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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29926 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.

Harris's 1.4% lead in national polls is cold comfort given that, at a similar point in the election, Biden was up by 9.4% and Clinton was up by 6.7%.

Democratics are panicking about Trump's support in the black community, which has traditionally voted 90/10 in favor of Democrats. While Trump will still lose the black vote by large margins, his style is more appealing to black voters (especially men) then previous Republican candidates like Mitt Romney. Democrats have responded by trying to shame black voters. Recently, Barack Obama was even unearthed to chastise black men for not wanting to vote for Harris.

Enter the latest vote-buying scheme, which I think is the most naked attempt to buy votes I've ever seen in recent US politics, even more than college debt forgiveness.

https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1845993766441644386

Harris-Walz have proposed a 20k forgiveable loan for up to 1 million Black (capital B) entrepreneurs to start a business. The fact that the loan is forgiveable means that this is essentially a gift to any grifter who wants to take advantage. But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.

Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.

Will Trump counter with some asinine scheme of his own? Probably.

I can't speak to Polymarket, but I was watching Predictit pretty closely. I saw a surge in market activity about a week ago with Trump moving from $0.49 to $0.56 and Harris dropping from $0.55 to as low as $0.48. I predicted this was a pump-and-dump and that the prices would inevitably settle back to $0.50-ish (there's not really enough volume to to totally wipe the pump, IMO). I missed the $0.48 shares for Harris, but she's back up to $0.51 and Trump is back down to $0.53. Had I taken the Trump short and gotten in at the Harris Lows I could have made $6 for every $100. Not huge, but basically proves my point that these market moves are opportunities for scalping and the race is strictly 50/50...at least for now.

This theory doesn't work unfortunately. PredictIt is not a real market. Betters are limited to $850 per contract. Also, to buy shares in both Kamala and Donald would cost you $1.06 right now. On Polymarket you can own both for $0.998.

So your 6% profit all gets eaten by transaction costs. And it's not possible to buy more than $850, so it's also impossible for a single whale to pump and dump. Polymarket is a liquid prediction market. PredictIt, on the other hand, is just a toy. That explains the weird behavior you are seeing.

If you are confident that Kamala has a greater than 41.7% chance of winning you can go on Polymarket right now and make real money.

would cost you $1.06 right now.

My point is this wasn't the case a few days ago. I could have bought Harris at $0.48 and sold Trump at $0.56 (aka buy 'No' at $0.44). Selling at market today would have been profit.

As for pump and dump, I think these markets are so thin that $850 would look like a pump and there's no reason to think, if it was a pump, that there was only a single individual involved. Volume doubled for a three day stretch, so something was happening and it was unlikely a single person.

I'm not confident in anyone winning anything...again, my point. I think the actual price per contract should be $0.50.

I'm also not trying to make 'real money' on prediction markets. I don't really understand who would do that...but w/e. What I'm interested in is how that market functions and how closely my predictions skew toward reality. Though, with your suggestion, I may take a closer look at Polymarket.

There's a speculative Twitter thread suggesting Polymarket is being distorted by a single huge better: https://x.com/Domahhhh/status/1846597997507092901

Seems possible, but also really stupid unless you think higher odds on Polymarket actually changes the real odds more than trivially.

If the market becomes obviously wrong (like Trump at 85%) then it will attract essentially unlimited money on the other side of the bet that will make it impossible for a single whale to fight.

They say that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. But that's actually NOT TRUE about prediction markets because they have a concrete end date.

There's still risk discounting to account for. Even if the true odds are, say, 50-50: to counteract 25m of dumb money, the sharp traders need a bankroll in the order of billions of dollars to avoid kelly ruin, i.e. approximately the total volume on that market right now.

True enough. But 1 billion is a tiny amount of the available hot money, which is in the trillions. There's already been a couple billion gambled on this market.

Among high net worth people, there is a huge demand for investments which are both positive alpha and uncorrelated from the stock market. They are rare and precious. Hell, if Trump was at 85% right now, I'd throw in 50k myself.

spreads would have nerfed some of those gains too

All of them actually.

Same for DJT stock, which is surging based on possibly renewed hopes for Trump

For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.

And I still don't see how people can take any of that seriously. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris.

But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.

What's new about that? If you were the sort to care (negatively) about that, weren't you already highly likely to vote Trump? What's one more such thing on top of the many that already exist. And for liberal whites, you've got their whole pro-outgroup feeling thing.

Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.

Aren't most "swing voters," particularly these days, the politically "checked out," who don't pay attention to any of this, and thus are unlikely to hear about this particular proposal?

Meanwhile, I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris.

Political division will increase, as will the intensification of the news cycle, but stocks and the economy should do fine. The wealth tax she floated during early campaigning, predictably, she has discarded in favor of middle-class tax cuts. I don't think it will be as bad as feared in regard to the economy. Also, 'peak woke' was under Biden, whereas wokeness got much worse under Trump. Elon Musk is single handedly doing more to fight wokeness than even any politician now.

the economy should do fine.

It doesn't look to be doing fine here in Alaska (it hasn't since the 07-08 financial crisis at least).

Also, 'peak woke' was under Biden

We have not seen "peak woke". We probably won't live long enough to see "peak woke." It's going to just keep getting worse for the rest of our lives.

Elon Musk is single handedly doing more to fight wokeness than even any politician now.

And accomplishing nothing that actually matters.

We have not seen "peak woke". We probably won't live long enough to see "peak woke." It's going to just keep getting worse for the rest of our lives.

There's a lot of data suggesting that we really have passed peak woke. 2020 seems to have been the inflection point.

First, I think that link is mostly focusing on the wrong set of people, who are downstream from those who matter more. Secondly, I think it's mistaking a brief ebb in a larger trend for a serious reversal. Expect these woke indicators to start going back up again during the Harris administration.

Edit: also, as pointed out in the paper, some of the "reversal" is just the removal of the temporary bloat that developed during Covid.

Meanwhile, I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris

Why do you feel it's inevitable?

Why do you feel it's inevitable?

To quote Curtis Yarvin, "Moore's Law of election 'fortification.'"

The cathedral seems much less enamored of Harris than they were of Biden in 2020.

I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris.

Buy a bunch of "Yes" shares for a Kamala victory at a discount, enjoy your windfall.

I'm strongly considering it.

Buy a bunch of "Yes" shares for a Kamala victory at a discount, enjoy your windfall.

With what money? Broke, disabled welfare parasite here.

If you really believe that Kamala is going to steal the election, then the obvious answer is ‘credit card debt’.

then the obvious answer is ‘credit card debt’.

That only nets me ~$500 (the credit limit of my credit card). It also removes most of my meager safety net for sudden expenses — like if medicaid decides not to cover part of my recent ER visit.

Edit: Once again, it seems like most people here don't understand how poor — and not just "poor" — someone can get.

You can take out new credit cards.

Look, I think this is a bad idea and your confidence is delusional doomerism. But if you really believed it, the logical answer would be to fund gambling with debt, from new credit cards if need be.

You can take out new credit cards.

Not in this timeframe. Even if the applications were processed in time, the cards likely wouldn't make it here (Alaska) in the mail before the election.

Some further points, after having given this more thought:

  • As what would I report the resulting income to Social Security? Gambling winnings?
  • To minimize impact to my benefits, I'd have to spend it all in the same month I obtained it
  • And even then, the impact to my benefits would still offset much of the gain (with the added issue of said impact being delayed until a few months later) — the "welfare trap" is a bitch.

