July 2015 Archives

Dear Internet,

If Trump were running as a Democrat, what percentage of the polls would we have right now?  RCP says he has 21% in national GOP polls.  I am thinking it would be at least 10%, maybe 15%, if he were running as a Democrat.

He'd be saying he's pro-choice, pro-immigration, anti-NAFTA, etc., playing the same role he is now: going after the blue-collar populist vote, and that vote is out there on the Democratic side.

"By one estimate, licensing restrictions cost millions of jobs nationwide and raise consumer expenses by over one hundred billion dollars."

I'm shocked, frankly, to see the White House say this.  But it's great to see.  People who oppose trade agreements because they hurt jobs should support less regulation of businesses: lower corporate tax rates, fewer regulations, easier compliance with necessary regulations, and delicensing of most occupations.

All that will do far more for American jobs that opposing trade deals (the effect of which on jobs is unclear anyway).

Playing the iOS game SEQ, current freebie from Starbucks. The solution for puzzle A-9 is a swastika. Oops.

I've seen this before in various forms, but I was reminded of it by +Jim Richardson: "You cannot reason a man out of an opinion he didn't arrive at by reason."

Now, I should point out, that most people arrive at most of their opinions for reasons apart from reason.  And people do change their opinions, based on reason, sometimes; but they need to open to changing them, and that openness itself is arrived at through reason.

I remind myself that as frustrating as this can be, it's also a mechanism that has allowed our species to survive.  So, there's that.

In "honor" of Mike Huckabee's dumb comparison of Obama to Hitler, I give you my original song: Hitler and Obama.

I hate to defend Mike Huckabee, so I won't. He compared Obama to Hitler, and he did so not because it was reasonable or righteous, but because the debate is in about a week and he needs to increase his status in the polls.

If he had compared Obama ot Chamberlain, that might be at least defensible.  But the comparison to Hitler (or Himmler or INSERT NAZI HERE) ... there's no logical defense possible of the comment itself, and it only makes sense in the context of trying to get attention for himself.

I hate to defend Donald Trump, but when the media lies about what he says -- no, he never said all Mexicans are rapists -- it only gives him credibility, because people see that the media is lying about him.  So stop it.  Trump is bad enough that you don't need to trump up charges against him (see what I did there)?

How TPM Proves Liberals Wrong About Libertarianism

The main point of the article is basically that because some of the rhetoric saying that Reddit should not ban anything sounds vaguely libertarian, that therefore libertarianism isn't coherent, even though libertarianism actually says that Reddit should be able to ban any speech it wants to, and for any reasons it wants to.

Dislike new PBS NewsHour theme. Sounds like a rejected 70s Monday Night Football theme.

Dear Fox News,

When you hold the first GOP debate this year, you say you will have a forum for the candidates not invited to the debate.  To increase your ratings and to make it more fair to the one candidate who would have been in the debate if not for Donald Trump's "candidacy," I suggest you add a Wild Card spot to the debate.  The forum will be followed by a 10-minute voting period (by Twitter and SMS) and the winner moves immediately on to the debate.

Yes, it won't be fair to the candidates in the debate, who get less exposure than the winner of the forum.  But it'd be pretty awesome.

Dear Republicans,

Should you gain the presidency in 2016, and retain both houses of Congress, please reform the tax code as your first order of business. Make the rate flat (maybe with a small handful of well-defined and simple exemptions and deductions), or eliminate it altogether and go to a consumption tax.

We need a massive overhaul, along the lines of Huckabee's FairTax or Paul's flat tax, that will virtually eliminate compliance costs, reduce the tax burden on most people, and reduce federal control over our lives through the thousands of credits and deductions they use to manipulate our behavior.

There's other important issues (setting aside existential threats like nuclear weapons and so on), such as reforming immigration, health insurance, Medicare, education, and Social Security.  But none is as important as this.  Not only will it immediately increase productivity and net income, it will also make all of those other problems easier to solve in various ways.

