Last of April Mid-Week Links

More stories for you:

The Mobster Who Bought His Son a Hockey Team – The Atlantic.  This is as good as it sounds.

ESPN Fawns Over The Intelligence Of Trevor Bauer, Who Is A Big Dumb Asshole - Deadspin.  I really have no opinion about Trevor Bauer, but this made me laugh, and the twitter exchange is amazing.

Yangxiang aims high with sows on many floors – Pig Progress.  I have no idea if this is true, but if it is, it sounds like a horror show.

Remembering the ‘Spooky Wisdom’ of Our Agrarian Past – The American Conservative.  I still don't think the phase of the moon has anything to do with setting fence posts.

Bosch Says It's Made a Breakthrough That Can Save Diesel Engines – Bloomberg

The Key to Everything - New York Review of Books

The Renegade Sheriffs – The New Yorker

Church of the Donald – Politico and Maybe It’s Time to Admit That The “Grotesque Caricature” of White Evangelicals is the Reality - Religion Dispatches.  These bother me more than most things Donald. 

Why Trump Gets Away With Lying – Bloomberg.  This makes an important point.  I have a hard time talking about Trump without saying, "dumbfuck" or "suckers," but that isn't going to sway any of his supporters, and probably will just make them dig in their heels deeper.  That's a challenging situation that requires more of me (and is one of the reasons I haven't written much about Trump).

Mick Mulvaney Says the Quiet Part Out Loud – The Atlantic.  Yeah, draining the swamp.  

The Reinvention of America – James Fallows.  He's more optimistic than I am, but that is a good thing (honestly, it is often hard to be more pessimistic than me).

This animal kills more people in a day than sharks do in a century – Gatesnotes.  Trump is far from alone when it comes to freaking out about sharks.

God Bless You, Mr. Oliver

Eat shit, Bob. Also, fuck you Don Blankenship and Don Trump.

The Trump Tax Cuts In One Chart

Via The Atlantic:

Take a wild guess which column Donald Trump would be The whole, tax break for pass-through income is ridiculous.  Pass-through entities were set up to avoid corporate income taxes.  Now they get treated at the state level in several cases, and in this proposal at the federal level, as somehow better than wage income, which is stupid.  Why should I as a farmer and a member in a farm partnership pay less in taxes on that income than I do for schlepping away at my town job working for The Man?  What if I became a contractor for the company I work in town for, and get paid through a pass-through entity.  This example of how that works is a doozy:

Take a real world example. The state of Kansas does not tax pass-through income, and its highest-paid public employee, Bill Self, the coach of the University of Kansas basketball team, is paid $4.8 million per year through an LLC. Under current federal law, a typical head of household earning $4.8 million might have to give more than a third of his income, or about $1.8 million, to the IRS. Under Trump's plan, somebody like Bill Self could save about $1 million in taxes by setting up a pass-through business, thus paying the same marginal rate as a household making about $50,000.

The highest-paid public employee in the state has his salary paid to an LLC, and thus he pays zero dollars in state income tax.  Brilliant, Sam Brownback, brilliant.  It just blows me away that so many people who are struggling to get by are more than happy to support a billionaire who is going to massively cut his own taxes while destroying the federal budget.  And those same struggling people will get negative returns once budget cuts to stem massive deficits are factored in.  

Trump's Massive Need To Overstate His Victory

James Fallows destroys the Trump transition team's propaganda:

Translation: “A long time ago” is actually one month, and “one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history” is actually one of the least impressive. Here are the facts:

• In terms of his Electoral College margin, which will probably end up at 306 to 232, Trump will rank #46 among the 58 presidential elections that have been held, or just above the bottom 20%.
• In terms of his popular vote margin, Trump will probably end up with the third-worst popular vote result ever, or if you prefer 56^th ranked of the 58 winning candidates in history. (Obviously the 58 elections have produced 45 presidents, some of them winning two terms and FDR winning four.) This ranking is based on Trump’s losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a little more than 2 percent, or a little less than 3 million votes. John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote by 10 percent in 1824 to Andrew Jackson, and also came in second in the electoral vote—but became president when the race went to the House, since none of the four candidates had an Electoral College majority. He is #58 out of 58, in terms of popular-vote mandate for winners. Rutherford B. Hayes, who won the electoral college while losing the popular vote by 3 percent to Samuel Tilden in 1876, is #57. Donald Trump, losing by 2 percent, is #56. Every president except J.Q. Adams and Hayes came to office with a stronger popular-vote mandate than Trump.

