I actually didn't hate Hillary so much as I hated the environment that propped her up and the tens of thousands of leeches who expected to profit from her reign or to keep being smug and tell others what to think. I loathed the idea of her being President but at some level I respected her as a person, she was fighting for what she thought was right (her becoming the center of the Universe), and she fought a good fight.
That she lost is, in my view, not just lucky for us, but for her too -- I believe the power she so craved would have made her mad before the end of the first term.
Three months ago I deactivated my account and I'm not getting any FB emails except when I activate it by logging in from time to time ("Welcome back to FB" it says).
Interestingly, now I am completely off the habit. My account is active again but I'm not -- I go there every 3-4 days for 5-10 minutes, save a couple of good articles and not comment or like anything. And frankly I prefer that to deleting the account -- now I have the best of both worlds: access to good stuff without the habit.
Want to add that meditation is one of the hardest things to learn correctly because just like in say swimming it requires a lot of new neural activity, but unlike the swimming coach the teacher can't easily see how you're doing. Unless it is a great teacher, but they are rare.
That I can comprehend, to her the patients were abstract, she probably never saw any. But as a woman, to give her youth and her looks to an unattractive, unremarkable looking man so she can get her scheme going... there is something profoundly sad about that.
Change yes but not one that comes from the place of an emotional storm. When you say "the day of reckoning will come for Trump supporters" I am all the more determined to vote for Trump again to prevent people who want to institute reckoning to take over.
At the same time if I saw Trump supporters write "the day of reckoning will come for libtards when we take over completely" I'd be inclined to do exactly the opposite, again to prevent people like that from coming to power.
To call half the voting population, tens of millions of ordinary living souls struggling at this life like everyone else, bandits, is hardly a hallmark of Stoicism.
If you'll forgive me for this, your behavior strikes me as the exact opposite of Stoicism: you place an awful lot of stock on the outcome of events you have almost zero control over -- whether Trump is President or not -- and when things don't go as you hope you wail and bemoan and almost threaten to millions of people. Meanwhile those outcomes -- I will bet! -- have close to ZERO effect on the physical security and safety of either you or your family and again I will bet almost all of your friends. You are not out of work because of Trump, I am guessing, and you are certainly not sent to fight in Syria or Ukraine or Korea over Trump.
This is all the more surprising coming from someone who practices martial arts. Look at the historical figures you respect: I am sure you will find large number of them acting like Stoics, whether they call it so or not. I for one love that Trump won, but in case he is voted out in 2020 so be it. Vox populi, vox Dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God.
If my guess above is true, I would ask myself what is the force in me that is so strong it makes me act in contrast with the principles of conduct I respect.
Believe it or not I don't mean to denigrate your views. But I don't want to take them at face value either. Rather what I'm seeing seems like a pattern in which certain people who otherwise have a lot to offer act as if the Trump election has opened a great wound in their minds and hearts. And this wound they can't help poking deeper every day and causing more harm -- primarily to themselves. It makes me genuinely sad to see that. This in part because I feel like I have otherwise many values in common with those people but their what seems to me an unceasing rumination on Trump makes communication nearly impossible.
From your side, is there any truth to this perception?
The premise was to imagine -- that was a thought experiment, imagining an alternative reality so you can observe how your mind reacts, thus giving you a clue to what is going in the layers below the conscious.
In this Gedankenexperiment you imagine a world in which Rand Paul is the President, as someone who won the Republican Primary, seemingly flirted with the Russians, then won the Elections to everyone's surprise, and now is enacting the exact same policies as Trump -- which would not be unrealistic at all -- and is reportedly (by the left media) even receiving loans from China for his family's medical business. Forget Trump, imagine in that world Trump never even ran. When you look from that other world with your mind's eye, are you as angry at President Rand Paul as you are with President Trump in this world? In that imaginary world, you may still believe that President Rand Paul's policies are harmful etc., but would you feel President Rand Paul is bringing the country into the axis of evil, and that the 60+ million people who support President Rand Paul in that world would have reckoning coming for them? If not, what is different?
