Linky Friday: Here, There, Everywhere
Home:
Image by JoeInSouthernCA 
[H2] I would guess because it’s primarily affecting Blue America, and so Red America doesn’t really care and Blue America doesn’t want to look like they’re not better than Red America in every imaginable way.
[H3] David Adler looks at the people who profit from poverty, specifically the eviction industry. We’ve been getting a feel for housing markets here and there, and we’re running across a lot more “If you buy the house, you have to get the current occupants out.” I’m not opposed to the universal housing voucher idea, though it’s going to open up a box of other issues.
[H4] The advent of the tower prison. I don’t know, when I was younger I really wanted to live in a highrise condo (a specific one right by the Colosse skyline where units started at $80k), and but for the fact I have a kid I still like the concept.
[H5] When I see stories like this from Canada it’s like a TV show where the plot revolves around something in the newspapers the previous week. Government-funded insurance for waterfront properties remains among the more indefensible policies we have.
[H6] Amazon: Housing the homeless.
School:
Image by Adam Procter
[Sc2] Per Andre Perry, the problem with white teachers is that they’re racist.
[Sc3] Phillip Levine looks at the limitations of Cuomo’s Free Tuition plan, which still manages to leave Vassar as less expensive than SUNY-Binghampton for some families. Seems to me that at the end of the day we’re going to have to make a decision: Smart kids or poor kids.
[Sc4] Well, this confirms my priors. It comes up a lot in debates about rewarding students for good grades, that it doesn’t count if they’re not motivated by love of learning or whatever. Bullocks!
[Sc5] Jesse Singal reports that microaggression training could be backfiring on minority students.
[Sc6] I’m still reluctant to believe that it’s about Political Correctness, but that the University of Missouri alone is having a steep drop in enrollment is noteworthy, and Missouri State is gaining. (Lurking in the background of this article is what appears to be a significant drop in international applications.)
[Sc7] Dave Taylor explains what Hollywood gets wrong about high school. Fortunately, he said nothing of Saved By The Bell. I don’t know if I could go on if I found out it wasn’t accurate (other than the school magically teleporting from Indiana to California, that is).
Work:
Image by roseannadana: Back on my home turf
[W2] African-Americans are returning to work!
[W3] Maybe, but I wouldn’t risk it if I could avoid it.
[W4] This old school coloring book (from 1961) is pretty badass and ahead of its time.
[W5] Employers steal from workers.
Earth:
Image by tonynetone
[E2] The science and archeology behind The Great Comet are really interesting.
[E3] Well, uhhh… could be worse? Might want to see about putting some cities on stilts, though…
[E4] Not helping, guys!
[E5] Al Globus argues that rather than colonizing Mars, we should put some tin cans within our existing magnetic field.
Space:
Image by Jemimus
[Sp2] A look at Io.
[Sp3] So what’s up next for NASA? They’re working on it. (I sort of vote for poking around the moon.)
[Sp4] Wait. Secret military space shuttle?!
[Sp5] Testing for Mars! Testing for Mars!
[Sp6] Andrew Lilico is bullish on Mars, but Adam Ozimek is a killjoy. (Also, you never know why you don’t want to have all of your eggs in a single basket until you do. Just saying.)
[Sp7] Ethan Siegel comes very close to killjoying Planet Nine.
Sc5: about time someone started demanding some rigor in that subject.Report
I worry about isolated demands for rigor. For example, saying “this might backfire on minorities” is itself an unproven assertion. Sure, it might. However, it might not. Furthermore, “social stuff” is inherently hard, inasmuch as things will always be rather fuzzy. Thus demanding a precise definition of “microagression” will fail for the same reason that we cannot define “common sense” or “basic politeness.”
For example, in the latter case I’m sure my grandma could have given you an earful on the obvious boundaries of “basic politeness,” but your grandma might totally disagree. That said, if you’re asking, “Hey, does basic politeness help social cohesion,” I think the answer is almost certainly yes, even if we don’t know its precise boundaries.
Microagressions certainly exist. How much harm to they cause? Well, that’s going to be hard to measure. However, “no effect” is a weird null hypothesis.
Myself, I certainly want cis people more aware of trans issues. Likewise, I want them to know that it is more than just those who call me a “faggot” or a “tranny.” There are other small things that are hurtful. Can I prove that? Well, how could prove that to you, other than saying, “Dammit this hurts”?
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Furthermore, there is always something weird in saying “this might backfire.” The question becomes, how will it backfire?
The interesting thing is, the answer is often something like, “Well, white people will become even more shitty to minorities if we point out the ways they are currently shitty to minorities.”
I’m serious. Dig into how this is often discussed. That really is often the underlying logic.
(Example: “transgender rights drove people to elect Trump” is something that was actually said, with the underlying logic that transgender people should silently accept being second class because otherwise they’ll put us in the ovens. Which, they might put us in the ovens. Trumpism really is fascism, after all.)
If this is true, it seems to imply that the majority is even more bigoted than we thought. That would be a pity.Report
“That said, if you’re asking, “Hey, does basic politeness help social cohesion,” I think the answer is almost certainly yes, even if we don’t know its precise boundaries.”
One might say, for example, that assuming any perceived slight was made knowingly and with the direct intent to cause maximum harm, and reacting with angry denunciation, is outside those boundaries.Report
“If this is true, it seems to imply that the majority is even more bigoted than we thought.”
Or that it creates bigots.Report
Right. Using our patented “bigotry creation ray!”
How fragile are you?Report
Don’t you agree that the imposition of one person’s set of beliefs onto another creates tensions?Report
The problem with training people to perceive and react to “microaggressions” is that it’s exactly the same thing you’d do if you wanted to bring back dueling, where we teach everybody kill each other over perceived slights and insults.
Italians used to have that kind of honor culture, and people were killed all the time over nothing. The Italian rapier masters even taught how to troll for insults just so their students would have an excuse to kill their enemies. Even after rapiers fell out of fashion, they kept killing each other in knife fights over nothing up through the 1800’s.
Parts of England (the cavaliers) had strong elements of such an honor culture and it became established in the South. Murder was rampant, as were duels, whippings, and lynchings. In an honor culture, you not only have to respond with vengeance upon any sleight to your honor, you have to insult other people’s honor to show you aren’t a coward and will kill them where they stand.
Thankfully, Southern whites largely grew out of that and adopted the dignity culture, where you ignore such insults because they are beneath you. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
But now leftist idiots are pushing a victimhood culture, which like the old honor culture looks to aggressively punish people for perceived sleights, and even manufactures new insults out of whole cloth. But instead of defending one’s honor with physical courage, one whines to all the nearby adults and screams at them to go beat up or jail the perceived offender.
The victimhood culture is inherently unstable and unsustainable. It won’t last long.Report
Human nature being what it is, it’s going to take a herculean effort to de-escalate things.Report
Nah. All you have to do is refuse to play the victimhood game, most of which is concentrated at universities, and especially at elite universities.
Fratboy Jock: “Oh, I apologize for offending you, snowflake, but I can’t help it if I come from a long line of winners and you come from a long line of losers. That’s just the way good DNA and superior culture works, enhancing assets over generations, while bad DNA and inferior cultures does the opposite, leading to my high status and desirability, as opposed your low status and life prospects.
I’m sure you’ll go seek solace in the company of other losers, where you will talk about how badly you all suck at everything and how how unfair society is.
I am the embodiment of that unfairness in culture and genetics, and I revel in it. I’ve earned it as the inheritor of countless generations of not sucking balls. Perhaps if your parents drank less you’d have turned out better.”
Repeat as necessary.Report
I really see things differently. Seems to me that both sides are escalating, and believing themselves to be innocent victims. You don’t badger or embarrass people out of that. For example, I look at the way Northerners talk about Southerners, and Southerners get more resentful, and Northerners get more resentful, and it…seems familiar. You talk about the lonely person with the toxic personality? Picture 300 million people with toxic personalities split into two camps.Report
That’s why I’m suggesting an honor based response to the victimhood culture. One celebrates being a winner while the other celebrates being a loser. Thus there shouldn’t be a real conflict, kind of like the way our soldiers want to kill jihadists and the jihadists want to be martyred. It’s win-win.
More seriously though, the victimhood proponents aren’t having as much penetration in Southern universities, and I suspect some of the reason is that those still retain a lot of the older honor culture, where people wouldn’t brag about being victims and certainly wouldn’t go whining to parents about it.
The more prevalent dignity culture, which would have been heavily dominant in northern and elite universities, seems to be the one that had few defenses to the intrusion and establishment of the victimhood culture.
Ironically, the people at the elite universities are the last people on the planet who could claim victimhood over anything, which might actually be some kind of root cause. Perhaps they were subjected to a lot more status-oriented guilt growing up.
In sum, to combat the victimhood culture, brag, gloat, and don’t apologize for being awesome, successful, and dominant – like Trump. SJW’s will still whine about being victims, but perhaps mockery, derision, and insults will set them straight.Report
Huh? Trump, honorable? He’s as big a whiner as our last president. His schtick is identical to the SJW’s. Nothing’s your fault, nothing’s his fault, it’s always someone else out there who’s disrespecting you. It’s maybe a little less obvious because Trump has been attacked unfairly lately, but he cries and wets himself like a little baby any time he feels slighted. At least an infant can grow up to be honorable. Donald Trump represents exactly what I’m afraid of: both sides being equally petty.Report
Trump launched himself into the Presidency when, in the first debate, Megyn Kelly went after him with blood shooting out of her eyes and other places, and he just smacked her down.
All the other candidates live in fear of being called nasty names in the media. Trump revels in it. He eggs it on. He trolls them. He sets them up to attack him.
He’s like one of those movie monsters who gain power from the energy you throw at them.Report
Hummm…So he gets stronger by being vicious and hurtful. He feeds on other peoples pain. Yup that sounds like Trump. Not honorable of course, but yeah you got him. Glad to see you understand what you like about him.Report
I remember that. Wah, wah, wah, a girl disrespected me, so I’m going to make fun of her for having a c*nt.Report
More specifically, a girl was questioning me about my compulsion to pick fights with girls…Report
George,
Oh, that ol’ honor culture. Yeah, I well have heard about being “uppity”. At least up North they don’t cut you for actually trying to be bettern’ yer parents.Report
” the victimhood proponents aren’t having as much penetration in Southern universities,”
probably because Southern universities have had a culture of victimhood since 1862Report
And they can’t stop beating an old war horse.
He’s dead already, folks!Report
Free speech is the innocent side not the SJWs using violence. If they can’t learn that, yes there may be violence and maybe there should be. This can’t be situation where you tell both sides to stop b/c both sides haven’t acted the sameReport
That’s true for now. But that’s not how resentment works. It used to take a generation or two to go from aggrieved innocence to itching for a fight. In the information age it might be quicker.Report
Or that it creates bigots.
I’m certainly not assuming Veronica D accepts this view, but the claim that anyone who doesn’t use the genderless pronoun Xe is a bigot strikes me as creating bigots out of thin air. And insisting that a “Xe”-less speaker actually IS a bigot merely increases the likelihood of targeted resentment.
In one sense, it’s easy to create bigots: just identify a behavior someone currently exhibits and define THAT as evidence of bigotry.Report
I think we’re using similar words to refer to different things. I’m not talking how creating fake new categories of bigotry allows one to identify more people as bigots. I’m talking about how strident accusations of bigotry inflame people into genuine dislike of the groups making the accusations.
Really, it seems like I’m talking about that a lot. We’re as a society locked into behaviour that reinforces both sides’ animosity while making both sides believe that they’re in the right. You couldn’t choreograph it better.Report
They indeed do that, but I would also encourage more of it because that’s how we get more Trump. I like Trump, and hope we get more of him when the SJW’s manage to alienate ever larger swathes of society by denouncing them on social media as irredeemable xenophobic racist sexist cis-gendered bigots who should die in fire.
In short, what happens to the college girl with a toxic personality who constantly lashes out at everyone around her? She becomes a party of one.Report
I’m talking about how strident accusations of bigotry inflame people into genuine dislike of the groups making the accusations.
I was talking about that as well, just focusing on one way the dynamic plays out (in particular as it applies to the post-moderny SJW folks).Report
OK. Just trying to avoid confusion.Report
@stillwater — But be honest, have you ever met anyone in meatspace who says that you are a bigot if you mess up someone’s “xe” pronouns? Because I’m an actual trans person who has literally dozens of trans friends who in fact take “weird pronouns,” and literally none of them will call you a bigot if you have problems remembering their pronouns. It doesn’t happen.
I mean, I forget their pronouns constantly. Obviously. Pronouns are hard. Language doesn’t work that way. We do our best. However, when I inevitably screw up, my friends are pretty understanding.
For example, one friend prefers “ze/zir,” but won’t get too upset if you call zir “they/them” or even “she/her.” Pronouns are hard. Ze gets that. We all do our best.
Look, these are people with real gender dysphoria just trying to figure out how to make their lives work. Gender is weird. Decades ago, there was no vocabulary for this, so they suffered in silence, just feeling “off” all the time. Now they have a vocabulary, such as “genderqueer” or “non-binary” or whatever. So … if you had a friend with deep clinical depression, and you could help mitigating that by using slightly different words to talk to them, would you?
That’s what people are asking for.
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We do encounter bigots, of course. There are people who just refuse to listen, who refuse to accept the existence of gender dysphoria, or that they might play a role in mitigating this stuff. Honestly, it would be good for English to develop a common set of gender-neutral pronouns. We already have singular-they. Perhaps “ze/zir” or “xe/xir” (or whatever) is better. I dunno. Language changes bottom up, not top down. It’s a slow process.
That said, attitude reveals a lot. We can read people’s attitude. It’s usually pretty obvious when someone is just a shithead about trans stuff.
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Honestly this whole subthread kinda demonstrates my point. Microaggressions are real. Unconscious bias is real. Our System 1 versus System 2 minds do in fact lead us into racist/sexist/etc. behavior, even if our expressed values differ. This is obvious.
On the other hand, sooner or later someone will call you a “racist.” It will happen. It might hurt your feelings…
Does that “cause” someone to be a racist?
Ha! Fuck that. If you find the occasional “SJW” on Twitter as justification to hate LGBT people or black people or whatever — look, that shit was in your heart to start with. You’re just happy for an excuse to let it out. “White fragility” is a real thing.
Who’s the fucking snowflake here?
If you talk to people long enough, it’s usually pretty easy to distinguish those who have a good attitude about racism/sexism/etc. and those who are just mean spirited little shits.
Choose.Report
Honestly I think the most exhausting bit are the very privileged folks who have to be very publicly and loudly offended for *you* for any and every imagined slight.
If I am inadvertently rude to a transgender person and they call me on it, I am happy to learn and alter my behavior. If it comes from some other source… let’s just say my reaction will depend a lot on the delivery of their admonishment. Self righteousness and holier than thou attitudes burn through my goodwill in a big goddamn hurry.Report
@oscar-gordon — Oh gawd, there is little worse than over-zealous “allies.” And honestly, they’re just as insufferable to us as they are to everyone else. They show up in our spaces and suck up all the oxygen, centering themselves, endless blather.
To me this has more a psychological explanation, rather than a political one. There are always some people who are just psychologically needy. They need to be center of attention. In turn, some of them seem to glom onto to {insert minority group} as their special “mission.”
I’m not your fucking mission!
I can fight my own damn fight. Just, sometimes it helps to have support.
But support adds. Needy people do not add. They are a damn energy suck.
Gawd know we trans folks have a hard enough time figuring out our own shit, without having to negotiate the sad-snowflake feelings of some hypersensitive “ally.”
Anyway, yeah.Report
v,
When you let the needy people (who are often liars, because game theory on attention getting) take over the movement, your movement is going to have serious problems getting support from other people.
There’s multiple reasons Gay Rights worked and Trannie Rights isn’t working.Report
I worry about isolated demands for rigor.
Isolated? In academic research? Well, it is social psychology, so maybe.
However, “no effect” is a weird null hypothesis.
“No effect” is almost always the null hypothesis.Report
The interesting thing is, the answer is often something like, “Well, white people will become even more shitty to minorities if we point out the ways they are currently shitty to minorities.”
You understand that that isn’t the claim being made by this article, right? The proposed mechanism here is that teaching minority students to perceive ambiguous patterns of behavior as microaggressions is harmful to their psychological health directly, in ways that are not mediated by changes in others’ behavior.
Do you remember, for example, that video that was going around of a black college RA assaulting a white student for having dreadlocks, on the grounds that it was cultural appropriation? Now, it’s entirely possible that she was by nature, a shitty person whose antisocial tendencies would have manifested themselves in other ways if she had never heard of cultural appropriation. But it’s also possible that being introduced to the concept of cultural appropriation, by teaching her to perceive others’ (admittedly regrettable) fashion choices as personal slights, filled her with anger and caused her to engage in antisocial behavior when she otherwise might not have.
It’s hard to say, really, without conducting some kind of controlled experiment.Report
v,
Up to you whether you want to eat the poison pills. I’m just going to say that eating the poison pills is likely to make you vomit on people that would otherwise be on your side.
… that’s why they’re on offer.Report
E4 is the Amazon homeless story. Why are you so cruel Will? They are helping.Report
Will supports the soylent green solution to homelessness. 😉Report
H1 and H2 are related. Beside apathy between Red and Blue America, one reason why housing hasn’t become a focus in the primaries is that even the people who recognize it as an issue really disagree on what to do about it. You have the build more crowd and the housing is a human right crowd that favors a lot of fancy legislation but little actual building. There are also NIMBYs.
H4: The Jenga Building is near where I work.
H6: In a dark dystopia, you will soon be able to order them on prime. Amazon Servant.
Sc7: Hollywood doesn’t depict a lot of the actual studying and school work done by students who graduate either. Dealing with depressing realities or hard real life work is boring. Its better to show a bunch of young hot people having a rollicking good time or dealing with aspects of teenage years that don’t involve work. There hasn’t exactly been realistic depictions of college or graduate school in Hollywood movies either.
W5: Its an amazingly common form of theft.Report
[H1] The other problem about affordable housing is that people don’t actually want housing that’s built to be affordable in a particular market; they want the same housing that’s being built anywhere else, only cheaper.
Also, “The very high per-unit construction costs of affordable housing only make the problem more vexing: the pressure to make any project that gets constructed as distinctive, amenity-rich and environmentally friendly as possible, means that the limited number of public dollars end up building fewer units.”
As I’ve said elsewhere, maybe it was a bad idea to make every government action be a referendum on progressive politics.Report
Welp, first fairly straightforward indicator that Trump is going to lose the House in 2018.Report
Per Sc2, the old chestnut that being white means being racist. What will liberals think of next?Report
This liberal doesn’t think you’re a racist because you’re white [1]. This liberal thinks you’re a racist because you post stupid racist shit.
[1] [Redacted]Report
Don’t you understand? Conservatives only became racist because liberals called them racist so much!
So out of self defense…or liberal mind control….I’m honestly not sure of the causative element there. But I know it’s true, because many conservatives have told me that.Report
H1 and H2 are related. Contra our Mr. Cain, djw at LGM believes that the American public is roughly divided between people who want to live in suburbs, cities, and rural areas. The problem is that all of our housing policy is really tilted to suburban dwelling for a variety of reason and suburban preferences. It is getting better but condo approval is still hard. Seattle still shoots down a lot of multi-family units.
H4: I just don’t get the point of living that high up. If I had oddles to spend on housing, I’d go for a West Village Townhouse or a Brooklyn Brownstone type of thing.
W1: I wouldn’t want to be stuck behind a paywall either.Report
Seattle ins in a somewhat special situation because you have a lot of NIMBYs of various stripes and a bunch of Leftists who want to do something about housing but are deeply suspicious of the just build it argument. They prefer fancy legislative arrangements over the simpler solution.
Townhouses and Brownstones are for people wealthy enough to afford them but not wealthy enough to be paranoid of everyone and everything.Report
Seattle ins in a somewhat special situation because you have a lot of NIMBYs of various stripes and a bunch of Leftists who want to do something about housing but are deeply suspicious of the just build it argument.
The problem, of course, is that more building is the only affordable housing policy that actually works. Any attempt to make housing more affordable for some people without increasing supply will necessarily make it less affordable for everyone else.Report
The arguments around building new housing and “gentrification” often seem eerily similar to the arguments around free trade.Report
I have to wonder if the monied whites did more damage to those communities when they pulled capital out during white flight or when the put capital in during gentrification. The bastards destroy communities by their presence and their absence alike.Report
They ruin everything, the only answer is more white liberal guilt.Report
Any attempt to make housing more affordable for some people without increasing supply will necessarily make it less affordable for everyone else.
Well, technically, you could make it more affordable by reducing total demand. It’s hard to see how that makes any sense, unless we either convince people to live outside or kill a lot of them, but it is *technically* possible. 😉
But, more seriously, NIMBYism is a huge problem.
Right now, my fairly small city is going through a cheap housing crisis mostly brought on by the college continually expanding, which means college students are taking all the cheap housing.
And the only person who is building any cheap housing is a complete asshole, in all sorts of ways I do not want to get into. And people seem to want to blame her for this situation, and complain constantly about the development that goes on.
And I’m like: Look, you guys cannot complain about the *lack* of cheap housing at the same time you complain about people *building* cheap housing.
And you also cannot complain how the sole person who seems to be building cheap housing keeps those prices pretty high…it’s basic supply and demand, and she functionally has a monopoly because *no one else is competing with her*. She owns basically every rowhouse and apartment complex in this town, not because she’s running around buying them, but because *she is the only person who has ever built any*.
