dragonfrog:
Not to mention, that there appears to be some statistical skew in cutaneous melanin density between the victims of those tragic mistakes, and the nation as a whole.

We just had a statistical analysis done by some left leaning black Harvard economist find the opposite.

One assumes he adjusted his stats for either encounters with the police or crime in general. I tried reading the raw report but it was going to take too long to get my head into. The racial breakdown of the shootings is a reflection of society, not a creation of the police.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/13/black-harvard-economist-finds-no-bias-against-blacks-in-police-shootings/

Oscar Gordon: What I suspect will be typical is the department (under the influence of the police union) doing everything it can to keep that cop on the job and out of trouble. It’ll be called an accident, no charges filed, he’ll get counseling & training, and we’ll all ignore the fact that if a civilian had done this, he’d be facing charges.

We don't insist that civilians point guns at people as part of their job.

I don't know the details of this incident, but the moment you're pointing a gun at someone, the stakes are raised seriously high, and accidents are going to happen and people are going to die.

The issue then becomes what happens next. Do we ask the question, 'is this officer salvable?' Should we?

There are lines which society needs to draw for police behavior, but we're not going to insist they can't point guns at people and we shouldn't insist on perfection.

I think it's fair to insist on basic competence, and maybe this steps over that line, but the press has screwed up so many of these that I think we need to wait.

Jaybird: Do cops have “never events”? Should they? If the answer to one or the other of those is “yes”, how in the flying heck this not one of them?

That's a wonderful comparison, and yes, I fully agree this sort of thing should never happen.

So then let's follow the logic. How often do "never events" actually happen in a hospital where the surgeons have total control, lots of time to plan, and a team of helpers?

50 million surgeries a year (Google).

5000 (link below) of which leave stuff (normally sponges) inside the patient (leaving a sponge in is mind-numbingly bad btw).

At those rates, the police should be seeing "never events" a thousand times a day.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/08/surgery-sponges-lost-supplies-patients-fatal-risk/1969603/

Further, as far as I can tell, the result of a never event isn't "fire everyone involved". Now maybe surgeons are harder to replace than police so that's not what we want to do, but it should be thought provoking.

A million cops. Probably 10 million encounters with the police per day.

So this was the worst one in the nation for this day.

That doesn't make it right, or not grim, but I expect this isn't "typical".

Oscar Gordon:
Double down, hexadecimal all the way!

Weirdly enough, there are some applications where you *want* hexadecimal. For example if you're down there on the bare metal of a computer chip and you're looking for patterns.

I simply don't care about "plagiarism" in a politician (much less his super-model wife who speaks English as a 2nd language).

A job of a politician is to steal other people's ideas, repackage them so they're politically practicable, and make them into laws. You judge him by whether he's stealing good ideas, and doing a good job on the repackaging.

By that standard he gets a total pass on this. He can repeat Lincoln's (or Obama's) entire speech as far as I care. I also could care less about the whole lack-of-dignity he brings to anything he touches. I don't like it, but whatever.

However another of his jobs is effective personal management and crisis management. By those standards this was bad. Arguably Trump has to be an effective manager because of his empire so it's probably more a short term than long term thing but whatever.

My problem with him is he's trying to repackage bad ideas. He's running on a lot of things which are economic poison and/or totally unworkable.

tl;dr – If someone wanted to bribe Hillary Clinton from 2013-2015, the correct way to do it would be to say ‘I am giving this *entirely legal* giant bag of money to you, Hillary Clinton, because I want you to like me.’, and she would say ‘No, please, give that *entirely legal* giant bag of money to my daughter instead, I don’t want it showing up on my released tax returns when I run for president.’.

That would be the daughter who has a net worth of $15 million dollars (google)? The Clinton Foundation reportedly pays her *nothing*, NBC paid her $600k/year during her less than 3 years there.

So working off the assumption that Clinton had “NO EXPERIENCE” and showing all sorts of mathematical models for how an inexperienced trader would fare is just straight bullshit.

