MadMonzer's profile

MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 16hr ago

Russia waited until after the pandemic, then waited a bit longer because the Chinese wouldn't support an invasion that could disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics. I don't think we can draw any conclusions about their preferred timing via-a-viz US domestic politics. Pre-pandemic conventional wisdom among the "Trump will let the Ruzzians invade NATO because Putin owns him" crowd was that the best time for Putin to start shit was after the 2020 election.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 16hr ago

The step-up basis makes sense to avoid double taxation in a world where there is a meaningful inheritance tax - the estate pays IHT instead of CGT on the gain from acquisition to death, and the heir's cost basis is the value on which IHT was paid.

In a world with no inheritance taxes, there is a reasonable argument that heirs should have zero cost basis in inherited assets - they didn't pay anything for them!

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 17hr ago

The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.

There is a reason why the UK will send you to jail for 2 years for handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 17hr ago

FWIW, there is a lot less persecution of gingers in the UK now than there was when I was a kid. My red-headed son is the most popular kid in his class. Was gingerism ever a big deal in the US?

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 2d ago

I don't know why Russia attacked a nuclear-armed NATO member with WMD, twice, but they did.

You go to war with the enemies you have, not the enemies you would like to have. In particular, we are facing an enemy whose tactics include psyops with the basic theme of "I have escalation dominance because I am a nuclear madman and you are not." Compared to the considered effort that the US and Soviet Union put into not doing that during the OG Cold War post-Cuban Missile Crisis, or the US and China put into not doing that now, I don't trust Putin to make risk-reward calculations about nuclear escalation that I would consider rational.

If Putin really is a nuclear madman and his enemies are not, then French and British nukes don't deter a Russian invasion of Poland, and probably don't deter a Russian invasion of Germany. Unless Russian policy changes, NATO has the choice of nuclear brinkmanship or massive nuclear proliferation. (Polish nukes probably deter a Russian invasion of Poland under any reasonable assumptions). The Russians have involved us in a game of high-stakes iterated chicken whether we like it or not, and iterated chicken 101 is that you should defend Schelling points like, well, a nuclear madman.

From a realist perspective the interesting question is which Schelling point do you defend, and how. The two big options are "Rules-based International Order" - i.e. you defend Ukraine once it becomes clear that Russia is waging an aggressive war of conquest (which it was by 2022, if not earlier), and "Article 5" - i.e. you defend NATO countries only. The "lesson of Munich" is that the stronger but less crazy side should defend the first Schelling point, not the most defensible one, because every Schelling point you fail to defend makes a promise to defend the later ones less credible. We can have an argument about whether the lesson of Munich applies to this conflict - it might even be productive in a way which arguments about who started it are not.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 15d ago

reverse Conquest's second law...

I suggest we call it "Scott's Law of Witches" after this post. The outgroup refer to it as the "Nazi Bar Problem" but we don't want to promote "Nazi" as an epithet for right-wing views in the large gap between Mitt Romney and the actual NSDAP.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 17d ago

Per Wikipedia, Bourdain looks like he was a serially relapsing druggie, which suggests deeper problems he was trying to self-medicate for. He was probably clean when he died, but the police never said what the prescribed medicine found in his system was, and in any case withdrawal is a bitch.

"Hard-living troubled artist" is a lifestyle trope which has a script, including a dramatic premature death. Perhaps Bourdain had always planned to die before he got old, and realised that he was running out of time and needed to take matters into his own hands. If you know why Kurt Cobain killed himself, Anthony Bourdain probably did it for the same reason, plus some semi-conscious desire to copy people like Cobain. The fact that Bourdain was 61 and Cobain was 27 is a comment on rockstardom being an even less healthy culture than celebrity chefdom.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 17d ago

In general the interplay of devolution and the judiciary is fascinating. It’s like the UK is cherry-picking bits and pieces of US- or Canadian-style federalism without a real guiding principle of who exactly has authority over what. No British constitution indeed.

Not really, no - that England and Scotland have had separate legal systems despite being part of the same sovereign state predates US-style federalism - the Act of Union was in 1707, and it explicitly left Scots law unchanged. The fact that Scotland had its own legal system but no legislature pre-devolution was one of the constitutional weirdnesses that so offended Tony Blair.

Technically the Supreme Court of the UK (mostly just England, Wales and NI) has ultimate jurisdiction over the Scottish Courts, but cases are vanishingly rare and generally relate to ‘devolution issues’ where controversy over the Scottish government’s authority lies.

The Supreme Court of the UK can't hear direct appeals of Scottish criminal cases (this was part of the deal made in 1707), but you are right that this one could be litigated as a devolution issue - the powers of the Scottish Parliament (like every other UK body with delegated legislative powers) are limited by the Human Rights Act, so if the Scottish law JK Rowling was being prosecuted under violated a ECHR right, it would be ultra vires. If the bad actor here was activist Scottish judges rather than politicians and she was prosecuted under Scots common law then there would be no appeal to a UK court, only to the ECtHR in Strasbourg.

That's Tony Blair for you. Same reason the UK now has a "Supreme Court" despite doing just fine without one for centuries.

