https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1836077792280371521
FWIW, Harry Enten had a pretty similar assessment last night, he had Kamala 70% to win the popular vote and basically a flip for EC.
70% seems low for the popular vote IMO.
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if you’re not familiar with “whiz kid” harry enten he used to work at 538 and now is at CNN, he’s more analytical than nate IMO and way less pundit-y
Right, basically everything post-Dobbs has been a pretty big miss the other way. I could take the available polling miss data and make a convincing argument either way, which just makes me less confident in the polling.
I do agree it’s reasonable to suspect that Trump’s support is weaker and Dems support (and particularly enthusiasm) is stronger, and that polls may miss this.
There was a slew of stories in 2021 about high turnover and a toxic work environment in her VP office.
I did some research on this a few weeks ago:
I still think all these folks should suspend their EC forecasts whenever national polling moves by X% within a certain time period and then wait for the state polls. Feels like it makes these narratives that may be completely artificial. Harris certainly could lose the EC and win popular vote but seems unlikely that chance is massively surging since debate compared to just needing to wait on data
Pretty much.
That’s where we disagree. If somebody has an edge it has to be Harris at this point.
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yeah I remember that, I meant I want to hear about the shitty nepo babies
yeah kinda but I feel like this sort of movement isn’t so unusual that they can’t make pretty good estimates until the state polls catch up
yeah
That’s fair, I guess that sort of whole point of doing modeling
The complaints about her boiled down to “she expects me to be able to fully explain what I put on her agenda for the day and have read the briefing materials”. I know a nepo baby when I hear one lol.
Yeah that’s why this feels like a flip to me. Polls for Biden were so much better in 20 than they are for Harris right now. We just need to hope that the polls don’t have the same bias they did in 16 and 20….
It’s like when they said “Why is the COVID vaccine free and insulin costs thousands?”
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All kidding aside I know the ruling class absolutely thinks that without the threat of homelessness nobody will ever do another minute of productive work ever again… but that just isn’t the case. The people who would drop out of the labor force are the least motivated, least productive, biggest pain in the ass people in the entire labor force and no one will ever be able to convince me that they produce anything of meaningful value for anyone. Seriously the sheer number of pretty good jobs in this economy that are essentially just ‘watch the slaves and make sure they don’t slack off, steal, or break shit’ is pretty crazy. You don’t need those jobs if you don’t have slaves and I don’t believe that slavery is productive over hiring willing and motivated people to do the work better and faster if not cheaper.
In reality if everyone had the bare minimum guaranteed basically yes it would cost more to get people to do unpleasant work (and you would be trying hard to make it less unpleasant if people could quit and still eat / have shelter the next month) but everything that really needs to get done would get done.
I know we’re all supposed to be rah rah for a revolution, but there really is a reasonable glide path from where we are to where we need to be that doesn’t involve the human population shrinking by 9% over 6 years as real global gdp contracts 55% sometime in the late 2040’s. I’m still going to be very much alive then and I do not want to spend my 50’s and 60’s doing the grimmest logistics imaginable. I can see it coming the first big ecological collapse that impacts the global food supply in a real way… it’s rising up like a tidal wave to meet us. It and the moment when the almost unlivable parts of India become fully unlivable and the social/political impacts of the largest wave of migration in human history. I like immigrants more than I like native born American’s usually, but I’ve seen how the trickle of immigration we’ve seen in my lifetime has been received and I’m already very uncomfortable.
I’m not sold we have enough time for a revolution, but obviously the limitless growth full private equity fuck externalities version of capitalism is a full blown suicide cult at this point. We collectively as a species have to get our shit together soonish so it’s long past time to start having the real negotiation on how we’re going to do all of this going forward when growth can’t bail out our ridiculousness anymore.
My first proposal is a large carbon tax, the receipts for which are paid out per capita on as close to a daily basis as is feasible. You do this by taxing the carbon at the gas pump globally. The oil industry depends on the US Navy to be viable so this is eminently collectable. Send each country a check for their share of the tax money, make it abundantly clear that money needs to be spent on welfare programs that require as little human administration as possible. I really cannot stress enough how important it is that this tax, that will have truly monumental impacts on the market prices of an absolutely wild number of things, goes back out to the consuming public to be spent in the real world. This is spending power that is being extracted from one side of the equation and for it to have the needed impacts it’s going to have to be a strong force. We’re talking 500 bucks a ton in today dollars by 2100 here. So much money there are going to be multibillion dollar carbon extraction companies with viable government contracts yanking this shit out of the air. If we get the money going back out part wrong we are going to kill a billion people. I’m not exaggerating. This shit will make energy astronomically expensive in the places worst affected and least responsible for this. They need at minimum a full cut of the first world tax income on this. That will provide some income to help the very poor from those places migrate, and provide a good amount of support to those who stay as they weatherize which really just means solar powered air conditioning everywhere. Less population density, but those places will still have crops they can grow, resources to extract, the usual stuff of life. It just won’t be a place where a meaningful chunk of a large population can live without climate control.
The oil companies understood this was the obvious solution to the problem back in the 70’s. That’s why we’ve tried every other thing over the last 40 years. It’s why some of you might think carbon credits are a thing. Greenwashing is an industry now. Ignore all of that we need to tax oil, coal, and natural gas, at every stage of its lifecycle, to whatever extent gets us to a global price on carbon that is high enough that absolutely everyone is incentivized to figure out the lowest carbon way to continue living their life. There are some other things that cause a fuckton of emissions that also need to get taxed, like concrete production, but most of those are actually really solvable if carbon is expensive. Yes this includes the meat industry.