And so now you'd be saying, "A reckoning is coming for Rand Paul and his supporters"? Despite the apparent fact that 60+ million of your fellow citizens are quite happy with Rand Paul and his policies and with what they think those policies are doing for their jobs and livelihoods?
I'm sorry but I find it hard to believe. Because if it were true it would mean you are incredibly intolerant.
Would you allow for a possibility that it is something specifically about Trump that makes things look unacceptable?
Image that Rand Paul were President and he enacted the exact same policies as Trump and even seemingly "conspired" with the Russians to get an election boost and accepted loans from China and so on. Would you see him with the same level of animosity?
Conversely imagine Trump boasting that he'll put on tough environmental regulations to preserve American nature and force companies and local governments to export toxic materials out of the country because no nature is greater than American nature. Would he be nearly as unbearable?
I'll tell you where I'm going with it if you'll indulge me in that thought experiment.
The problem with your position, if I may, is it makes it very difficult to reach any consensus. There was an article in WaPo today, no less, how this current madness is coming from people from both sides are unconsciously employing "tit for tat" game strategy. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-country-has-lost-its-mind-its-time-for-some-game-theory/2018/06/12/f8863076-6e77-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html?utm_term=.4a7f26394116). In the comments, the article -- and the author -- was reviled for even suggesting that anyone who supports Trump may be a normal person.
So if you say that Trump has made the US the Axis of Evil, what choice do I have responding? I think that position is ridiculous, and I don't think that Trump is anything like a Savior King. So it leaves me no choice but to assign most of the responsibility for our lack of consensus to the people on your side, at least in these kinds of forums. If you see an error in this reasoning I would like to know about it.
Last week’s G-7 summit was a mostly drama-free affair. The confrontation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came only after the summit ended. Members of the G-7, including the United States, issued a joint communique in which they agreed on the need for free and fair trade. The U.S. withdrew its support, and a war of words between the heads of state of two staunch allies ensued. Putting their spat in perspective requires an understanding of what the G-7 actually is.
What we now call the G-7 was meant to be an organization of the leading industrial countries in the world. It originated in the 1970s in response to the Arab oil embargo, which had hit the industrial world hard. It hit back by forming an entity that represented the major industrial powers that were struggling with high energy prices.
What the group was supposed to do remains unclear. What’s clear is that it accomplished very little. It didn’t speak with one voice, nor did the supply and demand of oil give the group much leverage over OPEC. So the group convened a summit and issued communiques, and what had been a response to a specific event became an annual meeting.
Without a specific purpose, it has become a meeting of the world’s major economic powers. Except that some of the leading economic powers in 1973 are no longer the leading powers in 2018. Its members – the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and the United Kingdom – are relatively unchanged. But Italy now has the eighth-largest economy. Canada has the 10th-largest economy. Russia, now the 11th-largest economy, was part of a G-8 for a while, but it was banished because of its behavior in Crimea. But most important, China and India boast the second- and seventh-largest economies in the world and yet are not members.
If the G-7 were constituted by the top seven economies in the world, it would probably hold different meetings with different agendas. Not having China and India at the table, after all, makes any decisions taken on economic matters of limited importance. Their inclusion may not make the G-7 any more viable as anything more than a forum for discussion, but the bigger point is that like many institutions of its ilk, the G-7 is frozen in a time that no longer exists. During the Cold War, its members arguably did represent the bulk of the world’s industrial. But it remains a fundamentally Euro-American creation, consisting of Euro-American agendas that dominate the event out of the sheer number of leaders there.
That agenda, of course, is provincial. It fails to represent the complexities that a contemporary global power like the United States is concerned with. This year’s summit was a case in point. For the Europeans and Canada, this meeting was an end in itself, a forum to jointly voice their displeasure about tariffs. For Trump, it was merely a pit stop on the way to Singapore and the North Korea talks. That was probably also the case for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for whom North Korea is not as distant an affair as it is for the Europeans. They have opinions, but they have little skin in that game. Again: Had China and India been invited, North Korea may have been a more prominent item on the agenda.
