(Part 3) Best products from r/neoliberal

/u/JetJaguar124 /u/Integralds

So first thing's first, Windows: ~$130 for Home Edition.

Okay, so things to keep in mind:

1. If you go Intel, overclocking isn't too great on 9th gen intel, especially if you don't have a beefy aftermarket cpu cooler. So if you don't plan on doing that at some point then you don't need a K series CPU and an overclocking motherboard. So your motherboard should primarily focus on giving you decent I/O options.
   
   
2. You also probably want to aim for 1080p or 1440p tops, given your price range.
   
   
3. Related to #1: If you don't plan on overclocking then a basic-ish mobo will do fine, and you mainly want to focus on I/O and other features. If you are getting Intel doubly so, as, as I mentioned before, intel 9th gen doesn't overclock well due to relatively low headroom to begin with. For intel overclocking boards are "Z" while non-overclocking boards are "B". For AMD they are "X" and "B" respectively.
   
   The GPU you should be seeking to use is the 1660 Ti, which is basically a slightly gimped RTX 2060 but without the raytracing stuff. If you are willing to spend a bit more then you could get an RX 5700 instead, which is nearly ~30% faster on average.
   
   That'll put you at $270 - $360 depending on the model you pick. Yes, it's a third of your budget, but the GPU is the single most important part of your build.
   
   Secondly you'll want a decent CPU to go with that.
   
   The Ryzen 5 3600 looks like a pretty good CPU, its a bit under $200, its fairly beefy and extendable so it's somewhat "future-proof" - in that it shouldn't cause much bottlenecking and you could upgrade your GPU past a 2080 Ti before needing to change the processor.
   
   This MSI Tomohawk Mobo looks good for the 3600.
   
   So we're at ~$320 for that, or about $640 total. Plus windows that is ~$730.
   
   The RAM Inty recommended before should be fine. You only really need 16 GB. This will set you back ~$80. If you find yourself wanting more RAM later down the line you can always add another pair of sticks later and double up your RAM.
   
   That puts us at around ~$800.
   
   $80 for a 750W Fully Modular Corsair PSU is basically a steal. It's refurbished though, although that shouldn't be a problem - especially with a PSU.
   
   We're at ~$880.
   
   Some good thermal paste for your CPU.
   
   We're now at ~$890.
   
   Storage depends on what you want to do. Do you install a lot of stuff and files at once? In which case you might want to get a nice sized SSD plus a big HDD.
   
   For your system drive. Plenty of space, good price, AND its an nvme SSD.
   
   That makes for ~$990.
   
   If you need lots of extra space
   
   If you need extreme extra space
   
   Keyboard and case are up to you, decide as you please. For the case just make sure that it can support an ATX mobo, as the mobo listed here is full ATX. Mechanical keyboards are crack, but they tend to be more expensive so they're probably out of range. This will be another $100 to $150 depending on what you pick.
   
   Something to keep in mind though: Your case and your monitors are basically "future proof". In other words, they won't really get "worse" with time or cause future performance issues. So monitors and case are things where you want to consider what you'll eventually want and buy ahead, even if you have to stretch a bit.
   
   This just leaves your monitor. I would NOT recommend a 1080p monitor above 24 in. Honestly, if you can go for a 1440p monitor then do it. I'm a bit of a resolution whore tho, so if 1080p works for you then that's fine. I would also avoid TN panels - they tend to look more washed out, tinny, and have worse viewing angles . . . although they also tend to be a fair bit cheaper than the good panels (namely IPS panels).
   
   I used to own one of these . . . it was vvy vvy gud. This is a relatively artsy monitor, so if color gamut correctness or whatever is important for you for photo or video editing or whatever, then this is a good pick. It's a bit expensive, yeah, but also super gorgeous. It also goes up to 75 Hz. Conversely, get a freesync monitor, and this one is probably good - haven't done much research on it, but Dells are generally pretty good in my experience (my current 4K monitor is a Dell too). Freesync will allow you to basically eliminate screen tearing and will provide a smoother feeling experience because it will even out frame rates better.
   
   One last thing to keep in mind: Shopping around on ebay and other sites can save you a fair bit. My rule of thumb is to never, ever buy sensitive parts like hard-drives, cpus, or motherboards second hand or refurbished. But everything else is fair game. So refurbished GPUs, Monitors, PSUs, Cases, etc. should be fine. Pre-owned? Ehhh . . . that I'm much, much more sketchy on - personally I wouldn't, but that's just me.
   