I know very little about prediction markets, so can someone explain to me how likely it is that Trump's surge on for example Polymarket is the result more of speculative behavior than of people rationally trying to predict the winner of the election? I don't really see any reason to currently view the race as being anything other than pretty close to 50-50. People might say well, if I believe that then why not try to make some money on it? And maybe that's fair. But that does not necessarily mean that the betting odds on Polymarket are actually an accurate guide to the likely election outcome.

The issue isn't about how the bet resolves, speculation is about scalping price movements on the margins.

If a true-beliver wants to move the markets, they can, by buying a bunch of shares at a certain price (or prices). I one is certain Trump will win and one wants to make it look like there's some support, buying contracts at $0.55 (or thereabouts) is pretty rational because if he wins the investor more-or-less doubles their money.

For me, a person who believes the actual market is 50/50 and $0.50 is the right price for both contracts I can take advantage of these swings to scalp a few bucks with limit orders. Over time, I expect the prices to settle back toward the 'real price', which they have, so I just have to be patient and I can win a few bucks here and there based on volatility. The nice thing about markets (at least well designed and functional ones) is that they will always drift back to the correct price even if they fluctuate in strange ways.

My experience with these markets is that you have people with positions, true-believers and you have speculators. The speculators love to see market moves because they can scalp profits. The true-believers are taking out a bet.

It's all speculation. Unless you have insider info or some way to arb it, there is nothing rational about it.

how likely it is that Trump's surge on for example Polymarket is the result more of speculative behavior than of people rationally trying to predict the winner of the election?

Why not both? We know that polls at least frequently are inaccurate with trump on the ballot, it is rational behavior to speculate endlessly.

Polling inaccuracy is because of declining response rates resulting in oversampling of hyper-engaged partisans, which can't be controlled for, not whether or not Trump is on the ballot.

Other countries have let people bet on politics for a long time and no, they’re far from always accurate. Right before Brexit, the betting market hugely favored remaining in the EU for example.

Prediction markets are well-calibrated when there is sufficient liquidity.

A 20% chance is not a 0% chance. It will happen 1 in 5 times. When it does happen, the prediction market is not "wrong".

This is what Nate Silver had to say over and over again in the wake of 2016 when he made a "wrong" prediction by giving Trump only a 30% of winning. Most people simply fail to understand how prediction works.

Yes, but for a non-repeatable event it’s also very easy for a pollster to say they were right. After all, even someone who predicts a 95% likelihood of A winning can say “well, the 5% likelihood of B winning happened to be the outcome in this scenario, my forecast was in fact entirely correct” and this is completely unfalsifiable.

They were all wrong, but Nate was less wrong ,so that makes him the winner in this regard. His model was more accurate.

No, Nate isn't "less wrong" because 95% chance of winning and 70% chance of winning don't actually have a meaning in this context. How could you even make such a judgement? How do you know that if we had access to 100 different universes with the exact same 2016 race, Hillary doesn't win 95% of them?

It's absurd to claim that Nate Silver's model was more accurate because it gave marginally better odds of a Trump victory; that's not even getting into the fact that absolutely no new polls were available to Nate that showed a tightening race - this was purely Nate fudging the numbers because he knew something was off (something he used to constantly do with his sports prediction spreadsheets he made his bones on)

No, Nate isn't "less wrong" because 95% chance of winning and 70% chance of winning don't actually have a meaning in this context. How could you even make such a judgement? How do you know that if we had access to 100 different universes with the exact same 2016 race, Hillary doesn't win 95% of them?

I disagree. By this logic, no polling can be considered useful or skill does not exist in terms of polling. Obviously one cannot redo the election hundreds of times or split off many universes.

Nate wasn't doing polling, he was placing odds on election outcomes. Why you think "that logic" has anything do with the potential accuracy of any given poll is beyond me.

Yes, but for a non-repeatable event it’s also very easy for a pollster to say they were right.

I respect the thrust of this argument in general, but Nate Silver specifically came the closest to predicting Trump's victory out of the major pollsters. Most pollsters just look at the headline probabilities but fail to properly take conditional probabilities into account. They looked at poll after poll and did the fairly standard "average everything, find the STDEV, there's your confidence interval, 99% clinton victory." What made Nate Silver special is that his model accurately identified the sorts of universes in which trump was likely to win by finding out the ways in which various poll results and errors were correlated. That allowed him to more accurately assess the possibility of a systematic underpolling based off of purely statistical guesswork-- he didn't need to understand why the polls could have been (and ultimately were) biased for clinton, he just had to set up his model so it spit out that possibility on its own.

Based on the reality we live in, it's probably true that even Nate's estimate was wrong-- that it wasn't rolling a 5+ on the six-sided election day dice that gave trump the win, but that underlying factors put trump's win probability somewhere north of 50%. Given the data available though, Nate was the most effective poll-aggregator available.

Prediction markets are like a super-nate. Aside from each individual user having having access to all the same tools nate did (and the retrospective + incentive to use them), every vote on every market is a sort of poll, and all the people playing arbitrage force the markets to take into account conditional probabilities. They're still not going to be "right," all the time-- they're not even necessarily going to outperform your average pundit. But as a casual observer without inside knowledge, following the markets is a dominant strategy over basing your worldview on any particular pundit or basket of pundits. It's like the "always buy SPY" investment advice. Rare people, in rare cases, can consistently outperform the betting markets. But without some very convincing reasons, you shouldn't assume you're one of them.

I don’t disagree with you, my objection is really primarily aesthetic and partially on principle. A fund manager makes a bet, he doesn’t just decide that there’s a 70% chance of Boeing stock doubling in the next year, he gambles that it will. This counts as ‘making a decision’.

Nate is the actually worse than the bank research analyst who defends his buy rating on a stock that took a huge dive by saying that all he actually meant was that it would most likely do well, and then shrugs, because at least the latter has a position.

Nate should be confident enough, at least, to have a headline prediction that says “X is probably going to win”.

Sure, but this doesn't make sense in the context of prediction markets. Prediction markets host hundreds of predictions. We can look at the history of those predictions and see how well calibrated they are.

I don't believe the claim that prediction markets are "not accurate" would bear scrutiny.

Is probability even well-defined for a one-off event? It's not like we can random sample the multiverse on how the election actually went. At the same time, nothing is absolutely certain (supervolcano as October surprise!).

Maybe it makes sense from a Bayesian perspective: given the current knowledge of the system state (polls, voter registrations, demographics, maybe even volcanology reports) we can estimate the probability of a specific outcome. But a frequentist view seems nonsensical, even if a lot of predictions seem to present themselves that way.

One-off events are intractable. Kelly does not work on them.

I completely agree, the frequentist view is nonsensical. This is why forecasters need to be nailed down to a specific outcome (or ‘I don’t know / it’s too close to call’ but this has to be acknowledged as opting-out).

That's my main problem with Nate Silver's modelling.

There should be large error bars around the prediction that slowly close in as the predicted event approaches.

It shouldn't be "X% Trump, Y% Kamala," it should be "X% Trump, Y% Kamala, Z% irreducible uncertainty."

The logic is "if the election were held today then here's the probability." But... the elections won't be held today. That's the whole point of the prediction for a future event, and I think it behooves them to acknowledge that uncertainty is inherent to the modelling process.

If they'd included that back when it was Trump vs. Biden, the conserved probability would have accounted for Biden suddenly dropping out and wouldn't have broken the model instantly. Also helps reflect the chance that one of the candidates dies... which also almost happened.

And if Nate trusts his model, there's a ton of money to be made in the prediction markets.

It shouldn't be "X% Trump, Y% Kamala," it should be "X% Trump, Y% Kamala, Z% irreducible uncertainty."

