Yes, most GOP campaign operations identify prime grift targets - donors, Fox News addicts, goldbugs, etc. - but Trump despite everything is still averaging 39% in national polls, and they can't all be the most gullible segment of society.
I wonder if all the small business providing services to the Trump campaign will be smart enough to insist on getting paid up front? Because there is no way that months-old catering bill is getting covered after he loses the election.
2: He's well known for stiffing people who do work for him all the time. So, yeah,
2: Yeah, even regular politicians have been known to do that, kept in check only by the possibility that it becomes an embarrassing article the next time they run, which is not an issue for Trump.
While my dad wasn't involved in the project, the architectural firm he worked for in the eighties worked on Trump Tower. And my understanding is that they were not paid in full.
Paid in Full seems like a good title for the upcoming retrospective of Trump's disastrous performance in the 2016 election.
I mean, I wouldn't have paid for it either. That is one ugly building. But not Dad's fault.
Seriously, it's literally part of his business model. TPM had a couple of good pieces on this a little while back.
1 makes a fair point, but some portion of those 39% are surely low-engagement voters who report that they plan to vote Trump because he's the Republican, and they always vote R. The interesting question will be how many of those he manages to drive away over the course of the campaign -- and, on the other side, how many new voters he's able to attract.
1
No, they can't all be the dumbest. But the scammers and phishers have an interest in getting the republican in, too. Between scammers, scamees, social reactionaries, contrarians, conspiracy theorists, the conservative and senile, and people who will tolerate anything for a tax cut (and there is a heavy overlap with scammers here) you've easily got 39% of the voting population.
Also the piece Krugman links in the article is a classic.
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
10: I'd agree with that. A spectrum from completely deluded to purely evil, with most combining both.
9: Well, his high water mark was already set a few weeks ago when there was that one poll showing him leading. From there, it may be all loss. Normally, you'd expect a convention bounce, but the convention may be a shitshow that makes Chicago '68 look like a Bolshoi performance.
I mean, in general I expect Trump's primary effect to be normalizing his poison, but he's so undisciplined, and his people are so incompetent (and few), that I think he may end up driving off even some fraction of hateful bigots by the end.
13: Yes, I popped in to let Messily know that I liked the WaPo article too.
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2016/06/13/seek-and-destroy/
"There are two distinct groups of people who are really into Trump. I understand one of them very well because I've spent my entire life around them. The other group I only encountered recently."
I came to post the long con link in 11. The mailing list marketing overlap between miracle cures and business opportunities
'they do not want you to know about' and Republican grassroots newsletter subscriptions is alarming.
Miracle cures are popular in all communities. Among the liberal demographics, you've got all the anti-vaxers and the juice cleanse people and the chemicalophobic people. And now that I'm in a Hispanic community I see that family-friendly pyramid scheme things like Nutrisystem are big among the Spanish-speakers.
I don't know why there aren't lucrative lists of suckers for these things though. Maybe it's that the conservative lists are mostly of people over age 80 who live alone.
Among the liberal demographics, you've got all the anti-vaxers and the juice cleanse people and the chemicalophobic people.
Homeopathic remedies also. Hippies love that shit.
"Here just dissolve 17 of these sugar pills in your mouth three times a day and it will get rid of your sniffles."
Except it won't, unless you chase it with Sudafed.
Sudafed!?
All natural Ma Huang will do just as well, but without the chemicals and toxins.
With enough global warming, it'll be possible to introduce gators to the Platte.
Wrong thread and Denver will figure how to steal all the water anyway.
With good Sudafed getting more difficult to score these days, I was actually thinking I should start growing Ma Huang.
Conservatives get swindled like this, liberals get swindled like that.
AIHMHB, I'm on some conservative mailing list because I once set up a Redstate account to read some thread there. Every day there's crap like this, sent from a "do not reply" address. I actually listened to one once, it was a monologue with captions flashing by and edited in that breathless style where they cut the natural pauses between sentences. It went on for 10+ minutes about how the economy will crash, you need to protect your family, they don't want you to know the truth, but I gave up eventually (no indication of how long it was going to keep going) and never even figured out what they were trying to sell. I think they only want the real suckers who are willing to listen for at least 30 min before they make the sales pitch.
