Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.
Christopher J. Hale
@chrisjollyhale
· 7h
BREAKING NEWS: In a stunning rebuke to Trump in the Deep South, Democrat John Bel Edwards has defied the odds to be re-elected the Governor of Louisiana.
@Bill two or three months ago I stopped going to CNN alltogether, because literally every time I did on my little phone there’s a one-inch red banner at the top saying BREAKING NEWS PUPPY RESCUED IN MONTPELIER etc.
Because Twitter is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, there’s always a lot of fun rampant speculation. Right now people are amusing themselves by wondering if Trump’s tests at Walter Reed are to set up a medical excuse for not running again or resigning.
@Teve: I don’t buy his excuse that he’s having the exam now so it won’t interfere with the re-election year, and clearly you and a lot of other people aren’t buying it, either.
@CSK: oh I don’t know anything about his actual health, I just find the speculation amusing. Personally I hope he has [comment redacted because Teve is a bad person]
“Deval Patrick was the Governor of Massachusetts and then spent years working for a company called Bain Capitol. This is just what the Democrats need. Somebody with the exact same resume as Mitt Romney.”
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, but Romney didn’t try and protect his brother in law from having to file as a sex offender by firing state officials, so there’s that.
@CSK: I wondered why Walter Reed Hospital was trending on Twitter. “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING” that it was chest pains.
Angry Staffer
@AngrierWHStaff
But seriously, if anyone thinks Trump was at Walter Reed for a physical, I’d like to sell you a bridge.
Physicals are never broken up in parts, and can be mostly done from the White House if necessary.
Also, and most telling: USSS didn’t do an advance, as would be customary.
Angry Staffer
@AngrierWHStaff
·
9h
Replying to
@AngrierWHStaff
It goes without saying, but the Secret Service doesn’t like taking POTUS anywhere without advanced warning — they only go somewhere unannounced if it’s an absolute necessity.
We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job training, taxes and cash transfers, and in-kind transfers. For each policy, we use existing causal estimates to calculate both the benefit that each policy provides its recipients (measured as their willingness to pay) and the policy’s net cost, inclusive of long-term impacts on the government’s budget. We divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, or its “MVPF”. Comparing MVPFs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their impact on social welfare. Our results suggest that direct investments in low-income children’s health and education have historically had the highest MVPFs, on average exceeding 5.
I have only skimmed the paper, so I can’t comment in detail on methodology, but it appears to be a metastudy that normalizes many past quantitative studies to a common measurement scale. As such, it is limited by the methodologies used in those past studies. They note that this leads to imprecise estimates in some cases, such as the MVPF for lowering the top marginal tax rate.
ETA: I’m also not quite sure what “willingness to pay” means when it comes to marginal tax rates. It’s clearly an inadequate measure for “tragedy of the commons” situations like climate change.
The authors also point out that, in many cases, one might reasonably care not only about the return on the investment, but also to whom that benefit accrues.
Looks like even EUreferendum has gotten bored with Brexit. Here’s an analysis of the present U.K. election. I think Dr. North has given up getting any sense out of the U.K. media–they’re all in political horse-racing mode. (While the EU is sitting on the other side of the Channel twiddling its thumbs saying “Erm? Hello? Preparation for end of January 2020? Hello? Is anyone listening?”)
@Ms. Cris Ericson: You are the second right wing nutbag on this page who complains of a browser so old it can’t communicate with necessary sites. Might I suggest that if you are running for elective office it might well be worth updating some portion of your personal technology so that you can communicate with people who are not living in 2005? I think it could add a little to your credibility…
(@Ms. Cris Ericson: Do you yell at people on street corners as well? You’re certainly going down that path….)
(BTW, if my mental state decays to that of Ms. Ericson by the time I am sixty-seven, please shoot me.)
For those still mildly interested in the Epstein Affair, Prince Andrew of the U.K. has provided an interview on his side of the matter. An interview which seems to have gone horribly, terribly, catastrophically wrong by all accounts, leaving anyone with a brain cell slack-jawed in amazement.
@Doug Mataconis: I’ve been chewing on this all week. I just found out this morning that due to my job I can get an unlimited data plan on a tablet for $10 a month so as soon as possible my old Lenovo laptop is going in the dumpster.
@Doug Mataconis:
Just going to copy parts of one of the top comments:
The mobile platform is one primarily designed for consumption of media. It can’t multitask. It cannot run advanced multifunction software. It does not remotely have the size of visual workspace required for serious work. It doesn’t make anyone smarter by virtue of its use, and arguably making the masses dangerously dumber. It is the illusion of technical acumen, without any real technical knowledge required, only eyes and finger.
The mobile OS is a toy whose only value is to distract an entire generation from the reality that the career path jobs that made things, created value, and promised a stable future are gone.
That is why the PC is no longer necessary. There are no desks left to put them on.
Bloomberg admits he was wrong, apologizes for ‘stop and frisk’
NY Times
The practice stopped and frisked more than 684,000 people at its peak in 2011, ostensibly in many cases to search for illegal weapons. But the non-profit Center for Constitutional Rights conducted a study that found blacks and Latinos were nine times more likely than white people to be stopped in 2009. The searches sometimes turned up low-level offenses such as drug possession that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
@PJ: that comment is nonsense. It’s the kind of thing a sixty-five-year-old slashdotter would write, right before transitioning to his favorite complaints about why people still use Windows 10 instead of his favorite Linux distro.
