tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16398947768457641162024-03-13T06:30:35.201-07:00What’s The Worst That Could Happen?The running thoughts of Matthew Janesmjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.comBlogger106125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-73125857422284955342023-01-08T16:31:00.000-08:002023-01-08T16:31:02.613-08:00Welcome to 2023<p>Been three years since I've written anything on here. Blogs feel a bit outdated, and looking through the history of this one, an occasionally embarrassing reminder of what I thought were important opinions in the late aughts.</p><p>However, fresh from a few weeks break to recharge over the holidays, I have my regular New Year's desire to create more in a public sphere outside of work. With Twitter devolving under the new management, and me still getting a feel of Mastodon, I'll take a stab at putting things back on a blog.</p><p>Wish me luck with writing more regularly and not holding everything up with editing and concern about significance.</p>mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-9803217850856161492020-10-19T22:45:00.001-07:002020-10-19T22:45:43.675-07:00Weeks Where Decades Happen<p>I hazard to say this will be the most historic year I have yet lived through. It is scary to write that, as it is only mid-October and there is time yet for things to become more memorable.</p><p>January and February seem decades ago with the simple excitement of the Democratic primary. Then Covid-19 and the inept response from the Trump administration leading to a year's worth of death, social isolation, and economic suspension here at home. As the months have gone, by add to that mass protests against racist police brutality, the west coast catching on fire, the death of RBG, and now a general election where we're fighting to keep the US from falling further into fascism.</p><p>During this all, I've barely written. I've written in my own journals, but scaled back writing publicly. Four years ago in the last presidential election, I was writing and arguing regularly, but now, not so much. Retweeting or reposting the works of others, but less to say myself.</p><p>Perhaps it's that the divides have solidified. I certainly don't feel it's worth arguing with anyone who is still a Trump supporter at this point. The few acquaintances I had who voted for Trump were cut out of my life a good while ago. The only person I've talked to this year who I know voted for Trump in 2016 is my grandfather. </p><p>There is still a good amount of debate between the left and the liberals, or between the mods and the progs here in San Francisco, and I'm happy to listen to all those sides when deciding on ballot propositions and the like. Still, I'm not out there arguing. I have more and more disagreements with the local political groups, and feel less a part of any of them. Here in SF, I find myself to the left of SF YIMBY and to the right of the DSA. I've been a member of the Sierra Club for a decade plus, but here in SF they've become a hypocritical anti-environmental org for wealthy pastoralists. Hell, I'm even irritated by an organization as focused on the Bicycle Coalition over their endorsements or lack thereof in this race. Fights over ideological purity and personal grudges make local politics a painful investment.</p><p>I do regret being more passive than I would like while history is happening. I could be out at more protests, more involved with political organizations. Maybe it's just the social isolation of sheltering in place and rarely seeing or talking with anyone in person. Maybe this is just what happens in a pandemic.</p><p>With national politics, there are some parallels, but the story is different. Within my wider social circle there is some divide in opinion, but a fraction of what I see locally. Biden wasn't in my top five choices for the Democratic primary, but in fighting against Trump and the GOP I can't say I lack for enthusiasm in this fight. While I am writing less, I am spending more time volunteering with get out the vote efforts and donating more than I was four years ago.</p><p>The Republican Party must be destroyed. The Trump administration has taken the mask off and shown the authoritarian drive of the GOP. If this election goes well, and it is such a blue wave that we can keep Trump and his lackey judges from stealing the election, I have a slight amount of hope that the Democrats will take thing seriously enough to make fundamental changes to erase the conservative biases in our government. If we don't, and there is another economic depression and the Republicans come back in 2022 like they did in 2010, there won't be much of a future to America. Gerrymandering, packed courts, and voter suppression could stomp out any hope for free elections in this country for a generation. </p><p>If the Democrats take the Senate and the Presidency, we have a chance. We should end the filibuster, pass HR1, work on adding six to twelve Democratic leaning states to the Union, increase the size of the House, increase the size of the federal court system, and add six members to the Supreme Court. I'm doubtful we'll do all that, but I have some hope that we'll do at least a part. Any part of this wish list would be more than we've done in my lifetime.</p><p>First we have to get there. If the election is close enough that the Republicans can attempt to steal the presidency or any Senate seat, I believe they will try. In fifteen days we will have to be ready to fight to keep them from throwing out the votes they don't like, and to force Trump to accept the election results.</p><p>Here's hoping the rest of the year doesn't become that historic and that Americans don't have to learning the meaning of the word "autogolpe".</p>mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-59268867538015683152020-01-04T21:26:00.001-08:002020-01-04T21:26:34.063-08:00Welcome to the TwentiesLooks like I haven't written here since 2017. I suppose habits change in adulthood. Or it could be that I got depressed with politics after 2016 and grew tired of shouting into the void.<br />
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However, with a new decade it seems a good time to record some thoughts. The next ten years might not be easy. Our senile and racist conman of a president opened up the year assassinating a top Iranian general, so things are already off to a worrisome start. Good luck to us all avoiding a war. I hope the elections go well in America this year, but worldwide the political environment is frightening with right-wing populists ruling Russia, China, India, Turkey, the UK, the Philippines, and Brazil.<br />
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To counteract the pessimism, the last decade did have a fair amount of good news. Childhood mortality and extreme poverty fell significantly, literacy has increased, and birthrates have continued to drop.<br />
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That said, I feel like I'm starting this decade with less hope than I did the last. Only part of that is politics. A greater part is environmental damage and global warming. I've had the same concerns for decades, and humanity keeps putting off doing anything close to what it needs to do. We are far past the point where we should have taken action, and the debt we have built up is significant. Even if we act decisively now, we can still expect rising sea levels for the rest of our lives to cause trillions of dollars of damage to coastal areas. Given what we've seen this century, I am pessimistic we'll act with anywhere close to enough speed, and that is going to mean even greater costs and suffering.<br />
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Solving things will not be easy. To simply get to a neutral position where we aren't digging ourselves deeper into environmental debt is going to require sacrifices to our standard of living. Technology will not improve fast enough to eliminate those costs. Imagine the disruption of setting aside half of all land area as a wilderness reserve, eliminating 90% of cars, reducing the number of plane flights by 90%, reducing meat consumption by 90%, and eliminating all usage of fossil fuels. We should be making changes along those orders of magnitude within the next ten years.<br />
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That will be expensive, but it is cheaper than the cost of inaction. I hope we make those changes before too many decades go by. It could be a beautiful world if we make make that transition.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-79702121567591215472017-07-23T15:45:00.002-07:002017-07-23T15:50:42.459-07:00What next for the Left?<div class="tr_bq">
<div class="tr_bq">
Here we are America. Politics is looking as grim as one could imagine with Trump. The little good news is that Trump's despotic tendencies have been hindered by his incompetence. Regardless, the corruption, disregard of facts, and disdain for the rule of law is taking its toll.<br />
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Have I become numb to it? Perhaps. Still furious, but now simply have lower expectations for America. In the face of thousands of warnings, of blatant law breaking and possible treason, the Republican Party marches on, uncaring. Lauren Duca summed it up well, "<a href="http://www.teenvogue.com/story/trumps-first-100-days-have-completely-undermined-americas-political-standards">There are no alarms left to sound</a>." Who cares about political norms if taxes can be lowered at the cost of services for the poor. Since I've been old enough to care about politics I have thought the Republican party to be morally rotten, but they are continuing to sink to new depths.<br />
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Frightfully, this is what a significant portion of America wants. I have read <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters">report</a> after <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-interview-trump-supporters-2017-2">report</a> after <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/">report</a> from people talking to Trump voters. I spent a good share of last year reading books attempting to explain what is in the mind of that side of the political spectrum. Most of them leave me wanting to scream. Impolitic as it was to say, Hillary was right when she said that a good share of Trump voters are deplorable. Too many are either fools, idiots, or bigots. An unfortunate number seem immune to feedback, cocooned in their bubble of Fox News propaganda.<br />
<br style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "Roboto Slab", "Times New Roman", serif; font-variant-ligatures: none; white-space: pre-wrap;" />
<span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unfortunately, the right has been winning for the last forty years. From the late 70's and onward, the Democrats have moved toward the right while the Republicans have gone off the deep end, and the Republicans have kept winning. </span><span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have a political system that either by constitutional design, or by voter suppression and gerrymandering, has given the right an out-sized share of power. Trump lost the popular vote by millions. Yet here we are, with the Republicans having the most power at the state and national level than they have had since the 1920's. To recover is going to be an uphill climb.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether you call it </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot" style="font-family: "Roboto Slab", "Times New Roman", serif; font-variant-ligatures: none; white-space: pre-wrap;">neoliberalism</a>,<span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or give it some other label, economic policy has followed suit, and the results have not been pretty. </span><span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">America has seen wages for the middle class stand stagnant for forty years. We now have the greatest inequality and least economic mobility in living memory. </span><span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cultural politics has gone better in some regards, but still civil-liberties have eroded and a racist criminal justice system has caused prison populations to increase by nearly a factor of five since 1980. </span><span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our political system has institutionalized corruption and extreme partisanship that has brought responsiveness to a standstill. Worldwide, this has gone hand-in-hand with unchecked environmental destruction and population growth. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: "roboto slab" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we want to save the Republic, much less the damn world, the Left needs to be doing many things differently.</span><br />
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We face a situation where many on the right goals that are incompatible with the left. On the topics where there is agreement, there is still the problem that we have become partisan and tribal to the point that we no longer communicate. </div>
