marshall.lewis's blog

As a gentle reminder, we're likely to have somewhere between two dozen and too many candidates running for president this election cycle. The odds of any one candidate securing a majority of pledged delegates are basically zero. This means that we're probably going to have a brokered convention, and this means that we're going to have to ask delegates who had been pledged to other candidates to support our candidate instead.

As a gentle reminder, the IPCC report explicitly refuses to endorse calls for 100% renewable energy, and instead calls for 100% net zero emissions energy, which includes renewables, non-renewable clean energy sources like nuclear, and dirty energy sources like natural gas and coal with CCS.

Here are the relevant passages:

Another batch of candidates have declared, so there's another batch of logos to review! As always, these reviews are offered in a spirit of good fun, and do not reflect my views of the candidates themselves. In fact, I don't have any views on the candidates themselves, because I am officially neutral.

ISIS has more or less lost its last remaining pocket of territory in Syria. There are a few patches of desert in regime-held areas where they still operate, and they maintain an extensive traditional cell-based terrorist network, but this is basically the end of them as a ruling body.

As we approach the 2020 campaign, it's important to properly vet our candidates and ensure that only the cream of the crop is able to rise to the highest office in the land. Needless to say, the obvious place to begin this process is with logo design.

Julian Castro's logo tries to do too much. The accent mark does double duty by emphasizing his Hispanic heritage and reminding us how to pronounce his name. This reduces the effectiveness of his "One nation. One Destiny" tagline ,which is kind of boring anyway.

I'm very irritated with basically everyone who had anything to do with the current mess at the border.

The Trump administration spent millions of dollars preparing for the arrival of the caravan. The fact that it's only been able to process 60-100 applicants per day is embarrassing. For a small fraction of the amount we spent deploying the military, we could have hired a bunch of temp workers, given them some basic training, and had the infrastructure in place to process the large number of asylum applications we knew were on their way.

DEMS WIN THE HOUSE. The next two years will be very different from the last two. We're not out of the woods yet, but at least we've found a path.

Illegal immigration was a serious crisis during the 80's and 90's, when well over a million people (almost all Mexican) were illegally crossing the border every year. Since then, though, it's fallen by over 80%, and illegal immigration from Mexico has fallen by roughly 90%. Over the last decade, though, illegal immigration from Central America has risen from basically nothing to roughly half of the total.

Food for thought: As a person's income rises, their risk tolerance increases. If the money is saved or invested, then as the risk tolerance increases, the average return on investment also increases. As the average return on investment increases, the net present value of that income also goes up. If you take the resulting net present value and tax it at a flat rate, you get something that looks an awful lot like a progressive tax system.

SYRIA UPDATE: The Assad regime is now in complete control of Damascus and the surrounding region. This means the strategic map of Syria has been greatly simplified.

The rebels are now down to four pockets of territory: Idlib province in the north, the Turkish occupation zone north of Aleppo, rural Daraa province in the south, and the area around the Tanf border crossing. Idlib and north Aleppo are both under the protection of Turkey, Tanf is under the protection of the US, and Daraa is probably under the protection of the US and/or Israel.