Tag Archives: Real

Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

by KitMowery0340 Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Is Donald Trump using his Twitter outbursts about the popular vote to distract us from this week’s real news: the vast conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming presidency? This question is getting a lot of attention today.

The answer is no. I mean yes. But no, not really. On the other hand, maybe a little bit yes. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

The real answer is the same as it was during the campaign: Trump is dedicated to creating constant uproars all the time. Is this because it’s just who he is? Or is it part of an instinctive strategy to keep us from ever paying attention to anything for long, aside from the fact that Trump is in the limelight? I can’t say for sure, but I’d put money on the latter.

My belief in this comes mainly from an observation about the campaign: Trump, it turns out, is fully able to focus on something for months at a time if he wants to. And the thing he focused on was “Crooked Hillary” and her emails. That was a constant theme of his campaign, which he hammered on relentlessly for months. And the press assisted, covering every new email revelation—big or small, meaningful or trivial— in blazing headlines on the front page.

And it worked. Sure, he needed a lucky break at the end when James Comey released his letter, but he had set the stage to take advantage of it. This constant drumbeat on a single issue was spectacularly successful.

Trump engaged in a high-risk-high-reward strategy by creating a strong brand identity—for Hillary Clinton. And as any brand manager can tell you, this is crucial. The relentless focus on Hillary Clinton’s email hurt her badly by confirming the sense that she was at least mildly corrupt. Trump’s scandals were different. The press did cover them, but it was something new every week. This didn’t confirm any particular view of Trump aside from his being a bit of a loose cannon. And within a week, each previous scandal was barely remembered. By November, the whole Access Hollywood thing—which was only four weeks old—might as well have been ancient history. It had been practically forgotten.

Donald Trump knows how to focus and he knows how to throw up lots of chaff to keep himself front and center. Does he mean this stuff to be a distraction? Beats me. I suspect it’s all intuitive with him. The only good news is that he can wear out his welcome doing this. In his previous life, that wasn’t a big problem because the press didn’t want to cover him 24/7 anyway. Now they do. He is likely to find that after a few months of this, even his most fervent supporters are a little weary of it.

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Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

by FrederiBoatman Posted on November 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump—or someone speaking for him, anyway—says that he plans to label China a currency manipulator on “day one” of his presidency. Fair enough. China does intervene in currency markets to manipulate the value of the yuan. Unfortunately, Trump might not like what would happen if China decides to call his bluff:

The simple act of calling out China for manipulating the value of its currency to gain an export advantage shouldn’t roil Beijing to the point of retaliation, said Derek Scissors, a China economy expert at the American Enterprise Institute….But slapping retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods would be more difficult because it would require congressional approval — a problem given that Republican leaders have been opposed to legislation to punish Chinese currency devaluation with duties, Scissors said.

There’s also the question of whether China is actually devaluing its currency. Most economists agree Beijing intervenes heavily in its currency markets, but in recent years has actually been propping up the value of the renminbi rather than lowering it.

Hmmm. Here is Brad Setser:

The monthly data suggest China has not bought foreign exchange in the market to keep the yuan from appreciating in the past 6 quarters or so, only sold. Its intervention in the market has worked to prevent exchange rate moves that would have the effect of widening China’s current account surplus over time. Every indicator of intervention that I track is telling the same story.

….If China stopped all management (“e.g. manipulation”) and let the yuan float against the dollar, China’s currency would drop. Possibly precipitously. China’s export machine would get a new boost. And rising exports would take pressure off China’s governments to make the difficult reforms needed to create a stronger domestic consumer base.

In other words, right now China’s currency is overvalued. If they weren’t manipulating it, it would most likely have fallen even more than it has—something along the lines of the chart on the right. This would mean Chinese imports get even cheaper, American exports get more expensive, and the trade deficit increases. This is exactly the opposite of what Trump wants.

Demonizing foreigners as the cause of all our problems is apparently a good campaign tactic. Dealing with the real world is a little different. Hopefully Trump will talk to a few actual economists and trade experts before he makes good on this particular promise.

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

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Climate change enjoyed its 2 seconds of fame in the final debate

by ConcepcionGerlac Posted on October 20, 2016

Five minutes and twenty-seven seconds were spent on climate change and other environmental issues in the three presidential debates, 2 percent of the total time — and that was pretty much all Hillary Clinton talking. (Surprise, surprise.)

There wasn’t a single question on climate policy, and only one that directly related to energy — thank you, Ken Bone.

How does that compare to debates in past years? We ran the numbers on the past five election cycles to find out.

