Week 32
News
Extreme heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike parts of the Indian subcontinent unless global carbon emissions are cut sharply and soon, according to new research. [..] The new analysis assesses the impact of climate change on the deadly combination of heat and humidity, measured as the “wet bulb” temperature (WBT). Once this reaches 35C, the human body cannot cool itself by sweating and even fit people sitting in the shade will die within six hours.
Sounds bad
Lee Atwater
[Campaign Operative for the Reagan Campaign, shortly after Reagan’s first election, talking to an author] you’re going to hear a lot in the days to come about the Reagan revolution. Don’t believe a word of it. If we Republicans are lucky, by dint of heroic effort we may push the system 5 degrees in one direction to compensate for the 5 degrees that President Carter pushed it in the other direction.
Wrong
What really happened was Carter tried to change 5 degrees, and failed, Reagan pushed 180 degrees, and succeeded. According to this excerpt, changes made by Reagan were both necessary and unavoidable. Carter could go into that direction but he was probably, institutionally, not able to do so. A Democrat President could not have made them. A sad result of this is Democrats were bulldozed over, both electorally and more importantly, ideologically. They still did not recover from the Reagan Revolution. Changes during 80s were about unshackling the enterpreneual energy [great] but since “the other side” had no hand in these changes, their ideological chops atropied, they became pansy-ass pencil-dick small-time modifiers, merely trying to change some little stuff around the edges, always trying to work through the existing structures. 80s gave companies more power, so pansy-ass modifiers try to introduce their changes through companies, like healthcare through employers, trying to force the insurance companies to do this little different that little different. It is unfathomable to them to pull out health insurance outside the market structure.
Comment
But Democrats had memorable politicians since the 80s, like Clinton.
He was a Southern Conservative
.. or a Conservative Democrat. Here’s an excerpt from All Too Human, by George Stepehanappololooopoololololuluuluoulpoopoololoous “Most liberals [he means left] understood that Clinton wasn’t really one of us. But it felt good to get lost in the partisan reverie [..] It felt good, again, to think about winning.”
News
Relations between the United States and China have reached “a pivot point”, Rex Tillerson has warned, calling for efforts to avoid “open conflict” between the world’s two largest economies.
Right
G. Friedman
[From The Next 100 Years] Having achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world’s oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motivated to build navies—or had the resources to do so. One strategy, “the carrot,” is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, “the stick,” is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.
The United States emerged from the Cold War with both an ongoing interest and a fixed strategy. The ongoing interest was preventing any Eurasian power from becoming sufficiently secure to divert resources to navy building. Since there was no longer a single threat of Eurasian hegemony, the United States focused on the emergence of secondary, regional hegemons who might develop enough regional security to allow them to begin probing out to sea. The United States therefore worked to create a continually shifting series of alliances designed to tie down any potential regional hegemon.
Budding regional powers watch out
If a country wants to have a huge oceanic naval presence, they need to be ready to be disrupted by US. The Friedman strategy is such a power is disrupted an tied down by land wars [so they cannot divert enough resources to naval power]. It is not China’s rising economy that worries the US, it is its activities in the South China sea and ship building.
For the Chinese IMO it does not make sense to antagonize the US. Unless you are loaded for bear, u best tread carefully. Like, Chinks are investing in submarine technology thinking that’ll give them a leg-up with a possible carrier encounter, but are they sure, like 100% sure, US is not ready for that? A career never moves alone BTW, there is a career group – with destroyers, subs of its own, etc. If the outcome of a war were to hinge on that, could the Chinese be absolutely sure they have a good solution?
G. Friedman
It is important to understand that Mexican immigration is fundamentally different from immigration from distant countries such as China and Poland. In those cases, people are breaking their tie with a homeland that is thousands of miles away. Some degree of assimilation is inevitable, because the alternatives are isolation or a life within a culturally segregated community. Although immigrants have frightened Americans ever since the Scots-Irish arrived to unsettle the merchants and gentry of eighteenth-century America, there is a fundamentally geopolitical reason not to compare Mexican immigration with those precedents.
Not only is Mexico adjacent to the United States, but in many cases the land the migrants are moving into is land that once belonged to Mexico. When Mexicans move northward, they are not necessarily breaking ties with their homeland. Indeed, within the borderland, which can extend hundreds of miles into both countries, the movement north can require minimal cultural adjustment. When Mexicans move to distant cities, they react as traditional immigrants have done and assimilate. Within the borderland, they have the option of retaining their language and their national identity, distinct from whatever legal identity they adopt. This state of affairs can create serious tension between the legal border and the cultural border.
Right
Link
As the air warms, some of that heat is absorbed by the ocean, which in turn raises the temperature of the sea’s upper layers.
