). I have no idea which. But if he doesn’t undertsand these things, it’s little wonder he found statistical mechanics “abstruse”.
JD Ohio
Yeah. It is always ironic when entities like businesses or schools want to show themselves open to free discussion but simultaneously want to control which arguments can be advanced and limit what things can be said.
Obviously, you can’t really discuss “gender equity”, what it is, how to achieve it and so on without permitting people to discuss things that might suggest the possibility that some differences between men and women might be innate nor that state that they think a homo sapien with XY chromosomes who is born with a penis and descended testes and whose body spontaneously generates testosterone in the “normal” range for a male is in fact a men and that further, they think those in this category who “think” they are “really” women have a psychological condition.
Perhaps the people hold this opinion about trans-sexuals are wrong. Nevertheless if they aren’t allowed to discuss it in a forum, then no amount of one sided discussion is going to result in a solution of any sort. Those who hold the notion that being a transsexual is a psychological problem will continue to believe so. They will also be aware that those who hold the opposite opinion are not only not listening or considering counter arguments, they are just blocking them. That’s knowledge will not result in them thinking anything about their opinion is incorrect.
The above argument also applies to discussing “anything equity”.
Mike M.:“No, you have contradicted your self on that, for instance by claiming that you could see the effect in the molecular dynamics simulations.â€
There’s no point in addressing Mike M.’s largely unsupported assertions, but I see in retrospect that I could have been clearer about the on-line simulation he identified.
As I said, it doesn’t appear that as a practical matter the simulation site gives you the statistics you need for a repeatable lapse-rate measurement. But I suggested that you might nonetheless detect by eyeball that speeds tend to be lower at higher altitudes.
And you might. But my not having tried it myself before I made the suggestion led me to omit the following fact: in order to see that effect you have to arrange the simulation to get molecules near the theoretical altitude limit. And to get them there with any frequency you need to reduce the number of molecules to a handful.
So, although there’s no merit in what Mike M. said, it is true that I failed to specify what’s needed to see the effect.
Joe
The fact that the first sentence is contradicts your follow on claim that there is no merit in what Mike M said.
In fact: There is merit in Mike M. observation that you claimed one could “see” the effect in what you did. You admit one cannot do so. One has to do something different. Beyond that there is merit in Mike M’s claim that your simulations are not relevant to Robert Brown’s theory.
I’m not sure which of Mike M’s statements you consider ” largely unsupported assertions”. Whether he actually supplied you with the “supporting” arguments and info I don’t know. But his assertions seem to be correct more often than yours!
lucia: “At *most* Joe’s point appears to be that when Brown made a claim about “Temperature gradientâ€, that claim is only true in the limit where the concentration of temperature is defined. . . . I’m not sure why anyone should care.â€
Yet people like Dr. Payne go out of their way to contradict me whenever they see me say a non-zero gradient would exist.
Let’s review the history. Dr. Brown argued equilibrium isothermality by positing an isolated ideal gas in a gravitational field. He said that the only value of temperature gradient that would result in no heat flow is zero. In response, I repeatedly invited him to modify his position.
It’s more precise, I said, to say that the no-heat-flow gradient so falls with the number of molecules as to be too small to measure in a macroscopic gas. The essential conclusion is the same, I said, but my formulation is more precise.
Dr. Brown studiously refrained from adopting that formulation. When I pointed out that Velasco et al. had reasoned from nothing more than the axioms of statistical mechanics that at equilibrium there is in fact a non-zero (albeit, for any significant quantity of gas, quite small) translational-kinetic-energy gradient in the presence of a gravitational field, Dr. Brown retorted, “Velasco et al is almost certainly wrong in their conclusion.â€
So, if you want to say this has nothing to do with the real world, fine. If you want to say it’s a “tempest in a nano-particle,†I won’t argue. But Dr. Brown certainly seemed to think it important to dispute the equilibrium kinetic-energy gradient. It’s therefore at least misleading to imply that Dr. Brown really meant what Velasco et al. said. It looks more like Dr. Brown was wrong if Velasco et al. were right, and vice versa.
And if there’s anything designed to “sow confusion,†it’s obscurantist expressions like “in the limit where the concentration of temperature is defined,†whatever that means. Make no mistake: whatever finite number of molecules you choose as enough to be “where concentration of temperature is defined,†Velasco et al. give a gradient for it, and it’s a non-zero value that Dr. Brown considered “almost certainly wrong.â€
The point has always been to disprove that a lapse rate on the order of what we see in the real atmosphere would prevail at equilibrium. I say it’s better to do so with the more-precise explanation than a “proof†that seems “simple and elegant,†and “irrefutable†but isn’t. And I don’t see how the more-precise formulation gives any comfort to Jelbring and his ilk.
Well, this exercise’s amusement value for me has long since been exhausted; I can explain it for you, but I can’t understand it for you. Still, thanks for playing.
The biggest problem with Damore is that the punishment didn’t fit the “crime”. Was this really a terminate on first offense issue?
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It’s similar to the career death penalties being handed out for harassment without any semblance of due process or discriminating the scale of the offense, all harassment is not created equal.
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This is the ugly side of social media, online mobs with pitchforks and torches. Somebody has to stand up against this stuff. Damore did, was fired. Trump did, got elected president ha ha. It’s too bad we had to get the rest of Trump as part of the package.
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Google can run their company how they want. They just don’t get to be perceived as virtuous while actually running an ideological inquisition.
Joe Born
So? First: you need to show a gradient can only be defined in something continuous. You have an example in which– you tell us — nothing is continuous. You need to define something continuous and then show a non-zero gradient in that.
You have failed to demonstrate he should modify his position. So I’m not surprised.
I haven’t said anything about the “real world”. Someone else has. Nor have I said anything about sowing confusing any of the other things you seem to be addressing to me as “rebuttals” to my position. You might want to keep track of individual people’s arguments when “rebutting” them. Doing otherwise is confusing (though I think largely, confusing yourself.) I’ll let the people who has advanced their own arguments address those points as they are perfectly capable of doing so.
Joe
What an odd point to be trying to make.
(1) No one says the lapse rate we see in the real atmosphere is at “equilibrium”– at least not if you mean “thermodynamic equilibrium”. Our atmosphere is not in “thermodynamic equilibrium”. Since no-one here says or thinks the atmosphere is at thermodamic equilibrium (and Dr. Brown certainly has not said it), it’s pretty odd to be spending lots of time trying to “disprove” that.
(2) If by equilibrium you mean a dynamic steady-state (and I have no issues with you meaning that), then SteveF’s complaint that your analysis is not “real world” is spot on. I’d tolerate some “not real world” but not taking the limit for the case of a large number density and leaving out the radiative physics and convection — which are the two important mechanics — is idiotic if you are trying to prove something about the real atmosphere.
Rest assured, most here are pretty sure you lost this “game”, if that’s what you think of it as.
lucia,
I think Joe’s problem is that he is convinced that in a monatomic ideal gas that T≡2/3(<KE>)/k for any number density of atoms, N. I’m pretty sure that is only true in the limiting case where N→∞ and the energy distribution is identically Maxwell-Boltzmann. For finite but large N, it’s just a very good approximation. The other thing that escapes him is that the definition of thermal equilibrium requires that the temperature gradient be identically zero in all directions, i.e. the system must be isothermal. If there is indeed a small gradient in average kinetic energy at low N, then he has proved that T is not identical to 2/3(<KE>)/k when N is small. Which is to say, again, that at small N, temperature is not defined.
I decided to work out the magnitude of the effect that Born is on about.
The physical reason is as follows. Imagine a container with just one molecule and a fixed total energy. From high school physics, the energy depends on height. According to the paper Born referenced, as long as the total energy is fixed, the absolute magnitude of that effect is independent of the total number of molecules in the system.
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Calculation of the magnitude of the effect:
The atmosphere contains 1.8e20 moles of gas.
Cp for air is just about 3.5*R = 29.1 J/mol/K.
T = 250 K, as a reasonable average.
Multiplying the above gives the total internal energy of the atmosphere as 1.3e24 J.
Mass of the atmosphere = 5.2e18 kg.
Scale height (average altitude) = 7200 m.
Total gravitational potential energy = 3.7e23 J.
Total energy of the system (sum of above two results) is
E = 1.7e24 J.
Average mass of an air molecule = 4.8e-26 kg.
Potential energy of a molecule at 100 km, m*g*z = 4.7e-20 J.
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From the reference Born gave, the fractional difference in kinetic energy between the surface and an altitude z is m*g*z/E.
For 100 km, that is 2.8e-44.
So the resulting temperature gradient is
(2.8e-44)*(250 K)/(100 km) = 6.9e-44 K/km
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45 orders of magnitude smaller than the effect that some people claim; i.e., that gravity is the cause of the dry adiabatic lapse rate..
But that only applies if the total energy is fixed. Since it is not fixed, the actual effect is zero.
Born clearly has no understanding of the phenomenon he is making such a big deal about.
DeWitt,
Yep. That’s a big conceptual error. He seems to be making it. If so, it explains why he thinks what he’s doing somehow could possibly rebut (or even engage) what Brown said.
Since T only exists in the limit where N→∞, trying to engage any claim about T with an example with a low value of N is a categorical error. The example has nothing to do with the claim. It’s like rebutting the claim that roses are red with the observation violets are blue. Violets aren’t roses. There is nothing about the color of violets that can “rebut” a claim about the color or roses.
Mike
Your analysis gives the upper bound of the possible magnitude. It’s treating molecules as billiard balls that don’t collide. So it doesn’t account for energy transferred by other mechanisms like collisions, transmission due to things like emission and absorption of photons and so on.
But I think his “real” problem is the one DeWitt points to: On the one hand, he wants to engage an argument about temperature, but he doesn’t want to discuss what happens in the limit N→∞. The effect he wants to go on about vanishes in the limit N→∞ and so doesn’t engage any claim about temperature. Temperature is a continuum concept.
I think it has to include collisions, or the ballistic velocity limits maximum height of an atom. Collisions support the distribution. Or you could adopt Bornian logic and say that atoms free-fall from 100 KM, strike the perfectly reflexive surface, and zoom off to a height of 100 KM over and over again.
lucia (Comment #166418): “Your analysis gives the upper bound of the possible magnitude. It’s treating molecules as billiard balls that don’t collide. So it doesn’t account for energy transferred by other mechanisms like collisions, transmission due to things like emission and absorption of photons and so on.”
No, it is an equilibrium statistical mechanics result that differs trivially from the limit N→∞ result.
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Lucia: “Temperature is a continuum concept.”
Temperature is certainly a concept in statistical mechanics. I guess it is trivially different from the continuum temperature except in the limit N→∞. But that has no effect at all when using the approximations I learned in introductory statistical mechanics.
MikeM-
My view is kinetic energy is the base concept in statistical mechanics. It maps into temperature, and gets called that because everyone is familiar with it from continuum mechanics. But it’s not the base concept in statistical mechanics.
Trump would be insane to agree to be interviewed by Mueller.
Tom,
I don’t see how he could get out of it.
Could Trump invoke executive privilege? But that would be a political disaster.
He presumably will be interviewed by Mueller with a lawyer (or lawyers) by his side after having been thoroughly prepped by them. Trump is sufficiently disciplined to do that, as shown by his recent performance in the televised DACA negotiations.
j ferguson :”Tom,
I don’t see how he could get out of it.”
Just say no.
From Popehat and Ken White: “You, dear readers, know my advice about talking to the FBI: don’t. If the FBI — or any law enforcement agency — asks to talk to you, say “No, I want to talk to my lawyer, I don’t want to talk to you,” and repeat as necessary. Do not talk to them “just to see what they want.” Do not try to “set the facts straight.” Do not try to outwit them. Do not explain that you have “nothing to hide.”
Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.” See https://www.popehat.com/2017/12/04/everybody-lies-fbi-edition/
On top of the normal reasons for not talking to the FBI, Mueller has engaged in a political prosecution, and he has very little credibility.
JD
JD
It’s politics not logic nor law which prevent him from taking a pass on a Mueller interview.
I’m with John, don’t think it’s politically feasible. He can’t say ‘No collusion, I’ve got nothing to hide, investigate me so you can clear my name’ and refuse to answer Mueller’s questions.
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Trump would be well advised to develop and/or exercise some control over his mouth during such an interview. Do the Hillary, basically. Not sure, can’t remember, don’t recall, unless Mueller is either asking about well established and well publicized fact or utter trivia.
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I suspect he’s not going to get through it without getting stung somehow.
*shrug*
Tom Scharf,
He will be surrounded by lawyers, and will be free to consult with them as needed. He will be carefully prepped as well. I would not be surprised if his lawyers demand a list of subject matter ahead of time.
M Bofill “I’m with John, don’t think it’s politically feasible. He can’t say ‘No collusion, I’ve got nothing to hide, investigate me so you can clear my name’ and refuse to answer Mueller’s questions.”
There are very sound legal reasons for the refusal to be questioned which can be found here. http://www.weeklystandard.com/scalias-finest-opinion/article/2001510 :
“In his analysis of the statute, Scalia relied on constitutional text, pointing out that Article II vests not some but all of the executive power in a president. And because it does, the independent counsel law must be unconstitutional “if the following two questions” are answered affirmatively: “Is the conduct of a criminal prosecution .  .  . the exercise of purely executive power?” and “Does the statute deprive the President of the United States of exclusive control over the exercise of that power?” Scalia said they must be answered affirmatively: the first because “governmental investigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function,” the second because “the whole object of the statute” is to deny a president exclusive control over the exercise of purely executive power.”
Virtually no politicians from Bush to Obama to Trump could survive a deposition dealing with foreign policy. They simply shouldn’t be done. Particularly where as here Mueller doesn’t even try to make a pretense of fairness and there is no underlying crime in any event.
JD
JD:
I agree. both about no other president surviving such a deposition and that such a deposition shouldn’t be done.
But that isn’t likely to be the subject of inquiry, or at least I don’t think so. I also don’t think it is part of a prosecutor’s biref to be fair. And I also don’t see how you can be sure there is no underlying crime, although if there isn’t I would agree with you there as well.
j Ferguson. Here is what Alan Dershowitz said:
““For it to be a crime, the campaign would’ve had to say to the Russians, look, we want you to hack into the Democratic National Committee,†said Dershowitz. “Here’s the names of the people. We’d like you to get information about them. That would be accessory before the crime with the hacking.â€
The prominent attorney and Harvard professor then went on to explain why what the media is trying to portray as a crime may be “terrible politically,†but would have been perfectly legal if it had happened.
“But, just collusion. If the president and his campaign say to the Russians, look if you help me get elected, we will help you with sanctions, that would be terrible politically, but it simply wouldn’t be a crime. Before something can be a crime, you have to find a provision in the criminal code that makes it a crime. Maybe it could be a crime, but right now it’s not a crime.†http://www.bizpacreview.com/2017/12/30/harvard-prof-dershowitz-shreds-medias-outrage-trump-saying-theres-no-crime-russia-collusion-581609
JD
JD,
Thanks for the link. I don’t think I disagree with you, actually. I don’t think it’s politically feasible for Trump to refuse. The reasons don’t have much to do with legality. For example, the media has always been hostile to Trump. I think a refusal would amount to hosing the media fires with gasoline. I haven’t really thought it through carefully, that’s just the first point that jumps to mind.
I’ll think it through and see if I can articulate what I mean more clearly tomorrow.
Re: Depositions of High Public Officials
Just as a general point. If I spent 3 weeks and was permitted to depose Mueller or Comey, I could make either of them look like a monkey. (Most probably 20 hours would be enough) High public officials are not altar boys and quite often are duplicitous liars. For example, the FBI working under Comey:
….
“The judge found prosecutors engaged in a “deliberate attempt to mislead†and made several misrepresentations to both the defense and the court about evidence relating to a surveillance camera and snipers outside the Bundy ranch in early April 2014, as well as threat assessments made in the case.
“The court is troubled by the prosecution’s failure to look beyond the FBI file,†Navarro said.
She said she “seriously questions†that the FBI “inexplicably placed†but “perhaps hid†a tactical operations log that referred to the presence of snipers outside the Bundy residence on a “thumb drive inside a vehicle for three years,†when the government has had four years to prepare the case.
“The court has found that a universal sense of justice has been violated,†Navarro said.
The judge found it especially egregious that the prosecutors chose not to share documents that the defendants specially asked for in pretrial motions, and “grossly shocking†that the prosecutors claimed they weren’t aware the material would assist the defendants in their defense.
“The government was well aware of theories of self defense, provocation and intimidation,†Navarro said. “Here the prosecution has minimized the extent of prosecutorial misconduct.†See http://www.gopusa.com/bundy-standoff-case-thrown-out-in-another-stunning-blow-to-fbi-prosecutors/
Would add that during part of the time that Comey was FBI director, the FBI continued a long standing practice of not taping or transcribing the statements of witnesses. The only practical reason for this was to permit FBI agents to lie about the testimony they heard when it was convenient for them to do so. See https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/21/fbi-reverses-recording-policy-interrogations/9379211/
JD
In previous post, should have said FBI and DOJ at time Comey was FBI director.
JD
Google is simultaneously being sued for discriminating against women and now for discriminating against men.
I don’t see what arguments they can make in the first suit that would be different from what Damore said that got him fired.
To complicate things, they have issued a study that found the best employees at Google are not correlated with their intelligence level or technical proficiency, but on qualities like communication skills.
Mueller still has not been identified as operating a specific criminal investigation. The Russia investigation is a counterintelligence one, and Rosenstein has ignored the law in appointing Mueller without identifying a criminal matter. Every expansion of his original mandate must also be approved by Rosenstein.
Mike N,
Seems to me very few politicians and bureaucrats in Washington actually follow laws they don’t like. Rosenstein and Muller are no different. Not unexpected for politicians, but troubling for “career bureaucrats” (e.g. Lois Lerner.. and most of the staff at EPA).
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WRT Google, the “communication is all that matters meme” is probably to justify promoting the technically less competent. They have an unlimited cash torrent, so can afford such luxury. It won’t always be that way.
JD,
I agree again with you that none of the acts conjectured in the media are sufficient for an honest prosecution, but that doesn’t mean that such acts cannot have taken place. Because we don’t know their details doesn’t mean they cannot have happened.
Trump vs. Mueller for 8 hours. Trump doesn’t even know what he will be asked. Who wins that engagement?
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Just Do It. Not.
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Trump stands to gain nothing, and the risks are high. My guess is there is really no crime here but as has been demonstrated by Martha Stewart and many others, the interview itself will invent a crime.
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Remember “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!” and “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”?. Not helpful for Bill. This interview won’t clear Trump of anything in the minds of the investigators or the public. The investigators are only offering up rope to allow someone to hang themselves.
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I don’t think it matters politically either. The vast majority have made up their minds here already, and the Trumpers will see it as a sign of strength that Trump gives the finger to the perceived political witch hunt. The anti-Trumpers will just assume he lied about everything except for any slip-up which will be absolute truth. The media can’t hyperventilate any more than they already have for the last 18 months.
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The chances of this interview being leaked are very high. They can keep a Clinton interview secret, but my guess is that a Trump interview will be leaked.
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The FBI/government has to be exceedingly careful. They let Clinton walk and if they suggest a crime occurred that doesn’t rise to the “Hillary Clinton standard” they will damage their institution for a generation. Of course I don’t know what to make of the “Bill Clinton standard” vs the “Hillary Clinton standard”.
It goes without saying that Trump thinking he is a genius is the most dangerous part of him participating in a high stakes interview. He likely has been deposed numerous times as a business owner though, so it wouldn’t be his first rodeo.
MikeM
Oddly, I suspect it’s possible for a large organization to do both at the same time!! Heck, it’s possible for the same individual to do both. For example: refuse to hire men as housekeepers and women as drivers. Large organizations wit multiple people and branches are capable of all sorts of contradictory behavior. So I would find it entirely plausible that a company could both
1) Design a system their HR deems “neutral” that in reality systematically offers women lower salaries than men with comparable abilities and
2) Create a internal and external systems that both encourages “teams” to kinda-sorta informally but kinda-sorta officially imposes quotas to hire woman.
Google is accused of both.
Part of the accusation of (1) is that they use past salary history to decide how much salary to offer. IF companies outside google pay women less for comparable work or are less likely to promote or hire women, this will tend to make Google systematically pay less to women. HR might deem it “neutral” because they can put info into a spreadsheet and just say that if the woman had been paid more in her previous job, the spread sheet would suggest a larger starting salary offer. So the criterion is the same criterion as for a men and women. We could argue endlessly about it– but my impression is this is more-or-less the accusation in one case.
I think there is also a case with (1) that involves people working in their child care center. They accuse them of systematically paying the men more in jobs that are pretty fungible.
Accusation (2) is pretty much in Damore’s complaint.
We’ll see how these pan out after the legal beagles argue in court.
Lucia wrote: “Part of the accusation of (1) is that they use past salary history to decide how much salary to offer.”
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When I was looking at jobs in industry a few years ago, this question, together with “how much money do you want?” were ubiquitous. Coming from a (relatively) low paid research job in academia and having no fricken idea how much money I should be asking for apart from what I could trawl off the web, I felt like I was getting screwed before I’d even sent in an application. A change in circumstances meant I never got to find out, however.
DaveJR,
Yep. That’s the sort of issue.
I have no idea if the effect of that sort of question can amount to sex discrimination if the people hiring know or should know that all the women were previously underpaid due to invidious discrimination by others in the industry or to society as a whole.
But my impression might also be wrong. This suit claims google put people on different tracks and levels
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16308740/google-class-action-sexism-gender-pay-lawsuit
This one claims they pay women at the same levels less:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-gender-disparity.html
I have no idea whether Google discriminates against either men or women. But I think oddly it’s not impossible for a company to do both.
James Damore is wrong. It’s fine to discriminate against bigots and bullies
“Let me explain, then, why it’s all right to discriminate against conservatives.”
“I discriminate against people who are rightwing and conservative. I’m entirely happy to say so.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/11/discriminate-conservatives-james-damore-suing-google-intolerance
The Sh***y Men List, ha ha.
What a boondoggle. Someone effectively creates a widely shared private crowd sourced blacklist of men who have done alleged things and people are falling all over themselves trying to find a way to claim this isn’t reprehensible behavior. They care about whether the list’s creator gets exposed, not the people on the list and whether it’s use crosses any lines, which it obviously does.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/business/media/a-feminist-twitter-campaign-targets-harpers-magazine-and-katie-roiphe.html
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Replace men with any other identity here, and watch the media go thermonuclear in a femtosecond. Man are these cards being overplayed.