And people protest every one of them, because they don’t want ‘development’, and also because they hate her.
Except, of course, the college is going to *keep* expanding, and there is literally nothing the town can legally do about that. Housing will get more and more scarce…which means she can jack prices higher and higher, and be more and more abusive to the renters.
The townsfolk need to stop pointing fingers at her for ‘development’. (There’s plenty of other reasons to point fingers at her.), and start pointing fingers at *the other wealthy people who are literally just sitting on their land* and ask why *they* aren’t putting up any cheap housing.
But the people in my town, like the people in most places, are teh dumb and run around NIMBYing.Report
There are places were housing affordability problems are exerbated by housing stock being used as investment vehicles and shadow assets rather than housing for people who actually want to live there. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in a lot of free markets, because that investment stimulates production of supply but the lag time of investment of capital and supply production in housing is pretty big so the market isn’t so elastic.
So under these specific conditions, demand destruction by disincentivising holding housing units as assets and not using them to live in is probably a justifiable intervention.
Basically, the demand for housing you get from foriegn millionaires who don’t live in the area isn’t demand you want in your housing market. You want housing to be used productively by putting people near where they need to be, not being used as the equivalent of gold bricks.Report
…rather than housing for people who actually want to live there.
Could you elaborate? I’ve heard about big time investors buying up lots of cheap houses in depressed markets to fix up and rent them, but it seems you have something else in mind.Report
see here
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-15/bc-government’s-foreign-home-buyers-tax-impact-vancouver-home-pricesReport
Thanks. Very interesting article. (I used to read zerohedge religiously and for some reason fell outa the habit.)Report
Some of this stuff reminds me of the theories that oil futures were being bought up by shadowy wealthy operators and driving up prices at the pump for all of us. It neglects that ultimately, oil can either stay in the ground or get pumped out of the ground and used by somebody who pays to use it. All of the middle men are ultimately just middle men–they generally can’t store lakes of oil somewhere.
The “foreign investors” thing smells very much the same. Housing has value because people want to live in it. If investors are buying up property, they’re mostly either selling it or renting it, so the bulk of the market is still being driven by people who actually use the housing. There are only so many investors who can afford to buy a property and let it sit unused for years, hoping to make a capital gain. Absent some pretty serious speculation, we’re still ultimately talking about how many people are willing to pay money to live in a home in a particular location.Report
That would be the general theory, but ignores the concept that there would be a major class of investors looking for assets beyond the reach of the Chinese Communist party. Not so much your traditional investment vehicle, more like having a stash of gold bars for when you have to make a run from the heat.Report
But ultimately, the way this external investor class can actually drive up prices is by buying those units and then sitting on them. Unless the units they’re buying are left unoccupied, the fundamentals are still being driven by what people are willing to pay to occupy them. Their motivations and country of origin aren’t really relevant.
I’m sure some small percentage are being held by ultra-wealthy people who want a sixth summer home, but absent some data, it seems like that’s unlikely to be a real driving factor.Report
That’s the thing, the tendancy is to buy them and leave them unoccupied.Report
I’m really interested in seeing numbers on this. I’m sure it’s happening, but the claimed size of the effect really strains credulity. It keeps sounding like the oil stories of investors buying up and storing oil. Yes, it’s possible and there may even be people doing it, but how big is it compared to the size of the market overall?
Anecdotally, Chinese investors have purchased a couple of homes in my (very expensive, by national standards) neighborhood, but they’ve gone up for rent immediately. That seems like the more rational behavior.Report
In Vancouver, at least, vacancy rates seem to suggest that this is not a major issue.Report
There are places were housing affordability problems are exerbated by housing stock being used as investment vehicles and shadow assets rather than housing for people who actually want to live there. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in a lot of free markets, because that investment stimulates production of supply but the lag time of investment of capital and supply production in housing is pretty big so the market isn’t so elastic.
Oh, I agree that *is* happening. But it’s not what’s happening here.
What is happening here is that there are some fairly old and wealthy families in town that ended up owning most of the land around here.
*One* of them (Who actually married into one of the wealthy families, and got a lot of land that way, and then when her husband died she married an even wealthier person, although not one from here.) is an asshole…and *also* the only person who builds anything.
Everyone else *just sits on their land for no reason*.
I mean, I feel, in some sense, it’s commendable to say ‘I have enough money and don’t need more. I am happy with what I have.’. I often find myself wishing the person who *does* build stuff would do that, because she is, again, a professional asshole.
But *there is a finite amount of land in town*. Sell your land, you idiots. You can still be content rich people after that. Or hire commercial builders to put up a building, hire a rental management company to run the place, and, hey, free money, and you *still* own the thing if property values spike later.
We had, until recently, a huge *warehouse* on one side of the theatre I volunteer at, and an *empty lot* on the other side. They were both owned by the same person. The warehouse, let me clarify, was the *personal warehouse* of someone, he kept boats and stuff in it.
This was about 400 feet from THE CENTER OF TOWN. On a main road in and out of town. Between the town and the college, in fact. To the point that it would have made sense to build a street level shop on one end, and college housing below back to the other end. (The town side is higher than the college side by two stories. We’re a very hilly town.)
Nope! Personal warehouse! And empty lot!
He died a few years ago, and gave the lots to his two kids. The son appears to be an intelligent human being, he got the warehouse, and immediately built a *store* there on the street side. Wow, building a commercial building in the *center of town* to *make money*. What a strange and novel idea! Granted, half the stupid warehouse is still there, sticking out the lower back. Not sure what’s going on there. Also it’s inexplicably half general store, half *decorative mug* shop, which is…a very odd choice for a business premise, even in a tourist town. But it seems to make money, or at least he’s content to *lose* money with it, so whatever.
The daughter still hasn’t done anything with her lot. Please note this town is *completely desperate for parking* and she could probably make a ton of money just putting up a pay parking lot, or selling it to the city for a parking lot.
But I’m sure that completely empty lot that the city had to require her to maintain because she let it grow wild is bringing her great satisfaction.
We also had some rich guy turn half a block into a memorial park for his late son. I mean, sad and all, but…really? That’s what we’re doing with property here now? It’s not like that was a park the kid loved or something, it was entirely built after he died. And there is the *actual* town park, taking up an entire block, one block away, so…did we really need another park right there? You know, dude, you probably could have paid to put up a pavillion or something in the existing park and named it after him.Report
Well, I would certainly phrase it differently.
Given where we are today, and ignoring for the moment how we got here, unless you’re fabulously wealthy all housing represents a set of compromises: cost, job, schools, family [1], lifestyle choices, etc. For ~55% of people, the suburbs offer the best compromise. If the ‘burbs didn’t, that many people wouldn’t live there.
Lots of policies — and more importantly, preferences — have got us here. Rail made massive economies of scale possible in manufacturing, so manufacturing moved out of the city (but not too far, if you have 5,000 workers you need enough nearby housing). All-weather personal transportation quickly became enormously popular. Ubiquitous telephone and cars did the same thing for much routine white-collar work that rail did for manufacturing (I would argue that the huge movement of federal staffing to the suburbs and exurbs during WWII and shortly after was much more important than the Interstate system for that change). All-white public schools were very popular (enough so to pass state-level laws to lock most large urban core cities up such that they could no long annex). A set of preferences that could be realized in the ‘burbs, but not the urban core or rural areas.
I encourage people who think 33/33/33 is a better split than 22/55/23 to convince enough voters to change things. I wish them luck if their plans would convert US cities to look more like Hong Kong — I think they’ll need it. I urge them to think about large complex systems that often react in unexpected ways when you constrain them. As an example, consider “Denver’s light rail system”, as coastal publications tend to phrase it — but when you look at the details, it’s really Denver’s suburbs building a light-rail system that will strengthen the inner-ring suburbs more so than Denver.
[1] At this point in my life, I would prefer a 1200 sq ft hard loft, windows on two sides, most of my errands (groceries, sundries, hardware, library) within walking distance, high-speed data, space for one car. My wife would prefer a sprawling ranch out at the boundary between suburb and exurb. So, until one or the other of us’s knees give up and we have to settle it, we’ll stay in the modest two-story inner-ring suburb that fit our lifestyle from years ago.Report
[H2] The issue in the Bay Area is that there isn’t really any room to put more houses. I’m house shopping right now. If I were willing to go over one of the nearby mountain ranges, the price would drop by half. But, I’m not, and neither are most other people. That’s what the price signal says.
I’m not a fan that characterizes this as Blue snobbiness, I must say.
As for lack of building, my (and Google’s) home town, Mountain View, is building apartments/condos at a prodigious rate. And yet, of course, we read national stories about Palo Alto and how they hate any development at all, and how a tiny lot with a shack on it is worth a million and a half. But that’s Palo Alto. It makes good copy, and people will click on it. Meanwhile, the issue in Mountain View is going to be getting all those people in all those new apartments to work at Google. There are two overpasses over 101, they are jammed morning and night, as is the primary offramp from CA 85 in the morning. I think most of these apartment dwellers are going to take their bikes, or their skateboards (or I’ve seen a unicycle rider), or a Google-sponsored shuttle to work.
Sunnyvale is building lots of units, too. As is Santa Clara and San Jose, I expect. Maybe Redwood City, too. We don’t really have the legal structure to force the Palo Altos and Athertons of the world (Why haven’t I seen pieces about how terrible Atherton is? It is terrible. It’s a bunch of giant estates, and no road maintenance. Major anti-development. But no, we have to talk about PA.)
We are rapidly urbanizing. Now there are reports that rents are weakening. The cited piece is a year old, and the situation has evolved. Though I’ve heard something about rent control in MV, too. I’m not a big fan.Report
Haven’t been there for five years or so, but I’m pretty sure I saw a bunch of single-family houses and/or duplexes out in Outer Sunset. There may not be vacant lots all over the place, but there’s room to build up.Report
Yeah, San Francisco doesn’t have a lot of undeveloped land (unless you want to start filling in Golden Gate Park, I guess), but most of the city has basically suburban density. There is a ton of potential to build up.Report
Even without the political issues of building up, your still going to need to buy out the landowners before you can build up. That could be an expensive proposition.Report
San Jose has a number of apartment units going up in the south end of town (and they are quietly inching towards declaring the old rocket-factory land “clean” so they can build there too.)
These apartments are renting for $3000 a month. I bought a house in 2007 and my mortgage isn’t that high.Report
[H2]: One of the other issues is location, of course. Just like Frisco and other places, I live in an area that’s geographically desirable-good schools for the families, close to major gov’t/civilian employers. Ergo, housing costs a boatload. A 20 minute drive northwest yields lower housing prices by at least 50-100K.
[H4] If I was “forced” to live in a city like Manhattan, this is exactly what I would choose. Assuming there is a landing pad for a helicopter.
[Sc2]: Just say it like this: White women are racists. (76% of all teachers are women) That should be news to all the public school teachers fighting for “diversity”.Report
[H5] I found this a little irritating in tone. I mean, isn’t this the same line of reasoning my cousin made when complaining about how the Feds had to move in to help New Orleans after Katrina? There can’t not be a city where New Orleans is. It’s just something we have to cope with.
But then, I find I agree with the policy prescriptions in this piece. Mandatory flood insurance, both for municipalities and homeowners. And mandatory disclosures of flood risk on home sale. CA already has this. I didn’t realize that Canada didn’t. So yeah. Do that.Report
The piece is too Canadian centric to be that applicable to the U.S., at least regarding rivine flooding. The U.S. government’s flood insurance program has been used to require flooded homes to be improved against flooding, or they’ve been bought-out to be torn down. Whole cities have been relocated. (There was an article on Miami flooding that mistakenly suggested that the U.S. just relocated its first community due to flooding; this was merely the first coastal relocation) The program is also used to force local governments to zone against floodplain development.
It also sounds like the flood-plain mapping is not as good as it is in the U.S.; the FEMA flood maps have long been widely available for planning purposes and are online. There probably needs to be a distinction made though between natural flooding and the type of urban rainfall events that can overcome a city’s drainage system.Report
There’s a whole lot more we can do to build homes to survive flooding, but such things are expensive, and there’s a lot of people in flood prone areas who are barely middle class.Report
The other issue is the surprising number of places that turn out to be flood risks. Like, I’m pretty sure that nobody expected the middle of San Jose to ever be under four feet of water.Report
Ruh-roh.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors this week to seek the maximum punishment for drug offenses, in one of the clearest breaks yet from the policies of the Justice Department under the Obama administration.
Question: Does anyone really want this? The public, I mean.Report
Did you meet the leviathan? You should really meet the leviathan.Report
I alluded to this above… it strikes me as an indicator that Trump’s going to lose the House in 2018.
His base wants many things, but most definitely *NOT* something like this.Report
Between the unpopularity of the AHCA, Comeygate, and Sessions new drug enforcement policy the Democrats may win the House merely with a bite-and-hold strategy and not have to undergo any huge strategic revision of platform and so on. They do have to actually field candidates and campaign in red districts and actually play to win, tho. Which is something they’re not very good at. So it’s not like a done deal. Never underestimate the incompetence of the DNC.Report
Well, “not enforcing the law” was never anything more than a short-term solution anyway. The law needs to change.
Maybe the DNC will run on changing the law.Report
You can make a lot of political hay out of something people hate, and very successfully, while being super-vague about what you’ll do instead. Often that’s much better politics than the alternative.
See, “Obamacare is bad!” vs. “Let’s replace Obamacare with the AHCA!”Report
I hate to say it but it makes me wonder if it isn’t the first step to a Ruby Ridge or Waco type scenario- just over pot instead of federal firearm regulations.Report
I agree 100%.
The only way to avert such a thing is to change the law.
We have established that the FDA can’t do it and the Surgeon General can’t do it… looks like it’s up to Congress.Report
‘Up to Congress..’ Talk about your discouraging phrases.Report
Ya know that bizarre feeling when you encounter a belief so distant and seemingly confused as to be almost incomprehensible? I feel like that about folks who think pot should be criminalized to the fullest extent of the law.Report
I feel similarly. I’d like to think that there isn’t really a constituency for it among regular voters and it’s more inertia, law enforcement, and general gut preference for politicians who are ‘tough on crime’ but who really knows?
Edit to add there are a lot of people who maybe don’t want their kids doing it but don’t really understand the way prohibition works. I guess that could be a big bloc of support.Report
It’s not really that alien. When it quickly became clear that the Volstead Act was unenforceable and Prohibition needed some liberalization to include beer and light wines, the Drys refused to give an inch. To them Prohibition meant no alcohol and they were not going to bend. It’s the same with Drug Warriors.Report
I’m not certain, but I’d venture to guess there is some segment of the population that wants this through some combination of A) thinking the effects of drugs Reefer-Madness style, B) seeing the use of drugs as a moral failing, and C) somehow remaining fairly isolated from the very real effects of drugs and drug prohibition.Report
Sure. But it’s a losing proposition politically, seems to me. That’s why I find Sessions’ decision here so interesting. Since cracking down on the reefer is politically dicey at best and a disaster in legalized/decriminalized states at worst, he’s unilaterally decided to take the war on drugs to a new level without regard to the political costs. I mean, we already know what happens: it doesn’t curtail drug use, it increases incarceration rates for victimless crimes, and it doesn’t address the underlying social problems drug use creates. Couple it with reduced funding for opioid addiction programs and you’ve got the potential for a policy disaster, one easily attacked by Dems and moderate conservatives.Report
Sessions is something people say they want in pol’s. He is a True Believer. That’s great when he is on your side but looks like a freakin maniac on the other side. He is simply sure that he is correct. He probably has Dirty Harry playing constantly on a loop in the back of his mind.Report
I have never understood the enthusiasm for true believers. I want representatives I can push around, not ones I can’t!Report
I agree. It’s good to have values and lines beyond which you will not go and beliefs, but being able to moderate them and work with others through compromise is just as important.Report
You want to blackmail your representatives?
*eyebrow*Report
No.Report
Then you are both No Fun and incapable of pushing representatives around. Perhaps you should try the carrot, if you won’t use the stick?
$1000 is about the going rate for a “bribe” (sent to the reelection effort).Report
I think Kimmi has confused ‘blackmail’ with ‘extortion’, and pillsy hasn’t.
For some reason, that’s a very common mistake. Blackmail is a form of extortion, but all extortion is not blackmail.
pillsy, like most of us, want to be able to *extort(1)* our elected officials, by threatening to unelect them if they don’t do what we want.
1) This is not technically extortion, which requires illegal or unethical behavior as the threat. But whatever. It’s a metaphor.Report
David,
Realpolitik, kiddo. You got a whip, someone else has a bigger bullwhip. Who you THINK gonna get listened to?
(In actuality, if you can get enough people grumpy, pols will listen. But it takes BIG SHIT to piss enough people off).Report
Sessions is something people say they want in pol’s.
But how many people? That’s my question. I know there are lots of folks on the reactionary right who think more punition will solve our current cultural crises, but I think they are fewer than their outsized voice implies. Eg, Trump’s voters are not in favor of these sorts of policies. As are most Dems.Report
Among the righteous socon old white guy demographic Sessions is typical. Trump and the R’s have a lot of those people as donors, party officials and state level peeps. Especially among some of the very rich but secretive donors, Sessions is The Man.
While Trump is not religious, the old white guy demo does love it some harsh punishment for those people. Trump always has been that way. So i’m sure between Sessions and Trump this kind of thing seems normal and what everybody believes.Report
{{I know.}}Report
Confirmation bias is the rule of the day with the Trump admin.Report
I agree it is a losing proposition. I’m simply answering the question as to whether or not any part of the public does.
I think a small segment of virtue warriors think this is GRAND news.Report
Ahh. I shoulda been a little clearer in the above question. What I was interested in is whether Sessions’ policy change helps the GOP win more elections. Seems to me it won’t and that it’s another example of the GOP advocating policies which the base rejects. (Which is why we have Trump!)Report
What strikes me as oddest is that the tide is, seriously, turning on this.
29 states plus DC have legalized Medicinal.
That not the magic number of 38, but we see a definite shift in public opinion.
Perhaps legalized recreational is a pipe dream on a national level… but Schedule 3 isn’t.
I don’t understand it.Report
Jeff Sessions and other conservatives believe drugs are bad and people should be punished for using them and either think the support for pot is overrated or they don’t care.
It’s not that complicated.Report
I don’t think this is quite right. I think a Rubio Administration or something—an ordinary White House staffed by ordinary professionals—wouldn’t have their AG haring off after this stuff, even if their AG were a dyed-in-the-wool Drug Warrior.
Conservatives may will still have a negative reaction to drugs and want drug crackdowns, but that doesn’t mean there’s a big constituency for it. Even Lawn Order [1] conservatives seem to be much more focused on other kinds of infractions these days.
[1] There is an actual landscaping business called Lawn Order around here. They even have the “Produced by Dick Wolf” font on their signs!Report
They also think that the law is the law, and giving people “leeway” allows them to decide that certain groups deserve special favors.
See below re: “zero tolerance”. Like, white teenagers get “he’s a good kid who’s learned his lesson”, black adults go to prison for ten years.
I’m sure the guys at Popehat can tell you all about prosecutorial discretion and how great it isn’t.Report
Certain drugs, obtained in certain ways. Haven’t heard Sessions calling out MDs who overprescribe opioids with threats of jail time. Where do most Americans with an opioid problem get their drugs? Big pharma. How can you approach that problem? Statistics in the states that have legalized marijuana, after the distribution system is set up, suggest that legal weed helps. There’s a reason the drug company that holds the most patents on synthetic opioids spent big dollars in California opposing legalization.Report
Session’s policy doesn’t have anything to do with pot legalization. It’s about how to charge people who have committed multiple crimes. (Charge the highest unless fairness dictates otherwise, in which case make a record and get the approval of the office supervisor)
Whether this is politically popular or not, we’re mostly talking about nudging prosecutorial discretion (which is mostly independent of DC anyway) within a Congressional framework. It’s the laws . . .Report
Oh, I wasn’t trying to imply that it was.
As for the “multiple crimes”, I’m rather expecting busts of most of the growers for the various dispensaries around the country for intent to distribute.
I suppose that, in the short term, we could hope for something like jury nullification… but hope is not a plan.Report
I think once its revealed that the press accounts explaining the policy were cribbed from NORML, you may be able to relax. This is a generous assessment of the media coverage: Misreporting of the Sessions MemoReport
I suspect the people who dislike it the most are already in blue areas. In red/purple, it’s probably more neutral (not a winner, due to safely red).Report
Colorado isn’t exactly Bluetopia though. It’s just that the folks in the Red parts of the state (of which there are many) are much more focused on other things.Report
El Muneco,
Here are some national poll numbers from 2016:
Marijuana legalization is particularly popular among Democrats (70 percent support) and independents (65 percent). Nearly half (47 percent) of Republican voters support legalization as well.
Nearly half of GOP voters support Peter Tosh!Report
Which is basically what I said – people who might vote for an R candidate in the future are almost exactly evenly split. For a D, yeah, it’s potential suicide. For an R it doesn’t move the needle either way, so it’s a relatively safe way to posture.Report
But, 95% of those GOP voters aren’t going to the ones arrested, so ya’ know, better make sure Donald Trump can cut taxes and regulations.Report
Yes, plenty of the public really like this. Some people really truly believe in harsh punishments and think drugs are terrible.Report
The Democrats won’t have a chance of winning back the House because all their voters are going to be in prison for drug offenses.Report
Say what? We should stop calling the Secret Service in on the gun runners?
