Biggest Landslides

Sorted by percentage

1: 1920: Warren Harding & Calvin Coolidge (R) vs James M Cox & FDR
      16,144,093 to 9,139,661 (7,004,432 differential)
      60.3% to 34.2% (26.1%)
      404 to 127 electors
      One of our most corrupt presidents and one of the most popular during his time in office.

2: 1924: Calvin Coolidge & Charles Dawes(R) v John W Davis & Charles W Bryan(D) v Robert La Follette (Progressive)
      15,723,789 to 8,386,242 to 4,831,706 (7,337,547 differential)
      54% to 28.8% (25.2%)
      382 to 136 to 13 electors
      Davis, a southern democrat and La Follete, a Wisconsin progressive, split the D vote, making the landslide appear larger than it really was.  Harding and Coolidge presided over the bubble that led to the great depression

3: 1936: FDR & John Nance Garner v Alf Landon and Frank Knox
      27,747,636 to 16,679,543 (11,068,093 differential)
      60.8% to 36.5% (24.3%)
      523 to 8 electors.
      FDR, his policies successful at beating back the depression, carried all but two states: VT and ME

4: 1972: Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew vs George McGovern & Sargent Shriver
     47,168,710 to 29,173,222 (17,995,480 difference)
     60.7% to 37.5% (23.2%)
     520 to 17 electors
     McGovern was forced to change VPs after the convention and Nixon ran a terribly dirty campaign, which included the watergate breakin.

5: 1964: LBJ & Hubert Humphrey vs Barry Goldwater & William Miller
      43,127,041 to 27,175,754 (15,951,287 difference)
      61.1% to 38.5% (22.6%)
      486 to 52 electors
      Goldwater made a lot of noise about using A-bombs against North Vietnam, which scared pretty much everybody.  He won only his home state Arizona and the deep south.

6: 1904: TR & Charles Fairbanks vs Alton Parker & Henry Davis
     7,630,457 to 5,083,880 (2,546,577 difference)
     56.4% to 37.6% (18.8%)
     336 to 140 electors
     Incumbent TR was successful in foreign affairs and trustbusting, and immensely popular.  He'd have easily won a third term but he elevated his protege, Taft, who turned against his successful policies.

7: 1984: Ronald Reagan & GHW Bush vs Walter Mondale & Geraldine Ferraro
      54,455,472 to 37,577,352 (16,878,120 difference)
      58.8% to 40.6% (18.2%)
      525 to 13 electors.
      Reagan touted his "Morning In America" as he presided over the end of the 10 year stagflation caused by the multiple OPEC oil embargoes.  Mondale won only his home state and DC

 8: 1932: FDR & John Nance Garner vs Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis
       22,821,277 to 15,761,254 (7,060,023 difference)
       57.4% to 39.7% (17.7%)
       472 to 59 electors
      Hoover presided over the start of the Great Depression and exacerbated it immensely with his misguided policies.

9: 1928: Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis vs Al Smith and Joe Robinson
      21,427,123 to 15,015,464 (6,411,659 difference)
       58.2% to 40.8% (17.4%)
       444 to 87 electors
       Hoover, presiding over the continuing bubble, ran against Smith, the first Catholic to run for president.

10: 1832: Andrew Jackson & Martin van Buren vs Henry Clay & John Sergeant
      701,780 to 484,205 (217,575 difference)
       54.2% to 37.4% (16.8%)
       219 to 49 electors



127M people voted in the 2012 election.   Inexplicably, there are at least 50 million people who will vote for Trump, despite, or perhaps because of his open dishonesty and appalling behavior, or any Republican, no matter how grotesquely unqualified the candidate is.  At this moment, fivethirtyeight.com has Trump at 42.7% and Clinton at 49.2%, a 6.5% difference.  If these numbers hold and there are 130M votes cast, Trump will get 55.5M and Hillary 63.9M votes, an 8.4M vote difference.   It's a good attempt so far, but he's got to alienate a lot more voters to get the Yuugest landslide in history.  He is certainly giving it his best shot.



      
      

Seattle Minimum Wage

There's a widely held belief that the minimum wage hurts low wage employment.  There's basically no evidence of this.

Washington state has one of the highest minimum wages in the country and among the lowest unemployment.  The statewide was $9.19 in 2013 and rose to $9.47 at the start of 2015.

Seattle is one of several cities that's voted in a gradual rise to a $15 minimum wage.  Prior to 1Apr2015, it was the same as the state, $9.47.  On that date, it went up to $10 for small businesses and $11 for big ones.  1Jan2016, it went up a further dollar to $11 for small businesses and $12 for big ones (big is defined by 500 or more workers).

