[kenberg]

andrei, on 2019-January-14, 10:42, said:

Yeap, one can tell you are not doing enough wondering.

I have been wondering about something myself. Here are two situations:
1. The Dems now control the House, and we are hearing that the Dems must negotiate with Trump Well, Nancy and Chuck must negotiate, presumably with Don.
2. We have repeatedly been told, by Trump supporters going back to the summer of 2016, that we should not get too focused on the exact words that Trump says.

So here is the question:
How do you negotiate with someone if you are not to focus on what he says?
This style of his was one of my strong objections to Trump in 2016 and it remains a strong objection.

A recent example: Not long ago Trump tweeted about Syria. From me to Erdogan, including just about everyone in between, we understood him to be saying that soon we would be out of Syria and Turkey could do as it pleased regarding the Syrian Kurds. Erdogan understood it this way, so did the Kurds, and so did just about everyone else. .Then John Bolton announced a policy that appeared to everyone to be quite different. Then Trump said something like "Yeah, that's just I said". Uh huh. Of course we could say that the Kurds and Erdogan and I and everyone are just too dumb to understand the clarity of what Trump was saying but this seems to happen over and over. I have never read The Art of the Deal, never watched The Apprentice either, but I understand that Trump regards keeping people off balance as a really good negotiating tactic. Perhaps so, providing you are negotiating with someone who mistakenly trusts what you say, but what works in the Real Estate and Casino business might not work so well on the world stage.


So the question is: How do you negotiate with a person whose words are not to be taken seriously? Why would anyone even try? You just end up with egg on your face. It was really clever of Trump to invite the cameras in to a supposedly private meeting, have the setting so that the camera is facing him, the camera behind Pelosi and Schumer, call them Chuck and Nancy while they call him Mister President, very clever, but probably not the way to encourage negotiation. But very clever. Clever works for a while. It seems to be wearing thin, and not just with me.

[barmar]

andrei, on 2019-January-13, 21:32, said:

I was always wondered why do we have speed limits on roads since it does not stop people under influence getting behind the wheel.

The issue is the cost vs. benefit of any particular solution, not comparisons.

If there are lots of injuries caused by speeding, and speed limits reduce them, and the cost to enforce this is manageable, we implement speed limits.

So let's translate that to border security. Are lots of the border security problems due to people walking across the border, so that a wall would prevent them? The simple answer is no, almost all illegal immigration and drug smuggling takes place using other entry points.

Today Trump said something like "This would all be over if the Democrats would agree to border security, and that means a wall or barrier." He's constantly asserting this false equivalence. Democrats have no problem with border security, as long as it's done intelligently. Trump is like a dog with a bone when it comes to the wall, he won't understand that it's not the only, or even the best, method of border security.

Meanwhile the shutdown is causing reduced TSA staffing, increased backlogs in immigration courts, etc. So the shutdown is ironically reducing border security.

[Winstonm]

The heart of the matter, from The Moscow Project:
https://themoscowpro...ked-operatives/
Last Updated January 9, 2019

Quote

On January 6, 2017, the U.S. intelligence community issued a report that showed there were two campaigns to elect Donald Trump: one run by Trump and one run by the Russian government. Trump and many of his senior advisors and close associates have repeatedly denied any connections between the two campaigns, despite the fact that they were working towards the same goal, at the same time, and utilizing the same tactics.

Yet over the past year, we’ve learned about a series of meetings and contacts between individuals linked to the Russian government and Trump’s campaign and transition team. In total, we have learned of 101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives, including at least 28 meetings. And we know that at least 28 high-ranking campaign officials and Trump advisors were aware of contacts with Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition. None of these contacts were ever reported to the proper authorities. Instead, the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.

emphasis added

Anything outside this basic narrative is nothing but dogs chasing cars.

[johnu]

andrei, on 2019-January-14, 10:42, said:

Yeap, one can tell you are not doing enough wondering.

I actually do a whole lot of wondering.

Why would a President of the US betray his country by being a Russian puppet?

Why would the country elect a bigot, racist, and white supremacist to be President?

Why can't most conservatives see that the man they voted for President is a pathological liar?

Why can't most conservatives see that the man they voted for President is an inveterate con man?

