100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
I think status, at the societal level, is a chicken and egg problem. I'll use a sort of related historical example.
Through the 1960s and maybe 1970s, if a family had a son decide to become a priest, there was a good chance it would be met with esteem in the community. An honorable decision informed by faith seen as something to be respected if not quite emulated (after all, we want grandkids). Flash forward to today, and outside of religious sub-communities, it's probably looked at as an extreme personal journey decision. "Oh, wow, the Johnson boy went to the seminary." Community pillar? Not really. Invited to speak at the High School? Definitely not. Probably awkwardly danced around at supermarket aisle run-ins.
Why the change? This one's pretty obvious. Religiosity in America has declined precipitously since the 1960s/1970s. The society level value (and, therefore, status) has evaporated. It's not longer a "worthwhile'' decision.
Maternity is different because it's never (well, I hope) going to decline by 30-40% in one or two generations. Even in PMC circles today that make a lot of noise about not having children for environmental reasons, a public pregnancy announcement is always met with excitement (side note: if the pregnancy isn't announced publicly, there's a decent chance it isn't going to come to term for one reason or another. That's a different post). It's never going to be "oh, wow, really?" weird to be a mother.
That being the case, I'd gesture at trying to status boost a lot of maternity adjacent things - kids, first of all. But also "homemaking" pursuits, I suppose. I think the fundamental tension, however, is between women-in-relation-to-children and women-in-their-own-right. Is it possible to applaud a woman for her personal and professional accomplishments? Sure! But is this done at the expense of praise for family and maternal pursuits? The kneejerk reaction may be "No, of course not! We can praise a woman for being an accomplished scientist and a Mom!" ... but if you walk through the incentives in a hyper-individualistic society, it gets complicated and uncomfortable. As a quick example - I bet people know the best player on their favor sports team immediately, but can they name the official captains? (There's a bit of a hack in that, in a lot of cases, these individuals are one in the same, but the point still stands).
If you want to raise the status of a role that is fundamentally non-individualistic, you have to raise the status of communal accomplishment as a category in a society. I have no idea how to begin doing that in the west today.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
Any insight from your friend on why Altman feels this way?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.
The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"
All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library
This 'idea' has zero percent chance of ever happening. And it's not because of rich people lobbying.
It's because it would catastrophically destroy all markets (public and private) overnight.
This is because the price of anything is different at different times and, before an actual transaction occurs, is only an approximate representation of what a theoretical buy and seller would agree on. There are plenty of reasons zero buyers and zero sellers would want to proceed with any transaction at a given time.
Example A would be startups. Startups raise cash from investors to get off the ground, develop products, market and sell them, enter new markets, acquire other companies etc. Their "valuation" at any given time is largely a projection of possible future revenue and/or a future reasonable acquisition price. It is not, in anyway, a guarantee of a spot cash price for equity. I think Anduril, the cool new defense technology company, has something like a $15bn valuation after its last funding round. To make the math easy, let's say there are 100,000,000 shares outstanding all with equal seniority etc. (this is a toy example. The realities are always more complex, which factors in later). Is anyone going to pay anyone else the $150 / share in the secondaries market for Anduril? Fuck no. There are maybe some early investors who got in at $10 (or less!) who may want to sell at $50 or something to lock in gains, but the biggest holders (including insiders) are holding out for an IPO or acquisition.
These are multi-year equity holders. What does their tax situation look like? Are they taxed every year based on new VC funding and the follow on valuations of the company? If that's the case, they would end up paying more in taxes than they invested in the company while being unable to liquidate their holdings in a thinly traded private market. Investing in a start up would become financially impossible. Perhaps evening just starting one on your own. What happens then? Only incumbent, large, highly traded public companies can be invested in - but you still have to pay tax on your not-cash winnings. Very quickly, there are only a few nationalized companies doing any business t all. Retail investors mostly hold cash which inflates away to nothing and there is zero new capital formation and investment. That's stagnancy and inflation - aka stagflation - and is the very model for how to kill a country and, very likely, pave the wave for a populist demagogue to seize power.
Taxing unrealized capital gains is literally taxing a business for existing and operating as normal, but with some sort of arbitrary number thrown on top of it as "valuation." If that number is wrong, which it will be sooner or later, you divide the business by zero and it not only ceases to be viable, it implodes overnight.