*eyeroll*Report
Heh. The goal of GOP policy revealed.Report
On the other hand, their candidates will be running unopposed, because the only explanation for the behavior of the House GOP is that they’re all high as kites.Report
People who say shit like that have very little imagination.Report
For both H4 and Sc7 I was looking for an Andy Borowitz byline.Report
NHS has just been hit by a ransomware attack.
If they have a James Bond hidden somewhere in the back, they really should get him out to help deal with this.Report
It’s the CDC that hires folks like him…Report
So my side can sometimes be silly. A Republican Senator improvised on TV and suggested that Merrick Garland replace Comey as the head of the FBI. Most lefty media pointed out that this is a horrible idea because:
1. Merrick Garland has a lifetime appointment as a DC Circuit Judge.
2. The Head of the FBI can be fired at will.
Yet Larry Summers and Amy Koblacher and maybe some other people tweeted that Garland would be a wonderful replacement pick. What’s going on here? Is there just a deep denial of the clown in the White House and deep partisanship/negative feelings.Report
Weigel’s explanation is good.Report
“The Head of the FBI can be fired at will.”
And won’t Will be surprised when it happens.Report
Maybe Trump can offer some cushy cabinet positions to Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan too. Sounds legit.Report
[Sc4] I recall P.J. O’Rourke: “To be fair, the Tri-Delts and B-School grinders weren’t interested in that stuff any more than I was. They crammed and took their Econ final and then forgot everything in the book so that they could get a diploma and then get a job from someone else who’d crammed and took his Econ final and then forgot everything in the book.”Report
Sc7 – I believe it was either Beavis or Butthead who once said, “why don’t they make movies about what schools are really like, where the teachers don’t care and nobody learns anything?”.
Saved By The Bell showed us that Elizabeth Berkley can’t act, and that turned out to be true in real life.Report
[Sc2] This is, by the way, the only other good reason for Zero Tolerance policies–because administrators do, in fact, treat black students differently from white ones. White students get “he’s a good kid really”, “do we want to wreck his future”, “I’m sure he’s learned a lesson”, “it was only this one time”. Black students aren’t allowed to graduate with the rest of their class.Report
I’m aware of that good reason for Zero Tolerance, but I didn’t know there was another one.Report
It’s sort of the flip side of that one. If ZT is in effect, then any punishment is handed out due to the application of an impartial, objective, and transparent system, as opposed to pernicious racist ideology; and so, ma’am, that’s why you can’t sue me on civil-rights grounds for sending your son to detention three times last week.Report
Ah, yeah, gotcha.Report
[Sp4] I wouldn’t say this is new, it’s been flying since the mid-2000s (and was designed back in the 90s) but two years in orbit followed by autonomous reentry and landing is pretty cool.Report
They’ve certainly done a good job of keeping it quiet, though. Compared to say, the B-2 at a similar point in its development.Report
Not so much keeping it quiet than just not having a PR rep assigned to it. There were some pretty well publicized failures of similar tech some years ago, once burned and all that.Report
Skimming over stuff, I think I read that amateur orbital hobbyists have tracked this thing, but that news never really made it out of the hobbyist forums. Which is weird in this day and age, when any random tidbit will get picked up first by conspiracy sites, then more mainstream pubs.
(Like not even Russian propanda news picked this up, and it’s right in their wheelhouse. I mean, they call one of their pubs Sputnik!)Report
I read this as pubs=taverns.
I think I prefer my read, it’s more entertaining.Report
[H2] An interesting bit is the fact that Democrat-voting regions are also the most unequal.
So maybe the reason that Democrats are so concerned about economic inequality is that they’re concentrated it around themselves, where as Republicans are less concerned because they’ve moved to regions with economic statuses similar to their own.Report
You just blew my mind.Report
H6 – Sure, you *think* giving the homeless a home would reduce their homelessness, but they’d probably just spend that home on drugs and booze.
W5 – Here’s a fun question: Why does wage theft require a *lawsuit* to correct? Whereas a worker stealing from the register is a *criminal* offense?
Someone’s about to point out that wage theft is a consensual agreement. The worker *agrees* to work below min wage, he *agrees* to clock out andf keep working, etc. It’s an *illegal* one, but an agreement nevertheless.
But this is a somewhat dubious distinction…so is prostitution, drug trade, etc, and yet *those* are criminal offenses.
Moreover, some of those ‘wage thefts’ already seem to be *criminal* thefts, like ‘the boss pocketing tips’ story in the article. To quote the U.S. Department of Labor: Tips are the property of the employee. The employer is prohibited from using an employee’s tips for any reason other than as a credit against its minimum wage obligation to the employee (“tip credit”) or in furtherance of a valid tip pool.
It’s not legal for companies to take tips from employees. This even applies to employees *who aren’t supposed to be tipped*. The company can say an employees cannot accept tips, and fire them if they do accept them, but they cannot make that employee hand over these ‘unallowed’ tips to them. The tips are, again, literally the property of the person who is tipped, barring a *very specific* exception in the law for tip pools that have to be run in a specific way under certain rules…and even with a tip pool the company cannot *keep* any of the tips, just give them out to other, different employees.
And, no, this wasn’t a tip pool, which a) would only include staff customarily tipped, but b) more importantly, requires tips be distributed equally based on time, not one guy taking them. (I mean, I’m sure there’s some hypothetical situation where some jackass manager calls himself a ‘host’ or something and claims he is eligible for a share of the tip pool, despite not doing anything or even being on the floor. But that’s not the situation described here.)
So why was this guy *sued* and had a judgement against him? Why wasn’t he *arrested for theft and thrown in jail*? I mean, he wasn’t stealing much at a time, but *in total* he stole a hell of a lot of money. We’ve had people arrested for stealing $20 a day for month from a register, why not a guy stealing $50 in tips a day from the employees?
Oh, right. Because we *care* when employees steal from businesses, but not when businesses, or business owners, steal from employees.
Likewise, that article, for some reason, completely avoids the ‘doctoring the books’ form of wage theft, where employers either change the hours worked, or just do the math wrong.Report
This is a good question for our menagerie of lawyers. Why does wage theft have to be pursued through civil suit, but stealing from the till is a matter for the police?Report
1) There is a difference btw/ a right to money and possession of money. If the person does not possess money, then it cannot have been stolen. Its the same reasoning with bounced checks. I pay for goods with a check that bounces, I didn’t steal the good, I simply still owe for it.
2) States have passed laws criminalizing wage theft (and bouncing checks). In my state wage theft is a misdemeanor on the first offence, a felony on the second.
3) When there are both civil and criminal avenues available, prosecutors may be reluctant to press charges when they feel the primary harm is to the individual, who has adequate civil remedies (particularly where there are attorney fees and penalties available to the victim).Report
3) When there are both civil and criminal avenues available, prosecutors may be reluctant to press charges when they feel the primary harm is to the individual, who has adequate civil remedies (particularly where there are attorney fees and penalties available to the victim).
That cannot possibly make *less* sense as a justification.
For one thing, almost all wage theft is done to *poor* people, who are *exceptionally* unable to pursue civil remedies.
For another thing, pursuing this in court, almost by definition, requires people *leave their job*, or at least risk being fired, to start this suit, which is not a particular good choice even for non-poor people.
For a third thing, the *individual returns* are usually very low. If someone working min wage is having their two legally-mandated 15 min paid breaks stolen and also being asked to work thirty minutes off the clock every night, for an average hour of stolen wages…that’s about $50 worth of wages a week, which means recovering a month of those wages would give them $200, or approximately *one hour* of a lawyer’s time.
Recovering $200 a month is a lot to a min wage worker. It’s not particularly a lot to a lawyer.
And saying ‘they can recover attorney fees’ doesn’t change anything, because a) that requires they win, and b) they probably don’t *know* that, and aren’t going to pay a lawyer to find out! Oh, and c) sometimes even if they win, as the article points out, they *still* won’t get any money from it because the place folds.
Or, to put it another way…if this problem was so easy to solve with lawsuits, we *wouldn’t have more wage theft than all other theft combined*.Report
It happened to me. Company with held money for benefits and 401k (and taxes), and didn’t deposit it. Some combination of being evil and incompetent. I didn’t pursue it because life is too short and I thought they wouldn’t have any money after the IRS took theirs.
A group of others did and eventually got like 15%(ish) back on the dollar, so I left money on the table but whatever.
They managed to destroy their business, several ended up in jail, they would have gotten thrown off the worksite if all of their employees hadn’t quit first (Fortune 500’s don’t like it when their Contracting Companies pull this kind of nonsense).
Massively ugly shitshow but I’m not sure how, or even why, we increase the level of punishment on things which already ended so badly for the scum in charge.
But that level of drama is both a problem and an opportunity. I coldly ignored the drama and used the situation to get a really large raise with a different contracting company.Report
Wage theft is also treated like a civil suit because its seen as falling under the realm of contract and labor law rather than criminal law. The employer is breaking their contract with the employees by not paying them the agreed upon wage or salary. The employees do not have the money in possession as PD Shaw pointed out but merely aren’t given what they were promised, so the employer isn’t taking from them in the literal sense like if the employer broke into their car and ran off with it for some reason.Report
Wage theft is also treated like a civil suit because its seen as falling under the realm of contract and labor law rather than criminal law.
That’s just begging the question. *Prostitution* is clearly a contractual situation (Although verbal.), and is literally a form of labor, but *it* is a criminal offense.
If you can make people consensually agreeing to money in exchange for sex labor illegal, you can make people consensually agreeing to *not enough money* in change for any labor illegal!
Hell, if you can make *soliciting* prostitution illegal, you can make *asking* someone to take less than min wage illegal.
The employees do not have the money in possession as PD Shaw pointed out but merely aren’t given what they were promised, so the employer isn’t taking from them in the literal sense like if the employer broke into their car and ran off with it for some reason.
Erm, how is breaking into a car and taking the employee’s money from that any different than the boss walking up to the table and taking *the employee’s money* from that? Because that seems to be what the article is talking about with ‘pocketing the staff’s tips’.
As I said, and the Federal courts have made crystal clear, if someone tips you money in return for a service, that money is, legally, 100%, now your money. Even if your boss says otherwise. (Although you may be required to turn it over to a properly operated tip pool.)
Doesn’t matter if it’s still sitting out on the table and hasn’t been collected yet…people don’t have a right to just steal money on the grounds ‘It was just laying around’, especially when it’s clear who the actual owner is and they’ll be there shortly to get it. (I.e., it’s clearly not abandoned in any sense.)Report
“If you can make people consensually agreeing to money in exchange for sex labor illegal, you can make people consensually agreeing to *not enough money* in change for any labor illegal!”
Keep going with this, I’m looking forward to you getting all the way to Freeman On The Land.
“As I said, and the Federal courts have made crystal clear, if someone tips you money in return for a service, that money is, legally, 100%, now your money.”
What I assume is that customers were paying by credit card and adding an overpayment for “tip”, but the restaurant owner was keeping that money instead of disbursing it to the employee. So it was never actually the employee’s money; it was paid to the restaurant with the intent that it be passed on the employee.
I am in no way saying this should happen, but this is how it could be the case that keeping tips could be a civil suit rather than a criminal issue.Report
Keep going with this, I’m looking forward to you getting all the way to Freeman On The Land.
I’m really going the wrong direction for that. They’re using it to show the government’s ability to outlaw private consensual action is near infinite and thus wrong, I’m saying the government’s ability to outlaw private consensual action is near infinite and thus…there’s no logical reason to apply it only to sex.
So it was never actually the employee’s money; it was paid to the restaurant with the intent that it be passed on the employee.
No. The courts and laws are very clear about that. That’s the employee’s money.
It might be in the *possession* of the restaurant, it might even be in their back accounts…but it’s still literally the employee’s money.
You’re thinking this is failure to pay them money *owed* to them. It’s not. *A tip is their money* from the second it is given. So this is failure to *give people something that is legally their property*, which is an entirely different thing.
Moreover, just refusing to give the property over is bad enough, but then they use the property for themselves.
This literally defined as ‘theft’. It is not the common theft by taking, it is called theft by *conversion*. Taking property that legally belongs to someone else, that you have possession of for some entirely legal reason, and instead of handing it back, or keeping it for them, you ‘convert’ it into your own property with the intent of never giving it back.
That is a crime most commonly called embezzlement. Or sometime it’s still under theft.
If an employee happens to be in possession of money that an employer legally owns (For example, if they are a cashier that has just been handed it in exchange for goods), and instead of turning it over to the employer(1), they keep it for themselves, that’s theft by conversion, aka, embezzlement.
Likewise, if an *employer* happens to be in possession of money that the *employee* legally owns (For example, if they run a credit card system that an employee’s tip has been run through), and instead of turning it over to the employee, they keep it for themselves, that is *also* theft by conversion, aka, embezzlement.
One of those behaviors gets investigated by the police and people are prosecuted for embezzlement. The other is completely ignored by the police.
1) If they ‘turn it over’ by putting it in the till, and then take it back out later, that can be interpreted as normal ‘theft’ from the till, but if they pocket the money when first handed it and it never makes it to the ‘possession’ of the store, it’s technically embezzlement instead. (And really both are embezzlement, because the premise of embezzlement is the thieve has permission to possess the money, just not to turn it into their own money…and cashiers have permission to physically take money from the till as part of their job duties.)Report
@pd-shaw @leeesq
Thanks!Report
As for microagressions…I think a rather serious mistake was made, at the start, in *naming* it that.
And then, as the article points out, there were entire houses built in clouds about them, all sorts of claims that, frankly, could not be true or basically everyone in existence would be a mess.
There *are* things, accidental things, that certain people have to put up with *all the time*, and it is, indeed, nice for people to learn ‘Hey, maybe stop assuming all people of Asian ethnicity are from another country and being being surprised when they were born in America. That is *really damn annoying*, and racist. We know you’re not *meaning* it to be racist, you have no malicious intent…but *really is* racist, so stop.’
Likewise, not every disabled person want to give long explanations of their disability, and they certainly don’t want to have to *justify* how disabled they are because you think they’re not disabled enough to park in that handicapped space.
Would you ask anyone else about the state of their junk? No? Then why are you asking trans people?
I mean, these things are real, they are actual hassles minorities have to put up with, and people need to learn not to do that. Stop assuming things based on race or ethnicity or disability or whatever. Not just negative things…just stop assuming shit about people, period, because that person is spending *days* of time every year having to deal with people like you. Even positive assumptions! Even innocent questions.
We are a pluralistic nation, so perhaps the go-to conversational topic *shouldn’t* instantly be ‘How this person seems slightly different than a straight cis white person’ 50% of the time. I suspect they’ve, uh, gotten tired of talking about that. Stop trying to make everything about them be whatever ‘difference’ they have. (And have you ever noticed you *don’t* seem to do that to white people: *walks up to blonde person* So, you from Sweden?)
So the idea of ‘microagressions’ is reasonable. It’s just prejudice, and it’s not even the ‘malicious’ sort of prejudice…it’s just a constant low-level annoyance with well-meaning idiots.
And the word ‘prejudice’ could have been used, or, even better, a word with *less* negative connotations than it. Like, oh ‘presumptions’. ‘Stop being so ‘presumptive’ about people. People who are slightly different have to face and correct all sorts of presumptions from random people, near-constantly…don’t be one of those people. Just let them be. Even if it’s interesting to you, *it’s almost certainly not interesting to them*.’ That works.
But instead the name went in the exact *opposite* direction, making it, frankly, sound worse than outright discrimination. It’s not just discrimination, it’s an *aggression*. (Please note the definition of aggression *requires* hostility or violence, aka, some sort of malice, whereas the entire concept here is *non*-malicious acts. The name is a deliberate lie!)
Moreover, it seems to encompass anything from completely innocent things, to deliberate offensive things….which already *had* a perfectly good term of ‘bigotry’. I can’t imagine how this regroup is helping.
—
And then, on top of that, it turned into a giant incestuous nonsense in academia, with all sorts of supposed ‘work’ and ‘theories’ done on it before anyone outside really understood it at all. Yeah, that was really stupid.
But I won’t say ‘this might backfire on minorities’, because that’s utter bullshit in two ways:
1) minorities are always asked to be polite until they get their rights, and then nothing happens. I won’t ask anyone to delay anything.
But, while not saying ‘minorities should wait to fix it’, I will instead say ‘while everyone is being taught about this, and behavior corrected, perhaps nonsense shouldn’t be made up about it by academics’.
This is basically a *politeness tweak*. People are basically being unwittingly rude. They will probably stop if they’re just taught that.
People being *deliberately* rude to minorities are something else entirely, and are mostly disapproved of…which is why *also* calling that microagressions is not helping anything! (And if that deliberate rudeness *isn’t* disapproved of by people around them, it’s hard to see the concept of ‘microagressions’ making any ground at all with them, so not really sure of the point there.)
2) that seems to assume that *minorities*, in some weird collective sense, are behind the idea of microagressions, which is, uh, racist. (Duh.) Minorities didn’t do this. This is some academics who turned this thing into gibberish and gave it the name and all sorts of things.
*Minorities* just pointed out ‘Look, everyone seems to innocently do X to us, and we know there’s no harm intended, but we have to deal with it constantly. And we wish people knew that and would stop.’. That was an entirely reasonable thing to point out. It was even reasonable to pull all those Xs together and maybe try to correct them all at once in a generalized way.
It was some tiny fraction of people, some who probably aren’t even minorities, who invented this entire framework around it, decided it was the worse thing ever, and ran off into lunacy with it.Report
Excellent comment, especially regarding the naming of this.Report
Solid comment. “This academic work about people being thoughtlessly rude and prejudiced is half-baked,” is a very different statement from, “There’s nothing wrong with being thoughtlessly rude and prejudiced.”
Actually quantifying the badness of even the most self-evidently bad things isn’t so easy, but is often not so necessary.Report
Actually quantifying the badness of even the most self-evidently bad things isn’t so easy, but is often not so necessary.
Indeed.
I’m sure it is reasonable, at some point, to try to figure out exactly how this sort of thing effects people.
But, well, it’s just inadvertent rudeness. The thing that people *actually* need to be taught is that certain, seemingly friendly things, are annoying as hell to the people who have to put up with them all the time.
We don’t run around assuming the black guy wants to eat fried chicken, because we understand, while perhaps not being a *negative* stereotype, it’s still somewhat stupid and racist.
Likewise, if someone said ‘You know, maybe don’t assume the ‘foreign looking guy’ is from another country. Don’t instantly make their origins the topic of conversation.’, we could easily learn to deal with that too!
In fact, I managed to hear *that* at some point, in high school, twenty years ago, way before this ‘microaggression’ concept happened. And it doesn’t hurt, in college, to make those sort of assumptions about people the topic of discussion at some point, and ask white people how *they* would feel if half the people they ran into assumed incorrect things about them based on how they looked, and they constantly had to explain the same things over and over.
Some sort of roleplay, perhaps, where minority students just keep making assumptions (non-offensive, but still assumptions) about white students. ‘Are you from England? You barely have an accent.’ and ‘Do you speak German?’, and ‘Do you like that weird Norwegian rotted fish food?’ and ‘Are you circumcised?’
But we don’t need to pretend it’s the most horrible thing ever, especially when there is plenty of actual *malicious* racism going on.
And it turned, weirdly, into *specific instances of things to attack people over*, despite literally the entire premise being ‘a large mass of people are being slightly, inadvertently rude, and don’t realize it, and it wears the people down who have to deal with it’.
The entire point is that it is a collective problem that slowly causes cumulative harm to people who have to deal with it constantly, so…yell at the first random guy you can see doing it? Huh?
This is akin to screaming at some guy driving a car for causing pollution. I’m…pretty sure it’s not him specifically, people. I don’t think he’s causing pollution in any measurable sense, and if we want to reduce pollution, we have to change *the system*, either by reducing average pollution of cars, or creating alternatives. Not demand that guy right there stop driving.
Now that guy over there whose operates a junkyard and disposes of tires in an ongoing tire fire, aka, the deliberately malicious racists, yeah, call *them* out, that’s entirely reasonable.Report
Minorities have talked about things they have to put up with, such as being followed around a store, but the people who took and ran with the “microaggressions” concept were lily white, pampered one percenters in academia, the same people who feel the need to be offended on the behalf of people they would never hang out with. Yet we are never told that it’s a microaggression to assume the guy with the Ducks Unlimited sticker is a hunter, or that a guy wearing an Alabama hat is a hick, or that a guy in a MAGA hat is a racist bigot.Report
These complaints would be a lot more credible if they ever stopped before the, “And how dare you think Trump supporters are bigots!” part.
But nope, it’s never enough to combat class prejudice or prejudice based on accent or regional origin which are totally real and bad things and could probably be profitably understood as “microaggressions” [1]. By the end of the paragraph, it’s always revealed as a scam to provide political cover for the most vile American political movement in decades.
[1] Well, if anything can be profitably understood as “microaggressions”, which is unclear.Report
And there you go. Have the country is irredeemable xenophobic racist sexist bigots, including more than half of white women, apparently because they don’t live in big cities that give out free needles or something.
It couldn’t have anything to do with the Democrats running the most power mad, vile, corrupt person in human history.Report
Indeed. The election of Trump demonstrates that the US really is as racist and sexist as we said it was.Report
Half the country doesn’t wear MAGA hats, dude, and more people who voted for Trump live in New York City than the whole state of Montana. You—like the smug misery tourists who write profiles of down-on-their-luck Trump voters from Middle America—decide that you’re going to conflate enthusiastic bigoted support for an enthusiastic bigot with being rural, being working class, or even drinking mass market beer or some such nonsense.