So ... go do that.

Dear Internet,

Stand Your Ground laws do not change the legal justifications for killing.  They do not allow anyone to kill.  All they do is -- by removing the legal obligation to retreat when threatened -- make it more likely that you will be in a situation where you need to use lethal force to defend yourself.  But the circumstances under which such lethal force is legal authorized do not change by virtue of Stand Your Ground laws.

If you could not legally kill someone in a particular situation before SYG was enacted, you also cannot do so afterward.

An example: you're walking on the street, and someone comes right up to you with a knife and threatens you with it.  Without SYG, you are legally allowed to shoot them dead.  With SYG, you are also legally allowed to shoot them dead.  In both cases, you are acting in self-defense from a real and imminent threat on your life.

However, if you were in your car and he were across the street on foot, without SYG, you would be required to drive away.  With SYG, you would not be required to drive away.  But it doesn't change the fact that you can still only kill the guy if you need to do so to save yourself from that real and imminent threat.

You can argue about the duty to retreat; my view is that if I retreat, the person might harm someone else who is less capable of defending himself than I am, and so I have a duty to my neighbors to not retreat. That right action to take should be seriously considered by each person, and they come up with their own answer that is best for themselves.

But what you cannot reasonably do is claim that SYG provides a license to kill.  It doesn't.  You may only kill in defense of imminent serious bodily harm to yourself or others, with or without SYG.

(Now, it may be true that some specific statutes have specific language that do modify the legal authorizations for using lethal force, but to the extent that they do, they are not SYG laws.  It's like if we have a marijuana legalization law that also allowed you to use heroin, and someone said "marijuana laws allow people to use heroin."  No, that's not how it works.)

Clark says that we are at war with terrorists.  He says, if you are radicalized and don’t support the United States and are disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principle that's fine, and it's your right.

But, he says, it's our right and obligation to segregate you from the normal community for the duration of the conflict with these terrorists.

He really said that, and appears to have meant it: internment camps for disloyal Americans.  Because it's your right to be disloyal, but we can still lock you up for it.

Dear Internet,

Stop pretending that there is a distinction between "manmade" and "natural."  If a bird's nest is natural, because it was created using materials from nature by a creature existing from nature, then so is the Large Hadron Collider.

The only thing "artificial" or "not natural" here is the distinction between "manmade" and "natural."

There's this guy who lives and works at home
He types all day, talks on the phone
One day he looks over his screen
And stares at the people across the street

Then something happens, I'm not sure what
It's not important to the story, but
It makes him think about his life
About his kids and second wife

I've got a few pages written already
And I'm working on it every Thursday night
The plot is coming along real well
I just need to get the characters right

That's my novel idea
That's my novel idea

It's more than a year before the GOP Convention that will ultimately select the Republican nominee for President.  According to what most people reading this poll might think, more people want Trump to win that nomination than anyone else.

But is that true?  There's another prize that is coming up much sooner than the nomination: participation in the debates. The top 10 candidates will be in the first big debate, on Fox News.  The nomination is only indirectly related to the poll results.

So the polls do not tell me that Trump is the favorite to win the nomination, only that he is a favorite to participate in the debate.  If I didn't have a favorite candidate, I'd pick Trump, just because I want to see him in the debate.

+Simon Vozick-Levinson is telling a stupid joke.  His article reads more like satire than opinion, let alone the news it purports to be.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is one of the most hardcore right-wing extremists in America.

False.  Not even remotely true.  He doesn't have any views that are "extremist" on the right.


His slash-and-burn policies have gutted Wisconsin workers' collective bargaining rights

Simon is being extremely dishonest here: Walker's reforms were only about government employees.  And far from being "extreme," many pro-union folks, including FDR himself, agreed with Walker's views on this.

defunded Planned Parenthood

Again, this is only true insofar as it relates to state government funds.  And this is not remotely "extreme."