Much like price controls, this is an "idea" that reveals profound economic and financial illiteracy. It is 100% vibes based in a Robin Hood aesthetic and is designed with all the depth of most sloganeering. It should be viewed for what it is, a very public display of a lack of interest in developing meaningful policy in any direction.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
Yes and no.
Biden / Pelosi style catholics are definitely solidly blue tribe and do vote democrat. There's even vestiges of old school machine politics for these kind of folks in states like Rhode Island and Massachusettes.
The problem is they aren't actually catholic. Just as "culturally Jewish" is a thing for totally non-observing "Jews" in the bicoastal cities, I believe "culturally catholic" exists as well for many democrat strongholds. To me, it's almost stolen valor. People like Biden etc get to say "faith is at the core of who I am" blah blah blah and infuse their speeches - and votes - with high minded moralism. But they aren't actually living or even trying to believe the doctrine of their faith. The Church is pretty damn clear on abortion and divorce, among other issues.
Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith. A lot of the politically motivated (and serious) American Catholics also get really into issues of religious liberties. One need look no further than the recent SCOTUS decision on tax-exemption status for faith based charities.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6mo ago
I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who:
- Hop between these temporary jobs for their entire working life and
- Have zero substance abuse issues and
- Have zero contact with the criminal justice system and
- Make it to retirement age with no savings
Rounds to zero.
Let's say you get the "burger flipping" job because you're not really doing anything else. You're living at home (or with a bunch of other underemployed roommates). Sure, maybe you get some cheap beer every weekend - fine, whatever. If you retain that job for two years, you're going to be promoted to some sort of assistant manager position by inertia and availability alone. The cycle repeats.
Or, you get the burger flipping job, decide that, yes, it does suck, and figure out a new job a little further up on the skill/wage level. You like this and do it again. The cycle repeats.
My more controversial take is that this should be the path for pretty much everyone.
College has become a pay-to-play social proof mechanism for bullshit jobs that mostly fuels middle class over-capture of resources - especially housing. There are some hacks around this (military service, community college pathways) but it, most of the time, boils down to a family being able to pay between $100,000 - $500,000 to jumpstart their kid into the professional class. Oh, by the way, for something like 50% of graduates, this has not worked and has been a fraud for 20+ years. Please ignore that.
At the bookstore job I alluded to in my original post, I got unofficially promoted to assistant manager by my second month mostly because I would follow the store close down procedures correctly each night. This was as a 17 year old. Several of the other 20-somethings working there would routinely forget to lock doors, secure the cash box, or do basic cleaning and organizing. It doesn't take much to be an above average performer and, with just a dash of talent, you can accelerate quickly. I've seen too many graduates of "prestigious" universities who can't metaphorically close down the bookstore making $100,000+ per year because they have the fancy sheepskin on their wall.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
Does anyone have a link to something explaining how communities like Kiryas Joel and various Amish / Mennonite towns exist in a legal sense?
It seems to me that they would be in constant violation of eveything from the mundane - say, fire code in buildings - to the serious - unreported child abuse etc.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Here's the security video. The link is foxnews, so there's .... oh so much javascript and other crap. The victim is fully blurred out and there isn't any gore or shocking content, but still probably technically NSFW.
The interesting thing is that there are half a dozen children who act as nothing more than curious onlookers. I could give you 5 paragraphs on Kitty Genovese, but that would be wasted here on the Motte.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4mo ago
In my analysis, the core of the difference between male and female social status arrangement is the locus of the evaluation rubric.
For men, it's an external, verifiable, and discrete measurement - performance. Who scored the most points? Who brought in the most dollars? Who got everyone to show up for the party/vote/heist? While there is certainly haggling over who should get what percentage of "credit" for a particular success, there is still a "thing" that happened and that everyone can point.
For women, it's the constantly in flux consensus mechanism for status. You're "cool" because enough other people decided you were. Why or how did they decide that? Irrelevant they just did, and at a critical mass that those who disagree with the coolness assessment are necessary in the minority (perhaps not in number, but in social capital within the group). I think you see this in a lot of female coded activities - fashion, art, food, entertainment. Anything that is governed chiefly by the hard to define concept of "taste." There's no discrete external rubric for what makes this year's pants/tops/shoes "in" yet, somehow, everyone seems to know (or is forced to accept) what is "in." Interestingly, this creates a constantly updating mechanism wherein whatever is current in terms of taste sets up its own demise by creating the opportunity for an opposition to develop. You can't get whatever is "in" right just once, you have to update lest you fall "out."
