Mine doesn’t care to participate, but Hemingway would like to know that he has the right. Not that it would apply to him anyway, he’s an anarcho-capitalist.
Apparently it was also the first implementation of a Harberger tax, as if you claimed that one of your peers was wealthier than you (and therefore should be chosen instead), he would have the option of trading all of his property for all of yours. Thus the incentive to not falsely underreport your wealth.
I think the last time that came up, people said it was historically dubious. There are records of people *offering* to make the trade, but it was probably just a rhetorical flourish with no expectation that such a trade could actually be effected.
I'm familiar with the idea, but I don't think that necessarily makes it dubious, as the purpose of it would be as a deterrent. You wouldn't want to deal with the complicated fallout of actually having to carry it out, but the possibility of it keeps people at least somewhat more honest.
Its not, but I think the left is strongly opposed to heaping social credit on billionaires for things they do with their money, even if those things are super great. Hence the charity is undemocratic thing.
What are the limits of that opposition though? A billionaire can get their name on a "public" hospital, but thats not a govt owned hospital. Can this only work then with a semi privatized military?
How about the Boule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_(ancient_Greece) ? Or more broadly, the general principle of selecting representatives randomly instead of with elections. The is an small modern political movement to make use of "citizens assemblies" based on their success in Athens and Venice (election of the doge), the idea being that there is no politicized election process, they are very difficult to corrupt compared to elected politicians (especially if anonymized), and they have a very good track record. Venice went hundreds of years of a form of democratic monarchy with no conflicts over succession, their doges served life terms with near absolute power (the exception being power to choose a successor or change the election process), and ultimately only ended for external reasons.
In the modern day, trial by jury provides a lot of real world evidence that small groups of randomly selected citizens are quite successful at making reasonable decisions. Obviously everyone can point to specific failures, but there are far more trials by jury in a given year than elections. Citizen's assemblies also generally employ multiple rounds of deliberation to increase the number of jurors while still having the discussion take place in small groups, which should decrease the failure rate even further. And beyond corruption, the fact that jurors aren't held politically accountable for their decisions is ideal when popular sentiment differs from reality. Ireland in the 90s, a majority Catholic country, used a citizen's assembly to pass abortion rights. Had their politicians attempted to do this, they would anger their constituents and lose their seats next election, and had they made it a referendum it would have failed. Regardless of your personal opinion on abortion, you must admit that its fascinating that the deliberation process genuinely changed the opinion of enough of the jurors to flip the majority.
I sort of understand what the deep state haters are on about when I think about how our border control and federal law enforcement and judiciary are mostly in the bag for Trump.
The deep state consists of everyone who is a career government official. These are part of it, and they help me understand how people might see this as potentially problematic rather than as a useful anti-corruption measure separating the operation of government from political patronage.
Were the role of the president a ceremonial one, I'd have been happy to see Hillary win that, not least because of the prospect of her grinding her teeth in fury about not getting her hands on the levers of power and being simply Ceremonial First Presidentess.
Now, she *would* be trying to find some way around using the position as one of real power.
I've been saying that for years: Trump would be great in some ceremonial role where he got to be in the news all the time and treated like a Serious Person. If that's a monarch, so be it. This could be the Missouri Compromise of the 21st Century.
Actually, your posts were funny, and mine was stupid. You can’t draw a line from 1820 to 1860, and anyway subsequent compromises departed drastically from the Missouri Compromise.
I'm not saying anything about Trump, but I really do think we should abstract the ceremonial duties of the president from the legal ones and create something like a British figurehead monarch.
Honestly, if the President was the ceremonial head of state and the Vice-President was the one with power (like a prime minister), it might work a lot better. You'd avoid the problem of having a VP whose daily duties don't amount to much except "be ready in case the president drops dead or is assassinated" and figures like Trump and Biden could take on the mantle of Elder Statesmen and do all the ribbon-cutting and speech-making without anybody caring that you've got near-octogenarians in power.
I'm against it on two fronts, both of which boil down to me being unironically supportive (at least in principle) of Constitutional Monarchy.
First, one of the major roles of a constitutional monarch in the British model is to provide a sort of adult supervision to the democratically-elected government. On a day-to-day basis, this takes the form of the power "to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn": i.e. the elected head of government has to regularly meet privately with the monarch (who has higher-status than the head of government and presumably has a long-term inside view of the high-level governance of the nation), explain himself to said monarch, and hear the monarch out with at least a token show of respect on the issues of the day. In the longer term, the Monarch's reserve powers to prorogue the legislature, fire the head of government, veto legislation, etc are a final line of legitimate constitutional defense against an elected government abusing its position to subvert democracy. This can easily be mistaken for being unimportant because the major reserve powers haven't been invoked in centuries, but that's like saying that the American nuclear arsenal is useless because we haven't used nuclear weapons against an enemy target in almost 80 years. The implicit threat is there and acts as a meaningful constraint, and the explicit threat of the UK monarch's reserve powers may have been used as recently as October 2019 when there was a spate of articles about the possibility of the Queen firing then-PM Boris Johnson if he defied Parliament over the implementation of Brexit (I suspect this was an actual threat, not just idle speculation, since many of the articles were based on "sources close to" the Queen and the PM in a way that sounds like the usual token obfuscation of strategic trial-balloon and battlespace-preparation leaks to the media).
Second, in order to be most effective, a constitutional monarchy should be deeply rooted in long-standing tradition, and the choice of monarch should be as firmly as possible established as a Schelling Point outside of the realm of recent partisan politics.
On the first point, I think Trump is conspicuously poorly suited to provide any sort of adult supervision to anyone, and in particular handing him strong reserve powers as a check on subversion of democracy by an elected head of government would be like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of anti-fraud regulation of the financial sector.
On the second point, Trump is quite unsuited for the "long-standing tradition" aspect and is quite possibly the worst possible choice for the "outside of recent partisan politics" aspect.
No, if I had to choose a Constitutional Monarch for the US, my candidate would be much more deeply rooted in tradition. Not many people know this, but the colonies that would become the US actually did have a constitutional monarch up until the mid-1776s. I looked up who would be our last King's heir, and it seems he's this rich, eccentric retired British naval officer named Charles Mountbatten-Windsor. His personal life sounds rather messy, but he's apparently done some laudable stuff as a philanthropist. Or if Charles is too foreign for our tastes, his son Harry is apparently married to an American actress and currently lives in California.
You gotta think long term though. Willie the Conqueror was just some crazy Viking and he certainly didn't come from a long line of legitimate kings of England. You gotta wait a thousand years or so 'til the days of Emperor Donald XXV before things eventually settle down.
I feel this is a little unfair. William was descended from Vikings, but his family had been granted lands and titles in what is now France over a hundred years before. He wasn’t just some piratical Norse arriviste.
Eh, the Viking was strong in his family, but so was the connection to England. His great-great-grandfather took his great-great-grandmother as spoils of war. His great-grandfather did the "have her bathed and sent to my chambers" thing, except without the bathing part. His grandfather ran too many Viking raids against England, so when King Aethelred came knocking, the grandfather bought him off with the great-aunt as second wife. His father never bothered to marry, and attempted an invasion of England to put his older cousin Edward on the throne in place of his great-aunt's second husband's family. And when cousin Edward (the Confessor) got the throne later through natural attrition, they kept in touch.
William the Incredible Badass wasn't "just some crazy Viking", he's a Viking that channeled his Viking-ness into socially acceptable feudal conquest, and had blood connections to the last few kings of England.
William's great-aunt Emma was the key. Off the top of my head, she was wife of Aethelred the Unready, stepmother of Edmund Ironside, future daughter-in-law of Sweyn Forkbeard, wife of Cnut the Great, stepmother of Harald Harefoot, mother of Harthacnut, mother of Edward the Confessor, sister's mother-in-law to Harold Godwinson (Edward's wife's brother), and of course great-aunt to William. Edward (later the Confessor) lived in exile with William's family from before William was conceived until William was about 14 or so, and they kept in touch afterward over the next 24 years or so. It is quite plausible that Edward wanted William to be his successor, rather than any of his wife's family.
Isn't a monarch with powers inherently a subversion of democracy?
>adult supervision
So, democratic leaders are less psychologically mature than non-democratic ones, or do I misunderstand you?
I mean, they do tend to be physically younger. But I'm not convinced that the supposed benefits of putting old people in charge outweigh the risks of of having leaders that are less accountable to the public.
I know Moldbug thinks that a monarchy is (theoretically) compatible with free speech. But the track record of actual monarchies say otherwise (see lèse-majesté).
>So, democratic leaders are less psychologically mature than non-democratic ones, or do I misunderstand you?
Democratically chosen leaders have a lot of things going for them (accountability as you mention, plus consent of the governed and better alignment of policy preferences between the head of government and the median voter), which is a big part of why I (conceptually) favor a relatively weak 20-21st century British-style constitutional monarchy with an elected legislature and mostly-democratically-chosen head-of-government, but I strongly oppose the kind of near-absolute monarchy that Moldbug argues for. That said, democratically-elected leaders do have shortcomings that can be mitigated by an undemocratic head of state.
One is that democratically-elected leaders tend to be heavily self-selected for political ambition. In other words, I'm inclined to sympathize with the famous Hitch-hiker's Guide quote, "Those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it [...] anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." A mostly-ceremonial head of state with rarely-used reserve powers, chosen by accident of birth, seems to be one of the more successful mitigations of this.
The other biggie is that democratically-elected leaders in two-party or multi-party systems (one party systems having rather nasty problems of their own that are outside the scope of this comment) tend to come to power as leaders of plurality or bare-majority factions, and they have a great deal of incentive towards sacrificing the interests of their opponents for the benefit of their supporters (i.e. tyranny of the majority) as well as angling for short-to-medium term political advantage in the next election even if that means sweeping problems under the rug for the next President to deal with. Giving the head of government a measure of accountability (even just the weak social accountability of weekly meetings with the monarchy) to someone with a multi-generational long-term outlook can help mitigate this a bit.
That said, British-style constitutional monarchy is far from the only successful mitigation of these problems. The American solution to the problem (division of powers between multiple elected power centers chosen by different mechanisms and constituencies to a mix of long and short terms of office, a hard-to-amend written constitution with substantive as well as procedural provisions, and an independent judiciary whose judges are appointed for life by the political branches of government) seems to be doing a pretty serviceable job; recent events suggest a need for tweaks on the margins, but not necessarily tossing the whole thing and starting over. And other countries seem to have gotten at least some of the benefits of a hereditary constitutional monarchy from a mostly-ceremonial elected head of state who serves much longer terms than than legislature or head of government.
It would be hard to argue that Britain over the past 100 years has been net better-governed than the US over the past 100 years. Britain had much worse economic outcomes despite a slight advantage in raw human talent. (2 IQ points). In 1913 the US was only 7% ahead of the UK in GDP per capita. Now it's 50% ahead. This has some pretty serious consequences for quality of life and probably far exceeds the importance of their minor differences in social policy.
Yes, that is a pretty significant prima facie piece of evidence against Britain being better governed than the US over the past 110 years, and it's worth digging a little deeper into how the GDP gap got so big.
Off the top of my head, the first major suspect is that Britain was hit a lot harder than the US by WW1 and WW2. Britain was in both wars from 1914 and 1939 respectively, while the US sat on the sidelines until 1917 and 1941. Britain probably spent more money relative to pre-war GDP, suffered a lot more casualties, and was more impacted by loss.of pre-war trade with Germany. And Britain's sea lanes were in range of (and the primary targets of) German U-Boats in both wars, while Britain's major cities were in range of German bombers in WW2 in particular. As I commented on Scott's "1960: THE YEAR THE SINGULARITY WAS CANCELLED" SSC post, the final graph in the post (showing Britain's long-term trend of GDP grown) seems to show the key break in the trend right around 1914.
A lot of this disparate impact was due to Britain's decision to put their country so close to Germany, which was already baked in long before 1913. The other big factor was Britain's policy decision to join both wars from the start, which was only partially forced by geography: theoretically, Britain could have sat out the wars and let Germany win (at least in the West), but that probably would have been a bad move especially in WW2. There are also longer-term geopolitical strategy decisions, namely the decisions leading to Britain aligning with France and Russia against Germany and reinforcing to division of Europe into rival power blocks, for which Edward VII definitely deserves a substantial share of the responsibility.
The other is Britain's mid-century flirtations with socialism, which went considerably further than the New Deal and Great Society programs in the US, to the point of large scale outright nationalization of several major industries. My sense is that this is more a matter of the mood of the electorate than of American checks and balances succeeding where British institutional restraints failed. And my understanding is that George V's personal rapport with Ramsey MacDonald went a long way towards successfully moderating the British Labour movement away from outright Marxism. I'm not sure what role if any George VI and Elizabeth II had on Labour's later evolution to its modern status as a regular centre-left party. But we probably can blame George V for enabling the nerfing of the House of Lords at beginning of his reign, removing a major institutional check on radical policy changes. And we can probably also assign him a measure of responsibility for the Lloyd George ministry and the subsequent decline of the Liberal party, which helped elevate Labour to its status as the second major party.
As recently as 1980 the US was only 31% ahead of the UK in GDP PPP per capita so I don’t think the world wars deserve all the blame. I would guess half the present gap is due to lower economic freedom and the other half is due to world wars.
I also think WWI involvement was an unforced error. They might have prevented it by avoiding entangling alliances or providing better adult supervision to the junior partners in their entangling alliances. Or they could have just sat out of WWI after it started and the eventual outcome would have been similar but not so bad for Germany that Germany starts WWII to get revenge. WWII was partly a consequence of the extremely unpopular treaty that was imposed on Germany after the war. Without which Hitler might not have been Hitler or might have not had enough support to form a coalition government in 1933. Just a few fewer seats and he wouldn't have had enough to form a coalition with the other right wing party.
The argument against absolute monarchy is that the monarch is in no way guaranteed to be competent .. And is effectively iremovable.. The argument against constitutional monarchy is similar: the monarch is not guaranteed to be a genuine and handed dem ocrat. Consider a traditionalist government bribing the monarch with an enhancement of their own powers.
I also oppose absolute monarchies, but I disagree about the arguments against them being deal-breakers for constitutional monarchies. The point of a constitutional monarchy is for the flaws and virtues of a stronger monarchy and the flaws and virtues of pure republics to balance out in a way that mitigates the flaws of both while keeping most of the virtues of each.
I'd much rather have William and Kate than Harry and Meghan, but I'm having trouble thinking of a clear principle (other than "I like them better", which is contrary to the spirit of hereditary divine right monarchy) for skipping over Charles without also skipping William. But with a choice between Harry and Meghan on one hand and Donald and Melania on the other, I know which pair I'd prefer.
But if you're letting me pick any Queen I want, I'm choosing Galadriel (actual canon Galadriel, not Rings of Power Galadriel, of course). She has the added benefit of being immortal, which solves the succession problem rather neatly. The main downside is that she's a fictional character, and hiring Cate Blanchett to play Galadriel again would only go so far at mitigating that.
The bit where Harry and Megan are completely unable to predict blindingly obvious consequences of their actions, while being wildly entitled, suggests they'd make poor leaders.
Shhhh, we're trying to get rid of the monarchy. At the moment anyone born in the UK is a British subject, not a citizen. The distinction is crucial in understanding why nothing significant seems to happen in British society, we are all Crown subjects with no fundamental rights to free speech...
I suspect your problem is with your constitution, not your monarchy. There are plenty of republics without free speech or meaningful citizenship status, and there are constitutional monarchies with free speech and meaningful citizenship status. Some of the latter, e.g. Canada, actually have the exact same monarch as Britain.
The trick, as far as I can tell, is to write down you constitution and put an explicit guarantee of freedom of speech in it. It also helps if your voters and judges actually take the free speech clause seriously, since constitutions (written or otherwise) rely of humans to enforce their provisions.
I am aware. That's why my policy recommendations for you guys lead with writing it down.
And yes, that is easier said than done. We Yanks took thirteen years and two rounds of trying to get ours written down properly, and we're still arguing about what various important details therein mean almost 250 years later.
In all seriousness, why don't we regularly clean the statue of liberty? Is this intentional/would be technically difficult or just another case Of New York being unable to maintain infrastructure?
According to this roofing company https://jtcroofing.co.uk/news/why-does-copper-turn-green/ you can expect your shiny copper exposed to the elements to turn an ugly brown within months and an ugly brown-green within five years before eventually stabilising a dignified light green in twenty years. This roughly matches my observations on some copper domes I know that had panels replaced a while ago.
The statue took years to make so it was probably already dull brown long before it was erected.
I was suspicious of this because atmospheric sulfur concentration surely varies from place to place, and what I found is that the rate of formation depends on sulfur and moisture levels, and in low sulfur areas it takes a few decades but can happen in five years in high sulfur areas.
Seems unlikely. The green is some kind of hydroxycarbonate stuff, that is, first you get oxides and then slowly water and CO2 react with that to get something similar to (but not chemically identical) to malachite.
Copper sulfide is black and the sulfite is unstable while the sulfate is water soluble... so the only stable sulfur-based coating would be the sulfide, and I think you'd only get that if you were next to a paper mill or something.
SO2 and SO3 in the air could certainly hasten the process of patination by reacting with the oxide coating though.
There's a building close to where I work that has a wooden roof painted in an ugly greenish-brown to look like fading copper. Somehow or other, that's supposed to be a good thing.
Copper patina is about 0.07mm. The surface of the statue of liberty is made of copper sheet only 2.4mm thick.
Let's say it's twice as thick as it needs to be structurally, and we can remove the patina perfectly gently. We'd have 17 cleanings before it fell apart, max.
The flame in the torch is still shiny because they covered it with gold leaf in the 1980's. We could probably do the same to the whole statue for less than recurrent cleaning costs.
According to the national park service, the oxidation has penetrated half of the total thickness already, so you'd probably have to replace panels as early as the first clean-up.
OTOH, it's already 150 years old, so not that fast…
I’ll be that guy. It’s called verdigris. Most copper or bronze statues become this color unless a clear coat of some sort is added.
If it’s a statue of a guy on a horse it usually ends up looking like Robert E Lee. If it’s a standing or seated man with a beard if usually ends up looking like V I Lenin.
My understanding is that yes, cleaning the statue would be technically difficult. The sheets of copper forming the outer structure aren't especially thick, and the layer of corrosion is more than just a thin film. If you cleaned it off, there's a risk of putting holes in the actual structure, and the more times you clean it off, the thinner and more vulnerable it's going to get.
I have no clue if this has anything to do with it, but jurisdiction over this area is complicated as hell. The island is entirely federally-owned and maintenance is supposed to be the responsibility of the national park service. The land is part of the state of New York, but all of the surrounding waters are part of the state of New Jersey. New York City provides mail service and has the right to collect sales tax from the souvenir shops. Jersey City provides sewage, water, and electricity.
I once had to polish a brass fitting on the outside of a ship. I got it from green to shiny gold-ish, and it was back to the exact same shade of green the next morning.
There's a chapter about this in Rust (Waldman 2016). Patina is adherent, and is one of the better corrosion products for protection against atmospheric corrosion (not applicable in seawater). It's not as good as aluminium oxide, but it's way better than iron oxide. It's also pretty and iconic.
I believe there's a sacrificial system inside it that tries to galvanically protect the statue but I'm not 100% on that (and also, unsure if cathodic protection works without electrolyte - I'll have to look up what it was).
Overall the structure is in shockingly good condition given how saline the environment must be. Modern steel looks worse at a third of the age.
Have you read The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge? A biography of William Marshall. I'm only about 100 pages in, but a good overview of The Anarchy, the reign of Henry II, knighting in general, and of course Marshall's role in it all.
