Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

Yeah. But that would have taken until 2020, probably. Which is just in time for the next round of gerrymandering, so it did make sense. But there wouldn't have been any higher federal minimum wage, and there wouldn't have been a 275 billion $ investment fund. It's just... You can't say both that Clinton should have run on a positive message, and that she should have figured out to sell the truth, because the truth was always bleak.

And I'll repeat, Sanders would have won, imo, but he wouldn't have run on a truthful message (nobody does) and he wouldn't have been able to deliver. It would still have been fucking bleak.

that was to treeship.

And you can't just pledge to renegotiate a trilateral agreement. That's kinda what trilateral means, it would have to include a willing Mexican partner, and they've already said they won't renegotiate NAFTA with Trump.

I mean, you can pledge it, but it's bullshit. It's not truthful.

With Mexico, Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NAFTA if Mexico and Canada don't negotiate with the U.S. and offer it more favorable terms. He's also threatened to impose a 35 percent tariff on Mexican imports.

As president, Trump would have the authority to renegotiate NAFTA and withdraw if the terms aren't to his liking. Under the rules of the trade pact, any member can withdraw with six month's written notice, and the American president can call for additional duties if trade terms unfairly advantage Canada or Mexico.

Don't see why Hillary couldn't have threatened the same.

Yeah, she could have threatened to withdraw. But that's not the same as saying that she would negotiate. And if she should also tell the truth about the impact of withdrawing from NAFTA, that wouldn't be a positive story as well.

And btw, Trump won't withdraw from NAFTA, nor get to negotiate it.

This is a very interesting point:

And part of where Clinton's campaign failed is that there was almost no acknowledgement of that fear in Middle America, and no story to tell that said, "If you give us your vote, we'll fix it for you."

I've been wondering about this in the UK context, where there are politicians and policy advisors who know nothing outside of the world they live in. They studied Politics/economics at a good university and then went straight into a political role.

Is it similar in the US?

If so, maybe part of the problem is that we now have a political class who come from a very narrow slice of society. In their ambition to fit in they lack the empathy for other parts of the population.

I think it's unfair to say Clinton didn't offer anything to Middle America. She offered tons of things (higher minimum wage, vastly increased education subsidies, better healthcare, etc.) - it's just that all of those things required Congressional approval which no one thought she was going to get. Something that is actually within Presidential prerogative to achieve - torpedoing trade deals - is something Trump promised but Clinton didn't.

trump merely promised to make corporations bring back jobs to america because he said so and defeat isis in a way the generals wouldn't fathom and build a wall that mexico would pay for

stupid hillary, offering nothing to the working class

Mr. Trump, a homebody who often flew several hours late at night during the campaign so he could wake up in his own bed in Trump Tower, is talking with his advisers about how many nights a week he will spend in the White House. He has told them he would like to do what he is used to, which is spending time in New York when he can.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/us/politics/trump-president.html

i was joking to my mother on the phone this evening, well, maybe he won't even move here..

this article makes him sound like such a baby.

That's not my issue. I would prefer to pay out of pocket. Hospitals prefer to work with you than wait on insurance companies to pay them. Now I have to have coverage or the government takes my tax return. To cover my family and myself, I pay $1383.57 a month. I use to pay $640 for my wife and child before Obamacare really kick in. I'm willing to admit I'm ill informed about what exactly has happened, but I know it was better before.

Do you understand why the tax penalty is there? The pre-Obamacare setup may have been better for you, but it was not better for the country as a whole. I've seen many people bemoan Obamacare because their premiums went up (or cause they have to pay tax penalty for going w/o insurance), but I've yet to see any of said people say "I don't care if a kid with leukemia can't get coverage, just lower my premiums". Cause that's the trade off.

Trump could offer a shitton of things, actually, because a win for him would include a republican controlled congress - as it turned out. Hopefully it's also pretty obvious how extreme it would have been if Clinton had pledged to 'torpedo' trade deals. It would have been shocking to do so for Sanders as well, btw, he clearly refused to do it, though he did say 'renegotiate'.

Again. Again. She should have been there in the Midwest. But fuck if I can figure out what she could have offered them. It's really easy to be outflanked on every issue, when you're running against a hypocritical liar who just spouts bullshit without thinking about any reaction.

Sure, there's lots of differences in the details, but both the election prediction models and the CDO rating models underestimated correlation in a way that led to overstating confidence.

