3. I'm no expert on it (and maybe I'm just a biased Catholic), but distributism seems like something that a variety of people from different parts of the political spectrum could get behind.
I agree. The outcome that reduces the economic power of large corporations and increases that of small businesses seems like it would be a large boost to technical innovation.
Large corporations are efficient at making money (which is why they naturally emerge from the current economic state) but tend to be sluggish at changing the technical status quo. It is why the FAANGs buy small businesses with new IP, rather than generating much internally.
I mean, distributism boils down to "everyone should own their means of production".* No disagreement here, but the whole point of the branding seems to be signaling you're a good, reliable religious conservative instead of some kind of radical commie revolutionary aiming to overthrow traditional society. (Which, come to think of it, would probably be a good thing for my fellow socialists to signal.)
*That's a vast simplification, I know. I don't mean to say it literally does not differ from other currents of socialist thinking, just that it fits perfectly among them by unambiguously sharing their defining ideological demand.
Distributists lose me when they start talking about guilds. I'm not super interested in letting the people who already have jobs using the government to suppress their future competitors, and it's a bit baffling to me that people could look at the socio-governmental landscape today and think, "yep, we need some more of that".
Interesting to see your take on Shellenberger, but you're incorrect on his stance re: Suboxone. I assume you got his stance on Suboxone from the chronicle hit piece, but they got it wrong.
also, calling CalPsyc "mass" incarceration of the mentally ill is a stretch. Perhaps if you think of Portugal's handling of homeless addicts as mass incarceration then you're at least consistent.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and wish to simply rest your head on your keyboard, I suggest stepping away from the computer entirely. A long walk outside, a conversation with a friend, or even a book can help alleviate stress.
Resting one’s frontal lobe on a precision machined cherry MX key is no way to deal with stress.
Leroux's "Pro-life Plus" seems pretty reasonable, per her website it's just Pro-life with funding for supporting single mothers with affordable childcare, remote education, employment opportunities etc.
Tony Fanara's Lower-48 aqueduct system sounds great if you're a coastal state importing water, but not so great if you're a midwestern state whos water is being stolen by coastal elites.
Presumably we would pay for the water we import; would idaho mind some of their excess water being diverted out of full reservoirs in return for money to pay for <whatever it is idahoans like>?
Probably yes very much so. Water is a very contentious issue even within Cali already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars) , and frankly nobody outside of Cali likes Californians much at all. Any plan to export water would (rightfully in my opinion) be viewed as a plot by blue states to steal scarce resources, heritage etc. from red states. I doubt a pipe could be planned and built, it would face tremendous local opposition. Beyond that I highly doubt it could survive without being repeatedly damaged under mysterious circumstances.
Conservationists don't want to harm native ecosystems, conservatives don't trust or want to help California. I challenge you to find a politician that will say their constituency has "excess water", the mayor of Atlantis probably wouldn't say it.
I think the real problem is that a pipeline barely pencils out when you're talking about a pipeline to ship something like petroleum, that sells for dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of dollars a barrel. Meanwhile, literally the most expensive municipal water in the United States sells for under $1 a barrel: https://www.publicwaternow.org/most_expensive_water
California has some big aqueducts that ship water a few hundred miles from the Sierras, and so do some other parts of the world. But very few of these try to cross mountains or do anything else expensive. Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
>Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
I have to disagree, it is “so” important. The price we have become accustomed to paying for it is an entirely separate issue. In other words, when supplies shrink I don’t think it’s going to have much effect on the demand.
I think it will have a huge effect on demand, given that most current urban demand is for landscaping and exterior washing, which are not actually highly valued activities. No one will pay $1 a gallon for a lawn or for exterior washing. There are other uses that will also disappear long before we hit the core inelastic demand.
And long before water reaches $1 a gallon, residents will leave and drop demand that way too. Water is not going to be globally scarce - just scarce in some localities.
There’s going to be a threshold, where there will be a wildfire in some location and there won’t be enough water available in nearby reservoirs to fight it. Something like that would be a big eye-opener. Some rivers already run dry in the summer.
Then I really think whoever has put the time and engineering into designing ways to capture & use iceberg water will basically become king.
Things don’t pencil out yet but I think they will, sadly.
Water is a more complicated market than it might seem. People buying bottles of drinking water at a grocery store are unlike farmers using water by the acre-foot.
For the kind of water that comes through pipes, to simplify you could think of it as cities versus farmers. Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale, but often it isn't.
I was just making the point that it’s a pretty essential commodity and the less of it there is to go around the uglier things will get. People aren’t going to give up water, when push comes to shove. Time to watch Chinatown again.
It would be a funny twist in the culture war if all kinds of people in the southwest had to move to all those states that have a lot of water. Perhaps they would be referred to as drybacks.
> Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale
Depends if they want to eat or not.
I'm not claiming to understand the laws of water markets; I know enough to know I don't.
But left to a free market, either the city people pay enough to the farmer to cover his water bill or they don't have food to eat, and city people are weird but they still like to eat.
Very few? Southern California gets almost all of its water either through the LA Aqueduct or the Colorado River Aqueduct, both of which cross significant mountain ranges by various combinations of tunnels and siphons.
You can just ignore the potential solution by not even looking at it and dismissing it as impossible while not actually examining the facts if you like. I won't try to stop you.
But no, by "throwing fresh water into the ocean" I meant exactly what I said.
This problem is entirely man-made, primarily through inaction, and mostly due to the fact that the majority of the people who run things in California care way more about the delta smelt and chinook salmon than people. Which, given that they're in charge of Californians, I suppose I can empathize with that.
I'll be polite enough to not put words in **your** mouth, and assert that what you really "mean" is that you hate humans in favor of random smelt, but you **do** have to actually decide which one you're going to support.
And as a practical matter, if you choose to go with the current status quo, you are picking the smelt and salmon. Which **isn't even actually accomplishing the (declared) intended result**. So the **only** thing that's actually being accomplished is making life in California more difficult for the people that live there.
I suppose there probably **is** an "ineffective anti-altruism" movement, but they kinda sound like jerks.
Everyone agrees that rivers and fish have some value. Everyone agrees that lawns and car washes have some value. Everyone agrees that drinking water and agricultural crops have some value. The question is just how much value each has, and therefore how much water to devote to each.
Those are generally derailed to political concerns or environmental ones, people hating big companies or worried about oil leaks. Harmless seawater used to refill a lake is not an issue there, and pipe building itself is not the challenge
I agree, but any project on that scale seems to have a very difficult problem of overcoming a zillion landowners and local governments who could potentially veto the project for any or no reason. I also wouldn't be surprised if California delayed such a project for decades with environmental litigation.
I mean, sure, but hopefully Biden wouldn't veto a water pipeline too.
As for a response to your second point, well, yeah. I definitely meant to imply that I consider this to be mostly the fault of the California government. ;)
As someone who lives in Idaho I can confirm there would be absolutely no chance of that. I'm not sure Californians realize that the exact same drought they are suffering is widespread through the West; although the North Rocky Mountain ecoregion is experiencing it to a less significant degree than Utah, California, and the Southwest, it still exists. Idaho is absolutely suffering from a precipitation shortage.
Also, everyone here seems to hate California, so there's another obstacle.
Canada gets a say too based on a treaty signed in 2005, and that say is emphatically not in favor of piping any Great Lakes water 2,000 miles southwest.
Shellenberger is aggressively mendacious. I like the "Apocalypse Never" idea but he's like a high school debate club in human form. He says stuff that he's smart enough to know isn't true, because he thinks YOU'RE not smart enough to notice. If you could desalinate water with smug you could plug him straight into the grid.
Interesting. I read that same book and came the to exact opposite conclusion on his substantiveness. Let me pull it off my bookshelf and see what I can find.
Re:Africa. The argument here is that deaths from extreme weather are orders of magnitude lower in the rich world than the developing world, and so if you had the choice between growing at 2% per person per year with +3 degrees of warming vs growing at 1% per person per year with +1.5 degrees of warming, the faster+hotter path would likely have fewer deaths from extreme weather and almost certainly have higher overall quality of life (since increased wealth reduces deaths from lots of things).
Other examples:
Deforestation. The planet is net-adding greenery, based on NASA satellite imagery over time. Yes, we are still losing rainforest so the forests that are replacing the rainforest are of net lower ecological value in terms of biodiversity, still the trendline on greenery is genuinely surprising relative to standard rhetoric.
Energy use in the Congo. Locals burning wood for energy uses a lot of land and degrades a lot of high-biodiversity rainforest. Replacing this biofuel use with ANYTHING would be a big improvement, even if that thing were fossil fuels (ideally it would be hydropower / wind / solar).
Sweatshops. All across the world people voluntarily leave family farms and travel hundreds of miles to work in sweatshops if the opportunity is available, because subsistence low-tech agriculture sucks and all of civilization is an elaborate scheme to get away from it.
Whales. The summary of the history of the whaling industry, and the importance of the "more ethical" replacement being both available in unlimited quantity and cheaper, was both interesting and instructive.
Nuclear. He is correct that Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a disastrous decision that burnt a lot of extra coal. His information on actual cancer cases caused by various nuclear disasters was interesting would be would be hard to independently verify. His information on the Vermont nuclear plant being mostly replaced by natural gas burning was new to me.
Energy storage component for renewables. The $23 trillion figure for the cost to have adequeate battery storage for the US if the grid was entirely wind+solar lines up decently with back-of-the-envelope math that I've done for myself using Googleable prices of batteries & similar factors, and demonstrates that there is a massive gap between current energy storage technology and what would be needed for a reliable renewable grid.
Malthus: continues to be wrong, and the 20th century chapters of the story are really embarrassing for Paul Erhlich in particular.
The deaths from extreme weather is a useful skeleton key that unlocks the understanding that projected damage from global warming *by the IPCC* is quite low relative to (for example) the difference global GDP in 2100 being $X per person or $1.6X per person. Adding together crop failures, extreme weather deaths, coastal relocation, increasing spending on mitigation + hardening measures, migration flows etc produces only a 5% impact on global GDP and a small number of additional deaths.
Given that the current "only acceptable" solution to climate change (no new nuclear, just wind+solar+batteries) currently seems like it would cost 1 order of magnitude more in $, that is quite suggestive that people dogmatically insisting that "this is the only acceptable course of action because the alternative is mass death" are full of it.
Now, one can make the case that the IPCC is underestimating the potential damage from climate change, but then at that point one must abandon appeals to authority and get down in the mud with every single other person waving around their own personal custom climate model.
As an italian i find it very funny how much people are critical of germany while my country does the exact same things and manage to completely avoid international criticism
To at least some extent the most recent round of condemnations is focused on Germany because it was NS2 that is at least often referenced as having held such a significant role in the way things played out, and that runs straight from Russia to Germany. If it went through Italy instead, I bet you guys would get more flak.
As far as relative levels of oppobrium specifically regarding the climate change question, I cannot speculate.
Only counting the land footprint of a fossil fuel power plant ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, which is both massive and also destructive. But he doesn't actually care about the issue of land use and environmental preservation, he just wants to win the argument.
Eh. We use a lot more space *using* energy vs producing it. And it's not like wind turbine blades or solar panels are birthed whole from the forehead of Zeus, neither.
The land required to run an electrical grid on fossil fuels requires both the land to operate the plants & also the land to extract the fossil fuels, yes.
But oil extraction+power plants are still a smaller footprint than generating an equivalent amount of energy through solar+wind+batteries+mines for lithium and rare earths. I'd need to go looking for sources to pin down exactly how much smaller, but my Fermi estimate of it would still be 2x to 10x?
I bring this up not to open this up for debate because I think the whole thing is utterly silly. It's an example of a very smart person knowingly using bait-and-switch argumentation.
So Shellenberger ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, while almost every pro renewable argument I've read ignores the land footprint of copper, cobalt, coltan, etc. mines. Also, Shellenberger isn't pro coal; he's pro nuclear, which has a much smaller mining footprint. So Shellenberger is not particularly mendacious by the standards of the energy debate.
Both renewables and conventional plants obviously require materials to build the physical plant, copper for transmission, etc. IN ADDITION, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants need a constant stream of mined fuel to generate power. It's their defining feature. Renewables do not; they just sit where you put them and generate power from ambient energy. Ignoring that is enough for me to write him off as a person worth listening to, on energy or frankly any other topic.
There's plenty of studies on land use by power source that include extraction of fuel and raw materials needed for that power source, and Shellenberger is correct that solar requires more land than coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear or geothermal.
But it's not 300-400x the amount, no idea where he's getting those figures - it's more like 2-20x depending on the "normal power plant" he's comparing it to.
The specific fuel in question is important. Nat-gas wells...even the dreaded fracking wells have a pretty tiny footprint; not more than an acre or so, at least in my experience. Whereas strip-mining coal or mountain-top removal mining creates big scars on the landscape, and they don't seem to go away quickly, either. The difference between the two fuel sources would be large, and so merging these together into some kind of average land use statistic for a conventional power plant would seem to me to be pretty misleading in its own right, because I'll bet Shellenberger isn't advocating building more coal fired power plants fueled with strip-mined coal.
Individual uranium mines are pretty big, but uranium is extremely efficient and a handful of mines suffice to supply the entire world, so the footprint per power plant is small.
This is a very good way of putting something I've noticed about him too—I agree with him on the merits on a ton of issues, especially around energy, but he seems like a guy who just has no problem lying if he thinks it's for "good reasons." Reminds me of, like, Nathan Robinson in that way.
If I were a Californian I might vote for him anyway, but I wouldn't feel great about it.
Shellenberger sounds pretty good to me. I get that he's not perfect, but the status quo in California seems so dysfunctional that I think he'd be a big improvement on housing (he's a YIMBY), crime, homelessness, and climate change (pro-nuclear).
If he's a YIMBY in regards to housing he hides it extremely well - never talking about obviously needed zoning reform, and he's relentless about denying the obvious link between housing costs and homelessness.
But then again so do most people running for governor, so...
> I started out thinking you struck your enemies with the Action Rod directly, but now I believe it probably attaches to a gun and makes the gun more powerful somehow. Further research is needed.
Research has continued! I believe this is a gun disassembly tool, which allows you to remove/detach AR-15 interior components via the barrel without the need to fully disassemble the gun (i.e an internal component that would normally need 50 other parts removed can be accessed directly via this).
Oh, that would be smart! I watched a video about the action rod and still had no idea what it was for or how you use it. I know nothing about guns, so I'm not the person for this.
Action Rod is a fantastic name though, and it really should be some kind of truncheon you use Batman-style on your enemies.
It's so you can install barrels to the AR15 upper without having to clamp the upper in a vise. The barrel is tightened to 30 to 80 ft-lbs of torque (using a torque wrench) and aligning the gas tube through the appropriate hole (the gas tube captures escaping gas from the barrel and uses it to cycle the AR).
To get the ~45 ft-lbs of torque you've really got to clamp the upper down, and of course, this can break/damage the upper (especially on light weight uppers), so a bunch of devices exist to luck the upper in place for barrel installation without damage to the upper.
I was surprised how you didn't address Mercuri's opposition to "goy shutdowns" and "goy gay in newsom" but I eventually figured out his "v" looks weird
Writing "Gov. Shut Downs" right above "Gov. Gavin Newsom" in the "Against" column makes it sound like the candidate opposes two Governors, named Gavin Newsom and Shut Downs.
I can't tell if you're joking about Gavin Newsom's name - Gavin's a pretty common name here in the UK, but in the US it does seem to be very rare among people born before the mid-90s: https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/m/gavin
People loved making fun of Sarah Palin's childrens' names, but this is the first I've heard of Gavin Newsom's.
Calling your kid "Brooklynn" (or for that matter Montana) seems like a definite lower-middle class move, but Gavin Newsom is nothing if not not lower middle class.
I agree that Newsom is going to be the governor and none of these people have a chance. But this one made me laugh (not in a mean way, because the only person you were remotely mean about was Newsom and he can handle that), and I badly needed a laugh today.
God bless California and all who re-invent themselves who live there!
I'm a power engineer. I promise not to evaluate Shellenberger's policy positions on mental health if you'll promise not to evaluate his policy positions on nuclear power.
How likely is it that a person who is both unqualified to set mental health policy and unqualified to design an energy system would get one of them wrong and the other right? One in three? Is that how rationalists choose their thought leaders? Why do apparently smart people give Shellenberger any credence at all?
What renaissance men have been leading us that wield policy mastery in all areas under their supervision? Electing a political leader is as much art as science; you must trust in them to use their judgment to effect their vision.
In the establishment of trust, one will of course weigh their own knowledge and what appears to be that of the candidate.
As someone who makes their living in and amongst technical experts, I am incredibly suspicious of those who claim to be such. What Shellenberger argues for regarding energy policy and addiction treatment makes a lot of sense to me. Renewables are important, but are (mostly) intermittent and there has to be baseline capacity. Baseline capacity that produces no CO2 or other regulated air pollutants, at the cost of a small amount of nuclear waste (small in context of US nuclear arms maintenance) makes sense to me because that is technology that is here today and achieves reduced CO2 emissions goals.
I wouldn't blame you for thinking he's anti-renewable, but if you actually listen to any sort of long form discussion with him (I haven't read his work, so can't comment there), what he actually is is anti-renewable-optimism-verging-on-delusion. Delusion because of the cold hard reality of engineering constraints; foot print, energy density, build times, etc. His strident discussion of renewables is a case of his rhetorical pendulum swinging too far to the right in service of correcting it's outward swing on the left, so it's understandable that you could have this impression. FWIW, I'm getting my take on his stance re: renewables from his appearance on Rogan.
Regarding addiction treatment, he makes compelling cases regarding the need to incentivize and ultimately compel if it requires it. I think this discussion is often framed around "homeless", but we're really talking about a small subset of homeless that are severely addicted to narcotics with complications from untreated mental illness. To paraphrase Shellenberger, we (the US) do a good job with the single mom who finds herself without shelter and a dependent. We get those people off the street very quickly. It's when mental illness and addiction are added into the mix that you get the encampments seen in SF, LA, Austin, etc. I've seen Michael do "man on the street" style discussions with SF's homeless where they make it very clear they are there because of the ease of servicing their addiction.
Shellenberger makes it clear that much lauded programs like Portugal's are misunderstood and/or mischaracterized by housing advocacy groups in the US as offering shelter first, and de-criminalization. But that's not the full picture, it is illegal to consume drugs in public in Portugal, and there is the equivalent of drug court with the option for incarceration for forced treatment if people are not able to work through the non-compulsion avenues offered to them to get clean.
All that is to say, this seems imminently reasonable. I don't bring strong ideological convictions regarding energy or addiction policy to my evaluation of Shellenberger, and I find his proposed solutions contain enough merit that I can evaluate them, and now offer my rhetorical support.
He's doing what so many in public life have lost the ability to do: make persuasive arguments using data, rather than assertions and appeals to authority.
I used to know a public health nurse most of whose job was keeping track of tuberculosis patients: she showed up at their location every day and administered their medication. If we deployed suboxone and methadone this way we’d make progress- bringing it to them at their dwelling, shelter, tent etc. Due to the combination of restrictions on who can prescribe & distribute it, and dismal transportation networks, we have people in the US who are addicts who get prescribed suboxone and then can’t get the ride an hour each way to the clinic.
Shellenberger is saying some good things. I don’t live in CA anymore but I think he has a chance.
yeah I mean wouldn’t really cheap utility scale solar make way more sense for water desalinization? it’s the perfect application for somewhat unreliable cheap power
I looked up some facts - I reckon it would cost about $20 billion to build enough desalination capacity to replace California’s average share of Colorado river water. The total amortized cost of the energy needed to run that would be about $500 million per year using grid scale solar and about $2.3 billion per year using nuclear (assuming new plants for each case).
I'm curious about the fine print on the $500MM for grid-scale solar. The big selling point for fission over solar is that fission plants can run at full capacity, all day, every day, whereas solar production is highly variable depending on weather, season, and time of day. So for desalinization, where you presumably want your desal plants to be able to run around the clock (since the desalination capacity costs 8x-40x the additional power generation capacity by your figures, so it wouldn't really make sense to idle the plants at night), you either need very large scale power storage or you need a dispatchable power source to fill in the gaps when solar production is low or nonexistent. Power storage is expensive and probably not included in the $500MM, and building new natural gas plants to run at night and in the winter is neither free nor carbon-neutral.
Usually, solar cost per capacity is quoted either at theoretical peak production or with some kind of "capacity factor" adjustment that bakes in assumptions about the ability of the grid to fill in the gaps of a marginal addition to solar capacity.
Shows that the LCOE of utility solar can be as cheap as $28 per MWh and nuclear $131.
The Colorado river allocation to California is about 4.3 mega acre feet per year.
You are correct that it might make sense to spend more on energy to recover the capital costs of the desalination plants more quickly. I suspect new tech and truly large desalination plants might be able to have new economies of scale.
The $20 bil estimate comes from the original $250 mil estimate for the Carlsbad plant before unions and environmentalists got ahold of it.
To me the sad part is that it is obvious the California water problem is completely solvable with desalination using existing tech and for not all that much money (Cal state budget is $300 bil). But I guess environmentalists would prefer to drown hetch hetchy instead of making the ocean a bit saltier in local places.
So your calculation ignores that you would need to overbuild the desalination plant by 5x in the solar case.
