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A new data source became available in April, at the U.C. Berkeley SDA archive, and that’s the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2016. This provides a cornucopia of information not available in the exit polls.

I ran this report selecting only non-Hispanic white voters.

In this dataset, among this demographic, Trump beat Clinton by 52.5% to 40.2%

However, the breakdown by income clearly shows that those with the top incomes swung decisively for Clinton. Trump’s support came from whites with income below than $110,000/year. Note that study asks for “family income.”

Income below $110,000: Trump beats Clinton 55.7% to 36.7%
Income $110,000 and above: Clinton beats Trump 50.3% to 43.3%

Democrats, party of the rich.

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Satellite temperature data still shows about 40 percent less warming than the average climate model trend, despite more warming being added to the satellite record after researchers corrected for decaying satellite orbits.

These are the climate models that the Chicken Littles are using to predict catastrophic rising seas and mass extinctions.

AlGore must be speaking somewhere about ‘climate change’.

I’m still waiting for the apocalyptic Global Warming holocaust he predicted in 1997 would occur within 10 years.

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Let’s hear it for the $15 minimum wage.

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A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

…

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

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And we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Two words: Franklin Mint.

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Since the rich are mostly Democrats these days, I have no problem with it.

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Canada’s socialized health care is driving more than 63,000 Canadians out of the country for medical assistance — largely to the U.S.

A new report from the Fraser Institute, a conservative think-tank, estimates that more than 63,459 Canadians traveled to find the health care that is often unavailable in Canada, usually due to long wait times for operations. That number is a 40 percent increase from the previous year, CTV News reports.

How about that great government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Only we wouldn’t have a United States to escape to when it failed, as it always does.

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I am not making this up.

Theodore Dalrymple talks to Parisian taxi drivers.

Most revealing, however, were two Parisian taxi drivers of African origin who said they were planning to return to Africa for the sake of their freedom. To return from Europe to Africa in search of freedom might seem at first a quixotic thing to do, completely counterintuitive, for is not Africa associated in our minds with tyranny, oppression, corruption, and poverty? It is true that the immediate inheritors of colonial power, the bizarre dictators who were the principals in what Byron called (and said that he longed to see) “Africa’s first dance of freedom,” are now of the past, having gone the way of all flesh; but even if tyranny has become a little less evident than it was formerly, arbitrary rule, official exactions, and so forth are still prevalent on the continent, and only a few countries have what we think of as proper elections.

…

In Africa, by contrast, they could start a business straight away, the only requirement being a little capital. They had already started: shops, hotels, cinemas, bars. They had needed no one’s permission; they simply bought premises or land upon which to build them and started their businesses as they saw fit. It was easy to square any interfering official, much easier than dealing with an “honest” bureaucracy. They hired whom they chose and paid them what the market would bear. They themselves could work as much or as little as they liked; the risk was entirely theirs, and if their enterprises failed, there was no one to rescue them and no one upon whom they could fall back other than their families (but they had chosen countries other than those of their descent). Paperwork was almost nonexistent and the government a long way off. In Africa, they felt they were free men in a way that they never would be free men in France.

Watch it.

Winter will be here before you know it. Be prepared.

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The Athenians did it.

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It’s from Harvard so it HAS to be true, right?

Perhaps exposure brings home the reality that poor people are typically that way for a reason, and the reason isn’t that rich people are rich.

ZMan has an interesting take.

One of the themes here is that the American Left is a different thing from the European Left in that it was not born out of the French Revolution. It was born out of the English Civil War and the religious radicalism of the prior century. American Progressives are the spiritual children of the Puritans and Public Protestantism. Their primary motivation is communal salvation. To that end, their focus is on rooting out sin and naming the sinner, rather than the material egalitarianism we associate with the European Left.

Is there anything that we can’t blame on Cromwell?

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Oil-eating microbes ate most of the oil BP spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, according to new research by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The study discovered and sequenced the DNA of a new type of natural oil-eating bacteria. Knowing how oil-eating bacteria behave will help prevent future oil spills from doing as much damage to the environmental as the BP spill.

So all of the OMG WE’RE DOOMED people are, as usual, full of shit.