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Regarding the concerns of the right, I see an odd mix. They are people on the other side, and there are many reasonable complaints. There are the concerns of middle class decline, the impoverishment of small towns, and to this I want to shout that the left has been trying to help fix this problem only to be spat upon for their efforts. Then there are values voters who are angrily fighting against abortion and for more Christianity in government, or against immigration and for white supremacy. For that, not much in the way of room for compromise. Some can be debated, but much of that viewpoint will have to be torn out root and branch from the American psyche if we are to live in a decent world.<br />
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Why have we become so separated? There is political clustering as documented well in <a href="http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php">The Big Sort</a>. The Democrats have become the urban party, the Republicans the rural party, and our constitution values rural voters more than it does urban ones. With the increasing lack of interactions between the two sides, it is easier to demonize and fear the other.<br />
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Reaching out to the middle is not exactly easy. The Democrats have been compromising for decades and it never bought more than a temporary reprieve. Due to the lack of trust and communication, it is difficult to get the right to accept basic <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/02/counter_lies_with_emotions_not_facts.html">facts</a>, much less have a policy debate.<br />
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What next for the left then? How do we win this fight?<br />
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It has been heartening to see the protests, the court cases, the swings in special elections, and the increased number of Democrats preparing to run for office, but being anti-Trump is not sufficient. I would have danced if Hillary had been elected and saved us from Trump, but she was hardly inspiring. Even Bernie had far too many weaknesses. That might just be the nature of political compromise, but we need a movement.<br />
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In response to all the liberal hand-wringing, the anguish trying to understand the other side, Tucker FitzGerald had an <a href="https://medium.com/@tuckerfitzgerald/intolerant-liberals-4ecd712ac939#.8anyb0n1e">excellent post</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The progressive liberal agenda isn’t about being nice. It’s about confronting evil, violence, trauma, and death. It’s about acknowledging the ways systemic power, systemic oppression, systemic evil, work in our world around us. I’m not fighting for diversity. I’m not fighting for tolerance. I’m fighting to overturn horrific systems of dehumanizing oppression.</blockquote>
The conservative mindset strikes me as hideously immoral and unclean. Denial of truth and evidence. Denial of inequality, racism, and sexism. Destroying our future through the denial of environmental degradation.<br />
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Admittedly, I am staunch partisan with rigorous beliefs, but if one wants a successful movement, a moral foundation is necessary. Last year I read Jonathan Haidt's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind">The Righteous Mind</a>, which I highly recommend, in which he explains his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory">moral foundations theory</a>. In the book, Haidt looks at the partisan divide in America through social psychology, and has the conclusion that the right often wins because it appeals to a broader spectrum of moral beliefs. While the left concerns itself with care, fairness, and liberty; the right, in addition to using those foundations, also appeals to authority, loyalty, and sanctity. Whether or not these psychological traits are as fundamental as Haidt thinks, there is certainly room for the left to appeal to the authority of experts, loyalty to the common man, or the sanctity of knowledge and the environment.<br />
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Another point regarding the failings of the left that struck a cord with me, by way of David Graeber in <a href="https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf">The Utopia of Rules</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
We no longer like to think about bureaucracy, yet it informs every aspect of our existence. It's as if, as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap our hands over our ears and hum start humming whenever the topic comes up. Insofar as we are even willing to discuss it, it's still in the terms popular in the sixties and early seventies. The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states. In the face of the gray functionaries of both state-capitalist and state-socialist regimes, sixties rebels stood for individual expression and spontaneous conviviality, and against ("rules and regulations, who needs them?") every form of social control.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on "market solutions" to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with--often even spearheaded--attempts to make government efforts more "efficient" through the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more "market principles," "market incentives," and market-based "accountability processes" into the structure of the bureaucracy itself. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The result is a political catastrophe. There's really no other way to put it. What is presented as the "moderate" Left solution to any social problems--and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now, ruled out <i>tout court</i>--has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism. It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing--because surely, if they do, it's not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger?<br />
The Right, at least, <i>has </i>a critique of bureaucracy. It's not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered-down version of the right-wing critique.</blockquote>
Unfortunately, Graeber does not exactly provide a clear plan for where to take that idea. Yes, we want less bureaucracy, whether or not that bureaucracy is run by the government or by corporations. The right has attacked the government, blaming it exclusively for the bureaucracy forced upon us, but this has simply allowed our freedom to be diminished under corporate bureaucracy and economic insecurity.<br />
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I would love to see the welfare state simplified by replacing the multitude of means tested programs with a basic income. Or the ending of the war on drugs and an emptying of prisons. Or a single payer healthcare system so that healthcare is guaranteed and people do not have to worry about the bureaucracy of private health insurance companies.<br />
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Some plans to decrease economic inequality and insecurity proceed by placing more power in the hands of the government, and that must be treated cautiously. As much as I hate the right for taking the position that all regulations and taxes are bad, the left is too often not willing to fight against taxes or regulations that end up harming the poor. At the local level here in San Francisco, it is easy to see so called progressive fighting for housing policies that evidence shows are harmful to the poor, harmful to immigrants, and primarily serve to benefit wealthy homeowners. Hell, if the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yimbys_and_the_dsa_can_t_get_along_despite_their_common_enemy_high_rent.html">conflict between the DSA and YIMBY advocates</a> can be resolved, I will throw my hat in with whatever group results from that.<br />
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The left needs a more coherent plan. Yes, we want less poverty and inequality. Yes, the world is complicated and regulation often has unintended consequences. Great. We have generalizations and hand waviness that has lead the Democratic party to an uninspiring muddle. While for me, non throwing more than twenty million people off of their health insurance is a perfectly good reason to vote for the Democrats, the electoral track record of the last few years shows something far more is needed.<br />
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The right-wing economic policy that has been pushed through over the last 40 years was built up for decades before it became politically viable. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society">Mont Pelerin Society</a> started laying the foundation of neoliberalism in 1947, and it took until the stagflation of the 1970's before it leapt onto the national stage and then became the default under Reagan.<br />
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The left is still thrashing about for such a plan. There has been some movement with Piketty and talk of universal basic income, but it is still incredibly formative. The left needs that new model twenty years ago. When the financial crises and the Great Recession hit in 2007 and 2008, there was no change in direction. There will be more crises in the next few decades, and some will be worse than 07-08. Either another financial collapse, or economic dislocation brought about by advances in AI, or rising sea levels and climate change causing refugees and starvation.<br />
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It is easy to state ambitious goals. The elimination of poverty, the elimination of institutional racism, a Gini index below 30, a reduction in atmospheric CO2 below 350 ppm, tuition-free public universities, housing for all, and a transparent and non-corrupt government. To be able to make such a platform that is not dismissed by the majority of the electorate as unrealistic or unacheivable, there needs to be plan. To then make it a movement, there needs to be a story for people to believe in.</div>
mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-25127226057986853422017-01-02T13:51:00.000-08:002017-01-02T13:51:21.373-08:00What happens next?2017 is here and the unpleasant political realities continue to sink in. Rearguard actions with the Louisiana Senate race, state recounts, and hope of an electoral college swing have all met their expected outcomes. Trump will be the 45th president of the United States, and Republicans will have the House, the Senate 52-48, and the majority of state legislatures and governors.<br />
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Congrats, America. We got the corrupt, lying, narcissist for president, and and have cemented control of the Republican Party.<br />
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Certainly the Democrats need to do better in the next elections. I would imagine a combination of better economic policy for those on the bottom two-thirds of the wealth spectrum, and somehow breaking through to change or appeal to the conservative white rural culture. Cannot say I have anything close to an easy answer for that given the gulf in media, social contact, and cultural assumptions. There is the possibility that economic mismanagement from the Republicans will do the immediate work for us, though that only bought the Democrats 2008 and had some effect on 2006. Sure came back to bite us in the ass in 2010 and a better plan is needed.<br />
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So, yes. What to expect in the next few years while the left attempts to rebuild its electoral strategy?<br />
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It's going to be hell.<br />
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Given Trump's lack of policy details and his erratic personality, it is difficult to predict what kind of hell, but with the Republican Congress and the advisers Trump is promoting, we can get some general outlines. Those outlines would be increased inequality, barriers to trade, more damage to the environment, increased militarization, and increased risk of war. All while stumbling towards fascism.<br />
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For overall government plans with taxes and expenditures, I expect the Tea Party/Norquist dreams to be put into force. Paul Ryan's plans may mostly go through, cutting taxes for the wealthy and reducing government finances. I expect to see the shredding the Affordable Care Act and Medicare. Permanent removal of the ACA may be out of reach, but vastly weakened, with millions losing health insurance. Social Security spending my slashed. I certainly expect to see financial regulation reduced. Dodd-Frank did not go far enough, but what little it did will be pared back.<br />
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Perhaps the one area that might see increased government expenditure, outside the military and police, will be the infrastructure improvement that the Republicans blocked throughout Obama's administration. Yay hypocrisy! While I do support a significant boost in infrastructure spending in this country, Trump's plan looks extremely unpleasant by funding the infrastructure through <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/12/20/can-trumps-infrastructure-plan-work/trumps-infrastructure-financing-seems-like-a-joke">tax credits</a> for toll roads and bridges.<br />
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Trade is a big unknown. Trump makes a lot of noise about protecting American workers from unfair trade deals, and wants to boost tariffs. Trade restrictions may benefit some parts of the economy, but at the cost of inflation. If a full scale trade war breaks out, well, that alone could blow up the world economy.<br />
