Here's what Trump means when he says 'drain the swamp' — even though it's not an accurate metaphor

REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Build that wall. Lock her up. Rigged.

At the bombastic and entertaining rallies now President-elect Donald Trump hosted throughout his campaign, the candidate yelled these refrains, and the crowd chanted them back.

In October, a new chant joined the canon: "Drain the swamp."

Trump announced his plans for sweeping ethics reform that day, pledging to "make our government honest once again."

Yet Trump is reportedly stacking his White House transition team with Washington lobbyists and GOP veterans, prompting some to question whether he really will "drain the swamp," and cleanse Washington of political insiders who are out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Where does the term come from?

Back when malaria was a problem in the US and Europe, draining swamps was an effective way to kill the mosquitoes that bred there and spread the disease.

The first person to apply the term to politics was a Democrat. "Socialists are not satisfied with killing a few of the mosquitoes which come from the capitalist swamp," Winfield E. Gaylord wrote in 1903. "They want to drain the swamp."

Trump likely drew his inspiration for the phrase from President Ronald Reagan. In 1980, Reagan called to "drain the swamp" of bureaucracy in Washington, and created the Grace Commission, which identified $424 billion of wasteful government spending that could be cut.

The commission's report overestimated potential savings and categorized necessary spending as "wasteful," so Congress didn't act on its recommendations.

An inaccurate depiction

The kicker is that Washington wasn't even built on a swamp. That's a common misconception, since the city's in a low-lying area between the Anacostia and Potomoc rivers, as urban historian Don Hawkins explained in The Washington Post.

Furthermore, draining a swamp is the worst thing you can do to it, environmentally speaking. It's even against the law in some municipalities of the US.

Draining an actual swamp can take necessary water from the environment that plants, animals, and other creatures need to survive.

It sure is catchy, though.

NOW WATCH: 'HOLD UP!': Watch Obama defend a Trump protester and scold the crowd at a Clinton rally

See Also:

• HARRY REID BREAKS SILENCE: Trump's election has 'emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry'
• Trump quickly changes his tone toward protesters following criticism
• What a Trump presidency will likely mean for the Supreme Court

SEE ALSO: Trump just shuffled his transition team

DON'T MISS: 'Drain the swamp'? Trump's transition team is full of DC lobbyists and insiders

from Business Insider http://ift.tt/2fF8Non
via IFTTT

Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?

(Photo: Tony Alter)

Season 6, Episode 10

When you take a sip of Cabernet, what are you tasting? The grape? The tannins? The oak barrel? Or the price?

Believe it or not, the most dominant flavor may be the dollars. Thanks to the work of some intrepid and wine-obsessed economists (yes, there is an American Association of Wine Economists), we are starting to gain a new understanding of the relationship between wine, critics and consumers.

One of these researchers is Robin Goldstein, whose paper detailing more than 6,000 blind tastings reaches the conclusion that “individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine.”

So why do we pay so much attention to critics and connoisseurs who tell us otherwise?

Along the way, you’ll hear details about Goldstein’s research as well as the story of how his “restaurant” in Milan, Osteria L’Intrepido, won an Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator magazine. (And not how you’d think!)

Also featured: Steve Levitt, who admits his palate is “underdeveloped,” describing a wine-tasting stunt he pulled on his elders at Harvard’s Society of Fellows.

Also, you’ll hear from wine broker Brian DiMarco who pulled a stunt of his own on his very wine-savvy employees. DiMarco also walks us through the mechanics of the wine-purchase business, and describes how price is often a far-too-powerful signal to our taste buds.

Plus, selective outrage — why we get so upset over some things, and then not over others.

Marius the giraffe lived at a zoo in Copenhagen. Zoo officials said he was a “surplus” animal: too genetically similar to other giraffes, and therefore he couldn’t breed. It was kinder, they said, to kill him. So they fed him some rye bread (“his favorite food”), shot him in the head, and dissected him in front of a crowd of onlookers, including kids. Next they fed his corpse to the lions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the world reacted with outrage.

How did this compare to the outrage expressed over the killing of hundreds of thousands of people during the ongoing civil war in Syria? Not quite commensurate. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, noticed this disparity, and he talks about it with Stephen Dubner.

You will also hear from Wall Street Journal reporter Jose de Cordoba, whose article about the Mexican avocado trade perhaps should have outraged people but didn’t. De Cordoba explains how most avocados eaten in the U.S. are “blood avocados,” made to pass through a criminal cartel that extorts, kidnaps, and kills.

To find out more, check out the podcasts from which this hour was drawn: “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” and “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Avocado”

You can subscribe to the Freakonomics Radio podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, or get the RSS feed.

The post Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Freakonomics http://ift.tt/2fkFVUj
via IFTTT

A climate change skeptic is leading Trump's EPA transition — but these charts prove that climate change is very real

President-elect Donald J. Trump has reportedly chosen Myron Ebell to head the EPA's transition team. Ebell is a proud climate skeptic, often referring to climate change scientists as alarmists.

Follow Tech Insider: On Facebook 

See Also:

• What happens when vegetarians eat meat for the first time
• A single bull made $30 billion for the dairy industry — but there’s a deadly downside
• Mount St. Helens isn’t like other volcanoes and scientists are just starting to understand why

from Business Insider http://ift.tt/2fJfh8f
via IFTTT

The Media Chart for Nov. 11: Baseball Maintains Top Swing

Unboxing the Nintendo NES Classic Edition everyone's going crazy for

Nintendo is back, and it's in high demand. The new NES Classic Edition was released in stores on November 11, and it sold out everywhere in a matter of minutes. The system is incredibly tiny and comes with 30 games pre-installed. Here's a look at what you'll find inside the box, if you can find one.