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It’s nearly incontrovertible that a slow-motion coup d’etat is now taking place. Since November 9, 2016, forces within the U.S. government, media, and partisan opposition have aligned to overthrow the Electoral College winner, Donald Trump.

To achieve this they have undermined the institutions of the Fourth Estate, the bureaucratic apparatus of the U.S. government, and the very nature of a contentious yet affable two-party political system. Unlike the coup d’etat that sees a military or popular figure lead a minority resistance or majority force into power over the legitimate government, this coup d’etat is leaderless and exposes some of the deepest fissures in our system of government. This coup d’etat represents not the rule of one man or even many, but by the multitude of our elites.

There is an old English proverb, ‘He who draws his sword against the king must throw away the scabbard’, and that’s what we’re seeing now.

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As cities and states raise minimum wages to as much as $15 an hour, companies that rely on unskilled labor are cutting labor costs. Of course they are, though those like McDonalds with low-income customers will never tell you why. But businesses don’t spend a dollar when they can spend 50 cents. Employees who contribute less than their pay don’t stay employees for long.

Duh.

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Whether it’s the deployment of special forces against ISIS or firing Tomahawk missiles against Bashar al-Assad, regardless of which faction is eliminated or who is removed from their position of power, the likelihood of stabilizing Syria is low. The country has traveled too far down a path that no amount of international goodwill can bring back. “Syria,” as it was previously known, is dead. Investing in an attempt to revive the pre-war status quo of a unitary state is a fool’s errand, which will drain immense resources, drag out the suffering of the people and distract the international community from seeking more achievable goals. The limited capacity of the international community (both resources and will), the conflicting geopolitical interests, and the depth of animosity among people on the ground mean that a strategy premised upon a return to the Syria that once was is bound to fail.

,,,

Our argument for the breakup of Syria isn’t a call to revisit the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent Treaty of Sèvres—in which Western nations mapped out the current Middle East, ignoring what the local people wanted—but rather to recognize that borders are not immutable and are a function of an ever-evolving history, culture and politics. The century-long map of the Middle East, for better or worse, served the region during the interwar period and the subsequent postcolonial transitions, but the internal pressures that had been contained by strongman dictatorships, with the support of various foreign governments, can no longer be held back. Persisting with the status quo in Syria without acknowledging these challenges and realistically considering the likelihood of a sustainable peace will lead to a far worse situation.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

No doubt Trump is to blame.

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A series of strong storms late last year brought warm winds down to Antarctica that melted a South Carolina-sized chunk of sea ice every day, leading to the lowest sea ice coverage on record for the South Pole.

And it likely had nothing to do with man-made global warming, according a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“There’s no indication this is anything but just natural variability,” John Turner, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, told the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) blog Friday.

DENIER! THERE’S A CONSENSUS!

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Avik Roy is a pretty prominent conservative health care policy expert, and he has the reputation of knowing what he’s talking about. We report, you decide.

Megan McArdle reads this crap so that you don’t have to.

Well, you know, if you tilt your head to one side and squint a little, you can sort of see … Obamacare. I called the House health care bill “Obamacare Lite,” but compared to the Senate bill, the House was offering a radical new taste sensation. The Senate bill touches very little of the underlying architecture of Obamacare; all it does is eliminate the insurance mandates, cut spending and give states somewhat more autonomy in how those dollars are spent. Repeal Obamacare, you say? They’re barely even worrying it.

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An official in the Nebraska state Democratic party has been removed from his position after an audio recording surfaced of him saying that he wished Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise had been killed last week when he was shot by a Democratic gunman during a congressional baseball practice.

Party chairwoman Jane Kleeb removed Phil Montag as chairman of the technology committee after an audio recording surfaced earlier this week of him saying that he was “glad” that Scalise was shot and that he wished “he was fucking dead.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Yeah, I can see toilets in India as being a significant part of Trump’s legacy. (After all, when draining the swamp, you’ve got to put all of the crap someplace….)

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Yeah, environmentalists all look pretty white to me. Sierra Club especially, they’re all a bunch of SWPL granola-crunchers.

Presumably non-white people have better things to do than hug trees.

‘Other countries have threatening neighbors; America has Mexicans and Canadians, whose greatest threats consist of cheap labor and porous borders.’

— Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

Steve Sailer finds a real head-scratcher.

This is our challenge. We have to build a world where everyone has a sense of purpose and community. That’s how we’ll bring the world closer together. We have to build a world where we care about a person in India or China or Nigeria or Mexico as much as a person here.

Uh … how is demanding Americans care more about strangers on the opposite side of the world as much as they care about their neighbors in their own communities going to rebuild community in America?

The thing to keep in mind about Mark Zuckerberg is that whatever he says that he believes in, he really believes in. But not because it makes sense, but because he has a genius for increasing his wealth. Whatever ideas he pushes on you are ideas that will make him richer if you believe in them too. (Whether Zuck’s ideas will make you and your loved ones better off, though, is hardly his concern.)

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A member of the elite Special Forces unit, Joint Task Force 2, who has not been named, killed an Isis insurgent from 3,450 metres (2.1 miles) away.

The shot broke the previous record, held by Craig Harrison, a member of the British armed forces, by almost 1000 metres.

…

“The shot in question actually disrupted a Daesh [Isis] attack on Iraqi security forces,” a military source told the Globe and Mail.

“Instead of dropping a bomb that could potentially kill civilians in the area, it is a very precise application of force and because it was so far way, the bad guys didn’t have a clue what was happening,” the source added.

 

Read it.

Johannes Gutenberg’s converted wine press, which turned inked letters into books, remained the same in principle for 500 years. But by the mid-1980s cheaper, faster, and more efficient ways of transferring words and images onto paper doomed the old practice of arranging clunky blocks of type in a massive metal machine to obsolescence.

Yet today letterpress is in the throes of a full-blown revival. In 2000, a flatbed proof press, often used in teaching and for posters, cost Boxcar Press founder Harold Kyle about $100. By 2005, the price rose to a few thousand. Today, if you could persuade someone to part with it, you might pay $15,000.

…

Beneath the old-timey patina of letterpress goods is a full-scale digital reinvention that drags Gutenberg’s great creation into the full embrace of modern technology.

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Speaking truth to glower.

Jim Treacher points and laughs.

Jon Ossoff raised millions of dollars from people who couldn’t vote for him. He couldn’t even vote for himself. In retrospect, maybe that was a problem.

Congratulations to our newest member of Congress, Karen Handel. But if you think feminists and other Democrats are happy about a woman winning an election, if you think they’re celebrating this victory over rape culture and toxic masculinity and whatnot, you haven’t taken into account that the woman in question is a Republican.

Apparently Republicans aren’t real women. Somebody needs to e-mail Lindsey Graham immediately.

Zman nails it yet again.

It probably says something about us that we accept the dystopian future of Orwell as being to some degree inevitable, despite the fact he has proven to be wrong about most things. He was not wrong about everything. He got communism right in Animal Farm. His critique of writing is timeless and is probably more applicable today than in his era. On the other hand, the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Not even close. The future is a bot making sure you never get your feelings hurt or have a bad day.

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That’s one of the findings contained in documents that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is releasing as part of its ongoing probe into the death of Joshua Brown. The motorist from Ohio was killed last year in a Florida highway crash when the Tesla he was driving struck a tractor-trailer (PDF) as the semi was crossing an intersection of a divided highway that did not have a traffic signal. The crash raised eyebrows about the safety of new automated driving features when used during long stretches of driving. It was also the nation’s first crash fatality involving a vehicle in self-driving mode.

If the car tells you to do something, do it. We’ve seen this movie before

Model S driver had hands on steering wheel for 25 seconds during a 37-minute period.

Darwin Award candidate here.

Read it.

Peak Oil is upon us! Yeah, we’re going to be running out of oil soon! Time to switch over to ‘renewable’ fuels!

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Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes….

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Ben Thompson’s blog Stratechery is one of my go-to places for understanding the tech world.

As you might expect, given a goal as audacious as “taking a cut of all economic activity”, Amazon has several different strategies. The key to the enterprise is AWS: if it is better to build an Internet-enabled business on the public cloud, and if all businesses will soon be Internet-enabled businesses, it follows that AWS is well-placed to take a cut of all business activity.

