Donald Trump Is Elected President

Export led industrialization has worked well for the Asian Tigers, and the quality of their products is decent enough.

It's also instructive to look at Europe's industrialization in the 19th century. The Brits famously demanded Made in Germany to be marked on goods to allow the British customer to detect the inferior products. Turned out, they weren't inferior any more.

Would you provide some examples of the countries you're thinking of? My inclination is that it's more a function of demand for cheap products and unwillingness to pay more for better quality even while complaining about the quality of what some are willing to pay for. Also, the generalization that all (or most) products coming out of a country are of equal in quality. Two counter examples come to mind as well. Japan and China have both been a source of cheap, low-quality goods during the last century, and both also produce some very high quality goods as well. I've also purchased very low-quality "Made in USA" products.

And things change, including "unique social and political histories". Is it more accurate and useful to think of differences in QC in a general way or to look more closely at the incentives and circumstances at work?

If I've mischaracterized your views, please do point it out, as that's not my intent. Thanks!

Sure, the scale is way smaller than coastal cities. But if you adjust the prices to match the incomes, the unaffordability problem is roughly identical in terms of pain. A Michigan $300k urban condo is basically as unaffordable as a Seattle $600k condo, once you notice that Michigan incomes are roughly 50% lower than Seattle, on average.

Sprawl is cheap, that's absolutely true. But it's also sprawl -- with all the problems that entails. The only cities I know of with "huge housing surpluses", are cities that have majorly failed in some way (like Flint).

Not saying that you are wrong, but it is a sad idea that we can't fix it. Maybe instead of giving out "gov't handouts" we just give out VR headsets and give pple a Matrix like existance who can no longer bare the thought of their current living conditions. Sad.

(Detroit is not a functioning city.)

The big difference I see is most millennials want to move to a big city and work hard at creating a new and better future.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...

That's a weird language. It's to the best benefit of the country to just adopt unilateral free trade. No need to bargain.

Of course, politically, that's not feasible.

But there's no `benefit' that comes at a cost to the country when allowing your citizens to freely trade with other countries citizens.

"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. [...] But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

EDIT: The transcript I pulled this from: http://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorable...

Without Obamacare we are probably going to see a return of unlimited out of pocket, no drug coverage and a maximum lifetime benefit (Don't get cancer). So those people are going to get the short end of the stick still as they age.

My health insurance bill has been going up 5-10% for the last 10 years. Between my employer and I it's now $14,000 just for insurance. That's nearly double the average total income taxes back in my country of birth.

There is no free lunch with trade.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ta...

But those small number of people who benefit plus the whole of people in their supply chain, people that also drive demand for whatever the other people paying more for cars are offering.

The point I'm trying to make is that international trade doesn't give any multiplying magic. Simply separate the states in your country and whatever trade between them will become "international". It would be the same trade as before with the only difference that now you don't get to tax whoever is benefiting the most, one gets to play tricks with the currency, etc. etc.

Making foreign cars more expensive will only make American cars a bit more expensive, due to higher demand, but in general will just raise prices for everyone.

People don't buy foreign cars these days because of cost. They buy them because of perceived higher quality, styling/performance preferences, brand cachet, etc. If they start selling Chinese-made cars here, maybe that'll change, but for now, saving money is not the reason you buy a foreign car. If you want a cheap-ass car, you buy something like a Chevy Spark or Ford Fiesta. (Worse, those cars might be made in Mexico anyway. I'm guessing the cheapest American-made car is probably a Honda Fit or some Toyota maybe.)

That doesn't work because companies outsource entire stacks of tasks. There isn't an "entry level" job anymore. There's no path inside when everyone wants experienced workers.

So what would happen is probably a 'Google customer service' level of customer service. Simply much less with the same people they already want.

I hate seeing this meme. It is ageist and makes older people less likely to be hired for even their same jobs.

