ControlsFreak
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ControlsFreak
1yr ago
This is relevant to much of the discussion here.
Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and used it to voice his own political and ideological views without a filter, President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight to go after him. During a press conference at the White House, President Biden stood at a podium adorned with the official seal of the President of the United States, and expressed his view that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.”1 When pressed by a reporter to explain how the government would look into Elon Musk, President Biden remarked: “There’s a lot of ways.”2 There certainly are. The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission adds itself to the growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses. I am not the first to notice a pattern here. Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that “the volume of government investigations into his businesses makes us wonder if the Biden Administration is targeting him for regulatory harassment.”3 After all, the editorial board added, Elon Musk has become “Progressive Enemy No. 1.” Today’s decision certainly fits the Biden Administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment. Indeed, the Commission’s decision today to revoke a 2020 award of $885 million to Elon Musk’s Starlink—an award that Starlink secured after agreeing to provide high-speed Internet service to over 640,000 rural homes and businesses across 35 states—is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.
Those are real agencies bringing real claims and making real administrative judgments that will be backed by the full force of the United States of America. They are also total bullshit and not real.
Tyler Cowen has a Conversation with Jennifer Pahika on Reforming Government
I will pull one little segment.
COWEN: If someone says, when it comes to regulatory reform, accountability is not the solution, it’s the problem, do you agree?
PAHLKA: Accountability is not the solution, it’s the problem?
COWEN: You put in accountability, everything has to be measured, everything has to have a process. It’s judicial review. Should we have less accountability in government?
PAHLKA: In a certain sense, I would agree with that. I don’t think in an absolute sense. I think the way that we structure accountability is very flawed. I think we are holding public servants essentially accountable to metrics that are not proxies for real outcomes that people care about. When you have a very high focus on accountability that is really about fidelity to procedure and process instead of to the actual outcome, that’s not accountability.
COWEN: Outcomes are heterogeneous, they’re tricky, they’re long term. When you ask people to measure, you end up with a lot more emphasis on process than you want. So, maybe accountability is the problem. To say accountability for outcomes — that’s just going to morph into accountability for process. That’s what I observe, even in private companies. Big, successful, profitable private companies that we’re all familiar with — they have the same problem, as I’m sure you know.
PAHLKA: That they’re held accountable to the —
COWEN: There’s far too much process, bureaucracy, delays. They’re slow. Look at construction productivity in the United States. It’s terrible. It’s declined.
PAHLKA: Yes, I would agree with that.
COWEN: And that’s the private sector.
PAHLKA: Yes. I think one of the issues though is that there is more accountability to process in government than in the private sector, I believe.
COWEN: More in government.
PAHLKA: More in government.
COWEN: Yes, sure.
PAHLKA: Because in the private sector, if you don’t get the outcomes, you are unlikely to succeed financially.
COWEN: There’s a profit — clear goal. In government, it’s not the same kind of outcome. It collapses more into process.
PAHLKA: Yes, it collapses more into process, absolutely. I think also you have — what is it — Goodhart’s Law that says once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful, and you see that everywhere in government. I think that’s part of what I mean about the new public management and the reinventing government in the ’90s was highly reliant on “Let’s set a goal and follow that goal.”
There can be real value in that. I’m not discrediting it entirely, but you do have that erosion of the value of those targets as people try to meet the target without actually meeting the outcome that was intended. I think that a more digital transformation approach that is instead able to change over time more quickly and say, “Wait, this target is no longer helping us get where we wanted to go. We’ve got to iterate on that. Let’s change it.” That can really, I think, get us out of that industrial era of thinking.
I want to pull on some threads in the vein of my previous comments on military research, development, and procurement. They talked about this some, but were also talking more broadly. I think the problem to be solved is perhaps most clearly cognizable in this domain. Reordering the discussion a bit, we'll start from the outcomes, the things that we're trying to achieve:
COWEN: Outcomes are heterogeneous, they’re tricky, they’re long term.
As I put it:
we have a situation where your military is very very rarely 'tested' (in fact, ideally it is very rare). You very rarely get actual feedback. When you do, you do not have access to the counterfactual of what would have happened if you had invested differently.
Look at the lead time for something like a modern fighter jet. What's the chance that the guy who originally greenlit the program is still around to be 'accountable' if/when it's actually used in a hot conflict, such that its performance can be assessed against the competition? Do you handicap that assessment at all? He made his decision a decade ago, seeing a certain set of problems that they were trying to solve. A decade or two later, your adversaries have also been developing their own systems. Should he be punished in some way for failing to completely predict how the operating environment would change over decades? Suppose he made the decision in Year X, and it came into service in Year X+10. It hypothetically would have performed perfectly well for a decade or two, but you just never had a hot war and never saw it. By the time Year X+25 rolls around and you do get into a hot war, it's now hot garbage in comparison to what else is out there? Is he blameworthy in some way? Should he be held 'accountable' in some way? There's a good chance he's now retired or even dead, so, uh, how are you going to do that?