Trump and his team are so bad at lying. There are countless reasons to visit a doctor, which do not project anything horribly wrong. Why can’t he pick one of those, rather than pretend he’s getting ahead on his tests because his next year is booked? “Knee pain, they wanted to do an MRI and you can’t do that in the Oval Office.”
But, after all the “Hillary Clinton is deathly ill” nonsense on 2016, I hope she outlives him. And, goes to his funeral. And coughs on his corpse.
@Gustopher: Coughing on the deceased would be disrespectful. I want to see a hat pin in his chest. I’ll want to be sure.
As an aside, a commenter at WAPO on the Trump to Walter Reed story notes that the general glee at the possibility of a serious problem was inappropriate. After all, he has a family. Said commenter hoped whatever it was is contagious.
@Gustopher: The “getting ahead on his tests” is so absurdly ridiculous. He’s the president, they’ll make time for him. I’m sure he’d be able to find a slow day somewhere. Maybe miss an hour or two of his morning Fox & Friends viewing.
They are all such terrible liars.
And yeah, my money would be on heartburn from his crap diet.
@grumpy realist: I have regular chest pain from mild heartburn, gastric reflux, gas, anxiety, and some staples (they get pulled). I know all my usual pains, and go to the ER every few years for a new one.
(I pinched nerve in neck, and a pinched nerve in the arm, which only come on when everything contracts from anxiety after a weird gas bubble or something… oh noes, chest pain radiating down arm and up neck! Off to the ER…)
There are countless innocuous reasons for chest pain. I think he would have been better served to gently throw Melania under the bus and say “I swallowed something funny, had heartburn, so Melania insisted I go to the doctor, and I’m not going to argue with the wife.”
It’s humanizing.
He could even make a joke that she doesn’t have the right outfit for his funeral and that’s why she insisted he go.
(I think the “I don’t really care, do u?” coat would be fine, but some people would be upset to wear green to a funeral instead of black)
I just want better lies. He lies so often, is it wrong of me to expect he would get better at it?
(I fully expect that one day I will have chest pain, decide it is my “normal” chest pain, and then drop dead half an hour later… Le sigh)
@OzarkHillbilly: I just googled and started reading an article from WaPo, and stopped at the line “The first rape conviction occurred in 1993.”
I don’t think Patrick will do well in the post #metoo era. What the hell was he thinking running for President?
I had been happy to see him enter the race, because “Why not? We have early states to filter this field down to something manageable…” But, wow.
Helping rapists, even helping rapists who “only” raped their wives, is going to be a hard sell in the modern Democratic Party. Or even the Republicans.
At least he will make it easy for everyone else to shore up their support with Lady Voters by condemning him. Rape polls poorly with the ladies.
@Mister Bluster: A lot of people supported Bloomberg’s law and order policies, and the crime statistics went down when he was mayor of New York City. No apologies needed. From what I hear, the people up there wish he was the mayor instead of Barnacle Bill.
(I fully expect that one day I will have chest pain, decide it is my “normal” chest pain, and then drop dead half an hour later… Le sigh)
Not with a bang, but a whimper… There are worse ways of dying.
What the hell was he thinking running for President?
I think he was thinking, “Nobody is paying attention to meeeeeeeee…….” I thought he was a dithering fool for entering so late and, like you with this new to me revelation (thank you, Jen) I too am on the WTF? page. I feel like women are now the uncontested engine of the DEM party. They are pissed off and they just aren’t going to take it anymore.
@CSK: the PC is no longer necessary? 260 million new PCs shipped last year. And the complaint that mobile devices can’t multitask is bizarre. I very commonly track my jogs while listening to podcasts while stopping occasionally to respond to a message from work or a friend. I sell businesses complicated data packages and tech support and I can literally drive to their business and carry my phone, work iPad, and mobile barcode scanner and do everything I need. And I know a professional artist who now uses an iPad Pro instead of a desktop. It’s not 14 years ago and I’m not running physics simulations in Mathematica notebooks, or wondering why my preprocessor isn’t working right. but I bet I could do both of those on a tablet if I had to. And I’m about to ditch my laptop and get a tablet because what I do now recreationally is watching Netflix, chatting with science friends, and catching up on a huge backlog of books I now borrow electronically through the Kindle software. And if that guy wants to complain that I must no longer have anything but “the illusion of technical acumen”, he can get stuffed. Literally every one of my OTB comments for months has been made using voice recognition on a Nokia 6.1 phone. But those comments weren’t any stupider than the ones I typed out last summer on my laptop.
Bloomberg’s law and order policies, and the crime statistics went down when he was mayor of New York City.
Which was just happy circumstance as the former had very little to do with the latter.
No apologies needed.
Except to all the black and hispanic young men who were harassed and sent to jail for the most minor of offenses, some of whom spent years in prison for the sin of being to poor to make bail. And yeah, I mean prison, not jail, as they pleaded guilty to things they were innocent of just to get out of the limbe they were stuck in.
Funny how easily you forget about all those people who were impacted the most by those policies. I guess they aren’t “real” Americans.
C’mon. This is a boring thread. Chris Ericson and debating whether the PC is dead. Do we really need any more comments?