   So in total it'd be somewhere in the range of $1500 including monitor, OS, case, and keyboard. The system itself is around $1000. But you can perhaps knock off a hundred bucks or two by shopping around and looking for where you can buy these parts cheaper than Amazon.
   
   But again: investing in a good monitor and case can be worth it. It means you won't have to replace it if/when you do upgrade. And worst case scenario you can offload your monitor as a side/secondary monitor when you upgrade your monitor to a new one.

The best way to learn is just go out there and talk to people as much as possible, but if you want to read, Harvard Business School books are pretty good for that. You might be interested in their set on Emotional Intelligence. Check out their other books too, though.

I personally learned the most from Getting to Yes, a book by a Harvard team about negotiation. This is sort of far from what you are asking about, but it actually contains important general advice about talking to people. Before reading it, I was extremely skeptical of any sort of self-help book or learning about social skills from books, but it is really quite good.

Two random thoughts from my own experience:

1. After my PhD, I decided to improve my social skills. For parties, what helped me the most was improving my story telling game. You want to have conversations that are easy to join (and leave), rather than 1-on-1 conversations asking people about their day. Look for stuff online on how to tell a great story. Make your material relevant to the type of party (unusual historical stuff related to the news, but not in the too distant past, is a good bet). Contrary to some online sources, you shouldn't attempt to monopolize the attention by trying to be a riveting orator. Instead, make sure to let other people react. If they say anything interesting or insightful, point it out enthusiastically. Look for reactions by other people who are listening, but seem shy, and encourage them to participate.
   
   
2. People always talk about how early thirties are a big social filter where you risk losing touch with your old friends because everyone is getting married, having kids, etc. One thing that worked for me is show genuine interest in people's big life changes. For example, whenever I hear about a baby being born, I write the new parents a nice letter. Most people love that and are very touched. You also learn a lot about babies, which I think might come in handy if I ever have one.

>A federal carbon tax will never be passed by the government and really the carbon tax does decrease emissions a little bit but it's more useful for generating money for the government.

Will a federal carbon tax ever be passed by the government? I think it's unlikely in the near term, but in the medium or long term? Who knows? As to the scale of emissions reduction, it would obviously depend on the scale of the tax! Admittedly we don't have much empirical data on this, but insofar as the demand curve slopes down, a carbon tax should be as effective as the rate it is set at. As for "it's more useful for generating money for the government", this is a seperate policy goal than reducing carbon emissions. The two aren't comparable as they have different metrics for success (revenue generated vs emissions reduced).

>Tesla's success has already spurred investment and research by all the other car companies without coercion or extra tax dollars.

How would you even prove this causal link? The fact that Tesla can't even fill its orders suggests that Toyota's success with the Prius could be just as important if not moreso. Either way, Tesla operates in one sector of the economy - The transportation sector is responsible for about 15% of emissions, and I'd bet that personal motor vehicle emissions are not even half that. The point is that Tesla will not spur research and development in the development of cleaner factories, for example.

>Tesla has accelerated the pathway to sustainable transportation by 8-10 years.

Again, don't know how you would prove this claim.

If you're looking for people to reject government spending based on "coercion", I don't think you're going to find many friends here. Neoliberals have an axiomatic belief that government is necessary. If you're interested in some historical policy successes of the US government (which frankly is one of the less effective governments in the developed world), I'd suggest you read this book. It does a good job outlining the technological innovation of the private sector as well as policy areas where it fell short and where government intervention was required.

https://www.amazon.es/Why-Not-Capitalism-Jason-Brennan/dp/0415732972

> Most economists believe capitalism is a compromise with selfish human nature. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Capitalism works better than socialism, according to this thinking, only because we are not kind and generous enough to make socialism work. If we were saints, we would be socialists.

> In Why Not Capitalism?, Jason Brennan attacks this widely held belief, arguing that capitalism would remain the best system even if we were morally perfect. Even in an ideal world, private property and free markets would be the best way to promote mutual cooperation, social justice, harmony, and prosperity. Socialists seek to capture the moral high ground by showing that ideal socialism is morally superior to realistic capitalism. But, Brennan responds, ideal capitalism is superior to ideal socialism, and so capitalism beats socialism at every level.

