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

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.

A friend of mine whose thoughts I value on most matters wrote this about health care and trade
"The problem is the drugs. We invent them at tremendous cost but nations like the UK, Canada, etc force us to sell them to them dirt cheap, which raises the cost to our citizens. TPP was going to make it more equitable by allowing governments to offset the cost directly and forcing them to abide by the agreement.
Basically everyone wants our innovations without having to pay. America subsidizes the luxury of cheap healthcare abroad. The cost falls back unfairly on us."

Its all about climate for me too. Dont wanna have to tell my kids in 20 years that they have no future thanks to an fbi director and an email server. The idea that Trump's massive conflicts of interest might hsave us all is.....amusing

The world’s 25 biggest drug and biotech companies hail from 8 countries, with 15 based in the U.S., 2 each headquartered in the U.K., Switzerland and Germany and 1 in Denmark, France, Israel and Japan.

How do all of the non-American companies manage?
xp

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/12/donald-trump-appears-to-soften-stance-on-range-of-pledges

already 'softening' on Obamacare and such.

Yeah Sanders, that's not only not true, that's kinda insulting to every medical researcher outside the us, including my brother who does foundational research at a public university, funded by taxpayer money from people like me.

Dean Baker worth reading:
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/surviving-the-age-of-trump

I wasn't agreeing with what he said, I was posting it here to see what you guys thought? I usually like what he post about things not because I agree with him but I like other's opinions.

I think he's wrong, and I got kinda angry about it because it hits close to home :)

But really, from over here, American pharmaceuticals are insane. Martin Skhreli, OxyContin, that blood-test scam that I can't figure out how to google right now.

How do all of the non-American companies manage?

Besides, if American drug companies, and by extension American consumers, are in fact being exploited by all these predatory foreign countries with socialized health care programmes, or more heavily regulated drug prices, it seems like it would be an easy problem for the US government to fix. Do you really think Canada could get away with exploitative trading practices against the US? For starters, as my earlier link about NAFTA shows, American corporations have had plenty of success with just flat out suing the Canadian government over legislation that gets in their way.

But, yes, as Frederik points out, a lot of research and innovation, even within the US, is done with public funding at research institutions. In the day and age of Martin Shkreli, it should not be hard to see that the corporations who charge astronomical prices for drugs are i) not always responsible for the innovation and ii) willing to charge whatever the market will bear.

xp

just skimming the last 12+ hours of posts, have mostly been writing up stuff for my blog, but a couple things that jumped out at me:

"For such an extreme radical who looks down his nose at ppl who take electoral politics seriously dr morbius has some depressingly typical "moderate" views"

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40)

man, you know how much it pisses me off that my bernie or bust/jill stein voter uncle who i had to ignore because he was so strident is now talking about "healing"? it takes some special skill to be wrong so consistently.

"Have been teetering on the brink of total despair all day, because I think this willful ignorance is probably unfixable."

― Josh in Chicago

for what it's worth, i agree that the ignorance is unfixable, but i don't see it as cause for despair. i think the best thing for us to do is to recalibrate our assumptions and find new and different ways of compensating for willful ignorance.

"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/12/donald-trump-appears-to-soften-stance-on-range-of-pledges

already 'softening' on Obamacare and such."

― piscesx

my wife's response to that: "he's not 'softening', he just parrots back whatever the last person he talked to told him.

Personally, I think we need to start thinking about healthcare expenditures competing with investments in our future. We can't spend 18% of GDP on healthcare without severe costs to other parts of the economy. Most of this spending is palliative care for chronic, self-inflicted diseases, where the cures are in lifestyle/diet, not medicine. We need to stop believing that drugs and procedures are more effective than they actually are. Many who wouldn't elect for them, if they were informed of the true costs, side-effects and limited benefits. Chemo increases survival rates 2%. Interventional cardiology (from stents to bypasses) reduces angina, less well than diet, and doesn't change outcomes.