The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History Vols. I and II (no one's ever going to be able to prove that you haven't read it), The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis (not history, but a short overview of medieval cosmology and philosophy).
The books that got me into medieval history were John Julius Norwich's books on Byzantium, Venice, and on the Normans in Italy. They are of a similar age to the Tuchman, so they obviously don't have the most recent scholarship.
> They are of a similar age to the Tuchman, so they obviously don't have the most recent scholarship
This might be an excessively specific question, but do you happen to know if there have been major changes in our understanding of the 14th century since Tuchman's book?
IIRC Tuchman's book is itself based on just reading Froissart to a greater degree than one might ideally like, but it was a long time ago and I could be way off-base on that.
Personally, I think reading the contemporary chronicles is way underrated as a source of entertainment and information. Sure, the numbers are often way, way off, but that just gives academics a source of employment in bitching about it.
My personal favorites are the History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours, and Froissart's chronicles of the Hundred Years' War.
Would ultimogeniture ever come up in the study of medieval history? It does not appear to have been used by any medieval country, which makes sense given that it has some fairly severe drawbacks and no benefits compared to primogeniture.
Disagree! There are a number of argument in favour of long reigns (although democratic governments seem to stink if they stick around too long, the stability benefits of very long-lived monarchs seems to outweigh the 'too long in power' effect), and ultimogeniture would create longer reigns. The opposite of ultimogeniture isn't primogeniture, it's the next-of-male-kin rules in many Arab countries, where your 90-year-old king dies, then his 89-year-old brother takes over, then he dies, then...
> the stability benefits of very long-lived monarchs
Very long-lived monarchs provide stability while they're on the throne, but they also supply a big spike of instability when they die. It is not necessarily advantageous to concentrate all your instability into a narrow window of time; there was an Egyptian dynasty that seems to have fallen for this reason. (When Pepi II died after a reign of many decades.)
> The opposite of ultimogeniture isn't primogeniture, it's the next-of-male-kin rules in many Arab countries
So? Does this respond to something I said?
Primogeniture has the advantages over ultimogeniture that (1) everyone knows what to expect; (2) You can start training the heir as soon as he's old enough to receive any training, because you know who he is; and (3) older people command more respect from everyone else in the world than younger people do. There is no difference in heir quality compared to ultimogeniture - it will often be the case that the youngest son is superior to the oldest son, but both inheritance systems choose the heir in advance when that information is unavailable. (In contrast, other systems may allow the king to nominate his own heir, in which case the average quality of heirs should go up.)
Ultimogeniture works better in CK because you can predict ability from birth and it's fairly easy to decide to have another child until you get a good one and then stop in the game (you can adopt celibacy or divorce your wife, etc).
Ultimogeniture for property (but not necessarily rulership) was a Mongol feature when Genghis Khan died toward the end of the medieval period - his youngest son was regent for a couple of years after dad died until an older brother officially succeeded as Khan.
Hear me out: nuclear disarmament through selling ad space on the moon.
Initiate an international treaty whereby companies can buy a certain number of warheads to detonate on the lunar service to inscribe their company logo for eternity.
Robert Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon". Moka Cola is convinced to gain publicity by blocking 6+ from using powdered carbon to inscribe their logo on the moon.
I was almost able to write that from memory, with Mocha Cola as the only mistake. Sometimes I wonder whether I'd be better off if I knew something else as well as I know classic science fiction.
There's an issue of the comic The Tick in which a supervillian, Chairface, uses a laser to start writing his name on the moon. He got three letters in before he was stopped.
I think defacing the moon would be taken as a casus belli by quite a large number of people. I wouldn't really even condemn them for taking it that way.
As a snotty American interloper, I will proudly carry my crappy 2-2 to my grave.
One of my fellow Americans tried to skip one of the tests entirely, but the college porters dragged him out of bed and made him show up in his pajamas to sign his name on the test paper.
He also destroyed an expensive fiberglass rowing boat. Accidentally.
The stat about coal is pretty far off. The linked source says, "Carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal use is responsible for about 40 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel use." That's a long way from 40 percent overall.
There are roughly two carbon cycles (not counting CNO):
* a fast cycle between biomatter, atmosphere, soil and oceans
* a slow cycle in which takes many millions of years and turns dead dinosaurs into fossil fuel.
If you burn a piece of wood or own some mitochondria, you move only within the fast cycle, and the total amount of carbon in that cycle stays constant. (I think if we took it upon ourselves to burn most of the biomass on the planet, we could cause a greenhouse effect by that alone. Fortunately, we don't do that.)
The problem is that we burn fossil fuel -- which has been out of the fast cycle for millions of years, thereby increasing the overall amount of carbon in the fast cycle.
As an analogy, consider two countries which decide to spend more money on statues or warships. Country "wood" raises taxes, while country "coal" just prints more money.
While the local effect of the money is similar in both cases (the statue- or shipmakers earn money), the big picture economic effects are likely to be very different.
Destroyer costs 3 billion, Aircraft Carrier costs 10 billion. Can you *imagine* a modern NYT reporter doing a thousand hours of work, or even three hundred? I can't.
You have no chance of winning as long as you insist on making statues of famous people. I would simply pull people off the street and entomb them in giant coal pyramids to ensure they have a bountiful afterlife.
No problem, Moon Moth, I am kinda drunk too, and am at the level where I am maxed out on bad taste. To get less crass I would have to drink more and then might get the spins. People understand we are just crapping around. Many posters are roaming around in their inner swamps looking for ideas that capture their rage in the form of wit.
I feel like making a large number of statues from flammable material could backfire, which would be terrible for the environment - I suggest we just bury the coal in a hole in the ground where it can't do any harm
And the fire services. This plan has so many advantages, who could possibly object to it?
EDIT: It just occurred to me that this would also establish an American version of the Swedish Yule Goat, with annual attempts to burn the monument. It really has something for everyone - the coal mine owners, the miners, those involved in the grafting industry of deciding who gets to be the represented national hero/ine immortalised in coal, the security services, the fire services, and inculcating the can-do spirit in our boisterous youth! Not to mention the prediction markets and bookies running bets on which coal figure would be set alight when or if it would happen this year!
It doesn't say anything else about him except that he's 52 years old, which means he's probably not approaching senility, which already makes him a lot better than certain other candidates I could mention.
You have a problem here, slightly different than expected! at the least, make sure to seal those statues so they don't self heat under ambiant oxidation conditions and then light up from the inside out.
Perhaps the US could coordinate with other countries to lower the amount of O2 back to pre-Great Oxygen Event levels. In such circumstances, coal would probably be safe to store.
I'm sorry am I really missing something? I did not get that interpretation and would benefit from clarification...sorry whatever it is you're getting from the message. Genuinely have no idea
Yeahhh, that's a pretty big stretch to me from "my god I have something to add" as a feeling to "racist motherfucker." I am clearly missing something completely.
Further down Eremolalos clarifies that they had a few scoops, so drunkposting. Presumably they've sobered up by now so the most charitable thing is politely ignore whatever they wrote under the influence.
Tom, the "racist motherfucker" remark was. *joke.*. I wouldn't have made it if there was any conceivable way that your remark could have been taken as racist. What you wrote was so completely and utterly disjunct from anything race-related that I felt sure readers would see that my comment was a joke about flinging around unfounded accusations of racism. And besides, this whole thread is people saying things they obviously do not mean. Scott is saying we should make Trump monarch! Anyhow, I'm sorry I upset you. And yeah, I'd been drinking that night, & it's possible that if I hadn't been I would have skipped that particular joke.
Yeah, that particular joke kinda fell short for me, just on account of you know...Idk, some open ness that sometimes people have a wildly different interpretation on race topics, I wasn't engaged enough to know if I missed something, but I also have missed enough things in life to be wary that I missed something.
I think your point about the whole thread being roundabout things people obviously do not mean, is very valid. I think racist motherfucker is just the point I have a flag of "ok, I'll take a moment and be serious just in case." :p glad to have you back and this resolved. Thanks
This is the funniest thing I have ever read on Substack. The combination of arch satire, bringing back castrati, with hilariously dumb random thoughts, Justice Justice, is just perfect.
A mix of “funny” and “get away with subversive because it is funny”. I missed whether you have plans to reform the Jones Act?
For a more serious take, I recommend starting with Vivek’s Ten Commandments. A few would have to be changed; I have “climate change is real or I’ll cut you” on my bingo card, and his line about the Constitution is a textbook example of “profound-sounding bullshit”. But, unlike the other candidates, he actually has a platform, which is something.
I believe your Supreme Court scheme would be better served by appointing Victoria Justice because we, as national, deserve a hot Supreme Court justice and she's partially Puerto Rican and almost certainly has some native ancestry, making it more likely you can pull off your Chief Justice goal
If you get a third appointment, I suggest Aaron Judge (a baseball player, if Wikipedia is to be believed); Justice Judge is almost as good as Justice Justice.
Or filmmaker Mike Judge (Office Space) or actor Christopher Judge (Teal’c on SG-1). Or all three. They can be the appointments to lower courts, who are indeed addressed as “Judge Lastname” (rarely exactly that though).
If you have two Supreme Court vacancies, look to Texas and Arkansas. Former representative Tom DeLay and county judge Barry Dean Hyde get you Justice DeLay and Justice Dean Hyde.
Prefer you make pop-ups that ask people to do something about the ePrivacy Directive, not the GDPR, personally, but it's a minor point. You have my vote. 8D
Beat me to it. It is worth making this point not only for the sake of pedanticism (which is its own reward) but because there’s chatter about fixing the eprivacy directive and presumably the process could use a boost.
(I’m not a European and tracking EU proposals is totally confounding so apologies if I’m misstating the current prospects for reform)
The Trump thing is surprisingly close to actual arguments I've read for constitutional monarchy...
(I.e., the argument that if you don't have a monarch or other similar outside-the-governent-head-of-state, people will be too inclined to revere the head of government and not question, rather than properly holding them to account as an employee of the public.)
Important to nominate someone from Narcissistic cluster (narcissist, sociopath, borderline). Otherwise they person will be wondering why the hell the world is so interested in them.
I wonder if people would hold the President more to account if the prestige of the office wasn't there. Maybe they work out of a plain brick office building, wear fairly casual clothes, aren't addressed by "Mr./Mrs. President", and look mostly like just some random person.
Hey, instead of just cleaning the Statue of Liberty, how about we reopen the torch?? It's been closed ever since a terrorist attack back during *World War I*, it's not like it hasn't been repaired since then, but they still haven't reopened it to visitors!
I'd guess the main issue now is that it's not handicapped-accessible. There's no room to put in an elevator or even a particularly *wide* staircase. WW1-era tourists were less likely to mind climbing lots of tiny little stairs and if they collapsed up there were likely to be small enough that you could easily carry them back down unconscious.
The best thing about the liturgy is the concept of antidosis (dealt with in the link). If Elon is asked to fund a warship he can say Why me, Zuck's richer than I am. Zuck can then either concede that he's richer, and fund the warship, or he can say No, Elon is richer, in which case Elon and Zuck exchange all their property, and Zuck pays for the liturgy but out of his increased (if he was right) fortune he has now got from Elon.
Unfortunately, as an election map enthusiast, I must correct you: Ottawa County voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and so has broken its streak of always voting for the winner. Your campaign would be better served focusing on Clallam County, Washington, which currently has the longest unbroken streak of voting for the winner (having done so at every election beginning in 1980).
(That said, I happen to live in the Cleveland area and have many acquaintances in Ottawa County — actually — so I can introduce them to the idea of forcing Elon Musk to build ships for the navy and report back their thoughts.)
I propose an alternate solution to the coal problem: we have a moral imperative to send what coal we have to Mars and other potential future colonies. Those poor deprived planets have starved too long without the precious bounty of a rotting environmental collapse, we owe it to the future to share the spoils of the past with them. No one cares about global warming on Mars. Alternatively: make Scott's proposed monuments on the moon. This removes the risk of spontaneous combustion and also stamps the power of American indomitability for millennia to come.
I once read a sci-fi premise where Mars has a thriving hot-rodding community because it's the only place where burning fossil fuels is not only still acceptable but encouraged.
(But IIRC in reality the big problem with terraforming Mars is just that it's too small and lacks a magnetosphere, so any atmosphere you install will eventually escape into space.)
Just build an artificial magnetosphere. You don't want to skimp on your planetary engineering and let all the air escape over the course of tens of millions of years, that'd be irresponsible :P
Ironically, coal may have been the original reason the Titanic struck the iceberg in the first place. Apparently one of the coal bunkers had a smouldering fire, as they often did surprisingly, and it was too inacessible to extinguish safely without causing a steam explosion.
So the captain was in a tearing hurry to reach New York before there was insufficient coal left to complete the journey, hence the excessive speed in unsuitable conditions. Worse still, the fire weakened the hull around part of the area along which the iceberg scraped, so that rivets popped out more readily.
Not sure whether that is generally accepted, or just someone's bright idea, but it all sounds quite plausible.
I have heard the theory that this coal fire may have weakened the steel, but never that it had anything to do with the captain’s hurry. “Old captain wants to set a cracking speed on his swan song voyage” seems more than enough of an explanation.
It doesn't sound plausible to me, for two reasons:
1) I doubt that the Titanic would have set off without sufficient coal to ensure it could complete the journey. The fire was discovered before departure, so they could take it into account when determining whether there was sufficient coal on board, but I think they would have allowed for the possibility of a coal fire in any case.
2) Water resistance is roughly proportional to the square of the velocity, which means that the fuel efficiency of a ship drops when you get close to maximum speed. In other words, if the captain were concerned about not having enough coal, that concern would counsel lower speed, not higher speed. The crew had put out the coal fire, so the captain wasn't trying to use coal before it burned up.
I'm convinced by all those arguments in combination, and have changed my mind about the hurried pace explanation.
My only slight reservation is that the coal power wasn't being used entirely for propulsion but for all the lighting and heating as well. So there must have been an optimum speed to minimise the combined usage of power on everything over the travel time. But I can see that would have been less than top speed if the power needed for propulsion dwarved everything else and increased with speed.
I keep hearing about the US losing interest in guaranteeing the safety of commerce from Peter Zeihan. Japan is a wealthy country that needs world trade. A US-Japan alliance might make sense. World trade is less essential for the US, but it's still pretty nice.
Yeah, I don’t even need the $18 profit. But I have the idea that there are (or would be, if Scott managed to get 65k donations) other requirements, like appearing in polls and so forth.
That worked out fine in the age of sail, and might still have worked during the first phase of the era of steel warships. However during the age of nuclear weapons, I dunno.... When the foreign power whose ships your authorized privateers are attacking could respond with a tactical or even strategic nuke, the targeting of which may or may not be restricted to your authorized privateer....?
I condemn your proposal for the Statue of Liberty. After cleaning it, it should be gilded. Or even better: coated with _Aluminum!_ I'm sure there's an allegory for technological progress in there somewhere.
What color goes with "rusty copper green" to produce gold? Maybe a few lasers pointed up at it would give a more impressive color, at least at night, if they didn't dazzle pilots approaching JFK Airport.
re: popup war -- Just install the ninja cookie plugin for your browser. And, no, it won't mean that you have to constantly relogin to all your sites that require you to make one.
reverse primogeniture is sometimes called ultimogeniture or postremogeniture, and as long as Barron promised to take care of his dad, it seems like a reasonable deal to me
Problem with getting rid of the nickel: we would not have a realization of the gcd, which seems unfortunate. We could go all the way to quarter as minimum, or change the value of a quarter (sounds like a bad idea to me).
Bezos’ rocket armada ain’t doing so hot. To the point that big bloated legacy ULA is sitting on its hands waiting around for him to finish a damn engine they can bolt on their rocket.
“When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it.”
It’s hardly that popular over here. Worst legislation ever - probably with no effect on privacy but a big cost to small business, or anybody with a video doorbell.
And the snake oil salesmen came out of the woodwork on that one, consultancies became GDPR experts overnight and much money was made from the gullible.
It’s been a big win from my perspective. I’ve finally been able to tell managers that the horrible thing they want to do is no longer legal, and a number of other software engineers that I’ve talked to have said the same. Privacy wins now, when it never did before. Unfortunately that’s not very legible, since it’s hard to list out all the ways in which you’re not being tracked anymore or to count the data breaches that didn’t contain your personal information, but the net result is very positive.
Not European, but tentatively agree with this – I've heard European acquaintances (and randos, for that matter) mention that they can't access various US websites, apparently mainly news sites, because those sites would rather just block all EU traffic than rejigger their websites to give up the sweet, sweet intrusion money. This suggests to me that the intrusion being done is... considerable.
It also means that if I really want to read the damn article because someone referenced it and I can't understand the points they are making without reading it, then I'll fire up the ol' VPN and pretend I am a red-white-and-blue, rootin'-tootin' Yankee. Yeehaw.
Same thing with adblockers, and now websites are doing the blegging of "We see you're using an adblocker, turn it off or else you can't read this". Well golly gosh gee, someone posted a very handy workaround for that on Tumblr and it works (so far) for non-fluent in computer code idiots like me.
The cookie law is terrible, because it gives websites the option to nag users into consenting to cookies. A better way would have been to force websites to respect privacy preferences sent by the browser.
Of course, you could still refuse to show the website to users who don't want to be tracked, and ask them to enable tracking instead of showing the website (just like some websites handle adblockers), or nag them to enable tracking.
Or you could argue that cookies are text files which the browser (which is a piece of software working on behalf of the user) sends to the server, and that it is implicitly acknowledged that the server may use that information. Users are free to disable or enable cookies in their browser as they prefer.
Or you could generally forbid tracking of users by ad networks.
But the idea that a popup is an even remotely acceptable way to get to an opt-in is completely bollocks. "Oh, we are so sorry, but unfortunately there is no technical way to know if you want to be spied on, so I guess we have to ask you for your preferences using some dark UI pattern checkboxes."
But then again, some EU people also believe that IP addresses should be treated as personal information. I guess having them in the memory of a server during a TCP connection is still considered okay.
Instead of having weirdly explicit rules about what you can do with this or that tech with or without user consent, one could simply decide that some goals (tracking users to target advertisement by any tech from IPs to mouse movement patterns) are forbidden and call it a day.
Why should random web pages want to store a cookie on my computer anyway?
Imagine a parallel universe where internet was never invented. Instead, the advertising industry gradually promoted a social norm that it is okay to put advertising stickers on random people on the street. At some moment some people get really tired of this, and some government makes a law that you cannot put a sticker on a stranger, unless you get their consent first.
And then most people are like: "Why does this annoying law exist? Now I can't even walk to a shop without dozen people asking me to sign a consent form. Why can't they simply put a sticker on me and let me go?"
Yeah, as a web developer, I worry that GDPR and well-intentioned legislation will have a huge chilling effect on the internet: trying to do anything on the internet will open you up to potential legislation over GDPR concerns, or cookie concerns, or accessibility concerns, or not-having-a-French-version-of-your-website-in-Quebec concerns.
Not to say that privacy, accessibility, and tracking control aren't important... but I worry that we'll end up increasingly putting the internet in the hands of just a few small companies that can hire people to jump through all these legal hoops, (even more so than it already does).
We had to implement it and my boss was very paranoid about possible infractions, but it hasn't made that huge a difference now once we're used to it. Mostly being careful about cc'ing emails and anything with personally identifying material.
We didn't use any consultants, but we're only very, very small potatoes. There were a lot of places popped up offering services, right enough, but unless you're a huge organisation why would you even bother?
And despite that, I regularly get emails from other organisations with the entire list of everybody's email address that they mass-mailed to, even though under GDPR this is a big no-no 🤦♀️
"The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now."
