Hungry eyes

According to a recent article, there's an interesting wrinkle in the world of driverless cars: Apparently all the computing required to run one uses 2-4kW. As an additional quirk, this usage needs to happen more or less all the time, no matter how slow a car is going. In a typical gas-operated scenario, mileage is largely independent of speed (up to a point where air resistance starts going up a lot), but is heavily affected by starts and stops. Electrics improve upon this by sitting in pure standby while idle and recapturing some of the energy used for acceleration during braking.

The dynamic of a constantly operating energy sink alters mileage computations significantly, especially if it's using 2-4kW (about 3-5hp). I'll use the Nissan Leaf as an example (30 kW-hr battery, 100 mile range). Other electrics fare similarly enough for this analysis in consumption per mile.

We can calculate the loss of range off a full charge due to the computing. I'll use the following shorthand in computations:
S: average speed of travel (in mph)
D: distance traveled (in mi)
U: power utilized by computing (in kW)
C: battery capacity (in kW-hr)
T: time traveled (in hr)
R: maximum range


Full charge = energy used for miles + energy used over time
C = CD/R + UT

And the time spent traveling is:
T = D/S

C = CD/R + UD/S
C = D(C/R + U/S)
D = C / (C/R + U/S)

A semi-urban commute might happen at an average of 20-35mph. This seems counterintuitive because most speed limits are 35 or higher, but consider how often you have to stop at a light, or traffic is backed up. I'll use what I consider common examples, but your mileage may vary.

at 35mph, range is reduced to 72-84 miles.
at 20mph, range is reduced to 60-75 miles.
at 10mph, range is reduced to 43-60 miles.

Here's a table showing what fraction of nominal range is maintained at different speeds and power utilizations:

	U1	U2	U3	U4	U5	U6	U7
Speed	4	3	2	1	0.5	0.3	0.1
75	0.840	0.875	0.913	0.955	0.977	0.986	0.995
70	0.831	0.867	0.908	0.952	0.975	0.985	0.995
65	0.820	0.859	0.901	0.948	0.973	0.984	0.995
60	0.808	0.849	0.894	0.944	0.971	0.982	0.994
55	0.794	0.837	0.885	0.939	0.969	0.981	0.994
50	0.778	0.824	0.875	0.933	0.966	0.979	0.993
45	0.759	0.808	0.863	0.927	0.962	0.977	0.992
40	0.737	0.789	0.849	0.918	0.957	0.974	0.991
35	0.710	0.766	0.831	0.908	0.952	0.970	0.990
30	0.678	0.737	0.808	0.894	0.944	0.966	0.988
25	0.637	0.700	0.778	0.875	0.933	0.959	0.986
20	0.584	0.651	0.737	0.849	0.918	0.949	0.982
15	0.513	0.584	0.678	0.808	0.894	0.933	0.977
10	0.412	0.483	0.584	0.737	0.849	0.903	0.966
5	0.260	0.318	0.412	0.584	0.737	0.824	0.933

Depending on the speed of a commute, the computer can realistically impose a 20% or even higher overhead on range. I've highlighted the chart to show classes of ranges. I've somewhat arbitrarily decided that more than a 20% loss is red, 10-20% loss is orange, 5-10% is yellow, etc. The green category I chose at 2% or less loss because that amounts to less than a mile per gallon at the mileage achieved by current hybrid cars, though full electrics are generally rated around double that (~100mpg equivalent).

