Election 2016

[Strat]

Lol. I think you guys are missing the point of my post. I didn't say I wasn't voting, I said i didn't want to vote. There's a difference

Name presidents you have liked

[E.H. Ruddock]

Lol. I think you guys are missing the point of my post. I didn't say I wasn't voting, I said i didn't want to vote. There's a difference

Name presidents you have liked

George Washington, Zachary Taylor, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[E.H. Ruddock]

Lol. I think you guys are missing the point of my post. I didn't say I wasn't voting, I said i didn't want to vote. There's a difference

Name presidents you have liked

George Washington, Zachary Taylor, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman

Why no FDR? Or Lincoln?

Polio is a sign of weakness

[Norah]

If a legit third party candidate ran, i would have no problem voting for them. They have been near lunatics in different ways though.

Also, if Trump wasn't the republican candidate, there would be a good chance i wouldnt vote for hillary. I also think if that were the case, Bernie may have ran as a third party candidate.

Thank god Trump is the nominee because the rest of the GOP only looks sane in comparison to trump. Any of the other Republicans who ran, along with control of Congress and the SCOTUS, would be an absolute disaster.

[McParadigm]

There was a great interview with George Packer this week (http://www.npr.org/2016/11/03/500457909 ... king-class), in which he lays out how the Dems' -- and specifically, Bill Clinton's -- policies lead to there being this enormous group of disenfranchised working-class whites who have been easily swayed by Trump. He distilled a lot of what I've been feeling about Hillary's campaign, especially when he says "She could make a great president, but I'm not sure she's the right president for right now."

there are better explanations in this thread for how America got here, but that starts to touch on it without actually recognizing liberals partial culpability in the situation.

We're in Luddite territory to the nth degree. Extreme technological change by definition is going to have extreme economic and societal impact, and we are moving so fast now that no politician can reasonably pretend the power to hold or release it.

The abandoned hope of middle America has everything to do with technological change, and how it alters industry infrastructure and needs. It cannot be healed by any vote.

[96583UP]

My model varies from the 538 model in that it does make a prediction on who will win. It uses a definitive quantitative starting point and then expands upon it with mostly qualitative variables. It goes like this:

If the Republican party lost the last two presidential elections in large part due to their failure to appeal to non-whites;
and their latest campaign is built almost entirely on alienating non-whites (pun intended);
and non-whites are the fastest growing demographic in the united states;
then the republican presidential candidate will lose.

There is also a more complex variant of this model that incorporates additional variables; but when you attempt to regress it on historical data, it returns a negative electoral vote count and then the computer explodes in a burst of flames:

y = insulting of women
z = insulting of hispanics
s = insulting of veterans
t = insulting of the disabled
n = insulting of native americans
p = insulting of news reporters
q = insulting of muslims
f = insulting of seventh-day adventists
r = insulting of the chinese
h = insulting of black accountants
k = losing all three presidential debates
i = being caught on video tape bragging about sexual assault
j = subsequently having 12 sexual assault accusers come public
w = alienating republicans that have common sense

[Strat]

Whatever. Sorry rubes. I know I'm part of the problem
But I wish middle America would get on board with the rest of the country/industrialized world. Put your bibles down. Get educated. Learn new skills. Evolve.


Hi Burt

[Strat]

I'm sorry that people don't look like you or worship like you. I really am. Must be awful.

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[BurtReynolds]

Whatever. Sorry rubes. I know I'm part of the problem
But I wish middle America would get on board with the rest of the country/industrialized world. Put your bibles down. Get educated. Learn new skills. Evolve.


Hi Burt

Hey I'm on your side: people are poor because they are stupid and deserve to be poor. You're practically a righty. You're one of us.

[Strat]

Whatever. Sorry rubes. I know I'm part of the problem
But I wish middle America would get on board with the rest of the country/industrialized world. Put your bibles down. Get educated. Learn new skills. Evolve.


Hi Burt

Hey I'm on your side: people are poor because they are stupid and deserve to be poor. You're practically a righty. You're one of us.

[Bi_3]

I still assert it's more a reaction to social exclusion and cultural shaming than economics.

[96583UP]

i want to be somewhere in mexico on 11/8 when hillary wins

that fiesta is going to be off the charts

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[Strat]

I still assert it's more a reaction to social exclusion and cultural shaming than economics.