We can update this to have rich people finance non-Marvel, non-Star Wars movies. Adult-oriented, a-political dramas of the kind that don't really get made much anymore, like say The Shawshank Redemption or Eyes Wide Shut. Add it to your campaign platform to lock down that all-important film buff demographic!
Rich people are already carrying out the liturgy to support theatre by sponsoring the arts such as opera houses, theatres, galleries and museums, etc.
If I listen to the Met broadcast on our classical music station, they roll out a list of sponsors before every one. Toll House Brothers and the Annenberg Foundation!
Yeah, that buys like zero goodwill with me, because a lot of that money goes to support art that few people actually like, hence why it needs the largesse of the wealthy to support it in the first place. Most modern art is garbage, a lot of modern theater is just gay cowboys eating pudding (as Eric Cartman so aptly put it), and opera has always sucked. The winning move here for Scott is to encourage the rich to subsidize art that *I* like for a change.
"While The Shawshank Redemption received critical acclaim upon its release—particularly for its story, the performances of Robbins and Freeman, Newman's score, Darabont's direction and screenplay and Roger Deakins' cinematography—the film was a box-office disappointment, earning only $16 million during its initial theatrical run. Many reasons were cited for its failure at the time, including competition from the films Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, the general unpopularity of prison films, its lack of female characters, and even the title, which was considered to be confusing for audiences. It went on to receive multiple award nominations, including seven Academy Award nominations, and a theatrical re-release that, combined with international takings, increased the film's box-office gross to $73.3 million."
People liked it once they got told it was amazing, loudly and at length.
The number one grossing movie hasn't been a drama like you describe since 1988. Before that, 1957. It's almost like that kind of thing is a niche product.
Taking it partly seriously, I understand there may be a use for mined coal as fertiliser. It is a long time since I heard about the research, but coal is carbon, which is what plants need. It’s a matter of turning it into useful carbon. Currently not as lucrative as mining coal to burn for the purpose of endangering human life but has potential.
I've kind of wondered if plants like the increased buffet of CO2 floating around, and think the world is turning into utopia. The parts where we aren't destroying existing plants.
It’s not a bad idea, the liturgy. Although to mix two ideas here, maybe the billionaires could get their faces on Mount Rushmore, or equivalent, if they volunteer most of their wealth to the state.
> When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.
*Sigh...*
First off, a lot of American websites (mostly newspapers) already do that. If you visit them as an european, they serve you a page that says "We don't want to comply with GDPR, fuck you and your data privacy, you don't get to read our articles" in a slightly more polite tone.
Second, the GDPR doesn't mandate cookie banners, and it's perfectly possible to comply with GDPR without a banner. Substack doesn't have one, for instance. What GDPR mandates is active consent before any kind of tracking of identifying data that isn't necessary to deliver your core service. That means you can (1) use regular cookies without a banner if they're used for site function (eg authentication) and (2) collect anonymized data if you want to track usage statistics. But what most sites with those banners want is (3) collect an invasive profile of everything you do to target you with ultra-personalized advertising, and that's against the spirit of GDPR. These cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance.
You want an end to cookie banners? Ask Google to lower the pagerank of any site with one, and publicly advertise it. That's probably what they'll do once they manage to roll out their own GDPR-compliant advertising.
> These cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance.
I get that this isn't the outcome legislators wanted, but it's a highly predictable outcome: "you can either reduce doing things that you're doing because they make you more money, or you can annoy your users with an extra pop-up and blame it on GDPR"... it's not super hard to imagine which way a lot of companies are going to go.
If your legislation is predictably going to make things worse due to companies taking the easy (or more profitable) way out... seems like it's not a great legislation.
---
Plus, even if you think you're probably doing all the anonymization and non-tracking stuff right, if you're not 100% sure (and knowing this requires an interesting blend of legal savvy and tech savvy), it's a lot easier to just slap a banner on it and be done.
It's like the law passed forcing companies to much more carefully prove that they don't have sesame seeds in their products: it was well-intentioned, but put a lot of cost on companies so a lot of them just added sesame seeds, making the result worse for the very thing the law was trying to help.
>They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future.
They might deserve that, but to have a chance to fail, policies first need to be implemented, and the president is a pretty lousy role for making that happen, considering that he's always at the center of attention and at least half the country hates him and everything he stands for. Everybody knows that some anonymous unelected paper pushers enact actual changes, have you considered applying there?
While I support the idea of building giant statues of black/Black people in principle, I am concerned white/White supremacists would ally with anti-climate extremists (unless they are the same people already?) and burn the statues in a double-whammy release of both hate and carbon. Should these statues be erected, 24/7 protection by armed guards from the Black Power movement would be required.
The statues shouldn't be of actual black/Black people because that would be racist. Or something. They should all be giant coal statues of bottles of Aunt Jemima as that would also be a comment on capitalism.
Based on my offering this idea to improve the platform, I should get one of those $20 gift cards.
Har har. There are three types of people who like to say Dems are obsessed with The Former Guy.
1) You’re either secretly rooting for their success every step of the way (and the success of the justice system which would be inactive without the Dem’s so-called obsession – with shout-outs to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger).
2) You're politically too ill-informed to realize your mirth emanates from cynical manipulation by the hypocritical big players trying to cling to power (From Fox to Musk to the GOP writ large).
3) Or you’re in that very special, very real tribe that has convinced themselves that democracy itself is secondary to stopping the trend of wokeness.
Anyone who isn’t “obsessed” with keeping the TFG and his cronies away from the Oval is playing with fire. And not a good citizen for always counting on the Dems to clean up the biggest messes!
If Hillary had won, there would never have been Covid? Isn't that stretching the divine powers of the Empress a bit too far, drosophilist?
Look around the world at different nations under different governments and how they handled, or didn't, Covid. Should it have been ivermectin for all? Is Fauci a hero or a loser? Masking forever? No masks since they don't work? Shutdowns and lockdowns or no? Vaccination for herd immunity or a killer of the young and healthy? Whichever option you pick, someone is going to argue, with copious supporting material, that the opposite would have surely worked and stopped the pandemic in six weeks flat.
You guys can send him to prison or whatever. That's Ok with me. But other than media scandals and tax cuts very little actually happened until covid hit. His next presidency will also be defined by media scandals while little happens.
Operation Warp Speed was probably the single most consequential and good act taken by government worldwide during covid. Trump then spent the following years convincing people to get vaccinated. His handling was overall fine.
I don't really care about the election stuff. It's stupid all around.
"The election stuff" matters a great deal to some of us, including some like me who are independent voters harboring plenty of disgust with today's lefty politics. Trying to simply strong-arm the result of a national election is so egregious and harmful that it demands an uncompromising civic response.
They filed more than 60 lawsuits in state and federal courts claiming that the election was rigged in various ways. They won _one_, which was over a changed deadline for providing missing identification on certain absentee and mail-in ballots in a single jurisdiction.
Judge Stephanos Bibas, one of the two dozen Trump-appointed judges scattered across the country who ruled against Trump and his raving lawyers, summed it up well: "Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Hillary believes in SCIENCE!!! obviously. OMB was a science denying horse-paste peddler that got his own voters killed with fish tank cleaner and injecting chlorox!
This is why New York, lead by the Emmy-award winning Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) did so much better than anywhere else.
Be careful to allow a wounded tiger back into your house. It is likely to be less pleasant to be around, in particular for those it suspects caused the wound, or were somehow associated with them.
I don’t talk about this much here anymore but it’s pretty amazing how large a percentage of the country seems just fine with the US going through a Silvio Berlusconi era.
It makes me wonder if high schools quit teaching Civics some time ago.
I agree with you. I would say that we are getting closer and closer to an armed conflict about what civics really is anymore. It sure as hell doesn’t mean
Live and let live, while fostering a public space that is respected by all. I think that’s a result of two things; the co-opting of public space in the interest of what would be more appropriately private behavior, and an intolerance that some people have about what their neighbors might be doing amongst themselves.
Some ideas are too harmful to be allowed in the public space. Live and let live is a childish form of racism almost as bad as being colorblind, that perpetuates the whitecisheteropatriarchical hegemonic oppressive dominance over liminal spaces.
Anyone that doesn't understand this is too uneducated to be taken seriously.
>Some ideas are too harmful to be allowed in the public space.
Agreed. in general terms. I think that was part of my point re a public space respected by all.As for the rest of your comment, I think I understand it just fine; it reads as nonsense.
I think that the media is very much into Florida Man, because he generates interactions (e.g. money) in a way which Mike Pence does not.
If during his first primaries, all of the liberals had made a commitment not to click on any links about the outrageous stuff he pulled, he would have lost the primary.
Let the courts do their job, but cut down on the media circus. He feeds on it.
The stuff he did in office (setting the stage for Dobbs, fighting "Obamacare") was mostly stuff any other GOP member would have done as well. Lying about election fraud is certainly burning the commons, but he did not use any presidential powers for his lies. Palpatine would have found a way to take power due to the COVID crisis. Even when trying to fix an election, Florida Man did it with all the political instinct of a three year old who can't accept that they have lost a game. (Which does not make him harmless, sometimes silly people end up doing great harm. Hitlers first big thing out of all strategic objectives there were in Germany, was to try to occupy the bloody Feldherrenhalle.)
Remember GWB, the respectable conservative who dragged the US into two disastrous wars and did his best to legalize torture? Compared to that, the funny man with the twitter account seems rather droll.
That was Mitt, who used to be a theocrat (and inflictor of dog-cruelty) who was going to introduce literal Handmaid's Tale Gilead if elected.
Or maybe it was his evil twin? I get confused easily about the version of the same guy before and after they lose elections or leave power, at least according to the people who fought tooth and nail to have them lose the election or leave power. They're always good guys when they're losers, seems to be the rule of thumb.
> Lying about election fraud is certainly burning the commons, but he did not use any presidential powers for his lies.
One of the unenumerated, but significant powers of presidency is the bully pulpit. I think I can make a case for him using that to great effect. Repeatedly saying if he lost the election in 2020 (starting six months before the election) it would mean it was fraudulent is pretty powerful signal.
Obviously, the media thrives on controversy because people thrive on it as well. Trump is difficult to ignore. For all of us. Even more so because a significant percentage of the population thinks highly of him. How do you ignore that?
It was hilarious watching McCain's expression when he went back to Jon Stewart et. al. when he was a candidate instead of a reliable R-hating R. He honestly didn't seem to expect that they'd turn on him that savagely.
Mittens was a dog-torturing religious wacko with magic underwear who wanted to put women in binders.
GWB had eight years in the White House to incite hatred for having an (R) after his name. McCain and Romney only had a campaign season, and they had to share the spotlight for part of it.
He doesn’t like the New York Times as they doxxed him. 10 million dollars an hour minimum wage means that it is not economical to hire anyone so they’re all fired.
They totally should, because they are so smart and so liberal. There is no joke here. Consider their varied backgrounds -- American rich kid . . . Muslim something-or-other . . . blue collar family but make it into HARVARD . . . have some goddam disability but made it into HARVARD. But despite starting out in various American shitholes they a MADE IT INTO HARVARD, and thence to the NYT. STFU and pay these people a shit ton of money.
I'm guessing the NYT likes to say that minimum wage increases don't cause unemployment. Which may be true on the current margins, but is clearly untrue on the extremes. Raising the minimum wage for NYT journalists to $10m would mean that they're all immediately out of a job, in a way that demonstrates that one of their cherished beliefs was wrong.
Anyone who claims that raising the minimum wage will reduce *zero* jobs is taking the extreme position. You can quibble about whether raising it $0.25 would reduce jobs above zero and whatnot, but the primary supporters of minimum wage increases locked onto an amount that was double the previous rate. That's definitely the extreme position.
An intellectually honest take would be to say that some jobs will be lost and that the amount lost increases with the amount the wage goes up, but it's worth it because _______. I don't recall ever hearing that take.
Or perhaps "some jobs will be lost, but the additional economic activity generated by the increased marginal utility of money at the low end will (more than?) make up for it". But I doubt many people are arguing that, either!
Because natural experiments are always imperfect. There are studies on both sides, and since the empirical literature is muddled labor being subject to supply and demand should be the null hypothesis.
There were a few badly conducted studies (the first Card study for example) that looked at one margin of adjustment over a short time horizon, did it badly, and found weak effects. We should have very strong priors on this topic, given how overwhelming the evidence is on demand and supply, and how labour markets largely follow those rules. More recent work that is able to look at other margins( http://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/minimum_wage.pdf) and carry out the study well finds that price floors( in the form of minimum wage) cause exactly the adjustments that demand and supply predict, i.e it favours more productive workers and reduces hours worked for less productive workers. And these are just short term adjustments. Over time artificial price floors encourage automation of tasks where labour supply exists and is the cheaper alternative, again disadvantaging those with the least skills.
Because they're worth it, Caba, with how they enlighten the ignorant, speak truth to power, fight tyranny, be the newspaper of record, and just make the world a better, more civilised, place simply by existing 😁
We are really not that much trouble you know. Plus, we all live really close to the border and all the essential infrastructure is already in place; Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Best Buy there’d be nothing to it.
The advantage is that all the people who regularly threaten to move to Canada after elections don't go their way now would have no excuse not to do so. That is a very enticing prospect, I must admit.
Hopefully he'll then open a chain of fitness facilities, so that when you visit the flagship location, you can say you set foot in Chief Justice Chief Jim Justice's chief gym.
All asynchronous communications, including internet comments, emails, text messages, voice messages, news articles, blog posts, youtube posts, social media posts, social media comments, comments of any kind, letters to the editor, letters of any kind, written publications of any kind, handbills, protest signs, end times signs, band flyers, religious flyers, political flyers, and notes in class cost $1 to post. NO FRANKING PRIVILEGES. Two individuals can establish a mutual free channel, which may be revoked by either party at any time with no repercussions.
I (genuinely) donated to my local food bank as a way of putting my money where my mouth is with this comment.
"The few people who continue to be interested will get their knowledge from the IRS website rather than far-right forums, denying extremist groups a key method of recruitment and organization."
You say this like the IRS is not an extremist group. In IRS court, you're innocent till proven guilty. Being able to chuck the bill of rights in the wastebasket sounds pretty extremist and anti-American to me.
Hey, CIV IV-players: The word is 'ultimogeniture": Play some CK3 and actually learn about civilisation!
("I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance - ie the youngest son takes the throne - just so we can have a “King Barron”. Ha! Restricted vocabulary. ) update: Obviously, another CK-player beat me by 8 hours. Well, my real point is about what is the superior game and me being disgusting, thus no delete.
All the older kids would try to kill younger siblings until they were the youngest.
The Ottomans had this problem (it didn't go by ultimogeniture, but in the end there could be only one, as with Scottish immortals) and it led to a few civil wars.
"Tanistry is a Gaelic system for passing on titles and lands. In this system the Tanist (Irish: Tánaiste; Scottish Gaelic: Tànaiste; Manx: Tanishtey) is the office of heir-apparent, or second-in-command, among the (royal) Gaelic patrilineal dynasties of Ireland, Scotland and Mann, to succeed to the chieftainship or to the kingship.
The word is preserved in the Republic of Ireland's government, where the prime minister is the Taoiseach while the deputy prime minister is the Tánaiste.
Historically the tanist was chosen from among the heads of the roydammna or "righdamhna" (literally, those of kingly material) or, alternatively, among all males of the sept, and elected by them in full assembly. The eligibility was based on patrilineal relationship, which meant the electing body and the eligibles were agnates with each other. The composition and the governance of the clan were built upon male-line descent from a similar ancestor."
This attempts to avoid the problems of primogeniture where the eldest is incompetent or otherwise unsuitable for the job, and inheritance by young child too young to take up the role, and disgruntled other family members or powerful nobles deciding that a sudden attack of death would be the best solution to getting them onto the throne instead of the squalling brat/dribbling boob.
statue of Liberty is extremely fragile and refurbishing it will be an enormous technical challenge. I've read about it's maintenance and it's harrowing.
I thought the patina had some kind of protective effect, and removing it was a bad idea. Unlike all of the other ideas put forth above, which have clearly been carefully thought out.
I enjoyed your blog articles. Today is the first time I tried clicking the "No Thanks" link and got through to the articles. I have always assumed that not subscribing on a page with a "No thanks" link meant one was prevented from reading the blogs. So I would give up at that point, being reluctant to pay for a subscription before having sampled the author's words of wisdom or otherwise. DOH! That reminds me, I must think about paying a subscription for Scott's blog!
We in the UK (well, the England part back then) had elected kings in early Saxon times. Anyone could apply, but the main qualification was that one had to prove to everyone's satisfaction that one was descended from the god Wodin!
"For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.
When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR."
I demand reciprocity on this! There are too many whiny complaining little American pop-ups about "I see you are based in the EU so we can't show you this website/article/cute photo of something or other because of GDPR, because despite our vaunted technologic, economic and every thing else superiority apparently it's too difficult not to steal your data or automatically link you to 599 advertisers or something".
And I don't have to click "I understand" on Facebook etc. (seldom as I use them) so I have no idea what is going on there.
"I propose that religious conservatives drop their opposition to puberty blockers for transgender youth. In exchange for the government funding all sex reassignment surgeries, young trans women will do two years of community service in religious choirs, allowing the Church to recapture 18th-century hymns that have fallen into disuse."
This could be doable, as puberty blockers are (allegedly) a temporary measure and are reversible. The only flaw here is (1) it was the Catholic Church had castrati in choirs and due to the double whammy of 'the Pope won't sign off on this' and 'Catholics don't sing in church anyway, what do you think we are, Protestants?' it won't fly and (2) the churches that do sing hymns and which might be amenable to changes on doctrine to accommodate this are the Protestant ones which emphasise communal congregational singing, not listening to choristers. And I think megachurches have long abandoned 18th century hymns, there seems to be some horrors that I am glad never to have experienced; it would appear that now they don't have church choirs, they have 'worship teams' who all sing the same material from the one big provider:
It's not one big provider, it's about four. And the real scourge is fog machines, which I'm glad my church has stopped using. (No, it wasn't billowing smoke, just adding a bit to the lighting. Also blurring the line between worship service and concert in a way I really don't like.)
Hello, bean! Naturally, under the new administration, you would be the Secretary for the Liturgy, and that means you get to decide on the naval ships the billionaires would fund *and* banning fog machines in church services! 😀
> economic and every thing else superiority apparently it's too difficult not to steal your data or automatically link you to 599 advertisers or something
I've been wanting to say this for years now and it seems like y'all are running low on tomatoes to throw at people, so here goes:
The GDPR's protections of privacy are good in principle and do cover a lot of nice things, but unelected European legislators telling people who aren't even in their jurisdiction what they can and cannot do is troubling for me. I believe they have overreached in some areas.
Consider the right to be forgotten, a noble goal on paper, but in practice requires a business to scrub all instances of a user's data in every single place it exists - live storage, backups, tape drives. Sure, there are exceptions for needed data - as long as you can prove to the fallible human European legislators that you really do need to keep this data.
If I right-to-be-forgotten myself on a webforum, do all my posts vanish? Do my quotes vanish from everyone who's quoted me? If someone copied my posts to another site or screenshotted them, should we make the hosts delete those, too? If I'm a contributor to a Git repository, should all my code be removed from the repository? If my e-mail is on a list of spammers, can I right-to-be-forgotten myself to get myself off of spam lists and send e-mail again?
(and, separately, I do tire of people complaining about companies stealing their personal data without really elaborating what they mean by "personal data" - is it my name? address? SSN? viewing habits? I think people are correct to be concerned, but I really wish they'd taboo "personal data" sometimes and actually _think_ about exactly what it is they want to keep private.)
