I see so much stupid specious word detritus like this.

I find it troubling that virtually no one can say what Trump's campaign did well, but everyone can harp on Hillary's mistakes.

— GothamGirlBlue (@GothamGirlBlue) April 22, 2017

Trump ran a far better campaign than Clinton. He spent half the money and got better results. But want specifics? Ok. Here you go.

1) Media manipulation/leveraging. Trump’s campaign was a master at this. Clinton was by contrast (as usual) tone-deaf, condescendingly exhortative and polished (which doesn’t get any attention). Those damn deplorables….

2) Social media. Not much to say about this. Trump’s campaign made better use of this medium and reached far more people whose votes were actually contestable.

3) Messaging. This is a really big one. Should’ve listed it first, but who cares when you’re responding to people who care not a whit about reality and are kind of dumb to boot. Anyway, Trump’s messaging about the working class, about the negative effects of NAFTA, China trade, etc., were spot on. Clinton’s mush-mouthed flip-flopping (TPP) were the exact opposite. (Note this is separate from the likelihood of Trump now keeping any promises. I think he will not.)

4) Trump concentrated campaign funds very intelligently on areas and rallies where they were likely to make a difference (Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, etc.). Clinton did not. Simple as that.

5) Trump’s other outreach efforts were also more effective, while Clinton’s were often extremely counterproductive.

That’s five. There are more. But this narrative that Clinton! Was the most qualified! Candidate! In the history of the universe EVER! Just has to die.

This is America, for better or worse. Our ethos is the proof that you deserve to win is that you won.

Who is president? Right. Not Clinton. The superiority of Trump’s campaign effort could glibly be described in just those few sentences.

See also this typical garbage by Lance Mannion.

The Democrats are spreading this ridiculous narrative wide and far, when really all they are conveying is how badly they want to lose in 2018 and 2020.

Oh fuck yes.

Linnell even proposes that employers, were they looking to design the best workforces, consider stationing employees who need to concentrate outside the city.

Immediate productivity increase for me of 50%, more likely double, if I were allowed to work from a well-connected place in the countryside, with birdsong and near a riverbank.

Companies, though, care about “efficiency” and not actual efficiency.

I don’t agree with a great deal of what Robert Prechter writes and believes, but this is indeed true.

Gilburt: With the advent and proliferation of computer-executed trading, what effect have they had on Elliott Wave analysis, other than the speed at which trading is done?

Prechter: Virtually none. People build their errors of thinking into their programs.

Algorithms reflect what everyone “knows.” Which is often all wrong. Like cows, they herd, and stampede at a loud noise. This might be true even sans humans composing them, but is definitely true with humans coding them up.

Clever friends who make good book recommendations are the best.

Wonderful. I saw Nirvana perform this live on stage in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1993. This is different but just as good.

The humanities become more important not less as science progresses. The possibility space of action concomitantly increases with scientific knowledge and application, thus giving rise to more situations where humanities learning is needed to mediate between expanded choices, individual and societal.

Vancouver is a better city than most in North America. Amazing what not destroying your community and its environs with highways and the worship of cars can do. To be clear, Vancouver (the one in Canada, not the one in Washington) is still pretty auto-centric, but they just haven’t given absolutely everything over to them.

It’s not perfect — housing costs are utterly out of control, but that is true to some extent in nearly any major North American city. Homeowners and their interests have a near lock on all politics, local and national. Hard to see a way to change that.

Still, striking how different Vancover feels than most American cities. It’s a place at least partially for humans, rather than for machines.

Compiling Samba from source and listening to “Good as Hell.”

How many people have ever done those two activities at the same time in the history of the world is probably one.

“The laws of physics, I concluded, to the extent that they are true, do not explain much. We could know all the true laws of nature, and still not know how to explain composite cases. Explanation must rely on something other than law.”

–Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie

The problem with thinking you know more than the experts.

Wrong framing. I don’t think I know more than most experts, but I certainly am not attempting to rip myself off, wrench money from my own wallet for nefarious causes, or otherwise attempting to pilfer, purloin, or prise away some ill-gotten gain from myself.

Experts these days more than ever are attempting to do exactly that if not most of the time, then certainly enough of the time that it is an ever-present and huge risk.

So no, I do not trust experts even if they are more skilled and/or competent than I am in their domain — with the way our society is structured, that makes them more of a risk to me, not less.

Oh hell yeah, The Leftovers is back. Such a beautiful, great, gut-wrenching, intelligent, daring second season.

The first season was ok. Boring in parts, unnecessary in others, great in a few others. (But it had Carrie Coon so I kept watching.)

The second season — I say goddamn.

It’s the most human, most absorbing, most lived-in and most dementedly painstaking show on television. And the greatness of Carrie Coon. That last sentence is incomplete because nothing can complete Carrie Coon.

If season 3 is even half as good as the second one was, it’ll be better than 99% of what’s on TV now.

I might go back and re-watch season 1 in light of what I now know — suspect I was missing a lot, or was not in the groove of the show then.

I’m very happy to be visiting my friend. Go away, John Nash, she’s the one with a beautiful mind.

Why do we keep Snell’s law on the books when we both know it to be false and have a more accurate refinement available? There are obvious pedagogic reasons. But are there serious scientific ones? I think there are, and these reasons have to do with the task of explaining. Specifying which factors are explanatorily relevant to which others is a job done by science over and above the job of laying out the laws of nature. Once the laws of nature are known, we still have to decide what kinds of factors can be cited in explanation.

–Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie

Tell me again, Neil deGrasse Tyson, how philosophy is irrelevant and useless?

Strength in adversity and the need to make a living are not the same thing as freedom.

–Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

It’s strange how realizing the truth of the artificiality of your preferred fiction in no way makes it easier to consume or enjoy fiction that is also just as highly stylized but is non-preferred.

All the fiction is a stage on a stage, and all the players merely types that echo our preferred way of seeing ourselves and our world.