If Mueller has real questions for Trump, rather than just playing ‘gotcha’ a la Martha Stewart, he should submit them in writing. I don’t see any reason for a direct personal interview other than playing ‘gotcha’.
Rosenstein needs to go. He’s clearly not doing his job, which is to keep Mueller on point.
Tom,
Hmmm….
Potential for suits alleging libel per se.
DeWitt,
Of course Muller is fishing for an “‘investigative process crime”. That is all he can get.
Mueller has added a cybercrime prosecutor to his team.
Fusion GPS was an FBI contractor able to do FISA inquiries on their own with no oversight.
Mike Rogers started investigating this, and eventually shut down the query system.
He visited with Donald Trump, and the next day the transition team was moved to New Jersey.
MikeN – “Fusion GPS was an FBI contractor able to do FISA inquiries on their own with no oversight.”
Where did you get this information?
MikeN – “Mueller has added a cybercrime prosecutor to his team.”
Let me point Mueller’s new employee in the right direction
—–> Imran Awan
The Conservative Treehouse has connected a lot of dots.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/11/the-doj-and-fbi-worked-with-fusion-gps-on-operation-trump/
I was introduced to the articles by Sundance on the conservativetreehouse.com site earlier this week.
I think he is a little over his ski’s on Fusion GPS being the contractor who was accessing the FBI’s copy of the raw 702 data. It could be, but not definitive in my reading.
Having said that, he is making a very convincing case for what has happened.
—–> Imran Awan
I was thinking the guy who used BleachBit.
DeWitt Payne: “I think Joe’s problem is that he is convinced that in a monatomic ideal gas that T≡2/3()/k for any number density of atoms, N. I’m pretty sure that is only true in the limiting case where N→∞ and the energy distribution is identically Maxwell-Boltzmann.â€
When I circled back to bookmark this page, I noticed Dr. Payne’s comment above. I know from experience that there’s little value in attempting to disabuse Dr. Payne of that misconception he’s “pretty sure†of. But I’ll make a point I may have omitted from our previous discussions.
Dr. Payne is right about one thing: I am indeed among those flyover-country deplorables who cling to their guns, religion, and kinetic definition of temperature. (Okay, I haven’t touched a weapon since the Vietnam War, but you get the idea.) And I’ve already said that in the present context my principal reason for choosing the kinetic definition is it’s the one Dr. Brown adopted. The tortured exegeses upthread to the contrary notwithstanding, Dr. Brown was indeed disputing the kinetic-energy gradient and showed no interest in adopting the theory that it wasn’t proportional to lapse rate. (Brown: “Temperature of a monatomic ideal gas is one thing, and one thing only. It is a direct measure of its internal, disorganized (equilibrated) average kinetic energy.†Born: “My reading of Velasco et al. is that it is a demonstration, based on no assumptions other than the basic axioms of statistical mechanics, that at equilibrium there is in fact a non-zero (albeit, for any significant quantity of gas, quite small) translational-kinetic-energy gradient in the presence of a gravitational field.†Brown: “Velasco et al is almost certainly wrong in their conclusion.â€)
What I may have left only implicit, though, was this: the definition choice makes little difference in the context of lapse rate, where you take measurements of local quantities, i.e., of temperatures specific to different altitudes, and divide the measurement difference by the altitude difference. Yes, the very act of placing the thermometer into thermal communication with the gas column can modify the lapse rate. And the degree to which it does so could be significant in comparison with quantities as exquisitely small as those that Velasco et al. specify.
No matter how you characterize what the thermometer measures, though, its values for the higher altitude will be (yes, only imperceptibly and statistically) lower than those for the lower altitude—because average kinetic energy changes with altitude.
So, yes, I do prefer the kinetic definition. But it doesn’t matter how you characterize what the thermometer measures: the difference between the measurement values it takes at different altitudes will not be exactly zero.
By the way, the reason I bookmark things like this is that they can help explain how dangerous it is for us laymen blindly to follow the folks with the credentials. Because of confidentiality considerations I can’t cite examples of the resultant damage from my real-world experience. As a substitute, though, woolly logic like that exhibited above from scientists on the Web can give laymen some sense of why we have to be vigilant.
In this case the drearily predictable logical train wreck was topped off by downright bad physics. (“T only exists in the limit where N→∞.â€)
Silicon Valley Will Pay the Price for Its Lefty Leanings
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-12/silicon-valley-will-pay-the-price-for-its-lefty-leanings
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“Perhaps even more importantly, conservatives vote. They elect legislators and public officials whose actions can deeply affect Google’s business. In general, Google has gotten much friendlier treatment from American regulators than from the EU or China. But American government is currently heavily dominated by Republicans who are unlikely to want to be nice to a powerful corporation whose internal communications suggest that it views advancing a progressive agenda, and bashing conservatives, as part of its corporate mission.”
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A search engine tax is looking more reasonable every day, ha ha.
Andy McCarthy points out that Mueller has essentially disproven the Trump collusion to hack the election claim. In his indictment of Papadopoulos, it says he was told Russians have thousands of Hillary’s e-mails. If there was a conspiracy to hack, they wouldn’t have needed to tell him this.
There are similar contradictions in almost every collusion claim. Why did Donald Jr need to set up a backchannel with Russia in December if there was collusion? Why did they need a music producer in Ireland to set up a meeting in July 2016 if there was collusion?
Mr. Born,
Where has DeWitt suggested this about you? If you want to derail the technical topic you introduced by veering off into politics, I guess that’s up to you. But I haven’t seen anyone else trying to label you a “deplorable” or anything else.
I think the conclusion many here are coming to, based on evidence from the miasma of stuff you post is that people like you are quite capable of confusing yourself.
But, whatever…. I’m off to work on something else that someone discussed on twitter.
Mike N,
Suppose after the Russians told Papadopolus that they had all of these damaging emails, they asked him to find out when would be the best time to wikileak them? And what if Papadopolous got back to them, told them that it would be best to hold on to the emails until he gave the word, and then he did give the word the day the groping recording was released?
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of course I have no knowledge that anything like that happened, but if it did, it might look like conspiracy to a prosecutor.
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what would you think if what I suggest above transpired?
Oh what to do when there is a collision of two highly protected victim classes? Aziz Ansari, the Muslim comedian, is now being threatened with the career death penalty for what appears to be nothing more than an awkward date gone wrong. Hopefully this will be a turning point and bring sanity back to the process.
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The Claims Against Aziz Ansari Reveal the Defects of Modern Sexual Morality
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455445/aziz-ansari-allegations-defects-modern-sexual-morality
Is there not a single person in the media that can give Trump a charitable interpretation of his alleged comments on Haiti? I interpreted these comments as being economic in nature, race was never mentioned. I have no idea why the US would prioritize immigration from Haiti over any country. If immigration was changed to merit based then I don’t really care where they come from. As usual the policy question at the root of this discussion was deemed beyond the pale and unworthy of debate.
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It is a bit telling that the left is willing to sacrifice DACA instead of negotiating any kind of deal. There was a time when the President could speak his mind without a Senator running to the press. The declaration of a person being racist because they support racially neutral policy that has disparate racial results is a bit tiresome.
Tom Scharf
That would be because it wasn’t an assault.
No it may voilate some sort of rule at some university somewhere. Or it could violate some sort of rule an employer imposes on its employees. But it is not “assault”.
Tom,
Trump is a vulgar man. He uses vulgar language. He may have meant only something economic, or he may have meant something totally racist. No one knows.
But honestly: wrt to “shitholes” he gets what he deserves here. Honestly, I don’t think he cares; if he cared, he would have learned to be less vulgar. He’s a grown man, has long experience speaking in public and to groups. He hasn’t tried to speak in ways that avoids all this criticism. I don’t see why anyone you bother to hunt for charitable interpretations.
Tom Scharf (Comment #166472): “Is there not a single person in the media that can give Trump a charitable interpretation of his alleged comments on Haiti?”
Not in the mainstream media, but on the right people are pointing out that (a) Sen. Durbin is a known liar, (b) others at the meeting contradict Durbin, and (c) the countries in question are in fact hellholes (to use a slightly less offensive term). One related immigration issue in the news is Trump not renewing Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from certain countries. That status has been repeatedly renewed for those countries for one reason and one reason only: The countries in question are hellholes.
One might ask why Trump would wonder why no-one from Norway wants to come here.
I think a reason why someone would bother is that the media represents themselves as professionals and fact seekers, and not a mob to remove Trump by any means necessary.
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I haven’t really paid close attention to this, but my understanding is the context of this conversation was that the left wanted to exchange the ending of chain migration(?) with prioritizing migration from Haiti et. al. Thus the question came to Mr. No Impulse control…
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Trump is certainly vulgar, but that doesn’t equate to a racist. Trump is also a lifelong businessman who is likely to see things from an economic perspective first, and campaigned on economic issues related to immigration. If a professional journalist wants to question this statement as racist, they have a duty to tell both sides of the story. Instead we get a breathlessly covered contest on who can be the most offended.
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The coverage of immigration is more distorted than any subject. The US is about 50/50 on immigration overall, but the coverage of Trump and immigration is 96% negative (Harvard Kennedy School). Over 30:1. The media routinely fails to discriminate between legal and illegal immigration. Questioning immigration automatically brings out the racist label today. I don’t think it works because it transparently avoids the debate.
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https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-first-100-days
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http://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
J Ferguson,
No need to ask Trump. There most certainly are Norwegian, Swede, and Danish immigrants (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_immigration_rate_2012-16.png). The rate, as a fraction of national population, looks fairly uniform across much of Europe, but is lower for Italians.. not sure why. The US remains a very desired place to live, in spite of Trump. Based on my travel experiences, I do not find this at all surprising.
SteveF,
I didn’t express it well. The question was why Trump would ask. Not the truth.
j ferguson (Comment #166476): “One might ask why Trump would wonder why no-one from Norway wants to come here.”
I haven’t seen that. The only thing I’ve seen is Trump said that we’d rather have immigrants from Norway than from Haiti and the present system discriminates against that.
Mike M. I think you are right about that. the idea that immigration from Haiti and other “difficult places” was to be given preference didn’t make it into very many reports on the discussion. It is in the Washington Post this morning, but I don’t think it was reported earlier there.
It’s likely Durbin poisoned the well for an immigration deal by running to the press with Trumps (alleged, but likely) comments. No deal benefits the anti-immigration side as that is the law and DACA will end. DACA for the wall is fundamentally the deal on the table. Here’s something that was never talked about:
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“At one point, Durbin told the president that members of that (Congressional Black Caucus) caucus — an influential House group — would be more likely to agree to a deal if certain countries were included in the proposed protections, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Trump was curt and dismissive, saying he was not making immigration policy to cater to the CBC and did not particularly care about that bloc’s demands, according to people briefed on the meeting. “You’ve got to be joking,†one adviser said, describing Trump’s reaction.”
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So, to sum it up, Trump’s responding comment is racist according to our esteemed truth tellers, but the CBC wanting to prioritize immigrants from the same countries is not racist. Why did the CBC pick those countries? That’s a question that will never be asked. The protected class mentality of the media is distorting their coverage and hurts everyone involved.
j ferguson, Mike M,
The debate on immigration is just another manifestation of a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government and public policy.
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Progressives see immigration as another means to make the world less “unfair”… so if you are going to end chain immigration, which is most often from countries with many serious problems and extreme poverty (like Haiti, Guatemala, etc.), progressives insist that the permanent residency visas eliminated by stopping chain immigration be re-assigned to countries with serious problems… meaning no real change in current policy.
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The idea that residency visas should go to people who can contribute more to the US economy, like Canada and Australia do, is contrary to the primary progressive goal of making the world less “unfair”. Admitting more productive people would automatically make the USA economically better off… but that is just not the desired outcome for progressives, and is in fact exactly the opposite of the desired outcome. Progressives will never compromise on this. Ditto strict enforcement of immigration laws; they just will never agree to it.
It seems unlikely that I would think of this, but is it possible that the idea is to import Democrats?
Who’s idea, is what the question really turns into in my view.
Is there anybody out there who likes illegal/undocumented immigration because it amounts to importing Democrats? I’d be surprised if nobody at all supported the idea of uncontrolled borders because of this reason.
Is is the idea of most liberals? Many liberals? A significant fraction even? Personally I doubt it. I don’t think large numbers of liberals are all that cynical; I’d like to believe they are more principled than that. But I could be wrong. I don’t actually know large numbers of people, forget about large numbers of liberals.
Tom Scharf (Comment #166482): “It’s likely Durbin poisoned the well for an immigration deal by running to the press with Trumps (alleged, but likely) comments”
I suspect that Durbin’s purpose was to poison the well. Why can’t he be like a normal Illinois pol and get himself sent to prison? 🙂
I don’t consider Durbin’s version of the comments to be at all likely. Trump is perfectly capable of policing his mouth; I don’t think there was a single instance during the campaign of Trump using even a mild obscenity in all the debates, rallies, and interviews. Trump definitely said something harsh about certain countries, he says so himself. But in all probability Durbin enhanced the quote.
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SteveF (Comment #166483): “The debate on immigration is just another manifestation … Progressives see immigration as another means to make the world less unfairâ€.
That is part of it. But they also see it as a wedge issue to be cynically used to gain Latino votes and paint Republicans as bad guys. And they see immigrants from certain countries as future clients for their politics of handouts for votes. If they really cared, they’d have used their big majorities in Congress to do something back in 2009-2010.
Mike M.,
” But they also see it as a wedge issue to be cynically used to gain Latino votes and paint Republicans as bad guys.”
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Like mark bofill, I am less cynical than that. I do not doubt that most “progressives” (AKA liberals) are sincerely OK with porous boarders, ‘sanctuary cities’, and lack of immigration enforcement because it greatly improves the lives of millions of disadvantaged people from many ‘sh!thole’ countries, even if that comes at considerable expense to US citizens. In the big picture view of most progressives, large international differences in wealth, enforced national boarders, and indeed, the existence of self governing nation-states, are inherently “unfair”, and so ought to be eliminated, by most any means. When you look at it from this POV, you don’t need to conclude anything nefarious on the part of progressives beyond that they insist on a very different future world than what exists, and that insistence means they have little regard for history, laws, or economic growth.
I agree with Mark Bofill and SteveF. I would be very surprised a significant fraction of liberals who want more porous borders are motivated by the idea of ‘importing democrats’. I think they tend to be more motivated by the idea of “sharing our advantages with others”.
It’s clear they like redistributing wealth, that explains what they want perfectly. I don’t really need to hunt other reasons.
But even if I wanted to hunt for other reasons,a desire to redistribute wealth and advantages explains it better than making more Democrats. There’s no guarantee that the immigrants will all vote Democrat after they naturalize. Their children may not vote that way either.
The fundamental problem here is that many progressives prioritize sh**hole countries over sh**hole states. If making the world a better place means making some states marginally worse off then they are willing to make that “sacrifice”. Everything in their words and deeds support this mentality and it is morally justifiable depending on how your tribal circles are laid out. What they aren’t willing to do is say this out loud because it is toxic to winning elections in sh**hole states. People from Haiti don’t get to vote, but people from KY and WV do.
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The poorer the state, the more likely it is to be Republican, curious that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income
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It’s clear they like redistributing (other people’s) wealth. There, I fixed that, ha ha. I am quite cynical about a progressive’s generosity when it means it will affect their backyard or their children’s schools. Someone wanted to build a “multi-family dwelling” near our neighborhood and you would have thought it was a MS13 crack house / brothel by design by the neighborhood’s reaction. Aaaaaghhhh! That got killed pronto. I heard nary a peep about how we needed to help those in need.
President asked the White House doctor for a cognitive exam after speculation about Trump’s mental fitness. Hilarious. That he passed seems to be global news. Even more hilarious.
Tom Scharf,
NIMBY’s are everywhere, both progressives and conservatives.
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The list of states by income is informative, but I bet the distribution of incomes in those states would be even more informative. What Trump managed was to peel off a few key (electorally key) states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, where there are enough people who have not been doing well for the past couple of decades. All it took was a swing of a few % toward Trump to win those states.
Tom,
Pardon me for a digression, if you would.
Ignoring whatever larger point you were making (and I beg your pardon for that, and I will be glad to get back to it later, if you like), this reminded me of a question I’d been kicking around. Why do you suppose it is that Alabamians are mostly Republican?
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I suspect religion takes its toll: the impact of a significant portion of the population adhering to relatively fundamentalist christian views; regarding abortion, regarding gays, to name a couple of relevant issues off the bat.
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Then again, some (270ToWin for example) point out that Alabama was a democratic stronghold until the 1960’s and point to civil rights legislation. Perhaps racism really is part of the reason. Or at least was one of the reasons. Roe vs Wade wasn’t until the 70’s I think.
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It sort of dismayed me when all of this occurred to me awhile back. I don’t think I have as much in common with most of my conservative party fellows here in Alabama as I might wish.
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Can you make a case that our poverty has more to do with it than these factors? It’d make me feel oh so much better if so! 🙂
mark,
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have been passed without strong Republican support. Republicans voted for cloture of the mainly Southern Democrat filibuster in the Senate by 27-6. On the Democrat side it was 44-23. At that time 67 votes were required for cloture. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed by similar margins with even fewer Republicans voting against it. Somehow the fact that Nixon had a southern strategy in the 1968 Presidential election morphed into crypto-racism. There is, AFAIK, zero evidence that Nixon would somehow reverse the progress of civil rights. Some southern racists possibly voted for Nixon rather than Humphrey or George Wallace, but not because he ran a campaign that appealed to them directly.
In 1968, Humphrey won Texas, Wallace won five other states in the Old South and Nixon won the rest. Wallace won 12.9% of the popular vote.
DeWitt,
My sincere thanks. It should have occurred to me to look at the votes on relevant legislation. Perhaps the notion that Alabama swung Republican due to racism is fiction. That certainly wouldn’t make me unhappy. 🙂
I’ll poke around some more.
Here’s polifact finding ‘true’ a similar claim by former RNC chairman Michael Steele. FWIW, if polifact leans, I think it leans Left rather than Right.
Jferguson, I would think it is more evidence that Trump had no part in the hacking of Hillary’s e-mails. They had to reveal it to Carter Page later. What you suggest was also implied by Roger Stone, though he may have just been having fun with the media.
Jennifer Palmieri, major Clinton campaign person, sent a memo saying,
“The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success,â€
If the immigrants were voting Republican, Democrats would be opposing amnesty, and Republicans would be supporting amnesty. Well, the Republicans are largely already supporting amnesty, but even more so.
This is why Cubans can get special deals, while Democrats will attack them and didn’t mind returning Elian.
Mike N, Your Palmieri quote is spot on. It may not be evident to everyone but progressives are not necessarily Democrats.
Lucia: “I agree with Mark Bofill and SteveF. I would be very surprised a significant fraction of liberals who want more porous borders are motivated by the idea of ‘importing democrats’. ”
I disagree with this. I always wondered why Democrats supported Muslim immigration so strongly, particularly women and feminist Democrats. Then I saw where 70% of Muslims voted Democratic in a Pew survey. That did it for me. Also, explains why the term Islamic terrorist is verboten in the Democratic party.
Additionally, although I don’t have precise articles in front of me, I saw multiple articles by Democratic strategists stating that they thought they had a demographic advantage as non-white voters increased. In fact, in California about 45% of its residents don’t speak English at home. Here are a couple of relevant articles. https://www.wsj.com/articles/changing-u-s-demographics-favor-democrats-in-election-report-says-1456376460
The WSJ stated: “If turnout rates and party preferences for the age and racial groups remain the same as in 2012, demographic change alone—the increased share of minority voters and the decline of white voters—would boost the Democrats’ winning vote margin to 4.8 percentage points in 2016, from 3.9 points in 2012.” [This is a very large number for a 4-year period.]
See also https://www.npr.org/2015/11/06/454970605/how-demographics-will-favor-the-democrat-s-nominee-for-president
where a Democratic pollster discusses this issue.
I would add that in the tech industry there is an economic component to their support for large scale/open borders types of immigration. The top 1% benefit greatly by paying lower wages and if things get out of control, they can simply move.
JD
mark bofill,
I grew up in WV and it was solidly blue for 50 years and turned red recently. The reasons were guns, coal, and religion.
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WV is also 94% white. I think identity politics plays a role as well, but I really find it hard to gauge how much. I use identity politics instead of racism because I think it is closer to reality. The left goes out of their way to highlight every identity except straight whites and that can be easily interpreted as anti-white. Racism has an evil connotation to it and I think the answer is closer to “the left doesn’t like my white traditionalist tribe and feels I should be ashamed of it”.
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The larger point I was making is that the left is losing touch with low income states because of their insularity and coastal dependency. They simply don’t talk about the issues WV and Alabama care about because they view them as some weird lost tribe in the Amazon, perhaps they will fund an expedition from Harvard to visit them soon. Maybe they will amaze the locals with their magic smart phones!
The parties have changed since the civil rights days. It’s a good talking point to remind the left who voted for civil rights, but it’s apples and oranges. 2018 isn’t 1964. The left can just respond that 90% of blacks vote for them now. I think identity politics based on race/religion/sex is poisonous to society.
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The parties will morph with society. The parties will look a lot different in 2072. This is why “demographics are destiny” is a fable. The right is responding by switching more to class based politics and breeding resentment against the coastal elites. Politics is ugly.
NPR:
“Particularly worrisome for the media is that a majority of Republicans, a full 53 percent, have no confidence in them at all. Combined with those who said not very much confidence, a whopping 90 percent of Republicans expressed a lack of confidence in the media. That’s compared to 42 percent of Democrats who felt the same.
What’s more, three-quarters (74 percent) of independents had not very much or no confidence at all in the media. Fairness and objectivity are tenets and pillars of a free press, but those have been eroded in the eyes of many Americans.”
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/17/578422668/heres-just-how-little-confidence-americans-have-in-political-institutions
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The media should really care about this, instead we get CNN saying the word “sh**hole” on air 195 times in a single day last week.
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Trust in the media is one of those questions that is interpreted as “are they biased politically and culturally?”. I’m guessing most people think they can cover an earthquake with competence.
Tom,
Thanks for your response.
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and,
Heh!
J,
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Not to attack your statement, merely to inquire to seek illumination and enlightenment. For I am indeed a person for which this is not evident. What progressives are not Democrats? (real question)
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1. I get that there are progressives outside of the U.S., and Democrat is a U.S. party. If that’s what’s meant, got it.
2. I guess we could be talking about parties further to the left than democrats. Socialist or communist political parties perhaps.