Obviously, there is a spectrum here, but I would argue that a modern fighter jet is more toward the middle of the spectrum than at the far end. Yes, there are plenty of faster-turnaround things, but there are also lots of long lead time things. Even just think about the components/subsystems of the fighter jet. By the time a decision is made to greenlight the larger project, most of these have to be relatively mature. The gov't and company involved can probably take some risk on some of these, but they can't do too many. They want a fair amount of subsystems that they are confident can be integrated into the design and refined within their overall project schedule. That means that all of that investment had to be done even earlier.
Back to that guy who makes the decision. Who is that? Probably a general or a political appointee. Possibly a group of gov't stakeholders. How does he decide what to buy? Remember, he's trying to predict the future, and he doesn't actually know what his adversaries are going to do in the meantime. He has no direct outcomes by which to do this. He doesn't yet have some futarchy market to somehow predict the future. He basically just has educating himself on what's out there, what's possible, what's at various stages of maturity, and where various people think stuff might be going. As I put it in the doubly-linked comment:
There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money?
And so, I think Tyler would claim, this fundamentally drives these decisions to be focused on process rather than outcome. The outcome isn't accessible and likely isn't going to be. Instead, people basically just implement a process to ensure that the decisionmaker(s) are talking to the right stakeholders, getting a wide variety of input, not just shoveling contracts to their buddies, etc. Sure, these decisionmakers still have some leeway to put their mark on the whole thing, but what's the plan for adding more 'accountability' to them that isn't just, "Whelp, let's make sure they go through enough process that they don't have the obvious failure modes, and then sort of hope that their personal mark on the process is generally good, because we've built up some trust in the guy(s) over some years"?
Now, think like a company or research org that is considering investing in lower maturity subsystems. It's a hellova risk to do that with such an incredibly long lead time and, frankly, a pretty low chance of having your product selected. You're going to care a lot about what that process looks like, who the relevant stakeholders/decisionmakers are, and what their proclivities are. If you're pretty confident that the guy(s) in charge mostly don't give a shit about airplanes, you're even more unlikely to invest a bunch of money in developing them or their components. Will some crazy company spent thirty years to develop a fully-formed system, getting no contracts anywhere along the way, just hoping that once the generals see it complete and in action (ish, because again, there's not a hot war and you can't really demonstrate the meaningfulness of having a thousand airplanes with your one prototype), they'll finally be 'forced' to acknowledge how effective it's going to be, finally unable to brush it off, and finally actually buy it for bazillions of dollars? I guess, maybe, sometimes. But probably not very often. Thus, I think it's pretty unlikely that the gov't can just completely wash its hands of any involvement in the research/development pipeline and just say, "Companies will always bring us fully-formed products, and we'll decide to buy the best ones." Pahlka touches on a need for the gov't to "insource" at least some parts of things:
There are rumors that DOGE is actually pro-insourcing more tech talent in government. I know you’re not hearing about that now. It may just be a rumor, and it may not be true, so don’t quote me on this. I certainly think that folks in Musk’s world came in and looked at government, and said, “How do you even operate with so little technical competence in-house? That’s crazy.” And it is crazy. They’re right about that.
We’ll either end up, I think, even further privatizing not just the software, but the whole operations as the software and the operations are increasingly melded — again, this is not new — or we’ll be forced finally to gain the internal competence that we have always needed and start to do this a little bit better.
Again, I think she's talking more broadly, but that bit about software and operations being very melded is quite poignant when thinking about military applications.
Getting back to the problem of not knowing what's going to be effective in the future, the traditional solution is to just fund pretty broadly, through multiple mechanisms. Not sure about airplanes? Have one guy/group who seem to like airplanes go ahead and fund a variety of airplane-related stuff. Have some other guy who doesn't like airplanes fund some other stuff. There's obviously a bunch of risky capital allocation questions here, and decisions ultimately have to be made. Those are tough decisions, but how do you add 'accountability' to them? I don't know. I think the easy/lazy way is basically a form of just looking at your 'guys' (your airplane guy, your submarine guy, etc.) and ask, "What have you done for me lately?" The obvious concern is that that makes all your guys focus their portfolios much more heavily toward shorter timelines. But part of the point of the government being 'eternal' is that it should be able to be thinking on longer time horizons, because that may end up being more valuable than just short time horizon things that can be more tightly linked to 'outcomes' or 'accountability'.
I started off being a bit taken aback by the idea Tyler proposed that we should almost just abandon accountability. I've generally been somewhat pro-accountability, and I know folks here have talked about it a lot. But upon reflection, with my pre-existing but not previously-connected thoughts on military procurement, it makes a bit more sense to me that there is a real tension here with no real easy solutions.
From time to time, people discuss prohibitions here. The general zeitgeist is often that one particular interpretation of the the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s is conclusive for all prohibitions of any type everywhere and always. Nevermind that there are alternative interpretations of the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Nevermind that different prohibitions are different. We now have one data set from South Africa.
