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Solar power is now the cheapest power.

Hopefully we will see a move to that.

Mitochondria wrote:
Solar power is now the cheapest power.

Hopefully we will see a move to that.

This is what we should be focusing on and investing more in to. Solar has a ton of potential.

It confuses me why we burn rocks that kill people and make them sick when we have a massive ball of fire showering energy down upon us every single day. Oh wait, jobs, that's why. People need to work more than they need a clean and healthy environment.

People don't need jobs, they need money to sustain themselves in an economy that is based on maximising the efficiency of resource distribution by means of pricing signals.

Mitochondria wrote:
Solar power is now the cheapest power.

Hopefully we will see a move to that.

With the current president probably not as his Secretary of State is an Oil Baron that is famous for not wanting to get solar power.

Considering all the things that are happening its incredible how many people are ignorant to te climate problems that could be averted just by simply switching how we get energy.

If I remember correctly from Global Warming project, at least half of the USA's power grid is supplied by coal and other fossil fuels. Because of this it is why if we just replaced coal production with solar production not only would we have excess power, we would need less plants to maintain energy, and allow for people to take other jobs.

Manufacturing is dead in the US essentially. People want something to sustain themselves akin to a job. Which means we need lesser skilled work.


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 whembly wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
That's just because we tend to be subtler about it.

Here in NY, we actually have medical marijuana, and were one of the states to legalize gay marriage. You don't hear about it because we didn't make a fuss about it.

Yeah I believe that.

Point being KK... each state can be REALLY different.

States are essentially seperate countries in theory. Infact State means country :
State - Noun
a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government.

ex : Italy, Germany, France.

Its pretty interesting how many people do not consider that each state has different customs and almost completely different cultures.

Which is one of the reasons many people call the US : The Great Experiment. - George Washington being the main inspiration of the 'Great Experiment'.

Surely the people of the USA have more in common with each other than they have differences. You all let off fireworks on 4th July, for instance.

Also there are universal values that transcend state, national and cultural boundaries. For example, fair and equal treatment before the law.

There are certain areas of life that it seems to make sense to control at a national level. For instance, does it make good sense for every individual state to issue a different driving licence based on different qualification criteria?

There are other areas of life that should be controlled at the lowest possible level. Parking fees, for instance, ought to be controlled at the level of the local town.

We've probably had this discussion before, but manufacturing is dead in a lot of countries, not just the USA, and is so dead, that it will soon be cremated and the ashes scattered at a memorial service!

There is nothing that Trump or anybody else can do, even if Trump wanted those jobs back.

Robots are on the way. They will do a lot of these jobs. They don't get sick, get pregnant, die, join unions or quit their jobs.

Aside from a few highly skilled technicians and engineers to maintain these robots, 99% of those jobs will go.

Driverless cars + Uber app = more job losses. That's the future.

We all know this on Dakka, but sadly, very few people in the USA or the UK or the West, are even thinking about this. Big questions are waiting down the road, and tough answers and decisions will be needed. Alas, our political leaders are clueless on this...

Will we need a citizens' income? If nobody has a job, what will that mean for society? If robots make stuff, how can people buy it if they have no money?

And so on and so on...

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Also there are universal values that transcend state, national and cultural boundaries. For example, fair and equal treatment before the law.

I'm not entirely sure that's as universal as one would think... Given recent events.

Anybody want to marvel at some insanity?

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5iuuwo/they_killed_breitbart_they_killed_breitbart_they/?sort=top

They've been like this all year, and it's only getting worse.

And the conflicts of interest...particularly with regards to Russian ties...keeps piling up.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/leak-reveals-rex-tillerson-is-director-of-bahamas-based-us-russian-oil-company/ar-AAlI9wJ?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=ASUDHP

 Asherian Command wrote:


With the current president probably not as his Secretary of State is an Oil Baron that is famous for not wanting to get solar power.

Considering all the things that are happening its incredible how many people are ignorant to te climate problems that could be averted just by simply switching how we get energy.

