Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
To some extent, I think just the fact that tariffs disappear in the "other stuff" is a downward adjustment on their importance compared to how Ive seen people talk, irrespective of what the "other stuff" is. Basically, for this balancing-out to be likely, the true effect of tariffs must be small compared to the yearly variation in growth. And again, all this has to come out of things we newly learned this year. At least to me, the tariffs seem to be the only events here with a visible effect size. Ruling out bubbles is stockmarket-complete, but this problem applies to any other methods you might use to assess politician performance equally.
The take that all of policy is a small part of the development... certainly its possible that the kind of variation in policy that you actually see in a given country over some time period is that small, but broader claims quickly run up against much of conventional development economics.
My initial intuition is that in the real world you could have genuinely bad policies (say, New York doing rent control) being overwhelmed by all the positive economic trends in a society.
Thats what I would expect. Rent control is bad, but ultimately a small part of the economy. Im not a housing-theorist-of-everything. Putting tariffs (even order-of-magnitude increases relative to previous variation!) into the same category as that is basically my conclusion.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
13hr ago
Today is a good day for a non-p-hacked evaluation of the stock market under Trump. I had discussed this with someone during the initial tariff chaos, and wanted to return to it at some point. That conversation ended up using euro prices due to worries about dollar inflation; in the following the brackets always show the data based on euros.
The day of the election, the S&P 500 made +2.5(+4.1)%, from which we can impute between -2.5(-4.1)% and -1.1(-1.8)% for a hypothetical Kamala win, depending on what odds we use for he election. Given the spirit of the exercise, I think we should use the prediction market prices for this, giving the second set of numbers. In reaction to the tariffs, it dropped strongly to a low point of -13.8(-15.4)%, on April 8(21), and after various takebacks recovered quickly to +3.1(+0.7)% on May 16(16). Since then it has shown a relatively linear increase, ending the year at +17.5(+11.1)%. Inflation that year was 3.0(2.1)%. Despite these seemingly similar inflation numbers, there is a significant gap in the final return, and its probably better to use the lower number.
Historically, annual returns were +10.5%, or +6.7% after inflation (those are for dollar only, the euro wasnt around that long, but probably irrelevant over those time scales). So going with the more pessimistic euro numbers, this year was slightly above average in total, or moderately below relative to the post-election price. I think we can take this mostly at face value; because expectations are priced in with stocks, there is much less risk that credit goes to anything that happened earlier, and I dont know what windfall looks like a linear increase. It doesnt seem like the market significantly misjudged Trump on election day.
The most interesting point here to me are the tariffs. Essentially since Trump revived this topic, Ive seen a never ending stream of takes about how very bad they are, an entirely new kind of economic terribleness, etc, and not a single one has claimed a numerical effect size. After asking around for one, the only thing Ive gotten is this, estimating GDP to be -0.6% in the long term based on policy in April (the have an update with more current policy to -0.35%). That seemed low, but from a non-trumpy source I figured thats probably a good sign. And it certainly seems in line with the numbers above now. Overall, I still think tariffs are bad for the economy, but it seems the effect size is still small relative to everything else going on, even with the drastic measures weve seen.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5d ago
I think he always was pro-israel, even before the break with Trump.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
7d ago
Whats that supposed to mean? The movement right after the election, together with the election odds, gives you the imputed market predictions for different presidents, ie what they would have used to decide whether lobbying is worth doing. Middling performance since then just means that they were mostly right so far about how good Trump would be for Bitcoin. If it hadnt been "front-loaded", that would mean Trumps benefit to bitcoin was largely unpredicated, and so would not explain political donations.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
8d ago
On Nov 4, BTC was 68K, a week later it was at 88K. Depending on whether you gave Trump .5 or .7 odds, you get that BTC was expected to be 47% or 83% higher under him than if Kamala won. (Im a bit surprised that it would take this long to price in the election, but its by far the steepest rise of that length in the year, which would be quite the coincidence.)
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
I understood you as saying: "This author prides himself with being center-left and not a woke psycho, but he still demands a formal cancellation by an institution for personal moral shortcomings." Was I misinterpreting?
Yesnt. I think a lot of left-leaning people arent "actively woke", but will go along with it, for various reasons - no enemies to the left, "but come on all the people agruing against this are bad", etc. They say they dont have the woke beliefs, and they dont, because those decisions arent made based on those. They would/could not, themselves, start it, but they will be one the woke side, when it starts. And that case seems to me like that programming triggering somewhere non-political.
