It's a lot less reasonable to legally require someone to be a member of government for a multi-year term than it is to require them to sit a jury, so presumably you would let people opt out. Keep drawing from the lottery, and hopefully within only a single-digit number of tries you'll get someone who is in a position that taking it is reasonable. Particularly if you set the salary as generous by current national standards.
This does inject a little more of the "you don't want to be ruled by anyone who wants to rule you" issue, but considerably less than a democratic system that requires that someone basically devote their life to achieving high office.
Honestly it sorta blows my mind how well juries do given they’re as close to a random sample of the population you can stitch together. Really renews my faith in society.
They'll still do a better job than the professional sociopaths we have now. Just removing the selection for dark triad traits from our political class would be an amazing feat.
The "Napoleon of Notting Hill" theory of government 😀
"We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot — that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."
"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's."
"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal."
"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant — he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."
"Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality."
This seems pretty obviously false. Many criminals commit crimes for reasons other than poverty. Making sure they are not poor and giving them power won't reduce their criminality.
The article makes it clear that they are proposing using privateers if a war between the US and China breaks out, not before. If we are at war with China then Chinese trade becomes out business.
It's the ravings of a retired Marine colonel who probably wants to go earn some prize money because he grew up reading too much Horatio Hornblower. He doesn't speak for anyone else, because Proceedings doesn't work that way.
I moved to the United States at 15, exactly half a lifetime ago. I remember watching GSN and the History Channel almost daily with my brother. In France, at the time, most households only had 5, or at most 6 TV channels, and there simply wasn't enough airwave space for niche shows like Ancient Aliens or Hitler this-and-that; documentaries were dour (to children), but probably trustworthy.
We eventually adjusted to these new, ahem, TV standards of evidence. But for a few long, awkward weeks, we would excitedly bring up the bible code, or some random Hitler-flavored crackpot theory, entirely convinced by the on-air experts. I still remember thinking the bible code stuff in particular was very compelling; why, after all, would a documentary lie about something like that?
Anyhow, I think I'd tried to repress those memories, and your comment vividly brought them back with a shudder
Could someone please explain what the mechanism is that big index funds use to get pharmaceutical companies (or other companies, for that matter) to do what they want?
Do they threaten to change the index-status of the company? Threaten to use the votes their stocks give them to fire the CEO? Either of those seem very much against the whole point of index funds--is it just that this is a clear emergency that justifies the exception? Or do Blackrock, Vanguard, etc, have some way of pressuring pharmaceutical companies that I don't know of?
there is no issue with index funds making choices on how to vote their shares. In the past they have been passive but there is no reason they shouldn't be trying to improve the governance of their holdings (although there are reasons that they shouldn't be trying to force collusion).
Well, there is one pretty good reason, which is that you need to pay somebody to figure out how to improve governance of holdings, which means the fees on the index fund goes up. Perhaps this is just an exception because of how obviously beneficial it would be to have a vaccine.
So IS this how we think index funds influence these companies?
Big stock owners have sway. They're not going to vote all their shares all the time, but if BlackRock's CEO gets a bee in his bonnet, it doesn't even cost BlackRock anything extra to have the CEO (who's already on the payroll) make a few calls, or to have an intern go vote 397 million shares at the Pfizer AGM. And for the same reason, he has a pretty good chance of winning a proxy fight.
It’s very cordial and informal. Management will take calls from their biggest shareholders. The relationship is probably a lot more interpersonal than what you might be imagining. All the major stakeholders have very tightly aligned interests (most of the time etc etc).
The dismantling the octopus chapter of Radical markets gets into it. The short version is that Hedge funds and mutual funds have significant voting shares, and are a coherent block, while the rest of the investors aren't. This means that when the simply pick up the phone and call the Board CEO etc, they listen. I'm dismayed that Scott is implying that *destroying competitive markets through pseudo monopoly power* is a good thing.
Some chaps have a chat. The real money doesn't need mechanisms, it has trust relationships. The CEO of a fund has a chat with his chum, the CEO of a pharma giant. Lunch is arranged.
Then the pharma CEO has a chat with his head of operations and his marketing guy.
All very informal. You don't take minutes at lunch. No paper trails, just old friends catching up.
I did a college research paper on the changes in hurricanes over time with global warming. What I found was that the data sets are really bad. They're mostly based on tidal gauge measures of storm surges, but tidal gauges malfunction in massive waves.
The paper Scott linked is based on satellite imagery, which seems like it should be better, but I wonder how they backtested their "Dvorak" technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite imagery. If they had to test it on the old data sets (i.e. the tidal gauges), I'd worry about the reliability of the Dvorak technique as well.
Worth noting as well that NOAA has been adjusting the data from previous pre-satellite era hurricane seasons, often by as much as 20%; the adjustments might be entirely called for, but if so that indicates that the historical data being adjusted can't be trusted to within 20%, making long-term calibration of historical data to satellite data even more difficult. 8% per decade is a very small signal to try to extract from this noise.
If each individual data point may be shifted by ~20% (in either direction) then mean’s will still fairly easily extract trends. All that changes is the specifics of a given year, not the trend.
Because it reduces the absolute amount of misinformation released into the world. Also, commenters are fallible and are gonna miss stuff, and aren't really in a position to suggest structural changes to, say, the layout or argumentation of a piece. Any of these reasons ought to be adequate to hire an editor.
On the other hand, perhaps some of the charm of the blog is that it is "off the cuff." I think that should really be balanced against the fact that, as a subscriber, a lot of people are paying frankly ridiculous sums of money for it.
": Seen here: how has the wealth of different generations changed over time? Note that this is not tracking specific individuals, who continue to mostly gain wealth as they get older - it’s tracking how much money an (eg) 25 year old would have made in 1990 vs. 2015:"
I'm pretty surprised at how poorly middle-aged people are doing. You can definitely see a big drop in the 45-64 range from the 2008 recession, which makes sense to me (I would expect that to be age range that had the highest fraction of their wealth in housing), but I would expect some recovery. It also looks like the divergence of 65+ vs everyone younger started around 2004-2007, so I still find myself confused.
"32: Also from the Slime Mold Time Mold blog: a critique of the research on hypobaric hypoxia causing weight loss. I’d previously cited the research favorably in my post on why obesity negatively correlates with altitude; the SMTM authors have a different theory where it has to do with how many pollutants are in your water (the lower you are, the more runoff has made it into your water supply)."
By complete coincidence, I was looking at my comment (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/11/open-thread-64-5/#comment-443619) following up on that post, and a respondent stated this exact hypothesis. (I'm still a bit skeptical, because for most of the country, the amount of water upstream of you has little to do with your elevation--think about all the people who live along the lower Mississippi, but are at nearly the same elevation as their slightly northerly neighbors, and also for the reasons I pointed out at the time, particularly the extreme selection effect of altitudes above 5,000 feet).
I'm looking at the map of obesity rates (figure 2), and I think upon looking more carefully, there's quite a lot that is still unusual. Most notably, I would expect a line of decreasing obesity running roughly North/South through Abilene, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Lincoln, and Bismarck. The elevation increases pretty sharply, from about 500 feet to 4-5,000 feet above sea level (comparable to the higher Appalachian peaks) in 100-200 miles. Instead, it looks like the obesity is constant until you get to the CO and NM state lines, well after the elevation has been gained.
I will say that the array of evidence summarized in sections 1 and 2 seems to be among the most maddeningly bizarre of any scientific question I have ever heard of.
I suppose I do have a question: how are wild animals affected, but not people living separately from the rest of society? Shouldn't the !Kung and other tribes be consuming the same air and water as those wild animals, and in some cases eating those wild animals?
And a second question: how tightly controlled are the diet and exercise experiments? Some of them last for a year or longer; presumably the participants aren't living in a lab the whole time (and if they are, could that moderate the effects of the treatment?). Do these studies rely on people following the diet/exercise plan of their own volition, and take self-reports of whether they did or not literally?
A follow-up question: What is the mechanism by which environmental contamination affects obesity? As far as I can tell, you mention 2 candidates. One is leptin, which Scott wrote about in his own review of Guyenet's book. But the mechanism by which leptin affects weight seems to be through... how much you eat, which you already established doesn't matter. That's certainly the case with the leptin-deficient children. Is it not the case for common leptin resistance? Does leptin also coincidentally control some other function, like how much you fidget? (I use that as an example because Scott's old post mentioned it, but in retrospect, fidgeting is exercise, which you also established doesn't matter. I suppose in some sense I'm confused as the basic accounting of calories, if both diet and exercise are completely irrelevant).
The other mechanism I saw mentioned is the gut microbiome. That's currently too much of a black box to me for me to be able to comment, but it does seem like it renders some of the evidence from above (the rat-leptin experiments as well as the the fact that psychiatric medication causes weight gain) seemingly irrelevant.
"Also from a public health perspective, mechanism isn't that important. We didn't need to understand the mechanism of how smoking caused cancer to figure out that it did."
There's a very clear signal that smoking causes lung cancer.
I gather there isn't nearly as a clear a signal about what in modern life causes obesity.
Is fidgeting actually a plausible mechanism for how fat people are? It seems to me that it would burn very little energy compared to even light exercise, and the added number of hours doesn't seem like enough.
Maybe it's harder to eat more than you want if you're fidgety, though you can still jiggle your feet while you're eating.
Is there a dose effect? Men (at least) are notable for putting on weight after about age 30 or 35. Does this correlate with a decline in fidgeting?
I don't know. I only thought of it because Scott's post from a few years ago mentioned it. I thought he cited a study claiming it could burn hundreds of calories per day, which sounds impressive to me but apparently doesn't mean anything.
Local police departments in brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen.
That was my immediate thought. In a county with a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 I'd hate to see what even worse terrible things looked like. Not a useful comparison.
I would expect that going on strike all the time would be *less* bad than going on strike exactly once ever, at least in terms of the immediate impact of a single strike.
If you strike often, then society has to find ways to cope during those periods, and criminals have many different strikes to take advantage of, letting them spread out their efforts. With only one strike, no other systems are in place to cope, and criminals are looking at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Here's a question in light of your final [and potentially most stupendous!!] item, namely the one about the possibility of mRNA vaccines for malaria. [Footnote 1 reprints the link at bottom of this comment should you not want to scroll back up.]
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My Question: I note a veritable cottage industry among certain economists (e.g., most blog-famous --- especially around these here parts --- would be Alex Tabarrok, see footnoted link #2) to produce estimates implying that even stupendous additional monies on COVID-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution pass all reasonable cost-benefit analyses.
** My basic question is: Anyone have opinions whether similar cost-benefit analyses for throwing stupendous government monies and effort on potential mRNA vaccines against... well, EVERYTHING (ok, ok, starting with a few major tropical diseases and certain types of cancer) would be worthwhile? **
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My own opinion is: Ummm, maybe? Seriously, I would need to expend more effort on the nitty-gritty of estimating costs and benefits. To wit, it's my preliminary impression that in the case of these COVID-19 cost-benefit estimates that a large part of the estimated benefit comes NOT from reducing COVID-19 sufferers' disability-adjusted-life-years-lost by themselves (at least not in the mean of most people's projections for the COVID-19 incidience in 2021), BUT RATHER from:
-- returning the world economy more quickly to its pre-pandemic productivity path [hey, say that 5 times fast ;) ],
-- and (sometimes) the possibility of reducing the tail risks of more-infectious-but-still-vaccine-affected variants getting out of hand and forcing massive lockdowns again --- indeed, lockdowns perhaps even more massive and more strict than those of early 2020.
Not to argue that it's morally right, but I get the strong impression most mainstream cost-benefit estimators wouldn't see those benefits as applicable to the case of markedly reducing the mortality and morbidity from major tropical diseases and a couple major cancers. (Prof. Tabarrok, are you reading this? Did you already think of this question? If so, hi!)
One potentially big advantage with the new mRNA vaccines is that they are driving down the marginal cost of vaccine development and testing. If this continues as expected, the costs of custom vaccines to disease X will be within the budgets of small organizations- single philanthropists. This could substantially change the social factors and economics of disease treatment...
The CDC announced that Covid had lowered life expectancy by a year. What they actually meant, as best I can tell, was that if you assumed that the age specific mortality rates of 2020 continued for ever, life expectancy would be a year less. Of course, that requires another pandemic every year for ever. Actual covid deaths represent an average cost of about five days.
But it occurred to me that if the Malaria story pans out, the pandemic might end up raising life expectancy — not life expectancy calculated by assuming pandemic mortality rates forever but how long people actually end up living.
I think the "lowered life expectancy by a year" thing was on the assumption that everyone got it, and it was a reduction to the life expectancy of people alive today. I won't swear to that, but it's killed about 1/700 Americans so far, and only a minority of the country has been infected. It's going to have a pretty substantial impact on mortality for the year.
As best I can tell, what it was about was what life expectancy would be if we had the age specific mortality of 2020 every year thereafter. That requires not that everyone gets Covid but that we repeat the pandemic, or something equivalent, every year forever.
So far as lost life per capita so far, it works out to about five days.
Yes, if you add “for someone born in 2020”. Which is not as ridiculous as it sounds, if you use it for e.g. comparisons over time or between sub populations. Of course it has no predictive value and is not intended to (any mor than one would blindly rely on instantaneous speed to predict the ETA for a cross-city drive).
One of the value propositions for the mRNA vaccine technology is in fact "super-customized" vaccine development. They're leading candidates for cancer immunotherapies, which hope to take cancerous cells from a biopsy and generate an immune response against those cells.
We know that vaccines against respiratory viruses can work so it's reasonable to throw money at making mRNA vaccines against this particular respiratory virus. We don't know that it's possible to vaccinate against certain major tropical diseases or major cancers so it is a very, very different thing to consider throwing money at those efforts.
Good point, Polynices. Though on that note of vaccines against respiratory viruses, you might be interested to note that mRNA vaccine work on a "universal" influenza vaccine [1, 2] is at the same encouraging-but-hardly-definitive stage as this malaria work linked to by Scott [3]. Namely, mRNA universal flu vaccines are at the stage for which honesty demands an explicit #justsayinmice hashtag caveat [which I gather is sort of a virology Twitter in-joke, see footnote 4]. Sadly, honesty's demands for such an explicit caveat are so rarely met in mainstream news / popular science media.
I bring up work on universal influenza vaccines since a novel strain of pandemic influenza seems to me to have been by and far the pandemic scenario that the US government was most worried about until SARS-CoV-2 reminded them for at least the 3rd time in 20 years that "ya know, there's other novel zoonotic respiratory viruses... indeed, ones that even scared the s#!% out of major countries... just sayin' ".
Indeed, if my memory's not failing me, I'm pretty sure not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, but also numerous other regular participants and guests on This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast [https://www.microbe.tv/] have opined to the effect "Gosh, if this COVID-19 pandemic doesn't get a fire under our proverbial butt to finally fully fund universal flu vaccines as long as it takes to succeed in making one, well... humanity's probably going to regret it majorly... and maybe in a decade or two rather than just by, say, 2100." [I'm too lazy to find links for that, unlike the other links that you see below... also, I'm not a virologist [5], but I think the TWiV podcast deserves all the praise and attention... well, relative attention in the world of academics podcasting... that it gets.]
[2] Not to insult anyone's intelligence on this learned blog, but the way flu vaccines are manufactured, they're specific to only 3 or 4 flu strains that have to be identified by public health "surveillance" experts making an educated guess about which strains are likely to be in wide circulation in the coming flu season. Commentors more virologically-informed than I are invited to enlighten me (and presumably other people) why the number of flu strains you can put in a vaccine tops out at effectively 4 with present day technology --- be that (1) the old-school flu vaccine technology of actually involves culturing lots of flu viruses in chicken egg media or certain mammalian cell cultures, isolating all that virus, and then "inactivating" or "attenuating" that virus so it'll just stimulate an immune response without giving you the flu or (2) the fancy-schmancier-new-since-early-2010s-but-alas-still-not-magic "recombinant" vaccine technology that takes the DNA coding for the hemagglutinin surface proteins of the flu strains you want to vaccinate and putting that into baculoviruses to inject (hemagglutinin types being the reason for the "H[digit]" part of the "H[digit]N[other digit]" naming scheme for flu viruses).
[3] The link Scott gave for the malaria mRNA-esque vaccine was really a news release for a patent application by the Yale / GlaxoSmithKline collaboration. The actual research (again #justsayinmice!) is in this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.430970v1.abstract
[5] I'm a theoretical physicist, not a virologist or any other sort of molecular biology person. Though I'm co-author on a paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.15776) which, umm... mentions how to speed up differential equation solving pertinent to epidemiology as well as "virality" on social networks, I swear I'm not the type of physicist lampooned here https://xkcd.com/793/ . Really, I'm not!
There might be some interesting math about the question of giving vaccines for influenzas which are further down on the list. I'm thinking that if the fifth and sixth most likely flus aren't that much less likely than number four or possibly numbers three and four, maybe the best bet is to randomly give a fairly high proportion of people vaccines against 1, 2, 4, and 5 or 1, 2, 4, and 6 so as to blunt the slightly less likely epidemics. I'm guessing, though.
I wouldn't move quite as fast against malaria or the like - covid is a fast-moving crisis, and speed really matters. Malaria is also very bad, and I don't want to waste too much time, but it's not an emergency in quite the same fashion.
I wouldn't throw every available dollar at vaccines against everything, but I'd certainly start up some research programs. I'm a layman, so I won't put hard numbers on this, but if a few billion got invested into this globally over the next year, I'd probably nod happily.
I don't disagree about speed, at all, but I would point out that the impact on lost years of life of a disease that kills large numbers of children is much larger than that of a disease that most kills much older people, relative to numbers of cases.
Personally, I'm mostly angry about years already lost for no good reason. In what year did humans first gain the ability, technologically, to design a vaccine to a novel virus in a matter of weeks to a few months, and complete clinical trials in a few months more? The idea of mRNA vaccines is over 30 years old (but wasn't feasible back then), and this review paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597572/) seems to show multiple demonstrations pre-2012. Even if it only became *really* feasible, say, 5 years ago, how many people died that didn't need to, of all sorts of diseases, which could already have vaccines if we'd thrown a few hundred billion dollars at them? How much faster could we have gotten a covid vaccine developed and rolled out if there were already a dozen other mRNA vaccines on the market with scaled-up manufacturing we could have repurposed?
Technologically, fast trials have been a thing for as long as vaccines. The limitation there is regulatory, not technological.
I don't know when mRNA became viable as a vaccine tech, per se, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History has a run-down of various related milestones. 1989 was when they showed you could inject mRNA, 1994 was when they showed it could create an immune response, and it looks like 2005 was when they solved one of the major issues with using it in actual humans. But Moderna and BioNTech were both working on mRNA treatments pre-covid, and not having a ton of luck getting them in a workable, marketable state. Looks like the transition to vaccines was comparatively recent - here's an article from 2017, for example: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
If they were only just switching to a vaccine mindset in 2017, then I doubt anything could have cleared trials by now (absent Warp Speed), so we wouldn't have any mRNA vaccines yet under normal circumstances.
Any sold-out-on-wokeness hypothesis for why the Sanders campaign failed has to grapple with several issues:
- Why New Bernie did so much better in Nevada in 2020 (with a much more diverse base). The article claims that caucuses "place a premium on ground-level organizing, where Sanders excelled." But this is not a distinction since Nevada was also a caucus in 2016 and the failures in 2020 South Carolina are being alleged at that same level, not that Bernie ran bad television ads or failed to show up.
- Why Classic Bernie did almost as badly in South Carolina in 2016. He got 26% of the vote there in 2016 and 20% in 2020. This is not a very dramatic difference considering the first contest was one-on-one against Hillary and it can be parsimoniously explained by an "anti-Hillary but not especially leftist" cohort.
- The specifics of Sanders' supposed sellout. What issues, specifically, does Bernie stand accused of shifting on? As near as I can tell, the only one on offer is that Bernie seems to have agreed with most Democrats that there was some sort of corruption involving Trump and Russia. Setting aside for the moment the various mottes and baileys imposingly shadowed here, I simply do not see a case made that any significant mass of (Democratic primary) voters were specifically motivated by an *absence* of this. And while Bernie was not a contrarian on this issue, neither did he especially lean into it. You can point to statements he made while being interviewed on news shows, but certainly it came up much less in his stump speeches than class issues.
As someone who followed his primary campaigns closely in 2016 and 2020 and supported him in both, I can't buy into this thesis. My view is much simpler: Bernie never had a majority of the primary electorate. In 2016 his numbers were puffed up by non-ideological anti-Hillary votes and in 2020 Democratic candidates simply coordinated to stop Bernie in exactly the way Republican candidates failed to do with Trump. The article skewers a straw man by contrapositing its arguments from "if the Democratic party was so desperate to rally around Biden...." They were not, any more than Republicans were eager to rally around Ted Cruz! The difference is they sucked up and did it when the circumstances left it as the only option. This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system.
And while I know people here are loath not to take others at their word, I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,"
"This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system."
Completely agreed, but it's worth noting that *arguing over* whether this type of coalition politics constitutes corruption has also been practiced since at least 1824 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_bargain). I think the arguments boil down to, if you're part of the deal then it's not corrupt, and if you're on the other side then it is.
If we think politicians do actually care about their stated policy preferences then it's the rational option. Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar were absolutely closer to Biden than to Sanders on policy, so when it looked like Sanders might win consolidating around one moderate-lane candidate was the rational choice. The GOP establishment messed up in 2016 — if they had been able to consolidate around one mainstream candidate, Trump wouldn't have been the nominee.
Of course, the fact that a lot of these turn into quid pro quos (see — VP! Cabinet positions!) does give it a whiff of corruption, but it's hard for me to imagine a world where politics didn't involve trades, negotiation, and deal-making. Being able to form a winning coalition is pretty much a politician's job.
One could imagine that giving way to another politician due to similar policy objectives could be a signal that those policy objectives are honestly held, and close to the then-recommended politician. If they win, and are then looking for people that are close to them on policy and have credibly signaled that they really care about said policies (plus being a "team player", as interpreted by those on the team), high level positions would seem a reasonably natural choice, without having to resort to it being a reward. Of course, then incentives for the ambitious would push them the same direction (which, so long as they push towards desired ends, still should mostly work out, I imagine).
The article is long but worth a read. They address a lot of your counterpoints.
On Nevada:
"Sanders’s only truly commanding victory of the entire cycle was in one of the few full-fledged caucus states that remained, Nevada. And this turned out to be completely illusory: caucus states place a premium on ground-level organizing, which is the area where the Sanders campaign obviously excelled: if there’s a need for left-wing activists to go agitate at complicated meetings (such as caucuses), that need was certainly able to be filled. In a cruel twist of fate, the Sanders representatives on the Unity Commission would’ve been better off lobbying for the retention of corrupt party-run caucuses, because these were evidently more favorable ground for Sanders than high-turnout primary elections—a paradox that directly countervails a central conceit of his campaign."
South Carolina is presented as emblematic, but hardly unique. They break down the numbers in many other states to show that Sanders' share of the vote, and in some cases raw vote count, went down despite higher overall turnout, including in rural and working class counties where he excelled in 2016.
With regards to how he "sold out", the overall thrust of the article is that the American electorate as a whole is "left" on economics and "right" on social issues, especially when social "right" on social issues means "not woke". They claim that, relatively speaking, Sanders put less emphasis on economic issues and more emphasis on culture war issues to appease a young, online, hyper-woke activist base, which led to less support among the typical Democratic primary voter.
They also make a pretty strong case that the party elite, while perhaps not stridently pro-Bernie, made a lot of concessions to his wing between 2016 and 2020, and that he wasted the large structural advantages that he held over the entire field.
They claim that, but I don't see much evidence for it. Obviously it's difficult to quantify something like "put less emphasis" but the least you could do is cite a bunch of examples and the only one on offer was "Sanders went along with Russia." If there were some deciding cohort of Democratic primary voters motivated by anti-anti-Russia skepticism they failed to show up in Tulsi Gabbard's vote totals (and the authors themselves point to her as an example of a candidate refusing while seemingly ignoring how it undermines their thesis; adding her vote to Sanders' gets you to the exact same place).
Other than that I can find no specific examples of this supposed shift to "culture war issues" by Bernie. I think there is some degree of distorted thinking on tap here, mainly in thinking Bernie Classic was "not woke" in some way because he took flak from Hillary on that subject. But this was Hillary's emphasis, not Bernie's, because she couldn't hope to flank him on economic policies. Bernie did not respond to this by running to the right. You can make a much, much, MUCH stronger case that Bernie shifted left between his time on the Congressional backbench and his 2016 campaign, since one of the few things Hillary could hit him on were past votes on immigration, gun control, and the like. But this would fail to make the case the authors want to make. The personnel shifts in South Carolina are also not terribly convincing. Nina Turner was a Bernie surrogate in 2016 too. Bernie's South Carolina polling was atrocious both before and after Kwadjo Campbell's ouster. There are simply no magic words to utter that will make cautious, religious black voters in the South embrace socialism. (Bernie's most prominent 2016 black surrogate, Symone Sanders, famously switched to Biden in 2020 and was fairly explicit about electability being the motivation.)
I agree with the structural portions of their thesis. Bernie was cheated in 2016 but he lost 2020 fair and square to the "Centrist Voltron" that left Twitter was roasting right up until it suddenly manifested. The difference between the 2016 and 2020 fields suffices to explain all of their observations about Bernie's vote totals; you simply cannot assume that everyone who voted for him in 2016 was committed to any particular policy at all, let alone specifically voting on anti-wokism, instead of being contingent anti-Hillary voters spoiled for choice in 2020. Who did those votes go to? Not to Tulsi or Yang, the only two candidates you can really make a case for being "less woke" than Bernie. Not out of the primaries entirely, turnout was way up from 2016. Mostly they went to Biden, who it must be said, was also not a paragon of wokeness compared to the field, and suffered not a whit for defending his old Senate busing votes.
The authors are correct that there is a certain fatigue among the electorate for meaningless culture war stunts. However this fatigue is just as much from the center as it is the far-left. The average American voter might be in the red quadrant, but if they are it's at like -1,1, and to those people, Biden is just fine. I do not like that this is the case, but facts don't care about my feelings.
I've never been a Sanders supporter (quite the opposite), so I never followed his campaign in detail. I'm also not plugged directly into the woke left. So I can't really comment on the degree to which he shifted in that direction -- I have a vague impression that he at least paid lip service to wokeness, but it's a second hand impression and may reflect the biases of my sources on this issue.
Having said that, I don't think the article was trying to make the case that Sanders became an ardent SJW or made identity politics the focus of his campaign. Only that in 2016 he at the very least seemed uninterested in it, and that in 2020 he at least seemed to appease it.
To my eye he did about the same amount of lip service in both campaigns. He himself is not "anti-woke," the class-first approach is a matter of emphasis. Where the authors go awry is in assuming voters cared about this lip service one way or the other. Bernie didn't lose ground from '16 because of some throwaway comment he made about "doing better" on sexism, or because they shitcanned some guy in South Carolina. He lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence. Ironically, Nagle and Tracey are committing a similar error as their liberal counterparts, wishcasting their beefs with rose Twitter onto an electorate of Rust Belt boomers who were never really attached to Sanders in '16 beyond him not being Hillary. Joe was there if you weren't that woke. Pete was there if you wanted an outsider. Tulsi was there for the 1% who wanted vague anti-anti-Putin stuff.
I appreciate your perspective on this, and I can certainly see how the authors of that article might be wishcasting, as you put it. But there is one thing I'd like to explore a little more
'[Sanders] lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence'
What if we apply that same reasoning to Trump? I think he benefited in a meaningful way from the "not-Hillary" vote in 2016, just as Sanders did (I've heard anecdotes about 2016 Sanders supporters whose second choice was Trump).
The answer might be, "Exactly! That's (one of the reasons) he lost in 2020!"
But as a counterpoint, consider that Trump increased his raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 in *every single state*. The article claims (I haven't verified) that Sanders primary raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 went down in several states and in several working-class counties. Voter turnout can't explain this alone because it was up in both the general election and primaries (at least the ones they cite).
Primary and general elections have different dynamics, obviously. Biden's raw vote totals were higher than Clinton's in *every single state*, too. If Sanders had been the Democratic nominee in 2020, the same trend may have held. Sanders went head to against Clinton in a year that was arguably a referendum on Clinton (or at least Clinton-sim). He didn't have the chance to go head to head against Trump in a year that was a referendum on Trump. Maybe that is all there is to it and I'm reading too much into it.
But the fact remains that after Hilary exited the scene, Trump maintained enthusiasm and even made inroads with new demographics. Sanders didn't (it seems). Why did Trump go up when Sanders went down? If 2016 anti-Clinton, anti-establishment Sanders-Trump voters switched to being Trump diehards in 2020, what did he do to make them so loyal?
I think it makes sense to talk about the "anti-Hillary" vote in three cohorts:
1. Sanders-Trump voters. These probably stayed loyal to Trump.
2. Sanders-nonvoters. These are represented by increased turnout in the general and I think there were more of them.
3. People who didn't vote at all in 2016. The article gestures at this by calling his first campaign "shoestring" but this is understating it. Bernie barely had *any* infrastructure spun up until about 1/3 of the way through the primary when people realized he could actually win this. If the campaign itself thought it was a doomed protest against a coronation, probably lots of voters did too. There's no way to guess how big THIS cohort is but since primary turnout was higher in 2020 this is probably a factor too.
Other than that, yes, parties tend to fall in line with their Presidents as elections become referendums on incumbency. Obama and Hillary fought to the bitter end in 2008, but while there were a few loud Hillary-or-bust PUMAs, most of the Democratic electorate fell in line and there was not a significant internal challenge to Obama in 2012. I think it's possible for Trump to have lost the upper Midwest due to a slice of "not-Hillary" voters that became "not-Trump" and restored just enough of the firewall even as turnout was juiced on all sides.
Sanders might have actually succeeded had he done two things:
1. Be more moderate (and not just on immigration issues; his economic platform was to the left of that of Corbyn's Labour)
2. Actually attack Biden
Democratic primaries, unlike Republican ones, tend to be massive hugfests. The only way for an unfavored candidate to win in such a system is to break out of that mold.
His Russia comments were not helpful to him because they were so easy to use against him, but they were only a symptom of Sanders's problem in the Democratic primary, not the actual problem itself.
Regarding the tricameral legislature proposal, I don't necessarily hate the concept, but one of the major arguments for it in that piece -- that the current political gridlock prevents laws from passing that have very wide support among the population -- is dubious. I don't know much about the other examples he cites, but the one about high support for background checks on firearms sales at gun shows is extremely misleading -- it's effectively a gun control talking point that gets passed around by their lobbyist organizations, but doesn't correspond to reality.
You can get large percentages of people to agree to "closing the gun show loophole" or "universal background checks" or similar, but when laws like these actually get brought up for consideration, even in proposal/referendum systems, the support is a much more partisan-typical 45-55%. This is because "universal background checks" is essentially a feel-good platitude, and the actual laws brought up to implement it are usually poison pills designed to attack gun owners. The usual form this takes is requiring full background checks on any transfer, and counting loans as transfers; thus, interactions that are completely normal among gun owners, like "let me use that rifle today while hunting so I can see how it feels", become felonies if not run through the proper federal bureaucracy. When concretized in this way, obviously support for the proposition drops.
In general, opinion polls like this are very weak sources of information, because even leaving aside lizardman effects, most public policy questions are sufficiently complex and subtle that your average person will require at least half an hour to understand what the question actually means. For people who aren't already policy junkies -- which is an excellent life choice that I endorse -- that means that a phone poll asking "do you approve or disapprove of $THING?" is basically only measuring whether the pollster phrases $THING in a way that sounds positive or negative. Thus a pollster can get whatever answer they want out of such polls, more or less; and any such poll that people are pushing is more likely propaganda than part of an effort to understand the world.
You could definitely write an implementation that isn't a poison pill, but no one really has a reason to do that.
For background, I'll go over the current background check regime. The phrase "gun show loophole" gets a lot of play, but the point of law involved has nothing to do with gun shows at all. Basically, if you sell guns for a living, you need to get a federal license (the FFL) and you need to run a background check on everyone you sell a gun to. If you don't sell guns for a living, on the other hand, you're allowed to sell your guns to other private citizens without needing to do a check, but if you know the person you're selling to is a prohibited person, then making the sale is a felony. The "gun show loophole" is the fact that private, person-to-person sales don't need a background check (and notionally a lot of these happen at gun shows). In practice, though, 99% of gun sales go through FFLs, including at gun shows; private sales are an edge case the same way garage sales are mostly an edge case compared to the overall retail market.
Thus, while you could design a system for universal background checks that wouldn't cause problems for non-criminals (say, by opening the background check system to ordinary citizens and letting it generate tokens that you can check through the system later), there's not much reason to think it would help with anything. 99% of existing legitimate sales go through FFLs and are checked already; criminal sales mostly happen in black-market contexts where no one involved cares what the law is. The marginal criminal who can get a gun via a private sale from a law-abiding private seller (who doesn't know the buyer is a criminal), but can't get one either by theft, via a straw purchase or on the black market, basically doesn't exist. (A "straw purchase" is when a legal buyer buys a gun at an FFL for the purpose of giving it to a prohibited person. This is, naturally, a felony, but it still happens a lot and is fundamentally hard to prevent.)
Gun owners and gun rights activists would not necessarily object to a non-poison-pill implementation of universal background checks, but they don't have any reason to proactively pursue it, because it wouldn't help any; and such people are also categorically extremely suspicious of any expansion of gun laws whatsoever. (This is basically for good reason, because probably the majority of new gun laws ever enacted are basically poison pills meant to hurt gun owners.) Meanwhile, gun control activists are mostly divided into people who don't know anything about the topic but support initiatives that sound nice, and people who do know about the topic and are actively trying to pass poison pills to hurt gun owners. None of these groups have any incentive to push for a reasonable universal background check system.
There was a proposal a while ago for a big gun control compromise, where gun control activists got a well-designed universal background check system in exchange for concealed carry license reciprocity and/or the removal of suppressors from the NFA. This got a fair amount of play and tentative approval among gun rights groups, but was never mentioned so far as I can tell among gun control groups; in any case, it never went anywhere.
#8: I had a parent on the wrong side of the ‘08 recession, they’re about mid 60s now, and that trend line down for 50-60 y/o nails it. There’s a large population of 60 y/o’s who will never retire because of ‘08 and ‘20, and I wonder what that future looks like for us. The money just isn’t there.
I’m thinking about another round of 401k liquidations and home equity prob occurring. Decades of saving get undone and age 40, really age 30 onward isn’t enough time to recuperate, using some rough excel math. That said - what did the 70 plus’ers do in ‘08 I wonder. Their numbers look fine, and right age in ‘08 to crack into their 401ks as well.
The 70+ people in '08 were probably old enough that most of them had little or nothing left on their mortgages and they had social security money to draw on, limiting the amount that they actually had to take out of the stock market (if any - by that age most financial advisors recommend things like bonds). And they're already unemployed, so it's not like they lost out on income. So while it wasn't great for them, they were pretty secure.
The people in their 50s however, would almost definitely still have a lot left on their mortgages, would not have social security as a stop-gap, would still have money in the stock market, and would still be relying on a job. So the unlucky ones would lose their job, then rely on savings and withdrawing from their diminished stocks, and then when the savings ran out, get foreclosed on. That of course also applied to people younger, but the younger people had more time before they expected to retire, so it didn't hurt their retirement chances in the same way, and younger people were more likely to be renting than owning, so they wouldn't be set back in the same way.
Please forgive me, I'm genuinely not that financially literate - 401k liquidation just means stocks went down a lot which hurt their retirement savings, right? Now that stocks have gone back up again, why is that still a problem?
The issue is when stocks go down and then you have to sell them near the bottom, for some nominally unrelated issue like losing your job or having large medical bills because you didn't have insurance. (You might ask how that works, since the funds are earmarked for retirement? The simple answer is that you can do it but you have to pay a penalty in taxes, although there are some ways to get around the penalty.)
The result of this is losing both the savings themselves and any chance of gaining them back. You have to start off from scratch and the nature of compound interest means that you've lost the years that would have been most important for your savings.
Old people are living on a retirement fund that includes mostly stocks, but need to pay their expenses in dollars. If stocks crash, as they did in '08, they need to sell more of the stocks to pay their constant dollar expenses. That means they've lost proportionately much more of their fund than they would have if stocks had remained high, and they don't get those assets back when the stock market rebounds.
To be fair, if someone is in retirement and still has a lot of money in stocks, they should also have a 2+ year safe fund in cash or bonds to draw on in downturns. But many don't. This was also a problem in 2008.
But straight forward in a way that can be replicated on a excel doc, using numbers which are close enough to the last time I did this such that I feel ok standing behind them:
- You need about $1mil saved to retire on a ~$50-70k/year equivalent lifestyle
(take $50k, grow it by 2-5% annually from now until you retire). $50k isn't nuts if you have your mortgage done, independent kids, no debts, etc. etc.
- In plain English, if you retire in the ~65-75 y/o range, w/ $1mil saved, you run out of money right around or after the time you die, factoring in like a 20 year retirement and no passive income aside from your $1mil and social security etc. This is factoring out home equity, which is also a big financial boost once you sell a paid off place. But the bulk of your financial safety in retirement is going to come from your IRA.
- That number is entirely achievable *if you have enough time to save*. That time to save is about 30-40 years with the bulk of that in 7% annual returns in the stock market, maxing out your Roth IRA at $500-$600/month. If you do this exactly from the 25 y/o to 30/35 /yo range, and you *never sell,* you'll very easily hit that $1mil. Locking up your retirement is pretty easy.
- If you do any of the following, you essentially won't have enough to retire if $50-70k/yr equiv lifestyle and up is your idea of retiring. Even if you're looking at $30-40k/yr equiv, still won't be able to retire:
---> sell at any point between starting to save and retiring. This is exacerbated the further into your retirement age you get (~40s/50s/60s). TLDR you need 40 years of 7%/yr average acting on that $550/mo in your 401k/IRA, a single slip up will undo it all.
---> don't invest in stocks for the bulk of those years.
At it's root, it's just some math using compound interest, but you can really go wild on the excel sheet wizadry to model this all in interesting ways. All retirement accounts follow the above rules (401ks, Roth/Traditional IRAs).
