A lot of people waking up to the idea that Trump in his second term is very different than Trump in his first term, a fact easily predictable (and predicted!) by anyone who was paying attention to him saying he was going to remove all the constraints that were placed on him in the first term.
I wonder if anyone who liked the first Trump term is going to revise their opinion on how much value the people holding him back added to his administration.
Yes, particularly the calculation of the tariff rates has increased my confidence in the claim that he wanted to do some crazy stuff in his first term but was held back because he was surrounded by competent people. I thought his first term seemed OK.
I don't buy it. How are tarriffs "revenge?" Or the mass rounding up of people without due process?
These are absolutely things that Trump talked about doing in the first administration, people defended him on the grounds that it was all rhetoric, and used the fact that he didn't actually do these things as evidence it was just rhetoric. But every report that came out after his term ended emphasized how many people worked tirelessly to stop him from doing things because they were worried about the legal, diplomatic, and economic implications of various actions. And now all those people are gone.
If Trump had started by sending the FBI after Biden, I'd say you were correct, and we may still get there. But he started by doing all of the stuff he'd been campaigning on his entire political career, that people claimed he didn't mean.
I don't think you are intentionally gaslighting me. I think its interesting how people's memories change, or maybe it depends on whether you engage primarily with one media source or another. But in the mainstream media, Trump's repeated mention of 11 million immigrants who needed to be deported during the primaries (particularly the primary debates) and his talk of creating a "deportation force" were a big deal.
Here's an interesting historical artifact, a headline published in 2016 imagining what 2017 would look like if Donald Trump were elected.
See if you can spot how many of these things, intended to be a cross between a joke and a warning, now reflect things this administration is working towards.
Maybe. But this article (which seems to be fairly conservative friendly) argues that it was the pushbacks from blue states and sanctuary cities that stalled out the process.
"Critical Trade Theory: Any trade imbalance between two countries is de facto evidence of systemic unfair trade practices."
That was posted yesterday by a Substack writer named William Miller. Jesse Singal today makes the same overall point. He writes that Trump "sees the world strictly through the friends/enemies binary, and he apparently makes those determinations solely on the basis of the perceived “loyalty” of the actor/group/country/whatever in question...Trump decided a while back that America is “getting ripped off” by other countries. And once he decided that, the evidence was easy to find — I mean, just look at those percentages!
This style of thinking reminded me a bit of Ibram X. Kendi, because Kendi decided that everything is either racist or anti-racist, and then further decided that any racial discrepancy anywhere concerning anything was proof positive of racism. It goes without saying that this isn’t a serious approach to addressing racial discrepancies...but it was taken seriously by a lot of powerful people with money. Kendi himself gained some degree of influence and a form of power (since squandered rather colorfully), but of course not one millionth the power Trump enjoys...."
>An unmanaged economy can adjust to tariffs on the fly without too much pain.
I don't see how this is true. It takes time to adjust to tariffs because you have to build new factories or set up new shipping routes to substitute for the tariffed goods, and making the market more free isn't going to let you build a new factory overnight. And in the meantime, you're simply poorer because you've made everything more expensive.
(And some goods may not be substitutable at all - e.g., crops that don't grow well in the US's climate.)
It doesn't matter if there's one company or ten, so long as they all depend on the same inputs, they're all going to have to find the same substitutes.
Also, antitrust regulation is a form of managing the economy, one that the US has been fairly lax on lately.
Antitrust actions can literally result in a company being broken up into smaller companies.
Also, as I said, I don't see how the number of companies makes a difference. How would it help to, say, have ten different auto companies instead of one, if they're all importing the same steel and aluminum?
That has not been true at all. Standard Oil was a huge monopoly that arose in a barely-managed economy. Monopolization is a natural outcome of unmanaged free-market in any area where economies of scale apply.
Oh this brings memories and explains a lot. I too was young once and read mises.org. Can’t believe this crock of shite is still around. It must be exhausting to be always wrong about everything and yet keep slogging the same crap year after year. I’m sure the dollar will collapse any day now, same as 20 years ago.
Sorry, I’m trying not to be sarcastic usually, it’s just hard when I see the same poisonous ideas continue to be flogged despite having been discredited by reality over and over again.
Ask me about measles vaccine “causing autism” next :)
The second headline refers to a once-eminent surgeon who in middle age decided to get rich hawking bullshit dietary and anti-aging supplements on TV, ran for the Senate in a state that he didn't reside in, etc.
This age we live in, oof. Guess today will be a good day to again apologize to each of my children for the shitshow we're leaving to them.
[Sadly for my eldest, Italy just cut way back on its longstanding citizenship-for-descendants-of-Italians program in part because there's been a flood of Americans like him applying for it.]
Inspired by the AI 2027 post, I want to ask. How worried should I be about AI driven doom, how can I spot if it's coming, and what on earth can I do about it?
Here’s how you can spot it coming: when you call a plumber to replace your garbage disposer and a robot shows up with the new one and installs it all by itself in 10 minutes - start worrying.
Really interesting post by Hanania today about how populism inherently leads to bad governance, whether it's the left or right doing it. Also notable is that he explicitly admits that he made a mistake about Trump. It's pretty rare for people to publicly admit mistakes like that.
Another bit I found interesting that I hadn't heard before:
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Lee Kuan Yew famously said that in a multiracial democracy, people vote for their ethnic or religious group. This is indeed a general trend, but when leaders lean too much into identity, we understand that this poisons discourse and thought, which is why we call them demagogues. In the US, ethnopolitics is more acceptable for blacks than any other group, and blacks tend to elect extremely corrupt politicians. As of late 2009, all active ethics probes in the House of Representatives were into the behavior of black members, which led to charges of racism. Since 2019 alone, the black mayors of New York City, Baltimore, and Jackson have been indicted for corruption related charges.
Trumpism can be seen as identity politics for alienated white people. It is not a coincidence that the right has been becoming more accepting of corruption at the same time it has become implicitly ethnonationalist. Morality based movements care about the ethical standards of politicians and more intellectually inclined movements care about ideas. Populism is about blaming others for problems, so it has less mental energy to put towards policing the behavior of members of its own movement. Often, it makes tribalism into a virtue.
TBH I think turning the US from c. 85% white to c. 50% white within a single human lifetime is more unprecedented and norm-violating than anything Trump's done. Granted that was a bipartisan violation rather than a strictly Democrat one, but still, the Democrats have been much more enthusiastic and open about it than the Republicans.
I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure that when white people took control of the Americas, they didn't do it by peacefully joining Native American tribes, gradually outbreeding them, and taking power through the democratic process. There was, you know, some violence involved.
Are you suggesting that White Americans are or somehow should be afraid that they will killed en masse, with the survivors put into reservations or into whatever non-explosive descriptor we can use for Palestinian confinement to Gaza and the West Bank?
"Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbors and when ethnic diversity is measured more locally. Covariate conditioning generally changes the relationship only slightly. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research."
I am in the same boat re. his racist past, but since Scott recommended his blog I decided to give it another chance. The good news is that some people clearly can change, recognize their errors and own them.
My part-way idea is that there should be a bicameral legislature; one house is elected in the usual equally-weighted sort of way, and the other house is elected by votes weighted by the amount of tax you pay.
So no retired people? Or how do you judge net? Do you count all government spending as part of the calculation? Because then almost no one would count - the US is spending far more than it takes in as taxes, so on net barely anyone is positive.
Again, how are you calculating net. Retired people are benefiting from roads, from money spent on defense, from medical research, they have pay interest on their "share" of the debt and so on. That all costs money. Or are you only counting direct transfers? Because if so, this kind of system would be ridiculously easy to game.
Medicare alone would push most retired people over into the net-negative column as taxpayers. More than 90 percent of all Americans 65+ are enrolled in Medicare now, and the FICA taxes they individually paid into that system cover only 5 to 25 percent of the benefits they get from it.
As long as your limiting the franchise, limiting it to people with a college education seems more reasonable. Or if you think college is evil, base it on an IQ test.
OIC....well in a nation that's passed exactly one purely-administrative Constitutional amendment during the last half-century, I'm with FLWAB: good luck with that one.
DJIA -3.01%, S&P 500 -3.34%, Nasdaq -4.37%, Russell 2000 -3.99%
The weird thing was watching the market climb yesterday, I guess the trading algorithms got conditioned to Trump chickening out and discounted the possibility that the mad king is actually mad.
I see this as a good time to buy. It might be good to diversify to EU stocks a bit though, particularly healthcare/defence (but I would still only do that through index tracking ETFs).
My prediction is:
1. Trump tanks US economy badly, keeps talking about how it is transitory a part of a great leap forward (or was that a different country?) etc.
2. Trump admin loses the midterm elections. Probably badly, but even a small loss is enough to significantly tie its hands as their majority is razor thin now. I think this is almost inevitable because people will lose jobs in most voting districts which are not safe MAGA anyway and prices will increase across the US:
a) People in the American rust belt might start seeing a creation of new jobs but not in enough quantities. This is because less than 2 years is not enough time to move production overseas and foreign investors will be reluctant to make such large decisions unless they really become convinced that mercantilism is now a long-term US policy.
b) Even if there is a significant number of new low-skilled labour jobs in the rust belt, these are already securely MAGA Republican areas and getting your congressman elected with a surprlus of 50 000 votes or 100 000 votes makes no difference.
3. Trump refuses to change course and will get bogged down in congressional and legal disputes. Republicans lose the next elections unless Democrats become completely suicidal and double down on the identity politics bullshit instead of shifting towards centrist views. At this point, and if Democrats abandon the identity politics, even libertarians will prefer them to the mercantilist MAGA Republicans.
4. Most (though probably not all) Trump tariffs are lifted (4 years from now) and the indexes jump massively in anticipation.
The low point in stocks might be now or it might be 6-12 months from now or something like that. I don't think it is going to be more than that. If Trump plans ahead at all he might even operate with the notion that the midterms are likely lost and will want to shoot all the bullets now.
The only other realistic scenario seems to be the "Democrats are irredeemably stupid" one.
Even if the old factory is a rusted-out piece of junk, it's often easier to get regulatory approval to "rebuild" an old factory in place than to build a new factory at a greenfield site. I don't think there's much chance we'll really see a massive increase in US manufacturing capability during the remainder of Trump's term, but if I were going to try and play in that game I'd definitely be prioritizing old industrial sites.
I might still fill them with robots and high-skill immigrants and leave the OG local workforce to wallow in poverty. But it would be politic to try and find *something* for them to do.
That is a good point. I was assuming this would be because of the old factories and know-how. But know-how is probably no longer there and the factories, if they still exist, are probably not in a good shape and you are better off just building from scratch.
So it would just be because it is a place with a pool of (relatively) low-wage workers. But I am not sure if that is enough. You also want somewhere where logistics is easy and also ideally where local government gives you some benefits (tax exemptions etc.).
Either way, setting up new factories really takes a long time, so the only place where this can have a positive impact on employment before the US midterm elections is somewhere where factories still exist and operate but perhaps run on at half capacity. So that would probably be the rust belt.
Are there actually many still existing factories running on half capacity? Seems very doubtful to me.
And I would guess any new manufacturing will go to the sun belt, not the rust belt. Younger population, less unions, more business friendly state governments.
Regarding (2) (a), consider also the effects of automation. These jobs are never coming back, even if the manufacturing does. Any new manufacturing in the US leans very heavily on automation, which you should expect given the high labor costs.
I am just deciding between buying US ETFs or European ETFs. I have most of my savings in US ETFs, so I think that I will now perhaps diversify a bit to German indices or something (Merz seems to be the first good chancellor in a while and he is business oriented, plus there will be quite a surge in the defence industry now, a lot of it in Germany).
On the other hand, US stocks will be hit harder now and they are also likely to bounce back fairly quick if the next administration reverses the course back. I guess it is a more high risk high reward now.
A good asset allocation strategy should have exposure to the world. FWIW I'm not touching any of my core investments because I have a reasonable spread across the world and sticking to the plan and letting rebalancing do the hard lifting is likely to produce better long-term outcome than me trying to second-guess the markets.
Yeah, makes sense. I've been too US-centred till now, in a way. All my physical assets (my flat and a few garage parking places which I rent) are in Europe and my job is also more dependent on European economy, although I could probably shift, since I can work remotely.
But my stocks are 100% American right now and it has worked really well in the past 10 years (since I've started investing regularly ... and I pretty much never sell). I have some money in European bonds and I will probably move then to European stocks and keep adding to those to maybe get to 50% American and 50% European in the long-run.
Hi! I'm a bit confused by that. I totally get that the tariffs are not reciprocal at all and that they seem nonsensical, but could you explain why they are unlikely to work as intended (aka relocalizing industry in america)? Could it be considered a painful period after which the economy will grow again? I'm not at all a MAGA guy (not even living in the US), but, as everyone is saying that tariffs are bad, I'm trying to consider the opposite opinion...
I'm not an economist, but to me the obvious problems here are:
1. Industries moved for a reason: generally the reason was some version of "higher production costs." If price increase for the tariffs on a particular good is less than the price increase that would follow from shifting production of that back to the U.S. then the industry has zero incentive to move. A 10% baseline tariff on everything seems likely to fall below that threshold for a lot of goods.
2. Lots of manufacturing can't realistically source all of their inputs from the U.S., so even if they move production to the U.S., they'll still be paying tariffs on their inputs. This effectively lowers the benefit of them moving to the U.S. as they'll still get charged some fraction of the tariffs anyway.
3. Moving production is a long and expensive process. Any company that is looking to move is looking at high up-front costs and won't see ANY return on that investment for probably at least a couple years. Even when the move is complete, it will likely take several more years before they hit the break-even point where the move pays for itself[1]. This interacts with points 1 and 2, as higher production costs in the U.S. reduce the benefit of the move and increase the time it takes to pay off the moving cost.
4. The Trump administration can't guarantee any sort of stability in the tariff regime. Even if people trust the word of Trump himself on this (and obviously they shouldn't), a big enough defeat in the midterms could end the tariffs as soon as 2 years from now, and a defeat in the presidential election would almost certainly end them 4 years from now. I'd guess that 4 years is not actually enough time for a lot of industries to both get production moved over and pay off the costs of the move, and even if they do, once the tariffs are lifted they'll be back in the state of paying more for production with no price protection to justify it, meaning they might be looking at *another* long and expensive move just to get back to where they started.
5. This move makes markets more unpredictable, and unpredictability breeds caution. No company is actually sure what their sales will look like in 1 year, 2 years or 4 years. Depending on how the markets change, the assumptions about sales driving the various relocation plans might be badly wrong. Careful planners know this. Spending a bunch of money up-front is much less attractive: a move that slightly increases your overall expected profit but leaves you exposed to serious problems if things don't break your way is generally a bad move, especially if you're already a well-established company.
If I were crafting a plan to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.[2] it would look very little like this. It would start with talking up the plan and trying to get buy-in from congress, key industry figures and important voting-blocs so I could ensure stability. It would start with no tariffs at all: instead you'd offer some form of subsidies and tax incentives to companies who tangibly committed to shifting production, with a tariff regime consistently signaled as coming at least a year in the future. The subsidies and tariffs would not be scattershot, they'd be focused at particular industries that had been determined to be good choices for creating jobs and/or protecting U.S. interests. The (eventual) tariffs might be quite high on this industries, but they'd be carefully chosen to minimize knock-on effects on other industries. Doing all of this suddenly, with no preparation, by executive fiat, while maintaining (deliberately, one presumes) high uncertainty about the content of tariffs until they're actually deployed, and above all putting them on *all imports* is pretty much the opposite of everything I just outlined. This seems like a move with a very, very high ratio of collateral damage to useful incentive.
[1] Keep in mind that they would have still made money staying where they were, just (presumably) less money. If their moving cost is X, their yearly revenue without moving is r_i and their revenue with moving is r_f, then it will take X/(r_f - r_i) years for the move to pay for itself. With a large X you have to assume a BIG difference between r_f and r_i for this to happen in a realistic time frame.
[2] Which of course I wouldn't do (at least not by myself) because again, I'm not an economist.
L50L already gave a good rundown, just to add as a general principle: it's good to stop and consider the opposite, but it's rare that the opposite ends up being true.
It's economics 101 that free trade is good in most cases.
There is the higher level view that sectoral tariffs can be useful in certain cases to protect infant industries, but that's basically the exact opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump is just wantonly destroying things out of stupidity and there's noone left on the right to tell him no.
Note that Trump's new tariffs are significantly HIGHER than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that contributed to the Great Depression.
Okay, thanks for your answer. Let's see how it pans out. I agree with you on a philosophical level, as I am close to being libertarian and I like the natural equilibrium of things (free trade definitely being a natural equilibrium, in the sense that it's the least constrained), but I'm wondering how different things are, this time. I mean, these tariffs stuff makes me think of weight regularization in Machine Learning: you may be losing a bit of performance but you definitely get a sounder model.
Are there any precedents where tariffs indeed achieved their goals? If not, I will be forced to join the mainstream opinion on that matter!
Also, I get that these tariffs are risky and nearly a war move against every country in the world.
The way I think about it, tariffs are a bit like an insurance policy. You consistently pay a manageable amount (pay more for products made in your country, even though under a free trade regime you could buy them for cheaper elsewhere) so that, if things go wrong (a war or COVID-type pandemic disrupts supply chains), you're cushioned somewhat from the effects (your key industries are safe in your own country and you don't run out of food because an enemy is blockading your ports).
Of course, this doesn't mean that destroying your economy with huge tariffs is a good idea, any more than bankrupting yourself by taking out expensive insurance policies on everything you own would be a good idea. Accurately balancing risks is part of what constitutes good stewardship, whether you're running a household or a country.
That's an argument for narrowly tailored tariffs based on national security considerations. The CHIPS act was a good effort in that vein. Trump however is doing the exact opposite. Trump's policies are likely to DECREASE American manufacturing without any compensating benefits.
There is nothing sounder about it though. There is no good reason for basic manufacturing to return to the US and the "trade deficit" is a very misleading term.
David Friedman has a great article explaining all of this quite concisely (the title "Ptolemaic Trade theory" is very fitting as this is really on the same level as believing that the sun revolves around Earth).
I think that one long-term benefit of these insane policies might be that they are so extreme that it will actually make many more people update away from 16th century economic theory.
David Friedman's a pretty good Substack to follow, on trade policy and other economics. In "Retaliatory Tariffs", he wrote about a tariff he could conceivably be in favor of, so he's not a straight-up anti-tariff ideologue; there are fundamental consequences he's pursuing (namely, people being better off), and if a tariff were to cause that, he would likely favor it. (It's just that tariffs practically never do this.)
By the way, I think that it is possible that Vance understands all this and still wants to pursue Trump's tariff policy (I am almost certain that Trumps doesn't really understand, nor does he care to understand the logic).
Vance comes from the rust belt, has been pretty traumatized by the decline of the low-skill labour communities there and wants to restore the "good old days". If it means making America (or the world) poorer, that is a price he is willing to pay, especially if it disproportionately hits the "coastal elites" (i.e. everyone not a part of these communities).
It might be a win-win from his perspective, even though he would not present it in the terms I do.
Or it is also possible he doesn't understand the economics of it either...
High Impact Professionals is excited to announce that applications are open for the next round of its Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a free, 6-week program starting the week of June 16, 2025, and is designed to help experienced (mid-career/senior) professionals not currently working in a high-impact role to: identify paths to impact; take concrete, impactful actions; and join a network of like-minded, experienced, and supportive impact-focused professionals.
Hello, everyone! We’re excited to invite you to a special ACX Everywhere gathering, where we’ll explore two of Scott Alexander’s most influential and widely discussed essays: “Meditations on Moloch” and “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup.” Whether you’re brand new to these pieces or have studied them before, we welcome your curiosity and ideas. Come ready for a relaxed but thought-provoking conversation—no prior expertise needed!
Readings & Links
1) Meditations on Moloch
Text: Slate Star Codex (2014)
Audio: YouTube Reading
2) I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Text: Slate Star Codex (2014)
Audio: Podcast link
(No worries if you can’t read or listen to them in full—just come with an open mind!)
Essay Overviews
“Meditations on Moloch”
Coordination Failures: Scott frames “Moloch” as the destructive force that arises when people or institutions compete in ways that force everyone into a worse outcome—even if no one wants it.
Arms Races & Zero-Sum: Examples include doping in sports, environmental exploitation, or endless overwork—everyone follows suit to stay competitive, with no single actor able to unilaterally stop.
Escaping Moloch: Potential solutions often involve strong collective agreements or frameworks that break the cycle of “If I don’t, the other guy will.”
“I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”
Tribalism’s Double-Edge: Many of us consider ourselves tolerant—until we meet the group we truly can’t stand.
Hypocrisy of Tolerance: We readily accept differences that don’t threaten us, but violently reject those we see as morally or culturally opposite.
Real Implications: We may unify around certain enemies or narratives, ironically bridging differences only to channel hate toward a chosen outgroup.
Conversation Starters
Personal Moloch Moments
Where have you felt trapped in a “race to the bottom”—working longer hours, competing for scarce resources—and wished for a collective fix?
Is Outgroup Hatred Inevitable?
Do we each have a hidden “line in the sand” for what we refuse to tolerate? Where do you draw that line, and why?
Solutions to Moloch
How do we form strong enough coalitions or social norms to break vicious cycles? Is it purely top-down (regulation, laws) or bottom-up (individual choices, culture shifts)?
Tolerance vs. Complicity
When does “tolerating” become passivity or enabling something harmful? Conversely, is it easy to mistake rightful moral stances for “intolerant outgroup hatred”?
Interplay: Moloch & Outgroups
Do these two phenomena reinforce each other? For instance, do tribal rivalries hamper the coordination needed to defeat Moloch?
Join Us On April 5!
We look forward to a friendly deep dive into these essays and their relevance—from everyday life dilemmas to global issues. If you have any questions, just contact Michael (info above). Whether you’re new to Scott Alexander or a longtime SSC/ACX reader, come share your perspective—and let’s celebrate the spirit of ACX Everywhere together!
So, the tariffs are out, with a predictable response from the markets, but that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to ask about is the countries further down on the big list of tariffs. What did the Falkland Islands do to get on Trump's shit list?
Never mind the Falklands; what's the deal with Diego Garcia? The only people who live there, the only economic activity, is a ginormous US military base. Are we taking a 10% cut of the personal possessions of our soldiers when they rotate home?
Since the tariffs were calculated based on trade deficits, it is natural that tiny countries end up at the top and bottom of the list. Random fluctuations are generally larger for small countries, so the maximum and minimum value are usually very small nations or domains which happen to be (un-)lucky with the randomness. This is why the tiny states/domains of Lesotho and of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon end up with the top rates.
It isn't even important *which* formula was used, just that *some* formula was used.
I believe the tariffs are based on the country of production. Otherwise the rest of the EFTA would start exporting everything through Iceland, which got 10% (while the EU got 20%).
Since they are billed as “reciprocal tariffs” I presume they impose a tariff on US imports. Naturally a cursory Google doesn’t tell me that because all the hits are about the new ones.
I’m not saying this was good to do, just that there does not seem to be any particular reason to wonder about the Falklands in particular.
The "reciprocal tariffs" are not based on any actual tariffs levied by other countries. The way they came up with the number was to take the trade deficits in goods with that country and divide it by the total exports, divide by 2, then floor at 10%. I wish I were making that up.
Note that the "in goods" part is important, since the US has a surplus with many countries when services are included.
Well, I agree that this is very disappointing. I’d love it if the point were to encourage tariffs to be removed so we could all benefit from free trade, but for that you need the stick to be very precise.
On the other hand, there still seems to be no reason to wonder what he has against the Falklands.
Added: I worry myself sick over budget deficits but despite the similarity in name I think “trade deficits” are a boogeyman that shouldn’t be a concern to anyone. So we trade Japan pieces of green paper for cars. Who’s the savvy trader?
I wondered about the Falklands because I posted that very shortly after the tariffs were announced and nobody had worked out the formula that they were using yet, it was just clear at first glance that the numbers didn't make sense. Lapras's reply answered my question.
(Still makes me curious about the two uninhabited islands that ended up on the list. I can only assume some form of trade gets recorded as passing through those islands for bureaucratic reasons.)
>(Still makes me curious about the two uninhabited islands that ended up on the list. I can only assume some form of trade gets recorded as passing through those islands for bureaucratic reasons.)
Or maybe some super thorough bureaucrat wanted to cover the possibility that they might become inhabited at some point in the future.
I am a lawyer, not a doctor and not a chemist. However, I do have the internet including ChatGPT which gives me just enough information about medicine and chemistry to be dangerous. I also have a mood disorder and take lithium, so that is one of my topics of interest to research.
I recently listened to an episode of the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast that discusses research on lithium proline salicylate (LISPRO), also known as AL001 or LiProSal. This compound is designed to enhance lithium delivery to the central nervous system (CNS) while minimizing systemic exposure, potentially reducing the risk of adverse effects associated with traditional lithium therapies. It appears based on the research done to-date to achieve this goal, the question now is whether the increase in lithium in the CNS translates into clinical benefit, and in the dementia trials it appears to but they have not released data on mood disorders. So they are years from releasing it to the public. However, this is of interest to me because I want to take lithium indefinitely and avoid burning out my kidneys. So the idea of a compound of lithium that could get more to my CNS where it benefits me, while also reducing the amount burdening my kidneys is very interesting.
Dr. ChatGPT tells me that the chemistry to create lithium proline salicylate is actually fairly straightforward and doable in a normal kitchen. You would want to combine lithium carbonate in a slightly acidic solution with proline and salicylic acid. This would not be perfect, but ChatGPT seems to think that a chemical reaction would take place in approximately 10 minutes of just mixing the substances together that would precipitate some LiProSal crystals suspended in solution. There would be some impurities compared to a pharmaceutical lab, but according to Dr. ChatGPT none would be substantially more harmful or dangerous than lithium, asprin, or proline.
I try not to do things that are stupid, but I admit I am kind of tempted to try this for a week to see how it treats me. Convince me I am stupid and this is a terrible idea?
I have no idea. But I’d suggest using not Chat but research GPT, and asking it for a summary with links that covers every
question you can think of: Has anyone else tried this, list of downsides and risks, etc. There also used to be a reddit sub that covered this kind of thing— see if you can find it. One possible problem
I see is figuring out what dose of the new compound is equivalent to the dose you are now taking. There’s a professional researcher named Elizabeth that people here recommend. You could also pay her to research this question: https://acesounderglass.com/hire-me/
Who else is now preparing for the fall of western civilization? Do we have any idea of how imminent the fall will be, or is it going to be a long drawn out thing? And will Wisconsin fall first? If anyone has any details it will be really helpful in aiding my preparations. Thanks.
Is it an absolute fall or a relative one, ie America is no longer “top nation” and we become sort of like postwar England, living off of soft power and nostalgia?
I can imagine a future where "Western Civilization" loses meaning as the US and Europe continue to drift apart culturally and geopolitically. It does not require any individual state to "fall".
I'm pessimistic in the short term, but optimistic long term aside from my concerns about AI.
Democrats are reforming by the sounds of it, woke stuff is on the decline and the backlash to Trump is not particularly woke (unlike 2016). Trump will trash the economy over the next year, Elon's clowning around will show poor results and the republicans will get creamed in the midterms. By 2028 support for Trump will be just his hardliners and the 'just want to see libs cry' demographic will abandon him.
Liberals getting spanked all over the world has made the center-left realize that appeasing the progressives was a mistake. Many of the issues that were ignored ten years ago, like cost disease, regulation and housing reform are getting more attention on the democrat side, so we could have bipartisan support for some real game changing quality of life improvements. The de-growthers are losing. Open borders have closed which is good and I doubt Dems will make the same mistake again. The economy can hopefully recover quickly from all this chaos.
If it weren't for the authoritarian stuff, I'd agree. But running the dictator playbook looks like a one-way street. Even if Democrats regain power in 2029, it will be hard for them to turn the other cheek.
What playbook is that? Is Trump arresting members of the opposition? Is he taking over the media? Is he quartering troops in our homes?
As near as I can tell Trump is *mostly* being aggressive about using powers that he arguably has been granted by statute and by the Constitution. If the Congress regrets delegating that much authority it is free to take it back, and that might be good for the nation.
There are a few things on his list that are considerably at the far end of “arguable”, and maybe a few that are beyond that line, but I have faith that the latter will not stand, and that he’s not even going to try sending the military to threaten the courts.
Kudos for saying “dictator” and “authoritarian” rather than “Hitler” and “Fascist”. We may make it through yet.
He's explicitly kicking legal immigrants out of the country purely for their political views. Independently of that, he's also secretly disappearing people to 3rd world torture dungeons without even a hearing (and in direction violation of explicit court orders no less). Independently of that, he's also banning law firms for perceived slights such as representing political opponents. Oh and as a bonus, his pet attorney is talking about prosecuting members of congress, since you ask, though that hasn't gone anywhere yet and is pretty far down the list of authoritarian moves he has made.
Any ONE of these alone represents a massive assault on civil rights and the rule of law. And Trump's doing worse stuff every day. There's a ton of other stuff I haven't even mentioned since even the list of five-alarm atrocities is already so long.
> t he’s not even going to try sending the military to threaten the courts
Not yet anyway. But he's gone extremely far beyond the pale already, including calling for impeachment of judges who ruled against him and pushing congress to pass a law preventing courts from issuing injunctions. Besides, there's no need to militarily threaten the courts when you can just ignore them (as he's done on several occasions already).
When you're illegally disappearing people without any due process and also banning courts from saying no, you're already 70% of the way to dictatorship. And the strongarming of companies for perceived disloyalty also goes a long way there. And keep in mind that we're less than three months into his term! Even Nazi Germany wasn't built in a day!
It is reassuring that the Trump admin still feels the need for at least a figleaf of legitimacy (e.g they've only sometime ignored court orders rather than going full nuclear), but it's hard to know how long that will hold.
Then impeach him! Ah, can't get enough members of Congress to agree? Then that doesn't sound like 70% of the way to dictatorship; that sounds like someone executing the will of the people.
I will grudgingly accept "demagogue", but that's what the old guard always calls populists.
I'm sorry I goaded you into mentioning Nazis. "Calling for the impeachment of judges" is pretty milquetoast compared to actual Nazis.
Every dictator ever claims to be following the will of the people. The difference is not what the leaders claim, but the actual institutions, laws, checks and balances and so on.
If on Jan 20, 2029, President Kendi "accidentally" arrests Trump and Musk and ships them off to a third world prison, would you say that he too is just "executing the will of the people"?
Trump is currently conducting an all-out assault against the rule of law, the constitution, and democracy, and if America manages to hold together in anything resembling its current form, it will be *in spite* of him, not because of any restraint on his part.
The one saving grace of Trump is that he is *also* pursuing unbelievably disastrous economic policy, which may erode his support base enough that it will be difficult to complete the turn towards autocracy. But if you don't fear Trump himself, just imagine what someone who is actually smart and disciplined could accomplish with these methods now that he has blazed the trail.
I am of two minds on this, but I am attempting to hedge the risk a bit. I sort of think that civilization will collapse, but not enough to go all-in. So I put a ton of my money into my 401(k) and stuff that will have zero value in an apocalypse. But I also have a hunting rifle plus know-how and a pantry full of food that could be starvation rations for months if not longer. I buy bulk beans, grains, tinned fish, etc. and keep it all in big plastic totes in my pantry. I eat this stuff regularly so I regularly freshen and renew my supplies and this stuff probably would not expire too quickly if the shit hits the fan.
I also bought a few acres of property for my home - not enough for a huge farm but I think probably enough to keep me and my family alive if I learn enough about gardening to play my cards right. I am planting out perennials that can provide a lot of calories like chestnut and hazelnut trees, etc. I am also trying to establish a root cellar so that I can store stuff over the winter like potatoes that could be a starvation ration that could also be re-planted in the spring.
I hope if things do go south, my preps are enough to keep my family alive on. If civilization stays afloat during my life, then my preps are nice hobbies that keep me physically active and encourage me to eat healthy food. So I am trying to prep in a way that balances my worry that civilization will collapse with a comfortable enjoyable life if this ship of fools piloted by a senile sociopath somehow avoids crashing on the rocks.
No; I think that we're heading in a dangerous direction, but slowly enough that we'll see warning signs before it's too late, and the proximate solution - "elect Democrats" - is sufficiently simple and low cost that I think that it will be implemented.
If it weren't for the authoritarian stuff, I'd agree. But running the dictator playbook looks like a one-way street. Even if Democrats regain power in 2029, it will be hard for them to turn the other cheek.
This is sarcastic in reference to Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court seat, right?
In the US, at least, systemic and structural elements of government have been consistently weakened since the George W Bush administration, if not earlier. The typical progression for this type of decay is that everything seems fine for a long time, then a repetition of crisis moments of collapse alternating with periods of calm.
This isn't meant to be subtly partisan; I think there is significant blame on both major parties. However, one of the parties is more enthusiastically rushing to knock down pillars without any apparent concern about whether they are load-bearing while the other mostly ignored structural considerations while in power and basked in the glow of "not as bad as those guys."
low confidence, but I feel like the petrodollar is the lynchpin. I expect the decline to play out over decades, not days. More in the vein of "huh, isn't it kinda weird that recessions (etc) are getting more frequent?" than the movie "The Day After Tomorrow".
My intuition is that it will be a long, slow decline. My emergency preparedness is a lot more extensive than most people's (thanks, ThePrepared.com!), but its purpose is to weather a short-term regional disaster. It's there to get me through until infrastructure is restored or until I can evacuate to a different area with infrastructure.
I have no interest in living should infrastructure fail everywhere.
I'm old (Xennial), so take this with a grain of salt, but:
Most of the value in a university education is signaling and networking. I think the connections in any 'anti-woke' university are mostly going to be for conservative political circles, and you'd have a hard time getting jobs with any left-leaning nonprofit. Most people who care about animals are left-wing; you have the occasional Christian who thinks it's cruel but they don't staff the organizations.
If you have idealistic life goals you probably want to pick up as much prestige as possible because that's how you gain influence. The only real decision point is if the state school is substantially less expensive, then you have to weigh how much debt to accrue in search of your goal. People are still paying that crap off decades later.
'Question 11: You have recently claimed that toddler-level AGI could come about by 2030. How confident are you of that prediction?
It’s looking more and more likely every year. I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually. And then it will be more than a toddler in the human sense. It will be a toddler savant, with ability to e.g. do science and math and answer questions way beyond the level of a human toddler. And once we’re there, the full-fledged Singularity won’t be far off in my opinion…. SingularityNET has potential to accelerate R&D progress in this and other AGI-ish directions, making it increasingly likely that the advancement of AI proves Kurzweil a pessimist…'
Maybe toddler-level in the sense that toddlers only mimic what they see other people doing. I could see that. If I can see that, I can also see toddler-savant.
The problem here is that toddlers don't stop there. Toddlers are capable of some symbolic reasoning, problem solving using small objects, putting words together in the right order, and knowing which words correspond to which objects in the real world. LLMs can't do that yet, and given what I've seen, they're not going to master symbolic reasoning any time soon, even if they aim a great deal of focus there instead of securing ever larger numbers of nodes in their neural nets or supplies of electricity.
Given all that, the idea of a full-fledged Singularity doesn't look likely to me by 2030. And if I don't see news of symbolic reasoning breakthroughs or the equivalent by 2030, I don't expect it by 2035, et cetera.
I'm not sure toddler AGI makes any sense as a concept.
In fact I'm no longer sure that AGI makes any sense as a concept, and I think toddlers are a good illustration of why. Toddlers don't have "general intelligence" in any sense, they have human toddler intelligence, which makes them quite good at certain things and terrible at others. Similarly, LLMs don't have "general intelligence", they have LLM-intelligence which makes them good at some things and terrible at others. (Very little overlap between LLMs and toddlers, as it happens).
We like to pretend that adult humans have "general intelligence", but we don't, we have adult-human intelligence and are good at certain things and terrible at others.
To pile on to that, animals, too, have their own intelligence that makes them good at some things and terrible at others. As a dog owner, I know well how incredible dogs are at observing others and reading from posture, gestures etc., an ability that comes naturally to them but is rare and valuable enough in humans that they can make a paid profession out of it.
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A legal immigrant and father to a US citizen with no criminal record was "accidentally" deported and thrown into the worst prison on the planet. US tax payer dollars are paying to keep him there. And the government claims there's now nothing they can do because he's outside jurisdiction.
I think this is indefensible. If, somehow, you're still defending this administration, I would love to understand what exactly is enough of a bright line for them to cross.
He was an illegal alien suspected of gang activity. We owe him nothing. DHS has the authority to remove him from the country. If you’re concerned about prison, here’s a simple solution: obey the law.
As has already been posted, both in op and in the comments on this thread, the man was legally allowed to be in the country, regardless of the circumstances of his entry. DHS does NOT have the authority to violate judicial orders. So the actual law breaker here is...the Trump admin.
It should be obvious why conservatives don't take this seriously. When the law suits your preferences, ignoring it is a crisis and an authoritarian power grab. When the law doesn't appeal to you, ignoring it is simply a practical reality of enforcement. Why wasn't he deported after his arrest in 2019? Was the decision to let him stay at that point a crisis of democracy?
If we're going to be histrionic about the actions of DHS, why not apply that to the judge as well? We could just as easily characterize him as a rouge judge misusing his authority for activist purposes and granting protection based on an obviously spurious asylum claim. We can even accuse him of trying to usurp the power of the democratically elected president and stymie the execution of his popular mandate. Would you really find any of that convincing though? If not, then hopefully you can see why conservatives are generally unconcerned about this.
> Why wasn't he deported after his arrest in 2019? Was the decision to let him stay at that point a crisis of democracy?
I mean, you can read the case law? The precedent, the laws in place, these are all well established and have been linked in the thread.
Paraphrasing from elsewhere, if your argument is that you do not believe in refugees or asylum seekers, that we should deport legal migrants who are the family of citizens to places where they might be killed, and that this is so important it is worth massively expanding the powers of the executive to the point where they are ignoring judicial orders and legal precedent, then you should actually make that argument. But handwaving to something like "this is illegal!!!" while doing exactly zero work to understand why Garcia's case went the way it did is not compelling.
And if your argument is "I do believe in asylum in some cases but we can do it a different way", then propose a different way. I, and everyone else who's thought about this for decades, would love to hear the unique insights.
The reality of the situation is that you're mad that the legislature has laws on the books protecting people you don't like. You can, like, advocate to change the laws. But throwing a tantrum through the executive that not only violates the actual letter of the law but also directly and massively expands the authority of the executive under a man who is clearly authoritarian? Make it make sense. This is in no way equivalent to the decision to let him stay in the country, which of course is a decision that actually does follow the law.
On a meta level of all this, I think what I've heard from you and several other people in these comments is something like "no violation of checks and balances, no violation of law, no violation of moral understanding is too great to get rid of immigrants in this country". Which of course begs the question: why? What is animating this level of extremism?
Even if I buy that all of these legal immigrants broke some law in arriving to this country, I have no idea what is compelling such massive hatred against a group of people who are literally paying taxes while getting no benefits. It'd be like shooting pedestrians to prevent the scourge of jaywalking. Like, what?
The strongest evidence for your side is 'it's complicated'. On the other side you have taxes, economic growth, consumer demand, being willing to do a bunch of jobs no one else wants to do ...
I'll freely admit that I'm not married to the existence of asylum or refugee status, especially in its current form. Whatever the original intention might have been, its primary use today is as a tool for economic migrants and open-borders activists to game the system. It's also not difficult to come up with reform ideas. (Auto-reject cases that pass through a third country, auto-reject anyone suspected of a crime, make it non-obligatory for the host country to hear claims, move to an opt-in system where the host country affirmatively selects people they want to grant asylum/refugee hearings to at their own discretion.)
There will always be a tension between liberal asylum/refugee policy and the ability to restrict immigration. Since the current policy makes it impossible to enforce immigration restrictions we need to make the policy less liberal. This is really just common sense and does not take years of study to understand. It's only a problem if you are adamant about maximizing asylum. To which, I can ask you the same question you asked me. Why? Why prioritize the interests of foreigners over the clearly expressed preferences of citizens?
If it's so easy to come up with reform ideas, you should push for legislation.
You haven't really responded to the meat of what I'm saying. We both seem to agree that the law and precedent supports that there is nothing "illegal" happening in the way the border is being enforced. We just disagree about whether the law is right or wrong. But instead of trying to fix the law -- which, you know, your people have both houses so like...??? -- you want to give power to the executive, remove checks and balances, and even seem open to some pretty monstrous collateral damage.
You can flail about claiming that there's an open border (there isn't) or that the law is somehow resulted in an open border (it hasn't). I'd love to see stats on this because the only information I can find indicates that asylum grants are like 5% of all applications.
Which of course makes what-about-this-strawman all the weaker. Why is this such a big deal to you, personally, that you think it's acceptable and in fact morally just to overturn checks and balances?
You're not going to shock or scandalise any conservatives by pointing out that the government is pretty incompetent and bad at its job. That's exactly what conservatives have been saying all along! A change in the party affiliation at the top isn't going to suddenly make millions of bone-headed government employees any smarter or more competent, and it should come as no surprise that the government is just as bad at deporting people as it is at airline security, health care or airport security.
I'm not really aiming for self-destructive conservatives. I'm aiming for the rationalist libertarian conservatives who claimed that Trump was going to be better for a less authoritarian government.
Like, if you're a xenophobic nationalist, yea, I think you're probably in full support of this. But also, we just have such fundamental values differences that we have to start the conversation several miles back before we can even begin to evaluate trump
>A legal immigrant and father to a US citizen with no criminal record
This just incorrect (apart from the “father to a US Citizen” part, which doesn’t indicate anything relevant about this case apart from the geographic coordinates his babymomma gave birth at). He entered the United States without authorization, which is a crime, and which by definition makes him an illegal immigrant.
"During the removal proceedings, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and a judge granted him withholding from removal. The government did not appeal the decision."
You seem to want to have a semantics debate, which I'm not interested in having. So let's taboo the word "immigrant" and get right to the point.
The man is "legally allowed to be in the country". You can disagree about how he got here, but he is legally allowed to be here. If you think there's something factually incorrect about that, please provide sources.
Also, sorry, I think it's material that he is the father of a citizen. This will destroy that girl's childhood and the rest of the family. Maybe that's acceptable collateral damage to you, but own at least own that.
It’s not a a semantic debate. He illegally entered the country. Therefore, he should be removed. There are in fact, practical and procedural hurdles to the actual removal of a person like that, but none of that changes the fact that he is not supposed to be in this country.
He had an order of removal to El Salvador. A judge paused that and said, “you can’t remove him to El Salvador.” The judge did not say that he is legally in the country. He could have been removed to some other country. The fact that he was not then removed to another country does not make the fact that he is in the country legal.
Yes, the government screwed up by removing him to El Salvador. The government did not screw up by removing a legal immigrant.
"It’s not a a semantic debate. He illegally entered the country. Therefore, he should be removed."
I believe that current US federal law is that a person who enters the country without permission and then says that he's sorry but he had to do this because he and his family were on the run from a vindictive authoritarian regime or whatever and can they please have asylum, is *not* to be removed from the country until we've had time to properly determine whether or not they're telling the truth about that.
If the circumstances make it patently obvious that they're lying, then maybe it can be a short and simple hearing, but you do have to hold that hearing. Sorry (not sorry) if the law doesn't work the way that you think it should. You can try changing the law, of course; your team holds the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
Part of the problem is that people claim asylum as one more move in "I got into the country and I want to stay here". Is this man genuinely in danger from the government or other entities in his home country?
This is how the well has been poisoned in trying to distinguish between genuine cases and people just trying it on, and now with the change of administration the pendulum has swung from "believe them all" to "doubt them all".
> Part of the problem is that people claim asylum as one more move in "I got into the country and I want to stay here". Is this man genuinely in danger from the government or other entities in his home country? This is how the well has been poisoned in trying to distinguish between genuine cases and people just trying it on, and now with the change of administration the pendulum has swung from "believe them all" to "doubt them all".
Sorry, are you saying that previously, every asylum request was granted? Do you really want to defend that?
"Affirmative asylum case filings with USCIS nearly doubled
from 241,280 applications in 2022 to 456,750 in 2023,
the highest number on record (and covering 636,380
individuals) [...] The total number of defensive asylum applications filed with EOIR nearly doubled from 260,830 in 2022 to 488,620 in 2023. [...]
The total number of persons granted asylum in the United
States increased from 35,720 in 2022 to 54,350 in 2023."
In your framing of "believe them all", only 54k out of a total of over a million asylum applications were accepted. This is, roughly, a 5% acceptance rate.
So, like, what are you even talking about? I think you should consider if the sources you are downstream from are grounded in factual information.
I think you're of the opinion that the judge was like 'you cannot remove him to El Salvador but he's still here illegally. And I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about.
"As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally. But at the end of the court process, an immigration judge enters a deportation order and then tells the government they
cannot execute that order. That is, the “removal” to a person’s home country is “withheld.” However, the government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept them.
Withholding of removal provides a form of protection that is less certain than asylum, leaving its recipients in a sort of limbo. A person who is granted withholding of removal may never leave the United States without executing that removal order, cannot petition to bring family members to the United States, and does not gain a path to citizenship. And unlike asylum, when a family seeks withholding of removal together a judge may grant protection to the parent while denying it to the children, leading to family separation."
So, again, he was legally in the country. And, by the way,
>Yes, the government screwed up by removing him to El Salvador.
No, it’s totally not, it’s a debate about the law, and you seem to… have no idea about how laws work, and what a “judge” is, and what “legal” means. Hope you’re not a lawyer! Or a prosecutor. That would be sad!
The argument for the other side is quite simple. The rule of law on immigration has been completely ignored for decades now. Entering the country without authorization is a federal crime; this is the law of the land and was never changed. The government just sometimes stopped preventing people from illegally entering the country and also sometimes didn't deport them when they were caught. The law was just ignored and unenforced, to the extent that there are tens of millions of people who illegally entered the country. Now the rule of law is just being ignored in the other direction. If you want to use that to criticize the other side, they'll just shrug and say turnabout is fair play. Your follow up to that thought might be "but this means as soon as someone stops following the law somewhere there is no more law anywhere." Yes, this is why politics makes people stupid. The left is stupid for allowing their preference of open borders to destroy the law. The right is stupid for allowing their preference of getting rid of foreigners to destroy the law.
> If you want to use that to criticize the other side, they'll just shrug and say turnabout is fair play.
> The left is stupid for allowing their preference of open borders to destroy the law. The right is stupid for allowing their preference of getting rid of foreigners to destroy the law.
This is a pretty shit equivocation. Obama famously had more deportations than Bush, Biden more than Trump 1. Hell, Biden had more deportations in his first quarter than Trump did. Trump is literally just doing it in the most power-grabbing way possible.
And even criticisms of policy like catch-and-release are well within established law, and have significant judicial precedent. There's a lot of relevant links on the wiki article on catch and release, for eg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_and_release_(immigration)) or asylum law in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_in_the_United_States). If your opinion is that this is bad, call your legislative reps? You're welcome to make the argument that the US should not have any refugee, asylum, or withheld release, but at least be honest about it. I want people to defend that they do not believe in refugees or asylum seekers, that we should deport legal migrants who are the family of citizens to places where they might be killed, and that this is so important it is worth massively expanding the powers of the executive to the point where they are ignoring judicial orders and legal precedent. Make the argument.
And if your response is "well, we can do it a different way" propose a different way. I, and everyone else who's thought about this for decades, would love to hear the unique insights.
On a meta level, regardless of how you feel about the immigration debate, it seems obviously, materially worse to deport a bunch of people over the explicit orders of the judiciary while also detaining citizens. If the defense is "we dont care enough about going through the usual channels, we just want our will now", I think that that's tantamount to saying "there is no line that I won't cross". At least it's good to know where they stand.
Your argument suggests that there is no more law and no constraint on the powers of the federal government. Is that your position? If not, what constraints do you believe should exist? What do you think actually constrains this administration?
My comment was a response to the OP's question - how are the Trump admin's deportation polices defensible? I was simply holding up a mirror - they are exactly as defensible as allowing tens of millions of people to enter the country illegally and then doing nothing about them.
Let's use the Abrego Garcia case. He illegally entered the country somewhere around 2011/12. In 2019 he was arrested under suspicion of being an MS-13 gang member. The only evidence of this presented was the word of an anonymous CI, which is pretty dubious. Anyway, only after being in the country illegally for 8 years does he make an asylum claim, which was rejected. But he also made a claim that he would be tortured if returned to El Salvador, which was only substantiated by a deposition from a family member. So the judge granted an order of protection specifically against Garcia being deported to El Salvador. At no point between 2019 and 2025 was anything done to remove him from the US despite his illegal presence. Then he does finally get deported, but to the country that a judge specifically ordered he couldn't be deported to, and also thrown in prison. The Trump admin response to this is whoops, but now he's in a foreign country so we have no jurisdiction to do anything, too bad.
Does any part of this sound like a functioning system? Garcia illegally entered the country and stayed here for 8 years with no consequence. He got arrested because of essentially unsubstantiated hearsay that he was a gang member. At this point he gets an order to prevent deportation to his home country, also based on unsubstantiated information. Years later he gets deported back anyway, and also thrown in prison. Should I be upset at the injustice of Garcia violating our immigration laws, or the kangaroo court standards of evidence that established Garcia as a MS-13 member and also protected him from deportation, or the Trump admin violating that protection to throw him in prison in El Salvador?
If you're asking me, personally, what I think should happen: Garcia should have been stopped at the border or deported in 2011. Failing that, he should have been deported in 2019 when he was arrested. Failing that, he should have been deported in 2025. At no point should he have been sent to a prison without due process.
This is the ideal standard and what the administration should be moving towards, but I think there's going to be a long delay before all the backlogs and bleeding-hearts about "Jose swears up and down that he's a political refugee and not simply an economic one" can be cleared out, and there will be a lot of damage done in the meantime.
Speaking of deportations, Germany is also deporting people for political activism (allegedly):
So I think that story is a counterpoint to what is going on in the US; Germany is not MAGA territory and they're deporting white Europeans who as EU citizens would have the right to be in Germany. I foresee interesting times ahead!
Thank you for the clarification. You are saying that both political parties have undermined the rule of law and tit-for-tat is part of their justification. You are not saying this is a good outcome.
I'll throw in my support for this interpretation as well. I do not support how the deportations are being executed. I didn't even vote for Trump. Yet Open Borders manages to be infinitely stupider. It's not even a question of policy, it's a question of sovereignty.
Can you point (with actual evidence) to ANY administration in the past 50 years that had a policy that can fairly be described as "Open Borders?" If not, then this entire claim seems pretty irrelevant.
Why are you framing it like this? Especially as some kind of bright line?
First, on Abrego Garcia, you can just read the article you linked and pretty trivially imagine what the conservative view is. The man arrived in 2011 "without inspection", removal proceedings began in 2019 when ICE accused him of being an MS-13 member after an arrest, the Biden administration didn't pursue it, and then the new Trump administration did. Whether he is involved in El Salvadorian gangs and to what extent is an open question but, again, just off the article you posted, the conservative case for expelling a suspected gang member are not difficult to understand.
Nor is the macro case confusing. Illegal immigration has been a big problem for a long time, it has been underenforced to the point where 'frickin Trump got elected, and now he's enforcing it. A condition of him enforcing it cannot be literally no mistakes; this is an isolated demand for rigor that no government program could ever possibly meet. There's no way there won't be some mistakes and this seems like exactly the kind of mistake you would expect: a gray area "uninspected" migrant with questionable links to violent crime. If, indeed, this ends up being an error.
And on Julio Noriega, the 2nd link...dude. It is settled precedent that the President of the US can assassinate you via drone strike without trial. (1) This is an Obama era thing. Regardless of the right or wrong of that case...no, potentially illegally detaining a US citizen for a few hours is not a bright line given the aforementioned precedent.
This is among the least charitable, most partisan framing of these events you could provide? Why? I've read some of your stuff, you're smart, how can you not guess how conservatives view the Garcia case just from that article?
First, I'm trying to understand why the OP thinks these are such brazen violations of the common good that it should shock and appall people and Trump supporters. Just at a factual level, this doesn't make sense to me.
Go back to the OP:
"I think this is indefensible. If, somehow, you're still defending this administration, I would love to understand what exactly is enough of a bright line for them to cross."
Regardless of the right or wrong of Awlaki or Noriega, I don't understand how anyone could consider Noriega, or even Garcia, as an "indefensible bright line" in light of Awlaki. Significantly strong bright lines have already been crossed. Regardless of our opinions, why would the OP presume several hours of wrongful detention would shock in the aftermath of drone assassinations? Just laying aside the actual right or wrong of the issue, his interpretation of the scale and seriousness confuse me. And I honestly suspect they're being exaggerated for polemical effect but I can't understand for what audience.
Second, like, yeah, it would be awesome to roll back the Awlaki precedent, it would be awesome if these deportations were being done more competently, it would be awesome if illegal immigration laws had been faithfully enforced 30+ years. It's not hard to imagine political situations better than the one we're in. But, given the real constraints of the situation we're in, it's not clear to me what's so horrible about these events.
I found it relevant to the point that WoolyAI was making and even felt that it supported his point. What makes you think it isn't relevant in an extraordinary way?
I seem to recall some people in the previous Open Thread arguing that the no-due-process deportations weren't a big deal because if they got something *really* wrong the courts would fix it eventually. Abrego Garcia's case seems to prove this false - if the government wrongly deports you, there's no taking it back, because you're outside the reach of the courts.
(Well, the case hasn't had a ruling yet, but it's certainly alarming that the government's official stance on its mistake is "sorry, too late, we can't fix this.")
There's disagreement about whether this is "really wrong". The conservative reading of the situation is something like "Proven illegal migrant and possible gang member abuses asylum law in transparent ploy to remain in the country. Gets deported anyway." To cross the threshold of *really* wrong, you would probably need to see a US citizen get deported. You might even need the US citizen to be non-immigrant and non-anchor baby, but those would be more contentious.
The argument the government is making is not "we didn't get this case wrong." The argument they're making is "even if we got this wrong, the court is not allowed to tell us to fix it." That's an argument that would apply to anyone who gets sent to El Salvador, even a citizen.
If this argument is successfully applied to a US citizen it will be too late to complain because the government will have the power to send you to the gulag for complaining.
On March 29, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) served Abrego-Garcia with a Notice to Appear, charging him as inadmissible pursuant to Section 1182(a)(6)(A)(i) of Title 8 of the United States Code, "as an alien present in the United States without being admitted or paroled, or who arrived in the United States at any time or place other than as designated by the [Secretary of Homeland Security]."
During the course of his proceedings, Abrego-Garcia remained in ICE custody because the Immigration Judge (IJ) with the Executive Office for Immigration Review denied Abrego-Garcia bond at a hearing on April 24, 2019, citing danger to the community because "the evidence show[ed] that he is a verified member of [Mara Salvatrucha] ('MS-13')]" and therefore posed a danger to the community. The IJ also determined that he was a flight risk. Abrego-Garcia appealed, and the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld this bond decision in an opinion issued on December 19, 2019, citing the danger Abrego-Garcia posed to the community.
I'm saying: ICE intended to pick up random people based on the color of their skin and the clothes being worn. They intentionally and knowingly pursued a policy of detainment that would pick up non criminals, legal residents, and yes, citizens.
That they eventually released him has no bearing on their decision to pursue that aggressive policy. It was not an accident that they picked him up.