A friend and I once tried to use Ma Huang as a bittering agent in an orange bitters. It was absolutely delicious - easily the best thing we'd managed. But also it turns out that in high proof alcohol it extracts really, really effectively* and we'd ended up with something where two dashes would get you pretty high which, all things considered, kind of ruined what we were hoping for. It was great if you wanted a nice cocktail and to feel really alert and also to spend the next day worrying about your blood pressure and heart rate.
*but not as far as what we were hoping for, which was the flavor, obviously.
A lot of the investment advice peddled on Fox News ads (buy gold! buy gold!) seems to have the almost explicit purpose of ensuring a steady stream of dumb money in markets.
26:
A good friend of mine came to me panicking with one of those once. It was kind of sad, but I was able to calm him down. They're just trying to get people to subscribe to their shitty news letters and peddle god awful financial products that no one in their right mind would purchase.
29: The anti efficient market hypothesis: any sufficiently knowledgable market will dedicate a portion of money to bring in suckers. Corollary: So long as there exist suckers with money, markets will not be efficient. (No markets can be efficient until all are efficient.)
"Enjoy your transgender bathrooms. We just lost America."
I don't think I've ever been in a really enjoyable lavatory. The most positive emotional experience I've had in that context has probably been one of relief. Even then, though, it's not like I wanted to linger particularly. That even applies to the transgender ones: there is a gents' at my office which used to be a ladies'. It's really no more enjoyable than any other.
Ha! Washington Monthly's redo has a few bugs. Political Animal for now brings up Drum's first post in 2004. I was disconcerted at first.
I just read that bathroom article. That guy has some problems.
Have we ever faced a time when our country was so polarized? Have we ever faced enemies so dangerous? Have we ever been on such a precipice that a frightening and painful energy radiated through each of us, tying us together in some disturbing, unifying, powerful and yet simultaneously divisive way?
The answers to those questions are: Usually, very often, the fuck?
Is Mr. G&T talking about himself or Trump voters? Most of those people probably like Hardees. He's the one who hates Hardees.
Conservatives get swindled like this, liberals get swindled like that.
What's interesting is the asymmetries: hard scams--things that you can't believe anyone would fall for--seem to be larger on the right (as evidenced by the scammers essentially co-opting the entire Republican Party; homeopathy adherents don't represent 20+% of Democrats), whereas the left seems more prone to mild, bleeding scams like (arguably) organic and "natural" foods, where they (we) are basically paying a small, but perpetual, tax for feeling like we're making ourselves healthier.
I do think it's inherent to the nature of the parties: authoritarians find a particular form of scam appealing, plus (duh) Republicans simply have more money to be scammed. That is, I don't think the absence of a mirror-image Viguerie is a fluke; I don't think that anybody can get rich selling the names of anti-vax homeopathers.
The other reason that this is asymmetrical is that the Republican Party is so much more homogenous: if X% of conservative whites will fall for a given scam, that means precisely X% of Republicans will. But even if that same X% of white liberals would fall for a different scam (which, again, I don't think is quite right), Dems also include centrist whites, effectively all blacks, 2/3 of Latinos, 2/3 of Asians, etc. Sure, there's some overlap, but the nature of the hard scammers seems to be too specific, too targeted to really thrive in that environment. Instead of X% of the GOP base, you've got X% of 1/4 of the Dem base, which isn't nearly as significant.
Speaking of homeopathy, a fun thing to do at medical conferences is to meet an osteopath and confuse that with homeopathy.
Old people with money are the main targets for scams and also the base of the Republican Party.
Osteopaths treat bones (osteon, a bone), homeopaths treat homes, sociopaths treat socialists, and footpaths treat feet.
Completely irrelevant, but I hate, hate, hate the fact that "blog" now no longer means "eclectic web magazine" it means what used to be called a blog post. The container is not the contents, people!
I blame Obama.
42: Here, osteopaths, despite the name/history, have most of the same training and license scope as MDs, so they're effectively a cut-rate equivalent you sometimes run into.
I don't think it now means that. It's always been a confusion by people who don't really know blogging.
I think ogged is right. A blog is an eclectic, or a specialist, web magazine, whereas a blog is a short essay appearing by magic on a series of tubes. It is important to maintain the distinction.
I fell asleep at my computer while writing my Deluge "blog" but I promise to finish it today.
Chapter 5 of "The Cave of White Water" up. Now with serious alpinism!