The high point for attention to green issues came in 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush spent just over 14 minutes talking about the environment over the course of three debates. The low point came in 2012, when climate change and other environmental issues got no time at all during the presidential debates. Some years, climate change came up during the vice presidential debates as well.

2016 total: 1 minute, 22 seconds in the first presidential debate, and 4 minutes, 3 seconds in the second. Climate got just a split-second in the vice presidential debate. Clinton only name-dropped climate change once in the final debate, adding a whole two seconds to the grand total.

2012: 0 minutes.

2008: 5 minutes, 18 seconds in two presidential debates. An additional 5 minutes, 48 seconds in a vice presidential debate.

2004: 5 minutes, 14 seconds in a single presidential debate.

2000: 14 minutes, 3 seconds in three presidential debates. 5 minutes, 21 seconds in a vice presidential debate.

In total, over the five election seasons we looked at, climate change and the environment got 37 minutes and 6 seconds on the prime-time stage during the presidential and vice presidential debates. That’s out of more than 1,500 minutes of debate. Not an impressive showing.

A note about how we arrived at these times:

We parsed questions asked of candidates and searched the transcripts for keywords like “climate,” “environment,” “energy,” and “warming.” We cross-referenced the transcripts with video of the debates. Only the mentions that pertained to fighting climate change, cleaning up the environment, and reducing emissions counted. President Obama’s passing reference to clean energy jobs in 2012 didn’t count, nor did discussions of energy security, because they were in the context of the economy and not fighting climate change.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this election

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Climate change enjoyed its 2 seconds of fame in the final debate

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Fossil fuel favorite Lamar Smith just lost a big ol’ endorsement.

by Nathanmlm Posted on October 19, 2016

The San Antonio Express-News, the fourth-largest daily newspaper in Texas, has refused to repeat its prior endorsement of Rep. Smith, who has represented Texas’ 21st congressional district since 1987.

Smith is chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee — and a climate change denier. The paper’s editorial board accuses him of “abuse” of that position and “bullying on the issue of climate change”:

[L]ast year Smith threatened the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Kathryn Sullivan, with criminal charges if she didn’t release emails from scientists about a certain climate change study. That study refuted gospel by deniers that global warming slowed between 1998 and 2012.

Smith said he was shielding scientific inquiry. But the real effect would be to chill such efforts. And in 2015, Smith sought to cut NASA funding for earth science — a science that includes climate science research. He said the agency should focus on space exploration. Both are necessary.

The non-endorsement ends with an acknowledgment that Smith will probably win in his largely conservative district anyway.

Luckily for Smith, he has other friends in high places: namely, the fossil fuel industry, which has donated more than $92,000 to his campaign this season.

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Fossil fuel favorite Lamar Smith just lost a big ol’ endorsement.

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Even in a Complex World, There Are Still Plenty of Facts That Can Be Checked

by MaurineGooding Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Corner, Patrick Brennan suggests that political journalists are lousy at fact checking, and debate moderators shouldn’t try to do it in real time. There’s a case to be made for this, but he sure picks a weird example:

Liberal Twitter was all a-huff about how the debate commissioner cites the unemployment rate as an area where the facts are up for debate — har har, they say, you know there literally is an official unemployment rate the government publishes, right?

Except anyone smart saying this is being remarkably coy: People of good faith and serious economic training debate about whether the “official” unemployment rate is a good representation of the unemployment rate all the time!

How absurd is it to complain about the commissioner’s statement here? Say Trump says something along the lines of “the real unemployment rate is much higher than the government tells you.”

This might well be true — although it all depends on what you mean by the real unemployment rate….The people braying for fact-checking in debates are thus asking for moderators to attempt, in real time, to adjudicate disputes that divide Ph.D. economists and of course, a whole range of other such disputes on which the respective experts — trade economists, classification experts, presidential historians, whatever — often don’t agree.

Brennan suggests this is all a high-minded argument about U3 vs. U6 and the declining labor force participation rate and so forth. Silly liberals! Who are they to say that the unemployment rate is a clear fact when even professional economists argue about it?

And, sure, fair point—if this is what Trump was talking about. He’s not. He’s said on multiple occasions that the unemployment rate is “really” 42 percent or 21 percent or 35 percent. The headline figure from the BLS (currently 4.9 percent) is a “hoax” and a “conspiracy.” In fact, it’s “one of the biggest hoaxes in politics.” This is presumably because Donald Trump doesn’t waste his time with anything other than the very best hoaxes.

