ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
Very possibly. They have copy/paste language, so it very well may be one of those where they grant cert on both questions and then have a variety of colloquies about whether there is any reason to interpret the same language differently. They may ultimately claim to punt on the Constitutional question, but my guess is that unless there is some form of "smoking gun" in the opinion for why they should interpret it differently, then I think the reasonable inference would be that we have significantly more certainty on the Constitutional question than we did before, and it significantly lowers the chance of a statute passing muster, either.
I would note that the only way they can really claim to punt on the Constitutional question would be if they rule against the gov't. They can't really rule for the gov't on the statutory question and then leave the Constitutional question unresolved. That's part of why they're likely to grant cert on both questions and from that point, there would be some chance of, "We're technically only resolving the statutory question against the gov't and leaving the Constitutional question open, but c'mon, it's gotta be 90+% that the Constitutional question with the exact same language will come out the same way."
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Agreed. I'd personally be completely fine with SCOTUS resolving the issue in favor of birthright citizenship, but in a way that is much more clear than the current mishmash of extremely old cases that are confusing. To me, the important part is that we get some clarity and certainty. I do hope that the number of people who are harmed in some way during the transient period between the EO and an eventual SCOTUS resolution is minimized, but I acknowledge that even if it is eventually resolved in their favor, there are likely to be some who are harmed in the transient period. With any luck, they'll settle the issue of what the ground rules are, and then it may be up to Congress to make tweaks, given the clarified underlying Constitutional law.
It's one of those few areas where I think the "Cases and Controversies" Clause is annoying. It's not enough that I would want to get rid of it, because it protects the courts from many many other issues that would be a waste of time, but it's one of the few where I would have really really loved if they could have just given an "advisory" opinion on the matter rather than having to wait until something like an EO/statute was passed to force the issue into the courts. So even if I don't necessarily like the EO, I don't think there was really any other way to get a very clear legal resolution of the matter, and since I prefer having the clarity significantly over having the issue always lurking in the background, I weakly support it, with hopes that things like TROs can mitigate most issues until a ruling comes out.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).
It will be quite the inconvenience to some and drive separations. There are multiple different types of situations. There are the folks who live right around the corner from the office, but they only go in one day a week or are even on full remote for whatever reason. Those folks will be inconvenienced, but they'll just do it; only a very few will actually leave. Other folks live halfway across the country from their agency's official locations. Perhaps the agency has other interests in that area, but hasn't set up an official office building, because they only want a small number of folks there. I've heard of some people whose remote work was literally a retention deal - their spouse got a job elsewhere, and they could do their job perfectly fine remotely, so they moved halfway across the country. This could basically force them to decide who is going to have to quit which job and whether they want to pick up and move again. Perhaps still an 'inconvenience', but a pretty significant one. The people who are likely to actually leave are these folks, and it's unclear to me which strata that's going to primarily affect.
One friend of ours doesn't work for the gov't, and she's not remote; she's hybrid. She was telling us about her situation, and it's actually dumb for her to have to go in to work, because she's in a global role, and the vast vast majority of the people she works with on a regular basis aren't local anyway. She commutes in to work, time that, let's be honest, she would normally spend working on the days that she stays home, just to sit in her closed office at work and be on Teams meetings with people from different countries all day. Some of her coworkers are remote, and yeah, they'd probably just drive those folks off to different companies if they said, "Sure, we told you that you could be remote, so you bought a house and set up roots and stuff, but now we're going to demand that you move halfway across the country so that you can sit in Teams meetings all day from here instead of there."
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Somehow that lack of temporary and local allegiance and related jurisdiction doesn't mean that courts actually lack jurisdiction though (such as for criminal prosecutions) even though that seems like the take The Schooner Exchange would imply.
Right, because The Schooner Exchange doesn't actually imply that. There is a "when" there and an explanation about the implied license.
If the local and temporary allegiance is not intertwined with the jurisdiction of courts for the prosecution of criminal matters where comes the concern about the lack of such allegiance being dangerous to society?