We may get some insight into the first question when Mueller releases his report.

As for the other 3 questions, there's this

Fear and Anxiety Drive Conservatives' Political Attitudes

Quote

4. Conservatives’ brains are more reactive to fear

Using MRI, scientists from University College London have found that students who identify themselves as conservatives have a larger amygdala than self-described liberals. This brain structure is involved in emotion processing, and is especially reactive to fearful stimuli. It is possible that an oversized amygdala could create a heightened sensitivity that may cause one to habitually overreact to anything that appears to be a potential threat, whether it actually is one or not.

and this

Are Conservatives More Scared of Stuff Than Liberals?

Quote

The evidence we have suggests that the fakest of this fake news — instances in which stuff is basically made up, rather than exaggerated or distorted — mostly targeted and was spread by conservatives, and that while there’s liberal fake news too, there’s less of it.

[johnu]

y66, on 2019-January-14, 10:10, said:

King's racist views are well known. No doubt they reflect the racist views of many of his Iowa constituents. But calling him a racist is not percentage for black senators from South Carolina of which there have been exactly one, from all southern states, since southern states passed disfranchising constitutions excluding African Americans from the political system between 1890 and 1908. In context, Scott deserves credit for calling King out on his remarks and increasing pressure on other Republicans to do likewise.

I don't give him any credit for initially sounding strong, and then slinking off into the night. It makes his initial comments sound totally insincere and made just for political theater.

GOP Strips Rep. Steve King Of All Committee Assignments Over White Supremacist Views

In a "stunning" move by House Republican leadership, King was stripped of his committee assignments. I have to admit that the House Republican leadership showed more self awareness about the bad optics of the situation than they have shown in decades and really surprised me.

[jjbrr]

Trump's greatest legacy may be his contribution to the english lexicon.

A mooch is a measurement of time equal to 10 days.
3 hamberders is equal to 1 hamburger.
Smocking may or may not be bad for your health, but it clears the president thank you.
Covfefe is still evolving in adaptation

[Winstonm]

jjbrr, on 2019-January-15, 08:40, said:

Trump's greatest legacy may be his contribution to the english lexicon.

A mooch is a measurement of time equal to 10 days.
3 hamberders is equal to 1 hamburger.
Smocking may or may not be bad for your health, but it clears the president thank you.
Covfefe is still evolving in adaptation

You forgot "rat", someone who is willing to testify against you.

[andrei]

This thread is full of LOL posts/articles. Who can forget this gem:

Quote

From Dubrovnik, Ivanka and Kushner went to Hvar, which is an island about 3-4 hours by boat. Ivanka herself documented being in both Dubrovnik and Hvar on Instagram.
What’s interesting is that she and American media sources waited until August 14th to post pics and stories, while Croatian media reported her in Dubrovnik on August 12th and arriving August 11th.
Why wait and post both pics days later? Was she trying to hide something?

I thought this would be hard to match.

I was wrong:

johnu, on 2019-January-15, 00:10, said:

4. Conservatives’ brains are more reactive to fear

Using MRI, scientists from University College London have found that students who identify themselves as conservatives have a larger amygdala than self-described liberals. This brain structure is involved in emotion processing, and is especially reactive to fearful stimuli. It is possible that an oversized amygdala could create a heightened sensitivity that may cause one to habitually overreact to anything that appears to be a potential threat, whether it actually is one or not.

Who knew you need to be "brave" to come up with stuff like "safe spaces", "micro aggression", "trigger warnings" and such?

[cherdano]

One of the really solid findings in political science is that being open to new experiences is highly correlated with being progressive/left-wing...

[Winstonm]

Dogs barking madly, spinning car tires
the chase
only
a distraction

[barmar]

andrei, on 2019-January-15, 14:21, said:

Who knew you need to be "brave" to come up with stuff like "safe spaces", "micro aggression", "trigger warnings" and such?

There's a big difference between being sensitive and being afraid.

[Winstonm]

This is a good rebuttal to the Stephen Miller crowd, which includes Individual-1.

