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T enacious,  R esolute,  U nder-estimated, M essianic, P ersuader It has been a surprise. Yes, I was shocked when I woke up on Wednesday morning. My dad who had been following the polls quite closely - mostly through Nate Silver's podcast - had been under the impression that Clinton would win. He was wrong. Likewise, I was sceptical about Trump's prevalence in the media and believed that all the hype and attention wouldn't necessarily correlate with the share of votes he would receive. I was wrong. In the year of Brexit, little is beyond the bounds of possibility. The anti-establishment mentality that I touched on in a previous post following the British referendum has become ever more widespread. A lot of the things Trump had said were music to the ears of those living in the so-called 'rust belt'. He'd bring life back into their towns, which have been economic vacuums for many years. There aren't just economic and social chasms between the citie

I don't mean to sound pessimistic (a sentence that usually precedes something very very pessimistic)... Have a look at this graph: Thanks to the guys at http://ilevel.ie I've made it nice and big so you can see the trend clearly. Above is the percentage of Dubliners over the age of 15 who listen to radio each week. The different coloured lines represent different demographs, as indicated on the right. The x-axis represents this period in 2010, in 2013 and in 2016 (the current period). Noticeably, they're all descending, and some quite significantly. In the case of 15-19 y/o's, listenership was at circa 92% in 2010, while it is at around 69% now. That's one hell of a decrease. Those 15-19 year olds are the streaming generation - what's the point in them listening to a pre-selected playlist on the radio if they can create their own on Spotify? Perhaps with the distractions of social media, gaming being more accessible than ever on our smartphones, and th