The manchurian candidate is not a secret agent hiding his true beliefs, he is sincere but can be mind-controlled with a passphrase.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
Im not familiar with baseball, but from what I can tell the Hall of Fame is entirely done by voting. I think thats obviously different from something recording an objective achievement.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
Social contracts broken, bad behavior leads to more attention, keep doubling down, never apologize, etc - it’s the same playbook in every case. FIDE has been slow to act,
In the Chess part
It’s yet another way in which social contracts are crumbling in front of us, and I honestly have no idea what I’d do about it if I was a woman who had to be on camera in front of the internet for my job.
In the Twitch part
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
The comparison to pervious conformism isnt relevant here, because this is not about Who Started It or is violating political norms or such. The vast majority of things wokeness has canceled people for, "normal" leftists agree that it would have been better not to do that thing, at least by a little. They disagree what to do about it, and object-level opinions about surrounding facts certainly play a role in that, but just increasing the willingness to demand conformity gets them to play along with whatever the wokes do (whether or not that makes them woke themselves is, again, not relevant here).
Theres also a difference in which things you enforce conformism on, and what you enforce it with. Removing the title here seems to me like something that used to be out of bounds. And I doubt anyone was removed from chess over communism - there literally where competitions with the USSR at the time.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
To my point, its not particularly important what the FIDE policy is currently, its about what Johnson considers reasonable. Unranking someone over... basically anything other than cheating himself, theres no practical reason for this besides "well, we could use this as a stick". Imagine making a list of the 10 fastest marathons ever and omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation. In line with the point of the post, this sort of thing used to be sacred, now "something must be done".
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
I was reading Does the social contract even exist any more?. It starts out with some typical stuff about questionable business models, some people being inconsiderate, some (left-leaning) politics. It mostly seems like a replacement-level post, until we get to the example of Daniel Naroditskys suicide.
Starting in late 2024, Naroditsky received repeated accusations from former world champion Vladimir Kramnik that he cheated in online chess tournaments. There is basically no evidence that this was true - Kramnik threw some slapdash statistics together that were roundly rejected by other experts - but Kramnik kept loudly repeating the accusations in interviews, on social media, and generally to anyone who would listen. As a former world champion, he had a large audience, and he specifically used it to harass Naroditsky without any real basis other than his own paranoia.
This mostly fits the theme (not that paranoid-delusional chess grandmasters are particularly new), and then comes:
Spurred by Naroditsky’s death, the chess community is demanding action. Some are calling for Kramnik to be investigated for ethics violations, stripped of his grandmaster title and kicked from FIDE, the sport’s governing body.
Holy shit, thats the normality youre missing? This is the only thing in the post that was actually unthinkable for me, though in retrospect with the amount streamers in the game, maybe it shouldnt have been. Still, in a post about how things used to work, presenting this as the obvious thing to do would still cause some whiplash, even if I thought to anticipate some people calling for it. The author here is an /r/neoliberal alumnus who frequently bangs the "You can just be center left, wokeness is a distraction" drum, and this feels like Ive just seen the manchurian punditate activate accidentally.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
9d ago
The reddit front page seemed quite certain that it was a shock collar, so the "sides" here are at least not the typical ones. As per the comments below... are you sure this isnt just Lorenz in paticular making shit up?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
10d ago
It is bad faith at least by the SCOTUS judges that continued to follow it. Other politicians share responsibility because they appoint those judges, and disagreeing with Wickard would take you out of the running.
And the amendment Im talking about it is not to reverse it, but to bring the text in line with current practice, for example by saying everything not forbidden is allowed instead of having enumerated powers. I dont think any amendments were made for reasons like that, because as per above, youre "in too deep" very quickly.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
Yes, but not the commerce clause. That bad faith interpretation has been used the entire time, with the approval of basically every politico and judge, because it was more important for them to be able to unconvincingly claim it didnt change than to fix that, and at this point, "We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.".
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
The rules of baseball have notably failed to punish the NBA for failing to enforce the foreign substance rule. Theyre not supposed to, of course, because the association is the authority which dispenses punishment on others. But the "constitutional rules" dont want anyone like that.