(A) Nuclear
1 GW plant ($X) runs 24/7 produces 24 GWh per day for desal plant ($Y) produces let’s say 100 m3 of water.
(B) Solar
5 GW plant ($0.2X by your numbers) produces 24 GWh per day (because ~0.2 capacity factor) for desal plant. However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
Given that Y is much higher than X, the solar case doesn’t look so good.
> However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
I'm pro-nuclear but this seems an unnecessarily stupid way to build a plant for desalination from solar. Desalination is a perfect use for intermittent power.
Maybe. Most of that water is probably used for agriculture anyway, so the water demand pattern is also seasonal.
There are also more scalable desalination methods like distilling that might use less energy.
To me the important point is that desalination is totally doable, but there are many tradeoffs. Solar PV might not be economic for some use cases, it might work for others.
Instead of total replacement, think of it as diversifying your water sources to avoid depending too much on a single source. San Diego has a big desalination plant, but they're increasing the size of a reservoir too.
Some people are really anti nuclear. I was banned from r/energy after just 4 posts for suggesting that Germany had shot itself in the foot by closing down its nuclear power stations, and that they had in fact increased their gas production recently compared to coal (as gas is easier to ramp up when the wind isn’t blowing). I sourced these arguments as well, and was banned for mis-information.
Ah, I confused you with the person Scott replied to, so I was wondering why you were coming out in support of his positions here. In my defense your profiles pictures have a the same color map and you both have somewhat generic white guy names.
I wonder if the anti-nuclear activists have become even more rabid recently because they have been pressed into defending the indefensible (the policy of shutting down perfectly workable nuke plants in Germany in the midst of this historically grave energy crisis in 2022)
We can have a productive debate over whether it is a good idea to shut down existing, operational nuclear plants, if they have a good safety record and no obvious deficits.
But Shellenberger wants to build more and more and more of them, and he declares this with the blithe self-assurance of somebody who won't actually be doing the work, dismissing the complexity and scale of such an undertaking, as if all we needed to do was just decide to do it.
Yes, there are lots of plants on the drawing board, but very few new plants are actually being built; we are barely maintaining the inventory, even taking into account planned builds. In Europe, three are/were under construction: the EPRs at Flamanville and Oikiluoto, and Hinkley Point C.
Hinkley Point C is too early in its construction for it to be late. But the budget has already been adjusted upward.
Olkiluoto 3 went online in March 2022, although it won't go to full production until September 2022. It is 13 years late and 7 billion euros overbudget. TVO (the operator) has already decided there will not be an Olkiluoto 4.
The EPR is the most advanced civilian reactor design now in use. As we get better at things, they are supposed to be delivered faster and at lower cost. In nuclear, the opposite has been true. Please, tell me, what observable evidence do we have that suggests this trend will reverse?
Shellenberger's plans are all based on some combination of the following assumptions and assertions:
- we need to generate as much electricity per capita now as we have been, plus some large delta (typically 30%)
- building new nuclear plants is or will be straightforward, fast and inexpensive
- the risks and consequences of doing so are accurately quantifiable, generally overstated by opponents and will be resolved in some as yet unknown way by our descendants
To take just the question of risk for example: The reinsurance companies, whose business and survival depend on reliable risk assessment, have found that the risks are not reliably quantifiable and hence useless for an insurance risk model. Nuclear power plants are uninsurable. When they do get built, it's only because governments assume the ultimate liability (whether they are actually in a position to bear them is another question; most governments have decided they are not).
I am deeply skeptical of simplified claims about complex systems, no matter where and whom they come from. The biggest strike against Shellenberger is that he repeatedly claims things that are demonstrably untrue, and fills the room with so much nonsense so quickly that one doesn't know where to begin correcting it.
For somebody who works in the sector, that is really exhausting! That is the reason that no serious researcher or subject matter specialist is willing to appear with him publicly anymore. They see that he lacks competence in the subject areas he holds forth on and seems uninterested in honest discussion. We are all too busy to be wasting our time on endless dead-horse debates with people who cannot even acknowledge or agree on the basic facts (it was painful for me to write this, as I do have better things to do; but I also understand that communicating these things is part of my professional responsibility, so here we are.)
Shellenberger is, at best, a kind of human version of a _Journal of Hypotheses_. At worst, he is querulous, irritating, and a dangerous distraction. Perhaps he is entertaining. Joe Rogan, at least, seems to think so.
Viewed that way, I suppose he is right at home in your list of California gubernatorial candidates.
I don't get the impression Shellenberger suggests building nukes would be trivial or quite cheap, my impression is that he thinks it's a better idea than hoping some miracle storage solution comes along to make solar/wind viable, or just keep shifting by default to natural gas.
I'm pretty willing to give that idea a hearing. I've been here all through the solar/wind enthusiasm, and I see the results as an unqualified disaster. Electricity is far more expensive and noticeably less reliable than it was 20 years ago. At this point, I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say, and I'd rather have more nukes than more fossil fuel plants. I'm sure it will be expensive, but having your electric grid go tits up is even more expensive.
I wish these comments could be made without insults. I read the phrase "I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say" as indicating that you've already made up your mind about a complicated debate, having categorized the opposing viewpoint as the outgroup. I think this is an interesting debate that could be more productive without that thinking.
Why is it an insult? I didn't say they were rat bastards, I simply said I don't believe them. If not believing someone is to be classified as a personal insult, I don't see how any discussion at all is possible -- so I would classify your desired framework as way more constraining and illiberal than any I have expressed.
And, yes, I have indeed made up my mind about part of the debate, which is that I cannot be persuaded by solar/wind enthusiasts by themselves. They'd have to bring along some more neutral party to make their case, if there is a case to be made. Perhaps that seems "premature" to you, perhaps because the argument is new and interesting, but I have been paying attention to this debate for more than 30 years, and I'd say three decades is a very reasonable degree of patience. If someone has something *new* to say -- something I didn't first hear in 1975 -- then I'm happy to listen.
You don't think calling people 'groupies' for a particular policy position impugns them?
I believe that you do, and you're being wilfully obtuse. And even more dishonestly, you've moved the goalposts to whether 'not believing someone' is an insult, rather than 'not believing a word they say'. The latter clearly implies that they are liars, which you might recognise as an insult.
Of course there is stuff you didn't first hear in 1975. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened after that. If you've irrevocably made up your mind about literally anything with an empirical grounding then you're being deeply irrational, no matter how many decades you've "paid attention" for. If you've not heard anything new about it since 1975, though, then I'm not sure you have been paying attention.
Olkiluoto is interesting that it is the only thing that can save Finland now from getting cut off from Russian gas.
Nuclear seems to be expensive but with gas prices now raising 3 or 4 times in Europe, what choice do we really have?
I have an impression that regulations are too strict on nuclear thus making it more expensive and believed that low gas prices will continue forever. The war in Ukraine changed this view and I believe that Russia/Belarus developed nuclear themselves with the aim to profit from raising oil/gas prices. If Belarus could build Astravets cheaply, why not others? Maybe the war in Europe will change the political and technical incentives?
Here's one: That we are in the midst of a "nuclear renaissance." In 2020 there was a net increase of nuclear generating capacity of 0.4 GW. We have 55 reactors under construction worldwide, for a total gross electrical generating capacity of 55.6 GW. The latest planned start is 2028.
About 100 reactors are planned (100 GW) and 300 reactors proposed (we can assume 300 GW) are on the drawing board.
Given the trend, we can expect most of these will never be built, and what is being or does get built will be late.
You can reasonably argue there has been increased interest in conserving nuclear generating capacity. But a renaissance it is not.
Given that the largest concentration of them are in China, I'd say the assumption that most will not get built is unwarranted. For better or worse, the Chinese are very reliable at following through on their civil engineering plans.
Doesn’t the existence of depreciated plants with a good safety record contradict your claims about unquantifiable risks?
I agree with your point about costs though, unless there is some breakthrough in construction costs nuclear plants are probably not worth the price (unless you take carbon elimination from base load seriously)
Note that I haven't made any claims about the risks of operating plants, only that I believe that a productive discussion can be had about whether to continue operating them and for how long or decommission them immediately. It's a matter of inertia.
That said, I don't know of any operating plants that don't have any issues which are relevant to safety.
“That said, I don't know of any operating plants that don't have any issues which are relevant to safety.”
Uhh, literally every energy production industry has “issues relevant to safety”. Why would we think nuclear is an exception? From the numbers I have seen the safety risk is lower with nuclear in deaths per GWh production compared to other energy sources.
Almost all the costs are from excessively onerous regulation - I don't know how much of that is at a federal level, mind you, but a state governor could presumably substantially reduce the regulator burden posed by state laws and agencies, at least.
I think most of Big Oil "self-insures" (I know XOM does) but their track record in actually cleaning up has been kinda abysmal, so understandable that the lack of a mechanism to keep them honest is a huge barrier.
Is there anything that can be done to the bidding process? A rule that when the state evaluates bids for operating nuclear power plants you MUST consider safety track record? That means P&GC cannot run it, those people are the last people you can trust to run a nuclear power plant.
Alternatively, a kind of collateral that the state gov holds onto. I believe some countries in the EU have something similar for starting new deepwater projects (in case the government gets saddled with the cost of cleaning up wells and platforms offshore).
You seemed to have framed this assumption as being suspect:
“- we need to generate as much electricity per capita now as we have been, plus some large delta (typically 30%”
With the widespread adoption of EVs and the movement of building hvac to heat pumps, it seems reasonable to think that electricity per capita will go up. Do you think otherwise?
This really strikes me as a typical specialist's blinders-on answer. You don't go to any great lengths to say anything about what you think is a better answer, but implicit in your points is the claim that we will in fact to something other than increasing current electricity use per capita, as well as that nuclear plants are somehow less safe than some unmentioned alternative. From the outside, it appears pretty much self-evident that our options are to either dramatically reduce per capita total energy consumption (i.e. stop having a modern lifestyle) by withdrawing from most petroleum products and natural gas while replacing as much as possible with wind and solar, to maintain roughly modern lifestyles a bit further into the century by ignoring the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels, or to build enough nuclear to at least make up for a big chunk of the fossil fuel energy production we're taking offline. You argue that nuclear plants are too expensive from actual experience; if we apply that mechanism to assessing safety, we see that nuclear plants have been orders of magnitude less dangerous than fossil fuel plants over their time of existence. So it seems like all you're left claiming is that nukes are too expensive and, somehow, not needed.
Anyway, so much for responding to actual points you've made. For somebody as overly busy and as burdened with the noblesse oblige of explaining your profession's knowledge to the public, you sure to have an incredible ratio of noise to signal in your comments. The pro-nuclear argument is really dead simple. I think all of us who favor it understand that nuclear is expensive and complicated, and that nuclear meltdowns are bad. Perhaps some expert can chime in to explain how there actually is some alternative other than the three I've listed above; if not then I'm afraid this discussion has done nothing to inform anybody of anything except your negative emotional valence around Shellenberger.
Do we agree that we must stop using fossil fuels? Then that means a fundamental transformation of our energy systems. It is not realistic to expect that such a fundamental transformation of our energy systems won't bring with it big changes in the way we live, and that's true whether we go the nuclear route, the all-renewables route, some combination of the two, or something else entirely.
I reject the premise that a dramatic reduction in per capita energy consumption means not "having a modern lifestyle", as you put it.
The easiest, cheapest energy is the energy you don't need in the first place. My grandmother would've said that we haven't earned the right to ask for more until we've learned how to use what we have judiciously. We are really nowhere near exhausting the potential of improvements in energy efficiency. (Nowhere is that more true than in the United States.)
The biggest driver of efficiency is energy cost. Up until now, energy has been unnaturally cheap (for many reasons which I won't discuss here) and so we have not had to think much about what energy uses we give priority. But some energy uses are clearly more important and more valuable than others, and it's time the way we price energy reflected that.
Buildings everywhere are leaky. If we tighten them up and use heat recovery ventilation, building energy consumption drops by 70, 80, 90%. That energy is now available for other things.
We are driving alone in motor vehicles by the hundreds of millions. Is that sensible or necessary? I don't believe we will be doing that for much longer. We can't afford hundreds of millions of Teslas on the road any more than we can afford hundreds of millions of diesel pickup trucks.
Since moving to Germany from Canada, I pay nearly nine times per kWh what I used to pay for electricity, but my bill in absolute terms is smaller. Why? Because everything I use is that much more efficient, and I live differently. Is my quality of life lower? If anything, I'd say it is higher.
Even if none of the nuclear plants in Germany had been shut down, it would not have made more than a small difference to the current gas supply crisis, because it's the proportion of non-dispatchable supply that determines the need for flexible generation. (Also, the bulk of the gas is used for heating - see my comment about leaky buildings above.) Utility-scale nuclear plants have lower ramp rates; running any thermal electric generator at higher ramp rates than it was designed for puts it under more thermal stress and increases the probability of failure. So at best, retaining the nuclear plants increases the proportion of nuclear in the inflexible baseload generation portion of the supply mix.
And what is this baseload, anyway? In the early days of the electric system, operators of thermal electric power plants were faced with the problem that ramp rates are small and cold starts take a long time, so nightly shutdowns aren't practical. If you keep the plant running, you have an output floor (say 30% of nameplate) below which you can't go. _That's_ the baseload: as originally conceived, it was the load you needed to keep operating the power plant safely overnight. In those years there were few electric devices, so electric utilities resorted to things like putting in street lighting even in areas where there was almost no traffic and then leaving it on all night.
So the baseload is an emergent property of a system and society shaped by dispatchable thermal electric generation. (It has also become a dog whistle for defenders of the status quo.)
An all-renewable system needs to have certain things. It needs enough broadly distributed generation to assure a base generation to some agreed upon availability probability (say 99.9%, which is achievable), some backup, and a strategy for load-shedding for the remainder (0.1% in our example).
That marginal reliability needs to be accurately priced. That's the only way we will have sufficient incentive to build the infrastructure needed to assure it. We are not served by policies that keep energy prices artificially low.
I don't see anything in the above that is a fundamental technical obstacle. The obstacles are behavioural.
So often this debate is framed as a choice between pastoral life and modern life. But really, there are many choices, many possibilities. Our whole way of life is the result of our choices. That's what we're talking about here: what unexplored degrees of freedom are available to us?
The energy consumption of a society is to a large degree structurally determined. Where do people live and work? How big are the buildings? How are they made? What consumer products are available in the market, and how is energy consumption a factor in their price?
The eco-modernist argument as I see it sets the hard boundary condition that we continue to use energy the way we have been, the infamous "the American way of life is not negotiable" position. But that's ideology, not reality.
Shellenberger may be right about one thing: What we believe determines what we choose. Shellenberger's thinking follows from his belief that there are no natural limits which can't be overcome by more technology. If you also believe that, then none of the other things I've written here will matter, and we'll have to agree to disagree.
So you think upgrading and retro fitting every building in the US (which has very different climate and energy needs than buildings in Germany or most of Europe) as well as completely transforming the culture that is "America" is less costly and less complicated than building more power generation?
>I don't see anything in the above that is a fundamental technical obstacle. The obstacles are behavioural.
This is basically the argument for nuclear. The technical side of nuclear is more or less "solved" (in that reactors can be built and fueled with relatively low danger); it's the regulatory (behavioral) side that is the problem.
Goodness, the capital costs of all the improvements you suggest to limit energy use would significantly exceed the costs to build a bunch of nukes. One assumes that your preference is esthetic, then. You will need to understand that others don't share your esthetic preferences, and would perhaps prefer to take the cheaper route.
Not knowing very much about nuclear power other than a very high level picture of industry trends, where would you say the problems with his position lie?
Are you the sort of power engineer who designs nuclear plants and energy grids, or the sort of power engineer who troubleshoots boilers and refrigerators? Because both of these exist, and I'm not sure "I know how refrigeration units work" is relevant expertise here.
Due to the outsize impact that California's economy has on the way the rest of the country does business (and enjoys their rights) *if* there was a state that I broke my 'let other democracies make their own choices' rule for, it would be CA.
But, no. I think that it is extremely important to not mess with the choices made by other free people.
FYI this is what the rest of the world feels about American elections. When one of your ultranationalists win Presidency, it has a nasty effect of making our ultranationalists more annoying.
Funnily enough, not really so! At the recent Australian Federal election, the showing from the ultranats was pretty weak, and it was fairly conclusively proven than attempting to win with culture war garbage doesn't work (see: transphobe failing to win Warringah). But yes, they were really friking irritating early last year.
There absolutely were no prominent "ultranats" running in the Australian election unless you have an utterly hysterical conception of a what an "ultranat" is. And the term "transphobe" is extraordinarily bad faith.
There has not been an "ultranationalist" American president in at least recent history, unless your definition of 'ultranationalist' is so broad as to include vast swathes of the leaders of non-western countries.
Instead of a book review contest we should have a gubernatorial candidate review contest (although the elections come up at different times, of course). I don't expect Scott to write about the other 49 states, but I would love to see some more of these, because this was very entertaining.
I think California is a bit unusual in several ways. It has the “top two” primary system, so all the candidates are in a single race, instead of a Republican primary, a Democratic primary, and some random other people that get ballot lines somehow. Also, with the recall election they just held, a lot of people got practice running for Governor and figured they might as well do it again. Additionally, it’s such a one-party state these days that unless there’s a reason for a challenge by a democrat (like when Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez represented Northern and Southern California for senate, or when Kevin de Leon ran against Dianne Feinstein from the left) there’s usually only one real candidate and so plenty of room for interesting others.
I think Louisiana, Washington, and Alaska may have similar top-two primary systems that might lead to some of these dynamics, but Louisiana and Alaska can be surprisingly competitive across parties.
European politicians have been hosting Ukrainian refugees. This, and the frequent references to homelessness above, had given me an unlikely idea. What if a candidate could qualify for the ballot by mentoring/sponsoring a homeless person until that person has a stable residence?
Then I looked up ballot access. Running for governor in California requires only $4,371.12 and 65 signatures, or just 4750 signatures. Those requirements seem far easier to meet than successfully helping one homeless person into a stable residence.
Shellenberger seems like he's the best choice here by far, to the point where it's not even a contest. I'd vote for him in a heartbeat if I lived in California. Sure, he's not perfect, but none of them are. And judging by your descriptions, he has the unique distinction of getting far more right than he gets wrong. Maybe it's partly because he codes as one of those rare Blue-Gray types, and as a Blue-Gray myself, it's very refreshing to see anyone with similar leanings actually run for office or be in the public eye at all. I was really rooting for Carrick Flynn too, for similar reasons.
I suppose my distant second pick would be Tony Fanara. Mostly because he's 1. not a conservative, 2. not a Bernie-style radical leftist, 3. not some other sort of weird crackpot, and 4. not Gavin Newsom. Though Woodrow Sanders III is tempting too, because "make the bureaucrats do their jobs better" is probably more likely to have an actual positive impact than any grand vision, and it displays an admirable level of pragmatism and intellectual humility.
I like the Woodrow Sanders III thing, but then I realize that many people consider it important for the heads of departments to represent voters in some way rather than being chosen directly by the deep state.
On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, I'm not sure "the Democrat party machine" is more democratic than "the many real people working as low and mid level paper pushers", they're both pretty out of touch.
Shellenberger is also arguably a borderline-credible candidate: he's one of only four candidates with endorsements listed on wikipedia's page for the election, the other three being Newsom, Dahle, and Rodriguez (the main Democratic, Republican, and Green Party candidates, respectively), and a quick search for his name on Google News seems to indicate he's getting at least a moderate amount of mainstream press attention.
Yeah, I'm seriously considering him. The slightly negative review given him here by Scott has raised him in my eyes. Gavin Newsom is what happens when Bay Area people get their way, and I'd be happy for that not to continue.
The key difference between him and all the other candidates is that Schultz is a huge supporter of ALL CAPS. I haven't seen that many caps on one page in... ever. I was going to say timecube but I looked up timecube again and it doesn't even have 10% as many caps.
I would like to congratulate Mr. Zacky on having passed a difficult test in American political life: plausibly convincing me that he actually wears Carhartt on days he isn't filming campaign ads.
Heather Collins' idea to build parking-like structures to provide basic accommodation to the homeless is a very good one and I support it (but not her as governor). They could be designed as panopticons and built and run very cheaply, but still provide much better accommodation than most current homeless shelters.
Serious question from a position of ignorance: why would a parking structure be a better shelter for homeless people than a traditional homeless shelter?
From the little I understand of this, a lot of homeless people don't like going to shelters, partly because they feel "shut in" (combination claustrophobia plus justifiable concern that your roommates at a homeless shelter may not be easy to get along with).
Maybe the idea is that elevated (vs. underground) parking garage-style structures would feel more open and hence more welcoming to homeless people than enclosed buildings?
The general reason (some) homeless people don't want to go to homeless shelters is that they want do drugs, which generally isn't allowed at homeless shelters.
The juxtaposition of "general" and "some" makes your position unclear. Roughly what proportion of the homeless population do you think would refuse to go to a homeless shelter specifically because it prevents / complicates drug usage?
Considering that there is always more space available at various shelters, but so many choose to sleep on the street anyway, probably the vast majority prefer the street to the shelter for various reasons (some combination of drug policies, mental illnesses, bad company in the shelters, or other factors).
The fact that homeless people congregate together in tent camps on the same street makes the "bad company in shelters" explanation seem less likely and the mental illness / addiction explanations seem more likely.
