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.
6d ago
his legacy as the most transformational president since FDR (and perhaps just as damaging)
Fuck you again, JTarrou, for being a great master of phrase. You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
The first Trump admin was important for its cultural shift and, frankly, vibes. But what were the major accomplishments? Tax cuts (Republican standard forever) and SCOTUS confirmations (the personal project of Mitch McConnell). Other than that ... not so much.
The second admin has been eventful to say the least. Things are happening and getting done. Now, as your wonderful comment says, is that to an ultimate good or productive end? T-B-fucking-D. There are some clear wins like broad deregulation. The Rubio architected western hemisphere foreign policy may be the biggest sea change since the Marshall Plan. While I broadly agree on your realpolitik assessment regarding the middle east, Trump may have, ironically, done more for the deep antisemitic movement in the USA than Representative Ilhan Omar of Mogadishu Minneapolis. The Tariffs may be a nothing burger macro-economically, but they may have been the last nail in the coffin for disaffected rust belt White Men. You know, the ones who vote 90% for Trump.
After Trump is going to look something like a loose alliance between the Christian Nationalist (I say that endearingly) Josh Hawley's of the country and the neo-neo-con Rubio's. Stuck in the middle will be the MAGA-by-convenience Vances, Hegseths and Patels. The problem with the latter group is that they never actually had a durable or deep political theory to begin with. They're essentially right leaning opportunists.
I worry about the intellectual and "formal" (if that's the right term ... perhaps "institutional") backbone of the GOP. Close political watchers are aware of the current case of Steve Daines, Senator from Montana.
Daines was elected as a Republican Senator in a State that had been solid blue since the 1980s (Montana has a weird union history). During the Biden Admin, he was the head of the Republican Senate Reelection Campaign. His job was to flip the Senate for the Republicans in 2024. He did that, including hand recruiting the other Senator from Montana, Tim Sheehy, who unseated Jon Tester, a Montana native who had been a Democrat Senator since 2007.
After such a successful time at the head of the NRSC, Daines was expected to, perhaps, join the 2024 Trump Admin. At the very least, he could be chair of any committee he wanted. What did he choose?
To retire.
Unexpectedly in March, Daines announced he wouldn't file to run for re-election in what promised to be an absolute Sunday stroll back into his Senate seat.
Daines never grabbed a lot of headline attention but was quietly very influential and a prolific fundraiser. He was also a dyed in the wool Regan era conservative.
Speculating, I wonder if folks like Daines see that MAGA 2.0 is hurdling towards a crack up. Mid-terms are looking bad, although perhaps not as apocalyptic as once thought. But, beyond that, 2028 is looking to potentially setup Little Marco to get down and dirty with J.D. Vance. Is that the divorce that kills the party? Who knows, but I'd bet people like Daines have a strong opinion.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
The Gender-Swapped and all Minority Remake of MeToo is Really Good
A J.P. Morgan executive is being sued by a former junior employee for allegedly saying hilarious shit like this. If there were merits to the case, it would be comic book levels of sexual harassment. Literal "cringey HR video" remarks.
Unfortunately, most of finance twitter has already come to the conclusion that the allegations are highly or totally fabricated at worse and, at best, that there was a mutually consensual affair that the junior employee, since fired, is trying to use to legally extort settlement money.
Here's the fun twist; the executive is female, of white-and-something else origin, and the alleged victim is a male of likely southeast asian or, maybe, arab origin.
This is mostly a flavor-of-the-week alleged sex scandal that will be forgotten quickly. But the culture war implications are fun if you list them out;
- Is this a case of male's trying to leverage the privilege from below (men always assume they have the right etc.)?
- Was this "internalized toxic masculinity" that evidences the corruption of high finance (women are wonderful)?
- Is this a cooky double-reverse-Rachel-Dolezal situation?
- Are we kink shaming a master-dom BDSM relationship that simply had full 24/7 commitment to roles? Are we the real problem?
Of course I am being tongue-in-cheek here because this is goofy tabloid nonsense. But goofy tabloid nonsense can have second and third order impact. If the ghost-of-the-ghost of MeToo now has junior male employees fabricating or embellishing facts to try to rend some money out of corporations, at what point do those corporations, and their legal departments, and courts, start to get fatigued of these annoyances? Do we see something coming-full-circle where off-color sexual jokes are de facto re-permitted in work environments because "everyone does them, and if you can't deal with them, you probably shouldn't be working here?"
