Tony K's Blog

I have been seeing posts for "normal" people complaining about all the attention Taylor Swift and Kelce have been getting in the press. "We just want football!" they say.  I'm calling bullshit on that. 15-yard penalty and loss of down. There are three major sources of news on Taylor right now. 1. Swifties who are overjoyed that their idol seems to have found happiness. But that's fan magazine crap. You're not seeing that. 2. MAGA politicians and news sources with their breathless conspiracy theories. 3. Blowback from more liberal sources ridiculing the idiotic conspiracy theories and overall meanness of 2. I am pretty certain that the complainers are overwhelmingly fans of source 2. They are unlikely to pay any attention to source 3 at all. On the Chiefs football broadcasts, they spend an average of 25 seconds or so of camera time on Taylor, so that seems unlikely to be an ACTUAL issue. The other issue, of course, is that the fans of source 2 overwhelmin...

Tucker Carlson demonstrates once again that he is a hack . He is first, claiming that Democrats are saying Trump deserved to catch COVID, which may be true in some cases, but in a very limited way. Then he says this is like blaming a woman who dresses provocatively for being raped. Victim blaming is a difficult subject because two things can be true at the same time. The woman dressed provocatively, walking in a bad neighborhood is being foolish or naive at best. At the same time, many other people walk in that neighborhood all the time, there are laws that punish people who assault others, and there are police patrolling the street.  A presumption of safety is naive, but our human and societal values say that she SHOULD be safe to walk in that neighborhood. Now look at COVID. We have been warned for months of the imprudence of not distancing and using a mask. We would like to be able to assume that we can do otherwise, but COVID is not human. It doesn't follow human laws. NOr can ...

The FBI, CIA, NSA, the special counsel, and the Republican-controlled senate have all stated that Russia meddled in our elections in 2016 to benefit Trump. They all agree that the Russians are at it again. On top of it, the intelligence community is unanimous that white supremacist terror groups pose a clear danger. So logically, supporters of the president have re-evaluated their position and decided to vote American. Uh uh. Instead, the president is focusing on a group of African Americans with a clear grievance. Who held protests after a horrific murder as being enemies of the state and planning a coup. This is the same president who tried to sow fear about caravans of brown people invading our nation. He claimed it was such a dire threat that he called out the military. Of course, there was no threat, but you believed him. If you believed the invasion was real, and you believe that BLM is a dangerous insurrection movement, you are choosing to believe the single man, who surrounded ...

I have alienated most of my right-leaning friends, now I’ll work on the other side. I’m a bipartisan kind of guy.   Let’s talk climate change, specifically wildfire. We all agree that for wildfires to burn hot, spread, and be destructive you need to have fuel as well as generally warm and dry conditions. This is why there are seldom wildfires in the desert. Although conditions are hot and dry, there is little fuel, because it is hot and dry. The fuel needed for a wildfire never reaches a critical mass. So let’s look at the recent fires in California. People make a case that they are driven by climate change/global warming. I believe there is some truth in that. The August lightning storms that came through California were unusual. I have never seen that kind of weather in summer in California. Of course, if you attribute a weather event to climate change, it is disingenuous to say that other weather events are only weather—such as unseasonable snowstorms. If you do, you have an unf...

Several weeks ago the CDC announced some new COVID statistics. They said that of all the 190k or so COVID deaths only 9500 did not ha e co-morbidities. The Trump administration and apologists have jumped on this claiming that COVID is a hoax and that Trump did great, etc. The first obvious issue has to do with death attribution. Let’s say some dude has a heart attack calls an ambulance and dies after they reach the emergency room. They do their post-Mortem stuff and discover that he also had controlled diabetes. What did he die of? Of course a heart attack. The apologists are effectively claiming it wasn’t the heart attack. Get over it. "Hospitals are slapping COVID onto as many cases as they can so they can make more money" is another thing I’m still hearing. First, is this actually a thing? Do hospitals get extra for treating COVID? Second, doing so is a crime. It’s called fraud. The poor sucker who writes COVID on the car crams victim death certificate has committed a crim...

Ranked Choice (RC) vs Instant Runoff (IRV) vs Approval RC and IRV are technically different. RC is a way of expressing preference, IRV is a method of tabulating votes from RC ballots. This is an important distinction. IRV, which seems pretty good can solve one problem (e.g. Gore v Bush) but introduce others. Technically IRV is nonmonotonic. That is, a shift of public opinion toward a candidate can cause that candidate to lose, and a shift of public opinion away from a candidate can cause that candidate to win. A different and probably superior method is one called Condorcet. It eliminates most of the IRV issues but introduces a few other, but less likely, issues. IRV is to Condorcet as single elimination is to round robin. Superior to both of them is Approval voting, in which you select all candidates that would be acceptable to you. It’s simple to tabulate and does not have the issues of either IRV or Condorcet. There’s a  website that has wonderful graphics of how the...

Background: The tax bill recently passed by Congress will have two results: benefits will go down for the majority of Americans and taxes will go up for the majority of Americans. Donald Trump and his family are in a position in which they will overwhelmingly benefit. They do not need most of the benefits, and DT's inheritance taxes alone will decrease by $4 billion . His family will also benefit enormously from the change in the pass-through rate. I am assuming that he pays taxes in the US at all, which based on the one tax return he made public is the case. It is fair to assume that the Trump family will benefit by more than $5 billion personally overt he next 10 years or so. Hypothesis: Donald Trump, as president of the United States is in a position to approve or veto a bill that will benefit him more than 99.99% of his constituents. Human beings all have a self-serving bias, and ethically and morally aware adults realize this. As a result, if Donald Trump is ethically and mo...