Perhaps, but homeless people in tent camps on a street can agree that Psycho Bob is bad news and should be beaten with sticks until he leaves, whereas a shelter's management has a mandate to shelter all the homeless including psychos named Bob, but the authority and incentive to remove (or incarcerate) anyone who tries to beat people up with sticks.
Cheap and quick to build, hygienic, easy to maintain, easy to supervise (panopticon-style), largely self-organizing because of the open-floor structure, safer than closed-in dorms, comfortable enough for people already living on the streets but not so comfortable as to give the taxpayers indigestion, room for service providers like finance and medical providers on the peripheries.
The more I think about this, you'd need temperature control unless you want people dying of heat/cold on government property. Yes, they were on the street already, but now they're in a government structure you are requiring them to sleep in. You'd also need soundproofing to avoid the place becoming an intolerable cacophony. At a certain point you're just better off with a building.
How do we deal with them on the streets? Clearly, some street lots are better than others, yet without any formal system of ownership, the homeless manage to work out who gets to pitch their tent where.
I don’t think a heavily enforced regime would work well in the parking panopticons and I’d prefer to leave as much regulation as possible to the homeless themselves, just as we do now.
I really like this idea. Many currently live on the sidewalk, it's just a stacked compact sidewalk that isn't in the way like the actual sidewalk is. We already have parking structures everywhere, they seem fairly simple and cheap to build, and would require little ongoing maintenance or amenities. Surely this doesn't 'solve all homelessness' but it would be a realistically implementable quick fix.
I'd support using my taxes to build a cheap vertical homeless camp to get the homeless out of the streets. Frankly it may not be that much better for the homeless but it would be much better for the nonhomeless.
It's a silly idea, because there is a reason the homeless live on sidewalks. They do not *want* to be out of the way, for any of various reasons: it allows them to beg, it allows them to steal, it allows them to make a political statement, it allows them to deal drugs, it allows them to feel like they are still a part of society.
Unless you are willing to forcibly round up and relocate these people, this solution is no more likely to clean up the streets than anything else we've tried. It might perhaps have the virtue that it will highlight this truth more clearly than previous attempts, and thereby bring us marginally closer to accepting that truth. But I am not optimistic.
In fact, you can say the same thing about parking itself. My city (Bryan, TX) built a big parking structure in downtown because people complain about too little parking in downtown. The parking structure is empty nearly all day every day, because no one wants to park in a structure, and everyone wants to park on the street. Street spaces are close to the places you want to be, they are very visible, and the street is a place that is at least halfway intended for humans to be in while a parking structure is usually a dismal space that is uncomfortable for humans. All of these same reasons apply just as much for a place to park yourself as for a place to park your car. (Conversely, if you or your car want shelter from rain or sun, there are sometimes advantages to the parking structure over street parking.)
Speaking as a driver who despises going into cities for parking-related reasons, I can add a few more reasons.
- Parking garages usually are significantly more expensive than parking on the street, if you can find a spot in the latter. Maybe not an order of magnitude exactly, but around there.
- My current navigation system has to be explicitly directed to find parking if there's no dedicated lot, and this requirement is not typically obvious before I actually get there. This results in having to split my attention between actually driving, searching for visual indicators of parking garages, and searching for nav system indicators of parking garages.
Yeah, the fact that garage parking is more expensive than street parking is a clear problem with the market. Garage parking is much lower demand than street parking, and much harder to find, so it should be cheaper. (And we should improve the ways people have of finding it, both by getting navigation systems doing car navigation to know about nearby garages, and by having better electronic signage indicating precisely how many open spots there are in the whole garage outside, and on each floor when you're inside.)
My recollection in LA (lived there some years) was that there were places with concentrations of homeless but also many scattered, effectively by themselves or in tiny groups. Not sure the relative populations. If it had just been Skid Row you could have avoided Skit Row, but they were everywhere.
I get the impression the idea is to build shelters into existing underused parking garages, rather than build parking garages from scratch for the purpose of homeless sheltering?
Instead of bussing them to other cities where people might complain, just make a city in the desert and ship them all there? Out of sight, out of mind?
Okay that sounds uncharitable, but I'm not sure how else to interpret forcibly relocating people to parking garages far away from cities. Calling it a panopticon doesn't really help the image either.
It's the bit where you build Special Camps for the people you have decided have nothing to contribute to your society, that is going to make people look at you funny and back away. Giving the camp a funny new name or a funny new shape won't change that.
A lot of homeless people *want* to be contributing members of your society. Some of them actually will; some of them are being naively optimistic about the prospect of that ever happening. But they won't willingly go to your special camps, and they won't willingly stay there, and when you start putting up the barbed wire to keep them there, that's not going to go over well with a lot of us.
The parking structure proposal is just these bans + some place for the homeless to go. Nobody has to stay in the parking structure. They just can't camp in the street. They can stay in their own apartment, in a friend's or relative's house, in a McDonald's, in their cars (although some cities ban that too), in a regular homeless shelter, or really anywhere else, but if they really have no place to stay, they can go to the parking garage.
And they *won't* go to the parking garage, and you don't have room for them all in the prisons, and then what?
The current system, in cities with bans on camping in public, means chasing the obstinately homeless from the streets where the police are tonight to the other streets where the police aren't tonight, lather, rinse, repeat, pointless disruption. I'm not seeing the advantage of the system that works the same way but with our having built a bunch of big empty concrete structures that almost nobody uses.
This is what traditional government housing projects are based on, and they have traditional failure modes. Putting things far away from major cities is a good recipe for getting people to try to stay away from there and get back to the major cities. You have to understand that homeless people are *people* and have desires and goals of their own, and if you are trying to forcibly relocate them to places that they aren't intentionally locating themselves, you're going to fail unless you either physically imprison them, or understand why they are locating in one place rather than another and make the other place have the features they want.
Yes, I would agree that they would need to be physically imprisoned.
You could have a scheme whereby they can be let out if some kind of parole board if their situation changes. They could be allowed out to earn money on supervised work (e.g. fruit picking) at below minimum wage.
There are probably constitutional problems with imprisoning people who haven't been convicted of any specific crime, but I imagine there are workarounds. For instance, many homeless people are drug addicts, drug possession carries a maximum penalty of one year, and it's easy to argue that anyone who is a drug addict must surely have already possessed drugs at least sixty times in their life, so that's sufficient to justify life imprisonment right there.
When you find yourself trying to think of "workarounds" for the constitution, it is probably a good time to stop and consider if what you're trying to do is actually a good idea, or if it is in fact exactly the kind of abuse that the writers of the constitution were trying to prevent. If you have a specific complaint about what some homeless people are doing, eg. shoplifting or vandalism or sleeping in the middle of a busy sidewalk, then the recommended policy is to start actually enforcing those existing laws better, not to drag all homeless people (including the ones who aren't doing anything wrong) off to special camps.
> For instance, many homeless people are drug addicts, drug possession carries a maximum penalty of one year, and it's easy to argue that anyone who is a drug addict must surely have already possessed drugs at least sixty times in their life, so that's sufficient to justify life imprisonment right there.
Excuse me? Being addicted to a drug is enough to justify life imprisonment?
Do you really think the problem with the US prison system is that they don't put *enough* people in prisons to avoid having to treat them like human beings?
What if the homeless people decide that they'd rather live in a tent under a freeway overpass, than live in a panopticon? An awful lot of what makes homelessness a thing is a combination of mental illness (which doesn't mix well with a perception of being watched all the time), and drug addiction (which means regularly doing illegal things that you probably don't want authority to watch) and general inability to get along with authority.
There's already a substantial population of homeless who will spend the night in a shelter if it's freezing and they would literally die on the street, but won't tolerate a shelter's rules in the long term and go back to the street as soon as the weather improves. And current shelters, whatever their problems, are not panopticons.
Interesting- thank you for this. The Courtyard is in line with what I’m advocating for here: a simple, basic, relatively safe place to pitch a tent or roll out a bed in a type of facility that is quick and cheap to build.
I’m especially keen on encouraging self-government (within limits). The homeless manage it on the streets; tent cities are relatively stable and organized. I like the panopticon layout not to enable close and oppressive management but to prevent violence and exploitation at minimum cost.
I’m amazed at Police Chief McManus: a public official who says he was wrong and changes direction. Much kudos to him!
Came for the entertaining review, but found the conclusion remarkably heartwarming. Great work! Room for a docuseries on the interesting political candidates of america.
What’s interesting to me, as an outsider, is how little of America’s cultural wars are being fought here. Some of the Republicans are anti vax, but that’s old hat. One guy opposed to the WEF. Some opposition to blm but it’s rare. On the other side no demands to fight white supremacy, increase the number of genders officially to 150, defund the police, replace all “o”s in gendered languages with “x”s.
Is twitter lying to me about what is Important, or does that stuff only matter at a federal level.
1) Most of these people are Berniecrats or Republicans, because the regular Democrats already have Gavin Newsom.
2) The Berniecrats are more into economics / material conditions
3) The Republicans do have all the standard Republican culture war positions, but I mostly packed this into "they have standard Republican positions on everything" to focus on their quirks. Some of the anti-BLM, anti-socialism stuff made it into this article, and there's more on their websites (especially against teaching CRT in schools)
Well, most of them are Republicans, so they aren't pushing the left side stuff. Of the Dems that are running, one wants to reopen the Robert Kennedy investigation, one is focused on aqueducts, and one seems to be trying to make up for the rest with a caps filled rant of a platform.
"I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of them are immigrants. Immigrants believe in the American Dream. Maybe they’re the only people who still do. Back in Mexico or India or wherever, they heard that America was a magical place where ordinary people governed themselves and anyone could get ahead."
I'm an immigrant too, and this is a good lesson for everyone living in the US. Yes, there are many social, political, and economic problems, but you're a paradise of equality and opportunity compared to most countries on Earth, and compared to any time in history more than 50 years back. Here, your abilities and your hard work actually matter, not just how well connected your father is or how many officials you can afford to bribe. For anyone coming from a country where corruption is a fact of life, where justice is merely the advantage of the stronger, and where the average person would envy America's homeless, America really is the land of dreams. That's not because immigrants are all naive starry eyed dreamers; sometimes it's because they are comparing America to other human societies and not to the Kingdom of Heaven.
I think that is a response to multiculturalism to be honest (where it is not plain racism anyway): when most people publicly advocating high levels of immigration are also espousing an ideology which does not require integration (I suspect most multiculturalists might expect integration would happen though) then it's easy to equate the two things. So, as you say, there's a valuable counterpoint in immigrants buying into the national legend rather than seeking to be separate.
Precisely this. The difference between "melting pot" multiculturalism and "salad bowl" multiculturalism is absolutely huge. When the former option is called "racist", it makes immigration a lot less appealing.
This was a really fun one to read! It's kind of a shame that the Republicans decided to unite around Dahle, when (Shawn) Collins would probably have been a better choice -- the national Republicans recruited him to run against Katie Porter and he fundraised pretty impressively, but then redistricting screwed him over and he decided to try for Governor instead of running in a seat that already had a Republican incumbent (he's in Young Kim's seat now). Not that Newsom is going to lose, but if some kind of absolutely improbable lightning strikes I think Collins would be a very marginally better candidate than Dahle, whose main qualification is just good connections to the state-level California Republican Party. Which shouldn't be a strong qualification for anything.
Being European, I always thought that I would be a staunch democrat in the US. However, I now see that my aspiration to own a ranch one day clearly makes me republican. The more you know!
Candidates in California get to choose their own occupational descriptions, so for decades it's been popular to Something / Rancher: e.g., Educator / Rancher.
1: I would watch a reality tv show featuring these people. Or, better yet: a show where, due to some constutional [mumble mumble] they find themselves collectivly as absloute rulers of CA, but they all have to work together.
2: Scott, or anyone else for that matter, who do you think would be the best govenor, distinct form questions of electability?
Scott, I recommend you stop using Adblock Plus and switch to Ublock Origin, the first switched to a "pay us to let YOUR ads through" business model. Also, good article.
I typically use ScriptSafe. It's a general script-blocker instead of being ad-focused. This means until I allow a given site-source for scripting, the page elements get blocked. As a result, sometimes I have to fiddle with a site to get to actually work correctly, but on the flip side, I don't have to rely on someone else deciding which sources are ad-shaped, i have full control over it.
I've also gotten a better understanding of how websites out in the wild are actually put together.
"Although his first wife left him for Donald Trump Jr. (?!), he is happily remarried and has four children named “Montana”, “Hunter”, “Brooklynn”, and “Dutch”.
"Dutch" was Arnold Schwarzenegger's character's name in the 1987 movie Predator. Arnold Schwarzenegger was of course also governor of California. His co-star in the film was Jesse Ventura, and coincidentally or not, he later served as governor of Minnesota. This makes me think that Gavin Newsome is a shoo-in for re-election.
Then again, Sonny Landham, who played "Billie" in the film, ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary election for Governor of Kentucky in 2003. Lots of political aspirations among the cast of this movie, strangely.
One is tempted to laugh at states like Alabama, given the success of college football-affiliated candidates there like Tommy Tuberville. But clearly the phenomenon is not limited to red states, and at least he had to deal with a real world problem, like slowing down Alabama's running game, whereas Arnold and Jesse were just actors. They'd get more points from me if they fought a real alien.
When I lived in California I heard the rumour that everyplace was bussing the homeless to California. Turns out it's true, but with the key caveat that California is also bussing its homeless everywhere. In fact California is probably a net exporter of homeless people. Municipal governments like to find contacts for homeless people ("So you have a sister in Peoria? Maybe she'd take you in?") and buy them bus tickets.
Best article I've seen on the subject, with some numbers:
If the US could get its act together on a national level, then instead of redistributing the population from state to state then the obvious thing to do would be to redistribute them to Mexico instead.
Putting aside policies and ideas, the important thing is to pick someone who _looks_ gubernatorial.
Ron Jones looks promising, he's just one slightly more expensive haircut and one much more expensive suit away from looking like a state governor from central casting. Lonnie Sotor is basically similar but as far as I can tell from his picture has no eyes, which is a problem.
Hanink looks like he turned up for the wrong casting call -- he looks more like he wants to be a philosophy professor. What's that? You already are a philosophy professor? Great, keep that up, it suits you.
Shawn Collins: I'm not sure if he's governor material with that haircut, but his wife looks like definite First Lady material. Maybe we can pair her off with a different candidate?
Brian Dahle has the sort of goatee that says "I definitely peaked in the 90s" and the confident smile of a man who is the boss of something, but it's not something very important". I would expect to see him as a very effective county school board president, or chairman of a local soccer club.
Gavin Newsom is clearly the corporate CEO bad guy from some kids TV series.
Jenny La Roux looks like the "who farted y'all?" beauty queen meme in middle age.
Reading the Major Williams section I was all poised to make some comment about how actually socialists and communist’s often have found themselves at opposite ends of the rifle. Then I read that his kid’s name was Lord and realized Major was probably his first name, not his rank. Then my brain broke.
Jenny Roux never worked at Bain Cap, she worked at Bain & Co. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyraeca/ The two firms have shared ancestry (first spun out of second) but are completely separate. First is a LOT more prestigious / hard to get into than second. She was an AC i.e. lowest level grunt at bain & co for a couple years, basically standard finishing school fare for ivy league grads these days.
As a citizen of California, I appreciate your making my choice so much easier. I'm definitely now going to stay home and stress-test my couch instead of driving three blocks to the middle school to vote for any of these vegetables. Thanks!
> when I inspect that emotion further I find it has a flavor of “I could fix him”, which I’m told is not a good way to choose one’s relationship partners or governors.
This was funny but I think it sort of preserves a very Republican point of view by where the jokes land.
It accepts a lot of Republican framing of the problems of California and hand waves a lot of problems with standard Republican positions.
For example, "California has a worst in the country business climate."
Like that is going to go up in an ad with scary music on a black and white clip of Gavin Newsom with a "paid for by the GOP"
By contrast, most of these the Republican candidates are pro life. This is treated as just wacky fun and to be expected. No comments or scary text on what that actually means for people with difficult pregnancies or who are pregnant via rape or incest. No mention of how this is a gap in any stated commitment to cut bureaucracy and red tape. Between the jokes about hair, there wasn't room for one about how being pro life means being pro "adding a bunch more government bureaucracy between a woman and her doctor"?
The tone of the piece kind of laments that Gavin Newsom is probably going to be reelected. It attributes a lot of it to him looking the part and having good hair without acknowledging that most people in California also prefer the policy positions of a generic Democrat.
"Worst in the nation business climate", which is a direct quote from several of these candidates' platforms, is a reference to California's rank on https://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-business/, the best-known ranker of these things. I don't think it's "playing into their hands" to mention this any more than it's "playing into their hands" to mention we sure do have a wildfire problem and a homelessness problem.
I don't think I should have to add "and by the way this is bad and you should be against it" every time I mention a Republican believing Republican things, any more than I should have to say this when I mention Ventresca believing socialist things, Zacky owning a factory farm, or Zink having a climate plan which I think cashes out to a perpetual motion machine.
I voted for Newsom last election and will probably do so again, because his policy positions are closest to mine. As compensation for that indignity having been inflicted upon me, I reserve the right to make fun of him being an empty suit, which I don't think anyone denies.
You didn't attribute it to the candidate platforms though. It was listed as a basic fact. Like the fires and homelessness.
Chiefexecutive.net gets their rankings from a survey of 700 ceos. They put California at #50 dead last and Texas and Florida at #1 and #2.
Cnbc, using their own methodology (clearly laid out and viewable with 85 metrics in 10 categories) for business put California at #33, below average but not nearly the worst in the country. Also, the best two on that the CNBC list are Virginia and North Carolina. (Texas sits at #4 and Florida sits at #17)
Chief executive gets their rankings from a survey of ceos and, interestingly, among this probably very Republican group, the ranking that comes out is both the "worst business environment" and the "likelihood of being featured in a negative Tucker Carlson segment".
I dunno, Forbes doesn't seem to think businesses like California very much either, ranking it as the #1 state businesses are fleeing. I don't think saying it has a bad climate for business is some kind of partisan statement that needs tons of disclaimers lest you inadvertently aid The Enemy — unless you hate the Right so much that agreeing on *anything* is treachery to you, perhaps.
The CNBC rankings also make more intuitive sense. If California were the worst state in the country for doing business how is it that so many businesses choose to locate themselves in California? The bottom ranking states in the CNBC survey are ones that actually don't have many so major businesses: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine. (Note that the CNBC rankings are obviously considering things that are mostly unrelated to state policies, such as accessibility to the rest of the country.)
A lot of business was located in CA previous to the regulatory climate becoming poor, Silicon Valley being the prime example, or has special exceptions (Hollywood) or can’t be located anywhere else (the entire agricultural sector of the West Coast). Frankly, for having a monopoly on all the warm-weather Pacific coastline, huge land area and massive population, CA should be doing much better than it is, and business has visibly begun to pull out and relocate.
Yes, but part of my (and CNBC's) point is that business-friendliness is more than just regulatory climate! An area can have a good regulatory climate but still be a bad place to do business, or vice-versa. California did in fact rank dead last in the "regulatory climate" aspect of CNBC's rankings, but other factors moved it up from the bottom of the list overall.
I’m don’t know what use that ranking is to anyone. Places with good regulatory and tax climates should score higher than places that are crooked but rich in trapped businesses desperate to escape.
Don't you get to judge Newsom by his deeds, in addition to his positions? It's not only what he promises (and what the others promise), it's also (and, I would imagine, more importantly) what you think they might deliver. By your own admission, his record is quite bad. Is there a reason to expect much better in his next term?
Some states are quite happy with governors who are of the opposite political alignment to most of people in that state. It's not only the views that matter.
I noticed that too! So it's not just my imagination. I got a similar feeling from other recent articles as well, with this one being the strongest to the point of wondering if I'd somehow mispegged his values all these years. I was very confused.
On the other hand, I've never before read his articles without first receiving one or several recommendations each so it was in fact *very possible* that my view of him was cherry picked.
What ARE good ideas for solving the homeless problem? Seems like we should from the outset admit that at least 50% of our concern for the homeless is we don't want to see them, but we also wish them well to the extent it doesn't cost us too much.
I like the idea of giving them high-rise parking lots as a thought experiment. The first effect is it makes them less visible to the rest of the public, without changing their circumstances much from living homeless at street level. It hides them from view and takes them off the sidewalks we wanted to pass down.
It breaks all regulations immediately, as all good ideas do. A big problem with homeless shelters is they are too expensive to build and maintain because progressives love to regulate things to an insane degree.
A parking garage is a nice start because it is a big fuck you to all the progressive notions of what a perfect homeless shelter should be.
Now, a high-rise parking lot for the homeless will cause problems for its neighbors. Many of the residents will need money and drugs in that order. Perhaps the drugs can be delivered inside the parking garage, but the money is likely to be searched for it in nearby blocks outside of it. This creates externalities for neighboring businesses or residents.
Maybe the homeless parking garage should look like this:
Floor 1: This is where local charities give out food. Nobody actually sleeps on this floor because who wants to live on a first floor?
Floor 2: Religious institutions offer services and counseling for those who want it.
Floor 3: Secular minded altruists offer practical advice on getting a job, getting skills training, perhaps other practical survival advice.
Floor 4: Closely monitored living and sleeping conditions for those who choose it. I imagine this would include a lot of women who want to feel safe from attack.
