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George Rebane
Holman Jenkins in his ‘What Ails the US Press?’ expands the strong point, much massaged in these pages, that “the media’s lack of interest in the Steele dossier amounts to collusion in a coverup.” In this 3aug19 WSJ piece he lays it out so well that I decided to let RR readers crawl under the paywall and read the whole thing themselves
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Dropout Derby update. As of 3 August 2019 with Democratic candidates 20 and 24 having bailed, the following is the cumulative score tally (bottom row). The number/name key is found in bottom figure.
[Addendum] One of the participants requested that I reprise the scoring algo with examples for a couple of the participants. The indicated ‘CumScore’ line contains the updated cumulative scores of the participants that account for all the dropouts to date – currently #20, then #24 as shown in the ‘Actual’ column. CumScore is the sum of the individual scores for each predicted dropout candidate.
A perfect prediction occurs when the participant’s dropout location matches the actual location in the sequence of dropouts. When there is a difference between a candidate’s predicted location and the actual location, then the prediction error is the (absolute value of the) difference between the two locations. The maximum possible difference value with 26 candidates is 25. So if a participant missed it by, say, 5 = predicted position minus actual position, then the relative error is 5/25 = 0.2, and the score for that prediction is the complement, 1 – |5/25| = 0.8. This yields a perfect score of 1.0 if the two positions match, and 1 – |25/25| = 0 if they maximally mismatch. CumSum is then the cumulative sum of all the participant’s individual candidate scores.
As examples, we’ll calculate the indicated CumSum scores for EstFox (1.40) and WaltB (1.24). For EstFox the first dropout difference is |7-1| = 6. Therefore 1 – 6/25 = 0.76. The second dropout yields a difference of |11-2| = 9, giving the candidate score of 1 – 9/25 = 0.64. The sum of these individual scores is the indicated 1.40 = 0.76 + 0.64. For WaltB we have the first score as 1 – |19-1|/25 = 0.28, and the second as 1 – |1-2|/25 = 0.96, for a total of 1.24 = 0.28 + 0.96. A perfect score at this point in the dropout sequence would be 2.0. This says that at the end of the competition when the last candidate ‘drops out’ to be the party’s nominee, a perfect score would be 26.
Along the same vein, we can also compute the ‘normalized score’ at every dropout in the sequence by dividing the participant’s CumScore by the perfect CumScore to date. The perfect normalized score would then always be 1.0 as the competition proceeds. Using the above examples, the normalized scores would be for EstFox 1.40/2.0 = 0.70, and for WaltB 1.24/2.0 = 0.62. The above table has been updated and corrected to show both the CumScore and NormScore for each participant. (H/T to commenter who noticed error in calculating the CumScore of participants who did not update their dropout lists when the last three Dem candidates entered the race. Such missing entries will receive a zero score for the dropped out candidate.)
George Rebane
Our favorite double-dummy communist, Umair Haque writing in Medium, continues his dive into the abyss of ideological idiocy with his latest essay attempting to explain ‘fascism’ to American readers. In a piece titled ‘America Is Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism’ he does a great job of confusing the matter even further on his journey into regions of history and semantics in which he is a complete naif. It’s worth a read though, if only to understand how our lightly-read are swayed.
George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility is the latest book to go on my reading list. The sometimes conservative commentator has enjoyed a long career purveying his right of center ideology in the media (a regular on NBC, MSNBC, WaPo, and the National Review). Will is both an anti-Trumper and an anti-Republican who shares my belief that our country’s march to collectivism has passed the tipping point, and that conservatism is in a terminal decline – the “Right’s losing battle against progressivism.” (more here)
For a little light-hearted, local comical relief, I direct your attention to Terry Lamphier’s ‘Grass Valley’s burning desire for growth’. There I challenge you to discover Mr Lamphier’s point of the article, save his eternal opposition to the county’s growth. The man continues his established tradition of writing articles both long-winded and opaque.