One might say that the laws are being subject to continual infraction, ya know, when people without political allegiance or an implied license commit infractions of the laws by entering the country illegally.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
The news is atwitter with talk of an EO on birthright citizenship. It's supposed to be signed today. I haven't seen a draft text yet, so part of this is so that I hopefully get a red notification when someone sees it and can link it here. The other part is to look back to my long long ago comment at the old old old place, with slight modification, since I'm pulling it out of the context of a conversation. The background is that the case that everyone points to concerning birthright citizenship is Wong Kim Ark. It's messy, because Constitutional law is very weird and particular when it comes to Indian tribes (now usually called "native", but at the time, they were called Indian, so I'm not going to bother going and replacing it out of some modern PC-ness). The Indian tribes were considered "separate sovereigns" at the time, which extra muddies the historical water, and that was the backdrop for a fair amount of their comparative analysis.
I know it's annoying, but I'm in single blockquotes; quoting opinions is in double blockquotes, and opinions quoting other opinions is in triple block quote:
[One can] call separate sovereignty a legal fiction that was discarded by statute (though I really don’t think that’s entirely the case, given the steady stream of Court cases on the matter; just the citizenship question was discarded), but this does have import nonetheless for the meaning of 14A. In fact, Wong Kim Ark specifically called this out as a particular category, but basically just to say, “Indians are weird, yo.” They discussed SCOTUS precedent on Indians:
The only adjudication that has been made by this court upon the meaning of the clause, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” in the leading provision of the Fourteenth Amendment is Elk v. Wilkins, in which it was decided that an Indian born a member of one of the Indian tribes within the United States, which still existed and was recognized as an Indian tribe by the United States, who had voluntarily separated himself from his tribe and taken up his residence among the white citizens of a State but who did not appear to have been naturalized, or taxed, or in any way recognized or treated as a citizen either by the United States or by the State, was not a citizen of the United States, as a “person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” within the meaning of the clause in question.
That decision was placed upon the grounds that the meaning of those words was
“not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance;”
that, by the Constitution, as originally established, “Indians not taxed” were excluded from the persons according to whose numbers representatives in Congress and direct taxes were apportioned among the several States, and Congress was empowered to regulate commerce not only “with foreign nations” and among the several States, but “with the Indian tribes;” that the Indian tribes, being within the territorial limits of the United States, were not, strictly speaking, foreign States, but were alien nations, distinct political communities, the members of which owed immediate allegiance to their several tribes and were not part of the people of the United States; that the alien and dependent condition of the members of one of those tribes could not be put off at their own will without the action or assent of the United States, and that they were never deemed citizens except when naturalized, collectively or individually, under explicit provisions of a treaty, or of an act of Congress; and therefore that
“Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of, and owing immediate allegiance to, one of the Indian tribes (an alien, though dependent, power), although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more ‘born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.”
And it was observed that the language used in defining citizenship in the first section of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, by the very Congress which framed the Fourteenth Amendment, was “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.”
Then, they discuss the dissent in Elk v. Wilkins, which they half seem to quote in favor of their expansive reading of jus soli and half say, “Ah, but Elk v. Wilkins was just about Indians, and they’re weird, so they don’t matter.” (Note: the dissent in question was written by Justice Harlan, who signed onto the dissent in Wong Kim Ark, too.) Ultimately, they just kind of move on and drag along an extra exception:
The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions: the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. [emphasis added]
In sum, it’s really not as simple as, “You can be detained, therefore you’re ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’.” In fact, it’s very messy. John Elk was born on a reservation, but the case had approximately nothing to do with physical location. I’m not sure that anyone would think that it would have come out differently if his parents had left the reservation briefly to, say, have his birth in a particular hospital. Further, in his adult life, he surely could be arrested by State authorities. It was entirely about political allegiance. And much of Wong Kim Ark discusses political allegiance, as well. AFAICT, the rule they embraced was, “Political allegiance has something to do with it, but we think that the only cases that are clear are foreign ministers (not consuls, though, in yet another strange nod to the type of criminal jurisdiction that you were referring to) and invaders… oh, and Indians are weird, yo.” Were there reasons for the court to think that the case in front of them should not be excepted? They cite The Schooner Exchange v. M’Faddon:
The reasons for not allowing to other aliens exemption “from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found” were stated as follows:
When private individuals of one nation spread themselves through another as business or caprice may direct, mingling indiscriminately with the inhabitants of that other, or when merchant vessels enter for the purposes of trade, it would be obviously inconvenient and dangerous to society, and would subject the laws to continual infraction and the government to degradation, if such individuals or merchants did not owe temporary and local allegiance, and were not amenable to the jurisdiction of the country. Nor can the foreign sovereign have any motive for wishing such exemption. His subjects thus passing into foreign counties are not employed by him, nor are they engaged in national pursuits. Consequently there are powerful motives for not exempting persons of this description from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found, and no one motive for requiring it. The implied license, therefore, under which they enter can never be construed to grant such exemption.