This, to me, is why you have the infamous gender specific difference in neuroticism. Why bitches be so crazy? do women, as a group in general, exhibit higher neuroticism? It's because their constant task is to covertly poll their social groups for the days' social standings which are, in turn, based on subtle expressions of taste (fashion, style, memetic currency etc.) without explicit voicing of opinions by the group members. Male or female, if this was your life, you'd be a little stressed, no?
I'd implore anyone reading this to avoid plunging into normie-feminist rage responses. I tried to describe what I see as differences while doing my best to avoid any implicit value judgements. The female means of determining social status is critically and necessarily important to human families, communities, and societies. A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison. I'll take a daily "mean girls status market" over a daily "avoid random lethal violence" roulette wheel. Furthermore, I do believe women have outsized importance in building and maintaining culture. Politics flows from that, and laws from politics. Many societies have tried to sequester women away from culture and politics - universally, I would say, to their existential risk and eventual death.
But the problem of our time, I'd argue, is that the west has, for 30+ years now, actively fostered cultural developments that try to maximize female styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. In the past 10+ years, it has risen to the level of doing so in explicit opposition to all male styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. But, wait, please don't think I'm saying "What about men?!". Far from it. The insidious and tragic result of the rise of extremist feminism has been it's disastrous effects on social order as a whole and women specifically. We eat our own with the best and most earnest of intentions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5mo ago
Look, I'm no DEI fan at all. My previous comment literally said I was going through the exercise of steelman-ing.
When you say things like "Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" you're demonstrating that you don't want to think through the other side's position, you just want to yell at it - which is exactly one of the core criticisms of DEI.
This is what's at the heart of the Motte - this community demands more than "boo outgroup." This is why there's literally the boo outgroup reporting button.
I tried to come up with a rational market explanation for DEI. It could very well be wrong. Your counter, however, was "no, actually DEI is just stupid and evil."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6mo ago
This is correct.
I've been reading a book that comments on The Wealth of Nations in the context of the contemporary international economy, with all of the various tariffs and spaghetti regulations. The author makes a recurring drumbeat point that price information must be at the center of any market for it to function as a market at all. Without prices being totally "open source" (for lack of a better term) as well as able to change in a time frame that's short enough to accurately reflect supply, demand and baseline cost, the market will not function as a market is intended.
I do like Noah's characterization that insurers are pretty much paid a small fee to be the fall guys. They have very little control over the market for medicine. Those that do - doctors and patients, also known as producers and consumers - lack that price information component so utterly, that you can't even really call it a market. It's a weird for-profit-not-for-profit-emotion-based "exchange" of services.
My two-cents prescriptions:
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Price transparency everywhere. The IT solution already exists to make it trivially easy to see "cost of MRI in USA" instantaneously everywhere.
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Invent "Uber for treatment' - you can book a course of treatment at any provider within whatever geography you want. You should be able to book an appointment on your phone in a few seconds.
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More doctors. We had a thread earlier this year about the number of doctors in the USA being essentially a cartel operation. Limited residency spots set by the AMA and not updated for 20 years and all that.
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More doctor-by-LLM for routine stuff. 50% of "disease" in America is diet, exercise, lifestyle. I'd venture a wild guess that another 10-20% is real but routine stuff; pneumonia, flu, skin stuff, broken bones without life threatening complications etc.
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People get to see and own their electronic health records. This feeds into the doctor-by-LLM. In fact, I could see a really awesome scenario in which people could (voluntarily) plug their electronic health records into a service, much like credit monitoring, that is always analyzing your data for deeper problems. And/or offering nudges for better health lifestyle choices.
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Pharmacy-by-mail for a lot more stuff. I can see this not being allowed for drugs that can have really bad interactions with other stuff, or painkillers because *gestures to opioid crisis*
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Break down state-by-state insurance fences. People aren't magically more or less healthy in Colorado, Minnesota, Georgia, or Maine.
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Auto insurance considers your make and model and year. Medical insurance should do the same. Check-ups (for insurance purposes) annually. No survey or self-reporting. Height, weight, blood work, treadmill or other cardio fitness measurement. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk (and aren't a paraplegic etc.) stand for as long as you can, or shuffle. Whatever. These reports go back to the insurance machine learning model to give you a quote. You pay it or you don't. If you can't afford insurance, you still know the price of the procedure down the road (see point 1)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
But we have numbers!