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With the tax reduction and potentially increased infrastructure spending, we will potentially see some boost in growth and inflation. We'll also see a significant boost in government debt that the Republicans fought so hard against when it was Obama in charge. Who knows where things will go with trade, but the uncertainty will be unstabilizing. Paring back financial regulations will also leave us much more open to bubbles. America has been in one of the longest periods of economic expansion in history. It has been slow and unequal, but it is going to end at some point. I would take good odds that it'll happen in the next four years. Question is how bad it will be.<br />
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Outside of economics and healthcare policy, there's the horror show facing civil liberties, the environment, birth control and abortion. Education and science research will be cut.<br />
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Then the big one for a lot of Trump's base, immigration. He's made enough noise about this that I am more certain of action on this than on most of his other half-baked policy proposals. Given that the number of illegal immigrants in the US has been <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/03/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/">declining since 2009</a>, and Obama has already deported more people than <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661">any other president</a>, we're already in that direction, but the degree sounds frightening. If Trump does manage to deport, say 3 million people in the next year or two I can only imagine the results. Hell for the immigrants themselves of course, and the second order effects will be unpleasant. America is already at its <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/baby-bust-u.s.-population-growth-crashes-to-80-year-low/article/2610398">lowest population growth in 80 years</a>, and if we expel that many immigrants, I wonder if we could tip towards negative.<br />
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Ah, and I almost forgot, foreign policy. Another frightening unknown. Given the hawks it looks like Trump is appointing, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up in a new shooting war with Iran. Or if we trade the Ukraine to Russia in exchange for ownership of Venezuela. Or how dangerous things will get with China. Who knows? I'm speculating. Unfortunately Trump is erratic, inexperienced, and what will happen is a damn mystery that could easily leave a lot of people dead.<br />
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Outside of politics, economic and technological trends are going to continue to not be kind to the rural areas that voted for Trump. Manufacturing automation will continue. Online delivery services will continue to rip out local retail. Soon as we cross the Rubicon of automated trucks and delivery drones, that's another few million jobs gone, though that may take another ten years. All the voters in coal country that enthusiastically supported Trump are still going to see demand for coal fall as natural gas remains cheap and solar prices thankfully continues to fall. Unfortunately, the Republicans won't provide support for those left behind. Resentment will build.<br />
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A big question I have is whether there will be any increase in communication between the left and right in this country, or if the opposing sides will keep living in their own bubbles, hating the other. Unsure how to get around that problem. Possibly work by tech and media companies to force people out of their filter bubbles. Possibly a significant push in cities for more housing construction in order to lower the cost of living and allow more to move to urban areas.<br />
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Sigh. See what happens in 2017. In America, I expect hell for the poor and minorities, possible boon for the wealthy. Increased risk of another economic meltdown. Increased global instability. Brace yourselves.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-32502923029831117502016-11-26T23:55:00.001-08:002016-11-26T23:55:41.419-08:00Followup<p dir="ltr">A few hours after my <a href="http://www.mjanes.com/2016/11/what-just-happened.html?m=1">last post</a>, sitting in the backseat of a car as we cross the interstate highway system, and I realize my attempted explanation of the election was only partial. A framing of how things went pear shaped, as opposed to a direct answer.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Why the hell did rural America and a balance of the suburbs settle on a millionaire (potentially billionaire, who knows?) real estate mogul from New York?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Was it just the tribal politics of being Republican? The few keywords of "abortion is bad!", "foreigners and immigrants are stealing our jobs!", and that's all it fucking took? Would Cruz or Kasich have done essentially the same in place of Trump? Would Bernie or Cory Booker or O'Malley or Elizabeth Warren have lost by the same margin as Hillary? </p>
<p dir="ltr">What could Hillary have done differently that would have won it for her?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Yes, blind tribalism is incredibly significant, and it does look to be increasing, but, presidential elections still go back and forth. What does it take to shift the few undecided voters, to increase the turnout in a few states?</p>
<p dir="ltr">Maybe a new politician who's not part of "the establishment" would have done better than Hillary. On the other hand Obama still has very high approval ratings.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Maybe it is simply better addressing the concerns of rural voters, and Bernie would have won enough of them over and provided the turnout needed.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I'm not sure. It does not appear to be policy, and I do not know what it takes to tip the balance of the cultural divide, much less break through it.</p>
mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-401716451916392762016-11-26T20:06:00.002-08:002016-11-26T20:23:07.272-08:00What just happened?The Democrats just had a gut wrenching electoral defeat that will take America years to recover from, but why? What the hell just happened? Who are these shameful fools that voted for this vile conman? I have been trying to get inside the minds of Trump voters for months, and now, horrendous as the results were, at least we have some data.<br />
<br />
There have, of course, been many think pieces investigating the loss, and explanations seem to settle on a couple of main themes. There is the idea that Hillary lost the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/opinions/how-clinton-lost-the-working-class-coontz/">white working class</a>. There is the counter proposal that it had little to do with class, but instead whites rejecting Clinton out of a conservative, racist, misogynist backlash<sup><a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/wasnt-working-class-revolt-white-revolt/">1</a>, </sup><sup><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/138754/blame-trumps-victory-college-educated-whites-not-working-class">2</a></sup>. I lean towards saying it more accurate cultural divide is more rural vs urban than it is conservative vs liberal, but are the two becoming the same? Other ascribe the difference to less talked about markers such as <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/">education</a>. Or is it simply that Hillary was an unlikeable establishment candidate, hamstrung by her own mistakes and decades of Republican attacks.<br />
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Looking at the exit polls (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html">New York Times</a>, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls">CNN</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/exit-polls/">Washington Post</a>) a few things come out. Aside from how Hillary won more votes than any presidential contestant in history other than Obama. Yet she still lost Florida and North Carolina, in addition to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, not to mention Ohio and Iowa. Turnout was down, by <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/">CNN's estimate</a> a lower proportion of the population voted than in any election in the last twenty years.<br />
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Compared to 2012, the gender gap increased slightly with five percent more men voting more for Trump than men for Romney, and more one percent women for Hillary than women for Obama.<br />
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The education gap increased significantly. Those with college or postgraduate degrees voted Democratic by eight more points than in last presidential election. The education divide is especially significant when combined with race. Whites with college degrees shifted ten points to Democrats, and whites without degrees shifted 14 points to Republicans.<br />
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People earning under $50,000 a year, though they did vote primarily for Hillary, voted more Republican than in 2012. Those earning between $50,000 and $200,000 voted for Trump by a very small margin, but voted more Democratic than in 2012.<br />
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The overall contours of the racial divide appear similar to 2012, with whites voting primarily Republican, and non-whites voting Democratic, though all racial groups voted slightly more Republican.<br />
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The above give some credence to the theory that it was the lack of support amongst the white working class that cost Hillary the election, but I find it hard to say that it was the primary reason. It does depend on your definition of working class, some would say that working class is mostly in the income range of <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class">$50,000 to $80,000</a>. Either way, Those earning under $50k still voted primarily for Hillary, if by a lower proportion than previously. Those earning between $50k and $100k voted more Democratic than in 2012, but still voted for Trump 50% to 46%.<br />
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If Hillary had had the same support among the income under $50k demographic as Obama did, she may have won the necessary states. However, you could also say that about the votes she won from blacks and Latinos. Both could simply fit under the explanation of a lack of Democratic voter enthusiasm.<br />
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I find less evidence that it was a white revolt. White voters apparently only voted one percent more for Trump than they did for Romney. There was significantly more racist rhetoric used on the campaign trail, but I would hazard that more revealed existing cultural divides then brought about new ones.<br />
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In the end, I find the rural/urban divide to be the most powerful summary explanation.<br />
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As in recent elections, rural voters went Republican, urban voters went Democratic, and suburban voters were fairly close. The NYT exit polls I linked to irritatingly lack the arrows indicating transitions from 2012, but they cover the topic <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/upshot/this-election-highlighted-a-growing-rural-urban-split.html">here</a>. The divide is significant and continuing to grow. Due in large part to this, the number of people living in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/10/us/politics/red-blue-divide-grew-stronger-in-2016.html">landslide counties that voted for one party over the other now stands at 60%</a>.<br />
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There are of course many causes for the election outcome. Economics, and the declining standard of living in the middle and lower classes is a significant factor. The Democrats should have done a better job of addressing this, but I do not view it as the fundamental divide, though it likely contributed to enthusiasm. The Democrats push far harder for the poor and working classes than the Republicans do, and it has largely been the Republicans in Congress preventing Obama from taking further action on this the last few years. There is definitely cultural and racial resentment, that is partly attributable to economics with people wishing for jobs, but I believe far more of the cause goes to the rural vs urban divide, and the cultural splitting of America.<br />
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As a partisan leftist/liberal Democrat living in San Francisco, Trump voters seem culturally alien and terrifying. I say this despite having some long ago friends from high school from back home and possibly even some relatives who voted for Trump. These days, my social circle has essentially nil Republican voters. Across this cultural divide the two sides rarely talks to each other, they view different media, and believe their own facts. It looks like the best explanation for this is the actual physical divide between urban and rural citizens. The cultural divide is increasingly a result of the different sides living in different neighborhoods, in different counties.<br />
