ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I'm seeing:
if also available in another language...
and
Despite subparagraph 2 of the first paragraph, the parties to an individual employment contract that is a contract of adhesion may be bound only by its version in a language other than French if, after examining its French version, such is their express wish. In the other cases, an individual employment contract may be drawn up exclusively in a language other than French at the express wish of the parties. Despite subparagraph 3 of the first paragraph, the employer may communicate in writing with a worker exclusively in a language other than French if the latter has so requested.
This does not read to me as "disallowing English". In fact, I would say that it expressly allows it. Now, obviously, if an employee wants it in French, they have to do it in French, too. But then we get into details of the compelled speech doctrine, which @Glassnoser has refused to acknowledge even exists, how it interacts with commercial speech, etc. I think that because that conversation gets complicated, he'd rather just fib a bit and claim that it "disallows English", when it doesn't seem to.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Yeah, and like I said, before that, we were in the land of memes. I went on to talk about the research that you sort of kind of cited. You didn't actually cite it in enough detail to tell if you were just invoking the meme version of that research or the real version of that research.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Ah, see, we were in the land of memes, not the finer points of research. This is a fine point, indeed, and most people should probably mostly ignore it. The meme version of the constrained daily energy expenditure model is mostly wrong, anyway (as opposed to the real version). It's certainly not 100%. It's dose dependent, etc. One can get into the estimates of this and that, but it's probably mostly swamped by individual variability for most people, and most people are probably not taking a genuine step function with their exercise in a way that lends itself to making these sorts of estimates useful. If anything, if someone is actually paying close enough attention for this sort of thing to matter, the step function is likely to be a step down function, where a normally-highly-athletic person who is paying close attention to their energy balance gets injured or something and their physical activity level goes down significantly for an extended period of time.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I think the distinction I would make is between the means being used to prevent automation and the result of preventing automation. That is, for the longshoreman, the means they used to prevent automation was to threaten to shut down some amount of port traffic (I don't actually know how much; I assume a good chunk of it). This would be pretty damaging to the economy. Whereas, as you say, once they've come to a deal that prevents some amount of automation, the result looks more like a drag on productivity. In their case, it would say that their drag on productivity is mostly confined to just their little corner of the economy. Other countries' ports will continue to become more and more efficient than ours. This may impact the trade flowing through them to some extent, but it probably kinda just shows up as a sort of a ransom that has to be paid, which ultimately is not that huge; there's just not that many of them that need paid off in the end.
Tariffs are actually probably a bit of a lesser threat to the economy. I used the strong wording, but I recall that back during Trump I, I had a comment in the old place quoting Krugman making an estimate that a Trumpian trade war might 'only' cost about 3% of GDP.1 IIRC, Krugman was doing a back-of-the-envelope that assumed that Trump would follow some academic paper for "optimal tariffs", and my guess is that what Trump II has now actually done is, uh, probably not that. Of course, in the limit, as tariffs go to the moon, trade grinds to a halt almost entirely, and it sort of more closely resembles longshoremen shutting down the ports.
Now, what's the ransom that has to be paid in order to actually stop automation in manufacturing? My answer would be, "???". Unlike ports, which are very concentrated in space, amenable to discrete deals that stop specific automation from occurring, and not subject to much competition, manufacturing is everywhere and subject to intense competition. Tariffs don't actually have a mechanism to stop automation in all these places. It's just paying a temporary ransom to some existing manufacturers, who might use part of that ransom to keep a few marginal employees around a little bit longer. They're still going to adopt more automation; if they don't, their competitors will (foreign and domestic). Even if tariffs magically stopped all domestic manufacturing automation, the drag on productivity growth will gradually make foreign manufacturers more and more competitive over time, and uh, I guess we'll have to raise even higher tariffs?! The only real limit in sight would be once they're high enough that they've basically killed all US imports. Yes, a nice ransom to some domestic manufacturers, but if all that automation keeps chugging along overseas, that basically plays out as US GDP numbers dragging and dragging and dragging, while foreigner GDPs moon.