Old people can still learn to do new things. The problem I see is that a lot of older people do not want to learn new things. Also, old people tend to have obligations such as family/child expenses, residence costs, etc. that they want to be compensated for even at an entry level.

Rural conservatism has a lot to do with preserving tradition, that is, making sure things don't change from the old status quo you loved before.

The problem is, people who used to make a livelihood don't want a minimum wage job, no matter how high the minimum wage. They're adults used to providing for themselves and possibly a family, for god's sake! They don't want some elementary retraining program to make them barely capable of doing a modern job. They want to feel productive and useful on their own, like most of us.

At the peak of his career he realized technology would kill the industry with the quality of amateur photography improving and technical skills becoming less important, he would often compete with people with barely any talent and be undercut on price. It was still sustainable at the time but he was sure better cameras, film and postproduction processes would kill his business.

He went back to school and became a homeopathy practitioner. My personal opinions of homeopathy aside, I have to acknowledge he was an expert at what he was doing and he was even regularly invited to give lectures. He kept doing that until the day he died, almost twenty years ago.

It's never to late to switch career paths. The bigger problem in the US seems to be that it is amazingly hard to do so unless you've built up a fortune to cover the cost of doing so.

Even someone approaching retirement age can start over and be productive if they have the chance, financial means, mental health and determination to do it.

In Trump's acceptance speech he explicitly mentions this:

We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.

A plumber or electrician in Seattle can pull in 100k/year and they are booked out for weeks to months.

They had labour market inefficiencies and weak demand.

The US labour market is a bit more flexible. And since they are issuing their own currency, they can always print more to stoke demand. (Ideally, the Fed would target nominal GDP.)

Good news: the Germans are having a much lower unemployment rate these days than in the late 90s.

1) irrelevant or (professionally) useless degrees. These would be fine but because they have a degree these candidates generally think they deserve a higher wage which I can't afford (before you say "but general knowledge is valuable as well" remember that self-taught candidates with similarly well-rounded knowledge generally demand less despite often having actual job experience)

2) complete lack of practical knowledge or skills. Even if a degree is job-related that doesn't mean they are capable of doing the job or have the frame of mind required to do the job properly. This is especially a problem with people who picked their majors based on what industry currently provides the best salaries rather than what they are actually interested in doing.

These are especially problems for people who went into university without knowing what they want to do professionally. TINSTAAFL but even if you just get a degree to orient yourself and pass time until you have figured out what you actually want to do with your life that can affect your employability.

The German political class has been keeping wages lower then they should be on purpose. While export corporations have boosted their profits the last 15 years, wages have been kept much lower than they ought to be, killing the competition elsewhere and destroying a sort-of natural recycling mechanism which should protect the other members of their Eurozone: A worker in Germany should be paid 4 to 5 times more than a worker in Portugal.

Indeed the current German surplus is a major problem in EU's economy. Y. Varoufakis, M. Draghi and B. Bernanke have spoken about this openly time and again (see links).

By definition in a monetary union, your surplus[3] is someone else's deficit, but if you take a look at the rhetoric PIIGS are to blame for their poor financial track-record. Someone is simply having his cake and eating it, but not for long.

It's funny that with a 12.1B in surplus the AfD (right-wing nazi-friendly political party) is on the raise in Germany, isn't it?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jul/24/germany-sur...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2015/04/03/germa...

[3] http://www.wsj.com/articles/german-government-achieves-histo...

You're basically fucked. But then government comes to the rescue again giving handouts! Yay... thanks for temporarily solving a problem that you shouldn't have created in the first place.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-r...

http://www.businessinsider.com/gap-between-unemployment-amon...

Status will always matter, but you can change the signifiers of status. There are plenty of places in, for example, rural China where women do most of the work while the men mostly stay home, and yet the men do not lack for status because of that.