There is a certain theory of the separation of powers, where the constituition is supposed to act as a sort of trap-equilibrium, that would force all the people in it to go along via some complicated conditional punishment instructions to everyone, without anyone uncontrolled "above". This is a pipedream, and hasnt really been attempted, but neither did they just say "well the buck ends here, whatever those guys do is correct". They just told them what to do. Do you have a reason why this specific constitutional provision should carry punishment, thats not just "they should in general"?
Im not necessarily surprised either, but it would imply that trauma is something very different than people generally think.
People think that negative experiences somehow damage your mind and make it work worse. But while physical pain is a sign that your getting damaged, an experience cannot just damage you. How your mind reacts to things is generally up to your evolutionary optimiser with no real constraint besides complexity, and there is absolutely no reason to just work worse in reaction to something that happens to basically everyone. It might be an unfortunate sideeffect of a positive adaptation thats triggerd only rarely, or an "out of sample" type error, but it shouldnt be standard.
So on the conventional theory, healing/avoiding trauma is good because less damage is better, and getting less traumatised today is a lot like better nutrition today - but as per above, thats wrong. "Untraumatised" is instead an engineered mental state, like literacy, allowed for but not planned by human nature. This implies some very different things in how we should think about its benefits, potential downsides, and how to maintain it!
But when they decided that this sort of thing wasnt good, they didnt roll back that result, nor change the letter of the constitution to match the practice. So, on the plain meaning of what you said, no, we have been doing an interpretation thats this bad-faith the entire time.
There are ways to address this, by setting up a construct of what you mean by "the constitution" where it is true (like, that the New Deal counts as changing the constitution even if it didnt really do that but come on, you know what I mean). I think its reasonable to do this, and to think its relevant to our current situation. But its important to remember that what youre talking about there is a very different kind of thing than people usually believe "the constitution" is (even while they also in practice do the same thing), and not to be too surprised if they dont see it the way you do.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
The party host is usually a peer of the people (and women) who attend. Why do you think s/he cant adjudicate this?
Much as I dislike our regulatory frenzy, if those companies truely felt parasitised they could just not enter this market. With certain regulations, if the companies follow them, theres arguably some sense in which non-EU customers are being parasitised, but if they pay its literally just a tarrif.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
Then again, this level of bad-faith interpretation was completely taboo, Before Trump.
What is your take on Wickard v. Filburn?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that.
This seems to imply large fractions of human history where everyone was psychiatrically disabled.
in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation)
I dont think thats true. I forgot my ears the first time duck hunting, and I didnt even notice until it was time to reload.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
Somehow the people who say that "X doesnt matter, dont be distracted from our great overlords" are never willing to give in on X to get the overlords. It always only doesnt matter in the way where you should do what I want.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
long nowhere for their own honour and home, nowhere for a fatherland
Seemingly the great improvements in this matter havent been to your taste.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
11d ago
When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance.
I truely thought this line was dead. Ive already seen socialists use the fact that everyone knows this isnt true to make fun of their opponents. "Take your government hands of my medicare, lmao trumpies really have no idea how the world works. They totally didnt just believe the lie our predecessors sold them, no, this is totally evidence that we are the ones you should listen to". But I guess theres always someone. How do you exist at a TheMotte-level of political awareness into the present day?
It is in fact very easy to tell that there is parasitism here. You just need to compare the "premiums" with the expected pay-out. This could in theory involve complicated statistics, but fortunately government programms dont even pretend to take riskfactors into account (in fact, politicians are often proud that they dont), and the amount you pay is determined almost entirely by your income, which the payouts are often inversely proportional to.
The presence of some insurance effect does not negate redistribution which numerically dwarfs it. The point, though valid in principle, is irrelevant to complaints made about actually existing government budgets.
As per my links, average effective tariff rate was 22.5% based on April policy, and is 17.9% based on current. Before it was 1.5%. That is a big increase, and not that much of a walkback, though they were selective with that. Still, if the current ones are invisible, the old one cant have been that bad either.
I think if the market were banking on singularity, we wouldnt need to interpret it out of stock data, we would hear it quite clearly from the humans doing that trading. The AI hype is still well short of that level.
No, I dont think it did "incredibly" well. In fact, the more incredible a given level of performance is, the less likely it is - and the argument is that that limits how bad the tariffs can be, since they need to balance.
The election day change in previous years was: 2008: +3.2% (but back into the negative the next day) 2012: +0.8 2016: +0.1% 2020:+2.1% (due to the fraud saga, the one day change may be insufficient here).
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