(I apparently accidentally hit notify me of follow up comments and my email is full of them. Anybody know a way to turn it off? And I bet it was my iPad, this doesn’t happen on my PC.)
A lot of people supported Bloomberg’s law and order policies, and the crime statistics went down when he was mayor of New York City. No apologies needed.
They dropped at the same rate as the rest of the county where stop and frisk was not implemented. And the data show the program was utterly ineffectual.
But hey, thanks for playing I casually endorse and support racism and pretend it’s science.
I think he was thinking, “Nobody is paying attention to meeeeeeeee…….”
If I were Deval Patrick, and I had tried to keep a rapist from having to register as a sex offender, I would count my blessings, and be glad that no one was thinking about meeeeeeeeeee.
What a f.cking idiot.
If you have committed toxic behavior in the past, the two reasonable alternatives are to become a spokesman for not committing that behavior (small audience in this case), and maintaining a low profile. I guess doubling down can also work, but not in this case — the group of people who are going to say that you can’t rape your wife are not going to be voting for a black guy in the Democratic primary,
Moron.
He deserves everything bad that happens to him because of this. I hope he becomes so toxic Bain Capital has to drop him.
I mean, what a f.cking moron.
He should have been thanking God, Buddha, Dumb Luck or his cat that he was not being dragged through the mud. What f.cking hubris.
I truly love that the Republicans are going with the Sideshow Bob defense: Attempted bribery. “Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?'”
@Teve: As a software engineer, I can’t see myself living without a “real” computer.
But most of my unprofessional stuff is done via tablet. (That might not be the best wording, but I’m going to stick with it)
Mobile devices are remarkably capable, and more user friendly. I don’t want to have to be technically savvy to watch my Netflix or post on a message board.
I mean, sure, If everyone had to enter their comments here through a vi interface, we would have fewer trolls, but everyone else would be gone too. Devices have to be no more complex than needed.
I expect that in 5 years laptops will be niche devices. And that I will have one.
To improve my budge, I do not buy my old 16 year old dog new store bought poopie pads anymore, I give her cotton towels and then I wash them and hang them up to dry on clotheslines in the guest bedroom.
Please tell me you do this while you have guests… please.
I painted my guest bedroom acid green. It discourages guests from staying too long. Alas, the most recent guest was color blind and found it soothing.
@Ms. Cris Ericson: Your local library most likely has free internet and up-to-date computers, AND copies of the Constitution. Socialism and all that. 😉
I casually endorse and support racism and pretend it’s science.
You, sir, are a monster.
I am playing “quote someone out of context and respond as if that was what they said”. Not that you were, it just amused me. This is just what happens after drinking a beer or two on a Sunday night,
@DrDaveT: Well yes, improving the overall health and educational opportunities of low income children should be the “best” programs as they will raise the chances of economic mobility for poor children.
Can’t you see what a mess you’re advocating with all this raise the economic mobility of poor children crap? What’s gonna happen to MY KID’S OPPORTUNITY/ECONOMIC MOBILITY if we keep pulling sh!t like this, hmmmmmmm???
@Gustopher: I still use a computer. In fact, I just recently bought an All-in-One to replace my cheapo laptop ($199-19 in screen), but I have to admit that I’m kind of a niche user. I have a tremor that makes using touch screens difficult and I’ve never found a stylus that worked well for me. I’m also too cheap to buy Dragon Speak or one of the other voice recognition programs although I have a friend that uses one. I think a tablet or a smartphone would be convenient except for those two issues.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
· 18h
Our great Farmers will recieve another major round of “cash,” compliments of China Tariffs, prior to Thanksgiving. The smaller farms and farmers will be big beneficiaries. In the meantime, and as you may have noticed, China is starting to buy big again. Japan deal DONE. Enjoy!
Roland Scahill
@rolandscahill
·
11h
I guess Trump’s health situation isn’t that serious because there haven’t been sightings of Melania Trump dancing in the streets yet
I’d love to know what kind of work people who ditch PCs are doing…
I handle large spreadsheets containing price lists, of several sorts. To determine price based on costs, to list prices of 350+ goods, to list prices of services like food preparation, etc. Even a 10″ tablet is to small for that, not to mention entering numbers and descriptions on a touch keyboard would take forever.
Sure, I could have a tablet hooked to a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor.
They dropped at the same rate as the rest of the county where stop and frisk was not implemented. And the data show the program was utterly ineffectual.
I was posting from a phone last night, and so I wanted to follow up with links that demonstrate the deep issues with Stop and Frisk:
@Kit: Thank you. I guess I’d have known that if I’d read any of those dozens of emails.”Thank you” is, of course, conditional on this comment not turning up in my mail.
”Thank you” is, of course, conditional on this comment not turning up in my mail.
🙂
My problem is the exact opposite: I no longer receive emails. Often it’s a pain, but I do like to know if someone has replied to something I wrote. As it stands, I need to keep several pages open until the thread seems to have died out.
And that’s the other thing. Granted at work we have a file server, so storage isn’t an issue, but at home I have several hundred GB in my drive, and don’t worry about downloading anything at all.
Sure, the cloud is great, if you don’t mind waiting for your files, and if the internet doesn’t go down.
DC rumor mill is saying Trumps BP was sky high, he was dizzy, and had chest pains.
They took him to the hospital because they were worried about a heart attack.