In The Man Who Was Thursday Chesterton gives a somewhat different illustration about chaos and progress - the rationalist argues with the anarchist that all things man-made imbue him with a sense of glory compared to the "natural" world.
Maybe you're too young to remember, or didn't always pay the same amount of attention to the going-ons in Old Europe, but this is not the first time or even the most high profile case. I guess my country of Europe was never "democratic" to begin with?
If you don't want the time, you shouldn't do the crime and so forth.
Unfortunately, the conservative party in the US is too well coordinated to ever allow any punishment of one of its members for a crime as small as stealing 3 million, you need to be in the billions before they'll even acknowledge that it happened, S&L style.
I think that's a strong argument for fines and imprisonment.
The fact that the court has specifically banned her from running for office for five years even though her "prison" sentence is only two years suspended and two on an ankle monitor doesn't wholly invalidate it, but it makes it somewhat weaker, I think, because that's less directly related to the traditional aims of justice.
This was discussed in an earlier thread, so please search below.
In case it is helpful context, France has a track record of prosecutions of powerful politicians. While this is "undemocratic" in the sense of restricting the choice of the voters, it isn't at all clear that this is a change or escalation from past behavior.
I follow the owner of Kiwifarms, Josh Moon, because he's probably the most censored man in America (more than Gab or Nick Fuentes) purely for running an edgy gossip website, and the efforts he goes through to keep it up are seriously impressive, and reveal a lot of fraying threads in the interconnectivity of the internet. His article about being banned from Cloudflare, and his article where he talks about how payment networks are taking away his right to transact online are both pretty revealing as far as how intense corporate censorship can get.
He's since managed to replace cloudflare and route around the tier 1 ISPs that have blackholed him, but the financial censorship hasn't changed at all in the years since those articles were made.
He's been trying to start a foundation for Internet Preservation to try and fix the payment processor overreach, but ironically the payment processors are preventing him from even doing this:
The man can't even raise money for a foundation to lobby for his right to raise money online.
Anyway, he's basically as censored as it gets, so if you have an interest in one of those 'high-risk customers' that payment processors like to screw over like porn or firearms sites, then he might be worth a follow.
And to tie this into current events, I suppose, it's hard to have sympathy for non-citizens getting deported for frivolous reasons when actual American citizens can be stripped of their ability to transact online with no recourse and sovereign nations like the U.K are threatening American website owners.
I mean, his website has been tied to multiple suicides and stalking cases. Hosting services don't want that liability for obvious reasons. I guess you can loosely call this censorship, but can you really compel a company to host material that will almost inevitably cause them legal problems?
I will admit its fascinating that he cares so much about his bullying website that he's dedicated his life to keeping it afloat.
Slate Star Codex has been tied to white nationalists by the New York Times. There's a poster by the handle blorbo who has been known to post on Astral Codex Ten, which has been tied to Slate Star Codex.
While I appreciate the sheer joy of responding to a semantic quibble as a way to avoid engaging in good faith, what I actually meant was that the site is used almost exclusively to organise harassment campaigns, share personal information and select targets for said campaigns.
White nationalists, while unfortunately present here are hardly using this space as their base of operations for illegal or dubiously legal activies
The word "activities" is--as you are apparently unaware--a plural noun. As in, more than one, singular activity. They do not all have to share a common status with regard to legality.
> Call the police if there are illegal activities.
...particularly ironic, since one of the exciting pastimes regularly organised on kiwifarms is calling armed police to some target location where there is no illegal activity.
In the US. Things get more complicated abroad and they'd rather avoid the whole thing. Also these liability in the sense of "public backlash". In the same way that reddit took down the "jailbait" subreddit about 10 years ago, hosting legal but objectionable things is a PR nightmare.
I agree that facebook, twitter and youtube should be torn to shreds for their complicity in all those things. Even worse, their lack of moderation in non-english languages has promoted ethnic cleansings in Myanmar.
The difference is that facebook and twitter have the defence (adequate or not) that bullying etc is not what their sites are for and the sheer scale of their sites means these things happen. Kiwi farms is 100% dedicated to stalking, bullying, sharing leaked nudes etc.
Also, twitter and facebook host their own servers. Kiwi farms rents servers off of other companies. If someone rents a room in your house and turns it into a grow room for weed, you'd probably kick them out.
To me, this is all a natural outcome of the over centralisation and monopolisation of the internet. I personally would be happy if all the monopolies were smashed up. I'm not a huge fan of payment denial, but again that's a consequence of monopoly.
There's a balance that needs to be struck, but unfortunately it seems like that is not a majority opinion anymore.
Actually, I love anime, and most of his anti-porn and anime signaling is directly against people like me (this takes up nearly as much time as the weekly anti-trans segment). I'm pretty ambivalent on all the other things though.
As to why I have less sympathy, it's multi-faceted. I'm not saying I want these deportations to happen in the way they have. I'm pro-free-speech in all cases, so if some Muslim immigrant without citizenship wants to yell "Death to Israel" on their college campus, I'm cool with that. I wouldn't even want them to face any reprisal from their college, let alone the government. I swear that much.
But that commitment doesn't mean anything. I haven't been advocating on their behalf and I don't feel a strong impulse to like I do with an American citizen getting locked out of online payment systems. Why is that?
It's a couple things. He is closer to someone like me. He's an edgy, tech-savvy white guy that grew up running wild online and immersed in imageboard culture. That's probably a lot of what it is. The other thing is that citizen have explicit protection, and citizen vs non-citizen resident seems like a very strong Schelling point. I'm not even slightly afraid of being deported, or even any of my friends being deported. My friends all have citizenship, as do my extended family.
If you think about it from that lens, it's clear that corporate censorship is much more frightening to me. After all, this country has a pretty arbitrary immigration policy anyway, what's one more layer of hoops to jump through for second class citizens?
If even citizen's rights mean nothing next to corporate power then citizens and residents will both be equal under their heel. If citizens have absolute free-speech, but non-citizens don't have free-speech at all, there is at least an example to aspire to in how we treat non-citizens. The former situation is what we've effectively had until now, and it's very, very hard to fix. The latter situation can be fixed by a later president saying residents have the same rights as Americans do when it comes to free speech. The executive branch giveth, the executive branch taketh away.
What I'm getting at with the last point is that corporate censorship is both more frightening to me personally, and also more clandestine. Who would you even litigate against to dispute being cut out of the global economy by payment processors? They're a black box in the first place. There's nothing you can do save pray for competent bureaucracy and legislators. But have a look at the deportation stuff. The enemy is clear, they know who they have to litigate against, and a single elected official can reverse it all.
Payment processors scare me more than the president.
I hope this helps you understand where I'm coming from and why my instinctual reaction is more apathetic to a threat I see as temporary, blatant, and actively being worked on vs a problem that is permanent, sneaky, and is being championed by no one except an internet bully. Like, they're still going on about banks even though the problem is the payment processors and their deliberately obfuscated stranglehold on all online services.
This is my most important issue. If a candidate offered to defang the payment processors, I would pick them over any others.
He has been sued. I think most of them get thrown out since he somehow tends to attract the attention of crazies.
To fine or jail him would require due process. Unless I missed something he hasn't ever been charged with a crime. One of the issues is all these things have happened to him *without* being charged. It's someone who hasn't broken any laws and struggles to stay online (partially due to his own social issues).
> Unless I missed something he hasn't ever been charged with a crime. One of the issues is all these things have happened to him *without* being charged.
If you're outraged about that, you're *really* going to be horrified when you hear what ICE has been up to lately.
I'm pretty upset about that and we discussed it at the organizing meeting we had last Saturday to go over voter mobilization and legal challenges and protests.
I think I saw you there. You had the sunglasses, right?
US presidents love to harp on about other NATO members spending and investing too little on defense, and they're absolutely right! But I wonder: How much of America's military expenditure can really be attributed to the direct interests of NATO, as opposed to enforcing geopolitical interests far away from North America and Europe?
America has spent a lot on wars in recent times, but Iraq I and Iraq II can hardly be called defensive wars to protect the nation's sovereignity, and as for Afghanistan – that's debatable to say the least. And although long-term investments into military infrastructure and technology benefit the self-defense scenario as well, for the last two decades, the US has focused on counter-insurgency operations instead of peer or near-peer conflicts.
At least half of our defense budget is driven by our commitment and intention to defend our allies, including NATO but also including e.g. Japan and South Korea and possibly Israel and Taiwan. It's difficult to break it down any further than "homeland defense" and "foreign wars", because the foreign-wars part is flexible and mobile - most of it will be deployed to defend whichever of our allies is under the greatest threat.
It is still reasonable for us to insist of all our allies, that they each take up their fair share of the burden in proportion to the resources available.
It's a fair point, but if a war breaks out an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, it can sail to Europe. Planes based in Japan or Korea can fly to Europe. Obviously the US probably could never dedicate 100% of its military to a Europe-based war, but it could still send a massive amount of troops/planes/ships etc.
I'd say it's not just the US military that has a non-NATO focus however. France uses it to project power into it's old colonies in Africa (Mali and the like), Greece and Turkey are basically funding armies to defend against/attack each other. Eastern/Central Europe is probably focused on defense from Russia just because that is where their biggest risk of invasion comes from regardless of NATO, and a cultural memory of Soviet occupation.
Also places like France and UK are just as prone to pork barrel funding for their defense industries as the US. Only Germany of the big nations I can think of doesn't have much of a reason for military spending outside NATO, and considering it's recent history (marching with broomsticks anyone), and how much money they've invested in economic ties to Russia (Nord Stream 1&2), it's say there's a case to be made until recently they've been a historic cost to NATO - potentially understandable due to historic reasons of not wanting to look too militaristic.
My view is basically everyone is a little guilty of using their militaries selfishly (or for their own national interest if we look at it another way), but with recent Russian adventurism in Ukraine, and developing threats globally, it is time for all the nations of NATO to recognise the world has changed and start funding their militaries accordingly.
I feel like there are probably a lot of Silicon Valley types on here, and I need some advice. My father is trying to entice my wife and I to move our kids to Palo Alto or Menlo Park in June for middle school and high school. I also have the option of settling in a beautiful setting in Mendocino County where I own a lovely house, but the schools and social scene are podunk. My wife and I are both teachers, so looking at around 120k each on the Peninsula. We would earn enough money above what we would get in a rural setting in Palo Alto to cover the 60-70k rent for an apartment.
Sometimes I hear Palo Alto is a great place to raise kids, others say it is a total rat race. Does anyone have experiences there? My daughters are good students, but not STEM focused, so I worry that schools are too big and competitive. They have always lived in nurturing expat communities.
Not a Silicon Valley type, but I was a tween and teen girl once.
Have you asked your daughters what option they want?
I'm not saying that you should let children make this decision for you, of course, but I think you should at least solicit their thoughts on it and seriously consider their arguments. Describe not only the expected academic setting, but general lifestyle, too. Will Silicon Valley mean sharing rooms in an apartment instead of having their own rooms in a house? Will it mean a lot of time commuting in cars? Will it mean cash going into rent instead of travel / hobbies / private lessons?
Or would living in Silicon Valley give them access to niche fields of interest (I dunno, rare musical instruments, top-tier competitive cheerleading, crew rowing, etc) they wouldn't be able to access in a rural setting? Do they see city perks that would be worth the inconvenience of city life?
And personally? As someone who's seeing young people entering my workplace, I would consider putting far less focus on their future as students and far more on them as future *employees* in (probably) non-STEM careers. Do they have any idea what they want to do as adults (and do those dreams seem plausible / achievable to you)? Which setting is more likely to produce resilient, humble, adaptable, charismatic, generally well-rounded and accomplished *workers?*
No employer gives a shit what grade their entry-level employee got in high AP Bio if they don't know how to prioritize tasks or incorporate critical feedback or get along with a prickly coworker. In almost all jobs across all fields, being likeable and socially savvy is far more useful than being merely smart. It's possible their very best teacher will be a boss at In-N-Out.
And last, student loan debt is increasingly a devastating *literal* opportunity cost. I have many peers and younger coworkers who live every day with the crushing stress of knowing they will never financially recover from their student loans early enough to start a family or own a home (while I, a college dropout, own my car outright, and my only debt is a condo in a highly desirable city which I can easily afford). If either of your daughters are blessed with a talent and inclination to skip college and go straight into an in-demand skilled trade, for godsake, *let them.* Do you want them to be able to own a house, or not?
I know "college isn't worth it!" is hard for a teacher to hear, but there are millions of people from whom college was very much not worth it, and that population is increasing every year.
I've asked my daughters where they want to live, and having never lived in the USA, and only visited the grandparents in Palo Alto they really have no idea what life there would be like. One of them wants to be a lawyer, and the other has no idea. I try to get them interested in trades, with pretty limited success. When I was in middle school and younger I spent tons of time disassembling stuff and hammering on tree forts, wrenching on bicycles, and building things. I feel like that is the kind of background one needs in order to be an electrician or a plumber, painting contractor etc. Physical strength is a real asset too. I guess trades can mean other fields, but my daughters have more typical feminine interests and pastimes, but one of them does like to build models and create stuff on a smaller scale.
The reason I was asking about Palo Alto, is I feel like that is the kind of rat race place that could crush a kid. But then maybe I am just reading BS on the internet, and really it could be a nice place to live in an insanely overpriced apartment and have access to some cool and interesting people and be near the grandparents who could offer love and care along with some financial help.
Yeah, it's a tougher choice when they don't even know which lifestyle they'd prefer, either.
The lawyer-leaning kid might benefit from the more prestigious high school if it eventually gets her into a more prestigious law school, but it might turn out she has an overly glamorous picture of what most lawyers do. There was a thread a while back by a guy contemplating law school, and a few lawyers popped in to provide some advice ranging from "don't do it!" to "it's okay, I guess." (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-371/comment/97875681), and this guy who misdirected his comment wishes he'd never gone (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-371/comment/97968664).
The city option might give her better access to internships / actual lawyers early enough to divert her away from law if it isn't something she is unusually suited to doing.
Some skilled trades don't require any strength at all (watchmaking / repair, etc), but of course that's the kind of thing it's best to have a native interest in before you do any study or get certifications. My dad bought a small locksmith business in his retirement - though he found the administrative aspects of running the small business much more difficult than the technical work of locksmithing. Someone who's able to do both the bookkeeping/marketing side of things and the technical work can clean up pretty well, especially if they get good enough at picking locks to not need to drill them, which my dad did! He was routinely getting paid $100 for a brief commute to someone's door, which he'd spend 45 seconds picking open for them.
But nobody ever makes shows about locksmiths, so it's not on anyone's radar, even though it can be a pretty good life.
PA can be both a great place to raise kids and be a total rat race at the same time. The local schools' student caliber is fantastic and the competition will drill discipline and stamina unmatched in any other American High school.
My biggest gripe with Paly and Henry Gunn is that you're at a disadvantage to get into UCs. UCs prefer to recruit schools by zipcode. Being #1 at a poor school in a poor zipcode will get you into Cal with a higher probability than being #50 at Henry Gunn. On the other hand, being #1 at Henry Gunn will give a better chance at getting into Stanford or MIT than being #1 at a worse high school.
The PA high schools are without a doubt the better educational experience, but sub-optimal for min-max-ing for UCs, and if I thought I would be #50 at Henry Gunn but #1 elsewhere, I would take being #1 elsewhere.
This too isn't without risks. I might not actually be #1 elsewhere and peer pressure from a bad friend group may turn myself, who would be a stellar student, into a sub-par student. There are no guarantees in life.
edit to add: I would send my own kids to PA high schools. I gave a fence sitter answer above, but for myself and my family I have a more decisive answer-- I refuse to metagame the UC system's ideological game that cultivates mediocracy around zipcodes. I will have my kids compete with the best or brightest, whoever/wherever/however-privileged they are and I simply do not recognize "alternative" forms of merit beyond STEM competitions. I myself was refused admission to UCLA and Cal as an undergrad, in some part because I went to a very competitive CA high school, but I was granted admission to their graduate programs for engineering four years later. But I am not you and my kids aren't yours.
Hey, thanks for your reply! I wasn’t sure if the perception of Pali and Gunn being hyper-competitive was just a Reddit thing or a widely held view.
The rural high school my daughters could attend has a graduating class of about 30 students, yet they regularly send kids to Stanford—a definite zip code perk. Plus, with such a small student body, it’s easy for students to participate in varsity sports, yearbook, and other activities since the bar is relatively low.
That said, the downsides include issues like drug use, a slacker culture, a weaker academic environment, and limited social opportunities. My main concern with a school like Pali is the mental health aspect, even smart kids might feel like they’re just meh. If a student isn’t pursuing STEM, I sometimes wonder whether such a rigorous high school experience is really worth it. Nice thing in a small town is you feel special.
If what is stopping you from sending your kids to a PA high school is your fear of mental illness from excessive "Korean High School" style competition, I would overcome it. Although it is true that PA high schools have on average one student suicide a year, I believe it is from an unhealthy home life.
I have to say it, so I'll say it, but both my neighbors are CEO types. I suspect they moved here to network with each other, the VCs, and to ambush Mark Zuckerburg on a walk. I would not be surprised if they accidentally drove their kids to mental illness. From what I've seen of both of my neighbors' children they are allowed 30 minutes of play a day and are chauffeured to extracurricular activities the rest of the time. It seems they are following some sort of cookbook to min-max their offspring
From what I've read of your comments, I believe it is unlikely that you will accidentally drive your kids to self harm. The adversity of intense "Korean High School" style competition may lift their spirit in the long run. It does not seem to me like you will threaten them with physical discipline based on their college acceptances list. (obligatory YMMV).
(We hope it’s okay to post this here—if not, we'll accept banishment without protest, but would appreciate any hints on where this might be better placed.)
We're an expat family of three living in Harlem, NYC, with our 4-year-old daughter. Over the past two years, we've had our daughter home-schooled by a professional teacher—think something like the aristocratic tutoring concept described by Hoehl[1], but with more emphasis on having time to be a child than pure academics. This has worked really well for us, so we can recommend that to anyone interested! However, this year our teacher decided to retire, so we're now in search of a new teacher for our little one.
What we're looking for:
* Experience (classroom or otherwise) in putting together a curriculum for a 4-7 year old and teaching it
* Availability to do this full days Mon-Fri or Mon-Thu
* Enthusiasm for the project and the other good things you'd expect from someone who chose a career working with pre-teen children :)
What we're offering:
* A flexible job where you can focus on educating one child with basically no overhead / meetings / paperwork / etc.
* An uncomplicated (by 5-year-old standards, anyway), engaged, happy girl as your primary partner on the journey
* A lot of freedom in putting together a well-rounded curriculum with as much time for field trips as you want
* Competitive pay (we will typically offer 1.2 - 1.3x the current salary)
* 4 weeks vacation + public holidays + time the three of us are traveling fully paid
* A maxed out QSHERA health savings account to cover health care
If this sounds interesting to you—or if you know someone who might be a great fit—please feel free to reach out or reply here!
Have you considered doing this as a pod, with a few other kids? Would you if you found compatible families? Do you think compatible families exist? And, bonus question: will you allow AI use by teacher/student?
Doing this together with a few other kids/families would absolutely be an option---in fact, the one thing we sometimes feel is missing from our current setup is that our daughter doesn’t have a small group of kids her age that she sees on a near-daily basis (she does have activities where she is within the same group of kids every week, but that's not quite the same in terms of intensity of interactions, friendships, etc).
So yes, we’d be open to forming a pod if we found the right families—compatible in terms of values, schedules, and overall vibe. We do think (or at least we we would like to think) that those families exist, though we haven’t actively looked. It would really depend on the dynamics and whether it feels like a good fit for everyone involved.
As for the bonus question: we’re not opposed to the use of AI tools by the teacher, and eventually by the student too, but it depends on age and context---at age 4 it seems to us more important to learn from and with humans (apart from the fact that most 4-year-olds don’t quite meet the literacy standards that would be required for effective learning with AI)
For us, on paper, a "compatible" pod sounds like an ideal solution, though I am still unsure if it's possible to be compatible in our hyper individualistic world.
I'm thinking of putting together a pod matching app, but I fear that there's just not enough compatibility locally and people may be unlikely to move their lives globally for a pod... Perhaps if the entire family gets a pod (cult?)...
That is the understatement of the year. Invading Greenland would be breathtakingly stupid, pointless, evil and catastrophic in its consequences. I hope that someone with enough influence comes to their senses and stops this madness.
That sentiment -- which I've heard from others in recent weeks -- is where it perhaps becomes relevant that less than 30 percent of US adult citizens actually voted for Trump last November. (Or if you prefer, about 31 percent of eligible voters.)
Clearly a large fraction of those who showed up to vote for Trump were "voting to burn it all down". Not all of them perhaps but, many. Also clearly some fraction of those who never turn out to vote agree with that sentiment at least generally.
However -- "generally" is now having to carry some real baggage. What fraction of Americans actually wants a definition of "burn it all down" that includes things like invading Greenland? Treating Canadians of all people like some sort of national enemy? Imposing tariffs that drag our stock market and manufacturing sector? Carrying out an anti-immigrant terror campaign that crashes international tourism to the US and pushes some of our colleges and universities towards bankruptcy? "There are ways" to ignore plain Constitutional text such as no third terms for presidents? Along with whatever other loony-tunes ideas the White House vomits up next.
Yes I know the MAGAts will all cheer the one about the universities, and will keep on parroting Dear Leader's whims on whatever else. Mohr lib tears, cry more, yada yada yada. Also there's no sign yet of the Democrats seeming any smarter or more interesting to anybody outside of their own bubble. But that was all baked in already as last November's result made plain.
The level of childish policy-by-tantrum flowing out of DC _now_ seems genuinely different from what even a lot of people who are done with woke-ism expected. The non-MAGA 75 percent or so of American adults may at some point, while likely agreeing on nothing else, come around to "you know actually we didn't sign up for _this_."
Also remember that we're not even 80 days into this administration yet, Trump's early-onset dementia remains obvious, and that condition as everyone knows is a one-way path. So does anybody think that invading Greenland and annexing Canada and turning Gaza into Las Vegas are the craziest/stupidest priorities that he'll babble about in public?
I mean hey Bhutan -- er pardon me, I meant "Burmerica" -- is just sitting there....
Maybe YOU voted for that (in that case, please go and have your moral compass fixed). I sure didn't. Trump is not only burning down "his" country, but quite possibly the whole world. Also, I doubt that everyone who thought "yeah, 'Make America Great Again' sounds good" was aware that that would plausibly involve a worldwide economic crisis (centered on the US) and world war.
>Also, I doubt that everyone who thought "yeah, 'Make America Great Again' sounds good" was aware that that would plausibly involve a worldwide economic crisis (centered on the US) and world war.
A major part of Trump's pitch was isolationism, and the promise of bringing US troops home and disengaging from foreign conflicts. Invading Greenland is pretty much the opposite of that.
> seems like bait for the left while not the slightest bit convincing to the right
That's what they said about everything, even the stuff that Trump is actually doing. "Take him seriously but not literally" apologists are in shambles.
Ambiguously hinting that you might invade one of your allies is not generally a good idea, at least not if you plan on having diplomatic relations with other countries.
Does anyone know how to block people on here? I didn't think it was possible but then someone blocked me. I can't find the option on either desktop or the app.
Oh man, I got very excited at the prospect of blocking, and then learned that it apparently doesn't prevent you from seeing that person's comments in forums other than one's own.
Perhaps you need to mute them instead. I haven't managed to penetrate the island fortress where Substack hides its instructions for the commenting system so I don't really know, but I both block and mute the people I don't want to see just to be sure, and it seems to work.
You're saying that you're able to block/silence someone here in the ACX comments, so that you don't have to see any of their comments *here on ACX?*
That function doesn't seem to be working for me! I've blocked and silenced someone whose comments I find very tedious, but I'm still seeing their comments here on ACX.
> Does anyone know how to block people on here? I didn't think it was possible but then someone blocked me. I can't find the option on either desktop or the app.
You click on their name to go to their Substack profile, then block or mute them there.
I knew because they announced it first. (Humorously it was theahura and it was in the thread where he asked people to steelman Trump - I guess he wasn't counting on a steelman he couldn't defeat.) The really annoying thing is that Substack hides all comments from me in all threads that that user created, so I can't even see the comments I made in our last thread or respond to other users who jumped in (though I still get notifications for those comments). I generally like Substack but it has some serious usability issues.
> Somebody blocked you? When someone blocks you, are you informed of it?
Think you probably meant to ask Wanda Tinasky?
I don't know if I've ever been blocked, I haven't ever received any notification that this is true. It'd be kind of weird and counterproductive for Substack to generate and send such notifications, wouldn't it? Down that road lies stalking people on multiple platforms and escalating rivalries, doesn't it?
I'd like to see the Dems get serious about open borders, along with the vibes of Abundance (Ezra Klein, Derek Thomson).
Effective government, lowering regulations, and enough of everything for everyone is great, and they surely do a better job than I could promoting it.
Open borders to the world (for residency at least) will require a willingness to be tough on crime, give (next to) no welfare to arrivals, a willingness to deport individuals and families that are drains, and active effort to make them productive. Getting rid of natural-born citizenship may be necessary as well.
In return the USA can return to it's heyday as the land of dreams, a country the world's citizens turn to for a brighter future, and a land bursting with productive man-power.
This combination seems like a powerful basis for a counter to Trump's MAGA, a powerful vision for the path the world and the USA should take.
The US cannot return to its heyday. What made it rich (abundant arable land up for grabs because its previous population was nearly destroyed by epidemies) is neither still available nor sufficient in today's world. What could make it thrive again is increasing the welfare of its population, and [increasing supply of cheap labor] results in the exact opposite, a race to the bottom for everyone but the richest.
If the supposed left wants to keep losing elections until the heat death of the universe (and deservedly), by all means, keep talking about open borders.
Because "open borders" is not populist. Populism means appealing to a broad population of voters, not to oligarchs and potential immigrants who can't vote anyway. Why would poor/ working class people be enthusiastic about lots of immigrants, if all it means is fewer benefits and more competition for them but even more money for rich people?
Depends what you're measuring, and what people think. MAGA seem to think 1950s were better in some important ways, you can sell a similar story for the early years of america.
Open borders were around for the most part till early 20th century, you can find some positive there
Did you miss the part where people who are currently stuck in hellholes can decide to work and live in the USA?
Their lives would be straightforwardly better, and they would also be able to choose between the options.
You are literally against giving people the option to choose a better life for themselves because that better life doesn't meet your personal standards.
This mindset is part of what I'm hoping goes away on the Left
I bet that in the age of feudalism, people argued that serfdom was a good thing because having a lord protecting you was better than the alternative.
Turning immigrants into second-class citizens would likely be an improvement in an economic sense, but it would also be creating a group of people who are extremely vulnerable to coercion by the government or by their employer. We can do better than that.
Maybe in the future open-borders with welfare, protection and benefit of the doubt for incoming migrants will be workable, and that sounds like an inspiring future.
Right now that doesn't work, and even without that slack open borders would be a tough sell
I don't think they're getting a better life in that scenario, because there are very few true "hellholes" on Earth, the US is not nearly as nice a place as Americans believe, and because such a proposal would cause American quality of life to markedly deteriorate.
But I think people would come anyway - because they'd get lied to by unscrupulous recruiters about conditions in the US, and then be trapped there out of shame or because they can't afford to go back. Or, when they have no more options, they'll end up in the new tough on crime prison system this proposal promotes.
I also think current citizens who have to work for a living are getting a significantly worse life out of the bargain; why hire one when there's a precarious foreigner you can underpay and retaliate against?
Quality of life would likely rise quite a bit, due to abundant labor supply and lowered regulations on growth (detailed in the book).
You also think hellholes exist, and the US is obviously a better place to live than many other countries which aren't hellholes. This would be a better option than they currently have.
Free one-time deportation service seems like our could be a good idea, for those who would rather leave.
Tough on crime with non-citizens looks more like fines, rapid deportation or in extreme cases death penalty, not prison.
Often making the pie bigger means someone gets a relatively smaller piece, in total I think they'll get a larger absolute piece, and better life
> will require a willingness to be tough on crime, give (next to) no welfare to arrivals, a willingness to deport individuals and families that are drains, and active effort to make them productive
We all know that this part isn't happening though, so what's the point? It's like saying "I could eat a cheesecake every day if I ran an extra twenty miles" when you currently barely leave your couch. We all know you're just gonna eat the cheesecake and not do the exercise.
If there's a version of this that makes sense then it's outright selling greencards.
Your half-assed dismissals of every criticism will do far more damage to the Left than I. This is exactly the attitude that led to a Trump presidency. Both terms.
Hold an actual deportation hearing, have a judge tell them that they've lost and they need to get out of the way now, and they'll get out of the way. They may whine a lot, but so what?
If that's too difficult for you, then it's on you to beef up your skills in that area.
I’m soliciting opinions on whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach. Question’s a follow-up to a discussion earlier in the comments here of whether it would be possible for DOGE to do a smarter, juster, more effective job of trimming back bureaucracy. Discussion started with my recounting an event described to me by an NIH scientist who was present: DOGE staff entered his part of a building and fired staff they were able to catch in small infractions. At least one person was fired for leaving his badge on his desk when he went to the bathroom.
Some who entered the discussion said that undoubtedly dismantling and pruning bloated government agencies was causing suffering but that “*not* doing the cuts also causes plenty of damage, it’s just harder to pinpoint and a lot of it will happen in 5-8 years.” I do not take issue with the need for making cuts, but think they are being done in a dumb, chaotic, random way. Suggested that a reasonable way to shrink staff would be to use some criterion based on their performance, such as performance evals, or productivity over recent years. Someone else countered that DOGE is not allowed to take the kind of steps I’m suggesting. The discussion is here:
Seems clear to me that the Trump administration is willing to walk right over various boundaries, some of them legal boundaries, and that they are mostly getting away with that. I’m curious to hear from people who know more than I do about the laws and norms involved to weigh in knowledgeably on whether it would be possible for DOGE to dismantle and shrink gov’t agencies in a way that is more systematic and uses reasonable criteria for identifying bureaucratic tangles and deadwood.
> I’m soliciting opinions on whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach.
Nearly *anything* would be more effective than their current approach, even simply doing nothing. Elon's DOGE campaign has been an astonishing own-goal at every level.
I feel like I should preface with gratitude for your approach. I'm seeing more and more anti-Trump alarmism and doommongering on ACX day after day, unleavened by any sort of understanding of what's driving conservatives, Trump, DOGE, et al., until this place is resembling /r/politics. People who ask as if they really want to solve a problem are getting rare around here.
That said, this is a tough problem. I'm tempted to say "I'll get back to you on that" - not in order to commit to any future report to submit to you, but rather to convey the hopelessness I think we're seeing from conservatives trying to prune back the government.
There's a recent exchange between Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart, discussing a plan by the Biden administration to bring broadband internet to rural areas. (It's pretty easy to find right now; I searched for "klein stewart biden plan". It's probably best to watch the video to get the appropriate impact. You might have seen it already.) It's 14 steps long; I believe Klein even cites how much money was allocated to each step, and how many players started, and how many got through each step. I think the total price tag ran into hundreds of millions; I do not know of any actual broadband having been installed.
I recall Musk saying "SpaceX can build rockets faster than the Govt can do the paperwork 'required' to launch". I think that quote, and its variants, gets a lot of sympathy from the right.
Pruning does seem to be an apt metaphor. The USG resembles a thicket of brambles now. Cut one stalk and pull on it; its thorns snag on the others, holding it fast. Cut the others; they snag on yet others. Keep cutting, and you might finally get a bit of it away; you will also have spent all day, burned thousands of calories, and you look up and see miles more of that growth. Keep going even so, and you anticipate getting to the other end in multiple generations - by which time the first end will have grown back, thicker than ever.
The point here is that the bureaucracy has literally interwoven with itself, to the point that no department can be cut without getting approval from several more, AND cutting support departments requires approval of yet more, AND each request for approval costs a million dollars and a month to process, AND could be reprioritized to the bottom of the pile for some reason, AND asking for that reason costs ten thousand dollars and a week to get a response. Anyone who wants to save money, cannot do so, cannot ask why, and cannot ask why they cannot ask.
And meanwhile, it's still growing. The interest on the debt is as large as the defense budget.
Given all this, I can understand why someone would want to look at all that growth and conclude that the least painful solution is indeed to use fire, even if it upsets all the animal life currently sheltering somewhere in it. There are conservatives who will tell you these animals are there by design (search for "hostage puppies" if you get a chance). I think it's some of that, and some of it is animals that do naturally wind up there, it's not their fault, and no one put them there on purpose to shield the waste and bloat. I also wonder if we could evac all the intentional hostage puppies and the unintentional ones still don't justify all that growth.
I can also understand if you or anyone else (including me, on occasion) might look at that gas can and think, surely there's a less chaotic way to trim at least something. And then I find the best sincere response I can give to that right now is, well, I'll get back to you on that. That's how wedged this is now.
It does occur to me now that, as chaotic as DOGE seems to me right now, there are even more chaotic ways to prune back the government that I would rather not see happen.
(Not a hostage puppy, I promise; I don't have control over this.)
My perspective is from experience working in the civil service of a very similar country. While the US bureaucracy might be idiosyncratic in some way I'm not aware of, every other democratic country also seems to have extreme difficulties in firing their bureaucrats so I'm guessing the US is similar enough for the following to apply
DOGE is resorting to silly tactics like firing people who leave their badges on their desk while on a bathroom break because it's nearly impossible to fire government employees based on logical reasons. Public sector unions have put up absurdly strong legal barriers against firing bureaucrats, so decisions on who gets cut in times of downsizing - which are infrequent in the first place - are always based on how easy it is to fire each person and not on how good they are at their jobs. Pro union parties have generally been in power for around half the history of most democratic countries, and unions only need to get a few good election cycles to get legally binding collective agreements that give public employees immense protections
My workplace's most recent round of layoffs is a case in point. About 10% were nominally fired. Of those, almost 90% were employees on fixed term contracts, who usually get renewed when their contract expires. After some number of years working on these contracts, term employees are automatically made permanent as per the collective agreement, meaning the number of permanent employees is ever-growing. The 10%~ of those fired who were permanent employees largely got shuffled around to other positions in other departments
It's obvious to see why this happens: in order to actually fire permanent employees (instead of shuffling them around), management has to decide which programs to target, get together to create "objective" metrics for every single targeted position, "objectively" evaluate all of the employees in each of these positions, and give notice to the affected employees. Once they're given notice, they get a few months to decide whether to take a lump sum payment (people near retirement often do this) or collect their paycheck for up to one year while looking for other government positions (people who choose this option often don't even bother looking for other government positions and just collect the paycheck). In total we're talking like two years from start to end in order to fire a government employee if you also want to check all the boxes and respect due process, during which there's a good chance another party will come to power and reverse all the work that was done to try to do it
Past performance evaluations can't be used either. The process management has to go through in order to fire public employees is strictly defined in the collective agreement. Unions have every reason to make it as slow and costly as possible. And even if past evaluations could be used, they would offer no useful information. Performance evaluations don't mean anything because there are basically no consequences for doing poorly on them - remember, ridiculous employment protections means no one is getting fired. This means that the evaluator (usually a middle manager) and the employee both know it's a pointless box-ticking exercise, which leads to everyone more or less getting some variation of "met expectations" for every single criteria
-I am not asking whether DOGE & Musk sincerely *want* to get rid of dead wood and make agencies leaner and meaner.
-I am not asking whether it is possible to do a slow, really thoughtful redo of agencies, perhaps involving first studies of their effectiveness, speed, and impact per dollar; then development of new, leaner, better models of them.
-I am asking this: Let's assume DOGE & Musk have it as their goal to quickly get rid of deadwood and nonsense in agencies and turn the agencies into small, effective groups with much smaller budgets. Would it be possible for them, on their own, to carry this out? Or are they so hindered by laws and regulations and agencies' unwillingness to change that the only way they can proceed is in the chaotic way they are? If we take the case of NIH staff: Is the only way they can reduce staff without being stopped by rules and laws and congress and the supreme court etc etc to eliminate people using simple, silly criteria? -- such as firing all the probationaries, or firing those they catch taking a leak without having their badge with them? Or would it be possible for DOGE to force the firing of people based on some reasonable criterion of their value as employees, such as performance evals, work accomplished per year, number of sick days per year?
In other words, is DOGE being forced to prune with a chain saw because an impenetrable net of laws and regulations keeps them from doing smart topiary with a graduated set of electric shears? Or do they just dig chain saws?
There's proof by example that this can be done, and done well. Bill Clinton, during his time in office, tasked Al Gore with streamlining the federal bureaucracy through the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, This and other related efforts reduced the federal workforce by almost 400,000 people, about 20% of the total. And nobody remembers it, because it was done in a professional, efficient, minimally-disruptive manner. And he did so under approximately the same legal and regulatory regime we have today.
It is probably not a coincidence that Bill Clinton was the last US president to have balanced the Federal budget. Possibly the very last ever.
I do have to wonder how much of NPR(g) was possible only by agreeing to cut defense spending as well. The WP article claims it had little effect, but I don't think it factors in private agreements made with various Congresspeople that weren't widely reported.
What I *do* know is that defense spending *did* decrease during the Clinton administration, as evidenced by numerous accounts from people I worked with back then who complained about how much harder it was to get promotions and resources compared to the Reagan years.
If you're serious about cutting government spending, you need to seriously consider cutting defense spending. And if you're also serious about pulling back from "foreign entanglements" and sucker moves like defending our allies, cutting defense should be pretty much a no-brainer.
If you're serious about all of that but you're also seriously not joking about your plans to maybe invade two NATO member nations, maybe you can't afford to cut the now-grossly-misnamed defense budget. Hmm...
> Would it be possible for them, on their own, to carry this out? Or are they so hindered by laws and regulations and agencies' unwillingness to change that the only way they can proceed is in the chaotic way they are?
The biggest obstacle is not regulation, but Musk's own descent into a far-right bubble which has prevented him from engaging with reality. That's not even a partisan thing. There are tons of libertarian think-tank types who have spent their lives thinking about how to do this kind of thing in a sane way and Musk has ignored every one of them because he thinks he knows better.
> Or do they just dig chain saws?
Pretty much. Musk's primary goal seems to be "fire as many people as possible as quick as possible without any regard for what impact that will have on the country or budget".
I confess that I do not know enough about the regulations involved. What is the executive branch allowed and not allowed to do to government agencies without approval or support from some other government entity -- such as congress? Is the executive branch allowed to fire, for example, managers at NIH? Do NIH staff have a union? If so, what would the union do if DOGE fired all mangers? Strike? Protest? Invoke some law or agreement? Do you know? And the second question is, what is the chance that whatever built-in barriers there are to Trump firing all managers simply cannot be overriden, or if overriden is very likely to be reversed? I do not know. Do you?
Seems to me there are a lot of ways the executive branch can make the case that under the present circumstances they are allowed to fire managers. There seem to be a lot of things on the books that can be used to justify breaking lower order rules. For example, Trump can call Venezuelan drug gangs in the US an invading foreign force (or something like that) and can then use that to justify doing various things to immigrants that by some lower-level laws violate their rights. So I say to myself that maybe there's a (and here I'm just loosely brainstorming) a financial emergency clause that lets the president shut down agencies to save money. Or a rogue manager clause that lets the president fire managers who refuse to carry out certain requests from the president in a timely fashion. Or -- well, you get the idea.
So my question is simply whether there are end runs around the rules and laws protecting agencies that would allow DOGE to reduce the size of agencies and their staff in a more planful manner than the present one. I am not being sneaky and tricky here. I just do not know enough about law and the structure of government. Do you?
And if you don't can you please refrain from answering questions I have not asked? Such is what is Trump/Musk's real intent, is DOGE as currently carried out likely to be to the country's benefit, how good a job can one do of shrinking and improving agencies if it must be done quickly, and whether your bellybutton is an innie or an outie.
> For example, Trump can call Venezuelan drug gangs in the US an invading foreign force (or something like that) and can then use that to justify doing various things to immigrants that by some lower-level laws violate their rights.
Don't confuse "nobody has managed to stop him yet" for "is legal". The "war" powers invocation in particular is pretty blatantly illegal.
It’s actually quite helpful to hear that, Ralph. I have had exactly the same perception of the responses, except that I have found it not amusing but extremely frustrating and sort of demoralizing. In fact the responses I’ve gotten led to a whole train of thought yesterday about looking for some other places online to read and discuss things. And I have not had that in reaction to hot arguments or occasional mean insults here in the past. Those were unpleasant but did not leave me with the same feeling of OK, I give up.
I think what’s led to my question being impossible to hear is that it does not make clear what side I’m
on. Do I think DOGE is dumb and bad both in methods and goal? Or only in methods? Or maybe I think it’s smart and good and I’m on board with the methods too, and looking for evidence that laws etc force it to use a chainsaw?
I didn’t ask my question in a way that left my loyalties unclear in order to play with people’s minds. I was just trying to find out the answer to my particular question, without having the discussion derailed by various right vs. left run-ins. But the net effect seems to have been that many people felt they had to strongly signal their position on DOGE good/bad/smart/dumb. Maybe that was because they did not know which tribe I belonged to, and were being asked to answer a question without knowing which side's arguments they were supporting? And then several others seemed determined to convince me that my question was based on various dumb-as-a-rock assumptions, and was therefore unanswerable. Maybe a way to neutralize the dilemma?
The upshot, IMO, is that politics makes people dumb.
I think the problem is that there are many different things your question could be asking about.
1. What can Musk legally do on his own?
2. What could Republicans as a whole do legally?
3. What can Musk practically do? (i.e. what can he get away with rather than what is legal)
4. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk says he wants to accomplish?
5. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk is actually trying to accomplish?
6. What would be a good way to do what Musk has actually done? (kind of tautological, but you often seem to be going for this based on your responses)
These are all different things! But you're implicitly assuming they're the same thing. And since they are different things, the answer to the question differs depending on which thing you're talking about. Therefore, people focus on trying to clarify the question.
<I think the problem is that there are many different things your question could be asking about.
1. What can Musk legally do on his own?
2. What could Republicans as a whole do legally?
3. What can Musk practically do? (i.e. what can he get away with rather than what is legal)
4. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk says he wants to accomplish?
5. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk is actually trying to accomplish?
6. What would be a good way to do what Musk has actually done? (kind of tautological, but you often seem to be going for this based on your responses)
These are all different things! But you're implicitly assuming they're the same thing. And since they are different things, the answer to the question differs depending on which thing you're talking about. Therefore, people focus on trying to clarify the question.>
No, the question is quite clear, and it is none of the above.. I have stated it and restated it numerous times : DOGE is going about dismantling and shrinking agencies in a way that seems unsystematic (I gave several examples of what I mean by this term), and unlikely to get rid of policies, staff and roles that DOGE sees as bad and keep those it sees as good. It seems like there would be quick simple ways to at least increase the fraction of “bad”(by DOGE’s standards) employees and policies gotten rid of and of good ones kept. (I named some simple ways this might be done, while admitting I did not think they were a great approach, just better than the present one for achieving DOGE’s aim.) My question is whether various laws and contracts prevent DOGE from using a more systematic approach that aims to maximize how much good stuff (by its standards) it keeps and how much bad stuff it gets rid of. I have clarified that when I ask whether the laws prevent DOGE from being more systematic, I mean *both* whether the laws prevent systematic approaches *and* whether DOGE has a reasonable chance of just ignoring the laws, etc., or else overriding them by stretching the meaning of various executive powers.
I have talked throughout about DOGE, not Musk the man, not the Republicans. I regard Musk as someone carrying out the DOGE project, backed by the president. It was clear in my questions that I was asking about DOGE, the project..
So none of your 6 are what I am asking. If we replace “Musk” with “DOGE, then I am asking a version of 1 + 3: Not what out of the universe of all possible actions can DOGE get away with, but what simple steps aimed at getting rid of undesirables (in DOGEs view) could it get away with. I have given exs. of quick and dirty steps: fire all managers and replace with DOGE loyalists; fire employees with low evaluations; fire employees known to strongly disagree with DOGE’s point of view.
In one of my many attempts to get someone to answer the question I was asking I stated it this way: Is DOGE trimming the shrubbery with a chain saw because it is surrounded with such a thick mesh that it can’t use a graduated series of topiary scissors, or because it just digs chain saws?
As further clarification I have stated in various posts (I must have put up 10 follow-up posts at least) things I am NOT asking: What is DOGE's *real* goal? Is that goal good? Is that goal attainable?
Do not tell me I have not been clear, unless you can quote several vague or ambiguous formulations of it. And don't say the flaw in my question is that assumes some dumb-shit thing like that there is a perfect way for DOGE to do this pruning and end up in a short period of time with a bunch of small, effective agencies that are wholeheartedly aligned with the DOGE viewpoint. It is not an all or nothing question. I did not ask whether it is possible for DOGE to do a great job of pruning the bad and keeping the good. I asked whether DOGE could do a *better* job, or whether it is so constrained by laws etc. it can only come at things the messy, chaotic way it is,
This is the most disillusioned and discouraged I have ever felt about ACX discussions, even though nobody has been particularly mean to me in this one. But everybody except Paul Brinkley and B Civil has either just rambled on about their miscellaneous opinions about DOGE or else tried to prove that my question is meaningless because it’s sort of like a snake swallowing its tail or a demand to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or an unanswerable inquiry about what color underpanties Ayn Rand wore while writing John Galt’s speech. No it ain't!
Know what I think? I think most of you don’t know all that much more than me about what legal, contractual, etc. constraints there are on what DOGE can do and, out of those, which it can probably get away violating with via brute power or trix. But nobody says that, they just don’t answer my question or say it's too flawed to mean anything. You're pretentious cowards. Fuck this place.
" Let's assume DOGE & Musk have it as their goal to quickly get rid of deadwood and nonsense in agencies and turn the agencies into small, effective groups with much smaller budgets. Would it be possible for them, on their own, to carry this out? Or are they so hindered by laws and regulations and agencies' unwillingness to change that the only way they can proceed is in the chaotic way they are?"
This framing is smuggling in a LOT of AFAICT unjustified assumptions. In particular, you're assuming a dichotomy that doesn't seem to be much in evidence:
either
A. It's possible for a smart and motivated agency to quickly and sharply reduce the staffing and budget of federal agencies while leaving them effective.
or
B. The reason A isn't possible is entirely because of laws, regulations and institutional inertia.
The first is akin to the belief in the proverbial $20 bill on the sidewalk (which certainly *could* exist, but you shouldn't be betting $19 or even $5 on finding it). The second is like saying one's failure to find said bill *must* be due to all those pesky pedestrians getting in the way by having the audacity to use the sidewalk to *go places* instead of recognizing its rightful place in your entirely-justified and not-at-all-frivolous treasure hunt.
Naw you missed the point. I am trying to figure out whether laws, contracts, regulations, loyalties etc. constrain DOGE so much that it is impossible for it be more selective than it is now in how it fires people and ditches programs. For instance, I have heard of people being fired because they were probationary employees; and because they were caught in the bathroom one afternoon without their badges. I have heard of all the staff of an agency being fired, then the agency rehiring all who were willing to return. None of these hiring and firing processes are likely to select for the most productive employees. A simple system of firing those with the worst performance reviews would at least be better.
So I am not trying to figure out whether DOGE could "quickly and sharply reduce the staffing and budget of federal agencies while leaving them effective." I am only trying to figure out whether it is possible for DOGE to be more systematic than it is now, or whether all the laws, loyalties etc. in and around hunks of the bureaucracy are such a dense nets that it is impossible for DOGE to use any approach more systematic, less chaotic and less violent than the present one. The reason I want to know is that people are defending DOGE's chain saw approach on the grounds that it has no choice but to fire people capriciously, possibly losing valuable experts and louyal hard-working people who are not a bit infected with woke and other things DOGE wants to get rid of. I do not think that's true.
There are many cases where DOGE could have better achieved their goals by *doing nothing*. For example, they could have *not fired* the IRS people who collect taxes. They could have *not fired* all the people in government who are already responsible for auditing and preventing waste. etc. They could have *not fired* the people in government who check whether government programs are actually working or not. Those are pure unforced errors even granted DOGE's premises.
I sort of see it. OTOH, this clearly would not have worked across the board. Out of curiosity, were there any instances of DOGE doing something that you would argue as a benefit to the goal of reducing government waste?
From a theoretical perspective, when they cut that much stuff, there's bound to be some bad stuff they cut, just by chance. If they had only cut that stuff, it would have been an improvement. But of course, figuring out what the bad stuff is is hard and DOGE is deliberately not even trying. There are also nonlinear effects where the rapid lawless destruction of the government has negative effects well beyond the pros or cons of specific programs being cut.
FWIW, I think the CFPB was in serious need of reform or reogranization. But that still doesn't mean that illegally shutting it down was a good idea. That's also not a question of "efficiency" but rather "the government should do good things and not bad things policy wise".
"The reason I want to know is that people are defending DOGE's chain saw approach on the grounds that it has no choice but to fire people capriciously"
But *of course* they have a choice. They always have a choice. For every person they fire, there is (at a bare minimum) the alternative of *not firing them*.
My core objection here is that the sort of people you describe taking "firing a large number of federal workers is just and necessary and will save money" as an axiom. It's not an axiom. It's very likely not even true. And determining if and when it's *actually useful* to fire people is necessarily upstream of determining *how* to fire them. Take this for example:
"None of these hiring and firing processes are likely to select for the most productive employees. A simple system of firing those with the worst performance reviews would at least be better."
Trying to model employees of complex federal organizations as homogenous lumps of labor whose efficiency can be measured in one number is a plain and obvious fallacy. It's easy to imagine a situation where you fire one and only one employee and lo and behold, despite their poor performance review, losing them *drops* the productivity of the whole department, and does so *dramatically.* It's as silly to assume that "fire the employees with the worst performance review" will make a department more efficient as it is to assume "remove the most worn part from your car engine" will make your car more efficient.
None of that is to say that greater efficiency is impossible; probably there are lots of improvements that could be made. But it's a reasonable bet that they'll require *understanding the system you're trying to improve* (which generally isn't quick if you're starting from zero). And it's unwarranted to assume from the word go that the improvements will *necessarily* involve firing people. Maybe sometimes they will. But sometimes they won't: there are lots of other ways to cut costs. Heck, sometimes they'll involve *hiring more people*: understaffing can create all sorts of costly inefficiencies.
Both the people involved in this project and the people supporting them seem to be doing so for ideological reasons that carry the unshakable assumption that firing federal employees will improve the world *no matter how it's done.* You reason your way to the truth if you start from an irrational premise that you refuse to ever update.
It's because your posts make it sound like you don't understand this. The issue isn't whether you are in favor of firing people or not, the issue is that your questions are smuggling in incorrect premises.
My experience of reforming problematic groups is that a small group ( say 20 people) takes full time, dedicated attention from an individual for months.
Actively hostile, idealogically oppositional groups will likely take much more.
Unless you break them.
They would need massive amounts of man-power to reform millions of workers, 10s of thousands of strong managers at a minimum.
If the groups involved were trying to cooperate as best they could then maybe
I didn't picture the temporary manager reforming the group, just going through the records and scoring people on simple criteria, such as recent performance reviews, completion of projects, maybe total sick and personal days. Then maybe consulting with someone with the scientific expertise to advise on what essential skills the group kept had to have, which might temper some decisions about who to fire. Then firing enough of the group to meet some criterion set by the administration. Maybe the temp manager wouldn't need 60 days -- maybe a coupla weeks would be enough.
My point isn't that my idea is good -- it's that if you want to downsize a group, doing it as I describe is better than randomly firing people (e.g. firing of 2 people 10 or so days ago for Peeing without Badges).
There's a sensible good-faith process that could theoretically be followed if enough organs of government were interested in executing a sensible good-faith process. Realistically if you start this process then you get four years of "actually we investigated ourselves and found that our budget isn't excessive after all", and then you lose power anyway and the moment has passed.
>"whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach."
No and yes.
No, because DOGE is Elon Musk and Elon Musk's goal is not efficiency. His goals are more along the lines of revenge against woke; ending projects he personally dislikes; destroying institutional memory so it can't be a check on his and Trump's power; finding things to lie about and use as anti-Dem pro-Trump propaganda (e.g., pretending a SSN means an immigrant is voting instead of just working and paying taxes and that this is Biden's fault); etc.
Yes, because *if* some hypothetical agency had the goal of efficiency, it would automatically be doing better than DOGE.
"I’m soliciting opinions on whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach"
I mean, it couldn't possibly be _less_ smart and effective, so obviously yes.
This requires hard and serious work, though, so it's obviously off the table in the current regime.
Sure, but I'm not sure it's possible while also shooting for a net decrease in government spending (especially at first). You would want to do audits, start medium-to-long term studies of effectiveness, and emphasize recruiting/retaining talented people - all of which requires extra resources and oversight to get started. The end result might be a government that is smaller than it is right now, but I don't think you can seriously embark on a project like this without considering that any given government program might be useful and worth expanding.
Yeah but what you are describing is a really thorough version of smart, thoughtful pruning. Right now I’m hearing about firings based on whether someone is “probationary,” i.e. in their first year or 2 of working at an agency; and whether someone was caught during a single DOGE staff visit failing to take their badge with them went the went to pee. Using better selection methods than those is a pretty low bar to clear, and could be done quickly.
So the model I suggested for NIH would be: (1) Fire the manager of each project of agency. (2) Hire in each manager’s place some DOGE-aligned person with demonstrated ability to trim fat and reduce inefficiency at organizations. (3) Give that person 60 days to fire staff using mostly some agreed-upon metrics such as average performance eval in last 2 years, or decreased productivity in last 2 years, with some room for manager to use own judgment as well. (4)After temporary management prunes staff and makes other changes to increase efficiency, they leave. (5) Hire in their place scientists who are qualified to run a medical reserach group. Limit their power to add to staff and make other changes.
I do not think my proposal is great, but seems likely to be better than the dumb, semi-random approach used now. It would also create much less fear, anger and chaos. The thing is, I am not sure DOGE has the power to do it, and someone who was defending present events said they did not. On the other hand, if DOGE can stroll in and fire people for not having their badge on when they’re at the urinal, seems like they could just fire managers for, I dunno, budget overruns, failure to respond to some demand of DOGE’s for bullet point lists of the week’s accomplishments, or wearing Birkenstocks.
After giving it some, but not a lot of thought, I don’t think it would work. First reason is what you are proposing is not truly aligned with what they are trying to do in my opinion. What they are trying to do is reestablish direct executive control over all of these employees, which means delegitimizing the institutional process for hiring and firing that exists now and in the past, and also delegitimizing power players like the unions (and lawyers) that stand in the way.
My second point concerns the idea of hiring a temporary bean counter manager to oversee a project for a certain amount of time and then do some cutting, and then hand that project back over to someone who actually understands what the project is trying to accomplish.
I don’t see how this works. The person doing the cutting does not have the knowledge to really understand who might be good or not good in the context of the goal of said project (not even to mention the loyalty issue which is important in the context of this administration); and the scientist (or other “ qualified expert“) who is coming in is going to be stuck with a bunch of people that he or she had no say in hiring.
The bottom line is it’s probably a lot faster to fire 10 people and then hire back four of them. And if there’s a bunch of confusion, well too bad.
When and if DOGE screws up really badly and demonstrably, then that will be the beginning of the end of this strategy.
Just to be clear, I never thought my proposed method was good. I proposed it as an example of an approach that was better than firings based on things probably uncorrelated with employee productivity (probationaries; people caught not taking their badge to the bathroom one afternoon; or the people willing to be rehired after all the staff has been fired). And the thing of interest to me is whether it is currently possible to carry out shrinkage of govt agencies in a way that gives more bang for the buck than the present approach.