For example

It is more of a history book on economic policy, but if you are American, I'd recommend Concrete Economics. This books chronicles the economic policy of the United States from its founding. This includes the US's relationship abroad. It is also very consumable (and short). I think it would be a good place to start. It does a good job setting some records straight during. Even if it is not what you are looking for, as a newly minted neo-liberal, I believe you would enjoy it.

https://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Economics-Hamilton-Approach-Economic/dp/1422189813

From Amazon:

"History, not ideology, holds the key to growth...This book does not rehash the sturdy and long-accepted arguments that to thrive, entrepreneurial economies need a broad range of freedoms. Instead, Steve Cohen and Brad DeLong remedy our national amnesia about how our economy has actually grown and the role government has played in redesigning and reinvigorating it throughout our history. The government not only sets the ground rules for entrepreneurial activity but directs the surges of energy that mark a vibrant economy. This is as true for present-day Silicon Valley as it was for New England manufacturing at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The authors’ argument is not one based on abstract ideas, arcane discoveries, or complex correlations. Instead it is based on the facts—facts that were once well known but that have been obscured in a fog of ideology—of how the US economy benefited from a pragmatic government approach to succeed so brilliantly."


Stephen S. Cohen is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is also codirector, and cofounder of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE). He has written and edited several books, most recently The End of Influence with J. Bradford DeLong, and his articles have appeared in such publications as Science, Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

J. Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of the Treasury in the Clinton administration. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He writes a monthly syndicated op-ed column for Project Syndicate. DeLong is also a prolific blogger and commentator on national and international affairs.

I'm trying to find an online source for copper price manipulation. I originally read about it in Allende's Chile: The Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad Popular but it's not excerpted much online. I loaned it to my sister so I don't have the book on hand >_<. We'll call that one a maybe, but you can see a dip coinciding pretty neatly with Allende's tenure. Obviously that's not proof but it's the best I have right now. Essentially the accusation was that the US released parts of it's copper reserves in 1970 as retaliation for the undervaluing of Anaconda and Kennecott in the nationalization scheme. Despite my best efforts I'm having a really hard time finding resources online that show the American Copper reserve levels over the last century. What the fuck am I doing with my life.

The economic mistakes made by Chavez pretty closely map to Allende's, although it's pretty difficult to know if he would have attempted to diversify the economy had he served his full term without having to deal with foreign interference at every turn. They were both shit with monetary policy, that much is obvious. They continued working in the framework of an extraction economy which is obviously a huge mistake. Countries are vulnerable when their sole source of income is natural resources, even if natural resources are probably the most just industry for nationalization.

What's interesting is the increase in wages did lead to an increase in consumer purchasing at first. The Chilean economy wasn't producing consumer goods, so they had a huge spike in their dependency on imports within the first six months of Allende's tenure. Those imports were targeted in a really surprisingly granular fashion. There was certainly a conspiracy of business interests to make borrowing and purchasing from American firms difficult. Without being able to meet consumer needs, the cost of goods skyrocketed. The same thing would happen here if one of our major trading partners decided to evaluate the purchases of American firms on a case by case basis.

My problem with that blogpost was that the author kind of dismissed out of hand the problems Chile was having with importing goods. Obviously you're going to have a hard time fostering growth if the most powerful country in the world, and one of your largest trading partners starts antagonizing your ability to buy goods. Ironically, ff the Chileans had managed to establish stronger economic ties with the Soviet Union from the start they probably would've fared a whole lot better. Small countries exist at the leisure of the superpowers. I read a quote from Nixon claiming that if Chile succeeded they'd put the US in the same position that the British Empire was in prior to WWI. It's interesting that Kissinger and Nixon really did take the view that these countries existed to service the requirements of the American Markets. It was a combination of bad monetary policy along with an overemphasis on self reliance that worked in concert with American meddling to cause the economic downturn.

Agreed that this is fun. Arguing with people in forums I disagree with is a great hobby until I start researching Nixon's copper reserve levels.

It's only partially related to this, but if you haven't read Naomi Klein's the Shock Doctrine I highly recommend it. I haven't seen and meaningful critiques with regards to the factual accuracy of the book, and it does a great job outlining the ways that Neoliberal institutions are designed from the bottom up to disintegrate states that don't conform to the American conception of governance. She's an ideologue so you have to deal with some incendiary language but I think everyone with an interest in geopolitics should read it.