Tariffs probably won't actually wreck the economy in one fell swoop, but they won't fundamentally affect the process of automation in manufacturing, either. They'll just cause some folks to get a little ransom and long-term terrible growth. Even the difference between 1-2% GDP growth each year is getting close to a 2x difference over 50 years.
1 - I absolutely know that Krugman is a partisan hack. His article was actually trying to downplay how bad it would be, so I thought on balance it was reasonable to use him as an OOM estimate, given the context; it really did not feel like he was trying to super inflate the estimate, even though that what I would have otherwise expected from him. I recall it well, because I compared that to the estimates of the 'cost' of climate change in terms of GDP (as well as a few other things), and it was hilarious how little of a thing climate change was.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
This abridges freedom of speech.
404 - Argument Not Found
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Which part?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Which part?
CICO is descriptively correct. Basically everyone agrees with that. There are huge disputes about whether it's prescriptively correct, with adjacent arguments about what constitutes "prescribing" it. One might even say that prescribing ozempic is, in a roundabout way, prescribing CICO, because the primary mechanism by which it causes you to lose weight is that you eat fewer calories than you use.
The meme is that you don't lose weight from cardio, or more pithily, "You can't outrun a bad diet." Harvard has some estimates of calorie usage by weight/activity here. Double them if you're thinking, "I'm going to do this for an hour." Well, are you going to do that every day? 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/week. I have a good friend who is an MD and a prof in public health who just flatly said, "We've known that number in the literature for a long time." It is descriptively correct. Many of those activities get you ≈500cal/hr. IF you do that every day AND eat at what is otherwise your maintenance, you will lose ≈1lb/week. Oh, you're only doing it three days a week? Reduce that rate by half. Oh, you're having an extra bottle of gatorade while you ride your bike (on top of what is otherwise your normal maintenance), that's 140cal (just whatever random flavor came up first in a search, 20oz bottle), taking you down another third. "I exercise all week so I can eat good"? ROFL.
One cannot determine whether a sink will overflow just by looking at the rate at which water is going down the drain. You need the rate that water is going in, too. Implicit in the meme is, "You don't lose weight by cardio alone," because if that's your plan, and your plan is to completely ignore what you're eating, it's extremely likely that you're just going to eat more.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
How does that happen? Who hired them? Why did they hire them? Did somebody do something to convince them to hire them when they might not have otherwise? Did those folks use a carrot or a stick? What did that look like?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
it clearly claims that the PMC are both currently "wrecking" things
No, it doesn't. Multiple other people read it correctly.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I'm not even kidding. I'm very sympathetic to the concern that quality adjustments are inherently difficult (Russ Roberts talks about this a lot), but if you have any further explanation/data to show that this is specifically a problem in microprocessors as an intermediate good and is of sufficient magnitude to significantly change the reasoning, I'd love to know more.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
A PMC Revolt Will Hold Us Back From The Glorious Automated Future
I've heard a few variants on this. When Tyler Cowen was on Dwarkesh, he said that people will be the bottleneck to automation. His prediction seemed part mechanistic, but part hearkening to the Luddites, that automatable members of the PMC will band together to do whatever it takes to save their weak, deplorable skins. Pass destructive policies, regulations, restrictions, maybe even try to physically break the machines. A minor variant on the Woke Capitalist Wrecker, if you will; the PMC wrecker.
Some might be concerned that these sorts of predictions are a bit vague. What will they actually do? What will it look like? How could we watch events unfold and categorize what is happening? Of course, as the old joke says, fascism comes with smiley faces and McDonald's, so it's unlikely that their activities will be immediately apparent on just a surface glance. Thus, I will turn to the impetus for this post and submit that one need look no further than current events.