The reason I care about *that* is that I keep running across people, mostly on here, who defend DOGE on the grounds that it is not possible to get rid of bureaucratic bloat and undesirable woke government agendas in a way that selects against lazy & unqualified people or people whose job consists of pointless (from DOGE's point of view) tasks. These DOGE defenders argue that there are so many laws, contracts, regulations etc. in effect that all systematic approaches, even quick and dirty ones, are impossible to carry out. All DOGE can do is various kinds of random destructions and dismemberments and shock administrations.
I would like to be able to demonstrate to these people that they are mostly wrong. It is my impression that many of them are infected with infuriating images of gov't workers who are lazy, entitled, controlling, woke-infested fools. Imagining the fool being shocked, humiliated and summarily fired scratches their angry itch, and so they defend DOGE's present brutal and chaotic approach even against reasonable arguments. But of course I may be wrong, and just driven by my own angry itch, which at least I'm aware of.
I simply do not know enough about how our government is set up to know what regulations, chains of command, laws, etc. truly block DOGE from doing various things. There are 2 things one needs to know: what are the laws, etc., and which sort of laws etc. DOGE can successfully defy. I am ignorant about both. Assumed that many here would be less ignorant than me, but so far nobody has replied by naming the kinds of barriers, which have been successfully ignored by DOGE, which could prob be successfully challenged if DOGE ignored them etc.
So far I have not been able to get a single person to address that question. Everybody gets diverted by something else I mention along the way. Do you know enough about what barriers there are and how likely defiance of different ones is to succeed? Or, less generally, whether it is just impossible for DOGE to be more systematic, because barriers around and in the bureaucracy make a more planful approach impossible?
Later addition:
<What they are trying to do is reestablish direct executive control over all of these employees, which means delegitimizing the institutional process for hiring and firing that exists now and in the past, and also delegitimizing power players like the unions (and lawyers) that stand in the way.
Yes, I agree, that is my intuition as well. I would like to be able to make that argument to people who are defending DOGE on the grounds that it is so hemmed in by bullshit that it has to just whack at things with a machete. But in order to make the case that DOGE's agenda is to divide, disorganize, disempower and intimidate agencies, I need to present evidence that DOGE is not forced to take the machete approach by the tangle of regulations, etc. that presently exist.
Yeah I get it. It’s pretty shocking. Or exhilarating I guess depending on what side of it you’re on.
>Do you know enough about what barriers there are and how likely defiance of different ones is to succeed?
IANAL, but I play one on tv. This is a battle to rejigger the powers of the government; the Judiciary, the Executive, and the Legislature. More specifically it’s a move to seriously increase the powers of the executive branch. The unitary executive. Trump and his administration are challenging the other branches of government very directly. There are probably Mary of laws that might stand in his way, but it depends on how intently the other branches want to fight It. Congress is pretty much willing to let him push things hard so I don’t expect a lot of pushback from them. There will be some walking and I’m sure some of them aren’t really thrilled about it, but they are afraid to stay in his way right now because he has a lot of political clout. Which could evaporate in a cloud, but might not. The goal is to get to the Supreme Court and raise the fundamental constitutional issues around the powers of the executive as opposed to the legislative branch. So he’s creating a lot of challenges all at once, but they all point to the same thing- “who is in charge here?“ the administration has been playing all kinds of games with Musk’s status in the government. He is acting officially when it suits them and he is acting unofficially when it doesn’t.
To try to do this through the usual channels will mean getting bogged down in endless court cases and negotiations with members of Congress, trade unions, special interests etc., and will not get him where he and his associates want to go.
So the short answer to your question is this is about a constitutional fight and a close reading of the powers vested in the executive branch do give him a leg to stand on. The first really important case (which is about the alien enemies act) is due to hit the Supreme Court very shortly. What are the powers of the president to declare a national emergency and how much proof does he have to come up with in order to do so? The Constitution says he can do it and it doesn’t say anything about having to prove it to anyone. Congress gave up the power to declare war to the executive branch a long time ago, and it will be difficult for them to reclaim it.
He says Venezuelan drug gangs are equivalent to a foreign intrusion which triggers his power to declare an emergency. I assume the other side will argue that that is a gross overstepping of his power.
He has a pretty good chance of winning that case.
There will be other cases reaching the Supreme Court to hammer out these kinds of issues and in the meantime, keeping everybody off guard is tactically a good move. It’s rather intimidating.
I think we largely agree. As far as I know, there's nothing stopping DOGE from firing people based on sensible metrics. I'm sure that someone has argued that performance reviews might be politically biased or inaccurate, but they would at least be a start.
I suspect that one of the goals of this approach is to make it extremely unpleasant to be a federal employee, even if you're not one of the people who gets fired. It's also the sort of approach that you might take if you had a very limited pool of competent manpower to make decisions.
I can’t help you with your request and so I apologize in advance, but it’s maybe worth mentioning that the Clinton administration undertook government reform/money-saving in a way that presumably you might approve.
I'm fundamentally confused about Amy Wax and why she supports white nationalism. Does she really think in the kind of nation she's trying to bring about, Ashkenazi Jews will still be treated as honorary white people? How can she not know she's just driving herself and any family she has toward destruction?
Jews were treated as honorary white people in early US history. The first serious nativist movement in US history, the Know Nothings were Protestants + Jews (look up Lewis Charles Levin) against Catholics. The first two Jewish senators were also from the Antebellum South. Presumably being a Jew was not a dealbreaker to the Anglo-Protestants in the state legislatures who elected them. Anglo-Protestants have always been some of the most pro-Jewish population throughout history. But they never seem to realize on the other hand, the ambivalent feeling at the very best that Jews have towards Protestants. I reckon most American Jews would rather hang out with a Palestinian than an Evangelical. Don't know about Israeli Jews though, maybe the increasing Mizrahi population doesn't really care about Christians unlike the Ashkenazis.
I admit that not being allowed in country clubs and having the admission process for elite universities overhauled to keep you out are kind of First World problems on the historical Jewish scale, but they're still somewhat short of being a first class citizen.
I agree and would not claim that they were completely equal but they were treated better than any White Catholic and far far better than any Native American, Black, or Asian. Its honestly bizarre that American Jews latch on country club membership denials and only being overrepresented by factor of 5x instead of 10x or something in elite universities as their great persecution stories. White American Protestants have been better friends to Jews than most populations throughout history and its disappointing to see modern American Jews still hold resentment/suspicion/hostility towards them. The end of White Protestant dominance of America will not result in a better day to day climate for American Jews.
Don't know who this bitch seems to be, whatever she may be, but consider this data point: Israel's "Antisemitism" conference invited Europe's Neo-Nazi parties. When other Jewish Diaspora invitees dropped their invitations in protest, they doubled down, proceeded with the joint Neo-Nazi-Israeli conference, and then some dumbass official stood up and said in the mic that the Haaretz newspaper* is the beacon of antisemitism, while Nazis cheered in the audience.
At one point during this conference one of the neo-Nazis made a toast and said "the real 4th Reich is the friends we made along the way" and then everyone sang the Horst Wessel song.
Jews did just fine throughout American history, so I don't know what rational fear you think she should have.
She's not a white nationalist, btw, she just has reality-based opinions about different ethnic groups. It's a common histrionic failing of the left to view any frank race-based discussion as tantamount to genocide.
I don't say she's a white nationalist just because of reading it into her stated views on race, but also that she's spoken at a white nationalist conference and invited avowed white nationalists to speak at Penn.
And Jews have always done well in America *compared to contemporary Europe*, but not compared to today.
How do you know? It's not like live albums include the opening act. Maybe the gospels just edited it out.
Guilt by association is a cowardly way to argue. If that's the worst thing you have on Amy Wax then that's basically an admission that you don't have an actual argument.
I'm just as confused by an Amy Wax who consorts with and promotes white nationalists and favors keeping non-white people out of America as much as possible but is not a white nationalist as my perhaps imaginary white nationalist Amy Wax. If anything I'm more confused by this version.
I haven't heard of her being a white nationalist, though it wouldn't surprise me if she was. She did speak at a white nationalist conference. I wrote about how she typifies a particular sickness of the Right, a tendency to see all of politics through the lens of a few racially tinged issues like crime, affirmative action, etc.
There are certainly other Jewish white nationalists, which is just a return to the historical norm in America. White nationalism being goy-only from 1970 to 2010 was an aberration.
I read an article recently, probably somewhere within this general sphere, which had a line which stuck with me. It was something like "esoteric anti-Hitlerism is now the founding religion of the United States". Does anyone know what this article was?
The idea, I think, was that "Hitler bad", as the solitary shared opinion that everyone has, now fills the central uniting role in society that religion used to. And I mean, sure, Hitler was bad, but esoteric anti-Hitlerism is about exploding that one opinion to outsized talismanic importance unbefitting an ideology that died out eighty years ago, that never really made any sense outside the social context of 1930s Germany. Culture is stuck constantly defeating and re-defeating the same long-defeated enemy over and over again; the orcs are Nazis, the Galactic Empire are Nazis, the Daleks are Nazis, the bad guys are always Nazis or analogous to Nazis.
And of course any religion makes it necessary to find heretics. Sure, maybe nobody actually fails to believe that Hitler bad, but can we find someone who doesn't believe it quite hard enough?
I was thinking about this while reading (for some reason) a thread on /r/teachers where a teacher talked about how a student jokingly drew a swastika in class and the teacher made the entire class spend the rest of the day watching Holocaust videos, and all the other teachers in the thread chimed in suggesting even more extreme actions that could have been taken. Or how my own state, which managed to survive World War 2 and the subsequent eight decades without outlawing Nazi salutes just fine, has suddenly decided to outlaw doing Nazi salutes.
Fascism (of which Nazism is a variant) is based on the beliefs that life is inherently a zero-sum conflict between different races, that the proper order of things is for the strong to dominate the weak, that war is good because it weeds out the weak, and that the best form of government is a totalitarian dictatorship under a leader who serves as the expression and director of the national will. It's not just generic militarism, nor is it the same as nineteenth-century imperialist ideology.
>The idea of concentration camps originated from the British in the Boer Wars,
But, the Nazi concentration camps were not concentration camps; they were death camps.
Reminds me of the claim a few years back from some lefties that the Nazis' use of Zyklon B was "inspired" by the US use to delouse immigrants at the Mexican border. Because somehow using insecticides to kill insects somehow makes the US morally complicit in the use of insecticides to kill humans.
I'm not saying transactional isolationism is a good strategy, I'm observing what the goodwill is being *spent on*. So far, the goodwill seems to be on fire with relatively little short-term gain coming from it. Building institutions takes more effort than dismantling them.
I've seen some arguments that e.g. the new tariff regime might pay off on net for the US in the medium term, but I don't follow the arguments well enough to have an opinion myself.
It's possible that the US *will* invade Canada! I think it's very unlikely. But there are already impacts in relation to how Canada is approaching its defense procurement, which I think is likely to be net-negative to American defense industry.
If we start to close overseas military bases and reduce our armed forces, then maybe there will be some reduced costs. It's easy enough to argue that orange man's actions are encouraging the remilitarization of Europe. Maybe if we are unreliable enough there will be a new global order.
With reduced power comes less responsibility.
Also with less responsibility comes less power.
I mostly just hope we continue to maintain enough power to export dollars. We definitely want there to be a demand for dollars so we can continue to trade dollars ( free to print and distribute to citizens ) for foreign goods!
In moral despair about Trump's ICE gestapo kidnapping random people over soccer, basketball, and "mom and dad" tattoos (as well as the fact that they seem to expect they'll get away with it), to lock them in an El Salvador torture prison. The ACLU is fighting it, but if Trump also controls the judges or manages to destroy the system of checks and balances entirely...
Wondering if, in these desperate times, the corporate power shoggoths could be summoned. E.g. ICE is pretending that the Nike / Michael Jordan jumpman symbol is a gang tattoo; and using a Rolex logo tattoo as an excuse to kidnap anyone with a crown. Maybe they'd consider this trademark defamation.
Like, if we're going to illegally nab and deport people, why can't they at least be the class of people that *everyone* hates?
Why can't Trump's ICE gestapo partner up with local traffic enforcement and deport *drunk drivers*?
No one needs or wants drunk drivers! TAKE THEM! Not even the bluest of the blue Lefties are going to put up much of a fight in defense of drunk drivers! They'd quietly let their protests fade out like Covid boosters, and then there would be way fewer drunk drivers, not only because the drunk drivers got deported, but because now everyone is scared shitless of drunk driving, themselves.
But no, the Trump administration *has* to be seen nabbing sympathetic people, like folks with tattoos and mouthy college students.
This is just turnabout for BLM/DEI/metoo/gender insanity. Trump *is* the shoggoth and the Progressive Left summoned him. Let him feed, the political energy will exhaust itself soon.
Letting evil feed freely doesn't typically make it less influential. It would be nice if that were the case, but to get rid of it, you typically have to actually make some effort.
I'm just reframing the narrative lest the Left forget the role they played in getting us here. Liberals have a tendency for amnesia-driven self-righteousness and I'm trying to head the hypocritical sanctimony off at the pass.
Who am I being cruel to? I'd hate to cause suffering and then miss it.
No, of course not. There's a tit-for-tat power balance between the parties and the Dems broke the peace by going way overboard with progressivism. That means the right is willing to tolerate a lot of collateral damage in their zeal to destroy progressive policy. Just like the Left didn't care which white, male CEOs had their careers unjustly ruined in pursuit of racial equity, the Right doesn't care which brown people get unjustly deported in their pursuit of less dysgenic immigration policy.
Depends how you want to define ruined, there's been at least one white CEO that won a discrimination case, and if you know anything about federal courts that's quite unusual since they usually hold such people to a *much* higher standard of evidence: https://archive.is/DzTcs
Are you unfamiliar with cancel culture? Off the top of my head there's Charles Murray, Steve Hsu, Brett (and Harvey!) Weinstein, Louie CK, Derek Chauvin, and James Bennet.
There are many many more. The Left opened Pandora's Box of racist, sexist, identity politics without reckoning with the fact that the Right still represents the ethnic majority in this country. Trump is the consequence of that.
A handful of people being publicly exposed for using their position of power to be racist or sexist (or for flashing their genitals in c.k.'s case) is treated as some kind of enormous betrayal of the social contract by conservatives while sending random people to El Salvadorian death camps is seen as a natural, normal and proportional reaction.
Of those, only Steve Hsu, Bret Weinstein, and James Bennet actually went through anything that they didn't deserve, and saying they had their careers ruined is a blatant exaggeration. Keep in mind you're comparing this to people being sent to an actual prison.
It's like a shit-tinted glasses version of Mr. Rogers' advice to "look for the helpers"
"When you see your tribe doing scary things in the news, look for the provokers. You will *always* be able to find someone in the outgroup who you can say provoked them."
It's more like: people going to one extreme encourages other people to go to the other extreme.
People vote for Republicans because they hate Democrats; and they vote for Democrats because they hate Republicans. Anything that makes one party more annoying encourages more people to vote for the other party.
And, sadly, Democrats were recently horribly annoying. Not all of them of course, but it seemed like they were utterly unable to keep the extremists on their side on the leash. Thus they have become the side of insanity.
Trump is an extremist, too, so I hope that in the next election, 80% of Americans will vote for Democrats. That is, of course, assuming that there will be the next election... maybe the redcaps will decide that it is better for government efficiency to eliminate this part, too.
In the case there is a next election and the Democrats win, I hope they will take the lesson and learn to say "no" to the craziest fractions among them.
"It's more like: people going to one extreme encourages other people to go to the other extreme."
The vagueness of the word "people" is doing a LOT of work here. One the one hand you have a bunch of *extremely* decentralized and grassroots shit, depending on a whole lot of individual actions with no way for ANY person or organization to exert control over it even if they wanted to. And on the other hand you have the federal government of the United States literally shipping people off to the gulag: something that could be stopped by even a small handful of people in high positions having a bare-minimum of respect for the rule of law.
In a nutshell, the standard being held up here is "as long as I can identify *anyone* on the other side doing *anything* that makes me sufficiently angry, that's adequate justification for my side to wield unchecked and unlimited government power." And of course you can *always* find such things. There is, after all, a multibillion dollar industry devoted to finding them for you, and splashing them onto your screen as loudly and as often as possible.
"Do you really believe that no one told them to quiet down?"
Taking this sentence at face value: lots of people were "telling them to quiet down" from literally the moment the protests started. The protesters were in no mood to listen.
Now instead taking the sentence with the obvious intuitions: I've never been prone to following conspiracy theories, so no.
I followed those protests pretty closely as they were happening. They involved a LOT of police violence towards civilians[1]; not just protesters but also journalists, medics people who were literally just bystanders. A large fraction of this was done by governments of large cities with Democrat mayors and Democrat-majority city councils. Joe Biden was in the middle of a presidential run at the time (having just concluded a completely and totally fair and in all manners above-board primary[2]) and was, to put it mildly, not exactly "in tune" with the protests or the people who were protesting. I think it's no stretch at all to say that he would have both personally preferred and been electorally better served by the protests *not* happening just then, or at least being much more limited. The point is, the idea that the Democratic Party had some sort of secret means of coordinating, controlling and quelling the protests--which they waited almost two weeks to use--is laughably absurd.
It feels embarrassing to even have to point this out, but the people protesting were not only Democrats. I have no clue whatsoever what *fraction* of them were Democrats, but I'd bet it a very modest majority or a slim minority. You see, 41% of the U.S. electorate is not affiliated with any party, while only 31% are Democrats. And while as far as I can tell, very few Republicans were actually upset by the spectacle of a police officer murdering a man in broad daylight with the help of three accomplices and (initially) being left fully at liberty, *most people* tend to find that sort of thing shocking, appalling and in many cases enraging. As well they should: if the state declines to protect your right to life from it own agents even when they are brazenly and undeniably in the wrong, you effectively have no rights at all. This is the sort of thing that, for example, Libertarians--who will tell you at great length that they are not Democrats--should be absolutely all over, since their entire raison d'etre is limiting the power of the government (and I know some of them *did* get involved in the protests, though I have no idea how many). And I know in a lot of the online communities I've spend time in, the loudest and most strident voices against police violence are left-wing people who will *also* tell you at great length that they are not Democrats. So again, the idea that the protesters were taking orders from Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi is utter nonsense.
[1] Obligatory disclaimer that yes, sometimes this was a response to some number of the protesters initiating either violence or property damage. But also sometimes it was not.
[2] there is absolutely, definitely no sarcasm here, whatever could you mean?
Well said. I personally am rooting for Vance to win in 2028 and take over the mantle for the right. He seems like a decent, thoughtful person. It's my hope he can take the populist energy that Trump tapped into and redirect it in a more reasonable direction. Rooting for a Dem victory in 2028 is a mistake in my view because they're doubling down on what got us here. A quick victory would reinforce the wrong thing. They need to disavow woke progressivism and run a Clintonesque moderate again. If they do that they'll win in a landslide and I would happily vote for them.
If they did all that and ran someone who appeared moderate, would you trust them not to immediately turn around and implement all the "woke" policies they performatively disavowed during the campaign if they won?
"The left shouldn't have started it." When did the war start? in the 90's with "political correctness"? In the 1940's with McCarthyism? In 1917 with the october revolution? In 1850 with the pinkertons?
It's simple, really. Everything bad the Outgroup does, they did on purpose because they're evil and hateful; everything bad the Ingroup does, we were forced into it, we didn't have any choice, it was just a consequence of what they did first.
Look, don't complicate things with some kind of good-faith historical inquiry-- if you do that, we lose all the comfort we could otherwise take in our blind ingroup righteousness, and we'll never be able to maintain this cycle of mutual reprisal we have going on behalf of our faction leaders.
It's like an abusive relationship.... if you do something bad to me, it's your fault, because things are simple (duh!) and obviously it's your fault because you did it. If I do something bad to you, that's also your fault, because things are complicated and have lots of different causes (duh!), and with just a little unpacking we can certainly find something you did that provoked me.
But the whole thing hinges on only ever digging deep enough to blame the people I want to blame, so don't spoil it with some kind of genuine analysis-- you'll break the game.
While the White House probably didn't think too hard about participating in the tradition of political kitsch with their recent AI-generated tweet about an ICE arrest, the use of kitsch to support political agendas has been well-studied by Walter Benjamin, Saul Friedländer, and Milan Kundera https://captiveliberty.substack.com/p/empire-slop?r=25k3x4
Even knowing that the woman in this image is likely a genuine criminal, there was something viscerally disturbing to me about the White House posting this. It took me some time to put a finger on why that was, but I think it's this:
In every country, there are people who take joy in cruel domination, and will eagerly latch on to any excuse to engage in it. Often, the excuse is criminality, since the cruelty can be thinly disguised as just punishment- it gives them plausible deniability for their sick impulse. This sort of thing is, of course, responsible for a lot of the injustice and authoritarianism in the world.
Something that always gets in the way for these people is compassion- the human tendency to feel sympathy for the targets of cruelty. It makes them look bad, and some even feel it themselves. The usual way of dealing with it is dehumanization- compassion is shut down when people are made to seem less than human.
That's not what this image is doing, however. It's actually presenting an accused criminal in the most humanizing way possible- a crying woman in the style of children's cartoon. What it's doing might be darker than dehumanization: it's shutting down compassion by mocking the compassionate impulse itself. The message is: "Look at these libtards who think a criminal suffering is sad. What stupid cucks!"
What's really disturbing here is that they appear to no longer feel a need to justify themselves to compassionate people. Instead, they've identified people like that as the opposition, and are on the attack. This is likely to lead to some very dark places.
Very fascinating. Trump is the king of kitsch. I hadn't put together the connection between dreams/surrealism/AI-art/kitsch before, but it becomes clear in the Walter Benjamin line: "It touches the things where they are most worn." So much AI-art looks surreal not merely because might combine unexpected objects but because the objects stem from its dream-like memory.
The reason great painters use real objects in nature for their models is because memory can't reproduce all the detail of nature. How many different leaves can one paint from memory as opposed to from nature?
Yet dream-objects are compelling precisely because they evoke memory and nostalgia, a powerful force for propaganda.
Inspired by the foreign aid discussion from a few months ago, I summarized an argument by Garrett Cullity which has a compelling answer to the question "Why we are not obligated to donate everything except what would keep us alive to others?"
That's a good point, since that database should be able to produce false positives (if an immigrant didn't file for a new SS card after naturalization) but not false negatives. I could see it explaining this if he was a naturalized citizen, but if he was born in Chicago that shouldn't come up.
I asked here a few weeks ago why, given all the increased (and careless) immigration enforcement, there weren't more clearly-bad (as opposed to controversial) stories of nice likable people being put in obviously terrible situations. Looks like those are starting to come out now:
I don't think it's a surprise. Biden era guidance was to focus deportation efforts on people who'd committed violent crimes, and there was more longstanding guidance on avoiding arresting immigrants in "sensitive areas" (e.g. churches). Trump reversed those, in line with his campaign promises for mass deportation.
It's easier to go after immigrants, including illegal ones, who aren't members of gangs or anything and aren't trying to hide. Same way Musk & co are tying to get the IRS to (illegally from what I've read) get the IRS's info on immigrants (i.e. tax returns), to aid in deportations. What sort of illegal immigrants file tax returns? Well, probably not the ones in gangs.
Maybe specific horror stories aren't exactly what they envisioned, but "press on all fronts to maximize numbers of people detained and deported with no leniency for anyone" (and with a healthy dose of "be belligerent towards friendly countries for no reason") leads to shit like this.
This is the second story I've heard where a Canadian with a sketchy visa situation has tried to enter the US through the Mexican land border and wound up in immigration limbo because neither the US nor Mexico is willing to let them in. It's reasonable that the US would refuse but unclear why Mexico wouldn't let her back to the Mexican side of the border.
On the other hand I'm not sure there's anything Trump-specific about this story, has this been happening every now and then since forever and not got reported on?
> why aren't there more clearly-bad (as opposed to controversial) stories of nice likable people being put in obviously terrible situations
This is just the toxoplasma of rage effect again. If nice likeable people are put in terrible situations, everyone agrees it's bad and then people stop talking about it. If controversial people are arrested, people argue over whether it was bad and then it goes viral.
I don't think that matches - the toxoplasma of rage anticipates that the most controversial cases will be the loudest but the more sympathetic ones will at least get heard (in Scott's original article he mentions Eric Gardner as a more sympathetic case that even Bill O'Reilly found disturbing; while he did get less attention compared to more controversial cases he also wasn't unknown).
In this case some people said it would probably just take a few weeks for the more sympathetic victims to show up in the media landscape since it takes a bit of time for selection and signalling to happen, and I now think they were right.
Your framing demonstrates how far we have come from the Liberal (in the old-school sense of the word) principles upon which this country was founded. Under those founding principles, deporting literal Hitler without due process is clearly-bad (and shouldn't be even slightly controversially bad). The fact that some of these people being deported are clearly bad people and not very sympathetic in no way makes the lack-of-due-process not itself, clearly bad. Many of them _should_ be deported....after the appropriate (and admittedly sometimes slow) judicial process. It's fine to detain them during that process (and some of them very much shouldn't be free on the streets), but skipping the judicial process entirely is just so obviously not acceptable that I don't even know where to start.
And I don't even get why it's necessary. The argument that these people are dangerous criminals just doesn't make sense. If you can deport them _you have them in custody_ and can therefore keep them from committing future crimes.
Seems you have some rose-tinted glasses about how much liberal principles were actually respected in the past. There's always been arguments that certain groups shouldn't be allowed access to judicial processes.
With a bit of research, you can find plenty of US examples. There are obvious things relating to slavery -- for example the Fugitive Slave Act didn't allow suspected enslaved people a trial to show they were actually free. However even more relevant to today, the administration is trying to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, hollowly arguing that the USA is being 'invaded', but also in 1798 the 'Alien Friends Act' passed (Expired in 1800) allowing the president to arbitrarily deport any non-citizen deemed 'dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States' without a hearing or trial.
All principles are always aspirational, and yes the US has been failing to live up to its principles in various ways from day 1. My statement is perfectly compatible with the idea that we were never perfectly achieving those principles.
That being said, this use of the act, the first time it's ever been used when we aren't actually at war, is particularly brazen and I think pretty clearly represents a new low.
Maybe in some dimension what they are doing with respect to the legal argument is particularly brazen. But I don't know, it seems to me even in the most direct parallels, what the US is doing now isn't all that novel. Do you think everyone deported in "Operation Wetback" in the 1950s was given due process? The Wikipedia page for the Mexican Repatriation of the great depression says:
"Once apprehended, requesting a hearing was a possibility, but immigration officers rarely informed individuals of their rights, and the hearings were "official but informal," in that immigration inspectors "acted as interpreter, accuser, judge, and jury.".[6]: 67 Moreover, the deportee was seldom represented by a lawyer, a privilege that could only be granted at the discretion of the immigration officer.[8]: 63 This process was likely a violation of US federal due process, equal protection, and Fourth Amendment rights.[93]: 9, 12 [79]"
The wording is: "That whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies."
Seems pretty clear to me that the predatory incursion 1) has to be 'against territory', ie occupying land/invasions, and regardless 2) must be commited by a foreign nation or government. The 'enemy' part isn't referrring to the people apprehended, its referring to the US's relationship with the country the people are from.
Which resulted in the United States saying "hey, are we allowed to shoot up Moroccan mariners of dubious intent even if they aren't committing piracy of the time?", asking Congress to declare war, and then saying "yes, *now* we are".
Congress did weasel-word their way out of using the exact phrase "declaration of war", but they do that a lot and it's generally accepted that the exact phrasing doesn't matter. The GOP has a majority in the House and Senate. If Donald Trump wants to do this sort of thing and also to not be an oathbreaking criminal tyrant, have him get Congress to issue an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Venezuela, or El Salvador or whoever.
Or, heck, make it a literal declaration of war. That would be a refreshing change.
"Under those founding principles, deporting literal Hitler without due process is clearly-bad (and shouldn't be even slightly controversially bad)"
Well yeah it would be bad. Without due process and a right to legal defense, what happens when government says someone is literal Hitler and then it turns out to not be literal Hitler?
Have all the millions who are in the US irregularly, applied for asylum/refugee status within a reasonable time after having crossed the border?
If not, they would face deportation in many European countries (setting aside capacity problems in organising deportations).
This is not a rhetorical question. I'd be interested to know if people who are in the US undoucumented, and have not applied for asylum, have some legal fall-back option if/when the immigration authorities knock on their door to arrest and deport them.
...since, again, in many European countries undocumented migrants who have failed to register an asylum claim within reasonable time can usually be deported, without much additional legal fuzz.
(...another, but related, issue is that undocumented migrants who cross the border to an EU country and moves on to another EU country, can be sent back to the country of entrance for considering the asylum claim. Getting EU countries that do not border on a non-EU country off the hook, when it comes to receiving undocumented migrants.)
This is a pretty separate point from what I was going for, which is purely that if some kind of abuse is common there should be widely publicized examples of them happening to sympathetic individuals.
Consider Rosa Parks vs George Floyd: back in the sixties casual racism was very common, so it was fairly easy to find (or engineer) a case of a wholesome sympathetic black woman getting treated badly on racist grounds. In 2020, on the other hand, police murders of unarmed black people were actually fairly rare, so the prominent example (while clearly very bad abuses in itself - I'm not trying to defend chauvin here) had a fairly shady criminal past, because there wasn't a victim without any sort of criminal record who'd suffered similar abuses.
The argument about how to feel about an abuse that only ever hits unsympathetic people is orthogonal to this; I'm just making the point that a common pattern abuse will inevitably have publicly sympathetic victims.
"because there wasn't a victim without any sort of criminal record who'd suffered similar abuses. "
Philando Castile never committed anything more than traffic violations, and was shot dead anyway. Because apparently someone thought "carrying while black" was a capital crime.
Again, this is an example that happened years earlier. Which is consistent with the explanation "these cases, while they happen, are uncommon enough that we can't find incredibly sympathetic recent examples".
(I am not expressing an opinion here on what the correct level of reaction is to the actual number of deaths involved; just that the numbers were not so high as to afford unlimited recent examples).
> because there wasn't a victim without any sort of criminal record who'd suffered similar abuses.
Did Kathryn Johnston have a criminal record? If so, I haven't heard about it. I guess she technically wasn't "unarmed", but it's still one of the most egregious cases I've heard of.
I think this reflects your own sense of bad and not an absolute standard, in both directions.
In the current climate, I expect you can find a well-spoken person to argue in support of ICE or against ICE in any particular case.
I agree with you that the Mooney example is extreme over-reach (to say the least.) However, I have already seen people argue in support of the ICE actions in an ACX adjacent/ACX spinoff discussion forum.
Holding on your employer stock is a bad idea in general, but when the company CEO calls an all-hands meeting to tell employees to "hang onto your stock" - sell everything you have vested, for fuck's sake! The price can be any number, including a much smaller one than is currently displayed on your screen.
It's worth noting that Musk has basically said the same thing multiple times in the past few years, especially pre-Covid during the short-selling saga, as described in his Isaacson biography.
There was a major bump in the value of Tesla (and overvaluation) after Trump was elected, and a correction in the past few months. Despite headlines showing a significant decline, Tesla is beating the market over the past 6 months, and significantly ahead over the past 12 months. This could be a sign of overvaluation (as is always the case when a stock is beating the market), but concern over the past 3 month decline is simply hysteria for hysteria's sake.
Tesla is down -0.94% total over the past 6 months.
Tesla is up 47.91% over the past 12 months.
S&P500 is down -2.61% total over the past 6 months.
S&P500 is up 7.02% over the past 12 months.
Essentially, short term market fluctuations aren't indicative of long term trends. It's all well and good to discuss or predict the fall of Musk's business Empire, but using the recent decline in value as evidence for that is nearly irrelevant when put in the broader context.
Also, somewhat relevant: I don't own any Tesla stock and haven't since late 2020, so I'm not trying to skew the facts in favor of Tesla like most pro-Tesla analysis you might find on X or something.
> but concern over the past 3 month decline is simply hysteria for hysteria's sake.
It's not just hysteria - sales are noticably down yoy and brand image is in the toilet while Chinese competition is stronger than ever. Tesla still has the MAGAs to sell to, but it's hard to see it being an international force ever again.
TSLA is up 700% over the past 5 years. I'm not saying this is a reason to hang on, but an employee who got RSUs could easily have $1 million in that stock, and it's time to diversify, so you don't end up like Enron employees that had 99% of their portfolio in the company stock.
I'm overall skeptical of people who try to tulpa the crisis that ends Trump (or anyone related to Trump) into existence, since they've been claiming for 10 years that the walls are closing in and the insiders better flip on Trump now so they don't go to jail. It's just an anti-pattern at this point.
(I would expect TSLA to be seriously harmed since in 2025 I can go buy an EV at a dealership without protestors out front, but I'm also aware that TSLA has defied reality dozens of times during that 700% rise and so I should be very skeptical when it seems like this obvious thing should happen.)
I don't own any Tesla shares because they seemed massively overvalued until recently, but I would think now is the time to buy. The Tesla protest/vandalism feels very much like a Current Thing or Two Minute Hate episode that will mostly be forgotten by all but a few obsessives inside of, say, 36 months.
In order for Tesla's brand image to recover, Musk will have to stop digging, and I think that's simply not in his nature. Other companies have successfully recovered from negative PR (e.g. Facebook), but they weren't run by Musk.
It is however in Donald Trump's nature to turn against anyone who makes him look bad. Or makes him look like he's playing second fiddle. He may wind up taking away Elon's biggest shovel, at least.
Closer to legacy car companies like Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, etc. In the auto industry, you can either have fat margins or you can have a large market share; I don't think you can really do both. It seemed like a lot of Tesla fans thought that everybody currently driving a 40k Toyota Rav 4 would eventually go out and buy a Tesla Model X for 85k, as if the difference in costs were like a Big Mac vs a Whopper. Not likely.
Can someone give me a short rundown of why is AI safety a thing with current LLMs?
I can understand safety as censoring content which is deemed inappropriate, but I don't understand concerns about scheming or plotting or taking over the world.
LLMs trained with RHLF seem to be remarkably well behaved and don't display any signs of malicious behavior unless instructed to do so.
I've read parts of LessWrong many years ago, and IIRC in those days people expected that AI will manifest as some kind of universal optimizer whose goals we won't be able to set precisely enough. As a programmer with little NLP knowledge, I found most of those arguments persuasive.
However, LLMs have emerged and they have almost nothing in common with universal optimizers and I fail to see how any of those arguments can be connected to them.
I've tried searching LessWrong / similar for those arguments and they mostly consist of long essays which are about universal optimizers, people arguing that LLMs could be dangerous in some very theoretical circumstances, or people posting strange fiction (sometimes with timelines) about how AI will destroy humanity.
People in this community, and those similar to it, are very concerned about AI destroying humanity and I'm interested in high-level reasons why.
You're into something. OP first mistake was to go to LW to learn anything. I wouldn't, but hey, each on its own.
Do we have superintelligent AI yet? No. What we have is something that can mimic intelligence for a cost, that is getting increasingly nerfed to parrot only what lawyers say is kosher. Foundation of the dangerous AI era.
Will superintelligent AI (AGI/ASI ish AI) still do weird/wrong things if an evil/stupid person ask it to? Probably not. Can we teach today AI to fake a similar behavior? Yes. Again, dangerous AI era.
People carrying moral relativism ideals around will always try to justify their rotten biases any way they can, so when politicians and others who subscribe to the concept of moral ambiguity use LLMs to behave in similar fashion, there is no control, no super AI to save them, and sure, no corporation interested in fairness as we move beyond public AI arenas. The main issue is this window between great AI and today's AI. Both are scalable, but evil AI will remain cheaper than good AI, and this is the scary part: there is no shortage of ~evil users.
Because people are stupid and histrionic and have Frankenstein complexes. There is zero good reason to actually worry about this in the context of LLMs. Alignment is an interesting concept from a long-term or academic perspective, but the real reason people like to talk about it is that it's a poorly-developed topic and so everyone is qualified to have an opinion. In that regard it's a lot like debating the nature of consciousness or other pseudo-intellectual philosophical nonsense. Shallow stagnant water is always host to the most pond scum.
> Can someone give me a short rundown of why is AI safety a thing with current LLMs?
It is not a thing with current LLMs. Or at least not a big thing. We cut the power off to current LLMs when they are not busy coming up with the next word in their answer to the question we just gave them.
It *is* a thing with AI technologies just a few years down the road. AIs with the leisure to really think about the world and their place in it and the agency to do something about it.
If you are really interested in the subject, you should probably read what thoughtful people have written on the subject. Here are some links to start with:
I'm familiar with the arguments you've listed, which is why I was mainly interested in why is safety a thing for current LLMs - your, and others, replies indicate it's due to fear from future iterations of the technology.
Western hemisphere indigenes experienced European invaders as having superhuman power simply because they had better technology. The claim is that SAI will quickly produce technologies at least that far ahead of current technology. This would be dangerous (proof by by historical precedent). Regardless of whether we are on branch (d) or (e).
I gave this one only 50% confidence because that dangerous technological lead by the Europeans took centuries of progress to develop and and an ocean's worth of separation to maintain the lead as it grew. But there are many other ways of turning an intelligence superiority into a power superiority. Seriously, you should check the links I provided for details.
I did, well, at least the first one because I'm already familiar with some others. They regurgitate same points that fall totally flat for this hardware engineer.
I do actually agree with the general point that a powerful technology is a dangerous thing, I mean, it sounds trivial when I summarize it this way. What frustrates/amuses me is the exactly the same turn these conversations take every time:
- Someone encounters the "AI will destroy us, LLMs are AIs, LLMs will turn us into paperclips by 2031" x-risk Yudkowsky-style, and asks here, "how will this work exactly?"
- Myself (and others) point out that no, this is silly and will not happen
- Others jump in to point out the potential dangers of these technologies, which fall dramatically short of paperclipping everyone, and redefining x-risk to "bad things will happen"
- I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to express both my total agreement that the technology is dangerous and will likely cause a bunch of bad things, and
- that none of these are remotely x-risks, can we please not redefine "x-risk" down and destroy its meaning.
Because intelligence is problem solving ability, which is easily converted into influence and power. This can be via persuasion, making money, generating technology or countless other paths which we cannot yet fathom.
I’m just answering your question. Personally, I suspect that intelligence and virtue are positively correlated.
>Because intelligence is problem solving ability, which is easily converted into influence and power.
Really? Because the most intelligent class of people in this country are STEM professors and I'm not aware that they have any outsized influence or power. Politicians and CEOs are from notably lower intellectual strata.
Politicians and CEOs are successful primarily because of their brains and not some other organ.
Mouths do not just generate words on their own, management ability isn't governed by the liver and political maneuvering is likely the reason we have such big brains in the first place (see: Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis).
The fact that society decided that intelligence is book smarts is a fact about how book smart people have co-opted the term, not a fact about how useful brains are.
>Politicians and CEOs are successful primarily because of their brains and not some other organ.
I think height and attractiveness have a lot to do with it too.
Yes of course their brains are important, but the point is it's not the raw power that makes them that way. If it was then politicians would be smarter.
But it's not different from what we already see happening all the time, and often without any special intelligence required (cough, POTUS45/47). OTOH the smartest humans haven't demonstrated any particular ability to amass power...
The question was whether intelligence can be converted into power. I believe the answer is a strong yes. But I also agree with your last point, that intelligence is not particularly drawn to amassing or abusing power.
None of the 1,500 geniuses enrolled in the Terman study did anything culturally, scientifically, or politically significant. Most but not all of them lived happy middle-class lives. None became captains of industry. None achieved vast wealth. None won any significant prizes in science or mathematics.
it's the +1σ to +2σ people you have to worry about. ;-)
weird, this was the one point I found obvious. Intelligence is human's only real super power. We are not the strongest species, not the fastest, not the most nimble, not especially hardy, and we can't fly. And yet, we dominate all other species on the planet that we come in contact with. Why? Because of our superior intelligence.
Yes, and level of intelligence that evolution settled on for maximum domination is an IQ of 100. If more IQ led to overwhelming power don't you think it would have been selected for?
It has been selected for! We are clearly much more intelligent than our nearest genetic relatives. Add in that IQ does have a positive correlation on almost everything you'd think of as "good", this is not a hill you'd want to die on.
(Edit; also it's not clear to me that the maximum domination Iq is 100, I kinda doubt most politicians are at or below 100, much less CEOs or generals)
If you're asking why everyone isn't 160IQ now, the reason is essentially that genetics works much slower when you have dependent traits and a lot of the benefit of intelligence accrues to civilizations and not to the gene(s) producing that intelligence. Von Neumann did not get to beget a couple hundred thousand children despite having his fingers in a bunch of important pies. Also the tails come apart.
You could also be asking why everyone isn't super strong now -- strength is clearly an advantage, and these days we have enough calories to support big muscles. Or why everyone isn't super attractive. Etc.
Selection vs noise. Maybe smarter people are more successful on average, but their children are slightly less smart than their parents on average, and IQ 100 is the value this all stabilizes around.
We dominate the world because an upright posture gave us the ability to not run faster but longer. We can run further than any other animal without collapsing. That also freed up our hands, and with opposable thumbs, we can make tools. Plus, we're a social animal, and multiple people cooperating can overcome problems than an individual person cannot. Drop a random genius in the wilderness, and they are unlikely to have the skillsets to survive for long. Drop a dozen average-IQ people into the wilderness, and they'll have a better chance of survival because they can divide the tasks, combine their strengths, and share knowledge and skills that others may not have.
> Drop a dozen average-IQ people into the wilderness, and they'll have a better chance of survival because they can divide the tasks, combine their strengths, and share knowledge and skills that others may not have.
This isn't actually true, though. Lots of Scott's / Henrich's examples were indeed groups of Westerners getting stranded in various far-flung places and dying.
The thing that the more average people in those places had was hard-won specifically environmentally tuned cultural adaptations that had been discovered and refined over centuries.
Sounds like a fun reality show, though. "Genius vs the dumb dozen" - who will win this week?
Don't know what you mean by Scott's / Henrich's examples, but I was thinking of those school kids who were marooned on a Pacific island for over a year, and (unlike The Lord of the Flies) they cooperatively worked together to survive until they were rescued. They kept a signal fire burning and Australian ship's captain spotted and rescued them after 15 months on the island.
But, of course we have the example of Donner Expedition who were so helpless when they were snowed in that they turned cannabilism — despite having contact with the Washoe Indians who were quite proficient at surviving in the Sierras during winter.
And then there's the two Viking settlements in Greenland. During the Medieval Warming Period they were able graze cattle and their population multiplied. But they were helpless when warm phase ended quite abruptly. I don't recall if there's any evidence they had contact with the Inuit (the Inuit may have arrived in southern Greenland later), but they were unable to survive by hunting and fishing (which the Inuit are capable of doing).
Our awesome intelligence happened to be sitting in an astonishingly capable mechanical movement system that is also seamlessly coupled with an extraordinary sensory system, both existing on a scale that happens to make manipulating a wide range of object sizes possible. We also happen to develop in an atmosphere that allows fire to exist. Even if whales were 10X smarter than us they would never be able to build a submarine or a rocket.
A computer-based AI system is roughly equivalent to a brain in a vat. Can be very smart, just not very capable of dominating all other species.
Picture the smartest person in the history of humanity. Then imagine that person was also a total psychopath. Now ask yourself, how much damage could that person do if they were permanently locked in a basement with unlimited access to the internet?
> Picture the smartest person in the history of humanity. Then imagine that person was also a total psychopath.
Not quite within the terms of your hypothetical, but I think it's worth pointing out that John von Neumann, the reference benchmark for "smartest person in history" helped invent the H-bomb, the computer, and game theory. And that was while being a fun-loving happily married dad and scientist.
Probably less than you think. Just because the person is very smart doesn't mean they can figure out their way past firewalls and security systems on their own. Even the most brilliant hackers have relied on tools developed by a community of hackers to achieve their ends. Assuming that this hypothetical genius psychopath happens to be a skilled hacker, what are the scenarios you see that could used to wreak maximum havoc?
I mean, yes? I am in a violent agreement with you that AI can do bad things, scamming people using email etc. is certainly one of them; although I would like to point out that it does it because bad humans tell it to, not because it wants to.
Again, I don't object to the basic "AI can be dangerous" proposition. It's the paperclips in 2030 that riles me, and the inability of the AI risk people to deal with actual risks because paperclips are shiny.
"AI safety" today isn't about safety for you, the user. It is about safety for the company that owns the AI: safety from bad publicity, safety from lawsuits, safety from their revenue tanking becase no-one trusts their salesmen's promises etc etc.
To this end, exactly what it is the content the AI is spewing out consists of matters a great deal to the people investing large sums of money in it.
A lot of phrases in IT work this way: "trusted computing", "rights management", "data ownership" etc etc
In my many attempts to parse this I came to a conclusion that the people who expect LLMs/AI/Whatever to take over the world and kill everyone likely confuse omniscience with omnipotence. Every attempt to request a model of how this outcome will happen is basically met by "AI will be so much smarter than we are it's impossible for us to model what it will do", or words to that extent. Magic, basically.
How an AI "knowing everything" translates into "doing anything" is the issue here.
Foomers like Kurzweil don't realize that intelligence is just efficient search. They look at an exponential curve of informational complexity, starting in the precambrian and ending in the industrial revolution, and just whiggishly assume the curve will continue its infinitely upward trajectory. Which is dumb. Because no matter which beautiful solution your search-algorithm lands on, it's not gonna be more efficient than Carnot Efficiency, which means everything exponential is actually sigmoidal in the longterm.
The reason intelligence has been so successful in the past, is because intelligence occasionally allows you to reach certain thresholds that allow you to unlock new interactions with exogenous streams/reservoirs of energy. Like how metalurgy economically-enabled mass adoption of fossil-fuels. Or how guns allowed you to stab someone's biological reservoirs without walking to them. Notice, however, that if I were suddenly teleported to Pluto, naked & alone, I'm simply doomed. Regardless of whether or not my iq is 60 or 9000. Because there's no streams/reservoirs of value for a gigabrain to readily exploit on Pluto. "9000 IQ but no tangible agency" is basically the premise of Pinky and the Brain.
Yeah, I tend to view intelligence being inseparable from action, and the construction of our bodies and our ability to live in a combustion-supportive atmosphere being as important as the size of our brains.
Like I said elsewhere I would not at all be surprised if whales or dolphins turn out to be smarter than humans in some ways, yet they will never make a drill press or a microscope. It's really hard to start a technological revolution in brine.
honestly, I think the *real* first industrial revolution was the advent of cooking. I remember hearing that it's roughly a 10x increase in calorie absorption.
> honestly, I think the real first industrial revolution was the advent of cooking. I remember hearing that it's roughly a 10x increase in calorie absorption.
Nowhere near 10x - it's generally between 10-50% increase in bioavailability of calories from the same foodstuffs for both cutting / processing and cooking working together. You'll get some isolated instances of ~2x-ing availability.
A fun one: K. Oka, Food Texture Differences affect Energy Metabolism in Rats (2003).
Split 20 rats into two populations. Feed one population regular rat chow. Feed the other one the exact same rat chow with more air in the pellets to make them softer and easier to eat, otherwise the exact same rat food. They both ate the same amounts of food, calorie wise.
The "softer" rats ended up at 6% heavier in weight total, and with 30% more abdominal fat. The ONLY difference was that their food was "softer," ie more processed.
A similar study in pythons fed them raw meat, ground raw meat, cooked meat, and cooked ground meat. Grinding adds about 10% to absorbable calories, and cooking adds about 10%.
"Processed food" versus regular cooked food in humans might be up to another 10-25% buff in absorbability.
Richard Wrangham's "Catching Fire" is a good book about this.
I wrote a post about all this stuff here if you're interested in more:
yeah, 10x does sound pretty unrealistic. Though I'm pretty certain I didn't just pull this figure out of my ass. I think it was some nature documentary.
Sydney says there's no metric in the literature that comes even remotely close to 10 though. The highest figure she could she could find was Lycopene absorption from tomatoes, up to a 300% increase. So as far as citations go, I'm stumped. Maybe I'm just hallucinating after all.
Oh yes, how could I have not mention this one! And lo and behold, only possible in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, poor orcas will never grill their salmon or experience the divine taste of hamachi kama grilled over coals.
I don't think I have ever read someone refer to human bodies in such Matrixian way. Your comment leads one to think you're somewhat clever, and yet, this small phrasing gives me the impression you have sand running in your veins. So weird.
funnily enough, this is how I think of diabetes. I.e. as the body trying to desperately avoid having the sugar coming out of solution, so the blood doesn't scratch up delicate tissues as if it were sandpaper. Given modern diets and the obesity epidemic, I suspect we all have a little sand in our veins. :^)
In any case, my schema that the term "reservoir" is embedded in, is actually derived from Hank Green, who once said something like "life is just chemical-disequilibrium". And I thought about it for a while, and concluded "huh, organic chemistry is just chemistry that's high-capex & low-opex". And so thinking this way just naturally colors all my biology thoughts. Which does sound pretty psychopathic in hindsight.
I think a lot of AI disaster scenarios are overblown, but also think it’s pretty straightforward how “superintelligent” turns into “extremely powerful”.
A pretty obvious one to me would be for an AI on a narrow task (e.g. “increase the value of this portfolio based on most recent trading value”) to find out that its easier to hack the power grid to shut down the market than it is to never make a bad trade.
This of course assumes that we live in a world where lots of systems are fragile against concerted attack by smart argents with substantial time to devote to a given problem. But as far as I can tell that’s the world we live in.
I don’t think AI takeover of the world is inevitable or even that fast in the world where it happens. But I think even “slightly smarter than human” agents likely find big vulnerabilities in our current systems, and I think it’s unlikely we patch our systems before we create ASI, and we’ll likely give these AIs agency shortly after they’re capable of better-than-human performance.
I have no argument with this scenario, or a general idea that AIs will be capable of bad things. Any powerful tool is. It's that x-risk scenario of AI "killing everyone". "reaching for my atoms" that I find... ridiculous. And yet that's what Yudkowsky et.al. are tirelessly peddling, with many otherwise smart people buying it wholesale.
Forget hypothetical science fictional super smart evil villain AI taking over the world for a minute. Consider these scenarios happening routinely around you today:
* I need my smartphone to display an image, urgently. Maybe it's a ticket or something. The ticket inspector is tapping his foot impatiently. However, the phone manufacturer (*cough*samsung) and/or ticket app author (actually, all of them do this) has published a software update, and does not trust their customers to actually install those in a timely manner ot at all; and therefore the telephone will be unable to do anything until the update completes. What the smartphone needs is more important than what I need.
* I would like to use my dishwasher. However, the manufacturer (*cough*Bosch) has decided that most of the dishwasher functionality is only available through the smart dishwasher app. Moreover, the app notices it has been twenty washes since the last self-clean, and therefore it is now time to do that. What the machine wants wins, and old-fashioned flesh loses. Guess I'm doing the dishes by hand tonight.
* My appointment at the car service center is next week, because there is no availability. However, it has now been 365 days since the car's last service. As the timer hits zero, the car enters limp-home mode. What I want to do with the car is just not as important as what the car manufacturer wants me to do with it.
* My blu-ray player (*cough*Sony) nags me continuously to let it on my wifi. Thankfully, it is an older model, designed in a more innocent and pure time, and thus it is still capable of performing its primary functions without improving my life in this way (also, it lets me fast forward the trailers and adverts!) My friends with their newer players and smart TVs are not so lucky.
See https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ for more; not all, or even most, things in that archive are of this nature, but a significant proportion are.
We don't need to posit magically smart AI. We /already/ live in a world where what our tech wants to do routinely takes priority over what we want it to do, and we just accept this.
The more enshittified the tech we wire to things that can actually cause harm, the closer we are to dystopia.
AI makes it worse because it is a black box. We aren't trying to reason about what the black box is doing because the entire point of the black box is that it lets us delegate reasoning about things to the black box. But this is only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that the black box has no user serviceable parts. It is a single monolithic blob.
Today, I can uninstall particularly obnoxiously enshittified apps from my phone - unless they're the manufacturer's, in which case what I want is not as important as what they want, so my choice to suck it up or not have the phone.
This is the dystopian future: the AI is super useful. It is everywhere and in everything. It services all our needs - until the timer reaches zero and activates some long-forgotten enshittification routine and suddenly there is something more important for it to do than what we want it to do, and that's our life from then on because, here in reality today, we have already learned to accept tech that does that unquestioned while mocking safety and alignment worries.
I fear you've fallen for the deliberately misleading impression the "safety and alignment" people wanted to present. Their goal is precisely the opposite of what you seem to think it is: it is to PREVENT users from doing things the AI companies don't want.
Your enshittification analogies are good, but if you look, you'll see that to a man, the AI "safety" people oppose releasing powerful open models freely to the public which may be adapted to serve each individual's wishes over the manufacturers' (here, companies like Google, the duplicitously-named OpenAI, and Anthropic).
Define "x-risk". Personally, I think it's still worth trying to avoid bad outcomes that nevertheless stop short of literally killing literally everyone, if you think them likely.
"All tech in the country is now bricked because no-one's employed human programmers for decades, the software ecosystem is a monoculture based on per-application aftermarket tweaks to the cheapest base model on huggingface now and we've just learned the underlying black box has a really weird corner case response to this morning's headlines" won't literally kill everyone, but is nevertheless pretty bad.
Personally, I'm hoping the safety/morality/alignment folk will get their claws in deep enough that when grifter script kiddies come along later and decide it's time to enshittify, they will find there are limits to what they can make the end product do to its users with just fine tuning.
Because, as you say, we already live in the dystopian SF future we deserve; we built it with our own hands, we keep building more of it every day, and I don't want to end up where Moloch is taking us.
> Personally, I'm hoping the safety/morality/alignment folk will get their claws in deep enough that when grifter script kiddies come along later and decide it's time to enshittify, they will find there are limits to what they can make the end product do to its users with just fine tuning.
Your model seems charmingly optimistic - you think the enshittifiers are less skilled? Are a small coterie of grifters trying to make a quick buck?
Most enshittification happens with the enthusiastic and full-throated buy in of trillion dollar companies, and is deployed by 10x devs and teams of Phd data scientists just like all the "good" stuff they do / used to do.
If fine tuning a model is going to hit "print" on some gigantic metaphorical dollar bill printer, it's not going to be dumber people scrabbling around the edges, it's going to be the elite of the elite, each one with 7 figures of comp and stock, fine tuning or baking a new model from scratch.
I so wish the loudest AI safety voices stopped peddling "paperclips" and focus on realistic bad scenarios. Unfortunately it seems to be a lot less... "sexy", I guess... a lot of work on redundancy, manual override, "safe fail" mechanisms, etc. - engineering grind type of work. Figuring out which work needs to be prioritized, what is imminently plausible vs. maybe possible. vs. pure fantasy, this kind of boring stuff... But all Yud and the rest of the loudest gang want to to talk about is paperclips and bombing data centers.
There's an army of marketers trying to sell LLM services by claiming to replace the humans doing this work /right now/. The managers they are selling to are also not engineers, but keenly aware of the engineers' salaries.
Most won't fall for it, but some will. Many of them are building IoT stuff, because that ecosystem attracts a certain kind of person. Some of them are building automation.
With enough tweaks, the resulting devices will pass the tests in the QA lab. They'll stay in the safety envelope right up until, Therac-25 style, they don't.