If I remember correctly from Global Warming project, at least half of the USA's power grid is supplied by coal and other fossil fuels. Because of this it is why if we just replaced coal production with solar production not only would we have excess power, we would need less plants to maintain energy, and allow for people to take other jobs.

The whole thing is complicated. If I remember correctly coal is also heavily subsidised (everywhere in the world) because it's a simple technology that can be adjusted to ones needs and the fact that solar is cheaper than coal now also includes these coal subsidies. The cost for solar is still falling faster than coal can compete with. My guess is that in a year or two coal won't be able to compete no matter how much it gets propped up and no matter if Trump manages so eliminate solar subsidies. But one shouldn't forget that solar also has negative sides as its production (actually making the panels) is not as clean as it's end-product (sun -> magic -> energy).

Manufacturing is dead in the US essentially. People want something to sustain themselves akin to a job. Which means we need lesser skilled work.

That's not completely correct. If I (again) remember correctly manufacturing may not have increased drastically but it also didn't fall due to outsourcing (you can think of that as extra production that was more viable in other countries) and a lot of automation and efficiency gains happened so that whatever does get manufactured is more profitable and needs fewer actual humans. Manufacturing itself is healthy and as robots get cheaper, it gets easier (and cheaper) to automate stuff, and each year there's new stuff that can be automated that was previously impossible (that could mean new factories in first world countries instead of oversees). China started shipping some jobs to other even cheaper countries and now they started automating too as it became financially viable (them outsourcing work wasn't viable for long, like the last half decade or so). Manufacturing jobs everywhere are in danger — or rather when somebody builds a new factory they will just end up hiring very few humans to do all the work and factories could soon look like data centres where a really tiny maintenance crew oversees huge warehouses of robots doing all the work.

Mitochondria wrote:
Solar power is now the cheapest power.

Hopefully we will see a move to that.

I work in this industry, and this is a much more complicated issue. Honestly, it depends on if you're talking about Solar Thermal (i.e. - collectors, evacuated tubes, etc) or PV (photovoltaic), and it also depends geographically as to whether and which either is affordable.

Solar Thermal can be used to heat water, but cannot be used to generate electricity. By proxy, in comparison to PV, its fairly efficient, but not anywhere near as efficient as most fossil fuel burning high-efficiency appliances that run on LP or NG (fair being fair: the tech has been around a lot longer, so we've had longer to get efficiencies up to theoretical highs such as 96.1% combustion efficiency, or 99% thermal efficiency ... which, basically never trust thermal efficiency, its BS, and even combustion efficiency relies on a lot of factors being ideal, which they never are in "real world scenarios". If you're getting 90-92%, your heating system is a boss). Most solar thermal systems also need a "heat dump" on days with excess heat for the domestic water being heated ... not a problem in southern CA, NV, or FL where you throw that into a pool as your head dump. Can be a much bigger issue in colder climes. Note too: that heat dump is essentially a fail safe to protect the equipment - its not intended to heat that pool, etc., that is just where you throw excess heat when the system has reached its limits, but the collectors / tubes continue to be activated by the sun (i.e. - a long period of cloudless, hot sunny days moreso than normal with no break other than night time, or you go on vacation and no DHW is being used, and its sunnier than normal, etc). So esentially any time the heat dump is activated to protect the equipment, you're wasting cost-benefit.

PV has the benefit of relative ease of installation and service (panel dies? pop it out, pop another one in. blammo, you're back in business), whereas if a ST tube in a collector fails, it can stagnate, and cook other tubes or the entire panel. So Solar Thermal requires a lot more monitoring and maintenance. It is not a lazy persons renewable, by any means. PV can generate electricity which you can feed back to the grid. ST cannot . PV presents a much greater fire hazard than Solar Thermal does, and is much, much less efficient - if you're getting 35-41% efficiency out of your PV system, you're doing really well.


