Rov_Scam
4hr ago
My point is that if Mexicans receiving remittances were living high on the hog due to wage and cost of living differentials, as OP suggests, then meeting solvency requirements for immigration should be a piece of cake. The fact that this might not be possible is evidence that they're not.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
We're not talking about people working in Mexico. We're talking about people not working in Mexico and being sent remittances from people working in the US.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
If you're trying to make an argument for restricting the labor supply, don't pick a country with over a billion people as an example of how to do things, especially if most of those people were poor peasants a generation ago.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
Do you find gentrification harmful as well? Looking back at my recent post about Lawrenceville, in 2000 it was a working-class to lower class area with an average home sale price of around $25,000. At the same time, a house in a good suburb like Bethel Park would cost over $100,000. These days, the average sale price in Lawrenceville is over $400,000 while Bethel Park is around $300,000. Bethel Park hasn't changes much over that time period but Lawrenceville certainly has.
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
Then why didn't it happen? Iran's nuclear program was effectively unrestricted for nearly 8 years.
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
No, but people move around all the time to improve their economic status, including to places where they don't speak the language, have extended families,nor have nostalgia for from growing up there. If these kinds of migrants were getting as good a deal as the OP thinks they are, more people would go in the opposite direction.
Rov_Scam
16hr ago
That theory has them getting a viable nuke sometime between June of last year and the present. I don't think you, or anyone, can predict the timeline with that degree of certainty.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
Americans generally do have the option of sending their families to live in Mexico and sending them remittances.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
LOOK AT THE TIMELINE! The offer Trump accepted was on the table before he made the threat.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
A smarter man would have done more to talk Trump out of it, or at least help identify strategic objectives and have an exit plan for what to do if those objectives weren't realized within a certain timeframe. I get the impression that Hegseth pretty much discounted the possibility that anything but bunnies hopping through the woods would come out of this, and that if he'd given stronger pushback from the outset, then we might not be in this mess. He's clearly the least qualified person in a major cabinet position and the only thing he has to offer is the role of sycophantic yes-man who's the only one in the room to tell the president his instincts are correct. Because let's fact it, if Trump wanted a qualified candidate who would tell it like it is, those guys aren't in short supply, especially when you consider the qualifications of the guy he actually picked. Unfortunately, unflappable loyalty doesn't keep you from being the scapegoat, especially when it's the only quality you have to offer, extra especially when the president trusted your word over all others. I agree that the problem wasn't with any of Hesgeth's individual tactical decisions. The problem was with his strategic decisions, of which there were none. Not once in this entire conflict did we get a clear picture of what the administration's goals were. If the administration doesn't know what its strategic goals are, then the whole enterprise is doomed. I hate to quote Sun-Tsu, since it's the realm of cringeworthy corporate assholes, but tactics without strategy is the fastest route to defeat.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
These are all fake posts, AI, Russian, both, or otherwise. I've seen enough political posts on Facebook from verifiable salt-of-the-earth conservatives to be able to spot fakes:
- No selective capitalization; Caps Lock is either on or it isn't
- No recognition that the em-dash exists, let alone an old typewriter substitute
- No statistics that aren't from copypasta
- At least one spelling or grammatical error
Perhaps "most extreme" was a bit of hyperbole; when people bring up the Fox comment section to provide examples of conservative idiocy, someone always points out that it isn't representative, and I wanted to avoid that accusation. But it is representative of a certain kind of conservative idiocy, the kind of person who creates an account just so they can respond to a comment they agree with with "Bingo".