3. Do you mean something else.
The thing is, if we’re talking about other U.S. parties, my thought is that such parties are too small to have impact except where they align themselves with one of the two major parties. I’d be interested in hearing about instances where socialist or communist groups aligned with Republicans if anyone knows of any; I won’t claim it’s inconceivable that that’s ever happened. Still, I’d think for the most part that socialist or communist party members would either effectively be counted as Democrats or be irrelevant.
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This is by way of explanation I guess, maybe of why I am dismissive in my thinking of distinguishing between progressives and Democrats. I think.
mark bofill (Comment #166485): “Is there anybody out there who likes illegal/undocumented immigration because it amounts to importing Democrats? … Is is the idea of most liberals? Many liberals? A significant fraction even? Personally I doubt it.”
You miss the point. The issue is not what most Democrat voters think. It is the opinion of people who care enough about a specific issue that is will change their vote or, better yet, open their wallets. Also, the opinions of party strategists and others with the ears of the national politicians. Wedge issues are important for the first group and demographic strategy is important for the second group. After the 2012 election, there was enormous Republican angst and Democrat triumphalism over the country’s changing demographics. And it is obvious that the Democrats are using illegal immigration as a wedge issue.
Mike M,
Possibly. Thanks. So you’re saying the answer to my question of ‘who?’ shouldn’t be focused on most Democrat voters, but big donors, strategists, movers and shakers in the Democratic party.
Because they impact what the party actually does I guess…
OK I guess. Sounds reasonable to me. I’ll think about it, but OK for the moment.
Tom Scharf (Comment #166489): “The poorer the state, the more likely it is to be Republican, curious that.”
I think the underlying correlation is rural/urban. Rural areas tend to be more conservative than urban areas; I think that is generally true across time and societies. In the U.S. today rural areas, small towns, and small cities are largely middle class with (I think) a relatively high proportion of small business owners. Big cities have lots of really poor people who depend on government handouts and lots of rich people and high income professionals who like to feel good about supporting such handouts.
JD Ohio (Comment #166499)
January 16th, 2018 at 10:46 pm
I would agree here with JD. I would never give much credit to either of the major political parties in the US (or other nations as well) of standing on principle. If the potential immigrants were largely expected to vote for Republicans the political roles on the issues would be mostly reversed. The Democrats have some advantages in these matters by being the more statist party (but not by much) and thus more willing in using the power of government to make immigrants and the less well-off nationals more dependent on the government and in turn on their party. That political strategy has worked for years for Democrats in large urban areas. The partisan intellectual friends in academia and the press can rationalize the baser political instincts to make it appear more principled but it is really politics that shapes the policies and how those policies are applied in the real world – and not by some Civics 101 point of view.
If the Republicans were politically savvy, which my observations say they are not, they might attempt to make immigrating future citizens and voters less dependent on government by requiring more responsible sponsorships that would have to make financial commitments similar to a court bond.
KF ”
“If the Republicans were politically savvy, which my observations say they are not, they might attempt to make immigrating future citizens and voters less dependent on government by requiring more responsible sponsorships that would have to make financial commitments similar to a court bond.”
That is the current law and I have sponsored two people for green cards. That is exactly what I had to do. I have not heard of any problems with this program. However, Obviously it doesn’t apply to illegals.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #166509): “If the Republicans were politically savvy, which my observations say they are not, they might attempt to make immigrating future citizens and voters less dependent on government by requiring more responsible sponsorships that would have to make financial commitments similar to a court bond.”
But the Republicans want to do that by getting rid of the lottery, reducing chain migration, and going to a merit based system.
Democrats will really start screaming if they actually enforced the public charge rules in screening for green cards and citizenship.
Apple’s going to pay $38B in taxes and bring some cash back to the US, that’s $115 per US citizen. They get a one time repatriation tax of 15.5%, it was 35%.
They claim they are going to create 20,000 new jobs with a $350B investment in the US over the next 5 years. They are giving $2500 bonuses to their employees.
Stock market cracks 26,000 today.
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The tax bill apocalypse continues.
Tom Scharf,
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Looks to me like financial ointment to salve the millions of conservatives offended by the Gestapo-like treatment of software engineer Damore by Google. If Google has a lick of sense in their heads, they will quickly settle with Damore et al for an undisclosed large sum and shut down the obnoxious internal systems used to exclude and attack conservatives. We’ll see how it goes.
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Maybe Megan McCartel’s column (Silicon Valley Will Pay Price for Lefty Leanings) got Apple’sr attention.
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Damore will need to find something else to do with his future… nobody in Silicon Valley will hire him.
🙂 Yeah.
I enjoy rereading the outraged claims regarding the tax cuts:
It’s good of people to put short term predictions down publicly and in writing.
Just livin’ the fantasy here. 🙂
[Edit: Personally, I’m hoping that after Trump’s term is done that there will be a good number of ‘credible’ economists who will have utterly destroyed their own credibility for the foreseeable future. ]
mark,
‘Credible economist’ is an oxymoron. Does Krugman still write columns for the NYT? Yes, he does. You can’t lose what you never had.
Shh DeWitt. You’re ruining the fantasy.
https://www.cbpp.org/archives/imm-spon.htm
KF: “The Form I-864 Affidavit of Support is a legally enforceable contract, meaning that either the government or the sponsored immigrant can take the sponsor to court if the sponsor fails to provide adequate support to the immigrant. In fact, the law places more obligations on the sponsor than on the immigrant–the immigrant could decide to quit a job and sue the sponsor for support.
When the government sues the sponsor, it can collect enough money to reimburse any public agencies that have given public benefits to the immigrant. When the immigrant sues, he or she can collect enough money to bring his or her income up to 125% of the amount listed in the U.S. government’s Poverty Guidelines (as shown in the chart in Form I-864P).”
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/fiance-marriage-visa-book/chapter3-5.html
You cited an article that was 20 years old.
JD
DeWitt,
“Does Krugman still write columns for the NYT?”
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Do bears still crap in the forest? There is no error grotesque enough to keep Krugman from continuing his foul defication on the editorial pages of the New York Times. The stench is long since too much for any reasonable person to tolerate.
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He is an obnoxious fool, nothing more.
From the gutter: The Lindsay Shepherd affair. Canadian student TA shows a 5 minute video of gender pronoun debate. She gets hauled in front of a university inquisition. She wisely secretly records the entire thing and releases it to the media. It’s almost a parody on political correctness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YdFlKaJv4g
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Best part from one of the inquisitors: “I find it ludicrous that there are accusations of cultural Marxism at our schoolsâ€, followed by comparing the episode to Hitler, climate deniers, Charles Murray, and then demanding no more videos, asking to pre-screen her lesson plans, and insinuating she may get fired.
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It comes out after an independent investigation is asked for that no complaint was actually ever filed by a student, oops. The president of the school writes an open letter of apology to her. Free speech task force is formed. I have a feeling the inquisitions aren’t ending anytime soon.
From the gutter: The Lindsay Shepherd affair. Canadian student TA shows a 5 minute video of gender pronoun debate. She gets hauled in front of a university inquisition. She wisely secretly records the entire thing and releases it to the media. It’s almost a parody on political correctness. You can find the recording on YouTube – FULL RECORDING – Lindsay Shepherd Interrogated by Wilfrid Laurier University’s Gender Police.
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Best part from one of the inquisitors: “I find it ludicrous that there are accusations of cultural Marxism at our schoolsâ€, followed by comparing the episode to Hitler, climate deniers, Charles Murray, and then demanding no more videos, asking to pre-screen her lesson plans, and insinuating she may get fired.
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It comes out after an independent investigation is asked for that no complaint was actually ever filed by a student, oops. The president of the school writes an open letter of apology to her. Free speech task force is formed. I have a feeling the inquisitions aren’t ending anytime soon.
From the gutter: The Lindsay Shepherd affair. Canadian student TA shows a 5 minute video from public television of gender pronoun debate. She gets hauled in front of a university inquisition. She wisely secretly records the entire thing and releases it to the media. It’s almost a parody on political correctness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YdFlKaJv4g
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Best part from one of the inquisitors: “I find it ludicrous that there are accusations of cultural Marxism at our schoolsâ€, followed by comparing the episode to Nazis, climate d—–s, Charles Murray, says she is creating a toxic environment, tells her she may have broken a law, demands no more videos, asks to pre-screen her lesson plans, and insinuates she may get fired.
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It comes out after an independent investigation is asked for that no complaint was actually ever filed by a student, oops. The president of the school writes an open letter of apology to her. Free speech task force is formed. I have a feeling the inquisitions aren’t ending anytime soon.
Result of fact finding commission, student exoneration, undisclosed faculty discipline.
https://wlu.ca/news/spotlights/2017/dec/president-statement-re-independent-fact-finder-report.html
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Color me skeptical that any of this would have happened if the meeting wasn’t recorded and sent to the media. The university does appear to be handling it transparently.
Worst-case global warming scenarios not credible, says study
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/18/worst-case-global-warming-scenarios-not-credible-says-study
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In The Guardian? Bizarre.
JD, thanks for pointing out the age of the article I cited. No excuse on my part as the date was in plain sight.
Is not I-864 almost entirely for immigrating relatives? I did some preliminary searching but could not find answers to how well that I-864 is enforced. Also what is the sponsorship factor outside of those covered under I-864?
Actually, I am not one of those who assumes that overall immigration has been detrimental to our economy or some undefined general cultural values. My main problem is the tendency of immigrants to become or think they are and/or others should be dependent on the government.
Tom Scharf, linked at the side of the article is “Ambitious 1.5C Paris target is still possible”. Put into perspective, it’s about keeping the dream alive. Just requires more effort.
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Interestingly, the paper appears to have carried out work similar to that by Nick Lewis. I’m curious how this compares. One thing that struck me was that TCS isn’t mentioned. Is this an attempt at a climb down while still ensuring things appear worse than they actually are?
I see the Guardian changed the title, ha ha. From:
Worst-case global warming scenarios not credible, says study
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To:
Climate sensitivity study suggests narrower range of potential outcomes
Tom Scharf,
I would like to think the kind of Orwellian abuse the TA suffered is not common, but I am pretty sure it is common. You are right, had the inquisition not been recorded she would have no choice but to accept the abuse or leave the school. What I do not understand is why the professors (and/or administrators) involved in this fiasco were not simply fired after the fact-finding report was issued. Since there had been no student complaint filed, this fraud was 100% instigated by a professor or administrator who should now be looking for work. I sure hope the TA has at least been assigned to a different supervising professor, and one who is not a left wing nut job.
“Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #166526)
January 18th, 2018 at 10:09 am
“Is not I-864 almost entirely for immigrating relatives?”
No, I have done two of these for both of my wives who came from China.
….
“I did some preliminary searching but could not find answers to how well that I-864 is enforced. Also what is the sponsorship factor outside of those covered under I-864?”
It can be enforced by virtually anyone, so it is enforced reasonably well. Divorce lawyers are very well acquainted with this provision. The language is so strong, that I have gotten a good umbrella insurance provision in case my second wife (I divorced her) gets in a car accident. The way I read 864, if she has a car accident and can’t pay, I am stuck with it even if I haven’t seen her for 10 years. Don’t really know the subtleties, but it is written so strongly that I don’t want to mess with it.
JD
DaveJR, TCS if we use a multiplier of .6 we get 1.3-2C. With .8, it is 1.8-2.5C
After listening to the gender inquisition I realized that not one of the people involved had actually seen the debate clip shown to the class at the root of the alleged crime but proceeded to berate the TA anyway. Guilty until proven…well just guilty! It was enough that their apparent nemesis Jordan Peterson was part of it, and his thinking was to be BANNED. James Damore is also a Peterson fan apparently, so I’m sure this was the lightening rod that made them lose their minds.
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(Trigger Warning: Sexism ahead) It didn’t hurt her cause when she used her girl superpower and cried while under attack.
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I hope these are still rare occurrences, but 20 of the inquisitors’ colleagues signed a letter stating “Charges that our program shelters students from real-world issues or fosters classrooms inhospitable to discussing contentious issues from different vantage points seem to us simply preposterous.”. Willfully blind.
https://medium.com/@ishmaeldaro/an-open-letter-from-members-of-the-communication-studies-department-wilfrid-laurier-university-421c94002276
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Disallowing debate on a contentious issue is exactly what happened here, and by the means of a hidden tribunal.
This isn’t a close call.
Mike N,
The TCR is always a smaller fraction of the ECS when the ECS is high, and a larger fraction when the ECS is low. Typically quoted values are 70-75% of a low ECS, and 55-60% for a high ECS. This is one of the reasons it is a challenge to determine ECS based on short term warming…. there just isn’t a lot of difference In TCR for different ECS values.
JD,
On umbrella insurance, if it isn’t too invasive a question, does it make sense to buy liability to an amount equal to your net worth? or more?
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It seems obvious to buy enough coverage that the insurance company will take a significant claim seriously, but what if the claim exceeds the coverage? Somewhere in my past I was aware of a major claim (which seemed legitimate at the time) which exceeded the coverage. Friend was informed of this by the underwriter and it was suggested that he provide his own counsel to handle the part of the claim which exceeded their exposure.
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In these situations I always imagine that I’ve caused an accident and ruined the left hands of the members of the Guarneri quartet. And unlike Django they cannot go on, winging it (so to speak) doesn’t cut it in the classical world.
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so here’s this really big – legitimate – claim and they want my insurance and everthing else.
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Is my fear rational?
JD, my searching indicated that I-864 is primarily based on immigrating family relationships including those based on marriage. I read a WSJ article yesterday that stated that approximately 71% of the immigrants to the US over the past several years immigrated under I-864. That article was written in support of immigration in general while pointing to some modifications to the immigration law that could be helpful.
Perhaps I have not been paying attention but I am wondering why politicians favoring more immigration are not pointing to I-864 and its enforcement for financial sponsorship – and away from government dependency. Would some of those politicians be thinking that I-864 is too onerous? Somewhere the enforcement issue must be tracked – I would think.
JD, on first reading your 2 wives reply I thought we might be starting a discussion of the legality of bigamy.
https://www.soundimmigration.com/i-864-affidavit-of-support/
j ferguson,
I’m no expert at all, but my understanding was you needed to buy insurance up to your potential liability. In Florida they cannot get access to your 401K or house in a civil lawsuit so your potential liability may be much lower than your net worth. To the extent that higher umbrella coverage may be cheap anyway and it gives you peace of mind than that is also a factor I suppose.
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It’s not untypical for someone to sue over a coverage limit as a pressure tactic. My nephew was in a horrible auto accident and my brother was sued over the insurance limit. They eventually settled on the court house door for the insurance limit. It’s stressful. I think a personal injury lawyer’s first question is how much insurance the defendant has.
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I will of course defer to anyone with actual legal knowledge. I’m interested in the answer.
Thanks for your thoughts, Tom,
Alas, by intention we have no real property so we suppose our entire net worth is unprotected. We do carry umbrella above our renters’ policy which seems like it would be enough to cover most things, but still I worry.
This one made me smile:
https://townhall.com/political-cartoons/2018/01/18/155244
SteveF,
Yes. It seems quite a few people are upset the President isn’t ill.
Dr. Francis’ definition of mental illness seemed to require suffering. In other words, you cannot be mentally ill if you are not a potential customer for psychiatric care.
the nub of the flap over the Barry Goldwater remote diagnoses seems more that it was bad for business than ethically questionable.
J Ferg: Re: Umbrella Policies
If you have significant property these are always a good idea. The most expensive insurance is on the lower end where most claims are made. So, effectively umbrella insurance typically costs pennies. I think I get several million dollars in coverage for something like $150 to $400 per year.
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You should also understand that if you ran over Bill Gates’ son and owed several billion dollars that, if you were sued, the insurance company would pay several million and you would still be liable for the excess amount owed.
Umbrella coverage is very helpful, but if you are really concerned, you could put your properties in an LLC. Easy for me, but maybe a hassle for you. Of course, each state has its own peculiarities.
KF “The I-864 is required in order to show that the sponsor – or joint sponsor – has adequate financial ability to support the immigrant beneficiary. We are required to show that the sponsor can support the beneficiary at a level equal to 125% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines for household size. The purpose of the form is to ensure that immigrant will not become dependent on public resource.”
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The wording of this quote is misleading in our context. 864 creates a contract, and if anything goes wrong the sponsor is liable under the law of contract to pay if the immigrant receives benefits or causes damages. Secondly, 864 requires the sponsor to disclose his income. If the sponsor’s income isn’t high enough, the immigrant can’t come to the US legally. (Of course, under Obama, you could just sneak in)
KF “Perhaps I have not been paying attention but I am wondering why politicians favoring more immigration are not pointing to I-864 and its enforcement for financial sponsorship – and away from government dependency. Would some of those politicians be thinking that I-864 is too onerous? Somewhere the enforcement issue must be tracked – I would think.”
I haven’t tracked this but my strong speculation is that sponsored immigrants rarely get welfare type benefits. Many of them come to work and work hard. If somehow, they can’t get jobs, their sponsor would, in the vast majority of cases, take care of them. The real problem is illegal aliens, who do appear to receive substantial welfare type benefits (such as free medical care in many instances) from my cursory reading on the subject.
Here is the government’s link explaining 864s. https://www.uscis.gov/greencard/affidavit-support
Thanks JD,
It does work as I’d feared. We have the Trust already set up. Maybe now is the time to fund it. I’m glad I asked.
best,
john
Trusts — John,
I have had to think long and hard about a trust for my two young children, since I am comparatively old. Obviously, you want the terms of the trust to be effective. However, the biggest issue to me is choosing the trustee. I was lucky that there was a confluence of events which led to my brother being happy to be the trustee for my children’s trust. However, personally, I would never hire a bank to be trustee because they are not structured to effectively take care of typical personal issues that arise when family members are beneficiaries.
If you write up a good trust, but have a bad or incompetent trustee, you have effectively wasted your time. With respect to a trust, if it earns income, it is taxed at a fairly high rate, which is something you may want to consider.
JD
JD, I suppose this is obvious, but I assume that the assets of someone who is defending himself from an excessive (?) liability claim are discoverable, even if there are no visible Benzes, McMansions, yachts, etc.
J Ferg: “I assume that the assets of someone who is defending himself from an excessive (?) liability claim are discoverable,”
Yes, although putting assets in a trust makes it more difficult.
JD
Re: protecting your assets.
Trusts are expensive and complicated to establish and properly administer but worthwhile in if the liability or tax situation is high (like high state inheritance tax).
Any money in a retirement account, 401-K or IRA or qualified pension is protected from seizure by creditors in a bankruptcy or judgment.
S-Corps and LLCs properly kept are veils of protection, each entity being compartmentalized from liability of other entity or individual. Just need to weigh the value of protecting the assets from its risks versus the costs of maintaining the artificial entity. Many states love to charge nice annual filing fees or franchise taxes to feather their treasuries. With real estate many states require that the entity be registered in the same state as the property.
You can establish LLCs and S-corporations without hiring a lawyer if you want to take the time to do the Googling or know someone in that’s done it.
Re: Doing your own LLC formation
Once you have done it several times it is not that difficult. However, I am amazed at the ingenuity, sometimes, of non-lawyers to find weird and wrong ways to do things. Being very conservative, and assuming that you only have a 10% chance of doing the LLC formation incorrectly, in my view spending, let’s say roughly $2,000, on attorney fees is worth the cost. (Many lawyers would charge more, but you have to be willing to discuss attorney fees directly to get a fair, economical price, and you have to take the time to contact multiple lawyers)
To give one example. Three years ago, I had a house in contract to buy and it fell through because there were 30 sales tax liens on the house. The owner had a convenience store in an LLC and simply ignored sales tax notices because he thought his LLC would shield him from sales tax liability. It didn’t.
JD
JD: “It didn’t.”
So succinct.
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I’ve used attorneys (not Realtors) for every real estate transaction since 1975. Twice I’ve been protected from serious wastes of time, and once from what may have been an attempt at fraud. In that case, i thought something didn’t sound right about things we were being asked to assure in writing prior to sale.
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It is vital to find someone you can be comfortable with. References are not always revealing. We are very fussy, do not attempt to disguise it and often find that someone highly recommended by a friend was barely marginal and friend really had no idea what was needed from Attorney and what was actually provided.
I’m seeing the same sort of “quality referrals” for a financial planner. A colleague recommended his guy, singing the praises about his financial wizardry.
I looked him up in the SEC database, available at https://www.sec.gov/reportspubs/investor-publications/investor-brokershtm.html
I saw in the database a couple judgements and a bankruptcy. He may be a wizard, but there’s no way I’m going to put my financial well-being in the hands of someone “brilliant” leaving things like that in his wake.
Earle, “brilliant” makes alarm bells go off. I like our outfit. They do ok, but not brilliantly. Each pair of parents and we had different management outfits and similar bond-equity mixes. Over the 15 years that performance could be tracked simultaneously, the results were very similar. I was much surprised by this because I thought the Merril Lynch agent was a hot dog. He may have acted like one, but his results were quite close to those produced by our sober New Englanders. Same with outfit in Chicago.
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j ferguson: “brilliant†makes alarm bells go off
What about “genius”? 😉
I used The Company Corporation about 20 years ago to incorporate in Delaware. They file the paper work and you have to pay an annual fee. It’s incorporate.com now. It’s been pain free but never tested in court.
https://www.incorporate.com/
I’ve allows been pretty undecided on immigration, I can take it or leave it. I’m really most concerned about the economics of it, actual value of immigrants over a few generations versus their costs to society and the costs of border security. There aren’t many downsides to additional responsible tax paying people in your country. It still just isn’t a high priority issue for me. If DACA students are getting subsidized college tuition and scholarships over citizens then it’s hard to support that.
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I think the left making it a high profile issue is a mistake. They continue to send the signal that they value immigrants more than citizens, it’s not a good look. Wisdom such as this may lead them to losing to Trump twice.
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The usual suspects performing mental gymnastics in order to somehow blame the right for the shutdown when the left voted against a continuation isn’t a very compelling argument.
McConnell’s giving them a face saving way to surrender. They pass a funding bill until Feb 8. If no immigration deal is reached by then, then he will bring to a vote any bill the Democrats want, but nothing attached to budget bill that’s needed at that time.
I am pretty sure I commented here (for sure on Climateaudit) as to what a joke Comey’s 3 hour questioning of Clinton was in that it occurred at the end of the “investigation” and was not taped. Confirmation of Comey’s duplicity just came out today.
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“Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew well in advance of FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 press conference that he would recommend against charging Hillary Clinton, according to information turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Friday.