Floors 5-8: People who want to live in relative anarchy. Who want to smoke crack, drink mouthwash, whatever floats their boat.
Outside fundraising can be used to distribute limited cash in some sort of equitable way among residents. (not sure how best to do this.) Those who want to better themselves and escape homelessness can use the cash for that; those who prefer to be drug addicts can use the cash for that -- which prevents them from harassing neighbors for cash.
Anything that compels drug and alcohol addiction treatment, and treatment for mental illness. Hardly anybody who is chronically homeless *doesn't* have one of these problems, or both. And you can't solve *any* lesser problem of no place to sleep, no job, no medical care, until you stop the voices and/or get the monkey off your back.
Serious question - what's the actual track record on the effectiveness of drug treatment? My impression is that other than a few examples in which we're openly acknowledging that we're trying to treat the symptomatic pathology rather than the addiction itself (e.g., Suboxone or Methadone treatment), the track record on addiction treatment itself is at best incredibly mixed.
I always tend to be extremely skeptical of proposals for drug and alcohol addiction treatment (other than Suboxone / Methadone, I guess) because my strong impression is that these are basically forms of pouring money down a giant hole, where we can (and celebrities often do) spend an essentially infinite amount of resources on a basically intractable problem for little if any tangible gain - let alone any kind of gain commensurate to the cost.
I haven't read the latest literature on this, though, and certainly not that from reputable medical journals, so maybe this perception of the ineffectiveness of treatment is mistaken or out of date. A state-of-the-art summary from someone in the know would be extremely welcome.
Regarding drug treatment, you are pretty much spot-on. I had a Chinese roommate recently, and I paid him a large sum to translate anything he could find on treatment during the Opium Wars to english, under a hunch that the Chinese probably tried every possible way of de-addicting their populace. And they did. They tried torture, they tried weird positive stuff where they made you a rich court official with a sinecure but if you touched opium again you were instantly executed on the spot, they tried everything any intelligent person might think of, with or without ethical constraints. Not a single thing worked, the relapse rate was very close to 100%.
Well, the death penalty for possession of opium has been a constant fixture for almost two centuries now, even in times when it wasn't really enforced.
Mostly they tried "going to war with Britain to stop them from selling Opium"
So. I just spent like an hour trying to find the comnent you're replying to.
I can't remember what you're asking for. Could it be the translation I commissioned of hpmor? Unlikely. It's probably the 'opium war' era chinese opiate stuff, I have a vague memory of talking about that sometime recently... except that I dug through the big thread about suboxone on this post and couldn't find our exchange, which is making me second-guess myself
Incoming rant about how horrible substack's comment systems are.
So I click 'return to main thread' which puts me... back out at the big list of all comments! Still no context! https://imgur.com/a/J52XaEl
Ctrl+f on "John Wittle" can't find it. Ctrl+f on "translated texts" can't find it either. Both also implied there is a ton of weird crap going on here; there are results that have a defined location on my scroll bar but which simply don't appear.
So then I went down and opened every single "more comments" link I could find that didn't actually open a new page, manually scanning for this thread's parent. I couldn't find it.
I am posting this comment to get a permalink (edit: ha! I forgot! The system can generate permalinks but it doesn't give us access to them!) I can share to substack devs, people on the ssc discord who think we're just complaining about meaningless change or new color schemes, etc. Maybe I can finally convince people that my hatred for this comment system is genuine.
Out of curiosity. Can you remember what you were asking for? Or do you have any way of getting to the parent thread to check?
I can't find my comment either, but yeah, it was the translated Opium War stuff. "Things a government motivated to the point of desperation tried that still didn't work" is a pretty compelling reading list.
I just found something Scott wrote that basically seems to be saying the same thing:
"Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution."
10 or so years ago I had some contact with a guy that was on methadone in order to avoid doing heroin. He took up a practice of meditation and pranayama. After a little while ha had a feeling he could cut his dose of methadone quite drastically and he did and experienced no withdrawals. After some more time meditating and doing pranayama he again got the feeling he could cut his dose again and once again did a drastic cut without withdrawals. This repeated a couple of more times and he was completely of them in six months or so. He told me that this was unheard of. That in order to get of methadone you had to cut tiny, tiny bits of the normal dosage in order to not get unbearable withdrawals. And that a large part of the reason there is so much resistance towards putting people on methadone is that they will likely stay on it for life because quitting it is so hard. He had a strong feeling that it was a particular and unusually powerful pranayama technique called spinal breathing that was most of the reason he could cut it so fast without withdrawals.
A while later I came across a blog post by a guy who wrote about how he got of methadone in a similar way by doing lots of qigong.
If the techniques these guys where using were indeed the reason they could get off methadone we have a potentially very good treatment path. Get people on methadone and help them stabilize their lives, then get them practicing these techniques to get off methadone.
This is pretty much empirically disproven. Lots of people have anecdotes about strategies people used to get clean. Whenever you examine them in detail, it's stuff like, christians telling their peers that christ helped them get clean so that the community'll feel uncomfortable showing skepticism, when really there is no sobriety and the addict just wants to avoid getting caught again. Or people have been through the sobriety -> relapse -> rehab cycle a dozen times, and each time they attribute their newfound sobriety to some new technique or wondercure or philosophy, but then when they relapse 4 years later you don't hear about it, like a temporal file drawer effect
That's why we use properly designed experimental science to determine stuff like the efficacy of medical treatments, because people can end up believing practically anything
Especially when it comes to narratives spun by unreliable narrators like opioid addicts talking about their own sobriety!
Frankly, your friend is right; drastically cutting a methadone dose without withdrawal is unheard of. As in, I have been studying addiction medicine for about 13 years and I have never heard of a single case of such. Opioid withdrawal is not nearly as prone to perception-placebo effects as, say, nicotine withdrawal. Opioid withdrawal has observable physiological symptoms that cannot be mistaken for nocebo, and certainly cannot be cured via meditation and breathing exercises. It's entirely possible that your friend was able to alter his subjective experience of the quantity of suffering that his withdrawal burdened him with, but that's not the same thing as not experiencing withdrawal in the first place.
On top of that... well. There are constantly scam artists selling opiate addiction cures. If I had to guess, I'd say the cottage industry of fake addiction cures is worth about as much as the illicit drug trade in the first place (you would not believe how much rehab clinics can charge, especially the ones who have thrown away any pretense of actually trying to be effective). And frankly, i'd say "meditation practices imported from eastern mysticism" is the second most common scam, after "psychedelic drug which was once used by pre-industrial humans for spiritual ceremonies". While it's true that just looking around at alternative rehabilitation scams you'll mostly see stuff about ibogaine, ketamine, or kratom, you'll also see a *lot* of barely-not-a-cult eastern spirituality stuff.
So like... I hope it's understandable that, for me, hearing a few anecdotes about meditation and 'powerful pranayama techniques' curing someone's methadone withdrawal feels similar to hearing a few anecdotes about a christian faith healer restoring sight to the blind, or healing the legs of a wheelchair-bound individual. It's not just that it doesn't make sense from a medical perspective, it's not just that it violates medical science norms. It's that it very precisely pattern-matches to other things I already know are scams, or at least things that probably wouldn't beat placebo in any decently designed double-blinded experiment
I'm a recovered addict and I've spent a bunch of time trying to answer this, with almost no results. The state of the art summary seems to be that treatment is better than no treatment, widely available treatment reduces the cost of addiction to society, but as a whole, no treatment programs are very effective.
We do know that spiritual transformation works. It's probably the only known cure for addiction so far. Of course this can't be prescribed, or usefully included in a meta analysis. Though it does make me very interested in and hopeful about the work going into psilocybin and related drugs.
Thank you for sharing your experience from the much more valuable perspective of someone who's actually gone to the effort of looking into the current state of the art, and my congratulations on what I'm sure was a hard road to recovery..
I have no idea, and I don't much care. We spend umpty kazillion dollars a year trying to stop people from dying of pancreatic cancer (median surivival 6 months) or glioblastoma multiforme (median survival 15 months), congestive heart failure, strokes, and a whole host of other promptly fatal ailments, and consider an earth-shattering success to be a novel treatment that buys people an extra 3 months of life for no more than $40,000 a pop. I think we can spare *just a little* compassion and cash for people struggling with something that is similarly devastating, albeit usually much more slowly, even if the success rates are poor, the struggle enormous, the setbacks frequent.
Is there a 100% cure just sitting there on the shelf, ready to inject, $50 a patient? Of course not. Does that suggest just giving up? Just let 'em go? Bullshit ourselves that it's because we deeply, deeply respect their autonomy, and not because we don't give a crap because they're ugly, smell bad, and say weird offensive things?
Even leaving aside the cost of treatment, there's an argument to be made that it doesn't really help anybody?
Like, if you take a homeless person, send them to rehab (probably against their will), then let them out, then they relapse immediately and end up back on the street, rinse and repeat...
Then you just end up repeatedly putting that person in an institutionalized environment, probably with all the abuse and poor life quality that entails, without having solved their problem. The person would have probably preferred you left them on the street.
We come back to the original problem, which is that the intervention's only tangible effect is taking the homelessness and misery out of sight of ordinary people.
I am a little surprised to hear you say this. This seems like, well, not the kind of sentiment I'd expect to hear from someone with a name that actually got referenced in the original sequences
The problem with opiate addiction treatment is that it doesn't work, not that we don't want to pay for it
"I had a Chinese roommate recently, and I paid him a large sum to translate anything he could find on treatment during the Opium Wars to english, under a hunch that the Chinese probably tried every possible way of de-addicting their populace. And they did. They tried torture, they tried weird positive stuff where they made you a rich court official with a sinecure but if you touched opium again you were instantly executed on the spot, they tried everything any intelligent person might think of, with or without ethical constraints. Not a single thing worked, the relapse rate was very close to 100%."
In the short term? 100% of course. If you are locked up and can't get drugs, you don't do drugs, end of story. What you probably mean is "How effective is it once you let people go?" The obvious plausible hypothesis is "about as effective as any other treatment that lasts the same duration and effects the same changes or lack of changes in behavior." Why would one expect anything different?
Anyway, I don't really care what the effectiveness is after you let them go, because if it stops working you just bring them back. Problem solved. The idea that it is more humane to allow people to live like animals in a stockyard of a factory farm, because it's their expressed choice (from a brain that is so deranged with illness and chemicals that it demonstrably cannot make decisions that optimize its own plain physical interests, let alone abstract complex psychological interests) -- instead of putting them whether they will or no into the best possible known treatment for their afflictions is bizarre to me. I cannot understand the worldview that would choose that as the option that best discharges our duty to our fellow man.
I do get how pundits and politicians who would rather wring their hands (which is cheap) instead of do the hard and expensive spade work of building the system to do the job think that way, but I don't have to respect cynicism and expediency, whatever fake pieties are prettily plastered over it, and I don't.
"Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution."
I have a bad idea: build a fully libertarian freedomtown where there are no cops and you can do drugs and kill yourself in peace. Basically a haven of total drug decrim but also complete lawlessness. We leave them an always available phoneline to Society if they decide they wanna get sober, where they can call for a bus to come pick them up, give them Suboxone, and take them back to a motel room in a big city where they can attempt vocational training etc.
Because it's promised to be completely decriminalised there (we won't stop them from making, growing, selling or doing drugs there, but we will stop that area from exporting), we shouldn't have any difficulty getting people to go there.
The reason why I think it's a bad plan is because it's pretty much just letting people walk out onto the freeway, but in a way that inconveniences the rest of us less. But Americans might see the appeal of this sort of thing.
I don't see how that differs strongly from the situation in the United States already, barring a few odd corners. If you want to (to the extent you can "want" anything when your mind is addled) burn your brain out with meth or heroin or even oxy there is nothing much to stop you, unless you have some incredibly dedicated family member who isn't co-dependent, or unless you fall foul of the law accidentally or on purpose.
So far as I know, the greatest amount of treatment of serious mental illness and bad drug and alcohol addition that goes on today is an adjunct of the legal system. People get caught up in it in some variety of petty criminality and a savagely overworked judge tries to divert them to some kind of treatment, hoping it will save the lost soul, and hoping also that the treatment won't itself be abusive or dishonest, which sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, since there's neither the money nor the manpower to be sure it's as good as the nice private clinics the beauiful people frequent when the pinot grigio starts flowing a little early in the day and an unfortunate thing happens with the car and a light pole.
The last link links to the "unspeakable" New York Times!?! What happened to "NYT delenda est" and "Écrasez l’infâme!" ?! - I only read it, cuz it's only 50 cent a week. Promised! And will get out asa the price goes up - or earlier. - Thanks for the insights into politics on the other side of the world. Was great fun. And very sad. As a good story should be.
On the Joe Rogan episode Shellenberger mentions reading the scout mindset, and reading substack. Maybe he reads SSC. As Rogan would say it's entirely possible. You might get your chance to fix him yet.
In another comment I mentioned how unrealistic a freshwater pipeline from the interior to the coast was. I maintain that it's ludicrous, but an opposite proposition is being seriously considered and makes a lot of sense. The Great Salt Lake is an endorheic lake with no outflows, so it's naturally far saltier than the sea. Unfortunately it's been drying up, due to increased population in the same watershed.
A not as unreasonable as you might think solution may be to pump seawater from the pacific into the Great Salt Lake. Nobody will mind pumping water out of the Pacific, it has plenty and it's not fit for human consumption, but it's actually less salty than the Great Salt Lake is already. This would not be drinking water for Utah, but it would prevent exposure of the dusty lakebed, cool the environment, and make it possible to keep drawing from the current inflows without drying it up altogether.
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2022/05/22/loony-idea-pacific-ocean/ - Environmentalist opposed to the idea because it doesn't involve raising water prices, and might disrupt the "Great Salt Lake's ecological balance" which is essentially just Brine Shrimp and flies, and declining every year as is.
This would require at least 56 TJ of energy to raise the water (a bit less than was released by early atom bombs) but maybe you could use excess solar power during the day.
It wouldn't need to be always-on and it would run through the best solar region on the planet, ideally it would be entirely renewable-based in an area where renewable energy is rapidly becoming free. There isn't even a transit or storage problem; put the pipeline and the farms next to each other in the middle of nowhere
Well, I don't think the length of the pipe is such a problem, there are oil pipelines that are longer, but the flow rate required is pretty hefty. The Great Salt Lake is ~1700 square miles. If you want to add 3 inches a year, you need a flow rate of ~375 CFS, which is about what you get for a good stout creek or medium-sized river in the summer.
I'm not sure if you've commented on it, but its striking how hard it is to vote in primaries (or even generals). There's a list of candidates most of whom lack a website or any clearly stated positions beyond one "slogan." The ballot gives the impression of choice, but it feels like a lie. I dont have enough time to determine which downballot races to vote on this year. Democracy feels dead.
I mean, if someone doesn't have a website at all it's probably fair to dismiss them from consideration, but that doesn't make democracy dead - you still get to vote for whoever you want. Just pick someone who actually has a policy platform, if that's what you want to see in a candidate. Besides, Scott seems to have found at least a loose set of policy positions for most of these candidates
The Controller race is probably an even better example of this than Governor, where an immigrant woman with no political experience is spending millions of dollars of her own money to run for Controller, just to prove she can.
It seems very unlikely that a republican candidate will be competitive in a state-wide election anytime soon. Given that, a moderate alternative to the democratic party may be beneficial. I've registered my party preference with the "California Common Sense Party" and I encourage others to consider doing the same. And if anyone thinks doing so is harmful, I'd be curious to learn why.
Thank you for correcting the error about my position about Suboxone, but you make another error claiming I support “sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill.” That’s simply false. I address this issue at length in my books and writings. Please correct it.
Woah. Why is this not getting any replies? This is incredible Scott, this is exactly what you wanted. It's been a whole weekend! We've got one of the candidates right here! Let's ask him stuff!
Scott, I'm way late to the game here, but just want to say, in response to your obviously tongue-in-cheek overview of Gavin Newsom, that I worked with a fellow who would have replied "Heh heh, now actually your assessment of Gavin is not quite right - you see, he IS ALREADY the governor, so the fact that his name is Gavin actually wasn't actually a major deterrent for voters. You should really do a little more research next time!"
Compromise: governator/governatorial?
3. I'm no expert on it (and maybe I'm just a biased Catholic), but distributism seems like something that a variety of people from different parts of the political spectrum could get behind.
I'm not Catholic, and I only found out what distributionism is today, but it strikes me as a good idea.
I agree. The outcome that reduces the economic power of large corporations and increases that of small businesses seems like it would be a large boost to technical innovation.
Large corporations are efficient at making money (which is why they naturally emerge from the current economic state) but tend to be sluggish at changing the technical status quo. It is why the FAANGs buy small businesses with new IP, rather than generating much internally.
I mean, distributism boils down to "everyone should own their means of production".* No disagreement here, but the whole point of the branding seems to be signaling you're a good, reliable religious conservative instead of some kind of radical commie revolutionary aiming to overthrow traditional society. (Which, come to think of it, would probably be a good thing for my fellow socialists to signal.)
*That's a vast simplification, I know. I don't mean to say it literally does not differ from other currents of socialist thinking, just that it fits perfectly among them by unambiguously sharing their defining ideological demand.
Distributists lose me when they start talking about guilds. I'm not super interested in letting the people who already have jobs using the government to suppress their future competitors, and it's a bit baffling to me that people could look at the socio-governmental landscape today and think, "yep, we need some more of that".
Interesting to see your take on Shellenberger, but you're incorrect on his stance re: Suboxone. I assume you got his stance on Suboxone from the chronicle hit piece, but they got it wrong.
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1525928377151959040
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1490703152244428805
also, calling CalPsyc "mass" incarceration of the mentally ill is a stretch. Perhaps if you think of Portugal's handling of homeless addicts as mass incarceration then you're at least consistent.
Hi Catherine,
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and wish to simply rest your head on your keyboard, I suggest stepping away from the computer entirely. A long walk outside, a conversation with a friend, or even a book can help alleviate stress.
Resting one’s frontal lobe on a precision machined cherry MX key is no way to deal with stress.
Thanks, corrected.
I can't tell whether Catherine is having a bad day or a very, very good day.
Leroux's "Pro-life Plus" seems pretty reasonable, per her website it's just Pro-life with funding for supporting single mothers with affordable childcare, remote education, employment opportunities etc.
Tony Fanara's Lower-48 aqueduct system sounds great if you're a coastal state importing water, but not so great if you're a midwestern state whos water is being stolen by coastal elites.
Presumably we would pay for the water we import; would idaho mind some of their excess water being diverted out of full reservoirs in return for money to pay for <whatever it is idahoans like>?
Probably yes very much so. Water is a very contentious issue even within Cali already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars) , and frankly nobody outside of Cali likes Californians much at all. Any plan to export water would (rightfully in my opinion) be viewed as a plot by blue states to steal scarce resources, heritage etc. from red states. I doubt a pipe could be planned and built, it would face tremendous local opposition. Beyond that I highly doubt it could survive without being repeatedly damaged under mysterious circumstances.
Conservationists don't want to harm native ecosystems, conservatives don't trust or want to help California. I challenge you to find a politician that will say their constituency has "excess water", the mayor of Atlantis probably wouldn't say it.
I think the real problem is that a pipeline barely pencils out when you're talking about a pipeline to ship something like petroleum, that sells for dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of dollars a barrel. Meanwhile, literally the most expensive municipal water in the United States sells for under $1 a barrel: https://www.publicwaternow.org/most_expensive_water
California has some big aqueducts that ship water a few hundred miles from the Sierras, and so do some other parts of the world. But very few of these try to cross mountains or do anything else expensive. Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
>Water is important, but it's not *so* important that people are paying *that* much for it.
I have to disagree, it is “so” important. The price we have become accustomed to paying for it is an entirely separate issue. In other words, when supplies shrink I don’t think it’s going to have much effect on the demand.
I think it will have a huge effect on demand, given that most current urban demand is for landscaping and exterior washing, which are not actually highly valued activities. No one will pay $1 a gallon for a lawn or for exterior washing. There are other uses that will also disappear long before we hit the core inelastic demand.
And long before water reaches $1 a gallon, residents will leave and drop demand that way too. Water is not going to be globally scarce - just scarce in some localities.
That’s probably true.
There’s going to be a threshold, where there will be a wildfire in some location and there won’t be enough water available in nearby reservoirs to fight it. Something like that would be a big eye-opener. Some rivers already run dry in the summer.
Then I really think whoever has put the time and engineering into designing ways to capture & use iceberg water will basically become king.
Things don’t pencil out yet but I think they will, sadly.
Water is a more complicated market than it might seem. People buying bottles of drinking water at a grocery store are unlike farmers using water by the acre-foot.
For the kind of water that comes through pipes, to simplify you could think of it as cities versus farmers. Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale, but often it isn't.
Yeah, that all makes sense, I get it.
I was just making the point that it’s a pretty essential commodity and the less of it there is to go around the uglier things will get. People aren’t going to give up water, when push comes to shove. Time to watch Chinatown again.
It would be a funny twist in the culture war if all kinds of people in the southwest had to move to all those states that have a lot of water. Perhaps they would be referred to as drybacks.
Canada will have to build a wall.
> Cities will outbid farmers if the water is for sale
Depends if they want to eat or not.
I'm not claiming to understand the laws of water markets; I know enough to know I don't.