At that point capitalism will very likely cure itself. If there’s one thing it’s designed to do it’s minimize a cost center. The second emitting a ton of carbon costs real money they’ll discover you can do all global trade with wind power and it pencils out fine. Suddenly the research project the company couldn’t be bothered to complete for the last fifty years is the most important thing in the company. When it’s costing you real money it’s remarkable how fast everyone is working all night to figure out how to make it stop. Plastic packaging we’ve never heard of it we use fiberboard for everything it’s made out of pulped mid tier max carbon soaking lumber from the carbon farms. It’s four times as expensive as plastic was, so essentially free!
So that’s the first step, but if we don’t get our shit together shortly that won’t be enough. Personally I’m 39 and in a pretty good position to get rich off of this. I suspect a lot of you are as well. Keep your eyes up and chase wherever the government money streams are going. Once stuff actually happens we’re so behind it’s going to be a crazy rush. Either we turn before it’s too late and we can mitigate for the rest of our lives, or we don’t and it’s adaptation time.
But I personally think the Boomers are dying off and the political will is there. Heck even the corporations are starting to get pretty uncomfortable now that the insurance companies are starting to have ‘look man…’ conversations with people about how they simply don’t want to cover them any more. We’re close to the end of the period where nothing happens one way or the other. Watch what happens to FL and certain parts of CA real estate over the next 24 months.
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I don’t think there’s a snowballs chance in post climate apocalypse Florida that were going to tax carbon and give the money to the global poor.
The next big renegotiation is the one between the state and parents. This deal where the state gets fucking everything and the parents pay for everything as they raise what is essentially livestock for the benefit of the state is crazy. You realize that kid you made is going to pay taxes right? For 50+ years that kid is going to pay taxes. When you’ve done your part and paid for every part of their lives sometime after their 18th birthday, as you are legally obligated to do, they aren’t even obligated to speak to you again if you were an asshole about it. Financial benefits? That worker you just served us up to work to death for as little as we can get them to not quit on life for had better like you so much and do so well that they can afford to tip you.
Yeah that’s a deal people on average do 1.4 times per woman because those are some special special brain chemicals, without which our species probably wouldn’t exist. We need 2.3 to be at replacement level so we are clearly several orders of magnitude away from the level of subsidy we’re going to eventually need. Right now we need fewer people but we’re also witnessing the beginning of a real tightening in the labor market because of the population aging. Once children go from being the only retirement product available for a population made up primarily of peasants to first worlders spending 15k on a week at Disney with their kids the birthrate goes from like 5 children per family to less than 2. That’s because one of those is a financial product you use to protect yourself and the other one is a pure luxury good you get severely punished for buying if you can’t afford it.
There’s like one generation where people haven’t figured out what the deal is yet and then the birthrate collapses. Every place that is like this, this is happening. No exceptions.
I mean, we want to have kids, but we don’t want to do so before we know we can afford to comfortably, so that we don’t doom ourselves and them to be drawing dead to financial independence and climate change. That math gets dicey in a hurry.
Yeah we don’t have kids either. I’m 39 and she’s 34. We’re still waffling and we’re doing fine financially. It’s just that we both had kinda hard lives before we were 25, and we’ve only been even a little comfortable in our own skin for like a couple of years at this point… and to disrupt that peace when finding it was hard is really really scary.
Let’s be real here for a second children are a mixture of nature and nurture. Part of it is your parenting but part of it is a mixture of all of your genetic relatives… and I like maybe 2 of my genetic relatives and I despise every person related to my wife.
It would be a much easier choice if the state was offering to pay even half the cost, but instead it sure looks like it costs something in the retiring 5-10 years later range. So I’m trading 5-10 years of having to still worry about money to have the above experience. I do love me some brain chemicals though. I really truly do.
A truly painful decision. Absolutely normal for our time and place. So normal that I take one look at the neighbors and assume that the reason they’re our neighbors is probably because they made that choice and went DINK. They’re democrats (beto yard signs I was so so so happy to see) about five years older than us and probably make less than I do because I make more than the median for the area and this is one side of what used to be called a duplex. If they were rich kids they would have been home owners sooner like we would have been. If they had had kids they wouldn’t be in any danger of living in our neighborhood. None of this is good news for the macroeconomy of 2040 my areas school district is meh. Definitely on the lower average side of the national education spectrum unless your kid is in the top 5% of their class and gets a free admit to UT. Speaking of which this area is packed full of Oracle engineers predominantly from India so I wish your kid the best of luck with that. That’s actually the main reason the schools aren’t worse actually.
Having my own kids and watching my friends kids really illuminated this for me. You have a lot less influence on your kid’s personality than you think. Some kids can be absolute terrors despite parents doing everything right, some kids can be absolute angels despite having horrible parents. I do think you can influence your kid’s values a great deal but only through example by living them.
One of my kids has some pretty severe special needs and it changed my life drastically. It’s not all bad, but even things like going on the stereotypical family vacation just seem near impossible that this point or at least so stressful that I’d rather just stay in familiar surroundings. I’m fortunate to have great health insurance through a great job but I’ll still hit my annual out of pocket max by March or April every year, just paying for my kid’s therapy.
That said rather than look at population as a negative due to statistical aggregates, I think the only solution to humanity’s problems will come from good humans, and if the good humans aren’t going to need to be raised by people like us, first worlders with somewhat good moral compass and enough resources to create a great environment.
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Yeah I don’t agree with the idea that having kids is some kind of ecological crime. If you can raise kids well that’s a worthwhile choice and someone has to for this to all continue.
I’m just very unsure about doing it myself for the above reasons. I have a lot of shitty relatives I never want to live in the same area code as again. Creating one under my own roof sounds like the plot to a horror comedy.
I’m also not at all sure that I’m not the problem if I’m being very honest. I do get along with most people though. Just not people for whom mooching and scamming are a way of life lol.
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