Clearly with the current tech this would be a major hit, especially for commuter situations (where the vast majority of driving, especially of shorter range electrics). I've focused on electrics for the moment because it's easier to do the math without converting between gas and electric consumptions. That said, if we use the baseline that current EVs are rated at 100mpg equivalent, it means they are about 2-3 times as efficient at producing miles per unit energy. Perhaps ironically, this means gasoline engines take a proportionally smaller hit from the self-driving computers since the energy used to power the computers is proportionally less than that used by the engine itself. Here's a similar table of a typical hybrid (assume 50mpg):

	U1	U2	U3	U4	U5	U6	U7
Speed	4	3	2	1	0.5	0.3	0.1
75	0.918	0.938	0.957	0.978	0.989	0.993	0.998
70	0.913	0.933	0.955	0.977	0.988	0.993	0.998
65	0.907	0.929	0.951	0.975	0.987	0.992	0.997
60	0.900	0.923	0.947	0.973	0.986	0.992	0.997
55	0.892	0.917	0.943	0.971	0.985	0.991	0.997
50	0.882	0.909	0.938	0.968	0.984	0.990	0.997
45	0.871	0.900	0.931	0.964	0.982	0.989	0.996
40	0.857	0.889	0.923	0.960	0.980	0.988	0.996
35	0.840	0.875	0.913	0.955	0.977	0.986	0.995
30	0.818	0.857	0.900	0.947	0.973	0.984	0.994
25	0.789	0.833	0.882	0.938	0.968	0.980	0.993
20	0.750	0.800	0.857	0.923	0.960	0.976	0.992
15	0.692	0.750	0.818	0.900	0.947	0.968	0.989
10	0.600	0.667	0.750	0.857	0.923	0.952	0.984
5	0.429	0.500	0.600	0.750	0.857	0.909	0.968

Also, ironically, as locomotive efficiency rises, the proportional drag of an always-on system rises. The same table for a 200mpg takes some pretty big hits even for a 100W system:

	U1	U2	U3	U4	U5	U6	U7
Speed	4	3	2	1	0.5	0.3	0.1
75	0.738	0.789	0.849	0.918	0.957	0.974	0.991
70	0.724	0.778	0.840	0.913	0.955	0.972	0.991
65	0.709	0.765	0.830	0.907	0.951	0.970	0.990
60	0.692	0.750	0.818	0.900	0.947	0.968	0.989
55	0.673	0.733	0.805	0.892	0.943	0.965	0.988
50	0.652	0.714	0.789	0.882	0.938	0.962	0.987
45	0.628	0.692	0.771	0.871	0.931	0.957	0.985
40	0.600	0.667	0.750	0.857	0.923	0.952	0.984
35	0.568	0.636	0.724	0.840	0.913	0.946	0.981
30	0.529	0.600	0.692	0.818	0.900	0.938	0.978
25	0.484	0.556	0.652	0.789	0.882	0.926	0.974
20	0.429	0.500	0.600	0.750	0.857	0.909	0.968
15	0.360	0.429	0.529	0.692	0.818	0.882	0.957
10	0.273	0.333	0.429	0.600	0.750	0.833	0.938
5	0.158	0.200	0.273	0.429	0.600	0.714	0.882

However, it's likely that by the time cars are twice as efficient much will have changed about our traffic. It might coincide with entire fleets of driverless cars that can coordinate in real-time and completely avoid traffic jams. Slow speeds may completely disappear.


In the nearer term, the question is whether this 2-4kW consumption is likely to drop significantly. The current systems are, as far as I know, running as software on relatively commodity compute devices. This is necessary because the technology is nascent. Over time, many routines can move to FPGAs or ASICs, which tend to come with gigantic power savings. This white paper suggests an FPGA has nearly an order of magnitude savings over GPUs. There will also be fabrication improvements that drive efficiency per operation downwards; it's not unrealistic to combine those two factors along with other efficiencies and get down to the 100W range in the next 5-10 years. At 100W, it's no worse than a stereo, and its highly optimized driving can probably save that much power compared to a human-operated gas pedal.