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A book I enjoyed tremendously a few years ago, <a href="http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php">The Big Sort</a>, still holds a lot explanatory power today. The author Bill Bishop has some good <a href="http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-bill-bishop-interview.html">thoughts</a> on how the trends he noted in 2004 have continued in 2016. I highly recommend it to anyone with a concern for the US. It provides a wealth of data about how communities have become more politically and culturally homogenous over the last forty years as we sort ourselves out, and the effects thereof on political extremism.<br />
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I fear for what happens next. The entire world may be <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-trend-conservative-stephen">drifting right</a>. America is becoming more divided, culturally and economically, and Trump and the Republican Party seem hell bent on increasing the divide.</div>
mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-82701913025416726942016-11-13T20:36:00.001-08:002016-11-13T20:36:49.588-08:00You bastards make me sickQuite literally it seems. Between meeting with hundreds of strangers through get out the vote operations, and then the stress of having failed and seeing the American government ceded to conmen and bigots, I have spent the last few days in bed with a fever. Welcome to Trump's America, all. It will be a long road.<div>
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<div>
Fortunately, the fever broke this morning. Would that I felt any better about the future than I did Tuesday night.</div>
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I have said many times since I became old enough to care about politics that I do not understand the American voter. Believe me, I have tried. Maybe I do understand America, and have just been in denial about how alien and terrifying so many of its people are.</div>
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For those of you who wanted an anti-establishment man in the White House, you might get a taste of what you wished for. It's true, Trump has never served a day in public office, so a big "hooray!" for that. You also got a corrupt billionaire who's filling his transition team with corporate lobbyists. It might not be politics as usual, but it sure looks like a dark and twisted reflection.</div>
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For those of you who wanted more concern for the working class and those harmed by trade agreements, you're damn fools. Hillary wasn't Bernie, but look at what you got instead. We'll see where inequality and poverty rates go in an America where Paul Ryan has free reign to write the tax code, and where Trump is starting trade wars in a re-enactment of Smoot-Hawley.</div>
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For those of you who wanted to throw off the yoke of moderate respect for women, people of color, LGBTQs, and non-Christians; who wanted a return to the glorious straight white Christian America of fantasy past; I say fuck off and die.</div>
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I'm tired, angry, disgusted, and afraid of what the future will look like.</div>
mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-47699080231132293392016-08-07T21:54:00.002-07:002016-08-07T21:54:32.782-07:00Searching for empathy<div dir="ltr">
I do miss Hunter S. Thompson. Of all the elections I have been around for, this one seems by far the best fit for the description 'fear and loathing'. Though I have a fairly liberal social circle, I do have friends and relatives who are Republicans, and I have argued politics with them over the years. I am a partisan liberal Democrat, but I have at least been able to understand some of their opposing arguments. But Trump, damn. Trump is a different beast.<br />
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I have a visceral revulsion to Trump, and what he represents for our government, for our culture. The strongman, willful ignorance, and hatred of the other makes my skin crawl. The man appears to me as a literal monster. The worst parts of Nixon, Mussolini, and the dreck of Fox News rolled into one.<br />
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Yet, on the right, there are similar feelings for Hillary, and I have a hard time having empathy for this position. I have certainly tried. All the books and articles about the diverging cultures in America, the diverging economies, and it still gives me no intuitive understanding. I find it hard to empathize with the pro-Trump articles I read as anything other than frothing right-wing hatred and conspiracy theories that are suggestive of needing to be checked into a mental institution. In my social circles I do not have one associate openly advocating for Trump.<br />
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But the polls! Depending on your sources, the polls have been frightfully even at times. I have been a tremendous fan of <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/">FiveThirtyEight </a>the last eight years, and only a few weeks ago it was painting a picture of close to even odds. Fortunately, the polls have swung back to Hillary, but it is still 90 some days to go. I honestly have a hard time grasping why Clinton is not, at minimum, up twelve points in the polls against Trump. Even the current odds, which are tremendously better than two weeks ago, are about the same as the odds of surviving a round of Russian roulette.<br />
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How would I explain what I have learned in trying to understand the millions of people that would vote for Trump? There is a tremendous amount of anger in America, from people across the spectrum. But why is Trump the result of this?<br />
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There is the economic side. Many people are left behind by the economy, with increasing wage inequality and the decline of middle class careers, especially for those with less of an education. I certainly agree that our economic system is more divided than ever, but, damn, why would you turn to the Republican party for salvation? Fair, if you can discern a pattern out of the incoherence spouting from Trump's mouth, he may be pushing the Republican party to the left economically. He is arguing for revising trade agreements, protecting social security, and increasing infrastructure spending. Still, that argument seems tenuous. First, it's hard to trust the Republican Party wanting to do anything for the poor or disadvantaged. Second, it's hard to trust Trump to do anything in particular.<br />
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Past economics, what of it is culture? There are many who do not like how our culture is changing, or feel imposed upon by the coastal urban centers. There are simply those who are partisan Republicans the same way I am a partisan Democrat. And then a lot, if not all, of Trump's support is racist, nationalist, misogynistic, culturally-conservative bastards who hate the other. That might explain things, but it doesn't give me much in the the way of empathy. I am for a political force that helps everyone, but that is a movement that deserves to be stamped out of existence.<br />
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So what positive could I say about Trump if I squint hard enough? He is anti-establishment, and a change from politics as normal. Not being beholden to the Republican establishment, he may shift policies in a new direction. He does pay attention to those left behind by the unexciting recovery from the Great Recession. And...<br />
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That's about it.<br />
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Let's hope we we survive through November.</div>
mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-26932746175236567352016-06-06T23:14:00.003-07:002016-06-06T23:15:24.726-07:00June 7th Election in CaliforniaVoting tomorrow in California. I am less settled than I would like to be on a few points, namely the Hillary vs Bernie portion of the voting tomorrow.<br />
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It is, for the most part, a moot point, as Hillary has an essentially insurmountable lead in both the pledged and superdelegates. After the votes this weekend in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and the latest shuffling of superdelegates, the A.P. just <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/politics/hillary-clinton-presidential-race.html">called the race for her</a> a few hours ago. Bernie is, of course, soldiering on and vowing to fight on to a contested convention, though I imagine Obama, Warren, and a throng of others will be endorsing Hillary tomorrow. Still, a win in California may prolong things.<br />
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Why my conflict with this? Why not say of course to the adamant fighting on for principle till the last vote is counted?<br />
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It is possible that I've become more supportive of Hillary, despite the private email server mess, and the unchanging aspects of her overly hawkish foreign policy, and unfortunately close relationship with the financial industry. She is after all, by most counts outside of the 2016 primary, quite to the progressive side of the Democrats, is extremely experienced, and an excellent politician.<br />
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It is certainly in large part because of fear of the festering boil that is Donald Trump, and a desire for the Democrats to focus on tearing him out root and branch.<br />
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Lastly, yes, some of it has been disappointment with Bernie. That is where my conflict is. I admire Bernie, I trust his personal ethics and commitment, and his desire for large scale revolutionary change. On the other hand, his policy plans, and the numbers behind them, seem near as wistfully inaccurate as the ones coming out from the Republicans. And at this stage of the game, he, and the followers he inspires, seem to be on the verge of tipping over from resolute defiance to self-destructive delusion. The Facebook friends of mine that swear they'll vote for Jill Stein if Bernie doesn't win the nomination make me want to scream. Doesn't anyone remember 2000? Christ, yes, I know we have a political system with a first-past-the-post system that forces us into a two-party system, and that that is hideously offensive to many of our beliefs, but we're not going to change that in the next six months. You want viable third party candidates, we'll need to rewrite the constitution. Believe me, I'd love to. I want a greater degree of proportional representation or instant-runoff voting, or at least abandoning the Electoral College. But right now, we have to keep Trump out. The odds on Trump winning are likelier than they should be. Would that more of our electorate were sane and educated and tolerant. I remember W far too well and that disaster of a human is head and shoulders above Trump.<br />
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So, there I am on the Democratic primary. I would still prefer Bernie to be president over Hillary, and so will most likely still vote for him, but I cannot say I will do so with as great an enthusiasm as I had hoped for.<br />
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In local news, I am likely to support the endorsements of the <a href="http://www.sfyimby.org/slate/">SF YIMBY</a> slate and <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/voter-guide/2016-05-01/june-2016-voter-guide">SPUR</a>. As another personal conflict, that puts me to the moderate side of the local housing debate, as apparently resisting new housing is what makes you a 'progressive' in local SF politics.<br />
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Sigh. This may be the getting older I feared.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-51371484903826482462016-04-10T23:30:00.001-07:002016-04-10T23:30:20.885-07:00I Am Not An Economist - Basic IncomeDespite not being an economist, I am someone who cares about politics and reads far too much news from sources such as Bloomberg, Fortune, WSJ, The Economist, etc. Thus, I have opinions about economic policy. For this week's thinking to myself, I wanted to go over an econ policy idea that has been making itself increasingly loudly heard through some corners of the net. See <a href="https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income">YCombinator</a>, Reddit with <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome">r/BasicIncome</a>, <a href="http://www.vox.com/">Vox</a>'s parade of articles on the subject, etc.<br />
