Surprised he didn't drop a huge tariff on Mexican products and use that money to build the wall. That way, he could actually say that Mexico paid for the wall.

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/856933469452201986

Traditional 401(k) is always excluded. Traditional IRA is only deductible if you are under a certain income threshold. Roth contributions can only be made up to a certain income level, but no deductible IRA contributions can be moved over to a Roth with no tax in many cases.

Hopefully today is the day they start the process of moving the wall to the Canadian border. In Mexico you don't find poker players who think magnetic bracelets actually work or Phds who think Rachel Maddow is better at math than me, or that all Republicans should die painfully. There is something in the water up there.

They tried to float that balloon in Jan and everyone freaked out so they slowly backed away.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/politi...x-border-wall/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Maddow

i don't know about Maddow, but as someone with an actual math phd your strutting around pretending to be good at "math" based on you enjoying elementary logic puzzles is pretty hilarious.

rachel maddow has a phd in public policy so it's fair to assume she has a better grasp of how government works than a math phd. you could probably calculate the volume of cones way faster than her tho so take pride in that

It was posted a couple pages ago but that piece on Trump at the apprentice is amazing. That's exactly how he governs. And then is press sec and cabinet are forced to talk and circles and go to bat for him.

The something in the water is called logic, progressives politics and rational social policy.

fyp

DS wasn't comparing maddow to a math phd. He was comparing maddow to himself. World of difference there. Like he likes to pretend he is part of that club, but it isn't remotely true.

What is your subfield uke?

This is awesome. State judiciary seems to be the only branch of government with any ****ing integrity nowadays

I think this has been tried but Trump has perfected his bull**** incoherent babble spiel game that he's basically unpenetrable. Wasn't GJ's primary failing that he stopped to ask what Aleppo was? Trump is expert in that he never does that. He'll just say his health care plan works because it covers everyone, no cost, it's tremendous. Ask him the details, he'll point to his dealmaking skills, how it's someone elses responsibility to know any of the details but he's a winner and his plan will be great, you'll see, he's got the best people on it. He's not going to be tripped up by that. Obviously to normal people it's complete bull**** gibberish but he's not going to suffer appreciably for it.

Better than asking him to explain how his health care plan work is to actually ask him obvious trivia questions. He should have Russerted, basically. Russert used to love those "and can you tell me the prime minister of the UK?" questions after he would let them riff on some policy about British/American relations. They were tedious but it's like the one form of question you can trip Trump up on because he can't simply answer it by telling you how great he'll make everything. It's unfortunate no one has done that with him: what's the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, how many representatives are in the House, what's the capital of Florida, etc.

Algebraic topology (sepcifically equivariant K-theory and applications in symplectic geometry). I moved into a teaching stream assistant professor position after PhD, so I consider myself more of an educator than a mathematician these days.

It's easy enough to brush off trivia questions as improper for an interview, and you would basically be guaranteeing that your outlet loses all future access.

this was the nuclear triad thing. but it didn't matter because the average american couldn't answer it either

Probably. And it is generally improper and not useful. But I'm confident it's probably the only way to really trip up Trump. Because I don't think "tell us the details of your health care plan?" are kryptonite for Trump. He's simply too skilled at bull**** gibberish to embarrass himself ala GJ. One of the obvious Trumpian skills is being media savvy and having 30 years of yuking it up with people about topics he probably knows less than nothing about, often on camera or in a big room full of people. He just spits out a bunch of verbal diarrhea, hand-waving allusions to how great he is or the outcome will be, and it often includes a tacit admission he doesn't know anything but has employed some experts to tell him or whatever. When pressed he just repeats the self-promote-y salesman word salad stuff. I don't think he can be shaken like that.

Actuary exams at 19 tho.

Exactly. But it's emblematic of why you can't stump him like that. It's not just because most people don't know how we deliver nukes. I don't remember exactly what he said but IIRC it was just self-promotion ("I'll handle it great") and trite truisms and populist jargon that are actual valid words and phrases but mean nothing in context ("nuclear is dangerous, that's the whole game!") and then literally just gave up and said the devastation was the most important thing to him (???). It's not just that people don't know about how we shoot nuclear missiles off but it's also that any question which allows for subjectivity and doesn't have a singular correct answer can simply be babbled through with some trite nonsense and the interviewer is not going to be equipped to combat it without violating standards and unwritten rules about editorializing ("lolol wtf, you're a moron?!") like ATC noted.

uke-sklansky math olympiad for rolls

Cool. I do mostly algebraic geometry, but some stuff in my work has analogues in K-Theory I believe. I also studied a very simple sounding problem called the Horn problem, maybe you know it, (given three hermitian matrices A, B, C, when do A and B have conjugates that sum to C?), which has a symplectic geometric approach involving moment maps. Interesting that several 2p2 politards can have such similar paths, but I guess poker + politics attracts only certain kinds of people.

I'll probably end up not doing research also. Not that I dislike it, but the postdoc period is just too long and miserable ime.

Oh right - I was mixing up 401(k) and IRA.

17. 11th grade.