In 2020, the South African government banned alcohol sales as part of their COVID measures. Then they lifted the ban, and then brought it back unexpectedly, and then did that again
Every ban saw murders decline, and every reprieve saw them return. Stunningly, prohibition worked:
Perhaps they just didn't keep the prohibition long enough over any time period for the data to show that murders would have really gone up massively over time. Perhaps murders aren't the right measure. (EDIT: Perhaps there were other restrictions that happened concurrent to the alcohol prohibition; one might be interested to see if there are any differences in start/end dates for other restrictions and see if there is something like a DiD.) Lots of interpretations, but only one limited data set. I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury belief of mine.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
On the topic of a small number of relatively 'known' people being involved in an outsized portion of the crime problem
or
AI is sometimes allowed to say things that are otherwise not allowed to be said, so long as they make sure to say that it's definitely not racist
Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It is the name of the paper. They took arrest/victimization records in Chicago and tried to predict who was likely to be shot in the next 18 months. 644,000 people in the data; of the top 500 with the highest predicted risk, almost 13% were shot. That's the top line. 13% accuracy might not seem like much, but they claim that the rate is 128 times higher than that of the average Chicagoan. For context, that's 64 shooting victims over an 18mo period. I don't know what the total 'shot but maybe didn't die' rate is, but Chicago has in the ballpark of 600 homicides (by all means) each year.
This is not about who did the shooting; it's about who was shot. The implicit argument is that most shooting victims are close enough to the criminal world. Even if they were just purely victims before, it is at their doorstep. Plausibly, if a little old lady just happens to live in a really terrible neighborhood and had to report being the victim of various prior crimes, this could indicate that she is also at risk of getting shot, too.
They definitely go out of their way to say that, yes, Black males are more likely to have prior data in the system, but that the system still predicts with similar accuracy across demographics.
I don't know how practical these sorts of things will be to actually use for any purpose, but this paper dropping is definitely adding some fuel for the folks who think that a variety of criminal problems are mostly concentrated within a relatively small subset that could, at least in theory, be somewhat identified.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
The flippant answer is stochastic terrorism. They want the conservative justices to know that they can ratchet up faux outrage on literally anything imaginable and to fear that the next Nicholas Roske won't be so timid. They don't actually need something that serious to happen; it's the fear that matters. It's not even just the fear of physical death, it's that every time you get up in the morning, there are protesters outside your house; no matter where you move to, your neighbor will be very unneighborly; every time you go out somewhere, you have to be wary of anyone nearby carrying either concealed weapons... or milkshakes; every time you talk to literally anyone, you have to think, "Imagine this is being recorded; how could that recording be twisted on Twitter to make all of the above even worse?"
Your choices are that life... or maybe have a miraculous come to Sagan moment and start making lefty rulings. Then you'll get to, like, hang out with Beyonce and stuff.
ControlsFreak
17d ago
Can I say the line? I kinda want to say the line. Ok, I'm going to try saying the line now.
What did you think 'let's destroy marriage and the family' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”.
"The" is an incorrect use of the definite article. There is another solution, another technology. Even Beyoncé knows of this technology, though she, like the author you cite, clearly lacks comprehension of what it's for and how it is to be used. It is the humble ring. It goes on a finger. There are many others which superficially look like it, but one is a special piece of social technology.
I think this is right, and I think the usual justification for why it would be beneficial in increasing output is often related to situations with significant fixed costs and small marginal costs. Buying a plane/operating a flight has significant fixed costs and low marginal costs. Another standard example is a drug company selling a pill in Africa for a tenth of the price they sell it for in America. Drug development has high fixed costs, while production of the pills often has low marginal costs. The key question is, "Would not being able to price discriminate lead to market exit?" In the drug case, if a company couldn't price discriminate between America/Africa (i.e., they had to choose one price everywhere), they're simply not going to sell drugs in Africa. They're going to exit the market. If an airline can't price discriminate at all, then some routes are going to become unprofitable, and they're just not going to offer the flights (and not buy the aircraft to fly the routes). I think this is essentially your idea that they're willing to sell African pills/cheap flights conditional on being able to price discriminate with other transactions. But in both of these cases, I think it's important to note that the price they're willing to give to the "poorer" folks is still above the marginal cost of production. This is obviously true, because otherwise they wouldn't sell a seat to a poorer person or a pill to an African, even with price discrimination.
A couple other salient differences between these examples are 1) monopoly power, and 2) the nature of the price discrimination. On (1), the drug example really only applies to drugs that are patented (and thus, the producers have monopoly power). For example, some countries don't respect patents of US drug companies, and those consumers get generic pills at the (low) marginal cost of production. Once a regular drug goes off-patent, no one really argues for the benefit of price discrimination, because everyone ends up enjoying paying the (low) marginal cost of production! Both in the US and Africa! (Remember, both sets of consumers were paying above the marginal cost of production during the period of monopoly + price discrimination.) The point of difference here is that while airlines have some significant regulatory and other barriers to entry, the market for air travel is much more competitive than that of a patented drug. Part of the question really boils down to how much "cartel-like" control one actually thinks universities/hospitals/whatever actually have. (We could probably argue about this another time; is a pretty rich conversation.)