There is a lot of talk from the republicans about how the tax cut on business will flow down to workers. Let's be clear about this though. The initial impact will be to increase profits to businesses. The tax shortfall has to be made up from somewhere else, either reduction in spending (mainly from programs for the poor), or from increases on others (aiming at blue state tax deductibility). Wages are set based on the local labor market. Any belief that a tax cut will result in higher labor rate is irrational. There is an argument that lower taxes will result in more investment, but this takes years, and may not actually happen. By the way, taxes on US businesses are among the lowest in the world already. Yes, the statutory rates are higher, but there are many deductions and dodges allowed. And ultimately, if we are to have programs that protect us and the poorest and least fortunate members of society, it has to be paid for. Ultimately, that means taxes. We all pay for it in ...

I wrote this in October of 2016. I had no idea how prescient it would be.   Trumps greedy long game - Trumps' heirs would receive at least $4 billion benefit at the expense of the US taxpayer   Donald's 1995 tax return was recently released. It's interesting that he had a tax loss of almost $1 billion in that year, but that, along with tax deductions, is business. Really nothing to see there. But it got me thinking.   The tax system is complex for businesses. One of the features is that it allows businesses to recognize depreciation of assets. Most governments do this in some form to encourage investment. If you invest $1,000 on an asset that is allowed to depreciate over 10 years, you can subtract $100 per year from your income each year for the next 10, until the tax value goes to zero. This reflects the value from a tax perspective, not the actual value.   If you then sell the asset for $50, you then owe taxes on $50 (sales value mi...

I see three concerns about voter "irregularities": vote fraud, obstruction at the polls, and disenfranchisement through manipulating laws and rules. Vote Fraud Hey, I'm from Chicago where "vote early and often" is more than a slogan, it's a career path. If you believe the mythology, this is mostly democrats. This is cheating, and it is illegal. It undermines our democracy by overrepresenting a point of view. It should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There is little evidence that this happens regularly at a large scale. The good news with this one is that everyone still has a voice; the bad news is that widespread abuse could dilute and overwhelm those voices and the process. Obstruction and Intimidation at the Polls This is bad. Trump's call to his followers to get out to the polls is troublesome. If they keep it under control and do not attempt to intimidate or obstruct, that's ok. I believe that there i...

I voted for Obama's re-election. He is not an evil Kenyan, Muslim, socialist. He is not a crazy spendthrift. Nor do I think he is the second coming. I believe he had some solid, very strategic victories in his first term that are and will be good for the country. Really if you look at what Obama actually did, he is pretty much in the same camp as some of those crazy herd-line right wingers like Goldwater, Nixon, Romney, and Reagan. I want to lay out my logic and reasoning for myself on why I think this was the right thing. It will be fun to look back 4 or 10 years from now at this. I also want to thank those whose views are different tlhan mine who have respectfully engaged around issues using facts and logic. The issues we face are not simple and are not solvable by sound bites and cynicism. There is tremendous depth of knowledge, thought, and understanding required. Romney I believe that if you separated Mitt Romney from the party system, he would be s...

Increase Taxes On The Rich - What that means There is a tremendous amount of innumeracy in this country. I don't know why that is. One thing I keep seeing is talk of tax hikes on those making more that $250k. I want to describe what that means. First, technically, it is an increase of tax rate on incremental (marginal) income above $250k. It's not simply raising the rates on everyone making more than $250k. It may have that effect, but the distinction is important. What is the distinction? Consider a person who makes $1.01 less than $250k. He or she will pay let's say $50k in income tax. If he makes $1 more, he will pay about $0.30 more taxes at a 30% income tax rate. Now let's say that the tax laws change so that income above $250k is taxed at 40% (up from 30%). It does not mean that suddenly his entire income is multiplied by 40%, it means that only the amount above $250k will be multiplied by 40%. So let's say our $249,999 earner gets a raise to $...

Ezra Klein recently published a blog post in response to a NY Times piece by David Brooks, the conservative on staff there. It was called "T he sad history of climate policy, according to David Brooks." It's interesting on some levels. It shows that the Republicans used their influence to kill initiatives to reduce carbon footprint, forcing the Democrats, who really wanted to do something about carbon into the corner of funding green startups as the only remaining available option. When some of those startups inevitably failed, the Ds became the bad guys on many levels. It is a sad story of the conversion of a bipartisan consensus going away for political gain. Klein makes the point that it is really quite clear who the bad guys are, the Rs. But there is a big assumption behind all this:  Catastrophic  global warming is happening. All the scientists say so. I sent this response to his column: "First, I completely agree with the premise that if Obama is for it, th...

--> I have mentioned previously that I am a big fan of Andrew Tobias. Recently, he posted on his blog  the claim that climate "deniers" were massively funded by corporate interests.  I sent him the following note. "You said, "The connection between the climate-change deniers and the Republican budget enthusiasts is that both are massively funded by corporate interests , now entirely unleashed by the Republican Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision.  That’s the one that stacks the political system even more heavily in favor of the rich and powerful, and allows their influence to be hidden. " "For the record, I am a big fan and we are on the same side politically. Scientifically we differ, and this thing about climate-change deniers being funded by corporate interests is simply not true as far as I can tell. People point to XOM funding someone for 25 M illion dollars or so. Compare that to the forces of climate change "proponen...