Funny how I was accused on several sites of being a BernieBro when I expressed doubts about Clinton*, despite not really being a Bernie supporter (mainly because I thought he’d be ineffective and wasn’t really radical enough for me).

Let’s see: didn’t really support Bernie, never voted for him, did not see him as being very effective in office, and yet I’m a BernieBro. Ok, then! Sure, that makes loads of sense.

When I mentioned that I supported Jill Stein far more strongly, it was like their brains melted down; you could almost hear the circuits liquefying, observe the smoke pouring out like in an old 1960s sci-fi b-movie as they skirled ever-more shrilly “BernieBro! BernieBro!”

It’s no mystery at all why Clinton lost.

It doesn’t matter who you supported. If it wasn’t Clinton, you were a BernieBro. See how much good that did.

*Doubts that turned out to be very fucking justified, as we see in the tragic present.

Every word in this headline is funnier than the one before it.

Bingo? Is that a person or a canid?

“Doublings: I suggest that you hold in your hands two distinct books. The main text of each is the same. It is all too easy to compare these two books to the two Don Quixote invented by Borges, the one written by Cervantes, the other, identical in words, written much later by an imagined Pierre Menard. Despite the words being the same, so much has happened that the meaning is different.”

-Ian Hacking, from the foreword to Michel Foucault’s History of Madness

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

My political predictions are usually terrible. However, my tech ones are typically far more spot on.

So here’s one: after Mozilla moronically deprecates XUL\XPCOM, Firefox as an ongoing project will be dead within three years from that time.

Now to establish what criteria I’m using by “dead.”

By this, I mean that within three years all non-maintenance development will have stalled, with no new features being added; the only development done will be security-related, sort of like the state Thunderbird is (alas) in now.

This is a gimme prediction as it’s almost inevitable. Without the one thing that makes Firefox unique and special, no one will have any reason at all to use it.

Easy one.

I noticed this from the NYT editorial board today:

Could there be a more perfect illustration for exactly why Trump won?

Yeah, America is already great if you are trust fund rich with a college degree and a sweet pad a little down from 5th Avenue.

But it’s not so great if you are poor and black. Or poor and white. Or affected by automation. Or by illegal immigration. Or by factories skedaddling to Mexico and along with them your job. Or if your family and friends are regularly dying of opioid overdoses. Or if your health care is still atrocious or too expensive despite the ACA. Or if you can’t afford college. Or if you need reliable public transportation to get to work. Or if you need childcare. Etc.

But cool, for the 10-20% that is composed of the affluent and the professional and managerial classes, yeah, I suppose America is already pretty great.

As for the rest, screw all of them, I guess. That’s certainly the perennial position of the NYT and is why Trump rode this sort of fatuous imbecility straight to victory.

What a time. We have one party that is both naive, stupid, and delusional conspiracy theorists. That’d be the Democrats.

And the other party is evil, stupid and sadists. That’d be the Republicans.

The only commonality is stupidity.

Great.

I obviously think Obama was a pretty shit president. I knew from the moment he picked Larry Summers for a cabinet position during his first term that he would be, that his campaign like Trump’s was all built on lies.

However, Trump will probably make Obama look good. He will by comparison appear to actually be the cool audacious super-competent genius that his delusional supporters claim that he is.

Trump is what you get when you care about crap like “cool” actions and “audacious” speeches rather than actually making people’s lives better.

It’s going to be a long four years.

I really like economics. I think about the field a great deal and read loads of books, papers and articles about it.

However it is a field with a lot of potential, but perhaps no future, because it is full of liars — and the best sorts of fabulists, too, as they don’t even know they are making things up.

Like this. The data is fine. Nothing wrong with it. The interpretation however leaves much to be desired.

Funny how decreases in productivity growth have nothing at all to do with vast increases in inequality, the weakening of labor and various “free” trade treaties that discourage automation.*

No, this of all things is the explanation.

Rather, the important factor after 2003 is slower growth in innovation.

No. This is stupid. The benefits of innovation have barely even been realized because we never even tried it. Instead, we destroyed labor, thus making it artificially cheap and then thought it was great having 20 burger flippers making $7.25 an hour rather than two robot burger flippers and a single human robot minder.

The paper I linked is mendacious by omission; it ignores many of the largest factors causing a productivity stall in Western countries and cites the one that almost definitely is not true.

Some way to run a “science.”

*If all the gains accrue only to capital owners, it’s not clear that automation is actually beneficial and almost certainly would not be as things stand now.

My partner and I saw a gator this large in the wild in Lake City, FL, a few years ago.

Seeing an alligator in Florida is not hard. Just, like, go near water and look around. But one this large is a bit rarer.

BTW those people are way too close — even a gator that large can move at 20mph or so if it wants to. I know it looks lethargic and poky. But it ain’t when it don’t wanna be.

Given productivity increases, the “natural” minimum wage is probably ~$20 per hour.

I’d not expect to see large disemployment effects in most of the US for any level set below that.

I do agree with economists that the minimum wage can in principle product such effects, just not that it does so at $7.25 an hour, and even if it does so the social benefits by far outweigh the drawbacks.

As a digression, economists drooling over validation by physicists and mathematicians have caused almost as much harm as straight ideology per se. The consequences of inter-academic signaling and prestige hierarchies is under-examined, IMO.

If quantum physics weren’t true, the calmest fire would emit copiously at every frequency, including in the x-ray and gamma ray range. The smallest fire would, in other words, kill you if you stood close to it.

Of course if quantum physics were untrue, you wouldn’t be alive anyway.

Just some assorted crap I was thinking about.

How can people believe that probability exists sans humans, or at least sans consciousness?

Humans created probability. In the universe absent us, events simply occur or they do not. No probability. Not even the possibility of probability.

Much of science seems intent on importing human biases into areas where they only obscure, not illuminate.

The first 10 in today’s playlist: