10 Thoughts for June 29, 2014

1. I drove a newer Honda CRV last week.  I've never driven a vehicle with this much oversteer.  It was terribly scary how unprecise its steering was.
2. This story about a dog named Toothless.  This reminds me a bit of my dog.  You see, he too, was a rescue dog and at age 10 months was severely underweight and in terrible shape.
3. Shame on Germany, the richest EU country, for its low commitment to NATO.  NATO members agree to spend 2.0% of their GDP on NATO defense.  But Germany, which averaged 2.1% of GDP in 1990-1994, averaged just 1.3% of GDP from 2005-2009 and 2010-2013.  Of course, you know who the big spender is.  The United States.
4. According to this website, I am shorter than the average American male, but my hands and calves are much larger than most men, and my feet are slightly larger than average.  That's all I'm saying about body measurements.
5. I wrote the other week that Apple was now blatantly copying Android.  Ars Technica has a full rundown of all the things iOS 8 has copied from Android.  I'm not complaining, though, because this sort of competition is good for all users.  Only thing is, Apple is still behind Google, and will probably always be one step behind.  No, this is not hubris.  The recent iPad Mini was a response to the Nexus 7.  The upcoming iPhone with an even-larger screen, is a response to the Nexus 5 and all of the Samsung Galaxy phones ever introduced.
6. I didn't mention this earlier, but I should have, from that Survey USA poll : "Voters who tell SurveyUSA that the failure of Cover Oregon has a major impact on their vote back Richardson 3:1. Those who say the failure of Cover Oregon is not a factor in how they vote back Kitzhaber 11:1."  This reiterated what I've been saying for months now, that Wehby and Republicans were pursuing a failed strategy of trying to use the ACA and Cover Oregon as their lead issue.
7. I previously wrote that Piper Chapman from OITNB had no redeeming qualities.  Piper knows what she shouldn't be doing but she can't stop herself.  Watching House of Cards, some would say that Frank Underwood is much worse than Piper Chapman.  Sure, he's a cold-blooded killer, but he has purpose -- to grab all the power he can get and make it to the top -- and he stands by his virtues (even if they're not worthy virtues).  The most useless people are those who know what is right and can't seem to do what's right, then feel sorry for themselves for not doing what's right.
8. If you understand that climate change is real, you probably don't need to watch James Balog's documentary, Chasing Ice.  But if you do watch it, it will scare you.  You see, back in 2012 when this documentary was released, Balog insisted that we were on the edge of change and we needed to respond rapidly.  However, we found out this year that we had passed one rubicon -- the melting of the Thwaite Antarctic glacier -- means that we've got a dozen feet of ocean rise built into the next century.
9. About the Thwaite melt: A day after scientists said that they had found evidence that underground volcanoes were melting the Thwaite glacier, conservative knuckleheads immediately seized upon this as evidence that climate change wasn't the cause.  I call these people knuckleheads, because you see, the volcanic melting mechanism hasn't just suddenly appeared, but the glacier retreat has.  It's sort of like when these same idiots explain to us that volcanic eruptions spewing out CO2 are the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases, irrespective of the fact that these volcanoes have been spewing out their greenhouse gases for millennium while global warming is a modern trend.
10. About 30 years ago, I tried diving down as far as I could go, with just a snorkeling mask.  I think I hit about 20~25 feet, which was the depth of where I had been snorkeling at Kailua Beach Park.  At that point, I had to surface.  It wasn't like diving in a pool -- the ocean pressure was a lot higher.  The lower you try to get, the harder it is to push deeper so you end up using more oxygen than you'd normally use up by holding your breath.  Doing this in a pool is easy.  Doing it in the ocean is considerably more difficult.  I was thinking about sit-on-top kayaks for rivers and lakes, and Oregon law requires carrying a PFD.  Naturally, this bugs me a little bit because it requires spending extra money on something I'll never need.  When I was a kid, I tried swimming in the ocean with a PFD...it was very frustrating.

Piper Chapman and the Orange -- a critique

Episode 9, Piper Chapman says, "I am so fucking stupid, what's wrong with me?"

Good question.  And yet, she continued through the end of season one.

I finished binge-watching OITNB (DVDs from Netflix), and for the life of me, I have never felt this conflicted about a show.  The acting is superb -- you don't doubt for a second that these actors are who they pretend to be.  Which of course means that the scripts are solid, too.  But here's the thing I don't get:

Why should I care about the show?

The main character -- Piper Chapman -- has zero redeeming qualities.  She's an absolutely detestable person.  She's pretty and she looks like a damsel in distress, but it's all bullshit.  You see, it's all window dressing covering up the worst human being in the prison.

Have you watched Denzel Washington in Flight?