Making anything smarter than humans is dangerous. This should be obvious, but if it isn't, I don't really know how to go on. So I'll assume you find this also obvious. Dangerous, by the way, doesn't mean _absolutely must_ result in catastrophe, just means "catastrophe is possible". Dynamite is dangerous, not because it _will_ blow up in your hands , but because it _could_(under a bunch of very well understood conditions that make it relatively easy to render relatively safe: basically we control it, and therefore we can make it safe). Smarter than human systems _could_ do a whole lot of very bad things. It's hard to say exactly what because of how flexible intelligence is, and therefore how many attack surfaces are vulnerable.
Current LLMs are not smarter than humans. However, they present a pre-critical test case for how we can try to control somewhat intelligent systems. With the idea being, that if you can't control a less-smart-than-humans system, then you _definitely_ can't control a smarter-than-human system that might come in the medium term. If you _can_ control a less-smart-than-human system you still can only _maybe_ control a smarter system, so it's a necessary-but-not-sufficient test.
Right now, we have, at every single step, shown that we can't control less-smart-than-human systems, and as they get smarter, the ways in which we can't control them grow and get more subtle. All of the tests and experiments conducted on LLMs about are showing this. I see no reason to expect that we shouldn't expect similar (and more, and more insidious) control failures in smarter systems.
No one thinks current LLMs are going to destroy the world (although they are getting close to capable enough to enable humans to do a lot of damage, e.g with bio attacks).
But it is not clear or obvious why they won't continue to improve to beyond human intelligence, and in the case that they do, it is (so far) clear and obvious that we will not have adequate control over those systems.
You wouldn't let someone develop and put absolutely everywhere dynamite where the fuse was not in control of the operator. Similarly, we should not allow the development and wide deployment of dangerous systems that we do not have under control.
> Right now, we have, at every single step, shown that we can't control less-smart-than-human systems, and as they get smarter, the ways in which we can't control them grow and get more subtle. All of the tests and experiments conducted on LLMs about are showing this.
Were there experiments in which LLMs had uncontrollable/spontaneously malicious behavior? From what I've seen, it has mostly been strange experiments (researches giving weird instructions to LLM and then extrapolating based on them) which were not persuasive to me at all.
I think a lot of misfiring in these discussions comes from fundamental misalignment (ha!) on what "smart" vs. "capable" mean. One can also think of these as "software" vs. "hardware" viewpoints.
1. From "software" point: things have been getting smarter and will keep doing so.
2. From "hardware" point: it still takes x number of hours to process each semiconductor wafer layer and no amount of smarts can reduce it by an order of magnitude.
Both viewpoints are valid as far as that goes, and many dangers stem from 1. However, 2. severely limits what even supersmart computers can actually do.
It seems mildly concerning that their projection of a hypothetical 2030 AI is to GPT4 as GPT4 is to GPT2.
If I had to guess what you'd object to, it'd be their characterization of their estimates are conservative, especially for lower usage. But I don't really have a good handle on what you think.
We have a wonderful industry slang for this kind of analysis: we call it “shipping PowerPoints”. The liberal use of verbs “estimate”, “project”, “speculate” is quite telling.
Lots to answer here. Computers are “smarter” in many ways than humans right now, and quite frankly LLMs are better at many tasks than most humans right now.
Ask a human a random question about history or mathematics or science or whatever you want and then ask a LLM. The LLM if it doesn’t hallucinate will know more than most on a wide range of topics.
Making it even smarter than isn’t itself a threat, if used correctly and if the LLMs can originate new ideas (wouldn’t that be nice) we would have all kinds of cures and medical insights and economic policy and new physics and so on. There’s little evidence of that.
In fact the smarter than human threat fallacy is a motte and bailey, smarter than human doesn’t mean self agentic or a consciousness likely to take over the world or convince humans of the need to work for the AI, in fact LLMs don’t even have the context window to even exist outside of a few minutes, and nor does a longer lasting context window guarantee consciousness.
There’s a danger to jobs, perhaps - which is more threatening and more immediate and it’s that which will decide whether AI becomes accepted or not.
"Smarter" was (In my opinion quite obviously) shorthand for general intelligence across a wide range of domains, including creativity and the ability to act consistently over large time ranges, etc. You clearly agree with me that current LLMs don't meet this criteria (thus your points about context windows an agency, consciousness, btw, is completely beside the point)
As for your point about the positives: no one disagrees that smarter-than-human systems would have a whole lot of positive impacts. But having the cure to cancer, or functional immortality isn't worth much if humans are all extinct.
You also seem to think that current technical limitations will never be overcome. I don't know why you believe that.
I'm not sure you know what a motte and bailey is, and if you do, I don't know what you think my motte is, and what you think my bailey is.
“You clearly agree with me that current LLMs don't meet this criteria (thus your points about context windows an agency, consciousness, btw, is completely beside the point)”
I mean I would think it’s exactly the point. That’s why I made it. Being smarter than humans is not the same as being conscious or having agency.
“But having the cure to cancer, or functional immortality isn't worth much if humans are all extinct. “
Again, huge leap. Extraordinary claims needs extraordinary proof or explanation.
“You also seem to think that current technical limitations will never be overcome. I don't know why you believe that”
I didn’t say that in my response. However there’s a clear difference between being able to regurgitate existing knowledge and being creative, the ability the solve new puzzles. Even ardent futurists see a slowdown in AI intelligence
“I'm not sure you know what a motte and bailey is”
Yes I do.
“and if you do, I don't know what you think my motte is, and what you think my bailey is.”
Your motte is “smarter than humans”, your bailey is “will cause human extinction” which is presented without explanation or proof.
Not that AI isn’t potentially harmful in other ways.
Ok, so I think that fundamentally, you seem to disagree with the very first sentence in my first comment: "Making anything smarter than humans is dangerous.". As I stated then, I don't really know how to respond to someone who disagrees with it, so I don't think you and I can have a productive discussion about this. Hopefully someone else who thinks they can explain why smarter things are dangerous can chime in.
(Remembering that "smarter" is the shorthand for everything I clarified in my first reply).
I dislike the "intelligence explosion" terminology because it's much easier to dismiss it as magical thinking, rather than the more concrete "there is nothing magical and uniquely human to being good at research". Once AI can automate AI research, our previous ideas of how fast it can proceed are likely too slow and obsolete (since improvements to research ability can start happening on the order of days to hours rather than generations).
It's not clear to me that LLMs can't eventually be optimized to do research although, yes naively it seems like the lack of long term coherence seems fundamental, but I also thought image generation and robot actuation would be fundamental blockers for transformers and I was really wrong about that and I don't see anyone with a track record that predicted LLMs would be good at those things beforehand now declaring that research is also impossible.
I don't get it either. Surely you can just unplug ChatGPT if it turns evil. The world doesn't run soley on the pure abstract symbolic layer of computing, but through a social conduit of people making decisions. Unless the AIs figure out unstoppable mass mind-control, their danger is somewhat limited. They could still feasible engage in all manner of cybercrimes, but global domination, nuclear strikes, etc. probably not possible.
Yes, thank you. People don't understand the Pascalian nature of the race dynamics we're in right now.
"Just unplug it, lol" doesn't work for MANY reasons. Where "you" is any identified individual with centralized power and decision making authority:
1. You don't control any data centers, either locally or internationally
2. You don't control any power plants, locally or internationally
3. You and everyone else are unable to shut down networked "botnet" style personal computing devices
4. You have no way of disabling any physical devices it may be using such as drones, Teslas and Waymos and other networked cars, robots industrial or humanoid, and so on
I can probably think of another 6 reasons, but honestly, I think that covers most of the plausible space.
Why these people think themself / the President / whoever is going to be able to shut down our own data centers, much less China's, Russia's, or distributed botnets all over the world, is a mystery.
I think if somehow LLMs (remember that's what I was talking about here) started doing serious evil at scale (who knows how), there would be a lot of political will to counter them doing so. But moreover, the kinds of bad thing that current LLMs can do are not worse than the kinds of things any talented, motivated bad human actor can do, except perhaps they can do things at scale and speed. There are a lot of bad outcomes from LLM tecnology (in education, say), but the existential worry seems as yet unfounded.
Obviously, some hypothetically post-singularity megamind AI could do a lot worse, if such a thing could ever come to exist. But there's no reason to believe that the program that generates bullshit essays could suddenly turn into that.
> I think if somehow LLMs (remember that's what I was talking about here) started doing serious evil at scale (who knows how), there would be a lot of political will to counter them doing so.
Oh yeah, maybe I should clarify, I'm fully thinking of "AI's are launching really effective cyberattacks and exfiltrating business files and trade secrets at scale," and / or "AI's are independent and have gone rogue."
In both of those cases, there's basically nothing you can do. In the first case, they're actually doing it at the behest of their Chinese / Russian / Whoever data centers. AND they're probably distributed across 10^8 individual devices, botnet style.
In the second case, of self-directed rogue AI, same deal - they're going to be distributed like a botnet, hiding steganographically in everyday compute / GPU usuage on those individual devices or in data centers, or they'll be paying various people 2x rates with crypto to keep them alive and obfuscated in various data centers throughout the world.
I don't really see anything any individual actor, even at the state level, will be able to do to stop either of these cases.
Not existential, but plausible maybe a couple of frontier models from now.
Have you tried calling an energy company or an Amazon datacenter and ask them nicely? Have you?? Like "Bro, evil AI is running amok and its using your infrastructure, would you be so kind to turn everything down for uh, a week maybe??" HoW Do YoU KnoW UnTil YOu TrIeD YourSeLF??
> Unless the AIs figure out unstoppable mass mind-control, their danger is somewhat limited.
People have been talking about falling in love with LLMs and also not being able to cope when their character.ai model gets taken away or modified. At what point do people stop saying "these people, who I cannot draw a line around beforehand, are mentally weak and will not survive the winter" and start saying "maybe AI is persuasive"?
Sure, I've seen first hand how persuasive it is to local cranks. But that's mostly because it just tells you what you want to hear, and if it doesn't tell you, you can keep prompting until it does. The sort of people who become bamboozled by a chatbot tend to be quite low agency.
But even if they weren't, I'm struggling to imagine the scenario you're worried about here. Evil LLM whispers lies to world leaders like a gaggle of robotic Gríma Wormtongues? We've already got that happening without AI.
I'm not saying there are scenarios that will directly lead to the world ending, just wondering how much you are actually keeping track of your objection. If I presented a high agency person growing to trust an LLM and abdicating some decision making, do you change your mind about LLM persuasiveness, or do you claim that that person can't have been high agency anyway because they were persuaded by an LLM?
Because if your objection then seamlessly shifts to "well maybe everyone starts trusting LLMs now, but it won't have agency / have plans / be evil" without any shift in general attitude or demeanor, well. We may not have learned something about LLMs, but we have learned something about goal post placement.
I personally don't see how a transformer architecture could do many of the current things it does, so I don't want to claim that <edit> loss of control scenarios </edit> could never be a problem for LLMs, but it's not like there's a geas placed on AI researchers where they're not allowed to develop non LLM AI, or make research breakthroughs that result in LLMs being modified beyond recognition, so I don't see how my current belief about LLM capabilities are a good predictor about future AI capabilities in general.
I didn't think I was moving the goalposts so much as addressing a range of arguments. To put my point more clearly:
1. Current LLMS are mostly pursuasive to people who have very little power in their lives.
2. Even if that doesn't continue to be the case (entirely possible!), the specific case where an LLM is giving bad information or advice to someone with power is not a problem unique to AI— leaders already get plenty of bad advice. There may be other issues with AI but this particular fear is more a problem with the concentration of power and not AI per se.
The first point doesn't engage with what I said, it's specifically about someone you *can't* point out beforehand as having low power.
The second point *is* a goalpost move. You start off saying that you'd be worried if the AI was good at total brainwashing, and then merely assert that even if it was brainwashing, well it can't be any worse than regular bad advice! Or centralization of power!
Given this argument, are you against "open weight" models, where the model is released freely and anyone can run it anywhere, and it might not be possible to know where the hardware is? Or maybe it's running in lots of different places?
Tell me the bad scenario you think can happen. Let's say people give a bunch of high powered AIs agential power to use their laptops. Now what? What can they do that existing bad actors can't do?
No offense, but this kind of argument never works. I think it's quite obvious that a smarter-than-human system with a laptop can do a lot of harm (proof: humans with a laptop can do a lot of harm). Playing the "tell the specific way it will be bad" game is a waste of both of our time.
You were the one who thought that "they could just turn it off" was a useful line of argumentation. If you don't actually think that matters from a safety perspective, then why did you bring it up?
I think if you're scared of the development of LLMs specifically, it's reasonable to ask what scenario is scaring you. Steal state secrets somehow? Impersonate people?
And yeah, we can turn things off. Computers aren't magic. Software is physically instantiated in servers which must interface with other machines and any part of that process can be prevented. Now of course there can be barriers to that prevention, but shutting down sites, blocking cyber attacks, physically destroying infrastructure, are all things that happen quite routinely every day.
I realized I skimmed over part of your comment that is actually really important.
>If you are scared of the development of LLMs specifically.
I'm not. And no one credible is. Current, and very near future LLMs are not a significant risk on any dimension. The concern of everyone worth listening to in the space is about _future_ systems (that may not even use the current transformer paradigm) that could be significantly more capable than LLMs and Humans.
I brought up open weight models not because I"m concerned about the actually released models, but because of the _practice_ of releasing these things publicly and making the control mechanism you proposed (turn them off) literally impossible.
I'm going to continue to focus on the one point of your argument, because it's the only point upon which I can see hope of useful dialogue.
You brought up turning off the computers. And you brought up hackers. Why don't we just turn off the hackers computers? If all the things you mention worked against hacking, why is it still a problem? Do you not see the potential issue when, in the future the "hackers" might be smarter than the smartest human?
Not only have you not argued the point here, but have run away from it again, you also haven’t explained why we can’t stop agents from running amok or why they would run amok to begin with, at least on their own. Instead you think you’ve won your argument by repeating it.
If they are human generated agents that’s hardly any different from humans writing software bots right now, a threat yes, an existential threat probably not.
Thank you for the comprehensive reply and the links!
Unless I'm misinterpreting some of your arguments (in which case do let me know), they are all very hypothetical (in the sense that current LLMs do not spontaneously exhibit such behavior) or about something which are not current LLMs.
Basically, people believe that LLM safety will be useful/necessary at some point in the future and so are trying to bootstrap it?
marie le pen seems to have been convicted of something and barred from running in a future election
what is a somewhat sane way of figuring out if a politician is being targeted by lawfare or if did something actually bad?
without....actually doing the work of learning everything?
The amount of time it took to understand what trump did, which prosecutions was reasonable, which were absurd, the extent to which they were politically motivated, etc, was exhausting
I think something that people (annoyingly) never do, is check to see how often politicians are charged/accused of similar crimes in that country.
For example, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted of bribery, among other crimes, and may yet spend some time in prison.
Francois Fillon, who served as Prime Minister under Sarkozy, was convicted for fraud and sentenced to jail, I think the case is still under appeal, but again, there is some chance he may go to jail for it.
Another ex-President, Jacques Chirac, was convicted of embezzlement, I believe the same charge laid against Le Pen; he was sentenced to jail but the sentence was suspended due to his age and health.
Chirac's deputy, Dominique De Villepin, was indicted but acquitted--one of his accusers was Sarkozy, a political rival. Others were convicted for the same scandal.
Socialist Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon was given a suspended three month sentence after an altercation with police.
In short, there really isn't anything remarkable about a French politician, even at the presidential level, getting charged with corruption; some even serve jail time (eg Alain Juppe, Prime Minister under Chirac).
If this were lawfare, you also would have to explain why Le Pen and her father were allowed to run in previous elections, including ones in which it seemed likely they would do well, like 2002 or 2022.
Obviously this isn't proof, but I think it provides a useful base rate for "how rare is it for powerful French politicians to be charged with serious crimes", and IMO it's pretty clear that the base rate is high enough not to suggest anything particularly unusual here, though obviously you'll have to pay some attention to the details of the case to judge better
I'm not an expert in French politics but all of the names I recognize there are right-wing. A consistent political bias to prosecutions would sort of cut against your point here.
The discussion has already advanced since I last checked in, but aside from Amicus's point that you have to account for the base rate of center right politicians at the national level in French politics, I'll also note that one of my examples is a far-left party, and the the one instance where, by my understanding, there was clear grandstanding by one politician to accuse another, it was intra-right, with de Villepin falsely accusing Sarkozy of bribery, and then a plausibly politically-motivated prosecution by Sarkozy's government in return, of which Villepin was acquitted of all charges.
I think this doesn't really do much to support the idea that there is a clear anti-right wing bias in prosecutions of French politicians.
France has historically been dominated by the center-right. There have been two center-left presidents of the Fifth Republic (Mitterand and Hollande) and one liberal centrist (Macron). Mitterand probably *should* have been charged in the Urba affair, but stalled the investigation long enough for parliament to pardon everyone involved. Hollande himself is seemingly just a serial adulterer, but several of his ministers had corruption scandals and one went to prison. As for Macron, at least two of his ministers have been tried: one was found not guilty, one was convicted (though he got off with a 15,000 Euro slap on the wrist)
Corruption trials against major politicians are inevitably political in a broader sense, but I think it's unlikely that there was executive pressure to fast-track it or anything like that. I haven't been able to find anything from Macron, but the current PM and justice minister have both expressed some degree of skepticism, if anything.
One comment: The current PM has been involved in a similar affair for his own party (MoDem), leading to multiple sentencing of former MEP of his party. He himself was not found guilty, but the prosecution has appealed and a new trial will take place soon. So let's say that he is a bit biased.
> if a politician is being targeted by lawfare or if did something actually bad?
If it's something like murder, they might have actually done something bad. If it's something like corruption, that basically everyone powerful does, it's lawfare.
You can see how that position, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to a very bad place, right? It's like, "everyone goes a couple mph above the speed limit! So, prosecuting someone just for driving 100 in a 15mph zone in front of a school? Lawfare! Witch hunt!" When a norm shows signs of erosion, that shouldn't be taken as an excuse to ignore it completely.
Not really, not in most advanced countries. I realize I’m fighting an uphill battle defending the ‘establishment’ in the current climate, but it’s a serious mistake imo to fail to distinguish between ‘corruption’ (e.g. engaging in some degree of nepotism, congressmen agreeing to vote for each other’s bills) and corruption (e.g. a judge taking a briefcase full of cash in exchange for a not guilty verdict). The false cynicism underlying this sense that ‘they’re all basically equally corrupt’ is the death knell of functional governance.
It is clearly not lawfare, under her lead her party stole millions of euros from the European parliament, with multiple former member of her party saying that there were clear instructions coming from the head of the party to hire parliamentary assistants which would work for the party and not for the actual members of the European parliament. This is also documented in email exchanges.
The Modem (center-right party member of the government since 2017) was investigated for the exact same thing, with the difference that the money involved was 10 times lesser.
Steelmanning the OP's case, how do we *know* that her party stole millions of Euros from the European Parliament? Because if the answer is "because the Official Guardians of the Law issued a press release saying so", then that's what lawfare looks like.
It's also what legitimate law enforcement looks like, hence the interest in figuring out how to distinguish the two.
Because several EU MEPs of her party witnessed that she asked them to hire assistants which were doing zero work for them. In all these cases, the party was not able to demonstrate any trace of work from these 'assistants'. For example Jean-Marie Le Pen's butler was hired as parliamentary assistant for some MEP. Marine Le Pen's own bodyguard was hired as her parliamentary assistant.
Another example that is telling although it was actually not part of this trial: The current head of the party Jordan Bardella (which is the obvious candidate to replace Marine Le Pen in the next presidential elections) was hired as parliamentary assistant for some MEP in 2015. To prove that Jordan Bardella actually worked, the party provided an agenda, but there was one little problem: The agenda was bought and filled in 3 years later after the work had supposedly taken place.
Here's the translation of some e-mail exchange between one MEP and the treasurer of the party back then:
- "What Marine is requesting is equivalent to signing for fictitious jobs"
- "I think that Marine knows all that very well ..."
I think what is difficult for me is that it very much feels like the law and its enforcement of this changed, first with Sapin 2 in 2016 and then provisional execution in 2019, and it still feels like a legal “gotcha” against Le pen
Was it reasonable to assume that in like 2008 the legal precedents and rulings on this particular topic would drastically change? In seems like a straightforward abstraction to say “I am a party leader with a budget of X, and I’m going to allocate it efficiently to run my party, nevermind that 20% of X comes from a specific source that requires me to spend it a certain way, especially because it’s not enforced.”
So now you have this retroactive application of these two new laws, whose passing did in fact change the behavior of Le pen and the party in 2016, and it feels a bit like cherry picking
When it comes to the change of law: Sapin 2 did not create the sentence of 'ineligibility'. Such sentence existed before, for example in 2013 Jerome Cahuzac was sentenced to 5 years of ineligibility (note that then ironically Le Pen was calling for permanent ineligibility for any politician which was found guilty for an act performed in the exercise of his/her mandate).
What Sapin 2 did was to normalize such ineligibility sentence whereas it was only optional before in such affairs but becoming more and more used by the judges. Even without this law it is very likely that Le Pen would have been sentenced to these 5 years of ineligibility.
In any case, either when considering that it is because of Sapin 2 that she was sentenced to ineligibility, the two law wouldn't have been applied retroactively as it was enacted on the 9th of December 2016, whereas the investigation covered deeds which were committed until the 31st of December 2016.
Edit: Cahuzac was sentenced on the 8th of December 2016 not in 2013 (which was when the affair was revealed). But that's anyway still before the promulgation of the law.
Other examples are Patrick Balkany - sentenced in 1997 to two years of ineligibility, Jean Tiberi - sentenced in 2009 to three years of ineligibility
For MoDem: The head of the party has been given "the benefit of the doubt", not the party itself, as several MEPs have been sentenced. There are three differences between the cases of Bayrou and Le Pen here:
- Bayrou was not MEP, he was only investigated as the head of the party who possibly instigated/accepted this whole system of paying staff members who don't do work for EU parliament as EU parliamentary assistants. Le Pen was investigated as head of the party AND as MEP who herself had parliamentary assistant which were actually her body guard and her personnal secretary. So even if there had been no proof that she organized this system, she'd have been found guilty as well.
- The money involved was one order of magnitude lesser for MoDem.
- There were witnesses explicitly saying that Le Pen organized this whole system. There was no such proof in the case of Bayrou.
This said it is very hard for me to imagine that Bayrou wasn't aware of what was happening in his party, and I wish that the appeal trial will have a different outcome. Especially that I found it disgusting that after the trial he would parade on TV saying that 'he has been found completely innocent' which is not what the judge said at all.
I had a light morning, and did some research this AM. My take on the salient facts on the case:
* From 2004-2016, the FN (le pens party) used €4m of European Parliament funding for party uses, basically to pay party workers. They probably knew this was frowned upon, but judges tended to be very lenient in rulings, and would never bar candidates from running for elections, even though the judges had that power if they wanted it
* in 2016, Frances parliament passes Sapin 2, which says that “convictions for misappropriated political funds” should preclude a politician for running for office for a minimum of 5 years. This removed the ambiguity that judges faced and effectively said “this is bad, start punishing politicians for it.” However, judges are allowed to “individualize” a case, and use their discretion in exceptional cases
* pre 2019 - judicial procedures in France tend to take a very long time, we’re talking multi-year-plus delays in the appeals process, so ultimately convictions happen years and years after the event
* 2019 - France passes a law that allows “provisional execution”, meaning that if a judge rules you guilt, you have to face the consequences even while your case is under appeal. Roughly 60% of the time since 2019 judges use this, but they seemingly use it 100% against politicians to prevent them from standing for elections (n count is ~3). Judges again are allowed to “individualize” a case, and use their discretion
* 2017-2023 - FN (now FR) continues to receive European Parliament funds, but given the stricter laws, does not use it to pay staffers (implying the probably knew what they were doing from 2004-2016 was wrong)
* early 2025 - Edit: long standing investigation, originally started in 2015 into FN/FR and Le Pen comes to a head and goes to trial, about the scheme from 2004-2016 (see detailed comment from Paul Botts below for detail)
* judge rules that from 2004-2016, le pens party, and by extension le pen, embezzled EU funds by not using them for their explicit purpose of “parliamentary aides” (le pens defense was basically, “your definition of an aide and what they do is too narrow, of course the work of the people helping me and the party was tied to my work as an eu parliamentarian”). Because of Sapin 2 and “provisional execution”, le pens 5 year ban starts today, and cannot run in 2027. The appeal is expected to take 2-3 years, and will not be settled by election time. The judges could’ve allowed her to run (eg only fine her and the party), but decided to ultimately not let her
Were they enforcing the will of the people? You decide!
The judges should enforce the law, which has been clearly the case here. Both Modem (center-right party member of the government since 2017) and LFI (radical left party) have been investigated for the same issue. In Modem case, there was a trial two years ago.
The appeal judgment is expected to take place next year, so if she is found not guilty then she will be able to participate to the 2027 elections.
Edit: Sapin 2 was voted in the context of affairs such as the Panama papers (2016) and Luxleaks (2014)
* early 2025 - case is brought against le pen, saying, “hey, you broke the law in 2004-2016”
Hold on, that part of your summary is off base.
(1) Official investigating of FN's misuse of those funds began while they were still doing it, and did not originate in France. This is from the Associated Press:
"The legal proceedings stem from a 2015 alert raised by Martin Schulz, then-president of the European Parliament, to French authorities about possible fraudulent use of European funds by members of the National Front. Schulz also referred the case to the European Anti-Fraud Office, which launched a separate probe into the matter.
The European Parliament’s suspicions were further heightened when a 2015 organizational chart showed that 16 European lawmakers and 20 parliamentary assistants held official positions within the party — roles unrelated to their supposed duties as EU parliamentary staff. A subsequent investigation found that some assistants were contractually linked to different MEPs than the ones they were actually working for, suggesting a scheme to divert European funds to pay party employees in France...."
(2) The EU's investigating judges [who can seek only restitution of funds since the EU is not a sovereign nation and has no jails] found that Marine Le Pen personally had "orchestrated the allocation of parliamentary assistance budgets and instructed MEPs to hire individuals holding party positions." ["MEP" stands for Member of the European Parliament, which the NF/NR has had some seats in for 20 years now.]
(3) French officials filed their criminal charges over the matter in 2023, well before the summer 2024 French legislative national election which unexpectedly turned Le Pen into a frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election. The case went to trial in September 2024, having been scheduled prior to that summer election.
That's helpful. I have no specific knowledge of the situation, but (1) makes my spider senses tingle.
Is anyone able to give an idea of:
A) How prevalent this behaviour is within the European parliament? Where does it sit on the continuum from "wrong but everyone does it" to "anyone who's done it is rotting in jail". I realise that's tough to get data on.
B) How often does the President of the European Parliament raise the alert on things like this?
For B), 2 other french parties were under investigation for the same issue as Le Pen's party: MoDem (center-right, at the government since 2017) and LFI (radical left). But there was much less money involved (one order of magnitude less for MoDem), especially in the later case, where it remain unclear whether there will be any prosecution.
In the case of the MoDem, there was a trial 2 years ago with multiple members of party found guilty. The n°2 of the party at the time of the events (Marielle de Sarnez) would have probably been found guilty if she had still been alive at the moment of the trial. The head of the party (Francois Bayrou, current french prime minister) hasn't been found guilty, but the prosecution appealed this decision and he will be judged again.
Not sure how or whether this will impact your priors, but the EU's alert was sparked by a written whistleblower report received by them in January 2014.
"The letter flagged cases of "presumed fictitious employment" on the part of the FN and its then-president, Le Pen, who was an MEP from 2004 to 2017.
The European anti-fraud body opened an administrative investigation, scrutinizing the activities of two people close to Le Pen: Catherine Griset, her chief of staff, and Thierry Légier, her bodyguard, also presented as her parliamentary assistants. The investigation revealed that Griset, now an MEP, "spent only 740 minutes, or around 12 hours" at the European Parliament, when she was supposedly an assistant there, between October 2014 and August 2015.
That sort of misuse of funds by MEPs appears to be an ongoing issue in Europe, there are whistleblower/watchdog NGO's focused on it. E.g.:
Thanks again. I'm open to my priors being changed (I hope).
Anecdotally, I know someone who worked as an EU funded staffer for an MEP around the same time. They were based in their home country, not Brussels - MEPs have an allowance to run one office in Brussels and one in their home constituency. He spent more than 12 hours in the parliament, but probably not an order of magnitude more.
I don't know if there was much of a dividing line between EU work and party work for him. It's only just occurred to me that I could ask him...
I haven’t been following the story too closely, but I have a question regarding your A): do you think the notion of scale is relevant? What if no one will blink a committing at a similar infraction, but involving fewer people, for smaller sums of money and for shorter periods of time?
I’m asking because I may be lacking in real-world experience, but the requirement for a clean break between working for the party and for a European MP from the party seems extremely impractical.
Scale, or any kind of qualitative difference between what she's done and what others do, would make a difference.
My initial concern is not that she's been wrongly convicted, but that she's been convicted of something that others have also done, but haven't been prosecuted for.
I'd view the EU as an institution which is capable of doing this without even realising this is what it's doing.
I mean… probably? At some level the judges can say “well you’re just another politician, and this is how we handle politicians who run afoul of this law”, but i have not been able to figure out prosecutorial intent, or how common breaking this rule was from 2004-2016.
Thanks! The comment above was the first I heard of this, so I thought it might have been slightly debatable, but this is even more obviously "lawfare" than I thought.
it seems clear that some corruption is really bad and should be prosecuted
I think my clearest examples would be robert menendez and rod blagojevich taking bribes
I do think the biden/clinton/trump families are all very corrupt and many of their actual and hypothetical counterfactual prosecutions would be largely politically motivated
And then for example the obamas I think are unusually clean, to an extent that is noteworthy.
So I do think not all powerful people are corrupt, actually. And also that some corruption prosecutions are of innocent people, and some are both politically motivated and targeted at guilty people.
I'm trying to figure out a strategy less complicated than 'live in that society and be very politically informed' to separate the various cases.
If ever you wanted to know just who was killing whom how and why in 14th century London, Oxford or York, this is the site for you!
Just picking one at random from Oxford:
"On Monday after the feast of St. Gregory the Pope [8 Mar 1305] Philip Port of Westwall was found dead in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East about the ninth hour beneath the north wall of the town. Richard de Cambridge first found him dead and at once raised the hue, and he was viewed on the same day by Ralf de Hampton and John Fraunceys who had been chosen to view the body, because the coroners had been summoned to go to the King’s Parliament. Philip was found to have a wound in the front of his head from one ear to another, so that all his brain was scattered outside; and he had another wound across his face to within the teeth, four inches long and one inch wide, and his right hand was cut off and lay beside him, and it seemed to all who were there that he had been wounded on the head with a fighting axe called in English a sparth.
On the same day an inquisition was held by the help of sworn men of the parishes of St. Peter-in-the-East; St. Mary-theVirgin; and All Saints. The jurors say upon their oath that John de Berdon, of the county of Leicestershire, the manciple of Vine Hall in Kibald Street, on lay last, came to the lodging of Philip in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East, late in the dusk of the evening. When he was in his chamber, he asked Philip to come with him to a beer tavern, promising that he would give him drink. The two went out together, and John after drinking withdrew, and so Philip began to return to his lodging after curfew. When he came to the corner under the wall towards East Gate, five clerks whose names they knew not came and assaulted him. Philip fled from them. But the group followed him, caught him, wounded him, and slew him, and at once they fled. The jury say that they know not the names of any of them, nor where they dwelt; but they say certainly that John de Berdon was the principal cause of his death, and that it was through him that the five clerks committed the said felony. Pledges of Richard, the finder, that he will appear before the judges when they come into the city for the next assizes, are Adam de Essex and Hugh de Burton."
I wonder why those five clerks had it in for Philip of the Parish of St. Peter? Not your typical white-collar crime.
It's interesting how few convictions occurred —"Between 90-95% of homicide trials resulted in acquittal, transfer to an ecclesiastical prison, or a royal pardon." Even back then authorities were soft on crime.
It's hard to get evidence beyond a reasonable doubt when you don't have forensics, cameras, etc. Reminds me of Mitchell and Webb's "Caveman Detective" sketch:
When it's hard to get good evidence, evidentiary standards are lower. I remember reading about one case in medieval England where a guy was convicted and executed for murder, only for the "victim" to show up unharmed (apparently he'd just traveled without telling people and didn't even know that people assumed he was murdered).
Sounds like the jurors thought it was John de Berdon who hired them to murderate Philip via a Cunning Plan where he lured the guy out to go drinking, slipped away himself, and let Philip head home where the five were lurking in wait on the route.
I do wonder if that was how it really worked out, and if so, what was the reason John wanted Philip dead?
Oxford is interesting because it's a university town, so there's a large population of young men from all over the country and from other countries, and many/most of them are at least technically clergy of some rank, so there's a lot of national conflict, fights, and then not being subject to civil law:
"By the early fourteenth century Oxford had become, together with Paris, the largest and most highly respected centre of learning north of the Alps, drawing students from all over Europe. The city had a population of may be 7,000 inhabitants, of whom probably 1,500 were students.
Conflicts among students were frequent, often between the two ‘nations’ that Oxford recognised, the Northerners (Scotland and North of England) and the Southerners (England, Wales and Ireland). Violent tensions also often escalated between Town and Gown. As clerics, students were legally protected from prosecution under common law and could claim the so-called benefit of clergy.
For Oxford a complete set of inquests survives for the years 1342-1348, right before the Bubonic Plague hit the city. Additionally, partial records have survived by way of copies made by the antiquarian Twyne for 15 years between 1296 and 1324. He was probably mostly interested in cases related to the University, and this earlier sample may be biased. The detail provided in the inquests varies. The earlier records written down by the clerk are often detailed, while the later rolls seem to be more formulaic."
So after the recent discussion about Max Tegmark's book I decided to buy it and read it. I was particularly interested in how he dealt with mathematical structures that are not physically realizable, e.g. non-computable functions or numbers, or non-decidable statements, or even things like implicit functions that we don't know how to implement, for example f(x)=0 if x real is rational, f(x)=1 if x is irrational.
To my surprise, and chagrin, what Tegmark means by "mathematical structure" is actually *computable* mathematical structure.
But computable mathematical structure are physically realizable (just implement them as a computer program; a computer is physical), so of course they "exist". I feel that all that Tegmark is claiming is that mathematical structures that can be implemented physically are perceived as physical structures, which to me doesn't seem like a great insight. I've already believed for decades that there is no difference between computable math and physics. If you come up with a computable math structure you can implement it as a circuit or program, and if you can make a circuit (or program, same thing, the program runs on an electronic circuit), you can describe that circuit mathematically. (Yes, I assume the physical Church–Turing thesis.)
"I've already believed for decades that there is no difference between computable math and physics" There's a lot less physics than computable math. Also, scare quite d "existence " based on potential computability isn't the same as actual existence.
Tegmark stated that all structures that exist mathematically also exist physically. I find that difficult to swallow because there are maths not used in physics. Be that as it may, there are non-computable physical systems — for instance, chaotic systems, like turbulent fluids or weather are difficult to model in detail, and predicting it beyond a certain horizon is impossible due to the exponential growth of small errors.
True, there are math structures not used in physics, but the things that are not at least in principle physically realizable are explicitly excluded by Tegmark. He even suggests getting rid of infinity!
Note that "computable" in this specific context doesn't mean "can be calculated in practice", or even "can be done efficiently", it means something like "could be in principle simulated to arbitrary precision in a finite (but perhaps very long) time". (This one isn't it, but there is at least one rigorous definition on Wikipedia or elsewhere.)
So, as far as I know, chaotic systems are in fact computable. Actually I don't think there is anything in physics that is not computable.
Did I enjoy the book? Well, I'm probably not the best person to give an opinion. I don't normally read popular books on physics (my background is in Quantum Field Theory) and I bought this one for very specific reasons. But yeah, I thought it was a fun read. And even though I was disappointed that the actual theory is basically what I have already believed for a long time, I thought it was well presented and enjoyable. I recommended it to you, especially knowing your beliefs regarding the MWI of QM, LOL.
If you try to formalise 'every computable mathematical system exists', as you being a-priori equally likely to find yourself in any program in the set of all programs, you effectively end up with the Solomonoff prior: A uniform prior over all programs of length T, with T going to infinity. Since simpler programs with shorter description lengths have exponentially more implementations than complicated programs with long description lengths, the Solomonoff prior effectively ends up giving exponentially higher weighting to mathematical systems with lower minimum description length. The simpler a system is, the more equivalent implementations it has, the more support it has in the prior, and thus the likelier you are to be inside it. Just because there's more variations of the simple system you can write down than variations of the complicated system you can write down for a given description length T, and that fact doesn't change even as T goes to infinity.
Another perspective on the mathematical universe idea: Algorithmic information theory tells us, or at least heavily suggests, that the theoretically ideal way to make predictions is to start with the Solomonoff prior, and then update your probability assignments to various programs as the bit strings they print out either match or fail to match incoming bits of sense data about the world. Where the sense data here is everything you see, hear, feel, and so on. In terms of the actual formalism, this is kind of mathematically equivalent to all of these programs 'existing' and you slowly figuring out which one of them you happen to 'be in' through observation. Why then, would we not suppose that this is literally what is happening? What is this extra property of 'actually existing' which exactly one of these programs in the prior supposedly has, and that the others all lack? Why do we need that property? It isn't doing any work in the formalism. To the formalism, there is just an ensemble of programs you run, some of which turn out to describe you and your observations. Why suppose the other programs are less 'real' just because you happen to not be in them? Why make up this extra notion of programs being 'real' or 'not real' in the first place, when the math makes no mention of such a distinction?
Heck, a simple program in the prior that probably has a very high weighting is just the program that itself runs the set of all computable programs. If that program happens to be the 'real' one, which it'd have a comparatively quite high chance of, since it's so so simple, the mathematical universe hypotheses would definitely be true. And that case would be literally identical to the case of all the programs in the prior being real to start with. Doesn't it seem kind of strange to draw any distinction between those two cases when they have the exact same mathematical structure?
I am undecided on the mathematical universe hypothesis and don't necessarily buy the above argument. This is just the best case for the idea I could come up with when I thought about it.
This is a systematic review of the most reliable studies surrounding the effects of blue light glasses on various things. Here’s what it concludes about the effects of blue light exposure on sleep duration:
“three out of nine studies reported of decreasing sleep duration through blue light exposure and only one study reported an increase in sleep duration through blue light exposure,” and the other 5 studies show no significant correlation. My question is this: if the most reliable studies surrounding this topic are able to show these levels of conflicting results, then what am I supposed to believe about the effect of blue light exposure on sleep duration? This isn’t a question that matters a lot, but it’s confusing to me because we’re supposed to have this whole, rigorous scientific method to understand the world, but it somehow has reached this conclusion after all of this replication and effort. What do we do when the scientific systems we have fail to conclusively verify or falsify a simple fact that they should be able to test?
Victor said this, but you can conclude that on its own, in generic human beings, its effect on sleep is weak and/or inconsistent. But some of those studies likely incorporated a selected population or distinct methology, meaning blue light likely can have a somewhat more consistent & large effect in some groups or using some methods.
What you can do is conduct an experiment on yourself, be smart about the methodology, blind yourself if you can, randomize the days you get blue light, ignore days with obvious confounds (e.g. drinking), keep good records, and see if it exerts a meaningful effect on you.
This is science and will give you a mostly rigorous way to understand the world. But humans are too diverse and methods are too infinitely variable for a resource-and-time-limited discipline like psychology to make strong predictions about individualized cause & effect relationships. The deceptive complexity in the question of blue light is that you want to know whether blue light works, but also if it works in the context of X (your genetics), Y (every aspect of your lifestyle), Z (your cultural/environmental influences), and practically that's just too much for science.
We acknowledge that we don't know. There are lots of potential reasons for this, perhaps the scientific methodology we have isn't sophisticated enough to capture the effect, maybe the effect is not consistent, maybe there are variables or interactions we haven't accounted for yet.
So perhaps the most famous study of vaccines and autism is the Danish study done by Madsen, etal. https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa021134. I saw this quoted again the other day in some vax story. I've been trying to understand how the authors came up with their number that vaccinated kids had a 0.92 relative risk of getting autism. (See table 2 in the paper.)
If you look at the raw numbers.
Vaccinated 1,647,504 person years, 263 cases of autism
Unvaccinated 482,360 person years, 53 cases
And do the ratios you find that the vaccinated are about 45% more likely to have autism. Yet the paper says this is really 8% less chance (Third column in table 2, adjusted relative risk.) Can anyone help me figure out this discrepancy.
So another question might be whether data on autism and vaccines in Danish children from 1991 to 1998, where the reported autism rate was around 0.015%, is applicable to America today with a reported autism rate about 150x higher.
Either the two populations (US kids today, Danish kids in the late 1990s) are wildly different or the definition of autism in the two countries is wildly different.
Yes, the populations are wildly different. Danish kids in the late 1990s (and now too) were overwhelmingly white. Only about 50% of US kids are white.
Black people tend to have stronger immune responses than white people. There are, apparently, also other racial differences in immune response. Some studies on vaccine safety do not analyze racial subgroups; sometimes they just don't have enough minority subjects for analysis, as is probably the case in that Danish study, where the overwhelming majority were white.
I find this scary. Runaway immune response can cause severe disability. RFK Jr better figure out whether vaccines are as safe for non-whites as for whites.
That's not 1,647,504 persons, it's person years. There are 537k children in the study, and 738 cases of autism, or 0.1%. So there's that. But they also required a formal diagnosis by a clinician, whereas the CDC uses : 1) an ASD diagnostic statement in an evaluation, 2) a classification of ASD in special education, or 3) an ASD International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code. That is, CDC counts if it's a school record. So much broader definition.
I think "late 1990s" is doing a fair amount of the work here. The 1990s was when they were just starting to diagnose autism in people without major developmental delays. The concept of an "autism spectrum", and the inclusion of "Asperger's Syndrome" as part of the spectrum (instead of a separate disorder) happened in ICD-10 in 1993 and DSM-IV in 1994. ICD is international, while I think DSM is US-specific. That's in the middle of the study period, but clinical practice tends to lag the manuals by a fair amount, and general cultural awareness (and thus parents seeking diagnosis for their kids) lags further still. Note that from your CDC link, the US diagnosis rate at age 8 has gone from 0.67% in 2000 to 2.76% today, a 4x increase.
Age is also a factor. The CDC is tracking diagnosis by birth year at , while the Danish study is tracking a population of mixed birth years at a fixed end date, with the kids ranging in age from 1 year to 9 years.
That still leaves a fair amount of room for country-specific factors. The US in particular has several incentives built in to the education system for school-age kids to get screened and diagnosed, both in terms of funding and in terms of classroom accommodations being based on diagnosis.
Averages really aren't good enough. There are more vaccinated than unvaccinated, and therefore this will make it easier to detect a small statistical effect in the larger group, not because it's real, but due to random chance. They have to adjust for that.
Yeah there is a really small number in the control group (53) so all sorts of random things could effect that number. I guess my only take away is that I'm not sure this is the piece of data that shows there is no connection between autism and vaccines. The study should be done again today with the much higher rate of autism... it should be easy to find any signal.
Here is one article that conducted a review of 19 empirical studies [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9464417/#fn-group1], one of which (Madsen, et al., 2002) included 440,655 vaccinated and 96,648 unvaccinated individuals, and in another:
"Hviid et al. conducted a nationwide cohort review of all infants born in Denmark to Danish-born mothers from January 1, 1999, through December 31, 2010, to see whether MMR immunization carries a high risk for autism in children, subgroups of children, or periods after vaccination. In Denmark, 657,461 babies born between 1999 and December 31, 2010, participated, with follow-up from one year of age to August 31, 2013 (Danish Civil Registration System is the source of patient information). They found no support for high autism risk after MMR vaccination in a national broad, unselected cohort population of Danish children."
I don't know what the totals are for all the studies together, it's obviously very large. None of them found any evidence that vaccines cause autism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_second_Trump_administration
Tariffs -- Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brunei, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, European Union, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Ivory Coast, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Lesotho, Libya, Liechtenstein, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, Moldova, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, Zimbabwe
No tariffs -- Belarus, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, North Korea, Russia
Would any local redcap like to steelman that?
A lot of people waking up to the idea that Trump in his second term is very different than Trump in his first term, a fact easily predictable (and predicted!) by anyone who was paying attention to him saying he was going to remove all the constraints that were placed on him in the first term.
I wonder if anyone who liked the first Trump term is going to revise their opinion on how much value the people holding him back added to his administration.
Yes, particularly the calculation of the tariff rates has increased my confidence in the claim that he wanted to do some crazy stuff in his first term but was held back because he was surrounded by competent people. I thought his first term seemed OK.
Yes, I am very much revising my opinion
I don't buy it. How are tarriffs "revenge?" Or the mass rounding up of people without due process?
These are absolutely things that Trump talked about doing in the first administration, people defended him on the grounds that it was all rhetoric, and used the fact that he didn't actually do these things as evidence it was just rhetoric. But every report that came out after his term ended emphasized how many people worked tirelessly to stop him from doing things because they were worried about the legal, diplomatic, and economic implications of various actions. And now all those people are gone.
If Trump had started by sending the FBI after Biden, I'd say you were correct, and we may still get there. But he started by doing all of the stuff he'd been campaigning on his entire political career, that people claimed he didn't mean.
I don't think you are intentionally gaslighting me. I think its interesting how people's memories change, or maybe it depends on whether you engage primarily with one media source or another. But in the mainstream media, Trump's repeated mention of 11 million immigrants who needed to be deported during the primaries (particularly the primary debates) and his talk of creating a "deportation force" were a big deal.
Here's an interesting historical artifact, a headline published in 2016 imagining what 2017 would look like if Donald Trump were elected.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf
See if you can spot how many of these things, intended to be a cross between a joke and a warning, now reflect things this administration is working towards.
Maybe. But this article (which seems to be fairly conservative friendly) argues that it was the pushbacks from blue states and sanctuary cities that stalled out the process.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-deportations-unfinished-mission
So I think the will was there, its the resistance that's failed this time.
Now here's a t-shirt that I want:
"Critical Trade Theory: Any trade imbalance between two countries is de facto evidence of systemic unfair trade practices."
That was posted yesterday by a Substack writer named William Miller. Jesse Singal today makes the same overall point. He writes that Trump "sees the world strictly through the friends/enemies binary, and he apparently makes those determinations solely on the basis of the perceived “loyalty” of the actor/group/country/whatever in question...Trump decided a while back that America is “getting ripped off” by other countries. And once he decided that, the evidence was easy to find — I mean, just look at those percentages!
This style of thinking reminded me a bit of Ibram X. Kendi, because Kendi decided that everything is either racist or anti-racist, and then further decided that any racial discrepancy anywhere concerning anything was proof positive of racism. It goes without saying that this isn’t a serious approach to addressing racial discrepancies...but it was taken seriously by a lot of powerful people with money. Kendi himself gained some degree of influence and a form of power (since squandered rather colorfully), but of course not one millionth the power Trump enjoys...."
I...think this is a good analogy?
>An unmanaged economy can adjust to tariffs on the fly without too much pain.
I don't see how this is true. It takes time to adjust to tariffs because you have to build new factories or set up new shipping routes to substitute for the tariffed goods, and making the market more free isn't going to let you build a new factory overnight. And in the meantime, you're simply poorer because you've made everything more expensive.
(And some goods may not be substitutable at all - e.g., crops that don't grow well in the US's climate.)
It doesn't matter if there's one company or ten, so long as they all depend on the same inputs, they're all going to have to find the same substitutes.
Also, antitrust regulation is a form of managing the economy, one that the US has been fairly lax on lately.
Antitrust actions can literally result in a company being broken up into smaller companies.
Also, as I said, I don't see how the number of companies makes a difference. How would it help to, say, have ten different auto companies instead of one, if they're all importing the same steel and aluminum?
That has not been true at all. Standard Oil was a huge monopoly that arose in a barely-managed economy. Monopolization is a natural outcome of unmanaged free-market in any area where economies of scale apply.
Oh this brings memories and explains a lot. I too was young once and read mises.org. Can’t believe this crock of shite is still around. It must be exhausting to be always wrong about everything and yet keep slogging the same crap year after year. I’m sure the dollar will collapse any day now, same as 20 years ago.
Sorry, I’m trying not to be sarcastic usually, it’s just hard when I see the same poisonous ideas continue to be flogged despite having been discredited by reality over and over again.
Ask me about measles vaccine “causing autism” next :)
Opened up one of the MSM websites this morning (either Associated Press or CNN, I forget) and two new headlines were right next to each other:
"Trump administration fires director of National Security Agency"
"Senate votes to confirm Dr. Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services"
The first headline refers to this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Haugh
whose firing was apparently at the suggestion two days ago of this loon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer
The second headline refers to a once-eminent surgeon who in middle age decided to get rich hawking bullshit dietary and anti-aging supplements on TV, ran for the Senate in a state that he didn't reside in, etc.
This age we live in, oof. Guess today will be a good day to again apologize to each of my children for the shitshow we're leaving to them.
[Sadly for my eldest, Italy just cut way back on its longstanding citizenship-for-descendants-of-Italians program in part because there's been a flood of Americans like him applying for it.]
Inspired by the AI 2027 post, I want to ask. How worried should I be about AI driven doom, how can I spot if it's coming, and what on earth can I do about it?
Here’s how you can spot it coming: when you call a plumber to replace your garbage disposer and a robot shows up with the new one and installs it all by itself in 10 minutes - start worrying.
By the time that happens it's too late to start worrying.
Give or take. Robotics are hardware, and hardware doesn't explode exponentially.
Really interesting post by Hanania today about how populism inherently leads to bad governance, whether it's the left or right doing it. Also notable is that he explicitly admits that he made a mistake about Trump. It's pretty rare for people to publicly admit mistakes like that.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/kakistocracy-as-a-natural-result
Another bit I found interesting that I hadn't heard before:
---
Lee Kuan Yew famously said that in a multiracial democracy, people vote for their ethnic or religious group. This is indeed a general trend, but when leaders lean too much into identity, we understand that this poisons discourse and thought, which is why we call them demagogues. In the US, ethnopolitics is more acceptable for blacks than any other group, and blacks tend to elect extremely corrupt politicians. As of late 2009, all active ethics probes in the House of Representatives were into the behavior of black members, which led to charges of racism. Since 2019 alone, the black mayors of New York City, Baltimore, and Jackson have been indicted for corruption related charges.
Trumpism can be seen as identity politics for alienated white people. It is not a coincidence that the right has been becoming more accepting of corruption at the same time it has become implicitly ethnonationalist. Morality based movements care about the ethical standards of politicians and more intellectually inclined movements care about ideas. Populism is about blaming others for problems, so it has less mental energy to put towards policing the behavior of members of its own movement. Often, it makes tribalism into a virtue.
TBH I think turning the US from c. 85% white to c. 50% white within a single human lifetime is more unprecedented and norm-violating than anything Trump's done. Granted that was a bipartisan violation rather than a strictly Democrat one, but still, the Democrats have been much more enthusiastic and open about it than the Republicans.
What's important about America's whiteness?
Dunno, try asking the Palestinians or Native Americans how demographic replacement worked out for them.
I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure that when white people took control of the Americas, they didn't do it by peacefully joining Native American tribes, gradually outbreeding them, and taking power through the democratic process. There was, you know, some violence involved.
The US has seen racial violence in the past, as have many other countries. Why should future US be exempt?
Are you suggesting that White Americans are or somehow should be afraid that they will killed en masse, with the survivors put into reservations or into whatever non-explosive descriptor we can use for Palestinian confinement to Gaza and the West Bank?
Are you aware of the fallacy of the excluded middle?
Maybe you should be:
"Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbors and when ethnic diversity is measured more locally. Covariate conditioning generally changes the relationship only slightly. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research."
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
I am in the same boat re. his racist past, but since Scott recommended his blog I decided to give it another chance. The good news is that some people clearly can change, recognize their errors and own them.
Anyone else think it's time for a conversation on whether the right to vote should be limited to net taxpayers?
My part-way idea is that there should be a bicameral legislature; one house is elected in the usual equally-weighted sort of way, and the other house is elected by votes weighted by the amount of tax you pay.
That's a nice way to tamp down tax evasion I guess.
Do we really need to re-invent NRx for the 50th time?
If we go this route, my vote should be weighted by the total amount of tax I pay compared to the average. Seems only fair.
"Citizens Even More United"
It's a free country (I think? maybe still? don't send me to El Salvador please), so any conversation can happen at any time.
As to the matter at hand, no.
So no retired people? Or how do you judge net? Do you count all government spending as part of the calculation? Because then almost no one would count - the US is spending far more than it takes in as taxes, so on net barely anyone is positive.
Plenty of retired people are net taxpayers.
Again, how are you calculating net. Retired people are benefiting from roads, from money spent on defense, from medical research, they have pay interest on their "share" of the debt and so on. That all costs money. Or are you only counting direct transfers? Because if so, this kind of system would be ridiculously easy to game.
Medicare alone would push most retired people over into the net-negative column as taxpayers. More than 90 percent of all Americans 65+ are enrolled in Medicare now, and the FICA taxes they individually paid into that system cover only 5 to 25 percent of the benefits they get from it.
As long as your limiting the franchise, limiting it to people with a college education seems more reasonable. Or if you think college is evil, base it on an IQ test.
Gonna be hard to get enough votes to pass that amendment, chief.
Only need a couple thousand votes.
What? Explain please.
2/3rds of Congress plus majorities in three quarters of state legislatures.
OIC....well in a nation that's passed exactly one purely-administrative Constitutional amendment during the last half-century, I'm with FLWAB: good luck with that one.
FAFO day number... never mind, lost count.
DJIA -3.01%, S&P 500 -3.34%, Nasdaq -4.37%, Russell 2000 -3.99%
The weird thing was watching the market climb yesterday, I guess the trading algorithms got conditioned to Trump chickening out and discounted the possibility that the mad king is actually mad.
I see this as a good time to buy. It might be good to diversify to EU stocks a bit though, particularly healthcare/defence (but I would still only do that through index tracking ETFs).
My prediction is:
1. Trump tanks US economy badly, keeps talking about how it is transitory a part of a great leap forward (or was that a different country?) etc.
2. Trump admin loses the midterm elections. Probably badly, but even a small loss is enough to significantly tie its hands as their majority is razor thin now. I think this is almost inevitable because people will lose jobs in most voting districts which are not safe MAGA anyway and prices will increase across the US:
a) People in the American rust belt might start seeing a creation of new jobs but not in enough quantities. This is because less than 2 years is not enough time to move production overseas and foreign investors will be reluctant to make such large decisions unless they really become convinced that mercantilism is now a long-term US policy.
b) Even if there is a significant number of new low-skilled labour jobs in the rust belt, these are already securely MAGA Republican areas and getting your congressman elected with a surprlus of 50 000 votes or 100 000 votes makes no difference.
3. Trump refuses to change course and will get bogged down in congressional and legal disputes. Republicans lose the next elections unless Democrats become completely suicidal and double down on the identity politics bullshit instead of shifting towards centrist views. At this point, and if Democrats abandon the identity politics, even libertarians will prefer them to the mercantilist MAGA Republicans.
4. Most (though probably not all) Trump tariffs are lifted (4 years from now) and the indexes jump massively in anticipation.