In theory, every single website on Earth must now comply with these regulations because an EU user might visit; I imagine that if the US passed a law requiring any global visitor to, say, verify their legal age to access any US-hosted website, you'd be (rightfully) upset with that.
There's something deeply ironic about americans complaining about *european* extra-territorial laws on the tune of "imagine if we were doing the same!". Yeah, you are.
See FATCA, all the dollar-based trade embargos, the Dodd-Frank act, etc.
Optimistically it would make some people realize "hey, I don't like it now that they're doing it to me, so maybe I should stop doing it to them". But I doubt it.
For some reason it puts me in the mood of an old WW2 joke. A German General returns from the war. His wife eagerly awaits him at the door: "Darling, how did it go?" The General: "We came second!"
Glad to see someone with a platform making the case for American monarchy. Give the people the messy, flamboyant, outrageous dramaking they crave and let boring normies back in real government again.
I'd like to take this space to put forward my personal political platform designed to raise revenue, increase employment, and most importantly improve American's mental health: set corporate tax rates equal to the average time it takes to get a question answered by a live, US-based customer service specialist. I am more than happy for a company that answers consumer questions and issues within a few minutes to pay nearly nothing in corporate taxes (they can use the savings on hiring the needed people), but if it regularly takes people upwards of an hour on hold to get a real answer, get ready for a 70% tax rate.
I thought this was a ridiculous joke until you explained about the constitutional monarchy. Now I want to vote for you or anyone else who will put your platform into effect, because it is clearly the only practical solution to our country's current situation.
I have doubts that it would work now, our society's dueling tantrums may be too far gone. But the only other real idea I've yet heard of -- holding out until the Boomers finally fade away and die off (*) -- is seeming less and less practical (we don't have that long).
A nonviolent national divorce is simply impractical.
So I guess yea, the constitutional monarchy idea might be worth trying. We don't have much to lose honestly.
(* I am a late Boomer with two siblings who are dead-center Boomers, so obviously this is a sentiment which I no longer voice at family dinners.)
Clean the statue of liberty then COAT IT IN GOLD USING ELECTROPLATING. We must do this as our patriotic duty! Let it shine forever, golden and glorious. This can be the FIRST thing that King Trump "does"!
Here's likely the most accurate general narrative:
TFG quickly amassed a huge following based solely on his talent for "owning the libs." It was mostly fun and games among uninformed cynics who had already convinced themselves democracy was a joke and government should be drowned in a bathtub.
But when the MAGA trajectory turned so dark so quickly, most of his fans simply closed their ears to the outside world of facts and laws and civil norms. Why should all the fun end? Just keep scaring the libs. This became their only compass setting. Which turned them into a literal cult. Soon they were willing to physically fight, lie, and lose family members for this guy who ordered them not to believe their own eyes -- only believe him. It was very much like like pre-war Nazi Germany. Keep the Champagne flowing when you don't want people looking at the dark side.
Still today, his supporters refuse to even glance at all the widely available facts; it's way easier (and more fun) just to call the libs hysterical. It is despicable that the vast majority of Republicans continue to undermine, ridicule, and attack anyone who is serious about democracy and respects the rule of law -- anyone willing to attempt the very difficult work of saving this democracy at its greatest period of crisis since the Civil War (which a plurality of Republicans would like to do over). Absolutely deplorable.
I remember a day when people still had the ability to feel enough shame that they never would have followed such a horrible man down this rabbit hole. Some here have taken the stance that they really don't care if he goes to prison, but the Dems are still hysterical. This is nihilism, and passive-aggressive support for authoritarianism.
If you don't believe in democracy, please just don't vote.
Gosh, JKPaw, it's true that it's really terrible that half the country actually is a basket of deplorables. Sigh. They can't even be helped, as you point out: they are all solidly evil and don't care about anything and are now a murder-cult, just like the Nazis!
What can be done? Save vote out the people and replace them with a better one?
Honestly the Liturgy idea and the Constitutional Monarch idea are worth serious consideration. Who the hell cares what big naval ships are named? Give me the USS "I didn't even have to pay for this", because that's what I'll see every time one of them sets sail. The USS Bill Gates will be great bait for right-wing nutjobs, practically a jobs program unto itself. And "this is the only way we're ever getting rid of them, you know it to be true". I do, Scott. *sobs* you're so right it hurts.
On wikipedia, I have read that during WW2 when deciding between adopting 5 star generals or "marshalls" one of the factors in consideration is that George Marshall would be one.
To be clear this was a point AGAINST using Marshalls as it would be "undignified." Some people just cannot be reasoned with.
It doesn't sound plausible to me, for two reasons:
1) I doubt that the Titanic would have set off without sufficient coal to ensure it could complete the journey. The fire was discovered before departure, so they could take it into account when determining whether there was sufficient coal on board, but I think they would have allowed for the possibility of a coal fire in any case.
2) Water resistance is roughly proportional to the square of the velocity, which means that the fuel efficiency of a ship drops when you get close to maximum speed. In other words, if the captain were concerned about not having enough coal, that concern would counsel lower speed, not higher speed. The crew had put out the coal fire, so the captain wasn't trying to use coal before it burned up.
There is one more thing I would like you to put on your agenda. Include some statement that a) foreign citizens are entitled to vote, providing (insert as appropriate), and that b) once you're elected president, the US steps in for setting up similiar rules all over the Western World and as such, lay the foundation for worldwide acceptance of your wise recommendations. Please be assured, that you can count on my vote.
I loved this post, but let this slide without a comment: "40% of CO2 emissions come from coal."
Nope. As the linked source says, 40% of /fossil fuel/ CO2 emissions come from coal.
The interesting question is, What fraction of CO2 emissions come from burning wood?
The US EPA says that "Total Emissions in 2021 are 6,340 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent". That doesn't include anything but the direct effects of economic activity, though; it doesn't count people burning wood, forest fires, or deforestation.
SUSPICIOUSLY, there doesn't seem to have ever been any other study of how much wood is burned outside of Europe, even though this may be a major contributor to global warming. I'll estimate the wood-burning CO2 contribution by multiplying the UK US-wood-pellet output by 2 (assuming at least as much wood is taken from the UK itself), and multiplying that by the world population divided by the UK population (in 2021): 17.6*2*7888/67.33 = 4124M metric tons/yr of CO2. This is if anything a gross under-estimate, since very few people in the tree-poor UK burn wood for fuel.
Then there's CO2 emissions from forest fires. UNDRR, whoever they are, wrote (https://www.preventionweb.net/news/wildfires-2021-emitted-record-breaking-amount-carbon-dioxide) that "Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO2) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021," but said that was 150% more than the mean from 2000 to 2020. That means the mean is 704 million metric tons/year. I think it's reasonable to assume that fires in the rest of the world produce at least as much CO2, giving us 1.41 billion metric tons/year from forest fires.
So, total emissions from wood, in metric? tons, are at least:
4124M from wood burning
1408M from forest fires
(12+20)/2 = 16%, X / {(6340M+1408M) + X} = 0.16; 0.16 * {X + 7748M} = X; 0.84X = 0.16*7748M; X = 1475M from deforestation
7007 from wood, total. That's 7007 / (7007+6,340) = 0.52499 of all CO2 emissions. Wood, not coal, is the biggest source of CO2 emissions. (Unless mammalian respiration, which nobody counts, is.)
The coal statue one has to be one of the most racist ideas, intended to be a good idea I've ever heard. Not only can anthracite be more than black (it has many shades) the idea of carving up ANOTHER mountain after offending Indigenous Americans by carving heads into mountains.
However making the Trump family US Monarchy seems like a FANTASTIC idea. It would save us from a possible president donald or Ivanka.
Sovcits: not cost-effective; far-right extremists don't actually cause that much harm, it's just hyped by the media
Giant statues: I don't think the coal miners would be any happier about this given that it's (a) obviously made work which would be considered similar to welfare (yes, of course this is all irrational) and (b) the subjects of the statues. Also, the statues would eventually catch fire and the result would be the same.
Datasets: actually not a terrible idea - aside from the data benefits, the tests could easily be used as a threshold for high school graduation and thereby eliminate some perverse incentives from NCLB
Justice Justice: as he's presumably a very Trumpy conservative, I don't think Democrats would go for this one
Lying about college: wouldn't work; elite colleges would have a strong incentive to provide accurate information to employers asking who actually graduated from them
NYT journalists: Yes, clever, but would almost certainly be considered to violate 1st Amendment given intent. Also, the NYT could just change its name.
Pop-ups: actually not a terrible idea
Statue of Liberty: this would result in incremental erosion of the statue as the exposed copper in turn corrodes. While this would actually be an even better metaphor for American society, I don't think people would like that.
For JUSTICE JUSTICE
until the inevitable military coup by major major major major
Gotta love a Catch 22 reference
Problem with a lotta the proposed candidates is they got flies in their eyes, that's probably why they can't see them.
I don't know, I think President (Sheldon) Whitehouse has a nice ring to it too. (He probably agrees.)
No, for GREAT JUSTICE JUSTICE.
In the UK: Igor Judge, Baron Judge was Lord Chief Justice a few years back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Judge,_Baron_Judge
Roger, Roger.
Huh?
What about voting rights for cats?
Why would cats worry about participating in a democracy? They’ve always ruled by fiat.
Mine doesn’t care to participate, but Hemingway would like to know that he has the right. Not that it would apply to him anyway, he’s an anarcho-capitalist.
Well I suppose we could see what those 6 toed cats on Key West think.
That’s the cat’s name and where his grandfather hailed from.
An anarcho-catipulist?
Feral Finster, is that you??
I'm not necessarily opposed to this, provided that cats are subject to the same 18+ age requirement as humans.
For that matter, I'm open to the idea of allowing any cats who somehow manage live to the age of 35 to automatically become President.
A thirty-five year old cat would make better decisions than our current crop of geriatric Washington lifers.
That thing where today's humour becomes next year's serious policy.
In practice the warship would end up having multiple sponsors all of whom demand that their name is included in the ship's eventual title.
Rather like that old George Jones song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywQHxhwYRAI
Oh and then the corporations would want in too
USS Dunkin D anyone?
R
I would unironically support the liturgy thing. It's not the worst idea.
I actually thought he was serious upon reading the liturgy idea. It should be adopted!
I was reminded of the Greek cruiser Georgios Averof, funded by Georgios Averof.
Apparently it was also the first implementation of a Harberger tax, as if you claimed that one of your peers was wealthier than you (and therefore should be chosen instead), he would have the option of trading all of his property for all of yours. Thus the incentive to not falsely underreport your wealth.
I think the last time that came up, people said it was historically dubious. There are records of people *offering* to make the trade, but it was probably just a rhetorical flourish with no expectation that such a trade could actually be effected.
(Not a historian, just speculating for fun)
I'm familiar with the idea, but I don't think that necessarily makes it dubious, as the purpose of it would be as a deterrent. You wouldn't want to deal with the complicated fallout of actually having to carry it out, but the possibility of it keeps people at least somewhat more honest.
Zuckerberg in a toga and a tricorn hat.
Its not, but I think the left is strongly opposed to heaping social credit on billionaires for things they do with their money, even if those things are super great. Hence the charity is undemocratic thing.
What are the limits of that opposition though? A billionaire can get their name on a "public" hospital, but thats not a govt owned hospital. Can this only work then with a semi privatized military?
While we're at it with Athenian laws, I'd like to have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphe_paranomon too.
How about the Boule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boule_(ancient_Greece) ? Or more broadly, the general principle of selecting representatives randomly instead of with elections. The is an small modern political movement to make use of "citizens assemblies" based on their success in Athens and Venice (election of the doge), the idea being that there is no politicized election process, they are very difficult to corrupt compared to elected politicians (especially if anonymized), and they have a very good track record. Venice went hundreds of years of a form of democratic monarchy with no conflicts over succession, their doges served life terms with near absolute power (the exception being power to choose a successor or change the election process), and ultimately only ended for external reasons.
In the modern day, trial by jury provides a lot of real world evidence that small groups of randomly selected citizens are quite successful at making reasonable decisions. Obviously everyone can point to specific failures, but there are far more trials by jury in a given year than elections. Citizen's assemblies also generally employ multiple rounds of deliberation to increase the number of jurors while still having the discussion take place in small groups, which should decrease the failure rate even further. And beyond corruption, the fact that jurors aren't held politically accountable for their decisions is ideal when popular sentiment differs from reality. Ireland in the 90s, a majority Catholic country, used a citizen's assembly to pass abortion rights. Had their politicians attempted to do this, they would anger their constituents and lose their seats next election, and had they made it a referendum it would have failed. Regardless of your personal opinion on abortion, you must admit that its fascinating that the deliberation process genuinely changed the opinion of enough of the jurors to flip the majority.
I ran the Trump-for-monarch plank past the most liberal members of my household, and they're for it. You may be on to something there.
(My favorite plank was funding warships by liturgy. We need the ships.)
Personally I’d go for Emperor of Saint Helena, but that’s just me.
I have no faith in keeping Trump under control by making his constitutional monarch. He's find some way to use it.
Yes, as we know the government is full of latent trump supporters desperately seeking ways to enact his will.
I sort of understand what the deep state haters are on about when I think about how our border control and federal law enforcement and judiciary are mostly in the bag for Trump.
Do you mean that the deep state consists of border control and federal law enforcement and judiciary?
The deep state consists of everyone who is a career government official. These are part of it, and they help me understand how people might see this as potentially problematic rather than as a useful anti-corruption measure separating the operation of government from political patronage.
Maybe revive the Republican Roman the office of the Rex Sacrorum, which is explicitly apolitical
Were the role of the president a ceremonial one, I'd have been happy to see Hillary win that, not least because of the prospect of her grinding her teeth in fury about not getting her hands on the levers of power and being simply Ceremonial First Presidentess.
Now, she *would* be trying to find some way around using the position as one of real power.
I've been saying that for years: Trump would be great in some ceremonial role where he got to be in the news all the time and treated like a Serious Person. If that's a monarch, so be it. This could be the Missouri Compromise of the 21st Century.
As in, "led to civil war"? But if it takes 40 years, fine, I'll be dead anyway.
Okay, maybe it could be Stuart Restoration of the 21st Century, then.
Actually, your posts were funny, and mine was stupid. You can’t draw a line from 1820 to 1860, and anyway subsequent compromises departed drastically from the Missouri Compromise.
I hope I can find it within myself to forgive you, someday.
That also lead to civil war, just James Stuart ran away too fast.
Moldbug often says Trump needs to be the Chairman of the country, not the CEO.
I'm not saying anything about Trump, but I really do think we should abstract the ceremonial duties of the president from the legal ones and create something like a British figurehead monarch.
Honestly, if the President was the ceremonial head of state and the Vice-President was the one with power (like a prime minister), it might work a lot better. You'd avoid the problem of having a VP whose daily duties don't amount to much except "be ready in case the president drops dead or is assassinated" and figures like Trump and Biden could take on the mantle of Elder Statesmen and do all the ribbon-cutting and speech-making without anybody caring that you've got near-octogenarians in power.
I'm against it on two fronts, both of which boil down to me being unironically supportive (at least in principle) of Constitutional Monarchy.
First, one of the major roles of a constitutional monarch in the British model is to provide a sort of adult supervision to the democratically-elected government. On a day-to-day basis, this takes the form of the power "to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn": i.e. the elected head of government has to regularly meet privately with the monarch (who has higher-status than the head of government and presumably has a long-term inside view of the high-level governance of the nation), explain himself to said monarch, and hear the monarch out with at least a token show of respect on the issues of the day. In the longer term, the Monarch's reserve powers to prorogue the legislature, fire the head of government, veto legislation, etc are a final line of legitimate constitutional defense against an elected government abusing its position to subvert democracy. This can easily be mistaken for being unimportant because the major reserve powers haven't been invoked in centuries, but that's like saying that the American nuclear arsenal is useless because we haven't used nuclear weapons against an enemy target in almost 80 years. The implicit threat is there and acts as a meaningful constraint, and the explicit threat of the UK monarch's reserve powers may have been used as recently as October 2019 when there was a spate of articles about the possibility of the Queen firing then-PM Boris Johnson if he defied Parliament over the implementation of Brexit (I suspect this was an actual threat, not just idle speculation, since many of the articles were based on "sources close to" the Queen and the PM in a way that sounds like the usual token obfuscation of strategic trial-balloon and battlespace-preparation leaks to the media).
Second, in order to be most effective, a constitutional monarchy should be deeply rooted in long-standing tradition, and the choice of monarch should be as firmly as possible established as a Schelling Point outside of the realm of recent partisan politics.
On the first point, I think Trump is conspicuously poorly suited to provide any sort of adult supervision to anyone, and in particular handing him strong reserve powers as a check on subversion of democracy by an elected head of government would be like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of anti-fraud regulation of the financial sector.
On the second point, Trump is quite unsuited for the "long-standing tradition" aspect and is quite possibly the worst possible choice for the "outside of recent partisan politics" aspect.
No, if I had to choose a Constitutional Monarch for the US, my candidate would be much more deeply rooted in tradition. Not many people know this, but the colonies that would become the US actually did have a constitutional monarch up until the mid-1776s. I looked up who would be our last King's heir, and it seems he's this rich, eccentric retired British naval officer named Charles Mountbatten-Windsor. His personal life sounds rather messy, but he's apparently done some laudable stuff as a philanthropist. Or if Charles is too foreign for our tastes, his son Harry is apparently married to an American actress and currently lives in California.
One day, Erica; one day we will get them back....
Make America Great Britain Again!
You gotta think long term though. Willie the Conqueror was just some crazy Viking and he certainly didn't come from a long line of legitimate kings of England. You gotta wait a thousand years or so 'til the days of Emperor Donald XXV before things eventually settle down.
Come up with a way for me to still be around a thousand years from now to see the upside and we can talk.
I feel this is a little unfair. William was descended from Vikings, but his family had been granted lands and titles in what is now France over a hundred years before. He wasn’t just some piratical Norse arriviste.
Eh, the Viking was strong in his family, but so was the connection to England. His great-great-grandfather took his great-great-grandmother as spoils of war. His great-grandfather did the "have her bathed and sent to my chambers" thing, except without the bathing part. His grandfather ran too many Viking raids against England, so when King Aethelred came knocking, the grandfather bought him off with the great-aunt as second wife. His father never bothered to marry, and attempted an invasion of England to put his older cousin Edward on the throne in place of his great-aunt's second husband's family. And when cousin Edward (the Confessor) got the throne later through natural attrition, they kept in touch.
William the Incredible Badass wasn't "just some crazy Viking", he's a Viking that channeled his Viking-ness into socially acceptable feudal conquest, and had blood connections to the last few kings of England.
William's great-aunt Emma was the key. Off the top of my head, she was wife of Aethelred the Unready, stepmother of Edmund Ironside, future daughter-in-law of Sweyn Forkbeard, wife of Cnut the Great, stepmother of Harald Harefoot, mother of Harthacnut, mother of Edward the Confessor, sister's mother-in-law to Harold Godwinson (Edward's wife's brother), and of course great-aunt to William. Edward (later the Confessor) lived in exile with William's family from before William was conceived until William was about 14 or so, and they kept in touch afterward over the next 24 years or so. It is quite plausible that Edward wanted William to be his successor, rather than any of his wife's family.
Isn't a monarch with powers inherently a subversion of democracy?
>adult supervision
So, democratic leaders are less psychologically mature than non-democratic ones, or do I misunderstand you?
I mean, they do tend to be physically younger. But I'm not convinced that the supposed benefits of putting old people in charge outweigh the risks of of having leaders that are less accountable to the public.