There's been a shortage of drug candidates for two decades. The low-hanging fruit among small molecule drug candidates has been found. Patent drug companies have few options. They spend money on marketing, significantly more than on research. They shop the market of biotechs startups for candidates. They do their trials in lower cost developing nations. But basic research won't end if institutional buyers (from Medicare to insurance cos" subject drugs to cost/benefit analysis. And if institutional buyers don't, who will?

If we want more medical breakthroughs, I'd spend more research grants on preventative medicine, and lower the regulatory burden for drug discovery for rare diseases. But I wouldn't reward the marketing firms that happen to sell patent drugs beyond what their products are worth.

In that earlier Times piece the Trump camp indicated, among other things, that he was interested in continuing to hold rallies. That does not bode well. What does bode well is every early indication that he will literally be unable to govern, due to his short attention span and rampant self-interest and regard. What are the odds that he won't distract himself micromanaging his family and/or fortune? What are the odds, that if a day or two of protests months before he's inaugurated gets under his skin, similar or larger protests down the line don't derail him? What are the odds that when or if he attempts to enact policies that will detrimentally affect tens of millions of people in America it will bring the GOP cold war - or something broader and more acute - to a head? Is he the type of guy to call in the national guard to get his way? He's long seemed to lack the courage of his convictions, whatever they may be, choosing the coward's route of legal harassment to conflict. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, still finding ways to cope, but hearing of a Trump hopeful to retain his rich homebody lifestyle in Trump Tower gives me some comfort. Bush could go clear brush in Texas. Who goes to the heart of Manhattan for peace and quiet? And Trump out of DC might give a clearer indication of the motives of his minions and cohort.

xpost Rush, please remind us (me) of your blog url.

Also: let's predict how may Trump Year One threads are we going to have.

Isn't the one drawback with Trump not being up to the job now taht he's been lined up that the job will instead fall on Mike Pence who would be much worse and wouldn't have been in tbe running if he hadn't agreed to the VP role?

Dudes, you know how its already been acknowledged that Trump's opinion on something depends on who he's recently discussed it with?

He recently discussed 'ObamaCare' with Barack Obama.

If that's all it takes, maybe the solution for the next four years is for Bill C to start playing golf with Trump again?

Might well be.

After my kid brother began complaining about all the barriers to effective medical research, I do get that it's more complex than just forcing the drug companies to charge lower prices - though I still think he's wrong on some details, I'm not going to artmajor-splain to him about his chosen field of study. I also remember this one RadioLab about a new wonder drug that was the first time you could cure this one disease, and it was massively expensive, tens of thousands of dollars for a few months of pills. But then you were cured. And you wouldn't need drugs for all the symptoms of the disease for decades, as you used to, and it the long run it would prove quite beneficial, not just for the lifes of the sick, but for the bottom line of the health care system as well. But in the short run, it could almost bankrupt some health care systems.

Can't there be a balance between government regulation of health care and free market solutions? I don't want health care for myself. I'd rather have a savings account for when I need it. I hate paying money for something I never use.

Can't there be a balance between government regulation of health care and free market solutions?

Yes. It's called the Affordable Care Act.

If that's all it takes, maybe the solution for the next four years is for Bill C to start playing golf with Trump again?

― Spiritual Hat Minimalism (Sund4r)

shit, no wonder eisenhower was such an effective president.

i think the exec branch is likely to work the way it did in the reagan years, when the president wanted to be head of state and in front of the tube by seven: a fractious coalition of dead-eyed d.c. republican psychos and wild-eyed breitbart psychos, backstabbing each other and competing to manipulate trump while enduring high turnover. (the difference being that the nihilistic zealot team in reagan's administration is the mainstream adult one in trump's.) meanwhile trump will go on tv and hold rallies and whip up public opinion against anyone who opposes the expansion of his power and perform the role of crisis president while plundering whatever he can plunder for his family.

xpost Rush, please remind us (me) of your blog url.

― Josh in Chicago

thank you so much for asking! now i can post it again without feeling like an asshole shill. :)

http://rebuildingeverything.blogspot.com/

i just posted a bunch more stuff there. the logorrhea continues unabated. if anything starting a blog has only increased it.

What happens to the crazy conspiracy theory right now they their guys are in the White House?

this is going to be the most leak-prone administration in history