MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
Because fit, healthy American citizens with good work ethics already have better jobs than picking fruit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
It is also probably the governing body whose leaders spend least time in the territory they govern. Your average tinpot dictator is most likely to be found in his Presidential Palace in his own country. Hamas leadership are most likely to be found in a luxury hotel in Qatar.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Yes - that. We can argue about the ethics of a country defending its citizens' property rights by couping foreign governments till the cows come home, but if we are considering the practical wisdom of doing so then "The 1953 Iranian coup had long-term negative consequences for the West which vastly outweigh the potential impact of an oil company being nationalised" is simply true and needs to be taken into account. In the world of international politics, a mistake is worse than a crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China.
Checking the list, Romania is richer than all of those, and appears to still be a net exporter of migrant farm workers. But googling suggests that Romania is importing sub-Saharan African migrants to do the jobs Romanians will only do for western European wages.
Argentina has significant numbers of migrant farm workers from poorer South American countries.
I think that leaves China as the most likely answer - it is richer than Brazil or Mexico now.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
The whole point of the Iraq war from the PoV of the "realist" faction in the Bush Jr White House (I would guess particularly Cheyney and Rumsfeld) was to set up a US client state on Iran's border, ideally one that (unlike Saudi Arabia) was not funding Al-Quaeda. The project failed because the only Iraqi faction that was willing to collaborate with the American invaders was Badr/SCIRI, which was also the pro-Iranian faction.
There was a long period (roughly from 9-11 to the defeat of ISIS by Russian and Iranian forces in 2017) where a rapprochement between the US and Iran would have been possible, based on the shared enemy in Salafi Jihadism (including Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS), if both sides had been run by actual foreign policy realists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Interesting question - what is the richest country (except city-states like Singapore with no agriculture) that doesn't make large-scale use of itinerant foreign farm workers? My initial guess was Japan, but they finally cracked and brought in an agricultural guest worker visa in 2019. South Korea and Taiwan also use guest workers on a large scale. Poland have scaled back their farm worker scheme because they can get Ukrainian refugees to do the work, but that isn't getting Poles to do it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
It is noteworthy that the well-run red states (Texas and Florida) don't have mandatory E-verify for private sector employers, and the badly-run red states do.
But then the GOPe never tried to conceal that they were using illegals to undermine worker protections. The main thing Bush Jr did to enforce the immigration laws was sending fake OHSA inspectors into workplaces and deporting any illegal who tried to report a safety violation.
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
The decision to treat never-married single mothers as deserving poor was, in the UK at least, both conceptually and temporally separate from the decision to bureaucratise poor relief. I agree with you that it hasn't produced good outcomes.
Under the Old Poor Law, the deserving poor were generally understood to be:
- People with a record of contributing to society who were now too old and frail to earn a living by manual labour.
- Cripples and lunatics (although in practice the resources simply weren't there to support them)
- Widows and orphans.
Wounded or disabled veterans were increasingly considered deserving poor over the course of the 18th century, although they were not legally treated as such by the Poor Law system so if they didn't qualify for the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea (for the Army) or Greenwich (for the Navy) then they often ended up on the streets or in the workhouse.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare.
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis. Coercively funded public welfare has been around since time immemorial, the consequences of abolishing it have been politically unacceptable even in poorer and harsher times, and members of the manual labour class who can no longer work hard enough to hold down a job due to old age have almost always been seen as the most deserving cases.
Poor relief through the Church in medieval Europe was not voluntary charity - it was institutionalised welfare funded by State-endorsed coercion. In England the system largely operated through the monasteries and there was a combination of real secular coercion (tithes were a compulsory levy which could ultimately be collected by force, and impropriation of rectories by monasteries basically meant that tithes beyond what was needed for the support of the parish priest were diverted to monastic "charity") and spiritual coercion (in a society where people actually believe in a religion which incorporates justification by works, "you will go to hell if you do not leave a reasonable percentage of your net worth to the local monastery" is coercive). In the middle of the 16th century the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation mean that this system stops working, and the resulting increase in visible destitution is as politically destabilising as the present-day street-shitting crisis in San Francisco. Eventually England gets a comprehensive system of tax-funded secular poor relief in 1601. The Malthusian turn in the 19th century doesn't change the principle - the workhouses were harsh but they weren't cheap. And "don't put the infirm elderly in the workhouse" was the first demand of left-populists and one of the top five demands of right-populists for most of the next century.
What did change, probably for the worse, was the shift from a poor relief system where who gets what was ultimately at the discretion of local elites who could rely on their own knowledge to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor to a bureaucratised system. And that change was made by the workhouse-mongers who thought that the local elites were too soft - something that is still an issue in the UK in the present day, where governments of all stripes keep trying to centralise eligibility assessment for disability benefits because patients' own NHS GPs (in the late 20th century, the archetypal local elite) are too soft, particularly in high-unemployment post-industrial areas like the Welsh valleys.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
This depends on the existing mode share in your city. If you start with a high enough public transport share (true for journeys into or within Manhattan but nowhere else in the US, also true for the cores of European cities including London and Paris) then improved cycling infrastructure is taking people off busses and trains, not cars.