On the consumer side the key is Prime. While Amazon has long pursued a dominant strategy in retail — superior cost and superior selection — it is difficult to build sustainable differentiation on these factors alone. After all, another retailer is only a click away.

One of Amazon’s key features (that everybody knows implicitly but few realize explicitly) is informational — people go to Amazon not just to buy stuff bot to find out what stuff there is to buy. I catch myself doing it multiple times a day: I have a need, and go to Amazon to find out whether somebody out there makes a product that will fit that need, and roughly what that product might cost.

This is the ‘network effect’ writ large; he bigger the Amazon ‘marketplace’ becomes, the better an approximation of the entire market it is, and the better the informational function that it can serve. I don’t know whether this was a conscious decision on Bezox’ part, but it may have been — when Amazon was Just Books, it dumped a universe of information on its site about books, many of which it didn’t even sell; old geezers of my generation may recall when Amazon was castigated by the Usual Suspects for doing so. But it got us accustomed to going to Amazon to find out what books were out there, even if they couldn’t be bought from Amazon, and eventually we got used to buying them from Amazon when we could, and that habit expanded with the expansion of Amazon’s stock.

This, though, is the brilliance of Prime: thanks to its reliability and convenience (two days shipping, sometimes faster!), plus human fallibility when it comes to considering sunk costs (you’ve already paid $99!), why even bother looking anywhere else? With Prime Amazon has created a powerful moat around consumer goods that does not depend on simply having the lowest price, because Prime customers don’t even bother to check.

Absolutely.

Today, all of the logistics that go into a Whole Foods store are for the purpose of stocking physical shelves: the entire operation is integrated. What I expect Amazon to do over the next few years is transform the Whole Foods supply chain into a service architecture based on primitives: meat, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, non-perishables (Whole Foods’ outsized reliance on store brands is something that I’m sure was very attractive to Amazon). What will make this massive investment worth it, though, is that there will be a guaranteed customer: Whole Foods Markets.

Read it.

This is the best overview I’ve seen.

Lileks.

It’s not quite accurate to say we lost power in last week’s harsh storm. It’s not like I couldn’t find it. “Hey, who had the power last, and where did you put it? Did it roll under the sofa? Wait, never mind — it was in my other pants pocket.”

No, the power was taken away. The transformer was hit by lightning, which seems to be the sort of thing a transformer would like: “Whoa! Awesome. That’s the good stuff. Set me up again, bartender.” But no, the transformer decided to do its best impersonation of a large star going nova while some snapped wires danced on the ground looking for squirrels to murder.

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Even without any James Bond upgrades.

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But, if you’re a proglodyte, it probably won’t.

Today while I was out running errands in my 5-year-old Honda Accord, I passed a Tesla. If I were a different kind of guy, seeing Elon Musk’s latest creation whisk past me as I trundled along in my middleclassmobile might have inspired a sense of personal envy, or even some worry about the social implications of inequality in America.

But I’m an economist. And let’s face it: In practical terms, the difference between a $200,000 Tesla and my last car, a beat-up minivan worth $2,000 at trade-in, is not all that large. They’re both safe forms of transportation that get you from point A to point B and, given legal limits and the reality of suburban traffic, most of the time they’re driven at roughly the same speeds.

In that sense, measures of income inequality overstate the differences within a developed country like the United States. The products available to the masses are, in many cases, nearly as good as those available only to the elite. Your garbageman’s old Timex and your podiatrist’s brand new Rolex serve almost precisely the same function.

It wasn’t always so. A century ago, a hungry rich person had access to significantly more food and more choices than a poor one. Yet even bluebloods would have been able to get their hands on less variety and quality than one now finds at an average Midwestern all-you-can-eat buffet. When Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot” in the election of 1928, it was the sort of pledge that no one expected a politician to actually keep. Today, each American consumes an average of 27 chickens a year, and obesity is a bigger problem than hunger.

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This reminds me of the SF story Gladiator-at-Law, in which one’s home is provided by one’s employer — lose your job, and you lose your home.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a ‘crisis’ if the yuppie hipsters on the Left Coast didn’t cause it with their crazy NIMBY land use laws. Their tax dollars at work.