What we should be saying to people is that they should strive to be better because that's the only sure way they can hope to improve their situations. Waiting for other people to help you isn't going to do anything. The only thing you have control over is your own life. If the public discourse around these issues focuses solely on how other people have control and how you have no control, then the situation only becomes worse because then people have an excuse to not try, and they don't.

It is not being called privileged that's the problem. It's being shamed or put in some hierarchy of oppression that is the problem.

>I don't see how acknowledging this is demeaning.

I'm sorry if this comes across as rude, but, obviously this conversation isn't about you. Many Americans they have seen this as demeaning. And for what it's worth, I know many people who do demean white, able-bodied, cis-gendered people for their "lack of" oppression.

This works the same for culture wars, or "war on christmas" etc. People are fundamentally nice, they don't want to stop gay people from marrying, so you need to frame it as "an attack on traditional marriage" to get people riled up with righteous fury.

Pointing out the obvious fact that white people have advantages needs to be twisted too. By for example pointing out that a poor white man has problems that a rich non-white man doesn't. Totally ignoring the obvious comparison point being two poor men, or two poor women, or two rich men/women with different skin colors. Not getting the point becomes imperative, to maintain the illusion of it being an attack.

My (laymen's) understanding of the word 'privilege' was always more along the line of "Mozart was his piano teacher". But it looks like at some point the word was redefined to some incredibly technical meaning whereby a broke--but white, and male--coal miner is also privileged.

It is probably rather insulting to a unemployed rust belt white man with no degree, who is getting by on social assistance, to be tagged by some well-off person on the coasts with a professional degree, that they are suffering from "white male privilege".

For a start, such "privilege" is not terribly applicable in this case. Regardless of whether the professional is not white and/or not male, the professional with the degree is in the "higher caste" in American society compared to the unemployed white man with no degree.

Many articles that use such phrases as "white privilege" tend to be accusatory and overly moralizing. If that's not insulting, at the very least you are not going to change any minds. (As an example from the "other side", my brother works at Citigroup. Guess what I start thinking of a person's argument when they start descending into an "evil Wall Street elite" meme?)

I agree that "white privilege" exists but there are better ways to phrase this -- at the very least, acknowledge and understand the other side.

If your life happens to actually truly suck, it's hard to not resent those who want to make it even worse.

If you want to start steering political life according to your values, next election cycle, pick a candidate for city/state/federal/whatever, or cause that matters to you, and give them 10 hours a week of your time.

They might win, and you might have your issue or values better represented at your city/state/federal/whatever.

If they lose, you get up and do it again the next election cycle.

I agree, but I would say that actively selecting what kind of code you will write using criteria that value wide economic utility -- much wider, say, than the goals of the average me-too unicorn chasing project -- is a healthy and all-too-rare thing.

If we look at mature technologies like plumbing we see an industry around them that enables small, local businesses. Yes a relatively few companies make plumbing components, but hundreds of independent plumbers are able to use those components distributed through local shops to solve local problems.

WordPress has done that for software. Through it's decentralized design it enables jobs for consultants, plug-in vendors, theme vendors, designers, web hosts, and content authors. This industry around WordPress employs many, many people. Further, it creates an opportunity for geographically targeted businesses to be built around WordPress.

The architecture of the tools systematizes the business models those tools enable.

The critical variable is what is the Congress willing to do - if the Republicans embrace the blue collar workers - a lot can be accomplished.

Right now republicans have a chance to shape the country for a generation. And I hope they will see how rewarding the working class could benefit their big corporate donors - because america need a new middle class that can consume everything that corporate america produces.

And infrastructure spending is hard to resist to - it will benefit even Democratic districts.

Personally, I wouldn't mind inflation if all workers are paid a decent wage as a result. For far too long inflation has been too low and confined to precisely the wrong sectors (i.e. land, health care, education). It's time for workers to get their share of the action.

Is it your intuition that the labor market would not adjust to a lower supply by becoming more desirable? If not, why?

Consider a company like Google, who doesn't hire on quotas, but just grabs all the talented engineers they can. In what sense is a visa worker taking a job away from an American, when Google will gladly hire both?

