MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
Medvedev was keeping the seat warm because Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term, not because he was aging out and his son was too young to take over. Everyone knew that Putin, who was only 56, would be back.
I would call it the Goh Chok Tong strategy after the man who was de jure PM of Singapore from 1990-2004. His political opponents (notably including The Economist newspaper, which was having a pissing contest with the Singapore authorities over censorship at the time) said that the country was actually run by Lee Kuan Yew (nominally retired, but still attending cabinet) and his son Lee Hsien Loon (as deputy prime minister and heir apparent). The joke was that Singapore was run by a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Goh. Teaching a heretical position on whether the power of the Holy Goh proceeded from the Father alone or the Father filioque was punishable by career-ending cancellation and crippling lawfare.
The difference was that LKY was 67 when he retired the first time, and only 81 when he retired for real and Lee Jr replaced Goh as Prime Minister. Trump will already be 81 when his second term ends.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
Since other people are bragging, I also called this one.
The interesting point is what happened at DOGE. Musk didn't have to call out Trump over the budget and may pay a price for doing so, so we can reasonably conclude that he is genuinely worried about spending. But he didn't run DOGE like a man who is genuinely worried about spending - he ran DOGE like a caricature of someone who wants to look like they are cutting spending without actually doing so. (In particular, he never went after the waste/fraud/abuse in Medicare or military procurement.)
My candidate theories:
- Conspiracy. DOGE was never meant to be about cutting spending - it was always about purging wokists from the civil service and defunding the pro-establishment left NGOsphere.
- Cock-up. Musk was in effect high on his own supply as a result of spending too much time on MAGA Twitter and had actually convinced himself that the right-idiotarian theory of the budget was correct. He expected to find an order of magnitude more easy cuts (wokestupid, fraud, obvious waste and inefficiency etc.) than he did.
- Kayfabe. DOGE was meant to produce the impression of big cuts that could provide political cover for the big giveaways in the BBB without actually cutting the big popular programmes,
In the conspiracy and kayfabe theories, Musk is willing to play ball when Trump tells him that he isn't actually going to be cutting spending because his businesses benefit more than most from a friendly government. Ramaswamy doesn't because he is now an asset manager, not a CEO of an operating business.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things?
The issue is that the relevant reference class is arguably "everything Musk does since he became a druggie". Until Grok, the last thing a Musk company did that didn't suck was the Tesla Model Y launch in 2019, and that was a minor variant on the 3 - the last difficult thing was the Falcon Heavy in 2018. Since they we have seen the Cybertruck (yuck), the 2nd-gen Roadster (not), the Semi (kinda), the 25,000 USD Tesla (just cancelled), FSD (based on non-standard meanings of "full" and "self" and about 5 years behind Waymo), Starship (subject to rapid unscheduled dissassembly), a deeply underwhelming Boring Company, and Twitter ending up bailed out with XAI's VC money. Oh - and DOGE breaking things without actually cutting spending.
So the case for "Musk has lost the secret sauce" is quite strong. The case for "Musk still has it" is being made by people who are already calling Starship and FSD as successes. The case for "Musk has mostly lost it, but is investable anyway" is that one Grok makes up for a lot of flops.
The bull case for Tesla is based on a pivot to a new AI/robotics business that doesn't exist yet. (Even Tesla bulls don't think the core automotive business is worth more than about 5x10^11 USD), so enough people still believe that Musk can do it again to keep buying the shares.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
I've lived in cities with emission norms, and even diesels are allowed in as long as they're relatively new. London and Paris might have gone literally zero emission, though I've never had to drive in either so can't confirm, and they'd be an exception.
EVs are exempt from the London Congestion Charge (to be replaced with a 50% discount from next year) and get discounts on residents' parking permits in most boroughs. But there isn't anywhere EVs can go where petrol or diesel cars can't. But the direct subsidies to EVs are lower in Europe than in the US - the big difference is that the running cost advantage of an EV is larger because petrol is more expensive here.