The revelation was included in 384 pages of text messages exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and it significantly diminishes the credibility of Lynch’s earlier commitment to accept Comey’s recommendation — a commitment she made under the pretense that the two were not coordinating with each other.
And it gets worse. Comey and Lynch reportedly knew that Clinton would never face charges even before the FBI conducted its three-hour interview with Clinton, which was supposedly meant to gather more information into her mishandling of classified information.
On July 1, 2016, as the Lynch announcement became public, Page texted Strzok:
Page: And yeah, it’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.
There are other revelations within the text messages. But in the cover letter accompanying them, the FBI notified Congress that many additional text messages are missing. According to the FBI, its “technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page from December 14, 2016 to approximately to [sic] May 17, 2017.â€
The reason?
(M)any FBI-provided Samsung 5 mobile devices did not capture or store text messages due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities. The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected.” http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/370019-was-lynch-coordinating-with-comey-in-the-clinton-investigation
So, we are supposed to trust Comey’s close confidante, Mueller, to conduct a fair investigation of Trump.
JD
“They Met on the tarmac.’ Not a scene from Casablanca. )
JD Ohio,
We don’t need any text messages to know that lynch and Obama had already instructed the FBI on what the result of the Clinton ‘investigation’ would be. We don’t need the FISA court documents to know that the Obama administration was spying on the Trump campaign. We don’t need anything more than what has long been known to see the obvious: the Obama administration would do anything they thought they could get away with to keep Trump out of the presidency and then went to extraordinary lengths, including more lawbreaking, to cripple his presidency after he won. Just as with most ‘progressives’, for Obama and his minions, the end justified the means.
These people are clueless to send messages like this on their work phones. I’m sure they will say they were just speculating, but the question needs to be asked and answered. If Mueller didn’t even ask the question then that may come back to haunt him.
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Every utterance from Trump is leaked in two minutes, while this kind of stuff that is actively held by the FBI is kept secret for almost a year. It might give paranoid people the feeling that the system is…fixed.
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It was always going to be hard to prosecute Clinton with anything major when the Patreaus incident was in the rear view mirror. We do want some consistency in our judicial system. Ultimately justice was served to Clinton, ha ha.
A politically inflammatory discussion of what journalists mean when using the term bias versus the correct mathematical meaning.
https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what-journalists-want-you-to-think-it-means/
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As introduced by SSC: “Jacobite: AI Bias Doesn’t Mean What Journalists Say It Means. Lots of people I know have been playing a giant game of chicken hoping someone else would write this article first so they didn’t have to – and it looks like Chris Stucchio and Lisa Mahapatra lost.”
Gov shutdown appears to be over.
mark,
Yep.
Among other things: Trump’s directives shows that “shut down” didn’t mean much of anything really needed to close. Left over funds were available to keep lots of things open. Trump’s administration worked to allow anything that could stay open stay open and that turned out to be lots of things because States often had resources to keep things open.
Obama could have done the same when the gov. shut down before. He just didn’t wanna. Which shows who wants a “shut down”. If it went on, “Why are these things open during this shutdown?” was going to be discussed rather openly. The answer was going to be “Because the President has the power and ability to keep quite a few things running. The GOP sides wants things open. And so, they are open”. Not great rhetoric for the DEMS who wanted the “shutdown” to be blamed on the GOP. After all: people would be likely to conclude: The GOP doesn’t want this shut down, the DEMs do. This one is the DEM’s bargaining chip.
lucia,
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I think so too. I’m cautious about drawing conclusions about how things are going to play with public perception in general for a few reasons, but I think it’s fairly safe to say this probably wasn’t going to fly very well for the Democrats.
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What do you think about providing the Dreamers a path to citizenship? I listened to the Sarah Huckabee Sanders press conference and noted that she was carefully non-committal on that point.
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What are the views in general here regarding a path to citizenship for these people?
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For my part, I haven’t given the matter much thought recently. My off the cuff thinking is – why not?
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Real questions. Thanks in advance to any and all who care to offer their views on this.
lucia: “Trump’s directives shows that “shut down†didn’t mean much of anything really needed to close. … Obama could have done the same when the gov. shut down before. He just didn’t wanna.”
Obama didn’t just not try to keep things open; he made an effort to shut down as much as possible, even when there was absolutely no need. He went so far as to put up barrycades around open air monuments.
I suspect the Dems quickly figured out that this was a loser for them.
mark bofill: “What do you think about providing the Dreamers a path to citizenship?”
I don’t mind if it is not part of the package to make DACA official (which I strongly support). Something could be provided later. There should be some way that the DACA recipients could eventually become citizens. But I would not want it to be automatic. They should have to show somehow that they are deserving. But frankly, I have no idea what that should consist of.
“What are the views in general here regarding a path to citizenship for these people?”
I would be happy to see these persons get some priority in going through the usual path to citizenship. I suspect that most of them are quite deserving of citizenship. That would give a modicum of legitimacy to the Executive preemption of normal rule-making, which I find an unpalatable result. But the affected individuals shouldn’t be penalized for the Executive actions.
And in general, I think that immigration is a win-win situation. It becomes win-lose for those who immediately end up on public support. The discussion upthread was very helpful, describing the rules for sponsorship to ensure that doesn’t happen. Dreamers with sponsors sounds like a wonderful solution, although I doubt there would be enough sponsors to go around. It’s a lot easier to say you’re for DACA than to sponsor an individual. What’s the expression? — talk is cheap.
Re: the shutdown
http://www.gocomics.com/kencatalino/2018/01/22
One Congressperson: “How’s it feel to just sit on our butts and get nothing accomplished?”
Other Congresspersons: “Just the same.”
JD Ohio said “Doing your own LLC formation…”
Have you ever seen articles of organization from sites like Lawdepot.com?
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Given your statement and the formulaic nature of them, it seems that these sites would be able to generate adequate documents for this purpose, but I do not know for sure.
Lucia,
“The GOP doesn’t want this shut down, the DEMs do. This one is the DEM’s bargaining chip.”
Senate Democrats caved after it became clear that at-risk Democrats would suffer at the polls if the shutdown continued for very long. Democrats will cave again around Feb 8. The reality is that most voters do not want a big government disruption on the basis of helping 700K unlawful aliens. This is a huge loser for Democrats; they continue this crazyness at their peril. The true believers on the left will of course continue to support the DACA people. Everyone else, not so much.
SteveF: “The reality is that most voters do not want a big government disruption on the basis of helping 700K unlawful aliens. … The true believers on the left will of course continue to support the DACA people.”
Of course, Trump and the Republicans are happy to help the DACA’s. What the Dems are really doing is opposing things like better border security and a more sensible immigration policy. That is an even bigger loser.
Mike M,
Of course democrats are opposed to spending money to reduce unlawful immigration. They wi dress that up 100 other ways, but the reality is that they do not want to actually restrict unlawful immigration…. ‘sanctuary cities’ (and states) are the obvious result. Sending recalcitrant local officials to the federal pen is the correct solution.
This is a somewhat humorous 30 minute “debate” between Jordan Peterson and a British TV journalist. This is what can happen when you think the person you are talking to is a moron, and they are not, and you don’t prepare well.
https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54
J Ferguson — Architecture
My son (currently a junior in HS) is finalizing next year’s schedule. His school has an architecture class and he was thinking of taking it. I told him that law schools typically don’t want people taking pre-law — they would prefer that students have a broad education before entering law school and learn law at law school. What is your opinion regarding whether my son should take the architecture class and how he can best prepare for architecture school if that is where he ends up [it is probably his second or third choice for a career now — he is covering his bases]?
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Also, I know that you have a low opinion of the business of architecture, which I previously explained to my son. If you have any pointers or additional comments to make I would appreciate them.
JD
Tom,
The first 5 minutes were beyond tedious. Can you summarize the rest?
Kan “Have you ever seen articles of organization from sites like Lawdepot.com?
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Given your statement and the formulaic nature of them, it seems that these sites would be able to generate adequate documents for this purpose, but I do not know for sure.”
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In Ohio, it is very easy to form an LLC. All you do is fill in the blanks and pay the fee. You are not even required to have an operating agreement. However, forming an LLC, and having an LLC that is really useful for your business are two different things. I would say that about 85% of the time, an honest, competent lawyer would significantly help most businesses who are forming an LLC. The real potential problem is that sometimes lawyers do a poor job.
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Every business has to tailor the forms found online to their own business. Something you could download online would be a good start, but they are not one size fits all. The vast majority of people who would be forming their own LLC for the first time, would not be competent to do so and would probably mess it up. Once you have several LLCs up and running with the assistance of a lawyer, there are a good number of sophisticated business people who can do additional LLCs on their own.
JD
PS for Ohio Supreme Court regulation purposes I have to add that I am in no way advising you as an individual. Am simply making general observations that you can use to do your own research.
JD Ohio,
My guess, and it’s just a guess, is the kids who plan on going to competitive colleges or who plan on careers in jobs that require advanced degrees should not take any “pre-job” classes. They should take traditional science: (a) Bio, (b) Physics, (c) Chem. They should take traditional English: Lit, rhetoric. Traditional history classes. (US, European, Asian what have you.)
Generally speaking a high school teacher is not the correct person to be teaching pre-Law, pre-Med, pre-Engineering, pre-etc. They aren’t trained in Law, Medicine, Engineering and so on. What they are teaching is not valued by universities that do teach those disciplines.
Harold, Mike, thanks for your responses. I’m pretty much on the same page.
Lucia: “My guess, and it’s just a guess, is the kids who plan on going to competitive colleges or who plan on careers in jobs that require advanced degrees should not take any “pre-job†classes.”
….
That is exactly the position of law schools, which I heard over and over on many occasions.
JD
Harold W: “And in general, I think that immigration is a win-win situation.”
….
I would say limited immigration where all parties (including those coming here) agree that the US has the right to limit immigration, and the explicit right to protect Western Culture, is a good thing. Now, many coming here and the Left take the position that open borders are essentially a right belonging to anyone who wants to come. This position needs to be faced head on. For instance, I would add to immigration rules that no one who believes that criticism of a religious figure merits the death of the person making the criticism. (The current mainstream Muslim doctrine) California has pretty much already flipped. 45% of its residents speak a language other than English at home.
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HW: “It becomes win-lose for those who immediately end up on public support. The discussion upthread was very helpful, describing the rules for sponsorship to ensure that doesn’t happen. Dreamers with sponsors sounds like a wonderful solution,… “To me the problem is not economic, but cultural. Without shared values, you cannot have a nation. My speculation, having been around many Mexicans and Chinese is that non-citizens work at a higher rate than citizens. The problem to me is not so much the original people who come here illegally, but their children who have little idea what their parents’ left and have a tendency to become resentful of the status of Americans whose economic status is higher than theirs.
Also, personally, I have a problem with the term “dreamers” which is an obvious attempt by the Left to sanitize the responsibility of the parents of children who are living in the US illegally. I acknowledge that there are many heart-rending situations and used to be quite sympathetic. However, with the current climate and many feeling that they have the right to violate US laws, most of my sympathy has gone out of the window. Unless real curbs on illegal aliens are applied, exactly the same thing will happen every 15 or 20 years, which is precisely the goal of the Left. (which rightly believes that it is is importing voters)
JD
Lucia,
“They aren’t trained in Law, Medicine, Engineering and so on. What they are teaching is not valued by universities that do teach those disciplines.”
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Depends a little on the teacher and course structure. Mr wife (PhD, Lehigh, chemistry) taught a lot of advanced chemistry classes in high schools, and hundreds of her students avoided introductory chemistry classes at universities based on their high school course work. My take was that her courses were more rigorous than many university chemistry first year courses. Not sure if that would qualify as ‘pre-chemistry’ but I know it saved a lot of kids a lot of time.
SteveF.
It’s a bit of a slow starter but picks up in absurdity pretty quickly. Here is a summary:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/
JD Ohio “P.S for Ohio Supreme Court regulation purposes I have to add that I am in no way advising you as an individual.”
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Thanks JD. I am not an individual any longer but an LLC :).
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Oh wait. the Supreme court has ruled that is still a person! (rightly so in my book).
SteveF,
It’s a a slow starter but ramps up in absurdity pretty quick. Here is a summary:
Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/
JD,
I don’t know what the schools think is important now – I’ve been away from it too long. I tend to think a pre-architecture course is going to be a waste of time which might be better spent perfecting writing skills, calculus, and physics.
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My views of the profession were probably best informed in the ’80s when i was running an office and keeping up with what was going on at my alma mater. This was just before CAD showed up.
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Because of CAD, a lot has changed, but there is one course which could be taken in high school, or junior college, which could help your son determine if he shouldn’t go into architecture. That would be a descriptive geometry class. The subject used to be taught in drafting classes. It may be impossible to find such a class today. Descriptive Geometry was part of the university design program and in most engineering schools, but more recently it isn’t. Too bad.
A CAD course will not filter out lack of aptitude in this vital area.
I bring this up because drawings which describe a design with sufficient information to get permits, bids, and construct are what architects produce. Drawings containing geometric errors of the sort where the plans do not agree with the elevations can result in all sorts of pain.
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Over the years, I encountered people who just couldn’t see these problems in their own work. Generally they didn’t work for me because I’d discover this shortcoming during hiring interviews. I used to think that who you didn’t hire was as important as who you did; a bit like the rests being as important as the notes in music.
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People who aren’t familiar with the business think it’s about design. But the actual design process, cooking up the sketches which best express a solution to a client’s requirements is about 5% of the work. And as it happens, about 5% of the people in architecture are actually good at it. I was ok, and have buildings here and there around the country which show I was ok, at least the ones which haven’t yet been torn down due to obsolescence.
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I soon found I could hire people who were really good. And then my job was more to make sure they didn’t show anything to anyone that I couldn’t figure out how to build.
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I should add that a lot of careers are the products of decisions made by 14 year olds. In my case i went to University with intention of becoming an attorney until i discovered first semester that I couldn’t read and absorb 400 pages a week. Architecture looked like something i could do, and so ….
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Aside from writing skill, inter-personal skills, ability to stand up in front of a bunch of people without being frightened (which I think i remember you writing that your son was good at) , ability to visualize what you see on a drawing is absolutely vital.
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the advent of CAD has led a lot of people to think that the machine will protect them from this, sort of like how spell check lets you use effect where you should have used affect.
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If you can’t find a course, you may be able to find tests which can at least give some hint as to where your son is with this sort of aptitude. They would be of the sort where two views of an object are shown and the test-taker has to draw the third or at least choose it from a number of variations. These things often show up in IQ tests – probably inappropriately. If you son doesn’t find this sort of testing remarkably easy and gets close to 100%, he should think very carefully of going on.
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JD, I’ll think about this some more and see if i can come up with some other thoughts which might be helpful.
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One last thing for which I hope i’ll be forgiven is that highly intelligent people are pretty infrequent in architecture in the US. I say this because I spent 7 years in the computer business and found myself working with people out west who were really sharp, the sort of people where a conversation could progress with an exchange of just the first sentences of paragraphs as you worked your way to the part of the subject that was either of special interest or neither of you understood. I loved that. This sort of thing seldom happened in construction.
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I did do a project in Ireland. It’s still a big deal to be an architect in Ireland, and accordingly there were some very sharp people on the job I worked on. it was a delight. And a surprise.
Tom, Steve,
Here’s the meme expressing the gist of it.
j Ferguson,
Wow… John’s first epistle on architecture. 😉
Tom Scharf,
Thanks for the link to a summary.
The interviewer is in no way unusual…. just a standard issue PC drone, like most at MSM outlets, university faculties, and ‘progressive’ politicians. The objective is to NOT hear any opposing point of view…. and in that the interviewer succeeds.
mark bofill (Comment #166611): “Here’s the meme expressing the gist of it.”
🙂
Yes, that sums it up nicely.
The attacks on the interviewer were, shall we say, a bit over enthusiastic. If you are on TV every day you are going to have a few bad hair days. Ironically her defenders declared her the victim. This is hopefully just part of a re-balancing of media excesses relating to gender lately. Peterson has become the Charles Murray of gender apparently.
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The media’s automatic reflex towards race and gender reductionism of complex social topics is tiring.
j ferguson Thanks a lot for your very detailed and interesting description of the field of architecture. I sent it to my son.
By way of background, when my son was younger he was very good with Legos. For instance, when he was 11 years old he could easily do Legos projects that were designed for 16 year olds. In the many Legos projects that he worked on, he never came close to getting stuck once. Don’t know if this is indicative of similar abilities to those shown by descriptive geometry. However, to me as a non math person it does seem to be similar.
Also, he is very sociable and organized. For instance, he has a short movie that he has written. He will also film it. . One of the first things he’s doing is setting up on team bonding meeting for this Friday. 7 students will get together with him and get acquainted, eat pizza and discuss his project. He is doing this totally through his own initiative.
As an off-topic commentary on today’s world for young people. Yesterday my son remarked that his reading is getting much faster because he has started reading more because of his film writing. His grades have been very good(over 4.0) and I had no idea that he didn’t read much.
Thanks, very much, again for your help.
JD
JD, the problem you describe is not one I would think is relegated to generations of immigrants but one that would have a tendency to occur in disadvantaged nationals. I think that attitude comes out of the playbook for encouraging government dependency by way of class warfare.
SteveF
I think chemistry, bio and physics are what should be taught in high school.The classes your wife taught were “chemistry”. Teaching it rigorously is good.
In constrast, “pre-chemical engineering” strikes me as “huh”? This isn’t going to get kids out of any future chemical engineering topic.
Basically, its things that have “pre” followed by “job name” that make me think, “huh”? JD Ohio brought up “pre-law” and “pre-architecture”. I’ve seen “pre-engineering”. (I have no idea what high school teachers think “pre-engineering” ought to cover.)
It’s difficult for anyone who reads those course names to have any idea what the course content will be.
In contrast, when the course has a topic name like “intro to philosophy: Early Greek ” or “history of Anglo-American legal system” or “Chicago architectural History”, “drafting”, “freehand drawing” or any number of much more specific titles, people know what the course covers. These courses might interest kids who are consider law, architecture or whatever and they sound like potentially useful electives that might benefit kids who are considering a range of possible future majors or professions. In contrast, “pre-architecture” sounds like something on one should take unless they are going into architecture. It’s also not at all clear what class at college it would replace.
J ferguson
See! A topic name. Actually, this class would be useful for engineers too. It’s not as critical in engineering as architecture. But I notice that physics students sometimes have trouble visualizing things and have trouble sketching things out. This becomes more troublesome when dealing with torque and rotation than other times, but is also a trouble in electrodynamics.
Some practice just looking at and representing 3 d objects on paper would help a sizable number. This is where it is a shame kids don’t take drafting or (oddly) even sewing anymore. (Pattern draping does different things from drafting, but you have to visualize what to do with flat fabric. Garment construction also requires people to assemble things and flip them around. )
I can’t say I was ever the best at visualizing 3 d– and I’m still not. But practice doing this is a good thing. If I had a kid who wanted to go into engineering, I’d try to find a summer class in something involving drawing realistic things. It would need to be for credit– it would be something at the YMCA for all I care.
Lucia,
If rigorous, high school physics might be close to “pre-engineering”.
JD, thanks. If your son is really bright as I suspect he is, he is very likely to be frustrated in architecture. Nothing will ever move fast enough and many of the problems which he would confront on an almost daily basis are repetitive and had their originators been a little smarter would have been avoided in the first place.
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One of the smartest guys I ever met in architecture was Walter Netsch who was a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago the summer I worked there. He was an MIT graduate and I suspect had become bored with work. His solution to this was to devise what came to be known as ‘field theory” the idea was that you built up this geometric array in plan using two superimposed squares one of which was rotated 45 degrees and then butt them so that the gird you created in plan was bigger than the proposed building. I cannot remember what the square dimension was – maybe 16 feet.
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The building was then laid out with the partitions on these grids so that walls could run at 90 degree angles or 45 degrees and so forth. The exterior of the building followed this scheme as well. There are at least two of these buildings at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
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I thought it was nuts. It didn’t occur to me until I too started to get bored by the whole thing that this was Walter’s way of dealing with a profession in which he’d lost interest.
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I doubt if any 16 year-old worries about winding up in a boring profession, but it happens, and happens a lot.
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Another way to keep it interesting is to be an architect in a design-build firm. Solving problems can keep it exciting. in a conventional architect-contractor relationship, you tend to be insulated from what is really going on. If you work for the contractor you’ll hear about all of them. You’d never believe how many of them originate with attempts to fool mother nature – efforts which cannot succeed without the repeal of some law of physics.
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Succeeding in a situation like this requires a pretty good grasp of engineering even if you are not able to run the numbers yourself.
In the end, I think the problems were the only thing that kept me interested. Boy were there some lulus over the years.
j ferguson: “I doubt if any 16 year-old worries about winding up in a boring profession, but it happens,”
It so happens my son does. Over the last couple of months, he has had a flurry of activity. (Including trying to sell himself as a photographer — in fact, he finagled a modeling shoot this week with a couple of teenage models simply by hustling)
A couple of days ago, he told me his motivation was that he didn’t want a 9-5 job. Luckily, I don’t have a 9-5 job and that is probably where he got his idea from. The weird thing is that when I was in college that was exactly my same motivation. However, I have never had any discussions regarding this with my son at all.
JD
The reconciliation process was used for tax reform and ObamaCare repeal, meaning 60 votes is needed to avoid a filibuster. But my reading of the Byrd rule is that they can pass a budget with just 50 votes if it doesn’t add to the deficit.
MikeN,
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But they can’t pass a budget that doesn’t add to the deficit.
Sad, sick, and wrong as that is.
*shrug*
[Edit: Well… Maybe they can. Honestly, I was thinking ‘debt’ not ‘deficit’ when I typed that.
I guess we’re passing budgets again. I’d lost track during all of those years we didn’t have one.]
SteveF,
Yes. But that’s not what a high school means when the offer a class they call a class “pre-engineering”. The problem is that real “pre-engineering” is math, physics, chemistry, enough language to write and read with understanding. Those classes are not called “pre-engineering” or “engineering”.
When a high school calls something “pre-job”, they generally means something mysterious that is supposed to teach you want that job is “all about” or some such thing. In contrast, when a college, university or trade school teaches something trains you in a profession, you usually take classes in subject matter or skills you need for that job, like chemistry, physics, math, design, drafting, garment construction, the electric code and so on. The selection of subject matter and skills are assembled to train you for the job or profession.
I tend to think colleges looking at high school applications would rather see high school classes that describe subject matter and skills (like calculus, chemistry and so on) rather than classes named things like “pre-Engineering”, “pre-Law”, “pre-Med” and so on.