Which is not to say that trade tariffs don’t matter. They do. But they matter in different ways to different countries. And this goes to the heart of one of the biggest problems facing the G-7: The consensus, such as it is, sought by its members is getting harder to reach. It’s difficult enough when the group’s purpose is clear and its membership appropriate. But they aren’t. The international order changes, and if institutions like the G-7 are to be useful at all, they have to change with it. And until the G-7 adapts to the times, episodes like this weekend’s between leaders will continue to pop up regardless of who’s in the White House.
So you don't care if the country will be doing well after Trump's term, you don't care who it is on the ticket, as long as it is not Trump?
It is fair to say that you don't want Trump because you can't stand him regardless of how things turn out to be. As an intellectual though you would do well to consider, what is it in Trump that creates such a reaction in you.
That's interesting. The underlying processes that drive societies and living systems evolve and change, sometimes quite quickly. Often what worked in marketing a year ago doesn't work anymore. The A that seemingly caused B in economics 20 years ago doesn't do that anymore, or not as strongly.
Sometimes I wonder whether what works now in physics won't quite work like that in 10 billion years. And vice versa...
You should watch a clip of Ali G trying to con Trump back in 2005. He figured Sacha Baron Kohen in ten seconds. They must have been so impressed they decided to include the footage anyway.
You'd do better than to automatically assume that a man who turn nearly everyone around to elect him President is a complete dumbass.
On whose screen windows they want to play to you recordings of more interesting parts of the world than the ones you would be looking at if you had real windows./s
I felt the same reading the OP so I dug up a bit on what it all means and found it quite interesting. We asked where the mass comes from, but we didn't say what we meant by mass. In classical physics, mass just "is" -- it's a fundamental property of matter, that gives things weight in gravity. But in quantum mechanics, mass is a property derived from the energy of a fundamental zero-volume "particle" like photon or electron, or a system like the helium nucleus (which we see it as two neutrons plus two protons, but it's really a "cage" for the 12 point-particles -- quarks -- that make those 4 nucleons.) When the energy of the particle/system changes, its mass changes as well. The E=mc2 captures this relation.
What the OP referred to is that the proton has a "resting" (non-moving) mass of 938 of some units, but the three quarks that make it have the rest mass of 9 of those units. The difference comes from the force that binds those quarks into a proton, and that force is carried by "particles" called "gluons". I put particles in quotes because the diameter of fundamental particles is thought to be exactly zero -- everything that makes the visible world is made of empty, non-material twists in space so to speak.... Now reading what I wrote it doesn't seem much less complicated from what the OP wrote, and I don't even understand a tenth of the stuff. You may want to read this paper, which is fairly accessible as far as QM papers go:
For my part, I'd only add that this is just a model -- quarks, electrons, photons etc. aren't "really" out there, those are all unknowable manifestation of nature that we interpret through our model. As that Nazi Werner Heisenberg said, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Nevertheless, it's a very useful model -- for one thing it let us made the bomb to help defeat the Nazis.:-)
Not consistently. Nate Silver only started downgrading Hillary's chances sometime in the late summer/early autumn of 2016. I remember there being a discussion on his site where someone claimed Nate was playing a dangerous game of small potential gains and huge potential loses. If Hillary won, the argument went, no one would credit Nate because it was obvious to all that she would. But if Trump won, everyone would say that if Nate Silver was so wrong about that how could he be right about anything else. He would not only ruin his reputation -- as the front runner of the social statistical science his failure to predict Trump victory would give his entire scientific field an irrecoverable blow. Someone said in his defense that Nate didn't fudge data, but the reply was that of course he didn't, that was for amateurs -- what Nate was doing was in a way worse, he was ignoring his hunch that the polling data was bad but went with it anyway because he so desired one outcome.
A couple of weeks after that discussion Nate started giving Trump more chance. In November he was accused by Huffpo of tweaking the data: "The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them." https://www.huffingtonpost.com...?