Harvey benefitted from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average. These waters were some of the hottest spots of ocean surface in the world. The tropical storm, feeding off this unusual warmth, was able to progress from a tropical depression to a category-four hurricane in roughly 48 hours.
“This is the main fuel for the storm,” says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Although these storms occur naturally, the storm is apt to be more intense, maybe a bit bigger, longer-lasting, and with much heavier rainfalls [because of that ocean heat].”
Deny That
News
Google has fired a computer engineer who caused a storm in Silicon Valley by asserting that the gender gap among technology workers was down to biological differences between men and women.
Google did the right thing
A company is no place to stir that kind of shit up. You can have your “discussions” outside, start a blog like mine, vent, go to the woods, scream it out, learn karate, do karate chops on wood blocks. Who cares? Don’t do it at a company. From a CEO / management’s perspective it is already hard enough to get all employees rowing in the same direction, keep them generally happy, motivated, satisfied with their work, offer growing opportunities, and turn a profit at the same time. There is no time or space for such philosophical meanderings. But this guy probably knew this would happen, wanted to make a point anyway, and made it, and was fired. He accomplished his goal.
Now on diversity: it is generally good a company’s internal make-up reflects the broader population, in US that would be 50% women, 15% black, Latino, etc. It is good companies striving to get there. How to get there? An approach, and according to affirmative action (law), a company gently prefers the minority candidate over another, at the door, if they have equal skill sets.
But once inside, I add, you don’t talk about gender, race. You don’t think about gender, race. Inside, it is the diversity club. What is the first rule of diversity club? You don’t talk about the diversity club. Simple. If, say, women are huddled in classrooms in companies to help them specifically to improve some of their skills, not okay. Making people aware of their difference, even if sometimes in positive ways, not okay. There is research that shows, while taking tests, some kids are made aware of their minority status, their score went down. Internally companies stay color-blind, gender-blind, purely merit based. If there are two employees equally unfit for a company, one of them woman the other man, both get fired. Affirmative action is only to fight against the discrimination at the door, the rest is up to the person, company stays neutral.
After all that, and the internal percentages are still off due to the availability of qualified diverse candidates or other causes, that is sad and not a company’s problem. The larger social system needs fixing.
Question
But does affirmative action work?
It does
The Clinton WH did a review on that, with the intention of removing it, but they decided against it because they found out it worked. Details are in the book All Too Human by George Stephanapopolopopolopoluoplpuoplupoplupououllpulpulpouplpuopuous. Unless there is new research that shows otherwise, I am going to stick with that.
Comment
You just made reference to someone’s long Greek last name and made him aware of his difference, if this person saw it it may hurt his feelings.
I am a blogger
I can say whatever funk I want. I am not in public office, write for a wide-circulation newspaper, a politician, an offical outlet, or a reader’s coworker. People in such position may not be able to say the things I do.
WaPo
Democrats are moving left — and that won’t necessarily hurt them in 2018 [..T]heir Better Deal, which is being amended week to week, has largely built on the left-wing platform that emerged from the 2016 convention. Democrats now endorse a $15 minimum wage; they back $1 trillion in deficit-financed infrastructure spending.
Not good enough
All of that is an example of “legislation-through-corporation” – this is what the “old new left” used to do. Democrats were brain-fucked by Reagan, with a butt-plug so they became paralyzed neck-down. They were lying on the floor, comotose, u know, with the occosional twitching.. So they lost their ability to think outside their predefined boundaries now, their “solutions” are always these little bitchy methods of getting companies to do this-or-that different. Getting companies to pay x amount of money, giving companies money so they create economic activity, making companies to give time-off for whatever reasons. In the case of health insurance however the solution does not lie with the companies, insurance needs to be taken away from companies.
P. Krugman
Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno’s book “One Nation, Uninsured” tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social contract.
But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.
Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are groaning under the strain.
So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all.
But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. And the big debate among would-be reformers is how to deal with those interests, especially the insurance companies. These companies played a secondary role in Truman’s failure but have since become a seemingly invincible lobby.
Right you are paduwan
Question
Do you think if Trump would sign a Medicare-for-all bill if it came to him?
I think he would
WaPo
Single-payer alternative [is] favored by the majority of House Democrats.
Good Good
at
August 09, 2017
The White House
Trump ‘condemns’ white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups
Shoulda Condemned Faster
This jackass cannot be pandered to. Dude totally had plastic surgery done BTW, really supreme. He regularly hurls insults at the Jews too. WH should watch out for this fucker - can even be a government plant.
J. Rickards, Currency Wars
One of the best measures of the rent seeking relationship between elites and citizens in a stagnant economy is the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality; a higher coefficient means greater income inequality. In 2006, shortly before the recent recession began, the coefficient for the United States reached an all-time high of 47, which contrasts sharply with the all-time low of 38.6, recorded in 1968 after two decades of stable gold- backed money. The Gini coefficient trended lower in 2007 but was near the all-time high again by 2009 and trending higher. The Gini coefficient for the United States is now approaching that of Mexico, which is a classic oligarchic society characterized by gross income inequality and concentration of wealth in elite hands.