"Experience" goes to her being there at all. The impossible part comes from making silly amounts of money off of shorts in market that doubled in value in a year (and yes, I realize part of me thinking this is totally outrageous is I have a lot more experience in this sort of thing than most).

That's over and above her first day where she got a 6.5x increase in a flat market where nothing increased by that amount. If I recall the reporting of this correctly, she had to make a dozen or so carefully timed trades to capture various options bouncing around in the market.

Those numbers they're tossing around in wiki claiming what she did was a LOT harder than winning the lottery? They match up really well with her win/loss ratio and various other stats they've got up in there.

People playing by the rules can't do this sort of thing.
Experienced people playing by the rules aren't going to try.

Of course... the cattle futures stuff was heavily investigated by incredibly partisan teams and despite the tin-foil brigade screaming about how obvious it was, nothing was ever found — despite money being poured out like water to find something.

There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy

Morat20:
God, I love the smell of conspiracy theories in the morning. I also love someone trying to pretend you can calculate the odds of futures trading retroactively. That’s fun. Trillions to one that you’d make 60 grand trading futures while heavily leveraged. Someone should tell the futures market it shouldn’t exist.

"Highly leveraged", would make sense if she had just a few trades and made a lot on them, but that's not what happened. She showed that she can consistently beat the market, and not only that, time the market. Note "highly leveraged" also isn't normally isn't allowed for people who don't have adequate depth, if her $1000 "investment" had turned into a $100k loss then that would have been a problem for her broker. Except this very obviously wasn't a normal situation or relationship.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.

The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr940527.htm

Her trades don't make any sense. She claims she studied the market a great deal, but her trades (betting short) in a rising market. That's nuts.

Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."

These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day. Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. Blair may have been front-running other orders. Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton's account.[17]

"At or near the best prices of the day" means she's simply being given the best trades after the fact. Her broker made a ton of trades, she got the best.

Morat20:
The conspiracy theory mongering about the Clinton Foundation is particular telling, though. From neutral sources, it’s a bog-standard charitable foundation. The only thing even vaguely different about it is it’s not a pass-through charity — they don’t collect funds and then give them to other charities, but do the bulk of the charitable work “in-house”.

I particularly like the sneering implications it’s some sort of bribery machine, because clearly charities are never audited, don’t have to report their spending, and can be used as a personal piggy bank by the Clinton’s without the board even knowing or the spending being tracked. Because unlike every other charity in the United States, the IRS and various watchdogs are totally unaware the CF even exists.

The list of people giving money to CF is very strange, Blackwater (the merc group), the Saudis, and so on (so, yes, it includes people Hillary deals with professionally as SoS).
The Structure of CF is very strange.
When she was Secretary of State, Hillary was getting 700 emails a month from CF (this may explain why she was so adamant that she needed a private server).

The IRS (etc) have to deal with their various publicly filed documents (I put their 2013 tax returns at the bottom to show the level of detail), and yes, they don't have entries for "bribes and kickbacks".

However these sorts of financial oddities and conflicts of interests seem to follow the Clintons around, and yes, they don't normally rise to the level where they can be arrested (the Statue of Limitations had elapsed for the Cattle thing before The NYT went with it).

But notice that the "appearance of impropriety" isn't even an issue (the Sec of State collecting money for her charity from people she's dealing with as Sec State stinks to high heaven), the issue is whether or not they can be arrested, and the answer is clearly 'no'.

They seem willing to go right up to the edge of what's provable, as opposed to what's legal, much less what looks bad.

https://www.clintonfoundation.org/sites/default/files/clinton_foundation_report_public_11-19-14.pdf

You're reversing things. It was Hillary herself who repeatedly claimed she managed her own account, from her own "research", and it was only later that this was shown to be a bald face lie.

Further if you saw her whitewater testimony, her statements on this thing were amazingly weaselly worded. If memory serves, she was asked if she managed her own account and she replied something like she doesn't remember not managing it.