But the basic point that replacing a car lane with a lane which moves more people than the car lane (whether on bikes, busses, trams, or anything else) will tend to speed car traffic up.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Every cyclist I've ever suggested this to hates it, and I think it's just because they don't like going as slow as you sometimes need to go on a sidewalk to be safe. But it is often what they are asking drivers to do: go slowly for the cyclists safety on the road. Which is when it turns into a whole political question. No one likes going slower than they can, so who has to suffer the indignity drivers or cyclists?
Are you proposing that drivers should be required to check sidewalks for cyclists and yield when turning left or going through an all-way stop? If not you are proposing a soft ban on cycling, in that cyclists are required to yield to everyone everywhere. If you are proposing that motorists should yield to cyclists in sidewalks when they would yield to cyclists in the road then you are proposing something that non-criminal motorists would find even more annoying than the status quo.
Fundamentally, primary safety (i.e. avoiding crashes altogether, rather than making them less lethal) requires cyclists to either be in fully segregated infrastructure (either grade separated at junctions as in Milton Keynes in the UK, or having their own phase at traffic lights as in Dutch cities) or to be in the road where drivers will see them.
In addition, a bike (ridden at speed by a competent adult cyclist) is more like a car than a pedestrian in that it can't stop safely if someone crosses its path without looking. The place where you are required to be paying sufficient attention to not cross other road users' paths without looking is the road, not the sidewalk.
If you want to ban bicycles (except as children's toys) in your community, that is a perfectly plausible tradeoff to make after considering the relative importance your community places on the health and fitness of the population, teenagers' ability to be independent, green goals etc. against a marginal speed improvement for drivers. But if there are bicycles in environments where the speed of car traffic is 30mph or less, they belong in the street. Society worked this one out while Henry Ford was still alive and nothing that matters has changed since then.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Of course the Jones Act regulates US shipping - the whole point is that it prohibits US shipping using imported ships.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
Shipbuilding was made obsolete by railroads and trucks
The EU moves more freight by coastal ship than by rail. American coastal shipping was rendered obsolete by the Jones Act, not by improvements in land transport tech.
I'm don't see any consensus that US made cars are inferior to foreign ones, and in my experience they're perfectly fine.
If by "cars", you mean "cars" and not pick-up trucks, then the only reason why US-made cars are still a thing is because foreign companies opened up non-union factories in places a long way from Detroit. That is not the outcome classic protectionism would have been looking for.
The pick-up truck market is an example of classic protectionism working, admittedly. There are lots of union jobs making pickup trucks for sale into a protected domestic market. There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
In the UK, the conventional wisdom was that "millenial beige" (which I think is the same colour - I have also seen the style called "greige") was a product of the high-end rental market which exploded after the 2008 crisis and the near-disappearance of 95% LTV mortgages.
If you are a landlord, it is more important to be good enough for whoever shows up on day 1 to get a tenant in quickly. And that means maximally inoffensive.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
He may be popular, but his popularity didn't open up any political space for a non-Trump right-populist candidate. The MAGA voter base appear to want the aesthetics of Trumpery as much as they want the right-populist policy substance.
In a hypothetical open field (say Trump had a heart attack in 2021), I think De Santis was the clear favourite in 2024. He is still a serious candidate (I think Abbott would be a narrow favourite) in the hypothetical where there is somehow an open Republican primary in 2028. But the question in this thread is whether he has any chance against a Trump-endorsed candidate, or an incumbent JD Vance if Trump is dead. He didn't run a good campaign in 2024 because there was no good campaign a right-populist could run with Trump in the race. And I think he faces the same lack of political space against any serious Trump-endorsed candidate in 2028.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Even if the DNC formally endorsed the decision, I think Harris and not the DNC chose Walz. I find Harris picking Walz as pushback against a underhand media campaign just as plausible as the DNC doing so.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
To be clear, I'm assuming that these people would have to compete against Vance running with a Trump endorsement.
I agree that Vance has the status of "most likely endorsee" now, but Trump is not known for sticking with decisions in the face of events. Trump could decide to endorse a dynastic successor, he could try to run for a third term (which Vance would have to discredit himself with the median voter by playing along with until Trump agreed the game was up). More likely, they could just have a falling out. Trump switching his endorsement to Rubio because Vance didn't clap loudly enough is totally in character.