― o. nate, Friday, November 11, 2016 10:31 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

with a broad enough brush though (as is used here) all issues at all with any form of probability aggregation can be chalked up to "correlation". it doesn't tell you anything. you might as well say "the election models and the cdo models both had in common one thing: statistics"

I don't see why threatening to torpedo a bad trade deal that the other side refuses to renegotiate should be shocking. I think if the Democratic party now values free trade above the well-being of working-class Americans, then it's losing touch with its roots. If the Democrats become the party only of the urban professional class, they better get used to losing elections. xp

I think "correlated error" is something they had in common, which is a bit more specific than "statistics", but if you disagree I won't argue the point.

“Hitler has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet” - Orwell

there are some trump voters who thought they were voting for him in order to help ease the economic pain of their communities but i think it is ludicrous to say that was the guiding factor, especially since hillary offered a better plan to people. trump voters liked his vision of america as a blood soaked dystopia, humiliated at every turn, that cries out for redemption. they liked having their prejudices flattered and most of all they liked having a national identity from which others were excluded. if obama's political career was based on the idea that there is "no white america and black america, just one america," trump ran on a platform of undoing that message.

the democrats, moving forward, should try to get a better deal for the american worker who has been left in the lurch of globalization. i've always said this. but they should do that becuase it's the right thing to do, not out of shame because trump somehow did a "better job" of speaking to these people than hillary. trump won with all kinds of whites, not just working ones. he was not talking about trade policy most of the time for the past 18 months!

we need to understand what has happened. people are angry all right but not always for righteous reasons.

I don't see why threatening to torpedo a bad trade deal that the other side refuses to renegotiate should be shocking. I think if the Democratic party now values free trade above the well-being of working-class Americans, then it's losing touch with its roots. If the Democrats become the party only of the urban professional class, they better get used to losing elections. xp

― o. nate, 12. november 2016 05:26 (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know what to say if you don't get why this would be shocking. And there are plenty of working class hispanic americans who would be horrified.

The idea of a multilateral agreement is that countries cooperate to make deals that help everyone. It's a give and take. The US just saying that an agreement is 'bad', and torpedoing to pressure a smaller country into better concessions, would be disastrous for the global order. And for what? Why is NAFTA 'bad'?

good question that i really wanted to discuss months and months ago and did a bunch of reading about it bc it seems like no one really knows and the conclusion from all that reading and consulting w/ ppl who know a lot about trade is - it probably was better for the economy but it also probably cost jobs but it probably gave americans more purchasing power which is a literal quality of life increase but maybe not and probably it's just neutral in the end - or at least that's a convenient conclusion bc it's very confusing.

I think it's unfair to say Clinton didn't offer anything to Middle America. She offered tons of things (higher minimum wage, vastly increased education subsidies, better healthcare, etc.) - it's just that all of those things required Congressional approval which no one thought she was going to get. Something that is actually within Presidential prerogative to achieve - torpedoing trade deals - is something Trump promised but Clinton didn't.

― o. nate,

yes but she couldn't sell these points, i.e talk to tem

*them

Re: NAFTA this links to several reviews from various ends of the spectrum and says it was mostly a wash (imo) but concludes:

So if the U.S. economy did so well after NAFTA, is there any reason to think the trade agreement was harmful? It all depends on where you are in the economic structure. A 2012 review by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development weighed NAFTA’s macroeconomic benefits against the plight of the thousands of largely low-skilled workers who were displaced in its wake. Many of them could not bridge the gap in skills to take the higher-skilled positions that had replaced the jobs they had lost to trade. Retraining and assistance programs didn’t “appreciably” help those workers find new jobs, either, the report said.

The report questioned whether the gains in trade under NAFTA were enough to offset the struggles of displaced workers and recommended that future agreements include stronger provisions to protect U.S. workers exposed to foreign competition.

But it may be too late for those Americans who have already lost their jobs to overseas competition and have been unable to enjoy the fruits of the larger and more efficient economy. Those workers are the ones who may use their votes this November as a referendum on free trade.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/09/28/Was-NAFTA-Really-So-Bad-Economy

I have a simpler question: Is NAFTA bad for the US, or for Canada or the US, or for all three countries? Like, what does the term 'bad trade agreement' mean?

There was an article on VOX - and VOX are never wrong! - explaining that the jobs didn't really go to Mexico, because they were all being outsourced to China. And there was one policy change that caused that to speed of rapidly, but it was a procedural change in WTO, and nobody can figure out an argument as to how to roll it back, because it was obviously unfair before.

so a lot of the stuff i read concluded with "maybe it's a wash" but i wonder if that's bc they crunched the numbers and really yeah it comes out about even or bc it's esoteric and they don't really know how to measure this stuff well so it's a lot of speculation and augury

A handful of sources in and around the Trump transition team said there was no evidence that the president-elect had even reviewed any of the binders of policy and personnel proposals produced by the team. Trump’s only contact with the transition staff, the sources said, had come through Christie, the New Jersey governor and transition team chief who was demoted on Friday from transition team chairman to being one of several vice chairs.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-team-rivals-231277

great stuff although you or I could have written this blindly and been 95% correct

Trump’s children and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who guided him throughout the campaign, appear to have retained their influence in an official capacity. Kushner’s presence at the White House on Thursday drew notice from Obama’s staff when he asked, as they toured the West Wing, how many of the individuals there would remain into the next administration. Nearly all will depart along with the president.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-transition-20161111-story.html

We're definitely in a bad timeline but it's funny as hell.