I know Moldbug thinks that a monarchy is (theoretically) compatible with free speech. But the track record of actual monarchies say otherwise (see lèse-majesté).
BTW, I found this thread suggesting that at least a few Thai kings are against lèse-majesté: https://www.reddit.com/r/Thailand/comments/aqsu4f/are_you_afraid_of_lese_majeste_law_curious_how/ and that the real oppressor is the military. But I don't know what most kings (Thai or not) think and have thought about the subject. I think historically most have been for it.
Anyway, I'm rambling.
>So, democratic leaders are less psychologically mature than non-democratic ones, or do I misunderstand you?
Democratically chosen leaders have a lot of things going for them (accountability as you mention, plus consent of the governed and better alignment of policy preferences between the head of government and the median voter), which is a big part of why I (conceptually) favor a relatively weak 20-21st century British-style constitutional monarchy with an elected legislature and mostly-democratically-chosen head-of-government, but I strongly oppose the kind of near-absolute monarchy that Moldbug argues for. That said, democratically-elected leaders do have shortcomings that can be mitigated by an undemocratic head of state.
One is that democratically-elected leaders tend to be heavily self-selected for political ambition. In other words, I'm inclined to sympathize with the famous Hitch-hiker's Guide quote, "Those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it [...] anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." A mostly-ceremonial head of state with rarely-used reserve powers, chosen by accident of birth, seems to be one of the more successful mitigations of this.
The other biggie is that democratically-elected leaders in two-party or multi-party systems (one party systems having rather nasty problems of their own that are outside the scope of this comment) tend to come to power as leaders of plurality or bare-majority factions, and they have a great deal of incentive towards sacrificing the interests of their opponents for the benefit of their supporters (i.e. tyranny of the majority) as well as angling for short-to-medium term political advantage in the next election even if that means sweeping problems under the rug for the next President to deal with. Giving the head of government a measure of accountability (even just the weak social accountability of weekly meetings with the monarchy) to someone with a multi-generational long-term outlook can help mitigate this a bit.
That said, British-style constitutional monarchy is far from the only successful mitigation of these problems. The American solution to the problem (division of powers between multiple elected power centers chosen by different mechanisms and constituencies to a mix of long and short terms of office, a hard-to-amend written constitution with substantive as well as procedural provisions, and an independent judiciary whose judges are appointed for life by the political branches of government) seems to be doing a pretty serviceable job; recent events suggest a need for tweaks on the margins, but not necessarily tossing the whole thing and starting over. And other countries seem to have gotten at least some of the benefits of a hereditary constitutional monarchy from a mostly-ceremonial elected head of state who serves much longer terms than than legislature or head of government.
It would be hard to argue that Britain over the past 100 years has been net better-governed than the US over the past 100 years. Britain had much worse economic outcomes despite a slight advantage in raw human talent. (2 IQ points). In 1913 the US was only 7% ahead of the UK in GDP per capita. Now it's 50% ahead. This has some pretty serious consequences for quality of life and probably far exceeds the importance of their minor differences in social policy.
Yes, that is a pretty significant prima facie piece of evidence against Britain being better governed than the US over the past 110 years, and it's worth digging a little deeper into how the GDP gap got so big.
Off the top of my head, the first major suspect is that Britain was hit a lot harder than the US by WW1 and WW2. Britain was in both wars from 1914 and 1939 respectively, while the US sat on the sidelines until 1917 and 1941. Britain probably spent more money relative to pre-war GDP, suffered a lot more casualties, and was more impacted by loss.of pre-war trade with Germany. And Britain's sea lanes were in range of (and the primary targets of) German U-Boats in both wars, while Britain's major cities were in range of German bombers in WW2 in particular. As I commented on Scott's "1960: THE YEAR THE SINGULARITY WAS CANCELLED" SSC post, the final graph in the post (showing Britain's long-term trend of GDP grown) seems to show the key break in the trend right around 1914.
A lot of this disparate impact was due to Britain's decision to put their country so close to Germany, which was already baked in long before 1913. The other big factor was Britain's policy decision to join both wars from the start, which was only partially forced by geography: theoretically, Britain could have sat out the wars and let Germany win (at least in the West), but that probably would have been a bad move especially in WW2. There are also longer-term geopolitical strategy decisions, namely the decisions leading to Britain aligning with France and Russia against Germany and reinforcing to division of Europe into rival power blocks, for which Edward VII definitely deserves a substantial share of the responsibility.
The other is Britain's mid-century flirtations with socialism, which went considerably further than the New Deal and Great Society programs in the US, to the point of large scale outright nationalization of several major industries. My sense is that this is more a matter of the mood of the electorate than of American checks and balances succeeding where British institutional restraints failed. And my understanding is that George V's personal rapport with Ramsey MacDonald went a long way towards successfully moderating the British Labour movement away from outright Marxism. I'm not sure what role if any George VI and Elizabeth II had on Labour's later evolution to its modern status as a regular centre-left party. But we probably can blame George V for enabling the nerfing of the House of Lords at beginning of his reign, removing a major institutional check on radical policy changes. And we can probably also assign him a measure of responsibility for the Lloyd George ministry and the subsequent decline of the Liberal party, which helped elevate Labour to its status as the second major party.
As recently as 1980 the US was only 31% ahead of the UK in GDP PPP per capita so I don’t think the world wars deserve all the blame. I would guess half the present gap is due to lower economic freedom and the other half is due to world wars.
I also think WWI involvement was an unforced error. They might have prevented it by avoiding entangling alliances or providing better adult supervision to the junior partners in their entangling alliances. Or they could have just sat out of WWI after it started and the eventual outcome would have been similar but not so bad for Germany that Germany starts WWII to get revenge. WWII was partly a consequence of the extremely unpopular treaty that was imposed on Germany after the war. Without which Hitler might not have been Hitler or might have not had enough support to form a coalition government in 1933. Just a few fewer seats and he wouldn't have had enough to form a coalition with the other right wing party.
The argument against absolute monarchy is that the monarch is in no way guaranteed to be competent .. And is effectively iremovable.. The argument against constitutional monarchy is similar: the monarch is not guaranteed to be a genuine and handed dem ocrat. Consider a traditionalist government bribing the monarch with an enhancement of their own powers.
I also oppose absolute monarchies, but I disagree about the arguments against them being deal-breakers for constitutional monarchies. The point of a constitutional monarchy is for the flaws and virtues of a stronger monarchy and the flaws and virtues of pure republics to balance out in a way that mitigates the flaws of both while keeping most of the virtues of each.
If you want Meghan Markle to be Queen of the United States, I'd say you would deserve what you would get.
I'd vote for President Camacho before that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgG1Ayf4kI
I'd much rather have William and Kate than Harry and Meghan, but I'm having trouble thinking of a clear principle (other than "I like them better", which is contrary to the spirit of hereditary divine right monarchy) for skipping over Charles without also skipping William. But with a choice between Harry and Meghan on one hand and Donald and Melania on the other, I know which pair I'd prefer.
But if you're letting me pick any Queen I want, I'm choosing Galadriel (actual canon Galadriel, not Rings of Power Galadriel, of course). She has the added benefit of being immortal, which solves the succession problem rather neatly. The main downside is that she's a fictional character, and hiring Cate Blanchett to play Galadriel again would only go so far at mitigating that.
The bit where Harry and Megan are completely unable to predict blindingly obvious consequences of their actions, while being wildly entitled, suggests they'd make poor leaders.
Shhhh, we're trying to get rid of the monarchy. At the moment anyone born in the UK is a British subject, not a citizen. The distinction is crucial in understanding why nothing significant seems to happen in British society, we are all Crown subjects with no fundamental rights to free speech...
Help!
I suspect your problem is with your constitution, not your monarchy. There are plenty of republics without free speech or meaningful citizenship status, and there are constitutional monarchies with free speech and meaningful citizenship status. Some of the latter, e.g. Canada, actually have the exact same monarch as Britain.
The trick, as far as I can tell, is to write down you constitution and put an explicit guarantee of freedom of speech in it. It also helps if your voters and judges actually take the free speech clause seriously, since constitutions (written or otherwise) rely of humans to enforce their provisions.
Easy to say...
The reality of the British constitution is that it doesn't actually exist in any single codified form.
This explains the state of play quite well
https://consoc.org.uk/the-constitution-explained/the-uk-constitution/#what-are-the-disadvantages-of-having-an-uncodified-constitution
I am aware. That's why my policy recommendations for you guys lead with writing it down.
And yes, that is easier said than done. We Yanks took thirteen years and two rounds of trying to get ours written down properly, and we're still arguing about what various important details therein mean almost 250 years later.
We need a revolution to get anyone interested in trying to properly codify the constitution. I'll keep you updated on any progress..
🤣
Best solution to Trump anywhere. Chief Justice Chief Justice is nice too. You can count on my vote.
We can't just hogtie him and use him as a doorstop for some really substantail door?
I think if we could, someone would have done it by now.
I prefer the Chief Chief Justice Justice, especially once we see how he would rule, which would be Chief Chief Justice Justice justice. But only just.
In all seriousness, why don't we regularly clean the statue of liberty? Is this intentional/would be technically difficult or just another case Of New York being unable to maintain infrastructure?
Isn't the Statue of Liberty made of copper and was expected and intended to turn into that greenish shade over the years?
Yeah, it's like Cor-Ten steel, it's meant to look like it's covered in rust.
I heard that when it started turning green, there was a movement to clean it, but they never got enough money to do it.
The kabbalistic implications are left as an exercise for the reader.
According to this roofing company https://jtcroofing.co.uk/news/why-does-copper-turn-green/ you can expect your shiny copper exposed to the elements to turn an ugly brown within months and an ugly brown-green within five years before eventually stabilising a dignified light green in twenty years. This roughly matches my observations on some copper domes I know that had panels replaced a while ago.
The statue took years to make so it was probably already dull brown long before it was erected.
I had heard from chemistry class that copper no longer turns green on account of lower air sulphur levels, and just stays brown now. Is that not true?
I was suspicious of this because atmospheric sulfur concentration surely varies from place to place, and what I found is that the rate of formation depends on sulfur and moisture levels, and in low sulfur areas it takes a few decades but can happen in five years in high sulfur areas.
https://www.worldcoppersmith.com/articles/copper-patina-information/#:~:text=However%2C%20this%20is%20just%20a,within%20five%20to%20seven%20years.
Seems unlikely. The green is some kind of hydroxycarbonate stuff, that is, first you get oxides and then slowly water and CO2 react with that to get something similar to (but not chemically identical) to malachite.
Copper sulfide is black and the sulfite is unstable while the sulfate is water soluble... so the only stable sulfur-based coating would be the sulfide, and I think you'd only get that if you were next to a paper mill or something.
SO2 and SO3 in the air could certainly hasten the process of patination by reacting with the oxide coating though.
There's a building close to where I work that has a wooden roof painted in an ugly greenish-brown to look like fading copper. Somehow or other, that's supposed to be a good thing.
it would get thinner and thinner every time until it was destroyed. honestly I don't know and would be interested to learn how fast it would happen.
A youtuber must be on it by now.
Copper patina is about 0.07mm. The surface of the statue of liberty is made of copper sheet only 2.4mm thick.
Let's say it's twice as thick as it needs to be structurally, and we can remove the patina perfectly gently. We'd have 17 cleanings before it fell apart, max.
Wow that's faster than I thought
The flame in the torch is still shiny because they covered it with gold leaf in the 1980's. We could probably do the same to the whole statue for less than recurrent cleaning costs.
A giant gold statue sounds a bit tacky.
But hear me out -- a gold-plated coal-filled statue of Donald Trump.
Gaudy on the outside, black and sooty on the inside. I like it.
+1
There's the obvious risk that a group of informed citizens would be tempted to burn it in their next round of peaceful protests.
A gold-plated PERPETUALLY BURNING statue of Donald Trump!
Get the guy who did the Viareggio carnival float. He knows how to be suitably grandiose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv1FE88JVps
According to the national park service, the oxidation has penetrated half of the total thickness already, so you'd probably have to replace panels as early as the first clean-up.
OTOH, it's already 150 years old, so not that fast…
https://www.nps.gov/stli/planyourvisit/get-the-facts.htm
I'd heard that people got used to the green and opposed a movement to clean it early on.
Copper things are usually intended to look this shade of green.
I’ll be that guy. It’s called verdigris. Most copper or bronze statues become this color unless a clear coat of some sort is added.
If it’s a statue of a guy on a horse it usually ends up looking like Robert E Lee. If it’s a standing or seated man with a beard if usually ends up looking like V I Lenin.
My understanding is that yes, cleaning the statue would be technically difficult. The sheets of copper forming the outer structure aren't especially thick, and the layer of corrosion is more than just a thin film. If you cleaned it off, there's a risk of putting holes in the actual structure, and the more times you clean it off, the thinner and more vulnerable it's going to get.
I have no clue if this has anything to do with it, but jurisdiction over this area is complicated as hell. The island is entirely federally-owned and maintenance is supposed to be the responsibility of the national park service. The land is part of the state of New York, but all of the surrounding waters are part of the state of New Jersey. New York City provides mail service and has the right to collect sales tax from the souvenir shops. Jersey City provides sewage, water, and electricity.
I once had to polish a brass fitting on the outside of a ship. I got it from green to shiny gold-ish, and it was back to the exact same shade of green the next morning.
There's a chapter about this in Rust (Waldman 2016). Patina is adherent, and is one of the better corrosion products for protection against atmospheric corrosion (not applicable in seawater). It's not as good as aluminium oxide, but it's way better than iron oxide. It's also pretty and iconic.
I believe there's a sacrificial system inside it that tries to galvanically protect the statue but I'm not 100% on that (and also, unsure if cathodic protection works without electrolyte - I'll have to look up what it was).
Overall the structure is in shockingly good condition given how saline the environment must be. Modern steel looks worse at a third of the age.
" reverse primogeniture-based inheritance" has a name.
It's called "ultimogeniture", which does sound very cool indeed.
Found the Crusader Kings player?
Well, yes. But I play Crusader Kings because I'm a medieval history nerd, not the other way around.
I just finished "A Distant Mirror." Any other good medieval history books you'd recommend?
Have you read The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge? A biography of William Marshall. I'm only about 100 pages in, but a good overview of The Anarchy, the reign of Henry II, knighting in general, and of course Marshall's role in it all.
Oh that looks interesting, thanks!
The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History Vols. I and II (no one's ever going to be able to prove that you haven't read it), The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis (not history, but a short overview of medieval cosmology and philosophy).
The books that got me into medieval history were John Julius Norwich's books on Byzantium, Venice, and on the Normans in Italy. They are of a similar age to the Tuchman, so they obviously don't have the most recent scholarship.
The titles are:
The Normans in the South
The Kingdom in the Sun
Venice: The Rise to Empire
Venice: The Greatness and Fall
Byzantium: The Early Centuries
Byzantium: The Apogee
Byzantium: The Decline and Fall
> They are of a similar age to the Tuchman, so they obviously don't have the most recent scholarship
This might be an excessively specific question, but do you happen to know if there have been major changes in our understanding of the 14th century since Tuchman's book?
14th century western Europe is so not my area, so no, I don't know.
Most of my medieval interest is earlier and more eastern.
IIRC Tuchman's book is itself based on just reading Froissart to a greater degree than one might ideally like, but it was a long time ago and I could be way off-base on that.
Personally, I think reading the contemporary chronicles is way underrated as a source of entertainment and information. Sure, the numbers are often way, way off, but that just gives academics a source of employment in bitching about it.
My personal favorites are the History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours, and Froissart's chronicles of the Hundred Years' War.
Would ultimogeniture ever come up in the study of medieval history? It does not appear to have been used by any medieval country, which makes sense given that it has some fairly severe drawbacks and no benefits compared to primogeniture.
Disagree! There are a number of argument in favour of long reigns (although democratic governments seem to stink if they stick around too long, the stability benefits of very long-lived monarchs seems to outweigh the 'too long in power' effect), and ultimogeniture would create longer reigns. The opposite of ultimogeniture isn't primogeniture, it's the next-of-male-kin rules in many Arab countries, where your 90-year-old king dies, then his 89-year-old brother takes over, then he dies, then...
Yup, Crusader Kings II has this one, called "Seniority".
> the stability benefits of very long-lived monarchs
Very long-lived monarchs provide stability while they're on the throne, but they also supply a big spike of instability when they die. It is not necessarily advantageous to concentrate all your instability into a narrow window of time; there was an Egyptian dynasty that seems to have fallen for this reason. (When Pepi II died after a reign of many decades.)
> The opposite of ultimogeniture isn't primogeniture, it's the next-of-male-kin rules in many Arab countries
So? Does this respond to something I said?
Primogeniture has the advantages over ultimogeniture that (1) everyone knows what to expect; (2) You can start training the heir as soon as he's old enough to receive any training, because you know who he is; and (3) older people command more respect from everyone else in the world than younger people do. There is no difference in heir quality compared to ultimogeniture - it will often be the case that the youngest son is superior to the oldest son, but both inheritance systems choose the heir in advance when that information is unavailable. (In contrast, other systems may allow the king to nominate his own heir, in which case the average quality of heirs should go up.)
Ultimogeniture works better in CK because you can predict ability from birth and it's fairly easy to decide to have another child until you get a good one and then stop in the game (you can adopt celibacy or divorce your wife, etc).
Both of those are untrue in the real world.
Ultimogeniture for property (but not necessarily rulership) was a Mongol feature when Genghis Khan died toward the end of the medieval period - his youngest son was regent for a couple of years after dad died until an older brother officially succeeded as Khan.
I'm glad someone else has already pointed this out.
It also sounds like a brand of plastic surgery for private parts.
Hear me out: nuclear disarmament through selling ad space on the moon.
Initiate an international treaty whereby companies can buy a certain number of warheads to detonate on the lunar service to inscribe their company logo for eternity.
Enjoy the full moon, brought to you by McDonalds.
There’s a A C Clarke short story that involved the the threat of putting the 7 Up logo on the moon. I think it was “Watch this Space”
I hate when people have my ideas before I have an opportunity to come up with them.
Eh, you can always just tell yourself your version would have been better than Clarke's if you'd written it.
As in 'The Anticipator' by Morley Roberts (and referenced by Arthur C Clarke)?
"Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born."
Man, what a way to be victimized by someone in the past before they could have even done it on purpose.
Robert Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon". Moka Cola is convinced to gain publicity by blocking 6+ from using powdered carbon to inscribe their logo on the moon.
I was almost able to write that from memory, with Mocha Cola as the only mistake. Sometimes I wonder whether I'd be better off if I knew something else as well as I know classic science fiction.
No guarantee that it wouldn't be something else of comparable utility, like an encyclopedic memory of the first decade of The Simpsons.
...speaking from experience.
One of the smartest people I know is a physician with an encyclopedic knowledge of both his medical subspecialty and the first decade of The Simpsons.
For me it’s Wheel of Time. I know way too much about the One Power.
RIP
There's an issue of the comic The Tick in which a supervillian, Chairface, uses a laser to start writing his name on the moon. He got three letters in before he was stopped.
Paging Chairface Chippendale!
I don’t know the comic but it reminds me of the weird Minnesota practice of naming Snow Plows.
Meet Plowy McPlowface:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fox9.com/news/plowy-mcplowface-ready-for-action-on-minnesota-roads.amp
I think defacing the moon would be taken as a casus belli by quite a large number of people. I wouldn't really even condemn them for taking it that way.
Unlikely to lead to disarmament of any kind.
Yeah, but what if every full moon there was a QR code that got you a buy one get one at Starbucks?
Add in a free brownie and I'm there!
Operation Plowshare, but for digging to the core of the moon. I swear there must be high-value minerals down there.