The article concluded "By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized." Turned out it was the opposite -- by acknowledging his hunch (or the danger of his game) he may have given it the lifeline.
Note though that it is your judgement, that Trump is doing what he's doing to benefit himself. You interpret his actions one way or another based on your knowledge of people you've met in your life and on your own psychological makeup. A lot of people -- close to a half of the voting population -- do not share your judgment. If Trump's character were on trial, we'd have a hung jury.
I would agree with you about coal, except that I don't know almost anything about the realities of the coal, and I cannot say that giving a struggling coal companies a lifeline will produce better or worse outcomes for the society -- those things are too complex to be known. So for the moment I'm content with giving Trump a benefit of the doubt and see how things turn out.
Well, how do you appraise a theory? You evaluate its predictions. The theory you suggested in your first post is the kind of theory that predicted his defeat in the election, and then doom and gloom afterwards. The "hunch" theory has been claiming the opposite since the beginning. Which do you think the current reality reflects better?
Scott Adams, whom I haven't followed for a long time, deserves credit on his own for predicting Trump successes. Scott's problem is that he is a hyperrational person which almost without exception means rather sad and unhappy as well.
Another possibility is Trump is not an ideologue and acts on hunches that are telling him something is beneficial to the country at the moment, without necessarily understanding (or trying to understand) why.
I know that sounds scary, but sometimes acting on a belief that everything is well understood and thought out leads to worse consequences, for example the intervention in Libya.
Exact same experience here but it served as an excellent litmus test: people who got pissed off by my merely trying to articulate an opposing argument to the mainstream opinion -- in my own status or on public pages, not on their own -- I realized are people whose opinions I don't need to care about. People who responded in a thoughtful argument I figured are open minded people who I should listen to what they have to say on various topics. Needless to say they were very few.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually didn't hate Hillary so much as I hated the environment that propped her up and the tens of thousands of leeches who expected to profit from her reign or to keep being smug and tell others what to think. I loathed the idea of her being President but at some level I respected her as a person, she was fighting for what she thought was right (her becoming the center of the Universe), and she fought a good fight.
That she lost is, in my view, not just lucky for us, but for her too -- I believe the power she so craved would have made her mad before the end of the first term.
Three months ago I deactivated my account and I'm not getting any FB emails except when I activate it by logging in from time to time ("Welcome back to FB" it says).
Interestingly, now I am completely off the habit. My account is active again but I'm not -- I go there every 3-4 days for 5-10 minutes, save a couple of good articles and not comment or like anything. And frankly I prefer that to deleting the account -- now I have the best of both worlds: access to good stuff without the habit.
Want to add that meditation is one of the hardest things to learn correctly because just like in say swimming it requires a lot of new neural activity, but unlike the swimming coach the teacher can't easily see how you're doing. Unless it is a great teacher, but they are rare.
It works across the board. Socrates said, "It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
This is a tech board but it doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss human nature, and that's impossible without speculation.
That I can comprehend, to her the patients were abstract, she probably never saw any. But as a woman, to give her youth and her looks to an unattractive, unremarkable looking man so she can get her scheme going... there is something profoundly sad about that.
She sacrificed everything for her ambition.
Change yes but not one that comes from the place of an emotional storm. When you say "the day of reckoning will come for Trump supporters" I am all the more determined to vote for Trump again to prevent people who want to institute reckoning to take over.
At the same time if I saw Trump supporters write "the day of reckoning will come for libtards when we take over completely" I'd be inclined to do exactly the opposite, again to prevent people like that from coming to power.
To call half the voting population, tens of millions of ordinary living souls struggling at this life like everyone else, bandits, is hardly a hallmark of Stoicism.
If you'll forgive me for this, your behavior strikes me as the exact opposite of Stoicism: you place an awful lot of stock on the outcome of events you have almost zero control over -- whether Trump is President or not -- and when things don't go as you hope you wail and bemoan and almost threaten to millions of people. Meanwhile those outcomes -- I will bet! -- have close to ZERO effect on the physical security and safety of either you or your family and again I will bet almost all of your friends. You are not out of work because of Trump, I am guessing, and you are certainly not sent to fight in Syria or Ukraine or Korea over Trump.