Grisham, who was indignant that people were accusing her of lying, appears to have been lying.
@mattbernius: That National Review column by Kyle Smith was stunning. I can’t remember the last time I saw a self identified conservative journalist, one whose primary source of income came from a conservative publication, look at actual data and admit that he was wrong. Good for him.
@grumpy realist: Looks like the Oklahoma shooting was a “typical” murder-suicide of an ex-husband killing his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, then turning the gun on himself.
The number of men who think they “own” their ex-wives is unfortunately very high. You don’t even have to have been an ex-wife for this to get triggered–just turning down a request for a date can do it.
@Kit: No real link intended, I just saw your comments and wanted to respond before I typed my own message…I suppose one possible connection might be that Trump could be in the same category as Richard III if he possessed any real intelligence and guile…as it is, Trump is much more like Dr. Claw…
WARREN: “Evidence suggests African Americans & whites use marijuana at the same rates, but African Americans are more likely to be arrested. When we talk about criminal justice reform, the best place to start is with legalizing marijuana.”
Michael McAuliff
@mmcauliff
Breaking: the House Judiciary Committee is going to mark up a bill Wednesday to decriminalize weed, expunge convictions, and make it easier for people harmed by the war on drugs to enter the pot industry.
10:04 AM · Nov 18, 2019·
yeah I know this will just be a House bill and the Senate will never pass it, that’s not the point. Has the House ever passed a bill like this?
@Jen: it’s extremely early. Super Tuesday is still 106 days away. To us political junkies Super Tuesday seems like half time, but to normal people it’s still the pregame.
@grumpy realist: So true. I’m dealing with something similar with my paranoid delusional “very stable genius” ex who suddenly showed up again. It’s patently obvious from his Facebook posts (pics of guns, money, hoes, many pages long manifestos naming every single person he thinks ever did him wrong, all written with no punctuation, capitalization or spell check, etc) that the dude is mentally ill and most likely on drugs, and his family will do nothing as far as getting him any help. I finally had to block him so he’d quit leaving nasty messages on my phone and couldn’t see me on Facebook. Considering a restraining order, but the likelihood of him having the resources to get to me or our daughter (he’s apparently couch-surfing and staying at homeless shelters several states away), or remembering where I live are slim, so I don’t know if it’s worth the effort.
This is the first time his mental health issues have been so obvious, so I keep thinking maybe I’m over-reacting….but I don’t want to end up a statistic or a blurb in the paper, either. My attorney and I decided that for now we’ll wait and see if he calls her like he was threatening to and go from there based on how he acted with her. (Like….what good does he think that’s gonna do? He’s gonna whine because I’m being mean and telling him the truth, his daughter doesn’t want to talk to him when he’s obviously high? I mean, fer fuck’s sakes….)
So if I suddenly go radio silent up in here, something happened. A piece of paper can only do so much, even backed up by guns. Crazy is crazy.
Joan Walsh
@joanwalsh
Wow, Obama’s former doctor is telling
@ErinBurnett
that Trump is having major neurological problems, especially with “word-finding,” and suggests he could be having small strokes.
7:34 PM · Nov 18, 2019·T
@Jen: Thank you. I really like you guys, too. My attorney called, he never called her, but based on his texts and posts, she thinks there are options to keep us safer, and maybe get him the help he needs.
@Jen
Really? How mighty white of you to suggest there is no logic in our preference for Biden.
Newsflash…in the hierarchy of identity beefs within the community…a pragmatic white man with at least a willingness to work to understand the community is going to win the day over a liberal baby boomer white woman and a millennial gay man from Indiana who never shown an interest in Black issues until they started caring about the South Carolina primary.
God some of you people are smug….
“Deval Patrick was the Governor of Massachusetts and then spent years working for a company called Bain Capitol. This is just what the Democrats need. Somebody with the exact same resume as Mitt Romney.”
Breaking news–CNN President Jeff Zucker Admits To Overusing The Term ‘Breaking News’
I have come to use the term ‘broken news’ to describe the trivialities that are reported as breaking news today.
@Bill two or three months ago I stopped going to CNN alltogether, because literally every time I did on my little phone there’s a one-inch red banner at the top saying BREAKING NEWS PUPPY RESCUED IN MONTPELIER etc.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a competitor to Facebook. It probably won’t succeed, but Facebook is run by some morally bankrupt people, and the defining feature of this network is they don’t sell your data. I’m number 37,037 on the waitlist.
Just in time for Xmas, the perfect gift for the man or woman in your life who has everything: Nuclear missile bunker: yours for less than $400k.
Do you believe Donald Trump wins re-election?
Who will be the Democratic nominee?
Trump survives impeachment, but what will the impact be for a Republicans?
Small Town Big News: Anti-Trump Books Disappearing From Idaho Library.
Because Twitter is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, there’s always a lot of fun rampant speculation. Right now people are amusing themselves by wondering if Trump’s tests at Walter Reed are to set up a medical excuse for not running again or resigning.
Microsoft has developed a new storage medium based on quartz glass that promises to keep large amounts of data safe for centuries.
@Teve: I don’t buy his excuse that he’s having the exam now so it won’t interfere with the re-election year, and clearly you and a lot of other people aren’t buying it, either.