This is not an academic argument about what unemployment “really” is. It’s idiocy. It’s a lie. It’s a shameless extension of Trump’s juvenile populism, and Brennan knows it. If he thinks debate moderators shouldn’t even push back on something this rank, he’s showing a contempt for the truth every bit as casual as Trump’s.

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Even in a Complex World, There Are Still Plenty of Facts That Can Be Checked

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Undocumented immigrants still face unique obstacles in Flint’s water crisis.

by hedsdfx Posted on September 9, 2016

Australian architect James Gardiner wants to use 3D-printing technology to build structures for coral to grow on in places where reefs are decimated by disease, pollution, dredging, and other maladies (looking at you, crown o’ thorns).

Right now, artificial reefs are built out of uniform, blocky assemblages of concrete or steel. Those are cheap and easy to make, but don’t look or work like the real thing — for starters, because “the marine life that colonizes these reef surfaces can sometimes fall off,” one biologist told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gardiner worked with David Lennon of Reef Design Lab to design new shapes with textured surfaces and built-in tunnels and shelters. The computer models are turned into wax molds with the world’s largest 3D printer, and then cast with, essentially, sand. It’s a cheap and low-carbon way to manufacture custom, modular pieces of reef.

Reef Design Lab installed the first 3D-printed reef in Bahrain in 2012 — and, eight months later, it was covered with algae, sponges, and fish.

Mandatory disclaimer: Rebuilding all of the world’s coral reefs by hand is impossible, and climate change is still the biggest threat facing coral reefs, so let’s not forget to save the ones we’ve got.

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Undocumented immigrants still face unique obstacles in Flint’s water crisis.

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Way too many Americans have to worry about feeding themselves.

by HesterChewning Posted on September 8, 2016

Australian architect James Gardiner wants to use 3D-printing technology to build structures for coral to grow on in places where reefs are decimated by disease, pollution, dredging, and other maladies (looking at you, crown o’ thorns).

Right now, artificial reefs are built out of uniform, blocky assemblages of concrete or steel. Those are cheap and easy to make, but don’t look or work like the real thing — for starters, because “the marine life that colonizes these reef surfaces can sometimes fall off,” one biologist told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gardiner worked with David Lennon of Reef Design Lab to design new shapes with textured surfaces and built-in tunnels and shelters. The computer models are turned into wax molds with the world’s largest 3D printer, and then cast with, essentially, sand. It’s a cheap and low-carbon way to manufacture custom, modular pieces of reef.

Reef Design Lab installed the first 3D-printed reef in Bahrain in 2012 — and, eight months later, it was covered with algae, sponges, and fish.

Mandatory disclaimer: Rebuilding all of the world’s coral reefs by hand is impossible, and climate change is still the biggest threat facing coral reefs, so let’s not forget to save the ones we’ve got.

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Way too many Americans have to worry about feeding themselves.

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Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

by JonnieMckinney Posted on August 27, 2016

A girl puts her hand in a box with male genetically modified mosquitoes REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

GMOsquitoes

Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

By on Aug 27, 2016Share

When the news started to spread about a plan to release genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, it seemed laughable. The idea was to release hordes of engineered male mosquitoes that would mate with the disease-carrying females and cause them to produce non-viable eggs. The average Facebook post on this was something like: “LOL, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

I don’t see that reaction much anymore. A poll out this week found that 60 percent of Florida residents support tweaking mosquitoes’ genes to fight diseases, while 30 percent opposed. This isn’t statistical noise: Polls are consistently finding that big majorities of Americans support the idea. Conventional wisdom has been flipped on its head. Disdain has morphed into support.

What happened? In a word, Zika. It was the accumulation of those pictures of babies with Zika-related microcephaly, the news that Zika-carrying mosquitoes are buzzing around Miami, and the realization that climate change will usher the disease farther north.

Juan Pedro, who has microcephaly, in Recife, BrazilREUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

This is a perfect demonstration of the way humans, those peculiar creatures, grapple with risk. There’s a principle at work here that helps explain why we reject some things as being too risky and embrace others. We shrug off the suspicion of cellphone radiation but worry about genetically modified foods, even though neither has any demonstrated harm. We fret about nuclear accidents but don’t think twice about people driving cars through our neighborhoods, even though a total of three people have been killed by nuclear power in the United States, while 100 people are killed in car accidents every day.

This can all be explained by what I’ll call, a bit grandly, the self-centeredness principle of risk perception. I’m not condemning this mode of reasoning by using the pejorative term self-centered, just observing that our intuitions about risk are informed by calculations centered on ourselves, not centered on, say, humanity or the planet. The benefits of any change are distributed unevenly and when the benefits are centered mostly on others, or diffused among many, it’s easy for me embrace a scary, sci-fi scenario as a reason for opposition. But if it becomes clear that I stand to benefit, I’ll want to know how likely those scenarios really are; I’ll weigh the pluses and minuses of change.