In short, the judgment in the case of The Exchange declared, as incontrovertible principles, that the jurisdiction of every nation within its own territory is exclusive and absolute, and is susceptible of no limitation not imposed by the nation itself; that all exceptions to its full and absolute territorial jurisdiction must be traced up to its own consent, express or implied; that, upon its consent to cede, or to waive the exercise of, a part of its territorial jurisdiction rest the exemptions from that jurisdiction of foreign sovereigns or their armies entering its territory with its permission, and of their foreign ministers and public ships of war, and that the implied license under which private individuals of another nation enter the territory and mingle indiscriminately with its inhabitants for purposes of business or pleasure can never be construed to grant to them an exemption from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found.
You can start to see how there might be room here. There’s still a linkage between jurisdiction and allegiance, but it’s not entirely clear how it operates in all cases. They’re imputing a temporary allegiance to common travelers, but even this stems from “the implied license under which they enter”. It’s squishy. There are indicators that go the other way, too.
Further, I should note that the majority opinion was clear about the fact that they were engaging in a common law approach to this question (while taking some guidance from the above-quoted statute using the language “not subject to any foreign power”). There’s a lot of squishy room here, which is why folks ... are trying to make the comparison with invaders – he’s essentially saying, “We recognized two cases that were clearly problematic from the perspective of political allegiance; I think this a third.” And I’m not sure that there’s any super knockdown legal argument against that. In fact, if faced with a statute saying, “Illegal aliens are on this side of the political allegiance line,” rather than engaging purely in a common law exercise, I’m not sure how the Wong Kim Ark Court goes. (They had a statute saying that he couldn’t be naturalized, but that’s clearly different.)
A mere executive order may not be enough. I'm sure folks are furiously looking into statutes to figure out if there is anything stronger somewhere that can be played against an EO. I'm sure the details of the text of a forthcoming EO will matter a lot. But I really wonder how this argument is going to go and if Trump will have someone (like Jonathan Mitchell) who can get steeped enough in this legal niche to put together an argument along these lines. Just because the oral argument at SCOTUS would be divine. If they can actually dig all the way down to The Exchange in order to say that black letter precedent actually only covers folks who had an "implied license" when they entered. They could argue that if you were here legally, under an implied license, even just a tourist visa, then yes, your child born on US soil is a US citizen... but if you entered illegally, with no implied license whatsoever, then you simply don't make the cut.
I have little dog in the fight for which way SCOTUS comes out; there are tradeoffs either way. I just really really want these mushy Consitutional issues brought to light. I want it to be clear how mushy it is, and for SCOTUS to do the work of digging all the way back into the depths of the mush in order to say something now. They might hack it together and skim over the top, but ya know what? I almost wouldn't even care. If the argument is even just made, brought to the fore, it would be wild and exciting for a Constitutional law nerd. I would absolutely prefer a statute, just because it gives fewer possible procedural outs and makes it more likely that they have to dig deep into the history (not because I actually want such a statute to be law), but even with just an EO, mayyyyyybe there's a chance?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I didn't dwell on it. Perhaps I should have. I didn't want to let my mind veer too heavily into the mire of the pure power games. I only briefly touched on it:
It is an acknowledgement that there can be power in tech, and to many, where there is power, there is something to be seized.
So, yes, to some... perhaps even "many", as I put it, it is purely a matter of exerting partisan power. I was shooting for more of a steelman. An "even if you actually care about the things you're saying..." and remarking on how even then, they can't even get basic terminology right and would instead find themselves in a mire. So perhaps you have made un-Straussian what might have been the Straussian reading of my comment.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I vaguely recall hearing (I think from Russ Roberts on EconTalk) that there is some debate in Jewish communities about whether belief in god is necessary for practicing Judaism. I vaguely recall him saying something about how there is no command in the Hebrew bible that people need to believe. I haven't done a whole lot of digging in to these schools of thought, so I don't really know if there are any communities like this or what they're like.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I would shorthand it as, "If we don't heavily regulate this tech, possibly to the point of completely smothering it in the cradle, it won't just be bad; it'll destroy us."