"Doing fine without one" is misleading. The UK Supreme Court doesn't have a materially different role to the old Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (i.e. the Law Lords) - it just meets in a different building. I agree with you about Tony Blair feeling the need to rationalise things when there was no practical benefit.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 17d ago

Scotland also has an abundance of natural resources and low population density. The SNPs two-faced messaging of "Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes" and "Independent Scotland will be a green superpower" is darkly amusing.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 17d ago

As a Brit who has bought two houses, sold one, and walked several friends and work colleagues through the process, the attached articles about the English process (Wales is basically the same, Scotland and Northern Ireland are very different) are accurate. Some thoughts about how the system works in practice:

Even before you look at the 2nd commission for they buyer's agent, England has lower % commissions - admittedly based on higher average house prices. "Standard" commissions for a full service bricks-and-mortar agent are 2% outside London, 1.5% in London, and are negotiable down on large transactions so in practice the commission is a flat £7,500-£10,000 for houses in the £500k-several million price range. (In all cases add 20% VAT on top). Discount agencies like PurpleBricks or Yopa charge a flat fee of roughly £1,500, but as far as I can see they do the bare minimum work not to get kicked off the property websites (which don't accept FSBOs).
Given the existence of Zillow-style property websites (the main ones in the UK are Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket), I don't see what MLS or buyers' agents add to the house-hunting process. Before property websites, a thorough house hunt with no buyer's agent involved speaking in person to 5-10 estate agents in your target neighborhood to see what was on the market.
I can see the advantages of both parties being represented in complex negotiations - but if you are in complex negotiations you are probably in a chain, and the norm in the English system is that all of the estate agents in the chain are supposed to work together to keep things moving forward - in practice this means that the agent I hired to sell my first house acted as an informal buyer's agent on the purchase of my second house. And I wouldn't trust someone being paid by the seller to represent me in any case!
If you hire a cheap lawyer to do the conveyancing, it costs about £1,500 for the buyer and £1,000 for the seller. This is usually fixed-price work, not hourly. A licensed conveyencer (i.e. a paralegal who specialises in uncomplicated real estate transactions) would cost about half that. De facto this goes up sublinearly with price because people doing bigger transactions tend to use fancier lawyers. Some of this covers work that would be done by realtors in the US (negotiating the non-price parts of the contract) and some covers work that is done by the title company (like local searches and organising the closing).
Solicitors get paid anyway, so they feel less urgency about closing transactions than estate agents do - particularly the cheap ones. (At the price level where people have family solicitors, the solicitor will feel the amount of urgency appropriate to the quality of the client relationship).
A major bogosity of the English system is that it takes a long time to actually close a sale after an estate agent tells you the seller has accepted your offer. The traditional target is 6 weeks from acceptance to exchange of contracts - closing is traditionally 2 weeks after exchange but can be delayed further to fit around removal arrangements etc. The actual average from acceptance to closing is 12 weeks. Obviously delay creates the risk of the seller (in a rising market) or the buyer (in a falling market) opportunistically renegotiating the offer - something referred to by the lovely technical terms gazumping and gazundering respectively (both of which are generally understood by the housing-obsessed English public). It isn't clear why this is, and multiple attempts to fix it have failed.
England has a Torrens-like registered title system, so a single Land Registry fee covers deed recordation and title insurance (including for any mortgages).

So the total cost of an English residential transaction (excluding the mortgage broker and taxes) looks like:

For a £300,000 semi in the burbs outside London (full service/discount):

Estate agent £6,000/£1,500
Seller's solicitor £1,000/£500
Buyer's solicitor £1,500/£750
Local search fees £300
Land Registry fee £150
Total £9,000/£3,200 (3%/1%)

For a £1-2 million London townhouse:

Estate agent £7,500-10,000
Seller's solicitor £1,500-£3,000
Buyer's solicitor £2,000-£5,000
Local search fees £500
Land Registry fee £500
Total £12-19k (slightly over 1%)

For a US comparison, you would need to add the title company fee and any county deed-related fees to the realtor commission to compare to the UK total.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 18d ago

And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately...

Stockholm has a clean, crime-free metro.. Since mass immigration altered Swedish demographics, this requires significant spend on graffiti cleanup and Metro-contracted security staff who are willing to use the necessary force to keep it that way. This continues to happen despite Swedish politics being what it is, because voters are neither morons nor masochists.

For the avoidance of doubt, so does every other sufficiently large Continental European or first-world Asian city. The fact that America can't police public spaces without a level of lethal violence that normies won't tolerate doesn't mean that it is impossible, just that America sucks at policing. The absence of research interest in "Why can't Americans convert taxpayer dollars spent on policing into an absence of crime the way other first-world countries can?" is exhibit A in why criminology as a discipline is a waste of space.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 18d ago

Joe Biden was VP to a politician who emerged from the universe of big-city political machines run out of Black churches, and won the Democratic primary against several progressive candidates who were both more charismatic than him, largely based on the support of those same machines. Black Christians worship on Easter Day in the same ways as white ones, except given the increase in evangelical self-ID among white Republicans who wouldn't darken a church door, they are probably more likely to show up.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 18d ago

Yes. The flagpole the trans flag was flown from primarily belongs to the Embassy to Italy, which is co-located with the administratively separate Embassy to the Holy See and Rome branch of the Embassy to the UN. A quick google suggests that the Embassy to the Vatican participated in Pride Month by hanging a rainbow flag (not the trans flag) above the entrance.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite 22d ago

At world market prices, HFCS was more expensive than cane sugar, so the only products which contained HFCS are ones that are intentionally made to American recipes. HFCS was an originally an American work-around for a cockamamie government sugar policy, and is now the driver for that policy (because of the lobbying power of Archer-Daniels-Midland).

This is starting to change as cane sugar prices have increased since 2010 and the Chinese are getting into the HFCS business in response.

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