Essentially all minicabs on London streets (including Ubers) are hybrids - a quick check of the stats suggests that EVs are about 20% of the UK new car market and hybrids about 25%. Note that fleet purchases are (unusually by global standards) 60% of the market in the UK - this is part of why Tesla's market share is so low - they don't put much effort into fleet sales.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
It is worth noting that the change to the first post is large, and load-bearing. The 25 points began with the union of all Germans, not all German citizens - it was a specific pledge to incorporate Austria, the Czech Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor etc. into the Reich. @AvocadoPanic could have said "All Americans" instead with the implied dog-whistle that Albertans are included, and it would have been closer to the original and still relevant to MAGA policy.
SSCReader said it was 56%?
My source is the CNN exit poll as reported on Wikipedia. I'm happy to defer to someone with a better data source.
The Catalist report has a reputation for being more accurate than exit polls, but the free online version doesn't include the sex/age crosstabs. Matt Yglesias did a Substack post based on what is presumably the paid version of the report and says that the big picture was a mostly-uniform swing apart from the big swing to Trump among Hispanics and (to a lesser extent) Asians.
That's fine. I just have issues with calling that "greater problems attracting young people".
I don't think we disagree here.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
I can't advocate anyone legally able to CCW to go to a Gaza-focused protest without CCW.
I can't advocate anyone able to avoid it going to a Gaza-focused protest at all. "Don't go near political protests" is standard travel advice offered by every country about every country for good reasons - and essentially nobody in the West has a stake in Gaza that makes it worth protesting about.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Isn't this completely false? Last I've seen they had trouble attracting young women, with young men flocking to the in droves.
"Droves" is an exaggeration - Trump won 18-29 men 49-48 per the 2024 exit poll, which is about the same margin he won the electorate as a whole by. He does better with the middle-aged than the young among white men and women, though not among ethnic minorities. The gender gap is only marginally higher for the young than the middle-aged and only marginally higher in 2024 than 2020 - the massive youth gender gap reported e.g. here didn't show up at the ballot box. What did happen is that Trump lost the youth vote (of both sexes) less badly than the Republicans normally do in a close election.
The place where right populism really is an old man's game is the UK. Reform's vote is younger than the Conservatives, but not by much.
My read is that the MAGA is in the middle of the pack in terms of right-populist movements ability to appeal to young men. Looking at the exit polls for the 1st round of the Polish presidential election, the total right-populist vote (PiS+Confederation+Crown) is flat by age but the young voted for the kekkier right-populist parties whereas the old voted for the more traditionalist PiS. The 2024 French legislative elections showed the Left winning the youth, RN winning the middle-aged, and Macron's party winning the old. The same picture applies to the 2025 German elections.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.
This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.
In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.
The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Exactly. The inner-ring suburbs of western European cities that were affluent c.1900 (mostly western ones - Holland Park, St John's Wood, Neuilly-sur-Seine etc.) never stopped being. My impression is that the same is true of most ex-NYC commuter towns.
This pattern implies that the problem is the broader problem that makes US cities other than NYC unable to police themselves, and Americans resort to ways of living that don't need policing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
More safety procedures
Although we are well past the point of diminishing returns (except, possibly, on the roads), this was the opposite of bullshit during the time period you mention. Workplace deaths dropped by an order of magnitude between 1900 and 1970 and another order of magnitude between 1970 and the present.
Getting as much work done in the same number of hours, but with fewer dead workers, is a real improvement.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
The liberal otoh detests aella’s education (“abuse”), yet finds she ended up fine (”sexually liberated”) .
Nobody on either side of the aisle wants their daughter to grow up to be a whore, even an expensive one. The School of Hard Knocks needs no policy waivers to award Aella's parents an F for parenting.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
Something is just off in the first world
It happened very fast too. There have always been minorities who are loudly disgruntled with good reasons (particularly older people in declining regions), but in the noughties and even the early teens the dominant outlook was Thatcher/Blair/Reagan/Clinton style optimism. By 2019 (even pre-pandemic) if you weren't some kind of doomer you stuck out like a sore thumb as either an out-of-touch establishment tool or a Silicon Valley investor talking their book.