The huge issue is there's a massive incentive if things get bad enough financially to touch your 401k "just once." The problem is "touching it just this once" means breaking that single rule of don't sell, ever. A lot of folks don't realize they nuke their retirements, or very nearly nuke it, by very small sales. If it's a serious emergency like 12 months of no work in '20-'21 and '07-'09, those small sales tend to be big sales, and those users will never retire because of it.
So, you have a large set of 40-50's in '07-'09, and I bet in '20-'21, who touched their retirement accounts, and didn't realize they bought themselves another 20+ years of saving to catch up. It's ugly, there's a whole generation of folks who won't retire because of this.
There are caveats, major one being the 401k limit is like $20k vs. the IRA limit being $5-6k (grows a bit each year). If you have the finances to max out a 401k consistently, you don't necessarily nuke your retirement if you sell a bit (or at least idk the numbers there but I sense that you could recover). The folks that can put $20k into a 401k year after year, after recovering from a financial setback that made them sell, is probably a small group I think.
Sorry, still confused. How do you nuke your retirement with a "very small sale"?
Suppose you have 500K saved up at age 50, and you do a "small sale" of 50K to support yourself in a difficult time. You still have 450K, which seems like most of your money - any retirement plan that succeeds on 500K (compounded for another 15 years) should also succeed on 450K. What am I missing?
"Oh no, my monthly bills are coming due! Better just make one small sale of $10000 to make ends meet! I'll still have 490k left next month, it's fine."
Then rinse and repeat that for the next two years while you can't get a job, and you're left with half. Meanwhile, the stocks kept on crashing for those two years, so you're actually down to a third of the original, which was the same amount that you had 14 years prior. That's assuming that you were investing $6,000 per year, the max Roth IRA contribution, and you got 6% return rate, but in actuality the markets in the 2000s weren't that good and the peak in 2007 didn't even reach the previous peak in 2000, so really it's more like what you had 20 years prior.
Even if you then got a job, and start putting in $10,000 per year, and had better returns in the market (7% instead of 6%), you're up to $700,000 when you retire, which is a good deal short of your goal.
On the other hand, if you hadn't lost your job and didn't have to make withdrawals, your retirement accounts would have gone down some (maybe to $400,000), but then with that better job at the better market, you're up to $1,350,000 at the end, twice as much, and plenty to retire on.
However, that all ignores that you need to be relying on the stock market less as you age, to avoid it crashing right when you retire. The usual solution is bond funds, which is much safer but much worse returns, or a mixture of bonds and stocks which is a mixture of the two in terms of safety and returns. So really the person who had to withdraw is only back up to $500,000 while the person who didn't have to withdraw is up to $1,000,000.
Even very smart people make blunders in volatile times. For example, here's Bryan Caplan on what he did in 2020:
> Conditions in March were so bleak that I set aside both of these beliefs and moved from 100% stocks to 90% bonds. As a result of my excessive open-mindedness, my family has lost an enormous amount of money. The situation is so weird that I’m going to wait until January to return to my normal investment strategy. After that, I will never again deviate from buy-and-hold. Never!
The part you're missing is the overall drop in the stock market ahead of time. If you start with 500K, and the market drops 20% (500K x 0.8) now you have 400K. You pull out 50K leaving 350K. The market recovers (x1.2) and you have 420K. You've lost 80K after the market has recovered. Assuming $1000 a month contribution rate, you've lost 80 months. Much worse really if you aren't contributing during the time when stocks are cheap.
First, the chart tracks wealth which is not yearly earnings. Wealth tracks closely to asset prices especially later in life. So the trend lines post 2008 probably says more about asset allocations by generation than anything else.
Second, a crisis is as much a psychological burden as an objective financial strain. They might not feel they can retire because 1) they made some panic-y investment decisions during the early days 2) they lost their job and were planning on having that income. Getting a new job at >60 isn’t really a thing or 3) they’re a bit stretched with their financial obligations. These things are deeply personal and reflect preferences and dispositions.
> “The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea.”
It's difficult to over-state how stupid this is.
- Piracy and state-sponsored privateering are unequivocally against international law -- law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)
- The Chinese have the world's largest surface navy, and the world's largest submarine fleet -- and they are chomping at the bit for any excuse to flex their muscles in the South China Sea, around the Strait of Malacca, in the Korean Sea, and in the Pacific all the way to the coast of Chile. The balance of power is not equal; the Chinese Navy is very powerful indeed, and these "Privateers" are, more likely than not, going to end up in Davy Jones' locker.
- Chinese trade is oriented towards export: Chinese cargo vessels are typically loaded with goods for US and European customers. Hit a Chinese freight carrier, and you've probably harmed Amazon and WalMart more than you've harmed the Chinese -- if indeed you've harmed them at all.
The notion of privateers may work as Casus Belli. It fails on every other strategic and tactical level. For there's only one way it ends: With the US condemned, with dead privateers, and with a justifiably strengthened and extended Chinese naval presence in every body of water but the Atlantic.
To be fair, the article argued in favor of using privateers if war ever broke out with China, not before. And the argument was that the Chinese Navy is so powerful that the US Navy will have it's hands full countering it, and that every privateer harassing Chinese shipping is one less US Naval ship that has to be diverted to the task.
While I agree that the idea is stupid, even the author isn't proposing that the privateers go up against the Chinese navy. He's proposing they take over the commerce campaign. There are other ways to do it which don't involve reliance on international law which hasn't been invoked for 160 years, though.
Also, where does the 1958 Convention ban privateering?
I've been trying to find the text of the 1958 convention online, so far unsuccessfully. But various references specify that piracy is "for private ends," which suggested that a privateer might not qualify. After all, British naval vessels in the Napoleonic period got prize money for ships they captured, but that didn't make them pirates. So a privateer that is trying to make money but acting under the authority of a state for the state's ends might also not qualify.
So far in the thread nobody seems to actually have a cite to the convention banning privateers.
Privateering is generally considered to have been banned by the 1856 Declaration of Paris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Declaration_Respecting_Maritime_Law), which has now been incorporated into customary international law (which is generally binding on everyone, even if they didn't sign, although this isn't absolute. International law is weird.)
In any case, China isn't as reliant upon imports as the US. Privateering, unless done on a tremendous (impracticable) scale, would hardly annoy them -- and, given that the scale of Chinese shipping tilts towards exports, it might be an own-goal that injures allies and neutral parties more than it injures the Chinese.
Strategically-valuable shipping is sure to be well-guarded in any case. As a rule, privateers don't hit hard targets.
So this fever-dream, however romantic, is tactically and strategically moronic, and its implementation would probably strengthen the Chinese and weaken the US.
I am less than certain that those actually ban privateering, but I also don't think that's necessary. The Paris Declaration is almost certainly customary international law at this point. My 1980s International Law for Seagoing Officers doesn't even mention the subject at all, which I presume is because it was seen as totally irrelevant.
I agree that it's a bad idea. I'm not defending it in any way, and would point out again that Proceedings is not peer-reviewed, and that this is far from the stupidest thing I've seen there. My thoughts on how to do this were definitely informed by Spanish-American war experience, including the very ships that article cites, although I do think he slightly misunderstands the Naval Militia, and generally isn't that familiar with US thinking in the runup to war. (If you're not aware, I'm a serious hobbyist naval historian.)
And China is very reliant on imports. It's just raw materials rather than finished products. No clue how that ends up in a war, particularly given that one of the biggest suppliers (Australia) is a US ally.
I can't say exactly what level of commerce warfare we're likely to see in a war with China. That depends heavily on the diplomacy surrounding the war, and what the US thinks it can get away with. But there's also the issue that we have the power to slap a blockade around China at source, in a way that wasn't possible up until the late 1800s.
Don't pay much attention to those naval strategist type guys. They just have to write something to justify the salaries they get at some think tank. Plus, they get a hit of status in their field: "Oh, that guy over there in the pink shirt is the letter of marque guy, the one talking to the invade Hong Kong with the US Marines guy." They write some pretty wacky stuff because they know nobody but 50 people will ever read it. You can read to your heart's content at https://www.hudson.org if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.
"law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)"
Madeline Albright called, she's reminding you of American Exceptionalism. For the liberal international order to work, we must enforce the international rules on others while not being subject to them ourselves. Thus she views American interference in other countries as totally in their right due to their superiority over others, while inferiors of course have no right to do the same to America.
All we have to do to put a stop to Chinese commerce is close the Strait of Malacca. It's where all their oil transits through from the US filling station in the Middle East, and they have a mere two months of reserves. You know what sits right at the lynchpin of the Strait of Malacca? Singapore, a staunch US ally. Unlike other US allies (Europe, looking at you, you worthless freeloaders) Singapore has a small but capable military, well suited to its job. Cutting China off from its oil supply would be as easy as when FDR cut Japan off from its oil supply in August 1941.
In a neat interlude probably of nobody's interest, but we have the minutes of the meetings at which the Japanese made the decision to go to war. They knew it was dicey and everything would have to go right to pull it off. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PPRtWDP9yR2U_MKb82rzmKgVm-5CWH2Q/view
China's navy is a paper tiger and can't even break past the first island chain. They're hemmed in with nowhere to go. It was big news when they sailed two whole ships to Turkey a while back. And may I remind you that privateers did not *sink* enemy vessels? They boarded them and took them as prizes. Pirates wearing naval uniforms. Imagine Erik Prince of Blackwater proudly leading a line of container ships into LA harbor: free bigscreens and housewares for everyone!
The authors are affiliated with CSIS, not Hudson Institute. That's more than a little disturbing, as I had this down as the ranting of retired officers who are mooning over their glory days being behind them. I'm definitely not a huge fan of think tanks in general, but HI is better than most, and this is the sort of dreck I'd expect out of CNAS.
As for closing off China's oil, that worked out so well last time we should definitely do it again. But yes, that is a definite vulnerability for them.
As for China's navy, no. It's quite good, and has been participating in regular operations off the horn of Africa for the last decade. Ships to Turkey was notable because of the diplomatic implications, not because it was notable the Chinese got ships out that far. (If Russia did it, on the other hand...)
Straits and geographic choke points are definitely important, but at the same time, shouldn't be overstated. The alternative to Malacca is the Lombok Strait, which is further, but not so much further that it couldn't be used. (Actually, I think a nontrivial fraction of the oil goes that way because Malacca isn't that deep.) There are probably other routes available, too, which never get used today because there's no reason to do so. But any blockade is going to be linked to intelligence work and economic and diplomatic attacks against the oil traffic, too.
- Modern naval weapons are too good at sinking ships, whereas privateering requires capturing ships intact to be profitable. For a trivial, and in this context uncontroversial, investment, China can equip their merchant fleet with defensive weapons that will sink any privateer, unless the privateer sinks them first.
- Privateers, being incapable of surviving a fight with real warships (especially modern ones), need to be able to hide from and if necessary outrun enemy warships. That's a lot harder to manage in a world of radio, radar, maritime patrol aircraft, and satellites. Harder still if you insist on taking prizes, which will be Lojacked beyond your ability to clear at sea. Even in a hot war with the United State, China will probably be able to spare e.g. an H-6K for a day to sink the privateer that just sank one of China's freighters, and that's all it will take.
- The rest of the world regards privateering as flat-out illegal, so virtually all of the ports of the world will be closed to the privateers *and their prizes*. Operating in the South China Sea directly from Hawaii, without any intermediate bases (what's left of Guam will have its hands full), is going to be logistically challenging to say the least. And the value of that prize ship you just took is greatly diminished if it can only be used in the US coastal trade, its cargo sold only on the US domestic market never to be reexported.
This is a stupid idea that keeps coming back every year or two because somebody read too many Napoleonic sea-adventure stories and thinks they're the only one who read those stories so their clever "obscure" idea is something the rest of us haven't heard and rejected a dozen times already.
I don't think the plan is to operate these in the South China Sea. That's a terrible plan. The idea is to use them in lower-threat zones in the rest of the world, where China won't be nearly as able to hunt them down and kill them. Defensive armament is legally tricky on merchant ships these days, and that might be an advantage to the privateers. They might also have access to friendly ports, but I wouldn't bet on it, as the lawyers will have all sorts of fits.
Defensively-armed merchant ships are far more palatable to the world's ports than outright privateers. Right now, the rule is "not any of that, but maybe we won't look too closely for small arms in the cabins of those suspiciously fit and clean-cut deckhands", but if that ever changes enough that the US can find any ports open to its privateers, I'm pretty certain China will find ports open to defensively-armed merchant ships.
If that's not the case, it's because the US has so thoroughly won the diplomatic conflict that the issue is moot because nobody is trading with the Chinese anyway.
My expectation was that the privateers would have to operate out of US and maybe allied ports. Definitely nobody also trading with China. My thought was that the US might be able to put enough diplomatic pressure on other countries to keep the rule roughly as it is now, which limits them to maybe a few ATGMs and heavy machine guns. I am far from certain that more armament would be a good idea, as it means that the main US weapon in the commerce campaign switches from a boarding party to a laser-guided bomb.
If the Chinese are going to lose the ship either way, I'm guessing they would prefer it be sunk. Preferably in a way that makes the Americans look like the bad guys, and if the Americans are both sending out pirates and then bombing ships for daring to defend themselves against pirates, the Americans are going to look like the bad guys.
If the Chinese crew doesn't like that calculus, that's why the guns are manned by the PLAN, and in any event Beijing knows where the sailors' families live.
The US could simply issue a prize for every Chinese ship sunk by authorized privateers. We'll already outsource our work to professional mercenaries, no reason to leave the amateurs out of the fun.
I'll borrow a page from the subreddit on tricameral legislatures:
Party list proportional representation.
Mostly because I feel it's telling that it wasn't even originally considered. Without necessarily making a value judgement, the various US federal elections are unrepresentative in so many ways - the population disparity of the senate, the per-state rounding of EC votes - that it often overshadows the part where even the House runs on a collection of single-seat elections the aggregate result of which is in no way guaranteed to be representative of the population as a whole. Yes, sortition is interesting and it would be nice to give it a run in a system where it's counterbalanced by more traditional forms of election, but if we're actually looking a for a system that's new, represents the population in a crucially different way from existing systems and is known to be functional and stable by itself, PLPP is the logical place to start.
I think this could be hard, because political parties don't exactly have a formal legal existence at the Federal level, as far as I can tell. (This is obviously a bit strange, for how important they are / have become.) I'm curious how all that works in countries where they are more of a formal part of the process.
I don't think that's really the sticking point. The parties would become more formal if they needed it. The real issue is that the people with the power to change the system are exactly the people who get elected under the old system.
I'm going to have to disagree with the article on the 1973 recession. Addressing its initial points:
1) The embargo was declared October 17th, but the price of oil did not really spike until January 1st.
Response: The timeline cited in the response shows that the "embargo" was a number of smaller events, not a single blanket ban, with actions and counteractions by the US and other states. It wasn't until December 22nd 1973 that the OPEC Gulf Six decided to increase crude benchmark prices, which coincides nicely with the January 1974 spike in oil prices.
2) The price of food spiked two months before the embargo was declared and plateaued before oil prices went up.
This part is inarguably true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=AZ8i However, there were inflation spikes in 1969 and 1980 that led to similar economic slowdowns, neither of which had anything to do with Bretton Woods.
3) A multiyear stock market crash started in January 1973, 9 months before embargo was declared.
Up until December 1973, this was a less than 5% Y/Y drop in the markets: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BzDe There were similar drops in 1978, 1988, etc., none of which led to severe economic slowdowns.
4) Previous oil embargoes had been attempted in 1956 and 1967, to absolutely no effect.
1956: Embargo is only on Britain and France, not the US; production is not affected. The US makes up the loss in shipments to Britain and France with its own production.
1967: The embargo does affect the US, but only lasts 3 months and involves no production cuts or changes in benchmark prices.
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the 1956 and 1967 embargoes to the 1973 embargo.
My personal opinion is that there was a minor economic slowdown in progress in early-mid 1973, which may have been caused by Bretton Woods-related issues, or may have been caused by other economic problems (inflation-related overheating, steel industry collapse caused by electric mills, etc.). The oil supply shock, however, would've destroyed even a perfectly healthy economy.
It seems kind of incredible that left out are the main reasons :
- US oil production reached a peak in 1971.
- While demand kept growing (causing some supply difficulties even in 1970).
- So US crude imports more than doubled between 1970 and 1973 (and before 1973, import quotas were in place).
- In April 1971, practically for the first time since WW2, the American trade balance was in the red.
- 4 months later Nixon ends the Bretton Woods gold standard : the convertibility between gold and dollars, leading to a strong devaluation of the dollar.
- At the same time OPEC quickly sensed the wind turning, and feeling powerful for the first time, threatened an embargo in January 1971. Western companies caved in to this price increase, only the first one of a long series of concessions... (And OPEC partially *had* to do it, as the dollars they are getting for the oil become devalued compared to gold, important in the Islmai hawala ! Not to mention that they're just following supply and demand, at least until the (semi-) embargo itself.)
- Oil companies got nationalized all over the world : Algeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Lybia...
- A transfer of shares from Western companies to Arab Gulf countries in their oil companies (like Aramco, which extractions doubled between 1970 and 1973 !) was negotiated.
- Speculative : about the "Christmas Eve Massacre" itself : according to the ex-minister of the Saudi oil, the Shah of Iran had told him that Kissinger wanted a higher price so that the Western oil companies could finance big new oil projects, now primarily offshore.
- Between 1973 and 1974 the natural decline of American extractions was almost double the reduction of oil mandated by OPEC's political decisions.
- 1970 to 1973 was a transition from the oil market being ruled by demand to being governed by supply.
Source : *Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History* by Matthieu Auzanneau
On cost disease: a non-monetary form of compensation is "how hard and how many hours do you have to work?". If competition for skilled labor is high (e.g. programmers and financiers) then even non-productive sectors like education and health have to compensate to attract skilled labor.
22. I've been noticing how tempting it is to assume that people you don't know and don't like have clearly perceptible bad motives-- and more so if you're in a group that doesn't like those people. Thanks for updating.
Re# 22, Doesn't everyone think 911 was an inside job? it was used to shamelessly justify the war on terror, drone warware, state secrets and improve Dick Cheney's Halliburton shares. Osama Bin Laden was Bush golf buddy and they refused to find him, despite lots of intelligence tips.
The Denver Post page doesn't want me to read it, so I'll instead discuss the listverse page. It flatly claims Osama was a CIA asset, which has been contradicted by both the CIA agent in charge of the program and Ayman al-Zawahiri's "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner". The CIA funneled their money through the ISI, and contrary to the NBC News article cited by the listverse page, that meant Afghans rather than Arabs. Pakistan has a frankly artificial border with Afghanistan that ethnic Pashtuns/Pukhtuns cross regularly and has long funded Islamists in Afghanistan in order to undermine ethnic sectarianism (of the sort that resulted in East Pakistan breaking away to form Bangladesh). It's a very important point that they want Afghan proxies in Afghanistan (Iran funds rival proxies there, mostly among the non-Pashtun ethnicities less inclined toward Sunni islamicism as a unifying ideology). Arabs who'll move on to somewhere else once the Soviets leave are not so useful to them. The Arabs, for their part, were getting plenty of money from the Saudis (admittedly, Saudi Arabia agreed to match US funding during the war, so there is a more indirect sense in which CIA funding can cause it). Zawahiri noted that they didn't need to get any money from ISI because the money coming out of the Middle East. Bin Laden in particular was rich enough to have autonomy. Various figures who fought against the Soviets were later active as the warlord era of Afghanistan, but it's important to remember that the Taliban was a reaction against that era. Bin Laden was not a "warlord" then, as his group was not that significant compared to the various Afghan bands and he only relocated to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.
The Denver Post article merely explains that Bush Sr had ties to the Bin Laden family, but that family was estranged from Osama. You are conflating other members of the family with Osama.
I think it's perfectly consistent to believe both (a) 9/11 was a terrorist attack orchestrated by Saudi Arabia without US government involvement and (b) the US government (and Cheney in particular) used that attack as an excuse to create and maintain the war on terror.
For what it's worth, I think the mainstream theory is that Saudi Arabia, as a government, also had nothing to do with it, though some former Saudi citizens, some exiled to Afghanistan and others at work in the United States, did all the plotting.
I think the mainstream theory puts a little more onus on the Saudi government. Like parts of the Saudi government were signing a lot of checks to people saying death to America and trusting US security forces to stop this before it went too far.
It reminds of how, during WW2, Ireland stayed neutral. When asked about the possibility of German invasion, the prevailing wisdom was, "Don't worry, the Royal navy would never allow it."
Yeah, I think saying that they had some policies with this sort of thing as a foreseeable result is plausible, but I really want to deny the "orchestrated by" claim (which is relevant to "inside job" and related claims). It's sort of like the difference between Trump recklessly encouraging the mob on Jan. 6, or knowingly benefiting from Russian involvement in 2016; vs Trump planning the attack on the capitol, or colluding with the Russian government.
Wars get justified for a lot of reasons, and some of those reasons are legit. A lot of people made money off the World Wars, but Germany really did invade Belgium and Poland.
Drone warfare is just a natural continuation of trends in how the US has been trying to fight its wars for decades. Throwing money at a problem to save blood has been the American way of war since WW2, precision weaponry in preference to carpet bombing started in Vietnam, and fighting a war by air power alone was the Kosovo campaign. The legalities of it are..."sketchy", but not really giving a damn about the laws of other countries is sort of a US hallmark at times too(basically, whenever they think it's really important).
And state secrets are kind of universal. I don't see how 9/11 changed those very much one way or the other.
On the flip side, imagine how big this conspiracy would need to be. Presumably, it didn't start with 19 suicidal hijackers who were in it to boost Cheney's stock prices, so you need to get rid of four planes complete with a couple hundred passengers, fly something that looks plane-shaped into several major buildings in the middle of extremely busy areas with lots of people watching (plus one random field in Pennsylvania), and then destroy the buildings somehow (since I assume you're like most truthers, and don't think they fell as a result of the impacts themselves).
How many people would need to be in on a conspiracy like that? Genuinely, ask yourself this question. How many people would it take to arrange this. You'd need to destroy four planes without alerting ATC or having the passengers' personal effects show up anywhere (or alternately, convince hundreds of people to never see their loved ones again for decades, without any of them changing their minds). You'd need to have three of the most famous buildings in the world wired to explode somehow, without anyone noticing. And you'd need everyone involved to keep their mouth shut for 20 years now.
Now, it's possible to keep a secret with that many people involved for that long - I know of exactly one example of it. The WW2 codebreaking efforts were secret for about thirty years post-war, and they used a similar number of people. But consider the differences. That was about winning a war against literal Nazis, and secrecy was essential to the task. That is a very strong motivation to keep a secret. You can make it clear that this is a noble undertaking, in a way that they'll believe.
Now, consider a conspiracy without such a strong motivation. Say, five dudes breaking into a hotel room in 1972. By 1974, that one took down a President, because nobody involved had any particular reason to keep quiet except saving their own skins, plus a desire to win an election. That's not strong enough to keep a lid on the act of merely tapping a phone. Now imagine if the Watergate break-in had been about planting a giant bomb, and thousands had died? You'd expect whistleblowers about that before they even broke in, because most people dislike mass murder.
The only "everybody thinks" conspiracy theory I know of is the one where Epstein was murdered. And that one is at least plausible - one person can do it on the orders of one other person, so it's small enough to contain, and there's obvious motivation on the part of powerful people(whether you pin it on Clinton, Trump, or Prince Andrew, the fact that all three of those names are plausible says enough). Of the common conspiracy theories, it's by far the most reasonable.
> On the flip side, imagine how big this conspiracy would need to be. Presumably, it didn't start with 19 suicidal hijackers who were in it to boost Cheney's stock prices, so you need to get rid of four planes complete with a couple hundred passengers, fly something that looks plane-shaped into several major buildings in the middle of extremely busy areas with lots of people watching (plus one random field in Pennsylvania), and then destroy the buildings somehow (since I assume you're like most truthers, and don't think they fell as a result of the impacts themselves).
If you're examining this theory as an intellectual exercise, you should try to construct the most plausible variant, not the least plausible.
Imagine (some element within) the Bush administration really wants an excellent casus belli. al-Qaeda actually exists and already has its grudge against the US. The obvious avenue is for US agents to inflame, foment and enable the actual al-Qaeda terrorists behind it, running cover for them behind the scenes in a deniable way. Assuming you can run the actual intel op with only a few professionals who are capable of keeping a secret, from the outside this just looks like US intel being oddly incompetent in failing to prevent the plot. Which we do in fact see in the case of 9/11.
Note that this is already a known US intel MO -- they love funding disposable third parties to achieve goals that are unpalatable as direct US actions, and also soliciting and enabling terrorist attacks in order to make them look good. (Normally in the latter case the actual attack is prevented as soon as the patsy has done enough to enable the felony prosecution, but letting the attack go through in order to make a casus belli is only a small extension of this.) And the reaction we see to 9/11, where people with existing agendas (patriot act, Iraq invasion) immediately and seamlessly pivot to pushing them through using 9/11 as a justification, is also consistent with this scenario.
I have no reason to believe that this actually happened, but it's a much more plausible story than all the silly weakmen that rely on secret demolitions teams or airplane holograms. Indeed, if this story were true, then intentionally inflaming all the silly weakmen would be a good idea on the part of the actual conspirators; it would provide a cowpox-y inoculation against anyone considering more plausible conspiracy theories.
But would you still describe this more plausible theory as 9/11 being an 'inside job'? I usually associate that terminology with theories that the US government actually planted charges that brought down the building in a controlled manner.
I think I would. The only thing I would require to say "inside job" is that USG agents were involved in causing or permitting it, not any particular mechanism by which it happened.
Of course, the usual conspiracy theories are wildly unlikely, and it's probably more likely this guy subscribes to an unlikely theory than a likely one on priors.
If the truthers posited the theory that the US riled up al-Qaeda until they did something big, that'd be a much more reasonable theory. But that's not the truther argument, or a plausible steelman of it. That's the Noam Chomsky argument.
In fairness, there's the "let it happen" truthers, and yes, it does match their theories. But that didn't seem to be what Ko was getting at, and it isn't the default truther position, that I've ever seen.
The last time anyone checked (2008), more than 70% of the world's population either believed that 9/11 was done by a bunch of pissed-off Arabs or isn't sure. Only 15% believed that the United States Government was responsible, and those were disproportionately pissed-off Arabs themselves. So no, "everyone" doesn't think that.
If you want to modify that to "everyone smart" and define "smart" as "agrees with me about the obviously true and important things", then your question becomes a boring tautology. For a more open-ended definition of "smart", no, most people generally considered smart don't believe that.
I think basically everyone could learn something from flat earthers, primarily because we don’t really have good cultural technology for interacting with people that disagree this profoundly with you about something
On the other hand I like Scott's point in "The Cowpox of Doubt" that using Flat Earthers as your easy-to-reach model of people you disagree with is a terrible mental habit to get into.
Flat Earthers are an outlier in terms of wrongness. I'm not sure if there's anyone else who is quite so obviously and insistently wrong about something that's super easy to disprove. Their motivations are ineffable, often they just seem to be massively trolling everybody else by pretending to believe something crazy, sometimes they even seem to be trolling themselves for kicks. But whatever's going on in their heads, it's a terrible way to develop cultural technology for interacting with people that disagree with you, just as you won't get better at boxing by punching a bowl of wet noodles.
I don’t think flat earthers are a particularly large outlier in terms of wrongness, but I do agree that they’re “easily disproved” if you already buy into the dominant western epistemological tradition of empiricism, and already trust scientific institutions to reliably report “facts”.
But the whole point is that people come into disagreement arising out of incompatibilities of orthodoxy all the time, so the tools you might use within the confines of an orthodoxy don’t really work when you’re reaching “across the aisle” so to speak.
Thus, I don’t think it’s any easier to convince a “legitimate” flat earther they’re wrong, than it is, say, to change the mind of an anti-vaxxer, or convince someone that evolution happens.
I think that Flat Earthers are an outlier in terms of wrongness. What I mean, specifically, is that ordinarily when debating someone I disagree with (say, an anti-vaxxer or Holocaust denier) then I need to keep in mind the fact that they just might have a point. Maybe they're right and I'm the one who is wrong, or maybe the truth is some kind of complicated synthesis that isn't quite the same as they believe but isn't quite the same as I believe either.
With flat-Earthers, they're clearly and obviously wrong enough that I think that discipline can go right out the window. They're wrong; clearly, obviously and hilariously wrong, and I've personally verified their wrongness in many ways, from watching ships go over the horizon to flying around the world. It takes no expertise to see that they're wrong, and I don't need to rely on expert opinion to tell me that they're wrong. You don't get that with anti-vaxxers, or even with creationists, let alone with mainstream real-world disagreements.
I think we’re talking past each other. For me, there’s two things going on:
1. The confidence with which you believe something to be the case
and
2. How might you go about convincing someone that they are wrong
On 1., flat earthers aren’t really outside the gamut of [overconfidence in wrong statements about reality], all told. Their phenomenological experience of “I feel like I’m right about this” is more or less identical to yours or mine, they’re just, as you point out, clearly and demonstrably wrong to you and me. This is what I mean, very specifically, in how their wrongness is not an outlier. Plenty of people are just as confidently wrong about plenty of things as the flat earthers.
On 2., despite their obvious wrongness to you and me, it’s actually pretty difficult to communicate this obvious wrongness to them, for a variety of reasons—reasons that play out symmetrically any time two people coming from somewhat incompatible epistemological orthodoxies collide. Some of these reasons are sociological—after watching the Netflix documentary it’s clear that plenty of these folks feel a sense of communion by participating in meetups, by perpetuating the myth. Whether they “really” believe it is sort of orthogonal to the material benefits they get out of being part of the community. “Proving them wrong” is like trying to tear a qanon-believer out of their friend group / support systems.
For others they’ve lost patience with “the system”, and simply don’t trust capital-S Science’s understanding of material reality, so they go and do things like write really long articles about symplectic integration that are subtly wrong.
I don’t think either of these types of people are “out of reach”, or even really that much different than your creationists and anti-vaxxers. They’re simply confidently wrong about a different kind of thing.
As a former young earth creationist, I want to second your point about community being vastly more important than independent reasoning for holding or changing beliefs. Of my few major belief shifts in life, every one has been preceded by a shift of community, loosening ties with the old as I latch onto the new. Looking on it later, it was necessary for me to build community in the new group as a prerequisite to "coming out" with changed beliefs. Community comes first for a lot of people (not just wrong people!), and the more "fringe" the belief, the greater that which sets you apart from the world. One can fill in the science later.
"You'd loose the bond of family!" your instinct diatribes.
Decide: Be shunned to wilderness, or rest in harmless lies.
Act against evolved traits? Your logic may agree,
but in your gut, you crave not truth, you crave community.
Yes, I'm more or less ignoring "2" because I don't like to think that "convincing someone that they're wrong" is a legitimate aim of a conversation with someone you disagree with. The aim should be to attempt to convince yourself that you're wrong.
"Flat Earthers are an outlier in terms of wrongness. I'm not sure if there's anyone else who is quite so obviously and insistently wrong about something that's super easy to disprove."
I recently had the flooring realization that the woke/TRA mantra of TWAW/TMAM is actually worse than flat eartherism because it asks you to disbelieve your own eyes on something easily verifiable by a simple assault charge. Confirming that the Earth is round, even without accounting for refraction and whatnot, with the old holes and sticks method, is actually really high effort in comparison.
The woke do not have false beliefs about the contents of transgender people's pants. Rather, their definitions of "man" and "woman" are different from yours. It's not about what kind of body you have; it's about whether you feel, deep in your heart, that you are a man or woman (or neither).
I always thought Flat Earthers just enjoyed making "rational" people lose their shit and thus prove they're not so rational after all. The more stonefaced and seriously you take it, the angrier they get. Michael Malice does a good job explaining it here with a comparison to Andy Kaufman: https://youtu.be/BIk1zUy8ehU?t=3856
One thing I did learn from flat earthers (or was reminded of) is that experimental science is really hard. Even for a basic claim like "the Earth is curved", getting a measurement to agree with a prediction requires accounting for many surprising affects like atmosphere refraction and so on.
Measuring the curvature of the Earth with simple tools is a useful exercise in coping with Nature's Magnificent Complexity.
"Maybe you’ve heard of the Big Mac Index, where economists use the price of a Big Mac to determine how a country’s currency is doing? And maybe you’ve heard of Goodhart’s Law, where anything that becomes a target gets manipulated? Yeah, Argentina is accused of pressuring McDonalds to underprice Big Macs to get better terms on its debt."
Argentina participated in both the 2011 and 2017 ICP; its price level was reported as 66.4% of the U.S. (lower than Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil) in 2011 and 61.9% of the U.S. in 2017 (still lower than Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil).
Manipulated or not, Argentina seems like the kind of outlier that makes the Big Mac index a bad idea to begin with. Argentina has many economic problems, but a lack of beef is not one of them.
re: #6 I wish I could find it again, but I have a facebook friend with insider-type knowledge of how these public budgets are created, and they basically said that since money is fungible, universities can and do make the budgets look like anything they want at that level of abstraction. And, they claim, this is why the bigger budgets are always sort of milquetoast, across the board rises. As opposed to them being actually milquetoast across the board rises. My facebook friend didn't say what they thought the money was actually being allocated to, and since I can't cite my source this is more like a trailhead or invitation for someone to look more deeply.
Can you explain how money being fungible lets them do this? If you have to pay $1 million extra to employees, how do you make this look like a boring across-the-board rise?
There are some weird things you can do. For instance, at many software companies it's common to capitalize the cost of creating new software — the intuition here is that if I make some new product, that's an asset (sort of like a factory or a machine) and we should treat it that way in the accounting results.
In practice, this means you move a portion of your software engineering salary expenses out of the "wages and salary" part of your accounting results and into depreciation. The logic usually goes something like this: if it took X hours of SWE labor to make this product, and we pay SWEs Y per hour, then the capitalized value of the software is X * Y.
That chunk of money (X * Y) is pulled out of your salary expenses and put onto the balance sheet to depreciate over some period of time (36 months is pretty common). It'd look like this:
Year A
Salary & Wages (on report) = Salary & Wages - Capitalized Software (this is X*Y)
Depreciation (on report) = original depreciation + Capitalized Software depreciation (usually X * Y / 36).
So by doing this, you can artificially lower your apparent payroll expenses on your financial statements since you've buried it in depreciation instead. It does show up on the balance sheet (in the form of an extra asset) so it's possible to tell when companies do this, and it's actually a common industry practice.
I doubt Harvard would have this, though. They're probably not building enough software for this situation to apply.
I'm still confused. If I were a car company, and my workers made cars, surely I would list my workers' salaries in one place, and then the values of the cars I had made in another place. Is this what you're saying software companies are doing, or is it something different?
The first thing to keep in mind is that an income statement (like Harvard's) isn't a measure of assets or inventory, but a measure of the activity in some particular period (e.g. 2020).
On that statement, there will be some lines for revenue (value of cars sold, tuition) and also some lines for expenses. Some of those expenses are direct inputs into the production process (e.g. the cost of car parts). Some of those costs are for labor (salaries, benefits). Some of those costs are for other things, like rent expenses or IT.
Generally, you're not allowed to move expenses between sections. If a company could pretend salaries were actually food expenses, or car parts costs were actually rent, financial statements would be useless!
However, there are some weird cases where this is allowed. Many of these cases are because of a fundamental principle of accounting: the matching principle. We want to associate revenue with the costs of that revenue whenever possible. So if the company buys a building, it doesn't want to suddenly have the whole price of the purchase sit on one month's income statement. After all, the building will be used for many years.
So instead, what happens is that the company takes the whole cost of the building and spreads it out over some period of time based on the expected useful life of that asset. For computers, it can be as short as three years, and for actual buildings, it can be as long as thirty years.
Instead of having one big expense for "buildings" or "machines", you instead have a small expense each month in "depreciation". This makes it so that your financial statements are more representative of the actual profit and loss for each period, but also makes them less informative.
The story of capitalized software is that some accountants made a convincing-enough argument (to auditors) that if a company is making big software projects, it should be allowed to treat some kinds of salaries in the same way as old-school physical assets. Hence, instead of having a big expense one year in "salary", there is a smaller expense for several years in "depreciation".
Long story short, you generally cannot obfuscate what the expense categories mean, except in certain special cases. Most of the fudging comes from having expense categories cover enough kinds of spend that it all kind of blurs together.
Potentially hire contractors to do something and classify it as “services purchased”. That category feels like a catch all.
The OP also postulates there has been an outsized increase in researchers. That could be standard “increase my fiefdom” behavior from Professors so while they’re not getting paid more, they’re behaving in a way that’s consistent with most large organizations where middle management cares a lot about increasing their budget.
I have no interest in doing this, but if your friend wants to get an account on Guide Star, they can get access to the IRS Form 990 for all registered non-profits, including Harvard: https://www.guidestar.org/profile/04-2103580
Unless you're actually a government, you can kind of do what you want with how you publish your budget, but you can't lie on your tax returns, and for non-profits, the tax returns have to be made publicly available. Alternatively, if you donate any amount, they have to provide it to you themselves, if you don't want to get a Guide Star account.
Speaking as someone who works in a company's finance department, this is more-or-less on point. There are usually two sets of accounting numbers, one for external reporting and one for internal management use. The former is meant to be deliberately uninformative, since you want to reveal as little information as you can get away with to your competitors. The internal managerial reporting is meant to actually be useful and thus has much more detail, but is kept tightly secret.
But there are still limits on what you can get away with. For instance, we can expect the "Salaries and Wages" and "Employee Benefits" sections to actually mean things like base salary, bonus, payroll taxes, severance expenses, health insurance, etc.
Proceedings isn't peer reviewed. For every good and insightful article, you have someone else beclowing himself in public. It's not always 100% clear which is which, and USNI's core mission is to facilitate discussion. This is clearly a beclowning, but the author speaks only for himself, not for the "American empire".
It's just a retired officer writing something. They write lots of stuff. As long as the US controls the oil in the Middle East, the US controls the world. Nothing runs without a steady supply of energy.