About that tax reform

While it's too early to know a lot of details about the GOP tax plan, there's already plenty of red flags. Reading through the article (and having heard GOP talk about it), there are themes that come up regularly

Taxes need to be fairer
Everyone can agree that fair is good, but it's usually hard to agree on what fair is. We could try to define it many ways, but canonical examples of fair are:
1. Everyone pays the same amount. This is a great model when we all split a pizza or gas money. However, taxes don't go to a fixed item that everyone is choosing to consume. They go into a general pool and general decisions are made on how to spend it. Given that our federal tax revenues hover around 10% of GDP, translating to about $6000 per person. This is unaffordable for many low-income families. Paying the same is fair, but asking someone to pay more than they make seems unfair, right?
2. Everyone pays the same percent of their income. This is fair in that everyone chips in an amount they actually have. Ignoring deductions for a second, there's still the matter of
3. The more you make, the higher percent (and total) you pay. This is roughly our system today (with famous exceptions for the very wealthy who primarily make income off capital gains). But, what is a fair curve to apply?

Fair is, outside of obviously unfair models, somewhat arbitrary. Pretty much the only thing we agree on is that someone who makes more should pay more ... but there's a ton of details left after that! Saying a code will be more fair is a barely assessable statement. We could write a strong argument that a particular scheme falls into the unfair category, but that's easy enough avoid. After that we're left comparing opinions.

Taxes need to be simpler
While taxes can be pretty complex for those with a lot of dealings, they are quite simple for the basic filer. A 1040A or 1040EZ requires copying values from a W-2, doing a few lines of math, and you're done. About 42% of filers use one of these forms instead of the 1040 long form. The choice of form speaks to, loosely, the amount of financial wheeling and dealing a person is doing. Most of the complexity stems from the way various money streams are treated. That includes special deductions (for mortgage interest, sales tax, charitable donations, tax-sheltered accounts like 401k, HSA, ...), incomes (capital gains, .. ), etc. The GOP has primarily been talking about the number of tax brackets though ... which seems to me the least offensive part of the tax complexities. Regardless of the tax brackets, you scroll to page 78 of this table, find your income, then copy the number from the correct column. We could have 1000 brackets and it'd be an identical process. It's fine to go with 3. Or 7. Or whatever. Just don't talk it up as an actual selling point.

The non-stupid simplification rhetoric speaks, I think, mostly to perceived loopholes in the system. These suggest to many that there's some kind of unfairness or cheat code in the system that only a select few (elites, if you will) get to take advantage of. That the system is stacked against them. There is likely some truth to this: the tax code evolved over decades to amend ambiguous rules for situations, for example. Getting a handle on those rules requires a professional understanding of tax. Sometimes specific tax breaks are given as part of deals. The tax code's goal is to strike a balance between a healthy economy and income for the country. It's actually a relatively pragmatic matter and not really an idealistic one. There are general philosophies, but also choices made to address relatively specific scenarios. However, most of those don't apply to most of us, so adjusting them will make no difference to us (aside from some abstract sense of justice that we didn't really understand to begin with).

One concrete detail we know is there's a plan to roughly double the standard deduction (to 12k for single and 24k for married filing jointly). One sell point is that more people will be able to file simpler returns. That's nice, but probably not the thing to base monetary policy on. The focus here should be on whether this helps people. Trivially it does: those with lower incomes get to keep more money! This is generally seen as compassionate, and "fair". I have no issue with it. However, look a bit further up the income graph: these people save even more. The higher tax bracket someone is in, the more benefit they get from a deduction. There is already an analogous critique of mortgage interest deductions, health savings accounts, etc: the more you make, the more benefit these tax shelters provide. It shifts the landscape to be less "the more you make, the more you pay", though in absolute terms we still meet that requirement. It's potentially "fair", but trending towards the boundary of less fair. Is that fair? Who knows. What the larger deduction definitely does is reduce tax revenue. If 42% of the population files a 1040A or 1040EZ, that's something like 60M returns deducting $300-700B at rates between 10 and 33%. Without getting further into the demographics, assume the middle of those ranges and we're looking at about $100B lost revenue per year. That sounds suspiciously in the ballpark of the $1.5T over a decade the revised tax code is predicted to lose. And the people probably making up the bulk of that pool don't need the tax cuts.