The amazing part of that press release from the transition team is that the most truthful part of the whole thing is the attack on the CIA, and the least truthful is in quotations ("Make America Great Again").  Trump will never be able to handle the fact that he won fewer overall votes than Hillary Clinton, even though he was elected president.  Even more amazing is that he won more electoral votes than George W. Bush did in either of his election victories, even though Bush won the popular vote by 2.4% in 2004.  The fact is, Trump didn't win a landslide victory no matter how you look at it, but just like when W was in office, that will in no way mitigate the damage done to the country by Republicans while he is in power.

U.S. Megaregions

National Geographic:

To try to solve this geographical problem, Garrett Nelson of Dartmouth College and Alasdair Rae of the University of Sheffield used census data on more than four million commuter paths and applied two different analyses, one based on a visual interpretation and the other rooted in an algorithm developed at MIT. Their results and maps appear today in the open-access journal PLOS ONE....But where should planners draw the edges of a megaregion encompassing this activity? Which connections are statistically significant? Which are important for regional transit planning? Should they focus on the cities surrounding the bay, or is Sacramento just as important to the Bay Area economy?
 For answers to these questions, Nelson and Rae turned to an algorithm-based tool designed by MIT’s Senseable City Lab to mathematically recognize communities. The algorithm only considers the strength of connections between nodes (more than 70,000 census tracts in this case), ignoring physical locations. This made for a nice test of Waldo Tobler’s “first law of geography”: that things that are near each other are more related than those that are farther apart.... 
One of the decisions the researchers made was to limit the algorithm to 50 megaregions, which can be seen in the map above, where every node is colored according to the region it belongs to. This made the map more plausible visually. While 50 may sound like an arbitrary number, it makes sense mathematically because a very high percentage of commutes lie entirely within a megaregion relative to paths that cross boundaries between regions.

I would guess selecting the number 50 explains the region I live in, which covers Cincinnati, Dayton, Lima, Columbus and areas down to southern West Virginia.  Regardless, that is a pretty cool map.  If one were to make a map of my drives, it would be dominated by a small triangle between my house, my job and the farm where my cows are, with a few small detours for feed, food and beer.  It would dominate a small portion of my county.  I honestly can't imagine a daily commute to Columbus.  I thought 20 miles to the next county's seat was pretty long.

Vote Gerald

Health Insurance Ate Your Raise

Ritholtz:

As you can see, real wages have been little changed for more than 46 years, increasing a minuscule 2.7 percent during that period.
Now look at the blue line: this is total compensation. During the same 46-plus years, this rose 61 percent. Total comp includes wages, various worker benefits such as matching 401(k) contributions, health insurance, disability insurance, paid vacation and leave plus any employer-paid taxes. “These benefits are now a substantial part of the cost of an employee – and they appear to be growing,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which compiled the data.
It isn't a stretch to surmise that most employees don't really appreciate how substantial this non-wage compensation is; nor do they realize how much health-care costs, the biggest part of their non-wage compensation, have risen.

Yes, Tea Partier, all of this is because of Obamacare.  Seriously, why in the fuck do people think the U.S. has the world's best health care?  Because we pay so Goddamn much for it?  We need national health care.  If we really wanted to spur the entrepreneurial spirit [buzzword], we'd break the connection between health insurance and employment, and we'd break the connection between health care and health insurance.  That would free people up to take risks, but, unfortunately, in this country that is seen as socialism.