Conservatives insisted that this would surely cause a spike in unemployment.  And sure enough, they managed to find one.  The very conservative "American Enterprise Institute" put together BLS data that seemed to show it and conservatives and business columnists around the country jumped on board.  Here's one from Forbes.   Ooh, scary, 9 months (8 actually, but we all know conservatives aren't good with anything that involves numbers) of declining employment.

But wait:  here's the same data, charted out to August this year

 Note that the climb in unemployment seems to have ended, and by August (the latest that data has been compiled for, it was back down almost to the low.  Well then, couldn't it have been lower without the burden of the high minimum wage?  Perhaps, but notice that the biggest declines took place after the second hike, which was almost double the size of the first hike.  And mysteriously, the sharpest drop occurred after the statewide wage hike that took place that January.

But here's the regional data.  Seattle (population 630K) is the biggest city in King County (pop 2M), and the whole thing is in the Seattle Tacoma Bellevue Metropolitan Statistical Area (pop 3.7M)

The pattern is almost exactly the same, and the rest of the MSA only got the statewide wage hike, not the city one.  Note also that Seattle's unemployment is almost a point lower than the regional, despite the higher wage, and the difference seems to be the same, irrespective of what Seattle's minimum wage is.    From these data, we can't be exactly sure what's causing these fluctuations, but this is pretty good evidence that it's not the minimum wage.  It's plainly dominated by events that are taking place at a much larger scale than the city itself.  Seattle is the biggest employment hub in the region, but it's not a large enough share to have this universal effect.  And of the 5 minimum wage hikes captured in these graphs (1Jan2013, 1Jan2014, 1Jan2015, 1Apr 2015, 1Jan2016), only one of them correlates with climbing unemployment.

This author makes a pretty good case that the insistence is not, and never has been, about the minimum wage depressing employment, but about employers wanting to keep their workers a little bit scared and desperate.  Scared and desperate workers don't make waves, like demanding better wages or safer working conditions.

2016 Calendar

Fri 1 Jan      New Year's Day
Mon 18 Jan   Martin Luther King Day (Holiday)
Tue 2 Feb     Groundhog's (midwinter) Day
Sun 7 Feb     Superbowl L, Santa Clara, CA
Mon 15 Feb  Presidents Day (Holiday)
Sun 13 Mar   Daylight Savings Time begins
Mon 20 Mar  04:30UT (19 Mar 21:30PDT)  Spring Equinox
Sun Mar 27    Easter
Mon 1 May   May Day (midspring)
Mon 30 May Memorial Day (Holiday)
Sun 5 Jun       Ramadan begins
Mon 20 Jun    22:34UT (15:34PDT) Summer Solstice
Mon 4 Jul       Independence Day (Holiday)
Tue 5 Jul         Ramadan ends
Mon 1 Aug     Midsummer day
Mon 5 Sep     Labor Day (Holiday)
Thu 22 Sep     14:21UT (07:21PDT) Autumn Equinox
Sun 2 Oct       Sundown Rosh Hashana begins year 5777
Mon 10 Oct    Columbus Day (Holiday for some people)
Wed 12 Oct    Yom Kippur
Mon 31 Oct     Hallowe'en
Tue 1 Nov      Mid autumn day
Sun 6 Nov      Daylight Savings Time ends 
Tue 8 Nov      Election Day
Fri 11 Nov     Veterans Day
Thu 24 Nov   Thanksgiving (Holiday)
Fri 25 Nov     Holiday
Thu 21 Dec    10:44UT (02:44PST) Winter Solstice
Sat 24 Dec     Sundown  Hannuka begins
Sun 25 Dec   Christmas (Holiday)
Mon 26 Dec   Holiday
Sun 1 Jan       Sundown  Hannuka ends