Everything below comes from this link from Guttmacher. Guttmacher is rabidly pro-choice.
You can piece through the crosstabs as you like, but I focus on these numbers:
- There are about a million abortions a year.
- "45% of abortions were obtained at six weeks’ gestation or earlier,"
- " 49% at 7–13 weeks’ gestation"
- Only 7% occur after 14 weeks
- The abortion rate is 15.9 per 1,000 women aged 15 - 44. If my mathin' is good, this would be 1,590 per 100,000. St. Louis has 69.4 murders per 100,000 people, the highest in the country. Do with that apples-to-oranges comparison what you will.
Here's another Guttmacher link - " About half of all U.S. women having an abortion have had one previously."
What does all of this mean?
Your categorization of good/bad/meh abortions is good and useful. The raw numbers, however, show that even if "bad" abortions make up a very small minority of all abortions, we're talking about (probably) somewhere on the order of 100,000s of cases of what a lot of reasonable people would probably view as infanticide.
Secondly, there's a bit of a hidden conclusion to drawn from the "Only 7% occur after 14 weeks" statistic. Some posters here like to point out how raising a r*tarded child is somehow beyond the pale for many humans (I think differently). Taken a little more charitably, it makes sense to consider that a fetus that has demonstrable physical or cognitive deformities could give would-be parents pause. But, if 45% of people are getting these abortions at six weeks or earlier, people aren't making these judgements based on particularly advanced fetus condition. At 6 weeks, an embryo is 6mm long, the size of a pea. Yes, there could be markers, indications, signs, what have you. But the often presented narrative of "We learned our baby would require 24/7 care forever" is far more rare than is presented in campaign narratives.
And that leads me back to the numbers. Democrats love to campaign on the the smaller proportion of abortions that would probably fall mostly into "meh" (and definitely into "good"). Pro-lifers see the plain fact that a lot of abortions are purely elective on the part of a mother than feels somehow "unready" to be a mother. We (I) think these are absolutely "bad" abortions, mostly the product of a sexual lack of discipline or a cavalier disregarding for what are very predictable outcomes of, you know, having sex.
While I don't doubt the sincerity of those emotions, there is no way they outweigh the fundamental right of an otherwise healthy baby to be born. Hypothetical future states about being "unloved" or "having a bad life" have to be thrown out. That's literally trading the truth of the present for an emotionally based forecast of the future. That's bad decision making 101.
Finally, regarding the fact that half of all women getting abortions have had one previously, I don't see how this is anything than stupid after-the-fact birth control. "Young girl makes mistake" is certainly an understandable situation for a single abortion. I do not see how it can be that common (50%!) unless it is viewed plainly as "no big deal"
Yes but no but yes.
The Vance "cat ladies" comment was harshly received even by some of the most MAGA women in my social circle. My read is that it was seen as a general attack on women as opposed to the specific subcategory of women Vance meant to target. And this weaponized ambiguity will persist until women themselves decide to status boost / value re-orient. Again, I don't see how this happens without the equivalent of a modern day Women's Temperance League popping up. You can imagine what the popular response would be to that.
--- (EDIT) ---
Your comment also made me consider an interesting non-obvious culprit - teen pregnancy. Through the 80s and 90s, there was a major push to reduce teen pregnancy. This was a good idea as the correlation between teen motherhood and poor outcomes for the kids was pretty ironclad. I worry that that's extended in age range to the mid 20s.
As an intellectual exercise, how many women who do a typical four year college after high school are pregnant within 12 months of graduating? If you take out the selective sampling from explicitly Christian colleges, i'd wager that number rounds to zero.
Contrast this with one of my own grandmothers who dropped out of a state school after marrying my grandpa so that they could jumpstart the family. This was not at all seen as a mistake, but as a fortunate shortcut to her ultimate goal.
Pregnant = always good isn't quite the message you want to send for a lot of reasons, but planned pregnant at any age = always good might be.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
I've searched for it dozens of times, including opening up old laptops and pouring over their browser histories, but I can't find it.
"It" was a blog that a FtM (that's chick-to-dude) transitioner was keeping about their ... transition. It was well written, deeply personal, and absolutely without trans ideology talking points or vibes. It was a wonderful example of an honest seeming person without any sort of ideology-induced hangups. It was incredibly and (unfortunately) uniquely informative.