She and her husband still have student loans, she has NO experience in this at all, Cattle Futures was a game where 3/4ths of the "investors" lose money, her initial investment was a lot of money for her at the time, and these trades were heavily on the margin (meaning it was FAR more likely that she'd lose tens of thousands of dollars than gain it).

She and Bill are both intelligent, it makes NO sense to expose themselves to this kind of a financial risk. This is up there with reading a book on juggling and then getting started with chainsaws. Further it also makes no sense for a broker to let her trade an account this thin on the margin this deeply, or for that matter to even HAVE an account at all.

And yes, the market was indeed booming... which actually makes the situation worse since she made money SHORTING it.

without anyone explaining WHO bribed her, HOW they managed to do it through a futures market, or WHY they bribed her — or what she did in return.

HOW is easy. Her dealer was a guy who made lots and lots of trades, at the end of the day he just retroactively gave the best ones to her.

WHY is easy. She's the wife of the newly elected governor. The spouse which is out of power makes mysterious money on behalf of the one who is in power.

WHO is interesting. James Blair (the broker) was another lawyer and the outside counsel to Arkansas' largest employer (Tyson Foods).

So, shock, she's benefiting from someone who represents people who do business in front of her husband. And, also shock, Tyson Foods was treated rather well during this time period by the Clinton Governorship.

The Times also reported, “During Mr. Clinton's tenure in Arkansas, Tyson benefited from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans, the placement of company executives on important state boards and favorable decisions on environmental issues.”

Tyson appears to have obtained these results for what looks like a bribe delivered though Hillary Clinton’s commodities account. To quote the company’s former chairman: politics is “a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money.”

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/02/02/Why-37-Year-Old-Clinton-Financial-Scandal-Still-Relevant

And none of this is hard proof of any crimes or precise exchange of money for favors. Which doesn't change that her behavior (and very much the math) makes no sense if everything was legal.

Dark Matter: Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethic
Mike Schilling: Also, Obama is a secret Muslim..

By all means, if it's easy and obvious, please explain the hundreds of millions of dollars that she's acquired (Billions if we count what has gone through the Clinton Foundation and we should). My assumption is that she's worth the money... but what is it that she's does, and for whom?

And while you're at it, please explain her vast abilities (even as a total raw beginner) with Cattle Futures which was roughly equiv to consistently winning the lottery.

Odds of what she did: 1 : 31 Trillion (this is at *best* and gives her the benefit of the doubt, link)
Odds of winning Powerball: 1 : 180 Million (Source: Google, included for perspective);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy

My expectation is "The Clinton Foundation" is just the modern update of "Cattle". As corrupt and dishonest as she is, imho she'd make a better President than Donald. But IMHO it's a problem when politicians "mysteriously" acquire large amounts of money.

It's a much larger problem when the press and their supporters turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.

Compare Hillary to Obama (or better yet, Obama's wife).

Normal people, even at the level of the Obamas, don't have hundreds of millions of dollars mysteriously show up in their bank accounts with thin excuses on how it was 'earned'.

Hillary and Bill have always been involved in these sorts of things, they're both trained lawyers who apparently go right up to the edge of what-can-be-proved, as opposed to what-is-legal, much less the-appearance-of-impropriety.

Edit: And agreed, I'm not impressed with Trump's basic competence for this sort of thing, which is among the many reasons why I think he should be kept out of the White House even at the expense of electing Hillary.

I thought David Boaz summed it up rather well, meaning Trump would be worse... although to be fair I don't think Trump actually believes half of what he says, but it is what he's running on.

Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethics, so it's easy to picture her making deals with a GOP Congress.

Further, Hillary getting herself arrested while President wouldn't be all that bad, but the last time we saw a truly awful GOP President the result was a Dem supermajority.

Stillwater: ...The concept of base mobilization strikes me as implying that partisan individuals within institutions with the power to determine policy are (as you said upthread) pandering to the emotions of a segment of the electorate to gain their votes.