So bang-up job promoting the stereotype you claim you’re trying to fight.Report
Half the country doesn’t wear MAGA hats because they don’t want to make America great again. They want to ruin it. They want to cut off the energy sector. They want to fill it with Somalis, Syrians, Saudis, and Palestinians, who they hope will purge the Jews and homosexuals and put women back in their place – in the harem. They want all the union workers replaced by Guatemalans. They want all the movie studies run by Chinese communists. And of course they want the country run by the mega banks. They are the same people who let Goldman Sachs pick Obama’s entire cabinet. That would be the same Goldman Sachs that pays Hillary for secret speeches. That would be the same Hillary who put Omar Mateen’s Taliban-supporting father right behind her in the VIP section at her Orlando rally, because what’s wrong with slaughtering 50 people in a gay nightclub while swearing allegiance to ISIS? I mean, everybody does that, don’t they?Report
Ah, it’s so refreshing when I don’t even have to make my argument because you make it for me.Report
You welcome! 🙂
But don’t worry about Hillary. She’s running again in 2020.Report
Yeah honestly, the guy in the MAGA hat is probably a racist bigot. Like, obvi.Report
I guess I better go out and get one. How can I be a good racist with out it?Report
@davidtc — The left in general sucks at naming things. For example, can you imagine all the nonsense we could have avoided if we had named “rape culture” instead “sexual pursuit culture.” Same idea, better name.
But anyway, most of the real-world conversation about “microaggressions” or “unconscious bias” are perfectly reasonable, if people would only listen.Report
“Rape culture” does convey a greater sense of urgency when it comes to solving the problem than “sexual pursuit culture” though. “Rape culture” sounds like something that needs to be solved right now but “sexual pursuit culture” doesn’t sound bad or sounds like something that could be put off until next week.
The same is true for “micro aggressions”, it suggests some thing that can be resolved and must be resolved. “Unconscious bias” seems like something trickier to tackle. It sounds like something that can only be done by self-examination by the holder of the unconscious bias. A microagression is something that can be tackled externally by aggressive truth-telling.Report
Why does the left always have to make up words? There already are words like “chastity” and “hatred”. The left rejects the old concepts, then creates new theories and gropes for words to describe them.Report
The answer is simple. I took a jurisprudence class in law school and one one the things I learned is that the language that you use is part of how you frame and win an argument. I won’t ever use the word assault rifle bc that is the liberal scare phrase they came up with to help win the argument. Don’t ever forget that words make a difference.Report
Assualt rifle is a translation of the German word Sturmgewehr for the type of weapon they invented in WW2. Its a standard military phrase for a definable family of objects.
You’re confusing it with assault weapon, which has no real meaning, yet is the name of a bill of legislation. So you’d be refusing to use a correct term because you’re mistaken about what is a real term and a related fake one.Report
What i wrote should have been clearer. Yes assault rifle refers to a particular class of weapons, however, liberals have referred to weapons that don’t fit into the original definition of assault rifle as assault rifles to make their case for gun control. In the case of assault weapon it is an entirely made up term, meaning whatever they want it to. I try to avoid using either term.Report
E1: The need for on demand peak power is an interesting wrinkle for the energy storage question. How much do you store? How quickly can you bring that stored capacity to a grid? If you are storing power, what idle losses can you tolerate?Report
Many engineers put the limits on renewable energy production at a nameplate capacity of below 20% of the gird, or about 5% or so of delivered power, though this depends on the mix of conventional sources powering the grid.
It might make some sense to have a separate renewable grid that powers things that can handle intermittent service, such as crushing gravel, pumping water that’s not for immediate use, or running batch chemical processes where production capacity naturally outstrips demand.
Basically, types of tasks where people are employed to load the inputs into the hopper or feeder or some machine, then a few days later they show up and empty the output bins.Report
A big off-peak possibility for homes is water heaters. I think I’ve mentioned this before here.
Water heaters are currently *absurdly* energy efficient, because they are very very well insulated, far past what people think…I took a shower once in a house where the power had been off for almost 24 hours (Obviously, with city-pumped water) and it was nice and warm, I barely turned the hot water up higher than normal, and it was not close to getting cold at the end. Call it maybe 80% of what it normally was…after sitting for a *day*.
If we would make them slightly larger than we make them, large enough to provide enough hot water a house needs for an entire day, we could run them just once a day, whenever electricity was cheapest.
Or, instead of bigger, we could make them smarter…right now, we refrain from making them super-hot because we don’t want to people (Especially children) to have the option of burning themselves with 200 degree near-boiling water. But the obvious solution there is to heat the water super-hot, but automatically mix in cold water on the output side until it reaches 130 degree or whatever the reasonably-safe-for-humans level is. (Along with an automatic cutoff if the cold water isn’t there.)
If we’d make them bigger, or hotter, once a day water heating is entirely plausible. It’s really plausible *now* in houses with one person that, usually, just take one shower and maybe use a bit of warm water at the sinks.(1) And, of course, we can still have some sort of ‘if it drops below this temp, turn the water heater on regardless of the time’.
1) Except, of course, that water heaters almost never have on-off switches, so if you do live alone, and try to only use your water heater at night, you have to flip the *breaker* off during the day. And that’s bad for the breaker. Breakers are not switches.
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Here’s the thing I’m not sure why we haven’t figured out yet: Some way to *inform* things inside a house when electricity is cheap.
It is trivially easy to use power lines to transmit data. I do not understand why no one has invented a simple protocol to transmit, hell, a single value, from 1 to 10. Or 0-7 would be a more logical binary thing, so let’s go with that. Where it roughly translates into the cost of power…where 0 is the cheapest, and 7 is the most expensive.
And then energy efficient appliance could have some sort of intelligence where they attempted to run when it was the cheapest. Like, the AC lets you get an entire two degree off at 6 before cutting on, five degrees off at 7 (Which is some sort of power emergency), but only half a degree off at 0. And you could also buy thing like those power timers they currently sell, but that work on the current power number instead.
It’s not rocket science, it’s barely complicated at all. People would probably be okay with it even if, like at my house, power cost *isn’t* based on time of day…because I know that the less *peak* power I use, and the more that I voluntarily shift to elsewhere, the less *power plants* get built and operated (And the less already-built giant turbines have to be turned on.), keeping my bill down.
I know they have super complicated smart meters and whatnot at some places, but for some reason it seems to *either* be that, or *no information at all*. Heaven forbid the power company just attach a $2 relay to their transformers that send a trivial standardized signal to everyone saying ‘we would prefer you use power now’ or ‘we would prefer you not use power now’ or any number in between, and we put cheap-ass chips in power supplies to read that.
This would actually help in all sorts of circumstances. In an emergency situation of power grid problems, bam, flip the grid manually to 7, and suddenly everyone’s cloths dryer isn’t working. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be able to *override* that, but there should be some ‘We are currently in a power emergency, please refrain from doing power-wasting shit unless it’s necessary’ prompt. (Make the start button a dial instead. You can set it to 2, and it will come on in the middle of the night, or you can leave it at 5, so it comes on usually immediately, and if it’s a power emergency you can be an asshole and turn the dial to 7 so it *still* starts.)
Likewise, to get back to your idea, @george-turner , perhaps at 0 all the water pumping and gravel crushing come on line. It’s easier and saner than trying to operate another grid.Report
Or just go tankless. I insisted we do that when we built our last house. It was more expensive upfront but the wife has all the hot water she wants for her bathes. Plus we aren’t heating water 24/7.Report
Tankless is great for saving water. People waste a hell of a lot of water while waiting for it to heat up.
But it’s the opposite of useful when trying to save electricity. (Assuming it’s electric, of course.) You have to run it the second you need the heat, you cannot shunt it to non-peak cycle at all.
As I said, people assume that a lot of heat gets wasted heating those things 24/7…but the reality is, the modern ones are astonishingly well insulated. The water really just gets heated once, just like tankless.
Of course, in some weird world where houses could cost infinite money, but water and power were limited, the least wasteful solution would be *both* a tankless heater and a tank. The water is instantly warm thanks to the tankless, but eventually the hot water from the tank makes its way over and the tankless heaters already have temp sensors in them…presumably they won’t heat *at all* if the water is already hot enough. And also you wouldn’t have to worry about running out of hot water and making sure the tank cuts on if it gets too cold…the tankless would cut back on and heat the water there.
But that’s an absurdly expensive system.
Although…you know, tankless heaters vary in cost based on the minimum incoming temp of the water. If your water might come in a 40 degrees, you need a higher capacity one than if it comes in at 60 degrees.
I wonder if anyone’s in, say, North Dakota has ever grabbed some cheap, used low capacity tank water heater to heat water up to the lowest setting, say, 80 degrees (Which, if the water heater is *inside*, is functionally not going to lose any heat at all to the surrounding 70 degree air, even if it is an old, poorly insulated water heater. And, hell, if they did lose some heat, all they did was heat up the house, which they were doing anyway.), *before* handing the water over to their tankless heater, and thus were able to buy the lowest cost tankless heater, the sort normally sold to people in Florida, where their water enters their house at room temperature.Report
My father did this with our house in Pennsylvania. The well water came into a cheap, uninsulated tank next to the wood furnace, then went to the water heater. So, the theory went, it got warmed to room temperature (or functionally higher, given the proximity to the furnace), before being heated for hot water.Report
Seems to me tankless saves both. Why spend money on heating water all the time when i can make it on demand? Today even the electric tankless designs are supposed to be pretty good. Mine is gas and I would buy it again. Yes folks waste water while waiting for the hot water to get to the spigot but I saw a recirculator at at a box store which could help with that.Report
California has some kind of smart meter, but I haven’t looked into it because I live in Kentucky where electricity is so cheap they just wire it right into your home.
You could easily just make appliances that connect to the Internet to get electricity supply and price information, although that would mean your family could be held hostage by Hungarian hackers.
My batch process idea would be having wind or solar powering local factories that produce energy-intensive products like glass, concrete, or aluminum. Almost all the cost on those is the energy to run the process, and if the intermittent energy is essentially “free” then it might make economic sense. Another application would be upgrading other energy sources, such as supplying external energy to more efficiently converting coal to liquids.Report
Cheap power with dirty coal? NoooooReport
DARPA has a process for coal+methane -> jet fuel that’s projected to come in at $2.82 a gallon.
Technology Review Article
Powering the system with renewables might lower the price even further – or might not. I’m a fan of powering such reactions with a lithium fluoride thorium reactor, but none of those are online yet.Report
It sounds very interesting, if it can be scaled.Report
You could easily just make appliances that connect to the Internet to get electricity supply and price information, although that would mean your family could be held hostage by Hungarian hackers.
Well, yes, but that’s absurdly expensive to add to appliances, not to mention the Internet of Things is super stupid and dangerous at this point anyway.
And if anyone was *actually* going to do that themselves, they’d just look it up themselves and put the appliances on timers.
I am saying, if there was some sort of easily decodable standard that appliance manufactures could assume was often there (Say in more than half of houses.), and it could be read by some cheap chip 30 cent chip attached to power (As opposed to an actual computer that has to be put on wifi and is insecure.), it might actually be used.
And once it starts being used, power companies can actually do it more intelligently. Like instead of leaving everyone at 5 during peak times, send a quarter of the houses a 4 for five minutes, staggering them around. See if you can get fridges and ACs to cut on at that point to spread themselves out more.
It wouldn’t be *perfect*, at some temperature fridges and AC have to cut on regardless of the signal, but if you could get *most* of them following along, most of the time, you might lower the max power demand at any point. Because that max demand was just sheer random unluckiness in timing cycles where 60% *could* decide to operate at once, whereas now it might be only 40% or even 30%.
Again, just as a sort of ‘hinting’ for things that need to run *often*, at all hours of the day, but it’s not particularly important *when* they run, and a few minutes isn’t going to make any different.
(Really, at this point, a more complicated protocol is in order, not 5s and 4s, but whatever.)Report
As a couple of people have mentioned, the technology to do all these things at the domestic home level already exists. Smart meters are even mandatory in several places.
There’s however three reasons why no one seems to be pushing the idea:
1. From the point of view of the distribution utility (the “wires on the poles” one), they would have to bear the cost of setting up all this technology (even if individual pieces of technology are cheap, we are talking a boatload of wires), but they don’t have the risk of the price spikes. That risk is borne by the generation companies and the retail power traders. So the utility would save nothing by doing all this investment. The local regulator would have to approve a tariff increase for the utility to cover it.
2. The generation/trading companies are not interested because, even though there’re millions of domestic customers, individually they are (almost) all very small. The transaction costs associated with handling millions of individual customers that, at the end of the day, even in the aggregate, would not move the needle much, are too high. They’d rather focus on the 20% of customers that represent 80% of the demand.
3. Because the generation market does not care much about the domestic loads one way or the other, the tariff structure doesn’t have incentives for domestic users to do peak shaving. Large industrial loads could (and in many places do) offer load shedding services. Their large, non essential loads can be shut off remotely, and they will receive a payment for all the energy not consumed. As renewables (in reality, only wind) add more uncertainty to the grid, it’s much more efficient and economic to pay large customers to shed their big loads than to pay 5,000 $/MWh to a peaker (*). But no one is offering to pay individual customers a quarter for them to reduce their A/C load.
(*) As a separate matter, but sort of inside basebally (sic), I strongly disagree with the concept of energy only markets supported by the article. Plus, I’ve seen a couple of those fail and move to capacity/energy as separate products. The vast majority of those 5,000 $/MWh peakers are legacy plants. Very few investors will go through the cost (and permitting) of installing new fast to run/expensive to run power plants on the expectation of making $ 5,000 per MWh a couple of hours a year, and no revenue otherwise.Report
But no one is offering to pay individual customers a quarter for them to reduce their A/C load.
I have no idea how common the practice is nationally, but my local utility — still largely vertically integrated due to circumstances — will pay me $40/yr to let them install a switch on my A/C compressor that lets them turn it off for 15-20 minutes at a time. I’ve been tempted — we seldom use it, and the times when we do use it tend to be outside of the normal window when they are looking to shed load.Report
I’ll take that deal if offered to me, and I’m in Houston, where it would impact the grid much more. Alas, I can’t even find my cents/kWh rate spelled out clearly in my utility bill.Report
See, it just blows my mind they’d willing to pay that much money, *and* physically install a switch, instead of utility companies getting together and coming up with some sort of signaling standard and get the large, load-heavy appliances to use it by default.
And, yes, I know homes are rarely metered for demand-based pricing, hell, most of them don’t even manage *time*-based pricing…but, honestly, 90% of home customers would probably go along with it *anyway* even if it didn’t save them any money, some in an attempt to keep the prices generally low, and probably just as many because they can’t be arsed to figure out how to override the defaults, or literally didn’t even know it was going on. (Who even pays attention to when their AC runs as long as it keeps things basically the correct temp?)
Sure, there will be 10% of people going ‘If they want me to use less power on their say so, they can *pay* me to do that, and until then, screw their suggestions!’ and tell all their stuff to ignore it, but whatever.
But, as J_A pointed out, the lack of integration in power makes this very tricky.Report
…the lack of integration in power makes this very tricky.
And this lack of integration is intentional federal policy. I find it amusing that some of the things I like best about my utility — demand management, priority dispatching for renewables — are things made possible largely because we’re so geographically isolated [1] that the state can ignore some of the federal policy.
On the good news side, last year the courts finished upholding FERC’s rule that allows utilities to bid demand reduction in the short-term power markets. Given the statutory language, I was pleasantly surprised.
[1] The major demand center closest to Front Range Colorado is Salt Lake City, 400 miles and three mountain ranges away.Report
On the “why pay that much money” thing, I can speculate about it. The decision — at least here — was made 25 years ago. Appliances were dumb — people like me predicting that “put a microprocessor in everything” would be a thing were relatively rare. The utility could install a thousand switches a week — in two years they could guarantee that they could shed significant load. Opt-in minimized legal risks. The PUC was willing to put cheap switches in the rate base.Report
California has some kind of smart meter…
Lots of places have smart meters. The harder parts are dealing with getting time-of-day or other non-uniform tariffs, deciding who pays for the smart meters, setting up the return data path for minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour usage, addressing personal data privacy issues, etc.Report
Lots of interesting questions, including that conventional generators are really interested in making sure that they are not selling power cheaply to someone who is using it to pump water uphill during off-peak hours, then running the water back downhill to generate power during peak periods. For market-based solutions, I’d suggest looking to see what PJM is doing — they are always tinkering with their model, adding markets in new categories. As a side note, some of the people who publish through Cato have concluded that the necessary number of markets needed — hour-ahead, day-ahead, spinning reserve, total capacity, transmission — results in higher costs than a well-regulated/run vertically integrated utility.
To George’s suggestion on the percentages of renewables that can be incorporated, Xcel in Colorado is already delivering 20%, thinks 30% is easy, and occasionally hits 50% during certain hours. That said, their situation is unusual. Local wind resources are very good, enough so that if they buy 100% of the output from a wind farm, the farm owner can price the power at less than Xcel’s cost to generate in thermal plants. So they sign 20-year contracts to take 100% of power from the wind farms, and dispatch their own generation as needed. Most of the country doesn’t have the same rich wind resource and geographic isolation to make that feasible. Spain uses renewables at surprisingly high percentages by the same sort of thing in formal dispatch rules — everyone else holds back to the degree needed to use 100% of the available renewables, no matter what the contracts say.Report
Wind plants are the only renewables that have a significant degree of short term uncertainty in their output. Solar plants are extremely predictable, and hydro plants have good seasonal predictability. Even wind is fairly predictable on a seasonal basis, and normally it picks up of dies down at such a rate that the dispatch can ramp up thermal generation reasonably well without needing to bring in the super fast peakers. Nicaragua operates fairly well (to my surprise) with 40% wind generation.
Though hydro generation output is affected by drought events, these are not sudden episodes that require to turn on super fast generation. It’s true, though, that droughts can last very long and deplete the reservoirs, but that’s a different problem, that triggers a long-term and not a short-term price signal.
Colombia has, in normal yeas, more than 80% hydro generation, but in Niño years the water availability drops substantially, low enough that blackouts were common. The solution was to install thermal plants under long-term (10 to 20 years) contracts for capacity only, paid in by a surcharge in the tariff of all customers (*). Some of these plants might not run for years, and then run baseload on a Niño event. This is an example of looking ahead and following the long-term, and not just the short-term price signals.
(*) Brazil has a similar mechanism, paid also by a tariff surcharge, but not as well run as Colombia’s.Report
https://twitter.com/ARVRRob/status/863472840422633475
So the ideal liberal society is a place that’s great for the upper middle class and their servants but terrible for everyone in between. I’d rather live in a country that’s like Utah or Nebraska than California.Report
New term going around the twitters. “Baizuo“.
I’ve seen this essay tweeted by some hardcore libertarians as well as some hardcore accelerationists.
The essay itself is written from the perspective of “I can’t believe that they’re saying this! It must be part of government propaganda!” which strikes me as being a defense mechanism on the part of the writer, but I reckon that you’re going to be sick of this term by the end of the summer.
To the point where “you can’t be racist against white people” might even be retconned out.Report
“Oh boy! Oh boy! This insult is identical to all the other things we say about people to our left, but, like, Chinese!”Report
But isn’t it weird how people from another very different culture are coming up with identical criticisms, er, I mean, “insults” that make sense within their own culture?Report
Not so much, nope.
[Insert a joke about cultural appropriation here. I can’t quite make mine work.]Report
Suppose four things:
1. Comey was fired to obstruct the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia.
2. Trump will only nominate someone on the expectation of personal loyalty to Trump rather than to the constitution.
3. Trump’s nominee will sail thru the Senate confirmation process without defections from GOP senators.
4. No institutional check exists to prevent 3 from occurring.
Question: Do 1-4 constitute a constitutional crisis? The prevailing answer appears to be that it does not, that a constitutional crisis would only result from 1-3 in fact occurring, rather than merely potentially occurring.
It seems to me this is wrongheaded in that it relies on the mere possibility that 2 and 3 do not obtain. But all the evidence available at this time suggests that both 1 and 2 are true, and that 3 is very likely true. Further support of 3 is the near zero-percent likelihood that a truly independent, non-Trump-loyalist would accept a position from which he or she could be fired merely by maintaining an already existing investigation. So from my pov, the fact that 2 and 3 are likely to the point of certainty and given 4, I’m inclined to think we’re already there.
Thoughts?Report
I don’t see how you get a Constitutional crisis from the mere possibility that Trump may have done something that’s not even a misdemeanor. Colluding with Russia isn’t illegal.Report
Obstructing justice is illegal
Dude was very likely in the clear on the Russia thing until he fired Comey to screw with the investigation.Report
Firing your FBI chief doesn’t make you guilty of the crime of obstructing justice. Congress may decide it’s an impeachable offense, but it’s not a criminal one.Report
Go back to 1-4 in my initial comment.Report
If he’d just fired Comey, he’d be fine.
But he fired Comey in order to interfere with an investigation into his own presidential campaign. He said as much in a TV interview!
I have a feeling he did this because he’s an irascible toddler who wanted to make the mean man on TV go away, not because of consciousness of guilt [1], but I might be wrong, and I’m pretty sure that isn’t a defense anyway.
[1] Is there any evidence that Trump has ever experienced guilt, or for that matter consciousness?Report
An investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russian electioneering by definition will extend beyond the bare issue of collusion to include other motivations upon which collusion might have come about. So the scope isn’t restricted to merely the electioneering issue.