The author shares one story about either beginning or hitting a major increase in the hormone replacement process. He's excited that he's going to start feeling testosterone-y like all other dudes. The week this starts, he's driving to work in traffic and someone cuts him off. He reports that, all of a sudden, he has a full blown panic attack and has to pull over to try to calm down. Perhaps the hormone replacement process has a high variance early period? Maybe he jacked up the dosage? Hmm, concerning.
I should note here that the author writes about going to a trans support group in his city. They help each other with the process as the different members are at different stages.
The author relates how he shares this panic attack incident to his group. There's an odd silence and some chuckling from some of the FtM's further along. People share knowing looks. Finally, one of them pipes up and says, "Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time." In a wonderful moment of self-awareness, the author writes about how he (when he was a she) never came close to appreciating what true male rage felt like. Even when "she" was 10/10 steamin' mad for some reason, it never came close to .... How a dude feels in Tuesday morning traffic when some asshole cuts him off.
I hope this jogs the memory of someone else who can point to that blog. There was a lot of good knowledge in there.
Anyway - I apply a similar view on male versus female sexual drive. It's definitely a difference in kind. It's been highlighted hundreds of times that men watch porn and women read trashy novels that end up at a sexual encounter but with a lot of very cringey situational foreplay. The male fantasy is the act itself, the female fantasy is the journey to the act. It is, however, also a difference in degree. I believe women when they say they get "super duper horny." I believe that, in their own framework of horny intensity judgement, they are at 10/10 Would Fck Again. But how does this compare to a male arousal rubric? I submit that female "10/10 Would Fck Again" is near equivalent to "Popped a bone watching that new Shakira music video on mute while at the airport bar." I'm having a little bit of fun here, so please don't try to nuke me on the rough comparison.
None of this should be taken as a judgement in validity, value, or worthiness of either male/female anger/arousal. Any moron who tells a woman, "oh, you're just girl angry, it's not that big of a deal" deserves whatever kitchen implement is launched at his head. And any idiot who tells his date, "No, but, like, I really want to fuck" deserves his future session of sullen, very alone rage masturbation.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
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Stop using emojis
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Write shorter, more declarative sentences.
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Church ... for a first date. Bruh.
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Most importantly - Stop using OLD. Go out and talk to people in real life. You will have more success, you will have more fun, you will build interpersonal skills that transcend dating.
I've never understood OLD. If the objective is dating a real person in real life ... go do that. Why is there this odd online first step? It's like saying "Before I jump in the pool, I'll interact with a digital model of water so I understand the water better"
Kamala has to do 80% of the work in the debate.
Trump is a known quantity in these things. Rambling will occur. His best messaging will be on immigration.
He'll have three some (EDIT: editing for clarity, but leaving the original typo because the first response to it was hilarious)
Trump will launch some zingers that land with varying degrees of efficacy.
Kamala has to convince those on the fence that she's not just a party apparatchik. She also stands to risk some support if she gets caught in a flip-flip struggle (some outlets are reporting that part of Trump's strategy is to try to corner Harris with her own debate performance from the 2019 primaries).
The median case is just that - something like a 2-3 point bump in the polls for whoever "wins' the debate. But this cycle has been about outliers. The last debate resulted in a sitting president getting knocked out of the race. So, what are some possible outliers?
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Trump could actually say something to sink him with a large part of undecided women - the key demographic for the election. It won't be about abortion, but I wonder if Harris can needle him enough so he off-handedly says something along the lines of "This is why you can't have a woman as president, the're too nasty." Trump loses hard on comments like this.
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Trump plays possum enough to let Harris sink herself. This is an almost guaranteed win strategy, but Trump finds it hard to help himself and just not say much. The interesting thing is this was actually what happened for a good part of the first half of the Biden debate. Trump saw that Joe's train was running off the tracks and just stayed out of the way .... before joining him in the ditch over the second half of the debate. If Trump had more discipline, he could engineer some pretty amazing mechanics with this in the debate - say he gets a 30 second rebuttal period after some Harris response, instead of responding at all, he could say "Actually, I'd really like to hear more from VP Harris on xyz" and just give her 30 more seconds to implode.