What would this irreducible uncertainty mean for an event with a binary outcome? I think Silver already accounts for increasing uncertainty as he propagates his current prediction into the future (what he calls forecast vs. nowcast).

Error bars would make sense around the expected vote percentage. Of course the probability distribution over vote percentages becomes broader as you look into the future, and perhaps he does show that to paying customers. But in the end you still have to integrate over that when the layman asks for the probabilities of who wins the election. And that still amounts to two numbers that sum to 100%.

Evaluating a predictor's performance seems straightforward to me via the usual log-likelihood score. Record the final outcome and take the log of the predictor's probability for that outcome. That score can then be summed over multiple different elections, if you like. (Not sure though if I'd call that scoring rule particularly frequentist.)

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There's not a ton of money to be made if you believe the odds are 50/50. Prediction markets give Trump 60/40 odds, while Nate's model gives 50/50 odds. If your bankroll is $1M, then it's only rational to bet 167k, for an expected value of 40k. Not nothing, but not a ton of money either.

That also ignores other costs, like counterparty risk. Nate also has to deal with reputational risk: people might value his published models less if they thought he was making bets on markets that were influenced by his models. Since that's his main source of actual income, a bet would be substantially negative EV for him.

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You have to look at their predictions in aggregate. If they predict 20 elections with a 95% chance for party A, and A wins 19 of those 20 elections, then yes they were accurate.

Even if that 1 election was a landslide for party B, the prediction method is accurate. People who say otherwise just aren’t accepting that it’s a percentage chance and not a poll.

The prediction markets, if anything, seem to be underselling Trump's chances right now.

I'd check out RealClearPolitics, which does a good job of aggregating all the polls. Trump is ahead in 6 of 7 swing states right now. Based on current polling averages, Trump wins 302 electoral votes. More importantly, polls are moving in his favor each day:

https://www.realclearpolling.com/elections/president/2024/battleground-states

Another data point. At this point in the campaign 8 years ago, Hilary was up by over 6.7 points nationally. Biden was up by 10 points. So we'd expect the polls to undersell Republican support on average. If the 2024 campaign follows the same trajectory as previous ones, Trump wins the popular vote by 3% and an electoral college landslide.

So, absent other information, I'd put Trump's odds at 70-80%. But I also know that I'm lacking information and fallible. I trust that the prediction markets are likely to be a truer reflection of the current state of the race than my opinions. There's actually a decent amount of liquidity in this particular market, with over $1 billion gambled, and a small bid ask spread of just 0.1%.

Swing states are so lumpy it's hard to call heads or tails on this.

While I fully agree with your general point and thrust of argument, particularly in overall polling differences compared to previous elections, the current leads in key states are still well within normal margins of error. We are in various cases talking about leads of 0.X% when a margin of error can be wide.

While I fully agree that based on historical patterns this would be a shoe in, there is a point that this assumes no changes in how polls were conducted between election cycles to try and improve their accuracy. There are many interests- commercial, strategic, and political-competitor- that have incentives to try and improve polling accuracy, and so it's not good to assume the same errors will continue to be repeated in the same way.

New equivalent errors may be introduced, and there are even conspiratorial takes on why polls may be wrong (such as presenting polls claiming a much closer race to support the effectiveness of future cheating by reducing the amount of cheating needed to plausibly 'narrowly' win), but these would have to be made and I don't think you or most other people are making them.

I generally think there's significantly more irreducible uncertainty out there than we like to acknowledge.

Even "margins of error" are just estimates (statistically sound, but still possible they're wrong) and actual outcomes can exceed them, rarely.

Sure. No disagreement, even. Consider this an assent.

...I'm not sure how else to add 'that is a sound and valid addition' without coming off as sillier than I mean to.

The prediction markets, if anything, seem to be underselling Trump's chances right now.

As much as I think the "Trump campaign is in disarray! They were not prepared for Kamala! Coconut-couchfucker-joy!" offensive was fake, I'll keep repeating "it's not over until it's over". Someone else also pointed out back then that relying on pollsters' past bias might be risky, because you never know when they might decide to correct for it.

Oh yeah, I'm with you. And we also can't escape the fact that many swing states have serious flaws in their election security.

A lot can still happen. I would expect a maximally damaging and fake news story to drop against Trump in the next few days. (50% chance). But on the plus side, Biden seems to hate Kamala so some of the levers that the current administration can pull (like sabre-rattling with Iran) won't get pulled.

But on the plus side, Biden seems to hate Kamala

Source?

See the recent Harris DeSantis Biden exchanges.

It was revealed to me in a dream

Low-effort comments lead to low-effort responses. Knock it off, all of you.

Do you think you're on reddit or something?

Okay, @stuckinbathroom's "Source?" is obnoxious, but so is this.

You want, like, a scientific study?

I’d take it if you had one.

But I’d settle for an interview, or even rumors like we had for Obama and Biden.

Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck it up.

You make it sound as if pollster bias is just a simple matter of them deciding not to correct for them, rather than them trying repeatedly to correct for it but reality being surprising in various ways.

Hofstadler's Law of polling mean there is always a shy Tory effect, even when you correct for Hofstadler's Law.

Right, but that doesn’t mean the pollsters aren’t trying to correct for it all the same.

Yes, and you seem to be implying there's something strange about that?

If the bias is consistently in the same direction, I find it unlikely that they are actually trying to correct it. I'd have to look up the post I'm citing, but I think they were talking about Sweden where their right-populist party was underestimated during one election, overestimated in the next one, and finally estimated correctly in the one after that. This is what you'd expect to see if they were trying.

How do you explain the pollster debate over polling methodologies if they’re not trying to correct for biases? Perhaps sometimes the biases are hard to correct for https://archive.is/6tjvT

The same way I explain debates over methodology in academia, which result in a peer review process that can't outperform laymen simply looking at studies' titles.

That does not imply a peer review process that can’t outperform laymen, because laypeople are only acting on the outputs of the peer review process. Moreover, a prediction performance of 67% may be much higher than chance, but there’s clearly a lot of signal still that laypeople cannot discern. You’d expect something different if they’re not trying at all.

I’ll go one further. I don’t think any poll is actually trying to figure out who will win so much as to convince the electorate of whatever the polling centers want to be true. There’s really no reason to bother with them other than to see if anything is changing within the narrative.

Polls are destructive tests: once you conduct one and announce the results, the value changes.

Which is kind of the point. If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results? If the polls say Trump wins, then it’s useful perhaps in business where you might want to long term plan for the future economic policies Trump brings. Or it might be useful to the various campaigns as a signal of where the weak points are. I suspect that they aren’t getting the polls generally available to the public, which are not about reporting the likely winners, but in motivating or demotivating various factions in the electorate. CNN isn’t trying to guess the outcome. They want to scare democrats into voting and working harder for Kamala and saying she might lose is motivation for people who are afraid of a Trump second term. If they’re wrong, it’s not like they get a black eye even.

I think what makes more sense is to try to gage enthusiasm and whether or not some factions of the base are not on board. Kamala has a big problem because of Israel Palestine. There’s a fairly large portion of the left that’s jumping to either staying home or voting Green Party. If they’re serious, I think that’s a problem no matter what the polls say. I don’t see the same divide with any issues for Trump. I see lots of people saying they can’t wait to vote for Trump. Both things seem important as data points.

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Nate Silver has written about how the Red Wave that never manifested was in fact never well supported by the polling data and instead was a result of just such an overcorrection so there is at least some evidence in that direction.

Trump has had two Presidential elections so far. Even with no bias, you'd expect the error to be the same sign 50% of the time.