He's another detestable character with seemingly zero redeeming qualities.  He packed screwdrivers (OJ and vodka) and a box full of beers to drink while he drove, showed up drunk everywhere, and he didn't just lie all the time but he also requested that others lie for him.

But he redeemed himself in the end.  He admitted to his alcoholism, his use of drugs and refused to pin it on someone else, and ended up in prison.

But back to OITNB.

I don't think I'll be watching season two.  Paid media critics are overrated.

Wehby's rapidly faltering campaign.

Jeff Merkley's been airing multiple ads for the past several weeks.  In the mean time Wehby has been completely absent from the airwaves.  And then last week she showed up in Oregon City and did a meet and greet while speaking to reporters.

Unfortunately, her campaign team didn't think her message through before she delivered it.

Coming out of hiding since the weekend before Oregon's primary elections, she finally spoke out about her run-ins with police over domestic issues.  She said that these run-ins were proof of her strength to stand up for what she believed in, and for Oregonians.

Sheesh.  That's a horrible defense for resorting to physical violence and stalking someone.  But it got worse.

She then went on to explain that no one was perfect.  So one moment she was calling her actions heroic examples of her strengths, then pointing to them as her failings.  Wow.

Without airing ads, she's losing voters rapidly.  The same day that she finally popped up, Survey USA (non-partisan) released its polling numbers showing Wehby down by 18 percentage points.  You know who's really upset with her?  Women.  Female voters have her pegged at 21 percentage points below Merkley.

So today, she replaced her campaign manager with one from a candidate who lost his primary in Iowa, while her displaced manager has moved over to the GOP's challenger to John Kitzhaber in the gubernatorial race.  Which of course begs the question as to why anyone would think it strategically smart to have a campaign manager move from a candidate who's down double digits, to a candidate who's down double digits.

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I've said it before: Oregon GOP are completely clueless.  Right now, they're barely alive in the state.  Last year they replaced their newly elected chair, just six months into her tenure.  Two years ago I laughed off Allen Alley's prediction that Oregon would become a battleground state for the presidential election.

Today, Oregon GOP hold just one national seat -- Greg Walden's seat in the House -- while Democrats hold the rest of the national seats, all of the top seats in statewide positions, and both chambers in Salem.  And despite Cover Oregon's ills, they're all going to win re-election in this midterm year.  Imagine that.

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Now, obviously Wehby's campaign needed a shakeup, but she doesn't seem to have any money.  Her last quarterly FEC report (end of April) showed that she had $352K in the bank.  For reference, Jeff Merkley's got $3.7M.  That was before the primary election, mind you.

She's broke folks.  That's why she can't air any ads and why she's been spending so much time out of sight (fundraising from national GOP groups.)

But like I said before: She was always a one-trick pony, riding on the repeal of the ACA.  If Cover Oregon and the ACA had any traction whatsoever in Oregon, Kitzhaber would be in a tight race or otherwise losing; instead, he's up by double digits.  Outside of this single issue, she appears to have limited knowledge and capacity to debate with Merkley.

Not only is her campaign in cardiac arrest, so is the state's GOP.  If I were in charge of the DPO, I'd be courting national money to take on Greg Walden and his votes to support going to wars around the world and supporting the NSA's spying on your average Oregonian.  I believe taking back the House is a plausible possibility by simply targeting the most conservative members of Congress for obstructing governance, for wanting to use force any time things heat up around the world, and for giving the NSA a free, get-out-of-jail card to do whatever it wants.

About upset primaries -- A post I regret not making sooner.

I had hinted at it before: The political pundits had it backwards and, rather than having a strong chance of winning back the Senate, they might actually lose seats.

To recap: Mitch McConnell, the minority senate leader, is now stuck in a runoff and may lose, despite having boat loads of cash, to a Tea Party favorite.  Eric Cantor, house majority leader lost his primary, by double digits.  The Oregon senate race, at once thought to be competitive, is clearly not -- heck, Monica Wehby hasn't aired a single advertisement since winning her primary, while Jeff Merkley has been airing three different spots.  Suddenly, a look of the races suggest that -- gasp -- GOP may lose seats!

The following was a post that I left 3/4 done. I wish that I had completed it at the time and published it, considering the shift in the odds of late.  Many people had thought that Obama's poor numbers mattered quite a bit.  I thought otherwise.  Here's my unpublished post:

Something doesn't look right

Something's been bugging me for a while.  You see, many pollsters and pundits have come out claiming that the GOP are poised to take over both chambers of Congress.  I think they're full of it, as we haven't yet completed the primary season and they're proclaiming some divine knowledge of where the races are headed.  Whatever.