The reason why PV farms are taking off is state and federal subsidies: if these fall off or go away, so will PV farming and power purchase agreements (Solar City, etc) where basically they rent your roof to put the equipment up there and pay a portion of the generated benefit to "lower" your electricity bill. What's going to be real interesting is that a lot of these companies are doing 20 year equipment leases with options to buy after the lease is over ... but what happens if the company doing the PPA goes under ? As its their equipment in the lease and they own all the maintenance on it per just about everyone of these agreements, what if they go out of business ?

That leads us into the next issue: renewables are cheap because of the subsidies. If those subsidies go away, renewables are NOT cheap at all. Paybacks on solar thermal systems can be 10-15 or more years, and that's assuming no additional cost of replacing pumps, valves, electronic equipment, or failed collectors / tubes. When you average in the life-cycle costs of those items and their breakdown / replacement post warranty, with labor if you can't do the job yourself, you're looking at 3-5 more years in payback lifecycle at the end of the payback schedule. Solar Thermal tubes and collectors can also lose vacuum for a variety of reasons, and usually the best warranty only covers 50% of these. They aren't terribly expensive, but at 50-125 bucks per tube, if you're unlucky and lose vacuum on a succession of tubes, it can add up, and also impact your payback schedule.

Finally: so you just got a PV or solar array up on your roof, and now you're heating your water and / or generating electricity. Great! You're very green, and that's wonderful. Fast forward until you need to re-roof your house: the price for that job will rise about 30% for any peak of the house that contains collectors or panels on it, and to add insult to injury, you not only have to hire the roofer to roof effectively around the penetrations (and hope to hell he actually does so ; fingers crossed until the first snow and melt!), you need to get a mechanical contractor in to decomission / recomission the system before and after respectively. That new roof which would have been about 10-12k for a normaly 1-2 peak roof ? Well, it probably will end up costing like 15k for the roof, and another grand or two for the mechanical work. Defintely, definitely know what you're getting into for maintainence before you stick a solar array up on your roof!

Without subsidies, a PV farm would basically never pay for itself, which is why you're only seeing PV take off in areas able to capitalize on strong state subsidies that compliment the ones in place on the federal level (i can speak for the northeast best in the states: Mass and NY have really good state level subsidies: you can't drive up a major highway in Mass without seeing PV farms every few miles). What is likely to happen to these subsidies if there is a sea change at the federal and gubernatorial level about the validity of climate change?

Renewables are great, but the technology needs to improve a lot more than it has from even the 1970's to today before it will be the energy way of the future and replace fossil fuels.

Mario wrote:

The whole thing is complicated. If I remember correctly coal is also heavily subsidised (everywhere in the world) because it's a simple technology that can be adjusted to ones needs and the fact that solar is cheaper than coal now also includes these coal subsidies.

It's not even about simplicity. For a long time the world literally ran on coal. A lot of the subsidies that exist today go back to an age when cheap coal was vital to economic growth. The railroad, shipping, and electricity were all coal powered 100+ years ago. Even as the times changed, a lot of those subsidies remained practice, and they got better as coal had to start competing with other energy sources because the Coal Lobby is really well funded.

If I (again) remember correctly manufacturing may not have increased drastically but it also didn't fall due to outsourcing

The US is still one of the world's leading manufacturers (actually predicted to overtake China in 2020);



It just isn't the employer it used to be. Capital owners have increasingly invested in their own capital and automation, and it's caused a steady decline in the value and employment of human labor even as output continues to rise.

 Haight wrote:
Solar Thermal can be used to heat water, but cannot be used to generate electricity.

How can it heat water but not be able to generate electricity? As long as it can evaporate water into steam which can then be sent through a turbine it can generate electricity.

Mario wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:


With the current president probably not as his Secretary of State is an Oil Baron that is famous for not wanting to get solar power.

Considering all the things that are happening its incredible how many people are ignorant to te climate problems that could be averted just by simply switching how we get energy.