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Harris short-circuit version 1: She gets tongue tied and confused early with an answer and defaults to a weird combination of canned responses and her woo-woo wine aunt aphorisms. This is probably the debate perfformance (outside of the median) that most people are expecting - and the reason why Harris has, reportedly, been conducting many, many prep debates with her staff. If this happened, I think you might be looking at almost the same level of panic as after the Biden debate. There's not enough time for Harris to recover and the worst clips would be repeated ad nauseum in PA and elsewhere. Like I said in another post, there's a chance Trump goes 2-0 with 2 KOs in Debates this year.
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Harris short-circuit version 2: ONLY Canned responses without any zingers to Trump or "hear felt" personal anecdotes or connection to voters. Comes across as robotic and scared to go off script. Will answer follow up questions with close to literal repetitions of what she just said. Minimal wine-aunt woo-woo-isms, but not zero. This exits as a Trump win, for sure, but I don't see the same level of panic in the DNC / Harris campaign. They would wake-up Wednesday thinking it wasn't that bad and "she won on substance." They run the rest of the campaign with these odd "isn't she so relatable!" spots from time to time (remember the infamous Hillary in Cedar Rapids selfie video). The end result is a Trump win bigger than everyone expects. The sobering, "Oh, shit, how did we not see this coming after the debate?" will hit like a falling silo on election night.
All that being said, the thing that will definitely not happen - but that I want to - is one of the debate moderators asking, "Why the hell have both of you gone full retard on economic policy. Tariffs and unrealized capital gains taxes. No reform to social security and medicare. How will your administration handle the recession that will likely occur during your first year in office?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
It's About Stupid Economics, Stupid
Two items of late have caught my eye. The first is this effortpost by Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution. I have the feeling that more than a few mottizens are regular MR readers or, at least, one of the blogs in the larger MR orbit. It covers the economics and regulatory process of an unrealized capital gains tax.
What makes this post noteworthy - all substance aside - is that it is a lengthy effortpost. Cowen largely does not do that. Most of the daily blog posts are link dumps. Occasionally, he'll add maybe up to 75 words of commentary usually on very academic economic things. He re-posts his own Bloomberg Column. An extended takedown of a single policy proposal (with a new follow up today) is remarkable.
The other item I'd pair with this; both Harris and Trump are against the potential U.S. Steel acquisition (by a Japanese firm). This tracks with Trump since forever. A big part of his career was him seeing the Japanese buy important NYC real estate and he's never gotten over it. In fact, a lot of his foreign policy is exactly what you'd model for a Reganite businessman from the 1980s. For Harris this tracks as far as "big business bad" goes (see: Lina Khan at the FTC), but her comments on it have been designed to appeal to highly emotive pro-USA union workers. It is remarkable how much both of the candidates' comments on this specific US steel deal could be swapped with a zero percent chance of detecting it.
Nationalistic arguments for blocking the U.S. Steel deal are emotive. "National Security" concerns are not with zero merit, but would be a red herring. This seems to be, like most things with this Presidential race, vibes based.
Regardless of its economic "merits" an unrealized cap gains tax will never get enacted. It's dead on arrival for any Congress you can think of over the next 4 years at least. Again, it's a vibes based signal of "those darn rich folks!"
The culture war angle here is interesting because of the incredible horseshoe shape in this case. The overlap is real and significant. Both candidates ignore some pretty basic economic theory in order to win some vibes-votes. Not at all unheard of. What is the fact that they both are ending up in the same place despite being "on opposite sides of the spectrum."
I see this as the inevitable outcome of a large portion of the population (baby-boomers with about 50% of millenials aiding and abetting them) simply wanting to avoid reality for as long as possible and being willing to vote note for someone who agrees with their favored method of ignoring that reality.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
212 days sober here.
What's your goal in regards to 'drinking less'? If it's literally just getting the number of drinks over a week / month down, then all you should worry about is tracking your drinks (plenty of apps for that) and looking for a gradual trend down. Eventually you'll find a sustainable level.
But is there something else? Are you worried your drinking is getting you fat and out of shape (it is) or that it's just sort of generally reducing your cognitive sharpness even if you aren't hungover every day(it is) or maybe that it's having a mild negative effect on mood stability? (it is)
If you want to quit. Quit. Hard sober for the rest of your life? Not necessarily. I think a good goal is to do 365 days sober and keep a log of how you're feeling about every 10 days or so. You'll learn a lot. You'll learn how to deal with out of nowhere cravings. You'll understand more about emotional and stress triggers. "Sober Octobers" aren't long enough and I feel like "stay sober for as long as you can including up to forever" creates an all-or-nothing kind of thinking that can lead to hard relapses (fun fact: a lot of programs have definitions of sober that allow for some level of drinking. I think this is absurd, but that's a personal opinion).