Woo! Awaiting more new material eagerly.
51: Not that tired old evil Alpino trope again.
In a shocking development, Oprah Winfrey endorses Hillary Clinton, despite widespread speculation that Trump would choose her as his running-mate. Sorry, bob!
11: we should totally change the name of the blog to "Citizens for Decent Literature"
Among the liberal demographics, you've got all the anti-vaxers and the juice cleanse people and the chemicalophobic people.
I always feel surprised when people say this, b/c every single anti-vaxer and magical-dieter I know, to a person, is right-wing. Maybe it's the presumed-liberal-because-Hollywood anti-vaxers that put them on our team by default? I do not want them on my team.
Folks, this Trump and Brexit business is really getting me down. I had a skype conversation with my dad last night and when I foolishly tried to engage him on politics by asking what practical, constitutional policy he wanted to see to address this imaginary muslim terrorist problem in the US, everything he said in reply was just straight up fascist. I couldn't even bear to call home after the Orlando thing because I knew that no matter what my parents had to say on the subject it would be awful. And now this young lefty MP has been murdered and my 4th or 5th thought after your usual "Oh, gods" and "her poor childrens" was "well, maybe this will help the remain vote."
The right really is about nothing more than persuading people to happily act against their own self-interests. And they're *so good* at it. Ugh. Everything sucks.
I feel like there was a point where the anti-vaxxers were more liberal than not, even though at this point it's a mostly right wing thing. And realistically of all the stupid-harmful-anti-science stupidity just the fact that liberals were involved at all made it distinctive enough that people looking for both-sides-do-it stories tended to latch onto it since, given the disparity, basically any significant concentration of liberals in one of those groups makes it look like a liberal group by comparison.
The Anti-GMO people are still mostly liberal, I think, so that might be the one to go to at this point.
57: Well the most famous anti-vaxxers were Hollywood people, and they are always assumed to be liberal.
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Live video address by Bernie in a few hours. Get in any last masturbating to his campaign just in case.
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Speaking of dumb, this house is the ugliest thing ever made.
Now that should be a VRBO. By law. Or, actually, startup headquarters. I honestly don't think SV has anything that would be more fun to desecrate with a bunch of whiteboards. Wakeful Californians, prove me wrong!
The linked article about the house is totally confusing. Apparently the Baha Men may or may not have stayed there, technically true of all homes.
Is "may or may not" really like "did or did not" that way?
There's a compass-floored rumpus room.
"And I can prove it all to you through the eyes of a child."
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
I don't think Trump would buy that house. His taste runs more towards faux baroque palace, as I understand it. However I would certainly challenge anybody to create a worse building, in terms of aesthetics, convenience, safety, or any other consideration you care to name.
OK, first of all: it's possible the exterior of the deposed Ukrainian president's house was worse. Certainly it was on an access to talent/result basis.
Second, I have a soft spot for idiosyncratic, amateur-designed houses: the part of me that isn't an uptight, elitist misanthrope is rather fond of goofball visionaries. Plus, when they work, they're amazing: see Coral Castle.
Third, I look at that kitchen, and I feel pity: so much effort, such ambition, such utter failure to create anything not-gross.
Fourth: WTF, those stairs don't meet code! No railings? Ack!
Fifth: I will not hear a word against that stone non-fireplace. It's magnificent. Not the one with the lions, the one with leather couches near it. The other contoured stone one, with the balcony sticking through it, is also pretty great.
Sixth, I want to spend some time with that rippling ceiling. Actually, I want it reproduced in foam and covered with silk, and to writhe around. Possibly forever.
Seventh, I didn't know they made queen bunk beds.
Eighth, my grandfather built a house by himself (they tore it down for a highway that never got built). There was a tree that he really wanted to save, but it was in the middle of the future living room. He couldn't figure out how to make it work, so it had to go, but as a result, I'll always approved of holes cut for existing trees.
Finally, have we made reservations for this place for May of 2023?
There's got to be a hidden sex grotto somewhere in there. How can there not be a sex grotto?
There is a grotto with a hot tub, but of course it's completely chaste.
The details are so hard to figure out but apparently there were two crazy homes of Mr. Big, and the one we're seeing is the smaller one he built after being forced to downsize. The bigger one was briefly home to the Baha Men.