That first link demonstrates a pretty terrifying lack of understanding when it comes to who actually owns the cargo on those Chinese merchant vessels. It's usually American or European companies who source from Chinese factories (e.g. Apple relies on factories in China to make iPhones). The goods are carried on a Chinese vessel by a Chinese shipping company, but they're owned by the consignee — the company that actually receives the final goods.
The victims of privateers attacking Chinese cargo vessels would be American firms. This isn't the old days when the Spanish were sailing silver back to Europe.
Well, the idea I suppose is that the Chinese factories need the American firms more than vice versa, and if you were to forcibly sever trade links between them then the American firms would start manufacturing their electronics domestically at a 20% markup or whatever (or, more realistically, move their outsourcing to SEA rather than PRC), whereas the Chinese factories would be screwed.
At least for the electronics supply chain it's not really true. The Shenzhen area has a tremendous nexus of industrial expertise; there are a lot of things that can't really be made economically anywhere else. Another example is how many car companies have stopped production lately due to a lack of chips — for certain classes of chips Taiwan's TSMC is basically the sole supplier because they are the only company who has the technology to manufacture certain designs at scale.
Of course if we actually had a war and those factories became off-limits to American firms, there would be an enormous incentive to build a new supply chain, but this would take years and a huge amount of investment. Many firms would go bankrupt first.
To be fair, the main asset in seizing a Chinese cargo vessel is the vessel itself. At least from a strategic point of view. Also, if we are at war with China then I imagine there will be a lot less cargo owned by American firms on Chinese ships, as they would no longer be welcome at American ports.
That makes sense! If there really were a war presumably it wouldn't be a surprise, and American firms would have been forced to stop using Chinese factories already.
Ships seized by American privateers won't be welcome at any non-American ports. Either the ship will be turned over to its lawful Chinese owners, or it will be interned while the lawyers spend the next twenty years arguing over it.
The idea isn't to sink the ship but to seize it. So the prize crew sails the ship to the U.S. port it was going to, delivers the goods to U.S. customers, and retains possession of the ship. If the good had not been paid for in advance, it collects the payment.
Collects the payment from whom? We're talking about a hot war with China, so there aren't going to be Chinese ships sailing to the United States with goods for paying American customers. The foreign customers definitely won't be paying American pirates, because their own countries' laws are going to frown on doing business with pirates. Maybe the goods they were carrying to or from e.g. Iran will turn out to be valuable on the American market, and maybe American customers will be willing to buy what international law regards as stolen property, but if either of those things come up short then the privateers don't get paid. Add that to all the other ways for privateers to not get paid in this venture, and it's not looking like nearly as profitable a venture as it was in 1812.
Shame about Lambda Schools. I guess they used to be good and all of a sudden... they're just burning their reputation for cash for no apparent reason? What's up with that? I was really excited about the ISA model.
It doesn't look like a good deal to me. The $30,000 cost is more than what the Coursera MS programs cost, and Georgia Tech's MS in CS through Udacity is still under $10,000. Granted, a MS program (even a MOOC one) has prerequisites that are a lot harder to meet than a web dev bootcamp, and probably takes longer to complete, but it also gives you a much broader knowledge base that doesn't lock you into being a web dev, which tends to be among the lowest paying of software jobs.
The widely-shared Academic Times article doesn't appear to contain any new news about the candidate malaria vaccine. Its news hook is that a patent was recently approved, but as far as I can tell, there is no actual status update since early December, when it was reported that a team at Oxford plans to start final-stage human trials sometime this year. (And they don't seem to be saying much, that I can find?) See:
I don’t have much interest in fashion but I liked this article about Mary Kate and Ashley’s Olsen’s post-Full House career as fashion entrepreneurs. It’s interesting to read about a business so clearly focused on serving the Upper Class, who has nothing to prove, so they buy $1,500 beige sweaters with boring cuts and no labels.
The privateering article is utterly moronic, and basically an act of war. Sheer lunacy - ask Bean or anyone else.
If you are already in a shooting war with the Chinese, use frigates or corvettes or coast guard cutters or allied navies. If the Chinese have so many allies that they somehow can ignore the huge insurance hikes in a shooting war, you just need to drop more bombs on shipping.
If you are not, and start doing such idiotic things, the Chinese will shoot back. They are in the process of building a navy.
Not to defend the idea (I have no idea if it's feasible) but the article in question proposed handing out letters of marque if we go to war with the Chinese, not before. The argument was that the US Navy is going to have it's hand's full countering the Chinese navy, and privateers would be able to raid Chinese shipping without us having to divert ships that are needed elsewhere to the task. He wasn't arguing we should start raiding Chinese shipping right now, while at peace.
China already has a Navy, and quite a potent one. It's the largest in the world by certain measures, although still inferior to the USN on the ones we should actually care about.
Oh yeah. Hence "in the process of". The Chinese will want flattops in the Persian Gulf and off Kenya someday. It's not a peer navy until it has six fully operational flattops and a solid base of institutional experience at the bare minimum.
My problem with this kind of language is that it gives the reader a very misleading impression of the state of the Chinese Navy today. I agree that it's not a peer navy, but it's (to borrow a terrible phrase from the DoD) near-peer, and it doesn't have to be a full peer navy to be formidable and a serious problem for the US if we were to get into a shooting war.
It is formidable, but the USN would still crush it like a bug one one month after mobilization day, after it assembled a four-carrier task force and rolled into the theater. Sure, the USAF/USN/allies would lose a carrier or two, ten thousand sailors and airmen, etc, etc on a bad day (and a few escorts), but it would probably win a crushing victory and sweep the Chinese Navy from the seas.
American expectations for military victory have been calibrated too high since the Gulf War live fire exercise.
Re: #8 (wealth decreases over last 30 years). I'm pretty sure that except for the youngest age group (which is more educated, starting their careers later), incomes are up for all the other ages over this time period [citation needed]. Interesting that wealth is down so much regardless.
I may be wrong, but I don't think it is showing absolute levels of wealth. My interpretation was that it was graphing relative wealth. If group A averaged half as much wealth as group B in the initial period and now had less than half as much, it's gone down, even if the wealth of group A has gone up.
Assuming it is actually tracking absolute wealth, which isn't at all clear, this is likely a result of declining fixed payout pensions and home ownership. Of course, some of that "wealth" that 40 year olds had 30 years ago turned out to be fake if it was tied up in a fixed payout pension that disappeared when their employer declared bankruptcy and defaulted on pension payments.
Weath is "assets - liabilities" so even if income is up, people (under 50) today have fewer assets and more debt than those their age from previous generations. This makes sense: college loan debt, less likely to own a home (and if they do they are owners later in life), etc.
Re the first link, it's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don't judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They do a lot of good work.
And yes, it is that stupid. First, privateering is probably illegal today. The US didn't sign the 1856 Paris declaration outlawing it, but the ban is almost certainly considered customary international law today, and thus binding on the US, too. (International law is very weird.)
Second, it makes no sense. It was something that people did in an era when the ability of the state to do things was sharply constrained, and it was never all that profitable. These days, the government is a lot more effective, and if it wants to hunt Chinese commerce (never mind the issues about who owns the cargo, which is rather different in the days of worldwide communications and the shipping container) it will make auxiliary commerce raiders of its own. There's definitely no need to have a DDG sit outside a Brazilian port waiting. Take any reasonable civilian ship (big yacht, fishing boat, tug, whatever) and fit it with a couple of 40mm guns and a boarding party. Have it do the waiting instead.
In "Radical Markets", I think Glen Weyl and Richard Posner make the argument that index fund ownership of large swathes of the economy explain anti-competitive behavior of the airlines. If Delta, American, and United are trying to maximize shareholder value, and they know their main shareholders also own their competitors, then they invest in separate routes and let their competitors keep monopoly profits on some routes, and vice versa. I don't recall if there's anything more sophisticated than the knowledge by executives that their owners are shared, allowing the executives at the different companies to solve their collective-action problem.
I'm not sure how shared ownership is necessary for this.
Even if the owners of the airlines were totally disjoint sets of people, it's easy to see how a cozy anti-competitive triopoly does a better job of maximising shareholder value for each airline than investing in an expensive and destructive price war.
I think it's more that shared ownership just makes this kind of anti-competitive behavior easier, or more likely. With different sets of investors you at least have the (hypothetical) possibility of investor X pushing airline A to start a price war at the expense of airline B and investor Y, but if both airlines have the same investor there is a strong incentive against.
Putting aside the feasibility and legality of privateering, how much of an investment would it be to become a professional privateer in the event of a war with China? What I mean is, what kind of boat, equipment, and personal would a modern day Francis Drake need to be a success at taking prizes on the high seas? I guess the Somalis would be the ones to emulate, but if you had financial backing what would be the most effective setup? I assume in such a scenario Chinese merchant ships would be better armed then your average ship today.
I'm not sure Somalis would be the ones to emulate. They happen to be right on a major route for seaborne trade, and you need a much bigger boat if you're going to go hunting on the high seas. Range is going to be an issue, because nobody who isn't fighting China will want to let you into port for fear of ending up in the horrible legal tangle that will result.
Here's what I'm wondering; let's suppose I take my crew and commandeer a Chinese cargo ship somewhere in the Pacific, and start sailing towards San Diego to sell my plundered booty. Next thing you know, along comes _another_ privateer, who sees my Chinese-flagged vessel and decides to take it for themselves. Do I wave a pirate flag and say "uh uh, this one is already taken?" What's to stop them from ignoring me and plundering my booty for themselves?
I would presume the same thing that made privateering work in the olden days, except even better thanks to radio and such ("Hey y'all, I'm an American piloting this here ship, so it'd be unpatriotic to try to take this ship from me"). I'm not sure exactly how privateering used to work though.
What is to stop the Chinese licencing their own privateers in revenge? I don't think turning the Pacific into the new playground for pirates is going to help matters much.
Because that's not how privateering worked. Prizes had to be sent into a port to be condemned by an Admiralty Court before they could be sold. Courts did regularly turn loose prizes that hadn't met the letter of the law. So there's no reason to try to take a prize from another ship working for the same side, because it will be ruled that it should belong to the first captor, and not you. In the Napoleonic Wars, it might have been possible, if exceptionally risky. Today, the first crew is going to call home as soon as they take the ship, so there's no way to pull it off.
Would that actually be necessary? If we were to go to war with China, isn't it a pretty good bet that space would get messy, probably in ways that take satellites off the board? If that were to happen does this get more plausible, or am I overestimating military reliance on GPS?
My own conspiracy theory is that all of the Flat-Earther YouTubers are just trolls. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anyone smart enough to operate a computer could also believe that the Earth is literally flat.
I'm not a flat Earther, but...why would being smart enough to operate a computer convince someone that the Earth is round? I mean, if you don't trust the scientific "establishment" then a link to Wikipedia isn't going to do much for you.
I just think that the background level of education, plus the minimal critical thinking skills required to operate a computer (I did say, "minimal") would preclude one from believing in the Flat Earth -- plus or minus some diagnosed mental issues, possibly.
I doubt it-- all you need to operate a computer is the ability to use short chains of logic which can be tested quickly. Establishing that the earth is round is much more abstract.
You know, I hear this claim a lot, and it's actually a surprisingly common justification used for why a fringe theory must be true. I've been listening to a lot of cryptid and paranormal stories lately (for fun!) and it's amazing how often it comes up - "Dan is a civil engineer and a member of the Rotary Club." Or "Alice is a decorated USAF pilot." People with apparently high intelligence and education are perfectly happy to believe in Young-Earth Creationism, alien encounters, Bigfoot, 9/11 conspiracies, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's an interesting phenomenon, and I don't know how much it's been studied or what the implications are. But apparently being smart and accomplished is not inoculation from believing in some really out-there stuff.
My spouse stumbled upon a subculture of minor celebrities and comedians who discuss cryptids and paranormal activities on podcasts last year. To my surprise, she became an enthusiastic consumer of conversations.
In her telling it's kind of like being a fan of a science fiction franchise - there are characters, there are rules, there are fan theories, etc. And it's a way to set up fun conversations with your friends - we're going to get together every Thursday and tell jokes about bigfoot.
Bracketing the question of any specific non-mainstream belief, it seems on the whole quite likely that at least some non-mainstream beliefs are true. One shouldn't expect that being smart and accomplished (assuming this is used as some sort of filter for beliefs-more-likely-to-be-correct, which is questionable but plausible) should automatically push one closer to the mainstream in all questions.
Right. Some things that sound like crazy gov't conspiracies turn out to be true. Tuskegee is the first to come to mind, but also the thing where the FBI murdered a Black Panther leader and then lied about it, and the NSA domestic surveillance program. All of them would have sounded nuts before we knew about them.
Right, I'm not saying it's dispositive one way or the other if seemingly intelligent individuals believe in something. I just think it's curious that it's NOT dispositive because that's the opposite of what I would expect.
This ties into the overall question of whether and to what degree you expect mainstream/consensus views to be truth-tracking. When you consider the institutions that are involved in constructing the mainstream view on any given topic, they usually have some notional purpose of truth-seeking and some pragmatic requirement of being not obviously wrong, but also a fair amount of leeway for internal or external politics to influence their pronouncements. And given the relative difficulty of checking mainstream institutions' work independently of those institutions, if the mainstream institutions firmly declare a falsehood it can take a long time for it to become clear to anyone that it's false.
Given this, you should expect the mainstream consensus on a topic to be determined by a mixture of the truth as they're best able to determine it, and the political and institutional incentives encouraging one narrative over another. Sometimes these political incentives are relatively straightforward and relate to legible political actors with a clear stake in one or another narrative being believed, but sometimes they're effectively random -- some highly-placed researcher stakes his reputation on a certain claim, and suddenly it becomes ill-advised to dispute that claim in public. (I suspect this is basically the case with Ancel Keys and dietary fat recommendations.)
Intelligent people are probably generally speaking more able to discern areas where mainstream wisdom is clearly false, and also more confident in trusting their own deductions over received wisdom. So you'd generally expect them to be more willing to entertain non-mainstream theories. This might or might not lead them to have more accurate beliefs on the whole; mainstream wisdom has problems, but it is truth-tracking to some non-zero degree, and an individual's reason can get skewed any number of ways by any number of things regardless of their intelligence.
For one example, I just read that a report from the CDC found that mask mandates work. I've seen a good deal of discussion on DSL, and while it is possible they work, it's far from obvious, easy to come up with what looks like counterexamples.
My response was that the CDC report doesn't much alter my view. The situation is complicated enough that anyone reasonably competent at statistical games could try multiple ways of evaluating the data until he found one that produced a statistically significant result, then throw away the others. And it's clearly in the interest of the CDC, which has long argued for mask wearing (ever since they stopped arguing against it), to have people believe it works.
To convince me, you need a context where there are competent people critiquing the article and publishing their own analyses. If they all end up agreeing it's probably true. If not, it might easily not be.
Flat Earth I really, really don't get just because GPS and satellite imagery would not work if it were true. I don't see how the believers get around that, though presumably they just understand how this stuff works. It'd be nice if the government and contractors could open source this stuff to prove that it really does rely on spheroidal earth models.
There are open-source software GPS packages out there that do the whole calculation. But who's going to 1. find and 2. read that source code, who wasn't already convinced by every other line of evidence?
You just triggered half of the tiny remnant of French society still arguing over whether the House of Bourbon has a better claim to the French throne than the House of Orleans (Napoleon? Oh you mean that Corsican upstart? Please we're having a serious conversation).
The whole thing is of course a hilarious meme outside the tiny world of French nobility (a really interesting subculture). Nothing brings together communists and liberals quite like talking lovingly of the demise of French Monarchy; brings a smile to my face just thinking about it :')
‘Dynastic change’ is an odd way of describing a sans culotte seizing power for a fleeting instant. 15ish years of rule is a rounding error to the Capetiens. Are we also conjuring dynasties from the presidents of the Convention? How about the members of the directoire, or the later consuls? Of course not!
Your claim regarding the Stuarts is of course absurd given the firm precedent set by the French youth in the 1450s.
(To be serious for a moment, I would argue that Napoleon was the first monarch to have a legitimate claim to rule over the French *nation*, as far as I can tell. The claims of the royal houses ring hollow when they are so clearly untethered from any modern understanding of the French nation. Just my Frenchie opinion, not a historian)
The Yankee Candle bit is a cool proxy, but IDK how useful it will be. Countries with a developed consumer culture, like the US, where people will review everything they get on Amazon, seem to have more or less reliable COVID infection rate statistics already. But maybe if you can tease out the % of coronavirus-infected scented candle buyers, being able to track the spread of smell loss helps?
>"13: CTRL+F “Blackrock” in this Matt Levine column for a discussion of how we accidentally stumbled into true communism for the good of all. The short version: an investing company called Blackrock owns so much of the economy that it’s in their self-interest to have all companies cooperate for the good of the economy as a whole."
That's not what communism means and as far as I can tell Matt Levine never mentions it in his article, so again this appears to be related to your usual mistakes regarding leftist philosophy Scott.
It's a joke, obviously. However, some versions of market communism do exist where the modern economy works the exact same except that all the firms are controlled by a single organization (usually the government) that everyone has an equal share in.
It's hard to say for sure if this is a "joke" since Scott makes a lot of "jokes" about communism that show he doesn't understand what communism is or even the basics of Marxism. I have told Scott the basics of his mistakes over and over again and he never seems to fix his errors.
If you took every time that Scott off-handedly mentioned "communism" and replaced it with "that social and economic system that American society likes to make jokes about," you wouldn't lose any information (although it would be significantly less humorous).
I do think that there are a lot of leftist systems that are super interesting and that Scott would like more than he expects, if he actually investigated them, but I don't think Scott is ever going to seriously appreciate Marxism qua Marxism.
I don't think it's a good idea to mislead people regarding communism and making jokes about it constantly without ever getting a good handle on the philosophy behind it is one way Scott Alexander misleads people. Marx especially is an outgroup thinker and should be taken seriously instead of sneered at with a few inaccurate barbs.
I read the communist manifesto once when I was young. Truthfully, I didn’t get it.
Now that I’ve lived a bit of life and seen the world, I might be curious enough to revisit those ideas. That is, until I interact with communists’ social norms and rhetoric. Then I realize that as a group generalization, you just lack any sort of sense of humor or self awareness. Even anarchists are more social able than you (which is actually fucking crazy if you think about it).
At this point, I don’t want to even come close to whatever ideological rat poison compels you to act the way you do. My life is just too good to fuck it up with that kind of angst.
Scott is clearly making a joke. The normative, pro social behavior would be to laugh, or acknowledge that you don’t get the joke and move on, or stop reading Scott given that you believe he continues to shit on the most important idea to you (and mankind or whatever).
Are we jokesters looking to be "sociable" or are we seeking the truth? The normal pro-social behaviour is to treat outgroup thinkers charitably, not to constantly attack them with "jokes".
Every time I point out something like this the automatic defence seems to be "he was joking". Like I said, the line between a joke and Scott's regular misunderstandings isn't really visible. He's never shown any ability to understand Marxist philosophy, so what is he even basing his jokes on? These certainly aren't deep jokes that arise from an actual understanding of leftist philosophy.
When a large group of autistic people have better ability to read social cues than you do on this topic, you should probably stop to think about whether the problem might be with how you're reading the room.
“ These certainly aren't deep jokes that arise from an actual understanding of leftist philosophy.”
That’s because actually understanding leftist philosophy involves recognizing the inherent tragic destruction of life and intellect and therefore malevolent envy and greed based philosophies such as Marxism and Leftism are impossible to joke about except shallowly.
Marxism does not fall apart "under a joke" - my point has always been that Scott Alexander's jokes show that he doesn't understand what communism is. His jokes always don't make sense if you know the basics of Marxism.
Well I'm a Marxist and I'm telling Scott that his jokes don't make any sense for any person even slightly familiar with Marxist philosophy. It seems more like he's aiming snide jokes at a very small ingroup which wants to act uncharitably to the Marxist outgroup.
Does it have to be one or the other? One can seek the truth without being dour pedant who refuses to understand the concept of humor, and one can occasionally joke about an ideology without forgetting the actual content of it. Marxism is a vile ideologic poison, which killed tens of millions in 20th century, and if we are going to be all serious and solemn about it, we have to mandate a lengthy quote from the Gulag Archipelago or a similar book each time this festering sore on the intellectual body of humanity is mentioned. But I think we can still occasionally be human about it and lighten the pain of the memory of humanity's colossal mistakes a little with some temporary light-heartedness.
It is true, and unfortunately, still, after all these years, necessary. So I got two out of three. Unfortunately, it is very hard to be kind talking about Gulag. Maybe somebody better than me could.
Also, the Talmud - something more close to my heart - teaches that those who are kind to the cruel, end up being cruel to the kind. And judging by the results, if one can argue whether Marxism - after Russian Gulag, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Cambodian killing fields, German Stasi and many, many others - deserves the title of the cruelest ideology of the 20th century, the place in the top three is pretty much assured.
Moreover, I would argue that in many places in today's America - such as Hollywood or academia - a communist would be much more in-group than a Trump voter (or a conservative in general). And we all know how charitable are Marxists to Trump voters. So, I don't think there's much place for complaints.
What do you disagree with Marx about? If Marxism is a "vile ideologic poison" you should find something in his work you find so poisonous and quote it for us.
Are those the only two choices. Because it's certainly not "seeking the truth".
It's very clear that Marxists, like so many other groups
(a) have zero interest in examining contradictions, steelmanning opponent arguments, examining alternative viewpoints, and all the other machinery of truthfinding
(b) live in a world of unfalsfiability, one where there are literally no facts that could change minds
(c) consider it important to attack aggressively anything that threatens the ideology (internal dissent is, as usual, most important, but outsiders should also be attacked as and when appropriate).
This does not seem charitable to the outgroup. I'm a Marxist and I'm very interested in seeking the truth, that's how I became a Marxist in the first place!
Levine might not have invoked the term in that particular column, but he's been joking/not joking about how index funds could at least theoretically reduce competition to zero for publicly traded firms for years.
"A Remarkable Decline in Landfalling Hurricanes: Since 1945, the number of hurricanes that make landfall has declined by about a third" by Roger Pielke Jr.
Last week a paper published in Science concluded that worldwide, “To date, there has been no firm evidence of global trends of the frequency of tropical cyclones with maximum wind speed above the hurricane-force wind (64 knots) at landfall.” That finding, which confirms our work, was based on data since 1982. But what happens when we take a look further back in time? What we find might surprise you.
This is a really interesting link, thanks for sharing. It's very surprising to see that the frequency of hurricanes isn't trending up after all. Another surprise from the same site:
"We find that the most commonly-used scenarios in climate research have already diverged significantly from the real world, and that divergence is going to only get larger in coming decades. You can see this visualized in the graph below, which shows carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels from 2005, when many scenarios begin, to 2045. The graph shows emissions trajectories projected by the most commonly used climate scenarios (called SSP5-8.5 and RCP8.5, with labels on the right vertical axis), along with other scenario trajectories. Actual emissions to date (dark purple curve) and those of near-term energy outlooks (labeled as EIA, BP and ExxonMobil) all can be found at the very low end of the scenario range, and far below the most commonly used scenarios."
But in fact I read the article you linked and it was much better than I thought it would be. The problem is of course that the energy modelling community and the climate community don't really talk to each other. I see a lot of discussion on this so maybe it will change.
But we should all be overjoyed that renewables seem to be getting really really cheap, that coal seems to be on its way out and that lots of climate policies are getting implemented! We might actually make it!
Unfortunately the climate community seems focused on the extremes: RCP8.5 as BAU scenarios (though that seems on its way out) and 1.5°C pathways, which in my humble opinion are impossible and the pathways that follow this are insane, with so many negative emissions, lots of CCS and just so much change that it would bet a lot of money that we will go over the threshhold soon.
A lot more effort should be put into modelling much more modal futures like 2.5°C, 3°C, 3.5°C which seems quite probable, and ironically we know much less about these than about +5°C or 1.5°C which are both insane in their own way.
Re 19: Gah, "A human's guide to words" again. I know that I'm goring sacred cows here, but that is probably my least favorite component of rationalist thought. It begins by knocking down a straw-man Platonism that even Plato didn't endorse (and which is characterized with, of all things, *Aristotelean* syllogism). And while it lays out useful tools to defuse certain kinds of confusion, it is *very* easy to over-apply the principle laid out in (for example) "disputing definitions".
There are certain words where we very much can't just acknowledge different definitions and move on. Moral philosophy can be summarized as a dispute of the definitions of words like "good" and "moral". And while hard-nosed nihilists might be comfortable with getting rid of all that, I don't think most people here will be. We need to dispute the "goodness" of, for example, ethnic cleansing - and we should counter an oppressive government's insistence on a different definition of "good" which includes it. Applied generally, the approach to words in the sequence is a short road to relativism.
As a more specific example, if you think utilitarianism gives you true answers about which actions to do, you need there to be a *real and true* concept of "happiness" (among other concepts), and you have to be prepared to defend your definition through argument. Otherwise, you won't have a leg to stand on in arguing that the mad scientists' nanobots shouldn't refactor you into a hedonium tile.
I think a more reasonable counterpoint is that the city was very much already on the edge of political/nationalist violence. There was a lot of tension between the French and English-speaking populations, notably the Quebec separatist movement was in full-swing, and the Mayor was apparently quite corrupt and bestowed political favors to his wealthy supporters in the business community who were mostly from the English population.
It's unlikely that there would be nearly as much violence and rioting if the experiment occurred in an otherwise peaceful city. But it does show that if there's any tension in a community, if the police go away that tension is going to erupt fast and furious. And over time there's always going to be some tension at some point.
#6 Harvard's costs. Who cares. Harvard's costs have nothing to do with their prices (tuition, room, board, fees).
Harvard's customers are completely price insensitive. They are buying status and related things like connections and marriage possibilites. And the more it costs, the better it is. Their customers are the winners in the American economy whose ability to pay is determined by the stock market, not by wages.
Costs can only explain prices in the most competitive markets. Costs can explain why Avocados went from$0.90 to $1.25. But, they have nothing to do with higher ed tuitions, especially not at the top 20 schools.
I should also add that from what I know about management of higher education that none of the schools have a cost accounting system or a cost accountant. They have never tried to control their costs, and they won't until the government puts a gun to their heads.
Harvard is surely an outlier, and for various reasons (including those you say) they want their price to go up instead of most businesses who want them to go down.
But what's interesting is how Harvard tries to post-hoc justify its tuition raise. They have to say *something* about why what cost $65,000 last year costs $70,000 this year.
I buy all of our meat and fish at a little market in town. They used to sell salmon fillets for $1/lbs. more than the supermarket say $8 vs $7), but my market had better quality and better service. Whole Foods (corporate motto: "Why Pay Less) finally opened up in town. They sold the fish for $15/lbs. The market raised theirs to $14.
Harvard is the Whole Foods of the college world. If Harvard raises its tuition, Yale and the rest of the Ivies are sure to follow. They in turn provide pricing shelter to the rest of the top 20, and even to state schools like Michigan and UCLA.
The depths of this depravity are shown by the recent jail terms handed out to parents, including a couple of Hollywood actresses, who were bribing college officials to get their dumb bunny sprogs in places that included USC, for God's sake.
For the record. I am in favor of ending this whole sad sick game by legislation including wage and price controls on colleges and admission by lottery. See my comment to "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class""
I read Steve Pinker's quote about that police strike ending his youthful belief in anarchism around the same time I was reading Bruce Benson's "The Enterprise of Law" and it just made me think it was actually an argument AGAINST government provision of policing service vulnerable to public sector labor unions. In the years since the US has experienced some serious upticks in homicide, and I have a somewhat less hostile stance toward the cops (my opinion on prosecutors hasn't changed). Even if they do commit lots of crimes all the time (and get away with it) and fail to protect people compared to the ideal (or even what they're supposed to do), under current margins things get a lot worse when police reduce their activity and that tends to happen when public opinion shifts against them (or at least when that becomes salient). A whole lot more of "building the new society within the shell of the old" than even Benson describes will need to take place before a prolonged police strike won't make them look essential.
Anarchist institutions almost certainly. Anarchy as an ideology using that name predates professional police forces in England but not, I think, in France, and surely not everywhere.
One possible explanation of the change in relative wealth is the availability of easy student loans in the more recent period. If you borrow $100,000 you probably have negative wealth for quite a while.
With regard to Ayn Rand's position on accepting government money. When I got an NSF fellowship I put the question to my father of whether it was legitimate to accept it. His response was that he was happy to credit me for some of the money the government had taken off him over the years.
Yeah, if the taxes aren't optional, you might as well take the proceeds that they'll give you. Don't get abusive with it, obviously, but you accomplish nothing by ripping up your Social Security checks.
I think there are cases where libertarians should refuse to take government money, but there's no reason to volunteer to pay higher taxes. If you don't believe in the NSF and are offered a way to not pay taxes for it in exchange for not being eligible for the grants, then you should take it, but if you're paying taxes for it either way, then there's no reason to insist that the government give your tax money to someone else.
Just here to mention that #18's "Frankenstein Veto" is popular among contemporary academic poets and is known as erasure poetry. The most popular recent text of this kind is probably M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong!", which is quite moving.
I had no idea this had a name and had become a trend. My best friend in college (who is now an Emmy-winning comedy writer for television) did this back in 1999 during a manic period when he covered his walls with stream of consciousness free form writing, which he then threw into a fire and the surviving lexemes became poetry.
I am a poet. I never heard of erasure poetry, but have lately been experimenting with "semi-found" (runs of text rearranged or lightly modified) poetry. Erasure poetry seems like a natural next step -- essentially, a constraint on semi-found poetry that the desired form may be created only by DELETE operations on the base text, rather than by DELETE or MOVE or LIGHTLY FUCKWITH operations as I've been doing.
Thanks again. Please check your postbox for a **Gnome of Gratitude.**
30. Reminds me of data scientist David Shor's interesting interview with Eric Levitz that dropped today. Shor has argued in the past that Democrats actually can win when they run on stuff that's popular and in the economic interest of at least some folks who otherwise don't like them or share their values. White folks without college education usually comes to mind here, but it applies to conservative hispanic folks as well - a lot of hispanic people who identify as conservative in polls nonetheless vote Democratic usually, but not always (and there was about an 8-9% shift in hispanic support to Trump in 2020).
This is interesting. I consider my family to be fairly "conservative Hispanic." Still Catholic, racist as hell, homo and transphobic, not at all woke, but definitely Democrat mostly because of the power of trade unions. Being any sort of a Mexican-American laborer in the Pacific and Southwest and especially California, Cesar Chavez may as well be a god to you.
At least, that used to be the case. I wonder how much of the shift recently is due to the declining power of unions. The younger generation doesn't care what they have to say any more.
Also, white conservatives are just a lot less racist than they used to be. I get that's probably a controversial statement in some quarters because Trump was such a dick about this kind of thing and egged on edgelords playing Nazi, but this isn't like the 80s when my dad traveled to the midwest for softball tournaments and would be refused service at restaurants.
#29 is interesting because it's the Lambda School talking up the importance of something that Lambda School is actually very bad at compared to their competitors, a four-year university. Learning appropriate middle-class signals is an important part of university, for students who didn't pick those up from their parents, and a nine-month all-online course just can't teach you those things as effectively as four years at university will.
+1. I periodically interview candidates from Lambda, bootcamps, and more recently from the new crop of 1-3 year degree programs aimed at software eng jobs.
There’s lots of problems with these programs, but the signaling they teach is... less than stellar.
Often, they talk about wanting to join a team/project with attributes X Y and Z, but don’t know what X Y and Z really mean. Here the attribute could be something like “agile” or “continuous deployment”, but also particular technologies. University candidates are more likely to not know what they’re looking for, or to mention a set of attributes X Y and Z that are silly, but the upper percentiles tend to know a bit about what X Y and Z mean - they haven’t usually been coached to bullshit.
That sums up everything I see in the process. They’ll do followups and research our company, because they took a crash course on interviewing. But the substance is not there. They rarely make any substantive insights and usually completely misunderstand what the company does at a reading comprehension level, probably because they’re speeding through 20 applications ticking off boxes.
I’m happy to hire people without credentials of any kind, and we work hard to eliminate bad biases in our recruiting process. So I try to look past these behaviors and associate them with the school, and not the candidate. But they really feel slimy.
Bonus: multiple of these candidates have recounted the ideas from “Zero To One” as if they were their novel personal beliefs. I don’t think *anyone* is coaching them to do that.
Question about the Harvard issue: Is it possible that administration just isn't interested in profit maximization (or whatever the equivalent term would be for Harvard)? You've got a University with an 11 figure endowment (I think that's correct-- I know it's a lot of money), and you have administrators who a) didn't earn that money, and b) aren't going to take it home with them if they don't spend it. So how much of this is, or could be, simply down to the people in charge of the budget just not having 'tamping down costs' as a prevailing element in their incentive structure?
I've seen this discussion of increasing costs before, and it seems like most of the discussion is centered around organizations/industries that have a significant number of internal stakeholders who might not have the same incentives to manage their cost structure in the same way that, say, the owner of a landscaping company might. Are we seeing these runaway costs across the board (i.e across all industries), or does it seem to predominantly be a problem in particular sectors?
Profit maximization definitely isn't the goal of the administration, but then that raises the question: what is? I think the answer is quite complex if you dig into it, because the administration is beholden to the larger Harvard community (students, alumni, faculty) which is a diverse group having many different goals. In particular,
- Harvard is in competition with other top universities for reputation, so they are strongly incentivized to spend as much as they can to distinguish themselves. Examples: dorm renovations to attract students, new research facilities to attract faculty.
- A lot of people in the community care deeply about their social/educational mission, so a lot of programs that might appear wasteful from a financial perspective are hard to cut.
Basically Harvard is in a situation where they need to keep investing in new stuff to stay competitive, and can't cut much existing stuff while keeping the community (especially donors) happy.
This is just the internal dynamics of their budget, though. I think the more interesting--and maybe harder-to-explain--issue is why sticker prices have been able to rise so rapidly in recent decades. (I have some guesses, but I don't have any data to back them up.)
The people running Harvard may not have access to the endowment, personally, but they get paid more the bigger the kingdom is. You get paid more to run a $600 billion business than a $200 billion business.
It is also ego-rewarding to have 1000 people report to you than to have 400 people report to you.
The board of trustees for universities are generally not paid at all and do it for the prestige. Of course, the manager of the endowment fund is compensated the same way any other fund manager is compensated, but I don't believe they're considered an employee of the university.
They seem to have actually set up a totally separate company for this: https://www.hmc.harvard.edu/. It doesn't say, but I would assume they're compensated as a percentage of the funds being managed, which is not going to be reflected in an operating budget.
That said, obviously the actual university executive leadership has a financial incentive to grow the school at any cost, but I'm not sure to what extent they can just independently make decisions solely to increase their own pay and prestige given the power that ultimately rests with the board. Typically, the only non-profit administrators that are really able to get away with that kind of thing are running museums (or sham foundations that are set up for tax avoidance rather than charity). At universities, usually the most highly paid people are not the executives, but deans and senior professors at business and medical schools, who need to be paid well to keep them out of industry, and sports coaches, but the athletic department is typically set up as a separate non-profit corporation with its own budget and earmarked funds so donors can specifically pay to have a better football team and not have to worry about improving the actual school.
"conservatives may not really have a stronger fear response than liberals."
Yeah, I thought it was pretty well established that sensitivity to negative emotion is higher on the left and much lower on the right. Leftists get upset more easily, and when they do get upset they get more upset. As someone said the other day, "Personality traits predict political affiliation." That's why the reaction to the election of Obama was "God-dammit" and then going out to mow the lawn, while the reaction to Trump was full-on public freakouts. You have to really suspect any result during the Replication Crisis that lets leftists pat themselves on the back and say that science *just proved* that conservatives really are bad people.
"nobody was able to fix it because it was run by social justice activists who interpreted any criticism of them as racist/sexist."
This is the great SJW strength, though. They are invulnerable to criticism because they believe themselves morally correct. They don't argue and they don't compromise. You gotta take the good with the bad. For those who want to understand the phenomenon, please read James Lindsay's famous essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why." where he lays it all out with copious citations. https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
I read somewhere that the event that precipitated the 1973 recession was that in 1971, France figured out that we were printing too many dollars to pay for the futile (but highly profitable for elites) war in Vietnam, and sent a destroyer to New York to trade in their federal reserve notes for gold. So instead of paying them Nixon took us off the gold standard and started the "what the hell happened in 1971" meme. I can't find any citations to the event, the name of the ship, if they got the gold or not, or anything. Just a message board thread on a naval history forum. https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3178266
Your first paragraph contradicts the research on this, which tends to find conservatives more sensitive or no difference.
As for personality traits predicting political affiliation, see Link 21, which finds pretty conclusively that they don't, at least for normal psychological meanings of "personality traits".
Can I slap my head here? Using Michaelangelo's "David" as a measure of who's the hick? I can proudly declare my hick credentials with anyone you like, I wouldn't be "oh no naked guy statue!" since the age of 14 and I got used to seeing classic nudity in art, and I wouldn't have voted for either Bush or Gore since I thought they were both dreadful choices.
If I go by this, then Haidt's surveys were nothing more than "what values, what stuff do nice middle- to upper-middle class college-educated professionals who vote Democrat like?" then judged "conservatives" on not liking that stuff. That's as rigorous as "do you prefer Coke or Pepsi? Aha - this makes you an X!"
I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt because that lecture does sound like he's genuinely trying, but he has such cultural blinkers on that he doesn't realise. For example, the painting he put up:
"The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity is not just about suppressing female sexuality." (He goes on to make a decent point about control of the appetites, but I'm going to pounce on this here after I head-desk. Be right back.
Ah, there we go. Okay, first I had to look that painting up - there's a couple of ones by that name. This particular painting is by Hans Memling, and an alternative title seems to be "Allegory, with a Virgin". So, we're in allegorical territory here. Haidt and his audience seem to think in terms of "purity = sex" and "purity = suppressing female sexuality" (always with the suppressing!)
But is that what the allegory is saying? You can look at it and say "the woman is locked up in a mountain, she is being suppressed" or you can look at it and say "the woman is as strong as a mountain, she has lions at her command".
There's a lot here that could be said about allegorical paintings, the role of the virtues, the valorisation of purity/chastity and so on, but to look at that painting and use it as a handy "purity = suppressing female sexuality" metaphor is to return to his starting point and cast Haidt - and his audience - in the role of yokel Bill, who can only stare at the sexual element and not the overall artistry or the context of the work.