This is an actually good idea. It has no place here.
The moon still has a molten core, though not so hot nor so large (as a proportion of the total mass) as Earth's.
Do you know that for a fact ? I tried to look it up some time ago and I could never find the actual temperature of the center of the moon.
I don't know that they narrowed down the temperature range very much, but they were able to get some seismic data which suggested it was liquid. See https://www.science.org/content/article/long-last-moons-core-seen
There was this joke where the Soviets paint the moon red, so the Americans take white paint and write "Coca-Cola" on it.
Yea, that was pretty much the Cold War in a nutshell..
This is like Astroscript Pilot Program in Netrunner.
I love these. Well, except the college thing, we still disagree on that somewhat.
I want to lie about my high honor Tripos at Cambridge.
Of course one has the temptation :D
As a snotty American interloper, I will proudly carry my crappy 2-2 to my grave.
One of my fellow Americans tried to skip one of the tests entirely, but the college porters dragged him out of bed and made him show up in his pajamas to sign his name on the test paper.
He also destroyed an expensive fiberglass rowing boat. Accidentally.
I went to lots of colleges, so I'd put them all on my resume. Of course, I was visiting them for other reasons, but no need to mention that.
I walked past the gates of Trinity College, Dublin, once, that should surely count for something!
I think it means you went to Trinity College.
I went to the University of Michigan, and I foresee going to Harvard within a few years.
We got any Rhodes Scholars here? Surely some of you went to the UK on holiday at least once!
Haven't, but I've visited as many as several roads.
Hey, me too! What year?
It was either the late 90s or early 00s, whichever looks better on the CV 😁
Amazing shitposting.
Fact check thread:
The stat about coal is pretty far off. The linked source says, "Carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal use is responsible for about 40 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel use." That's a long way from 40 percent overall.
Thanks, fixed.
There are roughly two carbon cycles (not counting CNO):
* a fast cycle between biomatter, atmosphere, soil and oceans
* a slow cycle in which takes many millions of years and turns dead dinosaurs into fossil fuel.
If you burn a piece of wood or own some mitochondria, you move only within the fast cycle, and the total amount of carbon in that cycle stays constant. (I think if we took it upon ourselves to burn most of the biomass on the planet, we could cause a greenhouse effect by that alone. Fortunately, we don't do that.)
The problem is that we burn fossil fuel -- which has been out of the fast cycle for millions of years, thereby increasing the overall amount of carbon in the fast cycle.
As an analogy, consider two countries which decide to spend more money on statues or warships. Country "wood" raises taxes, while country "coal" just prints more money.
While the local effect of the money is similar in both cases (the statue- or shipmakers earn money), the big picture economic effects are likely to be very different.
This was incredible 👏👏👏👏
$9,999,999/hour AND a CIA pension, what a gig.
With that kind of money, they'll be able to buy a few battleships. The only question is who will they invade.
Destroyer costs 3 billion, Aircraft Carrier costs 10 billion. Can you *imagine* a modern NYT reporter doing a thousand hours of work, or even three hundred? I can't.
With that kind of salary, they will all be fired instantly. Which is the point.
You have no chance of winning as long as you insist on making statues of famous people. I would simply pull people off the street and entomb them in giant coal pyramids to ensure they have a bountiful afterlife.
I would vote for that.
How about we compromise, and have the giant statues **be** the tomb? We could even put them in there while they're still alive, to avoid mistakes.
Can we put little Alien embryos inside the entombed people, cuz some of us have a taste for recursion, kwim?
I was going to edit my comment because it was in bad taste, but now I suppose I should leave it intact.
It says something when I get less bloodthirsty after ~4 drinks.
No problem, Moon Moth, I am kinda drunk too, and am at the level where I am maxed out on bad taste. To get less crass I would have to drink more and then might get the spins. People understand we are just crapping around. Many posters are roaming around in their inner swamps looking for ideas that capture their rage in the form of wit.
Is it LINCOLNLOOKER time? I think it's LINCOLNLOOKER time!
I'm more for "Team America", myself.
As the only up here who isn’t bought and paid for I can say this: the liturgy agenda is a hoax.
I feel like making a large number of statues from flammable material could backfire, which would be terrible for the environment - I suggest we just bury the coal in a hole in the ground where it can't do any harm
I think you mean "making a large number of statues from flammable material would create stable well-paying jobs for our nation's security guards."
And the fire services. This plan has so many advantages, who could possibly object to it?
EDIT: It just occurred to me that this would also establish an American version of the Swedish Yule Goat, with annual attempts to burn the monument. It really has something for everyone - the coal mine owners, the miners, those involved in the grafting industry of deciding who gets to be the represented national hero/ine immortalised in coal, the security services, the fire services, and inculcating the can-do spirit in our boisterous youth! Not to mention the prediction markets and bookies running bets on which coal figure would be set alight when or if it would happen this year!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat
We already have recreational Arson:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Night
That’s the Keynesian solution to everything, isn’t it.
No, I've got the perfect solution! Use the mined coal to fill up old, no longer used mines! Removes obstacles to safety both ways!
More nominative determinism! Can we find anyone with the last name President while we're at it?
Wonderful post. I haven't laughed this hard in a while.
I can make https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Whitehouse my VP.
Or maybe Steve Navalobservatory
Why not Wynot Random? Scion of Random House fortune.
(Wow. I just realized I'm sort of drunk.)
The only President sufficiently notable to be in wikipedia is Andre President https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_President who played briefly in the NFL.
It doesn't say anything else about him except that he's 52 years old, which means he's probably not approaching senility, which already makes him a lot better than certain other candidates I could mention.
Screw it, President for President!
I did love the name “Princess Washington” from Monday’s cities post. “President Princess Washington” has a certain ring to it...
If he's bisexual we could slip into calling District of Columbia AC/DC
Strong vibes of Führer President King Bradley here.
Possible that our final president will be a compromise candidate named A.I. Yudkowsky, AIEEEEEeeee! for short.
My god, I have something to add.
Coal combusts if you make it too big of a pile. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378382099000053
You have a problem here, slightly different than expected! at the least, make sure to seal those statues so they don't self heat under ambiant oxidation conditions and then light up from the inside out.
The only thing more inspiring than a giant statue is a giant flaming statue.
Build them underwater, like the ones in Mexico
'Spontaneous combustion' and 'empirical results' in the same title? I'm sold.
Perhaps the US could coordinate with other countries to lower the amount of O2 back to pre-Great Oxygen Event levels. In such circumstances, coal would probably be safe to store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
Only a racist motherfucker would post something like this.
I'm sorry am I really missing something? I did not get that interpretation and would benefit from clarification...sorry whatever it is you're getting from the message. Genuinely have no idea
I'm joking!
It's that "my god I have something to add" feeling.
Yeahhh, that's a pretty big stretch to me from "my god I have something to add" as a feeling to "racist motherfucker." I am clearly missing something completely.
Further down Eremolalos clarifies that they had a few scoops, so drunkposting. Presumably they've sobered up by now so the most charitable thing is politely ignore whatever they wrote under the influence.
Thanks, actually. Clarification appreciated. Your suggestion makes sense
It's not really a political policy until an alternative policy is met with charges of horrible racism.
Tom, the "racist motherfucker" remark was. *joke.*. I wouldn't have made it if there was any conceivable way that your remark could have been taken as racist. What you wrote was so completely and utterly disjunct from anything race-related that I felt sure readers would see that my comment was a joke about flinging around unfounded accusations of racism. And besides, this whole thread is people saying things they obviously do not mean. Scott is saying we should make Trump monarch! Anyhow, I'm sorry I upset you. And yeah, I'd been drinking that night, & it's possible that if I hadn't been I would have skipped that particular joke.
Yeah, that particular joke kinda fell short for me, just on account of you know...Idk, some open ness that sometimes people have a wildly different interpretation on race topics, I wasn't engaged enough to know if I missed something, but I also have missed enough things in life to be wary that I missed something.
I think your point about the whole thread being roundabout things people obviously do not mean, is very valid. I think racist motherfucker is just the point I have a flag of "ok, I'll take a moment and be serious just in case." :p glad to have you back and this resolved. Thanks
I am proud to support Scott Alexander for President, who will give American voters what they deserve, and make an inedible mark on American history.
But eventually, Americans will get their just deserts.
Gotta love dry humor.
Only if you think he is biting off more than he can chew with this platform?
This is the funniest thing I have ever read on Substack. The combination of arch satire, bringing back castrati, with hilariously dumb random thoughts, Justice Justice, is just perfect.
A mix of “funny” and “get away with subversive because it is funny”. I missed whether you have plans to reform the Jones Act?
For a more serious take, I recommend starting with Vivek’s Ten Commandments. A few would have to be changed; I have “climate change is real or I’ll cut you” on my bingo card, and his line about the Constitution is a textbook example of “profound-sounding bullshit”. But, unlike the other candidates, he actually has a platform, which is something.
If "a platform" is, as in this article, a list of things you want to do, most of Vivek's Ten Commandments don't really qualify.
Remy's take on the Jones Act:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9-qPrOE_VM
I believe your Supreme Court scheme would be better served by appointing Victoria Justice because we, as national, deserve a hot Supreme Court justice and she's partially Puerto Rican and almost certainly has some native ancestry, making it more likely you can pull off your Chief Justice goal
Thomas and Alito are both pretty old, maybe I'll get to make two appointments.
Well if you get a third nomination I’d skip the nominative determinism and go for extra added hotness and appoint Rihanna.
Nah, Dr. Dre. It’s about time we had a man of medicine back on the court.
If you get a third appointment, I suggest Aaron Judge (a baseball player, if Wikipedia is to be believed); Justice Judge is almost as good as Justice Justice.
Or filmmaker Mike Judge (Office Space) or actor Christopher Judge (Teal’c on SG-1). Or all three. They can be the appointments to lower courts, who are indeed addressed as “Judge Lastname” (rarely exactly that though).
There's a 30 Rock character named Paul L'astname, pronounced "last-nah-may" so it takes a while to get the joke.
Dr Spaceman - pronounced “spa -chem - in” was pretty funny too.
Or, for a different direction, Judge Reinhold.
Arrested Development got there first:
https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Judge_Reinhold
I nominate eminent bassist and bandleader Michael League
If you have two Supreme Court vacancies, look to Texas and Arkansas. Former representative Tom DeLay and county judge Barry Dean Hyde get you Justice DeLay and Justice Dean Hyde.
I nominate Googleplex Wretched, because he has great stature and the right temperament.
Prefer you make pop-ups that ask people to do something about the ePrivacy Directive, not the GDPR, personally, but it's a minor point. You have my vote. 8D
Beat me to it. It is worth making this point not only for the sake of pedanticism (which is its own reward) but because there’s chatter about fixing the eprivacy directive and presumably the process could use a boost.
(I’m not a European and tracking EU proposals is totally confounding so apologies if I’m misstating the current prospects for reform)
The Trump thing is surprisingly close to actual arguments I've read for constitutional monarchy...
(I.e., the argument that if you don't have a monarch or other similar outside-the-governent-head-of-state, people will be too inclined to revere the head of government and not question, rather than properly holding them to account as an employee of the public.)
Important to nominate someone from Narcissistic cluster (narcissist, sociopath, borderline). Otherwise they person will be wondering why the hell the world is so interested in them.
I wonder if people would hold the President more to account if the prestige of the office wasn't there. Maybe they work out of a plain brick office building, wear fairly casual clothes, aren't addressed by "Mr./Mrs. President", and look mostly like just some random person.
The new Presidential outfit is denim overalls, bunny slippers, and a baseball cap turned sideways.
All bulletproof, of course.
Hey, instead of just cleaning the Statue of Liberty, how about we reopen the torch?? It's been closed ever since a terrorist attack back during *World War I*, it's not like it hasn't been repaired since then, but they still haven't reopened it to visitors!
Even MORE on the nose as a metaphor!
I'd guess the main issue now is that it's not handicapped-accessible. There's no room to put in an elevator or even a particularly *wide* staircase. WW1-era tourists were less likely to mind climbing lots of tiny little stairs and if they collapsed up there were likely to be small enough that you could easily carry them back down unconscious.
I don't know if this is a joke or not. I guess I will just have to vote for you and find out.
I've seen worse reasons to vote for someone.
The best thing about the liturgy is the concept of antidosis (dealt with in the link). If Elon is asked to fund a warship he can say Why me, Zuck's richer than I am. Zuck can then either concede that he's richer, and fund the warship, or he can say No, Elon is richer, in which case Elon and Zuck exchange all their property, and Zuck pays for the liturgy but out of his increased (if he was right) fortune he has now got from Elon.
I regret to report that Ottawa County, Ohio, broke its winning streak in 2020. https://boe.ottawa.oh.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GN20-Summary.pdf
But did it really?
Unfortunately, as an election map enthusiast, I must correct you: Ottawa County voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and so has broken its streak of always voting for the winner. Your campaign would be better served focusing on Clallam County, Washington, which currently has the longest unbroken streak of voting for the winner (having done so at every election beginning in 1980).
(That said, I happen to live in the Cleveland area and have many acquaintances in Ottawa County — actually — so I can introduce them to the idea of forcing Elon Musk to build ships for the navy and report back their thoughts.)
Scott obviously has seen through the media lies and knows that Trump was the real winner in 2020.
Which makes it all the more urgent to prevent Trump from taking office in 2024, of course. He's term limited! It would be unconstitutional!
Job creation in the shipyards, it's a winning proposition!
HA! At last, conclusive evidence the election was stolen!
I propose an alternate solution to the coal problem: we have a moral imperative to send what coal we have to Mars and other potential future colonies. Those poor deprived planets have starved too long without the precious bounty of a rotting environmental collapse, we owe it to the future to share the spoils of the past with them. No one cares about global warming on Mars. Alternatively: make Scott's proposed monuments on the moon. This removes the risk of spontaneous combustion and also stamps the power of American indomitability for millennia to come.
I mean... if we were actually trying to make Mars habitable... wouldn’t a huge great dose of global warming be just the ticket?
I once read a sci-fi premise where Mars has a thriving hot-rodding community because it's the only place where burning fossil fuels is not only still acceptable but encouraged.
(But IIRC in reality the big problem with terraforming Mars is just that it's too small and lacks a magnetosphere, so any atmosphere you install will eventually escape into space.)
Just build an artificial magnetosphere. You don't want to skimp on your planetary engineering and let all the air escape over the course of tens of millions of years, that'd be irresponsible :P
Just build a bigger planet around Mars.
A single iceberg sunk the Titanic. What will the Zuckerberg do?
If it's a literal Berg of Zucker (sugar), the answer is "melt".
No, "dissolve"...
I guess this means he will lose. But I have confidence he will redeem himself, for vengeance is sweet.
I suppose that would make the ocean a Zuckerberg solution?
Stare at it with a blank face, same as he does with everything else.
Ironically, coal may have been the original reason the Titanic struck the iceberg in the first place. Apparently one of the coal bunkers had a smouldering fire, as they often did surprisingly, and it was too inacessible to extinguish safely without causing a steam explosion.
So the captain was in a tearing hurry to reach New York before there was insufficient coal left to complete the journey, hence the excessive speed in unsuitable conditions. Worse still, the fire weakened the hull around part of the area along which the iceberg scraped, so that rivets popped out more readily.
Not sure whether that is generally accepted, or just someone's bright idea, but it all sounds quite plausible.
I have heard the theory that this coal fire may have weakened the steel, but never that it had anything to do with the captain’s hurry. “Old captain wants to set a cracking speed on his swan song voyage” seems more than enough of an explanation.
It doesn't sound plausible to me, for two reasons:
1) I doubt that the Titanic would have set off without sufficient coal to ensure it could complete the journey. The fire was discovered before departure, so they could take it into account when determining whether there was sufficient coal on board, but I think they would have allowed for the possibility of a coal fire in any case.
2) Water resistance is roughly proportional to the square of the velocity, which means that the fuel efficiency of a ship drops when you get close to maximum speed. In other words, if the captain were concerned about not having enough coal, that concern would counsel lower speed, not higher speed. The crew had put out the coal fire, so the captain wasn't trying to use coal before it burned up.
I'm convinced by all those arguments in combination, and have changed my mind about the hurried pace explanation.
My only slight reservation is that the coal power wasn't being used entirely for propulsion but for all the lighting and heating as well. So there must have been an optimum speed to minimise the combined usage of power on everything over the travel time. But I can see that would have been less than top speed if the power needed for propulsion dwarved everything else and increased with speed.
I keep hearing about the US losing interest in guaranteeing the safety of commerce from Peter Zeihan. Japan is a wealthy country that needs world trade. A US-Japan alliance might make sense. World trade is less essential for the US, but it's still pretty nice.
I see no donate link. There is supposed to be a donate link.
(65k $2 donors to get in on the debates? ...How many readers do you have? That sounds almost doable.)
Yeah, I don’t even need the $18 profit. But I have the idea that there are (or would be, if Scott managed to get 65k donations) other requirements, like appearing in polls and so forth.
Better than the liturgy, you can just issues letters of marque. Explicitly constitutional, AND violates international law. A win-win!
That worked out fine in the age of sail, and might still have worked during the first phase of the era of steel warships. However during the age of nuclear weapons, I dunno.... When the foreign power whose ships your authorized privateers are attacking could respond with a tactical or even strategic nuke, the targeting of which may or may not be restricted to your authorized privateer....?
I condemn your proposal for the Statue of Liberty. After cleaning it, it should be gilded. Or even better: coated with _Aluminum!_ I'm sure there's an allegory for technological progress in there somewhere.
Get some rainbow gamer LEDs on her
Don't forget the cat ears UwU
I say coat it with lube, see who shows an interest.
What color goes with "rusty copper green" to produce gold? Maybe a few lasers pointed up at it would give a more impressive color, at least at night, if they didn't dazzle pilots approaching JFK Airport.
God forgive me for being serious, but aluminum is really a bad idea. It does not play nice with any kind of salt water.
Then cover it with the true symbol of Americana: concrete!
(I joke, I joke)
re: popup war -- Just install the ninja cookie plugin for your browser. And, no, it won't mean that you have to constantly relogin to all your sites that require you to make one.
It's FOSS, for anyone who cares about that.
Absolutely hilarious. And yet it makes alot of sense.
reverse primogeniture is sometimes called ultimogeniture or postremogeniture, and as long as Barron promised to take care of his dad, it seems like a reasonable deal to me
Do you mean take care of, or "take care of"...?
You should add to your presidential platform that you would abolish the penny and possibly the nickel.
Problem with getting rid of the nickel: we would not have a realization of the gcd, which seems unfortunate. We could go all the way to quarter as minimum, or change the value of a quarter (sounds like a bad idea to me).
Abolish the penny, bring back the thrupenny bit! 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threepence_(British_coin)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threepence_(Irish_coin)
"Thruppence isn't grammatical." - someone in an E. Nesbit story.
Brilliant. Also bringing back the Liturgy ain't the worst idea...
Only if you give them control of the project as well. There's no way Bezos would allow the kind of graft and bloat of Raytheon ruin his armada.
Bezos’ rocket armada ain’t doing so hot. To the point that big bloated legacy ULA is sitting on its hands waiting around for him to finish a damn engine they can bolt on their rocket.
“When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it.”
It’s hardly that popular over here. Worst legislation ever - probably with no effect on privacy but a big cost to small business, or anybody with a video doorbell.
And the snake oil salesmen came out of the woodwork on that one, consultancies became GDPR experts overnight and much money was made from the gullible.