[Interesting discussion from the last sandbox on Baltimore, shithole cities, and the misguided attack on Kushner and other investors in companies willing to provide housing in crime and drug infested ghettos. The simple-minded accuse such investors of being "slumlords" with the same logic that investors (like me) can be accused of causing the opioid epidemic by investing in pharma companies or killing women and children in the mid-east wars by investing in defense industries. Go figger. gjr]
George Rebane
President Trump’s current tariff wars are definitely having a mixed impact on economies in the US and around the world. His claim that ‘China is now paying us billions in tariffs’ is patently false. But most people still think that tariffs on Chinese imports now consist of the imported goods plus a check for the tariff amount written by someone in China. And that a 25% tariff on Chinese imports will increase their price for such goods by 25%. Not so.
Tariffs on imported goods are paid for by the US registered importers to our Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency within 10 days of the goods landing in the US, which monies go into the Treasury's general fund of tax collections. That, of course, increases the cost of doing business since the importer must now increase his, usually financed, operating capital by the amount of the tariff, thereby increasing both the direct cost of what he buys, and also adding the cost of financing the tariff amount. (more here)
To see how the tariff impacts us on the receiving end, consider the rule-of-thumb breakdown of end-user price. For most things the ‘one-thirds rule’ applies – 1/3 to the manufacturer, 1/3 to distribution, 1/3 to the retailer (end-seller). That means that the distributor (distribution channel) charges the end-seller twice its cost(s) for the item, and the end-seller then adds 50% of his cost to arrive at the price the end-user must pay.
So, let’s look at a pair of athletic shoes for which the consumer pays a pre-tariff $100. The Chinese manufacturer sells these out the door for, say, $32. The importer (distributor) must pay, say, a 25% tariff on the goods, or $8 to the CBP for a total cost of $40 for the shoes at the port of entry. Now how much of that additional $8 cost he passes on to the retailer depends on what kind of a hit he’s willing to take on his profit margin. Say, he’s willing to swallow half the increased cost, so he sells the shoes to the retailer for 2*($32 + 0.5*$8) = $72. If the retailer now followed the one-third rule, then the price for the end-user consumer would be 1.5*$72 = $108, or an 8% price increase. Being sensitive to the price-demand curve (you sell less of what costs more), the retailer may decide to swallow, say, 25% of his increased cost, or 0.25*($72 – $64) = $2. This brings the consumer price of the athletic shoes to $106 or a 6% increase to the American end-user that was caused by imposition of a 25% tariff on such imports.
You can, of course, play this game with different numbers, for example starting with the Chinese manufacturer also discounting his out-the-door price of $32 to keep his shoe sales volume up. Anyway, this should give us all an idea how and where tariff charges impact everyone in the process of getting imported stuff into the hands of end-users. (Those wanting to play with these numbers can now see the effect on end prices by also considering the slightly more complex intermediate ‘end pricing’ of imported components ordered by US manufacturers making goods for US and foreign markets.) And when all is said and done, everyone in the described chain will hold their breath to see how much the end-user will balk at paying the increased price and thereby lower the sales volume for the shoes, which effect will ripple up the chain impacting all kinds of decisions about what to pay, what to charge, and from where to buy.
In sum, the penalty that China (or any tariff assessed country) pays is that 1) they will sell less of the stuff to end users who have to pay a higher price, and/or 2) manufacturers and distributors on the receiving end will inevitably try to obtain the same stuff from countries that are not tariffed so as to regain their profit margins while lowering end user prices. When, like China, you have entire industrial sectors geared to make goods for the single largest market in the world, tariffs on the receiving end do impose many forms monetary and financial penalties at the source end. But make no mistake, the pain of tariffs is felt by all sides, and Trump needs to make that clear instead of spewing only the ‘China pays’ bullshit to the American electorate. (Don’t mistake this screed as an assessment of the strategic wisdom cum effectiveness of today’s tariff trade wars; that is another discussion altogether.)
George Rebane
This is possibly the scariest post to date on RR. Dr Robert Epstein’s congressional testimony about the vote manipulation antics of Google and Facebook are jaw-dropping. Epstein is the former editor-in-chief of the prestigious Psychology Today and continues as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research & Technology. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, this self-avowed liberal Democrat and strong Hillary supporter recounts numerous incidents of subliminal and so far unstoppable vote manipulation by the named tech giants. As an example of an experimentally demonstrable vote manipulation effort Dr Epstein recounts that Google swung an extra 2.6M to over 10M extra votes for Hillary and the Democrats. And to date there is not a thing anyone can do about this kind of activity which Epstein says will definitely be the deciding factor in the 2020 election. We are reminded during the testimony that Alphabet – Google’s parent – was the single largest contributor to Hillary’s 2016 campaign.