Also the guy was literally a pimp but also had children with a judge. Indianapolis! Who knew.
69
I couldn't figure out what purpose multiple rooms with the multiple queen-size beds would serve. Sex parties? The world's most flamboyant youth hostel?
If you sealed The Baha Men inside that house with a radioactive isotope hooked up to a geiger counter, rigged to release a cloud of poison gas if a neutron gets released, you would likely wind up in jail.
Oh, hey, not that any of you are the type to get off on watching techno-libertarians suffer the consequences of their own foolishness, but if you were, you might be interested in watching The DAO go down in flames.
It turns out that if you set up a $150 million decentralized venture capital fund implemented entirely through "smart contracts" that execute unalterable code in the blockchain, you had better make sure the code doesn't have bugs in it which allows attackers to just siphon off as much of that money as they want.
Yeah, Ether. For when Bitcoin isn't weird enough.
"Okay, guys, we need a name for our new cryptocurrency that shows how solid and reliable it is."
77: I liked this take on it: if you take them at face value that the "smart contracts" are the true contracts and any natural language explanation of them holds no ground, the "hacker" was just a legitimate customer. By definition the "smart contracts" cannot be hacked, they can only be bad business--but that's on your fault for entering into that bad contract/not understanding all the ramifications of the code. That that might not hold legal muster is interesting.
Anyway, [insert poorly thought out argument about how any code replacing financial markets needs to come with substantial machine verifiable proofs here].
It looks like they had a choice between 1) Upholding the sanctity of the "smart contract" by letting the hacker take all their money, or 2) Shutting that shit down and giving everybody a refund.
They chose 2 - which is a reasonable response - but it completely undermines the whole point of having a smart contract to begin with. "Hey, guess what guys, it tuns out that code-based contracts fall back on human institutions after all!"
I guess we can't kill all the lawyers just yet.
"smart contract"
Ain't it funny how all the "smart" shit is dumb as fuck.
And speaking of dumb, Chrome has lost my autofill settings at least for this blog and so expect a shitload of blank posts followed by me saying "that was me."
81 is a really nice article both on this particular case and also one on of the biggest most obvious flaws in an awful lot of techno-libertarian gibberish, which is the idea that the law is supposed to work the way computer code does in the first place (but doesn't because unlike enlightened software engineers like myself other people are stupid and flawed, it's like Heinlein said in blah blah blah).
Come to think of it this is also probably the same big misconception in Sovereign Citizen nutcases. "The law is a human institution and neither works that way nor could nor is intended to" is probably one of those things that highschool civics classes could probably do a better job conveying to students, along with similar things about marketplaces and all the other human institutions out there.
And now the hacker has posted a note threatening to sue the DAO people for breach of contract. He's got a point.
IMHMHB my contention that casinos should be barred, as a condition of their licenses, from excluding anyone based on that person's ability to win.
Is the "hacker" really a hacker, or is he/she/it just a skilled player?
I guess I should have read the article in 81 first.
With which I have quibbles, about both the FERC and Libya analogies.
I thought they were decent analogies, but I am lacking in background knowledge on either of those situations. Are there important details he's not mentioning?
Hi. If this is the resident politics thread: have we had a proper discussion of the possibility of Britain leaving the EU? aka Brexit. Voter leanings appear to be shaky in recent polls; and of course the assassination of Jo Cox affects things. I've just read this Guardian piece on the matter. Are there any good arguments in favor of a Brexit?
Note - there probably has been discussion of this here already, but damnit, I haven't been following every thread, and in the meantime, I'm becoming a bit worried.
FERC's charge in the energy market is pretty different, I think, from a court's in the broader commercial context.
Libya was trying to get its money back from the people who sweet-talked (and supposedly more) them into a sophisticated contract the sweet-talker designed. That would apply to the investors getting money from the creators of the DAO, but not the DAO getting money back from someone who didn't breach the contract.
One assumes that both sides are frantically working to determine the most favorable venue for their side of the argument.
Parsi, why do you care? Why should I?
It does seem strange than an MP can get murdered by a white supremacist and have it barely make news here. I guess that the combination of horrors out of Florida partially explains the lack of attention.
93: We care about Trump. You might return the courtesy when the equivalent movement is trying to fuck up an entire continent. Make no mistake, the logic of Brexit is the collapse of the whole damn EU
People in other parts of the world have started to notice Trump? Fuck. That can't help our reputation any.