Lowering taxes will boost the economy
This is an age-old argument. Companies will get to keep more money and will of course reinvest it in their operations and employees instead of pay it out as giant bonuses to senior leadership or spend it on share buybacks. The assessment from every impartial expert I've read is that the particulars of this tax plan are a pipe dream. Only with incredibly optimistic projections can this tax cut pay for itself. The actual history here is that healthcare reform (err - healthcare cuts) were supposed to save the money to pay for the tax cuts. GOP healthcare reform has famously fallen apart three times now, so this tax cut really does have to stand on its own. I'm not an expert, so I'll just go along with the assumption that it will not work as presented.



While we can't know the finer details of the plan until something is actually presented to the public, it seems like there's plenty of hot air behind what we already know. Touting trivial points and misleading policy decisions is not the way to do serious, actual, tax reform. Reality has this great way of winning in the long run; the people putting this plan together need to respect that fact.

Why the Equifax breach is such a huge deal

Equifax lost data for 143 million Americans. It's being reported that:
The criminals had access to information that could allow them to create or take over accounts for many of the people impacted since they have names, addresses, birth dates, social security numbers and "in some cases" drivers license numbers.

Public outrage has been mostly focused on Equifax (and Transunion and Experian and another one or two smaller agencies) asking customers to sign up for more Equifax products like credit freezing and monitoring services. This is completely missing the point.

Credit freezing only helps (sometimes) when criminals attempt to open new lines of credit. However, the stolen information could allow them to pose credibly as owners of existing accounts as well.

The particularly infuriating thing is that none of us chooses to have a relationship with Equifax or any other credit agency. Every line of credit, utility, loan, mortgage, etc, all end up in the bowels of these companies. They each use proprietary algorithms to condense our worthiness into a single number. There are three major ones so that fluctuations in how they assess our credit can be averaged out, or a particular institution can pick their favorite one. Regardless, it's impossible to function in the modern world without being completely linked with them.

When there's a mistake in their data or their analysis is bad, we have almost no recourse. Serious mistakes are surprisingly common. Silly mistakes happen all the time. My wife ended up with a huge hit to her credit because a zombie $75 end-of-service bill came back to life and Qwest/CenturyLink couldn't figure out how to contact her so they sent it to collections. I ended up with a ridiculous alias in one service probably because some data entry person copied my name wrong from a form. And these are just our problems.

And now, a company we want nothing to do with but gets all our information has allowed a lot of core, correlated, information to get out into the wild. And we have no recourse. We have to figure out what accounts might be vulnerable if someone knows enough information about us, and Equifax can't even reliably tell us what information was, in fact, compromised. Someone opening new lines of credit in our names that we can monitor and get shut down seem to be the least of our worries. As usual, we have virtually no recourse. Equifax doesn't have enough money to pay for the likely damages from this hack.

It seems like every company needs to recognize that name, address, social security number, birth day is not secure and move to a better model of security for account access.

The first 92 days

I posted this on Facebook this morning, but wanted to expand on it a bit.

As we approach the modern-day checkpoint of the first 100 days, Trumpflake would like to remind us that he's actually done so much and anyone who says he hasn't is fake news. What has Trump actually accomplished?

He has gotten a Supreme Court Justice appointed. That is certainly a thing. I would, however, argue that it was really Mitch McConnell who did that. If not for that bag of misery, we'd have filled the available seat with Garland a year ago. This is akin to Little Donnie being proud that he baked a cake when all he actually did was turn the oven on. It's so cute when they don't know what all else has to go into it!

He has managed to simultaneously achieve the lowest approval and highest disapproval numbers since that's been a thing. If only he could have done the exact opposite of what he's doing, he'd have very nice approval numbers in the low 60s.

He keeps telling us his wall is ahead of schedule, but there was never a schedule announced. He also proudly talks about how illegal immigration is way down already. But we still need the wall because Mexicans are bad.

He has signed a huge number of executive orders whose contents he's been barely aware of, none of which (to my knowledge) has demonstrable positive effects on society. The most egregious have been held up in court. He then lashed out at the courts because so-called judges are bad.