If I remember correctly from Global Warming project, at least half of the USA's power grid is supplied by coal and other fossil fuels. Because of this it is why if we just replaced coal production with solar production not only would we have excess power, we would need less plants to maintain energy, and allow for people to take other jobs.

The whole thing is complicated. If I remember correctly coal is also heavily subsidised (everywhere in the world) because it's a simple technology that can be adjusted to ones needs and the fact that solar is cheaper than coal now also includes these coal subsidies. The cost for solar is still falling faster than coal can compete with. My guess is that in a year or two coal won't be able to compete no matter how much it gets propped up and no matter if Trump manages so eliminate solar subsidies. But one shouldn't forget that solar also has negative sides as its production (actually making the panels) is not as clean as it's end-product (sun -> magic -> energy).

Manufacturing is dead in the US essentially. People want something to sustain themselves akin to a job. Which means we need lesser skilled work.

That's not completely correct. If I (again) remember correctly manufacturing may not have increased drastically but it also didn't fall due to outsourcing (you can think of that as extra production that was more viable in other countries) and a lot of automation and efficiency gains happened so that whatever does get manufactured is more profitable and needs fewer actual humans. Manufacturing itself is healthy and as robots get cheaper, it gets easier (and cheaper) to automate stuff, and each year there's new stuff that can be automated that was previously impossible (that could mean new factories in first world countries instead of oversees). China started shipping some jobs to other even cheaper countries and now they started automating too as it became financially viable (them outsourcing work wasn't viable for long, like the last half decade or so). Manufacturing jobs everywhere are in danger — or rather when somebody builds a new factory they will just end up hiring very few humans to do all the work and factories could soon look like data centres where a really tiny maintenance crew oversees huge warehouses of robots doing all the work.

I meant in terms of it being in the hands of less skilled workers. But thank you I did not know that!

It is a complicated issue and the main problem I am seeing is people are up in arms and talking about how solar power kills jobs . (Which is true for unskilled labor).

From what I know skilled labor is kind of being required as is having a college education. (As that is actually dropping drastically in price due to the need of more skilled workers, schools get grants and more government funding and their prices will steadily lower. Theoritically)



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 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Haight wrote:
Solar Thermal can be used to heat water, but cannot be used to generate electricity.

How can it heat water but not be able to generate electricity? As long as it can evaporate water into steam which can then be sent through a turbine it can generate electricity.

It is technically but you are probably expelling more energy to heat it than actually getting back from it. Because of this, currently it is unprofitable to do so.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Haight wrote:
Solar Thermal can be used to heat water, but cannot be used to generate electricity.

How can it heat water but not be able to generate electricity? As long as it can evaporate water into steam which can then be sent through a turbine it can generate electricity.

Depends what you're doing with it. You need a fairly huge amount of reflectors to boil a reasonable amount of water, which makes it unfeasible for power generation at a household level rather than industrial. It's still good for heating water on that scale, however.

Nice picture on CNN putting Trump's "electoral college landslide" into perspective:



Yep, that's right, 43 other presidential elections had a wider margin than his "landslide".

All you need to do to see that it wasn't remotely a landslide is look at how anyone of the major swing states (Michigan, PA, Ohio, Indiana, or Florida). Flip anyone of them and his "landslide" becomes a narrow but comfortable Electoral College win. Then you actually look at the voter margins in those states which were insanely, literally crazy, close margins. Hillary really did lose that college by about 1.4% of the vote across 3 states.

There's nothing remotely landslide like about it. 2016 was an extremely close election.

 LordofHats wrote:
Flip anyone of them and...

But he did flip them and you can't flip them back to justify your point because that'd mean you're not arguing reality.

 Breotan wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Flip anyone of them and...

But he did flip them and you can't flip them back to justify your point because that'd mean you're not arguing reality.

Did you not read what he just said?

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Breotan wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Flip anyone of them and...

But he did flip them and you can't flip them back to justify your point because that'd mean you're not arguing reality.

Did you not read what he just said?

I blame piss poor math classes (and I'm not even good at math).