It’s been a big win from my perspective. I’ve finally been able to tell managers that the horrible thing they want to do is no longer legal, and a number of other software engineers that I’ve talked to have said the same. Privacy wins now, when it never did before. Unfortunately that’s not very legible, since it’s hard to list out all the ways in which you’re not being tracked anymore or to count the data breaches that didn’t contain your personal information, but the net result is very positive.
Not European, but tentatively agree with this – I've heard European acquaintances (and randos, for that matter) mention that they can't access various US websites, apparently mainly news sites, because those sites would rather just block all EU traffic than rejigger their websites to give up the sweet, sweet intrusion money. This suggests to me that the intrusion being done is... considerable.
It also means that if I really want to read the damn article because someone referenced it and I can't understand the points they are making without reading it, then I'll fire up the ol' VPN and pretend I am a red-white-and-blue, rootin'-tootin' Yankee. Yeehaw.
Same thing with adblockers, and now websites are doing the blegging of "We see you're using an adblocker, turn it off or else you can't read this". Well golly gosh gee, someone posted a very handy workaround for that on Tumblr and it works (so far) for non-fluent in computer code idiots like me.
This is how you get piracy.
The cookie law is terrible, because it gives websites the option to nag users into consenting to cookies. A better way would have been to force websites to respect privacy preferences sent by the browser.
Of course, you could still refuse to show the website to users who don't want to be tracked, and ask them to enable tracking instead of showing the website (just like some websites handle adblockers), or nag them to enable tracking.
Or you could argue that cookies are text files which the browser (which is a piece of software working on behalf of the user) sends to the server, and that it is implicitly acknowledged that the server may use that information. Users are free to disable or enable cookies in their browser as they prefer.
Or you could generally forbid tracking of users by ad networks.
But the idea that a popup is an even remotely acceptable way to get to an opt-in is completely bollocks. "Oh, we are so sorry, but unfortunately there is no technical way to know if you want to be spied on, so I guess we have to ask you for your preferences using some dark UI pattern checkboxes."
But then again, some EU people also believe that IP addresses should be treated as personal information. I guess having them in the memory of a server during a TCP connection is still considered okay.
Instead of having weirdly explicit rules about what you can do with this or that tech with or without user consent, one could simply decide that some goals (tracking users to target advertisement by any tech from IPs to mouse movement patterns) are forbidden and call it a day.
Why should random web pages want to store a cookie on my computer anyway?
Imagine a parallel universe where internet was never invented. Instead, the advertising industry gradually promoted a social norm that it is okay to put advertising stickers on random people on the street. At some moment some people get really tired of this, and some government makes a law that you cannot put a sticker on a stranger, unless you get their consent first.
And then most people are like: "Why does this annoying law exist? Now I can't even walk to a shop without dozen people asking me to sign a consent form. Why can't they simply put a sticker on me and let me go?"
Yeah, as a web developer, I worry that GDPR and well-intentioned legislation will have a huge chilling effect on the internet: trying to do anything on the internet will open you up to potential legislation over GDPR concerns, or cookie concerns, or accessibility concerns, or not-having-a-French-version-of-your-website-in-Quebec concerns.
Not to say that privacy, accessibility, and tracking control aren't important... but I worry that we'll end up increasingly putting the internet in the hands of just a few small companies that can hire people to jump through all these legal hoops, (even more so than it already does).
We had to implement it and my boss was very paranoid about possible infractions, but it hasn't made that huge a difference now once we're used to it. Mostly being careful about cc'ing emails and anything with personally identifying material.
We didn't use any consultants, but we're only very, very small potatoes. There were a lot of places popped up offering services, right enough, but unless you're a huge organisation why would you even bother?
And despite that, I regularly get emails from other organisations with the entire list of everybody's email address that they mass-mailed to, even though under GDPR this is a big no-no 🤦♀️
"The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now."
We can update this to have rich people finance non-Marvel, non-Star Wars movies. Adult-oriented, a-political dramas of the kind that don't really get made much anymore, like say The Shawshank Redemption or Eyes Wide Shut. Add it to your campaign platform to lock down that all-important film buff demographic!
Rich people are already carrying out the liturgy to support theatre by sponsoring the arts such as opera houses, theatres, galleries and museums, etc.
If I listen to the Met broadcast on our classical music station, they roll out a list of sponsors before every one. Toll House Brothers and the Annenberg Foundation!
https://www.metopera.org/support/make-a-gift/support-the-met-broadcasts/donor-levels/100000-and-above/
Yeah, that buys like zero goodwill with me, because a lot of that money goes to support art that few people actually like, hence why it needs the largesse of the wealthy to support it in the first place. Most modern art is garbage, a lot of modern theater is just gay cowboys eating pudding (as Eric Cartman so aptly put it), and opera has always sucked. The winning move here for Scott is to encourage the rich to subsidize art that *I* like for a change.
A professional wrestling league already exists.
^^Found the gay cowboy^^
...You realize that your "art few people actually like" thing applies perfectly well to the kind of movies you are insisting must be supported.
Does it ? i remember Shawshank Redemption being in the top ten of most loved movies ever.
"While The Shawshank Redemption received critical acclaim upon its release—particularly for its story, the performances of Robbins and Freeman, Newman's score, Darabont's direction and screenplay and Roger Deakins' cinematography—the film was a box-office disappointment, earning only $16 million during its initial theatrical run. Many reasons were cited for its failure at the time, including competition from the films Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, the general unpopularity of prison films, its lack of female characters, and even the title, which was considered to be confusing for audiences. It went on to receive multiple award nominations, including seven Academy Award nominations, and a theatrical re-release that, combined with international takings, increased the film's box-office gross to $73.3 million."
People liked it once they got told it was amazing, loudly and at length.
The number one grossing movie hasn't been a drama like you describe since 1988. Before that, 1957. It's almost like that kind of thing is a niche product.
Taking it partly seriously, I understand there may be a use for mined coal as fertiliser. It is a long time since I heard about the research, but coal is carbon, which is what plants need. It’s a matter of turning it into useful carbon. Currently not as lucrative as mining coal to burn for the purpose of endangering human life but has potential.
You turn it into useful carbon for plants by burning it, or using it to make urea and other compounds.
I've kind of wondered if plants like the increased buffet of CO2 floating around, and think the world is turning into utopia. The parts where we aren't destroying existing plants.
It’s not a bad idea, the liturgy. Although to mix two ideas here, maybe the billionaires could get their faces on Mount Rushmore, or equivalent, if they volunteer most of their wealth to the state.
> When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.
*Sigh...*
First off, a lot of American websites (mostly newspapers) already do that. If you visit them as an european, they serve you a page that says "We don't want to comply with GDPR, fuck you and your data privacy, you don't get to read our articles" in a slightly more polite tone.
Second, the GDPR doesn't mandate cookie banners, and it's perfectly possible to comply with GDPR without a banner. Substack doesn't have one, for instance. What GDPR mandates is active consent before any kind of tracking of identifying data that isn't necessary to deliver your core service. That means you can (1) use regular cookies without a banner if they're used for site function (eg authentication) and (2) collect anonymized data if you want to track usage statistics. But what most sites with those banners want is (3) collect an invasive profile of everything you do to target you with ultra-personalized advertising, and that's against the spirit of GDPR. These cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance.
You want an end to cookie banners? Ask Google to lower the pagerank of any site with one, and publicly advertise it. That's probably what they'll do once they manage to roll out their own GDPR-compliant advertising.
> These cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance.
I get that this isn't the outcome legislators wanted, but it's a highly predictable outcome: "you can either reduce doing things that you're doing because they make you more money, or you can annoy your users with an extra pop-up and blame it on GDPR"... it's not super hard to imagine which way a lot of companies are going to go.
If your legislation is predictably going to make things worse due to companies taking the easy (or more profitable) way out... seems like it's not a great legislation.
---
Plus, even if you think you're probably doing all the anonymization and non-tracking stuff right, if you're not 100% sure (and knowing this requires an interesting blend of legal savvy and tech savvy), it's a lot easier to just slap a banner on it and be done.
It's like the law passed forcing companies to much more carefully prove that they don't have sesame seeds in their products: it was well-intentioned, but put a lot of cost on companies so a lot of them just added sesame seeds, making the result worse for the very thing the law was trying to help.
>They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future.
They might deserve that, but to have a chance to fail, policies first need to be implemented, and the president is a pretty lousy role for making that happen, considering that he's always at the center of attention and at least half the country hates him and everything he stands for. Everybody knows that some anonymous unelected paper pushers enact actual changes, have you considered applying there?
While I support the idea of building giant statues of black/Black people in principle, I am concerned white/White supremacists would ally with anti-climate extremists (unless they are the same people already?) and burn the statues in a double-whammy release of both hate and carbon. Should these statues be erected, 24/7 protection by armed guards from the Black Power movement would be required.
The statues shouldn't be of actual black/Black people because that would be racist. Or something. They should all be giant coal statues of bottles of Aunt Jemima as that would also be a comment on capitalism.
Based on my offering this idea to improve the platform, I should get one of those $20 gift cards.
Hey, I’d vote for you if you were on the ballot
Har har. There are three types of people who like to say Dems are obsessed with The Former Guy.
1) You’re either secretly rooting for their success every step of the way (and the success of the justice system which would be inactive without the Dem’s so-called obsession – with shout-outs to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger).
2) You're politically too ill-informed to realize your mirth emanates from cynical manipulation by the hypocritical big players trying to cling to power (From Fox to Musk to the GOP writ large).
3) Or you’re in that very special, very real tribe that has convinced themselves that democracy itself is secondary to stopping the trend of wokeness.
Anyone who isn’t “obsessed” with keeping the TFG and his cronies away from the Oval is playing with fire. And not a good citizen for always counting on the Dems to clean up the biggest messes!
He was president for 4 years. Things were mostly fine. If he’s re-elected things will again be mostly fine.
"Things were mostly fine."
/looks at COVID-19
/looks at a literal attempt to overturn an election
You and I appear to have wildly different definitions of "mostly fine." I'll leave it at that.
If Hillary had won, there would never have been Covid? Isn't that stretching the divine powers of the Empress a bit too far, drosophilist?
Look around the world at different nations under different governments and how they handled, or didn't, Covid. Should it have been ivermectin for all? Is Fauci a hero or a loser? Masking forever? No masks since they don't work? Shutdowns and lockdowns or no? Vaccination for herd immunity or a killer of the young and healthy? Whichever option you pick, someone is going to argue, with copious supporting material, that the opposite would have surely worked and stopped the pandemic in six weeks flat.
COVID was an angry God's punishment for failing to acknowledge Her Turn.
As usual, the rest of the world is just collateral damage in the psychodrama between America and the Lord.
You guys can send him to prison or whatever. That's Ok with me. But other than media scandals and tax cuts very little actually happened until covid hit. His next presidency will also be defined by media scandals while little happens.
Operation Warp Speed was probably the single most consequential and good act taken by government worldwide during covid. Trump then spent the following years convincing people to get vaccinated. His handling was overall fine.
I don't really care about the election stuff. It's stupid all around.
"The election stuff" matters a great deal to some of us, including some like me who are independent voters harboring plenty of disgust with today's lefty politics. Trying to simply strong-arm the result of a national election is so egregious and harmful that it demands an uncompromising civic response.
I have no idea if the election was rigged, and neither do you.
They filed more than 60 lawsuits in state and federal courts claiming that the election was rigged in various ways. They won _one_, which was over a changed deadline for providing missing identification on certain absentee and mail-in ballots in a single jurisdiction.
Judge Stephanos Bibas, one of the two dozen Trump-appointed judges scattered across the country who ruled against Trump and his raving lawyers, summed it up well: "Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
What would have been different about Covid with Hillary as President?
Hillary believes in SCIENCE!!! obviously. OMB was a science denying horse-paste peddler that got his own voters killed with fish tank cleaner and injecting chlorox!
This is why New York, lead by the Emmy-award winning Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) did so much better than anywhere else.
Be careful to allow a wounded tiger back into your house. It is likely to be less pleasant to be around, in particular for those it suspects caused the wound, or were somehow associated with them.
I don’t talk about this much here anymore but it’s pretty amazing how large a percentage of the country seems just fine with the US going through a Silvio Berlusconi era.
It makes me wonder if high schools quit teaching Civics some time ago.
My mind remains boggled.
I agree with you. I would say that we are getting closer and closer to an armed conflict about what civics really is anymore. It sure as hell doesn’t mean
Live and let live, while fostering a public space that is respected by all. I think that’s a result of two things; the co-opting of public space in the interest of what would be more appropriately private behavior, and an intolerance that some people have about what their neighbors might be doing amongst themselves.
Some ideas are too harmful to be allowed in the public space. Live and let live is a childish form of racism almost as bad as being colorblind, that perpetuates the whitecisheteropatriarchical hegemonic oppressive dominance over liminal spaces.
Anyone that doesn't understand this is too uneducated to be taken seriously.
>Some ideas are too harmful to be allowed in the public space.
Agreed. in general terms. I think that was part of my point re a public space respected by all.As for the rest of your comment, I think I understand it just fine; it reads as nonsense.
I'm pretty sure Purpleopolis is being sarcastic.
You know, about an hour after I posted I started to wonder about that.
The line between observation and satire is becoming increasingly porous.
I would apologize, but, either way it did read as nonsense. I just missed the joke. Anyway, I will know better next time when I read one of his posts.
I think that the media is very much into Florida Man, because he generates interactions (e.g. money) in a way which Mike Pence does not.
If during his first primaries, all of the liberals had made a commitment not to click on any links about the outrageous stuff he pulled, he would have lost the primary.
Let the courts do their job, but cut down on the media circus. He feeds on it.
The stuff he did in office (setting the stage for Dobbs, fighting "Obamacare") was mostly stuff any other GOP member would have done as well. Lying about election fraud is certainly burning the commons, but he did not use any presidential powers for his lies. Palpatine would have found a way to take power due to the COVID crisis. Even when trying to fix an election, Florida Man did it with all the political instinct of a three year old who can't accept that they have lost a game. (Which does not make him harmless, sometimes silly people end up doing great harm. Hitlers first big thing out of all strategic objectives there were in Germany, was to try to occupy the bloody Feldherrenhalle.)
Remember GWB, the respectable conservative who dragged the US into two disastrous wars and did his best to legalize torture? Compared to that, the funny man with the twitter account seems rather droll.
I remember GWB, the guy who we called "Chimpy McHitler" and suspected of being unable to read. Not sure who this "respectable conservative" guy was.
It was the deep state, don’t you know? Starting with Dick Cheney..
That was Mitt, who used to be a theocrat (and inflictor of dog-cruelty) who was going to introduce literal Handmaid's Tale Gilead if elected.
Or maybe it was his evil twin? I get confused easily about the version of the same guy before and after they lose elections or leave power, at least according to the people who fought tooth and nail to have them lose the election or leave power. They're always good guys when they're losers, seems to be the rule of thumb.
> Lying about election fraud is certainly burning the commons, but he did not use any presidential powers for his lies.
One of the unenumerated, but significant powers of presidency is the bully pulpit. I think I can make a case for him using that to great effect. Repeatedly saying if he lost the election in 2020 (starting six months before the election) it would mean it was fraudulent is pretty powerful signal.
Obviously, the media thrives on controversy because people thrive on it as well. Trump is difficult to ignore. For all of us. Even more so because a significant percentage of the population thinks highly of him. How do you ignore that?
GWB was the Hitlerest Hitler that Ever Hitlered, the absolute worst in all of space and time.
Until the next R on the ballot.
Nah, I think GWB got more hatred than either McCain or Romney.
It was hilarious watching McCain's expression when he went back to Jon Stewart et. al. when he was a candidate instead of a reliable R-hating R. He honestly didn't seem to expect that they'd turn on him that savagely.
Mittens was a dog-torturing religious wacko with magic underwear who wanted to put women in binders.
GWB had eight years in the White House to incite hatred for having an (R) after his name. McCain and Romney only had a campaign season, and they had to share the spotlight for part of it.
If Paul Wolfowitz has been right about the “being greeted as liberators” idea GWB would have a much better reputation.
Wolfowitz was brilliant but terribly misread a pivotal moment in history.
Yes, that comment certainly disabuses me of the notion that the Dems are obsessed with Orange Man Bad, JKPaw.
Not sure if trolling.
Literally laughing out loud! Great post!!!
Can someone please explain to me the NYT joke?
Why should NYT journalists get 10 million dollar a hour?
(I'm not American, maybe that's why I don't get it.)
He doesn’t like the New York Times as they doxxed him. 10 million dollars an hour minimum wage means that it is not economical to hire anyone so they’re all fired.
Sad it took a personal incident like that to be moved to hate the NYT
It was my personal favourite joke! Take on two shitty things at the same time. Minimum wage and the NYT!
Min wage is great.
Lol
Minimum wage is zero, but you already knew that.
They totally should, because they are so smart and so liberal. There is no joke here. Consider their varied backgrounds -- American rich kid . . . Muslim something-or-other . . . blue collar family but make it into HARVARD . . . have some goddam disability but made it into HARVARD. But despite starting out in various American shitholes they a MADE IT INTO HARVARD, and thence to the NYT. STFU and pay these people a shit ton of money.
I'm guessing the NYT likes to say that minimum wage increases don't cause unemployment. Which may be true on the current margins, but is clearly untrue on the extremes. Raising the minimum wage for NYT journalists to $10m would mean that they're all immediately out of a job, in a way that demonstrates that one of their cherished beliefs was wrong.
I don’t think anybody is claiming the extreme position.
Anyone who claims that raising the minimum wage will reduce *zero* jobs is taking the extreme position. You can quibble about whether raising it $0.25 would reduce jobs above zero and whatnot, but the primary supporters of minimum wage increases locked onto an amount that was double the previous rate. That's definitely the extreme position.
An intellectually honest take would be to say that some jobs will be lost and that the amount lost increases with the amount the wage goes up, but it's worth it because _______. I don't recall ever hearing that take.
Or perhaps "some jobs will be lost, but the additional economic activity generated by the increased marginal utility of money at the low end will (more than?) make up for it". But I doubt many people are arguing that, either!
EDIT: joke's on me, this is literally on the (optional) UK high-school economics syllabus! https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/minimum-wages-and-unemployment
The real joke is that the low end is where jobs/wages are lost!
It's not true at any margin. Supply and demand doesn't suddenly stop operating just because people on the left don't like it
A quick Google suggests that the empirical evidence on this question is very much less clear than the Econ 101 picture.
Because natural experiments are always imperfect. There are studies on both sides, and since the empirical literature is muddled labor being subject to supply and demand should be the null hypothesis.
There were a few badly conducted studies (the first Card study for example) that looked at one margin of adjustment over a short time horizon, did it badly, and found weak effects. We should have very strong priors on this topic, given how overwhelming the evidence is on demand and supply, and how labour markets largely follow those rules. More recent work that is able to look at other margins( http://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/minimum_wage.pdf) and carry out the study well finds that price floors( in the form of minimum wage) cause exactly the adjustments that demand and supply predict, i.e it favours more productive workers and reduces hours worked for less productive workers. And these are just short term adjustments. Over time artificial price floors encourage automation of tasks where labour supply exists and is the cheaper alternative, again disadvantaging those with the least skills.
Because they're worth it, Caba, with how they enlighten the ignorant, speak truth to power, fight tyranny, be the newspaper of record, and just make the world a better, more civilised, place simply by existing 😁
The gray lady has turned into a crabby old bitch let’s face it
I like how the Washington Post explicitly states its goal as "democracy dies in darkness".
You've my vote - I could buy you some more if you were well funded - NFT's, crypto & debased dollars accepted. SWIFT SWIFT
These are excellent plans, and I am in.
Can I be Secretary of the Navy? I promise to make sure the Liturgy is spent well.