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I'm sure there were some people who were suspicious, but for many years, they just lost. Some folks embody the prevailing perspective in folks like Ira Magaziner (a few examples). It resulted in policies and even laws like Section 230. It was chipped away at in many ways, some good recounting here. It really was a thing, with hopes of both domestic and foreign benefits; Peter Singer said:
There was this wave of techno optimism, and it probably hits its highest point during the Arab Spring, where the Internet is being credited for unleashing the forces of freedom and you literally have people in Egypt naming their children after Facebook or calling them "Facebook."
Lots of people, even boomers like Magaziner (born one year after Donald Trump), thought it was a panacea that could basically not be touched.
Vibe-Changes and the Still-Misunderstood Freedom of the Press
Some headlines have formed around Biden's Farewell Address and his invocation of the phrase "tech-industrial complex". From the speech:
It is also clear that American leadership in technology is unparalleled, an unparalleled source of innovation that can transform lives. We see the same dangers in the concentration of technology, power and wealth.
You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
For those of us who are old enough, this typifies a yuge vibe change from the "90s consensus" that tech is magic, that it's a democratizing force, that it can only do good in the world, and that the only thing that can possibly stop the progress of history toward utopia would be if government even put one single iota of regulation on it. Of course, this is not a vibe change that happened overnight. A lot has happened over the years. Insane proliferation of technology and connected devices, colossal increases in number of users and usage rates, displacement and reorientation of entire industries. With that came the shift from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0", and folks can debate whether "Web 3.0" has crashed and burned ten feet off the launchpad or whether it's still just slowly picking up steam. With the rise of bitcoin making it easy to cash out on internet crime, there are probably only a few ideological holdouts who still think that it cannot possibly be touched or that code is law or whatever.
So, glossing over mountains of events that have happened in the past 20+ years, what are the President's biggest concerns?
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.
Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy, and our security, our society. For humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, A.I. could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation. We must make sure A.I. is safe and trustworthy and good for all humankind.
In the age of A.I., it’s more important than ever that the people must govern. And as the Land of Liberty, America — not China — must lead the world in the development of A.I.
I'll start with AI, only to quickly drop it. No one here needs a retread of those debates, which are all too familiar. I'll only call attention to the same point as above - the vibe is completely opposed to a complete hands off, let it be what it be, surely it will be a good democratizing force vibe. Almost no one thinks that AI code is law, that if, say, a public university RLHF'ed their way into getting a bot to discriminate against white people or conservatives or whatever, then that's just how the world is and that nothing can be done, hands off the tech. The AI doomers are only an extreme example of how completely antiquated the old view is.
Similarly, for the main event, the President is very concerned about the core function of "information technology", which is to convey information. Make no mistake, this is a broadside on the core conception of what this stuff does, and it cannot be easily excised in some way. It is an acknowledgement that there can be power in tech, and to many, where there is power, there is something to be seized.
One of those industries that holds significant power and which has been disrupted and displaced several times in history is the press. The press, itself, was a disruptive technology, significantly affecting the old ways of scrolls, papyrus, stone carvings, etc. We've seen the rise of radio and television before the internet. With that, I would like to once again claim that this view of freedom of the press gets the history entirely backwards:
That is, for centuries after the printing press was created, governments around the world went to great lengths to control its use. Examples are found in Acemoğlu and Robinson. Private entities or companies would operate a printing press, and regular people could go interact with these operators in sort of a regular way; say, if they wanted to print up a pamphlet to hand out about their views or a newspaper or something, they would go to the printer, submit what they wanted to have printed, pay them however much money, then come back and receive their product after it was printed. Much the same as today, you could say that those private entities had some rights of their own to do business, and they might refuse to print something if they really disagreed with it (they didn't have to bake the cake or make the website; could ban the local Alex Jones, or whatever analogy you want). So what did governments do? They pressured press operators to adopt criteria that the government found favorable. Maybe they'd even issue local monopolies and say that only so-and-so had the right to run a press in a particular area. Of course, the guys they picked always somehow knew what sets of views they needed to have (and which they needed to reject to print) in order to keep their license and continue making bank.