Not "power", more like "money". My expectation is that the people funding BLM are the same people paying for Hillary. Yes, the bulk of the movement are true believers (in what is unclear) but it's odd how their actions never really do her damage. Bern seems a lot more like a natural ally for BLM than Hillary, but that's not how it played out.

BLM wants "massive change". Bern ran as a revolutionary, Hillary is a moderate and one of the founders of a big expansion of the war on drugs/crime. Somehow he was taken to task and his meetings disrupted while she was not. That's over and above the idea that Hillary is going to do the massively good things for BLM that Obama has not.

Stillwater:Btw, my above comment reminds me of one of the few times I’ve robustly agreed with something Hillary Clinton has said during the primary. When BLM confronted her...

Oh, I agree with her too. She handled that really, really well... it made me wonder how much of a "surprise" BLM's visit was.

Hillary doesn't think on her feet, adlib, or go off script, if she's pressed she'll just evade and say basically 'nothing' (mostly this is a strength). And that was the only time I can think of where BLM "confronted" her.

Somehow I suspect after the election when they're no longer useful, BLM will experience a substantial budget cut. In short I think they're being used.

...it's not that I disagree with you (I don't), but imho the BLM movement is channeling their efforts unproductively. If the movement were about reducing the number of dead bodies, then ending the war on drugs needs to be part of the conversation and, as far as I can tell, it's not.

Short of that, there are things we can/should do, but mostly they also isn't part of the conversation. The list(s) of demands seems pretty unorganized and fairly removed from reality (dismantling the police is unlikely to lead to good things for their communities).

This seems more like base mobilization than a serious movement.

I'm a day late but I'll chime in.

IMHO it's naive to think tearing down the system would make things better, as opposed to worse.

I also wonder how much of this is election year pandering to mobilize the base.

Guy:
Honestly, I might just say “all referenda require a 55% percent majority to change the status quo”, on the assumption that anything that winds up on the ballot is important and 50%+1 is vulnerable to noise on close decisions.

I don't know... the whole point of bypassing the politicians is to avoid the "agent" problem (where what's good for the agent isn't for the people). A 50%+1 vote is the legit will of the people, including the ability to be stupid.

Do we really want to establish a principal where 55%(-1) can declare they despise the current situation and have them still be told, "not good enough to override your political masters"? The powers in charge already have lots of ways to put their thumb on the scales, and I have to assume they did (competently is a different question).

I understand the attraction to wanting to override this one, but it seems like something which could and would be abused just as a matter of course.

Not supervillain, just an openly corrupt politician. And btw I'd vote for her to keep Trump out of the White House.

Go look at "Clinton Cattle Futures wiki". What she claims to have done is roughly the same as winning the lottery every week for months.

If she can actually get in/out of the market at it's absolute low/high on a daily basis, that's a Trillion (with a "T") dollar skill which no one else on the earth has and she's wasting her talents.

Now, the $64,000 question, of course:"Is this like or not like what Hillary Clinton was doing with her email server?"

Bush's actions are the nose of the camel, Hillary's are the entire camel. It's what server is hiding that I find disturbing.

Hillary is getting 700 emails a month from The Clinton Foundation (TCF).
Ergo she's actively taking part, presumably raising money...
...from the people she's dealing with as Secretary of State

That would be over and above how Bill Clinton's "speaking fees" skyrocketed after she became Secretary of State. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/more-money-more-problems-a-guide-to-hillary-clintons-cash-scandals/391299/

At it's root we're trying to compare the hiding of (assumed) dirty tricks getting Bush elected and what words do we want to use to describe this? Conflict of interest? Bribery? Clinton Cattle Futures 2?

"awkward or embarrassing" would be viewed as "dangerous" to a politician if said information would cost them the election.

Very good article, thank you for bringing it to my attention.

DavidTC: Additionally, offshoring won’t raise the GDP at all!