On this one, I'm in the Nothing Ever Changes camp. MeToo both nailed a few actual monsters (Weinstein, Bacon, Matt Lauer) and caused thousands of anonymous, awkward men permanent career damage. Something something trolley problems. MeToo did not cause a fundamental shift in workplace "gender relations."
"I bet your little Asian, fish head, wife doesn't have these cannons."
AI will never replace this level of art.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
I think this is, sadly, more probable than not.
Arlington County, Virginia, 2036:
The "White Girl Buses", manned by former Blackwater security, roll in sequence up Wilson Boulevard in Clarendon for the nightly 7:30pm run to Whole Foods. The armed men spill off the bus and cordon off the parking lot. A sergeant dispatches a squad to hastily speed-cuff a few military age somali males who have strayed too far from Seven Corners.
15 minutes 38 minutes later, as Rebecca, Becky, Becca, and Ashlaighyeh re-embark on the security bus with their paper boxes (recycled of course) full of pad thai, one of them flips a crinkled old $100 bill to the Guatemalan street cleaner who bags the liquid shit of their golden-doodle-pug breed. "Gross-eyy-ahhhsss!" she wails, waving at him like he's deaf.
Cain, the security chief for the convoy, radios as the busses pull off; "Got some skinnys by the 66 on-ramp near Ballston that look sporty. Can we get a QRF to do a sweep?"
"Palantir recon already has them marked for a UAV sortie. It's logged." Comes the distorted reply. Cain doesn't even bother to respond. The bus hits a pothole and one of the newer guys loses his balance for a moment, his left hip knocking Becca's dinner box off her lap on, harmlessly, onto the seat next to her.
"Sorry, ma'am" he offers.
"It's like ...... whatever." She says.
Cain thinks about his home in Morgantown. 17 more days until I'm off rotation.
Thank God for redistricting.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
I had ChatGPT find some information
Well, no, you didn't.
You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.
The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college.
Feature, not a bug. Federalist 10 does a better job of laying out the argument than I can, but my best attempt is that factions are inevitable and factions look out for themselves. Factions will often try to pass laws that are bad not only for their opponents, but for the polity at large and that infringe upon the rights of individuals.
If you're after a "pure" majority rule democracy with no checks and balances, you're going to have a bad time. It's just a matter of when it is your turn in the barrel, not if.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I appreciate the effortful response and like your analysis.
My WTF-age was mostly about clips like this
I would have to think twice about investing in a weapon .... this is defense, you know ... more defensive.
Bruh.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
Yep.
Their commercial work is stranger to me. I know that, at one point, they had some bad interactions with big companies and got shown the door but, of late, their commercial work has picked up. This, however, may just be on the back of general AI hype.
Having done both Federal and Commercial work, there's an interesting cultural split; Federal agencies don't mind paying you for 5, 10, 20+ years so long as your hourly rates and line item expenses are "reasonable." Commercial firms generally want you to GTFO as fast as possible, but don't even blink at $600 / hr for a 25 year old writing code.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I think the macro answer is kind of alarming.
We know that, stretching back to about 2014 through to the present, a disproportionate source of growth in core stock indicies like the SP500 has been tech stocks. Wall Street loves growth. The retail story is that FAANG etc. has created all of these wonderful new innovations and so, wouldn't you know it, of course they're driving economic growth.
My own (poorly researched) pet theory is that there was no alternative. Here's the BLS list of output by major sector of the economy.
"Tech" broadly speaking is hidden in a couple different areas here; Information, Professional services, Management. I don't think that matters. What does is that most of the other large categories are highly, highly regulated; finance, health care, education, utilities, construction, education. Government itself is a major "contributor" to the economy. The two large "trade" sectors mostly reference both everyday and durable goods that people just buy through the course of life; laundry detergent and food all the way up to cars and refrigerators.
So, my theory boils down to; it was so hard to really grow in any non-tech industry after 2008 because of regulatory burdens stretching back to the early 1970s, that the only place for investors to put their money (and, remember, money was cheap for a long time after 2008) was in "tech" because it was, and still largely is, un- or under-regulated. This may be changing with AI hype, but the theory, I think, isn't totally without merit.
Some of those tech investments were legitimate and make real money. Others were goofy nonsense that still make negative money to this day. But, when there's no alternative (and rising inflation (!)) you have to play the game even if it's a very dumb one.
Where this gets more shitty is that employment appears to be growing most in sectors that are heavily tied to gov't spending. Healthcare, education, and gov't. To me, it sort of looks like somewhere around 20% of "professional" workers are making their living through a complicated chutes-and-ladders rearrangement of tax dollars.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
the CEO of one of the most important companies.