He lied about basic, verifiable, facts like his inauguration crowd size, whether Korea was part of China, barely knowing Paul Manafort, 3+ million illegal voters (who all voted for Hillary), Obama screaming at protesters, Obama's nationality, the state of black neighborhoods, who donates money to, General Pershing subverting the Philippines by dipping bullets in pigs' blood, the relative size of his electoral college win, and probably the size of his penis. There's more, check out the false and pants on fires here (which together make up right about half of his evaluated statements):
http://www.politifact.com/…/dona…/statements/byruling/false/
http://www.politifact.com/…/donald-trump/statements/byrulin…

He made a total debacle of health care reform, then tried to pawn it all off on Paul Ryan (somewhat fairly). But, it was his promise too and he needed to be more involved.

He continues to focus on the Islamic Terrorist boogieman when there are so many far more dangerous things we can do a lot more about going on. (gun deaths, alcohol deaths, drug overdose deaths, distracted driver deaths, deaths due to preventable health conditions, homeless deaths, ... )

He also focuses on the regulations boogieman and how they should be significantly reduced. (Regulations are vetted and serve to protect the population as a whole)

He shot $90-100M of missiles at an airfield in Syria and failed to actually take it out of commission.

He has reduced the role of science in decision making, for example insisting that global warming is fake news and that it should not be a considered factor in regulations.

Numerous people on his senior/appointed staff have had to resign or recuse themselves due to lying about potentially inappropriate contact with Russians.

He, and many in his administration, continue to investigated by the FBI, Senate and House for suspicious ties to Russia.

He has spent at an actually unprecedented (the real term, not how he uses it) rate on vacations to Mar-a-Lago. He has also played golf at an unprecedented rate. Also, Trump the private citizen profits directly from these trips.

His wife lives in a different city, costing the city of New York $40-50M per year, as well as federal taxpayers money for lodging Secret Service. Trump the private citizen profits directly from this.
He rolled back protections for women and LQBQT.

He has reduced the quality of discourse to a 3rd-grade level.

While writing this up, I literally had to start looking back at older news because there's so much. I'm sure I didn't even get everything that could be considered major on here.

So ... what has he done right? Why should anyone write a positive report card about his work?

I had to think, and think, and think to come up with all the things on this list. And I still missed some (like the wiretapping lies, handing Merkel a bill for Germany's "debt" to NATO, ... ). I realize constantly that practically every day this administration does something that would be a once-a-year (or maybe once-a-quarter) shock. 

An admittedly imperfect take on gerrymandering

We all know gerrymandering is a thing, but what can we do about it? Can we even quantify how much there is? How can we say what representatives "should have" won? If you put people in different districts and had them vote on different representative options, there's no guarantee of who they would vote for.

I would propose, however, that there should be reasonable alignment between the popular presidential vote and the number of House seats for each party. While looking at each state is fraught with error (some representatives have broad appeal, for example), I would expect the effect to average out. Alternatively: the effect should average out if there's no systemic bias in how districts are drawn.

In the last election, Clinton took 48% of the popular vote, Trump 46%, and other 6%. If we simply scale this out over the 435 house seats, the alignment suggest we should see 209 Democrats, 200 Republicans, and 26 question marks. I would then generally expect that the question marks should also subdivide similarly and would leave us around 222 Democrats vs 213 Republicans.

The actual number is 193 Democrats, 237 Republicans, and 5 empty seats (for example because cabinet appointments who had been representatives have not been replaced yet). That's less Democrats than we'd expect in even the worst case (where the question marks all go Republican). It's certainly far fewer than the slight advantage this model says Democrats should have.

Where does this discrepancy come from? I charted the vote tallies in each state and compared the expected (proportional) representative count to the actual. I rolled the 3rd party votes proportionately into the two main parties. What do I see?

Republicans have an advantage in a lot more states than Democrats
While only 16 Democratic states have more representatives than the model would predict, 31 states have more Republicans than we'd expect. Screening out all the states where the net effect is less than 1 representative (rounding error, essentially), leaves only 7 states with a Democratic advantage compared to 21 going the other way.