Another measure of elite rent seeking is the ratio of amounts earned by the top 20 percent of Americans compared to amounts earned by those living below the poverty line. This ratio went from a low of 7.7 to 1 in 1968 to a high of 14.5 to 1 in 2010. These trends in both the Gini coefficient and the wealth-to-poverty income ratio in the United States are consistent with Tainter’s findings on civilizations nearing collapse. When society offers its masses negative returns on inputs, those masses opt out of society, which is ultimately destabilizing for masses and elites.
Right
Author, Social Network Analysis for Startups
We entered this fray in 2006, bringing with us a large-scale social network study of campaign finance and its influence on electoral outcome. In this section, we’ll give an overview of this study, and delve into the methods used to derive the results [..]
Every node on this chart is a political organization or political action committee (PAC) actively involved in the 2000 congressional and presidential elections. Red and blue nodes, respectively, are Republican and Democratic committees (national and state), green nodes are single-issue groups, purple nodes are industry associations, and yellow are non-profit organizations. The links between PACs are determined by where their money is spent—if PAC-A and PAC-B route donations to the same candidates, they become linked—and the more they have in common, the stronger this link becomes. The strongest links are shown with thicker lines on the diagram [..]
This study was based on data released by the Federal Election Commission, pursuant to the McCain-Finegold Campaign Finance Act (The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court has seriously undermined our ability to study these sort of interactions in the future; much of the data has become unavailable in 2010). The data is based on forms that PACs are required to file every time they make a campaign contribution to a candidate. [..]
[T]he single-issue PACs dominate [..] On the right is the Republican cluster, led by the Republican National Committee (RNC), and on the left is the Democratic cluster and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). However, right next to the “official players,” connected to them with thickest link are three PACs that seem to wield a significant amount of power in the network. Can anyone guess what they are?
The nodes on the left and right of the strong-link triads are, in turn, NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), and the National Right to Life PAC—representing the two sides of the abortion issue, which, in 2000 as well as now, is one of the most divisive issues in American politics.
In the middle is the AFL-CIO Political Action Committee, representing America’s largest labor union and, by proxy, over 11 million voters. The union vote historically tended to be Democratic, but Republicans needed to win key industrial states such as Ohio and Michigan in order to gain control of Congress and elect a Republican president— and that meant peeling union vote away from its traditional constituency. This required a “fulcrum issue”: an issue that was divisive enough to make union members break with their party affiliation—and abortion was it.
Interesting
I see Sanders making some moves in this area. It can pay off.
Blogger
When I read today’s news about OpenAI’s DotA 2 [an action game, u can play 1-on-1 or team against team] bot beating human players at The International, an eSports tournament with a prize pool of over $24M, I was jumping with excitement [..T]he OpenAI news came as such a shock. How can this be true? Have there been recent breakthroughs that I wasn’t aware of? As I started looking more into what exactly the DotA 2 bot was doing, how it was trained, and what game environment it was in, I came to the conclusion that it’s an impressive achievement, but not the AI breakthrough the press would like you to believe it is. That’s what this post is about. I would like to offer a sober explanation of what’s actually new. There is a real danger of overhyping Artificial Intelligence progress [..]
Let me start out by saying that none of the hype or incorrect assumptions is the fault of OpenAI researchers. OpenAI has traditionally been very straightforward and explicit about the limitations of their research contributions. I am sure it will be the same in this case. OpenAI has not yet published technical details of their solution, so it is easy to jump to wrong conclusions for people not in the field [..]
Let’s start out by looking at how difficult the problem that the DotA 2 bot is solving actually is. How does it compare to something like AlphaGo?
1v1 is not comparable to 5v5. In a typical game of DotA 2, a team of 5 plays against another team of 5 players. These games require high-level strategy, team communication and coordination, and typically take around 45 minutes. 1v1 games are much more restricted. Two players basically move down a single lane and try to kill each other. It’s typically over in a few minutes. Beating an opponent in 1v1 requires mechanical skill and short-term tactics, but none of the things, like long term planning or coordination, that are challenging for current AI techniques. In fact, the number of useful actions you can take is less than in a game of Go. The effective state space (the player’s idea of what’s currently going on in the game), if represented in a smart way, should be smaller than in Go as well.
Bots have access to more information: The OpenAI bot was (most likely) built on top of the game’s bot API, giving it access to all kinds of information humans do not have access to. Even if OpenAI researchers restricted access to certain kinds of information, the bot still has access to more exact information than humans.
Well..
There is also this.
Genuine advances in this field are exciting, and welcome. But watch out for the hype.