Citation needed.
Palantir is a very valuable company in the strict dollars and cents ... sense, but I don't know how "important" they are in the sense of a Ford, General Electric, US Steel, IBM, Standard Oil etc. Even within the post 2008 tech world, I wouldn't put them in front of Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the legacies-turned-cool-again Apple and Microsoft.
To shed some light on what Palantir actually does; they have a data "platfrom" that combines a bunch of open source technologies with their own tooling and integration layer. To be fair to them, this isn't something that anyone could vibe code. A lot of it is hard won engineering knowledge.
Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness -- it's kind of a "do anything" platfrom. Which sounds fun and cool and amazing until you consider that it does nothing out of the box. A big BIG part of Palantir is a role called "the forward deployed engineer." This is a software engineer - a team of them, usually - that sits on site with customers and builds, within the Palantir platform, purpose based "applications." Once the app is up and running, the Forward Deployed Engineers also, sometimes, try to "build back in" whatever they just built into the core Palantir platform.
Sound confusing and kind like a shitty way to do software development? You're not wrong. The Federal market loves this because it's how they've done software for ages -- by paying other people unending dollars to write it for them. The big Beltway Bandit firms like CACI, Booz Allen, Leidos, Deloitte Federal, and literally hundreds of smaller players do more or less what Palantir does, but with shittier marketing and without selling a required software license the way palantir does. All the way back in 2016, this got so bad that Palantir SUED THE ARMY for not giving them a "fair shot" at a contract.
(Again, to be totally generously fair to Palantir, protests over contract awards are common and all large players will use them from time to time. I think actually suing the gov't, however, was quite unusual).
An interesting note about Palantir is that several of its current and former executives are very publicly prominent, especially in tech spaces like X/Twitter and the podcast circuit. You have Alex Karp, Shyam Shankar, Trae Stephens (now at Anduril) among others. They capture a lot of attention and, frankly, a lot of what they say is smart and forward thinking. Still, you can't say the don't market themselves well. The cherry on top (crown jewel) is, of course, that Peter Thiel was an early Palantir investor and J.D. Vance worked for Thiel's investment company before running for Senate. In the good old fashioned DC tradition, a lot of Palantir's success has been because of Who They Know.
In terms of these culture war adjacent manifestos, I don't see how they make any sense from a risk/return perspective. Companies that get involved in culture war stuff often face blowback sooner or later without seeing much bottom or top line growth. If you're familiar with the hilarious tone-deaf "All In" podcast, you'll know that there's a tradition of Silicon Valley types thinking that because they're highly competent in one domain, they think they can easily use "first principles thinking" (what in the actual fuck?) to transfer that competency to another domain. Elon's Doge experiment was his flirtation.
I really like @bonsaii's comment below for a mixture of reasons.
Story time...
Several years ago (COVID, lol) I fled from a leafy suburb that had lost its damn mind. Previously, it was purple in the neo-lib/neo-con sense; while people were accepting of the gays, abortion, and whatnot, they wanted low taxes and weren't quite alright with the heavy-handed presence of gov't. Of course, COVID removed all of that reticence. Paired with George Floyd's Amazing Awokening Medicine Show, 2020-21 had masked Karens roaming the streets with the other members of the religious police to ensure that all Red Hat wearers, be they MAGA voters or Catholic Cardinals, were appropriately verbally pummeled for their lack of conviction to the One True Faith.
Being fully and permanently remote work and financial quite mobile, I exited my lease and started a new one sight unseen in a small town in a deep red area of my state about 90 minutes away. The place I rented then was quite nice on its own. A solo developer had bought up a foreclosed house at a bargain price and so could put in real money for renovations and upgrades while keeping the rent roughly in an acceptable range for the area. To be sure, however, he was targeting re-locating out of towners like me and COVID turned into somewhat of a bonanza for him.
The neighborhood within which my new pad was located was .... "transitioning." Spoiler alert, it still hasn't finished.