You wanna see what vote manipulation really looks like, then watch the goddam 7-minute video before someone takes it offline! (H/T to correspondent)
[8aug19 update] For a recent example of how these social media giants manipulate public attitudes, see the report in 'Scattershots – 6aug19' for what Twitter quietly did so as not to damage the progressive narrative about who are nation's haters and promoters of polarization.
George Rebane
SB27 just signed by Sleazebag Newsom. Just when you think it can’t get worse, something occurs that shows there is still a long way for us to go down from the dire straits in which we already find ourselves. Newsom and his single party super socialists just made a law in CA, specifically targeting President Trump to keep him from appearing in our state’s primary next spring. From now on you can’t appear in a CA primary, specifically for POTUS and governor, unless you have filed your recent years tax returns with the CA SecState. This is so blatantly unconstitutional as to invite an immediate suit against such obvious mischief, a most fiendish form of federalism practiced by America’s leading klatch of collectivists who want nothing to do with federalism. And the CA GOP is filing exactly such a suit, but the real legal counter should come from the DoJ. Candidates for federal office appearing on state ballots should have uniform requirements under the Constitution, and it’s the AG who should bring and argue the case in the SCOTUS.
Split Pill Problem. Here’s a change of pace for some of you puzzlers and critical thinkers out there. Suppose a patient is given a pill bottle with N pills in it. He’s told to take ½ pill per day until the bottle is empty. When he dispenses a whole pill into his palm, he is to split it, take a half, and put the other half back in the bottle. When he shakes out a half pill, he takes it and recaps the pill bottle. He knows that every whole and half pill in the bottle has an equal chance of being dispensed. He continues in this manner until the bottle is empty after 2N days. Then he wonders, what is the average (or expected) number of days that must pass before the bottle only contains split pills, and he doesn’t have to do any more pill splitting. Can you help him figure it out?
[31jul19 update] Last night’s Democrat debate left me with the feeling that half the gaggle of assembled candidates was going through a kabuki performance, while the other half tried to bring the dialogue back to something that more closely matched things possible on this Earth and this universe. They didn’t have a chance as the CNN lamestreamers kept tossing puffballs at the progressives. Seeing people like Reps Delaney and Ryan gave me momentary hope which quickly faded as we saw the kabuki performances overwhelm their voices. And the last vestige of hope was dashed later when, in a more sober moment, Jo Ann and I considered their chances of making it to the convention. From reading first person histories of 1932 Germany – e.g. Der Führer (1944) by Konrad Heiden (more here) – there sure are a lot of comparisons that can be made with our electorate today, the overwhelming numbers of whom don’t know history, current events, geography, economic basics, and to boot are totally innumerate. And then there are the Silicon Valley vote vultures well-practiced in turning out the correct constituent cohorts on election day (more here).
[1aug19 update] The second half Democrat debate was populated by solid progressives, not many leavening opinions were heard. But we did learn that progressives are strong believers in race-based criminality, and race-based punishments – colorblind application of ‘you do the crime, you do the time’ is racist and must no longer be applied. And it also became clear that when our Left calls for ‘unity’ and ‘let us come together’, that means what the Left has always defined it to mean – party line opinions only, dissent not allowed. Examples of that in practice are emerging from leftwing corporatist entities like Google which has been shunning then quietly firing conservative employees when they make their views known to fellow employees. Cory Booker came out as the fastest and smoothest talking mouth on the stage; DeBlasio showed his true colors as radical wingnut; Biden and Harris faded; and all of them called each other liars.
Russ Steele has assembled some revealing temperature data for all you climate crusaders. (here and here) As usual, the government’s (NOAA) hanky-panky on reporting global warming goes on unabated. The full court press on the looming climate catastrophe – they can’t agree whether it’s in 10, 12, or 30 years, but it’s a’comin’ – has been heightened recently as the Dems are using it to rally their true believers. The rest of us would still like to see a public debate on the matter that features their vaunted climate mavens defending their narrative viz data measurements, data manipulation, data availability, atmospheric physics (e.g. earth’s carbon cycle), the estimation problem, climate model designs, climate model programs, replicable computer runs, … . So far, none of them want to show up to defend the Gospel according to Gore.
