2016 Election Thread

[Craig Arko]

That's the beauty of the public sector vs. the private sector... I'm making the assumption you're working in a government related organization.

 

The software company I work for is only 40 hours a week and quite generous with PTO. This is because they know with the stress levels involved they'd be hauling a body out every few months otherwise.

 

Bad PR for the shareholders.

[Mike Sixel]

 

That's exactly what I was taking from that.  Your first post was more assertive in my view.  

 

I would just suggest that we thought machinery would eliminate the factory several generations ago and we're still here.  Having the conversation about what it might look like is important, but it's so difficult to actually plan for it.

 

And there will always be a sizable workforce needed just to service each other.  At least for a long, long time yet.

 

we can't even have a conversation about outsourcing, w/o blaming the victims (workers)....not sure how we go to the next level.

 

People said computers would never replace lawyers or accountants.....or lots of other things. We learned the wrong lesson from early robotics and machinery, we, imo, took the lesson that there will ALWAYS be enough work for the people, as we grow economies. The actual lesson was, imo, that it would take longer to do, but would happen.

 

Did anyone imagine self driving cars eliminating cab drivers and truckers and other jobs, even 5-10 years ago, other than some tiny group no one listened to?

[Badsmerf]

What's going to be really fun is when our species learns to bend space time and can teleport people and products instantly. What are we going to do then? I guess just explore space like star trek. That will be fun.

[Craig Arko]

What's going to be really fun is when our species learns to bend space time and can teleport people and products instantly. What are we going to do then? I guess just explore space like star trek. That will be fun.

Assuming the species survives that long, yes it will be fun.

 

Some of that is already happening in the sense that a digital description of an object can be sent a great distance and then 3-D printed at the destination. Tools have been designed on Earth and printed at the ISS in this fashion.

[TheLeviathan]

 

we can't even have a conversation about outsourcing, w/o blaming the victims (workers)....not sure how we go to the next level.

 

People said computers would never replace lawyers or accountants.....or lots of other things. We learned the wrong lesson from early robotics and machinery, we, imo, took the lesson that there will ALWAYS be enough work for the people, as we grow economies. The actual lesson was, imo, that it would take longer to do, but would happen.

 

Did anyone imagine self driving cars eliminating cab drivers and truckers and other jobs, even 5-10 years ago, other than some tiny group no one listened to?

 

My caution, however, is that we often misjudge the speed of advancement by the initial ones.  Read fiction or science fiction from the 60s and 70s and they talk about Mars colonies and flying cars as a given by this time.  Sometimes our initial advancements stall out before we take big leaps and predicting what the future of the economy looks like is extremely difficult.  The lesson you're talking about may be right, that eventually we will see shifts, but the nature of those shifts is pretty dubious because predicting the advancement of technology is extremely dicey.

 

I agree that things will continue to be more automated and that is a threat to the number of jobs out there.  I'm less convinced it's a threat to the nature of work for our society.

[Pardon My Dinger]

I grew up in a small rural Minnesota town. The kind that, if their one business shuts down, would cause the town to collapse. Drive around in out state Minnesota and you'll find a lot of dying towns. People are flocking to the in-between sized towns now like a Fairmont or Owatanna rather than sticking it out in their little town. We route roads away from towns and it does the same. When I was a kid going to school in LaCrosse I'd take highway 14 and it'd wind through Waconia and all the little towns there.

Um...there's a road that connects LaCrosse to Waconia?

 

Would have come in handy when I lived in Waconia and had to go to my dad's house in LaCrosse every other week.

[TheLeviathan]

 

Um...there's a road that connects LaCrosse to Waconia?

Would have come in handy when I lived in Waconia and had to go to my dad's house in LaCrosse every other week.

 

Doh.  Waseca.  I am sentenced to confuse those two forever.

[Pardon My Dinger]

Doh. Waseca. I am sentenced to confuse those two forever.

Ah. Gotcha.

 

Not calling you out either btw. I was just shocked to learn of a direct artery between my two childhood homes.

[TheLeviathan]

 

Ah. Gotcha.

Not calling you out either btw. I was just shocked to learn of a direct artery between my two childhood homes.

 

I should know the name well and yet I have had it confused for decades.

[nicksaviking]

It is possible you took:

 

work is an outdated concept...

 

 

to be about work, not work as the way we make money to live. That was what I was trying to say. Tying our ability to be alive to work is probably not a good idea going forward.

Agreed. Things like volunteering or Civil Service can still be "work" if in the future traditional jobs are sparse and/or obsolete. It's not like the alternative to a traditional job is sleeping until noon and watching TV all day. I'd hope people could find value in their lives even if they aren't compensated directly for specific actions.