I'm not hostile to worker's co-ops, but it's worth understanding why they (and also customers' co-ops, for that matter) don't tend to work.

A typical coroporation can be seen as a co-op of lenders. Control of the firm is vested in people to the extent that they provide capital for the firm. This works well because capital is fungible, which means (a) that shareholders' relative contributions are directly comparable, and (b) they have a common interest (i.e. increasing the value of shares). By contrast, the work done by workers is not directly comparable, and workers within a firm have a bevy of competing interests - while they all want the firm to be more profitable, they will (as individuals) be willing to sacrifice profitability to improving their personal circumstances within the firm.

If you want decisions to be made which will improve the firm's profitability, then, shareholder ownership is usually the way to go. (Why is profitability desirable as a goal? That's a whole essay by itself, but e.g. it's measurable in a way that many other goals aren't, which makes poor management vastly more identifiable). I'd highly recommend Joseph Heath's Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism as explaining this more clearly than I can.

The Book

The Review of The Book:

~~

OK... Deep breaths everybody...

It is not possible to overstate how good this book is. I tried to give it uncountably many stars but they only have five. Five is an insult. I'm sorry Dr. Rudin...

This book is a good reference but let me tell you what its really good for. You have taken all the lower division courses. You have taken that "transition to proof writing" class in number theory, or linear algebra, or logic, or discrete math, or whatever they do at your institution of higher learning. You can tell a contrapositive from a proof by contradiction. You can explain to your grandma why there are more real numbers than rationals. Now its time to get serious.

Get this book. Start at page one. Read until you come to the word Theorem. Do not read the proof. Prove it yourself. Or at least try. If you get stuck read a line or two until you see what to do.

Thrust, repeat.

If you make it through the first six or seven chaptors like this then there shall be no power in the verse that can stop you. Enjoy graduate school. You half way there.

Now some people complain about this book being too hard. Don't listen to them. They are just trying to pull you down and keep you from your true destiny. They are the same people who try to sell you TV's and lobodemies.

"The material is not motivated." Not motivated? Judas just stick a dagger in my heart. This material needs no motivation. Just do it. Faith will come. He's teaching you analysis. Not selling you a used car. By the time you are ready to read this book you should not need motivation from the author as to why you need to know analysis. You should just feel a burning in you chest that can only be quenched by arguments involving an arbitrary sequence {x_n} that converges to x in X.

Finally, some people complain about the level of abstraction, which let me just say is not that high. If you want to see abstraction grab a copy of Spanier's 'Algebraic Topology' and stare at it for about an hour. Then open 'Baby Rudin' up again. I promise you the feeling you get when you sit in a hottub for like twenty minutes and then jump back in the pool. Invigorating.

No but really. Anyone who passes you an analysis book that does not say the words metric space, and have the chaptor on topology before the chapter on limits is doing you no favors. You need to know what compactness is when you get out of an analysis course. And it's lunacy to start talking about differentiation without it. It's possible, sure, but it's a waste of time and energy. To say a continuous function is one where the inverse image of open sets is open is way cooler than that epsilon delta stuff. Then you prove the epsilon delta thing as a theorem. Hows that for motivation?

Anyway, if this review comes off a combative that's because it is. It's unethical to use another text for an undergraduate real analysis class. It insults and short changes the students. Sure it was OK before Rudin wrote the thing, but now? Why spit on your luck? And if you'r a student and find the book too hard? Try harder. That's the point. If you did not crave intellectual work why are you sitting in an analysis course? Dig in. It will make you a better person. Trust me.

Or you could just change your major back to engineering. It's more money and the books always have lots of nice pictures.

In conclusion: Thank you Dr. Rudin for your wonderfull book on analysis. You made a man of me.

> But if you're going to claim that "male brains are better at computers", you should describe the mechanism that makes this happen - "brains are different" is not enough.

Autism researchers have thoroughly documented this from every angle: higher testosterone levels predict higher systematizing ability and lower empathizing. Simon Baron Cohen, the preeminent expert in the field, wrote a great book on this: The Essential Difference. It is impossible to summarize it all but the evidence is overwhelming and incontravertible. Everything from the fact that male rats are better at solving mazes than female rats to the fact that babies who are exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the amniotic fluid spend less time looking at faces after they are born.

