MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
21d ago
Full-size vans dominate minivans on UK worksites too.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month.
I do not think the IDF would expose its soldiers to nuclear fallout just to put flags up on ruined buildings. Just to be clear what "gloves off" means when the full panoply of modern weapons are available.
One of the things you need to know to understand the current Israel-Palestine conflict is that if Israel were as evil as Hamas, or Hamas as powerful as Israel, this would already have happened.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
The Great Horseshit Crisis of 1894 is apparently an early example of fake news, but the price of horse manure in London dropped below zero at some point in the late 19th century, probably slightly after Carl Benz filed his first car patent in 1886.
Had people tried to run a city the size of 20th century London on 19th century transport technology, eventually there would have been a Great Horseshit Crisis. But we didn't and there wasn't. Van exhaust stinks, but per tonne-km (or ton-mile if you have to be perverse) of goods moved it stinks orders of magnitude less than horseshit. The Great Smog Crisis is real, but emissions control technology (and eventually the shift to EVs) is keeping pace with it in well-governed cities.
For a constant population and a roughly-constant material standard of living, high-tech urban societies are far more sustainable than traditional ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
21d ago
Are autoandrophiles even a thing? Blanchard was sceptical.
Heck, now the option of identifying as non-binary is more salient, FtMs are barely a thing for autoandrophiles to be a sub-thing of.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
and they are still mostly illegal
In the US. Licensed bookmakers in the UK can take bets on almost anything - betting on election results and royal baby names has been commonplace since well before 1988 - Robin Hanson did not invent prediction markets, and knows this. The commentariat on www.politicalbetting.com was the place to find the best non-partisan discussion of UK politics in the heyday of the OG blogosphere. I do not think that the existence of liquid prediction markets on UK politics (particularly after the foundation of Betfair reduced the large bid-ask spreads implied by dealing with a traditional bookmaker) has delivered the kind of benefits that US boosters of prediction markets expect.
My gut feeling is that the reason why prediction markets are currently the cool thing in non-leftist rationalist culture is:
- There were two close elections in the US (2016 and 2024) where biased pundits mis-represented the polls (which said the election was too close to call) and implied that the Democrat was well ahead. Prediction markets outperformed the pundits to a much larger degree than they outperformed honest polling aggregators like Nate Silver.
- Cryptobros looking for a less obviously anti-social use case for crypto than scams, ponzi schemes and ransomware.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
The glibertarian answer to the Riddle of the Flute Children is "Kill the man who asks who gets the flute." But that doesn't change the fact that someone gets the flute and others don't. If nobody is allowed to ask the question, we will get the default answer. And if the default answer is that the flute children fight among themselves then the flute will be broken as surely as it will be broken by the rival Grand High Flute Adjudicators in the Thirty Flutes' War.
Protection from organised predation is absolutely necessary for survival, and social insurance is mostly necessary. And neither can be practically provided by someone who lacks the powers of a Grand High Flute Adjudicator. If the State doesn't provide those things (or fails to do so effectively), other institutions will. And those institutions will coerce their members, and will seek to coerce nonmembers. And that coercive power will be fought over.
Now if we treat the flute metaphor as fact, the question has an easy default answer, that is revealing in the real world. Daddy decides which child gets the flute. "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a peace treaty between lineages. In the cis-Hajnal context where Daddy is the actual married biological father of actual minor children, it is one that works well.