[stringer bell]

Checking 538 every day. Clinton's win percentage has sunk from near 90 to about 65. Talk of a landslide and Democratic Congress has abated. It does look to me like Clinton has bottomed out (or Trump has peaked) and she still holds a discernible lead. I wonder if there will be another bombshell dropped today or this weekend.

[TheLeviathan]

 

Agreed. Things like volunteering or Civil Service can still be "work" if in the future traditional jobs are sparse and/or obsolete. It's not like the alternative to a traditional job is sleeping until noon and watching TV all day. I'd hope people could find value in their lives even if they aren't compensated directly for specific actions.

 

One might hope for that, but would it happen?  That's a very utopian idea, one I'm not sure is even a part of human nature.  Though, I guess we wouldn't find out until we had to.

 

We've had this discussion before and I'm absolutely ok with developing a system of guaranteed income to ease the demands of working but there are a couple factors to consider:

 

1) Work, in an abstract sort of way, is social buy-in.  It's perhaps the main way we contribute to one another in a meaningful way.  If you suddenly stop that, does that lead to a break down in social structure?  We see some of that now, but imagine if large cross sections of the populace have no connection with one another and rely on those, out of the goodness of their heart, providing for them?  A system where we replace have vs. have not with a sort of contribute vs. not is not one I see being successful.

 

2) Many (most or all?) of the very innovations we see as making this no-work-world possible are born out of the very concept we're trying to get rid of.  

 

My hesitations about the conversation are about fundamental issues of human nature and society.  I agree that changes will come as technologies advance, I'm far less convinced human nature will change along with them.

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

Is anyone here from Missouri who can comment? Anyone following the Missouri senate race? I would love to see Kander defeat Blunt.

 

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-senate-control-missouri-20161107-story.html

[Brock Beauchamp]

Promising numbers coming out of Nevada early voting:

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/has-trump-already-lost-nevada/

[Badsmerf]

It really feels like the polls are being fabricated to keep interest high. If the polls were a blow out nobody would care about the coverage anymore. It won't be surprising when the media claims the margin of victory is a shocker.

[Brock Beauchamp]

 

It really feels like the polls are being fabricated to keep interest high. If the polls were a blow out nobody would care about the coverage anymore. It won't be surprising when the media claims the margin of victory is a shocker.

There may be some of that but it's hard to make the argument FiveThirtyEight is clickbaiting to keep readers tuned in.

 

And they're talking about the closeness of this race as much or more than many other news outlets. They've actually been hedging their numbers with caution more than most other polling aggregates I've seen.

[PseudoSABR]

 

There may be some of that but it's hard to make the argument FiveThirtyEight is clickbaiting to keep readers tuned in.

 

And they're talking about the closeness of this race as much or more than many other news outlets. They've actually been hedging their numbers with caution more than most other polling aggregates I've seen.

Well looks like HuffPo accused Nate Silver of something just like that; Silver responded over twitter (Politico with the recap).

 

That said, I don't there's a lot of empirical science at work with these polls or the efforts to unskew them.  A lot of it is inherently subjective, even using history etc. as a back drop. 

[nicksaviking]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/comey-tells-congress-fbi-has-not-changed-conclusions/index.html

 

While no talk of emails is great for Clinton, getting cleared three days before the election seems like the exact number of days you would want it to happen.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Well looks like HuffPo accused Nate Silver of something just like that; Silver responded over twitter (Politico with the recap).

 

That said, I don't there's a lot of empirical science at work with these polls or the efforts to unskew them. A lot of it is inherently subjective, even using history etc. as a back drop.

I tend to side with Silver on this one. I've read a lot about his modeling - thankfully, he's very open about it - and I think his model taking into account inter-state influence is a superior system. It's doesn't make sense to treat each state as an island. Minnesota influences Wisconsin and vice-versa.

 

Maybe Silver's model is wrong and I doubt he'd be too upset if it is... this election is way out on the edge of the cliff and we have very few data points to predict presidential elections in the first place. If he's wrong, that gives important precedence for coming elections.

[Squirrel]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/comey-tells-congress-fbi-has-not-changed-conclusions/index.html

While no talk of emails is great for Clinton, getting cleared three days before the election seems like the exact number of days you would want it to happen.

Gee, imagine that. Three days before or a week before, the damage was done. Maybe it will reverse enough of it.

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

Gee, imagine that. Three days before or a week before, the damage was done. Maybe it will reverse enough of it.

That seems to be the new M.O. of the Fox right. Make the most outrageous, most hurtful claim imagineable. Let it circulate and seem credible for a couple days. Then, apologize! Retraction! Journalistic integrity!

 

Just be glad they didn't figure this out sooner? I have no idea.

[Bark's Lounge]

At this point, we get what we deserve. Two awful candidates, one that is extremely better than the other.