Days off work in bold
Astronomical events in italic

2017 Calendar

Sun 1 Jan      New Year's Day
Mon 2 Jan     Holiday
Mon 16 Jan   Martin Luther King Day (Holiday)
Fri 20 Jan      Inauguration Day
Thu 2 Feb     Groundhog's (midwinter) Day
Sun 5 Feb     Superbowl LI, Houston, TX
Mon 20 Feb  Presidents Day (Holiday)
Sun 12 Mar   Daylight Savings Time begins
Mon 20 Mar 10:28UT (03:28PDT)  Spring Equinox
Sun 16 Apr   Easter
Mon 1 May   May Day (midspring)
Sat 27 May   Ramadan begins
Mon 29 May Memorial Day (Holiday)
Wed 21 Jun    04:24UT (20 Jun 21:24PDT) Summer Solstice
Sun 25 Jun    Ramadan ends
Tue 4 Jul       Independence Day (Holiday)
Tue 1 Aug     Midsummer day
Mon 4 Sep    Labor Day (Holiday)
Wed 20 Sep   sundown Rosh Hashana begins year 5778
Fri 22 Sep     20:02UT (13:02PDT) Autumn Equinox
Fri 29 Sep      sundown Yom Kippur
Mon 9 Oct     Columbus Day (Holiday for some people)
Fri 13 Oct      Friday the 13th
Fri 31 Oct      Hallowe'en
Sat 1 Nov      Mid autumn day
Sun 2 Nov     Daylight Savings Time ends 
Sat 11 Nov     Veterans Day
Thu 23 Nov   Thanksgiving (Holiday)
Fri 24 Nov     Holiday
Tue 12 Dec    Sundown  Hannuka begins
Wed 20 Dec   Sundown  Hannuka ends
Thu 21 Dec   16:28UT (08:28PST) Winter Solstice
Mon 25 Dec  Christmas (Holiday)

Days off work in bold
Astronomical events in italic

Life on Other Planets?

Is there life on other planets?  Of course there is.  There are 100 billion stars in this galaxy and it looks like the majority of them have planets.   There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe.  that's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 septillion) stars with planets.  most of them will not be inhabited, but even if only one in a trillion is inhabited, that's 10 billion planets with life.  I'm confident will be far higher than that.

The circumstances that allow life as we understand it are fairly narrow: 

• the ambient temperature needs to stay fairly close to the melting point of water: a little above it and not too far below it.  too hot and too much of the water will be vapor.
• the ambient temperature can't vary too much.
• enough gravity that most of the water will stay liquid.
• not so much gravity that complex molecules break down.
• enough solar energy to provide a source of energy
• not so much solar that complex molecules will break down
• enough radiation to generate some mutation.
• not so much that a species can't be stable long enough to reproduce widely.
• has another big planet in the same system that cleans out most of the asteroids
• has a relatively circular orbit (to keep temperature constant)

the only specific chemistry that this requires is water.  Our life is based on carbon and water, but silicon or potentially any other chemistry is conceivable.


So far, there is only one planet that we know meets all these criteria, and it's the one we live on. About 3000 exoplanets have been detected so far and only one of them doesn't have obvious disqualifying factors.  The Kepler spacecraft is looking at 145,000 stars and has only detected planets on a few thousand of them.  The mechanism used wouldn't detect a system with one of the poles pointed at us--around half of the stars examined--and virtually all qualifying planets are below the minimum size that can be detected with Kepler. 


Of course, it may not be necessary for the physics we're familiar with to be relevant at all:

They're Made Out of Meat
A Fire Upon the Deep


The Drake equation: calculates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that might be able to generate signals that we can detect.   Most of the parameters are unknown.

R_* is the rate of star creation (known)
f_p is the fraction of stars that have planets (still unknown but appears to substantial)
n_e is the number of planets per such star that could contain life (still unknown, but in our system, if we count all moons and planets, it's about 2%)
f_l is the fraction that actually go on to develop life (totally unknown)
f_i is the fraction that develop intelligent life (totally unknown)
f_c is the fraction that release detectable signals into space. (totally unknown)
L is the average length that such civilizations are able to communicate (totally unknown)

he omitted one: fraction that are close enough that any signal might be detected.   It's hard to imagine this coming from anywhere outside of our galaxy and probably only the local quarter.


The first four terms address the same question I'm asking.  The only one that's still completely unknown is f_l, the fraction of planets or moons that actually develop life.  The earliest fossil record found so far of life on earth is about 3.5 Billion years ago.  The first time life as we know it could possibly have formed--the first time that liquid water was available on earth--was about 4.4 Billion years ago.   So we know life started at some time in the first 900m years that it was possible.  There's not much left of the fossil record from that long ago, so it's probable that it was a lot longer than 3.5B year ago.

Life tooled along making stromatolites and other primative things, until about 1.2B years ago, some protozoa figured out how to reproduce sexually.  This created lots of new things: species that would breed true, yet allowed a lot of very small variation, to allow evolution by natural selection to take place.  It took another 650m years for the real excitement to happen, in what's called the Cambrian Explosion, when all of the multicellular phyla of plants and animals evolved. 

So we took at least 3 Billion years to develop above the protazoa stage (and most of that to develop to the protazoa stage), and more than another half billion years to develop intelligence.  if this is typical, chances are pretty good that whatever life we find will be very, very simple.  We know that over 3/4ths of the time that life has been possible on earth, that it has existed.  It is entirely possible that the first life occurred in the first few million years, or even earlier. As it stands, it seems like that 3/4ths is a plausible guess for f_l.

