Maverick's World

Craving change - and supporting nonviable and risky ideas

As I travel to twitter, I see a pattern among Trump supporters. There does not appear to be a great deal of clarity in their minds about what they really want to see happen now that Donald Trump has been elected. This lack of clarity is giving way to a maximal posture that wants everything but is completely nonviable because of the resources such a measure would consume.

For example - urban Donald Trump voters want to see industry bring jobs back to the country. When Donald Trump starts talking about "35% tariffs" on industry shifting jobs to China or Mexico,  they love the man. However most corn farmers who supported Donald Trump don't want tariffs because they know that if Mexico and China buy a vast majority of US Agricultural produce. If Donald Trump appeases the urban voters, he will end up driving most of his corn belt supporters into bankruptcy.

Continuing on - Donald Trump corn belt supporters want him to boost domestic ethanol production and consumption. The best way to do this is to actually raise the EPA mandated levels of Ethanol in the gasoline supplied at the pump. This idea sounds great but it cuts into the money that domestic oil suppliers stand to make if the mandate is reduced. Domestic oil producers and suppliers also support Donald Trump because they think he will reduce the EPA mandate and cut down the Obama inspired EPA actions on fossil fuel use restrictions.

Continuing still further - Most domestic oil producers and suppliers are struggling against competition from Natural Gas. The Natural Gas guys also support Donald Trump as they feel that he should help them open up more reserves in Russia and the Eastern Mediterranean Levant Basin. The problem with doing that is that Natural Gas becomes even more competitive with oil and its not-too-distant cousin - Coal. Coal miners are another group of Donald Trump supporters. After all - McDowell county practically crowned the man King for simply talking about hair spray and holding a shovel while pretending to dig! So if Donald Trump appeases the Natural Gas guys with their deep pockets, he will alienate the oil and coal guys.

So he basically has to appease everyone - which if he could magically do - would imply a major increase in the availability of coal, oil and natural gas to US consumers. This would cause the price of all these commodities to fall and that would hit the energy commodities trading crowd in places like NYMEX. While that might not seem so bad - after all most of Donald Trump's voters hate Wall Street but see - a good fraction of Donald Trump's own investments are in the same sector. If any end of that sector takes a hit - he will take a hit also.

So one sees the outlines of the Trumpography - a mass of contradictory impulses all powered by the desire to see sudden and "great" change.

If Donald Trump acts on even one of these promises he has made to all these people - he will bring his house of cards down.

So what can he do - well - he can do what he does best - make promises and never actually deliver - his smart followers will realize what is going on and their ardor for his cause will decline. I will be able to see that in a gradual decline in popularity of Trump inspired hash tags like #draintheswamp #hillaryforprism and #MAGA etc... The not-so-smart followers will continue to cling to the idea that somehow they can salvage their personal standing among family and friends by going down with the proverbial shift. The pro-Trump # will end up being propped up by these remaining followers.

It is here that I humbly ask The Yasenevo Guys to please back off with the Twittervasion (hey I think that is a new term).  I mean only the highest respect when I ask you to please not interfere with my poor-man's data collection. I don't have the big fancy cloud in Utah to pore through every twitter feed and chase it down to the last server in the anonyimizer app's chain. I also don't have the time to write hack a binary and stick that inside the anonymizer app or the twitter app and see what the true geolocation of each pro-Trump tweet is. Now if you folks in Yasenevo would please step back - then I could sample the twitter feed and correlate trends in it to the desperation tone in the Anonymous' video uploads on Twitter.  Between those two alone, I should be able to construct a working metric of the true support for Donald Trump. There is a third statistic - the number of negative sentiment scores that articles against Donald Trump receive - thankfully most major website have started carrying such a scoring card now and it is easy to work out how things are progressing from there, but the measure is in its infancy and I don't know how good their semantic analysis clustering algorithm is.

So once again - Yasenevo guys please back off - thanks and BTW - even you must admit that the SNL Christmas cold open is a classic. You may be greatest hackers in the world, but the US is still ahead of Russia in the world of comedy.

posted by maverick @ 5:56 AM