 

I hope this serves as a positive turning point in the whole scheme of things. We all need to change, internally, externally, the whole works.

 

If the wrong candidate wins, I fear it will set us back more than we can wrap our heads around. The correct candidate might set us back a step or two.

 

I love our country. I want great things for the people of this nation and the overall good. This election has exposed to me how poor our education system is and the social programs that are in place to help the ghetto and trailer trash folks.

 

Poor is poor and it is sad all around. It breeds extremism, along with nonsensical religious folks, it creates an environment that is difficult for sensible, common sense people to contend with.

 

It's 2016. I am very sad we are in this place. ):

[Brock Beauchamp]

This is a really good article about state politics. My takeaway is that if you see a state representative running their platform on abortion or another national issue that state legislatures cannot impact whatsoever, you should drill deeply into that candidate to see if they actually have ideas they can implement at the local level or whether they're simply a partisan hack, playing on politics they can't deliver.

 

I'm going to reexamine my local representatives tonight.

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/all-politics-is-national/

[PseudoSABR]

 

I tend to side with Silver on this one. I've read a lot about his modeling - thankfully, he's very open about it - and I think his model taking into account inter-state influence is a superior system. It's doesn't make sense to treat each state as an island. Minnesota influences Wisconsin and vice-versa.

Maybe Silver's model is wrong and I doubt he'd be too upset if it is... this election is way out on the edge of the cliff and we have very few data points to predict presidential elections in the first place. If he's wrong, that gives important precedence for coming elections.

I don't want to push back on this too much.  I like that Silver is transparent about what his factors might be, though he's less open about the weight he gives those factors, or exactly how many non-poll factors he's really using.  

 

The Princeton Election Consortium had a nice write up about this today.  I'll quote a couple key paragraphs, which articulate my concerns:

 Now think about the FiveThirtyEight approach. I don’t want to get into too much detail. Although they discuss their model a lot, to my knowledge they have not revealed the dozens of parameters that go into the model, nor have they released their code. Even if they did, it is easy to make errors in evaluating someone else’s model. Recall Nate Silver’s errors in his attempted critique of PEC in 2014. So let me just make a few general comments. I am open to correction.

        Their roots are in detail-oriented activities such as fantasy baseball. They score individual pollsters, and they want to predict things like individual-state vote shares. Achieving these goals requires building a model with lots of parameters, and running regressions and other statistical procedures to estimate those parameters. However, every parameter has an uncertainty attached to it. When all those parameters get put together to estimate the overall outcome, the resulting total is highly uncertain.

        For this reason, the Huffington Post claim that FiveThirtyEight is biased toward Trump is probably wrong. It’s not that they like Trump – it’s that they are biased away from the frontrunner, whoever that is at any given moment. And this year, the frontrunner happens to be Hillary Clinton.

 

[Brock Beauchamp]

That's a fair analysis. If a model is weighting numbers, it's very possible the weights are off and the entire model becomes gibberish.

 

But I'll wait out the results before declaring a model gibberish.

 

And in this case, I very much hope Silver is wrong.

[Craig Arko]

 

I don't want to push back on this too much.  I like that Silver is transparent about what his factors might be, though he's less open about the weight he gives those factors, or exactly how many non-poll factors he's really using.  

 

The Princeton Election Consortium had a nice write up about this today.  I'll quote a couple key paragraphs, which articulate my concerns:

Same thing I've been harping with the baseball statistical models. Without proper error analysis, it's tough to draw meaningful conclusions.

 

Having said that, I sure hope 538 is wrong with the current Senate projections.

[PseudoSABR]

 

Same thing I've been harping with the baseball statistical models. Without proper error analysis, it's tough to draw meaningful conclusions.

 

Having said that, I sure hope 538 is wrong with the current Senate projections.

Ha, I almost added that Silver sounds like someone responding to those who are cynical of aggregating metrics in baseball.  But I thought better of poking that bear, so I thank you for doing so.

 

On the Senate, I think splitting the ticket is something that's more likely to happen in polling than actually in the voter's booth.   I don't believe all poll-respondents necessarily reach the Senate questions for variety of reasons; voter's lack of familiarity with their own senate candidates I think will eventually work against the poll-results and weigh more heavily towards the top of the ticket than the polls can indicate.

[Badsmerf]

I think he tries to take that into consideration. I think the polling is going to be a ways off this year. The dynamics of this election are just not going to follow previous models well.

[jimmer]

100 years ago today, Jeannette Rankin of Montana become the first woman to be elected to Congress.

[Squirrel]

 

100 years ago today, Jeannette Rankin of Montana become the first woman to be elected to Congress.

Progress! And out of curiosity, how many women has Montana sent to Washington since her?