But left to a free market, either the city people pay enough to the farmer to cover his water bill or they don't have food to eat, and city people are weird but they still like to eat.
Very few? Southern California gets almost all of its water either through the LA Aqueduct or the Colorado River Aqueduct, both of which cross significant mountain ranges by various combinations of tunnels and siphons.
If California cared about their fresh water supplies they'd stop throwing so much of it into the ocean.
Note that by “throwing fresh water into the ocean” you mean “allowing rivers to exist”.
You can just ignore the potential solution by not even looking at it and dismissing it as impossible while not actually examining the facts if you like. I won't try to stop you.
But no, by "throwing fresh water into the ocean" I meant exactly what I said.
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/ca-reservoirs-filled-to-top-in-2019-being-drained-by-state/
And last year: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-releasing-water-from-reservoirs-claiming-drought-conditions/
And the 20 years before that.
This problem is entirely man-made, primarily through inaction, and mostly due to the fact that the majority of the people who run things in California care way more about the delta smelt and chinook salmon than people. Which, given that they're in charge of Californians, I suppose I can empathize with that.
I'll be polite enough to not put words in **your** mouth, and assert that what you really "mean" is that you hate humans in favor of random smelt, but you **do** have to actually decide which one you're going to support.
And as a practical matter, if you choose to go with the current status quo, you are picking the smelt and salmon. Which **isn't even actually accomplishing the (declared) intended result**. So the **only** thing that's actually being accomplished is making life in California more difficult for the people that live there.
I suppose there probably **is** an "ineffective anti-altruism" movement, but they kinda sound like jerks.
Everyone agrees that rivers and fish have some value. Everyone agrees that lawns and car washes have some value. Everyone agrees that drinking water and agricultural crops have some value. The question is just how much value each has, and therefore how much water to devote to each.
We can barely even get long-distance oil pipelines built, even though oil is 2.5 orders of magnitude more valuable than water per unit volume.
Those are generally derailed to political concerns or environmental ones, people hating big companies or worried about oil leaks. Harmless seawater used to refill a lake is not an issue there, and pipe building itself is not the challenge
I agree, but any project on that scale seems to have a very difficult problem of overcoming a zillion landowners and local governments who could potentially veto the project for any or no reason. I also wouldn't be surprised if California delayed such a project for decades with environmental litigation.
Not a fan of Californians
I mean, sure, but hopefully Biden wouldn't veto a water pipeline too.
As for a response to your second point, well, yeah. I definitely meant to imply that I consider this to be mostly the fault of the California government. ;)
As someone who lives in Idaho I can confirm there would be absolutely no chance of that. I'm not sure Californians realize that the exact same drought they are suffering is widespread through the West; although the North Rocky Mountain ecoregion is experiencing it to a less significant degree than Utah, California, and the Southwest, it still exists. Idaho is absolutely suffering from a precipitation shortage.
Also, everyone here seems to hate California, so there's another obstacle.
Indeed. In fact the Great Lakes states passed an interstate agreement (enshrined also in federal law) specifically to pre-empt such notions.
https://greatlakes.org/campaigns/defending-the-great-lakes-compact/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
Canada gets a say too based on a treaty signed in 2005, and that say is emphatically not in favor of piping any Great Lakes water 2,000 miles southwest.
Shellenberger is aggressively mendacious. I like the "Apocalypse Never" idea but he's like a high school debate club in human form. He says stuff that he's smart enough to know isn't true, because he thinks YOU'RE not smart enough to notice. If you could desalinate water with smug you could plug him straight into the grid.
Interesting. I read that same book and came the to exact opposite conclusion on his substantiveness. Let me pull it off my bookshelf and see what I can find.
Re:Africa. The argument here is that deaths from extreme weather are orders of magnitude lower in the rich world than the developing world, and so if you had the choice between growing at 2% per person per year with +3 degrees of warming vs growing at 1% per person per year with +1.5 degrees of warming, the faster+hotter path would likely have fewer deaths from extreme weather and almost certainly have higher overall quality of life (since increased wealth reduces deaths from lots of things).
Other examples:
Deforestation. The planet is net-adding greenery, based on NASA satellite imagery over time. Yes, we are still losing rainforest so the forests that are replacing the rainforest are of net lower ecological value in terms of biodiversity, still the trendline on greenery is genuinely surprising relative to standard rhetoric.
Energy use in the Congo. Locals burning wood for energy uses a lot of land and degrades a lot of high-biodiversity rainforest. Replacing this biofuel use with ANYTHING would be a big improvement, even if that thing were fossil fuels (ideally it would be hydropower / wind / solar).
Sweatshops. All across the world people voluntarily leave family farms and travel hundreds of miles to work in sweatshops if the opportunity is available, because subsistence low-tech agriculture sucks and all of civilization is an elaborate scheme to get away from it.
Whales. The summary of the history of the whaling industry, and the importance of the "more ethical" replacement being both available in unlimited quantity and cheaper, was both interesting and instructive.
Nuclear. He is correct that Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a disastrous decision that burnt a lot of extra coal. His information on actual cancer cases caused by various nuclear disasters was interesting would be would be hard to independently verify. His information on the Vermont nuclear plant being mostly replaced by natural gas burning was new to me.
Energy storage component for renewables. The $23 trillion figure for the cost to have adequeate battery storage for the US if the grid was entirely wind+solar lines up decently with back-of-the-envelope math that I've done for myself using Googleable prices of batteries & similar factors, and demonstrates that there is a massive gap between current energy storage technology and what would be needed for a reliable renewable grid.
Malthus: continues to be wrong, and the 20th century chapters of the story are really embarrassing for Paul Erhlich in particular.
Etc.
> but that 1% vs. 3% example is just made up.
So is Global Cooling.
Oh, sorry, Global Warming.
No, wait. Climate Change. There we go.
The deaths from extreme weather is a useful skeleton key that unlocks the understanding that projected damage from global warming *by the IPCC* is quite low relative to (for example) the difference global GDP in 2100 being $X per person or $1.6X per person. Adding together crop failures, extreme weather deaths, coastal relocation, increasing spending on mitigation + hardening measures, migration flows etc produces only a 5% impact on global GDP and a small number of additional deaths.
Given that the current "only acceptable" solution to climate change (no new nuclear, just wind+solar+batteries) currently seems like it would cost 1 order of magnitude more in $, that is quite suggestive that people dogmatically insisting that "this is the only acceptable course of action because the alternative is mass death" are full of it.
Now, one can make the case that the IPCC is underestimating the potential damage from climate change, but then at that point one must abandon appeals to authority and get down in the mud with every single other person waving around their own personal custom climate model.
> Nuclear. He is correct that Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy was a disastrous decision that burnt a lot of extra coal.
And hasn't exactly done the local area a lot of good *this* year in particular.
As an italian i find it very funny how much people are critical of germany while my country does the exact same things and manage to completely avoid international criticism
To at least some extent the most recent round of condemnations is focused on Germany because it was NS2 that is at least often referenced as having held such a significant role in the way things played out, and that runs straight from Russia to Germany. If it went through Italy instead, I bet you guys would get more flak.
As far as relative levels of oppobrium specifically regarding the climate change question, I cannot speculate.
I see what you mean, but also since that start of the sanctions we increased our import of russian oil. And by A LOT.
https://www.ft.com/content/83fa3e90-e36d-463a-a4db-9ea24f22964f
And we still are managing to avoid international backlash
Give an example?
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1511821114128752643?t=jG1n4i4Au9G1EQDzHSA7lg&s=09
Here's a good example. An aggressively manipulative half-truth.
What's the half truth? That they can be built on desert and that land isn't valuable anyway?
Only counting the land footprint of a fossil fuel power plant ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, which is both massive and also destructive. But he doesn't actually care about the issue of land use and environmental preservation, he just wants to win the argument.
Edit: In case you're interested, this is what the land footprint of a normal powerplant looks like: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/6-wyoming-coal-mine-jim-west.jpg
Eh. We use a lot more space *using* energy vs producing it. And it's not like wind turbine blades or solar panels are birthed whole from the forehead of Zeus, neither.
The land required to run an electrical grid on fossil fuels requires both the land to operate the plants & also the land to extract the fossil fuels, yes.
But oil extraction+power plants are still a smaller footprint than generating an equivalent amount of energy through solar+wind+batteries+mines for lithium and rare earths. I'd need to go looking for sources to pin down exactly how much smaller, but my Fermi estimate of it would still be 2x to 10x?
I bring this up not to open this up for debate because I think the whole thing is utterly silly. It's an example of a very smart person knowingly using bait-and-switch argumentation.
So Shellenberger ignores the land footprint of fossil fuel extraction, while almost every pro renewable argument I've read ignores the land footprint of copper, cobalt, coltan, etc. mines. Also, Shellenberger isn't pro coal; he's pro nuclear, which has a much smaller mining footprint. So Shellenberger is not particularly mendacious by the standards of the energy debate.
Both renewables and conventional plants obviously require materials to build the physical plant, copper for transmission, etc. IN ADDITION, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants need a constant stream of mined fuel to generate power. It's their defining feature. Renewables do not; they just sit where you put them and generate power from ambient energy. Ignoring that is enough for me to write him off as a person worth listening to, on energy or frankly any other topic.
That still looks a lot smaller than the solar panel covered hills, though.
There's plenty of studies on land use by power source that include extraction of fuel and raw materials needed for that power source, and Shellenberger is correct that solar requires more land than coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear or geothermal.
But it's not 300-400x the amount, no idea where he's getting those figures - it's more like 2-20x depending on the "normal power plant" he's comparing it to.
The specific fuel in question is important. Nat-gas wells...even the dreaded fracking wells have a pretty tiny footprint; not more than an acre or so, at least in my experience. Whereas strip-mining coal or mountain-top removal mining creates big scars on the landscape, and they don't seem to go away quickly, either. The difference between the two fuel sources would be large, and so merging these together into some kind of average land use statistic for a conventional power plant would seem to me to be pretty misleading in its own right, because I'll bet Shellenberger isn't advocating building more coal fired power plants fueled with strip-mined coal.
You seem to think he's pro-fossil fuel. As Scott's post made clear, he's actually very pro-nuclear. What's the footprint of uranium mines?
Individual uranium mines are pretty big, but uranium is extremely efficient and a handful of mines suffice to supply the entire world, so the footprint per power plant is small.
Not very big. Uranium is highly energy dense and so the total volume of material produced is quite small.
This is a very good way of putting something I've noticed about him too—I agree with him on the merits on a ton of issues, especially around energy, but he seems like a guy who just has no problem lying if he thinks it's for "good reasons." Reminds me of, like, Nathan Robinson in that way.
If I were a Californian I might vote for him anyway, but I wouldn't feel great about it.
Don't say this stuff unless you're going to substantiate it with examples. Otherwise it's a bunch of meaningless words.
Shellenberger sounds pretty good to me. I get that he's not perfect, but the status quo in California seems so dysfunctional that I think he'd be a big improvement on housing (he's a YIMBY), crime, homelessness, and climate change (pro-nuclear).
If he's a YIMBY in regards to housing he hides it extremely well - never talking about obviously needed zoning reform, and he's relentless about denying the obvious link between housing costs and homelessness.
But then again so do most people running for governor, so...
The state government is already kind of YIMBY. There's that law requiring residential areas to allow duplexes. Local governments are fighting it:
https://calmatters.org/housing/2022/04/duplex-housing-resistance/
Gavin Newsom looks too much like Gavin Belson.
> I started out thinking you struck your enemies with the Action Rod directly, but now I believe it probably attaches to a gun and makes the gun more powerful somehow. Further research is needed.
Research has continued! I believe this is a gun disassembly tool, which allows you to remove/detach AR-15 interior components via the barrel without the need to fully disassemble the gun (i.e an internal component that would normally need 50 other parts removed can be accessed directly via this).
Oh, that would be smart! I watched a video about the action rod and still had no idea what it was for or how you use it. I know nothing about guns, so I'm not the person for this.
Action Rod is a fantastic name though, and it really should be some kind of truncheon you use Batman-style on your enemies.
It's so you can install barrels to the AR15 upper without having to clamp the upper in a vise. The barrel is tightened to 30 to 80 ft-lbs of torque (using a torque wrench) and aligning the gas tube through the appropriate hole (the gas tube captures escaping gas from the barrel and uses it to cycle the AR).
To get the ~45 ft-lbs of torque you've really got to clamp the upper down, and of course, this can break/damage the upper (especially on light weight uppers), so a bunch of devices exist to luck the upper in place for barrel installation without damage to the upper.
Interesting, thank you for the explanation!
Hilarious post.
I was surprised how you didn't address Mercuri's opposition to "goy shutdowns" and "goy gay in newsom" but I eventually figured out his "v" looks weird
I read it this way too initially!
Writing "Gov. Shut Downs" right above "Gov. Gavin Newsom" in the "Against" column makes it sound like the candidate opposes two Governors, named Gavin Newsom and Shut Downs.
I can't tell if you're joking about Gavin Newsom's name - Gavin's a pretty common name here in the UK, but in the US it does seem to be very rare among people born before the mid-90s: https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/m/gavin
As much as London Breed?
Oh, now you are showing your true colours. :)
It’s short for Gavinor Newsom
Gavirnator*
The name thing is weird, isn't it. I couldn't get over how often they give their children dog's names.
People loved making fun of Sarah Palin's childrens' names, but this is the first I've heard of Gavin Newsom's.
Calling your kid "Brooklynn" (or for that matter Montana) seems like a definite lower-middle class move, but Gavin Newsom is nothing if not not lower middle class.
The fact that you can inject so much wry humor, Scott, into your description of this motley crew of wannabe public servants is truly masterful.
Just commenting to say that this post made me feel warm and happy.
Agreed. I really liked it too
I agree that Newsom is going to be the governor and none of these people have a chance. But this one made me laugh (not in a mean way, because the only person you were remotely mean about was Newsom and he can handle that), and I badly needed a laugh today.
God bless California and all who re-invent themselves who live there!
I'm a power engineer. I promise not to evaluate Shellenberger's policy positions on mental health if you'll promise not to evaluate his policy positions on nuclear power.
Sadly, most Californians have not been, are not and will not be Governors - yet for some reason, they still hold this election!
How likely is it that a person who is both unqualified to set mental health policy and unqualified to design an energy system would get one of them wrong and the other right? One in three? Is that how rationalists choose their thought leaders? Why do apparently smart people give Shellenberger any credence at all?
What renaissance men have been leading us that wield policy mastery in all areas under their supervision? Electing a political leader is as much art as science; you must trust in them to use their judgment to effect their vision.
In the establishment of trust, one will of course weigh their own knowledge and what appears to be that of the candidate.
As someone who makes their living in and amongst technical experts, I am incredibly suspicious of those who claim to be such. What Shellenberger argues for regarding energy policy and addiction treatment makes a lot of sense to me. Renewables are important, but are (mostly) intermittent and there has to be baseline capacity. Baseline capacity that produces no CO2 or other regulated air pollutants, at the cost of a small amount of nuclear waste (small in context of US nuclear arms maintenance) makes sense to me because that is technology that is here today and achieves reduced CO2 emissions goals.
I wouldn't blame you for thinking he's anti-renewable, but if you actually listen to any sort of long form discussion with him (I haven't read his work, so can't comment there), what he actually is is anti-renewable-optimism-verging-on-delusion. Delusion because of the cold hard reality of engineering constraints; foot print, energy density, build times, etc. His strident discussion of renewables is a case of his rhetorical pendulum swinging too far to the right in service of correcting it's outward swing on the left, so it's understandable that you could have this impression. FWIW, I'm getting my take on his stance re: renewables from his appearance on Rogan.
Regarding addiction treatment, he makes compelling cases regarding the need to incentivize and ultimately compel if it requires it. I think this discussion is often framed around "homeless", but we're really talking about a small subset of homeless that are severely addicted to narcotics with complications from untreated mental illness. To paraphrase Shellenberger, we (the US) do a good job with the single mom who finds herself without shelter and a dependent. We get those people off the street very quickly. It's when mental illness and addiction are added into the mix that you get the encampments seen in SF, LA, Austin, etc. I've seen Michael do "man on the street" style discussions with SF's homeless where they make it very clear they are there because of the ease of servicing their addiction.
Shellenberger makes it clear that much lauded programs like Portugal's are misunderstood and/or mischaracterized by housing advocacy groups in the US as offering shelter first, and de-criminalization. But that's not the full picture, it is illegal to consume drugs in public in Portugal, and there is the equivalent of drug court with the option for incarceration for forced treatment if people are not able to work through the non-compulsion avenues offered to them to get clean.
All that is to say, this seems imminently reasonable. I don't bring strong ideological convictions regarding energy or addiction policy to my evaluation of Shellenberger, and I find his proposed solutions contain enough merit that I can evaluate them, and now offer my rhetorical support.
He's doing what so many in public life have lost the ability to do: make persuasive arguments using data, rather than assertions and appeals to authority.
I used to know a public health nurse most of whose job was keeping track of tuberculosis patients: she showed up at their location every day and administered their medication. If we deployed suboxone and methadone this way we’d make progress- bringing it to them at their dwelling, shelter, tent etc. Due to the combination of restrictions on who can prescribe & distribute it, and dismal transportation networks, we have people in the US who are addicts who get prescribed suboxone and then can’t get the ride an hour each way to the clinic.
Shellenberger is saying some good things. I don’t live in CA anymore but I think he has a chance.
yeah I mean wouldn’t really cheap utility scale solar make way more sense for water desalinization? it’s the perfect application for somewhat unreliable cheap power
I looked up some facts - I reckon it would cost about $20 billion to build enough desalination capacity to replace California’s average share of Colorado river water. The total amortized cost of the energy needed to run that would be about $500 million per year using grid scale solar and about $2.3 billion per year using nuclear (assuming new plants for each case).
I'm curious about the fine print on the $500MM for grid-scale solar. The big selling point for fission over solar is that fission plants can run at full capacity, all day, every day, whereas solar production is highly variable depending on weather, season, and time of day. So for desalinization, where you presumably want your desal plants to be able to run around the clock (since the desalination capacity costs 8x-40x the additional power generation capacity by your figures, so it wouldn't really make sense to idle the plants at night), you either need very large scale power storage or you need a dispatchable power source to fill in the gaps when solar production is low or nonexistent. Power storage is expensive and probably not included in the $500MM, and building new natural gas plants to run at night and in the winter is neither free nor carbon-neutral.
Usually, solar cost per capacity is quoted either at theoretical peak production or with some kind of "capacity factor" adjustment that bakes in assumptions about the ability of the grid to fill in the gaps of a marginal addition to solar capacity.
The fine print is thus:
https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/uploads/1/0/0/4/100463770/energy-minimization-and-ghg-reduction-plan-052308.pdf pg 14 says the carlsbad plant uses 4.4 MWh per acre foot produced.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/17/utility-scale-solar-reaches-lcoe-range-between-2-4¢-per-kwh-in-the-usa-record-low/
Shows that the LCOE of utility solar can be as cheap as $28 per MWh and nuclear $131.
The Colorado river allocation to California is about 4.3 mega acre feet per year.
You are correct that it might make sense to spend more on energy to recover the capital costs of the desalination plants more quickly. I suspect new tech and truly large desalination plants might be able to have new economies of scale.
The $20 bil estimate comes from the original $250 mil estimate for the Carlsbad plant before unions and environmentalists got ahold of it.
To me the sad part is that it is obvious the California water problem is completely solvable with desalination using existing tech and for not all that much money (Cal state budget is $300 bil). But I guess environmentalists would prefer to drown hetch hetchy instead of making the ocean a bit saltier in local places.
So your calculation ignores that you would need to overbuild the desalination plant by 5x in the solar case.
(A) Nuclear
1 GW plant ($X) runs 24/7 produces 24 GWh per day for desal plant ($Y) produces let’s say 100 m3 of water.
(B) Solar
5 GW plant ($0.2X by your numbers) produces 24 GWh per day (because ~0.2 capacity factor) for desal plant. However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
Given that Y is much higher than X, the solar case doesn’t look so good.
> However in this case to absorb all that power coming at the peak time of the day, the desal plant must be 5x bigger so then we add $5Y.
I'm pro-nuclear but this seems an unnecessarily stupid way to build a plant for desalination from solar. Desalination is a perfect use for intermittent power.
Maybe. Most of that water is probably used for agriculture anyway, so the water demand pattern is also seasonal.
There are also more scalable desalination methods like distilling that might use less energy.
To me the important point is that desalination is totally doable, but there are many tradeoffs. Solar PV might not be economic for some use cases, it might work for others.
Instead of total replacement, think of it as diversifying your water sources to avoid depending too much on a single source. San Diego has a big desalination plant, but they're increasing the size of a reservoir too.
What's wrong with his policy positions on nuclear power?
Some people are really anti nuclear. I was banned from r/energy after just 4 posts for suggesting that Germany had shot itself in the foot by closing down its nuclear power stations, and that they had in fact increased their gas production recently compared to coal (as gas is easier to ramp up when the wind isn’t blowing). I sourced these arguments as well, and was banned for mis-information.
This comment makes it sounds like you believe his stance on nuclear is good but unpopular. Do I have that right?
Yeh. I mean I was criticising Germany for shutting down nuclear plants.
Ah, I confused you with the person Scott replied to, so I was wondering why you were coming out in support of his positions here. In my defense your profiles pictures have a the same color map and you both have somewhat generic white guy names.