Concerning (2), I think there is a significant difference in the nature of the price discrimination. Drugs in US/Africa is in a meaningful sense, I think, targeted at general income patterns by regional area. That is short of the very individualized income data that universities/hospitals are able to use. The price discrimination will be a little "less perfect". Moreover, I think that there is a conceptual difference between a company simply being able to look at incomes (whether abstracted over a region or individualized) as opposed to traditional means of price discrimination. Like I mentioned in the OP, all companies want to price discriminate. They want to know incomes. They want to know everything that is going to correlate with willingness-to-pay. But usually, they have to fall back on some other sort of weak correlate. "Vacation travelers tend to book further in advance than business travelers, and the latter tend to have higher willingness-to-pay." "Retirees are more able to view a 2pm matinee at the theater on a week day, and they tend to have lower willingness-to-pay." It may in some sense be correlated with income, but they're actually targeting something else. I also think it's meaningful if the method involved includes actually giving people a different product. Sure, selling a business class ticket for $2k may help make it profitable to run a flight that also includes some $100 seats, but they have to at least, like, try to make that business class seat better in some way. Some incentive for the person to choose to pay $2k rather than just, "Whelp, we magically know your income, so you're gonna have to pay more for the same thing, because fuck you, that's why."
Bringing it back to universities (maybe I'll do healthcare another day), I think they are remarkably more cartel-like than most people understand. They control the accreditation boards that determine who is allowed to sell education. They control processes that require universities to "show a need" for opening up a new program even within an existing university (at least sometimes)! They went knives out in regulatory processes against for-profit colleges, MOOCs, etc. (notwithstanding other legitimate concerns that may exist with those things). You should hear the stories of various tech people/billionaires/etc. who have tried to go after the academia cartel. They give up, because the cartel is stronger than you think. We've bolstered it by subsidizing demand and restricting supply. That's the first problem. Then, I don't think there's any real charge that they will exit the market if they can't price discriminate. While their marginal costs are pretty low, their fixed costs don't really correlate with market exit in the same way that say, not buying a plane to fly a route or not bringing a drug to market does. They have no natural analog to simply not selling drugs in Africa if they're unable to price discriminate. And finally, they've always been able to "price discriminate" by offering a different product. Business class seats are like living in the fancy new dorm building. I don't know that anyone really cares about it that much. Those consumers are genuinely getting additional consumer surplus out of the deal. It is specifically the, "We've magic'ed (by force of government) into existence a new way to just take the surplus from you, not by giving you something else you want or by providing more things to more people, but because we vaguely threatened 'poor people' enough that the gov't now tells us how much money you make," that is a problem.
No one would accept this in any other industry that hasn't already been mammothly screwed up. No one thinks that when you go to the grocery store, or go to buy a TV, a refrigerator, or car, or anything else, that you should first have to just give them all your financial information so that they can tailor your price. Everyone realizes that if the starting point is one of those regular, well-functioning, competitive markets, there would be no benefit to such a thing; it would be a pure transfer of surplus from consumers to producers. Everyone realizes that apples/TVs/refrigerators/cars are already sold at the marginal cost of production, and that adding income-based price discrimination isn't going to magically make producers sell them below the marginal cost of production to poor people. It's only after we have completely screwed up a market that this starts even being a thinkable proposition.
I vaguely recall one of our resident military folks (maybe it was Hlynka, which would be sad) who had a fantastic post about some stories or lessons or what-have-you, and it had a line that stuck with me about one of the most important lessons of leadership: "Never give an order that will not be followed."
It's a multi-agent environment (Hlynka watch, even if Hlynka didn't make the above-referenced comment), and it's exceedingly difficult to force people to follow such an order. You end up having to go pretty over the top on it, which really ends up causing problems. And even if you don't, the mere giving of an order that will not be followed displays that you are completely out of touch with the reality on the ground. Whether or not that reality is "good", you are out of touch with it. Subsequent orders will absolutely be interpreted through a lens of, "...yeah, but this guy's out of touch and doesn't have a clue about how things work or what's going on."
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
7mo ago
Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up.
This is the type of hyperbole that makes me find it completely impossible to hang out in online forums dominated by lefties for very long. Like, have you ever talked to a Republican? In person?
I didn’t post about this, but I did upvote Blackpill posts about Democrat election fraud. I really did expect 3am mystery trucks, election officials putting up paper over the windows and keeping monitors outside, gas/water leaks and restarting the count after monitors had gone home etc etc at about 65-70% certainty. That didn’t eventuate thankfully.
Scoping out, an election needs more than to be an accurate, secure accounting of votes; it needs to have the appearance of such. People need to perceive that it is legitimate. It is very dangerous to have systems which allow people to even think that these things are possible. Not even that they're probable, but are even possible. That I could wake up in the morning with enough states undeclared (by two of the three organizations used to resolve Polymarket) to plausibly swing the result is horrific optics. It allows the imagination to run wild. It lets people think that it is at least possible that there are potential people in potential counties who might have a backup plan to pull these sorts of shenanigans, and who are up in the middle of the night, closely monitoring the developments, carefully calculating whether they can make a difference by implementing their backup plan, cautiously waiting until the perfect moment in the wee hours when just enough people have run out of gas and given in to sleep. That I could wake up and even imagine that such a person might have existed and might have finally given up at 4am, realizing that too much would have to happen in too many different states to make a difference, that it would have been sufficiently hard to pull off or sufficiently hard to hide... just that I could imagine this happening is a huge, dangerous fault line.