As countries became more liberal democratic, they realized that this was a problem. Some countries kept the monopolies, but passed pretty strict non-discrimination laws, saying that they had to just print whatever the customers wanted; no letting pro-monarchists print their pamphlets and rejecting revolutionary pamphlets. Others, like the US, passed freedom of the press provisions, simply saying that the government needed to stay TF away from press operators; no monopolies, no threats of shutting them down if they don't toe the party line, just leave
Britneypress operators alone. All of them. Whoever wanted to just buy a press and print.
So therein lies the contradiction. One cannot simply leave the entire internet alone; extorting someone via IP is not conceptually different than doing so by voice. But gobs and gobs of the core purpose of the internet is to simply convey information, as one would have in the past by going to the local printer and then handing out pamphlets. It seems that people really want to break this centuries old consensus, just like how the 90s consensus has crumbled. What's messed up about it is that they want to break that consensus in the name of that consensus. It's as if since no one seems to remember what a physical printing press is, you can just call whatever you want "the free press", and no one will bat an eye.
Is there a steelman? Possibly. The President talked about editing, facts, and lies. Perhaps one can just slightly tweak his speech to say, "Libel law is crumbling," and that fixes the glitch. Indeed, it would be conceptually coherent this way, but who's going to raise their hand to sign up for that? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? The nightmare of trying to wade through concepts of "misinformation", "disinformation", "malinformation", etc. is too scary, and the well is too poisoned to have any hope of bipartisan agreement to bring libel law up to the task of the internet. In fact, even just this morning, I listened to the oral argument from a case that was in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, where the entire issue was the fine-grained distinction between a "false statement" and one that is "misleading but not false". These arguments happen, probably have to happen sometimes, but are, for the most part, relatively rare. Anyone who wants to Make Libel Law Great Again in order to "fix" the internet has a monumental task in front of them. I don't know how they'd do it. The only thing I know is that continuing to propagate the misinformation that this is about "the free press" is going to occasionally cause me to write a far-too-long, far-too-annoyed comment.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
You are wording this as if
I would say that you are inferring it, instead. Everything you've presented is compatible with what I wrote. You described a plausible motivation for why such a person might take such a strategy.
...there is one quick check one can do, though.
surely a drawn-out sadistic public spectacle feeds the bloodthirst more than sheepish and clinical backroom euthanasia
One can simply ask such a person how they would feel about something like the nitrogen hypoxia room method I mentioned.1 Or to describe what they think would be the most sheepish, clinical, backroom euthanasia possible. Their answer (or non-answer) will likely be revelatory of their beliefs and views. It is left as an exercise to the reader to gather data and estimate relative population fractions.
1 - Could even go all Jewish on it and have the room be equipped with a fully autonomous random timer with some expectations on frequency so "no one is pushing the button"; could even just have no one watching the room at all if you want; could just come back to the room after some specified waiting period with some certain or almost certain probability that the deed was done. How sheepish can you come up with? Do you think your solution can satisfy folks who are motivated as you describe?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Nifty. Will you go one step further and say that all those pesky court rulings that were based on an obviously faulty premise the entire time should just be overturned?
Hlynka-watch. Multi-agent environment.
There are at least two other relevant players exerting agency here. First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.
Now, once they've gotten the focus onto methods of execution, they can focus on any extreme outliers. If there's even a 0.01% chance that someone will have an adverse reaction to something in some way, feel any anxiety or pain above the typical level, they latch onto it. They treat it like it's "possibly" the rule rather than the exception. They don't ever directly claim that it is such; they just say that perhaps sometimes things go poorly and hope the reader imagines statistics that aren't really plausible. See also arguments about unarmed black men being killed by police, abortion due to rape, or the focus on complications in the operating room preventing medical providers from providing prices.
The other relevant players are the executees. They don't want to die; this is only human. If they are aware that it is coming, they likely will have some amount of anxiety or negative psychological affect, and this may naturally lead them to struggle in any way possible in what may or may not be a vain hope that someone will make it stop.
Now back to the folks who are against the death penalty in principle. It takes no effort at all for them to interpret any outward sign of struggle as pain or whathaveyou. When Alabama used nitrogen hypoxia, a method that is used in Canada for doctor-assisted suicide specifically because it is so gentle, peaceful, and low risk1, you saw it all on display. An executee didn't want to die and knew he was going to die, so he struggled. Onlookers who don't like the death penalty can interpret that as something going wrong, pain, or whatever. So they write about how terrible it was and how everything must have gone so wrong compared to what they expected.