The low point in stocks might be now or it might be 6-12 months from now or something like that. I don't think it is going to be more than that. If Trump plans ahead at all he might even operate with the notion that the midterms are likely lost and will want to shoot all the bullets now.
The only other realistic scenario seems to be the "Democrats are irredeemably stupid" one.
>People in the American rust belt might start seeing a creation of new jobs
I'm assuming these jobs would be reshored manufacturing. But why would they go back to the rust belt? Why not anywhere else?
Even if the old factory is a rusted-out piece of junk, it's often easier to get regulatory approval to "rebuild" an old factory in place than to build a new factory at a greenfield site. I don't think there's much chance we'll really see a massive increase in US manufacturing capability during the remainder of Trump's term, but if I were going to try and play in that game I'd definitely be prioritizing old industrial sites.
I might still fill them with robots and high-skill immigrants and leave the OG local workforce to wallow in poverty. But it would be politic to try and find *something* for them to do.
That is a good point. I was assuming this would be because of the old factories and know-how. But know-how is probably no longer there and the factories, if they still exist, are probably not in a good shape and you are better off just building from scratch.
So it would just be because it is a place with a pool of (relatively) low-wage workers. But I am not sure if that is enough. You also want somewhere where logistics is easy and also ideally where local government gives you some benefits (tax exemptions etc.).
Either way, setting up new factories really takes a long time, so the only place where this can have a positive impact on employment before the US midterm elections is somewhere where factories still exist and operate but perhaps run on at half capacity. So that would probably be the rust belt.
Are there actually many still existing factories running on half capacity? Seems very doubtful to me.
And I would guess any new manufacturing will go to the sun belt, not the rust belt. Younger population, less unions, more business friendly state governments.
Yeah, I'm not sure about the current situation, I think you very well might be right.
But then that will make it even harder for MAGA (no reason to call them GOP anymore ... ) to win the midterm elections.
Regarding (2) (a), consider also the effects of automation. These jobs are never coming back, even if the manufacturing does. Any new manufacturing in the US leans very heavily on automation, which you should expect given the high labor costs.
Another reason to start buying ... now or soon.
I am just deciding between buying US ETFs or European ETFs. I have most of my savings in US ETFs, so I think that I will now perhaps diversify a bit to German indices or something (Merz seems to be the first good chancellor in a while and he is business oriented, plus there will be quite a surge in the defence industry now, a lot of it in Germany).
On the other hand, US stocks will be hit harder now and they are also likely to bounce back fairly quick if the next administration reverses the course back. I guess it is a more high risk high reward now.
A good asset allocation strategy should have exposure to the world. FWIW I'm not touching any of my core investments because I have a reasonable spread across the world and sticking to the plan and letting rebalancing do the hard lifting is likely to produce better long-term outcome than me trying to second-guess the markets.
Yeah, makes sense. I've been too US-centred till now, in a way. All my physical assets (my flat and a few garage parking places which I rent) are in Europe and my job is also more dependent on European economy, although I could probably shift, since I can work remotely.
But my stocks are 100% American right now and it has worked really well in the past 10 years (since I've started investing regularly ... and I pretty much never sell). I have some money in European bonds and I will probably move then to European stocks and keep adding to those to maybe get to 50% American and 50% European in the long-run.
Hi! I'm a bit confused by that. I totally get that the tariffs are not reciprocal at all and that they seem nonsensical, but could you explain why they are unlikely to work as intended (aka relocalizing industry in america)? Could it be considered a painful period after which the economy will grow again? I'm not at all a MAGA guy (not even living in the US), but, as everyone is saying that tariffs are bad, I'm trying to consider the opposite opinion...
I'm not an economist, but to me the obvious problems here are:
1. Industries moved for a reason: generally the reason was some version of "higher production costs." If price increase for the tariffs on a particular good is less than the price increase that would follow from shifting production of that back to the U.S. then the industry has zero incentive to move. A 10% baseline tariff on everything seems likely to fall below that threshold for a lot of goods.
2. Lots of manufacturing can't realistically source all of their inputs from the U.S., so even if they move production to the U.S., they'll still be paying tariffs on their inputs. This effectively lowers the benefit of them moving to the U.S. as they'll still get charged some fraction of the tariffs anyway.
3. Moving production is a long and expensive process. Any company that is looking to move is looking at high up-front costs and won't see ANY return on that investment for probably at least a couple years. Even when the move is complete, it will likely take several more years before they hit the break-even point where the move pays for itself[1]. This interacts with points 1 and 2, as higher production costs in the U.S. reduce the benefit of the move and increase the time it takes to pay off the moving cost.
4. The Trump administration can't guarantee any sort of stability in the tariff regime. Even if people trust the word of Trump himself on this (and obviously they shouldn't), a big enough defeat in the midterms could end the tariffs as soon as 2 years from now, and a defeat in the presidential election would almost certainly end them 4 years from now. I'd guess that 4 years is not actually enough time for a lot of industries to both get production moved over and pay off the costs of the move, and even if they do, once the tariffs are lifted they'll be back in the state of paying more for production with no price protection to justify it, meaning they might be looking at *another* long and expensive move just to get back to where they started.
5. This move makes markets more unpredictable, and unpredictability breeds caution. No company is actually sure what their sales will look like in 1 year, 2 years or 4 years. Depending on how the markets change, the assumptions about sales driving the various relocation plans might be badly wrong. Careful planners know this. Spending a bunch of money up-front is much less attractive: a move that slightly increases your overall expected profit but leaves you exposed to serious problems if things don't break your way is generally a bad move, especially if you're already a well-established company.
If I were crafting a plan to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.[2] it would look very little like this. It would start with talking up the plan and trying to get buy-in from congress, key industry figures and important voting-blocs so I could ensure stability. It would start with no tariffs at all: instead you'd offer some form of subsidies and tax incentives to companies who tangibly committed to shifting production, with a tariff regime consistently signaled as coming at least a year in the future. The subsidies and tariffs would not be scattershot, they'd be focused at particular industries that had been determined to be good choices for creating jobs and/or protecting U.S. interests. The (eventual) tariffs might be quite high on this industries, but they'd be carefully chosen to minimize knock-on effects on other industries. Doing all of this suddenly, with no preparation, by executive fiat, while maintaining (deliberately, one presumes) high uncertainty about the content of tariffs until they're actually deployed, and above all putting them on *all imports* is pretty much the opposite of everything I just outlined. This seems like a move with a very, very high ratio of collateral damage to useful incentive.
[1] Keep in mind that they would have still made money staying where they were, just (presumably) less money. If their moving cost is X, their yearly revenue without moving is r_i and their revenue with moving is r_f, then it will take X/(r_f - r_i) years for the move to pay for itself. With a large X you have to assume a BIG difference between r_f and r_i for this to happen in a realistic time frame.
[2] Which of course I wouldn't do (at least not by myself) because again, I'm not an economist.
L50L already gave a good rundown, just to add as a general principle: it's good to stop and consider the opposite, but it's rare that the opposite ends up being true.
It's economics 101 that free trade is good in most cases.
There is the higher level view that sectoral tariffs can be useful in certain cases to protect infant industries, but that's basically the exact opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump is just wantonly destroying things out of stupidity and there's noone left on the right to tell him no.
Note that Trump's new tariffs are significantly HIGHER than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that contributed to the Great Depression.
Okay, thanks for your answer. Let's see how it pans out. I agree with you on a philosophical level, as I am close to being libertarian and I like the natural equilibrium of things (free trade definitely being a natural equilibrium, in the sense that it's the least constrained), but I'm wondering how different things are, this time. I mean, these tariffs stuff makes me think of weight regularization in Machine Learning: you may be losing a bit of performance but you definitely get a sounder model.
Are there any precedents where tariffs indeed achieved their goals? If not, I will be forced to join the mainstream opinion on that matter!
Also, I get that these tariffs are risky and nearly a war move against every country in the world.
The way I think about it, tariffs are a bit like an insurance policy. You consistently pay a manageable amount (pay more for products made in your country, even though under a free trade regime you could buy them for cheaper elsewhere) so that, if things go wrong (a war or COVID-type pandemic disrupts supply chains), you're cushioned somewhat from the effects (your key industries are safe in your own country and you don't run out of food because an enemy is blockading your ports).
Of course, this doesn't mean that destroying your economy with huge tariffs is a good idea, any more than bankrupting yourself by taking out expensive insurance policies on everything you own would be a good idea. Accurately balancing risks is part of what constitutes good stewardship, whether you're running a household or a country.
That's an argument for narrowly tailored tariffs based on national security considerations. The CHIPS act was a good effort in that vein. Trump however is doing the exact opposite. Trump's policies are likely to DECREASE American manufacturing without any compensating benefits.
There is nothing sounder about it though. There is no good reason for basic manufacturing to return to the US and the "trade deficit" is a very misleading term.
David Friedman has a great article explaining all of this quite concisely (the title "Ptolemaic Trade theory" is very fitting as this is really on the same level as believing that the sun revolves around Earth).
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ptolemaic-trade-theory
I think that one long-term benefit of these insane policies might be that they are so extreme that it will actually make many more people update away from 16th century economic theory.
Haha, thanks for the link and the answer, much appreciated.
David Friedman's a pretty good Substack to follow, on trade policy and other economics. In "Retaliatory Tariffs", he wrote about a tariff he could conceivably be in favor of, so he's not a straight-up anti-tariff ideologue; there are fundamental consequences he's pursuing (namely, people being better off), and if a tariff were to cause that, he would likely favor it. (It's just that tariffs practically never do this.)
By the way, I think that it is possible that Vance understands all this and still wants to pursue Trump's tariff policy (I am almost certain that Trumps doesn't really understand, nor does he care to understand the logic).
Vance comes from the rust belt, has been pretty traumatized by the decline of the low-skill labour communities there and wants to restore the "good old days". If it means making America (or the world) poorer, that is a price he is willing to pay, especially if it disproportionately hits the "coastal elites" (i.e. everyone not a part of these communities).
It might be a win-win from his perspective, even though he would not present it in the terms I do.
Or it is also possible he doesn't understand the economics of it either...
s&p 500 is currently down 4.10% for the day.
High Impact Professionals is excited to announce that applications are open for the next round of its Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a free, 6-week program starting the week of June 16, 2025, and is designed to help experienced (mid-career/senior) professionals not currently working in a high-impact role to: identify paths to impact; take concrete, impactful actions; and join a network of like-minded, experienced, and supportive impact-focused professionals.
More information -- including links to register for informational webinars on April 23 that will provide an introduction to the IAP and a Q&A session -- is available here: https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/impact-accelerator-program
Apply to the IAP here by April 27: https://dal1g53wltj.typeform.com/to/xPmaxIKV
OC ACXLW Meetup #92 – ACX Everywhere Edition
Saturday, April 5, 2025 | 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik – (michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045)
Welcome!
Hello, everyone! We’re excited to invite you to a special ACX Everywhere gathering, where we’ll explore two of Scott Alexander’s most influential and widely discussed essays: “Meditations on Moloch” and “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup.” Whether you’re brand new to these pieces or have studied them before, we welcome your curiosity and ideas. Come ready for a relaxed but thought-provoking conversation—no prior expertise needed!
Readings & Links
1) Meditations on Moloch
Text: Slate Star Codex (2014)
Audio: YouTube Reading
2) I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Text: Slate Star Codex (2014)
Audio: Podcast link
(No worries if you can’t read or listen to them in full—just come with an open mind!)
Essay Overviews
“Meditations on Moloch”
Coordination Failures: Scott frames “Moloch” as the destructive force that arises when people or institutions compete in ways that force everyone into a worse outcome—even if no one wants it.
Arms Races & Zero-Sum: Examples include doping in sports, environmental exploitation, or endless overwork—everyone follows suit to stay competitive, with no single actor able to unilaterally stop.
Escaping Moloch: Potential solutions often involve strong collective agreements or frameworks that break the cycle of “If I don’t, the other guy will.”
“I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup”
Tribalism’s Double-Edge: Many of us consider ourselves tolerant—until we meet the group we truly can’t stand.
Hypocrisy of Tolerance: We readily accept differences that don’t threaten us, but violently reject those we see as morally or culturally opposite.
Real Implications: We may unify around certain enemies or narratives, ironically bridging differences only to channel hate toward a chosen outgroup.
Conversation Starters
Personal Moloch Moments
Where have you felt trapped in a “race to the bottom”—working longer hours, competing for scarce resources—and wished for a collective fix?
Is Outgroup Hatred Inevitable?
Do we each have a hidden “line in the sand” for what we refuse to tolerate? Where do you draw that line, and why?
Solutions to Moloch
How do we form strong enough coalitions or social norms to break vicious cycles? Is it purely top-down (regulation, laws) or bottom-up (individual choices, culture shifts)?
Tolerance vs. Complicity
When does “tolerating” become passivity or enabling something harmful? Conversely, is it easy to mistake rightful moral stances for “intolerant outgroup hatred”?
Interplay: Moloch & Outgroups
Do these two phenomena reinforce each other? For instance, do tribal rivalries hamper the coordination needed to defeat Moloch?
Join Us On April 5!
We look forward to a friendly deep dive into these essays and their relevance—from everyday life dilemmas to global issues. If you have any questions, just contact Michael (info above). Whether you’re new to Scott Alexander or a longtime SSC/ACX reader, come share your perspective—and let’s celebrate the spirit of ACX Everywhere together!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G1tEalk1wiNuwvsJMFoqqWMu4gJiYCyUuX7f4h3vYTs/edit?usp=drivesdk
So, the tariffs are out, with a predictable response from the markets, but that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to ask about is the countries further down on the big list of tariffs. What did the Falkland Islands do to get on Trump's shit list?
Never mind the Falklands; what's the deal with Diego Garcia? The only people who live there, the only economic activity, is a ginormous US military base. Are we taking a 10% cut of the personal possessions of our soldiers when they rotate home?
Since the tariffs were calculated based on trade deficits, it is natural that tiny countries end up at the top and bottom of the list. Random fluctuations are generally larger for small countries, so the maximum and minimum value are usually very small nations or domains which happen to be (un-)lucky with the randomness. This is why the tiny states/domains of Lesotho and of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon end up with the top rates.
It isn't even important *which* formula was used, just that *some* formula was used.
Svalbard is on the list because our bears need to be protected from competition with foreign bears who literally work for fish.
Are the Falklands tarrifs any different to the general UK ones?
But surely you can move goods freely between the Falklands and the UK?
I believe the tariffs are based on the country of production. Otherwise the rest of the EFTA would start exporting everything through Iceland, which got 10% (while the EU got 20%).
Clearly, Trump is a Peronist.
There's some Sporcle nerds at the White House who wanted to make sure every single country got on the list.
Every country *except* Russia and North Korea.
Since they are billed as “reciprocal tariffs” I presume they impose a tariff on US imports. Naturally a cursory Google doesn’t tell me that because all the hits are about the new ones.
I’m not saying this was good to do, just that there does not seem to be any particular reason to wonder about the Falklands in particular.
I had the same assumption, but L50 is right.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93gq72n7y1o
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-very-very-very-simple-way-of-calculating-reciprocal-tariffs-bdec48fd
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/03/economy/reciprocal-tariff-math/index.html
The "reciprocal tariffs" are not based on any actual tariffs levied by other countries. The way they came up with the number was to take the trade deficits in goods with that country and divide it by the total exports, divide by 2, then floor at 10%. I wish I were making that up.
Note that the "in goods" part is important, since the US has a surplus with many countries when services are included.
Well, I agree that this is very disappointing. I’d love it if the point were to encourage tariffs to be removed so we could all benefit from free trade, but for that you need the stick to be very precise.
On the other hand, there still seems to be no reason to wonder what he has against the Falklands.
Added: I worry myself sick over budget deficits but despite the similarity in name I think “trade deficits” are a boogeyman that shouldn’t be a concern to anyone. So we trade Japan pieces of green paper for cars. Who’s the savvy trader?
I wondered about the Falklands because I posted that very shortly after the tariffs were announced and nobody had worked out the formula that they were using yet, it was just clear at first glance that the numbers didn't make sense. Lapras's reply answered my question.
(Still makes me curious about the two uninhabited islands that ended up on the list. I can only assume some form of trade gets recorded as passing through those islands for bureaucratic reasons.)
>(Still makes me curious about the two uninhabited islands that ended up on the list. I can only assume some form of trade gets recorded as passing through those islands for bureaucratic reasons.)
Or maybe some super thorough bureaucrat wanted to cover the possibility that they might become inhabited at some point in the future.
I am a lawyer, not a doctor and not a chemist. However, I do have the internet including ChatGPT which gives me just enough information about medicine and chemistry to be dangerous. I also have a mood disorder and take lithium, so that is one of my topics of interest to research.
I recently listened to an episode of the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast that discusses research on lithium proline salicylate (LISPRO), also known as AL001 or LiProSal. This compound is designed to enhance lithium delivery to the central nervous system (CNS) while minimizing systemic exposure, potentially reducing the risk of adverse effects associated with traditional lithium therapies. It appears based on the research done to-date to achieve this goal, the question now is whether the increase in lithium in the CNS translates into clinical benefit, and in the dementia trials it appears to but they have not released data on mood disorders. So they are years from releasing it to the public. However, this is of interest to me because I want to take lithium indefinitely and avoid burning out my kidneys. So the idea of a compound of lithium that could get more to my CNS where it benefits me, while also reducing the amount burdening my kidneys is very interesting.
Dr. ChatGPT tells me that the chemistry to create lithium proline salicylate is actually fairly straightforward and doable in a normal kitchen. You would want to combine lithium carbonate in a slightly acidic solution with proline and salicylic acid. This would not be perfect, but ChatGPT seems to think that a chemical reaction would take place in approximately 10 minutes of just mixing the substances together that would precipitate some LiProSal crystals suspended in solution. There would be some impurities compared to a pharmaceutical lab, but according to Dr. ChatGPT none would be substantially more harmful or dangerous than lithium, asprin, or proline.
I try not to do things that are stupid, but I admit I am kind of tempted to try this for a week to see how it treats me. Convince me I am stupid and this is a terrible idea?
I find ChatGPT to be pretty good with recipes for food and hand lotion, but I’d never do anything like that and doubly never ingest it.
I have no idea. But I’d suggest using not Chat but research GPT, and asking it for a summary with links that covers every
question you can think of: Has anyone else tried this, list of downsides and risks, etc. There also used to be a reddit sub that covered this kind of thing— see if you can find it. One possible problem
I see is figuring out what dose of the new compound is equivalent to the dose you are now taking. There’s a professional researcher named Elizabeth that people here recommend. You could also pay her to research this question: https://acesounderglass.com/hire-me/
Who else is now preparing for the fall of western civilization? Do we have any idea of how imminent the fall will be, or is it going to be a long drawn out thing? And will Wisconsin fall first? If anyone has any details it will be really helpful in aiding my preparations. Thanks.
Is it an absolute fall or a relative one, ie America is no longer “top nation” and we become sort of like postwar England, living off of soft power and nostalgia?
I find I'm doing roughly the same thing I did the last few times I saw people talk about the fall of western civilization.
I’m doing what I do when they are *not* talking about it. You gotta figure that’s when the danger is worst.
The USA is just one part of Western Civ. Do you expect the other parts to
fall too?
What does fall even mean?
I can imagine a future where "Western Civilization" loses meaning as the US and Europe continue to drift apart culturally and geopolitically. It does not require any individual state to "fall".
I'm pessimistic in the short term, but optimistic long term aside from my concerns about AI.
Democrats are reforming by the sounds of it, woke stuff is on the decline and the backlash to Trump is not particularly woke (unlike 2016). Trump will trash the economy over the next year, Elon's clowning around will show poor results and the republicans will get creamed in the midterms. By 2028 support for Trump will be just his hardliners and the 'just want to see libs cry' demographic will abandon him.
Liberals getting spanked all over the world has made the center-left realize that appeasing the progressives was a mistake. Many of the issues that were ignored ten years ago, like cost disease, regulation and housing reform are getting more attention on the democrat side, so we could have bipartisan support for some real game changing quality of life improvements. The de-growthers are losing. Open borders have closed which is good and I doubt Dems will make the same mistake again. The economy can hopefully recover quickly from all this chaos.
Things are going well!
If it weren't for the authoritarian stuff, I'd agree. But running the dictator playbook looks like a one-way street. Even if Democrats regain power in 2029, it will be hard for them to turn the other cheek.
What playbook is that? Is Trump arresting members of the opposition? Is he taking over the media? Is he quartering troops in our homes?
As near as I can tell Trump is *mostly* being aggressive about using powers that he arguably has been granted by statute and by the Constitution. If the Congress regrets delegating that much authority it is free to take it back, and that might be good for the nation.
There are a few things on his list that are considerably at the far end of “arguable”, and maybe a few that are beyond that line, but I have faith that the latter will not stand, and that he’s not even going to try sending the military to threaten the courts.
Kudos for saying “dictator” and “authoritarian” rather than “Hitler” and “Fascist”. We may make it through yet.
> Is Trump arresting members of the opposition?
He's explicitly kicking legal immigrants out of the country purely for their political views. Independently of that, he's also secretly disappearing people to 3rd world torture dungeons without even a hearing (and in direction violation of explicit court orders no less). Independently of that, he's also banning law firms for perceived slights such as representing political opponents. Oh and as a bonus, his pet attorney is talking about prosecuting members of congress, since you ask, though that hasn't gone anywhere yet and is pretty far down the list of authoritarian moves he has made.
Any ONE of these alone represents a massive assault on civil rights and the rule of law. And Trump's doing worse stuff every day. There's a ton of other stuff I haven't even mentioned since even the list of five-alarm atrocities is already so long.
> t he’s not even going to try sending the military to threaten the courts
Not yet anyway. But he's gone extremely far beyond the pale already, including calling for impeachment of judges who ruled against him and pushing congress to pass a law preventing courts from issuing injunctions. Besides, there's no need to militarily threaten the courts when you can just ignore them (as he's done on several occasions already).
When you're illegally disappearing people without any due process and also banning courts from saying no, you're already 70% of the way to dictatorship. And the strongarming of companies for perceived disloyalty also goes a long way there. And keep in mind that we're less than three months into his term! Even Nazi Germany wasn't built in a day!
It is reassuring that the Trump admin still feels the need for at least a figleaf of legitimacy (e.g they've only sometime ignored court orders rather than going full nuclear), but it's hard to know how long that will hold.
Then impeach him! Ah, can't get enough members of Congress to agree? Then that doesn't sound like 70% of the way to dictatorship; that sounds like someone executing the will of the people.
I will grudgingly accept "demagogue", but that's what the old guard always calls populists.
I'm sorry I goaded you into mentioning Nazis. "Calling for the impeachment of judges" is pretty milquetoast compared to actual Nazis.
Every dictator ever claims to be following the will of the people. The difference is not what the leaders claim, but the actual institutions, laws, checks and balances and so on.
If on Jan 20, 2029, President Kendi "accidentally" arrests Trump and Musk and ships them off to a third world prison, would you say that he too is just "executing the will of the people"?
Trump is currently conducting an all-out assault against the rule of law, the constitution, and democracy, and if America manages to hold together in anything resembling its current form, it will be *in spite* of him, not because of any restraint on his part.
The one saving grace of Trump is that he is *also* pursuing unbelievably disastrous economic policy, which may erode his support base enough that it will be difficult to complete the turn towards autocracy. But if you don't fear Trump himself, just imagine what someone who is actually smart and disciplined could accomplish with these methods now that he has blazed the trail.
Where are your investments?
I've moved a little into overseas equities, which, I dunno if any good or not.
I am of two minds on this, but I am attempting to hedge the risk a bit. I sort of think that civilization will collapse, but not enough to go all-in. So I put a ton of my money into my 401(k) and stuff that will have zero value in an apocalypse. But I also have a hunting rifle plus know-how and a pantry full of food that could be starvation rations for months if not longer. I buy bulk beans, grains, tinned fish, etc. and keep it all in big plastic totes in my pantry. I eat this stuff regularly so I regularly freshen and renew my supplies and this stuff probably would not expire too quickly if the shit hits the fan.
I also bought a few acres of property for my home - not enough for a huge farm but I think probably enough to keep me and my family alive if I learn enough about gardening to play my cards right. I am planting out perennials that can provide a lot of calories like chestnut and hazelnut trees, etc. I am also trying to establish a root cellar so that I can store stuff over the winter like potatoes that could be a starvation ration that could also be re-planted in the spring.
I hope if things do go south, my preps are enough to keep my family alive on. If civilization stays afloat during my life, then my preps are nice hobbies that keep me physically active and encourage me to eat healthy food. So I am trying to prep in a way that balances my worry that civilization will collapse with a comfortable enjoyable life if this ship of fools piloted by a senile sociopath somehow avoids crashing on the rocks.
No; I think that we're heading in a dangerous direction, but slowly enough that we'll see warning signs before it's too late, and the proximate solution - "elect Democrats" - is sufficiently simple and low cost that I think that it will be implemented.
If it weren't for the authoritarian stuff, I'd agree. But running the dictator playbook looks like a one-way street. Even if Democrats regain power in 2029, it will be hard for them to turn the other cheek.
What do you think is going on in the UK right now?
Sounds pretty awful! I am very glad the UK I live in is not the one you describe.
This is sarcastic in reference to Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court seat, right?
In the US, at least, systemic and structural elements of government have been consistently weakened since the George W Bush administration, if not earlier. The typical progression for this type of decay is that everything seems fine for a long time, then a repetition of crisis moments of collapse alternating with periods of calm.
This isn't meant to be subtly partisan; I think there is significant blame on both major parties. However, one of the parties is more enthusiastically rushing to knock down pillars without any apparent concern about whether they are load-bearing while the other mostly ignored structural considerations while in power and basked in the glow of "not as bad as those guys."
low confidence, but I feel like the petrodollar is the lynchpin. I expect the decline to play out over decades, not days. More in the vein of "huh, isn't it kinda weird that recessions (etc) are getting more frequent?" than the movie "The Day After Tomorrow".
My intuition is that it will be a long, slow decline. My emergency preparedness is a lot more extensive than most people's (thanks, ThePrepared.com!), but its purpose is to weather a short-term regional disaster. It's there to get me through until infrastructure is restored or until I can evacuate to a different area with infrastructure.
I have no interest in living should infrastructure fail everywhere.
I got in to UATX. Should I go? My goal in life is end factor farms (or at least make progress in that regard)
How sympathetic are you to the overall political orientation of the place, and does it have any good faculty in your probable major?
Also, you have to factor in the risk of the institution collapsing because these are tough times for higher education.
I'm old (Xennial), so take this with a grain of salt, but:
Most of the value in a university education is signaling and networking. I think the connections in any 'anti-woke' university are mostly going to be for conservative political circles, and you'd have a hard time getting jobs with any left-leaning nonprofit. Most people who care about animals are left-wing; you have the occasional Christian who thinks it's cruel but they don't staff the organizations.
If you have idealistic life goals you probably want to pick up as much prestige as possible because that's how you gain influence. The only real decision point is if the state school is substantially less expensive, then you have to weigh how much debt to accrue in search of your goal. People are still paying that crap off decades later.
I'd love to hear someone else's opinion.
Was Ben Goertzel's prediction from 2017 right?
'Question 11: You have recently claimed that toddler-level AGI could come about by 2030. How confident are you of that prediction?
It’s looking more and more likely every year. I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually. And then it will be more than a toddler in the human sense. It will be a toddler savant, with ability to e.g. do science and math and answer questions way beyond the level of a human toddler. And once we’re there, the full-fledged Singularity won’t be far off in my opinion…. SingularityNET has potential to accelerate R&D progress in this and other AGI-ish directions, making it increasingly likely that the advancement of AI proves Kurzweil a pessimist…'
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html
Maybe toddler-level in the sense that toddlers only mimic what they see other people doing. I could see that. If I can see that, I can also see toddler-savant.
The problem here is that toddlers don't stop there. Toddlers are capable of some symbolic reasoning, problem solving using small objects, putting words together in the right order, and knowing which words correspond to which objects in the real world. LLMs can't do that yet, and given what I've seen, they're not going to master symbolic reasoning any time soon, even if they aim a great deal of focus there instead of securing ever larger numbers of nodes in their neural nets or supplies of electricity.
Given all that, the idea of a full-fledged Singularity doesn't look likely to me by 2030. And if I don't see news of symbolic reasoning breakthroughs or the equivalent by 2030, I don't expect it by 2035, et cetera.
I'm not sure toddler AGI makes any sense as a concept.
In fact I'm no longer sure that AGI makes any sense as a concept, and I think toddlers are a good illustration of why. Toddlers don't have "general intelligence" in any sense, they have human toddler intelligence, which makes them quite good at certain things and terrible at others. Similarly, LLMs don't have "general intelligence", they have LLM-intelligence which makes them good at some things and terrible at others. (Very little overlap between LLMs and toddlers, as it happens).
We like to pretend that adult humans have "general intelligence", but we don't, we have adult-human intelligence and are good at certain things and terrible at others.
To pile on to that, animals, too, have their own intelligence that makes them good at some things and terrible at others. As a dog owner, I know well how incredible dogs are at observing others and reading from posture, gestures etc., an ability that comes naturally to them but is rare and valuable enough in humans that they can make a paid profession out of it.
One might note here that among dogs, some are rather more intelligent than others, but all would score the same on a human intelligence test
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-el-salvador-abrego-garcia-b2725002.html
A legal immigrant and father to a US citizen with no criminal record was "accidentally" deported and thrown into the worst prison on the planet. US tax payer dollars are paying to keep him there. And the government claims there's now nothing they can do because he's outside jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, the admin is violating the deportation injunctions and continuing deportation flights, even though it's now become incredibly clear that they are essentially picking up anyone who has the wrong skin tone (i.e. violating judicial review AND doing it badly): https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-deports-more-alleged-gang-members-el-salvador-2025-03-31/
Meanwhile, ICE has already "accidentally" detained a US citizen, again for basically looking wrong: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/28/ice-arrested-and-detained-a-us-citizen-for-hours-because-he-looked-mexican/
I think this is indefensible. If, somehow, you're still defending this administration, I would love to understand what exactly is enough of a bright line for them to cross.
I find that my answer to a similar question last OT is unchanged.
He was an illegal alien suspected of gang activity. We owe him nothing. DHS has the authority to remove him from the country. If you’re concerned about prison, here’s a simple solution: obey the law.
As has already been posted, both in op and in the comments on this thread, the man was legally allowed to be in the country, regardless of the circumstances of his entry. DHS does NOT have the authority to violate judicial orders. So the actual law breaker here is...the Trump admin.
It should be obvious why conservatives don't take this seriously. When the law suits your preferences, ignoring it is a crisis and an authoritarian power grab. When the law doesn't appeal to you, ignoring it is simply a practical reality of enforcement. Why wasn't he deported after his arrest in 2019? Was the decision to let him stay at that point a crisis of democracy?
If we're going to be histrionic about the actions of DHS, why not apply that to the judge as well? We could just as easily characterize him as a rouge judge misusing his authority for activist purposes and granting protection based on an obviously spurious asylum claim. We can even accuse him of trying to usurp the power of the democratically elected president and stymie the execution of his popular mandate. Would you really find any of that convincing though? If not, then hopefully you can see why conservatives are generally unconcerned about this.
> Why wasn't he deported after his arrest in 2019? Was the decision to let him stay at that point a crisis of democracy?
I mean, you can read the case law? The precedent, the laws in place, these are all well established and have been linked in the thread.
Paraphrasing from elsewhere, if your argument is that you do not believe in refugees or asylum seekers, that we should deport legal migrants who are the family of citizens to places where they might be killed, and that this is so important it is worth massively expanding the powers of the executive to the point where they are ignoring judicial orders and legal precedent, then you should actually make that argument. But handwaving to something like "this is illegal!!!" while doing exactly zero work to understand why Garcia's case went the way it did is not compelling.
And if your argument is "I do believe in asylum in some cases but we can do it a different way", then propose a different way. I, and everyone else who's thought about this for decades, would love to hear the unique insights.
The reality of the situation is that you're mad that the legislature has laws on the books protecting people you don't like. You can, like, advocate to change the laws. But throwing a tantrum through the executive that not only violates the actual letter of the law but also directly and massively expands the authority of the executive under a man who is clearly authoritarian? Make it make sense. This is in no way equivalent to the decision to let him stay in the country, which of course is a decision that actually does follow the law.
On a meta level of all this, I think what I've heard from you and several other people in these comments is something like "no violation of checks and balances, no violation of law, no violation of moral understanding is too great to get rid of immigrants in this country". Which of course begs the question: why? What is animating this level of extremism?
Even if I buy that all of these legal immigrants broke some law in arriving to this country, I have no idea what is compelling such massive hatred against a group of people who are literally paying taxes while getting no benefits. It'd be like shooting pedestrians to prevent the scourge of jaywalking. Like, what?
>people who are literally paying taxes while getting no benefits.
Illegals cost the state money on balance
Citation needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States?wprov=sfla1
The strongest evidence for your side is 'it's complicated'. On the other side you have taxes, economic growth, consumer demand, being willing to do a bunch of jobs no one else wants to do ...
I'll freely admit that I'm not married to the existence of asylum or refugee status, especially in its current form. Whatever the original intention might have been, its primary use today is as a tool for economic migrants and open-borders activists to game the system. It's also not difficult to come up with reform ideas. (Auto-reject cases that pass through a third country, auto-reject anyone suspected of a crime, make it non-obligatory for the host country to hear claims, move to an opt-in system where the host country affirmatively selects people they want to grant asylum/refugee hearings to at their own discretion.)
There will always be a tension between liberal asylum/refugee policy and the ability to restrict immigration. Since the current policy makes it impossible to enforce immigration restrictions we need to make the policy less liberal. This is really just common sense and does not take years of study to understand. It's only a problem if you are adamant about maximizing asylum. To which, I can ask you the same question you asked me. Why? Why prioritize the interests of foreigners over the clearly expressed preferences of citizens?
If it's so easy to come up with reform ideas, you should push for legislation.
You haven't really responded to the meat of what I'm saying. We both seem to agree that the law and precedent supports that there is nothing "illegal" happening in the way the border is being enforced. We just disagree about whether the law is right or wrong. But instead of trying to fix the law -- which, you know, your people have both houses so like...??? -- you want to give power to the executive, remove checks and balances, and even seem open to some pretty monstrous collateral damage.
You can flail about claiming that there's an open border (there isn't) or that the law is somehow resulted in an open border (it hasn't). I'd love to see stats on this because the only information I can find indicates that asylum grants are like 5% of all applications.
Which of course makes what-about-this-strawman all the weaker. Why is this such a big deal to you, personally, that you think it's acceptable and in fact morally just to overturn checks and balances?
You're not going to shock or scandalise any conservatives by pointing out that the government is pretty incompetent and bad at its job. That's exactly what conservatives have been saying all along! A change in the party affiliation at the top isn't going to suddenly make millions of bone-headed government employees any smarter or more competent, and it should come as no surprise that the government is just as bad at deporting people as it is at airline security, health care or airport security.
I'm not really aiming for self-destructive conservatives. I'm aiming for the rationalist libertarian conservatives who claimed that Trump was going to be better for a less authoritarian government.
Like, if you're a xenophobic nationalist, yea, I think you're probably in full support of this. But also, we just have such fundamental values differences that we have to start the conversation several miles back before we can even begin to evaluate trump
>A legal immigrant and father to a US citizen with no criminal record
This just incorrect (apart from the “father to a US Citizen” part, which doesn’t indicate anything relevant about this case apart from the geographic coordinates his babymomma gave birth at). He entered the United States without authorization, which is a crime, and which by definition makes him an illegal immigrant.
"During the removal proceedings, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and a judge granted him withholding from removal. The government did not appeal the decision."
You seem to want to have a semantics debate, which I'm not interested in having. So let's taboo the word "immigrant" and get right to the point.
The man is "legally allowed to be in the country". You can disagree about how he got here, but he is legally allowed to be here. If you think there's something factually incorrect about that, please provide sources.
Also, sorry, I think it's material that he is the father of a citizen. This will destroy that girl's childhood and the rest of the family. Maybe that's acceptable collateral damage to you, but own at least own that.
It’s not a a semantic debate. He illegally entered the country. Therefore, he should be removed. There are in fact, practical and procedural hurdles to the actual removal of a person like that, but none of that changes the fact that he is not supposed to be in this country.
He had an order of removal to El Salvador. A judge paused that and said, “you can’t remove him to El Salvador.” The judge did not say that he is legally in the country. He could have been removed to some other country. The fact that he was not then removed to another country does not make the fact that he is in the country legal.
Yes, the government screwed up by removing him to El Salvador. The government did not screw up by removing a legal immigrant.
"It’s not a a semantic debate. He illegally entered the country. Therefore, he should be removed."
I believe that current US federal law is that a person who enters the country without permission and then says that he's sorry but he had to do this because he and his family were on the run from a vindictive authoritarian regime or whatever and can they please have asylum, is *not* to be removed from the country until we've had time to properly determine whether or not they're telling the truth about that.
If the circumstances make it patently obvious that they're lying, then maybe it can be a short and simple hearing, but you do have to hold that hearing. Sorry (not sorry) if the law doesn't work the way that you think it should. You can try changing the law, of course; your team holds the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
Part of the problem is that people claim asylum as one more move in "I got into the country and I want to stay here". Is this man genuinely in danger from the government or other entities in his home country?
This is how the well has been poisoned in trying to distinguish between genuine cases and people just trying it on, and now with the change of administration the pendulum has swung from "believe them all" to "doubt them all".
> Part of the problem is that people claim asylum as one more move in "I got into the country and I want to stay here". Is this man genuinely in danger from the government or other entities in his home country? This is how the well has been poisoned in trying to distinguish between genuine cases and people just trying it on, and now with the change of administration the pendulum has swung from "believe them all" to "doubt them all".
Sorry, are you saying that previously, every asylum request was granted? Do you really want to defend that?
Here is the information for 2023: https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/2024_1002_ohss_asylees_fy2023.pdf
Relevant quotes:
"Affirmative asylum case filings with USCIS nearly doubled
from 241,280 applications in 2022 to 456,750 in 2023,
the highest number on record (and covering 636,380
individuals) [...] The total number of defensive asylum applications filed with EOIR nearly doubled from 260,830 in 2022 to 488,620 in 2023. [...]
The total number of persons granted asylum in the United
States increased from 35,720 in 2022 to 54,350 in 2023."
In your framing of "believe them all", only 54k out of a total of over a million asylum applications were accepted. This is, roughly, a 5% acceptance rate.
So, like, what are you even talking about? I think you should consider if the sources you are downstream from are grounded in factual information.
I think you're of the opinion that the judge was like 'you cannot remove him to El Salvador but he's still here illegally. And I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about.
A withholding of removal is a legal term of art, a status that is applied to an individual. It's not, like, a one-off thing related to this particular case. You can read more about here (https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/the_difference_between_asylum_and_withholding_of_removal.pdf)
but the relevant quotes:
"As in the case of asylum, a person who is granted withholding of removal is protected from being returned to his or her home country and receives the right to remain in the United States and work legally. But at the end of the court process, an immigration judge enters a deportation order and then tells the government they
cannot execute that order. That is, the “removal” to a person’s home country is “withheld.” However, the government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept them.
Withholding of removal provides a form of protection that is less certain than asylum, leaving its recipients in a sort of limbo. A person who is granted withholding of removal may never leave the United States without executing that removal order, cannot petition to bring family members to the United States, and does not gain a path to citizenship. And unlike asylum, when a family seeks withholding of removal together a judge may grant protection to the parent while denying it to the children, leading to family separation."
So, again, he was legally in the country. And, by the way,
>Yes, the government screwed up by removing him to El Salvador.
THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT???
“It’s not a a semantic debate.”
No, it’s totally not, it’s a debate about the law, and you seem to… have no idea about how laws work, and what a “judge” is, and what “legal” means. Hope you’re not a lawyer! Or a prosecutor. That would be sad!
The argument for the other side is quite simple. The rule of law on immigration has been completely ignored for decades now. Entering the country without authorization is a federal crime; this is the law of the land and was never changed. The government just sometimes stopped preventing people from illegally entering the country and also sometimes didn't deport them when they were caught. The law was just ignored and unenforced, to the extent that there are tens of millions of people who illegally entered the country. Now the rule of law is just being ignored in the other direction. If you want to use that to criticize the other side, they'll just shrug and say turnabout is fair play. Your follow up to that thought might be "but this means as soon as someone stops following the law somewhere there is no more law anywhere." Yes, this is why politics makes people stupid. The left is stupid for allowing their preference of open borders to destroy the law. The right is stupid for allowing their preference of getting rid of foreigners to destroy the law.
> If you want to use that to criticize the other side, they'll just shrug and say turnabout is fair play.
> The left is stupid for allowing their preference of open borders to destroy the law. The right is stupid for allowing their preference of getting rid of foreigners to destroy the law.
This is a pretty shit equivocation. Obama famously had more deportations than Bush, Biden more than Trump 1. Hell, Biden had more deportations in his first quarter than Trump did. Trump is literally just doing it in the most power-grabbing way possible.
And even criticisms of policy like catch-and-release are well within established law, and have significant judicial precedent. There's a lot of relevant links on the wiki article on catch and release, for eg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_and_release_(immigration)) or asylum law in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_in_the_United_States). If your opinion is that this is bad, call your legislative reps? You're welcome to make the argument that the US should not have any refugee, asylum, or withheld release, but at least be honest about it. I want people to defend that they do not believe in refugees or asylum seekers, that we should deport legal migrants who are the family of citizens to places where they might be killed, and that this is so important it is worth massively expanding the powers of the executive to the point where they are ignoring judicial orders and legal precedent. Make the argument.
And if your response is "well, we can do it a different way" propose a different way. I, and everyone else who's thought about this for decades, would love to hear the unique insights.
On a meta level, regardless of how you feel about the immigration debate, it seems obviously, materially worse to deport a bunch of people over the explicit orders of the judiciary while also detaining citizens. If the defense is "we dont care enough about going through the usual channels, we just want our will now", I think that that's tantamount to saying "there is no line that I won't cross". At least it's good to know where they stand.
+1
Your argument suggests that there is no more law and no constraint on the powers of the federal government. Is that your position? If not, what constraints do you believe should exist? What do you think actually constrains this administration?
My comment was a response to the OP's question - how are the Trump admin's deportation polices defensible? I was simply holding up a mirror - they are exactly as defensible as allowing tens of millions of people to enter the country illegally and then doing nothing about them.
Let's use the Abrego Garcia case. He illegally entered the country somewhere around 2011/12. In 2019 he was arrested under suspicion of being an MS-13 gang member. The only evidence of this presented was the word of an anonymous CI, which is pretty dubious. Anyway, only after being in the country illegally for 8 years does he make an asylum claim, which was rejected. But he also made a claim that he would be tortured if returned to El Salvador, which was only substantiated by a deposition from a family member. So the judge granted an order of protection specifically against Garcia being deported to El Salvador. At no point between 2019 and 2025 was anything done to remove him from the US despite his illegal presence. Then he does finally get deported, but to the country that a judge specifically ordered he couldn't be deported to, and also thrown in prison. The Trump admin response to this is whoops, but now he's in a foreign country so we have no jurisdiction to do anything, too bad.
Does any part of this sound like a functioning system? Garcia illegally entered the country and stayed here for 8 years with no consequence. He got arrested because of essentially unsubstantiated hearsay that he was a gang member. At this point he gets an order to prevent deportation to his home country, also based on unsubstantiated information. Years later he gets deported back anyway, and also thrown in prison. Should I be upset at the injustice of Garcia violating our immigration laws, or the kangaroo court standards of evidence that established Garcia as a MS-13 member and also protected him from deportation, or the Trump admin violating that protection to throw him in prison in El Salvador?
If you're asking me, personally, what I think should happen: Garcia should have been stopped at the border or deported in 2011. Failing that, he should have been deported in 2019 when he was arrested. Failing that, he should have been deported in 2025. At no point should he have been sent to a prison without due process.
This is the ideal standard and what the administration should be moving towards, but I think there's going to be a long delay before all the backlogs and bleeding-hearts about "Jose swears up and down that he's a political refugee and not simply an economic one" can be cleared out, and there will be a lot of damage done in the meantime.
Speaking of deportations, Germany is also deporting people for political activism (allegedly):
https://www.rte.ie/news/europe/2025/0401/1505330-irish-citizens-berlin/
So I think that story is a counterpoint to what is going on in the US; Germany is not MAGA territory and they're deporting white Europeans who as EU citizens would have the right to be in Germany. I foresee interesting times ahead!
Thank you for the clarification. You are saying that both political parties have undermined the rule of law and tit-for-tat is part of their justification. You are not saying this is a good outcome.
I'll throw in my support for this interpretation as well. I do not support how the deportations are being executed. I didn't even vote for Trump. Yet Open Borders manages to be infinitely stupider. It's not even a question of policy, it's a question of sovereignty.
Can you point (with actual evidence) to ANY administration in the past 50 years that had a policy that can fairly be described as "Open Borders?" If not, then this entire claim seems pretty irrelevant.
Why are you framing it like this? Especially as some kind of bright line?
First, on Abrego Garcia, you can just read the article you linked and pretty trivially imagine what the conservative view is. The man arrived in 2011 "without inspection", removal proceedings began in 2019 when ICE accused him of being an MS-13 member after an arrest, the Biden administration didn't pursue it, and then the new Trump administration did. Whether he is involved in El Salvadorian gangs and to what extent is an open question but, again, just off the article you posted, the conservative case for expelling a suspected gang member are not difficult to understand.
Nor is the macro case confusing. Illegal immigration has been a big problem for a long time, it has been underenforced to the point where 'frickin Trump got elected, and now he's enforcing it. A condition of him enforcing it cannot be literally no mistakes; this is an isolated demand for rigor that no government program could ever possibly meet. There's no way there won't be some mistakes and this seems like exactly the kind of mistake you would expect: a gray area "uninspected" migrant with questionable links to violent crime. If, indeed, this ends up being an error.
And on Julio Noriega, the 2nd link...dude. It is settled precedent that the President of the US can assassinate you via drone strike without trial. (1) This is an Obama era thing. Regardless of the right or wrong of that case...no, potentially illegally detaining a US citizen for a few hours is not a bright line given the aforementioned precedent.
This is among the least charitable, most partisan framing of these events you could provide? Why? I've read some of your stuff, you're smart, how can you not guess how conservatives view the Garcia case just from that article?
(1) https://www.vox.com/2014/6/23/5835602/anwar-al-awlaki-memo
WRT Awlaki: shouldn't we correct that mistake, rather than use a past moral stain to infect present action?
Two things.
First, I'm trying to understand why the OP thinks these are such brazen violations of the common good that it should shock and appall people and Trump supporters. Just at a factual level, this doesn't make sense to me.
Go back to the OP:
"I think this is indefensible. If, somehow, you're still defending this administration, I would love to understand what exactly is enough of a bright line for them to cross."
Regardless of the right or wrong of Awlaki or Noriega, I don't understand how anyone could consider Noriega, or even Garcia, as an "indefensible bright line" in light of Awlaki. Significantly strong bright lines have already been crossed. Regardless of our opinions, why would the OP presume several hours of wrongful detention would shock in the aftermath of drone assassinations? Just laying aside the actual right or wrong of the issue, his interpretation of the scale and seriousness confuse me. And I honestly suspect they're being exaggerated for polemical effect but I can't understand for what audience.
Second, like, yeah, it would be awesome to roll back the Awlaki precedent, it would be awesome if these deportations were being done more competently, it would be awesome if illegal immigration laws had been faithfully enforced 30+ years. It's not hard to imagine political situations better than the one we're in. But, given the real constraints of the situation we're in, it's not clear to me what's so horrible about these events.
The Awlaki thing is extraordinarily irrelevant.
I found it relevant to the point that WoolyAI was making and even felt that it supported his point. What makes you think it isn't relevant in an extraordinary way?
I seem to recall some people in the previous Open Thread arguing that the no-due-process deportations weren't a big deal because if they got something *really* wrong the courts would fix it eventually. Abrego Garcia's case seems to prove this false - if the government wrongly deports you, there's no taking it back, because you're outside the reach of the courts.
(Well, the case hasn't had a ruling yet, but it's certainly alarming that the government's official stance on its mistake is "sorry, too late, we can't fix this.")
There's disagreement about whether this is "really wrong". The conservative reading of the situation is something like "Proven illegal migrant and possible gang member abuses asylum law in transparent ploy to remain in the country. Gets deported anyway." To cross the threshold of *really* wrong, you would probably need to see a US citizen get deported. You might even need the US citizen to be non-immigrant and non-anchor baby, but those would be more contentious.
The argument the government is making is not "we didn't get this case wrong." The argument they're making is "even if we got this wrong, the court is not allowed to tell us to fix it." That's an argument that would apply to anyone who gets sent to El Salvador, even a citizen.
At the point that it is applied to a citizen, I think conservatives would agree that things have gone too far.
If this argument is successfully applied to a US citizen it will be too late to complain because the government will have the power to send you to the gulag for complaining.
Their complaining might not do much good from the inside of a 3rd world prison though.
One bit I'm seeing cited is behind a Pacer wall: https://t.co/25XZEe8cTi
On March 29, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) served Abrego-Garcia with a Notice to Appear, charging him as inadmissible pursuant to Section 1182(a)(6)(A)(i) of Title 8 of the United States Code, "as an alien present in the United States without being admitted or paroled, or who arrived in the United States at any time or place other than as designated by the [Secretary of Homeland Security]."
During the course of his proceedings, Abrego-Garcia remained in ICE custody because the Immigration Judge (IJ) with the Executive Office for Immigration Review denied Abrego-Garcia bond at a hearing on April 24, 2019, citing danger to the community because "the evidence show[ed] that he is a verified member of [Mara Salvatrucha] ('MS-13')]" and therefore posed a danger to the community. The IJ also determined that he was a flight risk. Abrego-Garcia appealed, and the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld this bond decision in an opinion issued on December 19, 2019, citing the danger Abrego-Garcia posed to the community.
I'm saying: ICE intended to pick up random people based on the color of their skin and the clothes being worn. They intentionally and knowingly pursued a policy of detainment that would pick up non criminals, legal residents, and yes, citizens.
That they eventually released him has no bearing on their decision to pursue that aggressive policy. It was not an accident that they picked him up.
In The Man Who Was Thursday Chesterton gives a somewhat different illustration about chaos and progress - the rationalist argues with the anarchist that all things man-made imbue him with a sense of glory compared to the "natural" world.
Sometimes things fall apart for a good reason
https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/how-seattles-rsi-support-group-ended
Anyone seen the conviction of Marine Le Pen in France?
Seems the trend of Europe becoming shockingly undemocratic continues.
Maybe you're too young to remember, or didn't always pay the same amount of attention to the going-ons in Old Europe, but this is not the first time or even the most high profile case. I guess my country of Europe was never "democratic" to begin with?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#:~:text=On%201%20August%202013%2C%20Berlusconi,by%20doing%20unpaid%20community%20service.
If you don't want the time, you shouldn't do the crime and so forth.
Unfortunately, the conservative party in the US is too well coordinated to ever allow any punishment of one of its members for a crime as small as stealing 3 million, you need to be in the billions before they'll even acknowledge that it happened, S&L style.
I think that's a strong argument for fines and imprisonment.
The fact that the court has specifically banned her from running for office for five years even though her "prison" sentence is only two years suspended and two on an ankle monitor doesn't wholly invalidate it, but it makes it somewhat weaker, I think, because that's less directly related to the traditional aims of justice.
It was the democratically elected legislature of France that imposed the running-for-office ban, by passing a law to that effect.
This was discussed in an earlier thread, so please search below.
In case it is helpful context, France has a track record of prosecutions of powerful politicians. While this is "undemocratic" in the sense of restricting the choice of the voters, it isn't at all clear that this is a change or escalation from past behavior.
And since it was the national legislature which created that particular penalty, by passing a law, it is not undemocratic.
I follow the owner of Kiwifarms, Josh Moon, because he's probably the most censored man in America (more than Gab or Nick Fuentes) purely for running an edgy gossip website, and the efforts he goes through to keep it up are seriously impressive, and reveal a lot of fraying threads in the interconnectivity of the internet. His article about being banned from Cloudflare, and his article where he talks about how payment networks are taking away his right to transact online are both pretty revealing as far as how intense corporate censorship can get.
https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/joshua-moon-where-the-sidewalk-ends-the-death-of-the-internet
https://madattheinternet.com/2021/04/07/section-230-isnt-the-problem-payment-networks-are/
He's since managed to replace cloudflare and route around the tier 1 ISPs that have blackholed him, but the financial censorship hasn't changed at all in the years since those articles were made.
He's been trying to start a foundation for Internet Preservation to try and fix the payment processor overreach, but ironically the payment processors are preventing him from even doing this:
https://xcancel.com/usipsorg/status/1905621992432185512#m
The man can't even raise money for a foundation to lobby for his right to raise money online.
Anyway, he's basically as censored as it gets, so if you have an interest in one of those 'high-risk customers' that payment processors like to screw over like porn or firearms sites, then he might be worth a follow.
And to tie this into current events, I suppose, it's hard to have sympathy for non-citizens getting deported for frivolous reasons when actual American citizens can be stripped of their ability to transact online with no recourse and sovereign nations like the U.K are threatening American website owners.
https://kiwifarms.st/threads/2025-03-26-ofcom-advisory-letter-illegal-content-risk-assessments-your-duties-under-the-online-safety-act-2023.215543/page-55#post-20970052
Assorted trigger warnings for content that he posts:
Overt white nationalist signaling
Overt sex-negative feminist signaling
Overt anti-Semitic signaling
Overt anti-Muslim signaling
Overt anti-anime signaling
Overt anti-trans signaling
Coverage of E-drama and lolcows.
None of these bother me, so I can just pay attention to his difficulties in keeping his site up. It's interesting.
I mean, his website has been tied to multiple suicides and stalking cases. Hosting services don't want that liability for obvious reasons. I guess you can loosely call this censorship, but can you really compel a company to host material that will almost inevitably cause them legal problems?
I will admit its fascinating that he cares so much about his bullying website that he's dedicated his life to keeping it afloat.
> has been tied to
Slate Star Codex has been tied to white nationalists by the New York Times. There's a poster by the handle blorbo who has been known to post on Astral Codex Ten, which has been tied to Slate Star Codex.
While I appreciate the sheer joy of responding to a semantic quibble as a way to avoid engaging in good faith, what I actually meant was that the site is used almost exclusively to organise harassment campaigns, share personal information and select targets for said campaigns.
White nationalists, while unfortunately present here are hardly using this space as their base of operations for illegal or dubiously legal activies
> for illegal or dubiously legal activies
Which is it? Illegal, or dubiously legal?
The company is incorporated in America and has an American address. It operates under American law. Call the police if there are illegal activities.
If there was a suicide you could "tie to" you should be calling the police.
"Which is it? Illegal, or dubiously legal?"
The word "activities" is--as you are apparently unaware--a plural noun. As in, more than one, singular activity. They do not all have to share a common status with regard to legality.
> Call the police if there are illegal activities.
...particularly ironic, since one of the exciting pastimes regularly organised on kiwifarms is calling armed police to some target location where there is no illegal activity.
Are you talking about swatting? You're just making shit up now.
🙄
Section 230 means they don't have liability.
In the US. Things get more complicated abroad and they'd rather avoid the whole thing. Also these liability in the sense of "public backlash". In the same way that reddit took down the "jailbait" subreddit about 10 years ago, hosting legal but objectionable things is a PR nightmare.