@CSK: oh I don’t know anything about his actual health, I just find the speculation amusing. Personally I hope he has [comment redacted because Teve is a bad person]
Weekend Update: Impeachment Hearing Testimony – SNL
@Teve: One look at him and you know more than you ever wanted to know about his actual health.
“Deval Patrick was the Governor of Massachusetts and then spent years working for a company called Bain Capitol. This is just what the Democrats need. Somebody with the exact same resume as Mitt Romney.”
-Jimmy Kimmel
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, but Romney didn’t try and protect his brother in law from having to file as a sex offender by firing state officials, so there’s that.
@CSK: I wondered why Walter Reed Hospital was trending on Twitter. “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING” that it was chest pains.
Good article by Jonathan V. Last in http://www.thebulwark.com: “This Is How Trump’s Gangster Government Works.”
Buttigieg Jumps Out to Lead in Iowa Poll
First choice of 25% of would-be Iowa caucus-goers. Warren and Biden tied at 16%, Sanders at 15%.
@Doug Mataconis: Star Trek predicts the future once again.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Data_crystal
A Unified Welfare Analysis of Government Policies
NBER Working Paper No. 26144
Issued in August 2019, Revised in August 2019
I have only skimmed the paper, so I can’t comment in detail on methodology, but it appears to be a metastudy that normalizes many past quantitative studies to a common measurement scale. As such, it is limited by the methodologies used in those past studies. They note that this leads to imprecise estimates in some cases, such as the MVPF for lowering the top marginal tax rate.
ETA: I’m also not quite sure what “willingness to pay” means when it comes to marginal tax rates. It’s clearly an inadequate measure for “tragedy of the commons” situations like climate change.
The authors also point out that, in many cases, one might reasonably care not only about the return on the investment, but also to whom that benefit accrues.
Jennifer Arcuri: ‘I’ve kept Johnson’s secrets – now he’s cast me aside like a one-night stand’
Pobrecito….
The headline of the day-
Hong Kong police officer shot with arrow during university siege
These people deny responsibility.
@Bill:
“It’s not breaking, and it’s not news”
@Bill: “We wandered many years until we got here. then we said. “Where the Hekawi?” “
Looks like even EUreferendum has gotten bored with Brexit. Here’s an analysis of the present U.K. election. I think Dr. North has given up getting any sense out of the U.K. media–they’re all in political horse-racing mode. (While the EU is sitting on the other side of the Channel twiddling its thumbs saying “Erm? Hello? Preparation for end of January 2020? Hello? Is anyone listening?”)
@Ms. Cris Ericson: You are the second right wing nutbag on this page who complains of a browser so old it can’t communicate with necessary sites. Might I suggest that if you are running for elective office it might well be worth updating some portion of your personal technology so that you can communicate with people who are not living in 2005? I think it could add a little to your credibility…
@wr:
Not using capital letters so much would help too.
(Ron Howard:) It would not.
(@Ms. Cris Ericson: Do you yell at people on street corners as well? You’re certainly going down that path….)
(BTW, if my mental state decays to that of Ms. Ericson by the time I am sixty-seven, please shoot me.)
For those still mildly interested in the Epstein Affair, Prince Andrew of the U.K. has provided an interview on his side of the matter. An interview which seems to have gone horribly, terribly, catastrophically wrong by all accounts, leaving anyone with a brain cell slack-jawed in amazement.
Steve Jobs Was Right: Smartphones and Tablets Killed the P.C.
@Doug Mataconis: I’ve been chewing on this all week. I just found out this morning that due to my job I can get an unlimited data plan on a tablet for $10 a month so as soon as possible my old Lenovo laptop is going in the dumpster.
@Doug Mataconis:
Just going to copy parts of one of the top comments:
“Grady, you were the caretaker”
(Jack Torrance, “The Shining”)
@PJ: that comment is nonsense. It’s the kind of thing a sixty-five-year-old slashdotter would write, right before transitioning to his favorite complaints about why people still use Windows 10 instead of his favorite Linux distro.
@Teve: Well, I don’t think you can write a book on a smart phone.
@Bill:..These people deny responsibility.
From your F Troop link:
@Jen: It was the best chest pains.
Trump and his team are so bad at lying. There are countless reasons to visit a doctor, which do not project anything horribly wrong. Why can’t he pick one of those, rather than pretend he’s getting ahead on his tests because his next year is booked? “Knee pain, they wanted to do an MRI and you can’t do that in the Oval Office.”
But, after all the “Hillary Clinton is deathly ill” nonsense on 2016, I hope she outlives him. And, goes to his funeral. And coughs on his corpse.
@Gustopher: Trump does not like to admit any fallibility–even a knee pain.
@Gustopher: Coughing on the deceased would be disrespectful. I want to see a hat pin in his chest. I’ll want to be sure.
As an aside, a commenter at WAPO on the Trump to Walter Reed story notes that the general glee at the possibility of a serious problem was inappropriate. After all, he has a family. Said commenter hoped whatever it was is contagious.
@CSK: “Well, I don’t think you can write a book on a smart phone.”
Of course you can and many people have.
@Gustopher: “And, goes to his funeral. And coughs on his corpse.”
Next Tuesday.
@wr: Citation needed.
Your thumb would fall off.
@Gustopher: Considering Trump’s diet, am wondering if those “chest pains” weren’t simple heartburn….
(Given how much stress Trump has caused to others, I really do hope that it’s a case of the biter bit.)