The dog question also made me laugh, because I don't think dogs are smart enough to "relate to their owners as a friend and an equal" (it does depend on the breed, some are smarter than others - we used to have a Red Setter which was a lovely dog but nothing between its ears but air). That's more a reflection of the owner and what the owner thinks the dog is thinking. So maybe liberals are more likely to think "animals = humans in fur" (no I deliberately avoided using "fur suits" because we all know where that leads) and conservatives are more likely to think "animals = animals, my dog is not as smart as me and is not my equal".
> That's why the reaction to the election of Obama was "God-dammit" and then going out to mow the lawn, while the reaction to Trump was full-on public freakouts.
And what exactly just happened in January about Biden getting elected?
Whataboutism is a propaganda technique first used by the Soviet Union, in its dealings with the Western world.[1] When Cold War criticisms were levelled at the Soviet Union, the response would be "What about..." followed by the naming of an event in the Western world.[2][3] It represents a case of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy),[4] a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly refuting or disproving the opponent's initial argument.
It’s not whataboutism to respond to “Republicans don’t react strongly to Democrat presidents getting elected” (which is basically the point you were making) with “here’s an example of Republicans reacting strongly to Democrat presidents getting elected.”
>That's why the reaction to the election of Obama was "God-dammit" and then going out to mow the lawn, while the reaction to Trump was full-on public freakouts.
No dude. The reaction to Obama was tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people cos-playing the Revolutionary War, with Obama cast as George III. And, on a parallel track, a widespread conviction that he couldn't possibly be a real American, but instead had to have been born somewhere else. The parallel track eventually got one of its major proponents to the White House. It was different, but I don't think you can really say it wasn't a full-on public freakout. It just looks different because it happened a few years ago.
Yeah, I don't get it. The reaction to Obama was the creation of the Tea Party. It forever changed the GOP. It was a huge outsized response to a very regular centrist boring person being elected president.
He sold the idea that he would be different in kind very well. And he had sixty senators. That had to be a very very depressing year to be on the other side. I remember what it felt like in 2004. It had to be something like that.
"I’m interpreting this to mean that there are effective ways to reform the police, but that the atmosphere created by media saturation and protests produces ineffective counterproductive reform instead."
The authors seem to suggest it is mostly the investigations themselves causing the increase in crime, rather than any particular policy changes. The mechanism they propose is that police officers greatly reduce their quantity of policing when under federal investigation after a "viral" incident, but there is little indication that this comes about as the result of any particular policy reform - the suggestion is that police are either reducing public contact in an effort to avoid having their own actions scrutinized, or are trying to make a point (in the case of deliberate strikes and slowdowns/sickouts). There's also a section (page 27) where the authors talk about the possible impact of increased paperwork, and estimate it might account for about 20% of the reduction in police activity in one city. I'm not sure if we're calling this "reform" but even if we do it's a small proposed effect.
My own personal understanding of the police reaction is very close to what they are saying. That extreme amounts of attention to the situation (by going viral) causes a poorer end result in fixing the issue. Imagine being a cop on a police force that had an incident like this. Can you imagine even a really good cop just going about their daily tasks after this happens?
I think social media is terrible for correcting issues in society for a similar reason. By making all failures super public, the incentive is to react in non-productive ways (shut down, act defensively, quit, justify yourself) rather than to recognize the mistake and improve the behavior.
I'm still at a loss as to why you think saving lives is the highest ethical goal possible (re. malaria).
Now, arguably, malaria doesn't kill only infants so there's a destruction of resources in the deaths of young adults you want to avoid but, surely, the aim of a world wide ethic would be to maximize the ability for all people alive to live the good life, not simply maximizing the amount of people alive.
Otherwise, aren't you embracing those quiverfull natalists positions?
The infant mortality thing is kind of misleading, because generally people will have about the same number of children-who-survive-to-adulthood, so if a child dies in infancy, they're more likely to have another child to "replace" it. (Of course, everyone involved is human, and any loss of life is tragic, and this is an average and doesn't apply universally.)
That aside, about 45% of the deaths from Malaria are people over 5 (source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malaria-deaths-by-age), so that seams worthwhile enough for me, even if it halves the absolute number of lives saved. Plus having your children die of malaria sounds like a really unhappy thing, so avoiding it will definitely increase the happiness for the people around the child.
I mentioned the point about young people dying myself but thanks for locating a source. And, yes, I can't imagine the heartbreak of losing a baby, let alone a child. It must be heart-rending.
Really, I was using this as a reference to past comments (say, Scott mentioning Bill Gates vaccination efforts in Africa very favorably) and trying to push beyond the simplistic (imho) that a life saved is an unalloyed good.
I'm very much in the #thanos was right camp i.e. we, humans, are screwing things up and we cannot seem to get our act together. People dying in Africa for example don't die because of lack of scientific knowledge. They're dying because our institutions and, most of all, theirs, are absolutely appalling.
I would like people of good will to focus on bringing about institutions that allow for human flourishing before they focus on adding as many humans as they can, regardless of the life these humans are going to be forced to live through.
I would say that not having your friends and family get sick and die to a communicable disease significantly increases your human flourishing.
Of course there are drawbacks to more people being alive. They use resources that others could use, and if they wind up becoming our enemies, we dislike that too.
But I think on the margin, the benefits outweigh the costs. I am optimistic that understanding and cooperation will trend higher over the next decades, and that the resources that the current additional marginal person takes up is far away from seriously impinging on the resources of others, especially when you count the resources they themselves will contribute on average. Plus, there is the part where you do not have to spend resources caring for sick and dying people, or on consoling their friend and family, or suffer lost productivity from people stressed out from the trauma and life changes induced by a close one's death.
"I would say that not having your friends and family get sick and die to a communicable disease significantly increases your human flourishing".
Indeed, it does. But not, as you mentioned, if they grow up to become, IDK, members of the Lord's Resistance Army or Boko Haram.
My problem with Bill Gates intervention is that they prevent deaths but do not make living under failed regimes easier. I would prefer intervention seeking to either improve the failed regimes into normally functioning ones or replacing them, ideally without involving foreign armie (Irak, among others, proving that it is quite difficult to impose institutional improvements).
Of course, they're people ; but, from a purely utilitarian pov, they're, with very old people close to death, the least important, economically speaking.
Notably, this is a *specific* utilitarian pov - many utilitarians would say that an infant is of equal moral importance to a healthy and fit twenty-five year old. It's perfectly valid to have your perspective, but it's not the only utilitarian one, let alone the only consequentialist one.
So "class" is just office culture now? Do people inherit this from their parents or something?
Learning the jargon and culture norms of a new workplace, mostly by imitation, is what everyone does. Fitting into groups is one of the things your intelligence is _for_.
Either SV culture is really weird and elitist, or the Lambda School article is really patronizing towards the bright people it's supposed to help.
I'm surprised by "ping me" being used as an example of a class divide. I thought it was a nerd culture phrase, based on the telecommunications metaphor - a bit like saying "the pandemic is DDOSing hospitals" or "my mental stack just overflowed". I'd have expected it to be as opaque to someone from a family of old-school lawyers as to someone from a family of truckers.
I thought the same thing. Wasn't there a TV show several years ago in which a boss asks a subordinate for a "rundown of your projects" and the subordinate is too afraid to ask what a "rundown" is? I don't think that was a class thing, just a "humans are bad at communicating" thing.
yeah, ping is literally a computer program that you can use to "ping" sonar-like another IP address and if they respond you know the connection is live and other side is listening. So if you are learning to code you probably need to know that expression.
Also find this story about the gmail address bewildering - I sure as hell figured that out myself at the same age, almost 25 years ago. The beauty is precisely that NOBODY KNOWS your a teen.
"Ping me" was a good hook for this crowd, but there were other examples that are really class-markers, like the guy hired by Uber who asked for his paycheck to be a paper check to take to the check-cashing place.
The tracking COVID by candle reviews definitely looks like a case of [xkcd 1725](https://xkcd.com/1725/).
That aside though, I would like to see some data on reviews of other common items before I buy that this is due to loss of smell. I could easily come up with a story where negative reviews in general are increasing because everyone has tons of time and is stressed/bored/depressed from sitting at home all day.
There seems to be a structural issue with (parts of) science where they enthusiastically adopt new methodologies and draw far-reaching conclusions, only to then find out that the methodology has serious issues.
I think that they should first validate the methodology, before drawing those far-reaching conclusions.
Hey Scott, I'm Trey Goff, Chief of Staff at Honduras Próspera (point 4), and I'd like to correct one small point: we are a private, for-profit firm not affiliated with the Charter Cities Institute in any official way (although I love Mark Lutter's work and did a panel on Clubhouse with him last night). If you'd like more info on the project, please let me know, I can send you some doing business guides, a white paper, a peer-reviewed academic paper about the project I recently co-authored, or even hop on a call to discuss.
Additionally, we have a foundation focused on working with the local community that has done all sorts of awesome work I can show you. There's a lot more than meets the eye there with community relations.
Thanks for the correction. I didn't mean to imply CCI was leading the initiative and have edited the link. Interested in hearing about where I can learn more about Prospera.
Thanks, Scott! Long time fan of your work as well, so I appreciate the mention here. I'd love to send you the peer-reviewed paper--probably the best explication of what we're up to from a purely economic and governance perspective. What's the best way to send you the PDF? It'll be published in the Journal of Special Jurisdictions in a few weeks, so all I can give is a PDF until that journal issue is live. Alternatively, the best video/audio overview is here: https://youtu.be/0vIL2-S6KNw and the best mainstream media coverage is probably here: https://www.fdiintelligence.com/article/78387 but the PDFs I can send contain *far* more information.
On item #21--I checked the methods section, and the scope of the paper is much narrower than the abstract makes it out to be. The study's survey of "political attitudes" only includes social and religious issues (such as abortion and evolution). There's nothing about economic policy, foreign policy, immigration, the environment, or any of the other things people do politics about.
Just a guess, but probably some of the reasons listed at Always Bet On Text, https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html : "Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous..."
Video also rarely adds any particular value when it comes to exchanging ideas. Sometimes it can - a video of an operation (medical or otherwise) may be best communicated in a video or animation.
Video is better for entertainment, though. I watch people solve Sudoku online for fun. But pretty much all of my political philosophy is consumed in text format.
I can't stand watching videos, for most of the reasons Alex is alluding to. Can't easily scan, skim, pick out small pieces, can't copy/paste notes directly from the text. There also tends to be a fair amount of ambient chatter and dead space, and the information comes at you slower. Nobody can listen as fast as they can read.
Some of this I think is also just well-poisoning from the way has been embedded into web pages. Autoplay, especially with audio, was a nightmare. Persistent pop-out video that hovers over the text you're trying to read and stays there as you try to scroll past it is another nightmare. Audio continuing to play after the video is offscreen is terrible. Then there's the fact that news sites tend to embed unrelated or loosely related videos at the top of their articles (Yahoo! Sports is the absolute worst at this). If I click on a headline about topic X, I don't want the first thing I see and hear on the next page to be someone talking about topic Y. Thanks to all that, I have a lot of negative associations with video content now. None with text.
Also, for bandwidth-constrained consumers or people who just don't like latency (i.e. all users of the web) or people using a capped mobile data plan, text is much smaller and loads faster.
I tend to get distracted, particularly if there's a lot of filler or "humorous banter between the co-hosts" (guys you're not as funny as you think you are). Unless it's a topic I'm very interested in and/or the person is good at speaking and holding your interest, I tend to go "yeah yeah cut to the chase". And, as I said, I get distracted so I'm constantly "wait, what did you say?" and rewinding and then trying to skip ahead to get back to where I was.
As Alex and Graydon say, text is a *vastly* more efficient way of conveying language-encoded information and results in a higher degree of understanding in most cases. Text allows the reader to seamlessly and dynamically adjust the rate of information transfer as needed, skimming or skipping directly to the information they need, and stopping to digest or reread the bits that weren't immediately and fully understood when first encountered. This is also possible in a real-time dialogue, but can only be approximated by cumbersome kludges in video.
Text is vastly more efficient for the discriminating reader. Text requires somewhat more effort for the writer; it's easier to just blather to a camera. But if the intent is that there should be many viewers/readers, it's obvious where the global optimum is. I deeply, deeply resent anyone who wants me to understand what they're saying but won't either engage me in a dialogue or take the time to put it in writing; there's a fundamental arrogance in assuming that their time is more valuable than the time of all their audience combined. At bare minimum, post a transcript of your video.
I'll wait until someone else with the same idea writes it down. If there is no such person, well, there are vast libraries worth of information forever lost because the one person who came up with it had lousy communications skills; most of it isn't very valuable and I'm not going to waste half an hour trying to figure out if the example du jour is one of the exceptions. I *might* take Scott's word for it that this is one of the exceptions, but very few people have earned that respect, and I'd still prefer a transcript.
The tricameral legislature didn't work so well during the French Revolution, because it turned two of them (the one for the nobles and the one for the clergy) were on the same side, which was basically "let's not reform much of anything." I would imagine the same would hold true in modern times, in that if a party or set of interests can manage to capture two of the three houses, isn't that going to leave us with roughly the same situation we have now, just with more overhead costs in the legislative branch?
I've been thinking a bit about these things. I like the idea of different chambers representing different segments of the population, with somewhat different interests, who all have to agree to legislation.
The obvious categories are age and gender. I guess the article didn't bring up gender since, depending on who you ask there are either 2 or 57 genders, and they're aiming for 3 chambers.
Alternate gender elections every 2 years would certainly be interesting to see!
With age, you could have as many chambers as you like. Just determine the birth dates that splits the electorate in equal sizes for each election, and that's it.
I'm not at all sure either of these electoral inventions would improve things, but I'm damn sure it would be interesting, and much would be learned!
PS: You *can* consider the Presidential veto a third chamber in the US system.
> If you think mainstream philosophy is dumb, this post might help you appreciate some ways it’s getting smarter.
That's not my take-away. Chalmers' article just seems to be an implicit defense of weaponizing language. He even uses the term "conceptual activism" and bemoans the difficulty in making others adopt his new definitions for existing words. He recognizes that "words have power" and argues that words should be redefined to use that power to "make for a more just world," like pushing through things like gay marriage, without having to change the law. He completely ignores Foucault's objection that language is used for social control by the powerful.
This is just another step in turning academia into political weapons, where elites try to to use 'science' to social engineer society based on claims that their politics is obviously just and things like democracy and classical liberalism are obstacles to justice.
Seems misleading to bring up the Montreal "Night of Terror" without the context that it involved the police going on strike when the city was already tearing itself apart over Quebec separatism and general late 1960s craziness. The way it reads currently it sounds like the police went on strike and it prompted a riot, rather than the police going on strike because they were tired of dealing with riots.
"If a big pharma company shares lots of stockholders (eg Blackrock) with a generic company, it will put up less of a fuss when the generic company tries to copy their drug. This particular example is good because people get cheap medication more easily..."
I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of what that paper is reporting. I can't get past the paywall, but the abstract seems to say that if a pharma company shares lots of stockholders with a generic company, they will be more likely to come up with a deal wherein the pharma company bribes the generic company *not* to copy their drug. That does not result in people getting cheap medication more easily!
BTW, this is exactly what econ theory would suggest the companies will do, if given an opportunity to collude. Total profits (i.e. the profits from selling the brand-name drug, plus the profits from selling the generic version) are higher if the generic company stays out of the market. If the generic company stays out of the market, the brand-name pharma company can charge monopoly prices and make some huge amount of profit $y. If the pharma company enters the market, prices are set competitively, so prices fall and each company makes some tiny amount of profit $x, x<<y. In a well-functioning market, the generic company figures "I'd rather make $x than zero profit", so it enters the market and we get cheap drugs. But if the brand-name company can pay the generic some amount $z, where x < z < y-x, in exchange for a commitment not to enter the market, then they both come out ahead! (And the consumers get stuck with high prices.)
If the shareholders of the generic company also own part of the brand-name pharma company, you don't even need to make that payment explicitly. Those shareholders actually benefit more from the generic staying out of the market (since total profits are higher that way.) This dynamic generalizes, so we can broadly say that when you have more shared ownership or consolidation in an industry, consumers suffer. This is the classic point of the antitrust movement. (Along with the other classic point about concentrated economic power leading to political power.)
So if you are a Spotify user and have ever benefited from their music personalization (I have), then there's reason to believe there's some correspondence between their models of music and the real world.
Thanks for the link post I guess! (These ones usually take me an absurd amount of time to get through for obvious reasons, but I don't mind.)
Somewhat related to item #7: I am now generally pro-life. Prior to that I was just unsure. The reason I became pro-life is not to roll in money (unlike Roe; my net worth is *tiny*), but because I like loving things and because gwern pointed out that modern ethics actually hates some things that ancient ethics loved (c.f. https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle).
Also, #15 is great entertainment, and #24 is not very surprising based on how anti-inductive the market is (something something Efficient Market Hypothesis?).
> I am now generally pro-life. Prior to that I was just unsure. The reason I became pro-life is not to roll in money (unlike Roe; my net worth is tiny), but because I like loving things and because gwern pointed out that modern ethics actually hates some things that ancient ethics loved
This is an interesting position, but even if we go by the rule that "loving more things is better, regardless of whether those things actually exist and/or have cognitive capabilities" then embryo's still seems like an odd place to start expanding the circle. Why not start with something a little less politically charged like ancestor spirits, snakes, gods or the weather?
Also, kind of a tangent, but I think a better summary of Gwern is that modern society doesn't *care about* some things that ancient societies loved (because we've figured out they don't exist/don't matter) rather than that it hates more things.
My theory with police reform is that viral incidents have a bigger impact on morale and police work has a lot of components where morale is important. For instance, I think if morale is worse, then police officers are more likely to interpret an encounter with a random person in a more negative way, and thus more likely to accidentally escalate things.
On the other hand, without viral incidents, inertia and politics can kill reforms (even with viral incidents politics can kill reforms). So it's tricky. That's why I think it makes sense to not directly attack the "few bad apples" response of police. Even if it's not a few bad apples, you want the general police force to feel like they are part of the solution.
I think you see a similar situation with education reform. Whether or not the reforms are important, a significant drop in morale due to the politics around the reforms can nullify any gains (although I'm just speculating here, would be interesting to find out any stats related to this).
I don't think there's any settled solution for education reform (I'm not even sure there is a consensus that education reform is a good thing), but I think one thing that has happened in many cases is trading pay increases for the union agreeing to reforms.
#7) For the last week I have wondered why this link was included since the documentary aired in May 2020. Norma McCovey was apparently a grifter who was the vehicle for important political change in the US and the Reverend Rob Schenck is an example of maturation of perspective and understanding. Yet the culture war rages on between groups calling themselves pro-life and pro-choice while enriching the donation harvesting industry in the guise of promoting political activity.
Now every healthy female can potentially give birth to approximately twenty children and in fact on the street I grew up on in Massachusetts, there were three families with that many children. Today American women are choosing to have 1.71 children over their lifetimes, so by whatever means, women today are choosing to deny life to 18 potential children. So the issue becomes virtual abortions versus real abortions. Since Roe vs Wade the real rate has dropped to an all time low of 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. As studies have shown, the choice is dominated by virtual abortions. Clearly the choice of how many children to have is a personal one and should be private. The government's role should be very limited. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs Wade clearly reaffirmed that status.
#6 On Harvard Finances: I would not be so quick to pooh-pooh Alex Tabarok's cost disease explanation.
Of the $40k increase in expense per student, $20k is directly increases to salary and benefits. The total labor expense per student is up >20% while the number of employees is only up 8% per student. This suggests that the majority of the increase in cost per student comes from increasing salaries. Moreover, the labor shifts from relatively higher cost employees (faculty per student is down 7%) to relatively lower cost administrators and non-faculty academic staff (up >25% collectively).
Additional labor price increases are likely hidden in categories like "Other expenses" and "Services Purchased" whose cost increase of about $20k constitute almost the entirety of the rest of $40k increase per student.
Taken all together, this suggests increasing labor costs constitute more than 50% of the increased cost per student and likely much more than that. Of this more than half of the budget increase, more than half of that comes from increases to cost per employee rather than number of employees. So while "Cost disease" as Alex Tabaraok may not be 100% explanatory, any explanation that explains at least 30-60% of a phenomenon should be taken seriously.
(Just wanna say the comment textbox erased my pretty N++ formatting...)
I'm going to write a long comment about the Sanders article. I'll give my confidence for my statements as well. Michael Tracey has a unique view and not everything he says is agenda free.
Bernie Sanders ran a terrible campaign. In the end all the responsibility lies on the candidate, even if the proximate problems were caused by staffers.
There are several major problems with the campaign but the most prominent was the strategy devised by Faiz Shakir, previously director of political engagement with the ACLU.
The issue here was that their stated strategy was a common strategy among candidates but uniquely worthless for Sanders. Win early states with plurality victories and convince the party to coalesce.
100% confidence, the media had quotes from Faiz saying this.
This is a terrible strategy because the way it actually works is that the party coalesces around an establishment candidate. Even Obama was essentially a party insider. Also Bernie isn't actually a Democrat.
Not only is this strategy stupid on its face but, Bernie didn't get the kind of wins he needed. In fact one win is in dispute and the mainstream position is probably that he lost. The infamous Iowa Caucus.
Furthermore the strategy *did* end up working for Biden. As soon as the king of the Democrats won a single unexpectedly dominant victory, blamo!, he was crowned as the nominee as the other moderates dropped out.
Bernie's failures in Iowa and New Hampshire, even though he had a clear win in the latter, are unforgivable. His campaign plowed the majority of their resources into these states.
In a world where Bernie had a chance to win the nomination he would have been sailing to a 50-60% majority win in Iowa without expending the majority of his cash and human capital.
I quit my job to volunteer for the campaign. I went to Iowa but I mostly did online stuff. Permanently Online Posters may be aware of the Markos Dailykos Dem straw poll.
I organized series of victories there, with plenty of help, prior to the launch of the campaign. We basically tossed it once the campaign started because Markos stopped going on national TV when we started to win.
I had done the same thing in 2016 which is how we got it done so easily. I reconnected with old Bernie Bros like RoseAnn DeMoro through this. She would link my blog several times which was helpful.
I mention the blog so that you can see what strategy I advocated for and see my arguments against the actual campaign strategy. It was obviously shit and never had a real shot.
The Sanders campaign made several other major blunders like not fighting for a climate debate and refusing to direct the campaign at older and rural voters. These were key errors that hurt them in Iowa.
Another major error was that Bernie dropped popular ideas and policies from his actual political career and previous campaign. Flip flopping on guns, dropping his socialist support for police, etc.
Of course he had a wide open lane in police reform, rather than abolition, and could easily have got ahead of "defund the police" in a way other candidates couldn't. Huge failure.
If there was a popular Bernie Bro twitter account you hated I was in a DM group with them. Nate's Liver, John Cusack, RoseAnn, Savage Joy, Bethlynch2020, Tania Singh, etc. And also prominent but less controversial people.
I know that Faiz literally lied to Bernie about stuff. He lied about being in regular contact with Michael Sayman, famous Google and Facebook employee who has a very campaign/zeitgeist relevant life story.
95% confidence, the info comes from Levi Sanders
Bernie was unaware that the "1 million volunteers" were actually just 1 million webform signers.
Tracey is correct that the campaign is full of problems. He isn't always correct on what they are but he often is. I know that the California and Iowa teams were just essentially random college kids with an undergrad degree.
Even in California they were paid like $30k. They had no training and didn't know what to do. They were easily impressed by competent volunteers. Their tech team was essentially a single distance employee in Oregon without major experience.
Heads of various campaign sections refused to accept help from volunteers. Michael Sayman made an app on lunch breaks that was vastly superior to the "offical app". The organization among high level staffers was terrible and territorial.
As a dirty commie I can't believe they unionized the campaign. No voters gives a shit, it costs a ton of money, causes lots of problems, and even long running presidential campaigns do not fit the intended use of a union. Maternal leave?
For a political campaign? Absolute insanity. Just spend a whopping 6 months not getting pregnant. This is a massive issue regarding PMC-ification of political campaigns. If you care more about your upper middle class life plan than the campaign?
Work in industry. Or at least work for Biden where blatantly telling the working class donors to your campaign "fuck you" is not a big deal. Plenty of other issues around this as well but this was an especially ridiculous one.
Another issue related to people who are job/clout hunting instead of actually caring about political change is how absolutely ignorant staffers were on Bernie's history. They were completely untrained to discuss Israel/Palestine, policing, etc.
Like Bernie has an excellent history on these issues. Same for the infamous civil rights argument. Bernie went to Israel to work on a socialist kibbutz. He worked with a Jewish group(Chabad?) to allow equal placement of menorahs in public squares.
He led Seder for Burlington college students away from home for the first time. Just because he supports Palestinian rights doesn't make him a "fake jew" or anti-semitic. Bernie's first union endorsement was from the Burlington police.
He supported more training and saftey, but not offensive, gear. Commies love polices, everyone knows that. Staffers also couldn't explain or defend his position on guns. They didn't know about his work for veterans. Embarrassing.
Bernie's campaign had major issues with endorsements. He had 4 years, he had a new political group, the DSA had taken off. Yet the campaign did not have a slate of congressional candidates to organize with. They lacked major union support.
They had not locked up endorsements from major progressive names. There had been no outreach to the DSA or the Green Party or other small parties. The campaign didn't even have written positions on issues for several months.
On my blog you can see my arguments about creating a stash of policy papers to drop to keep in the news cycle, stay ahead of other candidates, etc. There was just so much obvious leg work that could have been sorted out.
As noted the campaign piled way too many resources into Iowa and New Hampshire, for very little benefit in the end, plus California, which at least mildly paid off. They did no outreach to other candidates, which is why only Gravel endorsed Bernie.
They didn't exploit the fact that candidates who go on the air early in mostly ignored states with purely positive messaging gain a very strong cushion. Easily 5% on average. They had the most money and the most and most organized volunteers(Not a million, though.)
Bernie did virtually nothing to organized with Warren, Gravel, Inslee, or Gabbard. Of course Warren wasn't much better. Before Bernie announced I emailed back and forth with her campaign on how to pick up Bernie voters, including me.
The exploratory committee staff promised to talk to her and get back to me which they did not. I donated money to several campaigns, the most to Warren, to get to talk to staffers early before they were deluged with money and emails.
Not only could Bernie have done more work for an eventual Warren endorsement, but he could have easily boxed her out of the race. Again he had 4 years and way more national campaign experience to get his house in order.
"I've got a plan for that" would never have taken off if his campaign had been dropping a couple white papers a week on every key issue. I emailed Faiz and others as well as doing social media work to get them to get ahead on policing for instance.
The campaign was incredibly petty and territorial among staff members. They froze out even major Bernie groups like the DSA and People For Bernie. Although they hired Winifred Wong(@waywardwinifred) they essentially froze out People For Bernie.
100% confidence, from PFB staff
They refused to work with volunteers at all, and their volunteer slack was arguably way more "fascist" and "cancel culture" than even Twitter. No discussion of the campaign allowed besides positive emoji bombs. Seriously. Emoji bombs.
Speaking on nonsense and Winifred, many top level staffers did little but tweet dumb shit. Belen and Bri did their little dorm room podcast, which would be fine if they shouldn't have been doing actually useful stuff. They promoted articles in nothing zines.
Seriously? LatinoRebels? Most Latino/Hispanic people haven't even heard of these niche left wing activist blogs, much less read them. Where was the Telemundo and Univision outreach? Although Chuck Rocha is way above average in Latino outreach, the ball was dropped.
Bernie had many high profile Spanish speaking supporters. But they didn't use them. The campaign was apparently unaware that Alex didn't speak fluent Spanish when they sent her to events. Major credit to her for turning it into a positive.
At a Nevada event she essentially charisma'd her way out of it by saying she could speak a little but not a lot because she didn't have a strong connection to the culture because of life circumstances. There was some understanding about that among many attendees.
Speaking of surrogates, the surrogate vetting and organizing was garbage. It took some surrogates, even valuable ones, weeks to get certified, and then they were poorly used or ignored. The campaign failed to cover events using surrogates quite a lot.
My first door in Iowa was a man who ran/organized a very large local veterans group. The campaign sent no one to their event. Delaney went himself. Granted he is nobody politically, filthy rich and had nothing better to do.
This guy was really connected, too. He was in the room in Iowa in 1968 when the phone call came down about the passing of the minority report that created the modern primary system. We talked about political history and he was impressed.
Again because most staffers, much less volunteers, are barely trained and don't know anything about politics. He said he was gonna give Bernie a chance and I gave his info to the campaign. They probably didn't get back to him.
Bernie's campaign had 4 years to prepare and literal months to of actual campaign time to get ahead of the game as Biden dithered. Sadly they were totally un-organized, had a terrible overall strategy, and none of the establishment support Obama had to beat Clinton.
Speaking of Clinton, the campaign, and most of the most intense supporters, didn't have a clue. I was ridiculed in early February for saying that out of the 45% he got he'd maintain 25% right away, since a large percent was purely anti-Clinton.
Very few people were willing to accept this until the polls started coming in. I wouldn't say the campaign was blindsided but many "Bernie Bros" were, totally. It was very embarrassing.
I actually switched in June to supporting Warren, when she was at 14% because the Bernie campaign was such a shit show. I stuck with her till late October when I realized her campaign was totally controlled by wokeness and ignoring the economy, stupid.
She crashed from 28% down to like 10% so quickly. Especially with the M4A debacle and the whole snakes on Twitter thing. I knew Biden was gonna win but I went to Iowa and reconnected with my fav Bernie bros until after SC because I still *wanted* Bernie.
I just didn't think he was gonna make it. Was fun to pretend and ride that pre-SC Nevada smash hypetrain.
Didn’t read all of the comments so someone may have mentioned this already but:
The Pudding article on songwriting mentions the growth in writers per song as an explanation for things starting to sound more similar and contrasts this to previous eras where one or two writers would be credited.
While I do think there is something to calling out the weird “too many cooks” and modularization problem in contemporary songwriting, the reality is that - in previous eras - there would often be “studio bands” that would write many key parts of hits and go uncredited.
The article mentions Motown, and The Funk Brothers (Motown’s house band) are one of the most salient and heartbreaking examples of this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the absolute number of writers per hit song is pretty similar now as it was in the 60s.
The third tricameral chamber should be 10 electorates of evenly sized groups of people sorted by age, you could use census data to determine where the age cut-offs should be.
Back in reality though: try and spread Maine's system of instant run-off voting, if you're in Maine try and form a third party (that eschews the extremes of either establishment party, so you can actually win elections).
It's a lot less reasonable to legally require someone to be a member of government for a multi-year term than it is to require them to sit a jury, so presumably you would let people opt out. Keep drawing from the lottery, and hopefully within only a single-digit number of tries you'll get someone who is in a position that taking it is reasonable. Particularly if you set the salary as generous by current national standards.
This does inject a little more of the "you don't want to be ruled by anyone who wants to rule you" issue, but considerably less than a democratic system that requires that someone basically devote their life to achieving high office.
I love jury duty, so this is incredibly good news for me.
Honestly it sorta blows my mind how well juries do given they’re as close to a random sample of the population you can stitch together. Really renews my faith in society.
They'll still do a better job than the professional sociopaths we have now. Just removing the selection for dark triad traits from our political class would be an amazing feat.
The "Napoleon of Notting Hill" theory of government 😀
"We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot — that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."
"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's."
"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal."
"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant — he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."
"Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality."
This seems pretty obviously false. Many criminals commit crimes for reasons other than poverty. Making sure they are not poor and giving them power won't reduce their criminality.
Where has it been done in the real world? What are the results?
Somewhat similar : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climate
Of course then if the government just ignores these propositions...
The article makes it clear that they are proposing using privateers if a war between the US and China breaks out, not before. If we are at war with China then Chinese trade becomes out business.
If we're at war with China, this will be a very short war, and the last war that the human species takes part in.
It's the ravings of a retired Marine colonel who probably wants to go earn some prize money because he grew up reading too much Horatio Hornblower. He doesn't speak for anyone else, because Proceedings doesn't work that way.
I knew about line-item vetoes but not the single-digit and Vanna variants. What's next, the Bible Code Veto? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bible_code_example.svg
I moved to the United States at 15, exactly half a lifetime ago. I remember watching GSN and the History Channel almost daily with my brother. In France, at the time, most households only had 5, or at most 6 TV channels, and there simply wasn't enough airwave space for niche shows like Ancient Aliens or Hitler this-and-that; documentaries were dour (to children), but probably trustworthy.
We eventually adjusted to these new, ahem, TV standards of evidence. But for a few long, awkward weeks, we would excitedly bring up the bible code, or some random Hitler-flavored crackpot theory, entirely convinced by the on-air experts. I still remember thinking the bible code stuff in particular was very compelling; why, after all, would a documentary lie about something like that?
Anyhow, I think I'd tried to repress those memories, and your comment vividly brought them back with a shudder
Could someone please explain what the mechanism is that big index funds use to get pharmaceutical companies (or other companies, for that matter) to do what they want?
Do they threaten to change the index-status of the company? Threaten to use the votes their stocks give them to fire the CEO? Either of those seem very much against the whole point of index funds--is it just that this is a clear emergency that justifies the exception? Or do Blackrock, Vanguard, etc, have some way of pressuring pharmaceutical companies that I don't know of?
IIRC, Blackrock isn't an index fund company. Or at least, not entirely index funds.
there is no issue with index funds making choices on how to vote their shares. In the past they have been passive but there is no reason they shouldn't be trying to improve the governance of their holdings (although there are reasons that they shouldn't be trying to force collusion).
Well, there is one pretty good reason, which is that you need to pay somebody to figure out how to improve governance of holdings, which means the fees on the index fund goes up. Perhaps this is just an exception because of how obviously beneficial it would be to have a vaccine.
So IS this how we think index funds influence these companies?
Big stock owners have sway. They're not going to vote all their shares all the time, but if BlackRock's CEO gets a bee in his bonnet, it doesn't even cost BlackRock anything extra to have the CEO (who's already on the payroll) make a few calls, or to have an intern go vote 397 million shares at the Pfizer AGM. And for the same reason, he has a pretty good chance of winning a proxy fight.
They (at least Vanguard) lay out how they vote in excruciatingly boring detail https://about.vanguard.com/investment-stewardship/portfolio-company-resources/2020_proxy_voting_summary.pdf
It seems to be about influence, not hard power. They just talk to them and maybe the CEO listens a bit.
It’s very cordial and informal. Management will take calls from their biggest shareholders. The relationship is probably a lot more interpersonal than what you might be imagining. All the major stakeholders have very tightly aligned interests (most of the time etc etc).
The dismantling the octopus chapter of Radical markets gets into it. The short version is that Hedge funds and mutual funds have significant voting shares, and are a coherent block, while the rest of the investors aren't. This means that when the simply pick up the phone and call the Board CEO etc, they listen. I'm dismayed that Scott is implying that *destroying competitive markets through pseudo monopoly power* is a good thing.
Some chaps have a chat. The real money doesn't need mechanisms, it has trust relationships. The CEO of a fund has a chat with his chum, the CEO of a pharma giant. Lunch is arranged.
Then the pharma CEO has a chat with his head of operations and his marketing guy.
All very informal. You don't take minutes at lunch. No paper trails, just old friends catching up.
It's how the real money actually makes decisions.
YES!! Just the existance of this post makes me happy. Thanks Scott :D
I did a college research paper on the changes in hurricanes over time with global warming. What I found was that the data sets are really bad. They're mostly based on tidal gauge measures of storm surges, but tidal gauges malfunction in massive waves.
The paper Scott linked is based on satellite imagery, which seems like it should be better, but I wonder how they backtested their "Dvorak" technique to estimate storm intensity from satellite imagery. If they had to test it on the old data sets (i.e. the tidal gauges), I'd worry about the reliability of the Dvorak technique as well.
Worth noting as well that NOAA has been adjusting the data from previous pre-satellite era hurricane seasons, often by as much as 20%; the adjustments might be entirely called for, but if so that indicates that the historical data being adjusted can't be trusted to within 20%, making long-term calibration of historical data to satellite data even more difficult. 8% per decade is a very small signal to try to extract from this noise.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/metadata_master.html
Depends on the details.
If each individual data point may be shifted by ~20% (in either direction) then mean’s will still fairly easily extract trends. All that changes is the specifics of a given year, not the trend.
>They're mostly based on tidal gauge measures of storm surges, but tidal gauges malfunction in massive waves.
That kind of has an "Abraham Wald showing survivorship bias via bullet holes in planes" vibe.
Have you considered hiring a fact checker/editor with some of your substack money?
Why bother, when experience shows we'll happily do it for free?
Because it reduces the absolute amount of misinformation released into the world. Also, commenters are fallible and are gonna miss stuff, and aren't really in a position to suggest structural changes to, say, the layout or argumentation of a piece. Any of these reasons ought to be adequate to hire an editor.
On the other hand, perhaps some of the charm of the blog is that it is "off the cuff." I think that should really be balanced against the fact that, as a subscriber, a lot of people are paying frankly ridiculous sums of money for it.
A large part of the value proposition - that people are paying ridiculous money for - is that this is not a business, and is not ran like one.
Kinda Zen if you think about it.
If the fact checkers also write about what they found out links with misinformation, it would probably be worth reading.
": Seen here: how has the wealth of different generations changed over time? Note that this is not tracking specific individuals, who continue to mostly gain wealth as they get older - it’s tracking how much money an (eg) 25 year old would have made in 1990 vs. 2015:"
I'm pretty surprised at how poorly middle-aged people are doing. You can definitely see a big drop in the 45-64 range from the 2008 recession, which makes sense to me (I would expect that to be age range that had the highest fraction of their wealth in housing), but I would expect some recovery. It also looks like the divergence of 65+ vs everyone younger started around 2004-2007, so I still find myself confused.
"32: Also from the Slime Mold Time Mold blog: a critique of the research on hypobaric hypoxia causing weight loss. I’d previously cited the research favorably in my post on why obesity negatively correlates with altitude; the SMTM authors have a different theory where it has to do with how many pollutants are in your water (the lower you are, the more runoff has made it into your water supply)."