NASA Photo of the Day

September 11:

All the Water on Planet Earth
Illustration Credit & Copyright: Jack Cook, Adam Nieman, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman, USGS Explanation: How much of planet Earth is made of water? Very little, actually. Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth's surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth's radius. The featured illustration shows what would happen if all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball. The radius of this ball would be only about 700 kilometers, less than half the radius of the Earth's Moon, but slightly larger than Saturn's moon Rhea which, like many moons in our outer Solar System, is mostly water ice. How even this much water came to be on the Earth and whether any significant amount is trapped far beneath Earth's surface remain topics of research.

And, what, 3% of that is freshwater?  If my maths are working, that would be a sphere with a radius slightly under 218 km.

The World Is Not Coming To An End

And violence against police isn't getting worse because Obama is President:

It's worth pointing out that in 2016, year-to-date officer fatalities via shooting only are up 44 percent over last year, according to the numbers compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officer's Memorial Fund. But that's partially an illustration of how sensitive these numbers are to individual incidents: If you set the Dallas shootings aside, the year-over-year increase is only 17 percent. And as Eugene Volokh points out, the 2016 numbers are roughly on par with the numbers for the past 10 years.

These figures in the chart above include all incidents in which a suspect intended to kill a police officer — shootings, stabbings, assaults, bombings and vehicular assaults. They exclude such things as accidental shootings, job-related illnesses and traffic accidents. If you were to narrow it down to just shootings, the overall trend would be roughly the same: from 80 deaths annually under Reagan to 48 annually under Obama. Again, factoring in the 2016 shooting numbers, including Dallas, has a negligible effect on the average under Obama.
These falling fatality numbers aren't simply a function of better medical care for injured officers. Overall assaults on officers are down, too. In 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, there were 15.9 assaults for every 100 sworn law enforcement officers according to the FBI. In 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration, there were 12.7 assaults for every 100 officers. By the end of the Bush administration that number fell further to 11.3. Under Obama in 2014, the most recent year for which the FBI has data, that number further fell to 9.0.

I read a comment on Facebook from a local person I've met before which stated that America's racial relations were improving before Obama was elected and he set about causing discord.  I wanted to just reply, "Bullshit," but thought better of it. The Blame Obama crowd seems to think that getting elected made Obama too uppity, and it is reflected in tense relations between black citizens and the police.  Never mind that these tensions have been in place for 50 years, and that it has only been the presence of cameras available to record police brutality that have brought these issues to the forefront.   I realize I won't be able to convince almost any white people that if they were treated like black people are by police every day, they'd take a swing at a cop within a week, but I believe that is true.

The frustrating thing for me is that the police videos last week were making some white people really consider what black people face every day.  I heard a few people I know to be typically critical of the generic black person in trouble with the law express shock at what they thought were unjust police actions.  But it only takes one instance of violence by a black person (albeit in this case, a particularly horrific one) to more or less wipe all that out.  Even generally peaceful protests anger the majority of white people I know.  It seems that white America can relate to the suffering of blacks as long as they suffer those injustices calmly and in silence.  I hope that America's streets become safer for all Americans, whether they are police or civilians, white or black, but the numbers indicate that in general, police are safer now than they have been at any time during my life.  And that is a good thing.

Why Is That S-Curve There?

From Wired:

While playing with Google Maps, he noticed that much of the Midwest is made up of colorful squares outlined by straight roads that are broken up every 24 miles or so by a sharp jog to the left or right. Ruijter found them so fascinating that he made them the subject of a photo series, Grid Corrections.
 These kinks in the road date to the earliest days of the US. After the American Revolution, the bureaucrats of the Surveyor General’s office faced the daunting task of parceling out vast swaths of land they’d never seen. To open western territories like Kansas to settlement, surveyors divided land into 160-acre plots—plenty of room for a family to settle and farm comfortably, says Steven Schrock, a civil engineer with the University of Kansas.
It being the Age of Enlightenment and all, the surveyors relied upon orderly and logical straight lines that intersect at 90-degree angles, forming the grid that the Midwest is known for.
There’s one problem with that: The world is not flat. Its oblate spheroid shape has long vexed cartographers, who must often distort reality to make it fit into a functional, two-dimensional survey. But those little fudges catch up with you when you build roads based on those maps. “If you put enough squares on a (more or less) spherical Earth, eventually you have to offset the boundaries so that you end up with what [de Ruijter] is calling ‘grid corrections’,” Schrock says.
Uncorrected, this problem does things like make Greenland the same size as Africa on a Mercator map. Those early American surveyors wanted to make each plot the same size IRL, so they inserted border corrections. When communities laid roads along the borders of these plots, they made those small kinks a little larger so horse-drawn wagons could navigate them more easily. The arrival of the automobile required making them larger still, because cars are faster than horses.