Whether Trump is guilty-and-obstructing or innocent-and-obstructing is irrelevant wrt the legal consequences of obstruction as it is understood right now, given the evidence we have. Ie., the only way Trump’s personal innocence can be determined is if the investigation he’s trying to quash continues unimpeded. Same goes for those in his campaign or his appointees, etc.
And that’s where the worry I expressed upthread comes in: Does the absence of a constitutional mechanism to prevent institutionalizing obstruction of an ongoing FBI investigation into actions of the person who appoints the Director overseeing that investigation constitutes a constitutional crisis? Seems to me it does.Report
The constitutional mechanism to prevent a President from obstructing an FBI investigation, shooting someone in the middle of 5th avenue, or rebroadcasting Major League Baseball with implied oral consent is impeachment. Like Jaybird said, if the House or Senate won’t do their job, that’s not a Constitutional crisis, that’s a dereliction of duty, which must and can only be corrected at the ballot box.
I grant you at repeated derelictions of duty, you do change the Constitution – whence the 17th amendment.Report
Like Jaybird said, if the House or Senate won’t do their job, that’s not a Constitutional crisis,
Not according to some legal scholars. Here’s Whittington from the linky above:
“both Congress and the White House have a responsibility to follow the FBI director’s removal with reasonable steps to maintain the integrity of the Department of Justice and the federal judicial system. The crisis, if it comes, will not be because of Comey’s removal, but because of how the system responds to Comey’s removal.”
His view is that Congress’ failure to check a Presidential abuse of power suffices, at least in this context, for a constitutional crisis.
I think I agree with him. (Hence my asking for people’s views about the topic.)Report
His view is that Congress’ failure to check a Presidential abuse of power suffices, at least in this context, for a constitutional crisis.
Wait until the voters refuse to do their own duty and revote these same senators/congressmen back in.Report
Well, by that definition we’ve been in a Constitutional crisis ever since our presidents have figured out they can declare war without Congress going nay nay moosebreath.Report
So you agree the current situation may result in a constitutional crisis?Report
I’m the wrong person to ask; I think we’ve been in a Constitutional crisis since Wickard v Filburn.Report
Word.
(I would have gone back to the Louisiana Purchase, though.)Report
Heck, the Alien and Sedition acts were never ruled unconstitutional, and part of it is still on the books.Report
Heh. Fair enough.Report
That’s a good date for saying it went off the rails then.Report
The failure of the Senate to act constructively on Garland’s SCOTUS nomination is more of a Constitutional crisis than any reaction or lack thereof to Comey’s firing.Report
I agree that the Garland obstruction constitutes a violation of constitutional principles in which the Senate co-opted powers accorded to the President.
I guess I’m not clear on the reasoning by which institutionalizing obstruction of justice does not constitute a constitutional crisis in the event that an executive branch institution is fundamentally prevented from performing its duties via actions taken by the legislative branch (in conjunction with the President’s prerogatives, obvs).Report
This is what, the 7th time the Senate has blocked a SCOTUS this way? Would the Senate voting him down have made a difference in your opinion?Report
See Noah Feldman on this — suggesting that this is really not something people who oppose Trump should be pushing.Report
I disagree.
First, Rothman rejects the idea that the Comey firing constitutes a constitutional crisis. So does everyone else. The crisis arises, insofar as the term is appropriate, from Congress ceding power to the President to appoint an FBI director for the purpose of quashing an investigation which may be personally or politically damaging to the President.
Second, Rothman writes, as a matter of political pragmatics, that “We need to save the concept of constitutional crisis for situations where there’s a fundamental breakdown in the structure of government.” But even on his own definition of the term it correctly applies if the above situation obtains.
Third, the fact that these issues can be politicized isn’t a reason to not talk about them. In fact, in this situation, it strikes me as exactly the reason we need to talk about them.Report
I suspect you skimmed this quickly and defensively, rather than really trying to take it in, not only because you got the guy’s name entirely wrong but also because you completely failed to understand his argument. What he’s saying (right or wrong) is that a “constitutional crisis” isn’t when the political actors are applying the rules incorrectly (even to disastrous effect), it’s when the entire framework of authority breaks down in some way. A crisis is like Andrew Jackson saying “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”, or (Feldman’s example) Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus unilaterally.
To use a sports analogy: pro basketball has a rule about carrying over, and recently there’s been some debate about Isaiah Thomas being allowed to get away with carrying over with impunity. You might strongly believe that this is true, and you could further believe that if this sort of thing is left unchecked, it could ultimately ruin the game. However, even if you’re right, while this is a big problem, it’s still not a crisis in Feldman’s terms — the accepted authorities (the referees) are interpreting the rules and applying them, however incorrectly, and the players and coaches are obeying them (though not necessarily without complaint). What might be a crisis is if the Wizards decided on their own that he was carrying over and stopped playing in protest, or forcibly took the ball from him, or otherwise rejected the overall structure of authority. They can’t even keep on playing the game, correctly or incorrectly, if both teams don’t accept the authority of the refs.Report
I did read it quickly, I didn’t read it defensively. He explicitly says that the Comey firing doesn’t satisfy the conditions required for a constitutional crisis, but no one is arguing that it does. So I think his focus is misguided. Here’s the quotation:
The Comey firing just doesn’t fit. No one thinks that the Constitution would prohibit the firing. There’s no lack of clarity about what the constitutional principles say, because they recognize executive authority to fire the FBI director.
Again, no one seriously thinking about this issue holds that merely firing Comey constitutes a CC but rather that it’s entirely within the legitimate authority of the President to do so.
Here’s his definition of a constitutional crisis:
My definition has two elements. First, for a constitutional crisis to exist, a country must face “a situation in which its constitutional principles offer no clear, definitive answer to a pressing problem of governance.”
Second, powerful political actors “have to signal that they are ready to press one course of action to its limits. Meanwhile, other comparably powerful actors have to be prepared to push the other way.”
Seems to me a situation in which Congress accedes to Trump’s desire to appoint a loyalist who will obstruct an investigation into Trump and his campaign et al satisfies both conditions. No clear resolution to a problem of governance, and serious pushback from powerful political actors.
At the end he says: The notion of a constitutional crisis implies a conflict between Trump and other parts of the government in which Trump would have the option of seeking decisive action that he would unquestionably claim to be justified even if it was unconstitutional.
Personally, I think he’s still talking merely about the firing of Comey, but even if we extend the judgment to include the situation I described upthread, I don’t see how this claim follows from his earlier definition (or even whether I understand the implied distinction between “justified even if unconstitutional”). In any event, that’s precisely what’s at issue. Whether there are clearer cases seems irrelevant. The issue is whether the conditions on the ground satisfy the definition. As I said, the hypothetical scenario I outlined seems to satisfy them.Report
Thinking about that some more, I think I understand what he means by “justified”: that Trump would appeal to the legitimacy of his actions even if the constitutionality of those actions was not only in dispute, but they were clearly unconstitutional. So yes, I think that the situation I’m describing, at least insofar as Trump actually DID assert that his actions fall under the power of the President as head of the Executive branch, would satisfy the conditions Feldman outlines.Report
I should apologize for the accusation of “defensive” absent any obvious evidence. You’re still not grokking his point, but I can’t think of any other way to express it that seems any clearer than what’s already been said , so I’ll leave off here.Report
Yeah. I already decided to leave it with my last comment regardless of how devastatingly you tore it apart in response. 🙂
I not a constitutional law scholar, nor am I familiar enough with Feldman’s general views to pick up on subtleties I’m undoubtedly missing.
Personally, even tho I don’t understand what you take to be that writer’s main point, I fully understand that opinions on the topic differ. Hell, no one yet has agreed with me.Report
But he wasn’t under investigation, so no obstruction of justice.
The investigation is looking at whether Russia tried to interfere with the election. But that’s not an offense they can prosecute, either. What are they going to do, put Russia in jail?
Russia and other countries try to interfere in every US election. We do the same to other countries. Obama was blatant about it, sending his campaign veterans to places like Israel to advise opposition candidates.Report
He doesn’t have to be the one under investigation for his interference to constitute obstruction.Report
Yes he does. You see, the FBI is always investigating things. Firing the head of the FBI therefore will always be “obstructing” a range of investigations. That would mean that no President could ever remove the head of the FBI or DoJ, for any reason, without being impeached for obstruction of justice.Report
This would be a vaguely plausible defense if Trump hadn’t admitted, in a TV interview, that he fired Comey to interfere with the Russia investigation.Report
But Trump didn’t say that. Rachel Maddow edited his interview to make it look like he said that. She lied.Report
Uh huh.Report
Maddow’s clip of Trump:
And then she paused for effect, and started babbling that he’d just admitted that he obstructed justice.
The fuller interview segment that Maddow wouldn’t let you see was this:
And that is exactly it. There was no collusion. Jake Clapper said there was absolutely no evidence of any collusion. Collusion wouldn’t even make sense. Trump is Putin’s worst nightmare. He’s not only standing up to Russia, he’s fracking like a madman and undercutting their economy.
But Hillary lost, and she lashed out at the Russians like she was the reincarnation of McCarthy. The media and the Democrats followed along and went the full red scare. They told us Trump got a golden shower in a Russian hotel. That was a lie, one pushed by and probably paid for by Comey.
And they’ve been lying ever since. The press told us that Rosenstein threatened to resign if Trump cited his recommendation as the reason to fire Comey. That was a lie. The press told us that Comey had requested additional money to continue the Russian investigation three days before Trump fired him. That was a lie.
There’s no end to it.Report
The fact that Trump accounted for the “made-up” Trump/Russia story by pinning it on Democratic Party petulance actually implicates him even more, seems to me. It plays well for parts of the base, I suppose, but not for those don’t view his actions thru a purely partisan filter, which includes quite a few GOP CCers and conservative pundits. Even they aren’t buying it.Report
It’s remarkable how you wrote all those words without actually doing anything to support your contention that Maddow lied about what Trump said.
On the other hand, it’s not like the contention that Maddow lied is relevant to anything, because Trump’s comments in, you know, a TV interview were public record before Maddow said a word about it.Report
No, Maddow didn’t lie. She didn’t even lie by omission when she didn’t play the rest of Trump’s comment. If anything, she did him a favor since the offered rationale is so patently absurd given the actions of Flynn, Sessions, Carter Page and so on. If anything she helped Trump by not exposing her audience to even more disturbing evidence of how delusional his views of the investigation actually are.Report
And if you watch the unedited interview, you don’t have Trump saying he fired Comey to stop the Russian investigation – because the Russian investigation is just a paranoid witch hunt by crazy, bitter people.Report
Uh huh.Report
Okay then, please tell me what law Trump is suspected of violating. If you answer “collusion with the Russians” I’ll need a link to the US Code that prohibits that, because Obama openly colluded with the Russians for the 2012 election against Romney and nobody even suggested it was illegal. Has the law changed since then?Report
Like, officially, he isn’t suspected of any particular crime. Or any crime at all, actually. Folks are investigating his campaign tho, which (I think…) he was a part of, for collusion or involvement with the Rooskies during the election cycle. Given the evidence at this point (Flynn Sessions, Carter Page, etc and so on) I don’t know why anyone would say the investigation isn’t entirely warranted.
For my part, I don’t think Trump personally colluded in any meaningful sense with the Russians during the campaign. I do think, tho, that Comey’s dismissal was an attempt on his part to obstruct the investigation. Personally, I think he’s worried that his ties to Russian dark money and various potentially criminal scams he’s engaged in will be exposed, not to mention the that the threat of blackmail such scams entail would be revealed. That’s also why the tax returns haven’t been released. But that’s obviously just a guess. Until the investigations are completed no one has enough information to make anything other than guesses.Report
How would something like Mike Flynn getting paid for a Moscow speech ensnare Trump in some kind of Russian dark money blackmail scam? That doesn’t even make any sense.
Hillary raked in billions of dollars in a wide variety of almost certainly illegal influence peddling schemes, including the recent revelation that she was pressuring the Prime Minister of Bangladesh to protect a Clinton Foundation donor. That violates a host of laws. Hillary approved the sale of Uranium One to the Russians by a Clinton Foundation donor who’d paid her hundreds of millions dollars.
Nothing Trump possibly did is a hundredth as bad as what Hillary did, yet nobody seems to be investigating her ties to the Russians, and that about half the world leaders on the planet could blackmail her over all those e-mails she deleted from her illegal servers. They have their own copies of their e-mail exchanges with her, the exchanges that she deleted to protect herself from criminal prosecution.
In contrast, Trump wasn’t in government. He had no access to sell, and no influence to peddle. He didn’t have rich and powerful people, world leaders, banks, and major oil companies giving him $2 billion dollars. Hillary did. Why did they give her $2 billion dollars? Why did she then approve just about anything they asked for, from dropping of human rights charges to permission to violate Iran sanctions? Why did Bill maintain overseas shell corporations?
It seems like someone might want to investigate those questions, but sadly, nobody is.
Instead they are making paranoid conspiracy theories about who hacked Hillary’s server, who hacked the DNC, and that it must have somehow been the Russians (with zero evidence presented after almost a year of “investigations”), and the Russians must have colluded with Trump to do it, because as we all know, Trump is a tech genius and Hillary gave him her passwords out of the goodness of her heart.
Meanwhile, nobody seems to wonder if the hacking was done by the Muslim IT workers employed by Debbie Wassermann Schultz who are under indictment for a host of thefts and IT breeches, and who were in debt up to their eyeballs.
House Dem IT scandal
Maybe Trump fired Comey because Comey kept looking for an elephant in the refrigerator when he was asked to figure out who keeps raiding the cookie jar when there’s a trail of toddler footprints on the counter and a trail of crumbs leading to the kid’s bedroom.Report
How would something like Mike Flynn getting paid for a Moscow speech ensnare Trump in some kind of Russian dark money blackmail scam?
Flynn’s actions are the entry point to investigating the Trump campaign generally (which included Trump, to the best of my recollection).Report
And they’re investigating Flynn because – Obama and Susan Rice were using our National Security apparatus to monitor political opponents, in violation of numerous US laws.
Maybe someone should investigate that.Report
Nah, that’s just Chicago politics on a larger scale. Nothing to see here.Report
I think it would be very interesting to see that investigated, but I doubt it will be, probably because it would more likely turn out that the monitoring had nothing to do with them being political opponents and everything to do with them being unsavory people with sketchy ties to foreign governments.
If I were Trump and I was worried about that, I’d make a bunch of noise in the press about it and not actually investigate anything. I mean, it’s not like the whole national security apparatus doesn’t report to Donald Trump now. He could learn and expose anything he wanted about Obama’s supposed spying on political opponents. The fact that that he’s opting to make noise in the press and not follow up on it is interesting.Report
You assume Trump’s not following up on it. Knowing Trump, he’s accumulating a stockpile of political nukes that he can hurl at the appropriate time.
But the lack of progress on the spying scandal under Comey is yet another reason for Comey’s firing. He wouldn’t to tell Congress whether the FBI was investigating it or not.
If he was, he’d obviously screw that up, too.Report
I’m sure he’s cutting through those issues like a knife. His track record is surely one of firing only the incompetent and always replacing them with the best of the best.
They should hire you. You’ve managed to come up with a more cogent set of rationales for firing Comey than they’ve been able to.Report
There were countless reasons to fire Comey, and both Democrats and Republicans had been screaming for his head. The Assistant Attorney General wrote a recommendation detailing reasons that Comey should be fired, and three days after he produced that recommendation, Comey was fired.
He was an inept leader, driven by his own ego, blind to facts, who operated with reckless disregard for the truth or the law. Nobody had any faith in him or anything he said.
The FBI does not need another Don Quixote directorReport
I certainly don’t disagree with you on that. It’s just interesting that Trump decided that was the case now and not some other time. And then couldn’t come up with a sensible consistent reason for firing him. And then basically said that the Russia investigation was part of his rationale.
But assuming he doesn’t appoint his caddy to the position, we’re probably better off without Director Comey.
As for whether Trump is biding his time with a stealth investigation, I suppose we must all concede his legendary ability to keep cool and avoid shooting his mouth off when he has something to throw at his enemies.Report
This is what @george-turner said, which roughly parrots what the White House said:
This is what the Acting Director of the FBI said in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee:
Y’all maybe see a pattern here?Report
Acting directory Andrew McCabe’s wife got about half a million dollars from extremely close Hillary confidant and fixer Terry McAuliffe, governor of Virginia.
No, no conflict of interest there at all. She was a doctor who hadn’t even sought public office until Hillary’s cronies started shoving money at her because of her husband’s position within the FBI.
McCabe is the person Comey put in charge of the Hillary investigation. He is bought and paid for, with real money, from the Clintons.Report
Cool story.
Do you have a newsletter?Report
That is the Russian MO for someone like Trump… except as far as I can tell, he’s not accused of that. Further afaict, he doesn’t own anything in Russian, although interestingly he’s tried several times.
Real estate developer operating in NY in the 70’s and 80’s? He had to be doing something with the mob if just paying them off. That nothing more ever was tied to him after many decades of a media microscope suggests he actually has lines he doesn’t cross and never let it go any further (which would be great training for modern Russia).
Or it could be that the media has simply been incompetent for decades.Report
That is the Russian MO for someone like Trump… except as far as I can tell, he’s not accused of that. Further afaict, he doesn’t own anything in Russian, although interestingly he’s tried several times.
While there are a lot of business ties with Russians *investing Trump* (not the other way around), and some very weird things like the fact that huge amount of very wealth Russias keep buying condos and stuff from him…none of that actually has anything to do with what is *probably* being investigated. (Except to show how he knows some people.)
The actual thing being investigated are, I suspect, is one of the *giant* red flashing strobe lights:
1) A lot of people that are related to the Trump campaign seemed to know *in advance* about DNC and Podestra email leaks. (Roger Stone, particularly.)
2) The RNC hacked emails, meanwhile, have never seen the light of day.
3) The only thing the Trump campaign changed in the RNC’s platform was to downplay the Russian condemnation about the Ukraine invasion….and then they lied about it and tried to confuse the issue. (Of course, with hindsight, they lie about and confuse the issue about literally everything, so weirdly their lies there have gotten less meaningful.)
4) While everyone knows Flynn was, surreally, supposedly working as a foreign agent for Turkey without declaring it *while* NSA, but he also has gotten a *lot* of money from Russia.
5) Same with Manafort. And Carter Page. At some point, it almost would be easier to list people working for Trump that *aren’t* involved with Russia. Statistically, this is fricking absurd.
Please note I am not saying the investigation is ‘based’ on one of those facts, none of those things *as we know about them* are worth an investigation this long…I’m saying I think the FBI knows *a lot more* than we do about at least one of those.
The whole ‘Donald Trump owe Russia money’ might, or might not, be true, but I don’t think it’s actually that *relevant* to this investigation.
I think there’s some sort of quid pro quo that the FBI thinks happened, or even *knows* happened, and they’ve been trying to figure out exactly who was in on it. Like someone in the Trump campaign was handed a chunk of cash for the Ukraine thing, or Roger Stone actually paid (Or had Manaford pay, or someone with a bunch of Russian business links) Russia to release the Podestra emails.
—
Of course, that’s the explanation on what the Trump administration is hiding, and hence I might be making one very crucial mistake: Trump’s Razor very clearly says that the *stupidest* explanation that explains the Trump’s administration’s behavior has to be true.
And the *stupidest* explanation is that Trump hates the investigation, and literally no one in the administration has anything idea if there’s any wrongdoing, and the Trump administration is, very idiotically, self-destructing over something *that might not be real*. Especially with the sheer amount of turnover in staff and the *huge* amount of Russian links it’s almost impossible to keep track of.
And Trump is so utterly stupid he doesn’t understand that firing Comey won’t stop the investigation, and doesn’t understand how bad that looks. (Actually, I’m pretty certain that sentence is true regardless.)
If Trump was *your* boss, would *you* trust he hadn’t agreed to change the RNC platform in exchange for email leaks? Would you trust that no one in his employ did? No, of course not. So you run around panicked trying to coverup and hide random Russian links, which there seems to be a hell of a lot, and then *you* get caught at those lies (Like Sessions), and now there’s even *more* vague Russian incriminating floating around, and everyone’s even more panicked and hiding more things, and now there’s subpoenas and eventually everyone’s try to hide evidence and lying to congress and…and…
…and it would possible the cherry on the whipped cream of stupid that is this administration if there *literally was never anything there* and the Trump administration clusterfuck themselves into covering up and obstructing justice about lawbreaking that don’t exist.
That said, I *do* think the FBI has something real…but it might not be particularly damning to Trump. Honestly, Trump is so dumb he’s *repeatedly admitted criminal behavior* in public, so I can’t imagine why anyone would *trust* him to participate illegal collusion activities, and if he had he’d have *publicly said it* by now.
(It’s a sad day when the justification of ‘This obviously unethical person couldn’t have participated in specific criminal activities because they are too stupid to have not told everyone afterward’…but that is, indeed, where I am.)Report
Or Trump is handling things quite well, there are no Russian ties, and the press is just a gaggle of screaming, lying morons having a constant stream of panic attacks.
Almost every day, they shout that Trump is bound to get impeached over this, and a couple of days later they scream that he’ll be impeached over something else, and then something else.
They are making themselves more and more irrelevant.Report
Or Trump is handling things quite well
There is no universe at all where this can be possibly be true.
We can *see* Trump.
We *saw* him fire the FBI director, and then later admit it was at least partially due to the investigation of his campaign.
This was really, really stupid, and was *previously* considered an impeachable offense, *literally by itself*.