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For those of you who don't read over my shoulder everything I skim on the internet, what exactly is a basic income? Wikipedia has the intro on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income">basic income</a> covered, but as I have seen it presented, the idea is to give every citizen, or every citizen at age of majority, a direct income. Simply a check every month or similar, with no means testing, generally so as to replace all, or most other, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_States">social programs</a> such as social security, food stamps, welfare, etc. The amount of money that would be paid out in such a system is up for debate, with some arguing that it should be enough to survive on, and others wanting just a baseline level of aid. The minimal level of aid could be along the lines of what is already done with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund">Alaska Permanent Fund</a>, or Norway's similar distribution of oil revenue through the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway">Government Pension Fund of Norway</a>.<br />
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Firstly, what is the reason one would want to do this? Looking at the collection of American law and regulation designed to provide aid and a reliable source of income, I see a complicated mess. As a software developer, it is the sort of situation that makes me dream of throwing it out and rewriting it from scratch, in as simplistic and direct a way as possible. Giving the same amount of money to everyone, through one singular program, with no means testing, is pretty much that ideal. Presuming it works, and is affordable, of course.<br />
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So, what might the benefits be? Beyond the simplifying of bureaucracy, there are, theoretically, a number. The system, being so simple, would be harder to corrupt. Furthermore, it removes a good share of the perverse incentives seen with many welfare systems. If you only get aid when you are below the poverty line, getting an income that would boost you above the poverty line is, if not a negative, is less of a positive than it would otherwise be.<br />
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The overall goal, of providing aid, and putting a floor on poverty is, in my mind, necessary. We've got a vast proportion of our population that's in poverty or unfortunately close to poverty. Wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated. There's a lot of risk in the future that jobs will be wiped out faster than people can train for new ones. Giving every citizen an equal amount of money will help equalize things and prevent abject poverty and social stratification.<br />
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There is the question of what to set the level of payments at. If set too low, you are providing less aid than with current systems, and some people are losing out. If set too high, you create a system that we cannot afford, and discourages people from wanting to work at all. Much as I would like to hope otherwise, I think we're at least a few years away from the futuristic utopia where robots do most of the work and we can all get by on five weeks of work a year. Maybe not too far, but not something we can just start tomorrow.<br />
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So, what could this basic income level be set at? Of all the papers about it I've seen on the net, I've seen very few with direct numbers.<br />
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As a first thought experiment, what would happen with a revenue neutral basic income? Do not change current tax rates, or total social program spending. Simply get rid of social security, food stamps, minimum wage, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, etc, and just give every citizen a check each month. What happens then?<br />
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For the roughest of back of the napkin calculations, bear in mind I'm not an economist, it looks like we spend ~2.25-2.5 trillion per year on the programs I mentioned. And there are ~320 million Americans, ~240 million of them over the age of 18. So, if we gave each of them an even distribution of that money, that would be approximately, $10,00 a year for citizen over the age of 18. That actually lines up fairly well with what <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/basic-income-talks-hit-new-zealand-2016-3">New Zealand</a>, <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/finlands-plan-to-give-everyone-free-money-2015-11">Finland</a>, <a href="http://www.basicincome.org/news/2016/04/canada-ontario-is-ready-to-test-a-basic-income/">Canada</a>, and <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3055679/a-dutch-city-is-experimenting-with-giving-away-a-basic-income-of-1000-a-month">the Netherlands</a> are experimenting with,<br />
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Not enough to get by on, certainly, which mostly avoids the problem of discouraging people from working, but how would the end result work, and who suffers? If you're giving this money out to all citizens instead of some subset of citizens, there are going to be people getting less money. Looking into that, I realized that I had no idea what the max social security distribution is in the US. Apparently it's about $2,639, for people who have contributed the maximum taxable earnings for 35 working years. For maximum benefits through welfare, SNAP, Medicaid, etc, I have even less of an idea, but after a brief internet search looks like for some people is greater than one thousand a month.<br />
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Distributing all this money perfectly evenly, instead of targeting it, would thus, of course, create a number of winners and losers. Despite the efficiency gains of such a program, a number of people currently hurting the most, would have aid reduced.<br />
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Furthermore, what are the efficiency gains? There are all the potential benefits of removing perverse incentives, but measuring that is mostly up to ambiguous econ theory to debate, Then, how many fewer people would it take to administer such a program? As not-an-economist, and spending a few seconds looking on the web, I see the US currently employs 62,000 people in the Social Security Administration, and after that, sifting through docs from OPM gets complicated. I imagine a good number of jobs would no longer be needed, but hardly enough to have a sizable impact on the amount of payout such a system would be able to give.<br />
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What if you wanted to increase the amount of basic income, in order to compensate for those losing out due to decreased payments? As a basic income is being given to all people, tax burdens on people not currently receiving aid, but who would under a basic income system, could be increased without changing their effective income levels, but then it all becomes a question of tax policy.<br />
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I love the aesthetics of such a basic income plan, its ideals, and basic argument, but still need more details to have any idea how it would actually work. Glad they are experimenting with it in other parts of the world, and look forward to seeing what happens.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-13340573363695015022016-04-04T00:35:00.000-07:002016-04-04T00:46:28.338-07:00Investing in CyberneticsBy investing in cybernetics, I mean more the purchasing of medical devices to plug into your body, less so the buying stock in companies that make cybernetic components. Though I may want to do that.<br />
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This week, after taking care of a work project that had consumed a good share of my free time the last month or two, I finally got around to a number of the items on my to-do list that I'd been ignoring. One of which was plugging in my new Dexcom G5 continuous glucose monitor. Now I have not one, but two Bluetooth enabled devices that plug in underneath my skin. Woo! It's the 21st Century alright. Not long until my eyes glow and I can punch through walls, right?<br />
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I've been a type 1 diabetic for a little more than 24 years now. This is cause for a moderate amount of watching my diet, frequently testing my blood sugar via finger pricks, and adjusting insulin dosages five to ten times a day. For the most part it's an inconvenience, admittedly with a constant dread that my long term health will suffer. Frequently though the blood sugars do something unexpected, either spiking high and leaving me feeling like shit for hours, or crashing low and leaving me with less than full mental faculties, sweating profusely and stubbornly refusing aid while my friends have to consider wrestling me to the ground to stuff food into my mouth. Occasionally with the screaming seizures or sprinting off into the woods. Ah, memories!<br />
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Thank you all, family, friends, and loved ones who have dealt with me in those situations.<br />
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About four or five years ago, after one such attack, I made my first such investment in cybernetics, moving away from the traditional usage of syringes for insulin injections. I got a Medtronic insulin pump, and Enlite continuous glucose monitor. The insulin pump was a wonderful success, and dramatically improved my blood sugar control. The pump has the benefit of having a varying basal rate, that continuously drips a background level of insulin into me, that can be easily calibrated. It talks wirelessly with my blood testing kit, and calculates, based on the time of day and how much I tell it I eat, in order to give me a more proper amount of insulin. Further, it remembers how much insulin has been injected into me. I had been doing this all in my head between the age of seven and twenty six, but the machine is a bit less prone to forget or overlook those important details.<br />
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Medtronic's Enlite CGM sensor system unfortunately left something to be desired. This was four years ago, and I'm sure Medtronic's tech has improved a good bit in the meantime, but the sensor then was so poor that I stopped using it after a few months.<br />
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For those of you not the most familiar with diabetes, a continuous glucose monitor is a system designed to, well, continuously monitor your blood glucose level. The ones on the market, both then, and now, do so with subcutaneous sensor that you implant in yourself for some number of days, and has a wireless/Bluetooth communication system, to beep out your blood sugar every minute or five.<br />
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As I was saying, the previous one I had left many things to be desired. Only lasted three days, had to be attached to the body with tape, easily fell off, and was inaccurate to the point of not being worth the trouble. I tossed it.<br />
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Over the years, the technology seems to have improved. Fellow diabetics recommended the newer Dexcom brand systems to me, and I finally took them up on their suggestion. The differences, though minor when describing them, add up to something that is exponentially better. The Dexcom G5 attaches without requiring additional tape wrapped over the top, and is a good share smaller and more comfortable. Most importantly, it has proved far more accurate, and to have less of a lag.<br />
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I have yet to see this Dexcom G5 be off by more than twenty percentage points or so, its alert system is timely, and in the week I've had it has kept my blood sugar in a much tighter range than I would normally be under. Don't think I've had a blood sugar above 190, and haven't had anything low without being awake and able to respond to it quickly.<br />
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The also checking while asleep is a significant benefit, one that of course existed in the previous CGM system I had, but with the added benefit of greater accuracy, and not waking me up without cause.<br />
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Managing blood sugars is a lot of dealing with lag. Insulin gets injected into your subcutaneous fat, and even with the quicker acting insulins, Humalog for me, it only starts to really have an effect half an hour after injection, peak effect perhaps hour and a half later, continuing effect out three or four hours. Eating food also has a similar lag time for raising your blood sugars. Non-diabetic bodies are a lot better with dealing with this, because pancreases are plugged in more directly to the arteries and veins, and can sense and respond to blood sugars much more quickly. Us diabetics though, with our putting insulin into subcutaneous fat, and with the continuous glucose monitors sensing the blood sugars in that tissue, we are on a delay.<br />
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Hence, once of the the great benefits of a continuous glucose monitor that happens to be accurate is that it can give you not just your close to current blood sugar, but the rate and direction of change. The derivative of your blood sugar, to think about high school calculus. Us diabetics are going to have the lag time in adjusting to our blood sugars, but being able to see the direction of change gives the ability to predict where it'll be in the next hour and to get ahead of it.<br />