My actual white guy name is probably unpronounceable to you. We do have similar profile color though.
I wonder if the anti-nuclear activists have become even more rabid recently because they have been pressed into defending the indefensible (the policy of shutting down perfectly workable nuke plants in Germany in the midst of this historically grave energy crisis in 2022)
We can have a productive debate over whether it is a good idea to shut down existing, operational nuclear plants, if they have a good safety record and no obvious deficits.
But Shellenberger wants to build more and more and more of them, and he declares this with the blithe self-assurance of somebody who won't actually be doing the work, dismissing the complexity and scale of such an undertaking, as if all we needed to do was just decide to do it.
Yes, there are lots of plants on the drawing board, but very few new plants are actually being built; we are barely maintaining the inventory, even taking into account planned builds. In Europe, three are/were under construction: the EPRs at Flamanville and Oikiluoto, and Hinkley Point C.
Hinkley Point C is too early in its construction for it to be late. But the budget has already been adjusted upward.
Olkiluoto 3 went online in March 2022, although it won't go to full production until September 2022. It is 13 years late and 7 billion euros overbudget. TVO (the operator) has already decided there will not be an Olkiluoto 4.
The EPR is the most advanced civilian reactor design now in use. As we get better at things, they are supposed to be delivered faster and at lower cost. In nuclear, the opposite has been true. Please, tell me, what observable evidence do we have that suggests this trend will reverse?
Shellenberger's plans are all based on some combination of the following assumptions and assertions:
- we need to generate as much electricity per capita now as we have been, plus some large delta (typically 30%)
- building new nuclear plants is or will be straightforward, fast and inexpensive
- the risks and consequences of doing so are accurately quantifiable, generally overstated by opponents and will be resolved in some as yet unknown way by our descendants
To take just the question of risk for example: The reinsurance companies, whose business and survival depend on reliable risk assessment, have found that the risks are not reliably quantifiable and hence useless for an insurance risk model. Nuclear power plants are uninsurable. When they do get built, it's only because governments assume the ultimate liability (whether they are actually in a position to bear them is another question; most governments have decided they are not).
I am deeply skeptical of simplified claims about complex systems, no matter where and whom they come from. The biggest strike against Shellenberger is that he repeatedly claims things that are demonstrably untrue, and fills the room with so much nonsense so quickly that one doesn't know where to begin correcting it.
For somebody who works in the sector, that is really exhausting! That is the reason that no serious researcher or subject matter specialist is willing to appear with him publicly anymore. They see that he lacks competence in the subject areas he holds forth on and seems uninterested in honest discussion. We are all too busy to be wasting our time on endless dead-horse debates with people who cannot even acknowledge or agree on the basic facts (it was painful for me to write this, as I do have better things to do; but I also understand that communicating these things is part of my professional responsibility, so here we are.)
Shellenberger is, at best, a kind of human version of a _Journal of Hypotheses_. At worst, he is querulous, irritating, and a dangerous distraction. Perhaps he is entertaining. Joe Rogan, at least, seems to think so.
Viewed that way, I suppose he is right at home in your list of California gubernatorial candidates.
I don't get the impression Shellenberger suggests building nukes would be trivial or quite cheap, my impression is that he thinks it's a better idea than hoping some miracle storage solution comes along to make solar/wind viable, or just keep shifting by default to natural gas.
I'm pretty willing to give that idea a hearing. I've been here all through the solar/wind enthusiasm, and I see the results as an unqualified disaster. Electricity is far more expensive and noticeably less reliable than it was 20 years ago. At this point, I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say, and I'd rather have more nukes than more fossil fuel plants. I'm sure it will be expensive, but having your electric grid go tits up is even more expensive.
I wish these comments could be made without insults. I read the phrase "I no longer believe a word the solar/wind groupies say" as indicating that you've already made up your mind about a complicated debate, having categorized the opposing viewpoint as the outgroup. I think this is an interesting debate that could be more productive without that thinking.
Why is it an insult? I didn't say they were rat bastards, I simply said I don't believe them. If not believing someone is to be classified as a personal insult, I don't see how any discussion at all is possible -- so I would classify your desired framework as way more constraining and illiberal than any I have expressed.
And, yes, I have indeed made up my mind about part of the debate, which is that I cannot be persuaded by solar/wind enthusiasts by themselves. They'd have to bring along some more neutral party to make their case, if there is a case to be made. Perhaps that seems "premature" to you, perhaps because the argument is new and interesting, but I have been paying attention to this debate for more than 30 years, and I'd say three decades is a very reasonable degree of patience. If someone has something *new* to say -- something I didn't first hear in 1975 -- then I'm happy to listen.
You don't think calling people 'groupies' for a particular policy position impugns them?
I believe that you do, and you're being wilfully obtuse. And even more dishonestly, you've moved the goalposts to whether 'not believing someone' is an insult, rather than 'not believing a word they say'. The latter clearly implies that they are liars, which you might recognise as an insult.
Of course there is stuff you didn't first hear in 1975. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened after that. If you've irrevocably made up your mind about literally anything with an empirical grounding then you're being deeply irrational, no matter how many decades you've "paid attention" for. If you've not heard anything new about it since 1975, though, then I'm not sure you have been paying attention.
Olkiluoto is interesting that it is the only thing that can save Finland now from getting cut off from Russian gas.
Nuclear seems to be expensive but with gas prices now raising 3 or 4 times in Europe, what choice do we really have?
I have an impression that regulations are too strict on nuclear thus making it more expensive and believed that low gas prices will continue forever. The war in Ukraine changed this view and I believe that Russia/Belarus developed nuclear themselves with the aim to profit from raising oil/gas prices. If Belarus could build Astravets cheaply, why not others? Maybe the war in Europe will change the political and technical incentives?
Which claims that are demonstrably untrue has he made?
Here's one: That we are in the midst of a "nuclear renaissance." In 2020 there was a net increase of nuclear generating capacity of 0.4 GW. We have 55 reactors under construction worldwide, for a total gross electrical generating capacity of 55.6 GW. The latest planned start is 2028.
About 100 reactors are planned (100 GW) and 300 reactors proposed (we can assume 300 GW) are on the drawing board.
Given the trend, we can expect most of these will never be built, and what is being or does get built will be late.
You can reasonably argue there has been increased interest in conserving nuclear generating capacity. But a renaissance it is not.
Okay that seems pretty minor and more or less irrelevant to what he's going to do as a politician.
Given that the largest concentration of them are in China, I'd say the assumption that most will not get built is unwarranted. For better or worse, the Chinese are very reliable at following through on their civil engineering plans.
Doesn’t the existence of depreciated plants with a good safety record contradict your claims about unquantifiable risks?
I agree with your point about costs though, unless there is some breakthrough in construction costs nuclear plants are probably not worth the price (unless you take carbon elimination from base load seriously)
Note that I haven't made any claims about the risks of operating plants, only that I believe that a productive discussion can be had about whether to continue operating them and for how long or decommission them immediately. It's a matter of inertia.
That said, I don't know of any operating plants that don't have any issues which are relevant to safety.
“That said, I don't know of any operating plants that don't have any issues which are relevant to safety.”
Uhh, literally every energy production industry has “issues relevant to safety”. Why would we think nuclear is an exception? From the numbers I have seen the safety risk is lower with nuclear in deaths per GWh production compared to other energy sources.
Leaving aside the disputability of these calculated deaths for the moment, opinions differ greatly on whether the nature and scope of nuclear risk are acceptable. This has been discussed at length in the comments to another Astral Codex Ten post (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying/comments?s=r#comment-2117794).
Almost all the costs are from excessively onerous regulation - I don't know how much of that is at a federal level, mind you, but a state governor could presumably substantially reduce the regulator burden posed by state laws and agencies, at least.
I think most of Big Oil "self-insures" (I know XOM does) but their track record in actually cleaning up has been kinda abysmal, so understandable that the lack of a mechanism to keep them honest is a huge barrier.
Is there anything that can be done to the bidding process? A rule that when the state evaluates bids for operating nuclear power plants you MUST consider safety track record? That means P&GC cannot run it, those people are the last people you can trust to run a nuclear power plant.
Alternatively, a kind of collateral that the state gov holds onto. I believe some countries in the EU have something similar for starting new deepwater projects (in case the government gets saddled with the cost of cleaning up wells and platforms offshore).
You seemed to have framed this assumption as being suspect:
“- we need to generate as much electricity per capita now as we have been, plus some large delta (typically 30%”
With the widespread adoption of EVs and the movement of building hvac to heat pumps, it seems reasonable to think that electricity per capita will go up. Do you think otherwise?
Of course. Not just EVs but heating
. In Scotland heating buildings is 50% of all energy use.
This really strikes me as a typical specialist's blinders-on answer. You don't go to any great lengths to say anything about what you think is a better answer, but implicit in your points is the claim that we will in fact to something other than increasing current electricity use per capita, as well as that nuclear plants are somehow less safe than some unmentioned alternative. From the outside, it appears pretty much self-evident that our options are to either dramatically reduce per capita total energy consumption (i.e. stop having a modern lifestyle) by withdrawing from most petroleum products and natural gas while replacing as much as possible with wind and solar, to maintain roughly modern lifestyles a bit further into the century by ignoring the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels, or to build enough nuclear to at least make up for a big chunk of the fossil fuel energy production we're taking offline. You argue that nuclear plants are too expensive from actual experience; if we apply that mechanism to assessing safety, we see that nuclear plants have been orders of magnitude less dangerous than fossil fuel plants over their time of existence. So it seems like all you're left claiming is that nukes are too expensive and, somehow, not needed.
Anyway, so much for responding to actual points you've made. For somebody as overly busy and as burdened with the noblesse oblige of explaining your profession's knowledge to the public, you sure to have an incredible ratio of noise to signal in your comments. The pro-nuclear argument is really dead simple. I think all of us who favor it understand that nuclear is expensive and complicated, and that nuclear meltdowns are bad. Perhaps some expert can chime in to explain how there actually is some alternative other than the three I've listed above; if not then I'm afraid this discussion has done nothing to inform anybody of anything except your negative emotional valence around Shellenberger.
People perceive danger differently. Danger is not binary. It can be immediate, it can be delayed, it can be focused or diffuse in space. This has been more than adequately hashed out by others in the comments under this Astral Codex Ten post https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying/comments?s=r#comment-2117794 so I don't need to repeat it here.
I want neither nuclear nor fossil fuel danger.
Do we agree that we must stop using fossil fuels? Then that means a fundamental transformation of our energy systems. It is not realistic to expect that such a fundamental transformation of our energy systems won't bring with it big changes in the way we live, and that's true whether we go the nuclear route, the all-renewables route, some combination of the two, or something else entirely.
I reject the premise that a dramatic reduction in per capita energy consumption means not "having a modern lifestyle", as you put it.
The easiest, cheapest energy is the energy you don't need in the first place. My grandmother would've said that we haven't earned the right to ask for more until we've learned how to use what we have judiciously. We are really nowhere near exhausting the potential of improvements in energy efficiency. (Nowhere is that more true than in the United States.)
The biggest driver of efficiency is energy cost. Up until now, energy has been unnaturally cheap (for many reasons which I won't discuss here) and so we have not had to think much about what energy uses we give priority. But some energy uses are clearly more important and more valuable than others, and it's time the way we price energy reflected that.
Buildings everywhere are leaky. If we tighten them up and use heat recovery ventilation, building energy consumption drops by 70, 80, 90%. That energy is now available for other things.
We are driving alone in motor vehicles by the hundreds of millions. Is that sensible or necessary? I don't believe we will be doing that for much longer. We can't afford hundreds of millions of Teslas on the road any more than we can afford hundreds of millions of diesel pickup trucks.
Since moving to Germany from Canada, I pay nearly nine times per kWh what I used to pay for electricity, but my bill in absolute terms is smaller. Why? Because everything I use is that much more efficient, and I live differently. Is my quality of life lower? If anything, I'd say it is higher.
Even if none of the nuclear plants in Germany had been shut down, it would not have made more than a small difference to the current gas supply crisis, because it's the proportion of non-dispatchable supply that determines the need for flexible generation. (Also, the bulk of the gas is used for heating - see my comment about leaky buildings above.) Utility-scale nuclear plants have lower ramp rates; running any thermal electric generator at higher ramp rates than it was designed for puts it under more thermal stress and increases the probability of failure. So at best, retaining the nuclear plants increases the proportion of nuclear in the inflexible baseload generation portion of the supply mix.
And what is this baseload, anyway? In the early days of the electric system, operators of thermal electric power plants were faced with the problem that ramp rates are small and cold starts take a long time, so nightly shutdowns aren't practical. If you keep the plant running, you have an output floor (say 30% of nameplate) below which you can't go. _That's_ the baseload: as originally conceived, it was the load you needed to keep operating the power plant safely overnight. In those years there were few electric devices, so electric utilities resorted to things like putting in street lighting even in areas where there was almost no traffic and then leaving it on all night.
So the baseload is an emergent property of a system and society shaped by dispatchable thermal electric generation. (It has also become a dog whistle for defenders of the status quo.)
An all-renewable system needs to have certain things. It needs enough broadly distributed generation to assure a base generation to some agreed upon availability probability (say 99.9%, which is achievable), some backup, and a strategy for load-shedding for the remainder (0.1% in our example).
That marginal reliability needs to be accurately priced. That's the only way we will have sufficient incentive to build the infrastructure needed to assure it. We are not served by policies that keep energy prices artificially low.
I don't see anything in the above that is a fundamental technical obstacle. The obstacles are behavioural.
So often this debate is framed as a choice between pastoral life and modern life. But really, there are many choices, many possibilities. Our whole way of life is the result of our choices. That's what we're talking about here: what unexplored degrees of freedom are available to us?
The energy consumption of a society is to a large degree structurally determined. Where do people live and work? How big are the buildings? How are they made? What consumer products are available in the market, and how is energy consumption a factor in their price?
The eco-modernist argument as I see it sets the hard boundary condition that we continue to use energy the way we have been, the infamous "the American way of life is not negotiable" position. But that's ideology, not reality.
Shellenberger may be right about one thing: What we believe determines what we choose. Shellenberger's thinking follows from his belief that there are no natural limits which can't be overcome by more technology. If you also believe that, then none of the other things I've written here will matter, and we'll have to agree to disagree.
So you think upgrading and retro fitting every building in the US (which has very different climate and energy needs than buildings in Germany or most of Europe) as well as completely transforming the culture that is "America" is less costly and less complicated than building more power generation?
>I don't see anything in the above that is a fundamental technical obstacle. The obstacles are behavioural.
This is basically the argument for nuclear. The technical side of nuclear is more or less "solved" (in that reactors can be built and fueled with relatively low danger); it's the regulatory (behavioral) side that is the problem.
Goodness, the capital costs of all the improvements you suggest to limit energy use would significantly exceed the costs to build a bunch of nukes. One assumes that your preference is esthetic, then. You will need to understand that others don't share your esthetic preferences, and would perhaps prefer to take the cheaper route.
I love how not a single part of this comment addresses the question: "what's wrong with Shellenberger's position on nuclear power?"
Not knowing very much about nuclear power other than a very high level picture of industry trends, where would you say the problems with his position lie?
Are you the sort of power engineer who designs nuclear plants and energy grids, or the sort of power engineer who troubleshoots boilers and refrigerators? Because both of these exist, and I'm not sure "I know how refrigeration units work" is relevant expertise here.
This is nice.
Due to the outsize impact that California's economy has on the way the rest of the country does business (and enjoys their rights) *if* there was a state that I broke my 'let other democracies make their own choices' rule for, it would be CA.
But, no. I think that it is extremely important to not mess with the choices made by other free people.
FYI this is what the rest of the world feels about American elections. When one of your ultranationalists win Presidency, it has a nasty effect of making our ultranationalists more annoying.
Heh. And when one of our pacifist globalists win, your ultranationalists get *really* annoying. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Funnily enough, not really so! At the recent Australian Federal election, the showing from the ultranats was pretty weak, and it was fairly conclusively proven than attempting to win with culture war garbage doesn't work (see: transphobe failing to win Warringah). But yes, they were really friking irritating early last year.
Perhaps allies' ultranationalists get annoying when POTUS is one and adversaries' do when not?
There absolutely were no prominent "ultranats" running in the Australian election unless you have an utterly hysterical conception of a what an "ultranat" is. And the term "transphobe" is extraordinarily bad faith.
If your definition of an ultranationalist is, "anti-trans" then you label a supermajority of the world as ultranationalist.
There has not been an "ultranationalist" American president in at least recent history, unless your definition of 'ultranationalist' is so broad as to include vast swathes of the leaders of non-western countries.
Instead of a book review contest we should have a gubernatorial candidate review contest (although the elections come up at different times, of course). I don't expect Scott to write about the other 49 states, but I would love to see some more of these, because this was very entertaining.
I think California is a bit unusual in several ways. It has the “top two” primary system, so all the candidates are in a single race, instead of a Republican primary, a Democratic primary, and some random other people that get ballot lines somehow. Also, with the recall election they just held, a lot of people got practice running for Governor and figured they might as well do it again. Additionally, it’s such a one-party state these days that unless there’s a reason for a challenge by a democrat (like when Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez represented Northern and Southern California for senate, or when Kevin de Leon ran against Dianne Feinstein from the left) there’s usually only one real candidate and so plenty of room for interesting others.
I think Louisiana, Washington, and Alaska may have similar top-two primary systems that might lead to some of these dynamics, but Louisiana and Alaska can be surprisingly competitive across parties.
Aren't ballot access rules in Cali extremely lenient too? Allowing, essentially, anyone to run for office?
Yes, ballot access is lenient (https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov//statewide-elections/2022-primary/section-3-candidate-filing-information.pdf).
European politicians have been hosting Ukrainian refugees. This, and the frequent references to homelessness above, had given me an unlikely idea. What if a candidate could qualify for the ballot by mentoring/sponsoring a homeless person until that person has a stable residence?
Then I looked up ballot access. Running for governor in California requires only $4,371.12 and 65 signatures, or just 4750 signatures. Those requirements seem far easier to meet than successfully helping one homeless person into a stable residence.
This was extremely funny
Shellenberger seems like he's the best choice here by far, to the point where it's not even a contest. I'd vote for him in a heartbeat if I lived in California. Sure, he's not perfect, but none of them are. And judging by your descriptions, he has the unique distinction of getting far more right than he gets wrong. Maybe it's partly because he codes as one of those rare Blue-Gray types, and as a Blue-Gray myself, it's very refreshing to see anyone with similar leanings actually run for office or be in the public eye at all. I was really rooting for Carrick Flynn too, for similar reasons.
I suppose my distant second pick would be Tony Fanara. Mostly because he's 1. not a conservative, 2. not a Bernie-style radical leftist, 3. not some other sort of weird crackpot, and 4. not Gavin Newsom. Though Woodrow Sanders III is tempting too, because "make the bureaucrats do their jobs better" is probably more likely to have an actual positive impact than any grand vision, and it displays an admirable level of pragmatism and intellectual humility.
I like the Woodrow Sanders III thing, but then I realize that many people consider it important for the heads of departments to represent voters in some way rather than being chosen directly by the deep state.
On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, I'm not sure "the Democrat party machine" is more democratic than "the many real people working as low and mid level paper pushers", they're both pretty out of touch.
Shellenberger is also arguably a borderline-credible candidate: he's one of only four candidates with endorsements listed on wikipedia's page for the election, the other three being Newsom, Dahle, and Rodriguez (the main Democratic, Republican, and Green Party candidates, respectively), and a quick search for his name on Google News seems to indicate he's getting at least a moderate amount of mainstream press attention.
Yeah, I'm seriously considering him. The slightly negative review given him here by Scott has raised him in my eyes. Gavin Newsom is what happens when Bay Area people get their way, and I'd be happy for that not to continue.
Frederich Schultz's campaign website is fred4ca.com.
Dear God.
A wise friend once told me, "It's not that it takes all kinds. It's just that there *are* all kinds."
I like that. Pretty much sums up my perspective.
The key difference between him and all the other candidates is that Schultz is a huge supporter of ALL CAPS. I haven't seen that many caps on one page in... ever. I was going to say timecube but I looked up timecube again and it doesn't even have 10% as many caps.
I would like to congratulate Mr. Zacky on having passed a difficult test in American political life: plausibly convincing me that he actually wears Carhartt on days he isn't filming campaign ads.
Heather Collins' idea to build parking-like structures to provide basic accommodation to the homeless is a very good one and I support it (but not her as governor). They could be designed as panopticons and built and run very cheaply, but still provide much better accommodation than most current homeless shelters.
Serious question from a position of ignorance: why would a parking structure be a better shelter for homeless people than a traditional homeless shelter?
From the little I understand of this, a lot of homeless people don't like going to shelters, partly because they feel "shut in" (combination claustrophobia plus justifiable concern that your roommates at a homeless shelter may not be easy to get along with).
Maybe the idea is that elevated (vs. underground) parking garage-style structures would feel more open and hence more welcoming to homeless people than enclosed buildings?
The general reason (some) homeless people don't want to go to homeless shelters is that they want do drugs, which generally isn't allowed at homeless shelters.
I don't think that's quite fair. Going into a shelter puts a person at risk for theft and assault from other residents.
> The general reason (some) homeless people
The juxtaposition of "general" and "some" makes your position unclear. Roughly what proportion of the homeless population do you think would refuse to go to a homeless shelter specifically because it prevents / complicates drug usage?