By complete coincidence, I was looking at my comment (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/11/open-thread-64-5/#comment-443619) following up on that post, and a respondent stated this exact hypothesis. (I'm still a bit skeptical, because for most of the country, the amount of water upstream of you has little to do with your elevation--think about all the people who live along the lower Mississippi, but are at nearly the same elevation as their slightly northerly neighbors, and also for the reasons I pointed out at the time, particularly the extreme selection effect of altitudes above 5,000 feet).
Thanks, I'm reading it now.
I'm looking at the map of obesity rates (figure 2), and I think upon looking more carefully, there's quite a lot that is still unusual. Most notably, I would expect a line of decreasing obesity running roughly North/South through Abilene, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Lincoln, and Bismarck. The elevation increases pretty sharply, from about 500 feet to 4-5,000 feet above sea level (comparable to the higher Appalachian peaks) in 100-200 miles. Instead, it looks like the obesity is constant until you get to the CO and NM state lines, well after the elevation has been gained.
US elevation map: https://gisgeography.com/us-elevation-map/
I will say that the array of evidence summarized in sections 1 and 2 seems to be among the most maddeningly bizarre of any scientific question I have ever heard of.
I suppose I do have a question: how are wild animals affected, but not people living separately from the rest of society? Shouldn't the !Kung and other tribes be consuming the same air and water as those wild animals, and in some cases eating those wild animals?
And a second question: how tightly controlled are the diet and exercise experiments? Some of them last for a year or longer; presumably the participants aren't living in a lab the whole time (and if they are, could that moderate the effects of the treatment?). Do these studies rely on people following the diet/exercise plan of their own volition, and take self-reports of whether they did or not literally?
Thanks a bunch!
A follow-up question: What is the mechanism by which environmental contamination affects obesity? As far as I can tell, you mention 2 candidates. One is leptin, which Scott wrote about in his own review of Guyenet's book. But the mechanism by which leptin affects weight seems to be through... how much you eat, which you already established doesn't matter. That's certainly the case with the leptin-deficient children. Is it not the case for common leptin resistance? Does leptin also coincidentally control some other function, like how much you fidget? (I use that as an example because Scott's old post mentioned it, but in retrospect, fidgeting is exercise, which you also established doesn't matter. I suppose in some sense I'm confused as the basic accounting of calories, if both diet and exercise are completely irrelevant).
The other mechanism I saw mentioned is the gut microbiome. That's currently too much of a black box to me for me to be able to comment, but it does seem like it renders some of the evidence from above (the rat-leptin experiments as well as the the fact that psychiatric medication causes weight gain) seemingly irrelevant.
"Also from a public health perspective, mechanism isn't that important. We didn't need to understand the mechanism of how smoking caused cancer to figure out that it did."
There's a very clear signal that smoking causes lung cancer.
I gather there isn't nearly as a clear a signal about what in modern life causes obesity.
Is fidgeting actually a plausible mechanism for how fat people are? It seems to me that it would burn very little energy compared to even light exercise, and the added number of hours doesn't seem like enough.
Maybe it's harder to eat more than you want if you're fidgety, though you can still jiggle your feet while you're eating.
Is there a dose effect? Men (at least) are notable for putting on weight after about age 30 or 35. Does this correlate with a decline in fidgeting?
I don't know. I only thought of it because Scott's post from a few years ago mentioned it. I thought he cited a study claiming it could burn hundreds of calories per day, which sounds impressive to me but apparently doesn't mean anything.
The wealth drop for 60s makes sense if you look at two metrics I bet:
- IRA/401k liquidations during ‘08/‘20
- PNL of people with total company stock in their IRAs, ie the “all in on Enron” generation.
Both have very rough numbers and I think were widespread.
Local police departments in brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen.
Or no big even-more-terrible-than-usual things happen?
That was my immediate thought. In a county with a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 I'd hate to see what even worse terrible things looked like. Not a useful comparison.
I would expect that going on strike all the time would be *less* bad than going on strike exactly once ever, at least in terms of the immediate impact of a single strike.
If you strike often, then society has to find ways to cope during those periods, and criminals have many different strikes to take advantage of, letting them spread out their efforts. With only one strike, no other systems are in place to cope, and criminals are looking at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
WaPo claims that terrible things did happen:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/01/police-went-on-strike-in-a-brazilian-state-the-result-was-near-anarchy/
This was more recent and was higher profile, true. I wasn't around then though so can't tell whether there is exaggeration going on.
The BBC reports that a more recent one also resulted in far more crime:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51623670
Wow, I am a new subscriber and just have to say, the amount of quality thinking-writing you produce on a weekly basis is astounding. Thanks for it.
Technically, we're all new subscribers :D
He doesn't actually write this fast. It's backlog after spending several months without a blog.
Oh, that would make more sense. Thanks!
However, the amount and quality of Scott's writing before the interruption was still remarkable.
Here's a question in light of your final [and potentially most stupendous!!] item, namely the one about the possibility of mRNA vaccines for malaria. [Footnote 1 reprints the link at bottom of this comment should you not want to scroll back up.]
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My Question: I note a veritable cottage industry among certain economists (e.g., most blog-famous --- especially around these here parts --- would be Alex Tabarrok, see footnoted link #2) to produce estimates implying that even stupendous additional monies on COVID-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution pass all reasonable cost-benefit analyses.
** My basic question is: Anyone have opinions whether similar cost-benefit analyses for throwing stupendous government monies and effort on potential mRNA vaccines against... well, EVERYTHING (ok, ok, starting with a few major tropical diseases and certain types of cancer) would be worthwhile? **
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My own opinion is: Ummm, maybe? Seriously, I would need to expend more effort on the nitty-gritty of estimating costs and benefits. To wit, it's my preliminary impression that in the case of these COVID-19 cost-benefit estimates that a large part of the estimated benefit comes NOT from reducing COVID-19 sufferers' disability-adjusted-life-years-lost by themselves (at least not in the mean of most people's projections for the COVID-19 incidience in 2021), BUT RATHER from:
-- returning the world economy more quickly to its pre-pandemic productivity path [hey, say that 5 times fast ;) ],
-- and (sometimes) the possibility of reducing the tail risks of more-infectious-but-still-vaccine-affected variants getting out of hand and forcing massive lockdowns again --- indeed, lockdowns perhaps even more massive and more strict than those of early 2020.
Not to argue that it's morally right, but I get the strong impression most mainstream cost-benefit estimators wouldn't see those benefits as applicable to the case of markedly reducing the mortality and morbidity from major tropical diseases and a couple major cancers. (Prof. Tabarrok, are you reading this? Did you already think of this question? If so, hi!)
Thoughts?
Link Footnotes:
[1] https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-against-malaria-builds-on-pandemic-driven-rna-tech/
[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/market-design-to-accelerate-vaccine-supply.html
One potentially big advantage with the new mRNA vaccines is that they are driving down the marginal cost of vaccine development and testing. If this continues as expected, the costs of custom vaccines to disease X will be within the budgets of small organizations- single philanthropists. This could substantially change the social factors and economics of disease treatment...
The CDC announced that Covid had lowered life expectancy by a year. What they actually meant, as best I can tell, was that if you assumed that the age specific mortality rates of 2020 continued for ever, life expectancy would be a year less. Of course, that requires another pandemic every year for ever. Actual covid deaths represent an average cost of about five days.
But it occurred to me that if the Malaria story pans out, the pandemic might end up raising life expectancy — not life expectancy calculated by assuming pandemic mortality rates forever but how long people actually end up living.
I think the "lowered life expectancy by a year" thing was on the assumption that everyone got it, and it was a reduction to the life expectancy of people alive today. I won't swear to that, but it's killed about 1/700 Americans so far, and only a minority of the country has been infected. It's going to have a pretty substantial impact on mortality for the year.
As best I can tell, what it was about was what life expectancy would be if we had the age specific mortality of 2020 every year thereafter. That requires not that everyone gets Covid but that we repeat the pandemic, or something equivalent, every year forever.
So far as lost life per capita so far, it works out to about five days.
Yes, if you add “for someone born in 2020”. Which is not as ridiculous as it sounds, if you use it for e.g. comparisons over time or between sub populations. Of course it has no predictive value and is not intended to (any mor than one would blindly rely on instantaneous speed to predict the ETA for a cross-city drive).
One of the value propositions for the mRNA vaccine technology is in fact "super-customized" vaccine development. They're leading candidates for cancer immunotherapies, which hope to take cancerous cells from a biopsy and generate an immune response against those cells.
We know that vaccines against respiratory viruses can work so it's reasonable to throw money at making mRNA vaccines against this particular respiratory virus. We don't know that it's possible to vaccinate against certain major tropical diseases or major cancers so it is a very, very different thing to consider throwing money at those efforts.
Good point, Polynices. Though on that note of vaccines against respiratory viruses, you might be interested to note that mRNA vaccine work on a "universal" influenza vaccine [1, 2] is at the same encouraging-but-hardly-definitive stage as this malaria work linked to by Scott [3]. Namely, mRNA universal flu vaccines are at the stage for which honesty demands an explicit #justsayinmice hashtag caveat [which I gather is sort of a virology Twitter in-joke, see footnote 4]. Sadly, honesty's demands for such an explicit caveat are so rarely met in mainstream news / popular science media.
I bring up work on universal influenza vaccines since a novel strain of pandemic influenza seems to me to have been by and far the pandemic scenario that the US government was most worried about until SARS-CoV-2 reminded them for at least the 3rd time in 20 years that "ya know, there's other novel zoonotic respiratory viruses... indeed, ones that even scared the s#!% out of major countries... just sayin' ".
Indeed, if my memory's not failing me, I'm pretty sure not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, but also numerous other regular participants and guests on This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast [https://www.microbe.tv/] have opined to the effect "Gosh, if this COVID-19 pandemic doesn't get a fire under our proverbial butt to finally fully fund universal flu vaccines as long as it takes to succeed in making one, well... humanity's probably going to regret it majorly... and maybe in a decade or two rather than just by, say, 2100." [I'm too lazy to find links for that, unlike the other links that you see below... also, I'm not a virologist [5], but I think the TWiV podcast deserves all the praise and attention... well, relative attention in the world of academics podcasting... that it gets.]
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(20)30199-4 [from April 2020]
[2] Not to insult anyone's intelligence on this learned blog, but the way flu vaccines are manufactured, they're specific to only 3 or 4 flu strains that have to be identified by public health "surveillance" experts making an educated guess about which strains are likely to be in wide circulation in the coming flu season. Commentors more virologically-informed than I are invited to enlighten me (and presumably other people) why the number of flu strains you can put in a vaccine tops out at effectively 4 with present day technology --- be that (1) the old-school flu vaccine technology of actually involves culturing lots of flu viruses in chicken egg media or certain mammalian cell cultures, isolating all that virus, and then "inactivating" or "attenuating" that virus so it'll just stimulate an immune response without giving you the flu or (2) the fancy-schmancier-new-since-early-2010s-but-alas-still-not-magic "recombinant" vaccine technology that takes the DNA coding for the hemagglutinin surface proteins of the flu strains you want to vaccinate and putting that into baculoviruses to inject (hemagglutinin types being the reason for the "H[digit]" part of the "H[digit]N[other digit]" naming scheme for flu viruses).
[3] The link Scott gave for the malaria mRNA-esque vaccine was really a news release for a patent application by the Yale / GlaxoSmithKline collaboration. The actual research (again #justsayinmice!) is in this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.430970v1.abstract
[4] The origin of the #justsayinmice Twitter corrective to / in-joke bemoaning mainstream news and popular science media hyping preliminary results was described here https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/15/in-mice-twitter-account-hype-science-reporting/
[5] I'm a theoretical physicist, not a virologist or any other sort of molecular biology person. Though I'm co-author on a paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.15776) which, umm... mentions how to speed up differential equation solving pertinent to epidemiology as well as "virality" on social networks, I swear I'm not the type of physicist lampooned here https://xkcd.com/793/ . Really, I'm not!
There might be some interesting math about the question of giving vaccines for influenzas which are further down on the list. I'm thinking that if the fifth and sixth most likely flus aren't that much less likely than number four or possibly numbers three and four, maybe the best bet is to randomly give a fairly high proportion of people vaccines against 1, 2, 4, and 5 or 1, 2, 4, and 6 so as to blunt the slightly less likely epidemics. I'm guessing, though.
I wouldn't move quite as fast against malaria or the like - covid is a fast-moving crisis, and speed really matters. Malaria is also very bad, and I don't want to waste too much time, but it's not an emergency in quite the same fashion.
I wouldn't throw every available dollar at vaccines against everything, but I'd certainly start up some research programs. I'm a layman, so I won't put hard numbers on this, but if a few billion got invested into this globally over the next year, I'd probably nod happily.
I don't disagree about speed, at all, but I would point out that the impact on lost years of life of a disease that kills large numbers of children is much larger than that of a disease that most kills much older people, relative to numbers of cases.
Personally, I'm mostly angry about years already lost for no good reason. In what year did humans first gain the ability, technologically, to design a vaccine to a novel virus in a matter of weeks to a few months, and complete clinical trials in a few months more? The idea of mRNA vaccines is over 30 years old (but wasn't feasible back then), and this review paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597572/) seems to show multiple demonstrations pre-2012. Even if it only became *really* feasible, say, 5 years ago, how many people died that didn't need to, of all sorts of diseases, which could already have vaccines if we'd thrown a few hundred billion dollars at them? How much faster could we have gotten a covid vaccine developed and rolled out if there were already a dozen other mRNA vaccines on the market with scaled-up manufacturing we could have repurposed?
Technologically, fast trials have been a thing for as long as vaccines. The limitation there is regulatory, not technological.
I don't know when mRNA became viable as a vaccine tech, per se, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History has a run-down of various related milestones. 1989 was when they showed you could inject mRNA, 1994 was when they showed it could create an immune response, and it looks like 2005 was when they solved one of the major issues with using it in actual humans. But Moderna and BioNTech were both working on mRNA treatments pre-covid, and not having a ton of luck getting them in a workable, marketable state. Looks like the transition to vaccines was comparatively recent - here's an article from 2017, for example: https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
If they were only just switching to a vaccine mindset in 2017, then I doubt anything could have cleared trials by now (absent Warp Speed), so we wouldn't have any mRNA vaccines yet under normal circumstances.
Thanks!
Any sold-out-on-wokeness hypothesis for why the Sanders campaign failed has to grapple with several issues:
- Why New Bernie did so much better in Nevada in 2020 (with a much more diverse base). The article claims that caucuses "place a premium on ground-level organizing, where Sanders excelled." But this is not a distinction since Nevada was also a caucus in 2016 and the failures in 2020 South Carolina are being alleged at that same level, not that Bernie ran bad television ads or failed to show up.
- Why Classic Bernie did almost as badly in South Carolina in 2016. He got 26% of the vote there in 2016 and 20% in 2020. This is not a very dramatic difference considering the first contest was one-on-one against Hillary and it can be parsimoniously explained by an "anti-Hillary but not especially leftist" cohort.
- The specifics of Sanders' supposed sellout. What issues, specifically, does Bernie stand accused of shifting on? As near as I can tell, the only one on offer is that Bernie seems to have agreed with most Democrats that there was some sort of corruption involving Trump and Russia. Setting aside for the moment the various mottes and baileys imposingly shadowed here, I simply do not see a case made that any significant mass of (Democratic primary) voters were specifically motivated by an *absence* of this. And while Bernie was not a contrarian on this issue, neither did he especially lean into it. You can point to statements he made while being interviewed on news shows, but certainly it came up much less in his stump speeches than class issues.
As someone who followed his primary campaigns closely in 2016 and 2020 and supported him in both, I can't buy into this thesis. My view is much simpler: Bernie never had a majority of the primary electorate. In 2016 his numbers were puffed up by non-ideological anti-Hillary votes and in 2020 Democratic candidates simply coordinated to stop Bernie in exactly the way Republican candidates failed to do with Trump. The article skewers a straw man by contrapositing its arguments from "if the Democratic party was so desperate to rally around Biden...." They were not, any more than Republicans were eager to rally around Ted Cruz! The difference is they sucked up and did it when the circumstances left it as the only option. This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system.
And while I know people here are loath not to take others at their word, I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,"
"This is not corruption, A endorsing B to put them over C is basic coalition politics as they have been practiced in every Presidential nominating process since the introduction of the party system."
Completely agreed, but it's worth noting that *arguing over* whether this type of coalition politics constitutes corruption has also been practiced since at least 1824 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_bargain). I think the arguments boil down to, if you're part of the deal then it's not corrupt, and if you're on the other side then it is.
If we think politicians do actually care about their stated policy preferences then it's the rational option. Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar were absolutely closer to Biden than to Sanders on policy, so when it looked like Sanders might win consolidating around one moderate-lane candidate was the rational choice. The GOP establishment messed up in 2016 — if they had been able to consolidate around one mainstream candidate, Trump wouldn't have been the nominee.
Of course, the fact that a lot of these turn into quid pro quos (see — VP! Cabinet positions!) does give it a whiff of corruption, but it's hard for me to imagine a world where politics didn't involve trades, negotiation, and deal-making. Being able to form a winning coalition is pretty much a politician's job.
One could imagine that giving way to another politician due to similar policy objectives could be a signal that those policy objectives are honestly held, and close to the then-recommended politician. If they win, and are then looking for people that are close to them on policy and have credibly signaled that they really care about said policies (plus being a "team player", as interpreted by those on the team), high level positions would seem a reasonably natural choice, without having to resort to it being a reward. Of course, then incentives for the ambitious would push them the same direction (which, so long as they push towards desired ends, still should mostly work out, I imagine).
The article is long but worth a read. They address a lot of your counterpoints.
On Nevada:
"Sanders’s only truly commanding victory of the entire cycle was in one of the few full-fledged caucus states that remained, Nevada. And this turned out to be completely illusory: caucus states place a premium on ground-level organizing, which is the area where the Sanders campaign obviously excelled: if there’s a need for left-wing activists to go agitate at complicated meetings (such as caucuses), that need was certainly able to be filled. In a cruel twist of fate, the Sanders representatives on the Unity Commission would’ve been better off lobbying for the retention of corrupt party-run caucuses, because these were evidently more favorable ground for Sanders than high-turnout primary elections—a paradox that directly countervails a central conceit of his campaign."
South Carolina is presented as emblematic, but hardly unique. They break down the numbers in many other states to show that Sanders' share of the vote, and in some cases raw vote count, went down despite higher overall turnout, including in rural and working class counties where he excelled in 2016.
With regards to how he "sold out", the overall thrust of the article is that the American electorate as a whole is "left" on economics and "right" on social issues, especially when social "right" on social issues means "not woke". They claim that, relatively speaking, Sanders put less emphasis on economic issues and more emphasis on culture war issues to appease a young, online, hyper-woke activist base, which led to less support among the typical Democratic primary voter.
They also make a pretty strong case that the party elite, while perhaps not stridently pro-Bernie, made a lot of concessions to his wing between 2016 and 2020, and that he wasted the large structural advantages that he held over the entire field.
They claim that, but I don't see much evidence for it. Obviously it's difficult to quantify something like "put less emphasis" but the least you could do is cite a bunch of examples and the only one on offer was "Sanders went along with Russia." If there were some deciding cohort of Democratic primary voters motivated by anti-anti-Russia skepticism they failed to show up in Tulsi Gabbard's vote totals (and the authors themselves point to her as an example of a candidate refusing while seemingly ignoring how it undermines their thesis; adding her vote to Sanders' gets you to the exact same place).
Other than that I can find no specific examples of this supposed shift to "culture war issues" by Bernie. I think there is some degree of distorted thinking on tap here, mainly in thinking Bernie Classic was "not woke" in some way because he took flak from Hillary on that subject. But this was Hillary's emphasis, not Bernie's, because she couldn't hope to flank him on economic policies. Bernie did not respond to this by running to the right. You can make a much, much, MUCH stronger case that Bernie shifted left between his time on the Congressional backbench and his 2016 campaign, since one of the few things Hillary could hit him on were past votes on immigration, gun control, and the like. But this would fail to make the case the authors want to make. The personnel shifts in South Carolina are also not terribly convincing. Nina Turner was a Bernie surrogate in 2016 too. Bernie's South Carolina polling was atrocious both before and after Kwadjo Campbell's ouster. There are simply no magic words to utter that will make cautious, religious black voters in the South embrace socialism. (Bernie's most prominent 2016 black surrogate, Symone Sanders, famously switched to Biden in 2020 and was fairly explicit about electability being the motivation.)
I agree with the structural portions of their thesis. Bernie was cheated in 2016 but he lost 2020 fair and square to the "Centrist Voltron" that left Twitter was roasting right up until it suddenly manifested. The difference between the 2016 and 2020 fields suffices to explain all of their observations about Bernie's vote totals; you simply cannot assume that everyone who voted for him in 2016 was committed to any particular policy at all, let alone specifically voting on anti-wokism, instead of being contingent anti-Hillary voters spoiled for choice in 2020. Who did those votes go to? Not to Tulsi or Yang, the only two candidates you can really make a case for being "less woke" than Bernie. Not out of the primaries entirely, turnout was way up from 2016. Mostly they went to Biden, who it must be said, was also not a paragon of wokeness compared to the field, and suffered not a whit for defending his old Senate busing votes.
The authors are correct that there is a certain fatigue among the electorate for meaningless culture war stunts. However this fatigue is just as much from the center as it is the far-left. The average American voter might be in the red quadrant, but if they are it's at like -1,1, and to those people, Biden is just fine. I do not like that this is the case, but facts don't care about my feelings.
I've never been a Sanders supporter (quite the opposite), so I never followed his campaign in detail. I'm also not plugged directly into the woke left. So I can't really comment on the degree to which he shifted in that direction -- I have a vague impression that he at least paid lip service to wokeness, but it's a second hand impression and may reflect the biases of my sources on this issue.
Having said that, I don't think the article was trying to make the case that Sanders became an ardent SJW or made identity politics the focus of his campaign. Only that in 2016 he at the very least seemed uninterested in it, and that in 2020 he at least seemed to appease it.
To my eye he did about the same amount of lip service in both campaigns. He himself is not "anti-woke," the class-first approach is a matter of emphasis. Where the authors go awry is in assuming voters cared about this lip service one way or the other. Bernie didn't lose ground from '16 because of some throwaway comment he made about "doing better" on sexism, or because they shitcanned some guy in South Carolina. He lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence. Ironically, Nagle and Tracey are committing a similar error as their liberal counterparts, wishcasting their beefs with rose Twitter onto an electorate of Rust Belt boomers who were never really attached to Sanders in '16 beyond him not being Hillary. Joe was there if you weren't that woke. Pete was there if you wanted an outsider. Tulsi was there for the 1% who wanted vague anti-anti-Putin stuff.
I appreciate your perspective on this, and I can certainly see how the authors of that article might be wishcasting, as you put it. But there is one thing I'd like to explore a little more
'[Sanders] lost because he had no hope of uniting all of his former "not-Hillary" constituencies in her absence'
What if we apply that same reasoning to Trump? I think he benefited in a meaningful way from the "not-Hillary" vote in 2016, just as Sanders did (I've heard anecdotes about 2016 Sanders supporters whose second choice was Trump).
The answer might be, "Exactly! That's (one of the reasons) he lost in 2020!"
But as a counterpoint, consider that Trump increased his raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 in *every single state*. The article claims (I haven't verified) that Sanders primary raw vote totals from 2016 to 2020 went down in several states and in several working-class counties. Voter turnout can't explain this alone because it was up in both the general election and primaries (at least the ones they cite).
Primary and general elections have different dynamics, obviously. Biden's raw vote totals were higher than Clinton's in *every single state*, too. If Sanders had been the Democratic nominee in 2020, the same trend may have held. Sanders went head to against Clinton in a year that was arguably a referendum on Clinton (or at least Clinton-sim). He didn't have the chance to go head to head against Trump in a year that was a referendum on Trump. Maybe that is all there is to it and I'm reading too much into it.
But the fact remains that after Hilary exited the scene, Trump maintained enthusiasm and even made inroads with new demographics. Sanders didn't (it seems). Why did Trump go up when Sanders went down? If 2016 anti-Clinton, anti-establishment Sanders-Trump voters switched to being Trump diehards in 2020, what did he do to make them so loyal?
"Why did Trump go up when Sanders went down?"
Biden ran to the right in the primary and to the left in the general.
I think it makes sense to talk about the "anti-Hillary" vote in three cohorts:
1. Sanders-Trump voters. These probably stayed loyal to Trump.
2. Sanders-nonvoters. These are represented by increased turnout in the general and I think there were more of them.
3. People who didn't vote at all in 2016. The article gestures at this by calling his first campaign "shoestring" but this is understating it. Bernie barely had *any* infrastructure spun up until about 1/3 of the way through the primary when people realized he could actually win this. If the campaign itself thought it was a doomed protest against a coronation, probably lots of voters did too. There's no way to guess how big THIS cohort is but since primary turnout was higher in 2020 this is probably a factor too.
Other than that, yes, parties tend to fall in line with their Presidents as elections become referendums on incumbency. Obama and Hillary fought to the bitter end in 2008, but while there were a few loud Hillary-or-bust PUMAs, most of the Democratic electorate fell in line and there was not a significant internal challenge to Obama in 2012. I think it's possible for Trump to have lost the upper Midwest due to a slice of "not-Hillary" voters that became "not-Trump" and restored just enough of the firewall even as turnout was juiced on all sides.
Sanders might have actually succeeded had he done two things:
1. Be more moderate (and not just on immigration issues; his economic platform was to the left of that of Corbyn's Labour)
2. Actually attack Biden
Democratic primaries, unlike Republican ones, tend to be massive hugfests. The only way for an unfavored candidate to win in such a system is to break out of that mold.
His Russia comments were not helpful to him because they were so easy to use against him, but they were only a symptom of Sanders's problem in the Democratic primary, not the actual problem itself.
Regarding the tricameral legislature proposal, I don't necessarily hate the concept, but one of the major arguments for it in that piece -- that the current political gridlock prevents laws from passing that have very wide support among the population -- is dubious. I don't know much about the other examples he cites, but the one about high support for background checks on firearms sales at gun shows is extremely misleading -- it's effectively a gun control talking point that gets passed around by their lobbyist organizations, but doesn't correspond to reality.
You can get large percentages of people to agree to "closing the gun show loophole" or "universal background checks" or similar, but when laws like these actually get brought up for consideration, even in proposal/referendum systems, the support is a much more partisan-typical 45-55%. This is because "universal background checks" is essentially a feel-good platitude, and the actual laws brought up to implement it are usually poison pills designed to attack gun owners. The usual form this takes is requiring full background checks on any transfer, and counting loans as transfers; thus, interactions that are completely normal among gun owners, like "let me use that rifle today while hunting so I can see how it feels", become felonies if not run through the proper federal bureaucracy. When concretized in this way, obviously support for the proposition drops.
In general, opinion polls like this are very weak sources of information, because even leaving aside lizardman effects, most public policy questions are sufficiently complex and subtle that your average person will require at least half an hour to understand what the question actually means. For people who aren't already policy junkies -- which is an excellent life choice that I endorse -- that means that a phone poll asking "do you approve or disapprove of $THING?" is basically only measuring whether the pollster phrases $THING in a way that sounds positive or negative. Thus a pollster can get whatever answer they want out of such polls, more or less; and any such poll that people are pushing is more likely propaganda than part of an effort to understand the world.
Do you think hypothetical implementations that aren't poison pills would have widespread support? If so, why isn't anyone doing that?
You could definitely write an implementation that isn't a poison pill, but no one really has a reason to do that.
For background, I'll go over the current background check regime. The phrase "gun show loophole" gets a lot of play, but the point of law involved has nothing to do with gun shows at all. Basically, if you sell guns for a living, you need to get a federal license (the FFL) and you need to run a background check on everyone you sell a gun to. If you don't sell guns for a living, on the other hand, you're allowed to sell your guns to other private citizens without needing to do a check, but if you know the person you're selling to is a prohibited person, then making the sale is a felony. The "gun show loophole" is the fact that private, person-to-person sales don't need a background check (and notionally a lot of these happen at gun shows). In practice, though, 99% of gun sales go through FFLs, including at gun shows; private sales are an edge case the same way garage sales are mostly an edge case compared to the overall retail market.
Thus, while you could design a system for universal background checks that wouldn't cause problems for non-criminals (say, by opening the background check system to ordinary citizens and letting it generate tokens that you can check through the system later), there's not much reason to think it would help with anything. 99% of existing legitimate sales go through FFLs and are checked already; criminal sales mostly happen in black-market contexts where no one involved cares what the law is. The marginal criminal who can get a gun via a private sale from a law-abiding private seller (who doesn't know the buyer is a criminal), but can't get one either by theft, via a straw purchase or on the black market, basically doesn't exist. (A "straw purchase" is when a legal buyer buys a gun at an FFL for the purpose of giving it to a prohibited person. This is, naturally, a felony, but it still happens a lot and is fundamentally hard to prevent.)
Gun owners and gun rights activists would not necessarily object to a non-poison-pill implementation of universal background checks, but they don't have any reason to proactively pursue it, because it wouldn't help any; and such people are also categorically extremely suspicious of any expansion of gun laws whatsoever. (This is basically for good reason, because probably the majority of new gun laws ever enacted are basically poison pills meant to hurt gun owners.) Meanwhile, gun control activists are mostly divided into people who don't know anything about the topic but support initiatives that sound nice, and people who do know about the topic and are actively trying to pass poison pills to hurt gun owners. None of these groups have any incentive to push for a reasonable universal background check system.
There was a proposal a while ago for a big gun control compromise, where gun control activists got a well-designed universal background check system in exchange for concealed carry license reciprocity and/or the removal of suppressors from the NFA. This got a fair amount of play and tentative approval among gun rights groups, but was never mentioned so far as I can tell among gun control groups; in any case, it never went anywhere.
Given your last paragraph, I cannot refrain from posting the Yes, Minister clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GSKwf4AIlI
#8: I had a parent on the wrong side of the ‘08 recession, they’re about mid 60s now, and that trend line down for 50-60 y/o nails it. There’s a large population of 60 y/o’s who will never retire because of ‘08 and ‘20, and I wonder what that future looks like for us. The money just isn’t there.
Why '20? I'd expect any dip in earnings potential to be temporary once the economy reopens, and the stock market has already bounced back. Is it debt?
I’m thinking about another round of 401k liquidations and home equity prob occurring. Decades of saving get undone and age 40, really age 30 onward isn’t enough time to recuperate, using some rough excel math. That said - what did the 70 plus’ers do in ‘08 I wonder. Their numbers look fine, and right age in ‘08 to crack into their 401ks as well.
The 70+ people in '08 were probably old enough that most of them had little or nothing left on their mortgages and they had social security money to draw on, limiting the amount that they actually had to take out of the stock market (if any - by that age most financial advisors recommend things like bonds). And they're already unemployed, so it's not like they lost out on income. So while it wasn't great for them, they were pretty secure.
The people in their 50s however, would almost definitely still have a lot left on their mortgages, would not have social security as a stop-gap, would still have money in the stock market, and would still be relying on a job. So the unlucky ones would lose their job, then rely on savings and withdrawing from their diminished stocks, and then when the savings ran out, get foreclosed on. That of course also applied to people younger, but the younger people had more time before they expected to retire, so it didn't hurt their retirement chances in the same way, and younger people were more likely to be renting than owning, so they wouldn't be set back in the same way.
compared to the younger cohorts, the older ines will also have a higher percentage of pensions
Please forgive me, I'm genuinely not that financially literate - 401k liquidation just means stocks went down a lot which hurt their retirement savings, right? Now that stocks have gone back up again, why is that still a problem?
The issue is when stocks go down and then you have to sell them near the bottom, for some nominally unrelated issue like losing your job or having large medical bills because you didn't have insurance. (You might ask how that works, since the funds are earmarked for retirement? The simple answer is that you can do it but you have to pay a penalty in taxes, although there are some ways to get around the penalty.)
The result of this is losing both the savings themselves and any chance of gaining them back. You have to start off from scratch and the nature of compound interest means that you've lost the years that would have been most important for your savings.
Old people are living on a retirement fund that includes mostly stocks, but need to pay their expenses in dollars. If stocks crash, as they did in '08, they need to sell more of the stocks to pay their constant dollar expenses. That means they've lost proportionately much more of their fund than they would have if stocks had remained high, and they don't get those assets back when the stock market rebounds.
To be fair, if someone is in retirement and still has a lot of money in stocks, they should also have a 2+ year safe fund in cash or bonds to draw on in downturns. But many don't. This was also a problem in 2008.
Other two comments list the gist of it too!
But straight forward in a way that can be replicated on a excel doc, using numbers which are close enough to the last time I did this such that I feel ok standing behind them:
- You need about $1mil saved to retire on a ~$50-70k/year equivalent lifestyle
(take $50k, grow it by 2-5% annually from now until you retire). $50k isn't nuts if you have your mortgage done, independent kids, no debts, etc. etc.
- In plain English, if you retire in the ~65-75 y/o range, w/ $1mil saved, you run out of money right around or after the time you die, factoring in like a 20 year retirement and no passive income aside from your $1mil and social security etc. This is factoring out home equity, which is also a big financial boost once you sell a paid off place. But the bulk of your financial safety in retirement is going to come from your IRA.
- That number is entirely achievable *if you have enough time to save*. That time to save is about 30-40 years with the bulk of that in 7% annual returns in the stock market, maxing out your Roth IRA at $500-$600/month. If you do this exactly from the 25 y/o to 30/35 /yo range, and you *never sell,* you'll very easily hit that $1mil. Locking up your retirement is pretty easy.
- If you do any of the following, you essentially won't have enough to retire if $50-70k/yr equiv lifestyle and up is your idea of retiring. Even if you're looking at $30-40k/yr equiv, still won't be able to retire:
---> sell at any point between starting to save and retiring. This is exacerbated the further into your retirement age you get (~40s/50s/60s). TLDR you need 40 years of 7%/yr average acting on that $550/mo in your 401k/IRA, a single slip up will undo it all.
---> don't invest in stocks for the bulk of those years.
At it's root, it's just some math using compound interest, but you can really go wild on the excel sheet wizadry to model this all in interesting ways. All retirement accounts follow the above rules (401ks, Roth/Traditional IRAs).
The huge issue is there's a massive incentive if things get bad enough financially to touch your 401k "just once." The problem is "touching it just this once" means breaking that single rule of don't sell, ever. A lot of folks don't realize they nuke their retirements, or very nearly nuke it, by very small sales. If it's a serious emergency like 12 months of no work in '20-'21 and '07-'09, those small sales tend to be big sales, and those users will never retire because of it.
So, you have a large set of 40-50's in '07-'09, and I bet in '20-'21, who touched their retirement accounts, and didn't realize they bought themselves another 20+ years of saving to catch up. It's ugly, there's a whole generation of folks who won't retire because of this.
There are caveats, major one being the 401k limit is like $20k vs. the IRA limit being $5-6k (grows a bit each year). If you have the finances to max out a 401k consistently, you don't necessarily nuke your retirement if you sell a bit (or at least idk the numbers there but I sense that you could recover). The folks that can put $20k into a 401k year after year, after recovering from a financial setback that made them sell, is probably a small group I think.
If you do this exactly from the 25 y/o to 30/35 /yo range* and continuing $500/mo until you retire, it's no issue to save that much (correction)
Sorry, still confused. How do you nuke your retirement with a "very small sale"?
Suppose you have 500K saved up at age 50, and you do a "small sale" of 50K to support yourself in a difficult time. You still have 450K, which seems like most of your money - any retirement plan that succeeds on 500K (compounded for another 15 years) should also succeed on 450K. What am I missing?
"Oh no, my monthly bills are coming due! Better just make one small sale of $10000 to make ends meet! I'll still have 490k left next month, it's fine."
Then rinse and repeat that for the next two years while you can't get a job, and you're left with half. Meanwhile, the stocks kept on crashing for those two years, so you're actually down to a third of the original, which was the same amount that you had 14 years prior. That's assuming that you were investing $6,000 per year, the max Roth IRA contribution, and you got 6% return rate, but in actuality the markets in the 2000s weren't that good and the peak in 2007 didn't even reach the previous peak in 2000, so really it's more like what you had 20 years prior.
Even if you then got a job, and start putting in $10,000 per year, and had better returns in the market (7% instead of 6%), you're up to $700,000 when you retire, which is a good deal short of your goal.
On the other hand, if you hadn't lost your job and didn't have to make withdrawals, your retirement accounts would have gone down some (maybe to $400,000), but then with that better job at the better market, you're up to $1,350,000 at the end, twice as much, and plenty to retire on.
However, that all ignores that you need to be relying on the stock market less as you age, to avoid it crashing right when you retire. The usual solution is bond funds, which is much safer but much worse returns, or a mixture of bonds and stocks which is a mixture of the two in terms of safety and returns. So really the person who had to withdraw is only back up to $500,000 while the person who didn't have to withdraw is up to $1,000,000.
(Calculations done using https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html)
Even very smart people make blunders in volatile times. For example, here's Bryan Caplan on what he did in 2020:
> Conditions in March were so bleak that I set aside both of these beliefs and moved from 100% stocks to 90% bonds. As a result of my excessive open-mindedness, my family has lost an enormous amount of money. The situation is so weird that I’m going to wait until January to return to my normal investment strategy. After that, I will never again deviate from buy-and-hold. Never!
(https://www.econlib.org/what-im-doing/)
This was a *catastrophic* decision by someone who ought to have known better!
The part you're missing is the overall drop in the stock market ahead of time. If you start with 500K, and the market drops 20% (500K x 0.8) now you have 400K. You pull out 50K leaving 350K. The market recovers (x1.2) and you have 420K. You've lost 80K after the market has recovered. Assuming $1000 a month contribution rate, you've lost 80 months. Much worse really if you aren't contributing during the time when stocks are cheap.
I think people are conflating a number of things.
First, the chart tracks wealth which is not yearly earnings. Wealth tracks closely to asset prices especially later in life. So the trend lines post 2008 probably says more about asset allocations by generation than anything else.
Second, a crisis is as much a psychological burden as an objective financial strain. They might not feel they can retire because 1) they made some panic-y investment decisions during the early days 2) they lost their job and were planning on having that income. Getting a new job at >60 isn’t really a thing or 3) they’re a bit stretched with their financial obligations. These things are deeply personal and reflect preferences and dispositions.
