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Days of Change
End of an Error
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As of November 15, MSNBC is dead. Instead, it has been rebranded as MSNOW, or Ms. Now according to it’s website address. It’s the same “great” lineup and hosts, but without NBC News having to lend their depleted credibility to them. It was never a good idea to begin with.
Back in 1996, Fox News worked hard to be placed on cable lineups where Ted Turner was leveraging TBS to keep CNN competitors off cable. But Fox had a vision and a winning formula. On the other hand, NBC had a CNBC. That business channel was popular during the day, but was a dead zone at night. Their solution was cheap call-in radio shows, but on camera. They hired a veteran radio guy, Roger Ailes, to produce them.
The call-in shows were a hit and the spin-off network America’s Talking was created. As AT made it into most of the cable markets, NBC had an idea. Why not hollow out the existing cable channel that was working and use it as a trojan horse to launch a cable news channel? Ailes liked the idea and wanted to lead the new network. But back then, NBC wanted it to belong to them. So, Ailes went to Fox News and beat MSNBC’s ass for two decades.
MSNBC is a combination of Microsoft and NBC. Early MSNBC strove for a techy vibe which did fairly poorly. The channel leaned left. Their first “story” was a poll where Bill Clinton was beating Bob Dole by 20 points. However, their crossfire-like segments put Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham on TV for the first time on a regular basis. MSNBC tried to copy Fox and lean more to the right at the start of the Gulf War until Keith Olbermann came along and steered the channel into the iceberg. Microsoft was long gone by then.
Fox was occasionally a competitor to moribund CNN, but was not a jewel in the NBC crown. This new spin-off, where former MSNBC hosts now have to move out of 30 Rock, is the culmination of low viewership, cultural mockery and exploding salaries of long-serving hosts with mediocre audiences. Until the network actually dies, it’s dead enough for now.
24 Years Later
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It’s strange to see how one death yesterday competes with thousands who died 24 years ago. People are learning about 9/11 rather than remembering it. I’m linking my original tribute from a project that hasn’t updated in the past 7 years. Life in the aggregate has to continue. The memory is important.
Popularity Contest
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Back when I was considering how Republicans could “stop” Donald Trump from getting the nomination in 2016, he was still pulling 35-40% of the vote in contested states. I was working under 2 false assumptions: that candidate chaos benefited Trump and that Hillary Clinton had a highly effective campaign. So, I can understand how Never Trumpers (pretty much disgruntled neocons) think that there is a process where members of Congress would defy the party for the “good of the country” in some show of defiance against and unpopular president.
Except he’s not. What’s even more interesting is that Republicans are more popular than Democrats. Going back about 100 years, Democrat Woodrow Wilson gained a whopping 44% in votes in his reelection in 1916. FDR gained 22% more votes in 1936 but proceeded to lose votes over the next two elections. About 50 years later, another Democrat finally was reelected (only Carter even bothered to try). Clinton gained about 6% of the popular vote, but was effectively freed of a third person running in the race that time. He still drew less than 50% of the vote. Obama lost 5% in his reelection and Biden got dropped from the ticket in 2024.
Republicans came out of the wilderness with Eisenhower, who gained a modest 4% of the popular vote in his 1956 reelection. Nixon gained a commanding 48% of the popular vote between 1968 and 1972 (although his 1960 vote total against Kennedy was actually higher). Reagan gained 24% of the vote, but apparently in all the right places to get an electoral landslide. George W. did close to the same with a 23% gain.
Donald Trump ended up running 3 times. He gained an additional 18% of the vote in 2020. He added another 4% on top of that in 2024, which puts him near 23% in voter gains over 8 years. Basically over the last 40 years, Republicans were (eventually) reelected 3 out of four times and gained 23-24% of the vote. Democrats were reelected twice and lost or gained 5% of their original vote totals. Majority rules.
50-50
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With the recent election results, the Democrats and the left are speed-running through the five stages of grief. I’m going to chalk one coping strategy to bargaining. Donald Trump now has over 300 Electoral votes and nearly 3% more total votes than Kamala Harris. The Senate is pretty firmly in Republican hands and the House will likely follow this week. So, what’s the Democrats’ silver lining? The center cannot hold.
Basically, the comparison is to the last 20 years of elections. After a single state margin and a popular vote deficit in 2000, (not to mention over a month of being contested in the courts by Democrats) George W. Bush came back in 2004 to a majority in the House and Senate, along with winning the popular vote. This was followed by Republican Congressional losses, then Democratic party White House victory. Basically, they have a chance in 2 years to block Trump like in 2018. Maybe this is denial instead of bargaining.
Certainly, they can hope for this kind of outcome, but to what end? This belief is predicated on the US being a 50-50 country where liberals and conservatives are in near equal numbers. If that’s true, then this would necessarily mean that the left thinks HALF the country are wrong, possibly stupid and potentially evil. Conservatives are more likely to think the regulatory state and entrenched government officials are the problem, not the Democrat citizens voting.
If we go back 30 years, even 50-50 was a pretty good deal for Republicans. From the 1950’s until 1994, the House was never in Republican hands and the Senate was mostly under Democrat control. Ronald Reagan didn’t have a Republican House for his entire presidency. Since 1994, presidents have had to either work with the other party or work fast to get things done while they had control. It’s not a great system, but it beats the previous generation.
Maybe this is acceptance. Democrats may try to actually appeal / lie to the voting public instead of telling them the way they want it and calling people racist and sexist if they disagree. Frankly, the only principles I see from the Democrats are to make America more like the EU where they get paid to not work, wait months for medical care (or die waiting) and get paid government-regulated low wages.