That's not actually true, though. Every immigrant who comes here and becomes employed is, of course, filling a slot that is no longer available to a native-born citizen. However, he or she will also be one more person who needs to be fed, clothed, housed, entertained, protected, and supported. All of those create demand that adds up to substantially more than one job (about 1.2, to be exact [1]).

If there's one thing I'm taking away from this campaign and election, it's that people have big problems reasoning about systems where costs are acute and centralized and benefits are diffuse, even if on the whole they personally benefit substantially from those systems. This seems true for immigration, for climate change, for free trade, for healthcare reform.

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w21123

I think you mean they fill labor demand or that they diminish the supply of jobs by providing labor. This however incorrectly assumes that the demand for labor is fixed. That demand is affected by supply + cost of labor and demand for goods and services. Immigrants consumer goods and pay of services so more immigrants means more aggregate consumer demand, which leads to higher demand for labor. In the end immigrants result in a net labor demand increase due to consumption. Immigrants no matter how frugal still get haircuts, buy groceries, see doctors, pay for tax help, call plumbers, by pants, go to bars, buy used cars etc.

The problem happens when government burdens a group of people with taxes and makes their livelihood more expensive, and becomes the cause of such inability to compete in the market. Limiting immigration is the dumb man's solution to that problem, the real solution would be a yuge cutting of expenses in order to reduce tax burden, and consequently the size of government.

First, Trump is not anti-immigrant. Two of his wives have been immigrants and the new First Lady-elect (?) is an immigrant with a very noticeable accent.

Trump is not anti-immigrant, he's anti-illegal-immigrant.

Let me first say I sympathize with the plight of Central Americans and if I was in that position, either pay $20k and wait 5 years for approval, I would probably take the chances and run the border too, especially knowing my children would be U.S. citizens automatically. However, there are risks incumbent in doing that.

Illegal immigration removes our ability to process and distribute new migrants. It makes it so we can't track whether they're having a disparate or unexpected economic impact, either on the nation as a whole or on specific areas. Illegal immigrants may have trouble finding jobs without SSNs, which may cause them to resort to crime, become dependent on welfare programs, or both. An insecure border allows people with impure motives, like terrorism, to enter. There can be substantial differences in social and cultural norms, which can affect their employability and ability to assimilate. While these people are illegally crossing the border, they're already committing a major repudiation to the social order of their intended new home by mocking rule of law and entering the country without authorization.

All of these things need to be managed and that's why immigration law exists. Americans in border towns are getting overrun and there's no reason they should have to be. They're sick of it.

People usually won't admit to this because SJWs come in and accuse them of being racist for wanting to preserve their traditions, social norms, employability, and language. The election of Trump is a resounding rejection of that hostile sentiment from the self-righteous elite class.

Most Americans have no problem at all with immigrants from other cultures, races, religions, etc., as long as they are given the tools to manage, understand, and direct it so that it's not disruptive to the existing social and economic order.

What all this really boils down to is something that both Republicans and Democrats agree on: our current immigration system is clunky, slow, and expensive, and badly needs rectification. Let's focus on fixing that instead of getting at each other's throats.

I think they do. I'm pretty sure most people know all the implications MADE IN CHINA carry.

They see they are getting 1 unit of benefit for 2 units of hindrance.

Structural unemployment is an inevitable result of globalization, we need ways to mitigate this. Trade from the POV of rich countries is often a redistribution from the poor (uncompetitive labor) to the wealthy (multinational corporations), justified by the "gains from trade". We must be willing to aggressively redistribute these resulting gains back to the disenfranchised or see populist backlash.

So while the goods that are mostly part of discretionary spending (think clothes and electronics) are cheaper, the essentials that can't be outsourced have also increased in price (education, healthcare, housing)

Trump's also credible, because as someone whose attempted many different lines of business, he's seen what it takes to be competitive, and as someone with the heart of a worker, he didn't like it and wanted to even the playing field.