So unless you can win the argument of, "Yes, people may choose to struggle against their execution, even when there is no pain being imposed, and everyone just has to accept that and shut up about it," this is the problem that pro-death-penalty people have to solve. Unfortunately, the typical solutions to that are actually pretty ugly. See also ISIS, who would perform many mock executions that they wouldn't go through with, so that the executees would simply lose the will to put up a struggle every time, and hopefully they wouldn't realize which one was the real one in time to turn it back on. (Also heavy drugs; they definitely used heavy drugs which wouldn't be acceptable in the US.)
There are other ways to get around this, modifying your own protocol. Put someone in a room where you control the air content. They can even know that this is "the death room". Maybe they'll jump around and scream and put on a show, but your task would be to be able to clearly demonstrate to observers that during that time, they are absolutely receiving 100% pure, regular air, so that it is only a show, not any sort of 'execution gone wrong'. Then, when they've given up or maybe even gone to sleep or something, you turn on invisible, odorless gas, letting people observe that nothing wildly obviously painful occurred. Even if you did this, it is almost assured that the anti-death-penalty people would yet again move the goalposts, saying that it's not about the pain, it's about the psychological effects of however long they're in the room before they die, knowing that they're going to die in that room. There will always be a new set of goalposts and always a new impossible 'problem' that one has to solve.
It really is one of those, "JUST FUCKING TELL US HOW WE'RE ALLOWED TO EXECUTE PEOPLE." In a bizarro but hilarious world, the "King" would round up all of the most ardent opponents, lock them in a room, and say, "You're not allowed to come out until you tell us which method is the best method according to you. 'No method' is not an answer."
1 - You can see an example of the typical affects of hypoxia here. People report feeling perfectly fine and capable. My understanding is that even after the event, if you ask them to reflect on it, they think that everything was just fine and that they were perfectly fine; it's only when they go back and look at their own video that they're like, "WOW! I had no idea that it affected me like that!"
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Others have hopefully properly warned you off from becoming a day trader, YOLOing on 0days and HODLing TVIX. As for "modern finance, investments, banking, markets, financial regulations," a couple things I would recommend are Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg and Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money. They're not what you would get if you pounded the textbooks, but they cover a pretty wide array of random happenings, at which point, they dig in enough for you to get a sense for how such folks think. Then, if there are any particular areas you're interested in, you at least have some of the right terminology to help you dive in more. They're also both hilarious.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
A good thought experiment I heard from Russ Roberts to help think about the tradeoffs involved is to consider the extreme possibilities. On one end, we could extend open market/active trading hours to be 24/7/365. On the other end, we could just have one market at one moment each day, say, everyone brings their orders at exactly noon every day, all the orders that can get filled, do, and then they go home until the next day. I don't really have all that much of a personal opinion, but it helps one think about possible tradeoffs.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I'm sure there will be infinite variations on "true communism DEI has never been tried".
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
One thing that is important to keep in mind is that there was a little cottage industry in the academic literature that strained to try to prove that diversity initiatives were actually supported by a simple business case, that increasing diversity would increase performance and increase profits. There were plenty of lit spats about such claims. But some folks still believe genericized versions of it.
The kind of funny thing is that a lot of those same people are the ones who are now saying that these companies are cutting such programs now just to make more money. If one truly believes that DEI programs increase performance/profits, then they should believe that cutting DEI programs decreases performance/profits. Thus undercutting at least one of their two rationales.
One would think that some set of these large companies who adopted such programs ≅4yrs ago would have seen their performance indicators and profits taking off. They'd be saying, "We can't cut this; it would cost us too much money." Instead, I think the much more likely interpretation is the one that is supported by the current claims, not the former claims - lots of companies adopted these programs in the wake of George Floyd; some were just trying to play the PR game, others may have legitimately believed the predictions of increased performance/profits. ≅4yrs later, they've seen that the magical increased performance/profit simply hasn't materialized, the political pressure is decreased, and they now, indeed, want to save some money.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I think a lot in here depends on how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces... and how much ability they have to alter their internal processes. I imagine there are a variety of answers for the many, many agencies in question.