Republicans own the majority of the biggest swings
The top 10 swings (positive denotes pro-Republican) are Texas (+5.3), Pennsylvania (+3.9), California (-3.6), Ohio (+3.3), North Carolina (+3.3), Massachusetts (-3.2), Florida (+2.3), Georgia (+2.2), Connecticut (-2.1), Michigan (2.0).

Republicans gain big in close states
It's not surprising that a state leaning heavily one way would have a more extreme representative makeup. However, Republicans make some huge gains in tightly contested states. Filtering those with popular votes between 47% and 53% shows significant wins in Pennsylvania (+3.9), North Carolina (+3.3), Florida (+2.3), Georgia (+2.2), Michigan (+2.0), Virginia (+1.8), Wisconsin (+1.0). In all, Republicans made more than half their gains (14.6 of 26.4) in states with fairly close presidential popular votes. Half again (+7.3) of that gain is made in states where the popular vote was within 51-49.

So what's going on here? There's a common narrative that Republicans got a boost from promising to repeal Obamacare. Even if not for that, perhaps there's just random volatility? Republicans have in fact controlled the House since 2010 (when Obamacare became their rallying cry), but didn't in 2008 or 2006. But, we have to go all the way back to 1992 to see the previous time Democrats had numbers ... though the Democrat win streak then stretches all the way back to 1960 when the party wasn't even the same thing it is today.

What happened in 1994 to turn the tide?
That was when the more heavily partisan rhetoric started to come into play, but I'm not sure how that influenced the outcomes. Perhaps it was more fear-based, playing on people's concerns? Whether through gerrymander, message, or something else, Republicans figured out a new way to play and win.

Republican presidents were winning elections in the 60s, 70s and 80s, proving that the model I've proposed has no predictive power. I still wonder if it should work, if there's some kind of rigging or gamesmanship afoot, or if there are just tides in politics I don't understand.

A little propaganda with breakfast

I just got up on the weekend and am making some eggs and toast and tea. I'm also, of course, looking over what people have posted on Facebook. A friend liked a meme with the following text:

He didn't say you couldn't have an abortion... he said you have to pay for it yourself if you do.
He didn't say refugees were not welcome... he said let's make sure they are not here to harm us before we let them in.
He didn't say Mexicans couldn't come in... he said come in the right way, not through the back door.
He's not taking away ANYONES freedom, he's keeping us safe and unfunding things that should never have been funded in the first place.
That's simply the way I see it... if I'm wrong please correct me.

The "he" is Trump, obviously. The writing requires vetting. Extreme vetting!

It's probably best to start (and end) at the end. The author has just made a number of statements that read like facts. Then, they soften their tone to say that's just their opinion and they are, apparently, open to discussion. This leaves the reader with a less harsh impression, perhaps more open to the idea that the author at least has some points. Let's look at those points.

He didn't say you couldn't have an abortion... he said you have to pay for it yourself if you do.
This has been essentially the case for 40 years. Abortions became federally legal in 1973 (Roe v Wade) and the Hyde amendment to limit the use of federal funds for abortions passed in 1976. It's been expanded a bit since; in its current incarnation it allows the use of those funds for abortions in the case of rape or life-endangering condition. So, Trump is saying nothing new from a Republican platform perspective.... is he?

He is, or at least he's backing legislation that does. In addition to the standard pro-life, pro-Hyde stance, the current draft of the AHCA ("TrumpCare", or "RyanCare", but lol neither wants their name attached to that steaming pile of shit) has a provision that the health care tax credits (akin to the ACA subsidies) that make health care theoretically more affordable for people can NOT be used on a plan that covers abortions. It's worth repeating that simply covering abortions negates the tax credit. It makes no difference if you use that coverage or not. This would essentially force a huge number of plans to abandon abortion coverage (evidently about 2/3 of insurance plans cover abortions to some degree), making abortion uncovered for a huge number of women. Even if a woman has no intention of ever having an abortion and is fine not covering it, there's still the case of rape or danger that may now not be covered. The AHCA clause is a poison pill designed to create new gaps which will almost definitely leave people uncovered in unfortunate cases.