Trump is the epitome of "Don't hate the player, hate the game". Trump was in a very unique position, shared perhaps only by a few dozen other living souls, to see the game, hate it, and be able to make a credible attempt to fix it.

Yes it can. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has lower economic inequality than Norway does. [0] And the percentage of income held by the poorest 10% is nearly the same across Nordic countries. [1]

I have quite a few friends from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and they are quick to tell you that things aren't perfect there, but I think you can say that government policies can create a more equal society even in countries without petromoney (e.g. Sweden).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality

[1] http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eu...

If anything you'd think the oil would cause higher inequality rather than lower.

It's not about oil, it's about realizing that a healthy, well educated and happy population is an investment that pays itself over time.

It's not about oil, it's about realizing that a healthy, well educated and happy population is an investment that pays itself over time.

The US federal government pays more per capita for health care than Norway, for one! The fact the US manages to pay so much per capita for healthcare and not have universal health care is actually quite an achievement.

I find this hard to believe. The US generates what looks to be close to 5x the barrels of oil per year as Norway, and since oil is globally prices, that should lead to approximately 5x the revenue. It will obviously be less per-capita, but that's not what you said.

> and is third worldwide exporter for Natural Gas just behind Qatar and Russia

Your facts are also slanted here. The US is the worlds largest natural gas producer[2], at over 6x the production of Norway, and 25% more than the second place, which is Russia.

That said, it's not like the US is a poor country, or doesn't have credit available to finance anything it wants. Training jobless workers would be a net benefit to the economy after a few years, and would pay itself off. We could easily finance that if we decided to. It's a matter of will, not capability.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...

It doesn't fully protect us from effects of globalization and we have similar situation with the population in rural areas and small old industrial towns not doing that well and turning against immigrants because of that.

But it seems that the situation is much worse in the US.

Wouldn't a social safety net to prevent destroyed families, to prevent crimes driven by desperation and/or drug abuse, and to fund the enrichment of workers in to higher skill cogs in the machine that is society be a wiser investment than in more police, prosecutors and jails?

You know what goes a long way to eliminating blue collar angst? Healthcare. There's a policy that the US would have no issue implementing if the will existed. Hell it would be cheaper than what you currently spend.

You know another policy that would help? Subsidized maternity leaves.

Do you want a third? A government run pension program.

A forth? Controlled college tuition.

All of these are well within the US's power to implement, provided the will is there. But the will not being there has nothing to do with the ability of a nation to implement these things.

Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away, but can't manage to pull off the same thing for someone in the rural US.

I wonder why?

I find that premise debatable, but if it is true, then how can they be retrained for technical jobs?

This is akin to saying, "It's not for the doctor to tell you how to live your life." True enough; but you ignore their advice at your own peril.

That an education is a path to economic stability and mobility is not a matter of opinion. To write this off as snobbery is shooting the messenger.

There will always be a distribution of skills. And that distribution of skills required by the market needs to match the education of the populace. "Smart" is a superlative; "educated in a particular field" is merely an attribute.

Manufacturing is not coming back. We need to move on, and soon.

Until you can convince Americans as a whole that they will have to pay more for goods made in the USA to employ Americans, jobs which were once done in the USA but are now cheaper to be done overseas will never see a return. Trade wars or import taxes won't fix that it will only exacerbate the problem.

And what happens to the cost of goods once everything is manufactured in the US, paying workers a living wage? In increase in the price of all products hurts the poorer and middle classes the most.

And what happens when more and more automation takes over? Then all the import tariffs in the world will be of no help to the welders and sewers you chose to let stagnate instead of improving their access to education and training.

Trump has exposed that the evangelical voters are hypocrites who don't practice what they preach. Their goal is to impose their religion on us.