[2aug19 update] Wow, ‘lamestream media’ is now a national meme that President Trump broke out in a tweet (here) about the withdrawal of Rep John Ratcliffe as nominee for DNI, and then FN reported on his use of it this afternoon Not sure if it’s true, but IMHO I came up with that pejorative for journalism on RR years ago. My earliest use that I could find was in a 21jan11 post (here). It didn’t take off too quickly, even with RR readers. But then readers started using it (ToddJ introduced it on his blog in Nov 2011), and now and then I started seeing it used on other blogs – things can go viral at various speeds, it doesn’t have be overnight. And lately it has cropped up pretty regularly in unexpected places on the web. So out of curiosity I’m asking readers to see if they can find, either on RR or elsewhere, a confirmed use of ‘lamestream media’ that pre-dates 21 January 2011.
George Rebane
After some considerable thought, we are adding the criterion for the natural size of a corporation to Rebane Doctrine. To keep it short and simple, a corporation becomes too large to manage when its manager cannot be reasonably held accountable for the corporation’s major violations of law and regulations. In short, when the corporation becomes criminally culpable, and no one can reasonably point a finger at any people in management who should be held accountable, then there is a problem. When that occurs, then the appropriate regulatory agencies, overseen by the Executive, should file suitable anti-trust suits to break up the corporation. In this case, the offending corporation should be given six to twelve months to come up with a ‘breakup plan’ that it considers acceptable to the regulators and shareholders so that the surviving entities may still be viable in the marketplace.
The acid test of such a break up is whether the new CEO nominees (or management committees) will accept their positions, given that they will be held personally culpable if their corporation goes off the legal or regulatory rails. If no one is still willing to take the job, then it’s clear that smaller pieces of the original corporation are called for. Management should have no excuse in copping the pleas that ‘it was too big and complex for me to keep track of it’. If corporations are to be treated as legal entities with rights and privileges, then they must also be liable for screwing up. And since corporations as legal entities per se can suffer neither pain nor celebrate joy, that feedback must fall to the humans who can. That is Rebane Doctrine.
All this comports with the long-held Rebane Doctrine principle that government is not the only kind of large bureaucratic organization that can regularly screw up – all large organizations in which feedback paths become dysfunctional or cease to exist are liable. Recall that when corporations become leviathans unable to compete in open markets, they use their cash reserves to buy politicians and transform themselves into the corporatist mold in which they invoke the government gun to keep competition at bay.
[update] The Cato Institute just released a recent policy analysis regarding how government should treat 'tech giants' that have a potential of acting like monopolies in their respective markets. It's an area where government should provide oversight but tread lightly when it comes to dictating the structure and operational limits for private enterprises. Economist Ryan Bourne explains in 'Is This Time Different?'
And as radical leftwing and unapologetic as one can get, here is a missive from Umair Haque, currently one of our favorite communists, on the “awesome plan” Elizabeth Warren has “to save America”. To keep up with great thoughts from our Left, especially on how to treat America's businesses, this piece (here) is assigned reading.
[Was going to intro this sandbox with a comment on the current Trump/Cummings imbroglio, but reader Todd Juvinall's comment in the last Scattershots covers it pretty well. "Elijah Cummings district is truly a shithole district. Most of the urban blight is contained in the areas represented by the Con Black Caucus. With over 40 members I have watched them most of my political years and they are as impotent (as) Steve Frisch. Their districts are shitholes. We see the same thing now in LA with the Hispanic Caucus. If they would cast off their leftist robes of failure and embrace Republican values and ideas they could revitalize their shitholes. But they won't. The press is siding with these failed politicians against Trump. He sure says what is true." gjr]
George Rebane
Readers know that today’s professional journalists comprise one of my favorite foils. Perusing the morning papers, I ran across three doozies that brought on a spate of self-satisfying chuckles. First, let’s start with Don Rogers’ essay in his 26jul19 Union. The newspaper’s publisher is an irreconcilable ‘never Trumper’, and promises to cut off your nose to spite your face. He observes the national scene and laments that “no one truly acts for the common good.” But in the sequel he doesn’t seem to understand that in today’s America we no longer have a ‘common good’, all the polarizing evidence withstanding. Let me begin by acknowledging that Mr Rogers is a likeable man of good character and an intellectual leader of our community
In today’s essay he claims to like “some actions” of Trump “almost exclusively in economic matters”, and brushes off the historic sea change from Obama years as something “any decent Republican could have accomplished”. But they didn’t, Trump did. Society correctly credits the individuals who actually accomplished a notable thing, good or bad, and doesn’t withhold accolades or accusations with the excuse that someone else could just as easily have done it sooner or later. Einstein discovered relativity, Lucky Lindy was first to solo the Atlantic, and Stalin killed tens of millions of his own citizens. It wasn’t just anyone doing those things.