@jeroboam is absolutely right on this. Florida has solved this problem, and every swing state which hasn't is playing a treacherous game. They report everywhere, all at once, so there is very little ability to calculate how much risk you might need to take to swing the result. They do so extremely quickly, so folks can be relatively confident that there is constant, alert, bipartisan monitoring of everything that happens in that short window. There is very little room for the imagination to run wild. I did not like the vast majority of the flavors of election denial that occurred in 2020, but it is apparently not that hard to preemptively shut all of that shit down in the future. Both sides really ought to be able to agree on this.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
Last week, this comment spurred a few subthreads about electronic and/or digital and/or online voting (depending on what one wants from it). I felt like the dominant view was that it was a terrible idea, hopelessly insecure, and perhaps even a bridge too far for one being able to think that an election is legitimate.
Today, I saw this article, saying that Kamala Harris' name was left off of some Montana ballots, causing them to shut things down until they could fix the problem. As I started reading, I casually wondered, "Shut what down? Just the ballot-printing process? Why is the headline saying 'voting system'?" Then I read the article and learned for the first time that Montana has an "electronic absentee voter system" that allows, for example, "Max Himsl, a Montana voter living in the UK," (who reported the issue) to "fill out his ballot online".
Whelp, I guess it's arrived. Is it a stupid, terrible idea? Is it hopelessly insecure? Has it delegitimized Montana's election? It is something that nobody's doing, nobody would do, nobody would be stupid enough to do, and it's a good thing that it's happening now?
Having not personally looked into the technicals of the system at all yet (obviously, having only just heard about it five minutes ago) and having said that I thought that a lot depended on technical specifics, I have little idea about how to feel other than that it seems obviously impossible for online voting to seriously maintain secrecy in voting, which I do care about. Of course, almost any system that allows for absentee voting seriously struggles on this point (as was pointed out by one of those international pro-democracy organizations that I quoted long ago), though I think that most people are somewhat willing to give up a little bit of this if it's a small number of absentee votes.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Canada doesn't use the new nitrogen hypoxia method. Canada uses the "old" lethal injection protocol that has been horribly cruel for decades, at least since it has been adopted in the US for capital punishment. Prior to adoption by the US for capital punishment, lethal injection was the "new" humane way of killing someone, and it was only the barbarous Americans who were still killing people via electric chair, which was the "old" protocol. At least, the electric chair was the "old", barbarous method only after the US adopted it for capital punishment. Before that, it was the "new" humane way of killing someone, and it was only the barbarous Americans who were still killing people via firing squad, which was the "old" protocol. Before that, ....
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The culture war about euthanasia in Canada has been roaring a bit, almost a decade after they began implementing the program. However, I'm not particularly interested in the current Canadian culture war on this topic; instead, I'm curious about a related topic in the US culture war.
I saw this chart being bandied about, describing the procedure. I hadn't really thought about how the procedure actually works. It seems that you can either choose a route like this, where a series of chemicals are injected by a doctor, or a route where you self-administer some oral drugs. My first thought for this route was, "That sounds a lot like what they use in the US for capital punishment." My Duck-Duck-fu quickly hit my lack of knowledge of pharmacology as I was trying to figure out if they were actually the same drugs or not. It seems like they're at least quite similar. From here, they list midazolam, propofol, and rocuronium as being used in MAID. Some examples from my searching includes things from Wikipedia like, for midazolam:
The drug has been introduced for use in executions by lethal injection in certain jurisdictions in the United States in combination with other drugs. It was introduced to replace pentobarbital after the latter's manufacturer disallowed that drug's use for executions.
For propofol:
The US state of Missouri added propofol to its execution protocol in April 2012. However, Governor Jay Nixon halted the first execution by the administration of a lethal dose of propofol in October 2013 following threats from the European Union to limit the drug's export if it were used for that purpose. The United Kingdom had already banned the export of medicines or veterinary medicines containing propofol to the United States.
For rocuronium, I can't even figure out if it's the same thing as rocuronium bromide or if they're different, but while Wikipedia doesn't have an article for the former, it has for the latter:
On July 27, 2012, the U.S. state of Virginia replaced pancuronium bromide, one of the three drugs used in execution by lethal injection, with rocuronium bromide.
On 3 October 2016, the U.S. state of Ohio announced that it would resume executions on January 12, 2017, using a combination of midazolam, rocuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. Prior to this, the last execution in Ohio was in January 2014.
On August 24, 2017, the U.S. state of Florida executed Mark James Asay using a combination of etomidate, rocuronium bromide, and potassium acetate.
I followed the litigation in the US some years back around the death penalty, and I was aware that there was a concerted effort to pressure drug manufacturers to stop selling whatever drugs were used to states who would use them for executions. I also remember many of the arguments being that such injections constituted cruel and unusual treatment, particularly focusing on the X% or whatever risk that something went wrong or something didn't work quite right for this person or that person. (As an aside, literally none of the Canadian websites I've seen on MAID say a single word about any risk of things not going swimmingly.)