The dark and cynical but not quite CapitalRoom level of cynicism is that the pollsters have to keep the polls showing the possibility of a Harris victory to give the Democrats cover when they "find" enough ballots to put her over the top.

the pollsters have to keep the polls showing the possibility of a Harris victory to give the Democrats cover when they "find" enough ballots to put her over the top

This has been the theory put forth by some commenters over at the Dreaded Jim's blog.

I do have to say it's concerning that this election runs through several of our nation's most corrupt cities: Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

I won't make specific claims but it's the height of naivete to think these cities can run an election correctly.

What city exists that Republicans actually trust?

Until we get annexation of metropolitan areas it's just going to be like this.

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There is also the possibility that the underlying cause for the bias could have abated. Support for Trump can have normalised in poll answering demographics for instance.

I still find it likely that some underestimation is going on but I wouldn't be surprised if the poll aggregate is largely accurate or even overestimating Trump.

Protect cryptocurrency investments so Black men who make them know their money is safe.

...what? I'm sure men are more involved in crypto than women, but why black men?

And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?

My bias is that crypto is speculative gambling for the mass public, though I believe there are valid use cases for it. What's next, subsidies for Amway to protect women-owned small businesses?

I probably profile as a "young man" for their software models and i get near constant ads built around vote for Trump because of Crypto/Zyns/Sports Gambling.

Crypto has pretty heavy black overrepresentation among the owners.

I saw some reporting a few days ago that speculated that part of the movement of black men towards the right (they will still vote Kamala at 80+% but still movement) was driven my crypto concerns. I'm not sure I buy that, but I'm guessing whomever wrote this press release did.

And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?

There's three interpretations in my head of what that could be, and considering what the Biden admin has been doing and how it's likely to be exactly the same people in charge under Harris, there isn't really any doubt which one it is.

Crypto traders and users want the governments to protect the ability to use and trade cryptocurrency by keeping the knee off the neck of the industry.

The crypto industry wants governments to give clarity as to where it will intervene and where it won't, so that the industry can finally know where and how they will be allowed to operate.

Governments wants to make the cryptomarket as "safe" and regulated as regular finance (and by doing so, kill opportunity in that market for the plebs).

I watched a Sagaar/Crystal Breaking Point show on the topic, and to me it seemed funny that for some reason none of them mentioned the potentially most important reason: crypto has been historically used to protect money from various actors, including garnishing the income due to child support or other such obligations. If you have irregular or under the table income, you can store it even using cash such as with bitcoin ATMs or peer-to-peer trading, there are also other methods. Sending signals that the government will be easy on these practices may be very important for black men specifically.

I may have misunderstood, but it kinda sound like you think that the Democrat staffers who wrote that press release were thinking 'black men use crypto to hide their drug-dealing money and avoid paying for the children they walked out on, we'd better tell them that they have our support'.

Even in politics, I think you'd struggle to find that kind of jet-black cynicism

Democrats dropped tens of millions for MAGA candidates in 2022 from their own money, while declaring the same candidates as existential threat to democracy.

Spending government money to get some votes of shady characters? Absolutely no problem, especially with so many naive people around.

The perspective of the policy maker would be more "black men are marginalized from traditional banking institutions and turn to alternative ones instead, so we should promise to protect the alternatives." They amount to the same thing, but the added layer of indirection lets you avoid consciously considering the concrete implications that you explicitly list.

I thought it meant regulate cryptocurrency investments so Black men don't gets scammed. Not sure if these policies are fleshed out in more detail elsewhere. Possibly, there is no intention to give specific details so people can just fill in the blanks with their preferred policy.

That's probably a good idea. But black men who are into crypto presumably don't want regulation to "protect" them from it.

The issue with the ambiguity is that people really into crypto are as likely to fill in the blanks with things they're worried about as things they're hopeful about.

My guess is that they have some sort of internal polling to try to figure out what the common factors are amongst black men who support Trump, and they came up with buisiness ownership and cryptocurrency investments.

And then stopped right there and treated them like the wider cohort instead of tailoring the message to who they are targeting.

This is fucking amateur hour.

Like how does one suck at marketing so bad that they try nanny state patronizing on the libertarian leaning business owners? It genuinely feels like being talked down to because you're black.

Like how does one suck at marketing so bad that they try nanny state patronizing on the libertarian leaning business owners? It genuinely feels like being talked down to because you're black.

Ok, some low social trust people are libertarian, but many are not- they want a government big enough to magically pass out money, and incompetent enough not to attach any conditions on it. Second order consequences don’t occur to them because 85 IQ and shitty schools that don’t teach economics. Crypto is not necessarily libertarian for the vast majority of people who own it.

That's fair, I'm going to have to get used to the fact it's no longer a cypherpunk secret club as it normalizes. We got Monero for the cool kids now.

But whilst not everyone who holds Bitcoin knows about the inner machinations of the SEC, "Operation Chokepoint" and all that jazz; they at least know that they don't want the government in charge of their money, that's the whole value proposition of it in the first place.

So the way I see it, either you're a degen gambler who will balk at being "protected" from being able to rug people with shitcoins, or you actually are treating it as an investment and you don't want the government to meddle with your neo-gold.

I just can't conceptualize what a person who sees this statement as a good thing and actually cares about crypto looks or sounds like. If you can I'd like you to draw that picture for me, because I'm really not seeing it. Black man or not. Even the most bottom of the barrel drug dealer who's silly enough to think the feds can't trace his crypto knows that them "protecting" you is bad news.

Really the only people it would work on are Affluent White Female Liberals like Warren herself, which is literally the opposite of the target demo on every single count.

Well yeah, I’m not claiming that Kamala is doing a good job appealing to this crowd either. Just that it’s possible, in theory, to offer them government shit- although I’m not sure what that would look like.

"You're a black man, right? Vote for me, I'll give you government handouts and weed! You can even use the handout to front money to start dealing!"

Okay wait, am I reading this right? Is 1 million times $20,000 actually TWENTY BILLION?

Good Lord, well I guess if you're going to give a naked bribe don't go small. But still. That is an INSANE amount of money to just casually throw out to a small part of the populace...

isn't that only 0.3% of the US federal budget. it's just a rounding error :)

I don’t know if tongue in cheek but I hard a discussion with someone on this esteemed website where I pointed out that rounding errors add up. If you can kill 15 of these kind of projects that’s 300b and real money.

Some rounding errors are positive, some are negative. So if you add them all together, in the limit the expected mean error is zero, so this program is effectively free!

I had the same thought at first, but if you read carefully, the language implies that these "loans" will be available to others. Which others, it doesn't say--all entrepreneurs? Racial minorities? Women? Who knows? But it is a sneaky bit of rhetoric--"we will be giving $20 billion to black men and others!" allows her to make the same claim to several groups separately while only actually committing a single pile of $20 billion.

Not that it's a small amount of money even then. This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels. When it comes to buying votes, no corporation in the world can outspend the U.S. government.

This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

What do you mean by this? What camels did it swallow?

https://biblehub.com/matthew/23-24.htm

Semicommon idiom. Jews have religious laws against bug eating, and so they were very fastidious about straining out bugs from drinking water. Jesus was contrasting this focus on very small things while letting a big thing (i.e. a hyperbolic camel) get through.

In this case, corporate money allowed by CU is the gnat, while federal spending is the camel.

How did CU allow for increased federal spending on elections? I thought it only barred the government from restricting private organizations from exercising free speech.

I thought it only barred the government from restricting private organizations from exercising free speech.

In the 30 days preceding a primary and 60 days preceding an election, specifically. Citizens United was an incredibly narrow decision that had really very little effect.