Obviously the solution is more prayer in school.

More nuns with rulers so you can learn it through slap osmosis that is what our schools need

 Ustrello wrote:
More nuns with rulers so you can learn it through slap osmosis that is what our schools need

To be fair, I think most people would really like having more nuns in schools, and not for the reasons the nuns would appreciate. That goes double for the spanking

 LordofHats wrote:

 Ustrello wrote:
More nuns with rulers so you can learn it through slap osmosis that is what our schools need

To be fair, I think most people would really like having more nuns in schools, and not for the reasons the nuns would appreciate. That goes double for the spanking

How to get parents to want to attend parent teacher evenings.

 Zywus wrote:
That's a common misconception actually.

Matrioshka = Nesting doll
Baboshka = Grandmother (real one of flesh and blood)

At least that's how it was explained to me by a Russian.

Of course, the classic Matrioshka is often painted as a woman, who could be a grandmother for all we know. Making it a Matrioshka depicting a Baboshka.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeh, Babushka is a granny, matryoshka is the doll.
The dolls could be referred to as Babushka dolls though, as the first layer tends to depict an old woman (matryoshka means matron, iirc)

Well there you go, all these years and I'd never heard that.

Thanks for the info guys.


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 BigWaaagh wrote:
Kudlow is just out of step. I remember vividly, in the almost immediate wake of the collapse in 2008/9 that he was doing his rounds on the financial news shows touting the need for "King Dollar" and the absolute mistake the Fed, et al were making with their dramatic easing moves with regards to rates and monetary policy. Meanwhile, Trichet was in Europe hiking in the not-so-distant aftermath of the collapse and does nothing but put Europe into an economic hole that it's still trying to ease and stimulate it's way out of as the U.S. begins normalizing rates. Unbelievable that this guy has any credible chops left, but he has ties to Reagan's administration...which it seems to me to be the model whose playbook they're going for economically...so sure, he's in.

Yeah, while the terms are very broad (and not perfectly applied here), in the wake of the GFC the saltwater didn't get everything right but it got a lot more right than wrong, and often only wrong in issues of scale, not underlying process. Whereas the freshwater school got pretty much everything completely wrong, from their nonsense fear of hyperinflation to their belief that austerity would cause 'confidence' to somehow magically return stimulus to the economy (which as you say a comparison of Europe to the US shows as being laughably wrong).

And yet, despite completely failing in every prediction and policy suggestion, no-one out of the freshwater school seems to have lost any legitimacy at all. Some like Kudlow have seen it advance their careers. It's almost as if actually being able to make accurate economic forecasts and policy proscriptions is less important than saying whatever justifies what right wing politicians already decided they wanted to do.


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 infinite_array wrote:
Because I'm sure it wouldn't touch off an international incident when a drone blows up and injures/kills a number of civilian and military personnel - or when they open it up and see a bomb inside. Because these drones aren't exactly the little toys you see for sale on Amazon. They're going to need a hefty explosion if you really want to prevent other powers from capturing them.

And I'm sure the oceanographers who are just trying to monitor salinity levels would be super happy having to deal with explosive devices attached to their drones, because the Chinese acted like idiots one time.


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 Frazzled wrote:
Stealing someone else's property in international waters is not an international incident? Sounds like a cause for war to me.

This is coming from a guy who posts regularly about how he doesn't want to lose US troops to any adventures overseas. Now he's talking about war because China took a drone and then gave it back.

It's just fething incredible, really.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Nice picture on CNN putting Trump's "electoral college landslide" into perspective:



Yep, that's right, 43 other presidential elections had a wider margin than his "landslide".

You mean he's been lying, erm, exaggerating! I do have to give the motherfether points for consistency!

 whembly wrote:
It’s to scare off the US Navy from challenging China’s invention of sovereignty in the South China Sea.