In the UK, you can date the change to somewhere between the 2012 Olympics and the 2016 Brexit referendum. The US isn't very different.
Given the timing and speed of the shift, I am inclined to blame algorithmically-curated social media.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
17d ago
This sounds like the hillbilly Oresteia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
17d ago
And, more significantly, Joe Biden was implementing the surrender agreement signed by Donald Trump in Doha in 2020.
The Deep State thought they could prevail upon Sleepy Joe to rat out of the deal, but I don't think they had any plans to win the war if they had done so. I don't know how much of the badly botched pull-out was Biden administration incompetence and how much was Deep State sabotage.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
17d ago
Hunter said he would hold 10% of the equity in a project for the big guy, but didn't do anything to act on this. This is consistent with both "Joe's share was 10%, but Hunter acted as the shell owner" and "Hunter was telling lies about Joe's involvement in order to scam corrupt foreigners by selling influence he didn't have". Given that Joe's lifestyle is consistent with his known clean income and that a Congressional committee with access to the bank records couldn't find any cashflows to "the big guy" from his alleged 10% participation, or any suggestion of what bribe-service Joe was providing to Hunter's Chinese clients in exchange for the 10%, Hunter freelancing seems more likely.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
For instance during latest elections 92% of votes of people in DC landed in favor of Democrats - these are all people staffing all the most powerful federal institutions.
The gentrified bits of DC where the young childless feds live is about 70% Dem. The reason DC is 92% Dem is not the feds (most of whom commute in from the suburbs), it is the black vote turned out by the Marion Barry political machine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
but also for not getting assassinated (don't make their outgroup too unhappy).
Empirically, the main threat model is unhinged people like Guiteau, Oswald, Hinckley and Crooks, not outgroup. It would be very bad if political leaders felt they had to optimise for not attracting the attention of violently unhinged people, because that basically requires not doing anything at all.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Although that reflects two very different marriage patterns - the cisHajnal one where a man in his late twenties marries a woman who is only a few years younger than him by mutual consent, and has also spent several years as a single young adult because she is expected to save her own dowry first, and the more usual one where a man who has accumulated sufficient capital to support a wife buys (either literally or figuratively) a teenage girl from her father.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
What you mean is that you prefer the implementation of a very bad policy (the build-nothing UK planning framework) to be undermined by corruption. The current policy is not "stealth corrupt" - it is working as advertised for the NIMBY voters who voted for it.
This is a special case of "competent and evil is more dangerous than incompetent and evil", with corruption being an effective competence-reducer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
The term was coined by Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns, who absolutely does not want to eliminate cars - at the point where he founded Strong Towns he lived in a suburb of Brainerd MN (micropolitan area population 99k) which even urbanists don't think is going to be a transit city. It is also geographically small enough (the contiguous built-up area around Brainerd proper is <10 miles across) that slowing the traffic in the city and inner suburbs to 30MPH isn't going to add more than a few minutes to anyone's journey. If you live in a town the size of Brainerd, there is no need for anything intermediate between city streets and the main road from Brainerd to the next town over.
Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles - as the correct one if you have enough traffic to justify that much tarmac. US-19 north of Tampa Bay - identified by various people as the worst stroad in America - looks like an example where there is enough space to do this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
Funnily enough classical geometry can be made to admit a coordinate system over it so both classical and (basic) coordinate geometry are effectively isomorphic in the sense that C++ and Conway's game of life are isomorphic (both are Turing Complete).
The cry of the Intercal programmer. Whether classical geometry corresponds to Intercal and co-ordinate geometry to Python or the other way round is let as an exercise to the interested reader.
(Can you tell I hated the geometry problems in olympiads?)
So did I, but then I don't claim to be a mathematician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
Googling suggests that the refrigerant sold under the brandname "Freon" used to be a CFC and is now an HFC, and so is no longer ozone-destroying. So this looks like either the LLM, the techs, or both is confused by generic use of a brandname.
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.
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