This morning at the gym, I listened to Phil Magness, an economic historian who specializes in tariffs, on Reason's Just Asking Questions Podcast. Then, when I got home, I read Alex Tabarrok's latest on Marginal Revolution. They both pointed out something that I had not realized. America still manufactures a lot of value. More value than ever before in history. In real terms. So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs. And why are jobs somehow impacted? It can't be that China has stolen all of the manufacturing value add from us; we've already established, from the data, that we're doing more of that than ever before.1 Nah... it's automation. We're manufacturing gobs more value with fewer human laborers.2
This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away. This is just what it looks like. It doesn't say it on the tin. The talk is always about jobs, but the blame is misplaced for why they're going away. It's automation. It can cause people to reach for whatever tool can possibly cause shortages and contract the economy, just hoping that doing so somehow reverses the impacts of automation. Nevermind that the intermediate steps are "cause shortages" and "contract the economy".
If you're worried about how the PMC will eventually sabotage the progress of automation or just want to find a way to model how humans might be a bottleneck on the way to a glorious automated future, one might need look no further than current events.
1 - Perhaps one wants to just compare total manufacturing value add. China does have approximately double of that than the US does. China also has approximately four times the population of the US.
2 - It also does not seem to be purely a population growth phenomenon.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I am not hearing a single reference to any established 1A doctrines.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Cite?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Cite?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I don't think that can be merely presumed, which is why I'm asking. My sort of uninformed sense is that they simply mandate that French must be there, but don't disallow English with it. Perhaps that's wrong, but so far, no one has even come out to actually claim it at any level stronger than your presumption.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
abridging the freedom of speech
Why is this an abridgment of the freedom of speech? (Generally, you could reach to one of the various well-established explanations of what counts as abridgments of the freedom of speech, some of which I mentioned.)
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
That is a law prohibiting the use of a language. Do they do that?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
the sheer depth of poor quality service and outright fraud associated with the old yellow cab model
What'd they do, not tell you the price and then make up one that didn't make sense after services were rendered? Hard to believe that people wouldn't love that...
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
You know what, I was going to go point-by-point and discuss some of this, but I'm going to wait on that. What I'd like to wait for is to hear you say anything at all about 1A law. I just don't see any of that yet. None of the keywords. Nothing about content-neutral/content-based, viewpoint-neutral/viewpoint-based, nothing about the compelled speech doctrine and its extent/limits, nothing about the standards for commercial speech, etc.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Sure... weird to our sensibilities, but, uh, what's the 1A violation?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I'm not sure what the 1A argument is, though. Moreover, I have a factual question. Do such laws prevent store signs from also having other languages, or do they just mandate that French must be present? If the former, I could perhaps see a 1A challenge that they are restricting speech. If just the latter, it's not so clear to me. There is some compelled nature to the speech, but the standards there are different, especially if it's just commercial regulation or gov't-run schools. So yeah, I'd really appreciate if anyone could put out at least a sketch of the argument.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
there is no more sacred political principle in Quebec than the belief that the French language must be protected by law. These laws would undoubtedly violate the first amendment.
Minor part of your broader point, but could you sketch out the argument here? I'm not sure whether I'm missing some portion of what these laws do or some portion of 1A precedent.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.
I'm sure every Party member in good standing could use a similar defense. They don't hate luxuries; they have them! (They certainly earned them, unlike those other freeloaders...) It's just when those other people have their luxuries and aren't contributing "according to their abilities" that there's a problem.
I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.
Whence tarrifs? (The proposed point of the OP.) They have nothing to do with immigrants or illegals. Like I alluded to, there are plenty of other (I think potentially good) reasons to go after immigration/illegals. Those motivations are different. I maintain that the ones you presented are just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. (...at least, any wealth that you perceive wasn't as 'deserved' as your own.)
Tyler Cowen has a Conversation with Jennifer Pahika on Reforming Government
I will pull one little segment.
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:
As I put it:
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:
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:
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.
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