Considering that there is always more space available at various shelters, but so many choose to sleep on the street anyway, probably the vast majority prefer the street to the shelter for various reasons (some combination of drug policies, mental illnesses, bad company in the shelters, or other factors).
The fact that homeless people congregate together in tent camps on the same street makes the "bad company in shelters" explanation seem less likely and the mental illness / addiction explanations seem more likely.
Perhaps, but homeless people in tent camps on a street can agree that Psycho Bob is bad news and should be beaten with sticks until he leaves, whereas a shelter's management has a mandate to shelter all the homeless including psychos named Bob, but the authority and incentive to remove (or incarcerate) anyone who tries to beat people up with sticks.
Cheap and quick to build, hygienic, easy to maintain, easy to supervise (panopticon-style), largely self-organizing because of the open-floor structure, safer than closed-in dorms, comfortable enough for people already living on the streets but not so comfortable as to give the taxpayers indigestion, room for service providers like finance and medical providers on the peripheries.
An open air panopticon with security is a prison camp. Let's call a spade a spade here.
Is it a prison camp if you can just walk out?
You have to sleep there, in her platform. Inmates in Manzanar were allowed to leave for walks. I'd still call it a prison camp.
You don't _have_ to sleep there, you just can't sleep on the street. If you can find a job and rent an apartment then you can sleep there instead.
The more I think about this, you'd need temperature control unless you want people dying of heat/cold on government property. Yes, they were on the street already, but now they're in a government structure you are requiring them to sleep in. You'd also need soundproofing to avoid the place becoming an intolerable cacophony. At a certain point you're just better off with a building.
> largely self-organizing because of the open-floor structure,
How do we deal with turf wars?
How do we deal with them on the streets? Clearly, some street lots are better than others, yet without any formal system of ownership, the homeless manage to work out who gets to pitch their tent where.
I don’t think a heavily enforced regime would work well in the parking panopticons and I’d prefer to leave as much regulation as possible to the homeless themselves, just as we do now.
I really like this idea. Many currently live on the sidewalk, it's just a stacked compact sidewalk that isn't in the way like the actual sidewalk is. We already have parking structures everywhere, they seem fairly simple and cheap to build, and would require little ongoing maintenance or amenities. Surely this doesn't 'solve all homelessness' but it would be a realistically implementable quick fix.
I'd support using my taxes to build a cheap vertical homeless camp to get the homeless out of the streets. Frankly it may not be that much better for the homeless but it would be much better for the nonhomeless.
It's a silly idea, because there is a reason the homeless live on sidewalks. They do not *want* to be out of the way, for any of various reasons: it allows them to beg, it allows them to steal, it allows them to make a political statement, it allows them to deal drugs, it allows them to feel like they are still a part of society.
Unless you are willing to forcibly round up and relocate these people, this solution is no more likely to clean up the streets than anything else we've tried. It might perhaps have the virtue that it will highlight this truth more clearly than previous attempts, and thereby bring us marginally closer to accepting that truth. But I am not optimistic.
In fact, you can say the same thing about parking itself. My city (Bryan, TX) built a big parking structure in downtown because people complain about too little parking in downtown. The parking structure is empty nearly all day every day, because no one wants to park in a structure, and everyone wants to park on the street. Street spaces are close to the places you want to be, they are very visible, and the street is a place that is at least halfway intended for humans to be in while a parking structure is usually a dismal space that is uncomfortable for humans. All of these same reasons apply just as much for a place to park yourself as for a place to park your car. (Conversely, if you or your car want shelter from rain or sun, there are sometimes advantages to the parking structure over street parking.)
Speaking as a driver who despises going into cities for parking-related reasons, I can add a few more reasons.
- Parking garages usually are significantly more expensive than parking on the street, if you can find a spot in the latter. Maybe not an order of magnitude exactly, but around there.
- My current navigation system has to be explicitly directed to find parking if there's no dedicated lot, and this requirement is not typically obvious before I actually get there. This results in having to split my attention between actually driving, searching for visual indicators of parking garages, and searching for nav system indicators of parking garages.
Yeah, the fact that garage parking is more expensive than street parking is a clear problem with the market. Garage parking is much lower demand than street parking, and much harder to find, so it should be cheaper. (And we should improve the ways people have of finding it, both by getting navigation systems doing car navigation to know about nearby garages, and by having better electronic signage indicating precisely how many open spots there are in the whole garage outside, and on each floor when you're inside.)
I suspect a problem a lot of these ideas have is that homeless people do not want to be around other homeless people, so they disperse.
Visit the Tenderloin in San Francisco or the encampments in LA and you’ll see how wrong you are
My recollection in LA (lived there some years) was that there were places with concentrations of homeless but also many scattered, effectively by themselves or in tiny groups. Not sure the relative populations. If it had just been Skid Row you could have avoided Skit Row, but they were everywhere.
I get the impression the idea is to build shelters into existing underused parking garages, rather than build parking garages from scratch for the purpose of homeless sheltering?
Yes, that would make much more sense, and seems to be what she's saying when she mentions work-from-home and underused parking garages.
I had a friend who lived homeless in NYC the whole time I knew him (30 years.) He wouldn’t go near a shelter.
Smart interesting man but just crazy enough to fall through the cracks but not the grate, if you know what I mean.
This sounds pretty good, but you'd also want to put them far away from major cities and provide free (and compulsory) transport out there.
Instead of bussing them to other cities where people might complain, just make a city in the desert and ship them all there? Out of sight, out of mind?
Okay that sounds uncharitable, but I'm not sure how else to interpret forcibly relocating people to parking garages far away from cities. Calling it a panopticon doesn't really help the image either.
I see nothing wrong with building a society for the people who contribute to it.
It's the bit where you build Special Camps for the people you have decided have nothing to contribute to your society, that is going to make people look at you funny and back away. Giving the camp a funny new name or a funny new shape won't change that.
A lot of homeless people *want* to be contributing members of your society. Some of them actually will; some of them are being naively optimistic about the prospect of that ever happening. But they won't willingly go to your special camps, and they won't willingly stay there, and when you start putting up the barbed wire to keep them there, that's not going to go over well with a lot of us.
Even in 2014, 34% of US cities had bans on camping in public: https://www.chn.org/voices/fact-week-u-s-cities-made-illegal-homeless/
The parking structure proposal is just these bans + some place for the homeless to go. Nobody has to stay in the parking structure. They just can't camp in the street. They can stay in their own apartment, in a friend's or relative's house, in a McDonald's, in their cars (although some cities ban that too), in a regular homeless shelter, or really anywhere else, but if they really have no place to stay, they can go to the parking garage.
And they *won't* go to the parking garage, and you don't have room for them all in the prisons, and then what?
The current system, in cities with bans on camping in public, means chasing the obstinately homeless from the streets where the police are tonight to the other streets where the police aren't tonight, lather, rinse, repeat, pointless disruption. I'm not seeing the advantage of the system that works the same way but with our having built a bunch of big empty concrete structures that almost nobody uses.
This is what traditional government housing projects are based on, and they have traditional failure modes. Putting things far away from major cities is a good recipe for getting people to try to stay away from there and get back to the major cities. You have to understand that homeless people are *people* and have desires and goals of their own, and if you are trying to forcibly relocate them to places that they aren't intentionally locating themselves, you're going to fail unless you either physically imprison them, or understand why they are locating in one place rather than another and make the other place have the features they want.
Yes, I would agree that they would need to be physically imprisoned.
You could have a scheme whereby they can be let out if some kind of parole board if their situation changes. They could be allowed out to earn money on supervised work (e.g. fruit picking) at below minimum wage.
There are probably constitutional problems with imprisoning people who haven't been convicted of any specific crime, but I imagine there are workarounds. For instance, many homeless people are drug addicts, drug possession carries a maximum penalty of one year, and it's easy to argue that anyone who is a drug addict must surely have already possessed drugs at least sixty times in their life, so that's sufficient to justify life imprisonment right there.
When you find yourself trying to think of "workarounds" for the constitution, it is probably a good time to stop and consider if what you're trying to do is actually a good idea, or if it is in fact exactly the kind of abuse that the writers of the constitution were trying to prevent. If you have a specific complaint about what some homeless people are doing, eg. shoplifting or vandalism or sleeping in the middle of a busy sidewalk, then the recommended policy is to start actually enforcing those existing laws better, not to drag all homeless people (including the ones who aren't doing anything wrong) off to special camps.
> For instance, many homeless people are drug addicts, drug possession carries a maximum penalty of one year, and it's easy to argue that anyone who is a drug addict must surely have already possessed drugs at least sixty times in their life, so that's sufficient to justify life imprisonment right there.
Excuse me? Being addicted to a drug is enough to justify life imprisonment?
Do you really think the problem with the US prison system is that they don't put *enough* people in prisons to avoid having to treat them like human beings?
What if the homeless people decide that they'd rather live in a tent under a freeway overpass, than live in a panopticon? An awful lot of what makes homelessness a thing is a combination of mental illness (which doesn't mix well with a perception of being watched all the time), and drug addiction (which means regularly doing illegal things that you probably don't want authority to watch) and general inability to get along with authority.
There's already a substantial population of homeless who will spend the night in a shelter if it's freezing and they would literally die on the street, but won't tolerate a shelter's rules in the long term and go back to the street as soon as the weather improves. And current shelters, whatever their problems, are not panopticons.
You may be interested in the Haven for Hope in San Antonio which provides some of what you are describing: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-na-san-antonio-homeless-20170826-htmlstory.html
Interesting- thank you for this. The Courtyard is in line with what I’m advocating for here: a simple, basic, relatively safe place to pitch a tent or roll out a bed in a type of facility that is quick and cheap to build.
I’m especially keen on encouraging self-government (within limits). The homeless manage it on the streets; tent cities are relatively stable and organized. I like the panopticon layout not to enable close and oppressive management but to prevent violence and exploitation at minimum cost.
I’m amazed at Police Chief McManus: a public official who says he was wrong and changes direction. Much kudos to him!
Came for the entertaining review, but found the conclusion remarkably heartwarming. Great work! Room for a docuseries on the interesting political candidates of america.
Does Dave Barry get a co-author credit on this?
What’s interesting to me, as an outsider, is how little of America’s cultural wars are being fought here. Some of the Republicans are anti vax, but that’s old hat. One guy opposed to the WEF. Some opposition to blm but it’s rare. On the other side no demands to fight white supremacy, increase the number of genders officially to 150, defund the police, replace all “o”s in gendered languages with “x”s.
Is twitter lying to me about what is Important, or does that stuff only matter at a federal level.
I think it's that:
1) Most of these people are Berniecrats or Republicans, because the regular Democrats already have Gavin Newsom.
2) The Berniecrats are more into economics / material conditions
3) The Republicans do have all the standard Republican culture war positions, but I mostly packed this into "they have standard Republican positions on everything" to focus on their quirks. Some of the anti-BLM, anti-socialism stuff made it into this article, and there's more on their websites (especially against teaching CRT in schools)
Well, most of them are Republicans, so they aren't pushing the left side stuff. Of the Dems that are running, one wants to reopen the Robert Kennedy investigation, one is focused on aqueducts, and one seems to be trying to make up for the rest with a caps filled rant of a platform.
Twitter is lying to you.
I don’t know, since I am not in the US. Nor do I discuss US politics offline. It’s good to hear that twitter isn’t representative though.
Thank you for a great article and all the research.
Great writeup, made my day.
"I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of them are immigrants. Immigrants believe in the American Dream. Maybe they’re the only people who still do. Back in Mexico or India or wherever, they heard that America was a magical place where ordinary people governed themselves and anyone could get ahead."
I'm an immigrant too, and this is a good lesson for everyone living in the US. Yes, there are many social, political, and economic problems, but you're a paradise of equality and opportunity compared to most countries on Earth, and compared to any time in history more than 50 years back. Here, your abilities and your hard work actually matter, not just how well connected your father is or how many officials you can afford to bribe. For anyone coming from a country where corruption is a fact of life, where justice is merely the advantage of the stronger, and where the average person would envy America's homeless, America really is the land of dreams. That's not because immigrants are all naive starry eyed dreamers; sometimes it's because they are comparing America to other human societies and not to the Kingdom of Heaven.
I think the people who are afraid of cultural change from immigrants don't understand how attractive American culture is.
I think that is a response to multiculturalism to be honest (where it is not plain racism anyway): when most people publicly advocating high levels of immigration are also espousing an ideology which does not require integration (I suspect most multiculturalists might expect integration would happen though) then it's easy to equate the two things. So, as you say, there's a valuable counterpoint in immigrants buying into the national legend rather than seeking to be separate.
There's a difference between requiring integration and noticing that a lot of people want to integrate.
Related: a lot of older immigrants might not learn the local language, but their children will.
Precisely this. The difference between "melting pot" multiculturalism and "salad bowl" multiculturalism is absolutely huge. When the former option is called "racist", it makes immigration a lot less appealing.
Thanks for that.
This was a really fun one to read! It's kind of a shame that the Republicans decided to unite around Dahle, when (Shawn) Collins would probably have been a better choice -- the national Republicans recruited him to run against Katie Porter and he fundraised pretty impressively, but then redistricting screwed him over and he decided to try for Governor instead of running in a seat that already had a Republican incumbent (he's in Young Kim's seat now). Not that Newsom is going to lose, but if some kind of absolutely improbable lightning strikes I think Collins would be a very marginally better candidate than Dahle, whose main qualification is just good connections to the state-level California Republican Party. Which shouldn't be a strong qualification for anything.
Hilarious.
Being European, I always thought that I would be a staunch democrat in the US. However, I now see that my aspiration to own a ranch one day clearly makes me republican. The more you know!
Candidates in California get to choose their own occupational descriptions, so for decades it's been popular to Something / Rancher: e.g., Educator / Rancher.
Pausing my reading halfway to just say a big "I love you America". You are the best. Also the worst, but still the best.
(To be developped)
Two thoughts:
1: I would watch a reality tv show featuring these people. Or, better yet: a show where, due to some constutional [mumble mumble] they find themselves collectivly as absloute rulers of CA, but they all have to work together.
2: Scott, or anyone else for that matter, who do you think would be the best govenor, distinct form questions of electability?
Scott, I recommend you stop using Adblock Plus and switch to Ublock Origin, the first switched to a "pay us to let YOUR ads through" business model. Also, good article.
Seconded hard. I would go so far as to say that having Adblock Plus installed is unethical.
I typically use ScriptSafe. It's a general script-blocker instead of being ad-focused. This means until I allow a given site-source for scripting, the page elements get blocked. As a result, sometimes I have to fiddle with a site to get to actually work correctly, but on the flip side, I don't have to rely on someone else deciding which sources are ad-shaped, i have full control over it.
I've also gotten a better understanding of how websites out in the wild are actually put together.
"Although his first wife left him for Donald Trump Jr. (?!), he is happily remarried and has four children named “Montana”, “Hunter”, “Brooklynn”, and “Dutch”.
"Dutch" was Arnold Schwarzenegger's character's name in the 1987 movie Predator. Arnold Schwarzenegger was of course also governor of California. His co-star in the film was Jesse Ventura, and coincidentally or not, he later served as governor of Minnesota. This makes me think that Gavin Newsome is a shoo-in for re-election.
Then again, Sonny Landham, who played "Billie" in the film, ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary election for Governor of Kentucky in 2003. Lots of political aspirations among the cast of this movie, strangely.
One is tempted to laugh at states like Alabama, given the success of college football-affiliated candidates there like Tommy Tuberville. But clearly the phenomenon is not limited to red states, and at least he had to deal with a real world problem, like slowing down Alabama's running game, whereas Arnold and Jesse were just actors. They'd get more points from me if they fought a real alien.
re Shellenberger:
"I oppose sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill, he’s for it."
I think this is incorrect.
Shellenberger advocates it only for homeless, drug addicts who aren't effectively cared for iirc.
distinct from what you described. and much less dubious....
When I lived in California I heard the rumour that everyplace was bussing the homeless to California. Turns out it's true, but with the key caveat that California is also bussing its homeless everywhere. In fact California is probably a net exporter of homeless people. Municipal governments like to find contacts for homeless people ("So you have a sister in Peoria? Maybe she'd take you in?") and buy them bus tickets.
Best article I've seen on the subject, with some numbers:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study
If the US could get its act together on a national level, then instead of redistributing the population from state to state then the obvious thing to do would be to redistribute them to Mexico instead.
See, you could have gotten Mexico to pay for the Wall. Where were you when Donald needed you man?
Putting aside policies and ideas, the important thing is to pick someone who _looks_ gubernatorial.
Ron Jones looks promising, he's just one slightly more expensive haircut and one much more expensive suit away from looking like a state governor from central casting. Lonnie Sotor is basically similar but as far as I can tell from his picture has no eyes, which is a problem.
Hanink looks like he turned up for the wrong casting call -- he looks more like he wants to be a philosophy professor. What's that? You already are a philosophy professor? Great, keep that up, it suits you.
Shawn Collins: I'm not sure if he's governor material with that haircut, but his wife looks like definite First Lady material. Maybe we can pair her off with a different candidate?
Brian Dahle has the sort of goatee that says "I definitely peaked in the 90s" and the confident smile of a man who is the boss of something, but it's not something very important". I would expect to see him as a very effective county school board president, or chairman of a local soccer club.
Gavin Newsom is clearly the corporate CEO bad guy from some kids TV series.
Jenny La Roux looks like the "who farted y'all?" beauty queen meme in middle age.
Reading the Major Williams section I was all poised to make some comment about how actually socialists and communist’s often have found themselves at opposite ends of the rifle. Then I read that his kid’s name was Lord and realized Major was probably his first name, not his rank. Then my brain broke.
This brightened my day. Thanks!
Jenny Roux never worked at Bain Cap, she worked at Bain & Co. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyraeca/ The two firms have shared ancestry (first spun out of second) but are completely separate. First is a LOT more prestigious / hard to get into than second. She was an AC i.e. lowest level grunt at bain & co for a couple years, basically standard finishing school fare for ivy league grads these days.
Thanks for the correction.
As a citizen of California, I appreciate your making my choice so much easier. I'm definitely now going to stay home and stress-test my couch instead of driving three blocks to the middle school to vote for any of these vegetables. Thanks!
> when I inspect that emotion further I find it has a flavor of “I could fix him”, which I’m told is not a good way to choose one’s relationship partners or governors.
It might be fun to try to contact him?
This was funny but I think it sort of preserves a very Republican point of view by where the jokes land.
It accepts a lot of Republican framing of the problems of California and hand waves a lot of problems with standard Republican positions.
For example, "California has a worst in the country business climate."
Like that is going to go up in an ad with scary music on a black and white clip of Gavin Newsom with a "paid for by the GOP"
By contrast, most of these the Republican candidates are pro life. This is treated as just wacky fun and to be expected. No comments or scary text on what that actually means for people with difficult pregnancies or who are pregnant via rape or incest. No mention of how this is a gap in any stated commitment to cut bureaucracy and red tape. Between the jokes about hair, there wasn't room for one about how being pro life means being pro "adding a bunch more government bureaucracy between a woman and her doctor"?
The tone of the piece kind of laments that Gavin Newsom is probably going to be reelected. It attributes a lot of it to him looking the part and having good hair without acknowledging that most people in California also prefer the policy positions of a generic Democrat.
"Worst in the nation business climate", which is a direct quote from several of these candidates' platforms, is a reference to California's rank on https://chiefexecutive.net/best-worst-states-business/, the best-known ranker of these things. I don't think it's "playing into their hands" to mention this any more than it's "playing into their hands" to mention we sure do have a wildfire problem and a homelessness problem.
I don't think I should have to add "and by the way this is bad and you should be against it" every time I mention a Republican believing Republican things, any more than I should have to say this when I mention Ventresca believing socialist things, Zacky owning a factory farm, or Zink having a climate plan which I think cashes out to a perpetual motion machine.
I voted for Newsom last election and will probably do so again, because his policy positions are closest to mine. As compensation for that indignity having been inflicted upon me, I reserve the right to make fun of him being an empty suit, which I don't think anyone denies.
You didn't attribute it to the candidate platforms though. It was listed as a basic fact. Like the fires and homelessness.
Chiefexecutive.net gets their rankings from a survey of 700 ceos. They put California at #50 dead last and Texas and Florida at #1 and #2.
Cnbc, using their own methodology (clearly laid out and viewable with 85 metrics in 10 categories) for business put California at #33, below average but not nearly the worst in the country. Also, the best two on that the CNBC list are Virginia and North Carolina. (Texas sits at #4 and Florida sits at #17)
Chief executive gets their rankings from a survey of ceos and, interestingly, among this probably very Republican group, the ranking that comes out is both the "worst business environment" and the "likelihood of being featured in a negative Tucker Carlson segment".
I don't think there's a lot of CEOs watching Tucker Carlson.
I dunno, Forbes doesn't seem to think businesses like California very much either, ranking it as the #1 state businesses are fleeing. I don't think saying it has a bad climate for business is some kind of partisan statement that needs tons of disclaimers lest you inadvertently aid The Enemy — unless you hate the Right so much that agreeing on *anything* is treachery to you, perhaps.
Bad climate for business is fine. It is when absolute statements "the worst, the most" etc. that you need to be careful about the source.