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
Read the timeline again. They made an offer. Trump turned it down and made threats. Then he accepted their offer. He could have done without the bombast and got the same result. I've been down this road before as a lawyer—you and the opposition are at odds, they make an offer, you refuse, you threaten to go to trial, and you cave during jury selection. It's pretty clear that he thought he could get a better offer if he made threats to wipe out their civilization but when no offer was forthcoming as the deadline approached, he decided to cave rather than go through with it.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
So... I originally replied (without reading more than one sentence)
That's actually apropos for the discussion since Levin and his ilk evidently do the same thing—reflexively praise Trump without paying attention to what actually happened. Respond to the part where Trump declares victory without looking into what's actually on the table. With Israel bombing Beirut less than 24 hours after the ceasefire was announced Levin may find himself throwing more intense fits if the US has to put real pressure on Israel to get them to stop.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
Say I'm negotiating a settlement to a lawsuit. I offer $200,000; the plaintiff insists on $250,000. It's the eve of trial and I tell opposing counsel that if she wants to take this to a jury fine, I'm happy to see that she gets nothing. We start picking a jury and by the end of the first day I've agreed to the $250,000. If I told you this story and ended it with "Whenever we started picking the jury and opposing counsel saw that shit was getting real she begged me to settle" you'd tell me I was delusional. I could have made the exact same deal the day before without wasting anyone's time. What happened was that we got into a staring contest and I blinked first. This isn't the perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
As for all these dubious benefits we have to keep in mind that, for the past 20 years, there have been two reasons Iran has been a problem:
- Their nuclear program
- Their arming of proxies in the Middle East
I don't recall any point in that timespan where anyone has claimed that Iran's conventional capabilities were a threat to anyone. They had those capabilities for decades but hadn't used them since the Iran-Iraq War, a war in which they were on the defensive. Six months ago, no one was warning us about the threat from the fucking Iranian navy. And I don't think there was much of a question that US conventional forces would be able to damage the Iranian military to the extent they have. In any event, we couldn't do enough to stop them from shutting down the strait, the one thing everyone has been warning they would do for years if we attacked them.
As for the nuclear program, that was supposedly "obliterated" last June, and I haven't heard much about it in the present war other than that they were continuing to bomb nuclear sites, so how much the program has actually been set back is anyone's guess. My own guess is not much, considering that I can't find any information about it and Trump would certainly be bragging about it if it were true, and probably even if it weren't. The Supreme Leader's death was completely without consequence. The guy was 87 years old and in bad health. If he had died of natural causes on the same day and was replaced with the same guy, I don't think any international analyst would be saying that this was a positive development for the United States. By all accounts the guy was actually worse to begin with, and now we've just killed his whole family. And I don't know how you extrapolate the ability to kill Supreme Leaders with impunity when we've only killed one to date.
So I think I can confidently make quite a few predictions that will be vindicated, because these are American non-negotiables and because America won (America is winning)
Did you actually read the ten point plan that Trump himself was claiming will form the basis of negotiations? Because there's nothing in there about anything on your list. The fact that you're reading into the terms of a future agreement items from your wishlist that Iran hasn't done anything to indicate they'd be amenable to discussing and that they've said repeatedly in the past that they wouldn't be amenable to discussing is evidence that you're doing exactly the same thing that all the conservative commentators are doing, i.e. relying on your own blind faith in Trump to achieve whatever fantasy land outcome you desire. You might as well add that the Assembly of Experts will all concede power to a pro-American democracy who will recognize Israel and become a strong ally in the region. Sheesh.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
For matters of policy, sure, but I think there's a place for generals to offer opinions on whether the proposed military actions will actually achieve the desired strategic objectives. If the president and his cabinet tell the general that they plan on toppling the Xi regime by bombing all the belts and roads that China built in Africa, I think there's a place for the military to explain why this isn't likely to happen.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Iran Ceasefire Takeaways
These are all based on my reactions as of early this afternoon and are subject to change with new developments.
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Per the article posted below, someone on the radio pointed out something interesting that's in it, or, more accurately, isn't in it. While the article includes details down to where everyone in the room was sitting and what kind of car Netanhayu arrived in, there's no mention of the Israelis saying that they were going forward with or without US assistance. This puts a huge implicit dent in the idea that the US had to do this to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
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I also heard on the radio this morning that J.D. Vance will be handling the upcoming negotiations. This represents a serious change in approach from Kushner.