They are totally enamored with a candidate who has profited off strip clubs, cheated on his wife, married multiple times, sexual assaulted women and bragged about it, and appeared on the cover of the nation’s pre-eminent porn magazine. But they are offended by Beyonce's songs.

This is an opportunity for GOP to move away from evangelical appeasement, but no... they will double down on it.

Why don't people just move closer, or change jobs?

But you're also kind of missing the point of my post, focusing on one small tree and forgetting there's a whole forest out there. Whether it's an hour, or an hour and a half, or 45 minutes isn't the point-- the point is we should optimizing it as close to zero as possible.

I've read the above several places, but anecdotally, I live in Raleigh (technically Garner) commute 25-30 minutes to work, and have one of the longer commutes of people I work with.

So, yes, I made a choice to get into software development. It wasn't an informed choice.

How about we come at it from the reverse angle: why are all those 55-person tech companies founded in Seattle? They pay more taxes. They pay more for office space and pretty much everything else. They create a longer commute for everybody by centralizing all the work. What's the problem with spreading-out a bit?

Anyway, the question was how to help blue-collar workers, and I just gave an answer that amounts to basically, "move jobs where they are".

I'm not proposing anything. This is a casual conversation on a web forum, not drafting a party platform.

> a massive tax[1] increase

I'm definitely not proposing anything massive.

> on urban workers who live with urban compromises (traffic, high prices, crime, etc) to be near work so that other workers in the suburbs can enjoy big lawns and beautiful single-family homes?

I live in the suburbs and I have to deal with all of those things. Remember: my exact gripe is I have to commute into the city to be employed. While I'm there, I'm subjected to the same traffic, high prices, crime, etc. as all other city dwellers are. And I get even more traffic coming and going.

And I don't see anything wrong with people who want to own a lawn or a single-family home being able to own one.

> Well, that's been our strategy with these red state rust belts for decades

No it hasn't.

You know what? Nevermind. I don't want to get into any more political discussion right now. Just relax a bit. It's just a casual conversation on a web form, I don't run the RNC or anything and I wasn't drafting a law and I don't need to be yelled at for how wrong I am.

There's a kind of unfairness in small communities creating safe and nurturing environments for families, educating children well, then waving farewell as their young adults move to a city far away. It's especially unfair if the young adults would just as soon stay in their hometowns given comparable opportunities.

I hope Trump's shock to both the major parties encourages them to reconsider the war for power they wage day and night. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Back in the 60's, the evangelicals started to learn the ropes of party machinery, primarily crystallizing around the abortion single-issue. During the 70's, they started to take up positions throughout the party and attempt to dominate it, but the Rockefeller Republicans trounced them. To their credit, they licked their wounds, learned their lessons, and kept coming back spoiling for another fight. In the 80's they consolidated their power. Today in the largest state Republican party, they absolutely control all the chokepoints of power, they vote virtually in lock-step, but they don't have the numbers to completely dictate policy and seed their own hand-picked and -groomed candidates at the national level. The parliamentarian is an evangelical, most times the convention chairman is either evangelical or strongly allied to them, and key committee chairmen who have a lot of control over which party members participate in the committees and advance to the next convention level are evangelicals. Your level of participation in the party is contingent upon passing one or more litmus test(s): for certain key levels, you are interviewed to state your positions on their hot button topics (abortion is a favorite).

While small in numbers, they carry a huge stick, and they're utterly ruthless political knife fighters, as many Ron Paul supporters found out. They're very tightly coordinated and highly prepared: as an example, they come to district and state conventions prepared with earbud FRS radios so they can confer upon split-second decisions on the floor. While they don't quite have the numbers to be the party unto itself, they dominate the voting plans of the congregations that send them to the party, so they make a formidable voting bloc.

The end result is they can exert enough pressure to force the Republican party to adopt objectively terrible policy planks (no-abortion-no-exception even in medically-dire situations where both mother and fetus can die, really?), that then don't make it into national legislation. But just like before, they keep trying, learning, and adapting.