So far, we have only sent missions capable of detecting life to one of the extraterrestrial bodies in our planet where life would be at all possible, Mars, and we know that it's unlikely there because atmospheric pressure is too low to sustain liquid water and temperature too high to allow a permanent frozen shell.   There are a handful of moons that probably do have liquid water, around Jupiter and Saturn, although in all cases, it's under a very thick layer of ice.   Until we find out whether there is life there, we really have no handle on that all important term: f_l.  But we have the beginnings of a handle on some of the others.  Life on about 1 in 200 planets seems possible based on what we know.  And since most stars that have any planets probably have multiple planets, the number of stars with life is probably similar.

September 11th

15 years ago today, 19 Arab guys, 15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, one each from Egypt and Lebanon, funded by a wealthy scion of the Saudi regime and partly inspired by the same Wahhabi fundamentalist crackpotism that inspires the Saudi regime, attacked America and killed about 3000 of us.

Our initial response was to invade Afghanistan, which was a failed state and not involved in the attack, but some of the warring parties allowed some of bin Laden's other projects to train there and it appears that bin Laden himself was there for a time.  It didn't really address what had caused the attacks, but it made a little progress against Afghanistan's real problems.  But like our efforts 20 years earlier, after the first superficial successes, we gave up on the real solutions (e.g. schools and a way for ordinary Afghans to make a decent living) and moved on to making yet another failed state in Iraq.

All together, our response to the September 11th attacks have killed more than 3 times as many US and allied soldiers, wounded far more than that, killed hundreds of thousands in the countries we've attacked, exacerbated the problems of Afghanistan, created newly failed states in Iraq and Syria where there had been stable states before, and created a far more deadly terrorist organization in ISIS than bin Laden's al Qaeda ever was.

By any standard I can think of, the "war" on terror has given a huge victory to the terrorists, and to the cause of nihilism in general.

The Saudi regime in Arabia is extremely repressive, and their huge wealth allows them to stay in power in spite of it.   The Arab guys who attacked us 15 years ago knew there was no point in attacking their oppressor.  As long as the money keeps rolling in, the family of ibn Saud will use it to retain power.  So they attacked the enabler of their oppression.


Meanwhile, we have been quietly increasing development of US petroleum reserves.  Corrected for inflation, the price of gasoline is about where it was in the mid '70s, down from all-time highs.   The Saudi are feeling the bite, but they're still making good money.   But more important than that, we've been installing renewable energy sources, mostly wind and solar, at a rapidly increasing rate.   In another decade or so, we may be able to stop buying buying from them entirely.  Once that happens, and the profligacy of the Saudi family burns through all that money, there will be regime change in Arabia.

That will be a victory for all of us. 

Did America Stop Being Great?

We didn't stop being great,  not really, but there's a real collection of problems that are making life not so great for a lot of people.  The picture below shows a particularly important manifestation of this.  It's from this article:
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/x-marks-the-spot-where-inequality-took-root-dig-here/
article

from that article

Something significant happened in the '70s to produce that shocking and very consequential discontinuity.

several things happened all at once: ever since the reforms that followed the great depression, the people that felt they had been hurt by those reforms (they are few in number, but they're very very rich) had been trying to undermine them and the gigantic success of the economic theory that worked extremely well for almost half a century. in the mid '70s, several things happened all at once:

1. OPEC created an artificial shortage of oil¹. this created an unusual type of recession, called a supply side recession, which is accompanied by high inflation, where normal, demand side recessions have deflation or deflationary pressure. The Fed was not able to do anything to restore the oil supply, so the problem persisted and president Nixon thrashed around with ineffective policies like price controls that just made everything worse.
2. Milton Friedman won the Nobel in 1976, giving him a potent platform, despite the obvious, catastrophic failure of his ideas when implemented² in Chile³, Argentina, Brazil, Iran. Reagan embraced them wholeheartedly and began implementing them here as fast as he could: killing unions and infrastructure projects, giving away government resources (especially forests) willy nilly⁴, allowing the minimum wage to fall behind inflation, etc.  But they'd learned how important propaganda is and they used it well. Obama is the first president since then to admit some skepticism.
3. One of those ideas was that shareholder value⁵ was the only thing that mattered, and that such issues as product quality, responsible behavior in the community, how they treat employees, etc., are accurately reflected in the stock price. This is one of a collection of ideas that are collectively called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. It is wrong, catastrophically so, but the double whammy of the Nobel and the OPEC-caused recession seemed to give it credibility.  It tended to encourage self serving or sometimes even fraudulent behavior to prop up the stock price, instead of better products and better corporate behavior.  And it tended to make the sort of people who can afford to buy influence even richer, so they chose to buy influence that reinforced the idea.
4. In 1978, the supreme court ruled⁶ that banks can charge up to whatever the interest limit is, in the state in which they are chartered no matter what the rules are where the business is being done. this immediately led to several states eliminating their usury laws and made the predatory lending business possible, as well as the only slightly less predatory credit card business.
5. availability of effective air conditioning made it practical to employ industrial and office workers in the south, so many industries moved their worker base to "right to work" states, where it was legal for businesses to obstruct union organizers. This was a long trend but the '70s marks a big transition.
6. containerized shipping made it practical to outsource manufacturing to far away places, where they have even fewer worker protections and lower wages than in the American South.
7. Free Trade agreements exacerbated the ease of outsourcing.
8. the people who were old enough to remember and understand the great depression first hand started dying off.   Policies like Glass-Steagall, the Securities Act of 1933, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 were enormously effective and they were all weakened in the 70s through 90s.