Attempting to interfere in an investigation he didn’t like is the reason Nixon was going to be impeached. Again, *by itself*…there was no evidence Nixon had anything to do with the break-in, and we still don’t know that piece of history. Nixon was at the point of impeachment entirely because he had attempted to quash the investigation.Report
I’m not privy to the details of who is suspected of what by the Russia investigation, but as far as I know, Trump himself isn’t being investigated, nor is he himself suspected of violating any specific law.
So what?Report
And if you watch the unedited interview, you don’t have Trump saying he fired Comey to stop the Russian investigation – because the Russian investigation is just a paranoid witch hunt by crazy, bitter people.
I’m not sure if anyone’s ever made this clear to you, but acts can be obstruction of justice *even if the investigation being obstructed is entirely unfounded*.
And that is pretending we actually *know* it was unfounded, that we are in the future and it’s legally been determined to be baseless. *Even if that were true*, it still would have been criminal to obstruct it!
Of course, we also don’t really have a habit of taking ‘people under investigation’ at their word that an investigation is baseless.Report
Taking the start date of July 27, when Trump said Russian hackers should share Hillary’s e-mails, by this time in the Watergate investigation, G Gordon Liddy had been convicted and sent to prison two months ago.
All the FBI, CIA, and NSA have is a great big nothing burger. Obama had the Trump team wiretapped, and he spread all the gathered information throughout 13 federal agencies, and then spread it to the press. There’s nothing to find or we’d already know about it.Report
Taking the start date of July 27, when Trump said Russian hackers should share Hillary’s e-mails, by this time in the Watergate investigation, G Gordon Liddy had been convicted and sent to prison two months ago.
I am not sure what sort of strange universe you live in where investigations taking ‘two months’ longer than other investigations make them invalid, but your math is rather dubious, mostly because you’ve decided to compare them to when G. Gordon Libby was arrested, instead of when Nixon was almost impeached.
Let’s pretend the leaked emails are what FBI is investigating (There are a couple of other options, but it’s certainly plausible), and let’s pretend the theory is that it works exactly the same…that someone close to the president (For the purpose of this post, let’s say it’s Roger Stone, he’s the most plausible person) contacted some foreigners (People forget the actual Watergate ‘burglars’ were Cuban.) to commit the burglaries/hacks.
Let’s make it as close an analogous situation as can possibly be made.
But the problem is that there is one huge difference no matter what, and that difference would probably keep the Libby analogue from being arrested *yet*, even if the rest of the timeline was identical:
The Watergate burglars were *caught in the act* and arrested, while holding documentation that incriminated others at the RNC and eventually Libby.
At this point the supposed identical stories fall apart and the timelines can’t continue identically, because of the difference between wiretapping a hotel room and stealing email credentials online. The people who did the email hacks *were not in this country*, and obviously could not be arrested, even if ‘caught’. There might be tons of evidence against a certain group of Russian hackers, but they simply aren’t here and can’t be arrested.
So instead of the open and shut case against Libby from the hired criminals, the FBI instead could have some electronic evidence Stone was in communication with the hired criminals, and that’s all.
Moreover, the FBI is no longer required to convene a grand jury to indict the people it just arrested in the act…because it didn’t arrest any people. Those people also aren’t asking for a plea deal trying to turn in the person who hired them.
So (again, pretending everything is identical, and pretending that all investigations should take exactly the same amount of time) there are at least two, quite logical reasons the FBI hasn’t arrested the Libby analog quite yet:
1) The FBI *is having to build a case* against Stone, because they have no burglars in jail making plea deals.
2) The FBI already has an open and shut case against Stone, but is seeing if they can *prove* Stone was working for someone else before they arrest him. (Remember, no one ever was able to determine if Nixon *did* know about the burglary in advance or not.)
Complaining about how one investigation is taking longer than another, when the latter *caught people in the act who then gave up the name of the person who hired them*, and the former didn’t, is completely idiotic. Of course building a case takes longer when the prosecutor doesn’t have their arrested underlings clamoring for a plea deal!Report
George,
Jesus fucking christ. I’d pay you to get a clue, if I figured you could possibly find one.
At least part of the Russian Investigation is people trying to “find evidence” to excuse their own deliberate obstruction of justice
That has jack all to do with Paranoia OR WitchHunts, and these ain’t bitter people, these are POWERFUL people. Powerful enough they can blame Russia and think to get away with it.Report
George,
Weiner and Abedin are both guilty of passing governmental data to the Russians. If trump has done the same, then you’re talking light treason.
This isn’t Japan-style espionage, this is freaking Russia.Report
How would you define a Constitutional crisis?Report
Read the linky above. There are a few to choose from. I’m partial to Whittington’s concise definItion, tho: “Constitutional crises arise out of the failure, or strong risk of failure, of a constitution to perform its central functions”.Report
The article didn’t make the case that the question “what is a constitutional crisis?” is meaningful. In fact it seemed to argue the opposite.Report
The article didn’t make the case that the question “what is a constitutional crisis?” is meaningful.
Sure it did. Given our constitutional structure, the question of whether a sitting President can fire and replace the head the FBI for the purpose of obstructing an investigation which is potentially personally and politically damaging is by definition meaningful. You may disagree with any particular answer, but it’s a meaningful question.
I’d make a joke about the corrupting influence post-modernism has had on your thinking but we’re way beyond that now. 🙂Report
The article quoted a bunch of people who argued, in various ways, that the question
“whether a sitting President can fire and replace the head the FBI for the purpose of obstructing an investigation which is potentially personally and politically damaging”
is different than the question
“whether this is a constitutional crisis”
because the question
“what is a constitutional crisis”
has no commonly-accepted answer.Report
How about this, then Pinky: does the absence of a mechanism to prevent a sitting president from actively obstructing an investigation which is potentially personally damaging constitute a failure in our constitutional framework?
(I really just want to talk about the substance of this issue rather than the partisan politics of it, hence my saying up thread “suppose” 1-4.)
BTW: the fist five people interviewed expressed the view that the Comey firing in and of itself didn’t constitute a constitutional crisis but that what devolves from it very likely could, given certain high probability events.Report
I don’t see how it could be a Constitutional crisis when the Democrats were running a candidate who, you know, actually obstructed justice by lying to investigators, destroying evidence, colluding with the Attorney General, etc.Report
George,
pppst! she’s gone! you won!Report
I would say that we’d be in a Constitutional Crisis if #3 wasn’t possible in the first place (but remained vaguely undefined).
The fact that there is a check and that the Senate isn’t inclined to use its check/balance power is not a crisis as much as a dereliction of its duty.
Resolvable, in theory, by voting the bums out.Report
But the end result (supposing 1 and 2) is that illegal activity has become institutionalized without recourse for remedy. That’s the worry. Maybe it’s misplaced.Report
I guess you slept through the eight years of Obama, under which a government official could do anything and only face the threat of a mandatory leave of absence – with full pay.Report
And my first thought was to write a comment that had to do with how firing Comey isn’t likely to have much of an impact on the investigation in the short run… no more than me losing my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss would affect my ability to make patch bundles.
“But what if Comey’s replacement told his subordinates to drop the investigation?!?”
Well, at that point, you make sure that it got put in writing then you scan that document or screencap that email and make it hit the front page of Reddit.
And when Trump refuses to step down, *THEN* we can have a good Constitutional Crisis.Report
Well, at that point, you make sure that it got put in writing then you scan that document or screencap that email and make it hit the front page of Reddit.
That strikes me as an extra-constitutional solution to the problem.Report
The First Amendment was put in there for a reason.
The Founders knew that we shouldn’t trust the government to be able to solve everything. There’s reason to believe that they thought that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, should be reserved to the States respectively, or to the people, for that matter.Report
It’s only a consitutional crisis if and when the House votes to impeachment and the Senate votes to convict and Trump doesn’t leave. If no impeachment, it’s only a constitutional crisis if Trump doesn’t get reelected in November 2020 and then doesn’t leave in January 2021. If he’s reelected, it’s only a constitutional crisis if he doesn’t leave in January 2025.
It’s the public’s job to either vote for people that will kick Trump out before 2020, or vote to kick Trump out in 2020 – if that’s the will of the people. It was the public’s job not to put Trump in the White House in the first place, but they failed in that assignment. Or more charitably, it was the electoral college’s sole design concept to keep someone like Trump out of the White House, but it failed to perform that essential function.Report
I’m pretty sure it’s not the job of the electoral college to ignore how their states voted so they can put into office the most corrupt politician in American history. Just the other day the Prime Minister of Bangladesh said Hillary had put her under a lot of pressure to keep in place, contrary to law, a big Clinton donor.Report
You’re focusing on the partisan/retail political side of the equation as a “constitutional” check on abuses. I’m focusing on the (so to speak) internal side of this: that the president can, functionally speaking, obstruct an investigation into his own activities without any branch of government challenging that behavior. Ie., a situation in which the Senate confirms someone on the expectation that they quash the investigations, and in which the House refrains from impeaching the President for nominating someone to quash those investigations.
Obvs, complicity (tho NOT according to Ivanka’s definition) from GOP CCers is essential for this eventuality to be realized. But given that, it seems to me codifying this type of behavior, which is illegal and prosecutable in any other setting, in fact would constitute a constitutional crisis. At least, according the the definitions used by the legal scholars in the above linky. And that’s what I was wondering about. You have apparently have a higher bar to clear for the concept to apply.
In other words, I (personally) don’t think we need to reach the level of a coup for the concept of a constitutional crisis to make sense.Report
Again, I’m not seeing the payoff from applying that label. I consider half the decisions the Supreme Court hands down to be constitutional crises. But what’s the benefit of phrasing it that way? It riles up the people who are inclined to agree with me, it means nothing to the people who don’t, and it might persuade a few in the middle – or alienate them. There’s no DEFCON for the political system, and even if there were, characterizing the Comey situation as something that could turn into a constitutional crisis is hardly a reason to scramble the jets.Report
So ditch the label and come up with a term which refers to the President firing and hiring an FBI director for the purposes of obstructing an investigation with Congressional approval. You choose, then we’ll discuss whether you think the term applies to the current situation.
I tend to think the term “constitutional crisis” is perfectly appropriate so long as we’re talking about constitutional conflicts created by the usurpation of powers accorded to one branch by another with an eye towards their severity and ability to break with established norms. Along those lines, the first time a President took the country to war with a foreign power without the consent of Congress a constitutional crisis was arose, but since than that initial usurpation of power the crisis has become institutionalized to some extent. It’s become the new norm. Hence my worries about the potential constitutional crisis devolving from Comey’s replacement process and that crisis being institutionalized as a new norm.Report
Why do we have to name it anything? A lot of things happen that we don’t name, much less give such a loaded name to.Report
Don’t name it anything, then. We can still talk about it, can’t we? What are your views on the dynamic that shall not be named?Report
Well, clearly Comey’s ring had some connection to the Dark Lord…Report
Calling it a crsis gets you eyeballs watching, money, votes and the chance to rush your preferred solution though the system before people stop to think. It’s the typical liberal reaction. Here is a crisis and here is our solution….Report
Yeah, this all goes back to a Vox article, so we should assume that the conversation was based on a few misunderstandings and bad logic.Report
Are you OK with calling it “a civilization-warping crisis of public trust”?
Ben Sasse is. Report
The important thing is that we label it.Report
Ugh.Report
Just watched it. Did you? You extracted the key quote, but he was talking a lot more generally about the need for maturity and sound judgment than about the specifics of this case.Report
Didn’t watch it, read the transcript.
You’re still evading the main topic by trying to reduce it to partisan politics.Report
No I’m not. I don’t care about the partisan politics. I haven’t even mentioned partisan politics.Report
You’ve yet to comment on the substantive issue the initial question was based on, either.Report
The entire consitutional design is about seperation of powers and tension between the branches over their use. So, true, if two or more branches collude to undertake an action that violates the norms and standards of good government, thats Not A Good Thing.
But the underlying check on everything, the only true limit on everything, is the sovereignty of the people. I’m not willing to call things a real crisis until that sovereignty, ratified in elections conducted under rules agreed to by everyone beforehand, somehow fails.
(And yeah, voter supression is a thing. But it was a thing the Democrats were fully cognizant of going into November 2016 and had a half a billion dollar war chest to work thru and around the obstacles GOP state legislatures have erected)Report
So, say, Watergate wasn’t a Constitutional crisis?
I’d argue it was, though it was also one where the order was able to properly react and survive the crisis.
Otherwise, I think we’ve only really had one Constitutional crisis: the Civil War.Report
I ain’t no constitutional nor Watergate scholar, but I’d say that Watergate and etc didn’t constitute a constitutional crisis since the House (at long last!) exercised its accorded powers to check presidential abuses, then closed some gaps to prevent similar abuses in the future. The current worry is that the GOP sanctions what I view as a pretty blatant abuse of executive power by refraining from impeaching Trump. (Conditional on the Senate confirming a Trump loyalty-oath taker, of course.)Report
I think the “at long last” is my point. It was uncertain for a while that the issue would be resolved appropriately, with Nixon out of office. It required quite a few then-unprecedented (and still unrepeated) measures, like Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
Same thing could happen in a worst-case-y version of 1-4, where Trump installs a crony as FBI Director and a tide of damaging leaks lead big Dem wins in ’18, paving the way to impeachment.
I.e., the crisis is the doubt, but the system may rise to the occasion and dispel the doubt.Report
Yes, good points. I’m inclined to agree. The situations are very analogous, to be sure, tho I’d say the crisis isn’t the doubt but lack of a mechanism to prevent it from happening other than future elections or that 3 doesn’t obtain. But yeah, I get what you’re saying. At the deepest depths of Watergate we were in fact experiencing a constitutional crisis, one which was remedied over time.Report
Election of 1800, death of WH Harrison, Civil War, election of 1876 were constitutional crisises.
Marbury v Madison, Johnson impeachment, Nixon near impeachment, Clinton impeachment, election of 2000 and 2016 were all on the brink of Constitutional crisises, but off ramped at one point or another (mainly by one side conceding victory to the other side; for the actual impeachments, the offramp was the vote against conviction)Report
As far as I know, Trump is pretty popular within the rank and file of the military. But if the Senate convicts and Trump refuses to leave, he’ll find himself escorted out of the White House by young men with uniforms and guns. They’ll offer him several chances to walk out with dignity first, but he will be walking out.
The military oath is to the Constitution, not to the President personally, and the rank and file as well as the brass are all really clear about that.
Thing is, it will never come to that. As I’ve argued before, Trump runs away from every serious fight he has even a chance of losing. If the whip count even gets close, he’ll resign just like Nixon did.Report
Some heroic staffer should plant a fake news story in his morning briefing saying he’s been impeached already, and the Senate is expected to vote to convict.Report
I don’t think any of the “Profiles in Courage” award winners actually lied to earn that accolade. Otherwise, yeah, that’s what the award is for.Report
It’s not a “constitutional crisis” because the gov isn’t conflicted with itself and doesn’t threaten to be so.
Further it’s hard to “Suppose” those 4 things when I can’t tell the difference between that and the Dems+Media still being in shock and making stuff up because they lost the election to Trump of all people.Report
The argument (in the form of a question, really) is purely internal to the nature of a constitutional framework of governance. If you can’t get passed viewing it in terms of partisan politics replace Trump’s name with a letter.Report
Partisan bullshit investigations are a longstanding thing, and generally we expect the President to tolerate them and fight them within established channels. Assuming arguendo that the Russia investigation is garbage really doesn’t do much to change the underlying dynamic and threat.Report
The issue then is, Did Trump just pull another Saturday Massacre? (I.e. Watergate’s firing of the guys investigating Nixon)
The answer so far is “no”, because as far as we know Conley wasn’t personally doing the investigation.
If we’re staring at media hysteria and Conley actively being on the “hit list” for a while, and (more importantly) if his replacement doesn’t halt the investigation, then we’re fine.
If the replacement halts the investigation, then we have a serious problem that could really quickly (and I hope would really quickly) rise to a Constitutional CrisisReport
The issue then is, Did Trump just pull another Saturday Massacre?
Not to be overly precise here (but I’ma gonna) the issue is whether 1-4 in my initial comment constitute a constitutional crisis.Report
Yes, on the face of it… but some of your assumptions are problematic.
Trump announces he’s firing the head of the FBI because that head is daring to investigate him (which is basically your assumption absent telepathy). *That’s* a problem.
Trump announces that he’s firing the head of the FBI because he wants his own crew.
Trump fires people really easily, most CEOs want their own crew, the head of the FBI is on the “can fire” list, the FBI is *always* investigating people.
With this, we don’t have a problem just yet. Trump is fully operating within the scope of his authority and even has cause because this head has been directly involved in several messy public problems.Report
And Trump’s public statements in a TV interview.
And a ton of subsequent reporting.
We’d have to rely on telepathy in the case of a normal President who’s not a moron.Report
This is the point where it’d be useful to have a press that isn’t insane with shock, hysteria, and constantly screams “wolf” every day. It’s possible there really is something there… but it’s also possible the press and dems just want it to be.
In a different universe where HRC won, she would have fired Conley for daring to investigate her and the Dems have admitted they’d solidly support him being fired.
So apparently it’s only a problem if Trump does it.
Either Trump just blew up his Presidency or the media and dems have (once again) shown that they spin up every time Trump opens his mouth.
The first would be interesting, “President Pence” would has a nice ring to it… but the whole “it’s only a problem if Trump does it” implies the 2nd.Report
If the replacement halts the investigation, then we have a serious problem that could really quickly (and I hope would really quickly) rise to a Constitutional Crisis
Yes!, this is the question I was interested in hearing people’s thoughts on. Obvs I agree.Report
Gee, My company has had two General Managers, two Reductions in Force (layoffs), and a reorganization in 24 months. Everyone doing tactical work and who were not laid off, are still doing work and making decisions and running the company. If the FBI is so utterly incompetent that the next level down leadership guys cannot fill in the leadership role for a few months, this is the least of our worries. Additionally, the “leadership” isn’t running the investigation. The tactical level guys are. If they can’t do their job because the head of the FBI isn’t around, then I’d submit that they can’t do the job at all. What, they put a dozen recent graduates of the FBI school on this and they need their hands held? Doubtful.Report
Damon,
This is push panic button, but for the people with contracts with the FBI, as the new guy might not want the old contractors. All Jobs In Air (not civil service, obviously), Standby For Landing.Report
The other issue is that it comes down to the mens rea of Trump, instead of just the overt act. Granted, how much inherent power for the President to hire and fire people was the underlying case of both Marbury v Madison and the Johnson impeachment (and I believe one of the draft articles against Nixon), but still, doing anything about Comey’s firing requires us to get into Trump’s head. (Which is the worst real estate market in existence)
You still got the basic defense that Comey should have been fired one of three times by Obama (either after the July press conference regarding Clinton, after the October surprise, or as Obama was heading out the door.) There’s also the premise that Obama shouldn’t have hired Comey in the first place. (You can point to summer of 2013 as the point were Obama lost his mojo and never got it back)Report
We have unusual amounts of insight into Trump’s mens (such as it is) rea because of the way he rambled on in his interview with Lester Holt, his deranged Tweets, and the way his Administration leaks like a porcupine’s waterbed.
That being said, these seem to be good arguments for appointing a more-independent-than-usual replacement for Comey, for the Senate being skeptical about Trump’s nominee, for having a Special Prosecutor, and so on and so forth.
If Trump weren’t, well, Trump, his WH could have managed this in ways that didn’t reek.Report
If Trump hadn’t fired Comey, we’d be discussing whether Trump is retarded for not firing him, and whether Trump was leaving him in position as part of some scheme to derail the investigations.
Probably the only person who didn’t think Comey should be fired was Comey’s wife.
From American Greatness: The FBI does not need another Don Quixote as director
Its Don Quixote analogy is good.
[Ed Note: Please find another word to make that point. ~trumwill]Report
Yikes! Twice over. “An official confirming Post story to us and says, ““it’s far worse than what has already been reported” ”
https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedBen/status/864236727145201664Report
Buzzfeed’s Twitter confirms a Post article with an unnamed source. That’s barely one-quarter of a yike.Report
We’ll see!Report
Why wait to see? React now!Report
You don’t find the allegations Yikes worthy? I can’t imagine why…Report
Well, if you can’t imagine why, here’s the answer. While I can’t stand Trump, didn’t vote for him, and never will vote for him, and while I’m pretty sure he will commit multiple impeachable offenses in the next four years, and hope that he’ll be removed from office if he does, I’m not going to spend those very same four years jumping on every story that might fit the bill.Report
It’s probably not impeachable even if true. “Awful but lawful,” is a pleasantly euphonious phrase for that sort of thing.
Of course, maybe it’s not true and the WH isn’t with it enough to even deny a false story convincingly. I’m not joking even a bit.Report
It’s probably not impeachable even if true.
I’ve heard differing views on that: that impeachment is restricted to high crimes and misdemeanors and that the power to impeach is almost limitless.Report
That raises a question I have for any actual legal experts here:
Let’s say the Democrats take over Congress and decide to impeach Trump for jaywalking. They have the votes and they’re about ready to follow through. Does the Supreme Court have the authority to rule that jaywalking isn’t a “high crime” for the purposes of impeachment? Can the Chief Justice just sit down in front of the Senate at the start of the trial and say, “This is nonsense. We’re done here?”
If that question isn’t subject to judicial review and it’s just a matter of having the votes, does impeachment even need to be over an actual crime?