Why is NAFTA 'bad'?

Not that Trump cares about this but I have concerns about the investor-state dispute mechanism and what it has meant in terms of environmental policy in Canada: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/canada-sued-investor-state-dispute-ccpa_n_6471460.html

My 30th birthday was on Wednesday. What a shitty way to start my third decade of life.

And then Leonard Cohen died. Like fuck this year.

I just learned that my father has lung cancer. What a week, huh?

xps s. clover & o. nate -

How i break it down (leaving out some details but w/e)

HRC was leading between +5% and +1% in just about every every swing state in the polls. if the errors among each swing state were uncorrelated, the probability of a HRC win is one minus the probability that the error in WI is at least as large as her lead multiplied by the probability the error in PA is at least as large as her lead, and so on, summed over every subset of swing states DJT would need to win. under the assumption of independence (and assuming poll sample variance is a good approximation of true underlying variance) that number is close to 1. IIRC this is what the Sam Wang model, which gave her the humiliating 99% probability of winning, assumed. however, if errors are correlated, then MI having a large error means WI has a larger error means FL has a larger error, and so on. rather than summing over the product of a bunch of small numbers, we're summing over the product of larger numbers, as errors now move together (what if all polls are underestimating turnout/enthusiasm/rabid racist Wille zur Macht, etc.) this roughly accounts for the difference between Nate Silver's model, which had her at something like 70%, and Sam Wang's. note that it's almost impossible, given poll data, to build a model that predicted a Trump win. (I previously attempted to make this point to caek in a primary thread after Silver failed to predict Sanders' upset win in MI and leftists all accused him of skewing polls, none of which showed him ahead, but I don't think I expressed myself properly at the time.)

Sam Wang is not an idiot; the reason he made that assumption is because the matrix of correlations that you have to estimate is large relative to available data (50 choose 2 is 1225, and we only have a half dozen elections or so) so you need to make assumptions on the joint distribution of errors, otherwise it's just pure shit noise. Sam Wang thought it would be more fruitful to use the data to more precisely estimate each individual state's variance, while Silver sacrificed some precision on state variance for a more realistic picture of the joint distribution. (but silver still made some stringent assumption!) these are the kind of subjective, intuitive calls every modeler needs to make. they are unavoidable and the only guide re: which assumptions to make are (1)out of sample fit on historical data, which in this case is slim, and (2)your gut feeling.

people pricing CDOs didn't assume uncorrelated errors (at least not all of them, some surely used models closer to Silver's), they just couldn't observe tail risk ('what if all loans are fraudulent and there is a crisis') in historical data, because tail risks by definition are rare. so they underestimated the correlation. it's not clear to me that there is any data-based procedure they could have used to better incorporate this risk. you could follow Nasim Taleb and apply the precautionary principle and assume it is large. he also assumes that the probability of GMOs wiping out life on earth is large by the precautionary principle, amd ignores the fact you still have to subjectively choose when to apply PP and when not to (this is why post-Black Swan Taleb is a raging moron imo), otherwise you should rationally hide under your bed and stockpile a lifetime supply of organic dried goods.

it's not so much about pernicious assumptions made by modelers (although there are obvious incentives in finance to understate risk) as difficult fundamental subjective choices.

sterlz is right that this is a fundamental problem in statistics and not unique to some devious method used in CDO pricing, I think that's what he means by 'you might as well say statistics'

fuck i just read a fb post equating the KKK to "other fringe groups that sow division, like BLM." shit like that makes my head explode, and then i go through the whole "is it worth replying? if so how?" sorry just venting. i'm so pissed.

We have to be vigilant and vocal about false equivalency now.

I have friends and relatives who just don't get identity politics (yes, they are all white). My response is that elevating the value of whiteness is identity politics in its original form, and all of what they call 'political correctness' is a response to that original dick move.

thank you suzy. i will indeed reply, but tomorrow. too angry and brain-tired to reply effectively rn

Excerpt from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (outstanding book, have been re-reading it lately).

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, 11 November 2016 23:12 (yesterday)

This is great, thanks.