Its a mess most companies want to avoid.
I agree that facebook, twitter and youtube should be torn to shreds for their complicity in all those things. Even worse, their lack of moderation in non-english languages has promoted ethnic cleansings in Myanmar.
The difference is that facebook and twitter have the defence (adequate or not) that bullying etc is not what their sites are for and the sheer scale of their sites means these things happen. Kiwi farms is 100% dedicated to stalking, bullying, sharing leaked nudes etc.
Also, twitter and facebook host their own servers. Kiwi farms rents servers off of other companies. If someone rents a room in your house and turns it into a grow room for weed, you'd probably kick them out.
Every generation has this guy.
It reminds me of Larry Flint and Hustler magazine
To me, this is all a natural outcome of the over centralisation and monopolisation of the internet. I personally would be happy if all the monopolies were smashed up. I'm not a huge fan of payment denial, but again that's a consequence of monopoly.
There's a balance that needs to be struck, but unfortunately it seems like that is not a majority opinion anymore.
Actually, I love anime, and most of his anti-porn and anime signaling is directly against people like me (this takes up nearly as much time as the weekly anti-trans segment). I'm pretty ambivalent on all the other things though.
As to why I have less sympathy, it's multi-faceted. I'm not saying I want these deportations to happen in the way they have. I'm pro-free-speech in all cases, so if some Muslim immigrant without citizenship wants to yell "Death to Israel" on their college campus, I'm cool with that. I wouldn't even want them to face any reprisal from their college, let alone the government. I swear that much.
But that commitment doesn't mean anything. I haven't been advocating on their behalf and I don't feel a strong impulse to like I do with an American citizen getting locked out of online payment systems. Why is that?
It's a couple things. He is closer to someone like me. He's an edgy, tech-savvy white guy that grew up running wild online and immersed in imageboard culture. That's probably a lot of what it is. The other thing is that citizen have explicit protection, and citizen vs non-citizen resident seems like a very strong Schelling point. I'm not even slightly afraid of being deported, or even any of my friends being deported. My friends all have citizenship, as do my extended family.
If you think about it from that lens, it's clear that corporate censorship is much more frightening to me. After all, this country has a pretty arbitrary immigration policy anyway, what's one more layer of hoops to jump through for second class citizens?
If even citizen's rights mean nothing next to corporate power then citizens and residents will both be equal under their heel. If citizens have absolute free-speech, but non-citizens don't have free-speech at all, there is at least an example to aspire to in how we treat non-citizens. The former situation is what we've effectively had until now, and it's very, very hard to fix. The latter situation can be fixed by a later president saying residents have the same rights as Americans do when it comes to free speech. The executive branch giveth, the executive branch taketh away.
What I'm getting at with the last point is that corporate censorship is both more frightening to me personally, and also more clandestine. Who would you even litigate against to dispute being cut out of the global economy by payment processors? They're a black box in the first place. There's nothing you can do save pray for competent bureaucracy and legislators. But have a look at the deportation stuff. The enemy is clear, they know who they have to litigate against, and a single elected official can reverse it all.
Payment processors scare me more than the president.
I hope this helps you understand where I'm coming from and why my instinctual reaction is more apathetic to a threat I see as temporary, blatant, and actively being worked on vs a problem that is permanent, sneaky, and is being championed by no one except an internet bully. Like, they're still going on about banks even though the problem is the payment processors and their deliberately obfuscated stranglehold on all online services.
This is my most important issue. If a candidate offered to defang the payment processors, I would pick them over any others.
He has been sued. I think most of them get thrown out since he somehow tends to attract the attention of crazies.
To fine or jail him would require due process. Unless I missed something he hasn't ever been charged with a crime. One of the issues is all these things have happened to him *without* being charged. It's someone who hasn't broken any laws and struggles to stay online (partially due to his own social issues).
> To fine or jail him would require due process
Not anymore!
> Unless I missed something he hasn't ever been charged with a crime. One of the issues is all these things have happened to him *without* being charged.
If you're outraged about that, you're *really* going to be horrified when you hear what ICE has been up to lately.
I'm pretty upset about that and we discussed it at the organizing meeting we had last Saturday to go over voter mobilization and legal challenges and protests.
I think I saw you there. You had the sunglasses, right?
US presidents love to harp on about other NATO members spending and investing too little on defense, and they're absolutely right! But I wonder: How much of America's military expenditure can really be attributed to the direct interests of NATO, as opposed to enforcing geopolitical interests far away from North America and Europe?
America has spent a lot on wars in recent times, but Iraq I and Iraq II can hardly be called defensive wars to protect the nation's sovereignity, and as for Afghanistan – that's debatable to say the least. And although long-term investments into military infrastructure and technology benefit the self-defense scenario as well, for the last two decades, the US has focused on counter-insurgency operations instead of peer or near-peer conflicts.
At least half of our defense budget is driven by our commitment and intention to defend our allies, including NATO but also including e.g. Japan and South Korea and possibly Israel and Taiwan. It's difficult to break it down any further than "homeland defense" and "foreign wars", because the foreign-wars part is flexible and mobile - most of it will be deployed to defend whichever of our allies is under the greatest threat.
It is still reasonable for us to insist of all our allies, that they each take up their fair share of the burden in proportion to the resources available.
I think a big part of it is maintaining a dependable nuclear umbrella.
It's a fair point, but if a war breaks out an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, it can sail to Europe. Planes based in Japan or Korea can fly to Europe. Obviously the US probably could never dedicate 100% of its military to a Europe-based war, but it could still send a massive amount of troops/planes/ships etc.
Troops/planes/ships in Europe or in the vicinity of Europe can sail on the other side of the world too, though.
I'd say it's not just the US military that has a non-NATO focus however. France uses it to project power into it's old colonies in Africa (Mali and the like), Greece and Turkey are basically funding armies to defend against/attack each other. Eastern/Central Europe is probably focused on defense from Russia just because that is where their biggest risk of invasion comes from regardless of NATO, and a cultural memory of Soviet occupation.
Also places like France and UK are just as prone to pork barrel funding for their defense industries as the US. Only Germany of the big nations I can think of doesn't have much of a reason for military spending outside NATO, and considering it's recent history (marching with broomsticks anyone), and how much money they've invested in economic ties to Russia (Nord Stream 1&2), it's say there's a case to be made until recently they've been a historic cost to NATO - potentially understandable due to historic reasons of not wanting to look too militaristic.
My view is basically everyone is a little guilty of using their militaries selfishly (or for their own national interest if we look at it another way), but with recent Russian adventurism in Ukraine, and developing threats globally, it is time for all the nations of NATO to recognise the world has changed and start funding their militaries accordingly.
I feel like there are probably a lot of Silicon Valley types on here, and I need some advice. My father is trying to entice my wife and I to move our kids to Palo Alto or Menlo Park in June for middle school and high school. I also have the option of settling in a beautiful setting in Mendocino County where I own a lovely house, but the schools and social scene are podunk. My wife and I are both teachers, so looking at around 120k each on the Peninsula. We would earn enough money above what we would get in a rural setting in Palo Alto to cover the 60-70k rent for an apartment.
Sometimes I hear Palo Alto is a great place to raise kids, others say it is a total rat race. Does anyone have experiences there? My daughters are good students, but not STEM focused, so I worry that schools are too big and competitive. They have always lived in nurturing expat communities.
Not a Silicon Valley type, but I was a tween and teen girl once.
Have you asked your daughters what option they want?
I'm not saying that you should let children make this decision for you, of course, but I think you should at least solicit their thoughts on it and seriously consider their arguments. Describe not only the expected academic setting, but general lifestyle, too. Will Silicon Valley mean sharing rooms in an apartment instead of having their own rooms in a house? Will it mean a lot of time commuting in cars? Will it mean cash going into rent instead of travel / hobbies / private lessons?
Or would living in Silicon Valley give them access to niche fields of interest (I dunno, rare musical instruments, top-tier competitive cheerleading, crew rowing, etc) they wouldn't be able to access in a rural setting? Do they see city perks that would be worth the inconvenience of city life?
And personally? As someone who's seeing young people entering my workplace, I would consider putting far less focus on their future as students and far more on them as future *employees* in (probably) non-STEM careers. Do they have any idea what they want to do as adults (and do those dreams seem plausible / achievable to you)? Which setting is more likely to produce resilient, humble, adaptable, charismatic, generally well-rounded and accomplished *workers?*
No employer gives a shit what grade their entry-level employee got in high AP Bio if they don't know how to prioritize tasks or incorporate critical feedback or get along with a prickly coworker. In almost all jobs across all fields, being likeable and socially savvy is far more useful than being merely smart. It's possible their very best teacher will be a boss at In-N-Out.
And last, student loan debt is increasingly a devastating *literal* opportunity cost. I have many peers and younger coworkers who live every day with the crushing stress of knowing they will never financially recover from their student loans early enough to start a family or own a home (while I, a college dropout, own my car outright, and my only debt is a condo in a highly desirable city which I can easily afford). If either of your daughters are blessed with a talent and inclination to skip college and go straight into an in-demand skilled trade, for godsake, *let them.* Do you want them to be able to own a house, or not?
I know "college isn't worth it!" is hard for a teacher to hear, but there are millions of people from whom college was very much not worth it, and that population is increasing every year.
I've asked my daughters where they want to live, and having never lived in the USA, and only visited the grandparents in Palo Alto they really have no idea what life there would be like. One of them wants to be a lawyer, and the other has no idea. I try to get them interested in trades, with pretty limited success. When I was in middle school and younger I spent tons of time disassembling stuff and hammering on tree forts, wrenching on bicycles, and building things. I feel like that is the kind of background one needs in order to be an electrician or a plumber, painting contractor etc. Physical strength is a real asset too. I guess trades can mean other fields, but my daughters have more typical feminine interests and pastimes, but one of them does like to build models and create stuff on a smaller scale.
The reason I was asking about Palo Alto, is I feel like that is the kind of rat race place that could crush a kid. But then maybe I am just reading BS on the internet, and really it could be a nice place to live in an insanely overpriced apartment and have access to some cool and interesting people and be near the grandparents who could offer love and care along with some financial help.
Ah, I see!
Yeah, it's a tougher choice when they don't even know which lifestyle they'd prefer, either.
The lawyer-leaning kid might benefit from the more prestigious high school if it eventually gets her into a more prestigious law school, but it might turn out she has an overly glamorous picture of what most lawyers do. There was a thread a while back by a guy contemplating law school, and a few lawyers popped in to provide some advice ranging from "don't do it!" to "it's okay, I guess." (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-371/comment/97875681), and this guy who misdirected his comment wishes he'd never gone (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-371/comment/97968664).
See also the much-beloved "Don't Be A Lawyer" song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which lawyers seem to hugely enjoy when they aren't sadly sighing over how true it is: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-371/comment/97968664
The city option might give her better access to internships / actual lawyers early enough to divert her away from law if it isn't something she is unusually suited to doing.
Some skilled trades don't require any strength at all (watchmaking / repair, etc), but of course that's the kind of thing it's best to have a native interest in before you do any study or get certifications. My dad bought a small locksmith business in his retirement - though he found the administrative aspects of running the small business much more difficult than the technical work of locksmithing. Someone who's able to do both the bookkeeping/marketing side of things and the technical work can clean up pretty well, especially if they get good enough at picking locks to not need to drill them, which my dad did! He was routinely getting paid $100 for a brief commute to someone's door, which he'd spend 45 seconds picking open for them.
But nobody ever makes shows about locksmiths, so it's not on anyone's radar, even though it can be a pretty good life.
What do you want out of a high school experience?
PA can be both a great place to raise kids and be a total rat race at the same time. The local schools' student caliber is fantastic and the competition will drill discipline and stamina unmatched in any other American High school.
My biggest gripe with Paly and Henry Gunn is that you're at a disadvantage to get into UCs. UCs prefer to recruit schools by zipcode. Being #1 at a poor school in a poor zipcode will get you into Cal with a higher probability than being #50 at Henry Gunn. On the other hand, being #1 at Henry Gunn will give a better chance at getting into Stanford or MIT than being #1 at a worse high school.
The PA high schools are without a doubt the better educational experience, but sub-optimal for min-max-ing for UCs, and if I thought I would be #50 at Henry Gunn but #1 elsewhere, I would take being #1 elsewhere.
This too isn't without risks. I might not actually be #1 elsewhere and peer pressure from a bad friend group may turn myself, who would be a stellar student, into a sub-par student. There are no guarantees in life.
edit to add: I would send my own kids to PA high schools. I gave a fence sitter answer above, but for myself and my family I have a more decisive answer-- I refuse to metagame the UC system's ideological game that cultivates mediocracy around zipcodes. I will have my kids compete with the best or brightest, whoever/wherever/however-privileged they are and I simply do not recognize "alternative" forms of merit beyond STEM competitions. I myself was refused admission to UCLA and Cal as an undergrad, in some part because I went to a very competitive CA high school, but I was granted admission to their graduate programs for engineering four years later. But I am not you and my kids aren't yours.
Hey, thanks for your reply! I wasn’t sure if the perception of Pali and Gunn being hyper-competitive was just a Reddit thing or a widely held view.
The rural high school my daughters could attend has a graduating class of about 30 students, yet they regularly send kids to Stanford—a definite zip code perk. Plus, with such a small student body, it’s easy for students to participate in varsity sports, yearbook, and other activities since the bar is relatively low.
That said, the downsides include issues like drug use, a slacker culture, a weaker academic environment, and limited social opportunities. My main concern with a school like Pali is the mental health aspect, even smart kids might feel like they’re just meh. If a student isn’t pursuing STEM, I sometimes wonder whether such a rigorous high school experience is really worth it. Nice thing in a small town is you feel special.
If what is stopping you from sending your kids to a PA high school is your fear of mental illness from excessive "Korean High School" style competition, I would overcome it. Although it is true that PA high schools have on average one student suicide a year, I believe it is from an unhealthy home life.
I have to say it, so I'll say it, but both my neighbors are CEO types. I suspect they moved here to network with each other, the VCs, and to ambush Mark Zuckerburg on a walk. I would not be surprised if they accidentally drove their kids to mental illness. From what I've seen of both of my neighbors' children they are allowed 30 minutes of play a day and are chauffeured to extracurricular activities the rest of the time. It seems they are following some sort of cookbook to min-max their offspring
From what I've read of your comments, I believe it is unlikely that you will accidentally drive your kids to self harm. The adversity of intense "Korean High School" style competition may lift their spirit in the long run. It does not seem to me like you will threaten them with physical discipline based on their college acceptances list. (obligatory YMMV).
Hi everyone,
(We hope it’s okay to post this here—if not, we'll accept banishment without protest, but would appreciate any hints on where this might be better placed.)
We're an expat family of three living in Harlem, NYC, with our 4-year-old daughter. Over the past two years, we've had our daughter home-schooled by a professional teacher—think something like the aristocratic tutoring concept described by Hoehl[1], but with more emphasis on having time to be a child than pure academics. This has worked really well for us, so we can recommend that to anyone interested! However, this year our teacher decided to retire, so we're now in search of a new teacher for our little one.
What we're looking for:
* Experience (classroom or otherwise) in putting together a curriculum for a 4-7 year old and teaching it
* Availability to do this full days Mon-Fri or Mon-Thu
* Enthusiasm for the project and the other good things you'd expect from someone who chose a career working with pre-teen children :)
What we're offering:
* A flexible job where you can focus on educating one child with basically no overhead / meetings / paperwork / etc.
* An uncomplicated (by 5-year-old standards, anyway), engaged, happy girl as your primary partner on the journey
* A lot of freedom in putting together a well-rounded curriculum with as much time for field trips as you want
* Competitive pay (we will typically offer 1.2 - 1.3x the current salary)
* 4 weeks vacation + public holidays + time the three of us are traveling fully paid
* A maxed out QSHERA health savings account to cover health care
If this sounds interesting to you—or if you know someone who might be a great fit—please feel free to reach out or reply here!
[1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins
Have you considered doing this as a pod, with a few other kids? Would you if you found compatible families? Do you think compatible families exist? And, bonus question: will you allow AI use by teacher/student?
Doing this together with a few other kids/families would absolutely be an option---in fact, the one thing we sometimes feel is missing from our current setup is that our daughter doesn’t have a small group of kids her age that she sees on a near-daily basis (she does have activities where she is within the same group of kids every week, but that's not quite the same in terms of intensity of interactions, friendships, etc).
So yes, we’d be open to forming a pod if we found the right families—compatible in terms of values, schedules, and overall vibe. We do think (or at least we we would like to think) that those families exist, though we haven’t actively looked. It would really depend on the dynamics and whether it feels like a good fit for everyone involved.
As for the bonus question: we’re not opposed to the use of AI tools by the teacher, and eventually by the student too, but it depends on age and context---at age 4 it seems to us more important to learn from and with humans (apart from the fact that most 4-year-olds don’t quite meet the literacy standards that would be required for effective learning with AI)
Thank you for the detailed response.
For us, on paper, a "compatible" pod sounds like an ideal solution, though I am still unsure if it's possible to be compatible in our hyper individualistic world.
I'm thinking of putting together a pod matching app, but I fear that there's just not enough compatibility locally and people may be unlikely to move their lives globally for a pod... Perhaps if the entire family gets a pod (cult?)...
Seems bad that Trump is manufacturing consent to invade Greenland
That is the understatement of the year. Invading Greenland would be breathtakingly stupid, pointless, evil and catastrophic in its consequences. I hope that someone with enough influence comes to their senses and stops this madness.
> comes to their senses
We voted to burn it all down, and this is exactly what we are getting. Why on earth would we stop?
That sentiment -- which I've heard from others in recent weeks -- is where it perhaps becomes relevant that less than 30 percent of US adult citizens actually voted for Trump last November. (Or if you prefer, about 31 percent of eligible voters.)
Clearly a large fraction of those who showed up to vote for Trump were "voting to burn it all down". Not all of them perhaps but, many. Also clearly some fraction of those who never turn out to vote agree with that sentiment at least generally.
However -- "generally" is now having to carry some real baggage. What fraction of Americans actually wants a definition of "burn it all down" that includes things like invading Greenland? Treating Canadians of all people like some sort of national enemy? Imposing tariffs that drag our stock market and manufacturing sector? Carrying out an anti-immigrant terror campaign that crashes international tourism to the US and pushes some of our colleges and universities towards bankruptcy? "There are ways" to ignore plain Constitutional text such as no third terms for presidents? Along with whatever other loony-tunes ideas the White House vomits up next.
Yes I know the MAGAts will all cheer the one about the universities, and will keep on parroting Dear Leader's whims on whatever else. Mohr lib tears, cry more, yada yada yada. Also there's no sign yet of the Democrats seeming any smarter or more interesting to anybody outside of their own bubble. But that was all baked in already as last November's result made plain.
The level of childish policy-by-tantrum flowing out of DC _now_ seems genuinely different from what even a lot of people who are done with woke-ism expected. The non-MAGA 75 percent or so of American adults may at some point, while likely agreeing on nothing else, come around to "you know actually we didn't sign up for _this_."
Also remember that we're not even 80 days into this administration yet, Trump's early-onset dementia remains obvious, and that condition as everyone knows is a one-way path. So does anybody think that invading Greenland and annexing Canada and turning Gaza into Las Vegas are the craziest/stupidest priorities that he'll babble about in public?
I mean hey Bhutan -- er pardon me, I meant "Burmerica" -- is just sitting there....
Maybe YOU voted for that (in that case, please go and have your moral compass fixed). I sure didn't. Trump is not only burning down "his" country, but quite possibly the whole world. Also, I doubt that everyone who thought "yeah, 'Make America Great Again' sounds good" was aware that that would plausibly involve a worldwide economic crisis (centered on the US) and world war.
>Also, I doubt that everyone who thought "yeah, 'Make America Great Again' sounds good" was aware that that would plausibly involve a worldwide economic crisis (centered on the US) and world war.
A major part of Trump's pitch was isolationism, and the promise of bringing US troops home and disengaging from foreign conflicts. Invading Greenland is pretty much the opposite of that.
>I hope that someone with enough influence comes to their senses and stops this madness.
That point is long past, unless you're talking about an actual assassin.
Trump's been making noises about annexing it, e.g., https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-says-he-thinks-us-will-annex-greenland-13327945
> seems like bait for the left while not the slightest bit convincing to the right
That's what they said about everything, even the stuff that Trump is actually doing. "Take him seriously but not literally" apologists are in shambles.
Trump has explicitly refused to rule out using military force: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/30/nx-s1-5344942/trump-military-force-not-off-the-table-for-greenland
Ambiguously hinting that you might invade one of your allies is not generally a good idea, at least not if you plan on having diplomatic relations with other countries.
Does anyone know how to block people on here? I didn't think it was possible but then someone blocked me. I can't find the option on either desktop or the app.
Oh man, I got very excited at the prospect of blocking, and then learned that it apparently doesn't prevent you from seeing that person's comments in forums other than one's own.
:(
Perhaps you need to mute them instead. I haven't managed to penetrate the island fortress where Substack hides its instructions for the commenting system so I don't really know, but I both block and mute the people I don't want to see just to be sure, and it seems to work.
You're saying that you're able to block/silence someone here in the ACX comments, so that you don't have to see any of their comments *here on ACX?*
That function doesn't seem to be working for me! I've blocked and silenced someone whose comments I find very tedious, but I'm still seeing their comments here on ACX.
Holy crap! I just tried again, and it worked for me, too!
For the same guy (I'm pretty sure!)!
Now if only I could mute Substack's broken indentation!
Works for me too!
Muting doesn't work that way, unfortunately — it leaves you still able to see their comments in threads.
> Does anyone know how to block people on here? I didn't think it was possible but then someone blocked me. I can't find the option on either desktop or the app.
You click on their name to go to their Substack profile, then block or mute them there.
Somebody blocked you? When someone blocks you, are you informed of it?
I knew because they announced it first. (Humorously it was theahura and it was in the thread where he asked people to steelman Trump - I guess he wasn't counting on a steelman he couldn't defeat.) The really annoying thing is that Substack hides all comments from me in all threads that that user created, so I can't even see the comments I made in our last thread or respond to other users who jumped in (though I still get notifications for those comments). I generally like Substack but it has some serious usability issues.
> Somebody blocked you? When someone blocks you, are you informed of it?
Think you probably meant to ask Wanda Tinasky?
I don't know if I've ever been blocked, I haven't ever received any notification that this is true. It'd be kind of weird and counterproductive for Substack to generate and send such notifications, wouldn't it? Down that road lies stalking people on multiple platforms and escalating rivalries, doesn't it?
This added significant value to my life.
Thank you.
Thanks.
I'd like to see the Dems get serious about open borders, along with the vibes of Abundance (Ezra Klein, Derek Thomson).
Effective government, lowering regulations, and enough of everything for everyone is great, and they surely do a better job than I could promoting it.
Open borders to the world (for residency at least) will require a willingness to be tough on crime, give (next to) no welfare to arrivals, a willingness to deport individuals and families that are drains, and active effort to make them productive. Getting rid of natural-born citizenship may be necessary as well.
In return the USA can return to it's heyday as the land of dreams, a country the world's citizens turn to for a brighter future, and a land bursting with productive man-power.
This combination seems like a powerful basis for a counter to Trump's MAGA, a powerful vision for the path the world and the USA should take.
What does it mean to have open borders yet be able to deport individuals? How do you prevent the person you deported from coming back?
Everyone coming in goes through official portals, they get entered in the system. Fingerprint, picture, gene test etc.
Open borders for first chances
Thank you. It may not be intuitive for all that "open borders" still means "heavily guarded borders".
The US cannot return to its heyday. What made it rich (abundant arable land up for grabs because its previous population was nearly destroyed by epidemies) is neither still available nor sufficient in today's world. What could make it thrive again is increasing the welfare of its population, and [increasing supply of cheap labor] results in the exact opposite, a race to the bottom for everyone but the richest.
If the supposed left wants to keep losing elections until the heat death of the universe (and deservedly), by all means, keep talking about open borders.
Populism and throwbacks to better times worked for MAGA, why not for the Democrats?
Because "open borders" is not populist. Populism means appealing to a broad population of voters, not to oligarchs and potential immigrants who can't vote anyway. Why would poor/ working class people be enthusiastic about lots of immigrants, if all it means is fewer benefits and more competition for them but even more money for rich people?
Depends what you're measuring, and what people think. MAGA seem to think 1950s were better in some important ways, you can sell a similar story for the early years of america.
Open borders were around for the most part till early 20th century, you can find some positive there
the "powerful vision of the world" is an underclass with no rights or social support who get deported if they lose their job?
Even MAGA sounds more appealing
Did you miss the part where people who are currently stuck in hellholes can decide to work and live in the USA?
Their lives would be straightforwardly better, and they would also be able to choose between the options.
You are literally against giving people the option to choose a better life for themselves because that better life doesn't meet your personal standards.
This mindset is part of what I'm hoping goes away on the Left
I bet that in the age of feudalism, people argued that serfdom was a good thing because having a lord protecting you was better than the alternative.
Turning immigrants into second-class citizens would likely be an improvement in an economic sense, but it would also be creating a group of people who are extremely vulnerable to coercion by the government or by their employer. We can do better than that.
We probably can't do better than that right now.
Maybe in the future open-borders with welfare, protection and benefit of the doubt for incoming migrants will be workable, and that sounds like an inspiring future.
Right now that doesn't work, and even without that slack open borders would be a tough sell
I don't think they're getting a better life in that scenario, because there are very few true "hellholes" on Earth, the US is not nearly as nice a place as Americans believe, and because such a proposal would cause American quality of life to markedly deteriorate.
But I think people would come anyway - because they'd get lied to by unscrupulous recruiters about conditions in the US, and then be trapped there out of shame or because they can't afford to go back. Or, when they have no more options, they'll end up in the new tough on crime prison system this proposal promotes.
I also think current citizens who have to work for a living are getting a significantly worse life out of the bargain; why hire one when there's a precarious foreigner you can underpay and retaliate against?
Quality of life would likely rise quite a bit, due to abundant labor supply and lowered regulations on growth (detailed in the book).
You also think hellholes exist, and the US is obviously a better place to live than many other countries which aren't hellholes. This would be a better option than they currently have.
Free one-time deportation service seems like our could be a good idea, for those who would rather leave.
Tough on crime with non-citizens looks more like fines, rapid deportation or in extreme cases death penalty, not prison.
Often making the pie bigger means someone gets a relatively smaller piece, in total I think they'll get a larger absolute piece, and better life
> will require a willingness to be tough on crime, give (next to) no welfare to arrivals, a willingness to deport individuals and families that are drains, and active effort to make them productive
We all know that this part isn't happening though, so what's the point? It's like saying "I could eat a cheesecake every day if I ran an extra twenty miles" when you currently barely leave your couch. We all know you're just gonna eat the cheesecake and not do the exercise.
If there's a version of this that makes sense then it's outright selling greencards.
You can exercise first
Great idea. Let's have the Left make their platform being Tough On Crime, and only after a proven track record on that do we talk about Open Borders.
You seem to be against the Left, usually you get to help choose either a group's direction or how to negotiate with them (in aggregate)
Your half-assed dismissals of every criticism will do far more damage to the Left than I. This is exactly the attitude that led to a Trump presidency. Both terms.
The process of letting someone in is much less costly than deporting someone. So the vision will just turn into invite the world, deport no one.
That could be fixed by charging immigrants a deposit (repaid upon citizenship/emigration) large enough to pay for the deportation.
Make it easy to deport them legally.
If you want to, call your senator and demand tracking bracelets on arrival as part of the deal.
How do you envision that working without the US turning into a homeless shelter for the entire planet?
Did you read past the "next to no welfare" part?
Yes. Even if there isn't explicit social welfare, being poor and/or homeless is better in the US than it is almost anywhere else.
Deport them if they aren't productive members of society within 5/10 years, and make it easy to find work?
I'm sure you're smart enough to think of fixes if you were trying to make such a policy work as intended
Sure, pour the whole container of salt into the soup. If it's too much we'll just take some out afterwards.
Hold an actual deportation hearing, have a judge tell them that they've lost and they need to get out of the way now, and they'll get out of the way. They may whine a lot, but so what?
If that's too difficult for you, then it's on you to beef up your skills in that area.
They are losing power due to acting in ways that look like your description. At some point they will change or disappear.
Either way I hope what replaces the current strategy is something that looks like this
I’m soliciting opinions on whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach. Question’s a follow-up to a discussion earlier in the comments here of whether it would be possible for DOGE to do a smarter, juster, more effective job of trimming back bureaucracy. Discussion started with my recounting an event described to me by an NIH scientist who was present: DOGE staff entered his part of a building and fired staff they were able to catch in small infractions. At least one person was fired for leaving his badge on his desk when he went to the bathroom.
Some who entered the discussion said that undoubtedly dismantling and pruning bloated government agencies was causing suffering but that “*not* doing the cuts also causes plenty of damage, it’s just harder to pinpoint and a lot of it will happen in 5-8 years.” I do not take issue with the need for making cuts, but think they are being done in a dumb, chaotic, random way. Suggested that a reasonable way to shrink staff would be to use some criterion based on their performance, such as performance evals, or productivity over recent years. Someone else countered that DOGE is not allowed to take the kind of steps I’m suggesting. The discussion is here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-375/comment/104745702
Seems clear to me that the Trump administration is willing to walk right over various boundaries, some of them legal boundaries, and that they are mostly getting away with that. I’m curious to hear from people who know more than I do about the laws and norms involved to weigh in knowledgeably on whether it would be possible for DOGE to dismantle and shrink gov’t agencies in a way that is more systematic and uses reasonable criteria for identifying bureaucratic tangles and deadwood.
> I’m soliciting opinions on whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach.
Nearly *anything* would be more effective than their current approach, even simply doing nothing. Elon's DOGE campaign has been an astonishing own-goal at every level.
I feel like I should preface with gratitude for your approach. I'm seeing more and more anti-Trump alarmism and doommongering on ACX day after day, unleavened by any sort of understanding of what's driving conservatives, Trump, DOGE, et al., until this place is resembling /r/politics. People who ask as if they really want to solve a problem are getting rare around here.
That said, this is a tough problem. I'm tempted to say "I'll get back to you on that" - not in order to commit to any future report to submit to you, but rather to convey the hopelessness I think we're seeing from conservatives trying to prune back the government.
There's a recent exchange between Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart, discussing a plan by the Biden administration to bring broadband internet to rural areas. (It's pretty easy to find right now; I searched for "klein stewart biden plan". It's probably best to watch the video to get the appropriate impact. You might have seen it already.) It's 14 steps long; I believe Klein even cites how much money was allocated to each step, and how many players started, and how many got through each step. I think the total price tag ran into hundreds of millions; I do not know of any actual broadband having been installed.
I recall Musk saying "SpaceX can build rockets faster than the Govt can do the paperwork 'required' to launch". I think that quote, and its variants, gets a lot of sympathy from the right.
Pruning does seem to be an apt metaphor. The USG resembles a thicket of brambles now. Cut one stalk and pull on it; its thorns snag on the others, holding it fast. Cut the others; they snag on yet others. Keep cutting, and you might finally get a bit of it away; you will also have spent all day, burned thousands of calories, and you look up and see miles more of that growth. Keep going even so, and you anticipate getting to the other end in multiple generations - by which time the first end will have grown back, thicker than ever.
The point here is that the bureaucracy has literally interwoven with itself, to the point that no department can be cut without getting approval from several more, AND cutting support departments requires approval of yet more, AND each request for approval costs a million dollars and a month to process, AND could be reprioritized to the bottom of the pile for some reason, AND asking for that reason costs ten thousand dollars and a week to get a response. Anyone who wants to save money, cannot do so, cannot ask why, and cannot ask why they cannot ask.
And meanwhile, it's still growing. The interest on the debt is as large as the defense budget.
Given all this, I can understand why someone would want to look at all that growth and conclude that the least painful solution is indeed to use fire, even if it upsets all the animal life currently sheltering somewhere in it. There are conservatives who will tell you these animals are there by design (search for "hostage puppies" if you get a chance). I think it's some of that, and some of it is animals that do naturally wind up there, it's not their fault, and no one put them there on purpose to shield the waste and bloat. I also wonder if we could evac all the intentional hostage puppies and the unintentional ones still don't justify all that growth.
I can also understand if you or anyone else (including me, on occasion) might look at that gas can and think, surely there's a less chaotic way to trim at least something. And then I find the best sincere response I can give to that right now is, well, I'll get back to you on that. That's how wedged this is now.
It does occur to me now that, as chaotic as DOGE seems to me right now, there are even more chaotic ways to prune back the government that I would rather not see happen.
(Not a hostage puppy, I promise; I don't have control over this.)
My perspective is from experience working in the civil service of a very similar country. While the US bureaucracy might be idiosyncratic in some way I'm not aware of, every other democratic country also seems to have extreme difficulties in firing their bureaucrats so I'm guessing the US is similar enough for the following to apply
DOGE is resorting to silly tactics like firing people who leave their badges on their desk while on a bathroom break because it's nearly impossible to fire government employees based on logical reasons. Public sector unions have put up absurdly strong legal barriers against firing bureaucrats, so decisions on who gets cut in times of downsizing - which are infrequent in the first place - are always based on how easy it is to fire each person and not on how good they are at their jobs. Pro union parties have generally been in power for around half the history of most democratic countries, and unions only need to get a few good election cycles to get legally binding collective agreements that give public employees immense protections
My workplace's most recent round of layoffs is a case in point. About 10% were nominally fired. Of those, almost 90% were employees on fixed term contracts, who usually get renewed when their contract expires. After some number of years working on these contracts, term employees are automatically made permanent as per the collective agreement, meaning the number of permanent employees is ever-growing. The 10%~ of those fired who were permanent employees largely got shuffled around to other positions in other departments
It's obvious to see why this happens: in order to actually fire permanent employees (instead of shuffling them around), management has to decide which programs to target, get together to create "objective" metrics for every single targeted position, "objectively" evaluate all of the employees in each of these positions, and give notice to the affected employees. Once they're given notice, they get a few months to decide whether to take a lump sum payment (people near retirement often do this) or collect their paycheck for up to one year while looking for other government positions (people who choose this option often don't even bother looking for other government positions and just collect the paycheck). In total we're talking like two years from start to end in order to fire a government employee if you also want to check all the boxes and respect due process, during which there's a good chance another party will come to power and reverse all the work that was done to try to do it
Past performance evaluations can't be used either. The process management has to go through in order to fire public employees is strictly defined in the collective agreement. Unions have every reason to make it as slow and costly as possible. And even if past evaluations could be used, they would offer no useful information. Performance evaluations don't mean anything because there are basically no consequences for doing poorly on them - remember, ridiculous employment protections means no one is getting fired. This means that the evaluator (usually a middle manager) and the employee both know it's a pointless box-ticking exercise, which leads to everyone more or less getting some variation of "met expectations" for every single criteria
Just to clarify what I am asking and not asking:
-I am not asking whether DOGE & Musk sincerely *want* to get rid of dead wood and make agencies leaner and meaner.
-I am not asking whether it is possible to do a slow, really thoughtful redo of agencies, perhaps involving first studies of their effectiveness, speed, and impact per dollar; then development of new, leaner, better models of them.
-I am asking this: Let's assume DOGE & Musk have it as their goal to quickly get rid of deadwood and nonsense in agencies and turn the agencies into small, effective groups with much smaller budgets. Would it be possible for them, on their own, to carry this out? Or are they so hindered by laws and regulations and agencies' unwillingness to change that the only way they can proceed is in the chaotic way they are? If we take the case of NIH staff: Is the only way they can reduce staff without being stopped by rules and laws and congress and the supreme court etc etc to eliminate people using simple, silly criteria? -- such as firing all the probationaries, or firing those they catch taking a leak without having their badge with them? Or would it be possible for DOGE to force the firing of people based on some reasonable criterion of their value as employees, such as performance evals, work accomplished per year, number of sick days per year?
In other words, is DOGE being forced to prune with a chain saw because an impenetrable net of laws and regulations keeps them from doing smart topiary with a graduated set of electric shears? Or do they just dig chain saws?
There's proof by example that this can be done, and done well. Bill Clinton, during his time in office, tasked Al Gore with streamlining the federal bureaucracy through the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, This and other related efforts reduced the federal workforce by almost 400,000 people, about 20% of the total. And nobody remembers it, because it was done in a professional, efficient, minimally-disruptive manner. And he did so under approximately the same legal and regulatory regime we have today.
It is probably not a coincidence that Bill Clinton was the last US president to have balanced the Federal budget. Possibly the very last ever.
What man has done, man can aspire to do.
I do have to wonder how much of NPR(g) was possible only by agreeing to cut defense spending as well. The WP article claims it had little effect, but I don't think it factors in private agreements made with various Congresspeople that weren't widely reported.
What I *do* know is that defense spending *did* decrease during the Clinton administration, as evidenced by numerous accounts from people I worked with back then who complained about how much harder it was to get promotions and resources compared to the Reagan years.
If you're serious about cutting government spending, you need to seriously consider cutting defense spending. And if you're also serious about pulling back from "foreign entanglements" and sucker moves like defending our allies, cutting defense should be pretty much a no-brainer.
If you're serious about all of that but you're also seriously not joking about your plans to maybe invade two NATO member nations, maybe you can't afford to cut the now-grossly-misnamed defense budget. Hmm...
> Would it be possible for them, on their own, to carry this out? Or are they so hindered by laws and regulations and agencies' unwillingness to change that the only way they can proceed is in the chaotic way they are?
The biggest obstacle is not regulation, but Musk's own descent into a far-right bubble which has prevented him from engaging with reality. That's not even a partisan thing. There are tons of libertarian think-tank types who have spent their lives thinking about how to do this kind of thing in a sane way and Musk has ignored every one of them because he thinks he knows better.
> Or do they just dig chain saws?
Pretty much. Musk's primary goal seems to be "fire as many people as possible as quick as possible without any regard for what impact that will have on the country or budget".
I confess that I do not know enough about the regulations involved. What is the executive branch allowed and not allowed to do to government agencies without approval or support from some other government entity -- such as congress? Is the executive branch allowed to fire, for example, managers at NIH? Do NIH staff have a union? If so, what would the union do if DOGE fired all mangers? Strike? Protest? Invoke some law or agreement? Do you know? And the second question is, what is the chance that whatever built-in barriers there are to Trump firing all managers simply cannot be overriden, or if overriden is very likely to be reversed? I do not know. Do you?
Seems to me there are a lot of ways the executive branch can make the case that under the present circumstances they are allowed to fire managers. There seem to be a lot of things on the books that can be used to justify breaking lower order rules. For example, Trump can call Venezuelan drug gangs in the US an invading foreign force (or something like that) and can then use that to justify doing various things to immigrants that by some lower-level laws violate their rights. So I say to myself that maybe there's a (and here I'm just loosely brainstorming) a financial emergency clause that lets the president shut down agencies to save money. Or a rogue manager clause that lets the president fire managers who refuse to carry out certain requests from the president in a timely fashion. Or -- well, you get the idea.
So my question is simply whether there are end runs around the rules and laws protecting agencies that would allow DOGE to reduce the size of agencies and their staff in a more planful manner than the present one. I am not being sneaky and tricky here. I just do not know enough about law and the structure of government. Do you?
And if you don't can you please refrain from answering questions I have not asked? Such is what is Trump/Musk's real intent, is DOGE as currently carried out likely to be to the country's benefit, how good a job can one do of shrinking and improving agencies if it must be done quickly, and whether your bellybutton is an innie or an outie.
> For example, Trump can call Venezuelan drug gangs in the US an invading foreign force (or something like that) and can then use that to justify doing various things to immigrants that by some lower-level laws violate their rights.
Don't confuse "nobody has managed to stop him yet" for "is legal". The "war" powers invocation in particular is pretty blatantly illegal.
I have no answer to this (its a good question), but I find the replies extremely funny. I feel like I'm watching a comedy sketch.
Eremolalos: "I'm trying to see if anyone around here has a parrot"
Person 1: "You want to kill a parrot? What's the matter with you!"
E: "No, I think you misunderstood me. I'm not trying to kill a parrot, just find one"
Person 2: "Yeah, I've got a Canary right here!"
E: "No, I'm actually just looking for a parrot. That's an unrelated bird"
Person 3: "Oh, I think I know what you mean. Here!"
*Hands over a box of fruit loops and points to the toucan*
It’s actually quite helpful to hear that, Ralph. I have had exactly the same perception of the responses, except that I have found it not amusing but extremely frustrating and sort of demoralizing. In fact the responses I’ve gotten led to a whole train of thought yesterday about looking for some other places online to read and discuss things. And I have not had that in reaction to hot arguments or occasional mean insults here in the past. Those were unpleasant but did not leave me with the same feeling of OK, I give up.
I think what’s led to my question being impossible to hear is that it does not make clear what side I’m
on. Do I think DOGE is dumb and bad both in methods and goal? Or only in methods? Or maybe I think it’s smart and good and I’m on board with the methods too, and looking for evidence that laws etc force it to use a chainsaw?
I didn’t ask my question in a way that left my loyalties unclear in order to play with people’s minds. I was just trying to find out the answer to my particular question, without having the discussion derailed by various right vs. left run-ins. But the net effect seems to have been that many people felt they had to strongly signal their position on DOGE good/bad/smart/dumb. Maybe that was because they did not know which tribe I belonged to, and were being asked to answer a question without knowing which side's arguments they were supporting? And then several others seemed determined to convince me that my question was based on various dumb-as-a-rock assumptions, and was therefore unanswerable. Maybe a way to neutralize the dilemma?
The upshot, IMO, is that politics makes people dumb.
Ugh.
I think the problem is that there are many different things your question could be asking about.
1. What can Musk legally do on his own?
2. What could Republicans as a whole do legally?
3. What can Musk practically do? (i.e. what can he get away with rather than what is legal)
4. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk says he wants to accomplish?
5. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk is actually trying to accomplish?
6. What would be a good way to do what Musk has actually done? (kind of tautological, but you often seem to be going for this based on your responses)
These are all different things! But you're implicitly assuming they're the same thing. And since they are different things, the answer to the question differs depending on which thing you're talking about. Therefore, people focus on trying to clarify the question.
<I think the problem is that there are many different things your question could be asking about.
1. What can Musk legally do on his own?
2. What could Republicans as a whole do legally?
3. What can Musk practically do? (i.e. what can he get away with rather than what is legal)
4. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk says he wants to accomplish?
5. What would be a good way to accomplish what Musk is actually trying to accomplish?
6. What would be a good way to do what Musk has actually done? (kind of tautological, but you often seem to be going for this based on your responses)
These are all different things! But you're implicitly assuming they're the same thing. And since they are different things, the answer to the question differs depending on which thing you're talking about. Therefore, people focus on trying to clarify the question.>
No, the question is quite clear, and it is none of the above.. I have stated it and restated it numerous times : DOGE is going about dismantling and shrinking agencies in a way that seems unsystematic (I gave several examples of what I mean by this term), and unlikely to get rid of policies, staff and roles that DOGE sees as bad and keep those it sees as good. It seems like there would be quick simple ways to at least increase the fraction of “bad”(by DOGE’s standards) employees and policies gotten rid of and of good ones kept. (I named some simple ways this might be done, while admitting I did not think they were a great approach, just better than the present one for achieving DOGE’s aim.) My question is whether various laws and contracts prevent DOGE from using a more systematic approach that aims to maximize how much good stuff (by its standards) it keeps and how much bad stuff it gets rid of. I have clarified that when I ask whether the laws prevent DOGE from being more systematic, I mean *both* whether the laws prevent systematic approaches *and* whether DOGE has a reasonable chance of just ignoring the laws, etc., or else overriding them by stretching the meaning of various executive powers.
I have talked throughout about DOGE, not Musk the man, not the Republicans. I regard Musk as someone carrying out the DOGE project, backed by the president. It was clear in my questions that I was asking about DOGE, the project..
So none of your 6 are what I am asking. If we replace “Musk” with “DOGE, then I am asking a version of 1 + 3: Not what out of the universe of all possible actions can DOGE get away with, but what simple steps aimed at getting rid of undesirables (in DOGEs view) could it get away with. I have given exs. of quick and dirty steps: fire all managers and replace with DOGE loyalists; fire employees with low evaluations; fire employees known to strongly disagree with DOGE’s point of view.
In one of my many attempts to get someone to answer the question I was asking I stated it this way: Is DOGE trimming the shrubbery with a chain saw because it is surrounded with such a thick mesh that it can’t use a graduated series of topiary scissors, or because it just digs chain saws?
As further clarification I have stated in various posts (I must have put up 10 follow-up posts at least) things I am NOT asking: What is DOGE's *real* goal? Is that goal good? Is that goal attainable?
Do not tell me I have not been clear, unless you can quote several vague or ambiguous formulations of it. And don't say the flaw in my question is that assumes some dumb-shit thing like that there is a perfect way for DOGE to do this pruning and end up in a short period of time with a bunch of small, effective agencies that are wholeheartedly aligned with the DOGE viewpoint. It is not an all or nothing question. I did not ask whether it is possible for DOGE to do a great job of pruning the bad and keeping the good. I asked whether DOGE could do a *better* job, or whether it is so constrained by laws etc. it can only come at things the messy, chaotic way it is,
This is the most disillusioned and discouraged I have ever felt about ACX discussions, even though nobody has been particularly mean to me in this one. But everybody except Paul Brinkley and B Civil has either just rambled on about their miscellaneous opinions about DOGE or else tried to prove that my question is meaningless because it’s sort of like a snake swallowing its tail or a demand to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or an unanswerable inquiry about what color underpanties Ayn Rand wore while writing John Galt’s speech. No it ain't!
Know what I think? I think most of you don’t know all that much more than me about what legal, contractual, etc. constraints there are on what DOGE can do and, out of those, which it can probably get away violating with via brute power or trix. But nobody says that, they just don’t answer my question or say it's too flawed to mean anything. You're pretentious cowards. Fuck this place.
I'll gladly admit I don't know all that much more than you about that. Which is why I haven't replied up to now.
" Let's assume DOGE & Musk have it as their goal to quickly get rid of deadwood and nonsense in agencies and turn the agencies into small, effective groups with much smaller budgets. Would it be possible for them, on their own, to carry this out? Or are they so hindered by laws and regulations and agencies' unwillingness to change that the only way they can proceed is in the chaotic way they are?"
This framing is smuggling in a LOT of AFAICT unjustified assumptions. In particular, you're assuming a dichotomy that doesn't seem to be much in evidence:
either
A. It's possible for a smart and motivated agency to quickly and sharply reduce the staffing and budget of federal agencies while leaving them effective.
or
B. The reason A isn't possible is entirely because of laws, regulations and institutional inertia.
The first is akin to the belief in the proverbial $20 bill on the sidewalk (which certainly *could* exist, but you shouldn't be betting $19 or even $5 on finding it). The second is like saying one's failure to find said bill *must* be due to all those pesky pedestrians getting in the way by having the audacity to use the sidewalk to *go places* instead of recognizing its rightful place in your entirely-justified and not-at-all-frivolous treasure hunt.
Naw you missed the point. I am trying to figure out whether laws, contracts, regulations, loyalties etc. constrain DOGE so much that it is impossible for it be more selective than it is now in how it fires people and ditches programs. For instance, I have heard of people being fired because they were probationary employees; and because they were caught in the bathroom one afternoon without their badges. I have heard of all the staff of an agency being fired, then the agency rehiring all who were willing to return. None of these hiring and firing processes are likely to select for the most productive employees. A simple system of firing those with the worst performance reviews would at least be better.
So I am not trying to figure out whether DOGE could "quickly and sharply reduce the staffing and budget of federal agencies while leaving them effective." I am only trying to figure out whether it is possible for DOGE to be more systematic than it is now, or whether all the laws, loyalties etc. in and around hunks of the bureaucracy are such a dense nets that it is impossible for DOGE to use any approach more systematic, less chaotic and less violent than the present one. The reason I want to know is that people are defending DOGE's chain saw approach on the grounds that it has no choice but to fire people capriciously, possibly losing valuable experts and louyal hard-working people who are not a bit infected with woke and other things DOGE wants to get rid of. I do not think that's true.
There are many cases where DOGE could have better achieved their goals by *doing nothing*. For example, they could have *not fired* the IRS people who collect taxes. They could have *not fired* all the people in government who are already responsible for auditing and preventing waste. etc. They could have *not fired* the people in government who check whether government programs are actually working or not. Those are pure unforced errors even granted DOGE's premises.
I sort of see it. OTOH, this clearly would not have worked across the board. Out of curiosity, were there any instances of DOGE doing something that you would argue as a benefit to the goal of reducing government waste?
From a theoretical perspective, when they cut that much stuff, there's bound to be some bad stuff they cut, just by chance. If they had only cut that stuff, it would have been an improvement. But of course, figuring out what the bad stuff is is hard and DOGE is deliberately not even trying. There are also nonlinear effects where the rapid lawless destruction of the government has negative effects well beyond the pros or cons of specific programs being cut.
FWIW, I think the CFPB was in serious need of reform or reogranization. But that still doesn't mean that illegally shutting it down was a good idea. That's also not a question of "efficiency" but rather "the government should do good things and not bad things policy wise".
"The reason I want to know is that people are defending DOGE's chain saw approach on the grounds that it has no choice but to fire people capriciously"
But *of course* they have a choice. They always have a choice. For every person they fire, there is (at a bare minimum) the alternative of *not firing them*.
My core objection here is that the sort of people you describe taking "firing a large number of federal workers is just and necessary and will save money" as an axiom. It's not an axiom. It's very likely not even true. And determining if and when it's *actually useful* to fire people is necessarily upstream of determining *how* to fire them. Take this for example:
"None of these hiring and firing processes are likely to select for the most productive employees. A simple system of firing those with the worst performance reviews would at least be better."
Trying to model employees of complex federal organizations as homogenous lumps of labor whose efficiency can be measured in one number is a plain and obvious fallacy. It's easy to imagine a situation where you fire one and only one employee and lo and behold, despite their poor performance review, losing them *drops* the productivity of the whole department, and does so *dramatically.* It's as silly to assume that "fire the employees with the worst performance review" will make a department more efficient as it is to assume "remove the most worn part from your car engine" will make your car more efficient.
None of that is to say that greater efficiency is impossible; probably there are lots of improvements that could be made. But it's a reasonable bet that they'll require *understanding the system you're trying to improve* (which generally isn't quick if you're starting from zero). And it's unwarranted to assume from the word go that the improvements will *necessarily* involve firing people. Maybe sometimes they will. But sometimes they won't: there are lots of other ways to cut costs. Heck, sometimes they'll involve *hiring more people*: understaffing can create all sorts of costly inefficiencies.
Both the people involved in this project and the people supporting them seem to be doing so for ideological reasons that carry the unshakable assumption that firing federal employees will improve the world *no matter how it's done.* You reason your way to the truth if you start from an irrational premise that you refuse to ever update.
Ok. But i don’t understand why you are telling me this. Is it that you think Im in favor of firing lotsa government workers?
It's because your posts make it sound like you don't understand this. The issue isn't whether you are in favor of firing people or not, the issue is that your questions are smuggling in incorrect premises.
My experience of reforming problematic groups is that a small group ( say 20 people) takes full time, dedicated attention from an individual for months.
Actively hostile, idealogically oppositional groups will likely take much more.
Unless you break them.
They would need massive amounts of man-power to reform millions of workers, 10s of thousands of strong managers at a minimum.
If the groups involved were trying to cooperate as best they could then maybe
I didn't picture the temporary manager reforming the group, just going through the records and scoring people on simple criteria, such as recent performance reviews, completion of projects, maybe total sick and personal days. Then maybe consulting with someone with the scientific expertise to advise on what essential skills the group kept had to have, which might temper some decisions about who to fire. Then firing enough of the group to meet some criterion set by the administration. Maybe the temp manager wouldn't need 60 days -- maybe a coupla weeks would be enough.
My point isn't that my idea is good -- it's that if you want to downsize a group, doing it as I describe is better than randomly firing people (e.g. firing of 2 people 10 or so days ago for Peeing without Badges).
Physically possible or politically possible?
There's a sensible good-faith process that could theoretically be followed if enough organs of government were interested in executing a sensible good-faith process. Realistically if you start this process then you get four years of "actually we investigated ourselves and found that our budget isn't excessive after all", and then you lose power anyway and the moment has passed.
>"whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach."
No and yes.
No, because DOGE is Elon Musk and Elon Musk's goal is not efficiency. His goals are more along the lines of revenge against woke; ending projects he personally dislikes; destroying institutional memory so it can't be a check on his and Trump's power; finding things to lie about and use as anti-Dem pro-Trump propaganda (e.g., pretending a SSN means an immigrant is voting instead of just working and paying taxes and that this is Biden's fault); etc.
Yes, because *if* some hypothetical agency had the goal of efficiency, it would automatically be doing better than DOGE.
"I’m soliciting opinions on whether it would be possible for DOGE to prune bloated, ineffective government agencies in a way that’s smarter and more effective than its present approach"
I mean, it couldn't possibly be _less_ smart and effective, so obviously yes.
This requires hard and serious work, though, so it's obviously off the table in the current regime.
Sure, but I'm not sure it's possible while also shooting for a net decrease in government spending (especially at first). You would want to do audits, start medium-to-long term studies of effectiveness, and emphasize recruiting/retaining talented people - all of which requires extra resources and oversight to get started. The end result might be a government that is smaller than it is right now, but I don't think you can seriously embark on a project like this without considering that any given government program might be useful and worth expanding.
Yeah but what you are describing is a really thorough version of smart, thoughtful pruning. Right now I’m hearing about firings based on whether someone is “probationary,” i.e. in their first year or 2 of working at an agency; and whether someone was caught during a single DOGE staff visit failing to take their badge with them went the went to pee. Using better selection methods than those is a pretty low bar to clear, and could be done quickly.
So the model I suggested for NIH would be: (1) Fire the manager of each project of agency. (2) Hire in each manager’s place some DOGE-aligned person with demonstrated ability to trim fat and reduce inefficiency at organizations. (3) Give that person 60 days to fire staff using mostly some agreed-upon metrics such as average performance eval in last 2 years, or decreased productivity in last 2 years, with some room for manager to use own judgment as well. (4)After temporary management prunes staff and makes other changes to increase efficiency, they leave. (5) Hire in their place scientists who are qualified to run a medical reserach group. Limit their power to add to staff and make other changes.
I do not think my proposal is great, but seems likely to be better than the dumb, semi-random approach used now. It would also create much less fear, anger and chaos. The thing is, I am not sure DOGE has the power to do it, and someone who was defending present events said they did not. On the other hand, if DOGE can stroll in and fire people for not having their badge on when they’re at the urinal, seems like they could just fire managers for, I dunno, budget overruns, failure to respond to some demand of DOGE’s for bullet point lists of the week’s accomplishments, or wearing Birkenstocks.
After giving it some, but not a lot of thought, I don’t think it would work. First reason is what you are proposing is not truly aligned with what they are trying to do in my opinion. What they are trying to do is reestablish direct executive control over all of these employees, which means delegitimizing the institutional process for hiring and firing that exists now and in the past, and also delegitimizing power players like the unions (and lawyers) that stand in the way.
My second point concerns the idea of hiring a temporary bean counter manager to oversee a project for a certain amount of time and then do some cutting, and then hand that project back over to someone who actually understands what the project is trying to accomplish.
I don’t see how this works. The person doing the cutting does not have the knowledge to really understand who might be good or not good in the context of the goal of said project (not even to mention the loyalty issue which is important in the context of this administration); and the scientist (or other “ qualified expert“) who is coming in is going to be stuck with a bunch of people that he or she had no say in hiring.
