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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

I didn't get that sense from the article. It was all about influence. False stories influence people's opinions, and that may have encouraged voters to turn out or not for their candidate.

There was a lot of false and misleading information distributed online during this election, and literally spoken by the candidates (one more than another).

The biggest lie is actually at the heart of Trump's campaign, that he can bring back the jobs. Those jobs he's talking about haven't just been outsourced to other countries, in many cases they have been automated into oblivion. Trump promised to bring these back, but how can you bring something back that doesn't exist?

Mind you the Dems and Clinton had no substantial story to weave for the people that are hurting from the lack of these jobs. So people chose the fiction over no substantive story. It's an uncomfortable thing to tell people that everything they know is irrrelevent in the modern economy.

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Except to be fair to the Dems and the Clinton campaign, they did have proposals and white papers addressing exactly these communities. For example, a proposal to invest $30 billion into coal mining communities within the Appalachia regions with promises for infrastructure investment and private business investment, and retraining former and current miners into new skilled occupations. Of course all of this pales in comparison to Clinton's emails, while Trump's incoherent economic message of howling pain to reopen all the mining operations gets all the air time it needs.

Hillary also was resistant to the $15 minimum wage which would make a _huge_ difference for a lot of folks in the countryside. Hillary of course wanted to treat them like second-class citizens with only a $12 minimum.

Who's going to go read white-papers after that sort of offer?

The $15 minimum wage would have devastated the countryside.

I'm all over something like a minimum basic income that would effectively do the same thing as doubling the minimum wage, without putting the cost burden on businesses that can't afford it.

The perk of a national $15 minimum wage is to remove any incentive US only businesses that may consider relocating to less expensive parts of the country. I'm sure it seems perfectly reasonable in a high cost of living area, but outside of that it's a jaw droppingly bad proposal.

The problem with a straight-up $15 minwage is that it goes against what is becoming a huge force in this country: inequality. Minwage is meant to somewhat try to address inequality. But in fact, the difference between rural and urban cost of living is huge. So minwage needs to be sensitive to this.

The issue really needs to be completely depoliticized, and the minimum wage should really be set to some kind of local/regional indicator, and indexed to inflation.

But if we did that... politicians wouldn't get to flip this card out every 10 years to play it.

Clinton prefers a $12 minimum wage because outside of cities small business wouldn't be able to keep up with $15. Clinton wanted $15 minimum wage to be passed in cities that can handle it, and has explicitly supported people organizing those efforts.

From the primary debate:

"While Clinton believes $12 an hour is the right federal minimum, she is not steadfastly opposed to the idea of a $15 hourly minimum nationwide. On Thursday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked if she would sign a bill from Congress setting the federal minimum at that level (something that would be politically improbable). "Well, of course I would," she said."

I live in London. In the UK we have a statutory minimum wage (like the federal min wage - we are having almost the same debate in the UK) and a voluntary 'living wage' that is higher than the minimum wage and set to a minimum level that you can raise a family on with some degree of comfort. Its meant to be a signal for UK businesses about what kind of wage is a 'good wage' for low skilled work that treats their employees and their employees' labour with dignity.

The living wage in London is £9.75 and everywhere else its £8.45. Nobody says the living wage council thinks that people outside of London are second class citizens. People think that the living wage council is wise to recognise that living costs are much higher in cities like London, and areas outside of London have a business cost advantage for locating operations outside of London because people living in smaller towns have lower living costs and hence can enjoy the same living standard on less income.

Don't be a jerk by taking the least charitable interpretation of a policy when you know full well that it's bollocks.

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

Raising the costs of employing people isn't always the best way to get more employed.

Personally, I think the minimum wage as it exists isn't very useful. I'd replace it with a federal base level minimum wage where the local (county) minimum wage is composed of the base federal + COLA (which gets reevaluated yearly, like SS.) and it'd apply to all workers, public, private, local, state, federal.

I find it incredible that even living in the liberal echo chamber I never heard news about this proposal! I am even from Appalachia!

Part of the problem is that those in the media forgot about people who are different from them--- for whom those $30 billion could have meant the difference between permanent regional decline and a new start.

Enjoy the read: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2015/11/1...

Because all we've heard about Hillary and Obama is how they'll put coal out of business. I'd be curious how a supportive news media didn't pick up the second part of that story.

I dont' believe he can bring them back either but it wasn't based on a lie and I am pretty sure he means it which is why he wants to dig into the resources and rebuild infrastructure.

That does not make it a lie anymore than "yes we can" does.

Trump relied on one of the worst aspects of the Human existence, that someone else will fix your problems for you.

Giving people optimism about the future, bettering yours and everyone's existence is motivating for everyone. I believe this for anyone I've ever managed, and for any project I've ever worked on. People work better when they are optimistic.

"Yes, we can" is a motivational statement encouraging people to try. Trump's "make America great again" is based on some misguided notion of nastalgia. When is this period that that statement harkens back to?

Remember, the decades after WWII were great for the US because literally every other industrialized nation had been bombed so badly that they could barely make anything at all. America did well during this period because we had no competition.

So how do we go back to that?

>> Trump relied on one of the worst aspects of the Human existence, that someone else will fix your problems for you.

All politicians rely on this. Some of them deliver, most do not.

The people who voted for Trump disagree with you. It gave the exactly the hope that Obama gave in 2008.

Whether Trump or anyone can bring back jobs is subjective, and that is the biggest problem with separating "real" from "fake" - I don't believe it is possible to do without in any objective way at all.

The policies being proposed mean that the next time there is a leak, or stolen/hacked e-mail, the party involved can simply deny it is real and then the publisher would have to take the story offline or face some sort of negative weight or ban in Google and Facebook.

> how can you bring something back that doesn't exist

Quite simply, you take away labor protections. Automation does not eliminate jobs, it competes for them. If people are cheaper, businesses will opt for people, even in the presence of automation. Robots won't work for free; people have proven time and time again that they will.

There is some evidence[1] that Trump supports this method, at least to the point that he can push the blame onto lower levels of government if jobs don't materialize.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/05/09/donald-tr...

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