He didn't say refugees were not welcome... he said let's make sure they are not here to harm us before we let them in.
On a very basic level this false. Trump has reduced the number of refugees the USA is taking in this year (50,000) to its lowest levels since at least 1980. That sends no other message than refugees are less welcome. It's not technically "not welcome", but clearly they are less, rather than as or more, welcome than before. This is also a crazy huge false dichotomy. It implies that there are two mindsets:
1. We have to further limit refugees to be safe
2. We should just let anyone in
There are clearly other possibilities, including the system we've had in place. As has been argued and documented over and over, refugees face years of vetting. There seems to be a misunderstanding that refugees just show up at our border and we give them hugs and gift baskets. And as has been documented time and again, these refugees (and immigrants in general) have caused less crime than the American baseline. As confirmed by leaked DHS documents, the new immigration policy from the Middle East is unlikely to have any positive effect on safety. There's just no need to "do more vetting". It's like checking that your door is locked three times instead of twice. Sure, it's not less safe ... but is it really more safe? To complete the analogy, what else did you miss out on doing while you were needlessly checking that lock over and over? Bringing that back to reality, we're creating the perfect propaganda for ISIS recruitment. I've purposefully avoided purely humanitarian or compassionate arguments. Yes, we should feel those things, but even without invoking any humanity, this is bullshit.

He didn't say Mexicans couldn't come in... he said come in the right way, not through the back door.
Funny, I'm sure his Mexicans went through the back door while working for him. Snark aside, this is an almost identically set up false dichotomy. There's no mainstream argument that we should just let Mexicans walk over the border illegally anytime they want. We just don't agree that a giant wall is the right way to accomplish this. A person can be for border security AND think the wall is idiotic. Since we're talking specifically about Mexicans, there's the other half (roughly) who came over legally and overstayed because it was unclear if they'd be able to come back again in the future as border policy changed. Or they just wanted to stay. Wrongs were done, sure. But the argument here is not an ideologue justice one, but rather a pragmatic one. Can we round up and deport millions of people and if we do, what effect does that have on communities and economies? These are the conversations we need to have instead of running around with our pitchforks to push people out who have been here far longer than the statute of limitations on most crimes lasts.

He's not taking away ANYONES freedom, he's keeping us safe and unfunding things that should never have been funded in the first place.
On a basic technical level, the unfunding claim pretends an opinion is actually fact. There's certainly disagreement on funding abortions, but that it never should have been funded is not a fact. TrumpCare is unfunding it in a roundabout way (and it will have unintended consequences), but it's mostly already unfunded. The claim that he's keeping us safe implies that he's doing more to keep us safer. That doesn't appear to hold water. He's like the daddy who won't let you go to the park because there might be a bad hombre there, even though you're going with your 20 friends and even though he has no concerns about you going to the grocery store or mall or movies or abandoned quarry. If we take "keeping us safe" literally, it's a status quo statement and adds nothing. Either way, there's nothing there.

Whether or not he's taking away anyone's freedom is a much broader question. This meme addresses three concrete items. If, say, a 4th item was "and no one is allowed out after dark", then this would be blatantly false. Not losing freedom does not follow from these particular three lines not encroaching on freedoms. Academics aside, even these 3 shouldn't lead to that conclusion. Even if you take the stance that refugees and Mexicans have no freedoms promised and are therefore not an issue, the abortion-related tax credit loss should raise a few flags. Technically you can still get whatever plan you want, but there's now a federal incentive to get one that does not cover abortions. If not a loss of freedom, it's at least a case of coercion. If we want to look beyond these three, the assault on the free press is evidence enough that he wants less freedom.

... and we come full circle.
Now that we've shoveled a giant load of contentious shit, we do the same thing Trump does. Tone it like we care so much, that this is just common sense, and maybe it's not bulletproof but the heart's in the right place. Even if you can nitpick things, overall this is sound.

I can't nitpick anything here, I can only blow the whole thing up.