You can see how this plays out with climate change. The benefits of cutting carbon are diffuse — they go mostly to unborn generations. So if I’m a conservative, predisposed to dismiss climate science, the self-centeredness principle makes it irrational for me to consider the evidence. I’m unlikely to see any meaningful benefit, reading voluminous scientific reports is hard, and changing my mind would make me a villain to my friends.

High-risk technologyREUTERS/Mike Segar

Or take GMOs. Farmers and seed companies reap most of the benefits. The rest of us get lower food prices — but that benefit is spread so thin that most of us haven’t noticed. Therefore the risks don’t have to be probable, or even plausible, for us to balk. You want to put something new in my food that doesn’t directly benefit me? Hells no. You can line up all the scientists, carrying all the authoritative data you want, but again, I have little incentive to read it.

It’s another story when you see the benefits. Mobile phones are so clearly beneficial that people can’t stop using them, even when they really should — like, when accelerating into an intersection. The outrage over the use of genetic modification to make plants for farmers doesn’t extend to the use of genetic modification to make medicines for us.

Follow the GM mosquito story and you can watch American perspectives do a 180 as we begin to see benefits for ourselves. Last year, a survey of people in Key West found that 58 percent opposed using them to control Zika, whereas, the latest poll found that 30 percent of Floridians were opposed. That’s not exactly comparing apples to apples (all Floridians don’t live in Key West) — but it does suggests a shift. The real test will come in November when residents of the Florida Keys vote on releasing the mosquitoes. That vote will tell us if the people of Key West have gone from feeling comfortable in the status quo, where experimenting with a new technology looks like an unacceptable risk, to feeling uncomfortably itchy and ready to consider something new.

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Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

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The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

by AlbertinaKimpton Posted on August 26, 2016

global weirding

The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

By on Aug 26, 2016Share

Antarctica is a weird place. While it’s losing ice faster than an heiress in a caper movie, it’s also getting a whole lot more snow — at least, it’s supposed to.

Warmer air holds more moisture, so globally warmed jet streams should dump even more snow over the frozen continent than they used to. Since Antarctica is cold as fuck, scientifically speaking, the snow won’t melt despite the warmer air, making the continent probably the only place on Earth where glaciers might actually grow (at least for the time being).

All that extra precipitation is good for the rest of us: Snow that falls on Antarctica is water that’s not adding to sea-level rise. While sea level is definitely increasing (you didn’t think it was that easy, did you?), Antarctica’s blizzard forecast could spare us a few critical inches.

But, so far, the snowfall has not increased as scientists expected. According to research published this week, that’s OK — there’s enough natural wobble-wobble in Antarctica’s climate to account for the lower-than-expected snow levels. In the next couple of decades, however, we should see the white stuff really start to pile up.

But as Antarctica’s ice sheets continue to crumble into the sea around the edges, faster and less predictably than scientists had hoped, we’ll need more than snow to save us.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

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Climate change will cost millennials more than student debt or the Great Recession

by RobbieDelee Posted on August 23, 2016

the root of all evil

Climate change will cost millennials more than student debt or the Great Recession

By on Aug 23, 2016Share

It costs a lot to be young in the era of climate change — $187,000 per college-educated millennial, to be precise. That figure, which represents the amount of income lost over the lifetime of someone born in 1994, is significantly greater than the usual culprits blamed for young people’s economic challenges. Your old pals Student Debt and the Great Recession will only cost millennials $113,000 and $112,000 over their lives, respectively.

NextGen Climate

A new report from NextGen Climate, an environmental advocacy organization, quantifies the economic impacts of a rapidly changing global ecosystem. For the millennial generation as a whole, the price tag is nearly $8.8 trillion.

As communities scramble for resources to deal with various climate impacts, young people will pay for the ecological and social disasters created by older generations: rising sea levels, drought, declining crop productivity, heat-related health problems, wildfires — you name it. In response, incomes will plummet and tax bills will climb.

And if no action is taken, today’s 1-year-old babies will eventually bear an even bigger financial burden: $581,000 over the course of their lifetimes.

NextGen Climate

Millennials are certainly more saddled with student debt than any other generation, and in addition, we’ve lived through the second-worst economic crisis in the nation’s history. But those costs are small potatoes compared to what’s in store — unless we act fast.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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Climate change will cost millennials more than student debt or the Great Recession

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