Quote

A good yardstick for whether a country is admitting too many or too few immigrants — beyond the political mood of the moment — is its economic needs. If America were admitting too many immigrants, the economy would have trouble absorbing them. In fact, the unemployment rate among immigrants, including the 11 million undocumented, in 2016, when the economy was considered to be at full employment, was almost three-quarters of a point lower than that of natives. How can that be evidence of mass immigration?

The truth is that America is a low-immigration nation. Demographic trends in America point to a severe labor crunch that’ll become a huge bottleneck for growth unless the country opens its doors wider.

[johnu]

andrei, on 2019-January-15, 14:21, said:

Who knew you need to be "brave" to come up with stuff like "safe spaces", "micro aggression", "trigger warnings" and such?

Feeling a little afraid Andrei? Maybe you just have a temporarily enlarged amygdala. You can get treatment for the symptoms.

[johnu]

Back on direct point about on thread:

With NATO withdrawal, Trump weighed ‘gift of the century for Putin’

Will the current Republican in Congress bend over and let Dennison have his way on withdrawing from NATO? You never know. You can hope they will repeat their actions from July, 2018

US Senate votes to defend NATO as Trump attacks alliance

Quote

Hours after Trump landed in Brussels, the Senate passed a non-binding measure, 97-2, that expresses support for NATO, its mutual self-defense clause and calls on the administration to rush its whole-of-government strategy to counter Russia’s meddling in the U.S. and other democracies.

OK, this was a non-binding measure. Now that Mattis is no longer Secretary of Defense, there is even more concern that Dennison will try to withdraw the US from NATO as he was instructed to do so by Putin. What next, a Nonaggression Pact between Dennison and Stalin Putin?

[johnu]

Could it be that walls (aka fences) actually work?

Boy avoids massive puddle by scaling fence, car drenches him anyway

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2019-January-15, 18:02, said:

This is a good rebuttal to the Stephen Miller crowd, which includes Individual-1.

Please forgive me, I will use this to illustrate why I urge skepticism in the use of data.
The NYT column gets its data from
https://www.bls.gov/.../pdf/forbrn.pdf
I'll start by praising the BLS for being cautious. They define some terms and they talk about methods of gathering data. Good.
But now let's use their data for a different argument.
We find:

Quote

In terms of educational attainment, the proportion of the foreign-born labor force age 25 and over that had not completed high school was 21.8 percent in 2017, much higher than the figure for the native-born labor force, at 4.2 percent. The foreign born were less likely than the native born to have some college or an associate degree—16.8 percent versus 29.4 percent. The proportions for foreign-born and native-born high school graduates (25.2 percent versus 25.9 percent) and those with a bachelor's degree or higher (36.2 percent versus 40.5 percent) were more similar

Huh. A group whose educational level is below the level of the nation as a whole has a lower unemployment rate. Kids! Drop out of school now. Pink Floyd is right. We don't need no education.
Even if we agree that some jobs are better than others, it still is remarkable that a group with substantially less education has a lower unemployment rate.

What I get out of this is not that kids should drop out of school, but also not that the data is an argument either for or against immigration. Rather I look at this and see numbers that are so impressive that I think they require a closer look before we use them for anything at all. 21.8 percent of this group have not completed high school and the unemployment rate is 4 point something percent?
I haven't done a study of the data. But in the Technical Notes we find:

Quote

In response to the increased demand for statistical information about the foreign born, questions on nativity, citizenship, year of entry into the United States, and the parental nativity of respondents were added to the CPS beginning in January 1994.

Hey, wait. Aren't we being told that we should not put such questions in the 2020 census because it will screw up the results?
That's just a first thought on what might be going on. Much more thought would be needed to have any confidence.

Note that none of the above involves "mathematics". It's just a matter of having a little skepticism when data seems to show that a group with a substantially lower educational level is having better luck in the job market than those with a higher level of education. It might be true, but we should look at just what is going on before we jump to any conclusions. Motivation can play a big role in achievement, maybe that's the answer, but we need to keep an open mind.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2019-January-16, 07:27, said:

Please forgive me, I will use this to illustrate why I urge skepticism in the use of data.
The NYT column gets its data from
https://www.bls.gov/.../pdf/forbrn.pdf
I'll start by praising the BLS for being cautious. They define some terms and they talk about methods of gathering data. Good.
But now let's use their data for a different argument.
We find:

Huh. A group whose educational level is below the level of the nation as a whole has a lower unemployment rate. Kids! Drop out of school now Pink Floyd is right. . We don't nee no education.
Even if we agree that some jobs are better than others, it still is remarkable that a group with substantially less education has a lower unemployment rate.