Follow Tech Insider: On Facebook

See Also:

• People are selling Nintendo's new $60 console for ridiculous amounts of money
• The story of 'Slender Man' — the internet’s creepiest urban legend
• How to find the new $60 miniature Nintendo console that's selling out everywhere

from Business Insider http://ift.tt/2epE6Gl
via IFTTT

Apple Watch And Other Trackers Are Still Missing A Vital Fitness Metric—Pain Factor

In the beginning they counted your steps, your distance, and your calorie burn. Then they counted your heartbeats. Some tried their luck at analyzing your sleep quality, with varying degrees of success.

Fitness trackers have been around for a few years now. Sensors have gotten better and cheaper. Algorithms have advanced. But what I’d argue is the most important fitness measurement—at least for aerobic stuff like running—has still not been added.

Let's call it "pain factor," the level and duration of physical strain or fatigue you feel while exercising.

Workouts come and workouts go. We come to our workouts at various times of the day and week, and with various body conditions—different amounts and quality of sleep, different types and amounts of fuel (food) in the tank, different stress levels. So that workout that seemed like a piece of cake on Monday morning can feel grueling on Thursday afternoon.

It’s that level of suffering we should be watching. The difference between someone who’s successful at working out well and consistently, and someone who isn't, may be in their ability to understand pain level and their capacity for pain—and manage it accordingly.

You don’t need a device to tell you when you’re feeling the burn. But a device could put a number on it that’s based on real, measurable factors. "Pain factor" is a relative number, meaningful only in its relationship to other pain levels at other times.

So we need our fitness trackers to know when we’re suffering based on some simple information that we, and our bodies, provide. The algorithm would need to know something about what I’d eaten that day. It might factor in the quality of my sleep the night before. Heart rate relative to the difficulty of the workout would likely be a factor.

Let’s say we can now look down at our wrist and see a "pain level" number from 1 to 10. What could we do with that? How could that help?

It could change the way you normally measure the quality of your workout. Instead of looking at basic metrics like pace, duration, or distance, you might begin seeing "quality" as the amount of time you maintained a specific activity at a given pain level.

Let’s say you haven’t worked out in a while and you’ve fallen out of shape. You might reach your pain factor norm well before you finish the normal time or distance of your workout. Time to stop.

On the other hand, if you’re having one of those good days when your body seems eager to work out, and you finish your normal workout before hitting your normal pain level, you might choose to tack an extra 10 minutes on to the end of the session.

It could service as a motivation tool. Let’s say you’re a little tired when you start your normal 35-minute run around the park. And five minutes in you’re hurting. If you know you have, in the past, powered through the same run at the same pain level, it might make you think, "I’ve been here before; I know I can do this" and keep going.

On the same logic, pain (or, rather, too much of it) doesn’t always turn into gain. Many people work out too hard (often driven by guilt about not working out enough) and endure more than a workout’s worth of pain. That can have physical risks, like injuries from trying to lift too much weight when you're tired.

The main risk might be psychological. When we push ourselves too hard or too long in a workout, it ratchets up the pain level. And it’s that pain level we tend to remember after the fact, not the extra 30 minutes on the treadmill or the extra two-mile run. And that memory of physical—and mental—pain can make it mentally harder to get yourself back in the gym or on the trail. And consistent workouts with moderate pain always trump infrequent, painful workouts.

Perhaps the main theme in the evolution of health wearables is their ability to go beyond giving users raw, static data like time and distance, and deliver meaningful, actionable insights that can directly impact performance and health. "Pain factor" might be an example of that. The new metric would result from data crunching a set of more basic static and real-time numbers—some provided by sensors, others provided by the user—to generate a meaningful number for the user.

Of course, even more useful would be a device that knows the meaning of that score so that it could say things like: "You’ve suffered enough today, Mark. Now hit the showers."

from Fast Company http://ift.tt/2eLlFr9
via IFTTT

Corey Lewandowski resigns from CNN amid speculation he will serve in Trump White House

Thomson Reuters

Corey Lewandowski, who was fired earlier this year as the campaign manager for President-elect Donald Trump, resigned his position at CNN on Friday amid speculation he will serve in the Trump administration.

A CNN spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that Lewandowski had left the network, effective immediately.

Lewandowski joined CNN in June just three days after being fired by Trump. 

Media critics skewered the cable news network for hiring the political operative, especially when it was revealed he was still accepting payments from the Trump campaign while serving as a political analyst.

A list of officials being considered for senior positions inside the White House was published by the Daily Caller on Thursday night. According to the list, Lewandowski was being considered for the positions of deputy chief of staff for planning and senior adviser to the president.

CNN reported he was spotted outside of Trump Tower in New York City on Friday.

NOW WATCH: David Cay Johnston: 'There’s very good reason to believe Trump’s been engaged in tax fraud'

See Also:

• 'Very unfair!': Trump sends mixed messages over ongoing protests
• 'Trump is a chump' — what Theresa May's chiefs of staff think about the new US president
• Trump says protesters have 'passion for our great country' after calling demonstrations 'very unfair'

SEE ALSO: Trump says he's willing to keep 2 key parts of Obamacare that he couldn't repeal anyway

from Business Insider http://ift.tt/2fKN6nD
via IFTTT