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The immediate conservative reaction I heard in-person last night and from commentators up to the present seems to be a cautious optimism that since the deal isn't finalized, the terms aren't as bad as they look. I'll admit that while that's true, the fact that the nuclear program doesn't appear to be on the table is already a bad sign, and the fact that some of the stuff, like tolling the strait, is even being talked about is also a bad sign.
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That being said, the Fox News comment section isn't even defending this. I know that's not representative of conservatives or even MAGA by a long shot, but I still like to check it out to get a feel for what the most extreme right-wing true believers have to say.
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Hesgeth this morning was trying to paint this as a decisive military victory. After Bondi was canned last week, there was some mention that other Cabinet members were on Trump's shit list and would be out soon, but no names were mentioned. I'd have to thing that Pete's going to be shown the door as soon as it is feasible. It seems to me that his failures are worse than those of Bondi and Noem, though I can't explain why other than that war seems worse than even being so aggressive that the administration is forced to back off of enforcement of its signature policy and reducing the DOJ to a shell of its former self. Unlike Noem, I expect he'll be replaced with an experienced general (or admiral) who will get bipartisan support in confirmation hearings. Honestly, of all the Trump cabinet nominations, Hesgeth has to be the worst. Bondi and Noem were bad but one was state AG and the other was governor. Hesgeth was a major in the reserves and a talk show host. The latter is perversely more important because if a president chose a random major as Defense Secretary then everyone would be scratching their heads. True to form, he seems more concerned with how he appears on television than with actually running the military. He comes across like he hired professional television writers to come up with good zingers for him, that he practices delivering in the mirror.
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Speaking of Hesgeth, I think the next presidential candidate could make some hay during the campaign of changing the Department of War back to the Department of Defense, with Hesgeth and his "Warrior Ethos" being Exhibit A. Spin it as a reminder that, unlike the previous administration, the goals of the military won't be waging wars that make us less safe but defending the nation, putting the American people first, etc. Honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if Trump does this himself after Hesgeth is gone, since he's probably going to be the scapegoat for all of this.
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Foil hat time: I heard Mark Kelly on the radio last night and while I didn't catch the entirety of his comments, he alluded to the remarks about refusing lawful orders that Trump wanted to prosecute him for. My thought is, what if the reason for the sudden reversal was that the relevant military leadership indicated that they wouldn't follow his orders and invoked the UCMJ? Just look at the timeline here—Trump makes threats Sunday. Iran makes a counteroffer (the 10 point plan) on Monday which Trump publicly rejects. Tuesday morning he threatens to end Iranian civilization. 2 hours before the deadline he agrees to the Iranian plan he rejected the day before. If military leadership got the impression that the promised strikes were less about hitting legitimate military targets and more about inflicting pain on civilians, they may have refused to act, either from their own sense of morality and legality or for fear that they may be dragged in front on an international tribunal once the Democrats regain power, which is looking increasingly inevitable. While the current deal looks bad, it's not nearly as bad as if a bunch of generals refuse orders and resign in the middle of a war. Trump can threaten courts martial, treason charges, whatever, and it won't undo the immense damage that that would cause. I don't think this is particularly likely, since I don't think that what Trump was actually proposing would have necessarily been a war crime, but given how inexplicable this cease fire is, I'm willing to consider the possibility.
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If you look at the timeline again, I don't know how anyone who isn't literally retarded can buy the official explanation coming out of the White House, i.e. that after Trump made his civilization-destroying threat Iran decided to let discretion be the better part of valor by agreeing to come to the bargaining table. I shouldn't have to explain why this is obviously retarded.