Lucia, regarding pre-* high school courses, I couldn’t agree more.
Legos rule.
legos rule +1
HaroldW (Comment #166585)
“What are the views in general here regarding a path to citizenship for these people?â€
And in general, I think that immigration is a win-win situation.”
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Another dreamer.
Look, ask the American Indians.
Ask the Australian aboriginals.
Ask the Fijian locals.
Ask the Vietnamese.
Ask the British, numerous times.
Ask people at a picnic about the ants.
In general unwanted immigration is a lose-lose situation.
That’s not to say that immigrants are not nice people who deserve to be made to feel comfortable.
Particularly when they do the jobs that everyone else is to educated or too lazy or both to do.-
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You can view it from both sides.
You can put up a heart rending it’s not their fault, they live here it’s not their fault argument.
You can put up an illegal, criminal, job stealing legal argument.
People will get hurt either way and whichever way you go the other way was always right in retrospect.
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Personally I would say do not worry. Human beings are infinitely adaptable. One of the two outcomes or a blend will happen. If they are all thrown out it will make where ever they go, with their skills and aspirations brighter. If they all stay some will sink to the morass of the general American way of life but otherwise they will make America brighter.
Wherever they are in 40 years they will be better off for having had the American experience, good or bad.
–
Views expressed are strictly contrarian and bear a strange resemblance to the way someone somewhere thinks.
I wanted to say, tinkertoys ruled, not legos. But. I have to admit. My kids make cooler things with legos than I ever made with tinkertoys.
sigh
Tinkertoys! Man that is old school. I had a set of these but liked Legos better.
I think if they make at least half of immigrants merit-based the deal is done. As I understand it > 75% of (legal) immigrants are through chain migration and the diversity lottery which surprised me in a bad way. A path to legal status through the military, college graduation, or proving you actually pay taxes for a long period would be OK by me. Illegals committing a violent crime, then deport. Crimes such as DUI are debatable. Most felonies should result in deportation. Actively searching for illegals that haven’t done anything major wrong is a bad use of government resources in my view. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
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It irritates me that I have to pay to educate the children of illegals among other social services but not so much that it isn’t the right thing to do. I’d prefer to not be called a xenophobic bigot while I’m doing it.
OMG. Socially Just Science.
I didn’t actually vomit, but I feel like throwing up might make me feel better now. Being the considerate fellow I am I thought I ought to share this delight with y’all.
[Edit: “…challenges researchers to think more deeply about the political implications of their work…” Right. Look at the smashing success of climate science!]
On a different subject, can anybody tell me where and when the secret society of the FBI meets. I didn’t get the memo with the time and place, but if they #ReleaseTheMemo maybe I can rectify that.
mark bofill (Comment #166635): “OMG. Socially Just Science.
I didn’t actually vomit, but I feel like throwing up might make me feel better now.”
Having spent most of my life at universities, I guess I have a stronger stomach. I just shook my head at that.
A sociology professor once told me that she thought that science courses should make room for different “ways of knowing”. I told her that science is a way of knowing, not a collection of subject matter.
Mike M.,
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That makes me feel better, seriously. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d decided to stick with academia instead of jumping into my career, but I see now I probably wouldn’t have been able to stick with it [over the long haul. I wouldn’t have made it.] 😉
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I’ve heard that expression before, ‘different ways of knowing’. There might be something of interest in there (in examining the term ‘different ways of knowing’) that could pertain to reality in some limited context, yet the way the term is generally used I think it’s crap. What do we mean by ‘knowing’? Merely because we decide we are going to accept something as true doesn’t qualify in my book; not what ‘knowing’ means in my view.
I suspect there is more than enough #resistance in STEM to prevent a takeover by SJW’s. Who pays for these things?
It’s a bit humorous that many Democrats already assume they will win the House, the question is by how much? Perhaps this will happen but they are going down the same road they did last time.
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Here is a discussion at the NYT that shows they may be wising up:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/enough-trump-bashing-democrats.html
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“TRIPPI: The mistake is to bash citizens who are Republican — many of them want an alternative to their party. Bashing Trump and anyone who supported him doesn’t help bring these voters over.
BRUNI: So, Joe Trippi, you’re saying: “Please. No more baskets. No more deplorables.�
TRIPPI: Yes, probably the single biggest mistake — in a campaign that saw many of them — perhaps was the “deplorables.â€
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I suspect they cannot possiblly resist the temptation to call the other side immoral, but we shall see.
Tom Scharf,
” I suspect they cannot possiblly resist the temptation to call the other side immoral, but we shall see.”
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Ummmm… ya, well that is because they actually think anyone who disagrees is profoundly immoral. They are moral and intellectual midgets, and this blinds them.
So no comment on Trumps tariffs? The solar panel one is particularly silly. It won’t be quite as bad as the Bush steel tariff because the total number of jobs is smaller, but it’s still a really bad idea.
I remember back when liberals were enthusiastic about tariffs, I would say that there should be a tariff on these Chinese solar panels. Now it’s happening as they are becoming free traders.
DeWitt,
The washing machine tariff will cost the economy some efficiency, at least until Korean manufacturers are operating their plants in the USA… dumb, but not damaging like Bush’s steel tarriffs.
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The tariff on solar panels will (perversely) probably have a net positive effect on economic efficiency, because the ‘solar industry’ is broadly supported by politically motivated ‘green incentives’, without which most of it would quickly disappear. Anything which ultimately minimizes the economic damage the industry presently produces, even an import tarriff on panels, will likely end up being less costly overall. There may be some loss of jobs, which is unfortunate, but the economic reality is those people should have been doing something other than installing subsidized solar systems…. and would have been, save for subsidies.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166643)
His tariffs and views on free trade are uninformed and very counter-productive. Trade restrictions can start small and then escalate into a major trade war were everybody suffers. Politically there are more consumers than workers who supposedly are being protected by these restrictions.
I’m a librul. I don’t like tariffs. Not when they’re Trump’s. Not when they’re anybody else’s.
I am willing to make limited concessions to developing nations that are (too) reliant on key industries. But that amounts to charity, not an economic strategy.
Otherwise, tariffs are bad for citizens. They provide temporary (and usually illusory) relief for some companies. Usually companies that have other problems besides tariffs.
I believe that actually captures mainstream librul thinking. And I stand by it today.
Chinese solar cell manufacturers can do it cheaper than American companies, most of whom have already gone out of business for precisely that reason. Remember Solyndra? Will you ever let us forget Solyndra?
Some American companies persist, hoping that if they build a better mousetrap (solar cells that can convert a higher percentage of sunlight into electricity) the world will beat a path to their door. But they haven’t really done it yet.
So let the Chinese rule this low margin market until our ability to innovate changes the facts on the ground.
That’s the way this stuff is supposed to work.
Can somebody help me understand what is going on with the smoothing in this description of Mann’s Nature Trick from a comment by Jean S on Skeptical Science [I am hoping to write a post on the Steyn appellate decision dealing with the “exonerations” and this is relevant]:
….
“Jean S at 00:58 AM on 3 January, 2011
“The “trick†was a way of presenting the data in this one particular graph, namely to truncate the tree ring data at the point when it diverged.”
This is incorrect. It’s “Mike’s Nature trick”. Mike (=Michael Mann) did not truncate any tree ring data in his publications (not specifically in his infamous 1998 Nature paper). Instead the “trick” is to add instrumental temperature series to the end of the reconstruction (to the truncated reconstruction in the case of Briffa’s series) prior to smoothing. This should be clear as the sentence continues “of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s”. Finally, the effect of this “trick” is to turn the end of the smoothed series upwards (instead of downwards as they would without adding in the instrumental series), and thus “to hide the decline”. https://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm
I get the general idea that the graph would decline without the smoothing. However, I don’t understand: why does adding instrumental temperatures prior to smoothing matter? Is smoothing appropriate at all? In a basic sense, what formulas or equations are used to smooth data?
JD Ohio
PS Lucia — I have an email to you that I hope you can answer
Tim Fuller,
I normally agree that tariffs are bad (economically). In this case, maybe not (see my comment above).
JD, Mann did truncate proxy data in a paper which I believe was Mann 2008 and he replaced that data with data derived from other proxies. That is a biasing no no.
One should never combine instrumental data with proxy data since it is very important to see any divergence in the proxy data and further proxy data has much more uncertainty than the instrumental data. Proxy data must be shown from historical start to finish – otherwise it is a deception and again a biasing no no.
Even a bigger error in these proxy temperature reconstructions is selecting the proxy data to be used after the fact of looking at how it relates to the instrumental data. Cross validation can alleviate some of this problem, but the optimum solution is to determine physically realistic criteria for proxy selection before looking at the data.
JD, smoothing is OK in presenting data for graphical presentations as it theoretically removes repetitive noise. When statistical calculations are made on the smoothed data the smoothing has to be taken into account.
I have not read Jean’s postings but he has an excellent reputation in dealing with statistics. I would guess he was objecting to the (mis)use of instrumental data and not the smoothing – although some smoothing methods can produce deceptive end effects.
Or he might be objecting to the smoothing used as a cover for using instrumental data.
JD wrote: “why does adding instrumental temperatures prior to smoothing matter? Is smoothing appropriate at all? In a basic sense, what formulas or equations are used to smooth data?”
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The primary “sin” was to add the instrumental data to the proxy data in the first place. This was done purely to mislead by pretending the proxy tracked modern temperature when it didn’t.
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The smoothing is really just incidental to this fact. Normally it would simply allow you to more easily see the longer term trend of the data by suppressing short term variation ie lots of spikes vs smooth line. However, in this case, smoothing had the further beneficial effect of making sure the temperature data blended in with the proxy data, completing the illusion of one seamless dataset.
If you are doing 30 point moving window smoothing typically you will just end the data at N-30 since the filter can no longer be filled.
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If you want to show the ends of the data series there are different ways to do it. What I would typically do is perform 29 point averaging on the final 29 points, 28 point averaging on the final 28 points, etc. It gets more complicated with frequency filtering and so forth.
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There is not really any “correct” way to do it, it depends on what the data represents and your goal. Very close to the bottom of all answers is to substitute in a different data set and not indicate this was done in any way. However I have been informed that this is normal and not deceptive in certain science disciplines, ha ha.
Tariffs are appropriate in some cases. If it can be established that a country is cheating then it is appropriate. An example of this was when the Japanese were dumping RAM chips on the US market below market price in order to force US manufacturers out of business, which basically worked as most US companies dropped out of the market.
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/25/business/us-reaffirms-japan-chip-dumping.html
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Cheating is in the eye of the beholder in international trade I would guess.
>cost the economy some efficiency, at least until Korean manufacturers are operating their plants in the USA… dumb,
I think it is better to sacrifice some efficiency to have plants operating in the USA.
>So let the Chinese rule this low margin market until our ability to innovate changes the facts on the ground.
If America develops a better solar cell, it will still be cheaper to produce it in China, so the company will produce there. Unless they realize that any manufacturing they send there will be copied by the Chinese and they will lose the market after a decade.
JD, first note that Skeptical Science edited the post after Jean’s comment with no notice.
There are different types of smoothing, but let’s say it’s a rolling average of 10 years before, 10 years after and the same year’s value. By adding in instrumental values, and then smoothing, you are changing the last ten data points of the proxy value.
Free trade produced open borders. In 1993, Harry Reid sounded like Donald Trump on illegal immigration, saying they’re using welfare and that it is an even worse deal than that with birthright citizenship. With manufacturing in decline, SEIU and government workers dominated Big Labor, and now Democrats support amnesty.
Mike N: “There are different types of smoothing, but let’s say it’s a rolling average of 10 years before, 10 years after and the same year’s value. By adding in instrumental values, and then smoothing, you are changing the last ten data points of the proxy value.”
…..
My question here is how are you changing the last 10 data points. My interpretation of Jean S’s comment was that something surreptitious was done separate and apart from the obvious issue with splicing two different data sets together.
Mann’s explanation, which is partly correct, is that before his work was posted it was well known in the literature that tree proxies didn’t work well after around 1960. He also did disclose it in some of the work he did. (Not disclosed in the WMO diagrams for which he wasn’t directly responsible for, but which he approved of in his CV)
To me, so far, the most serious problem with the splicing is that it calls into question the older proxies. Virtually no one is disputing that there was some warming in the 20th century so tree proxies showing a decline are obviously wrong.
My more particular issue here is whether the smoothing substantially changed the spliced graph to make it more misleading. That is the take I got from the Jean S comment. If that isn’t the case, I can move on to other issues. [Turns out that Muller at 3:40 explains it. Without smoothing you would notice an abrupt change. Figured this out while writing the comment after it was almost all done.]
After reading Jean S, it does appear that Richard Muller got the basic facts wrong in Muller’s youtube video. (other than his observation on smoothing) See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuqjX4UeBYs about 3:52 in the video. Without an explanation the graph is misleading. However, it would have been equally misleading to use tree proxies after 1960 when virtually everyone agrees they are wrong.
Mike N: Skeptical Science changed their post after Jean S posting. Could you please supply link or proof please?
JD
Free trade to a libertarian is trade that avoids government involvement . For example if the EU were for real free trade would trade with Great Britain depend on GB being in the EU. Forming larger groups with free trade amongst the group and restrictions outside the group is not free trade.
In addition if a nation wants to subsidize their trade with the US they are in effect subsidizing the US consumer. Why not take advantage of that situation. It cannot last forever.
JD, if you cannot use the proxies after 1960 what makes you think the proxies were reacting correctly to temperature prior to 1960. An honest approach would at least remove all that proxy data.
What you are looking at is the problem of post facto selection of proxy data carried to an extreme where some people can see the problem, but a lot of people including climate scientists evidently cannot. Your in the company of a lot of people observing climate from all sides that are confused by these issues.
JD,
Let’s take a block of 1900-1980 data points D1900-D1980.
We will report from 1910 with smoothing.
How you do the smoothing will change 1900-1910 and 1970 -1980.
So 1910 = 1/21*sum(D1900..1920)
1970=1/21*sum(D1960..1980)
Now by adding in instrumental temperatures from 1981 on,
the 1971 smoothed data point will become 1/21*(sum(D1961..D1980)+T1981)
1972 is 1/21*(sum(D1962..D1980)+sum(T1981,T1982))
and so on.
>most serious problem with the splicing is that it calls into question the older proxies. Virtually no one is disputing that there was some warming in the 20th century so tree proxies showing a decline are obviously wrong.
Yes. However, I think Mike’s Nature Trick is just part of Mann’s bag of tricks to enhance the alarmist narrative. Use of red for current temperatures to hide proxies underneath the instrumental for example.
1960 refers to Briifa’s truncation, not Mann’s. This is where a semantic dispute comes in.
It is ‘I’ve used Mike’s Nature Trick to hide the decline’ or ‘from 1960 for Briffa to hide the decline’?
There was a chart in 2008 showing the effect of adding in instrumental on the WMO graph at UEA’s site. I don’t think it was a substantial effect for Mann’s papers, but I’m not sure.
Kenneth,
I think climate scientists can see the problem, but are a) loath to discard the “it’s never been this warm” meme, and b) those who do tree ring reconstructions have too much invested to simply walk away from a field that is probably little more than rubbish. Imagine you have a doctorate and most of a lifetime in a field that is found to be nonsense…. there is going to be a huge amount of pushback to avoid admitting the obvious.
JD,
Let’s take a block of 1900-1980 data points D1900-D1980.
We will report from 1910 with smoothing.
How you do the smoothing will change 1900-1910 and 1970 -1980.
Removing parentheses in attempt to avoid moderation:
So 1910 = 1/21*sum D1900 .. 1920
1970=1/21*sum D1960 .. 1980
Now by adding in instrumental temperatures from 1981 on,
the 1971 smoothed data point will become 1/21* sum D1961..D1980 + T1981
1972 is 1/21*sumD1962..D1980+sumT1981,T1982
and so on.
>most serious problem with the splicing is that it calls into question the older proxies. Virtually no one is disputing that there was some warming in the 20th century so tree proxies showing a decline are obviously wrong.
Yes. However, I think Mike’s Nature Trick is just part of Mann’s bag of tricks to enhance the alarmist narrative. Use of red for current temperatures to hide proxies underneath the instrumental for example.
1960 refers to Briifa’s truncation, not Mann’s. This is where a semantic dispute comes in.
It is ‘I’ve used Mike’s Nature Trick to hide the decline’ or ‘from 1960 for Briffa to hide the decline’?
There was a chart in 2008 showing the effect of adding in instrumental on the WMO graph at UEA’s site. I don’t think it was a substantial effect for Mann’s papers, but I’m not sure.
KF: “JD, if you cannot use the proxies after 1960 what makes you think the proxies were reacting correctly to temperature prior to 1960. An honest approach would at least remove all that proxy data.”
I pretty much agree with that. In fact, I said “To me, so far, the most serious problem with the splicing is that it calls into question the older proxies.” If the older proxies (by implication from the current proxies showing declines in temperatures) are no good, you can’t compare today’s temperatures to those 1,000 years ago. Thus, the statements about recent temperatures being the highest in 1000 years (the speakers conveniently leave out by something like1/20 of a degree) are bogus. So, Mann and others are attempting to deceive/gloss over the serious problems with tree ring proxies.
On the other hand, what confuses a lot of people is the “hide the decline” language which refers to the decline shown by tree rings recently and not an actual decline in temperatures, which is the natural first impression of most people.
JD
Yes, that’s the first impression. I don’t mind defending it, since the proxies are proxies for temperature, so if they were hiding a decline in the proxies…
Jon Stewart had the best summary:
Trick is just a word used by scientists to mean a clever technique to — trick you, into not knowing about the decline.
You have to scale tree ring data to the temperature record, Mann trained/modeled the tree ring data over a time period in the 20th century with the instrumental record. When further tree ring data was taken it was shown using the Mann model/tree rings diverged from the observational temperature record. That is the most serious problem with the entire enterprise (of course it matched the time period it was trained on!). When it was given the opportunity to be predictive it failed. If it cannot reliably predict forwards, what makes one think it can reliably predict backwards?
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From a signal processing perspective they also appended high frequency / high resolution data onto low resolution / low frequency data and found that stuff on the end sure is changing faster! Alarm! The solid black line probably has effective averaging on it of a least 100 years. Sharp temperature spikes in the past would have been significantly flattened by the algorithm.
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All of this doesn’t meed this trend is wrong, it may in fact be correct. There is just no particular reason to believe it is accurate and it only represent one of many possibilities.
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The accuracy was oversold for political purposes. The only thing that really bothers me is how the climate science community en masse failed to do the right thing when it was exposed. Environmentalism >> math.
The Streisand Effect. This is the same guy Lindsay Shepherd was hauled in front of the diversity inquisition and told was banned.
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WSJ today: Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-jordan-peterson-1516925574
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NYT today: The Jordan Peterson Moment
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html
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Hope he doesn’t have skeletons in his closet, because the usual suspects will likely go into turbo mode on character assassination now.
MikeN,
Manufacturing isn’t in decline in the US. We make more stuff in the US now than we did twenty years ago. Manufacturing employment, however, is in decline. Automation is probably a major reason for this. The idea that tariffs and other restrictions on trade will somehow overcome this trend is fatuous. Any new plants that might eventually be built as a result of trade restrictions will be highly automated and won’t create many new jobs.
We also haven’t seen the other shoe drop yet. How many US jobs will be lost when the inevitable retaliatory foreign tariffs are imposed? IMO, far more than any hypothetical future new jobs and the job losses will be immediate. Smoot-Hawley was supposed to protect US farmers from foreign competition, among other things. They went bankrupt because they lost their export sales, taking a lot of banks with them.
Regardless of trade theory there is a problem with the widening economic gap between low skill workers and high skill workers. Low skill workers get to vote. If you make their lives miserable enough they will eventually force bad trade policy as a blunt tool in an attempt to fix the problem themselves. Perhaps it is the wrong solution, but they are going to be willing to take that risk because they have much less to lose than the knowledge class.
If you removed automation there would be more jobs. Strong unions would force socks to cost $10 instead of $1. Sure, low skilled workers would also have to pay $10 for socks, etc. etc. You can bring these jobs back, it’s just that the knowledge class is completely unwilling to make any sacrifice. They like their high paying robot design / repair jobs. Trust us, all those factories moving to Mexico is a good thing! You can buy toys real cheap at Walmart with your welfare check! The knowledge class better start explaining trade theory a lot better than they have, because low skilled workers no longer trust them and I’m not sure they should trust them anymore.
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So what to do? Nothing? I think it is important to get beyond trade theory and ask yourself what would too much globalization look like? Is too much even a possibility? Consider an extreme where it’s most efficient for 10 people to run the economy selling their anti-gravity machines and distributing the wealth to the rest of the citizens who do nothing. Is that an ideal society? People want respect and satisfaction in their lives, they like raising a family and feeling like they are contributing. Promised welfare from the knowledge class looks like dystopia to them in this view.
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Obviously we aren’t there yet, but it is heading that direction for low skilled workers in the US. Overly efficient trade may lead to social upheaval. It’s not a one dimensional problem.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166669): “Manufacturing isn’t in decline in the US. We make more stuff in the US now than we did twenty years ago. Manufacturing employment, however, is in decline. Automation is probably a major reason for this. The idea that tariffs and other restrictions on trade will somehow overcome this trend is fatuous.”
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That misstates the issue. When jobs are replaced by automation, overall productivity rises, even if the displaced workers end up in low productivity jobs. When workers are displaced by trade, productivity only rises if the workers find new work that is more productive than their old work. That has plainly not been happening. So trade (actually, just some trade) has been reducing U.S. productivity compared to what it otherwise would be. That is harmful to the U.S. economy.
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The argument that the U.S. benefits from being able to import cheap goods was demolished by Ricardo 200 years ago. He showed that the relative price of imported and domestic goods is irrelevant. The benefits of trade accrue by allowing domestic resources to be employed more productively. If domestic resources are employed less productively, trade is damaging. People being put of of good jobs and ending up unemployed or underemployed is a less productive use of resources. Trade that results in that is damaging to the U.S. economy.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166669): “How many US jobs will be lost when the inevitable retaliatory foreign tariffs are imposed?”
That bogeyman supposedly hiding under the bed does not worry me at all. Countries that benefit more than we do from trade are not going to start or expand a trade war.
Mike M.,
Trump has already fired the first shots. You’re making the questionable assumption that the other actors are rational.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166673): “Trump has already fired the first shots. You’re making the questionable assumption that the other actors are rational.”