See also: “to see the mote in your brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own”

“And why beholdest thou the motte that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the bailey that is in thine own eye?” — Jesus (or something like that)

(gestures to my username)

My small-child self always read that as laser beams…

While we're doing a campaign thread, I can't get through the ALCS without seeing ten of these fuckers, so y'all need to as well: How does everyone feel about this ad?

You may be wondering what's the difference between Bob Casey and me on abortion. We both believe in exceptions for rape incest and the save the life of the Mother. We differ on the third trimester. I support Pennsylvania's limits on elective abortion in the last months of pregnancy. That seems reasonable. Bob Casey supports late term abortion and tax dollars to pay for them. Senator Casey has the more extreme position. I'm more middle of the road and. looking for common ground. I'm Dave McCormick I approve this message

I generally think it is smart and well produced, except for the use of the term "Trimester" which is obfuscating for most people who don't think about abortion much, I think it would be more clear to say "after six months." I'm sure there's a focus grouped reason not to do that. Every time I talk to an abortion activist, pro or anti, they always talk in trimesters or weeks, instead of in months.

This represents a pretty major change from the messaging I, as an involved Republican, had been getting from the McCormick campaign for years now, which went something like "Pro-Life" or at the most liberal "Leave it to the States (Does Not Support a Federal/National Ban)."

This is McCormick directly advocating for a policy of elective abortion through six months of pregnancy, with exceptions for Rape etc. Though he does not indicate an intention to introduce national legislation on the matter, that is implied by the context of the ad when he's running for Senate, though limited by supporting "Pennsylvania's" laws on the matter. I suppose you could maybe weasel what he says here into supporting abortions for reasons of rape, incest*, life of the mother through six months; but it seems like the obvious meaning of his phrasing is that he's in favor of elective abortion through six months and exceptions later. This would, in my mind, be very hard to flip-flop on later; though of course we've seen worse.

My first thought is that this is the polity healing itself. Now that the legislated-from-the-bench forced compromise of Roe v Wade is behind us, Americans and their politicians are getting down to horse trading and finding a reasonable political compromise on the issue.

But of course this is dependent on McCormick winning using this strategy. If he gets back more votes from squishy pro-abortion voters than he loses from strident pro-lifers, then the compromise has been accepted and succeeded. But if he loses because pro-life voters are now watching him on TV every day say that he supports six months of abortion-by-choice, well then we might see a hardening of positions after this election.

Of course, my biggest frustration with McCormick remains that he refuses to talk about his best achievements. Every ad, every day, talking about how he grew up in Bloomsberg, went to West Point, wrestled. That's it. Nothing about his PhD from Princeton. Nothing about running one of the world's largest hedge funds. I only know these things about him from outside newspaper articles and wikipedia. According to McCormick's own campaign, he sorta went into stasis after the Army. By outside qualifications he is probably the smartest politician I've had the chance to vote for since Romney, and he refuses to bring any of it up. Sad commentary on modern politics.

*I've never understood why incest gets its own heading on the list. All the examples pro-abortion folk use to talk about incest are just rape-by-family-member which would obviously fall under the rape heading; and it's not clear to me that voluntary adult incest leading to pregnancy leading to abortion is a common enough situation to even need an exception drawn for it, or harmful enough to require one.

It's both amusing and slightly scary that even Republicans are now proposing abortion laws that would be considered (far-)leftwing in most of Europe.

I am pro-life, but I think its a good thing. It means Republicans are looking at what is feasible to do and trying to do that. Few things are as irritating as my side making the perfect the enemy of the good. Compromising too much is abandonment of principle, but standing on principle so firmly that you cede winnable ground to the enemy sort of is too. And now that abortion is not a constitutional matter it is always open to further changes so I'd rather take what I can get now and then keep working towards more later.

and it's not clear to me that voluntary adult incest leading to pregnancy leading to abortion is a common enough situation to even need an exception drawn for it, or harmful enough to require one.

It's not common, but it's also not terribly smart for a civilization to knowingly and intentionally bring into the world babies with such severe deficiencies. I understand horrible things happen by accident all the time and we should have grace and charity to those cases, but incest is taboo for a good reason ...

It's not common, but it's also not terribly smart for a civilization to knowingly and intentionally bring into the world babies with such severe deficiencies.

Surely you could say the same about any pregnancy where one or both parents have a serious hereditary condition?

If both parents have the same recessive condition, yeah. It's a big thing that genetic counselors will counsel for.

Incest does not typically result in "severe deficiencies" in one generation.

Nothing about his PhD from Princeton. Nothing about running one of the world's largest hedge funds.

Sound decisions, both. It's almost certainly bad for his campaign if voters think he's one of "the elites", and hedge funds have a morally questionable reputation amongst the commonfolk (see also: Romney, Mitt).

I generally think it is smart and well produced, except for the use of the term "Trimester" which is obfuscating for most people who don't think about abortion much, I think it would be more clear to say "after six months." I'm sure there's a focus grouped reason not to do that. Every time I talk to an abortion activist, pro or anti, they always talk in trimesters or weeks, instead of in months.

I would imagine that most people don't actually know how long a trimester is. I don't actually know myself, but from context I assume it is three months?

Abortions after six months sounds extremely late to me, given that a pregnancy is nine months long (usually). I would suppose that using "six months" also sounds very late to most people who aren't familiar with pregnancy. Meanwhile, a trimester could be anything to the common person. Three days? Three weeks?

So using "trimester" probably keeps timelines ambiguous, and "weeks" sounds a lot shorter than months (how many weeks are in a pregnancy? I think most people couldn't answer that without calculation).

An effective ad would be to simply show pictures of pregnant women at say 3m, 5m, 7m, 9m. That is a simple, visceral set of images that most people will be immediately familiar with and can instinctively compare.

So using "trimester" probably keeps timelines ambiguous, and "weeks" sounds a lot shorter than months

I've heard that the trimester language started being used because of the abortion debate and trying to make convenient bright lines, but I don't know how true that is. Pregnancy isn't really 9 months but rounding generously gives you the three-part structure.

(how many weeks are in a pregnancy? I think most people couldn't answer that without calculation).

Anyone that's been pregnant or close to someone pregnant should know it's (roughly) 40 weeks; appointments tend to be scheduled by weeks rather than months. Outside of the pregnant and adjacent, I'd be surprised if many people get the "right" answer even if they calculate.

Vance is probably in the category. Yale JD. VC.

Hill dawg by qualifications as well.

What are some examples of Republicans trying to implement overtly - not systemic - racist policies? The best example from Republican's I can think of are ant-ABS laws on behalf of Israel.

Anti-ABS laws are not racist laws, they’re laws against being progressive activists. And republicans have passed a few of those.

What is anti-ABS? While I do know that being against mandatory anti-lock braking systems is a sure sign you vote R, for some reason I don’t think that’s what you mean.

Misspelling of BDS (boycott, divest from, and sanction [Israel])

I’d personally count the Trump travel bans, but I understand that’s contentious.

North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.

If you’re willing to go back a generation, the cadre of former Southern Democrats provided plenty of examples. Thurmond and Byrd held on into the 2000s, even!

So really nothing overt, and certainly not even close to the overt racism of Democrats historically and currently.

Overt racism has definitely gotten less acceptable. Opponents of civil rights have been fighting a defensive action since the 50s. Atwater probably said it best:

Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

So, sure. Republicans didn’t implement anything as racist as the Southern Democrats. They just fought a rearguard action for policies more extreme and immoral than anything in today’s Overton window. Every now and then, they’d try something on a large enough scale to get slapped down in the courts.

North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.

