New Populism and Silicon Valley on a Collision Course
Trump’s focus on jobs, globalization and immigration tapped anxiety about technological change

http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-populism-and-silicon-valley-on-a-collision-course-1478814305


ENLARGE
A Donald Trump supporter on Election Night. Mr. Trump won the presidential race by tapping into popular concerns about where change is taking the country. PHOTO: JOE BURBANK/TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE/ZUMA PRESS

By 
CHRISTOPHER MIMS
Updated Nov. 10, 2016 5:03 p.m. ET

Tuesday’s election was an expression of voter angst that heralded a new type of populism. For Silicon Valley, it also marked the ascension of a vision starkly at odds with its own.

The world is changing faster than ever, and Donald Trump’s campaign tapped into concern about where that change is taking the country. Many of the campaign’s central issues—jobs, globalization and immigration—had in common that they were rooted, in large part, in technological change.

The populist wave Mr. Trump rode appears to be on a collision course with the fruits of technology and the people who build it.

Uber Technologies Inc. and others are testing self-driving trucks. That augurs trouble for the 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S., who hold some of the best-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence are beginning to consume white-collar jobs in fields such as medicine and finance, shifting the debate over the impact of technology.

• The tech industry champions immigration. Many of its executives are foreign born. It embraces trade. Overseas markets accounted for 58% of its revenue last year, the second-highest share for any U.S. industry after energy, according to CFRA Research. And overseas workers build most of the electronic gadgets that U.S. tech companies sell.

The repeal of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, is now a fait accompli - conceivably as soon as January 21st, via the "budget reconciliation" process.

But where do we go from here?

To prevent what literally would be a humanitarian crisis, state and local governments, and private and religious charities, will have to do the right thing - and the latter two are especially key: Will George Soros, Tom Steyer etc. pitch in, by making massive donations to organizations like this - and will evangelicals prove that they are not slavish disciples of Ayn Rand and do their part?  (You can bet that the Catholic Church, especially under Pope Francis, will take a strong stand on this).

If either fail, they will be exposed for all the world to see as the worst sort of hypocrites.

As the map below shows, the Democrats will have to defend Senate seats in nine states that Trump won on Tuesday in 2018, while the Republicans will have to defend only one seat in a state that Hillary won (Nevada).
If all ten of these Senate races repeat the same partisan outcomes from 2016 - and remember that mid-term elections tend to be more Republican-friendly than Presidential elections - the Republicans will have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Then they go full retard - and the income tax gets replaced with a national sales tax, EMTALA gets repealed, and so on.

Gonna repost this.

Quote:Don't expect shit to go downhill that quickly.

Trump will get his Indian summer, probably until after the 2018 midterms. You can expect that he'll rush through a few vaguely populist measures first, in an attempt at shoring up support. This will probably work.

If Trump is smart - and he is canny - he'll wait until after the midterm to begin pursuing deportations in earnest, just long enough to lull the public into a false sense of security.

The Democratic Party underestimated George Bush on the basis of his public persona, to their own peril. Don't make the same mistake again.

No rational person wants to be the President Of The United States.

Only those obsessed with personal power, and narcissism, will pursue the office.

This election proved that.

No major results in yet.

Exit polls have Trump doing the same with Hispanic voters as Romney did.

How many of us have?

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/55206-n...les-of-his

Quote:Three scenarios could play out after this election says Hedgeye Demography Sector Head Neil Howe. Howe, a bestselling author and renowned authority on generations and social change in America (who coined the term "millennials") lays them out in the interview above.
 
The third possibility is obviously disconcerting.
 

1. Conciliation
   
2. Gridlock
   
3. Civil War..
   

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/55206-n...les-of-his

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...ir-charge/

Quote:Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs debuted an online retail service designed to offer loans to consumers searching for an alternative to credit card borrowing. The move adds yet another competitor to an industry already struggling to add new customers. Late in the economic cycle, credit card companies usually rely more on interest payments than on additional debtors. But today’s frozen credit cycle has experts worried that credit cards are experiencing all the costs (defaults) with none of the benefits (revolving interest charges). Worse yet, a large share of Generation-X and Millennial consumers simply doesn’t use or trust credit cards.

The credit card industry encompasses a wide range of players who assume various roles in a transaction. First, there are the issuing banks—like Citigroup, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Capital One—that issue credit cards to consumers. Then there are the acquiring banks (overlapping with the issuing banks) that process payments on behalf of the merchant. And finally there are the networks—Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover—that act as middleman skimmers between the issuing and acquiring banks...


http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...ir-charge/

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/it-...ver-folks/

Quote:Judging by the tone of discussions in the mass media and the social media, most people are heartily sick of this “Election from Hell” and can’t wait until it’s over. Well, folks, I have bad news for you (and yes, I know what happens to a bearer of bad news): It Ain’t Over. Whoever gets elected tomorrow, we are guaranteed to see more political dysfunction and social instability both in the short and medium terms.
The chances of impeachment proceedings (to repeat, whoever wins the presidency) in 2017 are very high. The relations between the POTUS and the Congress are likely to deteriorate even more. Proxies for political fragmentation, which I use in Ages of Discord, such as the frequency of filibusters and the percent of judicial nominations who are not confirmed; all will probably continue to spike. Incidentally, when are we going to have a nine-member Supreme Court again?
In the medium run neither of the candidates has a good program that could even start addressing the deep structural causes of our current troubles. As I said many times, this blog is fiercely nonpartisan. I have not endorsed, nor dis-endorsed, either of the candidates. But even their supporters admit that both major candidates are flawed, each in his/her own way. The presidential campaign of 2016 has been relentlessly negative. I don’t even remember any substantive discussion of how the current trends to popular immiseration are going to be reversed. And, of course, nobody is discussing elite overproduction. Well, very few people understand how serious a problem it is.
Yet elite overproduction has a lot to do with why we find ourselves in this Election from Hell. In Ages of Discord I discuss two proxies for current elite overproduction: overproduction of multi-millionaires, and overproduction of politically ambitious holders of advanced degrees, most importantly, law degrees (because a law degree is the best kind of credential to have if you want to become a politician).

Source
As I pointed out in a previous post, Donald Trump is emblematic of the new crop of politically ambitious newly rich, who aim to translate their economic power into political office. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is emblematic of the Law School route to political office. As the number of multimillionaires and law degree holders per population capita exploded in recent decades, we now have an overly large pool of contenders for a fixed number of political offices (there is only one POTUS, only nine high justices, 100 senators, etc.). Structural-demographic theory posits that as competition for these offices becomes intense, so will intraelite fragmentation and conflict.
This is, really, why this election has been so nasty. It’s not just the personalities of Trump or Clinton. As intraelite competition becomes fierce, all methods of getting ahead become fair. Why should we expect that presidential candidates would compete on who proposes a better program to fix social ills? Smearing the opponent works much better.

No-Holds-Barred-Competition
What’s particularly worrying is how this no-holds-barred competition results in the unraveling of the social norms that govern the public discourse and the  political system in this country. Trump has refused to conform to one of the most important norms of democracy: to acquiesce to the election results. But (to be nonpartisan and even-handed in my critique of the two candidates), what was Clinton thinking about when she accepted a $1 million contribution from a foreign government during her tenure as Secretary of State?
Both candidates have been riding rough-shod over the social norms that have governed what is acceptable behavior of a member of the American political class. Such unraveling of social norms is what we see in the run-up to a major political rapture in historical societies that my colleagues and I have studied.