Mr Rogers joins his legion of liberal colleagues in calling Donald Trump “Racist? Sure, of course, but we’ve known that for a while.” And along with them he offers no definition of the ‘racism’ to which he hews; Trump is “of course” racist for the reason that Rogers simply echoes that accusation – for a liberal, that is more than enough to make it so. Consensus ignorance becomes common wisdom.
Our publisher’s main complaint in his ‘Impeach me, please’ is that Trump is flying solo in wanting the House to impeach him as part of some self-serving “thuggery” in his re-election strategy. Apparently, Mr Rogers has not been exposed to the last two years of news about how Democrats, high and low, are in an all-out assault to impeach and discredit the president based on no culpable evidence, and ONLY as a blatant tactic to end his presidency in 2020. The long litany of investigations, hearings, conspiracies, criminality, along with gratuitous and baseless accusations in the Democrat-compliant media, to Rogers somehow fall short of thuggery – actions and behaviors which for the rest of us overfill its most basic definition.
Don Rogers would rather vote for the Democrats’ “wrong-headed” and “ill-advised” legislation and policies and deny us the demonstrated benefits of Trump’s policies, why? because he doesn’t like the wrapper in which they are delivered. And there we have a sterling example of a journalist promoting the common good.
With a mild segue we now encounter Aaron Zitner, WSJ editor for digital innovation, who discovers the independent voter as those who actually swing elections one way or t’other. He breathlessly reports the news of both parties having the dilemma of spending campaign funds to nail down their core voters or spend it trying to convince those yet to make up their minds. His report (here) in the 26jul19 WSJ has got to be evidence of a slow news day. Why? That decision and its cash allocation dilemma is as old as electioneering. Anyone familiar with how America has voted for the last couple of centuries knows the 40-20-40 rule. We have reported on it extensively (here, here, and here) starting with The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan, who covered the large body research which demonstrated that the minority ruled, and did so until politicians discovered mass media in the 1920s. This caused voters to succumb to the guile of political sound bites in their number and recency. And that, of course, brought the whole thing back to which party and candidates could buy more eyeballs and earballs on the media. So we’re back to the ‘middle minority’ as the swing votes who always determine elections. But then, you knew that, and so should have Aaron Zitner.
OK, we’ll end with a real subtle knee-slapper. How many times have you been told about investors moving into this or that investment? The image painted by these financial reporters is of a mass of agitated people moving en masse from, say, stocks to bonds or vice versa, or to some other area like commodities or real estate. ‘Investors give up on gold!’ is a regular headline in this genre. Today we read Jessica Menton’s breathless report (here) about investors pouring money into bonds at a “record pace”. Apparently investors are forsaking stocks as being more risky and going into the perceived less risky debt instruments. Well, no they aren’t. No investor threw their gold bars or stocks into the gutter; no one left their corporate stocks lie fallow in some drawer or some broker account when they switched their investment focus. Every investor sold their old investments to whom? Rumor has it that these buyers have always been (seatbelts please) other investors – imagine that. Just as much money was coming out of one pile of investments as was going into another pile or two. These monies don’t move by abandoning what was previously valued; they can’t. Never are there discarded piles of share certificates found in dumpsters when monies move. For some reason, this important little aspect of investor monies moving around is never mentioned. You gotta sell stuff before you can buy other stuff. And if investors are buying something else at a record pace, other investors must also be buying what was sold at a record pace. Reporters should point this out now and then.