Re: people admitting they don't act on the basis of 'facts' - sample size of 1, obv, but this is exactly what my dad has been doing over the past years (voted Brexit) - his argument was that people, including him, are voting on feelings and that's how it SHOULD be. Presumably because 'facts' are too tiring to discern on the internet so you give up or just believe everything the Daily Mail tells you because why not? One of the big deals for him was that Obama saying UK would be last in the queue in trade negotiations and he was angrily reacting against that - took it as a slight rather than a blindingly obvious statement of what's in the best interests of countries other than the UK.

Re: people turning on Trump when he can't do anything he promised - in the UK, there has been no discernable progress to leaving the EU. Instead of engaging with why this is the case, Brexiters are blaming the Other Side for 'moaning' and creating obstacles. Of course I can't see Trump blaming anyone else for any future shortcomings of his but supporters will do it regardless.

Illegal immigration from Mexico has steadily declined in the US over the last 20 years, largely due to improvements in Mexico's economy, which are largely due to free trade agreements like NAFTA. Trump is a fucking idiot.

looking more soberly at the figures - trump didn't win this, hillary lost it.

hrc was a lousy candidate. the "deplorables" comment was completely tone-deaf. she carried two decades plus of pernicious anti-clinton narrative baggage (brought about not only by the right, but by mainstream orgs like the times and washington post, pundits like chris matthews, etc.). she couldn't telegraph her own positions. yet...there was no one else. the left is bereft of charismatic leaders who could have done any better than she.

she made tactical errors too -- like assuming those rust belt states were in the bag, and finishing up in the last couple weeks with all-anti-trump rhetoric instead of stressing how her own plans would help his constituency.

That's the most sobering stat from the exit polls (yes, yes, polls) - Clinton appears to have had a 7pt lead amongst those who decided who to vote for back in August or earlier, but it gradually dwindled to almost nothing over the subsequent weeks, taking a particularly bad hit in the wake of the Comey letter (the 6% of the active electorate who made up their minds that week split 50-38 for Trump).

So, yeah, terrible strategy to keep pounding how awful Trump was when his post-convention negatives (Gold Star parents, Access Hollywood) weren't actually helping HRC much, if at all. But I didn't think so at the time.

But how do you even get your genuinely good policy points through the noise of "Trump says unbelievable shit" in the media?

the media is a real big problem that needs to be worked on. focus should be on the mainstream media, because there's not much we can do about the right wing madness.

like, a news org that reported truthfully, didn't hue to narratives, and spoke to plain-spoken people. that would be helpful.

and that names names. when someone goes on tv and lies or tries to deceive million of people, that should be news.

BBC News has Trump announcing that he will keep elements of Obamacare. Not sure how much as yet.
Wonder what else he's going to renege on. Though this sounds like it could be in most people's best interests doesn't it? & somebody up thread was saying taht with a bit of tweaking this did sound like it would be a mostly beneficial program. Just not one seen as part of Obama's legacy.

Do hope people do look back at the Obama years and see him as mainly decent.
Just getting the feeling that it's an experiment in who could be the President,a man with non white ethnicity followed by a woman. Thought that might be overly remifying things

Now seems to have been overly tempting fate for Hilary to be hosting the expected victory party in a building with a glass ceiling.

& wonder when the next attempt to get a woman president will happen. Does taking several steps backwards throw everything off.
I did see that the Republicans had a female Presidential candidate early on, though she dropped out early on and became Cruz's VP candidate.

http://www2.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/magazine/a-time-for-refusal.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0

i like both of those.

have that fear that people will get tired of talking about trump and it will be like the mass shooting thing where people are outraged for a minute and yell about gun control and then go back to posting pictures of kitty cats a couple of days later. hoping for perpetual outrage and resistance to normalcy.

hoping for perpetual outrage and resistance to normalcy.

You were alive from 2000-2008. You know that's not happening. This will blow over by Thanksgiving, bubble up again a little at inauguration, and then disappear almost entirely next year. It'll disappear completely as far as the media are concerned; they will long since have normalized him and become court stenographers. Assuming this administration even engages with the press at all - the campaign/transition team is basically totally shutting out their press pool reporter already. I wouldn't be surprised if the White House briefing room was turned into a room for Trump's homunculus of a son to play video games in.

Don't underestimate his vanity. Iraq beats ISIS in Mosul, and its a Trump victory. Cosmetic changes to the ACA, and its Trumpcare.

Really, my glimmer of hope resolves around his self interest. If Trump backs out of the Paris Accord, I want every country around the world to boycott Trump properties, for legal action against his hotels and golf courses everywhere. Let his children know that his decisions are destroying their own prospects.

do people think that that jonathan pie guy is a real news person? why do people post those videos on facebook? i'm convinced people think he is real.