> “The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea.”
It's difficult to over-state how stupid this is.
- Piracy and state-sponsored privateering are unequivocally against international law -- law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)
- The Chinese have the world's largest surface navy, and the world's largest submarine fleet -- and they are chomping at the bit for any excuse to flex their muscles in the South China Sea, around the Strait of Malacca, in the Korean Sea, and in the Pacific all the way to the coast of Chile. The balance of power is not equal; the Chinese Navy is very powerful indeed, and these "Privateers" are, more likely than not, going to end up in Davy Jones' locker.
- Chinese trade is oriented towards export: Chinese cargo vessels are typically loaded with goods for US and European customers. Hit a Chinese freight carrier, and you've probably harmed Amazon and WalMart more than you've harmed the Chinese -- if indeed you've harmed them at all.
The notion of privateers may work as Casus Belli. It fails on every other strategic and tactical level. For there's only one way it ends: With the US condemned, with dead privateers, and with a justifiably strengthened and extended Chinese naval presence in every body of water but the Atlantic.
To be fair, the article argued in favor of using privateers if war ever broke out with China, not before. And the argument was that the Chinese Navy is so powerful that the US Navy will have it's hands full countering it, and that every privateer harassing Chinese shipping is one less US Naval ship that has to be diverted to the task.
Then it's even more stupid. What "war with China" ?!? Have they forgotten that China has nukes ?!?
While I agree that the idea is stupid, even the author isn't proposing that the privateers go up against the Chinese navy. He's proposing they take over the commerce campaign. There are other ways to do it which don't involve reliance on international law which hasn't been invoked for 160 years, though.
Also, where does the 1958 Convention ban privateering?
Honest question: why is the idea stupid? I recognize that it most likely is stupid, but I don't know enough to say why.
Short version: probably illegal, definitely less effective than simply requisitioning the ships and people and having the Navy give them orders.
I've been trying to find the text of the 1958 convention online, so far unsuccessfully. But various references specify that piracy is "for private ends," which suggested that a privateer might not qualify. After all, British naval vessels in the Napoleonic period got prize money for ships they captured, but that didn't make them pirates. So a privateer that is trying to make money but acting under the authority of a state for the state's ends might also not qualify.
So far in the thread nobody seems to actually have a cite to the convention banning privateers.
The 1958 Convention is here:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_High_Seas
Privateering is generally considered to have been banned by the 1856 Declaration of Paris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Declaration_Respecting_Maritime_Law), which has now been incorporated into customary international law (which is generally binding on everyone, even if they didn't sign, although this isn't absolute. International law is weird.)
Relevant because the U.S. did not sign the 1856 Declaration.
De facto, in articles 17 and 22.
The history of US privateering is interesting, and further illustrates why this would be a very bad idea, to say nothing of grossly hypocritical.
https://www.ijnhonline.org/why-there-was-no-privateering-in-the-spanish-american-war/
In any case, China isn't as reliant upon imports as the US. Privateering, unless done on a tremendous (impracticable) scale, would hardly annoy them -- and, given that the scale of Chinese shipping tilts towards exports, it might be an own-goal that injures allies and neutral parties more than it injures the Chinese.
Strategically-valuable shipping is sure to be well-guarded in any case. As a rule, privateers don't hit hard targets.
So this fever-dream, however romantic, is tactically and strategically moronic, and its implementation would probably strengthen the Chinese and weaken the US.
I am less than certain that those actually ban privateering, but I also don't think that's necessary. The Paris Declaration is almost certainly customary international law at this point. My 1980s International Law for Seagoing Officers doesn't even mention the subject at all, which I presume is because it was seen as totally irrelevant.
I agree that it's a bad idea. I'm not defending it in any way, and would point out again that Proceedings is not peer-reviewed, and that this is far from the stupidest thing I've seen there. My thoughts on how to do this were definitely informed by Spanish-American war experience, including the very ships that article cites, although I do think he slightly misunderstands the Naval Militia, and generally isn't that familiar with US thinking in the runup to war. (If you're not aware, I'm a serious hobbyist naval historian.)
And China is very reliant on imports. It's just raw materials rather than finished products. No clue how that ends up in a war, particularly given that one of the biggest suppliers (Australia) is a US ally.
I can't say exactly what level of commerce warfare we're likely to see in a war with China. That depends heavily on the diplomacy surrounding the war, and what the US thinks it can get away with. But there's also the issue that we have the power to slap a blockade around China at source, in a way that wasn't possible up until the late 1800s.
"De facto, in articles 17 and 22. "
Can you quote the articles for the rest of us, or link to the convention?
...and it's "champing at the bit", despite what William Safire might say. My wife rides horses and insists on that! :)
I bet that your wife is a champ.
Don't pay much attention to those naval strategist type guys. They just have to write something to justify the salaries they get at some think tank. Plus, they get a hit of status in their field: "Oh, that guy over there in the pink shirt is the letter of marque guy, the one talking to the invade Hong Kong with the US Marines guy." They write some pretty wacky stuff because they know nobody but 50 people will ever read it. You can read to your heart's content at https://www.hudson.org if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.
"law that the US is a signatory to. (See the 1958 High Seas Convention, among others.)"
Madeline Albright called, she's reminding you of American Exceptionalism. For the liberal international order to work, we must enforce the international rules on others while not being subject to them ourselves. Thus she views American interference in other countries as totally in their right due to their superiority over others, while inferiors of course have no right to do the same to America.
All we have to do to put a stop to Chinese commerce is close the Strait of Malacca. It's where all their oil transits through from the US filling station in the Middle East, and they have a mere two months of reserves. You know what sits right at the lynchpin of the Strait of Malacca? Singapore, a staunch US ally. Unlike other US allies (Europe, looking at you, you worthless freeloaders) Singapore has a small but capable military, well suited to its job. Cutting China off from its oil supply would be as easy as when FDR cut Japan off from its oil supply in August 1941.
In a neat interlude probably of nobody's interest, but we have the minutes of the meetings at which the Japanese made the decision to go to war. They knew it was dicey and everything would have to go right to pull it off. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PPRtWDP9yR2U_MKb82rzmKgVm-5CWH2Q/view
China's navy is a paper tiger and can't even break past the first island chain. They're hemmed in with nowhere to go. It was big news when they sailed two whole ships to Turkey a while back. And may I remind you that privateers did not *sink* enemy vessels? They boarded them and took them as prizes. Pirates wearing naval uniforms. Imagine Erik Prince of Blackwater proudly leading a line of container ships into LA harbor: free bigscreens and housewares for everyone!
The authors are affiliated with CSIS, not Hudson Institute. That's more than a little disturbing, as I had this down as the ranting of retired officers who are mooning over their glory days being behind them. I'm definitely not a huge fan of think tanks in general, but HI is better than most, and this is the sort of dreck I'd expect out of CNAS.
As for closing off China's oil, that worked out so well last time we should definitely do it again. But yes, that is a definite vulnerability for them.
As for China's navy, no. It's quite good, and has been participating in regular operations off the horn of Africa for the last decade. Ships to Turkey was notable because of the diplomatic implications, not because it was notable the Chinese got ships out that far. (If Russia did it, on the other hand...)
Call me ignorant about naval affairs (because I am), but why is this Strait so critical? Couldn't China just go around Singapore instead?
Straits and geographic choke points are definitely important, but at the same time, shouldn't be overstated. The alternative to Malacca is the Lombok Strait, which is further, but not so much further that it couldn't be used. (Actually, I think a nontrivial fraction of the oil goes that way because Malacca isn't that deep.) There are probably other routes available, too, which never get used today because there's no reason to do so. But any blockade is going to be linked to intelligence work and economic and diplomatic attacks against the oil traffic, too.
In addition to the problems already mentioned.
- Modern naval weapons are too good at sinking ships, whereas privateering requires capturing ships intact to be profitable. For a trivial, and in this context uncontroversial, investment, China can equip their merchant fleet with defensive weapons that will sink any privateer, unless the privateer sinks them first.
- Privateers, being incapable of surviving a fight with real warships (especially modern ones), need to be able to hide from and if necessary outrun enemy warships. That's a lot harder to manage in a world of radio, radar, maritime patrol aircraft, and satellites. Harder still if you insist on taking prizes, which will be Lojacked beyond your ability to clear at sea. Even in a hot war with the United State, China will probably be able to spare e.g. an H-6K for a day to sink the privateer that just sank one of China's freighters, and that's all it will take.
- The rest of the world regards privateering as flat-out illegal, so virtually all of the ports of the world will be closed to the privateers *and their prizes*. Operating in the South China Sea directly from Hawaii, without any intermediate bases (what's left of Guam will have its hands full), is going to be logistically challenging to say the least. And the value of that prize ship you just took is greatly diminished if it can only be used in the US coastal trade, its cargo sold only on the US domestic market never to be reexported.
This is a stupid idea that keeps coming back every year or two because somebody read too many Napoleonic sea-adventure stories and thinks they're the only one who read those stories so their clever "obscure" idea is something the rest of us haven't heard and rejected a dozen times already.
Fun wargaming idea, stupidly terrible and terribly stupid actual policy recommendation.
I don't think the plan is to operate these in the South China Sea. That's a terrible plan. The idea is to use them in lower-threat zones in the rest of the world, where China won't be nearly as able to hunt them down and kill them. Defensive armament is legally tricky on merchant ships these days, and that might be an advantage to the privateers. They might also have access to friendly ports, but I wouldn't bet on it, as the lawyers will have all sorts of fits.
Defensively-armed merchant ships are far more palatable to the world's ports than outright privateers. Right now, the rule is "not any of that, but maybe we won't look too closely for small arms in the cabins of those suspiciously fit and clean-cut deckhands", but if that ever changes enough that the US can find any ports open to its privateers, I'm pretty certain China will find ports open to defensively-armed merchant ships.
If that's not the case, it's because the US has so thoroughly won the diplomatic conflict that the issue is moot because nobody is trading with the Chinese anyway.
My expectation was that the privateers would have to operate out of US and maybe allied ports. Definitely nobody also trading with China. My thought was that the US might be able to put enough diplomatic pressure on other countries to keep the rule roughly as it is now, which limits them to maybe a few ATGMs and heavy machine guns. I am far from certain that more armament would be a good idea, as it means that the main US weapon in the commerce campaign switches from a boarding party to a laser-guided bomb.
If the Chinese are going to lose the ship either way, I'm guessing they would prefer it be sunk. Preferably in a way that makes the Americans look like the bad guys, and if the Americans are both sending out pirates and then bombing ships for daring to defend themselves against pirates, the Americans are going to look like the bad guys.
If the Chinese crew doesn't like that calculus, that's why the guns are manned by the PLAN, and in any event Beijing knows where the sailors' families live.
How can cargo be lojacked beyond your ability to handle? Can you not just faraday cage your cargo storage?
Try putting a Faraday cage over an entire container ship. I'll wait.
The US could simply issue a prize for every Chinese ship sunk by authorized privateers. We'll already outsource our work to professional mercenaries, no reason to leave the amateurs out of the fun.
I'll borrow a page from the subreddit on tricameral legislatures:
Party list proportional representation.
Mostly because I feel it's telling that it wasn't even originally considered. Without necessarily making a value judgement, the various US federal elections are unrepresentative in so many ways - the population disparity of the senate, the per-state rounding of EC votes - that it often overshadows the part where even the House runs on a collection of single-seat elections the aggregate result of which is in no way guaranteed to be representative of the population as a whole. Yes, sortition is interesting and it would be nice to give it a run in a system where it's counterbalanced by more traditional forms of election, but if we're actually looking a for a system that's new, represents the population in a crucially different way from existing systems and is known to be functional and stable by itself, PLPP is the logical place to start.
I think this could be hard, because political parties don't exactly have a formal legal existence at the Federal level, as far as I can tell. (This is obviously a bit strange, for how important they are / have become.) I'm curious how all that works in countries where they are more of a formal part of the process.
I don't think that's really the sticking point. The parties would become more formal if they needed it. The real issue is that the people with the power to change the system are exactly the people who get elected under the old system.
I'm going to have to disagree with the article on the 1973 recession. Addressing its initial points:
1) The embargo was declared October 17th, but the price of oil did not really spike until January 1st.
Response: The timeline cited in the response shows that the "embargo" was a number of smaller events, not a single blanket ban, with actions and counteractions by the US and other states. It wasn't until December 22nd 1973 that the OPEC Gulf Six decided to increase crude benchmark prices, which coincides nicely with the January 1974 spike in oil prices.
2) The price of food spiked two months before the embargo was declared and plateaued before oil prices went up.
This part is inarguably true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=AZ8i However, there were inflation spikes in 1969 and 1980 that led to similar economic slowdowns, neither of which had anything to do with Bretton Woods.
3) A multiyear stock market crash started in January 1973, 9 months before embargo was declared.
Up until December 1973, this was a less than 5% Y/Y drop in the markets: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BzDe There were similar drops in 1978, 1988, etc., none of which led to severe economic slowdowns.
4) Previous oil embargoes had been attempted in 1956 and 1967, to absolutely no effect.
There's a decent description of the 1956 and 1967 oil embargoes here: https://www.ogj.com/drilling-production/production-operations/article/17235813/the-oil-weapon-past-present-and-future
1956: Embargo is only on Britain and France, not the US; production is not affected. The US makes up the loss in shipments to Britain and France with its own production.
1967: The embargo does affect the US, but only lasts 3 months and involves no production cuts or changes in benchmark prices.
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the 1956 and 1967 embargoes to the 1973 embargo.
My personal opinion is that there was a minor economic slowdown in progress in early-mid 1973, which may have been caused by Bretton Woods-related issues, or may have been caused by other economic problems (inflation-related overheating, steel industry collapse caused by electric mills, etc.). The oil supply shock, however, would've destroyed even a perfectly healthy economy.
Yea these things are just incredibly multifaceted
It seems kind of incredible that left out are the main reasons :
- US oil production reached a peak in 1971.
- While demand kept growing (causing some supply difficulties even in 1970).
- So US crude imports more than doubled between 1970 and 1973 (and before 1973, import quotas were in place).
- In April 1971, practically for the first time since WW2, the American trade balance was in the red.
- 4 months later Nixon ends the Bretton Woods gold standard : the convertibility between gold and dollars, leading to a strong devaluation of the dollar.
- At the same time OPEC quickly sensed the wind turning, and feeling powerful for the first time, threatened an embargo in January 1971. Western companies caved in to this price increase, only the first one of a long series of concessions... (And OPEC partially *had* to do it, as the dollars they are getting for the oil become devalued compared to gold, important in the Islmai hawala ! Not to mention that they're just following supply and demand, at least until the (semi-) embargo itself.)
- Oil companies got nationalized all over the world : Algeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Lybia...
- A transfer of shares from Western companies to Arab Gulf countries in their oil companies (like Aramco, which extractions doubled between 1970 and 1973 !) was negotiated.
- Speculative : about the "Christmas Eve Massacre" itself : according to the ex-minister of the Saudi oil, the Shah of Iran had told him that Kissinger wanted a higher price so that the Western oil companies could finance big new oil projects, now primarily offshore.
- Between 1973 and 1974 the natural decline of American extractions was almost double the reduction of oil mandated by OPEC's political decisions.
- 1970 to 1973 was a transition from the oil market being ruled by demand to being governed by supply.
Source : *Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History* by Matthieu Auzanneau
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42527868-oil-power-and-war#
On cost disease: a non-monetary form of compensation is "how hard and how many hours do you have to work?". If competition for skilled labor is high (e.g. programmers and financiers) then even non-productive sectors like education and health have to compensate to attract skilled labor.
22. I've been noticing how tempting it is to assume that people you don't know and don't like have clearly perceptible bad motives-- and more so if you're in a group that doesn't like those people. Thanks for updating.
Re# 22, Doesn't everyone think 911 was an inside job? it was used to shamelessly justify the war on terror, drone warware, state secrets and improve Dick Cheney's Halliburton shares. Osama Bin Laden was Bush golf buddy and they refused to find him, despite lots of intelligence tips.
I don't think everyone thinks that, and what do you mean about Osama being Bush's golf buddy?
They were friends. https://www.denverpost.com/2006/09/11/bush-ties-to-bin-laden-haunt-grim-anniversary/
https://listverse.com/2018/01/06/10-bush-bin-laden-connections-that-raised-a-few-eyebrows/
The Denver Post page doesn't want me to read it, so I'll instead discuss the listverse page. It flatly claims Osama was a CIA asset, which has been contradicted by both the CIA agent in charge of the program and Ayman al-Zawahiri's "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner". The CIA funneled their money through the ISI, and contrary to the NBC News article cited by the listverse page, that meant Afghans rather than Arabs. Pakistan has a frankly artificial border with Afghanistan that ethnic Pashtuns/Pukhtuns cross regularly and has long funded Islamists in Afghanistan in order to undermine ethnic sectarianism (of the sort that resulted in East Pakistan breaking away to form Bangladesh). It's a very important point that they want Afghan proxies in Afghanistan (Iran funds rival proxies there, mostly among the non-Pashtun ethnicities less inclined toward Sunni islamicism as a unifying ideology). Arabs who'll move on to somewhere else once the Soviets leave are not so useful to them. The Arabs, for their part, were getting plenty of money from the Saudis (admittedly, Saudi Arabia agreed to match US funding during the war, so there is a more indirect sense in which CIA funding can cause it). Zawahiri noted that they didn't need to get any money from ISI because the money coming out of the Middle East. Bin Laden in particular was rich enough to have autonomy. Various figures who fought against the Soviets were later active as the warlord era of Afghanistan, but it's important to remember that the Taliban was a reaction against that era. Bin Laden was not a "warlord" then, as his group was not that significant compared to the various Afghan bands and he only relocated to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/who-responsible-taliban
The Denver Post article merely explains that Bush Sr had ties to the Bin Laden family, but that family was estranged from Osama. You are conflating other members of the family with Osama.
I think it's perfectly consistent to believe both (a) 9/11 was a terrorist attack orchestrated by Saudi Arabia without US government involvement and (b) the US government (and Cheney in particular) used that attack as an excuse to create and maintain the war on terror.
For what it's worth, I think the mainstream theory is that Saudi Arabia, as a government, also had nothing to do with it, though some former Saudi citizens, some exiled to Afghanistan and others at work in the United States, did all the plotting.
That's my understanding. IIRC they exiled bin Laden many years before 9/11 for criticising the government or something.
By "criticizing the government", you mean setting off bombs in Saudi Arabia ?
I don't remember that, but I believe you. Bin Laden blowing something up isn't exactly surprising.
It's very likely because "criticizing the government" was the official Saudi Arabian reason that maybe was given ?
It might also have taken quite some time to link these bombings to Al Quaeda..?
I think the mainstream theory puts a little more onus on the Saudi government. Like parts of the Saudi government were signing a lot of checks to people saying death to America and trusting US security forces to stop this before it went too far.
It reminds of how, during WW2, Ireland stayed neutral. When asked about the possibility of German invasion, the prevailing wisdom was, "Don't worry, the Royal navy would never allow it."
Yeah, I think saying that they had some policies with this sort of thing as a foreseeable result is plausible, but I really want to deny the "orchestrated by" claim (which is relevant to "inside job" and related claims). It's sort of like the difference between Trump recklessly encouraging the mob on Jan. 6, or knowingly benefiting from Russian involvement in 2016; vs Trump planning the attack on the capitol, or colluding with the Russian government.
Reichstag Fires can and do happen. Communists firebombing parliament, planes to the WTC, a horde of larping idiots at the Capitol, list goes on.
Wars get justified for a lot of reasons, and some of those reasons are legit. A lot of people made money off the World Wars, but Germany really did invade Belgium and Poland.
Drone warfare is just a natural continuation of trends in how the US has been trying to fight its wars for decades. Throwing money at a problem to save blood has been the American way of war since WW2, precision weaponry in preference to carpet bombing started in Vietnam, and fighting a war by air power alone was the Kosovo campaign. The legalities of it are..."sketchy", but not really giving a damn about the laws of other countries is sort of a US hallmark at times too(basically, whenever they think it's really important).
And state secrets are kind of universal. I don't see how 9/11 changed those very much one way or the other.
On the flip side, imagine how big this conspiracy would need to be. Presumably, it didn't start with 19 suicidal hijackers who were in it to boost Cheney's stock prices, so you need to get rid of four planes complete with a couple hundred passengers, fly something that looks plane-shaped into several major buildings in the middle of extremely busy areas with lots of people watching (plus one random field in Pennsylvania), and then destroy the buildings somehow (since I assume you're like most truthers, and don't think they fell as a result of the impacts themselves).
How many people would need to be in on a conspiracy like that? Genuinely, ask yourself this question. How many people would it take to arrange this. You'd need to destroy four planes without alerting ATC or having the passengers' personal effects show up anywhere (or alternately, convince hundreds of people to never see their loved ones again for decades, without any of them changing their minds). You'd need to have three of the most famous buildings in the world wired to explode somehow, without anyone noticing. And you'd need everyone involved to keep their mouth shut for 20 years now.
Now, it's possible to keep a secret with that many people involved for that long - I know of exactly one example of it. The WW2 codebreaking efforts were secret for about thirty years post-war, and they used a similar number of people. But consider the differences. That was about winning a war against literal Nazis, and secrecy was essential to the task. That is a very strong motivation to keep a secret. You can make it clear that this is a noble undertaking, in a way that they'll believe.
Now, consider a conspiracy without such a strong motivation. Say, five dudes breaking into a hotel room in 1972. By 1974, that one took down a President, because nobody involved had any particular reason to keep quiet except saving their own skins, plus a desire to win an election. That's not strong enough to keep a lid on the act of merely tapping a phone. Now imagine if the Watergate break-in had been about planting a giant bomb, and thousands had died? You'd expect whistleblowers about that before they even broke in, because most people dislike mass murder.
The only "everybody thinks" conspiracy theory I know of is the one where Epstein was murdered. And that one is at least plausible - one person can do it on the orders of one other person, so it's small enough to contain, and there's obvious motivation on the part of powerful people(whether you pin it on Clinton, Trump, or Prince Andrew, the fact that all three of those names are plausible says enough). Of the common conspiracy theories, it's by far the most reasonable.
> On the flip side, imagine how big this conspiracy would need to be. Presumably, it didn't start with 19 suicidal hijackers who were in it to boost Cheney's stock prices, so you need to get rid of four planes complete with a couple hundred passengers, fly something that looks plane-shaped into several major buildings in the middle of extremely busy areas with lots of people watching (plus one random field in Pennsylvania), and then destroy the buildings somehow (since I assume you're like most truthers, and don't think they fell as a result of the impacts themselves).
If you're examining this theory as an intellectual exercise, you should try to construct the most plausible variant, not the least plausible.
Imagine (some element within) the Bush administration really wants an excellent casus belli. al-Qaeda actually exists and already has its grudge against the US. The obvious avenue is for US agents to inflame, foment and enable the actual al-Qaeda terrorists behind it, running cover for them behind the scenes in a deniable way. Assuming you can run the actual intel op with only a few professionals who are capable of keeping a secret, from the outside this just looks like US intel being oddly incompetent in failing to prevent the plot. Which we do in fact see in the case of 9/11.
Note that this is already a known US intel MO -- they love funding disposable third parties to achieve goals that are unpalatable as direct US actions, and also soliciting and enabling terrorist attacks in order to make them look good. (Normally in the latter case the actual attack is prevented as soon as the patsy has done enough to enable the felony prosecution, but letting the attack go through in order to make a casus belli is only a small extension of this.) And the reaction we see to 9/11, where people with existing agendas (patriot act, Iraq invasion) immediately and seamlessly pivot to pushing them through using 9/11 as a justification, is also consistent with this scenario.
I have no reason to believe that this actually happened, but it's a much more plausible story than all the silly weakmen that rely on secret demolitions teams or airplane holograms. Indeed, if this story were true, then intentionally inflaming all the silly weakmen would be a good idea on the part of the actual conspirators; it would provide a cowpox-y inoculation against anyone considering more plausible conspiracy theories.
But would you still describe this more plausible theory as 9/11 being an 'inside job'? I usually associate that terminology with theories that the US government actually planted charges that brought down the building in a controlled manner.
I think I would. The only thing I would require to say "inside job" is that USG agents were involved in causing or permitting it, not any particular mechanism by which it happened.
Of course, the usual conspiracy theories are wildly unlikely, and it's probably more likely this guy subscribes to an unlikely theory than a likely one on priors.
If the truthers posited the theory that the US riled up al-Qaeda until they did something big, that'd be a much more reasonable theory. But that's not the truther argument, or a plausible steelman of it. That's the Noam Chomsky argument.
In fairness, there's the "let it happen" truthers, and yes, it does match their theories. But that didn't seem to be what Ko was getting at, and it isn't the default truther position, that I've ever seen.
Also, there was a South Park episode about that meta-conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_of_the_Urinal_Deuce
The last time anyone checked (2008), more than 70% of the world's population either believed that 9/11 was done by a bunch of pissed-off Arabs or isn't sure. Only 15% believed that the United States Government was responsible, and those were disproportionately pissed-off Arabs themselves. So no, "everyone" doesn't think that.
If you want to modify that to "everyone smart" and define "smart" as "agrees with me about the obviously true and important things", then your question becomes a boring tautology. For a more open-ended definition of "smart", no, most people generally considered smart don't believe that.
re flat earthers and humanizing them: https://twitter.com/bucketofkets/status/1363699922915106819?s=21
I think basically everyone could learn something from flat earthers, primarily because we don’t really have good cultural technology for interacting with people that disagree this profoundly with you about something
On the other hand I like Scott's point in "The Cowpox of Doubt" that using Flat Earthers as your easy-to-reach model of people you disagree with is a terrible mental habit to get into.
Flat Earthers are an outlier in terms of wrongness. I'm not sure if there's anyone else who is quite so obviously and insistently wrong about something that's super easy to disprove. Their motivations are ineffable, often they just seem to be massively trolling everybody else by pretending to believe something crazy, sometimes they even seem to be trolling themselves for kicks. But whatever's going on in their heads, it's a terrible way to develop cultural technology for interacting with people that disagree with you, just as you won't get better at boxing by punching a bowl of wet noodles.
I don’t think flat earthers are a particularly large outlier in terms of wrongness, but I do agree that they’re “easily disproved” if you already buy into the dominant western epistemological tradition of empiricism, and already trust scientific institutions to reliably report “facts”.
But the whole point is that people come into disagreement arising out of incompatibilities of orthodoxy all the time, so the tools you might use within the confines of an orthodoxy don’t really work when you’re reaching “across the aisle” so to speak.
Thus, I don’t think it’s any easier to convince a “legitimate” flat earther they’re wrong, than it is, say, to change the mind of an anti-vaxxer, or convince someone that evolution happens.
I think that Flat Earthers are an outlier in terms of wrongness. What I mean, specifically, is that ordinarily when debating someone I disagree with (say, an anti-vaxxer or Holocaust denier) then I need to keep in mind the fact that they just might have a point. Maybe they're right and I'm the one who is wrong, or maybe the truth is some kind of complicated synthesis that isn't quite the same as they believe but isn't quite the same as I believe either.
With flat-Earthers, they're clearly and obviously wrong enough that I think that discipline can go right out the window. They're wrong; clearly, obviously and hilariously wrong, and I've personally verified their wrongness in many ways, from watching ships go over the horizon to flying around the world. It takes no expertise to see that they're wrong, and I don't need to rely on expert opinion to tell me that they're wrong. You don't get that with anti-vaxxers, or even with creationists, let alone with mainstream real-world disagreements.
I think we’re talking past each other. For me, there’s two things going on:
1. The confidence with which you believe something to be the case
and
2. How might you go about convincing someone that they are wrong
On 1., flat earthers aren’t really outside the gamut of [overconfidence in wrong statements about reality], all told. Their phenomenological experience of “I feel like I’m right about this” is more or less identical to yours or mine, they’re just, as you point out, clearly and demonstrably wrong to you and me. This is what I mean, very specifically, in how their wrongness is not an outlier. Plenty of people are just as confidently wrong about plenty of things as the flat earthers.
On 2., despite their obvious wrongness to you and me, it’s actually pretty difficult to communicate this obvious wrongness to them, for a variety of reasons—reasons that play out symmetrically any time two people coming from somewhat incompatible epistemological orthodoxies collide. Some of these reasons are sociological—after watching the Netflix documentary it’s clear that plenty of these folks feel a sense of communion by participating in meetups, by perpetuating the myth. Whether they “really” believe it is sort of orthogonal to the material benefits they get out of being part of the community. “Proving them wrong” is like trying to tear a qanon-believer out of their friend group / support systems.
For others they’ve lost patience with “the system”, and simply don’t trust capital-S Science’s understanding of material reality, so they go and do things like write really long articles about symplectic integration that are subtly wrong.
I don’t think either of these types of people are “out of reach”, or even really that much different than your creationists and anti-vaxxers. They’re simply confidently wrong about a different kind of thing.
As a former young earth creationist, I want to second your point about community being vastly more important than independent reasoning for holding or changing beliefs. Of my few major belief shifts in life, every one has been preceded by a shift of community, loosening ties with the old as I latch onto the new. Looking on it later, it was necessary for me to build community in the new group as a prerequisite to "coming out" with changed beliefs. Community comes first for a lot of people (not just wrong people!), and the more "fringe" the belief, the greater that which sets you apart from the world. One can fill in the science later.
"You'd loose the bond of family!" your instinct diatribes.
Decide: Be shunned to wilderness, or rest in harmless lies.
Act against evolved traits? Your logic may agree,
but in your gut, you crave not truth, you crave community.
Yes, I'm more or less ignoring "2" because I don't like to think that "convincing someone that they're wrong" is a legitimate aim of a conversation with someone you disagree with. The aim should be to attempt to convince yourself that you're wrong.
Fair enough!
Why?
Convincing someone they're wrong can have significant instrumental advantages - sometimes for you, sometimes for the other person.
Of course, it helps if they're actually wrong.
"Flat Earthers are an outlier in terms of wrongness. I'm not sure if there's anyone else who is quite so obviously and insistently wrong about something that's super easy to disprove."
I recently had the flooring realization that the woke/TRA mantra of TWAW/TMAM is actually worse than flat eartherism because it asks you to disbelieve your own eyes on something easily verifiable by a simple assault charge. Confirming that the Earth is round, even without accounting for refraction and whatnot, with the old holes and sticks method, is actually really high effort in comparison.
The woke do not have false beliefs about the contents of transgender people's pants. Rather, their definitions of "man" and "woman" are different from yours. It's not about what kind of body you have; it's about whether you feel, deep in your heart, that you are a man or woman (or neither).
I always thought Flat Earthers just enjoyed making "rational" people lose their shit and thus prove they're not so rational after all. The more stonefaced and seriously you take it, the angrier they get. Michael Malice does a good job explaining it here with a comparison to Andy Kaufman: https://youtu.be/BIk1zUy8ehU?t=3856
One thing I did learn from flat earthers (or was reminded of) is that experimental science is really hard. Even for a basic claim like "the Earth is curved", getting a measurement to agree with a prediction requires accounting for many surprising affects like atmosphere refraction and so on.
Measuring the curvature of the Earth with simple tools is a useful exercise in coping with Nature's Magnificent Complexity.
It's also funny how one of the most common physical models assumes an infinitely flat (and deep) Earth...
"Maybe you’ve heard of the Big Mac Index, where economists use the price of a Big Mac to determine how a country’s currency is doing? And maybe you’ve heard of Goodhart’s Law, where anything that becomes a target gets manipulated? Yeah, Argentina is accused of pressuring McDonalds to underprice Big Macs to get better terms on its debt."
Argentina participated in both the 2011 and 2017 ICP; its price level was reported as 66.4% of the U.S. (lower than Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil) in 2011 and 61.9% of the U.S. in 2017 (still lower than Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil).
https://databank.worldbank.org/embed/ICP-2017-Cycle/id/4add74e?inf=n
Manipulated or not, Argentina seems like the kind of outlier that makes the Big Mac index a bad idea to begin with. Argentina has many economic problems, but a lack of beef is not one of them.
re: #6 I wish I could find it again, but I have a facebook friend with insider-type knowledge of how these public budgets are created, and they basically said that since money is fungible, universities can and do make the budgets look like anything they want at that level of abstraction. And, they claim, this is why the bigger budgets are always sort of milquetoast, across the board rises. As opposed to them being actually milquetoast across the board rises. My facebook friend didn't say what they thought the money was actually being allocated to, and since I can't cite my source this is more like a trailhead or invitation for someone to look more deeply.
Can you explain how money being fungible lets them do this? If you have to pay $1 million extra to employees, how do you make this look like a boring across-the-board rise?
There are some weird things you can do. For instance, at many software companies it's common to capitalize the cost of creating new software — the intuition here is that if I make some new product, that's an asset (sort of like a factory or a machine) and we should treat it that way in the accounting results.
In practice, this means you move a portion of your software engineering salary expenses out of the "wages and salary" part of your accounting results and into depreciation. The logic usually goes something like this: if it took X hours of SWE labor to make this product, and we pay SWEs Y per hour, then the capitalized value of the software is X * Y.
That chunk of money (X * Y) is pulled out of your salary expenses and put onto the balance sheet to depreciate over some period of time (36 months is pretty common). It'd look like this:
Year A
Salary & Wages (on report) = Salary & Wages - Capitalized Software (this is X*Y)
Depreciation (on report) = original depreciation + Capitalized Software depreciation (usually X * Y / 36).
So by doing this, you can artificially lower your apparent payroll expenses on your financial statements since you've buried it in depreciation instead. It does show up on the balance sheet (in the form of an extra asset) so it's possible to tell when companies do this, and it's actually a common industry practice.
I doubt Harvard would have this, though. They're probably not building enough software for this situation to apply.
I'm still confused. If I were a car company, and my workers made cars, surely I would list my workers' salaries in one place, and then the values of the cars I had made in another place. Is this what you're saying software companies are doing, or is it something different?
The first thing to keep in mind is that an income statement (like Harvard's) isn't a measure of assets or inventory, but a measure of the activity in some particular period (e.g. 2020).
On that statement, there will be some lines for revenue (value of cars sold, tuition) and also some lines for expenses. Some of those expenses are direct inputs into the production process (e.g. the cost of car parts). Some of those costs are for labor (salaries, benefits). Some of those costs are for other things, like rent expenses or IT.
Generally, you're not allowed to move expenses between sections. If a company could pretend salaries were actually food expenses, or car parts costs were actually rent, financial statements would be useless!
However, there are some weird cases where this is allowed. Many of these cases are because of a fundamental principle of accounting: the matching principle. We want to associate revenue with the costs of that revenue whenever possible. So if the company buys a building, it doesn't want to suddenly have the whole price of the purchase sit on one month's income statement. After all, the building will be used for many years.
So instead, what happens is that the company takes the whole cost of the building and spreads it out over some period of time based on the expected useful life of that asset. For computers, it can be as short as three years, and for actual buildings, it can be as long as thirty years.
Instead of having one big expense for "buildings" or "machines", you instead have a small expense each month in "depreciation". This makes it so that your financial statements are more representative of the actual profit and loss for each period, but also makes them less informative.
The story of capitalized software is that some accountants made a convincing-enough argument (to auditors) that if a company is making big software projects, it should be allowed to treat some kinds of salaries in the same way as old-school physical assets. Hence, instead of having a big expense one year in "salary", there is a smaller expense for several years in "depreciation".
Long story short, you generally cannot obfuscate what the expense categories mean, except in certain special cases. Most of the fudging comes from having expense categories cover enough kinds of spend that it all kind of blurs together.
Potentially hire contractors to do something and classify it as “services purchased”. That category feels like a catch all.
The OP also postulates there has been an outsized increase in researchers. That could be standard “increase my fiefdom” behavior from Professors so while they’re not getting paid more, they’re behaving in a way that’s consistent with most large organizations where middle management cares a lot about increasing their budget.
I have no interest in doing this, but if your friend wants to get an account on Guide Star, they can get access to the IRS Form 990 for all registered non-profits, including Harvard: https://www.guidestar.org/profile/04-2103580
Unless you're actually a government, you can kind of do what you want with how you publish your budget, but you can't lie on your tax returns, and for non-profits, the tax returns have to be made publicly available. Alternatively, if you donate any amount, they have to provide it to you themselves, if you don't want to get a Guide Star account.
Speaking as someone who works in a company's finance department, this is more-or-less on point. There are usually two sets of accounting numbers, one for external reporting and one for internal management use. The former is meant to be deliberately uninformative, since you want to reveal as little information as you can get away with to your competitors. The internal managerial reporting is meant to actually be useful and thus has much more detail, but is kept tightly secret.
But there are still limits on what you can get away with. For instance, we can expect the "Salaries and Wages" and "Employee Benefits" sections to actually mean things like base salary, bonus, payroll taxes, severance expenses, health insurance, etc.
First link is nice demonstration of American empire losing its mind as China rises and it can no longer control the globe.
Proceedings isn't peer reviewed. For every good and insightful article, you have someone else beclowing himself in public. It's not always 100% clear which is which, and USNI's core mission is to facilitate discussion. This is clearly a beclowning, but the author speaks only for himself, not for the "American empire".
It's just a retired officer writing something. They write lots of stuff. As long as the US controls the oil in the Middle East, the US controls the world. Nothing runs without a steady supply of energy.
That first link demonstrates a pretty terrifying lack of understanding when it comes to who actually owns the cargo on those Chinese merchant vessels. It's usually American or European companies who source from Chinese factories (e.g. Apple relies on factories in China to make iPhones). The goods are carried on a Chinese vessel by a Chinese shipping company, but they're owned by the consignee — the company that actually receives the final goods.
The victims of privateers attacking Chinese cargo vessels would be American firms. This isn't the old days when the Spanish were sailing silver back to Europe.
Well, the idea I suppose is that the Chinese factories need the American firms more than vice versa, and if you were to forcibly sever trade links between them then the American firms would start manufacturing their electronics domestically at a 20% markup or whatever (or, more realistically, move their outsourcing to SEA rather than PRC), whereas the Chinese factories would be screwed.
I have no idea whether this is actually true.