Trump has not yet done anything that is even a tiny bit unusual, as anyone from Canada could tell you.
Globalization is a thin reed to support the decoupling of productivity from employee compensation. This, IMO, is the elephant in the room:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_wages#/media/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_wages
The Fed with its ZIRP and Quantitative Easing has been a major aid in this process recently, no-trickle-down economics on steroids.
This excellent video from the Harvard Business Review has a compelling explanation about the decoupling of productivity and compensation: https://hbr.org/video/4102770682001/the-problem-with-stock-buybacks
SteveF,
I think hooking up home solar systems to the grid makes as much sense as asking the galley slaves to excahnge their oars for outboard motors.
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I can’t believe that the cost to the utilities in under-utilized capital investment in capacity and the maintenance wear and tear of keeping each of these systems as on-line as their agreements require is not much more than the value of the power they get from them. in addition to the cost the rest of us share in the tax incentives, we bear sooner or later our share in the inefficiencies suspected above.
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Was there some other aspect to this that I didn’t cover above?
DeWitt, most of these other countries that supposedly will put in place retaliatory tariffs, are currently operating with high tariffs on American goods. I assume Mexico does, but India will place stiff tariffs on foreign goods to encourage manufacturing to be placed in the country. Corolla is $30,000+, and Camry starts at $50,000. China does the same. I don’t know if it’s still true, but for awhile there were stories that Japanese would take flights to Hawaii to buy Japanese electronics. They don’t operate with the Milton Friedman idea that having no tariffs is a good thing as we are now exchanging goods for pieces of paper, and if other countries subsidize their exports to undercut domestic companies then we should send them a thank you note.
MikeN,
You have to be careful not to confuse very high consumption taxes with tariffs. There are many countries where consumption taxes (value added taxes and many others) boost the cost to the consummer by a huge amount: 50-100% is not uncommon. So for example, in Brazil there are punative taxes on imported electronics, but the same, or nearly the same punative taxes on locally produced electronics. So most everything in Brazil, save for unprocessed foods, is very expensive compared to US prices. There ARE of course many places which impose tariffs to limit or exclude foreign competition, and unfortunately, that includes the USA (e.g. sugar tariffs and quotas, lumber).
But most of the really high prices I have seen around the world are due mainly to very high consumption taxes, and much less to tariffs. I have even seen cases where it is unlawful for a retail merchant to disclose to the public the actual cost breakdown, which would make clear to the public the true level of taxation.
J ferguson,
Yes, the power generated for solar installations is not sufficient to cover the cost of capital and maintenance. The power companies only ‘invest’ in them because they receive subsidies, or because solar energy production is politically mandated, and the cost passed on to consummers.
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Mostly it is the same for wind; investment in wind generation is driven mainly by subsidies. Take those away and most of the investment will dry up. It is all very, very stoooopid.
Owen,
That you think that is an excellent video says far more about your political views than about the video… or economics.
SteveF (Comment #166680): “You have to be careful not to confuse very high consumption taxes with tariffs.”
But consumption taxes have much the same effect as tariffs. In a country that relies on consumption tax, domestic producers only pay tax on what they sell domestically, not on what they export. But in the U.S., producers pay our taxes on production for both export and domestic markets. Then the other country’s consumption taxes are added to what they export.
So when a foreign producer exports to the U.S., they pay little tax in either country. When a U.S. producer exports, they pay substantial tax in both countries. Effectively the same as the foreign country charging a tariff and the U.S. being duty free. And we call that “free trade”. Dumb.
SteveF,
“That you think that is an excellent video says far more about your political views than about the video… or economics.”
The data, collected over a decade from the S&P 500 companies, shows that increasing levels of expenditure (of corporate profits) on stock buy-backs are accompanied by decreasing levels of re-investment in the companies themselves.
Owen,
I watched the whole silly video before my earlier comment; I know what it said. The video is 100% politics and 0% economics; it’s nonsense.
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There are many reasons why blue-collar wages have stagnated over the past 25+ years: stiff competition from low-wage countries, ever advancing (and ever lower cost) automation that eliminates many production jobs in the USA, a constant flow of low skill immigrants who compete for low-skill jobs and drive down wages, disadvantageous corporate tax rates, onerous environmental and financial regulations, etc.
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That companies have dedicated more profits towards stock buy-backs rather than making capital investment is mainly a symptom of many of the problems, not a cause. The video represents a distillation of the very worst of the wrong-headed economic ideas advanced during 8 years of the Obama administration. If the suggestion that companies be “forced” (yes, that was the word used in the video) to “invest” in ways that make no economic sense were actually followed, then the economic damage would be only worse. Yes, those crazy ideas would make for greater “equality”… everyone a little more equal, and everyone a lot poorer. I note that forcing people (and businesses) to do things they don’t want to do is a common thread for nearly all ‘progressive’ policies. I don’t see much ‘progress’ in forcing people to act against what they believe is their own best interest.
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Watch what happens to corporate investment and hourly wages over the next three years.
Mike M.,
Yes, many US companies have faced difficult conditions and so been at a competitive disadvantage compared to companies operating on other countries: Very low wages in some other countries, onerous environmental and financial regulations, and the world’s highest corporate tax rate. Trump’s efforts to reduce regulations, and the new 21% corporate rate, will make US companies, and US based production, much more attractive.
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But that doesn’t have anything to do with consumption taxes. If consumption taxes are applied uniformly to both domestic and foreign products, they have no impact on the relative competitive positions of foreign and domestic producers. Tariffs do.
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High consumption taxes are a fact of life in all high-tax countries, including most countries in Europe, where those taxes represent a substantial fraction of GDP, used by government to promote greater “equality”. More tragic is high consumption taxes in poorer countries, where those high taxes impoverish people who are already quite poor, mainly to support bureaucrats and politicians who are not, thereby promoting greater inequality.
SteveF (Comment #166686): “If consumption taxes are applied uniformly to both domestic and foreign products, they have no impact on the relative competitive positions of foreign and domestic producers.”
That is only true if both countries rely on consumption taxes. If not, then they work like a tariff.
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Elaboration: If the U.S. replaced a payroll tax like FICA with a VAT, taxes paid by American companies would stay the same for domestic products and go down on exports. Taxes on imports would go up.
Mike M,
“That is only true if both countries rely on consumption taxes. If not, then they work like a tariff.”
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No, I don’t think that is correct. The fundamental issue is the overall conditions under which companies operate, not how a specific country raises tax revenue. Suppose there were zero income tax on companies in the USA, and all income came instead from individual income taxes. US companies would then be in a very favorable competitive position compared to companies in countries with higher corporate taxes, even if those other countries utilized a (uniformly applied) high consumption tax but had zero personal income tax.
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Elaboration: the company portion of FICA is a corporate tax, and one that is even more damaging than the corporate income tax; of course eliminating that corporate tax and substituting a tax on individuals (a VAT, national sales tax, or other) would improve the competitive position of US companies!
With the current economy and the lowest unemployment in decades there should be wage pressure. If this keeps up and the bottom half doesn’t see improvement then the system is broken somehow, and I’m not sure why. Maybe the Illuminati want it that way, although I think they are focused on tacos now, maybe they have a Mexican bias, ha ha.
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Market forces may ultimately solve the problem, but I’ve been waiting for this to happen for over ten years now.
The iron law of “far left speech is tolerated, far right speech is banned” continues. A bit of psychological projection here.
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The dirty war over diversity inside Google
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-war-over-diversity-inside-google/
“As the internal debate raged in the wake of Damore’s memo, McMillen says that he knows of at least 10 coworkers who were called into HR for making political statements related to the document, with consequences ranging from verbal warnings to a reduced performance-review score. McMillen was told by HR not to do anything hiring or promotion related for a year. Altman got a verbal warning for writing on an internal board that certain employees should be fired. “I meant only bigoted white men should be fired. They interpreted it as applying to all white men,†Altman says”
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This just begs the question of why bigoted women or bigoted men of other races should not be fired. This thing jumped the shark long ago. The lesson here is you need to nip diversity wars in the workplace in the bud.
This has been beaten to death, but it’s fun anyway.
NYT, OCT. 31, 2016
“The conventional wisdom is that, right off the bat, the stock market would fall precipitously. Simon Johnson, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, posited that Mr. Trump’s presidency would “likely cause the stock market to crash and plunge the world into recession.â€
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NYT, Today
“Every major economy on earth is expanding at once, a synchronous wave of growth that is creating jobs, lifting fortunes and tempering fears of popular discontent.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/business/its-not-a-roar-but-the-global-economy-is-finally-making-noise.html
The comments are a hoot, most readers interpret this as horrible news.
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And from the land of the hard to believe, U.S. oil production is expected this year to surpass Saudi Arabia’s output. For those of us who lived through the 1970’s energy crisis this is crazy talk.
Tom Scharf,
The Wired reporting is standard ‘progressive’ drivel, and disconnected from what actually happened with Damore. As Megan McArdle has already noted, this may not end well for Google. The sensible path forward in terms of protecting the business (eg. making political advocacy explicitly off-limits inside the company) is not what Google’s founders want. This may end up being a costly path for Alphabet’s non-insider shareholders. The founders retain ~60% of voting shares, even though the investing public holds a very large majority of the company’s market value…. the founders will control the company indefinitely, even if they hurt the stock price and outside investors lose money.
Tom Scharf,
“And from the land of the hard to believe, U.S. oil production is expected this year to surpass Saudi Arabia’s output. For those of us who lived through the 1970’s energy crisis this is crazy talk.”
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Technological advances have consequences.
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At current prices ($66 per barrel/WTI), fracking rigs can make a lot of money. Count on US production to easily pass Saudi Arabia this year. The Saudi’s could cut back on production more than they already have to try to maintain the current market price, but I don’t know if they can afford that in the long term. The strangest thing to me is that natural gas pricing (again, driven down by fracking) remains at the thermal equivalent of ~$21 per barrel crude oil…. I am astounded there has not been a move to convert more vehicles to natural gas. Lower CO2 emissions to boot! 😉
A friend sent me this.
His comment: “We’re doomed.”
It reminds me a lot of the fake article that got published in a real liberal arts journal, except I’m pretty sure this was a real event.
SteveF,
“There are many reasons why blue-collar wages have stagnated over the past 25+ years: stiff competition from low-wage countries, ever advancing (and ever lower cost) automation that eliminates many production jobs in the USA, a constant flow of low skill immigrants who compete for low-skill jobs and drive down wages, disadvantageous corporate tax rates, onerous environmental and financial regulations, etc.”
Sounds like US businesses are really struggling, with all those negatives, especially having had to endure Obama as president, how can they possibly increase worker salaries? Take a look of corporate profits in the last decade or so – the highest in 70 years: http://blogs.reuters.com/macroscope/files/2014/01/corpprofit-1.jpg
The Harvard Business Review study is spot on, all of your fulminations notwithstanding.
SteveF,
“Watch what happens to corporate investment and hourly wages over the next three years.”
They dammm well better invest in their companies and in their workers – with an incredible windfall tax break on top of already high profits. Many CEOs have already said, however, that much of the windfall will go into stock buy backs, with token bonuses to workers and little in the way of higher salaries.
CEO’s and the rest of upper management excepted. The brave and difficult decision to buy back more company stock must be rewarded handsomely. /sarc
DeWitt,
Thanks much for sharing that amazing notice (advertisement?) I wonder if the writer was confused by the tenet v tenant choice.
I don’t know about you, but this is the sort of thing that would make me reach for my gun … if I still had one.
SteveF, many countries may have that, but others have the high tariff rates. I’ve seen high gas taxes in India, but locally made cars are much cheaper.
Businesses are going to pay the salaries that the market forces them too. I wouldn’t expect them to do it on their good graces, although I assume it’s possible in some cases. Nothing forces them to raise wages faster than their good employees leaving for better wages elsewhere. The lack of bargaining power is a big problem, and if unions hadn’t become so corrupted that would be a good idea. Unions 2.0 would be useful. Realistically the other side of this is a NY subway costing $3.5B per mile, 7x the cost of anywhere else in the world. When one side has too much power corruption seems to inevitably occur. Let’s hope this problem is self resolving without the heavy hand of government.
Tom,
Here’s a quote from a newsletter I received about the problems with GDP as currently calculated as a measure of economic activity (there are many):
Revitalized unions might be part of that backlash.
Google’s Eric Schmidt was planning Hillary’s campaign in 2014. I doubt he will be involved in depoliticizing the company or its searches.
You guys might want to look at this chart from FRED when discussing corporate profits:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W273RE1A156NBEA
There is little doubt in my mind that during the Obama years and due partly to regulations and uncertainties from the great recession that many businesses put off capital expenditures. Certainly productivity has fallen off and it is productivity that requires capital investments and drives wages and salaries. That slow down in investment could also have alleviated the price inflation to be expected from loose monetary policies – at least for the time being.
Further improvement in productivity will increase our standard of living. It can also increase wages and salaries for those who have the proper skills or can readily acquire those skills.
Kenneth,
Unfortunately, since the 1970’s through at least 2008, productivity has been decoupled from wages in manufacturing. Here’s the graph from the US BLS via wikipedia that I posted above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_wages#/media/File:US_productivity_and_real_wages.jpg
DeWitt,
Sure. Manufacturing has become more dependent on automation (and the knowledge to support it) and less dependent on production labor. If you look at where businesses spend money on wages, it is clear that “knowledge workers” income remains more tightly linked to productivity. One example: wages for chemical engineers has increased in real terms for decades, while production workers in the chemical industry have been standing still at best. The further down the knowledge ladder you go, the worse off you have become. Combine automation with competition in manufacturing from very low wage countries, and the value of production labor in the States is bound to stagnate or fall. It is a very big problem, because many people are either incapable of, or uninterested in, learning STEM.
Owen,
The rise in corporate profits has been driven in large part by zero or near zero effective interest rates for large companies. Large US companies hold about $5 trillion in debt, with most of that accumulated in the last decade. They have been paying essentially nothing for this money. With regard to stock buy-backs: do you suppose the money paid for the stock is taken to a large incinerator and burned, or do you think it is used elsewhere?
Bizarre and entertaining news, SpaceX will be launching a Tesla into deep space next week on board the new Falcon heavy launch vehicle. I’m guessing they are going to take out the battery first. One can only imagine what some aliens will think when they find this drifting through space a million years from now.
Tom Scharf,
The reaction might be: what strange creatures must have done this…. maybe some kind of religious worship.
SteveF
Assuming this was a real question….
Of COURSE! Everyone knows that when shareholders make money from stock sales or even just get back the money they put into stocks, they put the money in an incinerator and burn it.
In contrast, when shareholders are paid dividends they use that money to invest in businesses where people who get that money will reinvest in things that might employ other people or buy things that other people might make.
Or maybe that’s just me. I mean, I always throw money I got from stock buy backs into an incinerator. It’s not good for anything else.
This is just as Owen’s video suggested. It’s all very simple yah see….
Oh. And of course, the only really good thing to do with profits is to pay it to the people who work on factory floors. No point in paying it to management, people who design the things that are made on the the factory floor, or to…. heaven forbid, the people (shareholders or lenders) who invested money to build the factory in the first place. The latter should definitely just spend money to build factories out of the goodness of their hearts and never, ever, see any profit on that investment. Cuz we know if the shareholers get their money back, or worse yet, make a profit, they will just put every dollar in an incinerator, while the factory workers would have done something useful like buy an SUV which will result in another factory worker getting paid.
(Note: It was not a real question. )
SteveF,
Stock buybacks are evidence of management incompetence. If they were any good, they would have more productive things to do with the money. The point is that upper management compensation has increased far faster than for any other level of employee. They pay themselves a lot because they can.
DeWitt,
“They pay themselves a lot because they can.”
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Sure, there is a lot of “foxes in charge of the hen house” going on, but that is a corporate governance issue.
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If you base compensation on stock price, then managers will do most anything to raise stock price. The real problem is that many shareholders want large stock price increases, not long term organic growth (which requires investment and patience). There have to be good reasons Warren Buffet has outperformed the S&P500 for most of his life, and I suspect one of those reasons is a willingness to make a long term investment in companies with growth potential.
SteveF,
Exactly my point. It has nothing to do with globalization and trade imbalances.
Lucia,
“This is just as Owen’s video suggested. It’s all very simple yah see…”
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I was poking fun at the video, of course. The bigger point is that the video is basically arguing that shareholders should not pocket profits (via dividends or stock buy-backs), they should be FORCED to 1) invest it to grow their business, and most of all, 2) increase compensation for the company employees. It is nothing but Obama’s “you didn’t build that” rubbish dressed up as an academic argument: the public really owns everything, and individuals do not.
DeWitt,
” It has nothing to do with globalization and trade imbalances.”
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Ummm… I respectfully disagree. Investment decisions are certainly influenced by those things, and lead to very bad investments if they are ignored (Solyndra, for example). Investment decisions are also influenced by corporate tax rates and regulatory costs. A trillion or so in overseas held cash, which will be repatriated soon, will go to many things, including stock buy-backs, but some will also go to capital investment due to a more business friendly environment.
SteveF,
Of course the idea that all profits should be plowed back into either (a) growing the business or (b) compensation is absurd and seen pretty easily.
There are all sorts of businesses, including small family businesses.
Say, farm is owned by a 70 year old retired farmer John who shells out for farming equipment, seed, some buildings and so on. He then hires hands to run operations.
There is no reason for him to “grow” the farm. It doesn’t make sense that he has to pay out all profits to employees nor even to say that’s the only “good” thing he can do.
(If one even wanted to begin to make the argument that growing the farm or paying all profits to employees are the only good things, they would need to admit that in this case, employees should also be required cover losses should they occur. And by “cover” I mean actually fork over $$ to the farmer, not merely lose their jobs. Employees don’t do this. And, perhaps, to be really fair, we would require employees who worked for Farmer John in “good” years to cover losses from “bad” years. We could keep track of the ones who leave and work for someone else and send them bills. , those who only work for Farmer John in good years are free riders on those who cover losses in “bad” years.)
If course, if we decree Farmer John can only use profits to grow the farm or pay employees, then Farmer John couldn’t have a stream of retirement income from the farm he owns because he no longer works there. Then if John wanted to eat, live in (an pay real estate taxes on) a house and so on, he would need to do something like
(a) sell the farm to someone else (who is not allowed to make any money off it) and then invest the money (somewhere) and live off something other than than profits from things anyone owns. (Where that money magically appears from is a mystery to me),
(b) continue to work until the day he dies or
(c) rely on a government to transfer money from currently working people to him. (Which some people would like. But maybe he doesn’t think all 70 year old people should be required to live on exactly the same amount of income.)
There may be other notions of how John might be allowed to have enough money to eat after retiring farming at 70 years old. But someone would really need to explain those notions. Because there are consequences to anyone simply decreeing there is something wrong with owners getting a share of profits earned from businesses they own. Those consequences don’t magically vanish just because a movie like the one Owen linked doesn’t discuss the consequences associated with their vision of what is “right” and instead simply decrees owners getting a share of profits is a bad thing.
The fact is: if there is something inherently wrong with owners getting some cut of profits, then no sane person would ever invest in anything. Because all businesses would be money pits for the owners and investors. I realize some people don’t like capitalism and do want all production to be in the hands of “the workers” which inevitably translates into “the government”. But if they like that, they should just say so.
As it happens: our system which is fundamentally capitalist does allow workers to decide to jointly own the businesses they work for. The fact is most don’t want to own the business they work for. They want to own something else. (That could mean they want to own a house. It could mean they want to diversify and own stock in a company in a different business so their wealth doesn’t vanish when their job does.)
The system has a good model, those who demonstrate they can manage money and businesses successfully get more opportunities for more of the same. There are distorting influences that make this system operate less efficiently and most of these distortions are bad, but not all of them. Businesses could collude with each other to artificially limit worker pay and benefits for example. In theory workers in this industry would leave for better pastures, but in one company towns this is much harder. Government has a role to make it a fair marketplace for both workers and companies.
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One can imagine where workers collude to keep salaries artificially high, such as public sector unions, ha ha.
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A weakness in this system is businesses colluding with government to enrich each other with power and money.
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I have never forgotten seeing an old cartoon teach the basics of business:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOX0_FUGM6k
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Shameless capitalism indoctrination by Elmer Fudd.
Tom Scharf
This is why it’s important to allow people to move.
Admittedly, it’s not always easy to move. People own houses, families tend to be support networks and moving often means losing some of that. But political and economic systems shouldn’t impede moving.
Serfdom and slavery were not economically efficient. (Admittedly, the economic inefficiency was hardly their major flaw. But the bigger flaws don’t wash away the smaller ones.)
Decent discussion here of productivity and wage gaps:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/below-trend-the-us-productivity-slowdown-since-the-great-recession.pdf
At the risk as being seen as sucking up to the blog hostess here I have to commend Lucia on her last two posts in this thread. The first for digging deeper into a question that for some at first glance might appear to have a simple – but wrong answer and the second for pointing out that in the extreme slavery and serfdom are impediments for relocation and that we need to stay as far away from those conditions as possible.
SteveF,
I question whether the vast expansion of CEO pay since the 1970’s qualifies as an investment decision, much less a wise one. Solyndra is an irrelevant example. I doubt there is direct collusion on CEO compensation, but I believe there is indirect collusion, since CEO compensation in a publicly held company is in the public record. There’s been a definite ratchet effect. We’re talking a 930% increase since 1978.
http://fortune.com/2017/07/20/ceo-pay-ratio-2016/
This is the type of thing that would get a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren elected to President of the US.
“our system which is fundamentally capitalist does allow workers to decide to jointly own the businesses they work for.”
The does allow is a wriggle word loophole.
Like the ECS does allow a rise of 20 C for a doubling of CO2.
Could, might , possibly etc.
I see these arguments all the time, I make them when I am careless.
Yes, the system does allow change.
But every bias in the system prevents it.
Old men drive open sports cars, probably a few of them here.
Young men have to work in their millions at drudgery for the Howard Hughes of the world.
Short of being a young, very lucky Megan Markle the same for most average young women in the world.
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I guess we all like to imagine the system we are in is fantastic but the people who write here are the lucky ones (they would say clever, careful or intelligent).
A serf or slave system does not have to worry or care about economic growth so no point in comparing the two that way.
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Productivity and wage gaps all true but do we really have a halcyon goal or percentage to aim at?
Some do.
Worth being aware of.
Can we ever be in control?
No, just an illusion.
angech
I don’t think it’s a loophole. Some businesses are largely owned by the workers. It’s not common, but, for example: united. https://www.nceo.org/observations-employee-ownership/c/united-airlines-esops-employee-ownership
Usually, worker owned businesses are smaller than United. It happens.