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My other compliments to Dexcom are the very excellent UI, ease of viewing the data, and general ease of use.<br />
<br />
Of course it's not perfect yet. Won't be perfect until we finally get around to curing diabetes, which has been promised to me as "five years away" since I was diagnosed in 1992. For more direct criticisms, I am irritated that there is software to access the data from the sensor for iOS devices but not Android. As an Android dev who often sees Android apps not started until a year or two after the iOS versions, I understand, but damn. Related, it's made by a different company than Medtronic, so it doesn't talk directly to my insulin pump, and I'm manually feeding data between the two. Sure be nice to have an open API for the two to plug into. Bloody corporate competition, and/or overzealous FDA regulation. Additionally, it's another thing sticking out of my skin, and I certainly can't do jujitsu with it. Then again, have to peel of the insulin pump insertion sight anyways to be able to do that, but now with two such peripherals stuck into my body, makes that sport less than practical. Some day, they'll either cure it, or it'll be subdermal. Then I'll get the Deus Ex future I've been hoping for since 2000.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-61012741188757423122016-03-27T22:39:00.002-07:002016-03-27T22:39:27.998-07:00Happy Easter AllBeen a busy week for me. The next Android launch that I've been building for work over the last three months is slightly behind schedule, but is close to release. It will be the largest single Android release we've done since I started at PlanGrid. That's been burning me out the last month, but am nearly there, and shall celebrate upon its completion.<br />
<br />
Had a relaxing early escape from work this weekend, as I went down to Arizona for the wedding of two close friends from college days. Congrats to Anneli and Erich! Was a wonderful wedding, and great to see all the friends collected in one place. As another plus, got to meet all of my girlfriend's family, as they happen to live in Phoenix. Learned how to make some wonderful Puerto Rican food for Easter.<br />
<br />
Outside of the work and social gatherings, haven't had too much time to think of things to write. Politics and the economy are trundling along. World news is about what it has been, perhaps with an unfortunate uptick in terrorist attacks the last few days. Sigh. Beyond that, perhaps I can write about the latest books I've been reading. You should all read The Expanse series, by the way.<br />
<br />
For now though, sleep. To write later. Be well, all.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-74519789630479222372016-03-20T17:47:00.001-07:002016-03-20T17:47:35.632-07:00Continuing Last Post's ThoughtsWhen I started writing this post two weeks ago, I had hoped it would be my last political post for a while. Then after getting buried under work and not writing for two weeks, I feel I've regained my ability to rant about politics. Still a long campaign season to go, and hopefully some room to write about other things, but for now, damn. America.<br />
<br />
Two weeks ago I was thinking about potential realignment in US political parties, and how I should first evaluate what it is that I would like to see out of our political system. I have seen some related articles in the last few weeks, asking what might come out of such a potential realignment that seems to be staring down America. If Trump wins the Republican nomination, and the more establishment Republicans flee in horror, what is it that the Democratic party would attempt to do in the general election? <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/613083/donald-trump-force-democratic-party-make-fundamental-decision">Appeal to the establishment Republicans, or follow through with Bernie's appeal to the working class</a>?<br />
<br />
Trump supporters, not that I particularly understand them, but most of what I have read describes them as primarily <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support">working class people who are pissed off that the economic system has deserted them</a>. Of course, there is a good share of bigotry, xenophobia, and anti-intellectualism walking hand-in-hand with that economic insecurity, and that puts them in a rather different camp than Bernie supporters. Still, there are at least a few similarities, in so much as "the system is broken" is a similarity.<br />
<br />
Personally, I would hope we do not have to make that choice. Why you can't both support the cosmopolitan intellectuals and the poor? Are these really the wedges that are opening in the American political parties?<br />
<br />
That question might be too open ended. If I can dream of a political system, I can dream of all humans being intelligent, foresighted, empathetic, etc. Sadly, that's not that likely to occur. If I were instead to imagine what I want out of a political party, that is perhaps more productive, but immediately concedes to cynicism. Politics is tribal. As much as we would like it to simply be about the best way to organize the government and associated economics and so forth, it is as much about dividing into camps, and fighting the other side.<br />
<br />
To get back to my earlier question, what exactly is it that I want?<br />
<br />
As Ray Smuckles said about <a href="http://achewood.com/index.php?date=01232008">his political stance</a>, "People want to eat some fuckin' dinner and have some fuckin' money! What the fuck do you think gettin' up in the morning is about?!"<br />
<br />
I can empathize, despite being lucky to be well off, a tech worker in 2016 San Francisco. Hard to complain, but, still, things seem askew. For many of my friends, 20 and 30 somethings, with no kids, making well into six figure salaries, the idea of owning property is laughable. That, in large part, can be blamed on local politics. In the grand scheme of things it is hard to complain, but still, far from ideal.<br />
<br />
Speaking of wanting a narrative, what might it be? Blanket libertarianism is a horribly broken approach to the economy, but of course there are a number of economic or business laws and regulations that are awful for the public. Democrats pay some service to this idea, but I have yet to see a cohesive plan or argument made with it. Republicans are much louder in making this argument, but to no significant effect that I have ever seen. Mostly they bankrupt whatever state they gain control of. Both sides support the regulations that benefit their side of the aisle and attack the other's.<br />
<br />
The political system is corrupt, in that it is often encouraging these inefficient laws. When writing the laws, legislators pay more attention to the lobbyists surrounding them then to the people. So, yes. I want electoral reform, campaign finance reform. All the stuff Lawrence Lessig is campaigning for.<br />
<br />
Where is the <a href="https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf">leftist critique of bureaucracy</a>?<br />
<br />
So, what do I want?<br />
<br />
I want a functional, fair, and non-corrupt political system.<br />
<br />
I want acknowledgement of, and attempt to fix, the lack of fairness in our economy and our culture. We benefit the wealthy, the white, the male, and have been exploiting those not in that group since the founding of America. I would like at the very least an equality of opportunity, which should be a self-evident goal, but seems laughably distant at the moment.<br />
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I want a support of intellectualism, a willingness to support testing ideas and to defend them with evidence.<br />
<br />
I would like to not worry that we are plunging towards future disaster, brought about by the shortsighted, greedy, and willfully ignorant. My main concerns with regard to this are climate change, resource depletion, and over population.<br />
<br />
So, yes. Find me a political that supports the above and I'll be for it.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-5350793301860180362016-03-06T23:26:00.001-08:002016-03-06T23:32:13.811-08:00Political Realignment in the USThe election continues to grind on, and the number of thoughts in my head dedicated to politics continues to tick upwards.<br />
<br />
Given the continuing influence of Trump, and the increasing bashing of him from the Republican establishment, there have been a number of articles coming out about how it seems like we may see a party realignment in the US, along the lines of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act and Nixon pursuing the southern strategy. For example; by <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dont-assume-conservatives-will-rally-behind-trump/">FiveThirtyEight</a>, by <a href="http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/3/1/11139054/trump-party-realignment">Vox</a>, and by <a href="http://inhomelandsecurity.com/commentary-the-sixth-political-party-realignment-and-the-end-of-the-gop/">miscellaneous academics</a>.<br />
<br />
The immediate reason people are talking about the potential for a realignment is Trump's unorthodox views combined with the Republican establishment's hatred of him, reaching a point where former Republican presidential candidates are pleading that people not vote for him. More generally, I and many others have been frustrated with the political process in this country over the last decade, and there are many still suffering economically after the Great Recession. The potential for realignment can be seen to some extent on the left with Bernie Sanders putting up a significant challenge to Hillary Clinton.<br />
<br />
So, what might come of this? I have a combination of hope, excitement, and dread. Yes, I do think our currently political system is horribly corrupt and broken, and do want to see it shaken up and made functional. For the excitement, living in interesting times is at least interesting. With the dread, I do not exactly trust a good share of America. Still, if I want change, a time of upheaval might be my best hope.<br />
<br />
With asking for political change, and seeking to take advantage of a potential party realignment. I should first figure out what it is I want out of the political system. I do not perfectly agree with any of the current candidates. Bernie Sanders might be the closest, but is certainly not perfect. I do know that I'll never find a candidate that agrees perfectly with me on every issue, unless I am one day so foolish as to run myself, but I at least want a narrative I agree with. I in part think we are ripe for a realignment, because there is no gripping, agreeable narrative, other than a terrifying fear of the other side.<br />
<br />
As a software developer, first step is to define what you want. Write out a spec. So, what do I want with our political system? What should that narrative be?<br />
<br />
And yes, yes, that is a broad open-ended question, but I should keep it somewhat contained, otherwise I'll be dreaming of a post-national anarchist utopia out of the dreams of David Graeber. To keep things at least somewhat in line with America, what might I hope for?<br />
<br />
To be continued later as I flesh out these half finished thoughts.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-73242476568509531652016-02-28T20:18:00.001-08:002016-02-28T20:27:54.115-08:00About That ElectionSuper Tuesday is nearly upon us and who isn't excited about the next step in the bizarre and fear-inducing competition to see who gets to be America's next president? The next several months will call for a lot of nervous news reading.<br />
<br />
On the Democratic side, where my loyalties are most closely aligned, it is Hillary vs Bernie. Given my political leanings, which are somewhat idealistic and rather anti-establishment, I am supporting Bernie. My main concerns about the future of humanity are the environment, political corruption, and poverty and inequality. Bernie is much more direct in addressing those issues that Hillary. The current political and economic system in this country needs be shaken up. I do want to see the large financial institutions in America broken up, to have a single payer healthcare system, and to see Citizen's United repealed. I am very thankful that there is a voice out there adamantly demanding that, and thus, am fully behind Bernie.<br />
<br />
Which is not to say I am opposed to Hillary in the general. Yes, she is quintessentially establishment. Worrisomely hawkish on foreign policy, unfortunately close to the financial industry and the private prison industry, etc. She is certainly much more moderate than Bernie. Yet, she's got endorsements from organizations I care about, such as the League of Conservation Voters, and I would be amazingly happy if her campaign platform were to be made into law. True, nobody ever succeeds in implementing what their platform calls for, but, while I prefer Bernie's, am also happy with the direction Hillary is going for.<br />
<br />