That stuff is even more complicated than it sounds.  I've posted on the rectangular grid system a few times in the past, and that's because it fascinates me and shapes the world I live in.

NCAA Bracket

South Region
First Round - Kansas, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, Arizona, Miami, Temple, Villanova
Second Round - Connecticut, Maryland, Arizona, Villanova
Regional Semifinal - Connecticut, Villanova
Regional Winner - Villanova

West Region
First Round - Oregon, St. Joseph's, Yale, Duke, Northern Iowa, Texas A&M, VCU, Oklahoma
Second Round - St. Joseph's, Duke, Texas A&M, Oklahoma
Regional Semifinal - Duke, Oklahoma
Regional Winner - Oklahoma

Midwest Region
First Round - Virginia, Butler, Purdue, Iona, Seton Hall, Utah, Dayton, Michigan State
Second Round - Virginia, Purdue, Seton Hall, Michigan State
Regional Semifinal - Virginia, Michigan State
Regional Winner - Michigan State

East Region
First Round - North Carolina, Providence, Indiana, Kentucky, Notre Dame, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Xavier
Second Round - North Carolina, Kentucky, Notre Dame, Xavier
Regional Semifinal - North Carolina, Xavier
Regional Winner - Xavier

National Semifinal - Villanova, Michigan State
Winner - Villanova

Sure, Catholic schools aren't going to do that well, but one can dream.

Update: My Midwest bracket is junk, along with most of the rest of the country.

WTF?

Fivethirtyeight:

How could the south be +8 Happy Holidays while the evil left coast be +3 Merry Christmas.  90% of the population in the west is in Washington, Oregon and California.  My world is turned upside-down.

Lottery Company Official Accused of Rigging Lottery Drawings

I knew lottery games were rigged, but jeez:

The former security chief for a national group that operates state lotteries personally bought two prize-winning tickets in Kansas worth $44,000, investigators said Monday, bringing to five the number of states where he may have fixed games to enrich himself and associates.
Investigators recently linked the winning 2010 Kansas tickets to Eddie Tipton, former security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, Iowa assistant attorney general Rob Sand disclosed in court documents. The evidence will show that Tipton associates who claimed the prizes returned half of the money in cash directly to him in early 2011, he wrote.
Tipton allegedly purchased two winning tickets to the "2by2" game at separate locations while traveling through Kansas on business in December 2010, the Kansas Lottery said. Each was worth $22,000, the prize for any player with the day's winning numbers, and were allegedly passed on from Tipton to individuals from Iowa and Texas who claimed them, the lottery's statement said.
In his job at the association managing lotteries for 37 states and territories, Tipton managed random number generators that pick winning numbers for some national games such as Hot Lotto and games played in individual lotteries.
Kansas Lottery officials said they were asked to look into the 2010 tickets by Iowa investigators earlier this month. Any alleged fixing happened at the association headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa, where "2by2" is administered and drawn, they said.

Wow, that would be a pretty crooked operation.

Outlier

From Vox:

Thanksgiving / OSU-Michigan Weekend Links

Here are a few interesting stories for your long holiday weekend:

Wojo's Pigskin Picks: UM, OSU keep sights on rivalry - Detroit News.  This is an OSU-Michigan tradition, but not one of his best efforts.  Michigan's decade of struggles have taken some of the fight out of him.

Bandwagon: Once a national TV staple, Grey Cup now restricted to specialty channels - Ottawa Citizen.  Ottawa notices once they have a team again which makes the Grey Cup (Ottawa vs. Edmonton for those of us in the States).