More honestly and directly, the neighborhood was shitty although not exactly unsafe in terms of humans. It was mixed country black and redneck white with a literal dividing avenue. The residents were a mix of about three or four groups depending on how you count; elderly black and white folks who had been living in the town for 30+ years and never left. Some of them were now living in quite large and legitimately "historic" homes too big for their needs. Others had a rotating cast of grown children, grown grand-children, nieces, nehphews, and boyfriends and girlfriends rotating in and out. The second group was a corps of local rednecks who moved into the town from the county when the housing prices got attractive. This group was the most aesthetically blighted; yards (on less than 1 acre plots) full of BBQ grills, kids toys, kiddie pools and adult hottubs, abandoned outdoor projects, broken down motorcycles and cars. The final group was magical junkies. Roughly every fifth house was in a state of disrepair and inhabited by heavily tattooed and questionably skinny men and women below forty and of all races. Color my suspicious that they were related. My theory is that one "pilgrim" junkie would inherit a home from a relative, move into it after that relative died or was relocated to a senior living center, and then gradually invite their junkie friends to flop. These places had tin foil and garbage bags on the windows, broken roofs, security cameras (?!) and ..... dogs.
And so did the rednecks.
(A short but important tangent)
I grew up in a very safe suburb that had lots of dogs. But these were suburban dogs. Lots of golden retrievers and black labs. Every dog, even from the "mean" breeds (Dobermans, German Shepherds) had been picked up either from a breeder or that special kind of suburban shelter that only seems to have Sarah McLaughlin level pitiable dogs with the kindest of souls. No pitbulls. No problem dogs.
Therefore, my default approach to dogs has always been "Awesome! A Dog!"
In my new neighborhood, back in the turn of the decade, however, I quickly update my priors.
My nextdoor neighbor had a large Doberman he had named "Orion" because that's fucking cool, bro. The dog was constantly menacing anyone who got close to the yard. Which was everyone because, as I said, this was a clump of mostly .5 acre homes with small, fenced in yards. I never saw him leap over the fence, but I always assumed it was possible if he got riled up enough. The yard was full - full - of Orion's feces every day of the year. The owner simply didn't care to clean it up.
Down the street, at one of the junkie houses, was a pitbull mix of some sort. This was an evil dog. Though it was, thankfully, chained to a wall without exception, it still managed to kill several semi-stray cats in the neighborhood, another dog that had tempted fate by getting just a little too close, and mauled a pizza delivery man who got the address wrong and walked up to the front door without realizing the pitbull was under the porch.
Before any dog absolutists jump in with "those are both mean breads" the final example I'll use is one of a rather kind looking hound of some sort (he had the classic "baying" sound, which I still actually like). Although I never saw him actually harm another living thing, he was the worst harasser of the bunch. For some reason, he was permitted off leash constantly, albeit with a rather sadistic looking double shock collar on. He routinely pushed passers by into the street due to his aggressive stance and loud baying. It a lot of ways, he was scarier than the pitbull because of the incongruity of appearance to behavior. The pitbull was a very obvious murder machine. This hound looked like me might teach you life lessons, but then began schizophrenically wailing at you for no reason.
Challenges
The dog defenders out there will look at my little story and say "Well, obviously those owners are all incompetent. They are the problem, not the dogs!" And I do agree with this but only as far as it goes. I'm not holding dogs culpable in a legal or moral sense. I don't really think they have agency in the way we say humans have agency. I also know dog behavior can be shaped very well or very poorly early in the dogs life.
The problem is, past a certain point, I don't think the dogs can be "un-fucked-up." Sure, maybe with constant, daily interaction from hardcore dog re-trainers or something. But the overwhelming majority of fucked up dogs are simply timebombs. Eventually, they'll hurt someone or some other thing (cat, dog, squirrel, chicken etc.) And the correlation between people who have fucked up dogs and people who cannot be trusted to responsibility manage fucked up dogs is probably > 0.99. Thinking back to my own childhood in Suburbia, those families nearly universally prioritized safety and pleasantness and were highly conscientious of their neighbors. Therefore, any dog with even the hint of aggression wouldn't even be adopted, let alone tolerated.
But in the 'hood (such as it was) that pro-social consideration doesn't exist and so now you have these random violence machines in the hands of the careless, stupid, and self-absorbed.
Which has made me less sympathetic to dogs in general because I can't afford to be. I see them, sometimes, as uninsulated live wires. Yes, someone should be blamed for not doing their basic job with them long ago but, now, we have to turn off the power, remove the damaged section, and replace it with what is intrinsically far safer.
Implications
Some of these come dangerously close to violating a lot of my small c-conservative "the government should not do stuff" principles. But the common good interest of public safety, imho, totally and obviously outweighs it. Bad Dogs are like grenades with pulled pins and delayed fuses rolling around the street. After a bad mauling or bite, saying "this was an unavoidable tragedy!" is an epistemically bankrupt thing to say.
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