In my experience so far, the physical and mental health benefits are obvious and unambiguous. Social situations aren't difficult to navigate after you've said "no thanks" about 10 times. (As another aside, just use "No, thanks" or "I'm not drinking tonight" as your responses. Don't get into any more detail than that - that's when people get weird. Be ready to repeat yourself. A lot. )
The tradeoff is that my life is fundamentally more boring. Alcohol, like other drugs, is a quick hack to emotional regulation. How it manifests will be person dependent. For me, I no longer have any reflex to drink if I am sad, stressed, overwhelmed etc. That's a great thing. I miss drinking now when I am feeling very good. A Big Business Thing happened at work a few weeks ago and, when it did, I really wanted to tie one on on a friday night knowing that not only did I have nothing to do on Saturday, but that I could probably take a few days off the next week because of the big win.
I cleaned out some old home depot boxes in my garage instead. Anti-climactic.
I'll tie it off here. Start at the beginning; what do you want your drinking life to look like?
This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.
I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.
The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.
And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.
So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.
I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.
Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11mo ago
But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.
I think you're correct.
It is fascinating how both Biden and Trump do exude what, as far as I can tell, are genuine feelings of personal aggrievement when both of them have had objectively stupendous lives. Biden was either the youngest or second youngest Senator of all time. His initial victory was narrow and surprising, but then was so incredibly solid that he never faced any legitimate challenge to it. True, he "failed" in his prime-age bid for President in the 1980s. But he simply went back to that Senate seated and just waited and waited before stumbling into .... the Vice Presidency.
Trump was not only rich, but he lived a cartoon version of a rich man's life because of his deep entanglements with media and entertainment. He wasn't some financial engineer who spent 20 years in balance sheets and came out of the other side holding a huge fortune. Between opening casinos and flying on his private jet, he was getting cameos in movies and, eventually, turning himself into a reality TV star (personally, I would detest this life, but I admit it at least seems like it could be compelling to those interested in glamour and fame)
Of course, yes, if you jump into the details, both men have had some personal tragedy. Biden's first wife and her car accident, the loss of Beau Biden. Trump's brother drank himself to death and I feel like his mother / father's deaths were maybe harder on him than has ever been reported.
But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything? I can understand "I am a political leader and I am emoting in a way that relates well to my base" but neither of them comes across that way to me. These dudes seem bone-deep rageful at life sometimes.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4mo ago
I disagree.
The threads around the OpenAI coup attempt highlighted multiple inside sources who have stated that Altman is a unique kind of sociopath. He's a non-technical non-founder. He is the networker's networker.
Him having a child, unfortunately, points to one of two pretty extreme scenarios; either he's in the midst of a pretty big change of heart about Techno-post-humanity and does believe in the future in a "people should have kids an invest in them" sort of way. Or...
He's had a surrogate child (who he can easily support as a billionaire) as a magic talisman to deflect precisely these "you don't care about a human future" attacks. "Sure I do!" Sam says, "Look at this human infant that I now pay for! Is this not our culturally agreed upon signal indicating my allegiance to the future of humans?"
Ask yourself if a billionaire sociopath is capable of this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6mo ago
Thank you for the high effort response. Upvote upvote'd.
I won't respond line for line because, frankly, you've made me think about multiple points and I haven't come up with a conclusion yet. So...thank you!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9mo ago
(Business theme here. Because I kind of want more business content on the Motte.)
I was wrong about Sales.
Beginning of my career, I was an engineer thinker, but who could Talk To Girls (TM), so I was sent out to talk to clients for technical sales reasons. Back then, I hated it because I was still trying to integrate the Autism firmware into my brain. Everything was logical, right? Cost-benefit analysis. Couldn't these stupid "customers" just see that our product provided value and pay us?
That's not how business works because that's not how humans work. Humans are not efficiency seeking automatons. We have problems, we want solutions. If we can't see how a thing helps us solve a problem, then that thing has a value of zero. Sales is the process of understanding problems deeply and then matching those problems (or not!) with a solution. It is applied empathy. It is one of the best skills to develop (so long as it is developed with integrity). If every Sales bro suddenly spent a year as therapists, we'd cure all this millennial mental health nonsense right away.