Cold Turkey - SB Nation.  In which a man tries to avoid football for an entire season.

The Central Valley is sinking: drought forces farmers to ponder the abyss - The Guardian

How Long Can Florida's Citrus Industry Survive? - The Salt

Fattest-Ever U.S. Cattle Herd Signals End to Record Beef Prices - Bloomberg

Don't Try This At Home: Cincinnati's Legendary Beer Gulpers - Cincinnati Magazine 

How potatoes rule the US, in 2 charts - Vox

The Miserable Life of the Presidential Turkey - Priceonomics

Palm Oil Facing 'Powerful Cocktail' of El Nino, Fuel Demand - Bloomberg

Making a Great Wool Blanket Is Harder Than You Think - Bloomberg.  US made.

Bertha: The big risks may lie ahead - Crosscut.  Example number one of a massive infrastructure project gone bad.

How an ugly, brutally effective warplane won the battle for its future - Reuters.  The A-10, of course.

The pretend war: why bombing ISIL won't solve the problem - Andrew Bacevich

Over There - Texas Monthly.  A little more optimistic than I might be about the "War on Terror."

How Chicago tried to cover up a police execution - Chicago Reporter and The Corrupt System that Killed Laquan McDonald - The Atlantic

Who Turned My Blue State Red - New York Times.  Democrats will be challenged to turn out lower income voters while Republicans consolidate gains among traditionally Democratic working-class whites (who are still employed).

How America's Demographic Revolution Reached The Church - National Journal

Who said it: Donald Trump or Mr. Burns from 'The Simpsons'? - Washington Post.  Harder than I anticipated.  Satire has been eclipsed by reality.

Some Parts of America Are Aging Much Faster Than Others - FiveThirtyEight.  Very interesting maps.  This one doesn't bode well for the Great Plains, although some areas also lead in population under 20 (I would guess that skews Hispanic in the Texas Panhandle and Kansas, while it is Mormon in the Mountain West, Catholic in Mercer County, OH, Amish in Holmes County, OH and NE Indiana, and Dutch Reformed in Sioux County, IA and Holland, MI ):

Budget Deal Cuts Crop Insurance Subsidies

ABC:

The two-year budget deal produces savings from one of the most popular programs in farm country — federally subsidized crop insurance — and farm state lawmakers are furious.

Senators and House members said Tuesday they weren't notified of the cut before the deal was struck, with Republican leaders pushing for a vote this week on the budget pact. The crop insurance companies that depend on federal subsidies said in a statement that the proposed $3 billion in cuts over 10 years could be devastating to the industry.

Budget-writers in Washington have long eyed the crop insurance program, which costs more than $9 billion annually, as a pot of available money. But farm-state lawmakers have fought to protect it, saying it makes more sense than other farm subsidies since it pays out when farmers suffer losses.

Congress got rid of other types of subsidies in a wide-ranging farm bill last year, including payments that went to farmers regardless of crop yield or crop price. In turn, they increased federal support for crop insurance.

The budget deal would create the savings by lowering the rate of return for companies that sell crop insurance to farmers. The federal government partially subsidizes those companies and insures some of their losses.

The Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, Texas Rep. Mike Conaway and Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, issued a joint statement along with the top Democrats on the panels objecting to the cuts, which they said would "undermine a critical risk-management tool for American agriculture producers and consumers."

Both said they would vote against the bill.

I'm sure I'll hear some farmers complain that these cuts make it hard to do long-term planning or some other crap, but I'm also sure I've heard some farmers complain that the government subsidizes health insurance premiums under Obamacare.  I'm not sure I see the differences in those subsidies.  Anyway, farm state legislators who are ready and willing to target government spending they think goes to minorities in cities ought to consider whether the rural voters who elect them aren't the real minorities.  I can guarantee that if blacks, Hispanics and other city voters turned out for elections, many conservatives would have to look for jobs outside of the public sector.

Update:  Farm state legislators are pissed:

Ag-state lawmakers, farm groups and the crop-insurance industry were flexing their muscles Tuesday to push back against plans to cut $3 billion from crop-insurance companies over eight years.

