Tag: What If?

Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. The Line From Slick Willie to The Donald

EJHillJoined in the first year of Ricochet Ricochet Charter Member
By EJHill
EJHill Podcaster
Thirty years in television production. Living in a midwestern city in the productive custody of his wife and four children (Baby Girl, Marine, Future Tony Winner & Xerox). Unrelenting, unrepentant conservative. Needs a better temperament that equals his photoshop skills. Will probably die broke but believes more in freedom than the welfare state.  
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This is an expansion of a comment made in another post.

It’s been an interesting ride. The line from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump is drawn with anything but a straight line.

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Recommended by Ricochet Members Created with Sketch. Imagine: Put Up or Shut Up

Judge Mental
By Judge Mental
Judge Mental Member
Like a sly demon the entity awaits his moment and then he STRIKES! No warning, no morals, no compunctions; these may indeed be the end times.
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Richard Goodstein is a Democratic campaign strategist, involved in the Hillary Clinton campaign. Of course, in a world where Carter Page is a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor, it’s difficult to know what that means. Is he just some rando volunteer padding his resume, did he actually get a paycheck from the campaign, or was he one of the inner cabal working to subvert the American electoral process? Who knows?

What we do know is that he’s a frequent talking head on the cable news networks, where he can be counted on to change the subject on a dime, and always reliably parrot the Democratic talking points of the day. I mention him because he’s been selling a particular talking point over the last week or so, a point that I have heard repeated by other Democrats, including a group of Congress critters in the wake of the report from the Office of Inspector General.

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Promoted from the Ricochet Member Feed by Editors Created with Sketch. A Generic Republican vs. Hillary: What If?

ValiuthJoined in the first year of Ricochet Ricochet Charter Member
By Valiuth
Valiuth Member
I was born in Romania under Communism, though I was too young to either understand or appreciate what I lived through I have heard the first hand accounts of totalitarianism, that have forever made me a bitter enemy of that political and philosophical system and its various adjacent ideologies, so naturally I am a conservative. I believe America is truly the greatest nation on earth today, and that while I was born in a foreign land I know in my heart I was born to be American.
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romney-clintonMuch talk before the election was given to how much better another candidate (insert generic Republican here) would have been doing against Hillary Clinton. Such a debate is of course unnecessary now since Donald Trump has won (bigly even). But, the question still has cropped up if someone else would have done better than Trump has done. Such a question of course is impossible to really answer in any kind of objective way. Too many counterfactuals and possibilities exist to be able to account for them. Yet, one possible option to test this hypothesis, has occurred to me, and I decided to put it to the test.

The Hypothesis: Mitt Romney is the quintessential generic Republican candidate. If he ran again in 2016 vs. Clinton and received all the same votes he did in 2012 would this allow him to beat Clinton if she received all the votes she got in 2016?

The experimental design is very simple. I went on a state-by-state basis comparing in each state the vote totals between Romney in 2012 and Clinton in 2016. Who ever had the most votes won the state (I didn’t factor in the Nebraska and Maine splitting because I was just too lazy to be that detailed). There are numerous problems with this kind of straight-up comparison, the biggest being that it assumes that Romney could not in 2016 get more votes than he got in 2012, that there is no overlap in voters between the two candidates, and that no new voters would turn out to vote for either.

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Member Post

John Stater
By John Stater
John Stater Thatcher
Father, husband, RPG writer and researcher of commercial real estate.
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Whenever you have Trump or Sanders types running in primaries, you hear the question “What if they decide to run as an independent?” This is usually uttered with a shudder of terror. “They’ll split the vote!” “The other side will win!” “Egad!” This year, of course, is different. The eccentric candidates in the race might […]

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Contributor Post Created with Sketch. Book Review: What If?

John Walker
By John Walker
John Walker Contributor
John Walker is a member of Ricochet.
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21 COMMENTS
 

“What If?” by Randall MunroeAs a child, the author would constantly ask his parents odd questions. They indulged and encouraged him, setting him on a lifetime path of curiosity, using the mathematics and physics he learned in the course of obtaining a degree in physics and working in robotics at NASA to answer whatever popped into his head. After creating the tremendously successful Web comic xkcd.com, readers began to ask him the kinds of questions he’d mused about himself. He began a feature on xkcd.com: “What If?” to explore answers to these questions. This book is a collection of these questions, some previously published on-line (where you can continue to read them at the previous link), and some only published here. The answers to questions are interspersed with “Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox,” some of which are reminiscent of my own Titanium Cranium mailbox. The book abounds with the author’s delightful illustrations. Here is a sample of the questions dealt with. I’ve linked the first to the online article to give you a taste of what’s in store for you in the book.

Main belt asteroid 4942 Munroe is named after the author.

While the hardcover edition is expensive for material most of which can be read on the Web for free, the Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

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