At least for the electronics supply chain it's not really true. The Shenzhen area has a tremendous nexus of industrial expertise; there are a lot of things that can't really be made economically anywhere else. Another example is how many car companies have stopped production lately due to a lack of chips — for certain classes of chips Taiwan's TSMC is basically the sole supplier because they are the only company who has the technology to manufacture certain designs at scale.
Of course if we actually had a war and those factories became off-limits to American firms, there would be an enormous incentive to build a new supply chain, but this would take years and a huge amount of investment. Many firms would go bankrupt first.
To be fair, the main asset in seizing a Chinese cargo vessel is the vessel itself. At least from a strategic point of view. Also, if we are at war with China then I imagine there will be a lot less cargo owned by American firms on Chinese ships, as they would no longer be welcome at American ports.
That makes sense! If there really were a war presumably it wouldn't be a surprise, and American firms would have been forced to stop using Chinese factories already.
Ships seized by American privateers won't be welcome at any non-American ports. Either the ship will be turned over to its lawful Chinese owners, or it will be interned while the lawyers spend the next twenty years arguing over it.
The idea isn't to sink the ship but to seize it. So the prize crew sails the ship to the U.S. port it was going to, delivers the goods to U.S. customers, and retains possession of the ship. If the good had not been paid for in advance, it collects the payment.
Collects the payment from whom? We're talking about a hot war with China, so there aren't going to be Chinese ships sailing to the United States with goods for paying American customers. The foreign customers definitely won't be paying American pirates, because their own countries' laws are going to frown on doing business with pirates. Maybe the goods they were carrying to or from e.g. Iran will turn out to be valuable on the American market, and maybe American customers will be willing to buy what international law regards as stolen property, but if either of those things come up short then the privateers don't get paid. Add that to all the other ways for privateers to not get paid in this venture, and it's not looking like nearly as profitable a venture as it was in 1812.
Shame about Lambda Schools. I guess they used to be good and all of a sudden... they're just burning their reputation for cash for no apparent reason? What's up with that? I was really excited about the ISA model.
"for cash" That's the reason.
It doesn't look like a good deal to me. The $30,000 cost is more than what the Coursera MS programs cost, and Georgia Tech's MS in CS through Udacity is still under $10,000. Granted, a MS program (even a MOOC one) has prerequisites that are a lot harder to meet than a web dev bootcamp, and probably takes longer to complete, but it also gives you a much broader knowledge base that doesn't lock you into being a web dev, which tends to be among the lowest paying of software jobs.
The widely-shared Academic Times article doesn't appear to contain any new news about the candidate malaria vaccine. Its news hook is that a patent was recently approved, but as far as I can tell, there is no actual status update since early December, when it was reported that a team at Oxford plans to start final-stage human trials sometime this year. (And they don't seem to be saying much, that I can find?) See:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/05/team-behind-oxford-covid-jab-start-final-stage-of-malaria-vaccine-trials
I don’t have much interest in fashion but I liked this article about Mary Kate and Ashley’s Olsen’s post-Full House career as fashion entrepreneurs. It’s interesting to read about a business so clearly focused on serving the Upper Class, who has nothing to prove, so they buy $1,500 beige sweaters with boring cuts and no labels.
https://www.thecut.com/2021/03/mary-kate-ashley-olsen-the-row.html
The privateering article is utterly moronic, and basically an act of war. Sheer lunacy - ask Bean or anyone else.
If you are already in a shooting war with the Chinese, use frigates or corvettes or coast guard cutters or allied navies. If the Chinese have so many allies that they somehow can ignore the huge insurance hikes in a shooting war, you just need to drop more bombs on shipping.
If you are not, and start doing such idiotic things, the Chinese will shoot back. They are in the process of building a navy.
Seriously, Scott, don't signal boost this kind of idiocy.
We are adults. The initial disclaimer is enough.
You might be an adult. I'm only eight years old.
And I'm a dog.
Not to defend the idea (I have no idea if it's feasible) but the article in question proposed handing out letters of marque if we go to war with the Chinese, not before. The argument was that the US Navy is going to have it's hand's full countering the Chinese navy, and privateers would be able to raid Chinese shipping without us having to divert ships that are needed elsewhere to the task. He wasn't arguing we should start raiding Chinese shipping right now, while at peace.
China already has a Navy, and quite a potent one. It's the largest in the world by certain measures, although still inferior to the USN on the ones we should actually care about.
Oh yeah. Hence "in the process of". The Chinese will want flattops in the Persian Gulf and off Kenya someday. It's not a peer navy until it has six fully operational flattops and a solid base of institutional experience at the bare minimum.
My problem with this kind of language is that it gives the reader a very misleading impression of the state of the Chinese Navy today. I agree that it's not a peer navy, but it's (to borrow a terrible phrase from the DoD) near-peer, and it doesn't have to be a full peer navy to be formidable and a serious problem for the US if we were to get into a shooting war.
It is formidable, but the USN would still crush it like a bug one one month after mobilization day, after it assembled a four-carrier task force and rolled into the theater. Sure, the USAF/USN/allies would lose a carrier or two, ten thousand sailors and airmen, etc, etc on a bad day (and a few escorts), but it would probably win a crushing victory and sweep the Chinese Navy from the seas.
American expectations for military victory have been calibrated too high since the Gulf War live fire exercise.
Re: #8 (wealth decreases over last 30 years). I'm pretty sure that except for the youngest age group (which is more educated, starting their careers later), incomes are up for all the other ages over this time period [citation needed]. Interesting that wealth is down so much regardless.
I may be wrong, but I don't think it is showing absolute levels of wealth. My interpretation was that it was graphing relative wealth. If group A averaged half as much wealth as group B in the initial period and now had less than half as much, it's gone down, even if the wealth of group A has gone up.
All groups declined on this chart from 2007 to 2010, which I think is inconsistent with the graph representing relative wealth.
Assuming it is actually tracking absolute wealth, which isn't at all clear, this is likely a result of declining fixed payout pensions and home ownership. Of course, some of that "wealth" that 40 year olds had 30 years ago turned out to be fake if it was tied up in a fixed payout pension that disappeared when their employer declared bankruptcy and defaulted on pension payments.
Weath is "assets - liabilities" so even if income is up, people (under 50) today have fewer assets and more debt than those their age from previous generations. This makes sense: college loan debt, less likely to own a home (and if they do they are owners later in life), etc.
Re the first link, it's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don't judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They do a lot of good work.
And yes, it is that stupid. First, privateering is probably illegal today. The US didn't sign the 1856 Paris declaration outlawing it, but the ban is almost certainly considered customary international law today, and thus binding on the US, too. (International law is very weird.)
Second, it makes no sense. It was something that people did in an era when the ability of the state to do things was sharply constrained, and it was never all that profitable. These days, the government is a lot more effective, and if it wants to hunt Chinese commerce (never mind the issues about who owns the cargo, which is rather different in the days of worldwide communications and the shipping container) it will make auxiliary commerce raiders of its own. There's definitely no need to have a DDG sit outside a Brazilian port waiting. Take any reasonable civilian ship (big yacht, fishing boat, tug, whatever) and fit it with a couple of 40mm guns and a boarding party. Have it do the waiting instead.
In "Radical Markets", I think Glen Weyl and Richard Posner make the argument that index fund ownership of large swathes of the economy explain anti-competitive behavior of the airlines. If Delta, American, and United are trying to maximize shareholder value, and they know their main shareholders also own their competitors, then they invest in separate routes and let their competitors keep monopoly profits on some routes, and vice versa. I don't recall if there's anything more sophisticated than the knowledge by executives that their owners are shared, allowing the executives at the different companies to solve their collective-action problem.
I'm not sure how shared ownership is necessary for this.
Even if the owners of the airlines were totally disjoint sets of people, it's easy to see how a cozy anti-competitive triopoly does a better job of maximising shareholder value for each airline than investing in an expensive and destructive price war.
I think it's more that shared ownership just makes this kind of anti-competitive behavior easier, or more likely. With different sets of investors you at least have the (hypothetical) possibility of investor X pushing airline A to start a price war at the expense of airline B and investor Y, but if both airlines have the same investor there is a strong incentive against.
Makes sense, thanks.
That Kossin paper is rather misleading (and the reporting on it even more so): https://wmbriggs.com/post/34364/
Putting aside the feasibility and legality of privateering, how much of an investment would it be to become a professional privateer in the event of a war with China? What I mean is, what kind of boat, equipment, and personal would a modern day Francis Drake need to be a success at taking prizes on the high seas? I guess the Somalis would be the ones to emulate, but if you had financial backing what would be the most effective setup? I assume in such a scenario Chinese merchant ships would be better armed then your average ship today.
I'm not sure Somalis would be the ones to emulate. They happen to be right on a major route for seaborne trade, and you need a much bigger boat if you're going to go hunting on the high seas. Range is going to be an issue, because nobody who isn't fighting China will want to let you into port for fear of ending up in the horrible legal tangle that will result.
Here's what I'm wondering; let's suppose I take my crew and commandeer a Chinese cargo ship somewhere in the Pacific, and start sailing towards San Diego to sell my plundered booty. Next thing you know, along comes _another_ privateer, who sees my Chinese-flagged vessel and decides to take it for themselves. Do I wave a pirate flag and say "uh uh, this one is already taken?" What's to stop them from ignoring me and plundering my booty for themselves?
I would presume the same thing that made privateering work in the olden days, except even better thanks to radio and such ("Hey y'all, I'm an American piloting this here ship, so it'd be unpatriotic to try to take this ship from me"). I'm not sure exactly how privateering used to work though.
Is there some way to re-flag the ship you've taken?
Would you be selling the cargo and possibly the ship in San Diego or in some less affiliated country?
Just for fun, maybe we need an organization (dare I say it, a proto-government) of privateers offering each other mutual protection?
Presumably you uncleat the flagpole halyard (the rope keeping the flag up), lower the Five-starred Red Flag and hoist your country's flag.
What is to stop the Chinese licencing their own privateers in revenge? I don't think turning the Pacific into the new playground for pirates is going to help matters much.
Because that's not how privateering worked. Prizes had to be sent into a port to be condemned by an Admiralty Court before they could be sold. Courts did regularly turn loose prizes that hadn't met the letter of the law. So there's no reason to try to take a prize from another ship working for the same side, because it will be ruled that it should belong to the first captor, and not you. In the Napoleonic Wars, it might have been possible, if exceptionally risky. Today, the first crew is going to call home as soon as they take the ship, so there's no way to pull it off.
In the event of a superpower state actor that wishes to secure a trade route far from any land?
Whatever equipment you have, it better outrun long range missiles.
Would that actually be necessary? If we were to go to war with China, isn't it a pretty good bet that space would get messy, probably in ways that take satellites off the board? If that were to happen does this get more plausible, or am I overestimating military reliance on GPS?
I'm not sure, but reading the first link definitely gave me ideas about Silicon Valley startups creating methods to Disrupt the privateer industry.
Drones? Using crypto currency like Scott's ConTracked? The possibilities are intriguing...
My own conspiracy theory is that all of the Flat-Earther YouTubers are just trolls. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anyone smart enough to operate a computer could also believe that the Earth is literally flat.
I'm not a flat Earther, but...why would being smart enough to operate a computer convince someone that the Earth is round? I mean, if you don't trust the scientific "establishment" then a link to Wikipedia isn't going to do much for you.
I just think that the background level of education, plus the minimal critical thinking skills required to operate a computer (I did say, "minimal") would preclude one from believing in the Flat Earth -- plus or minus some diagnosed mental issues, possibly.
I doubt it-- all you need to operate a computer is the ability to use short chains of logic which can be tested quickly. Establishing that the earth is round is much more abstract.
You know, I hear this claim a lot, and it's actually a surprisingly common justification used for why a fringe theory must be true. I've been listening to a lot of cryptid and paranormal stories lately (for fun!) and it's amazing how often it comes up - "Dan is a civil engineer and a member of the Rotary Club." Or "Alice is a decorated USAF pilot." People with apparently high intelligence and education are perfectly happy to believe in Young-Earth Creationism, alien encounters, Bigfoot, 9/11 conspiracies, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's an interesting phenomenon, and I don't know how much it's been studied or what the implications are. But apparently being smart and accomplished is not inoculation from believing in some really out-there stuff.
My spouse stumbled upon a subculture of minor celebrities and comedians who discuss cryptids and paranormal activities on podcasts last year. To my surprise, she became an enthusiastic consumer of conversations.
In her telling it's kind of like being a fan of a science fiction franchise - there are characters, there are rules, there are fan theories, etc. And it's a way to set up fun conversations with your friends - we're going to get together every Thursday and tell jokes about bigfoot.
Bracketing the question of any specific non-mainstream belief, it seems on the whole quite likely that at least some non-mainstream beliefs are true. One shouldn't expect that being smart and accomplished (assuming this is used as some sort of filter for beliefs-more-likely-to-be-correct, which is questionable but plausible) should automatically push one closer to the mainstream in all questions.
Right. Some things that sound like crazy gov't conspiracies turn out to be true. Tuskegee is the first to come to mind, but also the thing where the FBI murdered a Black Panther leader and then lied about it, and the NSA domestic surveillance program. All of them would have sounded nuts before we knew about them.
MK Ultra was a remarkably crazy conspiracy which turned out to be true.
I can't believe I missed that one. *facepalm*
Not just conspiracies. Continental drift was an obviously nutty idea until it turned out to be true.
Right, I'm not saying it's dispositive one way or the other if seemingly intelligent individuals believe in something. I just think it's curious that it's NOT dispositive because that's the opposite of what I would expect.
This ties into the overall question of whether and to what degree you expect mainstream/consensus views to be truth-tracking. When you consider the institutions that are involved in constructing the mainstream view on any given topic, they usually have some notional purpose of truth-seeking and some pragmatic requirement of being not obviously wrong, but also a fair amount of leeway for internal or external politics to influence their pronouncements. And given the relative difficulty of checking mainstream institutions' work independently of those institutions, if the mainstream institutions firmly declare a falsehood it can take a long time for it to become clear to anyone that it's false.
Given this, you should expect the mainstream consensus on a topic to be determined by a mixture of the truth as they're best able to determine it, and the political and institutional incentives encouraging one narrative over another. Sometimes these political incentives are relatively straightforward and relate to legible political actors with a clear stake in one or another narrative being believed, but sometimes they're effectively random -- some highly-placed researcher stakes his reputation on a certain claim, and suddenly it becomes ill-advised to dispute that claim in public. (I suspect this is basically the case with Ancel Keys and dietary fat recommendations.)
Intelligent people are probably generally speaking more able to discern areas where mainstream wisdom is clearly false, and also more confident in trusting their own deductions over received wisdom. So you'd generally expect them to be more willing to entertain non-mainstream theories. This might or might not lead them to have more accurate beliefs on the whole; mainstream wisdom has problems, but it is truth-tracking to some non-zero degree, and an individual's reason can get skewed any number of ways by any number of things regardless of their intelligence.
The evolution of any large institution is governed partly by drift and partly by selection, but in the specific case of dietary fat recommendations there is at least some evidence to suggest that lobbying efforts played a prominent role. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html
For one example, I just read that a report from the CDC found that mask mandates work. I've seen a good deal of discussion on DSL, and while it is possible they work, it's far from obvious, easy to come up with what looks like counterexamples.
My response was that the CDC report doesn't much alter my view. The situation is complicated enough that anyone reasonably competent at statistical games could try multiple ways of evaluating the data until he found one that produced a statistically significant result, then throw away the others. And it's clearly in the interest of the CDC, which has long argued for mask wearing (ever since they stopped arguing against it), to have people believe it works.
To convince me, you need a context where there are competent people critiquing the article and publishing their own analyses. If they all end up agreeing it's probably true. If not, it might easily not be.
Flat Earth I really, really don't get just because GPS and satellite imagery would not work if it were true. I don't see how the believers get around that, though presumably they just understand how this stuff works. It'd be nice if the government and contractors could open source this stuff to prove that it really does rely on spheroidal earth models.
There are open-source software GPS packages out there that do the whole calculation. But who's going to 1. find and 2. read that source code, who wasn't already convinced by every other line of evidence?
That King of Germany is much less interesting (and handsome) than Louis XX, the current Bourbon monarch of France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Alphonse_de_Bourbon
A more legitimate (and handsome) pretender to the German throne is George Friedrich of the house of Hohenzollern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Friedrich,_Prince_of_Prussia (handsomer than Peter II, not Louis XX)
Meanwhile, other pretenders to the French throne include Jean IV according to the Orleanist claim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean,_Count_of_Paris and Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoléon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Christophe,_Prince_Napol%C3%A9on according to the Bonapartist claim. Or if you really want to get into esoteric claims, Queen Elizabeth II.
You just triggered half of the tiny remnant of French society still arguing over whether the House of Bourbon has a better claim to the French throne than the House of Orleans (Napoleon? Oh you mean that Corsican upstart? Please we're having a serious conversation).
The whole thing is of course a hilarious meme outside the tiny world of French nobility (a really interesting subculture). Nothing brings together communists and liberals quite like talking lovingly of the demise of French Monarchy; brings a smile to my face just thinking about it :')
"Napoleon? Oh you mean that Corsican upstart? Please we're having a serious conversation"
If you are rejecting recent dynastic changes, shouldn't you include in the list of candidates whoever the current Stuart heir is?
‘Dynastic change’ is an odd way of describing a sans culotte seizing power for a fleeting instant. 15ish years of rule is a rounding error to the Capetiens. Are we also conjuring dynasties from the presidents of the Convention? How about the members of the directoire, or the later consuls? Of course not!
Your claim regarding the Stuarts is of course absurd given the firm precedent set by the French youth in the 1450s.
(To be serious for a moment, I would argue that Napoleon was the first monarch to have a legitimate claim to rule over the French *nation*, as far as I can tell. The claims of the royal houses ring hollow when they are so clearly untethered from any modern understanding of the French nation. Just my Frenchie opinion, not a historian)
It's only 15ish years of Napoleon I. Napoleon III got in a solid 20ish.
The Yankee Candle bit is a cool proxy, but IDK how useful it will be. Countries with a developed consumer culture, like the US, where people will review everything they get on Amazon, seem to have more or less reliable COVID infection rate statistics already. But maybe if you can tease out the % of coronavirus-infected scented candle buyers, being able to track the spread of smell loss helps?
>"13: CTRL+F “Blackrock” in this Matt Levine column for a discussion of how we accidentally stumbled into true communism for the good of all. The short version: an investing company called Blackrock owns so much of the economy that it’s in their self-interest to have all companies cooperate for the good of the economy as a whole."
That's not what communism means and as far as I can tell Matt Levine never mentions it in his article, so again this appears to be related to your usual mistakes regarding leftist philosophy Scott.
It's a joke, obviously. However, some versions of market communism do exist where the modern economy works the exact same except that all the firms are controlled by a single organization (usually the government) that everyone has an equal share in.
"it's a joke, obviously"
It's hard to say for sure if this is a "joke" since Scott makes a lot of "jokes" about communism that show he doesn't understand what communism is or even the basics of Marxism. I have told Scott the basics of his mistakes over and over again and he never seems to fix his errors.
If you took every time that Scott off-handedly mentioned "communism" and replaced it with "that social and economic system that American society likes to make jokes about," you wouldn't lose any information (although it would be significantly less humorous).
I do think that there are a lot of leftist systems that are super interesting and that Scott would like more than he expects, if he actually investigated them, but I don't think Scott is ever going to seriously appreciate Marxism qua Marxism.
I don't think it's a good idea to mislead people regarding communism and making jokes about it constantly without ever getting a good handle on the philosophy behind it is one way Scott Alexander misleads people. Marx especially is an outgroup thinker and should be taken seriously instead of sneered at with a few inaccurate barbs.
Everyone, take a drink!
I read the communist manifesto once when I was young. Truthfully, I didn’t get it.
Now that I’ve lived a bit of life and seen the world, I might be curious enough to revisit those ideas. That is, until I interact with communists’ social norms and rhetoric. Then I realize that as a group generalization, you just lack any sort of sense of humor or self awareness. Even anarchists are more social able than you (which is actually fucking crazy if you think about it).
At this point, I don’t want to even come close to whatever ideological rat poison compels you to act the way you do. My life is just too good to fuck it up with that kind of angst.
Scott is clearly making a joke. The normative, pro social behavior would be to laugh, or acknowledge that you don’t get the joke and move on, or stop reading Scott given that you believe he continues to shit on the most important idea to you (and mankind or whatever).
Are we jokesters looking to be "sociable" or are we seeking the truth? The normal pro-social behaviour is to treat outgroup thinkers charitably, not to constantly attack them with "jokes".
Every time I point out something like this the automatic defence seems to be "he was joking". Like I said, the line between a joke and Scott's regular misunderstandings isn't really visible. He's never shown any ability to understand Marxist philosophy, so what is he even basing his jokes on? These certainly aren't deep jokes that arise from an actual understanding of leftist philosophy.
They're surface level jokes. Which is okay. This is a blog, not the front page of the Washington Post.
When a large group of autistic people have better ability to read social cues than you do on this topic, you should probably stop to think about whether the problem might be with how you're reading the room.
Surely autistic people have an ability to become familiar with the basics of Marxism philosophy.
We do. But we also know that Scott jokes around a lot, and we can tell which is which.
Actually no.
Not if part of being autistic is being more sensitive than usual to contradiction, or to claimed entails that don't actually follow...
“ These certainly aren't deep jokes that arise from an actual understanding of leftist philosophy.”
That’s because actually understanding leftist philosophy involves recognizing the inherent tragic destruction of life and intellect and therefore malevolent envy and greed based philosophies such as Marxism and Leftism are impossible to joke about except shallowly.
Jokes are an important part of injecting common sense into conversation and loosening the hold ideology has on people.
If your philosophy falls apart under a joke, perhaps it's just shitty philosophy.
Marxism does not fall apart "under a joke" - my point has always been that Scott Alexander's jokes show that he doesn't understand what communism is. His jokes always don't make sense if you know the basics of Marxism.
Maybe the jokes are aimed at the perception of Marxism?
Much of Sidney Harris' oeuvre is aimed not at physics but at perceptions of physics, and it turns out that physicists get that...
Well I'm a Marxist and I'm telling Scott that his jokes don't make any sense for any person even slightly familiar with Marxist philosophy. It seems more like he's aiming snide jokes at a very small ingroup which wants to act uncharitably to the Marxist outgroup.
Does it have to be one or the other? One can seek the truth without being dour pedant who refuses to understand the concept of humor, and one can occasionally joke about an ideology without forgetting the actual content of it. Marxism is a vile ideologic poison, which killed tens of millions in 20th century, and if we are going to be all serious and solemn about it, we have to mandate a lengthy quote from the Gulag Archipelago or a similar book each time this festering sore on the intellectual body of humanity is mentioned. But I think we can still occasionally be human about it and lighten the pain of the memory of humanity's colossal mistakes a little with some temporary light-heartedness.
This doesn't appear very charitable to the outgroup.
It is true, and unfortunately, still, after all these years, necessary. So I got two out of three. Unfortunately, it is very hard to be kind talking about Gulag. Maybe somebody better than me could.
Also, the Talmud - something more close to my heart - teaches that those who are kind to the cruel, end up being cruel to the kind. And judging by the results, if one can argue whether Marxism - after Russian Gulag, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Cambodian killing fields, German Stasi and many, many others - deserves the title of the cruelest ideology of the 20th century, the place in the top three is pretty much assured.
Moreover, I would argue that in many places in today's America - such as Hollywood or academia - a communist would be much more in-group than a Trump voter (or a conservative in general). And we all know how charitable are Marxists to Trump voters. So, I don't think there's much place for complaints.
What do you disagree with Marx about? If Marxism is a "vile ideologic poison" you should find something in his work you find so poisonous and quote it for us.
Are those the only two choices. Because it's certainly not "seeking the truth".
It's very clear that Marxists, like so many other groups
(a) have zero interest in examining contradictions, steelmanning opponent arguments, examining alternative viewpoints, and all the other machinery of truthfinding
(b) live in a world of unfalsfiability, one where there are literally no facts that could change minds
(c) consider it important to attack aggressively anything that threatens the ideology (internal dissent is, as usual, most important, but outsiders should also be attacked as and when appropriate).
This does not seem charitable to the outgroup. I'm a Marxist and I'm very interested in seeking the truth, that's how I became a Marxist in the first place!
The only anarchists with a sense of humour are the meta/epistemological kind (see also Scott's love-hate relationship with Robert Anton Wilson).
What did Scott say about RAW?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/03/against-anton-wilsonism/
Levine might not have invoked the term in that particular column, but he's been joking/not joking about how index funds could at least theoretically reduce competition to zero for publicly traded firms for years.
What Blackrock did was create an unusually concrete demonstration of how class war solves it's free rider problem. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/14/does-class-warfare-have-a-free-rider-problem/
#3 see also:
"A Remarkable Decline in Landfalling Hurricanes: Since 1945, the number of hurricanes that make landfall has declined by about a third" by Roger Pielke Jr.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-decline-in-landfalling
Last week a paper published in Science concluded that worldwide, “To date, there has been no firm evidence of global trends of the frequency of tropical cyclones with maximum wind speed above the hurricane-force wind (64 knots) at landfall.” That finding, which confirms our work, was based on data since 1982. But what happens when we take a look further back in time? What we find might surprise you.
This is a really interesting link, thanks for sharing. It's very surprising to see that the frequency of hurricanes isn't trending up after all. Another surprise from the same site:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-unstoppable-momentum-of-outdated
"We find that the most commonly-used scenarios in climate research have already diverged significantly from the real world, and that divergence is going to only get larger in coming decades. You can see this visualized in the graph below, which shows carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels from 2005, when many scenarios begin, to 2045. The graph shows emissions trajectories projected by the most commonly used climate scenarios (called SSP5-8.5 and RCP8.5, with labels on the right vertical axis), along with other scenario trajectories. Actual emissions to date (dark purple curve) and those of near-term energy outlooks (labeled as EIA, BP and ExxonMobil) all can be found at the very low end of the scenario range, and far below the most commonly used scenarios."
I was going to write a comment on how BAU is not RCP8.5 and this is known (linking to this article : https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-the-high-emissions-rcp8-5-global-warming-scenario).
But in fact I read the article you linked and it was much better than I thought it would be. The problem is of course that the energy modelling community and the climate community don't really talk to each other. I see a lot of discussion on this so maybe it will change.
But we should all be overjoyed that renewables seem to be getting really really cheap, that coal seems to be on its way out and that lots of climate policies are getting implemented! We might actually make it!
Unfortunately the climate community seems focused on the extremes: RCP8.5 as BAU scenarios (though that seems on its way out) and 1.5°C pathways, which in my humble opinion are impossible and the pathways that follow this are insane, with so many negative emissions, lots of CCS and just so much change that it would bet a lot of money that we will go over the threshhold soon.
A lot more effort should be put into modelling much more modal futures like 2.5°C, 3°C, 3.5°C which seems quite probable, and ironically we know much less about these than about +5°C or 1.5°C which are both insane in their own way.
Re 19: Gah, "A human's guide to words" again. I know that I'm goring sacred cows here, but that is probably my least favorite component of rationalist thought. It begins by knocking down a straw-man Platonism that even Plato didn't endorse (and which is characterized with, of all things, *Aristotelean* syllogism). And while it lays out useful tools to defuse certain kinds of confusion, it is *very* easy to over-apply the principle laid out in (for example) "disputing definitions".
There are certain words where we very much can't just acknowledge different definitions and move on. Moral philosophy can be summarized as a dispute of the definitions of words like "good" and "moral". And while hard-nosed nihilists might be comfortable with getting rid of all that, I don't think most people here will be. We need to dispute the "goodness" of, for example, ethnic cleansing - and we should counter an oppressive government's insistence on a different definition of "good" which includes it. Applied generally, the approach to words in the sequence is a short road to relativism.
As a more specific example, if you think utilitarianism gives you true answers about which actions to do, you need there to be a *real and true* concept of "happiness" (among other concepts), and you have to be prepared to defend your definition through argument. Otherwise, you won't have a leg to stand on in arguing that the mad scientists' nanobots shouldn't refactor you into a hedonium tile.
#17 The Montreal one... seems not relevant anymore because of the date. 1969 was height of the "We have all been having low grade lead poisoning".
Do something similar now and there wouldn't be nearly so much antisocial behavior.
Crime peaked in the 80s and early 90s. Not 69.
As for your suggestion, I suspect you'd like to volunteer your city for the experimental purge night?
I think a more reasonable counterpoint is that the city was very much already on the edge of political/nationalist violence. There was a lot of tension between the French and English-speaking populations, notably the Quebec separatist movement was in full-swing, and the Mayor was apparently quite corrupt and bestowed political favors to his wealthy supporters in the business community who were mostly from the English population.
It's unlikely that there would be nearly as much violence and rioting if the experiment occurred in an otherwise peaceful city. But it does show that if there's any tension in a community, if the police go away that tension is going to erupt fast and furious. And over time there's always going to be some tension at some point.
#6 Harvard's costs. Who cares. Harvard's costs have nothing to do with their prices (tuition, room, board, fees).
Harvard's customers are completely price insensitive. They are buying status and related things like connections and marriage possibilites. And the more it costs, the better it is. Their customers are the winners in the American economy whose ability to pay is determined by the stock market, not by wages.
Costs can only explain prices in the most competitive markets. Costs can explain why Avocados went from$0.90 to $1.25. But, they have nothing to do with higher ed tuitions, especially not at the top 20 schools.
I should also add that from what I know about management of higher education that none of the schools have a cost accounting system or a cost accountant. They have never tried to control their costs, and they won't until the government puts a gun to their heads.
Harvard is surely an outlier, and for various reasons (including those you say) they want their price to go up instead of most businesses who want them to go down.
But what's interesting is how Harvard tries to post-hoc justify its tuition raise. They have to say *something* about why what cost $65,000 last year costs $70,000 this year.
I buy all of our meat and fish at a little market in town. They used to sell salmon fillets for $1/lbs. more than the supermarket say $8 vs $7), but my market had better quality and better service. Whole Foods (corporate motto: "Why Pay Less) finally opened up in town. They sold the fish for $15/lbs. The market raised theirs to $14.
Harvard is the Whole Foods of the college world. If Harvard raises its tuition, Yale and the rest of the Ivies are sure to follow. They in turn provide pricing shelter to the rest of the top 20, and even to state schools like Michigan and UCLA.
The depths of this depravity are shown by the recent jail terms handed out to parents, including a couple of Hollywood actresses, who were bribing college officials to get their dumb bunny sprogs in places that included USC, for God's sake.
For the record. I am in favor of ending this whole sad sick game by legislation including wage and price controls on colleges and admission by lottery. See my comment to "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class""
I read Steve Pinker's quote about that police strike ending his youthful belief in anarchism around the same time I was reading Bruce Benson's "The Enterprise of Law" and it just made me think it was actually an argument AGAINST government provision of policing service vulnerable to public sector labor unions. In the years since the US has experienced some serious upticks in homicide, and I have a somewhat less hostile stance toward the cops (my opinion on prosecutors hasn't changed). Even if they do commit lots of crimes all the time (and get away with it) and fail to protect people compared to the ideal (or even what they're supposed to do), under current margins things get a lot worse when police reduce their activity and that tends to happen when public opinion shifts against them (or at least when that becomes salient). A whole lot more of "building the new society within the shell of the old" than even Benson describes will need to take place before a prolonged police strike won't make them look essential.
Anarchism isn't just 'capitalism but with no cops' so Pinker's position doesn't really make any sense. I say this as a non-Anarchist myself.
Anarchism even predates professional police forces!
Anarchist institutions almost certainly. Anarchy as an ideology using that name predates professional police forces in England but not, I think, in France, and surely not everywhere.
Yeah, I was thinking of Burke/Godwin.
I suspect that Pinker's youthful belief wasn't in anarcho-capitalism, but I would well be wrong.
I think he said it was anarcho-syndicalism.
One possible explanation of the change in relative wealth is the availability of easy student loans in the more recent period. If you borrow $100,000 you probably have negative wealth for quite a while.
Yeah - what proportion of that loss in wealth is due to increased tuition loans and/or increased house mortgages?
With regard to Ayn Rand's position on accepting government money. When I got an NSF fellowship I put the question to my father of whether it was legitimate to accept it. His response was that he was happy to credit me for some of the money the government had taken off him over the years.
Yeah, if the taxes aren't optional, you might as well take the proceeds that they'll give you. Don't get abusive with it, obviously, but you accomplish nothing by ripping up your Social Security checks.
"Don't take government money" leaves you vulnerable to an attack where the government taxes every a huge pile of money and gives it right back to you.
It leaves you worse off when debating certain dishonest people, but should don't debate dishonest people.
Loren ipsum protocol.
I think there are cases where libertarians should refuse to take government money, but there's no reason to volunteer to pay higher taxes. If you don't believe in the NSF and are offered a way to not pay taxes for it in exchange for not being eligible for the grants, then you should take it, but if you're paying taxes for it either way, then there's no reason to insist that the government give your tax money to someone else.
Just here to mention that #18's "Frankenstein Veto" is popular among contemporary academic poets and is known as erasure poetry. The most popular recent text of this kind is probably M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong!", which is quite moving.
I had no idea this had a name and had become a trend. My best friend in college (who is now an Emmy-winning comedy writer for television) did this back in 1999 during a manic period when he covered his walls with stream of consciousness free form writing, which he then threw into a fire and the surviving lexemes became poetry.
Matthew, thank you for telling me of "Zong!"
I am a poet. I never heard of erasure poetry, but have lately been experimenting with "semi-found" (runs of text rearranged or lightly modified) poetry. Erasure poetry seems like a natural next step -- essentially, a constraint on semi-found poetry that the desired form may be created only by DELETE operations on the base text, rather than by DELETE or MOVE or LIGHTLY FUCKWITH operations as I've been doing.
Thanks again. Please check your postbox for a **Gnome of Gratitude.**
30. Reminds me of data scientist David Shor's interesting interview with Eric Levitz that dropped today. Shor has argued in the past that Democrats actually can win when they run on stuff that's popular and in the economic interest of at least some folks who otherwise don't like them or share their values. White folks without college education usually comes to mind here, but it applies to conservative hispanic folks as well - a lot of hispanic people who identify as conservative in polls nonetheless vote Democratic usually, but not always (and there was about an 8-9% shift in hispanic support to Trump in 2020).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html
This is interesting. I consider my family to be fairly "conservative Hispanic." Still Catholic, racist as hell, homo and transphobic, not at all woke, but definitely Democrat mostly because of the power of trade unions. Being any sort of a Mexican-American laborer in the Pacific and Southwest and especially California, Cesar Chavez may as well be a god to you.
At least, that used to be the case. I wonder how much of the shift recently is due to the declining power of unions. The younger generation doesn't care what they have to say any more.
Also, white conservatives are just a lot less racist than they used to be. I get that's probably a controversial statement in some quarters because Trump was such a dick about this kind of thing and egged on edgelords playing Nazi, but this isn't like the 80s when my dad traveled to the midwest for softball tournaments and would be refused service at restaurants.
#29 is interesting because it's the Lambda School talking up the importance of something that Lambda School is actually very bad at compared to their competitors, a four-year university. Learning appropriate middle-class signals is an important part of university, for students who didn't pick those up from their parents, and a nine-month all-online course just can't teach you those things as effectively as four years at university will.
+1. I periodically interview candidates from Lambda, bootcamps, and more recently from the new crop of 1-3 year degree programs aimed at software eng jobs.
There’s lots of problems with these programs, but the signaling they teach is... less than stellar.
Often, they talk about wanting to join a team/project with attributes X Y and Z, but don’t know what X Y and Z really mean. Here the attribute could be something like “agile” or “continuous deployment”, but also particular technologies. University candidates are more likely to not know what they’re looking for, or to mention a set of attributes X Y and Z that are silly, but the upper percentiles tend to know a bit about what X Y and Z mean - they haven’t usually been coached to bullshit.
That sums up everything I see in the process. They’ll do followups and research our company, because they took a crash course on interviewing. But the substance is not there. They rarely make any substantive insights and usually completely misunderstand what the company does at a reading comprehension level, probably because they’re speeding through 20 applications ticking off boxes.
I’m happy to hire people without credentials of any kind, and we work hard to eliminate bad biases in our recruiting process. So I try to look past these behaviors and associate them with the school, and not the candidate. But they really feel slimy.
Bonus: multiple of these candidates have recounted the ideas from “Zero To One” as if they were their novel personal beliefs. I don’t think *anyone* is coaching them to do that.
Question about the Harvard issue: Is it possible that administration just isn't interested in profit maximization (or whatever the equivalent term would be for Harvard)? You've got a University with an 11 figure endowment (I think that's correct-- I know it's a lot of money), and you have administrators who a) didn't earn that money, and b) aren't going to take it home with them if they don't spend it. So how much of this is, or could be, simply down to the people in charge of the budget just not having 'tamping down costs' as a prevailing element in their incentive structure?
I've seen this discussion of increasing costs before, and it seems like most of the discussion is centered around organizations/industries that have a significant number of internal stakeholders who might not have the same incentives to manage their cost structure in the same way that, say, the owner of a landscaping company might. Are we seeing these runaway costs across the board (i.e across all industries), or does it seem to predominantly be a problem in particular sectors?
Profit maximization definitely isn't the goal of the administration, but then that raises the question: what is? I think the answer is quite complex if you dig into it, because the administration is beholden to the larger Harvard community (students, alumni, faculty) which is a diverse group having many different goals. In particular,
- Harvard is in competition with other top universities for reputation, so they are strongly incentivized to spend as much as they can to distinguish themselves. Examples: dorm renovations to attract students, new research facilities to attract faculty.
- A lot of people in the community care deeply about their social/educational mission, so a lot of programs that might appear wasteful from a financial perspective are hard to cut.
Basically Harvard is in a situation where they need to keep investing in new stuff to stay competitive, and can't cut much existing stuff while keeping the community (especially donors) happy.
This is just the internal dynamics of their budget, though. I think the more interesting--and maybe harder-to-explain--issue is why sticker prices have been able to rise so rapidly in recent decades. (I have some guesses, but I don't have any data to back them up.)
The people running Harvard may not have access to the endowment, personally, but they get paid more the bigger the kingdom is. You get paid more to run a $600 billion business than a $200 billion business.