I KNEW we needed to raise academic salaries in Arkansas….
Oops.
@Gustopher: The “getting ahead on his tests” is so absurdly ridiculous. He’s the president, they’ll make time for him. I’m sure he’d be able to find a slow day somewhere. Maybe miss an hour or two of his morning Fox & Friends viewing.
They are all such terrible liars.
And yeah, my money would be on heartburn from his crap diet.
@Jen:
I had meant to say earlier (my ADD got the better of me) that I’d never heard that. Gonna google it now.
Haysoos Chispo…
@grumpy realist: I have regular chest pain from mild heartburn, gastric reflux, gas, anxiety, and some staples (they get pulled). I know all my usual pains, and go to the ER every few years for a new one.
(I pinched nerve in neck, and a pinched nerve in the arm, which only come on when everything contracts from anxiety after a weird gas bubble or something… oh noes, chest pain radiating down arm and up neck! Off to the ER…)
There are countless innocuous reasons for chest pain. I think he would have been better served to gently throw Melania under the bus and say “I swallowed something funny, had heartburn, so Melania insisted I go to the doctor, and I’m not going to argue with the wife.”
It’s humanizing.
He could even make a joke that she doesn’t have the right outfit for his funeral and that’s why she insisted he go.
(I think the “I don’t really care, do u?” coat would be fine, but some people would be upset to wear green to a funeral instead of black)
I just want better lies. He lies so often, is it wrong of me to expect he would get better at it?
(I fully expect that one day I will have chest pain, decide it is my “normal” chest pain, and then drop dead half an hour later… Le sigh)
@OzarkHillbilly: I just googled and started reading an article from WaPo, and stopped at the line “The first rape conviction occurred in 1993.”
I don’t think Patrick will do well in the post #metoo era. What the hell was he thinking running for President?
I had been happy to see him enter the race, because “Why not? We have early states to filter this field down to something manageable…” But, wow.
Helping rapists, even helping rapists who “only” raped their wives, is going to be a hard sell in the modern Democratic Party. Or even the Republicans.
At least he will make it easy for everyone else to shore up their support with Lady Voters by condemning him. Rape polls poorly with the ladies.
@Mister Bluster: A lot of people supported Bloomberg’s law and order policies, and the crime statistics went down when he was mayor of New York City. No apologies needed. From what I hear, the people up there wish he was the mayor instead of Barnacle Bill.
@Gustopher:
Not with a bang, but a whimper… There are worse ways of dying.
I think he was thinking, “Nobody is paying attention to meeeeeeeee…….” I thought he was a dithering fool for entering so late and, like you with this new to me revelation (thank you, Jen) I too am on the WTF? page. I feel like women are now the uncontested engine of the DEM party. They are pissed off and they just aren’t going to take it anymore.
DOA.
@CSK: the PC is no longer necessary? 260 million new PCs shipped last year. And the complaint that mobile devices can’t multitask is bizarre. I very commonly track my jogs while listening to podcasts while stopping occasionally to respond to a message from work or a friend. I sell businesses complicated data packages and tech support and I can literally drive to their business and carry my phone, work iPad, and mobile barcode scanner and do everything I need. And I know a professional artist who now uses an iPad Pro instead of a desktop. It’s not 14 years ago and I’m not running physics simulations in Mathematica notebooks, or wondering why my preprocessor isn’t working right. but I bet I could do both of those on a tablet if I had to. And I’m about to ditch my laptop and get a tablet because what I do now recreationally is watching Netflix, chatting with science friends, and catching up on a huge backlog of books I now borrow electronically through the Kindle software. And if that guy wants to complain that I must no longer have anything but “the illusion of technical acumen”, he can get stuffed. Literally every one of my OTB comments for months has been made using voice recognition on a Nokia 6.1 phone. But those comments weren’t any stupider than the ones I typed out last summer on my laptop.
@Tyrell:
Which was just happy circumstance as the former had very little to do with the latter.
Except to all the black and hispanic young men who were harassed and sent to jail for the most minor of offenses, some of whom spent years in prison for the sin of being to poor to make bail. And yeah, I mean prison, not jail, as they pleaded guilty to things they were innocent of just to get out of the limbe they were stuck in.
Funny how easily you forget about all those people who were impacted the most by those policies. I guess they aren’t “real” Americans.
@Tyrell: “From what I hear, the people up there wish he was the mayor instead of Barnacle Bill.”
I’m assuming that “what you hear” comes from Fox. There’s no Bloomberg nostalgia here, no matter what people think of DeBlasio.
Gym Jordan is now complaining on TV that Trump shouldn’t be impeached because he won an electoral college landslide.
The Party of Stupid™
C’mon. This is a boring thread. Chris Ericson and debating whether the PC is dead. Do we really need any more comments?
(I apparently accidentally hit notify me of follow up comments and my email is full of them. Anybody know a way to turn it off? And I bet it was my iPad, this doesn’t happen on my PC.)
@Tyrell:
They dropped at the same rate as the rest of the county where stop and frisk was not implemented. And the data show the program was utterly ineffectual.
But hey, thanks for playing I casually endorse and support racism and pretend it’s science.
…Trump shouldn’t be impeached because he won an electoral college landslide.
*To this day I do not understand why Nixon did not destroy the tapes.