In any case, one theory he advances is that testosterone affects the laterality of the brain (left right symmetry and how specialized the brain is between the two hemispheres). The right side of the brain is more developed and more asymmetrical in males than in females. You can inject anesthetic into one side of the brain and women's linguistic ability is reduced evenly on both sides, while men have a much worse reduction if injected on the left (language) hemisphere and less reduction if injected on the right. The asymmetry extends to the entire body: men have slightly larger right foot than left while women have slightly larger left foot than right.

The whole book is fascinating and I highly recommend it. If you are interested in sex differences in the brain it is pretty much the modern encyclopedia and chock full of all sorts of curious and intriguing research (Did you know that men who have a bigger left testicle than right testicle do better on language tests? It's true!)

I'm just gonna slide in and hijack this thread...

If you think this is good (and you totally should), just wait until you hear about Effective Altruism (EA)! In essence, it's the idea that we should do the most good we can with the limited resources that we have, and in order to do the most good we need to rigorously evaluate the causes we donate to. GiveWell, probably the most notable EA charity evaluation site, recommends the Against Malaria Foundation as one of its top charities based on extensive research assessing the overall impact-per-dollar that donors can achieve.

If you'd like to learn more about EA, check out Giving What We Can and read about how much good you can do with your Monsanto/Koch/Illuminati shill bucks. And if you'd like to delve a little deeper, check out Dr William MacAskill's Doing Good Better, which makes a compelling case for evidence-based giving, and which challenges many orthodoxies about how to do good in the world, including a defense of the long-term positive impact of sweatshop labour.

> Republicans unfairly benefit from it,

They really don't. In fact, you will normally find the pre-election pump-up-the-democrats news stories to say the opposite - that it favors the DNC because they start with 240 or so EC votes every election for the last few decades... I'll find you an example of that article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-2016-race-an-electoral-college-edge-for-democrats/2015/03/15/855f2792-cb3c-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_story.html

>In 2016 race, an electoral college edge for Democrats

Ok that one says 212. I guess they slippin.

We also saw that story in 2012 and 2008 and 2004 and 2000... And it was the backbone of that "We are now permanently in charge" narrative that started in 2008 when Democrats won in such a landslide.

>It doesn't make the EC good

The EC is good because it takes into account both the state's locality as important (Giving it 2 EC votes for just being a state) and it takes into account the state's population. (Giving one or more for every 720,000 per person on average, although it varies from state to state.)

That's just like we do it in congress, 2 senators and one or more representatives based on pop.

So yes - that small state that gets 3 EC votes is getting 2 for just being a state, and one for their small population. That is still only 3/270 EC votes or 1/90th the number needed to be president. And there are other small states with a million+ populations that also only get 1 extra EC vote. And so all those small states average somewhere around the same 720,000 per as CA and the big states do.

It's not a dramatic advantage over CA's 55 EC votes.

Whatsmore - the EC is over-weighted in it's ratios. It needs to do that to have a total pool of EC votes to draw from that is 1 less than 270 doubled. EDIT: 2 less - 538 total.

For example, California has 55/270 EC votes or a little more than 1/5th the EC votes needed to win.

With a population of 40 million/320million - or 1/8th of the population... the 20% of votes needed to win the EC is a lot more than their 12% of population. That doesn't even account for the fact that only 9 million in CA voted Hillary, not 40 million.

The EC makes sure the suburban areas have some say, not an unfair amount.

It doesn't go boom when it goes on the floor (or the grill/broiler like some stones) . Also, it transfers heat more quickly, which is good for pizza, but not for croissant, cookies and bread. Also, you need to season it (like a cast iron pan), otherwise it'll rust.

Generally speaking, a good pizza stone (or steel) should have two qualities:

• rough surface (smooth one will trap steam)
  
• at least 1/2 thickness (1/4 for steel, although 3/8 is preferable)
  
  If you want the absolute best pizza, The Original Baking Steel 3/8 is the best choice (for ~110USD).
  
  But since you said affordable, you'll probably like this more (~40USD) - it doesn't transfer heat as quickly as some other stones, but the difference in crust quality won't be noticable, as long as you let it reheat for longer between the pies (about 7 minutes).
  
  But the slower transfer means that it's better for croissants etc, so it's more versatile.

If you want to read a book there's a lengthy biography from John English (who I know) in two volumes called Citizen of the World (before becoming PM) and Just Watch Me (after 1968 when he becomes PM). Just a note that it's a friendly author, he was a Liberal MP under PET (for Pierre Elliot Trudeau), which provides a unique perspective as well. He still wrote a stellar biography if you look outside liberal circles like media reviews. You can also google Pierre's memoirs.