It is also ego-rewarding to have 1000 people report to you than to have 400 people report to you.
The board of trustees for universities are generally not paid at all and do it for the prestige. Of course, the manager of the endowment fund is compensated the same way any other fund manager is compensated, but I don't believe they're considered an employee of the university.
They seem to have actually set up a totally separate company for this: https://www.hmc.harvard.edu/. It doesn't say, but I would assume they're compensated as a percentage of the funds being managed, which is not going to be reflected in an operating budget.
That said, obviously the actual university executive leadership has a financial incentive to grow the school at any cost, but I'm not sure to what extent they can just independently make decisions solely to increase their own pay and prestige given the power that ultimately rests with the board. Typically, the only non-profit administrators that are really able to get away with that kind of thing are running museums (or sham foundations that are set up for tax avoidance rather than charity). At universities, usually the most highly paid people are not the executives, but deans and senior professors at business and medical schools, who need to be paid well to keep them out of industry, and sports coaches, but the athletic department is typically set up as a separate non-profit corporation with its own budget and earmarked funds so donors can specifically pay to have a better football team and not have to worry about improving the actual school.
"conservatives may not really have a stronger fear response than liberals."
Yeah, I thought it was pretty well established that sensitivity to negative emotion is higher on the left and much lower on the right. Leftists get upset more easily, and when they do get upset they get more upset. As someone said the other day, "Personality traits predict political affiliation." That's why the reaction to the election of Obama was "God-dammit" and then going out to mow the lawn, while the reaction to Trump was full-on public freakouts. You have to really suspect any result during the Replication Crisis that lets leftists pat themselves on the back and say that science *just proved* that conservatives really are bad people.
"nobody was able to fix it because it was run by social justice activists who interpreted any criticism of them as racist/sexist."
This is the great SJW strength, though. They are invulnerable to criticism because they believe themselves morally correct. They don't argue and they don't compromise. You gotta take the good with the bad. For those who want to understand the phenomenon, please read James Lindsay's famous essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why." where he lays it all out with copious citations. https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
I read somewhere that the event that precipitated the 1973 recession was that in 1971, France figured out that we were printing too many dollars to pay for the futile (but highly profitable for elites) war in Vietnam, and sent a destroyer to New York to trade in their federal reserve notes for gold. So instead of paying them Nixon took us off the gold standard and started the "what the hell happened in 1971" meme. I can't find any citations to the event, the name of the ship, if they got the gold or not, or anything. Just a message board thread on a naval history forum. https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3178266
Your first paragraph contradicts the research on this, which tends to find conservatives more sensitive or no difference.
As for personality traits predicting political affiliation, see Link 21, which finds pretty conclusively that they don't, at least for normal psychological meanings of "personality traits".
Yikes, the boss! Blame Haidt, not me!
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
Haidt strong point is that he realized that much of his research was shit because of progressive blind spots.
The talk you are linking to is before he realized this and founded the Heterodox Academy and thus is...
Can I slap my head here? Using Michaelangelo's "David" as a measure of who's the hick? I can proudly declare my hick credentials with anyone you like, I wouldn't be "oh no naked guy statue!" since the age of 14 and I got used to seeing classic nudity in art, and I wouldn't have voted for either Bush or Gore since I thought they were both dreadful choices.
If I go by this, then Haidt's surveys were nothing more than "what values, what stuff do nice middle- to upper-middle class college-educated professionals who vote Democrat like?" then judged "conservatives" on not liking that stuff. That's as rigorous as "do you prefer Coke or Pepsi? Aha - this makes you an X!"
I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt because that lecture does sound like he's genuinely trying, but he has such cultural blinkers on that he doesn't realise. For example, the painting he put up:
"The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity is not just about suppressing female sexuality." (He goes on to make a decent point about control of the appetites, but I'm going to pounce on this here after I head-desk. Be right back.
Ah, there we go. Okay, first I had to look that painting up - there's a couple of ones by that name. This particular painting is by Hans Memling, and an alternative title seems to be "Allegory, with a Virgin". So, we're in allegorical territory here. Haidt and his audience seem to think in terms of "purity = sex" and "purity = suppressing female sexuality" (always with the suppressing!)
But is that what the allegory is saying? You can look at it and say "the woman is locked up in a mountain, she is being suppressed" or you can look at it and say "the woman is as strong as a mountain, she has lions at her command".
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/m/memling/2middle3/15allego.html
There's a lot here that could be said about allegorical paintings, the role of the virtues, the valorisation of purity/chastity and so on, but to look at that painting and use it as a handy "purity = suppressing female sexuality" metaphor is to return to his starting point and cast Haidt - and his audience - in the role of yokel Bill, who can only stare at the sexual element and not the overall artistry or the context of the work.
The dog question also made me laugh, because I don't think dogs are smart enough to "relate to their owners as a friend and an equal" (it does depend on the breed, some are smarter than others - we used to have a Red Setter which was a lovely dog but nothing between its ears but air). That's more a reflection of the owner and what the owner thinks the dog is thinking. So maybe liberals are more likely to think "animals = humans in fur" (no I deliberately avoided using "fur suits" because we all know where that leads) and conservatives are more likely to think "animals = animals, my dog is not as smart as me and is not my equal".
> That's why the reaction to the election of Obama was "God-dammit" and then going out to mow the lawn, while the reaction to Trump was full-on public freakouts.
And what exactly just happened in January about Biden getting elected?
Whataboutism is a propaganda technique first used by the Soviet Union, in its dealings with the Western world.[1] When Cold War criticisms were levelled at the Soviet Union, the response would be "What about..." followed by the naming of an event in the Western world.[2][3] It represents a case of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy),[4] a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly refuting or disproving the opponent's initial argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
It’s not whataboutism to respond to “Republicans don’t react strongly to Democrat presidents getting elected” (which is basically the point you were making) with “here’s an example of Republicans reacting strongly to Democrat presidents getting elected.”
> And what exactly just happened in January about Biden getting elected?
The response seemed to be way less than after Trump's election. See the Women's Marches.
Hint: He's talking about January 6
>That's why the reaction to the election of Obama was "God-dammit" and then going out to mow the lawn, while the reaction to Trump was full-on public freakouts.
No dude. The reaction to Obama was tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people cos-playing the Revolutionary War, with Obama cast as George III. And, on a parallel track, a widespread conviction that he couldn't possibly be a real American, but instead had to have been born somewhere else. The parallel track eventually got one of its major proponents to the White House. It was different, but I don't think you can really say it wasn't a full-on public freakout. It just looks different because it happened a few years ago.
Yeah, I don't get it. The reaction to Obama was the creation of the Tea Party. It forever changed the GOP. It was a huge outsized response to a very regular centrist boring person being elected president.
He sold the idea that he would be different in kind very well. And he had sixty senators. That had to be a very very depressing year to be on the other side. I remember what it felt like in 2004. It had to be something like that.
"I’m interpreting this to mean that there are effective ways to reform the police, but that the atmosphere created by media saturation and protests produces ineffective counterproductive reform instead."
The authors seem to suggest it is mostly the investigations themselves causing the increase in crime, rather than any particular policy changes. The mechanism they propose is that police officers greatly reduce their quantity of policing when under federal investigation after a "viral" incident, but there is little indication that this comes about as the result of any particular policy reform - the suggestion is that police are either reducing public contact in an effort to avoid having their own actions scrutinized, or are trying to make a point (in the case of deliberate strikes and slowdowns/sickouts). There's also a section (page 27) where the authors talk about the possible impact of increased paperwork, and estimate it might account for about 20% of the reduction in police activity in one city. I'm not sure if we're calling this "reform" but even if we do it's a small proposed effect.
My own personal understanding of the police reaction is very close to what they are saying. That extreme amounts of attention to the situation (by going viral) causes a poorer end result in fixing the issue. Imagine being a cop on a police force that had an incident like this. Can you imagine even a really good cop just going about their daily tasks after this happens?
I think social media is terrible for correcting issues in society for a similar reason. By making all failures super public, the incentive is to react in non-productive ways (shut down, act defensively, quit, justify yourself) rather than to recognize the mistake and improve the behavior.
> Except he does say that he’s still completely sure 9-11 was an inside job
To be fair it's orders of magnitude more likely that 9-11 was an inside job than that the earth if flat.
I'm still at a loss as to why you think saving lives is the highest ethical goal possible (re. malaria).
Now, arguably, malaria doesn't kill only infants so there's a destruction of resources in the deaths of young adults you want to avoid but, surely, the aim of a world wide ethic would be to maximize the ability for all people alive to live the good life, not simply maximizing the amount of people alive.
Otherwise, aren't you embracing those quiverfull natalists positions?
The infant mortality thing is kind of misleading, because generally people will have about the same number of children-who-survive-to-adulthood, so if a child dies in infancy, they're more likely to have another child to "replace" it. (Of course, everyone involved is human, and any loss of life is tragic, and this is an average and doesn't apply universally.)
That aside, about 45% of the deaths from Malaria are people over 5 (source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malaria-deaths-by-age), so that seams worthwhile enough for me, even if it halves the absolute number of lives saved. Plus having your children die of malaria sounds like a really unhappy thing, so avoiding it will definitely increase the happiness for the people around the child.
Why can't I like your reply? That's weird...
I mentioned the point about young people dying myself but thanks for locating a source. And, yes, I can't imagine the heartbreak of losing a baby, let alone a child. It must be heart-rending.
Really, I was using this as a reference to past comments (say, Scott mentioning Bill Gates vaccination efforts in Africa very favorably) and trying to push beyond the simplistic (imho) that a life saved is an unalloyed good.
I'm very much in the #thanos was right camp i.e. we, humans, are screwing things up and we cannot seem to get our act together. People dying in Africa for example don't die because of lack of scientific knowledge. They're dying because our institutions and, most of all, theirs, are absolutely appalling.
I would like people of good will to focus on bringing about institutions that allow for human flourishing before they focus on adding as many humans as they can, regardless of the life these humans are going to be forced to live through.
I would say that not having your friends and family get sick and die to a communicable disease significantly increases your human flourishing.
Of course there are drawbacks to more people being alive. They use resources that others could use, and if they wind up becoming our enemies, we dislike that too.
But I think on the margin, the benefits outweigh the costs. I am optimistic that understanding and cooperation will trend higher over the next decades, and that the resources that the current additional marginal person takes up is far away from seriously impinging on the resources of others, especially when you count the resources they themselves will contribute on average. Plus, there is the part where you do not have to spend resources caring for sick and dying people, or on consoling their friend and family, or suffer lost productivity from people stressed out from the trauma and life changes induced by a close one's death.
Plus, death is bad, bad bad bad.
"I would say that not having your friends and family get sick and die to a communicable disease significantly increases your human flourishing".
Indeed, it does. But not, as you mentioned, if they grow up to become, IDK, members of the Lord's Resistance Army or Boko Haram.
My problem with Bill Gates intervention is that they prevent deaths but do not make living under failed regimes easier. I would prefer intervention seeking to either improve the failed regimes into normally functioning ones or replacing them, ideally without involving foreign armie (Irak, among others, proving that it is quite difficult to impose institutional improvements).
Infants aren't people now?
Of course, they're people ; but, from a purely utilitarian pov, they're, with very old people close to death, the least important, economically speaking.
Notably, this is a *specific* utilitarian pov - many utilitarians would say that an infant is of equal moral importance to a healthy and fit twenty-five year old. It's perfectly valid to have your perspective, but it's not the only utilitarian one, let alone the only consequentialist one.
So "class" is just office culture now? Do people inherit this from their parents or something?
Learning the jargon and culture norms of a new workplace, mostly by imitation, is what everyone does. Fitting into groups is one of the things your intelligence is _for_.
Either SV culture is really weird and elitist, or the Lambda School article is really patronizing towards the bright people it's supposed to help.
I'm surprised by "ping me" being used as an example of a class divide. I thought it was a nerd culture phrase, based on the telecommunications metaphor - a bit like saying "the pandemic is DDOSing hospitals" or "my mental stack just overflowed". I'd have expected it to be as opaque to someone from a family of old-school lawyers as to someone from a family of truckers.
I thought the same thing. Wasn't there a TV show several years ago in which a boss asks a subordinate for a "rundown of your projects" and the subordinate is too afraid to ask what a "rundown" is? I don't think that was a class thing, just a "humans are bad at communicating" thing.
yeah, ping is literally a computer program that you can use to "ping" sonar-like another IP address and if they respond you know the connection is live and other side is listening. So if you are learning to code you probably need to know that expression.
Came here to say exactly this.
Also find this story about the gmail address bewildering - I sure as hell figured that out myself at the same age, almost 25 years ago. The beauty is precisely that NOBODY KNOWS your a teen.
There was an imagining that it stood for Packet INternet Groper, but that was false. It actually comes from the resemblance to a sonar ping.
"Ping me" was a good hook for this crowd, but there were other examples that are really class-markers, like the guy hired by Uber who asked for his paycheck to be a paper check to take to the check-cashing place.
Re: 26 "though I can’t access the reviews to see how critical they were." I suggest using scihub, it works great!
I thought I tried and couldn't find them, were you able to get them on there? If so, can you give me the exact links?
The JAMA review seems to just be one paragraph, which I found intriguing, but not enlightening. You can read the entire thing here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/283124
I couldn't find the Nature review.
I could find the Nature review after all. Another one paragraph review (what this pages calls the abstract is actually the entire review):
https://www.nature.com/articles/114605c0
The tracking COVID by candle reviews definitely looks like a case of [xkcd 1725](https://xkcd.com/1725/).
That aside though, I would like to see some data on reviews of other common items before I buy that this is due to loss of smell. I could easily come up with a story where negative reviews in general are increasing because everyone has tons of time and is stressed/bored/depressed from sitting at home all day.
There seems to be a structural issue with (parts of) science where they enthusiastically adopt new methodologies and draw far-reaching conclusions, only to then find out that the methodology has serious issues.
I think that they should first validate the methodology, before drawing those far-reaching conclusions.
Aren't there reviewers in the loop, who are supposed to think about this sort of thing before approving a paper?
LOL just kidding.
#1) ***Stan Rogers enters the chat***
The author specifically alludes to Stan Rogers with "Cruise the Seas for Chinese Gold"
Hey Scott, I'm Trey Goff, Chief of Staff at Honduras Próspera (point 4), and I'd like to correct one small point: we are a private, for-profit firm not affiliated with the Charter Cities Institute in any official way (although I love Mark Lutter's work and did a panel on Clubhouse with him last night). If you'd like more info on the project, please let me know, I can send you some doing business guides, a white paper, a peer-reviewed academic paper about the project I recently co-authored, or even hop on a call to discuss.
Additionally, we have a foundation focused on working with the local community that has done all sorts of awesome work I can show you. There's a lot more than meets the eye there with community relations.
Thanks for the correction. I didn't mean to imply CCI was leading the initiative and have edited the link. Interested in hearing about where I can learn more about Prospera.
Thanks, Scott! Long time fan of your work as well, so I appreciate the mention here. I'd love to send you the peer-reviewed paper--probably the best explication of what we're up to from a purely economic and governance perspective. What's the best way to send you the PDF? It'll be published in the Journal of Special Jurisdictions in a few weeks, so all I can give is a PDF until that journal issue is live. Alternatively, the best video/audio overview is here: https://youtu.be/0vIL2-S6KNw and the best mainstream media coverage is probably here: https://www.fdiintelligence.com/article/78387 but the PDFs I can send contain *far* more information.
Send to scott@slatestarcodex.com
On item #21--I checked the methods section, and the scope of the paper is much narrower than the abstract makes it out to be. The study's survey of "political attitudes" only includes social and religious issues (such as abortion and evolution). There's nothing about economic policy, foreign policy, immigration, the environment, or any of the other things people do politics about.
Why don’t you like watching videos? Neither does Nassim Taleb apparently. I wonder if there’s a pattern here.
Just a guess, but probably some of the reasons listed at Always Bet On Text, https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html : "Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous..."
Video also rarely adds any particular value when it comes to exchanging ideas. Sometimes it can - a video of an operation (medical or otherwise) may be best communicated in a video or animation.
Video is better for entertainment, though. I watch people solve Sudoku online for fun. But pretty much all of my political philosophy is consumed in text format.
I can't stand watching videos, for most of the reasons Alex is alluding to. Can't easily scan, skim, pick out small pieces, can't copy/paste notes directly from the text. There also tends to be a fair amount of ambient chatter and dead space, and the information comes at you slower. Nobody can listen as fast as they can read.
Some of this I think is also just well-poisoning from the way has been embedded into web pages. Autoplay, especially with audio, was a nightmare. Persistent pop-out video that hovers over the text you're trying to read and stays there as you try to scroll past it is another nightmare. Audio continuing to play after the video is offscreen is terrible. Then there's the fact that news sites tend to embed unrelated or loosely related videos at the top of their articles (Yahoo! Sports is the absolute worst at this). If I click on a headline about topic X, I don't want the first thing I see and hear on the next page to be someone talking about topic Y. Thanks to all that, I have a lot of negative associations with video content now. None with text.
Also, for bandwidth-constrained consumers or people who just don't like latency (i.e. all users of the web) or people using a capped mobile data plan, text is much smaller and loads faster.
YouTube's interface is also pretty bad, to the point that some people prefer to download the video and watch it with VLC !
I tend to get distracted, particularly if there's a lot of filler or "humorous banter between the co-hosts" (guys you're not as funny as you think you are). Unless it's a topic I'm very interested in and/or the person is good at speaking and holding your interest, I tend to go "yeah yeah cut to the chase". And, as I said, I get distracted so I'm constantly "wait, what did you say?" and rewinding and then trying to skip ahead to get back to where I was.
As Alex and Graydon say, text is a *vastly* more efficient way of conveying language-encoded information and results in a higher degree of understanding in most cases. Text allows the reader to seamlessly and dynamically adjust the rate of information transfer as needed, skimming or skipping directly to the information they need, and stopping to digest or reread the bits that weren't immediately and fully understood when first encountered. This is also possible in a real-time dialogue, but can only be approximated by cumbersome kludges in video.
Text is vastly more efficient for the discriminating reader. Text requires somewhat more effort for the writer; it's easier to just blather to a camera. But if the intent is that there should be many viewers/readers, it's obvious where the global optimum is. I deeply, deeply resent anyone who wants me to understand what they're saying but won't either engage me in a dialogue or take the time to put it in writing; there's a fundamental arrogance in assuming that their time is more valuable than the time of all their audience combined. At bare minimum, post a transcript of your video.
I'll wait until someone else with the same idea writes it down. If there is no such person, well, there are vast libraries worth of information forever lost because the one person who came up with it had lousy communications skills; most of it isn't very valuable and I'm not going to waste half an hour trying to figure out if the example du jour is one of the exceptions. I *might* take Scott's word for it that this is one of the exceptions, but very few people have earned that respect, and I'd still prefer a transcript.
The tricameral legislature didn't work so well during the French Revolution, because it turned two of them (the one for the nobles and the one for the clergy) were on the same side, which was basically "let's not reform much of anything." I would imagine the same would hold true in modern times, in that if a party or set of interests can manage to capture two of the three houses, isn't that going to leave us with roughly the same situation we have now, just with more overhead costs in the legislative branch?
#31: "tricameral legislature"
I've been thinking a bit about these things. I like the idea of different chambers representing different segments of the population, with somewhat different interests, who all have to agree to legislation.
The obvious categories are age and gender. I guess the article didn't bring up gender since, depending on who you ask there are either 2 or 57 genders, and they're aiming for 3 chambers.
Alternate gender elections every 2 years would certainly be interesting to see!
With age, you could have as many chambers as you like. Just determine the birth dates that splits the electorate in equal sizes for each election, and that's it.
I'm not at all sure either of these electoral inventions would improve things, but I'm damn sure it would be interesting, and much would be learned!
PS: You *can* consider the Presidential veto a third chamber in the US system.
> Just determine the birth dates that splits the electorate in equal sizes for each election, and that's it.
That's probably trickier than you imagine as population distribution changes over time (and people tend to get older over time)
> If you think mainstream philosophy is dumb, this post might help you appreciate some ways it’s getting smarter.
That's not my take-away. Chalmers' article just seems to be an implicit defense of weaponizing language. He even uses the term "conceptual activism" and bemoans the difficulty in making others adopt his new definitions for existing words. He recognizes that "words have power" and argues that words should be redefined to use that power to "make for a more just world," like pushing through things like gay marriage, without having to change the law. He completely ignores Foucault's objection that language is used for social control by the powerful.
This is just another step in turning academia into political weapons, where elites try to to use 'science' to social engineer society based on claims that their politics is obviously just and things like democracy and classical liberalism are obstacles to justice.
PS. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1817141
Agreed, it sounds more like turning philosophy into a hammer and not a knowledge production attempt.
i like watching videos
Where's the report button?????
yeah really
Seems misleading to bring up the Montreal "Night of Terror" without the context that it involved the police going on strike when the city was already tearing itself apart over Quebec separatism and general late 1960s craziness. The way it reads currently it sounds like the police went on strike and it prompted a riot, rather than the police going on strike because they were tired of dealing with riots.
"If a big pharma company shares lots of stockholders (eg Blackrock) with a generic company, it will put up less of a fuss when the generic company tries to copy their drug. This particular example is good because people get cheap medication more easily..."
I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of what that paper is reporting. I can't get past the paywall, but the abstract seems to say that if a pharma company shares lots of stockholders with a generic company, they will be more likely to come up with a deal wherein the pharma company bribes the generic company *not* to copy their drug. That does not result in people getting cheap medication more easily!
BTW, this is exactly what econ theory would suggest the companies will do, if given an opportunity to collude. Total profits (i.e. the profits from selling the brand-name drug, plus the profits from selling the generic version) are higher if the generic company stays out of the market. If the generic company stays out of the market, the brand-name pharma company can charge monopoly prices and make some huge amount of profit $y. If the pharma company enters the market, prices are set competitively, so prices fall and each company makes some tiny amount of profit $x, x<<y. In a well-functioning market, the generic company figures "I'd rather make $x than zero profit", so it enters the market and we get cheap drugs. But if the brand-name company can pay the generic some amount $z, where x < z < y-x, in exchange for a commitment not to enter the market, then they both come out ahead! (And the consumers get stuck with high prices.)
If the shareholders of the generic company also own part of the brand-name pharma company, you don't even need to make that payment explicitly. Those shareholders actually benefit more from the generic staying out of the market (since total profits are higher that way.) This dynamic generalizes, so we can broadly say that when you have more shared ownership or consolidation in an industry, consumers suffer. This is the classic point of the antitrust movement. (Along with the other classic point about concentrated economic power leading to political power.)
"sweeping conclusions about the trajectory of music" is a reasonable dig at this genre of writing, but it's worth pointing out that the data is from the Echo Nest, which was acquired by Spotify in 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/06/spotify-echo-nest-streaming-music-deal
So if you are a Spotify user and have ever benefited from their music personalization (I have), then there's reason to believe there's some correspondence between their models of music and the real world.
In which the Wisconsin Legislature Discovers Blackout Poetry
So it turns out Lenin was almost right, he just needed to found the Vanguard company instead of a vanguard party.
Thanks for the link post I guess! (These ones usually take me an absurd amount of time to get through for obvious reasons, but I don't mind.)
Somewhat related to item #7: I am now generally pro-life. Prior to that I was just unsure. The reason I became pro-life is not to roll in money (unlike Roe; my net worth is *tiny*), but because I like loving things and because gwern pointed out that modern ethics actually hates some things that ancient ethics loved (c.f. https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle).
Also, #15 is great entertainment, and #24 is not very surprising based on how anti-inductive the market is (something something Efficient Market Hypothesis?).
> I am now generally pro-life. Prior to that I was just unsure. The reason I became pro-life is not to roll in money (unlike Roe; my net worth is tiny), but because I like loving things and because gwern pointed out that modern ethics actually hates some things that ancient ethics loved
This is an interesting position, but even if we go by the rule that "loving more things is better, regardless of whether those things actually exist and/or have cognitive capabilities" then embryo's still seems like an odd place to start expanding the circle. Why not start with something a little less politically charged like ancestor spirits, snakes, gods or the weather?
Also, kind of a tangent, but I think a better summary of Gwern is that modern society doesn't *care about* some things that ancient societies loved (because we've figured out they don't exist/don't matter) rather than that it hates more things.
My theory with police reform is that viral incidents have a bigger impact on morale and police work has a lot of components where morale is important. For instance, I think if morale is worse, then police officers are more likely to interpret an encounter with a random person in a more negative way, and thus more likely to accidentally escalate things.
On the other hand, without viral incidents, inertia and politics can kill reforms (even with viral incidents politics can kill reforms). So it's tricky. That's why I think it makes sense to not directly attack the "few bad apples" response of police. Even if it's not a few bad apples, you want the general police force to feel like they are part of the solution.
I think you see a similar situation with education reform. Whether or not the reforms are important, a significant drop in morale due to the politics around the reforms can nullify any gains (although I'm just speculating here, would be interesting to find out any stats related to this).
I don't think there's any settled solution for education reform (I'm not even sure there is a consensus that education reform is a good thing), but I think one thing that has happened in many cases is trading pay increases for the union agreeing to reforms.
#7) For the last week I have wondered why this link was included since the documentary aired in May 2020. Norma McCovey was apparently a grifter who was the vehicle for important political change in the US and the Reverend Rob Schenck is an example of maturation of perspective and understanding. Yet the culture war rages on between groups calling themselves pro-life and pro-choice while enriching the donation harvesting industry in the guise of promoting political activity.
Now every healthy female can potentially give birth to approximately twenty children and in fact on the street I grew up on in Massachusetts, there were three families with that many children. Today American women are choosing to have 1.71 children over their lifetimes, so by whatever means, women today are choosing to deny life to 18 potential children. So the issue becomes virtual abortions versus real abortions. Since Roe vs Wade the real rate has dropped to an all time low of 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. As studies have shown, the choice is dominated by virtual abortions. Clearly the choice of how many children to have is a personal one and should be private. The government's role should be very limited. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs Wade clearly reaffirmed that status.
According to CDC, in 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/births.htm
Number of births: 3,747,540
Birth rate: 11.4 per 1,000 population
Fertility rate: 58.3 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 ( measures the average number of children per woman)
Percent born low birthweight: 8.31%
Percent born preterm: 10.23%
Percent unmarried: 40.0%
Mean age at first birth: 27.0
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-there-a-link-between-a-decline-in-u-s-births-and-abortion-11550847334
https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2019/09/us-abortion-rate-continues-drop-once-again-state-abortion-restrictions-are-not-main
Ironically for the Pro-Life faction, ~11-12 million children in the US live in poverty.
https://www.childrensdefense.org/policy/resources/soac-2020-child-poverty/
The money they raise would be better spent taking care of the children that are born.
According to UN statistics, the US will have ~60 million youths age 0-14 years for the foreseeable future..
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Line/840
#6 On Harvard Finances: I would not be so quick to pooh-pooh Alex Tabarok's cost disease explanation.
Of the $40k increase in expense per student, $20k is directly increases to salary and benefits. The total labor expense per student is up >20% while the number of employees is only up 8% per student. This suggests that the majority of the increase in cost per student comes from increasing salaries. Moreover, the labor shifts from relatively higher cost employees (faculty per student is down 7%) to relatively lower cost administrators and non-faculty academic staff (up >25% collectively).
Additional labor price increases are likely hidden in categories like "Other expenses" and "Services Purchased" whose cost increase of about $20k constitute almost the entirety of the rest of $40k increase per student.
Taken all together, this suggests increasing labor costs constitute more than 50% of the increased cost per student and likely much more than that. Of this more than half of the budget increase, more than half of that comes from increases to cost per employee rather than number of employees. So while "Cost disease" as Alex Tabaraok may not be 100% explanatory, any explanation that explains at least 30-60% of a phenomenon should be taken seriously.
(Just wanna say the comment textbox erased my pretty N++ formatting...)
I'm going to write a long comment about the Sanders article. I'll give my confidence for my statements as well. Michael Tracey has a unique view and not everything he says is agenda free.
Bernie Sanders ran a terrible campaign. In the end all the responsibility lies on the candidate, even if the proximate problems were caused by staffers.
There are several major problems with the campaign but the most prominent was the strategy devised by Faiz Shakir, previously director of political engagement with the ACLU.
The issue here was that their stated strategy was a common strategy among candidates but uniquely worthless for Sanders. Win early states with plurality victories and convince the party to coalesce.
100% confidence, the media had quotes from Faiz saying this.
This is a terrible strategy because the way it actually works is that the party coalesces around an establishment candidate. Even Obama was essentially a party insider. Also Bernie isn't actually a Democrat.
Not only is this strategy stupid on its face but, Bernie didn't get the kind of wins he needed. In fact one win is in dispute and the mainstream position is probably that he lost. The infamous Iowa Caucus.
Furthermore the strategy *did* end up working for Biden. As soon as the king of the Democrats won a single unexpectedly dominant victory, blamo!, he was crowned as the nominee as the other moderates dropped out.
Bernie's failures in Iowa and New Hampshire, even though he had a clear win in the latter, are unforgivable. His campaign plowed the majority of their resources into these states.
In a world where Bernie had a chance to win the nomination he would have been sailing to a 50-60% majority win in Iowa without expending the majority of his cash and human capital.
You can read my popular blog about winning the campaign here: https://electingberniesanders.wordpress.com/
I quit my job to volunteer for the campaign. I went to Iowa but I mostly did online stuff. Permanently Online Posters may be aware of the Markos Dailykos Dem straw poll.
I organized series of victories there, with plenty of help, prior to the launch of the campaign. We basically tossed it once the campaign started because Markos stopped going on national TV when we started to win.
I had done the same thing in 2016 which is how we got it done so easily. I reconnected with old Bernie Bros like RoseAnn DeMoro through this. She would link my blog several times which was helpful.
I mention the blog so that you can see what strategy I advocated for and see my arguments against the actual campaign strategy. It was obviously shit and never had a real shot.
The Sanders campaign made several other major blunders like not fighting for a climate debate and refusing to direct the campaign at older and rural voters. These were key errors that hurt them in Iowa.
Another major error was that Bernie dropped popular ideas and policies from his actual political career and previous campaign. Flip flopping on guns, dropping his socialist support for police, etc.
Of course he had a wide open lane in police reform, rather than abolition, and could easily have got ahead of "defund the police" in a way other candidates couldn't. Huge failure.
If there was a popular Bernie Bro twitter account you hated I was in a DM group with them. Nate's Liver, John Cusack, RoseAnn, Savage Joy, Bethlynch2020, Tania Singh, etc. And also prominent but less controversial people.
I know that Faiz literally lied to Bernie about stuff. He lied about being in regular contact with Michael Sayman, famous Google and Facebook employee who has a very campaign/zeitgeist relevant life story.
95% confidence, the info comes from Levi Sanders
Bernie was unaware that the "1 million volunteers" were actually just 1 million webform signers.
90% confidence, came from PeopleForBernie source
Tracey is correct that the campaign is full of problems. He isn't always correct on what they are but he often is. I know that the California and Iowa teams were just essentially random college kids with an undergrad degree.
Even in California they were paid like $30k. They had no training and didn't know what to do. They were easily impressed by competent volunteers. Their tech team was essentially a single distance employee in Oregon without major experience.
Heads of various campaign sections refused to accept help from volunteers. Michael Sayman made an app on lunch breaks that was vastly superior to the "offical app". The organization among high level staffers was terrible and territorial.
As a dirty commie I can't believe they unionized the campaign. No voters gives a shit, it costs a ton of money, causes lots of problems, and even long running presidential campaigns do not fit the intended use of a union. Maternal leave?
For a political campaign? Absolute insanity. Just spend a whopping 6 months not getting pregnant. This is a massive issue regarding PMC-ification of political campaigns. If you care more about your upper middle class life plan than the campaign?
Work in industry. Or at least work for Biden where blatantly telling the working class donors to your campaign "fuck you" is not a big deal. Plenty of other issues around this as well but this was an especially ridiculous one.
Another issue related to people who are job/clout hunting instead of actually caring about political change is how absolutely ignorant staffers were on Bernie's history. They were completely untrained to discuss Israel/Palestine, policing, etc.
Like Bernie has an excellent history on these issues. Same for the infamous civil rights argument. Bernie went to Israel to work on a socialist kibbutz. He worked with a Jewish group(Chabad?) to allow equal placement of menorahs in public squares.
He led Seder for Burlington college students away from home for the first time. Just because he supports Palestinian rights doesn't make him a "fake jew" or anti-semitic. Bernie's first union endorsement was from the Burlington police.
He supported more training and saftey, but not offensive, gear. Commies love polices, everyone knows that. Staffers also couldn't explain or defend his position on guns. They didn't know about his work for veterans. Embarrassing.
Bernie's campaign had major issues with endorsements. He had 4 years, he had a new political group, the DSA had taken off. Yet the campaign did not have a slate of congressional candidates to organize with. They lacked major union support.
They had not locked up endorsements from major progressive names. There had been no outreach to the DSA or the Green Party or other small parties. The campaign didn't even have written positions on issues for several months.
On my blog you can see my arguments about creating a stash of policy papers to drop to keep in the news cycle, stay ahead of other candidates, etc. There was just so much obvious leg work that could have been sorted out.
As noted the campaign piled way too many resources into Iowa and New Hampshire, for very little benefit in the end, plus California, which at least mildly paid off. They did no outreach to other candidates, which is why only Gravel endorsed Bernie.
They didn't exploit the fact that candidates who go on the air early in mostly ignored states with purely positive messaging gain a very strong cushion. Easily 5% on average. They had the most money and the most and most organized volunteers(Not a million, though.)
Bernie did virtually nothing to organized with Warren, Gravel, Inslee, or Gabbard. Of course Warren wasn't much better. Before Bernie announced I emailed back and forth with her campaign on how to pick up Bernie voters, including me.
The exploratory committee staff promised to talk to her and get back to me which they did not. I donated money to several campaigns, the most to Warren, to get to talk to staffers early before they were deluged with money and emails.
Not only could Bernie have done more work for an eventual Warren endorsement, but he could have easily boxed her out of the race. Again he had 4 years and way more national campaign experience to get his house in order.
"I've got a plan for that" would never have taken off if his campaign had been dropping a couple white papers a week on every key issue. I emailed Faiz and others as well as doing social media work to get them to get ahead on policing for instance.
The campaign was incredibly petty and territorial among staff members. They froze out even major Bernie groups like the DSA and People For Bernie. Although they hired Winifred Wong(@waywardwinifred) they essentially froze out People For Bernie.
100% confidence, from PFB staff
They refused to work with volunteers at all, and their volunteer slack was arguably way more "fascist" and "cancel culture" than even Twitter. No discussion of the campaign allowed besides positive emoji bombs. Seriously. Emoji bombs.
Speaking on nonsense and Winifred, many top level staffers did little but tweet dumb shit. Belen and Bri did their little dorm room podcast, which would be fine if they shouldn't have been doing actually useful stuff. They promoted articles in nothing zines.
Seriously? LatinoRebels? Most Latino/Hispanic people haven't even heard of these niche left wing activist blogs, much less read them. Where was the Telemundo and Univision outreach? Although Chuck Rocha is way above average in Latino outreach, the ball was dropped.
Bernie had many high profile Spanish speaking supporters. But they didn't use them. The campaign was apparently unaware that Alex didn't speak fluent Spanish when they sent her to events. Major credit to her for turning it into a positive.
At a Nevada event she essentially charisma'd her way out of it by saying she could speak a little but not a lot because she didn't have a strong connection to the culture because of life circumstances. There was some understanding about that among many attendees.
Speaking of surrogates, the surrogate vetting and organizing was garbage. It took some surrogates, even valuable ones, weeks to get certified, and then they were poorly used or ignored. The campaign failed to cover events using surrogates quite a lot.
My first door in Iowa was a man who ran/organized a very large local veterans group. The campaign sent no one to their event. Delaney went himself. Granted he is nobody politically, filthy rich and had nothing better to do.
This guy was really connected, too. He was in the room in Iowa in 1968 when the phone call came down about the passing of the minority report that created the modern primary system. We talked about political history and he was impressed.
Again because most staffers, much less volunteers, are barely trained and don't know anything about politics. He said he was gonna give Bernie a chance and I gave his info to the campaign. They probably didn't get back to him.
Bernie's campaign had 4 years to prepare and literal months to of actual campaign time to get ahead of the game as Biden dithered. Sadly they were totally un-organized, had a terrible overall strategy, and none of the establishment support Obama had to beat Clinton.
Speaking of Clinton, the campaign, and most of the most intense supporters, didn't have a clue. I was ridiculed in early February for saying that out of the 45% he got he'd maintain 25% right away, since a large percent was purely anti-Clinton.
Very few people were willing to accept this until the polls started coming in. I wouldn't say the campaign was blindsided but many "Bernie Bros" were, totally. It was very embarrassing.
I actually switched in June to supporting Warren, when she was at 14% because the Bernie campaign was such a shit show. I stuck with her till late October when I realized her campaign was totally controlled by wokeness and ignoring the economy, stupid.
She crashed from 28% down to like 10% so quickly. Especially with the M4A debacle and the whole snakes on Twitter thing. I knew Biden was gonna win but I went to Iowa and reconnected with my fav Bernie bros until after SC because I still *wanted* Bernie.
I just didn't think he was gonna make it. Was fun to pretend and ride that pre-SC Nevada smash hypetrain.
Didn’t read all of the comments so someone may have mentioned this already but:
The Pudding article on songwriting mentions the growth in writers per song as an explanation for things starting to sound more similar and contrasts this to previous eras where one or two writers would be credited.
While I do think there is something to calling out the weird “too many cooks” and modularization problem in contemporary songwriting, the reality is that - in previous eras - there would often be “studio bands” that would write many key parts of hits and go uncredited.
The article mentions Motown, and The Funk Brothers (Motown’s house band) are one of the most salient and heartbreaking examples of this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the absolute number of writers per hit song is pretty similar now as it was in the 60s.
The third tricameral chamber should be 10 electorates of evenly sized groups of people sorted by age, you could use census data to determine where the age cut-offs should be.
Back in reality though: try and spread Maine's system of instant run-off voting, if you're in Maine try and form a third party (that eschews the extremes of either establishment party, so you can actually win elections).