This is all the more surprising coming from someone who practices martial arts. Look at the historical figures you respect: I am sure you will find large number of them acting like Stoics, whether they call it so or not. I for one love that Trump won, but in case he is voted out in 2020 so be it. Vox populi, vox Dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God.
If my guess above is true, I would ask myself what is the force in me that is so strong it makes me act in contrast with the principles of conduct I respect.
Believe it or not I don't mean to denigrate your views. But I don't want to take them at face value either. Rather what I'm seeing seems like a pattern in which certain people who otherwise have a lot to offer act as if the Trump election has opened a great wound in their minds and hearts. And this wound they can't help poking deeper every day and causing more harm -- primarily to themselves. It makes me genuinely sad to see that. This in part because I feel like I have otherwise many values in common with those people but their what seems to me an unceasing rumination on Trump makes communication nearly impossible.
From your side, is there any truth to this perception?
The premise was to imagine -- that was a thought experiment, imagining an alternative reality so you can observe how your mind reacts, thus giving you a clue to what is going in the layers below the conscious.
In this Gedankenexperiment you imagine a world in which Rand Paul is the President, as someone who won the Republican Primary, seemingly flirted with the Russians, then won the Elections to everyone's surprise, and now is enacting the exact same policies as Trump -- which would not be unrealistic at all -- and is reportedly (by the left media) even receiving loans from China for his family's medical business. Forget Trump, imagine in that world Trump never even ran. When you look from that other world with your mind's eye, are you as angry at President Rand Paul as you are with President Trump in this world? In that imaginary world, you may still believe that President Rand Paul's policies are harmful etc., but would you feel President Rand Paul is bringing the country into the axis of evil, and that the 60+ million people who support President Rand Paul in that world would have reckoning coming for them? If not, what is different?
And so now you'd be saying, "A reckoning is coming for Rand Paul and his supporters"? Despite the apparent fact that 60+ million of your fellow citizens are quite happy with Rand Paul and his policies and with what they think those policies are doing for their jobs and livelihoods?
I'm sorry but I find it hard to believe. Because if it were true it would mean you are incredibly intolerant.
Would you allow for a possibility that it is something specifically about Trump that makes things look unacceptable?
Image that Rand Paul were President and he enacted the exact same policies as Trump and even seemingly "conspired" with the Russians to get an election boost and accepted loans from China and so on. Would you see him with the same level of animosity?
Conversely imagine Trump boasting that he'll put on tough environmental regulations to preserve American nature and force companies and local governments to export toxic materials out of the country because no nature is greater than American nature. Would he be nearly as unbearable?
I'll tell you where I'm going with it if you'll indulge me in that thought experiment.
The problem with your position, if I may, is it makes it very difficult to reach any consensus. There was an article in WaPo today, no less, how this current madness is coming from people from both sides are unconsciously employing "tit for tat" game strategy. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-country-has-lost-its-mind-its-time-for-some-game-theory/2018/06/12/f8863076-6e77-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html?utm_term=.4a7f26394116). In the comments, the article -- and the author -- was reviled for even suggesting that anyone who supports Trump may be a normal person.
So if you say that Trump has made the US the Axis of Evil, what choice do I have responding? I think that position is ridiculous, and I don't think that Trump is anything like a Savior King. So it leaves me no choice but to assign most of the responsibility for our lack of consensus to the people on your side, at least in these kinds of forums. If you see an error in this reasoning I would like to know about it.
For better or worse, the only group Trump thinks of is G1.
G7 is obsolete:
Reality Check
By George Friedman
The G-7, Frozen in Time
It’s a product of an era that no longer exists.
Last week’s G-7 summit was a mostly drama-free affair. The confrontation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came only after the summit ended. Members of the G-7, including the United States, issued a joint communique in which they agreed on the need for free and fair trade. The U.S. withdrew its support, and a war of words between the heads of state of two staunch allies ensued. Putting their spat in perspective requires an understanding of what the G-7 actually is.