The Scientific consensus disagrees with you. Free Trade increases the GDP.

DavidTC: cheaper things *lower* the GDP, not raises it, due to people generally spending less and savings more.

Then you must be thrilled that the cost of healthcare and education are going up. Good for society and the GDP are they?

DavidTC: Again, taxes apparently do not exist in your universe. Because there *are* taxes, if everyone spent everything the multiplier would be, essentially, two.

First, the multiplier deals with taxes and it's a measured value (which you proposed to be "2" and I agreed to).

Secondly, if everyone spent everything then the multiplier would be "infinity". I spent $500 on a TV => the guy selling TVs spends $500 on food => the food guy spends $500 elsewhere, etc. In reality money is taken out via taxes, savings, and so forth.

DavidTC: what money does to the *economy*, not what it does to *jobs*. Which, as I keep pointing out, are not the same thing.

If I tell you the GDP is tanking because of the economy, are you going to think the economy is also creating a lot of jobs? Increasing the GDP is good for jobs (and yes, the job market lags recoveries), and decreasing it is bad. Putting exact numbers on that is hard but those are the generalities.

DavidTC: You have conflated ‘jobs’ and ‘the economy’ again, assuming that because the economy is doing better, that jobs exist. In fact, that appears to be heart of everything you say, because you simply cannot grasp that something that is good for ‘the economy’ can be bad for the average American.

Are you claiming "the average American" would benefit by spending lots more money on clothes?

And btw, agreed, we have problems with job creation (although there are signs we're getting closer to full employment again short of changing laws). However there are things we can do to increase job creation without tearing apart the economy and going against the economic equiv of the theory of gravity.

DavidTC: Note ‘the average American’ is not the same as ‘every American on average’. Take ten dollars from every American, give that and another billion dollars to Bill Gates, and the Americans, on average, just got better off.

The example you're objecting to put money in every household in the US by decreasing the cost of clothing.

Dark Matter: GDP/Job: $110,525
DavidTC: you’ve completely completely forgets...

The big distortions we should be focused on is mis-reporting of GDP or Jobs.
1) GDP is problematic because there are aspects of the GDP which probably don't involve much if any labor.
2) The number of jobs reported doesn't include things which add to the GDP (illegals or whoever working 'off the books', people working for themselves in some cases).
3) The Bill Gates effect.
All of these effects push pretty hard in the same direction.

And yes, granted, this is a distorted view of things, I'm only going down this path because you object to my numbers without providing a sensible alternative.

DavidTC: ...you’re assuming that every extra dime people have will *go* towards the GDP. But, uh, no, it doesn’t. Not if they don’t spend it.

The multiplier effect deals with this issue (that's it's job). If no one spent anything we'd have a multiplier of zero, if everyone spent everything it'd be infinity.

DavidTC: And that leads us to the actual problem: To show that this would increase jobs, you’d have to show it increased the total amount of wages, *instead* of just increasing the total amount of corporate profit or investment income.

Earlier you claimed the Stimulus, which did something similar (but worse designed and temporarily) did increase the number of jobs by just dropping money on the economy.

DavidTC: There have been *huge* increases in corporate profits and investment income over the decades, and wages have stayed steady or slowly declined.

Wage growth is off topic, and even if it were zero, you're objecting to an effective increase in household income and a strongly progressive increase at that. Spending less money on clothing is nothing for the rich, but it's a huge thing for the poor.

DavidTC: Ecomonists are quite clear what they’re talking about when they talk about relative efficiencies. It is not their fault that people are being taught the theory of relative efficiency and then using it to justify something that doesn’t have anything to do with it.... Offshoring factory work from the US is not justified via relative efficiency.

And yet my example of "relative efficiency" show trade worked just fine even though Country "A" was less efficient at everything. By all means, come up with some Country A/B, Product X/Y math which shows what you mean and why I'm wrong about what economists believe. One of us doesn't understand what "relative efficiency" means in this context, perhaps the math will show it's me.