The article gets stupider, but don't bother reading it.  Just realize that Rolling Stone is not getting any better, after publishing proven lies about vaccines and mercury, about how Bush "stole" Ohio in 2004, about college rape allegations, and so on.

Dear T-Mobile,

I tried to port my home number from Vonage to you.  I spent many hours on the phone trying to get it to work.  It never did.  A dozen different people on your end tried to help me over a half dozen or so phone calls, and you couldn't do this simple thing.

And not for nothing, but probably half the time I was on the phone with the T-Mobile reps, I literally could not understand what they were saying.  They all had thick accents that sounded Indian to me, and over a low-quality audio signal like a phone, it just doesn't work well.  I had to ask them to repeat themselves many times.  It's a terribly poor customer experience.

AT&T did this task for me in three days, with two quick followup phone calls: once to tell me I needed a new SIM card (which I picked up for free at an AT&T store), and once to activate the card and test the line.  It took a few minutes for the port to switch over, but then it worked like a champ.

I am not a huge fan of AT&T, but ... it's kinda like, years ago, when I got fed up with DirecTV, so I switched to cable.  Oops.  It's the "grass is always greener" scenario.  What you have might suck in various ways, but is the alternative necessarily better?  In the case of DirecTV and AT&T, in my experience, no.

Dear Google,

I just gave you money to port my old home phone to Google Voice.  Unbeknownst to me, you changed the service since I last used it, such that every time someone calls me, every device I have shows a Google Hangouts alert.  I never, ever, want this.

And there is literally no way to turn this off, except to not use Hangouts or Google Voice.

And what makes this even dumber is that my iPhone is already allowing me to answer the incoming call on all my devices.  So I get my phone, iPad, and Mac all ringing for both the call and Hangouts simultaneously, just for one call.

This is incredibly stupid, and apparently this has been broken for awhile now.  I can see how many people would want this feature, but it's also obvious that many people would not.

Google: please fix it.

I believe that engineers and product folks at Apple and Google don't actually use all their own software features.

This is a real thing.

This is particularly amazing.  Tim Eyman thinks that we should need a 2/3 majority in the state legislature to raise taxes.  Almost 2/3 of the voters agreed with Eyman.

This letter claims that Eyman "opposes democracy," because he wants a minority of the voters to be able to prevent a majority from raising taxes.  But he doesn't: he wants a majority of the voters to make a rule for the legislature.  And a majority of the voters did do that.  And that rule would have stuck, except that a majority of the Supreme Court of Washington said that you need a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority of the legislature.

You get that?  This guy is criticizing Eyman for saying we should have a supermajority of the legislature to raise taxes, but that rule was only shot down because the Court said you need a supermajority of the legislature to agree to it.  So no matter which side you're on, you are in favor of a supermajority being required to prevent the other guys from doing what you don't want done.

So that is what Eyman is doing now: he got a constitutional amendment initiative on the ballot (sort of*), which would require a supermajority of the legislature to say that in the future, only a supermajority of the legislature may raise taxes.  And a majority of the voters must agree with it.

It's amazing that The Olympian even printed this bizarre letter, that literally gets all the salient facts wrong.

*You can't put a constitutional amendment on the ballot -- it has to go through the legislature first -- so Eyman cleverly put an initiative on the ballot that says a tax increase would be eliminated unless a constitutional amendment requiring a 2/3 majority in the legislature to raise taxes is passed by the legislature and proposed to the people on the ballot.

Dear American Internet,

Encryption is here to stay.  You can't get at the bad guy's information if he encrypts it.  And if you get American companies to give you a back door, or "front door," then the bad guys will get their encryption somewhere else.

We already went through this in the 90's.  I can still put an algorithm in a few lines of code on the front of a t-shirt that is virtually unbreakable to anyone, including the government.  Let's not revisit the discussion, because the answer hasn't changed.