You see, every time I look at the favorable / unfavorable polling, no matter who conducts the tracking, it clearly and continually shows Democrats ahead of Republicans in Congress.  That is to say, generally the public looks less favorably upon Republicans than Democrats.

On a generic vote, how is it that both sides are roughly even, despite long-standing polling showing that the general public has frowned upon Republicans more than Democrats?

What's wrong

Here's the answer: The people who do political polling of candidates and these generic ballots, often do a terrible job of accurately designing their demographic set up.  They generally tend to get the party registration (D) - (R) - (I) split correct, but when it comes to registered independents (I), many pollsters make the error of splitting them nearly down the middle between leaning-Democrats and leaning-Republicans.

One group -- Gallup -- prods independent voters to identify the party that they most lean towards, and this is extremely important.  When you look at their combined party affiliation tracking, an extraordinary trend emerges.

Gallup's data matters quite a bit, because this annualized data is based on nearly 19,000 interviews.  By comparison, any given political poll averages about 1,000 interviews.  This gives Gallup's data a 1% Margin of Error at the 95% confidence interval -- something you don't see in political polls.

So do you see it?  Every time there's been a swing election, the year prior and up through the election year, there's been a big swing towards the winning party.

You can read it like a stock chart.  Because more Americans generally lean Democratic, when this number dips, it means that Independents are aligning themselves with Republicans and Republicans are set up for a major win.  When the number jumps, it means Independents have shifted towards Democrats and Democrats are headed for big wins.  So what do you see entering 2013?

I'm not saying that Democrats will take back the House, but it certainly does not bode well for the early expectations that the GOP will take over the Senate, now does it?

10 Thoughts for June 2, 2014

1. 4:25 am on the bike, at a 4-way stop.  After I made a full stop, to my left a street sweeper came to a full stop, and I started to go through the intersection.  To my right, a garbage truck ignored the stop sign and rolled through it in a right-turn, nearly plowing into me.  Me being defensive, I anticipated a collision and swerved while braking to avoid him.  Then, as he follows me up the street, he squeezes me rather than give me wide leeway.  Pure asshole.  I thought about calling the police on his two moving violations, but I didn't.
2. 4:33 am on the bike, stopped at a light, I looked up and saw the International Space Station fly over.  It pays to look up in the sky when stopped.
3. Ordered this bike helmet last week, while it was still a weekly special at REI.  The price had actually gone up, but because it was stuck in my cart, the lower price ($39) was honored.  I'd been tracking the price at Amazon for over a month, and this beat the lowest price on Amazon.  I learned my lesson, that buying an one-size-fits-all helmet will make you look like you're sporting a heavy duty motorcycle helmet. In my case, with a white helmet, it made many people react as though I were a police officer.  Quite humorous, really.
4. I get the sense that the annual US CES has been displaced by Taiwan's Computex as the most important tech show, aside from the annual corporate conferences (Google I|O, WWDC, etc.).  There are gazillions of new devices and form factors sporting various operating systems at this year's Computex, compared to the blah fare at this year's CES.
5. Speaking of WWDC, no stock price bounce for Apple.  
6. The EPA unveiled new plans to slash US CO2 output to 30% of 2005 levels, by 2030.  Last week it was predicted that the number was going to be just 17% of 2005 levels by 2020, which meant doing practically nothing to cut current CO2 output, as we were nearly there at ~16% below 2005.
7. So let's do a quick calc, shall we?  16% in 8 years is about 2% reduction per year.  Remaining 26 years, at 14% reduction is about 0.54% reduction per year, going forward.  Hmm.
8. I suggest ignoring the Chamber of Commerce's announced study that new regulations will cost $50B a year in lower GDP.  To start with, it's just a cost analysis, not a cost-benefit analysis like the EPA's 650+ page study.  (You'd never analyze the cost of building a new office building without also examining the income benefits, right?)  Also, the study was based on NRDC's proposal which had much higher targets of CO2 cuts (42%) than what the EPA proposed; after all, there's no way they could have released their study of costs, moments after the EPA released its 650+ page report.  It's true, I learned how to speed read, but 650+ pages in seconds is impossible.
9. Last week, Google unveiled its own, designed from the ground-up, automatic driving car.  Sure enough, cynics showered their critique of Google's work, around the net.  If we allowed cynics to lead us, we'd still be stuck with stone wheels and Fred's two feet.
10. Republicans can't seem to bring themselves to say out loud and straight up: We think Obama shouldn't have traded away 5 Taliban combatant prisoners for one American military personnel held captive the last 5 years.  They can't say that, because it would go against the US military's absolutist creed of "leave no man behind".  So instead they've gone on the air to question the legality of the move, the wisdom of the move and reintroduce questions over Bergdahl's capture.  Politics as usual.