@OzarkHillbilly:
If I were Deval Patrick, and I had tried to keep a rapist from having to register as a sex offender, I would count my blessings, and be glad that no one was thinking about meeeeeeeeeee.
What a f.cking idiot.
If you have committed toxic behavior in the past, the two reasonable alternatives are to become a spokesman for not committing that behavior (small audience in this case), and maintaining a low profile. I guess doubling down can also work, but not in this case — the group of people who are going to say that you can’t rape your wife are not going to be voting for a black guy in the Democratic primary,
Moron.
He deserves everything bad that happens to him because of this. I hope he becomes so toxic Bain Capital has to drop him.
I mean, what a f.cking moron.
He should have been thanking God, Buddha, Dumb Luck or his cat that he was not being dragged through the mud. What f.cking hubris.
I truly love that the Republicans are going with the Sideshow Bob defense: Attempted bribery. “Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQPNQ0PFSc
@Teve: As a software engineer, I can’t see myself living without a “real” computer.
But most of my unprofessional stuff is done via tablet. (That might not be the best wording, but I’m going to stick with it)
Mobile devices are remarkably capable, and more user friendly. I don’t want to have to be technically savvy to watch my Netflix or post on a message board.
I mean, sure, If everyone had to enter their comments here through a vi interface, we would have fewer trolls, but everyone else would be gone too. Devices have to be no more complex than needed.
I expect that in 5 years laptops will be niche devices. And that I will have one.
@Tyrell: Is that Barnacle Bill The Sailor?
“It’s just a shot that missed her (rhymes with shot),” said Barnacle Bill The Sailor.
I grew up listening to John Valby. Is there some other Barnacle Bill I should be aware of?
@Ms. Cris Ericson:
Please tell me you do this while you have guests… please.
I painted my guest bedroom acid green. It discourages guests from staying too long. Alas, the most recent guest was color blind and found it soothing.
@Ms. Cris Ericson: Your local library most likely has free internet and up-to-date computers, AND copies of the Constitution. Socialism and all that. 😉
@mattbernius:
You, sir, are a monster.
I am playing “quote someone out of context and respond as if that was what they said”. Not that you were, it just amused me. This is just what happens after drinking a beer or two on a Sunday night,
@Gustopher: So is it time for Late Night OTB, then? Where’s de Stijl?
I’ve had “Video Killed the Radio Star” in my head ever since Doug posted that comment about Steve Jobs.
Here, y’all should watch the video, cuz it’s GLORIOUS!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ
@DrDaveT: Well yes, improving the overall health and educational opportunities of low income children should be the “best” programs as they will raise the chances of economic mobility for poor children.
Can’t you see what a mess you’re advocating with all this raise the economic mobility of poor children crap? What’s gonna happen to MY KID’S OPPORTUNITY/ECONOMIC MOBILITY if we keep pulling sh!t like this, hmmmmmmm???
@OzarkHillbilly: From what I recall, the original name suggested for the tribe was Helawi, but Standards and Practices spiked it. 🙂
@PJ: Ooh! That’s gonna leave a mark. (Someone channeling his inner Marxist, I assume?)
@OzarkHillbilly: I assumed that he was auditioning for Obama 2.0 now that Booker is on the ropes.
@Gustopher: I still use a computer. In fact, I just recently bought an All-in-One to replace my cheapo laptop ($199-19 in screen), but I have to admit that I’m kind of a niche user. I have a tremor that makes using touch screens difficult and I’ve never found a stylus that worked well for me. I’m also too cheap to buy Dragon Speak or one of the other voice recognition programs although I have a friend that uses one. I think a tablet or a smartphone would be convenient except for those two issues.
@gVOR08:
At the bottom of those emails, you should see a link:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I am afflicted with obesedigititis and think touchscreens are the spawn of the devil. To repeat myself, “MY KINGDOM FOR A MOUSE!!!”
@Teve: She’s in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception fervently praying for an immaculate cessation.
I’d love to know what kind of work people who ditch PCs are doing…
I handle large spreadsheets containing price lists, of several sorts. To determine price based on costs, to list prices of 350+ goods, to list prices of services like food preparation, etc. Even a 10″ tablet is to small for that, not to mention entering numbers and descriptions on a touch keyboard would take forever.
Sure, I could have a tablet hooked to a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor.
But wouldn’t that be a desktop PC?
@mattbernius:
I was posting from a phone last night, and so I wanted to follow up with links that demonstrate the deep issues with Stop and Frisk:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/21/it-looks-like-rudy-giuliani-convinced-donald-trump-that-stop-and-frisk-actually-works/
https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
And for a little extra, the national review admitting they were wrong about promising that ending stop and frisk would lead to a crime wave:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/new-york-city-stop-and-frisk-crime-decline-conservatives-wrong/
@Kit: Thank you. I guess I’d have known that if I’d read any of those dozens of emails.”Thank you” is, of course, conditional on this comment not turning up in my mail.
@Kathy:
I’d love such a machine, to be honest.
@gVOR08:
🙂
My problem is the exact opposite: I no longer receive emails. Often it’s a pain, but I do like to know if someone has replied to something I wrote. As it stands, I need to keep several pages open until the thread seems to have died out.
@Kit:
You’d still need a hard drive. 😉
And that’s the other thing. Granted at work we have a file server, so storage isn’t an issue, but at home I have several hundred GB in my drive, and don’t worry about downloading anything at all.