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One of the analogies I've had since Trump seriously entered politics is that he's the equivalent of giving the loudmouth on a bar stool actual power. One of the divides between the so-called "elites" in media and politics and everyone else (regardless of political persuasion) is that everyone else says "Why can't we just do x?" and the elites explain that the situation is more complicated than it looks and give them 500 esoteric reasons why it's a bad idea. The biggest of these divides I've found (or at least the most obvious one) from the past 25 years is "Why can't we just bomb Iran?" I've had this exact discussion on actual bar stools dozens of time over the years, and few people making that argument have ever been persuaded by my counterarguments. I've seen that sentiment expressed here countless times as well, since it seems to never die. Well, it might have finally died, as the past month has been an object lesson in why you can't just bomb places, even in conditions as favorable as we had, where the opponent's air defenses are borderline useless and very few of their retaliatory strikes get through. Ditto for why decapitation doesn't work either. Trump seems to have fallen into the same trap where he assumed that there was an obvious solution to the Iran problem and that the only reason previous presidents didn't use it was because they were weak cowards or were too dumb to see what was obvious to everyone else.
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Speaking of things that the man on the street (and Trump by extension) saw as obvious but were actually more complicated: The JCPOA. When I criticized Trump for pulling out of the deal, his supporters were quick to point out all the ways in which the deal was inadequate. They weren't necessarily wrong, but criticizing the deal misunderstands a fundamental principle of negotiation. Any time you enter a negotiation you have to keep four deals in mind: The deal you want, the deal you'll ask for, the deal you think you're likely to get, and the minimum acceptable deal. The spread between each of these is proportional to the amount of leverage you have; the deal you want will always be the same, but with a lot of leverage you can push for a settlement closer to that ideal, while without leverage your expectations will cluster towards the lower end. The minimum deal you're willing to make is the point at which you're in a similar position without a deal at all. The lesson here is that sometimes a bad deal is better than no deal at all. Trump's mistake was to assume that the United States had more leverage in negotiations than it did, and that Obama was weak for refusing to use that leverage. The odd thing about this whole situation was that nobody was willing to say out loud what this leverage was. The implicit leverage that Obama wasn't willing to use was military action, but few Republicans other than John Bolton were calling for such; even Trump was unwilling to use this leverage during his first term. In other words, what everyone thought was leverage was no leverage at all.
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What Trump did in his first term was to essentially hand back the concessions that Obama had extracted from Iran, meager as they may have been, and got nothing in return. Okay, not exactly nothing, as he got some personal political benefit from dunking on Obama, and Iran was still obligated to hold up its end of the bargain to the other parties to the deal, but the long-term effect was to sow an increasing distrust between Iran and the US regarding our ability to hold up our end of the bargain. What this war proved was that the leverage Trump thought he had turned out to not be much leverage at all. On the other hand, it turns out that Iran actually had more leverage than Trump thought. The perverse effect of this war is that it put the United States in a worse bargaining position than it was before. If Trump can restore the status quo antebellum it would be a win at this point. The JCPOA, as much as Trump hated it, now seems like a pipe dream.
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With that said, I'm not criticizing Trump for making a crappy deal, because in some situations a crappy deal is better . I will criticize Trump for creating a situation where he was forced to make a crappy deal. Say what you want about Obama and his deal, his policies did not create the Iran nuclear situation; you can divide the blame for that among previous presidents going back to at least Carter.