As for who is most electable against the Republicans, I am actually unsure. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine an avowedly socialist candidate winning the majority of the American vote. On the other hand, there is a large proportion of the American electorate that has been been building a hatred of Hillary Clinton for more than twenty years, and anyone close to the establishment is going to have some issues this year. On the gripping hand, well, I don't have the best idea of what is going through the mind of the average American voter. Had I been alive and politically active in '72, I probably would have been a proud McGovern supporter, and would have expected him to win, because who the hell would vote for Nixon a second time?<br />
<br />
Which reminds me, I should go back and re-read all of Hunter S. Thompson's coverage of the '72 race. Shame we don't have him doing reporting this cycle.<br />
<br />
On the other side of the aisle we have the Republicans, and I am left at a loss for words. Since I started caring about politics, around the 2000 election when I was 17 and too young to vote, I've thought of the Republican Party as a rabid dog that needs to be taken out into the backyard and shot. If that was hyperbolic then, it has seemed a less and less extreme position as the years have gone by.<br />
<br />
Never overestimate the American electorate, but damn, Trump? A man who has refused to disavow an endorsement from David Duke, who has been Tweeting quotes from Mussolini, and has called Mexican immigrants rapists. How the hell is he leading in the polls among the Republicans?<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Republicans.<br />
<br />
Sigh.<br />
<br />
It is even more frightening watching the Republican debates and realizing that on some topics, Trump actually seems more sane than Cruz and Rubio. Admittedly, that does not take much more than pointing out that 9/11 happened while W was president and having the audience boo him, but that shows where the rest of the Republicans are.<br />
<br />
So, yes. This year will be interesting, entertaining, and frightful. There is, I believe, more potential for drama here than there has been for years. With how well Trump is doing, and the how much the Republican establishment hates him, we could see a brokered convention, or a significant third party run. I am all for shaking things up, and I have been hoping for a civil war among the Republicans to burn that party to the ground for ages, but let us hope it doesn't get to the point of a fascist revolution.<br />
<br />
Please vote, people.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-6998229277701663592016-02-21T22:40:00.002-08:002016-02-29T00:06:15.926-08:00What Happened to Artificial Life Games?I am a huge fan of simulation and strategy games, and one of my favorite subsections of this was the alife genre. Some of the better examples of this genre were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimLife">SimLife</a>, which came out in 1992, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(artificial_life_series)">Creatures </a>series that came out in the mid to late 90s. Yet, once we got into the 21st Century, the genre seems to have mostly melted away, and this leaves me fairly sad and wondering why.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it was how horribly executed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)">Spore</a> was, and seeing that blow up with Will Wright behind it scared people away.<br />
<br />
Even ignoring the large studio produced games, I remember in the 90s seeing and playing tons of simple freeware alife sims. The study of alife was at least a not completely ignored facet of academia. I found a lot of my way into it through that, reading books about complexity theory. See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life">Conway's Game of Life</a>, <a href="http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/">Boids </a>and <a href="http://sugarscape.sourceforge.net/">Sugarscape</a>. Even from that face of things, I have not seen much new come out. I suppose <a href="http://alife.org/">The International Society for Artificial Life</a> is still doing things, but as a non-academic I don't see much evidence of this in the pop-science press. Even the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/alife">/r/alife</a> subreddit is mostly dormant.<br />
<br />
And so I remain curious as to why. There seemed such an opportunity for growth in this field that simply turned to dust. Maybe I just haven't been keeping up in the right corners of the internet. If people could point me in a better direction that would be wonderful. I certainly can't speak for the potential for academic advances in the field, but simply as a toy, as a game, there is so much more that could be done. Processing power has expanded dramatically, and we have gotten tremendously better at making software.<br />
<br />
Likely it is lack of demand, which is frustrating, if believable. Many people don't like the same things as I do. Yet, we have amazingly better simulation and strategy games these days, and not just because of <a href="https://www.paradoxplaza.com/">Paradox Interactive</a>. I would assume there would be enough range in the simulation genre for the alife subset to eke out some sort of existence.<br />
<br />
Perhaps I need to better articulate what it is I loved about those games. I loved that you could have what was in effect a terrarium, that you could build with whatever configuration you wanted and restart at a moments notice, all at no cost. You could observe, and learned a good deal about how systems worked, about biology, evolution, neural networks, physics, genetics, and more. They were beautiful to simply look at.<br />
<br />
If I can't find these programs already out there, I should write them myself. Just give me a thousand hours of free time or so.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-77684890676449007922016-02-21T20:19:00.001-08:002016-02-21T22:44:27.345-08:00Past Due For MaintenanceHaving mostly ignored this site the last three or four years, and only recently getting back into regular updates thanks to <a href="http://iron-blogger-sf.com/">Iron Blogger SF</a>, I am continuing to find settings and UI elements that need cleanup.<br />
<br />
For example, I just had a wonderful weekend of wine tasting up in Oregon for my friend Erik's birthday, and in the car ride back I spent some time sketching out my next post, which involved taking a look at my site through my phone. Eesh, there was some hideousness. Not just because I never bothered to set it up for mobile, but because my desktop browser has so many extensions, that I was never seeing the defunct AdSense plugins, navigation bar, and whatever else Blogger thought was good to install at some point.<br />
<br />
My current extension roster on my default Chrome browser is <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom">AdBlock</a>, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdfkolichcflejclcbmpeaniij">Ghostery</a>, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-badger/pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp">Privacy Badger</a>, and <a href="https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere">HTTPS Everywhere</a>. I was speaking of filter bubbles last week, and here I am seeing a far different web than many people. I would recommend those extensions, but I should also put at least a minute into being a better web designer, and give a touch more thought into how this blog appears.<br />
<br />
I may have gone into my <a href="http://www.mjanes.com/2009_12_01_archive.html">moral opposition to advertising</a> before, but love to return to that topic at some point.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-12526249704360153622016-02-14T23:57:00.000-08:002016-02-21T19:58:00.739-08:00A Crack In The Filter BubbleAs much as I am interested in and opinionated about politics, I rarely see political arguments in person. I sit here writing this in my room, with books on politics and economics scattered across my line of sight, and yet it feels like the closest to a political argument I observed in 2015 was a discussion about the proper level to set a universal basic income to, which is a wee bit different than what most of the rest of the country is arguing about.<br />
<br />
Part of the reason there aren't those arguments is my own <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble">filter bubble</a>. Not just the internet software filter bubble that the Wikipedia page I linked to talks about, but how we filter our friends and acquaintances. Homophily as sociologists say. People tend to associate with those who are similar to themselves. I am a fairly liberal person, and so are most of my friends, and hell, I live in San Francisco. A good book I read a few years ago, <a href="http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php">The Big Sort</a> (not to be confused with The Big Short), makes some good arguments that clustering of like-minded American subcultures and political groupings has accelerated significantly in the last several decades, making it much more likely for people to mostly be surrounded by those of similar political and religious beliefs.<br />
<br />
Still, I do have friends, and relatives, that I know to vote Republican. At least three. Yet, I rarely see them get into arguments either. I believe most of the reason for that is wanting to be polite, not wanting to ruin Christmas dinner, or simply knowing that our beliefs diverge so wildly that there's not much of a chance of one of us to change one another's mind.<br />
<br />
With that level of non-confrontation and self-filtering in our daily lives, there are some rather unfortunate effects. If the only people I argue with are mostly anonymous asshats on the internet, it does lead to dehumanizing the other side. And believe me, my internal conception of the other side is rather dehumanizing. I see conservatives in America as either idiots, willfully ignorant, ideologically insane, greedy, or bigoted. So, yeah. Not much of a beginning to argue about.<br />
<br />
Which is why the last month has been very interesting for me. I certainly feel as though I've seen more political argument in the last month as I have in the last seven or eight years. Possibly longer. The reason for this, is of course, the Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders primary. I've actually seen friends get into long extended arguments with each other in public view! It's wonderful!<br />
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Of course, yes at least three quarters of those arguments quickly degenerate into either shouting, or passive aggressive sass, but at least it feels like a step in the right direction.<br />
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So, what makes things different now? I'd posit that it's a few main things. The positions are relatively new enough that we haven't had time to set up our filters and know who already agrees with us. Then, because we don't know other's opinions already, we tend to assume our friends agree with us, and get a good bit offended when they don't, thus throwing the wanting to politely deescalate arguments out the window. The surprise is a bit of a shock, and leads us to argue.<br />
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It certainly makes me wish I saw more arguments in our daily lives. Actual arguments, with the potential for allowing minds to be changed. Not sure what that would lead to, other than shouting a your uncle over Christmas break, but, damn. Better than ignoring each other for fear of causing an upset.<br />
<br />mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-7325408269819799382016-02-06T20:39:00.000-08:002016-02-06T20:48:16.239-08:00Never Too Late For New Year's ResolutionsNot being too late for New Year's resolutions doesn't mean I'm finally settling on what I want to be doing for 2016, it means I'm getting back to a resolution I abandoned three or four years ago; writing a post here at least once a week. As a means of encouragement, I have signed up with <a href="http://iron-blogger-sf.com/">Iron Blogger SF</a> in a beer money competition. Thank you, <a href="http://sbo-blog.mattspitz.net/">Matt Spitz</a>, for the intro to them. Not a bad year for blogging given the US election. If I follow through on other past New Year's resolutions on this schedule, I might actually end up with a tattoo in three years. Still need to figure out 2016, but I've got some time for that.<br />
<br />
So, yeah, where is humanity in 2016? What the hell am I doing with my life?<br />
<br />
Myself, things are good. Working away at the best job I've yet had at the wonderful <a href="http://www.plangrid.com/en">PlanGrid</a>. Personal life is enjoyable, good friends, wonderful relationships, and I'm mostly on top of things. May need some new excitement before too long. That, or what I'm sensing is the general 30's worries about getting a house, getting married. The "am I doing adulthood right!?" story.<br />
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The rest of the world? Eh... Fear of ongoing environmental destruction and increasing economic inequality. Mildly happy with the rate of technological and scientific improvements. Mostly happy with improved social tolerance in the developed world, with the general wealth improvements in the developing world.<br />
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Trends seem to be as they have been the last few years. Still waiting for one of those sea changes to mix things up. Closest thing I've seen to a sea change in my adult life was probably the Great Recession, and that, though painful, doesn't seem to have shaken up any of the larger economic or political systems out there.<br />