What we now call the G-7 was meant to be an organization of the leading industrial countries in the world. It originated in the 1970s in response to the Arab oil embargo, which had hit the industrial world hard. It hit back by forming an entity that represented the major industrial powers that were struggling with high energy prices.
What the group was supposed to do remains unclear. What’s clear is that it accomplished very little. It didn’t speak with one voice, nor did the supply and demand of oil give the group much leverage over OPEC. So the group convened a summit and issued communiques, and what had been a response to a specific event became an annual meeting.
Without a specific purpose, it has become a meeting of the world’s major economic powers. Except that some of the leading economic powers in 1973 are no longer the leading powers in 2018. Its members – the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and the United Kingdom – are relatively unchanged. But Italy now has the eighth-largest economy. Canada has the 10th-largest economy. Russia, now the 11th-largest economy, was part of a G-8 for a while, but it was banished because of its behavior in Crimea. But most important, China and India boast the second- and seventh-largest economies in the world and yet are not members.
If the G-7 were constituted by the top seven economies in the world, it would probably hold different meetings with different agendas. Not having China and India at the table, after all, makes any decisions taken on economic matters of limited importance. Their inclusion may not make the G-7 any more viable as anything more than a forum for discussion, but the bigger point is that like many institutions of its ilk, the G-7 is frozen in a time that no longer exists. During the Cold War, its members arguably did represent the bulk of the world’s industrial. But it remains a fundamentally Euro-American creation, consisting of Euro-American agendas that dominate the event out of the sheer number of leaders there.
That agenda, of course, is provincial. It fails to represent the complexities that a contemporary global power like the United States is concerned with. This year’s summit was a case in point. For the Europeans and Canada, this meeting was an end in itself, a forum to jointly voice their displeasure about tariffs. For Trump, it was merely a pit stop on the way to Singapore and the North Korea talks. That was probably also the case for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for whom North Korea is not as distant an affair as it is for the Europeans. They have opinions, but they have little skin in that game. Again: Had China and India been invited, North Korea may have been a more prominent item on the agenda.
Which is not to say that trade tariffs don’t matter. They do. But they matter in different ways to different countries. And this goes to the heart of one of the biggest problems facing the G-7: The consensus, such as it is, sought by its members is getting harder to reach. It’s difficult enough when the group’s purpose is clear and its membership appropriate. But they aren’t. The international order changes, and if institutions like the G-7 are to be useful at all, they have to change with it. And until the G-7 adapts to the times, episodes like this weekend’s between leaders will continue to pop up regardless of who’s in the White House.
So you don't care if the country will be doing well after Trump's term, you don't care who it is on the ticket, as long as it is not Trump?
It is fair to say that you don't want Trump because you can't stand him regardless of how things turn out to be. As an intellectual though you would do well to consider, what is it in Trump that creates such a reaction in you.
That's interesting. The underlying processes that drive societies and living systems evolve and change, sometimes quite quickly. Often what worked in marketing a year ago doesn't work anymore. The A that seemingly caused B in economics 20 years ago doesn't do that anymore, or not as strongly.
Sometimes I wonder whether what works now in physics won't quite work like that in 10 billion years. And vice versa...
You should watch a clip of Ali G trying to con Trump back in 2005. He figured Sacha Baron Kohen in ten seconds. They must have been so impressed they decided to include the footage anyway.
You'd do better than to automatically assume that a man who turn nearly everyone around to elect him President is a complete dumbass.
On whose screen windows they want to play to you recordings of more interesting parts of the world than the ones you would be looking at if you had real windows. /s
I felt the same reading the OP so I dug up a bit on what it all means and found it quite interesting. We asked where the mass comes from, but we didn't say what we meant by mass. In classical physics, mass just "is" -- it's a fundamental property of matter, that gives things weight in gravity. But in quantum mechanics, mass is a property derived from the energy of a fundamental zero-volume "particle" like photon or electron, or a system like the helium nucleus (which we see it as two neutrons plus two protons, but it's really a "cage" for the 12 point-particles -- quarks -- that make those 4 nucleons.) When the energy of the particle/system changes, its mass changes as well. The E=mc2 captures this relation.