Sure, the cloud is great, if you don’t mind waiting for your files, and if the internet doesn’t go down.
How many Obama officials refused subpoenas? I want to know what the comparison is.
DC rumor mill is saying Trumps BP was sky high, he was dizzy, and had chest pains.
They took him to the hospital because they were worried about a heart attack.
Grisham, who was indignant that people were accusing her of lying, appears to have been lying.
@Kathy:
The iPad now allows connections to USB drives! Tim Cook is still tossing and turning at night due to that decision 🙂
Another missing piece would be a seamless way to offload CPU-intensive tasks over to cloud computing.
As always it will be interesting to see how the technology evolves, even if I’m rarely willing to skate that cutting edge these days.
@mattbernius: That National Review column by Kyle Smith was stunning. I can’t remember the last time I saw a self identified conservative journalist, one whose primary source of income came from a conservative publication, look at actual data and admit that he was wrong. Good for him.
@OzarkHillbilly:
In the 1990s, there was a movie of Richard III starring Ian McKellen, set in a fascist version of pre-WW2 Britain. So, no horses.
The famous “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” line was delivered from a Jeep that was spinning its wheels in the mud.
That was my favorite part of the movie.
So Oklahoma getting rid of all regulations or checks on the owning of guns and is surprised when things like this happen?
I can’t figure out whether to applaud karma or swear.
@Gustopher:
Damn! I love that film! Fav scene: I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long.
@grumpy realist: Looks like the Oklahoma shooting was a “typical” murder-suicide of an ex-husband killing his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, then turning the gun on himself.
The number of men who think they “own” their ex-wives is unfortunately very high. You don’t even have to have been an ex-wife for this to get triggered–just turning down a request for a date can do it.
@Kit: One of the best Shakespeare adaptations I’ve ever seen…McKellen is excellent…
Meanwhile, no one has to have any love for Jeff Bezos to realize that this stinks…the most corrupt president in American history…
@An Interested Party: I’m not sure that I saw the link between the film and the Bezos scandal, but we are nonetheless in full agreement 🙂
I want a full house cleaning after the next election. Denazification. If you broke the law to curry favor with Trump, then off you go to prison.
@Kit: No real link intended, I just saw your comments and wanted to respond before I typed my own message…I suppose one possible connection might be that Trump could be in the same category as Richard III if he possessed any real intelligence and guile…as it is, Trump is much more like Dr. Claw…
Am I really the first to post about this?: US says Israeli settlements no longer considered illegal in dramatic shift.
This must be really smart or really dumb on the part of Israel.
@Kit: No, but you are the first person to put it in the proper thread.
yeah I know this will just be a House bill and the Senate will never pass it, that’s not the point. Has the House ever passed a bill like this?
@grumpy realist: Yes, which makes Deval Patrick’s decision to intervene on behalf of his BIL so astonishing.
@Teve: I continue to find it a bit baffling that nothing seems to shake Biden’s AA support. It feels entrenched to a no-longer-logical degree.
@Jen: it’s extremely early. Super Tuesday is still 106 days away. To us political junkies Super Tuesday seems like half time, but to normal people it’s still the pregame.
@grumpy realist: So true. I’m dealing with something similar with my paranoid delusional “very stable genius” ex who suddenly showed up again. It’s patently obvious from his Facebook posts (pics of guns, money, hoes, many pages long manifestos naming every single person he thinks ever did him wrong, all written with no punctuation, capitalization or spell check, etc) that the dude is mentally ill and most likely on drugs, and his family will do nothing as far as getting him any help. I finally had to block him so he’d quit leaving nasty messages on my phone and couldn’t see me on Facebook. Considering a restraining order, but the likelihood of him having the resources to get to me or our daughter (he’s apparently couch-surfing and staying at homeless shelters several states away), or remembering where I live are slim, so I don’t know if it’s worth the effort.
This is the first time his mental health issues have been so obvious, so I keep thinking maybe I’m over-reacting….but I don’t want to end up a statistic or a blurb in the paper, either. My attorney and I decided that for now we’ll wait and see if he calls her like he was threatening to and go from there based on how he acted with her. (Like….what good does he think that’s gonna do? He’s gonna whine because I’m being mean and telling him the truth, his daughter doesn’t want to talk to him when he’s obviously high? I mean, fer fuck’s sakes….)
So if I suddenly go radio silent up in here, something happened. A piece of paper can only do so much, even backed up by guns. Crazy is crazy.
@Jax: Stay safe. I really like some of the people here, you are one of them.
@Jen: Thank you. I really like you guys, too. My attorney called, he never called her, but based on his texts and posts, she thinks there are options to keep us safer, and maybe get him the help he needs.
@Jen
Really? How mighty white of you to suggest there is no logic in our preference for Biden.
Newsflash…in the hierarchy of identity beefs within the community…a pragmatic white man with at least a willingness to work to understand the community is going to win the day over a liberal baby boomer white woman and a millennial gay man from Indiana who never shown an interest in Black issues until they started caring about the South Carolina primary.
God some of you people are smug….
“Deval Patrick was the Governor of Massachusetts and then spent years working for a company called Bain Capitol. This is just what the Democrats need. Somebody with the exact same resume as Mitt Romney.”