Nov 09

Poll-itics

My prelim analysis.

Obviously, the polls were very wrong. But why?

From what I can tell, Trump get a much larger percentage of the Republican woman vote than expected, and (likely) slightly higher than Romney in 2012. Misogyny at least among this group didn’t tarnish him at all.

And he got a larger percentage of the Latino vote than Romney. Not surprising — legal immigrants often absolutely loathe illegal ones.

My private supposition: enough Bernie voters moved to Trump to also tip the balance.

The narrative will be just that rural enraged white males made the difference. But I’m guessing that the above factors I mentioned are the real difference.

Nov 09

About Tronald Dump

Don’t get me wrong — Trump winning is a terrible tragedy for our nation. But it’s one that was completely avoidable. The DNC (in the immediate, not systemic sense) is as much to blame as the Trump voters is what I am saying.

Unfortunately, being able to make fun of the clueless Clinton sycophants will not make up for the calamity that will be the next four years.

I should have stuck to my guns about the election when I said this — turns out that even I listened to the elites late in the process more than I should have.

There’s also going to be a whole lot of secret Trump voters who will not tell anyone they are intending to vote for Trump — even pollsters — yet will do so anyway. This is why many of the polls even right up to the election will be wrong.

Damn, me of 8 months ago was much more correct than me of two days ago. Ha. Here’s what I wrote then in full:

Donald Trump can actually beat Hillary in November: Stubborn pundits still refuse to accept it.

Can and will; Clinton will not win in the general any of the Southern states where she was strongest in the primaries, whereas Donald Trump is likely to win most of the Northeast states where he is strongest.

Clinton is a bad pick in general, but a particularly bad pick against Trump where her election and campaign weaknesses are imperfectly arrayed against Trump’s very strengths.

I didn’t and don’t support Clinton or Sanders (or Trump), but Sanders would’ve been far more likely to defeat Trump in the kind of matchup we’re moving towards.

And when Trump inevitably gets a landslide against Clinton due to her weakness in Southern states, the pundits will all be completely stunned, etc.

Also don’t forget just how rabid the hatred is for Clinton — many people who don’t vote are too young to remember the 90s, but I was there and haven’t forgotten. There’s a whole gaggle of people who will show up solely to vote against Clinton, whereas most liberals won’t bother about Trump.

There’s also going to be a whole lot of secret Trump voters who will not tell anyone they are intending to vote for Trump — even pollsters — yet will do so anyway. This is why many of the polls even right up to the election will be wrong.

Get used to saying “President Trump,” is what I’m telling you.

Nov 09

The US has gone full Florida

If Trump wins — and that looks unavoidable as I type this — I hope the elites and the pundits realize that they brought this on themselves.

First, they brought this anguish by running such a terrible candidate as Hillary Clinton. Neoliberalism is dying to be replaced with what we aren’t sure yet. That’s still up in the air, but the sickness and rot of that system of repression is irreversibly embedded now, with no cure and now no palliative. I thought the initial death spasms would be post-Hillary, but turns out I was wrong.

Second, they did this to themselves and all of us by telling large swathes of the population that they are irrelevant and the jobs shipped away and the towns destroyed were “progress” and that actually “free trade” has only salubrious effects. Even now you hear this litany of BS and Trump winning (probably) is America’s inchoate, self-destructive yawp of negation.

Third, in ignoring the consequences of their own disconnection from the day-to-day life of Americans they’ve insulated themselves from the idea that the pursuit of more money and more power is not what actually matters to most people.

The neoliberal consensus is done, though its expiration will take decades. That we’ll probably replace it with something far worse doesn’t mean it’s not over.

Still think Sanders would’ve bested Trump pretty easily, or even Elizabeth Warren.

I say this with a little gloating, I must admit — but mostly horror and trepidation: Democrats, this is what you get when you run such a irredeemably bad candidate as Clinton and then tell everyone they should worship the ground she walks on.

Nov 08

Countability

Yes.

It is possible to 1:1 map all dollar bills to all the twenties without ever exhausting the supply of either so this is a countably infinite collection. (Mathematicians call this “bijection.” because they watched too much sf I think.)

Means it is ℵ0. Multiply that puppy by any real finite number and you get ℵ0 all over again.

This is the most common infinity people talk about, and the “intuitive” one. But there are others. The uncountable infinities where the Old Ones live.

Best not to think about those for now. Might hurt your brain. Or summon Yog-Sothoth.

Nov 07

Hideous choice #1 or #2

Remember that I’m terrible at politics, but I think Hillary is going to take 56.5% of the popular vote, and take the Electoral 320 to 218.

No reputable polls suggest anything different than this, and it’s too close now for much to change.

So we’re going to get a nuclear war started on purpose rather than one started accidentally. Awesome.