A robotic future is very amenable to elite interests in all corners of the globe.

This is a microcosm of moving a factory to China. It's not that no Americans are willing to do those jobs, it's that companies hire illegal immigrants instead because they'll work for sub-minimum-wage and never contact the Labor Board about anything because they fear deportation. Illegal immigrants are also unlikely to complain about under-the-table cash payments that allow the employer to skirt tax law.

I have direct, personal knowledge of an establishment in middle America, in a place that doesn't have many undocumented immigrants, that routinely turns away American teenagers seeking employment because they'd rather pay illegal immigrants $2/hr and never have to worry about overtime.

>But there was such a stink about raising the minimum wage... I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. No one cares about the farm workers it seems.

It's funny you mention minimum wage and migrant workers in the same comment because an artificially high minimum wage is precisely what creates a market for underground labor. Employers are willing to pay because it's much cheaper for them; migrants, but not Americans, are willing to work in bad conditions for well below the minimum wage because without a SSN, under-the-table wages are their only way to make money, and if the authorities find out about them (e.g. during the course of investigating a complaint to the state's labor board), they may end up deported.

Oh, and to explore the data he is using to draw the graphs you need to be a SGS subscriber which costs $89 for six months.

In Pennsylvania (which I think is the center of the Rust belt) unemployment has decreased from a high of 8.7% to 5.3%. It is important to note that even if you believe the numbers are fudged, they aren't more fudged today than they were in 2008. Even if the real unemployment rate is double, that just means the decrease is from 17.4% to 10.6% instead.

Using the law to redistribute, as a preventive measure against generational accumulation of wealth (and thus power), was woven into the fabric of the United States early on. Being against this type of redistribution, or deriding it as "sophomoric", is the new and non-traditional thing in America.

[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/cost-deporting-undocumented-i...

My first two jobs were seasonal work on a potato farm and then working on the line in a packing plant. Neither of them would be available to me, and certainly not at a living wage, with a continuation of open borders.

*Edit to those who want to downvote me, please reconsider. I am asking a serious question, not trying to argue for no reason.

What I think is sexist is the outsized hate campaign that has dogged Hillary since she became first lady. She's not notably worse by any metric than John Kerry but she receives way more vitriol.

People were saying she was literally Satan. And Bernie voters were saying she was unacceptable due to being a corrupt sellout establishment candidate, but again... John Kerry didn't receive anywhere near the level of hate.

It's a tough issue to argue though, because I'm not saying it's black and white: I'm not saying haters would've supported her if she was a man. It's more of a matter of degree: the anger and malice toward her would've been less if she was a man. The tenor of people's opposition would've been different.

For that reason I don't think you're awful if you don't believe me. There's enough ambiguity that I think you can say "let's call it an open question and focus on more irrefutable examples of sexism".

But the reason so many women are upset is this is exactly the kind of sexism they face evety day: subtle sexism that is difficult to prove, but when experienced over several decades feels undeniable.

The only sexism I've seen this election has been from the hillary camp. Wouldn't it be nice to have a female president? wink wink

And one of those is the fear of terrorism.

You can, I guess, beat on the statistics drum until the sun swallows the Earth, but human beings on planet Earth, largely, do not agree with your model for assessing the costs of international terrorism.

Your model assumes that, hey, a death is a death is a death, no matter the cause; but most people care more about some types of deaths than others.

You seem to think you just need to educate those people, but the difference is deeper than that.

Can you tell me what the likelihood of a nuclear attack by terrorists will be in 10 years, 20 years? How about if Iran develops nuclear weapons? Do you think 9/11 will be the worst terrorist attack we will ever see? My whole point is terrorists, and those that support them, are becoming increasingly competent in nearly every vector of attack, nuclear being only one. And their destructive ambitions grow even faster than their competency. I simply don't see how anyone can call it a fake issue.

slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an-outlier-story/