Wikipedia also gives an overview but you won't really get the full picture. You can find some good stuff in the CBC archives (God love the CBC archives). You can see some of his famous political moments and see the man himself speak. While you're at it, watch Justin's eulogy for PET in 2000, it's the moment he really made a name for himself nationally.


There's a cbc miniseries called Trudeau you might be able to torrent or google (maybe it's on the CBC website somewhere) which is a bit more dramatized. You can find documentaries elsewhere too, like this one from CTV that focuses less on politics (the politics is super important to why he's such a big deal however).

I recently finished reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the 2016 election. Here are the paragraphs I highlighted on my Kindle.

on her decision to run

>Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned to the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message became.

On her script team struggling to put together her opening speech

>All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it. Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale. “I would have had a reason for running,” one of her top aides said, “or I wouldn’t have run.”

On the power structure

>Much of this infighting might have been avoided had someone been given the authority to have the final say on matters large and small. But Hillary distributed power so broadly that none of her aides or advisers had control of the whole apparatus.

On the attacks on Clinton

>For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything wrong with America. At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers on a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary’s a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful.

On Clinton's decision who to grant an exclusive interview with about her emails

>Palmieri asked Abedin to find out which newscaster Hillary would prefer, and the answer that came back was “Brianna.” That meant CNN’s Brianna Keilar, and Palmieri worked to set up a live interview on CNN. Only it turned out that Hillary had said “Bianna”—as in Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo! News, the wife of former Clinton administration economic aide Peter Orszag. By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late to pull back.

On coverage during the email scandal

>“The press covered Donald Trump to the complete exclusion of the other twenty-seven dwarves in that stupid clown bus the Republicans have,” one longtime Hillary pal said. “Her coverage was just as much, but it was only about one thing—the e-mails.”

On loyalty after her failed 2008 campaign

>After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.

On Robby Mook, the campaign manager who based all his decisions on data

>To Buell, the precocious campaign manager was frustratingly left-brained. You get so lost chasing the numbers, she thought. They’re like your gauge. You’re distracted from your emotions. You just get driven to increase numbers. The campaign’s inability to reveal Hillary’s authenticity—and its ham-fisted effort to manufacture a false version of it—was infuriating. The Hillary Buell knew, foulmouthed and fun, didn’t need a bunch of political operatives inventing a more genuine persona for her. She needed them to help her drop the armor built up over decades that shielded her most human traits.

...

>Bill thought the campaign manager was a capable operative but worried that the next-gen Mook was too invested in data to the exclusion of politics. Neither a traditional poll nor Mook’s preferred analytics—voter-behavior models based on surveys and demographic data—were as finely tuned as his own sense of political winds, Bill thought. They were an important part of a modern campaign but not the only part. “You couldn’t place all of your eggs in the data/polling basket,” one of Bill’s confidants said of his thinking. “He had the ability to sort of figure out what’s going on around him, to sort of take everyone’s feedback and synthesize it and measure [it] along with his experience and then report back.”

...

>Mook thought critics like Renteria didn’t understand his strategy. The plan for Super Tuesday relied on heavy doses of earned media, meaning television, digital, and print stories that would amplify Hillary’s message without forcing the campaign to spend precious dollars on paid organizing staff that couldn’t tilt a race by more than a few points. Mook was looking to make the most efficient expenditures possible, and sometimes that meant the campaign would look absent both on the ground and on the airwaves. In his view, for example, it was a waste of money to pay for expensive ads in Houston and Dallas, where most voters were inclined to go with Hillary in the primary.


On Bernie

>Bernie would portray her as out of touch with progressive values. Hillary thought he was out of touch with the realities of governance. It frustrated her no end that Bernie would promise the moon without offering a plan to get there.

...

>She was the one who had been absorbing his ever-heightening broadsides—and she was pissed that the news media always portrayed him as running a positive campaign on the issues. Bullshit, she thought. Bernie’s entire campaign was a character assassination—a moral-high-ground argument that she was less pure than he was. Of course, that was true in the sense that she believed in moving forward by building political coalitions. Bernie didn’t work with anyone. He didn’t do it in the House. He didn’t do it in the Senate. His “coalition” on the campaign trail was almost entirely white and disproportionately male. Hell, he was only competitive in states where just a handful of people showed up for caucuses or large portions of the electorate were independents, not Democrats.