I ask because it seems more and more like Congress having powers that are only checked its members’ own decency and reason is not going to work in the long run.Report
Impeachment is inherently political and does not need any violation of the letter of any particular law or constitutional provision.Report
It won’t come up. Someone will pay more than they should for something Trump does overseas, and that will be bribery.
And that’s assuming Trump doesn’t do something real, or that we don’t want to take some wolf call seriously. Firing the FBI head, etc, dig into the kitchen sink and you’ll find something better than jaywalking.Report
I definitely doubt that Trump will go four years without doing something more impeachable than jaywalking.
I’m more interested in whether it actually works another X years down the road when norms have eroded enough that “impeachment” just means “we have enough votes to oust a guy from the other party” or if there’s still something to keep those wheels on the car.Report
One assumes his job includes making judgements on what information to share with the Russians. If he made a judgement call, ideally with someone who knows what they’re doing advising him, then that’s fine.
On the other hand his public rep is that of someone who has no filter between his subconscious and his mouth.
On the other, other hand, supposedly he’s very different in person.
…but it’s remarkably easy to picture him making either an ego driven slip (bad) or just outright lying (good?).Report
As I understand it, POTUS has pretty broad discretion when it comes to divulging secrets to just about anybody he sees fit. Unless it’s straight up treason, like handing over nuclear launch codes and protocols to ISIS, this seems like it’s just another case of Trump doing dumb stuff that isn’t illegal.
I’d feel a lot better about a lot of Trump’s actions if I believed that “made a judgment call” described any of them. I’m pretty sure that most of the time it’s more along the lines of, “did/said the first thing that popped into his head.”Report
Speaking of not knowing how to deny a story:
This is some Burn After Reading shit right here.Report
Oh, it’s not about impeachable offenses. It’s about the massive, perhaps clinically diagnosable but always shocking level of rampant, reckless institutional and moral destruction and intellectual degradation which increasingly defines the person sitting in the Oval office and watching, in real time, what historians will try to make sense of for decades to come.
We’re living thru moments of real historical significance here. It’s fascinating.Report
Trump revealed classified information about ISIS to the Russians?!!!!
*faints*Report
Supposing the WaPo reporting is accurate (McMaster’s denial only refuted claims which the original reporting did not make) I have an additional worry: what level of batshit crazy insanity is going on within the WH that someone present at that very meeting, someone who’s a Top People type person, would leak to the press that Trump shared highly sensitive information with the Russians? This administration is broken.*
(Also, why was the US press excluded while the Russian press was allowed?….)
*Actually, that’s true even if the reporting is false. Maybe even moreso.Report
I think the WaPo made the whole thing up – again. They cite as their source a “current or former” official. Yeah, Biden or somebody was just right there in the Oval Office.
The WaPo story also claimed that they were told by their source not to release details of the city where the information came from, etc, or it would damage national security. Get that? They didn’t claim the White House, CIA, or DoD told them not to release the information, they claimed that the person leaking the information to them told them not to leak the information.
Basically, unless they’ve bugged the Oval Office, there’s no way they could have had the information that their story claims.
It’s more fake news.Report
Uh huh.Report
Broken? Yes. Bergdahl-level broken? Iran deal level broken? Abandonment of Iraq level broken?Report
I think the 24-hour rule is a good idea for this one.
A coherent reality-based story would be hard to put together under even the most disciplined and articulate Administrations. We do not currently enjoy a Presidential Administration for which the adjectives “disciplined” and “articulate” may be used unironically. Remember how impressed we were at the State of the Union address when Trump didn’t visibly spit on anyone or use profanity? That’s how low our standards have gotten, in a very short amount of time.
So as for figuring out whether the man actually divulged information that he should not have (a different question from disclosing sources and methods, Mr. McMaster) to the Russian Foreign Minister, I think that’s going to wait a little while.Report
Don’t know what the admin. can say to refute the reporting, at this point, given that they haven’t yet.Report
Pres. Donald J. Trump, tomorrow, probably:
Report
And then McMaster resigns? Tillerson? Both? No one?
Here’s when we know the admin has passed the point of no return: when the blatant lies covering up serious violations of norms and/or the law do not result in a public sacrifice.Report
McMaster, Tillerson, and everyone else in the meeting have all come out and said the WaPo story is fake news. And frankly, no one else was there, leaving no possible “anonymous source” for the story to be based on.
Second, what could possibly be top secret compartmented information that would be in any way relevant regarding ISIS putting bombs in laptops? If we have relevant information then we’d better be sharing it with our allies, and even the Russians, otherwise we’re putting both their citizens and US citizens at risk of getting blown out of the sky by an ISIS bomb on an airliner.Report
The Russians were there.Report
If the WaPo’s famous “anonymous sources” are Russians, no wonder they keep printing fake news.Report
Ahem:
Report
This comment is a joy for the ages.Report
😐
Report
Translation: Talking with the Russians is part of his job. No one would lift an eyebrow if it’d been some Prez other than Trump who had done it.
If it’s something Obama could do without anyone blinking, then it’s Media hysteria.Report
Obama wouldn’t have done it (nor would GWB, Clinton, GHWB, et c.).
He could have done something sorta like it, and been totally in the clear.
Just like firing Comey, come to think of it.Report
We’re on the same battle theater as the Russians, shooting at the same people, and our troops are *not* killing theirs and vise versa.
So yes, we (starting with Obama) *are* sharing sensitive intel including where we are, who we kill, and when.
As far as I can tell, the media doesn’t know what exactly Trump told the Russians, and he probably can’t just come out and announce it in the open. For that matter the Dem “experts” who are talking *also* probably don’t know since they don’t have a need to know.
Politically this is a wonderful move by the Dems, but there’s a war going on and the Russians are right next to us on the battlefield to the point where they need advance warning if we blow up one of their ally’s air bases.
Sharing intel is expected and necessary, and all we the public know at the moment is that Trump shared intel.Report
“Sharing intel” isn’t the issue. That is indeed something Obama (or any of his predecessors) might have done in a similar situation.
Blurting it out in the middle of a meeting without knowing what he was blurting or where it came from?[1]
No, they wouldn’t have done it because it would have been stupid, reckless, and (at best) a potential betrayal of an ally’s trust, for no real benefit.
[1] Somehow, the WH story is that the fact that Trump had no idea where the intelligence came from makes this better. This is… curious.Report
But is that what happened? Or is that just what the Press wants to think happened?
As far as I know, we don’t actually know what the *it* of it is. What was said. How it was said. What we know is that it was secret, and discussed in a meeting.
The bottom line is this really is part of Trump’s job, so assuming it was blurted out in a meeting needs to be strongly justified… and so far I haven’t seen it.Report
Well, McMaster said that Trump didn’t know where the intelligence came from, and if we’re assuming that he’s lying, then… well.
As for “know”, numerous people have reported it. Are we 100% certain that this is the case?
No.
But we have reasonable evidence for it, and if it is true, it’s not just something that would have been business as usual in another Administration.
If it’s not true, well, it’s back to the WH not even knowing how to deny a false story correctly. There was a way to communicate that what the President did was proper, and the WH did the exact opposite.Report
If people repeating other people is the standard, then Mike Brown was shot in the back and cannibalism happened during hurricane katrina.
Haven’t we seen this before?Report
The question wasn’t, “Are we sure this happened?” because as I said, it’s not certain.
The question was about whether what’s being reported is really that strange, and the answer there is yes.
And no, it’s not impossible that the White House just completely mangled everything about this story in a way that makes them look awful. But… it’s kind of their job not to do that, and it’s not immediately clear how much the media can do to compensate.Report
And no, it’s not impossible that the White House just completely mangled everything about this story in a way that makes them look awful.
I’m not so sure about that. Seems to me the only way the WH doesn’t come out of this looking really bad or lying to Israel and then covering it up is either a) that Trump didn’t say what he said (possible!) or b) that the WH asked for and received clearance from the Israeli’s to share it with the Russians (not possible!). A tighter ship could certainly have engaged in damage control more efficiently, but that wasn’t what caused the ruckus. It was Trump sharing the intelligence in the first place. And that woulda leaked either way (unless Israel gave clearance to do so).Report
IOW, Trump basically outed one of our allies intelligence operations to one of their enemies. Which is a pretty big fucking deal, if you think about it.Report
The Israelis said they didn’t mind at all.
This is just the leftist press being ridiculously outraged on behalf of a group that doesn’t actually care.Report
I do not envy whoever has the job of managing Trump, his public stands, and his mouth.
I don’t think they want to “compensate”.Report
I think this one looks genuinely bad for Trump even after accounting for the usual bias. See Erick Erickson, e.g.Report
I disagree. At worst, he screwed up (maybe even got people killed)… doing something that is totally within his area of responsibility and authority. The President can, at will, declassify things.
So, learning experience.
I suspect the press wasn’t informed (and didn’t go public) every time Obama did something like that. A hostile media still has the potential to explain the whole thing as something that just happens.
The firing of the FBI chief has potential to be way worse. There we are potentially into corrupting the system and conflicts of interest and so forth, “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup”.
Trump is going to have to up his game if he’s going to stay in office.Report
I don’t mean it makes him look guilty, I mean it makes him look bad. A little corruption and thumbs-on-the-scales is pretty much par for the course for politicians (not that I’m excusing it, but it’s ordinary) and doesn’t mean that they aren’t also effective. But Trump’s thoughtless, childish bragging about the secrets he was let in on is a clearer sign than ever that he’s just really not up to this job at all, just completely over his head. At some point even some of his ardent supporters will realize that he’s not able to get the job done that they elected him to do.Report
It certainly makes him look bad. There are options other than bragging. Media reports that he told them about laptop bombs (which the airlines have been guarding against since March) and what city they’re being made in.
The problem is “what city they’re made in” part. Presumably ISIS knows what city they’re making them in, and now that they know we know they’ll move the factory.
Of course they wouldn’t know we know without the leaker who apparently wanted to make Trump look bad.Report
The problem is “what city they’re made in” part. Presumably ISIS knows what city they’re making them in, and now that they know we know they’ll move the factory.
I don’t think the problem is ‘they will move the factory’.
I think the situation was, basically, that ‘we’ didn’t know where the factory was…Israel did. Israel told us, but didn’t *officially* tell us, if you see what I’m saying.
In the intelligence world, there’s a lot of information that is known that the people who know it aren’t supposed to act on, because *not* acting on it reveals a lot more over time. Meanwhile, acting on it without getting everything in a row endangers current assets…which means that the intelligence service that discovers it basically ‘owns’ that information and can make others pretend not to know. (Because being told and forced to pretend you don’t know is still better than actually not knowing.)
And I think that’s what the level of that intelligence was. I think Israel basically said something like:
Before this point, ISIS knew we knew ‘laptop’ bombs existed, but that could have leaked from a bunch of places. Perhaps we were *even deliberately confusing* them, pretending it was a bunch of different threats when we knew more specific things. Perhaps it’s not even an airplane plan, perhaps it’s a plan to get bombs inside buildings, but *we’re* pretending we don’t know what sort of plan it is.
Now Russia knows it includes the location, which means Iran knows, which means it is a lot more likely that ISIS knows and can say ‘Who exactly knew where we are making these?’. The more information known about a leak, the easier it is to track it down. ‘laptop battery bombs’ was vague. ‘Israel told us that laptop battery bombs were being made here’ is less so. That’s why we ‘didn’t know’ that.
But that’s not actually the important problem anyway. Whether or not it endangers any lives or causes any harm is sorta secondary here. In this case, it might not.
The important part is that *we have just proven Israel cannot trust us with that sort of information*, and Israel will, presumably, stop trusting us with it! Israel, for the record, is a *hell* of a lot better at that sort of ground collection of data in the Middle East than we are.
And this is an exceptionally stupid reason to break that trust. It might be reasonable, hell, Israel might have understood, if Israel wanted us to do a Coventry and risk American lives to protect Israeli sources, and we…didn’t. It’s possible to come up with a situation where it comes down to a choice, and we pick ‘some Israel sources get exposed’ over ‘Some Americans get killed’, and it’s worth it.
But, uh, this wasn’t that. This was an idiot who has somehow has access to classified information bragging about it.
Hell, considering this was a situation that Israel was specifically worried about when Trump took power, maybe they’ve been *deliberately* feeding the US government ‘forbidden knowledge’ and seeing if Trump was going to randomly tell it to Russia.
EDIT: Oh, and let’s not pretend we, and Israel, are on the same side as Russia there, just because we’re both anti-ISIS. The Israeli source could not only be spying on ISIS…they also might be spying on *Syria*….Russia’s ally.Report
David,
Fuck. Did he really?
Oh, my fucking lord.
We had PLANS about the freaking nuclear launch codes. (from Palin, actually). We didn’t have plans that included “Do Not Tell the President ANYTHING EVER PLEASE DON”T”Report
I think you’re making *way* too much of this.
We had an Israeli spy hand over thousands of US secrets to Israel.
We had Snowden and wiki-Leaks release tens or hundreds of thousands of US secrets to the world.
Trump can be taught to shut up and his one secret doesn’t seem very big compared to either of those other two.Report
I speculate you may be shielding yourself from viewing this through the proper lens.Report
Perhaps. Or maybe refusing to care more about this than the Israelis (who presumably know more than I) do is the way to go.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/If-Trump-leaked-Israel-secrets-why-doesnt-Israel-seem-to-care-492057Report
Maybe the Israelis will express their extreme displeasure in person…like you know in a few days when Trump is there. They might actually prefer to be quiet in public and save the screaming for private.Report
Or:
Former Israeli spymasters rip into Trump, say Israel must reassess intel sharingReport
The right lens being Dem’s hypocrisy. Snowden and Manning were librual heroes but Trump is help to a different standard. Can Trump share anything and not be criticized, I doubt it.Report
But Trump didn’t leak the information to the press, he just gave it to the Russian ambassador.
FDR shared all kinds of intelligence with Stalin, but that doesn’t mean it would be okay for some White House aid to leak it to a reporter to leak it to the AP who would then forward it to Der St?rmer.Report
McMaster is telling everyone that the disclosures weren’t pre planned; they came up as part of the ebb and flow of the conversation. That’s pretty darn close to ‘blurting out’ even if ‘wholly appropriate’Report
“Let’s go to the tape!”Report
Obama gave the Russians the serial numbers of every British Trident nuclear warhead, without the knowledge and permission of anyone in Britain.Report
Citation?Report
It just means that every single Trident missile and warhead in the world is accounted for (as for every other ICBM in the Russian and US inventories); there isn’t a secret off the books stockpile somewhere. All part of New Start (and was part of previous treaties)
We don’t get deterence by having an indeterminate number of Trident warheads. We get deterence when some number of those missiles and warheads ‘disappear’ on Ohio and Vanguard class submarines for months at a time.Report
Thanks. That was helpful, and also I am just shocked to learn that @george-turner ‘s partisan talking point framing was insane BS wreathed around a kernel of unremarkable truth.Report
There may be lots of that going around.Report
The British were livid. They had never even disclosed how many warheads they had. Obama handed the Russians every British warhead’s serial number.Report
Which is especially terrible because it means that the Russians can contact the manufacturer and get the launch codes.Report
I kid. It’s more like a Rumpelstiltskin sort of thing where if your enemy knows the serial numbers, they can utter them and disable your launch capabilities.Report
ROFLMAO…..i knew the responses to all this would be epic, but i couldn’t even make that up.Report
The problem is that Obama gave Britain’s most highly classified nuclear secret to Putin, for nothing in return.
UK Telegraph: Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Daily Mail: America ‘sold British nuclear secrets to Russia’: Shock claim in latest WikiLeaks cables
For that, Obama should probably face the same penalty as the Rosenbergs.Report
That wasn’t all Obama gave them. Dems have a convenient memory problem, some might call hypocrisy.
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kyle-drennen/2017/05/16/Report
Here’s something that might explain why top Democrats were so desperate to blame the Russians for the hacks.
Murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich had contact with Wikileaks
It seems quite possible that they want all the attention focused in the wrong place because they murdered the real leaker.Report
“murdered the real leaker” Man it must be getting tense in the bunker.Report
Julian Assange offered a huge reward for information on Seth Rich’s murder.
The British ambassador who was given the Wikileaks information was adamant that it did not come from the Russians.
And now we hear that Seth Rich was in contact with Wikileaks.
That points to him as the leaker, a DNC insider.
Looks like somebody in the DNC plugged the leak.Report
It seems quite possible that you’re the real leaker.Report
No, George is like every other surrogate who lies to protect Trump only to have Trump quickly expose them as liars.
DJT this morning: As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety.
McMaster, Tillerson, and George Turner, exposed liars, hung out to dry by Trump himself!Report
Did he lie, though, or just jump to unwarranted conclusions? If the Post won’t identify a source of information, it’s fair to mention it, but it’s not fair to assume that the information is false. It’s not particularly fair to assume it’s true, either.Report
It’s fair to assume the information is false with certain background assumptions in place, for example that something about the WaPo article suggests that it’s a fabrication, in part or in total. But the fact that neither Tillerson nor McMaster refuted the substance WaPo reported implies not only that we, as media consumers, should accept the likelihood of the story being true, but that the admin also accepts the basic facts presented. George, being smart enough to realize that, is willfully denying those obvious conclusions. Then this morning Trump confirmed that he shared intelligence – “facts” pertaining to sensitive intelligence – with the Russians and justified this action as a “right” he holds as POTUS, further undermining George’s initial willfully cynical view of WaPo’s reporting.
I’m not saying evryone should view the reporting with absolute certainty at the time it hits the press, of course. Just that pre-emptive attempts to refute it without any evidence whatsoever constitutes a willful nd self-serving obfuscation of the facts in play. Ie., a form of lying. And George knows that.Report
Don’t overestimate people’s respect for the press.
Edited: I should have made that stronger. A lot of people assume that anything in the mainstream press is a lie. That’s not a pose.Report
See, that’s the core of the problem: reducing the issue to “respect for the press” constitutes a cover to reject anything the press resports that doesn’t confirm a person’s priors irrespective of the substance being reported or the quality of the reporting. In this case, the thesis “don’t believe the press” has been undermined by the very people the press reported on, and which the “media deniers” are presumably trying to defend as well, which ought to constitute evidence that the general thesis is based on ignorance (of one form or another).
If people aren’t smart enough to evaluate the likelihood of reporting being true, or the relative importance of that reporting, then the default should be, on a personal level, that they’re agnostic about the conclusions presented until further information is presented. Instead, since agnosticism is apparently an impossibility anymore, folks default to rejecting the reliability of media outlets or specific reports that don’t confirm their already held beliefs. It’s a bad cycle, one which intelligent people like George employ cynically to further amplify public distrust which serves his own personal goals. He’s fully aware of what he’s doing.Report
A lot of people assume that anything in the mainstream press is a lie. That’s not a pose.
Which is belief based on ignorance and driven by ignorance, one that devolves from conspiratorial thinking. The world is a complex place and a simplistic view that everything in the mainstream media is a lie only makes sense within a very ideologically narrow and fact-denying conception of reality.Report
A lie? Probably not. Presented with a certain bias? Oh hell yes. I’ve observed the cable and broadcast news, and papers for 30 years. The bias is clear. Frankly I don’t have a problem with bias. I have a problem with reporters claiming they have no bias.
I also have enough info and education to know that reporters often times get reporting wrong. Not saying it’s intentional, but a lot of reporters don’t spend years covering specific subjects, so when they report on something and make stupid errors, errors that are obvious to anyone who does KNOW the real info, their “trust-ability” is further reduced.Report
That’s how I feel as well. I just ask the “journalists” be upfront with their bias. I enjoy listening to NPR and was raised on it. But I never forget that despite everything they say they are biased.Report
That’s a pretty good philosophy, but I think that most journalists think they’re not biased because they’re trying hard not to be. I’d just prefer they try not to be sensationalist, which I think is the real bias that pervades all media.
But ultimately, all news is biased. That bias just doesn’t usually mean factually wrong information. It means bad conclusions from “analysts” or a tendency to ignore true information that changes the flavor of the story. It’s pretty easy for a reasonably intelligent person to see the Matrix code behind it and still get useful facts and walk away knowing more about the world.
I think that Fox News has an obvious and heavy-handed slant. Some of the graphs and numerical comparisons they produce are nothing short of hilarious propaganda. But I could watch Fox News all day long and still have a decent idea of what’s going on. With a second source, I’d probably be in great shape.
In fact, that’s how every media source works. You absorb it, compare it with what you know and what other sources are saying, consider it in context, check its sources, and draw a rational conclusion. There’s no Media Fairy with an unbiased and complete daily newspaper printed on platinum that you should be waiting for.
My problem is that people seem to be saying, “I’ll hold out for the Media Fairy. She’s the only one worthy of presenting news to my discerning and unbiased eyes. And until she arrives, I’ll believe whatever stupid bullshit makes me feel good without any evidence whatsoever.” I can only conclude that these people just don’t get how knowledge works.Report
I’m reluctant to say that all media are biased. That seems too close to giving up, or letting them off the hook. I guess it depends on what we mean by bias. Internal bias is having a set of beliefs that could influence a story. But practical bias is where your output skews consistently in the direction of our beliefs. A person can take steps to question his assumptions and aim for objective reporting. We have a right to expect that.Report
I’m reluctant to say that all media are biased.
Me too, and not only because it conflates what reporters do and who they are with what headline writers write and what the goals of the media institution are and the markets they target, etc.