What the OP referred to is that the proton has a "resting" (non-moving) mass of 938 of some units, but the three quarks that make it have the rest mass of 9 of those units. The difference comes from the force that binds those quarks into a proton, and that force is carried by "particles" called "gluons". I put particles in quotes because the diameter of fundamental particles is thought to be exactly zero -- everything that makes the visible world is made of empty, non-material twists in space so to speak. ... Now reading what I wrote it doesn't seem much less complicated from what the OP wrote, and I don't even understand a tenth of the stuff. You may want to read this paper, which is fairly accessible as far as QM papers go:
"What is the physical meaning of mass in view of wave-particle duality? A proposed model" https://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/...
For my part, I'd only add that this is just a model -- quarks, electrons, photons etc. aren't "really" out there, those are all unknowable manifestation of nature that we interpret through our model. As that Nazi Werner Heisenberg said, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Nevertheless, it's a very useful model -- for one thing it let us made the bomb to help defeat the Nazis. :-)
Not consistently. Nate Silver only started downgrading Hillary's chances sometime in the late summer/early autumn of 2016. I remember there being a discussion on his site where someone claimed Nate was playing a dangerous game of small potential gains and huge potential loses. If Hillary won, the argument went, no one would credit Nate because it was obvious to all that she would. But if Trump won, everyone would say that if Nate Silver was so wrong about that how could he be right about anything else. He would not only ruin his reputation -- as the front runner of the social statistical science his failure to predict Trump victory would give his entire scientific field an irrecoverable blow. Someone said in his defense that Nate didn't fudge data, but the reply was that of course he didn't, that was for amateurs -- what Nate was doing was in a way worse, he was ignoring his hunch that the polling data was bad but went with it anyway because he so desired one outcome.
A couple of weeks after that discussion Nate started giving Trump more chance. In November he was accused by Huffpo of tweaking the data: "The short version is that Silver is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them." https://www.huffingtonpost.com...?
The article concluded "By monkeying around with the numbers like this, Silver is making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized." Turned out it was the opposite -- by acknowledging his hunch (or the danger of his game) he may have given it the lifeline.
Note though that it is your judgement, that Trump is doing what he's doing to benefit himself. You interpret his actions one way or another based on your knowledge of people you've met in your life and on your own psychological makeup. A lot of people -- close to a half of the voting population -- do not share your judgment. If Trump's character were on trial, we'd have a hung jury.
I would agree with you about coal, except that I don't know almost anything about the realities of the coal, and I cannot say that giving a struggling coal companies a lifeline will produce better or worse outcomes for the society -- those things are too complex to be known. So for the moment I'm content with giving Trump a benefit of the doubt and see how things turn out.
Well, how do you appraise a theory? You evaluate its predictions. The theory you suggested in your first post is the kind of theory that predicted his defeat in the election, and then doom and gloom afterwards. The "hunch" theory has been claiming the opposite since the beginning. Which do you think the current reality reflects better?
Scott Adams, whom I haven't followed for a long time, deserves credit on his own for predicting Trump successes. Scott's problem is that he is a hyperrational person which almost without exception means rather sad and unhappy as well.
Another possibility is Trump is not an ideologue and acts on hunches that are telling him something is beneficial to the country at the moment, without necessarily understanding (or trying to understand) why.
I know that sounds scary, but sometimes acting on a belief that everything is well understood and thought out leads to worse consequences, for example the intervention in Libya.
Exact same experience here but it served as an excellent litmus test: people who got pissed off by my merely trying to articulate an opposing argument to the mainstream opinion -- in my own status or on public pages, not on their own -- I realized are people whose opinions I don't need to care about. People who responded in a thoughtful argument I figured are open minded people who I should listen to what they have to say on various topics. Needless to say they were very few.