That's actually an interesting question. It's not clear to me from first principles (I understand Gingles makes it clear what SCOTUS thinks the VRA requires) whether packing minority voters into majority-minority districts or diluting them across other districts are both/either/neither to be found discriminatory.

I think you're right that some combination of pack/crack can be overtly discriminatory, but it just seems weird to me that the opposite actions are discriminatory. There's no clear 'arrow' nor is it manifest whether it's the voters in the packed or cracked districts are discriminated-against -- and surely it can't be both concurrently.

[ And as a normative factor that I think is irrelevant to the discussion, I think majority-minority districts are probably bad on net because to win them, politicians needs to take extreme positions which are (a) bad in themselves and (b) prevent those politicians from appealing to wider (e.g. statewide) office and are a kind of weird glass-ceiling kind of thing. ]

TBF to Byrd, the man turned it around so much he got a glowing eulogy from the NAACP, including mentioning his involvement in the VRA.

My mistake. I conflated him with Harry Byrd Sr., who never made such a pivot, but also died much earlier.

Harry Byrd Sr.

Huh, they don't seem to be related, especially since the name is because Robert was adopted, but Robert and Harry bear some resemblance IMO. Weird.

Being from West Virginia where 50% of buildings and public structures are named for Robert C. Byrd (citation needed), he's a memorable fella.

The Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia are not related. Strange but true.

Harris-Walz have proposed a 20k forgiveable loan for up to 1 million Black (capital B) entrepreneurs to start a business.

It says 'for Black entrepreneurs and others'. It's not illegal, it's just false advertizing and empty promises. Granted that this even actually happened, this weasel language is certainly there to pretend its something specifically for Blacks, but wouldn't really be.

If it's for "anybody but whites" it still illegal, fits right into the memeplex it's invoking, and fulfills the promise.

"This won't actually happen" is a poor argument. If you don't want to be criticize for your proposals, don't make them.

"This won't actually happen" is a poor argument. If you don't want to be criticize for your proposals, don't make them.

Oh, don't misunderstand. That's not a defense. I'm saying it's probably even more shitty and weasely than just brazen racism.

It is brazen racism though. The "others" doesn't change it. Maybe it will include other so called people of color, but that doesn't change the facts.

Er...

Young men at highest risk of schizophrenia linked with cannabis use disorder

Adolescents who frequently use cannabis may experience a decline in IQ over time

Now, before y'all @ me with "correlation is not causation," I don't have any strong feelings about marijuana either way. I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign. Legalized recreational drugs are the ultimate act of privatizing profits while publicizing losses (in the form of negative community externalities), and the tax revenues rarely measure up to expectations. This sounds like a recipe for the exacerbation of a negative trend in the lives of young American men (of whatever color).

I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign.

This feels like it rhymes with the argument that because most gun deaths are suicides, it's net negative for my own well being to own a gun.

It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.

I respect the self-consistency here. Guns AND drugs-- no dividing them! Either people have a right to hurt themselves or they don't. Though like the nanny-state liberal I am, I want pigouvian taxes on both guns and drugs. The average citizen should be able to afford LSD and an M82, but pistols and wrapping papers should be way more expensive.

It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.

Of course it may justify it, there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds - like with myriads of other illegal drugs and many other illegal activities, that limit your liberty to make many choices. What are you talking about.

The fact that "there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds" is not a justification. The government limits my liberty in many unjustified ways.

If Harris had simply said she would decriminalize marijuana, I might agree with you. But what she appears to actually say is that she wants to both legalize (a step that implies greater government endorsement than mere decriminalization) and also see to it that young black men are maximally empowered to profit from slinging dope.

For the gun analogy to hold, you would need a candidate promising not only to make gun ownership easier, but also to ensure profitability and a free flow of inventory for aspiring arms dealers seeking to do deals that are currently illegal.

Perhaps legalizing marijuana would have an impact on modern reefer madness rates if there was more of a free market to allow for non-insanity-inducing weed?

To point towards the gun analogy, the market has space for everything from wood-stocked single-shot shotguns and .22-caliber plinkers, all the way to semi-auto .50-caliber rifles and ATF-baiting niche products. Who's to say that the weed market cannot also sustain a range of products with different enough CBD levels to make things safer?

Now, granted, you might still be right that a thorough decriminalization might be enough to achieve this, but we must consider the possibility that the market may have an unaddressed demand for healthier product.

It doesn't though, legal pot markets push for the highest THC content possible. Nobody smokes because they enjoy the flavor- that’s for pipe tobacco.

I have had this thought too. If weed was fully legal but THC was capped at where it was in the black market in the late 90s rather than the ultra-potent strains we have now, most people would just buy what was legal rather than relying on the black market.

I pretty much gave up on smoking weed because all the legal options are way too strong. One of these days I'll grow my own weak weed.

Dutch weed is around the 8-15% THC range and it’s nice in Amsterdam, you can enjoy it without becoming a vegetable like on current US strains.

Well, that's terrifying...

Amsterdam weed was the first and only time I tried it, and ended up feeling how my IQ is dropping in real-time, and having a rather disturbing disassociative experience. Someone later told me I may have had too much for my first time, but if that's the "light" variant... damn...

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My province caps THC at 30%, that is generous for flower but is too low for concentrates to make any kind of sense. Ultimately people consume more of the less potent stuff to compensate, or go find the potent stuff outside of the legal market. That's how it's been for me when I was partaking and letting my tolerance build up. I could always reach the same level with flower than with, say, THC crystals, I'd just have to chain vape for 3 hours to get there (easy with the degenerate setup I had).

I think a different standard should apply for vape oil or whatever and I agree true degenerate stoners are always going to get their fix (same with true alcoholics in places where they make booze hard to come by, like Greenland), but I think if weed was cheaply and easily available in dispensaries but capped at 12-15% (and vape carts etc at proportional levels) most regular people would stick with that.

Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim

In b4 “but what about alcohol” yes that’s also bad but much harder to restrict given yeast and fermentable carbs are omni-available

Guns have valid uses, recreational drugs have less of a claim

What valid use does this website have? It's largely recreational and a drain on user's productivity, a bit like weed. Should the government ban the Motte?

I don’t think weed and internet usage are comparable or analogous at all for a variety of reasons

Of course they are different but the logic that it's ok to ban things as long as they lack "valid uses" (according to whom?) is seemingly applicable to both.

Guns have valid uses, do they not?

Alcohol has a pro social use as well.

And cannabis is just a plant you can grow. Easily in fact. It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.

This is definitely false, you can make an alcoholic drink by blending fruits/berries and letting them sit for a few days. No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

This feels like sophistry. No negative social consequences that result from alcohol will result from people home brewing weak berry wines. The bad stuff, alcoholism etc, happens because of readily available distilled liquor and beer in volume.

Beer of course is not distilled. Even spontaneously fermented beer can have ABVs above 6% (which is a pretty normal beer abv), so you don't even need special yeast to hit this ABV.

Yes but you can't get it in volume from the local corner store, which was the qualifier I put on it. Nobody drinks 64oz of spontaneously fermented homebrew and beats his wife.

We know this because even in countries with significant illegal alcohol problems, no illicit alcoholics are drinking homemade wine or beer in a problematic way. They're going blind from moonshine or bathtub gin.

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I've both make my own alcohol (cider) and grown my own cannabis. Both have some challenges and different aspects that make them easier or harder than the other.