On the Benghazi hearing

>Republicans had inadvertently staged an eleven-hour infomercial testament to her competence, soundness of mind, compassion for the victims of the Benghazi attack, and serenity in a crisis. It was worse than a waste of time for congressional Republicans; it was the high-water mark of Hillary’s campaign so far. She looked presidential in comparison to her adversaries.

On who Robby Mook's data targeted vs Bill Clinton

>From that Milwaukee [primary] debate through the end of the campaign, Hillary would never stray from the African American base that provided her sustenance in key primary states and numbers in November battlegrounds. But there was a trade-off. “Our failure to reach out to white voters, like literally from the New Hampshire primary on, it never changed,” said one campaign official.

...

>It was not only what she was doing on the ground but part and parcel of the narrative her advisers pushed to the press: she would win the nomination by collecting big majorities among minorities. The political strategy worked to complicate Sanders’s path, but it also began to alienate the very white voters who had picked her over Obama in 2008. The more she became a candidate of minority voters, the less affinity whites had for her—particularly those whites who had little or no allegiance to the Democratic Party. Amazingly, after having been the candidate of the white working class in a 2008 race against a black opponent, she was becoming anathema to them. Even more astounding, the wife of the president who had won on an “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra was ignoring the core of the Clinton brand—robust growth that touched every American. Why am I not talking to the foundation of what the Clinton brand is about? she thought, time and again, throughout the campaign.

...

>Where she had misunderstood the importance of delegate accumulation in 2008, she was now so driven by math—and the message that she would win by sheer numerical force—that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see that she was doing nothing to inspire the poor, rural, and working-class white voters who had so identified with her husband. She was aware of the problem, but she didn’t act effectively to fix it. After all, she was racking up delegates.

...

>Throughout the primary, [Bill would] report back from the field on what he was hearing at campaign events and from friends across the country. Mook’s response was always a variation on the same analysis: the data run counter to your anecdotes. Bill liked data, but he believed it was insufficient. To him, politics wasn’t just about finding people who agreed with you and getting them to the polls. He felt that it was important to talk to voters individually and get a real sense for what they were feeling. He also believed that a candidate could persuade voters with the right argument.

Bernie BTFO

>Browne, a slim, balding Pulitzer Prize winner with about forty years logged at the paper, tried to nail [Bernie] down on a basic question that had eluded most of the media for the entirety of the campaign. Bernie liked to say that he would break up the big banks. In the interview, Sanders acknowledged two important substantive matters that undermined his favorite talking point: he didn’t have a plan for what to do with the banks once they were broken up, and there was already existing authority under the Dodd-Frank law to wind down banks that posed too much risk to the system. He was calling for new authority that already existed! And beyond that, he couldn’t say what would happen to all of the assets once a bank was required to break apart. He was flirting with increasing the risk to consumers, rather than decreasing it. It was a demonstration of exactly what Hillary had been saying about him: his plans weren’t real.

Cool.

Linear Algebra Don't waste your time with anything other than Lay, pretty much. Sounds like you're 100% new to LinAlg (it's not about polynomial equations) so it may be a bit tough to get off the ground working by yourself, but not impossible. It'd be worth finding a MOOC on the subject, there should be plenty. Otherwise, it's a pretty standard freshman maths course and a lot of people struggle with it (not because it's hard, just because it's different to HS maths), so there's a ton of resources on the internet.

Calculus Kinda just gotta slog away with where you're at tbh. I had Stewart as a freshman, didn't think it was overly great though. Still, that's the kind of level you need, so search for "alternatives to Stewart calculus" and anything that comes up should be appropriate. I wouldn't be able to tell you which to pick though.

Stats Basically, completing both of the above is pretty much a prerequisite for being able to understand linear regression properly, so don't expect to gain much by diving straight into stats. You could probably find a "business analytics" style textbook that would let you do more stats without understanding what's really going on under the hood, but if you want to stick with it in the long term you'll benefit more from getting stuff right at the beginning.

I'd highly recommend the High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (RIP) on this subject. Great, pioneering book about how we fail to deal with the huge externalities of personal automobiles.

True capitalism has never been tried.

Broke



Woke

There's a 600 page book on it