during the 30s through 70s, we did such a good job with infrastructure that it took decades for the damage the EMH and the rest had caused to be obvious. The middle class had plenty of savings, the roads were built looking ahead to 30 years or so of growth and wear, and so forth. But now it's gone. if we actually do want to restore the things that were good about the 40s-90s, we need to unwind as much of this as we can.

There's probably not much we can do about shipping. But all of the rest are conscious choices we have made.  The most catastrophic was the election of Reagan, but we can repudiate the changes he made to union rights, to public infrastructure support, to management of public resources. 

We need to make regulations that force private corporations to be good citizens: minimum wage, union protections, environmental protection. Once one business in a market has begun cheating, they all need to, in order to compete.  We need to break that cycle.  Business groups might be able to do this but their track record is abysmal.  Regulation, unfortunately, is the only way.  If done right, it will hurt all by exactly the same amount, which means all will keep their present markets.

We need to reverse Marquette v First of Omaha somehow.   Probably the only way is a national usury law.  I'm thinking it should be flexible and adaptive.  For example, the Prime Lending Rate plus 6.  presently the prime is about 3.5%, so this would be a 9.5% cap on loan interest.  During more normal times, the prime is closer to 7% so this would be 13% cap.  If predatory lenders can't make a profit at that rate, that's a good thing: they won't be making ruinous loans.  Credit card companies are doing good business at 13% today.

Note that Donald Trump is a supporter of many of the things that have made us less great.  To the Donald, making America great again is about making Donald Trump rich at the expense of everybody else.



¹   The reason OPEC did is because the US gave its whole-hearted support to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.   OPEC is very dominated by Saudi Arabia.  After a second shortage in the late '70s, the US administration changed its policy to kowtow to the Saudis at every opportunity.  Reagan's point man on this policy was George HW Bush.

²   A lot of South America had been dominated by "the Chicago Boys", a group of economists who got their training under Friedman at the University of Chicago.

³   The 1973 coup in Chile was to remove (and murder) a popular and effective socialist (Allende) and replace him with a puppet that was friendly to Friedman's ideas (Pinochet) who deregulated much of Chile's business.   As usually happens when this is tried, economy quickly collapsed.   Well, they said, the only thing for it is even more freedom for business.  when the people squawked about mass unemployment and poverty wages for the few jobs there were, where before the coup they'd had good jobs and a booming economy, the leaders of the rebellion were "disappeared".  7 years later, Pinochet was soundly defeated in an election, so Pinochet rewrote the constitution to let him keep power.  Pinochet and his administration is gone now but Chile has not recovered from the damage he did.   This was the most egregious example, but Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Iran and several others were subjected to similar "experiments" in capitalism which all failed miserably.  Pretty much all of the trouble we've been having with Iran stem from our similar 1953 coup.

⁴   Lincoln had given massive tracts of land to the railroads and homesteaders.  There was a strategy behind this, about expanding infrastructure and opportunity for millions of Americans, and the country got far more in return than it gave up.  But what Reagan did was give away forests and mineral reserves to businesses who wanted despoil the land and take the profits for themselves, leaving the rest of us worse off than we were before.

⁵   Jack Welch, long time president of GE, was during his tenure a major supporter of this idea.  Since he retired, he's realized the error of his ways and has taken to calling it "the dumbest idea in the world".  http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/#152d2c682224.   I'm loath to use superlatives, especially when there are so many other incredibly dumb ideas to choose from, but it's possible he might be right. 

⁶   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Minneapolis_v._First_of_Omaha_Service_Corp.