But cis-Hajnal nuclear families are not the default, and "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a bad treaty if the flute children are productive adults with children of their own and Daddy is an increasingly senile paterfamilias who might not even be a blood relative. The human default is to look to extended family for protection against predation and for social insurance, and the normie way of thinking about other institutions that provide those things (including the State, the Mafia etc.) is as fictive extended families - hence Don Corleone's English-language title of "Godfather" and the often-accurate libertarian jibe against the Mummy Party and the Daddy Party. And in practice the people who find themselves inside those kind of extended family institutions are treated like naughty children whose flutes can be taken away if they backtalk Daddy. And so they work (and, more often than not, fight - Western civilisation's record at kicking the asses of fuzzy-wuzzies on the battlefield is even better than our record of delivering unimaginable universal material prosperity) like naughty children. The canonical book on this point is Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan
The Peace of God predates the Hajnal line, the Hajnal line predates the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Treaty of Westphalia predates SpaceX. This isn't an accident.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
If I'm advising a hypothetical DeSantis administration (i.e. accepting the basic premises of MAGA foreign policy thought, but ignoring Trump's personal beefs with Zelenskyy and apparent mancrush on Putin) then my strategic analysis is along the lines of:
- Ukraine is in Europe.
- The aims of US policy in Europe are (1) to encourage the Europeans to pay more of the cost of defending Europe [unspoken - from Russia] and (2) to prevent Europe (and the EU in particular) from developing the ability to act in a coordinated way contrary to US interests. This is hard because these aims are almost but not quite contradictory.
- In particular, Taiwan (and containing China more broadly) is worth more to the US than Ukraine (and containing Russia more broadly), but this matters less than you think because a land war going on right now and a possible naval war in the future draw on different weapon stockpiles with different supply chains.
- The so-called "rules based international order" is valuable to America, most importantly because it discourages nuclear proliferation. A world where Putin gets what he wants because he is a nuclear madman and DeSantis isn't is a world where a lot of countries are going to build nukes, and a few are going to act like nuclear madmen.
- Russia's goal is to subjugate Ukraine (probably by installing a pro-Russian puppet government similar to Lukashenko in Belarus). Putin has been explicit about this. "Neutrality" is a furphy - a "neutral" Ukraine would not be able to avoid subjugation without some kind of western security guarantee which Russia would consider a violation of neutrality. In the failed Istanbul negotiations, Russia was far more concerned about "neutrality" than territory, and their idea of neutrality incorporated an explicit treaty commitment by the USA, the UK, and France not to intervene if Russia attacked Ukraine again. Note that from a European perspective, a "neutral" Ukraine is also one that wouldn't be able to prevent Russia crossing its territory in order to attack other European countries.
- The key known unknown is Putin's intentions after subjugating Ukraine. The Mearsheimer view is that Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine into their sphere of influence, that this is reasonable because Ukraine is a natural part of the Russian sphere of influence, and that once Russia controls its natural sphere of influence Russia will not, for realist reasons, want to engage in continued aggression. The Putler view is that Russia is engaging in what lefties call "imperialism", Paradox players call "blobbing", and academics with sticks up their asses call something like "opportunistic expansionism". 200 years of Russian policy suggest that Russia sees its natural sphere of influence extending at least as far as the Vistula, and public statements by Putin administration officials are consistent with this, as is Russia's campaign of cyberattacks, election interference, WMD terrorism etc.
- If the Putler view is correct, then failing to defend Ukraine is a mistake. It is a survivable mistake for the US, but a catastrophic one for Europe. (To paraphrase Churchill, if we appease Putler in Ukraine then the US will get dishonour, but the EU will get war).
- Apart from Putin's intentions, there are no important secrets here. The Russians, Ukrainians, Europeans, Chinese etc. all know the same things we do. In particular, the Europeans know that Ukraine is near-existential if the Putler view is correct.
- A strategic deal with Russia is not worth it if it means throwing Europe under the bus, because Europe is an order of magnitude more valuable as a trade partner and as an ally against China.
And the resulting policy recommendation is:
- In the early days of the war, support for Ukraine is cheap and there is an outside chance of solving the Russia problem (if Russia either cuts and runs or offers a reasonable deal once it becomes clear that they can't win quickly). The Biden policy of providing cheap help like intel, and older weapons which were going to be replaced in the next 5-10 years anyway was a good one.