They should be shamed. If you think gays shouldnt be married, You are dumb. if you deny climate change, You are dumb. If you think college educated people are just elitist know it alls, you are dumb. If you think Jesus will resurrect and walk this earth, you are dumb.


Sorry im just venting and being dramatic. I can't wait till this world implodes soon here.

[Strat]

Whatever. Sorry rubes. I know I'm part of the problem
But I wish middle America would get on board with the rest of the country/industrialized world. Put your bibles down. Get educated. Learn new skills. Evolve.

I'm not sure that's how they see it, Strat. I think they're feeling more like, "We shouldn't have to go to college to earn a living wage, but our industrial/blue-collar jobs have all gone away." Your advice to "get educated, learn new skills, and evolve" disregards the realities of their situations: that a higher education isn't something they can, or perhaps want, to make happen, and they're getting left in the dust. I think this is the definition of the liberal culpability mentioned earlier.

"...or perhaps want"

These are the same people that often deny more tax dollars towards local education. Thats my point.

Its evolution, baby?

[Rangi Guy]

I still assert it's more a reaction to social exclusion and cultural shaming than economics.

They should be shamed. If you think gays shouldnt be married, You are dumb. if you deny climate change, You are dumb. If you think college educated people are just elitist know it alls, you are dumb. If you think Jesus will resurrect and walk this earth, you are dumb.


Sorry im just venting and being dramatic. I can't wait till this world implodes soon here.

Nice way to start week - log in here and be called dumb...

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[McParadigm]

There was a great interview with George Packer this week (http://www.npr.org/2016/11/03/500457909 ... king-class), in which he lays out how the Dems' -- and specifically, Bill Clinton's -- policies lead to there being this enormous group of disenfranchised working-class whites who have been easily swayed by Trump. He distilled a lot of what I've been feeling about Hillary's campaign, especially when he says "She could make a great president, but I'm not sure she's the right president for right now."

there are better explanations in this thread for how America got here, but that starts to touch on it without actually recognizing liberals partial culpability in the situation.

We're in Luddite territory to the nth degree. Extreme technological change by definition is going to have extreme economic and societal impact, and we are moving so fast now that no politician can reasonably pretend the power to hold or release it.

The abandoned hope of middle America has everything to do with technological change, and how it alters industry infrastructure and needs. It cannot be healed by any vote.

I don't understand how you got here. The policies referred to by George Packer have more to do with free trade and economics. I understand that technology -- particularly the internet and telecommuting -- have had an impact on those sectors, but I don't think that's the point you were trying to make?

My point is that any attempt to understand voter disenfranchisement, where those voters trend less educated than their peers, needs to begin with technology. That technological change is a root cause for most of the way economics has changed in the past 30 years, and a discussion of economics in isolation is going to be an incomplete picture.

A disproportionate number of the jobs lost in each of the last few downturns have been ones that were traditionally held by people without college degrees, and yet a disproportionate number of the jobs created by the healing economy have been tech centric and college degree-requiring. This isn't because of some policy somewhere, but because recessions encourage companies to tear down infrastructure, and that creates opportunities to find more efficient and up-to-date ways to fill those purposes later on. But that change was coming one way or another...it just got sped up.

Speaking only for the plains states, they are always behind the rest of the country in technology adoption. They have always had a deep cultural understanding that hard labor is how you get ahead. They were slow to the home computer, terribly slow to adopt to the Internet, and they trend less educated than the nation at large. Most of them are vastly out-skilled on new technologies, in a world where that skill is the new door opener to the American Dream. More than 70% of new positions paying above $50,000 created in the last 5 years require medium-to-heavy technology-based abilities, and quite a lot of those people feel powerless to adapt to that. Meanwhile, more and more of the manufacturing companies that used to litter the plains states are shrinking their payroll, as they improve automation or simply become makers of extinct products. And now there are ever growing numbers of minorities competing for those remaining jobs, and willing to do them for less money.

I actually think that this is just a consequence that you can't avoid, when a society sees technological change on the vast and quick scale that we have. And I believe that time will be the primary adjuster for that. But for right now the real problem is that you have a nation deeply rooted in the 21st century, littered with pocket cultures that still build their people for a 20th century workforce.