I've heard legends of a head of an agency taking a huge, 500+ page binder of rules, policies, and procedures to his bureaucratic overlords (plenty of agencies are subordinate agencies), basically begging for some of the constraints to be lifted and other authorities to be delegated down. Many hindrances come from other bureaucrats. I don't know if I'd call this a third axis or a part of the second axis.
The gold standard of have-to-dos are statutes and judicial rulings. I think most everything else is flexible... if you can get it to the right high-level bureaucrat or political appointee to sign off on it. I have to imagine that, like any sufficiently sizable company with loads of legacy internal 'rules', some of them just get conveniently forgotten anyway, unless some top-floor Joe gets a bee in his bonnet about it. So the question is what does the ratio of have-to-dos to flexible look like for different agencies? Of course, this plays into Scott's point; the measurement here is difficult - and different from just counting the number of bureaucrats.
Like, what happens when FDA staff slow-roll you because
I think that goes back to how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces. This is picking a different point on the 'responsiveness to political forces' scale.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I doubt Apple ever officially used those words, because it is dumb. But all sorts of tech industry/press folks say variations on the theme. The link I gave to the CKV/"AKV" debate was a back-and-forth with people who are still very prominent, who were absolutely actually claiming that it was technologically infeasible (to get there, you need to add certain qualifiers as to what "it" is). Reading that whole back and forth is probably the most useful for understanding where people try to draw the battle lines.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
That is a claim, but it's in a different debate. One is, "The government wants Apple to get into this existing phone right here, right now." The other is, "The government is considering passing a law that would require Apple to build future devices which would allow them to perform searches." I don't think anything that anyone has said so far in this thread is really relevant for the first debate; I certainly haven't said anything about that. It's the latter debate that is the context for so many of the poor applications of, "...but that's technologically infeasible!"
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
The encryption methods seem like they should be far more expensive than Apple is letting on
Oh, I would read it differently. I think they're letting on that it's pretty expensive, which is why they're doing all the mess with sharding and DP.
Are the encryption keys different per-device? If so, how do they avoid needing a separate database per device?
My understanding of BFV is that when the device does its keygen (unique for each query, I assume), it produces and then passes an "evaluation key" as part of the public key. One has to design the scheme so that there is sufficient expressivity in the set of evaluation functions that can take in the evaluation key and perform the desired operations on the encrypted message. I don't believe this involves completely encrypting the entire database from scratch using the public key every time; it just requires running the same operations on the same underlying database, but with the evaluation key in the operations. They call out that it's important that the BFV scheme has many of the operations they want, expressible in, shall we say "evaluation key parameterized form".
I think a lot of the work in library building is essentially building up a set of these "evaluation key parameterized" operations. You have to start with extremely simple operations and then build your way up to more usable tools that are composed of those simple operations.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
“The fact checkers have just been too politically biased.”
Wild. As always, no one on the outside will know which folks are true believers and which are just weather vanes. Of course, I also note that every single specific item mentioned will reduce FB's costs (and including "civic content" will likely increase engagement and revenue).
Correct, if that is your only terminal value, a la Vance's "fire everyone with an odd/even SSN" approach. Any selection/self-selection process will have its own mix of results. For example, the odd/even SSNs will be totally random, up and down the chain. Versus, for the classic example, if you lower everyone's salary, then you're selecting out the people who have better alternatives and could perhaps be more productive elsewhere, leaving yourself with probably the lower-quality folks. Versus the Schedule F approach, which targeted higher-level, policy-making positions. Versus the Musk-at-Twitter approach, where he just personally made decisions based on code commits, likely selecting on some combination of gross code output and a subjective quality/value of code assessment. Versus, say, firing people based on recent performance ratings, which mostly just lets management get rid of the people they already didn't like. Every method has its own results.
Going after remote work is going to merely inconvenience the folks who live nearby but drive disproportionate separations from those who live far away for various reasons. As @atelier points out, one might have a competing terminal value that would drive someone to want almost the opposite of this policy, but a lot depends on what your terminal values look like. My guess is that, unlike the Schedule F approach or atelier's idea, this is likely to mostly impact lower-level folks who weren't "in the club" of the top-level policy-making folks. Those folks are mostly all located pretty close, because 1) until COVID, they had to be, and 2) they're likely older and further in their career (thus higher level management) and had already established roots there and likely had less incentive to move in the last few years. This is likely to chip away at the raw numbers, but have very little impact on the power bases of the deep state.
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