My question is if anyone is familiar with more recent developments in the US. Have there been any reasonably big cases that are more recent (than probably 5-10yrs ago)? In any of those cases, was a US state able to successfully point to Canada's program in order to argue that the risk was low and that it should not constitute cruel/unusual punishment? Are there actual meaningful differences in the drugs used that have been argued in court? (Are those differences due to the pressure on drug manufacturers?) Have the anti-death penalty advocates just given up on that argument and focused their efforts more on pressuring the manufacturers? Basically, if we were to draw a "territory control map" for the US litigation/culture war, what does the current state look like?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
our country lost almost $2 trillion on trade
"lost". It honestly is just so extremely stupid. As if it were that we had something of value that was just lit on fire. Or was simply stolen from us without providing anything in return. As if I should say that I "lost" however much money to Walmart last year. Or that my employer "lost" money in employing me. The entire point of those trades is that each and every party to them gained more value than they "lost"; otherwise, they wouldn't have made the trade!
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour.
Hoooo buddy. At multiple levels. I've just read some BAAs. I've read a variety of papers from labs who cite their federal funding on all of said papers. And I've even talked to folks about their publications and been told, "Yeah, this is pretty dumb, but it's what the BAA called for and what the PM said he wanted us to do." And yes, I've even spoken to PMs who are totally out to lunch.
The problem is that understanding such requires significant domain expertise, and if you're a high-level politician, you have \approx no way of distinguishing between advisers who actually have such expertise and will be honest with you, versus those who are out of their lane or riding a grift.
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize.
A few years back, there was a "splashy" "study", which surveyed people, showing them three pie charts. One was a depiction of the wealth distribution, by quintile, in the US. Opposed to it was a completely equal distribution, 20% for each quintile. Conveniently, in the middle, they put "Sweden", and they asked folks which wealth distribution they'd prefer. People were at least smart enough to realize that a totally equal distribution makes no bloody sense, as an indebted fresh medical school grad is not going to have the same amount of wealth as a nearing-retirement saver-of-forty-years. Nevertheless, it allowed them to blast in the media that however much percent of the population surveyed would prefer a wealth distribution more like Sweden, heavily implying that the US should adopt some unspecified set of policies that people associate with Sweden.
...but of course, this sensationalism was entirely built on a complete lie. "Sweden" was not Sweden, at least not its wealth distribution. They called it "Sweden", with quotation marks attached in the original survey, because they simply lied and substituted Sweden's income distribution and compared that to the US's wealth distribution. If you looked at Sweden's actual wealth distribution, it would be extremely visually similar to the US, so they needed to lie and make people think that there was the magical possibility that is totally magically achievable that is visually clearly different if we only let them implement whatever haphazard collection of policies they want.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Very small thing I saw today. The claim is that people are not really moving out of NY/CA/WA/DC because of housing, presumably trying to implicitly support the general zeitgeist that there's nothing wrong with extremely restrictive housing policies. Instead, it's just jobs being in different locations that is causing people to move.
...like, sure, jobs are probably always going to be a major factor, if not the major factor, but I couldn't help looking at their chart and think that their category selection is just bad. To my eye, it looks like 'For cheaper housing', 'Other housing reason', 'Wanted new or better housing', 'To establish own household', and 'Wanted to own home, not rent' are all categories that are basically subcategories of "Housing". Much more minor, I could potentially see an argument for 'For easier commute', 'Wanted a better neighborhood', and 'Foreclosure or eviction' being lumped into a general "Housing" category.
Of course, I would also think that 'Other job-related reason' and 'To look for work or lost job' could potentially be lumped in a more general "Jobs" category, and eyeballing the chart, I think a general "Jobs" category would still beat out a general "Housing" category. I think this is probably right, and jobs are probably still a stronger driver than housing, but I can't help but think if we rolled these larger categories together, the visual impact of the chart would be much different. It would be "Jobs" and "Housing" as the two absolutely dominant categories, with "Housing" not looking as far behind "Jobs" as it does here.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
In the Marxist view, after all, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression.
Sometimes, I forget how core and radical this is. Then, I see things like this guy's most recent comic. It really kind of baffles me to imagine how they think that's actually supposed to work. What do they really think their life would be like if civilization reverted to essentially the state of nature and nobody was around to care every time a slightly larger hairless ape showed up and decided to take something from them by violence. I know the old joke about pro-capitalist people being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', but what are they actually envisioning? Are they 'temporarily embarrassed gang leaders/warlords'?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I mean, Re: Hillary, destruction of evidence is a pretty automatic charge. Can you imagine Trump not being charged with it? Not to mention the 1001 charges (also apparently seen here, according to reporting), and the OIG report quoted FBI agents who were dumbstruck as to why such charges weren't brought against folks, because they were dead-to-rights. But nope; that stuff is reserved for the likes of Flynn and Trump... the folks who need to be removed.