- Once it becomes clear that this is a long war, and that support for Ukraine is going to start coming out of the budget rather than existing idle resources, the goal is to maintain a leading role while dumping the economic cost on Europe. So say, first quietly and then loudly, that the US is happy to continue helping Ukraine, but after some reasonable period of time (3-6 months) they are not going to do so for free. Then follow through - based on the above analysis the Europeans will grumble, but pay up. The US should chip in enough to retain a seat at the table - say 10-20% of the cost.
- Engage in some performative show of strength in the Pacific to make clear that this is a pivot and not a bugout.
- Support the European-funded response. Sell anything the US can produce that Ukraine wants on normal commercial terms. Encourage US arms manufacturers to prioritise orders bound for Ukraine (which is at war) over orders for the US (which is not). Share intel if you already have it or can acquire it cheaply. If Musk refuses to provide Starlink service to the AFU on normal commercial terms, then he doesn't get US government contracts.
- Support the economic war against Russia, particularly in ways which directly promote US interests. (An energy-rich America is an economic competitor to Russia). Drill, baby, drill. Tank the oil price. Build out LNG export capacity. Name and shame the German businessmen who are trading with Russia via Kyrgyzstan.
- Points about public diplomacy which shouldn't need saying but apparently do - don't lie for the benefit of a domestic audience, because everyone can see you lying. Don't take sadistic pleasure in selling out Ukraine, because it strongly suggests you would sell out Taiwan as well. Don't endorse Russophile right-populist parties in western Europe. Talk like you are leading a coalition, stamp US flags on US-made weapons the Germans are paying for, etc. etc. - the whole point is to gain the benefits of leading the free world while shirking the cost.
- What is the win condition? We were seeing it in January/February this year. The combination of the cumulative impact of sanctions, the increasingly effective Ukrainian drone war, and the lame-duck Biden administration's decision to allow Ukraine to use western weapons to attack targets on Russian territory means that Russian logistics are falling apart. (The west, on the other hand, has near-infinite logistical capacity). If Russia doesn't come to terms while they can still supply the army in Ukraine, then the army is destroyed and they lose everything including Crimea - so they probably will.
- If Putin does come to terms, offer face-saving concessions (Ukraine in the EU but not NATO, possibly international recognition of Russian rule in Crimea if they still control it) but not substantive ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo 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
26d ago
Googling "American lawyer average IQ" gives various estimates in the 115-125 range, with comments that successful lawyers (white-shoe partners, lawprofs, federal judges) are mostly going to be 130+.
I am pretty confident Sotomayor is in the 115-130 range - above average for traffic court lawyers, but well below the average federal judge. KBJ is even dumber than her. Kagan, Alito, Roberts, Kav, Barrett and Gorsuch are all smart enough to be e.g. High Court judges in England. I don't have an estimate on Thomas because so much of what he writes is easy dissents (or increasingly, concurrences) where he applies his simple but wrong (at least according to the majority and stare decisiis) law to the facts.
I suspect Alito is the smartest justice, but it isn't obvious because he is also the most partisan of the smart justices and partisanship makes you act dumber that you are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo 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
2mo ago
and offer Ukraine vague European security guarantees
This is the rub. Russia has always cared more about Ukrainian "neutrality" than they do about the exact position of the border - the demands immediately before the invasion related to "neutrality" and not territory, and the Istanbul negotiations broke down over the issue. Russia has said that troops from NATO countries in Ukraine is a red line - and if you accept the Mearsheimer realist view of Russian goals then it should be one. If they are willing to accept peacekeepers from European NATO countries then that is a major move. And the vagueness from the Trump administration on this point suggests that they are not. And on the flip side, Ukraine has no incentive to accept a deal that doesn't leave them more defensible than they are now, given the risk of Russia reneging and restarting the war in the future.