That hypothesis doesn't work. I mean, how in the hell does it go from 'China took our drone and then gave it back again' end with 'we better not go in to those waters anymore'. And even if that was China's aim, you'll note China didn't claim this happened in their waters, they accept it happened in international waters.

What is most likely is that China didn't believe this was actually an environmental drone. They probably suspected it was undertaking some kind surveillance of China - and it isn't as though China doesn't have good cause for such suspicions. So now China cracks open the drone, verifies it does what it does, and then give it back.


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 whembly wrote:
Paul Krugman went there...

Thought: There was (rightly) a cloud of illegitimacy over Bush, dispelled (wrongly) by 9/11. Creates some interesting incentives for Trump

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 16, 2016

This is Alex Jones nuttery... and people pay for his opinions!

No, it isn't Alex Jones nuttery, because Krugman actually took the time to expand his thoughts on the matter, clarifying and explaining his position.
"At some point Trump will surely use the patriotism card to distract from a tainted election and effects of his anti-populist policies 1/"
"No, it won't be a false flag terrorist attack-- too hard and no need. It will either exploit a real terrorist attack 2/"
"or involve a US version of Falklands War -- picking a fight with a foreign power to rally home base (Iraq had some elements of that) 3/"
"So anyone who thought they were voting against neocon policies was another kind of useful idiot 4/"

I don't agree with Krugman's certainty of how things will play out. There's all kinds of terrible leaders that Trump might end up being, a terrible leader who hides his horrible domestic policies under a flag of patriotism by starting a war is only one possibility. By however we might discuss the ways in which Trump might turn out to be absolutely terrible, we should first start with you being honest about Krugman's actual position here, and not just taking one tweet and dragging it off in to fantasy land.


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 whembly wrote:
#ThisIsWhyTrumpWon

#bs.

Trump won because Republicans voted for him. There's lots of reasons they did so;
1) An incredibly large number believed his ludicrous lies.
2) A whole lot more decided they would vote for Trump no matter how fething terrible they knew he was, because they end of the day they turn out and vote like Republican loyalists. They then set about convincing themselves that Clinton was pure evil in order to justify that vote for Trump.
3) There has been sustained attack on US governmental institutions that an incredible number of people didn't think it would be a problem that the man they were voting for had little clue as to how those institutions operated, and held them in contempt.
4) There was a broad level of failure between the media and greater public that allowed much of the campaign to focus on absolute piffle, instead of policy substance. Both campaigns fed in to this for different reasons, and both were part of the problem.

But all of that is just answering why 60m Republicans might have voted for an idiot with a shameful record in business and in his private life. The ultimate fact is whatever reason those voters might have had, the ultimate responsibility for whatever Trump does from here belongs to them for voting for him.

 sebster wrote:

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 whembly wrote:
Paul Krugman went there...

Thought: There was (rightly) a cloud of illegitimacy over Bush, dispelled (wrongly) by 9/11. Creates some interesting incentives for Trump

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 16, 2016

This is Alex Jones nuttery... and people pay for his opinions!

No, it isn't Alex Jones nuttery, because Krugman actually took the time to expand his thoughts on the matter, clarifying and explaining his position.
"At some point Trump will surely use the patriotism card to distract from a tainted election and effects of his anti-populist policies 1/"
"No, it won't be a false flag terrorist attack-- too hard and no need. It will either exploit a real terrorist attack 2/"
"or involve a US version of Falklands War -- picking a fight with a foreign power to rally home base (Iraq had some elements of that) 3/"
"So anyone who thought they were voting against neocon policies was another kind of useful idiot 4/"

I don't agree with Krugman's certainty of how things will play out. There's all kinds of terrible leaders that Trump might end up being, a terrible leader who hides his horrible domestic policies under a flag of patriotism by starting a war is only one possibility. By however we might discuss the ways in which Trump might turn out to be absolutely terrible, we should first start with you being honest about Krugman's actual position here, and not just taking one tweet and dragging it off in to fantasy land.

Fantasy land?

This conjecture is fething lunacy seb... and you should feel bad for defending Krugman.