Possibly more interesting for actual culture war analysis is just observing the public narrative shift. Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore. For good or for bad, fair and just or unfair and unjust, it's a change in the narrative. Whether this change can be easily flip-flopped on in another 5-10 years... or whether it will be persistent, possibly leading to endless tit-for-tat, I don't know.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Drug prices have always been a tiny part of it. The big ones are the obvious cartel-like behavior, restricting the supply of trained doctors and approved facilities. But one of the biggest issues is still price transparency. It's what makes this market feel different to people. Compare to complaints that housing is "unaffordable". Well, the market for housing is abundantly transparent. In most places, people can just go look at the market prices, and they'll see a spectrum of prices from quite high to remarkably low. And they'll notice that when folks complain about "unaffordable housing", they really mean that they just want newer, nicer, bigger housing in better locations for less money. Moreover, because the market is transparent, they can see just how much local government housing policy can restrict/enable supply, pushing prices up/down. So the movement has rightly been able to focus on the underlying issue of restricted supply.
In healthcare, the shell game of price hiding is so advanced, people can't even notice what's going on. The process is, "People go about normal life; sometimes, that involves going to the doctor; poof! Some amount of money is gone. How much? Who knows? Maybe nobody can know." That's what's plaguing the PBMs - everything is predicated on playing "hide the paper". If they keep everyone in the dark about what the numbers mean, they can play four square all the way home to piles of money. And it's what's plaguing the hospitals, too. Of course they want to charge high "facility fees"; these are almost certainly hidden fees! Hidden fees rub a lot of people the wrong way. They feel like when you're in one of those countries where the guy acts like because you touched his product, the culturally-mandated thing is that you've already bought it and have to pay for it. What's the price? You didn't know, could be anything! But you're either a sucker for the paying the number he pulls out of his ass or you're a dick for arguing back.
Healthcare is entirely about hiding every fee possible. So while many people may have experienced a healthcare purchase that turned out to be a little cheaper than their wild-ass guess of what it might be, they've probably also experienced the opposite. And you know they're going to 1000% remember the time they felt they got screwed over wayyyyy more, even if they thought they got okay deals most of the rest of the time. People want a "deal" 100% of the time. They want some amount of "consumer surplus". That's kind of the definition. We turn down buying stuff every day that doesn't give us consumer surplus; we don't say those things are "unaffordable". They just don't bring me, personally, sufficient value right now. But for every single trade I willingly engage in, even if I don't think I got a "great" deal, I think I got more value than I spent. To have a transaction... and then to find out later that it was more expensive than you thought... enough more expensive that, had you known, you wouldn't have agreed to the transaction in the first place? That pisses people off. That makes people say that healthcare is "unaffordable". (That is probably what causes people to go bankrupt; most people don't willingly engage in many transactions that they know will bankrupt them; they have to be blindsided into it.)
I'm becoming more and more obstinate on this point for healthcare. The shell game is too entrenched. The "let's force prices onto the internet" tack didn't work. They're still too good at making it impossible to understand or impossible to access/figure out at the time that you need it. Nobody's going to be sitting in a doctor's office, trying to decide what to do, and say, "Gimme a second, I need to look up on the internet what the price is here and at other locations and.... oh shit, I need to write a JSON parser to figure that out?" Nah. At this point, I can't imagine there's anything we can do besides simply mandate that every single provider of healthcare services must give every single patient a written price prior to performing the service. (Assuming, of course, they're conscious, etc.)
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
When judges can override issues of national sovereignty
In the United States, national sovereignty is vested in three co-equal branches (plus, to the extent it still kinda counts as "national", fifty separately sovereign states).
literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel
You are correct that this is a very important thing for a country to decide. That makes it a teeny bit weird to get super upset about this case, in particular, since it appears that the government has claimed that this wasn't really a "decision" and was just an "error". Like, sure, someone could get a little bit into the details of the legal arguments, but on your own terms, it seems wayyyy less important than you're making it out to be.
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).
Doctors will also just blithely lie to you and make stuff up. They'll tell you to your face, in the exam room, that something is totally covered, but as you say, they have no idea whatsoever. You have to either force them to have someone actually verify it (which will annoy them, as they'll view it as just a waste of their precious time), or roll the dice and hope to not get slapped with a huge bill after the fact (that could be literally anything, could be gigantic enough to make whatever the service is completely not worth it to you).
I've said it before, and I'm becoming more obstinate about it; the entire medical industry is absolutely addicted to complete and total price opacity. This is only one of the many dysfunctions, but it's a big one. Forcing them to put their prices up on some website, in a way that would require you writing your own JSON or whatever parser, make your own interface, and still not be able to figure out what the price is because the doctor can't even tell you what the procedure code is... has simply failed as a "price transparency" law. I would be open to literally any other solution that anyone can think of, but I can't think of any other than simply forcing them to give you a price. Could declare that patients cannot exercise legally-valid informed consent to a procedure unless they've already been provided a price, in writing, for example.
EDIT: Forgot to add that when you call up the billing department to ask, "What the hell? I thought this was supposed to be covered?" they'll just bluntly tell you that the doctors don't have a clue and that "they probably just guessedsorrybut not sorry enough to have you not pay this".