My wild-ass guess probabilities, conditional on Trump not being dead or unconcealably senile by summer 2028 are:
- Trump doesn't make an unequivocal endorsement because he is still talking about running for a third term (either seriously or as an ego trip) or butthurt about his inability to run for a third term 25%
- Trump endorses a family member 10%
- Trump endorses Vance 30%
- Trump endorses Rubio or someone else with a similar profile 10%
- Trump endorses someone who isn't on the radar now 20%
- Trump does not make an endorsement and calls for a real primary 5%
I agree with you that if an apparently-compos mentis Trump endorses a non-family member then the Republican primary is basically sown up. DeSantisism is right-populist substance but without the reality-TV sideshows Trump generates, and there is no appetite for it among Red tribers in the country. I think this applies even if the endorsee is an obscure MAGA state legislator or a TV personality with no political experience. Even if Trump does endorse a family member, I think the MAGA vote is strong enough that the endorsee still has a >50% chance of winning a Republican primary.
As for Vance himself, I don't see him leaving a Senate seat to be VP for four years before going back into private life.
A significant part of the upside for Vance is the chance that he will become President because Trump (who will be 82 when he leaves office) dies or has a disqualifying medical event that can't be covered up leading to the 25th being invoked. This is a good enough shot at the White House that an ambitious politician would take it even if there was zero chance of a 2028 run.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Shapiro was such an obviously good pick (popular, moderate, highly increases chances of winning an important swing state) that not selecting him his strong Bayesian evidence that being a Jew is considered electoral poison by the DNC. If he's the nominee, leftist anti-Semitism becomes a major campaign issue and major source of internal strife for the Democrats.
Why? The case for Walz was that he was the most left-wing candidate available that could LARP as a regular guy. Shapiro is only an obviously good pick if you see Harris as too left-wing for the median voter and want to balance the ticket with a centrist. Choosing Walz over Shapiro is the obvious thing to do if you are running a left-wing base mobilisation campaign, which is what the Groups wanted Harris to do. It is also the obvious thing to do if you think you are the candidate as a result of a centrist coup and need to shore up credibility with the left (which is what the campaign staffers Harris inherited from Biden did think).
P(Walz as VP|Harris is too left-wing) and P(Walz as VP|Harris is afraid of anti-Semites) are both close enough to 100% that Walz as VP is not strong Bayesian evidence for one over the other. It is Bayesian evidence for both of those theories over something like "The Democrats are sensible moderates at heart, but too incompetent to communicate this to the voters", but if your prior on this in summer 2024 was still high enough for it to be worth collecting evidence against it then I want some of what you are smoking.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Particularly the paid agitators from out-of-town who wear masks to cover their faces.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
The Romans thought "a bunch of Romans deciding for themselves what to do" in the Senate or the assemblies was a holy ritual, or at least something where the special protection of the Gods was necessary and where certain ritual forms had to be followed in order to ensure that protection.
The analogous idea that the operation of American democracy has a special relationship with Divine Providence not shared with a group of pubgoers arguing over whose round it is was part of proto-Blue Tribe civil religion since the Colonial era, and remains so modulo changes in the Blue concept of divinity. It was generally accepted by proto-Red elites at the time of the Founding as well - both Washington and Jefferson talk like that a lot.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
I don't think whether Newsom has actually committed any specific federal crime is going to be a major factor in whether or not he draws the attention of federal law enforcement.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
I think the issue is that it works iff the police obey the order, but that if they don't then it is instadeath for the regime's credibility. The chance that police (or troops) will refuse to fire on their own countrymen engaged in a protest half the population finds sympathetic is high enough that governments don't normally want to risk it.
One of the advantages of a large multinational empire is that you can post troops from province A to keep order in province B, so the troops don't see the locals as their own countrymen. This doesn't work in nation-states, but the same general approach applies - this is why Singapore uses Ghurkas as riot police.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
GA or NC might start to be in play
They already are - Biden carried GA in 2020, and Obama carried NC in 2008. GA is about one point redder than perennial tipping-point state PA and NC is 2-3 points redder.
And they aren't going to get less in play - the extra EV each GA and NC are gaining is due to Democrats moving there.
On the bigger point, losing by 1.5% (popular vote) or 1.7% (tipping point state) would only suggest a defunct party if it happened under unusually favourable circumstances (like Neil Kinnock not quite beating the Tories in 1992 despite a recession and the Poll Tax debacle). That the Democrats came that close despite running a zombie and doing a last-minute switcheroonie for the ultimate Affirmative Action candidate suggests a party that can win if it avoids unforced errors.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Focussing the budget conversation on highly visible wasteful spending (as the late, great PJ O'Rourke called it, "balancing the budget by cutting Helium funds") has become pathognomic for saying you want to make large cuts when you don't actually plan to.
There is waste in the non-defense discretionary budget, because there is waste in everything. There may even be marginally more waste in the non-defense discretionary budget than in the average large private-sector organisation. But the idea that America is 30 trillion dollars in debt because of waste in the non-defense discretionary budget is simply false, and the man who says otherwise is either a moron or a liar.
If other low-wage employers are increasing wages to compete with the new high-wage farm jobs, then the total cost to consumers will be more than the $150/year/family.
We know how this works out, because the main feature of the Biden economy was higher low-end wages paid for out of higher consumer prices. The median voter hated it enough to vote for the crook.
More options
Context Copy link