Canary in the Coal Mine - Day

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

6:15PM

Ja Tramps blefoja par iespējamo draudzību ar Krieviju, lai par savu "secretary of state" beigās izvēlētos Romniju, tad jāatzīst, ka tā nav nekāda amatieru līga ar Klintones "reset pogu". Tas būtu ģeniāls "pokerface" blefs.

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8:35PM - Alien of extraordinary ability: Michal Zalewski (poļu izcelsmes 1. paaudzes imigrants ASV)

"Ultimately, we all live in bubbles and we all have biases; in that regard, not much sets CNN apart from Fox News, Vox from National Review, or The Huffington Post from Breitbart. The reason why most of us would trust one and despise the other is that we instinctively recognize our own biases as more benign. [..] We even have serious scientific studies to back that up; their authors breathlessly proclaim that the conservative brain is inferior to the progressive brain. Unlike the conservatives, we believe in science, so we hit the "like" button and retweet the news.

But here's the thing: I know quite a few conservatives, many of whom have probably voted for Mr. Trump - and they are about as smart, as informed, and as compassionate as my progressive friends. I think that the disconnect between the worldviews stems from something else: if you are a well-off person in a coastal city, you know people who are immigrants or who belong to other minorities, making you acutely attuned to their plight; but you may lack the same, deeply personal connection to - say - the situation of the lower middle class in the Midwest. You might have seen surprising charts or read a touching story in Mother Jones few years back, but it's hard to think of them as individuals; they are more of a socioeconomic obstacle, a problem to be solved. The same goes for our understanding of immigration or globalization: these phenomena make our high-tech hubs more prosperous and more open; the externalities of our policies, if any, are just an abstract price that somebody else ought to bear for doing what's morally right. And so, when Mr. Trump promises to temporarily ban travel from Muslim countries linked to terrorism or anti-American sentiments, we (rightly) gasp in disbelief; but when Mr. Obama paints an insulting caricature of rural voters as simpletons who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them", we smile and praise him for his wit, not understanding how the other side could be so offended by the truth. Similarly, when Mrs. Clinton chuckles while saying "we are going to put a lot of coal miners out of business" to a cheering crowd, the scene does not strike us as a thoughtless, offensive, or in poor taste. Maybe we will read a story about the miners in Mother Jones some day?

Of course, liberals take pride in caring for the common folk, but I suspect that their leaders' attempts to reach out to the underprivileged workers in the "flyover states" often come across as ham-fisted and insincere. The establishment schools the voters about the inevitability of globalization, as if it were some cosmic imperative; they are told that to reject the premise would not just be wrong - but that it'd be a product of a diseased, nativist mind. They hear that the factories simply had to go to China or Mexico, and the goods just have to come back duty-free - all so that our complex, interconnected world can be a happier place. The workers are promised entitlements, but it stands to reason that they want dignity and hope for their children, not a lifetime on food stamps. The idle, academic debates about automation, post-scarcity societies, and Universal Basic Income probably come across as far-fetched and self-congratulatory, too.

Most progressives are either oblivious to these biases, or dismiss them as a harmless casualty of fighting the good fight. Perhaps so - and it is not my intent to imply equivalency between the causes of the left and of the right. But in the end, I suspect that the liberal echo chamber contributed to the election of Mr. Trump far more than anything that ever transpired on the right. "

https://lcamtuf.blogspot.ch/2016/11/on-trump.html

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11:06PM

"In the early days of tackling these [machine translation] problems, computer scientists teamed with linguists and tried to code grammar. At IBM, a group including Mercer and Brown reasoned that the problems would be better solved using statistics and probabilities. (Their boss, Frederick Jelinek, liked to say, “Whenever I fire a linguist, the system gets better.”) "

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance-s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box

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11:52PM - Status update

"Let's look at the world in question.

Europe can barely hold itself together as it is - whether the Eurozone or EU - their overall economic system is rolling from one disaster to another while 0.3% growth is cheered. Europe has registered near zero real growth for a decade at this point. Their cooperative systems are all imploding as nations - from Sweden to Britain - put up barriers. Russia is guaranteed to seek more territory in Eastern Europe with nobody to stop them. Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal are all still in economic disaster mode and trying to recover or not implode further. German banks are acting like a depression is on-going, while the German economy is barely expanding. Finland has been in a near decade long soft depression. Norway's oil party is over, the next 20 years will be mostly austerity for them. France is a worsening mess both economically and politically. The UK has no idea what it's doing one way or another; Britain will be a mess for years to come due to Brexit. Oh and not one European country can actually afford to spend a dollar more on defense (and none of them really want to outside of Russia). The US pulling out of Europe in terms of military would cost those economies a hundred billion dollars per year that they don't have and would substantially increase nationalism and infighting.

Japan is fully subservient to the US because they have no means to deal with a rising China threat (they're already bankrupt at a government level and can't even remotely afford to defend themselves without nuclear weapons, their standard of living is rapidly falling thanks to endless Yen debasement). Japan is also still mired in a 25 year economic stagnation caused by debt and bad Keynesian economic policies, a stagnation which isn't going to end so long as they keep doing the same thing over and over again (which apparently they are going to do). Japan is in no position to stand against the US (which is why Abe just paid a visit to Trump, their position is exceptionally weak right now), nor are any other nations in Asia except for China. There is also almost zero unity in Asia, thanks to the divisive nature of China's aggressive territorial ambitions.

South America? Forget about it. Two of their three largest economies are in depressions (Venezuela is beyond that actually, they've fully collapsed as a nation). The other, Argentina, is barely starting to drag itself out of a deep recession. Who there is going to stand up to the US? Not going to happen, they have far bigger problems to deal with in their own backyard.

Australia? New Zealand? Canada? They might lodge complaints, let their grievances be publicly known, but that is all they can do.

Africa? They have no power or unity to cause the US problems.

The Middle East? Happy to keep the fossil fuel party going and would be promoters of the US tanking the Paris Agreement.

And that's it. "

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