Most people don’t want to own the business that employs them though. I can’t see how a system that forced employees to buy into a business would be better than one that lets them do so.
Angech,
I write here. I’m not careful, clever, or intelligent. Just ask anyone here. Just saying.
I mean, take this pointless response I’m typing…
DeWitt,
Yes, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and a gaggle of other upper level managers at large companies have increased their income wildly out of line compared to other employees. This is mostly due to a variety of stock incentives; their base salaries are very high, but the majority of their compensation is stock based. So upper managers are focused on raising stock price. If the shareholders are unhappy with this, they can vote against management. They very rarely do.
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In other news, the much hyped
FISA abuse memo will be made public, and McCabe steps down early. I wonder if the events are connected.
angech (Comment #166723)
Perhaps if you gave an alternative for overturning your somewhat miasmic view of the world we could discuss it. I would suggest that you might condemn some ones’ view of democracy because not everyone votes – not that I am a fan of a pure democracy.
Mark Bofill, Wray saw the memo over the weekend, and then McCabe was pushed out the next day.
Before that, Mike Rogers visited Trump, and the next day Trump transition team was moved to New Jersey and out of Trump Tower.
It looks like FBI lied about what Steele told them, so Grassley made a criminal referral about Steele to DOJ. He is forcing FBI to acknowledge the discrepancy.
Yup.
Yup.
Could be. It’s ambiguous to me whether or not Steele was really the culprit rather than the FBI.
Mike,
It’s unknown what specifically Steele is thought to have lied to the FBI about, correct? Do you know of anything that sheds light on this? Real questions.
[Edit: Oh, I missed this. making false claims to the FBI about speaking to the press about the dossier claims is what the referral says.]
[Edit2: Okay. I understand now (I think) why you said that about Grassley. Could be.]
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166722): “I question whether the vast expansion of CEO pay since the 1970’s qualifies as an investment decision, much less a wise one.”
Well, if you have a company with $50 billion a year in sales and if a good CEO can increase the profit margin from 10% to 11%, then one could argue that the CEO is worth $500 million per year. How many CEO’s can actually do that, I don’t know.
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DeWitt: “We’re talking a 930% increase since 1978.”
I don’t how the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker’s pay is relevant, especially if companies have increased in size. I have seen it claimed that the ratio of CEO pay to company profits has been roughly constant for the last 40-50 years. Unfortunately, I no longer have the reference on that.
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My gut tells me that top executive pay has become excessive. But my gut has been known to be wrong. Of course there have been egregious cases of a company losing money, cutting employee pay, and the CEO getting a huge bonus. I am inclined to trust my gut in such cases.
MikeM
Hardly. It doesn’t make sense that every single extra penny in additional profit margin should be spent on the CEO salary even if they are individually responsible for the extra 1% in profits. You might as well stick with the 10% profit margin.
But even besides that, while a CEO’s decisions are important, he still relies on other employees carrying out decisions and implementing things to increase the profit margin. So part of that extra $500 million per year should go to other employees whose efforts helped achieve the extra profit and who you need to retain to carry out the CEOs vision.
These other employees may or may not include people on the factory floor.
Kenneth Fritsch angech (Comment #166723)
Perhaps if you gave an alternative for overturning your somewhat miasmic view of the world we could discuss it. I would suggest that you might condemn some ones’ view of democracy because not everyone votes – not that I am a fan of a pure democracy.
–
Sorry, an attack of angst, was a bit stressed over 3rd child’s wedding and needed to vent some steam.
Appreciate your and Lucia’s views, always very sensible and sorry if upset either. My view of the world, in general, is to be as least interventional as possible. Just looking at previous figures of growth and saying we need to be where we were before when it was good, is a bit like Jordan Peterson talking about only covering one of the variables when there may be 30 or 300 others to consider.
Granted it might be right but we have moved on, the world and trade is a far different place now than it was even 5 years ago and there are a dozen black swans on the loose.
Suggest if Trump stays alive and in power for 3 years my retirement will be assured.
Now there is a wild gamble.
BTW I would rather read your comments than waste your time unless I improve a lot.
The NYT seems a bit nervous about what’s in the memo. Curiously they worry about it being used to hurt Mueller and not that it was reckless FBI behavior. Who hates the FBI is causing me whiplash every week. Apparently an issue is that is wasn’t disclosed that this information gathering was funded by HRC and the DNC. A judge would want to know that.
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Not likely to change anything, except clamping down on the abuse of secret publicly shielded courts.
CEO pay has gotten excessive, but I don’t think we should do anything about it. A question is whether one could get an equally competent CEO for 1/5 the pay. I suspect the answer is yes but companies are free to throw money down the toilet if they wish.
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CEO’s and their company’s performance are only loosely correlated in my opinion. They may make some clutch decisions from time to time but these are typically decisions with lots of uncertainty and incomplete information. I suggest they are just flipping coins like the rest of us. Certain superstar CEO’s probably earn their money like Jobs and Musk. I imagine whoever runs Coca-Cola is probably interchangeable with a 100 other people.
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For example, did Obama make the wrong decision with Syria? We can say it was wrong now in hindsight, but what about at the time? Putting a wall around Syria and letting it burn to the ground without US involvement wasn’t crazy given what he knew at the time. Things blew up that couldn’t be easily anticipated. This happens to “failed” CEO’s all the time.
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If you have 16 CEO’s flipping coins on 4 decisions, one of these CEO’s will be seen as a superstar.
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Somebody actually ran an investment scam based on this. He sent out “free” predictions on 10 stocks to 1024 people but iterated the predictions differently for each person…at least one person thought he was a certified genius.
Somebody actually ran an investment scam based on this. He sent out “free†predictions on 10 stocks to 1024 people but iterated the predictions differently for each person…at least one person thought he was a certified genius.
Did that really happen? I read it in one of John Allen Paulos’ books (not Innumeracy I think, but one of his later ones) as a hypothetical way one could use statistics to trick people into buying your newsletter…
I believe it was in a chapter suggesting turnpikes enforce the speed limit by clocking how long you took between entering and exiting (sure, you could speed if you want to, but if you averaged over the speed limit you’d get the ticket).
lucia (Comment #166733): “It doesn’t make sense that every single extra penny in additional profit margin should be spent on the CEO salary …”.
You completely missed the point and commented on something I never said. I’s restate the point, but upon reflection I see no need to.
angech (Comment #166734)
Thanks for the reply with your world POV.
Hope the wedding goes well for all involved.
“there are a dozen black swans on the loose”
These so-called highly consequential and unexpected black swan events are more the inventions of a consensus or at least a prevailing view of things and are unexpected because those who were predicting the event and the consequences were ignored and often because their view of the problem was out of the mainstream and even more likely the fixes that might be proposed are out of the mainstream. Even after the event the blame goes to whatever/whoever the mainstream and consensus can use that allows them to avoid facing the issue of being wrong on a very basic level. All these reactions lead up to repeating black swans.
As a sad update to the story of a DC high school:
1. They received national coverage when they had high graduation rates and every graduate got accepted into a college.
2. A NPR investigation later determined that over half the graduates missed more than 60 days of school and most didn’t complete required coursework.
3. A city wide investigation was ordered.
4. The report just came out, and the practice is pervasive city wide. 34% of graduates received a diploma against policy
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/01/29/581036306/in-d-c-thirty-four-percent-of-graduates-received-a-diploma-against-district-poli
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The district is forced with either failing large numbers of students or passing them with smoke and mirrors. They chose the latter. It’s a bit frustrating that the administration and teachers blame high pressure to improve performance for their lack of ethical behavior. I suppose ethical is in the eye of the beholder here.
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A school district cannot compel students who don’t want to learn to magically change their behavior. They are faced with decisions to fail them out of school or pass them along and neither of these is very good for society. If they are going to pass them along then at least do it transparently.
Joseph W,
It’s possible I remembered it wrong, or maybe someone actual did it based off the book. My Alzheimer’s kicks in regularly nowadays.
https://ask.metafilter.com/216295/Is-this-famous-investment-scam-real-or-fiction
MikeM
YOu wrote
I did the math. In this example 50e9 * 1e-2 = 5e8 = $500 millions.
You may not have literally said you think one could argue the guy is worth every penny of extra profit, but that’s what the example points to.
Perhaps one could argue that, but it would be a seriously flawed argument.
If you intended to make some other point, I don’t know what it was. I was engaging the point the bit I quoted seemed to make.
SteveF,
“With regard to stock buy-backs: do you suppose the money paid for the stock is taken to a large incinerator and burned, or do you think it is used elsewhere?”
I’m not sure where you are going with this. Investors receiving the funds from buy-backs may do any number of things, probably buy more stocks.
Instead spending the vast majority (91% according to video) of corporate profits in large scale buy-backs and dividends, I would much rather see the companies invest more (not all, but decidedly more) in infrastructure, in research and development, in modernizing plants, in training workers, in creating new jobs, and in increasing the salaries of all workers, and not just those of executives and upper management. Donald J. Trump would want nothing less.
Pfizer will sink $10 billion of tax windfall into buy-backs, but cancels Alzheimers and Parkinsons drug development programs, both high-risk but high-payoff programs. Opportunity for innovation missed? Or just prudent practice?
http://www.newsweek.com/alzheimers-parkinsons-tax-cuts-pfizer-research-780163
Owen,
If shareholders do “other things” with the money from share buy-backs, and most often that will be buying shares in other companies, how is that a bad thing? Buying shares in other companies is just as much an investment as using the funds within the original company, and in all likelihood (as DeWitt points out) there are better options for the money if managers don’t see an attractive investment opportunity within the company.
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My biggest objection to the video you linked was its suggestion that companies should be forced to invest profits rather than buy back stock or distribute dividends to shareholders. That way lies socialism… and inevitable economic decline.
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WRT Pfizer dropping Alzheimer drug research: Until now, most every dollar invested in Alzheimer drug research (certainly hundreds of millions) has been lost, with no return on investment. Nobody knows how to stop or even slow progression of the disease, never mind keep people from getting it; it remains a death sentence. Until understanding of the disease and its causes improves, success is extremely unlikely…. I suspect Pfizer managers understand that.
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BTW, I am working today and tomorrow at a Pfizer site, and next week at a different Pfizer site…. I can assure you, they are investing lots of money in drug development, just not on Alzheimers drugs.
You would have to pay tax on the $500 million in extra profit. You could also deduct the $500 million in CEO pay perhaps, but of course that would also go against your profits.
It might be justified if say the lack of a good CEO would cause the company to do worse.
Tom Scharf,
“For example, did Obama make the wrong decision with Syria? We can say it was wrong now in hindsight, but what about at the time? Putting a wall around Syria and letting it burn to the ground without US involvement wasn’t crazy given what he knew at the time.”
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Obama drew a “red line”, publicly forbidding Assad to use chemical weapons on his own people, and then backed away when Assad ignored him and used nerve agents anyway. Using hindsight, foresight, or just having your eyes open, it is easy to see that this was both a moral debacle and a truly horrible strategic decision. Obama was (and is) an incompetent fool.
MikeN (Comment #166746): “You would have to pay tax on the $500 million in extra profit. You could also deduct the $500 million in CEO pay perhaps, but of course that would also go against your profits.”
OK, so now we have two people who misread what I said, so I guess I should elaborate.
I wrote: “one could argue that the CEO is worth $500 million per year”.
I never said that the CEO is worth $500 million per year.
I certainly never said the CEO should be paid that.
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The point was just that with very large companies, small differences in performance can amount to huge sums of money. So potentially CEO’s are worth as much as, or even more than, star athletes and actors.
That is why I went on to write: “My gut tells me that top executive pay has become excessive. But my gut has been known to be wrong.”
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After re-reading my comment, I conclude that I was reasonably clear.
Mike M,
Certainly, if a CEO (or any other upper manager) at a large company could be shown to increase profits more than a reasonable replacement then they are indeed extremely valuable. (In baseball, they call it Wins Above Replacement, which makes Mike Trout very valuable and highly compensated: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/troutmi01.shtml.)
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The problem is that there is no way to judge if an executive really does significantly better than a reasonable replacement would in the same circumstances. My gut (and my experience) tells me that there is a lot more interchangeability than there is exceptionalism in the ranks of corporate management. But if the shareholders are willing to support enormous executive salaries, that is OK with me… it’s their money after all, even if they are wasting it. IMO, there is far too much “foxes in charge of the hen house” going on with executive salaries.
SteveF (Comment #166749): “if a CEO (or any other upper manager) at a large company could be shown to increase profits more than a reasonable replacement then they are indeed extremely valuable. … The problem is that there is no way to judge if an executive really does significantly better than a reasonable replacement would in the same circumstances. My gut (and my experience) tells me that there is a lot more interchangeability than there is exceptionalism in the ranks of corporate management.”
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I am inclined to agree with all of that. But consider a case where we can judge success: football coaches. A brand new NFL head coach with no prior head coaching experience gets a salary of $3 million or so a year. He gets that in spite of the fact that he is in all probability going to fail. He gets a raise of at least a factor of five to take a job that he has been working towards for years; surely he would take the job for a lot less. So what is going on?
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I think that the answer has to do with expectations. If the new coach succeeds, he is easily worth the salary. If management did not believe that the new coach is *the guy* who will finally lead them out of the wilderness, they would hire someone else. To pay the coach a piddling $1 million per year would imply that they don’t think he is going to succeed or at least that they aren’t willing to bet on it. That sends the wrong message to the players, fans, and to their own egos. So they really have no choice but to pay the going rate, not the minimum needed to get someone to take the job.
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I suspect something similar happens to inflate the salaries of CEO’s.
MikeM
I didn’t say you said they are worth that.
I responded by describing why that argument, if advanced, would be a very flawed one. I’m not seeing where I misunderstood you.
We all know that small difference can amount to huge sums of money.
Nevertheless, the specific amount you said one could argue the CEO might be worth is ridiculous because the specific amount you said one could argue is they get all the extra. That doesn’t make any sense for reasons I stated.
You did mention a specific amount which made the “argument” that you think one could make more specific that merely making the point that the CEO can make a big difference. I think people are allowed to point out the specific argument in question would be flawed. I did so and in doing so was merely responding to what you wrote. If what you wrote conveyed something rather different from what you intended to say… well… that happens. But you did write something specific even if that specificity didn’t allowed with a rather vaguer more general point which it now seems you intended to make.
Mike M,
In the case of a head coach in the NFL, there is a good way (not perfect, but pretty good) to judge performance relative to other head coaches… among executives, not so much. I think a relatively low starting wage with (very big) compensation increases based on wins q (or other clear metrics) would work for head coaches. For CEOs, the metric for reward is usually stock price, even if that metric often leads to decisions which may not be in the best interest of long term P/L. The problem is that lots of (most?) shareholders want stock price increases in the relatively short term, and accept compensation packages designed to boost stock price in the relatively short term.
SteveF (Comment #166752): “In the case of a head coach in the NFL, there is a good way (not perfect, but pretty good) to judge performance relative to other head coaches”
In spite of that, the pay range seems to be only a factor of two or so: https://www.boydsbets.com/highest-paid-coaches-nfl/
It seems that unproven head coaches get paid on expectations, even though most never achieve those expectations.
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SteveF : “… among executives, not so much.”
Well, the corporate boards should have a pretty good idea; certainly a much better idea than the shareholders. Unfortunately, corporate boards are also quite incestuous.
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SteveF: “I think a relatively low starting wage with (very big) compensation increases based on wins q (or other clear metrics) would work for head coaches.”
That would be very rational. However, the empirical evidence says that is not how it is done. It would seem that the real world is nowhere near as rational as us folks typing on computer keyboards might like to think. 🙂
SteveF and Mike M.,
Do NFL head coaches have many other employment options in the NFL if they’re fired? I’m not positive, but I don’t think so. So it’s something of a gamble to become a head coach. I think that explains the high starting salary for first time head coaches.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166754): “Do NFL head coaches have many other employment options in the NFL if they’re fired?”
One’s with a record of success often go on to another NFL head coach job. The others typically go back to being an offensive or defensive coordinator or maybe a head coach in college. And that can often lead to another head coach job. So there is not much of a career risk.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned. Trump was taunting/pleading with the Democrats to stand and cheer. It was like, really you won’t applaud for infrastructure?
MikeN,
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I don’t think taunting is the same thing as pleading.
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I suggest that your interpretation is colored by your bias. Consider for a moment. What would a speech by Trump that genuinely reached for unity and common cause/ common ground sound like?
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In my view, such a speech would sound like the SOTU he gave. If you do not start with an a-priori assumption that Trump is always in the wrong, perhaps you could elaborate with specific reasons why you believe Trump was taunting or pleading rather than [plainly] speaking words to be taken at face value.
Apologies MikeN.
I don’t think you are predisposed to believe Trump is always in the wrong. This said, I still don’t think he was taunting or pleading.
Mark, they’re not the same. I’m not sure which is the better term. I am not referring to what he said, but what he did as he was saying it.
Goad
The goad is a traditional farming implement, used to spur or guide livestock, usually oxen, which are pulling a plough or a cart; used also to round up cattle. It is a type of long stick with a pointed end, also known as the cattle prod.
More at Wikipedia
Mike,
That would explain my not following what you meant then. I wasn’t able to watch, I just read a transcript.
I indulged my habit of not watching the SOTU. . . (I happened to be at a group Salsa lesson. But still…)
To beat a dead horse a bit more thoroughly, I’d like to think the reason I was sensitive to the perception of Trump’s speech is at least in part due to some of the response I’m reading about.
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Maxine Waters – ‘Whenever he appears on TV there should be a disclaimer that says ‘This may be may not be acceptable for children..’
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ACLU – ““Tonight, President Trump said the word ‘America’ more than 80 times in his speech. Yet, after a divisive first year, we hear and feel how exclusionary that ‘America’ is, with policies that have harmed so many vulnerable American communities. ”
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Kennedy – “It would be easy to dismiss the past year as chaos. Partisanship. Politics. But it’s far bigger than that,” Kennedy said. “This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us — they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.”
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Give me an effing break already.
mark bofill
The ACLU uses it every time the name of their group is mentioned. Perhaps they should consider a trademark infringement suit barring others from using AMERICA. Otherwise, it might dilute their own use.
Lucia,
🙂 Heh.
ACLU – That’s pretty funny.
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The more Trump looks sane, the more insane his opponents make themselves look. Pelosi – “Make America White again”. The Dems can’t even stand for black unemployment at all time lows? The Dem generic ballot gap has closed significantly in the last two months. Approval of the tax bill is up about 20%. People are going to notice that a bigger take home paycheck does not equal a “tax heist”.
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How can the left possibly not make major gains in 2018? By sabotaging themselves. If they keep making everything about identity politics (white males are evil, and white females close behind) then they might pull another defeat from the jaws of victory. If Mueller comes up with nothing on Russia it will be a major political embarrassment. As far as obstruction goes it would probably work in Trump’s favor if they try to prosecute him on “trumped up” charges. The most likely scenario is Trump will make it impossible for people to support him by his usual behavior.
Tom Scharf
Yep. That’s why those who supported the tax break weren’t remotely concerned that some polls showed people supposedly didn’t want it. The knew that would change after people saw more take-home money, which would be the first month the change in deductions affected their paychecks.
I read here that the most dreaded Nunes FISA memo will be released tomorrow (at least, Trump will release it back to Nunes for him to release).
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I have to say, two things strike me regarding this:
1. Based on what I’ve heard Republicans saying about the memo, I wouldn’t expect anything all that shocking. I expect the memo to say that: the Steele dossier was the basis for the Page surveillance, it wasn’t vetted (or well vetted), it was DNC opposition research paid for by DNC. It will talk about some sort of abuse of government surveillance. All of this is already common knowledge; Trump supporters view it one way, Trump resistance ignores it. So – doesn’t seem like this should be a biggie. Gowdy says the memo will embarrass Schiff, but whatever.
2. Except for all the Democratic histrionics. Nancy Pelosi wants Paul Ryan to remove Nunes from the Intelligence committee. Schiff is claiming Nunes has altered the memo he passed on to the White House. The FBI released a statement saying the memo contains material omissions that put the whole thing out of context. Not to mention the FBI stonewalled as long as possible releasing any of this to Congress in the first place and only gave it up under threat of Congressional contempt.
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I’d have been inclined to expect a nothing or nothing-much burger, but at this point because of item #2 above I’m more than a little curious to see the memo and find out what all the fuss was about.
Mark
Yes. But sometimes common knowledge needs confirmation. Also, perhaps some names will be attached to some decisions.
Maybe. So the FBI should request a second memo containing the omitted stuff be published so we can all learn “the context”.
I think the problem for the Democrats is that “nothing burger” still takes away much of the force of all their “suspicions”. Basically: Confirmation that the Steele report was DNC opposition research, that this was known internally at the FBI and so on is not helpful to Democrats. It takes away talking points.
Lucia,
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I see. Makes sense.
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Dems put such a memo together, but the House intelligence committee hasn’t approved its release. Could the FBI just directly go to the press I wonder. Certainly they could ‘leak’ a second memo to the press. If not the FBI then House Dem staffers.
mark,
The Wall Street Journal said the Dem memo will probably get released in a week or two.
The Nunes one went through a review process. The Dem doc was written later (as a response I think.) It’s under review now.
The purpose of the review is to get comments, redact anything impacting on national security and so on. Since Nunes is reviewed, I think it’s best to just release it. The other can follow. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure the politics are such that the other review w_i_l_l t_a_k_e t_i_m_e (as a stalling strategy with the hope of eventually blocking release.)
WRT to the Steele Memo and entire “russians” thing, I long ago decided that it was best to not come to any firm conclusions because I figured things would come out in the fullness of time. It looks like that is starting to happen.
The FBI’s position on the House summary document is laughable. Reminds me a little of the line “If I told you, then I would have to kill you.” If the summary is materially wrong, or if it leaves out information that should have been included ‘for proper context’, then by all means the FBI should provide Congressional committees with whatever documentation is missing or which provides that proper context, and loudly support immediate public disclose of all that information. I am predicting they will never do it, because they are flat out lying about the whole sorry affair. What happened was a bunch of high level FBI, DOJ, and CIA staffers were utterly horrified about the prospect of Trump becoming president, and then acted (quite illegally) to try to keep that from happening. Now they are doing their best to hide the worst of their unscrupulous and unlawful behavior.