The fact is that deep engineer types who try to engineer products or services without caring about human interaction are truly trying to dehumanize humans. I get the same bad vibes from Sam Altman and Elon Musk because I truly believe both of them privately think, "Man, this would all be so much easier if like 90% of people just died." Technical elegance, engineering genius, physics-defying new invention don't. actually. matter if they fail to help people. I think the one hack here are the Theoretical Physicts who might actually be discovering capital-T Truth with math. But I'm too dumb to actually validate that.
But but but but ... Used car salesmen! Pushy boiler room stock brokers! The whole pharmaceutical industry! Can't sales be used for horrible awful very no-good reasons? Yes, but not try at scale for a long time unless there's tacit approval from lots of other humans. In all of the examples I provided, what's really going on is people want to defy reality in one way or another. They're being greedy. They don't want to live healthy they want to not feel pain. They want something they can't afford because they want to feel like they have certain status. Sales people playing into the self-deception of others isn't some black magic - it's psychological failure and manipulation that goes on constantly all over the world. Calling sales bad or evil is the same logical fallacy as calling human beings inherently bad or evil.
Can you tell I do a lot more sales and sales like things now? It's infinitely more satisfying that being a smarter than everyone else engineer. I'm not going to pretend like the software I've been involved with cured cancer, but, in many cases, I did see get applied to solve meaningful business problems. I like to think it contributed to economic growth in a small way.
If you want to be "part of a great effort to promote human flourishing" ... learn sales.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
Damn, dude.
I always really liked your posts. Their relative infrequency also made me pretty stoked when I saw a new one. "Oh, shit, Hoffmeister just dropped a new track!"
For a long while, you actually owned the GOAT'ed (quantitavely by upvtoes) Motte post.
I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.
But this just doesn't make any sense. Like, srsly bro, whutt?
It's more than anec-data, it's close to a human universal that women (and men, but whatever) tend to go "holy shit, my life changed after I have kids and I won't trade them for the world." It's kind of like, I don't know, wired into us as a species or something.
The thought-piece articles by largely PMC mothers who openly opine about "being better off" if they didn't have kids is exactly the backwards anti-social and hyperindividualistic status games that some of the threads you alluded to were trying to deal with. The women complaining about counterfactuals aren't at all representative of the species or society. Furthermore, they're being incredibly arrogant in their thinking; do they truly believe they're the first women in history to go, "Oh, shit, kids are kind of a big commitment, maybe I should think this through?" It's deeply embedded in the language; going through childbirth can be "traumatizing" - this assumes you make it through childbirth. Up until the 20th century all over the world (continuing in much of it today) pregnant women were aware that they might not make it out of delivery alive. The very assumption that "post childbirth life" could be "worse" is actually a verbal demonstration of how much better and easier than it ever has been to be a mother.
Aside from that, there are real difficulties in raising children that are specific to current society that ought to be address. I agree on the childcare hassle points - a lot of the proposed solutions had to do with massive tax incentives for childbearing couples so that we can bring back a one income household.
Delaying childbirth past 30 is, unfortunately, kind of a risky move even with modern medicine. Again, lots of solutions had to do with incentivizing earlier family formation and having children (side benefit for the dudes out there: being married and cohabitating with wife and children does great things in terms of your "likeliness to get arrested" quotient).
The deeper question that your posts raises by implication, however, is around the costs of childbirth outweighing its benefits on some sort of happiness rubric. Your brother can't hang out with the boys as much - ok, does 10 more years of football and beer really mean a whole lot? Women can't travel and pursue their careers if they have children - do instagram photos in Amalfi and being promoted to associate director of spreadsheets really actualize your inner Girlboss? If life's mission is happiness (side note: I don't think it is) then it stands to reason people should try to find the deepest and most durable source of happiness possible. Wouldn't you know it, for most folks that's close interpersonal relationships, specifically; their family.
The diabolic sleight of hand of modernist pseudo-philosophy was that "following your bliss" and maximizing personal happiness was some sort of self-evident Permanent Truth and Totally Right. Besides being wrong on a moral level, it's wrong in its own terms! The things you think are going to make you happy don't and the one's that really do have been the cornerstones of society forever.
"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.
Walz' response (bolding is my own):
Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;
Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.
The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.
I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.
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