jakke

ilyagerner replied to your link: Census Data Shows Rising Poverty in U.S.

one quirk in the data - thinkprogress.org/ygles…

Oh wow - thanks so much for pointing this out! I had no idea.

It’s really strange to me that food stamps wouldn’t be included here, especially since they are basically incorporated into the household budget and contribute directly to recipients’ consumption levels. And a huge proportion of the population receives the food stamps so that is definitely not a trivial adjustment. I guess the BLS poverty level statistic isn’t entirely measuring the actual experienced standard of living, contrary to what I’d expect.

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ilyagerner replied to your post: abbyjean replied to your post: loving the…

This was actually Ron Paul’s response. He said the fence would be used to keep us in.

Wow, I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not. That’s actually kind of worrisome, eh?

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ilyagerner replied to your post: glitterandgaga replied to your photo: In order to…

Snide comments about Canada’s military are actually a minor pet peeve of mine, since you guys have tended to punch well above your weight from WWII through different NATO ops.

We’re pretty used to it. (That, and leftist Americans coming here and complaining about being taxed to death.)

It’s cool, though. You should hear the snide comments people in Canada make about the United States. If your country were anything like people here envision, you are currently walking through a postapocalyptic hellscape on your way to take out a fourth home mortgage to pay medical bills arising from multiple gunshot wounds.

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ilyagerner replied to your photoset: As requested, here are the election prediction…

you meant 269 electors each.

Yes. Yes I did. Thanks so much for pointing it out. Corrected now.

That was just an error in the post; I just checked the code, and I used the correct numbers (269 for a tie, 270+ for a win) when I generated these maps.

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ilyagerner replied to your post: ilyagerner replied to your post: hey so let’s say…

If it’s 269-269, and neither party has 26 delegations in the House, the House deadlocks, and the VP-elect (selected by the Senate, so might be the GOP candidate) becomes Acting President under the 20th Amendment. I’ll write it out tmrw.

Oh exciting! Wow, so Biden could be president. Or whomever 51 multimillionaire septuagenarians feel should be president. Good to know.

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ilyagerner replied to your post: hey so let’s say you were making a map of American presidential election predictions

one your earlier posts is making me obsess about potential tie scenarios - ilyagerner.tumblr.com/p… there’s actually a plausible situation in which Biden becomes President…

Oh, wow, totally missed this post! You’re going to have to spell out how Biden would become President under a tie. Do you mean he’d be a compromise candidate, or do you mean the VP just gets to be President until Congress figures something else out?

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ilyagerner replied to your post: looks like there’s a nontrivial chance Obama and Romney would tie in electoral votes

You have it reversed. House selects the President (voting by state delegation, not by individual members, which will be hell for evenly divided delegations), Senate selects the VP, with each Senator voting.

Oh, wow, so that sounds like it would be a total shitshow, then. Like, I cannot imagine how you could get the majority of majorities of delegations to agree on a single candidate for President. Pretty sure your best bet would be to wind down the whole enterprise in an orderly manner?

 mikerickson replied to your post: looks like there’s a nontrivial chance Obama and Romney would tie in electoral votes

President: Ron Paul; Vice-President: Ron Paul

Right. Good point.

ilyagerner replied to your link: Sales Of Police Batons On Amazon.uk Are Up Over 41,000% As Riots Continue

Terrible and sad, but as a patriotic American, I’m proud that even a nation of cricket bat owners has to opt for something more destructive and oh, so, American when the going gets tough.

Also aluminum cricket bats are banned, as they damage the ball. And the wooden bats people own are probably pretty inefficient for smashing things.

ilyagerner replied to your post: need to get to sleep

Is it that markets are confident of a solution or that US Treasuries are seen as safest investment even in event of US-caused financial crisis? “Default” is a weird term - we won’t be defaulting on coupons, but on other obligations.

Possibly investors could still be regarding US Treasury bonds as the safest imaginable investment during a crisis, yeah. But I’m going to suggest that’s increasingly unlikely, as all three ratings agencies have made plenty of noise about their willingness to downgrade US debt. Perhaps no one will listen to them, but in general big institutional investors are super conservative about how they measure risk, and if they’be been listening to ratings agencies for decades, they’ll probably continue to do so now.

Also, it seems that if the US government were really about to shut down (even without any missed payments) it would seriously hit the stock market, as it would damage consumer confidence (particularly in the banking sector and for companies that compete for government contracts like General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin). A sharp decline in US stock markets hasn’t really happened yet. When I posted that, stock markets weren’t really clearly declining at all.

(However, I possibly spoke too soon. Markets are now trending downwards. Not crash territory, but it looks like investors are getting really hesitant regarding the ability of the US government to, you know, operate as a going concern.)

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