This one is pretty shocking, and I didn't realize until my mother got cancer right around her retirement age. It pushed her retirement date a little earlier than she had originally planned, which was a little annoying to her, but probably for the best. In any event, she asks me to help her look through some financial stuff, because even though she's normally pretty good with that sorta stuff, "chemo brain" is a bitch, as is just aging in general. When she was able to get on to Medicare was my first real exposure to how the system works, what it costs (I'm not even sure if I really had much of a grasp on which parts were truly free and which parts you had to pay extra for), what all the options are, etc. I shouldn't have been surprised that it had similar terms to normal health insurance, with things like premiums, out-of-pocket maximums, etc. What I was definitely surprised about was just how shockingly cheap it was, with incredibly low maxes. Like, simply insane. Like, better than the best monetary value I've seen out of even the top tier, most expensive insurance I've ever been offered by an employer, with premiums significantly lower than I've see out of even the bottom tier, most cut rate insurance I've ever been offered by an employer. That was when I realized just how massive of a wealth transfer the program is from young to old. It was also when I realized how the incentives worked. Out-of-pocket maxes so low that if you have literally anything happen to you in a year, then you simply do not even have to consider the price of any other medical service that you might think about consuming.
That's when it sort of clicked, why the large conglomerate that is managing her care has bundled in everything imaginable into what seems to be their "cancer package". If you can squint your eyes and think that it might be helpful for the cancer, for managing or recovering from the chemo, whatever, it's part of their package. They'll pay for Ubers to your appointments, every therapy under the sun (physical, occupational, mental, etc.), even your gym membership (at their extra fancy, extra expensive gym that just so happens to be a part of the conglomerate). Feel like you're not sleeping the best? We'll send you to some sleep specialists, do the full workup. Not fully happy with a rapid recovery of mental faculties from chemo? We'll give you some brain scans, a variety of tests, and surely, more weekly therapy of various sorts. The list goes on. It's a good thing that she's retired now, because she has basically a full-time job just managing and going to all of the myriad of possible appointments and offerings they provide in their neatly-packaged conglomerate, and all of the expenses can be justified in some way or another with respect to the cancer or side effects from the treatment, or something.
On the one hand, cool that she can get so much attention to get every month of vitality possible; I really do value the additional time spent with her, especially with her still being able to be as clear-minded and engaging as she is. Moreover, cool that she doesn't have to constantly worry about money. She hadn't really saved as much for retirement as she would have liked, and pre-retirement, I really got the sense that she was kinda constantly worried about it and how things were going to work out. Now that all the paperwork has been done and the numbers are on the table, she can see how it's going to work, that it's going to be okay, and that she no longer has to worry about it. On the other hand, hot damn, that means that she (and we, by extension) literally do not even have to think for a millisecond about a cost-benefit ratio for literally any possible option within their menu. From her perspective, it is all literally completely and totally free. There is not a single moment where she has to think, "How much tangible benefit do I think this is going to provide for me, and how much do I really value that benefit, to the point of being willing to give up some amount of my own resources for it?" If anything, the only thing that she trades off is just the time of going to the thing and doing it, but of course, she's retired now and has a lot of time in the week. So if she assesses that the tangible benefit has any decent probability of being literally any value more than epsilon>0, why not? How much does it 'cost'? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't come out of my pocket. I personally benefit from this, because 100% guaranteed that if there was any real expense, she'd be leaning on me to help figure out what's worth it and how to make the finances work. A nice burden off my shoulders, too. I can see the 'cost' now, but damn if the incentives don't do their best at making me apathetic, just because then I don't have to think about that stuff.
A couple final scattered thoughts. First, there was a moment where I thought, "Damn, I don't always sleep the best, and I've had some recurring sleep problems before. It would be nice if I could get a full workup and see if we could fix it. But that would be suuuuuper expensive, and I don't know that I can justify it, given the solid probability that they're not actually going to be able to help me in the end even after I wrack up huge bills." And even some jealousy that she can just go do that for free. I also sort of wonder, society-wide, if we'd be serving our population's health and productivity better if we did stuff like figure out people's sleep problems and fix them when they're young and have many years for those benefits to accrue, rather than make it prohibitively expensive for most of your life and then free right near the end.
Second, I almost wanted to make an analogy to the public school system. People often joke that the school system is mostly a daycare, with incidental ability to help educate children, primarily for the purpose of freeing up parents from having to take care of them. It almost is like getting hooked into one of these big health programs while on medicare is like that. "We'll take your elderly parents, give them constant care, keep them busy coming to appointments and such, and make sure they're at least doing alright," and it's not that genuine medical care isn't there (like how genuine education is not absent from public schools), but that it's more minor or incidental. "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your parent most of the time," just like, "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your child most of the time." A useful service, yes, with some amount of real value, for sure. Like I said, I realized that I genuinely benefit from it in that way. But how effective is it? How costly is it? How efficient compared to possible alternatives? Who knows? Who cares? The bureaucrats and the unions and the conglomerates control all that and don't really want you to know the answers even if you did want to know. All the incentives are just about perfect, so long as the whole thing doesn't blow up spectacularly at some point, and so long as the schools aren't so ineffective that China eats our technological lunch and conquers us via warfare.
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