Can you name a worst state? When it comes to business, that is? I am genuinely curious if there is anything worse out there
I’d say that ‘worst’ is pretty fair. CA taxes and regs are the most nightmarish in the country by far.
Thanks, the fact that CNBC disagrees is an update for me.
The CNBC rankings also make more intuitive sense. If California were the worst state in the country for doing business how is it that so many businesses choose to locate themselves in California? The bottom ranking states in the CNBC survey are ones that actually don't have many so major businesses: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine. (Note that the CNBC rankings are obviously considering things that are mostly unrelated to state policies, such as accessibility to the rest of the country.)
A lot of business was located in CA previous to the regulatory climate becoming poor, Silicon Valley being the prime example, or has special exceptions (Hollywood) or can’t be located anywhere else (the entire agricultural sector of the West Coast). Frankly, for having a monopoly on all the warm-weather Pacific coastline, huge land area and massive population, CA should be doing much better than it is, and business has visibly begun to pull out and relocate.
Yes, but part of my (and CNBC's) point is that business-friendliness is more than just regulatory climate! An area can have a good regulatory climate but still be a bad place to do business, or vice-versa. California did in fact rank dead last in the "regulatory climate" aspect of CNBC's rankings, but other factors moved it up from the bottom of the list overall.
I’m don’t know what use that ranking is to anyone. Places with good regulatory and tax climates should score higher than places that are crooked but rich in trapped businesses desperate to escape.
Don't you get to judge Newsom by his deeds, in addition to his positions? It's not only what he promises (and what the others promise), it's also (and, I would imagine, more importantly) what you think they might deliver. By your own admission, his record is quite bad. Is there a reason to expect much better in his next term?
Some states are quite happy with governors who are of the opposite political alignment to most of people in that state. It's not only the views that matter.
Lighten up, dude.
I noticed that too! So it's not just my imagination. I got a similar feeling from other recent articles as well, with this one being the strongest to the point of wondering if I'd somehow mispegged his values all these years. I was very confused.
On the other hand, I've never before read his articles without first receiving one or several recommendations each so it was in fact *very possible* that my view of him was cherry picked.
Thank you so much for this beautiful, kind, hilarious post.
What ARE good ideas for solving the homeless problem? Seems like we should from the outset admit that at least 50% of our concern for the homeless is we don't want to see them, but we also wish them well to the extent it doesn't cost us too much.
I like the idea of giving them high-rise parking lots as a thought experiment. The first effect is it makes them less visible to the rest of the public, without changing their circumstances much from living homeless at street level. It hides them from view and takes them off the sidewalks we wanted to pass down.
It breaks all regulations immediately, as all good ideas do. A big problem with homeless shelters is they are too expensive to build and maintain because progressives love to regulate things to an insane degree.
A parking garage is a nice start because it is a big fuck you to all the progressive notions of what a perfect homeless shelter should be.
Now, a high-rise parking lot for the homeless will cause problems for its neighbors. Many of the residents will need money and drugs in that order. Perhaps the drugs can be delivered inside the parking garage, but the money is likely to be searched for it in nearby blocks outside of it. This creates externalities for neighboring businesses or residents.
Maybe the homeless parking garage should look like this:
Floor 1: This is where local charities give out food. Nobody actually sleeps on this floor because who wants to live on a first floor?
Floor 2: Religious institutions offer services and counseling for those who want it.
Floor 3: Secular minded altruists offer practical advice on getting a job, getting skills training, perhaps other practical survival advice.
Floor 4: Closely monitored living and sleeping conditions for those who choose it. I imagine this would include a lot of women who want to feel safe from attack.
Floors 5-8: People who want to live in relative anarchy. Who want to smoke crack, drink mouthwash, whatever floats their boat.
Outside fundraising can be used to distribute limited cash in some sort of equitable way among residents. (not sure how best to do this.) Those who want to better themselves and escape homelessness can use the cash for that; those who prefer to be drug addicts can use the cash for that -- which prevents them from harassing neighbors for cash.
What are other good or bad ideas?
Anything that compels drug and alcohol addiction treatment, and treatment for mental illness. Hardly anybody who is chronically homeless *doesn't* have one of these problems, or both. And you can't solve *any* lesser problem of no place to sleep, no job, no medical care, until you stop the voices and/or get the monkey off your back.
Serious question - what's the actual track record on the effectiveness of drug treatment? My impression is that other than a few examples in which we're openly acknowledging that we're trying to treat the symptomatic pathology rather than the addiction itself (e.g., Suboxone or Methadone treatment), the track record on addiction treatment itself is at best incredibly mixed.
I always tend to be extremely skeptical of proposals for drug and alcohol addiction treatment (other than Suboxone / Methadone, I guess) because my strong impression is that these are basically forms of pouring money down a giant hole, where we can (and celebrities often do) spend an essentially infinite amount of resources on a basically intractable problem for little if any tangible gain - let alone any kind of gain commensurate to the cost.
I haven't read the latest literature on this, though, and certainly not that from reputable medical journals, so maybe this perception of the ineffectiveness of treatment is mistaken or out of date. A state-of-the-art summary from someone in the know would be extremely welcome.
Regarding drug treatment, you are pretty much spot-on. I had a Chinese roommate recently, and I paid him a large sum to translate anything he could find on treatment during the Opium Wars to english, under a hunch that the Chinese probably tried every possible way of de-addicting their populace. And they did. They tried torture, they tried weird positive stuff where they made you a rich court official with a sinecure but if you touched opium again you were instantly executed on the spot, they tried everything any intelligent person might think of, with or without ethical constraints. Not a single thing worked, the relapse rate was very close to 100%.
depressing, but fascinating!
Strong agree on both counts.
What did they try to stop people from becoming addicted in the first place?
Well, the death penalty for possession of opium has been a constant fixture for almost two centuries now, even in times when it wasn't really enforced.
Mostly they tried "going to war with Britain to stop them from selling Opium"
Holy shit, that sounds amazing. Have you published the translated texts somewhere?
So. I just spent like an hour trying to find the comnent you're replying to.
I can't remember what you're asking for. Could it be the translation I commissioned of hpmor? Unlikely. It's probably the 'opium war' era chinese opiate stuff, I have a vague memory of talking about that sometime recently... except that I dug through the big thread about suboxone on this post and couldn't find our exchange, which is making me second-guess myself
Incoming rant about how horrible substack's comment systems are.
First, I see a notification that you replied to something of mine. https://imgur.com/a/WHCkbRN
I click on it to get context. Unfortunately substack gives me 0 context. https://imgur.com/a/7aVHrTo
So I click 'return to main thread' which puts me... back out at the big list of all comments! Still no context! https://imgur.com/a/J52XaEl
Ctrl+f on "John Wittle" can't find it. Ctrl+f on "translated texts" can't find it either. Both also implied there is a ton of weird crap going on here; there are results that have a defined location on my scroll bar but which simply don't appear.
So then I went down and opened every single "more comments" link I could find that didn't actually open a new page, manually scanning for this thread's parent. I couldn't find it.
I am posting this comment to get a permalink (edit: ha! I forgot! The system can generate permalinks but it doesn't give us access to them!) I can share to substack devs, people on the ssc discord who think we're just complaining about meaningless change or new color schemes, etc. Maybe I can finally convince people that my hatred for this comment system is genuine.
Out of curiosity. Can you remember what you were asking for? Or do you have any way of getting to the parent thread to check?
I can't find my comment either, but yeah, it was the translated Opium War stuff. "Things a government motivated to the point of desperation tried that still didn't work" is a pretty compelling reading list.
Hey, I thought the root of this comment thread! It's the "What ARE good ideas for solving the homeless problem?" comment by poster Jack Wilson.
I just found something Scott wrote that basically seems to be saying the same thing:
"Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution."
Source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/02/practically-a-book-review-dying-to-be-free/ - PRACTICALLY-A-BOOK REVIEW: DYING TO BE FREE
10 or so years ago I had some contact with a guy that was on methadone in order to avoid doing heroin. He took up a practice of meditation and pranayama. After a little while ha had a feeling he could cut his dose of methadone quite drastically and he did and experienced no withdrawals. After some more time meditating and doing pranayama he again got the feeling he could cut his dose again and once again did a drastic cut without withdrawals. This repeated a couple of more times and he was completely of them in six months or so. He told me that this was unheard of. That in order to get of methadone you had to cut tiny, tiny bits of the normal dosage in order to not get unbearable withdrawals. And that a large part of the reason there is so much resistance towards putting people on methadone is that they will likely stay on it for life because quitting it is so hard. He had a strong feeling that it was a particular and unusually powerful pranayama technique called spinal breathing that was most of the reason he could cut it so fast without withdrawals.
A while later I came across a blog post by a guy who wrote about how he got of methadone in a similar way by doing lots of qigong.
If the techniques these guys where using were indeed the reason they could get off methadone we have a potentially very good treatment path. Get people on methadone and help them stabilize their lives, then get them practicing these techniques to get off methadone.
This is pretty much empirically disproven. Lots of people have anecdotes about strategies people used to get clean. Whenever you examine them in detail, it's stuff like, christians telling their peers that christ helped them get clean so that the community'll feel uncomfortable showing skepticism, when really there is no sobriety and the addict just wants to avoid getting caught again. Or people have been through the sobriety -> relapse -> rehab cycle a dozen times, and each time they attribute their newfound sobriety to some new technique or wondercure or philosophy, but then when they relapse 4 years later you don't hear about it, like a temporal file drawer effect
That's why we use properly designed experimental science to determine stuff like the efficacy of medical treatments, because people can end up believing practically anything
Especially when it comes to narratives spun by unreliable narrators like opioid addicts talking about their own sobriety!
Frankly, your friend is right; drastically cutting a methadone dose without withdrawal is unheard of. As in, I have been studying addiction medicine for about 13 years and I have never heard of a single case of such. Opioid withdrawal is not nearly as prone to perception-placebo effects as, say, nicotine withdrawal. Opioid withdrawal has observable physiological symptoms that cannot be mistaken for nocebo, and certainly cannot be cured via meditation and breathing exercises. It's entirely possible that your friend was able to alter his subjective experience of the quantity of suffering that his withdrawal burdened him with, but that's not the same thing as not experiencing withdrawal in the first place.
On top of that... well. There are constantly scam artists selling opiate addiction cures. If I had to guess, I'd say the cottage industry of fake addiction cures is worth about as much as the illicit drug trade in the first place (you would not believe how much rehab clinics can charge, especially the ones who have thrown away any pretense of actually trying to be effective). And frankly, i'd say "meditation practices imported from eastern mysticism" is the second most common scam, after "psychedelic drug which was once used by pre-industrial humans for spiritual ceremonies". While it's true that just looking around at alternative rehabilitation scams you'll mostly see stuff about ibogaine, ketamine, or kratom, you'll also see a *lot* of barely-not-a-cult eastern spirituality stuff.
So like... I hope it's understandable that, for me, hearing a few anecdotes about meditation and 'powerful pranayama techniques' curing someone's methadone withdrawal feels similar to hearing a few anecdotes about a christian faith healer restoring sight to the blind, or healing the legs of a wheelchair-bound individual. It's not just that it doesn't make sense from a medical perspective, it's not just that it violates medical science norms. It's that it very precisely pattern-matches to other things I already know are scams, or at least things that probably wouldn't beat placebo in any decently designed double-blinded experiment
I'm a recovered addict and I've spent a bunch of time trying to answer this, with almost no results. The state of the art summary seems to be that treatment is better than no treatment, widely available treatment reduces the cost of addiction to society, but as a whole, no treatment programs are very effective.
We do know that spiritual transformation works. It's probably the only known cure for addiction so far. Of course this can't be prescribed, or usefully included in a meta analysis. Though it does make me very interested in and hopeful about the work going into psilocybin and related drugs.
Thank you for sharing your experience from the much more valuable perspective of someone who's actually gone to the effort of looking into the current state of the art, and my congratulations on what I'm sure was a hard road to recovery..
I have no idea, and I don't much care. We spend umpty kazillion dollars a year trying to stop people from dying of pancreatic cancer (median surivival 6 months) or glioblastoma multiforme (median survival 15 months), congestive heart failure, strokes, and a whole host of other promptly fatal ailments, and consider an earth-shattering success to be a novel treatment that buys people an extra 3 months of life for no more than $40,000 a pop. I think we can spare *just a little* compassion and cash for people struggling with something that is similarly devastating, albeit usually much more slowly, even if the success rates are poor, the struggle enormous, the setbacks frequent.
Is there a 100% cure just sitting there on the shelf, ready to inject, $50 a patient? Of course not. Does that suggest just giving up? Just let 'em go? Bullshit ourselves that it's because we deeply, deeply respect their autonomy, and not because we don't give a crap because they're ugly, smell bad, and say weird offensive things?
Even leaving aside the cost of treatment, there's an argument to be made that it doesn't really help anybody?
Like, if you take a homeless person, send them to rehab (probably against their will), then let them out, then they relapse immediately and end up back on the street, rinse and repeat...
Then you just end up repeatedly putting that person in an institutionalized environment, probably with all the abuse and poor life quality that entails, without having solved their problem. The person would have probably preferred you left them on the street.
We come back to the original problem, which is that the intervention's only tangible effect is taking the homelessness and misery out of sight of ordinary people.
I am a little surprised to hear you say this. This seems like, well, not the kind of sentiment I'd expect to hear from someone with a name that actually got referenced in the original sequences
The problem with opiate addiction treatment is that it doesn't work, not that we don't want to pay for it
Maintenance works but that's a different story
What's the record of effectiveness for compelled treatment?
I think John Wittle's comment has a good answer:
"I had a Chinese roommate recently, and I paid him a large sum to translate anything he could find on treatment during the Opium Wars to english, under a hunch that the Chinese probably tried every possible way of de-addicting their populace. And they did. They tried torture, they tried weird positive stuff where they made you a rich court official with a sinecure but if you touched opium again you were instantly executed on the spot, they tried everything any intelligent person might think of, with or without ethical constraints. Not a single thing worked, the relapse rate was very close to 100%."
(link: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates/comment/6765303)
In the short term? 100% of course. If you are locked up and can't get drugs, you don't do drugs, end of story. What you probably mean is "How effective is it once you let people go?" The obvious plausible hypothesis is "about as effective as any other treatment that lasts the same duration and effects the same changes or lack of changes in behavior." Why would one expect anything different?
Anyway, I don't really care what the effectiveness is after you let them go, because if it stops working you just bring them back. Problem solved. The idea that it is more humane to allow people to live like animals in a stockyard of a factory farm, because it's their expressed choice (from a brain that is so deranged with illness and chemicals that it demonstrably cannot make decisions that optimize its own plain physical interests, let alone abstract complex psychological interests) -- instead of putting them whether they will or no into the best possible known treatment for their afflictions is bizarre to me. I cannot understand the worldview that would choose that as the option that best discharges our duty to our fellow man.
I do get how pundits and politicians who would rather wring their hands (which is cheap) instead of do the hard and expensive spade work of building the system to do the job think that way, but I don't have to respect cynicism and expediency, whatever fake pieties are prettily plastered over it, and I don't.
Further update: you may want to see (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/02/practically-a-book-review-dying-to-be-free/ - PRACTICALLY-A-BOOK REVIEW: DYING TO BE FREE), particularly its conclusion:
"Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution."
I have a bad idea: build a fully libertarian freedomtown where there are no cops and you can do drugs and kill yourself in peace. Basically a haven of total drug decrim but also complete lawlessness. We leave them an always available phoneline to Society if they decide they wanna get sober, where they can call for a bus to come pick them up, give them Suboxone, and take them back to a motel room in a big city where they can attempt vocational training etc.
Because it's promised to be completely decriminalised there (we won't stop them from making, growing, selling or doing drugs there, but we will stop that area from exporting), we shouldn't have any difficulty getting people to go there.
The reason why I think it's a bad plan is because it's pretty much just letting people walk out onto the freeway, but in a way that inconveniences the rest of us less. But Americans might see the appeal of this sort of thing.
I don't see how that differs strongly from the situation in the United States already, barring a few odd corners. If you want to (to the extent you can "want" anything when your mind is addled) burn your brain out with meth or heroin or even oxy there is nothing much to stop you, unless you have some incredibly dedicated family member who isn't co-dependent, or unless you fall foul of the law accidentally or on purpose.
So far as I know, the greatest amount of treatment of serious mental illness and bad drug and alcohol addition that goes on today is an adjunct of the legal system. People get caught up in it in some variety of petty criminality and a savagely overworked judge tries to divert them to some kind of treatment, hoping it will save the lost soul, and hoping also that the treatment won't itself be abusive or dishonest, which sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, since there's neither the money nor the manpower to be sure it's as good as the nice private clinics the beauiful people frequent when the pinot grigio starts flowing a little early in the day and an unfortunate thing happens with the car and a light pole.
The last link links to the "unspeakable" New York Times!?! What happened to "NYT delenda est" and "Écrasez l’infâme!" ?! - I only read it, cuz it's only 50 cent a week. Promised! And will get out asa the price goes up - or earlier. - Thanks for the insights into politics on the other side of the world. Was great fun. And very sad. As a good story should be.
My favorite bits are the enthusiasm for immigrants and the idea of using a campaign to advertise one's advertising business.
On the Joe Rogan episode Shellenberger mentions reading the scout mindset, and reading substack. Maybe he reads SSC. As Rogan would say it's entirely possible. You might get your chance to fix him yet.
I think Gavin names his kids based on where they were conceived.
My son Back-Of-Toyota Scizorhands appreciates this
In another comment I mentioned how unrealistic a freshwater pipeline from the interior to the coast was. I maintain that it's ludicrous, but an opposite proposition is being seriously considered and makes a lot of sense. The Great Salt Lake is an endorheic lake with no outflows, so it's naturally far saltier than the sea. Unfortunately it's been drying up, due to increased population in the same watershed.
A not as unreasonable as you might think solution may be to pump seawater from the pacific into the Great Salt Lake. Nobody will mind pumping water out of the Pacific, it has plenty and it's not fit for human consumption, but it's actually less salty than the Great Salt Lake is already. This would not be drinking water for Utah, but it would prevent exposure of the dusty lakebed, cool the environment, and make it possible to keep drawing from the current inflows without drying it up altogether.
https://wswrp.com/great-salt-lake/ - Unfortunately this was a bit optimistic about timelines but it may happen.
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2022/05/22/loony-idea-pacific-ocean/ - Environmentalist opposed to the idea because it doesn't involve raising water prices, and might disrupt the "Great Salt Lake's ecological balance" which is essentially just Brine Shrimp and flies, and declining every year as is.
That's a pretty cool idea.
This would require at least 56 TJ of energy to raise the water (a bit less than was released by early atom bombs) but maybe you could use excess solar power during the day.
It wouldn't need to be always-on and it would run through the best solar region on the planet, ideally it would be entirely renewable-based in an area where renewable energy is rapidly becoming free. There isn't even a transit or storage problem; put the pipeline and the farms next to each other in the middle of nowhere
Well, I don't think the length of the pipe is such a problem, there are oil pipelines that are longer, but the flow rate required is pretty hefty. The Great Salt Lake is ~1700 square miles. If you want to add 3 inches a year, you need a flow rate of ~375 CFS, which is about what you get for a good stout creek or medium-sized river in the summer.
What a great piece. Informative and insightful, hilarious without being smug or demeaning. Thanks!
My thoughts precisely.
I'm not sure if you've commented on it, but its striking how hard it is to vote in primaries (or even generals). There's a list of candidates most of whom lack a website or any clearly stated positions beyond one "slogan." The ballot gives the impression of choice, but it feels like a lie. I dont have enough time to determine which downballot races to vote on this year. Democracy feels dead.
I mean, if someone doesn't have a website at all it's probably fair to dismiss them from consideration, but that doesn't make democracy dead - you still get to vote for whoever you want. Just pick someone who actually has a policy platform, if that's what you want to see in a candidate. Besides, Scott seems to have found at least a loose set of policy positions for most of these candidates
What happens in California if you try to give your kid a regular name? Does a judge make you change it or something?
Maybe it's like vanity plates over there. All the good ones you can think of are already taken.
The Controller race is probably an even better example of this than Governor, where an immigrant woman with no political experience is spending millions of dollars of her own money to run for Controller, just to prove she can.
Thanks for this, it made me LOL several times.
It seems very unlikely that a republican candidate will be competitive in a state-wide election anytime soon. Given that, a moderate alternative to the democratic party may be beneficial. I've registered my party preference with the "California Common Sense Party" and I encourage others to consider doing the same. And if anyone thinks doing so is harmful, I'd be curious to learn why.
https://cacommonsense.org/
Thank you for correcting the error about my position about Suboxone, but you make another error claiming I support “sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill.” That’s simply false. I address this issue at length in my books and writings. Please correct it.
Woah. Why is this not getting any replies? This is incredible Scott, this is exactly what you wanted. It's been a whole weekend! We've got one of the candidates right here! Let's ask him stuff!
Scott, I'm way late to the game here, but just want to say, in response to your obviously tongue-in-cheek overview of Gavin Newsom, that I worked with a fellow who would have replied "Heh heh, now actually your assessment of Gavin is not quite right - you see, he IS ALREADY the governor, so the fact that his name is Gavin actually wasn't actually a major deterrent for voters. You should really do a little more research next time!"
They are real, and they walk among us.
You really ought to read Klaus Schwab's book instead of calling Zacky wacky