What I get out of this is not that kids should drop out of school, but also not that the data is an argument either for or against immigration. Rather I look at this and see numbers that are so impressive that I think they require a closer look before we use them for anything at all. 21.8 percent of this group have not completed high school and the unemployment rate is 4 point something percent?
I haven't done a study of the data. But in the Technical Notes we find:

Hey, wait. Aren't we being told that we should not put such questions in the 2020 census because it will screw up the results?
That's just a first thought on what might be going on. Much more thought would be needed to have any confidence.

Note that none of the above involves "mathematics". It's just a matter of having a little skepticism when data seems to show that a group with a substantially lower educational level is having better luck in the job market than those with a higher level of education. It might be true, but we should look at just what is going on before we jump to any conclusions. Motivation can play a big role in achievement, maybe that's the answer, but we need to keep an open mind.

I get what you say, but I found the data very easy to accept because of my personal experience with migrant farm workers.

I think you might be overstating the "jobs" aspect. Most illegal immigrants - rather than asylum seekers - come to the U.S. precisely for work. I would be shocked to see a high unemployment rate for poorly-educated illegal immigrants living in the U.S. Mar-a-lago has to have a crew mowing the grass. I lived for a short time in Santa Barbara and from there for a class assignment drove to the farm fields outside a small town north of Santa Barbara where every single worker was hispanic - the town was Spanish speaking and the movies playing in the lone theater were in Spanish.

I would be surprised to find high education levels in migrant farm workers.

As to the census, my understanding is the census is trying to find out population only - and that discouraging minorities to answer would skew the results. BLS is different and looking for different data and uses different methods, to my understanding.

[barmar]

Be careful. Couldn't this "low unemployment rate among immigrants" statistic also be used to support the claim that immigrants are stealing our jobs?

But it's well known that many of the jobs that immigrants take are the back-breaking, menial jobs we don't want to do ourselves. The reason they have such low unemployment is probably because they're not picky, they'll take any job they can get. That's why they came here in the first place, they were desperate.

[kenberg]

I agree with both Winston and Barry from the last two posts. I also believe it supports the general idea of being careful with how we use data.
First to Barry. I quote from the same BLS document:

Quote

In 2017, the share of the U.S. civilian labor force that was foreign born increased to 17.1 percent from 16.9 percent in 2016. (See table 1.) The share of the U.S. civilian labor force that was foreign born was 13.3 percent in 2000.

17 percent might seem high or it might seem low, but surely the impact is not felt evenly across all types of employment. If we looked at, for example, maid service in a motel, I think that the percentage would be far higher. Again I say that this is not an argument for or against immigration, I favor immigration, it is an argument for being careful with data.

And yes, Winston, surely much farm labor is done by immigrants. In my youth I held many jobs but I spent exactly one day, or make that exactly one half of one day, doing farm labor. Well, there was also the two weeks or so that I spent at my cousion's farm when I was 11 or maybe 12. I was very happy to go home.


The NYT article might have said "Look folks, we need farm labor, and until we can find a way to get the native born to do it we need immigrants". That's not what it said.
I expect there is some useful stuff in the BLS report if it is carefully looked at, approached with a desire to see what it shows and what it doesn't show. The NYT article took one year of data, used it to show that for that particular year the immigrant unemployment rate was almost three quarters of a percentage point lower than the overall unemployment rate, and claimed that this comparison demonstrated something huge. I don't think so. Way way too quick.

[johnu]

Senate Democrats fail to stop Trump administration from lifting sanctions on firms linked to Putin friend

In another show of cowardice and hysterical fear of invoking the twitter insults of Dennison, 42 Republican Senators voted to uphold Dennison's lifting of sanctions on the Russian Deripaska, who was one of the Russians behind the hacking of the 2016 US elections. I was hopeful that these Dennison puppets would act in the best interests of the US, but getting reelected is apparently more important to these "patriots".