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 whembly wrote:
#ThisIsWhyTrumpWon

#bs.

Trump won because Republicans voted for him. There's lots of reasons they did so;
1) An incredibly large number believed his ludicrous lies.
2) A whole lot more decided they would vote for Trump no matter how fething terrible they knew he was, because they end of the day they turn out and vote like Republican loyalists. They then set about convincing themselves that Clinton was pure evil in order to justify that vote for Trump.
3) There has been sustained attack on US governmental institutions that an incredible number of people didn't think it would be a problem that the man they were voting for had little clue as to how those institutions operated, and held them in contempt.
4) There was a broad level of failure between the media and greater public that allowed much of the campaign to focus on absolute piffle, instead of policy substance. Both campaigns fed in to this for different reasons, and both were part of the problem.

5) Clinton campaign fethed up big by missing out the WI/MI/PA trifecta.
6) HRC was such an amazingly bad candidate.

Its almost as if Whembly has been drinking the fox news/republican kool aid about HRC for years

 Ustrello wrote:
Its almost as if Whembly has been drinking the fox news/republican kool aid about HRC for years

It's almost like Ustrello unable to admit HRC's faults....

 Spinner wrote:
I know it's anecdotal, but I know people who did. It might not have been new, but it was in the news again, being shouted from the rooftops...

That was an interesting theme of the campaign.

"Trump said he'd order US troops to commit war crimes and called our generals morons."

"But Hillary's emails!

(snip all the other Trump failings and Clinton's got emails points)

"Trump's policy is an incoherent mess."

"Yeah, but Hillary's got emails, man."

That just about summarises the entirety of this 417 page thread.


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 Breotan wrote:
This thread isn't evidence of anything except which side of the isle Dakka posters fall on. But as long as we're doing anecdotal stuff, my very liberal friends in Facebook and Twitter show that Bernie's perceived treatment by the Clinton campaign had a much greater effect on Democrat voters than any other single issue. None of my FB/Twitter friends ever mentioned the emails as being a concern to them.

Exactly why some voters walked away from Clinton when they'd been for Obama is due to a bunch of factors. She was dogged by that stupid email nonsense, and also some crazy lies about the Clinton Foundation that stuck. And there was also the bitterness compared to Sanders (which the email leaks definitely fueled), but that issue assumes all the Berniebros were previously Obama voters, which is a dubious assumption. And then there was also some level of complacency after 8 years of Obama. Probably more than any of that was Clinton's fairly crappy campaign, which really failed to get people to hear about her actual policy positions. That last part alone could probably explain why Clinton dropped 900k votes compared to Obama 2012.

But exactly why Clinton lost those votes is focusing on the small question. The bigger question is how the Republicans could field Romney, an average campaigner with a fine personal reputation, good record as governor, and a set of strongly right wing but not crazy suite of policies, then move to Trump, who has no government record, a horrible record in his personal and business life, and who's policies consist basically of craziness, self-contradiction and just plain incoherence in equal measures, and gain 1.9m votes. Conservative and crazy is more popular than conservative and not crazy.


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 d-usa wrote:
The amazing thing is that every single thing that made Hillary the worst candidate alive with people screaming "lock her up" had happened in the last few weeks with Trump and none of them appear to care now.

Before the election I was saying Trump wasn't going to act on his 'lock her up' promises, because it was just a convenient bit of crap to sell to the crazier part of his base. I wasn't surprised when Trump lost interest in Clinton before the count was even finished.

What has surprised is how much the base has happily moved on, it seems 'lock her up' was as much a political fiction for them as it was for Trump. And now Putin's favourability among Republicans has spiked, and 53% of Republicans believe Trump won the popular vote.

It is quite amazing how fast the collective moves from one self-delusion to the next.


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 whembly wrote:
Heh...

What's hysterical is that evidently, his phone spellcheck allowed "Unpresidented".

I want a constitutional amendment that presidents can be impeached if they fail a spelling test.