Nov 06

It’s a mistake

I know it’s a mistake to read anything in the mainstream press almost always, but this article that purports to discuss why health care costs rise so much in comparison to inflation only half-touches on two partial reasons and doesn’t actually discuss the root causes at all.

The first and main reason that health care costs spike skyward every year is that insurance is itself inflationary. No, I am not saying eliminate insurance but just like a loan for a house or student loans, the more money available in a market the more prices rise. This is one of the few completely correct areas of economics IMO and this is what has happened in the health care market and will continue to happen absent some other huge force counteracting this tendency.

That the insurers and hospitals have adversarial relations probably does more to promote that than if they were all one entity (no, I am not advocating that hospitals and insurers merge — also a terrible solution). By the way, inflation doesn’t just mean raising prices in the medical context, it means unnecessary tests, procedures, surgeries and all of that too.

This is not like car insurance (though that is inflationary too in some markets) because medical care is more obligatory — more akin to an oil change (not insured) or having brake pads replaced. Imagine how much an oil change would cost if insurance were mandated by law for this common need, and everywhere available to perform the procedure accepted insurance, and it was illegal to do it yourself. (Back of the envelope calcs suggest an oil change would cost somewhere around $1,000 in that environment.)

Ok, already tired of the car metaphors.

The second huge omission of the article is that doctors in America and Canada are hugely overpaid (and overtrained) compared to the rest of the world.

The third cause is that human labor — which the health care depends on in spades — gets more expensive relatively in relation to what can be automated. Meaning over time that the labor share of cost rises as compared to say the cost of a scalpel.

There are other causes of rising costs — I am not implying only three. But how can an article like this miss the greatest cause (that to be fair most others also miss) which is that the more money in a market, the more something will cost? So easy but completely outside of the comprehension of the “educated.”

Nov 06

No mystic

I’m not into mysticism. I’ve always strongly identified with the more scientific-minded.

However, recognizing that, as one who’s not really math-minded or much interested in contaminating my mind in that way, it’s easy to see how the structure of the supposed impartiality of math is used in “objective” fields to impose and reify pre-existing prejudices. The “science” of economics is mostly bogus* math masquerading as objective truth, for instance.

It must have been a real blow to the “everything can be understood tidily in a neat system of simple equations” crowd then when quantum entanglement was discovered. (Yes, I know about Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” but that must have been just the tip of a massive iceberg.)

For instance, take a look at this description from Wikipedia:

The above result may or may not be perceived as surprising. A classical system would display the same property, and a hidden variable theory (see below) would certainly be required to do so, based on conservation of angular momentum in classical and quantum mechanics alike. The difference is that a classical system has definite values for all the observables all along while the quantum system does not. In a sense to be discussed below, the quantum system considered here seems to acquire a probability distribution for the outcome of a measurement of the spin along any axis of the other particle upon measurement of the first particle. This probability distribution is in general different from what it would be without measurement of the first particle. This may certainly be perceived as surprising in the case of spatially separated entangled particles.

You can tell this fundamentally bothers the math-brained people from this description alone. “May or may not be perceived as surprising” and then a bunch of weird equivocating.

Unless one wishes to posit some method of faster-than-light signaling (for which there is no evidence, and much evidence against) well yeah, I’d say it’s pretty darn surprising.

I’m not saying quantum entanglement and that the fact that electrons have memory can never be explained mathematically (though I personally doubt it), or that there is some mystical explanation — rather that Hamlet’s admonition to Horatio is for the most part as true in the “hard” fields as it is in the soft ones: more things in heaven and earth and all that.

I’m not interested in pseudoscience or mysticism at all, except sociologically. Physics is remarkable in that we know so very much about the universe. However, don’t let the math-brained con you into believing that their systems of understanding are that predictive about very much. They simply are not and probably never will be.

See the above about how we don’t have any fundamental understanding at all about some pretty basic features of our universe and likely never will.

Yes, I know quantum entanglement can’t be used to pass information, yadda yadda, so it has no real impact on causality, blah blah, but it’s one area that makes me laugh because it’s clear that something completely bizarre is going on and physicists’ minds glitch when they contemplate it. For that matter, most math-brained people have mental glitches when try to to contemplate something that can’t be neatly systematized (and then they try to do it anyway, and then pronounce it truth.)

*Yes, the economists have equations that work out. Cool. I’ve even worked out some of them myself. But the models having anything to do with reality? Nope.

Nov 05

Lampoon

Apple’s approach to the so-called pro laptop:

griswold-electrical-safety-tips

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you don’t recognize that, it’s from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, or the movie Apple used as inspiration for their latest laptop decisions.

Nov 04

Not so pro

The MacBook Pro used to be the best laptop you could buy at any price.

Now it’s a below-average machine in a sea of not-that-good competitors that are still better than it by wide margins.

Great job, Apple.