The budget bill would reverse a provision in the farm bill and effectively require USDA to renegotiate the Standard Reinsurance Agreement with crop insurance companies in 2016. The bill also sets a hard cap of 8.9% as the overall rate of return crop-insurance companies can receive. Under current law, the overall rate of return is 14.5%.

The bill doesn't make any changes in crop insurance the cost of policies or protection levels for farmers.

Several congressmen and senators took to social media to vent as details about the budget plan made the rounds on Tuesday.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., ‏@SenatorHeitkamp -- See statement on how I'm looking 4 path to prevent cuts to #cropinsurance & avoid reopening #FarmBill in #BudgetDeal http://1.usa.gov/…

Senate Ag Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, ‏@SenPatRoberts -- I will oppose the budget deal. Farmers should not be forced to shoulder the nation's financial burdens. http://goo.gl/…

The battle immediately raised the profile of crop insurance in the budget arguments with Republicans loudly defending higher spending for a government program.

Roberts, along with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., House Ag Chairman Michael Conaway, R-Texas, and Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., issued a joint statement, "Ag Committee Leaders State United Against Reopening Farm Bill to New Crop Insurance Cuts."

Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., placed the blame for the crop-insurance provision on the White House with the "intent to re-open the Farm Bill and create a single payer 'Obamacare of Crop Insurance,' " which Cramer said was unacceptable. Cramer then stated he was "committed to working with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway and his committee to find the $3 billion in savings in other areas of the government."

Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, also issued a statement that included, "While this is unacceptable, it is of particular concern for cotton producers in my district as crop insurance is now the sole means of risk management available. Furthermore, the House Agriculture Committee was not even consulted during this process, and the Committee has overwhelmingly rejected similar proposals at every recent occasion—America’s farmers deserve better."

Now, if one were to listen to conservative talk radio (and not suffer brain damage), that person would probably be told that the solution to any problem is less government subsidy and more free market.  I'll just throw a rhetorical question out here and ask why that wouldn't be the case here.  I'll be interested to hear if any of the GOP candidates for president reference this while campaigning in Iowa.

Fear the Terrorists

Vox:

To Scale: The Solar System

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

Republican Electoral Success, In a Nutshell

Wall Street Journal:

This is the real secret to Republicans winning elections, and it is why they do everything they can to suppress the vote.  Their only real chance to win the 2016 election will be if young people and non-whites stay home.

The Power of Demographics

Tokyo is going to host the Olympics just before it loses the title of the world's largest metropolitan area:

Half a century ago, the Tokyo Olympics ushered in a golden age for Japan’s capital, as industrial prowess made it the largest urban complex in history. Now the games are returning to mark the end of that growth.
“This will be the final festival,” says Yasunari Ueno, 52, Tokyo-based chief market economist at Mizuho Securities Co.
In Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, the ground has been cleared for a new national stadium, surrounded by a gymnasium, swimming pools, tennis courts and a baseball arena. Elsewhere, transport systems are being upgraded and new roads, apartments and hotels are being built. The whole infrastructure upgrade could cost 2.7 trillion yen ($22 billion) and together with the games create more than 200,000 jobs, according to Mizuho Research Institute Ltd.
Yet, once the 2020 games are over, Tokyo faces a bleak future. It is one of only four cities among the 71 most-populous urban centers ranked by the United Nations that are poised to shrink between 2014 and 2030, and the other three are also in Japan. The Tokyo metropolitan area that includes contiguous cities like Yokohama will see its population drop 1.7 percent to 37.2 million, according to the UN.
By 2030, it will be neck and neck with Delhi in the competition for the world’s biggest metropolis. Last year, it was more than 50 percent bigger than the Indian city. Tokyo also faces challenges from Manila and Jakarta, both of which will have more than 30 million people in their urban areas by 2025, according to forecasts by Belleville, Illinois-based Demographia.

Unfortunately, we are seeing similar, if not quite as bad, demographic changes in the Rust Belt and rural Midwest.  The future is not bright.