I tend to think that most (not all) reporting from MSM sites is actually unbiased in the sense that one person is incapable of presenting, let alone knowing or understanding, all the information relevant to an important piece of news and therefore just picks out the relevant, newsworthy bits. How that reporting gets packaged and presented by editors/show producers moves it closer to an actual claim of bias, and how opinionators spin that reporting moves it to almost full-blown propaganda.
But the base level reporting is usually unbiased unless we include under the concept of bias that (eg) the business beat-writer will adopt a business-oriented slant on a piece of news rather than its correlated social/moral/political implications. And vice-versa, of course.Report
Adding: the problem with cable news channels is that there isn’t enough actual reporting – and by that I mean first order reports of newsworthy facts in the world – to fill out the day, so they report on what “some people are saying” about those bits more than they talk about the actual reporting itself. So we end up confusing opiniating about reported news with the news itself.Report
I think you’re a special case, Damon: you don’t trust anyone. 🙂
You make a good point, for sure. But if you tease out the view to its logical conclusions and take the argument seriously, general media consumption ought to incline a person to have less certainty in their beliefs rather than higher certainty. Ie., the only way to have high certainty is to not consume media which presents counterveiling evidence.
That’s not a new view, of course, but it’s important to keep in mind that if a person starts from a general lack of trust in the media, belief certainty cannot result from media consumption. But lots of people hold their media-based beliefs, especially political beliefs, with high certainty. So that certainty comes from somewhere else.Report
That’s fair. I will say that my “VERY LIBERAL” actress friend doesn’t consume much media for the very reason you stated. I find it funny that most of the media should would choose to consume would actually support her world view, in general. But, since most of the news is about Trump, she probably is too disgusted to watch it. 🙂Report
No, that’s not true at all. A lot of people assume that anything in the mainstream press that doesn’t flatter their preconceptions is a lie. I don’t know of anybody who takes the “It’s all lies” position when the report favors their team. In fact, I find that “It’s all lies” position is almost 100% predictive of being a partisan hack and almost never indicative of actual skepticism.Report
How about this: a lot of people give zero credibility to what they see in the mainstream press. If they believe “yes” on issue A, and the mainstream press reports “yes” or “no” it doesn’t affect their overall calculation.
But my main point was: it’s not a pose. I doubt that George is being disingenuous in giving zero credit to reports that conflict with his position, because he wouldn’t give supportive reports any credit either. Garrison Keillor once said that truth in the media is like a blue 7: sometimes when you see a 7 it’s blue, and sometimes when you see something blue it’s a 7, but there’s no reason for a person to associate the two.Report
How about this: a lot of people give zero credibility to what they see in the mainstream press.
That strikes me as wildly inaccurate (or rests on an ambiguity in the term “mainstream media), but even if you’re right the view is based a form of ignorance. WaPo’s recent story is a good example of why: even the administration concedes that WaPo’s original reporting was accurate. Hence according “zero credibility” to WaPo is not an evidence-based judgment but arises from prior ideological commitments which have nothing to do with the MSM per se.
It’s a trap, man.Report
I think I can accept that formulation of it. For somebody who legitimately believes that, I just take it as evidence of lazy media consumption and a general inability to reason usefully about the real world.
They’re certainly philosophically different positions to stake out, but they both ultimately lead to being a person who more likely than not lives in a comforting fantasy world of their own invention.Report
Here’s a perfect and mind-blowing illustration of how it works: last night on Fox a panelist in a discussion group responded to the argument that the leaking of classified info was The Real Story here by saying that, no, the real issue is that Trump disclosed classified information to the Russians which compromised US and allied intelligence gathering operations and endangered the lives of the people involved. The host responded by saying something like “well, only if you believe the WaPo article, and they’ve been wrong before.” When pressed, he said, “well, they were wrong about Spicer hiding in the bushes” when he was actually hiding behind the bushes.
If WaPo can’t even get an important detail like that right, why should we trust them about anything?Report
That’s exactly the phenomenon that bothers me so much. People who should be at least a little bit smarter than third graders are staking out an epistemological position that makes no sense.
The claim seems to be that if you open a random major newspaper or cable news report and grab a random truth claim from it, it is equally likely to be true or false. Further, it follows that you’re better off just making up something that makes you feel good deep in your tummy.
Adults are saying this. Adults who can tie neckties to go on television and cash paychecks without their parents’ help.Report
Well, that’s not the only thing the Post has ever gotten wrong, is it?
ETA: And, the original story was based on an anonymous source, correct?Report
Sure, I’ll concede it even tho don’t know of any examples since I’m certain – in a statistical sense – that they’ve been wrong in the past. But the conclusion that everything WaPo reports is not credible does not follow from that premise. The rational conclusion is to regard WaPo reporting with a degree of skepticism commensurate with their actual record – and the quality of the reporting, etc – until further evidence presents itself.
A person who rejects WaPo entirely on the view that they’re not credible because they were wrong about Spicer hiding in the bushes is not basing that judgment on an evaluation of the evidence but rather some other form of reasoning.Report
Well it’s not like the story about Trump giving out secret info hasn’t already been admitted to be true or anything. So it seems like they should have some credibility.Report
Agreed, if you’ll stipulate that a criticism of the Post is not simply based on the one report about Spicer (even though that was the one thing that the panelist came up with). I’m not saying that the mainstream press is necessarily wrong or should be presumed to be wrong. And clearly George made an outrageous claim. But that doesn’t mean he’s lying or willfully obfuscating. It’s enough to say that he’s wrong.Report
So stipulated.
But that doesn’t mean he’s lying or willfully obfuscating.
No, he’s lying.Report
I’m not willing to go that far. Google defines lie as: “be in or assume a horizontal or resting position on a supporting surface”. Yes, I actually googled the word, and that’s what I came up with. But Wikipedia and dictionary.com refer to intention.Report
Heh. Old joke:
“Why should we let sleeping dogs lie?”
“Because if you call them “liars” they’ll wake up and bite you.”Report
@stillwater
@pinky
It’s not “lies” but (to a first approximation) it is written by journalists (i.e. English or Journalism majors) the majority of which are Social Justice Warriors who…
1) want to change the world,
2) see the world thru a heavy filter,
3) only talk or associate with similar people,
4) don’t understand most subjects well enough to ask critical questions,
5) don’t understand their own biases,
6) are under heavy time pressure to put something out right now.
So everything Trump is, does, and says pushes their buttons. They asked people “are you going to be a racist and vote for Trump” and were shocked when they didn’t get accurate polling. Most are looking for *the* story that leads to Trump’s expected impeachment.
It is possible Trump’s administration isn’t any more dysfunctional than Obama’s adjusted for time in office (Obama’s was giving guns to drug dealers at this point), and the only real differences are Trump’s mouth and the media’s love for the Great One.
It is even possible Trump is doing a much better job. Within the margin of error and adjusted for media attitude I simply can’t tell.
Case in point. Trump decided to share information with Russia about ISIS. Would the press even cover this if Obama had done so? It was (shock) presented as potentially *the* story which might lead to Trump’s expected impeachment.
…and people wonder why the WaPo’s credibility is questioned?Report
It’s not “lies” but (to a first approximation) it is written by journalists (i.e. English or Journalism majors) the majority of which are Social Justice Warriors who…
You lost me right here. Everything that follows from this claim is irrelevant.Report
I will grant that it is within the realm of physical possibility that Trump only looks like he’s blundering all the time because the press has played ball and covered up the even worse blunders by all previous presidents, presumably in anticipation that at some point there’d be one they really didn’t like and wanted to embarrass.
And yet, instead of getting into evidence that the facts aren’t/weren’t being reported accurately, your post pretty much boils down to, “I don’t trust this sort of people, so I’m going to substitute my own intuitions for evidence.”
This, for example:
sounds more like bitter, hyperbolic horseshit than an actual description of anything that happened in the real world.Report
That’s too much planning, it’s more basic than that. Members of the Press are human and they, as individuals, wanted to see Obama succeed. It was a great moment in history and all that. So they looked for evidence to support that viewpoint and discarded evidence which suggested the guy with no management experience (or leadership, etc) didn’t do management or leadership very well.
With Trump, we have the opposite. And in a large, new organization run by a new boss who hasn’t done this before, there are going to be issues. There’d absolutely be negative things to report even if everything was going great and if Trump were a normal guy.
Put differently, how many members of the Press are Trump supporters? Are they shamelessly talking about how they get a tingle of excitement when he enters the room (presumably because of his Aura of Greatness)?
It’s more, I’m going to wait a while and see if this is actually a thing. Explosive news is often wrong in the first day or three and everything about Trump is “explosive”.
I especially find leaks from the “deep state” or whatever problematic when they’re talking about what might be ignored if any other President were doing it.
Hyperbolic and an exaggeration to express a point.
But not in the real world? The polling and predictions were shockingly inaccurate. Multiple people on this site have recently made comments to the effect that America proved it’s a racist country by voting in Trump and all Conservatives are racists.
Media bias played a part in the media’s lack of predictive accuracy for the election, they were *that* removed from the electorate. That bias didn’t go away after the election, it might have gotten worse.Report
I totally agree with you here, but I’m also going to put it in the same category as the overall liberal media, the patriarchy, institutional racism, corporate interference with science research, and a host of other phenomena: Things that exist and have real, measurable effects but do not explain nearly as much as their most vocal proponents believe they do.
I 100% believe that most of the media have a lot of confirmation bias expecting Trump to be a self-dealing buffoon and are more likely to believe and run with stories that paint him as a self-dealing buffoon. But I stop short of believing that he’s actually more competent and less corrupt than his predecessor. The effect of that kind of bias simply isn’t likely to be that big, and the number of things that have actually turned out to be real is just too high.
And of course, there’s the fact that the media doesn’t choose who they assume is a self-dealing buffoon at random. Well before Trump became a partisan issue and the liberal media had reason to attack him, all available evidence pointed to Donald Trump being a self-dealing buffoon. That certainly makes the media less skeptical of stories that fit the narrative, but it also looks like the narrative is true.
I’m not especially moved by the classified material thing because it strikes me as a pretty mundane screwup at worst. He’s within his rights, and even assuming it was really a terrible decision, it just confirms the uncontroversial fact that Trump usually talks without thinking. The media is probably too fired up about that.
But Comey claiming Trump tried to squelch an investigation into his associates?
Trump basically admitting the Russia investigation was a consideration when firing Comey?
The fact that his associates all seem to have a consistent set of unsavory connections (rather than the hodgepodge of unsavory associates most politicians have)?
His consistently idiotic and ill-considered tweeting?
His regular sky-is-green lies about obviously checkable facts?
The fact that he literally created a fake university to scam his gullible fans?
At some point, “media bias” as an explanation is doing far too much heavy lifting. It’s like people claiming that 100% of the negative views of Hillary Clinton were because she’s a woman.Report
And Flynn. The sheer scope of Flynn.Report
I have to shake my head periodically and remind myself that they actually made him the National Security Adviser. That would have been bananas merely based upon his available public statements indicating that he’s a conspiracy theorist, but then it just goes on and on and on.Report
I tried to keep the list short, but yeah, the Flynn thing is getting more and more interesting. It’s only a matter of time before Trump announces that he’s never heard of Flynn, I suppose.
All of this could be explained by media sensationalism and seeing patterns where they don’t exist, but I would not bet on it. I won’t speculate about what’s under the covers, but I seriously doubt it’s nothing. Even granting that some of the scandals are manufactured outrage, most of them seem to go:
1) News reports something scandal-like.
2) Trump’s people flatly deny it.
3) 4-24 hours pass.
4) Trump admits to it on Twitter, insisting that it’s not a scandal but rather just more evidence that he’s awesome.
5) Trump’s people insist that it’s totally normal and not scandal-like at all and that they never denied it.
6) Fox News insists that it there’s a long tradition of it and Donald Trump just did it the best.
7) Wikileaks dumps a bunch of documents smearing the original leaker.
Sometimes a step or two is skipped, but the fact that the past four months was enough to establish a pretty obvious pattern is nothing short of amazing.Report
I think I agree with most everything you said (and well said btw), but the following is worth a follow up quibble.
There is a lot of room for his predecessor to be *way* more incompetent than normally presented, especially on management type issues. Reagan looked good for a long time, right up until he got so dysfunctional that it caught up with him. Obama’s lack of accomplishments where they could be attributed to him should give us pause.
I agree Obama was less corrupt than Trump, but HRC was the actual choice and Trump (although just as, if not more, money seeking) has had a lot less opportunity to turn political influence into profit.
RE: Trump the buffoon…
This takes us into reality TV territory, and that’s a tough spot to be in. Trump managed to keep himself interesting and in the public eye for 50 years, and didn’t blow himself up. That’s *really* hard and suggestive of a *much* brighter mind than his public persona. You add in the money and the businesses and he presumably has management skills. So… maybe. *Probably*.
On the other hand we may be looking at survivor bias. 1024 people play Russian Roulette with a 50/50 odds, 1 lives 10 times, his odds of an 11th is 50%.Report
There’s room for it, but is it the most likely conclusion? Even assuming a heroic effort by the media (from the NYT to Fox News) to keep his failures under wraps, he also faced years of investigations from a hostile Congress with subpoena powers. Trump hasn’t yet been subject to anything like a Benghazi! investigation. He has had the benefit of a Congress that covers for him, and even that’s wearing thin after only 4 months.
If I remember correctly, given your priors about Obama and the actual record of his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law, you felt that it was more likely that he was receiving special grades reserved for articulate black people, so I suspect we’ll have to agree to disagree about what’s actually most likely to be true.
Well, this started with a Trump/Obama comparison, so I’m not sure why the baseline is changing, but I don’t think Trump compares favorably to Clinton on the corruption / money grubbing metric either. Donald Trump literally created a scam university to defraud his fans into maxing out their credit cards in exchange for basically nothing. And that’s what he did to make money without political influence to wield.
As for Trump’s management skills, I think survivorship bias plays a very large role in the ranks of the rich and powerful, as does inheriting a lot of money and influence. Trump’s actual business track record appears to be one of somebody who is good at exaggerating his successes and sticking his business partners with the costs of his failures. He hasn’t blown up, but he has been to the brink more than once and been bailed out. That certainly implies a certain craftiness, but it doesn’t map well to what I’d call “management.”
It’s not easy to measure a president’s management skills since the management tree is so deep. Ultimately the buck stops with the President, but the reality is that we should expect a certain number of things to go wrong well down the management tree because POTUS delegates to people who delegate to people who eventually delegate further. Using whether, say, the F35 project is going well probably isn’t a good indicator.
What I will say is that a decent manager should at least be able to appoint and manage an immediate set of competent staff and cabinet members who can work together professionally and not resign in scandal. So far, that’s going about as well as my mental model of Trump would have predicted. I don’t think it fits particularly well with the model of a Machiavellian genius who only pretends to be inept. I’m confident enough to predict that this was not a fluke and the pattern will continue.Report
It normally takes a heroic effort to get past the Presidency shielding the President, absent that there’s a lot we don’t learn. What mistakes did Obama make with classified information, what management mistakes did he make, etc. Were the guns to drug dealers thing Obama’s work or someone else’s? This was Obama’s *first* experience with management/leadership on a job that’s both management centered and one of the hardest on the planet.
The expectation should be that the raw newbie did work which reflected that he was a raw newbie. No one picks up a set of clubs for the first time and racks up a professional golf score.
The same logic holds true for Trump but he has different weaknesses. The big difference is we’re hearing about Trump’s various mis-steps, either because of leaks or because he insists on announcing them.
Not so much “more likely” as I don’t think it can be used as proof of outstanding intellect… and if we don’t have that, we have *nothing*. He worked for more than a decade in a field where proving intellect is expected and trivial. He managed to do nothing which proved intellect. At some point absence of evidence starts looking like evidence of absence.
You made a prediction about Trump so I’ll make one about Obama. He’s going to not do anything beyond being articulate and charismatic.
HRC gave uranium mining rights to a Russian mobster. To advance HRC’s career, her husband sold a Presidential pardon and also pardoned some unreformed cop killing terrorists. She’s had to shut down parts of her “charity” because funding instantly dried up after she couldn’t hand out political access.
Corruption is defined as misuse of government resources to enrich yourself and HRC easily wins that contest.
Yes, but at some point you have to wonder if there’s skill in flipping that coin. I think he has serious flaws, but those flaws are balanced with strengths and don’t represent his totality.
Trump hits the radar as an extreme version of “the charming sociopath”.
Agreed.
:Sigh:. “President Pence” continues to have a nice ring. Having said that, history suggests it’s remarkably easy to underestimate Trump, even repeatedly. I think it’s fair to say his current failures are being examined with a microscope while Obama’s were ignored or shielded by the office.
Trump is very much the President we have and not the one we want to have… but I’m going to wait another year before speculating on his overall success or failure. We’re still in transition. He has a history of successful management and the bigger the item (implying more personal attention), the better the outcome.
He’s the President because he beat, fairly, a large number of better financed, more experienced, opponents who were supported by the system. He represents a sizeable amount of the electorate. For the sake of democracy he deserves a fair chance.Report
The media has clearly suddenly gotten very good at it–even better than the full force of congressional and senate oversight committees in the past. Much better than they were for Obama or GW Bush or any POTUS before, it seems. I mean, it’s not like Obama is unique in looking cleaner than Trump. As far as I can tell, every POTUS before him has enjoyed that privilege.
I’m not sure what the question is? Did he start the program? No, it started at the Justice Department in 2006. Did he directly design or oversee it? That seems pretty unlikely given all of the things a POTUS does. Are you saying that there was a lack of investigation/coverage on the topic?
If that was all he was doing and if his title wasn’t Lecturer, I might agree with you. But he had day jobs during those years (law firms, activist organizations, state government). And his title was Lecturer, not Professor, meaning his job was to teach. I’m wondering what kind of output you’d expect.
This isn’t even remotely close to an accurate description of what happened. I think we said something earlier about unremarkable day to day operations being spun as outrageous? This is one of those things. When my sources do those things to me, I stop using those sources.
I’ve never been clear on how money for a thoroughly accounted-for charity counts as “personal enrichment.” Personal aggrandizement, perhaps. But the use of scare quotes around “charity” has some sinister implications that the data don’t seem to bear out. Nobody seems to be able to clearly articulate what the Clinton Foundation was doing to enrich Hillary Clinton.
Of course, given your definition, Trump could not possibly be involved in any corruption, not having been in government until now. For example, when he paid off a state Attorney General to keep her from taking up the case against the fraudulent university that he was running for personal enrichment, that would not be corruption. So the good news is that we elected a POTUS with zero history of corruption.
Given the congressional investigation aspect of it and the existence of outlets like Fox News, to the extent that the effect is real, I seriously doubt that it explains the difference in apparent scandal volume, unless Fox News is uniquely incompetent at investigations in a way other news outlets aren’t. We’re into Area 51 territory in terms of the ability to squelch bad news. Eight years with pretty bland scandal output versus four months of this–the effect would have to be enormous.
But I guess we’ll see. Maybe it’s all nothing.Report
Multiple issues. First, the press is unusually hostile to Trump compared to other Presidents (even GOP Presidents), and to be fair he’s largely earned that. Trump likes creating outrage and channeling it. I can’t think of any other POTUS who gave us unfiltered access to his subconscious.
2nd, Trump really is new at this, and many members of his crew are new, and they’re not used to working either together or in the context of the White House.
3rd, As far as I can tell, despite having multiple members of the GOP running on this, Trump is the *first* POTUS to actually try shrinking the gov’s role and power. It’s *supposed* to cost government workers their jobs and reduce their influence.
I expect the EPA to be staffed with people who view environmentalism as a good thing and probably their life calling. I expect the DC administration to be “statists” and think the power of the State is a force for good, or at a bare minimum like their jobs and authority out of self interest.
Some of what we’re seeing is push back by what I’ll call “the deep state”. Among other things this means various interests leak destructively to the Press, and Trump is a lot less protected by the normal machinery of the POTUS because he’s threatening the interests of that machinery.
Basically. I’m also saying, although it’s unlikely Obama was at fault, if he were then we wouldn’t know. As a raw newbie it’s stunningly unlikely he had no problems.
TCF accepted more than $100 million from people or entities connected with Uranium One, and yes, (excluding 2.3 million or so) the timeline does NOT match up for a quid pro quo deal, so it was legal. Maybe exactly like there was no quid pro quo deal with the pardons so that was legal too.
Which doesn’t change that HRC was collecting money with one hand and giving out gov favors with the other. We can’t legally prove a connection which would result in her getting jail time, but the donations instantly dried up when she lost influence.
My view is she’s found “legal” ways to be corrupt, which is why all these investigations start and ultimately why they fail.
TCF is used to give jobs to Clinton insiders, fund Clinton causes, and do the various “power and influence” things your typical Billionaire does if they’re into that sort of thing. It’s a tool for power and influence, and it’s funded by power and influence.
Bribery would be a good example of Trump corruption. Up until now he would have had to be giving bribes and not taking them.
Decades ago, Playboy evaluated every POTUS in terms of sexual morality and concluded the *only* POTUS who’d been above reproach was Nixon. To be guilty of one thing doesn’t make you guilty of everything, Or in Trump’s case, to be guilty of almost everything doesn’t make you guilty of everything.
I would not be shocked if Trump branches out into corruption (his business is absurdly well situated to do this, way more than TCF), but thus far it’s been a minor side note compared to his many other flaws.Report
Uh huh.Report
Denver Post pictures from Colorado hailstorms from 1950 to the present. Can’t blame the recent ones on climate change, I guess. I still recall clearly the first time I saw the city where I live break out snow plows to clear hail from sections of roads.Report