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Shall see what the year brings, as always.<br />
<br />mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-25727073029480674362015-10-31T18:37:00.000-07:002015-11-03T09:14:27.177-08:00SF Local ElectionsNothing makes me worry about an aging slide into conservatism more than local politics in San Francisco. I consider myself an extremely liberal, progressive voter. I hope for Bernie Sanders for president, and the Republicans are either insane, idiotic, or unethical. Yet local SF politics...<br />
<br />
Sigh<br />
<br />
In San Francisco the people who call themselves progressives with regard to local politics are the ones who tend to put up the most roadblocks to new housing development. For anyone who doesn't live in the area, housing and rental prices have <a href="http://sf.curbed.com/tags/rental-rates">exploded</a> over the last few years. This has of course created a lot of resentment towards developers and people moving into the city, but much of the response to this has been to restrict development. San Francisco has some of the most restrictive anti-development laws in the country, and has been building far <a href="http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/02/04/sfs_population_is_growing_way_faster_than_its_housing_stock.php">too few units</a> over the last few decades.<br />
<br />
Even environmental organizations that I normally support contribute to the problem. The local Sierra Club chapter has acted against a number of development initiatives and left me fuming as an environmentalist, because living in a dense urban area is <a href="http://www.popsci.com/article/science/suburbias-carbon-footprint-four-times-size-urban-residents-study-finds">far better for the environment</a>. The alternative is pushing people further out into the suburbs, developing on currently undeveloped land, and forcing them to commute long distances.<br />
<br />
Of course, this isn't all San Francisco's fault. Similar anti-development attitudes <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2015/06/san_francisco_rent_crisis_the_solution_isn_t_in_the_city_it_s_in_the_suburbs.html">elsewhere in the bay area</a> have been a major contributor.<br />
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I want more housing units, dense development, with functioning public transit. I would love to buy property in this wonderful city someday and raise a family, and am left screaming at the idiots pushing ballot initiatives to further halt development.<br />
<br />
Thus, my endorsements for the Tuesday election closely follow those of <a href="http://www.spur.org/publications/voter-guide/2015-10-01/november-2015-voter-guide">SPUR</a>.<br />
<br />
A: Yes<br />
B: Yes<br />
C: ?<br />
D: Yes<br />
E: ?<br />
F: No<br />
G: No<br />
H: Yes<br />
I: No<br />
J: No<br />
K: Yesmjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-70795829652570501662015-07-24T08:53:00.003-07:002015-07-24T08:54:11.590-07:00Battle BlimpsOver the last few months, one thing I've been spending a share of my time on is helping to build a system of remote controlled blimps, for eventual use in a series of hydrogen-filled explosion-fueled dogfights at Burning Man.<br />
<br />
Take a look here at our Indiegogo campaign for Battle Blimps:<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="445px" scrolling="no" src="https://www.indiegogo.com/project/battle-blimps/embedded/3785747" width="222px"></iframe>mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-21434424955137801242015-04-23T09:22:00.000-07:002015-04-23T09:23:10.440-07:00What the Hell Has Happened in the Last Year?I was reminded recently by some recruiter on LinkedIn that I had a blog. Sure enough, essay ideas were staring at me balefully from the bottom of my to-do list. I was surprised, and happy, that my last post came as recently as nine months ago, had guessed it was closer to two years. That does make me feel better about how little has changed in the world since last I wrote, we shall see if I can retain my optimism that I'll eventually get to the exciting future I've hoped for.<br />
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On top of that, I have a friend who has recently started blogging, in a different style than I have been using, quick 200 word posts that he churns out multiple times a day. I hope to take that for inspiration.<br />
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<br />mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-50722684915545478072014-07-23T20:18:00.001-07:002014-07-23T20:18:26.263-07:00Capital in the 21st CenturyIn a similar vein to <a href="http://www.mjanes.com/2014/07/republic-lost-and-mayday-pac.html">my last post</a>, here is another set of thoughts on a book composed of criticism and advice for our political and economic systems. This time <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century">Capital in the 21st Century</a> by Thomas Piketty.<br />
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I have many worries about the future of the world, the two greatest being environmental destruction and wealth inequality. <i>Capital in the 21st Century</i> takes an extremely detailed look at the second of these. If you care about inequality, or the world's political and economic organization, I highly recommend reading this book. It is worth the time investment, which is certainly significant given its size. The only popular economic books I have read in the last few years that perhaps match its its significance would be <i>Debt</i> and <i>The Second Machine Age</i>.<br />
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Being on Amazon and the New York Times best-sellers lists, there has already been a lot of talk about the book, and much more exhaustive reviews than what I am putting together now. Cory Doctorow in particular has a good <a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-t.html">review of the book</a>.<br />
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Piketty looks at the distribution of wealth in Europe and America over the last 300 years, and has documented an extraordinary amount of detail. Progressives and activists such as Occupy have been railing against wealth inequality for years, if you go back to Marx, more than a century, but Piketty paints a clear picture of the details of the economic distribution in a way that has not been before. This book is more a book on economic history than economic theory. It breaks down in great detail, not just the distribution of wealth in Europe and America since the Industrial Revolution, but such details as the share of income generated through labor vs capital at various wealth levels of society, the proportion of wealth transferred through inheritance, and more.<br />
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What this historical research shows is that the 20th Century, primarily the period between the start of World War I and the 1970s, was an outlier in terms of its level of equality. Piketty attributes this to three main factors: 1) the massive destruction of capital caused by the First and Second World Wars, 2) significant economic growth, primarily caused by population growth, and 3) progressive taxation and social welfare policy that gained prominence in this time period. Since the 1970s, due to rollback of these social policies, and the thankful recovery from the world wars, inequality has steadily risen, approaching levels not seen since the Gilded Age. As population growth rates continue to hopefully decline, and barring any horrible wars, without further governmental policy inequality looks set to rise throughout the 21st century.<br />
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Though a lesser part of the book than the historical analysis, there is some economic theory that is used to make these predictions. And there are certainly economists out there that will <a href="http://aida.wss.yale.edu/smith/piketty1.pdf">argue the theory</a>. Regardless, the fact that we have already slipped back in many ways to a level of economic inequality that existed before the First World War is deeply frightening to me. The current political debate is still set by an economic reality that has been disappearing for the last forty years and is increasingly unrealistic. The economic realities of the 19th Century that were assumed by popular culture of the time, that Piketty shows through works such as those from Austen and Balzac, are horribly distasteful to a modern citizen. That is the world that we are on the verge of living in if trends from the last forty years continue. We are approaching the level of economic inequality that caused Marx to produce his works. It is not the society I want to live in. Piketty has potential solutions of course, such as a return to the top income tax levels of the 1950s, and a progressive global tax on capital. I would certainly support these solutions in theory, but more importantly, I want popular opinion to realize how far we have swung back to the extreme inequalities of the Gilded Age.mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1639894776845764116.post-85218534038119011552014-07-04T14:10:00.001-07:002014-07-04T14:10:09.552-07:00Republic Lost and the Mayday PACHappy 4th of July everyone. In the midst of fitfully trying to convince myself to write again, I came across a draft of my thoughts on <i><a href="http://republic.lessig.org/">Republic, Lost</a></i>, which I had originally tried to get out back in October of 2012. With the July 4th deadline for the current <a href="https://mayday.us/">Mayday PAC</a> fundraising goal today I figured now was a good time to get this out the door.<br />
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I would like to recommended <i>Republic, Lost,</i> by Lawrence Lessig, to anyone with an interest in American politics, or who lives and votes in America. I have been a fan of the works of Lawrence Lessig for years. He first came to my attention with his work on the disastrous effects of modern intellectual property law, and this is the first work I have read of his that branches out to a broader view of the American political process.<br />
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<i>Republic, Lost</i> goes into painful detail how corrupt American politics have become over the last forty years. This book is frightful in its details, explaining how the process of deciding elections, how the practice of governing, and the end result of law and policy have all been horribly warped by money. The book traces a majority of the issues I care about back to this cause. Yes, it is a political policy book designed for the mass market, of course it is going to explain that it knows the primary cause of and cure for the nation's ills, but I found myself convinced of the importance of the issue.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: normal;">Over the last several decades the amount and importance of campaign fund-raising has increased tremendously. Campaign processes have grown increasingly sophisticated in ways that sink money into advertising, research, etc. Campaign finance restrictions have been rolled back. The ethical norms of what is expected of our elected officials has changed and lobbyists have become a normal, accepted part of our political system while politicians spend more and more of their time fund-raising.</span> Politicians work hand in hand with lobbyists in creating the laws. Congressmen spend less time debating the bills that they are supposed to be writing, farming that duty out to lobbyists. The laws grow more complex as lobbyists seek benefits for their industries, and politicians seek to expand regulation so that they have more influence to bargain with lobbyists in exchange for campaign donations.<br />
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Lessig goes on to detail how this corrupted process created the disastrous financial regulatory framework that lead to the Great Recession, how it prevented more thorough healthcare reform such as a single payer system, how it contributes to growing wealth inequality, how it has created an overly complex set of tax law, and many other unfortunate examples. There are many dreams of idealists on both the right and left that have been thwarted by the current corruption of the American political system.<br />
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In order to fix this issue Lessig as recommended many solutions since <i>Republic, Lost</i> was published in 2011. A constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, or publicly financed elections, or other forms of electoral reform would be wonderful, but are unlikely given the current state of political polarization and with moneyed interests opposed. Right now, the most important plan that I would like to encourage support for is the <a href="https://mayday.us/">Mayday PAC</a>, which with some degree of irony, is raising money to support candidates pledged to get money out of American politics. I am more optimistic about the <a href="https://mayday.us/the-plan/">Mayday plan</a> than any previous attempt to address this issue I have seen before, simply in terms of the amount of public awareness it is generating. I would like to encourage you all to consider supporting it.<br />
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mjaneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07642108550616338576noreply@blogger.com0