Correction
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Assuming you want a system to stay the same way, (what science calls homeostasis) you generally need to add or remove something from the system to return balance caused by variation. In the world of control systems, this is a correction. It’s pushing a system past normalcy to balance out the system.
There’s an argument that the character Batman helped to create the strange and outlandish villains who confront him. In a sense, they are testing their mettle against him. I’m finding Trump to be Batman this year.
I’d say since the 1960’s, there’s been a pattern of Republicans coming into office to change government, Democrats in Congress thwarting those efforts and Democrats then running for president to restore “civility” and bipartisanship. Then they tank the economy and Republicans get re-elected. Kamala Harris is right on cue, trying to bring balance to the force by doing nothing.
But correction is the natural order. The only true homeostasis is a steady-state system that is frozen in place and lifeless. Life is change. The correction of a Donald Trump was largely blunted by institutional advisors and an external crisis. Biden has been a stagnation. Jobs returned, but inflation soared. The fix for inflation decimated job growth. The economy added a measly 12,000 jobs last month.
Instead, the wailing and gnashing of teeth has come from the media and “celebrities” who are throwing their (sometimes paid) support toward the candidate of no change. Trolling against Donald Trump is at a fever pitch of hatred and violence. Two attempts have been made on his life and Trump is the one who is supposed to tone down the “rhetoric.”
Small corrections applied often are the ideal, but they can cause enough noise to rip a system apart. Large corrections often reveal the path to balance. In other words, it’s good to shake things up once in a while. Donald Trump is that large and necessary correction.
23 Years Later
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This will be a short post. I think the political Islam that led to 9/11/2001 is in a much weaker state now. Letting the terrorists exist freely is no longer an option. Instead, they are turning to attacking Israel and being destroyed. Oil money is going to dry up in a matter of decades. In 23 years from now, the Middle East will be sitting on a small supply of a legacy fuel. I like to think about the world that will be, where the most hateful people are the ones out of power. I hope that’s the future.
Day 5536
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Here we go again. Election in 10 months.
A Renewed Spirit
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I was thinking about what my approach would be to this post. It’s been 15 years since I started this blog and 22 since 9/11/2001. The attack is now part of history. High school kids were born before 9/11 and nearly every student in college has no direct memory of it. At the same time, I have seen and heard people marking and remembering the day, now more than the last couple of years. My new employer dedicated time to today and the 4 employees who were killed on a flight that day. The memories of the day are still alive. So is my tribute.
Taking Your Appliances to Meet Impossible Goals
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Wow. I am no good at writing titles these days.
Long before this blog, I wrote about technology like electric cars when there was the Prius and, not much else. The Chevrolet Volt was announced, but not built for years after. Chris Paine directed the anti-GM documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” In subsequent interviews, he talked about how great the technology of the Prius (which used NiMH batteries) was. When he made a sequel, he was taking delivery of a Tesla. In about 5 years, cars went from being hybrids that ran efficiently on gas to fully electric vehicles with higher capacity batteries. Imagine if everyone bought a Prius when they first came out (or a Volt). They’d be annoyed that they couldn’t get a Tesla with a power socket and newer batteries.
The environmentalist mantra of “electrify everything” is trying to shift consumption to fairly new technology that may improve in 5-10 years and is really not ready for prime time in much of the northern US. Even if it were, electric grid capacity is severely lagging. There is some value in bringing more solar and wind power online at the utility level. But there are NIMBY issues, location issues with distance from substations and a fairly big financial cost unless current power plants actually reach catastrophic failure. Getting us off foreign oil will also be helped by renewables, but not from people putting in their own panels.
Countries that made climate pledges are finding that the costs to go green exceeded their expectations and are trying to save face. The cheapest way to make anything happen in government is the unfunded mandate. Pass a law telling people what to do, don’t pay them for it and fine them if they don’t comply. Then politicians can look good in front of the UN by claiming x amount of fossil fuels were cut by forcing poor people to buy appliances they don’t need.
In New York, the state is “recommending” a ban on natural gas furnaces by 2025 to be replaced by air source heat pumps. Ground source heat pumps are highly effective, but their upfront cost is not something New York is willing to pay for in grants. Air source heat pumps are cheaper, but can freeze up or require additional heaters while they are maxing out your electric demand. New York wants to give rebates for those because they’re cheap and they *almost* work.
New York and the Federal government want to phase out the gas stove as well. From a perspective of reducing fossil fuels, gas ranges would be the last on the list. They don’t get used for a long time during the day but they use large amounts of energy when on. The conversion to electricity would almost certainly cost a homeowner money in electrical upgrades along with the higher cost of electricity vs. gas which can’t be overcome with efficiency gains.
There will be early adopters who put solar panels on the roof or buy new whiz-bang appliances because they’re new. Those people are also likely to buy the very next new appliance because of the improvements. A lot of electrification technology is hard to install, hard to service and is not proven over time. This is why taking away the time factor by claiming global destruction in 25 years is the future. How long ago was Al Gore saying the same thing?
A Memory
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September 11 fell on Sunday of the weekend of Queen Elizabeth’s death. Like the British on 9/11/2001, the Americans have been watching the events in the monarchy. 21 years before 9/11, Muslims were taking hostages. Now, the’re back to fighting themselves and the Israelis. Governance is largely broken in the Middle East, with economics being one of the few things holding the region together.
2001 is a memory to me, 4 jobs and two careers ago. In many ways, Donald Trump closed the book on this conflict by pulling US forces out of a disintegrating country. The children of 9/11 have children of their own and can only relate their memories, if they even choose to. But it will be decades before those of us who do remember are gone and we will never forget.
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