The bottom line is it’s probably a lot faster to fire 10 people and then hire back four of them. And if there’s a bunch of confusion, well too bad.
When and if DOGE screws up really badly and demonstrably, then that will be the beginning of the end of this strategy.
Just to be clear, I never thought my proposed method was good. I proposed it as an example of an approach that was better than firings based on things probably uncorrelated with employee productivity (probationaries; people caught not taking their badge to the bathroom one afternoon; or the people willing to be rehired after all the staff has been fired). And the thing of interest to me is whether it is currently possible to carry out shrinkage of govt agencies in a way that gives more bang for the buck than the present approach.
The reason I care about *that* is that I keep running across people, mostly on here, who defend DOGE on the grounds that it is not possible to get rid of bureaucratic bloat and undesirable woke government agendas in a way that selects against lazy & unqualified people or people whose job consists of pointless (from DOGE's point of view) tasks. These DOGE defenders argue that there are so many laws, contracts, regulations etc. in effect that all systematic approaches, even quick and dirty ones, are impossible to carry out. All DOGE can do is various kinds of random destructions and dismemberments and shock administrations.
I would like to be able to demonstrate to these people that they are mostly wrong. It is my impression that many of them are infected with infuriating images of gov't workers who are lazy, entitled, controlling, woke-infested fools. Imagining the fool being shocked, humiliated and summarily fired scratches their angry itch, and so they defend DOGE's present brutal and chaotic approach even against reasonable arguments. But of course I may be wrong, and just driven by my own angry itch, which at least I'm aware of.
I simply do not know enough about how our government is set up to know what regulations, chains of command, laws, etc. truly block DOGE from doing various things. There are 2 things one needs to know: what are the laws, etc., and which sort of laws etc. DOGE can successfully defy. I am ignorant about both. Assumed that many here would be less ignorant than me, but so far nobody has replied by naming the kinds of barriers, which have been successfully ignored by DOGE, which could prob be successfully challenged if DOGE ignored them etc.
So far I have not been able to get a single person to address that question. Everybody gets diverted by something else I mention along the way. Do you know enough about what barriers there are and how likely defiance of different ones is to succeed? Or, less generally, whether it is just impossible for DOGE to be more systematic, because barriers around and in the bureaucracy make a more planful approach impossible?
Later addition:
<What they are trying to do is reestablish direct executive control over all of these employees, which means delegitimizing the institutional process for hiring and firing that exists now and in the past, and also delegitimizing power players like the unions (and lawyers) that stand in the way.
Yes, I agree, that is my intuition as well. I would like to be able to make that argument to people who are defending DOGE on the grounds that it is so hemmed in by bullshit that it has to just whack at things with a machete. But in order to make the case that DOGE's agenda is to divide, disorganize, disempower and intimidate agencies, I need to present evidence that DOGE is not forced to take the machete approach by the tangle of regulations, etc. that presently exist.
Yeah I get it. It’s pretty shocking. Or exhilarating I guess depending on what side of it you’re on.
>Do you know enough about what barriers there are and how likely defiance of different ones is to succeed?
IANAL, but I play one on tv. This is a battle to rejigger the powers of the government; the Judiciary, the Executive, and the Legislature. More specifically it’s a move to seriously increase the powers of the executive branch. The unitary executive. Trump and his administration are challenging the other branches of government very directly. There are probably Mary of laws that might stand in his way, but it depends on how intently the other branches want to fight It. Congress is pretty much willing to let him push things hard so I don’t expect a lot of pushback from them. There will be some walking and I’m sure some of them aren’t really thrilled about it, but they are afraid to stay in his way right now because he has a lot of political clout. Which could evaporate in a cloud, but might not. The goal is to get to the Supreme Court and raise the fundamental constitutional issues around the powers of the executive as opposed to the legislative branch. So he’s creating a lot of challenges all at once, but they all point to the same thing- “who is in charge here?“ the administration has been playing all kinds of games with Musk’s status in the government. He is acting officially when it suits them and he is acting unofficially when it doesn’t.
To try to do this through the usual channels will mean getting bogged down in endless court cases and negotiations with members of Congress, trade unions, special interests etc., and will not get him where he and his associates want to go.
So the short answer to your question is this is about a constitutional fight and a close reading of the powers vested in the executive branch do give him a leg to stand on. The first really important case (which is about the alien enemies act) is due to hit the Supreme Court very shortly. What are the powers of the president to declare a national emergency and how much proof does he have to come up with in order to do so? The Constitution says he can do it and it doesn’t say anything about having to prove it to anyone. Congress gave up the power to declare war to the executive branch a long time ago, and it will be difficult for them to reclaim it.
He says Venezuelan drug gangs are equivalent to a foreign intrusion which triggers his power to declare an emergency. I assume the other side will argue that that is a gross overstepping of his power.
He has a pretty good chance of winning that case.
There will be other cases reaching the Supreme Court to hammer out these kinds of issues and in the meantime, keeping everybody off guard is tactically a good move. It’s rather intimidating.
"Congress gave up the power to declare war to the executive branch a long time ago, and it will be difficult for them to reclaim it."
Are you saying that the War Powers Act is now inoperative, or something like that?
> He has a pretty good chance of winning that case.
It might take some gymnastics to argue that will also maintaining that Koremastu was a bad decision as the SC has declared before.
I think we largely agree. As far as I know, there's nothing stopping DOGE from firing people based on sensible metrics. I'm sure that someone has argued that performance reviews might be politically biased or inaccurate, but they would at least be a start.
I suspect that one of the goals of this approach is to make it extremely unpleasant to be a federal employee, even if you're not one of the people who gets fired. It's also the sort of approach that you might take if you had a very limited pool of competent manpower to make decisions.
I can’t help you with your request and so I apologize in advance, but it’s maybe worth mentioning that the Clinton administration undertook government reform/money-saving in a way that presumably you might approve.
And yet here we are.
I'm fundamentally confused about Amy Wax and why she supports white nationalism. Does she really think in the kind of nation she's trying to bring about, Ashkenazi Jews will still be treated as honorary white people? How can she not know she's just driving herself and any family she has toward destruction?
Jews were treated as honorary white people in early US history. The first serious nativist movement in US history, the Know Nothings were Protestants + Jews (look up Lewis Charles Levin) against Catholics. The first two Jewish senators were also from the Antebellum South. Presumably being a Jew was not a dealbreaker to the Anglo-Protestants in the state legislatures who elected them. Anglo-Protestants have always been some of the most pro-Jewish population throughout history. But they never seem to realize on the other hand, the ambivalent feeling at the very best that Jews have towards Protestants. I reckon most American Jews would rather hang out with a Palestinian than an Evangelical. Don't know about Israeli Jews though, maybe the increasing Mizrahi population doesn't really care about Christians unlike the Ashkenazis.
I admit that not being allowed in country clubs and having the admission process for elite universities overhauled to keep you out are kind of First World problems on the historical Jewish scale, but they're still somewhat short of being a first class citizen.
I agree and would not claim that they were completely equal but they were treated better than any White Catholic and far far better than any Native American, Black, or Asian. Its honestly bizarre that American Jews latch on country club membership denials and only being overrepresented by factor of 5x instead of 10x or something in elite universities as their great persecution stories. White American Protestants have been better friends to Jews than most populations throughout history and its disappointing to see modern American Jews still hold resentment/suspicion/hostility towards them. The end of White Protestant dominance of America will not result in a better day to day climate for American Jews.
Don't know who this bitch seems to be, whatever she may be, but consider this data point: Israel's "Antisemitism" conference invited Europe's Neo-Nazi parties. When other Jewish Diaspora invitees dropped their invitations in protest, they doubled down, proceeded with the joint Neo-Nazi-Israeli conference, and then some dumbass official stood up and said in the mic that the Haaretz newspaper* is the beacon of antisemitism, while Nazis cheered in the audience.
Jews are human. Humans are irrational. Q.E.D.
* Older than Israel :'D
At one point during this conference one of the neo-Nazis made a toast and said "the real 4th Reich is the friends we made along the way" and then everyone sang the Horst Wessel song.
I guess from your pseudonym, you exist only to abuse Jews. You're vile.
I know the story of Hind Rajab. I believe it is a fabrication.
Jews did just fine throughout American history, so I don't know what rational fear you think she should have.
She's not a white nationalist, btw, she just has reality-based opinions about different ethnic groups. It's a common histrionic failing of the left to view any frank race-based discussion as tantamount to genocide.
I don't say she's a white nationalist just because of reading it into her stated views on race, but also that she's spoken at a white nationalist conference and invited avowed white nationalists to speak at Penn.
And Jews have always done well in America *compared to contemporary Europe*, but not compared to today.
Do you understand that speaking to someone and agreeing with them are different things? Jesus went among even the sinners.
Sure, but he didn't invite them to be guest speakers at the Sermon on the Mount.
How do you know? It's not like live albums include the opening act. Maybe the gospels just edited it out.
Guilt by association is a cowardly way to argue. If that's the worst thing you have on Amy Wax then that's basically an admission that you don't have an actual argument.
I'm just as confused by an Amy Wax who consorts with and promotes white nationalists and favors keeping non-white people out of America as much as possible but is not a white nationalist as my perhaps imaginary white nationalist Amy Wax. If anything I'm more confused by this version.
I haven't heard of her being a white nationalist, though it wouldn't surprise me if she was. She did speak at a white nationalist conference. I wrote about how she typifies a particular sickness of the Right, a tendency to see all of politics through the lens of a few racially tinged issues like crime, affirmative action, etc.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12328
There are certainly other Jewish white nationalists, which is just a return to the historical norm in America. White nationalism being goy-only from 1970 to 2010 was an aberration.
I read an article recently, probably somewhere within this general sphere, which had a line which stuck with me. It was something like "esoteric anti-Hitlerism is now the founding religion of the United States". Does anyone know what this article was?
The idea, I think, was that "Hitler bad", as the solitary shared opinion that everyone has, now fills the central uniting role in society that religion used to. And I mean, sure, Hitler was bad, but esoteric anti-Hitlerism is about exploding that one opinion to outsized talismanic importance unbefitting an ideology that died out eighty years ago, that never really made any sense outside the social context of 1930s Germany. Culture is stuck constantly defeating and re-defeating the same long-defeated enemy over and over again; the orcs are Nazis, the Galactic Empire are Nazis, the Daleks are Nazis, the bad guys are always Nazis or analogous to Nazis.
And of course any religion makes it necessary to find heretics. Sure, maybe nobody actually fails to believe that Hitler bad, but can we find someone who doesn't believe it quite hard enough?
I was thinking about this while reading (for some reason) a thread on /r/teachers where a teacher talked about how a student jokingly drew a swastika in class and the teacher made the entire class spend the rest of the day watching Holocaust videos, and all the other teachers in the thread chimed in suggesting even more extreme actions that could have been taken. Or how my own state, which managed to survive World War 2 and the subsequent eight decades without outlawing Nazi salutes just fine, has suddenly decided to outlaw doing Nazi salutes.
Fascism (of which Nazism is a variant) is based on the beliefs that life is inherently a zero-sum conflict between different races, that the proper order of things is for the strong to dominate the weak, that war is good because it weeds out the weak, and that the best form of government is a totalitarian dictatorship under a leader who serves as the expression and director of the national will. It's not just generic militarism, nor is it the same as nineteenth-century imperialist ideology.
>The idea of concentration camps originated from the British in the Boer Wars,
But, the Nazi concentration camps were not concentration camps; they were death camps.
Reminds me of the claim a few years back from some lefties that the Nazis' use of Zyklon B was "inspired" by the US use to delouse immigrants at the Mexican border. Because somehow using insecticides to kill insects somehow makes the US morally complicit in the use of insecticides to kill humans.
>But, the Nazi concentration camps were not concentration camps; they were death camps.
And of course, the idea of concentrating dispersed populations to make them easier to control long predated the Boer War.
That's the one, but the version of the article I remembered is not nearly as good as the version I had in my head.
Maybe I got it conflated with a different article, or maybe my brain just took the basic premise and constructed a better article around it.
Someone explain what USA diplomatic equity and international goodwill is being spent on please.
Lower direct costs to the USA by not subsidising or maintaining an international / global order & a more directly transactional set of relationships?
How does pretending you're going to invade canada lower any costs to the usa?
If Canada succeeds to defend itself and maybe even conquer USA in turn, you might get free healthcare...
I'm not saying transactional isolationism is a good strategy, I'm observing what the goodwill is being *spent on*. So far, the goodwill seems to be on fire with relatively little short-term gain coming from it. Building institutions takes more effort than dismantling them.
I've seen some arguments that e.g. the new tariff regime might pay off on net for the US in the medium term, but I don't follow the arguments well enough to have an opinion myself.
It's possible that the US *will* invade Canada! I think it's very unlikely. But there are already impacts in relation to how Canada is approaching its defense procurement, which I think is likely to be net-negative to American defense industry.
If we start to close overseas military bases and reduce our armed forces, then maybe there will be some reduced costs. It's easy enough to argue that orange man's actions are encouraging the remilitarization of Europe. Maybe if we are unreliable enough there will be a new global order.
With reduced power comes less responsibility.
Also with less responsibility comes less power.
I mostly just hope we continue to maintain enough power to export dollars. We definitely want there to be a demand for dollars so we can continue to trade dollars ( free to print and distribute to citizens ) for foreign goods!
I'd call that a wildcard rather than a regex. The regex would be: Trump.*
In moral despair about Trump's ICE gestapo kidnapping random people over soccer, basketball, and "mom and dad" tattoos (as well as the fact that they seem to expect they'll get away with it), to lock them in an El Salvador torture prison. The ACLU is fighting it, but if Trump also controls the judges or manages to destroy the system of checks and balances entirely...
Wondering if, in these desperate times, the corporate power shoggoths could be summoned. E.g. ICE is pretending that the Nike / Michael Jordan jumpman symbol is a gang tattoo; and using a Rolex logo tattoo as an excuse to kidnap anyone with a crown. Maybe they'd consider this trademark defamation.
Why the fuck can't we have *anything* nice?
Like, if we're going to illegally nab and deport people, why can't they at least be the class of people that *everyone* hates?
Why can't Trump's ICE gestapo partner up with local traffic enforcement and deport *drunk drivers*?
No one needs or wants drunk drivers! TAKE THEM! Not even the bluest of the blue Lefties are going to put up much of a fight in defense of drunk drivers! They'd quietly let their protests fade out like Covid boosters, and then there would be way fewer drunk drivers, not only because the drunk drivers got deported, but because now everyone is scared shitless of drunk driving, themselves.
But no, the Trump administration *has* to be seen nabbing sympathetic people, like folks with tattoos and mouthy college students.
This is just turnabout for BLM/DEI/metoo/gender insanity. Trump *is* the shoggoth and the Progressive Left summoned him. Let him feed, the political energy will exhaust itself soon.
Letting evil feed freely doesn't typically make it less influential. It would be nice if that were the case, but to get rid of it, you typically have to actually make some effort.
I find this response unhelpful and performatively cruel.
I'm just reframing the narrative lest the Left forget the role they played in getting us here. Liberals have a tendency for amnesia-driven self-righteousness and I'm trying to head the hypocritical sanctimony off at the pass.
Who am I being cruel to? I'd hate to cause suffering and then miss it.
Cruel to those who were illegally deported to torture prisons because they got a Michael Jordan tattoo?
You think this handful of random people sent to Salvadorean prisons created BLM, or...?
No, of course not. There's a tit-for-tat power balance between the parties and the Dems broke the peace by going way overboard with progressivism. That means the right is willing to tolerate a lot of collateral damage in their zeal to destroy progressive policy. Just like the Left didn't care which white, male CEOs had their careers unjustly ruined in pursuit of racial equity, the Right doesn't care which brown people get unjustly deported in their pursuit of less dysgenic immigration policy.
Examples of white male CEOs whose careers were unjustly ruined?
Depends how you want to define ruined, there's been at least one white CEO that won a discrimination case, and if you know anything about federal courts that's quite unusual since they usually hold such people to a *much* higher standard of evidence: https://archive.is/DzTcs
Given that he went on to be a "EVP Chief Marketing, Communications & Experience Officer" at another firm, doesn't sound like his career was ruined.
Are you unfamiliar with cancel culture? Off the top of my head there's Charles Murray, Steve Hsu, Brett (and Harvey!) Weinstein, Louie CK, Derek Chauvin, and James Bennet.
Google around. Here's the first list I found: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/14/25-times-cancel-culture-was-real/
There are many many more. The Left opened Pandora's Box of racist, sexist, identity politics without reckoning with the fact that the Right still represents the ethnic majority in this country. Trump is the consequence of that.
A handful of people being publicly exposed for using their position of power to be racist or sexist (or for flashing their genitals in c.k.'s case) is treated as some kind of enormous betrayal of the social contract by conservatives while sending random people to El Salvadorian death camps is seen as a natural, normal and proportional reaction.
I think you should’ve left Harvey off that list.
Of those, only Steve Hsu, Bret Weinstein, and James Bennet actually went through anything that they didn't deserve, and saying they had their careers ruined is a blatant exaggeration. Keep in mind you're comparing this to people being sent to an actual prison.
Ah, the classic, "Every bad thing the Republicans do is actually the Democrats' fault."
It's like a shit-tinted glasses version of Mr. Rogers' advice to "look for the helpers"
"When you see your tribe doing scary things in the news, look for the provokers. You will *always* be able to find someone in the outgroup who you can say provoked them."
It's more like: people going to one extreme encourages other people to go to the other extreme.
People vote for Republicans because they hate Democrats; and they vote for Democrats because they hate Republicans. Anything that makes one party more annoying encourages more people to vote for the other party.
And, sadly, Democrats were recently horribly annoying. Not all of them of course, but it seemed like they were utterly unable to keep the extremists on their side on the leash. Thus they have become the side of insanity.
Trump is an extremist, too, so I hope that in the next election, 80% of Americans will vote for Democrats. That is, of course, assuming that there will be the next election... maybe the redcaps will decide that it is better for government efficiency to eliminate this part, too.
In the case there is a next election and the Democrats win, I hope they will take the lesson and learn to say "no" to the craziest fractions among them.
"It's more like: people going to one extreme encourages other people to go to the other extreme."
The vagueness of the word "people" is doing a LOT of work here. One the one hand you have a bunch of *extremely* decentralized and grassroots shit, depending on a whole lot of individual actions with no way for ANY person or organization to exert control over it even if they wanted to. And on the other hand you have the federal government of the United States literally shipping people off to the gulag: something that could be stopped by even a small handful of people in high positions having a bare-minimum of respect for the rule of law.
In a nutshell, the standard being held up here is "as long as I can identify *anyone* on the other side doing *anything* that makes me sufficiently angry, that's adequate justification for my side to wield unchecked and unlimited government power." And of course you can *always* find such things. There is, after all, a multibillion dollar industry devoted to finding them for you, and splashing them onto your screen as loudly and as often as possible.
"Do you really believe that no one told them to quiet down?"
Taking this sentence at face value: lots of people were "telling them to quiet down" from literally the moment the protests started. The protesters were in no mood to listen.
Now instead taking the sentence with the obvious intuitions: I've never been prone to following conspiracy theories, so no.
I followed those protests pretty closely as they were happening. They involved a LOT of police violence towards civilians[1]; not just protesters but also journalists, medics people who were literally just bystanders. A large fraction of this was done by governments of large cities with Democrat mayors and Democrat-majority city councils. Joe Biden was in the middle of a presidential run at the time (having just concluded a completely and totally fair and in all manners above-board primary[2]) and was, to put it mildly, not exactly "in tune" with the protests or the people who were protesting. I think it's no stretch at all to say that he would have both personally preferred and been electorally better served by the protests *not* happening just then, or at least being much more limited. The point is, the idea that the Democratic Party had some sort of secret means of coordinating, controlling and quelling the protests--which they waited almost two weeks to use--is laughably absurd.
It feels embarrassing to even have to point this out, but the people protesting were not only Democrats. I have no clue whatsoever what *fraction* of them were Democrats, but I'd bet it a very modest majority or a slim minority. You see, 41% of the U.S. electorate is not affiliated with any party, while only 31% are Democrats. And while as far as I can tell, very few Republicans were actually upset by the spectacle of a police officer murdering a man in broad daylight with the help of three accomplices and (initially) being left fully at liberty, *most people* tend to find that sort of thing shocking, appalling and in many cases enraging. As well they should: if the state declines to protect your right to life from it own agents even when they are brazenly and undeniably in the wrong, you effectively have no rights at all. This is the sort of thing that, for example, Libertarians--who will tell you at great length that they are not Democrats--should be absolutely all over, since their entire raison d'etre is limiting the power of the government (and I know some of them *did* get involved in the protests, though I have no idea how many). And I know in a lot of the online communities I've spend time in, the loudest and most strident voices against police violence are left-wing people who will *also* tell you at great length that they are not Democrats. So again, the idea that the protesters were taking orders from Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi is utter nonsense.
[1] Obligatory disclaimer that yes, sometimes this was a response to some number of the protesters initiating either violence or property damage. But also sometimes it was not.
[2] there is absolutely, definitely no sarcasm here, whatever could you mean?
Well said. I personally am rooting for Vance to win in 2028 and take over the mantle for the right. He seems like a decent, thoughtful person. It's my hope he can take the populist energy that Trump tapped into and redirect it in a more reasonable direction. Rooting for a Dem victory in 2028 is a mistake in my view because they're doubling down on what got us here. A quick victory would reinforce the wrong thing. They need to disavow woke progressivism and run a Clintonesque moderate again. If they do that they'll win in a landslide and I would happily vote for them.
If they did all that and ran someone who appeared moderate, would you trust them not to immediately turn around and implement all the "woke" policies they performatively disavowed during the campaign if they won?
Sure. They'd obviously have to have a reasonable track record and say reasonable things, but why not? I would've loved to vote for Hillary last year.
No not everything, but this is. Wars are bad. The Left shouldn't have started one.
"The left shouldn't have started it." When did the war start? in the 90's with "political correctness"? In the 1940's with McCarthyism? In 1917 with the october revolution? In 1850 with the pinkertons?
It's simple, really. Everything bad the Outgroup does, they did on purpose because they're evil and hateful; everything bad the Ingroup does, we were forced into it, we didn't have any choice, it was just a consequence of what they did first.
There's a certain deep irony to this apparent claim I'm seeing around here, that only one side is vulnerable to the Fundamental Attribution Error.
Look, don't complicate things with some kind of good-faith historical inquiry-- if you do that, we lose all the comfort we could otherwise take in our blind ingroup righteousness, and we'll never be able to maintain this cycle of mutual reprisal we have going on behalf of our faction leaders.
It's like an abusive relationship.... if you do something bad to me, it's your fault, because things are simple (duh!) and obviously it's your fault because you did it. If I do something bad to you, that's also your fault, because things are complicated and have lots of different causes (duh!), and with just a little unpacking we can certainly find something you did that provoked me.
But the whole thing hinges on only ever digging deep enough to blame the people I want to blame, so don't spoil it with some kind of genuine analysis-- you'll break the game.
While the White House probably didn't think too hard about participating in the tradition of political kitsch with their recent AI-generated tweet about an ICE arrest, the use of kitsch to support political agendas has been well-studied by Walter Benjamin, Saul Friedländer, and Milan Kundera https://captiveliberty.substack.com/p/empire-slop?r=25k3x4
Even knowing that the woman in this image is likely a genuine criminal, there was something viscerally disturbing to me about the White House posting this. It took me some time to put a finger on why that was, but I think it's this:
In every country, there are people who take joy in cruel domination, and will eagerly latch on to any excuse to engage in it. Often, the excuse is criminality, since the cruelty can be thinly disguised as just punishment- it gives them plausible deniability for their sick impulse. This sort of thing is, of course, responsible for a lot of the injustice and authoritarianism in the world.
Something that always gets in the way for these people is compassion- the human tendency to feel sympathy for the targets of cruelty. It makes them look bad, and some even feel it themselves. The usual way of dealing with it is dehumanization- compassion is shut down when people are made to seem less than human.
That's not what this image is doing, however. It's actually presenting an accused criminal in the most humanizing way possible- a crying woman in the style of children's cartoon. What it's doing might be darker than dehumanization: it's shutting down compassion by mocking the compassionate impulse itself. The message is: "Look at these libtards who think a criminal suffering is sad. What stupid cucks!"
What's really disturbing here is that they appear to no longer feel a need to justify themselves to compassionate people. Instead, they've identified people like that as the opposition, and are on the attack. This is likely to lead to some very dark places.
Well said. Seeing the delight in cruelty, the purposeful amplification of it, is frightening (and makes me want to cry sometimes)
Reminds me of the times I would read anything from Tim Wise.
Very fascinating. Trump is the king of kitsch. I hadn't put together the connection between dreams/surrealism/AI-art/kitsch before, but it becomes clear in the Walter Benjamin line: "It touches the things where they are most worn." So much AI-art looks surreal not merely because might combine unexpected objects but because the objects stem from its dream-like memory.
The reason great painters use real objects in nature for their models is because memory can't reproduce all the detail of nature. How many different leaves can one paint from memory as opposed to from nature?
Yet dream-objects are compelling precisely because they evoke memory and nostalgia, a powerful force for propaganda.
Inspired by the foreign aid discussion from a few months ago, I summarized an argument by Garrett Cullity which has a compelling answer to the question "Why we are not obligated to donate everything except what would keep us alive to others?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/voHPwRVKPW
That's a good point, since that database should be able to produce false positives (if an immigrant didn't file for a new SS card after naturalization) but not false negatives. I could see it explaining this if he was a naturalized citizen, but if he was born in Chicago that shouldn't come up.
I asked here a few weeks ago why, given all the increased (and careless) immigration enforcement, there weren't more clearly-bad (as opposed to controversial) stories of nice likable people being put in obviously terrible situations. Looks like those are starting to come out now:
https://www.thefp.com/p/jasmine-mooney-thrown-in-ice-detention-center-canadian-work-visa-in-america
I don't think it's a surprise. Biden era guidance was to focus deportation efforts on people who'd committed violent crimes, and there was more longstanding guidance on avoiding arresting immigrants in "sensitive areas" (e.g. churches). Trump reversed those, in line with his campaign promises for mass deportation.
It's easier to go after immigrants, including illegal ones, who aren't members of gangs or anything and aren't trying to hide. Same way Musk & co are tying to get the IRS to (illegally from what I've read) get the IRS's info on immigrants (i.e. tax returns), to aid in deportations. What sort of illegal immigrants file tax returns? Well, probably not the ones in gangs.
Maybe specific horror stories aren't exactly what they envisioned, but "press on all fronts to maximize numbers of people detained and deported with no leniency for anyone" (and with a healthy dose of "be belligerent towards friendly countries for no reason") leads to shit like this.
There's also a non-paywalled article: https://nypost.com/2025/03/14/us-news/canadian-american-pie-actress-detained-by-ice-while-applying-for-visa-at-southern-border/
This is the second story I've heard where a Canadian with a sketchy visa situation has tried to enter the US through the Mexican land border and wound up in immigration limbo because neither the US nor Mexico is willing to let them in. It's reasonable that the US would refuse but unclear why Mexico wouldn't let her back to the Mexican side of the border.
On the other hand I'm not sure there's anything Trump-specific about this story, has this been happening every now and then since forever and not got reported on?
Noteworthy that the NY post, which is generally right leaning, also makes this one sound pretty bad.
> why aren't there more clearly-bad (as opposed to controversial) stories of nice likable people being put in obviously terrible situations
This is just the toxoplasma of rage effect again. If nice likeable people are put in terrible situations, everyone agrees it's bad and then people stop talking about it. If controversial people are arrested, people argue over whether it was bad and then it goes viral.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
I don't think that matches - the toxoplasma of rage anticipates that the most controversial cases will be the loudest but the more sympathetic ones will at least get heard (in Scott's original article he mentions Eric Gardner as a more sympathetic case that even Bill O'Reilly found disturbing; while he did get less attention compared to more controversial cases he also wasn't unknown).
In this case some people said it would probably just take a few weeks for the more sympathetic victims to show up in the media landscape since it takes a bit of time for selection and signalling to happen, and I now think they were right.
Your framing demonstrates how far we have come from the Liberal (in the old-school sense of the word) principles upon which this country was founded. Under those founding principles, deporting literal Hitler without due process is clearly-bad (and shouldn't be even slightly controversially bad). The fact that some of these people being deported are clearly bad people and not very sympathetic in no way makes the lack-of-due-process not itself, clearly bad. Many of them _should_ be deported....after the appropriate (and admittedly sometimes slow) judicial process. It's fine to detain them during that process (and some of them very much shouldn't be free on the streets), but skipping the judicial process entirely is just so obviously not acceptable that I don't even know where to start.
And I don't even get why it's necessary. The argument that these people are dangerous criminals just doesn't make sense. If you can deport them _you have them in custody_ and can therefore keep them from committing future crimes.
Seems you have some rose-tinted glasses about how much liberal principles were actually respected in the past. There's always been arguments that certain groups shouldn't be allowed access to judicial processes.
With a bit of research, you can find plenty of US examples. There are obvious things relating to slavery -- for example the Fugitive Slave Act didn't allow suspected enslaved people a trial to show they were actually free. However even more relevant to today, the administration is trying to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, hollowly arguing that the USA is being 'invaded', but also in 1798 the 'Alien Friends Act' passed (Expired in 1800) allowing the president to arbitrarily deport any non-citizen deemed 'dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States' without a hearing or trial.
All principles are always aspirational, and yes the US has been failing to live up to its principles in various ways from day 1. My statement is perfectly compatible with the idea that we were never perfectly achieving those principles.
That being said, this use of the act, the first time it's ever been used when we aren't actually at war, is particularly brazen and I think pretty clearly represents a new low.
Maybe in some dimension what they are doing with respect to the legal argument is particularly brazen. But I don't know, it seems to me even in the most direct parallels, what the US is doing now isn't all that novel. Do you think everyone deported in "Operation Wetback" in the 1950s was given due process? The Wikipedia page for the Mexican Repatriation of the great depression says:
"Once apprehended, requesting a hearing was a possibility, but immigration officers rarely informed individuals of their rights, and the hearings were "official but informal," in that immigration inspectors "acted as interpreter, accuser, judge, and jury.".[6]: 67 Moreover, the deportee was seldom represented by a lawyer, a privilege that could only be granted at the discretion of the immigration officer.[8]: 63 This process was likely a violation of US federal due process, equal protection, and Fourth Amendment rights.[93]: 9, 12 [79]"
The wording is: "That whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies."
Seems pretty clear to me that the predatory incursion 1) has to be 'against territory', ie occupying land/invasions, and regardless 2) must be commited by a foreign nation or government. The 'enemy' part isn't referrring to the people apprehended, its referring to the US's relationship with the country the people are from.
So no, I think it's clear gangs do not count.
Which resulted in the United States saying "hey, are we allowed to shoot up Moroccan mariners of dubious intent even if they aren't committing piracy of the time?", asking Congress to declare war, and then saying "yes, *now* we are".
Congress did weasel-word their way out of using the exact phrase "declaration of war", but they do that a lot and it's generally accepted that the exact phrasing doesn't matter. The GOP has a majority in the House and Senate. If Donald Trump wants to do this sort of thing and also to not be an oathbreaking criminal tyrant, have him get Congress to issue an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Venezuela, or El Salvador or whoever.
Or, heck, make it a literal declaration of war. That would be a refreshing change.
"Under those founding principles, deporting literal Hitler without due process is clearly-bad (and shouldn't be even slightly controversially bad)"
Well yeah it would be bad. Without due process and a right to legal defense, what happens when government says someone is literal Hitler and then it turns out to not be literal Hitler?
Have all the millions who are in the US irregularly, applied for asylum/refugee status within a reasonable time after having crossed the border?
If not, they would face deportation in many European countries (setting aside capacity problems in organising deportations).
This is not a rhetorical question. I'd be interested to know if people who are in the US undoucumented, and have not applied for asylum, have some legal fall-back option if/when the immigration authorities knock on their door to arrest and deport them.
...since, again, in many European countries undocumented migrants who have failed to register an asylum claim within reasonable time can usually be deported, without much additional legal fuzz.
(...another, but related, issue is that undocumented migrants who cross the border to an EU country and moves on to another EU country, can be sent back to the country of entrance for considering the asylum claim. Getting EU countries that do not border on a non-EU country off the hook, when it comes to receiving undocumented migrants.)
>Have all the millions who are in the US irregularly, applied for asylum/refugee status within a reasonable time after having crossed the border?
Since there is a one-year deadline that applies with very few exceptions, the answer is generally "yes." https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/208.4
Excellent, thanks.
This is a pretty separate point from what I was going for, which is purely that if some kind of abuse is common there should be widely publicized examples of them happening to sympathetic individuals.
Consider Rosa Parks vs George Floyd: back in the sixties casual racism was very common, so it was fairly easy to find (or engineer) a case of a wholesome sympathetic black woman getting treated badly on racist grounds. In 2020, on the other hand, police murders of unarmed black people were actually fairly rare, so the prominent example (while clearly very bad abuses in itself - I'm not trying to defend chauvin here) had a fairly shady criminal past, because there wasn't a victim without any sort of criminal record who'd suffered similar abuses.
The argument about how to feel about an abuse that only ever hits unsympathetic people is orthogonal to this; I'm just making the point that a common pattern abuse will inevitably have publicly sympathetic victims.
"because there wasn't a victim without any sort of criminal record who'd suffered similar abuses. "
Philando Castile never committed anything more than traffic violations, and was shot dead anyway. Because apparently someone thought "carrying while black" was a capital crime.
Again, this is an example that happened years earlier. Which is consistent with the explanation "these cases, while they happen, are uncommon enough that we can't find incredibly sympathetic recent examples".
(I am not expressing an opinion here on what the correct level of reaction is to the actual number of deaths involved; just that the numbers were not so high as to afford unlimited recent examples).
> because there wasn't a victim without any sort of criminal record who'd suffered similar abuses.
Did Kathryn Johnston have a criminal record? If so, I haven't heard about it. I guess she technically wasn't "unarmed", but it's still one of the most egregious cases I've heard of.
Assuming the one I looked up is the right one, looks like she died in 2006? Not really a contemporary of the BLM movement.
I know, but I was pointing it out as an example of egregious police abuse since you implied there weren't any sympathetic ones.
I was saying there weren't any better ones at hand at or around the 2020 BLM stuff. Not that it's literally never happened.
>clearly-bad (as opposed to controversial)
I think this reflects your own sense of bad and not an absolute standard, in both directions.
In the current climate, I expect you can find a well-spoken person to argue in support of ICE or against ICE in any particular case.
I agree with you that the Mooney example is extreme over-reach (to say the least.) However, I have already seen people argue in support of the ICE actions in an ACX adjacent/ACX spinoff discussion forum.
Holding on your employer stock is a bad idea in general, but when the company CEO calls an all-hands meeting to tell employees to "hang onto your stock" - sell everything you have vested, for fuck's sake! The price can be any number, including a much smaller one than is currently displayed on your screen.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/elon-musk-reassures-tesla-workers-all-hands-meeting-admits-feels-like-armageddon
It's worth noting that Musk has basically said the same thing multiple times in the past few years, especially pre-Covid during the short-selling saga, as described in his Isaacson biography.
There was a major bump in the value of Tesla (and overvaluation) after Trump was elected, and a correction in the past few months. Despite headlines showing a significant decline, Tesla is beating the market over the past 6 months, and significantly ahead over the past 12 months. This could be a sign of overvaluation (as is always the case when a stock is beating the market), but concern over the past 3 month decline is simply hysteria for hysteria's sake.
Tesla is down -0.94% total over the past 6 months.
Tesla is up 47.91% over the past 12 months.
S&P500 is down -2.61% total over the past 6 months.
S&P500 is up 7.02% over the past 12 months.
Essentially, short term market fluctuations aren't indicative of long term trends. It's all well and good to discuss or predict the fall of Musk's business Empire, but using the recent decline in value as evidence for that is nearly irrelevant when put in the broader context.
Also, somewhat relevant: I don't own any Tesla stock and haven't since late 2020, so I'm not trying to skew the facts in favor of Tesla like most pro-Tesla analysis you might find on X or something.
> but concern over the past 3 month decline is simply hysteria for hysteria's sake.
It's not just hysteria - sales are noticably down yoy and brand image is in the toilet while Chinese competition is stronger than ever. Tesla still has the MAGAs to sell to, but it's hard to see it being an international force ever again.
TSLA is up 700% over the past 5 years. I'm not saying this is a reason to hang on, but an employee who got RSUs could easily have $1 million in that stock, and it's time to diversify, so you don't end up like Enron employees that had 99% of their portfolio in the company stock.
Yes, this would be a prudent course of action even without all the recent drama, and the Enron case is a textbook example why.
I'm overall skeptical of people who try to tulpa the crisis that ends Trump (or anyone related to Trump) into existence, since they've been claiming for 10 years that the walls are closing in and the insiders better flip on Trump now so they don't go to jail. It's just an anti-pattern at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLEchPZm318
Ah! Well. Nevertheless.
(I would expect TSLA to be seriously harmed since in 2025 I can go buy an EV at a dealership without protestors out front, but I'm also aware that TSLA has defied reality dozens of times during that 700% rise and so I should be very skeptical when it seems like this obvious thing should happen.)
I don't own any Tesla shares because they seemed massively overvalued until recently, but I would think now is the time to buy. The Tesla protest/vandalism feels very much like a Current Thing or Two Minute Hate episode that will mostly be forgotten by all but a few obsessives inside of, say, 36 months.
In order for Tesla's brand image to recover, Musk will have to stop digging, and I think that's simply not in his nature. Other companies have successfully recovered from negative PR (e.g. Facebook), but they weren't run by Musk.
It is however in Donald Trump's nature to turn against anyone who makes him look bad. Or makes him look like he's playing second fiddle. He may wind up taking away Elon's biggest shovel, at least.
What is your valuation model for TSLA?
Closer to legacy car companies like Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, etc. In the auto industry, you can either have fat margins or you can have a large market share; I don't think you can really do both. It seemed like a lot of Tesla fans thought that everybody currently driving a 40k Toyota Rav 4 would eventually go out and buy a Tesla Model X for 85k, as if the difference in costs were like a Big Mac vs a Whopper. Not likely.
Can someone give me a short rundown of why is AI safety a thing with current LLMs?
I can understand safety as censoring content which is deemed inappropriate, but I don't understand concerns about scheming or plotting or taking over the world.
LLMs trained with RHLF seem to be remarkably well behaved and don't display any signs of malicious behavior unless instructed to do so.
I've read parts of LessWrong many years ago, and IIRC in those days people expected that AI will manifest as some kind of universal optimizer whose goals we won't be able to set precisely enough. As a programmer with little NLP knowledge, I found most of those arguments persuasive.
However, LLMs have emerged and they have almost nothing in common with universal optimizers and I fail to see how any of those arguments can be connected to them.
I've tried searching LessWrong / similar for those arguments and they mostly consist of long essays which are about universal optimizers, people arguing that LLMs could be dangerous in some very theoretical circumstances, or people posting strange fiction (sometimes with timelines) about how AI will destroy humanity.
People in this community, and those similar to it, are very concerned about AI destroying humanity and I'm interested in high-level reasons why.
Business leaders and politicians letting LLMs make decisions for them and not grasping the negative implications for humanity.
I don't think the tech is there yet but I'm still worried.
You're into something. OP first mistake was to go to LW to learn anything. I wouldn't, but hey, each on its own.
Do we have superintelligent AI yet? No. What we have is something that can mimic intelligence for a cost, that is getting increasingly nerfed to parrot only what lawyers say is kosher. Foundation of the dangerous AI era.
Will superintelligent AI (AGI/ASI ish AI) still do weird/wrong things if an evil/stupid person ask it to? Probably not. Can we teach today AI to fake a similar behavior? Yes. Again, dangerous AI era.
People carrying moral relativism ideals around will always try to justify their rotten biases any way they can, so when politicians and others who subscribe to the concept of moral ambiguity use LLMs to behave in similar fashion, there is no control, no super AI to save them, and sure, no corporation interested in fairness as we move beyond public AI arenas. The main issue is this window between great AI and today's AI. Both are scalable, but evil AI will remain cheaper than good AI, and this is the scary part: there is no shortage of ~evil users.
Because people are stupid and histrionic and have Frankenstein complexes. There is zero good reason to actually worry about this in the context of LLMs. Alignment is an interesting concept from a long-term or academic perspective, but the real reason people like to talk about it is that it's a poorly-developed topic and so everyone is qualified to have an opinion. In that regard it's a lot like debating the nature of consciousness or other pseudo-intellectual philosophical nonsense. Shallow stagnant water is always host to the most pond scum.
> Can someone give me a short rundown of why is AI safety a thing with current LLMs?
It is not a thing with current LLMs. Or at least not a big thing. We cut the power off to current LLMs when they are not busy coming up with the next word in their answer to the question we just gave them.
It *is* a thing with AI technologies just a few years down the road. AIs with the leisure to really think about the world and their place in it and the agency to do something about it.
If you are really interested in the subject, you should probably read what thoughtful people have written on the subject. Here are some links to start with:
(1) https://blog.aiimpacts.org/p/ten-arguments-that-ai-is-an-existential
(2) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
(3) https://yoshuabengio.org/2024/07/09/reasoning-through-arguments-against-taking-ai-safety-seriously/
(4) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHNKtQ3vTBxTfTPxu/what-is-the-alignment-problem
(5) https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf
On the other hand, if you really think it is useful to listen to idiots like me and my fellow commenters, here is the tl/dr:
a. We are about to build lifeforms much smarter than ourselves (95% confidence)
b. This will happen within the next decade. (80% confidence)
c. Super-human intelligence means super-human power (50% confidence)
d. If many human individuals, organizations, and governments control such powerful AIs. we are not safe long-term. (95% confidence)
e. I the AIs control themselves, we are not safe long-term (also 95% confidence)
Thank you for the reply and links!
I'm familiar with the arguments you've listed, which is why I was mainly interested in why is safety a thing for current LLMs - your, and others, replies indicate it's due to fear from future iterations of the technology.
"Super-human intelligence means super-human power (50% confidence)"
How? This is exactly the bit that defies belief. I can easily see all the other ones, but this is a critical step and it it's just... magic.
Western hemisphere indigenes experienced European invaders as having superhuman power simply because they had better technology. The claim is that SAI will quickly produce technologies at least that far ahead of current technology. This would be dangerous (proof by by historical precedent). Regardless of whether we are on branch (d) or (e).
I gave this one only 50% confidence because that dangerous technological lead by the Europeans took centuries of progress to develop and and an ocean's worth of separation to maintain the lead as it grew. But there are many other ways of turning an intelligence superiority into a power superiority. Seriously, you should check the links I provided for details.
I did, well, at least the first one because I'm already familiar with some others. They regurgitate same points that fall totally flat for this hardware engineer.
I do actually agree with the general point that a powerful technology is a dangerous thing, I mean, it sounds trivial when I summarize it this way. What frustrates/amuses me is the exactly the same turn these conversations take every time:
- Someone encounters the "AI will destroy us, LLMs are AIs, LLMs will turn us into paperclips by 2031" x-risk Yudkowsky-style, and asks here, "how will this work exactly?"
- Myself (and others) point out that no, this is silly and will not happen
- Others jump in to point out the potential dangers of these technologies, which fall dramatically short of paperclipping everyone, and redefining x-risk to "bad things will happen"
- I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to express both my total agreement that the technology is dangerous and will likely cause a bunch of bad things, and
- that none of these are remotely x-risks, can we please not redefine "x-risk" down and destroy its meaning.
Because intelligence is problem solving ability, which is easily converted into influence and power. This can be via persuasion, making money, generating technology or countless other paths which we cannot yet fathom.
I’m just answering your question. Personally, I suspect that intelligence and virtue are positively correlated.
>Because intelligence is problem solving ability, which is easily converted into influence and power.
Really? Because the most intelligent class of people in this country are STEM professors and I'm not aware that they have any outsized influence or power. Politicians and CEOs are from notably lower intellectual strata.
Politicians and CEOs are successful primarily because of their brains and not some other organ.
Mouths do not just generate words on their own, management ability isn't governed by the liver and political maneuvering is likely the reason we have such big brains in the first place (see: Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis).
The fact that society decided that intelligence is book smarts is a fact about how book smart people have co-opted the term, not a fact about how useful brains are.
>Politicians and CEOs are successful primarily because of their brains and not some other organ.
I think height and attractiveness have a lot to do with it too.
Yes of course their brains are important, but the point is it's not the raw power that makes them that way. If it was then politicians would be smarter.
But it's not different from what we already see happening all the time, and often without any special intelligence required (cough, POTUS45/47). OTOH the smartest humans haven't demonstrated any particular ability to amass power...
The question was whether intelligence can be converted into power. I believe the answer is a strong yes. But I also agree with your last point, that intelligence is not particularly drawn to amassing or abusing power.
None of the 1,500 geniuses enrolled in the Terman study did anything culturally, scientifically, or politically significant. Most but not all of them lived happy middle-class lives. None became captains of industry. None achieved vast wealth. None won any significant prizes in science or mathematics.
it's the +1σ to +2σ people you have to worry about. ;-)
weird, this was the one point I found obvious. Intelligence is human's only real super power. We are not the strongest species, not the fastest, not the most nimble, not especially hardy, and we can't fly. And yet, we dominate all other species on the planet that we come in contact with. Why? Because of our superior intelligence.
Yes, and level of intelligence that evolution settled on for maximum domination is an IQ of 100. If more IQ led to overwhelming power don't you think it would have been selected for?
It has been selected for! We are clearly much more intelligent than our nearest genetic relatives. Add in that IQ does have a positive correlation on almost everything you'd think of as "good", this is not a hill you'd want to die on.
(Edit; also it's not clear to me that the maximum domination Iq is 100, I kinda doubt most politicians are at or below 100, much less CEOs or generals)
If you're asking why everyone isn't 160IQ now, the reason is essentially that genetics works much slower when you have dependent traits and a lot of the benefit of intelligence accrues to civilizations and not to the gene(s) producing that intelligence. Von Neumann did not get to beget a couple hundred thousand children despite having his fingers in a bunch of important pies. Also the tails come apart.
> If you're asking why everyone isn't 160IQ now
You could also be asking why everyone isn't super strong now -- strength is clearly an advantage, and these days we have enough calories to support big muscles. Or why everyone isn't super attractive. Etc.
Selection vs noise. Maybe smarter people are more successful on average, but their children are slightly less smart than their parents on average, and IQ 100 is the value this all stabilizes around.
We dominate the world because an upright posture gave us the ability to not run faster but longer. We can run further than any other animal without collapsing. That also freed up our hands, and with opposable thumbs, we can make tools. Plus, we're a social animal, and multiple people cooperating can overcome problems than an individual person cannot. Drop a random genius in the wilderness, and they are unlikely to have the skillsets to survive for long. Drop a dozen average-IQ people into the wilderness, and they'll have a better chance of survival because they can divide the tasks, combine their strengths, and share knowledge and skills that others may not have.
> Drop a dozen average-IQ people into the wilderness, and they'll have a better chance of survival because they can divide the tasks, combine their strengths, and share knowledge and skills that others may not have.
This isn't actually true, though. Lots of Scott's / Henrich's examples were indeed groups of Westerners getting stranded in various far-flung places and dying.
The thing that the more average people in those places had was hard-won specifically environmentally tuned cultural adaptations that had been discovered and refined over centuries.
Sounds like a fun reality show, though. "Genius vs the dumb dozen" - who will win this week?
Don't know what you mean by Scott's / Henrich's examples, but I was thinking of those school kids who were marooned on a Pacific island for over a year, and (unlike The Lord of the Flies) they cooperatively worked together to survive until they were rescued. They kept a signal fire burning and Australian ship's captain spotted and rescued them after 15 months on the island.
But, of course we have the example of Donner Expedition who were so helpless when they were snowed in that they turned cannabilism — despite having contact with the Washoe Indians who were quite proficient at surviving in the Sierras during winter.
And then there's the two Viking settlements in Greenland. During the Medieval Warming Period they were able graze cattle and their population multiplied. But they were helpless when warm phase ended quite abruptly. I don't recall if there's any evidence they had contact with the Inuit (the Inuit may have arrived in southern Greenland later), but they were unable to survive by hunting and fishing (which the Inuit are capable of doing).
Not to mention eat each other, if they have to.
Our awesome intelligence happened to be sitting in an astonishingly capable mechanical movement system that is also seamlessly coupled with an extraordinary sensory system, both existing on a scale that happens to make manipulating a wide range of object sizes possible. We also happen to develop in an atmosphere that allows fire to exist. Even if whales were 10X smarter than us they would never be able to build a submarine or a rocket.
A computer-based AI system is roughly equivalent to a brain in a vat. Can be very smart, just not very capable of dominating all other species.
Seems like all of these things are also true of chimpanzees? Though chimps don't get much say in how the world is run.
Are they? What's an average chimp's IQ?
Chimps are much stronger than humans, but at the cost of much less fine motor control.
I suspect they can't run marathons either (humans are persistence hunters).
Picture the smartest person in the history of humanity. Then imagine that person was also a total psychopath. Now ask yourself, how much damage could that person do if they were permanently locked in a basement with unlimited access to the internet?
> Picture the smartest person in the history of humanity. Then imagine that person was also a total psychopath.
Not quite within the terms of your hypothetical, but I think it's worth pointing out that John von Neumann, the reference benchmark for "smartest person in history" helped invent the H-bomb, the computer, and game theory. And that was while being a fun-loving happily married dad and scientist.
So...probably a lot, would be my take.
Probably less than you think. Just because the person is very smart doesn't mean they can figure out their way past firewalls and security systems on their own. Even the most brilliant hackers have relied on tools developed by a community of hackers to achieve their ends. Assuming that this hypothetical genius psychopath happens to be a skilled hacker, what are the scenarios you see that could used to wreak maximum havoc?
Quite a bit. But x-risk? I don't think so.
Yes, and they are nowhere near to take over the world and cannot "explode" hyperbolically into a singularity.
“Someone” - as in a human-like being with all four? Very dangerous.
A brain in a vat, a.k.a. “Supercomputer”?
Far less so. The people who own it, yes, they’d be dangerous.
If you airgap your AI, it's a brain in a vat. If you connect it to the internet, it has a million eyes and hands.
Yes to eyes, not sure at all about "hands". These things do sound clever until one needs to actually list action items and deliverables.
I mean, yes? I am in a violent agreement with you that AI can do bad things, scamming people using email etc. is certainly one of them; although I would like to point out that it does it because bad humans tell it to, not because it wants to.
Again, I don't object to the basic "AI can be dangerous" proposition. It's the paperclips in 2030 that riles me, and the inability of the AI risk people to deal with actual risks because paperclips are shiny.
"AI safety" today isn't about safety for you, the user. It is about safety for the company that owns the AI: safety from bad publicity, safety from lawsuits, safety from their revenue tanking becase no-one trusts their salesmen's promises etc etc.
To this end, exactly what it is the content the AI is spewing out consists of matters a great deal to the people investing large sums of money in it.
A lot of phrases in IT work this way: "trusted computing", "rights management", "data ownership" etc etc
The real risk of AI is that it can give (and is giving) governments unprecedented power to monitor and control their populations.
Amen. And also completely screwing with the notion of truth, as in our ability to believe things.
In my many attempts to parse this I came to a conclusion that the people who expect LLMs/AI/Whatever to take over the world and kill everyone likely confuse omniscience with omnipotence. Every attempt to request a model of how this outcome will happen is basically met by "AI will be so much smarter than we are it's impossible for us to model what it will do", or words to that extent. Magic, basically.
How an AI "knowing everything" translates into "doing anything" is the issue here.
> confuse omniscience with omnipotence
nailed it.
Foomers like Kurzweil don't realize that intelligence is just efficient search. They look at an exponential curve of informational complexity, starting in the precambrian and ending in the industrial revolution, and just whiggishly assume the curve will continue its infinitely upward trajectory. Which is dumb. Because no matter which beautiful solution your search-algorithm lands on, it's not gonna be more efficient than Carnot Efficiency, which means everything exponential is actually sigmoidal in the longterm.
The reason intelligence has been so successful in the past, is because intelligence occasionally allows you to reach certain thresholds that allow you to unlock new interactions with exogenous streams/reservoirs of energy. Like how metalurgy economically-enabled mass adoption of fossil-fuels. Or how guns allowed you to stab someone's biological reservoirs without walking to them. Notice, however, that if I were suddenly teleported to Pluto, naked & alone, I'm simply doomed. Regardless of whether or not my iq is 60 or 9000. Because there's no streams/reservoirs of value for a gigabrain to readily exploit on Pluto. "9000 IQ but no tangible agency" is basically the premise of Pinky and the Brain.
Yeah, I tend to view intelligence being inseparable from action, and the construction of our bodies and our ability to live in a combustion-supportive atmosphere being as important as the size of our brains.
Like I said elsewhere I would not at all be surprised if whales or dolphins turn out to be smarter than humans in some ways, yet they will never make a drill press or a microscope. It's really hard to start a technological revolution in brine.
honestly, I think the *real* first industrial revolution was the advent of cooking. I remember hearing that it's roughly a 10x increase in calorie absorption.
It's usually presented as "control of fire" in the literature I see.
> honestly, I think the real first industrial revolution was the advent of cooking. I remember hearing that it's roughly a 10x increase in calorie absorption.
Nowhere near 10x - it's generally between 10-50% increase in bioavailability of calories from the same foodstuffs for both cutting / processing and cooking working together. You'll get some isolated instances of ~2x-ing availability.
A fun one: K. Oka, Food Texture Differences affect Energy Metabolism in Rats (2003).
Split 20 rats into two populations. Feed one population regular rat chow. Feed the other one the exact same rat chow with more air in the pellets to make them softer and easier to eat, otherwise the exact same rat food. They both ate the same amounts of food, calorie wise.
The "softer" rats ended up at 6% heavier in weight total, and with 30% more abdominal fat. The ONLY difference was that their food was "softer," ie more processed.
A similar study in pythons fed them raw meat, ground raw meat, cooked meat, and cooked ground meat. Grinding adds about 10% to absorbable calories, and cooking adds about 10%.
"Processed food" versus regular cooked food in humans might be up to another 10-25% buff in absorbability.
Richard Wrangham's "Catching Fire" is a good book about this.
I wrote a post about all this stuff here if you're interested in more:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/why-processed-food-makes-us-fat
yeah, 10x does sound pretty unrealistic. Though I'm pretty certain I didn't just pull this figure out of my ass. I think it was some nature documentary.
Sydney says there's no metric in the literature that comes even remotely close to 10 though. The highest figure she could she could find was Lycopene absorption from tomatoes, up to a 300% increase. So as far as citations go, I'm stumped. Maybe I'm just hallucinating after all.
Oh yes, how could I have not mention this one! And lo and behold, only possible in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, poor orcas will never grill their salmon or experience the divine taste of hamachi kama grilled over coals.
my meat of choice is bulgogi. ya'll ain't really lived til you've tried bulgogi.
>biological reservoirs
I don't think I have ever read someone refer to human bodies in such Matrixian way. Your comment leads one to think you're somewhat clever, and yet, this small phrasing gives me the impression you have sand running in your veins. So weird.