The hard part of negotiating a Russia-Ukraine deal is the security arrangements. By default any arrangement which makes it easier for NATO to defend Ukraine from a Russian attack in future is something that could, in theory, make it easier for NATO to attack Russia from Ukrainian territory. If the security arrangements are TBD (as they have to be if the countries that will actually be guaranteeing Ukraine's security were excluded from the negotiations) then there isn't a deal.
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
21d ago
A lack of revolution is understandable
Critically, this is a federalism issue with no important underlying policy disagreement. Non-consensually cutting people's hair (except in specific situations like the military draft) is uncontroversially illegal everywhere. In the modern US, nobody cares whether the same policy is implemented by the States or the Feds except in so far as it works as a litigation maneuver. (This isn't true in Europe, where the EU is not a country and the member states are still seen by their electorates as countries, and a substantial minorities of people are deeply attached to the idea that certain types of decision are made at country level)
Since America became a country and the individual States ceased to be countries (which a lot of people date to the Civil War, but I think happened somewhere between the Monroe and Jackson administrations) federalism ceased to be a principle people actually believed in and became a peace treaty. (Compare the infamous Yonatan Zunger essay making the same argument about liberal tolerance.) And right now, politically engaged Americans on both sides unfortunately don't seem to believe in abiding by the long-standing peace treaties between the Red and Blue tribes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
It is slightly more specific than that. The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
There is also a rarer reclamatory use of the term found on places like /r/neoliberal - the people using the word this way think the key neoliberal beliefs are free trade, support legal immigration at or above current levels, general scepticism of economic regulation, agnosticism about the ideal size of the welfare state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers. And now he is in power his opponents who are not doomposters have been using the same approach as cope. The only people for whom "Trump is just as bad as he says he is" is a comfortable thing to believe is the minority of his supporters who are straightforwardly malignant, and professional Blue Tribe doomposters.
Trump said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His opponents said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His non-retarded supporters said "Lol TDS - of course he won't actually do that." He is now blowing up the global economy with tariffs, and his non-retarded supporters are split between the ones still claiming that he doesn't mean it and this is a madman strategy negotiating move (and repeating his lies about the tariffs other countries impose on the US in order to do so) and the ones trying to reverse ferret into "Actually blowing up the global economy is good."
The model "Trump is as bad as he claims to be, but the damage was limited in the first term because of GOPe moles in the administration" has an increasingly good track record of making correct predictions. But most people don't want to make correct predictions, they want to appeal to readers. And right now everyone who can read wants to believe that Trump is not as bad as he appears to be - so there is a lot of demand for theories where Trump does not mean what he says.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
26d ago
actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise)
My understanding of Catholic (and even more so Orthodox) teaching is that everyone is either called to marriage and family or to a religious life. "Religious life" includes lay and clerical members of religious orders (monks are only ordained if their work as a monk includes ministering the sacraments, and nuns are obviously never ordained) as well as the (for Catholics only) celibate parochial clergy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo 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
15d ago
It is worth noting that the top British public (i.e. private) schools do not run on a quis paget entrat basis, and have not done since roughly the 1980's. There is a standard examination (Common Entrance) meaning that the system is transparent enough that people would know if it ran like Harvard admissions. At the time Prince Harry got into Eton in 1997, they apparently still had slightly lower academic standards for children of hereditary peers (and significantly lower standards for royalty - he wouldn't have met the reduced standards for the aristocracy), but they had no need to let a dim kid in for cash, and didn't. The other top schools had published pass marks with no exceptions.
Part of the joke about St Cake's is that there used to be a lot of mildly shit public schools that were selling social exclusivity and nothing else (and the resulting stereotypes survive because the upper classes are one of the designated acceptable targets for outgroup-bashing humour) but most of them went out of business after WW2.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
27d ago
I think this has been overtaken by events in Ukraine - also by the news about what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan. Actual drone warfare fought by people who know they are at war, hate the enemy, and want to win, is about as gentlemanly as WW1 era trench warfare.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo 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.
This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.
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