For the cider I get the apples from a local orchard's roadside stand where they crush the apples into cider and put it in milk style jugs for you. I've processed the apples myself in the past but its a pain. Once I have the soft cider I use a few of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5Z78SC/ fermenting bottles with yeast from the local wine shop. Takes about two weeks to ferment. You can easily screw it up and make revolting vomit cider if your equipment is contaminated. I give some of it to my father in law who makes apple jack out of it. I drink very little personally so 3 gallons last about a year. You can make it at any time of the year but I do in the fall, as that's when the local apples are up. This is the only alcohol I consume.

Cannabis is dead easy to grow and process if all you want is dried flower. You can put effort into preparing the soil, using fertilizer, staking the plants to encourage multiple flowering runners etc. You can also just literally throw handfuls of seeds at your yard. Cannabis is an extremely hardy, robust plant that can overcome some pretty rough conditions. I've seen seeds sprout in wet carpet near a window. With even a small amount of prep: tilling the soil, checking on the seedlings a couple of times, maybe giving them a generic garden center fertilizer, they will do the rest of it on their own. This assumes outdoor growing. Indoor setups are a whole other beast and largely driven imo by prohibition and the need to hide it. I put a fair amount of work into my outdoor plants. I grow them from seedlings in planters inside until they are about 6-8 inches tall them transplant them outside when the weather is foretasted to be nice for a week of so. I prepare the soil well with a tiller and fertilizer, stake them up, and check on them regularly. Its legal in my state so they are just beside the house. 5 plants per person is the limit, so my wife and I grow 10. Curing is easy, I just cut the flowers off in the fall and hang them in the barn for a week. I live pretty deep in the country so I'm not really worried about passers by bothering it. Everyone in eyesight of my farm is a family member anyway.

The cannabis is ostensibly more work, but not that much more. Not really any more than growing tomatoes tbh, which I also do, and peppers and some herbs. What is a bit of work is that I process the flowers into hash oil, which requires specialized equipment (https://www.dabpress.com/products/4x7-rosin-plates-diy-heat-machine) and has a learning curve. Of note, 10 outdoor plants produce a tremendous amount of product for personal use. Each plant can easily output 1.5 lbs of dried flower. With high quality seeds and care, before it was legalized, this was like $30,000 worth of cannabis per year. Honestly its still worth that much now, IF I was part of the legal market, which I'm not interested in. Prices really haven't gone down for the high end stuff. I give about 2/3rds of it away, as wax or oil. For personal use I ingest it in cookies/gummies etc. I haven't actually smoked dried flower in years, I may occasionally vaporize some of the oil.

The cider is less work, but mostly because I produce so little. In equivalent dosage it would probably be more work overall.

Apples are harder to ferment nicely than other fruits/berries due to the high levels of pulp and pectin in them. Every time I make cider dealing with the pulp is a huge pain in the ass, and it varies by apple variety as well. Berries are much easier to manage and generate much less pulp, and since they don't have any pectin, they clear up nicely just standing in the fermenter without the need for fining agents.

Since fruits and berries are and always will be available at any market (unlike cannabis, which in most places and times is a specialty product), and yeast is in the air all around us, there's really no contest here between growing and processing a plant by yourself vs blending some berries and letting it sit.

Having done this, it might be possible to make an alcoholic beverage this way, but usually some degree of intentionality would be required or you’ll produce vinegar, not wine.

Your mileage will certainly vary based on the microbiome in the air and on the berries. There are styles of beer that are spontaneously fermented and can be quite tasty (e.g. lambic), and I've visited family in the countryside that literally just blend berries picked in the woods and make a kind of fruit wine from them that's also pretty tasty. However in my spontaneous fermentation experience at home, off flavors are much more likely.

I've never managed to try it, but the literature on palm wine suggests that palm sap will ferment to a nontrivial ABV (4% or so) in just a couple of hours sitting out unrefrigerated at what I assume are tropical temperatures.

No need for seeds, soil, fertilizer, regular watering, sunshine, waiting for the plant to flower, etc.

How exactly do you get fruits/berries without seeds, soil, sunshine, rain, waiting etc?

You buy them from the supermarket. Obviously.

Recreation is not a valid use? Why? We have a long list to go through if we just start crossing off anything that's not at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid.

Yep. The last thing the black community (or any community) needs is more drug use.

Let's also not overlook how bad the optics are here. "We heard that you black guys like smoking weed". Maybe they should throw in some benefits for 40 ounce malt beverages and scratch offs while they're at it.

The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.

Of course, most drug dealers' comparative advantage is in willingness to risk prison and engage in violence to defend their turf, neither of which are particularly useful in sales of legal products.

Surprising no one who gave it five minutes of thought in advance, neither black nor Latino people have, in fact dominated legal cannabis retailing.

Either she didn't get the memo, or she's alluding to some sort of program that privileges black-owned (i.e. mostly white-owned with black figureheads) cannabis businesses.

Actually a good amount of the legal weed around me IS grown, or at least the operations are owned, by black men. They are retired professional athletes who were able to afford the state licenses when they auctioned them off.

The idea is that since drug dealers are disproportionately black, they must have some special expertise that will give them an edge in legal cannabis sales.

I think it’s more the idea of reparations. Given the war on drugs has hit blacks harder. They should profit more from the repeal of unjust drug laws, so as to heal their communities from these laws. Or something. I dunno it just feels like more racial welfare giveaways. But that’s the spin.

Yeah she’s alluding to the NYC program that limited licenses to people convicted of weed dealing, but just led to the proliferation of various gray market stores.

Not a fan of marijuana, but I think that Harris is banking on claiming that these young black men will have the economic benefits from legalization.

I would support a law that people who were convicted of marijuana offenses during prohibition have the exclusive privilege of owning legal marijuana businesses now.

For what duration? Eventually they’ll age out of the business. Or is this just a sneaky attempt to reenact prohibition in a few decades’ time?

I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign.

I don't think either Harris or Trump or any particular politician that's running for office has any reason to care if policies they propose would actually benefit anyone. I think the implication of Harris making this a highlight of her campaign isn't that young black men would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, but rather that pushing for greater availability is more likely to cause young black men, as well as people who believe that young black men are disproportionately likely to go to prison for marijuana use, to giver her their votes.

It was a common mode of speculation so far back as high school as to whether smoking a lot of pot made you stupid, or whether the stoners were dumb to begin with.

It makes you stupid. I have seen people who recover all right after years of heavy use. They become snappier.

I can’t speculate on whether it makes you permanently stupider, but in my experience it takes me at least a few months of total abstinence after heavy use before I’m back to my usual intellectual level.

Aside from the egregious, aggressive, absolutely blatant 14th Amendment violation that makes this anti-constitutional, the most glaring thing to me is how incoherent the idea of a "forgivable loan" is. That's not what a loan is. Per Merriam-Webster, a loan is:

an amount of money that is borrowed, often from a bank, and has to be paid back, usually together with an extra amount of money that you have to pay as a charge for borrowing

If you're informing someone up front that you don't expect the money back, you are extending them largesse or patronage, or perhaps you are providing them a fee for service, but you are not offering them a loan. There were many things that were terrible about Covid spending policies, but this might have been the absolute king of them. The PPP "loans" were never really intended to be paid back, they were always a handout to keep things moving and allow businesses to skip out on doing actual commercial transactions. Framing them as "loans" was intended to attach a couple strings, but these were mostly just helicopter money dispersed with the knowledge that there would be a huge amount of outright fraud and even more casual fudging of the program to collect money. Maybe that was a good idea, maybe it wasn't, but these weren't loans in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, because they were called loans, now everyone that just took a totally normal loan with a totally normal expectation that they would pay it back thinks that PPP loans being treated that way justifies "forgiving" their loans too.