> sand running in your veins
funnily enough, this is how I think of diabetes. I.e. as the body trying to desperately avoid having the sugar coming out of solution, so the blood doesn't scratch up delicate tissues as if it were sandpaper. Given modern diets and the obesity epidemic, I suspect we all have a little sand in our veins. :^)
In any case, my schema that the term "reservoir" is embedded in, is actually derived from Hank Green, who once said something like "life is just chemical-disequilibrium". And I thought about it for a while, and concluded "huh, organic chemistry is just chemistry that's high-capex & low-opex". And so thinking this way just naturally colors all my biology thoughts. Which does sound pretty psychopathic in hindsight.
I think a lot of AI disaster scenarios are overblown, but also think it’s pretty straightforward how “superintelligent” turns into “extremely powerful”.
A pretty obvious one to me would be for an AI on a narrow task (e.g. “increase the value of this portfolio based on most recent trading value”) to find out that its easier to hack the power grid to shut down the market than it is to never make a bad trade.
This of course assumes that we live in a world where lots of systems are fragile against concerted attack by smart argents with substantial time to devote to a given problem. But as far as I can tell that’s the world we live in.
I don’t think AI takeover of the world is inevitable or even that fast in the world where it happens. But I think even “slightly smarter than human” agents likely find big vulnerabilities in our current systems, and I think it’s unlikely we patch our systems before we create ASI, and we’ll likely give these AIs agency shortly after they’re capable of better-than-human performance.
I have no argument with this scenario, or a general idea that AIs will be capable of bad things. Any powerful tool is. It's that x-risk scenario of AI "killing everyone". "reaching for my atoms" that I find... ridiculous. And yet that's what Yudkowsky et.al. are tirelessly peddling, with many otherwise smart people buying it wholesale.
"destroying our power grid"
yes, it can do that
"to build it's own supercomputer"
how? didn't it just destroy the power grid, for starters?
Forget hypothetical science fictional super smart evil villain AI taking over the world for a minute. Consider these scenarios happening routinely around you today:
* I need my smartphone to display an image, urgently. Maybe it's a ticket or something. The ticket inspector is tapping his foot impatiently. However, the phone manufacturer (*cough*samsung) and/or ticket app author (actually, all of them do this) has published a software update, and does not trust their customers to actually install those in a timely manner ot at all; and therefore the telephone will be unable to do anything until the update completes. What the smartphone needs is more important than what I need.
* I would like to use my dishwasher. However, the manufacturer (*cough*Bosch) has decided that most of the dishwasher functionality is only available through the smart dishwasher app. Moreover, the app notices it has been twenty washes since the last self-clean, and therefore it is now time to do that. What the machine wants wins, and old-fashioned flesh loses. Guess I'm doing the dishes by hand tonight.
* My appointment at the car service center is next week, because there is no availability. However, it has now been 365 days since the car's last service. As the timer hits zero, the car enters limp-home mode. What I want to do with the car is just not as important as what the car manufacturer wants me to do with it.
* My blu-ray player (*cough*Sony) nags me continuously to let it on my wifi. Thankfully, it is an older model, designed in a more innocent and pure time, and thus it is still capable of performing its primary functions without improving my life in this way (also, it lets me fast forward the trailers and adverts!) My friends with their newer players and smart TVs are not so lucky.
See https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ for more; not all, or even most, things in that archive are of this nature, but a significant proportion are.
We don't need to posit magically smart AI. We /already/ live in a world where what our tech wants to do routinely takes priority over what we want it to do, and we just accept this.
The more enshittified the tech we wire to things that can actually cause harm, the closer we are to dystopia.
AI makes it worse because it is a black box. We aren't trying to reason about what the black box is doing because the entire point of the black box is that it lets us delegate reasoning about things to the black box. But this is only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that the black box has no user serviceable parts. It is a single monolithic blob.
Today, I can uninstall particularly obnoxiously enshittified apps from my phone - unless they're the manufacturer's, in which case what I want is not as important as what they want, so my choice to suck it up or not have the phone.
This is the dystopian future: the AI is super useful. It is everywhere and in everything. It services all our needs - until the timer reaches zero and activates some long-forgotten enshittification routine and suddenly there is something more important for it to do than what we want it to do, and that's our life from then on because, here in reality today, we have already learned to accept tech that does that unquestioned while mocking safety and alignment worries.
I fear you've fallen for the deliberately misleading impression the "safety and alignment" people wanted to present. Their goal is precisely the opposite of what you seem to think it is: it is to PREVENT users from doing things the AI companies don't want.
Your enshittification analogies are good, but if you look, you'll see that to a man, the AI "safety" people oppose releasing powerful open models freely to the public which may be adapted to serve each individual's wishes over the manufacturers' (here, companies like Google, the duplicitously-named OpenAI, and Anthropic).
That dystopian future is half-way here (and I have made my small contributions to it, sorry). But again, not an x-risk.
Define "x-risk". Personally, I think it's still worth trying to avoid bad outcomes that nevertheless stop short of literally killing literally everyone, if you think them likely.
"All tech in the country is now bricked because no-one's employed human programmers for decades, the software ecosystem is a monoculture based on per-application aftermarket tweaks to the cheapest base model on huggingface now and we've just learned the underlying black box has a really weird corner case response to this morning's headlines" won't literally kill everyone, but is nevertheless pretty bad.
Personally, I'm hoping the safety/morality/alignment folk will get their claws in deep enough that when grifter script kiddies come along later and decide it's time to enshittify, they will find there are limits to what they can make the end product do to its users with just fine tuning.
Because, as you say, we already live in the dystopian SF future we deserve; we built it with our own hands, we keep building more of it every day, and I don't want to end up where Moloch is taking us.
> Personally, I'm hoping the safety/morality/alignment folk will get their claws in deep enough that when grifter script kiddies come along later and decide it's time to enshittify, they will find there are limits to what they can make the end product do to its users with just fine tuning.
Your model seems charmingly optimistic - you think the enshittifiers are less skilled? Are a small coterie of grifters trying to make a quick buck?
Most enshittification happens with the enthusiastic and full-throated buy in of trillion dollar companies, and is deployed by 10x devs and teams of Phd data scientists just like all the "good" stuff they do / used to do.
If fine tuning a model is going to hit "print" on some gigantic metaphorical dollar bill printer, it's not going to be dumber people scrabbling around the edges, it's going to be the elite of the elite, each one with 7 figures of comp and stock, fine tuning or baking a new model from scratch.
An "x-risk" means everyone dies. It's the most simple risk of all!
Yes, this would be bad!
I so wish the loudest AI safety voices stopped peddling "paperclips" and focus on realistic bad scenarios. Unfortunately it seems to be a lot less... "sexy", I guess... a lot of work on redundancy, manual override, "safe fail" mechanisms, etc. - engineering grind type of work. Figuring out which work needs to be prioritized, what is imminently plausible vs. maybe possible. vs. pure fantasy, this kind of boring stuff... But all Yud and the rest of the loudest gang want to to talk about is paperclips and bombing data centers.
> engineering grind type of work
There's an army of marketers trying to sell LLM services by claiming to replace the humans doing this work /right now/. The managers they are selling to are also not engineers, but keenly aware of the engineers' salaries.
Most won't fall for it, but some will. Many of them are building IoT stuff, because that ecosystem attracts a certain kind of person. Some of them are building automation.
With enough tweaks, the resulting devices will pass the tests in the QA lab. They'll stay in the safety envelope right up until, Therac-25 style, they don't.
Paperclips don't scare me, but this does.
“How an AI "knowing everything" translates into "doing anything" is the issue here.”
That’s right. There’s never a satisfactory explanation. Even the idea that smartness is a threat to humans from humans is suspect.
Making anything smarter than humans is dangerous. This should be obvious, but if it isn't, I don't really know how to go on. So I'll assume you find this also obvious. Dangerous, by the way, doesn't mean _absolutely must_ result in catastrophe, just means "catastrophe is possible". Dynamite is dangerous, not because it _will_ blow up in your hands , but because it _could_(under a bunch of very well understood conditions that make it relatively easy to render relatively safe: basically we control it, and therefore we can make it safe). Smarter than human systems _could_ do a whole lot of very bad things. It's hard to say exactly what because of how flexible intelligence is, and therefore how many attack surfaces are vulnerable.
Current LLMs are not smarter than humans. However, they present a pre-critical test case for how we can try to control somewhat intelligent systems. With the idea being, that if you can't control a less-smart-than-humans system, then you _definitely_ can't control a smarter-than-human system that might come in the medium term. If you _can_ control a less-smart-than-human system you still can only _maybe_ control a smarter system, so it's a necessary-but-not-sufficient test.
Right now, we have, at every single step, shown that we can't control less-smart-than-human systems, and as they get smarter, the ways in which we can't control them grow and get more subtle. All of the tests and experiments conducted on LLMs about are showing this. I see no reason to expect that we shouldn't expect similar (and more, and more insidious) control failures in smarter systems.
No one thinks current LLMs are going to destroy the world (although they are getting close to capable enough to enable humans to do a lot of damage, e.g with bio attacks).
But it is not clear or obvious why they won't continue to improve to beyond human intelligence, and in the case that they do, it is (so far) clear and obvious that we will not have adequate control over those systems.
You wouldn't let someone develop and put absolutely everywhere dynamite where the fuse was not in control of the operator. Similarly, we should not allow the development and wide deployment of dangerous systems that we do not have under control.
That's basically it.
Thank you for the reply!
Could you clarify this part:
> Right now, we have, at every single step, shown that we can't control less-smart-than-human systems, and as they get smarter, the ways in which we can't control them grow and get more subtle. All of the tests and experiments conducted on LLMs about are showing this.
Were there experiments in which LLMs had uncontrollable/spontaneously malicious behavior? From what I've seen, it has mostly been strange experiments (researches giving weird instructions to LLM and then extrapolating based on them) which were not persuasive to me at all.
I think a lot of misfiring in these discussions comes from fundamental misalignment (ha!) on what "smart" vs. "capable" mean. One can also think of these as "software" vs. "hardware" viewpoints.
1. From "software" point: things have been getting smarter and will keep doing so.
2. From "hardware" point: it still takes x number of hours to process each semiconductor wafer layer and no amount of smarts can reduce it by an order of magnitude.
Both viewpoints are valid as far as that goes, and many dangers stem from 1. However, 2. severely limits what even supersmart computers can actually do.
Re point 2, do you have any specific objections to the analysis done here: https://epoch.ai/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030
It seems mildly concerning that their projection of a hypothetical 2030 AI is to GPT4 as GPT4 is to GPT2.
If I had to guess what you'd object to, it'd be their characterization of their estimates are conservative, especially for lower usage. But I don't really have a good handle on what you think.
We have a wonderful industry slang for this kind of analysis: we call it “shipping PowerPoints”. The liberal use of verbs “estimate”, “project”, “speculate” is quite telling.
Lots to answer here. Computers are “smarter” in many ways than humans right now, and quite frankly LLMs are better at many tasks than most humans right now.
Ask a human a random question about history or mathematics or science or whatever you want and then ask a LLM. The LLM if it doesn’t hallucinate will know more than most on a wide range of topics.
Making it even smarter than isn’t itself a threat, if used correctly and if the LLMs can originate new ideas (wouldn’t that be nice) we would have all kinds of cures and medical insights and economic policy and new physics and so on. There’s little evidence of that.
In fact the smarter than human threat fallacy is a motte and bailey, smarter than human doesn’t mean self agentic or a consciousness likely to take over the world or convince humans of the need to work for the AI, in fact LLMs don’t even have the context window to even exist outside of a few minutes, and nor does a longer lasting context window guarantee consciousness.
There’s a danger to jobs, perhaps - which is more threatening and more immediate and it’s that which will decide whether AI becomes accepted or not.
"Smarter" was (In my opinion quite obviously) shorthand for general intelligence across a wide range of domains, including creativity and the ability to act consistently over large time ranges, etc. You clearly agree with me that current LLMs don't meet this criteria (thus your points about context windows an agency, consciousness, btw, is completely beside the point)
As for your point about the positives: no one disagrees that smarter-than-human systems would have a whole lot of positive impacts. But having the cure to cancer, or functional immortality isn't worth much if humans are all extinct.
You also seem to think that current technical limitations will never be overcome. I don't know why you believe that.
I'm not sure you know what a motte and bailey is, and if you do, I don't know what you think my motte is, and what you think my bailey is.
“You clearly agree with me that current LLMs don't meet this criteria (thus your points about context windows an agency, consciousness, btw, is completely beside the point)”
I mean I would think it’s exactly the point. That’s why I made it. Being smarter than humans is not the same as being conscious or having agency.
“But having the cure to cancer, or functional immortality isn't worth much if humans are all extinct. “
Again, huge leap. Extraordinary claims needs extraordinary proof or explanation.
“You also seem to think that current technical limitations will never be overcome. I don't know why you believe that”
I didn’t say that in my response. However there’s a clear difference between being able to regurgitate existing knowledge and being creative, the ability the solve new puzzles. Even ardent futurists see a slowdown in AI intelligence
“I'm not sure you know what a motte and bailey is”
Yes I do.
“and if you do, I don't know what you think my motte is, and what you think my bailey is.”
Your motte is “smarter than humans”, your bailey is “will cause human extinction” which is presented without explanation or proof.
Not that AI isn’t potentially harmful in other ways.
Ok, so I think that fundamentally, you seem to disagree with the very first sentence in my first comment: "Making anything smarter than humans is dangerous.". As I stated then, I don't really know how to respond to someone who disagrees with it, so I don't think you and I can have a productive discussion about this. Hopefully someone else who thinks they can explain why smarter things are dangerous can chime in.
(Remembering that "smarter" is the shorthand for everything I clarified in my first reply).
The recursive self-improvement is a risk, but it is bound by the available hardware, and it's not at all clear how a smarter system can add hardware.
Yes, I think the "usual counter" is quite plausible, but it will result in an S-curve rather than an exponential improvement.
"Building its own hardware" is indeed very remote.
I dislike the "intelligence explosion" terminology because it's much easier to dismiss it as magical thinking, rather than the more concrete "there is nothing magical and uniquely human to being good at research". Once AI can automate AI research, our previous ideas of how fast it can proceed are likely too slow and obsolete (since improvements to research ability can start happening on the order of days to hours rather than generations).
It's not clear to me that LLMs can't eventually be optimized to do research although, yes naively it seems like the lack of long term coherence seems fundamental, but I also thought image generation and robot actuation would be fundamental blockers for transformers and I was really wrong about that and I don't see anyone with a track record that predicted LLMs would be good at those things beforehand now declaring that research is also impossible.
I don't get it either. Surely you can just unplug ChatGPT if it turns evil. The world doesn't run soley on the pure abstract symbolic layer of computing, but through a social conduit of people making decisions. Unless the AIs figure out unstoppable mass mind-control, their danger is somewhat limited. They could still feasible engage in all manner of cybercrimes, but global domination, nuclear strikes, etc. probably not possible.
> you can just unplug ChatGPT if it turns evil.
Yes, but you can't so simply "unplug" DeepSeek, for example, so I wouldn't base my argument on this.
Yes, thank you. People don't understand the Pascalian nature of the race dynamics we're in right now.
"Just unplug it, lol" doesn't work for MANY reasons. Where "you" is any identified individual with centralized power and decision making authority:
1. You don't control any data centers, either locally or internationally
2. You don't control any power plants, locally or internationally
3. You and everyone else are unable to shut down networked "botnet" style personal computing devices
4. You have no way of disabling any physical devices it may be using such as drones, Teslas and Waymos and other networked cars, robots industrial or humanoid, and so on
I can probably think of another 6 reasons, but honestly, I think that covers most of the plausible space.
Why these people think themself / the President / whoever is going to be able to shut down our own data centers, much less China's, Russia's, or distributed botnets all over the world, is a mystery.
I think if somehow LLMs (remember that's what I was talking about here) started doing serious evil at scale (who knows how), there would be a lot of political will to counter them doing so. But moreover, the kinds of bad thing that current LLMs can do are not worse than the kinds of things any talented, motivated bad human actor can do, except perhaps they can do things at scale and speed. There are a lot of bad outcomes from LLM tecnology (in education, say), but the existential worry seems as yet unfounded.
Obviously, some hypothetically post-singularity megamind AI could do a lot worse, if such a thing could ever come to exist. But there's no reason to believe that the program that generates bullshit essays could suddenly turn into that.
> I think if somehow LLMs (remember that's what I was talking about here) started doing serious evil at scale (who knows how), there would be a lot of political will to counter them doing so.
Oh yeah, maybe I should clarify, I'm fully thinking of "AI's are launching really effective cyberattacks and exfiltrating business files and trade secrets at scale," and / or "AI's are independent and have gone rogue."
In both of those cases, there's basically nothing you can do. In the first case, they're actually doing it at the behest of their Chinese / Russian / Whoever data centers. AND they're probably distributed across 10^8 individual devices, botnet style.
In the second case, of self-directed rogue AI, same deal - they're going to be distributed like a botnet, hiding steganographically in everyday compute / GPU usuage on those individual devices or in data centers, or they'll be paying various people 2x rates with crypto to keep them alive and obfuscated in various data centers throughout the world.
I don't really see anything any individual actor, even at the state level, will be able to do to stop either of these cases.
Not existential, but plausible maybe a couple of frontier models from now.
Have you tried calling an energy company or an Amazon datacenter and ask them nicely? Have you?? Like "Bro, evil AI is running amok and its using your infrastructure, would you be so kind to turn everything down for uh, a week maybe??" HoW Do YoU KnoW UnTil YOu TrIeD YourSeLF??
> Unless the AIs figure out unstoppable mass mind-control, their danger is somewhat limited.
People have been talking about falling in love with LLMs and also not being able to cope when their character.ai model gets taken away or modified. At what point do people stop saying "these people, who I cannot draw a line around beforehand, are mentally weak and will not survive the winter" and start saying "maybe AI is persuasive"?
Sure, I've seen first hand how persuasive it is to local cranks. But that's mostly because it just tells you what you want to hear, and if it doesn't tell you, you can keep prompting until it does. The sort of people who become bamboozled by a chatbot tend to be quite low agency.
But even if they weren't, I'm struggling to imagine the scenario you're worried about here. Evil LLM whispers lies to world leaders like a gaggle of robotic Gríma Wormtongues? We've already got that happening without AI.
I'm not saying there are scenarios that will directly lead to the world ending, just wondering how much you are actually keeping track of your objection. If I presented a high agency person growing to trust an LLM and abdicating some decision making, do you change your mind about LLM persuasiveness, or do you claim that that person can't have been high agency anyway because they were persuaded by an LLM?
Because if your objection then seamlessly shifts to "well maybe everyone starts trusting LLMs now, but it won't have agency / have plans / be evil" without any shift in general attitude or demeanor, well. We may not have learned something about LLMs, but we have learned something about goal post placement.
I personally don't see how a transformer architecture could do many of the current things it does, so I don't want to claim that <edit> loss of control scenarios </edit> could never be a problem for LLMs, but it's not like there's a geas placed on AI researchers where they're not allowed to develop non LLM AI, or make research breakthroughs that result in LLMs being modified beyond recognition, so I don't see how my current belief about LLM capabilities are a good predictor about future AI capabilities in general.
I didn't think I was moving the goalposts so much as addressing a range of arguments. To put my point more clearly:
1. Current LLMS are mostly pursuasive to people who have very little power in their lives.
2. Even if that doesn't continue to be the case (entirely possible!), the specific case where an LLM is giving bad information or advice to someone with power is not a problem unique to AI— leaders already get plenty of bad advice. There may be other issues with AI but this particular fear is more a problem with the concentration of power and not AI per se.
The first point doesn't engage with what I said, it's specifically about someone you *can't* point out beforehand as having low power.
The second point *is* a goalpost move. You start off saying that you'd be worried if the AI was good at total brainwashing, and then merely assert that even if it was brainwashing, well it can't be any worse than regular bad advice! Or centralization of power!
That kind of moral panic would ban most devices.
Given this argument, are you against "open weight" models, where the model is released freely and anyone can run it anywhere, and it might not be possible to know where the hardware is? Or maybe it's running in lots of different places?
Tell me the bad scenario you think can happen. Let's say people give a bunch of high powered AIs agential power to use their laptops. Now what? What can they do that existing bad actors can't do?
No offense, but this kind of argument never works. I think it's quite obvious that a smarter-than-human system with a laptop can do a lot of harm (proof: humans with a laptop can do a lot of harm). Playing the "tell the specific way it will be bad" game is a waste of both of our time.
You were the one who thought that "they could just turn it off" was a useful line of argumentation. If you don't actually think that matters from a safety perspective, then why did you bring it up?
I think if you're scared of the development of LLMs specifically, it's reasonable to ask what scenario is scaring you. Steal state secrets somehow? Impersonate people?
And yeah, we can turn things off. Computers aren't magic. Software is physically instantiated in servers which must interface with other machines and any part of that process can be prevented. Now of course there can be barriers to that prevention, but shutting down sites, blocking cyber attacks, physically destroying infrastructure, are all things that happen quite routinely every day.
I realized I skimmed over part of your comment that is actually really important.
>If you are scared of the development of LLMs specifically.
I'm not. And no one credible is. Current, and very near future LLMs are not a significant risk on any dimension. The concern of everyone worth listening to in the space is about _future_ systems (that may not even use the current transformer paradigm) that could be significantly more capable than LLMs and Humans.
I brought up open weight models not because I"m concerned about the actually released models, but because of the _practice_ of releasing these things publicly and making the control mechanism you proposed (turn them off) literally impossible.
I'm going to continue to focus on the one point of your argument, because it's the only point upon which I can see hope of useful dialogue.
You brought up turning off the computers. And you brought up hackers. Why don't we just turn off the hackers computers? If all the things you mention worked against hacking, why is it still a problem? Do you not see the potential issue when, in the future the "hackers" might be smarter than the smartest human?
Not only have you not argued the point here, but have run away from it again, you also haven’t explained why we can’t stop agents from running amok or why they would run amok to begin with, at least on their own. Instead you think you’ve won your argument by repeating it.
If they are human generated agents that’s hardly any different from humans writing software bots right now, a threat yes, an existential threat probably not.
this is great. thank you a lot. makes me more scared for the future lmao
Thank you for the comprehensive reply and the links!
Unless I'm misinterpreting some of your arguments (in which case do let me know), they are all very hypothetical (in the sense that current LLMs do not spontaneously exhibit such behavior) or about something which are not current LLMs.
Basically, people believe that LLM safety will be useful/necessary at some point in the future and so are trying to bootstrap it?
I'm not familiar with french politics at all.
marie le pen seems to have been convicted of something and barred from running in a future election
what is a somewhat sane way of figuring out if a politician is being targeted by lawfare or if did something actually bad?
without....actually doing the work of learning everything?
The amount of time it took to understand what trump did, which prosecutions was reasonable, which were absurd, the extent to which they were politically motivated, etc, was exhausting
I think something that people (annoyingly) never do, is check to see how often politicians are charged/accused of similar crimes in that country.
For example, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted of bribery, among other crimes, and may yet spend some time in prison.
Francois Fillon, who served as Prime Minister under Sarkozy, was convicted for fraud and sentenced to jail, I think the case is still under appeal, but again, there is some chance he may go to jail for it.
Another ex-President, Jacques Chirac, was convicted of embezzlement, I believe the same charge laid against Le Pen; he was sentenced to jail but the sentence was suspended due to his age and health.
Chirac's deputy, Dominique De Villepin, was indicted but acquitted--one of his accusers was Sarkozy, a political rival. Others were convicted for the same scandal.
Socialist Presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon was given a suspended three month sentence after an altercation with police.
In short, there really isn't anything remarkable about a French politician, even at the presidential level, getting charged with corruption; some even serve jail time (eg Alain Juppe, Prime Minister under Chirac).
If this were lawfare, you also would have to explain why Le Pen and her father were allowed to run in previous elections, including ones in which it seemed likely they would do well, like 2002 or 2022.
Obviously this isn't proof, but I think it provides a useful base rate for "how rare is it for powerful French politicians to be charged with serious crimes", and IMO it's pretty clear that the base rate is high enough not to suggest anything particularly unusual here, though obviously you'll have to pay some attention to the details of the case to judge better
I'm not an expert in French politics but all of the names I recognize there are right-wing. A consistent political bias to prosecutions would sort of cut against your point here.
The discussion has already advanced since I last checked in, but aside from Amicus's point that you have to account for the base rate of center right politicians at the national level in French politics, I'll also note that one of my examples is a far-left party, and the the one instance where, by my understanding, there was clear grandstanding by one politician to accuse another, it was intra-right, with de Villepin falsely accusing Sarkozy of bribery, and then a plausibly politically-motivated prosecution by Sarkozy's government in return, of which Villepin was acquitted of all charges.
I think this doesn't really do much to support the idea that there is a clear anti-right wing bias in prosecutions of French politicians.
France has historically been dominated by the center-right. There have been two center-left presidents of the Fifth Republic (Mitterand and Hollande) and one liberal centrist (Macron). Mitterand probably *should* have been charged in the Urba affair, but stalled the investigation long enough for parliament to pardon everyone involved. Hollande himself is seemingly just a serial adulterer, but several of his ministers had corruption scandals and one went to prison. As for Macron, at least two of his ministers have been tried: one was found not guilty, one was convicted (though he got off with a 15,000 Euro slap on the wrist)
Interesting, thanks. So what's your take, is this a political prosecution or is it just business as usual? Or is it both?
Corruption trials against major politicians are inevitably political in a broader sense, but I think it's unlikely that there was executive pressure to fast-track it or anything like that. I haven't been able to find anything from Macron, but the current PM and justice minister have both expressed some degree of skepticism, if anything.
One comment: The current PM has been involved in a similar affair for his own party (MoDem), leading to multiple sentencing of former MEP of his party. He himself was not found guilty, but the prosecution has appealed and a new trial will take place soon. So let's say that he is a bit biased.
> if a politician is being targeted by lawfare or if did something actually bad?
If it's something like murder, they might have actually done something bad. If it's something like corruption, that basically everyone powerful does, it's lawfare.
You can see how that position, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to a very bad place, right? It's like, "everyone goes a couple mph above the speed limit! So, prosecuting someone just for driving 100 in a 15mph zone in front of a school? Lawfare! Witch hunt!" When a norm shows signs of erosion, that shouldn't be taken as an excuse to ignore it completely.
Whatever blackpill you're taking is far worse than the disease
Yes, Sophocles was right: "Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise!"
Cynicism uninformed by specific knowledge bears only a slight resemblance to "wisdom"
“Something basically everyone powerful does…”
Not really, not in most advanced countries. I realize I’m fighting an uphill battle defending the ‘establishment’ in the current climate, but it’s a serious mistake imo to fail to distinguish between ‘corruption’ (e.g. engaging in some degree of nepotism, congressmen agreeing to vote for each other’s bills) and corruption (e.g. a judge taking a briefcase full of cash in exchange for a not guilty verdict). The false cynicism underlying this sense that ‘they’re all basically equally corrupt’ is the death knell of functional governance.
I agree that occasionally someone does the thing stupidly, like with literal gold bars or briefcases stuffed with cash, which LOOKS a lot worse.
My former Senator resembles that remark!
It is clearly not lawfare, under her lead her party stole millions of euros from the European parliament, with multiple former member of her party saying that there were clear instructions coming from the head of the party to hire parliamentary assistants which would work for the party and not for the actual members of the European parliament. This is also documented in email exchanges.
The Modem (center-right party member of the government since 2017) was investigated for the exact same thing, with the difference that the money involved was 10 times lesser.
Steelmanning the OP's case, how do we *know* that her party stole millions of Euros from the European Parliament? Because if the answer is "because the Official Guardians of the Law issued a press release saying so", then that's what lawfare looks like.
It's also what legitimate law enforcement looks like, hence the interest in figuring out how to distinguish the two.
Because several EU MEPs of her party witnessed that she asked them to hire assistants which were doing zero work for them. In all these cases, the party was not able to demonstrate any trace of work from these 'assistants'. For example Jean-Marie Le Pen's butler was hired as parliamentary assistant for some MEP. Marine Le Pen's own bodyguard was hired as her parliamentary assistant.
Another example that is telling although it was actually not part of this trial: The current head of the party Jordan Bardella (which is the obvious candidate to replace Marine Le Pen in the next presidential elections) was hired as parliamentary assistant for some MEP in 2015. To prove that Jordan Bardella actually worked, the party provided an agenda, but there was one little problem: The agenda was bought and filled in 3 years later after the work had supposedly taken place.
Here's the translation of some e-mail exchange between one MEP and the treasurer of the party back then:
- "What Marine is requesting is equivalent to signing for fictitious jobs"
- "I think that Marine knows all that very well ..."
I think what is difficult for me is that it very much feels like the law and its enforcement of this changed, first with Sapin 2 in 2016 and then provisional execution in 2019, and it still feels like a legal “gotcha” against Le pen
Was it reasonable to assume that in like 2008 the legal precedents and rulings on this particular topic would drastically change? In seems like a straightforward abstraction to say “I am a party leader with a budget of X, and I’m going to allocate it efficiently to run my party, nevermind that 20% of X comes from a specific source that requires me to spend it a certain way, especially because it’s not enforced.”
So now you have this retroactive application of these two new laws, whose passing did in fact change the behavior of Le pen and the party in 2016, and it feels a bit like cherry picking
And as you’ve noted elsewhere, it certainly doesn’t help that the moderates have been given “the benefit of the doubt”: https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/02/macron-ally-bayrou-cleared-of-embezzlement-as-five-ex-meps-found-guilty/
When it comes to the change of law: Sapin 2 did not create the sentence of 'ineligibility'. Such sentence existed before, for example in 2013 Jerome Cahuzac was sentenced to 5 years of ineligibility (note that then ironically Le Pen was calling for permanent ineligibility for any politician which was found guilty for an act performed in the exercise of his/her mandate).
What Sapin 2 did was to normalize such ineligibility sentence whereas it was only optional before in such affairs but becoming more and more used by the judges. Even without this law it is very likely that Le Pen would have been sentenced to these 5 years of ineligibility.
In any case, either when considering that it is because of Sapin 2 that she was sentenced to ineligibility, the two law wouldn't have been applied retroactively as it was enacted on the 9th of December 2016, whereas the investigation covered deeds which were committed until the 31st of December 2016.
Edit: Cahuzac was sentenced on the 8th of December 2016 not in 2013 (which was when the affair was revealed). But that's anyway still before the promulgation of the law.
Other examples are Patrick Balkany - sentenced in 1997 to two years of ineligibility, Jean Tiberi - sentenced in 2009 to three years of ineligibility
For MoDem: The head of the party has been given "the benefit of the doubt", not the party itself, as several MEPs have been sentenced. There are three differences between the cases of Bayrou and Le Pen here:
- Bayrou was not MEP, he was only investigated as the head of the party who possibly instigated/accepted this whole system of paying staff members who don't do work for EU parliament as EU parliamentary assistants. Le Pen was investigated as head of the party AND as MEP who herself had parliamentary assistant which were actually her body guard and her personnal secretary. So even if there had been no proof that she organized this system, she'd have been found guilty as well.
- The money involved was one order of magnitude lesser for MoDem.
- There were witnesses explicitly saying that Le Pen organized this whole system. There was no such proof in the case of Bayrou.
This said it is very hard for me to imagine that Bayrou wasn't aware of what was happening in his party, and I wish that the appeal trial will have a different outcome. Especially that I found it disgusting that after the trial he would parade on TV saying that 'he has been found completely innocent' which is not what the judge said at all.
I had a light morning, and did some research this AM. My take on the salient facts on the case:
* From 2004-2016, the FN (le pens party) used €4m of European Parliament funding for party uses, basically to pay party workers. They probably knew this was frowned upon, but judges tended to be very lenient in rulings, and would never bar candidates from running for elections, even though the judges had that power if they wanted it
* in 2016, Frances parliament passes Sapin 2, which says that “convictions for misappropriated political funds” should preclude a politician for running for office for a minimum of 5 years. This removed the ambiguity that judges faced and effectively said “this is bad, start punishing politicians for it.” However, judges are allowed to “individualize” a case, and use their discretion in exceptional cases
* pre 2019 - judicial procedures in France tend to take a very long time, we’re talking multi-year-plus delays in the appeals process, so ultimately convictions happen years and years after the event
* 2019 - France passes a law that allows “provisional execution”, meaning that if a judge rules you guilt, you have to face the consequences even while your case is under appeal. Roughly 60% of the time since 2019 judges use this, but they seemingly use it 100% against politicians to prevent them from standing for elections (n count is ~3). Judges again are allowed to “individualize” a case, and use their discretion
* 2017-2023 - FN (now FR) continues to receive European Parliament funds, but given the stricter laws, does not use it to pay staffers (implying the probably knew what they were doing from 2004-2016 was wrong)
* early 2025 - Edit: long standing investigation, originally started in 2015 into FN/FR and Le Pen comes to a head and goes to trial, about the scheme from 2004-2016 (see detailed comment from Paul Botts below for detail)
* judge rules that from 2004-2016, le pens party, and by extension le pen, embezzled EU funds by not using them for their explicit purpose of “parliamentary aides” (le pens defense was basically, “your definition of an aide and what they do is too narrow, of course the work of the people helping me and the party was tied to my work as an eu parliamentarian”). Because of Sapin 2 and “provisional execution”, le pens 5 year ban starts today, and cannot run in 2027. The appeal is expected to take 2-3 years, and will not be settled by election time. The judges could’ve allowed her to run (eg only fine her and the party), but decided to ultimately not let her
Were they enforcing the will of the people? You decide!
The judges should enforce the law, which has been clearly the case here. Both Modem (center-right party member of the government since 2017) and LFI (radical left party) have been investigated for the same issue. In Modem case, there was a trial two years ago.
The appeal judgment is expected to take place next year, so if she is found not guilty then she will be able to participate to the 2027 elections.
Edit: Sapin 2 was voted in the context of affairs such as the Panama papers (2016) and Luxleaks (2014)
* early 2025 - case is brought against le pen, saying, “hey, you broke the law in 2004-2016”
Hold on, that part of your summary is off base.
(1) Official investigating of FN's misuse of those funds began while they were still doing it, and did not originate in France. This is from the Associated Press:
"The legal proceedings stem from a 2015 alert raised by Martin Schulz, then-president of the European Parliament, to French authorities about possible fraudulent use of European funds by members of the National Front. Schulz also referred the case to the European Anti-Fraud Office, which launched a separate probe into the matter.
The European Parliament’s suspicions were further heightened when a 2015 organizational chart showed that 16 European lawmakers and 20 parliamentary assistants held official positions within the party — roles unrelated to their supposed duties as EU parliamentary staff. A subsequent investigation found that some assistants were contractually linked to different MEPs than the ones they were actually working for, suggesting a scheme to divert European funds to pay party employees in France...."
(2) The EU's investigating judges [who can seek only restitution of funds since the EU is not a sovereign nation and has no jails] found that Marine Le Pen personally had "orchestrated the allocation of parliamentary assistance budgets and instructed MEPs to hire individuals holding party positions." ["MEP" stands for Member of the European Parliament, which the NF/NR has had some seats in for 20 years now.]
(3) French officials filed their criminal charges over the matter in 2023, well before the summer 2024 French legislative national election which unexpectedly turned Le Pen into a frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election. The case went to trial in September 2024, having been scheduled prior to that summer election.
That's helpful. I have no specific knowledge of the situation, but (1) makes my spider senses tingle.
Is anyone able to give an idea of:
A) How prevalent this behaviour is within the European parliament? Where does it sit on the continuum from "wrong but everyone does it" to "anyone who's done it is rotting in jail". I realise that's tough to get data on.
B) How often does the President of the European Parliament raise the alert on things like this?
My priors would be:
A) Not unheard of, and lots of borderline cases.
B) Very rarely.
For B), 2 other french parties were under investigation for the same issue as Le Pen's party: MoDem (center-right, at the government since 2017) and LFI (radical left). But there was much less money involved (one order of magnitude less for MoDem), especially in the later case, where it remain unclear whether there will be any prosecution.
In the case of the MoDem, there was a trial 2 years ago with multiple members of party found guilty. The n°2 of the party at the time of the events (Marielle de Sarnez) would have probably been found guilty if she had still been alive at the moment of the trial. The head of the party (Francois Bayrou, current french prime minister) hasn't been found guilty, but the prosecution appealed this decision and he will be judged again.
Not sure how or whether this will impact your priors, but the EU's alert was sparked by a written whistleblower report received by them in January 2014.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/09/30/why-le-pen-and-26-other-far-right-party-members-are-standing-trial-in-paris-in-fake-eu-parliament-jobs-case_6727729_8.html
"The letter flagged cases of "presumed fictitious employment" on the part of the FN and its then-president, Le Pen, who was an MEP from 2004 to 2017.
The European anti-fraud body opened an administrative investigation, scrutinizing the activities of two people close to Le Pen: Catherine Griset, her chief of staff, and Thierry Légier, her bodyguard, also presented as her parliamentary assistants. The investigation revealed that Griset, now an MEP, "spent only 740 minutes, or around 12 hours" at the European Parliament, when she was supposedly an assistant there, between October 2014 and August 2015.
That sort of misuse of funds by MEPs appears to be an ongoing issue in Europe, there are whistleblower/watchdog NGO's focused on it. E.g.:
https://www.ftm.eu/share-your-tip
That may be how legal cases such as Le Pen's get going, like this one:
https://www.politico.eu/article/fraud-busters-eppo-investigate-eu-parliaments-most-powerful-group-epp-manfred-weber/
Worth noting that FR is not the French member party of that European umbrella group headed by Manfred Weber.
Thanks again. I'm open to my priors being changed (I hope).
Anecdotally, I know someone who worked as an EU funded staffer for an MEP around the same time. They were based in their home country, not Brussels - MEPs have an allowance to run one office in Brussels and one in their home constituency. He spent more than 12 hours in the parliament, but probably not an order of magnitude more.
I don't know if there was much of a dividing line between EU work and party work for him. It's only just occurred to me that I could ask him...
I haven’t been following the story too closely, but I have a question regarding your A): do you think the notion of scale is relevant? What if no one will blink a committing at a similar infraction, but involving fewer people, for smaller sums of money and for shorter periods of time?
I’m asking because I may be lacking in real-world experience, but the requirement for a clean break between working for the party and for a European MP from the party seems extremely impractical.
Do you think this would affect the analysis?
Scale, or any kind of qualitative difference between what she's done and what others do, would make a difference.
My initial concern is not that she's been wrongly convicted, but that she's been convicted of something that others have also done, but haven't been prosecuted for.
I'd view the EU as an institution which is capable of doing this without even realising this is what it's doing.
Ok thank you, I will update the summary. I only had seen “9 week trial” in most of the articles I read on it
okay....this seems like lawfare, right?
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-375?r=izqzp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=104843060
I mean… probably? At some level the judges can say “well you’re just another politician, and this is how we handle politicians who run afoul of this law”, but i have not been able to figure out prosecutorial intent, or how common breaking this rule was from 2004-2016.
Thanks! The comment above was the first I heard of this, so I thought it might have been slightly debatable, but this is even more obviously "lawfare" than I thought.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-375?r=izqzp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=104843060
okay, let's use examples i'm familiar with
it seems clear that some corruption is really bad and should be prosecuted
I think my clearest examples would be robert menendez and rod blagojevich taking bribes
I do think the biden/clinton/trump families are all very corrupt and many of their actual and hypothetical counterfactual prosecutions would be largely politically motivated
And then for example the obamas I think are unusually clean, to an extent that is noteworthy.
So I do think not all powerful people are corrupt, actually. And also that some corruption prosecutions are of innocent people, and some are both politically motivated and targeted at guilty people.
I'm trying to figure out a strategy less complicated than 'live in that society and be very politically informed' to separate the various cases.
Find someone(s) you trust who does learn everything. Whether they're a journo or an autistic friend. Otherwise there are no silver bullets.
An interesting link courtesy of Tumblr, this project is over a year old but still fascinating.
Mediaeval Murder Maps:
https://www.tumblr.com/questionableadvice/777188260137091072/welcome-to-medieval-murder-maps?source=share
https://medievalmurdermap.co.uk/
If ever you wanted to know just who was killing whom how and why in 14th century London, Oxford or York, this is the site for you!
Just picking one at random from Oxford:
"On Monday after the feast of St. Gregory the Pope [8 Mar 1305] Philip Port of Westwall was found dead in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East about the ninth hour beneath the north wall of the town. Richard de Cambridge first found him dead and at once raised the hue, and he was viewed on the same day by Ralf de Hampton and John Fraunceys who had been chosen to view the body, because the coroners had been summoned to go to the King’s Parliament. Philip was found to have a wound in the front of his head from one ear to another, so that all his brain was scattered outside; and he had another wound across his face to within the teeth, four inches long and one inch wide, and his right hand was cut off and lay beside him, and it seemed to all who were there that he had been wounded on the head with a fighting axe called in English a sparth.
On the same day an inquisition was held by the help of sworn men of the parishes of St. Peter-in-the-East; St. Mary-theVirgin; and All Saints. The jurors say upon their oath that John de Berdon, of the county of Leicestershire, the manciple of Vine Hall in Kibald Street, on lay last, came to the lodging of Philip in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East, late in the dusk of the evening. When he was in his chamber, he asked Philip to come with him to a beer tavern, promising that he would give him drink. The two went out together, and John after drinking withdrew, and so Philip began to return to his lodging after curfew. When he came to the corner under the wall towards East Gate, five clerks whose names they knew not came and assaulted him. Philip fled from them. But the group followed him, caught him, wounded him, and slew him, and at once they fled. The jury say that they know not the names of any of them, nor where they dwelt; but they say certainly that John de Berdon was the principal cause of his death, and that it was through him that the five clerks committed the said felony. Pledges of Richard, the finder, that he will appear before the judges when they come into the city for the next assizes, are Adam de Essex and Hugh de Burton."
I wonder why those five clerks had it in for Philip of the Parish of St. Peter? Not your typical white-collar crime.
It's interesting how few convictions occurred —"Between 90-95% of homicide trials resulted in acquittal, transfer to an ecclesiastical prison, or a royal pardon." Even back then authorities were soft on crime.
https://medievalmurdermap.co.uk/blog/prosecuting-homicide-in-medieval-england/
It's hard to get evidence beyond a reasonable doubt when you don't have forensics, cameras, etc. Reminds me of Mitchell and Webb's "Caveman Detective" sketch:
"Did anyone see this man being killed?"
"No."
"Right, well, I'm out of ideas."
https://youtu.be/jWCQndvxyzg?si=6yxaHIQ90X75mol1
When it's hard to get good evidence, evidentiary standards are lower. I remember reading about one case in medieval England where a guy was convicted and executed for murder, only for the "victim" to show up unharmed (apparently he'd just traveled without telling people and didn't even know that people assumed he was murdered).
Sounds like the jurors thought it was John de Berdon who hired them to murderate Philip via a Cunning Plan where he lured the guy out to go drinking, slipped away himself, and let Philip head home where the five were lurking in wait on the route.
I do wonder if that was how it really worked out, and if so, what was the reason John wanted Philip dead?
Oxford is interesting because it's a university town, so there's a large population of young men from all over the country and from other countries, and many/most of them are at least technically clergy of some rank, so there's a lot of national conflict, fights, and then not being subject to civil law:
"By the early fourteenth century Oxford had become, together with Paris, the largest and most highly respected centre of learning north of the Alps, drawing students from all over Europe. The city had a population of may be 7,000 inhabitants, of whom probably 1,500 were students.
Conflicts among students were frequent, often between the two ‘nations’ that Oxford recognised, the Northerners (Scotland and North of England) and the Southerners (England, Wales and Ireland). Violent tensions also often escalated between Town and Gown. As clerics, students were legally protected from prosecution under common law and could claim the so-called benefit of clergy.
For Oxford a complete set of inquests survives for the years 1342-1348, right before the Bubonic Plague hit the city. Additionally, partial records have survived by way of copies made by the antiquarian Twyne for 15 years between 1296 and 1324. He was probably mostly interested in cases related to the University, and this earlier sample may be biased. The detail provided in the inquests varies. The earlier records written down by the clerk are often detailed, while the later rolls seem to be more formulaic."
So after the recent discussion about Max Tegmark's book I decided to buy it and read it. I was particularly interested in how he dealt with mathematical structures that are not physically realizable, e.g. non-computable functions or numbers, or non-decidable statements, or even things like implicit functions that we don't know how to implement, for example f(x)=0 if x real is rational, f(x)=1 if x is irrational.
To my surprise, and chagrin, what Tegmark means by "mathematical structure" is actually *computable* mathematical structure.
But computable mathematical structure are physically realizable (just implement them as a computer program; a computer is physical), so of course they "exist". I feel that all that Tegmark is claiming is that mathematical structures that can be implemented physically are perceived as physical structures, which to me doesn't seem like a great insight. I've already believed for decades that there is no difference between computable math and physics. If you come up with a computable math structure you can implement it as a circuit or program, and if you can make a circuit (or program, same thing, the program runs on an electronic circuit), you can describe that circuit mathematically. (Yes, I assume the physical Church–Turing thesis.)
Thoughts?
"I've already believed for decades that there is no difference between computable math and physics" There's a lot less physics than computable math. Also, scare quite d "existence " based on potential computability isn't the same as actual existence.
Tegmark stated that all structures that exist mathematically also exist physically. I find that difficult to swallow because there are maths not used in physics. Be that as it may, there are non-computable physical systems — for instance, chaotic systems, like turbulent fluids or weather are difficult to model in detail, and predicting it beyond a certain horizon is impossible due to the exponential growth of small errors.
Other than that, did you enjoy the book?
True, there are math structures not used in physics, but the things that are not at least in principle physically realizable are explicitly excluded by Tegmark. He even suggests getting rid of infinity!
Note that "computable" in this specific context doesn't mean "can be calculated in practice", or even "can be done efficiently", it means something like "could be in principle simulated to arbitrary precision in a finite (but perhaps very long) time". (This one isn't it, but there is at least one rigorous definition on Wikipedia or elsewhere.)
So, as far as I know, chaotic systems are in fact computable. Actually I don't think there is anything in physics that is not computable.
Did I enjoy the book? Well, I'm probably not the best person to give an opinion. I don't normally read popular books on physics (my background is in Quantum Field Theory) and I bought this one for very specific reasons. But yeah, I thought it was a fun read. And even though I was disappointed that the actual theory is basically what I have already believed for a long time, I thought it was well presented and enjoyable. I recommended it to you, especially knowing your beliefs regarding the MWI of QM, LOL.
If you try to formalise 'every computable mathematical system exists', as you being a-priori equally likely to find yourself in any program in the set of all programs, you effectively end up with the Solomonoff prior: A uniform prior over all programs of length T, with T going to infinity. Since simpler programs with shorter description lengths have exponentially more implementations than complicated programs with long description lengths, the Solomonoff prior effectively ends up giving exponentially higher weighting to mathematical systems with lower minimum description length. The simpler a system is, the more equivalent implementations it has, the more support it has in the prior, and thus the likelier you are to be inside it. Just because there's more variations of the simple system you can write down than variations of the complicated system you can write down for a given description length T, and that fact doesn't change even as T goes to infinity.
Another perspective on the mathematical universe idea: Algorithmic information theory tells us, or at least heavily suggests, that the theoretically ideal way to make predictions is to start with the Solomonoff prior, and then update your probability assignments to various programs as the bit strings they print out either match or fail to match incoming bits of sense data about the world. Where the sense data here is everything you see, hear, feel, and so on. In terms of the actual formalism, this is kind of mathematically equivalent to all of these programs 'existing' and you slowly figuring out which one of them you happen to 'be in' through observation. Why then, would we not suppose that this is literally what is happening? What is this extra property of 'actually existing' which exactly one of these programs in the prior supposedly has, and that the others all lack? Why do we need that property? It isn't doing any work in the formalism. To the formalism, there is just an ensemble of programs you run, some of which turn out to describe you and your observations. Why suppose the other programs are less 'real' just because you happen to not be in them? Why make up this extra notion of programs being 'real' or 'not real' in the first place, when the math makes no mention of such a distinction?
Heck, a simple program in the prior that probably has a very high weighting is just the program that itself runs the set of all computable programs. If that program happens to be the 'real' one, which it'd have a comparatively quite high chance of, since it's so so simple, the mathematical universe hypotheses would definitely be true. And that case would be literally identical to the case of all the programs in the prior being real to start with. Doesn't it seem kind of strange to draw any distinction between those two cases when they have the exact same mathematical structure?
I am undecided on the mathematical universe hypothesis and don't necessarily buy the above argument. This is just the best case for the idea I could come up with when I thought about it.
Sorry if this comment appears multiple times, my internet connection is weird.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07420528.2021.1930029
This is a systematic review of the most reliable studies surrounding the effects of blue light glasses on various things. Here’s what it concludes about the effects of blue light exposure on sleep duration:
“three out of nine studies reported of decreasing sleep duration through blue light exposure and only one study reported an increase in sleep duration through blue light exposure,” and the other 5 studies show no significant correlation. My question is this: if the most reliable studies surrounding this topic are able to show these levels of conflicting results, then what am I supposed to believe about the effect of blue light exposure on sleep duration? This isn’t a question that matters a lot, but it’s confusing to me because we’re supposed to have this whole, rigorous scientific method to understand the world, but it somehow has reached this conclusion after all of this replication and effort. What do we do when the scientific systems we have fail to conclusively verify or falsify a simple fact that they should be able to test?
Victor said this, but you can conclude that on its own, in generic human beings, its effect on sleep is weak and/or inconsistent. But some of those studies likely incorporated a selected population or distinct methology, meaning blue light likely can have a somewhat more consistent & large effect in some groups or using some methods.
What you can do is conduct an experiment on yourself, be smart about the methodology, blind yourself if you can, randomize the days you get blue light, ignore days with obvious confounds (e.g. drinking), keep good records, and see if it exerts a meaningful effect on you.
This is science and will give you a mostly rigorous way to understand the world. But humans are too diverse and methods are too infinitely variable for a resource-and-time-limited discipline like psychology to make strong predictions about individualized cause & effect relationships. The deceptive complexity in the question of blue light is that you want to know whether blue light works, but also if it works in the context of X (your genetics), Y (every aspect of your lifestyle), Z (your cultural/environmental influences), and practically that's just too much for science.
I've been wearing orange glasses in the evenings for many years, but never noticed a clear effect when I wore them or didn't.
We acknowledge that we don't know. There are lots of potential reasons for this, perhaps the scientific methodology we have isn't sophisticated enough to capture the effect, maybe the effect is not consistent, maybe there are variables or interactions we haven't accounted for yet.
But the bottom line is: We don't know. Yet.
A bird bit by kids ear. Then she got sick. Now I am sick. Shes better, but I am not. If you're all dead from bird flu in a year, I am sorry.
Huh, I didn't think bird bites could transmit disease. I didn't even know they had salivary glands! Thanks!
Then youll get a kick out of this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_bird%27s_nest
Nice! Thanks!
Since birds aren't real, I will blame this on "the conspiracy" and not hold you accountable.
So perhaps the most famous study of vaccines and autism is the Danish study done by Madsen, etal. https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa021134. I saw this quoted again the other day in some vax story. I've been trying to understand how the authors came up with their number that vaccinated kids had a 0.92 relative risk of getting autism. (See table 2 in the paper.)
If you look at the raw numbers.
Vaccinated 1,647,504 person years, 263 cases of autism
Unvaccinated 482,360 person years, 53 cases
And do the ratios you find that the vaccinated are about 45% more likely to have autism. Yet the paper says this is really 8% less chance (Third column in table 2, adjusted relative risk.) Can anyone help me figure out this discrepancy.
To help create confusion, I will note that:
*) 263 cases out of 1,647,504 is a 0.016% occurrence.
*) 53 out of 482,360 is a 0.011% occurrence.
*) 1 out of 36 children in the US are autistic, a 2.8% occurrence, and
*) 1 out of 45 US adults are autistic, a 2.22% occurrence
https://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-statistics-asd
https://www.cdc.gov/autism/data-research/index.html
So another question might be whether data on autism and vaccines in Danish children from 1991 to 1998, where the reported autism rate was around 0.015%, is applicable to America today with a reported autism rate about 150x higher.
Either the two populations (US kids today, Danish kids in the late 1990s) are wildly different or the definition of autism in the two countries is wildly different.
Yes, the populations are wildly different. Danish kids in the late 1990s (and now too) were overwhelmingly white. Only about 50% of US kids are white.
Black people tend to have stronger immune responses than white people. There are, apparently, also other racial differences in immune response. Some studies on vaccine safety do not analyze racial subgroups; sometimes they just don't have enough minority subjects for analysis, as is probably the case in that Danish study, where the overwhelming majority were white.
I find this scary. Runaway immune response can cause severe disability. RFK Jr better figure out whether vaccines are as safe for non-whites as for whites.
That's not 1,647,504 persons, it's person years. There are 537k children in the study, and 738 cases of autism, or 0.1%. So there's that. But they also required a formal diagnosis by a clinician, whereas the CDC uses : 1) an ASD diagnostic statement in an evaluation, 2) a classification of ASD in special education, or 3) an ASD International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code. That is, CDC counts if it's a school record. So much broader definition.
Right, this says about the same rate in US in 1990's (0.1%) https://www.thetreetop.com/statistics/autism-prevalence
I think "late 1990s" is doing a fair amount of the work here. The 1990s was when they were just starting to diagnose autism in people without major developmental delays. The concept of an "autism spectrum", and the inclusion of "Asperger's Syndrome" as part of the spectrum (instead of a separate disorder) happened in ICD-10 in 1993 and DSM-IV in 1994. ICD is international, while I think DSM is US-specific. That's in the middle of the study period, but clinical practice tends to lag the manuals by a fair amount, and general cultural awareness (and thus parents seeking diagnosis for their kids) lags further still. Note that from your CDC link, the US diagnosis rate at age 8 has gone from 0.67% in 2000 to 2.76% today, a 4x increase.
Age is also a factor. The CDC is tracking diagnosis by birth year at , while the Danish study is tracking a population of mixed birth years at a fixed end date, with the kids ranging in age from 1 year to 9 years.
That still leaves a fair amount of room for country-specific factors. The US in particular has several incentives built in to the education system for school-age kids to get screened and diagnosed, both in terms of funding and in terms of classroom accommodations being based on diagnosis.
Averages really aren't good enough. There are more vaccinated than unvaccinated, and therefore this will make it easier to detect a small statistical effect in the larger group, not because it's real, but due to random chance. They have to adjust for that.
Ugh, statistics is complicated.
Yeah there is a really small number in the control group (53) so all sorts of random things could effect that number. I guess my only take away is that I'm not sure this is the piece of data that shows there is no connection between autism and vaccines. The study should be done again today with the much higher rate of autism... it should be easy to find any signal.
Here is one article that conducted a review of 19 empirical studies [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9464417/#fn-group1], one of which (Madsen, et al., 2002) included 440,655 vaccinated and 96,648 unvaccinated individuals, and in another:
"Hviid et al. conducted a nationwide cohort review of all infants born in Denmark to Danish-born mothers from January 1, 1999, through December 31, 2010, to see whether MMR immunization carries a high risk for autism in children, subgroups of children, or periods after vaccination. In Denmark, 657,461 babies born between 1999 and December 31, 2010, participated, with follow-up from one year of age to August 31, 2013 (Danish Civil Registration System is the source of patient information). They found no support for high autism risk after MMR vaccination in a national broad, unselected cohort population of Danish children."
I don't know what the totals are for all the studies together, it's obviously very large. None of them found any evidence that vaccines cause autism.