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This will not end well for the ‘intelligence’ community (an oxymoron if there ever was one)… they will ultimately be called to account.
lucia,
To quote a line from what I thought was a wonderful (so of course it was cancelled) series from long ago, Wizards and Warriors (now available on DVD): “Does the phrase ‘fat chance’ mean anything to you?” (Here’s a clip with the typical humor of the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCj1SKVnlmg )
The FBI will claim that releasing “the context” would interfere with the Mueller investigation. As usual, they want to have it both ways.
DeWitt,
“As usual, they want to have it both ways.”
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This time, that is not going to work. They have to put up or shut up.
Steve,
Str[z]ok’s text
inclines me to believe this. Str[z]ok, Lisa Page, and in all likelihood Andy McCabe apparently discussed this stuff in Andy’s office. Strtok at least apparently wasn’t going to ‘take the risk’ that Trump was going to be elected, unlikely as he thought that was.
I’m not sure the memo is going to ‘go there’ though. Don’t know. Can’t wait to find out though!
[lol. Once a C programmer, always a C programmer. ‘strzok’ autocorrects to ‘strtok‘ in my world. Can’t help it.]
Mark,
All three should probably spend a fair amount of time in a Federal corrections facility. But I suspect they will all skate like Lois Lerner. Which is too bad… a very teachable moment in the swamp is being wasted.
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Do you still work in C?
Steve,
True.
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Regarding C, short answer is yes. [long answer is:] Device drivers, kernels, system level stuff is still generally straight C code. People who do systems level work will admit to using C without blushing. Up on the application level, many who profess to use C++ are in fact using C and occasionally taking some advantage of C++ features. Managers will claim their teams are using C++ but as often (more often? Not sure, would have to think back) as not they’re really using C.
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At the moment I’m doing applications level work, but I work with a bunch of electrical engineers in a pretty low level / close to the hardware environment. We’re using C++ but mostly we’re really using C.
I’ve been writing firmware for the last couple weeks for ARM controllers, lots of C. C still dominates in the firmware world and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon.
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When I use C++ it’s more like C(kinda +). I will use objects and classes but I prefer to keep “clever coding” to a minimum so I and others can understand what I wrote years from now. I use C# for applications and love it. Mostly because of Visual Studio though, intellisense, edit and continue, a good editor, and a powerful debugger. I do miss pointers in C#, though I expect it improved code reliability for marginal coders by quite a bit.
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C’s handling of strings is (fill in a very vile adjective).
You gents have found the philosophers stone; to get Mark to FINALLY quit going on about politics, say a few words about programming. :>
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I’ll try to contain myself.
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That’s the real trick, couldn’t agree more. Code anybody can understand and in particular troubleshoot when something goes south.
Yeah. C# and Python are my go-to’s languages when I get [the] choice.
You are not a real coder if you haven’t punched cards, ha ha. I taught myself programming with an Atari 400 I bought with paper route money.
I know. sigh. Punch cards were a little before my time. I have actually developed an awful lot of respect for the programmers of yore, who made pretty decent air defense and space systems with insanely minuscule storage and ponderously slow and simple processors. You had to know what you were about back then, I think. These days, any monkey can make stuff work.
My early storage memory was the cassette tape interface on my TRS-80. Heh. I still remember what the tones sounded like.
Alright, to give the uninterested an easy out:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/economy-to-grow-at-5-point-4-percent-rate-in-first-quarter-atlanta-fed-tracker-shows.html
5.4% growth. Not too shabby!
Is it Trump’s policies, confidence in Trump, both, neither? Is it the long dead arm of Obama’s policies finally manifesting? What do you y’all think.
>Could the FBI just directly go to the press I wonder.
Yes. They own the intelligence that the House is releasing, so they can declassify and release if they want to.
The story of Wray threatening to resign I think is made up. Trump cannot stop the release by the House. He can only make objections. So Wray’s threat is not to stop the release of the memo but to get Trump to state an objection.
I think the memo will have a little bit more. Particularly that Fusion GPS as an FBI contractor was looking thru NSA’s database for info on Trump campaign people. The FBI doesn’t need a warrant just to see if something is available.
Overall, the process is set up where the more Democrats complain about the memo being taken out of context, the public will then demand declassification of the underlying material so they can decide for themselves, which is Nunes’s goal.
Trump could just order declassification and release.
Mark, some of NASA’s software is using legacy code written for punch cards. So input files will have a format to look like punch cards.
I have seen a company use C code, with special rules to make it look like C++ code. ARM processor required C, but they wanted C++. Problem is the compiler doesn’t know it’s supposed to be C++ code, so they had to write a separate precompiler to check for violations of C++.
Mike,
Really! Interesting. I’ve worked on an old air defense system where it was still evident in the docs that the system was adapted from punch cards. I contracted briefly with NASA but my group was using Python.
I remember vaguely hearing that early C++ compilers compiled to C source… Am I making that up? Let me go check. Yeah! Cfront. I think the C++ language may be too grown up to pull this off today. Depends on what standard, maybe. What are we up to, anyway? C++14?
MikeN
As much of the investigation is aimed at him, it’s probably politically better to have the House do a lot of the heavy lifting. Or, if after making a stink about omissions, the FBI can decide to release on their own– better.
It’s obviously difficult to take the FBI’s objections seriously for all the reasons SteveF said.
I’ve just read on twitter that someone at the FBI is complaining the memo contains names which somehow “must” be a security risk. Well… releasing some names is a national security risk. Others not so much. We already know the names of lots of people involved in things. We also know the names of many people with office jobs in DC, NY and so on. Releasing their names isn’t like releasing the name of a field agent, secret connection, spy and so on.
I guess we’ll know names tomorrow.
Mark, I worked with a preJava language called CLU, where my friend complained that his code wouldn’t compile after he unrolled loops for speed. Turns out 100k of code was turned by the compiler into 10MB of C code.
I like this reaction to the endless attempts at people warning the memo shouldn’t be released on Twitter
People saying there is nothing unexpected in the memo. What if it says there was no FISA warrant?
There’s an old BBC video called Connections, which eventually gets around to how the 1920 census was run with a computer and punch cards, even before computers were invented, using water wheel technology.
OK, OK. If we have to talk about ancient programming…
After I finished my freshman year (spring 1970) I learned that my former high school had received a donation of an outdated Honeywell minicomputer from a local company. It had no disc drives or other permanent memory. Everything was run by loading paper tapes through a paper tape reader into RAM. The only working software they received was an assembler, which nobody knew how to use, and a Fortran compiler, both of which you loaded via the paper tape reader. Once you loaded the Fortran compiler, it would read and execute a Fortran program (again, on paper tape).
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So students (physics) were supposed to key in a complete program at a keyboard attached to a paper tape punching machine, without EVER hitting a wrong key, Any mis-key meant they would have to start over again. As you might imagine, not a lot of programming got done.
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So in the summer between freshman and sofamore years, I taught myself assembly language for that minicomputer and wrote a simple text editor, which allowed editing of modest size text Fortran programs in RAM, after which they were punched all at once on paper tape (without typos!), ready for reading by the Fortran compiler.
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After that experience, everything else I ever did in programming seemed pretty straightforward by comparison. 😉
ACLU – ““Tonight, President Trump said the word ‘America’ more than 80 times in his speech. Yet, after a divisive first year, we hear and feel how exclusionary that ‘America’ is, with policies that have harmed so many vulnerable American communities. â€
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US and dem.
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The dem side is for (illegal) immigration — Anybody who wants to be American should be allowed to become an American. Just like anybody should be allowed to choose their sex/gender/pronouns, because that’s how they feel. Meanwhile, the dems who already are American are ashamed of that and don’t want to be American. It’s so confusing when you choose one side of an issue because your opponent chose the other side!
There are a lot of interesting matters coming out of the Mueller situation. You just scratch the surface a bit and the cockroaches start flying out. First, according to his wiki entry, Strzok was married during his affair and texting binge with Lisa Page. Hadn’t seen that until today.
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Next Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s chief prosecutors, has had a good amount of black marks during his career. Among them are the failed Arthur Anderson and Merrill Lynch prosecutions and attempting to have a defendant plead guilty to an act that was not a crime. See https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/22/christopher-wray-robert-muellers-top-prosecutor-kn/
On top of that he congratulated Sally Yates in an effusive way when she grandstanded and refused to file arguments in support of her client, the President, in the first couple of executive order court cases.
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“prosecutor Andrew Weissmann reveals that he also supported Yates’ decision. “I am so proud,” Weissmann wrote. “And in awe. Thank you so much.”
Weissman later joined special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in the high-profile investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.”
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I would comment that Yates was playing to her constituency and that Weismmann had nothing to be in awe of. The fact that he is given a major role in Trump investigation is a disgrace.
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Finally, James Comey tweeted that
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“All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy.”
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The idea that making public the bias of FBI workers and Mueller’s office is McCarthyism is an absolute joke.
JD
The purpose of Mueller’s investigation is to hide the extent to which the government was used against the Trump campaign. Witnesses can refuse to testify, saying the special counsel is investigating it.
Ledite (Comment #166793): “Meanwhile, the dems who already are American are ashamed of that and don’t want to be American. It’s so confusing when you choose one side of an issue because your opponent chose the other side!”
Confusing indeed. The establishment types in both parties support both multiculturalism (the D’s more strongly) and a foreign policy based on values rather than national interest (the R’s rather more strongly). So we have the mind-bending situation where they don’t want to make those who choose to come here adopt our values, but they support imposing our values on people in other countries.
Eric Holder: “People must understand what is at stake by release of the bogus, contrived Nunes memo. It uses normally protected material and puts at risk our intell capabilities in order to derail a legitimate criminal investigation. This is unheard of- it is dangerous and it is irresponsible”
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Have Comey or Holder even read the memo?
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Seems like a bit of a rush to judgment and they are actively cheering for a lack of public transparency. If the memo reveals no obvious national security issues it is going to look bad for the whiners at the FBI. Are these the captains of justice we are supposed to have faith in? The best move for the FBI is to just to take it like man and move on and do their job. The more they engage in mud throwing, the more they look partisan. They are walking into a trap.
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This is a political document and should be interpreted as one. It seems everything related to investigations of high profile politicians is becoming tainted, probably by design. It’s hard to investigate powerful people.
The Onion weighed in on this FBI’s objections:
“FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies”
https://politics.theonion.com/fbi-warns-republican-memo-could-undermine-faith-in-mass-1822639681
Paper tape reader wins! I only had to punch cards for one semester. My school must have wanted to dissuade people from programming. They sold blank cards out of a vending machine for an ancient IBM mainframe. I remember it took me hours to figure out Fortran defaults different letters to different variable types.
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I used a cassette reader for my Atari. I had months of programming backed up to a cassette that failed. I played the entire thing with audio and it it had a minuscule audio blip in it. Perhaps a dual tape backup scheme might be better? I was traumatized, now I have multi-layered different location backup schemes.
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My current computer has 8 million times more memory than my first computer, it’s mind boggling the advances. I thought people who bought 16K computers were crazy, what would you do with all that memory? It was a great experience living through the computer revolution.
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These pampered millennials need to go enter a few tweets through paper tape readers! That will learn them some respect!
After I became a prestiged upper classman and got access to terminals, I started executing every program in the bin folder for fun and…
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> YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
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I spent days and days on that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
lucia (#166799)
Love the Onion’s take…
The LATimes has pretty much the same opinion, without the tongue in cheek. They quote Michael Waldman, a former Pres. Clinton speechwriter, about the release of the Nunes memo: “It’s yet another step on a slide into abuse of power.”
My irony meter went to 12, then broke.
Whether the FISA process was “gamed” or not, I think the legalized intelligence gathering on American citizens is profoundly anti-liberty. The real question is whether Congress will actually step up and eviscerate those provisions. My guess is, sadly, no.
The warning at The Onion for using an Ad-Blocker is hilarious.
Tom Scharf (#166801) –
I remember that game well! After I had solved the maze, my score was one point less than perfect, which was annoying. Much later, I was given a copy of the FORTRAN source code, printed on fan-fold line-printer paper. It allowed me to peek at the scoring function, after which I was able to pick up the final point.
Anyone remember DEC PDP-11’s? Before you could read the paper tape, you had to enter the boot loader with the switch register on the front of the console. At least the memory was magnetic core based, which is non-evaporative. We didn’t have a high speed paper tape reader, which meant using a KSR33 teletype. Not only was that slow, there was a significant risk it would eat the tape. The last one I had used 8 inch floppy disks.
Tom Scharf,
“This is a political document and should be interpreted as one. It seems everything related to investigations of high profile politicians is becoming tainted, probably by design. It’s hard to investigate powerful people.”
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Yes, it is a political document of sorts, but mainly it is an effort to unmask wrongdoing by powerful people.
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If it is factually inaccurate, those involved in its production and release will pay a political price. If it is factually accurate, then the powerful people unmasked will pay a political price. I do hope that the absolute maximum of information on this sorry affair is released, and sooner rather than later. I hope Congress subpoenas the FBI inspector general’s report for public release; let the voters judge what went down.
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Based on how loud the FBI and DOJ squealing has been so far, I think in the end the FBI, DOJ, and other agencies which are normally cloaked in secrecy will look very, very bad to voters. Listening in on the phone calls (and likely the email messages) of the Trump campaign shows an FBI that was out of control, and run by people with at least very bad judgement, and more likely strong political bias that influenced their decisions. Spying on a presidential campaign, if discovered, has an almost unlimited potential downside. That downside seems to be closing in on the FBI today.
DeWitt,
“Anyone remember DEC PDP-11’s?”
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Sure. I tried to have the research lab where I worked buy one of these in 1974 – 1975. It was hopelessly expensive (well over US$150,000 in today’s dollars) for a lab with a near zero capital budget. So we were limited to a single time share terminal (with very limited allowed hours!) connected to a distant IBM mainframe, where we could write Fortran programs.
We creep closer to zero hour.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/02/trump-approves-release-controversial-nunes-memo-fbi-surveillance-russia-campaign/1082196001/
And here it is.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #166805): “Anyone remember DEC PDP-11’s? Before you could read the paper tape, you had to enter the boot loader with the switch register on the front of the console.”
One of my fellow grad students had one of those hooked up to his apparatus. I was impressed.
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Dewitt: “We didn’t have a high speed paper tape reader, which meant using a KSR33 teletype. Not only was that slow, there was a significant risk it would eat the tape.”
I used a paper tape reader one summer. A small tear anywhere in the tape, and the whole thing was useless.
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Dewitt: “The last one I had used 8 inch floppy disks.”
With 128 K capacity, if they were like the ones I used.
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I also accessed a mainframe via a teletype terminal. I wrote my dissertation on it. Had to go over to the main computer center to pick up my printouts. They were printed on some super expensive thing called a “laser printer”. Luckily, the terminal had a hardwired connection to the mainframe, rather than a phone line. That meant I could set it on the highest speed; 300 baud, if memory serves.
Tom Scharf (Comment #166798): “Have Comey or Holder even read the memo?
Seems like a bit of a rush to judgment and they are actively cheering for a lack of public transparency.”
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Sounds to me like a desperate last minute attempt at stonewalling.
My reaction to this whole business has been that it is probably bad for the FBI and the deep state. Thanks to the frantic screaming, I have changed “probably” to “almost certainly”.
ADVENT lives!
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7540
The memo is an interesting read; not exactly what I expected, but interesting. What I think it shows is that the FBI and DOJ willfully withheld key information form the FISA court, starting with the initial application: They failed to disclose that the dossier was an opposition hit piece funded by the DNC and Hillary Clinton, and that nothing of substance had been independently verified. For certain the FISA court should have been made aware of this, and if they had been it seems much less likely the court would have granted the warrant.
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It got worse: after DOJ and the FBI knew for sure that Steele was strongly biased against Trump, and was “desperate for him not to be elected”, the FBI re-applied to the FISA court for renewal of the warrant, while withholding both the fact that the dossier was political opposition research and that the author of the dossier was obviously biased against Trump, and so not at all a reliable source. The FBI also did not disclose to the court that they had independently authorized payment to Steele to continue his ‘research’ on behalf of the FBI.
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And then the very worst: Andy McCabe testified under oath in December 2016 that without the dossier, the FBI would never have gone to the FISA court at all. In other words, the FBI picked up the opposition research from the DNC and the Clinton campaign, and continuously represented to the FISA court that the material in the dossier was credible, when they clearly knew that it was neither verified nor credible. The result was a continuation of eavesdropping which should never have started, refusal to terminate the spying even in the face of obvious prejudice by Steele, and refusal to FBI to disclose to the public that the dossier was nothing but political opposition research, even after the dossier was published.
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So, in frustration, Trump calls Comey and asks if he is being investigated. Comey replies multiple times that he is not, but then REFUSES to state that publicly. In anger, Trump fires Comey, and we end up with a special prosecutor who is implacably opposed to Trump. What it all suggests (strongly) is that the FBI and DOJ were out to “get” Trump, both during the campaign and after the election.
SteveF,
Maybe they would have granted, maybe not. But given the spirit of the FISA rules, which is to avoid letting agencies get wiretaps one whoever whenever they want, they certainly should have revealed this to the court.
If it’s not required, then the law should be revised to require it. This case proves that.
Which does show they either (a) thought the court wouldn’t give them the warrant or (b) knew that they didn’t have a case to justify asking for the warrant absent the dossier.
Comey’s standards for what he says publicly certainly seem…. well…. to be his own standards. Evidently he’s teaching ethics now. Wow!
Lucia, quoting SteveF: ” For certain the FISA court should have been made aware of this, and if they had been it seems much less likely the court would have granted the warrant.
Maybe they would have granted, maybe not. But given the spirit of the FISA rules, which is to avoid letting agencies get wiretaps one whoever whenever they want, they certainly should have revealed this to the court.”
Worth remembering the words of New York’s highest ranking justice concerning one-sided (grand jury) investigations — he could indict a ham sandwich if he wished. By presenting one side, the FBI has virtually no restraints on what it can get.
JD Ohio
Precisely.
And they are a powerful agency with the ability to cloak actions in secrecy. The “other side” isn’t allowed to explain why the warrant should not be issued. And this warrant is for a long ongoing investigation that potentially invades the privacy of multiple people- not just to do a 1 hour search to sweep for weed or something.
So rules should not allow them to make one side presentations omitting counter evidence.
Maybe they do. But they shouldn’t. If nothing else, we’ve learned that this needs to change. If documents like the Nunes memo cannot be revealed then the American people will be deprived of information we need to ensure our liberties and privacy are respected.
JD Ohio, Lucia,
According to the Guardian, on Jan 11, 2017, an earlier application to the court (without the dossier) was in fact rejected by the FISA court…. one of the very few rejections ever issued.
If this report is true, of course they would not have returned to the court without either a change in target(s) or additional information.
Ahh… well, that does tend to suggest they needed the Steele Dosier.
Yes. here, near the middle/bottom.
Over the summer… What originally got this ball rolling, if not the Steele dossier? (not rhetorical)
[Edit: Steele dossier started in June 2016 I think. I guess it could’ve still been the original cause of all this.]
mark bofill,
“What originally got this ball rolling, if not the Steele dossier? ”
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According the Glen Simpson’s testimony, Steele provided information from his opposition research to the FBI in July 2016. The dossier was not complete at that point, but Steele was clearly in contact with the FBI early enough to have prompted an earlier FISA request. George Papadopoulos was, according the the House Intelligence committee, the underlying motivation. This stemmed from drunken bragging in the UK about the Russians having Hillary’s emails. From the Washington Examiner today:
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“The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok.”
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It could easily have been some of both.
Thanks Steve, sounds reasonable to me.
They don’t need ironclad evidence of guilt to do a wiretap, they need probable cause. It’s not a trial it’s an investigation. I don’t know the legal threshold they need to cross, but I assume there are rules and precedents.
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To say that plenty of people are predisposed to think Trump and company is a Russian plant is the understatement of the century. To open an investigation into a major party nominee based on just this document of ill origin is very questionable. I’m guessing the FBI wouldn’t open an investigation into Trump’s opponent in 2020 based on him saying they might have been peed on by Russian hookers.
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Ultimately what really matters is if they end up finding anything. If they don’t then this will end up being a major black eye to the FBI. They also investigated Clinton, maybe this was just them being “fair” by investigating both sides and doing some CYA.
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Has anyone found the alleged security threats in the memo that would have prevented it from being released?
I like how they keep calling this dossier “unverified”. If this was from Trump the standard is it is either 100% verifiable or else it is a “lie”. Maybe someone should look into this dossier and try to verify it? I jest. Obviously our fair minded media worked plenty hard to verify this stuff because they see a pot of impeachment gold at the end of that rainbow as well as Pulitzer prizes.
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I see this information as unlikely to be true at this point, we will see what Mueller finds. I wonder how hard the FBI tried to verify this stuff, if they knowingly were only using it for a prop, then they likely didn’t try very hard.
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I don’t think anyone really sees anything very differently based on this memo. I find it very unsurprising that over-zealous people at the FBI who were convinced Trump is the next Hitler skirted the boundaries of ethical behavior. Democracy is in danger don’t you know.
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The left is now in the unenviable position of defending the FISA courts which they have never been big fans of. All I ask is the same standards are used for both sides and a pretty high threshold be used for political investigations. Not sure this is the case.
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Anyone who knew this was funded by the DNC and chose to not disclose it to the FISA court should be fired. Immediately. That is a red line. Who made that decision?
I fail to understand all the emotional “don’t release the memo because blah blah blah”. Everyone who thought this shouldn’t be released based on “concerns” just fell a couple rungs down the credibility ladder. They didn’t disclose DNC / HRC connections to the evidence, that is not a national security concern. It never said that was the sole evidence given to the FISA court (what is not said is as important as what it does say).
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The intelligence community needs to starting looking outward, not inward. I don’t really want my tax dollars spent on partisan agendas of their employees. If this is what they want to do, then I could do without their so called help as a taxpayer.
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All sins are forgiven if they find real evidence of wrong doing, but that is looking increasingly unlikely.
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I assume the judge approving the warrant could enlighten things by stating how important this dossier was in his view. He should do so.
‘participating over at Lucia’s crib”
Belief is a funny conundrum.
The word Trump makes unicorns happen.
For instance Russia influencing the American election.
48 million people voting for a sexist, racist, wall building deplorable Christian view supporting anti abortionist.
I want to know how they got this man over the line.
Did they hold people’s toes to the fire to make them vote Trump?
Did they put up hypnotizing pictures of Russian brides on Facebook?
Did they drop leaflets over America promising rubles?
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A slight uptick in the polls.
like a growth in sea ice
tantalizing and illusory?