I could see this becoming a more frequent tactic, just calling handouts to fake businesses, affinity groups, and other favored constituents "loans" that are explicitly designed to never be paid. Really, it's a brilliant tactic, because the recipients don't even feel like they're just welfare cases, they feel like they've received a totally valid loan that they have met the terms of. I do wonder if there's an exploitable tax loophole here - no direct payments for me, thanks, I'll just take the money as a loan with no required payments until June of 2250.

Maybe the loans could be structured such that, while there's no serious obligation to pay it back, if you do, then...something happens. Not sure what, but that could make such a loan more than just helicopter money.

I do wonder if there's an exploitable tax loophole here - no direct payments for me, thanks, I'll just take the money as a loan with no required payments until June of 2250.

The IRS has been wise to that sort of thing for a long time and will classify such "loans" as income. If they're not coming from the government of course.

Her official policy release on the plan is wild. It’s specifically only for black men. “Black men” occurs 70 times in nine pages. “Black women” occurs zero.

Black women already vote solidly Democrat

Black men overwhelmingly vote Democrat, but now around a quarter of them prefer Trump. This is trying to pander to them.

This obviously reads like they hired one of those charlamagne tha god guest black guy hustle bros to pen a scheme and he shrugged and said this is what it’s gonna cost you and they decided they didn’t have any better ideas. We’ll see whether it works, personally I think a Trump II administration will be kind of like Clinton II, pure vibes and maybe a slow motion financial crisis toward the end. I doubt he has another sex scandal in him, but there were those Laura Loomer rumors…

Will Trump counter with some asinine scheme of his own? Probably.

Trump has mostly resisted the urge to engage in explicitly ethnic spoils, other than the obvious problems for certain Hispanics in certain places in an environment of mass deportation, which is priced in at this point.

Trump has mostly preferred, in the "asinine scheme game," stuff that sounds great if you don't think about it too hard. "No tax on tips;" "no tax on Social Security;" "X% Tariffs on everything in the world" etc.

WSJ Economists rated Trump's economic proposals worse than Kamala's, but also rated hers as terrible. Unfortunately, in this election I'm left hoping that the winning candidate is not able to implement their policies.

I'm left hoping that the winning candidate is not able to implement their policies.

The only sane point-of-view in modern American presidential politics.

Did they double blind the proposals? How do they even know what the proposals are?

Trump had a Platinum Plan in 2020 where he was offering about half a trillion for blacks. Who knows if he ever intended to follow through on that or what exactly he meant but he absolutely plays the ethnic spoils game...

If you vote Republican over the next four years, we will create three million new jobs for the Black community, open 500,000 new Black owned businesses, increase access to capital in Black communities by $500 billion. This includes investing in community development, financial institutions, and minority depository institutions. Build up peaceful and safer urban neighborhoods with the highest standards of, and you know this, of policing. We want the highest standards. We have to have highest standards of policing. Bring even greater fairness to the justice system. We did criminal justice reform. We remember that. Even greater.

Oh man I forgot all about that. Good pick.

Yeah, both candidates have bad proposals. I believe that, in both cases, the proposals are meant to be taken "seriously, not literally". So what does that mean?

Trump cares about working people while Kamala cares about racial spoils.

Unfortunately, in this election I'm left hoping that the winning candidate is not able to implement their policies.

For the last 3 presidential elections I've explicitly been hoping for partisan legislative Gridlock as the only real check on bad policy. Granted, partisan gridlock tends to produce even worse policies, but at least its fewer of them.

With the added bonus this time around that the Supreme Court has managed to hamstring and will possibly continue gutting Administrative agency authority, I'm REALLY hoping for gridlock now.

I'll take credit for a decent prediction back when she became the candidate:

I continue to be near certain she ends up dragging in the polls when the honeymoon period ends and she actually makes public appearances."

I could not have anticipated this specific string of bad news, but "Kamala finally does unscripted interviews and comes across HORRIBLY" is exactly what I expected. Bad Product with good marketing. A fucking TAYLOR SWIFT endorsement didn't even help Harris! Granted, if Swift actually lent her muscle to the campaign itself it might have nudged things.

"JD Vance, an attorney with a YALE LAW SCHOOL Degree outperforms Walz in the VP Debate" was also on my bingo card.

I have to admit I was wrong on my prediction for the Trump-Harris debate.

I think I reasoned correctly with regard to the candidates, but did NOT foresee it becoming a 3 v. 1 with the Moderators basically carrying Kamala over the line, and thus the subsequent increase in her polls.

But she is precisely what she's always been, and I don't think it is possible to rehab her public image any further at this point. I do not know what affirmative action (heh) she could take to goose her polls, and it is extremely unlikely that Trump does something that actually hurts his standing much, or any new revelations come out that actually hurt him.

Also, several of the various legal cases against him appear to be imploding. Even the one where he was already found guilty.

I say this with pun slightly intended: The Dems appear to be mostly out of ammo. The one thing that is still out there is the extent to which they CAN get out the vote and/or the extent that election fraud does actually occur. I make no specific claims, this is OBVIOUSLY still a close election.

However I also expect that given the intense scrutiny on election integrity, some affirmative steps at securing the elections that some states have taken, and the fact that we're not in the same weird world that was Covid-Addled 2020, the fraud factor will be much lesser this time around.

I think the affirmative action that Democrats are still relying on is having a corrupt Eastern European dictatorship assassinate their political opposition for them. I hope and pray that doesn’t work, lest the country turn into Syria for the next ten years.

I’m not aware of any linkages between the trump assassins and Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, or Azerbaijan. Iran is not an European country.

Time is running out for that expediency. Its been three months since the one that came within an inch of working.

I say this with pun slightly intended: The Dems appear to be mostly out of ammo.

They spent it at the right time. Michigan voters are already returning ballots in huge numbers. Remember, elections no longer happen on the first Tuesday of November, they happen over the course of five or six weeks and then take another week or so to actually count (or a month in California).

Correct, but overall there are WAY fewer mail-in votes.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/politics/election-2024-early-voting-data/index.html

https://nypost.com/2024/10/11/us-news/early-voting-is-down-and-the-numbers-hold-bad-news-for-democrats/

Goes to my point, we aren't in Covid Times. There's probably less room to hide any efforts to fudge numbers.

did NOT foresee it becoming a 3 v. 1 with the Moderators basically carrying Kamala over the line

Was this really not foreseeable? It was the only thing I would have given 90%+ certainty to.

Mostly about the degree. I wasn't expecting 'neutral' moderators, but the live and direct fact checking allowed them to speak for Kamala so she didn't have to risk a gaffe with her own responses.

So basically they mitigated a major risk by reducing Kamala's need to speak for herself, and THAT I hadn't foreseen.

These bribes are the inevitable result of having racial voting blocs. It’s a literal racial spoils system with a race to the bottom. I wonder how much they offend swing voters actually though. I also wonder how serious the Dems are about it, or if it’s just an electioneer promise that will evaporate once any opposition starts.

The Dems know it won't happen. This is a plus for them. The proposal, if passed, would be a major embarrassment and result in massive fraud.

Better for the Dems would be for Republicans to block it proving they are racist or whatever.

most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.

It says "and others". So it sounds like its available to all, she's just spinning it. In the same way that someone might say "this bill will create hundreds of jobs for welders and others" if trying to get a union vote.

I look forward to the day when politicians will promise spoils for "whites, and others" and people will say it's no big deal.

Her message is flat out racist.

Come on, now. It's a fig leaf. If Trump proposed 'A Muslim ban and others' everyone would still call him racist.

If Trump said ‘the sky is blue’ everyone would still call him racist, so this doesn’t prove much.

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