Let’s be clear. The Sleeping Giant, with its larger share of women and people of color, is shifting the center of gravity in politics. Thanks to largely working-class movements such as the Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter, candidates of both political parties have been compelled to address economic and racial inequality in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
I usually drop off before 9 PM, but I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep while Bernie Sanders was nursing a slim lead, so I stayed up until AP called Michigan for Sanders at 11:30 or so. I had TPM’s AP link, FiveThirtyEight’s live feed and LisB’s Facebook thread open.
During the reporting phase of the Michigan and other primaries, Nate Silver and Harry Enten took a lot of flak in FiveThirtyEight’s comment feed, which ran along the right side of the screen while Silver, Enten, Carl Bialik, Julia Azari, Aaron Bycoffe, Micah Cohen and others posted their thoughts on the left. Once it seemed clear that Sanders was outperforming the polls, Silver admitted:
One summer, I was one of four white college boys working as summer interns for the Corps of Engineers in Maryland. Most of our coworkers were white folk, but one engineer was Asian and one secretary was African-American. We had a very dignified lady for a boss, who treated us well. A lot of good ol’ boys from other departments would wander in with jokes or stories or just to shoot the breeze. We were taken aback when some hound dog joked about making our boss mother of the year if she’d only let him. She was an attractive woman, but they were both married, and not to each other.
Once there was a young man from a wealthy family. He studied hard at good schools, and when he was old enough, his father let him drive the company limousine so he could learn how rich people talked. So he learned to be very thoughtless towards other people, and even more obnoxious if they complained. And he learned lots of great words. Later, he wanted to be a real estate mogul like his Dad, and so he wore a suit and a colorful tie, and went to work every day, and made deals with people to build great stuff for very little money, like his Dad.
I’ve been called a political naif for supporting Sanders, and not wanting to accept Clinton as a consolation candidate. My first primary vote was for Jerry Brown, but I had to accept Jimmy Carter as the nominee. Carter was a very unpopular president, and though he now stands out as a very good and compassionate elder statesman, he was considered to have made a neoliberal bargain in the wake of the 1970’s oil shock, which probably contributed to the stagflation that followed.
FiveThirtyEight has a little chart on the right of their main page today [Thursday 3/3/2016]. They have established a target number of delegates that they feel each candidate needs by any given date to eventually capture the nomination:
In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings.
After months of hype and hysteria, insurance policies purchased under the Affordable Care Act went into effect on New Year’s Day, and journalists have largely pivoted from writing about the problems of HealthCare.gov to how the law is actually working for consumers.
Some journalists don’t have to look very far. That’s because they are the story, too. ...
... Today, anti-Obama signs with racist language accompany Tea Party rallies; a Confederate flag is unfurled in front of the White House to protest the government shutdown.
Looking back, there was one book [that Obama had read as a young man] that could have helped us anticipate all this. That book was “Benito Cereno,” a largely forgotten masterpiece by Herman Melville.
The negative impact of deranged Internet comment trolls on reader opinion has already been documented. Last year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that readers exposed to invective in comment sections at the end of a fictitious article about nanotechnology were more likely to develop “polarized” interpretations of its content. That finding was one reason why Popular Science, which argued that the negative effect was particularly pronounced when it came to scientific discourse, shut down its comment sections.
... three years ago, dispatched to an almost certain death by an assassin’s bullet, I was allowed the opportunity for a new life. I had planned to spend my 40s continuing my public service and starting a family. I thought that by fighting for the people I cared about and loving those close to me, I could leave the world a better place. And that would be enough.
Instead, I’ve spent the past three years learning how to talk again, how to walk again. I had to learn to sign my name with my left hand.
Until about 10 years ago, it was fashionable among policy makers to suppose that relatively rich countries had grown or evolved beyond the stage where they would be vulnerable to debilitating financial crises. The reasoning was that financial markets had become sophisticated, in part because big companies knew how to diversify their risks.
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr.
One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft's Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the annoying window that occasionally pops up on screen when an internal problem is detected, an automatic message that prompts the user to report the bug to the manufacturer and to restart the program. These crash reports offer TAO specialists a welcome opportunity to spy on computers.
... interviews with dozens of academics and traders, and a review of hundreds of emails and other documents involving two highly visible professors in the commodities field — Mr. Pirrong and Professor Scott H.
Arizona's utility regulator last month approved a hike in the surcharge that solar customers with net metering pay the state's largest utility. The Arizona Corporation Commission ordered workshops to study the value and costs associated with NEM. Conversations about net metering are beginning in Louisiana, parts of Texas, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts (ClimateWire, Dec.
Wind enthusiasts have been known to claim that the days of turbines killing raptors were limited to a few bad years at Altamont. But in A Struggle to Balance Wind Energy With Wildlife, the NY Times - which no longer has an environmental blog - writes:
Over the past six months, The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of documents related to shale gas, including hundreds of industry e-mails, internal agency documents and reports by analysts. A selection of these documents is included here; names and identifying information have been redacted to protect the confidentiality of sources, many of whom were not authorized by their employers to communicate with The Times. ...
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