Why no parallel liturgy?
Scott, I also competed at the NOSB finals in DC! What a blast from the past XD
What’s your position on invading Canada?
The problem there would be that if you won, then you'd have Canada on your hands. Do you really want that?
This is often referred to as The Pottery Law of Politics: If you break it, you own it.
We are really not that much trouble you know. Plus, we all live really close to the border and all the essential infrastructure is already in place; Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Best Buy there’d be nothing to it.
And you're incredibly easy to oppress as the Covid era showed.
The advantage is that all the people who regularly threaten to move to Canada after elections don't go their way now would have no excuse not to do so. That is a very enticing prospect, I must admit.
Hopefully he'll then open a chain of fitness facilities, so that when you visit the flagship location, you can say you set foot in Chief Justice Chief Jim Justice's chief gym.
Or at least you can try to say that.
You should write a screenplay for a political satire film. It's all right there.
A single issue platform proposal:
All asynchronous communications, including internet comments, emails, text messages, voice messages, news articles, blog posts, youtube posts, social media posts, social media comments, comments of any kind, letters to the editor, letters of any kind, written publications of any kind, handbills, protest signs, end times signs, band flyers, religious flyers, political flyers, and notes in class cost $1 to post. NO FRANKING PRIVILEGES. Two individuals can establish a mutual free channel, which may be revoked by either party at any time with no repercussions.
I (genuinely) donated to my local food bank as a way of putting my money where my mouth is with this comment.
"The few people who continue to be interested will get their knowledge from the IRS website rather than far-right forums, denying extremist groups a key method of recruitment and organization."
You say this like the IRS is not an extremist group. In IRS court, you're innocent till proven guilty. Being able to chuck the bill of rights in the wastebasket sounds pretty extremist and anti-American to me.
Other way around. In IRS court, you're guilty until proven innocent.
Hey, CIV IV-players: The word is 'ultimogeniture": Play some CK3 and actually learn about civilisation!
("I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance - ie the youngest son takes the throne - just so we can have a “King Barron”. Ha! Restricted vocabulary. ) update: Obviously, another CK-player beat me by 8 hours. Well, my real point is about what is the superior game and me being disgusting, thus no delete.
Play some CK2!
What we all did before CK3 came out. Ultimogeniture was a thing even then.
All the older kids would try to kill younger siblings until they were the youngest.
The Ottomans had this problem (it didn't go by ultimogeniture, but in the end there could be only one, as with Scottish immortals) and it led to a few civil wars.
The Ottomans certainly were very vigorous in their approach to pruning the family tree, that is so.
You could always try tanistry!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanistry
"Tanistry is a Gaelic system for passing on titles and lands. In this system the Tanist (Irish: Tánaiste; Scottish Gaelic: Tànaiste; Manx: Tanishtey) is the office of heir-apparent, or second-in-command, among the (royal) Gaelic patrilineal dynasties of Ireland, Scotland and Mann, to succeed to the chieftainship or to the kingship.
The word is preserved in the Republic of Ireland's government, where the prime minister is the Taoiseach while the deputy prime minister is the Tánaiste.
Historically the tanist was chosen from among the heads of the roydammna or "righdamhna" (literally, those of kingly material) or, alternatively, among all males of the sept, and elected by them in full assembly. The eligibility was based on patrilineal relationship, which meant the electing body and the eligibles were agnates with each other. The composition and the governance of the clan were built upon male-line descent from a similar ancestor."
This attempts to avoid the problems of primogeniture where the eldest is incompetent or otherwise unsuitable for the job, and inheritance by young child too young to take up the role, and disgruntled other family members or powerful nobles deciding that a sudden attack of death would be the best solution to getting them onto the throne instead of the squalling brat/dribbling boob.
That sounds like an improvement on old England's aetheling system, by making the choice of the successor ahead of time.
Bonus points if Musk does his best L Ron Hubbard impression and has his most devoted followers cater to his every whim while he sails the high seas.
https://manifold.markets/Tossup/will-scottalexander-write-another-b?r=Sm9zaHVh
This post was so good I'm betting on it
missing a period:
"Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things"
statue of Liberty is extremely fragile and refurbishing it will be an enormous technical challenge. I've read about it's maintenance and it's harrowing.
with enough money etc. of course
I thought the patina had some kind of protective effect, and removing it was a bad idea. Unlike all of the other ideas put forth above, which have clearly been carefully thought out.
There is nothing I have read this year that I enjoyed as much as this. But now I just feel even more sad that real politics is so sh-t.
I enjoyed your blog articles. Today is the first time I tried clicking the "No Thanks" link and got through to the articles. I have always assumed that not subscribing on a page with a "No thanks" link meant one was prevented from reading the blogs. So I would give up at that point, being reluctant to pay for a subscription before having sampled the author's words of wisdom or otherwise. DOH! That reminds me, I must think about paying a subscription for Scott's blog!
Is Scott a secret r/NonCredibleDefense aficionado?
I feel you should include the Irish presidential platform as per Michael D. Higgins.
If elected, I promise to own not one but *two* dogs while in office, said dogs to be at least one-third my own body size:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0j5zBJrYOw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XQvqHv2k0Q
We in the UK (well, the England part back then) had elected kings in early Saxon times. Anyone could apply, but the main qualification was that one had to prove to everyone's satisfaction that one was descended from the god Wodin!
You may not believe it, but I literally have such documentation. Along with many thousands of others who have some Norwegian ancestry.
I mean, he’s the All-Father. QED.
"For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.
When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR."
I demand reciprocity on this! There are too many whiny complaining little American pop-ups about "I see you are based in the EU so we can't show you this website/article/cute photo of something or other because of GDPR, because despite our vaunted technologic, economic and every thing else superiority apparently it's too difficult not to steal your data or automatically link you to 599 advertisers or something".
And I don't have to click "I understand" on Facebook etc. (seldom as I use them) so I have no idea what is going on there.
"I propose that religious conservatives drop their opposition to puberty blockers for transgender youth. In exchange for the government funding all sex reassignment surgeries, young trans women will do two years of community service in religious choirs, allowing the Church to recapture 18th-century hymns that have fallen into disuse."
This could be doable, as puberty blockers are (allegedly) a temporary measure and are reversible. The only flaw here is (1) it was the Catholic Church had castrati in choirs and due to the double whammy of 'the Pope won't sign off on this' and 'Catholics don't sing in church anyway, what do you think we are, Protestants?' it won't fly and (2) the churches that do sing hymns and which might be amenable to changes on doctrine to accommodate this are the Protestant ones which emphasise communal congregational singing, not listening to choristers. And I think megachurches have long abandoned 18th century hymns, there seems to be some horrors that I am glad never to have experienced; it would appear that now they don't have church choirs, they have 'worship teams' who all sing the same material from the one big provider:
https://apnews.com/article/worship-music-hit-makers-bethel-hillsong-elevation-passion-2982ab331782af96cfcc67a974793961
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWicNLXxtj4
I think you'll have to stick with the Anglicans/Episcopalians on this, and they're not the ones opposing trans rights anyway.
It's not one big provider, it's about four. And the real scourge is fog machines, which I'm glad my church has stopped using. (No, it wasn't billowing smoke, just adding a bit to the lighting. Also blurring the line between worship service and concert in a way I really don't like.)
Hello, bean! Naturally, under the new administration, you would be the Secretary for the Liturgy, and that means you get to decide on the naval ships the billionaires would fund *and* banning fog machines in church services! 😀
> economic and every thing else superiority apparently it's too difficult not to steal your data or automatically link you to 599 advertisers or something
I've been wanting to say this for years now and it seems like y'all are running low on tomatoes to throw at people, so here goes:
The GDPR's protections of privacy are good in principle and do cover a lot of nice things, but unelected European legislators telling people who aren't even in their jurisdiction what they can and cannot do is troubling for me. I believe they have overreached in some areas.
Consider the right to be forgotten, a noble goal on paper, but in practice requires a business to scrub all instances of a user's data in every single place it exists - live storage, backups, tape drives. Sure, there are exceptions for needed data - as long as you can prove to the fallible human European legislators that you really do need to keep this data.
If I right-to-be-forgotten myself on a webforum, do all my posts vanish? Do my quotes vanish from everyone who's quoted me? If someone copied my posts to another site or screenshotted them, should we make the hosts delete those, too? If I'm a contributor to a Git repository, should all my code be removed from the repository? If my e-mail is on a list of spammers, can I right-to-be-forgotten myself to get myself off of spam lists and send e-mail again?
(and, separately, I do tire of people complaining about companies stealing their personal data without really elaborating what they mean by "personal data" - is it my name? address? SSN? viewing habits? I think people are correct to be concerned, but I really wish they'd taboo "personal data" sometimes and actually _think_ about exactly what it is they want to keep private.)
In theory, every single website on Earth must now comply with these regulations because an EU user might visit; I imagine that if the US passed a law requiring any global visitor to, say, verify their legal age to access any US-hosted website, you'd be (rightfully) upset with that.
There's something deeply ironic about americans complaining about *european* extra-territorial laws on the tune of "imagine if we were doing the same!". Yeah, you are.
See FATCA, all the dollar-based trade embargos, the Dodd-Frank act, etc.
Yeah, and it sucks!
Optimistically it would make some people realize "hey, I don't like it now that they're doing it to me, so maybe I should stop doing it to them". But I doubt it.
"My team took second place, because taking first would have made me an elite, which I am not."
Well damn, I'd vote for you, based on this alone! 😁
For some reason it puts me in the mood of an old WW2 joke. A German General returns from the war. His wife eagerly awaits him at the door: "Darling, how did it go?" The General: "We came second!"
Glad to see someone with a platform making the case for American monarchy. Give the people the messy, flamboyant, outrageous dramaking they crave and let boring normies back in real government again.
Jim Justice to the Supreme Court. I’m dying. 😂😂😂😂😂😂
You forgot “bring back calling forth levies of yeoman archers to hunt deer for population control”: https://twitter.com/WB_Baskerville/status/1699048078651629753
I'd like to take this space to put forward my personal political platform designed to raise revenue, increase employment, and most importantly improve American's mental health: set corporate tax rates equal to the average time it takes to get a question answered by a live, US-based customer service specialist. I am more than happy for a company that answers consumer questions and issues within a few minutes to pay nearly nothing in corporate taxes (they can use the savings on hiring the needed people), but if it regularly takes people upwards of an hour on hold to get a real answer, get ready for a 70% tax rate.
What would that mean for government offices? Do their budgets get cut for overly long wait times?
Clean up the country first, THEN clean up the statue. Otherwise, you are just another politician.
Fuckin lol, this is the weirdest and funniest post I've read in a long time
> New York Times journalists play a central role in the American information ecosystem, and I believe they deserve this.
Honestly, my favorite part of the article. This one is a deep cut.
Same....I'm a sucker for dead-pan sarcasm that draws blood.
I thought this was a ridiculous joke until you explained about the constitutional monarchy. Now I want to vote for you or anyone else who will put your platform into effect, because it is clearly the only practical solution to our country's current situation.
I have doubts that it would work now, our society's dueling tantrums may be too far gone. But the only other real idea I've yet heard of -- holding out until the Boomers finally fade away and die off (*) -- is seeming less and less practical (we don't have that long).
A nonviolent national divorce is simply impractical.
So I guess yea, the constitutional monarchy idea might be worth trying. We don't have much to lose honestly.
(* I am a late Boomer with two siblings who are dead-center Boomers, so obviously this is a sentiment which I no longer voice at family dinners.)
Not the worst platform I have seen, not by a long shot.
Clean the statue of liberty then COAT IT IN GOLD USING ELECTROPLATING. We must do this as our patriotic duty! Let it shine forever, golden and glorious. This can be the FIRST thing that King Trump "does"!
"So if you know someone in Ottawa County, please tell them about my ideas."
Are you sure about this? I thought you were trying to campaign there.
Anybody supporting the USS Musk is a LITTORAL NAZI
You don't think the ship would also travel across deeper waters?
Here's likely the most accurate general narrative:
TFG quickly amassed a huge following based solely on his talent for "owning the libs." It was mostly fun and games among uninformed cynics who had already convinced themselves democracy was a joke and government should be drowned in a bathtub.
But when the MAGA trajectory turned so dark so quickly, most of his fans simply closed their ears to the outside world of facts and laws and civil norms. Why should all the fun end? Just keep scaring the libs. This became their only compass setting. Which turned them into a literal cult. Soon they were willing to physically fight, lie, and lose family members for this guy who ordered them not to believe their own eyes -- only believe him. It was very much like like pre-war Nazi Germany. Keep the Champagne flowing when you don't want people looking at the dark side.
Still today, his supporters refuse to even glance at all the widely available facts; it's way easier (and more fun) just to call the libs hysterical. It is despicable that the vast majority of Republicans continue to undermine, ridicule, and attack anyone who is serious about democracy and respects the rule of law -- anyone willing to attempt the very difficult work of saving this democracy at its greatest period of crisis since the Civil War (which a plurality of Republicans would like to do over). Absolutely deplorable.
I remember a day when people still had the ability to feel enough shame that they never would have followed such a horrible man down this rabbit hole. Some here have taken the stance that they really don't care if he goes to prison, but the Dems are still hysterical. This is nihilism, and passive-aggressive support for authoritarianism.
If you don't believe in democracy, please just don't vote.
Gosh, JKPaw, it's true that it's really terrible that half the country actually is a basket of deplorables. Sigh. They can't even be helped, as you point out: they are all solidly evil and don't care about anything and are now a murder-cult, just like the Nazis!
What can be done? Save vote out the people and replace them with a better one?
HAHA
Honestly the Liturgy idea and the Constitutional Monarch idea are worth serious consideration. Who the hell cares what big naval ships are named? Give me the USS "I didn't even have to pay for this", because that's what I'll see every time one of them sets sail. The USS Bill Gates will be great bait for right-wing nutjobs, practically a jobs program unto itself. And "this is the only way we're ever getting rid of them, you know it to be true". I do, Scott. *sobs* you're so right it hurts.
On wikipedia, I have read that during WW2 when deciding between adopting 5 star generals or "marshalls" one of the factors in consideration is that George Marshall would be one.
To be clear this was a point AGAINST using Marshalls as it would be "undignified." Some people just cannot be reasoned with.
reverse primogeniture-based inheritance is called ultimogeniture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimogeniture
Be careful what you wish for.
My sides! This is art!
It doesn't sound plausible to me, for two reasons:
1) I doubt that the Titanic would have set off without sufficient coal to ensure it could complete the journey. The fire was discovered before departure, so they could take it into account when determining whether there was sufficient coal on board, but I think they would have allowed for the possibility of a coal fire in any case.
2) Water resistance is roughly proportional to the square of the velocity, which means that the fuel efficiency of a ship drops when you get close to maximum speed. In other words, if the captain were concerned about not having enough coal, that concern would counsel lower speed, not higher speed. The crew had put out the coal fire, so the captain wasn't trying to use coal before it burned up.
Sorry, this is a reply to John R Ramsden. I clicked on reply and then logged in, which doesn't work correctly on substack.
There is one more thing I would like you to put on your agenda. Include some statement that a) foreign citizens are entitled to vote, providing (insert as appropriate), and that b) once you're elected president, the US steps in for setting up similiar rules all over the Western World and as such, lay the foundation for worldwide acceptance of your wise recommendations. Please be assured, that you can count on my vote.
Unfortunately, Republicans defund Veteran healthcare at every opportunity, but other than that the platform is pretty solid
I loved this post, but let this slide without a comment: "40% of CO2 emissions come from coal."
Nope. As the linked source says, 40% of /fossil fuel/ CO2 emissions come from coal.
The interesting question is, What fraction of CO2 emissions come from burning wood?
The US EPA says that "Total Emissions in 2021 are 6,340 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent". That doesn't include anything but the direct effects of economic activity, though; it doesn't count people burning wood, forest fires, or deforestation.
Yale tauts a study (https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/yale-study-yields-surprising-insights-into-effects-of-wood-fuel-burning) which says that "Emissions from wood fuels account for about 1.9 to 2.3 percent of global emissions." But on the other hand, the NRDC (https://www.nrdc.org/stories/no-burning-wood-fuels-not-climate-friendly), citing a study, says "wood pellets sourced in the United States and burned for energy in the United Kingdom emitted up to 17.6 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2019." That would mean US wood pellets burned in the UK account for 10% of all wood burned for fuel, which is absurd.
SUSPICIOUSLY, there doesn't seem to have ever been any other study of how much wood is burned outside of Europe, even though this may be a major contributor to global warming. I'll estimate the wood-burning CO2 contribution by multiplying the UK US-wood-pellet output by 2 (assuming at least as much wood is taken from the UK itself), and multiplying that by the world population divided by the UK population (in 2021): 17.6*2*7888/67.33 = 4124M metric tons/yr of CO2. This is if anything a gross under-estimate, since very few people in the tree-poor UK burn wood for fuel.
Then there's CO2 released from deforestation--cutting down trees, even without burning them, makes them decay and release carbon. The London School of Economics says (https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/whats-redd-and-will-it-help-tackle-climate-change/), "Land use change, principally deforestation, contributes 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions."
Then there's CO2 emissions from forest fires. UNDRR, whoever they are, wrote (https://www.preventionweb.net/news/wildfires-2021-emitted-record-breaking-amount-carbon-dioxide) that "Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO2) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021," but said that was 150% more than the mean from 2000 to 2020. That means the mean is 704 million metric tons/year. I think it's reasonable to assume that fires in the rest of the world produce at least as much CO2, giving us 1.41 billion metric tons/year from forest fires.
So, total emissions from wood, in metric? tons, are at least:
4124M from wood burning
1408M from forest fires
(12+20)/2 = 16%, X / {(6340M+1408M) + X} = 0.16; 0.16 * {X + 7748M} = X; 0.84X = 0.16*7748M; X = 1475M from deforestation
7007 from wood, total. That's 7007 / (7007+6,340) = 0.52499 of all CO2 emissions. Wood, not coal, is the biggest source of CO2 emissions. (Unless mammalian respiration, which nobody counts, is.)
The coal statue one has to be one of the most racist ideas, intended to be a good idea I've ever heard. Not only can anthracite be more than black (it has many shades) the idea of carving up ANOTHER mountain after offending Indigenous Americans by carving heads into mountains.
However making the Trump family US Monarchy seems like a FANTASTIC idea. It would save us from a possible president donald or Ivanka.
If we are going to have a liturgy, don't do "modern equivalent warship" stuff.
MAKE THEM BUILD AN ACTUAL TRIREME!
This was wonderfully hilarious!
Liturgy: actually a decent idea
Sovcits: not cost-effective; far-right extremists don't actually cause that much harm, it's just hyped by the media
Giant statues: I don't think the coal miners would be any happier about this given that it's (a) obviously made work which would be considered similar to welfare (yes, of course this is all irrational) and (b) the subjects of the statues. Also, the statues would eventually catch fire and the result would be the same.
Datasets: actually not a terrible idea - aside from the data benefits, the tests could easily be used as a threshold for high school graduation and thereby eliminate some perverse incentives from NCLB
Justice Justice: as he's presumably a very Trumpy conservative, I don't think Democrats would go for this one
Lying about college: wouldn't work; elite colleges would have a strong incentive to provide accurate information to employers asking who actually graduated from them
NYT journalists: Yes, clever, but would almost certainly be considered to violate 1st Amendment given intent. Also, the NYT could just change its name.
Pop-ups: actually not a terrible idea
Statue of Liberty: this would result in incremental erosion of the statue as the exposed copper in turn corrodes. While this would actually be an even better metaphor for American society, I don't think people would like that.