"There was a fat contestant who was a buffoon and a fuckup," recalls the midlevel producer. "And he would fuck up week after week, and the producers would figure that he'd screwed up so badly that Trump would have to fire him. But Trump kept deciding to fire someone else. The producers had to scramble because of course Trump can never be seen to make a bad call on the show, so we had to re-engineer the footage to make a different contestant look bad. Later, I heard a producer talk to him, and Trump said, 'Everybody loves a fat guy. People will watch if you have a funny fat guy around. Trust me, it's good for ratings.' I look at Chris Christie now and I swear that's what's happening."
I hadn't known about FERC before. It really is an impressive cock-up on the implementation of neoliberal "lets turn everything into a market!" policy.
It really is an impressive cock-up on the implementation of neoliberal "lets turn everything into a market!" policy.
Yeah, deregulation of electricity markets is a good example of deregulation not necessarily leading to the promised benefits of lower cost and greater efficiency. Someone still has to design those markets, and it turns out that's really hard to do without leaving tons of loopholes.
Although California is a particularly egregious example. Gaming the electricity market there is also what got Enron in trouble.
In the Northeast, by contrast, deregulation hasn't led to these sorts of problems (at least on this scale), but it hasn't produced any particularly noticeable benefits either.
it hasn't produced any particularly noticeable benefits either.
Benefits to whom? Presumably somebody is getting rich...
At least in theory, utility regulation is always supposed to advance the interests of ratepayers, and deregulation advocates sell it on that basis.
As near as I can tell, the junk mailers and telemarketers got any money saved.
Are there any good arguments in favor of a Brexit?
No.
81 is a really nice article both on this particular case and also one on of the biggest most obvious flaws in an awful lot of techno-libertarian gibberish, which is the idea that the law is supposed to work the way computer code does in the first place
Agreed, the linked article is good, and that's a good way to describe it.
The techno-utopian faith in the logical accuracy and superiority of code seems bizarre given how buggy and unreliable actual code is in the real world.
I use Windows because it serves to keep me free from that type of illusion.
I was actually speaking before an audience not long ago, and briefly mentioned the DAO. I had a line about "as a software developer, I've written too many bugs to have a lot of faith in using code as a contract." It got a good laugh, and now I get to feel vindicated.
I long for the day when "As a software developer..." replaces "As a busy mom..." in the TV commercials for microwavable convenience foods.
Yeah, the marketers should get on that. "Nerds who eat lunch at their desks" is an under-targeted segment.
I'm not apathetic about the fate of my British friends. I'm just not sure what exactly that fate looks like; I guess I consider collapse of the EU unlikely.
According to pollsters in Wales that are in my Facebook feed, the Brexit vote looks close.
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Don Carlo run time - 4 heures 20 minutes 😲
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That's really good for a marathon.
If that's your half time, I think you ran just steps ahead of the sweep, but just finishing is an accomplishment.
When nobody I know is at the bar, you people are supposed to say stuff.
113- I can't give you a date, but I can't see how the collapse of the EU is anything but inevitable. They set up the common currency area thinking that when it ran into trouble it would force closer union. The politician went the other way, toward punishing everyone who isn't German. Now the EU is steadily getting less popular in Europe. I guess there might be some way to reverse things but I don't know what it is.
As well as Matt Levine, Alphaville has been good on the DAO (and about blockchain stuff in general), for instance here. The cracks in the ideology were showing long before the hack.
121: The EU is not on a good path right now, but history is not that deterministic. The French Third Republic looked like a completely doomed institution from the start, but it was able to survive everything short of actual Nazi conquest.
Only loosely related: I was just reading some comments at the Guardian about the attack on Turkish Radiohead fans, and one actual argument I saw for leaving the EU is because Turkey is going to join. Which... what?
121. The Euro is steadily getting less popular; not at all sure this is true of the EU, except in England (not Scotland), which is apparently largely inhabited by homicidal lunatics and politicians who believe that the medical profession is wrong about smoking being bad for you. So, one would devoutly hope, not typical. The central European strong state parties seem to be mostly content to remain in it.
Big falls in support for the EU, not just the euro - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/euroscepticism-on-the-rise-across-europe-as-analysis-finds-increasing-opposition-to-the-eu-in-france-a7069766.html