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I don't understand how anyone, regardless of his position on the war, can defend Trump right now. Myself, pretty much all of the left, and a decent chunk of the right think that this was a bad idea to begin with, be it from and ideological or practical perspective. If you're an Iran hawk then this only proves he's too weak to fully commit, which would require a ground invasion, removal of nuclear material and full destruction of the program, and regime change. Saying that you're in favor of continued action as long as there aren't any boots on the ground isn't a position you can take any more, because even Trump admits that this isn't feasible.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Mark Levin may be a shill, but he's more of a Trump shill at this point than an Israel shill. I flipped over to Hannity late last night and all he (Levin) could talk about was what a great deal this was, his argument being that Trump made it so it had to be a great deal and we have to trust Trump because he's the smartest president we've ever had with the best leadership skills and all the other presidents bungled Iran but he showed them who's boss... at which point I turned the radio off. He made noises about how regime change is ultimately necessary but since that was never in the offing and is even less likely now, I don't understand how someone so pro-Israel can treat this as anything other than a betrayal. There's no permanent deal yet, but it doesn't look like the US is going to get it as good as we had it before the war started. The JCPOA is looking like a dream right now.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I think there might be certain limits to this patience, though. Not that Trump cares about anything that happens on the left, but even normally pro-Israel people there are looking askance at this war and at what's gone on in Gaza, there's a wing of the right that's variously anti-war and openly anti-Semitic, and we were just forced to accept humiliating cease fire terms to end a war that many commentators believe that Israel baited us into, and while I'd normally treat such a theory as a hallucination of the militantly anti-Israel crowd, Trump hasn't done much in the way of offering an alternative explanation to suggest that it isn't true. Given the political costs of this adventure, I'd have to imagine that there's a point where Trump runs out of patience. Then again, this is Trump we're talking about, and betting that he'll make terrible decisions is never a losing proposition.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It depends on how Iran responds. We have the leverage to convince them to stop. Whether Trump uses it is anyone's guess, but I have a hard time believing he'd want a repeat of the last month due to Israel's incontinence.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I don't think the US is going to be consulting Israel for much of anything going forward. Trump just agreed to one of the more humiliating cease fires in American history, in part because he got completely snowed by Israel.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I think it kind of did, though. He was already staring in the face of a wave election. If he could get Iran to capitulate quickly, he could prop up his numbers, and by extension the GOP's, by being the president who could solve the Iran nuclear issue once and for all by being the only president with the balls to attempt a military solution. Unfortunately, he believed his own bullshit and has such disdain for every president since Bush that he failed to consider that there were good reasons why nobody did it before. In the course of things, he pissed off the America First wing of the party and made fools of the hawks by insisting that he was achieving unprecedented success, akin to Germany in 1918. I figured he'd eventually be forced to yield, but not like this.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
There's a cost aspect as well. If it costs $200,000 to find a glitch in a video codec that may, horror of horrors, cause your player to crash (and which, to anyone's knowledge, hasn't done so in 16 years), that's not exactly a selling point. $200,000 may actually be an understatement; they said it took 5 million tries to catch it. At 20 cents an attempt, more like a million dollars. We also don't know if they ran any of these tests on old code with known bugs. If they did and the software didn't catch half of the ones that were already caught, its utility isn't that great.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I understand what you're saying, and while I don't practice in criminal court or (presumably) your jurisdiction, my own experience suggests that this is unlikely to happen. As we all learned in law school, the practice of law is the application of the law to the facts of the case. Traditionally, pro se litigants who don't know the law argue the facts and appeal to a vague sense of justice. LLM is the complete opposite since the LLM usually doesn't know anything about the facts but will gladly generate pages upon pages worth of vague legal arguments based on the invariably vague instructions it was given. Even a really good LLM is ultimately limited by the facts the user inputs, which, most of the time, is few to none, because they see it as just a magic box that will spit out something that looks professional but really doesn't do anything. Hence you get a guy with a 300 paragraph brief that doesn't once even hint at the general kind of case that it is.
Overall, though, while I see this as a problem, I only see it as such insofar as acting pro se is generally. If a prosecutor is reduced to tears of rage because he has to respond to endless motions from a pro se litigant and cuts a favorable deal to get out of it, I don't see how that situation is any worse than if the same prosecutor has to deal with the same thing from a team of high-priced attorneys paid for by the father of a wealthy defendant. My concern here is less for the prosecutor and more for the pro se who wastes the court's time and doesn't get a deal when he would have got one had a public defender filed the one motion that had any merit. My concern with LLMs isn't much different than my overall concern with DIY legal solutions where people think they're getting a good deal because they save a little bit of money in the short term but end up getting screwed in the long term.
I'm going to limit my response to this post for the time being, since @Amadan summarized my position better than I ever could, but you state:
If this is what winning looks like, then why does Trump need a deal? Why not just declare victory and walk away, secure in the knowledge that Iran will not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon for the foreseeable future, that they will not be able to arm proxies in the region, and, as you say it, will not be able to project any appreciable amount of force in the region?
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